0333672267_A_History_of_English_Literature

Mac Flecknoe reverses the aims and methods of heroic tragedy, turning heroic into mock-heroic and converting the rhyming couplet to new ends: magnifying the littleness of pretension. ‘There is a vast difference,’ Dryden wrote in a Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, ‘between the slovenly Butchering of a Man, and the fineness of a stroak that separates the Head from the Body, and leaves it standing in its place.’ Dryden used the sharp edge of praise. Whereas Donne, Jonson, Milton and Butler employ the harsh ridicule of classical satirists, Dryden preferred ‘fine raillery’, intelligent teasing. Flecknoe’s ‘deviates’ is a ‘fine stroak’; we are amused, not outraged. Such writing is easy, yet full of comparison, metaphor, allusion, wordplay. Dryden made the couplet so efficient a instrument of satire that Swift, Pope and Johnson used no other. Pope re-used Mac Flecknoe’s Empire of Dulness in his Dunciad.

The subject of Absolom and Achitophel is the rebellion of Charles’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, prompted by the Earl of Shaftesbury, leader of the Whigs. Dryden parallels this failed rebellion with that of the biblical Absolom against his father David, the great king of Israel; Israel, as in the sermons Dryden heard as a boy, means England. Nonconformists thought that Charles’s infidelities had made God send the Plague, the Fire and the Dutch in 1666-7. Achitophel (Shaftesbury) was supported by City merchants who believed that ‘Kings were useless, and a Clog to Trade’. The brave David (Charles II), humane to his enemies, was a King beloved in Israel. He loved God - but also music, song, dance, and beautiful women. Dryden grasps this nettle with glee:

In pious times, e’er Priest-craft did begin, Before Polygamy was made a sin;

When man, on many, multiply’d his kind, E’er one to one was, cursedly, confind: When Nature prompted, and no law deny’d

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Promiscuous use of Concubine and Bride;

Then Israel’s Monarch, after Heaven’s own heart, His vigorous warmth did, variously, impart

To Wives and Slaves: And, wide as his Command, Scatter’d his Maker’s Image through the Land.

Dryden launches his complex fable with astonishing ease, confidence and humour. Criticism of Absolom is wrapped in praise: ‘What faults he had (for who from faults is free?)/His Father could not, or he would not see.’ Achitophel is a Miltonic tempter, offering Monmouth

‘Not barren praise alone, that gaudy flower Fair only to the sight, but solid power; And nobler is a limited command,

Given by the love of all your native land, Than a successive title, long and dark, Drawn from the mouldy rolls of Noah’s ark.’

The biblical David grieved bitterly for his son Absolom, killed running away; but Monmouth survived.

This dexterous poem, published during Shaftesbury’s trial for treason, ends with David’s mercy to the rebels - and to his sons. But it warns the King, the country, and any future rebels against a second civil war. Charles had prevented Parliament’s exclusion of James Duke of York from his ‘successive title’. Parliament took revenge, however: when James was deposed, Dryden lost the Laureateship to Shadwell. Dulness had succeeded.

Literary succession was on Dryden’s mind in his moving poem in memory of the younger poet John Oldham, and again in his late work: his musical Odes, his Preface to the Fables, and his Virgil. It is the theme of his 1693 epistle ‘To my dear friend Mr Congreve on his comedy called The Double Dealer’:

Well then, the promis’d Hour is come at last;

The present Age of Wit obscures the past:

Strong were our Syres, and as they fought they Writ,

Conqu’ring with Force of Arms and Dint of Wit:

Theirs was the Giant Race before the Flood ...

The realism of this retrospect is as remarkable as its tone. Making way for Congreve, Dryden finds his own generation weaker than its predecessor. Charles had brought refinement, but the likes of Shakespeare and Jonson would not come again. There had been giants on earth in those days, before the ‘Flood’ of the Civil War.

Our age was cultivated thus at length,

But what we gain’d in Skill we lost in Strength.

Our Builders were with Want of Genius curst;

The second Temple was not like the first.

The rebuilt temple was English Augustanism. ‘O that your brows my Lawrel had sustain’d,’ says Dryden to Congreve: ‘Well had I been depos’d if you had reign’d!’

Latin translation would cultivate the English, as Greek translation had cultivated Rome. The success of Dryden’s Sylvae (1685), a selection from Horace, Theocritus, Lucretius and Virgil, encouraged him to do a complete Virgil for Tonson the bookseller. Couplets could at last be properly heroic:

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The proclamatory flourish of this opening recalls the fanfares of Henry Purcell (1659-95), Dryden’s collaborator in these years, or the ornate woodcarving of Griming Gibbons (1648-1721). ‘I looked on Virgil,’ Dryden wrote in the preface to the Sylvae, ‘as a succinct and grave majestic writer, who weighed not only every thought, but every word and syllable: who was still aiming to crowd his sense into as narrow a compass as possibly he could ...’. Yet in his Aeneid Dryden chose to ‘pursue the excellence and forsake the brevity’, for English is less compact than Latin. The preface to the Sylvae gives his policy:

a translator is to make his author appear as charming as possibly he can, provided he maintains his character, and makes him not unlike himself. Translation is a kind of drawing after the life; where everyone will acknowledge there is a double sort of likeness, a good one and a bad. ’Tis one thing to draw the outlines true, the features like, the proportions exact, the colouring itself perhaps tolerable; and another thing to make all these graceful, by the posture, the shadowings, and, chiefly, by the spirit which animates the whole.

This animating spirit can be felt in the prophecy in which Aeneas’s father exalts the rule of Rome above the arts of Greece:

England too is to excel in empire rather than art. Dryden’s artful Dedication can also be read sideways, as accepting the rule of William III. Ever a political writer, he read his times and his readers well, as in the last jocular Chorus to the Secular Masque (1700):

All, all, of a piece throughout:

Thy Chase had a Beast in View; Thy wars brought nothing about;

Thy lovers were all untrue. ’Tis well an Old Age is out,

And time to begin a New.

At the end of a century where monarchical succession had twice been broken and restored, Dryden was buried in Chaucer’s grave. ‘What was said of Rome, adorned

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by Augustus, may be applied by an easy metaphor to English poetry embellished by Dryden,’ wrote Dr Johnson: “he found it brick, and he left it marble.”’ If Dryden made English verse more elegant, he also left it more usable than when he had found it.

Prose

Dryden was equally a master of what he called ‘the other harmony of prose’, Although musical, he contrives to sound as if he is talking to an intelligent friend, This civilized tone became general over a range of English discourse, including humbler genres: diary, familiar letters, the essay, the ‘character’; romance and autobiography; history, criticism, philosophy, political thought, religion and natural science.

The Royal Society of London was the nursery of English science, its members in-

A chronology of Restoration prose

1662 Revised Version of The Book of Common Prayer; Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing

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eluding Wren, Boyle, Hooke, Locke and Newton. Its secretary Thomas Sprat, writing in History of the Royal Society, wished to make language fit for science:

Of all the Studies of Men, nothing may be sooner obtain’d than this vicious Abundance of Phrase, this Trick of Metaphor, this Volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a Noise in the World ... They [the Royal Society] have therefore been more rigorous in putting in Execution the only Remedy, that can be found for this Extravagance; and that has been a constant Resolution, to reject all the Amplifications, Digressions, and Swellings of Style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when Men deliver’d so many Things, almost in an equal number of Words. They have exacted from all their Members, a close, naked, natural way of Speaking; positive expressions, clear Senses; a native Easiness; bringing all things as near the mathematical Plainness as they can; and preferring the Language of Artizans, Country-Men, and Merchants, before that of Wits, or Scholars.

This is propaganda: the Society’s royal patron much preferred the language of Wits. Nor did Sprat cure all the members of metaphor, although such ideals may have helped in the clarification of prose. His puritan suspicion of figurative language was taken to a logical extreme in John Wilkins’s Philosophical Language, satirized in Jonathan Swift’s Academy of Projectors in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where the projectors, instead of using words to represent things, carry the things themselves.

As the titles in the chronology indicate, the Restoration ushered in an age of reasonableness. The Society was social as well as scientific, beginning in informal meetings of Oxford savants and writers, not all of whom had the scientific interests of Abraham Cowley. It was an early example of a club, meeting to discuss things of interest. Talk, Sprat’s ‘natural way of speaking’, informs Restoration prose, allowing for difference but inviting agreement. The presumption that language is for civil exchange made for reasonableness. Civilization and urbanity spread from the city and the Court to the professions and the gentry. Women begin to make a substantial contribution to writing. But this civilization excluded middle-class dissenters, and the Society had few ‘Artizan’ members.

There is much pleasurable minor prose: Izaak Walton’s Lives; the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn; the Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson by his daughter Lucy; the account of the assassination of Buckingham in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Dorothy Osborne began a letter to her future husband William Temple: ‘Sir, If to know I wish you with me pleases you, ’tis a satisfaction you may always have, for I do it perpetually.’

Another new form was the ‘character’, a brief biography. An example is Lord Shaftesbury’s Character of Henry Hastings, ‘the copy of our nobility in ancient days in hunting and not warlike times’:

he was low, very strong and very active, of a reddish flaxen hair, his clothes always green cloth, and never all worth when new five pounds ... Not a woman in all his walks of the degree of a yeoman’s wife or under, and under the age of forty, but it was extremely her fault if he were not intimately acquainted

with her ... The upper part of [the parlour] had ... a desk, on the one side of which was a church Bible, on the other the Book of Martyrs; on the tables were hawks’ hoods, bells, and such like, two or three old green hats with their crowns thrust in so as to hold ten or a dozen eggs, which were of a pheasant kind of poultry he took much care of and fed himself; tables, dice, cards and boxes were not wanting. In the hole of the desk were store of tobacco-pipes that had been used. One side of this end of the room was the door of a closet, wherein stood the strong beer and wine, which never came thence but in single glasses, that being the rule of the house exactly observed, for he never exceeded in drink or permitted it. On the other side was a door into an old chapel not used for devotion; the pulpit, as the safest

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place, was never wanting of a cold chine of beef, pasty of venison, gammon of bacon, or great applepie, with thick crust extremely baked ... He lived to a hundred, never lost his eyesight, but always wrote and read without spectacles, and got to horse without help. Until past fourscore he rode to the death of a stag as well as any.

John Locke

John Locke (1632-1704) was a key figure in British cultural history. An Oxford academic, he became physician to Lord Shaftesbury, moved to Holland in the Monmouth crisis and returned with William of Orange. Publishing after 1689, he formulated an empirical philosophy which derived knowledge from experience and a theory of government as a contract between governor and the governed.

He preferred to derive Christianity from reason rather than from revelation, yet exempted Catholics from his advocacy of religious toleration. His Essay concerning Human Understanding held that at birth the human mind was ‘a white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas’: a blank written upon by experience. Knowledge comes from the reason reflecting upon sense-impressions, and monitoring the association of ideas. This epistemology and psychology, drawing on the mechanics and optics of Sir Isaac Newton, became part of the common sense of the 18th century,

Women writers

Among women writers of the 17th century not yet acknowledged are the poets Anne Bradstreet (c.1612-72) and Katherine Philips, ‘the matchless Orinda’ (1631-64); Anne Killigrew (1660-85) and Anne, Lady Winchilsea (1661-1720). Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Delarivière Manley (1663-1724) wrote variously and at length, as

Anne Bracegirdle, one of the first actresses on the

Restoration stage, playing the Indian Queen in Aphra Behn’s

The Widow Ranter (1689). A mezzotint in the Victoria and

Albert Theatre Museum, London.

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did Aphra Behn (1640-89), thrown into authorship by the early death of her Dutch husband. The merry banter of Behn’s sex comedies gave scandal, though not to other playwrights, with whom she was on good terms, nor to Nell Gwynn, to whom she dedicated The Feign’d Curtezans. She shows the other side of libertinism, notably in The Rover, where Angellica Bianca, a ‘famous courtesan’, truly loves but experiences the disappointments of free love. Behn’s adventures as a colonist in Surinam, a royal spy in Antwerp, and a woman of the Restoration theatre also got into her fiction. Her ‘novel’, Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave, is an ideological romance: a noble African prince cruelly enslaved by colonists is redeemed by the love of ‘the brave, the beautiful and the constant Imoinda’.

William Congreve

The literary century closed with Congreve’s comedy The Way of the World, a classic intrigue of manners, love, money and marriage. William Congreve (1670-1729) polishes the mirror of society to a new brilliance. Mirabell woos Millamant, neice of the widow Lady Wishfort, while being gallant to the aunt. This the aunt is kindly told by Mrs Marwood, whose advances Mirabell has rejected. Lady Wishfort now hates Mirabell ‘worse than a quaker hates a parrot’, and will disinherit Millamant if she marries him. A plot by Mrs Marwood and Fainall, Lady Wishfort’s son-in-law, to get the inheritance, is foiled by an entertaining counterplot involving servants, a country cousin (‘rustick, ruder than Gothick’), and a late legal surprise. Love and virtue outwit villainy, though wit shines more than virtue. In this double-dealing world, integrity (when in love) has to assume the mask of frivolity. The audience need the clues in the characters’ names, yet the lovers’ names are unclear. How does Millamant treat her ‘thousand lovers’? What besides wit is ‘admirable’ in Mirabell?

In the Proviso scene, the lovers negotiate the rules of their marriage:

MILLAMANT: ... I won’t be called names after I’m married; positively I won’t be called names.

MIRABELL: Names!

MILLAMANT: Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweetheart, and the rest of that nauseous cant, in which men and their wives are so fulsomly familiar - I shall never bear that - Good Mirabell, don’t let us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks ... Let us never visit together, nor go to a play together, but let us he very strange and well bred: let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well bred as if we were not married at all.

MIRABELL: Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your demands are pretty reasonable.

Yet the sophisticated Millamant soon confesses to Mrs Fainall: ‘If Mirabell should not make a good husband, I am a lost thing; for I find I love him violently.’ The mask of wit slips to reveal true love.

Ushering Mrs Marwood into her closet to overhear a conversation, Lady Wishfort says: ‘There are books over the chimney - Quarles and Pryn, and Short View of the Stage, with Bunyan’s works to entertain you.’ Quarles was a quaint old moralizer; Prynne an enemy of stage plays; Bunyan died in 1688. Congreve tries thus to laugh off the recent attack on himself, among others, by Jeremy Collier in A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). Collier was not a Puritan but a principled Anglican clergyman who refused to swear the oath to William and Mary.

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The new St Paul’s, built to replace Old St Paul’s (see page 133), the Cathedral of the City of London. Begun in 1675, completed in 1711. The architect, Sir Christopher Wren, had wanted a dome on a central drum, but had to incorporate a traditional long ‘Gothic’ nave.

The Way of the World was not a hit, and Congreve wrote no more plays. George Farquhar stuck to the formula, but Collier’s distaste was prophetic. Alexander Pope (1688-1744), whose own wit could be risqué, was soon to disapprove of the kind of Restoration comedy in which ‘obscenity was wit’.

Further reading

Corns, T. N. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Danielson, D. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to John Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Parry, G. The Seventeenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1603-1700 (Harlow: Longman, 1989).

with sense, as in the title of Jane Austen’s novel. Sense, finally, recalls Locke’s influential account of the mind, in which reliable knowledge of the real comes from sense-impressions.

Alexander Pope and 18th-century civilization

The day of Augustanism coincides with the days of Alexander Pope (1688-1744), when Addison and Swift also flourished - as did the unAugustan Defoe. The Augustan temper did not thereafter rule the roost, but characterizes the most accomplished work of the century: Gulliver’s Travels, Dunciad IV, Gray’s Elegy and the judgements of Johnson. Joseph Addison was a poet and tragedian, but his legacy is The Spectator, a daily paper which he edited and co-wrote with Sir Richard Steele, in succession to Steele’s The Tatler (1709). Steele’s paper amused, The Spectator educated entertainingly.

Joseph Addison

After the excesses of faction and enthusiasm, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren and others had shown what human intelligence could do. Joseph Addison (1672-1719) relayed these achievements to the new middle class in a prose which Johnson thought ‘the model of the middle style’. The Spectator sold an unprecedented ten thousand copies of each issue; its wit was edifying, unlike that of the Restoration; Addison’s essays were taken as a model for more than a century.

In issue No. 1 (Thursday, March 1, 1711), the Spectator introduces himself:

I find, that I ... was always a Favourite of my School-master, who used to say, that my Parts were solid and would wear well. I had not been long at the University, before I distinguished myself by a most profound Silence: For during the Space of eight Years, except in the publick Exercises of the College, I scarce uttered the quantity of an hundred words; and indeed do not remember that I ever spoke three Sentences together in my whole Life. Whilst I was in this Learned Body I applied myself with so much Diligence to my Studies, that there are very few celebrated Books, either in the Learned or the Modern Tongues, which I am not acquainted with ....

This know-all then travels to Egypt to ‘take the Measure of a Pyramid; and as soon as I had set myself right in that Particular, returned to my Native Country with great Satisfaction’. He is also an observer of men:

I have passed my latter Years in this City, where I am frequently seen in most Publick Places, tho’ there are not above half a dozen of my select Friends that know me; of whom my next Papers shall give a more particular Account. There is no place of general Resort, wherein I do not often make my appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my Head into a Round of Politicians at Will's, and listning with great Attention to the Narratives that are made in those little Circular Audiences. Sometimes I smoak a Pipe at Child’s; and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the Post-Man, over-hear the Conversation of every Table in the Room ... In short, wherever I see a Cluster of People I always mix with them, though I never open my Lips but in my own Club.

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The Club exists to set forth ‘such Papers as may contribute to the Advancement of the Public Weal’. Its members are Sir Roger de Coverley, Sir Andrew Freeport, Captain Sentry and Will Honeycomb - country, city, army and society; the Church is not represented. The Spectator is the Club’s critic: ‘His Taste of Books is a little too just for the Age he lives in; he has read all, but approves of very few.’ Addison maintains this mock-pomp throughout.

Instruction comes breezily from Steele: ‘I do not doubt but England is at present as polite a Nation as any in the World; but any Man who thinks can easily see, that the Affectation of being Gay and in Fashion has very near eaten up our good Sense and our Religion.’ Good Sense and Religion are interchangeable. Addison warned that ‘The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture.’ This is the civil version of ‘Satan finds some mischief still/For idle hands to do’ (Isaac Watts, ‘Against Idleness and Mischief’).

Addison continues (in No. 10) to weed out folly and cultivate the mind:

It was said of Socrates, that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven, to inhabit among Men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses. I would therefore in a very particular Manner recommend these my Speculations to all well regulated Families, that set apart an Hour in every Morning for Tea and Bread and Butter; and would earnestly advise them for their Good to order this Paper to be punctually served up, and to be looked upon as Part of the Tea Equipage.

The gentleman-Socrates offers empty-headed men sound material for conversation. He then turns to the Tea Equipage.

But there are none to whom this Paper will be more useful, than to the Female World. I have often thought there has not been sufficient Pains taken in finding out proper Employments and Diversions for the Fair ones. Their Amusements seem contrived for them rather as they are Women, than as they are reasonable Creatures; and are more adapted to the Sex than to the Species.

This combination of raillery, analysis and seriousness is Augustan. The premise is that the human is a rational animal or (in Christian terms) a reasonable creature. What is proposed with a smile is serious: assiduous daily culture will root out folly and vice from the well-regulated family, one that takes The Spectator. It was for the family, not just the father, that Addison wrote