Book: A History of English Literature

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The second of these religious poets, Richard Crashaw, [Footnote: The first
vowel is pronounced as in the noun _crash_.] whose life (1612-1649)
was not quite so short as Herbert's, combined an ascetic devotion with a
glowingly sensuous esthetic nature that seems rather Spanish than English.
Born into an extreme Protestant family, but outraged by the wanton
iconoclasm of the triumphant Puritans, and deprived by them of his
fellowship, at Cambridge, he became a Catholic and died a canon in the
church of the miracle-working Lady (Virgin Mary) of Loretto in Italy. His
most characteristic poetry is marked by extravagant conceits and by
ecstatic outbursts of emotion that have been called more ardent than
anything else in English; though he sometimes writes also in a vein of calm
and limpid beauty. He was a poetic disciple of Herbert, as he avowed by
humbly entitling his volume 'Steps to the Temple.'

The life of Henry Vaughan [Footnote: The second _a_ is not now
sounded.] (1621-1695) stands in contrast to those of Herbert and Crashaw
both by its length and by its quietness. Vaughan himself emphasized his
Welsh race by designating himself 'The Silurist' (native of South Wales).
After an incomplete university course at Jesus College (the Welsh college),
Oxford, and some apparently idle years in London among Jonson's disciples,
perhaps also after serving the king in the war, he settled down in his
native mountains to the self-denying life of a country physician. His
important poems were mostly published at this time, in 1650 and 1655, in
the collection which he named 'Silex Scintillans' (The Flaming Flint), a
title explained by the frontispiece, which represents a flinty heart
glowing under the lightning stroke of God's call. Vaughan's chief traits
are a very fine and calm philosophic-religious spirit and a carefully
observant love of external Nature, in which he sees mystic revelations of
God. In both respects he is closely akin to the later and greater
Wordsworth, and his 'Retreat' has the same theme as Wordsworth's famous
'Ode on Intimations of Immortality,' the idea namely that children have a
greater spiritual sensitiveness than older persons, because they have come
to earth directly from a former life in Heaven.

The contrast between the chief Anglican and Catholic religious poets of
this period has been thus expressed by a discerning critic: 'Herrick's
religious emotions are only as ripples on a shallow lake when compared to
the crested waves of Crashaw, the storm-tides of Herbert, and the deep-sea
stirrings of Vaughan.'

We may give a further word of mention to the voluminous Francis Quarles,
who in his own day and long after enjoyed enormous popularity, especially
among members of the Church of England and especially for his 'Emblems,' a
book of a sort common in Europe for a century before his time, in which
fantastic woodcuts, like Vaughan's 'Silex Scintillans,' were illustrated
with short poems of religious emotion, chiefly dominated by fear. But
Quarles survives only as an interesting curiosity.

Three other poets whose lives belong to the middle of the century may be
said to complete this entire lyric group. Andrew Marvell, a very moderate
Puritan, joined with Milton in his office of Latin Secretary under
Cromwell, wrote much poetry of various sorts, some of it in the Elizabethan
octosyllabic couplet. He voices a genuine love of Nature, like Wither often
in the pastoral form; but his best-known poem is the 'Horatian Ode upon
Cromwell's Return from Ireland,' containing the famous eulogy of King
Charles' bearing at his execution. Abraham Cowley, a youthful prodigy and
always conspicuous for intellectual power, was secretary to Queen Henrietta
Maria after her flight to France and later was a royalist spy in England.
His most conspicuous poems are his so-called 'Pindaric Odes,' in which he
supposed that he was imitating the structure of the Greek Pindar but really
originated the pseudo-Pindaric Ode, a poem in irregular, non-correspondent
stanzas. He is the last important representative of the 'Metaphysical'
style. In his own day he was acclaimed as the greatest poet of all time,
but as is usual in such cases his reputation very rapidly waned. Edmund
Waller (1606-1687), a very wealthy gentleman in public life who played a
flatly discreditable part in the Civil War, is most important for his share
in shaping the riming pentameter couplet into the smooth pseudo-classical
form rendered famous by Dryden and Pope; but his only notable single poems
are two Cavalier love-lyrics in stanzas, 'On a Girdle' and 'Go, Lovely
Rose.'

JOHN MILTON, 1608-1674. Conspicuous above all his contemporaries as the
representative poet of Puritanism, and, by almost equally general consent,
distinctly the greatest of English poets except Shakspere, stands John
Milton. His life falls naturally into three periods: 1. Youth and
preparation, 1608-1639, when he wrote his shorter poems. 2. Public life,
1639-1660, when he wrote, or at least published, in poetry, only a few
sonnets. 3. Later years, 1660-1674, of outer defeat, but of chief poetic
achievement, the period of 'Paradise Lost,' 'Paradise Regained,' and
'Samson Agonistes.'

Milton was born in London in December, 1608. His father was a prosperous
scrivener, or lawyer of the humbler sort, and a Puritan, but broad-minded,
and his children were brought up in the love of music, beauty, and
learning. At the age of twelve the future poet was sent to St. Paul's
School, and he tells us that from this time on his devotion to study seldom
allowed him to leave his books earlier than midnight. At sixteen, in 1625,
he entered Cambridge, where he remained during the seven years required for
the M. A. degree, and where he was known as 'the lady of Christ's'
[College], perhaps for his beauty, of which all his life he continued
proud, perhaps for his moral scrupulousness. Milton was never, however, a
conventional prig, and a quarrel with a self-important tutor led at one
time to his informal suspension from the University. His nature, indeed,
had many elements quite inconsistent with the usual vague popular
conception of him. He was always not only inflexible in his devotion to
principle, but--partly, no doubt, from consciousness of his intellectual
superiority--haughty as well as reserved, self-confident, and little
respectful of opinions and feelings that clashed with his own. Nevertheless
in his youth he had plenty of animal spirits and always for his friends
warm human sympathies.

To his college years belong two important poems. His Christmas hymn, the
'Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity,' shows the influence of his early
poetical master, Spenser, and of contemporary pastoral poets, though it
also contains some conceits--truly poetic conceits, however, not exercises
in intellectual cleverness like many of those of Donne and his followers.
With whatever qualifications, it is certainly one of the great English
lyrics, and its union of Renaissance sensuousness with grandeur of
conception and sureness of expression foretell clearly enough at twenty the
poet of 'Paradise Lost.' The sonnet on his twenty-third birthday, further,
is known to almost every reader of poetry as the best short expression in
literature of the dedication of one's life and powers to God.

Milton had planned to enter the ministry, but the growing predominance of
the High-Church party made this impossible for him, and on leaving the
University in 1632 he retired to the country estate which his parents now
occupied at Horton, twenty miles west of London. Here, for nearly six
years, amid surroundings which nourished his poet's love for Nature, he
devoted his time chiefly to further mastery of the whole range of approved
literature, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English. His poems of these
years also are few, but they too are of the very highest quality.
'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' are idealized visions, in the tripping
Elizabethan octosyllabic couplet, of the pleasures of suburban life viewed
in moods respectively of light-hearted happiness and of reflection.
'Comus,' the last of the Elizabethan and Jacobean masks, combines an
exquisite poetic beauty and a real dramatic action more substantial than
that of any other mask with a serious moral theme (the security of Virtue)
in a fashion that renders it unique. 'Lycidas' is one of the supreme
English elegies; though the grief which helps to create its power sprang
more from the recent death of the poet's mother than from that of the
nominal subject, his college acquaintance, Edward King, and though in the
hands of a lesser artist the solemn denunciation of the false leaders of
the English Church might not have been wrought into so fine a harmony with
the pastoral form.

Milton's first period ends with an experience designed to complete his
preparation for his career, a fifteen months' tour in France and Italy,
where the highest literary circles received him cordially. From this trip
he returned in 1639, sooner than he had planned, because, he said, the
public troubles at home, foreshadowing the approaching war, seemed to him a
call to service; though in fact some time intervened before his entrance on
public life.

The twenty years which follow, the second period of Milton's career,
developed and modified his nature and ideas in an unusual degree and
fashion. Outwardly the occupations which they brought him appear chiefly as
an unfortunate waste of his great poetic powers. The sixteen sonnets which
belong here show how nobly this form could be adapted to the varied
expression of the most serious thought, but otherwise Milton abandoned
poetry, at least the publication of it, for prose, and for prose which was
mostly ephemeral. Taking up his residence in London, for some time he
carried on a small private school in his own house, where he much
overworked his boys in the mistaken effort to raise their intellectual
ambitions to the level of his own. Naturally unwilling to confine himself
to a private sphere, he soon engaged in a prose controversy supporting the
Puritan view against the Episcopal form of church government, that is
against the office of bishops. There shortly followed the most regrettable
incident in his whole career, which pathetically illustrates also the lack
of a sense of humor which was perhaps his greatest defect. At the age of
thirty-four, and apparently at first sight, he suddenly married Mary
Powell, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a royalist country gentleman
with whom his family had long maintained some business and social
relations. Evidently this daughter of the Cavaliers met a rude
disillusionment in Milton's Puritan household and in his Old Testament
theory of woman's inferiority and of a wife's duty of strict subjection to
her husband; a few weeks after the marriage she fled to her family and
refused to return. Thereupon, with characteristic egoism, Milton put forth
a series of pamphlets on divorce, arguing, contrary to English law, and
with great scandal to the public, that mere incompatibility of temper was
adequate ground for separation. He even proceeded so far as to make
proposals of marriage to another woman. But after two years and the ruin of
the royalist cause his wife made unconditional submission, which Milton
accepted, and he also received and supported her whole family in his house.
Meanwhile his divorce pamphlets had led to the best of his prose writings.
He had published the pamphlets without the license of Parliament, then
required for all books, and a suit was begun against him. He replied with
'Areopagitica,' an, eloquent and noble argument against the licensing
system and in favor of freedom of publication within the widest possible
limits. (The name is an allusion to the condemnation of the works of
Protagoras by the Athenian Areopagus.) In the stress of public affairs the
attack on him was dropped, but the book remains, a deathless plea for
individual liberty.

Now at last Milton was drawn into active public life. The execution of the
King by the extreme Puritan minority excited an outburst of indignation not
only in England but throughout Europe. Milton, rising to the occasion,
defended the act in a pamphlet, thereby beginning a paper controversy,
chiefly with the Dutch scholar Salmasius, which lasted for several years.
By 1652 it had resulted in the loss of Milton's eyesight, previously
over-strained by his studies--a sacrifice in which he gloried but which
lovers of poetry must always regret, especially since the controversy
largely consisted, according to the custom of the time, in a disgusting
exchange of personal scurrilities. Milton's championship of the existing
government, however, together with his scholarship, had at once secured for
him the position of Latin secretary, or conductor of the diplomatic
correspondence of the State with foreign countries. He held this office,
after the loss of his eyesight, with Marvell as a colleague, under both
Parliament and Cromwell, but it is an error to suppose that he exerted any
influence in the management of affairs or that he was on familiar terms
with the Protector. At the Restoration he necessarily lost both the
position and a considerable part of his property, and for a while he went
into hiding; but through the efforts of Marvell and others he was finally
included in the general amnesty.

In the remaining fourteen years which make the third period of his life
Milton stands out for subsequent ages as a noble figure. His very obstinacy
and egoism now enabled him, blind, comparatively poor, and the
representative of a lost cause, to maintain his proud and patient dignity
in the midst of the triumph of all that was most hateful to him, and, as he
believed, to God. His isolation, indeed, was in many respects extreme,
though now as always he found the few sympathetic friends on whom his
nature was quite dependent. His religious beliefs had become what would at
present be called Unitarian, and he did not associate with any of the
existing denominations; in private theory he had even come to believe in
polygamy. At home he is said to have suffered from the coldness or more
active antipathy of his three daughters, which is no great cause for wonder
if we must credit the report that he compelled them to read aloud to him in
foreign languages of which he had taught them the pronunciation but not the
meaning. Their mother had died some years before, and he had soon lost the
second wife who is the subject of one of his finest sonnets. In 1663, at
the age of fifty-four, he was united in a third marriage to Elizabeth
Minshull, a woman of twenty-four, who was to survive him for more than
fifty years.

The important fact of this last period, however, is that Milton now had the
leisure to write, or to complete, 'Paradise Lost.' For a quarter of a
century he had avowedly cherished the ambition to produce 'such a work as
the world would not willingly let die' and had had in mind, among others,
the story of Man's Fall. Outlines for a treatment of it not in epic but in
dramatic form are preserved in a list of a hundred possible subjects for a
great work which he drew up as early as 1640, and during the Commonwealth
period he seems not only to have been slowly maturing the plan but to have
composed parts of the existing poem; nevertheless the actual work of
composition belongs chiefly to the years following 1660. The story as told
in Genesis had received much elaboration in Christian tradition from a very
early period and Milton drew largely from this general tradition and no
doubt to some extent from various previous treatments of the Bible
narrative in several languages which he might naturally have read and kept
in mind. But beyond the simple outline the poem, like every great work, is
essentially the product of his own genius. He aimed, specifically, to
produce a Christian epic which should rank with the great epics of
antiquity and with those of the Italian Renaissance.

In this purpose he was entirely successful. As a whole, by the consent of
all competent judges, 'Paradise Lost' is worthy of its theme, perhaps the
greatest that the mind of man can conceive, namely 'to justify the ways of
God.' Of course there are defects. The seventeenth century theology, like
every successive theological, philosophical, and scientific system, has
lost its hold on later generations, and it becomes dull indeed in the long
expository passages of the poem. The attempt to express spiritual ideas
through the medium of the secular epic, with its battles and councils and
all the forms of physical life, is of course rationally paradoxical. It was
early pointed out that in spite of himself Milton has in some sense made
Satan the hero of the poem--a reader can scarcely fail to sympathize with
the fallen archangel in his unconquerable Puritan-like resistance to the
arbitrary decrees of Milton's despotic Deity. Further, Milton's personal,
English, and Puritan prejudices sometimes intrude in various ways. But all
these things are on the surface. In sustained imaginative grandeur of
conception, expression, and imagery 'Paradise Lost' yields to no human
work, and the majestic and varied movement of the blank verse, here first
employed in a really great non-dramatic English poem, is as magnificent as
anything else in literature. It cannot be said that the later books always
sustain the greatness of the first two; but the profusely scattered
passages of sensuous description, at least, such as those of the Garden of
Eden and of the beauty of Eve, are in their own way equally fine. Stately
and more familiar passages alike show that however much his experience had
done to harden Milton's Puritanism, his youthful Renaissance love of beauty
for beauty's sake had lost none of its strength, though of course it could
no longer be expressed with youthful lightness of fancy and melody. The
poem is a magnificent example of classical art, in the best Greek spirit,
united with glowing romantic feeling. Lastly, the value of Milton's
scholarship should by no means be overlooked. All his poetry, from the
'Nativity Ode' onward, is like a rich mosaic of gems borrowed from a great
range of classical and modern authors, and in 'Paradise Lost' the allusions
to literature and history give half of the romantic charm and very much of
the dignity. The poem could have been written only by one who combined in a
very high degree intellectual power, poetic feeling, religious idealism,
profound scholarship and knowledge of literature, and also experienced
knowledge of the actual world of men.

'Paradise Lost' was published in 1677. It was followed in 1671 by 'Paradise
Regained,' only one-third as long and much less important; and by 'Samson
Agonistes' (Samson in his Death Struggle). In the latter Milton puts the
story of the fallen hero's last days into the majestic form of a Greek
drama, imparting to it the passionate but lofty feeling evoked by the close
similarity of Samson's situation to his own. This was his last work, and he
died in 1674. Whatever his faults, the moral, intellectual and poetic
greatness of his nature sets him apart as in a sense the grandest figure in
English literature.

JOHN BUNYAN. Seventeenth century Puritanism was to find a supreme spokesman
in prose fiction as well as in poetry; John Milton and John Bunyan,
standing at widely different angles of experience, make one of the most
interesting complementary pairs in all literature. By the mere chronology
of his works, Bunyan belongs in our next period, but in his case mere
chronology must be disregarded.

Bunyan was born in 1628 at the village of Elstow, just outside of Bedford,
in central England. After very slight schooling and some practice at his
father's trade of tinker, he was in 1644 drafted for two years and a half
into garrison service in the Parliamentary army. Released from this
occupation, he married a poor but excellent wife and worked at his trade;
but the important experiences of his life were the religious ones. Endowed
by nature with great moral sensitiveness, he was nevertheless a person of
violent impulses and had early fallen into profanity and laxity of conduct,
which he later described with great exaggeration as a condition of
abandoned wickedness. But from childhood his abnormally active dramatic
imagination had tormented him with dreams and fears of devils and
hell-fire, and now he entered on a long and agonizing struggle between his
religious instinct and his obstinate self-will. He has told the whole story
in his spiritual autobiography, 'Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners,'
which is one of the notable religious books of the world. A reader of it
must be filled about equally with admiration for the force of will and
perseverance that enabled Bunyan at last to win his battle, and pity for
the fantastic morbidness that created out of next to nothing most of his
well-nigh intolerable tortures. One Sunday, for example, fresh from a
sermon on Sabbath observance, he was engaged in a game of 'cat,' when he
suddenly heard within himself the question, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and
go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell?' Stupefied, he looked up to
the sky and seemed there to see the Lord Jesus gazing at him 'hotly
displeased' and threatening punishment. Again, one of his favorite
diversions was to watch bellmen ringing the chimes in the church steeples,
and though his Puritan conscience insisted that the pleasure was 'vain,'
still he would not forego it. Suddenly one day as he was indulging in it
the thought occurred to him that God might cause one of the bells to fall
and kill him, and he hastened to shield himself by standing under a beam.
But, he reflected, the bell might easily rebound from the wall and strike
him; so he shifted his position to the steeple-door. Then 'it came into his
head, "How if the steeple itself should fall?"' and with that he fled alike
from the controversy and the danger.

Relief came when at the age of twenty-four he joined a non-sectarian church
in Bedford (his own point of view being Baptist). A man of so energetic
spirit could not long remain inactive, and within two years he was
preaching in the surrounding villages. A dispute with the Friends had
already led to the beginning of his controversial writing when in 1660 the
Restoration rendered preaching by persons outside the communion of the
Church of England illegal, and he was arrested and imprisoned in Bedford
jail. Consistently refusing to give the promise of submission and
abstention from preaching which at any time would have secured his release,
he continued in prison for twelve years, not suffering particular
discomfort and working for the support of his family by fastening the ends
onto shoestrings. During this time he wrote and published several of the
most important of his sixty books and pamphlets. At last, in 1672, the
authorities abandoned the ineffective requirement of conformity, and he was
released and became pastor of his church. Three years later he was again
imprisoned for six months, and it was at that time that he composed the
first part of 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' which was published in 1678. During
the remaining ten years of his life his reputation and authority among the
Dissenters almost equalled his earnest devotion and kindness, and won for
him from his opponents the good-naturedly jocose title of 'the Baptist
bishop.' He died in 1688.

Several of Bunyan's books are strong, but none of the others is to be named
together with 'The Pilgrim's Progress.' This has been translated into
nearly or quite a hundred languages and dialects--a record never approached
by any other book of English authorship. The sources of its power are
obvious. It is the intensely sincere presentation by a man of tremendous
moral energy of what he believed to be the one subject of eternal and
incalculable importance to every human being, the subject namely of
personal salvation. Its language and style, further, are founded on the
noble and simple model of the English Bible, which was almost the only book
that Bunyan knew, and with which his whole being was saturated. His
triumphant and loving joy in his religion enables him often to attain the
poetic beauty and eloquence of his original; but both by instinct and of
set purpose he rendered his own style even more simple and direct, partly
by the use of homely vernacular expressions. What he had said in 'Grace
Abounding' is equally true here: 'I could have stepped into a style much
higher ... but I dare not. God did not play in convincing of me ...
wherefore I may not play in my relating of these experiences.' 'Pilgrim's
Progress' is perfectly intelligible to any child, and further, it is highly
dramatic and picturesque. It is, to be sure, an allegory, but one of those
allegories which seem inherent in the human mind and hence more natural
than the most direct narrative. For all men life is indeed a journey, and
the Slough of Despond, Doubting Castle, Vanity Fair, and the Valley of
Humiliation are places where in one sense or another every human soul has
often struggled and suffered; so that every reader goes hand in hand with
Christian and his friends, fears for them in their dangers and rejoices in
their escapes. The incidents, however, have all the further fascination of
supernatural romance; and the union of this element with the homely
sincerity of the style accounts for much of the peculiar quality of the
book. Universal in its appeal, absolutely direct and vivid in manner--such
a work might well become, as it speedily did, one of the most famous of
world classics. It is interesting to learn, therefore, that Bunyan had
expected its circulation to be confined to the common people; the early
editions are as cheap as possible in paper, printing, and illustrations.

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