part of its programme. And the style of Sprat, as of scientific
masters like Newton and Ray the botanist, itself attests the
change. A time of profound and peaceful and fruitful scientific
labour began; the whole of Newton’s Principia appeared in
1687; the dream of Bacon came nearer, and England was less
isolated from the international work of knowledge. The spirit
of method and observation and induction spread over the whole
field of thought and was typified in John Locke, whose Essay
concerning Human Understanding came out in English in 1690,
and who applied the same deeply sagacious and cautious calculus
to education and religion and the “conduct of the understanding.”
But his works, though their often mellow and dignified
style has been ignorantly underrated, also show the change in
philosophic writing since Hobbes. The old grandeur and
pugnacity are gone; the imaginative play of science, or quasi-science,
on the literature of reflection is gone; the eccentrics,
the fantasts, the dreamers are gone, or only survive in curious
transitional writers like Joseph Glanvil (Scepsis scientifica, 1665)
or Thomas Burnet (Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684). This
change was in part a conscious and an angry change, as is clear
from the attacks made in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663–1668)
upon scholastic verbiage, astrology, fanatical sects and their
disputes, poetic and “heroic” enthusiasm and intellectual
whim.
Before the Restoration men of letters, with signal exceptions
like Milton and Marvell, had been Cavalier, courtly and Anglican
in their sympathies. The Civil War had scattered them
away from the capital, which, despite Milton’s dream
in Areopagitica of its humming and surging energies,
had ceased to be, what it now again Courtly
and social influence.became, the natural
haunt and Rialto of authors. The taste of the new king and
court served to rally them. Charles II. relished Hudibras, used
and pensioned Dryden, sat under Barrow and South and heard
them with appreciation, countenanced science, visited comedies,
and held his own in talk by mother-wit. Letters became the
pastime, and therefore one of the more serious pursuits, of men
of quality, who soon excelled in song and light scarifying verse
and comedy, and took their own tragedies and criticisms gravely.
Poetry under such auspices became gallant and social, and also
personal and partisan; and satire was soon its most vital form,
with the accessories of compliment, rhymed popular argumentation
and elegy. The social and conversational instinct was the
master-influence in prose. It produced a subtle but fundamental
change in the attitude of author to reader. Prose came nearer
to living speech, it became more civil and natural and persuasive,
and this not least in the pulpit. The sense of ennui, or boredom,
which seemed as unknown in the earlier part of the century as
it is to the modern German, became strongly developed, and
prose was much improved by the fear of provoking it. In all
these ways the Restoration accompanied and quickened a
speedier and greater change in letters than any political event in
English history since the reign of Alfred, when prose itself was
created.
The formal change in prose can thus be assigned to no one writer, for the good reason that it presupposes a change of spoken style lying deeper than any personal influence. If we begin with the writing that is nearest living talk—the letters of Otway or Lady Rachel Russell, or the diary of Pepys (1659–1669)—that Prose and criticism.supreme disclosure of our mother-earth—or the evidence in a state trial, or the dialogue in the more natural comedies; if we then work upwards through some of the plainer kinds of authorship, like the less slangy of L’Estrange’s pamphlets, or Burnet’s History of My Own Time, a solid Whig memoir of historical value, until we reach really admirable or lasting prose like Dryden’s Preface to his Fables (1700), or the maxims of Halifax;—if we do this, we are aware, amid all varieties, survivals and reversions, of a strong and rapid drift towards the style that we call modern. And one sign of this movement is the revulsion against any over-saturating of the working, daily language, and even of the language of appeal and eloquence, with the Latin element. In Barrow and Glanvil, descendants of Taylor and Browne, many Latinized words remain, which were soon expelled from style like foreign bodies from an organism. As in the mid-sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth century, the process is visible by which the Latin vocabulary and Latin complication of sentence first gathers strength, and then, though not without leaving its traces, is forced to ebb. The instinct of the best writers secured this result, and secured it for good and all. In Dryden’s diction there is a nearly perfect balance and harmony of learned and native constituents, and a sensitive tact in Gallicizing; in his build of sentence there is the same balance between curtness or bareness and complexity or ungainly lengthiness. For ceremony and compliment he keeps a rolling period, for invective a short sharp stroke without the gloves. And he not only uses in general a sentence of moderate scale, inclining to brevity, but he finds out its harmonies; he is a seeming-careless but an absolute master of rhythm. In delusive ease he is unexcelled; and we only regret that he could not have written prose oftener instead of plays. We should thus, however, have lost their prefaces, in which the bulk and the best of Dryden’s criticisms appear. From the Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) down to the Preface to Fables (1700) runs a series of essays: On the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, On Heroic Plays, On Translated Verse, On Satire and many more; which form the first connected body of criticisms in the language, and are nobly written always. Dryden’s prose is literature as it stands, and yet is talk, and yet again is mysteriously better than talk. The critical writings of John Dennis are but a sincere application of the rules and canons that were now becoming conventional; Rymer, though not so despicable as Macaulay said, is still more depressing than Dennis; and for any critic at once so free, so generous and so sure as Dryden we wait in vain for a century.
Three or four names are usually associated with Dryden’s in the work of reforming or modifying prose: Sprat, Tillotson, Sir William Temple, and George Savile, marquis of Halifax; but the honours rest with Halifax. Sprat, though clear and easy, has little range; Tillotson, though lucid, orderly, and a very popular preacher, has littleContributors to the new prose. distinction; Temple, the elegant essayist, has a kind of barren gloss and fine literary manners, but very little to say. The political tracts, essays and maxims of Halifax (died 1695) are the most typically modern prose between Dryden and Swift, and are nearer than anything else to the best French writing of the same order, in their finality of epigram, their neatness and mannerliness and sharpness. The Character of a Trimmer and Advice to a Daughter are the best examples.
Religious literature, Anglican and Puritan, is the chief remaining department to be named. The strong, eloquent and coloured preaching of Isaac Barrow the mathematician, who died in 1677, is a survival of the larger and older manner of the Church. In its balance of logic, learning and emotion, in its command alike of Latin splendour and native force, it Preachers.deserves a recognition it has lost. Another athlete of the pulpit, Robert South, who is so often praised for his wit that his force is forgotten, continues the lineage, while Tillotson and the elder Sherlock show the tendency to the smoother and more level prose. But the revulsion against strangeness and fancy and magnificence went too far; it made for a temporary bareness and meanness and disharmony, which had to be checked by Addison, Bolingbroke and Berkeley. From what Addison saved our daily written English, may be seen in the vigorous slangy hackwork of Roger L’Estrange, the translator and pamphleteer, in the news-sheets of Dunton, and in the satires of Tom Brown. These writers were debasing the coinage with their street journalism.
Another and far nobler variety of vernacular prose is found in the Puritans. Baxter and Howe, Fox and Bunyan, had the English Bible behind them, which gave them the best of their inspiration, though the first two of them were also erudite men. Richard Baxter, an immensely Puritan prose. fertile writer, is best remembered by those of his own fold for his Saint’s Everlasting Rest (1650) and his autobiography, John Howe for his evangelical apologia The Living Temple of God
