Halleck's New English Literature Part 35

The same influence which gave vigor, point, and definiteness to the prose, necessary for the business of the world, helped to dwarf the poetry. If both could not have advanced together, we may be thankful that the first part of the eighteenth century produced a varied prose of such high excellence.

The Cla.s.sic School.--The literary lawgivers of this age held that a rigid adherence to certain narrow rules was the prime condition of producing a masterpiece. Indeed, the belief was common that a knowledge of rules was more important than genius.

The men of this school are called _cla.s.sicists_ because they held that a study of the best works of the ancients would disclose the necessary guiding rules. No style that did not closely follow these rules was considered good. Horace, seen through French spectacles, was the cla.s.sical author most copied by this school. His _Epistles_ and _Satires_ were considered models.

The motto of the cla.s.sicists was polished regularity. Pope struck the keynote of the age when he said:--

"True wit is nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd."[1]

These two lines show the form of the "riming couplet," which the cla.s.sical poets adopted. There is generally a pause at the end of each line; and each couplet, when detached from the context, will usually make complete sense.

Edmund Waller (1606-1687), remembered today for his single couplet:--

"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light through c.h.i.n.ks that time has made,"

had used this form of verse before 1630; but it was reserved for Dryden, and especially for Pope, to bring the couplet to a high degree of perfection. A French critic advised poets to compose the second line of the couplet first. No better rule could have been devised for dwarfing poetic power and for making poetry artificial.

Voltaire, a French cla.s.sicist, said, "I do not like the monstrous irregularities of Shakespeare." An eighteenth-century cla.s.sicist actually endeavored to improve Hamlet's soliloquy by putting it in riming couplets. These lines from _Macbeth_ show that Shakespeare will not tolerate such leading strings nor allow the ending of the lines to interfere with his sense:--

"...Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against The deep d.a.m.nation of his taking-off."

A later romantic poet called the riming couplet "rocking-horse meter"; and said that the reading of many couplets reminded him of round trips on a rocking-horse.

Advances are usually made by overstressing some one point. The cla.s.sicists taught the saving grace of style, the need of restraint, balance, clearness, common sense. We should therefore not despise the necessary lesson which English literature learned from such teaching,--a lesson which has never been forgotten.

The Drama.--The theaters were reopened at the time of the Restoration. It is interesting to read in the vivacious _Diary_ of Samuel Pepys how he went in 1661 to see Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_, "a play of itself the worst that I ever heard." The next year he characterizes _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ as "the most ridiculous play that I ever saw." He liked the variety in _Macbeth_, and calls _The Tempest_ "the most innocent play that I ever saw."

The Restoration dramatists, who were dominated by French influence, so often sneered at morality and the virtues of the home, that they have paid the penalty of being little read in after times. The theater has not yet entirely recovered from the deep-seated prejudice which was so intensified by the coa.r.s.e plays which flourished for fifty years after the Restoration.

Although John Dryden is best known among a large number of Restoration dramatists,[2] he did better work in another field. William Congreve (1670-1729) made the mast distinctive contribution to the new comedy of manners. Descended from an old landowning family in Staffords.h.i.+re, he was for a while a mate of Jonathan Swift at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1691 Congreve was entered in the Middle Temple, London, to begin the study of law, but he soon turned playwright. His four comedies,--_The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer, Love for Love, The Way of the World_,--and one tragedy, _The Mourning Bride_, were all written in the last decade of the seventeenth century. After 1700 he wrote no more plays, although he lived nearly thirty years longer. On his death, in 1729, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Congreve attempts to picture the manners of contemporary society, and he does not penetrate far below the surface of life. He is not read for the depth of his thought, but for his humor and for the clear, pointed style of his prose comedies. George Meredith says:--

"Where Congreve excels all his English rivals is in his literary force, and a succinctness of style peculiar to him... He is at once precise and voluble. If you have ever thought upon style, you will acknowledge it to be a signal accomplishment. In this he is a cla.s.sic, and he is worthy of treading a measure with Moliere."

Congreve's best comedies are _Love for Love_ and _The Way of the World_. The majority of critics agree with Meredith in calling Miss Millimant, who is the heroine of the latter play, "an admirable, almost a lovable heroine." Meredith ill.u.s.trates one phase of his own idea of the comic spirit, by the language which Miss Millimant uses in accepting her lover: "If I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife." Congreve's peculiar genius is well shown in his ability to make her manner of speech reveal her characteristics. His plays are unfortunately disfigured with the coa.r.s.eness of the age.

The blemishes in the drama did not exist, however, without an emphatic contemporary protest. Jeremy Collier (1650-1729), a non-conforming bishop, in his _Short View of the Immorality of the Stage_ (1698), complains that the unworthy hero of one of Congreve's plays "is crowned for the man of merit, has his wishes thrown into his lap, and makes the happy exit."

Such attacks had their weight and prepared the way far the more moral sentimental comedies of Richard Steele and succeeding playwrights. The sacrifice of plot to moral purpose and the deliberate introduction of scenes designed to force an appeal to sentiment caused the later drama to deteriorate in a different way. We shall see that the natural hearty humor of Goldsmith's comedy, _She Stoops to Conquer_(1773), afforded a welcome relief from such plays.

JOHN DRYDEN, 1631-1700

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN DRYDEN. _From the painting by Sir G.o.dfrey Knellwe, National Portrait Gallery_.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BIRTHPLACE OF DRYDEN. _From a print._]

Life.--John Dryden was born in 1631 in the small village of Aldwinkle, in the northern part of Northamptons.h.i.+re. Few interesting facts concerning his life have come down to us. His father was a baronet; his mother, the daughter of a rector. Young Dryden graduated from Cambridge in 1654.

During his entire life, Dryden was a professional literary man; and with his pen he made the princ.i.p.al part of his living. This necessity often forced him against his own better judgment to cater to the perverted taste of the Restoration. When he found that plays had more market value than any other kind of literature, he agreed to furnish three plays a year for the king's actors, but was unable to produce that number. For fifteen years in the prime of his life, Dryden did little but write plays, the majority of which are seldom read to-day.

His only important poem during his dramatic period was _Annus Mirabilis_ (_The Wonderful Year_, 1666), memorable for the great London fire and for naval victories over the Dutch.

By writing the greatest political satire in the language at the age of fifty, he showed the world where his genius lay. During the last twenty years of his life, he produced but few plays. His greatest satires, didactic poems, and lyrics belong to this period. In his last years he wrote a spirited translation of Vergil, and retold in his own inimitable way various stories from Chaucer and Boccaccio and _Ovid_.

These stories were published in a volume ent.i.tled _Fables, Ancient and Modern_. Dryden died in 1700 and was buried in Westminster Abbey beside Chaucer.

It is difficult to speak positively of Dryden's character. He wrote a poem in honor of the memory of Cromwell, and a little later another poem, _Astraea Redux_, welcoming Charles II. He argued in stirring verse in favor of the Episcopal religion when that was the faith of the court; but after the accession of James II., who was a Catholic, Dryden wrote another poem to prove the Catholic Church the only true one. He had been appointed poet laureate in 1670, but the Revolution of 1688, which drove James from the throne, caused Dryden to lose the laureates.h.i.+p. He would neither take the oath of fealty to the new government nor change his religion. In spite of adversity and the loss of an income almost sufficient to support him, he remained a Catholic for the rest of his life and reared his sons in that faith.

He seems to have been of a forgiving disposition and ready to acknowledge his own faults. He admitted that his plays were disfigured with coa.r.s.eness. He was very kind to young writers and willing to help them with their work. In his chair at Will's Coffee House, discoursing to the wits of the Restoration about matters of literary art, he was one of the most prominent figures of the age.

His Prose.--Although to the majority of people Dryden is known only as a poet, his influence on prose has been so far-reaching as to ent.i.tle him to be called one of the founders of modern prose style.

The shortening of sentences has been a striking feature in the development of modern English prose. Edmund Spenser averages about fifty words to each of his prose sentences; Richard Hooker, about forty-one. One of the most striking sentences in Milton's _Areopagitica_ contains ninety-five words, although he crowds over three hundred words into some of his long sentences. The sentences in some of Dryden's pages average only twenty-five words in length.

Turning to Macaulay, one of the most finished masters of modern prose, we find that his sentences average twenty-two words. Dryden helped also to free English prose from the inversions, involutions, and parenthetical intricacies of earlier times. His influence on both prose and poetry were much the same. In verse he adopted the short, easily understood unit of the cla.s.sical couplet; and in prose, the short, direct sentence.

Dryden's prose deals chiefly with literary criticism. Most of his prose is to be found in the prefaces to his plays and poems. His most important separate prose composition is his _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, a work which should be read by all who wish to know some of the foundation principles of criticism.

Satiric Poetry.--No English writer has surpa.s.sed Dryden in satiric verse. His greatest satire is _Absalom and Achitophel_, in which, under the guise of Old Testament characters, he satirizes the leading spirits of the Protestant opposition to the succession of James, the brother of Charles II., to the English throne. Dryden thus satirizes Achitophel, the Earl of Shaftesbury:--

"Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin part.i.tions do their bounds divide; Else, why should he, with wealth and honor blest, Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?

Punish a body which he could not please, Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?

And all to leave what with his toil he won To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son.

In friends.h.i.+p false, implacable in hate, Resolved to ruin or to rule the state."

Zimri, the Duke of Buckingham, is immortalized thus:--

"Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long."

_Mac Flecknoe_ is another satire of almost as great merit, directed against a certain Whig poet by the name of Shadwell. He would have been seldom mentioned in later times, had it not been for two of Dryden's lines:--

"The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense."

_All for Love_, one of Dryden's greatest plays, shows the delicate keenness of his satire in characterizing the cold-blooded Augustus Caesar, or Octavius, as he is there called. Antony has sent a challenge to Octavius, who replies that he has more ways than one to die. Antony rejoins:--

"He has more ways than one; But he would choose them all before that one.

_Ventidius._ He first would choose an ague or a fever.

_Antony._ No; it must be an ague, not a fever; He has not warmth enough to die by that."

Dryden could make his satire as direct and blasting as a thunderbolt.

He thus describes his publisher:--

"With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair, With two left legs, and Judas-colored hair, And frowsy pores that taint the ambient air."

Argumentative or Didactic Verse.--Dryden is a master in arguing in poetry. He was not a whit hampered by the restrictions of verse. They were rather an advantage to him, for in poetry he could make more telling arguments in briefer compa.s.s than in prose. The best two examples of his power of arguing in verse are _Religio Laici_, written in 1682, to uphold the Episcopal religion, and _The Hind and the Panther_, composed in 1687, to vindicate the Catholic church. Verse of this order is called didactic, because it endeavors to teach or to explain something. The age of the Restoration delighted in such exercises of the intellect vastly more than in flights of fancy or imagination.

Lyrical Verse.--While most of Dryden's best poetry is either satiric or didactic, he wrote three fine lyrical poems: _Alexander's Feast, A Song for St. Cecilia's Day_, and _An Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew_. All are distinguished by remarkable beauty and energy of expression.

_Alexander's Feast_ is the most widely read of Dryden's poems. The opening lines of the Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew seem almost Miltonic in their conception, and they show great power in the field of lyrical poetry. Mistress Killigrew was a young lady of rare accomplishments in both poetry and painting, who died at the age of twenty-five. Dryden thus begins her memorial ode:--

"Thou youngest virgin daughter of the skies, Made in the last promotion of the blest; Whose palms, new plucked from Paradise, In spreading branches more sublimely rise, Rich with immortal green above the rest: * * * * *