Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/443

Rh 1579-1660.] ENGLISH LITERATURE 423 peace conduces to their enjoyment more than war ; they are willing, therefore, that the natural right which each possesses should be abridged, and with this end in view they enter into a covenant under which a government is set up over them, charged with maintaining peace, and attend ing to their welfare in other ways. After this has been done, the subjects cannot change their government without its consent. There are three possible forms of government, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, in each of which the sovereign power cannot be limited or divided. He appears to have thought the limited monarchy of England a vicious form, which events had shown to be practically untenable, the division of power between sovereign and democratic assembly having led to civil war. Of the three forms he much prefers monarchy, that is, absolute monarchy. He thinks it even more important that the sovereign should not be hampered by any opposition on the part of the priesthood, than that he should not be disturbed by the democracy. Accordingly he insists that the state and the church should be the same body under different aspects, the sovereign of the one being also the supreme head and ruler of the other. The sovereign, if he be a Christian, is to determine what religious dogmas shall be taught by the clergy, and to be the judge in the last resort on questions affecting those dogmas. &quot; This,&quot; as Mr Hallam observes, &quot;is not very far removed from the doctrine cf Hooker, and still less from the practice of Henry VIII.&quot; There is ample evidence that the philosophy of Hobbes exercised a baneful influence on the morality of a large number of educated men in the last half of the 1 7th century. But for his love of paradox, this influence would doubtless have been still greater. In an eloquent peroration, Mr Hallam thus sums up his examination of the political and ethical writings of the philosopher of Malmesbury : &quot; The political system of Hobbes, like his moral system, of which, in fact, it is only a portion, sears up the heart. It takes away the sense of wrong, that has consoled the wise and good in their dangers, the proud appeal of innocence under oppression, like that of Prometheus to the elements, uttered to the witnessing world, to the coming ages, to the just ear of heaven. It confounds the principles of moral approbation, the notions of good and ill desert, in a servile idolatry of the monstrous leviathan it creates, and after sacrificing all right at the altar of power, denies to the Omnipotent the prerogative of dictating the laws of His own worship.&quot; 1 VII. Reaction and Counter-Action, 1660-1700. At the Restoration, the king and his personal friends, who had lived abroad during the Commonwealth and Protectorate, brought to England a sense of fitness in things literary, and an aversion to what was grotesque and exaggerated in style, which they had picked up in the polished society of the French salons. In poetry, perhaps, no reform was needed. The prevalence of good taste and good sense, assisted by the example of Milton, who in his juvenile poems scorned to use the &quot;new-fangled toys&quot; of the fantastic poets, had already condemned the school which delighted in &quot; con ceits.&quot; There is a purity of form in the odes of Waller, in the works of Denham, and even in much that in his later years came from the pen of Cowley, which prevented ex ception being taken to them on the score of refinement. With regard to prose style and the drama the case was different. When men looked back for twenty years and more to the theatre as it was before the troubles, and re membered the plays of Jonson and Shirley, they felt that there was much need of a change. The gay young roue of Jonson s plays is a coarse, brutal, and insupportable personage ; his &quot;clenches&quot; and sallies are not wit, but the 1 Literature of Europe vol. iii. noisy outcome of a superficial cleverness, aided by a flow .of animal spirits. The easy badinage and well-managed double entendre of the French comic stage were new phenomena, of which that of England had never had the least conception. Nor, in tragedy, was there any inclina tion to return to the piled up agony &quot; horror on horror s head &quot; of the plots of Ford and Fletcher. Corneille had shown that the sentiments of honour and kve in their chivalrous intensity, when exhibited as in conflict with the harsh demands of circumstance and the world, are capable of producing the finest tragic situations. Dryden s heroic plays (The Indian Emperor, The Conquest of Granada, &c.) wero up to a certain point imitations of Corneille ; the extent to which they are sensational and crowded with incident was a feature taken from the theatre of Spain. The verse is rhymed in imitation of his French models : and in more than one of his prefaces or essays Dryden ably urged the claims of &quot; his long loved mistress, Rhyme,&quot; as an indispen sable decoration without hich the requisite weight and dignity of the tragic style could not be attained, In the article on the DRAMA (vol. vii. p. 434), notice has been taken of the chief works, both in tragedy and comedy, pro duced by our dramatists between the Restoration and the end of the century. Drydeu, whose power and insight grew with advancing age, recognized, after devoting himself to the heroic style for years, the superiority of Shakespeare, abandoned rhyme, and produced in 1690 his finest play Don Sebastian. But it was then too late to arrest the decay of the drama. The Dutch king who then sat on the Stuart throne, the Dutch army which had placed him there, the exultation of the &quot;Whigs and the dissenters, were all so many indications that the Teutonic element in the English mind was again in the ascendant. And the ascendency of the Teutonic element, then still more than in previous ages, on account of the gulf which had been established between the Teutonic and Latin races by the Reformation, implied the predominance of an energy which preferred strength to grace, the useful to the beautiful, industry to art. All these impulses were of course only confirmed by the religious and moral views which are grouped under the general name of Puritanism. The drama, therefore, being Decline in opposition to the prevailing spirit, fell ever lower and of the lower ; and though momentarily uplifted, in later times, drama, by the genius of a Goldsmith or a Sheridan, it has never regained its hold upon the nation. A modern critic has compared our drama, commencing with the Elizabethan age and ending with the present day, to a huge pyramid which stands on a broad and magnificent base, dwindles continually, and ends in nothing. Even at this day, there is still too much of the Puritan temper in general society to admit of the success of any proposal in parliament tending to the encouragement and support of the drama by the state, as a department of national culture. The prose style of the French writers was, at the time Prose of the Restoration, much superior to ours. We had no stvle - one to oppose to Segrais, Fontenelle, Balzac, Voiture, Menage, and Bouhours, to select only the principal names among the French critics and beaux esprit*. Nor was this superiority of our neighbours sensibly diminished till the next century, when Addison, Steele, and Swift redressed the balance. Yet it must be conceded to Dryden that the prose of his numerous essays, prefaces, and dedications, prefixed or subjoined to his published plays (especially the Essay on Dramatic Poesy), is incomparably more polished and more effective than any of the rude attempts at criticism which our writers had hitherto attempted. There is, how ever, a certain wildness clinging to Dryden s style, in spite of his efforts to improve it, and in spite of his wit and the promptitude of his vivacious intellect : one never feels quite secure against the occurrence of a solecism. Hobbes s