A history of eighteenth century literature (1600-1780)

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Chapter I Poetry After The Restoration

WHEN the romantic fervour of the age of Elizabeth had completely exhausted itself, towards the middle of the seventeenth century, the poetical field in England was again left fallow, as it had been left in the early part of the sixteenth century, at the decline of the medizval period. The great poets had spoken in rapturous accents, with a nobie and irregular music, and their followers, unable to repeat their sublimity, had exaggerated their irregularity into licence. This rapid decline from the Elizabethan elevation of style was hastened by the general subsidence, throughout Europe, of the fervour of the Renaissance. The form of English poetry was degraded, not merely by its own impetus, but by the nature of the literary changes then being made in France, in Spain, and in Italy. Imaginative literature was undergoing a complete transformation in all parts of Europe. At the moment of deepest decadence it had reached very much the same position which it had reached, at various moments, in the complete decline of medizvalism. In England, for instance, the relation of a writer like Phineas Fletcher to Spenser was almost exactly analogous to that of Hawes to Chaucer. But when it came to the question of revival, it was plain that renovation could not lie any longer on the side of what was fervid, spontaneous, and fantastic. In this direction there was nothing new to be attained, and the tendency had to be rather in the medizval than in the Renaissance LLL & B direction, more towards the classic regularity of the great fourteenth century writers than towards the exquisite audacities of the end of the sixteenth century.

The change, then, was one in the direction of repression and revision. It was made in the pursuit of regular form, reasonable thought, and a subdued and chastened ornament. Although the results of the change appear anything but attractive to ourselves, and although the direct and positive gain to English poetry seems very small to us now, the relief from irregularity and licence was eagerly welcomed. ‘The most obvious phenomenon connected with the change in poetry was the gradual substitution, in non-dramatic verse, for the thousand-and-one odd metrical forms of the lyrists, of a single normal instrument in versification, namely, the neatly-balanced and unbroken heroic couplet, containing five beats in each line. It was true that this form, as well as almost all others to be found in English poetry, had been known to the Elizabethans, but it had possessed no special attraction for them, and not one of them had made habitual use of it. But throughout the period with which we deal in this volume, this heroic couplet was the normal and habitual form in which poetry, except on the stage, moved in its serious moments. ‘There were, of course, many exceptions, and about 1725 a very vigorous effort was made, but with only partial success, to substitute blank verse for it. These exceptions will be noted as we proceed, but it is proper here to insist that the employment of the heroic couplet, and the polishing of that couplet, are the most prominent facts connected with the art of poetry during the classic period in this country.

This alteration of form was introduced by one writer, who lived to see it universally adopted. The life of this poet, Edmund Waller (1605-1687), covers the entire period of transformation. When he was a youth the romantic manner was the only one in practice ; long before he died the classic manner was unchallenged. The precise and regular taste made fashionable by Waller found a special propriety in resuming a vehicle of expression which had

I WALLER 3 been, it would seem, invented by Chaucer for use in Zhe Canterbury Tales, about 1385. The heroic couplet had been employed by its author with extraordinary art, and almost without irregularity. But it was an instrument upon which none but Chaucer seemed to know how to play, and within a quarter of a century after his death it was completely laid aside. When the couplet came into use again, in the Elizabethan age, the form was greatly modified, and the polished distich, as Chaucer had devised it, was lost in a flowing easy measure, kept in hand merely by the recurrent tinkle of the rhyme. Chaucer’s artful cesuva was exaggerated into what the French call an exjambement, and what is called in English an “overflow”; “the sense,” as Milton says in describing this peculiarity, ‘being variously drawn out from one verse into another.” In the hands of the best romantic poets of Elizabeth and James, this loose and elastic treatment of the couplet had led to very charming effects ; but when inspiration passed away, this laxity of form gave the poetasters occasion for every species of weakness and flaccidity. Waller, without apparently any ambition to restore the couplet as Chaucer had left it, nor on the other hand any suggestion from France, where the Alexandrine was not yet subjected to a like reform, revised and strengthened this form of verse, and gave it the character which it retained for no less than one hundred and fifty years. For that space of time the couplet took the same almost universal position as the vehicle for expression in verse that the rhyme royal had taken in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this case, as in that, the popularity of the form survived the power of the poets to extract new effects out of so conventional an instrument.

Waller, to whom is due the singular distinction of being the coryphzeus of this long procession of the commonplace, was a very wealthy landlord of Buckinghamshire. He entered Parliament at an early age, held completely aloof from the active literary life of his contemporaries, and seemed interested in anything rather than in poetry. His earliest verses, dated apparently in 1623, possess the formal character, the precise prosody without irregularity or overflow, which we find in the ordinary verse of Dryden, Pope, and Darwin. To so great an extent is this true, that a passage of Waller’s earliest heroics, if compared at the same time with a typical passage from one of his coevals, such as Carew or Crashaw, and with one from Darwin’s Botanic Garden of 1789, would be recognised at once as bearing a closer relation to the latter than to the former. In other words, we hold in Waller’s earliest occasional pieces the key to the prosody of the eighteenth century, to what Mr. Ruskin has very happily called “the symmetrical clauses of Pope’s logical metre.” For many years Waller was entirely unsupported in this innovation, and his persistence in setting his face against the fashion of his own age is very curious. About 1632 he began to court Lady Dorothy Sidney in a cycle of poems, under the name of Sacharissa, and some of these lyrics were, and still remain, justly popular. They are remarkable for grace, and for a curious felicity in diction ; in them he escapes from his self-imposed chain of the couplet. Waller plotted to reinstate the king, and in 1644 was heavily fined and banished to France.

Before this, however, he had obtained his first disciple. The critics of the succeeding age saw a direct relation between Waller and Sir John Denham (1615-1668), which has, until lately, been again obscured. Dryden said, in 1664, “The excellence and dignity of rhyme were never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it ; but this sweetness of his lyric poesy was afterwards followed in the epic by Sir John Denham in his Cooper's Hill.” This last-mentioned work, Denham’s sole important contribution to literature, is not what we now call an epic; it is a topographical poem, and the earliest of its class to possess a distinctly national interest. It was published in 1642, before Waller had printed anything, but it contains a direct allusion to him as “the first of poets,” showing, as the adoption of the unbroken distich also did, that the author had perceived and had accepted the reform suggested by Waller. It is not lengthy, nor very animated, and there is little in its form or matter to account for the extraordinary reputation which it has

I COWLEY 5 enjoyed. It is a soliloquy of the author’s, who, resting on the brow of Cooper’s Hill, addresses the Thames rolling at his feet, and enumerates the stately attractions of the great city through which the river is about to flow. Four lines of this address, added in the second edition, are among the most famous of English quotations : **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.”

Denham was an architect by profession, and succeeded Inigo Jones as the king’s surveyor-general, to be succeeded in his turn by Sir Christopher Wren. ‘The latter part of his life was clouded by insanity. Denham is not a poet of importance, but he supplies a link between Waller and Dryden. Sidney Godolphin (1610-1643), another very early disciple of Waller’s, died too young to exert much influence.

A much more versatile and more attractive writer than Denham was Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), but he was not nearly so consistent an adherent of the new school. On one side of his poetical character, indeed, Cowley represents nothing more than the extreme decline of the earlier romantic poetry. He attributed his own start in life to the fact that before he was twelve he had read the works of Spenser through, and his early writings, the precocity of which is extraordinary, are imitations of the great Elizabethans. Before he was twenty he had published two volumes of poetry and a play, all three of which had enjoyed great success. During the early years of the civil war he was engaged in writing the collection of cold and elaborate loveenigmas, which he called Zhe A/tstress—pieces in which feeling and thought, expression and metrical form, are all tortured in concert. After the battle of Naseby, Cowley, who, like most of the men of letters, was a royalist, followed the queen to Paris, and there came under the influence of Waller. Zhe Mistress appeared in 1647, and was immediately accepted and approyed by the members of the new school, although it hardly belonged to their camp.

It was his want of colour, his intellectual ingenuity, and his temperate prosaic spirit, which recommended Cowley to the new classic poets. He wrote but little in the heroic measure—his sacred epic, Zhe Davidets, and one very noble elegy on Crashaw, being his principal essays in that form. Cowley rarely speaks so simply and sincerely as in these stanzas from the poem on the death of Mr. William Hervey :

‘* He was my friend, the truest friend on earth : A strong and mighty influence join’d our birth. Nor did we envy the most sounding name

By friendship given of old to fame.

None but his brethren he, and sisters knew, Whom the kind youth preferr’d to me ; And even in that we did agree,

For much above myself I lov’d them too.

‘* Say, for you saw us, ye immortal lights, How oft unwearied have we spent the nights ? Till the Ledzean stars so famed for love, Wonder’d at us from above.

We spent them not in toys, in lusts, in wine ; But search of deep philosophy, Wit, eloquence, and poetry ; Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine.

“Ve fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say, Have ye not seen us walking every day ?

Was there a tree about which did not know The love betwixt us two?

Henceforth, ye gentle trees, for ever fade ; Or your sad branches thicker join, And into darksome shades combine ; Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid.

‘‘ Henceforth no learned youths beneath you sing, ’Till all the tuneful birds to your boughs they bring ; No tuneful birds play with their wonted cheer, And call the learned youths to hear ;

No whistling winds through the glad branches fly, But all with sad solemnity Mute and unmoved be,

Mute as the grave wherein my friend does lie.”

1 COWLEY’S ODES ”

In 1656 Cowley presented the public with a collection of Pindarigue Odes—pompous lyrics in what the French call zers libres—that is to say, lines of irregular length disposed on a whimsical system, which had lately received the approval of Corneille, and was, long after Cowley’s death, to be raised by Racine into momentary dignity in the choral portions of &sther and Athalie. At that day the elaborate plan on which the odes of Pindar were built up was not understood, and Cowley’s idea was that they were formed irregularly and spontaneously, more on a musical than a metrical system. As an example of the vicious Pindaric manner invented by Cowley, of his strange passion for conceit, and of his occasional felicity, the opening strophes of “The Muse” may here be given. It contains what is perhaps the most beautiful line Cowley has left behind him:

‘*Go, the rich chariot instantly prepare ; The Queen, my Muse, will take the air ; Unruly Fancy with strong Judgment trace, Put in nimble-footed Wit, Smooth-pac’d Eloquence join with it, Sound Memory with young Invention place, Harness all the winged race.

Let the postilion Nature, mount, and let The coachman Art be set.

And let the airy footmen running all beside, Make a long row of goodly Pride.

Figures, Conceits, Raptures, and Sentences, In a well-worded Dress.

And innocent Loves, and pleasant Truths, and useful Lies, In all their gaudy liveries.

Mount, glorious Queen, thy travelling throne, And bid it to put on ; For long, though cheerful, is the way, And life, alas, allows but one ill winter’s day. Where never foot of man, or hoof of beast The passage prest.

Where never fish did fly, And with short silver wings cut the low liquid sky. Where bird with painted oars did ne’er Row through the trackless ocean of the air.

Where never yet did pry The busy morning’s curious eye, The wheels of thy bold coach pass quick and free ; And all’s an open road to thee.

Whatever God did say, Is all thy plain and smooth, uninterrupted way. Nay, ev’n beyond His works thy voyages are known, Thou hast thousand worlds too of thine own. Thou speak’st, great Queen, in the same style as He, And a new world leaps forth when Thou say’st, Let it be.”

This uncouth and mistaken form of ode was unchallenged for some fifty years, when Congreve attempted a diversion in favour of regularity ; no successful stand, however, was made against it until Gray began to write. This so-called “ Pindarique ode” was for fifty or sixty years not only the universal medium for congratulatory lyrics and tumid occasional pieces, but it was for a long time almost the only variety allowed to the cultivators of the heroic couplet. Dryden succeeded in putting a noble organ music into it, but there can scarcely be mentioned one other ode than his second Oz Saint Cecilia’s Day, which is a perfectly successful poem. The forgotten lyrists of the Restoration found it a particularly convenient instrument in their bound and inflexible fingers, and even the tuneless Shadwell could turn off Pindarique odes. But almost without exception those ‘majestic strains” are miserably flat. Concerning the value of Cowley’s own verse criticism strangely differs. He had a very high ideal of the poetic vocation. He is wonderfully felicitous sometimes in the structure of single lines, and those who are able to appreciate poetry of the class of which France has produced so much, the purely rhetorical and intellectual, will extend their approval to entire stanzas, and sometimes to entire poems. But it must be confessed that to the modern reader most of his Song” is what, in another sense, he said that Pindar’s was—“ unnavigable.”

Another precursor of the classic school in poetry was Sir William Davenant (1606-1668), an uninspired but exceedingly active professional writer. He was mainly a writer of plays, ~

1 | DAVENANT 9 which will be mentioned in the next chapter, but he also produced an epic which attracted a great deal of notice. Davenant, whose parents were intimate friends of Shakespeare, was that poet’s godson. His youth was spent in the house of Fulke Greville—Lord Brooke—the old Elizabethan worthy, until Brooke was murdered in 1628. Davenant succeeded Ben Jonson as poet laureate in 1637, and in 1638 collected his scattered verses into a volume called Wadagascar._ Up to this time he had been entirely identified with the old romantic school, but in 1650 we find him in Paris with Waller and Cowley, and converted to the new prosody of the former. He published in that year the first (and only) volume of an epic poem, called Gondtbert, on a Lombard story. This poem is mainly interesting because of the extraordinary influence which it exercised over the early style of Dryden, who was slow in quite escaping from the fascination of it. Gondibert is Davenant’s best production, but it is very obscure and ill-constructed. Its merit consists in the grace of some of the episodes, and in the sententious vigour of single lines. It is written in the four-line heroic stanza, with alternate rhymes, which Gray made so popular in the following century. Davenant’s essays in the heroic distich show that late in life he learned Waller’s lesson with remarkable adroitness. He was a clever man of letters, but scarcely a poet.

The great writer of the period, the greatest poet in English literature between Milton and Wordsworth, was John Dryden (1631-1700). In comparison with this stately figure, those precursors of the classical school whom we have just mentioned pass into insignificance. Even Waller, though nothing can shake his importance as the founder of the school, is intellectually a dwarf by the side of Dryden. It should, however, be clearly perceived that the change from the romantic to the classical manner in English poetry, the rejection of the overflow in favour of the distich, had been carried out to the full before Dryden came to the front and stamped his own powerful character on the movement. Waller was writing excellent couplets before Dryden was born, but it was part of Dryden’s greatness not so much to introduce phases of thought as to adopt and illuminate them when they had once become national. For this reason, perhaps, he was not happy until all question of transition was over. He did not take up poetry in earnest till all intelligent Englishmen had decided what kind of poetry it was they wanted. And then Dryden, confident of his audience, made the distich of Waller an instrument on which to play his boldest music.

Dryden, the nephew of a local baronet, was born near Oundle, in Northamptonshire, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his famous portrait still adorns the hall. His early life is exceedingly obscure, and we possess very few contributions from it, either in prose or verse. In 1659, at the age of twenty-eight, he took part in the publication of a thin volume of three elegies on Oliver Cromwell. There are two simultaneous editions of this, one by itself, which is excessively rare, and the other in combination with Waller, with whom it is very interesting to find Dryden thus early identified, and Thomas Sprat (1636-1713), an imitator of Cowley, and afterwards Bishop of Rochester. At this time Gondibert was in fashion, and Dryden’s stanzas are closely modelled on those of Davenant. The next year brought the Restoration, when every bush was vocal, and Dryden presented his share of tribute in his Astrea Redux. Here Waller was his model more than Davenant, but still there was little promise of high attainment. Dryden, as was afterwards remarked, was but “faintly distinguished in his thirtieth year.” In 1661, in his Coronation Panegyric, his heroics are, for the first time, on a level with those of Waller and Davenant ; and the writer has removed from his style a turbid affectation of wit which stuck to it from the bad models of his childhood. ‘This and other short exercises bring us down to the year 1666, when Dryden published his first long piece, the historical poem of Anus Mirabilis, closely modelled upon Gondibert. It will easily be seen, however, from such a stanza as the following, that Dryden already was a far greater master of metre than Davenant had ever been:

I DRYDEN II

‘The ghosts of traitors from the bridge descend, With bold fanatic spectres to rejoice ; About the fire into a dance they bend, And sing their sabbath notes with feeble voice.”

There can be no sense, however, in which Annus Mirabilis can be called a good poem. It is confused, violent, and affected, full of crudities of style and thought, and its fine passages, brilliant as they are, are mere purple patches. The theme was twofold-—the progress of our naval war with Holland, and that of the great fire of London.

The character of Dryden’s work now changed completely, and the change was coincident with the close of the first period of the classic epoch in England. Within a few months Cowley, Denham, and Davenant died, Waller was silent, Dryden turned his attention exclusively to the drama, and the only non-dramatic poetry produced was that of Milton, a magnificent survival from the romantic age. Late in 1663 Dryden had married the eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, a woman who proved to be silly and peevish ; they were not destined to enjoy much happiness together. The personal life of Dryden, however, is very vague to us, and the trustworthy anecdotes preserved about him are singularly few. We know, however, that he stepped at once into the honours and into the consideration enjoyed by his lately deceased forerunners, that he was now in general parlance “ Mr. Dryden the poet,” and that in 1670 he was made laureate and historiographer-royal. He was gradually absorbed by the writing of plays, of which an account will be given in the next chapter, and about 1667 he entered into an agreement to supply the players of the king’s theatre with three plays a year, on exceedingly favourable terms. Dryden was not able to keep his part of the contract, but he wrote enough to bring him in a large’ theatrical income, and this was a period of high prosperity with him. He was also intimate with the great literary nobles of the court, and sunned himself in their favour almost without an interval, until, in- 1675, he had the misfortune to quarrel with the malignant Earl of Rochester. For fourteen years, however, after the publication of Annus Mirabilis, Dryden has to be treated exclusively as a dramatist. The peculiar character of his plays, however, was not without influence on his style as a poet. In the heroic plays, which were written in rhyme, he had an opportunity of increasing the volume and polishing the structure of his couplets, and in this way of preparing for his future and purely poetical triumphs. His plays, moreover, contained songs, which are valuable guides to the critic in estimating Dryden’s progress as a metrist. “I feed a flame within,” in the A/azden Queen of 1668, and “ After the pangs of a desperate lover,” and ‘Celimena, of my heart,” both in An Evening’s Love (1671), are the best instances of Dryden’s early songs: ‘*T feed a flame within, which so torments me, That it both pains my heart, and yet contents me:

Tis such a pleasing smart, and I so love it, That I had rather die, than once remove it.

** Vet he, for whom I grieve, shall never know it ; My tongue does not betray, nor my eyes show it. Not a sigh, nor a tear, my pain discloses,

But they fall silently, like dew on roses.

_ “ Thus, to prevent my love from being cruel, My heart’s the sacrifice, as ’tis the fuel : And while I suffer this to give him quiet, My faith rewards my love, though he deny it.”

In these, and still more in later and better examples, he shows that he possessed a genuine lyric grace, the existence of which we should otherwise scarcely have suspected. His songs are entirely unlike those of the earlier English dramatists, and remind us rather, in their grace and courtly turns of thought, of the kind of poetry introduced into France by Voiture and his friends.

These fourteen years of Dryden’s exclusive attachment to drama mark a very low spot indeed in English poetical literature. Dryden himself had reached his fiftieth year without writing anything which was really admirable in any very supreme sense, or which, if

I DRYDEN 13 he had died before 1680, could have secured his name a high place in human memory. What is of greatest importance to poetical students is to observe what progress Dryden made in the new prosody, and how by means of it he drew out those qualities which had been too much neglected in the verse of the previous age— ease, intelligibility, and flexibility. The heroic plays were not wholly useless, if they merely trained the English ear, so long accustomed to discord, to enjoy such harmonious periods as these, in which we see Dryden at his best in 1670:

‘* Ethereal music did her death prepare, Like joyful sounds of spousals in the air ; A radiant light did her crowned temples gild, And all the place with fragrant scents was filled ; The balmy mist came thickening to the ground, And sacred silence covered all around, But when (its work performed) the cloud withdrew, And day restored us to each other’s view, I sought her head, to bring it on my spear, — In vain I sought it, for it was not there ; No part remained, but, from afar, our sight Discovered in the air long tracts of light ; Of charming notes we heard the last resounds, And music dying in remoter sounds.”

Dryden’s command over versification, moreover, is shown in the prologues and epilogues which he produced not merely for his own plays, but for those of others. His study of the drama of the Elizabethans presently led him to a certain change of opinion. While continuing to hold the couplet to be the proper vehicle for pure poetry, he began to be dissatisfied with rhyme on the stage. Mr. Saintsbury thinks that a tendency to overflow in the verse of the rhymed tragedy of Aureng-Zebe (1676), shows that Dryden was recurring to the form of Shakespeare. Whether this be so or not, in A for Love (1678) we find him returning to blank verse, in direct rivalry with the exquisite cadences of Antony and Cleopatra. From this time forth Dryden drew a careful distinction between the couplet, which was to be used for serious poetry of all non-dramatic kinds, and blank verse, which, in spite of what Milton had said, was to be restricted to the theatre. His own dramatic blank verse, from this time onward, was more severe than any which had been used, except by Milton, since Ben Jonson. It was not characteristic of Dryden to invent forms of writing or to introduce fresh material to public consideration. He was never an innovator, since an innovator stands outside contemporary feeling, that he may direct it. This Dryden had no inclination to attempt ; he always represented the public and was led by it, his function being, when the town had accepted a certain form or a certain taste, to bring his superlative gifts to the task of making that taste or form as classical and splendid as possible.

Hence, when, at the age of fifty, he suddenly achieved the highest distinction in a field new to him, the field of satire, it came very naturally from the fact that the public had within two or three years past become strongly interested anew in that species of poetic work. We shall speak later on of those satires of Marvell and Oldham which led the way for Dryden. He so far surpassed those his forerunners, and made the style so completely his own, that we need not delay here for their consideration. It is valuable, however, to note that these less brilliant writers selected the form of political satire for Dryden, that the Scriptural tissue thrown as a light veil over the story was suggested by an anonymous tract, called /Vadboth’s Vineyard, in 1679, and that the very name of Achitophel had been nailed upon Shaftesbury before the great poet stirred a hand. It is highly characteristic of Dryden that he should remain in watchful inaction until all the tools were forged which he needed, and that when he moved it was to produce a work of finished magnificence. When he did speak, it was as a master, and his wonderful fourfold group of satires forms the most faultless section of his work. ~ The four famous Tory satires were published in quick succession, within the course of twelve months. The first part of Absalom and Achitophel appeared in November 1681, when Shaftesbury (Achitophel) was in the Tower; Zhe Medal appeared

I DRYDEN’S SATIRES 15 in March 1682, after the bill of high treason against him, a bill which Dryden’s poem was intended to support, had been thrown out by the grand jury ; d/acFlecknoe, which was specially directed against the Whig bard, Shadwell, is dated October 1682; and the ensuing month saw the publication of the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, written after the arrest of Monmouth (Absalom) at Stafford. The first of these four poems is the most important, and the longest too, and of the last only two hundred lines are certainly from Dryden’s pen, the remainder being written under the poet’s supervision by Nahum Tate. In the original Absalom and Achitophel there is but a thin strain of narrative or allegory, the story of the critical state of English affairs at the moment being told under a Hebrew disguise. The poem really consists of a series of satirical portraits, cut and polished like jewels, and flashing malignant light from all their facets. The sketch of Absalom is indulgent enough, for the secret love of the king to Monmouth was well known, but none of the other Whig leaders were spared,—Shaftesbury himself, ** A fiery soul, which, working out its way,