The temper of the seventeenth century in English literature

Preface

My original plan for the lectures contained in this book would have made them, as a whole, twice as long as they are. I meant to treat the second half of the seventeenth century quite as fully as I treated the first. The circumstances under which the lectures were given, at Trinity College, prevented this. The time at my disposal proved so limited that I must either greatly condense the first part of my work or else frankly change the scale on which I should consider the Age of Dryden. I chose the latter course.

Having done so, I thought for a good while that, before venturing to print any of this material, I had best rewrite it, restoring the proportions of the original plan. Various circumstances have prevented such rewriting, until it has become evident that the lectures must either appear as they were given or not appear at all. For several reasons, the former course has seemed on the whole preferable.

In the first place, a considerable part of what interest the lectures may have must arise from the fact that, so far as I am aware, they are the first regular lectures concerning English literature ever given by

Vi PREFACE

an American at an English university. To alter them would be in some degree to misrepresent them.

In the second place, these lectures, made for delivery, not to students but to a popular academic audience, are naturally rather a running comment on the subject in question — a series of essays — than a formal treatise. To turn them into anything like a severe and comprehensive form would be at once the work of years rather than of months, and so radical an alteration of their character that, whatever the result, they would no longer be the kind of thing they are.

In the third place, and by far chiefly, they seemed to me about as expressive as I could make them of what I wished to say. For my purpose was not to write a standard history of English literature in the seventeenth century, touching on every man and work therein included, and giving to each of these, great and small, a value and a place which I might hope should be permanent. My purpose was only to indicate, as best I could, the manner in which the national temper of England, as revealed in seventeenth-century literature, changed from a temper ancestrally common to modern England and to modern America, and became, before the century closed, something which later time must recognize as distinctly, specifically English. Whether these lectures make my view of this national transformation clear, it is not for me to judge; but I feel pretty sure that, even as they stand, they make it as clear as I am now able to. In this

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opinion I have been strengthened by the experience of the year which has intervened since the lectures were given. During that year I have treated the matters which they concern in my regular courses of instruction at Harvard College. In these courses, the scale was naturally much larger than that of the Clark lectures, but I could not discover that this enlargement of scale in any way altered the main outlines of my conception.

It is perhaps superfluous to say that any such treatment of a large subject as I have here attempted involves no special study of other than obvious authorities. Accordingly, it has seemed needless to encumber this book with bibliographic matter or with notes. It is not superfluous, however, to add here a word of my gratitude to the friends and the colleagues who have kindly let me talk with them about the matters in question, and whose suggestions have from time to time been deeply helpful. Among these friends I cannot refrain from naming two: Professor William Allan Neilson, now of Columbia University, and Dr. Chester Noyes Greenough, until very lately Instructor in English at Harvard.

Yet, after all, the friends who come most vividly to mind as I write these lines are not the old friends of our New England Cambridge. They are rather the new friends who welcomed me so cordially to their own Cambridge two years ago. In the lectures themselves, I have said something of what that

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PREFACE welcome meant to me; it was not only a personal experience of kindness which can never be forgotten; it was a constant assurance that they had at heart what I had at heart too. Loyal Englishmen can never be Americans, nor loyal Americans Englishmen; but no patriotic loyalty can ever affect the truth that Englishmen and Americans are ancestrally brethren. And whoever does his best to strengthen the sense and the ties of our kinship does a good deed for the future of this puzzling world.

To name these new-found friends individually would be to name all those whom I had the good fortune to meet during my pleasant months in England. Among them, however, is one group, to whom I owe most of all, for it was at their bidding that I came to the deep pleasure which those months brought me. Had chance made these lectures in themselves memorable enough to warrant hope that they deserved such honor, I should have asked leave to give them a formal dedication. And that dedication could have been to none but the Master and Fellows of Trinity.

Barrett Wendell.

Nahant, Massachusetts, July 15, 1904.

Contents

PAGE

I. Elizabethan Literature i

II. The Disintegration of the Drama ... 46

II The Disintegration Of The Drama

When the seventeenth century began, we have seen, the national temper of England, as expressed in literature, was enthusiastic, spontaneous, and versatile. More clearly still — when we hastily traced the outburst of lyric poetry, the growth .of serviceable prose, the literary fantasies and achievements of Lily, of Sidney, and of Spenser, and, above all, the development of the drama into the full ripeness of Shakspere's chronicle histories and comedies — we found that national temper integral. For all their differences, every one of the Elizabethan poets and writers — even to Shakspere himself — seemed adventurously experimental. "Plus Ultra" seemed the motto for those buoyant days; beyond the Pillars of Hercules there was more than any voyager into strange seas of thought could know beforehand.

Henceforth our effort will be to trace the changes in this national temper, until — a century later — England, at least in its literary expression, had become so different from that elder Elizabethan world — an elder world from which not only modern England, but modern America, too, can surely trace its origin.

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And first, we shall consider what happened to the two forms of literature which, in 1600, had reached the highest development — lyric poetry and the drama.

We may best consider them separately. Within half a century each had changed conspicuously. Both had disintegrated ; but while lyric verse still flourished disinteprajl y, the drama had declined. And even had their courses been more nearly parallel, there would be reason why we should first attend to the drama by itself. For, as I hastily said when we first turned to it, the history of the English drama from its awakening under Elizabeth to its extinction under Charles I. affords a remarkably clear and typical example of literary evolution. By studying its course, we may discover more than its mere history; we may perceive how any school of art — Greek sculpture, if you like, Gothic architecture, Florentine or Venetian painting — rises, flourishes, and decays.

In brief, whatever school of human expression is destined to reach vitality originates from certain fixed, immemorial conventions rather blindly followed in a manner which we may broadly call archaic. The painted statues which excavation has restored to light in the Museum of the Acropolis are examples of this ; so are the mosaics of Ravenna or of St. Mark's; so are the English miracle plays and moralities. To a people long bound by such archaic convention comes an impulse, no doubt traceable to external forces, but known to themselves chiefly, if not only, as freshened imaginative activity. They suddenly feel, they seem instinctively to perceive, how things may be altered in the direction of truth and beauty. When such impulse comes, it seems for a while illimitable; there seems no reason why achievement should not advance forever, stronger and nobler with each new effort. So the art, whatever it is, surges ahead — often wildly and luxuriantly, in great degree abortively, in some degree immortally. Then, by and by, comes an insidious sense of the limits which human conditions and human powers must always impose on humanity. No tower based on earth can ever soar to the true heavens; at best it can only lift its summit a little higher heavenward. So a benumbing sense of fact begins inexorably to check the imaginative impulse which a little while before burst so irresistibly from the bonds of old conventions; and in new conventional traditions, in contented or restless consciousness of limitation, the art declines into a new lifelessness.

There are many moods, accordingly, in which one is disposed to think of human expression much as one thinks of physical phenomena throughout the living world. Wildly various and strong and individual as these may seem, they prove, in truth, nothing more various or individual than cumulative examples of how those great forces work which we begin to recognize as natural law. When we take whatever fragment we like from the beautiful, confused intricacy of nature, and study its parts in their relations, we find slowly growing in our minds an image of such deathless, inexorable order as the mere contemplation of fact at any given moment could never reveal. Astronomy has thus emerged into colossal truth; geology, too; physics is following; biology and all the human facts which we may include within it stand ready for deathless words which shall flash newer and ever newer cosmic order into the midst of receding chaos. And even we students of literature cannot, and should not, resist that truest imaginative impulse of our own time ; we should ourselves be anachronisms if we were content only to enjoy the splendidly confused creations of the art we love — if we did not eagerly strive to perceive and to define the relations in which they really stand to one another.

In fine art, as in all Nature else, phenomena appear inextricably intermingled. The simplicity of laboratories is magnificently artificial. The order of law, as we can state it, is never the same as the aspect of fact. So accidents of chronology rarely combine with accidents of expression to define such generalizations as I have just tried to suggest. In the case of the Elizabethan drama, they come near doing so. The uncertainties of date which still confuse the minute history of this school of literature do not confuse its outline. We need hardly lament longer that such uncertainties persist. Rather we may count ourselves fortunate to possess two passages, so definitely fixed as to be trustworthy in date, and so unmistakably phrased as to afford remarkable examples of how imagination breaks the limits of old conventions, and of how, after the brief period when imagination and sense of fact have been immortally fused, a crushing sense of fact slowly and inexorably checks the further aspirations of imagination, imposing new conventions on an art which is no longer free.

Marlowe's "Tamburlaine," published in 1590, was probably acted at just about the time when Shakespere came to London. Among other things, it is believed finally to have made popular and inevitable on our stage the blank verse in which our lasting dramatic works were phrased. Whether the prologue was written before the play was published, nobody knows ; but it was surely published in 1590, before Shakspere had emerged from the experiments of what has been called his apprenticeship ; and here it is :

From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We'll lead you to the stately tent of war. Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine Threatening the world with high astounding terms, And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. View but his picture in this tragic glass, And then applaud his fortunes as you please.

If no other words of Marlowe's were left us, these would tell what Jonson meant when he wrote of "Marlowe's mighty line" ; they would express, too, that spirit of imaginative aspiration, bursting the bonds of convention, which breathes throughout Marlowe's fragmentary and colossal work. Twenty-two years after this prologue was published — perhaps twenty-five after it was written — there w r as published, in turn, the first complete work of John Webster, the "White Devil." The year in which this was printed, 1612, coincides with the close of Shakspere's career even more closely than that in which "Tamburlaine" was probably written coincides with its beginning. Shakspere began his work just when Marlowe broke the shackles of old conventions, and ended it just before John Webster prefaced his first play with the following words :

"Detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance: for mine own part, I have ever truly cherished my good opinion of other men's worthy labours; especially of that full and heightened style of Master Chapman ; the laboured and understanding works of Master Jonson; the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Master Fletcher; and lastly (without wrong last to be named) the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekker, and Master Heywood; wishing what I write may be read by their light; protesting that, in the strength of mine own judgment, I know them so worthy, that though I rest silent in my own work, yet to most of theirs I dare (without flattery) fix that of Martial,

You shall search literature far and wide for a more concrete statement of how a limiting sense of fact benumbs into new conventionality a school of art which has become consciously aware that it must obey tradition. Marlowe speaks of old, enfeebled, broken bonds; Webster of those bonds with which the giants themselves replaced the ancient ones they had splendidly disdained.

And so back to Shakspere. Webster thought him only one of many dramatic poets ; to us he has emerged supreme. Of the playwrights living in 1612, and mentioned by Webster as his masters, Shakspere, in point of publication, was the eldest. When we last considered him, in 1600, his work consisted of his histories, his comedies, "Romeo and Juliet," and perhaps the Sonnets. Now, in 16 12, his career was finished. That very statement is enough to remind us of what he had accomplished during the first twelve years of the seventeenth century. He had produced "Julius Caesar," "Measure for Measure," the four great tragedies, "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Coriolanus"; then, perhaps after a brief collaborative interval, to which "Timon" and "Pericles" are attributed, he had made his three great romances — "Cymbeline," the "Tempest," and the "Winter's Tale"; finally he had done his collaborative part, whatever it was, in "Henry VIII." ; so an end. Here is matter enough for a lifetime of conferences like ours. In this glance at the latter half of Shakspere's work, we must neglect all detail and generalize with what may well seem bewildering swiftness.

These works of Shakspere clearly divide themselves into two groups, different from each other and still more different from what he had written before. Broadly speaking, we may call the first group tragic and the second romantic. In the tragic group, there is little trace left of the robust cheerfulness which marked his histories and his comedies. Instead we have a crescent emphasis on three distinct, though intermingled, phases of inexorable tragic fact : the irony of fate, the mischief women can work, and the horrors of madness. Meanwhile his style, the texture of his verse, slowly intensifies. From the beginning his words had been charged with concepts beyond the words of other men. Now, his thought grows overwhelming, sometimes to the point of distortion, finally to what approaches obscurity. It is as if the marriage of word and meaning in his mind were growing old — as if meaning were enforcing its control more and more, like some powerful mate who proves at last the dominant partner in what once seemed equal wedlock. There was more beauty, perhaps, in the elder time; now there is inestimably more power and passion and significance.

Then, if we may trust our conjectural chronology, comes a sudden cessation of power — in "Coriolanus," what seems a colossal chill of exhaustion ; in "Timon" and "Pericles" something like momentary impotence.

Finally, in the three romances, comes a new temper and a new manner. Comedy and tragedy are finally fused. Things go ill for a while, but tend to happy ends. As the "Tempest" clears, the ideal world where it has played its mimic life is suffused with the radiance of an ideal philosophy. The verse, meanwhile, still overcharged with meaning, grows so flexibly informal under the weight thereof that if you playfully read it aloud as prose, he must have a fine ear who should detect your prank. I touch on this merely technical matter because, in itself, it is strongly typical of artistic decline. Marlowe, with his mighty line, broke away from the "jigging veins" of the careless old playwrights. Then, for a while, blank verse, with growing elasticity, seemed eternally able to sustain any burden of significance which the poets would have it bear. By and by it began to bend under the tasks imposed on it. By Webster's time it had left the jigging veins far behind; but at that same time its vigor and outburst had subsided into something little different from the daily speech of men. For the while blank verse had reached its limits. As it struggled against them, its sustaining power weakened, its surging spirit seemed almost broken.

But all this should not distract us from our chief question now; namely, what we may best believe the double change in Shakspere's utterances to signify. From a buoyant poet he became a tragic, and finally a romantic. The first impulse of critics who recognized this course of his development was to believe it due to his own spiritual experience. Without question it may thus be explained. Suppose, for example, that, unwelcomely married at Stratford, he came to London, and made his way there, and met some woman of higher rank than he had known before, and fell in love with her; that he found her faithless, and suffered accordingly; and finally that he surmounted the suffering. Then consider some of his heroines — Juliet, Portia, Beatrice ; the haunting doubts about Hero ; the dark lady of the Sonnets ; Ophelia, Cressida, Desdemona; the daughters of Lear; Lady Macbeth ; and Cleopatra. Here are keys, it might seem, with which he unlocked chamber after chamber of his heart. And then came Imogen, and Miranda, and Perdita, like the glowing rays of some serene sunset. Whatever the truth, there is hardly anywhere a more consistent expression of the stages through which a lover passes who yields himself reverently to the fascination of a woman; who finds her, after a while, an object of doubt; who then has the agony to know her certainly unworthy; yet who ends by rising from the depths in which all this misery has plunged him, and by finding consolation in charity and in self-mastery. All of which conjectural story hangs upon the autobiographic truth of those sonnets about the reprehensible lady with dark hair.

Mr. Sidney Lee, as we saw, has finally demonstrated how unlikely it is that these sonnets have personal origin. At least it is certain that they admirably follow, and develop into excellence, a literary form which other men had not long before made the fashion. There is no need to assume that they reveal a new Shakspere. They are explicable if we regard him still as that supremely imitative man of letters whose experimental work had proved him so versatile; whose impulse, from the beginning, had been not to express himself — if, indeed, he had any conscious self to express — but only to do incomparably better things which more adventurously original men had already done well.

A young American scholar whose name has hardly yet crossed the Atlantic — Professor Ashley Horace Thorndike — has lately made some studies in dramatic chronology which go far to confirm the unromantic conjecture that to the end Shakspere remained imitative, and little else. Professor Thorndike, for example, has shown with convincing probability that certain old plays concerning Robin Hood proved popular; a little later, Shakspere produced the woods and the outlaws of "As You Like It." The question is one of pure chronology; and pure chronology has convinced me, for one, that the forest scenes of Arden were written to fit available costumes and properties — that the green raiment of the banished duke was an Elizabethan prototype of the tubs of Mr. Vincent Crummies. Again, Professor Thorndike has shown that Roman subjects grew popular, and tragedies of revenge, such as Marston's; a little later Shakspere wrote "Julius Caesar" and "Hamlet." With much more elaboration, Professor Thorndike has virtually proved that the romances of Beaumont and Fletcher — different both in motive and in style from any popular plays which had preceded them — were conspicuously successful on the London stage before Shakspere began to write romances. It seems likely, therefore, that "Cymbeline," which less careful chronology had conjectured to be a model for Beaumont and Fletcher, was, in fact, imitated from models which they had made. In other words, Professor Thorndike has shown that we may account for all the changes in Shakspere, after 1600, by merely assuming that the most skilful and instinctive imitator among the early Elizabethan dramatists remained till the end an instinctively imitative follower of fashions set by others.

Incomparably more simple I find this explanation than the old, romantic one; and incomparably more significant, as well, to anyone who has been perplexed to know why Shakspere's work, arranged in chronologic order, proves so broadly typical of literary evolution. If we clearly understand that he chanced to live at a time when the Elizabethan drama passed through almost its whole course from "Tamburlaine" to the "White Devil" ; and if we admit that his persistent tendency was to imitate changing fashions, there is no puzzle left. As students of literary history we have only to sketch in details of the picture which Shakspere's career comprehends in outline.

In this task no guide is more helpful than that preface of Webster's, published, as we have seen, just as Shakspere stopped writing. "Without wrong to be named the last," you will remember, he mentions Shakspere, carelessly grouped with Dekker and Heywood, only after he has somewhat more respectfully named Chapman, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher.

Of the six men thus hastily mentioned by Webster, four began their careers as dramatists before 1600. We may find it convenient to consider them first, and, indeed, to mention one or two other men, whom Webster neglects, before we turn to Beaumont and Fletcher. For these slightly earlier writers indicate only the disintegration of the Elizabethan drama. It is in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, in those of Webster himself, and in those of men who followed a little after 1612, that the decadence and exhaustion of the drama become unmistakable.

First, then, for Chapman, eldest and longest-lived of them all. "That full and heightened style of Master Chapman" was the ray of light he cast by which Webster would have his own work read. As you turn page after page of the three fat little ill-printed volumes in which Chapman's copious utterances are most easily accessible, you feel Webster's criticism just. Only one of these volumes comprises Chapman's dramatic work; the others contain his great version of Homer, his completion of Marlowe's "Hero and Leander," and sundry original poems. Neither these original poems nor his plays have truly survived ; it is only as translator of Homer that anyone reads Chapman now. As translator of Homer, however, he remains eminent. We need only recall Keat's sonnet to be assured that, whatever the verdict of modern scholarship, Chapman's translation is a great Elizabethan poem. After the manner of his time, Chapman held Homer at once the earliest and the greatest of poets, and he believed poets to be literally the vehicles of divine inspiration. In translating Homer, accordingly, he felt himself a conduit of divine truth; and as such he seems to have held himself most worthy of lasting esteem. Indeed, he himself virtually asserts this conviction, in peculiarly characteristic terms. On the quaint title-page which preserves his portrait, he calls himself "Homeri Metaphrastes." That last word tells something of what Webster had in mind when he characterized Chapman's style. One sees instantly what "Metaphrastes" means ; but when I looked for it once in some Latin and Greek dictionaries, I could not find it. Doubtless Chapman found it somewhere; and very probably he chose it mostly because the place where he found it was a little out of the way. He liked the word because it was more full and heightened than any obvious one.

A scholar meanwhile, this same word shows him; and when he turned himself to poetry he wrote in a spirit of didactic pedantry. His plays are as free as any in the language from the artificial restraints of pseudo-classic form; but so far as human interest goes, t they are as lifeless as the most slavish parody of Plautus or Seneca ever made by anybody. His comedies are confused masses of conventional intrigue. Of his tragedies, the most memorable translate into ten acts of pompous declamation an almost contemporary tale of French life — the same which Dumas, some fifty years ago, awakened into the perennial, if trivial, vitality of "La Dame de Monsoreau." The plays of Chapman could never have been popular. In the dedication of the "Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois" he incidentally tells us why: "For the authentical truth of either person or action," he writes, "who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a poem, whose subject is not truth, but things like truth? . . . material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to vir- • tue, and deflection from her contrary, being the soul, limbs, and limits of an autnentical tragedy." Accordingly, when, in the very tragedy which he thus defends, he was moved to touch on poetry — and a true poet, he honestly held, must be divinely inspired — we find his inspiration breathing out the following lines:

As worthiest poets Shun common and plebeian forms of speech, Every illiberal and affected phrase To clothe their matter; and together tie Matter and form, with art and decency ; So worthiest women should shun vulgar guises.

Compare these cool lucubrations with the passionate idealism of what Marlowe, who was younger than Chapman in years, as well as in spirit, had uttered concerning poets, in "Tamburlaine," a good while before :

If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, And every sweetness that inspir'd their hearts, Their minds, and muses on admired themes ; If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit ; If these had made one poem's period, And all combin'd in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue could digest.

Compare Chapman's lines with what Shakspere — like Marlowe, younger than Chapman — had sung of poetry in the "Midsummer Night's Dream" :

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact :

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;

That is the madman : the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt :

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Compare Chapman's lines even with what Ben Jonson had written of poetry in the "Poetaster" :

If she be True-born, and nursed with all the sciences, . . . She can so mould Rome and her monuments Within the liquid marble of her lines That they shall live, fresh and miraculous, Even when they mix with innovating dust.

You can hardly help feeling the difference between Chapman's lines and all the others; and feeling it, you will surely feel where this crabbed, wise, didactic Chapman belongs, with that full and heightened style which makes him, some hold, the dramatic moralist best worth pondering after Shakspere himself.

"The laboured and understanding works of Master Jonson," Webster names next. "Works" was what Jonson himself called his writings when, four years later, he collected them in a folio; and the name gave rise to sundry jests, for the greater part of these avowed works took the form of plays. This Ben Jonson, from whom they proceeded, chances to be the best-recorded literary figure of his time. For not only do his voluminous works reveal many phases of his assertive personality, but the note-book in which William Drummond, of Hawthornden, set down the particulars of a somewhat unwelcome visit from Jonson, in 1619, preserves detail of his talk with almost Boswellian fidelity. Of his blustering, halfbibulous assertions, the most familiar, and perhaps the most characteristic is, that "Shakspere wanted art." Preposterous as the statement now seems, it was one which Jonson would seriously have maintained, thereby implicitly defining his own position in the history of our dramatic literature. Among the later Elizabethan playwrights — "Every Man in His Humour," his first published play, was acted in 1598 — Jonson was the most sturdy upholder of such pseudo-classic standards as imposed themselves on the theatres of France and of Italy.