"As for Mr Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his subject is not of an heroic poem, properly so called. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous like that of all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and human persons are but two. But I will not take Mr Rhymer's work out of his hands; he has promised the world a critique on that author, wherein, though he will not allow his poem for heroic, I hope he will grant us that his thoughts are elevated, his words sounding, and that no man has so happily copied the manner of Homer, or so copiously translated his Grecisms, and the Latin elegancies of Virgil. It is true he runs into a flat of thoughts, sometimes for a hundred lines together, but it is when he has got into a track of Scripture. His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser, as Spenser did Chaucer. And though, perhaps, the love of their master may have transported both too far in the frequent use of them, yet, in my opinion, obsolete words may there be laudably revived, when either they are more sounding or more significant than those in practice; and when their obscurity is taken away, by joining other words to them which clear the sense, according to the rule of Horace, for the admission of new words. But, in both cases, a moderation is to be observed in the use of them: for unnecessary coinage, as well as unnecessary revival, runs into affectation; a fault to be avoided on either hand. Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse, though I may excuse him, by the example of Hannibal Caro, and other Italians, who have used it; for whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme, (which I have not now the leisure to examine,) his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it; which is manifest in his 'Juvenilia,' or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer though not a poet."
"As for Mr Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his subject is not of an heroic poem, properly so called. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous like that of all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and human persons are but two. But I will not take Mr Rhymer's work out of his hands; he has promised the world a critique on that author, wherein, though he will not allow his poem for heroic, I hope he will grant us that his thoughts are elevated, his words sounding, and that no man has so happily copied the manner of Homer, or so copiously translated his Grecisms, and the Latin elegancies of Virgil. It is true he runs into a flat of thoughts, sometimes for a hundred lines together, but it is when he has got into a track of Scripture. His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser, as Spenser did Chaucer. And though, perhaps, the love of their master may have transported both too far in the frequent use of them, yet, in my opinion, obsolete words may there be laudably revived, when either they are more sounding or more significant than those in practice; and when their obscurity is taken away, by joining other words to them which clear the sense, according to the rule of Horace, for the admission of new words. But, in both cases, a moderation is to be observed in the use of them: for unnecessary coinage, as well as unnecessary revival, runs into affectation; a fault to be avoided on either hand. Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse, though I may excuse him, by the example of Hannibal Caro, and other Italians, who have used it; for whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme, (which I have not now the leisure to examine,) his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it; which is manifest in his 'Juvenilia,' or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer though not a poet."
The general effect of this captious passage is far from pleasant. It leaves us in doubt of the sincerity of Courts, and Towns, and Dryden's admiration of Mr Milton. "His subject is not that of a heroic poem, properly so called." Milton did not call it a heroic poem. But it is an epic poem, and a divine. "The event is not prosperous." Assuredly not. For that matter, neither, to our minds, is that of the Iliad. It seems not a little unreasonable to complain that in Paradise Lost, the "human persons are but two." Dryden "will not take Mr Rhymer's work out of his hands, who has promised us a critique on that author;" and he hopes Mr Rhymerwill grantso and so—look pray again at what Dryden hopes Mr Rhymer will grant to Mr Milton. Mr Rhymer had promised to favour the public "with some reflections on that Paradise Lost of Milton, which some are pleased to call a poem." But this promise, says best Sir Walter, "he never filled up the measure of his presumption by attempting to fulfil." Milton running on a flat of thought for a hundred lines together on a track of Scripture! In his poem, by unnecessary coinage of new, and unnecessary revival of old words, running intoaffectation! Milton not to bejustifiedfor his blankverse, no not even by the example of the illustrious and immortal Hannibal Caro! Then he took to it in despair, for rhyme was not his talent! His rhyme forced and constrained in the Hymn on the Nativity—in Lycidas—in L'Allegro—in Il Penseroso!
In the same Essay on Satire—Dryden talks, not very intelligibly, about "thebeautiful turns of words and thoughts, which are as requisite in this as in heroic poetry itself;" but with which he confesses himself to have been unacquainted till about twenty years before, when "that noble wit of Scotland," Sir George Mackenzie, asked him why he did not imitate "the turnsof Mr Waller and Sir John Denham, of which he repeated many to me." The memory of that "noble wit of Scotland" is far from being honoured—nay, it is execrated by his countrymen—by the common people we mean—and, in the long run, they are no bad judges of merit. He was, we believe, no great shakes as a lawyer, either within or without the bar; and, like many other well-born, weak-minded men, had a taste for elegant literature and vulgar blood. Of his "voluminous works, historical and juridical," we know less than nothing; but his "Essays on several moral subjects," have more than once fallen out of our hands. Sir Walter says, "he was an accomplished scholar, of lively talents, and ready elocution, and very well deserved the appellation of a 'noble wit of Scotland.'" "The Bluidy Mackenyie," reciting to Dryden many "beautiful turns" from Waller and Denham—and Dryden calling the poetasters "those two fathers of our English poetry," in the same page where he is writing of Milton! At Sir George's behest, in Cowley, even in his "Davideis," an heroic poem, he sought in vain for "elegant turns, either on the word or on the thought;" and his search was equally fruitless in the "Paradise Lost"—for, as Milton "endeavours every where to express Homer, whose age had not yet arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty thoughts, which were clothed with admirable Grecisms, and ancient words which he had been digging from the mines of Chaucer and Spenser; and which, with all their rusticity, had somewhat of venerable in them. But I found not there neither, that for which I looked." His search through Spenser and Tasso is more fortunate; Virgil and Ovid are the two principal fountains of them in Latin poetry; and "the French, at this day, are so fond of them, that they judge them to be first beauties;delicate et bien tourné, are the highest commendations which they bestow on somewhat which they think a masterpiece."
This sort of explicit criticism, in a small way, is rather unsatisfactory; so let us look at a specimen of implicit on Milton. In Todd's edition are detailed the names of the translators of "Paradise Lost" into rhyme and prose. "We must not" says Sir Walter, "confound with these effusions of gratuitous folly an alteration or imitation planned and executed by John Dryden." We must not; therefore let "his gratuitous folly" stand aloof from theirs, and be judged of in itself. "The State of Innocence" isan Opera! "Had the subject been of a nature which admitted its being actually represented, we might conceive that Dryden, who was under engagements to the theatre, with which it was not always easy to comply, might have been desirous to shorten his own labourby adopting the story, sentiments, and language of a poem" (how kind and cool) "which he so highly esteemed, and which might probably have been new to the generality of his audience. But thecostumeof our first parents, had there been no other objection, must have excluded 'The State of Innocence' from the stage; and, accordingly, it was certainly never intended for representation." One cannot well help agreeing with Sir Walter in this pleasant passage; nevertheless, might not the opera have been indited with a view to representation? With what morerationalpurpose could it have been "planned and executed"? The stage directions are full and minute; and, if meant for perusal only, and to be part of the poem, they are beyond the ridiculous. As, for example—
"Scene I. represents a chaos, or a confused mass of matter; the stage is almost wholly dark. A symphony of warlike music is heard for some time; then from the heavens (whichare opened) fall the rebellious angels, wheeling in air, and seeming transfixed with thunderbolts. The bottom of the stage being opened, receives the angels, who fall out of sight. Tunes of victory are played, and an hymn sung; angels discovered alone, brandishing their swords. The music ceasing, and the heavens being closed, the scene shifts, and, on a sudden, represents hell. Part of the scene is a lake of brimstone or rolling fire; the earth of a burnt colour. The fallen angels appear on the lake, lying prostrate; a tune of horror and lamentation is heard."
How all this might take with a mixed audience, we do not presume to conjecture, yet very great absurdities do sometimes take almost as well on as of the stage. Must "thecostumeof our first parents, had there been no other objection, have excluded the 'State of Innocence' from the stage?" True, Sir Charles Sedley, and other "men of wit and fashion about town," were not well received when exhibiting themselves naked on a balcony overhanging a great thoroughfare; but then they were drunk, and acted not only indecent but insulting, nay, threatening attitudes, accompanied with abjurgations and blasphemies, which was going injudiciously in advance of that age of refinement. Suppose Booth perfectly sober in Adam, and Nell Gwynne up merely to the proper pitch of vivacity in Eve, we do not see why the opera might not have had a run during the reign of the Merry Monarch. The first sight we have of Adam is, "as newly created, laid on a bed of moss and flowers, by a rock." He rises as he begins to utter his earliest soliloquy; and we believe it is an established rule, not to turn your back on—or in playhouse phrase—not to rump your audience. In such a case; however, considerable latitude would have been conceded by both sexes to our original; and what with shades and shrubs, and, above all, the rock, an adroit actor could have had little difficulty in accommodating to his posterity their progenitor. Of Eve our first glimpse is among "trees cut out on each side, with several fruits upon them; a fountain in the midst; at the far end the prospect terminating in walks." Nelly might have worn her famous felt chapeau, broad as a coach-wheel, as appropriately in that as in any other character, and contrived to amble about with sufficient decorum for those fastidious times. Besides, as custom soon reconciles people to the most absurd dress, so would it probably, before long, reconcile them to no dress at all. A full-bottomed wig in the mimic scene, on heroic representative of a class of men, who, off the boards, had always worn, not only their own hair, but a crop, wasa sine qua noncondition of historic success.In puris naturalibuswould have been but to fall back on nature. Why, only couple of years ago, half a million of our countrymen and countrywomen of all ages, flocked by instalments, in a single season, to look at our First Parents fresh from the hands of a French painter, naked as you were born. Such is the power of Names. No imagination—not the least in the world—had that painter; no sense—not the least in the world—of the beautiful or of the sublime in the human figure. But the population, urban and rural alike, were unhappy till they had had a sight of Adam and Eve in Paradise. We cheerfully acknowledge that Adam was a very good-looking young fellow—bang up to the mark, six feet without his shoes-close upon thirteen stone. Had he been advertised as Major Adam of the Scots Greys, the brevet would have exhibited himself on that bank to empty benches. In like manner, with the fairest of her daughters, Eve. As Pope says,
"Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see,Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be."
Pious old gentlemen, however, pronounced her perfect, merely because they gazed on the image of the mother of mankind. Painted they both were in oils. But from what we saw—for we too were carried away by the general enthusiasm—we are justified in inferring that, under prudent management, our First Parents might be successfully got up alive during the summer season at our Adelphi.
We believe that "The State of Innocence"waswritten for the stage.But the playwright did not intend that Adam and Eve should be stark-naked in an acted opera. Strange to say, there is not a word in it about their naked majesty or innocence. Dryden, by his idea of an opera, was forced to depart from nature and Milton. Eve's dream, so characteristically narrated by her to Adam in the poem, is shadowed out by a vision passing before her asleep, in the opera. The stage direction gives:—"A vision, where a tree rises loaden with fruit; spirits rise with it, and draw a canopy out of the tree; and the spirits dance about the tree in deformed shapes; after the dance an angel enters,with a woman,habited like Eve." That is decisive.
But what of the opera? In the preface, Dryden says "I cannot, without injury to the deceased author of 'Paradise Lost,' but acknowledge, that the poem has receivedits entire foundation, part of the design, and many of the ornaments from him. What I have borrowed will be so easily discerned from my mean productions, that I shall not need to point the reader to the places." That avowal may be thought to set aside all criticism—but not so—for his illustrious editor says, "the probable motive therefore of this alteration was the wish, so common to genius, to exert itself upon a subject on which another had already attained brilliant success; or, as Dryden has termed a similar attempt, the desire to shoot in the bow of Ulysses." And he adds, that because Milton intended at first to model his poem into a dramatic form, "Dryden, conscious of his own powers, and enthusiastically admiring those of Milton, was induced to make an experiment on the forsaken plan of the blind bard, which, with his usual rapidity of conception and execution, he completed in the short space of one month." Wide-encroaching Walter would see nothing far wrong in Glorious John. It is not "the forsaken plan of the blind bard," nor any thing in the least like it. They are opposite as any things that "own antipathy in nature." But this is all mere nonsense. The opera is disgraceful to Dryden. It proves that he had no understanding of the "Paradise Lost."
"Ay, you maytagmy verses, if you will." But had Milton lived to hear their taggery, wrathful fire would have been in his eyes.
The opera opens, as we saw, in chaos, the scene sinking into hell, and we have Lucifer "raising himself on the lake." His exclamatory speech, of some sixteen lines, on the lake is versified, not in Dryden's best manner, from that most sublime one of Satan on reaching with Beelzebub the burning marle, with some additions from Satan's first address to that angel, while yet they were lying side by side on the fiery flood. To those who have the First Book of the "Paradise Lost" by heart, this sort of transposition patchwork cannot but be most offensive. As if to give an air of originality, where everything is borrowed and blurred, Asmoday in Milton one of the lowest, is made one of the highest, and is substituted for Beelzebub—and to him Lucifer most unarchangel-like calls "Ho! Asmoday, awake!"
Asmoday answers in a short speech, very ill reported, formerly delivered by Milton's Beelzebub, concluding with a bit absolutely stolen from his Satan himself! Lucifer then observes to Asmoday, that "our troops,like scattered leaves in autumn, lie!" A poor plagiarism indeed from the famous description from Milton's own lips, and from Lucifer's incredibly absurd! Lucifer then announces—
"With wings expanded wide, ourselves we'll rear,And fly incumbent on the dusky air.Hell! thy new lord receive!Heaven cannot envy me an empire here."(Both fly to dry land.)
You remember the lines in Milton—
"Then with expanded wings he steers his flight,Aloft incumbent on the dusky air"—
and the other sublimities of the description—all here destroyed by the monstrous absurdity of making Lucifer paint his own projected flight. He then asks "the rest of the devils," "Are you onbeds of down?" On beds of down our grandsires lay—but think of eider-ducks in heaven. Moloch says his say from the Miltonic Satan, with a slight new reading.
"Better torulein hell than serve in heaven."
And Beelzebub approves the dictum.
"Moloch, in that all are resolved, like thee.The means are unprepared; but 'tis not fit,Our dark divan in public view should sit;Or what we plot against the Thunderer,The ignobleCROWD OF VULGAR DEVILShear!"
Lucifer adopts this disdainful suggestion, and, great magician as he is, exclaims—
"A golden palace let be raised on high,To imitate—no, to outshine the sky!All mines are ours, and gold above the rest;Let this be done, andquick as 'twas exprest."
"A palace rises, where sit as in council,Lucifer, Asmoday, Moloch, Belial, Beelzebub, andSatan." Whohemay be, deuce take us if we can tell. Up to the very moment of his making his appearance, we in our simple faith had believed Lucifer and Satan to be one devil—nay, the devil. We were taken quite aback by this unexplained phenomenon of Satan's acting the part of his own tail. In this capacity he makes but one speech—but it is the speech of the evening. One seldom hears such eloquence. Moloch having proposed battle, the mysterious stranger rises to second the motion.
"Satan.I agreeWith this brave vote; and if in Hell there beTen more such spirits, heaven is our own again.We venture nothing, and may all obtain.Yet, who can hope but well, since our successMakes foes secure, and makes our dangers less?Seraph and Cherub, careless of their chargeAnd wanton, in full ease now live at large;Unguarded leave the passes of the sky,And all dissolved in hallelujahs lie."
In the "grand consult," as recorded by Milton, Beelzebub, after proposing the "perilous attempt," asks,
"But, first, whom we shall sendIn search of this new world? Whom shall we findSufficient? who shall tempt with wandering feetThe dark, unbottom'd, infinite abyss,And through the palpable obscure find outHis uncouth way, or spread his aery flight,Upborne with indefatigable wingsOver the vast abrupt, ere he arriveThe happy isle?"
And Satan is the self-chosen missionary of the religion of Hell. In Dryden Asmoday suggests the enterprise, and
"Moloch.This glorious enterprise—(rising up.)Lucifer.Rash angel, stay. (Rising, and laying his sceptre on Moloch's head.)That palm is mine, which none shall take away.Hot braves like thee may fight, but know not wellTo manage this, the last great stake of hell."
The council comes to a close—and Lucifer promises to be with them again,
"Before yon brimstone lake thrice ebb and flow."
Tides in the Mediterranean! a touch beyond Milton.
"Here, while the chiefs sit in the palace, may be expressed the sports of the devils, as flights and dancing in grotesque figures; and a song, expressing the change of their condition, what they enjoyed before, and how they fell bravely in battle, having deserved victory by their valour, and what they would have done if they had conquered."
What had Dryden purposed to achieve? Out of two books of a great epic, to edify one act of an opera. To invention of situation, character, or passion, he aspires not; all he had to do—since he must needs meddle—was to select, compress, and abridge, with some judgment and feeling, and to give the result—unhappy at the best—in his own vigorous verse and dearly-beloved rhyme. But beneath the majesty and imagination of Milton, his genius, strong as it was, broke down, and absolutely sunk beneath the level of that of common men. Yet not in awe, nor in reverence of a superior power; for there is no trepidation of spirit; on the contrary, with cool self-assurance he rants his way through the fiery gloom of hell. Byhis hands shorn of their beams, the fallen angels are, one and all, poor devils indeed. The Son of the Morning is seedy, and has lost all authority over the swell mob, which he vainly essays to recover by cracking Moloch's organ with his sceptre. Yet Sir Walter, blinded by his generous admiration of Dryden's great endowments, scruples not to say that "the scene of the consultation in Pandemonium, and of the soliloquy of Satan (not Satan, it seems, but Lucifer) on his arrival in the newly-created universe, would possess great merit did they not unfortunately remind us of the majestic simplicity of Milton." Oh, heavens and earth! the veritable Satan's soliloquy on Niphate's top!
"O thou, that with surpassing glory crown'd,Look'st from thy sole dominion like the GodOf this new world; at whose sight all the starsHide their diminish'd heads, to thee I call,But with no friendly voice,and add thy name,O Sun!to tell thee how I hate thy beams,That bring to my remembrance from what stateI fell, how glorious once above thy sphere,Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,Warring in heaven against heaven's matchless king!"
And so on for nearly a hundred lines, in many a changeful strain, arch-angelical all, of heaven-remembering passion, while ever, as thus he spoke,
"Each passion dimm'd his face,Thrice changed with pale, ire, envy, and despair;Which marr'd his borrow'd visage, and betray'dHim counterfeit, if any eye beheld;For heavenly minds, from such distempers foulAre ever clear."
The soliloquy of Dryden's Lucifer consists of twenty lines, taken almost at hap-hazard from that of Milton's, jumbled together without consideration, and mangled from the most multitudinous blank verse ever written, into rhymes much beneath the average merit of one who, at times, could indeed command "the long-majestic march and energy divine."
Adam and Eve fare little better than the angels under his reforming fingers. Milton, you remember, makes Adam tell Raphael the story of his birth, in language charmful to affable arch-angel's ear, albeit tuned to harmonies in heaven. Dryden burlesques that revelation into the following soliloquy, supposed to have beenthe first words spoken by human lips. Adam at once opens his mouth in the style of the age of refinement. After the fall, how degenerate kept growing on our father tongue, till it reached its acme in the barbarous lingo of Shakspeare! And how suited, here, the thought to the speech! How natural the natural theology of both! He anticipates Descartes.
"Adam.What am I? or from whence?For that I am(rising)I know, because I think; but whence I come,Or how this frame of mine began to be,What other being can disclose to me?I move, and see, and speak, discourse, and know;Though now I am, I was not always so.Then that from which I was, must be before,Whom, as my spring of being, I adore.How full of ornament is all I view,In all its parts! and seems as beautiful as new:O goodly order'd earth! O Power Divine!Of thee I am, and what I am is thine."
A day or two after, "a cloud descends with six angels in it, and when it is near the ground breaks, and, on each side, discovers six more." Raphael and Gabriel, sent to admonish and warn, discourse with Adam, the ten others standing at a distance. The conversation instantly assumes, and throughout sustains, an intensely controversial character, and Raphael and Gabriel, though two to one, and moreover angelversusman, are hard put to it on predestination and free-will. Adam is equipped with all the weapons of the schools, and uses them defensively, and most offensively, with all the dexterity of a veteran gladiator. But our disgust soon ceases, along with our deception; and we but see and hear John Drydenpuzzling a brace of would-be wits at Wills's. The whole reads like a so-so bit of theReligio Laici. It ends thus:—
"Adam.Hard state of life! since heaven foreknows my will,Why am I not tied up from doing ill?Why am I trusted with myself at large,When he's more able to sustain the charge?Since angels fell, whose strength was more than mine,'Twould then more grace my frailty to confine.Foreknowing the success, to leave me free,Excuses him, and yet supports not me!"
Thisfrom Adam yet sinless in Paradise!
The loves of Adam and Eve are not perhaps absolutely coarse—at least not so for Dryden—but they are of the earth earthy, and the earth is not of the mould of Eden. Aiblins—not coarse, but verily coquettish, and something more, is Eve. And she is too silly.
"From each treeThe feather'd kinds peep down to look on me;And beasts with upcast eyes forsake their shade,And gaze as if I were to be obey'd.Sure I am somewhat which they wish to be,And cannot.I myself am proud of me."
A day or two after their marriage, Eve gives Adam a long description of her first emotions experienced in the nuptial bower. More warmly coloured than in her simplicity she seems to be aware of; and Adam, pleased with her innocent flattery, treats her with an Epithalamium.
"When to my arms thou brought'st thy virgin love,Fair angels sang our bridal hymn above:The Eternal, nodding, shook the firmament!And conscious nature gave her glad consent.Roses unbid, and every fragrant flowerFlew from their stalks to strew thy nuptial bower:The furr'd and feather'd kinds the triumph did pursue,And fishes leap'd above the streams the passing pomp to view."
Hats off—bravo—bravo—hurra—hurra!—Of such stuff is made, in the "State of Innocence," Dryden's implicit criticism on theParadise Lostof Milton.
Peace be with his shade! and its forgiveness with us. It is dangerous to unite the functions of judge and executioner. The imperturbable bosom of the seated judge calmly gives forth the award of everlasting Justice, and the mandate for the punishment that must expiate or appease her violated majesty. But the judge who is obliged to turn lictor, and must step down from the tribunal to take his criminal farther in hand, undoubtedly runs a risk, when he feels his hand in, of being carried too far by his excited zeal. After all, we have stayed ours. And now, having discharged a principal part of our office, what remains, but that we turn round, heal with our right hand what our left has inflicted, and lift up Glorious John to the skies? And lift him up we will; and with good reason; for we are far indeed from being done with this first era of deliberate and formal criticism in English literature. Extol him to the clouds and to the stars we will, but not now; for lo! where another great name beckons!
The close of the seventeenth century for ever shut the eyes of John Dryden upon the clouded and fluctuating daylight of our sublunary world. It may have been, in the same year, that a solitary boy, then twelve years old, wrote five stanzas which any man might have been glad to have written—and which you have by heart—an "Ode to Solitude"—conspicuous in the annals of English poetry as the dawn-gleam of a new sun that was presently to arise, and to fill the region that Dryden had left.
A feeble frame has dedicated many a student. This, with other causes about this time, took the boy,Alexander Pope, from schools where he learned little, to commit him, under the guardian more than guiding love of indulgent parents, to his own management of his own studies. And study he did—instinctively, eagerly, ramblingly through books of sundry kinds—helping himself as he could to their languages—devouring more than he digested—wedding himself to the high and gracious muses—seeking for, and finding, his own extraordinarypowers—and diminishing the small quantity of delicate health which nature had put in his keeping. He resigned himself to die, and was dying, when a strong interposition, among other sanatary measures, transferred him from the back of Pegasus to that of an earth-born horse.
Pope had a gentleness of spirit, which showed itself in his filial offices to his father and mother—to her the most, ill the prolonged wearing out of a beloved life. It appears in kindly relations to his friends, in charities, in the scheme of his life—contentedness in a bounded, quiet existence, a seclusion among books, and trees, and flowers. His life flowed on peaceably and gently, like the noble river upon which his modest dwelling looked. Ill health, as we said, often dedicates a student. The constitutional feebleness from which he suffered, might doubly favour his mind; as often the more delicate frame harbours the greater spirit; and as inaptitude for active and rough sports, throws the solitary boy upon the companionship of books, and upon the energies, avocations, and pleasures of his own intelligence and fancy. The little poem of his boyhood, and the first of his manhood, prophesy his tenor of life, and his literary career.
A commanding power, a predominant star in English literature—you might say that the last century belonged to him. Dryden reigned over his contemporaries. Pope, succeeding, took dominion over his own time and the following. The pupil of Dryden, and gratefully proud to proclaim the greatness of his master, and to own all obligations, he moulded himself nevertheless upon a type in his own mind. In the school of Dryden he is an original master. Dryden is, properly speaking, without imitators. His manner proceeds from his own genius, and baffles transcribers. But Pope completed an art which could be learned, and he left a world full of copyists.
A remarkable feature is the early acknowledgment of Pope by his contemporaries. At sixteen he is a poet for the world by hisPastorals, and at that age he has a literary adviser in Walsh and a literary patron in Trumbull. He does not seem to court. He is courted. He is the intimate friend, we do not know how soon, of scholars and polite writers, of men and women high in birth, in education, in station. Scarce twenty, by his "Essay on Criticism" he assumes a chair in the school of the Muses. At five-and-twenty, he is an acknowledged dictator of polite letters. So early, rapid, untroubled an ascension to fame, it would require some research to find a parallel to. Our literature has it not. And this acknowledgment, gratulation, triumph, which friends and circles, and the confined literary world of that day in this country could furnish, a whole age, and a whole country, and a whole world, the extended republic of letters, confirm.
In the judgment of England, in the eighteenth century, the reputation of Pope may be called the most dazzling in English literature. It was a nearer sun than Dryden, Milton, Shakspeare; as for Spenser and Chaucer, they were little better than fixed stars.
Great revolutions in the state of the heavens and of astronomical science have ensued. To say nothing of new luminaries that have come into birth, from the bosom of "chaos and unoriginal night," either we have wheeled round upon Shakspeare, or he upon us, in a surprising manner; the orb of Milton enlarges day by day; cheerily we draw large accessions of the gentlest light on Spenser; and old Father Geoffrey and we are sensibly approximating.
We have taken Pope's counsel. We have with some good-will reverted to Nature, and so we come nearer to the poets of Nature. There may have been other causes at work. The change has involved more than was just a depreciation of Pope himself: as if he were an accomplished artist in a limited sphere of art, and no poet. We dissenttoto corde et toto cœlo. He was a spirit, muse-born, a hero of half celestial extraction, and so by all rule a demigod.
His age confined him. A poet is not independent of his age. He may ride on the van of the tide—no more. And we see that the greatest poets are but the most entire expression of the age, taken at the best. How shall it be otherwise? Their age is motherand nurse to them. And what air does a poet respire, but the circulating, fanning, living, breeze of sympathy? He more than all beings receives into his soul the souls of other men. So he thrives and grows; and shall he not be a partaker in his age?
In an age thus to be described, that it refines instead of creating, and that, in particular, it imposes the refinement elaborated by social, and indeed aristocratical manners, upon genius, which should only refine itself by tenderness and sanctity, and by love dwelling evermore in the inextinguishable paradise of the beautiful—he who was fitted to his age by much of his mind, by his wit, by fancy given more fully than imagination, by inclination to thelimæ labor, by the susceptibility of polish, by a reasonableness of understanding, by his perception of manners, even by the delicacy of his habits—he,Alexander Pope, nevertheless, desired the greatnesses of poetry. At fourteen, he tries his hand in practice on the lofty Statius—at five-and-twenty, upon the sublime Homer. Judge of his poetical heart by his Preface to Shakspeare, by his translation of Homer, preface and all. What was the translation of Homer? Of all works, not creative, the one of most aspiring ambition, even more than that of Pindar or Æschylus. The young poet who has launched on the air the light self-buoyed, gracefully-floating Rape of the Lock, who has dipped his pen in the pathos of love and religion for Eloisa, longs to put in use the powers that kindle and struggle within him. He will do something of greater design in weightier literature; he will, so as a poet may, stir, melt, strengthen, instruct, exalt, and amplify the mind of his country; and he makes the greatest of poets, the father of all poetry—English. He pledges himself, before his country, to the task, and then trembles at the difficulties and magnitude of his undertaking, and then sits down to it, and then delivers it accomplished.
Did Homer already speak English, through the organ of Chapman? If he did, it was not English for England; least of all, for the England of Pope's day. Fiery and eloquent, and creative as it is, Chapman'sHomeris hard reading now, and somewhat rare.Then, the book was, for the general capacity, precisely the same thing as if it were not. And Pope, no grudging bestower of merited honours, awards generous praise to his irregularly-great predecessor, amply acknowledging, with one word, in him both native power and effectual sympathy with their unparagoned original.
Let us reflect, also, that after all a true translation of Homer into English is, in all probability, a thing impossible. Why did not Milton leave us half a book, or some fifty verses, that we might know what the utmost poetical power, and the utmost mastery of our speech, and the utmost resources of our verse, could effect? The inspiring expressive music of the original tongue clothes the simplest and most unadorned word and phrase in wealth, splendour, gorgeous majesty, prodigal magnificence; and this, not with any incongruence or disharmony, any more than Eve'sGOLDENtresses were excessive ornament, unmeet for the primitive simplicity of Eden. The same exhilaration and vivification of the hearing soul, which this perpetual music infuses, united to the same simplicity of the thought and the words, will not easily be found in English. Again, rhyme seems wanted to the richness of the harmony. Yet how shall rhyme allow that utmost freedom and range in the flow of the thought which marks the now majestically, now impetuously sweeping, Homeric river? That measure, someasured, and yet so free; large, various, capacious—that hexameter is despair. Meanwhile no nation concludes to forego the incorporation of the great foreign works of literature into its own, merely for such discouragement, merely because the adequate representation lies wholly out of reach. We have gained much in bringing over the powerful matter, if we must leave the style behind, and yet the style is almost a part of the matter.
Homer is out of hand—Iliad and Odyssey. The Mæonian sun has ripened the powers of the occidental poet. And Pope—aged thirty-seven—declares that henceforward he will writefrom, as well asto, his ownmind. The "Essay on Man" follows. It expresses that graver study of the universal subject, MAN, which appeared to Pope, now self-known, to be, for the time of poetical literature to which he came, the most practicable—for his own ability the aptest; and it embodies that part of anthropology which doubtless was the most congenial to his own inclination—the philosophical contemplation of man's nature, estate, destiny.
The success of this enterprise was astonishing. Be the philosophy what and whose it may, the poem revived to the latest age of poetry the phenomenon of the first, when precept and maxim were modulated into verse, that they might write themselves in every brain, and live upon every tongue.
The spirit and sweetness of the verse, the lucid and vivid expression, the pregnant brevity of the meanings, the marrying of ardent and lofty poetical imagings to moral sentiments and reflections, of which every bosom is the birth-home, the pious will of the argument, which humbles the proud and rebellious human intellect under the absolute rectitude and benevolence of the Deity—nor least of all, the pleasure of receiving easily, as in a familiar speech, thoughts thatwerehigh, andmight beabstruse, that, at all events, wore a profound and philosophical air—with strokes intervening of a now playful, now piercing, but always adroit wit—and with touches, here and there strewn between, of natural painting, and of apt unsought pathos—these numerous and excellent qualifications met upon the subject of all subjects nearest to all—Man—speedily made the first great, original, serious writing of Pope a textbook and a manual for its branch of ethico-theosophy, in every house where there were books in England. These powerful excellences of this great poem did more. They inwove its terse, vigorous, clear, significant, wise, loving, noble, beautiful, and musical sentences—east, west, north, south—with all memories, the mature and the immature—even as in that old, brave day of the world or ever books were.
Pause, gentle reader, for a while, and reflect kindly on these paragraphs for the sake of Alexander Pope and Christopher North. And now accompany us while we select our specimens of the British critics, from the "Nightingale of Twickenham's" preface to the works of Shakspeare. What he proposed to accomplish in this undertaking was, "to give a more correct text from the collated copies of the old editions, without any innovation or indulgence to his own private sense, or conjecture; to insert the various readings in the margin, and to place the suspected passages or interpolations at the bottom of the page; to this was added an explanation of some of the more obsolete or unusual words; and such as appeared to him the most striking passages were marked by a star, or by inverted commas." Warton laments that Pope ever undertook this edition; "a task which the course of his reading and studies did not qualify him to execute with the ability and skill which it deserved, and with which it has since been executed;" but though it was a failure, there was no occasion for lamentation. Johnson says more wisely, "that Pope did many things wrong, and left many things undone, but let him not be defrauded of his due praise. He was the first that knew, or at least, the first that told by what helps the text might be improved. If he inspected the early editions negligently, he taught others to be more accurate. In his preface he expanded with great skill and eloquence the character which had been given of Shakspeare by Dryden; and he drew the public attention upon his works, which, though often mentioned, had been little read."
Warton, too, admits that the "preface is written with taste, judgment, purity, and elegance." Pope speaks modestly of the design of his preface, which is not, he says, to enter into a criticism upon Shakspeare, "though to do it effectually, and not superficially, would be the best occasion that any just writer could take to form the judgment and taste of our nation." His humbler aim is but to give an account of the fate of his works, and the disadvantages under which they have been transmitted to us. But he cannot neglect the opportunity thusafforded him, "of mentioning some of the principal and characteristic excellences for which (notwithstanding his defects)he is justly and universally elevated above all other dramatic writers."
"If ever any author deserved the name of anoriginal, it was Shakspeare. Homer himself drew not his art so immediately from the fountains of nature; it proceeded through Egyptian strainers and channels, and came to him not without some tincture of the learning, or some cast of the models, of those before him. The poetry of Shakspeare was inspiration indeed: he is not so much an imitator, as an instrument, of Nature; and it is not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks through him."Hischaractersare so much nature herself, that it is a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as copies of her. Those of other poets have a constant resemblance, which shows that they received them from one another, and were but multipliers of the same image; each picture, like a mock rainbow, is but the reflection of a reflection. But every single character in Shakspeare is as much an individual as those in life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike; and such as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear most to be twins, will, upon comparison, be found remarkably distinct. To this life and variety of character, we must add the wonderful preservation of it; which is such throughout his plays, that had all the speeches been printed without the very names of the persons, I believe one might have applied them with certainty to every speaker."Thepowerover ourpassionswas never possessed in a more eminent degree, or displayed in so different instances. Yet all along, there is seen no labour, no pains to raise them; no preparation to guide or guess to the effect, or be perceived to lead toward it, but the heart swells, and the tears burst out, just at the proper places; we are surprised at the moment we weep; and yet upon reflection, find the passion so just, that we should be surprised if we had not wept, and wept at that very moment."How astonishing is it again, that the passions directly opposite to these, laughter and spleen, are no less at his command? that he is not more a master of thegreatthan theridiculousin human nature; of our noblest tendernesses, than of our vainest foibles; of our strongest emotions, than of our idlest sensations!"Nor does he only excel in the passions; in the coolness of reflection and reasoning he is full as admirable. Hissentimentsare not only in general the most pertinent and judicious upon every subject; but by a talent very peculiar, something between penetration and felicity, he hits upon that particular point on which the bent of each argument turns, or the force of each motive depends. This is perfectly amazing, from a man of no education or experience in those great and public scenes of life which are usually the subject of his thoughts; so that he seems to have known the world by intuition, to have looked through human nature at one glance, and to be the only author that gives ground for a very new opinion, that the philosopher, and even the man of the world, may beborn, as well as the poet."
"If ever any author deserved the name of anoriginal, it was Shakspeare. Homer himself drew not his art so immediately from the fountains of nature; it proceeded through Egyptian strainers and channels, and came to him not without some tincture of the learning, or some cast of the models, of those before him. The poetry of Shakspeare was inspiration indeed: he is not so much an imitator, as an instrument, of Nature; and it is not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks through him.
"Hischaractersare so much nature herself, that it is a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as copies of her. Those of other poets have a constant resemblance, which shows that they received them from one another, and were but multipliers of the same image; each picture, like a mock rainbow, is but the reflection of a reflection. But every single character in Shakspeare is as much an individual as those in life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike; and such as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear most to be twins, will, upon comparison, be found remarkably distinct. To this life and variety of character, we must add the wonderful preservation of it; which is such throughout his plays, that had all the speeches been printed without the very names of the persons, I believe one might have applied them with certainty to every speaker.
"Thepowerover ourpassionswas never possessed in a more eminent degree, or displayed in so different instances. Yet all along, there is seen no labour, no pains to raise them; no preparation to guide or guess to the effect, or be perceived to lead toward it, but the heart swells, and the tears burst out, just at the proper places; we are surprised at the moment we weep; and yet upon reflection, find the passion so just, that we should be surprised if we had not wept, and wept at that very moment.
"How astonishing is it again, that the passions directly opposite to these, laughter and spleen, are no less at his command? that he is not more a master of thegreatthan theridiculousin human nature; of our noblest tendernesses, than of our vainest foibles; of our strongest emotions, than of our idlest sensations!
"Nor does he only excel in the passions; in the coolness of reflection and reasoning he is full as admirable. Hissentimentsare not only in general the most pertinent and judicious upon every subject; but by a talent very peculiar, something between penetration and felicity, he hits upon that particular point on which the bent of each argument turns, or the force of each motive depends. This is perfectly amazing, from a man of no education or experience in those great and public scenes of life which are usually the subject of his thoughts; so that he seems to have known the world by intuition, to have looked through human nature at one glance, and to be the only author that gives ground for a very new opinion, that the philosopher, and even the man of the world, may beborn, as well as the poet."
Nothing can be better. Dryden gave us large and grand outlines. Pope's is closer criticism. But it is more than that which Johnson says, that all the successors of Dryden have produced—an expansion only of his notions; unless, in that sense in which every follower in time could by possibility do nothing but expand the notions of the first critic who should have said—"Shakspeare was a poet of the highest description, with a good many troublesome faults." Pope's portraiture is drawn from near and intent inspection; a likeness after the life, and reflecting the life; thoroughly independent of any thing preceding him. Thus,THE COMPLETE SEVERING OF NEARLY-ALLIED PERSONAGES(upon which Pope insists, and which, more than the immense multiplicity, contemplated in a general way, of the some hundredDRAMATIS PERSONÆ, determines essential variety; attests the constituting of every character, after the manner of Nature, from an indivisibleSELF, which at once rules it into unity, and holds it unconfused with all others) is a finely-just observation, of which we have not a hint from Dryden; and it carries us, instantly, deep into a most interesting study of comparisons. Asof Macbeth and Richard III., both murderous usurpers, as different as two men can well be; of Leontes and Othello, two jealous husbands, and as different, even in their jealousy, as two men can be; of Coriolanus and Hotspur, each an earthly Mars; each "the soul of honour;" each sudden in passion, impetuous, and ungovernable; each with a kindliness of nature that draws and attaches his friends as much as the superiority of his character overrules them; each with a rough, abrupt, penetrating strength of intellect; each endowed, which is more peculiar, with vivid imagination, that leaps into bold poetical figures; each of a cutting wit, and, in his own way, humourous pleasantry; and yet the semi-traditionary Roman patrician, and the quite historical English earl's son, so distinct that you shall read the two plays, in which they are, ten and twenty times over, without thinking of putting the towering heroes, twinned by so many, so marked, and so profound affinities, upon a line of comparison. Or put all Shakspeare's gallant warriors in a catalogue, and what a diversified list have you drawn up! Hector, Troilus, Diomed, Coriolanus, Tullus Aufidius, Mark Antony, Othello, Cassio, nay, and Iago, Falconbridge, Hotspur, Glendower, Mortimer, Henry V., Talbot, Warwick, Richard III., Richmond, Macbeth, Banquo, Macduff, Old Seward, Edmund, Edgar, Benedict, Bertram, are some of them; for Shakspeare like Scott loved a good soldier. Compare the melancholy Hamlet and the melancholy Jaques; both shrewd observers of men; both given to philosophizing; and yet different—Heaven knows. And so on. Thus, the remark of Pope goes to the root of Shakspeare's creative art, and leads you into a method of thinking, not soon exhausted.
We endeavour, says Dryden, to follow theVARIETYand greatness of characters that are derived to us from Shakspeare and Fletcher. But does this most general attribution of a characteristic—shared with Fletcher—and such as the loosest observation of the plays forces upon the most uncritical reader—does the accident that Dryden left this inevitable word "VARIETY" written, make the critical observation of Pope no more than a "diffusing" and "paraphrasing" of Dryden's "Epitome?" Has he only "changed Dryden's gold for baser metal, of lower value, though of greater bulk?" It would at least be as near the truth to say, that he has made Dryden's bill good money by accepting it. Pope, in the precise and critical sense in which he has attached the praise of "variety" to Shakspeare, would certainly not have communicated the praise, with him, to Fletcher.
Shakspeare, says Dryden, "drew the images of Nature,not laboriously, but luckily." "All along," says Pope, "there is seenno labour, no pains to raise the passions, no preparation to lead towards the effect; but the heart swells, and the tears burst out, just at the proper places." The unstudied, spontaneous movement of the scene, in Shakspeare, both of the Action and of the Passion, as if every thing went on of its own impulse, and not as willed and ruled by the poet, is an imitation of Nature which no other dramatist has so closely urged. Pope insists upon it—for the passion, at least. Is this characteristic already contained in the "not laboriously, but luckily," of Dryden? If it is contained, it is hardly conveyed. A seed has dropped from the hand of Dryden. Under the gardening of Pope, it springs up into a fair and fairly-spread plant. That is a sort of "diffusion" very distinct from turning gold into base metal. So Pope of himself admires that, in the comedies, histories, and tragedies of the unversed Shakspeare, all the businesses, high and low, of human life, turn upon their own hinges.—If a statesman counsel, he lays down the very grounds of proceeding which greyheaded statesmanship would have propounded—a king reigns like a king, a soldier fights like a soldier, woman loves and hates like a woman, a clown is a clown, a thief is a thief. In short, besides the individual constitution and self-consistency of theCHARACTERS, besides the spontaneous and self-timed motion of thePASSIONS, we are further and distinctly to admire this—that the springs, the constitution, and the government ofACTIONare imitated;—as if theinexperienced player from Avon side had stood personally, confidentially, participatingly present in the heart of all human transactions: And if it appears to the acute critic wonderful that Shakspeare should have found, in his own bosom, the archetypes of so many and so diverse individualities, that he should have found there the law given by original Nature for the flow and current, the impulsion, the meandering, and the precipitation of thepassions; it strikes him as yet more wonderful, more like an inspiring, that he should have found there a divination of that which is subsequent to and ingrafted upon Nature—namely, of human life itself, of universal human experience; much in the same way as Ulysses admired most, in the song of Demodocus, his knowledge of that which had passed withinside the Wooden Horse, and concluded, hence, to the undoubted inspiration of the Muse.
This appears to us to be the meaning of Pope's eulogy; and if it but unfolds the hints of Dryden's, it unfolds them, be it said, uninvidiously, something after the fashion in which Shakspeare himself unfolded the hints which he found in old books, of plots and personages; that is to say, originally, creatively, with quite independent power; and certainly with no deterioration to the matter. Pope goes on to admit faults. We must here dissent as to facts and opinions, and must qualify.