The typical Elizabethan poet is Michael Drayton; who followed Spenser in pastoral, Daniel, Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare in sonnet, Daniel again in chronicle and legend, and Marlowe in mythological story, and whoDrayton and Daniel.yet remained himself. HisEndimion and Phoebein passages stands nearHero and Leander; hisEngland’s Heroical Epistles(1597) are in ringing rhetorical couplets; hisOdes(1606), like theBallad of Agincourtand theVirginian Voyage, forestall and equal Cowper’s or Campbell’s; hisNymphidia(1627) was the most popular of burlesque fairy poems; and his pastorals are full of graces and felicities. The work of Drayton that is least read and most often mentioned is hisPoly-Olbion(1612-1622), a vast and pious effort, now and then nobly repaid, to versify the scenery, legend, customs and particularities of every English county. The more recluse and pensive habit of Samuel Daniel chills his long chronicle poems; but with Chapman he is the clearest voice of Stoicism in Elizabethan letters; and his harmonious nature is perfectly expressed in a style of happy, even excellence, free alike from “fine madness” and from strain. Sonnet and epistle are his favoured forms, and in hisMusophilus(1599) as well as in his admirable proseDefence of Rhyme(1602), he truly prophesies the hopes and glories of thatillustre vulgare, the literary speech of England. All this patriotic and historic verse, like the earlier and ruderAlbion’s England(1586) of William Warner, or Fitzgeoffrey’s poem upon Drake, or the outbursts of Spenser, was written during or inspired by the last twenty years of the queen’s reign; and the same is true of Shakespeare’s and most of the other history plays, which duly eclipsed the formal, rusty-gray chronicle poem of the type of theMirror for Magistrates, though editions (1559-1610) of the latter were long repeated. Patriotic verse outside the theatre, however, full of zeal, started at a disadvantage compared with love-sonnet, song, or mythic narrative, because it had no models before it in other lands, and remained therefore the more shapeless.
The English love-sonnet, brought in by Wyatt and rifest between 1590 and 1600, was revived as a purely studious imitation by Watson in hisHekatompathia(1582), a string of translations in one of the exceptional measures thatSonnets.were freely entitled “sonnets.” But from the first, in the hands of Sidney, whoseAstrophel and Stella(1591) was written, as remarked above, about 1581, the sonnet was ever ready to pulse into feeling, and to flash into unborrowed beauty, embodying sometimes dramatic fancy and often living experience. These three fibres of imitation, imagination and confession are intertwisted beyond severance in many of the cycles, and now one, now another is uppermost. Incaution might read a personal diary into Thomas Lodge’sPhillis(1593), which is often a translation from Ronsard. Literal judges have announced that Shakespeare’sSonnetsare but his mode of taking exercise. But there is poetry in “God’s plenty” almost everywhere; and few of the series fail of lovely lines or phrasing or even of perfect sonnets. This holds of Henry Constable’sDiana(1592), of theParthenophil and Parthenopheof Barnabe Barnes (1593), inebriate with poetry, and of the stray minor groups,Alcilia, Licia, Caelia; while theCaelicaof Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, in irregular form, is full of metaphysical passion struggling to be delivered.Astrophel and Stella, Drayton’sIdea(1594-1619), Spenser’sAmorettiand Shakespeare’sSonnets(printed 1609) are addressed to definite and probably to known persons, and are charged with true poetic rage, ecstatic or plaintive, desperate or solemn, if they are also intermingled with the mere word-play that mocks or beguiles the ebb of feeling, or with the purely plastic work that is done for solace. In most of these series, as in Daniel’s paler but exquisitely-wroughtDelia(1591-1592), the form is that of the three separate quatrains with the closing couplet for emotional and melodic climax; a scheme slowly but defiantly evolved, through traceable gradations, from that stricter one of Italy, which Drummond and Milton revived, and where the crisis properly coincides with the change from octave to sestet.
The amorous mythologic tale in verse derives immediately from contemporary Italy, but in the beginning from Ovid, whoseMetamorphoses, familiar in Golding’s old version (1555-1557), furnished descriptions, decorations andMythic poems.many tales, while hisHeroidesgave Chaucer and Boccaccio a model for the self-anatomy of tragic or plaintive sentiment. Within ten years, between 1588 and 1598, during the early sonnet-vogue, appeared Lodge’sScillaes Metamorphosis, Shakespeare’sVenus and AdonisandRape of Lucrece, Marlowe’sHero and Leanderand Drayton’sEndimion and Phoebe. Shakespeare owed something to Lodge, and Drayton to Marlowe. All these points describe a love-situation at length, and save in one instance they describe it from without. The exception is Marlowe, who achieves a more than Sicilian perfection; he says everything, and is equal to everything that he has to say. InVenus and Adonisthe poet is enamoured less of love than of the tones and poses of lovers and of the beauty and gallant motion of animals, while in TheRape of Lucrecehe is intent on the gradations of lust, shame and indignation, in which he has a spectator’s interest. Virtuosity, or the delight of the executant in his own brilliant cunning, is the mark of most of these pieces.
If we go to the lyrics, the versified mythic tales and the sonnets of Elizabethan times for the kind of feeling that Molière’s Alceste loved and that Burns and Shelley poured into song, we shall often come away disappointed, and thinkLyric.the old poetry heartless. But it is not heartless, any more than it is always impassioned or personal; it is decorative. The feeling is often that of the craftsman; it is not of the singer who spends his vital essence in song and commands an answering thrill so long as his native language is alive or understood. The arts that deal with ivories or enamelling or silver suggest themselves while we watch the delighted tinting and chasing, the sense for gesture and grouping (inVenus and Adonis), or the delicate beating out of rhyme in a madrigal, or the designing of a single motive, or two contrasted motives, within the panel of the sonnet. And soon it is evident how passion and emotion readily become plastic matter too, whether they be drawn from books or observation or self-scrutiny. This is above all the case in the sonnet; but it is found in the lyric as well. The result is a wonderful fertility of lyrical pattern, a wonderfully diffused power of lyrical execution, never to recur at any later time of English literature. Wyatt had to recover the very form of such verse from oblivion, and this he did in the school of translation and adaptation. Not only the decasyllabic, but the lyric, in short lines had almost died out of memory, and Wyatt brought it back. From his day to Spenser’s there is not much lyric that is noteworthy, though in Gascoigne and others the impulse is seen. The introduction of Italian music, with its favourite metrical schemes, such as the madrigal, powerfully schooled and coloured lyric: in especial, the caressing double ending, regular in Italian but heavier in English, became common. The Italian poems were often translated in their own measure, line by line, and the musical setting retained. Their tunes, or other tunes, were then coupled with new and original poems; and both appeared together in the song-books of Dowland the lutanist, of Jones and Byrd (1588), and in chief (1601-1619) of Thomas Campion. The words of Campion’s songs are not only supremely musical in the wider sense, but are chosen for their singing quality. Misled awhile by the heresy that rhyme was wrong, he was yet a master of lovely rhyming, as well as of a lyrical style of great range, gaily or gravely happy. But, as with most of his fellows, singing is rather his calling than his consolation. The lyrics that are sprinkled in plays and romances are the finest of this period, and perhaps, in their kind, of any period. Shakespeare is the greatest in this province also; but the power of infallible and unforgettable song is often granted to slighter, gentler playwrights like Greene and Dekker, while it is denied to men of weightier build and sterner purpose like Chapman and Jonson. The songs of Jonson are indeed at their best of absolute and antique finish; but the irrevocable dew of night or dawn seldom lies upon them as it lies on the songs of Webster or of Fletcher. The best lyrics in the plays are dramatic; they must be read in their own setting. While the action stops, they seize and dally with the dominant emotion of the scene, and yet relieve it. The songs of Lodge and Breton, of Drayton and Daniel, of Oxford and Raleigh, and the fervid brief flights of the Jesuit Southwell, show the omnipresence of the vital gift, whether among professional writers of the journalistic type, or among poets whose gift was not primarily song, or among men of action and quality or men of religion, who only wrote when they were stirred. Lullaby and valentine and compliment, and love-plaint ranging from gallantry to desperation, are all there:and the Fortunate Hour, which visits commonly only a few men in a generation, and those but now and then in their lives, is never far off. But the master of melody, Spenser, left no songs, apart from his two insuperable wedding odes. And religious lyric is rarer before the reign of James. Much of the best lyric is saved for us by the various Miscellanies,A Handful of Pleasant Delights(1584), thePhoenix Nest(1593) and Davison’sPoetical Rhapsody(1602); while other such collections, likeEngland’s Helicon(1600), were chiefly garlands of verse that was already in print.
There is plenty of satiric anger and raillery in the spirit of the time, but the most genuine part of it is drawn off into drama. Except for stray passages in Spenser, Drayton and others, formal satire, though profuse, was a literary unreal thing, a pose in the manner of Persius or Juvenal, and tiresome in expression. In this kind only Donne triumphed. The attempts of Lodge and Hall and Marston and John Davies of Hereford and Guilpin and Wither are for the most part simply weariful in different ways, and satire waited for Dryden and his age. The attempt, however, persisted throughout. Wyatt was the first and last who succeeded in the genial, natural Horatian style.
Verse from Donne to Milton.—As the age of Elizabeth receded, some changes came slowly over non-dramatic verse. In Jonson, as in John Donne (1573-1631), one of the greater poets of the nation, and in many writers after Donne, mayMetaphysical or fantastic schools.be traced a kind of Counter-Renaissance, or revulsion against the natural man and his claims to pleasure—a revulsion from which regret for pleasure lost is seldom far. Poetry becomes more ascetic and mystical, and this feeling takes shelter alike in the Anglican and in the Roman faith. George Herbert (The Temple, 1633), the most popular, quaint and pious of the school, but the least poetical; Crashaw, with his one ecstatic vision (The Flaming Heart) and occasional golden stanzas; Henry Vaughan, who wrote from 1646 to 1678, with his mystical landscape and magical cadences; and Thomas Traherne, his fellow-dreamer, are the best known of the religious Fantastics. But, earlier than most of these are Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Habington with hisCastara(1634), who show the same temper, if a fitful power and felicity. Such writers form the devouter section of the famous “metaphysical” or “fantastic” school, which includes, besides Donne its founder, pure amorists like Carew (whose touch on certain rhythms has no fellow), young academic followers like Cartwright and Cleveland (in whom survives the vein of satire that also marks the school), and Abraham Cowley, who wrote from 1633 to 1678, and was perhaps the most acceptable living poet about the middle of the century. In hisLife of CowleyJohnson tramples on the “metaphysical” poets and their vices, and he is generally right in detail. The shock of cold quaintness, which every one of them continually administers, is fatal. Johnson only erred in ignoring all their virtues and all their historical importance.
In Donne poetry became deeply intellectualized, and in temper disquisitive and introspective. The poet’s emotion is played with in a cat-and-mouse fashion, and he torments it subtly. Donne’s passion is so real, if so unheard-of, and his brain so finely-dividing, that he can make almost any image, even the remotest, even the commonest, poetical. His satires, hisValentine, hisLitany, and his lyric or odic pieces in general, have an insolent and sudden daring which is warranted by deep-seated power and is only equalled by a few of those tragedians who are his nearest of kin. The recurring contrast of “wit” or intelligence, and “will” or desire, their struggle, their mutual illumination, their fusion as into some third and undiscovered element of human nature, are but one idiosyncrasy of Donne’s intricate soul, whose general progress, so far as his dateless poems permit of its discovery, seems to have been from a paganism that is unashamed but crossed with gusts of compunction, to a mystical and otherwordly temper alloyed with covetous regrets. TheAnatomy of the Worldand other ambitious pieces have the same quality amid their outrageous strangeness. In Donne and his successors the merely ingenious and ransacking intellect often came to overbalance truth and passion; and hence arose conceits and abstract verbiage, and the difficulty of finding a perfect poem, however brief, despite the omnipresence of the poetic gift. The “fantastic” school, if it contains some of the rarest sallies and passages in English, is one of the least satisfactory. Its faults only exaggerate those of Sidney, Greville and Shakespeare, who often misuse homely or technical metaphor; and English verse shared, by coincidence not by borrowing, and with variations of its own, in the general strain and torture of style that was besetting so many poets of the Latin countries. Yet these poets well earn the name of metaphysical, not for their philosophic phrasing, but for the shuttle-flight of their fancy to and fro between the things of earth and the realities of spirit that lie beyond the screen of the flesh.
Between Spenser and Milton many measures of lyrical and other poetry were modified. Donne’s frequent use of roughly-accentual, almost tuneless lines is unexplained and was not often followed. Rhythm in general came toRhythm.be studied more for its own sake, and the study was rewarded. The lovely cordial music of Carew’s amorous iambics, or of Wither’s trochees, or of Crashaw’s odes, or of Marvell’s octo-syllables, has never been regained. The formal ode set in, sometimes regularly “Pindaric” in strophe-grouping, sometimes irregularly “Pindaric” as in Cowley’s experiments. Above all, the heroic couplet, of the isolated, balanced, rhetorical order, such as Spenser, Drayton, Fairfax and Sylvester, the translator (1590-1606) of Du Bartas, had often used, began to be a regular instrument of verse, and that for special purposes which soon became lastingly associated with it. The flatteries of Edmund Waller and the Ovidian translations of Sandys dispute the priority for smoothness and finish, though the fame was Waller’s for two generations; but Denham’s overestimatedCooper’s Hill(1642), Cowley’sDavideis(1656), and even Ogilby’sAeneidmade the path plainer for Dryden, the first sovereign of the rhetorical couplet which throve as blank verse declined. Sonnet and madrigal were the favoured measures of William Drummond of Hawthornden, a real and exquisite poet of the studio, who shows the general drift of verse towards sequestered and religious feeling. Drummond’sPoemsof 1616 andFlowers of Zion(1623) are full of Petrarch and Plato as well as of Christian resignation, and he kept alive the artistry of phrasing and versification in a time of indiscipline and conflicting forms. William Browne has been named as a Spenserian, but hisBritannia’sPastorals (1613-1616), with their slowly-rippling and overflowing couplets which influenced Keats, were a medley of a novel kind. George Wither may equally rank among the lighter followers of Spenser, the easy masters of lyrical narrative, and the devotional poets. But hisShepherd’s Huntingand other pieces in his volume of 1622 contain lovely landscapes, partly English and partly artificial, and stand far above his pious works, and still further above the dreary satires which he lived to continue after the Restoration.
Of poets yet unmentioned, Robert Herrick is the chief, with his two thousand lyrics and epigrams, gathered inHesperidesandNoble Numbers(1648). His power of song and sureness of cadence are not excelled within his range ofHerrick.topic, which includes flowers and maidens—whom he treats as creatures of the same race—and the swift decay of both their beauties, and secular regret over this decay and his own mortality and the transience of amorous pleasure, and the virtues of his friends, and country sports and lore, and religious compunction for his own paganism. TheHesperidesare pure Renaissance work, in natural sympathy with the Roman elegiac writings and with the Pseudo-Anacreon. Cowley is best where he is nearest Herrick, and his posy of short lyrics outlives his “epic and Pindaric art.” There are many writers who last by virtue of one or two poems; Suckling by his adept playfulness, Lovelace and Montrose by a few gallant stanzas, and many a namelessThe long poem.poet by many a consummate cadence. It is the age of sudden flights and brief perfections. All the farther out of reach, yet never wholly despaired of or unattempted in England, was the “long poem,” heroical and noble, the “phantom epic,” that shadow of the ancient masterpieces,which had striven to life in Italy and France. Davenant’sGondibert(1651), Cowley’sDavideisand Chamberlayne’sPharonnida(1659) attest the effort which Milton in 1658 resumed with triumph. These works have between them all the vices possible to epic verse, dulness and flatness, faintness and quaintness and incoherence. But there is some poetry in each of them, and inPharonnidathere is far more than enough poetry to save it.
Few writers have found a flawless style of their own so early in life as John Milton (1608-1674). His youthful pieces show some signs of Spenser and the Caroline fantastics; but soon his vast poetical reading ran clear and lay atMilton.the service of his talent. His vision and phrasing of natural things were already original in theNativity Ode, written when he was twenty; and, there also, his versification was already that of a master, of a renovator. The pensive and figured beauty ofL’AllegroandIl Penseroso, two contrasted emblematic panels, the high innocent Platonism and golden blank verse of theComus(1634); the birth of long-sleeping power in theLycidas(1637), with its unapproached contrivance both in evolution and detail, where the precious essences of earlier myth and pastoral seem to be distilled for an offering in honour of the tombless friend;—the newness, the promise, the sureness of it all amid the current schools! The historian finds in these poems, with their echoes of Plato and Sannazzaro, of Geoffrey of Monmouth and St John, the richest and most perfect instance of the studious, decorative Renaissance style, and is not surprised to find Milton’s scholars a century later in the age of Gray. The critic, while feeling that the strictly lyrical, spontaneous element is absent, is all the more baffled by the skill and enduring charm. The sonnets were written before or during Milton’s long immersion (1637-1658) in prose and warfare, and show the same gifts. They are not cast in the traditional form of love-cycle, but are occasional poems; in metre they revert, not always strictly but once or twice in full perfection, to the Italian scheme; and they recall not Petrarch but the spiritual elegies or patriot exaltations of Dante or Guidiccioni.
Milton also had a medieval side to his brain, as theHistory of Britainshows. The heroic theme, which he had resolved from his youth up to celebrate, at last, after many hesitations, proved to be the fall of man. This, for one of his creed and for the audience he desired, was the greatest theme of all. Its scene was the Ptolemaic universe with the Christian heaven and hell inserted. The time, indicated by retrospect and prophecy, was the whole of that portion of eternity, from the creation of Christ to the doomsday, of which the history was sacredly revealed. The subject and the general span of the action went back to the popular mystery play; and Milton at first planned outParadise Lostas such a play, with certain elements of classic tragedy embodied. But according to the current theory the epic, not the drama, was the noblest form of verse; and, feeling where his power lay, he adopted the epic. The subject, therefore, was partly medieval, partly Protestant,—for Milton was a true Protestant in having a variant of doctrine shared by no other mortal. But the ordering and presentment, with their overture, their interpolated episodes or narratives, their journeys between Olympus, Earth and hell, invocations, set similes, battles and divine thunderbolts, are those of the classical epic. Had Milton shared the free thought as well as the scholarship of the Renaissance, the poem could never have existed. With all his range of soul and skill, he had a narrower speculative brain than any poet of equal gift; and this was well for his great and peculiar task. But whatever Milton may fail to be, his heroic writing is the permanent and absolute expression of something that in the English stock is inveterate—the Promethean self-possession of the mind in defeat, its right to solitude there, its claim to judge and deny the victor. This is the spirit of his devils, beside whom his divinities, his unfallen angels (Abdiel excepted), and even his human couple with their radiance and beauty of line, all seem shadowy. The discord between Milton’s doctrine and his sympathies inParadise Lost(1667) has never escaped notice. The discord between his doctrine and his culture comes out inParadise Regained(1671), when he has at once to reprobate and glorify Athens, the “mother of arts.” In this afterthought to the earlier epic the action is slight, the Enemy has lost spirit, and the Christ is something of a pedagogue. But there is a new charm in its even, grey desert tint, sprinkled with illuminations of gold and luxury. InSamson Agonistes(1671) the ethical treatment as well as the machinery is Sophoclean, and the theology not wholly Christian. But the fault of Samson is forgotten in his suffering, which is Milton’s own; and thus a cross-current of sympathy is set up, which may not be much in keeping with the story, but revives the somewhat exhausted interest and heightens a few passages into a bare and inaccessible grandeur.
The essential solitude of Milton’s energies is best seen in his later style and versification. When he resumed poetry about 1658, he had nothing around him to help him as an artist in heroic language. The most recent memories of the drama were also the worst; the forms of Cowley and Davenant, the would-be epic poets, were impossible. Spenser’s manner was too even and fluid as a rule for such a purpose, and his power was of an alien kind. Thus Milton went back, doubtless full of Greek and Latin memories, to Marlowe, Shakespeare and others among the greater dramatists (including John Ford); and their tragic diction and measure are the half-hidden bases of his own. The product, however, is unlike anything except the imitations of itself. The incongruous elements of theParadise Lostand its divided sympathies are cemented, at least superficially, by its style, perhaps the surest for dignity, character and beauty that any Germanic language has yet developed. If dull and pedantic over certain stretches, it is usually infallible. It is many styles in one, and Time has laid no hand on it. In these three later poems its variety can be seen. It is perfect in personal invocation and appeal; in the complex but unfigured rhetoric of the speeches; in narrative of all kinds; for the inlaying work of simile or scenery or pageant, where the quick, pure impressions of Milton’s youth and prime—possibly kept fresher by his blindness—are felt through the sometimes conventional setting; and for soliloquy and choric speech of a might unapproachable since Dante. To these calls his blank verse responds at every point. It is the seal of Milton’s artistry, as of his self-confidence, for it greatly extends, for the epical purpose, all the known powers and liberties of the metre; and yet, as has often been shown, it does so not spasmodically but within fixed technical laws or rather habits. Latterly, the underlying metricalictusis at times hard to detect. But Milton remains by far the surest and greatest instrumentalist, outside the drama, on the English unrhymed line. He would, however, have scorned to be judged on his form alone. His soul and temper are not merely unique in force. Their historic and representative character ensure attention, so long as the oppositions of soul and temper in the England of Milton’s time remain, as they still are, the deepest in the national life. He is sometimes said to harmonize the Renaissance and the Puritan spirit; but he does not do this, for nothing can do it. The Puritan spirit is the deep thing in Milton; all his culture only gives immortal form to its expression. The critics have instinctively felt that this is true; and that is why their political and religious prepossessions have nearly always coloured, and perhaps must colour, every judgment passed upon him. Not otherwise can he be taken seriously, until historians are without public passions and convictions, or the strife between the hierarch and the Protestant is quenched in English civilization.
Drama, 1580-1642.—We must now go back to the drama, which lies behind Milton, and is the most individual product of all English Literature. The nascent drama of genius can be found in the “University wits,” who flourishedDrama.between 1580 and 1595, and the chief of whom are Lyly, Kyd, Peele, Greene and Marlowe. John Lyly is the first practitioner in prose—of shapely comic plot and pointed talk—the artificial but actual talk of courtly masquers who rally one another with a bright and barren finish that is second nature.Campaspe,Sapho and Phao,Midas, and Lyly’s other comedies, mostly written from 1580 to 1591, are frail vessels, often filled with compliment, mythological allegory, or topical satire, andenamelled with pastoral interlude and flower-like song. The work of Thomas Kyd, especiallyThe Spanish Tragedy(writtenc.1585), was the most violent effort to put new wine into the old Senecan bottles, and he probably wrote the lost pre-ShakespearianHamlet. He transmitted to the later drama that subject of pious but ruinous revenge, which is used by Chapman, Marston, Webster and many others; and his chief play was translated and long acted in Germany. Kyd’s want of modulation is complete, but he commands a substantial skill of dramatic mechanism, and he has more than the feeling for power, just as Peele and Greene have more than the feeling for luxury or grace. To the expression of luxury Peele’s often stately blank verse is well fitted, and it is by far the most correct and musical before Marlowe’s, as hisArraignment of Paris(1584) and hisDavid and Bethsabeattest. Greene did something to create the blank verse of gentle comedy, and to introduce the tone of idyll and chivalry, in hisFriar Bacon and Friar Bungay(1594). Otherwise these writers, with Nashe and Lodge, fall into the wake of Marlowe.
Tamburlaine, in two parts (part i.c.1587),The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus,The Jew of Malta,Edward II.(the first chronicle play of genius), and the incomplete poemHero and Leanderare Christopher Marlowe’s title-deedsMarlowe.(1564-1593). He established tragedy, and inspired its master, and created for it an adequate diction and versification. His command of vibrant and heroic recitative should not obscure his power, in his greater passages, describing the descent of Helen, the passing of Mortimer, and the union of Hero and Leander, to attain a kind of Greek transparency and perfection. The thirst for ideal beauty, for endless empire, and for prohibited knowledge, no poet has better expressed, and in this respect Giordano Bruno is nearest him in his own time. This thirst is his own; his great cartoon-figures, gigantic rather than heroic, proclaim it for him: their type recurs through the drama, from Richard III. to Dryden’s orotund heroes; but inFaustusand inEdward II.they become real, almost human beings. His constructive gift is less developed in proportion, though Goethe praised the planning-out ofFaustus. The glory and influence of Marlowe on the side of form rest largely on his meteoric blank lines, which are varied not a little, and nobly harmonized into periods, and resonant with names to the point of splendid extravagance; and their sound is heard in Milton, whom he taught how to express the grief and despair of demons dissatisfied with their kingdom. Shakespeare did not excel Marlowe in Marlowe’s own excellences, though he humanized Marlowe’s Jew, launched his own blank verse on the tide of Marlowe’s oratory, and modulated, inRichard II., his master’s type of chronicle tragedy.
As the middle ages receded, the known life of man upon this earth became of sovereign interest, and of this interest the drama is the freest artistic expression. If Marlowe is the voice of the impulse to explore, the plays ofShakespeare.Shakespeare are the amplest freight brought home by any voyager. Shakespeare is not only the greatest but the earliest English dramatist who took humanity for his province. But this he did not do from the beginning. He was at first subdued to what he worked in; and though the dry pedantic tragedy was shattered and could not touch him, the gore and rant, the impure though genuine force of Kyd do not seem at first to have repelled him; if, as is likely, he had a hand inTitus Andronicus. He probably served with Marlowe and others of the school at various stages in the composition of the three chronicle dramas finally entitledHenry VI. But besides the high-superlative style that is common to them all, there runs through them the rhymed rhetoric with which Shakespeare dallied for some time, as well as the softer flute-notes and deeper undersong that foretell his later blank verse. InRichard III., though it is built on the scheme and charged with the style of Marlowe, Shakespeare first showed the intensity of his original power. But after a few years he swept out of Marlowe’s orbit into his own vaster and unreturning curve. InKing Johnthe lyrical, epical, satirical and pathetic chords are all present, if they are scarcely harmonized. Meantime, Lyly and Greene having displaced the uncouther comedy, Shakespeare learned all they had to teach, and shaped the comedy of poetic, chivalrous fancy and good-tempered high spirits, which showed him the way of escape from his own rhetoric, and enabled him to perfect his youthful, noble and gentle blank verse. This attained its utmost fineness inRichard II., and its full cordiality and beauty1590-1595.in the other plays that consummate this period—A Midsummer Night’s Dream,The Merchant of Venice, and one romantic tragedy,Romeo and Juliet. Behind them lay the earlier and fainter romances, with their chivalry and gaiety,The Comedy of Errors,Love’s Labour’s LostandThe Two Gentlemen of Verona. Throughout these years blank verse contended with rhyme, which Shakespeare after a while abandoned save for special purposes, as though he had exhausted its honey. The Italian Renaissance is felt in the scenery and setting of these plays. Thenovellafurnishes the story, which passes in a city of the Southern type, with its absolute ruler, its fantastic by-laws on which the plot nominally turns, and its mixture of real life and marvel. The personages, at first fainter of feature and symmetrically paired, soon assume sharper outline: Richard II. and Shylock, Portia and Juliet, and Juliet’s Nurse and Bottom are created. Thenovellahas left the earth and taken wings: the spirit is now that of youth and Fancy (or love brooding among the shallows) with interludes of “fierce vexation,” or of tragedy, or of kindly farce. And there is a visionary element, felt in the musings of Theseus upon the nature of poetry of the dream-faculty itself; an element which is new, like the use made of fairy folklore, in the poetry of England.
Tragedy is absent in the succeeding histories (1597-1599), and the comedies of wit and romance (1599-1600), in which Shakespeare perfected his style for stately, pensive or boisterous themes. Falstaff, the most popular as1596-1600.he is the wittiest of all imaginable comic persons, dominates, as to their prose or lower world, the two parts ofHenry IV., and its interlude or offshoot,The Merry Wives of Windsor. The play that celebrates Henry V. is less a drama than a pageant, diversified with mighty orations and cheerful humours, and filled with the love of Shakespeare for England. Here the most indigenous form of art invented by the English Renaissance reaches its climax. The Histories are peopled chiefly by men and warriors, of whom Hotspur, “dying in his excellence and flower,” is perhaps more attractive than Henry of Agincourt. But in the “middle comedies,”As You Like It,Much Ado, andTwelfth Night, the warriors are home at court, where women rule the scene and deserve to rule it; for their wit now gives the note; and Shakespeare’s prose, the medium of their talk, has a finer grace and humour than ever before, euphuism lying well in subjection behind it.
Mankind and this world have never been so sharply sifted or so sternly consoled, since Lucretius, as in Shakespeare’s tragedies. The energy which created them evades, like that of the sun, our estimate. But they were not1601-1608.out of relation to their time, the first few years of the reign of James, with its conspiracies, its Somerset and Overbury horrors, its enigmatic and sombre figures like Raleigh, and its revulsion from Elizabethan buoyancy. In the same decade were written the chief tragedies of Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Marston, Tourneur; andThe White Devil, andA Yorkshire Tragedy, andThe Maid’s Tragedy, andA Woman Killed with Kindness. But, in spite of Shakespeare’s affinities with these authors at many points,Hamlet,Macbeth,Lear,Othello, with the three Roman plays (written at intervals and not together), and the two quasi-antique playsTroilus and Cressida, andTimon of Athens, form a body of drama apart from anything else in the world. They reveal a new tragic philosophy, a new poetic style, a new dramatic technique and a new world of characters. In one way above all Shakespeare stands apart; he not only appropriates the ancient pattern of heroism, of right living and right dying, revealed by North’s Plutarch; others did this also; but the intellectual movement of the time, though by no means fully reflected, is reflected in his tragedies far more than elsewhere. The new and troublous thoughts on man and conductthat were penetrating the general mind, the freedom and play of vision that Montaigne above all had stimulated, here find their fullest scope; and Florio’s translation (1603) of Montaigne’s Essays, coming out between the first and the second versions of Shakespeare’sHamlet, counted probably for more than any other book. TheSonnets(published 1609) are also full of far-wandering thoughts on truth and beauty and on good and evil. The story they reveal may be ranked with the situations of the stranger dramas likeTroilusandMeasure for Measure. But whether or no it is a true story, and the Sonnets in the main a confession, they would be at the very worst a perfect dramatic record of a great poet’s suffering and friendship.
Shakespeare’s last period, that of his tragi-comedies, begins about 1608 with his contributions toPericles, Prince of Tyre. For unknown reasons he was moved, about the time of his retirement home, to record, as though in justiceLast period.to the world, the happy turns by which tragic disaster is at times averted.Pericles,The Winter’s Tale,Cymbeline, andThe Tempestall move, after a series of crimes, calumnies, or estrangements, to some final scene of enthralling beauty, where the lost reappear and love is recovered; as though after all the faint and desperate last partings—of Lear and Cordelia, of Hamlet and Horatio—which Shakespeare had imagined, he must make retrieval with the picture of young and happy creatures whose life renews hope even in the experienced. To this end he chose the loose action and free atmosphere of theroman d’aventure, which had already been adapted by Beaumont and Fletcher, who may herein have furnished Shakespeare with novel and successful theatrical effects, and who certainly in turn studied his handiwork. InThe Tempestthis tragi-comic scheme is fitted to the tales brought by explorers of far isles, wild men, strange gods and airy music. Even if it be true that in Prospero’s words the poet bids farewell to his magic, he took part later nevertheless in the composition ofHenry VIII.; and not improbably also inThe Two Noble Kinsmen. His share in two early pieces,Arden of Feversham(1592) andEdward III., has been urged, never established, and of many other dramas he was once idly accused.
Shakespeare’s throne rests on the foundation of three equal and master faculties. One is that of expression and versification; the next is the invention and presentation of human character in action; the third is the theatrical faculty. The writing of Dante may seem to us more steadily great and perfect, when we remember Shakespeare’s conceits, his experiments, his haste and impatience in his long wrestle with tragic language, his not infrequent sheer infelicities. But Dante is always himself, he had not to find words for hundreds of imaginary persons. Balzac, again, may have created and exhibited as many types of mankind, but except in soul he is not a poet. Shakespeare is a supreme if not infallible poet; his verse, often of an antique simplicity or of a rich, harmonious, romantic perfection, is at other times strained and shattered with what it tries to express, and attains beauty only through discord. He is also many persons in one; in hisSonnetshe is even, it may be thought, himself. But he had furthermore to study a personality not of his own fancying—with something in it of Caliban, of Dogberry and of Cleopatra—that of the audience in a playhouse. He belongs distinctly to the poets like Jonson and Massinger who are true to their art as practical dramatists, not to the poets like Chapman whose works chance to be in the form of plays. Shakespeare’s mastery of this art is approved now by every nation. But apart from the skill that makes him eternally actable—the skill of raising, straining and relieving the suspense, and bringing it to such an ending as the theatre will tolerate—he played upon every chord in his own hearers. He frankly enlisted Jew-hatred, Pope-hatred and France-hatred; he flattered the queen, and celebrated the Union, and stormed the house with hisfanfareover the national soldier, Henry of Agincourt, and glorified England, as inCymbeline, to the last. But in deeper ways he is the chief of playwrights. Unlike another master, Ibsen, he nearly always tells us, without emphasis, by the words and behaviour of his characters, which of them we are to love and hate, and when we are to love and when to hate those whom we can neither love nor hate wholly. Yet he is not to be bribed, and deals to his characters something of the same injustice or rough justice that is found in real life. His loyalty to life, as well as to the stage, puts the crown on his felicity and his fertility, and raises him to his solitude of dramatic greatness.
Shakespeare’s method could not be imparted, and despite reverberations in Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster and others he left no school. But his friend Ben Jonson, his nearest equal in vigour of brain, though not in poetical intuition,Jonson.was the greatest of dramatic influences down to the shutting of the theatres in 1642, and his comedies found fresh disciples even after 1660. He had “the devouring eye and the portraying hand”; he could master and order the contents of a mighty if somewhat burdensome memory into an organic drama, whether the matter lay in Roman historians or before his eyes in the London streets. He had an armoury of doctrine, drawn from thePoeticsand Horace, which moulded his creative practice. This was also partly founded on a revulsion against the plays around him, with their loose build and moral improbabilities. But in spite of his photographic and constructive power, his vision is too seldom free and genial; it is that of the satirist who thinks that his office is to improve mankind by derisively representing it. And he does this by beginning with the “humour,” or abstract idiosyncrasy or quality, and clothing it with accurately minute costume and gesture, so that it may pass for a man; and indeed the result is as real as many a man, and in his best-tempered and youthful comedy,Every Man in his Humour(acted 1598), it is very like life. In Jonson’s monumental pieces,Volpone or the Fox(acted 1605) andThe Alchemist(acted 1610), our laughter is arrested by the lowering and portentous atmosphere, or is loud and hard, startled by the enormous skill and energy displayed. Nor are the joy and relief of poetical comedy given for an instant byThe Silent Woman,Bartholomew Fair(acted 1614), orThe Staple of News, still less by topical plays likeCynthia’s Revels, though their unfailing farce and rampant fun are less charged with contempt. The erudite tragedies,Sejanus(acted 1603) andCatiline, chiefly live by passages of high forensic power. Jonson’s finer elegies, eulogies and lyrics, which are many, and his fragmentarySad Shepherd, show that he also had a free and lovely talent, often smothered by doctrine and temper; and his verse, usually strong but full of knots and snags, becomes flowing and graciously finished. His prose is of the best, especially in hisDiscoveries, a series of ethical essays and critical maxims; its prevalently brief and emphatic rhythms suggesting those of Hobbes, and even, though less easy and civil and various, those of Dryden. The “sons” of Jonson, Randolph and Browne, Shadwell and Wilson, were heirs rather to his riot of “humours,” his learned method and satiric aim, than to his larger style, his architectural power, or his relieving graces.
As a whole, the romantic drama (so to entitle the remaining bulk of plays down to 1642) is a vast stifled jungle, full of wild life and song, with strange growths and heady perfumes, with glades of sunshine and recesses of poisonedRomantic drama.darkness; it is not a cleared forest, where single and splendid trees grow to shapely perfection. It has “poetry enough for anything”; passionate situations, and their eloquence; and a number, doubtless small considering its mass, of living and memorable personages. Moral keeping and constructive mastery are rarer still; and too seldom through a whole drama do we see human life and hear its voices, arranged and orchestrated by the artist. But it can be truly said in defence that while structure without poetry is void (as it tended at times to be in Ben Jonson), poetry without structure is still poetry, and that the romantic drama is like nothing else in this world for variety of accent and unexpectedness of beauty. We must read it through, as Charles Lamb did, to do it justice. The diffusion of its characteristic excellences is surprising. Of its extant plays it is hardly safe to leave one unopened, if we are searchers for whatsoever is lovely or admirable. The reasons for the lack of steadfast power and artistic conscience lay partlyin the conditions of the stage. Playwrights usually wrote rapidly for bread, and sold their rights. The performances of each play were few. There was no authors’ copyright, and dramas were made to be seen and heard, not to be read. There was no articulate dramatic criticism, except such as we find casually in Shakespeare, and in the practice and theory of Jonson, who was deaf or hostile to some of the chief virtues of the romantic playwrights.
The wealth of dramatic production is so great that only a broad classification is here offered. George Chapman stands apart, nearest to the greatest in high austerity of sentiment and in the gracious gravity of his romanticChapman.love-comedies. But the crude melodrama of his tragedies is void of true theatrical skill. His quasi-historical French tragedies on Bussy d’Ambois and Biron and Chabot best show his gift and also his insufferable interrupting quaintness. His versions of Homer (1598-1624), honoured alike by Jonson and by Keats, are the greatest verse translations of the time, and the real work of Chapman’s life. Their virtues are only partially Homer’s, but the general epic nobility and the majesty of single lines, which in length are the near equivalent of the hexameter, redeem the want of Homer’s limpidity and continuity and the translator’s imperfect knowledge of Greek. A vein of satiric ruggedness unites Jonson and Chapman with Marston and Hall, the professors of an artificial and disgusting invective; and the same strain spoils Marston’s plays, and obscures his genuine command of the language of feverish and bitter sentiment. With these writers satire and contempt of the world lie at the root both of their comedy and tragedy.
It is otherwise with most of the romantic dramatists, who may be provisionally grouped as follows. (a) Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood are writers-of-all-work, the former profuse of tracts and pamphlets, the latter of treatisesDekker and Heywood.and compilations. They are both unrhetorical and void of pose, and divide themselves between the artless comedy of bustling, lively, English humours and pathetic, unheroic tragedy. But Dekker has splendid and poetical dreams, inOld Fortunatus(1600) andThe Honest Whore, both of luxury and of tenderness; while Heywood, as in hisEnglish TravellerandWoman killed with Kindness(acted 1603), excels in pictures of actual, chivalrous English gentlemen and their generosities. The fertility and volubility of these writers, and their modest carelessness of fame, account for many of their imperfections. With them may be named the large crowd of professional journeymen, who did not want for power, but wrote usually in partnership together, like Munday, Chettle and Drayton, or supplied, like William Rowley, underplots of rough, lively comedy or tragedy. (b) Amongst dramatists of primarily tragic and sombre temper, who in their best scenes recall the creatorMiddleton and Webster.of Angelo, Iago and Timon, must be named Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627), John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. Middleton has great but scattered force, and his verse has the grip and ring of the best period without a sign of the decadence. He is strong in high comedy, likeThe Old Law, that turns on some exquisite point of honour—“the moral sense of our ancestors”; in comedy that is merely graphic and vigorous; and in detached sketches of lowering wickedness and lust, like those inThe ChangelingandWomen beware Women. He and Webster each created one unforgettable desperado, de Flores inThe Changelingand Bosola inThe Duchess of Malfi(whose “pity,” when it came, was “nothing akin to him”). In Webster’s other principal play,Vittoria Corombona, or the White Devil(produced about 1616), the title-character is not less magnificent in defiant crime than Goneril or Lady Macbeth. The style of Webster, for all his mechanical horrors, distils the essences of pity and terror, of wrath and scorn, and is profoundly poetical; and his point of view seems to be blank fatalism, without Shakespeare’s ever-arching rainbow of moral sympathy. Cyril Tourneur, inThe Revenger’s Tragedy, is even more of a poet than Webster; he can find the phrase for half-insane wrath and nightmare brooding, but his chaos of impieties revolts the artistic judgment. These specialists, when all is said, are great men in their dark province, (c) The playwrights who may be broadly called romantic, of whom Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger are the chief, while they share in the same sombre vein, have a wider range and move more in the daylight. The three just named left a very large body of drama, tragic, comic and tragi-comic, in which their several shares can partly be discerned by metrical or other tests. Beaumont (d. 1616) is nearest the prime, with his vein of CervantesqueBeaumont and Fletcher.mockery and his pure, beautifully-broken and cadenced verse, which is seen in his contributions to Philaster andThe Maid’s Tragedy. Fletcher (d. 1625) brings us closest to the actual gaieties and humours of Jacobean life; he has a profuse comic gift and the rare instinct for natural dialogue. His verse, with its flood of vehement and expansive rhetoric, heard at its best in plays likeBonduca, cannot cheat us into the illusion that it is truly dramatic; but it overflows with beauty, like his silvery but monotonous versification with its endecasyllabics arrested at the end. In Fletcher the decadence of form and feeling palpably begins. His personages often face about at critical instants and bely their natures by sudden revulsions. Wanton and cheap characters invite not only dramatic but personal sympathy, as though the author knew no better. There is too much fine writing about a chastity which is complacent rather than instinctive, and satisfied with its formal resistances and technical escapes; so that we are far from Shakespeare’s heroines. These faults are present also in PhilipMassinger.Massinger (d. 1640), who offers in substantial recompense, not like Beaumont and Fletcher treasures of incessant vivacious episode and poetry and lyric interlude, but an often splendid and usually solid constructive skill, and a steady eloquence which is like a high table-land without summits.A New Way to Pay Old Debts(1632) is the most enduring popular comedy of the time outside Shakespeare’s, and one of the best. Massinger’s interweaving of impersonal or political conceptions, as inThe BondmanandThe Roman Actor, is often a triumph of arrangement; and though he wrote in the reign of Charles, he is saved by many noble qualities from being merely an artist of the decline, (d) A mass of plays, of which the authorship is unknown, uncertain or attached to a mere name,The Many.baffle classification. There are domestic tragedies, such asArden of Feversham; scions of the vindictive drama, likeThe Second Maiden’s Tragedy; historic or half-historic tragedies likeNero. There are chronicle histories, of which the last and one of the best is Ford’sPerkin Warbeck, and melodramas of adventure such as Thomas Heywood poured forth. There are realistic citizen comedies akin toThe Merry Wives, like Porter’s refreshingTwo Angry Women of Abingdon; there are Jonsonian comedies, vernacular farces, light intrigue-pieces like Field’s and many more. Few of these, regarded as wholes, come near to perfection; few fail of some sally or scene that proves once more the unmatched diffusion of the dramatic or poetic instinct. (e) Outside the regular drama there are many varieties: academic plays, likeThe Return from ParnassusandLingua, which are still mirthful; many pastoral plays or entertainments in the Italian style, likeThe Faithful Shepherdess; versified character-sketches, of which Day’sParliament of Bees, with its Theocritean grace and point, is the happiest; many masques and shows, often lyrically and scenically lovely, of which kind Jonson is the master, and Milton, in hisComus, the transfigurer; Senecan dramas made only to be read, like Daniel’s and Fulke Greville’s; and Latin comedies, likeIgnoramus. All these species are only now being fully grouped, sifted and edited by scholars, but a number of the six or seven hundred dramas of the time remain unreprinted.
There remain two writers, John Ford and James Shirley, who kept the higher tradition alive till the Puritan ordinance crushed the theatre in 1642. Ford is another specialist, of grave, sinister and concentrated power (reflectedFord and Shirley.in his verse and diction), to whom no topic, the incest of Annabella in’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, or the high crazed heroism of Calantha inThe Broken Heart, is beyond the pale, if only he can dominate it; as indeed he does, withoutcomplicity, standing above his subject. Shirley, a fertile writer, has the general characteristic gifts, in a somewhat dilute but noble form, of the more romantic playwrights, and claims honour as the last of them.
Prose from 1579 to 1660.—With all the unevenness of poetry, the sense of style, of a standard, is everywhere; felicity is never far off. Prose also is full of genius, but it is more disfigured than verse by aberration and wasted power. A central, classic, durable, adaptive prose had been attained by Machiavelli, and by Amyot and Calvin, before 1550. In England it was only to become distinct after 1660. Vocabulary, sentence-structure, paragraph, idiom and rhythm were in a state of unchartered freedom, and the history of their crystallization is not yet written. But in more than compensation there is a company of prose masters, from Florio and Hooker to Milton and Clarendon, not one of whom clearly or fully anticipates the modern style, and who claim all the closer study that their special virtues have been for ever lost. They seem farther away from us than the poets around them. The verse of Shakespeare is near to us, for its tradition has persisted; his prose, the most natural and noble of his age, is far away, for its tradition has not persisted. One reason of this difference is that English prose tried to do more work than that of France and Italy; it tried the work of poetry; and it often did that better than it did the normal work of prose. This overflow of the imaginative spirit gave power and elasticity to prose, but made its task of finding equilibrium the harder. Moreover, prose in England was for long a natural growth, never much affected by critical or academic canons as in France; and when it did submit to canons, the result was often merely manner. The tendons and sinews of the language, still in its adolescent power and bewilderment, were long unset; that is, the parts of speech—noun and verb, epithet and adverb—were in freer interchange than at any period afterwards. The build, length and cadence of a complex sentence were habitually elaborate; and yet they were disorganized, so that only the ear of a master could regulate them. The law of taste and measure, perhaps through some national disability, was long unperceived. Prose, in fact, could never be sure of doing the day’s work in the right fashion. The cross-currents of pedantry in the midst of simplicity, the distrust of clear plain brevity, which was apt to be affected when it came, the mimicries of foreign fashions, and the quaintness and cumbrousness of so much average writing, make it easier to classify Renaissance prose by its interests than by its styles.
The Elizabethan novel was always unhappily mannered, and is therefore dead. It fed the drama, which devoured it. The tales of Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, Margaret ofThe novel.Navarre, and others were purveyed, as remarked above, in the forgotten treasuries of Painter, Pettie, Fenton and Whetstone, and many of these works or their originals filled a shelf in the playwrights’ libraries. The first of famous English novels, Lyly’sEuphues(1578), and its sequelEuphues and his England, are documents of form.Lyly and euphuism.They are commended by a certain dapper shrewdness of observation and an almost witty priggery, not by any real beauty or deep feeling. Euphuism, of which Lyly was only the patentee, not the inventor, strikes partly back to the Spaniard Guevara, and was a model for some years to many followers like Lodge and Greene. It did not merely provide Falstaff with a pattern for mock-moral diction and vegetable similes. It genuinely helped to organize the English sentence, complex or co-ordinate, and the talk of Portia and Rosalind shows what could be made of it. By the arch-euphuists, clauses and clusters of clauses were paired for parallel or contrast, with the beat of emphatic alliteration on the corresponding parts of speech in each constituent clause. This was a useful discipline for prose in its period of groping. Sidney’s incomposite and unfinishedArcadia, written 1580-1581, despite its painful forced antitheses, is sprinkled with lovely rhythms, with pleasing formal landscapes, and even with impassioned sentiment and situation, through which the writer’s eager and fretted spirit shines. Both these stories, like those of Greene and Lodge, show by their somewhat affected, edited delineation of life and their courtly tone that they were meant in chief for the eyes of ladies, who were excluded alike from the stage and from its audience. Nashe’s drastic and photographic tale of masculine life,Jack Wilton, or The Unfortunate Traveller, stands almost alone, but some of the gap is filled by the contemporary pamphlets, sometimes vivid, often full of fierce or maudlin declamation, of Nashe himself—by far the most powerful of the group—and of Greene, Dekker and Nicholas Breton. Thus the English novel was a minor passing form; the leisurely and amorous romance went on in the next century, owing largely to French influence and example.
In criticism, England may almost be counted with the minor Latin countries. Sidney, in hisDefence of Poesy(1595, written about 1580), and Jonson, in hisDiscoveries, offer a well-inspired and lofty restatement of the currentCriticism.answers to the current questions, but could give no account of the actual creative writing of the time. To defend the “truth” of poetry—which was identified with all inventive writing and not only with verse—poetry was saddled with the work of science and instruction. To defend its character it was treated as a delightful but deliberate bait to good behaviour, a theory at best only true of allegory and didactic verse. The real relation of tragedy to spiritual things, which is admittedly shown, however hard its definition, in Shakespeare’s plays, no critic for centuries tried to fathom. One of the chief quarrels turned on metric. A few lines that Sidney and Campion wrote on what they thought the system of Latin quantity are really musical. This theory, already raised by Ascham, made a stir, at first in the group of Harvey, Sidney, Dyer and Spenser, called the “Areopagus,” an informal attempt to copy the Italian academies; and it was revived on the brink of the reign of James. But Daniel’s firm and eloquentDefence of Rhyming(1602) was not needed to persuade the poets to continue rhyming in syllabic verse. The stricter view of the nature and classification of poetry, and of the dramatic unity of action, is concisely given, partly by Jonson, partly by Bacon in hisAdvancement of LearningandDe Augmentis; and Jonson, besides passing his famed judgments on Shakespeare and Bacon, enriched our critical vocabulary from the Roman rhetoricians. Scholastic and sensible manuals, like Webbe’sDiscourse of Poetryand theArt of English Poesy(1589) ascribed to Puttenham, come in the rear.
The translators count for more than the critics; the line of their great achievements from Berners’Froissart(1523-1525) to Urquhart’sRabelais(1653) is never broken long; and though their lives are often obscure, their numberTranslators.witnesses to that far-spread diffusion of the talent for English prose, which the wealth of English poetry is apt to hide. The typical craftsman in this field, Philemon Holland, translated Livy, Pliny, Suetonius, Plutarch’sMoralsand Camden’sBritannia, and his fount of English is of the amplest and purest. North, in his translation, made from Amyot’s classic French, of Plutarch’sLives(1579), disclosed one of the master-works of old example; Florio, in Montaigne’sEssays(1603), the charter of the new freedom of mental exploration; and Shelton, inDon Quixote(1612), the chief tragi-comic creation of continental prose. These versions, if by no means accurate in the letter, were adequate in point of soul and style to their great originals; and the English dress of Tacitus (1591), Apuleius, Heliodorus, Commines,Celestinaand many others, is so good and often so sumptuous a fabric, that no single class of prose authors, from the time of More to that of Dryden, excels the prose translators, unless it be the Anglican preachers. Their matter is given to them, and with it a certain standard of form, so that their natural strength and richness of phrase are controlled without being deadened. But the want of such control is seen in the many pamphleteers, who are the journalists of the time, and are often also playwrights or tale-tellers, divines or politicians. The writings, for instance, of the hectic, satiric and graphic Thomas Nashe, run at one extreme into fiction, and at the other into the virulent rag-sheets of the Marprelate controversy, which is of historical and social but not of artisticnote, being only a fragment of that vast mass of disputatious literature, which now seems grotesque, excitable or dull.
Richard Hooker’sLaws of Ecclesiastical Polity(1594-1597), an accepted defence of the Anglican position against Geneva and Rome, is the first theological work of note in the English tongue, and the first of note since WycliffeHooker.written by an Englishman. It is a plea for reason as one of the safe and lawful guides to the faith; but it also speaks with admirable temper and large feeling to the ceremonial and aesthetic sense. The First Book, the scaffolding of the treatise, discusses the nature of law at large; but Hooker hardly has pure speculative power, and the language had not yet learnt to move easily in abstract trains of thought. In its elaboration of clause and period, in its delicate resonant eloquence, Hooker’s style is Ciceronian; but his inversions and mazes of subordinate sentence somewhat rack the genius of English. Later divines like Jeremy Taylor had to disintegrate, since they could not wield, this admirable but over-complex eloquence. The sermons (1621-1631) of Donne have the mingled strangeness and intimacy of his verse, and their subtle flame, imaginative tenacity, and hold upon the springs of awe make them unique. Though without artificial symmetry, their sentences are intricately harmonized, in strong contrast to such pellet-like clauses as those of the learned Lancelot Andrewes, who was Donne’s younger contemporary and the subject of Milton’s Latin epitaph.
With Francis Bacon (1561-1626) English philosophy began its unbroken course and took its long-delayed rank in Europe. His prose, of which he is the first high and various master in English, was shaped and coloured by hisBacon.bent as orator and pleader, by his immixture in affairs, by his speculative brain, and by his use and estimate of Latin. In his conscious craftsmanship, his intellectual confidence and curiosity, his divining faith in the future of science, and his resolve to follow the leadings of nature and experience unswervingly; in his habit of storing and using up his experience, and in his wide wordly insight, crystallized in maxim, he suggests a kind of Goethe, without the poetic hand or the capacity for love and lofty suffering. He saw all nature in a map, and wished to understand and control her by outwitting the “idols,” or inherent paralysing frailties of the human judgment. He planned but could not finish a great cycle of books in order to realize this conception. TheDe Augmentis Scientiarum(1623) expanded from the EnglishAdvancement of Knowledge(1605) draws the map; theNovum Organum(1620) sets out the errors of scholasticism and the methods of inductive logic; theNew Atlantissketches an ideally equipped and moralized scientific community. Bacon shared with the great minds of his century the notion that Latin would outlast any vernacular tongue, and committed his chief scientific writings to a Latin which is alive and splendid and his own, and which also disciplined and ennobled his English. TheEssays(1597, 1612, 1625) are his lifelong, gradually accumulated diary of his opinions on human life and business. These famous compositions are often sadly mechanical. They are chippings and basketings of maxims and quotations, and of anecdotes, often classical, put together inductively, or rather by “simple enumeration” of the pros and cons. Still they are the honest notes of a practical observer and statesman, disenchanted—why not?—with mankind, concerned with cause and effect rather than with right and wrong, wanting the finer faith and insight into men and women, but full of reality, touched with melancholy, and redeeming some arid, small and pretentious counsels by many that are large and wise. Though sometimes betraying the workshop, Bacon’s style, at its best, is infallibly expressive; like Milton’s angels, it is “dilated or condensed” according to its purposes. In youth and age alike, Bacon commanded the most opposite patterns and extremes of prose—the curt maxim, balanced in antithesis or triplet, or standing solitary; the sumptuous, satisfying and brocaded period; the movements of exposition, oratory, pleading and narrative. TheHistory of Henry VII.(1622), written after his fall from office, is in form as well as insight and mastery of material the one historical classic in English before Clarendon. Bacon’s musical sense for the value and placing of splendid words and proper names resembles Marlowe’s. But the master of mid-Renaissance prose is Shakespeare; with him it becomes the voice of finer and more impassioned spirits than Bacon’s—the voice of Rosalind and Hamlet. And the eulogist of both men, Ben Jonson, must be named in their company for his senatorial weight and dignity of ethical counsel and critical maxim.
As the Stuart rule declined and fell, prose became enriched from five chief sources: from philosophy, whether formal or unmethodical; from theology and preaching and political dispute; from the poetical contemplation of death; from the observation of men and manners; and from antiquarian scholarship and history. As in France, where the first three of these kinds of writings flourished, it was a time rather of individual great writers than of any admitted pattern or common ideal of prose form, although in France this pattern was always clearlier defined. The mental energy, meditative depth, and throbbing brilliant colour of the English drama passed with its decay over into prose. But Latin was still often the supplanter: the treatise of Lord Herbert of Cherbury,De Veritate, of note in the early history of Deism, and much of the writing of the ambidextrousHobbes.Thomas Hobbes, are in Latin. In this way Latin disciplined English once more, though it often tempted men of genius away from English.The Leviathan(1651) with its companion books onHuman NatureandLiberty, and Hobbes’ explosive dialogue on the civil wars,Behemoth(1679), have the bitter concision of Tacitus and the clearness of a half-relief in bronze. Hobbes’ speculations on the human animal, the social contract, the absolute power of the sovereign, and the subservience owed to the sovereign by the Church or “Kingdom of Darkness,” enraged all parties, and left their track on the thought and controversial literature of the century. With Ben Jonson and the jurist Selden (whose English can be judged from hisTable Talk), Hobbes anticipates the brief and clear sentence-structure of the next age, though not its social ease and amenity of form. But his grandeur is not that of a poet, and the poeticalFunereal prose.prose is the most distinctive kind of this period. It is eloquent above all on death and the vanity of human affairs; its solemn tenor prolongs the reflections of Claudio, of Fletcher’s Philaster, or of Spenser’s Despair. It is exemplified in Bacon’s EssayOf Death, in the anonymous descant on the same subject wrongly once ascribed to him, in Donne’s plea for suicide, in Raleigh’sHistory of the World, in Drummond’sCypress Grove(1623), in Jeremy Taylor’s sermons andHoly Dying(1651), and in Sir Thomas Browne’sUrn-Burial(1658) andLetter to a Friend. Its usual vesture is a long purple period, freely Latinized, though Browne equally commands the form of solemn and monumental epigram. He is also free from the dejection that wraps round the other writers on the subject, and a holy quaintness and gusto relieve his ruminations. TheReligio Medici(1642), quintessentially learned, wise and splendid, is the fullest memorial of his power. Amongst modern prose writers, De Quincey is his only true rival in musical sensibility to words.
Jeremy Taylor, the last great English casuist and schoolman, and one of the first pleaders for religious tolerance (in hisLiberty of Prophesying, 1647), is above all a preacher; tender, intricate, copious, inexhaustible in image andJeremy Taylor.picturesque quotation. From the classics, from the East, from the animal world, from the life of men and children, his illustrations flow, without end or measure. He is a master of the lingering cadence, which soars upward and onward on its coupled clauses, as on balanced iridescent wings, and is found long after in his scholar Ruskin. Imaginative force of another kind pervades Robert Burton’sAnatomy of MelancholyBurton.(1621), where the humorous medium refracts and colours every ray of the recluse’s far-travelled spirit. The mass of Latin citation, woven, not quilted, into Burton’s style, is another proof of the vitality of the cosmopolitan language. Burton and Browne owe much to the pre-critical learning of their time, which yields up such precious savours to their fancy, that we may be thankful for the delay of more precise science andscholarship. Fancy, too, of a suddener and wittier sort, preserves some of the ample labours of Thomas Fuller, which are scattered over the years 1631-1662; and theLivesandCompleat Angler(1653) of Izaak Walton are unspoilt, happy or pious pieces of idyllic prose. No adequate note on the secular or sacred learning of the time can here be given; on Camden, with his vast erudition, historical, antiquarian and comparatively critical (Britannia, in Latin, 1586); or on Ussher, with his patristic and chronological learning, one of the manysavantsof the Anglican church. Other divines of the same camp pleaded, in a plainer style than Taylor, for freedom of personal judgment and against the multiplying of “vitals in religion”; the chief were Chillingworth, one of the closest of English apologists, in hisReligion of Protestants(1638), and John Hales of Eton. The Platonists, or rather Plotinists, of Cambridge, who form a curious digression in the history of modern philosophy, produced two writers, John Smith and Henry More, of an exalted and esoteric prose, more directly inspired by Greece than any other of the time; and their champion of erudition, Cudworth, in hisTrue Intellectual System, gave some form to their doctrine.
Above the vast body of pamphlets and disputatious writing that form the historian’s material stands Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon’sHistory of the Rebellion, printed in 1702-1704, thirty years after his death. Historical writingClarendon.hitherto, but for Bacon’sHenry VII., had been tentative though profuse. Raleigh’s vast disquisition upon all things,The History of the World(1614), survives by passages and poetic splendours; gallantly written second-hand works like Knolles’sHistory of the Turks, and the rhetoricalHistory of the Long Parliamentby May, had failed to give England rank with France and Italy. Clarendon’s book, one of the greatest of memoirs and most vivid of portrait-galleries, spiritually unappreciative of the other side, but full of a subtle discrimination of character and political motive, brings its author into line with Retz and Saint-Simon, the watchers and recorders and sometimes the makers of contemporary history. Clarendon’sLife, above all the picture of Falkland and his friends, is a personal record of the delightful sort in which England was thus far infertile. He is the last old master of prose, using and sustaining the long, sinuous sentence, unworkable in weaker hands. He is the last, for Milton’sMilton’s prose.polemic prose, hurled from the opposite camp, was written between 1643 and 1660. Whether reviling bishops or royal privilege or indissoluble monogamy, or recalling his own youth and aims; or claiming liberty for print inAreopagitica(1644); in his demonic defiances, or angelic calls to arms, or his animal eruptions of spite and hatred, Milton leaves us with a sense of the motive energies that were to be transformed intoParadise LostandSamson. His sentences are ungainly and often inharmonious, but often irresistible; he rigidly withstood the tendencies of form, in prose as in verse, that Dryden was to represent, and thus was true to his own literary dynasty.
A special outlying position belongs to the Authorized Version (1611) of the Bible, the late fruit of the long toil that had begun with Tyndale’s, and, on the side of style, with the Wycliffite translations. More scholarly than all theThe Authorized Version.preceding versions which it utilized, it won its incomparable form, not so much because of the “grand style that was in the air,” which would have been the worst of models, as because the style had been already tested and ennobled by generations of translators. Its effect on poetry and letters was for some time far smaller than its effect on the national life at large, but it was the greatest translation—being of a whole literature, or rather of two literatures—in an age of great translations.
Some other kinds of writing soften the transition to Restoration prose. The vast catalogue of Characters numbers hundreds of titles. Deriving from Theophrastus, who was edited by Casaubon in 1592, they are yet another Renaissance form that England shared with France. But in English hands, failing a La Bruyère—in Hall’s, in Overbury’s, even in those of the gay and skilful Earle (Microcosmographie, 1628)—the Character is a mere list of the attributes and oddities of a type or calling. It is to the Jonsonian drama of humours what the Pensée, or detached remark, practised by Bishop Hall and later by Butler and Halifax, is to the Essay. These works tended long to be commonplace or didactic, as the popularResolvesof Owen Feltham shows. Cowley was the first essayist to come down from the desk and talk as to his equals in easy phrases of middle length. A time of dissension was not the best for this kind of peaceful, detached writing. The letters of James Howell, the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and the memoirs of Kenelm Digby belong rather to the older and more mannered than to the more modern form, though Howell’s English is in the plainer and quicker movement.
IV. Restoration Period
Literature from 1660 to 1700.—The Renaissance of letters in England entered on a fresh and peculiar phase in the third quarter of the century. The balance of intellectual and artistic power in Europe had completely shifted since 1580. Inspiration had died down in Italy, and its older classics were no longer a stimulus. The Spanish drama had flourished, but its influence though real was scattered and indirect. The Germanic countries were slowly emerging into literature; England they scarcely touched. But the literary empire of France began to declare itself both in Northern and Southern lands, and within half a century was assured. Under this empire the English genius partly fell, though it soon asserted its own equality, and by 1720 had so reacted upon France as more than to repay the debt. Thus between 1660 and 1700 is prepared a temporary dual controlFrench influence.of European letters. But in the age of Dryden France gave England more than it received; it gave more than it had ever given since the age of Chaucer. During Charles II.’s days Racine, Molière, La Fontaine and Bossuet ran the best of their course. Cavalier exiles like Waller, Cowley and Hobbes had come back from the winter of their discontent in Paris, and Saint-Evremond, the typicalbel espritand critic, settled long in England. A vast body of translations from the French is recounted, including latterly the works of the Protestant refugees printed in the free Low Countries or in England. Naturally this influence told most strongly on the social forms of verse and prose—upon comedy and satire, upon criticism and maxim and epigram, while it also affected theology and thought. And this meant the Renaissance once more, still unexhausted, only working less immediately and in fresh if narrower channels. Greek literature, Plato and Homer and the dramatists, became dimmer; the secondary forms of Latin poetry came to the fore, especially those of Juvenal and the satirists, and thepedestris sermo, epistolary and critical, of Horace. These had some direct influence, as Dryden’s translation of them, accompanying his Virgil and Lucretius, may show. But they came commended by Boileau, their chief modernizer, and in their train was the fashion of gallant, epigrammatic and social verse. The tragedy of Corneille and Racine, developed originally from the Senecan drama, contended with the traditions of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and was reinforced by that of the correcter Jonson, in shaping the new theatre of England. The French codifiers, who were often also the distorters, of Aristotle’sPoeticsand Horace’sArs poëtica, furnished a canonical body of criticism on the epic and the drama, to which Dryden is half a disciple and half a rebel. All this implied at once a loss of the larger and fuller inspirations of poetry, a decadence in its great and primary forms, epic, lyric and tragic, and a disposition, in default of such creative power, to turn and take stock of past production. In England, therefore, it is the age of secondary verse and of nascent, often searching criticism.