Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/445

Rh 1660-1700.] ENGLISH LIT A T U R E 425 The Paradise Lost is indisputably the work of a great and lofty mind, of a mind armed by nature with an astonish ing moral energy, and equipped with powers of imagination and conception suitable to the charge of a vast enterprise. This is the more apparent, because the diction of the poem certainly falls below the standard of purity and evenness which the best writers of the day had reached, while the peculiar nature of his subject involved Milton in the greatest difficulties. A number of awkward and ill-sound ing words, the use of which would fix the note of pedantry on any one else than Milton, were formed by him from the Latin, and freely employed in the Paradise Lost; how injudiciously, the mere fact that not one of them has held its ground and come into common use is sufficient to prove. The subject, belonging neither to history nor legend, so that details could not be supplied by tradition, and could only be invented at the imminent risk of profaneness, was baffling by its very grandeur and simplicity. It did not in itself present a sufficiency of changes and incidents to furnish out the material of a long epic composition ; hence Milton was obliged to have recourse to episodes, with which nearly half the poem is taken up. It is noteworthy how weighty and dignified a rhythm blank verse becomes in his hands. Never, as used by him, does it even tend to be the dull, insignificant, tiresome metre which it was in the hands of later writers, e.g., Thomson, Young, and even Words worth, in their negligent hours. Milton, in whose eyes the Cavaliers of the Restoration were &quot; The sons Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine,&quot; neither wished nor expected to be read at court. Forty years later, when counter-action had accomplished the Re volution, and Whiggism had secured much of the ground from which its parent Puritanism had been contemptuously thrust back, Whig critics like Addison found no difficulty in gaining a hearing, when they pressed upon general society the consideration of the surpassing claims of the Paradise Lost to the admiration of Englishmen. In the department of history, the reaction produced, in Clarendon s History of the Rebellion, a masterly and endur ing work. The writers of the counter-action were also busy in this field ; and Burnet s History of the Reformation (1679) was thought to lend so much support to Protestant and liberal principles that he received the thanks of the House of Commons for writing it. The materialistic empiricism of Hobbes gave place in this period to what has been called the sensistic empiricism, or sensationalism, of Locke. Inasmuch as this philosopher struck two important blows at principles which the Whig- Puritans detested, at the principle of authority, by deriving all human knowledge from experience, and at the doctrine which ascribes reality both to the accidents, or sensible qualities, of objects, and to the substances in which they are supposed to inhere, by (with Descartes) awarding mere subjectivity to accidents, and relegating substance to the region of the unknowable, he may properly be regarded as the philosopher of the counter-action. ockc s The first book of the Essay on the Human Understanding ssa y- (1689) is devoted to the endeavour to disprove the doctrine of innate ideas. Yet, when we proceed to examine Locke s own view of the origin of our knowledge, it would appear at first sight that he admits one source which is independent of the reports of sense. Our knowledge, he say, is made up partly of ideas of sensation, partly of ideas of reflection. These last are supplied to the mind by its own operations ; we know that we think, believe, doubt, will, love, ttc. Now, if these operations were assumed to have any other basis than sensible experience, ideas of reflection might be a source of knowledge independent of the senses. But as his argument proceeds, it is evident that Locke had no such meaning. All such mental operations, in his view, are de pendent on the mind s having previously been supplied with ideas by the senses. &quot; In time the mind comes to reflect on its own operations about the ideas got by sensation, and thereby stores itself with a new set of ideas, which I call ideas of reflection.&quot; This and many similar passages are decisive as to Locke s belief, that there is but one original gate of ideas, viz., the senses. The mind at birth is a tabula rasa, or, to use his own illustration, a &quot; sheet of white paper ; &quot; whatever knowledge it afterwards acquires is written on it by the finger of experience. Thi? denial of i knowledge was not effectually confuted till the rise of Kant, near the close of the 18th century. It followed from Locke s principles that belief in revealed religion (which in his case was perfectly sincere) was simply and entirely a question of external evidence. If the evidence for the truth of the alleged fact or doctrine appeared sufficient, the mind would accept it ; if not, reject it ; but no principle inherent in its own constitution could be appealed to in either case to aid its judgment; for on Locke s system no such principles existed. VIII. The Age of Queen Anne, 1700-1729. Weary of life, Dryden had descended into the tomb; and his mantle had fallen on no poet. Grateful for support manfully rendered when all the world was against him, he had, in some moving and musical lines, designated in Congreve the successor to his fame &quot; Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue, But shade those laurels which descend to you : &quot; but that cold man of fashion never rose above the point which he had reached in the Mourning Bride. A poet, however, appeared before long, but he was a Whig poet ; that is, he represented respectability, common-sense, and the juste milieu; the cause which fires the blood, the ideal which kindles the imagination, were btrange to him. This was Addison, whose Campaign (1704), an heroic poem on Addison. the battle of Blenheim, is much in the style of that portion of Dryden s Annus Jfirabilis which describes the duke of York s victory over the Dutch fleet, but is written with more care and more concentration. To the production of Cato, a tragedy which observes the rules, and aims at exhibiting the lofty grandeur and the devotion to principle of the Roman character, Addison seems to have been in duced partly by his protracted stay in Italy (where his attention was engrossed by classical monuments, and turned with indifference from mediaeval), partly by the desire to win laurels in the field where Corneille and Racine had shone with such distinction, and to show that an English dramatist could be as correct as they. No other poem of note, with the single exception to which we shall presently refer, was written in the reign of Anne. The innumerable verses composed by Swift were written rather to give vent to his spleen, and exercise his misanthropic humour, than under the presence of any motive which ordinarily influ ences poets. Parnell wrote one or two didactic pieces, and Rowe some pastoral ballads, which are not without merit. Defoe s satirical poems, The True-Born Englishman and Defoe. the Ode to the Pillory, possess the interest which the in domitable character and caustic humour of the man impart to them. As a dissenter, he felt properly grateful to the Dutch prince, one of the first acts of whose reign was to establish a legal toleration, and was equally indignant with the clergymen and gentlemen of England, who, though glad to be rid of James II., felt sore at the thought that the Re volution was effected by foreign regiments. This feeling led to a temporary insistance in society on the fact that a man was an Englishman born ; and it is this insistance which Defoe assa ils with homely but effective ridicule in the True-Born Englishman. The Ode to the Pillory was vin. - 54