But it does not follow that we can put the finger on this and that person as having “begun” the new movement. Such an opinion is always tempting to not too judicious inquirers, and there has been no lack of books on Le Romantisme des Classiques and the like. The fact, of course, simply is that everything human exists essentially or potentially in the men of every time; and that you may not only find books in the running brooks but (what appears at first more contradictory) dry stones in them: while, on the other hand, founts of water habitually gush from the midst of the driest rock. Indagation of the kind is always treacherous, and has to be conducted with a great deal of circumspection.
Case of Butler on Rymer, Denham,
It would be difficult to find an author who illustrates this danger and treachery better than Butler, whom some may have been surprised not to find in the last volume. The author of Hudibras was born not long after Milton, and nearly twenty years before Dryden, who outlived him by the same space. His great poem did not give much room for critical utterances in literature; but the Genuine Remains[[4]] are full of it in separate places, both verse and prose. Take these singly, and you may make Butler out to be, not merely a critic, but half a dozen critics. In perhaps the best known of his minor pieces, the Repartees between Cat and Puss, he satirises “Heroic” Plays, and is therefore clearly for “the last age,” as also in the savage and admirable “On Critics who Judge Modern Plays precisely by the Rules of the Ancients,” which has been reasonably, or certainly, thought to be directed against Rymer’s blasphemy of Beaumont and Fletcher, published two years before Butler’s death. The satirist’s references and illustrations (as in that to “the laws of good King Howel’s days”) are sometimes too Caroline to be quotable; but the force and sweep of his protest is simply glorious. The Panegyric on Sir John Denham is chiefly personal; but if Butler had been convinced that Cooper’s Hill was the ne plus ultra of English poetry he could hardly have written it: and though the main victim of “To a Bad Poet” has not been identified,[[5]] the lines—
“For so the rhyme be at the verse’s end,
No matter whither all the rest does tend”—
could scarcely have been written except against the new poetry. The “Pindaric Ode on Modern Critics” is chiefly directed against the general critical vice of snarling, and the passages on critics and poets in the Miscellaneous Thoughts follow suit. But if we had only the verse Remains we should be to some extent justified in taking Butler, if not for a precursor of the new Romanticism, at any rate for a rather strenuous defender of the old.
and Benlowes.
But turn to the Characters. Most of these that deal with literature are in the general vein which the average seventeenth-century character-writer took from Theophrastus, though few put so much salt of personal wit into this as Butler. In “A Small Poet” the earlier pages might be aimed at almost anybody from Dryden himself (whom Butler, it is said, did not love) down to Flecknoe. But there is only one name mentioned in the piece; and that name, which is made the object of a furious and direct attack, lightened by some of the brightest flashes of Butler’s audacious and acrid humour, is the name of Edward Benlowes.[[6]] Now, that Benlowes is a person taillable et corvéable à merci et à miséricorde by any critical oppressor, nobody who has read him can deny. He is as extravagant as Crashaw without so much poetry, and as Cleveland without so much cleverness. But he is a poet, and a “metaphysical” poet (as Butler was himself in another way), and an example, though a rather awful example, of that “poetic fury” which makes Elizabethan poetry. Yet Butler is more savage with him than with Denham.