The Three Devils: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's Part 5

That Milton, then, notwithstanding his natural austerity and seriousness even in youth, was led by his keen appreciation of literary beauty and finish, and especially by his delight in sweet and melodious verse, to read and enjoy the poetry of those writers who are usually quoted as examples of the lusciousness and sensuousness of the poetic nature, and even to prefer them to all others, is specially stated by himself. But let the reader, if he should think he sees in this a ground for suspecting that we have a.s.signed too much importance to Milton's personal seriousness of disposition as a cause affecting his aims and art as a poet, distinctly mark the continuation--

"Whence, having observed them [the elegiac and love poets] to account it the chief glory of their wit, in that they were ablest to judge, to praise, and by that could esteem themselves worthiest to love, those high perfections which, under one or other name, they took to celebrate, I thought with myself, by every instinct and presage of nature (which is not wont to be false), that what emboldened them to this task might, with such diligence as they used, embolden me, and that what judgment, wit, or elegance was my share would herein best appear, and best value itself, by how much more wisely and with more love of virtue I should choose (let rude ears be absent!) the object of not unlike praises. For, albeit these thoughts to some will seem virtuous and commendable, to others only pardonable, to a third sort perhaps idle, yet the mentioning of them now will end in serious. Nor blame it, readers, in those years to propose to themselves such a reward as the n.o.blest dispositions above other things in this life have sometimes preferred; whereof not to be sensible, when good and fair in one person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judgment, and withal an ungentle and swainish breast. For, by the firm settling of these persuasions, I became, to my best memory, so much a proficient that, if I found those authors anywhere speaking unworthy things of themselves, or unchaste those names which before they had extolled, this effect it wrought in me: From that time forward their art I still applauded, but the men I deplored; and above them all preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never wrote but honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime and pure thoughts without transgression. And long it was not after when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem--that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy."--_Apology for Smectymnuus._

Here, at last, therefore, we have Milton's own judgment on the matter of our inquiry. He had speculated himself on that subject; he had made it a matter of conscious investigation what kind of moral tone and career would best fit a man to be a poet, on the one hand, or would be most likely to frustrate his hopes of writing well, on the other; and his conclusion, as we see, was dead against the "wild oats" theory. Had Ben Jonson, according to our previous fancy, proffered him, out of kindly interest, a touch of that theory, while criticising his juvenile poems, and telling him how he might learn to write better, there would have descended on the lecturer, as sure as fate, a rebuke, though from young lips, that would have made his strong face blush. "_He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem_:" fancy that sentence, an early and often p.r.o.nounced formula of Milton's, as we may be sure it was, hurled some evening, could time and chance have permitted it, into the midst of the a.s.sembled Elizabethan wits at the Mermaid! What interruption of the jollity, what mingled uneasiness and resentment, what turning of faces towards the new speaker, what forced laughter to conceal consternation! Only Shakespeare, one thinks, had he been present, would have fixed on the bold youth a mild and approving eye, would have looked round the room thoroughly to observe the whole scene, and, remembering some pa.s.sages in his own life, would mayhap have had his own thoughts! Certainly, at least, the essence of that wonderful and special development of the literary genius of England which came between the Elizabethan epoch and the epoch of the Restoration, and which was represented and consummated in Milton himself, consisted in the fact that then there was a temporary protest, and by a man able to make it good, against the theory of "wild oats," current before and current since. The nearest poet to Milton in this respect, since Milton's time, has undoubtedly been Wordsworth.

DRYDEN, AND THE LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION.

DRYDEN, AND THE LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION.[6]

It is a common remark that literature flourishes best in times of social order and leisure, and suffers immediate depression whenever the public mind is agitated by violent civil controversies. The remark is more true than such popular inductions usually are. It is confirmed, on the small scale, by what every one finds in his own experience. When a family is agitated by any matter affecting its interests, there is an immediate cessation from all the lighter luxuries of books and music wherewith it used to beguile its leisure. All the members of the family are intent for the time being on the matter in hand; if books are consulted it is for some purpose of practical reference; and, if pens are active, it is in writing letters of business. Not till the matter is fairly concluded are the recreations of music and literature resumed; though then, possibly, with a keener zest and a mind more full and fresh than before. Precisely so it is on the large scale. If everything that is spoken or written be called literature, there is probably always about the same amount of literature going on in a community; or, if there is any increase or decrease, it is but in proportion to the increase of the population. But, if by literature we mean a certain peculiar kind and quality of spoken or written matter, recognisable by its likeness to certain known precedents, then, undoubtedly literature flourishes in times of quiet and security, and wanes in times of convulsion and disorder. When the storm of some great civil contest is blowing, it is impossible for even the serenest man to shut himself quite in from the noise, and turn over the leaves of his Horace, or practise his violin, as undistractedly as before. Great is the power of _pococurantism_; and it is a n.o.ble sight to see, in the midst of some Whig and Tory excitement which is throwing the general community into sixes and sevens, and sending mobs along the streets, the calm devotee of hard science, or the impa.s.sioned lover of the ideal, going on his way, aloof from it all, and smiling at it all. But there are times when even these obdurate gentlemen will be touched, in spite of themselves, to the tune of what is going on; when the shouts of the mob will penetrate to the closets of the most studious; and when, as Archimedes of old had to leave his darling diagrams and trudge along the Syracusan streets to superintend the construction of rough cranes and catapults, so philosophers and poets alike will have to quit their favourite occupations, and be whirled along in the common agitation. Those are times when whatever literature there is a.s.sumes a character of immediate and practical interest. Just as, in the supposed case, the literary activity of the family is consumed in mere letters of business, so, in this, the literary activity of the community exhausts itself in newspaper articles, public speeches, and pamphlets, more or less elaborate, on the present crisis. There may be a vast amount of mind at work, and as much, on the whole, may be written as before; but the very excess of what may be called the pamphlet literature, which is perishable in its nature, will leave a deficiency in the various departments of literature more strictly so called--philosophical or expository literature, historical literature, and the literature of pure imagination. Not till the turmoil is over, not till the battle has been fairly fought out, and the mental activity involved in it has been let loose for more scattered work, will the calmer muses resume their sway, and the press send forth treatises and histories, poems and romances, as well as pamphlets. Then, however, men may return to literature with a new zest, and the very storm which has interrupted the course of pure literature for a time may infuse into such literature, when it begins again, a fresher and stronger spirit. If the battle has ended in a victory, there will be a tone of joy, of exultation, and of scorn, in what men think and write after it; if it has ended in a defeat, all that is thought and written will be tinged by a deeper and finer sorrow.

The history of English literature affords some curious ill.u.s.trations of this law. It has always puzzled historians, for example, to account for such a great unoccupied gap in our literary progress as occurs between the death of Chaucer and the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. From the year 1250, when the English language first makes its appearance in anything like its present form, to the year 1400, when Chaucer died, forms, as all know, the infant age of our literature. It was an age of great literary activity; and how much was achieved in it remains apparent in the fact that it culminated in a man like Chaucer--a man whom, without any drawback for the early epoch at which he lived, we still regard as one of our literary princes. Nor was Chaucer the solitary name of his age. He had some notable contemporaries, both in verse and in prose. When we pa.s.s from Chaucer's age, however, we have to overleap nearly a hundred and eighty years before we alight upon a period presenting anything like an adequate show of literary continuation. A few smaller names, like those of Lydgate, Surrey, and Skelton, are all that can be cited as poetical representatives of this sterile interval in the literary history of England: whatever of Chaucer's genius still lingered in the island seeming to have travelled northward, and taken refuge in a series of Scottish poets, excelling any of their English contemporaries. How is this to be accounted for? Is it that really, during this period, there was less of available mind than before in England, that the quality of the English nerve had degenerated? By no means necessarily so. Englishmen, during this period were engaged in enterprises requiring no small amount of intellectual and moral vigour; and there remain to us, from the same period, specimens of grave and serious prose, which, if we do not place them among the gems of our literature, we at least regard as evidence that our ancestors of those days were men of heart and wit and solid sense. In short, we are driven to suppose that there was something in the social circ.u.mstances of England during the long period in question which prevented such talent as there was from a.s.suming the particular form of literature. Fully to make out what this "something" was may baffle us; but, when we remember that this was the period of the Civil Wars of the Roses, and also of the great Anglican Reformation, we have reason enough to conclude that the dearth of pure literature may have been owing, in part, to the engrossing nature of those practical questions which then disturbed English society. When Chaucer wrote, England, under the splendid rule of the third Edward, was potent and triumphant abroad, but large and leisurely at home; but scarcely had that monarch vacated the throne when a series of civil jars began, which tore the nation into factions, and was speedily followed by a religious movement as powerful in its effects.

Accordingly, though printing was introduced during this period, and thus Englishmen had greater temptations to write, what they did write was almost exclusively plain grave prose, intended for practical or polemical occasions, and making no figure in a historical retrospect. How different when, pa.s.sing the controversial reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Mary, we come upon the golden days of Queen Bess! Controversy enough remained to give occasion to plenty of polemical prose; but about the middle of her reign, when England, once more great and powerful abroad as in the time of the Edwards, settled down within herself into a new lease of social order and leisure under an ascertained government, there began an outburst of literary genius such as no age or country had ever before witnessed. The literary fecundity of that period of English history which embraces the latter half of the reign of Elizabeth and the whole of the reign of James I. (1580-1625) is a perpetual astonishment to us all. In the entire preceding three centuries and a half we can with difficulty name six men that can, by any charity of judgment, be regarded as stars in our literature, and of these only one that is a star of the first magnitude: whereas in this brief period of forty-five or fifty years we can reckon up a host of poets and prose-writers all noticeable on high literary grounds, and of whom at least thirty were men of extraordinary dimensions. Indeed, in the contemplation of the intellectual abundance and variety of this age--the age of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon, of Raleigh and Hooker, of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Donne, Herbert, Ma.s.singer, and their ill.u.s.trious contemporaries--we feel ourselves driven from the theory that so rich a literary crop could have resulted from that mere access of social leisure after a long series of national broils to which we do in part attribute it, and are obliged to suppose that there must have been, along with this, an actually finer substance and condition, for the time being, of the national nerve. The very brain of England must have become more "quick, nimble, and forgetive," before the time of leisure came.

We have spoken of this great age of English literature as terminating with the reign of James I., in 1625. In point of fact, however, it extended some way into the reign of his son, Charles I. Spenser had died in 1599, before James had ascended the English throne; Shakespeare and Beaumont had died in 1616, while James still reigned; Fletcher died in 1625; Bacon died in 1626, when the crown had been but a year on Charles's head. But, while these great men and many of their contemporaries had vanished from the scene before England had any experience of the first Charles, some of their peers survived to tell what kind of men they had been. Ben Jonson lived till 1637, and was poet-laureate to Charles I.; Donne and Drayton lived till 1631; Herbert till 1632; Chapman till 1634; Dekker till 1638; Ford till 1639; and Heywood and Ma.s.singer till 1640.

There is one point in the reign of Charles, however, where a clear line may be drawn separating the last of the Elizabethan giants from their literary successors. This is the point at which the Civil War commences.

The whole of the earlier part of Charles's reign was a preparation for this war; but it cannot be said to have fairly begun till the meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640, when Charles had been fifteen years on the throne. If we select this year as the commencement of the great Puritan and Republican Revolution in England, and the year 1660, when Charles II.

was restored, as the close of the same Revolution, we shall have a period of twenty years to which, if there is any truth in the notion that the Muses shun strife, this notion should be found peculiarly applicable. Is it so? We think it is. In the first place, as we have just said, the last of the Elizabethan giants died off before this period began, as if killed by the mere approach to an atmosphere so lurid and tempestuous. In the second place, in the case of such writers as were old enough to have learnt in the school of those giants and yet young enough to survive them and enter on the period of struggle,--as for example, Herrick (1591-1660), Shirley (1596-1666), Waller (1605-1687), Davenant (1605-1668), Suckling (1608-1643), Milton (1608-1674), Butler (1612-1680), Cleveland (1613-1658), Denham (1615-1668), and Cowley (1618-1667),--it will be found, on examination, either that the time of their literary activity did not coincide with the period of struggle, but came before it, or after it, or lay on both sides of it; or that what they did write of a purely literary character during this period was written in exile; or, lastly, that what they did write at home of a genuine literary character during this period is inconsiderable in quant.i.ty, and dashed with a vein of polemical allusion rendering it hardly an exception to the rule. The literary career of Milton ill.u.s.trates very strikingly this fact of the all but entire cessation of pure literature in England between 1640 and 1660.

Milton's life consists of three distinctly marked periods--the first ending with 1640, during which he composed his exquisite minor poems; the second extending precisely from 1640 to 1660, during which he wrote no poetry at all, except a few sonnets, but produced his various polemical prose treatises or pamphlets, and served the state as a public functionary; and the third, which may be called the period of his later muse, extending from 1660 to his death in 1674, and famous for the composition of his greater poems. Thus Milton's prose-period, if we may so term it, coincided exactly with the period of civil strife and Cromwellian rule. And, if this was the case with Milton--if he, who was essentially the poet of Puritanism, with his whole heart and soul in the struggle which Cromwell led, was obliged, during the process of that struggle, to lay aside his singing robes, postpone his plans of a great immortal poem, and in the meanwhile drudge laboriously as a prose pamphleteer--how much more must those have been reduced to silence, or brought down into practical prose, who found no such inspiration in the movement as it gave to the soul of Milton, but regarded it all as desolation and disaster!

Indeed, one large department of the national literature at this period was proscribed by civil enactment. Stage-plays were prohibited in 1642, and it was not till after the Restoration that the theatres were re-opened. Such a prohibition, though it left the sublime muse of Milton at liberty, had it cared to sing, was a virtual extinction for the time of all the customary literature. In fine, if all the literary produce of England in the interval between 1640 and 1660 is examined, it will be found to consist in the main of a huge ma.s.s of controversial prose, by far the greater proportion of which, though effective at the time, is little better now than antiquarian rubbish, astonishing from its bulk, though some small percentage including all that came from the terrible pen of Milton is saved by reason of its strength and grandeur. The intellect of England was as active and as abundant as ever, but it was all required for the current service of the time. Perhaps the only exception of any consequence was in the case of the philosophical and calm-minded Sir Thomas Browne, author of the _Religio Medici_. While all England was in throes and confusion Browne was quietly attending his patients, or pottering along his garden at Norwich, or pursuing his meditations about sepulchral urns and his inquiries respecting the Quincuncial Lozenge. His views of things might have been considerably quickened by billeting upon his household a few of the Ironsides.

Had Cromwell lived longer, or had he established a dynasty capable of maintaining itself, there can be little doubt that there would have come a time of leisure during which, even under a Puritan rule, there would have been a new outburst of English Literature. There were symptoms, towards the close of the Protectorate that Cromwell, having now "reasonable good leisure," was willing and even anxious that the nation should resume its old literary industry and all its innocent liberties and pleasures. He allowed Cowley, Waller, Denham, Davenant, and other Royalists, to come over from France, and was glad to see them employed in writing verses.

Waller became one of his courtiers, and composed panegyrics on him. He released Cleveland from prison in a very handsome manner, considering what hard things the witty roysterer had written about "O.P." and his "copper nose." He appears even to have winked at Davenant, when, in violation of the act against stage-plays, that gentlemanly poet began to give private theatrical entertainments under the name of operas. Davenant's heretical friend, Hobbes, too, already obnoxious by his opinions even to his own political party, availed himself of the liberty of the press to issue some fresh metaphysical essays, which the Protector may have read. In fact, had Cromwell survived a few years, there would, in all probability, have arisen, under his auspices, a new literature, of which his admirer and secretary, Milton, would have been the laureate. What might have been the characteristics of this literature of the Commonwealth, had it developed itself to full form and proportions, we can but guess. That, in some respects, it would not have been so broad and various as the literature which took its rise from the Restoration is very likely; for, so long as the Puritan element remained dominant in English society, it was impossible that, with any amount of liberty of the press, there should have been such an outbreak of the merely comic spirit as did occur when that element succ.u.mbed to its antagonist, and genius had official licence to be as profligate as it chose. But, if less gay and riotous, it might have been more earnest, powerful, and impressive. For its masterpiece it would still have had _Paradise Lost_,--a work which, as it is, we must regard as its peculiar offspring, though posthumously born; nor can we doubt that, if influenced by the example and the recognised supremacy of such a laureate as Milton, the younger literary men of the time would have found themselves capable of other things than epigrams and farces.

It was fated, however, that the national leisure requisite for a new development of English literary genius should commence only with the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660; and then it was a leisure secured in very different circ.u.mstances from those which would have attended a perpetuation of Cromwell's rule. With Charles II. there came back into the island, after many years of banishment, all the excesses of the cavalier spirit, more reckless than before, and considerably changed by long residence in continental cities, and especially in the French capital.

Cavalier n.o.blemen and gentlemen came back, bringing with them French tastes, French fashions, and foreign ladies of pleasure. As Charles II.

was a different man from his father, so the courtiers that gathered round him at Whitehall were very different from those who had fought with Charles I. against the Parliamentarians. Their political principles and prejudices were nominally the same; but they were for the most part men of a younger generation, less stiff and English in their demeanour, and more openly dissolute in their morals. Such was the court the restoration of which England virtually confessed to be necessary to prevent a new era of anarchy. It was inaugurated amid the shouts of the mult.i.tude; and Puritanism, already much weakened by defections before the event, hastened to disappear from the public stage, diffusing itself once more as a mere element of secret efficacy through the veins of the community, and purchasing even this favour by the sacrifice of its most notorious leaders.

Miserable in some respects as was this change for England, it offered, by reason of the very unanimity with which it was effected, all the conditions necessary for the forthcoming of a new literature. But where were the materials for the commencement of this new literature?

First, as regards _persons_ fit to initiate it. There were all those who had been left over from the Protectorate, together with such wits as the Restoration itself had brought back, or called into being. There was the old dramatist, Shirley, now in his sixty-fifth year, very glad, no doubt, to come back to town, after his hard fare as a country-schoolmaster during the eclipse of the stage, and to resume his former occupation as a writer of plays in the style that had been in fashion thirty years before. There was Hobbes, older still than Shirley, a tough old soul of seventy-three, but with twenty more years of life in him, and, though not exactly a literary man, yet st.u.r.dy enough to be whatever he liked within certain limits. There was mild Izaak Walton, of Chancery-lane, only five years younger than Hobbes, but destined to live as long, and capable of writing very nicely if he could have been kept from sauntering into the fields to fish. There was the gentlemanly Waller, now fifty-six years of age, quite ready to be a poet about the court of Charles, and to write panegyrics on the new side to atone for that on Cromwell. There was the no less gentlemanly Davenant, also fifty-six years of age, steady to his royalist principles, as became a man who had received the honour of knighthood from the royal martyr, and enjoying a wide reputation, partly from his poetical talents, and partly from his want of nose. There was Milton, in his fifty-second year, blind, desolate, and stern, hiding in obscure lodgings till his defences of regicide should be sufficiently forgotten to save him from molestation, and building up in imagination the scheme of his promised epic. There was Butler, four years younger, brimful of hatred to the Puritans, and already engaged on his poem of _Hudibras_, which was to lash them so much to the popular taste. There was Denham, known as a versifier little inferior to Waller, and with such superior claims on the score of loyalty as to be considered worthy of knighthood and the first vacant post. There was Cowley, still only in his forty-third year, and with a ready-made reputation, both as a poet and as a prose-writer, such as none of his contemporaries possessed, and such indeed as no English writer had acquired since the days of Ben Jonson and Donne. Younger still, and with his fame as a satirist not yet made, there was Milton's friend, honest Andrew Marvell, whom the people of Hull had chosen as their representative in Parliament. Had the search been extended to theologians, and such of them selected as were capable of influencing the literature by the form of their writings, as distinct from their matter, Jeremy Taylor would have been noted as still alive, though his work was nearly over, while Richard Baxter, with a longer life before him, was in the prime of his strength, and there was in Bedford an eccentric Baptist preacher, once a tinker, who was to be the author, though no one supposed it, of the greatest prose allegory in the language. Close about the person of the king, too, there were able men and wits, capable of writing themselves, or of criticising what was written by others, from the famous Clarendon down to such younger and lighter men as Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, Sackville, Earl of Dorset, and Sir Charles Sedley. Lastly, not to extend the list farther, there was then in London, aged twenty-nine, and going about in a stout plain dress of grey drugget, a Northamptonshire squire's son, named John Dryden, who, after having been educated at Cambridge, had come up to town in the last year of the Protectorate to push his fortune under a Puritan relative then in office, and who had already once or twice tried his hand at poetry. Like Waller, he had written and published a series of panegyrical stanzas on Cromwell after his death; and, like Waller also, he had attempted to atone for this miscalculation by writing another poem, called _Astra Redux_, to celebrate the return of Charles. As a taste of what this poet, in particular, could do, take the last of his stanzas on Cromwell:--

"His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest; His name a great example stands to show How strangely high endeavours may be blessed, Where piety and valour jointly go";

or, in another metre and another strain of politics, the conclusion of the poem addressed to Charles:--

"The discontented now are only they Whose crimes before did your just cause betray: Of those your edicts some reclaim from sin, But most your life and blest example win.

Oh happy prince! whom Heaven hath taught the way By paying vows to have more vows to pay!

Oh happy age! Oh times like those alone By fate reserved for great Augustus' throne, When the joint growth of arms and arts foreshow The world a monarch, and that monarch you!"

Such were the _personal elements_, if we may so call them, available at the beginning of the reign of Charles II. for the commencement of a new era in English literature. Let us see next what were the more p.r.o.nounced _tendencies_ visible amid these personal elements--in other words, what tone of moral sentiment, and what peculiarities of literary style and method, were then in the ascendant, and likely to determine the character of the budding authorship.

It was pre-eminently clear that the forthcoming literature would be Royalist and anti-Puritan. With the exception of Milton, there was not one man of known literary power whose heart still beat as it did when Cromwell sat on the throne, and whose muse magnanimously disdained the change that had befallen the nation. Puritanism, as a whole, was driven back into the concealed vitals of the community, to sustain itself meanwhile as a sectarian theology lurking in chapels and conventicles, and only to re-appear after a lapse of years as an ingredient in the philosophy of Locke and his contemporaries. The literary men who stepped forward to lead the literature of the Restoration were royalists and courtiers: some of them honest cavaliers, rejoicing at being let loose from the restraints of the Commonwealth; others timeservers, making up for delay by the fulsome excess of their zeal for the new state of things. It was part of this change that there should be an affectation, even where there was not the reality, of lax morals. According to the sarcasm of the time, it was necessary now for those who would escape the risk of being thought Puritans to contract a habit of swearing and pretend to be great rakes.

And this increase, both in the practice and in the profession of profligacy, at once connected itself with that inst.i.tution of English society which, from the very fact that it had been suppressed by the Puritans, now became doubly attractive and popular. The same revolution which restored royalty in England re-opened the play-houses; and in them, as the established organs of popular sentiment, all the anti-Puritanic tendencies of the time hastened to find vent. The custom of having female actors on the stage for female parts, instead of boys as heretofore, was now permanently introduced, and brought many scandals along with it.

Whether, as some surmise, the very suppression of the theatres during the reign of Puritanism contributed to their unusual corruptness when they were again allowed by law--by damming up, as it were, a quant.i.ty of pruriency which had afterwards to be let loose in a ma.s.s--it is not easy to say; it is certain, however, that never in this country did impurity run so openly at riot in literary guise as it did in the Drama of the Restoration. To use a phrenological figure, it seemed as if the national cranium of England had suddenly been contracted in every other direction so as to permit an inordinate increase of that particular region which is situated above the nape of the neck. This enormous preponderance of the back of the head in literature was most conspicuously exhibited in Comedy.

Every comedy that was produced represented life as a meagre action of persons and interests on a slight proscenium of streets and bits of green field, behind which lay the real business, transacted in stews. To set against this, it is true, there was a so-called Tragic Drama. The tragedy that was now in favour, however, was no longer the old English tragedy of rich and complex materials, but the French tragedy of heroic declamation.

Familiarized by their stay in France with the tragic style of Corneille and other dramatists of the court of Louis XIV., the Royalists brought back the taste with them into England; and the poets who catered for them hastened to abandon the Shakespearian tragedy, with its large range of time and action and its blank verse, and to put on the stage tragedies of sustained and decorous declamation in the heroic or rhymed couplet, conceived, as much as possible, after the model of Corneille. Natural to the French, this cla.s.sic or regular style accorded ill with English faculties and habits; and Corneille himself would have been horrified at the slovenly and laborious attempts of the English in imitation of his masterpieces. The effect of French influence at this time, however, on English literary taste, did not consist merely in the introduction of the heroic or rhymed drama. The same influence extended, and in some respects beneficially, to all departments of English literature. It helped, for example, to correct that peculiar style of so-called "wit" which, originating with the dregs of the Elizabethan age, had during a whole generation infected English prose and poetry, but more especially the latter. The characteristic of the "metaphysical school of poetry," as it is called, which took its rise in a literary vice perceptible even in the great works of the Elizabethan age, and of which Donne and Cowley were the most celebrated representatives, consisted in the identification of mere intellectual subtlety with poetic genius. To spin out a fantastic conceit, to pursue a thread of quaint thought as long as it could be held between the fingers of the metre without snapping, and, in doing so, to wind it about as many oddities of the real world as possible, and introduce as many verbal quibbles as possible, was the aim of the "metaphysical poets."

Some of them, like Donne and Cowley, were men of independent merit; but the style of poetry itself, as all modern readers confess by the alacrity with which they avoid reprinted specimens of it, was as unprofitable an investment of human ingenuity as ever was attempted. At the period of the Restoration, and partly in consequence of French influence, this kind of wit was falling into disrepute. There were still pract.i.tioners of it; but, on the whole, a more direct, clear, and light manner of writing was coming into fashion. Discourse became less stiff and pedantic; or, as Dryden himself has expressed it, "the fire of English wit, which was before stifled under a constrained melancholy way of breeding, began to display its force by mixing the solidity of our nation with the air and gaiety of our neighbours." And the change in discourse pa.s.sed without difficulty into literature, calling into being a nimbler style of wit, a more direct, rapid, and decisive manner of thought and expression, than had beseemed authorship before. In particular, and apart from the tendency to greater directness and concision of thought, there was an increased attention to correctness of expression. The younger literary men began to object to what they called the involved and incorrect syntax of the writers of the previous age, and to pretend to greater neatness and accuracy in the construction of their sentences. It was at this time, for example, that the rule of not ending a sentence with a preposition or other little word began to be attended to. Whether the notion of correctness, implied in this, and other such rules, was a true notion, and whether the writers of the Restoration excelled their Elizabethan predecessors in this quality of correctness, admits of being doubted. Certain it is, however, that a change in the mechanism of writing--this change being on the whole towards increased neatness--did become apparent about this time. The change was visible in prose, but far more in verse. For, to conclude this enumeration of the literary signs or tendencies of the age of the Restoration, it was a firm belief of the writers of the period that then for the first time was the art of correct English versification exemplified and appreciated.

It was, we say, a firm belief of the time, and indeed it has been a common-place of criticism ever since, that Edmund Waller was the first poet who wrote smooth and accurate verse, that in this he was followed by Sir John Denham, and that these two men were reformers of English metre.

"Well-placing of words, for the sweetness of p.r.o.nunciation, was not known till Mr. Waller introduced it," is a deliberate statement of Dryden himself, meant to apply especially to verse. Here, again, we have to separate a matter of fact from a matter of doctrine. To aver, with such specimens of older English verse before us as the works of Chaucer and Spenser, and the minor poems of Milton, that it was Waller or any other petty writer of the Restoration that first taught us sweetness, or smoothness, or even correctness of verse, is so ridiculous that the currency of such a notion can only be accounted for by the servility with which small critics go on repeating whatever any one big critic has said.

That Waller and Denham, however, did set the example of something new in the manner of English versification,--which "something" Dryden, Pope, and other poets who afterwards adopted it, regarded as an improvement,--needs not be doubted. For us it is sufficient in the meantime to recognise the change as an attempt after greater neatness of mechanical structure, leaving open the question whether it was a change for the better.

It was natural that the tendencies of English literature thus enumerated should be represented in the poet-laureate for the time being. Who was the fit man to be appointed laureate at the Restoration? Milton was out of the question, having none of the requisites. Butler, the man of greatest natural power of a different order, and possessing certainly as much of the anti-Puritan sentiment as Charles and his courtiers could have desired in their laureate, was not yet sufficiently known, and was, besides, neither a dramatist nor a fine gentleman. Cowley, whom public opinion would have pointed out as best ent.i.tled to the honour, was somehow not in much favour at court, and was spending the remainder of his days on a little property near Chertsey. Waller and Denham were wealthy men, with whom literature was but an amus.e.m.e.nt. On the whole, Sir William Davenant was felt to be the proper man for the office. He was an approved royalist; he had, in fact, been laureate to Charles I. after Ben Jonson's death in 1637; and he had suffered much in the cause of the king. He was, moreover, a literary man by profession. He had been an actor and a theatre-manager before the Commonwealth; he had been the first to start a theatre after the relaxed rule of Cromwell made it possible; and he was one of the first to attempt heroic or rhymed tragedies after the French model. He was also, far more than Cowley, a wit of the new school; and, as a versifier, he practised, with no small reputation, the neat, lucid style introduced by Denham and Waller. He was the author of an epic called _Gondibert_, written in rhymed stanzas of four lines each, which Hobbes praised as showing "more shape of art, health of morality, and vigour and beauty of expression," than any poem he had ever read. We defy anyone to read the poem now; but there have been worse things written; and it has the merit of being a careful and rather serious composition by a man who had industry, education, and taste, without genius. There was but one awkwardness in having such a man for laureate: he had no nose. This awkwardness, however, had existed at the time of his first appointment in the preceding reign. At least, Suckling adverts to it in the _Session of the Poets_, where he makes the wits of that time contend for the bays--

"Will Davenant, ashamed of a foolish mischance, That he had got lately, travelling in France, Modestly hoped the handsomeness of 's muse Might any deformity about him excuse.

"And surely the company would have been content, If they could have found any precedent; But in all their records, either in verse or prose, There was not one laureate without a nose."

If the more decorous court of Charles I., however, overlooked this deficiency, it was not for that of Charles II. to take objection to it.

After all, Davenant, notwithstanding his misfortune, seems to have been not the worst gentleman about Charles's court, either in morals or manners. Milton is said to have known and liked him.

Davenant's laureateship extended over the first eight years of the Restoration, or from 1660 to 1668. Much was done in those eight years both by himself and others. Heroic plays and comedies were produced in sufficient abundance to supply the two chief theatres then open in London--one of them that of the Duke's company, under Davenant's management; the other, that of the King's company, under the management of an actor named Killigrew. The number of writers for the stage was very great, including not only those whose names have been mentioned, but others new to fame. The literature of the stage formed by far the largest proportion of what was written, or even of what was published. Literary efforts of other kinds, however, were not wanting. Of satires, and small poems in the witty or amatory style, there was no end. The publication by Butler of the first part of his _Hudibras_ in 1663, and of the second in 1664, drew public attention, for the first time, to a man, already past his fiftieth year, who had more true wit in him than all the aristocratic poets put together. The poem was received by the king and the courtiers with shouts of laughter; quotations from it were in everybody's mouth; but, notwithstanding large promises, nothing substantial was done for the author. Meanwhile Milton, blind and gouty, and living in his house near Bunhill Fields, where his visitors were hardly of the kind that admired Butler's poem, was calmly proceeding with his _Paradise Lost_. The poem was finished and published in 1667, leaving Milton free for other work.

Cowley, who would have welcomed such a poem, and whose praise Milton would have valued more than that of any other contemporary, died in the year of its publication. Davenant may have read it before his death in the following year; but perhaps the only poet of the time who hailed its appearance with enthusiasm adequate to the occasion was Milton's personal friend Marvell. Gradually, however, copies of the poem found their way about town, and drew public attention once more to Cromwell's old secretary.

The laureateship remained vacant two years after Davenant's death; and then it was conferred--on whom? There can be little doubt that, of those eligible to it, Butler had, in some respects, the best t.i.tle. The author of _Hudibras_, however, seems to have been one of those ill-conditioned men whom patronage never comes near, and who are left, by a kind of necessity, to the bitter enjoyment of their own humours. There does not seem to have been even a question of appointing him; and the office, the income of which would have been a competence to him, was conferred on a man twenty years his junior, and whose circ.u.mstances required it less--John Dryden. The appointment, which was made in August, 1670, conferred on Dryden not only the laureateship, but also the office of "historiographer royal," which chanced to be vacant at the same time. The income accruing from the two offices thus conjoined was 200_l._ a-year, which was about as valuable then as 600_l._ a-year would be now; and it was expressly stated in the deed of appointment that these emoluments were conferred on Dryden "in consideration of his many acceptable services done to his majesty, and from an observation of his learning and eminent abilities, and his great skill and elegant style both in verse and prose."

At the time of the Restoration, or even for a year or two after it, such language could, by no stretch of courtesy, have been applied to Dryden. At that time, as we have seen, though already past his thirtieth year, he was certainly about the least distinguished person in the little band of wits that were looking forward to the good time coming. He was a stout, fresh-complexioned man, in grey drugget, who had written some robust stanzas on Cromwell's death, and a short poem, also robust, but rather wooden, on Charles's return. That was about all that was then known about him. What had he done, in the interval, to raise him so high, and to make it natural for the Court to prefer him to what was in fact the t.i.tular supremacy of English literature, over the heads of others who might be supposed to have claims, and especially over poor battered old Butler? A glance at Dryden's life during Davenant's laureateship, or between 1660 and 1670, will answer this question.

Dryden's connexion with the politics of the Protectorate had not been such as to make his immediate and cordial attachment to the cause of restored Royalty either very strange or very unhandsome. Not committed either by strong personal convictions, or by acts, to the Puritan side, he hastened to show that, whatever the older Northamptonshire Drydens and their relatives might think of the matter, he, for one, was willing to be a loyal subject of Charles, both in church and in state. This main point being settled, he had only farther to consider into what particular walk of industry, now that official employment under government was cut off, he should carry his loyalty and his powers. The choice was not difficult.

There was but one career open for him, or suitable to his tastes and qualifications--that of general authorship. We say "general authorship;"

for it is important to remark that Dryden was by no means nice in his choice of work. He was ready for anything of a literary kind to which he was, or could make himself, competent. He had probably a preference for verse; but he had no disinclination to prose, if that article was in demand in the market. He had a store of acquirements, academic and other, that fitted him for an intelligent apprehension of whatever was going on in any of the London circles of that day--the circle of the scholars, that of the amateurs of natural science, or that of the mere wits and men of letters. He was, in fact, a man of general intellectual strength, which he was willing to let out in any kind of tolerably honest intellectual service that might be in fashion. This being the case, he set the right way to work to make himself known in quarters where such service was going on. He had about 40_l._ a-year of inherited fortune; which means something more than 120_l._ a-year with us. With this income to supply his immediate wants, he went to live with Herringman, a bookseller and publisher in the New Exchange. What was the precise nature of his agreement with Herringman cannot be ascertained. His literary enemies used afterwards to say that he was Herringman's hack and wrote prefaces for him. However this may be, there were higher conveniences in being connected with Herringman. He was one of the best known of the London publishers of the day, was a personal friend of Davenant, and had almost all the wits of the day as his customers and occasional visitors. Through him, in all probability, Dryden first became acquainted with some of these men, including Davenant himself, Cowley, and a third person of considerable note at that time as an aristocratic dabbler in literature--Sir Robert Howard, son of the Earl of Berkshire. That the impression he made on these men, and on others in or out of the Herringman circle, was no mean one, is proved by the fact that in 1663 we find him a member of the Royal Society, the foundation of which by royal charter had taken place in the previous year. The number of members was then one hundred and fifteen, including such scientific celebrities of the time as Boyle, Wallis, Wilkins, Christopher Wren, Dr. Isaac Barrow, Evelyn, and Hooke, besides such t.i.tled amateurs of experimental science as the Duke of Buckingham, the Marquis of Dorchester, the Earls of Devonshire, Crawford, and Northampton, and Lords Brouncker, Cavendish, and Berkeley. Among the more purely literary members were Waller, Denham, Cowley, and Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester. The admission of Dryden into such company is a proof that already he was socially a man of mark. As we have Dryden's own confession that he was somewhat dull and sluggish in conversation, and the testimony of others that he was the very reverse of a bustling or pushing man, and rather avoided society than sought it, we must suppose that he had been found out in spite of himself. We can fancy him at Herringman's, or elsewhere, sitting as one of a group with Davenant, Howard, and others, taking snuff and listening, rather than speaking, and yet, when he did speak, doing so with such judgment as to make his chair one of the most important in the room, and impress all with the conviction that he was a solid fellow. He seems also to have taken an interest in the scientific gossip of the day about magnetism, the circulation of the blood, and the prospects of the Baconian system of philosophy; and this may have helped to bring him into contact with men like Boyle, Wren, and Wallis. At all events, if the Society elected him on trust, he soon justified their choice by taking his place among the best known members of what was then the most important cla.s.s of literary men--the writers for the stage. His first drama, a lumbering prose-comedy ent.i.tled _The Wild Gallant_, was produced at Killigrew's Theatre in February, 1662-3; and, though its success was very indifferent, he was not discouraged from a second venture in a tragi-comedy, ent.i.tled _The Rival Ladies_, written partly in blank verse, partly in heroic rhyme, and produced at the same theatre. This attempt was more successful; and in 1664 there was produced, as the joint composition of Dryden and Sir Robert Howard, an attempt in the style of the regular heroic or rhymed tragedy, called _The Indian Queen_. The date of this effort of literary co-partnership between Dryden and his aristocratic friend coincides with the formation of a more intimate connexion between them, by Dryden's marriage with Sir Robert's sister, Lady Elizabeth Howard. The marriage (the result, it would seem, of a visit of the poet, in the company of Sir Robert, to the Earl of Berkshire's seat in Wilts) took place in November, 1663; so that, when _The Indian Queen_ was written, the two authors were already brothers-in-law. The marriage of a man in the poet's circ.u.mstances with an earl's daughter was neither altogether strange nor altogether such as to preclude remark. The earl was poor, and able to afford his daughter but a small settlement; and Dryden was a man of sufficiently good family, his grandfather having been a baronet, and some of his living relations having landed property in Northamptonshire. The property remaining for the support of Dryden's brothers and sisters, however, after the subduction of his own share, had been too scanty to keep them all in their original station; and some of them had fallen a little lower in the world. One sister, in particular, had married a tobacconist in London--a connexion not likely to be agreeable to the Earl of Berkshire and his sons, if they took the trouble to become cognisant of it. Dryden himself probably moved conveniently enough between the one relationship and the other. If his aristocratic brother-in-law, Sir Robert, could write plays with him, his other brother-in-law, the tobacconist of Newgate-street, may have administered to his comfort in other ways. It is known that the poet, in his later life at least, was peculiarly fastidious in the article of snuff, abhorring all ordinary snuffs, and satisfied only with a mixture which he prepared himself; and it is not unlikely that the foundation of this fastidiousness may have been laid in the facilities afforded him originally in his brother-in-law's shop. The tobacconist's wife, of course, would be pleased now and then to have a visit from her brother John; but whether Lady Elizabeth ever went to see her is rather doubtful.

According to all accounts, Dryden's experience of this lady was not such as to improve his ideas of the matrimonial state, or to give encouragement to future poets to marry earls' daughters.

In consequence of the ravages of the Great Plague in 1665 and the subsequent disaster of the Great Fire in 1666 there was for some time a total cessation in London of theatrical performances and all other amus.e.m.e.nts. Dryden, like most other persons who were not tied to town by business, spent the greater part of this gloomy period in the country. He availed himself of the interruption thus given to his dramatic labours to produce his first writings of any moment out of that field, his _Annus Mirabilis_ and his _Essay on Dramatic Poesy_. The first, an attempt to invest with heroic interest, and celebrate in sonorous stanzas, the events of the famous years 1665-6, including not only the Great Fire, but also the incidents of a naval war then going on against the Dutch, must have done more to bring Dryden into the favourable notice of the King, the Duke of York, and other high personages eulogized in it, than anything he had yet written. It was, in fact, a kind of short epic on the topics of the year, such as Dryden might have been expected to write if he had been already doing laureate's duty; and, unless Sir William Davenant was of very easy temper, he must have been rather annoyed at so obvious an invasion of his province, notwithstanding the compliment the poet had paid him by adopting the stanza of his _Gondibert_, and imitating his manner. Scarcely less effective in another way must have been the prose _Essay on Dramatic Poesy_--a vigorous treatise on various matters of poetry and criticism then much discussed. It contained, among other things, a defence of the Heroic or Rhymed Tragedy against those who preferred the older Elizabethan Tragedy of blank verse; and so powerful a contribution was it to this great controversy of the day that it produced an immediate sensation in all literary circles. Sir Robert Howard, who now ranked himself among the partisans of blank verse, took occasion to express his dissent from some of the opinions expounded in it; and, as Dryden replied rather tartly, a temporary quarrel ensued between the two brothers-in-law.

On the re-opening of the theatres in 1667 Dryden, his reputation increased by the two performances just mentioned, stepped forward again as a dramatist. A heroic tragedy called _The Indian Emperor_, which he had prepared before the recess, and which, indeed, had then been acted, was reproduced with great success, and established Dryden's position as a pract.i.tioner of heroic and rhymed tragedy. This was followed by a comedy, in mixed blank verse and prose, called _The Maiden Queen_; this by a prose-comedy called _Sir Martin Mar-all_; and this again, by an adaptation, in conjunction with Sir William Davenant, of Shakespeare's _Tempest_. The two last were produced at Davenant's theatre, whereas all Dryden's former pieces had been written for Killigrew's, or the King's company. About this time, however, an arrangement was made which secured Dryden's services exclusively for Killigrew's house. By the terms of the agreement, Dryden engaged to supply the house with three plays every year, in return for which, he was admitted a shareholder in the profits of the theatre to the extent of one share and a-half. The first fruits of the bargain were a prose-comedy called _The Mock Astrologer_ and two heroic tragedies ent.i.tled _Tyrannic Love_ and _The Conquest of Granada_, the latter being in two parts. These were all produced between 1668 and 1670, and the tragedies, in particular, seem to have taken the town by storm, and placed Dryden, beyond dispute, at the head of all the heroic playwrights of the day.

The extent and nature of Dryden's popularity as a dramatist about this time may be judged by the following extract from the diary of the omnipresent Pepys, referring to the first performance of the _Maiden Queen_:--"After dinner, with my wife to see the _Maiden Queene_, a new play by Dryden, mightily commended for the regularity of it, and the strain and wit; and the truth is, the comical part done by Nell [Nell Gwynn], which is Florimell, that I never can hope to see the like done again by man or woman. The King and Duke of York were at the play. But so great a performance of a comical part was never, I believe, in the world before as Nell do this, both as a mad girle, then most and best of all when she comes in like a young gallant and hath the motions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I confess, admire her." But even Nell's performance in this comedy was nothing compared to one part of her performance afterwards in the tragedy of _Tyrannic Love_. Probably there was never such a scene of ecstasy in a theatre as when Nell, after acting the character of a tragic princess in this play, and killing herself at the close in a grand pa.s.sage of heroism and supernatural virtue, had to start up as she was being borne off the stage dead, and resume her natural character, first addressing her bearer in these words:--

"Hold! are you mad? you d----d confounded dog: I am to rise and speak the epilogue.",

and then running to the footlights and beginning her speech to the audience:--

"I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye: I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly.

Sweet ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil: I'm what I was, a little harmless devil." &c. &c.

It is a tradition that it was this epilogue that effected Nell's conquest of the king, and that he was so fascinated with her manner of delivering it, that he went behind the scenes after the play was over and carried her off. Ah! and it is two hundred years since that fascinating run to the footlights took place, and the swarthy face of the monarch was seen laughing, and the audience shrieked and clapped with delight, and Pepys bustled about the boxes, and Dryden sat looking placidly on, contented with his success, and wondering how much of it was owing to Nelly!

One can see how, even if the choice had been made strictly with a reference to the claims of the candidates, it would have been felt that Dryden, and not Butler, was the proper man to succeed Davenant in the laureateship. If Butler had shewn the more original vein of talent in one peculiar walk, Dryden had proved himself the man of greatest general strength, in whom were more broadly represented the various literary tendencies of his time. The author of ten plays, four of which were stately rhymed tragedies, and the rest comedies in prose and blank verse; the author, also, of various occasional poems, one of which, the _Annus Mirabilis_, was noticeable on its own account as the best poem of current history; the author, moreover, of one express prose-treatise, and of various shorter prose dissertations in the shape of prefaces and the like prefixed to his separate plays and poems, in which the principles of literature were discussed in a manner at once masterly and adapted to the prevailing taste: Dryden was, on the whole, far more likely to perform well that part of a laureate's duties which consisted in supervising and leading the general literature of his age than a man whose reputation, though justly great, had been acquired by one continuous effort in the single department of burlesque. Accordingly, Dryden was promoted to the post, and Butler was left to finish, on his own scanty resources, the remaining portion of his _Hudibras_, varying the occupation by jotting down those sc.r.a.ps of cynical thought which were found among his posthumous papers, and which show that towards the end of his days there were other things that he hated and would have lashed besides Puritanism. Thus:--