Chapter VII: Criticism

The age of the Restoration possessed many men qualified to shine in criticism, but their acumen is in general only indicated by casual remarks, and, setting aside the metrical prolusions of Roscommon and Sheffield, nearly all the serious criticism it has bequeathed to us proceeds from the pen of Dryden. No other of our poets except Coleridge and Wordsworth has given us anything so critically valuable, but Dryden's principal service is one which they could not render; for, even if their style had equalled his--and this would be too much to say even of Wordsworth's--it could not have exerted the same wide and salutary influence. Dryden is entitled to be considered as the great reformer of English prose, the writer in whom the sound principles of the Restoration were above all others impersonated, and who above all others led the way to that clear, sane, and balanced method of writing which it was the especial mission of Restoration literature to introduce. We need only compare his style with Milton's to be sensible of the enormous progress in the direction of perspicuity and general utility. Milton is a far more eloquent writer, but his style is totally unfit for the close reasoning and accurate investigation which the pressure of politics and the development of science and philosophy were soon to require, and the rest of the prosaists of the time are, with few exceptions, either too pedantic or too commonplace. Dryden is lucid, easy, familiar, yet he can be august and splendid on occasion, and if he does not emulate Milton's dithyrambic, the dignity of English prose loses nothing in his hands. Take the opening of his _Dialogue on Dramatic Poesy_:

'It was that memorable day, in the first summer of the late
war, when our navy engaged the Dutch; a day wherein the two
most mighty and best appointed fleets which any age had ever
seen, disputed the command of the greater half of the globe,
the commerce of nations, and the riches of the universe: while
these vast floating bodies, on either side, moved against each
other in parallel lines, and our countrymen, under the happy
conduct of his royal highness, went breaking, by little and
little, into the line of the enemies; the noise of the cannon
from both navies reached our ears about the city, so that all
men being alarmed with it, and in a dreadful suspense of the
event, which they knew was then deciding, every one went
following the sound as his fancy led him; and leaving the town
almost empty, some took towards the park, some across the
river, others down it; all seeking the noise in the depth of
silence.

'Amongst the rest, it was the fortune of Eugenius, Crites,
Lisideius, and Neander, to be in company together; three of
them persons whom their wit and quality have made known to all
the town; and whom I have chose to hide under these borrowed
names, that they may not suffer by so ill a relation as I am
going to make of their discourse.

'Taking then a barge, which a servant of Lisideius had provided
for them, they made haste to shoot the bridge, and left behind
them that great fall of waters which hindered them from hearing
what they desired: after which, having disengaged themselves
from many vessels which rode at anchor in the Thames, and
almost blocked up the passage towards Greenwich, they ordered
the watermen to let fall their oars more gently, and then,
every one favouring his own curiosity with a strict silence, it
was not long ere they perceived the air to break about them
like the noise of distant thunder, or of swallows in a
chimney:[8] those little undulations of sound, though almost
vanishing before they reached them, yet still seeming to retain
somewhat of their first horror, which they had betwixt the
fleets. After they had attentively listened till such time as
the sound by little and little went from them, Eugenius,
lifting up his head, and taking notice of it, was the first who
congratulated to the rest that happy omen of our nation's
victory: adding, that we had but this to desire in confirmation
of it, that we might hear no more of that noise, which was now
leaving the English coast.'

This fine induction can hardly have formed part of the original essay, which, Dryden tells us, was written in the country in 1665, since the naval battle, which was fought on June 3rd, 1665, is described as having taken place in 'the first summer of the late war.' One extraordinary passage must have been left uncorrected by oversight, at least we cannot well suppose that Dryden would have printed 'Blank verse is acknowledged to be too low for a poem' after the appearance of _Paradise Lost_, which was published on the day after the conclusion of the Peace of Breda, not then known in England. The essay has two objects not very compatible: to defend the English stage against the French, and to advocate the use of rhyme in tragedy, which necessarily gives the piece a French air, and makes it appear imitative, when it is in truth original. Dryden points out with considerable force the restrictions which French dramatists of the classical school impose upon themselves by servile adherence to the unities of time and place, and in a well-known passage which does honour to his taste sets Shakespeare above Ben Jonson. His criticism of _Troilus and Cressida_, in his essay on _The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy_ (1679), is instructive as illustrating by force of contrast that enlarged view of Shakespeare for which we are indebted to Goethe and Coleridge. He justly censures _Troilus and Cressida_ as a play; it does not occur to him that Shakespeare may have intended a satire. All his essays, which consist principally of prefaces and dedications to his own works, are worth reading; none more so than his defence of Virgil in the dedication to his translation of his poems, and the remarks on Horace and Juvenal in his _Essay on Satire_. Everywhere we must admire his sanity, penetration, and massive common sense; his chief defects are conventional prejudice, negligence (as when he ascribes the invention of blank verse to Shakespeare), and the parade of second-hand learning. It may be said of his criticisms, as truly as of his poems or plays, that his merits are his own, his faults those of his age.

Another critic of the stage only deserves notice in this capacity from his connection with Dryden. Thomas Rymer (1639-1714) will be mentioned again as a meritorious antiquary. As a critic he is remarkable for having by his _Tragedies of the Last Age_ (1673) drawn some judicious remarks from Dryden, and for having analyzed _Othello_ as a pattern of a bad play. He has consequently been unanimously hooted by his countrymen, for it passes belief that Pope should have praised him to Spence, though Spence affirms it. It was his misfortune to be an Englishman; in France at the time his views would have been thought very correct; in fact, he criticises Shakespeare much in the style of Voltaire. He is a votary of decorum and dignity, and would no more than Voltaire have let a mouse into a tragedy. He discusses with imperturbable gravity, 'Who and who may kill one another with decency?' and decides, 'In poetry no woman is to kill a man, except her quality gives her the advantage above him. Poetical decency will not suffer death to be dealt to each other by such persons, whom the laws of duel allow not to enter the lists together.' And Rymer would have been content to have dwelt in such decencies for ever.

Jeremy Collier, a Nonjuring clergyman (1650-1726), attained fame, not as the advocate of decencies, but of decency. His _Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage_ (1698) occasioned a great sensation, and was efficacious in abating the evils against which it was directed, although it is probable that Addison's mild rebuke and better example accomplished even more. As the adversary of men of wit and genius, Collier has become obnoxious to their representatives, and has been unfairly reviled as a sour fanatic. In fact he is very moderate, admits that the stage may be a valuable medium of instruction, and only denounces its abuse. Scott and Macaulay have done him justice, and Mr. Gosse gives an excellent analysis of his work in his biography of Congreve. His wit is as unquestionable as his zeal, but his argument is not everywhere equally cogent. On the chapter of profaneness he is fantastic and straitlaced, and so tender of dignities that he will not allow even the god Apis to be disrespectfully mentioned. On that of immorality he is unanswerable, and unless the incriminated dramatists were prepared to say, 'Evil, be thou my good,' they could but own

'Pudet haec opprobria nobis
Et dici potuisse, et non potuisse refelli.'

Congreve and Vanbrugh attempted to reply, but to little purpose. Dryden kissed the rod. Collier's volume is said to have been 'conceived, disposed, transcribed, and printed in a month.' He had previously achieved notoriety as a Jacobite pamphleteer, and in his old age became the official head of the decaying sect of the Nonjurors.

Although Richard Bentley (1662-1743) belongs mainly to the eighteenth century, his dissertation upon the _Epistles of Phalaris_ (1699) falls within the seventeenth, and an account of the literary criticism of this age would be incomplete without some mention of the one epoch-making critical work it produced. There is no need to tell again the story of the Bentley-Boyle controversy, so admirably narrated by Macaulay and Jebb; but it may be observed here that it marks an era in criticism as the first example of the testimony of antiquity being irretrievably overthrown by internal evidence. It was not the first time that the genuineness of attested ancient writings had been disputed. Valla had waged war upon the forged donation of Constantine, but his case was so very clear that he had not been answered, but as far as possible ignored. Phalaris had found defenders, and this controversy was perhaps the first in which tradition and authority were fairly vanquished in a pitched battle. Bentley's extraordinary powers of mind were almost equally evinced in his _Boyle Lectures_, also a production of the seventeenth century, which will be noticed in their place.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] An instance of the observation of nature as unusual with Dryden as chimneys of the size required are unusual with us.