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It is not a part of the plan of this book to present any extended bibliography, but there are certain reference books to which the student's attention should be called.
'Absalom and
Achitophel' he drew the portrait of Buckingham as Zimri. But in 1680
an outrage of which he was the victim, a brutal and unprovoked beating
inflicted by ruffians in the employ of the Earl of Rochester, seems
to mark a permanent change for the worse in his fortunes, a change not
indeed to disaster but to a permanent condition of doubtful prosperity.
The next year
he became engaged in political controversy, which resulted in the production
of his most famous work. Charles II was without a legitimate child,
and the heir to the throne was his brother, the Duke of York, who a
few years later actually became king as James II. But while Charles
was outwardly, for political reasons, a member of the Church of England
(at heart he was a Catholic), the Duke of York was a professed and devoted
Catholic, and the powerful Whig party, strongly Protestant, was violently
opposed to him. The monstrous fiction of a 'Popish Plot,' brought forward
by Titus Oates, and the murderous frenzy which it produced, were demonstrations
of the strength of the Protestant feeling, and the leader of the Whigs,
the Earl of Shaftesbury, proposed that the Duke of York should be excluded
by law from the succession to the throne in favor of the Duke of Monmouth,
one of the king's illegitimate sons. At last, in 1681, the nation became
afraid of another civil war, and the king was enabled to have Shaftesbury
arrested on the charge of treason. Hereupon Dryden, at the suggestion,
it is said, of the king, and with the purpose of securing Shaftesbury's
conviction, put forth the First Part of 'Absalom and Achitophel,' a
masterly satire of Shaftesbury, Monmouth, and their associates in the
allegorical disguise of the (somewhat altered) Biblical story of David
and Absalom. [Footnote: The subsequent history of the affair was as
follows: Shaftesbury was acquitted by the jury, and his enthusiastic
friends struck a medal in his honor, which drew from Dryden a short
and less important satire, 'The Medal.' To this in turn a minor poet
named Shadwell replied, and Dryden retorted with 'Mac Flecknoe.' The
name means
'Son of Flecknoe,'
and Dryden represented Shadwell as having inherited the stupidity of
an obscure Irish rimester named Flecknoe, recently deceased. The piece
is interesting chiefly because it suggested Pope's 'Dunciad.' Now, in
1682, the political tide again turned against Shaftesbury, and he fled
from England. His death followed shortly, but meanwhile appeared the
Second Part of 'Absalom and Achitophel,' chiefly a commonplace production
written by Nahum Tate (joint author of Tate and Brady's paraphrase of
the Psalms into English hymn-form), but with some passages by Dryden.]
In 1685 Charles
died and James succeeded him. At about the same time Dryden became a
Catholic, a change which laid him open to the suspicion of truckling
for royal favor, though in fact he had nothing to gain by it and its
chief effect was to identify him with a highly unpopular minority. He
had already, in 1682, written a didactic poem, 'Religio Laici' (A Layman's
Religion), in which he set forth his reasons for adhering to the English
Church. Now, in 1687, he published the much longer allegorical 'Hind
and the Panther,' a defense of the Catholic Church and an attack on
the English Church and the Dissenters. The next year, King James was
driven from the throne, his daughter Mary and her husband, William,
Prince of Orange, succeeded him, and the supremacy of the Church of
England was again assured. Dryden remained constant to Catholicism and
his refusal to take the oath of allegiance to the new rulers cost him
all his public offices and reduced him for the rest of his life to comparative
poverty. He had the further mortification of seeing the very Shadwell
whom he had so unsparingly ridiculed replace him as poet laureate. These
reverses, however, he met with his characteristic manly fortitude, and
of his position as the acknowledged head of English letters he could
not be deprived; his chair at 'Will's' coffee-house was the throne of
an unquestioned monarch. His industry, also, stimulated by necessity,
was unabated to the end. Among other work he continued, in accordance
with the taste of the age, to make verse translations from the chief
Latin poets, and in 1697 he brought out a version of all the poems of
Vergil. He died in
1700, and his
death may conveniently be taken, with substantial accuracy, as marking
the end of the Restoration period.
Variety, fluency,
and not ungraceful strength are perhaps the chief qualities of Dryden's
work, displayed alike in his verse and in his prose. Since he was primarily
a poet it is natural to speak first of his verse; and we must begin
with a glance at the history of the rimed pentameter couplet, which
he carried to the highest point of effectiveness thus far attained.
This form had been introduced into English, probably from French, by
Chaucer, who used it in many thousand lines of the 'Canterbury Tales.'
It was employed to some extent by the Elizabethans, especially in scattered
passages of their dramas, and in some poems of the early seventeenth
century. Up to that time it generally had a free form, with frequent
'running-on'
of the sense from one line to the next and marked irregularity of pauses.
The process of developing it into the representative pseudo-classical
measure of Dryden and Pope consisted in making the lines, or at least
the couplets, generally end-stopt, and in securing a general regular
movement, mainly by eliminating pronounced pauses within the line, except
for the frequent organic cesura in the middle. This process, like other
pseudo-classical tendencies, was furthered by Ben Jonson, who used the
couplet in more than half of his non-dramatic verse; but it was especially
carried on by the wealthy politician and minor poet Edmund Waller (above,
page 164), who for sixty years, from 1623 on, wrote most of his verse
(no very great quantity) in the couplet. Dryden and all his contemporaries
gave to Waller, rather too unreservedly, the credit of having first
perfected the form, that is of first making it (to their taste) pleasingly
smooth and regular. The great danger of the couplet thus treated is
that of over-great conventionality, as was partly illustrated by Dryden's
successor, Pope, who carried Waller's method to the farthest possible
limit. Dryden's vigorous instincts largely saved him from this fault;
by skilful variations in accents and pauses and by terse forcefulness
of expression he gave the couplet firmness as well as smoothness. He
employed, also, two other more questionable means of variety, namely,
the insertion (not original with him) of occasional Alexandrine lines
and of frequent triplets, three lines instead of two riming together.
A present-day reader may like the pentameter couplet or may find it
frigid and tedious; at any rate Dryden employed it in the larger part
of his verse and stamped it unmistakably with the strength of his strong
personality.
In satiric
and didactic verse Dryden is accepted as the chief English master, and
here 'Absalom and Achitophel' is his greatest achievement. It is formally
a narrative poem, but in fact almost nothing happens in it; it is really
expository and descriptive--a very clever partisan analysis of a situation,
enlivened by a series of the most skilful character sketches with very
decided partisan coloring. The sketches, therefore, offer an interesting
contrast with the sympathetic and humorous portraits of Chaucer's 'Prolog.'
Among the secrets of Dryden's success in this particular field are his
intellectual coolness, his vigorous masculine power of seizing on the
salient points of character, and his command of terse, biting phraseology,
set off by effective contrast.
Of Dryden's
numerous comedies and 'tragi-comedies' (serious plays with a sub-action
of comedy) it may be said summarily that some of them were among the
best of their time but that they were as licentious as all the others.
Dryden was also the chief author of another kind of play, peculiar to
this period in England, namely the 'Heroic' (Epic) Play. The material
and spirit of these works came largely from the enormously long contemporary
French romances, which were widely read in England, and of which a prominent
representative was 'The Great Cyrus' of Mlle. de Scudery, in ten volumes
of a thousand pages or more apiece. These romances, carrying further
the tendency which appears in Sidney's 'Arcadia,' are among the most
extravagant of all products of the romantic imagination--strange melanges
of ancient history, medieval chivalry, pastoralism, seventeenth century
artificial manners, and allegory of current events. The English 'heroic'
plays, partly following along these lines, with influence also from
Fletcher, lay their scenes in distant countries; their central interest
is extravagant romantic love; the action is more that of epic adventure
than of tragedy; and incidents, situations, characters, sentiments,
and style, though not without power, are exaggerated or overstrained
to an absurd degree. Breaking so violently through the commonplaceness
and formality of the age, however, they offer eloquent testimony to
the irrepressibility of the romantic instinct in human nature. Dryden's
most representative play of this class is 'Almanzor and Almahide, or
the Conquest of Granada,' in two long five-act parts.
We need do
no more than mention two or three very bad adaptations of plays of Shakspere
to the Restoration taste in which Dryden had a hand; but his most enduring
dramatic work is his 'All for Love, or the World Well Lost,' where he
treats without direct imitation, though in conscious rivalry, the story
which Shakspere used in 'Antony and Cleopatra.' The two plays afford
an excellent illustration of the contrast between the spirits of their
periods. Dryden's undoubtedly has much force and real feeling; but he
follows to a large extent the artificial rules of the pseudo-classical
French tragedies and critics. He observes the 'three unities' with considerable
closeness, and he complicates the love-action with new elements of Restoration
jealousy and questions of formal honor. Altogether, the twentieth century
reader finds in 'All for Love' a strong and skilful play, ranking, nevertheless,
with its somewhat formal rhetoric and conventional atmosphere, far below
Shakspere's less regular but magnificently emotional and imaginative
masterpiece.
A word must
be added about the form of Dryden's plays. In his comedies and in comic
portions of the others he, like other English dramatists, uses prose,
for its suggestion of every-day reality. In plays of serious tone he
often turns to blank verse, and this is the meter of 'All for Love.'
But early in his dramatic career he, almost contemporaneously with other
dramatists, introduced the rimed couplet, especially in his heroic plays.
The innovation was due in part to the influence of contemporary French
tragedy, whose riming Alexandrine couplet is very similar in effect
to the English couplet. About the suitability of the English couplet
to the drama there has always been difference of critical opinion; but
most English readers feel that it too greatly interrupts the flow of
the speeches and is not capable of the dignity and power of blank verse.
Dryden himself, at any rate, finally grew tired of it and returned to
blank verse.
Dryden's work
in other forms of verse, also, is of high quality. In his dramas he
inserted songs whose lyric sweetness is reminiscent of the similar songs
of Fletcher. Early in his career he composed (in pentameter quatrains
of alternate rime, like Gray's 'Elegy') 'Annus Mirabilis' (The Wonderful
Year--namely 1666), a long and vigorous though far from faultless narrative
of the war with the Dutch and of the Great Fire of London. More important
are the three odes in the 'irregular Pindaric' form introduced by Cowley.
The first, that to Mrs. (i. e., Miss) Anne Killigrew, one of the Queen's
maids of honor, is full, thanks to Cowley's example, of
'metaphysical'
conceits and science. The two later ones, 'Alexander's Feast' and the
'Song for St. Cecilia's Day,' both written for a musical society's annual
festival in honor of the patron saint of their art, are finely spirited
and among the most striking, though not most delicate, examples of onomatopoeia
in all poetry.
Dryden's prose,
only less important than his verse, is mostly in the form of long critical
essays, virtually the first in English, which are prefixed to many of
his plays and poems. In them, following French example, he discusses
fundamental questions of poetic art or of general esthetics. His opinions
are judicious; independent, so far as the despotic authority of the
French critics permitted, at least honest; and interesting. Most important,
perhaps, is his attitude toward the French pseudo-classical formulas.
He accepted French theory even in details which we now know to be absurd--agreed,
for instance, that even Homer wrote to enforce an abstract moral (namely
that discord destroys a state). In the field of his main interest, further,
his reason was persuaded by the pseudo-classical arguments that English
(Elizabethan) tragedy, with its violent contrasts and irregularity,
was theoretically wrong. Nevertheless his greatness consists throughout
partly in the common sense which he shares with the best English critics
and thinkers of all periods; and as regards tragedy he concludes, in
spite of rules and theory, that he 'loves Shakspere.'
In expression,
still again, Dryden did perhaps more than any other man to form modern
prose style, a style clear, straightforward, terse, forceful, easy and
simple and yet dignified, fluent in vocabulary, varied, and of pleasing
rhythm.
Dryden's general
quality and a large part of his achievement are happily summarized in
Lowell's epigram that he 'was the greatest poet who ever was or ever
could be made wholly out of prose.' He can never again be a favorite
with the general reading-public; but he will always remain one of the
conspicuous figures in the history of English literature.
THE OTHER DRAMATISTS.
The other dramatists of the Restoration period may be dismissed with
a few words. In tragedy the overdrawn but powerful plays of Thomas Otway,
a man of short and pathetic life, and of Nathaniel Lee, are alone of
any importance. In comedy, during the first part of the period, stand
Sir George Etherege and William Wycherley. The latter's 'Country Wife'
has been called the most heartless play ever written. To the next generation
and the end of the period (or rather of the Restoration literature,
which actually lasted somewhat beyond 1700), belong William Congreve,
a master of sparkling wit, Sir John Vanbrugh, and George Farquhar. So
corrupt a form of writing as the Restoration comedy could not continue
to flaunt itself indefinitely. The growing indignation was voiced from
time to time in published protests, of which the last, in 1698, was
the over-zealous but powerful 'Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness
of the English Stage' by Jeremy Collier, which carried the more weight
because the author was not a Puritan but a High-Church bishop and partisan
of the Stuarts. Partly as a result of such attacks and partly by the
natural course of events the pendulum, by the end of the period, was
swinging back, and not long thereafter Restoration comedy died and the
stage was left free for more decent, though, as it proved, not for greater,
productions.
Chapter IX.
Period VII. The Eighteenth Century, Pseudo-Classicism And The Beginnings
Of Modern Romanticism
POLITICAL CONDITIONS.
During the
first part of the eighteenth century the direct connection between politics
and literature was closer than at any previous period of English life;
for the practical spirit of the previous generation continued to prevail,
so that the chief writers were very ready to concern themselves with
the affairs of State, and in the uncertain strife of parties ministers
were glad to enlist their aid. On the death of King William in 1702,
Anne, sister of his wife Queen Mary and daughter of James II, became
Queen. Unlike King William she was a Tory and at first filled offices
with members of that party. But the English campaigns under the Duke
of Marlborough against Louis XIV were supported by the Whigs,
[Footnote:
The Tories were the political ancestors of the present-day Conservatives;
the Whigs of the Liberals.] who therefore gradually regained control,
and in 1708 the Queen had to submit to a Whig ministry. She succeeded
in ousting them in 1710, and a Tory cabinet was formed by Henry Harley
(afterwards Earl of Oxford) and Henry St. John (afterwards Viscount
Bolingbroke). On the death of Anne in 1714 Bolingbroke, with other Tories,
was intriguing for a second restoration of the Stuarts in the person
of the son of James II (the 'Old Pretender'). But the nation decided
for a Protestant German prince, a descendant of James I through his
daughter Elizabeth, [Footnote: The subject of Wotton's fine poem, above,
p. 158.] and this prince was crowned as George I--an event which brought
England peace at the price of a century of rule by an unenlightened
and sordid foreign dynasty. The Tories were violently turned out of
office; Oxford was imprisoned, and Bolingbroke, having fled to the Pretender,
was declared a traitor. Ten years later he was allowed to come back
and attempted to oppose Robert Walpole, the Whig statesman who for twenty
years governed England in the name of the first two Georges; but in
the upshot Bolingbroke was again obliged to retire to France. How closely
these events were connected with the fortunes of the foremost authors
we shall see as we proceed.
THE GENERAL SPIRIT OF THE PERIOD.
The writers
of the reigns of Anne and George I called their period the Augustan
Age, because they flattered themselves that with them English life and
literature had reached a culminating period of civilization and elegance
corresponding to that which existed at Rome under the Emperor Augustus.
They believed also that both in the art of living and in literature
they had rediscovered and were practising the principles of the best
periods of Greek and Roman life. In our own time this judgment appears
equally arrogant and mistaken. In reality the men of the early eighteenth
century, like those of the Restoration, largely misunderstood the qualities
of the classical spirit, and thinking to reproduce them attained only
a superficial, pseudo-classical, imitation. The main characteristics
of the period and its literature continue, with some further development,
those of the Restoration, and may be summarily indicated as follows:
1. Interest was largely centered in the practical well-being either of society as a whole or of one's own social class or set. The majority of writers, furthermore, belonged by birth or association to the upper social stratum and tended to overemphasize its artificial conventions, often looking with contempt on the other classes. To them conventional good breeding, fine manners, the pleasures of the leisure class, and the standards of 'The Town' (fashionable London society) were the only part of life much worth regarding.
2. The men of this age carried still further the distrust and dislike felt by the previous generation for emotion, enthusiasm, and strong individuality both in life and in literature, and exalted Reason and Regularity as their guiding stars. The terms 'decency' and 'neatness' were forever on their lips. They sought a conventional uniformity in manners, speech, and indeed in nearly everything else, and were uneasy if they deviated far from the approved, respectable standards of the body of their fellows. Great poetic imagination, therefore, could scarcely exist among them, or indeed supreme greatness of any sort.
3. They
had little appreciation for external Nature or for any beauty except
that of formalized Art. A forest seemed to most of them merely wild
and gloomy, and great mountains chiefly terrible, but they took delight
in gardens of artificially trimmed trees and in regularly plotted and
alternating beds of domestic flowers. The Elizabethans also, as we have
seen, had had much more feeling for the terror than for the grandeur
of the sublime in Nature, but the Elizabethans had had nothing of the
elegant primness of the Augustans.
4. In speech and especially in literature, most of all in poetry, they were given to abstractness of thought and expression, intended to secure elegance, but often serving largely to substitute superficiality for definiteness and significant meaning. They abounded in personifications of abstract qualities and ideas ('Laughter, heavenly maid,' Honor, Glory, Sorrow, and so on, with prominent capital letters), a sort of a pseudo-classical substitute for emotion. 5. They were still more fully confirmed than the men of the Restoration in the conviction that the ancients had attained the highest possible perfection in literature, and some of them made absolute submission of judgment to the ancients, especially to the Latin poets and the Greek, Latin, and also the seventeenth century classicizing French critics. Some authors seemed timidly to desire to be under authority and to glory in surrendering their independence, individuality, and originality to foreign and long-established leaders and principles.
6. Under these circumstances the effort to attain the finished beauty of classical literature naturally resulted largely in a more or less shallow formal smoothness.
7. There
was a strong tendency to moralizing, which also was not altogether free
from conventionality and superficiality.
Although the
'Augustan Age' must be considered to end before the middle of the century,
the same spirit continued dominant among many writers until near its
close, so that almost the whole of the century may be called the period
of pseudo-classicism.