Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 07.djvu/131

* ENGLISH LITERATURE. 109 ENGLISH LITERATURE. but in him and in tlicm depth and intensity of feeling atone for much that i^ merely fantastic. Two alternatives to the melancholy which Rich- ard Burton was at this time anatomizing with bo much quaint learning were taken by different men; the cavalier poets, Lovelace, Carew, and Suckling, escaped it by their graceful absorption in the charms of real or imaginary mistresses; while the pastoral writers, Browne and Wither (with whom Herrick and Marvell may he classed, though religion meant at times much to both of them, and the latter went with Milton into poli- tics), delight in the contemplation of nature and the sweet, unspoiled life of the beautiful Eng- lish country, which touched Shakespeare in such diverse ways at the beginning and end of his career — in the Midsummer Night's Dream and in the Tempest. The same spirit breathes in Isaak Walton, and teaches him to write, little as he may have thought it, an undying classic. The link between the Elizabethan age and that whose culmination is assigned to the reign of a later queen (Anne) is to be found in the work of Milton. In his sonnets (except for the innova- tion of using the form for something else than love poetry), his elegies, and his masques, he is a true Elizabethan; in his thorough appropria- tion of the classics, in such technical points as the use of blank verse out of drama, and in many of the articles of his creed, he anticipates that which is to follow. Born eight years before the death of Shakespeare, and the heir of the great traditions of that glorious company, he is in one aspect, as Matthew Arnold called him, 'the last of the immortals' : but still more truly he is a product of the new forces that were stirring in the England of his youth. The change from the mood of the Renaissance to the sober earnestness of Puritanism may be summed up in Green's vivid words: "The daring which had turned Eng- land into a people of adventurers, the sense of inexhaustible resources, the buoyant freshness of youth, the intoxicating sense of beauty and joy which created Sidney, and Marlowe, and Drake, were passing away before the consciousness of evil and the craving to order man's life aright before God." The magnificent bursts of elo- quence which diversify the long reaches of Para- dise Lost, and the exquisite grace and melody of his shorter poems, especially "Lycidas," which Tennyson called "a touchstone of poetic taste," set noble models before his successors. Perhaps the greatest single lesson which he taught was the use of the caesura in the iambic pentameter, which, in its variations according to the de- mands of a nice ear, makes all the difference be- tween the best of his blank verse and prose chopped up into lengths of ten syllables. He did less for prose than for poetry ; in fact, his prose is more rugged and harder to read than that of the earlier Bacon, and he himself confessed that in it he had the use of his left hand only. But what the accomplished scholar failed to do, a simple Bedfordshire tinker, nourished on the Bible and Foxe's Book of Martyrs, accomplished with triumphant ease. Bunyan little thought, as he followed the fortunes of Christian on bis pil- grimage, that later critics would call his book one of the three great allegories of the world, and discover in it at once a revival of the old French romance and an anticipation of the eighteenth- century novel. The change which took place at the Restoration is often spoken of as if it had been n men n version to the temper of mind which prevailed before the destroying Hood of Puritanism swept over the land. But this is a superficial view of it. The England of Charles II., whether in poli tics, iii science, or in pure literature, was vastly different from that of Elizabeth. In the first flush of that age of splendid youth Mine seemed to be no limits to the powers of humanity. Men were not afraid to take, with Bacon, all knowl- edge to be their province, or to soar with Vfai lowe info empyrean heights, lint the men of I lie Restoration, like burnt children, dreaded the lire of unrestrained enthusiasm which had kindled so devouring a conflagration. Moderation, the ai eeptance and study of actual conditions, the cstnh lishment of a quiet level of uniform conduct based strictly upon the- dictates of common sense, became its ideal. Now for the first time in Eng- land criticism went, hand in hand with creation. At an epoch when English literature was scarcely known across the Channel, when Bayle was de- fining Milton as "the famous apologist for the execution of Charles I.," who "meddled in poetry, and several of his poems saw the light during his life or after his death," the returning Royal- ist exiles, on the other hand, brought with them from France the canons of a school of strictness there earlier established. Mallierbe had risen to brandish the pedagogue's ferule over the young poets of that country; Corneille and Racine had framed their drama on the strictest classical rules. Dryden followed them, botli in the the oretical discussions of his Essay on Dramatic Poesie and in his practice ; the classical school restored the unities, kept tragedy and comedy strictly separate, and usually employed rhymed couplets in preference to blank verse. The trage- dy of the Restoration, in which, besides Dryden himself, Otway must be mentioned for at least two imperishable plays, was largely a survival or an imitation. Comedy, however, has an im- portance of its own, if only for its exact repro- duction of the tone and manners of the society of the time. It follows, not the romantic treatment of Shakespeare, but the realistic fidelity of Jon- son and Shirley in the earlier England, or more consciously that which Moli&re had taught its authors in France. Etherege and Wycherley. Congreve and Vanbrugh are corrupt and cynical because such was the society in which they lived and for which they wrote. But we shall scarcely need to touch the drama again; from various causes it has practically ceased to have a living connection with literature, despite the brave at- tempts of no less poets than Tennyson and Browning and Swinburne to revive its ancient glories; there are clever comedians to-day, yet wdien we look for a comedy which will live in libraries we must go back to The School for Scandal, The Rivals, and She Stoops to Conquer — to the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The tendency of the Restoration world to a strictly regulated uniformity, alluded to above, found expression in non-dramatic poetry not only by an increasing preference, in subject, for the life of an organized and cultivated society, the life of the town, but by the almost universal adoption of a single form — the heroic couplet — which was to dominate English verse for more than a century. The form was not new ; it had been used long before by Chaucer, as it was to be used again by Keats, but with a radical dif-