Comus. 11. How does Comus differ from the ordinary masque (consult Evans, or Ward's English Drama, or Symonds's Shakespeare's Predecessors, ch. ix)? 12. Does the pastoral form add to the beauty and interest of Lycidas? 13. Explain the phrase, "last of the Elizabethans," as applied to Milton. 14. Compare his blank verse with Shakespeare's and Tennyson's. 15. Justify Wordsworth's line: "Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea"; and Tennyson's epithet: “God-gifted organvoice of England." 16. Contrast between the Milton of the poems and the Milton of the prose pamphlets. 17. Evidences of Milton's love of the drama. 18. Milton's ideal of womanhood as embodied in his Eve (Paradise Lost; bk. iv, 634; bk. viii, 521-578; bk. ix, 227– 234). 19. Compare Milton's form of the sonnet with Shakespeare's, Wordsworth's, and Rossetti's. 20. Discuss the application to his own life of Milton's famous saying: "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem." Reaction CHAPTER XII THE RESTORATION 1660-1700 THE return of the Stuarts to the throne opened a period of excessive reaction. The people, already in revolt against the unnatural restraints imposed by Puritanism, welcomed the King as a deliverer from hateful bondage, and celebrated the restoration of their freedom by plunging into the wildest dissipations. The easy-going Charles made pleasExcesses of ure his most serious occupation, and under his leadership society adopted the manners and morals acquired during the exile in France. Noble lords became French fops, scented their clothes with pulvilio and jasmine, and decorated their speech with French phrases. Ordinary standards of conduct were changed; virtue and sobriety were synonyms for Puritanism and hypocrisy; lofty sentiments, such as love and reverence, were sneered at as hollow mockeries. The shams and corruption of this society are faithfully mirrored in the inimitable Diary of Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Admiralty under Charles II. This delightful gossip wrote down each day in cipher what he had seen and heard in court circles, with a naïve and confidential particularity that is "mighty divertising," as he would say, and historically very valuable. In the secrecy of his diary he expresses a furtive sympathy with the Puritans, on seeing several led to prison for attending conventicles, wishing that "they would either conform, or be more wise and not be Pepys's catched." And four years later he wrote, more prophetically than he knew: "The business of abusing the Puritans begins to grow stale and of no use, they being the people that at last will be found the wisest." This "business of abusing the Puritans" was carried on by Samuel Butler with uproarious laughter in his Hudibras, a mock heroic poem, in which a Presbyterian justice and his Independ Butler's Hudibras, 1663 ent squire, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, go forth to suppress May games and bear-baitings. Though the hero was modeled after Sir Samuel Luke, a Presbyterian colonel, in whose family Butler had lived, the purpose was to ridicule Puritans in general. The humorous adventures are coarse and boisterous, but there is much keen wit and shrewd characterization, and the reader's mind is kept on the jump by the most surprising verbal tricks and clever audacities of rhyme and rhythm. The poem was immensely popular; the King carried a copy in his pocket for ready reference. It has contributed the adjective "Hudibrastic" to the vocabulary of criticism and scores of its short, snappy couplets to the common stock of quotations. A few couplets will illustrate Butler's method of putting Puritanism in the pillory: Such as do build their faith upon And prove their doctrine orthodox For nothing else but to be mended. Politically the reaction was toward peace. The drums and tramplings of war that had so shaken the nation no longer Political and Social Changes stirred men's hearts. Politics, falling away from large national issues, became factional and personal. Modern party politics began; the names "Whig" and "Tory" first appeared in the reign of Charles II. Warfare was transferred to the field of letters; the sword was exchanged for the pen, and combats of wit were the order of the day. An age of satire opened, in which the greatest masterpieces of this kind in our literature were produced. In the general breakdown of ideals and principles, faith gave way to skepticism and doubt, inspiration to cold logic, imagination to understanding, idealism to materialism. Under the influence of the Royal Society, founded in 1662, men of all classes engaged with enthusiasm in experimental science. Bacon now came to his own. The King had a laboratory in Whitehall, and the elegant Buckingham turned from intrigues of diplomacy to experiments in chemistry. Poets sang in lofty phrases the approach of a golden age of knowledge. Thomas 1588-1679. For the madness of both politics and society a kind of sanction was found in the materialistic theories of the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes, who had been a tutor of the King. According to this philosopher, self-interest is the mainspring of all human action, a doctrine easily turned to the support of all sorts of selfish indulgence. "Through John Locke, disgust of Puritanism," says Taine, "Hobbes reduced human nature to its merely animal aspects." Intellectualism reached its philosophic culmination in 1690 in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he argues against the theory of "innate ideas," that is, inborn or inspired wisdom, claiming that all knowledge is derived from experience. In this and other works of Locke the age realized its ideal of exact thinking and enlightened common sense. 1632-1704 In matters purely literary the year 1660 marks a more complete division than is usually found between literary epochs. There was a violent break with traditions of the past. Relics New Literary Ideals of the Renaissance disappeared, and a new intellectual civilization began. Waller, Cowley, Davenant, and other authors had lived in France during the exile of the court, and there they had found a movement in progress to correct the loose manner of romanticism by a more faithful following of "the ancients." It was a new criticism, the aims of which were uniform excellence, consistency of form, close reasoning, and clear expression. The poets had found also an Academy for promoting and sustaining literary standards. They returned to England enthusiastic for the propagation of these ideas, and English literature was made over on the French plan. The Royal Society, modeled after the French Academy, included in its purposes the reform of literary expression. Classicism had come to England in the Elizabethan period through Italy, and had inspired but not materially changed the native French genius; classicism now came to England through France and became a dominant influence that almost obliterated the native genius. Boileau's Art Poétique, founded upon Horace's Ars Poetica, was the one lawbook of literature in both France and England. The natural style of the Elizabethans that was a law unto itself gave place to an artificial style that was regulated by the ancient law. Criticism took the place of creation, thinking of feeling, art of inspiration. The Classic The couplet-makers were now exalted, and the smoothly rounded, nicely balanced, and precisely rhymed couplet became an epitomized expression of the new literary ideals. Whether Waller and his followers might have developed the couplet independently of French precedent is still a matter of controversy, but certainly its universal adoption and final perfection were results of the French influence. Every poet and fashionable rhymster cultivated it diligently, and many wrote treatises in rhyme to commend the new criticism, like the Earl of Roscommon's |