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A History of English Literature

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We need do no more than mention two or three very bad adaptations of plays
of Shakspere to the Restoration taste in which Dryden had a hand; but his
most enduring dramatic work is his 'All for Love, or the World Well Lost,'
where he treats without direct imitation, though in conscious rivalry, the
story which Shakspere used in 'Antony and Cleopatra.' The two plays afford
an excellent illustration of the contrast between the spirits of their
periods. Dryden's undoubtedly has much force and real feeling; but he
follows to a large extent the artificial rules of the pseudo-classical
French tragedies and critics. He observes the 'three unities' with
considerable closeness, and he complicates the love-action with new
elements of Restoration jealousy and questions of formal honor. Altogether,
the twentieth century reader finds in 'All for Love' a strong and skilful
play, ranking, nevertheless, with its somewhat formal rhetoric and
conventional atmosphere, far below Shakspere's less regular but
magnificently emotional and imaginative masterpiece.

A word must be added about the form of Dryden's plays. In his comedies and
in comic portions of the others he, like other English dramatists, uses
prose, for its suggestion of every-day reality. In plays of serious tone he
often turns to blank verse, and this is the meter of 'All for Love.' But
early in his dramatic career he, almost contemporaneously with other
dramatists, introduced the rimed couplet, especially in his heroic plays.
The innovation was due in part to the influence of contemporary French
tragedy, whose riming Alexandrine couplet is very similar in effect to the
English couplet. About the suitability of the English couplet to the drama
there has always been difference of critical opinion; but most English
readers feel that it too greatly interrupts the flow of the speeches and is
not capable of the dignity and power of blank verse. Dryden himself, at any
rate, finally grew tired of it and returned to blank verse.

Dryden's work in other forms of verse, also, is of high quality. In his
dramas he inserted songs whose lyric sweetness is reminiscent of the
similar songs of Fletcher. Early in his career he composed (in pentameter
quatrains of alternate rime, like Gray's 'Elegy') 'Annus Mirabilis' (The
Wonderful Year--namely 1666), a long and vigorous though far from faultless
narrative of the war with the Dutch and of the Great Fire of London. More
important are the three odes in the 'irregular Pindaric' form introduced by
Cowley. The first, that to Mrs. (i. e., Miss) Anne Killigrew, one of the
Queen's maids of honor, is full, thanks to Cowley's example, of
'metaphysical' conceits and science. The two later ones, 'Alexander's
Feast' and the 'Song for St. Cecilia's Day,' both written for a musical
society's annual festival in honor of the patron saint of their art, are
finely spirited and among the most striking, though not most delicate,
examples of onomatopoeia in all poetry.

Dryden's prose, only less important than his verse, is mostly in the form
of long critical essays, virtually the first in English, which are prefixed
to many of his plays and poems. In them, following French example, he
discusses fundamental questions of poetic art or of general esthetics. His
opinions are judicious; independent, so far as the despotic authority of
the French critics permitted, at least honest; and interesting. Most
important, perhaps, is his attitude toward the French pseudo-classical
formulas. He accepted French theory even in details which we now know to be
absurd--agreed, for instance, that even Homer wrote to enforce an abstract
moral (namely that discord destroys a state). In the field of his main
interest, further, his reason was persuaded by the pseudo-classical
arguments that English (Elizabethan) tragedy, with its violent contrasts
and irregularity, was theoretically wrong. Nevertheless his greatness
consists throughout partly in the common sense which he shares with the
best English critics and thinkers of all periods; and as regards tragedy he
concludes, in spite of rules and theory, that he 'loves Shakspere.'

In expression, still again, Dryden did perhaps more than any other man to
form modern prose style, a style clear, straightforward, terse, forceful,
easy and simple and yet dignified, fluent in vocabulary, varied, and of
pleasing rhythm.

Dryden's general quality and a large part of his achievement are happily
summarized in Lowell's epigram that he 'was the greatest poet who ever was
or ever could be made wholly out of prose.' He can never again be a
favorite with the general reading-public; but he will always remain one of
the conspicuous figures in the history of English literature.

THE OTHER DRAMATISTS. The other dramatists of the Restoration period may be
dismissed with a few words. In tragedy the overdrawn but powerful plays of
Thomas Otway, a man of short and pathetic life, and of Nathaniel Lee, are
alone of any importance. In comedy, during the first part of the period,
stand Sir George Etherege and William Wycherley. The latter's 'Country
Wife' has been called the most heartless play ever written. To the next
generation and the end of the period (or rather of the Restoration
literature, which actually lasted somewhat beyond 1700), belong William
Congreve, a master of sparkling wit, Sir John Vanbrugh, and George
Farquhar. So corrupt a form of writing as the Restoration comedy could not
continue to flaunt itself indefinitely. The growing indignation was voiced
from time to time in published protests, of which the last, in 1698, was
the over-zealous but powerful 'Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness
of the English Stage' by Jeremy Collier, which carried the more weight
because the author was not a Puritan but a High-Church bishop and partisan
of the Stuarts. Partly as a result of such attacks and partly by the
natural course of events the pendulum, by the end of the period, was
swinging back, and not long thereafter Restoration comedy died and the
stage was left free for more decent, though, as it proved, not for greater,
productions.




CHAPTER IX

PERIOD VII. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. PSEUDO-CLASSICISM AND THE BEGINNINGS OF
MODERN ROMANTICISM [Footnote: Thackeray's 'Henry Esmond' is the greatest
historical novel relating to the early eighteenth century.]


POLITICAL CONDITIONS. During the first part of the eighteenth century the
direct connection between politics and literature was closer than at any
previous period of English life; for the practical spirit of the previous
generation continued to prevail, so that the chief writers were very ready
to concern themselves with the affairs of State, and in the uncertain
strife of parties ministers were glad to enlist their aid. On the death of
King William in 1702, Anne, sister of his wife Queen Mary and daughter of
James II, became Queen. Unlike King William she was a Tory and at first
filled offices with members of that party. But the English campaigns under
the Duke of Marlborough against Louis XIV were supported by the Whigs,
[Footnote: The Tories were the political ancestors of the present-day
Conservatives; the Whigs of the Liberals.] who therefore gradually regained
control, and in 1708 the Queen had to submit to a Whig ministry. She
succeeded in ousting them in 1710, and a Tory cabinet was formed by Henry
Harley (afterwards Earl of Oxford) and Henry St. John (afterwards Viscount
Bolingbroke). On the death of Anne in 1714 Bolingbroke, with other Tories,
was intriguing for a second restoration of the Stuarts in the person of the
son of James II (the 'Old Pretender'). But the nation decided for a
Protestant German prince, a descendant of James I through his daughter
Elizabeth, [Footnote: The subject of Wotton's fine poem, above, p. 158.]
and this prince was crowned as George I--an event which brought England
peace at the price of a century of rule by an unenlightened and sordid
foreign dynasty. The Tories were violently turned out of office; Oxford was
imprisoned, and Bolingbroke, having fled to the Pretender, was declared a
traitor. Ten years later he was allowed to come back and attempted to
oppose Robert Walpole, the Whig statesman who for twenty years governed
England in the name of the first two Georges; but in the upshot Bolingbroke
was again obliged to retire to France. How closely these events were
connected with the fortunes of the foremost authors we shall see as we
proceed.

THE GENERAL SPIRIT OF THE PERIOD. The writers of the reigns of Anne and
George I called their period the Augustan Age, because they flattered
themselves that with them English life and literature had reached a
culminating period of civilization and elegance corresponding to that which
existed at Rome under the Emperor Augustus. They believed also that both in
the art of living and in literature they had rediscovered and were
practising the principles of the best periods of Greek and Roman life. In
our own time this judgment appears equally arrogant and mistaken. In
reality the men of the early eighteenth century, like those of the
Restoration, largely misunderstood the qualities of the classical spirit,
and thinking to reproduce them attained only a superficial,
pseudo-classical, imitation. The main characteristics of the period and its
literature continue, with some further development, those of the
Restoration, and may be summarily indicated as follows:

1. Interest was largely centered in the practical well-being either of
society as a whole or of one's own social class or set. The majority of
writers, furthermore, belonged by birth or association to the upper social
stratum and tended to overemphasize its artificial conventions, often
looking with contempt on the other classes. To them conventional good
breeding, fine manners, the pleasures of the leisure class, and the
standards of 'The Town' (fashionable London society) were the only part of
life much worth regarding. 2. The men of this age carried still further the
distrust and dislike felt by the previous generation for emotion,
enthusiasm, and strong individuality both in life and in literature, and
exalted Reason and Regularity as their guiding stars. The terms 'decency'
and 'neatness' were forever on their lips. They sought a conventional
uniformity in manners, speech, and indeed in nearly everything else, and
were uneasy if they deviated far from the approved, respectable standards
of the body of their fellows. Great poetic imagination, therefore, could
scarcely exist among them, or indeed supreme greatness of any sort. 3. They
had little appreciation for external Nature or for any beauty except that
of formalized Art. A forest seemed to most of them merely wild and gloomy,
and great mountains chiefly terrible, but they took delight in gardens of
artificially trimmed trees and in regularly plotted and alternating beds of
domestic flowers. The Elizabethans also, as we have seen, had had much more
feeling for the terror than for the grandeur of the sublime in Nature, but
the Elizabethans had had nothing of the elegant primness of the Augustans.
4. In speech and especially in literature, most of all in poetry, they were
given to abstractness of thought and expression, intended to secure
elegance, but often serving largely to substitute superficiality for
definiteness and significant meaning. They abounded in personifications of
abstract qualities and ideas ('Laughter, heavenly maid,' Honor, Glory,
Sorrow, and so on, with prominent capital letters), a sort of a
pseudo-classical substitute for emotion. 5. They were still more fully
confirmed than the men of the Restoration in the conviction that the
ancients had attained the highest possible perfection in literature, and
some of them made absolute submission of judgment to the ancients,
especially to the Latin poets and the Greek, Latin, and also the
seventeenth century classicizing French critics. Some authors seemed
timidly to desire to be under authority and to glory in surrendering their
independence, individuality, and originality to foreign and
long-established leaders and principles. 6. Under these circumstances the
effort to attain the finished beauty of classical literature naturally
resulted largely in a more or less shallow formal smoothness. 7. There was
a strong tendency to moralizing, which also was not altogether free from
conventionality and superficiality.

Although the 'Augustan Age' must be considered to end before the middle of
the century, the same spirit continued dominant among many writers until
near its close, so that almost the whole of the century may be called the
period of pseudo-classicism.

DANIEL DEFOE. The two earliest notable writers of the period, however,
though they display some of these characteristics, were men of strong
individual traits which in any age would have directed them largely along
paths of their own choosing. The first of them is Daniel Defoe, who
belongs, furthermore, quite outside the main circle of high-bred and
polished fashion.

Defoe was born in London about 1660, the son of James Foe, a butcher, to
whose name the son arbitrarily and with characteristic eye to effect
prefixed the 'De' in middle life. Educated for the Dissenting ministry,
Defoe, a man of inexhaustible practical energy, engaged instead in several
successive lines of business, and at the age of thirty-five, after various
vicissitudes, was in prosperous circumstances. He now became a pamphleteer
in support of King William and the Whigs. His first very significant work,
a satire against the High-Church Tories entitled 'The Shortest Way with
Dissenters,' belongs early in the reign of Queen Anne. Here, parodying
extreme Tory bigotry, he argued, with apparent seriousness, that the
Dissenters should all be hanged. The Tories were at first delighted, but
when they discovered the hoax became correspondingly indignant and Defoe
was set in the pillory, and (for a short time) imprisoned. In this
confinement he began _The Review_, a newspaper which he continued for
eleven years and whose department called 'The Scandal Club' suggested 'The
Tatler' to Steele. During many years following his release Defoe issued an
enormous number of pamphlets and acted continuously as a secret agent and
spy of the government. Though he was always at heart a thorough-going
Dissenter and Whig, he served all the successive governments, Whig and
Tory, alike; for his character and point of view were those of the
'practical' journalist and middle-class money-getter. This of course means
that all his professed principles were superficial, or at least secondary,
that he was destitute of real religious feeling and of the gentleman's
sense of honor.

Defoe's influence in helping to shape modern journalism and modern
every-day English style was large; but the achievement which has given him
world-wide fame came late in life. In 1706 he had written a masterly short
story, 'The Apparition of Mrs. Veal.' Its real purpose, characteristically
enough, was the concealed one of promoting the sale of an unsuccessful
religious book, but its literary importance lies first in the
extraordinarily convincing mass of minute details which it casts about an
incredible incident and second in the complete knowledge (sprung from
Defoe's wide experience in journalism, politics, and business) which it
displays of a certain range of middle-class characters and ideas. It is
these same elements, together with the vigorous presentation and emphasis
of basal practical virtues, that distinguished 'Robinson Crusoe,' of which
the First Part appeared in 1719, when Defoe was nearly or quite sixty years
of age. The book, which must have been somewhat influenced by 'Pilgrim's
Progress,' was more directly suggested by a passage in William Dampier's
'Voyage Round the World,' and also, as every one knows, by the experience
of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who, set ashore on the island of Juan
Fernandez, off the coast of Chile, had lived there alone from 1709 to 1713.
Selkirk's story had been briefly told in the year of his return in a
newspaper of Steele, 'The Englishman'; it was later to inspire the most
famous poem of William Cowper. 'Robinson Crusoe,' however, turned the
material to account in a much larger, more clever, and more striking
fashion. Its success was immediate and enormous, both with the English
middle class and with a wider circle of readers in the other European
countries; it was followed by numerous imitations and it will doubtless
always continue to be one of the best known of world classics. The precise
elements of its power can be briefly indicated. As a story of unprecedented
adventure in a distant and unknown region it speaks thrillingly to the
universal human sense of romance. Yet it makes a still stronger appeal to
the instinct for practical, every-day realism which is the controlling
quality in the English dissenting middle class for whom Defoe was writing.
Defoe has put himself with astonishingly complete dramatic sympathy into
the place of his hero. In spite of not a few errors and oversights (due to
hasty composition) in the minor details of external fact, he has virtually
lived Crusoe's life with him in imagination and he therefore makes the
reader also pass with Crusoe through all his experiences, his fears, hopes
and doubts. Here also, as we have implied, Defoe's vivid sense for external
minutiae plays an important part. He tells precisely how many guns and
cheeses and flasks of spirit Crusoe brought away from the wreck, how many
days or weeks he spent in making his earthen vessels and his canoe--in a
word, thoroughly actualizes the whole story. More than this, the book
strikes home to the English middle class because it records how a plain
Englishman completely mastered apparently insuperable obstacles through the
plain virtues of courage, patience, perseverance, and mechanical ingenuity.
Further, it directly addresses the dissenting conscience in its emphasis on
religion and morality. This is none the less true because the religion and
morality are of the shallow sort characteristic of Defoe, a man who, like
Crusoe, would have had no scruples about selling into slavery a
dark-skinned boy who had helped him to escape from the same condition. Of
any really delicate or poetic feeling, any appreciation for the finer
things of life, the book has no suggestion. In style, like Defoe's other
writings, it is straightforward and clear, though colloquially informal,
with an entire absence of pretense or affectation. Structurally, it is a
characteristic story of adventure--a series of loosely connected
experiences not unified into an organic plot, and with no stress on
character and little treatment of the really complex relations and
struggles between opposing characters and groups of characters. Yet it
certainly marks a step in the development of the modern novel, as will be
indicated in the proper place (below, p. 254).

Defoe's energy had not diminished with age and a hard life, and the success
of 'Robinson Crusoe' led him to pour out a series of other works of
romantic-realistic fiction. The second part of 'Robinson Crusoe' is no more
satisfactory than any other similar continuation, and the third part, a
collection of moralizings, is today entirely and properly forgotten. On the
other hand, his usual method, the remarkable imaginative re-creation and
vivifying of a host of minute details, makes of the fictitious 'Journal of
the Plague Year' (1666) a piece of virtual history. Defoe's other later
works are rather unworthy attempts to make profit out of his reputation and
his full knowledge of the worst aspects of life; they are mostly very frank
presentations of the careers of adventurers or criminals, real or
fictitious. In this coarse realism they are picaresque (above, p. 108), and
in structure also they, like 'Robinson Crusoe,' are picaresque in being
mere successions of adventures without artistic plot.

In Defoe's last years he suffered a great reverse of fortune, paying the
full penalty for his opportunism and lack of ideals. His secret and
unworthy long-standing connection with the Government was disclosed, so
that his reputation was sadly blemished, and he seems to have gone into
hiding, perhaps as the result of half-insane delusions. He died in 1731.
His place in English literature is secure, though he owes it to the lucky
accident of finding not quite too late special material exactly suited to
his peculiar talent.

JONATHAN SWIFT. Jonathan Swift, another unique figure of very mixed traits,
is like Defoe in that he connects the reign of William III with that of his
successors and that, in accordance with the spirit of his age, he wrote for
the most part not for literary but for practical purposes; in many other
respects the two are widely different. Swift is one of the best
representatives in English literature of sheer intellectual power, but his
character, his aims, his environment, and the circumstances of his life
denied to him also literary achievement of the greatest permanent
significance. Swift, though of unmixed English descent, related to both
Dryden and Robert Herrick, was born in Ireland, in 1667. Brought up in
poverty by his widowed mother, he spent the period between his fourteenth
and twentieth years recklessly and without distinction at Trinity College,
Dublin. From the outbreak attending the Revolution of 1688 he fled to
England, where for the greater part of nine years he lived in the country
as a sort of secretary to the retired statesman, Sir William Temple, who
was his distant relative by marriage. Here he had plenty of time for
reading, but the position of dependence and the consciousness that his
great though still unformed powers of intellect and of action were rusting
away in obscurity undoubtedly did much to increase the natural bitterness
of his disposition. As the result of a quarrel he left Temple for a time
and took holy orders, and on the death of Temple he returned to Ireland as
chaplain to the English Lord Deputy. He was eventually given several small
livings and other church positions in and near Dublin, and at one of these,
Laracor, he made his home for another nine years. During all this period
and later the Miss Esther Johnson whom he has immortalized as 'Stella'
holds a prominent place in his life. A girl of technically gentle birth,
she also had been a member of Sir William Temple's household, was
infatuated with Swift, and followed him to Ireland. About their intimacy
there has always hung a mystery. It has been held that after many years
they were secretly married, but this is probably a mistake; the essential
fact seems to be that Swift, with characteristic selfishness, was willing
to sacrifice any other possible prospects of 'Stella' to his own mere
enjoyment of her society. It is certain, however, that he both highly
esteemed her and reciprocated her affection so far as it was possible for
him to love any woman.

In 1704 Swift published his first important works (written earlier, while
he was living with Temple), which are among the masterpieces of his
satirical genius. In 'The Battle of the Books' he supports Temple, who had
taken the side of the Ancients in a hotly-debated and very futile quarrel
then being carried on by French and English writers as to whether ancient
or modern authors are the greater. 'The Tale of a Tub' is a keen, coarse,
and violent satire on the actual irreligion of all Christian Churches. It
takes the form of a burlesque history of three brothers, Peter (the
Catholics, so called from St. Peter), Martin (the Lutherans and the Church
of England, named from Martin Luther), and Jack (the Dissenters, who
followed John Calvin); but a great part of the book is made up of
irrelevant introductions and digressions in which Swift ridicules various
absurdities, literary and otherwise, among them the very practice of
digressions.

Swift's instinctive dominating impulse was personal ambition, and during
this period he made long visits to London, attempting to push his fortunes
with the Whig statesmen, who were then growing in power; attempting, that
is, to secure a higher position in the Church; also, be it added, to get
relief for the ill-treated English Church in Ireland. He made the
friendship of Addison, who called him, perhaps rightly, 'the greatest
genius of the age,' and of Steele, but he failed of his main purposes; and
when in 1710 the Tories replaced the Whigs he accepted their solicitations
and devoted his pen, already somewhat experienced in pamphleteering, to
their service. It should not be overlooked that up to this time, when he
was already more than forty years of age, his life had been one of
continual disappointment, so that he was already greatly soured. Now, in
conducting a paper, 'The Examiner,' and in writing masterly political
pamphlets, he found occupation for his tremendous energy and gave very
vital help to the ministers. During the four years of their control of the
government he remained in London on intimate terms with them, especially
with Bolingbroke and Harley, exercising a very large advisory share in the
bestowal of places of all sorts and in the general conduct of affairs. This
was Swift's proper sphere; in the realization and exercise of power he took
a fierce and deep delight. His bearing at this time too largely reflected
the less pleasant side of his nature, especially his pride and arrogance.
Yet toward professed inferiors he could be kind; and real playfulness and
tenderness, little evident in most of his other writings, distinguish his
'Journal to Stella,' which he wrote for her with affectionate regularity,
generally every day, for nearly three years. The 'Journal' is interesting
also for its record of the minor details of the life of Swift and of London
in his day. His association, first and last, with literary men was
unusually broad; when politics estranged him from Steele and Addison he
drew close to Pope and other Tory writers in what they called the
Scriblérus Club.

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