(1675), Fox for his Journal and its mixture of quaintness and rapturous mysticism. John Bunyan, the least instructed of them all, is their only born artist. His creed and point Bunyan. of view were those of half the nation—the half that was usually inarticulate in literature, or spoke without style or genius. His reading, consisting not only of the Bible, but of the popular allegories of giants, pilgrims and adventure, was also that of his class. The Pilgrim’s Progress, of which the first part appeared in 1678, the second in 1684, is the happy flowering sport amidst a growth of barren plants of the same tribe. The Progress is a dream, more vivid to its author than most men’s waking memories to themselves; the emblem and the thing signified are merged at every point, so that Christian’s journey is not so much an allegory with a key as a spiritual vision of this earth and our neighbours. Grace Abounding, Bunyan’s diary of his own voyage to salvation, The Holy War, an overloaded fable of the fall and recovery of mankind, and The Life and Death of Mr Badman, a novel telling of the triumphal earthly progress of a scoundrelly tradesman, are among Bunyan’s other contributions to literature. His union of spiritual intensity, sharp humorous vision, and power of simple speech consummately chosen, mark his work off alike from his own inarticulate public and from all other literary performance of his time.
The transition from the older to the newer poetry was not abrupt. Old themes and tunes were slowly disused, others previously of lesser mark rose into favour, and a few quite fresh ones were introduced. The poems of John Oldham and Andrew Marvell belong to both periods. Transitional verse. Both of them begin with fantasy and elegy, and end with satires, which indeed are rather documents than works of art. The monody of Oldham on his friend Morwent is poorly exchanged for the Satires on the Jesuits (1681), and the lovely metaphysical verses of Marvell on gardens and orchards and the spiritual love sadly give place to his Last Instructions to a Painter (1669). In his Horatian Ode Marvell had nobly and impartially applied his earlier style to national affairs; but the time proved too strong for this delightful poet. Another and a stranger satire had soon greeted the Restoration, the Hudibras. Hudibras (1663–1678) of Samuel Butler, with its companion pieces. The returned wanderers delighted in this horribly agile, boisterous and fierce attack on the popular party and its religions, and its wrangles and its manners. Profoundly eccentric and tiresomely allusive in his form, and working in the short rhyming couplets thenceforth called “Hudibrastics,” Butler founded a small and peculiar but long-lived school of satire. The other verse of the time is largely satire of a different tone and metre; but the earlier kind of finished and gallant lyric persisted through the reign of Charles II. The songs of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, are usually malicious, sometimes Songsters. passionate; they have a music and a splendid self-abandonment such as we never meet again till Burns. Sedley and Dorset and Aphra Behn and Dryden are the rightful heirs of Carew and Lovelace, those infallible masters of short rhythms; and this secret also was lost for a century afterwards.
In poetry, in prose, and to some extent in drama, John Dryden, the creature of his time, is the master of its expression. He began with panegyric verse, first on Cromwell and then on Charles, which is full of fine things and false writing. The Annus Mirabilis (1667) is the chief example, celebrating Dryden. the Plague, the Fire and the naval victory, in the quatrains for which Davenant’s pompous Gondibert had shown the way. The Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668), a dialogue on the rivalries of blank verse with rhyme, and of the Elizabethan drama with the French, is perfect modern prose; and to this perfection Dryden attained at a bound, while he attained his poetical style more gradually. He practised his couplet in panegyric, in heroic tragedy, and in dramatic prologue and epilogue for twenty years before it was consummate. Till 1680 he supported himself chiefly by his plays, which have not lived so long as their critical prefaces, already mentioned. His diction and versification came to their full power in his satires, rhymed arguments, dedications and translations. Absalom and Achitophel (part i., 1681; part ii., with Nahum Tate, 1682), as well as The Medal and Mac Flecknoe, marked a new birth of English satire, placing it at once on a level with that of any ancient or modern country. The mixture of deadly good temper, Olympian unfairness, and rhetorical and metrical skill in each of these poems has never been repeated. The presentment of Achitophel, earl of Shaftesbury, in his relations with Absalom Walters and Charles the minstrel-king of Judah, as well as the portraits of Shimei and Barzillai and Jotham, the eminent Whigs and Tories, and of the poets Og and Doeg, are things whose vividness age has never discoloured. Dryden’s Protestant arguings in Religio Laici (1682) and his equally sincere Papistical arguings in The Hind and the Panther (1687) are just as skilful. His translations of Virgil and parts of Lucretius, of Chaucer and Boccaccio (Fables, 1700), set the seal on his command of his favourite couplet for the higher kinds of appeal and oratory. His Ode on Anne Killigrew, and his popular but coarser Alexander’s Feast, have a more lyric harmony; and his songs, inserted in his plays, reflect the change of fashion by their metrical adeptness and often thorough-going wantonness. The epithet of “glorious,” in its older sense of a certain conscious and warranted pride of place, not in that of boastful or pretentious, suits Dryden well. Not only did he leave a model and a point of departure for Pope, but his influence recurs in Churchill, in Gray, in Johnson and in Crabbe, where he is seen counteracting, with his large, wholesome and sincere bluntness, the acidity of Pope. Dryden was counted near Shakespeare and Milton until the romantic revival renewed the sense of proportion; but the same sense now demands his acknowledgment as the English poet who is nearest to their frontiers of all those who are exiled from their kingdom.
Restoration and Revolution tragedy is nearly all abortive; it is now hard to read it for pleasure. But it has noble flights, and its historic interest is high. Two of its species, the rhymed heroic play and the rehandling of Shakespeare in blank verse, were also brought to their utmost by Tragedy. Dryden, though in both he had many companions. The heroic tragedies were a hybrid offspring of the heroic romance and French tragedy; and though The Conquest of Granada (1669–1670) and Tyrannic Love would be very open to satire in Dryden’s own vein, they are at least generously absurd. Their intention is never ignoble, if often impossible. After a time Dryden went back to Shakespeare, after a fashion already set by Sir William Davenant, the connecting link with the older tragedy and the inaugurator of the new. They “revived” Shakespeare; they vamped him in a style that did not wholly perish till after the time of Garrick. The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra were thus handled by Dryden; and the last of these, as converted by him into All for Love (1678), is loftier and stronger than any of his original plays, its blank verse renewing the ties of Restoration poetry with the great age. The heroic plays, written in one or other metre, lived long, and expired in the burlesques of Fielding and Sheridan. The Rehearsal (1671), a gracious piece of fooling partially aimed at Dryden by Buckingham and his friends, did not suffice to kill its victims. Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee, both of whom generally used blank verse, are the other tragic writers of note, children indeed of the extreme old age of the drama. Otway’s Otway. long-acted Venice Preserved (1682) has an almost Shakespearian skill in melodrama, a wonderful tide of passionate language, and a blunt and bold delineation of character; but Otway’s inferior style and verse could only be admired in an age like his own. Lee is far more of a poet, though less of a dramatist, and he wasted a certain talent in noise and fury.
Restoration comedy at first followed Jonson, whom it was easy to try and imitate; Shadwell and Wilson, whose works are a museum for the social antiquary, photographed the humours of the town. Dryden’s many comedies often show his more boisterous and blatant, rarely his finer Comedy. qualities. Like all playwrights of the time he pillages from the French, and vulgarizes Molière without stint or shame. A truer light comedy began with Sir George Etherege, who mirrored in
