Jeremy Collier, a Nonjuring clergyman (1650-1726), attained fame, not as the advocate of decencies, but of decency. His Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) occasioned a great sensation, and was efficacious in abating the evils against which it was directed, although it is probable that Addison’s mild rebuke and better example accomplished even more. As the adversary of men of wit and genius, Collier has become obnoxious to their representatives, and has been unfairly reviled as a sour fanatic. In fact he is very moderate, admits that the stage may be a valuable medium of instruction, and only denounces its abuse. Scott and Macaulay have done him justice, and Mr. Gosse gives an excellent analysis of his work in his biography of Congreve. His wit is as unquestionable as his zeal, but his argument is not everywhere equally cogent. On the chapter of profaneness he is fantastic and straitlaced, and so tender of dignities that he will not allow even the god Apis to be disrespectfully mentioned. On that of immorality he is unanswerable, and unless the incriminated dramatists were prepared to say, ‘Evil, be thou my good,’ they could but own
‘Pudet haec opprobria nobis
Et dici potuisse, et non potuisse refelli.’
Congreve and Vanbrugh attempted to reply, but to little purpose. Dryden kissed the rod. Collier’s volume is said to have been ‘conceived, disposed, transcribed, and printed in a month.’ He had previously achieved notoriety as a Jacobite pamphleteer, and in his old age became the official head of the decaying sect of the Nonjurors.
Although Richard Bentley (1662-1743) belongs mainly to the eighteenth century, his dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris (1699) falls within the seventeenth, and an account of the literary criticism of this age would be incomplete without some mention of the one epoch-making critical work it produced. There is no need to tell again the story of the Bentley-Boyle controversy, so admirably narrated by Macaulay and Jebb; but it may be observed here that it marks an era in criticism as the first example of the testimony of antiquity being irretrievably overthrown by internal evidence. It was not the first time that the genuineness of attested ancient writings had been disputed. Valla had waged war upon the forged donation of Constantine, but his case was so very clear that he had not been answered, but as far as possible ignored. Phalaris had found defenders, and this controversy was perhaps the first in which tradition and authority were fairly vanquished in a pitched battle. Bentley’s extraordinary powers of mind were almost equally evinced in his Boyle Lectures, also a production of the seventeenth century, which will be noticed in their place.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] An instance of the observation of nature as unusual with Dryden as chimneys of the size required are unusual with us.
CHAPTER VIII.
PHILOSOPHY.
From the criticism of books we pass, by no violent transition, to the criticism of principles—moral science. The latter half of the seventeenth century is a distinguished period in the history of English philosophy, for in it the most distinctively national of all systems which have obtained currency in this country was fully formulated. It is remarkable that while both empirical and transcendental views in philosophy found supporters, the champions of the latter comprised several illustrious names, and that of the former only one, while nevertheless empiricism obtained as complete a triumph as has ever been recorded in the history of opinion. The principal reason, no doubt, is the natural attractiveness to the solid homely understanding of the Englishman of conclusions based on experience and common sense;[9] but partly also to the fact that the illustrious man by whom the empirical philosophy was mainly upheld carried his speculations into practical life, and became foremost among the defenders of civil and religious liberty. If Locke, like his forerunner Hobbes, had employed his acuteness in defence of absolute power, he would, like Hobbes, have been caressed by the court, but his doctrines would have been slighted by the nation.
John Locke (1632-1704).