The Restoration (Barnard)

 

Ch. 7 from A Short History of English Literature, by Robert Barnard (2nd ed.):

 

The Restoration

In the popular English imagination, the Restoration of 1660 is one of those watersheds of history, a period when the whole atmosphere changed from that of a gloomy prayer-meeting to one of licence, ribaldry and unashamed pleasure. No doubt the popular view is nonsense as far as the vast majority of the inhabitantes of the British Isles were concerned: the average villager (and Britain was still very much a rural civilization) would doubtless have registered that church services had regained a little of their old ceremony, that country pastimes such as maypole-dancing were no longer to be regarded as works of the devil, but there would have been no great change otherwise in their lives. It needed more than a new regime in Whitehall to change the patterns of existence in Little Totham by the Wold. 

But in so far as the king set the tone for metropolitan life and the life of the gentry in general there is a grain of truth in the popular myth. The new ruling class—many of whom, like the King, had spent formative years in exile on the Continent—looked to France for their culture and their manners; the dominant tone of the Court and of upper-class London life in general was gay, cynical and permissive. The King himself—in every way the opposite of his virtuous, domestic and unwise father—used all his considerable political skills to avoid 'going on his travels again'; he was gregarious, democratic in his habits, unashamedly promiscuous. Londond gossip fell delightedly on the doings of his mistresses, from the flagrant Duchess of Castlemaine, busty, greedy and vicious, to the charming and earthy Nell Gwynne. It was all very different from Oliver Cromwell's time.

One inevitable consequence of Charles II's jubilant and acclaimed return was the reopening of the theatres: the thirst for drama was such that he had hardly set foot on English soil before troupes of actors were being formed and the old plays dusted down. Nevertheless, when things settled down, the new theatres were physically and spiritually very different from the old. For a start, the theatre confirmed the trend of the pre-Commonwealth stage: it moved entirely indoors. It was roofed in, lit by artificial lighting, with scenery, and the stage area divided off from the audience by the proscenium arch (though in early years there was an 'apron' out into the audience, one tiny relic of Elizabethan customs). In addition, the female roles were now played by women, as on the Continent—an innovation which was made, according to Charles, 'in the interests of morality,' though the reverse might have been a more honest justification. All these changes marked great gains for the theatre as a place of illusion, though many of them involved a loss of that speed, vigour and free play of the imagination which had characterised Elizabethan theatre at its best.

Charles was no more anxious than the city worthies of Elizabethan times that the theatre (though it provided him, in one way or another, with his main forms of entertainment) should blossom in an unrestricted manner. Performances in London were licensed, and restricted to two companies. Perhaps the most significant fact about Restoration drama is this: until the end of the century two theatre, and often only one, supplied the needs of play-going London; yet even so, plays were seldom performed more than five or six times, the performances frequently being little better than shambles. Nothing could more vividly illustrate the contraction of the audience for drama than this. The theatre may have attracted a fair cross-section of the nation, but it was a very tiny segment, and in the middle and lower reaches the theatre-goers were only typical of the more 'liberated' members (the diarist Samuel Pepys is a good example). The theatre was no longer the mirror of the nation, but was dominated by a small, like-minded clique, who looked to the theatre to confirm its prejudicesm cynicisms and aristocratic illusions.

One sees this very clearly in the comedies of the time: the principal characters are generally drawn from the charmed circle of aristocratic life in the metropolis, and anyone outside that circle is a booby, a villain or a butt. The city businessman or the rural squire is equally to be ridiculed and deceived. There are, to be sure, fools within the charmed cirlce: elegance overdone becomes foppery, and is mocked; amorousness in women is admirable until the lady becomes middle-aged, then it is depicted as a ravening fever close to nymphomania. But as a whole the characters display the qualities that were admired: balance, judgment and cool, cynical sense. The dramatists, in other words, turned a blind eye to the uglier sides of aristocratic life under Charles—to the violence, the disease, the exhaustion of excess. The court wanted to see themselves as an exquisitely refined elite, as the witty custodians of civilized values. And that, for the most part, was how they were shown. 

One of the few playwrights who was a partial exception to this was William Wycherley (?1640-1716). He was himself a fringe member of the Court circle (he was one of the many lovers of the Duchess of Castlemaine, which argued a strong constitution rather than a delicate stomach), yet he seems to have been as much repelled as attracted by it. There is no doubt he perceived the heartlessness and hypocrisy behind the elegance and charm. He seems to have been a tormented, uncomfortable, bitter man, a moralist and a libertine, a strange mixture of old values and new. The contradictions find expression in his plays. The Country Wife, the most famous of them, was for two centuries unperformed in its original version, thought in our own more lax time it is perhaps the most frequently revived Restoration comedy. It has two concurrent, intersecting plots. In one Horner, a London gallant, has the rumoiur spread through town that—as a result of an unsuccessful operation for the pox—he is now impotent. The result is that whereas once he was the terror of all husbands, they now rush to offer their wives to him, seeing him as a harmless companion for them while they, the husbands, go about their own business. The wives, once the secret has been revealed to them, enthusiastically play along, for they are voracious harpies to a woman. The second plot concerns Pinchwife, an elderly roué, who has married a 'country wife' much younger than himself. Much of the action concerns his attemps, inevitably vain, to keep her faithful to him, and culminates with Horner's both cucolding Pinchwife yet managing to keep his secret safe.

Wycherley's satiric flail cuts to left and right: sex-crazed wives, negligent husbands, reformed rakes and foolish men of fashion fall beneath its blade. Words change meaning in the mouths of these fashionable hypocrites: 'honour'—as in the phrase 'man' or 'woman of honour'—becomes synonymous with dishonour, unchastity, limitless sexual appetite, similarly with 'reputation,' which means nothing but a false front. In the famous 'China' scene, a masterpiece of elegant obscenity, Lady Fidget, who has been copulating with Horner in the next room, emerges holding a piece of his china collection, and in the ensuing dialogue 'china' gains a monstrous patina of sexual significances:

LADY FIDGET: I have been toiling and moiling for the prettiest piece of china, my dear.

HORNER: Nay, she has been too hard for me, do what I could.

MRS SQUEAMISH: Oh Lord, I'll have some china too. Good Mr Horner, don't think to give other people china and me none; come in with me too.

HORNER: Upon my honour, I have none left now.

MRS SQUEAMISH: Nay, nay, I have known you deny your china before now, but you shan't put me off so. Come.

HORNER: This lady had the last there.

LADY FIDGET: Yes, indeed, madam, to my certain knowledge he has no more left.

MRS SQUEAMISH: O, but it may be he may have some you coulde not find.

LADY FIDGET: What, d'ye think if he had had any left, I would not have had it too? for we women of quality never think we have china enough...

The elegant indiscretion of this is not altogether typical of Wycherley. More often his wit has a whiplash quality: the innate honesty of Wycherley's mind cuts through pretence, it shouts 'Look how things really are':

HORNER: But prithee, was not the way you were in better? Is not keeping [a mistress] better than marriage?

PINCHWIFE: A pox on't! the jades would jilt me. I could never keep a whore to myself.

HORNER: So, then you only married to keep a whore to yourself.

What modern critics find puzzling,  even disturbing about Wycherley is what were his positives: they find it inconceivable that Horner the libertine should be able to waltz through the play, bedding women right, left and centre, yet should find himself at the end unexposed, quite prepared to continue with his rake's progress. Why, the man even seems to be happy! In bewilderment, critics have called him a 'horned beast', a shell of a man unable to find real emotional fulfilment; one critic has even called the joyous seduction of the delightful Margery Pinchwife 'moving drama, the result of a realistic imagination as powerful, almost, as Ibsen's.' That is not hjow it seems in performance. On stage the play becomes a delighted celebration of Horner's enterprise, initiative and cunning. And I have little doubt that that was what Wycherley intended.

Most Restoration dramatists made more effort than Wycherley to cover a brutal sexual code under a cloak of elegance and wit. The typical Restoration comedy plot concerns the efforts of a gentleman of fashion to disencumber himself of stale amorous entanglements, and win the hand of the heroine, who is, typically virtuous (for double standards prevail for almost all the dramatists except Wycherley), witty, and 'a good match' from the financial point of view. Dorimant, in Etherege's Man of Mode, is the archetypal Restoration hero: his attitude to women has been described by John Wain the novelist as  a sort of 'fighter-pilot's mentality: he wants to get them before they get him.' After several acts in which we have seen his ruthless, contemptuous, purely accumulative attitude to women, it is not easy to get any warm, pleasurable feeling when finally he wins the charming Harriet. But perhaps, we are not meant to; perhaps hoping for such a feeling is a modern sentimentalism. To most Restoration writers marriage seems to be less of a matter of love than of dynastic necessity: one married to perpetuate one's line, and the honeymoon is no more than an interlude between pursuing beddable women and pursuing more beddable women. It is hard to take. At least Wycherley did not commit the hypocrisy of granting Horner a happy marriage at the end of The Country Wife. 

The most elegant of all the Restoration writers was Congreve (1670-1729) and it is in his work that the uglinesses of the age were transmuted into something infinitely witty, imaginative and delicate. Even his butts—the country boobies, the ageing but amorous women of fashion—express their oddities with such verbal distinction that the edge is taken of the brutality. In his masterpiece The Way of the World the elderly Lady Wishfort (i.e. wish-for-it, and the reader should be able to guess what she wished for) is a case in point. An absurd, posturing, amorously optimistic creature, her language removes her into a realm of artificiality and fantasy, so that she becomes almost a person of distinction. She is not a butt, more an oddly misshapen pottery firm. Her misuse of the English language is more subtle and imaginative than Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop in the next century, and less likely to bore on repetition: 'You must not attribute my yielding to any sinister appetite, or indigestion of widowood, nor impute my complacency to any lethargy of continence. I hope you do not think me prone to any iteration of nuptials.' It is mostly when she is emotionally disturbed by a member of the opposite sex who might (with luck) have designs on her that her language becomes deranged. At other times it has a directness that is still imaginative yet precise: 'I look like an old peeled wall.'

With Congreve, in fact, we move away from comedy as social comment and towards comedy as fantasy. When Millamant, the heroine, comments that when she does her hair she always uses poetry for curl-papers, because it never will sit pleasantly with prose, we are very close indeed to the world of Oscar Wilde. This makes it difficult to see the progress of Millamant and her admirer Mirabel towards a modus vivendi that will enable them to endure married life as anything as serious as a 'rationalization of sex', as some critics have called it. It is true that the high-point of the play is the scene in which both of them state their terms for matrimony, the necessary conditions which will render marriage tolerable enough for Mirabel to give up his life of promiscuous pleasure and for Millamant to (as she puts it) 'dwindle into a wife.' But since the conditions put forward by both of them all concern the conduct and rights of the wife, its nby no means easy to see the scene as a serious or impartial investigation of the state of marriage. In fact, if we bring any sort of moral code to bear on the play at all, Mirabel's actions throughout are nothing short of loathsome. It is Congreve's achievement that he persuades us to leave such codes along with our hats and coats in the cloackroom, and enter a world of high, fantastic comedy, purged of the grossness of earlier Restoration plays.

There was good reason why the blatant crudities of Wycherley and Etherege had been refined out of Congreve's style. In the closing years of the century there had been published Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, in which Congreve had been singled out for attack, though for the wrong reasons. Collier, like the Elizabethan puritans before him, saw the theatre as a sink of iniquity, a place where vice was recommended and virtue ridiculed. His ire was in no way diminished by the existence of a more elevated sort of play in the Restoration theatre: the heroic tragedy. These plays, classical in conception, French in inspiration, were often full of splended rhetorical poetry (Dryden's All for Love is the best known example but Otway's Venice Preserved is perhaps more theatrically viable), yet their expressions of invincible heroism and undying loves are ultimately unconvincing, and sit uneasily in the English dramatic tradition. Collier's attack was most opportunely timed: in 1698 the hectic, permissive world of the Restoration was gone; since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which chased out the Catholic James II, a Dutchman had occupied the throne, worthily and unspectacularly; the revels were over, responsibility and  dullness reigned.

Restoration comedy never really recovered from the attempt to clean it up. Perhaps it was unscrubbable. In the early years of the eighteenth century there werer several lively, eminently stageworthy plays: Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem and The Recruiting Officer are works of no great distinction, but they can still charm audiences in performance. But when the middle-classes started tricling back to the theatres and demanding a more sentimental, more overtly moral typ of comedy, the stage was set for a long period of decline in the British theatre.

If we look in vain to most Restoration dramas for firm principles, for consistent moral and social attitudes, these qualities were to be foun in abundance in the greatest poet of the age. John Dryden (1631-1700). This may seem odd at first sight: Dryden began his poetic career with Heroic stanzas to the Glorious Memory of Cromwell yet spent most of his life as a defender of the restored Stuart sovereings; he wrote one long poem in defence of the Protestant religion as enshrined in the Church of England, and another, after his conversion, in parise of Catholicism. Nevertheless, the old gibes that Dryden was a truncoat and a time-server could not be further from the truth. Like many who grow up in times of social upheaval (his adolescence covered the period of the Civil war, his young manhood the dictatorship of Cromwell), his first commitment was to public order, to a strong, accepted central authority. Radical or revolutionary movements seemed to him at best to bring dubious benefits, at the cost of certain misery. Authoritarian rule which sprang from and respected the ancient traditions of the country seemed infinitely better than (what he saw as) a democracy supported by a rabble and led by power-crazed egotists. It was inevitable that Dryden should support the country's legitimate monarchs, inevitable that his religious quest should lead him finally to the Catholic Church.

It is Dryden's political ideas, and his political gut-reactions too, that give such strength and urgency to his greatest satire, Absalom and Achitophel. It was written to order, about a particular situation at a particular time, the 'Catholic plot' crisis of 1679-1681, and it was intended to influence the situation. In the late 1670s the joy that had greeted Charles II's Restroation had given way to scepticism and disillusion: restorations always bring disappointment, for they are expected to restore times which are gone forever. A new opposition party began grouping, consisting of members of the gentry who felt they had failed to get their just rights, puritans who had opposed the Restoration throughout, traditional Parliamentarians, and Protestants with a genuine and deep-rooted fear of the Catholic Church. The catalysts of the crisis was an exceedintly unsavoury character called Titus Oates, a man with a Catholic past, a dubious theological degree (like Dr Ian Paisley in our own day, and the comparison need not end there) and a new-found but loud devotion to the Protestant religion.  It was Oates's 'revelation' of a series of Catholic plots centred on Charles's brother and heir, James, Duke of York, and involving Charles's Catholic queen, that brought this heterogeneous opposition together. Soon anti-Catholic hysteria gripped the nation in much the same way that anti-witchcraft hysteria was to grip American Salem not long afterwards. The opposition began to demand the exclusion from the succesion of the Catholic Duke of York, and the adoption of Charles's illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth (the white Protestant hope) as heir to the throne.

It was into this situation that Dryden weighed with his scoriating satire Absalom and Achitophel. His choice of a biblical parallel to the present situation was a stroke of genius. Charles II becomes King David from the Old Testament, and at once his profligacy takes on a new, attractive, even a spiritual look:

In pious times, e'er priestcraft did begin,

Before polygamy was made a sin;

When man on many multiplied his kind,

E'er one to one was cursedly confined,

When nature prompted, and no law denied

Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;

Then Israel's monarch, after Heaven's own heart,

His vigorious warmth did, variously, impart

To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command,

Scattered his Maker's image through the land.

Thus the loose moraled Charles is transformed into David, father of his people, living in the days before monogamy was ordained, and before priests of varying religions began causing trouble and restricting natural pleasures (Dryden was no friend to priests of any religion: it is worth looking closely at the first line, with its suggestion that priests diminish rather than increase piety, and its wicked pun on the word 'craft'). Sexual licence becomes 'vigorous warmth'—something good and (literally and metaphorically) life-giving. Charles's habit of scattering bastards in his wake is transformed into something like largesse—a shower of gold descending on his subjects: 'scattered his maker's image through the land.'

After a no-holds-barred description of the English (called here, of course, the Jews) as 'a headstrong, moody, murmuring race,' and one that had veered from religion to religion over the last century of so ('Gods they had tried of every shape and size / That God-smiths could produce, or priests devise'), Dryden comes to the heart of his poems and his pupose. This is a series of satirical portraits of the main conspirators against Charles II. Dryden is one of the great artists of the satirical portrait, the thumbnail sketch of a man that utterly demolishes his reputation and credibility, and at the same time both establishes him as an eternal type and suggests general reflections on human nature. For example, the Earl of Shaftesbury ('Achitophel'—one of the main conspirators, and evil genius to the young Duke of Monmouth) is depicted as fiery, turbulent, cunning, the incurable and perennial conspirator, and a man 'for close designs and crooked counsels fit.' Then Dryden broadens out the picture to establish him as a type: he makes him into a crazed, over-venturesome sailor, good in high seas, but bored in calm waters:

Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high,

He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,

Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.

And then he immediately comes in with a trenchant couplet of generalized reflection that has become the classic quote to describe not only the brilliant political adventurer, but all erratic men of genius—a quote that is as relevant in our own days as in his:

Great wits are sure to madness near allied

And thin partitions do their bounds divide . . .

The portraits in this rogues' gallery range from the crude, comptentuous daub to the most subtle pieces of ironic brushwork. Exuberant mud-slinging is good enough for the mean, slippery Sheriff of London, who 'Did wisely from expensive sins refrain, / And never broke the Sabbath but for gain.' More subtle arts of destruction were called for by the various, talented, changeable Duke of Buckingham ('Zimri'), who, according to Dryden, changed sides as he would his coat, dabbled in everything and excelled in nothing:

Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong,

Was everything by stats, and nothing long:

But in the course of one revolving moon

Was chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon.

The placing of those last four nouns is in itself a lesson in the techniques of satire.

If these portraits are the central achievement of the poem, Dryden shows almost equal mastery in the action of the poem, which is mainly a dialogue between Achitophel and Absalom (the Duke of Monmouth) in which, amid echoes of Paradise Lost, Achitophel takes on Satanic dimensions as the tempter, and Absalom becomes the weak, narcisssistic pawn in a political game he barely understands (for Charles loved Monmouth, as David did Absalom, and any more culpable involvement could not be suggested). The poem is by turns subtle, vigorous, dangeerous and uproarious — atriumph of suggestion, tact and sheer impish cleverness. It has claims to be the greatest satire in our language.

Dryden's other great satire is MacFlecknoe, in which a rival poet, Thomas Shadwell, author of some bad poetry and some lively and very dirty plays, is crowned King of Dullness by his predecessor Flecknoe (another dreadful poet):

Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,

Mature in dullness from his tender years;

Shadwell alone of all my sons is he

Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

But we should not forget that Dryden is not just a satirist. In fact, he can claim to be among the most various poets in our language. He was a master of the Ode, with two outstandingly brilliant Odes to St Cecilia (patron saint of music), of which the second, Alexander's Feast shows him still at the height of his technical powers, and still experimenting, in the last years of his life. His tributes to friends and kinsmen (for example To the Memofy of Mr Oldham) are as positive and sober as his satire is destructive and hilarious. His occasional poems (such as that celebrating the return of Charles II from exile, or Annus Mirabilis, in which he depicts the year of the Great Fire of London and the Plague) are much above the average for such productions, and no doubt gained him the Poet Laureateship (he was one of the few to hold this office while still wriring good poetry). His poems on serious and religious matters are restrained but often moving statements, and his translations are frequently brilliant — he made Chaucer available again after generations of neglect due to the transformations of the language since his time. We know virtually nothing of Dryden the man. If we judge him from his poetry he was versatile, trenchant, contemplative, witty, and supremely sane.

Dryden stood alone among Restoration poets; there were others with talent, notably the Earl of Rochester, whose life of daring and varied debauchery, ending in that ultimate debauch a death-bed repentance, intefered with his poetry too greatly for him ever to do justice to his talent. But there is something in the literary history of the Restoration period which is of reater significance for the future than any bouquet of minor poets: this is a vigorous crop of prose writers, forging a prose idiom to march the already established dramatic and poetic idioms. Aubrey's Brief Lives of his contemporaries are quirky and delightful contributions to the as yet new art of biography, and we get an even more vivid picture of notable personalities from the best diaries of the period, notably Evelyn's and Pepys's. 

But of all the writers in thie new and rather difficult medium of prose the one whose influence was greatest was John Bunyan (1628-1688), for his Pilgrim's Progress was staple reading for generations, the sort of book that is read first in childhood (as George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver reads it) and constantly returned to for delight and spiritual refreshment thereafter. Modelling his prose on the Bible (the influence of the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible on English prose cannot be exaggerated), he describes the pilgrimage that to him life was in the from of an allegory. Christian, the principal pilgrim, travels with other like-minded people of varying degrees of determination and genuine piety through a series of perils — natural, human and supernatural — to his destined heaven. Bunyan's experience as a preacher (in and out of jail) is obvious, but so is his natural talent as a story-teller, and his feeling for language that is at once simple, fortright, homely, yet vivid. 

A very different sort of narrative was that provided by Aphra Behn (1640-1689), the first woman writer to be mentioned in this survey (and, alas, it will be a century before another gains a place). Mrs Behn wrote a series of plays, notably comedies that went a good deal further in bawdy than even most male writers of the time. But what she is remembered for today is some prose narratives which are clearly stepping-stones from the Elizabethan short tale to the novel as we know it today. The best remembered of these is Oroonoko, the tale of a noble savage sold into slavery in Surinam. The impeccable nad high-toned moral sentiments of this noeble creature are not likely to appeal to the modern reader, but the believable setting and inter-racial relationships are the result of Aphra Behn's own stay in the colony. Aphra Behn created a narrative that seemes to people at the time to be not really fiction, but a documentary account of events and people that actually took place. Defoe in the next century created several such works, and they lead us directly to the novel proper.

 

 

 By the Sword Divided  - Restoration

 

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