The general temper of Europe.
Such an influence could hardly have been aroused by English letters had they not given expression to what was the general temper of Europe at the time. The cessation of religious wars, the upgrowth of great states with a new political and administrative organization, the rapid progress of intelligence, showed their effect everywhere in the same rationalizing temper, extending not only over theology but over each department of thought, the same interest in political and social speculation, the same drift towards physical inquiry, the same tendency to a diffusion and popularization of knowledge. Everywhere the tone of thought became secular, scientific, prosaic; everywhere men looked away from the past with a certain contempt; everywhere the social fusion which followed on the wreck of the Middle Ages was expressing itself in a vulgarization of ideas, in an appeal from the world of learning to the world of general intelligence, in a reliance on the "common sense" of mankind. Nor was it only a unity of spirit which pervaded the literature of the eighteenth century. Everywhere there was as striking an identity of form. In poetry this showed itself in the death of the lyric, as in the universal popularity of the rhetorical ode, in the loss of all delight in variety of poetic measure, and in the growing restriction of verse to the single form of the ten-syllable line. Prose too dropped everywhere its grandeur with its obscurity; and became the same quick, clear instrument of thought in the hands of Addison as in those of Voltaire.
Creation of a literary class.
How strongly this had become the bent of English letters was seen in the instance of Dryden. In the struggle of the Revolution he had struck fiercely on the losing side, and England had answered his blows by a change of masters which ruined and beggared him. But it was in these later years of his life that his influence over English literature became supreme. He is the first of the great English writers in whom letters asserted an almost public importance. The reverence with which men touched in after-time the hand of Pope, or listened to the voice of Johnson, or wandered beside his lakes with Wordsworth, dates from the days when the wits of the Revolution clustered reverently round the old man who sate in his armchair at Will's discussing the last comedy, or recalling his visit to the blind poet of the "Paradise Lost." It was by no mere figure that the group called itself a republic of letters, and honoured in Dryden the chosen chief of their republic. He had done more than any man to create a literary class. It was his resolve to live by his pen that first raised literature into a profession. In the stead of gentlemen amusing a curious leisure with works of fancy, or Dependants wringing bread by their genius from a patron's caprice, Dryden saw that the time had come for the author, trusting for support to the world of readers, and wielding a power over opinion which compensates for the smallness of his gains. But he was not only the first to create a literary class; he was the first to impress the idea of literature on the English mind. Master as he was alike of poetry and of prose, covering the fields both of imagination and criticism, seizing for literary treatment all the more prominent topics of the society about him, Dryden realized in his own personality the existence of a new power which was thenceforth to tell steadily on the world.
The new poetry.
And to this power he gave for nearly a century its form and direction. In its outer shape as in its inner spirit our literature obeyed the impulse he had given it from the beginning of the eighteenth century till near its close. His influence told especially on poetry. Dryden remained a poet; even in his most argumentative pieces his subject seizes him in a poetic way, and prosaic as much of his treatment may be, he is always ready to rise into sudden bursts of imagery and fancy. But he was a poet with a prosaic end; his aim was not simply to express beautiful things in the most beautiful way, but to invest rational things with such an amount of poetic expression as may make them at once rational and poetic, to use poetry as an exquisite form for argument, rhetoric, persuasion, to charm indeed, but primarily to convince. Poetry no longer held itself apart in the pure world of the imagination, no longer concerned itself simply with the beautiful in all things, or sought for its result in the sense of pleasure which an exquisite representation of what is beautiful in man or nature stirs in its reader. It narrowed its sphere, and attached itself to man. But from all that is deepest and noblest in man it was shut off by the reaction from Puritanism, by the weariness of religious strife, by the disbelief that had sprung from religious controversy; and it limited itself rigidly to man's outer life, to his sensuous enjoyment, his toil and labour, his politics, his society. The limitation, no doubt, had its good sides; with it, if not of it, came a greater correctness and precision in the use of words and phrases, a clearer and more perspicuous style, a new sense of order, of just arrangement, of propriety, of good taste. But with it came a sense of uniformity, of monotony, of dulness. In Dryden indeed this was combated if not wholly beaten off by his amazing force; to the last there was an animal verve and swing about the man that conquered age. But around him and after him the dulness gathered fast.
The new prose.
Of hardly less moment than Dryden's work in poetry was his work in prose. In continuity and grandeur indeed, as in grace and music of phrase, the new prose of the Restoration fell far short of the prose of Hooker or Jeremy Taylor, but its clear nervous structure, its handiness and flexibility, its variety and ease, fitted it far better for the work of popularization on which literature was now to enter. It fitted it for the work of journalism, and every day journalism was playing a larger part in the political education of Englishmen. It fitted it to express the life of towns. With the general extension of prosperity and trade the town was coming into greater prominence as an element of national life; and London above all was drawing to it the wealth and culture which had till now been diffused through the people at large. It was natural that this tendency should be reflected in literature; from the age of the Restoration indeed literature had been more and more becoming an expression of the life of towns; and it was town-life which was now giving to it its character and form. As cities ceased to be regarded simply as centres of trade and money-getting, and became habitual homes for the richer and more cultured; as men woke to the pleasure and freedom of the new life which developed itself in the street and the mall, of its quicker movement, its greater ease, its abundance of social intercourse, its keener taste, its subtler and more delicate courtesy, its flow of conversation, the stately and somewhat tedious prose-writer of days gone by passed into the briefer and nimbler essayist.
The Essayists.
What ruled writer and reader alike was the new-found pleasure of talk. The use of coffee had only come in at the close of the civil wars; but already London and the bigger towns were crowded with coffee-houses. The popularity of the coffee-house sprang not from its coffee, but from the new pleasure which men found in their chat over the coffee-cup. And from the coffee-house sprang the Essay. The talk of Addison and Steele is the brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print: but its literary charm lies in this, that it is strictly talk. The essayist is a gentleman who chats to a world of gentlemen, and whose chat is shaped and coloured by a sense of what he owes to his company. He must interest and entertain, he may not bore them; and so his form must be short; essay or sketch, or tale or letter. So too his style must be simple, the sentences clear and quotable, good sense ready packed for carriage. Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of imaginative excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of phrase. The deeper themes of the world or man were denied to him; if he touches them it is superficially, with a decorous dulness, or on their more humorous side with a gentle irony that shows how faint their hold is on him. In Addison's chat the war of churches shrinks into a puppet-show, and the strife of politics loses something of its fictitious earnestness as the humourist views it from the standpoint of a lady's patches. It was equally impossible to deal with the fiercer passions and subtler emotions of man. Shakspere's humour and sublimity, his fitful transitions from mood to mood, his wild bursts of laughter, his passion of tears, Hamlet or Hamlet's gravedigger, Lear or Lear's fool, would have startled the readers of the "Spectator" as they would startle the group in a modern drawing-room.
