In other kinds of poetry we find similar changes of taste which affected the art injuriously, although the increased attention paid to correctness and refinement was a step in improvement. These mischievous changes related both to the themes and forms of poetry, and in neither can the true functions of art be forgotten without injury to the work. An age must be held unpoetical, and cannot produce great poetical works, if its poetry chooses insufficient topics; and the aims of the age of the Restoration were low, producing only a constant crop of poems celebrating contemporary events or incidents in the lives of individuals. The dramatic and narrative forms of poetry are undoubtedly those in which that imaginative excitement of pleasing emotion, which is the immediate and characteristic end of the art, may be most powerfully worked out, and to one of these forms all the greatest poems have belonged. But in the age of the Restoration the drama had lost its elevation and poetic significance, and original narrative poetry was hardly known. Almost all the poems of the day were didactic, and the prevalence of this style of poetry is a palpable symptom of an unpoetical age. The verse-making of these forty years, after setting aside a very few works, maintains a dead level. Among the dwarfish rhymers of the day there lingered some of the august shapes of a former age. Milton still walked his solitary course, and Waller wrote his occasional odes and verses, but of names not already given there are no more than two or three that require commemoration. One of the famous poems of the day was an "Essay on Translated Verse," by Lord Roscommon; and the smaller poems of Marvell are felicitous in feeling and diction; both writers are distinguished for their moral purity.
The "Hudibras" of Butler, which properly belongs to the age before, is a phenomenon in the history of English literature. His pungent wit, his extraordinary ingenuity, and his command of words are rare endowments, but he has no poetic vein that yields jewels of the first water, and his place is not a high one in the path which leads upward to the ethereal regions of the imagination.
Pryor (1661-1721) in his lighter pieces shows wit of a less manly kind.
His serious poems have great facility of phrase and melody.
Dryden was a man of high endowments as a poet and thinker, condemned to labor for a corrupt generation, and he has received from posterity no higher fame than that of having improved English prose style and versification. His poems are rather essays couched in vigorous verse, with here and there passages of great poetical beauty. His "Annus Mirabilis," celebrating with great animation the year 1666, is an effusion of historical panegyric. The "Absalom and Achitophel" is a satire on the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth and his adviser Shaftesbury. "The Hind and Panther," full of poetical and satirical force, was an argument to justify the author's recent change of religion. One of the most thoroughly sustained poems is the "Ode on Alexander's Feast." His translation of the Aeneid, as imperfect a picture of the original as Pope's translation of the Iliad, is yet full of vigor and one of his best specimens of the heroic couplet, a measure never so well written in English as by Dryden.
4. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.—The influence of the eighteenth century on prose style has been great and permanent, and the two dissimilar manners of writing which were then formed, have contributed to all that is distinctive in our modern form of expression. The earlier of these is found in the language of Addison and Swift, the later in that of Johnson. The style of Addison and his friends reproduced those genuine idiomatic peculiarities of our speech which had been received into the conversation of intelligent men. The style of which Johnson was the characteristic example abandons in part the native and familiar characteristics of the Saxon for those expressions and forms common to the modern European tongues. Large use was made of words derived from the Latin, which, in addition to the effect of novelty, gave greater impressiveness and pomp to the style.
In the First Generation, named from Queen Anne, but including also the reign of George I. (d. 1727), the drama scarcely deserves more than a parenthesis. Although the moral tone had improved, it was still not high, when Gray's "Beggar's Opera" and Cibber's "Careless Husband" were the most famous works. The "Fair Penitent" has been noticed as a clever plagiarism from Massinger; in Addison's "Cato" the strict rules of the French stage were preserved, but its stately and impressive speeches cannot be called dramatic. The "Revenge" of Young had more of tragic passion; but it wanted the force of characterization which seemed to have been buried with the old dramatists.
The heroic measure, as it was now used, aimed at smoothness of melody and pointedness of expression, and in this the great master was Pope.
In the poems of Pope (1688-1744), we find passages beautifully poetical, exquisite thoughts, vigorous portraits of character, shrewd observation, and reflective good sense, but we are wafted into no bright world of imagination, rapt in no dream of strong passion, and seldom raised into any high region of moral thought. Like all the poets of his day, he set a higher value on skill of execution than on originality of conception, and systematically abstained from all attempts to excite imagination or feeling. The taste of the poet and of his times is most clearly shown in his "Essay on Criticism," published before his twenty-first year. None of his works unites more happily, regularity of plan, shrewdness of thought, and beauty of verse. His most successful effort, the "Rape of the Lock," assumed its complete shape in his twenty-sixth year, and is the best of all mock-heroic poems. The sharpest wit, the keenest dissection of the follies of fashionable life, the finest grace of diction, and the softest flow of melody, come appropriately to adorn a tale in which we learn how a fine gentleman stole a lock of a lady's hair. In the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard," and in the "Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady," he attempted the pathetic not altogether in vain. The last work of his best years was his "Translation of the Iliad;" of the Odyssey he translated only half. Both misrepresent the natural and simple majesty of manner which the ancient poet never lost; yet if we could forget Homer, we might be proud of them. In the "Dunciad" he threw away an infinity of wit upon writers who would not otherwise have been remembered. His "Essay on Man" contains much exquisite poetry and finely solemn thought; it abounds in striking passages which, by their felicities of fancy, good sense, music, and extraordinary terseness of diction, have gained a place in the memory of every one.
Among the philosophical writers none holds so prominent a place as Bishop Berkeley (1684-1753), whose refinement of style and subtlety of thought have seldom been equaled. His philosophical Idealism exercised much influence on the course of metaphysical inquiry.
Lord Shaftesbury's brilliant but indistinct treatises have also been the germ of many discussions in ethics.