Halleck's New English Literature

by Reuben Post Halleck

During the reign of James I. and that of his son, Charles I. (1625-1649) a worse ruler on the same lines, thousands of Englishmen came to New England to enjoy religious liberty. The Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth in 1620. The exodus was very rapid during the next twenty years, since those who insisted on worshiping God as they chose were thrown into prison and sometimes had their ears cut off and their noses mutilated. In the sixteenth century, the religious struggle was between Catholics and Protestants, but in this age both of the contestants were Protestant. The Church of England (Episcopal church) was persecuting those who would not conform to its beliefs.

Side by side with the religious strife was a struggle for constitutional government, for legal taxes, for the right of freedom of speech in Parliament. James I. and Charles I. both collected illegal taxes. Finally, when Charles became involved in war with Spain, Parliament forced him in return for a grant of money to sign the Petition of Right (1628), which was in some respects a new Magna Charta.

Charles did not keep his promises. For eleven years he ruled in a despotic way without Parliament. In 1642 civil war broke out between the Puritans, on one side, and the king, nobles, landed gentry, and adherents of the Church of England, on the other. The Puritans under the great Oliver Cromwell were victorious, and in 1649 they beheaded Charles as a "tyrant, traitor and murderer." Cromwell finally became Protector of the Commonwealth of England. The greatest Puritan writer, John Milton, not only upheld the Commonwealth with powerful argumentative prose, but also became the government's most important secretary. Though his blindness would not allow him to write after 1652, he used to translate aloud, either into Latin or the language of the foreign country, what Cromwell dictated or suggested. Milton's under-secretary, Andrew Marvel, wrote down this translation.

[Illustration: CROMWELL DICTATING TO MILTON DISPATCHES TO THE KING OF
FRANCE CONCERNING THE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT.[1] From the painting by
Ford Madox Brown.]

The Puritans remained in the ascendancy until 1660, when the Stuart line was restored in the person of Charles II.

The Puritan Ideals.—The Renaissance had at first seemed to promise everything, the power to reveal the secrets of Nature, to cause her to gratify man's every wish, and to furnish a perpetual fountain of happy youth. These expectations had not been fulfilled. There were still poverty, disease, and a longing for something that earth had not given. The English, naturally a religious race, reflected much on this. Those who concluded that life could never yield the pleasure which man anticipates, who determines by purity of living to win a perfect land beyond the shores of mortality, who made the New World of earlier dreams a term synonymous with the New Jerusalem, were called Puritans.

Their guide to this land was the Bible. Our Authorized Version (1611), the one which is in most common use to-day, was made in the reign of James I. From this time became much easier to get a copy of the Scriptures, and their influence was now more potent than ever to shape the ideals of the Puritans. In fact, it is impossible to estimate the influence which this Authorized Version has had on the ideals and the literature of the English race. Had it not been for this Version, current English speech and literature would be vastly different. Such words and expressions as "scapegoat," "a labor of love," "the eleventh hour," "to cast pearls before swine," and "a howling wilderness" are in constant use because the language of this translation of the Bible has become incorporated in our daily speech, as well as in our best literature.

The Puritan was so called because he wished to purify the established church from what seemed to him great abuses. He accepted the faith of John Calvin, who died in 1564. Calvinism taught that no earthly power should intervene between a human soul and God, that life was an individual moral struggle, the outcome of which would land the soul in heaven or hell for all eternity, that beauty and art and all the pleasures of the flesh were dangerous because they tended to wean the soul from God.

The Puritan was an individualist. The saving of the soul was to him an individual, not a social, affair. Bunyan's Pilgrim flees alone from the wrath to come. The twentieth century, on the other hand, believes that the regeneration of a human being is both a social and an individual affair,—that the individual, surrounded by the forces of evil, often has little opportunity unless society comes to his aid. The individualism of the Puritan accomplished a great task in preparing the way for democracy, for fuller liberty in church and state, in both England and America.

Our study of the Puritan ideals embodied in literature takes us beyond 1660, the date of the Restoration, because after that time two great Puritan writers, John Milton and John Bunyan, did some of their most famous work, the one in retirement, the other in jail. Such work, uninfluenced by the change of ideal after the Restoration, is properly treated in this chapter. While a change may in a given year seem sufficiently pronounced to become the basis for a new classification, we should remember the literary influences never begin or end with complete abruptness.