Malherbe, Corneille, Racine, Moliere,--all that
brilliant company which makes the reign of Louis XIV the Elizabethan Age of
French literature,--to see how far astray the early writers of the
Restoration went in their wretched imitation. When a man takes another for
his model, he should copy virtues not vices; but unfortunately many English
writers reversed the rule, copying the vices of French comedy without any
of its wit or delicacy or abundant ideas. The poems of Rochester, the plays
of Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, all popular in
their day, are mostly unreadable. Milton's "sons of Belial, flown with
insolence and wine," is a good expression of the vile character of the
court writers and of the London theaters for thirty years following the
Restoration. Such work can never satisfy a people, and when Jeremy
Collier,[172] in 1698, published a vigorous attack upon the evil plays and
the playwrights of the day, all London, tired of the coarseness and
excesses of the Restoration, joined the literary revolution, and the
corrupt drama was driven from the stage.

With the final rejection of the Restoration drama we reach a crisis in the
history of our literature. The old Elizabethan spirit, with its patriotism,
its creative vigor, its love of romance, and the Puritan spirit with its
moral earnestness and individualism, were both things of the past; and at
first there was nothing to take their places. Dryden, the greatest writer
of the age, voiced a general complaint when he said that in his prose and
poetry he was "drawing the outlines" of a new art, but had no teacher to
instruct him. But literature is a progressive art, and soon the writers of
the age developed two marked tendencies of their own,--the tendency to
realism, and the tendency to that preciseness and elegance of expression
which marks our literature for the next hundred years.

In realism--that is, the representation of men exactly as they are, the
expression of the plain, unvarnished truth without regard to ideals or
romance--the tendency was at first thoroughly bad. The early Restoration
writers sought to paint realistic pictures of a corrupt court and society,
and, as we have suggested, they emphasized vices rather than virtues, and
gave us coarse, low plays without interest or moral significance. Like
Hobbes, they saw only the externals of man, his body and appetites, not his
soul and its ideals; and so, like most realists, they resem