VOLUME IX SLICE VI English Language to Epsom Salts (continued 4)

In Donne poetry became deeply intellectualized, and in temper disquisitive and introspective. The poet’s emotion is played with in a cat-and-mouse fashion, and he torments it subtly. Donne’s passion is so real, if so unheard-of, and his brain so finely-dividing, that he can make almost any image, even the remotest, even the commonest, poetical. His satires, his Valentine, his Litany, and his lyric or odic pieces in general, have an insolent and sudden daring which is warranted by deep-seated power and is only equalled by a few of those tragedians who are his nearest of kin. The recurring contrast of “wit” or intelligence, and “will” or desire, their struggle, their mutual illumination, their fusion as into some third and undiscovered element of human nature, are but one idiosyncrasy of Donne’s intricate soul, whose general progress, so far as his dateless poems permit of its discovery, seems to have been from a paganism that is unashamed but crossed with gusts of compunction, to a mystical and otherwordly temper alloyed with covetous regrets. The Anatomy of the World and other ambitious pieces have the same quality amid their outrageous strangeness. In Donne and his successors the merely ingenious and ransacking intellect often came to overbalance truth and passion; and hence arose conceits and abstract verbiage, and the difficulty of finding a perfect poem, however brief, despite the omnipresence of the poetic gift. The “fantastic” school, if it contains some of the rarest sallies and passages in English, is one of the least satisfactory. Its faults only exaggerate those of Sidney, Greville and Shakespeare, who often misuse homely or technical metaphor; and English verse shared, by coincidence not by borrowing, and with variations of its own, in the general strain and torture of style that was besetting so many poets of the Latin countries. Yet these poets well earn the name of metaphysical, not for their philosophic phrasing, but for the shuttle-flight of their fancy to and fro between the things of earth and the realities of spirit that lie beyond the screen of the flesh.

Between Spenser and Milton many measures of lyrical and other poetry were modified. Donne’s frequent use of roughly-accentual, almost tuneless lines is unexplained and was not often followed. Rhythm in general came to Rhythm. be studied more for its own sake, and the study was rewarded. The lovely cordial music of Carew’s amorous iambics, or of Wither’s trochees, or of Crashaw’s odes, or of Marvell’s octo-syllables, has never been regained. The formal ode set in, sometimes regularly “Pindaric” in strophe-grouping, sometimes irregularly “Pindaric” as in Cowley’s experiments. Above all, the heroic couplet, of the isolated, balanced, rhetorical order, such as Spenser, Drayton, Fairfax and Sylvester, the translator (1590-1606) of Du Bartas, had often used, began to be a regular instrument of verse, and that for special purposes which soon became lastingly associated with it. The flatteries of Edmund Waller and the Ovidian translations of Sandys dispute the priority for smoothness and finish, though the fame was Waller’s for two generations; but Denham’s overestimated Cooper’s Hill (1642), Cowley’s Davideis (1656), and even Ogilby’s Aeneid made the path plainer for Dryden, the first sovereign of the rhetorical couplet which throve as blank verse declined. Sonnet and madrigal were the favoured measures of William Drummond of Hawthornden, a real and exquisite poet of the studio, who shows the general drift of verse towards sequestered and religious feeling. Drummond’s Poems of 1616 and Flowers of Zion (1623) are full of Petrarch and Plato as well as of Christian resignation, and he kept alive the artistry of phrasing and versification in a time of indiscipline and conflicting forms. William Browne has been named as a Spenserian, but his Britannia’s Pastorals (1613-1616), with their slowly-rippling and overflowing couplets which influenced Keats, were a medley of a novel kind. George Wither may equally rank among the lighter followers of Spenser, the easy masters of lyrical narrative, and the devotional poets. But his Shepherd’s Hunting and other pieces in his volume of 1622 contain lovely landscapes, partly English and partly artificial, and stand far above his pious works, and still further above the dreary satires which he lived to continue after the Restoration.

Of poets yet unmentioned, Robert Herrick is the chief, with his two thousand lyrics and epigrams, gathered in Hesperides and Noble Numbers (1648). His power of song and sureness of cadence are not excelled within his range of Herrick. topic, which includes flowers and maidens—whom he treats as creatures of the same race—and the swift decay of both their beauties, and secular regret over this decay and his own mortality and the transience of amorous pleasure, and the virtues of his friends, and country sports and lore, and religious compunction for his own paganism. The Hesperides are pure Renaissance work, in natural sympathy with the Roman elegiac writings and with the Pseudo-Anacreon. Cowley is best where he is nearest Herrick, and his posy of short lyrics outlives his “epic and Pindaric art.” There are many writers who last by virtue of one or two poems; Suckling by his adept playfulness, Lovelace and Montrose by a few gallant stanzas, and many a nameless The long poem. poet by many a consummate cadence. It is the age of sudden flights and brief perfections. All the farther out of reach, yet never wholly despaired of or unattempted in England, was the “long poem,” heroical and noble, the “phantom epic,” that shadow of the ancient masterpieces, which had striven to life in Italy and France. Davenant’s Gondibert (1651), Cowley’s Davideis and Chamberlayne’s Pharonnida (1659) attest the effort which Milton in 1658 resumed with triumph. These works have between them all the vices possible to epic verse, dulness and flatness, faintness and quaintness and incoherence. But there is some poetry in each of them, and in Pharonnida there is far more than enough poetry to save it.

Few writers have found a flawless style of their own so early in life as John Milton (1608-1674). His youthful pieces show some signs of Spenser and the Caroline fantastics; but soon his vast poetical reading ran clear and lay at Milton. the service of his talent. His vision and phrasing of natural things were already original in the Nativity Ode, written when he was twenty; and, there also, his versification was already that of a master, of a renovator. The pensive and figured beauty of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, two contrasted emblematic panels, the high innocent Platonism and golden blank verse of the Comus (1634); the birth of long-sleeping power in the Lycidas (1637), with its unapproached contrivance both in evolution and detail, where the precious essences of earlier myth and pastoral seem to be distilled for an offering in honour of the tombless friend;—the newness, the promise, the sureness of it all amid the current schools! The historian finds in these poems, with their echoes of Plato and Sannazzaro, of Geoffrey of Monmouth and St John, the richest and most perfect instance of the studious, decorative Renaissance style, and is not surprised to find Milton’s scholars a century later in the age of Gray. The critic, while feeling that the strictly lyrical, spontaneous element is absent, is all the more baffled by the skill and enduring charm. The sonnets were written before or during Milton’s long immersion (1637-1658) in prose and warfare, and show the same gifts. They are not cast in the traditional form of love-cycle, but are occasional poems; in metre they revert, not always strictly but once or twice in full perfection, to the Italian scheme; and they recall not Petrarch but the spiritual elegies or patriot exaltations of Dante or Guidiccioni.

Milton also had a medieval side to his brain, as the History of Britain shows. The heroic theme, which he had resolved from his youth up to celebrate, at last, after many hesitations, proved to be the fall of man. This, for one of his creed and for the audience he desired, was the greatest theme of all. Its scene was the Ptolemaic universe with the Christian heaven and hell inserted. The time, indicated by retrospect and prophecy, was the whole of that portion of eternity, from the creation of Christ to the doomsday, of which the history was sacredly revealed. The subject and the general span of the action went back to the popular mystery play; and Milton at first planned out Paradise Lost as such a play, with certain elements of classic tragedy embodied. But according to the current theory the epic, not the drama, was the noblest form of verse; and, feeling where his power lay, he adopted the epic. The subject, therefore, was partly medieval, partly Protestant,—for Milton was a true Protestant in having a variant of doctrine shared by no other mortal. But the ordering and presentment, with their overture, their interpolated episodes or narratives, their journeys between Olympus, Earth and hell, invocations, set similes, battles and divine thunderbolts, are those of the classical epic. Had Milton shared the free thought as well as the scholarship of the Renaissance, the poem could never have existed. With all his range of soul and skill, he had a narrower speculative brain than any poet of equal gift; and this was well for his great and peculiar task. But whatever Milton may fail to be, his heroic writing is the permanent and absolute expression of something that in the English stock is inveterate—the Promethean self-possession of the mind in defeat, its right to solitude there, its claim to judge and deny the victor. This is the spirit of his devils, beside whom his divinities, his unfallen angels (Abdiel excepted), and even his human couple with their radiance and beauty of line, all seem shadowy. The discord between Milton’s doctrine and his sympathies in Paradise Lost (1667) has never escaped notice. The discord between his doctrine and his culture comes out in Paradise Regained (1671), when he has at once to reprobate and glorify Athens, the “mother of arts.” In this afterthought to the earlier epic the action is slight, the Enemy has lost spirit, and the Christ is something of a pedagogue. But there is a new charm in its even, grey desert tint, sprinkled with illuminations of gold and luxury. In Samson Agonistes (1671) the ethical treatment as well as the machinery is Sophoclean, and the theology not wholly Christian. But the fault of Samson is forgotten in his suffering, which is Milton’s own; and thus a cross-current of sympathy is set up, which may not be much in keeping with the story, but revives the somewhat exhausted interest and heightens a few passages into a bare and inaccessible grandeur.

The essential solitude of Milton’s energies is best seen in his later style and versification. When he resumed poetry about 1658, he had nothing around him to help him as an artist in heroic language. The most recent memories of the drama were also the worst; the forms of Cowley and Davenant, the would-be epic poets, were impossible. Spenser’s manner was too even and fluid as a rule for such a purpose, and his power was of an alien kind. Thus Milton went back, doubtless full of Greek and Latin memories, to Marlowe, Shakespeare and others among the greater dramatists (including John Ford); and their tragic diction and measure are the half-hidden bases of his own. The product, however, is unlike anything except the imitations of itself. The incongruous elements of the Paradise Lost and its divided sympathies are cemented, at least superficially, by its style, perhaps the surest for dignity, character and beauty that any Germanic language has yet developed. If dull and pedantic over certain stretches, it is usually infallible. It is many styles in one, and Time has laid no hand on it. In these three later poems its variety can be seen. It is perfect in personal invocation and appeal; in the complex but unfigured rhetoric of the speeches; in narrative of all kinds; for the inlaying work of simile or scenery or pageant, where the quick, pure impressions of Milton’s youth and prime—possibly kept fresher by his blindness—are felt through the sometimes conventional setting; and for soliloquy and choric speech of a might unapproachable since Dante. To these calls his blank verse responds at every point. It is the seal of Milton’s artistry, as of his self-confidence, for it greatly extends, for the epical purpose, all the known powers and liberties of the metre; and yet, as has often been shown, it does so not spasmodically but within fixed technical laws or rather habits. Latterly, the underlying metrical ictus is at times hard to detect. But Milton remains by far the surest and greatest instrumentalist, outside the drama, on the English unrhymed line. He would, however, have scorned to be judged on his form alone. His soul and temper are not merely unique in force. Their historic and representative character ensure attention, so long as the oppositions of soul and temper in the England of Milton’s time remain, as they still are, the deepest in the national life. He is sometimes said to harmonize the Renaissance and the Puritan spirit; but he does not do this, for nothing can do it. The Puritan spirit is the deep thing in Milton; all his culture only gives immortal form to its expression. The critics have instinctively felt that this is true; and that is why their political and religious prepossessions have nearly always coloured, and perhaps must colour, every judgment passed upon him. Not otherwise can he be taken seriously, until historians are without public passions and convictions, or the strife between the hierarch and the Protestant is quenched in English civilization.

Drama, 1580-1642.—We must now go back to the drama, which lies behind Milton, and is the most individual product of all English Literature. The nascent drama of genius can be found in the “University wits,” who flourished Drama. between 1580 and 1595, and the chief of whom are Lyly, Kyd, Peele, Greene and Marlowe. John Lyly is the first practitioner in prose—of shapely comic plot and pointed talk—the artificial but actual talk of courtly masquers who rally one another with a bright and barren finish that is second nature. Campaspe, Sapho and Phao, Midas, and Lyly’s other comedies, mostly written from 1580 to 1591, are frail vessels, often filled with compliment, mythological allegory, or topical satire, and enamelled with pastoral interlude and flower-like song. The work of Thomas Kyd, especially The Spanish Tragedy (written c. 1585), was the most violent effort to put new wine into the old Senecan bottles, and he probably wrote the lost pre-Shakespearian Hamlet. He transmitted to the later drama that subject of pious but ruinous revenge, which is used by Chapman, Marston, Webster and many others; and his chief play was translated and long acted in Germany. Kyd’s want of modulation is complete, but he commands a substantial skill of dramatic mechanism, and he has more than the feeling for power, just as Peele and Greene have more than the feeling for luxury or grace. To the expression of luxury Peele’s often stately blank verse is well fitted, and it is by far the most correct and musical before Marlowe’s, as his Arraignment of Paris (1584) and his David and Bethsabe attest. Greene did something to create the blank verse of gentle comedy, and to introduce the tone of idyll and chivalry, in his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594). Otherwise these writers, with Nashe and Lodge, fall into the wake of Marlowe.

Tamburlaine, in two parts (part i. c. 1587), The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II. (the first chronicle play of genius), and the incomplete poem Hero and Leander are Christopher Marlowe’s title-deeds Marlowe. (1564-1593). He established tragedy, and inspired its master, and created for it an adequate diction and versification. His command of vibrant and heroic recitative should not obscure his power, in his greater passages, describing the descent of Helen, the passing of Mortimer, and the union of Hero and Leander, to attain a kind of Greek transparency and perfection. The thirst for ideal beauty, for endless empire, and for prohibited knowledge, no poet has better expressed, and in this respect Giordano Bruno is nearest him in his own time. This thirst is his own; his great cartoon-figures, gigantic rather than heroic, proclaim it for him: their type recurs through the drama, from Richard III. to Dryden’s orotund heroes; but in Faustus and in Edward II. they become real, almost human beings. His constructive gift is less developed in proportion, though Goethe praised the planning-out of Faustus. The glory and influence of Marlowe on the side of form rest largely on his meteoric blank lines, which are varied not a little, and nobly harmonized into periods, and resonant with names to the point of splendid extravagance; and their sound is heard in Milton, whom he taught how to express the grief and despair of demons dissatisfied with their kingdom. Shakespeare did not excel Marlowe in Marlowe’s own excellences, though he humanized Marlowe’s Jew, launched his own blank verse on the tide of Marlowe’s oratory, and modulated, in Richard II., his master’s type of chronicle tragedy.

As the middle ages receded, the known life of man upon this earth became of sovereign interest, and of this interest the drama is the freest artistic expression. If Marlowe is the voice of the impulse to explore, the plays of Shakespeare. Shakespeare are the amplest freight brought home by any voyager. Shakespeare is not only the greatest but the earliest English dramatist who took humanity for his province. But this he did not do from the beginning. He was at first subdued to what he worked in; and though the dry pedantic tragedy was shattered and could not touch him, the gore and rant, the impure though genuine force of Kyd do not seem at first to have repelled him; if, as is likely, he had a hand in Titus Andronicus. He probably served with Marlowe and others of the school at various stages in the composition of the three chronicle dramas finally entitled Henry VI. But besides the high-superlative style that is common to them all, there runs through them the rhymed rhetoric with which Shakespeare dallied for some time, as well as the softer flute-notes and deeper undersong that foretell his later blank verse. In Richard III., though it is built on the scheme and charged with the style of Marlowe, Shakespeare first showed the intensity of his original power. But after a few years he swept out of Marlowe’s orbit into his own vaster and unreturning curve. In King John the lyrical, epical, satirical and pathetic chords are all present, if they are scarcely harmonized. Meantime, Lyly and Greene having displaced the uncouther comedy, Shakespeare learned all they had to teach, and shaped the comedy of poetic, chivalrous fancy and good-tempered high spirits, which showed him the way of escape from his own rhetoric, and enabled him to perfect his youthful, noble and gentle blank verse. This attained its utmost fineness in Richard II., and its full cordiality and beauty 1590-1595. in the other plays that consummate this period—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and one romantic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. Behind them lay the earlier and fainter romances, with their chivalry and gaiety, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Throughout these years blank verse contended with rhyme, which Shakespeare after a while abandoned save for special purposes, as though he had exhausted its honey. The Italian Renaissance is felt in the scenery and setting of these plays. The novella furnishes the story, which passes in a city of the Southern type, with its absolute ruler, its fantastic by-laws on which the plot nominally turns, and its mixture of real life and marvel. The personages, at first fainter of feature and symmetrically paired, soon assume sharper outline: Richard II. and Shylock, Portia and Juliet, and Juliet’s Nurse and Bottom are created. The novella has left the earth and taken wings: the spirit is now that of youth and Fancy (or love brooding among the shallows) with interludes of “fierce vexation,” or of tragedy, or of kindly farce. And there is a visionary element, felt in the musings of Theseus upon the nature of poetry of the dream-faculty itself; an element which is new, like the use made of fairy folklore, in the poetry of England.

Tragedy is absent in the succeeding histories (1597-1599), and the comedies of wit and romance (1599-1600), in which Shakespeare perfected his style for stately, pensive or boisterous themes. Falstaff, the most popular as 1596-1600. he is the wittiest of all imaginable comic persons, dominates, as to their prose or lower world, the two parts of Henry IV., and its interlude or offshoot, The Merry Wives of Windsor. The play that celebrates Henry V. is less a drama than a pageant, diversified with mighty orations and cheerful humours, and filled with the love of Shakespeare for England. Here the most indigenous form of art invented by the English Renaissance reaches its climax. The Histories are peopled chiefly by men and warriors, of whom Hotspur, “dying in his excellence and flower,” is perhaps more attractive than Henry of Agincourt. But in the “middle comedies,” As You Like It, Much Ado, and Twelfth Night, the warriors are home at court, where women rule the scene and deserve to rule it; for their wit now gives the note; and Shakespeare’s prose, the medium of their talk, has a finer grace and humour than ever before, euphuism lying well in subjection behind it.

Mankind and this world have never been so sharply sifted or so sternly consoled, since Lucretius, as in Shakespeare’s tragedies. The energy which created them evades, like that of the sun, our estimate. But they were not 1601-1608. out of relation to their time, the first few years of the reign of James, with its conspiracies, its Somerset and Overbury horrors, its enigmatic and sombre figures like Raleigh, and its revulsion from Elizabethan buoyancy. In the same decade were written the chief tragedies of Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Marston, Tourneur; and The White Devil, and A Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Maid’s Tragedy, and A Woman Killed with Kindness. But, in spite of Shakespeare’s affinities with these authors at many points, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, with the three Roman plays (written at intervals and not together), and the two quasi-antique plays Troilus and Cressida, and Timon of Athens, form a body of drama apart from anything else in the world. They reveal a new tragic philosophy, a new poetic style, a new dramatic technique and a new world of characters. In one way above all Shakespeare stands apart; he not only appropriates the ancient pattern of heroism, of right living and right dying, revealed by North’s Plutarch; others did this also; but the intellectual movement of the time, though by no means fully reflected, is reflected in his tragedies far more than elsewhere. The new and troublous thoughts on man and conduct that were penetrating the general mind, the freedom and play of vision that Montaigne above all had stimulated, here find their fullest scope; and Florio’s translation (1603) of Montaigne’s Essays, coming out between the first and the second versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, counted probably for more than any other book. The Sonnets (published 1609) are also full of far-wandering thoughts on truth and beauty and on good and evil. The story they reveal may be ranked with the situations of the stranger dramas like Troilus and Measure for Measure. But whether or no it is a true story, and the Sonnets in the main a confession, they would be at the very worst a perfect dramatic record of a great poet’s suffering and friendship.

Shakespeare’s last period, that of his tragi-comedies, begins about 1608 with his contributions to Pericles, Prince of Tyre. For unknown reasons he was moved, about the time of his retirement home, to record, as though in justice Last period. to the world, the happy turns by which tragic disaster is at times averted. Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest all move, after a series of crimes, calumnies, or estrangements, to some final scene of enthralling beauty, where the lost reappear and love is recovered; as though after all the faint and desperate last partings—of Lear and Cordelia, of Hamlet and Horatio—which Shakespeare had imagined, he must make retrieval with the picture of young and happy creatures whose life renews hope even in the experienced. To this end he chose the loose action and free atmosphere of the roman d’aventure, which had already been adapted by Beaumont and Fletcher, who may herein have furnished Shakespeare with novel and successful theatrical effects, and who certainly in turn studied his handiwork. In The Tempest this tragi-comic scheme is fitted to the tales brought by explorers of far isles, wild men, strange gods and airy music. Even if it be true that in Prospero’s words the poet bids farewell to his magic, he took part later nevertheless in the composition of Henry VIII.; and not improbably also in The Two Noble Kinsmen. His share in two early pieces, Arden of Feversham (1592) and Edward III., has been urged, never established, and of many other dramas he was once idly accused.

Shakespeare’s throne rests on the foundation of three equal and master faculties. One is that of expression and versification; the next is the invention and presentation of human character in action; the third is the theatrical faculty. The writing of Dante may seem to us more steadily great and perfect, when we remember Shakespeare’s conceits, his experiments, his haste and impatience in his long wrestle with tragic language, his not infrequent sheer infelicities. But Dante is always himself, he had not to find words for hundreds of imaginary persons. Balzac, again, may have created and exhibited as many types of mankind, but except in soul he is not a poet. Shakespeare is a supreme if not infallible poet; his verse, often of an antique simplicity or of a rich, harmonious, romantic perfection, is at other times strained and shattered with what it tries to express, and attains beauty only through discord. He is also many persons in one; in his Sonnets he is even, it may be thought, himself. But he had furthermore to study a personality not of his own fancying—with something in it of Caliban, of Dogberry and of Cleopatra—that of the audience in a playhouse. He belongs distinctly to the poets like Jonson and Massinger who are true to their art as practical dramatists, not to the poets like Chapman whose works chance to be in the form of plays. Shakespeare’s mastery of this art is approved now by every nation. But apart from the skill that makes him eternally actable—the skill of raising, straining and relieving the suspense, and bringing it to such an ending as the theatre will tolerate—he played upon every chord in his own hearers. He frankly enlisted Jew-hatred, Pope-hatred and France-hatred; he flattered the queen, and celebrated the Union, and stormed the house with his fanfare over the national soldier, Henry of Agincourt, and glorified England, as in Cymbeline, to the last. But in deeper ways he is the chief of playwrights. Unlike another master, Ibsen, he nearly always tells us, without emphasis, by the words and behaviour of his characters, which of them we are to love and hate, and when we are to love and when to hate those whom we can neither love nor hate wholly. Yet he is not to be bribed, and deals to his characters something of the same injustice or rough justice that is found in real life. His loyalty to life, as well as to the stage, puts the crown on his felicity and his fertility, and raises him to his solitude of dramatic greatness.

Shakespeare’s method could not be imparted, and despite reverberations in Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster and others he left no school. But his friend Ben Jonson, his nearest equal in vigour of brain, though not in poetical intuition, Jonson. was the greatest of dramatic influences down to the shutting of the theatres in 1642, and his comedies found fresh disciples even after 1660. He had “the devouring eye and the portraying hand”; he could master and order the contents of a mighty if somewhat burdensome memory into an organic drama, whether the matter lay in Roman historians or before his eyes in the London streets. He had an armoury of doctrine, drawn from the Poetics and Horace, which moulded his creative practice. This was also partly founded on a revulsion against the plays around him, with their loose build and moral improbabilities. But in spite of his photographic and constructive power, his vision is too seldom free and genial; it is that of the satirist who thinks that his office is to improve mankind by derisively representing it. And he does this by beginning with the “humour,” or abstract idiosyncrasy or quality, and clothing it with accurately minute costume and gesture, so that it may pass for a man; and indeed the result is as real as many a man, and in his best-tempered and youthful comedy, Every Man in his Humour (acted 1598), it is very like life. In Jonson’s monumental pieces, Volpone or the Fox (acted 1605) and The Alchemist (acted 1610), our laughter is arrested by the lowering and portentous atmosphere, or is loud and hard, startled by the enormous skill and energy displayed. Nor are the joy and relief of poetical comedy given for an instant by The Silent Woman, Bartholomew Fair (acted 1614), or The Staple of News, still less by topical plays like Cynthia’s Revels, though their unfailing farce and rampant fun are less charged with contempt. The erudite tragedies, Sejanus (acted 1603) and Catiline, chiefly live by passages of high forensic power. Jonson’s finer elegies, eulogies and lyrics, which are many, and his fragmentary Sad Shepherd, show that he also had a free and lovely talent, often smothered by doctrine and temper; and his verse, usually strong but full of knots and snags, becomes flowing and graciously finished. His prose is of the best, especially in his Discoveries, a series of ethical essays and critical maxims; its prevalently brief and emphatic rhythms suggesting those of Hobbes, and even, though less easy and civil and various, those of Dryden. The “sons” of Jonson, Randolph and Browne, Shadwell and Wilson, were heirs rather to his riot of “humours,” his learned method and satiric aim, than to his larger style, his architectural power, or his relieving graces.

As a whole, the romantic drama (so to entitle the remaining bulk of plays down to 1642) is a vast stifled jungle, full of wild life and song, with strange growths and heady perfumes, with glades of sunshine and recesses of poisoned Romantic drama. darkness; it is not a cleared forest, where single and splendid trees grow to shapely perfection. It has “poetry enough for anything”; passionate situations, and their eloquence; and a number, doubtless small considering its mass, of living and memorable personages. Moral keeping and constructive mastery are rarer still; and too seldom through a whole drama do we see human life and hear its voices, arranged and orchestrated by the artist. But it can be truly said in defence that while structure without poetry is void (as it tended at times to be in Ben Jonson), poetry without structure is still poetry, and that the romantic drama is like nothing else in this world for variety of accent and unexpectedness of beauty. We must read it through, as Charles Lamb did, to do it justice. The diffusion of its characteristic excellences is surprising. Of its extant plays it is hardly safe to leave one unopened, if we are searchers for whatsoever is lovely or admirable. The reasons for the lack of steadfast power and artistic conscience lay partly in the conditions of the stage. Playwrights usually wrote rapidly for bread, and sold their rights. The performances of each play were few. There was no authors’ copyright, and dramas were made to be seen and heard, not to be read. There was no articulate dramatic criticism, except such as we find casually in Shakespeare, and in the practice and theory of Jonson, who was deaf or hostile to some of the chief virtues of the romantic playwrights.

The wealth of dramatic production is so great that only a broad classification is here offered. George Chapman stands apart, nearest to the greatest in high austerity of sentiment and in the gracious gravity of his romantic Chapman. love-comedies. But the crude melodrama of his tragedies is void of true theatrical skill. His quasi-historical French tragedies on Bussy d’Ambois and Biron and Chabot best show his gift and also his insufferable interrupting quaintness. His versions of Homer (1598-1624), honoured alike by Jonson and by Keats, are the greatest verse translations of the time, and the real work of Chapman’s life. Their virtues are only partially Homer’s, but the general epic nobility and the majesty of single lines, which in length are the near equivalent of the hexameter, redeem the want of Homer’s limpidity and continuity and the translator’s imperfect knowledge of Greek. A vein of satiric ruggedness unites Jonson and Chapman with Marston and Hall, the professors of an artificial and disgusting invective; and the same strain spoils Marston’s plays, and obscures his genuine command of the language of feverish and bitter sentiment. With these writers satire and contempt of the world lie at the root both of their comedy and tragedy.

It is otherwise with most of the romantic dramatists, who may be provisionally grouped as follows. (a) Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood are writers-of-all-work, the former profuse of tracts and pamphlets, the latter of treatises Dekker and Heywood. and compilations. They are both unrhetorical and void of pose, and divide themselves between the artless comedy of bustling, lively, English humours and pathetic, unheroic tragedy. But Dekker has splendid and poetical dreams, in Old Fortunatus (1600) and The Honest Whore, both of luxury and of tenderness; while Heywood, as in his English Traveller and Woman killed with Kindness (acted 1603), excels in pictures of actual, chivalrous English gentlemen and their generosities. The fertility and volubility of these writers, and their modest carelessness of fame, account for many of their imperfections. With them may be named the large crowd of professional journeymen, who did not want for power, but wrote usually in partnership together, like Munday, Chettle and Drayton, or supplied, like William Rowley, underplots of rough, lively comedy or tragedy. (b) Amongst dramatists of primarily tragic and sombre temper, who in their best scenes recall the creator Middleton and Webster. of Angelo, Iago and Timon, must be named Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627), John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. Middleton has great but scattered force, and his verse has the grip and ring of the best period without a sign of the decadence. He is strong in high comedy, like The Old Law, that turns on some exquisite point of honour—“the moral sense of our ancestors”; in comedy that is merely graphic and vigorous; and in detached sketches of lowering wickedness and lust, like those in The Changeling and Women beware Women. He and Webster each created one unforgettable desperado, de Flores in The Changeling and Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi (whose “pity,” when it came, was “nothing akin to him”). In Webster’s other principal play, Vittoria Corombona, or the White Devil (produced about 1616), the title-character is not less magnificent in defiant crime than Goneril or Lady Macbeth. The style of Webster, for all his mechanical horrors, distils the essences of pity and terror, of wrath and scorn, and is profoundly poetical; and his point of view seems to be blank fatalism, without Shakespeare’s ever-arching rainbow of moral sympathy. Cyril Tourneur, in The Revenger’s Tragedy, is even more of a poet than Webster; he can find the phrase for half-insane wrath and nightmare brooding, but his chaos of impieties revolts the artistic judgment. These specialists, when all is said, are great men in their dark province, (c) The playwrights who may be broadly called romantic, of whom Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger are the chief, while they share in the same sombre vein, have a wider range and move more in the daylight. The three just named left a very large body of drama, tragic, comic and tragi-comic, in which their several shares can partly be discerned by metrical or other tests. Beaumont (d. 1616) is nearest the prime, with his vein of Cervantesque Beaumont and Fletcher. mockery and his pure, beautifully-broken and cadenced verse, which is seen in his contributions to Philaster and The Maid’s Tragedy. Fletcher (d. 1625) brings us closest to the actual gaieties and humours of Jacobean life; he has a profuse comic gift and the rare instinct for natural dialogue. His verse, with its flood of vehement and expansive rhetoric, heard at its best in plays like Bonduca, cannot cheat us into the illusion that it is truly dramatic; but it overflows with beauty, like his silvery but monotonous versification with its endecasyllabics arrested at the end. In Fletcher the decadence of form and feeling palpably begins. His personages often face about at critical instants and bely their natures by sudden revulsions. Wanton and cheap characters invite not only dramatic but personal sympathy, as though the author knew no better. There is too much fine writing about a chastity which is complacent rather than instinctive, and satisfied with its formal resistances and technical escapes; so that we are far from Shakespeare’s heroines. These faults are present also in Philip Massinger. Massinger (d. 1640), who offers in substantial recompense, not like Beaumont and Fletcher treasures of incessant vivacious episode and poetry and lyric interlude, but an often splendid and usually solid constructive skill, and a steady eloquence which is like a high table-land without summits. A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1632) is the most enduring popular comedy of the time outside Shakespeare’s, and one of the best. Massinger’s interweaving of impersonal or political conceptions, as in The Bondman and The Roman Actor, is often a triumph of arrangement; and though he wrote in the reign of Charles, he is saved by many noble qualities from being merely an artist of the decline, (d) A mass of plays, of which the authorship is unknown, uncertain or attached to a mere name, The Many. baffle classification. There are domestic tragedies, such as Arden of Feversham; scions of the vindictive drama, like The Second Maiden’s Tragedy; historic or half-historic tragedies like Nero. There are chronicle histories, of which the last and one of the best is Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, and melodramas of adventure such as Thomas Heywood poured forth. There are realistic citizen comedies akin to The Merry Wives, like Porter’s refreshing Two Angry Women of Abingdon; there are Jonsonian comedies, vernacular farces, light intrigue-pieces like Field’s and many more. Few of these, regarded as wholes, come near to perfection; few fail of some sally or scene that proves once more the unmatched diffusion of the dramatic or poetic instinct. (e) Outside the regular drama there are many varieties: academic plays, like The Return from Parnassus and Lingua, which are still mirthful; many pastoral plays or entertainments in the Italian style, like The Faithful Shepherdess; versified character-sketches, of which Day’s Parliament of Bees, with its Theocritean grace and point, is the happiest; many masques and shows, often lyrically and scenically lovely, of which kind Jonson is the master, and Milton, in his Comus, the transfigurer; Senecan dramas made only to be read, like Daniel’s and Fulke Greville’s; and Latin comedies, like Ignoramus. All these species are only now being fully grouped, sifted and edited by scholars, but a number of the six or seven hundred dramas of the time remain unreprinted.

There remain two writers, John Ford and James Shirley, who kept the higher tradition alive till the Puritan ordinance crushed the theatre in 1642. Ford is another specialist, of grave, sinister and concentrated power (reflected Ford and Shirley. in his verse and diction), to whom no topic, the incest of Annabella in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, or the high crazed heroism of Calantha in The Broken Heart, is beyond the pale, if only he can dominate it; as indeed he does, without complicity, standing above his subject. Shirley, a fertile writer, has the general characteristic gifts, in a somewhat dilute but noble form, of the more romantic playwrights, and claims honour as the last of them.

Prose from 1579 to 1660.—With all the unevenness of poetry, the sense of style, of a standard, is everywhere; felicity is never far off. Prose also is full of genius, but it is more disfigured than verse by aberration and wasted power. A central, classic, durable, adaptive prose had been attained by Machiavelli, and by Amyot and Calvin, before 1550. In England it was only to become distinct after 1660. Vocabulary, sentence-structure, paragraph, idiom and rhythm were in a state of unchartered freedom, and the history of their crystallization is not yet written. But in more than compensation there is a company of prose masters, from Florio and Hooker to Milton and Clarendon, not one of whom clearly or fully anticipates the modern style, and who claim all the closer study that their special virtues have been for ever lost. They seem farther away from us than the poets around them. The verse of Shakespeare is near to us, for its tradition has persisted; his prose, the most natural and noble of his age, is far away, for its tradition has not persisted. One reason of this difference is that English prose tried to do more work than that of France and Italy; it tried the work of poetry; and it often did that better than it did the normal work of prose. This overflow of the imaginative spirit gave power and elasticity to prose, but made its task of finding equilibrium the harder. Moreover, prose in England was for long a natural growth, never much affected by critical or academic canons as in France; and when it did submit to canons, the result was often merely manner. The tendons and sinews of the language, still in its adolescent power and bewilderment, were long unset; that is, the parts of speech—noun and verb, epithet and adverb—were in freer interchange than at any period afterwards. The build, length and cadence of a complex sentence were habitually elaborate; and yet they were disorganized, so that only the ear of a master could regulate them. The law of taste and measure, perhaps through some national disability, was long unperceived. Prose, in fact, could never be sure of doing the day’s work in the right fashion. The cross-currents of pedantry in the midst of simplicity, the distrust of clear plain brevity, which was apt to be affected when it came, the mimicries of foreign fashions, and the quaintness and cumbrousness of so much average writing, make it easier to classify Renaissance prose by its interests than by its styles.

The Elizabethan novel was always unhappily mannered, and is therefore dead. It fed the drama, which devoured it. The tales of Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, Margaret of The novel. Navarre, and others were purveyed, as remarked above, in the forgotten treasuries of Painter, Pettie, Fenton and Whetstone, and many of these works or their originals filled a shelf in the playwrights’ libraries. The first of famous English novels, Lyly’s Euphues (1578), and its sequel Euphues and his England, are documents of form. Lyly and euphuism. They are commended by a certain dapper shrewdness of observation and an almost witty priggery, not by any real beauty or deep feeling. Euphuism, of which Lyly was only the patentee, not the inventor, strikes partly back to the Spaniard Guevara, and was a model for some years to many followers like Lodge and Greene. It did not merely provide Falstaff with a pattern for mock-moral diction and vegetable similes. It genuinely helped to organize the English sentence, complex or co-ordinate, and the talk of Portia and Rosalind shows what could be made of it. By the arch-euphuists, clauses and clusters of clauses were paired for parallel or contrast, with the beat of emphatic alliteration on the corresponding parts of speech in each constituent clause. This was a useful discipline for prose in its period of groping. Sidney’s incomposite and unfinished Arcadia, written 1580-1581, despite its painful forced antitheses, is sprinkled with lovely rhythms, with pleasing formal landscapes, and even with impassioned sentiment and situation, through which the writer’s eager and fretted spirit shines. Both these stories, like those of Greene and Lodge, show by their somewhat affected, edited delineation of life and their courtly tone that they were meant in chief for the eyes of ladies, who were excluded alike from the stage and from its audience. Nashe’s drastic and photographic tale of masculine life, Jack Wilton, or The Unfortunate Traveller, stands almost alone, but some of the gap is filled by the contemporary pamphlets, sometimes vivid, often full of fierce or maudlin declamation, of Nashe himself—by far the most powerful of the group—and of Greene, Dekker and Nicholas Breton. Thus the English novel was a minor passing form; the leisurely and amorous romance went on in the next century, owing largely to French influence and example.

In criticism, England may almost be counted with the minor Latin countries. Sidney, in his Defence of Poesy (1595, written about 1580), and Jonson, in his Discoveries, offer a well-inspired and lofty restatement of the current Criticism. answers to the current questions, but could give no account of the actual creative writing of the time. To defend the “truth” of poetry—which was identified with all inventive writing and not only with verse—poetry was saddled with the work of science and instruction. To defend its character it was treated as a delightful but deliberate bait to good behaviour, a theory at best only true of allegory and didactic verse. The real relation of tragedy to spiritual things, which is admittedly shown, however hard its definition, in Shakespeare’s plays, no critic for centuries tried to fathom. One of the chief quarrels turned on metric. A few lines that Sidney and Campion wrote on what they thought the system of Latin quantity are really musical. This theory, already raised by Ascham, made a stir, at first in the group of Harvey, Sidney, Dyer and Spenser, called the “Areopagus,” an informal attempt to copy the Italian academies; and it was revived on the brink of the reign of James. But Daniel’s firm and eloquent Defence of Rhyming (1602) was not needed to persuade the poets to continue rhyming in syllabic verse. The stricter view of the nature and classification of poetry, and of the dramatic unity of action, is concisely given, partly by Jonson, partly by Bacon in his Advancement of Learning and De Augmentis; and Jonson, besides passing his famed judgments on Shakespeare and Bacon, enriched our critical vocabulary from the Roman rhetoricians. Scholastic and sensible manuals, like Webbe’s Discourse of Poetry and the Art of English Poesy (1589) ascribed to Puttenham, come in the rear.

The translators count for more than the critics; the line of their great achievements from Berners’ Froissart (1523-1525) to Urquhart’s Rabelais (1653) is never broken long; and though their lives are often obscure, their number Translators. witnesses to that far-spread diffusion of the talent for English prose, which the wealth of English poetry is apt to hide. The typical craftsman in this field, Philemon Holland, translated Livy, Pliny, Suetonius, Plutarch’s Morals and Camden’s Britannia, and his fount of English is of the amplest and purest. North, in his translation, made from Amyot’s classic French, of Plutarch’s Lives (1579), disclosed one of the master-works of old example; Florio, in Montaigne’s Essays (1603), the charter of the new freedom of mental exploration; and Shelton, in Don Quixote (1612), the chief tragi-comic creation of continental prose. These versions, if by no means accurate in the letter, were adequate in point of soul and style to their great originals; and the English dress of Tacitus (1591), Apuleius, Heliodorus, Commines, Celestina and many others, is so good and often so sumptuous a fabric, that no single class of prose authors, from the time of More to that of Dryden, excels the prose translators, unless it be the Anglican preachers. Their matter is given to them, and with it a certain standard of form, so that their natural strength and richness of phrase are controlled without being deadened. But the want of such control is seen in the many pamphleteers, who are the journalists of the time, and are often also playwrights or tale-tellers, divines or politicians. The writings, for instance, of the hectic, satiric and graphic Thomas Nashe, run at one extreme into fiction, and at the other into the virulent rag-sheets of the Marprelate controversy, which is of historical and social but not of artistic note, being only a fragment of that vast mass of disputatious literature, which now seems grotesque, excitable or dull.

Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594-1597), an accepted defence of the Anglican position against Geneva and Rome, is the first theological work of note in the English tongue, and the first of note since Wycliffe Hooker. written by an Englishman. It is a plea for reason as one of the safe and lawful guides to the faith; but it also speaks with admirable temper and large feeling to the ceremonial and aesthetic sense. The First Book, the scaffolding of the treatise, discusses the nature of law at large; but Hooker hardly has pure speculative power, and the language had not yet learnt to move easily in abstract trains of thought. In its elaboration of clause and period, in its delicate resonant eloquence, Hooker’s style is Ciceronian; but his inversions and mazes of subordinate sentence somewhat rack the genius of English. Later divines like Jeremy Taylor had to disintegrate, since they could not wield, this admirable but over-complex eloquence. The sermons (1621-1631) of Donne have the mingled strangeness and intimacy of his verse, and their subtle flame, imaginative tenacity, and hold upon the springs of awe make them unique. Though without artificial symmetry, their sentences are intricately harmonized, in strong contrast to such pellet-like clauses as those of the learned Lancelot Andrewes, who was Donne’s younger contemporary and the subject of Milton’s Latin epitaph.

With Francis Bacon (1561-1626) English philosophy began its unbroken course and took its long-delayed rank in Europe. His prose, of which he is the first high and various master in English, was shaped and coloured by his Bacon. bent as orator and pleader, by his immixture in affairs, by his speculative brain, and by his use and estimate of Latin. In his conscious craftsmanship, his intellectual confidence and curiosity, his divining faith in the future of science, and his resolve to follow the leadings of nature and experience unswervingly; in his habit of storing and using up his experience, and in his wide wordly insight, crystallized in maxim, he suggests a kind of Goethe, without the poetic hand or the capacity for love and lofty suffering. He saw all nature in a map, and wished to understand and control her by outwitting the “idols,” or inherent paralysing frailties of the human judgment. He planned but could not finish a great cycle of books in order to realize this conception. The De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) expanded from the English Advancement of Knowledge (1605) draws the map; the Novum Organum (1620) sets out the errors of scholasticism and the methods of inductive logic; the New Atlantis sketches an ideally equipped and moralized scientific community. Bacon shared with the great minds of his century the notion that Latin would outlast any vernacular tongue, and committed his chief scientific writings to a Latin which is alive and splendid and his own, and which also disciplined and ennobled his English. The Essays (1597, 1612, 1625) are his lifelong, gradually accumulated diary of his opinions on human life and business. These famous compositions are often sadly mechanical. They are chippings and basketings of maxims and quotations, and of anecdotes, often classical, put together inductively, or rather by “simple enumeration” of the pros and cons. Still they are the honest notes of a practical observer and statesman, disenchanted—why not?—with mankind, concerned with cause and effect rather than with right and wrong, wanting the finer faith and insight into men and women, but full of reality, touched with melancholy, and redeeming some arid, small and pretentious counsels by many that are large and wise. Though sometimes betraying the workshop, Bacon’s style, at its best, is infallibly expressive; like Milton’s angels, it is “dilated or condensed” according to its purposes. In youth and age alike, Bacon commanded the most opposite patterns and extremes of prose—the curt maxim, balanced in antithesis or triplet, or standing solitary; the sumptuous, satisfying and brocaded period; the movements of exposition, oratory, pleading and narrative. The History of Henry VII. (1622), written after his fall from office, is in form as well as insight and mastery of material the one historical classic in English before Clarendon. Bacon’s musical sense for the value and placing of splendid words and proper names resembles Marlowe’s. But the master of mid-Renaissance prose is Shakespeare; with him it becomes the voice of finer and more impassioned spirits than Bacon’s—the voice of Rosalind and Hamlet. And the eulogist of both men, Ben Jonson, must be named in their company for his senatorial weight and dignity of ethical counsel and critical maxim.

As the Stuart rule declined and fell, prose became enriched from five chief sources: from philosophy, whether formal or unmethodical; from theology and preaching and political dispute; from the poetical contemplation of death; from the observation of men and manners; and from antiquarian scholarship and history. As in France, where the first three of these kinds of writings flourished, it was a time rather of individual great writers than of any admitted pattern or common ideal of prose form, although in France this pattern was always clearlier defined. The mental energy, meditative depth, and throbbing brilliant colour of the English drama passed with its decay over into prose. But Latin was still often the supplanter: the treatise of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De Veritate, of note in the early history of Deism, and much of the writing of the ambidextrous Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes, are in Latin. In this way Latin disciplined English once more, though it often tempted men of genius away from English. The Leviathan (1651) with its companion books on Human Nature and Liberty, and Hobbes’ explosive dialogue on the civil wars, Behemoth (1679), have the bitter concision of Tacitus and the clearness of a half-relief in bronze. Hobbes’ speculations on the human animal, the social contract, the absolute power of the sovereign, and the subservience owed to the sovereign by the Church or “Kingdom of Darkness,” enraged all parties, and left their track on the thought and controversial literature of the century. With Ben Jonson and the jurist Selden (whose English can be judged from his Table Talk), Hobbes anticipates the brief and clear sentence-structure of the next age, though not its social ease and amenity of form. But his grandeur is not that of a poet, and the poetical Funereal prose. prose is the most distinctive kind of this period. It is eloquent above all on death and the vanity of human affairs; its solemn tenor prolongs the reflections of Claudio, of Fletcher’s Philaster, or of Spenser’s Despair. It is exemplified in Bacon’s Essay Of Death, in the anonymous descant on the same subject wrongly once ascribed to him, in Donne’s plea for suicide, in Raleigh’s History of the World, in Drummond’s Cypress Grove (1623), in Jeremy Taylor’s sermons and Holy Dying (1651), and in Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn-Burial (1658) and Letter to a Friend. Its usual vesture is a long purple period, freely Latinized, though Browne equally commands the form of solemn and monumental epigram. He is also free from the dejection that wraps round the other writers on the subject, and a holy quaintness and gusto relieve his ruminations. The Religio Medici (1642), quintessentially learned, wise and splendid, is the fullest memorial of his power. Amongst modern prose writers, De Quincey is his only true rival in musical sensibility to words.

Jeremy Taylor, the last great English casuist and schoolman, and one of the first pleaders for religious tolerance (in his Liberty of Prophesying, 1647), is above all a preacher; tender, intricate, copious, inexhaustible in image and Jeremy Taylor. picturesque quotation. From the classics, from the East, from the animal world, from the life of men and children, his illustrations flow, without end or measure. He is a master of the lingering cadence, which soars upward and onward on its coupled clauses, as on balanced iridescent wings, and is found long after in his scholar Ruskin. Imaginative force of another kind pervades Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy Burton. (1621), where the humorous medium refracts and colours every ray of the recluse’s far-travelled spirit. The mass of Latin citation, woven, not quilted, into Burton’s style, is another proof of the vitality of the cosmopolitan language. Burton and Browne owe much to the pre-critical learning of their time, which yields up such precious savours to their fancy, that we may be thankful for the delay of more precise science and scholarship. Fancy, too, of a suddener and wittier sort, preserves some of the ample labours of Thomas Fuller, which are scattered over the years 1631-1662; and the Lives and Compleat Angler (1653) of Izaak Walton are unspoilt, happy or pious pieces of idyllic prose. No adequate note on the secular or sacred learning of the time can here be given; on Camden, with his vast erudition, historical, antiquarian and comparatively critical (Britannia, in Latin, 1586); or on Ussher, with his patristic and chronological learning, one of the many savants of the Anglican church. Other divines of the same camp pleaded, in a plainer style than Taylor, for freedom of personal judgment and against the multiplying of “vitals in religion”; the chief were Chillingworth, one of the closest of English apologists, in his Religion of Protestants (1638), and John Hales of Eton. The Platonists, or rather Plotinists, of Cambridge, who form a curious digression in the history of modern philosophy, produced two writers, John Smith and Henry More, of an exalted and esoteric prose, more directly inspired by Greece than any other of the time; and their champion of erudition, Cudworth, in his True Intellectual System, gave some form to their doctrine.

Above the vast body of pamphlets and disputatious writing that form the historian’s material stands Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, printed in 1702-1704, thirty years after his death. Historical writing Clarendon. hitherto, but for Bacon’s Henry VII., had been tentative though profuse. Raleigh’s vast disquisition upon all things, The History of the World (1614), survives by passages and poetic splendours; gallantly written second-hand works like Knolles’s History of the Turks, and the rhetorical History of the Long Parliament by May, had failed to give England rank with France and Italy. Clarendon’s book, one of the greatest of memoirs and most vivid of portrait-galleries, spiritually unappreciative of the other side, but full of a subtle discrimination of character and political motive, brings its author into line with Retz and Saint-Simon, the watchers and recorders and sometimes the makers of contemporary history. Clarendon’s Life, above all the picture of Falkland and his friends, is a personal record of the delightful sort in which England was thus far infertile. He is the last old master of prose, using and sustaining the long, sinuous sentence, unworkable in weaker hands. He is the last, for Milton’s Milton’s prose. polemic prose, hurled from the opposite camp, was written between 1643 and 1660. Whether reviling bishops or royal privilege or indissoluble monogamy, or recalling his own youth and aims; or claiming liberty for print in Areopagitica (1644); in his demonic defiances, or angelic calls to arms, or his animal eruptions of spite and hatred, Milton leaves us with a sense of the motive energies that were to be transformed into Paradise Lost and Samson. His sentences are ungainly and often inharmonious, but often irresistible; he rigidly withstood the tendencies of form, in prose as in verse, that Dryden was to represent, and thus was true to his own literary dynasty.

A special outlying position belongs to the Authorized Version (1611) of the Bible, the late fruit of the long toil that had begun with Tyndale’s, and, on the side of style, with the Wycliffite translations. More scholarly than all the The Authorized Version. preceding versions which it utilized, it won its incomparable form, not so much because of the “grand style that was in the air,” which would have been the worst of models, as because the style had been already tested and ennobled by generations of translators. Its effect on poetry and letters was for some time far smaller than its effect on the national life at large, but it was the greatest translation—being of a whole literature, or rather of two literatures—in an age of great translations.

Some other kinds of writing soften the transition to Restoration prose. The vast catalogue of Characters numbers hundreds of titles. Deriving from Theophrastus, who was edited by Casaubon in 1592, they are yet another Renaissance form that England shared with France. But in English hands, failing a La Bruyère—in Hall’s, in Overbury’s, even in those of the gay and skilful Earle (Microcosmographie, 1628)—the Character is a mere list of the attributes and oddities of a type or calling. It is to the Jonsonian drama of humours what the Pensée, or detached remark, practised by Bishop Hall and later by Butler and Halifax, is to the Essay. These works tended long to be commonplace or didactic, as the popular Resolves of Owen Feltham shows. Cowley was the first essayist to come down from the desk and talk as to his equals in easy phrases of middle length. A time of dissension was not the best for this kind of peaceful, detached writing. The letters of James Howell, the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and the memoirs of Kenelm Digby belong rather to the older and more mannered than to the more modern form, though Howell’s English is in the plainer and quicker movement.

IV. Restoration Period

Literature from 1660 to 1700.—The Renaissance of letters in England entered on a fresh and peculiar phase in the third quarter of the century. The balance of intellectual and artistic power in Europe had completely shifted since 1580. Inspiration had died down in Italy, and its older classics were no longer a stimulus. The Spanish drama had flourished, but its influence though real was scattered and indirect. The Germanic countries were slowly emerging into literature; England they scarcely touched. But the literary empire of France began to declare itself both in Northern and Southern lands, and within half a century was assured. Under this empire the English genius partly fell, though it soon asserted its own equality, and by 1720 had so reacted upon France as more than to repay the debt. Thus between 1660 and 1700 is prepared a temporary dual control French influence. of European letters. But in the age of Dryden France gave England more than it received; it gave more than it had ever given since the age of Chaucer. During Charles II.’s days Racine, Molière, La Fontaine and Bossuet ran the best of their course. Cavalier exiles like Waller, Cowley and Hobbes had come back from the winter of their discontent in Paris, and Saint-Evremond, the typical bel esprit and critic, settled long in England. A vast body of translations from the French is recounted, including latterly the works of the Protestant refugees printed in the free Low Countries or in England. Naturally this influence told most strongly on the social forms of verse and prose—upon comedy and satire, upon criticism and maxim and epigram, while it also affected theology and thought. And this meant the Renaissance once more, still unexhausted, only working less immediately and in fresh if narrower channels. Greek literature, Plato and Homer and the dramatists, became dimmer; the secondary forms of Latin poetry came to the fore, especially those of Juvenal and the satirists, and the pedestris sermo, epistolary and critical, of Horace. These had some direct influence, as Dryden’s translation of them, accompanying his Virgil and Lucretius, may show. But they came commended by Boileau, their chief modernizer, and in their train was the fashion of gallant, epigrammatic and social verse. The tragedy of Corneille and Racine, developed originally from the Senecan drama, contended with the traditions of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and was reinforced by that of the correcter Jonson, in shaping the new theatre of England. The French codifiers, who were often also the distorters, of Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars poëtica, furnished a canonical body of criticism on the epic and the drama, to which Dryden is half a disciple and half a rebel. All this implied at once a loss of the larger and fuller inspirations of poetry, a decadence in its great and primary forms, epic, lyric and tragic, and a disposition, in default of such creative power, to turn and take stock of past production. In England, therefore, it is the age of secondary verse and of nascent, often searching criticism.

The same critical spirit was also whetted in the fields of science and speculation, which the war and the Puritan rule had not encouraged. The activities of the newly-founded Royal Society told directly upon literature, and Science and Letters. counted powerfully in the organization of a clear, uniform prose—the “close, naked, natural way of speaking,” which the historian of the Society, Sprat, cites as part of its programme. And the style of Sprat, as of scientific masters like Newton and Ray the botanist, itself attests the change. A time of profound and peaceful and fruitful scientific labour began; the whole of Newton’s Principia appeared in 1687; the dream of Bacon came nearer, and England was less isolated from the international work of knowledge. The spirit of method and observation and induction spread over the whole field of thought and was typified in John Locke, whose Essay concerning Human Understanding came out in English in 1690, and who applied the same deeply sagacious and cautious calculus to education and religion and the “conduct of the understanding.” But his works, though their often mellow and dignified style has been ignorantly underrated, also show the change in philosophic writing since Hobbes. The old grandeur and pugnacity are gone; the imaginative play of science, or quasi-science, on the literature of reflection is gone; the eccentrics, the fantasts, the dreamers are gone, or only survive in curious transitional writers like Joseph Glanvil (Scepsis scientifica, 1665) or Thomas Burnet (Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684). This change was in part a conscious and an angry change, as is clear from the attacks made in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663-1668) upon scholastic verbiage, astrology, fanatical sects and their disputes, poetic and “heroic” enthusiasm and intellectual whim.

Before the Restoration men of letters, with signal exceptions like Milton and Marvell, had been Cavalier, courtly and Anglican in their sympathies. The Civil War had scattered them away from the capital, which, despite Milton’s dream Courtly and social influence. in Areopagitica of its humming and surging energies, had ceased to be, what it now again became, the natural haunt and Rialto of authors. The taste of the new king and court served to rally them. Charles II. relished Hudibras, used and pensioned Dryden, sat under Barrow and South and heard them with appreciation, countenanced science, visited comedies, and held his own in talk by mother-wit. Letters became the pastime, and therefore one of the more serious pursuits, of men of quality, who soon excelled in song and light scarifying verse and comedy, and took their own tragedies and criticisms gravely. Poetry under such auspices became gallant and social, and also personal and partisan; and satire was soon its most vital form, with the accessories of compliment, rhymed popular argumentation and elegy. The social and conversational instinct was the master-influence in prose. It produced a subtle but fundamental change in the attitude of author to reader. Prose came nearer to living speech, it became more civil and natural and persuasive, and this not least in the pulpit. The sense of ennui, or boredom, which seemed as unknown in the earlier part of the century as it is to the modern German, became strongly developed, and prose was much improved by the fear of provoking it. In all these ways the Restoration accompanied and quickened a speedier and greater change in letters than any political event in English history since the reign of Alfred, when prose itself was created.

The formal change in prose can thus be assigned to no one writer, for the good reason that it presupposes a change of spoken style lying deeper than any personal influence. If we begin with the writing that is nearest living Prose and criticism. talk—the letters of Otway or Lady Rachel Russell, or the diary of Pepys (1659-1669)—that supreme disclosure of our mother-earth—or the evidence in a state trial, or the dialogue in the more natural comedies; if we then work upwards through some of the plainer kinds of authorship, like the less slangy of L’Estrange’s pamphlets, or Burnet’s History of My Own Time, a solid Whig memoir of historical value, until we reach really admirable or lasting prose like Dryden’s Preface to his Fables (1700), or the maxims of Halifax;—if we do this, we are aware, amid all varieties, survivals and reversions, of a strong and rapid drift towards the style that we call modern. And one sign of this movement is the revulsion against any over-saturating of the working, daily language, and even of the language of appeal and eloquence, with the Latin element. In Barrow and Glanvil, descendants of Taylor and Browne, many Latinized words remain, which were soon expelled from style like foreign bodies from an organism. As in the mid-sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth century, the process is visible by which the Latin vocabulary and Latin complication of sentence first gathers strength, and then, though not without leaving its traces, is forced to ebb. The instinct of the best writers secured this result, and secured it for good and all. In Dryden’s diction there is a nearly perfect balance and harmony of learned and native constituents, and a sensitive tact in Gallicizing; in his build of sentence there is the same balance between curtness or bareness and complexity or ungainly lengthiness. For ceremony and compliment he keeps a rolling period, for invective a short sharp stroke without the gloves. And he not only uses in general a sentence of moderate scale, inclining to brevity, but he finds out its harmonies; he is a seeming-careless but an absolute master of rhythm. In delusive ease he is unexcelled; and we only regret that he could not have written prose oftener instead of plays. We should thus, however, have lost their prefaces, in which the bulk and the best of Dryden’s criticisms appear. From the Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) down to the Preface to Fables (1700) runs a series of essays: On the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, On Heroic Plays, On Translated Verse, On Satire and many more; which form the first connected body of criticisms in the language, and are nobly written always. Dryden’s prose is literature as it stands, and yet is talk, and yet again is mysteriously better than talk. The critical writings of John Dennis are but a sincere application of the rules and canons that were now becoming conventional; Rymer, though not so despicable as Macaulay said, is still more depressing than Dennis; and for any critic at once so free, so generous and so sure as Dryden we wait in vain for a century.

Three or four names are usually associated with Dryden’s in the work of reforming or modifying prose: Sprat, Tillotson, Sir William Temple, and George Savile, marquis of Halifax; but the honours rest with Halifax. Sprat, Contributors to the new prose. though clear and easy, has little range; Tillotson, though lucid, orderly, and a very popular preacher, has little distinction; Temple, the elegant essayist, has a kind of barren gloss and fine literary manners, but very little to say. The political tracts, essays and maxims of Halifax (died 1695) are the most typically modern prose between Dryden and Swift, and are nearer than anything else to the best French writing of the same order, in their finality of epigram, their neatness and mannerliness and sharpness. The Character of a Trimmer and Advice to a Daughter are the best examples.

Religious literature, Anglican and Puritan, is the chief remaining department to be named. The strong, eloquent and coloured preaching of Isaac Barrow the mathematician, who died in 1677, is a survival of the larger and older Preachers. manner of the Church. In its balance of logic, learning and emotion, in its command alike of Latin splendour and native force, it deserves a recognition it has lost. Another athlete of the pulpit, Robert South, who is so often praised for his wit that his force is forgotten, continues the lineage, while Tillotson and the elder Sherlock show the tendency to the smoother and more level prose. But the revulsion against strangeness and fancy and magnificence went too far; it made for a temporary bareness and meanness and disharmony, which had to be checked by Addison, Bolingbroke and Berkeley. From what Addison saved our daily written English, may be seen in the vigorous slangy hackwork of Roger L’Estrange, the translator and pamphleteer, in the news-sheets of Dunton, and in the satires of Tom Brown. These writers were debasing the coinage with their street journalism.

Another and far nobler variety of vernacular prose is found in the Puritans. Baxter and Howe, Fox and Bunyan, had the English Bible behind them, which gave them the best of their inspiration, though the first two of them were Puritan prose. also erudite men. Richard Baxter, an immensely fertile writer, is best remembered by those of his own fold for his Saint’s Everlasting Rest (1650) and his autobiography, John Howe for his evangelical apologia The Living Temple of God (1675), Fox for his Journal and its mixture of quaintness and rapturous mysticism. John Bunyan, the least instructed of them all, is their only born artist. His creed and point Bunyan. of view were those of half the nation—the half that was usually inarticulate in literature, or spoke without style or genius. His reading, consisting not only of the Bible, but of the popular allegories of giants, pilgrims and adventure, was also that of his class. The Pilgrim’s Progress, of which the first part appeared in 1678, the second in 1684, is the happy flowering sport amidst a growth of barren plants of the same tribe. The Progress is a dream, more vivid to its author than most men’s waking memories to themselves; the emblem and the thing signified are merged at every point, so that Christian’s journey is not so much an allegory with a key as a spiritual vision of this earth and our neighbours. Grace Abounding, Bunyan’s diary of his own voyage to salvation, The Holy War, an overloaded fable of the fall and recovery of mankind, and The Life and Death of Mr Badman, a novel telling of the triumphal earthly progress of a scoundrelly tradesman, are among Bunyan’s other contributions to literature. His union of spiritual intensity, sharp humorous vision, and power of simple speech consummately chosen, mark his work off alike from his own inarticulate public and from all other literary performance of his time.

The transition from the older to the newer poetry was not abrupt. Old themes and tunes were slowly disused, others previously of lesser mark rose into favour, and a few quite fresh ones were introduced. The poems of John Transitional verse. Oldham and Andrew Marvell belong to both periods. Both of them begin with fantasy and elegy, and end with satires, which indeed are rather documents than works of art. The monody of Oldham on his friend Morwent is poorly exchanged for the Satires on the Jesuits (1681), and the lovely metaphysical verses of Marvell on gardens and orchards and the spiritual love sadly give place to his Last Instructions to a Painter (1669). In his Horatian Ode Marvell had nobly and impartially applied his earlier style to national affairs; but the time proved too strong for this delightful poet. Another and a Hudibras. stranger satire had soon greeted the Restoration, the Hudibras (1663-1678) of Samuel Butler, with its companion pieces. The returned wanderers delighted in this horribly agile, boisterous and fierce attack on the popular party and its religions, and its wrangles and its manners. Profoundly eccentric and tiresomely allusive in his form, and working in the short rhyming couplets thenceforth called “Hudibrastics,” Butler founded a small and peculiar but long-lived school of satire. The other verse of the time is largely satire of a different tone and metre; but the earlier kind of finished and gallant lyric persisted through the reign of Charles II. The songs of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, are usually malicious, sometimes Songsters. passionate; they have a music and a splendid self-abandonment such as we never meet again till Burns. Sedley and Dorset and Aphra Behn and Dryden are the rightful heirs of Carew and Lovelace, those infallible masters of short rhythms; and this secret also was lost for a century afterwards.

In poetry, in prose, and to some extent in drama, John Dryden, the creature of his time, is the master of its expression. He began with panegyric verse, first on Cromwell and then on Charles, which is full of fine things and false writing. Dryden. The Annus Mirabilis (1667) is the chief example, celebrating the Plague, the Fire and the naval victory, in the quatrains for which Davenant’s pompous Gondibert had shown the way. The Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668), a dialogue on the rivalries of blank verse with rhyme, and of the Elizabethan drama with the French, is perfect modern prose; and to this perfection Dryden attained at a bound, while he attained his poetical style more gradually. He practised his couplet in panegyric, in heroic tragedy, and in dramatic prologue and epilogue for twenty years before it was consummate. Till 1680 he supported himself chiefly by his plays, which have not lived so long as their critical prefaces, already mentioned. His diction and versification came to their full power in his satires, rhymed arguments, dedications and translations. Absalom and Achitophel (part i., 1681; part ii., with Nahum Tate, 1682), as well as The Medal and Mac Flecknoe, marked a new birth of English satire, placing it at once on a level with that of any ancient or modern country. The mixture of deadly good temper, Olympian unfairness, and rhetorical and metrical skill in each of these poems has never been repeated. The presentment of Achitophel, earl of Shaftesbury, in his relations with Absalom Walters and Charles the minstrel-king of Judah, as well as the portraits of Shimei and Barzillai and Jotham, the eminent Whigs and Tories, and of the poets Og and Doeg, are things whose vividness age has never discoloured. Dryden’s Protestant arguings in Religio Laici (1682) and his equally sincere Papistical arguings in The Hind and the Panther (1687) are just as skilful. His translations of Virgil and parts of Lucretius, of Chaucer and Boccaccio (Fables, 1700), set the seal on his command of his favourite couplet for the higher kinds of appeal and oratory. His Ode on Anne Killigrew, and his popular but coarser Alexander’s Feast, have a more lyric harmony; and his songs, inserted in his plays, reflect the change of fashion by their metrical adeptness and often thorough-going wantonness. The epithet of “glorious,” in its older sense of a certain conscious and warranted pride of place, not in that of boastful or pretentious, suits Dryden well. Not only did he leave a model and a point of departure for Pope, but his influence recurs in Churchill, in Gray, in Johnson and in Crabbe, where he is seen counteracting, with his large, wholesome and sincere bluntness, the acidity of Pope. Dryden was counted near Shakespeare and Milton until the romantic revival renewed the sense of proportion; but the same sense now demands his acknowledgment as the English poet who is nearest to their frontiers of all those who are exiled from their kingdom.

Restoration and Revolution tragedy is nearly all abortive; it is now hard to read it for pleasure. But it has noble flights, and its historic interest is high. Two of its species, the rhymed heroic play and the rehandling of Shakespeare Tragedy. in blank verse, were also brought to their utmost by Dryden, though in both he had many companions. The heroic tragedies were a hybrid offspring of the heroic romance and French tragedy; and though The Conquest of Granada (1669-1670) and Tyrannic Love would be very open to satire in Dryden’s own vein, they are at least generously absurd. Their intention is never ignoble, if often impossible. After a time Dryden went back to Shakespeare, after a fashion already set by Sir William Davenant, the connecting link with the older tragedy and the inaugurator of the new. They “revived” Shakespeare; they vamped him in a style that did not wholly perish till after the time of Garrick. The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra were thus handled by Dryden; and the last of these, as converted by him into All for Love (1678), is loftier and stronger than any of his original plays, its blank verse renewing the ties of Restoration poetry with the great age. The heroic plays, written in one or other metre, lived long, and expired in the burlesques of Fielding and Sheridan. The Rehearsal (1671), a gracious piece of fooling partially aimed at Dryden by Buckingham and his friends, did not suffice to kill its victims. Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee, both of whom generally used blank verse, are the other tragic writers of note, children indeed of the extreme old age of the drama. Otway’s Otway. long-acted Venice Preserved (1682) has an almost Shakespearian skill in melodrama, a wonderful tide of passionate language, and a blunt and bold delineation of character; but Otway’s inferior style and verse could only be admired in an age like his own. Lee is far more of a poet, though less of a dramatist, and he wasted a certain talent in noise and fury.

Restoration comedy at first followed Jonson, whom it was easy to try and imitate; Shadwell and Wilson, whose works are a museum for the social antiquary, photographed the humours of the town. Dryden’s many comedies Comedy. often show his more boisterous and blatant, rarely his finer qualities. Like all playwrights of the time he pillages from the French, and vulgarizes Molière without stint or shame. A truer light comedy began with Sir George Etherege, who mirrored in his fops the gaiety and insolence of the world he knew. The society depicted by William Wycherley, the one comic dramatist of power between Massinger and Congreve, at first Wycherley. seems hardly human; but his energy is skilful and faithful as well as brutal; he excels in the graphic reckless exhibition of outward humours and bustle; he scavenges in the most callous good spirits and with careful cynicism. The Plain Dealer (1677), a skilful transplantation, as well as a depravation of Molière’s Le Misanthrope, is his best piece: he writes in prose, and his prose is excellent, modern and lifelike.

Bibliography.—General Histories: Hallam, Introduction to the Lit. of Europe (1838-1839); G. Saintsbury, Elizabethan Literature (1890), and History of Literary Criticism, vol. ii. (1902); W.J. Courthorpe, History of English Poetry, vols. i.-v. (1895-1905); J.J. Jusserand, Histoire littéraire du peuple anglais, vol. ii. (1904); T. Seccombe and J.W. Allen, The Age of Shakespeare (2 vols., 1903); D. Hannay, The Later Renaissance (1898); H.J.C. Grierson, First Half of 17th Century; O. Elton, The Augustan Ages (1899); Masson, Life of Milton (6 vols., London, 1881-1894); R. Garnett, The Age of Dryden (1901); W. Raleigh, The English Novel (1894); J.J. Jusserand, Le Roman anglais au temps de Shakespeare (1887, Eng. tr., 1901); G. Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (2 vols., 1904, reprints and introd.). Classical and Foreign Influences.—Mary A. Scott, Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (bibliography), (Baltimore, 1895); E. Koeppel, Studien zur Gesch. der ital. Novelle i. d. eng. Litteratur des 16ten Jahrh. (Strasb., 1892); L. Einstein The Italian Renaissance in England (New York, 1902); J. Erskine, The Elizabethan Lyric (New York, 1903); J.S. Harrison, Platonism in Eliz. Poetry of the 16th and 17th Centuries (New York, 1903); S. Lee, Elizabethan Sonnets (2 vols., 1904); C.H. Herford, Literary Relations of England and Germany in 16th Century; J.G. Underhill, Spanish Lit. in the England of the Tudors (New York, 1899); J.E. Spingarn, Hist. of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York, 1899). Many articles in Englische Studien, Anglia, &c., on influences, texts and sources. See too arts. Drama; Sonnet; Renaissance.

(O. E.*)

V. The 18th Century

In the reign of Anne (1702-1714) the social changes which had commenced with the Restoration of 1660 began to make themselves definitely felt. Books began to penetrate among all classes of society. The period is consequently Social changes. one of differentiation and expansion. As the practice of reading becomes more and more universal, English writers lose much of their old idiosyncrasy, intensity and obscurity. As in politics and religion, so in letters, there is a great development of nationality. Commercial considerations too for the first time become important. We hear relatively far less of religious controversy, of the bickering between episcopalians and nonconformists and of university squabbles. Specialization and cumbrous pedantry fall into profound disfavour. Provincial feeling exercises a diminishing sway, and literature becomes increasingly metropolitan or suburban. With the multiplication of moulds, the refinement of prose polish, and the development of breadth, variety and ease, it was natural enough, having regard to the place that the country played in the world’s affairs, that English literature should make its début in western Europe. The strong national savour seemed to stimulate the foreign appetite, and as represented by Swift, Pope, Defoe, Young, Goldsmith, Richardson, Sterne and Ossian, if we exclude Byron and Scott, the 18th century may be deemed the cosmopolitan age, par excellence, of English Letters. The charms of 18th-century English literature, as it happens, are essentially of the rational, social and translatable kind: in intensity, exquisiteness and eccentricity of the choicer kinds it is proportionately deficient. It is pre-eminently an age of prose, and although verbal expression is seldom represented at its highest power, we shall find nearly every variety of English prose brilliantly illustrated during this period: the aristocratic style of Bolingbroke, Addison and Berkeley; the gentlemanly style of Fielding; the keen and logical controversy of Butler, Middleton, Smith and Bentham; the rhythmic and balanced if occasionally involved style of Johnson and his admirers; the limpid and flowing manner of Hume and Mackintosh; the light, easy and witty flow of Walpole; the divine chit-chat of Cowper; the colour of Gray and Berkeley; the organ roll of Burke; the detective journalism of Swift and Defoe; the sly familiarity of Sterne; the dance music and wax candles of Sheridan; the pomposity of Gibbon; the air and ripple of Goldsmith; the peeping preciosity of Boswell,—these and other characteristics can be illustrated in 18th-century prose as probably nowhere else.

But more important to the historian of literature even than the development of qualities is the evolution of types. And in this respect the 18th century is a veritable index-museum of English prose. Essentially, no doubt, it is true that in form the prose and verse of the 18th century is mainly an extension of Dryden, just as in content it is a reflection of the increased variety of the city life which came into existence as English trade rapidly increased in all directions. But the taste of the day was rapidly changing. People began to read in vastly increasing numbers. The folio was making place on the shelves for the octavo. The bookseller began to transcend the mere tradesman. Along with newspapers the advertizing of books came into fashion, and the market was regulated no longer by what learned men wanted to write, but what an increasing multitude wanted to read. The arrival of the octavo is said to have marked the enrolment of man as a reader, that of the novel the attachment of woman. Hence, among other causes, the rapid decay of lyrical verse and printed drama, of theology and epic, in ponderous tomes. The fashionable types of which the new century was to witness the fixation are accordingly the essay and the satire as represented respectively by Addison and Steele, Swift and Goldsmith, and by Pope and Churchill. Pope, soon to be followed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was the first Englishman who treated letter-writing as an art upon a considerable scale. Personalities and memoirs prepare the way for history, in which as a department of literature English letters hitherto had been almost scandalously deficient. Similarly the new growth of fancy essay (Addison) and plain biography (Defoe) prepared the way for the English novel, the most important by far of all new literary combinations. Finally, without going into unnecessary detail, we have a significant development of topography, journalism and criticism. In the course of time, too, we shall perceive how the pressure of town life and the logic of a capital city engender, first a fondness for landscape gardening and a somewhat artificial Arcadianism, and then, by degrees, an intensifying love of the country, of the open air, and of the rare, exotic and remote in literature.

At the outset of the new century the two chief architects of public opinion were undoubtedly John Locke and Joseph Addison. When he died at High Laver in October 1704 at the mature age of seventy-two, Locke had, Locke; Addison. perhaps, done more than any man of the previous century to prepare the way for the new era. Social duty and social responsibility were his two watchwords. The key to both he discerned in the Human Understanding—“no province of knowledge can be regarded as independent of reason.” But the great modernist of the time was undoubtedly Joseph Addison (1672-1719). He first left the 17th century, with its stiff euphuisms, its formal obsequiousness, its ponderous scholasticism and its metaphorical antitheses, definitely behind. He did for English culture what Rambouillet did for that of France, and it is hardly an exaggeration to call the half-century before the great fame of the English novel, the half century of the Spectator.

Addison’s mind was fertilized by intercourse with the greater and more original genius of Swift and with the more inventive and more genial mind of Steele. It was Richard Steele (1672-1729) in the Tatler of 1709-1710 who Steele. first realized that the specific which that urbane age both needed and desired was no longer copious preaching and rigorous declamation, but homoeopathic doses of good sense, good taste and good-humoured morality, disguised beneath an easy and fashionable style. Nothing could have suited Addison better than the opportunity afforded him of contributing an occasional essay or roundabout paper in praise of virtue or dispraise of stupidity and bad form to his friend’s periodical. When the Spectator succeeded the Tatler in March 1711, Addison took a more active share in shaping the chief characters (with the immortal baronet, Sir Roger, at their head) who were to make up the “Spectator Club”; and, better even than before, he saw his way, perhaps, to reinforcing his copious friend with his own more frugal but more refined endowment. Such a privileged talent came into play at precisely the right moment to circulate through the coffee houses and to convey a large measure of French courtly ease and elegance into the more humdrum texture of English prose. Steele became rather disreputable in his later years, Swift was banished and went mad, but Addison became a personage of the utmost consideration, and the essay as he left it became an almost indispensable accomplishment to the complete gentlemen of that age. As an architect of opinion from 1717 to 1775 Addison may well rank with Locke.

The other side, both in life and politics, was taken by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), who preferred to represent man on his unsocial side. He sneered at most things, but not at his own order, and he came to defend the church and the country Swift. squirearchy against the conventicle and Capel court. To undermine the complacent entrenchments of the Whig capitalists at war with France no sap proved so effectual as his pen. Literary influence was then exercised in politics mainly by pamphlets, and Swift was the greatest of pamphleteers. In the Journal to Stella he has left us a most wonderful portrait of himself in turn currying favour, spoiled, petted and humiliated by the party leaders of the Tories from 1710-1713. He had always been savage, and when the Hanoverians came in and he was treated as a suspect, his hate widened to embrace all mankind (Gulliver’s Travels, 1726) and he bit like a mad dog. Would that he could have bitten more, for the infection of English stylists! In wit, logic, energy, pith, resourcefulness and Saxon simplicity, his prose has never been equalled. The choicest English then, it is Arbuthnot. the choicest English still. Dr John Arbuthnot (1667-1735) may be described as an understudy of Swift on the whimsical side only, whose malignity, in a nature otherwise most kindly, was circumscribed strictly by the limits of political persiflage. Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), unorthodox as he was in every respect, discovered a little of Swift’s choice pessimism in his assault (in The Fable of the Bees of 1723) against the genteel optimism of the Characteristics of Lord Shaftesbury. Neither the matter nor the manner of the brilliant Bolingbroke. Tory chieftain Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), appears to us now as being of the highest significance; but, although Bolingbroke’s ideas were second-hand, his work has an historical importance; his dignified, balanced and decorated style was the cynosure of 18th-century statesmen. His essays on “History” and on “a Patriot King” both disturb a soil well prepared, and set up a reaction against such evil tendencies as a narrowing conception of history and a primarily factious and partisan conception of politics. It may be noted here how the fall of Bolingbroke and the Tories in 1714 precipitated the decay of the Renaissance ideal of literary patronage. The dependence of the press upon the House of Lords was already an anomaly, and the practical toleration achieved in 1695 removed another obstacle from the path of liberation. The government no longer sought to strangle the press. It could generally be tuned satisfactorily and at the worst could always be temporarily muzzled. The pensions hitherto devoted to men of genius were diverted under Walpole to spies and journalists. Yet one of the most unscrupulous of all the fabricators of intelligence, looked down upon as a huckster of the meanest and most inconsiderable literary wares, established his fame by a masterpiece of which literary genius had scarcely even cognizance.

The new trade of writing was represented most perfectly by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), who represents, too, what few writers possess, a competent knowledge of work and wages, buying and selling, the squalor and roguery of the Defoe. very hungry and the very mean. From reporting sensations and chronicling faits divers, Defoe worked his way almost insensibly to the Spanish tale of the old Mendoza or picaresque pattern. Robinson Crusoe was a true story expanded on these lines, and written down under stress of circumstance when its author was just upon sixty. Resembling that of Bunyan and, later, Smollett in the skilful use made of places, facts and figures, Defoe’s style is the mirror of man in his shirt sleeves. What he excelled in was plain, straightforward story-telling, in understanding and appraising the curiosity of the man in the street, and in possessing just the knowledge and just the patience, and just the literary stroke that would enable him most effectually to satisfy it. He was the first and cleverest of all descriptive reporters, for he knew better than any successor how and where to throw in those irrelevant details, tricks of speech and circumlocution, which tend to give an air of verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative—the funny little splutterings and naïvetés as of a plain man who is not telling a tale for effect, but striving after his own manner to give the plain unvarnished truth. Defoe contributes story, Addison character, Fielding the life-atmosphere, Richardson and Sterne the sentiment, and we have the 18th-century novel complete—the greatest literary birth of modern time. Addison, Steele, Swift and Defoe, as master-builders of prose fiction, are consequently of more importance than the “Augustan poets,” as Pope and his school are sometimes called, for the most that they can be said to have done is to have perfected a more or less transient mode of poetry.