Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/531

ENGLAND his best he would have been the greatest of English poets". Of another Catholic poet, William Habington, Crashaw's contemporary, but less than he, though occasionally writing fine passages, the same critic remarks that he is "creditably distinguished" from too many others "by a very strict and remarkable decency of thought and language".

But this was poetry which could not develop; it was a kind of second crop from the Elizabethan field, and it gradually withered away. Some time before its end, certain young poets, several of whom had been in France, exiled with the Queen, Henrietta Maria, and had caught a new spirit, turned to fresh ways of verse. Edmund Waller (1605-1687) led the way as early as 1620. Denham, Cowley, and Davenant (a Catholic and romantic, brought up in the house of Lord Brooke, Sir Philip Sidney's friend) followed him in varying degrees. These young poets initiated a change of far-reaching effect. In their hands poetry took on another aspect.

It discarded nearly all forms of meter except the heroic couplet, refused to use any but rather commonplace imagery, and turning away from all passionate emotion, tended to treat of subjects which belonged to the intellect rather than to imagination or feeling. Satire or didactic poetry gradually usurped almost the whole field. But this was not accomplished in full until Dryden came. It was he who stamped this school with its leading marks, and gave the heroic couplet its "long resounding march and energy divine". Yet the restricted and prosaic subject-matter of this verse—satiric, didactic, and argumentative work on religion ("The Hind and the Panther" was written in the cause of the Church) and politics—has made some critics deny to it, unjustly, the name of poetry. It is poetry of a certain restricted kind.

John Dryden (1631-1700), had he lived in a time more favorable to imaginative work, would have written verse more purely poetic. He had about him something of the amplitude, inventiveness, and freedom of the Elizabethans, and the history of his poetic development shows him passing from stage to stage of excellence. Though he was the crown and chief of the so-called "classical school", he was indeed deeply tinged with romantic feeling, and he himself knew and acknowledged that poetry was capable of a higher flight and wider range than it had ever taken in his own day. He was, moreover, a man of many powers. He was a prolific dramatist, and his critical writings have made an epoch in the history of English prose. In the course of his life he changed his politics and his religion; and though doubts have been cast upon his good faith in this respect, the most recent criticism is of opinion that he had nothing but spiritual ends to gain by his conversion to Catholicism. It is unfortunate that we cannot exonerate him as an author from the charge of that sensuality which mars a good deal of his dramatic writing—it is no better and sometimes worse than the immoral though brilliantly witty drama of his time. He himself at the close of his life wrote a full apology for this trait in his work.

Dryden's lines on Milton show the exalted estimate he had formed of his greater and earlier contemporary, and time has proved the general truth of it. The poetry of Milton (1608-1674) has become an English classic, and "Paradise Lost" has been translated into many tongues. It is regarded as the one great epic in English, and its fame has somewhat overshadowed that of Milton's earlier work—"L'Allegro", "Il Penseroso", "Comus", and "Lycidas"—poems within their own limits as perfect as anything he ever did. It is when we turn to his prose that we realize, from the immeasurable difference between it and his verse, how comparatively low the received standard of prose must have been. "Milton, the great architect of the paragraph and the sentence in verse, seems to be utterly ignorant of the laws of both in prose, or at least utterly incapable or careless of obeying those laws." Yet it contains some splendid passages more like poetry than prose, but the controversial matter which is the subject of most of it—to say nothing of its often violent manner—is scarcely interesting to the present generation. Prose in the seventeenth century had an eventful history, and in spite of the lack of a high common standard, produced some masterpieces. At the beginning of it there is the weighty work of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), embracing in many volumes matters of natural science, philosophy, history, ethics, worldly wisdom, even fiction, and in the "Essays" and the "Advancement of Learning" especially, adding to English classics. Lord Clarendon' s "History" presents a noble gallery of portraits; there is Sir Thomas Browne (accounted by his enthusiastic admirers one of the greatest prose writers in all the range of English), the finest of the rhetorical, fantastic, and wholly delightful set of writers who arose at this time, treating in a semi-speculative fashion a wide, various range of subject-matter. A number of religious and devotional works appear, among which the sermons of Jeremy Taylor stand high, and John Bunyan in "The Pilgrim's Progress" produced a master-piece of English. Nor must we forget the Authorized Version of the Bible, in 1611—a work of a wonderful prose style, eclectic, drawn from many sources, and yet having the appearance of absolute naturalness and simplicity. Preaching was a notable feature of the time, and the very long sermons of Tillotson, Barrow, Stillingfleet, and others make good literature. Dryden claimed Archbishop Tillotson as his master in prose, and it is when we come to Dryden's own work in the latter half of the century that we find prose beginning to take its place as "the other harmony" of verbal artistic expression. On the whole, it is the mark of Restoration prose to become conversational, and we may say that modern prose, easy, flexible, and fitted for general use, arose in Dryden's critical prefaces.

Dryden died in 1700, and with the opening of the eighteenth century we pass into an age of strongly marked characteristics. The Revolution by which the Stuart dynasty was displaced had been accomplished, involving, naturally, great changes in the fortunes of religious and political life, particularly disastrous to the Catholic Faith in England. In its earlier stages the century is filled by the party strife of Whigs and Tories, and by the religious movements known as Methodism and Deism—two strange opposites. In the upper classes there was a general lowering of spiritual and emotional temperature—to be enthusiastic was "bad form"—and religion and literature equally suffered. The growing middle class seems to some extent to have escaped this tepidity, and the preaching of Methodism touched their hearts.