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CHAPTER IV

THE LITERATURE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

1613-1700

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The Puritan Movement. During the sixteenth century there had arisen in England a group of Protestants who soon came to be called Puritans because they demanded a purer worship than that of the Roman Catholic Church. By "purer they meant "simpler," but to simplify meant, to them, to abandon all the ceremonies in use in the Catholic worship. The best and most intelligent among these Puritans desired "purity" to extend to all the doings of daily life, as well as to the worship of the church, and they soon came to enroll among their numbers many men eminent in the affairs of state as well as of church. These eminent men desired to control the state according to principles that were "pure" and single-minded. They had a great share in the overthrow of the Stuart kings during the seventeenth century, and, under Cromwell, they came into full control of the nation's political affairs. This was a quarter of a century after a certain part of the Puritans, called Separatists, had sent some of their members to the shores of America as Pilgrims. The whole literature of the seventeenth century mirrors the struggles between men of the Puritan type who desired to lead the "simple life," and those who preferred the more irregular life which, the student of history knows, the Stuart kings after James I desired themselves and their friends and followers to lead. John Milton, who said that he wished to

live as if ever in the great Taskmaster's eye, represented the Puritans better than any other writer. The most refined of those who represented the authors opposed to the program of the Puritans were the writers whom in this chapter we shall call the "Caroline lyrists." And John Dryden might well be said to stand between Milton and the opponents of the Puritans, for he at times represented Puritan ideas and at other times ideas much more pleasing to the life of the Court.

I. TO MILTON

Groups of seventeenth-century writers. While Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries among dramatic writers of the Elizabethan days survived and worked for over a decade into the seventeenth century, yet they so evidently belong to an age different from that of the Puritan movement in church and state, in the days of that movement's strength, that we do not consider this century of Puritanism in Literature as beginning until the time when Shakespeare ceased to write, 1613.

The dramatists who continued to write after Shakespeare's death we call the "successors of Shakespeare." Character writers followed them; also the lyric poets of the days of the Charleses; religious writers, and philosophers were numerous; but above all of these stood John Milton and John Dryden, who were, along with Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, among the greatest of English men of letters.

Shakespeare's successors. - The leading successors of Shakespeare were Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, John Ford, and " modest and manly" Philip Massinger. Some of them had helped Shakespeare in the writing of some of his thirty-seven plays. Beaumont and Fletcher between them wrote at least fifty-two

plays; but it is not quantity that is significant in literature. Ben Jonson is the greatest among these successors of the great tragic master, though a few of the plays of some of the others are worthy of special note. Among these are The Witch and Women beware Women, by Middleton; The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, by Webster; The Faithful Shepherdess, by Fletcher, and Broken Heart, by Ford.

The chief difficulty with all of these men, including Ben Jonson, was that they were too highly self-conscious. They were not absorbed in the subject matter of their work, not lost in their attention to the breathless process of the action of their plays or of the development of the characters under their gaze, or in the vivid reality of the dialogue of those characters. They were too intent upon showing themselves, upon making an impression that they, the authors, were of consequence. They were too intent upon "making a hit " with the public by "theatrical successes." All of this kept them from writing sincerely from themselves. They wrote extravagantly, therefore. They became "decadent," in the sense that their work showed undue interest in style and in a kind of subject matter that was no longer important.

Ben Jonson wrote many delightful Masques and three splendid comedies. The comedies were named Volpone the Fox, The Silent Woman, and The Alchemist. Later he wrote the gentle pastoral drama entitled The Sad Shepherd. His Catiline and Bartholomew Fair were popular in their day, and had something to do with his appointment as Poet Laureate. Other plays of his are worth mentioning, if for no other reason than that their very titles indicated the trend of the drama. Every Man in His Humor and Every Man out of His Humor and Cynthia's Revels suggest that dramatists were becoming interested, not so much in characters as in what those char

acters, because of their temperaments, might chance to do. Yet, as out of the decay of other things something new arises, so out of this decadent interest in and close attention to typical temperaments and their manners, rather than to vital characters, there arose a type of writing quite distinctive in English literature, though it had had vogue in the late days of the literature of ancient Greece; namely, character writing.

Character writing. The "character" was not what we to-day call a character sketch." It was a distinct type of literature, just as the epic and the sonnet are distinct in themselves from other types. The character was a brief expository description of a type of human being, not of an individual. It was an attempt to show the qualities of a class of people by saying in brief, epigrammatic form how a representative of the class shows himself. The chief character writers were Sir Thomas Overbury, Joseph Hall, and John Earle, the lastnamed being the best of them. One example from John Earle will illustrate what these writers succeeded in doing:

A CHILD

Is a man in a small letter, yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted of Eve or of the apple; and he is happy whose small practice in the world can only write his character. He is nature's fresh picture newly drawn in oil, which time, and much handling, dims and defaces. His soul is yet a white paper unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith, at length, it becomes a blurred notebook. He is purely happy, because he knows no evil, nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery. He arrives not at the mischief of being wise, nor endures evils to come, by foreseeing them. He kisses and loves all, and, when the smart of the rod is past, smiles on his beater. Nature and his parents alike dandle him, and 'tice him on with a bait of sugar to a draught of wormwood. He plays yet, like a young prentice the first day, and is not come to his task of melancholy. All the language he speaks yet is tears; and they serve him well enough to express his necessity. His hardest labor is his tongue, as if he were loath

to use so deceitful an organ; and he is best company with it when he can but prattle. We laugh at his foolish sports, but his game is our earnest; and his drums, rattles, and hobby-horses, but the emblems and mocking of man's business. His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember, and sighs to see what innocence he hath out-lived. The elder he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches. He is the Christian's example, and the old man's relapse; the one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his simplicity. Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got eternity without a burden, and exchanged but one heaven for another.

Caroline lyrists. The lyric poets of the time of Charles I and Charles II are called Caroline poets. The chief of them were Robert Herrick, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Francis Quarles, and George Herbert. Their poems were mainly of love and of religion. Herrick's Corinna and Herbert's series of poems under the general title of The Temple are the best known from this group. In our day there has been a considerable revival of interest in both Herrick and Herbert, as there has been in the satirist, Dr. John Donne, who was a trifle older than they. Much of their poetry is very quaint, much of it dainty and lovely, but not a great deal is highly passionate. They looked upon both their love and their religion reflectively rather than with passionate emotion. Because of this, some of them have been called metaphysical poets. Their "metaphysics" consisted of curious and far-fetched comparisons and contrasts, however, rather than of very profound thinking.

These lines are representative of Herbert,

Sweet day! so cool, so calm, so bright, —

The bridal of the earth and sky;

The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.

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