1665-1700]

Literary criticism.

Satire

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knowledge of the English drama of the day his preference of Shadwell and other "coarse" poets, as Dryden called them, to the more "polite" may reveal. At any rate, his influence and particularly his preference for the modern drama over the ancient had a great effect on English men of letters. Everyone who wrote a play wrote in a preface his own theories of play-writing; and this is the form in which most of Dryden's critical work-excepting the Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1665)—was done. Dryden, while a large borrower from the French, is a sturdy champion of the English drama. He displays a truer taste in discriminating Elizabethan authors than any of his fellows. Though he lent a hand in the spoiling of The Tempest, and "tagged" Milton's lines in The Age of Innocence, he recognised the true place of both the poets he attempted to adapt. As a rule, his critical work is called out by some special need of his own-the defence or the surrender of the heroic couplet in drama, for instance; and it combines reason and enthusiasm in a manner that makes it at once profitable and delightful to read. It was in this school, as the preface to the translation of the Georgies shows, that Addison was trained; and by Dryden, Sprat, Rymer (whose manner is far better than his deplorable literary matter), Congreve, and other critics, were laid the foundations of the edifice completed in the following century.

Such an age as this makes fruitful ground for satire - a form of literature that looks not so much at the ideal itself as at the faults of those who depart from it. And it is due to Dryden that the satire of this period at its best is of supreme merit. The Hudibras of Samuel Butler, much of which was written before the Restoration, is in some respects a voice from the age that had passed. Its versification has all and more than all the ruggedness of Donne or Marston at their worst: the author chooses deliberately to make his effects by jocular antics of diction, which his shrewd humour and close observation of detail carry off successfully. But we look in vain for elevation, dignity, or strong purpose. Butler shows to the full some of the worst characteristics of the age which laughed at Hudibras; its easy ridicule of externals, its want of conviction and of taste, its vulgarity and its scepticism. It is not Puritanism but Puritans that he attacks, and he attacks them rather with caricature than with satire. Neither Royalist nor Churchman, but sceptic and opportunist, he writes less from belief in a cause than from the desire to make fun of the external extravagances of its opponents, and there is as little principle in his message as there is plan or cohesion in the poem he took and dropped and took up again. Reverence was not a characteristic of the man who could so use his models, Don Quixote and The Faerie Queene, as to debase them in Butler's manner. It might be objected that there was as little conviction at the bottom of Dryden's satires as of Butler's; and, allowing for all reasonable change of opinion, consistency can hardly be claimed for the man who wrote Amboyna with its prologue and epilogue in 1673, and eight years later attacked in Absalom and

up

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Dryden's satire

[1681-2

Achitophel and The Medal the policy which he supposed to be Shaftesbury's. But here Dryden's genius, the dignity of his mind, the actual superiority conferred on him, not by lofty purpose but by mere ability, came to his rescue. He took to satire late in life, and then, probably, rather on suggestion than from any ardent interest in politics; and the qualities of his mind and the nature of his training for the work were such that in his hands political satire reached its highest point.

Absalom and Achitophel, the first and greatest of these poems, was published in November, 1681. The "Popish Plot" and the rejection of the Exclusion Bill by the Lords had wrought popular feeling to a height not reached in any preceding period of Charles' reign. The Parliament at Oxford had been dissolved; Shaftesbury was on his trial for high treason; and it is said that Charles himself suggested to Dryden that he should strike a blow in the fight. Dryden's blow was this satire, which, though it failed of its main object on the acquittal of Shaftesbury a few days after its publication, was one of the most powerful aids to the King in his resistance to the Exclusionists. The story of Absalom and David fitted aptly enough the circumstances of Monmouth and his father: Achitophel, considerably changed, became Shaftesbury, whom Dryden affected to regard as part inventor of the "Popish Plot" and the leader in the decision to make war on the Dutch. The Biblical story could not, of course, be closely followed, and the conduct of the fable, which ends with a speech from the King, is its weakest part. Its strength lies in its masterly characterisation, the finest in an age which Clarendon and SaintÉvremond had helped to educate in a favourite field of literature, and in Dryden's ability in presenting a case. To celebrate the acquittal of Shaftesbury, a medal was struck, which formed the text of Dryden's next satire, The Medal, A Satire against Sedition (March, 1682), also suggested to him, as report declared, by Charles II. In the introductory Epistle to the Whigs and in the satire itself Dryden makes fun of the medal and attacks the party; he returns to his invective on Shaftesbury, and explains in a passage of great didactic force, sound sense and strong fancy the unsuitability of republican institutions to the climate and temper of England. The Medal, like its predecessors, was not allowed to go unanswered by the Whigs, and among the answers was Shadwell's The Medal of John Bayes, a savage piece of scurrility. Dryden, for once, used his satire for personal ends, and replied to Shadwell in October, 1682, with Mac Flecknoe, or, a Satire on the True Blue Protestant poet. In this he fathers Shadwell on Flecknoe, an Irish priest and an indifferent poet, who had died not long before, and represents the sire handing on his mantle of dulness to his duller son. In the following month, he returned to the attack with some 200 lines on Shadwell, Settle and others included in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, the rest of which was composed by Nahum Tate, possibly (for the verse is above Tate's level) under Dryden's revision. And in the same month with this, his last satire and

1682-8]

Dryden's religious poems

135

the most violent attack he ever wrote, he put forth a remarkable piece, the Religio Laici, an examination of the credibility of the Christian religion and the claims of the Church of England against the Catholic Church and the Deists. The surprise that has been expressed at Dryden's sudden excursion into theology is ungrounded. Theological thought must have been called forth in all who had dwelt on the double question, religious and political, raised by the "Popish Plot" and the Exclusion Bill. Still less is there reason for suspecting Dryden's sincerity. The poem could not serve his turn with Charles, of whose secret leanings to Catholicism he must have been aware, or with the Duke of York. It forms a sober and sincere expression of the opinions of a man of fifty-one who was passing through the process of thought which led him four years later to join the Catholic Church. The conversion was followed by the publication of The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which, with even more argumentative skill than was shown in the Religio Laici, he supports the claims of the Church, commending at the same time the policy of James II. The sincerity, again, of Dryden's conversion has been questioned; and even Saintsbury admits that it may have been helped on to some extent by the prospect of being on the winning side, by the "journalist spirit" and by his dislike of the unliterary character of the Protestant Whigs. Dryden indeed was always abreast or a little in advance of the public opinion of his party. But it is from the Whig party and its descendants that this charge of insincerity, together with that of personal profligacy, proceeded, and neither rests on good foundation. Sincere or not, Dryden held to his path. Except for the Britannia Rediviva, an ode celebrating the birth of a son to James II, The Hind and the Panther was his last word on matters of state and religion. The Revolution found him on the losing side; he was deprived of his laureateship; his authority, save in matters of literature, was at an end.

We have only to compare the work of Oldham, who published his Satires upon the Jesuits the year before the appearance of Absalom and Achitophel, with the poems mentioned above, to see what Dryden did for satire and didactic poetry. Oldham, student of Marvell though he was, is a rugged writer. His hits are shrewd; but he has none of the "science" of Dryden in the art of attack, and none of his dignity and intellectual supremacy. He maintains throughout the tone to which Dryden descends in the regrettable attack on the son of Shaftesbury in Absalom and Achitophel. For the most part, only on the greatest provocation does Dryden stoop to personalities. He strikes from above, and condescends as he strikes. In most cases, though the individual sufferer is unmistakable, Dryden succeeds in treating him as the embodiment of a principle. He writes not as a moral reformer but as a man of sense, and hits hardest when apparently most cool. There is no calculating exactly the effect of such a weapon as this of Dryden's in the victory of Charles over the Exclusionists. Besides the direct satire of Absalom and

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The novel and the Characters

[1643-1712 Achitophel, its severe and logical expression of the political thought of the King's party, its scorn of popular rule and of such abstractions as "that golden calfa state," and its glorification of monarchy and of Charles, account must be taken of the skill with which, by its very tone of ease and superiority, it contrives to put a social stigma on those whom it attacks in an age which was socially ambitious and socially sensitive. The place of these poems as pure literature has been almost universally acknowledged to be supreme in their kind. Poetry and argument go hand in hand in a manner never before achieved, and the management of the couplet for which Dryden had been trained by years of work in the drama is perfect. These didactic poems and the Fables from Chaucer and Boccaccio to which he turned after the Revolution may be regarded as the best poetry of a prosaic age. If skill in stating a case or telling

a story does not constitute the highest form of poetry, it is to Dryden's honour that he gathered up all the reasoning power, the wit, and the polish of his age and gave them expression with the best of the taste that his labours had helped to form.

A last word must be added concerning another form of literary expression, which the following century brought to perfection—the novel. During the closing of the theatres after 1642, the heroic romances of France made their way into England and were translated and imitated freely by Orrery, Crowne, and others, while D'Avenant's Gondibert and Chamberlayne's Pharonnida are heroic romances in verse. The renascence of the drama affected the demand for romances; but in Mrs Behn we find an attempt to bring romance into touch with contemporary life. Her prose novel Oroonoko is a strange mixture of the romantic and the realistic; a mixture even more strangely marked in The Fair Jilt. This attempt was to bear little fruit. A more important work is Congreve's novel, Incognita, which reveals him as a humorist in prose fiction, and a parodist of the heroic style. On the other hand, we have the allegories of Bunyan, which have no parentage but the Bible and the vivid imagination of an untutored man. The voice of Bunyan is not the voice of his age. He has no affinities with Milton save his knowledge of the Bible; he owes nothing to the other writers of his day. His imagi nation and sincerity made him forcible and arresting; the Bible made him lucid and direct. His immediate influence was nothing, and the temptation to dwell on his genius must be resisted. Despite the attempt of Mrs Behn and such close interest in the common facts of life as Bunyan shows in Mr Badman, the origin of the novel must be looked for not in the fiction of this age, but in its history and in its "characters." Clarendon and Burnet with their powers of characterisation and anecdote, Butler with his Theophrastian Characters, Halifax, Saint-Évremond, and the letter-writers and diarists, sowed the seeds of such work as the Spectator papers on Sir Roger de Coverley, and their development into the English novel.

CHAPTER VII

THE ADMINISTRATIONS OF JOHN DE WITT AND

WILLIAM OF ORANGE

(1651-88)

THE sudden demise of William II was the signal for a reaction against the Orange party and policy. The Great Assembly of 1651 assured the triumph of the principles of the "States party," which inherited the tradition of Oldenbarneveldt, and the domination in the Union of the Province of Holland. It was really called together to decide between two opposing systems of government; and the critical conjuncture of affairs, which left the Orangists without a leader, made the decision a foregone conclusion. Its effect was to emphasise the sovereignty of the States of the several Provinces at the expense of that of the States General of the Union. By the thoroughgoing advocates of provincial autonomy it was indeed denied that the States General possessed any of the attributes of sovereignty at all. The Federal Assembly represented the Republic in the eyes of the outside world; but it had no authority save what was delegated to it by the seven sovereign Provinces acting in accord. It could not coerce the Provincial States or take action in opposition to their wishes. Such a theory, had it been pushed to its extreme limits, would have proved from the first unworkable. It had been corrected in practice by the existence in the United Netherlands of two strong, though antagonistic, influences. The one was the extensive executive powers vested in successive Princes of Orange. By their distinguished abilities, no less than by virtue of the offices they filled, the Stadholders William I, Maurice, Frederick Henry, and William II, exercised an authority which was strong enough at critical moments to override opposition. They were in reality, what they were often styled, "eminent heads" of the State. The other influence was that of the predominant Province of Holland, which bore more than half of the entire financial burden of the Union, and provided the greater part of its indispensable fleet. The States of Holland jealously and vigilantly asserted their independence and privileges, and their control of the purse gave them an almost irresistible weight in the determination of the policy of the Republic. Twice, in 1618 and 1650, had it been necessary to settle the question of supremacy between Holland and the Generality by the sword. But the imprisonment of Jacob de Witt and