The change which took place at the Restoration is often spoken of as if it had been a mere re v ersion to the temper of mind which prevailed before the destroying flood of Puritanism swept over the land. But this is a superficial view ut The England of Charles II., whether in poli tics, in scienee, or in pure literature, was vastly different from that of Elizabeth. In the first flush of that age of splendid youth I here second to be no limits to the powers of humanity. Men were not afraid to take, with Bacon, all knowl edge to be their province, or to soar with _Mar lowe into empyrean heights. But the men of the Restoration, like burnt children, dreaded the fire of unrestrained enthusiasm which had kindled so devouring a conflagration. Moderation. the ac ceptance and study of actual conditions, the estab lishment of a quiet level of uniform conduct based strictly upon the dictates of common sense, became its ideal. Now for the first time in Eng land criticism went hand in hand with creation. At an epoch when English literature was scarcely known across the Channel, when Bayle was de fining Milton as "the famous apologist for the execution of Charles I.," who "meddled in poetry, and several of his poems saw the light during his life or after his death," the returning Royal ist exiles, on the other hand, brought with them from France the canons of a school of strictness there earlier established. Malherbe had risen to brandish the pedagogue's fertile over the young poets of that country; Corneille and Racine had framed their drama on the strictest classical rules. Dryden followed them, both in the the oretical discussions of his Essay on Dramatic Poesie and in his practice; the classical school restored the unities, kept tragedy and comedy strictly separate, and usually employed rhynied couplets in preferenee to blank verse. The trage dy of the Restoration, in which, besides Dryden himself, Otway must be mentioned for at least two imperishable plays. was largely a survival or an imitation. Comedy, however, has an im portance of its own, if only for its exact repro duction of the tone and manners of the society of the time. It follows, not the romantic treatment of Shakespeare. but the realistic fidelity of Jon son and Shirley in the earlier England, or more consciously that which Moliere had taught its authors in France. Etherege and Wyche-ley, Congreve and Vanbrugh are corrupt and cynical because such was the society in which they lived and for which they wrote. But we shall scarcely need to touch the drama again; from various causes it has practically (-eased to have a living conneetion with literature, despite the brave at tempts of no less poets than Tennyson and Browning and Swinburne to revive its ancient glories; there are clever comedians to-day, yet when we look for a comedy which will live in libraries we must go back to The School for Scandal, The Rivals, and She Stoops to Conquer —to the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
The tendency of the Restoration world to a strictly regulated uniformity, alluded to above, found expression in non-dramatie poetry not only by an increasing preference. in subject. for the life of an organized and cultivated society. the life of the town, but by the almost universal adoption of a single form—the heroic couplet— which was to dominate English verse for more than a century. The form was not new; it had been used long before by Chaucer. as it was to he used again by Keats, but with a radical dif ferenee. In the hands, first of Edmund Waller, then of Dryden and his eighteenth-century follow ers. each pair of lines as it rule contained one
complete thought, limited and condensed by these narrow bounds. The influence of Dryden on prose was not dissimilar to that which he exer cised on poetry. It was not, perhaps, so con sciously exerted: prose had not even yet. attained the dignity of a form worthy the careful atten tion of the artist. What he strove to do was to make it a fit vehicle for the conveyance of well defined thonght: and to this end he abandoned the rolling periods of the Elizabethan and Caroline prose writers—as in poetry. he "reduced the unit of treatment to manageable size," and determined the structure of the modern sentence as it has ever since been preserved. Thus, in his own production in both kinds. as in his singular ly influential and epoch-making criticism, Dryden bodied forth the spirit of his age and molded that which was to follow.
The eighteenth century was characteristically a period of unrest. Its intellectual ferment was fostered by skepticism. which invaded every do main. The concrete was engulfed by a flood of abstract speculations, and in industrial spheres the result was wholesome. Rationalism and deism were accompanied by an analytic study of man. almost exclusively, however, on his intel lectual side. The spirit of man had suffered eclipse. All this we find in the poetry of the period. Pope, as the spokesman of the school, had declared the proper study of mankind to be man, and man was accordingly dissected. _Ns a social unit, whenever so regarded, man is treated most flippantly, and the affections are mostly ignored. Indeed, it. was a tenet of the philosophy then current that man was a most despicable thing, and yet it arrogated to itself peculiar wisdom. Pope's adoption of this attitude was the sheerest affectation. From poetry in general the note of sincerity. was missing% mid the great god Pan was dead. In the evolution of literary ideals, however. ideals which find eompletest acceptance to-day, the eighteenth century is of the first im portance. and, can boast some of the most de lightful masters in both prose and verse. What these new ideals are may be indicated by a brief survey of these writers.
In philosophy, theology, history. and oratory the century takes high rank. Berkeley attacked the sensation theory of Locke• and insisted on what has been termed a theological idealism. ilunge brotight admirable eominon sense and a strenuous skeptical spirit to bear on the theory, and in his turn assailed Berkeley's thesis. Of other philosophical writers am may mention Hartley. Paley, Reid, Shaftesbury (of the Char ristieg), and Inigald Stewart, and, though less important. Bolingbroke was more faithfully representative. Deism was the common target of the clergy. Mien Anthony Collins published his un Warburton, and llerkeley appeared in rebuttal. But the pla..n. I if this field is the .1»a/ogy, in which But I'm' the good •I to beer in mind his work 1% as not in absolute argument. The eon tra-ts of the century eannot elsewhere be more miudb st than in the rise of the Methodists. \NM re t hi ory was impotent. practice availed.
qhe Li, and tram' porqnnalit v of and preaching of Whitefiehl. furnished the corroeliye fo the 101101'41U and deistic conception so widely prevailing. This con nte I.-movement was supported by a fine poetry of devotion, the work of the no less beautiful spirit, Charles Wesley, and by a multitude of hymns, many of them devotional rather than poetic, from the pious Watts.