Part 10

The history of English literature affords some curious illustrations of this law. It has always puzzled historians, for example, to account for such a great unoccupied gap in our literary progress as occurs between the death of Chaucer and the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. From the year 1250, when the English language first makes its appearance in anything like its present form, to the year 1400, when Chaucer died, forms, as all know, the infant age of our literature. It was an age of great literary activity; and how much was achieved in it remains apparent in the fact that it culminated in a man like Chaucer--a man whom, without any drawback for the early epoch at which he lived, we still regard as one of our literary princes. Nor was Chaucer the solitary name of his age. He had some notable contemporaries, both in verse and in prose. When we pass from Chaucer's age, however, we have to overleap nearly a hundred and eighty years before we alight upon a period presenting anything like an adequate show of literary continuation. A few smaller names, like those of Lydgate, Surrey, and Skelton, are all that can be cited as poetical representatives of this sterile interval in the literary history of England: whatever of Chaucer's genius still lingered in the island seeming to have travelled northward, and taken refuge in a series of Scottish poets, excelling any of their English contemporaries. How is this to be accounted for? Is it that really, during this period, there was less of available mind than before in England, that the quality of the English nerve had degenerated? By no means necessarily so. Englishmen, during this period were engaged in enterprises requiring no small amount of intellectual and moral vigour; and there remain to us, from the same period, specimens of grave and serious prose, which, if we do not place them among the gems of our literature, we at least regard as evidence that our ancestors of those days were men of heart and wit and solid sense. In short, we are driven to suppose that there was something in the social circumstances of England during the long period in question which prevented such talent as there was from assuming the particular form of literature. Fully to make out what this "something" was may baffle us; but, when we remember that this was the period of the Civil Wars of the Roses, and also of the great Anglican Reformation, we have reason enough to conclude that the dearth of pure literature may have been owing, in part, to the engrossing nature of those practical questions which then disturbed English society. When Chaucer wrote, England, under the splendid rule of the third Edward, was potent and triumphant abroad, but large and leisurely at home; but scarcely had that monarch vacated the throne when a series of civil jars began, which tore the nation into factions, and was speedily followed by a religious movement as powerful in its effects. Accordingly, though printing was introduced during this period, and thus Englishmen had greater temptations to write, what they did write was almost exclusively plain grave prose, intended for practical or polemical occasions, and making no figure in a historical retrospect. How different when, passing the controversial reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Mary, we come upon the golden days of Queen Bess! Controversy enough remained to give occasion to plenty of polemical prose; but about the middle of her reign, when England, once more great and powerful abroad as in the time of the Edwards, settled down within herself into a new lease of social order and leisure under an ascertained government, there began an outburst of literary genius such as no age or country had ever before witnessed. The literary fecundity of that period of English history which embraces the latter half of the reign of Elizabeth and the whole of the reign of James I. (1580-1625) is a perpetual astonishment to us all. In the entire preceding three centuries and a half we can with difficulty name six men that can, by any charity of judgment, be regarded as stars in our literature, and of these only one that is a star of the first magnitude: whereas in this brief period of forty-five or fifty years we can reckon up a host of poets and prose-writers all noticeable on high literary grounds, and of whom at least thirty were men of extraordinary dimensions. Indeed, in the contemplation of the intellectual abundance and variety of this age--the age of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon, of Raleigh and Hooker, of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Donne, Herbert, Massinger, and their illustrious contemporaries--we feel ourselves driven from the theory that so rich a literary crop could have resulted from that mere access of social leisure after a long series of national broils to which we do in part attribute it, and are obliged to suppose that there must have been, along with this, an actually finer substance and condition, for the time being, of the national nerve. The very brain of England must have become more "quick, nimble, and forgetive," before the time of leisure came.

We have spoken of this great age of English literature as terminating with the reign of James I., in 1625. In point of fact, however, it extended some way into the reign of his son, Charles I. Spenser had died in 1599, before James had ascended the English throne; Shakespeare and Beaumont had died in 1616, while James still reigned; Fletcher died in 1625; Bacon died in 1626, when the crown had been but a year on Charles's head. But, while these great men and many of their contemporaries had vanished from the scene before England had any experience of the first Charles, some of their peers survived to tell what kind of men they had been. Ben Jonson lived till 1637, and was poet-laureate to Charles I.; Donne and Drayton lived till 1631; Herbert till 1632; Chapman till 1634; Dekker till 1638; Ford till 1639; and Heywood and Massinger till 1640.

There is one point in the reign of Charles, however, where a clear line may be drawn separating the last of the Elizabethan giants from their literary successors. This is the point at which the Civil War commences. The whole of the earlier part of Charles's reign was a preparation for this war; but it cannot be said to have fairly begun till the meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640, when Charles had been fifteen years on the throne. If we select this year as the commencement of the great Puritan and Republican Revolution in England, and the year 1660, when Charles II. was restored, as the close of the same Revolution, we shall have a period of twenty years to which, if there is any truth in the notion that the Muses shun strife, this notion should be found peculiarly applicable. Is it so? We think it is. In the first place, as we have just said, the last of the Elizabethan giants died off before this period began, as if killed by the mere approach to an atmosphere so lurid and tempestuous. In the second place, in the case of such writers as were old enough to have learnt in the school of those giants and yet young enough to survive them and enter on the period of struggle,--as for example, Herrick (1591-1660), Shirley (1596-1666), Waller (1605-1687), Davenant (1605-1668), Suckling (1608-1643), Milton (1608-1674), Butler (1612-1680), Cleveland (1613-1658), Denham (1615-1668), and Cowley (1618-1667),--it will be found, on examination, either that the time of their literary activity did not coincide with the period of struggle, but came before it, or after it, or lay on both sides of it; or that what they did write of a purely literary character during this period was written in exile; or, lastly, that what they did write at home of a genuine literary character during this period is inconsiderable in quantity, and dashed with a vein of polemical allusion rendering it hardly an exception to the rule. The literary career of Milton illustrates very strikingly this fact of the all but entire cessation of pure literature in England between 1640 and 1660. Milton's life consists of three distinctly marked periods--the first ending with 1640, during which he composed his exquisite minor poems; the second extending precisely from 1640 to 1660, during which he wrote no poetry at all, except a few sonnets, but produced his various polemical prose treatises or pamphlets, and served the state as a public functionary; and the third, which may be called the period of his later muse, extending from 1660 to his death in 1674, and famous for the composition of his greater poems. Thus Milton's prose-period, if we may so term it, coincided exactly with the period of civil strife and Cromwellian rule. And, if this was the case with Milton--if he, who was essentially the poet of Puritanism, with his whole heart and soul in the struggle which Cromwell led, was obliged, during the process of that struggle, to lay aside his singing robes, postpone his plans of a great immortal poem, and in the meanwhile drudge laboriously as a prose pamphleteer--how much more must those have been reduced to silence, or brought down into practical prose, who found no such inspiration in the movement as it gave to the soul of Milton, but regarded it all as desolation and disaster! Indeed, one large department of the national literature at this period was proscribed by civil enactment. Stage-plays were prohibited in 1642, and it was not till after the Restoration that the theatres were re-opened. Such a prohibition, though it left the sublime muse of Milton at liberty, had it cared to sing, was a virtual extinction for the time of all the customary literature. In fine, if all the literary produce of England in the interval between 1640 and 1660 is examined, it will be found to consist in the main of a huge mass of controversial prose, by far the greater proportion of which, though effective at the time, is little better now than antiquarian rubbish, astonishing from its bulk, though some small percentage including all that came from the terrible pen of Milton is saved by reason of its strength and grandeur. The intellect of England was as active and as abundant as ever, but it was all required for the current service of the time. Perhaps the only exception of any consequence was in the case of the philosophical and calm-minded Sir Thomas Browne, author of the _Religio Medici_. While all England was in throes and confusion Browne was quietly attending his patients, or pottering along his garden at Norwich, or pursuing his meditations about sepulchral urns and his inquiries respecting the Quincuncial Lozenge. His views of things might have been considerably quickened by billeting upon his household a few of the Ironsides.

Had Cromwell lived longer, or had he established a dynasty capable of maintaining itself, there can be little doubt that there would have come a time of leisure during which, even under a Puritan rule, there would have been a new outburst of English Literature. There were symptoms, towards the close of the Protectorate that Cromwell, having now "reasonable good leisure," was willing and even anxious that the nation should resume its old literary industry and all its innocent liberties and pleasures. He allowed Cowley, Waller, Denham, Davenant, and other Royalists, to come over from France, and was glad to see them employed in writing verses. Waller became one of his courtiers, and composed panegyrics on him. He released Cleveland from prison in a very handsome manner, considering what hard things the witty roysterer had written about "O.P." and his "copper nose." He appears even to have winked at Davenant, when, in violation of the act against stage-plays, that gentlemanly poet began to give private theatrical entertainments under the name of operas. Davenant's heretical friend, Hobbes, too, already obnoxious by his opinions even to his own political party, availed himself of the liberty of the press to issue some fresh metaphysical essays, which the Protector may have read. In fact, had Cromwell survived a few years, there would, in all probability, have arisen, under his auspices, a new literature, of which his admirer and secretary, Milton, would have been the laureate. What might have been the characteristics of this literature of the Commonwealth, had it developed itself to full form and proportions, we can but guess. That, in some respects, it would not have been so broad and various as the literature which took its rise from the Restoration is very likely; for, so long as the Puritan element remained dominant in English society, it was impossible that, with any amount of liberty of the press, there should have been such an outbreak of the merely comic spirit as did occur when that element succumbed to its antagonist, and genius had official licence to be as profligate as it chose. But, if less gay and riotous, it might have been more earnest, powerful, and impressive. For its masterpiece it would still have had _Paradise Lost_,--a work which, as it is, we must regard as its peculiar offspring, though posthumously born; nor can we doubt that, if influenced by the example and the recognised supremacy of such a laureate as Milton, the younger literary men of the time would have found themselves capable of other things than epigrams and farces.

It was fated, however, that the national leisure requisite for a new development of English literary genius should commence only with the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660; and then it was a leisure secured in very different circumstances from those which would have attended a perpetuation of Cromwell's rule. With Charles II. there came back into the island, after many years of banishment, all the excesses of the cavalier spirit, more reckless than before, and considerably changed by long residence in continental cities, and especially in the French capital. Cavalier noblemen and gentlemen came back, bringing with them French tastes, French fashions, and foreign ladies of pleasure. As Charles II. was a different man from his father, so the courtiers that gathered round him at Whitehall were very different from those who had fought with Charles I. against the Parliamentarians. Their political principles and prejudices were nominally the same; but they were for the most part men of a younger generation, less stiff and English in their demeanour, and more openly dissolute in their morals. Such was the court the restoration of which England virtually confessed to be necessary to prevent a new era of anarchy. It was inaugurated amid the shouts of the multitude; and Puritanism, already much weakened by defections before the event, hastened to disappear from the public stage, diffusing itself once more as a mere element of secret efficacy through the veins of the community, and purchasing even this favour by the sacrifice of its most notorious leaders.

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Miserable in some respects as was this change for England, it offered, by reason of the very unanimity with which it was effected, all the conditions necessary for the forthcoming of a new literature. But where were the materials for the commencement of this new literature?

First, as regards _persons_ fit to initiate it. There were all those who had been left over from the Protectorate, together with such wits as the Restoration itself had brought back, or called into being. There was the old dramatist, Shirley, now in his sixty-fifth year, very glad, no doubt, to come back to town, after his hard fare as a country-schoolmaster during the eclipse of the stage, and to resume his former occupation as a writer of plays in the style that had been in fashion thirty years before. There was Hobbes, older still than Shirley, a tough old soul of seventy-three, but with twenty more years of life in him, and, though not exactly a literary man, yet sturdy enough to be whatever he liked within certain limits. There was mild Izaak Walton, of Chancery-lane, only five years younger than Hobbes, but destined to live as long, and capable of writing very nicely if he could have been kept from sauntering into the fields to fish. There was the gentlemanly Waller, now fifty-six years of age, quite ready to be a poet about the court of Charles, and to write panegyrics on the new side to atone for that on Cromwell. There was the no less gentlemanly Davenant, also fifty-six years of age, steady to his royalist principles, as became a man who had received the honour of knighthood from the royal martyr, and enjoying a wide reputation, partly from his poetical talents, and partly from his want of nose. There was Milton, in his fifty-second year, blind, desolate, and stern, hiding in obscure lodgings till his defences of regicide should be sufficiently forgotten to save him from molestation, and building up in imagination the scheme of his promised epic. There was Butler, four years younger, brimful of hatred to the Puritans, and already engaged on his poem of _Hudibras_, which was to lash them so much to the popular taste. There was Denham, known as a versifier little inferior to Waller, and with such superior claims on the score of loyalty as to be considered worthy of knighthood and the first vacant post. There was Cowley, still only in his forty-third year, and with a ready-made reputation, both as a poet and as a prose-writer, such as none of his contemporaries possessed, and such indeed as no English writer had acquired since the days of Ben Jonson and Donne. Younger still, and with his fame as a satirist not yet made, there was Milton's friend, honest Andrew Marvell, whom the people of Hull had chosen as their representative in Parliament. Had the search been extended to theologians, and such of them selected as were capable of influencing the literature by the form of their writings, as distinct from their matter, Jeremy Taylor would have been noted as still alive, though his work was nearly over, while Richard Baxter, with a longer life before him, was in the prime of his strength, and there was in Bedford an eccentric Baptist preacher, once a tinker, who was to be the author, though no one supposed it, of the greatest prose allegory in the language. Close about the person of the king, too, there were able men and wits, capable of writing themselves, or of criticising what was written by others, from the famous Clarendon down to such younger and lighter men as Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, Sackville, Earl of Dorset, and Sir Charles Sedley. Lastly, not to extend the list farther, there was then in London, aged twenty-nine, and going about in a stout plain dress of grey drugget, a Northamptonshire squire's son, named John Dryden, who, after having been educated at Cambridge, had come up to town in the last year of the Protectorate to push his fortune under a Puritan relative then in office, and who had already once or twice tried his hand at poetry. Like Waller, he had written and published a series of panegyrical stanzas on Cromwell after his death; and, like Waller also, he had attempted to atone for this miscalculation by writing another poem, called _Astraea Redux_, to celebrate the return of Charles. As a taste of what this poet, in particular, could do, take the last of his stanzas on Cromwell:--

"His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest; His name a great example stands to show How strangely high endeavours may be blessed, Where piety and valour jointly go";

or, in another metre and another strain of politics, the conclusion of the poem addressed to Charles:--

"The discontented now are only they Whose crimes before did your just cause betray: Of those your edicts some reclaim from sin, But most your life and blest example win. Oh happy prince! whom Heaven hath taught the way By paying vows to have more vows to pay! Oh happy age! Oh times like those alone By fate reserved for great Augustus' throne, When the joint growth of arms and arts foreshow The world a monarch, and that monarch you!"

Such were the _personal elements_, if we may so call them, available at the beginning of the reign of Charles II. for the commencement of a new era in English literature. Let us see next what were the more pronounced _tendencies_ visible amid these personal elements--in other words, what tone of moral sentiment, and what peculiarities of literary style and method, were then in the ascendant, and likely to determine the character of the budding authorship.