English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History Part 26

VANBRUGH.--Sir John Vanbrugh (born in 1666, died in 1726) was an architect as well as a dramatist, but not great in either role. His princ.i.p.al dramas are _The Provoked Wife_, _The City Wives' Confederacy_, and _The Journey to London_ (finished by Colley Cibber). His personages are vicious and lewd, but quite real; and his wit is constant and flowing. _The Provoked Wife_ is so licentious a play that it is supposed Vanbrugh afterwards conceived and began his _Provoked Husband_ to make some amends for it.

This latter play, however, he did not complete: it was finished after his death by Cibber, who says in the Prologue:

This play took birth from principles of truth, To make amends for errors past of youth.

Though vice is natural, 't was never meant The stage should show it but for punishment.

Warm with such thoughts, his muse once more took flame, Resolved to bring licentious life to shame.

If Vanbrugh was not born in France, it is certain that he spent many years there, and there acquired the taste and handling of the comic drama, which then had its halcyon days under Moliere. His dialogue is very spirited, and his humor is greater than that of Congreve, who, however, excelled him in wit.

The princ.i.p.al architectural efforts of Vanbrugh were the design for Castle Howard, and the palace of Blenheim, built for Marlborough by the English nation, both of which are greater t.i.tles to enduring reputation than any of his plays.

FARQUHAR.--George Farquhar was born in Londonderry, in 1678, and began his studies at Trinity College, Dublin, but was soon stage-struck, and became an actor. Not long after, he was commissioned in the army, and began to write plays in the style and moral tone of the age. Among his nine comedies, those which present that tone best are his _Love in a Bottle_, _The Constant Couple_, _The Recruiting Officer_, and _The Beaux'

Stratagem_. All his productions were hastily written, but met with great success from their gayety and clever plots, especially the last two mentioned, which are not, besides, so immoral as the others, and which are yet acted upon the British stage.

ETHEREGE.--Sir George Etherege, a c.o.xcomb and a diplomatist, was born in 1636, and died in 1694. His plays are, equally with the others mentioned, marked by the licentiousness of the age, which is rendered more insidious by their elegance. Among them are _The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub_, and _The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter_.

TRAGEDY.

The domain of tragedy, although perhaps not so attractive to the English people as comedy, was still sufficiently so to invite the attention of the literati. The excitement which is produced by exaggerated scenes of distress and death has always had a charm for the mult.i.tude; and although the princ.i.p.al tragedies of this period are based upon heroic stories, many of them of cla.s.sic origin, the genius of the writer displayed itself in applying these to his own times, and in introducing that "touch of nature"

which "makes the whole world kin." Human sympathy is based upon a community of suffering, and the sorrows of one age are similar to those of another. Besides, tragedy served, in the period of which we are speaking, to give variety and contrast to what would otherwise have been the gay monotony of the comic muse.

OTWAY.--The first writer to be mentioned in this field, is Thomas Otway (born in 1651, died in 1685). He led an irregular and wretched life, and died, it is said, from being choked by a roll of bread which, after great want, he was eating too ravenously.

His style is extravagant, his pathos too exacting, and his delineation of the pa.s.sions sensational and overwrought. He produced in his earlier career _Alcibiades_ and _Don Carlos_, and, later, _The Orphan_, and _The Soldier's Fortune_. But the piece by which his fame was secured is _Venice Preserved_, which, based upon history, is fictional in its details. The original story is found in the Abbe de St. Real's _Histoire de la Conjuration du Marquis de Bedamar_, or the account of a Spanish conspiracy in which the marquis, who was amba.s.sador, took part. It is still put upon the stage, with the omission, however, of the licentious comic portions found in the original play.

NICHOLAS ROWE, who was born in 1673, a man of fortune and a government official, produced seven tragedies, of which _The Fair Penitent_, _Lady Jane Grey_, and _Jane Sh.o.r.e_ are the best. His description of the lover, in the first, has become a current phrase: "That haughty, gallant, gay Lothario,"--the prototype of false lovers since. The plots are too broad, but the moral of these tragedies is in most cases good.

In _Jane Sh.o.r.e_, he has followed the history of the royal mistress, and has given a moral lesson of great efficacy.

NATHANIEL LEE, 1657-1692: was a man of dissolute life, for some time insane, and met his death in a drunken brawl. Of his ten tragedies, the best are _The Rival Queens_, and _Theodosius, or The Force of Love_. The rival queens of Alexander the Great--Roxana and Statira--figure in the first, which is still presented upon the stage. It has been called, with just critical point, "A great and glorious flight of a bold but frenzied imagination, having as much absurdity as sublimity, and as much extravagance as pa.s.sion; the poet, the genius, the scholar are everywhere visible."

THOMAS SOUTHERN, 1659-1746: wrote _Isabella, or The Fatal Marriage_, and _Oronooko_. In the latter, although yielding to the corrupt taste of the time in his comic parts, he causes his captive Indian prince to teach that period a lesson by his pure and n.o.ble love for Imoinda. Oronooko is a prince taken by the English at Surinam and carried captive to England.

These writers are the best representatives of those who in tragedy and comedy form the staple of that age. Their models were copied in succeeding years; but, with the expulsion of the Stuarts, morals were somewhat mended; and while light, gay, and witty productions for the stage were still in demand, the extreme licentiousness was repudiated by the public; and the plays of Cibber, c.u.mberland, Colman, and Sheridan, reflecting these better tastes, are free from much of the pollution to which we have referred.

CHAPTER XXIV.

POPE, AND THE ARTIFICIAL SCHOOL.

Contemporary History. Birth and Early Life. Essay on Criticism. Rape of the Lock. The Messiah. The Iliad. Value of the Translation. The Odyssey. Essay on Man. The Artificial School. Estimate of Pope. Other Writers.

Alexander Pope is at once one of the greatest names in English literature and one of the most remarkable ill.u.s.trations of the fact that the literature is the interpreter of English history. He was also a man of singular individuality, and may, in some respects, be considered a _lusus naturae_ among the literary men of his day.

CONTEMPORARY HISTORY.--He was born in London on the 21st of May, 1688, the year which witnessed the second and final expulsion of the Stuarts, in direct line, and the accession of a younger branch in the persons of Mary and her husband, William of Orange. Pope comes upon the literary scene with the new order of political affairs. A dynasty had been overthrown, and the power of the parliament had been established; new charters of right had secured the people from kingly oppression; but there was still a strong element of opposition and sedition in the Jacobite party, which had by no means abandoned the hope of restoring the former rule. They were kept in check, indeed, during the reign of William and Mary, but they became bolder upon the accession of Queen Anne. They hoped to find their efforts facilitated by the fact that she was childless; and they even a.s.serted that upon her death-bed she had favored the succession of the pretender, whom they called James III.

In 1715, the year after the accession of George I., the electoral prince of Hanover,--whose grandmother was the daughter of James I.,--they broke out into open rebellion. The pretender landed in Scotland, and made an abortive attempt to recover the throne. The nation was kept in a state of excitement and turmoil until the disaster of Culloden, and the final defeat of Charles Edward, the young pretender, in 1745, one year after the death of Pope.

These historical facts had a direct influence upon English society: the country was divided into factions; and political conflicts sharpened the wits and gave vigor to the conduct of men in all ranks. Pope was an interpreter of his age, in politics, in general culture, and in social manners and morals. Thus he was a politician among the statesmen Bolingbroke, Buckingham, Oxford, Sunderland, Halifax, Harley, and Marlborough. His _Essay on Criticism_ presents to us the artificial taste and technical rules which were established as a standard in literature.

His _Essay on Man_, his _Moral Epistles_, and his _Universal Prayer_ are an index to the semi-Christian, semi-Grecian ethics of an age too selfish to be orthodox, and too progressive to be intolerant. His _Rape of the Lock_ is a striking picture of social life, sketched by the hand of a gentle satire. His translations of Homer, and their great success, are significant of a more extended taste for scholarship; not attended, however, with many incentives to originality of production. The n.o.bles were still the patrons of literature, and they fancied old things which were grand, in new and gaudy English dresses. The age was also marked by rapid and uniform progress in the English language. The sonorous, but c.u.mbrous English of Milton had been greatly improved by Dryden; and we have seen, also, that the terse and somewhat crude diction of Dryden's earlier works had been polished and rendered more harmonious in his later poems.

This harmony of language seemed to Pope and to his patrons the chief aim of the poet, and to make it still more tuneful and melodious was the purpose of his life.

BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE.--Pope was the son of a respectable linen-draper, who had achieved a competency and retired to enjoy it. The mother of the poet must have been a good one, to have retained the ardent and eulogistic affection of her son to the close of her life, as she did. This attachment is a marked feature in his biography, and at last finds vent in her epitaph, in which he calls her "_mater optima, mulierum amantissima_."

Pope was a sickly, dwarfed, precocious child. His early studies in Latin and Greek were conducted by priests of the Roman Catholic Church, to which his parents belonged; but he soon took his education into his own hands.

Alone and unaided he pursued his cla.s.sical studies, and made good progress in French and German.

Of his early rhyming powers he says:

"I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came."

At the age of twelve, he was taken to Will's Coffee-house, to see the great Dryden, upon whom, as a model, he had already determined to fashion himself.

His first efforts were translations. He made English versions of the first book of the _Thebais_ of Statius; several of the stories of Chaucer, and one of Ovid's Epistles, all of which were produced before he was fifteen.

ESSAY ON CRITICISM.--He was not quite twenty-one when he wrote his _Essay on Criticism_, in which he lays down the canons of just criticism, and the causes which prevent it. In ill.u.s.tration, he attacks the mult.i.tude of critics of that day, and is particularly harsh in his handling of a few among them. He gained a name by this excellent poem, but he made many enemies, and among them one John Dennis, whom he had satirized under the name of Appius. Dennis was his life-long foe.

Perhaps there is no better proof of the lasting and deserved popularity of this Essay, than the numerous quotations from it, not only in works on rhetoric and literary criticism, but in our ordinary intercourse with men.

Couplets and lines have become household words wherever the English language is spoken. How often do we hear the sciolist condemned in these words:

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or touch not the Pierian spring?

Irreverence and rash speculation are satirized thus:

Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead, For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

We may waive a special notice of his _Pastorals_, which, like those of Dryden, are but clever imitations of Theocritus and anachronisms of the Alexandrian period. Of their merits, we may judge from his own words. "If they have any merit, it is to be attributed to some good old authors, whose works as I had leisure to study, so I hope I have not wanted care to imitate."