Books: English literary criticism
V >>
Various >> English literary criticism
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22
On the other matter the record of Sidney is yet clearer. By "well
doing" he does not mean, as is too often meant, mere abstinence from
evil, but the active pursuit of whatsoever things are manly, noble,
and of good report. It is not only the "temperance of Diomedes"--
though temperance too may be conceived as an active virtue--but the
wisdom of Ulysses, the patriotism of Aneas, "the soon repenting pride
of Agamemnon", the valour of Achilles--it is courage, above all courage,
that stirs his soul in the great works of ancient poetry. It is the
same quality that moves him in the ballads and romances of the moderns.
"Certainly I must confess my own barbarousness; I never heard the old
song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than
with a trumpet." And again: "Truly I have known men that, even with
reading _Amadis de Gaule_ (which, God knoweth, wanteth much of a perfect
poesy), have found their hearts moved to the exercise of courtesy,
liberality, and especially courage." The man who wrote these words had
no starved conception of what poetry should be.
Once again. Sidney has small patience with those who would limit art
by the banishment of all that recalls the baser side of life. "Now,
as in geometry, the oblique must be known as well as the right. So in
the actions of our life, who seeth not the filthiness of evil, wanteth
a great foil to perceive the beauty of virtue. This doth the comedy
handle so ... as with hearing it we get, as it were, an experience....
So that the right use of comedy will, I think, by no body be blamed."
No doubt, the moral aspect of comedy is here marked with what must be
called immoderate stress. Here, too, as when he deals with the kindred
side of tragedy, Sidney demands that the poet shall, in his villains,
"show you nothing that is not to be shunned"; in other words, that,
so far as it paints evil, comedy shall take the form of satire.
But, even with this restriction, it must be allowed that Sidney takes
a wider view than might appear at a hasty reading; wider, it is
probable, than was at all common among the men of his generation. No
Shakespeare had yet arisen to touch the baser qualities of men with
a gleam of heroism or to humanize the most stoical endurance with a
strain of weakness. And even Shakespeare, in turning from the practice
to the theory of his art, could find no words very different from those
of Sidney. To him, as to Sidney, the aim of the drama is "to show
virtue her own image and scorn her own feature"; though by a saving
clause, which Sidney perhaps would hardly have accepted, it is further
defined as being to show "the very age and body of the time his form
and pressure". Yet it must be remembered that Sidney is loud in praise
of so unflinching a portraiture of life, base and noble, as Chaucer's
_Troilus and Cressida_. And on the whole it remains true that the
limitations of Sidney are the limitations of his age, while his
generosity is his own.
The remainder of the _Apologie_ is necessarily of slighter texture.
Apart from the examination of Plato's banishment of the poets--a theme
on which Harington also discourses, though with less weight than
Sidney--it is concerned mainly with two subjects: an assertion that
each form of poetry has its peculiar moral import, and a lament over
the decay into which English poetry had fallen in the sixteenth century.
Such a lament sounds strangely to us, accustomed as we are to regard
the age of Elizabeth, already half ended when Sidney wrote, as the
most fruitful period of our literature. But, when the _Apologie_ was
composed, no one of the authors by whose fame the Elizabethan age is
now commonly known--Sidney himself and Spenser alone excepted--had
begun to write. English poetry was about to wake from the long night
that lies between the age of Chaucer and the age of Shakespeare. But
it was not yet fully awakened. And the want of a full and free life
in creative art goes far to account for the shortcomings of Elizabethan
criticism.
Vague the Elizabethan critics undeniably are; they tend to lose
themselves either in far-fetched analogies or in generalities that
have but a slight bearing upon the distinctive problems of literary
appreciation. When not vague, they are apt to fritter their strength
on technical details which, important to them, have long lost their
significance for the student of literature. But both technicalities
and vagueness may be largely traced to the uncertain practice of the
poets upon whom, in the first instance, their criticism was based. The
work of Surrey and of Sackville was tentative; that of Webbe and
Puttenham was necessarily the same. It is the more honour to Sidney
that, shackled as he was by conditions from which no man could escape
altogether, he should have struck a note at once so deep and so strong
as is sounded in the _Apologie_.
II. In turning from Sidney to Dryden we pass into a different world.
The philosophy, the moral fervour, the prophetic strain of the
Elizabethan critic have vanished. Their place is taken by qualities
less stirring in themselves, but more akin to those that modern times
have been apt to associate with criticism. In fact, whatever qualities
we now demand from a critic may be found at least foreshadowed, and
commonly much more than foreshadowed, in Dryden. Dryden is master of
comparative criticism: he has something of the historical method; he
is unrivalled in the art of seizing the distinctive qualities of his
author and of setting them before us with the lightest touch. His very
style, so pointed yet so easy, is enough in itself to mark the gulf
that lies between the age of Elizabeth and the age of the Restoration.
All the Elizabethan critics, Sidney himself hardly excepted, bore some
trace of the schoolmaster. Dryden was the first to meet his readers
entirely as an equal, and talk to them as a friend with friends. It
is Dryden, and not Sainte-Beuve, who is the true father of the literary
_causerie_; and he still remains its unequalled master. There may be
other methods of striking the right note in literary criticism. Lamb
showed that there may be; so did Mr. Pater. But few indeed are the
critics who have known how to attune the mind of the reader to a
subject, which beyond all others cries out for harmonious treatment,
so skilfully as Dryden.
That the first great critic should come with the Restoration, was only
to be expected. The age of Elizabeth was essentially a creative age.
The imagination of men was too busy to leave room for self-scrutiny.
Their thoughts took shape so rapidly that there was no time to think
about the manner of their coming. Not indeed that there is, as has
sometimes been urged, any inherent strife between the creative and the
critical spirit. A great poet, we can learn from Goethe and Coleridge,
may also be a great critic. More than that: without some touch of
poetry in himself, no man can hope to do more than hack-work as a
critic of others. Yet it may safely be said that, if no critical
tradition exists in a nation, it is not an age of passionate creation,
such as was that of Marlowe and Shakespeare, that will found it. With
all their alertness, with all their wide outlook, with all their zeal
for classical models, the men of that time were too much of children,
too much beneath the spell of their own genius, to be critics. Compare
them with the great writers of other ages; and we feel instinctively
that, in spite of their surroundings, they have far more of vital
kindred with Homer or the creators of the mediaval epic, than with the
Greek dramatists--Aschylus excepted--or with Dante or with Goethe. The
"freshness of the early world" is still upon them; neither they nor
their contemporaries were born to the task of weighing and pondering,
which is the birthright of the critic.
It was far otherwise with the men of the Restoration. The creative
impulse of a century had at length spent its force. For the first time
since Wyatt and Surrey, England deserted the great themes of literature,
the heroic passions of Tamburlaine and Faustus, of Lear and Othello,
for the trivial round of social portraiture and didactic discourse;
for _Essays on Satire_ and _on Translated Verse_, for the Tea-Table
of the _Spectator_, for dreary exercises on the _Pleasures of the
Imagination_ and the _Art of Preserving Health_. A new era had opened.
It was the day of small things.
Yet it would be wrong to regard the new movement as merely negative.
Had that been all, it would be impossible to account for the passionate
enthusiasm it aroused in those who came beneath its spell; an enthusiasm
which lived long after the movement itself was spent, and which--except
in so far as it led to absurd comparisons with the Elizabethans--was
abundantly justified by the genius of Butler and Dryden, of Congreve
and Swift and Pope. Negative, on one side, the ideal of Restoration
and Augustan poetry undoubtedly was. It was a reaction against the
"unchartered freedom", the real or fancied extravagances, of the
Elizabethan poets. But, on the higher side, it was no less positive,
though doubtless far less noble, than the ideal it displaced.
The great writers of the eighty years following the Restoration were
consumed by a passion for observation--observation of the men and
things that lay immediately around them. They may have seen but little;
but what they did see, they grasped with surprising force and clearness.
They may not have gone far beneath the surface; but, so far as they
went, their work was a model of acuteness and precision. This was the
secret of their power. To this may be traced their victory in the
various tasks that they undertook.
Hence, on the one hand, their success in painting the manners of their
own day--a task from which, with some notable exceptions, the greatest
of the Elizabethans had been apt to shrink, as from something alien
to their genius; and, on the other hand, the range and keenness of
their satire. Hence, finally, the originality of their work in
criticism, and their new departure in philosophy. The energies of these
men were diverse: but all sprang from the same root--from their
invincible resolve to see and understand their world; to probe life,
as they knew it, to the bottom.
Thus the new turn given to criticism by Dryden was part of a far-
reaching intellectual movement; a movement no less positive and self-
contained than, in another aspect, it was negative and reactionary.
And it is only when taken as part of that movement, as side by side
with the philosophy of Locke and the satire of Swift or Pope, that its
true meaning can be understood. Nor is it the least important or the
least attractive of Dryden's qualities, as a critic, that both the
positive and the negative elements of the prevailing tendency--both
the determination to understand and the wish to bring all things under
rule--should make themselves felt so strongly and, on the whole, so
harmoniously in his Essays. No man could have felt more keenly the
shortcomings of the Elizabethan writers. No man could have set greater
store by that "art of writing easily" which was the chief pride of the
Restoration poets. Yet no man has ever felt a juster admiration for
the great writers of the opposite school; and no man has expressed his
reverence for them in more glowing words. The highest eulogy that has
yet been passed on Milton, the most discriminating but at the same
time the most generous tribute that has ever been offered to
Shakespeare--both these are to be found in Dryden. And they are to be
found in company with a perception, at once reasoned and instinctive,
of what criticism means, that was altogether new to English literature.
The finest and most characteristic of Dryden's critical writings--but
it is unfortunately also the longest--is without doubt the _Essay of
Dramatic Poesy_. The subject was one peculiarly well suited to Dryden's
genius. It touched a burning question of the day, and it opened the
door for a discussion of the deeper principles of the drama. The _Essay_
itself forms part of a long controversy between Dryden and his
brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard. The dispute was opened by Dryden's
preface to his tragi-comedy, _The Rival Ladies_, published probably,
as it was certainly first acted, in 1664; and in the beginning Dryden,
then first rising [Footnote: "To a play at the King's house, _The Rival
Ladies_, a very innocent and most pretty witty play"--is Pepys' entry
for August 4, 1664: _Diary_, ii. 155. Contrast his contemptuous
description of Dryden's first comedy, _The Wild Gallant_, in the
preceding year (Feb. 23)--"So poor a thing as I never saw in my life
almost".--_Ib_., i. 390.] into fame as a dramatist, confines himself
to pleading the cause of rhyme against blank verse in dramatic writing.
[Footnote: Tragedy alone is mentioned by name [_English Garner_, in.
490, 491]. But, from the general drift of the argument, it seems
probable that Dryden was speaking of the drama in general. At a later
stage of the dispute, however, he distinguishes between tragedy and
comedy, and allows that the arguments in favour of rhyme apply only
to the former--a curious inversion of the truth, as it would appear
to the modern mind.--_Ib_., pp. 561, 566.] Howard--who, it may
reasonably be guessed, had had some brushes with Dryden over their
joint tragedy, _The Indian Queen_--at once took up the cudgels. He had
written rhymed plays himself, it is true; the four plays, to which his
attack on rhyme was prefixed, were such; but he saw a chance of paying
off old scores against his brother-in-law, and he could not resist it.
Dryden began his reply at once; but three years passed before it was
published. And the world has no reason to regret his tardiness. There
are few writings of which we can say with greater certainty, as Dryden
himself said of a more questionable achievement,
'T is not the hasty product of a day,
But the well-ripened fruit of wise delay.
The very form of the _Essay_ bears witness to the spirit in which it
is written. It is cast as a dialogue, "related"--as Dryden truly
says--"without passion or interest, and leaving the reader to decide
in favour of which part he shall judge most reasonable". The balance
between opposing views is held as evenly as may be. It is a search for
truth, carried out in the "rude and undigested manner" of a friendly
conversation. Roughly speaking, the subjects of the _Essay_ are two.
The first, and the more slightly treated, is the quarrel of rhyme
against blank verse. The second is the far more important question,
How far is the dramatist bound by conventional restrictions? The
former--a revival under a new form of a dispute already waged by the
Elizabethans--leads Dryden to sift the claims of the "heroic drama";
and his treatment of it has the special charm belonging to an author's
defence of his artistic hearth and home. The latter is a theme which,
under some shape or other, will be with us wherever the stage itself
has a place in our life.
This is not the place to discuss at length the origin or the historical
justification of the Heroic Drama. There is perhaps no form of art
that so clearly marks the transition from the Elizabethan age to that
of the Restoration. Transitional it must certainly be called; for, in
all vital points, it stands curiously apart from the other forms of
Restoration literature. It has nothing either of the negative or the
positive qualities, nothing of the close observation and nothing of
the measure and self-restraint, that all feel to be the distinctive
marks of the Restoration temper. On the other hand the heroic drama,
of which Dryden's _Conquest of Granada_ and _Tyrannic Love_ may be
taken as fair samples, has obvious affinities with the more questionable
side of the Elizabethan stage. It may be defined as wanting in all the
virtues and as exaggerating all the vices of the Elizabethan dramatists.
Whatever was most wild in the wildest of the Elizabethan plays--the
involved plots, the extravagant incidents, the swelling metaphors and
similes--all this reappears in the heroic drama. And it reappears
without any of the dramatic force or of the splendid poetry which are
seldom entirely absent from the work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatists. The term "heroic drama" is, in fact, a fraud. The plays
of Dryden and his school are at best but moc-heroic; and they are
essentially undramatic. The truth is that these plays take something
of the same place in the history of the English drama that is held by
the verse of Donne and Cowley in the history of the English lyric. The
extravagant incidents correspond to the far-fetched conceits which,
unjustly enough, made the name of Donne a by-word with the critics
of the last century. The metaphors and similes are as abundant and
overcharged, though assuredly not so rich in imagination, as those of
the "metaphysical" poets. And Dryden, if we may accept the admission
of Bayes, "loved argument in verse"; a confession that Donne and Cowley
would heartily have echoed. The exaggerations of the heroic drama are
the exaggerations of the metaphysical poets transferred from the study
to the stage; with the extravagance deepened, as was natural, by the
glare of their new surroundings. And, just as the extravagance of the
"metaphysicians" led to the reaction that for a hundred years stifled
the lyric note in English song, so the extravagance of the heroic drama
gave the death-blow to English tragedy.
Against this parallel the objection may be raised that it takes no
reckoning of the enormous gulf that, when all is said, separates even
the weakest of the Elizabethan plays from the rant and fustian of
Dryden: a gulf wider, it must be admitted, than that which parts the
metaphysical poets from the "singing birds" of the Elizabethan era.
And, so far as we have yet gone, the objection undoubtedly has force.
It is only to be met if we can find some connecting link; if we can
point to some author who, on the one hand, retains something of the
dramatic instinct, the grace and flexibility of the Elizabethans; and,
on the other hand, anticipates the metallic ring, the declamation and
the theatrical conventions of Dryden. Such an author is to be found
in Shirley; in Shirley, as he became in his later years; at the time,
for instance, when he wrote _The Cardinal_ (1641). _The Cardinal_ is,
in many respects, a powerful play. It is unmistakably written under
the influence of Webster; and of Webster at his most sombre and his
best--the Webster of the _Duchess of Malfi_. But it is no less
unmistakably wanting in the subtle strength, the dramatic grip and
profound poetry, of its model. The villainy of the Cardinal is mere
mechanism beside the satanic, yet horribly human, iniquity of Ferdinand
and Bosolo. And, at least in one scene, Shirley sinks--it is true, in
the person of a subordinate character--to a foul-mouthed vulgarity
which recalls the shameless bombast of the heroes and heroines of
Dryden. [Footnote:
I would this soldier had the Cardinal
Upon a promontory; with what a spring
The churchman would leap down! It were a spectacle
Most rare to see him topple from the precipice,
And souse in the salt water with a noise
To stun the fishes. And if he fell into
A net, what wonder would the simple sea-gulls
Have to draw up the o'ergrown lobster,
So ready boiled! He shall have my good wishes.
--_The Cardinal_, act v. sc, 2.]
Yet, with all his shortcomings, Shirley preserves in the main the great
tradition of the Elizabethans. A further step downwards, a more deadly
stage in the history of decadence, is marked by Sir William Davenant.
That arch-impostor, as is well known, had the effrontery to call himself
the "son of Shakespeare": a phrase which the unwary have taken in the
physical sense, but which was undoubtedly intended to mark his literary
kinship with the Elizabethans in general and with the greatest of
Elizabethan dramatists in particular.
So far as dates go, indeed, the work of Davenant may be admitted to
fall within what we loosely call the Elizabethan period; or, more
strictly, within the last stage of the period that began with Elizabeth
and continued throughout the reigns of her two successors. His first
tragedy, _Albovine, King of the Lombards_, was brought out in 1629;
and his earlier work was therefore contemporary with that of Massinger
and Ford. But much beyond this his relation to the Elizabethans can
hardly claim to go. Charity may allow him some faint and occasional
traces of the dramatic power which is their peculiar glory; and this
is perhaps more strongly marked in his earliest play than in any of
its successors. What strikes us most forcibly, however--and that, even
in his more youthful work--is the obvious anticipation of much that
we associate only with the Restoration period. The historical plot,
the metallic ring of the verse,
[Footnote: I take two instances from _Albovine_.--
(1) Let all glad hymns in one mix'd concord sound,
And make the echoing heavens your mirth rebound.--Act i.
(2) I am the broom of heaven; when the world grows foul,
I'll sweep the nations into the sea, like dust.--Act ii.
It is noticeable that both passages are spoken by Albovine himself,
a very creditable elder brother of Dryden's Maximin and Almanzor. One
more passage may be quoted, from the _Just Italian_ (1630):--
The sacred noise attend that, whilst we hear,
Our souls may dance into each others' ear.--Act v.
It will be observed that two out of the above passages, coming at the
end of scenes, are actually in rhyme, and rhyme which is hardly
distinguishable from that of Dryden.] the fustian and the bombast--
we have here every mark, save one, of what afterwards came to be known
as the heroic drama. The rhymed couplet alone is wanting. And that was
added by Davenant himself at a later stage of his career. It was in
_The Siege of Rhodes_, of which the first part was published in 1656,
that the heroic couplet, after an interval of about sixty years, made
its first reappearance on the English stage. It was garnished, no
doubt, with much of what then passed for Pindaric lyric; it was eked
out with music. But the fashion was set; and within ten years the
heroic couplet and the heroic drama had swept everything before them.
[Footnote: A few lines may be quoted to make good the above description
of _The Siege of Rhodes_:--
What various voices do mine ears invade
And have a concert of confusion made?
The shriller trumpet and tempestuous drum,
The deafening clamour from the cannon's womb.
--Part i. First _Entry_.
The following lines from part ii. (published in 1662) might have been
signed by Dryden:--
No arguments by forms of senate made
Can magisterial jealousy persuade;
It takes no counsel, nor will be in awe
Of reason's force, necessity, or law.
Or, again,
Honour's the soul which nought but guilt can wound,
Fame is the trumpet which the people sound.]
The above dates are enough to disprove the common belief that the
heroic drama, rhymed couplet and all, was imported from France.
_Albovine_, as we have seen, has every mark of the heroic drama, except
the couplet; and _Albovine_ was written seven years before the first
masterpiece of Corneille, one year before his first attempt at tragedy.
A superficial likeness to the drama of Corneille and, subsequently,
of Racine may doubtless have given wings to the popularity of the new
style both with Davenant and his admirers. But the heroic drama is,
in truth, a native growth: for good or for evil, to England alone must
be given the credit of its birth. Dryden, no doubt, more than once
claims French descent for the literary form with which his fame was
then bound up. [Footnote: He is, however, as explicit as could be
wished in tracing the descent _through_ Davenant. "For Heroick Plays
... the first light we had of them on the English theatre was from the
late Sir W. Davenant. He heightened his characters, as I may probably
imagine, from the example of Corneille and some French Poets."--_Of
Heroic Plays_, printed as preface to _The Conquest of Granada, Dramatic
Works_ (fol.), i. 381. It was for this reason that Davenant was taken
as the original hero of that burlesque masterpiece, _The Rehearsal_
(1671); and even when the part of Bayes was transferred to Dryden, the
make-up still remained largely that of Davenant.] In a well-known
prologue he describes his tragic-comedy, _The Maiden Queen_, as
a mingled chime
Of Jonson's humour and
Corneille's rhyme.
[Footnote: The greater part of _The Maiden Queen_, however, is
written either in prose or in blank verse.]
But the fact is that of Corneille there is no more trace in Dryden's
tragedy than there is of Jonson in his comedy; that is, just none at
all. The heroic temper, which was at once the essence of Corneille's
plays and true to the very soul of the man, was mere affectation and
_mise-en-scene_ with Dryden. The heroes of Corneille reflect that
nobility of spirit which never entirely forsook France till the days
of the Regency; those of Dryden give utterance to nothing better than
the insolent swagger of the Restoration.
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22