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II

ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM 1600 TO 1700

THE Social history of seventeenth-century England broadly groups itself in three parts: that which preceded the dominant Puritanism of the Commonwealth; the dominant Puritanism itself; and what came after. All three of these phases of English life found adequate expression in lasting literature. An easy way to remind ourselves of these literary types is to glance at some records of publication in England during the three distinct periods of the seventeenth century.1 Between 1600 and 1605 appeared plays by Dekker, Ben Jonson, John Lyly, Shakspere, Marston, Middleton, Heywood, and Chapman; Fairfax's translation of Tasso, Lodge's of Josephus, and Florio's of Montaigne; "England's Helicon," Campion's “Art of English Poetry," and Davidson's "Poetical Rhapsody;" and, among many other lesser works, the last volume of Hakluyt's "Voyages." Between 1648 and 1652 appeared works by Fuller, Herrick, Lovelace, Milton, Francis Quarles, Jeremy Taylor, Baxter, Bunyan, Cowley, Hobbes, Vaughan, Davenant, Izaak Walton, and George Herbert. Finally, between 1695 and 1700 appeared plays by Colley Cibber, Southern, Congreve, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh; and works of one sort or another by Bentley, Blackmore, Defoe, Evelyn, Garth, Lord Shaftesbury, and Dryden; not to speak of Tate and Brady's version of the "Psalms." These random lists will

1 Throughout our study, the names recorded in Ryland's "Chronological Outlines of English Literature," published by Macmillan, should suffice for such purposes as that now in mind. Though sometimes slightly inaccurate, this admirably useful book is always trustworthy enough to warrant generalisation.

define, almost as clearly as lists made with thoughtful care, the chief facts which we should now keep in mind.

In the beginning of the century, even though Elizabeth's reign was very near its end, the literature which we call Elizabethan was at its height; and as the generations have passed, we begin to see how surely its central figure, the dominant figure of all English literature, is that of Shakspere. In the middle of the century there was more confusion; yet it takes no great knowledge of English letters to feel in the first place that the Elizabethan temper was no longer strong; and in the second place, that among the men who were then writing, there was one who—if not so surely central -rose almost as superior to the rest as Shakspere was fifty years before. That man, of course, is Milton. In the last five years of the century, when the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution had done their work, there was another group, less diverse than that of Cromwell's time, almost as homogeneous indeed as that of Elizabeth's, but as different from either of the others as the periwigs of Marlborough were from the jewelled caps of Walter Ralegh; and in this last group, as in both the others, one figure emerged from the rest. Here that figure is John Dryden, the first great maker of heroic couplets, and the first masterly writer of what has become modern English prose. It is worth our while to glance in turn at each of these literary periods,—the periods of Shakspere, of Milton, and of Dryden.

Elizabethan literature, in which Shakspere declares himself more and more supreme, is at once the first, and in many respects the greatest, of the schools or periods of letters which have come to constitute modern English literature as a whole. Marked throughout by the spontaneity, the enthusiasm, and the various versatility of the England which bred it, this period is clearly marked as well by the fact that it brought to final excellence two kinds of poetry, the lyric, and a little later the dramatic. In thinking of Elizabethan literature, then,

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one is apt to forget that it includes noble work of other than poetic sort; yet no reader of English can long forget that to this same school belongs the scientific work and the final aphorisms of Bacon. It was during the first fifteen years of the seventeenth century, too, that Walter Ralegh, in the Tower, wrote his "History of the World;" and we have only to glance back at Ryland's summaries of publication to see what masterly translations were steadily leading the way to that final masterpiece of translation, the English Bible of 1611. There were minor phases of literature meanwhile which posterity has been apt to forget; but the name of Hakluyt, the collector of so many records of explorations, is still familiar; and so perhaps is that of Richard Hooker, whose "Ecclesiastic Polity" remains the chief literary monument of religious controversy during the reign of Elizabeth. Poetry was first, then, and supreme; but there was fine, noble, thoughtful prose in philosophy and history alike; and not less characteristic of the time, though far less excellent as literature, was much matter of contemporary chronicle, like Hakluyt's "Voyages," and much religious controversy.

Throughout this literature there is one trait which the lapse of three centuries, with their slow, inevitable changes. of language, has tended to obscure. Yet whoever grows familiar even with the work of Shakspere by himself, and still more with that of his contemporaries as well, must grow to feel it. This is a sort of pristine alertness of mind, evident in innumerable details of Elizabethan style. One may best detect it, perhaps, by committing to memory random passages of Elizabethan literature. If the trait occurred only in the work of Shakspere, one might deem it a mere fresh miracle of his genius; but you will find it everywhere. In the thinner plays, for example, of Beaumont and Fletcher, the words, the sentences, the lines, the cadences, are full of refinements of phrase, subtleties of alliteration, swift glancing varieties of allusion, flashes alike of sentiment and of wit,

somehow beyond the instant perception of any English-born modern mind. Yet it is no mere juggling with words to say that the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Shakspere, and of all the dramatists, are truly plays; and plays are meant not for such serious study as the excellence of these has compelled from posterity, but rather to give such instant emotional pleasure as theatres afford us to-day, and as we have got best during the nineteenth century in Paris. Such literature as the Elizabethan world has left us, in short, bespeaks a public whose spontaneous alertness of mind, whose instant perception of every subtle variety of phrase and allusion, was more akin to that of our contemporary French than to anything which we are now accustomed to consider native to insular England. Elizabethan literature bears witness throughout to the spontaneous, enthusiastic versatility which the English temperament possessed in the spacious Elizabethan days.

By the middle of the century, after the convulsions of the Civil Wars, this trait had begun to fade out of English letters. Our brief list of mid-century publications revealed Milton, not as the chief of a school, but rather as the one great figure who subsisted amid a group of excellently deliberate minor poets and elaborate makers of overwrought rhetorical prose, often splendid, but never simple. Fuller, Taylor, and Walton fairly typify seventeenth-century prose; to complete our impression of it we might glance back at Burton, whose "Anatomy of Melancholy" appeared in 1621, and at Sir Thomas Browne, whose "Religio Medici" was in 1650 less than ten years old. In Milton's time, except for Milton himself, the creative impulse which had made Elizabethan literature so vital had subsided. The English imagination seemed checked by a variously developed sense of the inexorable limits of fact and of language. One term by which we may characterise this mid-century English literature, to distinguish it from the elder, is the term "deliberate." Mysteriously but certainly

the old spontaneity and versatility of the Elizabethan mind. had disappeared.

Deliberate, indeed, is an epithet which may help us to define the impression made by Milton himself. Throughout his poctry, even of that earlier period when in so many aspects he was still almost Elizabethan, one may often feel him tending toward his later poetic contemporaries in the conscious carefulness of his art; and surely in the great epic work of his later years, when solitary and alone he strove to give artistic expression to the dominant ideals of a Puritanism whose earthly hopes were as lost as ever Paradise was to our erring fathers, one feels amid his all but unequalled power a colossal deliberation. In the prose work which intervened between these two periods of his poetic production, there is incisive swiftness of thought and phrase, but on the whole its effect is hardly more marked by grimly passionate asperity of temper than by an almost conscious ponderousness of phrase. The literature of Cromwell's England was as different from that of Elizabeth's as Cromwell was from Walter Ralegh. The names of Shakspere and Milton tell the story.

The name of Dryden is as different from that of Milton as Milton's is from Shakspere's. Though Dryden's "Astræa Redux" was published seven years before "Paradise Lost," Dryden died in 1700 amid a literature whose poetry had cooled into something like the rational form which deadened it throughout the century to come, and whose drama had for forty years been revealing fresh phases of decadent lifelessness. For though at least the comedies of the Restoration and of the years which follow seemed to contemporaries full of wit and vitality, few bodies of literature in the world have proved more evanescent, and more corrupt, artistically as well as morally. But if poetry and the drama were for the moment sleeping, the latter seemingly for ever, the former for wellnigh a century to come, there were other phases of English thought, if not of English feeling, which were full of life.

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