SECTION IV THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY CHAPTER I. GENERAL VIEW HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS THE patriotic unity of the country under Elizabeth did not survive the queen's death; and James I. had not reigned long before England found itself in the midst of that conflict which had indeed been adumbrated in Elizabeth's time and was only held in abeyance by the great personal influence wielded by the queen herself. The long struggle between King and Parliament grew continuously more bitter as the 17th century proceeded, and came to its climax with the execution of Charles I. in 1649. The struggle was in part political and in part religious. To such men as Pym and Hampden it was the legal aspect of the king's claims that appealed with most force; while others, of whom Cromwell and Milton may be regarded as representative figures, were profoundly inspired by the religious, moral, and social aspects of the struggle. On the one side were the king, Laud, and Strafford, with their theories of divine right-honest if short-sighted men, unyielding advocates of authority and orderly government in Church and State; on the other side were the defenders of popular privileges against unchecked prerogative, and of a sternly logical Protestantism against an Arminianism which seemed to them but a version of the hated Popery. Both sides were in grim and stubborn earnest, and the country suffered the disturbance and distraction of a civil war fought for an idea. England was sharply divided, class against class. Generally speaking, the aristocracy and their dependents were Cavaliers; the commercial and trading classes in the main supported Parliament. The Puritans were especially strong in London and the eastern counties, the king's men were in a majority in the remoter districts of the north and west. Yet it should be noted that the armies engaged were small, and the causes of the quarrel little interested the mass of the people, who had no love for the extreme views of either side. The growth of Puritanism, however, had important consequences on the social and literary life of the nation. Not because the Puritans were ever strong numerically; this they were not, except locally; but their leaders were men of a character at once strong and serious, calmly determined and obstinately fanatical. Their energy and ability made them the dominant figures in Parliament, overwhelming the apostles of compromise like Hyde and Falkland. They were not cowed by persecution, and (a) they did not recoil from the sternest deeds, such as the execution of Strafford and Laud, when their ideas of patriotic duty demanded them. They were especially hostile to the theatre, as we may read in Prynne's famous Histriomastix (1632), and an early Act of the Long Parliament decreed the complete closure of all dramatic performances in 1642. This was the final blow to the languishing Elizabethan drama. Art and literature came under a similar suspicion, except in so far as they were didactic in intention. It is thus natural that no great national literature throve during the period of Puritan ascendancy or under its influence. The Caroline lyrists were Cavaliers, as were such prose-writers as Taylor, Browne, and Fuller. The Cavalier, while he could be serious like Taylor, Herbert, and Herrick (sometimes), was in the main a human creature, interested in worldly concerns such as love-making and sport. But Milton scarcely wrote a line that could be called humorous; the claims of literature upon his muse were almost entirely superseded by the demands of his stern life-purpose. The fact that he, while in the prime of his life, during the period 1640-60, wrote no poetry to speak of, and confined himself to embittered controversy in prose, is of itself a sufficient commentary on the artistic sterility of those twenty years. Cromwell's government was undoubtedly highly efficient, but it was after all a military despotism, and the ideal of freedom expressed in Milton's Areopagitica was imperfectly understood even among the most enlightened of the Puritan party. The people as a whole chafed under tyrannous edicts that made their simple sports and amusements a crime. Cromwell's success abroad did not atone for the irritating presence of his major-generals. He and all that he stood for became bitterly unpopular, and it is not remarkable that, when death at last removed his iron hand, and when the country had tasted the discomforts of unsettled government, there was a general welcome to the exiled Charles. After revolution came the inevitable reaction. The Puritans had asked too much of human nature, and writers in particular rejoiced when Charles showed himself a man of the world, and a man also of some literary taste. Charles II. was of a temper tolerant and broad-minded, and he had great charm of person and manner; but he was dissolute, cynical, and unprincipled, and his court soon became as scandalous as it was gay. To literature he was, according to his lights, a useful friend. No doubt he preferred wit and sparkle to imagination and ecstasy; the rhetoric of Dryden's dramas and the impudent satire of Hudibras were more pleasing to him than a dozen Paradise Losts. He liked to have his feet on the earth, and never wished to lift his head above the clouds. His ideas were drawn from the French literary circle around Louis XIV.; and he learned from them the superiority of the French writers in the matter of clear and well-balanced expression. In fostering a taste for such plain and unambiguous writing he did English prose an immense service and our poetry no lasting harm. When the theatres were reopened, it was with two types of play that were new to our litera ture: the heroic drama with its echoes, somewhat faint, of Corneille; and the comedy of manners, witty, licentious, sparkling in dialogue but weak in individual characterization, which ripened in Congreve. In their various ways both these types are of strong literary and social interest; but even when they resound in Dryden's best verse, they are essentially prosaic. The characteristic work of the age is either prose in itself or in conception. No age has pictured itself more vividly than this unimaginative epoch has done in the two famous diaries of Pepys and Evelyn. There we can read what men did, what men thought about, and what they felt; and behold, it is all prose-humdrum and commonplace, by no means strait-laced, but of extraordinary interest. The writings of the divines tell the same tale. If Charles enjoyed the sermons of a South or a Tillotson, he enjoyed much sound and serious reasoning couched in sonorous language-but, again, prose-real prose. We do not imagine that he read Bunyan, but his people did; and it must be counted to them for righteousness that they still clung to imaginative prose which had a lucidity and force that no court inspired. Finally, we have to credit Charles with his encouragement of science through the foundation of the Royal Society (1661). The work of this famous institution is a memorial more lasting than bronze to Charles's tastes. We should not be far wrong, perhaps, in asserting that, along with Milton, Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke are the most important personages, for the world and humanity as a whole, of the 17th century in England. The fate of James II. is sufficient evidence that Englishmen were by no means prepared to sacrifice the solid results of the Puritan Revolution, and it brings more clearly to light the worldly wisdom of his brother. In the literary sense, the last years of the century give us merely the ripe fruit from the seeds sown at the Restoration CHAPTER 2. JOHN MILTON (1608-74) Life.-Youth, 1608-32. Born in London, the son of a scrivener, a man of literary and musical tastes and Protestant views, and, as his son says, marked by " the wonderful integrity of his life," Milton was sent to St. Paul's School, and thence in 1625 to Christ's College, Cambridge. He intended to take holy orders; it was not till after 1632 that he found himself out of sympathy with the Anglican hierarchy, and resolved to devote himself to a poet's life. His Latin epistles to his friend Diodati (1626-7-9) show him as a gentle and sociable youth, a lover of music, dancing, women, books, plays, and country pleasures; at the same time studious, religious, highminded, and modest. Though he wrote in 1629 The Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, he thought himself as slow to reach maturity of mind as he was to reach the semblance of manhood. In 1631 John Milton. he wrote: My hasting dayes flie on with full career, Country Life and Travel, 1632-9. Leaving Cambridge in 1632, he went to live at Horton, in Buckingham shire, where his father had bought a house. Six years of studious seclusion were broken by occasional visits to London "to buy books or learn something new in mathematics or in music." Soon after settling at Horton he wrote L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. His friendship with Henry Lawes, the musician, led to the composition of Arcades as part of an entertainment given by the family of the dowager Countess of Derby at Harefield in 1634, and of a Maske, since known as Comus, acted by the family of the Earl of Ellesmere, Lady Derby's stepson and son-in-law, at Ludlow Castle in the same year. In 1637 the death of his Cambridge acquaintance Edward King occasioned the writing of Lycidas. In 1638 he set out for a tour in France and Italy. He seems to have designed two years' travel, but returned after fifteen months because the news of the Scottish troubles made him think that the fight for freedom was about to begin. Political and Social Work, 1640-60. Settling in London, he took pupils and wrote pamphlets on the controversies of the hour. In 1643 he married Mary Powell, daughter of an Oxfordshire Cavalier, so ill-sorted a match that within a few weeks the wife returned to her parents and the husband sat down to write two pamphlets in favour of divorce. These he published without licence, and action taken against him by the Stationers' Company and the House of Commons led him to compose Areopagitica, or a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenced Printing. In 1645 the ruin of the Cavalier cause made his wife's friends desire her to return to him. With some hesitation he received her, and soon afterwards gave shelter to her parents and sisters. In the years 1646-52 three daughters were born to him, and his wife died in the last year. In 1647 his father's death had left him with means enough to give up pupils. In 1649 the publication of his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates was followed by his appointment to be Latin secretary to the new Council of State. He once more threw himself fiercely into controversy, defending the regicides and assailing their opponents. His eyesight had for some time been failing, and he now (1653) knew that unless he abandoned writing he must go blind. He chose blindness, and justified his choice in the sonnet which ends. They also serve who only stand and waite. His blindness did not end his labours as a champion of the Independents; the last of his works in the cause, a defence of republicanism, appeared in 1660. In 1656 he married again, but his wife lived little more than a year. At the Restoration he went into hiding in the City, but was arrested there. He seems to have found influential friends, and the Indemnity Act freed him from danger, but his income. was very much reduced. Retirement: Great Poems, 1661-74. He continued living in London, and in 1663 made a happy third marriage. As early as 1641 he had settled on the Fall of Man as the subject of his epic, and he seems to have set to work on the poem in 1658. Phillips says that some parts were already written, the speech of Satan1 as early as 1642. Completed about 1663, Paradise Lost appeared in 1667 as a poem "written in ten books," and the second edition, "a poem in twelve books," in 1674. In 1671 Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes appeared together. Milton's health was now breaking, and his life was clouded by differences with his daughters; but he published some few books in prose and a collected edition of his early poems. He died quietly on November 8, 1674, and was buried in St. Giles's, Cripplegate. Chief Poetical Works.-Hymn on the Nativity (1629); L'Allegro and Il Penseroso (1633); Arcades (1634); A Maske (Comus), (1634); Lycidas (1637); Paradise Lost 1 Paradise Lost, IV. 32-113. |