No More Learning

For, we
must once more remember that the conceits and the quips were
by no means intended merely to amuse; they were meant, partly,
to act as sugarplums for the serious passages, and, partly, to
drive these passages closer home by humorous application or
illustration. To expect all or many readers to read all Fuller's
books would be unreasonable; but nobody should think that he
a


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250
Antiquaries
understands Fuller until he has read at least one of them as
a book.
>
Except in regard to Reliquiae Wottonianae, and, perhaps,
even to this in most points beyond its title, the work of Izaak
Walton, by which he is almost universally known, may not seem to
'intrude him upon antiquaries' as Browne has it; but he was no
mean example of the temperament, then common, which creates
the antiquarian tendency. Born in East Gate street, Stafford, on
9 August 1593, he represented, through his father James, a family
of yeomen; but he was early sent to London to be apprenticed
to Thomas Grinsell and became a freeman of the Ironmongers'
company on 12 November 1618, having previously settled down
in the neighbourhood of Fleet street and Chancery lane. His
residence near St Dunstan's brought him into contact with Donne.
Jonson, Drayton, bishops Hall and King, Sir Henry Wotton and
others were, also, his friends; and, by 1619, his connection with
literature is, to some extent, shown by the dedication to him of
the poems of a certain ‘S. B. ' For a long time, we hear nothing
of him ; but, in 1640, he published his life of Donne, and, four
years later, left London, though he was back at the time of Laud's
execution. In 1650, he is found living at Clerkenwell, and, next
year, published Reliquiae. In an unobtrusive way, he seems to
have been a trusted member of the royalist party; and he had
Charles II's 'lesser George' confided to his care after Worcester.
In 1653, The Compleat Angler (not yet complete) appeared ; five
years later, he wrote his name on Casaubon's tablet in West-
minster abbey; and, in 1662, took up his abode, after the
hospitable fashion of great households in those days, with his
friend bishop Morley of Winchester. His other Lives followed
의 ​at intervals. In 1682, he published Chalkhill's Thealma and
Clearchus, and he died at the house of his son-in-law Hawkins
(a Winchester prebendary who had married his daughter Anne)
on 15 December 1683. He had been twice married : first, in 1626,
to Rachel Floud (a collateral descendant of archbishop Cranmer),
who died in 1640; then, in 1646, to Anne Ken, half and elder
sister to the future bishop who wrote Walton's epitaph. His
second wife died twenty years before him.
Walton's long life was thus divided into two periods; and it was
only in the later of these that he had full leisure. But this was a
leisure of forty unbroken years; and it is not likely that the work
i See ante, chap. iv.


## p. 251 (#267) ############################################

Izaak Walton
251
2
of the earlier time was very severe or strenuous. That his tastes,
his avocations, his associations were thoroughly literary, there is
no doubt; but they do not seem to have prompted him to any ex-
tensive or frequent literary exercise. The world-famous Compleat
Angler and the widely known Lives go together in one moderate
sized volume (even with Cotton's part of the firstnamed). There
is no valid reason whatever for crediting bim with the authorship
of Thealma and Clearchus. And the minor works and anecdota,
which the diligence of R. H. Shepherd collected some thirty years
ago, are of little importance and less bulk.
It has generally been conceded that the absence of quantity is
more than made up by the presence of quality, but the quantity
of that quality itself has been made the subject of dispute, some-
times unnecessarily (and, in reference to Walton, most inappro-
priately) ill-tempered. In The Compleat Angler, it has been
pronounced by some to be the result of consummate literary
art; while, to others, it seems to be—there almost exclusively,
and, in the Lives, to no small extent-purely natural and unpre-
meditated, the spontaneous utterance of a 'happy old man' (as
Flatman, with complete felicity, if not complete originality, called
him), who has lived with men of letters, and is familiar with
letters themselves, but who no more thinks of picking words and
turning phrases than a nurse does in telling tales to a child. But
this dispute could hardly be settled without settling what 'literary
art' is, and that would be a long process. Nor is the settlement
of the actual quarrel a matter of absorbing interest. The fact
remains that the singular and golden simplicity of Walton's style
-in The Compleat Angler more especially but, except when the
occasion seems to insist on more ceremony, also in the Lives
is matter of common ground and of no dispute whatever. Walton
was a man of no inconsiderable reading; and he could not have
been a man of his time if he had been shy of showing it, however
completely his character might lack pretension. But not Bunyan
himself can use a plainer and purer vernacular than Walton when
he chooses, as he generally does choose. On the much rarer
occasions when he talks book' a little (as in the passage about
the silver stream gliding towards the tempestuous sea,' which
preludes the scene with Maudlin and 'Come live with me and be
my love'), he may, possibly, be aiming higher, but he goes much
wider of his mark.
If this naturalness of style be duly considered, it will, perhaps,
be found to diminish, if not to remove altogether, any surprise
a


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252
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that might otherwise be felt at the production of so little work in
so long a life; at the remarkable excellence of the product; and
at its curious variety. Personal interest, and nothing else, appears
to have been the sole starting influence, so far as matter goes, in
every case, even in that of the life of Hooker? ; and personal quality,
and nothing else, to have been the fashioner of the style. Anything
-country, scenery, old-fashioned manners, piety, the strange com-
plexity of Donne, the simplicity (patient in life, massive and
independent in letters) of Hooker, the various characteristics of
Wotton and Herbert and Sanderson, the pastoral-romantic fairy-
land of Chalkhill-all these things, in one way or another, were
brought directly home to him, and he made them at home without
parade, and, with perfect homeliness and ease, as Philemon and
Baucis did the gods who visited them, to speak in the manner of
his own time.
The result was what ease generally brings with it-charm.
There have been, from his own time downwards, fishermen who
were contemptuous of his fishing; and recent biographers have
been contemptuous of anyone who should be content with the
facts of his biographies. The competent orbis terrarum of readers
has always been careless of either contempt. In his case, as in
almost all, the charm is not really to be analysed, or, rather, it is
possible to distinguish the parts, but necessary to recognise that
the whole is much greater than these parts put together. The
angling directions might fail to interest, and the angling erudition
succeed in boring; as to the subjects of the Lives, though they
were all remarkable men in their different ways, only Donne can
be said to have an intense interest of personality. The source
of attraction is Walton, not the 'chub or chavender,' or the
Hertfordshire meadows and streams, or Maudlin and 'red cow,'
or the decent joviality of my brother Peter, or Hooker's mis-
fortunes in marriage, or Sir Henry Wotton's scholarly urbanity,
but these things, as Walton shows them to us, with art so un-
premeditated, that, as has been said, some would deny it to be
art at all, yet with the effect of consummate mimesis of
presentation of nature with something of the individual presenter
added. But it will hardly be denied that his grace is positively
enhanced by the characteristic which he shares with the other
subjects of this chapter—the quaint, and, in him, almost un-
expected seasoning of learning. He has it, no doubt, least of the
1 Walton quotes from Hooker the words 'as discernible as a natural from an
artificial beauty. They were not without application in his own case.


## p. 253 (#269) ############################################

The Compleat Angler 253
four; and what he has he neither obtrudes and caricatures like
Urquhart, nor makes his main canvas like Browne, nor associates
pell-mell with play of conceit and purpose of instruction, as does
Fuller. With him, it is a sort of silver or gold lacing to the sober
grey garment of his thought and diction, though it should always
be remembered that grey is capable of almost more fascinating
shades than any other colour, and sets off the most delicate
textures admirably.
To dwell at any length on the fashion in which this sober grace
is brought out in The Compleat Angler would be superfluous; but
a word or two may be permitted. No book so well deserves as
a motto that stanza of The Palace of Art which describes the
'English home,' 'a haunt of ancient Peace,' with 'dewy pas-
tures, dewy trees. ' There is no dulness and no stagnation ; the
characters walk briskly, talk vigorously and argumentatively, fish,
eat, drink like men of this world, and like cheerful and active
men of a world that is going pretty well after all. But there is
also no worry; nothing ugly, vulgar or jarring. It is the landscape
and the company of The Faerie Queene passed through a slight
sieve of realism, and crimeless; only, in the distance, perhaps, an
erring gentleman, who reprehensibly derives his jests from Scripture
or from want of decency. A land of Beulah in short—with a
somewhat less disquieting atmosphere of lack of permanence, which
the land of Beulah itself must have carried with it.
!
The birth-year of Thomas, afterwards Sir Thomas, Urquhart,
or Urchard1_the best Scottish representative of the peculiar
seventeenth century character which was exhibited in different
ways in England by Burton earlier, and by Browne and Fuller in his
own time-used to be assigned to the same date as Browne's, 1605.
But this date has now, on good evidence, been shifted six years
later, to 1611. His father, another Sir Thomas, represented the
Urquharts of Cromarty, a family whose pedigree has been verified
to the year 1300, while it may reasonably be extended to Adam,
though the acceptance of the particulars (supplied, with character-
istic pedantry and humour mingled, by the subject of this notice)
may be facultative. The younger Thomas's mother was Christian
Livingstone of the noble family of that name. His father suc-
ceeded to considerable estates; but was either a determined
spendthrift or a very bad manager; and, in his later years (1637 to
1 He sometimes, if not always, signed himself so; using, as well, the initials 'C. P. ',
i. e. Christianus Presbyteromastix. '
6


## p. 254 (#270) ############################################

2 54
Antiquaries
his death in 1641), appears to have been subjected to rather
peremptory treatment, including personal restraint, by his eldest
son and other members of a self-constituted family council. It
is certain that, all his life, our Sir Thomas himself was the victim
of creditors; though, perhaps—when one considers his foreign
travels, and the fact that, at Worcester, he lost four trunks of
fine clothes besides three of MSS-not entirely without his own
contribution to the difficulties. He entered King's college,
Aberdeen, in 1622, and must have studied there vigorously; while,
after completing his course, he travelled much abroad, learnt
more, acquired accomplishments of various kinds and, according
to his own account, displayed martial and patriotic prowess re-
sembling that of the Admirable Crichton (whose chief celebrator
he himself was), and of 'Squire Meldrum' still earlier. He
emerges into public life at the time of the at first successful but
soon suppressed royalist rising in the north of Scotland which is
known as the Trot of Turriff (1639).
After the failure of this, he went to England, was knighted by
Charles I at Whitehall in 1641, but took no part in the civil
war proper, making another excursion to the continent in 1642–5.
In the last named year, he returned and settled at Cromarty. Three
years later, he was made officer of horse and foot’and, after the
king's execution in 1649, shared in the abortive rising at Inverness,
was declared a traitor, but, in 1650, was dismissed by the General
Assembly after examination. He joined Charles II in the ex-
pedition to England, fought at Worcester, lost the seven trunks
above mentioned, was taken and thrown into the Tower, but
leniently treated, transferred to Windsor and, finally, liberated by
Cromwell. Then he returned to Scotland and, in 1653, published
his great translation of the earlier part of Rabelais. From this
time, we know nothing whatever about him. That he died abroad
of rapture or laughter on hearing of the restoration is a legend.
But, in August 1660, his brother Alexander laid claim to the
hereditary office of sheriff of Cromarty, which practically implies
Sir Thomas's death.
For people who like a clear and consistent character, classi-
fiable under ordinary conventions, Urquhart must be a hopeless
puzzle ; indeed, most of his critics have got out of their difficulties
by the easy suggestion-door of a little mad,' which may be allowed,
but is insufficient. From his portraits-one exhibiting a gentleman
in cavalier dress, spruce, mustachioed, beribboned to the very
“nines' of the irresistible vernacular, and suggesting, in one of his


## p. 255 (#271) ############################################

Sir Thomas Urquhart 255
own admirable phrases, ‘one of the quaintest Romancealists' of the
time; the other, the same gentleman enthroned and crowned by
muses and other mythological personages—the enquirer turns to the
works they adorn, where the coxcomb, though he remains, shows
quite a different kind of coxcombry, and blends it with a pedantry
which is gigantesque and almost incredible. His Epigrams (1642)
are not specially remarkable for this, being mostly sensible enough
commonplaces expressed in hopelessly prosaic verse. But, in the
series of elaborately Greek-named treatises which followed, the
characteristics are quite different. Mathematicians do not seem
quite agreed as to Trissotetras (1645), but at least some competent
authorities are said to have allowed it possible merit, if only it
had been written in a saner lingo. As it is, it informs us that
The axioms of plane triangles are four viz. Rulerst, Eproso,
Grediftal and Bagrediffiu,' while Rulerst branches into Gradesso
and Eradetul, and is under the directory of Uphechet. This mania
for jargonic nomenclature pursues Urquhart throughout, and
seems sometimes to have been the very mainspring or exciting
cause of his lucubrations. The indulgence of it must have counted
for something in his famous and (even in his own time) much
ridiculed genealogy of the Urquharts (Pantochronocanon, 1652)
from Adam, with invented names for all the fathers and mothers
from Seth's wife downwards, whom history does not mention or
whom he cannot borrow from it. It dictated more than the titles
of Logopandecteision (1653), a scheme for a universal language,
and Ekskubalauron (1652), a treatise of his own rescued from
the gutter after the dispersal of his property at Worcester. When
it descends from proper names, it dictates, in its severer moods,
remarks about 'disergetic loxogonosphericals'; in its lighter,
intimations that he will 'proceed to the catheteuretic operation'
of something, and sneers at the ministerian philoplutaries' who
deprived a friend of his of a living for what Urquhart thought
insufficient cause.
Yet he is not mad all round the compass. The best known
passage of his work outside Rabelais, the account of the Ad-
mirable Crichton, though it may somewhat embroider the plain
canvas of truth, is vigorously and effectively written. Intensely
patriotic as he is a very 'bur-thistle’ in his aggressive proclama-
tion of Scottish merits and virtues—he, in the mid-seventeenth
century and in mid-war-time between England and Scotland,
argues stoutly and sensibly for a union parliament, representing
both divisions of the island. When his coxcomb-familiar is not


## p. 256 (#272) ############################################

256
Antiquaries
a
playing tricks with him on the one side, or his pedant-familiar on
the other, or both together-sometimes, in flashes, even when they
are doing their worst—he shows himself not merely, what he
always is, a scholar and a gentleman, but a man of most excellent
differences, acute, fanciful, stocked with pregnant ideas and
possessed of a very noteworthy faculty of expression for them,
whenever the fiend of jargon does not simply possess and speak
through him.
It may be questioned, however, whether his most glaring faults
and foibles did not stand him in almost as good stead as his gifts
and graces, when he took it into his head to give an English version
of Gargantua and Pantagruel. It is true that they led him to
exaggerate the peculiarities of his original; and that this exag-
geration has undoubtedly passed into the usual English estimate
of Rabelais himself. But only a man who had practised jargon, ,
largely combined with learning, for years could, even by exag-
gerating it, have excogitated a lingo capable of reproducing the
wonderful genius-galimatias of Master Francis. Urquhart could
coin words as easily as he could write, blenched at no extravagance,
would have scorned to rationalise any apparent nonsense, sym-
pathised thoroughly with, and could understand, his author's
undoubted learning, and had quite enough shrewdness, good
feeling and even exaltation of thought and sentiment to interpret
these qualities when they met him in that author.
The result, as is pretty generally granted, is an almost ideal
translation, perhaps enlarging slightly, as has been said, the moles
and warts of his subject—the gibberish, the 'broad' language, the
torrents of grotesque synonyms (in this last respect, Sir Thomas
was especially lavish) but reproducing the general effect amazingly.
Very often, scholars in originals are the harshest critics of trans-
lations. It may be said with confidence that those who have
known their Rabelais best in his own shape and language have
been the heartiest admirers of his English presenter. Motteux,
Urquhart's successor, did his work very well, but something has
departed in it; and Sir Thomas remains the last and greatest of
the great translators of the larger Elizabethan period.
These four royalist writers--Urquhart, to some extent, but by
no means wholly, being what Browne calls a 'monstrous draught
and caricatured representation’ of what Browne himself presents
magnificently, Fuller ingeniously and Walton in the simplest and
least pretentious fashion-agree in something more than in their


## p. 257 (#273) ############################################

Summary
257
a
royalism and in that determined attention to the past which un-
doubtedly they all display. They represent their own age, not
merely in the learning which attracted and rewarded that attention,
and in which the earlier seventeenth century probably surpassed
every other period, not merely in the obstinate quaintness which
was also characteristic of it, but in a peculiar command of prose
style which is likely to remain inimitable and unique. To set this
down to something like an accident of time, the dying down or
approaching extinction of the moreʻinsolent and passionate' spirit of
poetry and its temporary taking refuge in prose, is not irrational
and is probably correct, but it is not quite sufficient. More went
to the making of the group—and especially of Browne—than this ;
even if we leave to the idiosyncrasy of the individuals its first and
incalculable value. Perhaps not a little should be allowed for the
.
existence of a body of readers, not very large, perhaps, but not
inconsiderable, interested in learning and thought and not yet
accustomed to 'light' reading of the more modern type. Some-
thing more may be set down to the absence of the restrictions
of conventional grammar, conventional vocabulary, conventional
propriety of various kinds. The revolt of the plain style, the
demand for 'a naked natural way of speaking' and the like may
have been justified even by Browne and Fuller to a certain extent
and more than amply by Urquhart in his serious work. Even
Walton, though he speaks ‘naturally' enough, might be thought
by a man like Sprat not to speak sufficiently nakedly—to dress his
thought with too many tags of learning and flights of fancy. But,
if there was any sin, there was mighty and manifold solace.
Without the liberty of syntax, to some extent; without the un-
restrained abundance and variegated colour of vocabulary to a
much greater; without the endless decoration of learning, and
arabesque of imagination and conceit, the quaint flashing wit of
Fuller would find itself miserably hampered and (which is of far
greater importance) the magnificence of Browne could not exist.
The wit may tease some and the magnificence appear too solemn
and cumbrous, too much a matter of apparatus and circumstantial
peroration to others. If so, these authors are not for those
readers. But, fortunately, there are others for whom they are,
and who should be able to perceive that without what, from
some points of view, may seem their defects, their qualities could
hardly exist. Walton's simplicity would not be what it is without
the contrast of its mannerism; and, though a little of the original
writing of Urquhart may go a very long way, and to read too
17
E. L. VII.
CH. X.


## p. 258 (#274) ############################################

258
Antiquaries
much, even of Fuller consecutively, is not well, the parenthetic
and metaphysical wit of Broadwindsor can be returned to again
and again with satisfaction, and a moderate dose even of Logo-
pandecteision and Ekskubalauron has no unwelcome gust. On
the other hand, the charm of Walton is unfailing and unfading;
and the Rabelais of Sir Thomas of Cromarty has not merely a
borrowed, but an earned and contributory, place in the utterances
of the comic spirit of the world. While, as for those of the graver
genius, the work of Sir Thomas of Norwich, its scepticism tem-
pered by imagination and its style incrusted with the rarest gems
of phrase and rhythm, stands practically alone, even in its own
time—some things in Donne excepted—and without anything
similar or second at any other.


## p. 259 (#275) ############################################

CHAPTER XI
JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE CRITICISM
THE great names of Jonson and Bacon meet us at the threshold
of the seventeenth century, and the names of Milton and Hobbes
are soon added to theirs; but disappointment awaits the scholar
who expects to find their achievement in poetry and philosophy
matched by a similar achievement in the field of criticism. It is
doubtful whether any of these four justified one of the most
significant of the critic's functions by interpreting a poet to his
contemporaries, or by making an unknown name a real possession
of English literature: not a single author was better understood
because of any light shed by them. The utterances of Jonson con-
cerning Shakespeare impressed themselves upon his countrymen,
and, in a sense, increased Shakespeare's vogue and prestige ; but,
for the most part, they understated rather than illuminated the
contemporary taste which they confirmed. Yet, it would be untrue
to say that these critics did not accomplish anything, for they
changed the attitude of men toward literature and the criticism
of literature; and, by modifying the literary outlook of Englishmen,
they so transformed the spirit of criticism that the transition from
the age of Sidney to the age of Dryden seems not only intelligible
but inevitable.
At the outset, we are met by Bacon, and it is no less true of
him than of the others that his services to contemporary thought
are not the measure of his services to criticism. But he, too,
helped to transform the theory of literature, or, at least, to bring
order out of the chaos of theory; and he created a new conception
of literary history, which served as a touchstone to scholars from
the moment he enunciated it, though its real significance was not
apprehended for many generations to come. It was he who first
defined the relation of poetry to the imagination, and attempted a
classification of the arts and sciences based on the divisions of the
mind, according to which poetry bears the same relation to the
imaginative faculty that history and philosophy bear, respectively,
17-2


## p. 260 (#276) ############################################

260 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
to memory and reason. The Spaniard Huarte, in his Examen de
Ingenios, had already classified sciences and arts in a similar way,
and Bacon adopted this foreign system. But, in elaborating it, he
gave it a significance for criticism as well as for philosophy; and
his classification became a more or less permanent possession of
English thought and taste. Within the scope of the imagination,
he included allegorical poetry; and, to his rationalising mind, this
seemed the highest expression of poetic genius. He finds no
difficulty in justifying this inclusion, though his conception of the
imagination as a transformation of the realities of life into forms
more sympathetic to the human mind, as external nature idealised,
forces him to separate the lyric from truly imaginative poetry
and to place it with rhetoric and philosophy.
All this may seem to have little to do with the actual progress
of criticism ; but it must be remembered that the critics of the
preceding age had not thus definitely connected literature with
the mental faculty that creates it, and that Bacon, in doing
this, is a herald of the attitude of Hobbes and his successors.
It is by his conception of literary history, however, that he has
made his most important contribution. Just as literature was
regarded as a product of the imagination, and not merely as
something interesting in itself and by itself separate from the
mind of man, so, here, he conceives of it as baving certain external
relations with the age in which it is produced, not a thing in vacuo
but something expressive of the Zeitgeist, of which he was the first
to have a fairly adequate conception. Yet, with all these ideas
about the place of poetry in the scheme of the sciences and the
meaning and function of literary history, Bacon has given us very
few concrete judgments in respect to literature that are of any
considerable value. His method of interpreting poetry is either
through allegory, as in The Wisdom of the Ancients and elsewhere,
where poetic truth becomes merely a symbol of moral truth, or
through history, where a record of external changes in style and
in manner passes for criticism, without for a moment grappling
with the secret of an author's power or charm. His influence, both
by his specific achievements and by his general theory, was in the
direction of rationalism and science; yet he was an Elizabethan, and
touched by the romantic longings of his time. His statement that
art becomes more delightful when 'strangeness is added to beauty'
foreshadows Pater's definition of romanticism, and his assertion
that art works by felicity not by rule' places him in opposition to
the whole tendency of criticism in the century that was to follow.
>
6


## p. 261 (#277) ############################################

Jonson as a Critic
261
It was his contemporary Jonson, in fact, who first made this
conception of 'rule' native to English thought. In the prologue
of Volpone, he boasts that he has followed all the laws of refined
comedy,
As best Criticks have designed;
The lawes of time, place, persons he observeth,
From no needfull rule he swerveth;
and it was his critical function throughout his life to make
Englishmen realise that literary creation is not determined by
individual whim, but by an external and ideal order given by
literary tradition, and not to be swerved from without the sacrifice
of art. This was the chief influence which he exerted on his
younger contemporaries; and, in Jonsonus Virbius, the monument
of verse reared to his memory, John Cleiveland could say that it
was Jonson
Who first reform'd our Stage with justest Lawes,
And was the first best Judge in your own Cause;
Who, when his Actors trembled for Applause,
Could with a noble Confidence preferre
His own, by right, to a whole Theater,
From Principles which he knew could not erre.
‘Laws' and 'principles which could not err' first entered English
criticism through the agency of Jonson. It is true that Sidney, in
his Defence of Poesie, had espoused the three unities, on the
authority both of Aristotle and of 'common reason,' and it was
from Sidney that Jonson may have derived his original impetus
toward the acceptance of the classical tradition. Sidney's con-
ception of the high dignity of poetry, of dramatic form and of
humours in comedy are all to be found in the early writings of
Jonson; and, though this early glow of Elizabethan fervour cooled
with age, in the prefaces, prologues and epilogues of his plays,
in epigrams and poems, he continued to expound the message of
order in literature, of classical form, of the tempered spirit as
opposed to boisterous energy and emphasis. He took counsel
with the Latin rhetoricians, with Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca, Pliny,
Petronius and, later, with the humanists of the continent, Erasmus,
Daniel Heinsius, Justus Lipsius and Julius Caesar Scaliger. The
star of scholarship in criticism was passing northward from Italy to
Holland; and the deliberate and moderate classicism of the Dutch
Latinists, their reasonableness and common sense, made a deep
appeal to Jonson. Though his own classicism became more and more
rigid, he never failed to echo their assertion of the ‘liberty of poets
and their conception of the classics as 'guides, not commanders. '


## p. 262 (#278) ############################################

262 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
The chief result of these studies, and the chief monument of
Jonson as a critic, is to be found in his Timber or Discoveries,
published, posthumously, in 1641. It is a commonplace book,
certainly not intended for publication in its present form, and,
possibly, never intended for publication at all. Certainly, not one
of the utterances which it contains in respect to poetry and poetic
criticism is the result of Jonson's own thought. Recent scholarship
has been able to trace nearly every one of its famous passages to
some contemporary or classical origin, and it is fair to assume that
the slight remnant is equally unoriginal'.
If it were our purpose to judge Jonson as a literary artist, this
would be of slight consequence, for the artist may consider the
world as all before him where to choose, and may demand that we
consider not whence he has borrowed his materials but what he
has done with them. The critic's case is different. We have a
right to expect of him that he shall have reflected on literature;
that, out of the ideas of others, he shall mould ideas which shall
seem as if they were his own. Jonson has translated his originals
verbatim, and has not added a single idea that was not already
full-grown in them. If we were merely studying the taste of the
dramatist Jonson, all this would have high interest for us; but
it would be idle to dispute that Jonson the critic suffers from
the discovery. The 'constant good sense, occasional felicity of
expression, conscientious and logical intensity of application or
devotion to every point of the subject handled or attempted,'
which Swinburne found in the critical portions of Discoveries, are
virtues that must be credited to Jonson's originals rather than to
Jonson himself.
Yet, though Dryden's statement that 'there are few serious
thoughts which are new in’ Jonson has proved truer with time,
this did not affect the influence of his selective translation on the
age that was to follow; and Dryden himself could say that, in
Discoveries, 'we have as many and profitable rules for perfecting
the stage as any wherewith the French can furnish us. As an
influence, Jonson remains what he was ; as an original critic, he
indubitably loses in prestige. His influence was immediately
exerted on the younger men about him; some of its results may
be observed, for example, in the comments on poets and prosemen
in Bolton's Hypercritica; and, even now, the tremendous effects of
this influence on restoration poetry and criticism are only partly
comprehended. It was due to him that the pregnant utterances
1 See ante, vols. iv, pp. 348, 524, and vi, pp. 8, 9.
6


## p. 263 (#279) ############################################

New Elements
263
of post-classic rhetoricians and the lucid and rational classicism of
Dutch scholars became part and parcel of English thought.
Despite changes of taste, a number of Elizabethan survivals
may be found in the very heart of this period. The chapter on
poetry in Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman (1622) forms a kind of
text-book borrowed from Puttenham and Scaliger. The chapter
begins with a long and enthusiastic defence of poetry and a
rhapsody on its history, quite in the Elizabethan manner, and this
is followed by a brief survey of Latin and English poetry; but
Peacham has nothing to say concerning the Latin poets that had
not already been uttered by Scaliger, and nothing concerning the
English poets that had not been said by Puttenham. In similar
manner, Sir William Alexander, in his Anacrisis (1634 ? ), reverts to
the tradition of Sidney's Defence of Poesie, and summarises the
taste begun with Arcadia and culminating, after his own day, in
the heroic romances. Yet, even here, the new ideals of Caroline
taste are beginning to assert themselves. Not only is modern poetry
summed up in the prose romances, not only are Tasso and Sidney,
Vergil and Lucan, his idols, but a comparison of poetry to a formal
garden stands side by side with an attack on Scaliger and a defence
of poetic freedom. Balzac's letters and the writings of other men
of the new French school furnish us with the models of his style,
and we are here on the threshold of D'Avenant's preface to
Gondibert in manner and feeling. A new and tentative classicism
was struggling through the ordeal of preciosité. To this period,
too, belongs Suckling's Sessions of the Poets, with its casual and
ironical judgments of some of his contemporaries; and a few minor
essays of like character illustrate similar tendencies of the time.
In the next decade or two, the results of contact with France
appear, also, in the new theory and practice of translation and in
the critical trend toward simplicity in style. In France, a number
of brilliant translators were adapting the classics to the taste of
their countrymen. Of these, Perrot d'Ablancourt was the chief
exemplar, and the prefaces of his numerous translations enunciate
most clearly this new philosophy of paraphrase. 'I do not always
limit myself to the words or even to the thoughts of this author'
he
says,
in his version of Lucian, 'but, mindful solely of his purpose,
I accommodate it to the French air and manner'; and, in his
complete version of Tacitus, he goes so far as to say that an
injustice is done to a translation by comparing it with its original.
When this theory reached England, it came into contact with the
Jonsonian tradition of literal translation, and, for some time, these


## p. 264 (#280) ############################################

264 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
two schools existed side by side. Cowley, in the preface to his
Pindaric Odes, claims for himself the credit of having introduced
the new way into England; his biographer Sprat assumes that
Cowley was not the first to recommend it, but insists that he was
one of the first to practise it. The acknowledged herald of the
new method was Sir John Denham, in the well known verses
prefixed to Fansbawe's version of Il Pastor Fido (1647):
That servile path thou nobly dost decline
Of tracing word by word and line by line . . .
A new and nobler way thou dost pursue
To make Translations and Translators too;
They but preserve the Ashes, Thou the Flame,
True to his sense but truer to his fame.
Nine years later, Denham restated the argument in the prose
preface to his Essay on Translation, which had been begun much
earlier and which is one of the first English, attempts to put the
theory of loose paraphrase into practice.
The critical trend toward simplicity, which, also, received an
impetus from French influence, was especially directed to the
elimination of the conceits of the metaphysical school and the
current perversions of poetry and prose. That school had not had
any adequate expression in English criticism, just as the Eliza-
bethan drama was really without its true critical expounders and
defenders; but Henry Reynolds's Mythomystes (1632) illustrates
the perverse effect of the school in the realms of criticism. In this
work, the friend of Drayton and translator of Tasso's Aminta has
systematically applied Neoplatonism to the interpretation of
poetry. Bacon had already indicated the road, but Reynolds
follows it into a tropical forest of strange fancies. The cabalists
and neoplatonists, Philo and Reuchlin, but especially Pico della
Mirandola and Alessandro Farra, here find an English voice.
Mythomystes has another historical interest in its relation to the con-
troversy respecting ancients and moderns. It professes to contain
a brief for the ancients; but it argues their claims on grounds
utterly repugnant to neo-classicism, not their superior portrayal of
the fundamentals of human nature, but their defter manipulation
of the cabalistic mysteries. For Bacon, allegorical interpretation
seemed to furnish an opportunity for the scientific explanation of
poetry ; Reynolds's method implies the negation of science. It was
against such perversities of taste as these that the new exponents
of simplicity now directed sporadic attacks; but no systematic
expression of this new movement is to be found at this period, and
it did not gain real headway until the age of Dryden.


## p. 265 (#281) ############################################

Milton and Hobbes
265
6
The critical position of Milton, who began to write about this
time, has been defined by himself. In the treatise Of Education
(1644), he commits himself unequivocally to the tradition of 'that
sublime art' which is taught 'in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace,
and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and
others'; and to the tradition of renascence criticism he remained
faithful throughout his life. In the preface to Samson Agonistes
(1671), this attitude remains unmodified except by an occasional
touch of puritan conscience; even the somewhat earlier attack
on rime he inherited from Trissino and Tolomei. In the judgment
of literature, he has little to offer save a venomous onslaught on
Hall's satires (referring, especially, to the cacophonous 'pace of the
verse' and to the 'poorness and frigidity' of the imagery), and
contemptuous allusions to Sidney's Arcadia and Shakespeare's
Richard III. But his conception of the imagination as that which
alone makes literature vital, his veneration for the poet's con-
secrated office, his passionate defence of literary freedom, his ideas
concerning the spiritual unity of poetry and religion, were heritages
which he passed on to the critics of the following age; and, in-
directly at least, he helped to fructify not only poetry but criticism
as well, through the agency of such men as Edward Phillips,
Dennis and the two Wartons.
Bacon, as we have seen, gave poetry a definite place in a
scheme of the arts and sciences; he referred it to the imagination,
and used this term to explain the idealising process by which
poetry transforms the materials of life into forms of art. But he
did not attempt to analyse this process, or to explain the sources
and mutual relations of the various functions of the mind. This
is the peculiar work of Hobbes. The critics of the sixteenth
century had dealt with literature as an external phenomenon ;
they isolated the work of art from its position in space and time,
and from its relation to the mind which created it. This generalisa-
tion does not imply that the historical sense did not make itself
felt in some literary controversies, or that such words as 'wit,
'fancy,' 'imagination and the like do not occasionally and casually
occur in criticism; the Spanish critic Rengifo, for example, asserts
a vehement imagination, furor poeticus and agudeza de ingenio
to be essentials of the poet. But such words as these are casual
and unreasoned; they are not analysed; they remain, one might
say, abstract virtues of the poet, and are not brought into funda-
mental relation with the work of art itself. The concrete work
is tested in vacuo, and the critic is concerned with its unity,
>


## p. 266 (#282) ############################################

266 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
6
a
probability, regularity, harmony and the like. The seventeenth
century first attempted to deal accurately with the relation between
the creative mind and the work of art; it began to analyse the
content of such terms as 'wit,''fancy' and 'taste. ' Hobbes is here
a pioneer; he left an impress on critical terminology, and his
psychology became the groundwork of restoration criticism.
The relation of Descartes to French classicism suggests the
position of Hobbes in Stewart England.
Hobbes's theory of poetry is a logical result of his philosophy
of mind. For him, a mechanical universe continues to make itself
felt on the tabula rasa of the human mind; these impressions the
mind retains, arranges and combines. "Time and Education' (as
he puts it briefly, in popular fashion, in the letter to D'Avenant pre-
fixed to Gondibert) 'begets experience; Experience begets Memory;
Memory begets Judgement and Fancy; Judgement begets the
strength and structure, and Fancy begets the ornaments of a Poem. '
Here, ‘fancy' and 'judgment,' like Bacon’s ‘imagination,' are mental
processes which re-arrange the materials of experience into forms
of art; but, for Hobbes, the imaginative process is no longer
sufficient or even vital; fancy furnishes the 'ornaments,' and
judgment the strength and structure of poetry. His distinction
between the two became a commonplace of criticism in the period
of classicism : 'wit,' the current term for fancy, denotes quickness
of mind in seeing the resemblances between disparate objects;
judgment, or reason, finds differences in objects apparently similar.
This distinction had been suggested by the Italians of the later
renascence, and had been more clearly indicated, as a difference
in human temperament, by Bacon; but, with Hobbes, who first
gave it precision, it became part and parcel of English thought,
and was adopted by Robert Boyle, Locke, Temple, Addison and
others, until Harris pointed out that a distinction of this sort
would place Euclid's Geometry among the supreme works of fancy.
The French had realised the critical significance of the antithesis
for some time, but they never formulated it so clearly as this.
Throughout the second half of the century, in both countries, the
terms wit' and `judgment' were placed in a sort of conventional
opposition, like the doctrina and eloquentia of the humanists, and
the clash resounds through neo-classical criticism.
Hobbes's distinction of the poetic genres is the logical outcome
of his philosophy. He conceives of them as conditioned by the
divisions of the external world-heroic, comic and pastoral, corre-
sponding to court, city and country-and man simply arranges


## p. 267 (#283) ############################################

The New Aesthetic
267
>
9
what nature gives in forms of his own speech, narrative or dramatic.
The poetry of the court thus assumes the form of epic or tragedy;
the poetry of the city, satire or comedy; the poetry of the country,
bucolics or pastoral comedy. Here, there is no place for lyrical
forms; they are 'but essayes and parts of an entire poem. Bacon
had set the example for this indifference, and, later, Temple followed
in the path of Hobbes. Nor is there any place for didactic or
descriptive verse, for the subject of poetry is not natural science
or moral theory, but the manners of men,' presented in the guise
of lifelike fiction. The exclusion of didactic verse is Aristotelian,
and had furnished the subject for infinite controversy in the
renascence; but the seventeenth century tended more and more
to follow Roman practice rather than Aristotelian precept in this
respect. Yet Hobbes's 'manners of men' fails to suggest that the
whole content of human life (in its inner as well as its outer
manifestations) is the theme of poetry, and is Horatian rather than
Aristotelian.
The theme of poetry, then, is the manners of men ; its method
is that of verisimilitude, or resemblance to the actual conditions
of life; and Hobbes's scorn for ghosts and magic is the natural
outcome of this insistence on vraisemblance. From acquaintance
with the manners of men, rather than from books, the poet is to
obtain the elements of style, or 'expression. ' To know human
nature well, to retain images of it in the memory that are distinct
and clear, are the sources of perspicuity and propriety of style, and
of 'decorum’ in character-drawing; to know much of it is the
source of variety and novelty of expression. Hobbes's aesthetic is
consistent and logical throughout, the first of its kind in English
literature.
When he wields this body of theory in the concrete field of
criticism, his discretion fails.
A quarter of a century intervened
between the publication of his letter to D'Avenant (1650) and the
preface to his translation of Homer (1675), but the theory has not
fundamentally changed. Edward Phillips preferred the latter
because of the bias and friendly compliment of the former, and,
certainly, Hobbes's judgment of Gondibert and of Howard's British
Princes must be approached with at least as much caution as the
flattering dedications of the period. In the later preface, he
justifies his taste by the preference of Homer to both Vergil and
Lucan. He formulates seven 'virtues of the epic-in diction,
style, imagery, plot, elevation of fancy (which, he says, is usually
overestimated as a virtue of poetry), the amplitude of the subject
6


## p. 268 (#284) ############################################

268 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
and the justice and impartiality of the poet—and he then compares
Homer with Vergil and Lucan in respect to these essential quali-
ties. Dryden complains that Hobbes 'begins the praise of Homer
where he should have ended it,' meaning that Hobbes first considers
the choice of words and the harmony of numbers instead of the
design, the manners and the thoughts; and it is true that he also
fails to express several of the other main tendencies of neo-
classicism. Unlike his more orthodox contemporaries, he does
not give to the logical structure of a poem the same sort of exagge-
rated importance that the theorists of art for art's sake have given
to the externals of style ; he cares nothing for the rules which the
French had inherited from the Italians; he has serious doubts
about a fixed standard of taste. The method of comparison which
he urges was to have an important bearing on the progress of
criticism. This was a conventional exercise from the time of
Scaliger to that of Rapin, but Hobbes's way of basing his judg-
ments on general qualities of style and content is an advance
on theirs. The method was adopted by Rymer in his preface to
Rapin (1674); and it was from Hobbes, also, that Rymer acquired,
especially later, something of the same external and mechanical
outlook on life, the same political philosophy and spirit of con-
formity, the same clangour of style, the same magisterial attitude,
and that intellectual arrogance which made Dryden compare the
sage of Malmesbury with Lucretius.
D'Avenant's long preface to Gondibert (1650) is a dilution of the
aesthetic theory of Hobbes, but Tasso's discourses on the epic and
Chapelain's preface to Marino's Adone, doubtless, served as his
models. Nothing could differ more widely than the prose styles
of the two men; the style of Hobbes foreshadows Rymer, while
Cowley and D'Avenant prepare the way for Dryden and Temple.
Of the four men who associated themselves with the composition of
Gondibert in Paris, Hobbes was sixty-two years of age, D'Avenant
and Waller forty-four and Cowley thirty-two; obviously, the eldest
of these was less likely than the others to succumb to the influences
of French taste. The heroic poem (like the pastoral, an artificial
product of the later renascence) was in the air in Paris at that
time. Chapelain had been at work on La Pucelle for nearly
fifteen years, Lemoyne on his Saint Louis somewhat less; and
D'Avenant's preface bears a remarkable resemblance to those which
were soon to precede these and many other French epics in the
dozen years that followed. The spirit with which they worked
explains that of D'Avenant. It explains his conception of epic
a


## p. 269 (#285) ############################################

D'Avenant and Cowley
269
>
>
6
practice as a merely mechanical consequence of epic theory; it
explains how experience of human nature, which Hobbes con-
sidered essential to the writing of great poetry, tends to limit
itself to 'conversation’; it explains the talk about nature,' which
was to be more and more fundamental for English criticism, and
the attack on 'conceits,' one of the first of its kind in our language.
The concetti of the Italians had lost ground in France for some
time; D'Avenant was a pioneer in a campaign that, thenceforth,
was sustained without a break in England. In both countries, there
had been a metaphysical school of poetry; but only in Italy did the
principles of the school receive a critical formulation; and neither
England nor France had any contemporary equivalent for such im-
portant works as Tesauro's Cannocchiale Aristotelico or Pellegrini's
Fonti dell Ingegno. D'Avenant himself shows his natural leanings
toward the older school in his conception of poetry as a presenta-
tion of truth 'through unfrequented and new ways, and from the
most remote Shades, by representing Nature, though not in an
affected, yet in an unusual dress. ' This is Bacon’s ‘strangeness
added to beauty,' and is far from the principle of Pope's 'what oft
was thought but ne'er so well expressed. ' The defence of the
stanza form, the confused conception of 'wit;' the insistence on
religion as well as nature and reason as the basis of poetry, all
suggest D'Avenant's place in this transitional period of English
criticism.
Cowley, the junior of D'Avenant by a dozen years, occupies
a similar position. The influence of his poetry on contemporary
taste was powerful; but taste does not become criticism until it
has received reasoned expression. His keenest intellectual powers
expressed themselves, however, in his verse; in his prose, he aimed
rather at charm and clarity, after the fashion of the new standards
of France: here, his critical opinions are casual and fragmentary,
and, unlike Milton's, they explain the externals rather than the
essence of his own poetic practice. His chief critical utterances
are contained in the 1656 edition of his poems, both in the general
preface and in the notes to Davideis. This preface contains a
passage acknowledging the triumph of the commonwealth which
he omitted from later editions, and for which his first biographer
apologises at some length. The spirit of the commonwealth ex-
hibits itself in the insistence that poets should avoid obscenity
and profaneness, and in the impassioned defence of Biblical material
for modern poetry. In the decade which opens with D'Avenant's
preface to Gondibert (in which the Christian epic had been


## p. 270 (#286) ############################################

270 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
defended), heroic poems, sacred and profane, were coming forth
from French presses with the speed of the modern novel; Mambrun
had published his treatise De Poemate Epico; and Desmarets
de Saint-Sorlin inaugurated his long campaign in favour of the
merveilleux chrétien. Cowley does not accept
Cowley does not accept their moralistic
theory; for him, as for Waller, 'to communicate delight to others
is the main end of Poesie,' and a soul 'filled with bright and
delightful Idæas' the fountain of poetic creation. In charming
prose, he has paraphrased Ovid's complaint that poetry will not
bear fruit in a troubled mind or body, and he has extended the
principle to the influence of climate and of a 'warlike, various,
and a tragical age,' which is best to write of, but worst to write
in': this is the logical outcome of Hobbes's psychology. His later
work connects itself largely with the foundation and progress of
the Royal Society, and, through it, with the Baconian tradition;
and he played so important a part (if we may believe Evelyn) in
the attempt of the Society to organise a literary academy for the
refinement of English, that, at his death, the whole scheme was
dropped.
The influence of Hobbes's political philosophy on Restoration
thought and conduct is well known; his outlook on life, and, more
especially, the psychology by which it is explained, were scarcely
less influential in the domain of letters. Tempered and refined by
the social and literary influences proceeding from France, they
became, in the hands of younger men (not least of all in Cowley's
Odes), instruments of power. No member of this group accepts
an absolute standard of taste; they do not yield a complete sub-
servience to classical authority or to the pseudo-classical rules;
the rationalistic temper has not, as yet, flooded criticism to the
exclusion of all imaginative elements. They logically connect the
critical activity of the first and the second Caroline periods; and
Dryden begins his work at the point where D'Avenant and Cowley
leave off.
It will be noticed that most of these critics concern themselves
with literary principles, and only on occasion (and with doubtful
success) enter the field of critical judgment. But, even here, some
progress may be observed. In the censure' of authors, the
Elizabethans had seldom gone beyond the repetition of a few
traditional phrases. Impassioned on the subject of poetry in
general, its antiquity, its dignity, its beauty, they became timid
and reserved so soon as they faced the concrete problem which
every critic must face in the individual poet or the individual
6


## p. 271 (#287) ############################################

The Roll-Call
271
a
poem. Their method, for the most part, was the method of the
'roll-call,' a catalogue of poets, in which one name follows another,
each with its tag of critical comment. These comments are limited
by a narrow range of critical terminology, a few words of praise or
blame, some commonplace, some more highly coloured, and the
judgments that they express are those of a well established literary
tradition or of the common opinion of their time. The first ex-
tended critique in English seems to be that which Sidney, in his
Defence of Poesie, devotes to the tragedy of Gorboduc; here, for
the first time, critical principles are applied systematically to a
work of English literature. Yet, Sidney has little to say of Gorboduc
except that it has ignored the dramatic unities; he has few terms
with which to express its positive qualities, its special beauties or
defects, and no method of summing up the general effect in the
form of literary portraiture or appreciation. In the case of other
works, he adheres to the method of the roll-call. 'I account the
Mirrour of Magistrates meetely furnished of beautiful parts; and
in the Earle of Surries Liricks many things tasting of a noble birth,
and worthy of a noble minde. '
This is the staple of his judgment of authors. Nor do his
contemporaries and his successors stray beyond the range of the
roll-call. Of the seventy-four chapters of Puttenham's Arte of
English Poesie, which attempts to cover the whole field of poetical
criticism, a single chapter is devoted to a 'censure' of the English
poets; and here we are told that ‘for dittie and amourous ode
I finde Sir Walter Rawleyghs vayne most loftie, insolent, and
passionate; Maister Edward Dyar, for elegy most sweet, solempne,
and of high conceit; Gascon, for a good meeter and for a plentifull
vayne,’ etc. This is a typical example of roll-call criticism, the
most primitive form of literary characterisation ; literary history,
unguided by any organic principle, is as yet unable to express
itself save by adding name to name and epithet to epithet.
Harington, it is true, argues against the charge that 'Ariosto
wanteth art,' and repeats some of the commonplaces of Italian
criticism; but, for the rest, he is limited to disjointed and in-
temperate eulogy, the same incense that Sidney burnt at the
altar of Vergil. It is tradition and not criticism which speaks in
both. As they approach the poets of their own tongue, even more
as they approach their own time, they lose their certainty of
utterance; they have no terminology to give precision to their
vague impressions; they have no form or method which gives
unity or logic to their disjointed thoughts. It is at this point that
>
6


## p. 272 (#288) ############################################

272
Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
Jonson enters the field. It is not merely that he makes Quintilian
and Scaliger native to English criticism, by translating or para-
phrasing their ideas in a language both sane and robust; but,
under their guidance, he attempts the literary ‘portrait. ' Yet,
note how cautiously he works this new vein. The brief note on
Shakespeare in Discoveries is made up of classical echoes; and
the masterly portrait of Bacon as an orator follows, almost word
for word, the elder Seneca's description of Severus Cassius. Such
a portrait was as yet impossible in English, and, not unwisely,
Jonson leans heavily on Roman crutches. But it is in the famous
lines to Shakespeare that he is at his best, for the uplift of verse
has helped him to sureness and swiftness of speech. This is the
first adequate tribute to a great English poet; this, and the portrait
of Bacon, are the first of their kind in English.
The first training in adequate characterisation of the poets
seems, then, to have been given (however tentatively) by Jonson,
and it was certainly among his own disciples that literary por-
traiture first began to flourish. Verse rather than prose was
the surer vehicle, and the chief training ground seems to have
been the commendatory verses prefixed to plays and poems.
Those, for example, that appeared in Jonsonus Virbius (1638),
or in the 1647 folio of Beaumont and Fletcher, contain some
of the most acute criticism of the first half of the seventeenth
century, amid much that is the merest distortion of ingenious
eulogy. But what is new (and effective for criticism) in them is
the complete realisation of a great literary background. Shake-
speare, Fletcher, Jonson, Spenser, had imposed themselves on
criticism; and criticism grew rich (as it always does) by accepting
and passing these great poets as current coin of the realm. There
was a more or less serious attempt to understand them, to appraise
them, to express their significance; they jostled one another in
every discussion; and it was the most natural thing in the world
to compare and contrast them. It is this comparative criticism
which is employed to good use in these commendatory verses.
A few lines from Cartwright's tribute to Fletcher will illustrate the
acuteness of some of this criticism:
Jonson hath writ things lasting and divine,
Yet his love-scenes, Fletcher, compard to thine,
Are cold and frosty, and express love so,
As heat with ice, or warm fires mix'd with snow . . .
Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies
l' the ladies' questions and the fools' replies;


## p. 273 (#289) ############################################

Literary Appreciation
273
Old-fashion'd wit, which walk'd from town to town
In turn'd hose, which our fathers call'd the clown,
Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call,
And which made bawdry pass for comical.
a
6
Yet, elsewhere, for the most part, critics continued to follow the
roll-call; and even Jonson, here bookish rather than critical, uses
it in a brief note on the chief writers of English prose (embedded
in the borrowed material of Discoveries) and in other places. His
curt dicta in conversation with Drummond seem almost typical
of the method of contemporary criticism; and, despite all the
changes of time, this method retained its vogue up to the middle
of the century. Peacham, Bolton, Drayton, Alexander, Reynolds,
Suckling, all employ it, though some of them have amplified its
narrow scope or transformed it even in using it. Bolton, in Hyper-
critica (1618 ? ), gives a catalogue of bis favourite poets in crabbed
prose; Drayton, in the Epistle to Henry Reynolds, of Poets and
Poesy (1627), strings together a necklace of famous names on a
silken thread of verse. Drayton's comments are brief, but often
singularly appropriate and just; some of them have remained
memorable utterances of poetic criticism, as in the lines on the
'fine madness' of Marlowe and the kinship of his genius with the
'brave translunary things' of the first poets. But, after all, they
retain the marks of the roll-call; singly, as it were, they are
mere obiter dicta, like Jonson's conversations with Drummond,
utterances oracular and compact; together, they have no other
framework than that furnished by the familiar epistle in verse.
Neither singly nor jointly do they give any consistent criticism
of poets or poetry.
In Reynolds's Mythomystes, there is a serious attempt to arrive
at some consistency in the criticism of poetry by means of a
systematic interpretation of its content. But the allegorical
method, complicated here by an admixture of Neoplatonism and
cabalism, though it may offer opportunities for subtle interpretation
of mythological or mystical poetry, fails to explain most of the
moderns; and, in his brief introductory survey of modern poetry,
Reynolds does not divest himself of the cataloguing spirit of his
predecessors.
Though efforts to enrich the content and amplify the scope
of the roll-call failed, an attempt to bind its disjecta membra
into some kind of unity may be said to have succeeded temporarily.
As the Italians had bound their novelle together by an artificial
framework, so critics adopted a device from classical mythology to
18
E. L. VII.
CH. XI.


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274 Jacobean and Caroline Criticism
perform a similar function. This new framework makes of the
term roll-call no longer a metaphor but a poetic fact. In Suck-
ling's Sessions of the Poets (1637? ), the poets of the time are
represented as claimants for the laureateship at the court of Apollo;
each argues his claims, and hears them discussed by his fellows;
until, finally, Apollo decides in favour of a rich alderman whose
money makes up for his lack of skill. The discussion is rather
personal than literary, the talk of a coterie of artists and wits, and
is interesting as indicating the flavour of literary discussion during
the first Caroline period, much as the conversations of Jonson and
Drummond shed light on Jacobean taste. Yet, even here, not
much has been added since Jonson's day, for lady Would-be, in
the third act of Volpone, anticipates, by more than thirty years,
the very note of Suckling's criticism, in such lines as these:
Hee (Guarini] has so moderne and facile a veine,
Fitting the time, and catching the court-eare;
Your Petrarch is more passionate, yet hee
In dayes of sonnetting trusted 'hem [i. e. plagiarists) with much;
Dante is hard, and few can understand him;
But for a desperate wit, there's Aretine!
Only his pictures are a little obscene.
The Italian poet Caporali, taking a hint from Lucian, had first
systematically used mythological allegory for the purpose of literary
criticism or satire; and, in Spain, Cervantes had followed his
example in the Voyage to Parnassus. But it was the Italian
proseman Boccalini who, in his Ragguagli di Parnaso, gave
European prestige to this form; his work was translated and
imitated in all the languages of Europe; and, in England, besides
Suckling, Sheppard's Socratic Session, or the Arraignment and
Conviction of Julius Scaliger (1651) and Wither's(? ) Great Assises
holden in Parnassus (1645) illustrate the character of its influence.
This framework transfigures the dead bones of the old roll-call,
and, in Suckling and others, gives wit and fancy an opportunity to
enliven the casual utterances of criticism.
As we follow the course of the seventeenth century, we note
that the tags which follow the names of the roll-call develop in
amplitude. They still remain more or less conventional, but they
have been extended from a brief clause or a succession of adjectives
to sentences and paragraphs. Thus, D'Avenant, in a page or two,
traces the growth of epic poetry from Homer to Spenser, devoting
to each poet a paragraph of his own; and though, for example,
that on Spenser merely objects to the 'obsolete language,' the


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The Old and the New
275
unlucky choice of the stanza' and the allegory, critical utterance
has become more facile and self-expressive, has, in fact, developed
a manner of its own. But it was not until the age of Dryden that
the roll-call disappears entirely, and is displaced by the critical
study of a poet and his work. The critique of The Silent Woman,
the literary portraits of Jonson, Shakespeare and Fletcher, in An
Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), mark a new stage in the growth
of English criticism. The commendatory verses of many poets,
the new aesthetic of Hobbes, the prose style of Cowley and
D'Avenant, and many tentatives in the art of character-writing
have made such things possible; but it is the discours and examens
of Corneille (1660) that furnished Dryden with his true models.
With Dryden, then, the intensive study of works of literature
begins, and displaces the mere tags and epithets of the older
criticism. But literary history was not born in England for an-
other quarter of a century; and, in Rymer's View of Tragedy
(1693), despite an exaggerated animus against Elizabethan tragedy,
real learning was placed at the service of criticism, and the first
connected account of the rise of modern literatures attempted.
The critical literature of the first half of the century is interest-
ing, therefore, for its direction, rather than for any accomplishment
of its own. It revolutionised aesthetic principles, but accomplished
little or nothing in the field of concrete criticism. It did not
adequately explain or appraise the works of the great poets and
playwrights of the Elizabethan age. Englishmen were slowly
beginning to realise the greatness of their literary past, but
criticism did little to direct or encourage this new taste. The
playwrights themselves scattered comments on their own art
throughout their plays, and the modern scholar may arrange
these isolated utterances at his pleasure into a unified code; yet,
no critic of this age brought order and meaning out of the chaos
of hints and hopes, and the romantic drama remained without
its thoroughgoing exponents or analysts. New ideas in respect
to poetry were, indeed, being developed. But, though Jonson
elaborated a classical point of view and Hobbes a new aesthetic,
these ideas were not consistently or intelligently applied to the
literary heritage of the English people. Not until after the
.
restoration was the clash of romantic and classical achievement
truly apprehended, and its meaning analysed and explained.
a
18-2


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CHAPTER XII
HOBBES AND CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY
THE philosophical writings which belong to the period following
Bacon's death show but slight traces of Bacon's influence. His
genius was recognised, and he was quoted, now and again, on special
points; but his leading doctrines were generally ignored. No new
logic appeared on the lines described in his Novum Organum.
The writers of logical treatises followed the traditional scholastic
method, or adopted the modifications of it introduced by Ramus.
Even Milton's logic, which is founded on that of Ramus, pays no
attention to the Baconian revolution. It is worthy of note that, in
the middle of the sixteenth century, a beginning had been made at
writing works on logic in English. In 1552, Thomas Wilson pub-
lished The Rule of Reason, conteining the arte of logique. The
innovation was not without danger at the time, if it be true that his
publication on this subject in a vulgar tongue led to the author's
imprisonment by the inquisition at Rome. His example was
followed, in safer circumstances, by Ralph Lever, who, in his Arte
of Reason rightly termed Witcraft, teaching a perfect way to argue
and dispute (1573), not only wrote in English, but used words of
English derivation in place of the traditional terminology-foreset
and backset for 'subject' and 'predicate,' inholder and inbeer for
‘substance’and 'accident,' saywhat for 'definition' and so on. This
attempt was never taken seriously; and a considerable time had
to elapse before English became the usual language for books
on logic. In the seventeenth century, as well as in the sixteenth,
the demands of the universities made the use of Latin almost
essential for the purpose. The work of Richard Crakanthorp,
Logicae libri quinque de Praedicabilibus (1622), was one of the
best known of these text-books. The question of method, which
had ruled the thought of Bacon, was less prominent in the English
philosophy of the following period and did not lead to any new
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Fotherby and Hakewill
277
Religion is as powerful a stimulus to philosophical thought as
science is, and it is apt to lead more directly to the study of ultimate
problems. It was the chief interest in the speculative writings of
Herbert of Cherbury, and the same interest is even more directly
obvious in other writings. In 1599, Sir John Davies had published
his philosophical poem Nosce Teipsum, in which a view of the
nature of the soul and arguments for its immortality are 'ex-
pounded in two elegies. ' Utilising Platonic, as well as Aristotelian,
ideas, the author worked out a spiritual philosophy in which the
soul is regarded as akin to the universal order,
For Nature in man's heart her lawes doth pen;
Prescribing truth to wit, and good to will,
Which doe accuse, or else excuse all men,
For every thought or practise, good or ill:
and, therefore, the soul can find no true satisfaction in earthly
things:
Wit, seeking Truth, from cause to cause ascends,
And never rests till it the first attaine:
Will, seeking Good, finds many middle ends,
But never stayes, till it the last doe gaine.
The same influence led to work of a philosophical kind among
theologians, usually conveyed in a scholastic manner. In his
Atheomastix (1622), Martin Fotherby, bishop of Salisbury, relied
chiefly on St Thomas Aquinas in his demonstration of the being of
God, and maintained that there is a 'natural prenotion' that there
is a God. The work of George Hakewill, archdeacon of Surrey,
entitled An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence
of God (1627), touches on philosophy without being genuinely philo-
sophical in character. Bacon is referred to for his ‘noble and
worthy endeavour. . . so to mix and temper practice and speculation
together, that they may march hand in hand'; but his new method
is not spoken of, though both Ramus and Lully are referred to in
the section on advances in logic. Nor does the discussion on truth
contain any observations beyond the ordinary commonplaces: it does
not show any knowledge of Herbert of Cherbury's enquiry, and can
hardly have suggested ideas to lord Brooke.