JOHNSONS LIVES. 



2S5 



too, have their debt to Charles II., although it 

 may be quite true that that prince, as Burnet 

 says, "had little or no literature. . . . The king 

 had little or no literature, but true and good sense, 

 and had got a right notion of style ; for he was 

 in France at the time when they were much set on 

 reforming their language. It soon appeared that 

 he had a true taste. So this helped to raise the 

 value of these men " (Tillotson and others), " when 

 the king approved of the style their discourses 

 generally ran in, which was clear, plain, and 

 short." 



It is the victory of this prose style, " clear, 

 plain, and short," over what Burnet calls " the 

 old style, long and heavy," which is the dis- 

 tinguishing achievement, in the history of Eng- 

 lish letters, of the century following the Resto- 

 ration. From the first it proceeded rapidly and 

 was never checked. Bui net says of the Chancel- 

 lor Finch, Earl of Nottingham, " He was long 

 much admired for his eloquence, but it was la- 

 bored and affected, and he saw it much despised 

 before he died." A like revolution of taste 

 brought about a general condemnation of our 

 old prose style, imperfectly disengaged from the 

 style of poetry. By Johnson's time the new style, 

 the style of prose, was altogether paramount in its 

 own proper domain, and in its pride of victorious 

 strength had invaded also the domain of poetry. 



That invasion is now visited by us with a con- 

 demnation not less strong and general than the 

 condemnation which the eighteenth century passed 

 upon the unwieldly prose of its predecessors. But 

 let us be careful to do justice while we condemn. 

 A thing good in its own place may be bad out of 

 it. Prose requires a different style from poetry. 

 Poetry, no doubt, is more excellent in itself than 

 prose. In poetry man finds the highest and most 

 beautiful expression of that which is in him. We 

 had far better poetry than the poetry of the eigh- 

 teenth century before that century arrived, we 

 have had better since it departed. Like the 

 Greeks, and, unlike the French, we can point to 

 an age of poetry anterior to our age of prose, 

 eclipsing our age of prose in glory, and fixing the 

 future character and conditions of our literature. 

 We do well to place our pride in the Elizabethan 

 age and Shakespeare, as the Greeks place theirs 

 in Homer. We did well to return in the present 

 century to the poetry of that older age for illu- 

 mination and inspiration, and to put aside, in a 

 great measure, the poetry and poets intervening 

 between Milton and Wordsworth. Milton, in 

 whom our great poetic age expired, was the last 

 of the immortals. Of the five poets whose lives 



follow his in our proposed volume, three, Dryden, 

 Addison, and Swift, are eminent prose-writers as 

 well as poets ; two of the three, Swift and Addi- 

 son, far more distinguished as prose-writers than 

 as poets. The glory of English literature is in 

 poetry, and in poetry the strength of the eigh- 

 teenth century does not lie. 



Nevertheless, the eighteenth century accom- 

 plished for us an immense literary progress, and 

 even its shortcomings in poetry were an instru- 

 ment to that progress, and served it. The exam- 

 ple of Germany may show us what a nation loses 

 from having no prose style. The practical genius 

 of our people could not but urge irresistibly to 

 the production of a real prose style, because for 

 the purposes of modern life the old English prose, 

 the prose of Milton and Taylor, is cumbersome, 

 unavailable, impossible. A style of regularity, 

 uniformity, precision, balance, was wanted. These 

 are the qualities of a serviceable prose style. 

 Poetry has a different logic, as Coleridge said, 

 from prose ; poetical style follows another law 

 of evolution than the style of prose. But there 

 is no doubt that a style of regularity, uniformity, 

 precision, balance, will acquire a yet stronger 

 hold upon the mind of a nation, if it is adopted 

 in poetry as well as in prose, and so comes to 

 govern both. This is what happened in France. 

 To the practical, modern, and social genius of 

 the French, a true prose was indispensable. They 

 produced one of conspicuous excellence, one 

 marked in the highest degree by the qualities of 

 regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. With 

 little opposition from any deep-seated and impe- 

 rious poetic instincts, they made their poetry 

 conform to the law which was moulding their 

 prose. French poetry became marked with the 

 qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, bal- 

 ance. This may have been bad for French poe- 

 try, but it was good for French prose. It height- 

 ened the perfection with which those qualities, 

 the true qualities of prose, were impressed upon 

 it. When England, at the Restoration, desired a 

 modern prose, and began to create it, our writers 

 turned naturally to French literature, which had 

 just accomplished the very process which en- 

 gaged them. The king's acuteness and taste, as 

 we have seen, helped. Indeed, to the admission 

 of French influence of all kinds, Charles II.'s 

 character and that of his court were but too fa- 

 vorable. But the influence of the French writers 

 was at that moment, on the whole, fortunate, and 

 seconded what was a vital and necessary effort in 

 our literature. Our literature required a prose 

 which conformed to the true law of prose ; and, 



