English Literature
all who had been connected with Cromwell's iron government. Once more a
wretched formalism--that perpetual danger to the English Church--came to
the front and exercised authority over the free churches. The House of
Lords was largely increased by the creation of hereditary titles and
estates for ignoble men and shameless women who had flattered the king's
vanity. Even the Bench, that last strong refuge of English justice, was
corrupted by the appointment of judges, like the brutal Jeffreys, whose
aim, like that of their royal master, was to get money and to exercise
power without personal responsibility. Amid all this dishonor the foreign
influence and authority of Cromwell's strong government vanished like
smoke. The valiant little Dutch navy swept the English fleet from the sea,
and only the thunder of Dutch guns in the Thames, under the very windows of
London, awoke the nation to the realization of how low it had fallen.
Two considerations must modify our judgment of this disheartening
spectacle. First, the king and his court are not England. Though our
histories are largely filled with the records of kings and soldiers, of
intrigues and fighting, these no more express the real life of a people
than fever and delirium express a normal manhood. Though king and court and
high society arouse our disgust or pity, records are not wanting to show
that private life in England remained honest and pure even in the worst
days of the Restoration. While London society might be entertained by the
degenerate poetry of Rochester and the dramas of Dryden and Wycherley,
English scholars hailed Milton with delight; and the common people followed
Bunyan and Baxter with their tremendous appeal to righteousness and
liberty. Second, the king, with all his pretensions to divine right,
remained only a figurehead; and the Anglo-Saxon people, when they tire of
one figurehead, have always the will and the power to throw it overboard
and choose a better one. The country was divided into two political
parties: the Whigs, who sought to limit the royal power in the interests of
Parliament and the people; and the Tories, who strove to check the growing
power of the people in the interests of their hereditary rulers. Both
parties, however, were largely devoted to the Anglican Church; and when
James II, after four years of misrule, attempted to establish a national
Catholicism by intrigues which aroused the protest of the Pope[171] as well
as of Parliament, then Whigs and Tories, Catholics and Protestants, united
in England's last great revolution.
The complete and bloodless Revolution of 1688, which called William of
Orange to the throne, was simply the indication of England's restored
health and sanity. It proclaimed that she had not long forgotten, and could
never again forget, the lesson taught her by Puritanism in its hundred
years of struggle and sacrifice. Modern England was firmly established by
the Revolution, which was brought about by the excesses of the Restoration.
LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS. In the literature of the Restoration we note a
sudden breaking away from old standards, just as society broke away from
the restraints of Puritanism. Many of the literary men had been driven out
of England with Charles and his court, or else had followed their patrons
into exile in the days of the Commonwealth. On their return they renounced
old ideals and demanded that English poetry and drama should follow the
style to which they had become accustomed in the gayety of Paris. We read
with astonishment in Pepys's _Diary_ (1660-1669) that he has been to see a
play called _Midsummer Night's Dream_, but that he will never go again to
hear Shakespeare, "for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I
saw in my life." And again we read in the diary of Evelyn,--another writer
who reflects with wonderful accuracy the life and spirit of the
Restoration,--"I saw _Hamlet_ played; but now the old plays begin to
disgust this refined age, since his Majesty's being so long abroad." Since
Shakespeare and the Elizabethans were no longer interesting, literary men
began to imitate the French writers, with whose works they had just grown
familiar; and here begins the so-called period of French influence, which
shows itself in English literature for the next century, instead of the
Italian influence which had been dominant since Spenser and the
Elizabethans.
One has only to consider for a moment the French writers of this period,
Pascal, Bossuet, Fénelon, Malherbe, Corneille, Racine, Molière,--all that
brilliant company which makes the reign of Louis XIV the Elizabethan Age of
French literature,--to see how far astray the early writers of the
Restoration went in their wretched imitation. When a man takes another for
his model, he should copy virtues not vices; but unfortunately many English
writers reversed the rule, copying the vices of French comedy without any
of its wit or delicacy or abundant ideas. The poems of Rochester, the plays
of Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, all popular in
their day, are mostly unreadable. Milton's "sons of Belial, flown with
insolence and wine," is a good expression of the vile character of the
court writers and of the London theaters for thirty years following the
Restoration. Such work can never satisfy a people, and when Jeremy
Collier,[172] in 1698, published a vigorous attack upon the evil plays and
the playwrights of the day, all London, tired of the coarseness and
excesses of the Restoration, joined the literary revolution, and the
corrupt drama was driven from the stage.
With the final rejection of the Restoration drama we reach a crisis in the
history of our literature. The old Elizabethan spirit, with its patriotism,
its creative vigor, its love of romance, and the Puritan spirit with its
moral earnestness and individualism, were both things of the past; and at
first there was nothing to take their places. Dryden, the greatest writer
of the age, voiced a general complaint when he said that in his prose and
poetry he was "drawing the outlines" of a new art, but had no teacher to
instruct him. But literature is a progressive art, and soon the writers of
the age developed two marked tendencies of their own,--the tendency to
realism, and the tendency to that preciseness and elegance of expression
which marks our literature for the next hundred years.
In realism--that is, the representation of men exactly as they are, the
expression of the plain, unvarnished truth without regard to ideals or
romance--the tendency was at first thoroughly bad. The early Restoration
writers sought to paint realistic pictures of a corrupt court and society,
and, as we have suggested, they emphasized vices rather than virtues, and
gave us coarse, low plays without interest or moral significance. Like
Hobbes, they saw only the externals of man, his body and appetites, not his
soul and its ideals; and so, like most realists, they resemble a man lost
in the woods, who wanders aimlessly around in circles, seeing the confusing
trees but never the whole forest, and who seldom thinks of climbing the
nearest high hill to get his bearings. Later, however, this tendency to
realism became more wholesome. While it neglected romantic poetry, in which
youth is eternally interested, it led to a keener study of the practical
motives which govern human action.
The second tendency of the age was toward directness and simplicity of
expression, and to this excellent tendency our literature is greatly
indebted. In both the Elizabethan and the Puritan ages the general tendency
of writers was towards extravagance of thought and language. Sentences were
often involved, and loaded with Latin quotations and classical allusions.
The Restoration writers opposed this vigorously. From France they brought
back the tendency to regard established rules for writing, to emphasize
close reasoning rather than romantic fancy, and to use short, clean-cut
sentences without an unnecessary word. We see this French influence in the
Royal Society,[173] which had for one of its objects the reform of English
prose by getting rid of its "swellings of style," and which bound all its
members to use "a close, naked, natural way of speaking ... as near to
mathematical plainness as they can." Dryden accepted this excellent rule
for his prose, and adopted the heroic couplet, as the next best thing, for
the greater part of his poetry. As he tells us himself:
And this unpolished rugged verse I chose
As fittest for discourse, and nearest prose.
It is largely due to him that writers developed that formalism of style,
that precise, almost mathematical elegance, miscalled classicism, which
ruled English literature for the next century.[174]
Another thing which the reader will note with interest in Restoration
literature is the adoption of the heroic couplet; that is, two iambic
pentameter lines which rime together, as the most suitable form of poetry.
Waller,[175] who began to use it in 1623, is generally regarded as the
father of the couplet, for he is the first poet to use it consistently in
the bulk of his poetry. Chaucer had used the rimed couplet wonderfully well
in his _Canterbury Tales_, but in Chaucer it is the poetical thought more
than the expression which delights us. With the Restoration writers, form
counts for everything. Waller and Dryden made the couplet the prevailing
literary fashion, and in their hands the couplet becomes "closed"; that is,
each pair of lines must contain a complete thought, stated as precisely as
possible. Thus Waller writes:
The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.[176]
That is a kind of aphorism such as Pope made in large quantities in the
following age. It contains a thought, is catchy, quotable, easy to
remember; and the Restoration writers delighted in it. Soon this mechanical
closed couplet, in which the second line was often made first,[177] almost
excluded all other forms of poetry. It was dominant in England for a full
century, and we have grown familiar with it, and somewhat weary of its
monotony, in such famous poems as Pope's "Essay on Man" and Goldsmith's
"Deserted Village." These, however, are essays rather than poems. That even
the couplet is capable of melody and variety is shown in Chaucer's _Tales_
and in Keats's exquisite _Endymion_.
These four things, the tendency to vulgar realism in the drama, a general
formalism which came from following set rules, the development of a simpler
and more direct prose style, and the prevalence of the heroic couplet in
poetry are the main characteristics of Restoration literature. They are all
exemplified in the work of one man, John Dryden.
JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700)
Dryden is the greatest literary figure of the Restoration, and in his work
we have an excellent reflection of both the good and the evil tendencies of
the age in which he lived. If we can think for a moment of literature as a
canal of water, we may appreciate the figure that Dryden is the "lock by
which the waters of English poetry were let down from the mountains of
Shakespeare and Milton to the plain of Pope"; that is, he stands between
two very different ages, and serves as a transition from one to the other.
LIFE. Dryden's life contains so many conflicting elements of greatness and
littleness that the biographer is continually taken away from the facts,
which are his chief concern, to judge motives, which are manifestly outside
his knowledge and business. Judged by his own opinion of himself, as
expressed in the numerous prefaces to his works, Dryden was the soul of
candor, writing with no other master than literature, and with no other
object than to advance the welfare of his age and nation. Judged by his