I

LATIN TASTE IN POETRY

37

individual inspiration gave way to a passion for regularity and intellectual discipline, until only such terrestrial forms of poetical fancy gave satisfaction as Rome rather than Greece or Italy had nourished. The taste for poetry, in the abstract, as a species of literature, retained its hold on the public even when the art had been despoiled of all its lyric and idyllic charms, of half its colour and its music, and of much of its variety. In order to adapt it to these new conditions, there was a curious relapse to the most primitive instincts of men; and as though the age of Hesiod had returned, readers looked to verse for instruction in those common things of life that had been resigned to prose, in the practice of medicine, in the cultivation of an orchard, in the theories of metaphysics, in the conduct of the politics of Europe. Dryden alone had retained to the last some reverberations of the great romantic music of Elizabeth. When he died the Latinists were absolutely paramount, and the poets of the next quarter of a century knew no Apollo but Horace.

CHAPTER II

DRAMA AFTER THE RESTORATION

THE drama took a place in English literature during the last third of the seventeenth century relatively more prominent than it has ever taken since. Certain sections of society were passionately addicted to theatrical amusement, and their appetites had been whetted by eighteen years of enforced privation. All theatres had been closed by ordinance of the Lords and Commons on the 2d September 1642, and in 1647, for fear of a relapse, this order had been stringently repeated. On the 21st of May 1656 Davenant obtained permission to rig up a semi-private stage in Rutland House, but it was not until August 1660 that Killigrew and he secured each a patent to open a public theatre in London. This vacuum of eighteen years sufficed to mark a condition which it did not cause, namely, the complete decline and fall of the exhausted Jacobean drama. In 1642 only one dramatist of the old school, Shirley, was still alive, and of his plays all the most important had already been acted. It was no serious attack on literature to exclude from the boards the plays of such men as Brome and Jasper Mayne. The poets of the old school soon grew tired of writing for an imaginary stage, and their successors were found unprejudiced when the time came for resuming the real drama.

In response to the universal demand for theatrical amusements at the Restoration, various playwrights instantly came forward. But these men had seen no stage plays in England for nearly twenty

CHAP. I

JOHN WILSON

39

39

years, and they did not know what to supply. The names of the earliest purveyors of Restoration drama are remembered only by students, with one exception; without exception their efforts are beneath critical attention. Sir William Davenant alone requires notice, not on account of his merit, but from the fact that he was first in the field. He had been a writer of bad dramas more than thirty years before, and his Siege of Rhodes (1656), a clumsy piece which he called an opera, was the first of a series of plays which he brought out at his own theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. In writing his Restoration comedies he had the wit to steal from the French, and his last and best play, The Man's the Master, performed just before his death in 1668, is taken almost bodily from Scarron.

While the new Cavalier society, released from the intolerable oppression of Puritanism, was looking around it for a stage on which it could see its own face grimacing in the concave mirror of convention, a solitary effort was made to revive the old romantic comedy, as Ben Jonson had instituted it. The first dramatist of talent after the Restoration was John Wilson (1622 ?1696?). Of this writer's career very little is known. He was a lawyer of independent means, most of whose life was spent in Ireland. In 1662 he produced, and in the next year published, a comedy of The Cheats, which surpassed in talent anything in dramatic form which had been brought forward in England for twenty years. It was in prose, ably but somewhat pedantically written, with the fantastic humours of a magician detailed in the elaborate manner of Ben Jonson. A passage from the third act may be quoted as an example of Wilson's curious belated Euphuism:

66

Mopus. This is that which we call our Magistrium Elixir, or Rosycrucian Pantarva. The father of it is the sun, the mother of it the moon, its brothers and sisters the rest of the planets; the wind carries it in its belly, and the nurse thereof is the earth.

Jolly. Pray, sir, proceed; and disclose this son of gold.

Mopus. Hermetically, I shall. It is situated in the centre of the earth, and yet falls neither within centre nor circumference; small, and yet great;

earthy, and yet watery; airy, and yet very fire; invisible, yet easily found; soft as down, yet hard above measure; far off, and yet near at hand. That that is inferior, is as that which is superior; and that which is superior is as that which is inferior. Separate the combustible from the incombustible, the earth from the fire, the fluid from the viscous, the hot from the cold, the moist from the dry, the hard from the soft, the subtile from the thick--sweetly, and with a great deal of judgment, per minima, in the caverns of the earth-and thou shalt see it ascend to heaven, and descend to earth, and receive the powers of superiors and inferiors. Comprehend this, and be happy! Thou hast > discovered the balsam of sulphur, the humidum radicale of metals, the sanctuary of nature; and there is little or nothing between thee and the mountain of diamonds, and all the spirits of astromancy, geomancy, and coschinomancy are at your command.

Jolly. Pray, sir, how call you that? That last again!

Mopus. Coschinomancy, sir; that is to say, the most mysterious art of sieve and sheers."

Wilson proceeded to prove how apt a pupil of Ben Jonson he was by bringing out a Roman tragedy, in very stately and correct blank verse, modelled on Sejanus; and another comedy of character, The Projectors, which was performed in 1664. Wilson then retired from authorship, only to appear once more as a dramatist, with a tragi-comedy in 1690. His work was swept aside by the theatrical wave from France, although it was full of ability, and closer to the best manner of Jonson than that of any of Ben's acknowledged "sons" of the preceding generation. But it possessed neither the sparkle nor the lightness requisite for the stage of Charles II., and Wilson failed where more than one frothier poet succeeded.

After this distinct false start, and after several amateur hands had tried their prentice skill on the new-found drama, it passed into the care of the literary profession. The distinction between literature and the manufacture of plays was not yet conceived, and the Restoration drama owes its importance to the fact that it was the serious occupation of men of letters. Except Marvell and Oldham, every leading writer of the imagination, until the close of the century, was in some degree a constructor of plays. The faults of the drama of the Restoration are conspicuous, but

II

DRYDEN

41

it was at least professional. Composition for the stage was the most lucrative and the most fashionable of all modes of writing, and it was not an unimportant circumstance that the greatest man of letters of the age was also, without exception, its most persistent playwright. Schools of drama were founded, and others took their place. One dramatist only, Dryden, kept the stage all the while, down to 1700. The career of Dryden as a dramatist includes the careers of all his stage companions, only Farquhar being a little later in his main successes. There were several writers who excelled Dryden in single departments of dramatic talent, but on the whole he is the greatest figure here as elsewhere in the literature of the epoch; and it may be well to glance at the character of his work, to its close, before examining that of any of the subsidiary men who were his fellows.

Dryden had no spontaneous attraction to the stage. He set to work to write plays, after he was thirty, because he was poor, and because this was a ready way to a competence. He took a Spanish plot from a French source, and he produced, in 1663 (not printed till 1669), his comedy of The Wild Gallant, a vulgar and unfortunate composition. This was followed in 1664 by The Rival-Ladies, a dull tragi-comedy in blank verse, solely remarkable for the preface, in which, among other things, Dryden recommends the use of rhyme in heroic plays. Etheredge, as we shall see later on, immediately acted on this suggestion, and Dryden's third and fourth plays, The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperor, were examples, bolder than Etheredge's, of the adoption of a new form in English literature-the rhymed serious drama. Dryden's argument in favour of a fashion which he imported from France is worth noting. He said that rhyme, as which most regulates the fancy, and gives the judgment its busiest employment, is like to bring forth the richest and clearest thoughts." The English plays written since the reign of Charles I. had been turbid and irregular; Dryden thought the buskin of dramatic rhyme might give dignity and propriety to the licentious step of the tragedian. The experiment was almost universally

that