From the large number of his works two stand out as representative of the

man himself: _The Liberty of Prophesying_ (1646), which Hallam calls the

first plea for tolerance in religion, on a comprehensive basis and on

deep-seated foundations; and _The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living_

(1650). To the latter might be added its companion volume, _Holy Dying_,

published in the following year. _The Holy Living and Dying_, as a single

volume, was for many years read in almost every English cottage. With

Baxter's _Saints' Rest, Pilgrim's Progress_, and the _King James Bible_, it

often constituted the entire library of multitudes of Puritan homes; and as

we read its noble words and breathe its gentle spirit, we cannot help

wishing that our modern libraries were gathered together on the same

thoughtful foundations.

RICHARD BAXTER (1615-1691). This "busiest man of his age" strongly suggests

Bunyan in his life and writings. Like Bunyan, he was poor and uneducated, a

nonconformist minister, exposed continually to insult and persecution; and,

like Bunyan, he threw himself heart and soul into the conflicts of his age,

and became by his public speech a mighty power among the common people.

Unlike Jeremy Taylor, who wrote for the learned, and whose involved

sentences and classical allusions are sometimes hard to follow, Baxter went

straight to his mark, appealing directly to the judgment and feeling of his

readers.

The number of his works is almost incredible when one thinks of his busy

life as a preacher and the slowness of manual writing. In all, he left

nearly one hundred and seventy different works, which if collected would

make fifty or sixty volumes. As he wrote chiefly to influence men on the

immediate questions of the day, most of this work has fallen into oblivion.

His two most famous books are _The Saints' Everlasting Rest_ and _A Call to

the Unconverted_, both of which were exceedingly popular, running through

scores of successive editions, and have been widely read in our own

generation.

IZAAK WALTON (1593-1683). Walton was a small tradesman of London, who

preferred trout brooks and good reading to the profits of business and the

doubtful joys of a city life; so at fifty years, when he had saved a little

money, he left the city and followed his heart out into the country. He

began his literary work, or rather his recreation, by writing his famous

_Lives_,--kindly and readable appreciations of Donne, Wotton, Hooker,

Herbert, and Sanderson, which stand at the beginning of modern biographical

writing.

In 1653 appeared _The Compleat Angler_, which has grown steadily in

appreciation, and which is probably more widely read than any other book on

the subject of fishing. It begins with a conversation between a falconer, a

hunter, and an angler; but the angler soon does most of the talking, as

fishermen sometimes do; the hunter becomes a disciple, and learns by the

easy method of hearing the fisherman discourse about his art. The

conversations, it must be confessed, are often diffuse and pedantic; but

they only make us feel most comfortably sleepy, as one invariably feels

after a good day's fishing. So kindly is the spirit of the angler, so

exquisite his appreciation of the beauty of the earth and sky, that one

returns to the book, as to a favorite trout stream, with the undying

expectation of catching something. Among a thousand books on angling it

stands almost alone in possessing a charming style, and so it will probably

be read as long as men go fishing. Best of all, it leads to a better

appreciation of nature, and it drops little moral lessons into the reader's

mind as gently as one casts a fly to a wary trout; so that one never

suspects his better nature is being angled for. Though we have sometimes

seen anglers catch more than they need, or sneak ahead of brother fishermen

to the best pools, we are glad, for Walton's sake, to overlook such

unaccountable exceptions, and agree with the milkmaid that "we love all

anglers, they be such honest, civil, quiet men."

SUMMARY OF THE PURITAN PERIOD. The half century between 1625 and 1675 is

called the Puritan period for two reasons: first, because Puritan standards

prevailed for a time in England; and second, because the greatest literary

figure during all these years was the Puritan, John Milton. Historically

the age was one of tremendous conflict. The Puritan struggled for

righteousness and liberty, and because he prevailed, the age is one of

moral and political revolution. In his struggle for liberty the Puritan

overthrew the corrupt monarchy, beheaded Charles I, and established the

Commonwealth under Cromwell. The Commonwealth lasted but a few years, and

the restoration of Charles II in 1660 is often put as the end of the

Puritan period. The age has no distinct limits, but overlaps the

Elizabethan period on one side, and the Restoration period on the other.

The age produced many writers, a few immortal books, and one of the world's

great literary leaders. The literature of the age is extremely diverse in

character, and the diversity is due to the breaking up of the ideals of

political and religious unity. This literature differs from that of the

preceding age in three marked ways: (1) It has no unity of spirit, as in

the days of Elizabeth, resulting from the patriotic enthusiasm of all

classes. (2) In contrast with the hopefulness and vigor of Elizabethan

writings, much of the literature of this period is somber in character; it

saddens rather than inspires us. (3) It has lost the romantic impulse of

youth, and become critical and intellectual; it makes us think, rather than

feel deeply.

In our study we have noted (1) the Transition Poets, of whom Daniel is

chief; (2) the Song Writers, Campion and Breton; (3) the Spenserian Poets,

Wither and Giles Fletcher; (4) the Metaphysical Poets, Donne and Herbert;

(5) the Cavalier Poets, Herrick, Carew, Lovelace, and Suckling; (6) John

Milton, his life, his early or Horton poems, his militant prose, and his

last great poetical works; (7) John Bunyan, his extraordinary life, and his

chief work, _The Pilgrim's Progress;_ (8) the Minor Prose Writers, Burton,

Browne, Fuller, Taylor, Baxter, and Walton. Three books selected from this

group are Browne's _Religio Medici_, Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_, and

Walton's _Complete Angler_.

SELECTIONS FOR READING. _Milton_. Paradise Lost, books 1-2, L'Allegro, Il

Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas, and selected Sonnets,--all in Standard English

Classics; same poems, more or less complete, in various other series;

Areopagitica and Treatise on Education, selections, in Manly's English

Prose, or Areopagitica in Arber's English Reprints, Clarendon Press Series,

Morley's Universal Library, etc.

_Minor Poets_. Selections from Herrick, edited by Hale, in Athenaeum Press

Series; selections from Herrick, Lovelace, Donne, Herbert, etc., in Manly's

English Poetry, Golden Treasury, Oxford Book of English Verse, etc.;

Vaughan's Silex Scintillans, in Temple Classics, also in the Aldine Series;

Herbert's The Temple, in Everyman's Library, Temple Classics, etc.

_Bunyan_. The Pilgrim's Progress, in Standard English Classics, Pocket

Classics, etc.; Grace Abounding, in Cassell's National Library.

_Minor Prose Writers_. Wentworth's Selections from Jeremy Taylor; Browne's

Religio Medici, Walton's Complete Angler, both in Everyman's Library,

Temple Classics, etc.; selections from Taylor, Browne, and Walton in

Manly's English Prose, also in Garnett's English Prose.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.[170]

_HISTORY_. _Text-book_, Montgomery, pp. 238-257; Cheyney, pp. 431-464;

Green, ch. 8; Traill; Gardiner.

_Special Works_. Wakeling's King and Parliament (Oxford Manuals);

Gardiner's The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution; Tulloch's

English Puritanism and its Leaders; Lives of Cromwell by Harrison, by

Church, and by Morley; Carlyle's Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches.

_LITERATURE_. Saintsbury's Elizabethan Literature (extends to 1660);

Masterman's The Age of Milton; Dowden's Puritan and Anglican.

_Milton_. Texts, Poetical Works, Globe edition, edited by Masson; Cambridge

Poets edition, edited by Moody; English Prose Writings, edited by Morley,

in Carisbrooke Library; also in Bohn's Standard Library.

Masson's Life of John Milton (8 vols.); Life, by Garnett, by Pattison

(English Men of Letters). Raleigh's Milton; Trent's John Milton; Corson's

Introduction to Milton; Brooke's Milton, in Student's Library; Macaulay's

Milton; Lowell's Essays, in Among My Books, and in Latest Literary Essays;

M. Arnold's Essay, in Essays in Criticism; Dowden's Essay, in Puritan and

Anglican.

_Cavalier Poets_. Schelling's Seventeenth Century Lyrics, in Athenaeum

Press Series; Cavalier and Courtier Lyrists, in Canterbury Poets Series;

Gosse's Jacobean Poets; Lovelace, etc., in Library of Old Authors.

_Donne_. Poems, in Muses' Library; Life, in Walton's Lives, in Temple

Classics, and in Morley's Universal Library; Life, by Gosse; Jessup's John

Donne; Dowden's Essay, in New Studies; Stephen's Studies of a Biographer,

vol. 3.

_Herbert_. Palmer's George Herbert; Poems and Prose Selections, edited by

Rhys, in Canterbury Poets; Dowden's Essay, in Puritan and Anglican.

_Bunyan_. Brown's John Bunyan, His Life, Times, and Works; Life, by

Venables, and by Froude (English Men of Letters); Essays by Macaulay, by

Dowden, _supra_, and by Woodberry, in Makers of Literature.

_Jeremy Taylor_. Holy Living, Holy Dying, in Temple Classics, and in Bohn's

Standard Library; Selections, edited by Wentworth; Life, by Heber, and by

Gosse (English Men of Letters); Dowden's Essay, _supra_.

_Thomas Browne_. Works, edited by Wilkin; the same, in Temple Classics, and

in Bohn's Library; Religio Medici, in Everyman's Library; essay by Pater,

in Appreciations; by Dowden, _supra;_ and by L. Stephen, in Hours in a

Library; Life, by Gosse (English Men of Letters).

_Izaak Walton_. Works, in Temple Classics, Cassell's Library, and Morley's

Library; Introduction, in A. Lang's Walton's Complete Angler; Lowell's

Essay, in Latest Literary Essays.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 1. What is meant by the Puritan period? What were the

objects and the results of the Puritan movement in English history?

2. What are the main characteristics of the literature of this period?

Compare it with Elizabethan literature. How did religion and politics

affect Puritan literature? Can you quote any passages or name any works

which justify your opinion?

3. What is meant by the terms Cavalier poets, Spenserian poets,

Metaphysical poets? Name the chief writers of each group. To whom are we

indebted for our first English hymn book? Would you call this a work of

literature? Why?

4. What are the qualities of Herrick's poetry? What marked contrasts are

found in Herrick and in nearly all the poets of this period?

5. Who was George Herbert? For what purpose did he write? What qualities

are found in his poetry?

6. Tell briefly the story of Milton's life. What are the three periods of

his literary work? What is meant by the Horton poems? Compare "L'Allegro"

and "Il Penseroso." Are there any Puritan ideals in "Comus"? Why is

"Lycidas" often put at the summit of English lyrical poetry? Give the main

idea or argument of _Paradise Lost_. What are the chief qualities of the

poem? Describe in outline _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_. What

personal element entered into the latter? What quality strikes you most

forcibly in Milton's poetry? What occasioned Milton's prose works? Do they

properly belong to literature? Why? Compare Milton and Shakespsare with

regard to (1) knowledge of men, (2) ideals of life, (3) purpose in writing.

7. Tell the story of Bunyan's life. What unusual elements are found in his

life and writings? Give the main argument of _The Pilgrim's Progress_. If

you read the story before studying literature, tell why you liked or

disliked it. Why is it a work for all ages and for all races? What are the

chief qualities of Bunyan's style?

8. Who are the minor prose writers of this age? Name the chief works of

Jeremy Taylor, Thomas Browne, and Izaak Walton. Can you describe from your

own reading any of these works? How does the prose of this age compare in

interest with the poetry? (Milton is, of course, excepted in this

comparison.)

CHRONOLOGY

_Seventeenth Century_

=====================================================================

HISTORY | LITERATURE

---------------------------------------------------------------------

| 1621. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy

|

| 1623. Wither's Hymn Book

|

1625. Charles I |

Parliament dissolved |

|

1628. Petition of Right | 1629. Milton's Ode on the Nativity

|

1630-1640. King rules without |

Parliament. Puritan migration |

to New England | 1630-1633. Herbert's poems

|

| 1632-1637. Milton's Horton poems

|

1640. Long Parliament |

|

1642. Civil War begins | 1642. Browne's Religio Medici

|

1643. Scotch Covenant |

|

1643. Press censorship | 1644. Milton's Areopagitica

|

1645. Battle of Naseby; |

triumph of Puritans |

|

1649. Execution of Charles I. |

Cavalier migration to Virginia |

|

1649-1660. Commonwealth | 1649. Milton's Tenure of Kings

|

| 1650. Baxter's Saints' Rest.

| Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living

|

| 1651. Hobbes's Leviathan

|

1653-1658. Cromwell, Protector | 1653. Walton's Complete Angler

|

1658-1660. Richard Cromwell |

|

1660. Restoration of Charles II | 1663-1694. Dryden's dramas

| (next chapter)

|

| 1666. Bunyan's Grace Abounding

|

| 1667. Paradise Lost

|

| 1674. Death of Milton

|

| 1678. Pilgrim's Progress published

| (written earlier)

=====================================================================

* * * * *

CHAPTER VIII

PERIOD OF THE RESTORATION (1660-1700)

THE AGE OF FRENCH INFLUENCE

HISTORY OF THE PERIOD. It seems a curious contradiction, at first glance,

to place the return of Charles II at the beginning of modern England, as

our historians are wont to do; for there was never a time when the progress

of liberty, which history records, was more plainly turned backwards. The

Puritan régime had been too severe; it had repressed too many natural

pleasures. Now, released from restraint, society abandoned the decencies of

life and the reverence for law itself, and plunged into excesses more

unnatural than had been the restraints of Puritanism. The inevitable effect

of excess is disease, and for almost an entire generation following the

Restoration, in 1660, England lay sick of a fever. Socially, politically,

morally, London suggests an Italian city in the days of the Medici; and its

literature, especially its drama, often seems more like the delirium of

illness than the expression of a healthy mind. But even a fever has its

advantages. Whatever impurity is in the blood "is burnt and purged away,"

and a man rises from fever with a new strength and a new idea of the value

of life, like King Hezekiah, who after his sickness and fear of death

resolved to "go softly" all his days. The Restoration was the great crisis

in English history; and that England lived through it was due solely to the

strength and excellence of that Puritanism which she thought she had flung

to the winds when she welcomed back a vicious monarch at Dover. The chief

lesson of the Restoration was this,--that it showed by awful contrast the

necessity of truth and honesty, and of a strong government of free men, for

which the Puritan had stood like a rock in every hour of his rugged

history. Through fever, England came slowly back to health; through gross

corruption in society and in the state England learned that her people were

at heart sober, sincere, religious folk, and that their character was

naturally too strong to follow after pleasure and be satisfied. So

Puritanism suddenly gained all that it had struggled for, and gained it

even in the hour when all seemed lost, when Milton in his sorrow

unconsciously portrayed the government of Charles and his Cabal in that

tremendous scene of the council of the infernal peers in Pandemonium,

plotting the ruin of the world.

Of the king and his followers it is difficult to write temperately. Most of

the dramatic literature of the time is atrocious, and we can understand it

only as we remember the character of the court and society for which it was

written. Unspeakably vile in his private life, the king had no redeeming

patriotism, no sense of responsibility to his country for even his public

acts. He gave high offices to blackguards, stole from the exchequer like a

common thief, played off Catholics and Protestants against each other,

disregarding his pledges to both alike, broke his solemn treaty with the

Dutch and with his own ministers, and betrayed his country for French money

to spend on his own pleasures. It is useless to paint the dishonor of a

court which followed gayly after such a leader. The first Parliament, while

it contained some noble and patriotic members, was dominated by young men

who remembered the excess of Puritan zeal, but forgot the despotism and

injustice which had compelled Puritanism to stand up and assert the manhood

of England. These young politicians vied with the king in passing laws for

the subjugation of Church and State, and in their thirst for revenge upon

all who had been connected with Cromwell's iron government. Once more a

wretched formalism--that perpetual danger to the English Church--came to

the front and exercised authority over the free churches. The House of

Lords was largely increased by the creation of hereditary titles and

estates for ignoble men and shameless women who had flattered the king's

vanity. Even the Bench, that last strong refuge of English justice, was

corrupted by the appointment of judges, like the brutal Jeffreys, whose

aim, like that of their royal master, was to get money and to exercise

power without personal responsibility. Amid all this dishonor the foreign

influence and authority of Cromwell's strong government vanished like

smoke. The valiant little Dutch navy swept the English fleet from the sea,

and only the thunder of Dutch guns in the Thames, under the very windows of

London, awoke the nation to the realization of how low it had fallen.

Two considerations must modify our judgment of this disheartening

spectacle. First, the king and his court are not England. Though our

histories are largely filled with the records of kings and soldiers, of

intrigues and fighting, these no more express the real life of a people

than fever and delirium express a normal manhood. Though king and court and

high society arouse our disgust or pity, records are not wanting to show

that private life in England remained honest and pure even in the worst

days of the Restoration. While London society might be entertained by the

degenerate poetry of Rochester and the dramas of Dryden and Wycherley,

English scholars hailed Milton with delight; and the common people followed

Bunyan and Baxter with their tremendous appeal to righteousness and

liberty. Second, the king, with all his pretensions to divine right,

remained only a figurehead; and the Anglo-Saxon people, when they tire of

one figurehead, have always the will and the power to throw it overboard

and choose a better one. The country was divided into two political

parties: the Whigs, who sought to limit the royal power in the interests of

Parliament and the people; and the Tories, who strove to check the growing

power of the people in the interests of their hereditary rulers. Both

parties, however, were largely devoted to the Anglican Church; and when

James II, after four years of misrule, attempted to establish a national

Catholicism by intrigues which aroused the protest of the Pope[171] as well

as of Parliament, then Whigs and Tories, Catholics and Protestants, united

in England's last great revolution.

The complete and bloodless Revolution of 1688, which called William of

Orange to the throne, was simply the indication of England's restored

health and sanity. It proclaimed that she had not long forgotten, and could

never again forget, the lesson taught her by Puritanism in its hundred

years of struggle and sacrifice. Modern England was firmly established by

the Revolution, which was brought about by the excesses of the Restoration.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS. In the literature of the Restoration we note a

sudden breaking away from old standards, just as society broke away from

the restraints of Puritanism. Many of the literary men had been driven out

of England with Charles and his court, or else had followed their patrons

into exile in the days of the Commonwealth. On their return they renounced

old ideals and demanded that English poetry and drama should follow the

style to which they had become accustomed in the gayety of Paris. We read

with astonishment in Pepys's _Diary_ (1660-1669) that he has been to see a

play called _Midsummer Night's Dream_, but that he will never go again to

hear Shakespeare, "for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I

saw in my life." And again we read in the diary of Evelyn,--another writer

who reflects with wonderful accuracy the life and spirit of the

Restoration,--"I saw _Hamlet_ played; but now the old plays begin to

disgust this refined age, since his Majesty's being so long abroad." Since

Shakespeare and the Elizabethans were no longer interesting, literary men

began to imitate the French writers, with whose works they had just grown

familiar; and here begins the so-called period of French influence, which

shows itself in English literature for the next century, instead of the

Italian influence which had been dominant since Spenser and the

Elizabethans.

One has only to consider for a moment the French writers of this period,

Pascal, Bossuet, Fénelon, Malherbe, Corneille, Racine, Molière,--all that

brilliant company which makes the reign of Louis XIV the Elizabethan Age of

French literature,--to see how far astray the early writers of the

Restoration went in their wretched imitation. When a man takes another for

his model, he should copy virtues not vices; but unfortunately many English

writers reversed the rule, copying the vices of French comedy without any

of its wit or delicacy or abundant ideas. The poems of Rochester, the plays

of Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, all popular in

their day, are mostly unreadable. Milton's "sons of Belial, flown with

insolence and wine," is a good expression of the vile character of the

court writers and of the London theaters for thirty years following the

Restoration. Such work can never satisfy a people, and when Jeremy

Collier,[172] in 1698, published a vigorous attack upon the evil plays and

the playwrights of the day, all London, tired of the coarseness and

excesses of the Restoration, joined the literary revolution, and the

corrupt drama was driven from the stage.

With the final rejection of the Restoration drama we reach a crisis in the

history of our literature. The old Elizabethan spirit, with its patriotism,

its creative vigor, its love of romance, and the Puritan spirit with its

moral earnestness and individualism, were both things of the past; and at

first there was nothing to take their places. Dryden, the greatest writer

of the age, voiced a general complaint when he said that in his prose and

poetry he was "drawing the outlines" of a new art, but had no teacher to

instruct him. But literature is a progressive art, and soon the writers of

the age developed two marked tendencies of their own,--the tendency to

realism, and the tendency to that preciseness and elegance of expression

which marks our literature for the next hundred years.

In realism--that is, the representation of men exactly as they are, the

expression of the plain, unvarnished truth without regard to ideals or

romance--the tendency was at first thoroughly bad. The early Restoration

writers sought to paint realistic pictures of a corrupt court and society,

and, as we have suggested, they emphasized vices rather than virtues, and

gave us coarse, low plays without interest or moral significance. Like

Hobbes, they saw only the externals of man, his body and appetites, not his

soul and its ideals; and so, like most realists, they resemble a man lost

in the woods, who wanders aimlessly around in circles, seeing the confusing

trees but never the whole forest, and who seldom thinks of climbing the

nearest high hill to get his bearings. Later, however, this tendency to

realism became more wholesome. While it neglected romantic poetry, in which

youth is eternally interested, it led to a keener study of the practical

motives which govern human action.

The second tendency of the age was toward directness and simplicity of

expression, and to this excellent tendency our literature is greatly

indebted. In both the Elizabethan and the Puritan ages the general tendency

of writers was towards extravagance of thought and language. Sentences were

often involved, and loaded with Latin quotations and classical allusions.

The Restoration writers opposed this vigorously. From France they brought

back the tendency to regard established rules for writing, to emphasize

close reasoning rather than romantic fancy, and to use short, clean-cut

sentences without an unnecessary word. We see this French influence in the

Royal Society,[173] which had for one of its objects the reform of English

prose by getting rid of its "swellings of style," and which bound all its

members to use "a close, naked, natural way of speaking ... as near to

mathematical plainness as they can." Dryden accepted this excellent rule

for his prose, and adopted the heroic couplet, as the next best thing, for

the greater part of his poetry. As he tells us himself:

And this unpolished rugged verse I chose

As fittest for discourse, and nearest prose.

It is largely due to him that writers developed that formalism of style,

that precise, almost mathematical elegance, miscalled classicism, which

ruled English literature for the next century.[174]

Another thing which the reader will note with interest in Restoration

literature is the adoption of the heroic couplet; that is, two iambic

pentameter lines which rime together, as the most suitable form of poetry.

Waller,[175] who began to use it in 1623, is generally regarded as the

father of the couplet, for he is the first poet to use it consistently in

the bulk of his poetry. Chaucer had used the rimed couplet wonderfully well

in his _Canterbury Tales_, but in Chaucer it is the poetical thought more

than the expression which delights us. With the Restoration writers, form

counts for everything. Waller and Dryden made the couplet the prevailing

literary fashion, and in their hands the couplet becomes "closed"; that is,

each pair of lines must contain a complete thought, stated as precisely as

possible. Thus Waller writes:

The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,

Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.[176]

That is a kind of aphorism such as Pope made in large quantities in the

following age. It contains a thought, is catchy, quotable, easy to

remember; and the Restoration writers delighted in it. Soon this mechanical

closed couplet, in which the second line was often made first,[177] almost

excluded all other forms of poetry. It was dominant in England for a full

century, and we have grown familiar with it, and somewhat weary of its

monotony, in such famous poems as Pope's "Essay on Man" and Goldsmith's

"Deserted Village." These, however, are essays rather than poems. That even

the couplet is capable of melody and variety is shown in Chaucer's _Tales_

and in Keats's exquisite _Endymion_.

These four things, the tendency to vulgar realism in the drama, a general

formalism which came from following set rules, the development of a simpler

and more direct prose style, and the prevalence of the heroic couplet in

poetry are the main characteristics of Restoration literature. They are all

exemplified in the work of one man, John Dryden.

JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700)

Dryden is the greatest literary figure of the Restoration, and in his work

we have an excellent reflection of both the good and the evil tendencies of

the age in which he lived. If we can think for a moment of literature as a

canal of water, we may appreciate the figure that Dryden is the "lock by

which the waters of English poetry were let down from the mountains of

Shakespeare and Milton to the plain of Pope"; that is, he stands between

two very different ages, and serves as a transition from one to the other.

LIFE. Dryden's life contains so many conflicting elements of greatness and

littleness that the biographer is continually taken away from the facts,

which are his chief concern, to judge motives, which are manifestly outside

his knowledge and business. Judged by his own opinion of himself, as

expressed in the numerous prefaces to his works, Dryden was the soul of

candor, writing with no other master than literature, and with no other

object than to advance the welfare of his age and nation. Judged by his

acts, he was apparently a timeserver, catering to a depraved audience in

his dramas, and dedicating his work with much flattery to those who were

easily cajoled by their vanity into sharing their purse and patronage. In

this, however, he only followed the general custom of the time, and is

above many of his contemporaries.

Dryden was born in the village of Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, in 1631. His

family were prosperous people, who brought him up in the strict Puritan

faith, and sent him first to the famous Westminster school and then to

Cambridge. He made excellent use of his opportunities and studied eagerly,

becoming one of the best educated men of his age, especially in the

classics. Though of remarkable literary taste, he showed little evidence of

literary ability up to the age of thirty. By his training and family

connections he was allied to the Puritan party, and his only well-known

work of this period, the "Heroic Stanzas," was written on the death of

Cromwell:

His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone,

For he was great ere Fortune made him so;

And wars, like mists that rise against the sun,

Made him but greater seem, not greater grow.

In these four lines, taken almost at random from the "Heroic Stanzas," we

have an epitome of the thought, the preciseness, and the polish that mark

all his literary work.

This poem made Dryden well known, and he was in a fair way to become the

new poet of Puritanism when the Restoration made a complete change in his

methods. He had come to London for a literary life, and when the Royalists

were again in power he placed himself promptly on the winning side. His

"Astraea Redux," a poem of welcome to Charles II, and his "Panegyric to his

Sacred Majesty," breathe more devotion to "the old goat," as the king was

known to his courtiers, than had his earlier poems to Puritanism.

In 1667 he became more widely known and popular by his "Annus Mirabilis," a

narrative poem describing the terrors of the great fire in London and some

events of the disgraceful war with Holland; but with the theaters reopened

and nightly filled, the drama offered the most attractive field to one who

made his living by literature; so Dryden turned to the stage and agreed to

furnish three plays yearly for the actors of the King's Theater. For nearly

twenty years, the best of his life, Dryden gave himself up to this

unfortunate work. Both by nature and habit he seems to have been clean in

his personal life; but the stage demanded unclean plays, and Dryden

followed his audience. That he deplored this is evident from some of his

later work, and we have his statement that he wrote only one play, his

best, to please himself. This was _All for Love_, which was written in

blank verse, most of the others being in rimed couplets.

During this time Dryden had become the best known literary man of London,

and was almost as much a dictator to the literary set which gathered in the

taverns and coffeehouses as Ben Jonson had been before him. His work,

meanwhile, was rewarded by large financial returns, and by his being

appointed poet laureate and collector of the port of London. The latter

office, it may be remembered, had once been held by Chaucer.

At fifty years of age, and before Jeremy Collier had driven his dramas from

the stage, Dryden turned from dramatic work to throw himself into the

strife of religion and politics, writing at this period his numerous prose

and poetical treatises. In 1682 appeared his _Religio Laici_ (Religion of a

Layman), defending the Anglican Church against all other sects, especially

the Catholics and Presbyterians; but three years later, when James II came

to the throne with schemes to establish the Roman faith, Dryden turned

Catholic and wrote his most famous religious poem, "The Hind and the

Panther," beginning:

A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,

Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged;

Without unspotted, innocent within,

She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.

This hind is a symbol for the Roman Church; and the Anglicans, as a

panther, are represented as persecuting the faithful. Numerous other

sects--Calvinists, Anabaptists, Quakers--were represented by the wolf,

boar, hare, and other animals, which gave the poet an excellent chance for

exercising his satire. Dryden's enemies made the accusation, often since

repeated, of hypocrisy in thus changing his church; but that he was sincere

in the matter can now hardly be questioned, for he knew how to "suffer for

the faith" and to be true to his religion, even when it meant misjudgment

and loss of fortune. At the Revolution of 1688 he refused allegiance to

William of Orange; he was deprived of all his offices and pensions, and as

an old man was again thrown back on literature as his only means of

livelihood. He went to work with extraordinary courage and energy, writing

plays, poems, prefaces for other men, eulogies for funeral occasions,--

every kind of literary work that men would pay for. His most successful

work at this time was his translations, which resulted in the complete

_Aeneid_ and many selections from Homer, Ovid, and Juvenal, appearing in

English rimed couplets. His most enduring poem, the splendid ode called

"Alexander's Feast," was written in 1697. Three years later he published

his last work, _Fables_, containing poetical paraphrases of the tales of

Boccaccio and Chaucer, and the miscellaneous poems of his last years. Long

prefaces were the fashion in Dryden's day, and his best critical work is

found in his introductions. The preface to the _Fables_ is generally

admired as an example of the new prose style developed by Dryden and his

followers.

From the literary view point these last troubled years were the best of

Dryden's life, though they were made bitter by obscurity and by the

criticism of his numerous enemies. He died in 1700 and was buried near

Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.

WORKS OF DRYDEN. The numerous dramatic works of Dryden are best left in

that obscurity into which they have fallen. Now and then they contain a bit

of excellent lyric poetry, and in _All for Love_, another version of

_Antony and Cleopatra_, where he leaves his cherished heroic couplet for

the blank verse of Marlowe and Shakespeare, he shows what he might have

done had he not sold his talents to a depraved audience. On the whole,

reading his plays is like nibbling at a rotting apple; even the good spots

are affected by the decay, and one ends by throwing the whole thing into

the garbage can, where most of the dramatic works of this period belong.

The controversial and satirical poems are on a higher plane; though, it

must be confessed, Dryden's satire often strikes us as cutting and

revengeful, rather than witty. The best known of these, and a masterpiece

of its kind, is "Absalom and Achitophel," which is undoubtedly the most

powerful political satire in our language. Taking the Bible story of David

and Absalom, he uses it to ridicule the Whig party and also to revenge

himself upon his enemies. Charles II appeared as King David; his natural

son, the Duke of Monmouth, who was mixed up in the Rye House Plot, paraded

as Absalom; Shaftesbury was Achitophel, the evil Counselor; and the Duke of

Buckingham was satirized as Zimri. The poem had enormous political

influence, and raised Dryden, in the opinion of his contemporaries, to the

front rank of English poets. Two extracts from the powerful

characterizations of Achitophel and Zimri are given here to show the style

and spirit of the whole work.

(SHAFTESBURY)

Of these the false Achitophel was first;

A name to all succeeding ages cursed:

For close designs and crooked counsels fit;

Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit;

Restless, unfixed in principles and place;

In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace:

A fiery soul, which, working out its way,

Fretted the pygmy body to decay....

A daring pilot in extremity,

Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high

He sought the storms: but for a calm unfit,

Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,

And thin partitions do their bounds divide;

Else why should he, with wealth and honor blest,

Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?

Punish a body which he could not please;

Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?

And all to leave what with his toil he won,

To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son....

In friendship false, implacable in hate;

Resolved to ruin or to rule the state;...

Then seized with fear, yet still affecting fame,

Usurped a patriot's all-atoning name.

So easy still it proves in factious times

With public zeal to cancel private crimes.

(THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM)

Some of their chiefs were princes of the land;

In the first rank of these did Zimri stand,

A man so various, that he seemed to be

Not one, but all mankind's epitome:

Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,

Was everything by starts and nothing long;

But, in the course of one revolving moon,

Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon;

Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,

Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.

Blest madman, who could every hour employ

With something new to wish or to enjoy!

Railing and praising were his usual themes,

And both, to show his judgment, in extremes:

So over-violent, or over-civil,

That every man with him was God or devil.

Of the many miscellaneous poems of Dryden, the curious reader will get an

idea of his sustained narrative power from the _Annus Mirabilis_. The best

expression of Dryden's literary genius, however, is found in "Alexander's

Feast," which is his most enduring ode, and one of the best in our

language.

As a prose writer Dryden had a very marked influence on our literature in

shortening his sentences, and especially in writing naturally, without

depending on literary ornamentation to give effect to what he is saying. If

we compare his prose with that of Milton, or Browne, or Jeremy Taylor, we

note that Dryden cares less for style than any of the others, but takes

more pains to state his thought clearly and concisely, as men speak when

they wish to be understood. The classical school, which followed the

Restoration, looked to Dryden as a leader, and to him we owe largely that

tendency to exactness of expression which marks our subsequent prose

writing. With his prose, Dryden rapidly developed his critical ability, and

became the foremost critic[178] of his age. His criticisms, instead of

being published as independent works, were generally used as prefaces or

introductions to his poetry. The best known of these criticisms are the

preface to the _Fables_, "Of Heroic Plays," "Discourse on Satire," and

especially the "Essay of Dramatic Poesy" (1668), which attempts to lay a

foundation for all literary criticism.

DRYDEN'S INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE. Dryden's place among authors is due

partly to his great influence on the succeeding age of classicism. Briefly,

this influence may be summed up by noting the three new elements which he

brought into our literature. These are: (1) the establishment of the heroic

couplet as the fashion for satiric, didactic, and descriptive poetry; (2)

his development of a direct, serviceable prose style such as we still

cultivate; and (3) his development of the art of literary criticism in his

essays and in the numerous prefaces to his poems. This is certainly a large

work for one man to accomplish, and Dryden is worthy of honor, though

comparatively little of what he wrote is now found on our bookshelves.

SAMUEL BUTLER (1612-1680). In marked contrast with Dryden, who devoted his

life to literature and won his success by hard work, is Samuel Butler, who

jumped into fame by a single, careless work, which represents not any

serious intent or effort, but the pastime of an idle hour. We are to

remember that, though the Royalists had triumphed in the Restoration, the

Puritan spirit was not dead, nor even sleeping, and that the Puritan held

steadfastly to his own principles. Against these principles of justice,

truth, and liberty there was no argument, since they expressed the manhood

of England; but many of the Puritan practices were open to ridicule, and

the Royalists, in revenge for their defeat, began to use ridicule without

mercy. During the early years of the Restoration doggerel verses ridiculing

Puritanism, and burlesque,--that is, a ridiculous representation of serious

subjects, or a serious representation of ridiculous subjects,--were the

most popular form of literature with London society. Of all this burlesque

and doggerel the most famous is Butler's _Hudibras_, a work to which we can

trace many of the prejudices that still prevail against Puritanism.

Of Butler himself we know little; he is one of the most obscure figures in

our literature. During the days of Cromwell's Protectorate he was in the

employ of Sir Samuel Luke, a crabbed and extreme type of Puritan nobleman,

and here he collected his material and probably wrote the first part of his

burlesque, which, of course, he did not dare to publish until after the

Restoration.

_Hudibras_ is plainly modeled upon the _Don Quixote_ of Cervantes. It

describes the adventures of a fanatical justice of the peace, Sir Hudibras,

and of his squire, Ralpho, in their endeavor to put down all innocent

pleasures. In Hudibras and Ralpho the two extreme types of the Puritan

party, Presbyterians and Independents, are mercilessly ridiculed. When the

poem first appeared in public, in 1663, after circulating secretly for

years in manuscript, it became at once enormously popular. The king carried

a copy in his pocket, and courtiers vied with each other in quoting its

most scurrilous passages. A second and a third part, continuing the

adventures of Hudibras, were published in 1664 and 1668. At best the work

is a wretched doggerel, but it was clever enough and strikingly original;

and since it expressed the Royalist spirit towards the Puritans, it

speedily found its place in a literature which reflects every phase of

human life. A few odd lines are given here to show the character of the

work, and to introduce the reader to the best known burlesque in our

language:

He was in logic a great critic,

Profoundly skilled in analytic;

He could distinguish, and divide

A hair 'twixt south and southwest side;

On either which he would dispute,

Confute, change hands, and still confute;

He'd undertake to prove, by force

Of argument, a man's no horse;

He'd run in debt by disputation,

And pay with ratiocination.

For he was of that stubborn crew

Of errant saints, whom all men grant

To be the true Church Militant;

Such as do build their faith upon

The holy text of pike and gun;

Decide all controversies by

Infallible artillery;

And prove their doctrine orthodox

By apostolic blows and knocks;

Compound for sins they are inclined to,

By damning those they have no mind to.

HOBBES AND LOCKE. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is one of the writers that

puzzle the historian with a doubt as to whether or not he should be

included in the story of literature. The one book for which he is famous is

called _Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth_

(1651). It is partly political, partly a philosophical book, combining two

central ideas which challenge and startle the attention, namely, that

self-interest is the only guiding power of humanity, and that blind

submission to rulers is the only true basis of government.[179] In a word,

Hobbes reduced human nature to its purely animal aspects, and then asserted

confidently that there was nothing more to study. Certainly, therefore, as

a reflection of the underlying spirit of Charles and his followers it has

no equal in any purely literary work of the time.

John Locke (1632-1704) is famous as the author of a single great

philosophical work, the _Essay concerning Human Understanding_ (1690). This

is a study of the nature of the human mind and of the origin of ideas,

which, far more than the work of Bacon and Hobbes, is the basis upon which

English philosophy has since been built. Aside from their subjects, both

works are models of the new prose, direct, simple, convincing, for which

Dryden and the Royal Society labored. They are known to every student of

philosophy, but are seldom included in a work of literature.[180]

EVELYN AND PEPYS. These two men, John Evelyn (1620-1706) and Samuel Pepys

(1633-1703), are famous as the writers of diaries, in which they jotted

down the daily occurrences of their own lives, without any thought that the

world would ever see or be interested in what they had written.

Evelyn was the author of _Sylva_, the first book on trees and forestry in

English, and _Terra_, which is the first attempt at a scientific study of

agriculture; but the world has lost sight of these two good books, while it

cherishes his diary, which extends over the greater part of his life and

gives us vivid pictures of society in his time, and especially of the

frightful corruption of the royal court.

Pepys began life in a small way as a clerk in a government office, but soon

rose by his diligence and industry to be Secretary of the Admiralty. Here

he was brought into contact with every grade of society, from the king's

ministers to the poor sailors of the fleet. Being inquisitive as a blue

jay, he investigated the rumors and gossip of the court, as well as the

small affairs of his neighbors, and wrote them all down in his diary with

evident interest. But because he chattered most freely, and told his little

book a great many secrets which it were not well for the world to know, he

concealed everything in shorthand,--and here again he was like the blue

jay, which carries off and hides every bright trinket it discovers. The

_Diary_ covers the years from 1660 to 1669, and gossips about everything,

from his own position and duties at the office, his dress and kitchen and

cook and children, to the great political intrigues of office and the

scandals of high society. No other such minute-picture of the daily life of

an age has been written. Yet for a century and a half it remained entirely

unknown, and not until 1825 was Pepys's shorthand deciphered and published.

Since then it has been widely read, and is still one of the most

interesting examples of diary writing that we possess. Following are a few

extracts,[181] covering only a few days in April, 1663, from which one may

infer the minute and interesting character of the work that this clerk,

politician, president of the Royal Society, and general busybody wrote to

please himself:

April 1st. I went to the Temple to my Cozen Roger Pepys, to see and talk

with him a little: who tells me that, with much ado, the Parliament do

agree to throw down Popery; but he says it is with so much spite and

passion, and an endeavor of bringing all Nonconformists into the same

condition, that he is afeard matters will not go so well as he could

wish.... To my office all the afternoon; Lord! how Sir J. Minnes, like a

mad coxcomb, did swear and stamp, swearing that Commissioner Pett hath

still the old heart against the King that ever he had, ... and all the

damnable reproaches in the world, at which I was ashamed, but said little;

but, upon the whole, I find him still a foole, led by the nose with stories

told by Sir W. Batten, whether with or without reason. So, vexed in my mind

to see things ordered so unlike gentlemen, or men of reason, I went home

and to bed.

3d. To White Hall and to Chappell, which being most monstrous full, I could

not go into my pew, but sat among the quire. Dr. Creeton, the Scotchman,

preached a most admirable, good, learned, honest, and most severe sermon,

yet comicall.... He railed bitterly ever and anon against John Calvin and

his brood, the Presbyterians, and against the present terme, now in use, of

"tender consciences." He ripped up Hugh Peters (calling him the execrable

skellum), his preaching and stirring up the mayds of the city to bring in

their bodkins and thimbles. Thence going out of White Hall, I met Captain

Grove, who did give me a letter directed to myself from himself. I

discerned money to be in it, and took it, knowing, as I found it to be, the

proceed of the place I have got him, the taking up of vessels for Tangier.

But I did not open it till I came home to my office, and there I broke it

open, not looking into it till all the money was out, that I might say I

saw no money in the paper, if ever I should be questioned about it. There

was a piece of gold and 4£ in silver.

4th. To my office. Home to dinner, whither by and by comes Roger Pepys,

etc. Very merry at, before, and after dinner, and the more for that my

dinner was great, and most neatly dressed by our owne only mayde. We had a

fricasee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a

dish, a great dish of a side of lambe, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of

four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie), a dish of

anchovies, good wine of several sorts, and all things mighty noble and to

my great content.

5th (Lord's day). Up and spent the morning, till the Barber came, in

reading in my chamber part of Osborne's Advice to his Son, which I shall

not never enough admire for sense and language, and being by and by

trimmed, to Church, myself, wife, Ashwell, etc. Home and, while dinner was

prepared, to my office to read over my vows with great affection and to

very good purpose. Then to church again, where a simple bawling young Scot

preached.

19th (Easter day). Up and this day put on my close-kneed coloured suit,

which, with new stockings of the colour, with belt and new gilt-handled

sword, is very handsome. To church alone, and after dinner to church again,

where the young Scotchman preaching, I slept all the while. After supper,

fell in discourse of dancing, and I find that Ashwell hath a very fine

carriage, which makes my wife almost ashamed of herself to see herself so

outdone, but to-morrow she begins to learn to dance for a month or two. So

to prayers and to bed. Will being gone, with my leave, to his father's this

day for a day or two, to take physique these holydays.

23d. St. George's day and Coronacion, the King and Court being at Windsor,

at the installing of the King of Denmarke by proxy and the Duke of

Monmouth.... Spent the evening with my father. At cards till late, and

being at supper, my boy being sent for some mustard to a neat's tongue, the

rogue staid half an houre in the streets, it seems at a bonfire, at which I

was very angry, and resolve to beat him to-morrow.

24th. Up betimes, and with my salt eele went down into the parler and there

got my boy and did beat him till I was fain to take breath two or three

times, yet for all I am afeard it will make the boy never the better, he is

grown so hardened in his tricks, which I am sorry for, he being capable of

making a brave man, and is a boy that I and my wife love very well.

SUMMARY OF THE RESTORATION PERIOD. The chief thing to note in England

during the Restoration is the tremendous social reaction from the

restraints of Puritanism, which suggests the wide swing of a pendulum from

one extreme to the other. For a generation many natural pleasures had been

suppressed; now the theaters were reopened, bull and bear baiting revived,

and sports, music, dancing,--a wild delight in the pleasures and vanities

of this world replaced that absorption in "other-worldliness" which

characterized the extreme of Puritanism.

In literature the change is no less marked. From the Elizabethan drama

playwrights turned to coarse, evil scenes, which presently disgusted the

people and were driven from the stage. From romance, writers turned to

realism; from Italian influence with its exuberance of imagination they

turned to France, and learned to repress the emotions, to follow the head

rather than the heart, and to write in a clear, concise, formal style,

according to set rules. Poets turned from the noble blank verse of

Shakespeare and Milton, from the variety and melody which had characterized

English poetry since Chaucer's day, to the monotonous heroic couplet with

its mechanical perfection.

The greatest writer of the age is John Dryden, who established the heroic

couplet as the prevailing verse form in English poetry, and who developed a

new and serviceable prose style suited to the practical needs of the age.

The popular ridicule of Puritanism in burlesque and doggerel is best

exemplified in Butler's _Hudibras_. The realistic tendency, the study of

facts and of men as they are, is shown in the work of the Royal Society, in

the philosophy of Hobbes and Locke, and in the diaries of Evelyn and Pepys,

with their minute pictures of social life. The age was one of transition

from the exuberance and vigor of Renaissance literature to the formality

and polish of the Augustan Age. In strong contrast with the preceding ages,

comparatively little of Restoration literature is familiar to modern

readers.

SELECTIONS FOR READING. _Dryden_. Alexander's Feast, Song for St. Cecilia's

Day, selections from Absalom and Achitophel, Religio Laici, Hind and

Panther, Annus Mirabilis,--in Manly's English Poetry, or Ward's English

Poets, or Cassell's National Library; Palamon and Arcite (Dryden's version

of Chaucer's tale), in Standard English Classics, Riverside Literature,

etc.; Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in Manly's, or Garnett's,

English Prose.

_Butler_. Selections from Hudibras, in Manly's English Poetry, Ward's

English Poets, or Morley's Universal Library.

_Pepys_. Selections in Manly's English Prose; the Diary in Everyman's

Library.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _HISTORY_. _Text-book_, Montgomery, pp. 257-280; Cheyney, pp.

466-514; Green, ch. 9; Traill; Gardiner; Macaulay.

_Special Works_. Sydney's Social Life in England from the Restoration to

the Revolution; Airy's The English Restoration and Louis XIV; Hale's The

Fall of the Stuarts.

_LITERATURE_. Garnett's The Age of Dryden; Dowden's Puritan and Anglican.

_Dryden_. Poetical Works, with Life, edited by Christie; the same, edited

by Noyes, in Cambridge Poets Series; Life and Works (18 vols.), by Walter

Scott, revised (1893) by Saintsbury; Essays, edited by Ker; Life, by

Saintsbury (English Men of Letters); Macaulay's Essay; Lowell's Essay, in

Among My Books (or in Literary Essays, vol. 3); Dowden's Essay, _supra_.

_Butler_. Hudibras, in Morley's Universal Library; Poetical Works, edited

by Johnson; Dowden's Essay, _supra_.

_Pepys_. Diary in Everyman's Library; the same, edited by Wheatley (8

vols.); Wheatley's Samuel Pepys and the World He Lived In; Stevenson's

Essay, in Familiar Studies of Men and Books.

_The Restoration Drama_. Plays in the Mermaid Series; Hazlitt's Lectures on

the English Comic Writers; Meredith's Essay on Comedy and the Comic Spirit;

Lamb's Essay on the Artificial Comedy; Thackeray's Essay on Congreve, in

English Humorists.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 1. What marked change in social conditions followed

the Restoration? How are these changes reflected in literature?

2. What are the chief characteristics of Restoration literature? Why is

this period called the Age of French influence? What new tendencies were

introduced? What effect did the Royal Society and the study of science have

upon English prose? What is meant by realism? by formalism?

3. What is meant by the heroic couplet? Explain why it became the

prevailing form of English poetry. What are its good qualities and its

defects? Name some well-known poems which are written in couplets. How do

Dryden's couplets compare with Chaucer's? Can you explain the difference?

4. Give a brief account of Dryden's life. What are his chief poetical

works? For what new object did he use poetry? Is satire a poetical subject?

Why is a poetical satire more effective than a satire in prose? What was

Dryden's contribution to English prose? What influence did he exert on our

literature?

5. What is Butler's _Hudibras_? Explain its popularity. Read a passage and

comment upon it, first, as satire; second, as a description of the

Puritans. Is _Hudibras_ poetry? Why?

6. Name the philosophers and political economists of this period. Can you

explain why Hobbes should call his work _Leviathan_? What important

American documents show the influence of Locke?

7. Tell briefly the story of Pepys and his _Diary_. What light does the

latter throw on the life of the age? Is the _Diary_ a work of literature?

Why?

CHRONOLOGY

_Last Half of the Seventeenth Century_

=====================================================================

HISTORY | LITERATURE

---------------------------------------------------------------------

|

1649. Execution of Charles I |

|

1649-1660. Commonwealth | 1651. Hobbes's Leviathan

|

1660. Restoration of Charles II | 1660-1669, Pepys's Diary

|

| 1662. Royal Society founded

|

| 1663. Butler's Hudibras

1665-1666. Plague and Fire of London |

War with Holland |

|

1667. Dutch fleet in the Thames | 1667. Milton's Paradise Lost.

| Dryden's Annus Mirabilis

|

| 1663-1694. Dryden's dramas

|

| 1671. Paradise Regained

|

| 1678. Pilgrim's Progress

| published

1680. Rise of Whigs and Tories |

| 1681. Dryden's Absalom and

| Achitophel

1685. James II |

Monmouth's Rebellion |

| 1687. Newton's Principia

| proves the law of

| gravitation

1688. English Revolution, William of |

Orange called to throne |

|

1689. Bill of Rights. Toleration Act |

| 1690. Locke's Human

| Understanding

| 1698. Jeremy Collier attacks

| stage

| 1700. Death of Dryden

=========================================================================

* * * * *

CHAPTER IX

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE (1700-1800)

I. AUGUSTAN OR CLASSIC AGE

HISTORY OF THE PERIOD. The Revolution of 1688, which banished the last of

the Stuart kings and called William of Orange to the throne, marks the end

of the long struggle for political freedom in England. Thereafter the

Englishman spent his tremendous energy, which his forbears had largely

spent in fighting for freedom, in endless political discussions and in

efforts to improve his government. In order to bring about reforms, votes

were now necessary; and to get votes the people of England must be

approached with ideas, facts, arguments, information. So the newspaper was

born,[182] and literature in its widest sense, including the book, the

newspaper, and the magazine, became the chief instrument of a nation's

progress.

The first half of the eighteenth century is remarkable for the rapid social

development in England. Hitherto men had been more or less governed by the

narrow, isolated standards of the Middle Ages, and when they differed they

fell speedily to blows. Now for the first time they set themselves to the

task of learning the art of living together, while still holding different

opinions. In a single generation nearly two thousand public coffeehouses,

each a center of sociability, sprang up in London alone, and the number of

private clubs is quite as astonishing.[183] This new social life had a

marked effect in polishing men's words and manners. The typical Londoner of

Queen Anne's day was still rude, and a little vulgar in his tastes; the

city was still very filthy, the streets unlighted and infested at night by

bands of rowdies and "Mohawks"; but outwardly men sought to refine their

manners according to prevailing standards; and to be elegant, to have "good

form," was a man's first duty, whether he entered society or wrote

literature. One can hardly read a book or poem of the age without feeling

this superficial elegance. Government still had its opposing Tory and Whig

parties, and the Church was divided into Catholics, Anglicans, and

Dissenters; but the growing social life offset many antagonisms, producing

at least the outward impression of peace and unity. Nearly every writer of

the age busied himself with religion as well as with party politics, the

scientist Newton as sincerely as the churchman Barrow, the philosophical

Locke no less earnestly than the evangelical Wesley; but nearly all

tempered their zeal with moderation, and argued from reason and Scripture,

or used delicate satire upon their opponents, instead of denouncing them as

followers of Satan. There were exceptions, of course_;_ but the general

tendency of the age was toward toleration. Man had found himself in the

long struggle for personal liberty; now he turned to the task of

discovering his neighbor, of finding in Whig and Tory, in Catholic and

Protestant, in Anglican and Dissenter, the same general human

characteristics that he found in himself. This good work was helped,

moreover, by the spread of education and by the growth of the national

spfrit, following the victories of Marlborough on the Continent. In the

midst of heated argument it needed only a word--Gibraltar, Blenheim,

Ramillies, Malplaquet--or a poem of victory written in a garret[184] to

tell a patriotic people that under their many differences they were all

alike Englishmen.

In the latter half of the century the political and social progress is

almost bewildering. The modern form of cabinet government responsible to

Parliament and the people had been established under George I; and in 1757

the cynical and corrupt practices of Walpole, premier of the first Tory

cabinet, were replaced by the more enlightened policies of Pitt. Schools

were established; clubs and coffeehouses increased; books and magazines

multiplied until the press was the greatest visible power in England; the

modern great dailies, the _Chronicle, Post_, and _Times_, began their

career of public education. Religiously, all the churches of England felt

the quickening power of that tremendous spiritual revival known as

Methodism, under the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield. Outside her own

borders three great men--Clive in India, Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham,

Cook in Australia and the islands of the Pacific--were unfurling the banner

of St. George over the untold wealth of new lands, and spreading the

world-wide empire of the Anglo-Saxons.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS. In every preceding age we have noted especially

the poetical works, which constitute, according to Matthew Arnold, the

glory of English literature. Now for the first time we must chronicle the

triumph of English prose. A multitude of practical interests arising from

the new social and political conditions demanded expression, not simply in

books, but more especially in pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers. Poetry

was inadequate for such a task; hence the development of prose, of the

"unfettered word," as Dante calls it,--a development which astonishes us by

its rapidity and excellence. The graceful elegance of Addison's essays, the

terse vigor of Swift's satires, the artistic finish of Fielding's novels,

the sonorous eloquence of Gibbon's history and of Burke's orations,--these

have no parallel in the poetry of the age. Indeed, poetry itself became

prosaic in this respect, that it was used not for creative works of

imagination, but for essays, for satire, for criticism,--for exactly the

same practical ends as was prose. The poetry of the first half of the

century, as typified in the work of Pope, is polished and witty enough, but

artificial; it lacks fire, fine feeling, enthusiasm, the glow of the

Elizabethan Age and the moral earnestness of Puritanism. In a word, it

interests us as a study of life, rather than delights or inspires us by its

appeal to the imagination. The variety and excellence of prose works, and

the development of a serviceable prose style, which had been begun by

Dryden, until it served to express clearly every human interest and

emotion,--these are the chief literary glories of the eighteenth century.

In the literature of the preceding age we noted two marked tendencies,--the

tendency to realism in subject-matter, and the tendency to polish and

refinement of expression. Both these tendencies were continued in the

Augustan Age, and are seen clearly in the poetry of Pope, who brought the

couplet to perfection, and in the prose of Addison. A third tendency is

shown in the prevalence of satire, resulting from the unfortunate union of

politics with literature. We have already noted the power of the press in

this age, and the perpetual strife of political parties. Nearly every

writer of the first half of the century was used and rewarded by Whigs or

Tories for satirizing their enemies and for advancing their special

political interests. Pope was a marked exception, but he nevertheless

followed the prose writers in using satire too largely in his poetry. Now

satire--that is, a literary work which searches out the faults of men or

institutions in order to hold them up to ridicule--is at best a destructive

kind of criticism. A satirist is like a laborer who clears away the ruins

and rubbish of an old house before the architect and builders begin on a

new and beautiful structure. The work may sometimes be necessary, but it

rarely arouses our enthusiasm. While the satires of Pope, Swift, and

Addison are doubtless the best in our language, we hardly place them with

our great literature, which is always constructive in spirit; and we have

the feeling that all these men were capable of better things than they ever

wrote.

THE CLASSIC AGE. The period we are studying is known to us by various

names. It is often called the Age of Queen Anne; but, unlike Elizabeth,

this "meekly stupid" queen had practically no influence upon our

literature. The name Classic Age is more often heard; but in using it we

should remember clearly these three different ways in which the word

"classic" is applied to literature: (1) the term "classic" refers, in

general, to writers of the highest rank in any nation. As used in our

literature, it was first applied to the works of the great Greek and Roman

writers, like Homer and Virgil; and any English book which followed the

simple and noble method of these writers was said to have a classic style.

Later the term was enlarged to cover the great literary works of other

ancient nations; so that the Bible and the Avestas, as well as the Iliad

and the Aeneid, are called classics. (2) Every national literature has at

least one period in which an unusual number of great writers are producing

books, and this is called the classic period of a nation's literature. Thus

the reign of Augustus is the classic or golden age of Rome; the generation

of Dante is the classic age of Italian literature; the age of Louis XIV is

the French classic age; and the age of Queen Anne is often called the

classic age of England. (3) The word "classic" acquired an entirely

different meaning in the period we are studying; and we shall better

understand this by reference to the preceding ages. The Elizabethan writers

were led by patriotism, by enthusiasm, and, in general, by romantic

emotions. They wrote in a natural style, without regard to rules; and

though they exaggerated and used too many words, their works are delightful

because of their vigor and freshness and fine feeling. In the following age

patriotism had largely disappeared from politics and enthusiasm from

literature. Poets no longer wrote naturally, but artificially, with strange

and fantastic verse forms to give effect, since fine feeling was wanting.

And this is the general character of the poetry of the Puritan Age.[185]

Gradually our writers rebelled against the exaggerations of both the

natural and the fantastic style. They demanded that poetry should follow

exact rules; and in this they were influenced by French writers, especially

by Boileau and Rapin, who insisted on precise methods of writing poetry,

and who professed to have discovered their rules in the classics of Horace

and Aristotle. In our study of the Elizabethan drama we noted the good

influence of the classic movement in insisting upon that beauty of form and

definiteness of expression which characterize the dramas of Greece and

Rome; and in the work of Dryden and his followers we see a revival of

classicism in the effort to make English literature conform to rules

established by the great writers of other nations. At first the results

were excellent, especially in prose; but as the creative vigor of the

Elizabethans was lacking in this age, writing by rule soon developed a kind

of elegant formalism, which suggests the elaborate social code of the time.

Just as a gentleman might not act naturally, but must follow exact rules in

doffing his hat, or addressing a lady, or entering a room, or wearing a

wig, or offering his snuffbox to a friend, so our writers lost

individuality and became formal and artificial. The general tendency of

literature was to look at life critically, to emphasize intellect rather

than imagination, the form rather than the content of a sentence. Writers

strove to repress all emotion and enthusiasm, and to use only precise and

elegant methods of expression. This is what is often meant by the

"classicism" of the ages of Pope and Johnson. It refers to the critical,

intellectual spirit of many writers, to the fine polish of their heroic

couplets or the elegance of their prose, and not to any resemblance which

their work bears to true classic literature. In a word, the classic

movement had become pseudo-classic, i.e. a false or sham classicism; and

the latter term is now often used to designate a considerable part of

eighteenth-century literature.[186] To avoid this critical difficulty we

have adopted the term Augustan Age, a name chosen by the writers

themselves, who saw in Pope, Addison, Swift, Johnson, and Burke the modern

parallels to Horace, Virgil, Cicero, and all that brilliant company who

made Roman literature famous in the days of Augustus.

ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744)

Pope is in many respects a unique figure. In the first place, he was for a

generation "the poet" of a great nation. To be sure, poetry was limited in

the early eighteenth century; there were few lyrics, little or no love

poetry, no epics, no dramas or songs of nature worth considering; but in

the narrow field of satiric and didactic verse Pope was the undisputed

master. His influence completely dominated the poetry of his age, and many

foreign writers, as well as the majority of English poets, looked to him as

their model. Second, he was a remarkably clear and adequate reflection of

the spirit of the age in which he lived. There is hardly an ideal, a

belief, a doubt, a fashion, a whim of Queen Anne's time, that is not neatly

expressed in his poetry. Third, he was the only important writer of that

age who gave his whole life to letters. Swift was a clergyman and

politician; Addison was secretary of state; other writers depended on

patrons or politics or pensions for fame and a livelihood; but Pope was

independent, and had no profession but literature. And fourth, by the sheer

force of his ambition he won his place, and held it, in spite of religious

prejudice, and in the face of physical and temperamental obstacles that

would have discouraged a stronger man. For Pope was deformed and sickly,

dwarfish in soul and body. He knew little of the world of nature or of the

world of the human heart. He was lacking, apparently, in noble feeling, and

instinctively chose a lie when the truth had manifestly more advantages.

Yet this jealous, peevish, waspish little man became the most famous poet

of his age and the acknowledged leader of English literature. We record the

fact with wonder and admiration; but we do not attempt to explain it.

LIFE. Pope was born in London in 1688, the year of the Revolution. His

parents were both Catholics, who presently removed from London and settled

in Binfield, near Windsor, where the poet's childhood was passed. Partly

because of an unfortunate prejudice against Catholics in the public

schools, partly because of his own weakness and deformity, Pope received

very little school education, but browsed for himself among English books

and picked up a smattering of the classics. Very early he began to write

poetry, and records the fact with his usual vanity:

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.

Being debarred by his religion from many desirable employments, he resolved

to make literature his life work; and in this he resembled Dryden, who, he

tells us, was his only master, though much of his work seems to depend on

Boileau, the French poet and critic.[187] When only sixteen years old he

had written his "Pastorals"; a few years later appeared his "Essay on

Criticism," which made him famous. With the publication of the _Rape of the

Lock_, in 1712, Pope's name was known and honored all over England, and

this dwarf of twenty-four years, by the sheer force of his own ambition,

had jumped to the foremost place in English letters. It was soon after this

that Voltaire called him "the best poet of England and, at present, of all

the world,"--which is about as near the truth as Voltaire generally gets in

his numerous universal judgments. For the next twelve years Pope was busy

with poetry, especially with his translations of Homer; and his work was so

successful financially that he bought a villa at Twickenham, on the Thames,

and remained happily independent of wealthy patrons for a livelihood.

Led by his success, Pope returned to London and for a time endeavored to

live the gay and dissolute life which was supposed to be suitable for a

literary genius; but he was utterly unfitted for it, mentally and

physically, and soon retired to Twickenham. There he gave himself up to

poetry, manufactured a little garden more artificial than his verses, and

cultivated his friendship with Martha Blount, with whom for many years he

spent a good part of each day, and who remained faithful to him to the end

of his life. At Twickenham he wrote his _Moral Epistles_ (poetical satires

modeled after Horace) and revenged himself upon all his critics in the

bitter abuse of the _Dunciad_. He died in 1744 and was buried at

Twickenham, his religion preventing him from the honor, which was certainly

his due, of a resting place in Westminster Abbey.

WORKS OF POPE. For convenience we may separate Pope's work into three

groups, corresponding to the early, middle, and later period of his life.

In the first he wrote his "Pastorals," "Windsor Forest," "Messiah," "Essay

on Criticism," "Eloise to Abelard," and the _Rape of the Lock;_ in the

second, his translations of Homer; in the third the _Dunciad_ and the

_Epistles_, the latter containing the famous "Essay on Man" and the

"Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," which is in truth his "Apologia," and in which

alone we see Pope's life from his own view point.

The "Essay on Criticism" sums up the art of poetry as taught first by

Horace, then by Boileau and the eighteenth-century classicists. Though

written in heroic couplets, we hardly consider this as a poem but rather as

a storehouse of critical maxims. "For fools rush in where angels fear to

tread"; "To err is human, to forgive divine"; "A little learning is a

dangerous thing,"--these lines, and many more like them from the same

source, have found their way into our common speech, and are used, without

thinking of the author, whenever we need an apt quotation.

The _Rape of the Lock_ is a masterpiece of its kind, and comes nearer to

being a "creation" than anything else that Pope has written. The occasion

of the famous poem was trivial enough. A fop at the court of Queen Anne,

one Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair from the abundant curls of a pretty

maid of honor named Arabella Fermor. The young lady resented it, and the

two families were plunged into a quarrel which was the talk of London.

Pope, being appealed to, seized the occasion to construct, not a ballad, as

the Cavaliers would have done, nor an epigram, as French poets love to do,

but a long poem in which all the mannerisms of society are pictured in

minutest detail and satirized with the most delicate wit. The first

edition, consisting of two cantos, was published in 1712; and it is amazing

now to read of the trivial character of London court life at the time when

English soldiers were battling for a great continent in the French and

Indian wars. Its instant success caused Pope to lengthen the poem by three

more cantos; and in order to make a more perfect burlesque of an epic poem,

he introduces gnomes, sprites, sylphs, and salamanders,[188] instead of the

gods of the great epics, with which his readers were familiar. The poem is

modeled after two foreign satires: Boileau's _Le Lutrin_ (reading desk), a

satire on the French clergy, who raised a huge quarrel over the location of

a lectern; and _La Secchia Rapita_ (stolen bucket), a famous Italian satire

on the petty causes of the endless Italian wars. Pope, however, went far

ahead of his masters in style and in delicacy of handling a mock-heroic

theme, and during his lifetime the _Rape of the Lock_ was considered as the

greatest poem of its kind in all literature. The poem is still well worth

reading; for as an expression of the artificial life of the age--of its

cards, parties, toilettes, lapdogs, tea-drinking, snuff-taking, and idle

vanities--it is as perfect in its way as _Tamburlaine_, which reflects the

boundless ambition of the Elizabethans.

The fame of Pope's _Iliad_, which was financially the most successful of

his books, was due to the fact that he interpreted Homer in the elegant,

artificial language of his own age. Not only do his words follow literary

fashions but even the Homeric characters lose their strength and become

fashionable men of the court. So the criticism of the scholar Bentley was

most appropriate when he said, "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must

not call it Homer." Pope translated the entire _Iliad_ and half of the

_Odyssey_; and the latter work was finished by two Cambridge scholars,

Elijah Fenton and William Broome, who imitated the mechanical couplets so

perfectly that it is difficult to distinguish their work from that of the

greatest poet of the age. A single selection is given to show how, in the

nobler passages, even Pope may faintly suggest the elemental grandeur of

Homer:

The troops exulting sat in order round,

And beaming fires illumined all the ground.

As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,

O'er Heaven's clear azure spreads her sacred light,

When not a breath disturbs the deep serene,

And not a cloud o'ercasts the solemn scene;

Around her throne the vivid planets roll,

And stars unnumbered gild the glowing pole,

O'er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed,

And tip with silver every mountain's head.

The "Essay" is the best known and the most quoted of all Pope's works.

Except in form it is not poetry, and when one considers it as an essay and

reduces it to plain prose, it is found to consist of numerous literary

ornaments without any very solid structure of thought to rest upon. The

purpose of the essay is, in Pope's words, to "vindicate the ways of God to

Man"; and as there are no unanswered problems in Pope's philosophy, the

vindication is perfectly accomplished in four poetical epistles, concerning

man's relations to the universe, to himself, to society, and to happiness.

The final result is summed up in a few well-known lines:

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good:

And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,

One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

Like the "Essay on Criticism," the poem abounds in quotable lines, such as

the following, which make the entire work well worth reading:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:

Man never is, but always to be blest.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

The same ambition can destroy or save,

And makes a patriot as it makes a knave.

Honor and shame from no condition rise;

Act well your part, there all the honor lies.

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,

As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;

Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law,

Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw:

Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,

A little louder, but as empty quite:

Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,

And beads and prayer books are the toys of age:

Pleased with this bauble still, as that before;

Till tired he sleeps, and Life's poor play is o'er.[189]

_The Dunciad_ (i.e. the "Iliad of the Dunces") began originally as a

controversy concerning Shakespeare, but turned out to be a coarse and

revengeful satire upon all the literary men of the age who had aroused

Pope's anger by their criticism or lack of appreciation of his genius.

Though brilliantly written and immensely popular at one time, its present

effect on the reader is to arouse a sense of pity that a man of such

acknowledged power and position should abuse both by devoting his talents

to personal spite and petty quarrels. Among the rest of his numerous works

the reader will find Pope's estimate of himself best set forth in his

"Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," and it will be well to close our study of this

strange mixture of vanity and greatness with "The Universal Prayer," which

shows at least that Pope had considered, and judged himself, and that all

further judgment is consequently superfluous.

JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745)

In each of Marlowe's tragedies we have the picture of a man dominated by a

single passion, the lust of power for its own sake. In each we see that a

powerful man without self-control is like a dangerous instrument in the

hands of a child; and the tragedy ends in the destruction of the man by the

ungoverned power which he possesses. The life of Swift is just such a

living tragedy. He had the power of gaining wealth, like the hero of the

_Jew of Malta_; yet he used it scornfully, and in sad irony left what

remained to him of a large property to found a hospital for lunatics. By

hard work he won enormous literary power, and used it to satirize our

common humanity. He wrested political power from the hands of the Tories,

and used it to insult the very men who had helped him, and who held his

fate in their hands. By his dominant personality he exercised a curious

power over women, and used it brutally to make them feel their inferiority.

Being loved supremely by two good women, he brought sorrow and death to

both, and endless misery to himself. So his power brought always tragedy in

its wake. It is only when we remember his life of struggle and

disappointment and bitterness that we can appreciate the personal quality

in his satire, and perhaps find some sympathy for this greatest genius of

all the Augustan writers.

LIFE. Swift was born in Dublin, of English parents, in 1667. His father

died before he was born; his mother was poor, and Swift, though proud as

Lucifer, was compelled to accept aid from relatives, who gave it

grudgingly. At the Kilkenny school, and especially at Dublin University, he

detested the curriculum, reading only what appealed to his own nature; but,

since a degree was necessary to his success, he was compelled to accept it

as a favor from the examiners, whom he despised in his heart. After

graduation the only position open to him was with a distant relative, Sir

William Temple, who gave him the position of private secretary largely on

account of the unwelcome relationship.

Temple was a statesman and an excellent diplomatist; but he thought himself

to be a great writer as well, and he entered into a literary controversy

concerning the relative merits of the classics and modern literature.

Swift's first notable work, _The Battle of the Books_, written at this time

but not published, is a keen satire upon both parties in the controversy.

The first touch of bitterness shows itself here; for Swift was in a galling

position for a man of his pride, knowing his intellectual superiority to

the man who employed him, and yet being looked upon as a servant and eating

at the servants' table. Thus he spent ten of the best years of his life in

the pretty Moor Park, Surrey, growing more bitter each year and steadily

cursing his fate. Nevertheless he read and studied widely, and, after his

position with Temple grew unbearable, quarreled with his patron, took

orders, and entered the Church of England. Some years later we find him

settled in the little church of Laracor, Ireland,--a country which he

disliked intensely, but whither he went because no other "living" was open

to him.

In Ireland, faithful to his church duties, Swift labored to better the

condition of the unhappy people around him. Never before had the poor of

his parishes been so well cared for; but Swift chafed under his yoke,

growing more and more irritated as he saw small men advanced to large

positions, while he remained unnoticed in a little country church,--largely

because he was too proud and too blunt with those who might have advanced

him. While at Laracor he finished his _Tale of a Tub_, a satire on the

various churches of the day, which was published in London with the _Battle

of the Books_ in 1704. The work brought him into notice as the most

powerful satirist of the age, and he soon gave up his church to enter the

strife of party politics. The cheap pamphlet was then the most powerful

political weapon known; and as Swift had no equal at pamphlet writing, he

soon became a veritable dictator. For several years, especially from 1710

to 1713, Swift was one of the most important figures in London. The Whigs

feared the lash of his satire; the Tories feared to lose his support. He

was courted, flattered, cajoled on every side; but the use he made of his

new power is sad to contemplate. An unbearable arrogance took possession of

him. Lords, statesmen, even ladies were compelled to sue for his favor and

to apologize for every fancied slight to his egoism. It is at this time

that he writes in his _Journal to Stella:_

Mr. Secretary told me the Duke of Buckingham had been talking much about me

and desired my acquaintance. I answered it could not be, for he had not yet

made sufficient advances; then Shrewsbury said he thought the Duke was not

used to make advances. I said I could not help that, for I always expected

advances in proportion to men's quality, and more from a Duke than any

other man.

Writing to the Duchess of Queensberry he says:

I am glad you know your duty; for it has been a known and established rule

above twenty years in England that the first advances have been constantly

made me by all ladies who aspire to my acquaintance, and the greater their

quality the greater were their advances.

When the Tories went out of power Swift's position became uncertain. He

expected and had probably been promised a bishopric in England, with a seat

among the peers of the realm; but the Tories offered him instead the place

of dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. It was galling to a man of

his proud spirit; but after his merciless satire on religion, in _The Tale

of a Tub_, any ecclesiastical position in England was rendered impossible.

Dublin was the best he could get, and he accepted it bitterly, once more

cursing the fate which he had brought upon himself.

With his return to Ireland begins the last act in the tragedy of his life.

His best known literary work, _Gulliver's Travels_, was done here; but the

bitterness of life grew slowly to insanity, and a frightful personal

sorrow, of which he never spoke, reached its climax in the death of Esther

Johnson, a beautiful young woman, who had loved Swift ever since the two

had met in Temple's household, and to whom he had written his _Journal to

Stella_. During the last years of his life a brain disease, of which he had

shown frequent symptoms, fastened its terrible hold upon Swift, and he

became by turns an idiot and a madman. He died in 1745, and when his will

was opened it was found that he had left all his property to found St.

Patrick's Asylum for lunatics and incurables. It stands to-day as the most

suggestive monument of his peculiar genius.

THE WORKS OF SWIFT. From Swift's life one can readily foresee the kind of

literature he will produce. Taken together his works are a monstrous satire

on humanity; and the spirit of that satire is shown clearly in a little

incident of his first days in London. There was in the city at that time a

certain astrologer named Partridge, who duped the public by calculating

nativities from the stars, and by selling a yearly almanac predicting

future events. Swift, who hated all shams, wrote, with a great show of

learning, his famous _Bickerstaff Almanac_, containing "Predictions for the

Year 1708, as Determined by the Unerring Stars." As Swift rarely signed his

name to any literary work, letting it stand or fall on its own merits, his

burlesque appeared over the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff, a name

afterwards made famous by Steele in _The Tatler_. Among the predictions was

the following:

My first prediction is but a trifle; yet I will mention it to show how

ignorant those sottish pretenders to astrology are in their own concerns:

it relates to Partridge the almanack maker; I have consulted the star of

his nativity by my own rules, and find he will infallibly die upon the 29th

of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever; therefore I advise

him to consider of it, and settle his affairs in time.

On March 30, the day after the prediction was to be fulfilled, there

appeared in the newspapers a letter from a revenue officer giving the

details of Partridge's death, with the doings of the bailiff and the coffin

maker; and on the following morning appeared an elaborate "Elegy of Mr.

Partridge." When poor Partridge, who suddenly found himself without

customers, published a denial of the burial, Swift answered with an

elaborate "Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff," in which he proved by

astrological rules that Partridge was dead, and that the man now in his

place was an impostor trying to cheat the heirs out of their inheritance.

This ferocious joke is suggestive of all Swift's satires. Against any case

of hypocrisy or injustice he sets up a remedy of precisely the same kind,

only more atrocious, and defends his plan with such seriousness that the

satire overwhelms the reader with a sense of monstrous falsity. Thus his

solemn "Argument to prove that the Abolishing of Christianity may be

attended with Some Inconveniences" is such a frightful satire upon the

abuses of Christianity by its professed followers that it is impossible for

us to say whether Swift intended to point out needed reforms, or to satisfy

his conscience,[190] or to perpetrate a joke on the Church, as he had done

on poor Partridge. So also with his "Modest Proposal," concerning the

children of Ireland, which sets up the proposition that poor Irish farmers

ought to raise children as dainties, to be eaten, like roast pigs, on the

tables of prosperous Englishmen. In this most characteristic work it is

impossible to find Swift or his motive. The injustice under which Ireland

suffered, her perversity in raising large families to certain poverty, and

the indifference of English politicians to her suffering and protests are

all mercilessly portrayed; but why? That is still the unanswered problem of

Swift's life and writings.

Swift's two greatest satires are his _Tale of a Tub_ and _Gulliver's

Travels_. The _Tale_ began as a grim exposure of the alleged weaknesses of

three principal forms of religious belief, Catholic, Lutheran, and

Calvinist, as opposed to the Anglican; but it ended in a satire upon all

science and philosophy.

Swift explains his whimsical title by the custom of mariners in throwing

out a tub to a whale, in order to occupy the monster's attention and divert

it from an attack upon the ship,--which only proves how little Swift knew

of whales or sailors. But let that pass. His book is a tub thrown out to

the enemies of Church and State to keep them occupied from further attacks

or criticism; and the substance of the argument is that all churches, and

indeed all religion and science and statesmanship, are arrant hypocrisy.

The best known part of the book is the allegory of the old man who died and

left a coat (which is Christian Truth) to each of his three sons, Peter,

Martin, and Jack, with minute directions for its care and use. These three

names stand for Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists; and the way in which

the sons evade their father's will and change the fashion of their garment

is part of the bitter satire upon all religious sects. Though it professes

to defend the Anglican Church, that institution fares perhaps worse than

the others; for nothing is left to her but a thin cloak of custom under

which to hide her alleged hypocrisy.

In _Gulliver's Travels_ the satire grows more unbearable. Strangely enough,

this book, upon which Swift's literary fame generally rests, was not

written from any literary motive, but rather as an outlet for the author's

own bitterness against fate and human society. It is still read with

pleasure, as _Robinson Crusoe_ is read, for the interesting adventures of

the hero; and fortunately those who read it generally overlook its

degrading influence and motive.

_Gulliver's Travels_ records the pretended four voyages of one Lemuel

Gulliver, and his adventures in four astounding countries. The first book

tells of his voyage and shipwreck in Lilliput, where the inhabitants are

about as tall as one's thumb, and all their acts and motives are on the

same dwarfish scale. In the petty quarrels of these dwarfs we are supposed

to see the littleness of humanity. The statesmen who obtain place and favor

by cutting monkey capers on the tight rope before their sovereign, and the

two great parties, the Littleendians and Bigendians, who plunge the country

into civil war over the momentous question of whether an egg should be

broken on its big or on its little end, are satires on the politics of

Swift's own day and generation. The style is simple and convincing; the

surprising situations and adventures are as absorbing as those of Defoe's

masterpiece; and altogether it is the most interesting of Swift's satires.

On the second voyage Gulliver is abandoned in Brobdingnag, where the

inhabitants are giants, and everything is done upon an enormous scale. The

meanness of humanity seems all the more detestable in view of the greatness

of these superior beings. When Gulliver tells about his own people, their

ambitions and wars and conquests, the giants can only wonder that such

great venom could exist in such little insects.

In the third voyage Gulliver continues his adventures in Laputa, and this

is a satire upon all the scientists and philosophers. Laputa is a flying

island, held up in the air by a loadstone; and all the professors of the

famous academy at Lagado are of the same airy constitution. The philosopher

who worked eight years to extract sunshine from cucumbers is typical of

Swift's satiric treatment of all scientific problems. It is in this voyage

that we hear of the Struldbrugs, a ghastly race of men who are doomed to

live upon earth after losing hope and the desire for life. The picture is

all the more terrible in view of the last years of Swift's own life, in

which he was compelled to live on, a burden to himself and his friends.

In these three voyages the evident purpose is to strip off the veil of

habit and custom, with which men deceive themselves, and show the crude

vices of humanity as Swift fancies he sees them. In the fourth voyage the

merciless satire is carried out to its logical conclusion. This brings us

to the land of the Houyhnhnms, in which horses, superior and intelligent

creatures, are the ruling animals. All our interest, however, is centered

on the Yahoos, a frightful race, having the form and appearance of men, but

living in unspeakable degradation.

The _Journal to Stella_, written chiefly in the years 1710-1713 for the

benefit of Esther Johnson, is interesting to us for two reasons. It is,

first, an excellent commentary on contemporary characters and political

events, by one of the most powerful and original minds of the age; and

second, in its love passages and purely personal descriptions it gives us

the best picture we possess of Swift himself at the summit of his power and

influence. As we read now its words of tenderness for the woman who loved

him, and who brought almost the only ray of sunlight into his life, we can

only wonder and be silent. Entirely different are his _Drapier's Letters_,

a model of political harangue and of popular argument, which roused an

unthinking English public and did much benefit to Ireland by preventing the

politicians' plan of debasing the Irish coinage. Swift's poems, though

vigorous and original (like Defoe's, of the same period), are generally

satirical, often coarse, and seldom rise above doggerel. Unlike his friend

Addison, Swift saw, in the growing polish and decency of society, only a

mask for hypocrisy; and he often used his verse to shock the new-born

modesty by pointing out some native ugliness which his diseased mind

discovered under every beautiful exterior.

That Swift is the most original writer of his time, and one of the greatest

masters of English prose, is undeniable. Directness, vigor, simplicity,

mark every page. Among writers of that age he stands almost alone in his

disdain of literary effects. Keeping his object steadily before him, he

drives straight on to the end, with a convincing power that has never been

surpassed in our language. Even in his most grotesque creations, the reader

never loses the sense of reality, of being present as an eyewitness of the

most impossible events, so powerful and convincing is Swift's prose. Defoe

had the same power; but in writing _Robinson Crusoe_, for instance, his

task was comparatively easy, since his hero and his adventures were both

natural; while Swift gives reality to pygmies, giants, and the most

impossible situations, as easily as if he were writing of facts.

Notwithstanding these excellent qualities, the ordinary reader will do well

to confine himself to _Gulliver's Travels_ and a book of well-chosen

selections. For, it must be confessed, the bulk of Swift's work is not

wholesome reading. It is too terribly satiric and destructive; it

emphasizes the faults and failings of humanity; and so runs counter to the

general course of our literature, which from Cynewulf to Tennyson follows

the Ideal, as Merlin followed the Gleam,[191] and is not satisfied till the

hidden beauty of man's soul and the divine purpose of his struggle are

manifest.

JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719)

In the pleasant art of living with one's fellows, Addison is easily a

master. It is due to his perfect expression of that art, of that new social

life which, as we have noted, was characteristic of the Age of Anne, that

Addison occupies such a large place in the history of literature. Of less

power and originality than Swift, he nevertheless wields, and deserves to

wield, a more lasting influence. Swift is the storm, roaring against the

ice and frost of the late spring of English life. Addison is the sunshine,

which melts the ice and dries the mud and makes the earth thrill with light

and hope. Like Swift, he despised shams, but unlike him, he never lost

faith in humanity; and in all his satires there is a gentle kindliness

which makes one think better of his fellow-men, even while he laughs at

their little vanities.

Two things Addison did for our literature which are of inestimable value.

First, he overcame a certain corrupt tendency bequeathed by Restoration

literature. It was the apparent aim of the low drama, and even of much of

the poetry of that age, to make virtue ridiculous and vice attractive.

Addison set himself squarely against this unworthy tendency. To strip off

the mask of vice, to show its ugliness and deformity, but to reveal virtue

in its own native loveliness,--that was Addison's purpose; and he succeeded

so well that never, since his day, has our English literature seriously

followed after false gods. As Macaulay says, "So effectually did he retort

on vice the mockery which had recently been directed against virtue, that

since his time the open violation of decency has always been considered

amongst us a sure mark of a fool." And second, prompted and aided by the

more original genius of his friend Steele, Addison seized upon the new

social life of the clubs and made it the subject of endless pleasant essays

upon types of men and manners. _The Tatler_ and _The Spectator_ are the

beginning of the modern essay; and their studies of human character, as

exemplified in Sir Roger de Coverley, are a preparation for the modern

novel.

LIFE. Addison's life, like his writings, is in marked contrast to that of

Swift. He was born in Milston, Wiltshire, in 1672. His father was a

scholarly English clergyman, and all his life Addison followed naturally

the quiet and cultured ways to which he was early accustomed. At the famous

Charterhouse School, in London, and in his university life at Oxford, he

excelled in character and scholarship and became known as a writer of

graceful verses. He had some intention, at one time, of entering the

Church, but was easily persuaded by his friends to take up the government

service instead. Unlike Swift, who abused his political superiors, Addison

took the more tactful way of winning the friendship of men in large places.

His lines to Dryden won that literary leader's instant favor, and one of

his Latin poems, "The Peace of Ryswick" (1697), with its kindly

appreciation of King William's statesmen, brought him into favorable

political notice. It brought him also a pension of three hundred pounds a

year, with a suggestion that he travel abroad and cultivate the art of

diplomacy; which he promptly did to his own great advantage.

From a literary view point the most interesting work of Addison's early

life is his _Account of the Greatest English Poets_ (1693), written while

he was a fellow of Oxford University. One rubs his eyes to find Dryden

lavishly praised, Spenser excused or patronized, while Shakespeare is not

even mentioned. But Addison was writing under Boileau's "classic" rules;

and the poet, like the age, was perhaps too artificial to appreciate

natural genius.

While he was traveling abroad, the death of William and the loss of power

by the Whigs suddenly stopped Addison's pension; necessity brought him

home, and for a time he lived in poverty and obscurity. Then occurred the

battle of Blenheim, and in the effort to find a poet to celebrate the

event, Addison was brought to the Tories' attention. His poem, "The

Campaign," celebrating the victory, took the country by storm. Instead of

making the hero slay his thousands and ten thousands, like the old epic

heroes, Addison had some sense of what is required in a modern general, and

so made Marlborough direct the battle from the outside, comparing him to an

angel riding on the whirlwind:

'T was then great Marlbro's mighty soul was proved,

That, in the shock of charging hosts unmoved,

Amidst confusion, horror, and despair,

Examined all the dreadful scenes of war;

In peaceful thought the field of death surveyed,

To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid,

Inspired repulsed battalions to engage,

And taught the doubtful battle where to rage.

So when an angel by divine command

With rising tempests shakes a guilty land,

(Such as of late o'er pale Britannia past,)

Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;

And, pleased th' Almighty's orders to perform,

Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.

That one doubtful simile made Addison's fortune. Never before or since was

a poet's mechanical work so well rewarded. It was called the finest thing

ever written, and from that day Addison rose steadily in political favor

and office. He became in turn Undersecretary, member of Parliament,

Secretary for Ireland, and finally Secretary of State. Probably no other

literary man, aided by his pen alone, ever rose so rapidly and so high in

office.

The rest of Addison's life was divided between political duties and

literature. His essays for the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, which we still

cherish, were written between 1709 and 1714; but he won more literary fame

by his classic tragedy _Cato_, which we have almost forgotten. In 1716 he

married a widow, the Countess of Warwick, and went to live at her home, the

famous Holland House. His married life lasted only three years, and was

probably not a happy one. Certainly he never wrote of women except with

gentle satire, and he became more and more a clubman, spending most of his

time in the clubs and coffeehouses of London. Up to this time his life had

been singularly peaceful; but his last years were shadowed by quarrels,

first with Pope, then with Swift, and finally with his lifelong friend

Steele. The first quarrel was on literary grounds, and was largely the

result of Pope's jealousy. The latter's venomous caricature of Addison as

Atticus shows how he took his petty revenge on a great and good man who had

been his friend. The other quarrels with Swift, and especially with his old

friend Steele, were the unfortunate result of political differences, and

show how impossible it is to mingle literary ideals with party politics. He

died serenely in 1719. A brief description from Thackeray's _English

Humorists_ is his best epitaph:

A life prosperous and beautiful, a calm death; an immense fame and

affection afterwards for his happy and spotless name.

WORKS OF ADDISON. The most enduring of Addison's works are his famous

_Essays_, collected from the _Tatler_ and _Spectator._ We have spoken of

him as a master of the art of gentle living, and these essays are a

perpetual inducement to others to know and to practice the same fine art.

To an age of fundamental coarseness and artificiality he came with a

wholesome message of refinement and simplicity, much as Ruskin and Arnold

spoke to a later age of materialism; only Addison's success was greater

than theirs because of his greater knowledge of life and his greater faith

in men. He attacks all the little vanities and all the big vices of his

time, not in Swift's terrible way, which makes us feel hopeless of

humanity, but with a kindly ridicule and gentle humor which takes speedy

improvement for granted. To read Swift's brutal "Letters to a Young Lady,"

and then to read Addison's "Dissection of a Beau's Head" and his

"Dissection of a Coquette's Heart," is to know at once the secret of the

latter's more enduring influence.

Three other results of these delightful essays are worthy of attention:

first, they are the best picture we possess of the new social life of

England, with its many new interests; second, they advanced the art of

literary criticism to a much higher stage than it had ever before reached,

and however much we differ from their judgment and their interpretation of

such a man as Milton, they certainly led Englishmen to a better knowledge

and appreciation of their own literature; and finally, in Ned Softly the

literary dabbler, Will Wimble the poor relation, Sir Andrew Freeport the

merchant, Will Honeycomb the fop, and Sir Roger the country gentleman, they

give us characters that live forever as part of that goodly company which

extends from Chaucer's country parson to Kipling's Mulvaney. Addison and

Steele not only introduced the modern essay, but in such characters as

these they herald the dawn of the modern novel. Of all his essays the best

known and loved are those which introduce us to Sir Roger de Coverley, the

genial dictator of life and manners in the quiet English country.

In style these essays are remarkable as showing the growing perfection of

the English language. Johnson says, "Whoever wishes to attain an English

style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give

his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." And again he says, "Give

nights and days, sir, to the study of Addison if you mean to be a good

writer, or, what is more worth, an honest man." That was good criticism for

its day, and even at the present time critics are agreed that Addison's

_Essays_ are well worth reading once for their own sake, and many times for

their influence in shaping a clear and graceful style of writing.

Addison's poems, which were enormously popular in his day, are now seldom

read. His _Cato_, with its classic unities and lack of dramatic power, must

be regarded as a failure, if we study it as tragedy; but it offers an

excellent example of the rhetoric and fine sentiment which were then

considered the essentials of good writing. The best scene from this tragedy

is in the fifth act, where Cato soliloquizes, with Plato's _Immortality of

the Soul_ open in his hand, and a drawn sword on the table before him:

It must be so--Plato, thou reason'st well!--

Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,

This longing after immortality?

Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,

Of falling into nought? why shrinks the soul

Back on herself, and startles at destruction?

'Tis the divinity that stirs within us;

'Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter,

And intimates eternity to man.

Many readers make frequent use of one portion of Addison's poetry without

knowing to whom they are indebted. His devout nature found expression in

many hymns, a few of which are still used and loved in our churches. Many a

congregation thrills, as Thackeray did, to the splendid sweep of his "God

in Nature," beginning, "The spacious firmament on high." Almost as well

known and loved are his "Traveler's Hymn," and his "Continued Help,"

beginning, "When all thy mercies, O my God." The latter hymn--written in a

storm at sea off the Italian coast, when the captain and crew were

demoralized by terror--shows that poetry, especially a good hymn that one

can sing in the same spirit as one would say his prayers, is sometimes the

most practical and helpful thing in the world.

RICHARD STEELE (1672-1729). Steele was in almost every respect the

antithesis of his friend and fellow-worker,--a rollicking, good-hearted,

emotional, lovable Irishman. At the Charterhouse School and at Oxford he

shared everything with Addison, asking nothing but love in return. Unlike

Addison, he studied but little, and left the university to enter the Horse

Guards. He was in turn soldier, captain, poet, playwright, essayist, member

of Parliament, manager of a theater, publisher of a newspaper, and twenty

other things,--all of which he began joyously and then abandoned, sometimes

against his will, as when he was expelled from Parliament, and again

because some other interest of the moment had more attraction. His poems

and plays are now little known; but the reader who searches them out will

find one or two suggestive things about Steele himself. For instance, he

loves children; and he is one of the few writers of his time who show a

sincere and unswerving respect for womanhood. Even more than Addison he

ridicules vice and makes virtue lovely. He is the originator of the

_Tatler_, and joins with Addison in creating the _Spectator_,--the two

periodicals which, in the short space of less than four years, did more to

influence subsequent literature than all other magazines of the century

combined. Moreover, he is the original genius of Sir Roger, and of many

other characters and essays for which Addison usually receives the whole

credit. It is often impossible in the _Tatler_ essays to separate the work

of the two men; but the majority of critics hold that the more original

parts, the characters, the thought, the overflowing kindliness, are largely

Steele's creation; while to Addison fell the work of polishing and

perfecting the essays, and of adding that touch of humor which made them

the most welcome literary visitors that England had ever received.

THE TATLER AND THE SPECTATOR. On account of his talent in writing political

pamphlets, Steele was awarded the position of official gazetteer. While in

this position, and writing for several small newspapers, the idea occurred

to Steele to publish a paper which should contain not only the political

news, but also the gossip of the clubs and coffeehouses, with some light

essays on the life and manners of the age. The immediate result--for Steele

never let an idea remain idle--was the famous _Tatler_, the first number of

which appeared April 12, 1709. It was a small folio sheet, appearing on

post days, three times a week, and it sold for a penny a copy. That it had

a serious purpose is evident from this dedication to the first volume of

collected _Tatler_ essays:

The general purpose of this paper is to expose the false arts of life, to

pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity, and affectation, and to

recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse, and our

behavior.

The success of this unheard-of combination of news, gossip, and essay was

instantaneous. Not a club or a coffeehouse in London could afford to be

without it, and over it's pages began the first general interest in

contemporary English life as expressed in literature. Steele at first wrote

the entire paper and signed his essays with the name of Isaac Bickerstaff,

which had been made famous by Swift a few years before. Addison is said to

have soon recognized one of his own remarks to Steele, and the secret of

the Authorship was out. From that time Addison was a regular contributor,

and occasionally other writers added essays on the new social life of

England.[192]

Steele lost his position as gazetteer, and the _Tatler_ was discontinued

after less than two years' life, but not till it won an astonishing

popularity and made ready the way for its successor. Two months later, on

March 1, 1711, appeared the first number of the _Spectator_. In the new

magazine politics and news, as such, were ignored; it was a literary

magazine, pure and simple, and its entire contents consisted of a single

light essay. It was considered a crazy venture at the time, but its instant

success proved that men were eager for some literary expression of the new

social ideals. The following whimsical letter to the editor may serve to

indicate the part played by the _Spectator_ in the daily life of London:

Mr. Spectator,--Your paper is a part of my tea equipage; and my servant

knows my humor so well, that in calling for my breakfast this morning (it

being past my usual hour) she answered, the _Spectator_ was not yet come

in, but the teakettle boiled, and she expected it every moment.

It is in the incomparable _Spectator_ papers that Addison shows himself

most "worthy to be remembered." He contributed the majority of its essays,

and in its first number appears this description of the Spectator, by which

name Addison is now generally known:

There is no place of general resort wherein I do not often make my

appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my head into a round of

politicians at Will's [Coffeehouse] and listening with great attention to

the narratives that are made in those little circular audiences. Sometimes

I smoke a pipe at Child's, and, whilst I seem attentive to nothing but _The

Postman_, overhear the conversation of every table in the room. I appear on

Sunday nights at St. James's, and sometimes join the little committee of

politics in the inner room, as one who comes to hear and improve. My face

is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa Tree, and in the

theaters both of Drury Lane and the Haymarket. I have been taken for a

merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten years; and sometimes pass

for a Jew in the assembly of stock jobbers at Jonathan's.... Thus I live in

the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species,...

which is the character I intend to preserve in this paper.