CHAPTER THREE

The   Seventeenth Century up to the Restoration (1601-1660)       

Jacobean Drama /129

JACOBEAN DRAMA

Q.20.    Discuss the element of decadence in Jacobean drama.

(Agra 1964) Or Q.        Write a note on Jacobean drama. (Rohilkhand 1979)

–    r   :    (Himanchal 1989)

Q.        Write a short essay on any one of the following:- (b) Jacobean Drama (and five more topics)

(Gorakhpur 1984) (Himanchal 1988)

(Companion Question) Account for the decline of the drama after Shakespeare. Mention some cf the dramatists whose plays show obvious signs of decline.

(Agra 1957) Or

Q.         What were the causes of the decline of drama after Shakespeare ?

(Rohilkhand 1988) Introduction :-

Jacobean drama (that is, the drama of the age of James 1-1603-

1625) was a decadent form of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The Elizabethan age was the golden age of English drama. But with the turn of the century the drama in England also took a turn. It does not mean that there were no dramatists left. There certainly was a large number of them, but none of them could come anywhere near Shakespeare. Just as after Chaucer poetry in England suffered a decline, similarly after Shakespeare had given his best (that is, after the sixteenth century) drama also suffered a decline. With the passage of time it grew more and more decadent, till with Shirley in the age of Charles I the ok} kind of drama expired and even theatres were closed (in 1642). ”It was inevitable”, says Long, ”that drama should decline after Shakespeare, for the simple reason that there, was no other great enough to fill his place.”

The dramatists of the Jacobean age can be divided into two classes as follows :

(i) The dramatists of the old school-Dekker, Heywood, Webster, Beaumont, and Fletcher.

-9        

a?i

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(ii) The satiric group-Chapman, Jonson, Marston, Middleton, and Tourneur.

The Change of Patrons :

One of the reasons for the decadence in Jacobean drama was its loss of national spirit and patronage. In the age of Elizabeth drama was truly national, as it was patronised alike by the queen, the nobles, the courtiers, and groundlings. But in the age of James I, it lost contact with common people and came to be patronised by, to quote Hardin Craig, ”the courtly classes, their hangers-on, and the socially irresponsible parts of the population.” Consequently, to quote the same critic, ”the stage spoke not to all men, but to men with somewhat specialized interests” Dramatists had to cater to the somewhat decadent courtly taste with tales of intrigue, cruelty, and immprality couched in a high-flown, ”polished” style.

Marked Foreign Influence :-

The drama of the age of James shows, unlike that of the age of Elizabeth, a very marked foreign influence, for more ill than good. In this connexion Hardin Craig observes: The older dramatists and their audiences had been satisfied with such intrigue as was afforded by the Italian short story. Their patriotism had sent them to Holinshed, who had rifled Geoffrey of Monmouth …But in the new age foreign influences of increased potency made themselves felt. Dramatists borrowed the declamatory themes and exaggerated sentiments of Spanish drama, and discovered rew ranges of intrigue, crime, and licentiousness in Italy and Italian subjects. Specifically they revived the drama of revenge and, driving it to the extreme, converted it into a drama of horror.”

Plot-construction :-

In spite of the overall inferiority of Jacobean dramatists to Elizabethan dramatists, some credit must be given to them for their gift of plot-construction. Elizabethan dramatists, including Shakespeare, did not show any skill at architectonics. Moreover, they were generally too lazy to invent plots for themselves and were content to borrow them rather too frequently. It does not mean, however, that they were plagiarists pure and simple. Shakespeare borrowed the plots of most of his plays, but by virtue of his imagination, dramatic skill, poetic gift, and psychological insight transformed them into altogether new entities. But the fact remains that he was a borrower. The Jacobean dramatists”, observes Hardin Craig, ”seem for the first time to have begun to invent plots to suit their own tastes and ends. This is

Jacobean Drama/131

particularly true of the comic dramatists like Marston and Ben Jonson. Secondly, Jacobean dramatists show a greater skill in the construction and development of their plots. In many of them the various threads of the action are carefully interwoven into a wonderful harmony of texture seldom to be met with in Elizabethan plays. Jonson, Middleton, and Fletcher were particularly endowed with the gift of plot-construction. Ben Jonson’s Alchemist is, according to Coleridge, one of the three literary works of the world (the two others being Sophocles,Oed//?i« the King and Fielding’s novel Tom Jones) which have perfectly constructed plots. But what applies to the above -named dramatists does not apply to all Jacobean dramatists. Many of them, such as Dekker, are agregious offenders in this respect. As Jenet Spens points out in Elizabethan Drama, ”the lack of connexion between plot and sub-plot was one of the most marked vices of the post-Shakespearean dramatists, and Dekker happens tt offer the most absurd instance of it. There is unity in Dekker’s better plays, but it is the unity of the novel rather than that of the drama.”

New Experiments :- .        ’

In addition to their overall better plot-construction Jacobean dramatists may be credited with setting up some new patterns of drama. It was they who gave us the following kinds of drama, till then unattempted, or indifferently attempted, in England:

(i) Domestic drama: such as Heywood’s A Woman Killed witli Kindness.

(ii) Drama glorifying a particular profession: such as Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (which came, however, in 1599).

(iii) Drama showing the life and manners of the people of London: such as many of Ben Jonson’s comedies.

(iv) Drama dealing with social problems, mostly prostitution: such as Dekker’s The Honest Whore. This kind of drama later came to be practised by no less a distinguished dramatist than George Bernard Shaw.

Moral Laxity :-

After giving Jacobean drama its due, let us discuss some elements of decadence which appear in it. One of these elements is its moral laxity. As we have already said, Jacobean drama was patronised mostly by the courtly classes which were known for their lack of moral discipline. James I himself was, to use the words of Hardin Craig, ”a moralist without character.” The same is true of most of the dramatists of his age. Some of them made fairly sincere attempts to preach

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morality, and none of them commended, or even condoned, sin or vice. But that does not absolve them of the charge of showing an almost morbid interest in sexual immorality even though for the purpose of condemning it. Play after play was written on the theme of immoral love. Tlie White Devil, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and The Duchess ofMalfi are all tragedies of illicit love. A King and No King is a tragedy of incestuous Jove. Later, in the Caroline age, Ford produced his very shocking play Tis Pity She Is a Whore in which he openly dealt with the incestuous passion of a brother and sister which ends in disaster for both. Prostitutes appeared as heroines in many a play, such as Dekker’s Tlie Honest Wliore and Marston’s Vie Dutch Courtesan. Abject debauchees figured prominently in numerous plays. It was only Heywood and Webster who abstained from licentious themes. Heywood looked to the past and, in the words of Irving Ribner in his Jacobean Tragedy, ”doggedly continued to assert the moral values of an earlier age in a new world in which they no longer had great meaning.” As regards Webstc/, the same critic observes that his plays ”are an agonised search for moral order in the uncertain and chaotic world of Jacobean scepticism.” Gloom and Pessimism .

This scepticism led the Jacobean age to spiritual vacuity and despair. The courtiers, in particular, became voluptuous cynics. But this voluptuousness was not without the agonising sense of melancholy arising chiefly from the prospect of human mortality without any Christian consolation regarding the future. Theme of death, time, and mutability engaged the attention of most writers and the tragedies of the Jacobean period, too, are exhibitive’ of what Ribner calls a ”spirit of negation and disillusion, depair and spiritual no-confidence.” Shakespearean tragedy does give rise to the feelings of pity and fear, and even awe, but it does not create any pessimistic feeling. There are death and destruction no doubt, but the human spirit rises phoenix-like from the pyrewith a new, resplendent glory. But this kind of reassuring feeling isaBscnt from Jacobean tragedy. All that happens in it is quite earthly, lacking the spiritual dimension of Hamlet, and still less, the much vaster, cosmic dimension of Lear. The scepticism, gloom, despair, and pessimism of the age arc thus reflected by its tragedy also.

Melodramatic Sensationalism :-

The English have always had, in spite of the long line of critics from Sidney to Dryden to Addison to Dr. Johnson, a taste for crude and melodramatic sensationalism generally of the kind of physical violence

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and bloodshed. Even Elizabethan dramatists including Shakespeare could not do without catering to the popular taste by introducing into their tragedies a large number of murders and scenes of violence. They might have been partly influenced by the tradition of Senecan revenge tragedy, but the popular taste for ”blood and thunder” was also a dictating factor. Considered from the point of view of story alone, such plays as Marlowe’s Tamburiainc and Tlie Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy are all melodramas. But their melodramatic nature does not force itself on the eye or the ear, thanks to the rare poetic power, which sustains them in a higher region. But the same a not true of the Jacobean melodramatic tragedies. With the departure or decay of the poetic power they have not much left to recommend themselves to us. Most of the tragedies of the age only succeed in covering the stage in the last act with a virtual rivulet of blood so revolting to the refined eye. ””””

Sentimentalism :

On the other side of the scale to this artless and unthinking bloodshed was the Jacobean tendency towards sentimentalism. To quote Allardyce Nicoll, ”there is apparent in the audience of the seventeenth century an increasing love of pathos and of what may be called sentimentalism.” The pathos sought to be created by Jacobean dramatists is generally of the artificial kind. But some plays, such as Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, contain some . really pathetic scenes. The death scene of the duchess in Webster’s The Duchess ofMalfi is one of the superb examples of pathos in the whole range of English literature. But such scenes are more of the nature of an exception than a rule. The pathos of Lear’s or Cordelia’s or Edward IPs death is seldom captured by a Jacobean dramatist. Allardyce Nicoll observes about these dramatists: The dramatists employ every means, illegitimate as well as legitimate, to stir the emotions of the spectators and to present before them something of novelty.”

Satire and Realism :-

The Jacobean age brought into vogue a new kind of realistic and satiric comedy aimed at the exposure of London life and manners and the vices and follies of the times. The exposure was effected for the purpose of correction through satire and ridicule. We find comedy writers like Ben Jonson and Marston holding the mirror to their age and lashing the follies of the LondonersTheir plays are quite realistic with real London as their background. They do not transport us to the fairyland atmosphere of the romantic comedies such as As You Like It

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or .A Midsummerr Night’s Dream. What they give us is a much more direct criticism of life. Ben Jonson was quite articulate about his aim.

I’ll strip the ragged follies of the time

Naked, as at their birth;

And with a whip of steel

Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs.

Marston and Ben Jonson were engaged in what is known as ”the War of Theatres” and wrote stinging satires against each other, The humour of Jacobean comedy was no longer the genial, puckish, fresh and refreshing humour of Shakespeare’s comedies, rJuTine bitter and satirical humour which always arises from didactic aims.

Poor Characterisation

Jacobean drama suffered decadence in the all-important field of characterisation. It could not boast of a character of the stature and psychological complexity of Shakespeare’s Lear or Hamlet, or even Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Jacobean dramatists relied for dramatic effect more on the situation than on the character. In the field of comedy, the Jacobean age presents conventional and wooden types, as, for instance, Ben Jonson’s ”humours. In the field of tragedy, we have again some highly conventional and recurring characters such as, to use the words of Nicoll, the ”headstrong monarch,” the ”lustful tyrant,” ”a predetermined hero, often a husband, and with him the inevitable heroine either sinning or sinned against. Then there is the ”faithful friend” of the hero. ”Again, there are,” says Nicoll, ”sudden and wholly unpsychological revolutions of chaiacter which mar. the majority of these dramas and we realize that there could be no possible delving into the depths of personality such as we find in Shakespeare.”

Poor Poetry :

Poetically, Jacobean drama is much less rich than Elizabethan drama. The passionate lyricism of Shakespeare and the grandeur of Marlowe’s mighty line became things of the past ”Rhetorical devices took the place of true poetry. In Ben Jonson’s tragedies, Catiline and Sejamts, there is more of oratory than poetry. Playwrights such as Dekker, Heywood, and Iburneur Hndled blank verse quite loosely, nor could they breathe into it that pulsatiag life and poetic beauty which constitute an overwhelming proportion of the pleasure we derive from Elizabethan drama.

Ben Jonson’s Contribution /135

BEN JONSON’S CONTRIBUTION TO ENGLISH COMEDY

QJl.    Estimate Ben Jonson’s contribution to the art of English comedy. (Punjab 1957)

Or

Q.        Write a short essay on the historical importance of the literary work of Jonson. (Punjab 1963)

Introduction :

Ben Jonson’s importance in the history of English drama is mainly due to his envisagement of a/ new kind of comedy of which he gave excellent examples. He was’a vigorous’crusader for good sense and rectitude. From the very beginning of his dramatic career (the closing years of the sixteenth century) .he undertook, what he thought, the reform of Elizabethan drama, and particularly comedy. He appeared at a time when the University Wits such as Marlowe, Lyly, Greene, Kyd, and Nashe were establishing upon the stage what is called ”romantic drama.” To those like Ben Jonson who had any respect for classical drama and its canons, as also moderation, sanity, and the moral and intellectual well-being of man, the romantic comedies and histories offered much that was abominably absurd and lawless. He was critical of romantic extravagance and the egregious lack of realism as well as the general ignorance, or defiance, of the classical rules sanctified by the theories and practice of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Frequent changes of place, long duration of the time represented, absence of a unified plan or coherent structure, mingling of farce and tragedy, of clowns and kings, lack of definite aesthetic or ethical aims, and, in short an easy disregard of precision and discipline appeared to Jonson as indefensible errors. The themes treated were as objectionable as the treatment. The romantic plays told simply; impossible stories and did not imitate life or nature. They dealt with.idealised heroes, far-flung places, unbelievable adventures and vicissitudes, and flamboyant situations. The drama before BenJonson was romantic insofar as

(i) it did not adhere to the theory and practice of the ancients; and

(ii) it did not attempt a representation of actuality.

Ben Jonson’s reformation of drama meant, in fact, his correction of these twin romantic tendencies. He tried to establish, instead,

comic form and a tragic form based on the classical practice and to bring drama nearer life. In the field of tragedy he had no tangible success (he wrote only two tragedies), but in that of comedy he succeeded in ”»fH”g tmttufit the greatest figure of his age.

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Jonson’s Classicism :-

We will consider Jonson’s achievement and contribution in the Held of comedy with respect to his following three tendencies:

(i) Classicism

(ii) Realism

(iii) Moralism

They are not so well defined, nor are they capable of being accurately differentiated from one another. But they are all in fundamental opposition to ”romanticism.”

Ben Jonson had great deference for the classical antiquity, and he often referred to the great Greek and Roman dramatists with unqualified adoration. In spite of the fact that he could not sport a University degree-uhlike the University Wits-he was well- read in the classics. His protest against romantic drama, says Thorndike, was similar in its essentials to Matthew Arnold’s protest against the romantic school of poetry. He wanted, observed this critic, that the drama should ”rest on right appreciation of the classics and a rationalised study of the present.” Jonson wished to take the drama, as far as possible, to the purposes and methods of the Greeks and Romans, for this purpose it was required of him to obey certain set rules which critics had derived from the classicalpractice. These rules were:

(a) The so-called ”three uniUes-those of place, time, and action. The first requires the scene of the play to be restricted to the same town. The second requires the action of the play not to be extended over a period of more than twenty-four hours. The third requires the play to represent one single and well- constructed plot, without structurally superfluous episodes, sub- plots, or by-plots.

(b) The laws of decorum which require:

(i) The separation of the species. Tragedy and comedy are to be set apart and not allowed to mingle with each other.

(ii) A certain propriety in characterisation. Characterisation should not be capricious and confused, but should be based on an accurate analysis of life. Every character should be a representative as well as an individual Any king, for example, should represent kings in general; a jealous husband should exhibit the typical traits of jealousy, and neither person should lapse into mere individual whimsy.

Only by adherence to such sane principles, Ben Jonson believed, could the flagrant and dangerous departure from artistic standards and

Ben Jonson’s Contribution /137

classical discipline be arrested. Ben Jonson’s classicism earns for him the remark of David Daiches that ”he is the one great example in English of the Renaissance humanist (in the narrowest sense of that term) turned dramatist and poet.” But it must be pointed out that Ben Jonson was not a slavish imitator of the classical dramatists. He treated them more as guides than as masters. He was less rigid in practice than in theory, and even in theory he admitted the need of ”some place for digression and art.” He does not, for example, always observe the unities. In the Prologue to his greatest comedy Volpone he claimed about himself:

The laws of time, place, persons he observeth.

From no needful rule he swervclh.

But in practice he did ”swerve” from many ”needful” rules which he tenaciously championed in theory. In the very play just mentioned the strict unity of action is violated by the admittance of a sub-plot. In Bartholomew Fair, again, the action is episodic rather than architectonically perfect. In Every Man out of His Humour the characters sleep one night in the country and return to the town the next morning, thus violating the unity of time. In the tragedy Catiline the hero flies to join his army in Tuscany, thus violating the unity of place. These instances show that Jonson did not allow the classical rules to straitjacket his artistic liberty or to arm-twist his native tendencies. What he fell foul of was the heady licence to go to-improbable length in these matters.

Jonson’s Realism :-

Ben Jonson’s chief contribution to English comedy lies in his effort to bring it much nearer reality. He was a champion of all-round realism and was quick to dissociate himself from the romantic extravagances, grotesqueries, and, in a word, a wanton disregard of unvarnished actuality. In his,very first play Every Man in His Humour he was decisively articulate about the intention of his kind of comedy. He proposed as theme and vehicle of his comedy

Deeds, and language, such as men do use,

And persons, such as comedy would choose,

When she would shew an image of the times,

And sport with human follies, not with crimes. He felt that comedy, as distinguished from tragedy (in which the remote or the ideal does not hinder, and may even help, the dramatist’s purpose), had lost its touch with life in romantic extravagance. Reaction had already set in against this, as, for example, in the work of his

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friend Chapman : in his All Fools the continuity of the story is broken up into more or less elaborate studies of characters or ”humours” in some respects suggestive of Jonsonian characters. The change is perceptible in Middleton and Marston, too. But Jonson, if not the first to express this change, was the first to define it and to supply the appropriate canons thereof. He was the first to propound realism in comedy in critical and well-defined terms. As T. S. Eliot in his critical study of Ben Jonson in Tlie Sacred Wood observes, ”the interest in the depiction and criticism of the actual life of the day – an interest essential to vitality in the literature of any age-had its chief exponent in Jonson.” He was as intimately acquainted with the life and manners of the Londoners of his age as the author of The Canterbury Tales Lamb, Smollett, and Dickens were with those of the Londoners of their respective ages. His comedies bring to the fore all types of people from nobles to beggars, and landlords to water-carriers. Most of them have for the scene of action not the romantic Forest of Arden, nor the enchanted island of The Tempest, nor the idyllic land of Illyria, but the real London with its panorama of humanity, its brightness, and squalor. Jonson cannot be justly dismissed as a grim and pedantic classicist as, to use the words of Daiches, he was also ”a rugged Englishman with a sardonic relish for the varied and colourful London life of his day…”

Ben Jonson’s Comedy is also called the ”comedy of humours” as he analysed society into ”humours” or dominant characteristics. These humours are types maintaining throughout the play ”certain welldefined attributes.” This sometimes makes them look static, or, to use the term put into vogue by E. M. Forster, ”fiat”. But here again Jonson is no slave of his rules. He makes his types look lively and realistic by strongly individualising them with certain auxiliary characteristics, T. S. Eliot maintains that Ben Jonson’s ”comic characterisation remains among the greatest achievements of the English drama because of its clearness and certainty, its richness of humour and its dramatic veracity.” Jonson’s Moralism :-

Jonson’s intention to show the image of the times was not an end in kself, but only a means to his end, which was to reform the society of his age by ridding it of all follies and aberrations. He fervently announced:

111 strip the ragged f oilia of Hit 6me Naked, as at their birth; And with a whip of sue I

Ben Jonson’s Contribution /139

Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs.

His ”whip of steel” was his very powerful satire. The element of satire is quite dominant in Ben Jonson’s comedies. In fact, he characterised some of his comedies as ”comic satires.” According to him, comedy was expected not to pander to rude and thrill- hungry crowds by transporting them to unrealistic regions created by the poet’s fancy, but to perform a seriously ethical purpose. It had to mock at baseness and folly in their lesser degrees by sporting ”with human follies, not with crimes.” He tells the Universities in the Dedication of Volpone that his ”special aim” is ”to put the snaffle in their mouths that cry out, we never punish vice in our interludes.” In his preoccupation with ethical considerations he went so far as to assert ”the impossibility of any man’s being the good poet, without first being a good man.” Again, in the Prologue to Every Man out of His Humour he proclaims:

/ will scourge those apes

And to these courteous eyes oppose a mirror

As large as is the stage whereon toe act,

Where they shall see the time’s deformity

Anatomized in every nerve and sinew

Witli constant courage and contempt of fear.

In Volpone (where the scene is not London but Venice) Jonson satirises greed, lust, cruelty, treachery, and lewdness. In The Alchemist, likewise, the evils of greed and trickery are exposed and satirised. In The Staple of News he lashes the crude taste for newsmongering. In Bartholomew Fair hypocritical Puritans are made the butt of ridicule. In The Silent Woman people with a pathological hatred of gaiety and noise (as exemplified by Morose) are attacked. In Every Man in His Humour the attack is levelled alike at the boasting but cowardly soldiers, jealous husbands, and town and country gulls. Thus in practically all of his comedies we meet with a satiric and didactic aim. This aim sometimes does violence to the true dramatic art. He was a dramatic artist His sense of crisp dialogue, his uncanny mastery of situation and suspense, his masculine vigour and anti-sentimentalism, his distrust of tear-jerking devices, his adeptness at plot-construction, his keen study of actual men and manners, and, above all, his genuine poetic impulse, particularly his lyrical strain, sustain his comedies at a very hieh artistic level and do not allow them to be bogged down by their pronounced purposrveness. IteScBoolarBar :-

Joasaaian comedy attracted the attention of a very large number of Us contemporaries and excited emulation among the numerous

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assembly of playwrights known as ”the sons of Ben.” Unfortunately most of them copied their ”father” too slavishly, without the equipment of equally excellent dramatic or poetic gifts. Thus what was true of the followers of Chaucer (the Chaucerians) and. those of Shakespeare was also true of Ben Jonson. Shadwell was his very close follower. The works of such dramatists as Sir Robert Howard, brother-in-law of Dryden, and even Sheridan exhibit some influences of the comedy of humours. Even while in the Restoration age a new kind of comedythe comedy of manners- came to be established, ”Jonson” says Allardyce Nicoll, ”still held his position as chief of comic dramatists.” Oryden in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy placed him alongside Shakespeare. ”In the latter part of his career”, avers David Daiches, lie was the leader oC an important literary group and indeed something of a literary dictator, the first significant example of that species in English literature.” It was not for nothing that his epitaph in Westminster Abbey carried the words:

”O rare Ben Jonson.”

BEN JONSON’S COMEDY OF HUMOURS Q.22.    Write a brief essay on Ben Jonson’s theory and practice

of the comedy of humours. The Word ”Humour” :

The term ”humour comes from the ancient Greek physicians and, later, from the medieval system’of medicine. This system envisaged four major humours corresponding with the four elements (fire, air, earth, and water) and possessing the quality respectively .of heat, cold, dryness, and moisture. The ”complexion,” ”temperament,” or constitution .of a man depended on the proportionate alliance of the four humours or subtle juices in his body. The predominance of the moist humour caused a man to grow sanguine, of the hot to grow choleric, and so on. The prevailing idea with the physiologist was that in a healthy body there was a natural balance of all the four humours and that a disturbance of the balance was dangerous and needed to be checked. ”In Elizabethan times”, says Ifor Evans in A Short History of English Drama, ”this medieval physiology was not treated with complete seriousness, but its vocabulary became a popular fashion in sophisticated conversation and this again Jonson exploited.” Elizabethan Interpretation :-

”Humour”, apart from its currency in the medical profession, was also a catchword when Ben Jonson began to write. But his contem-

Ben Jonson’s Comedy of Humours /141

poraries used the word for any passing mood, whim, fancy, or caprice and not, as Ben Jonson did, for a more a less permanent and predominant peculiarity of disposition. Shakespeare, like the rest, used the word in the sense of mood or fancy. For instance, in his Richard III we have:

Was ever woman in this humour wooed ?

Was ever woman in this humour won ?

Again, in Tlie Merchant of Venice, when Shylock is asked why he prefers a pound of the flesh of Bassonio’s heart to the sum of three thousand ducats, he replies:

It is my humour. Jonson’s Interpretation :

Ben Jonson dissociated himself from this degenerate meaning of the word ”humour”, took it back to its original physiological sense and fitted it into the context of his concept of the nature and function of comedy. Just as a man has in his physique a dominant humour, similarly he has in his psyche a dominant passion. Under the influence of this dominant passion a man may become, as the case may be, greedy, jealous, cowardly, deceptible, foolhardy, and so forth. As Jonson clarified in the Prologue to Every Man out of His Humour, he was taking the word ”humour” from medicine and was using it as a metaphor for the general disposition of a man-that is, his psychological set-up. He explains that

Wlien some one peculiar quality

Doth so possess a man that it doth draw

All his effects, his spirits, and his powers,

In their confluctions, all to run one way;

This may truly be said to be a humour. The Purpose of Comedy :

Ben Jonson’s comedy is called the comedy of humours as it aimed primarily at the representation of such characters as were motivated mainly or entirely by their peculiar, dominant passions or humours. Jonson felt that, in the words of a critic, ”the purpose of comedy is to note those elements in human character which are cither naturally and permanently dominant in each man, or which on occasion, in the hazard of life, overflow and exceed their limits at the expense of the other contributing elements to represent a number of characters differently humoured; and in the clash of contrasts to paint with pleasant laughter, the moral of these disorders. A man whom we call avaricious

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because avarice to us is his most striking characteristic and to him his most absorbing humour may either preserve the established proportion of his dominating quality in all his dealings, or under stress of living in a peculiar set of circumstances, let it grow at the expense of other qualities. In the first case, he may be said to be ’in his humour and in die second, to be ’out of his humour.’ Both are excellent material for comic dramatisation and the question is one of degree. The latter is the more tempting to die playwright not merely because excess gives him more striking stage effects, but because it serves his ethical purpose better because of die enormity of its magnitude.” The comedy of humours had a highly didactic aim which was sought to be realised through satire levelled at various humours. Volpone is a satire on cupidity and depravity of human character. The Alchemist on greed, Bartholomew Fair on hypocritical Puritans, The Sjlent Woman on jittery melancholiacs afraid of noise, The Staple of News on irresponsible newsmongering and the uncultured craving forthrills,and so on. It was not without reason that Ben Jonson characterised more than one of his comedies as ”comical

satires.”

Is Jonson an Imitator ?

We have not so far referred to Jonson’s indebtedness to classical dramatists in arriving at his concept of the comedy of humours. It was partly his classical instruction and taste which led hinj to this concept. But it is a popular misrepresentation to assert that Jonson was a mechanical imitator of the Roman   comic dramatists-Plautus and Terence. There is no doubt that in Latin comedy/ to quote Ifor Evans, ”each character belonged to a recognizable type, and maintained throughout certain well-defined attributes.” However, as a critic observes,”it is really a strange critical error to hold that the Jonsonian conception of the dramatic humour is only an English copy of Plautine and Terentian types and that his braggarts and gulls and misers were but Romans in doublet and ruff…” Jonson was no transcriber. He acknowledged ”no man” his ”master.” His dramatic art came not from the study of literature but the study of life. His insistence that comedy should be real and English comedy should be English and real was meant partly to dispel the charge that his comic art was merely literary, far removed from life and only a scholar’s affair. His native vigour and originality save him from being treated as a mechanical transcriber. He was a redoubtable scholar, but, what is more important, ”he was”, in the words of David Daiches in/4 Critical History of English Literature, ”also a rugged Englishman with a sardonic relish for the varied and colourful London life of his day… he showed enormous and impressive originality even when most closely following classical models or applying rules from classical theory or practice.” Take an example. Most of the humours in his first important comedy Every Man in His Humour have

Ben Jonson’s Comedy of Humours /143

their prototypes in the classical comedy of Plautus and Terence. But all of them are Londoners, not Romans, and are drawn not from books but observation. The jealous husband, the timid father, the corrupt son, the cunning slave or parasite, the simple gull, and the boasting but cowardly soldier of Plautus and Terence have suggested Ben Jonson’s Kitely the merchant, the elder Knowell, the younger Knowell (he is not corrupt indeed but it is supposed by his father to be so), Brainworm, Matthew and Stephen (the town and the country gull respectively), and Bobadill. All of them are no mere copies but represent a lively crosssection of London society of the age of Ben Jonson. A critic observes regarding these characters : ”No.more genuine sketches of London character are to be found in the annals of the drama.” They are children of Jonson’s own observation; and as an observer, he had, save Shakespeare, few rivals among his contemporaries. Advantages of the Humour Technique :-

They were some obvious advantages Jonson derived from the adoption of the humour technique. The chief among them are given below :

(i) First, it allowed him to dispense with the traditional clown or jester. The farcical laughter arising from the grotesque and slapstick farce of clownery could be substitued by the clash of humours.

(ii) Secondly, it provided a meeting-ground between classical theory and modern life.

(iii) Thirdly, as the introduction of humours put the dramatic emphasis on character at the cost of incident, it threw out of favour, once and for all, the comedy of mere intrigue.

(iv) Lastly, it rendered it possible for the master of satiric comedy, the doughty champion of classicism, and the most powerful of Elizabethan realists to be united in the same man. Jonson threw the massive weight of his dramatic genius against the current of popular taste and succeeded in pruning the romantic excesses of Elizabethan comedy.

The Disadvantages :-

A very grave danger inherent in the envisagement and representation of humours was the possibility of a falsification of human nature. The characters were apt to grow wooden and monotonous. Gregory Smith observes in this connexion : ”In the first place, the presentation of certain selected humours throughout a long play involves the playwright, as it does novelists like Dickens, in one of the two risks : either of making the characters too rigid or uniform in habit.

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puppet-like after the fashion of the personages in the old Morailty, and dramatically unreal or in the consciousness of this danger, of striving to escape from it by exaggeration…! n the second place-characters thus fixed lend to become too simple. Even when the humour is not plain study of a single folly, but a complex impression of several with one only slightly overtopping the rest, it is hard to sustain the combination throughout the action.” Jonson does manage, thanks to his vigour and originality, to negotiate these dangers pretty safely. It cannot be said that his characters are only wooden figures, representatives of types and embodiments of specific traits as arc the characters of the morality plays of the Middle Ages. He docs manage to breathe into them a life of their own. As T. S. Eliot maintains, rather partially, in The Sacred Wood, Shakespeare’s charactt -s are ”no more alive than are the characters of Jonson.”

In spite of their realism and vividness Ben Jonson’s humours are open to the charge of being psychologically too simple. It is often said that he was not acquainted with man in his fulness and that he built on the surface and built but a single storey. The complexities of human psyche find no expression. There is,” says a critic, ”no light and shade, the cross-play of motives is apt to be neglected; and above all, he misses the inconsistency which is so powerful an element in the nature of us all.” ”He,” says another critic, ”chooses a general idea-cunning, folly, severity, lust-and makes a person out of it. He takes an abstract quality, and putting together all the acts to which it may give rise, trots it out on the stage in a man’s dress. Now it is a vice selected from  the catalogue of moral philosophy, sensuality thirsting for gold : the perverse double inclination becomes a personage, Sir Epicure Mammon; before the alchemist, before his friend, before his mistress, in public or alone, all his words denote a greed of pleasure and of gold, and they express nothing more. Now it is a piece of madness gathered from the old sophists, a tremendous horror of noise: this form Of mental pathology becomes a personage, Morose.” To have a humour is almost a whole-time profession. It is to some extent, an over-simplification of human nature amounting to its falsification. Ben Jonson’s characters are, to adopt E. M. Forster’s phraseology in his Aspects oftlie Novel, flat and not round characters. They are all predictable and are ”not capable of surprising us in a convincing way.” They do not have the unpredictability of life, though they are lively and arresting.

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BACON’S CONTRIBUTION TO ENGLISH PROSE

Q. 23.   Trace Bacon’s  contribution to   the development of English prose. (Agra 1962)

Or

Q.        Write a critical note on Bacon’s contribution to the development of English prose. (Agra 1962)

Introduction :-

”A bell ringer who is up first to call others to church”-these words of Bacon himself amply sum up his contribution to the world of letters. He was- the earliest to seek (in hisAdvancement of Learning) the ways and means to unify and consolidate learning j he was almost the first to show (through his History of Henry the Seventh) the possibilities of an authentic historical discourse free alike from the elements of myth and legend as well as strained conceits and stylistic gewgaws; he was definitely the first to forward (through his New Atlantis) the plpa for a college of scientific research; then he was the first to naturalise into English a new species of literature, namely, the essay. But, above all, Bacon was the first to set up through his personal example a model of English prose which had hitherto been non-existent. Referring to Bacon’s contribution to English prbse Hugh Walker observes : ”He took one of the biggest steps ever taken in the evolution of English prose style, a step which set that style on the road which it travelled, though not without divagations, down to the days of Swift and Addison.”

Prose before Bacon :-

Roughly speaking modem prose begins with Dryden and the writers of the closing years of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. We, no doubt, agree with Douglas Bush that it is a ”vulgar error” to suppose that Dryden started something altogether new. He observes : ”Literary history has given currency to the notion that prose writing before 1660 was largely ornate and poetical and that a plain, workaday, modern style was first inaugurated after the Restoration chiefly through the efforts of the Royal Society to develop this along with other elements of its Baconian heritage.” In fact, to quote Bush again, ”Dryden and his fellows represented a culmination rather than a beginning”. Dryden completed the transition of English prose from antiquity to modernity. Several of Dryden’s predecessors also contributed towards this transition. Among them Bacon occupies a very important place.

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Ascham :-

To assess the importance of Bacon in the history of English prose it is desirable to have a glance at the prose of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, and then to see in what ways he registered an improvement upon it. Among such persons the most important were Ascham, Lyly, Sidney, and Hooker. All of them had some definite achievement to their names. We cannot justly dismiss them as antiquated prose poets who wrote unnatural, over-ornamented, strained, prolix, and turgid prose. Take, for example, the work of Ascham.  Ascham’s prose is far from ornate. In his Toxophilus he puts forward the claim that he is ”writing this English matter in the English speech for Englishmen.” He seems to have put special emphasis on English in order to proclaim his independence from the mannerisms imported from Italy and France and so popular with his contemporary prose writers. This claim, as Saintsbury points out, ”is no mere figure of rhetoric or bit of jingle but a sentence to which the author adheres as far as possible throughout his work.” In his vocabulary and syntax, Ascham is racy, direct, and simple. However, like most contemporaries, he retains and and even abuses the especially English device of alliteration. He is also fond of balance and antithesis which remind one of Lyly, so much so that he has been ”charged with ”Euphuism before Euphues.’ Saintsbury lists two defects of Ascham’s style as follows : (i) ”It was very ill-fitted for fanciful, gorgeous or passionate

expression.”

(ii)     It tended sometimes ”to degenerate into lameness commonness, insipidity.”

Nevertheless, Ascham’s work constitutes a definite landmark in the history of prose. Saintsbury observes: ”The period of mere experiments in stocking the vocabulary and arranging the syntax, had ceased, experiments in all directions had been made in point of subject, and at length a fairly normal style had been attained,suitable,as Ascham himself showed, for a good variety of literary purposes, if not for all.”

Lyly –

John Lyly, dramatist and poet, is best known, however for his prose work Euphues which gave a new example of highly ornamental, gorgeous, and poetical prose. Lyly gave a new word ”Euphuism” representing the qualities, including the stylistic characteristics, of his

famous work, Euphues. Euphues was followed by Euphues and His England. Saintsbury calls Lyly ”a great mannerist in style” who revolted against simple style. Euphuistic style is marked by various mannerisms such

Bacon’s Contribution to English Prose /147

as excessive use of alliteration, often highly artificial, and strained use of similes from all kinds of sources, but especially the ”unnatural natural history,” and still more especially ”the fanciful zoology of the Middle Ages”, use of rhetorical question, over-incidence of parenthesestnd so on. As regards syntax, it was highly diffuse and loose, or, as it may be called, ”Ciceronian.” Simplicity was at a discount, wrier-Ms uncommonness and remoteness (even unintelligibiliry) and artifice were exalted. However, one discordant note in Euphuism may also be noted. That is the frequency of typically native phrases, sucb as ”I am of the shoemaker’s mind who careth not so the shoe hold the plucking on.” Such phrases are, surprisingly enough, commoner in Lyly than in Ascham.

Sidney :-

Sir Philip Sidney-courtier, poet, soldier, critic, and prose stylist– was another who helped English prose to come to its own. He is famous for The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, a pastoral romance which achieved immediate and immense popularity. A critic observes about Sidney: ”He put aside the elaborate affectations of Lyly, and while hot free from mannerism struck a happy compromise between the straightforward simplicity of Ascham and the highly coloured complexity of Euphuism.” His prose is generally simple thoughjn cadence and occasional alliteration, somewhat poetical. The syntax, again, is somewhat unorganised and diffuse.

Hooker :-

It was Hooker, one of Bacon’s contemporaries, who through his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity gave a model of simple, straightforward, yet grave and elevated, prose for the treatment of serious and philosophical subjects. This was not a model for all kinds of subjects, however. Hooker is lucid and grave from the beginning to the end. In his syntax, however, he is the perfection of Ciceronianism. He depends too much on Latinism in his syntax, though much less in his vocabulary. As Goldsmith jeeringly remarked about Johnson’s style, Hooker’s style is good enough for the mouths of whales, but hardly those of little fishes. Thus, it was not a model for all kinds of subjects, but only of a limited kind.

Bscoo Provided the Model :-

It was for Bacon to provide such a working model. The prose of his essays set up such a model of lucid, straightforward English which could serve as a vehicle for all kinds of subjects, both grave and trivial, high and low. Bacon’s prose is free from needless artifice, ornament.

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prolixity, and diffuseness which are qualities of the prose of most of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. Simplicity, lucidity, and flexibility are the keynotes of his style. Though he retained some liking for analogy, antithesis, and suchlike qualities reminiscent of the prose of his predeccessors, yet, on the whole, he recorded an unmistakable break with the past to give a prose which was suitable for the treatment of all kinds of subjects. In his Essays he treats of such elevated themes as justice and truth on the one hand, and,on the other, such trifling themes as masques and triumphs which,in his own words, are no more than ”toys.” The new style of Bacon”, observes Hugh Walker, ”fitted itself as easily to buildings and gardens as to suitors or ceremonies, as to truth and death. It could sink to the familiarity of likening money to muck, not good unless it be spread or rise to a comparison between the movement of the human mind and the movement of the heavenly bodies.”

Revolt against Ciceronianism :-

Bacon was the first English prose writer who revolted against the highly organised (or Ciceronian) prose style of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. He was,in the words of Douglas Bush, ”the theoretical and practical leader of the anti-Ciceronian movement in England.” The anti-Ciceronian movement aimed at furthering the cause of simplicity, naturalness, and straightforwardness in expression. As regards syntax, it favoured short sentences. It favoured conversational ease against strained, artificial expression. It is evident that Bacon in his Essays put forward a glorious example of the possibilities of natural, anti-Ciceronian expression free from stylistic gewgaws, prolixity, circumlocution, intentional ”poetisms”, and remote analogies. There is nothing in the style of his Essays which may put one in mind of the grand, rolling, finished periods of a lumbering length rich in majestic harmonics. Bacon’s style is, on the other hand, aphoristic rather than Ciceronian. Comparing the aphoristic with the highly organised Ciceronian style, Bacon himself pointed out: ”Aphorisms representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther ; whereas Methods [that is, the Circeronian form] do secure men, as if they were at farthest.”

Simplicity and Precision :-

Through the prose of his Essays Bacon set new standards of simplicity and precision which were later to be accepted as the hallmarks of good prose. Being a scientist himself Bacon was critical of all ambiguity, prolixity, circumlocution, and needless ornamentation

Bacon’s Contribution to English Prose /149

which go ill with everyday prose. His attitude to words was the same as his attitude to knowledge, that is, their subservience to utility. It is, said he, ”the first distemper of learning when men study words and not matter,” for ”words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.” Bacon himself never fell in love with ”pictures.” He was an economiser as regards words, and would never use two where one would suffice. That is particularly true of his earlier essays in which his style borders upon the bald. In succinctness the style of his essays comes close to the standard laid down by Ben Jonson : ”A strict and succinct style is that where you can take away  nothing without loss, and that loss to be manifest.” Bacon’s extremely condensed and terse expression is sui generis. None after him seriously tried to imitate the particular flavour of his style, probably because without his massive mind and intellectual equipment it was impossible to do so. Nevertheless Bacon’s importance lies in the fact that he imported into English prose a new sense of precision and clarity. The Elizabethan Quality :- ;

Though in the precision and clarity of his prose Bacon looks forward to the moderns, yet he is not altogether modern. His prose is still tinctured with a bit of the Elizabethan colour, a true child of the age as he is. Take, for instance, his frequent use of Latinisms. That is the legacy of an age in which Latin was the medium of instruction. The Renaissance had brought an awareness of the treasures of Latin and Greek literature. Further, in Bacon’s prose there is occasional occurrence of all kinds of analogies so popular with his contemporaries, particularly the Euphuists. However, his analogies, similes, and metaphors are not like the ”conceits” of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. Further, some instances of ungrammatical structure can be quoted from his essays. His use of obsolete and obsolescent words is also reminiscent of his Elizabethanism. in short, Bacon belongs partly to (he age of Elizabeth and partly he looks forward to the late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century prose writers such as Dry9en, Addison, Sfeele, and Swift. Redpath says : ”It is probably more helpful simply to say that Bacon’s prose occupies a position somewhere between the plentiful in ep, lar vitality of the typical Elizabethans and the late 17th century barer styles.’ A New Genre :

Bacon’s importance in the history of English prose is also due fo his naturalisation of a new genre in English. Ws are referring to the

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essay. He borrrowed the concept of the essay from Montaigne, the French writer, whose Essais appeared in 1580, seventeen years before the first edition of his own Essays. Bacon modified the concept of the essay so as to make it suit his own particular genius. He used it not ”as a vehicle of self-revelation as Montaigne did, but a repository of ’dispersed mcditations’-impersonal, practical, and worldly. Later the essay underwent a substantial change in the hands of his many followers. However, it still holds that it was Bacon who was the father of (he English essay. For sheer mass of intellect he remains till now the greatest of English essayists. His importance is,therefore, not only due to precedence but also to excellence. Bush well compares Bacon followed by his successors to a whale followed by a school of porpoises.

BACON AND THE RENAISSANCE

Q.24.     What features of the Renaissance are reflected in the

works of Bacon (and Milton) ? (Agra 1960)

(Companion Question) Q. Show how Bacon’s   essays   reflect the Renaissance

spirit. (Punjab 1952)

Or Q.         What evidence of the Renaissance spirit do you find in

Bacon’s Essays ? (Agra 1966)

Introduction :-

Tillotson says : ”Bacon the man was the product of the Renaissance : man’s glory, generous or tense, his opportunities of mind and body, his eye finally rolling across the subtlety and magnificence of the world, his joy in learning, discovering, weighing, creating-all this as it existed in Bacon’s mind sifted through into the Essays.” The modern .world starts with the sixteenth century which was the century of transition from the Middle Ages to the modern times. The dawn of the Renaissance had brought in that century a spirit of rational enquiry and criticism which started taking the place of childlike faith and ignorant reverence of authority. In both secular and religious matters a spirit of revolt was impinging upon set traditions,authority and custom. Secular interests had started overshadowing religious interests. Interest was now apparent for the cultivation of classical humanistic learning. The ”other worldliness” gave place to ”this worldliness.” A restless spirit of exploration and discovery was abroad. However, the excess of

Bacon and the Renaissance / 151

materialism and the weakening of the religious bond also liberated the grosser instinct of some who aimed at material advancement at the cost of conscience and morality. Bacon was an interesting figure of thLs interesting age. He represents both the splendour and the sordidncss of the times. And so do his works. Let us see how.

Bacon’s Intellectual Modernity :-

Bacon represent the intellectual modernhy’so closely associated with the Renaissance. The Renaissance, in intellectual terms, signalised the end of medieval scholasticism and the beginning of the ago of dispassionate and rational enquiry and experimentation. With his Instauratio Magna Bacon tried to sweep aside the cobwebs of scholastic philosophy which had all along been blurring the light of science and progressive thought. The medieval schoolmen (the protagonists of scholastcism) did nothing but strain, their nerves in justifying the tenets of Christianity in the light of Aristotelean principles. Bacon gave his novum organum (a new instrument)-induction-which has since played a major role in the progress of experimental science. With his The Advancement of Learning he became the first man to put forward a prosposal for the establishment of a society of scientists-a proposal which foreshadowed the establishment of the Royal Society by about half a century. Bacon was an enthusiastic votary of truth. His death was caused by his enthusiasm. He once killed a bird and stuffed it with snow in order to find out the preservative effect of snow on flesh. In the process of this experiment he caught cold, which worsened into pneumonia of which he died soon after. He lived for philosophic and scientific truth, and died as a martyr in its cause.

Love of Learning :-

The Renaissance whetted the appetite of the people for learning, especially the Greek and Latin classics which had lain unknown to the Middle Ages. Bacon claimed to have taken all knowledge to be his province. la the Essays he shows a keen awareness of several branches of learning. Though none of the essays concerns itself with any formal academic subject, yet in his imagery and style we are constantly conscious of his acquaintance with many branches of learning. He himself referred to his essays as ”certain brief notes set down rather significantly than curiously”, concerning subjects ”of which men shall find much in business and little in books.” The topics of the essays are certainly connected with a man’s worldly conduct, but not unoften show his love of various branches of learning, such as astronomy, mineralogy, and geography, in his treatment of these topics.

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Consider in this connexion Bacon’s use of analogies. In ”Of Seditions and Troubles” we have: ”Shepherds of people had need know the calendars of tempests in state: which are commonly greatest when things grow to equality, as natural tempests are greatest about the Equinoctia. In ”Of Faction” he says : ”The motions of factions under kings ought to be like the motions (as the astronomers speak) of the inferior orbs, which may have their proper motions, but yet still are quietly carried by the higher motion ofprimum mobile.”

We can easily multiply such instances as convince one of Bacon’s familiarity with learning.

Knowledge of the Classics :-

This learning has another aspect-thai which concerns the Latin and Greek classics with which the Renaissance had come to England. The massive magnitude of Bacon’s classical learning is easily sampled by even a cursory glance at his essays. There is perhaps not a single essay which is without some references to and quotations from Latin and Greek writers. He quotes, among others, Lucretius, Cicero, Tacitus, Seneca, Pliny, Livy, and Ovid. No doubt, quite a sizeable number of these quotations are actually misquotations (of course, on account of only slight variations) yet they bespeak Bacon’s comprehensive knowledge of the classics. It is a little intriguing to note that Bacon nowhere quotes a dramatist, classical or English. As a matter of fact, towards all English writers he is too full of contempt to quote any.

Political Views :-

Bacon’s political views as expressed in the Essays have, to a great extent, the stamp of Greek political thinkers’. It was Plato who had set rolling the ball of totalitarianism. B -on pushes it along. la fact, Bacon’s whole conception of a state, its relation to the individuals, its supreme authority, his conception of war and commerce, etc. are all Greek in their main features. His plea for centralised power, his undemocratic suspicions about the common masses, and his unqualified faith in the absolute power of monarchs are testimonies of his allegiance to the ancient Greek thought. His ideal was King Henry VII whose history he wrote and who kept up the king’s prerogative. Like Machiavelli Bacon wants to keep the authority of the king above question. The duty of all the subjects is to work for the interest of the king who like ”primum mobiie’ carries all the ”lesser orbs” along with him, himself unaffected by their ”proper motions,” Even judges are not tobe independent in their judgements, but have to be ruled by the king. His observation about judges in the essay ”Of Judicature” is that ”let them be lions, but yet lions under the throne”.

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The Authorised Version /153

Materialism and Worldliness ;-

The dawn of the Renaissance, as we have pointed out above, was responsible for injecting into people a new interest in this world and the affairs of this world. Gone were the days of scholasticism and religious casuistry. The star-gazers of the past gave place to the earthgazers of the new tiroes. The humanistic culture of the Greeks and Romans was mainly responsible for this new trend. Bacon’s essays are a Bible of the new worldly wisdom. Like Marlowe’s heroes, particularly Dr. Faustus and the Jew of Malta, Bacon, with the new learned class, was desirous of material advancement, not only selfless learning.

His essays are a reflection of the new spirit in so far as he deals with the business of providing practical precepts to a man desirous of rising in the world in the materialistic sense. His essays like ”Of Simulation and Dissimulation”, ”Of Cunning,” and ”Of Negotiat’.ug” could have neither been written nor appreciated in the pre-Renaissance times. That Bacon’s essays were in accordance with the temper of the times is easily seen by the fact that they immediately created an enormous circle of readers and admirers, so much so that not fewer than six editions of the work were taken out during his life-time itself.

Unscrupulousness :-

The Essays arc distinguished further by their coldness and lack of moral earnestness-the qualities which marked off their writer as well. Bacon shows a kind of Machiavellian dispassionateness in the treatment of even such subjects as love and marriage. He deals with these subjects in relation to their suitability or otherwise in furthering the material interests of an aspirant for worldly advancement. In this respect he reminds one of the University Wits (like Marlowe, Peele, and Greene)-the most distinguished products of the Renaissance who lived depraved, godless lives.Though he but seldom indulges in irreligious or immoral observations, yet his tone and treatment betray the shallowness of his moral principles. His Essays, in the words of William Blake, are ”good advice for Satan’s kingdom.”

THE, AUTHORIZED   VERSION    AND    ITS IN-

/ FLUENCE ON ENGUSH LITERATURE .     Q.25.   Assess the impact of the ”Authorized Version of the Bible Vs on English language and literature.-

(Rohilkhand 1987, Himachal 1987) Or

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Q. What do you know about the Authorized Version of the Bible and its impact on English thought and literature?

(Rohilkhand 1983) Or

Q. Write a note on the Authorized Version of the Bible and its influence on English literature. (Agra 1965, Himachai 1991)

Or

Q. Assess the influence of the authorized version of the Bible on English language and literature. (Rohilkhand

1989)

Q. Write a note on the Authorised Version of the Bible and its impact on English thought, language and literature.

(Agra 1971) Or

Q.       Trace the influence of the Bible on English Prose. (Agra

1987,1990; Garhwal 1991)

(1) THE AUTHORISED VERSION Introduction :

The Authorised Version of the Bible or only ”the Authorized Version” was the English translation of the Bible (both the Old Testament and the new) which was jointly produced by a number of scholars in 1611 at the behest of the then king of England, James I. The Bible-the Book of Books-has been a spiritual guide for the Christian world for ages and ages, and has been the most vastly read of all the books of all the times.Even as recently as 1965 the Bible in America was a bestseller among books. It has been translated into almost all the languages of the world, and even many of the dialects. It is to the Christians what the Koran is to the Moslems. But unlike the Koran, the Bible was the production of a joint effort of a number of inspired men and prophets. The Bible falls into two sections-the Old Testament and the New Testament. The two sections are further sub-divided into a number of books. The former, the bulkier of the two, consists of thirty-nine books, and the latter of twenty-seven. Thus, in all, the Bible comprises sixty-six books. The Old Testament was initially written in Hebrew, and the New in Greek. The Old Testament tells the story of the creation, the ancient history of man, and the vicissitudes of t he J e ws, ”the chosen people of God”, and also includes the prophecy of the future arrival of the Messiah (the deliverer) who would deliver mantind through his own sacrifice. The New Testament is, in a way, representation of the fulfilment of that prophecy-the arrival of Jesus

The Authorised Version / 155

Christ. His teachings and his career are part of the Ne. Testament. The Bible contains writings of the following kinds :

(i) lyrical;

(ii) prophetic;

(iii) narrative; and

(iv) didactic.

The Bible is not written in verse but’the use of marked cadences, effective and frequent repetition and telling rhythm has lent it a kind of poetic beauty. The religious importance of the Bible is supreme and needs no mention. It enshrines for Christians all over the world the Word of God which was delivered by Him through the agency; of the prophets. But its importance’ is not only of the religious kind; it is, rather all-embracing. Seccotnbe and Allen observe in 77je Age of Shakespeare, Vol.] : ”Except the Koran it is doubtful if any book has been more read. It has become part of the national mind and has permanently impressed upon that mind some of its simplicity and directness. Us noble figures, happy turns, and pithy sentiments are upon every lip.” The Bible’s influence on western literature, particularly English literature, has been tremendous. Henry Rogers aptly remarks that ”there is no other book, and I think I might say no other ten books, that have left so deep or so many traces on human literature; none that are so often cited or alluded to, none which have supplied so much matter for apt illustration, or been so often resorted to for vivid imagery and energetic diction”.

The Authorized Version :

The Authorized Version came as late as 1611, though the Bible had been translated into English much earlier, and quite frequently. The earliest translations in patches come from the ninth and tenth centuries. As we have already said, the Old Testament was originally in the Hebrew language. The Septiiagint is the oldest Greek version of the Bible and belongs to the third century B.C. Both the Old and the New Testament were translated by St. Jerome into Latin at the beginning of he fifth century A.D. (the year 405). It was the most authoritative version of the Bible respected by the learned all over Europe. After many half-hearted attempts at translating the Bible into English made by a number of writers ranging over the length of the Dark and Middle Ages, it was John Wyclif who gave the first full-length English translation of the Bible, which appeared in 1382 and later in a revised form in

1388. Wyclif, who has been aptly called ”the morning star of the Reformation” based his translation upon the Latin text of St. Jerome.

I I

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Wyclif s English was simple, rugged, and coarse, but not without some vigour. It was William Tyndale who was the first to translate the Bible into English direct from the original Hebrew and Greek texts. He completed his translation of the New Testament, but before he could complete that of the Old Testament he was seized as a heretic, strangulated at the stake, and then burnt. His unfinished work was completed by Miles Coverdale, and the complete version of the Bible appeared in 1535. ”Tyndale’s translation”, reads the Encyclopaedia Brilannica, ”may be described as a truly noble work, faithful and scholarly, though couched in simple and faithful language.” It was Tyndale’s translation on which the Authorized Version was mainly based, and it was he who made the Bible a truly popular book for the millions in England who started having daily readings. Comparing the relative importance of the work of Wyclif and TvndaJe,Dr.WestcoU observes’in his History of the English Bible: ”The History of the English Bible begins with the work of Tyndale and not with that of Wycliffc”, because not only did Tyndale base his translation on the original sources, but because he made the study of the Bible exceedingly popular among the common people who ”stayed up all night to peruse it, and relinquished in its favour their old chapbooks and tales of the Round Table and of Robin Hood.”

After the work of Tyndale and Coverdale we find quite a few attempts at the translation of the Scriptures. In 1538 came a new edition of Coverdale’s Bible known as The Great Bible. Another edition of the same appeared in 1538 and carried a preface by Cranmer. It was known as Cranmer’s Bible. Matthew’s Bible was published in 1537 under the pseudonym of John Matthew by John Rogers. During Mary’s reign the reformers took refuge in Geneva from where they issued the Geneva Bible (1560) carrying a marginal commentary tailored to the taste of the Puritans. Archbishop Parker issued in 1568 what is called the Bishop’s Bible. Many other editions followed

It was felt in the age of James I thai some perfectly authentic Version of the Bible should be brought out so as to resolve the-confusion in ths interpretation of the Word of God caused by the multiplicity of editions. The plan for an authorized version took shape at a coofersnce of distinguished scholars and divines convened by James I. They belonged id both the High and tb.e Low Church parties. The proposal for suea a version was put forward by Dr. John Reynolds, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and himself a man of Low Church leaning. The proposal was readily accepted by the king, and Che work of translation was assigned to forty-sewa scholars tad divines who

The Authorised Version /157

were divided into numerous committees each of which had to handle an allotted portion of the text. The whole work took three years and a half and was completed and published in 1611. It was known as the King’s Bible or the Authorized Version in the belief that it was the king who had authorised the translation. But it must be pointed out that, as Harvey puts it, ”it was not authorized by any official pronouncement.” The Authorized Version came out in two issues, known respectively as the ”He Bible” and the ”She Bible”. In the first the words in Ruth iii, 15 read : ”and he went into the citie”, and in the second ”and she went into the citie.” The Version received immediate popularity and still enjoys it. ”Modern bibles,” say Harvey, ”are based with slight variations on the She Bible.” One reason fpr its widespread popularity was its avoidance of sectariansim. Hardin Craig observes : ”The Authorized Version thus gave no shock to readers already familiar with the Bible and since it was relatively free from partisan bias, it was, therefore, quickly accepted by all denominations.”

The translators did their job pretty well and sincerely and adhered to the original text with remarkable fidelity, bothering not at all about stylistic mannerisms and gaudy drapery. They had been instructed to adhere to the Bishop’s Bible as far as possible. In fact much of their work comes close to that of Tyndale. ”It is”, points out Harvey, ”practically the version of Tyndale with some admixture from Wycliffe.” Tht Authorized Version wasndeed, a repository of cumulative excellence; which it drew from Wycliffe, Tyndale, the Latin Vulgate, and some naturalized from Hebrew and Greek. The style, too, is not narrowly representative of the age. It looks back too often and captures the fragrance of the stylistic flowers long since extinct. As Moody and Lovett remark, ”in the King James Bible we possess a monument of English prose of no particular age, but gathering into itself the strength and sweetness of all ages.”

(2) THE INFLUENCE OF THE AUTHORISED VERSION

ON ENGLISH LITERATURE

Introduction :-

The year 1611 marked the beginning of the period in which he Bible became a truly popular book and the daily reading of almost the whole nation. It influenced alike the peer and the peasant, the noble and the churl, the divine and the layman, the scholar and the man in the street. Edmund Gosse maintains: ”Not a native author but owes something of hs melody and his charm to the echo of those Biblical accents which were the first fragments of purely classiclal English to attract his admiration in childhood.” We may give here the testimonies

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of some great English writers. According to Milton there are no songs which can be compared with the songs of Zion, and no orations comparable to those of the prophets. Bunyan considered the Bible to be the best of all books. Swift regarded the style of the Bible as ”one of the greatest perfections in any language.” Sir Walter Scott desired Lockhart to read the Bible to him when he felt himself to be arriving at his journey’s end. For Wordsworth ”the grand store-house of enthusiastic and meditative imagination….are the prophetic and lyrical parts of the Holy Scriptures.” Ruskin maintained : ”1 count [the Bible] very confidently the most precious and on the whole the one essential part of all my education”/Carlyle said: ”In the poorest cottage…..is one book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man  had found light and nourishment.” Newman referred to the Scriptures as ”composition which, even humanly considered, are am.ong the most sublime and beautiful ever written.” Macauiay regarded the Authorized Version as an adequate example of the power and beauty of the English language. HaHam, very like Swift, considered the style of the Authorized Versiom as ”the pe’rfection of our English language.”  –

Many Kinds or Literary Influence :-

The Authorized Version has exerted many kinds of influence on English literature. This influence has been both thematic and stylistic; that is, it has provided the English men of letters Scriptural themes and has also modulated their literary style. Thus Bunyan and Oscar Wilde imitated the simple, rhythmical, repetitive style of the Authorized Version . Further, ideas, sentiments, and even phrases have been frequently drawn upon from the Authorized Version for use in writings of both religious and secular nature. Ruskin, particularly, was fond of packing his writings to the brim with biblical quotations which came to him with amazing facility. Many phrases from the Authorized Version have become a part and parcel of the English language. They are often used in writing and conversation by those who have never read a page of the Bible. Such phrases as ”clear as crystal,” ”arose as one man,” ”the sweat of his face,” and ”a broken reed” are instances in point. Some Specific Writers :-

Let us briefly consider the influence of Authorised Version on the literary work of some specific writers. Let us begin with Shakespeare. Shakespeare borrowed no Scriptural theme for any of his works, and yet the influence of the Authorized Version on him has to be taken seriously. As Henry Rogers points out, ”no less than three works have-

The Authorised Versi

M”

been expressly written to trace the influence of the Bible on hi and writings.” Milton was saturated with the spirit of the B( magnum opus, Paradise Lost, has for its theme ”man’s disobedience” resulting in his fall. Henry Rogers says : ”The matchless energy of Milton’s diction in many parts of his prose writings is in no slight degree due to the use he made of scripture.” He incorporated in his prose very effective Hebraic cadences. About the influence of the Authorized Version on seventeenth-century prose writers, Compton-Rickett observes in A History of English Literature: ”The historians, Clarendon and Fuller, catch some measure of the stately rhetoric of the Old Testament] while Sir Thomas Browne in his quaint Religio Medici, Robert Burton

 with his discursive Anatomy of Melancholy, and Jeremy Taylor, in varying ways, testify to its influence.” As regards John Bunyan, the same critic observes that his style ”owes more to the Bible, probably more than does any other man of letters.” About Bunyan,Legouis in,4 Short History of English Literature, maintains : ”He seems to have lived with the Scriptures alone, indifferent to every production of the human mind, occupied only with the quest for means of salvation. ComptonRickett further maintains: ”Addison’s conversational ease is certainly influenced by them [the two Testaments] just as Swift reflects the sterner qualities of the prophetic books. While in our own day, it is sufficient to recall the stormy vigour of Carlyle and the ironic eloquence of Ruskin, to realise the spell of Hebraism over our masters of prose.” Pope’s well-known tribute to Newton :

Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night, God .said, let Newton be, and there was Light is an obvious echo of

”And God said, Let there be light, and there was Light.”

Dryden’s reference in \\isAbsalom andAchitophel to Shimei (Slingsby

Bethel) as one who ”loved his wicked neighbour as himself is a near

travesty of theteaching of Christ to love our neighbour as ourselves. Of

all the English prose writers it is Ruskin who quotes most copiously and

most persistently from the Bible. The very title of his greatest work

Unto This Last is a biblical phrase.The work contains more than fifty

direct and indirect quotations from the Bible. Similarly his lecture on Work

has a pronounced pulpit twang about it. The peroration of this lecture is

no more than a torrent of biblical snatches. Many have disapproved of his

”needless text-flinging.” However, as he himself observed, his initmate

knowledge of the Authorized Version made it impossible for him ”to write

an entirely superficial or formal English.” Among the modem writers Oscar

15’

16U ’ A History of English Literature

Wilde is the most influenced by the Authorized Version.. His allegorical stories like ”The Selfish Giant” and ”The Nightingale and the Rose” use a language which is highly imitative of the language of the Authorized Version. To conclude with the words of Ifor Evans, the language of the Authorized Version ”has so embedded itself in our national tradition that if the Bible is forgotten a precious possession will be lost.” CHARACTER WRITERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH / CENTURY

x/ Q. 26.    Write an essay on the character writers of the seventeenth century. (Kohilkhand 1985)

Or

Q. Critically comment  on  the character-writers of the

seventeenth century. (Rohilkhand 1983)

Or

Q.         Write a short essay on any one of the following:- (a)        The character writers of the Seventeenth Century (and two more topics). (Punjab 1970)

introduction :-

The seventeenth century ”character” was a new English prose form. Sir Thomas Overbury, one of the important seventeenth century character writers, defined it as a picture, real or personal, quaintly drawn in various colours, all of them brightened by one shadowing.” A ”character” is very short-a thumb-nail sketch of an indvidual who is much more a type than an individual. The intention of the characterwriter is, generally, reformative, and his instruments are satire and wit. The character.says David Daiches in /(Critical History of English Uteraure, Vol.1, ”is essentially a portrait of a type rather than an individual, often done with an almost exhibitionist wit.” The progress of the character in England is marked by a gradual shift of emphasis from the typical to the individual qualities of the persons dealt with.

Theophrastus :-

Like most English literary genres, the character was imported from abroad. The model for the English character writers was the Greek psychologist Theophrastus (372-287 B.C.) whose Ethical Characters comprised brief character-sketches of some thirty vicious or unpleasant Athenian types done in witty but bitter prose. Theophrastus first came to be known in Latin translation in 1592 and in English in

1616. It is possible that Theophrastus wrote some characters of virtuous types also : however, only the characters of evil or unpleasant types

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Character Writers/161

have come down to us. He composed his characters in accordince with a set formula. He starts every character with a very brief description of the vice he is going tc handle-flattery, cowardice, talkativeness, superstitiousness, etc. After that he goes on to describe a typical possessor of that vice and his actions under its influence. Any reference to the strictly individual peculiarities of the person concerned is conspicuous by its absence. For illustration let us quote here the beginning of his character of Tlie Distrustful Man :

”Distrustfulness is a disposition to suspect all men of dishonesty. The Distrustful Man is this sort of man. When he has sent one of his slaves to buy provisions he sends another one after the first to find out exactly what they cost. In travelling he carries his own money and sits down every few hundred years to count it…”

The vogue of character writing was initiated in English by Joseph Hall, and was carried forward by the.distinguished character writers Overbury and Earle, right upto the age of the Restoration when it died a natural death after having outlived its appeal and utility. Let us now discuss briefly the work of the more important of seventeenthcentury character writers.

Joseph Hall (15744656) —

Joseph Hall is credited with the naturalisation of the new prose form of the character in English literature. His work entitled Characters of Virtues and Vices came out in 1608. He doubtlessly took Theophrastus for his model, but it is possible that, as Tucker Brooke observes, ”his immediate inspiration was found in the incidental character-sketches that Ben Jonson had introduced in Every Man out of His. Humour (1599) and Cynthia’s Revels (1600). Ben Jonson’s ”humours” are also predominantly types, but whereas he adopts the dynamic method of the dramatist in unfolding them, the character writer, like Hall, uses the static or descriptive method. But the moral aim is shared equally earnestly by the dramatist and the prose writer.

Hall’s Characters of Virtues and Vices consists of two books: Book I deals with virtuous types (such as the wise man, the honest man,and the true friend) and Book II with their vicious counterparts (such as the malcontent, the flatterer, and the unshrift). On the whole, Hall is more successful with vices than with virtues! Let us now compare Hall’s approach and execution with those of Theophrastus.

(1) Hall’s sketches are somewhat longer than Thcophrastus’s. In spite of the fact that he was called by his contemporaries ”our English Seneca” for his packed and rhetorical expression, it has to be admitted

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that his characters lack compression as also the artistic selection and rejection of traits which distinguish Theophrastus’s work.

(2) Secondly, Hall, as Tucker Brooke says, ”intensified the moral tone.” He was a clergyman. David Daiches observes : ”He is less the witty observer of men than the Christian moralist seeking to improve his readers by warning or example.” His egregious moral bias finds expression in his Proem to Book I: ”Virtue is not loved enough; because she is not seen : and Vice  loseth much detestation; .because her loveliness is secret….What need we more, than to discover the two to the world ? This work shall save the labour of exhorting and dissuasion.”

(3) Thirdly, his characters are rich in a peculiar kind of wit which is entirely his own. For illustration, see the end of the character of the busybody: ”He knows not why, but his custom is to go a little about and to leave the cross still on the right hand. One event is enough to make a rule ; out of these rules he concludes fashions, proper to himself; and nothing can turn him out of his course. If he has done his task, he is safe: it matters not with what affection. Finally, if God would let him be the carvej of his own obedience, he could not have a better subject as he is, he cannot have a worse.”

(4) Lastly, Hall’s sketches are characterised by crude and unpolished vigour~the same which we find ia his satirical verse Virgidemi-

arum.

Sir Thomas Overbury (1581-1613) :-

Hall’s work did not achieve any notable popularity. It was Overbury who first distinguished himself in the field of character writing. He died in the Tower of London in 1613 in quite mysterious circumstances. A year after his death a publisher brought out his poem/1 Wife. The second edition of the poem was supplemented by twenty-two prose characters said to be the work of Overbury ”and other learned’ gentlemen his friends.” The next three months saw the publication of  no fewer than four more editions and the number of characters in- i crease from twenty-two to eighty-three. Among the anonymous contributors were famous writers of their times, such as John Donne the poet and Dekker and Webster the dramatists. This work achieved and maintained remarkable popularity. Fourteen editions were published in the following half-century. Let us now discuss some of the important features of Overbur/s characters.

(1) Overburys characters are considerably shorter in length than Hall’s- Most of them run to under three hundred words.

Character Writers /163

(2) Overbury does not portray his characters to view them from an abstract moral position. Nor is his aim pre-eminently reformative. He is interested rather in the presentation of contemporary types. However, he was a courtier and, as such, had open contempt for the commonalty. Hardin Craig observes in A History of English Literature edited by himself : ”Overbury was a courtier and an acute and acrimonious observer of men and manners. His essays are the product of a circle of wits who profess scorn of the ordinary and the commonplace in human life.”

(3) Overbury, unlike Hall, did not make any formal division between virtue and vice. This, as Tucker Brooke, observes in A Literary History of England edited by Albert C.Baugh, helped him inchieving greater naturalness and a more pleasant diversity? However, that does not mean that he is blind to moral considerations. He does, like Theophrastus and Hall before him, have a didactic and reformative aim which he tries to realise through witty satire.

(4) His satire and wit. are more sophisticated than Hall’s. They have much more of literary and artistic quality. According to Legouis it was Overbury who ”gave this genere [the character] a really literary character.” Mark the telling pungency in his description of a Puritan: ”A Puritan is a diseased piece of Apocrypha : bind him to the Bible, and he corrupts the whole text: ignorance and fat feed are his founders; his nurses railing rabies and round breeches: his life is but a borrowed blast of wind; for between two religious, as between two doors, he is ever whistling.”

(5) Lastly, Overbury practised a novelty in including some women also among his characters. The most striking, fresh, and refreshing of his characters is The Fair and Happy Milkmaid.” As a courtier disgusted with the artificial beauty aids used by sophisticated women of the highest circles of society he celebrates in glowing terms the natural beauty and innocence of a milkmaid. Here is an extract from that character:

… though she be not arrayed in the spoil of the silk-worm, she is decked in innocence, a far better wearing….In milking a cow, and straining the teats through her fingers, it seems that so sweet a milkpress makes the milk whiter or sweeter; for never came almond-gloss or aromatic ointment on her palm to taint it The golden ears of corn fall and kiss her feet, when she reaps them as if they wished to be bound and led prisoners by the same hand that-felled them.

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John Earle (16017-1665) :-

Over-billy’s work gave a considerable fillip to character writing in English. Among those who practised this genre may be mentioned the following:

(i) John Stephens-Sflririca/ Essays, Characters and Others (1615) (ii) Nicholas Breton (1555-1626) and Richard Barthwait (1588-

1673)

(iii) Geoffrey Minshull (c.!594-1668)–£woyj and Characters of a Prison and Prisoners (1618).

Character sequences followed almost as thickly as sonnet sequences. But out of all of them John Earle’s Microcosmography is the most important and the most interesting. It was first published in 1628, and achieved immediate and well deserved fame. Earle’s seventy-eight portraits have lived on till today for he is easily the most attractive of all the character writers. Given below are some important features ol his work.

(1) Earle has a greater variety of material. His treatment ranges over such diverse characters as ”A Young Raw Preacher”, ”A Mere Formal Man”, ”A She Precise Hypocrite”, and ”The Common Singing Men in Cathedral Churches”.  Overbuy as a courtier had better opportunities to see the world than Earle who was a clergyman and for nearly twenty years a fellow of Merton College, Oxford. His clerical and scholarly bias is apparent in his frequent selection of types connected with the church and the university- ”An Old College Butler,” ”A Young Gentleman of the University” ,nA Downright Scholar,” ”A Plodding Student,” ”An University Don,” ”A Pretender to Learning,” and so forth.

(2) Earle is not very exhibitive of his’ wit which is generally unobtrusive and polished.However, it sharpens up whenever he deals with hypocrisy, as when he chastises ”A Pretender to Learning” who, as he says,  ”is one that would make others more fools than himself; for though he know nothing, he would not have the world know so much.”

(3) A novel feature initiated by Earle was the treatment of some inanimate objects among his characters. One such ”character” is ”A Tavern”. Earle says about it: ”A house of sin you may call it, but not a house of darkness, for the candles are never out, and it is like those countries far in the north where it is as dear at midnight as at midday.”

(4) Much of the charm of Earle’s characters lies in his style. Tucker Brooke observes: ”Earle has a neat epigrammatic style which, if he had lived a century later, would have been called Addisoaian….” One of the most remarkable of his portraits is that of ”A Child”, which curiously

English Prose in the Age of Milton /165

foreshadows Wordsworth’s exaltation of childhood. Mark these words: The elder he grows, he is a stair lower from God, and like his first father much worse in his breeches…. Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got eternity without a burthen, and exchanged but one heaven for another.”

After Earle :

After Earle we find the character shifting from the type to the individual. Samuel Butler’s large collection of characters was written in the late 1660’s but not published until 1759. Butler was pungently satirical and was chiefly concerned with contemporary follies and fads. However, it is not his characters but the characters of Earle which have a clear affinity with the spirit of the Taller and the Spectator. Thereafter the character, as David Daiches puts it in A Critical History of English Literature, Vol. I, was ”ready to join the other streams that flowed into the English novel.”

V/O.5

ENGLISH PROSE IN THE AGE OF MILTON

Q. 27.    Write a short essay on the prose literature of the i

v Q. 27.    Write a short essay on the prose literature of the age of Milton.

Or

Q.        Trace the development of English prose between Bacon and Dryden.

Introduction :

The age of Milton (that is, 1625 – 1660, comprising the Caroline age and the Commonwealth) was an age of singular activity in the field of English prose. The central events of the age-political struggles culminating in the execution’ of Charles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth-exerted both a hampering and an encouraging influence on the prose writers of the age. Much was written by them in sheer party spirit to promote either of the two conflicting parties–the Puritans and the Cavaliers. Thus the air was thick with party: pamphlets most of which proved only of ephemeral interest. Further, this age was remarkable for its production of some very eloquent and compelling sermons of the first rank in the language. The age of Milton has been very aptly called ”the Golden Age of English Pulpit.” The names of such powerful writers as Taylor, Robert South, Fuller, Isaac Barrow, and Richard Baxter are associated with this department of writing. In the field of moral, social, and political philosophy the age was enriched by the works of Sir Thomas Browne, John Hales, and Hobbes. Clarendon and Fuller wrote distinguished histories. Isaac Walton composed the quaint work The Compleat Angler- a work of its own kind. And then there was the almighty Milton who distinguished himself almost as eminently in the field of prose as that of poetry. In a word, the age of Milton was a period of prolific activity in the field of English prose touching many departments of life.

The Baroque Style :-

As regards prose style, the writers of the age of Milton exhibit a curious retrogressive tendency. Every past age in England had in some measure advanced literature from antiquity to modernity. But the age of Milton does not seem to have advanced English prose from the extravagance and antiquity of the prose of the Elizabethan period towards the ideal of simplicity, comprehensibility, and lucidity associated with the prose of the writers of the age of Queen Anne (1702-14). Right in the Jacobean age (1603-25) we come across some important writers like Bacon and the character writers who look to the future and dissociate themselves from the ornateness, prolixity, involvedness, and diffuseness of the prose of their contemporaries. The ”Gothic” style of most Elizabethans influenced a sizable proportion of the prose writer of the age of Milton. The lesson of simplicity and sententiousness set forth by Bacon and the character writers was forgotten, with the result that a kind of ”baroque” style was cultivated during the age of Milton. It was at the end of the age that the Restoration writers like Dryden stemmed the retrogressive tide and furthered the advance towards simplicity and lucidity which came fully and effectively to be realised by such writers as Addison and Swift after the close of the seventeenth century. However, it may be admitted with H. J. C. Grieson that the progress towards simplicity and modernity cost the English prose some freshness,harmony, dignity, and poetic richness of phraseology”. When prose becomes strictly functional in nature these qualities have to be done without.

With these preliminary remarks let us proceed to examine the work of the major prose writers of the age.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) :

Sir Thomas Browne was a quaint figure, though a very typical prose writer of his age. He may be compared with Burton before him. But whereas Burton was by profession a clergyman with a deep interest in medicine, Browne was by prpfession a physician, with a very deep interest in religion. As a thinker and writer he was a surprising blend of the medieval and modern characteristics. He had a scientific love of investigating the physical truths, the qualities of both a mystic and a sceptic, was a crusader for a rationalistic appraisal of both the work and the word of God, a great supporter of religious tolerance, a zealous campaigner for the removal of errors in all fields of learning ind divinity, but himself tenaciously wedded to such errors as belief in witchcraft and the mystic supremacy of the number five. His works reveal his attractively quaint personality in its fullness, and therein lies the reason of his perpetual appeal to the readers of all ages. The modern reader may justly scoff at the pomposity and the occasional absurdity of the learned doctor, but he has to admit with the Earl of Dorset that” assuredly, he is the owner of a strong generous heart.”

Browne’s Religio Medici (The Religion of a Doctor) which was published in 1642 immediately achieved Continental fame, and was translated into several languages. The work may be called ”an autobiography of the soul”. But apart from its importance in revealing the personality of the writer, the work intended a curative effect on the ”sick” society of the age. ”It is likely,” says Tucker Brooke in A Literary History of England, edited by Albert C. Baugh, ”that Pr. Browne, in all his estimable career, never prescribed a better medicine than when he wrote Religio Medici. The world was sick of horrors, on the brink of civil war, and in the throes of a harsh theology. The book is a prophylactic against totalitarian damnation, and the world took it to its heart.”

Browne’s PseudodoxiaEpidemica (Vulgar Errors), which comprised seven books, attempted to correct the common errors in the fields of mineral and vegetable bodies, animals, men, misrepresentations in pictures etc, geography, and history, However, the author himself is not altogether free from errors. In his Hydriotophia or Urn-Burial and The Garden of Cyrus (both published 1658), the emphasis is clearly on style. The former was occasioned by the recovery of a few sepulchral urns in Norwich, the habitat of the writer. As Legouis says, ””It treats of the oblivion which covers the traces of men, even though famous and with this subject he plays as a dilettante”. The latter work is concerned with the supremacy of the number five (the quincunx). Browne’s Christian Morals, published posthumously, is written in the character of a fairly orthodox Christian.

Browne’s prose style-though there are passages of rare lucidity charged with incisive energy-is representative of the baroque style. He has love of Latinised expressions and poetic cadences and sonorouss words. ”The interweaving of his harmonies”, says Legouis, offers an enchantment to the ear scarcely less than that of the finest lyrics.”

The Anglican Clergy: Taylor and Others :-

The prose of the age of Milton is remarkable for its pronounced religious slant. The secular interest of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods seem to have yielded considerable place to religious interests. Legouis remarks in this connexion : The rich humanity, the widespread curiosity, the intermingling of comedy with tragedy in the portrayal of life, were replaced by a passionate controversy on the forms of Christian religion and a search-which became almost an obsession–for the way of salvation”. In the Caroline period there was a complete polarisation of religious affiliations and the Puritans and the Protestants (Anglicans) emerged as two groups irreconcilably opposed to each other. Both of them had eminent men of letters among their ranks. Whereas Milton was the most important of the’Puritans, Jeremy Taylor was the best among the Protestants. Let us consider briefly the prose of the Anglicans first.

Among the Anglicans the important prose writers were George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, John Hales, William Chillingworth, John Gauden, and Jeremy Taylor (1613-67). Most of them mainly wrote sermons. The last named was the most distinguished and the most tolerant of all of them. Along with his sermons he gave Liberty of Prophesying (1646) and his most famous works Holy Living and Holy Dying (1650-51). Like Browne, Taylor is preoccupied with the thought of human mortality. Like him, again, he is not afraid of death; he considers it as ”nothing but a middle-point between the two lives.” The then recent death of his wife prompted him further to enter into the contemplation of mortality and the holy practice of prayer as also the importance of faith and patience.

Taylor’s style is a good example of the baroque style. His prose is a collection of long, rich, rolling sentences each of which goes like the river Alph in Coleridge’s ”Kubla Khan”

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion.

The structure is Ciceronian and highly Latinised. Taylor’s prose is characterised by a love of fancy at the cost of logic. Like the verse of the metaphysicals, Taylor’s prose manifests what T.S. Eliot calls the association of sensibility. He is very close to the Elizabethans, and has been called-not without justice-the Shakespeare of English prose” and ”the Spenser of the pulpit.” According to Legouis, in Taylor’s case ”the logician becomes lost in the poet.” Nevertheless, his prose is not without its beauty of harmony and dignity when he dwells on a theme dear to him,such as death or human frailty. The Puritans:Baxter, Milton, and Others :-

The Puritan camp was dominated by Milton. But there were also some other important figures such as Baxter and Prynne. As compared to the prose works of the Anglicans, those of the Puritans are marked by violence and coarseness and,not unoften, downright lack of good taste. In his Histriomastix ((1632) Prynne made a violent attack on the alleged immorality of the stage. Elsewhere, he lashed at the Anglican bishops. Richard Baxtek(1615-91), however, is not so intolerant. He wrote two manuals of practical religion–77ie Saints’Everlasting Rest (1650) and Call to the Unconverted (1657) which remained for long very important books in the Puritan tradition in both England and America. His style is quite simple but has few other qualities to recommend itself. The prose of John Owen (1616-83), another Puritan divine, is again, as Legouis remarks, ”rather dull and uninviting.”

Milton from the age of thirty-one to fifty wrote a number of pamphlets on political and ecclesiastical themes. In this period his poetic activity remained suspended except for the production of a dozen sonnets. On his return from the Continent to England he found the country ”on a troubled sea of noises and hoarse, disputes.” But he plunged into the ”sea” and made his appearance felt. Milton’s prose is the work of an excellent poet who looked upon prose as something contemptible and the work of but his ”left hand.” His prose is generally rhetorical and too highly Latinised, but is not without its rocky strength and overwhelming grandeur. For one thing, it has the quality of high seriousness plus sincerity. Milton always has a point to make and does make it, and quite often, effectively. But some bitterness dors become manifest here and there. Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644) is Milton’s most outstanding prose work. It was an eloquent plea for the liberty of the press. Regarding Milton’s style, Legouis observes : The remorseless length of his sentences renders them formidable at first to the reader, but from their troubled vehemence breaks forth at times a scathing irony or a sudden splendour. They reveal the impetuous idealist, unpractical and thoroughgoing,”

Philosophy: Hobbes, Harrington, etc.

The prose of Thomas Habbes (1588-1679) rises above all political and religious controversies. Hobbes was Bacon’s secretary and Decartes’ correspondent. He combines in his philosophic work the empiricism of the former and the mechanistic rationalism of the latter. His important work Leviathan ’(1651) sets forth his totalitarian, materialistic,, and rationalistic philosophy. Leviathan, says Legouis, ”is written in strong, logical, massive prose, exempt from the oratorical vehemence and ornaments of his great contemporaries, and heralding the prose of the classical period”.

James Harrington in his Utopian’work Oceana (1656) offered to controvert the views of Hobbes favouring absolute monarchy. The Cambridge Platonists, Henry More (1614-87) and Ralph Cudworth (1617-88) wrote in opposition to Hobbes’s rationalism. The prose of all these writers is fanciful and devoid of lucidity and exactncss-the hallmarks of Hobbes’s style.

The Eccentrics :-

Lastly, we come across some ”eccentrics” who wrote about the middle of the seventeenth century. Of them Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611-60) translated the first two books of .Rabelais’ Garganlua (1653). In giving free play to fancy he outdid even Browne. Thomas Fuller (1608-61), an Anglican clergyman, wrote the Church History of Britain (1655-56), Holy and Prophane State (1642), and The History of the Worthies ofEngland (1662). Fuller’s prose is somewhat quaint, but has an element of wit, even the wit of the metaphysical kind. At any rate, he is delightful, even though in patches. He wittily describes a negro as ”an image of God cut in ebony.” ”The soldier”, Fuller writes at a plase, ”at the same time shoots out his prayers to God and his pistol at his enemy.”

Izaac Walton (1593-1683) falls in a class by himself. He is known for his biographies of Donne, Henry Wotton, Hooker, George Herbert, and Bishop Sanderson written between 1640 and 1678. They are, says Hardin Craig in A History of English Literature, ed. Hardifl Craig, ”masterpieces, not of biography, but of style and temper, hearty sincerity, cheerfulness and good nature, and personal interest in the men treated. His mistakes as a biographer, for example in the case of Hooker, have to be guarded against, but his pictures are, essentially true.”

Walton’s more important work, however, is The Compleat Angler (1653) which is essentially a treatise on fishing, but has alongside many incidental attractions for the student of literature. Walton was an ironmonger by profession and he spent all of his leisure on fishing, of which sport he acquired an almost uncanny knowledge. He sets forth this knowledge in this book. ”Its charm,” says Hardin Craig, ”rests also on its background which is made up of natural scenery, life at inns, fishermen’s tales and casual conversations with fishermen, and of casually interspersed songs and lyrics”.

”He”, says Legouis in his A Short History of English Literature, ”serves as a link between Marlowe and Dryden.” We can easily perceive in his prose, even though it is the prose of an ironmonger, a marked Elizabethan quality. ”He describes”, says Legouis, ”these healthful pleasures in a prose, limpid, if a little slow, still redolent of the artificial pastoral here and there but wherein 1 the English countryside.”

Q.28.

THE ENGLISH METAPHYSICALS

Write an essay on Metaphysical  poetry. Also mention its chief characteristics.

(Puravanchai1992)

Or

Discuss the salient features of metaphysical poetry with examples from Donne and Marvel! (GNDU 1992)

Or

Write a short essay on one of the following :- (a) Metaphysical Poetry (and five more topics).

(Agra 1960) Or

Write  short essay on the metaphysical poets and comment briefly in their contribution to English literature.

(Agra 1964) Attempt a survey of Metaphysical poetry.

(Rohilkhand 1993) Or

Bring out the characteristics of Metaphysical poetry and show how it differs from Elizabethan poetry.

(Rohilkhand, 1990) Or

Bring out the salient features of the Metaphysical School of Poetry with special reference to Donne.

(Rohilkhand 1987)

Or

Discuss the principal characteristics of the Metaphysical school of poetry and give an account of th poetsof the school.

(Agra 1971)

Or Who were the great Metaphysical poets ? What were their

aims and methods ?

(Rohilkhand 1994)

170 I A

Aoiy of English Literature

.action :-

, the term ”metaphysical” as applied to Ponne and his fo’Uowers is,

ynore or less, a misngnjer. However, it has come to stick. It was Dryden

/ who first applied theterm in relation toDoone’s poetry.”He affected”

complained Dryden, ”the metaphysics, not only in his satires but in his

amorous verses.” Dr. Johnson borrowed Dryden’s ideas, and in his”Life

of Cowley- called Cowley a poet of the metaphysical school of Donne.

He derided Cowley’s pedantic exhibition of Jus  learning and

vocabulary in his poems. But the exhibition of their learning was only

one of the many characteristics of the metaphysical poets. Their love

ofdanngimagery,enigmaticexpression,apeculiarsensualismuneasily . wedded to a mystical conception of religion, their intellectualisnr and taste for the expression of novel ideas in a novel manner, were some other qualities. The term .”metaphysical” denotes, according.to Samtsbury, ”the habit, common to this school of poets, of always seeking to express something after, something behind, the simple, obvious first sense and suggestion of a subject.” In this way Donne and his followers strike a note of variance from Spenser and the Spensenans and Elizabethan poetry in general Composite Quality :-

According to Grierson, metaphysical poetry, in the full sense of the term, is a poetry which like Dante’s Divine Comedy and Goethe’s Faust has been inspired by a philosophical conception of the universe and of the role assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence.” It arises when the physical world loses its stability, and the people lose faith in the orthodox patterns of thought and belief ffST such times sensitive poets turn their attention inwards, and through self-analysis aim at better understanding of themselves, their situation in the world, and their relation to a philosophic or idealised/other world. The age in which Donne lived witnessed a gradual crumbling ot the old order of things, the disturbing progress of science, and the scepticism which went with it. ”The new philosophy”, said Donne, ”calls allui doubt . The realisation that the earth is not the centre of the universe, and the inference that man is not the greatest of all creatures, dealt a rude blow totfie orthodox Christian complacency. Donne’s search for some principle of coherence in a orid of chaos led him to tee reconciliation of opposites-resolution of doubts and the intergrahon of the world of reality with the world of the imagination, of sensual cynicism and highHown mysticism, and even of carnal and spiritual longings This led hun sisrdy to  emp|oy0ent of what have been dubbed metaphysical concerts” and an occasional display of out-

The English Metaphysicals /173

of-the-way, recondite learning. The subtler points of his feeling found outlet quite often in obscure and enigmatic expression which has been the delight of some, and the despair of many readers. In spite of Donne’s obscurity and persistent intellectualism it may be said to his credit as a love poet that he imported into English love poetry a vigorous element of hard realism (which sometimes amounts even to cynicism). In this respect he scored a big advance over Spenser and his school who glorified Platonic love and celebrated almost unearthly and highly conventional mistresses of the Petrarchan tradition. Donne’s lead was accepted by a large number of poets succeeding him. Among them may be mentioned Herbert, Vaughan, Carew, Crashaw, Traheme, early Milton, and Cowley. These poets are often classed together as ”metaphysicals” or ”metaphysical poets”. Apart from them the influence of Donne and his school may also be discerned in the work of a sizable number of poets who flourished in the Caroline period. In fact the metaphysical vein was in evidence as a major current in the stream of English poetry till the age of Dryden, when it gave place to neo-classicism ushered in by him.

Now let us consider some salient characteristics-of the poetry of the metaphysical school

”Undissociated Sensibility” :-

The most important characteristic of the metaphysicals is their possession of, or striving after, what T. S. Eliot calls ”undissociated sensibility” (the combination of thought and feeling) which Milton was to ”split” later. However, Prof. L. C. Knights in his essay ”Bacon and the Dissociation of Sensibility” in Explorations puts forward the view that sensibility came to be dissociated much earlier-by Bacon. The metaphysicals are ”constantly amalgamating disparate experiences” and forming new wholes out of materials so diverse as ”reading Spinoza, falling in love and smelling the dinner cooking.” Donne has the knack of presenting together different objects which have between them a quite remote though undeniable similarity. He connects the abstract with the concrete, the remote with the near, the physical with the spiritual, and the sublime with the commonplace and sometimes during moments of the most serious meditation breaks into a note of sardonic humour or bathetic frivolity. This juxtaposition and, sometimes, interfusion of apparently dissimilar or exactly opposite objects often pleasantly thrills us imo a new perception of reality. And Donne, says Hayward, is a ”thrilling poet.” Donne wrote:

:

174 / A History of English Literature

Oh,to vex me, contraries meet in one,

Inconstancy naturally hath begot

A constant habit.

These ”contraries” meeting in Donne’s poetry ”vex” not only the poet but also, sometimes, his readers. His successors handled these contraries rather crudely, with very unpleasant effects. Metaphysical Wit and Conceits :-

Dr. Johnson was the first critic to point out the tendency of the metaphysical poets to yoke radically different images forcibly together. This tendency arose, according to T. S. Eliot, from their undissociated sensibility. But it may be objected that Donne and his followers, do not really seem to be serious and spontaneous in the tendency noted by DC Johnson. When Donne compares a pair of lovers to a pair of compasses, is he not speaking with his tongue in cheek? Such a tendency is a true manifestation of the metaphysical wit. Hobbes in his Leviathan defined wit as the capability to find out similarities between things which may look very dissimilar. When Carew said that Donne

ruled, as he thought fit, The universal monarchy of wit

he was most probably referring to wit in this sense. All the metaphysicals have an incOTrigjbJe aptitude for witty comparisons, juxtaposition, and imagery, and what maybe called ”the metaphysical conceit”-some strained or far-fetched comparison or figure of speech. Dr. Johnson defined the wit of the metaphysicals as a kind of discordia concors, combination of dissimilar images. Let us consider some instances of t\us discordia concors.ln Donne’s Tw’vcknam Garden we meet with the expression ”spider love.” Now, we are used to splendid, decorative, or moving images in connexion with the subject of love; but the word ”spider” is quite contrary to our expectation. In the same poem the lover’s tears are called the wine of love. The poet invites lovers to come equipped with phials to collect his tears! In another poem we have the very quaint line:’ ’

A holy, thirsty dropsy melts me yet.

1 ne word ”holy” is highly serious, ”thirsty” stands for a simple physical need, and ”dropsy”-the name of a disease-has a clinical twang. Again, consider the lines:

Go tell court-huntsmen, that the king tvill ride; Call country ants to harvest offices.

The Hnglish Metaphysicals /175

See how the king and country ants are juxtaposed. Iearnedness :

The poetry of the metaphysicals has the impress of very vast learning. Whatever be the demerits of the metaphysical poets, even Dr. Johnson had to admit that for writing such poetry it was at least necessary to think and read. However, it may be said that this poetry is brain-_ sprung, not heart-felt. It is intellectual and witty to a fault. Dr. Johnson noted that the metaphysical poets sometimes drew their conceits from ”recesses of learning not very much frequented by common readers of poetry.” Learning is an asset for a poet. Our quarrel with the metaphysicals is not that they are learned but that, sometimes, they show off their learning just to impress the reader. An imaginative and learned writer, says Edmund Blunder ”calls for annotation, but the object of his difficult allusi9ns is to give shape to his ideas of the world, of the soul, not to decide matters of astronomy, physics, geography and natural history.” Many of Donne’s followers do not always prove so ”imaginative.”

Paradoxical Ratiocination :-

According to Grierson, the hallmarks of metaphysical poetry are passionate feeling and paradoxical ratiocination. The same critic observes that the metaphysicals ”exhibited deductive reasoning carried to a high pitch.” Too often does Donne state at the beginning of a poem a hopelessly insupportable proposition, which he defends soon after. Consider the poem The Indifferent” which opens as below”:

/ can love both fair and brown.

Whatever qualities a woman has are made into so many reasons for loving her! Again, note this in his poem The Broken Heart ”: He is stark mad, who ever says, That he hath been in love one hour.

With his tremendous ratiocinative ability Donne defends this proposition. In The Flea” the proposition presented to his mistress is: Thisjlea is you and I, and this Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.

It seems an unpromising subject, but there are twenty-seven lines of packed’argument to drive it home. ’This excessive’ intellectualism not unoften makes for obscurity. See, for instance, the following clever lines:

You that are she and you, that’s double she, In her dead face half of yourself shall see.

, IU’.i

176 / A History of English Literature

Commenting on these, Tucker Brooke says: ”The meaning can be made out, but the satisfaction of his mental ingenuity in so doing is the only reward the reader will receive.” Lucas complains : ”Donne treats poetry as a trapeze for mental frisks.’ Clay Hunt disapproves such ”pyrotechnics of wit.”

Diction and Versification :-

In style and versification Donne and his followers reacted against the cloying sweetness and harmony of the school of Spenser. The metaphysicals deliberately avoided conventional poetic expressions;;; they had lost their meaning through overuse. According to Wordsworth the language of poetry should be ”the natural language of impassioned feeling.” The metaphysicals employed very ”prosaic” words as if they were scientists or shopkeepers. The result is that in their work we often stumble against ragged and unpoetic words we seldom expect in serious poetry. The versification of the metaphysicals is also, like their diction, coarse and jerky in contrast to the hpneyed smoothness of much of Elizabethan poetry. Their revolt, according to G rierson, is due to two motives:

(i) The desire to startle; and

(ii) the desire to approximate poetic to direct, unconventional colloquial speech.

Donne could ”sing” whenever he liked, but often he seems to be bending and cracking the metrical pattern to the rhetoric of direct and vehement utterance.” He very often throws all prosodic considerations to the winds and distributes his stresses not according to the metre but according to the sense. ”In his work”, say Tucker Brooke, ”the Pierian flood is no clear spring : it is more like a Yellowstone geyser : overheated , turbid, explosive, and far from pure.” Donne and other metaphysicals’ metrical infelicity has been adversely commented upon by all. But, to be fair, we may say that Donne writes as one who will say what he has to say without regard to the conventions of poetic diction or smooth verse; but what he has to say is subtle and surprising and so are often the metrical effects with which it is presented.

Religious Poetry of the Metaphysicals :

Most of the metaphysical poets wrote on religion. Indeed, we owe most of our good religious poetry to them. It must be emphasised that all the metaphysicals do not write exactly alike. All of them are strongly marked individuals. The English metaphysical poetry from Donne to Traherne should be treated not as a type but as a movement. Donne’s religious poetry has all the qualities we have detailed above. Herbert

The English Metaphysicals /177

followed Donne in most respects. He has been called the ”saint” of I       the metaphysical school. His approach to God and Christ is full of, what Edmund Gosse calls, ”intimate tenderness.” But he does use the imagery and conceits of the Donnean type. His Templewas the most popular Anglican poem of the age. Herbert had two distinguished followers-Vaughan and Crashaw. They acknowledged their debt to Herbert, but they had tempers fundamentally their own. Vaughan is temperamentally a mystic though he uses conceits afI       ter the manner of Donne and Herbert-conceits such as ”stars shut I       up shop” when the arrival of the morning is described. He is at his I       best while dealing with such themes as childhood, communion with I      nature, and eternity. His thoughts concerning childhood,    in his I     . poem The Retreat are largely echoed by Wordsworth in the Ode on I       the Intimations of Immortality in Childhood. His poem The World I      has a daring image : I / saw eternity Hie other night,

I Like a great ring of pure and endles light, r

I All calm as it was bright.

I Crashaw’s poetry is uneven work. Whereas Herbert is a gentle stream, I Crashaw is an impetuous torrent. He is quite undisciplined and given I to moods of religious exaltation and excitement. He has a taste for I Jaring images and metaphysical conceits. The eyes of Mary MagI daleneinTTie Weeper are described as I Two walking baths; two weeping motions;

I Potable and compendious oceans.

I ”He sings”, says a critic, ”the raptures of soul visited by divine love

I       n terms as concrete and glowing as any human lover has ever used to

I       elebrate an earthly passion.” Herein, again, his debt to Donne is

I      discernible. It is the mystic vein in Thomas Traherne which tempts a

I       ritic to classify him with Vaughan among the metaphysicals. Traherne

I       ; not a great poet, however. He contemplates the beauty of God’s

I        niverse till it stirs in him a mystic response. Like Vaughan he idealises

I        tiildhood as the age in which a human being is nearest God. Crashaw

r £/as the only Roman Catholic among the metaphysical poets; and

Andrew Marvell, Milton’s secretary, the only Puritan. Unlike most

P uritans, Marvell was not a hide-bound fanatic; rather he appears in

-|fc colour of a Christian humanist dating from the Elizabethan age. He

4 (fj-fii poet has been assigned a quite high status by the school of modern

Cities led by R R. Leavis. But in him we find English poetry already on

~Utabt|fc»,way to the neo-classicism of Dryden’s school. His greatest poem

178 / A History of English Literature

To His Coy Mistress” is secular (and not religious) in theme and execution. He urges his ”coy” mistress to shed her coyness and make the best of the opportunity granted by Time to them to make merry.

Had we but worid enough, and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime…

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

The following lines have tragic pathos wedded to a metaphysical conceit: ’

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there’ embrace, The Contribution of the Metaphysical Poets to English Literature :

(1) The metaphysical poets have given to the English language its best religious poetry. The moods of incisive introspection and mysticism could best be expressed not through commonplace, conventional poetic images and language but unconventional and bold imagery which would jolt the mind and spirit of the reader into an intimate rapport with the mood of the poet. Herbert, Donne, Vaughan, Crashaw, and Traherne are the most important among the religious English poets of all ages.

(2) In the field of love poetry, too, the contribution of the metaphysicals is considerable and quite important from th historical point of view.When Donne appeared on the stage, Spenser and his followers were following the Petrarchan tradition of highly sentimental and idealised love poetry which had not much to do with reality. Donne demolished this Claptrap and started a vein of highl) realistic, frankly sensual, and sometimes downright cynical, amajprj verse. He was critical of the Elizabethan sonneteers and lyricists whc put their mistresses, real or imaginary, on the pedestal of a deity, ant pretended to woo them as their ”servants,” dying or living in accor dana with their moods of rejection or acceptance of their supplications Donne was frank enough. ’

Love’s not so pure and abstract as they use To say which have no mistress but their Muse. Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do

(3) Even in the ruggedness and occasional vulgarity of their dictic

’    !

The Cavalier Poets /179

in that they made the poets realise that the ”smoothness of numbers” alone does not make fo» great poetry. What was needed was a hard core of sense and deft handling of experience related to the poet himself who reserved for himself the liberty to employ whatever diction and style he thought was embently suitable for his purpose. After Donne and his followers the mere music of poetry could not capture for it any appreciative audience.

(4) The intellectualism of the metaphysical poetry and the compositeness of its imagery, and. even the crabbed nature of its style, secured for it a ’continuous stream of readers from generation to generation. In the modern times all these qualities appear agreeable to a large number of readers. The -modern poets, particularly T. S. Eliot, living in an age of crumbling values (like the age of Donne), have found a guide and a source of inspiration in Donne. It is not surprising, then, that in the modern critical canon Donne is rated as one of the best English poets.

/  ~    THE CAVALIER POETS Q. 29.   Write what you know of the Cavalier Poets.

Or

(Punjab 1970)

Q.

Q.         What do you know of the ”Cavalier” poets?

(Punjab 1957)

fCompanion Question). Who were Cavalier poets and Metaphysical Poets? Discuss one of each group. (Agra

1952)

Introduction :-

In the Caroline period (the age of Charles 1-1625-49) there was a remarkable dfl|burst of lyrical activity. Most of the lyricists, with the very notable exception of Herrick, were courtiers. On account of their leanings towards the King and the court party as against the Puritans or Roundheads, these lyncists-cunv-opurtiers fcave come to be classed in the history of English literature as Cavalier poets or Cavalier lyricists. However, it may be pointed out that they did not use their Muse as a tool of propaganda- political or religious. They kept their Royalism away and apart from their poetic activity. Among the Cavalier poets may also be mentioned the names of Falkland, Meyne, Cleveland, Habington, May, Randolph and many more also; however, here our

180 / A History of English Literature

purpose is to deal with only the more important ones. They arc Hcrrick, Carew, Suckling, and Lovelace.

Some Common Features :-

The output of the Cavalier poets falls in a class on account of certain qualities which may be discerned, though in varying degrees, in the work of each one of them. But it may be pointed out that it is only the minor Cavalier poets who are merely representative with comparatively less well-defined individualities of their own. Every one of the four major Cavalier poets named above has his own individual approach and flavour and that is the reason why he is a ”major” poet. Yet they share some characteristics. For intance, they all write very short poems, very few of them comprising above a hundred words. Further, even though they are both urban and urbane they show an undisguised, and sometimes intense, love of such natural objects as Trees, plants, birds and country scene in general. Then, all of them exhibit an admiration for simplicity as against the sophisticated culture of the court. Again, none of them shows any real intensity of feeling or rapturous spontaneity we have come to associate with Elizabethan lyricists. Lastly, their idiom and diction reflect the flavour of aristocratic speech-fluent, though a little slipshod and unamenable to the dulling discipline of any formal education. The conversational flavour of the following lines needs no emphasis:

Now you have freety given me leave to love, Wlwt will voudo?

CarcwLovelace

Hark, reader/wilt be learn’d i’th’wars?              Lovelace / tell ihee, fellow who’er tliou be.

Tltat made this fine sing-song of me, Suckling,

Thou art a rhyming sort.

The Twin Influence of Donne and Ben Jonson :-

This conversational note which imports a kind of dramatic quality into poetry might have been due to Donne’s influence. Donne himself was fond of imparting drama to lyrics. Witness such lines as the following:

/ wonder’by my troth what thou and I

Did,lillwelov’d?

But Donne’s influence on the Cavalier poets went farther than this.Hi.s use of the ”metaphysical conceits” prompted emulation. The Cavalier! poets sometimes directly imitated Donne’s conceits. The following lines from Carew’s ”Upon a Riband” are directly based on Donne’ The Funeral” :

–

The Cavalier Poets /181

Tim silken wreath, circled in mine arm,

Is but an emblem of that mystique charm,

Wlterewitlt the magic of your beauties binds

My captive soul…”

Lovelace’s To Lucasta, going beyond the Seas” and Suckling’s To Mistress Cicely Crofts”echo Donne’s ”The Extasie” and ”A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning.” In more general terms, Donne gave the Cavalier poets the tendency of introspective self-analysis, so conspicuously Kicking in most courtiers, and the tendency of ratiocinative argumentation using examples from all branches of learning. Donne was also respected by them for his exuberant fancy of which some samples may be found in their own works too. Like Donne’s poems some of the Cavalier poems show a rare blend of passion and ratiocination. Some of the Donnean kind of cynical realism also is to be found in these poems.

But Donne was not the only guiding spirit for the Cavajier poets. There was Ben Jonson, too. Indeed most of them felt proud of calling themselves ”Sons of Ben” or members of the Tribe of Ben”. The ”rare Ben Jonson” was the first classical lyricist in English literature. He himself wrote under the influence of the Latin lyricists of antiquityparticularly Catullus. Like all classicists he set store by lucidity and general beauty of expression, chastened and chiselled imagination, and balance and proportion of design. The Cavalier poets were especially indebted for the clarity of expression to Ben Jonson. They disowned the turbidity of Donne’s poetic expression. Their control of emotion, felicity of phrase, and sophistication of tone were some other Jonsonian qualities. Many of them wrote tr jbutary verses to Ben Jonson as they did to Donne. In fact, Donne and Jonson both influenced the Cavalier poets in almost equal proportion–and mostly for the better. Geoffrey Walton observes in this connexion : ”As the poetic masters of these poets, Donne and Jonson formed an almost ideal partnership, at once stimulating and disciplining, arousing exuberant feeling and ingenious elaboration of the fancy and exerting a dignified restraint and sensitive literary tact.” Critical Evaluation :-

The Cavalier lyric does not, by any means, enjoy an inconsiderable position in the history of English literature. It is customary to compare the Cavalier poets with Elizabethan lyricists. Doing this, Swinburne puts the former above the latter. Comparing the growth of the drama and that of the lyric in England, he points out that the kind of drama

V

182 / A History of English Literature

which started with Marlowe at once reached its. apex in Shakespeare, and immediately suffered a steep decline in the Jacobean and Caroline periods till it died with Sheridan. On the other hand, the lyric, starting witffWyatt and Surrey, developed slowly, reached a high point in the Elizabethan age, but went on rising still higher and reached its apex in the wojk of the Cavalier poets, and started declining only after them. Most critics do not accept this placement of the Cavalier poets above Elizabethan lyricists. The Cavaliers have certainly more of polish and even ingenuity, but they lack the spontaneity and emotional intensity of the Elizabethans. The ”wood notes wild” of Shakespearean song are not to be heard in their efforts, even though they have quite a few attractive substitutes to offer.

Let us now consider briefly the work of the four major Cavalier poets we have named above.

Robert Herriclc (1591-1674) :- , .         «..

Herrick by the consensus of critical opinion enjoys the highest status among the Cavalier poets. This is the status which Douglas Bush also gives him in English Literature in the Earlier XVIIth Century. However Geoffrey Walton in his essay on the Cavalier poets in Vol. II of the Pelican Guide to English Literature would place Carew above him. Harrick was the only Cavalier poet \no was not a courtier. He was the first of the ”Sons of Ben” who came under his influence. Hardin Craig observes in A History of English Literature, ed. Hardin Craig: ”He became Jensen’s greatest disciple and actually realized a greatness in the field of the classical lyric superior to that of Jonson himself.” Along with Jonson, Herrick took _”;r his model and inspiration the clear, objective, spirited but perfectly ordered and lucidly worded poetry of the Latin poets Hke OvidfHorace, Catullus, Martial, and the Greek poet Anacreon (possibly, in his Latin version done by Henri Estienne). He does not seem to have paid much attention to Elizabethan lyricists before him. But his first guide was ”Saint Ben” whose aid he invoked in his poem ”Prayer to Ben Jonson.”

Herrick was perfectly convinced of his immortality as a poet and therefore very assiduously he preserved each and every scrap of his writing. His only~b”ook Herperides : or ihe Works both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq. which appeared in 1648 contains about twelve hundred poems few of which extend beyond a hundred lines. Most of them are of the ”occasional” type or of ihe nature of epigrams. Herrick is a poet of moods and moments and is perhaps incapable of sustained poetic expression. But he is seldom frivolous, inelegant, or

The Cavalier Poets /183

unsophisticated. As F. H. Moorman observes, ”he reveals lyrical power of a high order: fresh, passionate and felicitously exact, but at the same time meditative and observant.” However, wehave to agree with Geoffrey Walton that Herrick is ”a poet 61 a charmingly fanciful but simple sensibility.” His moods and themes have variety but no complexity. The true metaphysical manner is beyond him. He sings mostly of woman, love, wine, and song. But he also exhibits a refreshing love for trees, plants, and flowers and often looks at them as emblems of human predicament, as for instance ’in ”Divination by a Daffodil” :

Whenadaffbdillsee,

Hanging down his head towards me,

Guess I may what I must be.

First, I shall decline my head ;

Secondly, I shall be dead”;

Lastly, safely buried. Or, again, see the last stanza of To Blossoms”:

But you are lovefy leaves wfiere we

May read how soon things have

Their end, thougli ne’er so brave:

And after tliey have shown their pride,

Like you, awhile, theyKde . \

Into the grave. .  

But Herrick has not one but Protean moods and is equaiiy dexterous in the expression of them all. ”Cherry Ripe,” ”To Julia” and ”To Altheaare some of his best known poems. He is, indeed, the delight of all anthologists. . .

Thomas Carew (1598 7-1639) :-

Whereas Herrick looked to Jensen alone, Carew blends in his poetry the metaphysical manner of Donne ard the classical spirit of Ben Jonson. His poems on Donne and Jonseu express admirably his keen appreciation of his two guides. J onson was to hiin the man ”greater than all men else” and Donne the poet ”worth all that went before.” As Geoffrey Kfelton observes, ”the two influences of Donne and Jonson are fused in him by a considerable native talent.” Hardin Craig observes : ”He borrowed from them to the extent in which a poet of his powers could: from Jonson the great jessott of classic poiish, and from Donne a sense of the exciting power of a figure.” As an instance see the following lines: ’

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lam a dial’s hand, still walking round. You are the compass; and I never sound Beyond your circle, neither can I show Aught but what first expressed is in you.

(from” To Celia, upon Love’s Ubiquity”)

So, though a virgin, yet a bride To every grace, she justified A chaste polygamy, and died.

(from ”Maria Wentworth”)

Carew shows more of critical intelligence and sense of pattern than Harrick, but he suffers in imaginative power which gets a substitute in a kind of courtly wit. Among his popular poems may be mentioned ”Upon a Ribbon Tied about His Arm by a Lady”-a very delightful lyric in long lines, ”Ask me no more where Jove bestows when June is past, the fading rose”-a famous song, and that very good ”didactic” lyric ”He that loves a rosy cheek.”

Sir John Suckling (1609-1642) :-

It is customary to characterise,Suckling as both an irresponsible man and an irresponsible poet. Thus says Legouis :

”Sir John Suckling typifies the Cavaliers, their loyalty, dash, pgtulancy, frivolity, easy morals and wit. Rich, spendthrift, valiant, a gamester and a gallant, an amateur of the drama who wrote four not unsuccessful plays and a faithful admirer of Shakespeare, Suckling mocked at the pains Carew took to polish his verses. He was himself an improviser, one whose work is very unequal but who writes with irresistible swing.”

Hardin Craig thinks such criticism to be unjustified. ”His verses,” says this critic, ”show no evidence of carelessness, and his dramas are rather carefully wrought. On the personal side also the estimate is a little misleading, since Suckling was a man who respected religion and wrote a treatise on the subject.” Hardin Craig is more correct than Legouis who follows the traditional assessment of Suckling. Suckling in his poetry shows the twin influence of Jonson and Donne. His cynical observations on female capriciousness and inconstancy and his hard, introspective realism remind one of Donne. His general attitude is well-leavened with what Geoffrey Walton calls ”his uninhibited and  boisterous cynicism” and ”a good sense of horse.” This attitude determiKt4he ”spirit of his poetry, the controlling wit.” Sucklingvs delicate sense of observation is exemplified by the following lines from ”A Ballad upon a Wedding”:

Influence of the Reformation and the Renaissance /185

Her feet beneath her petticoat

Like little mice, stole in and out,

As if they feared the light.

His best-known poem is the song from Aglaura, ”Why so pale and wan tond lover ?” which expresses a somewhafDonnean sentiment.

Richard Lovelace (1618-58) :-

Lovelace is the least important of the foursome of Cavalier poets named above. He was a very well educated courtier, and was even sent to prison for favouring the king actively in the Civil War. It was in 1648 that while in prison he prepared for the press his volume entitled Lucasla: Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs, etc., to which is added Amarantha a Pastoral (1649). Though his poems are full of freshness and exuberance he lacks the fancy of Herrick, the force of Suckling, and the polish of Carew. ”He wasj says Hardin Craig, ”not so skilful and sustained as Carew, perhaps not so forceful as Sukling, but has the greatness of having achieved a few immortal utterances.” His ”Ellinda’s Glove” is the prettiest of his short pieces .

Tliou snowy Farm with thy five tenements I

Tell thy white Mistris here was one

Tliat call’d to pay his daily rents :

But she a- gathering Flowers and Hearts is gone,

And thou left void to rude Possession.

His To Althea, from Prison” has for the concluding stanza the following famous lines:

Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take, That for a hermitage !

If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free,– Angels alone that soar above Enjoy such liberty.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION AND THE RENAISSANCE ON MILTON

Q.30.     Show how Milton blends in his poetic genius the spirit of the Renaissance and of the Reformation.

(Rohilkhand 1992)

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Influence of the Reformation and the Renaissance /187

Q.

Q.

Or

How far is it correct to say that in Milton’s poetry there is a nice fusion of the Renaissance and Reformation elements ?

Or

Q.        In Milton’s poetry the Hellenic and the Hebraic elements are happily wedded”. Discuss.

(Rohilkhand 1983) Or

Q.         Explain how Milton nobly weds the Puritan spirit with that of the Renaissance.    (Agra 1967, Rohilkhand 1975) Introduction :

Milton’s work reflects the influence of both the reformation and the Renaissance. The Renaissance and the Reformation had their impact on England in the sixteenth century. Generally speaking, they exerted pulls in mutually opposite directions. Most of the Elizabethans came under the classical and humanistic influence of the Renaissance but did not admit the influence of the Reformation on their literary work. Spenser among them, however, tried obviously to reconcile the two enthusiasms. On the one hand, he celebrated the Church of England and condemned the Popish hypocrites in the persons of Duessa and the Wily Archimago, and showed his excessive concern for virtue and the spirit; and and on the other, manifested much enthusiasm for beauty (generally of the human figure), a kind of Platonic idealism, reverence for the classical models of Grecian and Roman antiquity and some other characteristics associated with the Renaissance. In spite of his efforts, Spenser could go no farther than effecting a rather superficial synthesis of the Renaissance and the Reformation tendencies. It was left for Milton-’the poetical son of Spenser”, as Dryden called him-to homogenise these two into a perfect whole. When he started writing, the initial exuberance ushered in by the Renaissance and the Reformation was already on its way out. His poetry is the first and the last example of the happy and effortless harmonisation of the two mutually antagonistic enthusiasms which stirred the England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How Milton Blends the Two :-

Very roughly speaking, the spirit of the Reformation provides the content and spirit of Milton poetry, and the spirit of the Renaissance classicism its mould and pattern. Miltoa did In the seventeenth

century what the poets of the French Pleiade had done in the sixteenth. ”No poet”, says Grierson in The First Half of the Seventeenth Century ”realised so completely the Renaissance ideal of poetry cast in classical moulds-carried out so entirely and majestically the programme of the Pleiade. Milton, and Milton only, succeeded in producing living and beautiful poems in correct classical forms. And into these classical forms he poured the intensest spirit of the Protestant movement.” In fact Milton’s’puritanism (a product of the Reformation) and his Hellenism (a product of the Renaissance) were more closely harmonised in his genius than the formular division of theme and form would Suggest. Just as Addison professed ”to enliven morality with wit and to temper wit with morality”, Milton seems to have enlivened puritanism with Hellenism and tempered his Hellenism with-puritan ism. Milton was neither a godless pagan nor a Puritan formalist nor was he both… simultaneously. He imbibed the true spirit of both tendencies and wrote under the unified impact of both.

The Reformation Elements :-

In Milton’s poetry the Reformation element is found as his soft and steady puritanism. Puritans were those who ”protested” against even the Protestants who in their turn had protested against the Pope and the .Popish religion. The Reformation signifies the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century which gave rise to the various Protestant or evangelical organisations of Christendom. The movement was European in extent and was widely successful in the reign of Henry VIII, and later Elizabeth I. But some splinter sects rose against the Protestant Church of England which they thought was not yet fully reformed, and who urged to take Christianity back to the religion of Jesus Christ. These Puritans devotedly and rather superstitiously revered the Bible, condemned the Protestant bishop (episcopacy) and every institutionalised religion, emphasised every man’s bner light, hated all arts such as painting, sculpture and music and even drama, all show and luxury, shied at the least appearance of evil, favoured highly formalised and rigorous conduct, and, in general, turned against all literature and aesthetic pursuits. Now, Milton was born in a Puritan family, HU schooling and surroundings, his social and political affiliation, and a number of other factors combined to instil in him a love of Puritan ideology and way of life. However, he was a man of too strong M Individuality to accept any formal ”ism in its totality. He was a

I

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deeply religious man, and even at the age of twenty-three he could ’ write :

All is, if I have grace to use it so;

As ever in my great Task Master’s eye.

Milton’s puritanism has not much to do with the macabrcsquc and stoic creed of ordinary puritans. The Renaissance elements of his intellectual set-up effectively controvert these tendencies and any fanatic adherence to a rigorous code of conduct and Ultimate values. His version of puritanism was tinged by lux love of the.classics, the love of nature, the love of beauty, and Renaissance humanism insisting on the world of man, and love of ”the human-face divine.” Moreover, unlike most Puritans, Milton emphasises the spirit rather than the conduct. And this emphasis brings rum into afhroiy. with the Cambridge Platonists who were themselves ’mostly Puritans. Milton believed that ”the Spirit which is given to us is a more.certain guide than Scripture.” In his pamphlet Of True Religion he states that along with external Scripture there is an internal Scripture, ”the Holy Spirit written in the Hearts of believers”. Milton departed from the puritanic creed even in some important doctrinal points. iFor instance, he did not subscribe to the doctrine of predestination and refused the Son an equal status with the Father. In more general terms, he tried to reconstruct the puritanic creed on the basis of the humanistic ideology of the Renaissance. The Renaissance Elements :-

The Renaissance in England gave rise to a large number of tendencies.lt brought in its wake love and appreciation of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, a keen love of beauty and art, and a new stress on human life and pursuits. Milton is obviously affected by all these ramifications of the spirit of the Renaissance. As early as in 1637 he wrote to his friend Deodati: ”Whatever the deity may have bestowed upon me in other respects, he has certainly inspired me, if any ever were inspired,with a passion for the good and the beautiful. Nor did Ceres, according to the fable, ever seek her daughter Proserpine with such unceasing solicitude as I have sought this idea of the beautiful in all the forms and appearance of things, for many are the shapes of things divine. Day and night I-am wont to continue my search, unlike some others, Milton does not stand for atheistic epicureanism or hard-hearted materialism which attracted many (for example, the University Wits). Nor was he a votary of paganism, even though he showed vast knowledge of pagan mythology which came into limelight with the Renaissance. Again, though he respected the dignity of human beings yet he stood for their acquiescence in the will of God. In short, the

Influence of the Reformation and the Renaissance /189

Renaissance spirit in Milton was influenced and modified by his ingrained puritanism. The Renaissance elements show themselves in Milton in two ways :

(i) They provide, as we have already said, the classical framework for most of his major poetical works.

(ii) Secondly, they leaven, humanise, hellenise, refine, and somewhat secularise his puritanism and mitigate its severity. Almost all of Milton’s poetic works are embodiments of the Renaissance and the Reformation elements. Let us see how. ’On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” :-

The ode On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity which Milton wrote in

1629 was his first masterpiece. Therein he celebrates the arrival of Jesus Christ and the dismay of pagan deities at his birth. The poem shows that, as Legouisputs it, ”Milton’was already dedicating his hightest art to the service of his religion.” The theme and the tone are both deeply religious. However, the impact of the Renaissance is also visible in :-

(i) the classical form of the poem; and

(ii) Milton’s profound and vast knowledge of pagan mythology (even if with his open disapproval of it).

”L’Allegro” and ”II Ptenseroso” :-

Milton’s next important poems L’Allegro nd II Penseroso show in themselves a preponderance of the Renaissance spirit over his puritanism. Basically, these two companion poems are poems of joyL’Allegro describing the pleasures sought after by a joyous man, and the other the pursuits desired by a melancholy man. The first poem is the work of a young man who is filled to the brim with thtjoiede vivre and who abandons himself to those pleasures which were anathema to the gloomy Puritans. Thus the poem strikes a positively anti-Puritan note. Milton invokes the Goddess of of joy:

Haste dice nymph, and bring with thee

Jest and youthful Jollity,

Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles,

Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles,

Such as hang on Hebe’s cheek,

And love to live in dimple sleek;

Sport that wrinkled Care derides,

And Laughter holding both his sides.

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Milton expreses his taste for country amusements and the plays of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare–things heartily disliked by the Puritans. In // Panseroso the tone and spirit are much more subdued, and they put Milton nearer the Puritans. The Goddess of Melancholy is dccribcd as a ”pensive nun” and has a few definitely Christian associations. But there is the same Renaissance element visible 4eo. Milton likes Plato and Hermes. He loves to read Chaucer and see tragic performances A critic observes about L ’Allegro and // Penseroso ”The Renaissance culture and learning were sweeping over these poems. There is no hint here of the fanaticism that would shut the theatres, pull down the maypoles on the village greens, and turn ’merry England’ into ’psalm singing England’.” ”Comus” :-

Milton’s next important work is the masque Comus. The genre of the masque was very popular in Renaissance England, and before Milton, Ben Jonson had already written some splendid masques. But whereas the masques before Milton were unalloyed embodiments of the Renaissance spirit (including love of pagan mythology, fun and frivolous merry-making, and eschewing all moral purpose), Milton’s masque is in spirit and purpose highly puritanic. Its only Renaissance characteristic is its form. Milton sets out in highly didactic terms to exalt cold and colourless virtue of the puritanic kind and the way in which it succeeds in circumventing the wily arts of vice. ”Lycidas” :-

Lycidas (1637) was a pastoral elegy written on the death of Milton’s friend Edward King who was drowned in a shipwreck near Ar.glesea. As in Comus, its form and theme are representative of two different cultures. The form of Lycidas is classical but the theme and expression are indicative of a puritanic spirit. We find more of Milton than King in the poem. King’s death prompts Milton to think of the futility of his own poetic craft:

Alas ! What boots it with incessant care

Tb lend the homely slighted shepherd’s trade,

And strictly meditate the thankless Muse ?

Were it not better done as others use,

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles ofNeaem’s hair?

But Milton expresses his intention to devote himself to serious and religious poetry, as Phoebus tells him that his reward is not fame,’that

Influence of the Reformation and the Renaissance /191

last infirmity of noble mind” He should, rather, ”in heaven expect his meed.” Then as a.zealous Puritan Milton finds the opportunity to lash the corrupt clergy who lead a comforable life whereas; The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But swoll’n with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread. ”Paradise Lost :-

Paradise Lost-Mikon’s magnum cpitf-is, according to L. A. Cormican, ”the highest achievement of the Protestant, mind looking at the whole created cosmos through faith purified and elevated till it coincides with the mind of God.” Both in theme and purpose. Paradise Lost is a product of the Reformation spirit. Its theme is the fall of Satan and, through him the fall of Man. Its purpose is, in Milton’s own words, ”to justify the ways of God to man.” Not that Milton thought for a moment that God’s ways stood any need of justification,but he thought that in the case of some understandings clouded by evil and human frailty some pleading might have been helpful. He took up the role of God’s own advocate. It was an assertion of militant puritanism-intolerant and self-righteous. In the beginning Milton had remained toying for long with the idea of writing an epic on King Arthur and his Round Table, but his puritanism made him gravitate surely and steadily towards a biblical theme. JxfTaradise Lost he went out of his way to condemn in unmistakable/terms the corruption and hedonism of the Cavaliers whom he calls ”The sons of Belial flown with insolence and wine” who riot in the streetsLondon every night.

Some critics have tried to ”exculpate” Milton of puritanism by pointing out his covert sympathy with Satan. Blake went so far as to assert that ”Milton was the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Some have averred that it is not Adam but Satan who is the hero of Paradise Lost. These views are altogether untenable. Satan is indeed a heroic figure unconquered and almost unconquerable, but he is not a hero, and he is quite definitely an ejnpodiment of all the evil with which Milton has no sympathy.at afl.’Of course, there is something parallel between Satan’s rebellion against God and Milton’s own rebellion against Charles II. But that is almost all. Hafdin Craig observes in A ’History of English Literature (General Editor : Hardin Craig) : ”One would attribute the excellence of Milton’s picture of Satan not to his sympathy with the heart of the archfiend, but to his great knowledge of the nature, even the power and attractiveness, of evil1’

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. In its form Paradise Lost conforms quite strictly to the classical epic of the kind of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid. Milton upholds all the conventions of the epic. It has fable, action, characters, and diction as demanded of a classical epic. For the hexameter of Ac Aeneid Milton effectively substitutes the pentameter of blank verse, which comes close to his model. Instead of the pagan marvels we have ”Christian” miracles wrought by God and His Son. Then there is the invocation to the Muse, though Milton’s Muse is not the conventional Muse of epic poetry but the Holy Spirit. In short, it may be said that the form of Paradise Lost reflects the Renaissance spirit, and its theme the Reformation spirit.

”Paradise Regained” :

There is very little of the Renaissancespirit in Paradise Regained in which is described in four books the temptation of Christ by Satan, but his ultimate failure. From the beginning to the end the work is instinct with the religious spirit so strong in Milton. ”Samson Agonistes” :-

Samson stgonistes is a classical tragedy composed strictly on the principles enunciated by Aristotle in his Poetics and, to a great extent, after the practice of the Greek tragedy writers-Euripides,. Sophocles, and Aeschylus; However, the spirit and the theme are highly religious. Milton put something of himself in the Biblical hero who defied the corrupt rulers of his times and fell a martyr to virtue and integrity. The mould of the tragedy is Hellenic but the spirit is pre-eminently Hebraic.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENT IN

MILTON’S POETRY i

Q. 31.    Comment on the autobiographical element in Miton’sl Poetry. (Agra 1985)|

Or

Q.         Write a note on the autobiographical nature of Milton’s Poetry. (Agra 1978)

Introduction :-

It is something like a paradox that Milton, imbued  throughly with the spirit of the Greek and Roman classics of antiquity as he was, should give a strong autobiographical flavour to his poetic work. One of the important tips that every schoolboy is given about poetry is that

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The Autobiographical Element/ 193

romantic poetry is subjective and classical poetry is objective in both content and execution. The romantic writer reveals his personality in his work, but the classical writer, writing about general truths, keeps his personality veiled. Thus whereas Wordsworth in The Prelude gives an autobiography of the development of his mind and Lamb unveils all the facets of his warm and attractive personality in his essays, Pope deals with general themes in an objective manner in his works like the Essay on Man and the Essay on Criticism. But this differentiation is misleading if pressed too rigorously and unthinkingly. Both the romantic and’the classical writers reveal their personality in their work, though in different ways. There is as much of Pope in The Rape of the Lock as of Shelley in the Ode to the West Wind, but each has his own modtpperandi. Behind every book there is its writer, and the book is an expression of his personality. However, there are certain genres which lend themselves more easily to the process of self-revelation by the author. They are the essay, the lyric, the elegy, and so forth. But some other genres, such as the drama and the novel, are of a different character. For understanding the personality of a dramatist or a novelist there is no obvious cut-and-dried method. The reader has to find directions from indirections.

Milton is, broadly speaking, a classical poet. Even then, he puts too much of himself into his literary works. We are not here referring to his prose works-most of which are in the form of pamphets. In his prose works Milton obviously gives his own thoughts and feelings, and t hereby reveals himself. But even in his poetic work we see both directly and indirectly his monumental personality revealed in all its facets glittering as well as none-too-beautiful. Even into his only play, Samson Agonistes, he manages to put something of himself. Thereby he strikes a note of contrast with Shakepeare-to track down whose elusive personality in his plays has been the despair even of the most industrious critic. Shakespeare is like Ariel of The Tempest who is here, there, and everywhere-ever laughing at the toils of the erudite critics who perspire to shut up his Puckish spirit in their critical bottles. But the reconstruction of Milton’s personality from his poetry presents very few difficulties, as it .is chock-full of the autobiographic element. Coleridge contrasts Shakespeare and Milton in these words : ”Shakespeare’s poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakespeare but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Inthe/Vpo4ue/att~indeedineveryoneof his poems-it is Milton himself whom you see : his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve-are all John Milton; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading Milton’s works.”

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The autobiographic element in Milton’-s poetry does not mean much of the revelation of his outer life; it rather abides in his expression of his intellectual and spiritual character. Let us now examine the important poetic works of Milton with regard to their autobiographic importance.

The Sonnets :-

The sonnet is only one of the more disciplined forms of the lyric and, like the lyric, therefore, is normally employed by a poet as a vehicle for the conveyance of his own personal emotions. The sonnet first appeared around the twelfth or thirteenth century in Italy where its first notable practitioner was Dante. The next illustrious Italian sonneteer was Petrarch who served as a model for the numerous French sonneteers. Wyatt brought the sonnet to England in the sixteenth century in the last years of which »he vogue of the-sonnet grew to its peak and hunderds of ”sonnet sequences” came to be written. In the next century the most notable sonneteer was Milton. His sonnets, like the sonnes before him, are all personal in spirit and complexion. But there is one major difference. Almost all the sonneteers before him-Italian and French as well as English-had love for their theme. An overwhelming majority of  their sonnets was addressed to their mistresses, real or imaginary. But Milton does not write of love. Nevertheless, he is quite personal in his sonnets which throw light on the various facets of his personality. Thus, for instance, the sonnet ”How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth” written by him on his twentythird birthday expresses a melancholy feeling that his genius has not ripened with years: –

Myhasting days fiyonwithfitU career,

But my late spring no bud or blossom shewVt. –

”When I consider how my light is spent” is Milton’s best-known sonnet. Therein he tells us how his sadness at his early blindness (”ere half my days”) and the prospect of his not being able to do his duty towards his ”Maker” on account of his blindness, is dispelled by the spirit of Patience who points out: ,

’God doth not need

Either man’s work or His own gifts. Who best Bear His mild yoke, they serve him best His state Is kingty: thousands at His bidding speed And post o’er land and ocean without rest: They also serve who onfy stand and wait

r-

The Autobiographical Element / 19.5

”Lf Allegro” and MI Penseroso” :-

Milton’s earliest important poems L’Allegro and II Penseroso are not autobiographical in the narrow sense of the terra in so far as they fail to convey to the reader information about any important event in the life of the poet. Even then they reveal the composite nature of Milton’s intellectual set-up. His love of nature, his disposition to be melancholy, his interest in classical mythology, his intellectual pursuits– all of them come in for expression in these companion poems. ”Comus” :-

Comus is a masque-a genre which generally precludes the expression of any personal feelings. But Comus has a very strong personal flavour. The moral conveyed by it is that steadfast virtue manages quite easily to vanquish the evU designs of clever and hypocritical vice. This moral is conveyed through the career of Alice-a personification of virtue-and her attempted seduction by the lustful magician Comus after she has been led astray in a wood. Of course, Comus does not succeed and Alice remains unscathed. Alice can easily be supposed to be Milton himself, who was also tempted as a young man by the brilliant exterior of vice. Legouis observes in this connexion : ”His heroine is himself; Comus tempts as he has been tempted; she resists as he did; he speaks every word in the poem; Comus merely expresses the appeal to the senses which young Milton has felt. The moral of the masque is Milton’s moral-high, disdainful, and solitary. .The final impression is one of virtue remote from mankind and above it, sure and haughty virtue, ignoring the multitude. For the Milton of Comus, as for the Calvinists, the number of the elect is few

Lycidas” :-

Milton’s next important poem is the pastoral elegy Lycidas written at the death of his friend Edward King. The poem is as autobiographical as similar poems by Shelley and Matthew Arncld-Adonais and Thyrsis respectively«, The immediate purpose of an elegyis to celebrate the good qualities of the deceased and to express the depth of sorrow at the sad departure of a noble spirit and, very often, a good companion. Milton does it quite effectively:

But O the heavy change, now thou art gone,

Now thou art gone, and never must return! Thee Shepherd, thee, the woods, and desert caves, With wild thyme and tlie gadding vine o’ergrown,

And all their echoes mourn.

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Quite obviously Milton does think of his departed friend. However, there is more of Milton than of his friend in this poem. Legouis avers in this context: ”It is not King but Milton who should be sought in them [the lines of the poem]. The death of his friend who was so young, and whose future promised so much, led Milton to reflect on his own life.” . There is an obvious conflict in the poet’s mind–whether to give his days ind nights to poetry or to indulge in tht pleasures of the flesh : Alas.’ what boots it with uncessant care, To tend the homely slighted shepherd’s trade, And strictly mediate the thankless Muse? Were it not better done as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles ofNeaera’s hair ?

However, Milton’s choice is made, for he has for his aim not worldly fame, but he must ”in heaven expect his meed.” Incidentally, Milton–a Puritan as he is-takes an opportunity to lash the Pope and the corrupt clergy through the words of St. Peter-The Pilot of the GalHlean lake.” Such satiric flings are essentially alien to the spirit of an elegy.

’Paradise Lost”  :-

”aradise Lost reveals, in Legoutf words, a Milton ”whose personality is intense and self-centred.” His puritanism, his misogyny, his austere nature, and his anti-royalisiti peep through this great poem. Milton was married twice, but was not very happy. In Adam’s outburst against the first woman we can hear the voice of Milton: Oh ! why did God,

Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven

With Spirits masculine, create at last

This novelty on Earth, this fair defect

Of Nature Man has to suffer

innumerable

Disturbances on Earth through female snares

And straight conjunction with this sex.

Milton lashes the corrupt Cavaliers of his age by representing them as ”sons of Belial” who indulge in drunken riots in the streets after they are ”flown with insolence and wine.” Further, he takes opportunities here and there to express his anti-royalist feeling. He was a supporter of the Commonwealth and a champion of personal liberties which were

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often denied or suppressed by the king. In the rebellion of Satan against the Almighty we can see a resemblance, however remote, with Milton’s rebellion against Charles II who had assumed the throne of England in 1660. His republican feelings led Milton to a kind of sympathy with the Arch Rebel-Milton was, according to William Blake, ”of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” It is debatable, no doubt, if Blake knew more about Milton than Milton about himself. However, though between Satan and Milton there may not be a bond of sympathy, yet there is between them a parallelism of situation. Satan is an embodiment of vice in all its ramifications.Milton knows it and gives it not only an adequate but a vehement expression. Disobedience towards God is a sin, but disobedience towards a corrupt ruler despiseful of the liberties and welfare of his subjects is a different matter. However, here and there in Paradise Lost Milton comes dangerously close to Satan. A critic observes: ”It is in the passages where Satan speaks of the joy of independence, and of the hatred whi :h he bears to the tyranny of Heaven’s Ruler, that he reaches the most commanding heights of noble eloquence. The reason for this is obvious, for Milton was the great champion of popular liberty in his own day and gave up the best years of his life, as well as his eyesight, to the cause of England’s fight against oppression. Hence Milton cannot help imparting to Satan some of his own sentiments and putting him in the position of the champion of liberty against autocratic rule.” ”Paradise Regained” :-

Parodist Regained was a sequel to Paradise Lost. Milton revealed himself in this work as a strict Puritan. In the very beginning of the poem we learn how even as a child Milton studied the Bible:

…above my years,

Ttie Law of God I read, and found it sweet,

Made it my whole delight, and in it grew

To such perfection. ”Samson Agonistes” :-

Samson Agonistes is a tragedy after the Greek classical examples. Samson is the Biblical character who figures in the Judges. His blindness and captivity in the hands of the Philistines bear an obvious resemblance to Milton’s own blindness and suppression in the age of Charles II. In the end Samson brings death to himself and destruction to his captors by pulling down the pillars supporting their palace. In Samson’s agonised cry we can hear the complaint of Milton himself :

– t

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But, chief of all,

Of loss of sight of (heel must complain I Blind among enemies IO worse than chains, Dungeon, or beggary or decrepit age t

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day.

In Samson’s indictment of his false wife, Dalila, we hear the misogynistic Milton:

Out, out, hyaena! These are thy wonted arts, And arts of every woman false like theeTo break all faith, all vows, deceive, betray. ’’.

Milton’s unswerving faith in God is. echoed hi Samson’s words: Just are the ways of Cod, And justifiable to men, Unless there be who think not God at all