Hobbes. 33. We can produce nevertheless several names of those who laid the foundations at least, and indeed furnished examples, of good style; some of them among the greatest, for other merits, in our literature. Hobbes is perhaps the first of whom we can say that he is a good English writer; for the excellent passages of Hooker, Sydney, Raleigh, Bacon, Taylor, Chillingworth, and others of the Elizabethan or the first Stuart period are not sufficient to establish their claim; a good writer being one whose composition is nearly uniform, and who never sinks to such inferiority or negligence as we must confess in most of these. To make such a writer, the absence of gross fault is full as necessary as actual beauties; we are not judging as of poets, by the highest flight of their genius, and forgiving all the rest, but as of a sum of positive and negative quantities, where the latter counterbalance and efface an equal portion of the former. Hobbes is clear, precise, spirited, and, above all, free, in general, from the faults of his predecessors; his language is sensibly less obsolete; he is never vulgar, rarely, if ever, quaint or pedantic.
Cowley. 34. Cowley’s prose, very unlike his verse, as Johnson has observed, is perspicuous and unaffected. His few essays may even be reckoned among the earliest models of good writing. In that, especially, on the death of Cromwell, till, losing his composure, he falls a little into the vulgar style towards the close, we find an absence of pedantry, an ease and graceful choice of idiom, an unstudied harmony of periods, which had been perceived in very few writers of the two preceding reigns. “His thoughts,” says Johnson, “are natural, and his style has a smooth and placid equability which has never yet obtained its due commendation. Nothing is far-sought or hard-laboured; but all is easy without feebleness, and familiar without grossness.”
Evelyn. 35. Evelyn wrote in 1651 a little piece, purporting to be an account of England by a Frenchman. It is very severe on our manners, especially in London; his abhorrence of the late revolutions in church and state conspiring with his natural politeness which he had lately improved by foreign travel. It is worth reading as illustrative of social history; but I chiefly mention it here on account of the polish and gentlemanly elegance of the style, which very few had hitherto regarded in such light compositions. An answer by some indignant patriot has been reprinted together with this pamphlet of Evelyn, and is a good specimen of the bestial ribaldry which our ancestors seem to have taken for wit.[1040] The later writings of Evelyn are such as his character and habits would lead us to expect, but I am not aware that they often rise above that respectable level, nor are their subjects such as to require an elevated style.
[1040] Both these will be found in the late edition of Evelyn’s Miscellaneous Works.
Dryden. 36. Every poem and play of Dryden, as they successively appeared, was ushered into the world by those prefaces and dedications which have made him celebrated as a critic of poetry and a master of the English language. The Essay on Dramatic Poesy, and its subsequent Defence, the Origin and Progress of Satire, the Parallel of Poetry and Painting, the Life of Plutarch, and other things of minor importance, all prefixed to some more extensive work, complete the catalogue of his prose. The style of Dryden was very superior to any that England had seen. Not conversant with our old writers, so little, in fact, as to find the common phrases of the Elizabethan age unintelligible,[1041] he followed the taste of Charles’s reign, in emulating the politest and most popular writers in the French language. He seems to have formed himself on Montaigne, Balzac, and Voiture; but so ready was his invention, so vigorous his judgment, so complete his mastery over his native tongue, that, in point of style, he must be reckoned above all the three. He had the ease of Montaigne without his negligence and embarrassed structure of periods; he had the dignity of Balzac with more varied cadences, and without his hyperbolical tumour,—the unexpected turns of Voiture without his affectation and air of effort. In the dedications especially, we find paragraphs of extraordinary gracefulness, such as possibly have never been surpassed in our language. The prefaces are evidently written in a more negligent style; he seems, like Montaigne, to converse with the reader from his arm-chair, and passes onward with little connection from one subject to another.[1042] In addressing a patron, a different line is observable; he comes with the respectful air which the occasion seems to demand; but, though I do not think that Dryden ever, in language, forgets his own position, we must confess that the flattery is sometimes palpably untrue, and always offensively indelicate. The dedication of the Mock Astrologer to the Duke of Newcastle is a masterpiece of fine writing; and the subject better deserved these lavish commendations than most who received them. That of the State of Innocence to the Duchess of York is also very well written; but the adulation is excessive. It appears to me that, after the Revolution, Dryden took less pains with his style; the colloquial vulgarisms, and these are not wanting even in his earlier prefaces, become more frequent; his periods are often of more slovenly construction; he forgets even in his dedications that he is standing before a lord. Thus, remarking on the account Andromache gives to Hector of her own history, he observes, in a style rather unworthy of him, “The devil was in Hector if he knew not all this matter as well as she who told it him, for she had been his bed-fellow for many years together; and if he knew it then, it must be confessed that Homer in this long digression has rather given us his own character, than that of the fair lady whom he paints.”[1043]
[1041] Malone has given several proofs of this. Dryden’s Prose Works, vol. i., part 2, p. 136, et alibi. Dryden thought expressions wrong and incorrect in Shakspeare and Johnson which were the current language of their age.
[1042] This is his own account. “The nature of a preface is rambling, never wholly out of the way, nor in it.... This I have learned from the practice of honest Montaigne.” Vol. iii., p. 605.
[1043] Vol. iii., p. 286. This is in the dedication of his third Miscellany to Lord Ratcliffe.
His Essay on Dramatic Poesy. 37. His Essay on Dramatic Poesy, published in 1668, was reprinted sixteen years afterwards, and it is curious to observe the changes which Dryden made in the expression. Malone has carefully noted all these; they show both the care the author took with his own style, and the change which was gradually working in the English language.[1044] The Anglicism of terminating the sentence with a preposition is rejected.[1045] Thus “I cannot think so contemptibly of the age I live in,” is exchanged for “the age in which I live.” “A deeper expression of belief than all the actor can persuade us to,” is altered, “can insinuate into us.” And, though the old form continued in use long after the time of Dryden, it has of late years been reckoned inelegant and proscribed in all cases, perhaps with an unnecessary fastidiousness, to which I have not uniformly deferred, since our language is of a Teutonic structure, and the rules of Latin or French grammar are not always to bind us.
[1044] Vol. i., p. 136-142.