Reviews of the Week
The Great Century
Seventeenth-Century English Literature. By C. V. Wedgwood. Home University Series. (Geoffrey Cumberledge. 5s.) IT is much to be wished that more historians (in the usually accepted sense) would write about literature,and that more men of letters would write general history, for the former would perhaps leirn to write more flexibly than they often do, and the latter might learn something about the handling of masses of material. Miss Wedgwood, of course, is already recognised as being both able to write history, and able to write. What an admirable sentence, for example, near the beginning of the book : " Life was shorter, noisier, gayer, and more dreadful ; shot with pain for which there was no help, and darkened by illness for which there was no cure." That is the historian. Now near the end of the book, the literary critic : " Urquhart's Rabelais is a rich, juicy, eccentric, extraordinary book, as succulent as the original, a great bursting haggis of a book." It should be clear by now that anybody taking up this volume can prcnnise themselves good reading.
To deal with such a century in a short space was a terrific task, because in it there took place not only what may be the greatest political revolution in our history, but also the deepest metaphysical revolution. It begins, we might say, in the middle ages, and it ends in modern times. If there is one major criticism one might make of this book, it is that Miss Wedgwood does not quite bring but the tense drama of the period. " The seventeenth century was a time of exuberant activity, of experiment in politics, speculation in religion, investigation in the natural sciences, and argument ever- where." There was, we might suggest, more agony than is implied in those phrases. Yet Miss Wedgwood has a point to -make, for a little later she says : " The talkative seventeenth century coincided with the confident and fertile youth of modern English " : and about half-way through the book, speaking of mid-century pamphleteering, she remarks "nothing sharpens prose like the necessity to do battle with it," a welcome antidote to the usual cliche about Sprat and Royal Society writing as the main influence in creating the new prose. It is also welcome to be reminded that the Bible was already a hundred years or so out of date 'linguistically when it was re-issued in the Authorised Version, and so had not so great an influence as is usually taken for granted.
It must not, however, be thought that this book is con- cerned with hare bones only. Miss Wedgwood writes well and stimulatingly about the great authors, and includes an amazing number of the lesser ones. It is good to see in so short a space room given to such writers as Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Drayton—though more might have been said about the Heroical Epistles and the lovely Nymphidiae, and some may think that Daniel receives rather scant attention. It is a pity, perhaps, that in talking of the later religious poets, John Norris should have been left out. But it is easy to pick holes, since everyone will lay a different emphasis on various writers or pieces, and in so short a book aver-simplification of certain aspects is inevitable. But no better volume could be de- manded as an introduction for the general reader. It is also a refreshing book for anyone already familiar with the period.
Miss Wedgwood is right to insist on the continuity of the . century : you cannot divide the literature into pre- and post- Great Rebellion phases. Since Shakespeare does not come within her purview, " that mountain peak is Milton, this delightful grove is Dryden," and those are the major ones. Everything almost can be grouped around them, leading up to or away from them. But how accidented the landscape is on either side, particularly the one further from us, with Jonson and Donne, the cavalier poets, the great preachers. It is still the great century of our literature, for diversity, for depth and complexity in poetry, for sheer power in prose. It is much to be hoped that Miss Wedgwood will produce further
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