English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History Part 25

WILLIAM PENN.--The fame of Fox in America has been eclipsed by that of his chief convert William Penn. In an historical or biographical work, the life of Penn would demand extended mention; but his name is introduced here only as one of the theological writers of the day. He was born in 1644, and while a student at Oxford was converted to the Friends' doctrine by the preaching of Thomas Loe, a colleague of George Fox. The son of Admiral Sir William Penn, he was the ward of James II., and afterwards Lord Proprietary and founder of Pennsylvania. Persecuted for his tenets, he was frequently imprisoned for his preaching and writings. In 1668 he wrote _Truth Exalted_ and _The Sandy Foundation_, and when imprisoned for these, he wrote in jail his most famous work, _No Cross, no Crown_.

After the expulsion of James II., Penn was repeatedly tried and acquitted for alleged attempts to aid the king in recovering his throne. The malignity of Lord Macaulay has reproduced the charges, but reversed, most unjustly, the acquittals. His record occupies a large s.p.a.ce in American history, and he is reverenced for having established a great colony on the basis of brotherly love. Poor and infirm, he died in 1718.

ROBERT BARCLAY, who was born in 1648, is only mentioned in this connection on account of his Latin apology for the Quakers, written in 1676, and translated since into English.

JOHN BUNYAN.--Among the curious religious outcroppings of the civil war, none is more striking and singular than John Bunyan. He produced a work of a decidedly polemical character, setting forth his peculiar doctrines, and--a remarkable feature in the course of English literature--a story so interesting and vivid that it has met with universal perusal and admiration. It is at the same time an allegory which has not its equal in the language. Rhetoricians must always mention the Pilgrim's Progress as the most splendid example of the allegory.

Bunyan was born in Elston, Bedfordshire, in 1628. The son of a tinker, his childhood and early manhood were idle and vicious. A sudden and sharp rebuke from a woman not much better than himself, for his blasphemy, set him to thinking, and he soon became a changed man. In 1653 he joined the Baptists, and soon, without preparation, began to preach. For this he was thrown into jail, where he remained for more than twelve years. It was during this period that, with no other books than the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs, he excogitated his allegory. In 1672 he was released through the influence of Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln. He immediately began to preach, and continued to do so until 1688, when he died from a fever brought on by exposure.

In his first work, _Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners_, he gives us his own experience,--fearful dreams of early childhood, his sins and warnings in the parliamentary army, with divers temptations, falls, and struggles.

Of his great work, _The Pilgrim's Progress_, it is hardly necessary to speak at length. The story of the Pilgrim, Christian, is known to all English readers, large and little; how he left the City of Destruction, and journeyed towards the Celestial City; of his thrilling adventures; of the men and things that r.e.t.a.r.ded his progress, and of those who helped him forward. No one has ever discoursed with such vivid description and touching pathos of the Land of Beulah, the Delectable Mountains, the Christian's inward rapture at the glimpse of the Celestial City, and his faith-sustaining descent into the Valley of the Shadow of Death! As a work of art, it is inimitable; as a book of religious instruction, it is more to be admired for sentiment than for logic; its influence upon children is rather that of a high-wrought romance than of G.o.dly precept. It is a curious reproduction, with a slight difference in cast, of the morality play of an earlier time. Mercy, Piety, Christian, Hopeful, Greatheart, Faithful, are representatives of Christian graces; and, as in the morality, the Prince of Darkness figures as Apollyon.

Bunyan also wrote _The Holy War_, an allegory, which describes the contest between Immanuel and Diabolus for the conquest of the city of Mansoul.

This does not by any means share the popularity of _The Pilgrim's Progress_. The language of all his works is common and idiomatic, but precise and strong: it is the vigorous English of an unpretending man, without the graces of the schools, but expressing his meaning with remarkable clearness. Like Milton's Paradise Lost, Bunyan's allegory has been improperly placed by many persons on a par with the Bible as a body of Christian doctrine, and for instruction in righteousness.

ROBERT SOUTH.--This eccentric clergyman was born in 1633. While king's scholar at Dr. Busby's school in London, he led the devotions on the day of King Charles' execution, and prayed for his majesty by name. At first a Puritan, he became a churchman, and took orders. He was learned and eloquent; but his sermons, which were greatly admired at the time, contain many oddities, forced conceits, and singular anti-climaxes, which gained for him the appellation of the witty churchman.

He is accused of having been too subservient to Charles II.; and he also is considered as displaying not a little vindictiveness in his attacks on his former colleagues the Puritans. He is only known to this age by his sermons, which are still published and read.

OTHER THEOLOGICAL WRITERS.

_Isaac Barrow_, 1630-1677: a man of varied learning, a traveller in the East, and an oriental scholar. He was appointed Professor of Greek at Cambridge, and also lectured on Mathematics. He was a profound thinker and a weighty writer, princ.i.p.ally known by his courses of sermons on the Decalogue, the Creed, and the Sacraments.

_Edward Stillingfleet_, 1635-1699: a clergyman of the Church of England, he was appointed Bishop of Worcester. Many of his sermons have been published. Among his treatises is one ent.i.tled, _Irenic.u.m, a Weapon-Salve for the Churches Wounds, or the Divine Right of Particular Forms of Church Government Discussed and Examined_. "The argument," says Bishop Burnet, "was managed with so much learning and skill that none of either side ever undertook to answer it." He also wrote _Origines Sacrae, or a Rational Account of the Christian Faith_, and various treatises in favor of Protestantism and against the Church of Rome.

_William Sherlock_, 1678-1761: he was Dean of St. Paul's, and a writer of numerous doctrinal discourses, among which are those on _The Trinity_, and on _Death and the Future Judgment_. His son, Thomas Sherlock, D.D., born 1678, was also a distinguished theological writer.

_Gilbert Burnet_, 1643-1715: he was very much of a politician, and played a prominent part in the Revolution. He was made Bishop of Salisbury in 1689. He is princ.i.p.ally known by his _History of the Reformation_, written in the Protestant interest, and by his greater work, the _History of my Own Times_. Not without a decided bias, this latter work is specially valuable as the narration of an eye-witness. The history has been variously criticized for prejudice and inaccuracy; but it fills what would otherwise have been a great vacuum in English historical literature.

_John Locke_, 1632-1704. In a history of philosophy, the name of this distinguished philosopher would occupy a prominent place, and his works would require extended notice. But it is not amiss to introduce him briefly in this connection, because his works all have an ethical significance. He was educated as a physician, and occupied several official positions, in which he suffered from the vicissitudes of political fortune, being once obliged to retreat from persecution to Holland. His _Letters on Toleration_ is a n.o.ble effort to secure the freedom of conscience: his _Treatises on Civil Government_ were specially designed to refute Sir John Filmer's _Patriarcha_, and to overthrow the principle of the _Jus Divinum_. His greatest work is an _Essay on the Human Understanding_. This marks an era in English thought, and has done much to invite attention to the subject of intellectual philosophy. He derives our ideas from the two sources, _sensation_ and _reflection_; and although many of his views have been superseded by the investigations of later philosophers, it is due to him in some degree that their inquiries have been possible.

DIARISTS AND ANTIQUARIANS.

_John Evelyn_, 1620-1705. Among the unintentional historians of England, none are of more value than those who have left detailed and gossiping diaries of the times in which they lived: among these Evelyn occupies a prominent place. He was a gentleman of education and position, who, after the study of law, travelled extensively, and resided several years in France. He had varied accomplishments. His _Sylva_ is a discourse on forest trees and on the propagation of timber in his majesty's dominions.

To this he afterwards added _Pomona_, or a treatise on fruit trees. He was also the author of an essay on _A Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the Modern_. But the work by which he is now best known is his _Diary_ from 1641 to 1705; it is a necessary companion to the study of the history of that period; and has been largely consulted by modern writers in making up the historic record of the time.

_Samuel Pepys_, 1637-1703. This famous diarist was the son of a London tailor. He received a collegiate education, and became a connoisseur in literature and art. Of a prying disposition, he saw all that he could of the varied political, literary, and social life of England; and has recorded what he saw in a diary so quaint, simple, and amusing, that it has retained its popularity to the present day, and has greatly aided the historian both in facts and philosophy. He held an official position as secretary in the admiralty, the duties of which he discharged with great system and skill. In addition to this _Diary_, we have also his _Correspondence_, published after his death, which is historically of great importance. In both diary and correspondence he has the charm of great _navete_,--as of a curious and gossiping observer, who never dreamed that his writings would be made public. Men and women of social station are painted in pre-Raphaelite style, and figure before us with great truth and vividness.

_Elias Ashmole_, 1617-1693. This antiquarian and virtuoso is princ.i.p.ally known as the founder of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. He studied law, chemistry, and natural philosophy. Besides an edition of the ma.n.u.script works of certain English chemists, he wrote _Bennevennu_,--the description of a Roman road mentioned in the Itinerary of Antoninus,--and a _History of the Order of the Garter_. His _Diary_ was published nearly a century after his death, but is by no means equal in value to those of Evelyn and Pepys.

_John Aubrey_, 1627-1697: a man of curious mind, Aubrey investigated the supernatural topics of the day, and presented them to the world in his _Miscellanies_. Among these subjects it is interesting to notice "blows invisible," and "knockings," which have been resuscitated in the present day. He was a "perambulator," and, in the words of one of his critics, "picked up information on the highway, and scattered it everywhere as authentic." His most valuable contribution to history is found in his _Letters Written by Eminent Persons in the 17th and 18th Centuries, with Lives of Eminent Men_. The searcher for authentic material must carefully scrutinize Aubrey's _facts_; but, with much that is doubtful, valuable information may be obtained from his pages.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE DRAMA OF THE RESTORATION.

The License of the Age. Dryden. Wycherley. Congreve. Vanbrugh.

Farquhar. Etherege. Tragedy. Otway. Rowe. Lee. Southern.

THE LICENSE OF THE AGE.

There is no portion of the literature of this period which so fully represents and explains the social history of the age as the drama. With the restoration of Charles it returned to England, after a time in which the chief faults had been too great rigor in morals. The theatres had been closed, all amus.e.m.e.nts checked, and even poetry and the fine arts placed under a ban. In the reign of Charles I., Prynne had written his _Histrio Mastix_, or Scourge of the Stage, in which he not only denounced all stage plays, but music and dancing; and also declaimed against hunting, festival days, the celebration of Christmas, and Maypoles. For this he was indicted in the Star Chamber for libel, and was sentenced to stand in the pillory, to lose his ears, to pay the king a fine of 5000, and to be imprisoned for life. For his attack there was much excuse in the license of the former period; but when puritanism, in its turn, was brought under the three spears, the drama was to come back tenfold more injurious and more immoral than before.

From the stern and gloomy morals of the Commonwealth we now turn to the debaucheries of the court,--from cropped heads and dark cloaks to plumes and velvet, gold lace and embroidery,--to the varied fashions of every kind for which Paris has always been renowned, and which Charles brought back with him from his exile;--from prudish morals to indiscriminate debauchery; from the exercisings of brewers' clerks, the expounding of tailors, the catechizing of watermen, to the stage, which was now loudly pet.i.tioned to supply amus.e.m.e.nt and novelty. Macaulay justly says: "The restraints of that gloomy time were such as would have been impatiently borne, if imposed by men who were universally believed to be saints; these restraints became altogether insupportable when they were known to be kept up for the profit of hypocrites! It is quite certain that if the royal family had never returned, there would have been a great relaxation of manners." It is equally certain, let us add, that morals would not have been correspondingly relaxed. The revulsion was terrible. In no period of English history was society ever so grossly immoral; and the drama, which we now come to consider, displays this immorality and license with a perfect delineation.

The English people had always been fond of the drama in all its forms, and were ready to receive it even contaminated as it was by the licentious spirit of the time. An illiterate and ignorant people cannot think for themselves; they act upon the precepts and example of those above them in knowledge and social station: thus it is that a dissolute monarch and a subservient aristocracy corrupt the ma.s.ses.

DRYDEN'S PLAYS.--Although Dryden's reputation is based on his other poems, and although his dramas have conduced scarcely at all to his fame, he did play a princ.i.p.al part in this department of literary work. Dryden made haste to answer the call, and his venal muse wrote to please the town. The names of many of his plays and personages are foreign; but their vitality is purely English. Of his first play, _The Duke of Guise_, which was unsuccessful, he tells us: "I undertook this as the fairest way which the Act of Indemnity had left us, as setting forth the rise of the great rebellion, and of exposing the villanies of it upon the stage, to precaution posterity against the like errors;"--a rebellion the master-spirit of which he had eulogized upon his bier!

His second play, _The Wild Gallant_, may be judged by the fact that it won for him the favor of Charles II. and of his mistress, the d.u.c.h.ess of Cleveland. Pepys saw it "well acted;" but says, "It hath little good in it." It is not our purpose to give a list of Dryden's plays; besides their occasional lewdness, they are very far inferior to his poems, and are now rarely read except by the historical student. They paid him in ready money, and he cannot ask payment from posterity in fame.

On the 13th of January, 1667-8, (we are told by Pepys,) the ladies and the Duke of Monmouth acted _The Indian Emperour_ at court.

The same chronicler says: _The Maiden Queene_ was "mightily commended for the regularity of it, and the strain and wit;" but of the _Ladys a la Mode_ he says it was "so mean a thing" that, when it was announced for the next night, the pit "fell a laughing, because the house was not a quarter full."

But Dryden, as a playwright, does not enjoy the infamous honor of a high rank among his fellow-dramatists. The proper representations of the drama in that age were, in Comedy, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar; and, in Tragedy, Otway, Rowe, and Lee.

WYCHERLEY.--Of the comedists of this period, where all were evil, William Wycherley was the worst. In his four plays, _Love in a Wood_, _The Gentleman Dancing-Master_, _The Country Wife_, and _The Plain Dealer_, he outrages all decency, ridicules honesty and virtue, and makes vice always triumphant. As a young man, profligate with pen and in his life, he was a wicked old man; for, when sixty-four years of age, he published a miscellany of verses of which Macaulay says: "The style and versification are beneath criticism: the morals are those of Rochester." And yet it is sad to be obliged to say that his characters pleased the age, because such men and women really lived then, and acted just as he describes them. He depicted vice to applaud and not to punish it. Wycherley was born in 1640, and died in 1715.

CONGREVE.--William Congreve, who is of the same school of morals, is far superior as a writer; indeed, were one name to be selected in ill.u.s.tration of our subject, it would be his. He was born in 1666, and, after being educated at Trinity College, Dublin, was a student at the Middle Temple.

His first play, _The Old Bachelor_, produced in his twenty-first year, was a great success, and won for him the patronage of Lord Halifax. His next, _The Double Dealer_, caused Dryden to proclaim him the equal of Shakspeare! Perhaps his most famous comedy is _Love for Love_, which is besides an excellent index to the morality of the age. The author was quoted and caressed; Pope dedicated to him his Translation of the Iliad; and Voltaire considered him the most successful English writer of comedy.

His merit consists in some degree of originality, and in the liveliness of his colloquies. His wit is brilliant and flashing, but, in the words of Thackeray, the world to him "seems to have had no moral at all."

How much he owed to the French school, and especially to Moliere, may be judged from the fact that a whole scene in _Love for Love_ is borrowed from the _Don Juan_ of Moliere. It is that in which Trapland comes to collect his debt from Valentine Legend. Readers of Moliere will recall the scene between Don Juan, Sganarelle and M. Dimanche, which is here, with change of names, taken almost word for word. His men are gallants neither from love or pa.s.sion, but from the custom of the age, of which it is said, "it would break Mr. Tattle's heart to think anybody else should be beforehand with him;" and Mr. Tattle was the type of a thousand fine gentlemen in the best English society of that day.

His only tragedy, _The Mourning Bride_, although far below those of Shakspeare, is the best of that age; and Dr. Johnson says he would go to it to find the most poetical paragraph in the range of English poetry.

Congreve died in 1729, leaving his gains to the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough, who cherished his memory in a very original fashion. She had a statue of him in ivory, which went by clockwork, and was daily seated at her table; and another wax-doll imitation, whose feet she caused to be blistered and anointed by physicians, as the poet's gouty extremities had been.

Congreve was not ashamed to vindicate the drama, licentious as it was. In the year 1698, Jeremy Collier, a distinguished nonjuring clergyman, published _A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage_; a very vigorous and severe criticism, containing a great deal of wholesome but bitter truth. Congreve came to the defence of the stage, and his example was followed by his brother dramatists. But Collier was too strong for his enemies, and the defences were very weak. There yet existed in England that leaven of purity which has steadily since been making its influence felt.