A History of English Literature - George Saintsbury (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

displaying, on the whole, a singular lack of inspiration which half excuses the mistaken attempt of the younger of them, and of their immediate successors, to arrive at the desired poetical medium by the use of classical metres. Among men actually living and writing at this time Lord Buckhurst alone displays a real poetical faculty. Nor is the case much better in respect of drama, though here the restless variety of tentative displays even more clearly the vigorous life which underlay incomplete performance, and which promised better things shortly. The attempt of Gorboduc and a few other plays to naturalise the artificial tragedy, though a failure, was one of those failures which, in the great literary "rule of false," help the way to success; the example of Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle could not fail to stimulate the production of genuine native farce which might any day become la bonne comédie. And even the continued composition of Moralities showed signs of the growing desire for life and individuality of character. Moreover, the intense and increasing liking for the theatre in all classes of society, despite the discouragement of the authorities, the miserable reward offered to actors and playwrights, and the discredit which rested on the vocations of both, was certain in the ordinary course of things to improve the supply. The third division of literature made slower progress under less powerful stimulants. No emulation, like that which tempted the individual graduate or templar to rival Surrey in addressing his mistress's eyebrow, or Sackville in stately rhyming on English history, acted on the writers of prose. No public demand, like that which produced the few known and the hundred forgotten playwrights of the first half of Elizabeth's reign, served as a hotbed. But it is the great secret of prose that it can dispense with such stimulants. Everybody who wished to make his thoughts known began, with the help of the printing press, to make them known; and the informal use of the vernacular, by dint of this unconscious practice and of the growing scholarship both of writers and readers, tended insensibly to make itself less of a mere written conversation and more of a finished prose style. Preaching in English, the prose pamphlet, and translations into the vernacular were, no doubt, the three great schoolmasters in the disciplining of English prose. But by degrees all classes of subjects were treated in the natural manner, and so the various subdivisions of prose style—oratorical, narrative, expository, and the rest—slowly evolved and separated themselves, though hardly, even at the close of the time, had they attained the condition of finish.

The year 1580 may be fixed on with almost mathematical accuracy as the date at which the great generation of Elizabethan writers first showed its hand with Lyly's Euphues in prose and Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar in verse. Drama was a little, but not more than a little, later in showing the same signs of rejuvenescence; and from that time forward till the end of the century not a year passed without the appearance of some memorable work or writer; while the total production of the twenty years exceeds in originality and force, if not always in artistic perfection of form, the production of any similar period in the world's history. The group of University Wits, following the example of Lyly (who, however, in drama hardly belongs to the most original school), started the dramas of history, of romance, of domestic life; and, by fashioning through their leader Marlowe the tragic decasyllable, put into the hands of the still greater group who succeeded them an instrument, the power of which it is impossible to exaggerate. Before the close of the century they had themselves all ceased their stormy careers; but Shakespere was in the full swing of his activity; Ben Jonson had achieved the freshest and perhaps capital fruit of his study of humours; Dekker, Webster, Middleton, Chapman, and a crowd of lesser writers had followed in his steps. In poetry proper the magnificent success of The Faërie Queen had in one sense no second; but it was surrounded with a crowd of productions hardly inferior in their own way, the chief being the result of the great and remarkable sonnet outburst of the last decade of the century. The doggerel of the earlier years had almost entirely disappeared, and in its place appeared the perfect concerted music of the stanzas (from the sonnet and the Spenserian downwards), the infinite variety of the decasyllable, and the exquisite lyric snatches of song in the dramatists, pamphleteers, and music-book writers. Following the general law already indicated, the formal advance in prose was less, but an enormous stride was made in the direction of applying it to its various uses. The theologians, with Hooker at their head, produced almost the first examples of the measured and dignified treatment of argument and exposition. Bacon (towards the latter end it is true) produced the earliest specimens of his singular mixture of gravity and fancy, pregnant thought and quaint expression. History in the proper sense was hardly written, but a score of chroniclers, some not deficient in narrative power, paved the way for future historians. In imaginative and miscellaneous literature the fantastic extravagances of Lyly seemed as though they might have an evil effect. In reality they only spurred ingenious souls on to effort in refining prose, and in one particular direction they had a most unlooked for result. The imitation in little by Greene, Lodge, and others, of their long-winded graces, helped to popularise the pamphlet, and the popularisation of the pamphlet led the way to periodical writing—an introduction perhaps of doubtful value in itself, but certainly a matter of no small importance in the history of literature. And so by degrees professional men of letters arose—men of letters, professional in a sense, which had not existed since the days of the travelling Jongleurs of the early Middle Ages. These men, by working for the actors in drama, or by working for the publishers in the prose and verse pamphlet (for the latter form still held its ground), earned a subsistence which would seem sometimes to have been not a mere pittance, and which at any rate, when folly and vice did not dissipate it, kept them alive. Much nonsense no doubt has been talked about the Fourth Estate; but such as it is, for good or for bad, it practically came into existence in these prolific years.

The third period, that of vigorous manhood, may be said to coincide roughly with the reign of James I., though if literary rather than political dates be preferred, it might be made to begin with the death of Spenser in 1599, and to end with the damnation of Ben Jonson's New Inn just thirty years later. In the whole of this period till the very last there is no other sign of decadence than the gradual dropping off in the course of nature of the great men of the preceding stage, not a few of whom, however, survived into the next, while the places of those who fell were taken in some cases by others hardly below the greatest, such as Beaumont and Fletcher. Many of the very greatest works of what is generally known as the Elizabethan era—the later dramas of Shakespere, almost the whole work of Ben Jonson, the later poems of Drayton, Daniel, and Chapman, the plays of Webster and Middleton, and the prose of Raleigh, the best work of Bacon, the poetry of Browne and Wither—date from this time, while the astonishingly various and excellent work of the two great dramatists above mentioned is wholly comprised within it. And not only is there no sign of weakening, but there is hardly a sign of change. A slight, though only a slight, depression of the imaginative and moral tone may be noticed or fancied in those who, like Fletcher, are wholly of the period, and a certain improvement in general technical execution testifies to longer practice. But Webster might as well have written years earlier (hardly so well years later) than he actually did; and especially in the case of numerous anonymous or single works, the date of which, or at least of their composition, is obscure, it is very difficult from internal evidence of style and sentiment to assign them to one date rather than to another, to the last part of the strictly Elizabethan or the first part of the strictly Jacobean period. Were it not for the occasional imitation of models, the occasional reference to dated facts, it would be not so much difficult as impossible. If there seems to be less audacity of experiment, less of the fire of youth, less of the unrestrainable restlessness of genius eager to burst its way, that, as has been already remarked of another difference, may not improbably be mainly due to fancy, and to the knowledge that the later efforts actually were later as to anything else. In prose more particularly there is no change whatever. Few new experiments in style were tried, unless the Characters of Overbury and Earle may be called such. The miscellaneous pamphlets of the time were written in much the same fashion, and in some cases by the same men, as when, forty years before Jonson summoned himself to "quit the loathed stage," Nash had alternately laughed at Gabriel Harvey, and savagely lashed the Martinists. The graver writers certainly had not improved upon, and had not greatly changed the style in which Hooker broke his lance with Travers, or descanted on the sanctity of law. The humour-comedy of Jonson, the romantic drame of Fletcher, with the marmoreally-finished minor poems of Ben, were the nearest approaches of any product of the time to novelty of general style, and all three were destined to be constantly imitated, though only in the last case with much real success, during the rest of our present period. Yet the post-Restoration comedy is almost as much due to Jonson and Fletcher as to foreign models, and the influence of both, after long failing to produce anything of merit, was not imperceptible even in Congreve and Vanbrugh.

Of the fourth period, which practically covers the reign of Charles I. and the interregnum of the Commonwealth, no one can say that it shows no signs of decadence, when the meaning of that word is calculated according to the cautions given above in noticing its poets. Yet the decadence is not at all of the kind which announces a long literary dead season, but only of that which shows that the old order is changing to a new. Nor if regard be merely had to the great names which adorn the time, may it seem proper to use the word decadence at all. To this period belong not only Milton, but Taylor, Browne, Clarendon, Hobbes (four of the greatest names in English prose), the strange union of learning in matter and quaintness in form which characterises Fuller and Burton, the great dramatic work of Massinger and Ford. To it also belongs the exquisite if sometimes artificial school of poetry which grew up under the joint inspiration of the great personal influence and important printed work of Ben Jonson on the one hand, and the subtler but even more penetrating stimulant of the unpublished poetry of Donne on the other—a school which has produced lyrical work not surpassed by that of any other school or time, and which, in some specially poetical characteristics, may claim to stand alone.

If then, we speak of decadence, it is necessary to describe with some precision what is meant, and to do so is not difficult, for the signs of it are evident, not merely in the rank and file of writers (though they are naturally most prominent here), but to some extent in the great illustrations of