CHAPTER II

THE AGE OF DRYDEN

1660-1700

THE year 1660 provides us with a landmark which is perhaps more salient than any other in the history of English literature. In most instances the dates with which we divide our chronicle are merely approximations, points empirically taken to mark the vague transition from one age to another. But when Monk went down to Dover to welcome the agitated and astonished Charles, it was not monarchy only that he received into England, but a fresh era in literature and the arts. With that act of his, the old English Renaissance, which had long been dying, ceased to breathe, and a new departure of intellectual civilisation began. Henceforth the ideals of the leading minds of England were diametrically changed. If they had looked westwards, they now looked towards the east. Instantly those men who still remained loyal to the Jacobean habit passed out of fashion, and even out of notice, while those who had foreseen the new order of things, or had been constitutionally prepared for it, stood out on a sudden as pioneers and leaders of the new army of intelligence.

To us the post-Restoration writings of Milton possess a greater value than all else that was produced in verse for more than a hundred years; but in taking an historical survey we must endeavour to realise that his influence on the age he lived in was nil, and that to unprejudiced persons of education living in London about 1665, the author of Paradise Lost was something less than Flecknoe or Flatman. Nor to us, who see beneath the surface, does he present any features which bring him into the general movement of literature. He was a species in himself-a vast, unrelated Phoenix. In his youth, as we have seen, Milton had been slightly subjected to influences from Shakespeare, Spenser, and even the disciples of Spenser; but after his long silence he emerges with a style absolutely formed, derived from no earlier poet, and destined for half a century to influence no later one. Critics amuse themselves by detecting in Paradise Lost relics of Du Bartas, of Vondel, of Cowley, even of lesser men; but these were mere fragments of ornament disdainfully transferred to Milton's magnificent edifice as material, not as modifying by a jot the character of its architecture. It is very strange to think of the aged Milton, in stately patience, waiting for death to come to

95

The Decline

of Literature

The

Restoration

him in his relative obscurity, yet not doubting for a moment that he had succeeded in that "accomplishment of greatest things" to which his heart had been set at Cambridge more than forty years before.

We turn from Milton, then, wrapped like Moses in a cloud, and the contrast is great when we concentrate our attention on the state of letters in England around the foot of his mountain; for here, at least, there was no isolation, but a combined unison of effort in a single direction was the central feature of the moment. During the strenuous political agitation of the Commonwealth, literature had practically come to an end in England. There were still, of course, men of talent, but they were weak, discouraged, unilluminated. Some were trying to keep alive, in its utter decrepitude, the Jacobean method of writing; others were looking ahead, and were ready, at the cost of what capricious beauty remained in English verse, to inaugurate a new school of reason and correctness. When 1660 brought back the Court, with its Latin sympathies, the first of these two classes faded like ghosts at cockcrow. Herrick, Shirley, Vaughan long survived the Restoration, but no notice of them or of their writings is to be found in any of the serious criticisms of the age, although they held their place in the Restoration anthologies. On the other hand, the second class came forth at once into prominence, and four small poets-Waller, with his precise grace; Denham, with his dry vigour; Davenant, who restored the drama; Cowley, who glorified intellect and exact speculation-were hailed at once as the masters of a new school and the martyrs to a conquered barbarism. It was felt, in a vague way, that they had been holding the fort, and theirs were the honours of a relieved and gallant garrison.

The Commonwealth, contemplating more serious matters, had neglected and discouraged literature. The monarchy, under a king who desired to be known as a patron of wit, should instantly have caused it to flourish; but for several years after 1660-why, we can hardly tell-scarcely anything of the least value was composed. The four poets just enumerated, in spite of the fame they had inherited, wrote none but a few occasional pieces down to the deaths of Cowley (1667) and Davenant (1668). There was a general consciousness that taste had suffered a revolution, but what direction it was now to take remained doubtful. The returning cavaliers had brought the message back from France that the savagery of English letters was to cease, but something better than Davenant's plays or even Cowley's odes must surely take its place. The country was eager for guidance, yet without a guide. No one felt this more perspicaciously than the youthful Dryden, who described his own position long afterwards by saying that in those days he "was drawing the outlines of an art without any living master to instruct" him in it.

The guidance had to come from France, and the moment of the Restoration was not a fortunate one. The first great generation after Malherbe was drawing to a close, and the second had not quite begun. The development of English literature might have been steadier and purer, if the exiled English courtiers had been kept in Paris ten years longer, to witness the

THE ACADEMIC SCHOOL

97

death of Mazarin, the decay of the old Academic coterie, and the rise of Boileau and Racine. They left Chapelain behind them, and returned home to find Cowley-poets so strangely similar in their merits and in their faults, in their ambitions and in their failures, that it is hard to believe the resemblance wholly accidental. They had left poetry in France dry, harsh, positive, and they found it so in England. The only difference was that on this side of the Channel there was less of it, and that it was conducted here with infinitely less vigour, resource, and abundance. There was no Corneille in London, no Rotrou; the authority of Waller was late and feeble in comparison with that bequeathed by Malherbe.

It was, nevertheless, important to perceive, and the acutest Englishmen of letters did at once perceive, that what had been done in France about thirty years before was now just being

begun in England; that is to say, the old loose romantic manner, say of Spenser or of Ronsard, was being totally abandoned in favour of "the rules," the unities, a closer prosody, a drier, exacter system of reasoning. Unfortunately, up to 1660 there was little real criticism of poetic style in France, and little effort to be dexterously complete all through a composition. Happy lines, a brilliant passage, had to excuse pages of flatness and ineptitude. So it was in England. A few single lines of Cowley are among the most beautiful of the century, and he has short jets of enchanting poetry, but these lie scattered in flat wildernesses of what is intolerably grotesque. The idea of uniform excellence was to

be introduced, directly in France and then incidentally here, by Boileau, who was writing his first great satires when Charles II. was in the act of taking possession of his throne.

Even in these first stumbling days, however, the new school saw its goal before it. The old madness, the old quaint frenzy of fancy, the old symbolism and impressionism had utterly gone out. In their place, in the place of this liberty which had turned to licence, came the rigid following of "the ancients." The only guides for English verse in future were to be the polestar of the Latin poets, and the rules of the French critics who sought to adapt Aristotle to modern life. What such a poet as Dryden tried to do was regulated by what, reading in the light of Scaliger and Casaubon, he found

The Royal
Society

the Latins had done. This excluded prettiness altogether, excluded the extravagances and violent antics of the natural school, but admitted, if the poet was skilful enough to develop them, such qualities as nobility of expression, lucidity of language, justice of thought, and closeness of reasoning, and these are the very qualities which we are presently to discern in Dryden.

Meanwhile, although poetry, mainly in the criticism of poetry, was the subject uppermost in the minds of the men of wit and pleasure who clustered around the Court of Charles, attention was paid, and with no little seriousness, to the deplorable state of prose. Here the distinction between old and new could not be drawn with as much sharpness as it could in verse, yet here also there was a crisis imminent. The florid, involved, and often very charming prose of such writers as Jeremy Taylor, Fuller, and Henry More, was naturally destined to become obsolete. Its long-windedness, its exuberance, its caprices of style, marked it out for speedy decay; its beauties, and they have been already dwelt upon, were dolphin colours. A time had come when what people craved in prose was something simpler and terser in form, less ornate, less orotund, more supple in dealing with logical sequences of ideas. England had produced several divines, essayists, and historians of great distinction, but she had hitherto failed to bring forth a Pascal.

The returning Royalists had left behind them in Paris an Academy which, with many faults, had yet for a quarter of a century been a great power for good in France. It had held up a standard of literature, had enforced rules, had driven the stray sheep of letters into something resembling a flock. The first important step taken in intellectual life after the Restoration was the foundation in England of a body which at its initiation seemed more or less closely to resemble the French Academy. In 1661 Cowley had issued his Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy, the direct result of which was the institution of the Royal Society in 1662, with the King as patron, and Lord Brouncker, the mathematician, as first president. Cowley's tract was merely the match which set fire to a scheme which had long been preparing for the encouragement of experimental knowledge. As every one is aware, the Royal Society soon turned its attention exclusively to the exacter sciences, but most of the leading English poets and prose-writers were among its earlier members, and it does not seem to have been observed by the historians of our literature that the original scope of the assembly included the renovation of English prose. According to the official definition of the infant Royal Society, they "exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can," and passed "a resolution to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style." No literary Academy could have done more; and although the Royal Society soon dropped all pretensions to jurisdiction over prose-writing, this early action, coming when it did, can but have been of immense service

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to the new school. Nor must it be forgotten that among these savants who bound themselves to the exercise of lucidity and brevity in composition were Boyle, Clarendon, Barrow, Evelyn, Pearson, Pepys, Stanley, Thomas Burnet, the very representatives of

all that was most vivid in the prose of the age. Of these not all survived to learn the lesson that they taught, but it is therefore, perhaps, the more significant that they should have accepted it in principle.

Viscount Bouncker

In all this movement JOHN DRYDEN'S place was still insignificant. In his thirtieth year he was, as a later Laureate put it, faintly distinguished. But he was presently to find his opportunity in the resuscitation of dramatic poetry. From before the death of Ben Jonson the stage had begun to languish, and its decline cannot in fairness be attributed entirely to the zeal of the Puritans. But in 1641 Parliament had issued an ordinance ordaining that public stage-plays Drama should cease, those who had been in the habit of indulging in these spectacles of lascivious pleasure being sternly recommended to consider repentance, reconciliation, and peace with God. This charge being found insufficient, an Act was passed in 1648 ordering that all theatres should be dismantled, all convicted actors publicly whipped, and all spectators fined. An attempt to perform the Bloody Brother of Fletcher merely proved that the authorities were in deadly earnest, for the actors were carried off to prison in their stage clothes. The drama is a form of art which cannot exist in a vacuum; starved of all opportunities of exercise, English play-writing died of inanition. Nothing could be more abjectly incompetent and illiterate than the closet-dramas printed during the Commonwealth. Men who had not seen a play for twenty years had completely forgotten what a play should be. It is scarcely credible that an art which had been raised to perfection by Shakespeare, should in half a century sink into such an abysm of feebleness as we find, for example, in the unacted dramas of the Killigrews. Nor did a spark of poetry, however wild and vague, survive in these degenerate successors of the school of Fletcher.: