Thought and Style
English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660. By Douglas Bush. (Oxford : at the Clarendon Press 1945. 21s.)
Tins is the first volume issued of what promises to be a big under- taking, a history not of literature alone, but of the whole work, liter- ary, scientific, political, religious, etc. of the period. Perhaps even in a short review a word may be said first on the general plan of this Oxford History of English Literature before any criticism of the specific volume. In contradistinction to the Cambridge History, which gave separate chapters to the different authors and by different critics, though some writers contributed to several volumes, forming a line of reserve on whom the editors could always fall back, notably Professor Saintsbury, in the Oxford plan "each volume or half- volume will be an independent book." The Cambridge plan had certain disadvantages, notably inequality of treatment. But it had this attraction that each author was criticised throughout by one man and from one point of view. Here apparently periods are to take the place of authors, with no overlapping. Thus Mr. Bush deals with half Donne, being excluded by chronology from the early love-poems, and confined to "The Progress of the Soul, a number of occasional pieces, the two Anniversaries and the divine poems an uneven and arbitrary but considerable slice "; so Mr. Bush. More- over, division is carried so far that this history of literature in the seventeenth century does not include one dramatist as such, though he may creep in as a poet. In later volumes one gathers Scott will figure in one volume as a poet and in another as novelist. Well, the dproof of the pudding is in the eating, and one must wait and see how the whole works out.
Mr. Bush's volume is a solid contribution to the work as thus planned. He touches on an enormous number of writers if of some- he can do little but make a mention and indicate shortly the subjects:- of their work. But he deals fully with the period under all the heads, I have enumerated above. Even in dealing with what is generally, regarded as literature Mr. Bush's work, though he can do excellent critical appreciations as I hope to show, is at the opposite pole from Saintsbury's ideal of criticism. Take Bacon in the chapter. on Essays and Characters, and compare with Saintsbury in his Short History. Bush gives one paragraph to a short account of the form and, style, and then two long paragraphs to the itibjects dealt with. Saintsbury, after declaring that "his character does not much concern us" he gives two sentences to it) and that "his philosophical acquirements concern us, if possible, even less," gives almost two full pages to his style. In Bush's volume Bacon, of course, reappears in the chapters on political thought and on science. And these separations affect others, thus Sir Thomas Browne figures. in the chapter on- Science and again in that on Religion and Regions Thought, but so difficult is it to divide matter and form in Browne that it is in the latter chapter that one gets Mr. Bush's admirable appreciation of Browne's style. I confess to leaning to Saintsbury's side more than I have always done. The question of the place of the subject-matter in a
history of literature as such is a difficult one. The conclusion to which the present writer leans is that the critic must try to find what is the salient ,character of an author's thought and show how it determines or is reflected in his style. It is interesting to see how carefully Pascal has considered both Descartes' requirement of clear- , ness as the supreme consideration and Balzac's defence of style as a second science.
But if Mr. Bush has much to say about thought of all kinds he is an admirable critic when he chooses. I would instance in closing some examples ; firstly, his appreciation of Jeremy Taylor, and pre- eminently the long chapter on Milton which closes the volume. The paragraph on Lycidas is the best analysis I know on the combined and complex qualities which make the poem a touchstone of poetic taste. Of Paradise Lost he has written an eloquent and thorough- going vindication viewing the poem, as it must be fairly viewed, from the point of view of an orthodox Christian and Protestant of the seventeenth century. But he does not fail to indicate the touch of hardness which has 'repelled readers (and not all of them are of the unhappy race of romantics) and the source of that repulsion: "Above all, the anthropomorphic and royalist presentation of God, which was almost unavoidable in a heroic poem, has misled many readers and critics into seeing only the trappings of a tyrant and not the religious and metaphysical ideas "ne embodies.' Mr Bush seems to me equally successful against those critics of Milton's style who have condemned it as inferior to that of Dryden. This, criticism has not come from the romantics but from their severe critics.
Mr. Bush is equally sound on the last poems, alike as poems and as the expression of Milton's final mood of mind : "If his faith in men and action has proved vain, there is still hope for the individual man • he can at least with divine grace rule himself." If one question lingers in the mind it is evoked by another statement at the end (p. 39s) where Samson is described as "the last and - retrospective utterance of a great soul to an ignoble nation which he had laboured to serve and save." Did Milton's humility at the end ever allow him, as it did Baxter to recognise that there was something to be said for the other side, that all his opponents were not wicked men? "I make no doubt," wrote Baxter, " that both parties were to blame as commonly falleth - out in most wars and contentions." Did Milton ever feel like that? It seems to me that such a thought never darkened, or lightened, his mind.
The bibliography to this volume can only be described as kolossal. Criticism would need a chapter, and a consideration of what makds a useful bibliography. H. J. C. GRIERSON.
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