CHAPTER I

POETRY AFTER THE RESTORATION

WHEN the romantic fervour of the age of Elizabeth had completely exhausted itself, towards the middle of the seventeenth century, the poetical field in England was again left fallow, as it had been left in the early part of the sixteenth century, at the decline of the mediæval period. The great poets had spoken in rapturous accents, with a noble and irregular music, and their followers, unable to repeat their sublimity, had exaggerated their irregularity into licence. This rapid decline from the Elizabethan elevation of style was hastened by the general subsidence, throughout Europe, of the fervour of the Renaissance. The form of English poetry was degraded, not merely by its own impetus, but by the nature of the literary changes then being made in France, in Spain, and in Italy. Imaginative literature was undergoing a complete transformation in all parts of Europe. At the moment of deepest decadence it had reached very much the same position which it had reached, at various moments, in the complete decline of medievalism. In England, for instance, the relation of a writer like Phineas Fletcher to Spenser was almost exactly analogous to that of Hawes to Chaucer. But when it came to the question of revival, it was plain that renovation could not lie any longer on the side of what was fervid, spontaneous, and fantastic. In this direction there was nothing new to be attained, and the tendency had to be rather in the medieval than in the Renaissance

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direction, more towards the classic regularity of the great fourteenth century writers than towards the exquisite audacities of the end of the sixteenth century.

The change, then, was one in the direction of repression and revision. It was made in the pursuit of regular form, reasonable thought, and a subdued and chastened ornament. Although the results of the change appear anything but attractive to ourselves, and although the direct and positive gain to English poetry seems very small to us now, the relief from irregularity and licence was eagerly welcomed. The most obvious phenomenon connected with the change in poetry was the gradual substitution, in nondramatic verse, for the thousand-and-one odd metrical forms of the lyrists, of a single normal instrument in versification, namely, the neatly-balanced and unbroken heroic couplet, containing five beats in each line. It was true that this form, as well as almost all others to be found in English poetry, had been known to the Elizabethans, but it had possessed no special attraction for them, and not one of them had made habitual use of it. But throughout the period with which we deal in this volume, this heroic couplet was the normal and habitual form in which poetry, except on the stage, moved in its serious moments. There were, of course, many exceptions, and about 1725 a very vigorous effort was made, but with only partial success, to substitute blank verse for it. These exceptions will be noted as we proceed, but it is proper here to insist that the employment of the heroic couplet, and the polishing of that couplet, are the most prominent facts connected with the art of poetry during the classic period in this country.

This alteration of form was introduced by one writer, who lived to see it universally adopted. The life of this poet, Edmund Waller (1605-1687), covers the entire period of transformation. When he was a youth the romantic manner was the only one in practice; long before he died the classic manner was unchallenged. The precise and regular taste made fashionable by Waller found a special propriety in resuming a vehicle of expression which had

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been, it would seem, invented by Chaucer for use in The Canterbury Tales, about 1385. The heroic couplet had been employed by its author with extraordinary art, and almost without irregularity. But it was an instrument upon which none but Chaucer seemed to know how to play, and within a quarter of a century after his death it was completely laid aside. When the couplet came into use again, in the Elizabethan age, the form was greatly modified, and the polished distich, as Chaucer had devised it, was lost in a flowing easy measure, kept in hand merely by the recurrent tinkle of the rhyme. Chaucer's artful cæsura was exaggerated into what the French call an enjambement, and what is called in English an "overflow"; "the sense," as Milton says in describing this peculiarity, "being variously drawn out from one verse into another." In the hands of the best romantic poets of Elizabeth and James, this loose and elastic treatment of the couplet had led to very charming effects; but when inspiration passed away, this laxity of form gave the poetasters occasion for every species of weakness and flaccidity. Waller, without apparently any ambition to restore the couplet as Chaucer had left it, nor on the other hand any suggestion from France, where the Alexandrine was not yet subjected to a like reform, revised and strengthened this form of verse, and gave it the character which it retained for no less than one hundred and fifty years. For that space of time the couplet took the same almost universal position as the vehicle for expression in verse that the rhyme royal had taken in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this case, as in that, the popularity of the form survived the power of the poets to extract new effects out of so conventional an instrument.

Waller, to whom is due the singular distinction of being the coryphæus of this long procession of the commonplace, was a very wealthy landlord of Buckinghamshire. He entered Parliament at an early age, held completely aloof from the active literary life of his contemporaries, and seemed interested in anything rather than in poetry. His earliest verses, dated apparently in 1623, possess the formal character, the precise prosody without