Chillingworth

FROM THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY"

Voluntary solitariness is that which is familiar with melancholy, and gently brings on, like a Siren, a shooing-horn, or some Sphinx, to this irrevocable gulf; a primary cause, Piso calls it; most pleasant it is at first to such as are melancholy given, to lie in bed whole days, and keep their chambers, to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by a brook side, to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect them most; amabilis insania, and mentis gratissimus error. A most incomparable delight it is so to melancholize and build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose and strongly imagine they represent, or that they see acted or done. . . . So delightsome are these toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years alone in such contemplations and fantastical meditations, which are like unto dreams; and they will hardly be drawn from them, or willingly interrupt. So pleasant their vain conceits are, that they hinder their ordinary tasks and necessary business; they cannot address themselves to them, or almost to any study or employment: these fantastical and bewitching thoughts so covertly, so feelingly, so urgently, so continually, set upon, creep in, insinuate, possess, overcome, distract and detail them, they cannot, I say, go about their more necessary business, stave off or extricate themselves, but are ever musing, melancholizing and carried along, as he (they say) that is led round about an heath with a Puck in the night.

Probably the strongest prose work produced in England during the dead time of which we are speaking is WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH'S Religion of Protestants (1637). This divine was somewhat slighted in his own age, as giving little show of learning in his discourses; but the perspicuity of his style and the force of his reasoning commended him to the Anglican divines of the Restoration. It is characteristic that Tillotson had a great admiration for this humane latitudinarian, and that Locke wrote, "If you would have your son reason well, let him read Chillingworth."

William Chillingworth (1602-1644) was a son of a mayor of Oxford of the same name; he was born in that city in October 1602. In 1618 he became a scholar of Trinity College, took his degree in 1620, and in 1628 was elected fellow of his college. The famous Jesuit, John Fisher (whose real name was John Percy), was now very active in Oxford, and Chillingworth became one of his converts. He retired to Douai, but Laud, who took a great interest in him, kept up a correspondence with him, and persuaded him in 1631 to leave the Jesuits and return to Oxford. He was still a Catholic, but about the year 1634 his scruples were removed and he finally declared for Protestantism. Chillingworth was taunted with inconsistency of temper and judgment, and he began his Religion of Protestants a safe way to Salvation as an apologia; it appeared in 1637. Before this, he had been urged to take orders in the Church of England, but his conscience had been too sensitive. In 1638, however, these difficulties also were removed, and Chillingworth became Chancellor to the diocese of Salisbury, with the prebend of Brixworth attached. He was a zealous Royalist, and took part, more as a military engineer than as a chaplain, in the siege of Gloucester. He was taken prisoner at the surrender of Arundel Castle in December 1643. He was already ill, and was permitted, when the rest of the prisoners were marched to London, to be carried to the Bishop's palace in Chichester, where he died on the 30th of January 1644. He was originally denied

Christian burial by the Presbyterian garrison, who, however, eventually allowed his body to be placed in Chichester Cathedral. At his burial there was an unseemly protestation, and at the close of a wild diatribe, a fanatic flung into the grave a copy of Chillingworth's book "to

rot," he said, "with its author, and see corruption." Chillingworth's sermons were collected in 1664.

FROM THE "RELIGION OF
PROTESTANTS

be

As nothing by water can made more cold than water, nor by fire more hot than fire, nor by honey more sweet than honey, nor by gall more bitter than gall; or if you will suppose it infused without means, then that power which infuseth into the understanding assent, which bear analogy to sight in the eye, must also infuse evidence, that is, visibility into the object and look what degree of assent is infused into the understanding, at least the same degree of evidence must be infused into the object. And for you to require a strength of credit beyond the appearance of the object's credibility, is all one as if you should require me to go ten mile an hour upon a horse that will go but five; to discern a man certainly

William Chillingworth

After Kyte's Engraving

through a mist or cloud that makes him not certainly discernible; to hear a sound more clearly than it is audible; to understand a thing more fully than it is intelligible; and he that doth so, I may well expect that his next injunction will be that I must see something that is invisible, hear something inaudible, understand something that is wholly unintelligible.

The masterpiece of Chillingworth stands almost alone, in a sort of Essays underwood of Theophrastian character-sketches. Among these must be named the popular Microcosmography (1628) of JOHN EARLE (1601-1668), and the Resolves of OWEN FELTHAM (1600?-1677?), which was published about the same time. These latter were technically essays. The fashion for these studies was greatly encouraged by the decay of the drama, and particularly by that of comedy. This decay is one of the most extraordinary features of the time, and requires particular attention. The brief and magnificent school of English drama, begun by Kyd and Marlowe scarcely

more than a generation before, having blazed and crackled like a forest fire fed with resinous branches, sank almost in a moment, and lingered only as a heap of white ash and glowing charcoal.

The Decline of the Drama

The causes of the rapid decline of the drama have been sought in the religious and political disturbances of the country; but if we examine closely, we find that stage-poetry had begun to be reduced in merit before those disturbances had taken definite shape. It will probably be safer to recognise that the opening out of national interests took attention more and more away from what had always been an exotic entertainment, a pleasure mainly destined for the nobles and their retainers. There was a general growth of enthusiasm, of public feeling, throughout England, and this was not favourable to the cultivation of a species of entertainment such as the drama had been under Elizabeth, a cloistered art destined exclusively for pleasure, without a didactic or a moral aim. For many years there continued to persist an interest in the stage wide enough to fill the theatres, in spite of the growing suspicion of such amusements; but the audiences rapidly grew less select and less refined, less able to appreciate the good, and more tolerant of the rude and bad. In technique there was a falling off so abrupt as to be quite astonishing, and not easily to be accounted for. The "sons" of Ben Jonson, trained as they had been at his feet, sank into forms that were primitive in their rudeness. The curious reader may pursue the vanishing genius of poetic drama down through the writings of Randolph, of Jasper Mayne, of Brome, of Cartwright, till he finds himself a bewildered spectator of the last gibberings and contortions of the spectre in the inconceivable "tragedies" of Suckling. If the wits of the universities, highly trained, scholarly young men, sometimes brilliantly efficient in other branches of poetry, could do no better than this, what wonder that in ruder hands the very primitive notions with regard to dramatic construction

Title-page of Feltham's "Resolves "

THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA

7

and propriety were forgotten. Before Shakespeare had been a quarter of a century in his grave, Shirley was the only person left writing in England who could give to fiction in dialogue the very semblance of a work

of art.

We must pause for a moment to observe a highly interesting phenomenon. At the very moment when English drama was crumbling to dust, the drama of France was springing into vigorous existence. The conjectured year of the performance of

our last great play, the Broken Heart, of Ford, is that of the appearance of the earliest of Corneille's tragedies. So rapidly did events follow one another, that when that great man produced Le Cid, English drama was moribund; when his Rodogune was acted, it was dead; and the appearance of his Agésilas saw it re-arisen under Dryden in totally different forms, and as though from a different hemisphere. It is impos

sible not to reflect that if the dramatic instinct had been strong in Milton, the profoundest of all religious tragedies might happen to be not that Polyeucte which we English have enviously to admire in the literature of France, but a play in which the noblest ideas of Puritanism might have

Pierre Corneille

been posed against worldly philosophy and sensual error. Yet even for a Milton in 1643 the ground would not have been clear as it was for Corneille. The French poet had but to gather together and lift into splendid distinction elements whose main fault had been their imperfection. For him, French tragedy, long preparing to blossom, was reaching its spring at last; for us, our too brief summer was at an end, and, cloyed with fruit, the drama was hurrying through its inevitable autumn. If Ben Jonson, tired and old, had felt any curiosity in glancing across the Channel, he might have heard of the success of a goodly number of pieces by a poet destined, more exactly than any Englishman, to carry out