From Chaucer to Tennyson
Greatest English Poets_, and Pope's _Essay on Criticism_, 1711, which
was nothing more than versified maxims of rhetoric, put with Pope's
usual point and brilliancy. The classicism of the 18th century, it has
been said, was a classicism in red heels and a periwig. It was Latin
rather than Greek; it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin
literature and found its models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius,
but in the satires, epistles, and didactic pieces of Juvenal, Horace,
and Persius.
The chosen medium of the new poetry was the heroic couplet. This had, of
course, been used before by English poets as far back as Chaucer. The
greater part of the _Canterbury Tales_ was written in heroic couplets.
But now a new strength and precision were given to the familiar measure
by imprisoning the sense within the limit of the couplet, and by
treating each line as also a unit in itself. Edmund Waller had written
verse of this kind as early as the reign of Charles I. He, said Dryden,
"first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which,
in the verse of those before him, runs on for so many lines together
that the reader is out of breath to overtake it." Sir John Denham, also,
in his _Cooper's Hill_, 1643, had written such verse as this:
O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example as it is my theme!
Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.
Here we have the regular flow, and the nice balance between the first
and second member of each couplet, and the first and second part of each
line, which characterized the verse of Dryden and Pope.
Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long resounding march and energy divine.
Thus wrote Pope, using for the nonce the triplet and alexandrine by
which Dryden frequently varied the couplet. Pope himself added a greater
neatness and polish to Dryden's verse and brought the system to such
monotonous perfection that he "made poetry a mere mechanic art."
The lyrical poetry of this generation was almost entirely worthless. The
dissolute wits of Charles the Second's court, Sedley, Rochester,
Sackville, and the "mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease," threw off a
few amatory trifles; but the age was not spontaneous or sincere enough
for genuine song. Cowley introduced the Pindaric ode, a highly
artificial form of the lyric, in which the language was tortured into a
kind of spurious grandeur, and the meter teased into a sound and fury,
signifying nothing. Cowley's Pindarics were filled with something which
passed for fire, but has now utterly gone out. Nevertheless, the fashion
spread, and "he who could do nothing else," said Dr. Johnson, "could
write like Pindar." The best of these odes was Dryden's famous
_Alexander's Feast_, written for a celebration of St. Cecilia's day by a
musical club. To this same fashion, also, we owe Gray's two fine odes,
the _Progress of Poesy_ and the _Bard_. written a half-century later.
Dryden was not so much a great poet as a solid thinker, with a splendid
mastery of expression, who used his energetic verse as a vehicle for
political argument and satire. His first noteworthy poem, _Annus
Mirabilis_, 1667, was a narrative of the public events of the year 1666;
namely, the Dutch war and the great fire of London. The subject of
_Absalom and Ahitophel_--the first part of which appeared in 1681--was
the alleged plot of the Whig leader, the Earl of Shaftesbury, to defeat
the succession of the Duke of York, afterward James II., by securing the
throne to Monmouth, a natural son of Charles II. The parallel afforded
by the story of Absalom's revolt against David was wrought out by Dryden
with admirable ingenuity and keeping. He was at his best in satirical
character-sketches, such as the brilliant portraits in this poem of
Shaftesbury, as the false counselor Ahitophel, and of the Duke of
Buckingham as Zimri. The latter was Dryden's reply to the _Rehearsal..
Absalom and Ahitophel_ was followed by the _Medal_, a continuation of
the same subject, and _Mac Flecknoe_, a personal onslaught on the "true
blue Protestant poet" Thomas Shadwell, a political and literary foe of
Dryden. Flecknoe, an obscure Irish poetaster, being about to retire from
the throne of duncedom, resolved to settle the succession upon his son,
Shadwell, whose claims to the inheritance are vigorously asserted.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense....
The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull
With this prophetic blessing--_Be thou dull_.
Dryden is our first great satirist. The formal satire had been written
in the reign of Elizabeth by Donne, and by Joseph Hall, Bishop of
Exeter, and subsequently by Marston, the dramatist, by Wither, Marvell,
and others; but all of these failed through an over violence of
language, and a purpose too pronouncedly moral. They had no lightness of
touch, no irony and mischief. They bore down too hard, imitated Juvenal,
and lashed English society in terms befitting the corruption of imperial
Rome. They denounced, instructed, preached, did every thing but
satirize. The satirist must raise a laugh. Donne and Hall abused men in
classes; priests were worldly, lawyers greedy, courtiers obsequious,
etc. But the easy scorn of Dryden and the delightful malice of Pope gave
a pungent personal interest to their sarcasm, infinitely more effective
than these commonplaces of satire. Dryden was as happy in controversy as
in satire, and is unexcelled in the power to reason in verse. His
_Religo Laici_, 1682, was a poem in defense of the English Church. But
when James II came to the throne Dryden turned Catholic and wrote the
_Hind and Panther_, 1687, to vindicate his new belief. Dryden had the
misfortune to be dependent upon royal patronage and upon a corrupt
stage. He sold his pen to the court, and in his comedies he was heavily
and deliberately lewd, a sin which he afterward acknowledged and
regretted. Milton's "soul was like a star and dwelt apart," but Dryden
wrote for the trampling multitude. He had a coarseness of moral fiber,
but was not malignant in his satire, being of a large, careless, and
forgetting nature. He had that masculine, enduring cast of mind which
gathers heat and clearness from motion, and grows better with age. His
_Fables_--modernizations from Chaucer and translations from Boccaccio,
written the year before he died--are among his best works.
Dryden is also our first critic of any importance. His critical essays
were mostly written as prefaces or dedications to his poems and plays.
But his _Essay of Dramatic Poesie_, which Dr. Johnson called our "first
regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing," was in the shape
of a Platonic dialogue. When not misled by the French classicism of his
day, Dryden was an admirable critic, full of penetration and sound
sense. He was the earliest writer, too, of modern literary prose. If the
imitation of French models was an injury to poetry it was a benefit to
prose. The best modern prose is French, and it was the essayists of the
gallicised Restoration age--Cowley, Sir William Temple, and above all,
Dryden--who gave modern English prose that simplicity, directness, and
colloquial air which marks it off from the more artificial diction of
Milton, Taylor and Browne.
A few books whose shaping influences lay in the past belong by their
date to this period. John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was
almost wholly in the Bible and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, imprisoned for
twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at conventicles, wrote and,
in 1678, published his _Pilgrim's Progress_, the greatest of religious
allegories. Bunyan's spiritual experiences were so real to him that they
took visible concrete shape in his imagination as men, women, cities,
landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transparent of allegories.
Unlike the _Faerie Queene_, the story of _Pilgrim's Progress_ has no
reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and yet its reality is
so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond and
Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of Death with the same
belief with which they read of Crusoe's cave or Aladdin's palace.
It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the cultivated poet of
_Paradise Lost_. They represent the poles of the Puritan party. Yet it
may admit of a doubt whether the Puritan epic is, in essentials, as
vital and original a work as the Puritan allegory. They both came out
quietly and made little noise at first. But the _Pilgrim's Progress_ got
at once into circulation, and hardly a single copy of the first edition
remains. Milton, too--who received ten pounds for the copyright of
_Paradise Lost_--seemingly found that "fit audience though few" for
which he prayed, as his poem reached its second impression in five years
(1672). Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked leave to turn it
into rime and put it on the stage as an opera. "Ay," said Milton, good
humoredly, "you may tag my verses." And accordingly they appeared, duly
tagged, in Dryden's operatic masque, the _State of Innocence_. In this
startling conjunction we have the two ages in a nutshell: the
Commonwealth was an epic, the Restoration an opera.
The literary period covered by the life of Pope, 1688-1744, is marked
off by no distinct line from the generation before it. Taste continued
to be governed by the precepts of Boileau and the French classical
school. Poetry remained chiefly didactic and satirical, and satire in
Pope's hands was more personal even than in Dryden's, and addressed
itself less to public issues. The literature of the "Augustan age" of
Queen Anne (1702-1714) was still more a literature of the town and of
fashionable society than that of the Restoration had been. It was also
closely involved with party struggles of Whig and Tory, and the ablest
pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders.
Swift was in high favor with the Tory ministers, Oxford and Bolingbroke,
and his pamphlets, the _Public Spirit of the Whigs_ and the _Conduct of
the Allies_, were rewarded with the deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin.
Addison became secretary of state under a Whig government. Prior was in
the diplomatic service. Daniel De Foe, the author of _Robinson Crusoe_,
1719, was a prolific political writer, conducted his _Review_ in the
interest of the Whigs, and was imprisoned and pilloried for his ironical
pamphlet, _The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_. Steele, who was a
violent writer on the Whig side, held various public offices, such as
Commissioner of Stamps, and Commissioner for Forfeited Estates, and sat
in Parliament. After the Revolution of 1688 the manners and morals of
English society were somewhat on the mend. The court of William and
Mary, and of their successor, Queen Anne, set no such example of open
profligacy as that of Charles II. But there was much hard drinking,
gambling, dueling, and intrigue in London, and vice was fashionable till
Addison partly preached and partly laughed it down in the _Spectator_.
The women were mostly frivolous and uneducated, and not unfrequently
fast. They are spoken of with systematic disrespect by nearly every
writer of the time, except Steele. "Every woman," wrote Pope, "is at
heart a rake." The reading public had now become large enough to make
letters a profession. Dr. Johnson said that Pope was the first writer in
whose case the book-seller took the place of the patron. His translation
of Homer, published by subscription, brought him between eight and nine
thousand pounds and made him independent. But the activity of the press