ART. V.-English Poetry from Dryden to Cowper. Na recent paper attention was called to some of the features by which English poetry, from Chaucer to Milton, is contrasted with that of our own age. We then dwelt mainly on the peculiarities exhibited by the early Art, its limitations and its excellences, without much inquiry why these things were so. It is our wish here to notice certain further aspects of the same interesting subject, in which the political and social circumstances of the country during the century and half following 1660 will be found to hold a leading position as causes operative on the career of the English Muses. For Poetry, under her own peculiar laws, is, more perhaps than any other pursuit of man, the direct reflection of the spirit of every age as it passes. The mirror she holds up is not so much to Nature at large as to Human Nature. The poet is indeed the child of his century, even when, in the fine figure of Schiller, he returns from his education under a Grecian sky to teach and to purify it. His Art not only gives back the form and pressure to the body of the time, but is itself the impersonation of its most advanced thought, the efflorescence of its finest spirit. In our brief notice of the writers under Edward III. and Elizabeth it was considered sufficient to indicate this identity between the national and the poetic life. Every one feels instinctively that the spirit shown in the campaigns which conquered half France in one reign, and founded the settlements which were to conquer more than half America in the other— the spirit which animated Wickliffe and Bacon-appeared also in Chaucer and Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare. There is a congruity pleasing to the imagination between the splendid poetry produced under Elizabeth and her successors and the struggles and vigour of their times. Poetry is here much indebted to history, which by successive advances has revealed to us the inner worth and meaning of that period. Queen Elizabeth, indeed, has always retained a popularity little likely (we think) to be shaken by any attacks of sceptical investigation; but the Commonwealth had been too severely judged, and the really heroic qualities then displayed by many have been tardily recog nised. There would almost seem to be a species of law by which the latest past phase in national thought and manners, like the latest past fashion, becomes especially distasteful in its turn: nor shall we escape this fate. Thus English poetry, to Johnson, almost began with Dryden: whilst in the criticism now popular, the stream seems almost stayed after Dryden. We think that this reaction against the times just gone by, with which every one is familiar, has accomplished its purpose; that it is time to consider the eighteenth century in a more historical spirit, asking how far the poetical taste then prevalent was the necessary result of other and wider causes, and how far it performed a useful part in advancing the national mind. The law of antipathy above noticed appears to us to have done injustice to the post-Restoration literature (which for convenience we will define as that from 1660 to 1720), and to that which followed to 1800; the aims, the spirit, and the circumstances influencing the writers have been, in consequence, misstated or neglected. It is proposed here-I. To examine the real causes of the change inaugurated by Dryden, its objects, and its development to the time of Pope, noticing briefly what share French literature and ancient models exercised over England; II. To trace the course of the modern school through the different lines into which it diverges under George I., and to point out the chief links that unite the style of this century with its predecessor. We believe it may be proved that the aim of the first writers of the modern school was to give to poetry greater clearness, condensation, and straightforwardness of style, while extending its range to new fields; and that this was done, not under direct foreign influence, but in obedience to a general movement in European thought. In our later pages it will be shown how this critical spirit opened the way for bold and varied experiments in poetry; how a peculiarly high and manly tone accompanied these attempts; how, after a transitional period, when new and old were unconsciously and not always happily blended, poetry burst forth in the more splendid and complete achievements of our own age. It may be seen that the course of literature is here treated as necessary and natural, personified, indeed, in individuals, yet in the main holding on in an irresistible current; sometimes fed only by its own resources, sometimes widened or discoloured by external influences; sometimes, as it were, returning to renew itself from the fountains of its youth. And it may be a lesson of high value if the reader derives from the survey a conviction of that great truth of human progress so long since anticipated by the imperial-souled historian of the Cæsars-that there is a kind of circle in things, through which, like the revolution of the seasons, the minds and thoughts of men pass;' that there is no final pause, or canon of the perfect and the complete in Art; that hence moderation in judgment is the only safe and wise attitude for a creature whose intellect seems to move, onwards and with increasing purpose L 2 indeed, indeed, yet ever through the spiral orbit of successive reactions.* I. It was, we believe, through the poet Southey-a man of whom it may be now not improper to say that he never did full justice to any one of his many remarkable gifts-that the criticism arose which speaks of the French school' in English literature. This appears to us an ill-chosen and misleading phrase. The epithet so far represents the truth that Charles II. had lived in France, that he received pay from Lewis, and imported to Whitehall a very English imitation of Versailles; that several of the courtier-writers of the time had resided or travelled in France; and that French prose and poetry, then beginning their course, were in the hands of the less serious portion of the literary men of England. But when we turn to our literature itself, few and far between are the direct proofs of this foreign influence. Dryden was undoubtedly the leading spirit in the new style: but, except in some of his long-forgotten plays, in what sense can the author of the 'Hind and Panther,' of 'Absalom and Achitophel,' the versifier of Chaucer and Boccaccio, the translator of Virgil, Juvenal, and Plutarch, be called a follower of the French school? Pass on from the first of the modern style to the latest of the post-Restoration poets. Can any writer be more characteristically English than Prior, whether in Alma,' or in 'Solomon'?-than Pope in the Essays' or the 'Satires'? The fact is, that the only two French poets who appear distinctly in an English reflection were neither of them men whose works were capable of any far-reaching influence. Long before the Restoration we have the brief popularity which attended Sylvester's translation from Du Bartas; long after it the vague hints which Pope took from Boileau in his boyish Essay on Criticism.' A few short songs and epigrams, translated from the fashionable versifiers after Malherbe, occupy the interval. If, indeed, those who have familiarised us with the idea of a French school' had examined the contemporary literature of France, they would at once have seen that this influence was imaginary. For the truth is, that France, during the earlier part of the seventeenth century, was distracted by civil war and 6 We have heard that, during the last years of a life spent in noble studies, Mr. Hallam employed himself in collecting materials for a History of Public Opinion during the Eighteenth Century. It is much to be desired that, if any portion of this was (as we believe) committed to paper, it might be given to the world-to those, we should rather say, who are sufficiently above the world's partialities and partisanships to value the one weight and the one measure,' the just judgment and high-hearted patriotism by which, even more than by his vast knowledge and insight, that eminent Englishman was distinguished. engaged engaged in that downward process which at the close threatened to leave nothing in that noble country between the huts in which the peasantry starved and the palaces where the Great King was adored with almost Oriental adulation. Hence, after the cold polish of Malherbe, a long interval occurs until non-dramatic poetry was revived, by curious contrast, in the classicalism of Boileau and the naïveté of La Fontaine-writers who can hardly be said to have more affected England than England them. Nor even in the drama is the connexion much closer. What likeness lies between the charming delicacy of Racine, and the rampant coarseness, the Spanish exuberance, of Dryden? between the fine spirit, the high poetic tone, the deep and subtle characterization of Molière, and the clever caricatures of debauched courtiers and country people in Congreve and Wycherley? When our dramatists exhibited excellence, it was not as children of Spain or France, but as countrymen of Marlowe and Fletcher; and it must be confessed that their faults were not less native. Some theories on Poetry-in fact, the first crude attempts at criticism were the only distinct post-Restoration loan from France. French writers, now as forgotten as Rymer, who formed his treatise on them, had introduced that pseudo-classical spirit which took the laws for verse (two thousand years after Aristotle) from the mistranslated and fragmentary treatise in which that great critic had imperfectly put together, not an Art of Poetry, but a few interesting deductions from the Drama of his own age. Even the views thus formed, we find, from the curious notes preserved by Garrick, were disputed by Dryden, with arguments that do more credit to his national feeling than to his taste or knowledge; nor, except Cato,' was any play we know of constructed after the French rules. 6 We think then that the epithet 'French School' is as little applicable to our poetry from Dryden to Pope as the title. 'Augustan Age' to Addison's contemporaries. Yet the name marks a change of style so deep as to appear, if typical writers like Spenser and Pope are compared, almost generic. Even if we take poets at less distant intervals, the difference in manner between Herrick and Sedley (contemporaries during nearly half their lifetime †) is like the difference which we often perceive in our Museums, between the fossils of two contiguous strata. Yet, unlike as they may seem, to the geologist's eye they are closely related by links lying perhaps in other regions, or by his knowledge of the physical causes which induced consecutive Printed at the end of Johnson's 'Life of Dryden,' in Chalmers's Poets. formations. formations. Turning from the superficial agencies which strike a first sight-what are the larger underlying laws which governed this progress in poetry?-laws in which we shall find the true history of changes not less interesting and important than the transition from the Mollusc to the Vertebrate. There is a real resemblance-one even closer than has been imagined-between our post-Restoration poetry and that of France. But the ground of this resemblance lies in the whole tone of mind that the process of centuries was then creating throughout all the countries of Europe which enjoyed any mental freedom. The sixteenth century witnessed the outbreak against the intellectual and moral system of the middle ages. The seventeenth was that in which the new opinions gained stability and a fixed sphere in politics; and having accomplished this-in the Thirty Years' War, the civil disturbances in France and England, and the extinction of Spanish power in the Netherlands--the same spirit of bold Doubt and Inquiry advanced into remoter regions of thought, and transformed itself into new influences. Within this century-to sketch in the fewest lines a revolution which has never yet been drawn in completeness-we find Astronomy revealed by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton; Anatomy by Harvey; Hydrostatics by Boyle; Mathematics by Napier, Kepler, Briggs, Descartes, and others; the beginnings of Botany and Geology under Tournefort, Ray, and Burnet; the first systematic recognition of science by the foundation of the Academy of France and the Royal Society of England. None of these noble pursuits can be without an influence on literature; but in literature itself we find the same spirit-represented in philosophy by Bacon, Pascal, Malebranche, Descartes, Leibnitz, Hobbes, and Locke; in language and scholarship by Selden, Pococke, Grotius, Voss, Gronovius, and Bentley: nor should it be overlooked that to this century belong at once the writings of the Casuists and of Bayle-men who, starting from the opposite points of Credulity and of Scepticism, ended in the same attempt to reduce under system the 'obstinate questionings' to which the mind of man could no longer find in authority and tradition satisfactory answers. We have not here space to exemplify in detail the tangible influence exercised by this movement over Poetry, although the special traces, in the form of agreement or antagonism, are clearly written on the works of Cowley, Dryden, Butler, Roscommon, Prior, Swift, Addison, Pope, and almost every versifier of the age. What we would point out is, the common bond that united these writers with the many modes of knowledge to which new avenues were then opened. This may be summed up in one word, the Spirit of Criticism. A truly noble confidence in the powers man has received |