French classical drama was, about this time, at its height. French writers of plays, like writers of other verse, followed rules which they attributed to the Drama ancients. Their plays (in a set couplet of counted syllables) must keep certain unities. A play must deal with one place, and one time, and one set of people. The French made more of such rules than did the ancients themselves, and added so many restrictions that they took most of the life out of their art. The rules of the Greeks did not fit the French stage, and the rules that the French stage tried to follow would have amazed the Greeks. Leading French dramatists of The "inner stage" has already (as in this time are Cor- modern times) become the chief stage. neille and Racine. It seems very deep and narrow. The To-day they seem, to elaborate decorations are typical of the English-speaking times. ON THE RESTORATION STAGE people, unreal and frigid. Only one dramatic writer of this age is widely read outside France. That is Molière. A writer of comedies, he enjoyed more freedom, and could go more realistically into depiction of human nature. His plays belong with those of Goldsmith and Sheridan. They are, however, higher in creative art. Molière, though far from Shakspere, is one of the few that can be named in the same breath. The English drama of the period is not great. When tragic, it has no faith in itself. And it suffers from an attempt to follow the French rules. Addison's Cato is icily correct. Otway's plays, the best of their time, do not rise to poetic height. Dryden's are unreal in feeling and labored in form. In comedy, the age did better; it at least produced writers of comedy capable of drawing an amusing picture of life and of creating human character. Most of them drew, rather unintelligently, from Molière, using his material, but missing his spirit. But their comedy is morally at the bottom of the scale. Not merely is it incredibly indecent; it is almost consistently on the side of vice. Wycherly, Farquhar, Congreve, and their contemporaries sought the applause of their own corrupt age. They won it, but lost the audience that still applaud Goldsmith and Sheridan. QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW Why is Dryden remembered rather than Waller? Test the couplets in the extracts from Dryden by the rules on page 263. Why are satires of past times seldom read with interest? What does the Song for St. Cecilia's Day lack, according to modern poetic standards? Who was the great French comic dramatist of Dryden's day? What is the chief fault of Restoration dramatists? Why are their plays no longer acted? CHAPTER III POPE THE weakness of the eighteenth century lay in its unwillingness to face important facts. Instead of going to work to remedy troubles, men ignored their Shallow existence. They suffered from shallow opOptimism timism, which means that they tried to believe that all is right with the world as it is. Pope's line "Whatever is, is right" is true, provided that one takes it in its bigger sense. Whatever is, as part of the Living Will, is right. But poverty and injustice and disease have no part in God's plan. God's will is to better the world and man's discontent is His way of bettering it. The socially respectable classes of England, the court and upper middle classes, disregarded the problems of the classes below them. Politics of the day dealt, not with national issues but with the welfare of selfish little cliques striving for "spoils" and office. It was an age of polite incredulity. It was "bad form" to take religion seriously. It was an age when great respect was shown to women, and little was felt; when the tradition of a deceased chivalry hung respectably over a land that regarded the betrayal of innocence as proper sport for a gentleman. It was an age that was contented that "heaven had given us the poor as objects of charity" and that felt that to reduce poverty would be "flying in the face of Providence." It was an age, in short, that was bound to be satisfied with itself and to find philosophic excuses for not doing all the things it ought to have done. It was on the way to better things, but this was only Lower Class slightly to its credit. The real reason that the better things came, that society did not go on idling, as in France, till a deluge of bloody revolution broke out, was that in England class lines were not drawn as sharply as in France. The vitality and earnestness of the lower class were always working to the top. What one should watch, through the eighteenth century, is the gradual breaking down of a narrow oligarchical society by the steady pressure of the mass of the English people. We might study the uninspired years for their own sake. It is far better to watch them, as one watches a photo graphic film in a dark room, for the first signs of the coming image, the hints of the Second Renaissance, the Romantic Revival. The representative poet of the early eighteenth century (1688-1744) is Alexander Pope. In his Pope work we find no signs of a new dawn. It is marked by energy, brilliant intellectual activity, and absolute mastery of the form used, the heroic couplet. His energy is not, like Dryden's, a force that gives the impression of solid strength. It seems rather the result of nervous excitement. His intellectual power is brilliant, but not deep. He is satisfied to make an easy idea plain. He does not make his task difficult by digging deep. Nor does he rise to heights of imagination. He expresses what are practically prose ideas in skillful verse. He does a thing not greatly worth doing, and does it amazingly. And, having done this one thing all his life, he made it so easy that anybody could do it. So what he has done no longer seems wonderful. The sense There must What Pope did with the heroic couplet was this: We have seen that the strict rules, under which English poets from the time of Dryden chose to bind them- His Use of selves, allowed little variety. The clauses the Couplet and sentences must end at certain points. must not run over from couplet to couplet. be a pause at the end of the first line. Pauses within the line must fall at given points. It was hard indeed for a writer of such verse to keep out of monotony without breaking rules. Pope managed both to keep the rules and to attain variety. Occasionally one sees an athlete who goes through acrobatic feats in evening dress. The audience applauds him for overcoming the restraint of his formal garments. So, realizing how hard it was to write freely in the heroic couplet, we may admire Pope's skill and ingenuity, though we may wonder whether the task is worth the effort. Pope was a literary juggler. He exhausted every possibility of the couplet. In the passage on page 278 observe how, while each couplet follows the rules, Pope attains variety, first by slight shiftings of the place of the pauses |