THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITERARY STYLE
1. Poetry. In surveying the poetical style of the age one is aware of conflicting tendencies, a state of affairs quite in keeping with the transitional nature of the time.
(a) The lyrical style shows a decline from the natural splendors of the Elizabethan age; but it shows an increase in care, in polish, and in actual metrical dexterity. Moreover, in the best examples of the time we find a melodious resonance and beauty that is quite peculiar to the period. The lyric of Carew quoted on p. [172] illustrates this felicity both of sound and expression. The startling “metaphysical” quality of the works of many of the poets has been commented upon. It is revealed at its worst in the works of John Cleveland (1613–58), whose more violent efforts came to be known as “Clevelandisms.” The following is a mild example of his manner:
The flowers, called out of their beds,
Start and raise up their drowsy heads;
And he that for their colour seeks,
Will find it mantling in her cheeks,
Where roses mix; no civil war
Between her York and Lancaster.
The marigold, whose courtier face
Echoes the sun, and doth unlace
Her at his rise, at his full stop
Packs and shuts up her gaudy shop,
Mistakes her cue, and doth display:
Thus Phillis antedates the day.
On Phillis, walking before Sunrise
(b) In blank verse conflicting movements are also apparent. In Milton the style reaches a magnificent climax. But in the drama, especially in the drama of minor playwrights of the ability of Suckling and Davenant, it becomes a huddle of verse and prose, so bad that one hesitates to say where the verse ends and the prose begins. It is the last stage of poetical decrepitude.
(c) The heroic couplet begins to appear, ushering in its long reign. We have it appearing as early as Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) and Sandys’s Ovid (1626); but the true stopped couplet, as used by Dryden and developed by Pope, is usually set down to the credit of Cowley’s Davideis (1637), or Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1641), or the shorter poems of Edmund Waller (1606–87), who wrote stopped couplets as early as 1623. The heroic couplet will receive further notice in the next chapter.
TABLE TO ILLUSTRATE THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITERARY FORMS
| Date | Poetry | Drama | Prose | |||||
| Lyric | Epic | Descriptive | Comedy | Tragedy | Historical | Religious | Miscellaneous | |
| Wither | ||||||||
| Massinger | ||||||||
| 1630 | Milton[125] | Cowley | Ford | |||||
| Herbert | Milton | |||||||
| Cowley | Suckling | |||||||
| Suckling | Davenant | |||||||
| 1640 | Carew | Fuller | ||||||
| Denham | ||||||||
| Browne[126] | ||||||||
| Crashaw | Milton | |||||||
| Vaughan | Fuller | Howell | ||||||
| Clarendon[127] | Browne | |||||||
| Herrick | Baxter | |||||||
| Lovelace | ||||||||
| 1650 | Davenant | Taylor[128] | ||||||
| Marvell | Hobbes | |||||||
| Barrow | Walton | |||||||
| Cowley | ||||||||
| Milton[129] | Chamberlayne | |||||||
| 1660 | Fuller | |||||||
| 1670 | Milton[130] | |||||||
2. Prose. In prose also we see the opposing tendencies. The principal movement is toward ornate prose, in Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Clarendon, and in the Scottish writer William Drummond (1585–1649), whose Cypress Grove (1616) is in the fashionable funereal vein. In the middle style we have the precision of Hobbes in The Leviathan. At the other extreme from the ornate, the miscellaneous writers adopt great simplicity. Of this class, which includes Howell and Felltham, the best example is Isaac Walton, whose artless prose is shown in the following specimen:
Piscator. O sir, doubt not but that angling is an art. Is it not an art to deceive a trout with an artificial fly? a trout that is more sharp-sighted than any hawk you have named, and more watchful and timorous than your high-mettled merlin is bold! and yet I doubt not to catch a brace or two to-morrow for a friend’s breakfast. Doubt not, therefore, sir, but that angling is an art, and an art worth your learning; the question is rather, whether you be capable of learning it? for angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so—I mean with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice; but he that hopes to be a good angler must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit, but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself; but having once got and practised it, then doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant that it will prove to be like virtue, a reward to itself.
The Compleat Angler
EXERCISES
1. The following extracts illustrate the good and bad features of the “metaphysical” style in poetry. Comment upon each feature as it appears to you, and estimate the value of the style as a literary medium.
(1) Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two,
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th’ other foot obliquely run,
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
Donne, A Valediction forbidding Mourning
(2) But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Marvell, To his Coy Mistress
(3) When, like committed linnets, I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, mercy, majesty,
And glories of my King;
When I shall voice aloud, how good
He is, how great should be,
Enlarged winds that curl the flood
Know no such liberty.
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.
Lovelace, To Althea, from Prison
(4) Each little pimple had a tear in it,
To wail the fault its rising did commit.
Dryden, Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings
(5) The plants, whose luxury was lopped,
Or age with crutches underpropped,
Whose wooden carcases are grown
To be but coffins of their own,
Revive, and at her general dole,
Each receives his ancient soul.
Cleveland
(6) Her finger was so small, the ring,
Would not stay on, which they did bring,
It was too wide a peck:
And to say the truth (for out it must)
It looked like the great collar (just)
About our young colt’s neck.
Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice, stole in and out,
As if they feared the light:
But O, she dances such a way!
No sun upon an Easter-day
Is half so fine a sight.
Her cheeks so rare a white was on,
No daisy makes comparison,
(Who sees them is undone),
For streaks of red were mingled there,
Such as are on a Catherine pear
The side that’s next the sun.
Suckling, A Ballad upon a Wedding
2. Compare the following examples of Milton’s earlier and later blank verse respectively. Observe the metrical dexterity, the cadence, and the vowel-music.
(1) They left me then, when the gray-hooded even,
Like a sad votarist in palmer’s weed
Rose from the hindmost wheels of Phœbus’ wain.
But where they are, and why they came not back,
Is now the labour of my thoughts; ’tis likeliest
They had engaged their wandering steps too far;
And envious darkness, ere they could return,
Had stole them from me: else, O thievish night,
Why shouldst thou, but for some felonious end,
In thy dark lantern thus close up the stars,
That nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps
With everlasting oil, to give due light
To the misled and lonely traveller?
Comus
(2) Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid,
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature’s works to me expung’d and ras’d,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
Paradise Lost
3. The following paragraph is fairly typical both of the prose of Jeremy Taylor and of that of the period in general. Point out the good and bad qualities of the style, and estimate its value.
Anger is a perfect alienation of the mind from prayer, and therefore is contrary to that attention which presents our prayers in a right line to God. For so have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest than it could recover by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings, till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had learned music and motion from an angel, as he passed sometimes through the air, about his ministries here below. So is the prayer of a good man: when his affairs have required business, and his business was matter of discipline, and his discipline was to pass upon a sinning person, or had a design of charity, his duty met with the infirmities of a man, and anger was its instrument; and the instrument became stronger than the prime agent, and raised a tempest, and overruled the man; and then his prayer was broken, and his thoughts were troubled, and his words went up towards a cloud; and his thoughts pulled them back again, and made them without intention; and the good man sighs for his infirmity, but must be content to lose that prayer, and he must recover it when his anger is removed, and his spirit is becalmed, made even as the brow of Jesus, and smooth like the heart of God; and then it ascends to heaven upon the wings of the holy dove, and dwells with God, till it returns, like the useful bee, laden with a blessing and the dew of heaven.
Jeremy Taylor, On Prayer
4. Explain the references in the following passages. What parts of Milton’s character and literary works are emphasized?
(1) Nor second he, that rode sublime
Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy,
The secret of th’ abyss to spy.
He passed the flaming bounds of place and time—
The living throne, the sapphire-blaze,
Where angels tremble while they gaze,
He saw; but, blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night.
Gray, The Progress of Poesy
(2) Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour.[131]
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters; altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
Wordsworth, To Milton
(3) He left the upland lawns and serene air
Wherefrom his soul her noble nurture drew,
And reared his helm among the unquiet crew
Battling beneath; the morning radiance rare
Of his young brow amid the tumult there
Grew grim with sulphurous heat and sanguine dew:
Yet through all soilure they who marked him knew
The sign of his life’s dayspring, calm and fair.
But when peace came, peace fouler far than war,
And mirth more dissonant than battle’s tone,
He, with a scornful sigh of that clear soul,
Back to his mountain clomb, now bleak and frore,
And with the awful night he dwelt alone,
In darkness, listening to the thunder’s roll.
Ernest Myers, Milton
5. “Milton neither belonged to nor founded a school.” Expand this statement, and try to account for the truth of it.
6. Point out the effects, good and bad, of the civil and religious strife upon the literature of the time.
7. “Both in prose and poetry the period is a turning-point in the history of English literature.” Discuss this statement.
8. Write a brief essay on “The Poetry of Puritanism.”