by John Dryden
‘But who can think what a turn, what a change, what an alteration this hint of things did make in the countenance of the town of Mansoul; no man of Mansoul could sleep that night for joy; in every house there was joy and music, singing and making merry, telling and hearing of Mansoul’s happiness was then all that Mansoul had to do; and this was the burden of all their song, “Oh! more of this at the rising of the sun! more of this to-morrow! Who thought yesterday, would one say, that this day would have been such a day to us? And who thought, that saw our prisoners go down in irons, that they would have returned in chains of gold! Yea, they that judged themselves as they went to be judged of their judge, were, by his mouth, acquitted, not for that they were innocent, but of the Prince’s mercy, and sent home with pipe and tabor.”’
The Life and Death of Mr. Badman is a piece of prose indeed, and its realism is, perhaps, the more effective from being wholly devoid of the least particle of imagination. The genesis and purpose of the book are thus stated by the author: ‘As I was considering with myself what I had written concerning the progress of the Pilgrim from this world to glory, and how it had been acceptable to many in this nation, it came again into my mind to write, as then of him that was going to heaven, so now of the life and death of the ungodly, and of their travel from this world to hell.’ Had this conception been strictly carried out, the narrative must have been a failure from the want of admixture of light and shade. The Christian of the Pilgrim’s Progress is a mixed character, and though we are scarcely in doubt as to the ultimate success of his adventure, this is sufficiently chequered with peril and hardship to keep our interest alert. This evidently cannot be the case with Mr. Badman, whose career is not only a monotony, but a monotony of sordid evil; and who only excites a flickering sort of interest in virtue of the sympathy naturally felt for the victim of the animosity of his creator. Bunyan, however, has not been faithful to his original plan, and has in a measure redeemed one fault in art by committing another. As a rule, nothing is more reprehensible in a fiction than inordinate digression; but here it is the greatest relief to be turned away from the repulsive career of Mr. Badman to the running commentary in which Bunyan opens his mind on a variety of subjects, spiritual and secular, ranging from earnest rebukes of the maxim to be anon formulated as ‘buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest,’ to foolish stories of the deaths of persecutors, quite in the vein of the Methodist anecdotes satirized by Sydney Smith. This garrulity is greatly promoted by the inartistic character of the machinery employed, a dialogue between Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive, which allows the writer to say whatever he pleases. It is evident that he has real persons and actual transactions continually in his mind, and it would not be surprising to learn that his book made no inconsiderable commotion in the town of Bedford.
Grace Abounding resembles thousands of similar narratives in essentials, differing principally in the vigour with which a terrifying religious experience is portrayed. It does not, as some seem to have taken for granted, terminate with what would be technically considered as Bunyan’s conversion; on the contrary, a large portion is employed in recording his agonies of apprehension long after he had become a recognized religious instructor, even so late as the beginning of his imprisonment, when he was so little acquainted with the law as to suppose himself in jeopardy of the gallows. Much might be said in censure or compassion of his lamentably distorted views of divine things; but one thing cannot be said: there is not from first to last the slightest symptom of cant. The book is more sincere than Rousseau’s Confessions, but could not, like that book, have helped a Carlyle or a George Eliot to learn that there was something in them. As Pilgrim’s Progress may be termed a prosaic Divine Comedy, so might the Bunyan of Grace Abounding rank as a prosaic Augustine, but an Augustine without a Monica. With the rarest exceptions, self is its beginning, middle, and end; it is only when the author for a space becomes, unlike Cardinal Newman, conscious of the existence of something besides God and his own soul, that we catch the real moral of his tale, which he himself was far from intending or perceiving. In his own incomparably forcible words: ‘I went myself in chains to preach to them in chains; and carried that fire in my own conscience that I persuaded them to beware of. I can truly say, and that without dissembling, that when I have been to preach I have gone full of guilt and terror even to the pulpit-door, and there it hath been taken off; and I have been at liberty in my mind until I have done my work, and then immediately, even before I could get down the pulpit-stairs, I have been as bad as I was before.’ What is this but to own that self-seeking is unprofitable even when cloaked with piety and contrition; that there is no true peace save in disinterested service?
Aphra Behn (1640-1689).
Violent indeed is the transition from John Bunyan to Aphra Behn, but in fact the living fiction of the age is almost summed up in these two names. But for the demonstration of the contrary afforded by the state of French literature since 1830, one would almost have been inclined to formulate it as a maxim that the drama and the novel cannot flourish together. The almost utter barrenness of the Restoration age in the latter class of literature is certainly very remarkable. All needful conditions seemed present in a teeming national life, clever writers, and a public that craved to be amused. It seems difficult to offer any explanation except that it had as yet occurred to none to depart from French models, and that the French exemplars of the day, like Samuel Weller, disdained all under the degree of ‘a female markis.’ Hence the healthy realism without which the English novel cannot prosper was impossible, and it was left to the Fieldings and Smolletts of the next age to effect a momentous revolution in art by the simple discovery that for the novelist’s purpose, ‘Jack was as good as his master.’ One variety of fiction, apparently still popular at the Restoration, gradually died out — the interminable romance of the Clelia class, by which French polite society under Louis XIII. had replaced the exploded romance of chivalry. Of the few examples of this which English literature still produced, it will suffice to name Lord Orrery’s Parthenissa, whose heroine, as an example of chastity, lived long enough to be dethroned by Pamela. Mrs. Behn’s tales, it need not be said, are constructed upon principles in every respect antipodal to Parthenissa; they are, however, much less objectionable than her comedies. They are on the French pattern, brief and bright, but inevitably conventional. At the present day, however, when the disuse of an equally conventional fashion is restoring action to the rank from which it had been almost displaced by dialogue, Mrs. Behn’s tales might be not unprofitably read as examples of movement and condensation; and occasionally of strong situation, of which she rarely makes the most. The most celebrated is Oroonoko, the groundwork of Southern’s play, and itself founded on facts within the authoress’s knowledge. Among other remarkable passages is one descriptive of the effects of the electric eel. Mrs. Behn’s stories are types of a large number of miniature romances, apparently little noticed in their own day, and utterly unknown in ours, which they have not always reached in other fashion than Protus’s
‘Little tract on worming dogs, Whereof the name, in sundry catalogues, Is extant yet.’
‘This class of literature,’ says Mr. Gosse, ‘was treated with marked disdain, and having been read to pieces by the women, was thrown into the fire.’ One specimen, Incognita, deserves a word of mention as the first work of the youthful Congreve. Some variety was introduced into pure fiction by the importation from France by Mrs. Manley, already mentioned as a dramatist, of the political novel, in which the actions of living monarchs and statesmen were represented under transparent disguises. The presses of Amsterdam and Cologne had long teemed with such productions, and Mrs. Manley’s Atalanta and Zarah are conspicuous English examples. Another romance, A New and further Discovery of the Isle of Pines, in a letter professing to emanate from Cornelius van Sloetton, a Dutchman (1668), deserves some attention from its possible influence on Defoe. It has been represented to be connected with Australian discovery, with which
it has in fact nothing to do, the imaginary island being placed in the very centre of the Indian Ocean. It afforded the theme for Voltaire’s joke about the Englishman qui travaillait si bien that the island on which he was wrecked was shortly afterwards found to be peopled by twelve thousand English Protestants.
CHAPTER XIV. ESSAYISTS AND LETTER WRITERS, LITERARY HISTORIANS.
The most important part of the posthumous papers of Samuel Butler, the discovery of which in the eighteenth century has been mentioned, was his Characters, composed upon the model of Theophrastus, and fairly entitling him to the appellation of the English Theophrastus, which is not the highest encomium imaginable. As the only work of the kind which has come down to us from antiquity, the Characters of Theophrastus, which are in reality much later than the time of that successor of Aristotle, have passed as models, a reputation in excess of their desert. They offer an acute and entertaining enumeration of various peculiarities of character, but do not succeed in presenting the personage as a whole, and have much the air of being compiled from traits delineated with a real truth of representation by the comic poets. Butler’s Characters are of just the same kind, and his work is rather a museum of particulars than a gallery of portraits. The age of Charles II. by no means lives in him as the age of Anne lives in Addison. La Bruyère, Butler’s more celebrated French successor, who certainly never read and probably never heard of him, fell into precisely the same error from too timid an adherence to Theophrastus; and the improvement upon him effected by Addison may be compared to the service rendered to sculpture by Dædalus, the first, it is said, to show the human form in motion. Isolated remarks in Butler’s essays are frequently very shrewd and pregnant; as when he says of the newsmonger, ‘He would willingly bear his share in any public calamity to have the pleasure of hearing and telling it;’ or of the hunter, ‘Let the hare take which way she will, she seldom fails to lead him at long-running to the alehouse;’ or the description of a prince’s unworthy favourite as ‘a fog raised by the sun to obscure his own brightness.’ Many of Butler’s miscellaneous thoughts, appended to the Characters, are highly acute, and exhibit a happy talent for illustrating abstract ideas by comparison with sensible objects, as for instance: ‘Oaths and obligations in the affairs of the world are like ribands and knots in dressing, that seem to tie something, but do not.’ In politics Butler is, of course, a loyalist, and one whose loyalty is intensified by his æsthetic dislike to Puritanism, in which he was constitutionally incapable of seeing anything but cant. At the same time, the contempt which as a man of understanding he could not help entertaining for the conduct of affairs under the Restoration, and disappointment at the neglect with which he was himself treated, seem to have almost reduced him to a condition of political scepticism. ‘The worst governments are the best when they light in good hands; and the best the worst, when they fall into bad ones’ — a remark condensed into a famous couplet by Pope, who appears to have become acquainted with Butler’s MS. through Atterbury. It is worth observing that Butler not only prefers Ben Jonson to Shakespeare, but seems to take his superiority for granted: ‘Virgil, who wanted much of that natural easiness of wit that Ovid had, did nevertheless with hard labour and long study arrive at a higher perfection than the other with all his dexterity of wit, but less industry, could attain to. The same we may observe of Jonson and Shakespeare; for he that is able to think long and judge well will be sure to find out better things than another man can hit upon suddenly, though of more quick and ready parts, which is commonly but chance, and the other art and judgment.’ One special distinction of Butler’s is to have been perhaps the first English satirist of mark who made parody a political weapon, or at least showed its capabilities for this purpose, as it does not appear that any of his political parodies were printed in his lifetime. Jack Cade’s speeches in Shakespeare are, indeed, a sufficient model, but Butler worked out the hint elaborately in his fictitious speeches in the Rump Parliament; his mock eulogium of this body or segment of a body in the oration supposed to be delivered at Harrington’s Rota; and the parody of Prynne’s style in the imaginary correspondence between him and John Audland, the Quaker.
Butler’s remains were only partially printed in 1759, but the MSS. from which Thyer’s publication was drawn were acquired in 1885 by the British Museum. His selection seems to have been in general exceedingly judicious, but the opportunity may be taken of giving some examples of Butler’s unpublished thoughts:
‘There is no better argument to prove that the Scriptures were written by divine inspiration than that excellent saying of our Saviour, If any man will go to law with thee for thy cloak, give him thy coat also.
‘Birds are taken with pipes that imitate their own voices, and men with those sayings that are most agreeable to their own opinions.
‘If the French nobility should follow our fashions, and send their children over to learn our language, and receive their education from us, we should have as glorious an opinion of ourselves, and as mean a value of them, as they have of us; and therefore we have no reason to blame them, but our own folly for it.’
It is interesting to learn Butler’s opinion of Dryden as a critic:
‘Dryden weighs poets in his virtuoso’s scales that will weigh to the hundredth part of a grain, as curiously as Juvenal’s lady pedantess —
“Committit vates, et comparat inde Maronem, Atque alia parte in trutina suspendit Homerum.”
He complained of Ben Jonson for stealing scenes out of Plautus. Set a thief to find out a thief.’
George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, who ranks with Shaftesbury and Temple among the few politicians of that age entitled to the appellation of statesman, enriched English literature with a small volume of essays, the most important of which are his vindication of his own political course and principles in The Character of a Trimmer and The Anatomy of an Equivalent. Of these Macaulay justly says: ‘What particularly strikes us is the writer’s passion for generalization. He was treating of the most exciting subjects in the most agitated times; he was himself placed in the very thick of the civil conflict; yet there is no acrimony, nothing inflammatory, nothing personal. He treats every question as an abstract question, begins with the widest propositions, argues these propositions on general grounds, and often, when he has brought out his theorem, leaves the reader to make the application, without adding an allusion to particular men or to passing events.’ The effect of this remarkable breadth of view was not with Halifax, as so frequently the case, to paralyze energy, and render the comprehensive mind unfit for practical action. He was not retained in equilibrium by the difficulty of deciding between two courses, but was an enthusiast for the via media, as great a zealot for compromise as zealots commonly are for strong measures; and, though sometimes too yielding or too speculative for the unquiet times in which his lot was cast, would have made an almost ideal prime minister for the nineteenth century. His praise of trimming, which to more fiery spirits must have seemed an ignoble policy, rings with the eloquence and passion of the most genuine conviction:
‘Our Trimmer adores the Goddess Truth, though in all ages she has been scurvily used, as well as those that worshipped her. ’Tis of late become such a ruining virtue that mankind seems to be agreed to commend and avoid it; yet the want of practice, which repeals the other laws, has no influence upon the law of truth, because it has root in heaven, and an intrinsic value in itself that can never be impaired. She shows her greatness in this, that her enemies, even when they are successful, are ashamed to own it. Nothing but power full of truth has the prerogative of triumphing, not only after victories, but in spite of them, and to put conquest herself out of countenance. She may be kept under and suppressed, but her dignity still remains with her, even when she is in chains. Falsehood with all her impudence has not enough to speak ill of her before her face. Such majesty she carries about her that her most prosperous enemies are fain to whisper their treason, all the power upon the earth can never extinguish her. She has lived in all a
ges, and let the mistaken zeal of prevailing authority christen any opposition to her with what name they please, she makes it not only an ugly and an unmannerly, but a dangerous thing to persist. She has lived very retired indeed, nay, sometimes so buried that only some few of the discerning part of mankind could have a glimpse of her; with all that, she has eternity in her, she knows not how to die, and from the darkest clouds that shade and cover her she breaks from time to time with triumph for her friends, and terror to her enemies.