It was at the close of the Elizabethan period that our first town-satirists arose, from whom we learn the complicate system of manners, in the artifices practised in society; and in looking on their phantasmagorias, we are often startled among their grotesque forms by discovering our own exact faces. Satires on manners, descriptive of the lighter follies and the more involved artifices of social life, could hitherto have had no scope. The great in station alone constituted what may be considered as society, without any of those marking differences resulting from the inequalities of fortune. Satire then, as with Skelton, was an invective discharged at some potent individual at the risk of life; or it was an attack on a whole body, as Piers Ploughman’s on the clergy of the times, while Will, or John, or Piers, whatever was his name, hid himself behind a hedge on Malvern Hills. Society, in the modern acceptation, of a miscellaneous mixture, which equalizes men even in their inequality, supplying passing objects for raillery or indignation, opened that wider stage, which a growing metropolis only could exhibit. We must become intimate with men to sound even the depths of superficial follies, and declamation may even fall short in the conception of some enormous criminal. Society must have considerably advanced before a town-satirist could appear.
The change in style was not less remarkable than that in manners. Towards the close of the reign of Elizabeth, after the wild luxuriance of fancy which had everywhere covered the fresh soil of the public mind, in the riot of our genius, a great change was occurring in the minds of our writers. Nature, in her open paths of sunshine, no longer busied them, while they stole into the bye-corners of abstract ideas, and roved after glittering conceits. Philosophy introduced itself into poetry, and wit became the substitute for passion. It was then that Sir John Davies wrote his “Immortality of the Soul,” which still remains a model of didactic verse; and Donne, “The Progress of the Soul,” a progress which he did not venture to conclude—a poem the most creative and eccentric in the language, but which must be reserved for the few. Donne, who closed his life as a St. Austin, had opened it as a Catullus.
The depth of sentiment was contracted into sententious epigrams, alike in prose and verse; and in the display of their ingenuity, the remotest objects were brought into collision, and the most differing things into a strange coherence, to startle by surprises, and to make us admire these wonders by their novelty. They cast about them their pointed antitheses, and often subsided into a clink of similar syllables, and the clench of an ambiguous word.
In all matters they affected curt phrases; and it has been observed that even the colloquial style was barbarously elliptical. They spoke gruff and short, affecting brevity of words, which was probably held to be epigrammatic. It became fashionable to write what they entitled books of “Epigrams” and books of “Characters.” They appear to have taken their notion of an epigram from the Greek anthology, where the term was confined to any inscription for a statue or a tomb, or any object to be commemorated. Modern literature, in adopting the term, has applied it to a different purpose from its original signification. An epigram now is a short satire closing with a point of wit. Wit, in our present sense, was yet unpractised, and the modern epigram was not yet discovered. Ben Jonson has composed books of epigrams; but, though he has censured Sir John Harrington’s as not being epigrams, but mere narratives, has written himself in the prevalent style of his day. They are short poems on persons, and on incidents in his own life, which he poured out to relieve his own feelings when they were outraged, and, so far, they are a reflection of the poet’s state of mind—the autobiography of his potent intellect. As among these epigrammatists we never had a Martial, so among these character-writers we could hardly expect a La Bruyère for his refined causticity; but the most skilful, as Sir Thomas Overbury and Bishop Earle, are so witty as to seem grotesque, but it is human nature disguised in the fashions of the day.[2]
This infection of style must have come from a higher source than a mere fashionable affectation of the day, for it endured through half a century. The axiomatic style of Bacon in his “Essaies,” which first appeared in 1597, probably set the model of the curt period for these Senecas in prose and verse, who found no difficulty in putting together short sentences, without, however, having discovered the art of short thoughts.
This change in style is considered as characteristic of the age of James, but it began before his reign. The age of this monarch has been universally condemned as the age of pedantry, and of quibbles and conceits, all which, indeed, have been liberally ascribed to his taste; but in the plentiful evidence of his wit and humour, it would be difficult to find an instance of these bastard ornaments of style.
In the history of literature the names of sovereigns usually only serve to mark its dates; and an “author-sovereign,” to use Lord Shaftesbury’s emphatic expression, can exercise no prerogative, and yields even his precedence. In more than one respect James the First may form an exception, for the barren list of his writings alone might serve to indicate the age; their subjects were not so peculiar to this monarch’s taste as they were common with higher geniuses than his majesty.
When on the throne of England, it was deemed advisable to collect his majesty’s writings, the honour of the editorship was conferred on Montague, Bishop of Winton, whom Fuller has characterised as “a potent courtier;” and the courtly potency of the prelatical editor effuses itself before the “majesty of kings” in the most awful of all prefaces.
Cavillers there were, who, on distinct principles, objected to a king being a writer of books, carrying on war “by the pen instead of the pike, and spending his passion on paper instead of powder.” This was a military cry from those whose “occupation had long gone.” Others, more critically nice, assumed that, “since writing of books had grown into a trade, it was as discreditable for a king to become an author as it would be for him to be a practitioner in a profession.” Such objectors were not difficult to put down, and the bishop has furnished an ample catalogue of “royal authors” among all great nations; and, in our own, from Alfred to Elizabeth. The royal family of James were particularly distinguished for their literary acquirements. As that was the day when no argument could be urged without standing by the side of some authority, the bishop had done well, and no scholar in an upper class could have done better; but this bishop was imprudent, his restless courtliness fatigued his pen till he found a divine origin of king-writing! “The majesty of kings,” he asserts, “is not unsuited to a writer of books;” and proceeds—“The first royal author is the King of kings—God himself, who doth so many things for our imitation. It pleased his divine wisdom to be the first in this rank, that we read of, that did ever write. He wrote on the tables on both sides, which was the work of God.” This was in the miserable strain of those unnatural thoughts and remote analogies which were long to disfigure the compositions even of our scholars. How James and the bishop looked on one another at their first meeting, after this preface was fairly read, one would like to learn; but here we have the age!
One work by this royal author must not pass away with the others; it is not only stamped with the idiosyncrasy of the author, but it is one of those original effusions which are precious to the history of man. “The Basilicon Doron, or His Majesty’s Instructions to His Dearest Son Henry the Prince,” is a genuine composition in the vernacular idiom; not the prescribed labour of a secretary, nor the artificial composition of the salaried literary man, but warm with the personal emotions of the royal author. He writes for the Prince of Scotland, and about the Scottish people; he instructs the prince even by his own errors and misfortunes. Some might be surprised to find the king strenuously warning the prince against pedantry; exhorting his pupil to avoid what he calls any “corrupt leide, as book-language and pen-and-ink terms;” counselling him to write in his own language, “for it best becometh a king to purify and make famous his own tongue.” To have ventured on so complete an emancipation from the prevalent prejudices, in the creation of a vernacular literature, is one evidence, among many, that this royal author was not a mere pedant; and the truth is, that his writings on popular subjects are colloquially unostentatious; abstaining from those oratorical periods and rhetorical fancies which the scholar indulged in his speeches and proclamations—the more solemn labours of his own hand.