CHAPTER V

THE LYRICAL DECLINE; FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF COWPER

ITH the Restoration of King Charles II to the throne, indubitably a new spirit came to prevail in English poetry, and in no form was the change so complete as in the lyric. The new poets sang from the first in the newer strain; the older poets unlearned their art of singing or, failing so to do, were carried back into a swift oblivion. Such was the case with Cowley whose reputation was soon eclipsed by the greater fame of Dryden. Milton was inadequately appreciated in his own later time. Herrick, Carew, Suckling, Herbert - to say nothing of the earlier lyrists - all were speedily forgotten; and Waller, who had continued to keep his poetical (like his political) cock-boat afloat by its very lightness in the rapids of Commonwealth times, now floated out into the calm waters of the new age the acclaimed leader of the new poetry.

It is customary at this point in the history of English poetry to dilate on the extravagances of the pre-Restoration poets, to gibbet the conceits of Cowley and Crashaw and the occasional lapses into bad taste of Cartwright, Lovelace, and lesser men. Clearly, in view of such conditions, something had to be done; so the temperate Wal

ler and the admirable Dryden here step forth consciously and generously to save English poetry from impending wreck on the jagged rocks of its own exorbitant imagination. As a matter of fact, no literature has ever been wrecked by the exuberance of the poetical imagination, although poverty of imagination has stranded many a petty craft on the sand-banks of time. Even the misdirected ingenuity of the conceit - which began with the first of the Petrarchists, not with Donne, much less with Crashaw cannot be held accountable for the change in literary taste. Passing by the unfairness of a comparison of the lapses of the concettists and their failures with the controlled literary style of their successors in the next age, it may be affirmed that the contrast has been much exaggerated; and it might be easy to find passages in the poetry of the pre-Restoration poets exhibiting a control, a sequence of thought, and a moderation not inferior to the much praised "classicality" that came after. Nor is it difficult to find conceit, extravagance, and want of taste in the early work even of Dryden. Among the many affirmations as to this contrast none is more gratuitous than that which makes Dryden, or even Waller, a conscious leader in the change of poetical taste, or even, in a very large measure, responsible for it in its alleged foreign importation. The qualities of style and the manner of thinking that came, in their fullness, to characterize the literature of the Augustan age, had their origins far back,

1 See the present writer's "Ben Jonson and the Classical School," Publications of the Modern Language Association, XIII, 1898.

and mainly in England; as to poetry at least, we shall find them especially (as already suggested) in the precept and example of Jonson. It can be shown beyond the peradventure of a doubt that Jonson exhibits in his non-dramatic poetry, so much of it occasional, a trend towards a precise, pointed, and antithetical diction, a Latinized vocabulary, and a preference for the decasyllabic couplet stronghold of the Augustans-over all other kinds of verse. Dryden, like Jonson, was a playwright, a satirist, a poetical translator, and a critic of high order; and Davenant, who intervened, in some respects the most important literary figure between them, affected a similar catholicity. As to the lyric, it was in the nature of things that it should suffer in the new age. Already the imaginative power of the best of the Elizabethan lyrists had contracted largely to the play of fancy that characterized the concettists and writers of vers de société. Although Jonson wrote a poem telling us fancifully "Why I write not of love," it may be suspected that he felt a certain condescension with respect to the whole lyrical art as contrasted with his serious work in drama and satire, a condescension shared by Dryden and others that came after. Should this attitude among the lyrists of postRestoration times be held in question, we have only to contrast the impassioned eloquence of Sidney's sonnets, or those even of Spenser, with the polite love-making of Waller in his effusions to his Saccharissa, to feel the difference. Therein this pattern of the new polite age disclosed to his admiring followers how a fine gentleman

should court the lady of his poetical choice in verse as smooth and filed as his sentiments were becoming and unsullied by so vulgar a thing as passion. The coxcombry of some of these verses can be made credible only by quotation, though seriously to criticise it is, according to the proverb, to break a butterfly on the wheel.

Thyrsis, a youth of the inspired train,

Fair Saccharissa loved, but loved in vain:
Like Phoebus sung the no less amorous boy;
Like Daphne she, as lovely, and as coy!
With numbers he the flying nymph pursues;
With numbers, such as Phœbus' self might use!

But alas! the cruel nymph would not for a moment stay, and after a chase

O'er craggy mountains, and thro' flowery meads,

the lover gives up the pursuit with these consolatory congratulations:

Yet, what he sung in his immortal strain,

Though unsuccessful, was not sung in vain:

All, but the nymph who should redress his wrong,
Attend his passion, and approve his song,

Like Phoebus thus, acquiring unsought praise,

He catched at love, and filled his arms with bays.

Sir William Davenant, god-son of Shakespeare, dramatist and author of the epic Gondibert, has less of the lyrical element in him than almost any poet of equal rank. A few songs, scattered through the plays, echoes at long range of the brave old age, an occasional poem or two, rising somewhat at times towards the higher air in which the lyric flourishes - these are absolutely all that there

are to name of the strenuous first laureate of King Charles. Great poet, too, that Dryden was, towering tall and unashamed in his vigorous contrasted art even beside the austere bulk of Milton, his greatest limitations appear in his lyrical poetry. Three noble and serious "Odes" he did achieve, the two "for St. Cecilia's Day" and the splendid lines "to the pious Memory of Mistress Anne Killigrew, excellent in the two sister arts of poesy and painting." There are some half dozen lyrics in the plays adapted to other themes than those of love, a hunting song, a song of jealousy, a charm and so forth, besides some more or less perfunctory religious verse to which the term lyric may indulgently be applied. But, in general, by Dryden's time a lyric had come to signify simply a love-song, now languishing, now disdainful, now complacent, now satirical, but a love-song none the less; nay worse, if passionate, deteriorating into mere animalism; if sentimental, a bauble or lure in the frivolous game of gallantry that so occupied the Merry Monarch and his too loyal and imitative subjects. Thus one of the songs of Dryden's opera, King Arthur, 1691, begins promisingly: "Fairest isle, all isles excelling"; but this promise degenerates immediately into "swains and nymphs," "Venus" and "Cyprian groves," and England, we find "shall be renowned [merely] for love." Of another incidental love lyric of Dryden's from Cleomenes, 1692, Professor Saintsbury enthusiastically exclaims: "The song, "No, no, poor suffering heart,' is in itself a triumphant refutation of those who deny passion and tenderness in poetry to Dry