A History of English Prose Fiction

by Bayard Tuckerman

The Puritans had overthrown the political tyranny of Charles, but in attempting to build up by force a kingdom of the saints on earth, they had established a spiritual tyranny, quite as irksome and quite as perishable, of their own. Meanwhile they had failed to preserve the reputation for sanctity which formed the chief basis of their authority. As soon as they had attained power, they were joined by men who professed their principles merely for selfish purposes; who vied with each other in presenting to the world the outward signs of Puritanism, and remained notoriously profligate in life and character. The kingdom of the saints, objectionable as a tyranny, and finally identified in the popular mind with a hated hypocrisy, came to its inevitable end in the reaction of the Restoration. But when the first fury of this reaction had passed away, it was evident that Puritanism survived it: no longer a political power, but a moral influence which controlled the great body of the people, and gave to English habits and literature their distinctive tone of serious morality.

But for the time, all sight of this was lost. The entry of Charles II into Whitehall was the sign for unlimited indulgence in all that had lately been forbidden. "Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop."[84] The Puritans had pent up for so long the natural cravings for pleasure and gaiety, that, when the barriers were withdrawn, license and debauchery were necessary to satisfy appetites which a long-enforced abstinence had made abnormal. In Vanburgh's "Provoked Wife," a comedy, like so many others of the time, at once very immoral and very entertaining, Sir John Brute thus excuses the virtues of his early life: "I was afraid of being damned in those days; for I kept sneaking, cowardly company, fellows that went to church, said grace to their meat, and had not the least tincture of quality about them." Heartfree: "But I think you have got into a better gang now." Sir John: "Zoons, sir, my Lord Rake and I are hand in glove."[85] In the country, people were generally satisfied with getting back their May-poles and Sunday games. But in London, where the rule of Puritanism had been the strictest, and above all among the courtiers, the new liberty resulted in a license and shamelessness unequalled in English history.

In the general proscription of Puritan ideas, the good were involved in the same destruction as the bad. Religion was mocked at as a cloak for hypocrisy, self-restraint was thrown aside as an obstacle to enjoyment. It was thought that emancipation from Puritan tyranny could not be attained more effectually than by a life of open licentiousness; by gambling and drunkenness. Such, under the Restoration, were the occupations most attractive to the gentlemen of fashion. Buckingham, Rochester, and the troop of courtiers who looked to them for an example, spent their lives in sinking into an ever deeper depravity. Their thoughts and mouths were never clean. The verses they wrote are too foul to transcribe as an illustration of the taste of their composers. The orgies in which they indulged were not scenes of gaiety, in which buoyant spirits and lively wit might excuse excess, but were serious, bestial, and premeditated. The dealings of these men with the female sex were but a succession of low intrigues, which destroyed all sentiment and left nothing but disgust behind them. We hear a great deal about "love" in the literature of the time, but it is the same kind of love that might be found among a herd of cattle. It would be difficult to mention any man about the court of Charles II who could have appreciated the pure and enduring passion which in the century before had breathed through the noble lines of Spenser's "Epithalamion," and in the century that followed inspired "John Anderson, my jo' John." Charles himself, "the old goat," set an example which hardly needed the authority of the Lord's anointed to become attractive. Without honor or virtue himself, and denying their existence in others, he made a fitting leader of the society about him. His mistresses insulted the queen by their splendor and arrogance, and insulted him by amours with servants and mountebanks. So destitute of dignity or principle as to share the Duchess of Cleveland with the world, he coolly asked a courtier who was reputed to be on too intimate terms with the queen, how his "mistress" did. While the gaming-tables at court were nightly covered with gold, and Lady Castlemaine gambled away thousands of pounds at a sitting, the exchequer was closed amid a widespread ruin, and the menial servants about the court were in want of bread. So openly was the king's coarse licentiousness pursued, that "the very sentrys speak of it," that the queen rarely entered her dressing-rooms without first being assured that the king was not there with one of his women. Such an example had a powerful influence upon all the rank and fashion of the time, already predisposed to a similar course. The extent of the prevailing reverence for royalty is admirably illustrated by the scene in which the Earl of Arlington advised Miss Stewart concerning her conduct as mistress of the king, to which position "it had pleased God and her virtue to raise her." Thus from the popular dislike of Puritanism, and the example of a profligate court, began that reign of social and political corruption which for a hundred years demoralized the manners and sullied the literature of the English people. The vice which became so engrafted on the habits of private life as to make decency seem an affectation, invaded religion and politics. To religion it brought about a general indifference, which in the higher ranks of the clergy took effect in disregard of their duties and in a shameless scramble for lucrative posts, and in the lower ranks produced poverty and social degradation. In politics are to be dated from this reign the gross corruption which enabled every public officer, however high or however low, to use his position for the purpose of private plunder, and the habit of bribing members of Parliament which soon converted them into tools of the crown's ministers.

While the men found their greatest enjoyment and most congenial occupation in drunkenness, duelling, and seduction, it is not to be expected that women should have retained an unappreciated refinement. Half-naked and ornamented with a profusion of jewels, they look out from the portraits of the time with a sleepy, voluptuous expression, which suggests a lack of intelligence and too great a susceptibility to physical impressions. Women as we find them in contemporary memoirs, and these most often deal with such as are about the court, are not unfit companions for the men. We see not a few the willing victims of coarse intrigues, and some even assisting in the degradation of others of their sex. Many of them swore "good mouth filling oaths," and the scandal they talked would have shocked the taste as well as the principles of Elizabeth's time. In the eighteenth century much coarseness is to be seen in literature and society, but we are constantly meeting with the words "delicacy" and "indelicacy" in their application to social refinement, and it is evident that the ideas of that time on this subject differ from ours only in degree. Under the Restoration, these words, or the thoughts they represent, had a very insignificant existence. Public taste inclined to the gross and the sensual, and welcomed as enjoyable, what the present discards as disgusting. Ladies of the highest rank sat through plays of which the purpose and effect was to degrade their own womanhood, to remove from the minds of the men who sat about and watched their countenances at each new obscenity, whatever respect for the sex might have lingered there. Some wore masks to hide the blushes which might have been looked for as a drama proceeded, which represented every female character on the stage as little better than an animal, using such reason as she possessed only to further the gratification of her appetites. Under such conditions there could be no encouragement for maiden modesty, and for old age no crown.

It is usually unfair to judge a community by its theatre, to which an exceptional liberty must always be allowed. But the drama of the Restoration may be said to reflect with much truth the popular taste. For the noblest efforts of dramatic genius the student turns by preference to the age of Elizabeth. There he finds art, beauty, and poetry; there he finds human nature, with its nobility and its littleness, with its virtues and its vices. The time of Charles II was as narrow in its way as the Puritans had been in theirs, and was as little capable of forming broad and just views of mankind. The Puritans, if they had had a stage, would have represented man as an embodiment of moral qualities. The dramatists of the Restoration made him merely a creature subject to animal desires and brutish instincts, which he made no effort to regulate. "It might, not be easy perhaps," says Hallam, "to find a scene in any comedy of Charles II's reign, where one character has the behavior of a gentleman, in the sense we attach to the word."[86] The stage was in perfect accord with its audience. Morality was outraged by a constant association of virtue with all that is contemptible and of vice with all that is attractive. Taste was outraged by a perpetual choice of degraded subjects and disgusting scenes. Nature was outraged by the representation of man, not as a complex being, worthy of deep and skilful investigation, but as a creature influenced by two or three passions always apparent on the surface. Thus the dramatists, notwithstanding their very exceptional abilities, produced little of enduring value, and nothing which could outlive a change in the popular taste. They did, however, produce what was greatly admired by their contemporaries: and the fact that the men and the women of the time enjoyed the plays provided for them, shows that they preferred to noble and elevating subjects, the literary reproduction of their own corrupt lives. The theatre no doubt represented men as worse than they were. But the friends of Buckingham and Rochester, both male and female, found in its long list of unprincipled men, of married women debauched, and of young girls anxious to be debauched, the reflection and justification of their own careers.

Posterity remembers little of the reign or the theatre of Charles II beyond their corruption. Yet there is much that is worthy of remembrance, without which any remarks on the social condition of the time would be one-sided. There are to be referred to that period many legislative enactments in the highest degree conducive to civil and religious liberty. The foundation of the Royal Society marked the inauguration of a new interest in speculative enquiry, of a great activity in scientific research, and of a broader and more liberal habit of thought on questions connected with government and education. These advantages were attained in spite of a worthless king, of corrupt ministers, and a licentious court, and they are due to the earnestness and vigor of the great body of the English people, qualities which have remained unchanged through every national vicissitude or success. While Pepys and Grammont supply full details of the moral degeneration which weakened and debased the highest ranks of society, the sound morality, steady industry, and progressive nature of the nation are to be seen in the journal of the good Evelyn. His character and occupations, as well as those of his friends, offset the coarse tastes and worthless lives which brought the time into discredit. To the prevailing disregard of the marriage tie may well be contrasted the happiness of Evelyn's domestic life. His daughter, of whom he has left a beautiful description, was endowed with an elevation of character, a charm of disposition, and a purity of thought admirable in any age, and it cannot be doubted that she had many contemporary parallels.

[84] Destouches, "Glorieux," v. 3.
[85] Act ii, sc. 1.
[86] "Literature of Europe," vol. 4, chap. 6, sec. 2-47.

II.

With the pensions and fashions which were sent across the Channel from the court of Louis XIV, came a curious species of fiction which had a temporary vogue in England. Gomberville, Scudéri, and Calprenède had created the school of Heroic Romance by the publication of those monumental works which the French not inaptly termed "les romans de longue haleine." This was the bulky but enervated descendant of chivalric and pastoral romance. The tales of chivalry and of pastoral life had their raison d'être. The feudal knighthood found in the tournaments, in the adventures of knight-errantry, and in the supernatural agencies which filled their volumes of romance, the reflection of their own aspirations and beliefs. They admired in the ideal characters of Charlemagne and Arthur the qualities most valued among themselves. Martial glory was to them the chief object of life; love was simply the reward of valor. The pastoral romance followed in less warlike times. Its subject was love; and that passion was usually described amidst humble and peaceful shepherds, where its strength and charm could develop more fully than amidst scenes of war and tumult. Both the chivalric and the pastoral romance were the embodiment of ideals which in turn represented contemporary tastes. But heroic romance, although it shared some of the characteristics of its predecessors, had not the same claim to interest. It was unnatural and artificial, rather than ideal. It imitated the martial character of the tales of chivalry, but subordinated that character to love. It imitated the devoted strain of adoration which ran through the fanciful phrases of pastoral fiction; but that artificial passion which seemed appropriate to ideal shepherds tuning their pipes under a perpetual sunshine, became absurd when applied to Greek or Carthaginian soldiers.

Gomberville's "Polexander," complete-in six thousand pages, and Calprenède's "Cassandra," "the fam'd romance," are now before me. Greeks, Romans, Turks, Parthians, Scythians, Babylonians are mingled together in a truly heroic structure of absurdity and anachronism. Artaxerxes appears on one page, the queen of the Amazons on the next, then the king of Lacedæmon, Alexander the Great, even a prince of Mexico, and comparatively private persons beyond computation. This crowd of names represent personages who imitate the deeds of chivalry, and converse in the affected style of the French court, while their ancient bosoms are distracted by a pure, all-absorbing, and never-dying love as foreign to their nature as to that of the readers of heroic romance. That this species of fiction should have met with any success, is largely due to the circumstance, that under the disguise of Greek warriors or Parthian princesses, there were really described contemporary beauties and courtiers, who fondly believed that they had attained, through the genius of Calprenède and Scudéri, an enviable immortality. Unhappily for them, the characters of heroic romance have found in that endless desert of phraseology at once their birthplace and their tomb.