Halleck's New English Literature Part 30

[Ill.u.s.tration: CROMWELL DICTATING TO MILTON DISPATCHES TO THE KING OF FRANCE CONCERNING THE Ma.s.sACRE IN PIEDMONT.[1] _From the painting by Ford Madox Brown._]

The Puritans remained in the ascendancy until 1660, when the Stuart line was restored in the person of Charles II.

The Puritan Ideals.--The Renaissance had at first seemed to promise everything, the power to reveal the secrets of Nature, to cause her to gratify man's every wish, and to furnish a perpetual fountain of happy youth. These expectations had not been fulfilled. There were still poverty, disease, and a longing for something that earth had not given. The English, naturally a religious race, reflected much on this. Those who concluded that life could never yield the pleasure which man antic.i.p.ates, who determines by purity of living to win a perfect land beyond the sh.o.r.es of mortality, who made the New World of earlier dreams a term synonymous with the New Jerusalem, were called Puritans.

Their guide to this land was the _Bible_. Our _Authorized Version_ (1611), the one which is in most common use to-day, was made in the reign of James I. From this time became much easier to get a copy of the _Scriptures_, and their influence was now more potent than ever to shape the ideals of the Puritans. In fact, it is impossible to estimate the influence which this _Authorized Version_ has had on the ideals and the literature of the English race. Had it not been for this _Version_, current English speech and literature would be vastly different. Such words and expressions as "scapegoat," "a labor of love," "the eleventh hour," "to cast pearls before swine," and "a howling wilderness" are in constant use because the language of this translation of the _Bible_ has become incorporated in our daily speech, as well as in our best literature.

The Puritan was so called because he wished to purify the established church from what seemed to him great abuses. He accepted the faith of John Calvin, who died in 1564. Calvinism taught that no earthly power should intervene between a human soul and G.o.d, that life was an individual moral struggle, the outcome of which would land the soul in heaven or h.e.l.l for all eternity, that beauty and art and all the pleasures of the flesh were dangerous because they tended to wean the soul from G.o.d.

The Puritan was an individualist. The saving of the soul was to him an individual, not a social, affair. Bunyan's Pilgrim flees alone from the wrath to come. The twentieth century, on the other hand, believes that the regeneration of a human being is both a social and an individual affair,--that the individual, surrounded by the forces of evil, often has little opportunity unless society comes to his aid.

The individualism of the Puritan accomplished a great task in preparing the way for democracy, for fuller liberty in church and state, in both England and America.

Our study of the Puritan ideals embodied in literature takes us beyond 1660, the date of the Restoration, because after that time two great Puritan writers, John Milton and John Bunyan, did some of their most famous work, the one in retirement, the other in jail. Such work, uninfluenced by the change of ideal after the Restoration, is properly treated in this chapter. While a change may in a given year seem sufficiently p.r.o.nounced to become the basis for a new cla.s.sification, we should remember the literary influences never begin or end with complete abruptness.

THE PROSE OF THE PURITAN AGE

Variety of Subject.--Prose showed development in several directions during this Puritan age:--

I. The use of prose in argument and controversy was largely extended.

Questions of government and of religion were the living issues of the time. Innumerable pamphlets and many larger books were written to present different views. We may instance as types of this cla.s.s almost all the prose writings of John Milton (1608-1674).

II. English prose dealt with a greater variety of philosophical subjects. Shakespeare had voiced the deepest philosophy in poetry, but up to this time such subjects had found scant expression in prose.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is the great philosophical writer of the age. In his greatest work, _Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth_, he considers questions of metaphysical philosophy and of government in a way that places him on the roll of famous English philosophers.

III. History had an increasing fascination for prose writers. Sir Walter Raleigh's _History of the World_ (1614) and Lord Clarendon's _History of the Great Rebellion_, begun in 1646, are specially worthy of mention.

IV. Prose was developing its capacity for expressing delicate shades of humor. In Chaucer and in Shakespeare, poetry had already excelled in this respect. Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), an Episcopal clergyman, displays an almost inexhaustible fund of humor in his _History of the Worthies of England_. We find scattered through his works pa.s.sages like these:--

"A father that whipped his son for swearing, and swore at him while he whipped him, did more harm by his example than good by his correction."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THOMAS FULLER.]

Speaking of a pious short person, Fuller says:--

"His soul had but a short diocese to visit, and therefore might the better attend the effectual informing thereof."

Of the lark, he writes:--

"A harmless bird while living, not trespa.s.sing on grain, and wholesome when dead, then filling the stomach with meat, as formerly the ear with music."

Before Fuller, humor was rare in English prose writers, and it was not common until the first quarter of the next century.

V. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), an Oxford graduate and physician, is best known as the author of three prose works: _Religio Medici (Religion of a Physician_, 1642), _Vulgar Errors_ (1646), and _Hydriotaphia_ or _Urn Burial_ (1658). In imagination and poetic feeling, he has some kins.h.i.+p with the Elizabethans. He says in the _Religio Medici_:--

"Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable... Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition and fortunes, do err in my alt.i.tude; for I am above Atlas's shoulders... There is surely a piece of divinity in us--something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the sun."

The _Religio Medici_, however, gives, not the Elizabethan, but the Puritan, definition of the world as "a place not to live in but to die in."

_Urn Burial_, which is Browne's masterpiece, shows his power as a prose poet of the "inevitable hour":--

"There is no antidote against the _opium_ of time... The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of G.o.d, not in the record of man... But man is a n.o.ble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal l.u.s.ter, not omitting ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature."

Browne's prose frequently suffers from the infusion of too many words derived from the Latin, but his style is rhythmical and stately and often conveys the same emotion as the notes of a great cathedral organ at the evening twilight hour.

VI. _The Complete Angler_ of Izaak Walton (1593-1683) is so filled with sweetness and calm delight in nature and life, that one does not wonder that the book has pa.s.sed through about two hundred editions. It manifests a genuine love of nature, of the brooks, meadows, flowers.

In his pages we catch the odor from the hedges gay with wild flowers and hear the rain falling softly on the green leaves:--

"But turn out of the way a little, good scholar, towards yonder high honeysuckle hedge; there we'll sit and sing, whilst this shower falls so gently on the teeming earth, and gives yet a sweeter smell to the lovely flowers that adorn these verdant meadows."

[Ill.u.s.tration: IZAAK WALTON.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: JEREMY TAYLOR.]

VII. Of the many authors busily writing on theology, Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), an Episcopal clergyman, holds the chief place. His imagination was so wide and his pen so facile that he has been called a seventeenth-century prose Shakespeare. Taylor's _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_ used to be read in almost every cottage. This pa.s.sage shows his powers of imagery as well as the Teutonic inclination to consider the final goal of youth and beauty:--

"Reckon but from the sprightfulness of youth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness and strong texture of the joints of five-and-twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece ... and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces."

JOHN BUNYAN, 1628-1688

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN BUNYAN. _From the painting by Sadler, National Portrait Gallery_.]

Life.--The Bedfords.h.i.+re village of Elstow saw in 1628 the birth of John Bunyan who, in his own peculiar field of literature, was to lead the world. His father, Thomas Bunyan, was a brazier, a mender of pots and pans, and he reared his son John to the same trade. In his autobiography, John Bunyan says that his father's house was of "that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land."

The boy went to school for only a short time and learned but little from any books except the _Bible_. The father, by marrying a second time within a year after his wife's death, wounded the feelings of his sixteen-year-old son sufficiently to cause the latter to enlist as a soldier in the Civil War. At about the age of twenty, Bunyan married, though neither he nor his wife had at the time so much as a dish or a spoon.

Bunyan tells us that in his youth he was very wicked. Probably he would have been so regarded from the point of view of a strict Puritan. His worst offenses, however, seem to have been dancing on the village green, playing hockey on Sundays, ringing bells to rouse the neighborhood, and swearing. When he repented, his vivid imagination made him think that he had committed the unpardonable sin. In the terror that he felt at the prospect of the loss of his soul, he pa.s.sed through much of the experience that enabled him to write the _Pilgrim's Progress_.

Bunyan became a preacher of G.o.d's word. Under trees, in barns, on the village green, wherever people resorted, he told them the story of salvation. Within six months after the Restoration, he was arrested for preaching without Episcopal sanction. The officers took him away from his little blind daughter. The roisterers of the Restoration thought a brazier was too coa.r.s.e to have feelings; yet Bunyan dropped tears on the paper when he wrote of "the many hards.h.i.+ps, miseries, and wants that my poor family were like to meet with, should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my heart than all besides. Oh, the thoughts of the hards.h.i.+p my poor blind one might undergo, would break my heart to pieces." In spite of his dependent family and the natural right of the freedom of speech, Bunyan was thrust into Bedford jail and kept a prisoner for nearly twelve years. Had it not been for his imprisonment in this "squalid den," of which he speaks in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, we should probably be without that famous work, a part of which, at least, was written in the jail.

In 1672, as a step toward restoring the Catholic religion, Charles II.

suspended all penal statutes against the dissenting clergy; Bunyan was thereupon released from jail.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BEDFORD BRIDGE, SHOWING GATES AND JAIL. _From an old print_.]

After his release, he settled down to his life's work of spreading the Gospel by both pen and tongue. When he visited London to preach, it was not uncommon for twelve hundred persons to come to hear him at seven o'clock in the morning of a week day in winter.

The immediate cause of his death was a cold caught by riding in the rain, on his way to try to reconcile a father and son. In 1688 Bunyan died as he uttered these words, "Take me, for I come to Thee."

His Work.--Bunyan achieved the distinction of writing the greatest of all allegories, the _Pilgrim's Progress_. This is the story of Christian's journey through this life, the story of meeting Mr.

Worldly Wiseman, of the straight gate and the narrow path, of the Delectable Mountains of Youth, of the valley of Humiliation, of the encounter with Apollyon, of the wares of Vanity Fair, "kept all the year long," of my lord Time-server, of Mr. Anything, of imprisonment in Doubting Castle by Giant Despair, of the flowery land of Beulah, lying beyond the valley of the Shadow of Death, through which a deep, cold river runs, and of the city of All Delight on the other side.

This story still has absorbing interest for human beings, for the child and the old man, the learned and the ignorant.

Bunyan wrote many other works, but none of them equals the _Pilgrim's Progress_. His _Holy War_ is a powerful allegory, which has been called a prose _Paradise Lost_. Bunyan also produced a strong piece of realistic fiction, the _Life and Death of Mr. Badman_. This shows the descent of a soul along the broad road. The story is the counterpart of his great masterpiece, and ranks second to it in point of merit.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BUNYAN'S DREAM. _From Fourth Edition Pilgrim's Progress, 1680_.]

General Characteristics.--Since the _Pilgrim's Progress_ has been more widely read in England than any other book except the _Bible_, it is well to investigate the secret of Bunyan's power.