The Development of Literary Style

The main tendency of the age, in all departments of literature, is toward a clear, plain, and forcible style.

1. Poetry. The new movement was seen most clearly in the development of the heroic couplet, which was soon to spread throughout poetry and through much of the drama. As we have seen (p. ), in the previous age the couplet had become so loose that it resembled a cross between prose and verse. An exponent of such a measure is Chamberlayne (1619–89):

Poor love must dwell

Within no climate but what’s parallel

Unto our honoured births; the envied fate

Of princes oft these burdens find from state

When lowly swains, knowing no parent’s voice

Of negative, make a free and happy choice.

This is a curious liquid measure. The pause is irregularly distributed, and the rhythm is light and easy.

Cowley and Denham likewise obtain much credit for the introduction of the new measure; but the chief innovator is Edmund Waller (1606–87). Dryden, in his dedication to The Rival Ladies says, “Rime has all the advantages of prose besides its own. But the excellence and dignity of it were never fully known till Mr. Waller first taught it.” An extract from Waller will suffice:

While in this park I sing, the listening deer

Attend my passion, and forget to fear;

When to the beeches I report my flame,

They bow their heads, as if they felt the same,

To gods appealing, when I reach their bowers,

With loud complaints, they answer me in showers.

The note here is quite different from that of the previous extract. The tread of the meter is steady and almost uniform, and the pauses cluster about the middle and the end of the lines. It must be noted, too, that a large proportion of Waller’s poetry took this form.

Dryden adopted the heroic couplet, but he improved upon the wooden respectability of his predecessors’ verse. While he retained all the couplet’s steadiness and force, he gave it an additional vigor, a sinewy elegance, and a noble rhythm and beauty. It is worth while giving another example of his couplet:

A milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged,

Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged;

Without unspotted, innocent within,

She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.

Yet had she oft been chased with horns and hounds

And Scythian shafts; and many winged wounds

Aimed at her heart; was often forced to fly,

And doomed to death, though fated not to die.

Dryden, The Hind and the Panther

In its own fashion this passage is as melodious and powerful as some of the noblest lines of Milton.

In other forms of poetry the style contains little to be commented upon. The blank verse continues the disintegration that (with the exception of the verse of Milton) began with the death of Shakespeare. We give a good example of this Restoration blank verse:

Through a close lane as I pursued my journey,

And meditating on the last night’s vision,

I spied a wrinkled hag, with age grown double,

Picking dry sticks, and mumbling to herself;

Her eyes with scalding rheum were galled and red,

And palsy shook her head; her hands seemed withered;

And on her crooked shoulder had she wrapped

The tattered remnant of an old striped hanging.

Otway, The Orphan

In this passage we can observe the absence of the high poetic fire of the Elizabethans and the lack of the thunderous depth of Milton. Observe the regularity of the beat, the uniformity of the pauses, and the frequency of the hypermetrical ending. There is, nevertheless, a certain somber, dogged attraction about the style of the passage. The average blank verse of the time is much less regular, and much less attractive.

The lyric still shows a reflection of the Caroline manner, as can be seen in the following example:

Love still has something of the sea,

From whence his mother rose;

No time his slaves from doubt can free,

Nor give their thoughts repose.

They are becalmed in clearest days,

And in rough weather tossed;

They wither under cold delays,

Or are in tempests lost.

Sedley (out of seven stanzas)

This lyric has an undoubted sweetness of expression, though it is artificial in thought.

2. Prose. Though the prose writing of the period is not great in bulk, it shows a profound change in style. Previous writers, such as Browne, Clarendon, and Hobbes, had done remarkable and beautiful work in prose, but their style had not yet found itself. It was wayward and erratic, often cumbrous and often obscure, and weighted with a Latinized construction and vocabulary. In Dryden’s time prose begins definitely to find its feet. It acquires a general utility and a permanence; it is smoothed and straightened, simplified and harmonized. This is the age of average prose, and prepares the way for the work of Swift and Addison, who stand on the threshold of the modern prose style. Less than forty years intervene between Dryden and Sir Thomas Browne; yet Dryden and his school seem to be nearer the twentieth century than they are to Browne.

Not that Dryden’s style is flawless. It is sometimes involved and obscure; there are little slips of grammar and many slips of expression; but on the average it is of high quality, and the impression that the reader receives is one of great freshness and abounding vitality. Further examples of this good average style will be found in the work of Temple and Halifax.

In the case of Bunyan the style becomes plainer still. But it is powerful and effective, and bears the narrative nobly. Pepys and Evelyn have no pretensions to style as such, but their work is admirably expressed, and Evelyn in especial has passages of more elevated diction.

In some authors of the period we find this desire for unornamented style degenerating into coarseness and ugliness. Such a one is Jeremy Collier (1650–1726), whose Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage (1698) caused a great commotion in its day. It attacked the vices of the stage with such vigor that it is said to have driven some of the playwrights from their evil courses. The style of this famous book is so colloquial that it becomes in places ungrammatical. Thomas Sprat (1635–1713) was another disciple of the same school. He wrote on the newly formed Royal Society, which demanded from its members, “a close, naked, natural way of speaking.” This expresses the new development quite well. A greater man than Sprat but a fellow-member of the Royal Society, was John Locke (1632–1704), who in his famous Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) put the principle into practice. Locke’s style is bare to baldness, but it is clear. We give an example:

Some men are remarked for pleasantness in raillery; others, for apologues, and apposite, diverting stories. This is apt to be taken for the effect of pure nature, and that the rather, because it is not got by rules, and those who excel in either of them, never purposely set themselves to the study of it as an art to be learnt. But yet it is true, that at first some lucky hit, which took with somebody, and gained him commendation, encouraged him to try again, inclined his thoughts and endeavours that way, till at last he insensibly got a facility in it without perceiving how; and that is attributed wholly to nature, which was much more the effect of use and practice. I do not deny that natural disposition may often give the first rise to it; but that never carries a man far without use and exercise, and it is practice alone that brings the powers of the mind as well as those of the body to their perfection. Many a good poetic vein is buried under a trade, and never produces anything for want of improvement. We see the ways of discourse and reasoning are very different, even concerning the same matter, at court and in the university. And he that will go but from Westminster Hall to the Exchange, will find a different genius and turn in their ways of talking; and one cannot think that all whose lot fell in the city were born with different parts from those who were bred at the university or inns of court.

TABLE TO ILLUSTRATE THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITERARY FORMS

Date Poetry Drama Prose

Lyrical Narrative Satirical
and
Didactic Tragedy Comedy Narrative Essay Miscellaneous

1650

1660 Pepys

Dryden Dryden

Butler Evelyn

Dryden

Dorset Etheredge Bunyan

|Sedley Dryden Dryden Dryden

Rochester

1670 Shadwell Tillotson

Sprat

Lee Wycherley

Otway

Oldham

1680 Halifax

Shadwell Temple Temple

Dryden

Rowe

Dryden

1690 Dryden

Congreve

Vanbrugh

Dryden

1700 Dryden Farquhar

In one prominent case we have a survival of the more elaborate style of the past, and that is in the history of Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), Bishop of Salisbury, whose History of his own Times was published after his death. The style of the book is modeled on that of Clarendon. Burnet’s style is not of the same class as that of his predecessor: it has lapses into colloquialism; its sentences are snipped into small pieces by means of frequent colons and semicolons; and he has not Clarendon’s command of vocabulary.