EN MEM©E.IAM Chester Harvey Rowell ! Camelot Classics, EDITED BY ERNEST BUYS. MY STUDY WINDOWS. iff- MY STUDY WINDOWS, BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. V WITH INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD GARNETT, LL.D. LONDON: WALTER SCOTT, 24 WARWICK LANE, PATERNOSTER ROW. 1886. fl CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION . . vii MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE .... I A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER . . . .21 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS . 48 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER . . . -73 ABRAHAM LINCOLN . . . . . . IOI THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL . 125 THOREAU . . . . . . .137 EMERSON THE LECTURER , . , . .152 CARLYLE . . . . ' . . . l6l SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES . . . . .191 CHAUCER . . . . . . .205 DRYDEN . , . , - 262 POPE ..... . 335 Jntro&uctfon, HILE, as a rule, it is impossible to speak with too high appreciation of the busy, restless, inquisitive intellect of ancient Greece, there is one point in which it signally disappoints reasonable expectation. It was incurious respecting the literature of foreign nations. The monuments of Egypt excited the wonder of Herodotus ; the social condition of this nation and of Babylonia aroused his intelligent interest ; we are infinitely indebted to him for the facts which he has observed and recorded : and if his survey of the history of these countries is inaccurate and uncritical, it at least proves that he deemed the subject worthy of his attention. But we should hardly have learned from him that Egypt and Babylonia possessed a literature. If Plato really sought the East in quest of mystic knowledge, his intercourse with the Oriental mind was merely oral. Megasthenes spent years in the industrious investigation of the natural conditions and products of India, but he never gave a thought to Sanscrit, about which the modern Italian traveller, Delia Valle, inquires intelligently as soon as he sets foot in the country. Some excuse may be made for this want of interest in strange speech and unfamiliar thought ; but what can be said of the phenomenon of Greeks dwelling for centuries under the dominion of a kindred people, whose language is nearly akin to theirs, whose literature is modelled upon and partly derived from their own, in whose temples they may worship, whose laws they must obey, whosa families they instruct, with whose public and private life they are in daily contact, while yet their literature is almost destitute of allusion to any evidence of intellectual life among their rulers, pupils, and intimates? viii INTRODUCTION. Had Greek literature perished, its renown would have left abundant traces in the literature of Rome. If Latin literature had disappeared, we should hardly have been aware of the loss. How infinitely would our knowledge be extended if Greece had played the part of an active and busy critic, if we had known what a Greek Quintilian thought of a Latin Homer or Thucydides, and been able to read a Caesar with the eyes of an Arrian ! This strange insensibility is at this day a thing of the past. Every civilised nation now takes a warm interest in the literature of its sister peoples, and each is more or less able to see itself in its literary aspect as it is seen by others. The rapid conquest which Russian and Norwegian novels have recently made of the circulating libraries of all nations is one of the phenomena of the age, and an Italian critic has just awarded the palm of contemporary love poetry to a Portuguese. Differ ences of national taste and habit form, of course, serious obstacles to adequate recognition. We English necessarily suffer from our insularity, the cheap price of our independence. Some of our great writers have indeed beaten down all opposition, and made good their place in universal literature. But we have still to deplore that the Continent which has accepted Shakespeare, Scott, and Byron, and is slowly familiarising itself with Wordsworth and Shelley, which has adopted Dickens and Thackerary and tries to digest George Eliot, remains as a whole deaf and blind to Keats, Browning, and Landor ; to Borrow and De Quincey and Patmore ; accords no welcome to the young genius of a Shorthouse or a Jefferies, and adds the last sensational tales of the day to its cheap reprints with as much satisfaction as it includes a Bronte or a Meredith. This scarcely seems the case with any other country. Elsewhere the success of the national author among foreigners appears fairly proportioned to the recognition he has obtained at home. We alone complain that the fame of much of our best authorship is local, or at least should have to make that com plaint, but for a circumstance which turns the balance in our favour. INTRODUCTION. ix This circumstance is, that the wide dissemination of our race over the western and the northern continents is raising up new centres of culture which derive their tone from England, which provide her men of letters with a public destined to become more ample than Europe could afford, were Europe English, and which promises to afford them, at no distant date, all the advantages of exterior criticism, unwarped by having had to pass through a foreign medium. When Australia shall have become more thoroughly differentiated from the mother country than is now the case, the capability of impressing an Australian audience will be no bad test of the merit of an English author. At present she is too much a reproduction of England, and has too little indigenous literature of worth to inspire confidence in her critical deliverances. American culture seems almost venerable in comparison, and has had time to develop literary types which entitle it to an independent rank among intellectual civilisations. Though far more intimately connected with the culture of the parent country than the Roman was with the Greek, being much more of an offshoot than of a copy, it renders English letters the same service as Rome rendered to the Greeks, in subjecting them to the criticism of an intelligent and impartial opinion, and greatly extending their circulation and usefulness. Thanks to America, the preservation of English literature, so far as already existing, is assured, and the prospect of its continued existence is indefinitely strengthened. What the mother country has already produced of excellent is safe, and the stimulus to future production is rendered infinitely more active. The English author now speaks to an audience of a hundred millions, soon to be doubled and trebled, even apart from the reasonable anticipation that it may ere very long include the cultivated classes of India and Japan, if not even of China. In presence of such a majestic fact, European criticism, however welcome and valuable, is not essential. The imprimatur of Paris or Berlin is not wanted ; and the time is arriving when the Continental writer who would rise to cosmopolitan fame must captivate the Anglo-American public. From this point of view x INTRODUCTION. it would almost seem that while superior excellence of produc tion may long remain the attribute of England, the decisive voice in criticism may pass to America. In proportion as literature becomes, as it is becoming, cosmopolitan, as the great author is received as the common heritage of all nations, the more liberal and universal taste must supplant the narrower and more exclusively national. While indigenous American literature, the only native article which has no help from a protective tariff, struggles as hopelessly with the foreigner as British corn contends with American, and for the same reason ; the affluence of importation, mischievous in many respects, fosters that width of view and freedom from conventional prejudice which distinguishes American judgment in literary as in other matters. Americans far surpass us English in the prompt recognition of excellence. Carlyle, De Quincey, Coventry Patmore, James Martineau, found their first consider able audiences across the Atlantic. Americans are quicker to discover the merits of a foreign author, more thorough in naturalising him, and demand a higher standard of excellence in the translation of his works. Hence they are better fitted than we to assign a writer his proper place without unreasonable delay, and to recommend him to the world. All the novels of Marie Schwarz have been translated in America ; in England scarcely one. Turgeneff, Bjorson, Jonas Lie, are almost as much household words as Hawthorne or Henry James. At the same time, writers of that peculiarly intense nationalism which circumscribes itself within the limits of a district, such as Cable and Egbert Craddock, are no less popular. This flexibility and catholicity of taste will invest American criticism with especial authority, as it becomes more generally recognised. It admirably fits America to do for England what Greece might have done for Rome — to win an entrance for her literature into nations hitherto repelled by her insularity, or, failing that, to make her independent of them. Two natural and inevitable developments may be remarked in American criticism. There is first the classical, conservative, cautious school of the Irvings and Channings and Ticknors, INTRODUCTION. xi and of the old North American Review in general ; a school consciously under the influence of the old country. There is also a younger school consciously aiming at originality, at evolving a national type, and occupying a position in criticism akin to Bret Harte's in production. This is undoubtedly the school of the future, destined to prevail more and more as America becomes more and more differentiated from Europe. It embodies all the specifically American characteristics, which are, however, precisely such as require to be kept in check by the refinement and moderation of the older school, and it will be ill for it if, in effacing its predecessor, it fails to absorb the latter's qualities. Mr. Russell Lowell is, in a sense, the most perfect represent ative of American criticism to be found, for he occupies a central position between the old school and the new. An exemplar of the highest New England culture, his poetry either emulated English models, or attained a classic finish, admir able as such, but excluding any marked individuality of style. Suddenly, as it were at a bound, he became the leader of a new departure, and placed himself in the first rank of native humorists. There had seemed neither the " promise " nor the " potency " of the Fable for Critics or the Biglow Papers in Sir Launfal ; but circumstances had given him something to say which the ordinary style was incapable of expressing : with true insight he discerned the fact, and with happy flexibility created a new literary form to meet the demand. The Fable for Critics, indeed, is rather the revelation of an unsuspected talent than of a novel style. But the Biglow Papers is a That in Worten. It not merely struck a new vein of humour which has ever since gushed like a Virginian oil-spring : but it was a revelation to European readers of the sound healthy instincts of the American people, when not perverted by speculation or misguided by professional politicians. It showed there was a love of righteousness to which the high-minded statesman might confidently appeal, and it foreshadowed the sacrifices and triumphs of the great civil war. It was the more effective as being itself the product of a deep moral indignation, stung xii INTRODUCTION. into energy by Texan annexations, Mexican wars, Fugitive Slave Bills, and the other too abundant evidences of subserviency to the slave power and general political demoralisation, so rife at that unhappy period. At the same time, there was nothing in Mr. Lowell in the slightest degree tasteless, absurd, or fanatical. He impressed the conviction that he was not only much better than the professional politicians of his day, but also much wiser. The same sanity characterises his deliver ances as a critic. He is original to a much higher degree than the Irvings and the Ticknors, and his originality is of a dis tinctively national type. But he has not that disengagement from all traditional and conventional influences — sometimes real, sometimes affected — which characterises or is assumed by younger men. He is free from their extravagance, but he does not succeed so often in setting old things in a new light. Hence the English reader will find him less suggestive and stimulating than a Greek might have found a Roman, if he had condescended to study the latter. He is like an English fruit transplanted, racy, it may be said, of the new soil, but not endowed with the full flavour of an indigenous product. As his own Fable for Critics foreshadowed what might come of satire applied to politics : so his criticisms hint what service American culture may render to English letters when it has obtained an entirely independent point of view. That it has not yet done so is recognised by Mr. Lowell himself in his essay on Josiah Quincy, in language perhaps even stronger than altogether justified by the circumstances. It may almost be suggested that he writes as a New Englander, and that a citizen of the Great West, while allowing with him that America "must submit herself to the European standard of intellectual weights and measures," would claim that she had earned the right to apply them in her own way to the estimate of other nations' products and her own. Such intellectual standards are in a measure elastic. There is but one manner of weighing tea all the world over, but the literary balance, though graduated on the same principles, must inevitably yield various results. The essay from which this quotation is taken belongs to the INTRODUCTION. xiii group of Mr. Lowell's essays dealing with American persons and things, and is one of the most characteristic. Thomas Quincy, " the great public character," belongs to a type in one sense almost extinct in the United States, in another, it is to be hoped, multiplying. The vast development of population, industry, and foreign immigration, leaves no room for the quasi-aristocracy represented by Mr. Quincy. The old patri- cianship of Massachusetts and Virginia, worthy in many respects of the best days of the Roman Republic, cannot exist in so numerous and so thoroughly democratised a community, any more than the Roman Senate could retain its influence when the franchise had been extended to all the citizens of the empire. But democracy has not proved incapable of producing honest men and bearing them to office, and the new type of homely, practical citizen, like the present Chief Magistrate, if less imposing than that expressed by the stately Quincy, appears to reproduce its virtues. In an essay of kindred sub ject and spirit, Mr. Lowell sketches, with singular felicity, the character of a great man who in a measure united the type of Quincy and the type of Cleveland. Any less aristocratic per sonality than Abraham Lincoln's could not, indeed, well be conceived ; but the dignity of his nature, once recognised, produced much the same effect as dignity of birth or bearing, while his homely good sense won him the confidence which might have failed to accompany mere respect. The whole character is peculiarly and intensely American, and Mr. Lowell's faithful and sympathetic analysis, rising to eloquence at the close, is a most valuable contribution to the understanding of American affairs, and a most dignified rebuke to the narrow- minded stupidity of average foreign critics. It is more profitable reading every way than the remonstrance, " On a certain condescension in Foreigners," worthy as this is of attention on the part of all travellers who would refrain from wantonly or inadvertently wounding a hospitable people. But it shows temper to a degree unusual with Mr. Lowell, and it does not do justice to the foreigner's case. Belonging to the most cultivated circles of New England, Mr. Lowell has perhaps hardly realised xiv INTRODUCTION. how much the traveller may have to put up with elsewhere. The picture of Washington society in " Democracy," the work of an American author, is even more unpleasing, if less agonising, than that delineated by the hapless M. de Bacourt forty years ago ; and the most unreasonable carping of the most exacting and self-sufficient European tourist can hardly be more lamentably peevish than the pages devoted to England by no less an American than Hawthorne. Political prejudice on both sides has also a good deal to do with the occasional acerbity of criticism, which is, however, much ameliorated since Mr. Lowell wrote. Passing by the pretty " Garden Acquaintance " and " Good Word for Winter," we come to another class of Mr. Lowell's American essays — those devoted to American men of letters. Of these there are three in this volume — those treating of Percival, Thoreau, and Emerson as a lecturer. Mr. Lowell is always at his best when most genial, and the subjects of the first two of these do not allow his geniality scope. He cannot put up with the incompetence of Percival, and the poverty of the literary productiveness that was pleaded as its excuse. Genius itself does not get absolution for its dulcia vitia as easily as it used ; still, when genius is undeniably present, forgiveness is seldom very remote. But the luckless Percival wanted to exemplify all the errors of genius, and to be petted and admired on the strength of them, without complying with the indispens able condition of being a genius. This positively cannot be allowed. Mr. Lowell's estimate of Percival as a poet through all his life, and as a man for the first half of it, is undeniably sound ; but he fails to render justice to him in his peculiar and almost unique character of a pseudo-genius reformed. Mock Byrons usually come to such bad ends, that when we find one of them, in his maturer years, hammer in hand, actually rendering first-rate service to his country as a geologist, one is inclined to exclaim, Meliiis sic poenituisse quam non errasse ! Thoreau is altogether a different sort of person, open, it may be, to the contrary charge of having made a trade of self-reliance, as Per cival did of helplessness. The essayist half reveals a suspicion INTRODUCTION. xv that the apostle of nature may have been something of a char latan. "This egotism of his is a Stylites pillar after all, a seclusion which keeps him in the public eye. He squatted on another man's land ; he borrows an axe ; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe — all turn state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilisation which alone rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all." Yet, having so fairly hit this blot, Mr. Lowell reconciles himself to his author, and dismisses him with a benediction. "Emerson the Lecturer" helps one, in some degree, to understand the magnetism exercised by Emer son on men who, as is evidently the case with Mr. Lowell himself, had but slight intellectual affinity with him. Without being precisely told so, we are made to understand that, for a large class of highly-cultivated minds, Emerson was rather a great personality than a great teacher ; while it is not denied that to many, differently constituted, he was the bearer of a gospel. Carlyle naturally succeeds Emerson, and forms a connecting link between the young genius of America and the classic poetry of England which forms the theme of most of Mr. Lowell's remaining essays. The circumstances under which this particular disquisition was penned were unpropitious both for author and subject. Carlyle had certainly been most unfor tunate in his treatment of the American Civil War. Everything had conspired to put him wrong. He was prejudiced against philanthropy, he was prejudiced against popular institutions, he was merciless to shiftlessness and incapacity. Philanthropy and liberalism were undoubtedly for the North, and, misled by the English newspapers and the unreasonable complaints of the Federalists themselves, Carlyle early adopted the welcome theory that the South had a monopoly of wisdom and valour. For a champion of the North, for a man absorbed heart and soul in the great struggle, Mr. Lowell's reply is wonderfully moderate. From the point of view of a purely objective criti cism, it is much too severe. To retort effectively upon Carlyle xvi INTRODUCTION. involves the necessity of much carping and cavilling, fair enough in literary warfare, but hardly worthy of a first-class literary judge. We must hope that this will not be Mr. Lowell's last word on Carlyle, whose errors in the point under discussion Time has made so patent that they no longer need Mr. Lowell's pillory, but of whose deserts he might find much more to say. There remain Mr. Lowell's essays on the classical poets of England, of whom Chaucer, Dryden, and Pope find place in this volume. They all illustrate the favourable position occu pied by competent American critics, sufficiently remote from English traditional opinion for complete independence, and yet not estranged from their subjects by differences of language or of manners. The bard of the fourteenth century is manifestly as near to the modern American as to the modern Englishman. One great qualification of Mr. Lowell's for the treatment of Chaucer, which an equally intelligent judge might easily have missed, is his extensive knowledge of the Italian and French literature of Chaucer's age. Dante is equally familiar to him, and is the subject of another essay not included in this collec tion. The critique on Dryden is perhaps the writer's master piece, thoroughly sound and appreciative, and teeming with terse and luminous observations. Pope, less of a favourite with the writer than Dryden, deserved a fuller treatment than he has received. The space given to the "Rape of the Lock" is somewhat disproportionate, though not excessive if the general scale had been more ample. It is startling to be told that Pope's fame as a poet is principally founded upon the "Essay on Man," though the poem undoubtedly ranks among his chief works, and Mr. Lowell's strictures upon it strike us as.) rather hypercritical. But Pope's literary character as a whole could not be better summed up than in the concluding sentence : " Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be found wanting ; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivalled." MY STUDY WINDOWS. MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. NE of the most delightful books in nay father's library was White's Natural History of Selborne. For me it has rather gained in charm with years. I used to read it without knowing the secret of the pleasure I found in it, but as I grow older I begin to detect some of the simple expedients of this natural magic. Open the book where you will, it takes you out of doors. In our broiling July weather one can walk out with this genially garrulous Fellow of Oriel, and find refreshment instead of fatigue. You have no trouble in keeping abreast of him as he ambles along on his hobby-horse, now pointing to a pretty view, now stopping to watch the motions of a bird or an insect, or to bag a specimen for the Honourable Dairies Barrington or Mr. Pennant. In simplicity of taste and natural refinement he reminds one of Walton ; in tender ness toward what he would have called the brute creation, of Cowper. I do not know whether his descriptions of scenery are good or not, but they have made me familiar with his neighbourhood. Since I first read him, I have walked over some of his favourite haunts, but I still see them through his eyes rather than by any recollection of actual and personal vision. The book has also the delight- 129 3 MY GARDEN A CQ UATNTANCE. fulness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems never to have had any harder work to do than to study the habits of his feathered fellow-townsfolk, or to watch the ripening of his peaches on the wall. His volumes are the journal of Adam in Paradise, « Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade." It is positive rest only to look into that garden of his. It is vastly better than to — " See great Diocletian walk In the Salonian garden's noble shade," for thither ambassadors intrude to bring with them the noises of Home, while here the world has no entrance. No rumour of the revolt of the American Colonies seems to have reached him. " The natural term of an hog's life " has more interest for him than that of an empire. Burgoyne may surrender and welcome \ of what consequence is thai compared with the fact that we can explain the odd tumbling of rooks in the air by their turning over " to scratch themselves with one claw ? " All the couriers in Europe spurring rowel-deep make no stir in Mr. White's little Chartreuse ; but the arrival of the house-martin a day earlier or later than last year is a piece of news worth sending express to all his correspondents. Another secret charm of this book is its inadvertent humour, so much the more delicious because unsuspected by the author. How pleasant is his innocent vanity in adding to the list of the British, and still more of the Sel- bornian, fauna ! I believe he would gladly have consented to be eaten by a tiger or a crocodile, if by that means the occasional presence within the parish limits of either of these anthropophagous brutes could have been established. He brags of no fine society, but is plainly a little elated by " having considerable acquaintance with a tame brown owl." Most of us have known our share of owls, but few can boast MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 3 of intimacy with a feathered one. The great events of Mr. White's life, too, have that disproportionate importance which is always humorous. To think of his hands having actually been thought worthy (as neither Willoughby's nor Bay's were) to hold a stilted plover, the Charadrius himan- topus, with no back toe, and therefore " liable, in speculation, to perpetual vacillations ! " I wonder, by the way, if meta physicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the acquaintance in Sussex of " an old family tortoise," which had then been domesticated for thirty years. It is clear that he fell in love with it at first sight. We have no means of tracing the growth of his passion, but in 1780 we find him eloping with its object in a post-chaise. " The rattle arid hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it that, when I turned it out in a border, it walked twice down to the bottom of my garden." It reads like a Court Journal : — "Yesterday morning H.E/.H. the Princess Alice took an airing of half-an-hour on the terrace of Windsor Castle." This tortoise might have been a member of the Royal Society, if he could have condescended to so ignoble an ambition. It had but just been discovered that a surface inclined at a certain angle with the plane of the horizon took more of the sun's rays. The tortoise had always known this (though he unostentatiously made no parade of it), and used accordingly to tilt himself up against the garden-wall in the autumn. He seems to have been more of a philosopher than even Mr. White himself, caring for nothing but to get under a cabbage-leaf when it rained, or the sun was too hot, and to bury himself alive before frost — a four-footed Diogenes, who carried his tub on his back. There are moods in which this kind of history is infinitely refreshing. These creatures whom we affect to look down upon as the drudges of instinct are members of a common wealth whose constitution rests on immovable bases. Never any need of reconstruction there ! They never dream of settling it by vote that eight hours are equal to ten, or that one creature is as clever as another and no more. They do not use their poor wits in regulating God's clocks, nor think 4 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. they cannot go astray so long as they carry their guide- board about with them — a delusion we often practise upon ourselves with our high and mighty reason, that admirable finger-post which points every way and always right. It is good for us now and then to converse with a world like Mr. White's, where Man is the least important of animals. But one who, like me, has always lived in the country and always on the same spot, is drawn to his book by other occult sympathies. Do we not share his indignation at that stupid Martin who had graduated his thermometer no lower than 4° above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in the coldest weather ever known the mercury basely absconded into the bulb, and left us to see the victory slip through our fingers just as they were closing upon it ? No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his neighbours. With us descendants of the Puritans especially, these weather-competitions supply the abnegated excitement of the race-course. Men learn to value thermometers of the true imaginative temperament, capable of prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. The other day (July 5) I marked 98° in the shade, my high-water mark, higher by one degree than I have ever seen it before. I happened to meet a neighbour ; as we mopped our brows at each other, he told me that he had just cleared 100°, and I went home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine ; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vulgarity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity became all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own) ; but it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing a-tiptoe, could look down on mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar weakness in Mr. White. He, too, has shared in these mercurial triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt that he MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 5 had a true country-gentleman's interest in the weathercock ; that his first question on coming down of a morning was, like Barabas's — 11 Into what quarter peers my halcyon's bill ? " It is an innocent and healthful employment of the mind, distracting one from too continual study of himself, and leading him to dwell rather upon the indigestions of the elements than his own. " Did the wind back round, or go about with the sun?" is a rational question that bears not remotely on the making of hay and the prosperity of crops. I have little doubt that the regulated observation of the vane in many different places, and the interchange of results by telegraph, would put the weather, as it were, in our power, by betraying its ambushes before it is ready to give the assault. At first sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial than the lives of those whose single achievement is to record the wind and the temperature three times a day. Yet such men are doubtless sent into the world for this special end, and perhaps there is no kind of accurate obser vation, whatever its object, that has not its final use and value for some one or other. It is even to be hoped that the speculations of our newspaper editors and their myriad correspondents upon the signs of the political atmosphere may also fill their appointed place in a well-regulated universe, if it be only that of supplying so many more jack-o'-lanterns to the future historian. Nay, the observa tions on finance of an M. C. whose sole knowledge of the subject has been derived from a lifelong success in getting a living out of the public without paying any equivalent therefor, will perhaps be of interest hereafter to some explorer of our cloaca maxima, whenever it is cleansed. For many years I have been in the habit of noting down some of the leading events of my embowered solitude, such as the coming of certain birds and the like, — a kind of memoires pour servir, after the fashion of White, rather than properly digested natural history. I thought it not impossible that a few simple stories of my winged acquaint- 6 MY GARDEN A CQ UAINTANCE. ances might be found entertaining by persons of kindred taste. There is a common notion that animals are better meteorologists than men, and I have little doubt that in immediate weather-wisdom they have the advantage of our sophisticated senses (though I suspect a sailor or shepherd would be their match), but I have seen nothing that leads me to believe their minds capable of erecting the horoscope of a whole season, and letting us know beforehand whether the winter will be severe or the summer rainless. I more than suspect that the clerk of the weather himself does not always know very long in advance whether he is to draw an order for hot or cold, dry or moist, and the musquash is scarce likely to be wiser. I have noted but two days' difference in the coming of the song-sparrow between a very early and a very backward spring. This very year I saw the linnets at work thatching, just before a snow-storm which covered the ground several inches deep for a number of days. They struck work and left us for a while, no doubt in search of food. Birds frequently perish from sudden changes in our whimsical spring weather of which they had no foreboding. More than thirty years ago, a cherry-tree, then in full bloom, near my window, was covered with humming-birds benumbed by a fall of mingled rain and snow, which probably killed many of them. It should seem that their comiiig was dated by the height of the sun, which betrays them into unthrifty matrimony ; " So nature pricketh them in their corages ; " but their going is another matter. The chimney-swallows leave us early, for example, apparently so soon as their latest fledglings are firm enough of wing to attempt the long rowing-match that is before them. On the other hand, the wild-geese probably do not leave the North till they are frozen out, for I have heard their bugles sounding southward so late as the middle of December. What may be called local migrations are doubtless dictated by the M Y GARDEN A CQ UAINTANCE. ? chances of food. I have once been visited by large flights of cross-bills ; and whenever the snow lies long and deep on the ground, a flock of cedar-birds comes in midwinter to eat the berries on my hawthorns. I have never been quite able to fathom the local, or rather geographical partialities of birds. Never before this summer (1870) have the king birds, handsomest of flycatchers, built in my orchard; though I always know where to find them within half a mile. The rose-breasted grosbeak has been a familiar bird in Brookline (three miles away), yet I never saw one here till last July, when I found a female busy among my rasp berries, and surprisingly bold. I hope she was prospecting with a view to settlement in our garden. She seemed, on the whole, to think well of my fruit, and I would gladly plant another bed if it would help to win over so delightful a neighbour. The return of the robin is commonly announced by the newspapers, like that of eminent or notorious people to a watering-place, as the first authentic notification of spring. And such his appearance in the orchard and garden undoubtedly is. But, in spite of his name of migratory thrush, he stays with us all winter, and I have seen him when the thermometer marked 15 degrees below zero of Fahrenheit, armed impregnably within, like Emerson's Titmouse, and as cheerful as he. The robin has a bad reputation among people who do not value themselves less for being fond of cherries. There is, I admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never has those fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are apt to fall. But for a' that, and twice as muckle's a' that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that ever came out of Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he has not wholly forfeited that superiority which belongs to the children of nature. He has a finer taste in fruit than could be distilled from 8 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. many successive committees of the Horticultural Society, and he eats with a relishing gulp not inferior to Dr. Johnson's. He feels and freely exercises his right of eminent domain. His is the earliest mess of green peas • his all the mulberries I had fancied mine. But if he gets also the lion's share of the raspberries, he is a great planter, and sows those wild ones in the woods that solace the pedestrian and give a momentary calm even to the jaded victims of the White Hills. He keeps a strict eye over one's fruit, and knows to a shade of purple when your grapes have cooked long enough in the sun. During the severe drought a few years ago, the robins wholly vanished from my garden. I neither saw nor heard one for three weeks. Meanwhile a small foreign grape-vine, rather shy of bearing, seemed to find the dusty air congenial, and, dreaming perhaps of its sweet Argos across the sea, decked itself with a score or so of fair bunches. I watched them from day to day till they should have secreted sugar enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my mind that I would celebrate my vintage the next morning. But the robins too had somehow kept note of them. They must have sent out spies, as did the Jews into the promised land, before I was stirring. When I went with my basket, at least a dozen of these winged vintagers bustled out from among the leaves, and alighting on the nearest trees interchanged some shrill remarks about me of a derogatory nature. They had fairly sacked the vine. Not Welling ton's veterans made cleaner work of a Spanish town ; not Federals or Confederates were ever more impartial in the confiscation of neutral chickens. I was keeping my grapes a secret to surprise the fair Fidele with, but the robins made them a profounder secret to her than I had meant. The tattered remnant of a single bunch was all my harvest- home. How paltry it looked at the bottom of my basket, as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in an eagle's nest ! I could not help laughing ; and the robins seemed to join heartily in the merriment. There was a native grape-vine closo by, blue with its less refined abundance, but my MY GA RDEN A CQ UAINTANCE. g cunning thieves preferred the foreign flavour. Could I tax them with want of taste ? The robins are not good solo singers, but their chorus, as, like primitive fire-worshippers, they hail the return of light and warmth to the world, is unrivalled. There are a hundred singing like one. They are noisy enough then, and sing, as poets should, with no afterthought. But when they come after cherries to the tree near my window, they muffle their voices, and their faint pip, pip, pop ! sounds far away at the bottom of the garden, where they know I shall not suspect them of robbing the great black-walnut of its bitter-rinded store.* They are feathered Pecksniffs, to be sure, but then how brightly their breasts, that look rather shabby in the sunlight, shine in a rainy day against the dark green of the fringe-tree ! After they have pinched and shaken all the life out of an earthworm, as Italian cooks pound all the spirit out of a steak, and then gulped him, they stand up in honest self-confidence, expand their red waistcoats with the virtuous air of a lobby member, and outface you with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry. " Do / look like a bird that knows the flavour of raw vermin? I throw myself upon a jury of my peers. Ask any robin if he ever ate anything less ascetic than the frugal berry of the juniper, and he will answer that his vow forbids him." Can such an open bosom cover such depravity 1 Alas, yes ! I have no doubt his breast was redder at that very moment with the blood of my rasp berries. On the whole, he is a doubtful friend in the garden. He makes his dessert of all kinds of berries, and is not averse from early pears. But when we remember how omnivorous he is, eating his own weight in an incredibly short time, and that Nature seems exhaust- less in her invention of new insects hostile to vegetation, perhaps we may reckon that he does more good than harm. * The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill name, is one of the sweetest sounds in nature, softens his voice in the same way with the most beguiling mockery of distance. 10 My GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. For my own part, I would rather have his cheerfulness and kind neighbourhood than many berries. For his cousin, the catbird, I have a still warmer regard. Always a good singer, he sometimes nearly equals the brown thrush, and has the merit of keeping up his music later in the evening than any bird of my familiar acquaintance. Ever since I can remember, a pair of them have built in a gigantic syringa, near our front door, and I have known the male to sing almost uninterruptedly during the even ings of early summer till twilight duskened into dark. They differ greatly in vocal talent, but all have a delightful way of crooning over, and, as it were, rehearsing their song in an undertone, which makes their nearness always unob trusive. Though there is the most trustworthy witness to the imitative propensity of this bird, I have only once, during an intimacy of more than forty years, heard him indulge it. In that case, the imitation was by no means so close as to deceive, but a free reproduction of the notes of some other birds, especially of the oriole, as a kind of variation in his own song. The catbird is as shy as the robin is vulgarly familiar. Only when his nest or his fledglings are approached does he become noisy and almost aggressive. I have known him to station his young in a thick cornel-bush on the edge of the raspberry-bed, after the fruit began to ripen, and feed them there for a week or more. In such cases he shows none of that conscious guilt which makes the robin contemptible. On the contrary, he will maintain his post in the thicket, and sharply scold the intruder who ventures to steal his berries. After all, his claim is only for tithes, while the robin will bag your entire crop if he get a chance. Dr. Watts's statement that "birds in their little nests agree," like too many others intended to form the infant mind, is very far from being true. On the contrary, the most peaceful relation of the different species to each other is that of armed neutrality. They are very jealous of neighbours. A few years ago, I was much interested in the housebuilding of a pair of summer yellow-birds. They MY GA RDEN A CQ UAINTANCE. i i had chosen a very pretty site near the top of a tall white lilac, within easy eye-shot of a chamber window. A very pleasant thing it was to see their little home growing with mutual help, to watch their industrious skill interrupted only by little flirts and snatches of endearment, frugally cut short by the common sense of the tiny housewife. They had brought their work nearly to an end, and had already begun to line it with fern-down, the gathering of which demanded more distant journeys and longer absences. But, alas ! the syringa, immemorial manor of the catbirds, was not more than twenty feet away, and these " giddy neighbours" had, as it appeared, been all along jealously watchful, though silent, witnesses of what they deemed an intrusion of squatters. No sooner were the pretty mates fairly gone for a new load of lining, than "To their unguarded nest these weasel Scots Came stealing." Silently they flew back and forth, each giving a vengeful dab at the nest in passing. They did not fall-to and deliberately destroy it, for they might have been caught at their mischief. As it was, whenever the yellow-birds came back, their enemies were hidden in their own sight-proof bush. Several times their unconscious victims repaired damages, but at length, after counsel taken together, they gave it up. Perhaps, like other unlettered folk, they came to the conclusion that the Devil was in it, and yielded to the invisible persecutions of witchcraft. The robins, by constant attacks and annoyances, have succeeded in driving off the blue-jays who used to build in our pines, their gay colours and quaint noisy ways making them welcome and amusing neighbours. I once had the chance of doing a kindness to a household of them, which they received with very friendly condescension. I had had my eye for some time upon a nest, and was puzzled by a constant fluttering of what seemed full-grown wings in it whenever I drew nigh. At last I climbed the tree, in spite of angry protests from the old birds against my intrusion. 12 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. The mystery had a very simple solution. In building the nest, a long piece of packthread had been somewhat loosely woven in. Three of the young had contrived to entangle themselves in it, and had become full-grown without being able to launch themselves upon the air. One was unharmed ; another had so tightly twisted the cord about its shank that one foot was curled up and seemed para lysed ; the third, in its struggles to escape, had sawn through the flesh of the thigh and so much harmed itself that I thought it humane to put an end to its misery. When I took out my knife to cut their hempen bonds, the heads of the family seemed to divine my friendly intent. Suddenly ceasing their cries and threats, they perched quietly within reach of my hand, and watched me in my work of manumission. This, owing to the fluttering terror of the prisoners, was an affair of some delicacy ; but ere long I was rewarded by seeing one of them fly away to a neighbouring tree, while the cripple, making a parachute of his wings, came lightly to the ground, and hopped off as well as he could with one leg, obsequiously waited on by his elders. A week later I had the satisfaction of meeting him in the pine-walk, in good spirits, and already so far recovered as to be able to balance himself with the lame foot. I have no doubt that in his old age he accounted for his lameness by some handsome story of a wound received at the famous Battle of the Pines, when our tribe, overcome by numbers, was driven from its ancient camping-ground. Of late years the jays have visited us only at intervals ; and in winter their bright plumage, set off by the snow, and their cheerful cry, are especially welcome. They would have furnished JEsop with a fable, for the feathered crest in which they seem to take so much satisfaction is often their fatal snare. Country boys make a hole with their finger in the snow-crust just large enough to admit the jay's head, and, hollowing it out somewhat beneath, bait it with a few kernels of corn. The crest slips easily into the trap, but refuses to be pulled out again, and he who came to feast remains a prey. MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 13 Twice have the crow-blackbirds attempted a settlement in my pines, and twice have the robins, who claim a right of pre-emption, so successfully played the part of border- ruffians as to drive them away, — to my great regret, for they are the best substitute we have for rooks. At Shady Hill (now, alas ! empty of its so long loved household) they build by hundreds, and nothing can be more cheery than their creaking clatter (like a convention of old-fashioned tavern-signs) as they gather at evening to debate in mass meeting their windy politics, or to gossip at their tent-doors over the events of the day. Their port is grave, and their stalk across the turf as martial as that of a second-rate ghost in Hamlet. They never meddled with my corn, so far as I could discover. For a few years I had crows, but their nests are an irresistible bait for boys, and their settlement was broken up. They grew so wonted as to throw off a great part of their shyness, and to tolerate my near approach. One very hot day I stood for some time within twenty feet of a mother and three children, who sat on an elm bough over my head, gasping in the sultry air, and holding their wings half-spread for coolness. All birds during the pairing season become more or less sentimental, and murmur soft nothings in a tone very unlike the grinding organ repetition and loudness of their habitual song. The crow is very comical as a lover, and to hear him trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint Preux standard has something the effect of a Mississippi boatman quoting Tennyson. Yet there are few things to my ear more melodious than his caw of a clear winter morning as it drops to you filtered through five hundred fathoms of crisp blue air. The hostility of all smaller birds makes the moral character of the crow, for all his deaconlike demeanour and garb, some what questionable. He could never sally forth without insult. The golden robins, especially, would chase him as far as I could follow with my eye, making him duck clumsily to avoid their importunate bills. I do not believe, however, that he robbed any nests hereabouts, for the 14 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. refuse of the gas-works, which, in our free-and-easy com munity, is allowed to poison the river, supplied him with dead alewives in abundance. I used to watch him making his periodical visits to the salt-marshes and coming back with a fish in his beak to his young savages, who, no doubt, like it in that condition which makes it savoury to the Kanakas and other corvine races of men. Orioles are in great plenty with me. I have seen seven males flashing about the garden at once. A merry crew of them swing their hammocks from the pendulous boughs. During one of these latter years, when the canker-worms stripped our elms as bare as winter, these birds went to the trouble of rebuilding their unroofed nests, and chose for the purpose trees which are safe from those swarming vandals, such as the ash and the button-wood. One year a pair (dis turbed, I suppose, elsewhere) built a second nest in an elm, within a few yards of the house. My friend, Edward E. Hale, told me once that the oriole rejected from his web all strands of brilliant colour, and I thought it a striking example of that instinct of concealment noticeable in many birds, though it should seem in this instance that the nest was amply protected by its position from all marauders but owls and squirrels. Last year, however, I had the fullest proof that Mr. Hale was mistaken. A pair of orioles built on the lowest trailer of a weeping elm, which hung within ten feet of our drawing-room window, and so low that I could reach it from the ground. The nest was wholly woven and felted with ra veilings of woollen carpet in which scarlet predominated. Would the same thing have happened in the woods ? Or did the nearness of a human dwelling perhaps give the birds a greater feeling of security ? They are very bold, by the way, in quest of cordage, and I have often watched them stripping the fibrous bark from a honey suckle growing over the very door. But, indeed, all my birds look upon me as if I were a mere tenant at will, and they were landlords. "With shame I confess it, I have been bullied even by a humming-bird. This spring, as I was cleansing a pear-tree of its lichens, one of these zigzagging MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 15 blurs came purring toward me, couching his long bill like a lance, his throat sparkling with angry fire, to warn me off from a Missouri-currant whose honey he was sipping. And many a time he has driven me out of a flower-bed. This summer, by the way, a pair of these winged emeralds fastened their mossy acorn-cup upon a bough of the same elm which the orioles had enlivened the year before. We watched all their proceedings from the window through an opera-glass, and saw their two nestlings grow from black needles with a tuft of down at the lower end, till they whirled away on their first short experimental flights. They became strong of wing in a surprisingly short time, and I never saw them or the male bird after, though the female was regular as usual in her visits to our petunias and verbenas. I do not think it ground enough for a generalisation, but in the many times when I watched the old birds feeding their young, the mother always alighted, while the father as uniformly remained upon the wing. The bobolinks are generally chance visitors, tinkling through the garden in blossoming-time, but this year, owing to the long rains early in the season, their favourite meadows were flooded, and they were driven to the upland. So I had a pair of them domiciled in my grass-field. The male used to perch in an apple-tree, then in full bloom, and, while I stood perfectly still close by, he would circle away, quivering round the entire field of five acres, with no break in his song, and settle down again among the blossoms, to be hurried away almost immediately by a new rapture of music. He had the volubility of an Italian charlatan at a fair, and, like him, appeared to be proclaiming the merits of some quack remedy. Opodeldoc-opodeldoc-try- Doctor- Lincolris-opodeldoc ! he seemed to repeat over and over again, with a rapidity that would have distanced the deftest- tongued Figaro that ever rattled. I remember Count Gurowski saying once, with that easy superiority of knowledge about this country which is the monopoly of foreigners, that we had no singing birds ! Well, well, Mr. Hepworth Dixon has found the typical America in Oneida 16 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. and Salt Lake City. Of course, an intelligent European : the best judge of these matters. The truth is, there ai more singing-birds in Europe because there are fewer forest These songsters love the neighbourhood of man becaus hawks and owls are rarer, while their own food is moi abundant. Most people seem to think, the more trees th more birds. Even Chateaubriand, who first tried th primitive-forest-cure, and whose description of the wildernej in its imaginative effects is unmatched, fancies the " peop] of the air singing their hymns to him." So far as my ow observation goes, the farther one penetrates the sombt solitudes of the woods, the more seldom does he hear th voice of any singing-bird. In spite of Chateaubriand minuteness of detail, in spite of that marvellous reverben tion of the decrepit tree falling of its own weight, which h was the first to notice, I cannot help doubting whether h made his way very deep into the wilderness. At any rat( in a letter to Fontanes, written in 1804, he speaks c mes chevaux paissant d, quelque distance. To be sur Chateaubriand was apt to mount the high horse, and thi may have been but an after-thought of the grand seigneui but certainly one would not make much headway on horse back toward the druid fastnesses of the primeval pine. The bobolinks build in considerable numbers in a meadow within a quarter of a mile of us. A houseless lane passe through the midst of their camp, and in clear wester! weather, at the right season, one may hear a score of ther singing at once. When they are breeding, if I chance t pass, one of the male birds always accompanies me like constable, flitting from post to post of the rail-fence, with : short note of reproof continually repeated, till I am fairl out of the neighbourhood. Then he will swing away int the air and run down the wind, gurgling music withou stint over the unheeding tussocks of meadow-grass and dar] clumps of bulrushes that mark his domain. We have no bird whose song will match the nightingale' in compass, none whose note is so rich as that of tin European blackbird; but for mere rapture I have neve MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 17 heard the bobolink's rival. But his opera-season is a short one. The ground and tree-sparrows are our most constant performers. It is now late in August, and one of the latter sings every day and all day long in the garden. Till within a fortnight, a pair of indigo-birds would keep up their lively duo for an hour together. While I write, I hear an oriole gay as in June, and the plaintive may-be of the goldfinch tells me he is stealing my lettuce-seeds. I know not what the experience of others may have been, but the only bird I have ever heard sing in the night has been the chip-bird. I should say he sang about as often during the darkness as cocks crow. One can hardly help fancying that he sings in his dreams. " Father of light, what sunnie seed, What glance of day hast thou confined Into this bird ? To all the breed This busie ray thou hast assigned ; Their magnetism works all night, And dreams of Paradise and light." On second thought, I remember to have heard the cuckoo strike the hours nearly all night with the regularity of a Swiss clock. The dead limbs of our elms, which I spare to that end, bring us the flicker every summer, and almost daily I hear his wild scream and laugh close at hand, himself invisible. He is a shy bird, but a few days ago I had the satisfaction of studying him through the blinds as he sat on a tree within a few feet of me. Seen so near and at rest, he makes good his claim to the title of pigeon-woodpecker. Lumberers have a notion that he is harmful to timber, digging little holes through the bark to encourage the settlement of insects. The regular rings of such perfora tions which one may see in almost any apple-orchard seem to give some probability to this theory. Almost every season a solitary quail visits us, and, unseen among the currant-bushes, calls Bob White, Bob White, as if he were playing at hide-and-seek with that imaginary being. A 130 18 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. rarer visitant is the turtle-dove, whose pleasant coo (some thing like the muffled crow of a cock from a coop covered with snow) I have sometimes heard, and whom I once had the good luck to see close by me in the mulberry-tree. The wild-pigeon, once numerous, I have not seen for many years.* Of savage birds, a hen-hawk now and then quarters himself upon us for a few days, sitting sluggish in a tree after a surfeit of poultry. One of them once offered me a near shot from my study-window one drizzly day for several hours. But it was Sunday, and I gave him the benefit of its gracious truce of God. Certain birds have disappeared from our neighbourhood within my memory. I remember when the whippoorwill could be heard in Sweet Auburn. The night-hawk, once common, is now rare. The brown thrush has moved farther up country. For years I have not seen or heard any of the larger owls, whose hooting was one of my boyish terrors. The cliff-swallow, strange emigrant, that eastward takes his way, has come and gone again in my time. The bank-swallows, well-nigh innumerable during my boyhood, no longer frequent the crumbly cliff of the gravel-pit by the river. The barn-swallows, which once swarmed in our barn, flashing through the dusty sunstreaks of the mow, have been gone these many years. My father would lead me out to see them gather on the roof, and take counsel before their yearly migration, as Mr. White used to see them at Selborne. Eheu, fugaces / Thank fortune, the swift still glues his nest, and rolls his distant thunders night and day in the wide-throated chimneys, still sprinkles the evening air with his merry twittering. The populous heronry in Fresh Pond meadows has been well-nigh broken up, but still a pair or two haunt the old home, as the gypsies of Ellangowan their ruined huts, and every evening fly over us riverwards, clearing their throats with a hoarse hawk as they go, and, in cloudy weather, scarce higher than the tops of the chimneys. Sometimes I have known one to alight in one of our trees, though for what purpose * They made their appearance again this summer (1870). MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 19 I never could divine. Kingfishers have sometimes puzzled me in the same way, perched at high noon in a pine, springing their watchman's rattle when they flitted away from my curiosity, and seeming to shove their top-heavy heads along as a man does a wheel-barrow. Some birds have left us, I suppose, because the country is growing less wild. I once found a summer duck's nest -within a quarter of a mile of our house, but such a trouvaille would be impossible now as Kidd's treasure. And yet the mere taming of the neighbourhood does not quite satisfy me as an explanation. Twenty years ago, on my way to bathe in the river, I saw every day a brace of woodcock, on the miry edge of a spring within a few rods of a house, and constantly visited by thirsty cows. There was no growth of any kind to conceal them, and yet these ordinarily shy birds were almost as indifferent to my passing as common poultry would have been. Since bird-nesting has become scientific, and dignified itself as oology, that, no doubt, is partly to blame for some of our losses. But some old friends are constant. Wilson's thrush comes every year to remind me of that most poetic of ornithologists. He flits before me through the pine-walk like the very genius of solitude. A pair of pewees have built immemorially on a jutting brick in the arched entrance to the ice-house. Always on the same brick, and never more than a single pair, though two broods of five each are raised there every summer. How do they settle their claim to the homestead ? By what right of primogeniture 1 Once the children of a man employed about the place oologized the nest, and the pewees left us for a year or two. I felt towards those boys as the messmates of the Ancient Mariner did towards him after he had shot the albatross. But the pewees came back at last, and one of them is now on his wonted perch, so near my window that I can hear the click of his bill as he snaps a fly on the wing with the unerring precision a stately Trasteverina shows in the capture of her smaller deer. The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morning ; and during the early summer he preludes his matutinal 20 MY GARDEN A CQ UAINTANCE. ejaculation of pewee with a slender whistle, unheard at any other time. He saddens with the season, and, as summer declines, he changes his note ekeu, pewee / as if in lamenta tion. Had he been an Italian bird, Ovid would have had a plaintive tale to tell about him. He is so familiar as often to pursue a fly through the open window into my library. There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these old friendships of a lifetime. There is scarce a tree of mine but has had, at some time or other, a happy homestead among its boughs, to which I cannot say, 1 ' Many light hearts and wings, "Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers." My walk under the pines would lose half its summer charm were I to miss that shy anchorite, the Wilson's thrush, nor hear in haying-time the metallic ring of his song, that justifies his rustic name of scythe-whet. I protect my game as jealously as an English squire. If anybody had oologized a certain cuckoo's nest I know of (I have a pair in my garden every year), it would have left me a sore place in my mind for weeks. I love to bring these aborigines back to the mansuetude they showed to the early voyagers, and before (forgive the involuntary pun) they had grown accustomed to man and knew his savage ways. And they repay your kindness with a sweet familiarity too delicate ever to breed contempt. I have made a Penn-treaty with them, preferring that to the Puritan way with the natives, which converted them to a little Hebraism and a great deal of Medford rum. If they will not come near enough to me (as most of them will), I bring them close with an opera- glass — a much better weapon than a gun. I would not, if I could, convert them from their pretty pagan ways. The only ones I sometimes have savage doubts about is the red squirrel. I think he oologizes. I know he eats cherries (we counted five of them at one time in a single tree, the stones pattering down like the sparse hail that preludes a storm), and that he gnaws off the small end of pears to get at the seeds. He steals the corn from under the noses of A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 21 my poultry. But what would you have ? He will come down upon the limb of the tree I am lying under till he is within a yard of me. He and his mate will scurry up and down the great black-walnut for my diversion, chattering like monkeys. Can I sign his death-warrant who has tolerated me about his grounds so long ? Not I. Let them steal, and welcome. I arn sure I should, had I had the same bringing up and the same temptation. As for the birds, I do not believe there is one of them but does more good than harm ; and of how many featherless bipeds can this be said *? A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. " MEN scarcely know how beautiful fire is," says Shelley ; and I am apt to think there are a good many other things concerning which their knowledge might be largely increased without becoming burdensome. Nor are they altogether reluctant to be taught — not so reluctant, perhaps, as unable — and education is sure to find one fulcrum ready to her hand by which to get a purchase on them. For most of us, I have noticed, are not without an amiable willingness to assist at any spectacle or entertainment (loosely so called) for which no fee is charged at the door. If special tickets are sent us, another element of pleasure is added in a sense of privilege and pre-eminence (pitiably scarce in a demo cracy), so deeply rooted in human nature that I have seen people take a strange satisfaction in being near of kin to the mute chief personage in a funeral. It gave them a moment's advantage over the rest of us whose grief was rated at a lower place in the procession. But the words "admission free" at the bottom of a handbill, though holding out no bait of inequality, have yet a singular charm for many minds, especially in the country. There is some thing touching in the constancy with which men attend 22 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. free lectures, and in the honest patience with which they listen to them. He who pays may yawn and shift testily in his seat, or even go out with an awful reverberation of criticism, for he has bought the right to do any or all of these and paid for it. But gratuitous hearers are anaesthetised to suffering by a sense of virtue. They are performing perhaps the noblest, as it is one of the most difficult, of human functions in getting Something (no matter how small) for Nothing. They are not pestered by the awful duty of securing their money's worth. They are wasting time, to do which elegantly and without lassitude is the highest achievement of civilisation. If they are cheated, it is, at worst, only of a superfluous hour which was rotting on their hands. Not only is mere amusement made more piquant, but instruction more palatable, by this universally relished sauce of gratuity. And if the philo sophic observer finds an object of agreeable contemplation in the audience, as they listen to a discourse on the probability of making missionaries go down better with the Feejee-Islanders by balancing the hymn-book in one pocket with a bottle of Worcestershire in the other, or to a plea for arming the female gorilla with the ballot, he also takes a friendly interest in the lecturer, and admires the wise economy of Nature who thus contrives an ample field of honest labour for her bores. Even when the insidious hat is passed round after one of these eleemosynary feasts, the relish is but heightened by a conscientious refusal to disturb the satisfaction's completeness with the rattle of a single contributory penny. So firmly persuaded am I of this gratis-instinct in our common humanity, that I believe I could fill a house by advertising a free lecture on Tupper considered as a philosophic poet, or on my personal recol lections of the late James K. Polk. This being so, I have sometimes wondered that the peep-shows which Nature provides with such endless variety for her children, and to which we are admitted on the bare condition of having eyes, should be so generally neglected. To be sure, eyes are not so common as people think, or poets would be plentier, A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 23 and perhaps also these exhibitions of hers are cheapened in estimation by the fact that in enjoying them we are not getting the better of anybody else. Your true lovers of nature, however, contrive to get even this solace ; and Wordsworth, looking upon mountains as his own peculiar sweethearts, was jealous of anybody else who ventured upon even the most innocent flirtation with them. As if such fellows, indeed, could pretend to that nicer sense of what-d'ye-call-it which was so remarkable in him ! Marry come up ! Mountains, no doubt, may inspire a profounder and more exclusive passion, bub on the whole I am not sorry to have been born and bred among more domestic scenes, where I can be hospitable without a pang. I am going to ask you presently to take pot-luck with me at a board where Winter shall supply whatever there is of cheer. I think the old fellow has hitherto had scant justice clone him in the main. We make him the symbol of old age or death, and think we have settled the matter. As if old age were never kindly as well as frosty ; as if it had no reverend graces of its own as good in their way as the noisy impertinence of childhood, the elbowing self-conceit of youth, or the pompous mediocrity of middle life. As if there were anything discreditable in death, or nobody had ever longed for it ! Suppose we grant that Winter is the sleep of the year, what then ? I take it upon me to say that his dreams are finer than the best reality of his waking rivals. "Sleep, Silence' child, the father of soft Rest," is a very agreeable acquaintance, and most of us are better employed in his company than anywhere else. For my own part, I think Winter a pretty wide-awake old boy, and his bluff sincerity and hearty ways are more congenial to my mood, and more wholesome for me, than any charms of which his rivals are capable. Spring is a fickle mistress, who either does not know her own mind, or is so long in making it up, whether 24 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. you shall have her or not have her, that one gets tired at last of her pretty miffs and reconciliations. You go to her to be cheered up a bit, and ten to one catch her in the sulks, expecting you to find enough good humour for both. After she has become Mrs. Summer she grows a little more staid in her demeanour, and her abundant table, where you are sure to get the earliest fruits and vegetables of the season, is a good foundation for steady friendship ; but she has lost that delicious aroma of maidenhood, and what was delicately rounded grace in the girl gives more than hints of something like redundance in the matron. Autumn is the poet of the family. He gets you up a splendour that you would say was made out of real sunset ; but it is nothing more than a few hectic leaves, when all is done. He is but a sentimentalist, after all; a kind cf Lamartine whining along the ancestral avenues he has made bare timber of, and begging a contribution of good spirits from your own savings to keep him in countenance. But Winter has his delicate sensibilities too, only he does not make them as good as indelicate by thrusting them forever in your face. He is a better poet than Autumn, when he has a mind, but, like a truly great one as he is, he brings you down to your bare manhood, and bids you understand him out of that, with no adventitious helps of association, or he will none of you. He does not touch those melancholy chords on which Autumn is as great a master as Heine. Well, is there no such thing as thrumming on them and maundering over them till they get out of tune, and you wish some manly hand would crash through them and leave them dangling brokenly for ever? Take Winter as you find him, and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow, with no nonsense in him, and tolerating none in you, which is a great comfort in the long run. He is not what they call a genial critic, but bring a real man along with you, and you will find there is a crabbed generosity about the old cynic that you would not exchange for all the creamy concessions of Autumn. " Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," quotha? That's just it; Winter soon blows A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 25 your head clear of fog and makes you see things as they are. I thank him for it ! The truth is, between ourselves, I have a very good opinion of the whole family, who always welcome me without making me feel as if I were too much of a poor relation. There ought to be some kind of distance, never so little, you know, to give the true relish. They are as good company, the worst of them, as any I know, and I am not a little flattered by a condescension from any one of them ; but I happen to hold Winter's retainer this time, and, like an honest advocate, am bound to make as good a showing as I can for him, even if it cost a few slurs upon the rest of the household. Moreover, Winter is coming, and one would like to get on the blind side of him. The love of Nature in and for herself, or as a mirror for the moods of the mind, is a modern thing. The fleeing to her as an escape from man was brought into fashion by Rousseau ; for his prototype Petrarch, though he had a taste for pretty scenery, had a true antique horror for the grander aspects of nature. He got once to the top of Mount Yentoux, but it is very plain that he did not enjoy it. Indeed, it is only within a century or so that the search after the picturesque has been a safe employment. It is not so even now in Greece or Southern Italy. Where the Anglo- Saxon carves his cold fowl, and leaves the relics of his picnic, the ancient or mediaeval man might be pretty confident that some ruffian would try the edge of his knife on a chicken of the Platonic sort, and leave more precious bones as an offering to the genius of the place. The ancients were certainly more social than we, though that, perhaps, was natural enough, when a good part of the world was still covered with forest. They huddled together in cities as well for safety as to keep their minds warm. The Romans had a fondness for country life, but they had fine roads, and Rome was always within easy reach. The author of the Book of Job is the earliest I know of who showed any profound sense of the moral meaning of the outward world ; and I think none has approached him since, though Wordsworth comes nearest with the first two books of the 26 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. " Prelude." But their feeling is not precisely of the kind I speak of as modern, and which gave rise to what is called descriptive poetry. Chaucer opens his Clerk's Tale with a bit of landscape admirable for its large style, and as well composed as any Claude. " There is right at the west end of Itaille, Down at the root of Vesulus the cold, A lusty plain abundant of vitaille, Where many a tower and town thou mayst behold, That founded were in time of fathers old, And many an other delectable sight ; And Saluces this noble country hight." What an airy precision of touch there is here, and what a sure eye for the points of character in landscape ! But the picture is altogether subsidiary. No doubt the works of Salvator Rosa and Caspar Poussin show that there must have been some amateur taste for the grand and terrible in scenery ; but the British poet Thomson (" sweet-souled " is Wordsworth's apt word) was the first to do with words what they had done partially with colours. He was turgid, no good metrist, and his English is like a translation from one of those poets who wrote in Latin after it was dead ; but he was a man of sincere genius, and not only English, but European literature is largely in his debt. He was the inventor of cheap amusement for the million, to be had of All-out-doors for the asking. It was his impulse which uncon sciously gave direction to Rousseau, and it is to the school of Jean Jacques that we owe St. Pierre, Cowper, Chateau briand, Wordsworth, Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, Rusldn — the great painters of ideal landscape. So long as men had slender means, whether of keeping out cold or checkmating it with artificial heat, Winter was an unwelcome guest, especially in the country. There he was the bearer of a lettre de cachet, which shut its victims in solitary confinement with few resources but to boose round the fire and repeat ghost-stories, which had lost all their freshness and none of their terror. To go to bed v/as to lie awake of cold, with an added shudder of fright A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 27 whenever a loose casement or a waving curtain chose to give you the goose-flesh. Bussy Rabutin, in one of his letters, gives us a notion how uncomfortable it was in the country, with green wood, smoky chimneys, and doors and windows that thought it was their duty to make the wind whistle, not to keep it out. With fuel so dear, it could not have been much better in the city, to judge by Menage's warning against the danger of our dressing-gowns taking fire, while we cuddle too closely over the sparing blaze. The poet of Winter himself is said to have written in bed, with his hand through a hole in the blanket ; and we may suspect that it was the warmth quite as much as the company that first drew men together at the coffee-house. Coleridge, in January 1800, writes to Wedgewood : "I am sitting by a fire in a rug greatcoat. ... It is most barbar ously cold, and you, I fear, can shield yourself from it only by perpetual imprisonment." This thermometrical view of winter is, I grant, a depressing one ; for I think there is nothing so demoralising as cold. I know of a boy who, when his father, a bitter economist, was brought home dead, said only, "Now we can burn as much wood as we like." I would not off-hand prophesy the gallows for that boy. I remember with a shudder a pinch I got from the cold once in a railroad-car. A born fanatic of fresh air, I found myself glad to see the windows hermetically sealed by the freezing vapour of our breath, and plotted the assassination of the conductor every time he opened the door. I felt myself sensibly barbarising, and would have shared Colonel Jack's bed in the ash-hole of the glass- furnace with a grateful heart. Since then I have had more charity for the prevailing ill-opinion of winter. It was natural enough that Ovid should measure the years of his exile in Pontus by the number of winters. " Ut sumus in Ponto, ter frigore constitit Ister. Facta est Euxini dura ter unda maris • " " Thrice hath the cold bound Ister fast, since I In Pontus was, thrice Euxine's wave maS TRAGEDIES. his waxen "Gebirus Rex" above all the natural fruits of his mind ; and we have no doubt that, if some philosopher should succeed in accomplishing Paracelsus's problem of an artificial homunculus, he would dote on this misbegotten babe of his science, and think him the only genius of the family. We cannot over-estimate the value of some of the ancient classics, but a certain amount of superstition about Greek and Latin has come down to us from the revival of learning, and seems to hold in mortmain the intellects of whoever has, at some time, got a smattering of them. Men quote a platitude in either of those tongues with a relish of conviction as droll to the uninitiated as the knight hood of freemasonry. Horace Walpole's nephew, the Earl of Orford, when he was in his cups, used to have Statius read aloud to him every night for two hours by a tipsy tradesman, whose hiccupings threw in here and there a kind of csesural pause, and found some strange mystery of sweetness in the disquantitied syllables. So powerful is this hallucination that we can conceive of festina lente as the favourite maxim of a Mississippi steamboat captain, and apurrov plv vSup cited as conclusive by a gentleman for whom the -bottle before him reversed the wonder of the stereoscope, and substituted the Gascon v for the b in binocular. Something of this singular superstition has infected the minds of those who confound the laws of conventional limitation which governed the practice of Greek authors in dramatic composition — laws adapted to the habits and traditions and preconceptions of their audience — with that sense of ideal form which made the Greeks masters in art to all succeeding generations. Aristophanes is beyond question the highest type of pure comedy, etherealising his humour by the infusion, or intensifying it by the contrast of poetry, and deodorising the personality of his sarcasm by a sprinkle from the clearest springs of fancy. His satire, aimed as it was at typical characteristics, is as fresh as ever ; but we doubt whether an Aristophanic drama, retaining its exact form, but adapted to present SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 199 events and personages, would keep the stage as it is kept by "The Rivals," for example, immeasurably inferior as that is in every element of genius except the prime one of liveliness. Something similar in purpose to the parabasis was essayed in one, at least, of the comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, and in our time by Tieck ; but it took, of necessity, a different form of expression, and does not seem to have been successful. Indeed, the fact that what is called the legitimate drama of modern times in England, Spain, and France has been strictly a growth, and not a manufacture, that in each country it took a different form, and that, in all, the period of its culminating and beginning to decline might be measured by a generation, seems to point us toward some natural and inevitable law of human nature, and to show that, while the principles of art are immutable, their application must accommodate itself to the material supplied them by the time and by the national character and traditions. The Spanish tragedy inclines more toward the lyrical, the French toward the epical, the English toward the historical, in the representation of real life ; the Spanish and English agree in the Teutonic peculiarity of admitting the humorous offset of the clown, though in the one case he parodies the leading motive of the drama, and represents the self-consciousness of the dramatist, while in the other he heightens the tragic effect by contrast (as in the grave-digging scene of " Hamlet "), and suggests that stolid but wholesome indifference of the general life — of what, for want of a better term, we call Nature — to the sin and suffering, the weakness and mis fortunes of the individual man. All these nations had the same ancient examples before them, had the same reverence for antiquity, yet they involuntarily deviated, more or less happily, into originality, success, and the freedom of a living creativeness. The higher kinds of literature, the only kinds that live on because they had life at the start, are not, then, it should seem, the fabric of scholarship, of criticism, diligently studying and as diligently copying the best models, but are much rather born of some genetic 260 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. principle in the character of the people and the age which produce them. One drop of ruddy human blood puts more life into the veins of a poem than all the delusive aurum potabile that can be distilled out of the choicest library. The opera is the closest approach we have to the ancient drama in the essentials of structure and presentation ; and could we have a libretto founded on a national legend and written by one man of genius, to be filled out and accom panied by the music of another, we might hope for some thing of the same effect upon the stage. But themes of universal familiarity and interest are rare — " Don Giovanni " and " Faust," perhaps, most nearly, though not entirely, fulfilling the required conditions — and men of genius rarer. The oratorio seeks to evade the difficulty by choosing Scriptural subjects, and it may certainly be questioned whether the day of popular mythology, in the sense of which it subserves the purposes of epic or dramatic poetry, be not gone by for ever. Longfellow is driven to take refuge among the red men, and Tennyson in the Cambro-Breton cyclus of Arthur ; but it is impossible that such themes should come so intimately home to us as the semi-fabulous stories of their own ancestors did to the Greeks. The most successful attempt at reproducing the Greek tragedy, both in theme and treatment, is the " Samson Agonistes," as it is also the most masterly piece of English versification. Goethe admits that it alone, among modern works, has caught life from the breath of the antique spirit. But he failed to see, or at least to give, the reason of it ; probably failed to see it, or he would never have attempted the " Iphigenia." Milton not only subjected himself to the structural requirements of the Attic tragedy, but with the true poetic instinct availed himself of the striking advantage it had in the choice of a subject. No popular tradition lay near enough to him for his purpose ; none united in itself the essential requisites of human interest and universal belief. He accordingly chose a Jewish mythus, very near to his own heart as a blind prisoner, betrayed by his wife, among the Philistines SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 201 of the Restoration, and familiar to the earliest associations of his hearers. This subject, and this alone, met all the demands both of living poetic production and of antique form — the action grandly simple, the personages few, the protagonist at once a victim of Divine judgment and an executor of Divine retribution, an intense personal sym pathy in the poet himself, and no strangeness to the habitual prepossessions of those he addressed to be over come before he could touch their hearts or be sure of aid from their imaginations. To compose such a drama on such a theme was to be Greek, and not to counterfeit it ; for Samson was to Milton traditionally just what Herakles was to Sophocles, and personally far more. The "Agonistes" is still fresh and strong as morning, but where are " Oaractacus " and "Elfrida?" Nay, where is the far better work of a far abler man — where is "Merope?" If the frame of mind which performs a deliberate experiment were the same as that which produces poetry vitalised through and through by the conspiring ardours of every nobler passion and power of the soul, then " Merope " might have had some little space of life. But without colour, without harmonious rhythm of movement, with less passion than survived in an average Grecian ghost, and all this from the very theory of her creation, she has gone back, a shadow, to join her shadowy Italian and French namesakes in that limbo of things that would be and cannot be. Mr. Arnold but retraces, in his Preface to " Merope," the arguments of Mason in the letters prefixed to his classical experiments, What finds defenders, but not readers, may be correct, classic, right in principle, but it is not poetry of that absolute kind which may and does help men, but needs no help of theirs ; and such surely we have a right to demand in tragedy, if nowhere else. We should not speak so unreservedly if we did not set a high value on Mr. Arnold and his poetic gift. But "Merope " has that one fault against which the very gods, we are told, strive in vain. It is dull, and the seed of this dulness lay in the system on which it was written. 202 &WIN&URN&S TRAGEDIES. Pseudo-classicism takes two forms. Sometimes, as Mr. Landor has done, it attempts truth of detail to ancient scenery and manners, which may be attained either by hard reading and good memory, or at a cheaper rate from such authors as Becker. The " Moretum," once attributed to Virgil, and the idyl of Theocritus lately chosen as a text by Mr. Arnold, are interesting, because they describe real things ; but the mock-antique, if not true, is nothing ; and how true such poems are likely to be we can judge by " Punch's " success at Yankeeisms, by all England's accurate appreciation of the manners and minds of a contemporary people one with herself in language, laws, religion, and literature. The eye is the only note-book of the true poet \ but a patchwork of second-hand memories is a laborious futility, hard to write and harder to read, with about as much nature in it as a dialogue of the Deipnosophists. Alexander's bushel of peas was a criticism worthy of Aristotle's pupil. We should reward such writing with the gift of a classical dictionary. In this idyllic kind of poetry also we have a classic, because Goldsmith went to nature for his " Deserted Village," and borrowed of tradition nothing but the poetic diction in which he described it. This is the only method by which a poet may surely reckon on ever becoming an ancient himself. When we heard it said once that a certain poem might have been written by Simonides, we could not help thinking that, if it were so, then it was precisely what Simonides could never have written, since he looked at the world through his own eyes, not through those of Linus or Hesiod, and thought his own thoughts, not theirs, or we should never have had him to imitate. Objections of the same nature, but even stronger, lie against a servile copying of the form and style of the Greek tragic drama, and yet more against the selection of a Greek theme. As we said before, the life we lead, and the views we take of it, are more complex than those of men who lived five centuries before Christ. They may be better or worse, but, at any rate, they are different, and irremediably SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 203 so. The idea and the form in which it naturally embodies itself, mutually sustaining and invigorating each other, cannot be divided without endangering the lives of both. For in all real poetry the form is not a garment, but a body. Our very passion has become metaphysical, and speculates upon itself. Their simple and downright way of thinking loses all its savour when we assume it to ourselves by an effort of thought. Human nature, it is true, remains always the same, but the displays of it change ; the habits which are a second nature modify it inwardly as well as outwardly, and what moves it to passionate action in one age may leave it indifferent in the next. Between us and the Greeks lies the grave of their murdered paganism, making our minds and theirs irreconcilable. Christianity as steadily intensifies the self-consciousness of man as the religion of the Greeks must have turned their thoughts away from themselves to the events of this life and the phenomena of nature. We cannot even conceive of their conception of Phoibos with any plausible assurance of coming near the truth. To take lesser matters, since the invention of printing and the cheapening of books have made the thought of all ages and nations the common pro perty of educated men, we cannot so dis-saturate our minds of it as to be keenly thrilled in the modern imitation with those commonplaces of proverbial lore in which the chorus and secondary characters are apt to indulge, though in the original they may interest us as being natural and charac teristic. In the German-silver of the modern we get something of this kind, which does not please us the more by being cut up into single lines that recall the outward semblance of some pages in Sophocles. We find it cheaper to make a specimen than to borrow one. " CHORUS. Foolish who bites off nose, his face to spite. OTJTIS. Who fears his fate, him Fate shall one day spurn. CHORUS. The gods themselves are pliable to Fate. OUTIS. The strong self-ruler dreads no other sway. CHORUS. Sometimes the shortest way goes most about. OUTIS. Why fetch a compass, having stars within ? CHORUS. A shepherd once, I know that stars may set 204 SWINBURNR'S TRAGEDIES. OUTIS. That thou led'st sheep fits not for leading men. CHORUS. To sleep-sealed eyes the wolf-dog barks in vain." We protest that we have read something very like this, we will not say where, and we might call it the battledore and shuttlecock style of dialogue, except that the players do not seem to have any manifest relation to each other, but each is intent on keeping his own bit of feathered cork continually in the air. The first sincerely popular yearning toward antiquity, the first germ of Schiller's " Gotter Griechenland's," is to be found in the old poem of Tanhauser, very nearly coincident with the beginnings of the Reformation. And if we might allegorise it, we should say that it typified precisely that longing after Venus, under her other name of Charis, which represents the relation in which modern should stand to ancient art. It is the grace of the Greeks, their sense of proportion, their distaste for the exaggerated, their exquisite propriety of phrase, which steadies imagination without cramping it — it is these that we should endeavour to assimilate without the loss of our own individuality. We should quicken our sense of form by intelligent sympathy with theirs, and not stiffen it into formalism by a servile surrender of what is genuine in us to what was genuine in them. " A pure form," says Schiller, " helps and sustains, an impure one hinders and shatters." But we should remember that the spirit of the age must enter as a modifying principle, not only into ideas, but into the best manner of their expression. The old bottles will not always serve for the new wine. A principle of life is the first requirement of all art, and it can only be communicated by the touch of the time and a simple faith in it ; all else is circumstantial and secondary. The Greek tragedy passed through the three natural stages of poetry — the imaginative in -ffischylus, the thoughtfully artistic in Sophocles, the sentimental in Euripides — and then died. If people could only learn the general applicability to periods and schools of what young Mozart says of Gellert, that " he had written no poetry since his death 1 " No effort to raise a defunct CHAUCER. 205 past has ever led to anything but just enough galvanic twitching of the limbs to remind us unpleasantly of life. The romantic movement of the school of German poets which succeeded Goethe and Schiller ended in extravagant unreality, and Goethe himself, with his unerring common- sense, has given us, in the second part of "Faust," the result of his own and Schiller's common striving after a Grecian ideal. Euphorion, the child of Faust and Helen, falls dead at their feet ; and Helen herself soon follows him to the shades, leaving only her mantle in the hands of her lover. This, he is told, shall lift him above the earth. We fancy we can interpret the symbol. Whether we can or not, it is certainly suggestive of thought that the only immortal production of the greatest of recent poets was conceived and carried out in that Gothic spirit and form from which he was all his life struggling to break loose. CHA UCER* WILL it do to say anything more about Chaucer ? Can anyone hope to say anything, not new, but even fresh, on a topic so well worn ? It may well be doubted ; and yet one is always the better for a walk in the morning air — a medicine which may be taken over and over again without any sense of sameness, or any failure of its invigorating quality. There is a pervading wholesomeness in the writings of this man — a vernal property that soothes and * Publications of the Chaucer Society. London. 1869-70. Etude sur G. Chaucer consid6r6 comme imitateur des Trouveres. Par E. G. SANDRAS, Agrege de 1'Universite. Paris : Auguste Dusand. 1859. 8vo. pp. 298. Geoffrey Chaucer's Canter bury-Geschichten, ubersetzt in den Vers- massen der Urschrift, und durch Einleitung und AnmerTcungen erlautert. Von WIHLELM HERTZBERG. Hildburghausen. 1866. 12mo. pp. 674. Chaucer in seinen Beziehungen zur italienischen Literatur. Inaugural- Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doctorwilrde. Von ALFONS KISSNER, Bonn. 1867. 8vo. pp. 81. 206 CHAUCER. refreshes in a way of which no other has ever found the secret. I repeat to myself a thousand times — " Whan that April e with his showres sote The droughte of March hath perced to the rote, And bathed every veine in swich licour Of which vertue engendered is the flour, — When Zephyrus eek with his swete breth Enspired hath in every holt and heth The tender croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the ram his halfe cors yronne, And smale foule's maken melodie," — and still at the thousandth time a breath of uncontaminate springtide seems to lift the hair upon my forehead. If here be not the largior ether, the serene and motionless atmos phere of classical antiquity, we find at least the seclusum nemus, the domos placidas, and the oubliance, as Froissart so sweetly calls it, that persuade us we are in an Elysium none the less sweet that it appeals to our more purely human, one might almost say domestic, sympathies. We may say of Chaucer's muse, as Overbury of his milkmaid, " her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of June like a new-made haycock." The most hardened roue of literature can scarce confront these simple and winning graces without feeling somewhat of the unworn sentiment of his youth revive in him. Modern imaginative literature has become so self-conscious, and therefore so melancholy, that Art, which should be " the world's sweet inn," whither we repair for refreshment and repose, has become rather a watering-place, where one's own private touch of the liver-complaint is exasperated by the affluence of other sufferers whose talk is a narrative of morbid symptoms. Poets have forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life, is the learning how to burn your own smoke ; that the way to be original is to be healthy ; that the fresh colour, so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from the fixed air of self into the brisk atmos phere of universal sentiments; and that to make the common marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is the test CHAUCER. 207 of genius. It is good to retreat now and then beyond earshot of the introspective confidences of modern literature, and to lose ourselves in the gracious worldiness of Chaucer. Here was a healthy and hearty man, so genuine that he need not ask whether he was genuine or no, so sincere as quite to forget his own sincerity, so truly pious that he could be happy in the best world that God chose to make, so humane that he loved even the foibles of his kind. Here was a truly epic poet, without knowing it, who did not waste time in considering whether his age were good or bad, but quietly taking it for granted as the best that ever was or ever could be for him, has left us such a picture of contemporary life as no man ever painted. "A perpetual fountain of good-sense," Dryden calls him ; yes, and of good-humour, too, and wholesome thought. He was one of those rare authors whom, if we had met him under a porch in a shower, we should have preferred to the rain. He could be happy with a crust and spring-water, and could see the shadow of his benign face in a flagon of Gascon wine without fancying Death sitting opposite to cry Supernaculum I when he had drained it. He could look to God without abjectness, and on man without contempt. The pupil of manifold experience — scholar, courtier, soldier, ambassador, who had known poverty as a housemate and been the companion of princes — his was one of those happy temperaments that could equally enjoy both halves of culture, the world of books and the world of men. " Unto this day it doth mine herte boote, That I have had my world as in my time ! " The portrait of Chaucer, which we owe to the loving regret of his disciple Occleve, confirms the judgment of him which we make for his works. It is, I think, more engaging than that of any other poet. The downcast eyes, half sly, half meditative, the sensuous mouth, the broad brow, drooping with weight of thought, and yet with an inexpugnable youth shining out of it as from the morning forehead of a boy, are all noticeable, and not less so their harmony of 208 CHAUCER. placid tenderness. We are struck, too, with the smooth ness of the face as of one who thought easily whose phrase flowed naturally, and who had never puckered his brow over an unmanageable verse. Nothing has been added to our knowledge of Chaucer's life since Sir Harris Nicolas, with the help of original records, weeded away the fictions by which the few facts were choked and overshadowed. We might be sorry that no confirmation has been found for the story, fathered on a certain phantasmal Mr. Buckley, that Chaucer was "fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street," if it were only for the alliteration ; but we refuse to give up the meeting with Petrarch. All the probabilities are in its favour. That Chaucer, being at Milan, should not have found occasion to ride across so far as Padua, for the sake of seeing the most famous literary man of the day, is incredible. If Froissart could journey on horse back through Scotland and Wales, surely Chaucer, whose curiosity was as lively as his, might have ventured what would have been a mere pleasure- trip in comparsion. I cannot easily bring myself to believe that he is not giving some touches of his own character in that of the Clerk of Oxford :— " For him was liefer have at his bed's head A twenty bookes clothed in black and red Of Aristotle and his philosophic Than robes rich, or riddle or psaltrie : But although that he were a philosopher, Yet had he but a little gold in coffer : Of study took he moste care and heed ; Not one word spake he more than was need: All that he spake it was of high prudence, And short and quick, and full of great sentence ; Sounding in moral virtue was his speech, And gladly would he learn and gladly teach." That, himself as plump as Horace, he should have described the Clerk as being lean, will be no objection to those who remember how carefully Chaucer effaces his own personality in his great poem. Our chief debt to Sir Harris CHAUCER. 209 Nicolas is for having disproved the story that Chaucer, imprisoned for complicity in the insurrection of John of Northampton, had set himself free by betraying his accom plices. That a poet, one of whose leading qualities is his good sense and moderation, and who should seem to have practised his own rule, to " Fly from the press and dwell with soothfastness ; Suffice thee thy good though it be small." should have been concerned in any such political excesses, was improbable enough ; but that he should add to this the baseness of broken faith was incredible except to such as in a doubtful story " Demen gladly to the badder end." Sir Harris Nicolas has proved by the records that the fabric is baseless, and we may now read the poet's fine verse, " Truth is the highest thing a man may keep," without a pang. We are thankful that Chaucer's shoulders are finally discharged of that weary load, " The Testament of Love."* The later biographers seem inclined to make Chaucer a younger man at his death in 1400 than has hitherto been supposed. Herr Hertzberg even puts his birth so late as 1340. But, till more conclusive evidence is produced, we shall adhere to the received dates as on the whole more consonant with the probabilities of the case. The monu ment is clearly right as to the year of his death, and the chances are at least even that both this and the date of birth were copied from an older inscription. The only counter-argument that has much force is the manifestly unfinished condition of the " Canterbury Tales." That a * Tyrwhitt doubted the authenticity of " The Flower and the Leaf" and "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale." To these Mr. Bradshaw (and there can be no higher authority) would add "The Court of Love," "The Dream," "The Praise of Woman," and "The Romaunt of the Rose," and several of the shorter poems. To these doubtful productions there is strong ground, both moral and aesthetic, for adding '• The Parson's Tale." 342 216 CHAUCER. man of seventy odd could have put such a spirit of youth into those matchless prologues will not, however, surprise those who remember Dryden's second spring-time. It is plain that the notion of giving unity to a number of discon nected stories by the device which Chaucer adopted was an afterthought. These stories had been written, and some of them even published, at periods far asunder, and without any reference to connection among themselves. The pro logues, and those parts which internal evidence justifies us in taking them to have been written after the thread of plan to string them on was conceived, are in every way more mature — in knowledge of the world, in easy mastery of verse and language, and in the overpoise of sentiment by judgment. They may with as much probability be referred to a green old age as to the middle-life of a man who, upon any theory of the dates, was certainly slow in ripening. The formation of a Chaucer Society, now four centuries and a-half after the poet's death, gives suitable occasion for taking a new observation of him, as of a fixed star, not only in our own, but in the European literary heavens, " whose worth's unknown although his height be taken." The admirable work now doing by this Society, whose establish ment was mainly due to the pious zeal of Mr. Furnivall, deserves recognition from all who know how to value the too rare union of accurate scholarship with minute exact ness in reproducing the text. The six-text edition of the " Canterbury Tales," giving what is practically equivalent to six manuscript copies, is particularly deserving of grati tude from this side the water, as it for the first time affords to Americans the opportunity of independent critical study and comparison. This beautiful work is fittingly inscribed to our countryman, Professor Child, of Harvard, a lover of Chaucer, "so proved by his wordes and his werke," who lias done more for the great poet's memory than any man since Tyrwhitt. We earnestly hope that the Society may find enough support to print all the remaining manuscript CHAUCER. 2il texts of importance, for there can hardly be any one of them that may not help us to a valuable hint. The works of M. Sandras and Herr Hertzberg show that this is a matter of interest not merely or even primarily to English scholars. The introduction to the latter is one of the best essays on Chaucer yet written, while the former, which is an investi gation of the French and Italian sources of the poet, sup plies us with much that is new and worth having as respects the training of the poet, and the obstacles of fashion and taste through which he had to force his way before he could find free play for his native genius or even so much as arrive at a consciousness thereof. M. Sandras is in every way a worthy pupil of the accomplished M. Victor Leclerc, and, though he lays perhaps a little too much stress on the indebtedness of Chaucer in particulars, shows a singularly intelligent and clear-sighted eye for the general grounds of his claim to greatness and origin ality. It is these grounds wrhich I propose chiefly to examine here. The first question we put to any poet, nay, to any so-called national literature, is that which Farinata addressed to Dante — Chi fur li maggior tui ? Here is no question of plagiarism, for poems are not made of words, and thoughts, and images, but of that something in the poet himself which can compel them to obey him and move to the rhythm of his nature. Thus it is that the new poet, however late he come, can never be forestalled, and the shipbuilder who built the pinnace of Columbus has as much claim to the discovery of America as he who suggests a thought by which some other man opens new worlds to us has to a share in that achievement by him unconceived and incon ceivable. Chaucer undoubtedly began as an imitator, perhaps as mere translator, serving the needful apprentice ship in the use of his tools. Children learn to speak by watching the lips and catching the words of those who know how already, and poets learn in the same way from their elders. They import their raw material from any and everywhere, and the question at last comes down to this — 212 CHAUCER. whether an author have original force enough to assimilate all he has acquired, or that be so over-mastering as to assimilate him. If the poet turn out the stronger, we allow him to help himself from other people with wonderful equanimity. Should a man discover the art of transmuting metals, and present us with a iHmp of gold as large as an ostrich-egg, would it be in human nature to inquire too nicely whether he had stolen the lead ? Nothing is more certain than that great poets are not sudden prodigies, but slow results. As an oak profits by the foregone lives of immemorial vegetable races that have worked-over the juices of earth and air into organic life out of whose dissolution a soil might gather fit to maintain that nobler birth of nature, so we may be sure that the genius of every remembered poet drew the forces that built it up out of the decay of a long succession of forgotten ones. Nay, in proportion as the genius is vigorous and original will its indebtedness be greater, will its roots strike deeper into the past and grope in remoter fields for the virtue that must sustain it. Indeed, if the works of the great poets teach anything, it is to hold mere invention somewhat cheap. It is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found, that is of consequence. Accordingly, Chaucer, like Shakespeare, invented almost nothing. Wherever he found anything directed to Geoffrey Chaucer, he took it and made the most of it. It was not the subject treated, but himself, that was the new thing. Cela m'appartient de droit, Moliere is reported to have said when accused of plagiarism. Chaucer pays that " usurious interest which genius," as Coleridge says, " always pays in borrowing." The characteristic touch is his own. In the famous passage about the caged bird, copied from the " Romaunt of the Rose," the " gon eten wormes " was added by him. We must let him, if he will, eat the heart out of the literature that had preceded him, as we sacrifice the mulberry-leaves to the silkworm, because he knows how to convert them into something richer and more lasting. The question of originality is not one of form, but of CHAUCER. 213 substance; not of cleverness, but of imaginative power. Given your material, in other words the life in which you live, how much can you see in it*? For on that depends how much you can make of it. Is it merely an arrange ment of man's contrivance, a patchwork of expediencies for temporary comfort and convenience, good enough if it last your time \ or is it so much of the surface of that ever- flowing deity which we call Time, wherein we catch such fleeting reflection as is possible for us, of our relation to predurable things ? This is what makes the difference between j^schylus and Euripides, between Shakespeare and Fletcher, between Goethe and Heine, between literature and rhetoric. Something of this depth of insight, if not in the fullest, yet in no inconsiderable measure, characterises Chaucer. We must not let his playfulness, his delight in the world as mere spectacle, mislead us into thinking that he was incapable of serious purpose or insensible to the deeper meanings of life. There are four principal sources from which Chaucer may be presumed to have drawn for poetical suggestion or literary culture — the Latins, the Troubadours, the Trouveres, and the Italians. It is only the two latter who can fairly claim any immediate influence in the direction of his thought or the formation of his style. The only Latin poet who can be supposed to have influenced the spirit of mediaeval literature is Ovid. In his sentimentality, his love of the marvellous and the picturesque, he is its natural precursor. The analogy between his Fasti and the versified legends of saints is more than a fanciful one. He was cer tainly popular with the poets of the thirteenth and four teenth centuries. Virgil had well-nigh become mythical. The chief merit of the Provengal poets is in having been the first to demonstrate that it was possible to write with elegance in a modern dialect, and their interest for us is mainly as forerunners, as indications of tendency. Their literature is prophecy, not fulfilment. Its formal sentiment culminated in Laura, its ideal aspiration in Beatrice. Shakespeare's hundred and sixth sonnet, if, for the 214 CHAUCER. imaginary mistress to whom it was addressed, we substitute the muse of a truer conception and more perfected utterance, represents exactly the feeling with which we read Provengal poetry : — " When in the chronicle of wasted Time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, I see their antique pen would have expressed Even such a beauty as you master now ; So all their praises are but prophecies Of this our time, all you prefiguring, And, for they looked but with divining eyes, They had not skill enough your worth to sing. " It is astonishing how little of the real life of the time we learn from the Troubadours, except by way of inference and deduction. Their poetry is purely lyric in its most narrow sense, that is, the expression of personal and momentary moods. To the fancy of critics who take their cue from tradition, Provence is a morning sky of early summer, out of which innumerable larks rain a faint melody (the sweeter because rather half divined than heard too distinctly) over an earth where the dew never dries and the flowers never fade. But when we open Raynouard it is like opening the door of an aviary. We are deafened and confused by a hundred minstrels singing the same song at once, and more than suspect that the flowers they welcome are made of French cambric, spangled with dewdrops of prevaricating glass. Bernard de Yentadour and Bertrand de Born are well-nigh the only ones among them in whom we find an original type. Yet the Troubadours undoubtedly led the way to refinement of conception and perfection of form. They were the conduit through which the failing stream of Roman literary tradition flowed into the new channel which medieval culture was slowly shaping for itself. Without them we could not understand Petrarca, who carried the manufacture of artificial bloom and fictitious dewdrop to a CHAUCER. 215 point of excellence where artifice, if ever, may claim the praise of art. Without them we could not understand Dante, in whom their sentiment for woman was idealised by a passionate intellect and a profound nature, till Beatrice becomes a half human, half divine abstraction, a woman still to memory and devotion, a disembodied symbol to the ecstasy of thought. The Provengal love-poetry was as abstracted from all sensuality as that of Petrarca, but ifc stops short of that larger and more gracious style of treat ment which has secured him a place in all gentle hearts and refined imaginations for ever. In it also woman leads her servants upward, but it is along the easy slopes of conven tional sentiment, and no Troubadour so much as dreamed of that loftier region, native to Dante, where the woman is subtilised into das Ewig- Weibliche, type of man's finer con science and nobler aspiration made sensible to him only through her. On the whole, it would be hard to find anything more tediously artificial than the Provengal literature, except the reproduction of it by the Minnesingers. The Tedeschi lurchi certainly did contrive to make something heavy as dough out of what was at least light, if not very satisfying, in the canarous dialect of Southern Gaul. But its doom was inevitably predicted in its nature and position, nay, in its very name. It was, and it continues to be, a strictly provincial literature, imprisoned within extremely narrow intellectual and even geographical limits. It is not race or language that can inflict this leprous isolation, but some defect of sympathy with the simpler and more universal relations of human nature. You cannot shut up Burns in a dialect bristling with archaisms, nor prevent Be>anger from setting all pulses a-dance in the least rhythmic and imaginative of modern tongues. The healthy temperature of Chaucer, with its breadth of interest in all ranks and phases of social life, could have found little that was sympathetic in the evaporated sentiment and rhetorical punctilios of a school of poets which, with rare exceptions, began and ended in courtly dilettantism. 216 CHAUCER. The refined formality with which the literary product of Provence is for the most part stamped, as with a trademark, was doubtless the legacy of Gallo-Roman culture, itself at best derivative and superficial. I think, indeed, that it may well be doubted whether Roman literature, always a half- hardy exotic, could ripen the seeds of living reproduction. The Roman genius was eminently practical, and far more apt for the triumphs of politics and jurisprudence than of art. Supreme elegance it could and did arrive at in Virgil, but, if I may trust my own judgment, it produced but one original poet, and that was Horace, who has ever since continued the favourite of men of the world, an apostle to the Gentiles of the mild cynicism of middle-age and an after- dinner philosophy. Though in no sense national, he was, more truly than any has ever been since, till the same combination of circumstances produced B6ranger, an urbane or city poet. Rome, with her motley life, her formal religion, her easy morals, her spectacles, her luxury, her suburban country-life, was his muse. The situation was new, and found a singer who had wit enough to turn it to account. There are a half-dozen pieces of Catullus unsur passed (unless their Greek originals should turn up) for lyric grace and fanciful tenderness. The sparrow of Lesbia still pecks the rosy lips of his mistress, immortal as the eagle of Pindar. One profound imagination, one man, who with a more prosperous subject might have been a great poet, lifted Roman literature above its ordinary level of tasteful common-sense. The invocation of Venus, as the genetic force of nature, by Lucretius, seems to me the one sunburst of purely poetic inspiration which the Latin language can show. But this very force, without which neque Jit Icetum neque amabile quicquam, was wholly wanting in those poets of the post-classic period, through whom the literary influences of the past were transmitted to the romanised provincials. The works of Ausonius interest us as those of our own Dwights and Barlows do. The " Conquest of Canaan" and the "Columbiad" were Connecticut epics no doubt, but still were better than nothing in their day. CHAUCER. 217 If not literature, they were at least memories of literature, and such memories are not without effect in reproducing what they regret. The provincial writers of Latin devoted themselves with a dreary assiduity to the imitation of models which they deemed classical, but which were truly so only in the sense that they were the more decorously respectful of the dead form in proportion as the living spirit had more utterly gone out of it. It is, I suspect, to the traditions of this purely rhetorical influence, indirectly exercised, that we are to attribute the rapid passage of the new Provengal poetry from what must have been its original popular character to that highly artificial condition which precedes total extinction. It was the alienation of the written from the spoken language (always, perhaps, more or less malignly operative in giving Roman literature a cool-blooded turn as compared with Greek), which, ending at length in total divorce, rendered Latin incapable of supplying the wants of new men and new ideas. The same thing, I am strongly inclined to think, was true of the language of the Troubadours. It had become literary, and so far dead. It is true that no language is ever so far gone in consumption as to be beyond the great-poet-cure. Undoubtedly a man of genius can out of his own superabundant vitality compel life into the most decrepit vocabulary. But it is by the infusion of his own blood, as it were, and not without a certain sacrifice of power. No such rescue came for the langue d'oc, which, it should seem, had performed its special function in the development of modern literature, and would have perished even without the Albigensian war. The position of the Gallo-Romans of the South, both ethical and geo graphical, precluded them from producing anything really great or even original in literature, for that must have its root in a national life, and this they never had. After the Burgundian invasion their situation was in many respects analogous to our own after the Revolutionary War. They had been thoroughly romanised in language and culture, but the line of their historic continuity had been broken. The 218 CHAUCER. Roman road, which linked them with the only past they knew, had been buried under the great barbarian land-slide. In like manner we, inheriting the language, the social usages, the literary and political traditions of Englishmen, were suddenly cut adrift from our historical anchorage. Very soon there arose a demand for a native literature, nay, it was even proposed that, as a first step toward it, we should adopt a lingo of our own to be called the Columbian or Hesperian. This, to be sure, was never accomplished, though our English cousins seem to hint sometimes that we have made very fair advances toward it ; but if it could have been, our position would have been precisely that of the Provencals when they began to have a literature of their own. They had formed a language which, while it completed their orphanage from their imperial mother, continually recalled her, and kept alive their pride of line age. Such reminiscences as they still retained of Latin culture were pedantic and rhetorical,* and it was only natural that out of those they should have elaborated a code of poetical jurisprudence with titles and subtitles applicable to every form of verse and tyrannous over every mode of sentiment. The result could not fail to be artificial and wearisome, except where some man with a truly lyrical genius could breathe life into the rigid formula and make it pliant to his more passionate feeling. The great service of the Provengals was that they kept in mind the fact that poetry was not merely an amusement, but an art, and long after their literary activity had ceased their influence had reacted beneficially upon Europe through their Italian pupils. They are interesting as showing the tendency of the Romanic races to a scientific treatment of what, if it be not spontaneous, becomes a fashion and ere long an impertinence. Fauriel has endeav oured to prove that they were the first to treat the mediaeval heroic legends epically, but the evidence is strongly against him. The testimony of Dante on this * Fauriel's Histoire de la Gaule Meridionale, vol. i. passim. CHAUCER. 219 point is explicit,* and moreover, not a single romance of chivalry has come down to us in a dialect of the pure Provengal. The Trouveres, on the other hand, are apt to have some thing nai've and vigorous about them, something that smacks of race and soil. Their very coarseness is almost better than the Troubadour delicacy, because it was not an affectation. The difference between the two schools is that between a culture pedantically transmitted and one which grows and gathers strength from natural causes. Indeed, it is to the North of France and to the Trouveres that we are to look for the true origins of our modern literature. I do not mean in their epical poetry, though there is something refreshing in the mere fact of their choosing native heroes and legends as the subjects of their song. It was in their Fabliaux and Lais that, dealing with the realities of the life about them, they became original and delightful in spite of themselves. Their Chansons de Geste are fine specimens of fighting Christianity, highly inspiring for men like Peire de Bergerac, who sings — " Bel m'es can aug lo resso Que fai 1'ausbercs ab 1'arso, Li bruit e il crit e il masan Que il corn e las trombas fan ; " f but who, after reading them — even the best of them, the Song of Roland — can remember much more than a cloud of * Allegat ergo pro se lingua Oil quod propter sui faciliorem et delcctabiliorem vulgaritatem, quicquid redactum sive inventum est ad vulgare prosaicum, suum est ; videlicet biblia cum Trojanorum, Roraanorumque gestibus compilata et Arturi regis ambages pul- cherrimre et quamplures alise historic ac doctriiife. That Dante by prosaicum did not mean prose, but a more inartificial verse, numeros lege solutos, is clear. Cf. Wolf, Ueber die Lais, pp. 92 seq. and notes. It has not, I think, been remarked that Dante borrows his faciliorem et delectabiliorem from the plus dilctable et comune of his master Brunette Latini. t " My ears no sweeter music know Than hauberk's clank with saddlebow, The noise, the cries, the tumult blown From trumpet and from clarion. 220 CHA UCER. battle-dust, through which the paladins loom dimly gigantic, and a strong verse flashes here and there like an angry sword? What are the Roman d'avantures, the cycle of Arthur and his knights, but a procession of armour and plumes — mere spectacle, not vision like their Grecian antitype, the Odyssey, whose pictures of life, whether domestic or heroic, are among the abiding consolations of the mind 1 An element of disproportion, of grotesqueness,* earmark of the barbarian, disturbs us, even when it does not disgust, in them all. Except the fioland, they all want adequate motive, and even in that we may well suspect a reminiscence of the Iliad. They are not without a kind of dignity, for manliness is always noble, and there are detached scenes that are striking, perhaps all the more so from their rarity, like the combat of Oliver and Fierabras, and the leave-taking of Parise la Duchesse. But in point of art they are far below even Firdusi, whose great poem is of precisely the same romantic type. The episode of Sohrab and Rustem as much surpasses the former of the passages just alluded to in largeness and energy of treat ment, in the true epical quality, as the lament of Tehmine over her son does the latter of them in refined and natural pathos. In our revolt against pseudo-classicism we must not let our admiration for the vigour and freshness which are the merit of this old poetry tempt us to forget that our direct literary inheritance comes to us from an ancestry who would never have got beyond the Age of Iron but for the models of graceful form and delicate workmanship which they found in the tombs of an earlier race. I recall but one passage (from Jourdain de Blaivies) which in its simple movement of the heart can in any way be compared with Chaucer. I translate it freely, merely changing the original assonance into rhyme. Eremborc, to save the son of her leige-lord, has passed off her own child for his, only stipulating that he shall pass the night before his death with her in the prison where she is confined by * Compare Floripar in Fierabras with Nausikaa, for example. CHAUCER. 221 the usurper Fromond. The time is just as the dreaded dawn begins to break. " ' Gamier, fair son,' the noble lady said, ' To save thy father's life must thou be dead ; And mine, alas, must be with sorrow spent, Since thou must die, albeit so innocent 1 Evening thou shalt not see that see'st the morn ! Woe worth the hour that I beheld thee born, Whom nine long months within my side I bore ! Was never babe desired so much before, Now summer will the pleasant days recall When I shall take my stand upon the wall And see the fair young gentlemen thy peers That come and go, and, as beseems their years, Run at the quintain, strive to pierce the shield, And in the tourney keep their sell or yield ; Then must my heart be tearswoln for thy sake, That 'twill be marvel if it do not break.' At morning, when the day began to peer, Matins rang out from minsters far and near, And the clerks sang full well with voices high. ' God, ' said the dame, ' thou glorious in the sky, These lingering nights were wont to tire me so ! And this, alas, how swift it hastes to go ! These clerks and cloistered folk, alas, in spite So early sing to cheat me of my night ! ' " The great advantages which the langue d'oil had over its sister dialect of the South of France were its wider dis tribution, and its representing the national and unitary tendencies of the people as opposed to those of provincial isolation. But the Trouveres had also this superiority, that they gave a voice to real and not merely conventional emotions. In comparison with the Troubadours their sympathies were more human, and their expression more popular. While the tiresome ingenuity of the latter busied itself chiefly in the filigree of wire-drawn sentiment and supersubtilised conceit, the former took their subjects from the street and the market as well as from the chateau. In the one case language had become a mere material for clever elaboration ; in the other, as always in live literature, it was a soil from which the roots of thought and feeling unconsciously drew the colouring of vivid expression. The 222 CHAUCER. writers of French, by the greater pliancy of their dialect and the simpler forms of their verse, had acquired an ease which was impossible in the more stately and sharply-angled vocabulary of the South. Their octosyllabics have not seldom a careless facility not unworthy of Swift in his best mood. They had attained the highest skill and grace in narrative, as the lays of Marie de France and the Lai de rOiselet bear witness.* Above all, they had learned how to brighten the hitherto monotonous web of story with the gayer hues of fancy. It is no improbable surmise that the sudden and sur prising development of the more strictly epical poetry in the North of France, and especially its growing partiality for historical in preference to mythical subjects, were due to the Normans. The poetry of the Danes was much of it authentic history, or what was believed to be so ; the heroes of their Sagas were real men, with wives and children, with relations public and domestic, on the common levels of life, and not mere creatures of imagination, who dwell apart like stars from the vulgar cares and interests of men. If we compare Havelok with the least idealised figures of Carlovingian or Arthurian romance, we shall have a keen sense of this difference. Manhood has taken the place of caste, and homeliness of exaggeration. Havelok says, — " Godwot, I will with thee gang For to learn some good to get ; Swinken would I for my meat ; It is no shame for to swinken." This Dane, we see, is of our own make and stature, a being much nearer our kindly sympathies than his compatriot Ogier, of whom we are told, " Dix pies de lone avoit le chevalier." But however large or small share we may allow to the Danes in changing the character of French poetry and supplanting the Romance with the Fabliau, there can be little doubt either of the kind or amount of influence which * If internal evidence may be trusted, the Lai de VEspine is not hers. CHAUCER. 223 the Normans must have brought with them into England. I am not going to attempt a definition of the Anglo-Saxon element in English literature, for generalisations are apt to be as dangerous as they are tempting. But as a painter may draw a cloud so that we recognise its general truth, though the boundaries of real clouds never remain the same for two minutes together, so amid the changes of feature and complexion brought about by commingling of race, there still remains a certain cast of physiognomy which points back to some one ancestor of marked and peculiar character. It is toward this type that there is always a tendency to revert, to borrow Mr. Darwin's phrase, and I think the general belief is not without some adequate grounds which in France traces this predominant type to the Kelt, and in England to the Saxon. In old and stationary communities, where tradition has a chanee to take root, and where several generations are present to the mind of each inhabitant, either by personal recollection or transmitted anecdote, everybody's peculiarities, whether of strength or weakness, are explained and, as it were, justified upon some theory of hereditary bias. Such and such qualities he got from a grandfather on the spear or a great-uncle on the spindle side. This gift came in a right line from So-and-so ; that failing came in by the dilution of the family blood with that of Such-a-one. In this way a certain allowance is made for every aberration from some assumed normal type, either in the way of reinforcement or defect, and that universal desire of the human mind to have everything accounted for — which makes the moon responsible for the whimsies of the weathercock — is cheaply gratified. But as mankind in the aggregate is always wiser than any single man, because its experience is derived from a larger range of observation and experience, and because the springs that feed it drain a wider region both of time and space, there is commonly some greater or smaller share of truth in all popular prejudices. The meteorologists are beginning to agree with the old women that the moon is an accessory before the fact in our 224 CHAUCER. atmospheric fluctuations. Now, although to admit this notion of inherited good or ill to its fullest extent would be to abolish personal character, and with it all responsibility, to abdicate free-will, and to make every effort at self-direction futile, there is no inconsiderable alloy of truth in it, nevertheless. No man can look into the title-deeds of what may be called his personal estate, his faculties, his predilections, his failings — whatever, in short, sets him apart as a capital I — • without something like a shock of dread to find how much of him is held in mortmain by those who, though long ago mouldered away to dust, are yet fatally alive and active in him for good or ill. What is true of individual men is true also of races, and the prevailing belief in a nation as to the origin of certain of its characteristics has something of the same basis in facts of observation as the village estimate of the traits of particular families. Interdum vulgus rectum videt. We are apt, it is true, to talk rather loosely about our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and to attribute to them in a vague way all the pith of our institutions and the motive power of our progress. For my own part, I think there is such a thing as being too Anglo-Saxon, and the warp and woof of the English national character, though undoubtedly two elements mainly predominate in it, is quite too complex for us to pick out a strand here and there, and affirm that the body of the fabric is of this or that. Our present concern with the Saxons is chiefly a literary one ; but it leads to a study of general characteristics. What, then, so far as we can make it out, seems to be their leading mental feature ? Plainly, understanding, common-sense — a faculty which never carries its possessor very high in creative literature, though it may make him great as an acting and even think ing man. Take Dr. Johnson as an instance. The Saxon, as it appears to me, has never shown any capacity for art, nay, commonly commits ugly blunders when he is tempted in that direction. He has made the best working institu tions and the ugliest monuments among the children of men. He is wanting in taste, which is as much as to say that he CHAUCER. 225 has no true sense of proportion. His genius is his solidity — an admirable foundation of national character. He is healthy, in no danger of liver-complaint, with digestive apparatus of amazing force and precision. He is the best farmer and best grazier among men, raises the biggest crops and the fattest cattle, and consumes proportionate quanti ties of both. He settles and sticks like a diluvial deposit on the warm, low-lying levels, physical and moral. He has a prodigious talent, to use our Yankee phrase, of staying put. You cannot move him ; he and rich earth have a natural sympathy of cohesion. Not quarrelsome, but with indefatigable durability of fight in him, sound of stomach, and not too refined in nervous texture, he is capable of indefinitely prolonged punishment, with a singularly obtuse sense of propriety in acknowledging himself beaten. Among all races perhaps none has shown so acute a sense of the side on which its bread is buttered, and so great a repug nance for having fine phrases take the place of the buty- raceous principle. They invented the words " humbug," "cant," "sham," "gag," " soft-sodder," "flapdoddle," and other disenchanting formulas, whereby the devil of falsehood and unreality gets his effectual apage Satana ! An imperturbable perception of the real relations of things is the Saxon's leading quality — no sense whatever, or at best small, of the ideal in him. He has no notion that two and two ever make five, which is the problem the poet often has to solve. Understanding, that is, equilibrium of mind, intellectual good digestion, this, with unclogged biliary ducts, makes him mentally and physically what we call a very fixed fact ; but you shall not find a poet in a hundred thousand square miles — in many prosperous cen turies of such. But one element of incalculable importance we have not mentioned. In this homely nature, the idea of God, and of a simple and direct relation between the All-Father and his children, is deeply-rooted. There, above all, will he have honesty and simplicity ; less than anything else will he have the sacramental wafer — that beautiful emblem of our dependence on Him who giveth the daily M3 226 CHAUCER. bread ; less than anything will he have this smeared with that Barmecide butter of fair words. This is the lovely and noble side of his character. Indignation at this will make him forget crops and cattle : and this, after so many centuries, will give him at last a poet in the monk of Eisle- ben, who shall cut deep on the memory of mankind that brief creed of conscience — " Here am I : God help me : I cannot otherwise." This, it seems to me, with dogged sense of justice— both results of that equilibrium of thought which springs from clear-sighted understanding — makes the beauty of the Saxon nature. He believes in another world, and conceives of it without metaphysical subtleties as something very much after the pattern of this, but infinitely more desirable. Witness the vision of John Bunyan. Once beat it into him that his eternal well-being, as he calls it, depends on certain con ditions, that only so will the balance in the ledger of eternity be in his favour, and the man who seemed wholly of this world will give all that he has, even his life, with a superb simplicity and scorn of the theatric, for a chance in the next. Hard to move, his very solidity of nature makes him terrible when once fairly set agoing. He is the man of all others slow to admit the thought of revolution ; but let him once admit it, he will carry it through and make it stick — a secret hitherto undiscoverable by other races. But poetry is not made out of the understanding ; that is not the sort of block out of which you can carve wing-footed Mercuries. The question of common- sense is always, " What is it good for ? " — a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage. The danger of the prosaic type of mind lies in the stolid sense of superiority which blinds it to everything ideal, to the use of anything that does not serve the practical purposes of life. Do we not remember how the all-observing and all-fathom ing Shakespeare has typified this in Bottom, the weaver 1 Surrounded by all the fairy creations of fancy, he sends one to fetch him the bag of a humble-bee, and can find no better employment for Mustard-seed than to help Cavalero Cobweb CHAUCER. 227 scratch his ass's head between the ears. When Titania, queen of that fair ideal world, offers him a feast of beauty, he says he has a good stomach to a pottle of hay ! The Anglo-Saxons never had any real literature of their own. They produced monkish chronicles in bad Latin, and legends of saints in worse metre. Their earlier poetry is essentially Scandinavian. It was that gens inclytissima Northmannorum that imported the divine power of imagina tion — that power which, mingled with the solid Saxon understanding, produced at last the miracle of Stratford. It was to this adventurous race, which found America before Columbus, which, for the sake of freedom of thought, could colonise inhospitable Iceland, which, as it were, typifying the very action of the imaginative faculty itself, identified itself always with what it conquered, that we owe whatever aquiline features there are in the national physiognomy of the English race. It was through the Normans that the English mind and fancy, hitherto pro vincial and uncouth, were first infused with the lightness, grace, and self-confidence of Romance literature. They seem to have opened a window to the southward in that solid and somewhat sombre insular character, and it was a painted window all aglow with the figures of tradition and poetry. The old Gothic volume, grim with legends of devilish temptation and satanic lore, they illuminated with the gay and brilliant inventions of a softer climate and more genial moods. Even the stories of Arthur and his knights, toward which the stern Dante himself relented so far as to call them gratissimas ambages — most delightful circumlocutions — though of British origin, were first set free from the dungeon of a barbarous dialect by the French poets, and so brought back to England, and made popular there by the Normans. Chaucer, to whom French must have been almost as truly a mother tongue as English, was familiar with all that had been done by Troubadour or Trouvere. In him we see the first result of the Norman yeast upon the home-baked Saxon loaf. The flour had been honest, the paste well 228 CHA UCER. kneaded, but the inspiring leaven was wanting till the Norman brought it over. Chaucer works still in the solid material of his race, but with what airy lightness has he not infused it ? Without ceasing to be English, he has escaped from being insular. But he was something more than this ; he was a scholar, a thinker, and a critic. He had studied the Divina Commedia of Dante, he had read Petrarca and Boccaccio, and some of the Latin poets. He calls Dante the great poet of Italy, and Petrarch a learned clerk. It is plain that he knew very well the truer purpose of poetry, and had even arrived at the higher wisdom of comprehend ing the aptitudes and limitations of his own genius. He saw clearly and felt keenly what were the faults and what the wants of the prevailing literature of his country. In the " Monk's Tale " he slily satirises the long-winded morality of Gower, as his prose antitype Fielding was to satirise the prolix sentimentality of E/ichardson. In the rhyme of Sir Thopas he gives the coup de grace to the romances of Chivalry, and in his own choice of a subject he heralds that new world in which the actual and the popular were to supplant the fantastic and the heroic. Before Chaucer, modern Europe had given birth to one great poet, Dante; and contemporary with him was one supremely elegant one, Petrarch. Dante died only seven years before Chaucer was born, and, so far as culture is derived from books, the moral and intellectual influences they had been subjected to, the speculative stimulus that may have given an impulse to their minds— there could have been no essential difference between them. Yet there are certain points of resemblance and of contrast, and those not entirely fanciful, which seem to me of considerable interest. Both were of mixed race, Dante certainly, Chaucer presumably so. Dante seems to have inherited on the Teutonic side the strong moral sense, the almost nervous irritability of conscience, and the tendency to mysticism which made him the first of Christian poets — first in point of time and first in point of greatness. From the other side he seems to have received almost in overplus a feeling CHA UCER. 229 of order and proportion, sometimes well-nigh hardening into mathematical precision and formalism — a tendency which at last brought the poetry of the Romanic races to a dead lock of artifice and decorum. Chaucer, on the other hand, drew from the South a certain airiness of sentiment and expression, a felicity of phrase, and an elegance of turn hitherto unprecedented and hardly yet matched in our literature, but all the while kept firm hold of his native soundness of understanding, and that genial humour which seems to be the proper element of worldly wisdom. With Dante, life represented the passage of the soul from a state of nature to a state of grace ; and there would have been almost an even chance whether (as Burns says) the Divina Commedia had turned out a song or a sermon, but for the wonderful genius of its author, which has compelled the sermon to sing and the song to preach, whether they would or no. With Chaucer, life is a pilgrimage, but only that his eye may be delighted with the varieties of costume and character. There are good morals to be found in Chaucer, but they are always incidental. With Dante the main question is the saving of the soul, with Chaucer it is the conduct of life. The distance between them is almost that between holiness and prudence. Dante applies himself to the realities and Chaucer to the scenery of life, and the former is consequently the more universal poet, as the latter is the more truly national one. Dante represents the justice of God, and Chaucer his loving-kindness. If there is anything that may properly be called satire in the one, it is like a blast of the Divine wrath, before which the wretches cower and tremble, which rends away their cloaks of hypocrisy and their masks of worldly propriety, and leaves them shivering in the cruel nakedness of their shame. The satire of the other is genial with the broad sunshine of humour, into which the victims walk forth with a delightful unconcern, laying aside of themselves the disguises that seem to make them uncomfortably warm, till they have made a thorough betrayal of themselves so unconsciously that we almost pity while we laugh. Dante shows us the 230 CHAUCER. punishment of sins against God and one's neighbour, in order that we may shun them, and so escape the doom that awaits them in the other world. Chaucer exposes the cheats of the transmuter of metals, of the begging friars, and of the pedlars of indulgences, in order that we may be on our guard against them in this world. If we are to judge of what is national only by the highest and most characteristic types, surely we cannot fail to see in Chaucer the true forerunner and prototype of Shakespeare, who, with an imagination of far deeper grasp, a far wider reach of thought, yet took the same delight in the pageantry of the actual world, and whose moral is the moral of worldly wisdom only heightened to the level of his wide-viewing mind, and made typical by the dramatic energy of his plastic nature. Yet if Chaucer had little of that organic force of life which so inspires the poem of Dante that, as he himself says of the heavens, part answers to part with mutual interchange of light, he had a structural faculty which distinguishes him from all other English poets, his con temporaries, and which indeed is the primary distinction of poets properly so called. There is, to be sure, only one other English writer coeval with himself who deserves in any way to be compared with him, and that rather for contrast than for likeness. With the single exception of Langland, the English poets, his contemporaries, were little else than bad versifiers of legends classic or mediaeval, as happened, without selection and without art. Chaucer is the first who broke away from the dreary traditional style, and gave not merely stories, but lively pictures of real life as the ever-renewed substance of poetry. He was a reformer, too, not only in literature, but in morals. But as in the former his exquisite tact saved him from all eccentricity, so in the latter the pervading sweetness of his nature could never be betrayed into harshness and invective. He seems incapable of indignation. He mused good-naturedly over the vices and follies of men, and, never forgetting that he was fashioned of the same clay, is rather apt to pity than condemn. There CHAUCER. 231 is no touch of cynicism in all he wrote. Dante's brush seems sometimes to have been smeared with the burning pitch of his own fiery lake. Chaucer's pencil is dipped in the cheerful colour-box of the old illuminators, and he has their patient delicacy of touch, with a freedom far beyond their somewhat mechanic brilliancy. English narrative poetry, as Chaucer found it, though it had not altogether escaped from the primal curse of long- windedness so painfully characteristic of its prototype, the French Romance of Chivalry, had certainly shown a feeling for the picturesque, a sense of colour, a directness of phrase, and a simplicity of treatment, which give it graces of its own and a turn peculiar to itself. In the easy knack of story-telling, the popular minstrels cannot compare with Marie de France. The lightsomeness of fancy, that leaves a touch of sunshine and is gone, is painfully missed in them all. Their incidents enter dispersedly, as the old stage directions used to say, and they have not learned the art of concentrating their force on the key-point of their hearers' interest. They neither get fairlv hold of their subject, nor, what is more important, does it get hold of them. But they sometimes yield to an instinctive hint of leaving-off at the right moment, and in their happy negligence achieve an effect only to be matched by the highest successes of art. " That lady heard his mourning all Right under her chamber wall, In her oriel where she was, Closed well with royal glass ; Fulfilled it was with imagery Every window, by and by ; On each side had there a gin Sperred with many a divers pin ; Anon that lady fair and free Undid a pin of ivory And wide the window she open^set, The sun shone in at her closet." It is true the old rhymer relapses a little into the habitual drone of his class, and shows half a mind to bolt into their common inventory style when he comes to his gins and 232 CHAUCER. jrins, but he withstands the temptation manfully, and his sunshine fills our hearts with a gush as sudden as that which illumines the lady's oriel. Coleridge and Keats have each in his way felt the charm of this winsome picture, but have hardly equalled its hearty honesty, its economy of material, the supreme test of artistic skill. I admit that the phrase " had there a gin " is suspicious, and suggests a French original, but I remember nothing alto gether so good in the romances from the other side of the Channel. One more passage occurs to me, almost incom parable in its simple straightforward force and choice of the right word. " Sir Graysteel to his death thus tliraws, He welters [wallows] and the grass updraws ; A little while then lay he still, (Friends that saw him liked full ill) And bled into his armour bright." The last line, for suggestive reticence, almost deserves to be put beside the famous " Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante " of the great master of laconic narration. In the same poem* the growing love of the lady, in its maidenliness of unconscious betrayal, is touched with a delicacy and tact as surprising as they are delightful. But such passages, which are the despair of poets who have to work in a language that has faded into diction, are exceptional. They are to be set down rather to good luck than to art. Even the stereotyped similes of these fortunate alliterates, like "weary as water in a weir," or "glad as grass is of the rain," are new, like nature, at the thousandth repetition. Perhaps our palled taste overvalues the wild flavour of these wayside treasure-troves. They are wood-strawberries, prized in proportion as we must turn over more leaves ere we find one. This popular literature is of value in helping * Sir Eger a?id Sir Grine in the Percy Folio. The passage quoted is from Ellis. CHAUCER. 233 us toward a juster estimate of Chaucer by showing what the mere language was capable of, and that all it wanted was a poet to put it through its paces. For though the poems I have quoted be, in their present form, later than he, they are, after all, but modernised versions of older copies, which they doubtless reproduce with substantial fidelity. It is commonly assumed that Chaucer did for English what Dante is supposed to have done for Italian and Luther for German, that he, in short, in some hitherto inexplicable way, created it. But this is to speak loosely and without book. Languages are never made in any such fashion, still less are they the achievement of any single man, however great his genius, however powerful his indi viduality. They shape themselves by laws as definite as those which guide ^nd limit the growth of other living organisms. Dante, indeed, has told us that he chose to write in the tongue that might be learned of nurses and chafferers in the market. His practice shows that he knew perfectly well that poetry has needs which cannot be answered by the vehicle of vulgar commerce between man and man. What he instinctively felt was, that there was the living heart of all speech, without whose help the brain were powerless to send will, motion, meaning, to the limbs and extremities. But it is true that a language, as respects the uses of literature, is liable to a kind of syncope. No matter how complete its vocabulary may be, how thorough an outfit of inflections and case-endings it may have, it is a mere dead body without a soul till some man of genius set its arrested pulses once more athrob, and show what wealth of sweetness, scorn, persuasion, and passion lay there awaiting its liberator. In this sense it is hardly too much to say that Chaucer, like Dante, found his native tongue a dialect and left it a language. But it was not what he did with deliberate purpose of reform, it was his kindly and plastic genius that wrought this magic of renewal and inspiration. It was not the new words he introduced,* but his way of using the old ones, that surprised them into * I think he tried one now and then, like "eyen columbine." 234 CHAUCER. grace, ease, and dignity in their own despite. In order to feel fully how much he achieved, let any one subject him self to a penitential course of reading in his contemporary, Gower, who worked in a material to all intents and pur poses the same, or listen for a moment to the barbarous jangle which Lydgate and Occleve contrive to draw from the instrument their master had tuned so deftly. Gower has positively raised tediousness to the precision of science, he has made dulness an heirloom for the students of our literary history. As you slip to and fro on the frozen levels of his verse, which give no foothold to the mind, as your nervous ear awaits the inevitable recurrence of his rhyme, regularly pertinacious as the tick of an eight-day clock, and reminding you of Wordsworth's " Once more the ass did lengthen out The hard, dry, seesaw of his horrible bray," you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this indefatigable man. He is the undertaker of the fair mediaeval legend, and his style has the hateful gloss, the seemingly unnatural length, of a coffin. Love, beauty, pas sion, nature, art, life, the natural and theological virtues, — there is nothing beyond his power to disenchant, nothing out of which the tremendous hydraulic press of his allegory (or whatever it is, for I am not sure if it be not something even worse) will not squeeze all feeling and freshness and leave it a juiceless pulp. It matters not where you try him, whether his story be Christian or pagan, borrowed from history or fable, you cannot escape him. Dip in at the middle or the end, dodge back to the beginning, the patient old man is there to take you by the button and go on with his imperturbable narrative. You may have left off with Clytemnestra, and you may begin again with Samson; it makes no odds, for you cannot tell one from t'other. His tediousness is omnipresent, and like Dogberry he could find in his heart to bestow it all (and more if he had it) on your worship. The word lengthy has been charged to our American account, but it must have been CHAUCER. 235 invented by the first reader of Gower's works, the only inspiration of which they were ever capable. Our literature had to lie by and recruit for more than four centuries ere it could give us an equal vacuity in Tupper, so persistent a uniformity of commonplace in the t( Recrea tions of a Country Parson." Let us be thankful that the industrious Gower never found time for recreation ! But a fairer as well as more instructive comparison lies between Chaucer and the author of " Piers Ploughman." Langland has as much tenderness, as much interest in the varied picture of life, as hearty a contempt for hypocrisy, and almost an equal sense of fun. He has the same easy abundance of matter. But what a difference ! It is the difference between the poet and the man of poetic tempera ment. The abundance of the one is a continual fulness within the fixed limits of good taste ; that of the other is squandered in overflow. The one can be profuse on occasion ; the other is diffuse whether he will or no. The one is full of talk ; the other is garrulous. What in one is the refined bonhomie of a man of the world, is a rustic shrewdness in the other. Both are kindly in their satire, and have not (like too many reformers) that vindictive love of virtue which spreads the stool of repentance with thistle- burrs before they invite the erring to seat themselves therein. But what in "Piers Ploughman" is sly fun, has the breadth and depth of humour in Chaucer ; and it is plain that while the former was taken up by his moral purpose, the main interest of the latter turned to perfecting the form of his work. In short, Chaucer had that fine literary sense which is as rare as genius, and, united with it, as it was in him, assures an immortality of fame. It is not merely what he has to say, but even more the agreeable way he has of saying it, that captivates our attention and gives him an assured place in literature. Above all, it is not in detached passages that his charm lies, but in the entirety of expres sion and the cumulative effect of many particulars working toward a common end. Now though ex ungue leonem be a good rule in comparative anatomy, its application, except 236 CHAUCER. in a very limited way, in criticism is sure to mislead ; for we should always Lear in mind that the really great writer is great in the mass, and is to be tested less by his cleverness in the elaboration of parts than by that reach of mind which is incapable of random effort, which selects, arranges, combines, rejects, denies itself the cheap triumph of immediate effects, because it is absorbed by the controlling charm of proportion and unity. A careless good-luck of phrase is delightful ; but criticism cleaves to the teleological argument, and distinguishes the creative intellect, not so much by any happiness of natural endowment as by the marks of design. It is true that one may sometimes discover by a single verse whether an author have imagination, or may make a shrewd guess whether he have style or no, just as by a few spoken words you may judge of a man's accent ; but the true artist in language is never spotty, and needs no guide-boards of admiring italics, a critical method introduced by Leigh Hunt, whose feminine temperament gave him acute perceptions at the expense of judgment. This is the Boeotian method, which offers us a brick as a sample of the house, forgetting that it is not the goodness of the separate bricks, but the way in which they are put together, that brings them within the province of art, and makes the difference between a heap and a house. A great writer does not reveal himself here and there, but everywhere. Langland's verse runs mostly like a brook, with a beguiling and well-nigh slumberous prattle, but he, more often than any writer of his class, flashes into salient lines, gets inside our guard with the home-thrust of a forthright word, and he gains if taken piece-meal. His imagery is naturally and vividly picturesque, as where he says of Old Age, — " Eld the hoar That was in the vauntward, And bare the banner before death, — and he softens to a sweetness of sympathy beyond Chaucer when he speaks of the poor or tells us that Mercy is "sib of all sinful ; " but to compare " Piers Ploughman " with the " Canterbury Tales " is to compare sermon with song. CHAUCER. 237 Let us put a bit of Langland's satire beside one of Chaucer's. Some people in search of Truth meet a pilgrim and ask him whence he comes. He gave a long list of holy places, appealing for proof to the relics on his hat : — " ' I have walked full wide in wet and in dry And sought saints for my soul's health.' ' Know'st thou ever a relic that is called Truth ? Couldst thou show us the way where that wight dwelleth ? * Nay, so God help me," said the man then, 1 1 saw never palmer with staff nor with scrip Ask after him ever till now in this place.' " This is a good hit, and the poet is satisfied ; but, in what I am going to quote from Chaucer, everything becomes picture, over which lies broad and warm the sunshine of humorous fancy. " In olde dayes of the King Artour Of which that Britouns speken gret honour, All was this lond fulfilled of fayerie : The elf-queen with her joly compaignie Danced ful oft in many a grene mede : This was the old opinion as I rede ; I speke of many hundrid yer ago : But now can no man see none elves mo, For now the grete charite and prayeres Of lymytours and other holy freres That sechen every lond and every streem, As thick as motis in the sormebeam, Blessyng halles, chambres, kitchenes, and bourcs, Citees, and burghes, castels hihe and toures, Thorpes and bernes, shepnes and dayeries, This makith that ther ben no fayeries. For ther as wont to walken was an elf There walkith none but the lymytour himself, In undermeles and in morwenynges, And sayth his matyns and his holy thingcs, As he goth in his lymytatioun. Wommen may now go saufly up and doun ; In every bush or under every tre There is none other incubus but he, And he ne wol doon hem no dishon6ur." How cunningly the contrast is suggested here between the Elf -queen's jolly company and the unsocial limiters, thick as 238 CHAUCER. motes in the sunbeam, yet each walking by himself ! And with what an air of innocent unconsciousness is the deadly thrust of the last verse given, with its contemptuous emphasis on the Tie that seems so well-meaning! Even Shakespeare, who seems to come in after everybody has done his best with a " Let me take hold a minute and show you how to do it," could not have bettered this. " Piers Ploughman " is the best example I know of what is called popular poetry — of compositions, that is, which contain all the simpler elements of poetry, but still in solution, not crystallised around any thread of artistic purpose. In it appears at her best the Anglo- Saxon Muse, a first cousin of Poor Richard, full of pro verbial wisdom, who always brings her knitting in her pocket, and seems most at home in the chimney-corner. It is genial ; it plants itself firmly on human nature with its rights and wrongs ; it has a surly honesty, prefers the downright to the gracious, and conceives of speech as a tool rather than a musical instrument. If we should seek for a single word that would define it most precisely, we should not choose simplicity, but homeliness. There is more or less of this in all early poetry, to be sure ; but I think it especially proper to English poets, and to the most English among them, like Cowper, Orabbe, and one is tempted to add Wordsworth — where he forget's Coleridge's private lectures. In reading such poets as Langland, also, we are not to forget a certain charm of distance in the very language they use, making it unhackneyed without being alien. As it is the chief func tion of the poet to make the familiar novel, these fortunate early risers of literature, who gather phrases with the dew still on them, have their poetry done for them, as it were, by their vocabulary. But in Chaucer, as in all great poets, the language gets its charm from him. The force and sweetness of his genius kneaded more kindly together the Latin and Teutonic elements of our mother tongue, and made something better than either. The necessity of writing poetry, and not mere verse, made him a reformer whether he would or no ; and the instinct of his finer ear CHAUCER. 239 was a guide such as none before him or contemporary with him, nor indeed any that came after him, till Spenser, could command. Gower had no notion of the uses of rhyme except as a kind of crease at the end of every e'ghth syllable, where the verse was to be folded over ag&in into another layer. He says, for example, " This maiden Canacee was Light, Both in the day and eke by night," as if people commonly changed their names at dark. And he could not even contrive to say this without the clumsy pleonasm of both and eke. Chaucer was put to no such shifts of piecing out his metre with loose -woven bits of baser stuff. He himself says, in the " Man of Law's Tale,"— " Me lists not of the chaff nor of the straw To make so long a tale as of the corn." One of the world's three or four great story-tellers, he was also one of the best versifiers that ever made English trip and sing with a gaiety that seems careless, but where every foot beats time to the tune of the thought. By the skilful arrangement of his pauses he evaded the monotony of the couplet, and gave to the rhymed pentameter, which he made our heroic measure, something of the architectural repose of blank verse. He found our language lumpish, stiff, unwilling, too apt to speak Saxonly in grouty monosyllables ; he left it enriched with the longer measure of the Italian and Provengal poets. He reconciled, in the harmony of his verse, the English bluntness with the dignity and elegance of the less homely Southern speech. Though he did not and could not create our language (for he who writes to be read does not write for linguisters), yet it is true that he first made it easy, and to that extent modern, so that Spenser, two hundred years later, studied his method and called him master. He first wrote English ; and it was a feeling of this, I suspect, that made it fashionable in Eliza beth's day to " talk pure Chaucer." Already we find in his 240 CHA UCER. works verses that might pass without question in Milton or even Wordsworth, so mainly unchanged have the language of poetry and the movement of verse remained from his day to our own. "Thou Polymnia On Pernaso, that, with* thy sisters glade, By Helicon, not far from Cirrea, Singest with voice memorial in the shade, Under the laurel which that may not fade. And downward from a hill under a bent There stood the temple of Mars omnipotent Wrought all of burned steel, of which th' entree Was long and strait and ghastly for to see : The northern light in at the doores shone For window in the wall ne was there none Through which men mighten any light discerne ; The dore was all of adamant eterne." And here are some lines that would not seem out of place in the " Paradise of Dainty Devises : " — 11 Hide, Absolom, thy gilte [gilded] tresses clear, Esther lay thou thy meekness all adown. Make of your wifehood no comparison ; Hide ye your beauties Ysoude and Elaine, My lady cometh, that all this may distain." When I remember Chaucer's malediction upon his scrivener, and consider that by far the larger proportion of his verses (allowing always for change of pronunciation) are perfectly accordant with our present accentual system, I cannot believe that he ever wrote an imperfect line. His ear would never have tolerated the verses of nine syllables, with a strong accent on the first, attributed to him by Mr. Skeate and Mr. Morris. Such verses seem to me simply impossible in the pentameter iambic as Chaucer wrote it. A great deal of misapprehension would be avoided in dis cussing English metres, if it were only understood that quantity in Latin and quantity in English mean very different things. Perhaps the best quantitative verses in * Commonly printed hath. CHAUCER. 241 our language (better even than Coleridge's) are to be found in Mother Goose, composed by nurses wholly by ear and beating time as they danced the baby on their knee. I suspect Chaucer and Shakespeare would be surprised into a smile by the learned arguments which supply their halting verses with every kind of excuse except that of being readable. When verses were written to be chanted, more licence could be allowed, for the ear tolerates the widest deviations from habitual accent in words that are sung, Segnius irritant demissa per aurem. To some extent the same thing is true of anapa?stic and other tripping measures, but we cannot admit it in marching tunes like those of Chaucer. He wrote for the eye more than for the voice, as poets had begun to do long before.* Some loose talk of Coleridge, loose in spite of its affectation of scientific precision, about " retardations " and the like, has misled many honest persons into believing that they can make good verse out of bad prose. Coleridge himself, from natural fineness of ear, was the best metrist among modern English poets, and, read with proper allowances, his remarks upon versification are always instructive to who ever is not rhythm-deaf. But one has no patience with the dyspondseuses, the pseon primuses, and what not, with which he darkens verses that are to be explained only by * Froissart's description of the book of traites amoureux et de moralite, which he had engrossed for presentation to Richard II. in 1394, is enough to bring tears to the eyes of a modern author. "Et lui plut tres grandement ; et plaire bien lui devoit, car il etoit enlumine, ecrit et historie et couvert de vermeil velours & dis cloux d'argent dores d'or, et roses d'or an milieu, et k deux grands fremaulx dores et richement ouvres au milieu de rosiers d'or." How lovingly he lingers over it, hooking it together with et after et! But two centuries earlier, while the jongleurs were still in full song, poems were also read aloud. " Pur remembrer des ancessours Les faits et les dits et les mours, Deit Ten les livres et les gestes Et les estoires lire afestes." — Roman du Eon, But Chaucer wrote for the private reading of the closet. 144 242 CHAUCER. the contemporary habits of pronunciation. Till after the time of Shakespeare we must always bear in mind that it is not a language of books but living speech that we have to deal with. Of this language Coleridge had little know ledge, except what could be acquired through the ends of his fingers as they lazily turned the leaves of his haphazard reading. If his eye was caught by a single passage that gave him a chance to theorise, he did not look farther. Speaking of Massinger, for example, he says, " When a speech is interrupted, or one of the characters speaks aside, the last syllable of the former speech and first of the suc ceeding Massinger counts for one, because both are supposed to be spoken at the same moment. " 'And felt the sweetness oft How her mouth runs over.' " Now fifty instances may be cited from Massinger which tell against this fanciful notion, for one that seems, and only seems, in its favour. Anyone tolerably familiar with the dramatists knows that in the passage quoted by Coleridge, the how being emphatic, "how her" was pronounced how'r. He tells us that Massinger is fond of the anapaest in the first and third foot, as : — " To your more | than mas | culine rea | son that | commands 'ern.H " Likewise of the second paeon (^__ v_x_) in the first foot, followed by four trochees (— ^-), as : — " So greedily | I5ng for, | know their | titill | ations." In truth, he was no fonder of them than his brother dramatists who, like him, wrote for the voice by the ear. " To your " is still one syllable in ordinary speech, and " masculine " and " greedily " were and are dissyllables or trisyllables according to their place in the verse. Coleridge was making pedantry of a very simple matter. Yet he has said with perfect truth of Chaucer's verse, " Let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final e of syllables, and for expressing the terminations of such words as ocean and nation, etc., as dissyllables, — or let the syllables to be CHAUCER. 243 sounded in such cases be marked by a competent metrist. This simple expedient would, with a very few trifling exceptions, where the errors are inveterate, enable anyone to feel the perfect smoothness and harmony of Chaucer's verse." But let us keep widely clear of Latin and Greek terms of prosody ! It is also more important here than even with the dramatists of Shakespeare's time to remem ber that we have to do with a language caught more from the ear than from books. The best school for learning to understand Chaucer's elisions, compressions, slurrings- over and runnings-together of syllables is to listen to the habitual speech of rustics with whom language is still plastic to meaning, and hurries or prolongs itself accord ingly. Here is a contraction frequent in Chaucer, and still common in New England : — "But me were lever than [lever'n] all this town, quod he." Let one example suffice for many. To Coleridge's rules another should be added by a wise editor ; and that is to restore the final n in the infinitive and third person plural of verbs, and in such other cases as can be justified by the authority of Chaucer himself. Surely his ear could never have endured the sing-song of such verses as " I couthe telle for a gowne-cloth," or "Than ye to me schuld breke youre trouthe." Chaucer's measure is so uniform (making due allowances) that words should be transposed or even omitted where the verse manifestly demands it, — and with copyists so long and dull of ear this is often the case. Sometimes they leave out a needful word : — " But er [the] thunder stynte, there cometh rain, When [that] we ben y flattered and ypraised, Tak [ye] him for the greatest gentleman." Sometimes they thrust in a word or words that hobble the verse : — 244 CHAUCER. 11 She trowed he were yfel in [some] maladie, Ye faren like a man [that] had lost his wit, Then have I got of you the maystrie, quod she, (Then have I got the maystery, quod she) And quod the juge [also] thou must lose thy head." Sometimes they give a wrong word identical in meaning :— " And therwithal he knew [couthe] mo proverbes." Sometimes they change the true order of the words : — " Therefore no woman of clerkes is [is of clerkes] praised His felaw lo, here he stont [stont he] hool on live." " He that coveteth is a pore wight For he wold have that is not in his might ; But he that nought hath ne coveteth nought to have." Here the "but" of the third verse belongs at the head of the first, and we get rid of the anomaly of " coveteth " differently accented within two lines. Nearly all the seemingly unrnetrical verses may be righted in this way. I find a good example of this in the last stanza of " Troilus and Creseide." As it stands, we read — " Thou one, two, and three, eterne on live That raignast aie in three, two and one." It is plain that we should read " one and two " in the first verse, and " three and two " in the second. Remembering, then, that Chaucer was here translating Dante, I turned (after making the correction) to the original, and found as I expected " Quell* uno e due e tre che sempre vive, E regna sempre in tre e due ed uno." (Par. xiv. 28, 29.) In the stanza before this we have — 11 To thee and to the philosophical strode, To vouchsafe [vouchesafe] there need is, to correct ; and further on — " With all mine herte' of mercy ever I pray And to the Lord aright thus I speake and say,'* CHA UCER. 245 where we must either strike out the second " I," or put it after " speake." One often finds such changes made by ear justified by the readings in other texts, and we cannot but hope that the Chaucer Society will give us the means of at last settling upon a version which shall make the poems of one of the most fluent of metrists at least readable. Let any one compare the " Franklin's Tale " in the Aldine edition* with the text given by Wright, and he will find both sense and metre clear themselves up in a surprising way. A careful collation of texts, by the way, confirms one's confidence in Tyrwhitt's good taste and thoroughness. A writer in the "Proceedings of the Philological So ciety" has lately undertaken to prove that Chaucer did not sound the final or medial e, and throws us back on the old theory that he wrote "riding-rime," that is, verse to the eye and not the ear. This he attempts to do by showing that the Anglo-Norman poets themselves did not sound the e, or, at any rate, were not uniform in so doing. It should seem a sufficient answer to this merely to ask whence modern French poetry derived its rules of pronunciation so like those of Chaucer, so different from those of prose. But it is not enough to prove that some of the Anglo-Norman rhymers were bad versifiers. Let us look for examples in the works of the best poet among them all, Marie de France, with whose works Chaucer was certainly familiar. What was her practice ? I open at random and find enough to overthrow the whole theory : — " Od sa fillet ke le cela— Tut li curages li fremi — Di mei, fet-ele par ta fei — La Dameisele 1'aporta — Ear ne li sembla mie boeris — La dame 1'aveit apelee — Et la mere 1'areisuna." * One of the very worst, be it said in passing. t Whence came, pray, the Elizabethan commandement clmpelain, surety, and a score of others ? Whence the Scottish bonny, and so many English words of Romance derivation ending in y 1 246 CHA UCER. But how about the elision ? 11 Le pali' esgarde sur le lit — Et ele' est devant li alee — Bele' amie [of. mie, above] ne'il me celcz. La dame' ad sa fille' amenee." These are all on a single page,* and there are some to spare. How about the hiatus ? On the same page I find — " Ear 1'Erceveske i estoit — Pur eus beneistre' e euseiner. What was the practice of Wace 1 Again I open at random. " N'osa remaindre' en Normandie, Maiz, quant la guerre fu fiiiio, Od sou herneiz en Puille' #la — Gil de Baienes lunge'ment — Ne il nes pout par force prendre — Dune la vile mult amendout, Prisons e preie's amenout. "t Again we have the sounded final e, the elision, and the hiatus. But what possible reason is there for supposing that Chaucer would go to obscure minstrels to learn the rules of French versification 1 Nay, why are we to suppose that he followed them at all ? In his case as in theirs, as in that of the Italians, with the works of whose two greater poets he was familiar, it was the language itself and the usuges of pronunciation that guided the poet, and not arbitrary laws laid down by a synod of versemakers. Chaucer's verse differs from that of Gower and Lydgate precisely as the verse of Spenser differs from that of Gascoigne, and for the same reason — that he was a great poet, to whom measure was a natural vehicle. But admitting that he must have formed his style on the French poets, would he not have gone for lessons to the most famous and popular among them — the authors of the " Roman de la Rose ? " Wherever you open that poem, * Poesies de Marie de France, tome i. p. 168. t Le Roman de la Rose, tome ii. p. 390. CHAUCER. 247 you find Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung following precisely the same method — a method not in the least arbitrary, but inherent in the material which they wrought. The e sounded or absorbed under the same conditions, the same slurring of the diphthongs, the same occasional hiatus, the same compression of several vowels into one sound where they immediately follow each other. Shakespeare and Milton would supply examples enough of all these practices that seem so incredible to those who write about versification without sufficient fineness of sense to feel the difference between Ben Jonson's blank verse and Marlowe's. Some men are verse-deaf as others are colour-blind — Messrs, Malone and Guest, for example. I try Rutebeuf in the same haphazard way, and chance brings me upon his " Pharisian." This poem is in stanzas, the verses of the first of which have all of them masculine rhymes, those of the second feminine ones, and so on in such continual alternation to the end, as to show that it was done with intention to avoid monotony. Of feminine rhymes we find ypocrisie, fame, justice, mesure, yglise. But did Kutebeuf mean so to pronounce them ? I open again at the poem of the Secrestain, which is written in regular octosyllabics, and read — " Envie fet home tuer, Et si fait bonne' remuer — Envie greve', envie blece, Envie con font charite Envie' ocist humility — Estoit en ce pais en vie Sanz orgueil ere' et sanz envie — La glorieuse, dame, chiere'."* Froissart was Chaucer's contemporary. What was his usage? " J'avoie fait en ce voiaige Et je li di, ' Ma dame s'ai-je Pour vous eu maint souvenir' ; Mais je ne sui pas bien hardis * Rutebeuf, tome i. pp. 203 seqq. 304 248 CHAUCER. De vous remonstrer, dame chier£, Par quel art ne par quel maniere, J'ai eu ce comencement De 1'amourous atouchement." If we try Philippe Mouskes, a mechanical rhymer, if ever there was one, and therefore the surer not to let go the leading-strings of rule, the result is the same. But Chaucer, it is argued, was not uniform in his practice. Would this be likely ? Certainly with those terminations (like courtesie) which are questioned, and in diphthongs generally. Dante took precisely the same liberties. ' ' Facea le stelle a noi parer prh radi, Ne fu per fantasia giamnuw compreso, Poi piovve dentro all' alta fantasia, Solea valor e cortesia trovarsi, Che ne 'nvogliava amor e cortesia." Here we have fantasi and fantasia, cortesl' and cortesid. Even Pope has promiscuous, obsequious, as trisyllables, individual as a quadrisyllable, and words like tapestry, opera, indifferently as trochees or dactyls according to their place in the verse. Donne even goes so far as to make Cain a monosyllable and dissyllable in the same verse : — " Sister and wife to Cain, Cain that first did plough." The csesural pause (a purely imaginary thing in accentual metres) may be made to balance a line like this of Donne's, 11 Are they not like | singers at doors for meat," but we defy anyone by any trick of voice to make it supply a missing syllable in what is called our heroic measure, so mainly used by Chaucer. Enough and far more than enough on a question about which it is as hard to be patient as about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. It is easy to find all manner of bad metres among these versifiers, and plenty of inconsistencies, many or most of them the fault of careless or ignorant transcribers, but whoever has read them thoroughly, and CHA UCER. 249 with enough philological knowledge of cognate lang uges to guide him, is sure that they at least aimed at regularity, precisely as he is convinced that Raynouard's rule about singular and plural terminations has plenty of evidence to sustain it, despite the numerous exceptions. To show what a bad versifier could make out of the same language that Chaucer used, I copy one stanza from a contemporary poem. "When Phebus fresh was in chare resplendent, In the moneth of May erly in a morning, I hard two lovers prefer this argument In the yeere of our Lord a M. by rekening, CCCXL. and YIIL yeere following 0 potent princesse conserve true lovers all And grant them thy region and blisse celestial. * Here is riding-rhyme, and on a very hard horse too ! Can any one be insensible to the difference between such stuff as this and the measure of Chaucer 1 Is it possible that with him the one halting verse should be the rule, and the twenty musical ones the exception *{ Let us take heed to his own words : — "And, for there is so great diversite In English, and in writing of our tong, So pray I Godt that non miswrite the Ne the mismetre for defaut of tong, And redde whereso thou be or elles song That thou be understood God I beseech." Yet more. Boccaccio's ottava rima is almost as regular as that of Tasso. Was Chaucer unconscious of this ? It will be worth while to compare a stanza of the original with one of the translation : — " Era cortese Ettore di natura Pero vedendo di costei il gran pianto, Ch' era piu bella ch' altra creatura, Con pio parlare comfortolla alquanto, Dicendo, lascia con la ria ventura * From the "Craft of Lovers," attributed by Ritson to Lydgate, but too bad even for him. t Here the received texts give "So pray I to God." Cf. "But Reason said him." T. & C, 250 CHAUCER. Tuo padre andar che tutti ha offeso tanto, E tu, sicura e lieta, senza noia, Mentre t' aggrada, con noi resta in Troia." * " Now was this Hector pitous of nature, And saw that she was sorrowful begon And that she was so faire a creature, Of his goodnesse he gladed her anon And said [saide] let your father's treason gon Forth with mischance, and ye yourself in joy Dwelleth with us while [that] you list in Troy." If the Italian were read with the same ignorance that has wreaked itself on Chaucer, the riding-rhyme would be on its high horse in almost every line of Boccaccio's stanza. The same might be said of many a verse in Donne's satires. Spenser in his eclogues for February, May, and September evidently took it for granted that he had caught the measure of Chaucer, and it would be rather amusing, as well as instructive, to hear the maintainers of the hop-skip- and-jump theory of versification attempt to make the elder poet's verses dance to the tune for which one of our greatest metrists (in his philological deafness) supposed their feet to be trained. I will give one more example of Chaucer's verse, again making my selection from one of his less mature works. He is speaking of Tarquin : — "And ay the more he was in despair The more he coveted and thought her fair ; His blinde lust was all his coveting. On morrow when the bird began to sing Unto the siege he cometh full privily And by himself he walketh soberly The image of her recording alway new : Thus lay her hair, and thus fresh was her hue, Thus sate, thus spake, thus span, this was her cheer, Thus fair she was, and this was her manere. All this conceit his heart hath new ytake, And as the sea, with tempest all toshake, That after, when the storm is all ago, Yet will the water quap a day or two, Right so, though that her forme were absent, The pleasance of her forme was present." * Corrected from Kissner, p. 18. CHAUCER. 251 And this passage leads me to say a few words of Chaucer as a descriptive poet; for I think it a great mistake to attribute to him any properly dramatic power as some have done. Even Herr Hertzburg, in his remarkably intelligent essay, is led a little astray on this point by his enthusiasm. Chaucer is a great narrative poet ; and, in this species of poetry, though the author's personality should never be obtruded, it yet unconsciously pervades the whole, and communicates an individual quality — a kind of flavour of its own. This very quality, and it is one of the highest in its way and place, would be fatal to all dramatic force. The narrative poet is occupied with his characters as a picture, with their grouping, even their costume, it may be, and he feels for and with them instead of being they for the moment, as the dramatist must always be. The story-teller must possess the situation perfectly in all its details, while the imagination of the dramatist must be possessed and mastered by it. The latter puts before us the very passion or emotion itself in its utmost intensity; the former gives them, not in their primary form, but in that derivative one which they have acquired by passing through his own mind and being modified by his reflection. The deepest pathos of the drama, like the quiet " no more but so 1 " with which Shakespeare tells us that Ophelia's heart is bursting, is sudden as a stab, while in narrative it is more or less suffused with pity — a feeling capable of prolonged sustention. This presence of the author's own sympathy is noticeable in all Chaucer's pathetic passages, as, for instance, in the lamentation of Constance over her child in the " Man of Law's Tale." When he comes to the sorrow of his story, he seems to croon over his thoughts, to sooth them and dwell upon them with a kind of pleased compassion, as a child treats a wounded bird which he fears to grasp too tightly, and yet cannot make up his heart wholly to let go. It is true also of his humour that it pervades his comic tales like sunshine, and never dazzles the attention by a sudden flash. Sometimes he brings it in parenthetically, and insinuates a sarcasm so slyly as almost to slip by without 252 CHAUCER. our notice, as where he satirises provincialism by the cock, " Who knew by nature each ascension Of the equinoctial in his native town." Sometimes he turns round upon himself and smiles at a trip he has made into fine writing : — 11 Till that the brighte sun had lost his hue, For th' orisont had reft the sun his light, (This is as much to sayen as * it was night.' ") Nay, sometimes it twinkles roguishly through his very tears, as in the " 'Why wouldest thou be dead/ these women cry, ' Thou haddest gold enough— and Emily ? '" that follows so close upon the profoundly tender despair of Arcite's farewell : — " What is this world ? What asken men to have ? Now with his love now in the colde grave Alone withouten any company ! " The power of diffusion without being diffuse would seem to be the highest merit of narration, giving it that easy flow which is so delightful. Chaucer's descriptive style is remarkable for its lowness of tone — for that combination of energy with simplicity which is among the rarest gifts in literature. Perhaps all is said in saying that he has style at all, for that consists mainly in the absence of undue emphasis and exaggeration, in the clear uniform pitch which penetrates our interest and retains it, where mere loudness would only disturb and irritate. Not that Chaucer cannot be intense, too, on occasion; but it is with a quiet intensity of his own, that comes in as it were by accident. 11 Upon a thicke palfrey, paper- white, With saddle red embroidered with delight, Sits Dido : And she is fair as is the brighte morrow That healeth sicke folk of nightes sorrow. CHAUCER. 253 Upon a courser startling as the fire, jEneas sits." Paiidarus, looking at Troilus, " Took up a light and found his countenance As for to look upon an old romance." With Chaucer it is always the thing itself and not the de scription of it that is the main object. His picturesque bits are incidental to the story, glimpsed in passing ; they never stop the way. His key is so low that his high lights are never obtrusive. His imitators, like Leigh Hunt, and Keats in his " Endymion," missing the nice gradation with which the master toned everything down, become streaky. Hogarth, who reminds one of him in the variety and natural action of his figures, is like him also in the subdued brilliancy of his colouring. When Chaucer condenses, it is because his conception is vivid. He does not need to per sonify Revenge, for personification is but the subterfuge of unimaginative and professional poets ; but he embodies the very passion itself in a verse that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we heard a stealthy tread behind us : — " The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak.* " And yet how unlike is the operation of the imaginative faculty in him and Shakespeare ! When the latter de scribes, his epithet simply leaves always an impression on the moral sense (so to speak) of the person who hears or sees. The sun " flatters the mountain-tops with sovereign eye ; " the bending " weeds lacquey the dull stream ; " the shadow of the falcon " coucheth the fowl below ; " the smoke is " helpless ; " when Tarquin enters the chamber of Lucrece " the threshold grates the door to have him heard." His outward sense is merely a window through which the metaphysical eye looks forth, and his mind passes over at once from the simple sensation to the complex meaning of it — feels with the object instead of merely feeling it. His imagination is for ever dramatising. Chaucer gives only * Compare this with the Mumbo-Jumbo Revenge in Collins's Ode. 254 CHAUCER. the direct impression made on the eye or ear. He was the first great poet who really loved outward nature as the source of conscious pleasurable emotion. The Troubadour hailed the return of spring ; but with him it was a piece of empty ritualism. Chaucer took a true delight in the new green of the leaves and the return of singing birds — a delight as simple as that of Robin Hood : — " In summer when the shaws be sheen, And leaves be large and long, It is full merry in fair forest To hear the small birds' song." He has never so much as heard of the " burthen and the mystery of all this unintelligible world." His flowers and trees and birds have never bothered themselves with Spinoza. He himself sings more like a bird than any other poet, because it never occurred to him, as to Goethe, that he ought to do so. He pours himself out in sincere joy and thankfulness. When we compare Spenser's imitations of him with the original passages, we feel that the delight of the later poet was more in the expression than in the thing itself. Nature with him is only good to be transfigured by art. We walk among Chaucer's sights and sounds ; we listen to Spenser's musical reproduction of them. In the same way, the pleasure which Chaucer takes in telling his stories has in itself the effect of consummate skill, and makes us follow all the windings of his fancy with sympathetic interest. His best tales run on like one of our inland rivers, sometimes hastening a little and turning upon themselves in eddies that dimple without re tarding the current ; sometimes loitering smoothly, while here and there a quiet thought, a tender feeling, a pleasant image, a golden-hearted verse, opens quietly as a water-lily, to fioat on the surface without breaking it into ripple. The vulgar intellectual palate hankers after the titillation of foaming phrase, and thinks nothing good for much that does not go off with a pop like a champagne cork. The mellow suavity of more precious vintages seems insipid : but the taste in proportion as it refines, learns to appreciate the indefinable flavour, too subtile for analysis. A manner has CHAUCER. 255 prevailed of late in which every other word seems to be underscored as in a school-girl's letter. The poet seems intent on showing his sinew, as if the power of the slim Apollo lay in the girth of his biceps. Force for the mere sake of force ends like Milo, caught and held mockingly fast by the recoil of the log he undertook to rive. In the race of fame, there are a score capable of brilliant spurts for one who comes in winner after a steady pull with wind and muscle to spare. Chaucer never shows any signs of effort, and it- is a main proof of his excellence that he can be so inadequately sampled by detached passages — by single lines taken away from the connection in which they contribute to the general effect. He has that continuity of thought, that evenly prolonged power, and that delightful equanimity, which characterise the higher orders of mind. There is something in him of the disinterestedness that made the Greeks masters in art. His phrase is never importunate. His simplicity is that of elegance, not of poverty. The quiet unconcern with which he says his best things is peculiar to him among English poets, though Goldsmith, Addison, and Thackeray have approached it in prose. He prattles inadvertently away, and all the while, like the princess in the story, lets fall a pearl at every other word. It is such a piece of good luck to be natural ! It is the good gift which the fairy godmother brings to her prime favourites in the cradle. If not genius, it is alone what makes genius amiable in the arts. If a man have it not, he will never find it, for when it is sought it is gone. When Chaucer describes anything, it is commonly by one of those simple and obvious epithets or qualities that are so easy to miss. Is it a woman ? He tells us she is fresh; that she has glad eyes ; that " every day her beauty newed : " that "Methought all fellowship as naked Withouten her that I saw once, As a coroiie without the stones." Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as where the Friar, before setting himself softly down, drives away 256 CHAUCER. the cat. We know without need of more words that he has chosen the snuggest corner. In some of his early poems he sometimes, it is true, falls into the catalogue style of his contemporaries ; but after he had found his genius he never particularises too much — a process as deadly to all effect as an explanation to a pun. The first stanza of the " Clerk's Tale " gives us a landscape whose stately choice of objects shows a skill in composition worthy of Claude, the last artist who painted nature epically : — " There is at the west ende of Itaile, Down at the foot of Vesulus the cold, A lusty plain abundant of vitaile, Where many a tower and town thou may'st behold That founded were in time of fathers old, And many another delitable sight ; And Skluces this noble country hight" The Pre-Raphaelite style of landscape entangles the eye among the obtrusive weeds and grass-blades of the foreground which, in looking at a real bit of scenery, we overlook ; but what a sweep of vision is here ! and what happy generalisa tion in the sixth verse as the poet turns away to the business of his story ! The whole is full of open air. But it is in his characters, especially, that his manner is large and free ; for he is painting history, though with the fidelity of portrait. He brings out strongly the essential traits, characteristic of the genus rather than of the indi vidual. The Merchant who keeps so steady a countenance that " There wist no wight that he was e'er in debt," the Sergeant at Law, " who seemed busier than he was," the Doctor of Medicine, whose " study was but little on the Bible," — in all these cases it is the type and not the personage that fixes his attention. William Blake says truly, though he expresses his meaning somewhat clumsily, " the characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations. Some of the names and titles are altered by time, but the characters remain for ever unaltered, and consequently they are the physiognomies CHAUCER. 257 and lineaments of universal human life, beyond which Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linnaeus num bered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men." In his outside accessories, it is true, he sometimes seems as minute as if he were illuminating a missal. Nothing escapes his sure eye for the picturesque — the cut of the beard, the soil of armour on the buff jerkin, the rust on the sword, the expression of the eye. But in this he has an artistic purpose. It is here that he individualises, and, while every touch harmonises with and seems to com plete the moral features of the character, makes us feel that we are among living men, and not the abstract images of men. Crabbe adds particular to particular, scattering rather than deepening the impression of reality, and mak ing us feel as if every man were a species by himself; but Chaucer, never forgetting the essential sameness of human nature, makes it possible, and even probable, that his motley characters should meet on a common footing, while he gives to each the expression that belongs to him, the result of special circumstance or training. Indeed, the absence of any suggestion of caste cannot fail to strike any reader familiar with the literature on which he is supposed to have formed himself. No characters are at once so broadly human and so definitely outlined as his. Belong ing, some of them, to extinct types, they continue contem porary and familiar for ever. So wide is the difference between knowing a great many men and that knowledge of human nature which comes of sympathetic insight and not of observation alone. It is this power of sympathy which makes Chaucer's satire so kindly — more so, one is tempted to say, than the panegyric of Pope. Intellectual satire gets its force from personal or moral antipathy, and measures offences by some rigid conventional standard. Its mouth waters over a gall ing word, and it loves to say Thou, pointing out its victim to public scorn. Indiynatio facit versus, it boasts, though they might as often be fathered on envy or hatred. But 258 CHAUCER. imaginative satire, warmed through and through with the genial leaven of humour, smiles half sadly and murmurs We. Chaucer either makes one knave betray another, through a natural jealousy of competition, or else expose himself with a naivete of good-humoured cynicism which amuses rather than disgusts. In the former case the butt has a kind of claim on our sympathy ; in the latter, it seems nothing strange if the sunny atmosphere which floods that road to Canterbury should tempt anybody to throw oiF one disguise after another without suspicion. With per fect tact, too, the Host is made the choragus in this diverse company, and the coarse jollity of his temperament explains, if it does not excuse, much that would otherwise seem out of keeping. Surely nobody need have any scruples with him. Chaucer seems to me to have been one of the most purely original of poets, as much so in respect of the world that is about us as Dante in respect of that which is within us. There had been nothing like him before, there has been nothing since. He is original, not in the sense that he thinks and says what nobody ever thought and said before, and what nobody can ever think and say again, but because he is always natural ; because, if not always absolutely new, he is always delightfully fresh, because he sets before us the world as it honestly appeared to Geoffrey Chaucer, and not a world as it seemed proper to certain people that it ought to appear. He found that the poetry which had preceded him had been first the expression of individual feeling, then of class feeling as the vehicle of legend and history, and at last had well-nigh lost itself in chasing the mirage of allegory. Literature seemed to have passed through the natural stages which at regular intervals bring it to decline. Even the lyrics of the jongleurs were all run in one mould, and the Pas- tourelles of Northern France had become as artificial as the Pastorals of Pope. The Romances of chivalry had been made over into prose, and the Melusine of his contemporary Jehan d' Arras is the forlorn hope of the modern novel. CHAUCER. 250 Arrived thus far in their decrepitude, the monks endeav oured to give them a religious and moral turn by allegorising them. Their process reminds one of something Ulloa tells us of the fashion in which the Spaniards converted the Mexicans : " Here we found an old man in a cavern so extremely aged as it was wonderful, which could neither see nor go because he was so lame and crooked. The Father, Friar Raimund, said it were good (seeing he was so aged) to make him a Christian ; whereupon we baptised him." The monks found the Romances in the same stage of senility, and gave them a saving sprinkle with the holy water of allegory. Perhaps they were only trying to turn the enemy's own weapons against himself, for it was the free-thinking " Romance of the Rose " that more than anything else had made allegory fashionable. Plutarch tells us that an allegory is to say one thing where another is meant, and this might have been needful for the personal security of Jean de Meung, as afterwards for that of his successor, Rabelais. But, except as a means of evading the fagot, the method has few recommendations. It reverses the true office of poetry by making the real unreal. It is imagination endeavouring to recommend itself to the understanding by means of cuts. If an author be in such deadly earnest, or if his imagination be of such creative vigour as to project real figures when it meant to cast only a shadow upon vapour ; if the true spirit come, at once obsequious and terrible, when the conjuror has drawn his circle and gone through with his incantations merely to produce a proper frame of mind in his audience, as was the case with Dante, there is no longer any question of allegory as the word and thing are commonly understood. But with all secondary poets, as with Spenser for example, the allegory does not become of one substance with the poetry, but is a kind of carven frame for it, whose figures lose their meaning, as they cease to be contemporary. It was not a style that could have much attraction for a nature so sensitive to the actual, so observant of it, so interested by it as that of Chaucer. He seems to have tried his hand at all the forms in vogue, and to have arrived in his old age at 266 CHAUCER. the truth, essential to all really great poetry, that his own instincts were his safest guides, that there is nothing deeper in life than life itself, and that to conjure an allegorical significance into it was to lose sight of its real meaning. He of all men could not say one thing and mean another, unless by way of humorous contrast. In thus turning frankly and gaily to the actual world, and drinking inspiration from sources open to all ; in turning away from a colourless abstraction to the solid earth and to emotions common to every pulse; in discovering that to make the best of nature, and not to grope vaguely after something better than nature, was the true office of Art ; in insisting on a definite purpose, on veracity, cheerfulness, and simplicity, Chaucer shows himself the true father and founder of what is characteristically English literature. He has a hatred of cant as hearty as Dr. Johnson's, though he has a slyer way of showing it ; he has the placid common- sense of Franklin, the sweet, grave humour of Addison, the exquisite taste of Gray ; but the whole texture of his mind, though its substance seem plain and grave, shows itself at every turn iridescent with poetic feeling like shot silk. Above all, he has an eye for character that seems to have caught at once not only its mental and physical features, but even its expression in variety of costume — an eye, indeed, second only, if it should be called second in some respects, to that of Shakespeare, I know of nothing that may be compared with the prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," and with that to the story of the " Chanon's Yeoman," before Chaucer. Characters and por traits from real life had never been drawn with such discrimination, or with such variety, never with such bold precision of outline, and with such a lively sense of the picturesque. His Parson is still unmatched, though Dryden and Goldsmith have both tried their hands in emulation of him. And the humour also in its suavity, its perpetual presence and its shy unobtrusiveness, is something wholly new in literature. For anything that deserves to be called like it in English we must wait for Henry Fielding. CHAUCER. 261 Chaucer is the first great poet who has treated To-day as if it were as good as Yesterday, the first who held up a mirror to contemporary life in its infinite variety of high and low, of humour and pathos. But he reflected life in its large sense as the life of men, from the knight to the plough man — the life of every day as it is made up of that curious compound of human nature with manners. The very form of the " Canterbury Tales " was imaginative. The garden of Boccaccio, the supper-party of Grazzini, and the voyage of Giraldi make a good enough thread for their stories, but exclude all save equals and friends, exclude consequently human nature in its wider meaning. But by choosing a pilgrimage, Chaucer puts us on a plane where all men are equal, with souls to be saved, and with another world in view that abolishes all distinctions. By this choice, and by making the Host of the Tabard always the central figure, he has happily united the two most familiar emblems of life — the short journey and the inn. We find more and more as we study him that he rises quietly from the conventional to the universal, and may fairly take his place with Homer in virtue of the breadth of his humanity. In spite of some external stains, which those who have studied the influence of manners will easily account for without imputing them to any moral depravity, we feel that we can join the pure-minded Spenser in calling him "most sacred, happy spirit." If character may be divined from works, he was a good man, genial, sincere, hearty, temperate of mind, more wise, perhaps, for this world than the next, but thoroughly humane, and friendly with God and men. I know not how to sum up what we feel about him better than by saying (what would have pleased most one who was indifferent to fame) that we love him more even than we admire. We are sure that here was a true brother-man so kindly that in his " House of Fame," after naming the great poets, he throws in a pleasant word for the oaten pipes 11 Of the little herd-grooms That keepen beasts among the brooms." 262 DRYDEN. No better inscription can be written on the first page of his works than that which he places over the gate in his " Assembly of Fowls," and which contrasts so sweetly with the stern lines of Dante from which they were imitated : — " Through me men go into the blissful place Of the heart's heal and deadly woundes" cure ; Through me men go unto the well of Grace, Where green and lusty May doth ever endure, This is the way to all good aventure ; Be glad, thou Reader, and thy sorrow offcast, All open am I, pass in, and speed thee fast ! " DRYDEN* BEXVENUTO CELLINI tells us that when, in his boyhood, he saw a salamander come out of the fire, his grandfather forthwith gave him a sound beating, that he might the better remember so unique a prodigy. Though perhaps in this case the rod had another application than the auto- biographer chooses to disclose, and was intended to fix in the pupil's mind a lesson of veracity rather than of science, the testimony to its mnemonic virtue remains. Nay, so universally was it once believed that the senses, and through them the faculties of observation and retention, were quickened by an irritation of the cuticle, that in France it was customary to whip the children annually at the boundaries of the parish, lest the true place of them * The Dramatick Works of JOIIN DRYDEN, Esq. In six volumes. London : Printed for Jacob Tonson, in the Strand. MDCCXXXV. 18mo. The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of JOHN DRYDEX, now first collected. With Notes and Illustrations. An account of the Life and Writings of the Author, grounded on Original and Authentick Documents ; and a Collection of his Letters, the greatest Part of which has never before been published. By EDMUND MALONE, Esq. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, in the Strand. 4 vols. 8vo. The Poetical Works of JOHN DRYDEN. (Edited by MITFORD.) London : W. Pickering. 1832. 5 vols. 18mo. DRYDEN. 263 might ever be lost through neglect of so inexpensive a mor dant for the memory. From this practice the older school of critics would seem to have taken a hint for keeping fixed the limits of good taste, and what was somewhat vaguely called classical English. To mark these limits in poetry, they set up as Hermse the images they had made to them of Dryden, of Pope, and later of Goldsmith. Here they solemnly castigated every new aspirant in verse, who in turn performed the same function for the next generation, thus helping to keep always sacred and immovable the ne plus ultra alike of inspiration and the vocabulary. Though no two natures were ever much more unlike than those of Dryden and Pope, and again of Pope and Goldsmith, and no two styles, except in such externals as could be easily caught and copied, yet it was the fashion, down even to the last generation, to advise young writers to form themselves, as it was called, on these excellent models. Wordsworth himself began in this school ; and though there were glimpses, here and there, of a direct study of nature, yet most of the epithets in his earlier pieces were of the traditional kind so fatal to poetry during great part of the last century ; and he indulged in that alphabetic personifica tion which enlivens all such words as Hunger, Solitude, Freedom, by the easy magic of an initial capital. 11 Where the green apple shrivels on the spray, And pines the unripened pear in summer's kindliest ray, Even here Content has fixed her smiling reign With Independence, child of high Disdain. Exulting 'mid the winter of the skies, Shy as the jealous chamois, Freedom flies, And often grasps her sword, and often eyes." Here we have every characteristic of the artificial method, even to the triplet, which Swift hated so heartily as "a vicious way of rhyming wherewith Mr. Dryden abounded, imitated by all the bad versifiers of Charles the Second's reign." Wordsworth became, indeed, very early the leader of reform ; but, like Wesley, he endeavoured a reform within the Establishment, Purifying the substance, he retained 264 DRYDEN. the outward forms with a feeling rather than conviction that, in poetry, substance and form are but manifestations of the same inward life, the one fused into the other in the vivid heat of their common expression. Wordsworth could never wholly shake off the influence of the century into which he was born. He began by proposing a reform of the ritual, but it went no further than an attempt to get rid of the words of Latin original where the meaning was as well or better given in derivatives of the Saxon. He would have stricken out the " assemble " and left the " meet together." Like Wesley, he might be compelled by neces sity to a breach of the canon ; but, like him, he was never a willing schismatic, andTris singing robes were the full and flowing canonicals of the church by law established. Inspi ration makes short work with the usage of the best authors and ready-made elegances of diction; but where Words worth is not possessed by his demon, as Moliere said of Corneille, he equals Thomson in verbiage, out-Miltons Mil ton in artifice of style, and Latinises his diction beyond Dryden. The fact was, that he took up his early opinions on instinct, and insensibly modified them as he studied the masters of what may be called the Middle Period of Eng lish verse.* As a young man, he disparaged Yirgil (" We talked. a great deal of nonsense in those days," he said when taken to task for it later in life) ; at fifty-nine he translated three books of the ^neid, in emulation of Dryden, though falling far short of him in everything but closeness, as he seems, after a few years, to have been convinced. Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the true founder of the modern school, which admit no cis-Elizabethan authority save Milton, whose own English was formed upon those earlier models. Keats denounced the authors of that style which came in toward the close of the seventeenth century, and reigned absolute through the whole of the eighteenth, as * His "Character of a Happy Warrior" (1806), one of his noblest poems, has a dash of Dryden in it, — still more his " Epistle to Sir George Beaumont" (1811). DRYDEN. 265 " A schism, Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, . . „ who went about Holding a poor decrepit standard out, Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in largo The name of one Boileau 1 " But Keats had never then* studied the writers of whom he speaks so contemptuously, though he might have profited by so doing. Boileau would at least have taught him that flimsy would have been an apter epithet for the standard than for the mottoes upon it. Dryden was the author of that schism against which Keats so vehemently asserts the claim of the orthodox teaching it had displaced. He was far more just to Boileau, of whom Keats had probably never read a word. " If I would only cross the seas," he says, " I might find in France a living Horace and a Juvenal in the person of the admirable Boileau, whose numbers are excellent, whose expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just, whose language is pure, whose satire is pointed, and whose sense is just. What he borrows from the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good and almost as universally valuable." f Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a hundred and seventy years ; in the second class of English poets perhaps no one stands, on the whole, so high as he ; during his life time, in spite of jealousy, detraction, unpopular politics, and a suspicious change of faith, his pre-eminence was con ceded ; he was the earliest complete type of the purely literary man, in the modern sense; there is a singular unanimity in allowing him a certain claim to greatness which would be denied to men as famous and more read, — to Pope or Swift, for example ; he is supposed, in some way or other, to have reformed English poetry. It is now about half a century since the only uniform edition of his works was edited by Scott. No library is complete without him, * He studied Dryden's versification before writing his " Lamia," t On the Origin and Progress of Satire. See Johnson's counter opinion in his life of Dryden, 266 DRYDEN. no name is more familiar than his, and yet it may be suspected that few writers are more thoroughly buried in that great cemetery of the "British Poets." If contem porary reputation be often deceitful, posthumous fame may be generally trusted, for it is a verdict made up of the suffrages of the select men in succeeding generations. This verdict has been as good as unanimous in favour of Dryden. It is, perhaps, worth while to take a fresh observation of him, to consider him neither as warning nor example, but to endeavour to make out what it is that has given so lofty and firm a position to one of the most unequal, inconsistent, and faulty writers that ever lived. He is a curious example of what we often remark of the living, but rarely of the dead, — that they get credit for what they might be quite as much as for what they are, — and posterity has applied to him one of his own rules of criticism, judging him by the best rather than the average of his achievement, a thing posterity is seldom wont to do. On the losing side in politics, it is true of his polemical writings as of Burke's, — whom in many respects he resembles, and especially in that supreme quality of a reasoner, that his mind gathers not only heat, but clearness and expansion by its own motion, — that they have won his battle for him in the judgment of after times. To us, looking back at him, he gradually becomes a singularly interesting and even picturesque figure. He is in more senses than one, in language, in turn of thought, in style of mind, in the direction of his activity, the first of the moderns. He is the first literary man who was also a man of the world, as we understand the term. He succeeded Ben Jonson as the acknowledged dictator of wit and criticism, as Dr. Johnson, after nearly the same interval, succeeded him. All ages are, in some sense, ages of transition ; but there are times when the transition is more marked, more rapid ; and it is, perhaps, an ill fortune for a man of letters to arrive at maturity during such a period, still more to represent in himself the change that is going on? and to be an efficient cause in bringing it about. DRYDEN. 267 Unless, like Goethe, he is of a singularly uncontempo- raneous nature, capable of being tutta in se romita, and of running parallel with his time rather than be sucked into its current, he will be thwarted into that harmonious development of native force which has so much to do with its steady and successful application. Dry den suffered, no doubt, in this way. Though in creed he seems to have drifted backward in an eddy of the general current ; yet of the intellectual movement of the time, so far certainly as literature shared in it, he could say, with ^neas, not only that he saw, but that himself was a great part of it. That movement was, on the whole, a downward one, from faith to scepticism, from enthusiasm to cynicism, from the imagination to the understanding. It was in a direction altogether away from those springs of imagination and faith at which they of the last age had slaked the thirst or renewed the vigour of their souls. Dryden himself recognised that indefinable and gregarious influence which we call nowadays the Spirit of the Age, when he said that " every Age has a kind of uni versal Genius."* He had also a just notion of that in which he lived ; for he remarks, incidentally, that " all knowing ages are naturally sceptic and not at all bigoted, which, if I am not much deceived, is the proper character of our own."t It may be conceived that he was even painfully half-aware of having fallen upon a time incapable, not merely of a great poet, but perhaps of any poet at all; for nothing is so sensitive to the chill of a sceptical atmosphere as that enthusiasm, which, if it be not genius, is at least the beautiful illusion that saves it from the baffling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice unhappy he who, born to see things as they might be, is schooled by circumstances to see them as people say they are, — to read God in a prose translation. Such was Dryden's lot, and such, for a good part of his days, it was by his own choice. He who was of a stature to snatch the torch of life that flashes from lifted hand to hand along the generations, over the heads of inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy to the stews. * Essay on Dramatick Poesy. t Life of Lucian. 268 DRYDEN. As a writer for the stage, he deliberately adopted and repeatedly reaffirmed the maxim that " He who lives to please, must please to live." Without earnest convictions, no great or sound literature is conceivable. But if Dryden mostly wanted that inspira tion which comes of belief in and devotion to something nobler and more abiding than the present moment and its petulant need, he had, at least, the next best thing to that, — a thorough faith in himself. He was, moreover, a man of singularly open soul, and of a temper self-confident enough to be candid even with himself. His mind was growing to the last, his judgment widening and deepening, his artistic sense refining itself more and more. He con fessed his errors, and was not ashamed to retrace his steps in search of that better knowledge which the omniscience of superficial study had disparaged. Surely an intellect that is still pliable at seventy is a phenomenon as interest ing as it is rare. But at whatever period of his life we look at Dryden, and whatever, for the moment, may have been his poetic creed, there was something in the nature of the man that would not be wholly subdued to what it worked in. There are continual glimpses of something in him greater than he, hints of possibilities finer than any thing he has done. You feel that the whole of him was better than any random specimens, though of his best, seem to prove. Incessu patet, he has by times the large stride of the elder race, though it sinks too often into the slouch of a man who has seen better days. His grand air may, in part, spring from a habit of easy superiority to his com petitors; but must also, in part, be ascribed to an innate dignity of character. That this pre-eminence should have been so generally admitted, during his life, can only be ex plained by a bottom of good sense, kindliness, and sound judgment, whose solid worth could afford that many a flurry of vanity, petulance, and even error should flit across the surface and be forgotten. Whatever else Dryden may have been, the last and abiding impression of DRYDEN. 269 him is, that he was thoroughly manly ; and while it may be disputed whether he was a great poet, it may be said of him, as Wordsworth said of Burke, that "he was by far the greatest man of his age, not only abounding in know ledge himself, but feeding, in various directions, his most able contemporaries."* Dryden was born in 1631. He was accordingly six years old when Jonson died, was neary a quarter of a century younger than Milton, and may have personally known Bishop Hall, the first English satirist, who was living till 1656. On the other side, he was older than Swift by thirty-six, than Addison by forty-one, and than Pope by fifty-seven years. Dennis says that " Dryden, for the last ten years of his life, was much acquainted with Addison, and drank with him more than he ever used to do, probably so far as to hasten his end," being commonly " an extreme sober man." Pope tells us that, in his twelfth year, he "saw Dryden," perhaps at Will's, perhaps in the street, as Scott did Burns. Dryden himself visited Milton now and then, and was intimate with Davenant, who could tell him of Fletcher and Jonson from personal recollection. Thus he stands between the age before and that which followed him, giving a hand to each. His father was a country clergyman, of Puritan leanings, a younger son of an ancient county family. The Puritanism is thought to have come in with the poet's great-grandfather, who made in his will the somewhat singular statement that he was " assured by the Holy Ghost that he was elect of God." It would appear from this that Dryden's self-confidence was an inheritance. The solid quality of his mind showed itself early. He himself tells us that he had read Polybius " in English, with the pleasure of a boy, before he was ten years of age, and yet even then had some dark notions of the prudence with which he conducted his design"^ The con cluding words are very characteristic, even if Dryden, as * " The great man must have that intellect which puts in motion the intellect of others." — LANDOR, Itn. Con., Diogenes and Plato, f Character of Polybius (1692). 270 DRYDEN. men commonly do, interpreted his boyish turn of mind by later self-knowledge. We thus get a glimpse of him browsing — for, like Johnson, Burke, and the full as distin guished from the learned men, he was always a random reader* — in his father's library, and painfully culling here and there a spray of his own proper nutriment from among the stubs and thorns of Puritan divinity. After such schooling as could be had in the country, he was sent up to Westminster School, then under the headship of the celebrated Dr. Busby. Here he made his first essays in verse, translating, among other school exercises of the same kind, the third satire of Persius. In 1650 he was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained there for seven years. The only record of his college life is a dis cipline imposed, in 1652, for "disobedience to the Vice- Master, and contumacy in taking his punishment, inflicted by him." Whether this punishment was corporeal, as Johnson insinuates in the similar case of Milton, we are ignorant. He certainly retained no very fond recollection of his Alma Mater, for in his " Prologue to the University of Oxford " he says : — " Oxford to him a dearer name shall be Than his own mother university ; Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage, He chooses Athens in his riper age." By the death of his father, in 1654, he came into possession of a small estate of sixty pounds a-year, from which, how ever, a third must be deducted, for his mother's dower, till 1676. After leaving Cambridge he became secretary to his near relative, Sir Gilbert Pickering, at that time Cromwell's chamberlain, and a member of his Upper House. In 1670 he succeeded Davenant as Poet Laureate,! and Ho well as Historiographer, with a yearly salary of two hundred pounds. * " For my own part, who must confess it to my shame that I never read anything but for pleasure."— Life of Plutarch (1683). _ t Gray says petulantly enough that " Dryden was as disgraceful to the office, from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his verses." — GRAY to MASON, 19th December, 1757. DRYDEN. 271 This place ho lost at the Revolution, and had the mortifica tion to see his old enemy and butt, Shadwell, promoted to it, as the best poet the Whig party could muster. If William \vas obliged to read the verses of his official minstrel, Dryden was more than avenged. From 1688 to his death, twelve years later, he earned his bread manfully by his pen, without any mean complaining, and with no allusion to his fallen fortunes that is not dignified and touching. These latter years, during which he was his own man again, were probably the happiest of his life. In 1664 or 1665 he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. About a hundred pounds a-year were thus added to his income. The marriage is said not to have been a happy one, and perhaps it was not, for his wife was apparently a weak-minded woman; but the inference from the internal evidence of Dryden's plays, as of Shakespeare's, is very untrustworthy, ridicule of marriage having always been a common stock in trade of the comic writers. The earliest of his verses that have come down to us were written upon the death of Lord Hastings, and are as bad as they can be, — a kind of parody on the worst of Donne. They have every fault of his manner, without a hint of the subtile and often profound thought that more than redeems it. As the Doctor himself would have said, here is Donne outdone. The young nobleman died of the small-pox, and Dryden exclaims pathetically, — " Was there no milder way than the small-pox, The very filthiness of Pandora's box ? " He compares the pustules to " rosebuds stuck i' the lily skin about," and says that 11 Each little pimple had a tear in it To wail the fault its rising did commit." But he has not done his worst yet, by a great deal. What follows is even finer : — " No comet need foretell his change drew on. Whose corpse might seem a constellation. 272 DRYDEN. O, had lie died of old, how great a strife Had been who from his death should draw their life ! Who should, by one rich draught, become whate'er Seneca, Cato, Numa, Csesar, were, Learned, virtuous, pious, great, and have by this An universal metempsychosis ! Must all these aged sires in one funeral Expire ? all die in one so young, so small ? " It is said that one of Allston's early pictures was brought to him, after he had long forgotten it, and his opinion asked as to the wisdom of the young artist's persevering in the career he had chosen. Allston advised his quitting it forth with as hopeless. Could the same experiment have been tried with these verses upon Dryden, can any one doubt that his counsel would have been the same ? It should be remembered, however, that he was barely turned eighteen when they were written, and the tendency of his style is noticeable in so early an abandonment of the participial ed in learned and aged. In the next year he appears again in some commendatory verses prefixed to the sacred epigrams of his friend, John Hoddesdon. In these he speaks of the author as a "Young eaglet, who, thy nest thus soon forsook, So lofty and divine a course hast took As all admire, before the down begin To peep, as yet, upon thy smoother chin. " Here is almost every fault which Dryden's later nicety would have condemned. But perhaps there is no schooling so good for an author as his own youthful indiscretions. After this effort Dryden seems to have lain fallow for ten years, and then he at length reappears in thirty-seven " heroic stanzas " on the death of Cromwell. The versifica tion is smoother, but the conceits are there again, though in a milder form. The verse is modelled after " Gondibert." A single image from nature (he was almost always happy in these) gives some hint of the maturer Dryden : — " And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, Made him but greater seem, not greater grow." DRYDEN. 273 Two other verses, "And the isle, wheii her protecting genius went, Upon his obsequies loud sighs conferred," are interesting, because they show that he had been study ing the early poems of Milton. He has contrived to bury under a rubbish of verbiage one of the most purely imaginative passages ever written by the great Puritan poet. " From haunted spring and dale, Edged with poplar pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent." This is the more curious because, twenty-four years after wards, he says, in defending rhyme : " Whatever causes he [Milton] alleges for the abolishment of rhyme, 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, , , . where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at the age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer, though not a poet.5'* It was this, no doubt, that heartened Dr. Johnson to say of " Lycidas " that " the diction was harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing." It is Dryden's excuse that his characteristic excellence is to argue persuasively and powerfully, whether in verse or prose, and that he was amply endowed with the most needful quality of an advocate, — to be always strongly and wholly of his present way of thinking, what ever it might be. Next we have, in 1660, " Astrsea Redux" on the "happy restoration" of Charles II. In this also we can forebode little of the full-grown Dryden but his defects. We see his tendency to exaggeration, and to confound physical with metaphysical, as where he says of the ships that brought home the royal brothers, that " The joyful London meets The princely York, himself alone a freight, The Swiftsure groans beneath great Gloster's weight * Essay on the Origin and Progress of Satire. 146 274 DRYDEN. and speaks of the 11 Repeated prayer Which stormed the skies and ravished Charles from thence." There is also a certain everydayness, not to say vulgarity, of phrase, which Dryden never wholly refined away, and which continually tempts us to sum up at once against him as the greatest poet that ever was or could be made wholly out of prose. " Heaven would no bargain for its blessings drive " is an example. On the other hand, there are a few verses almost worthy of his best days, as these : — " Some lazy ages lost in sleep and ease, No action leave to busy chronicles ; Such whose supine felicity but makes In story chasms, in epochas mistakes, O'er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down, Till with his silent sickle they are mown." These are all the more noteworthy, that Dryden, unless in argument, is seldom equal for six lines together. In the poem to Lord Clarendon (1662) there are four verses that have something of the "energy divine" for which Pope praised his master. "Let envy, then, those crimes within you see From which the happy never must be free ; Envy that does with misery reside, The joy and the revenge of ruined pride." In his " Aurengzebe" (1675) there is a passage, of which, as it is a good example of Dryden, I shall quote the whole, though my purpose aims mainly at the latter verses : — " When I consider life, 't is all a cheat ; Yet, fooled with Hope, men favour the deceit, Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay ; To-morrow 's falser than the former day, Lies worse, and, while it says we shall be blest With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. DRYDEN. 275 Strange cozenage ! none would live past years again, Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain, And from the dregs of life think to receive What the first sprightly running could not give. I 'm tired of waiting for this chymic gold Which fools us young and beggars us when old." The "first sprightly running " of Dryden'a vintage was, it must be confessed, a little muddy, if not beery ; but if his own soil did not produce grapes of the choicest flavour, he knew where they were to be had ; and his product, like sound wine, grew better the longer it stood upon the lees. He tells us, evidently thinking of himself, that in a poet, " from fifty to threescore, the balance generally holds, even in our colder climates, for he loses not much in fancy ; and judgment, which is the effect of observation, still increases. His succeeding years afford him little more than the stubble of his own harvest, yet, if his constitution be healthful, his mind may still retain a decent vigour, and the gleanings of that of Ephraim, in comparison with others, will surpass the vintage of Abiezer.5;* Since Chaucer, none of our poets has had a constitution more healthful, and it was his old age that yielded the best of him, In him the understanding was, perhaps, in overplus for his entire good fortune as a poet, and that is a faculty among the earliest to mature. We have seen him, at only ten years, divining the power of reason in Polybius.f The same turn of mind led him later to imitate the French school of tragedy, and to admire in Ben Jonson the most correct of English poets. It was his imagination that needed quick ening, and it is very curious to trace through his different prefaces the gradual opening of his eyes to the causes of the solitary pre-eminence of Shakespeare. At first he is sensible of an attraction towards him which he cannot explain, and for which he apologises, as if it were wrong. But he feels himself drawn more and more strongly, till at * Dedication of the Georgics. t Dryden's penetration is always remarkable. His general judg ment of Polybius coincides remarkably with that of Mommsen. (Rom. Gesch. II. 448, seq.) 276 DRYDEN. last he ceases to resist altogether, and is forced to acknow ledge that there is something in this one man that is not and never was anywhere else, something not to be reasoned about, ineffable, divine; if contrary to the rules, so much the worse for them. It may be conjectured that Dryden's Puritan associations may have stood in the way of his more properly poetic culture, and that his early knowledge of Shakespeare was slight. He tells us that Davenant, whom he could not have known before he himself was twenty-seven, first taught him to admire the great poet. But even after his imagination had become conscious of its prerogative, and his expression had been ennobled by fre quenting this higher society, we find him continually drop ping back into that sermo pedestris which seems, on the whole, to have been his more natural element. We always feel his epoch in him, that he was the lock which let our language down from its point of highest poetry to its level of easiest and most gently flowing prose. His enthusiasm needs the contagion of other minds to arouse it ; but his strong sense, his command of the happy word, his wit, which is distinguished by a certain breadth and, as it were, power of generalisation, as Pope's by keenness of edge and point, were his, whether he would or no. Accordingly, his poetry is often best and his verse more flowing where (as in parts of his version of the twenty-ninth ode of the third book of Horace) he is amplifying the suggestions of another mind.* Viewed from one side, he justifies Milton's re mark of him, that " he was a good rhymist, but no poet." To look at all sides, and to distrust the verdict of a single mood, is, no doubt, the duty of a critic. But how if a cer tain side be so often presented as to thrust forward in the memory and disturb it in the effort to recall that total impression (for the office of a critic is not, though often so misunderstood, to say guilt1}/ or not guilty of some particular * "I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in English." Preface to Second Miscellany. Fox said that it " was better than the original." J. C. Scaliger said of Erasmus — "Ex alieno ingenio poeta, ex suo versificator." DRYDEN. 277 fact) which is the only safe ground of judgment ? It is the weight of the whole man, not of one or the other limb of him, that we want. Expende Hannibalem. Very good, but not in a scale capacious only of a single quality at a time, for it is their union, and not their addition, that assures the value of each separately. It was not this or that which gave him his weight in council, his swiftness of decision in battle that outran the forethought of other men, — it was Hannibal. But this prosaic element in Dryden will force itself upon me. As I read him, I cannot help thinking of an ostrich, to be classed with flying things, and capable, what with leap and flap together, of leaving the earth for a longer or shorter space, but loving the open plain, where wing and foot help each other to something that is both flight and run at once. What with his haste and a certain dash, which, according to our mood, we may call florid or splendid, he seems to stand among poets where Rubens does among painters, — greater, perhaps, as a colourist than an artist, yet great here also, if we compare him with any but the first. We have arrived at Dryden's thirty-second year, and thus far have found little in him to warrant an augury that he was ever to be one of the great names in English litera ture, the most perfect type, that is, of his class, and that class a high one, though not the highest. If Joseph de Maistre's axiom, Qui ria pas vaincu a trente ans, ne vaincra jamais, were true, there would be little hope of him, for he has won no battle yet. But there is something solid and doughty in the man, that can rise from defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, when we are able to choose our position better, and the sun is at our back. Hitherto his performances have been mainly of the obligate sort, at which few men of original force are good, least of all Dryden, who had always something of stiffness in his strength. Waller had praised the living Cromwell in per haps the manliest verses he ever wrote, — not very manly, to be sure, but really elegant, and, on the whole, better than those in which Dryden squeezed out melodious tears. 278 DRYDEN. Waller, who had also made himself conspicuous as a volunteer Antony to the country squire turned Caesar, (" With ermine clad and purple, let him hold A royal sceptre made of Spanish gold,") was more servile than Dryden in hailing t1 .e return of ex officio Majesty. He bewails to Charles, in muffling heroics, " Our sorrow and our < , ime To have accepted life so long a time, With out you here." A weak man, put to the test by rough and angry times, as Waller was, may be pitied, but meanness is nothing but contemptible under any circumstances. If it be true that "every conqueror creates a Muse," Cromwell was un fortunate. Even Milton's sonnet, though dignified, is reserved if not distrustful. Marvell's "Horatian Ode," the most truly classic in our language, is worthy of its theme. The same poet's Elegy, in parts noble, and everywhere humanly tender, is worth more than all Carlyle's biography as a witness to the gentler qualities of the hero, and of the deep affection that stalwart nature could inspire in hearts of truly masculine temper. As it is little known, a few verses of it may be quoted to show the difference between grief that thinks of its object and grief that thinks of its rhymes : — " Yalour, religion, friendship, prudence died At once with him, and all that's good beside, And we, death's refuse, nature's dregs, confined To loathsome life, alas ! are left behind. Where we (so once we used) shall now no more, To fetch day, press about his chamber-door, No more shall hear that powerful language charm, Whose force oft spared the labour of his arm, No more shall follow where he spent the days In war or counsel, or in prayer and praise. I saw him dead ; a leaden slumber lies, And mortal sleep, over those wakeful eyes ; DRYDEN. 279 Those gentle rays under the lids were fled, Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed ; That port, which so majestic was and>3trong, Loose and deprived of vigour, stretched along, All withered, all discoloured, pale, and wan, How much another thing ! no more That Man ! 0 human glory ! vain ! 0 death ! 0 wings ! 0 worthless world ! 0 transitory things ! Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed That still, though dead, greater than Death he laid, And, in his altered face, you something feign That threatens Death he yet will live again." Such verses might not satisfy Lindley Murray, but they are of that higher mood which satisfies the heart. These couplets, too, have an energy worthy of Milton's friend : — " When up the armed mountains of Duuljar He marched, and through deep Severn, ending war." " Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse Shall the English soldier, ere he charge, rehearse." On the whole, one is glad that Dryden's panegyric on the Protector was so poor. It was purely official verse-making. Had there been any feeling in it, there had been baseness in his address to Charles. As it is, we may fairly assume that he was so far sincere in both cases as to be thankful for a chance to exercise himself in rhyme, without much caring whether upon a funeral or a restoration. He might naturally enough expect that poetry would have a better chance under Charles than under Cromwell, or any successor with Commonwealth principles. Cromwell had more serious matters to think about than verses, while Charles might at least care as much about them as it was in his base good-nature to care about anything but loose women and spaniels. Dryden's sound sense, afterwards so conspicuous, shows itself even in these pieces, when we can get at it through the tangled thicket of tropical phrase. But the authentic and unmistakable Dry den first manifests himself in some verses addressed to his friend, Dr. Oharlton, in 1663. We have first his common sense, which has almost the point of wit, yet with a tang of prose : — 28o DRYDEN. "The longest tyranny that ever swayed Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed Their freeborn reason to the Stagyrite, And made his torch their universal light. So truth, while only one supplied the state, Grew scarce ahd dear and yet sophisticate. Still it was bought, like cmp'ric wares or charms , Hard words sealed up with Aristotle s arms." Then we have his graceful sweetness of fancy, where he speaks of the inhabitants of the New World :— " Guiltless men who danced away their time, Fresh as their groves and happy as their clime." And, finally, there is a hint of imagination where " mighty visions of the Danish race " watch round Charles sheltered in Stonehenge after the battle of Worcester. These passages might have been written by the Dryden whom we learn to know fifteen years later. They have the advantage that he wrote them to please himself. His contemporary, Dr. Heylin, said of French cooks, that " their trade was not to feed the belly, but the palate." Dryden was a great while in learning this secret, as available in good writing as in cookery. He strove after it, but his thorougly English nature, to the last, would too easily content itself with serving up the honest beef of his thought, without regard to daintiness of flavour in the dressing of it.* Of the best English poetry, it might be said that it is understanding aerated by imagination. In Dryden the solid part too often refused to mix kindly with the leaven, either remaining lumpish or rising to a hasty puffiness. Grace and lightness were with him much more a laborious achievement than a * In one of the last letters he ever wrote, thanking his cousin, Mrs. Steward, for a gift of marrow-puddings, he says : "A chine of honest bacon would please my appetite more than all the marrow-puddings ; for I like them better plain, having a very vulgar stomach." So of Cowley he says : " There was plenty enough, but ill sorted, whole pyra mids of sweetmeats for boys and women, but little of solid meat for men." The physical is a truer antitype of the spiritual man than we are willing to admit, and the brain is often forced to acknowledge the inconvenient country-cousinship of the stomach. DRYDEN. 281 natural gift, and it is all the more remarkable that he should so often have attained to what seems such an easy perfection in both. Always a hasty writer,* he was long in forming his style, and to the last was apt to snatch the readiest word rather than wait for the fittest. He was not wholly and unconsciously poet, but a thinker who sometimes lost him self on enchanted ground and was transfigured by its touch. This preponderance in him of the reasoning over the intuitive faculties, the one always there, the other flashing in when you least expect it, accounts for that inequality and even incongruousness in his writing which makes one revise his judgment at every tenth page. In his prose you come upon passages that persuade you he is a poet, in spite of his verses so often turning state's evidence against him as to convince you he is none. He is a prose-writer, with a kind of .^Eolian attachment. For example, take this bit of prose from the dedication of his version of Virgil's Pastorals, 1694; "He found the strength of his genius betimes, and was even in his youth preluding to his Georgicks and his -<3Eneis. He could not forbear to try his wings, though his pinions were not hardened to maintain a long, laborious flight ; yet sometimes they bore him to a pitch as lofty as ever he was able to reach afterwards. But when he was admonished by his subject to descend, he came down gently circling in the air and singing to the ground, like a lark melodious in her mounting and continuing her song till she alights, still preparing for a higher flight at her next sally, and tuning her voice to better music." This is charming, and yet even this wants the ethereal tincture that pervades the style of Jeremy Taylor, making it, as Burke said of Sheridan's eloquence, " neither prose nor poetry, but something better than either." Let us * In his preface to "All for Love," he says, evidently alluding to himself : " If he have a friend whose hastiness in writing is his great est fault, Horace would have taught him to have minced the matter, and to have called it readiness of thought and a flowing fancy." And in the Preface to the Fables he says of Homer : " This vehemence of his, I confess, is more suitable to my temper." He makes other allusions to it. 282 DRYDEN. compare Taylor's treatment of the same image : " For so have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven and climb above the clouds ; but the poor bird was beaten back by the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest than it could recover by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings, till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was over, and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing as if it had learned music and motion of an angel as he passed sometimes through the air about his ministries here below." Taylor's fault is that his sentences too often smell of the library, but what an open air is here ! How unpremeditated it all seems ! How carelessly he knots each new thought, as it comes, to the one before it with an and, like a girl making lace! And what a slidingly musical use he makes of the sibilants with which our language is unjustly taxed by those who can only make them hiss, not sing ! There are twelve of them in the first twenty words, fifteen of which are monosyllables. We notice the structure of Dryden's periods, but this grows up as we read. It gushes, like the song of the bird itself, — " In profuse strains of unpremeditated art." Let us now take a specimen of Dryden's bad prose from one of his poems. I open the " Annus Mirabilis " at random, and hit upon this : — " Our little fleet was now engaged so far, That, like the swordfish in the whale, they fought : The combat only seemed a civil war, Till through their bowels we our passage wrought." Is this Dryden, or Sternhold, or Shadwell, those Toms who made him say that "dulness was fatal to the name of Tom ? " The natural history of Goldsmith in the verse of DRYDEN. 283 Pye ! His thoughts did not " voluntary move harmonious numbers." He had his choice between prose and verse, and seems to be poetical on second thought. I do not speak without book. He was more than half conscious of it himself. In the same letter to Mrs. Steward, just cited, he says, " I am still drudging on, always a poet and never a good one ; " and this from no mock-modesty, for he is always handsomely frank in telling us whatever of his own doing pleased him. This was written in the last year of his life, and at about the same time he says elsewhere : " What judgment I had increases rather than diminishes, and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into verse or to give them the other harmony of prose ; I have so long studied and practised both, that they are grown into a habit and become familiar to me."* I think that a man who was primarily a poet would hardly have felt this equanimity of choice. I find a confirmation of this feeling about Dryden in his early literary loves. His taste was not an instinct, but the slow result of reflection and of the manfulness with which he always acknowledged to himself his own mistakes. In this latter respect few men deal so magnanimously with themselves as he, and accordingly few have been so happily inconsistent. Ancora imparo might have served him for a motto as well as Michael Angelo. His prefaces are a complete log of his life, and the habit of writing them was a useful one to him, for it forced him to think with a pen in his hand, which, according to Goethe, " if it do no other good, keeps the mind from staggering about." In these prefaces we see his taste gradually rising from Du Bartas to Spenser, from Cowley to Milton, from Oorneille to Shakespeare. " I remember when I was a boy," he says in his dedication of the " Spanish Friar," 1681, "I thought inimitable Spenser a mean poet in comparison of Sylvester's Du £artast and was rapt into an ecstacy when I read these lines : — * Preface to the Tables. 284 DRYDEN. 'Now when the winter's keener breath began To crystallise the Baltic ocean, To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods, And periwig with snow* the baldpate woods.' I am much deceived if this be not abominable fustian." Swift, in his " Tale of a Tub," has a ludicrous passage in this style: "Look on this globe of earth, you will find it to be a very complete and fashionable dress. What is that which some call land, but a fine coat faced with green ? or the sea, but a waistcoat of water-tabby ? Proceed to the particular works of creation, you will find how curious journeyman Nature has been to trim up the vegetable beaux ; observe how sparkish a periwig adorns the head of a beech, and what a fine doublet of white satin is worn by the birch." The fault is not in any inaptness of the images, nor in the mere vulgarity of the things themselves, but in that of the associations they awaken. The " Prithee, undo this button " of Lear, coming where it does and expressing what it does, is one of those touches of the pathetically sublime, of which only Shakespeare ever knew the secret. Herrick, too, has a charming poem on " Julia's petticoat," the charm being that he lifts the familiar and the low to the region of sentiment. In the passage from Sylvester, it is precisely the reverse, and the wig takes as much from the sentiment as it adds to a Lord Chancellor. So Pope's proverbial verse, "True wit is Nature to advantage drest," unpleasantly suggests Nature under the hands of a lady's- maid.f We have no word in English that will exactly * Wool is Sylvester's word. Dryden reminds us of Burke in this also, that he always quotes from memory and seldom exactly. His memory was better for things than for words. This helps to explain the length of time it took him to master that vocabulary at last so various, full, and seemingly extemporaneous. He is a large quoter, though, with his usual inconsistency, he says, "lam no admirer of quotations." — (Essay on Heroic Plays.) t In the Epimetheus of a poet usually as elegant as Gray himself, one's finer sense is a little jarred by the " Spectral gleam their snow-white dresses." DRYDEN. 285 define this want of propriety in diction. Vulgar is too strong, and commonplace too weak. Perhaps bourgeois comes as near as any. It is to be noticed that Dryden does not unequivocally condemn the passage he quotes, but qualifies it with an "if I am not much mistaken," Indeed, though his judgment in substantials, like that of Johnson, is always worth having, his taste, the negative half of genius, never altogether refined itself from a colloquial familiarity, which is one of the charms of his prose, and gives that air of easy strength in which his satire is unmatched. In his "Royal Martyr" (1669), the tyrant Maximin says to the gods : — " Keep you your rain and sunshine in the skies, And I'll keep back my flame and sacrifice ; Your trade of Heaven shall soon be at a stand, And all your goods lie dead upon your hand" — a passage which has as many faults as only Dryden was capable of committing, even to a false idiom forced by the last rhyme. The same tyrant in dying exclaims : — " And after thee I'll go, Revenging still, and following e'en to th' other world my blow, And, shoving back this earth on which I sit, I'll mount and scatter all the gods I hit." In the "Conquest of Grenada" (1670), we have:— " This little loss in our vast body shews So small, that half have never heard the news ; Fame's out of breath e'er she can fly so far To tell 'em all that you have e'er made war."* * This probably suggested to Young the grandiose image in his "Last Day" (B. ii.) :— " Those overwhelming armies . . . Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking down Roused the broad front and called the battle on." This, to be sure, is no plagiarism ; but it should be carried to Dryden's credit that we catch the poets of the next half-century oftener with their hands in his pockets than in those of any one else. 286 DRYDEN. And in the same play, " That busy thing, The soul, is packing up, and just on wing Like parting swallows when they seek the spring," where the last sweet verse curiously illustrates that in equality (poetry on a prose background) which so often puzzles us in Dryden. Infinitely worse is the speech of Alraanzor to his mother's ghost : — " I'll rush into the covert of the night And pull thee backward by the shroud to light, Or else I'll squeeze thee like a bladder there, And make thee groan thyself away to air." What wonder that Dryden should have been substituted for Davenant as the butt of the " Rehearsal," and that the parody should have had such a run ? And yet it was Dryden who, in speaking of Persius, hit upon the happy phrase of " boisterous metaphors ; "* it was Dryden who said of Cowley, whom he elsewhere calls " the darling of my youth,"f that he was " sunk in reputation because he could never forgive any conceit which came in his way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and small."! But the passages * Essay on Satire. t Ibid. $ Preface to Fables. Men are always inclined to revenge themselves on their old idols in the first enthusiasm of conversion to a purer faith. Cowley had all the faults that Dryden loads him with, and yet his popularity was to some extent deserved. He at least had a theory that poetry should soar, not creep, and longed for some expedient, in the failure of natural wings, by which he could lift himself away from the conventional and commonplace. By beating out the substance of Pindar very thin, he contrived a kind of balloon, which, tumid with gas, did certainly mount a little, into the clouds, if not above them, though sure to come suddenly down with a bump. His odes, indeed, are an alternation of upward jerks and concussions, and smack more of Chapelain than of the Theban, but his prose is very agreeable, — Montaigne and water, perhaps, but with some flavour of the Gascon wine left. The strophe of his ode to Dr. Scarborough, in which he compares his surgical friend, operating for the stone, to Moses striking the rock, more than justifies all the ill that Dryden could lay at his door. It was into precisely such mud-holes that Cowley's Will-o'-the- Wisp had misguided him. Men may never wholly shake off a vice but they are always conscious of it, and hate the tempter. DRYDEN, 287 I have thus far cited as specimens of our poet's coarseness (for poet he surely was intus, though not always in cute) were written before he was forty, and he had an odd notion, suitable to his healthy complexion, that poets on the whole improve after that date. Man at forty, he says, " seems to be fully in his summer tropic, .... and I believe that it will hold in all great poets that, though they wrote before with a certain heat of genius which inspired them, yet that heat was not perfectly digested." But artificial heat is never to be digested at all, as is plain in Dryden's case. He was a man who warmed slowly, and, in his hurry to supply the market, forced his mind. The result was the same after forty as before. In " CEdipus " (1679) we find, 11 Not one bolt Shall err from Thebes, but more be called for, more, New-moulded thunder of a larger size ! " This play was written in conjunction with Lee, of whom Dryden relates! that, when some one said to him, " It is easy enough to write like a madman," he replied, "No, it is hard to write like a madman, but easy enough to write like a fool," — perhaps the most compendious lecture on poetry ever delivered. The splendid bit of eloquence, which has so much the sheet-iron clang of impeachment thunder (I hope that Dryden is not in the Library of Congress ! ) is perhaps Lee's. The following passage almost certainly is his : — " Sure 't is the end of all things ! Fate has torn The lock of Time off, and his head is now The ghastly ball of round Eternity ! " But the next, in which the soul is likened to the pocket of an indignant housemaid charged with theft, is wholly in Dryden's manner : — "No ; I dare challenge heaven to turn me outward, And shake my soul quite empty in your sight." * Dedication of Georgics. t In a letter to Dennis, 1693. 288 DRYDEN. In the same style, he makes his Don Sebastian (1690) say that he is as much astonished as "drowsy mortals" at the last trump, "When, called in haste, they fumble for their limbs," and propose to take upon himself the whole of a crime shared with another by asking Heaven to charge the bill on him. And in " King Arthur," written ten years after the Preface from which I have quoted his confession about Dubartas, we have a passage precisely of the kind he condemned ; — " Ah for the many souls as but this morn Were clothed with flesh and warmed with vital blood, But naked now, or skirted but with air." Dryden too often violated his own admirable rule, that "an author is not to write all he can, but only all he ought."* In his worst images, however, there is often a vividness that half excuses them. But it is a grotesque vividness, as from the flare of a bonfire. They do not flash into sudden lustre, as in the great poets, where the imagin ations of poet and reader leap toward each other and meet half-way. English prose is indebted to Dryden for having freed it from the cloister of pedantry. He, more than any other single writer, contributed, as well by precept as example, to give it suppleness of movement and the easier air of the modern world. His own style, juicy with proverbial phrases, has that familiar dignity, so hard to attain, perhaps unattain able except by one who, like Dryden, feels that his position is assured. Charles Cotton is as easy, but not so elegant ; Walton as familiar, but not so flowing; Swift as idiomatic, but not so elevated; Burke more splendid, but not so equally luminous. That his style was no easy acquisition (though, of course, the aptitude was innate) he himself tells us. In his dedication of " Troilus and Cressida" (1679), where he seems to hint at the erection of an Academy, he * Preface to Fables. DRYDEN. 289 says that " the perfect knowledge of a tongue was never attained by any single person. The Court, the College, and the Town must all be joined in it. And as our English is a composition of the dead and living tongues, there is required a perfect knowledge, not only of the Greek and Latin, but of the Old German, French, and Italian, and to help all these, a conversation with those authors of our own who have written with the fewest faults in prose and verse. But how barbarously we yet write and speak your Lordship knows, and I am sufficiently sensible in my own English.* For I am often put to a stand in considering whether what I write be the idiom of the tongue, or false grammar and nonsense couched beneath that specious name of Anglicism, and have no other way to clear my doubts but by translat ing my English into Latin, and thereby trying what sense the words will bear in a more stable language." Tantce molls erat. Five years later : " The proprieties and delicacies of the English are known to few ; it is impossible even for a good wit to understand and practice them with out the help of a liberal education, long reading and digesting of those few good authors we have amongst us, vhe knowledge of men and manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversation with the best company of both sexes, and, in short, without wearing off the rust which he contracted while he was laying in a stock of learning." In the pas sage I have italicised, it will be seen that Dryden lays some stress upon the influence of women in refining language. Swift, also, in his plan for an Academy, says : " Now, though I would by no means give the ladies the trouble of advising us in the reformation of our language, yet I cannot help thinking that, since they have been left out of all meetings except parties at play, or where worse designs are * More than half a century later, Orrery, in his "Remarks" on Swift, says : " We speak and we write at random ; and if a man's common conversation were committed to paper, he would be startled for to find himself guilty in so few sentences of so many solecisms and such false English." I do not remember for to anywhere in Dryden'a prose. So few has long been denizened ; no wonder, since it is nothing more than si peu Anglicised. 290 DRYDEN. carried on, our conversation has very much degenerated.'5* Swift affirms that the language had grown corrupt since the Restoration, and that " the Court, which used to be the standard of propriety and correctness of speech, was then, and, I think, has ever since continued, the worst school in England."! He lays the blame partly on the general licentiousness, partly upon the French education of many of Charles's courtiers, and partly on the poets. Dryden undoubtedly formed his diction by the usage of the Court. The age was a very free-and-easy, not to say a very coarse one. Its coarseness was not external, like that of Eliza beth's day, but the outward mark of an inward depravity. What Swift's notion of the refinement of women was may be judged by his anecdotes of Stella. I will not say that Dryden's prose did not gain by the conversational elasticity which his frequenting men and women of the world enabled him to give it. It is the best specimen of every-day style that we have. But the habitual dwelling of his mind in a * Letter to the Lord High Treasurer. t Ibid. He complains of "manglings and abbreviations." "What does your Lordship think of the words drudg'd, disturb'd, rebuk'd, fledg'd, and a thousand others ? " In a contribution to the " Tatler" (No. 230) he ridicules the use of 'urn for them, and a number of slang phrases, among which is mob. " The war," he says, "has introduced abundance of polysyllables, which will never be able to live many more campaigns." Speculations, operations, preliminaries, ambas sadors, pallisadoes, communication, circumvallation, battalions, are the instances he gives, and all are now familiar. No man, or body of men, can dam the stream of language. Dryden is rather fond of 'em for them, but uses it rarely in his prose. Swift himself prefers 't is to it is, as does Emerson still. In what Swift says of the poets, he may be fairly suspected of glancing at Dryden, who was his kinsman, and whose prefaces and translation of Virgil he ridicules in the " Tale of a Tub." Dryden is reported to have said of him, " Cousin Swift is no poet." The Dean began his literary career by Pindaric odes to Athenian Societies and the like, — perhaps the greatest mistake as to his own powers of which an author was ever guilty. It was very likely that he would send these to his relative, already distinguished, for his opinion upon them. If this was so, the justice of Dryden's judgment must have added to the smart. Swift never forgot or for gave ; Dryden was careless enough to do the one, and large enough to do the other. DRYDEN. 291 commonplace atmosphere, and among those easy levels of sentiment which befitted Will's Coffee-house and the Bird cage Walk, was a damage to his poetry. Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character. He cannot always distinguish between enthusi asm and extravagance when he sees them. But apart from these influences which I have adduced in exculpation, there was certainly a vein of coarseness in him, a want of that exquisite sensitiveness which is the conscience of the artist. An old gentleman, writing to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1745, professes to remember "plain John Dryden (before he paid his court with success to the great) in one uniform clothing of Norwich drugget. I have eat tarts at the Mulberry Garden with him and Madam Reeve, when our author advanced to a sword and Chadreux wig."* I always fancy Dryden in the drugget, with wig, lace ruffles, and sword superimposed. It is the type of this curiously-incongruous man. The first poem by which Dryden won a general acknow ledgment of his power was the " Annus Mirabilis," written in his thirty-seventh year. Pepys, himself not altogether a bad judge, doubtless expresses the common opinion when he says — " I am very well pleased this night with reading a poem I brought home with me last night from Westminster Hall, of Dryden's, upon the present war ; a very good * Both Malone and Scott accept this gentleman's evidence without question, but I confess suspicion of a memory that runs back more than eighty-one years, and recollects a man before he had any claim to remembrance. Dryden was never poor, and there is at Oxford a por trait of him painted in 1664, which represents him in a superb periwig and laced band. This was " before he had paid his court with success to the great." But the story is at least ben trovato, and morally true enough to serve as an illustration. Who the " old gentleman " was has never been discovered. Of Crowne (who has some interest for us as a sometime student at Harvard) he says— "Many a cup of metheglin have I drank with little starch'd Johnny Crown ; we called him so, from the stiff, unalterable primness of his long cravat." Crowne re flects no more credit on his Alma Mater than Downing. Both were sneaks, and of such a kind as, I think, can only be produced by a de bauched Puritanism. Crowne, as a rival of Dryden, is contemptuously alluded to by Gibber in his " Apology." 292 DRYDEN. poem."* And a very good poem, in some sort, it continues to be, in spite of its amazing blemishes. We must always bear in mind that Dryden lived in an age that supplied him with no ready-made inspiration, and that big phrases and images are apt to be pressed into the service when great ones do not volunteer. With this poem begins the long series of Dryden's prefaces, of which Swift made such excellent, though malicious, fun that I cannot forbear to quote it. " I do utterly disapprove and declare against that pernicious custom of making the preface a bill of fare to the book. For I have always looked upon it as a high point of indiscretion in monster-mongers and other retailers of strange sights to hang out a fair picture over the door, drawn after the life, with a most eloquent description underneath ; this has saved me many a threepence. . Such is exactly the fate at this time of prefaces. . . . This expedient was admirable at first ; our great Dryden has long carried it as far as it would go, and with incredible success. He has often said to me in confidence, ' that the world would never have suspected him to be so great a poet, if he had not assured them so frequently, in his prefaces, that it was impossible they could either doubt or forget it.' Perhaps it may be so ; however, I much fear his instruc tions have edified out of their place, and taught men to grow wiser in certain points where he never intended they shouldn't The monster-mongers is a terrible thrust, when we remember some of the comedies and heroic plays which Dryden ushered in this fashion. In the dedication of the " Annus" to the city of London is one of those pithy sen tences of which Dryden is ever afterwards so full, and which he lets fall with a carelessness that seems always to deepen the meaning: "I have heard, indeed, of some virtuous persons who * Diary, III. 390. Almost the only notices of Dryden that make him alive to me I have found in the delicious book of this Polonius- Montaigne, the only man who ever had the courage to keep a sincere journal, even under the shelter of cipher. t Tale of a Tub, Sect. V. Pepys also speaks of buying the "Maiden Queen" of Mr. Dryden's, which he himself, in his preface, seems to brag of, and indeed is a good play. — 18th January 1668. DRYDEN. 293 have ended unfortunately, but never of any virtuous nation ; Providence is engaged too deeply when the cause becomes so general." In his "account" of the poem in a letter to Sir Robert Howard he says : " I have chosen to write my poem in quatrains or stanzas of four in alternate rhyme, because I have ever judged them more noble and of greater dignity, both for the sound and number, than any other verse in use amongst us. ... The learned languages have certainly a great advantage of us in not being tied to the slavery of any rhyme But in this necessity of our rhymes, I have always found the couplet verse most easy, though not so proper for this occasion ; for there the work is sooner at an end, every two lines concluding the labour of the poet." A little further on : " They (the French) write in alexandrines, or verses of six feet, such as amongst us is the old transla tion of Homer by Chapman : all which, by lengthening their chain,* makes the sphere of their activity the greater." I have quoted these passages because, in a small compass, they include several things characteristic of Dry den. " I have ever judged," and " I have always found," are particularly so. If he took up an opinion in the morning, he would have found so many arguments for it before night that it would seem already old and familiar. So with his reproach of rhyme ; a year or two before he was eagerly defending it;t again a few years, and he will utterly condemn and * He is fond of this image. In the "Maiden Queen" Celadon tells Sabina that, when he is with her rival Florimel, his heart is still her prisoner, "it only draws a longer chain after it." _ Gold smith's fancy was taken by it ; and everybody admires in the "Traveller " the extraordinary conceit of a heart dragging a lengthen ing chain. The smoothness of too many rhymed pentameters is that of thin ice over shallow water ; so long as we glide along rapidly, all is well ; but if we dwell a moment on any one spot, we may find ourselves knee-deep in mud. A later poet, in trying to improve on Goldsmith, shows the ludicrousness of the image : — " And round my heart's leg ties its galling chain." To write imaginatively a man should have — imagination ! t See his epistle dedicatory to the "Rival Ladies" (1664). For the other side, see particularly a passage in his "Discourse on Epic Poetry" (1697)? 294 DRY DEN. drop it in his plays, while retaining it in his translations \ afterwards his study of Milton leads him to think that blank verse would suit the epic style better, and he proposes to try it with Homer, but at last translates one book as a specimen, and behold, it is in rhyme ! But the charm of this great advocate is, that, whatever side he was on, he could always find excellent reasons for it, and state them with great force, and abundance of happy illustration. He is an exception to the proverb, and is none the worse pleader that he is always pleading his own cause. The blunder about Chapman is of a kind into which his hasty tempera ment often betrayed him. He remembered that Chapman's " Iliad " was in a long measure, concluded without looking that it was alexandrine, and then attributes it generally to his "Homer." Chapman's "Iliad" is done in fourteen- syllable verse, and his " Odyssee " in the very metre that Dry den himself used in his own version.* I remark also what he says of the couplet, that it was easy because the second verse concludes the labour of the poet. And yet it was Dryden who found it hard for that very reason. His vehement abundance refused those narrow banks, first running over into a triplet, and, even then uncontainable, rising to an alexandrine in the concluding verse. And I have little doubt that it was the roominess, rather than the dignity, of the quatrain which led him to choose it. As apposite to this, I may quote what he elsewhere says of octosyllablic verse : " The thought can turn itself with greater ease in a larger compass. When the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straightens the expres- * In the same way he had two years before assumed that Shake speare " was the first who, to shun the pains of continued rhyming, invented that kind of writing which we call blank verse ! " Dryden was never, I suspect, a very careful student of English literature. He seems never to have known that Surrey translated a part of the "^Eneid" (and with great spirit) into blank verse. Indeed, he was not a scholar, in the proper sense of the word, but he had that faculty of rapid assimilation without study, so remarkable in Coleridge and other rich minds, whose office is rather to impregnate than to invent. These brokers of thought perform a great office in literature, second only to that of originators. DR YDEN, 295 sion : we are thinking of the close, when we should be employed in adorning the thought. It makes a poet giddy with turning in a space too narrow for his imagination." * Dry den himself, as was not always the case with him, was well satisfied with his work. He calls it his best hitherto, and attributes his success to the excellence of his subject, " incomparably the best he had ever had, excepting only the Royal Family" The first part is devoted to the Dutch war ; the last to the fire of London. The martial half is infinitely the better of the two. He altogether surpasses his model, Davenant. If his poem lack the gravity of thought attained by a few stanzas of " Gondi- bert," it is vastly superior in life, in picturesqueness, in the energy of single lines, and, above all, in imagination. Few men have read " Gondibert," and almost every one speaks of it, as commonly of the dead, with a certain sub dued respect. And it deserves respect as an honest effort to bring poetry back to its highest office in the ideal treat ment of life. Davenant emulated Spenser, and if his poem had been as good as his preface, it could still be read in another spirit than that of investigation. As it is, it always reminds me of Goldsmith's famous verse. It is remote, unfriendly, solitary, and, above all, slow. Its shining passages, for there are such, remind one of distress- rockets sent up at intervals from a ship just about to founder, and sadden rather than cheer, f * Essay on Satire. What he has said just before this about Butler is worth noting. Butler had had a chief hand in the " Rehearsal," but Dryden had no grudges where the question was of giving its just praise to merit. t The conclusion of the second canto of Book Third is the best continuously fine passage. Dryden's poem has nowhere so much meaning in so small space as Davenant, when he says of the sense of honour that, " Like Power, it grows to nothing, growing less." Davenant took the hint of the stanza from Sir John Davies. Wyatt first used it, so far as I know, in English, 296 DRYDEN. The first part of the " Annus Mirabilis " is by no means clear of the false taste of the time,* though it has some of Dryden's manliest verses and happiest comparisons, always his two distinguishing merits. Here, as almost everywhere else in Dryden, measuring him merely as poet, we recall what he, with pathetic pride, says of himself in the prologue to " Aurengzebe " : — " Let him retire, betwixt two ages cast, The first of this, the hindmost of the last." What can be worse than what he says of comets ? — " "Whether they unctuous exhalations are Fired by the sun, or seeming so alone, Or each some more remote and slippery star Which loses footing when to mortals shown." Or than this, of the destruction of the Dutch India- ships 1 — " Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball, And now their odours armed against them fly ; Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, And some by aromatic splinters die." Dear Dr. Johnson had his doubts about Shakespeare, but here at least was poetry ! This is one of the quatrains which he pronounces "worthy of our author."! But Dryden himself has said that "a man who is resolved * Perhaps there is no better lecture on the prevailing vices of style and thought (if thought this frothy ferment of the mind may be called) than in Cotton Mather's "Magnalia." For Mather, like a true provincial, appropriates only the mannerism, and, as is usual in such cases, betrays all its weakness by the unconscious parody of exaggeration. t The Doctor was a capital judge of the substantial value of the goods he handled, but his judgment always seems that of the thumb and forefinger. For the shades, the disposition of colours, the beauty of the figures, he has as good as no sense whatever. The critical parts of his Life of Dryden seem to me the best of his writing in this kind. There is little to be gleaned after him. He had studied his author, which he seldom did, and his criticism is sympathetic, a thing still rarer with him. As illustrative of his own habits, his remarks ow Dryden's reading are curious, DRYDEN. 297 to praise an author with any appearance of justice must be sure to take him on the strongest side, and where he is least liable to exceptions." This is true also of one who wishes to measure an author fairly, for the higher wisdom of criticism lies in the capacity to admire. " Leser, wie gefall ich dir ? Leser, wie gefallst du mir ? " are both fair questions, the answer to the first being more often involved in that to the second than is sometimes thought. The poet in Dryden was never more fully revealed than in such verses as these : — " And threatening France, placed like a painted Jove,* Kept idle thunder in his lifted hand ; " " Silent in smoke of cannon they come on ; " " And his loud guns speak thick, like angry men ; " " The rigorous seaman every port-hole plies, And adds his heart to every gun he fires ; " " And, though to me unknown, they sure fought well, Whom Rupert led, and who were British born." This is masculine writing, and yet it must be said that there is scarcely a quatrain in which the rhyme does not * Perhaps the hint was given by a phrase of Corneille, monarque en peinture. Dryden seldom borrows, unless from Shakespeare, without improving, and he borrowed a great deal. Thus in " Don Sebastian " (of suicide) : — " Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls, And give them furloughs for the other world ; But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand In starless nights and wait the appointed hour." The thought is Cicero's, but how it is intensified by the "starless nights ! " Dryden, I suspect, got it from his favourite, Montaigne, who says, " Que nous ne pouvons abandonner cette garnison du monde, sans le commandement exprez de celuy qui nous y a mis." (L. ii. chap. 3.) In the same play, by a very Drydenish verse, lie gives new force to an old comparison : — " And I should break through laws divine and human, And think 'em cobwebs spread for little man, Which all the bulky herd of Nature breaks." 298 DRYDEN. trip him into a pla.titude, and there are too many swaggering with that expression forte d'un sentiment faible which Voltaire condemns in Corneille, — a temptation to which Dryden always lay too invitingly open. But there are passages higher in kind than any I have cited, because they show imagination. Such are the verses in which he describes the dreams of the disheartened enemy : — *' In dreams they fearful precipices tread, Or, shipwrecked, labour to some distant shore, Or in dark churches walk among the dead ; " and those in which he recalls glorious memories, and sees where "The mighty ghosts of our great Harries rose, And armed Edwards looked with anxious eyes." A few verses, like the pleasantly alliterative one in which he makes the spider " from the silent ambush of his den," " feel far off the trembling of his thread," show that he was beginning to study the niceties of verse, instead of trusting wholly to what he would have called his natural fougue. On the whole, this part of the poem is very good war poetry, as war poetry goes (for there is but one first- rate poem of the kind in English, — short, national, eager, as if the writer were personally engaged, with the rapid metre of a drum beating the charge, — and that is Drayton's " Battle of Agincourt,"*) but it shows more study of Lucan than of Virgil, and for a long time yet we shall find Dryden bewildered by bad models. He is always imitating — no that is not the word, always emulating — somebody in his more strictly poetical attempts, for in that direction he always needed some external impulse to set his mind in motion. This is more or less true of all authors ; nor does it detract from their originality, which depends wholly on their being able so far to forget themselves as to let something of themselves * Not his solemn historical droning under that title, but addressed 11 To the Cambrio-Britons on their harp." DRY DEN. 299 slip into what they write.* Of absolute originality we will not speak till authors are raised by some Deucalion-and- Pyrrha process • and even then our faith would be small, for writers who have no past are pretty sure of having no future. Dryden, at any rate, always had to have his copy set him at the top of the page, and wrote ill or well accord ingly. His mind (somewhat solid for a poet) warmed slowly, but, once fairly heated through, he had more of that good-luck of self-oblivion than most men. He certainly gave even a liberal interpretation to Moliere's rule of taking his own property wherever he found it, though he sometimes blundered awkwardly about what was properly his ; but in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.f Mr. Savage Landor once told me that he said to Wordsworth : " Mr. Wordsworth, a man may mix poetry * "Les poetes euxmemes s'animent et s'echauffent par la lecture des autres poetes. Messieurs de Malherbe, Corneille, etc., se disposoient an travail par la lecture des poetes qui etoient de leur gout." — Vigneul, Marvilliana, I. 64, 65. T For example, Waller had said, " Others may use the ocean as their road, Only the English make it their abode; We tread on billows with a steady foot," — long before Campbell. Campbell helps himself to both thoughts, enlivens them into " Her march is o'er the mountain wave, Her home is on the deep," and they are his forevermore. His " leviathans afloat " lie lifted from the " Annus Mirabilis ; " but in what court could Dryden sue ? Again, Waller in another poem calls the Duke of York's flag "His dreadful streamer, like a comet's hair ; " and this, I believe, is the first application of the celestial portent to this particular comparison. Yet Milton's "imperial ensign" waves defiant behind his impregnable lines, and even Campbell flaunts his " meteor flag" in Waller's face. Gray's bard might be sent to the lock-up, but even he would find bail. " C'est imiter quelqu'un que de planter des choux," 300 DRYDEN. with prose as much as he pleases, and it will only elevate and enliven ; but the moment he mixes a particle of prose with his poetry, it precipitates the whole/' Wordsworth, he added, never forgave him. The always hasty Dryden, as I think I have already said, was liable, like a careless apothecary's 'prentice, to make the same confusion of ingredients, especially in the more mischievous way. I cannot leave the " Annus Mirabilis " without giving an example of this. Describing the Dutch prizes, rather like an auctioneer than a poet, he says that " Some English wool, vexed in a Belgian loom, And into cloth of spongy softness made, Did into France or colder Denmark doom, To ruin with worse ware our staple trade." One might fancy this written by the secretary of a board of trade in an unguarded moment ; but we should remember that the poem is dedicated to the city of London. The depreciation of the rival fabrics is exquisite ; and Dryden, the most English of our poets, would not be so thoroughly English if he had not in him some fibre of la nation boutiquiere. Let us now see how he succeeds in attempting to infuse science (the most obstinately prosy material) with poetry. Speaking of "a more exact knowledge of the longitudes," as he explains in a note, he tells us that, " Then we upon our globe's last verge shall go, And view the ocean leaning on the sky ; From thence our rolling neighbours we shall know, And on the lunar world securely pry." Dr. Johnson confesses that he does not understand this. Why should he, when it is plain that Dryden was wholly in the dark himself ? To understand it is none of my business, but I confess that it interests me as an Americanism. We have hitherto been credited as the inventors of the "jumping-off place" at the extreme western verge of the world. But Dryden was beforehand with us. Though he doubtless knew that the earth was a sphere (and perhaps that it was flattened at the poles), it was always a flat DRYDEN. 301 surface in his fancy. In his " Amphitryon,*' he makes Alcmena say : — 1 ' No, I would fly thee to the ridge of earth, And leap the precipice to 'scape thy sight." And in his " Spanish Friar," Lorenzo says to Elvira that they "will travel together to the ridge of the world, and then drop together into the next." It is idle for us poor Yankees to hope that we can invent anything. To say sooth, if Dryden had left nothing behind him but the " Annus Mirabilis," he might have served as a type of the kind of poet America would have produced by the biggest- river-and-tallest-mountain recipe, — longitude and latitude in plenty, with marks of culture scattered here and there like the carets on a proof-sheet. It is now time to say something of Dryden as a dramatist. In the thirty-two years between 1662 and 1694 he produced twenty-five plays, and assisted Lee in two. I have hinted that it took Dryden longer than most men to find the true bent of his genius. On a superficial view, he might almost seem to confirm that theory, maintained by Johnson, among others, that genius was nothing more than great intellectual power exercised persistently in some particular direction which chance decided, so that it lay in circumstance merely whether a man should turn out a Shakespeare or a Newton. But when we come to compare what he wrote, regardless of Minerva's averted face, with the spontaneous production of his happier muse, we shall be inclined to think his example one of the strongest cases against the theory in question. He began his dramatic career, as usual, by rowing against the strong current of his nature, and pulled only the more doggedly the more he felt himself swept down the stream. His first attempt was at comedy, and, though his earliest piece of that kind (the "Wild Gallant," 1663) utterly failed, he wrote eight others afterwards. On the 23d February 1663 Pepys writes in his diary : " To Court, and there saw the * Wild Gallant ' performed by the king's house ; but it was ill acted, and the play so poor a thing as I never saw in 302 DRYDEfo my life almost, and so little answering the name, that, from the beginning to the end, I could not, nor can at this time, tell certainly which was the Wild Gallant. The king did not seem pleased at all the whole play, nor anybody else." After some alteration, it was revived with more success. On its publication in 1669 Dryden honestly admitted its former failure, though with a kind of salvo for his self-love. " I made the town my judges, and the greater part condemned it. After which I do not think it my concernment to defend it with the ordinary zeal of a poet for his decried poem, though Oorneille is more resolute in his preface before ' Pertharite,'* which was condemned more universally than this. . . . Yet it was received at Court, and was more than once the divertisement of his Majesty by his own command." Pepys lets us amusingly behind the scenes in the matter of His Majesty's divertisement. Dryden does not seem to see that in the condemnation of something meant to amuse the public there can be no question of degree. To fail at all is to fail utterly. 11 Touf 7« genres sontpe nnis, hws k genre entiuycux.'- In the reading, at least, all Dryden's comic writing for the stage must be ranked with the latter class. He himself would fain make an exception of the " Spanish Friar," but I confess that I rather wonder at than envy those who can be amused by it. His comedies lack everything that a comedy should have, — lightness, quickness of transition, unexpectedness of incident, easy cleverness of dialogue, and humorous contrast of character brought out by identity of situation. The comic parts of the "Maiden Queen " seem to me Dryden's best, but the merit even of these is Shakespeare's, and there is little choice where even the best is only tolerable. The common quality, however, of all Dryden's comedies is their nastiness, the more remarkable because we have ample evidence that he was a man of modest conversation. Pepys, who was by no * Corneillo's tragedy of 4I Pertharite " was acted unsuccessfully in lbf>9. Racine made free use of it in Lis more fortunate "Audro mantle." DRYDEN. 303 means squeamish (for he found " Sir Martin Marall " " the most entire piece of mirth .... that certainly ever was writ .... very good wit therein, not fooling "), writes in his diary of the 17th June 1668: "My wife and Deb to the king's playhouse to-day, thinking to spy me there, and saw the new play, * Evening Love,' of Dryden's, which, though the world commends, she likes not." The next day he saw it himself, " and do not like it, it being very smutty, and nothing so good as the ' Maiden Queen ' or the * Indian Emperor ' of Dry den's making. / was troubled at it." On the 22nd he adds : " Calling this day at Herringman's,* ho tells me Dryden do himself call it but a fifth-rate play." This was no doubt true, and yet, though Dryden in his preface to the play says, " I confess I have given [yielded] too much to the people in it, and am ashamed for them as well as for myself, that I have pleased them at so cheap a rate," he takes care to add, " not that there is anything here that I would not defend to an ill-natured judge." The plot was from Calderon, and the author, rebutting the charge of plagiarism, tell us that the king (4< without whose command they should no longer be troubled with anything of mine ") had already answered for him by saying, "that he only desired that those who accused me of theft would always steal him plays like mine." Of the morals of the play he has not a word, nor do I believe that he was conscious of any harm in them till he was attacked by Collier, and then (with some protest against what he considers the undue severity of his censor) he had the manliness to confess that he had done wrong. " It becomes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one."t And in a letter to his correspondent, Mrs. Thomas, written only a few weeks before his death, warning her against Mrs. Belm, he says, with remorseful sincerity : " I confess I am the last man in the world who ought in justice to arraign her, who have been myself too much a libertine in most of my poems, which I should be well contented 1 had time either to purge or to see them fairly * Dryden's publisher. t Preface to the Fabler. 304 DRY DEN, burned." Congreve was less patient, and even Dryden, in the last epilogue he ever wrote, attempts an excuse : — " Perhaps the Parson stretched a point too far, "When with our Theatres he waged a war ; He tells you that this very moral age Received the first infection from the Stage, But sure a banished Court, with lewdness fraught, The seeds of open vice returning brought. Whitehall the naked Venus first revealed, Who, standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine, The strumpet was adored with rites divine. The poets, who must live by courts or starve, Were proud so good a Government to serve, And, mixing with buffoons and pimps profane, Tainted the Stage for some small snip of gain." Dryden least of all men should have stooped to this palliation, for he had, not without justice, said of himself : " The same parts and application which have made me a poet might have raised me to any honours of the gown." Milton and Marvell neither lived by the Court, nor starved. Charles Lamb most ingeniously defends the Comedy of the Restoration as "the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry," where there was no pretence of representing a real world.* But this was certainly not so. Dryden again and again boasts of the superior advantage which his age had over that of the elder dramatists, in painting polite life, and attributes it to a greater freedom of intercourse between the poets and the frequenters of the Court.f We shall be less surprised at the kind of refinement upon which Dryden congratulated himself, when we learn (from the dedication of " Marriage a la Mode ") that the Earl of Rochester was its exemplar : " The best comic writers of * I interpret some otherwise ambiguous passages in this charming and acute essay by its title: "On the artificial comedy of the last century." t See especially his defence of the epilogue to the Second Part of the •' Conquest of Granada " (1672). DRYDEN. 305 our age will join with me to acknowledge that they have copied the gallantries of courts, the delicacy of expression, and the decencies of behaviour from your Lordship." In judging Dryden, it should be borne in mind that for some years he was under contract to deliver three plays a-year, a kind of bond to which no man should subject his brain who has a decent respect for the quality of its products. We should remember, too, that in his day manners meant what we call morals^ that custom always makes a larger part of virtue among average men than they are quite aware, and that the reaction from an outward conformity which had no root in inward faith may for a time have given to the frank expression of laxity an air of honesty that made it seem almost refreshing. There is no such hotbed for excess of license as excess of restraint, and the arrogant fanaticism of a single virtue is apt to make men suspicious of tyranny in all the rest. But the riot of emancipation could not last long, for the more tolerant society is of private vice, the more exacting will it be of public decorum, that excellent thing, so often the plausible substitute for things more excellent. By 1678 the public mind had so far recovered its tone that Dryden's comedy of " Limberham " was barely tolerated for three nights. I will let the man who looked at human nature from more sides, and therefore judged it more gently than any other, give the only excuse possible for Dryden : — "Men's judgments are A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward Do draw the inward quality after them To suffer all alike." Dryden's own apology only makes matters worse for him by showing that he committed his offences with his eyes wide open, and that he wrote comedies so wholly in despite of nature as never to deviate into the comic. Failing as clown, he did not scruple to take on himself the office of Ohiffinch to the palled appetite of the pub lic. "For I confess my chief endeavours are to delight the age in which I live. If the humour of this be for low 118 306 DRY DEN. comedy, small accidents, and raillery, I will force my genius to obey it, though with more reputation I could write in verse. I know I am not so fitted by nature to write comedy ; I want that gayety of humour which is requisite to it. My conversation is slow and dull, my humour satur nine and reserved : In short, I am none of those who endeavour to break jests in company or make repartees. So that those who decry my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit : Reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend."* For my own part, though I have been forced to hold my nose in picking my way through these ordures of Dryden, I am free to say that I think them far less morally mischievous than that corps- de-ballet literature in which the most animal of the passions is made more temptingly naked by a veil of French gauze. Nor does Dryden's lewdness leave such a reek in the mind as the filthy cynicism of Swift, who delighted to uncover the nakedness of our common mother. It is pleasant to follow Dryden into the more congenial region of heroic plays, though here also we find him making a false start. Anxious to please the king,f and so able a reasoner as to convince even himself of the justice of what ever cause he argued, he not only wrote tragedies in the French style, but defended his practice in an essay which is by far the most delightful reproduction of the classic dialogue ever written in English. Eugenius (Lord Buckhurst), Lisideius (Sir Charles Sidley), Crites (Sir R. Howard), and Neander (Dryden) are the four partakers in the debate. The comparative merits of ancients and moderns, of the Shakespearian and contemporary drama, of rhyme and blank verse, the value of the three (supposed) Aristotelian unities, are the main topics discussed. The tone of the discussion is admirable, midway between bookishness and * Defence of an Essay on Dramatick Poesy. t "The favour which heroick plays have lately found upon our theatres has been wholly derived to them from the countenance and approbation they have received at Court." — (Dedication of " Indian Emperor " to Duchess of Monmouth.) DRYDEN. 307 talk, and the fairness with which each side of the argument is treated shows the breadth of Dryden's mind perhaps better than any other one piece of his writing. There are no men of straw set up to be knocked down again, as there commonly are in debates conducted upon this plan. The " Defence " of the Essay is to be taken as a supplement to Neander's share in it, as well as many scattered passages in subsequent prefaces and dedications. All the inter locutors agree that "the sweetness of English verse was never understood or practised by our fathers," and that " our poesy is much improved by the happiness of some writers yet living, who first taught us to mould our thoughts into easy and significant words, to retrench the superfluities of expression, and to make our rhyme so properly a part of the verse that it should never mislead the sense, but itself be led and governed by it." In another place he shows that by " living writers " he meant Waller and Denham. " Rhyme has all the advantages of prose besides its own. But the excellence and dignity of it were never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it : he first made writing easily an art; first showed us to conclude the sense, most commonly in distiches, which in the verse before him runs on for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath to overtake it."* Dryden afterwards changed his mind, and one of the excellences of his own rhymed verse is, that his sense is too ample to be concluded by the distich. Rhyme had been censured as unnatural in dialogue ; but Dryden replies that it is no more so than blank verse, since no man talks any kind of verse in real life. But the argument for rhyme is of another kind. " I am satisfied if it cause delight, for delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy [he should have said means] ; instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it de lights. . . . The converse, therefore, which a poet is to imitate must be heightened with all the arts and ornaments of poesy, and must be such as, strictly considered, could * Dedication of " Rival Ladies." 3o8 DRYDEN. never be supposed spoken by any without premeditation. . . . Thus prose, though the rightful prince, yet is by common consent deposed as too weak for the government of serious plays, and, he failing, there now start up two com petitors ; one the nearer in blood, which is blank verse ; the other more fit for the ends of government, which is rhyme. Blank verse is, indeed, the nearer prose, but he is blemished with the weakness of his predecessor. Rhyme (for I will deal clearly) has somewhat of the usurper in him ; but he is brave and generous, and his dominion pleas ing."* To the objection that the difficulties of rhyme will lead to circumlocution, he answers in substance, that a good poet will know how to avoid them. It is curious how long the superstition that Waller was the refiner of English verse has prevailed since Dryden first gave it vogue. He was a very poor poet and a purely mechanical versifier. He has lived mainly on the credit of a single couplet, " The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light through chinks that Time hath made," in which the melody alone belongs to him, and the conceit, such as it is, to Samuel Daniel, who said, long before, that the body's " "Walls, grown thin, permit the mind To look out thorough and his frailty find." Waller has made worse nonsense of it in the transfusion. It might seem that Ben Jonson had a prophetic foreboding of him when he wrote — " Others there are that have no composition at all, but a kind of tuning and rhyming fall, in what they write. It runs and slides and only makes a sound. Women's poets they are called, as you have women's tailors. They write a verse as smooth, as soft, as cream, In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream. * Defence of the Essay. Dryden, in the happiness of his illustrative comparisons, is almost unmatched. Like himself, they occupy a middle ground between poetry and prose, — they are a cross between metaphor and simile. DRYDEN. 309 You may sound these wits and find the depth of them with your middle-finger."* It seems to have been taken for granted by Waller, as afterwards by Dryden, that our elder poets bestowed no thought upon their verse. " Waller was smooth/' but unhappily he was also flat, and his im portation of the French theory of the couplet as a kind of thought-coop did nothing but mischief, t He never com passed even a smoothness approaching this description of a nightingale's song by a third-rate poet of the earlier school, — • " Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note Through the sleek passage of her open throat, A clear, unwrinkled song," — one of whose beauties is its running over into the third verse. Those poets indeed " Felt music's pulse in all her arteries ; " and Dryden himself found out, when he came to try it, that blank verse was not so easy a thing as he at first conceived it, nay, that it is the most difficult of all verse, and that it must make up in harmony, by variety of pause and modula tion, for what it loses in the melody of rhyme. In what makes the chief merit of his later versification, he but rediscovered the secret of his predecessors in giving to rhymed pentameters something of the freedom of blank verse, and not mistaking metre for rhythm. Yoltaire, in his Commentary on Corneille, has sufficiently lamented the awkwardness of movement imposed upon the French dramatists by the gyves of rhyme. But he considers * Discoveries. t What a wretched rhymer he could be we may see in his alteration of the "Maid's Tragedy " of Beaumont and Fletcher : — " Not long since walking in the field, My nurse and I, we there beheld A goodly fruit ; which, tempting me, I would have plucked ; but, trembling, she, Whoever eat those berries, cried, In less than half-an-hour died ! " What intolerable seesaw ! Not much of Byron's " fatal facility " in these octosyllabics 1 310 DRYDEN. the necessity of overcoming this obstacle, on the whole, an advantage. Difficulty is his tenth and superior muse. How did Dryden, who says nearly the same thing, succeed in his attempt at the French manner 1 He fell into every one of its vices, without attaining much of what constitutes its excellence. From the nature of the language, all French poetry is purely artificial, and its high polish is all that keeps out decay. The length of their dramatic verse forces the French into much tautology, into bombast in its original meaning, the stuffing out a thought with words till it nils the line. The rigid system of their rhyme, which makes it much harder to manage than in English, has accustomed them to inaccuracies of thought which would shock them in prose. For example, in the " China " of Corneille, as originally written, Emilie says to Augustus, — " Ces flammes dans nos coeurs dcs longtemps etoient nees, Et ce sont des secrets de plus de qiiatre annees." I say nothing of the second verse, which is purely prosaic surplusage exacted by the rhyme, nor of the jingling together of ces, des, etoient, nees, des, and secrets, but I confess that nees does not seem to be the epithet that Corneille would have chosen torftammes, if he could have had his own way, and that flames would seem of all things the hardest to keep secret. But in revising, Corneille changed the first verse thus, — " Ces flammes dans nos coeurs sans wtre ordre etoient nees." Can anything be more absurd than flames born to order ? Yet Voltaire, on his guard against these rhyming pitfalls for the sense, does not notice this in his minute comments on this play. Of extravagant metaphor, the result of this same making sound the file-leader of sense, a single example from " Heraclius " shall suffice : — " La vapeur de mon sang ira grossir la foudre Que Dieu tient dejk prete k le reduire en poud re. One cannot think of a Louis Quatorze Appollo except in a full-bottomed periwig, and the tragic style of their poets is DRYDEN. 311 always showing the disastrous influence of that portentous comet. It is the style perruque in another than the French meaning of the phrase, and the skill lay in dressing it majestically, so that, as Gibber says, " upon the head of a man of sense, if it became him, it could never fail of drawing to him a more partial regard and benevolence than could possibly be hoped for in an ill-made one." It did not become Dryden, and he left it off.* Like his own Zimri, Dryden was " all for " this or that fancy, till he took up with another. But even while he was writing on French models, his judgment could not be blinded to their defects. " Look upon the * Cinna ' and the * Pompey,' they are not so properly to be called plays as long discourses of reason of State, and 1 Polieucte ' in matters of religion is as solemn as the long stops upon our organs ; . . . their actors speak by the hour-glass like our parsons. ... I deny not but this may suit well enough with the French, for as we, who are a more sullen people, come to be diverted at our plays, so they, who are of an airy and gay temper, come thither to make themselves more serious, "f With what an air of innocent unconsciousness the sarcasm is driven home ! Again, while he was still slaving at these bricks without straw, he says : " The present French poets are generally accused that, wheresoever they lay the scene, or in what ever age, the manners of their heroes are wholly French. Racine's Bajazet is bred at Constantinople, but his civilities are conveyed to him by some secret passage from Versailles into the Seraglio." It is curious that Voltaire, speaking of the Berenice of Racine, praises a passage in it for precisely what Dryden condemns: "II semble qu'on entende Hen- riette d'Angleterre elle-meme parlant au marquis de Vardes. La politesse de la cour de Louis XIV., 1'agrement de la langue Frangaise, la douceur de la versification la plus iiaturelle, le sentiment le plus tendre, tout se trouve dans * In more senses than one. His last and best portrait shows him in his own grey hair. t Essay on Dramatick Poesy, 312 DRYDEM ce peu de vers." After Dryden had broken away from the heroic style, he speaks out more plainly. In the Preface to his "All for Love," in reply to some cavils upon "little, and not essential decencies," the decision about which he refers to a master of ceremonies, he goes on to say : " The French poets, I confess, are strict observers of these punc tilios ; ... in this nicety of manners does the excellency of French poetry consist. Their heroes are the most civil people breathing, but their good breeding seldom extends to a word of sense. All their wit is in their ceremony ; they want the genius which animates our stage, and therefore 't is but necessary, when they cannot please, that they should take care not to offend. . . . They arc so careful not to exasperate a critic that they never leave hiin any \vork, . . . for no part of a poem is worth our discommending where the whole is insipid, as when we have once tasted palled wine we stay not to examine it glass by glass But \vhil« they affect to shine in trifles, they are often careless in essentials. . . . For my part, I desire to be tried by the laws of my own country." This is said in heat, but it is plain enough that his mind was wholly changed. In his discourse on epic poetry he is as decided, but more temper ate. He says that the French heroic verse "runs with more activity than strength.* Their language is not strung with sinews like our English ; it has the nimbi eness of a greyhound, but not the bulk and body of a mastiff. Our men and our verses overbear them by their weight, and pondere, non numero, is the British motto. The French have set up purity for the standard of their language, and a masculine vigour is that of ours= Like their tongue is the * A French hen decasyllabic verse runs exactly like our ballad measure ; — A cobbler there was and he lived in a stall, . . . La raison, pour marcher, ria souvent qu'une voye. (Dryden's note.) The verse is not a hendecasyllable. "Attended watchfully to her re itative (Mile. Duchesnois), and find that, in nine lines out of ten, ' A cobbler there was,' etc., is the tune of the French heroics," — Moore's Diary, 24th April 1821. DRYDEN. 313 genius of their poets, — light and trifling in comparison of the English."* Dryden might have profited by an admirable saying of his own, that " they who would combat general authority with particular opinion must first establish themselves a reputation of understanding better than other men." He understood the defects much better than the beauties of the French theatre. Lessing was even more one-sided in his judgment upon it.f Goethe, with his usual wisdom, studied it carefully without losing his temper, and tried to profit by its structural merits. Dryden, with his eyes wide open, copied its worst faults, especially its declamatory sentiment. He should have known that certain things can never be transplanted, and that among these is a style of poetry whose great excellence was that it was in perfect sympathy with the genius of the people among whom it came into being. But the truth is, that Dryden had no aptitude whatever for the stage, and in writing for it he was attempting to make a trade of his genius, — an arrangement from which the genius always withdraws in disgust. It was easier to make loose thinking and the bad writing which betrays it pass unobserved while the ear was occupied with the sonorous music of the rhyme to which they marched. Except in u All for Love," " the only play," he tells us, " which he wrote to please himself,";}! there is no trace of real passion in any of his tragedies. This, indeed, is inevitable, for there are no characters, but * " The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose." — GHAY to WEST. t Diderot and Rousseau, however, thought their language unfit for poetry, and Voltaire seems to have half agreed with them. No one has expressed this feeling more neatly than Fauriel : " Nul doute que Ton ne puisse dire en prose des choses eminemment poetiques, tout comme il n'est que trop certain que Ton peut en dire de fort prosaiques en vers, et meme en excellents vers, en vers elegamment tournes, et en beau langage. C'est un fait dont je n'ai pas besoin d'indiquer d'exemples : aucune litterature n'en fournirait autant que le ndtre."— Hist, de la Poesie Prove^ale, II. 237. J Parallel of Poetry and Painting. 314 DRYDEN. only personages, in any except that. That is, in many respects, a noble play, and there are few finer scenes, whether in the conception or the carrying out, than that between Antony and Ventidius in the first act.* As usual, Dryden's good sense was not blind to the extravagances of his dramatic style. In "Mac Flecknoe " he makes his own Maximin the type of childish rant, " And little Maximins the gods defy ; " but, as usual also, he could give a plausible reason for his own mistakes by means of that most fallacious of all fallacies which is true so far as it goes. In his Prologue to the " Royal Martyr " he says : — " And he who servilely creeps after sense Is safe, but ne'er will reach an excellence. • • • « • • But, when a tyrant for his theme he had, He loosed the reins and let his muse run mad, And, though he stumbles in a full career, Yet rashness is a better fault than fear ; They then, who of each trip advantage take, Find out those faults which they want wit to make.'' And in the Preface to the same play he tells us : "I have not everywhere observed the equality of numbers in my verse, partly by reason of my haste, but more especially because I would not have my sense a slave to syllables" Dryden, when he had not a bad case to argue, would have had small respect for the wit whose skill lay in the making of faults, and has himself, where his self-love was not engaged, admirably defined the boundary which divides boldness from rashness. What Quintilian says of Seneca applies very aptly to Dryden : " Yelles eum suo ingenio dixisse, alieno judicio."t He was thinking of himself, I fancy, when he makes Ventidius say of Antony, — * "II y a seulement la scene de Ventidius et d' Antoine qui est digne de Corneille. C'est la le sentiment de milord Bolingbroke et de tous les bons auteurs ; c'est ainsi que pensait Addisson." — VOLTAIRE to M. DE FHOMONT, 15th November 1735. t Inst. X., i. 129. DRYDEN. 315 " He starts out wide And bounds into a vice that bears him far_ From his first course, and plunges him in ills ; But, when his danger makes him find his fault, Quick to observe, and full of sharp remorse, He censures eagerly his own misdeeds, Judging himself with malice to himself, And not forgiving what as man he did, Because his other parts are more than man. " But bad though they nearly all are as wholes, his plays contain passages which only the great masters have surpassed, and to the level of which no subsequent writer for the stage has ever risen. The necessity of rhyme often forced him to a platitude, as where he says, — " My love was blind to your deluding art, But blind men feel when stabbed so near the heart."* But even in rhyme he not seldom justifies his claim to the title of " glorious John." In the very play from which I have just quoted are these verses in his best manner : — " No, like his better Fortune I'll appear, With open arms, loose veil, and flowing hair, Just flying forward from her rolling sphere." His comparisons, as I have said, are almost always happy. This, from the " Indian Emperor," is tenderly pathetic :— "As callow birds, Whose mother 's killed in seeking of the prey, Cry in their nest and think her long away, And, at each leaf that stirs, each blast of wind, % Gape for the food which they must never find." And this, of the anger with which the Maiden Queen, striving to hide her jealousy, betrays her love, is vigorous : — " Her rage was love, and its tempestuous flame, Like lightning, showed the heaven from whence it came." The following simile from the " Conquest of Grenada " is as well expressed as it is apt in conception : — " I scarcely understand my own intent ; But, silk-worm like, so long within have wrought, That I am lost in my own web of thought." * Conquest of Grenada, Second Part 3i6 DRYDEN. In the " Rival Ladies/' Angelina, walking in the dark, describes her sensations naturally and strikingly : — " No noise but what my footsteps make, and they Sound dreadfully and louder than by day : They double too, and every step I take Sounds thick, methinks, and more than one could make." In all the rhymed plays* there are many passages which one is rather inclined to like than sure he would be right in liking them. The following verses from " Aurengzebe " are of this sort : — " My love was such it needed no return, Rich in itself, like elemental fire, Whose pureness does no aliment require." This is Cowleyish, and pureness is surely the wrong word • and yet it is better than mere commonplace. Perhaps what oftenest turns the balance in Dryden's favour, when we are weighing his claims as a poet, is his persistent capability of enthusiasm. To the last he kindles and sometimes almost flashes out that supernatural light which is the supreme test of poetic genius. As he himself so finely and characteristically says in "Aurengzebe," there was no period in his life when it was not true of him that " He felt the inspiring heat, the absent god return." The verses which follow are full of him, and, with the exception of the single word underwent, are in his luckiest manner : — " One loose, one sally of a hero's soul, Does all the military art control. While timorous wit goes round, or fords the shore, He shoots the gulf, and is already o'er, And, when the enthusiastic fit is spent, Looks back amazed at what he underwent, "t Pithy sentences and phrases always drop from Dryden's pen as if unawares, whether in prose or verse. I string together a few at random : — * In most, he mingles blank verse. t Conquest of Grenada. DRYDEN. 317 11 The greatest argument for love is love." " Few know the use of life before 't is past." 11 Time gives himself and is not valued." " Death in itself is nothing ; but we fear To be we know not what, we know not where.** " Love either finds equality or makes it ; Like death, he knows no difference in degrees." " That 's empire, that which I can give away." " Yours is a soul irregularly great, Which, wanting temper, yet abounds in heat." " Forgiveness to the injured does belong, But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong." " Poor women's thoughts are all extempore." *' The cause of love can never be assigned, 'T is in no face, but in the lover's mind,"f " Heaven can forgive a crime to penitence, For Heaven can judge if penitence be true ; But man, who knows not hearts, should make examples." " Kings' titles commonly begin by force, "Which time wears off and mellows into right." " Fear 's a large promisor ; who subject live To that base passion, know not what they give.* " The secret pleasure of the generous act Is the great mind's great bribe." 11 That bad thing, gold, buys all good things." " Why, love does all that 's noble here below." " To prove religion true, If either wit or sufferings could suffice, All faiths afford the constant and the wise." But Pryden, as he tells us himself, " Grew weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme ; Passion 's too fierce to be in fetters bound, And Nature flies him like enchanted ground." The finest things in his plays were written in blank verse, * This recalls a striking verse of Alfred de Musset : — 11 La muse est toujours belle, Meme pour 1'insense, rnerne pour 1'impuissant, Car so, bcaut^ pour nous, c'est notre amour pour elle,* 3i 8 DRY DEN. as vernacular to him as the alexandrine to the French. In this he vindicates his claim as a poet. His diction gets wings, and both his verse and his thought become capable of a reach which was denied them when set in the stocks of the couplet. The solid man becomes even airy in this new found freedom : Anthony says, "How I loved, Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours That danced away with down upon your feet." And what image was ever more delicately exquisite, what movement more fadingly accordant with the sense, than in the last two verses of the following passage ? " I feel death rising higher still and higher, Within my bosom ; every breath I fetch Shuts up my life within a shorter compass, And, like the vanishing sound of bells, grows less And less each pulse, till it be lost in air."* Nor was he altogether without pathos, though it is rare with him. The following passage seems to me tenderly full of it :— "Something like That voice, methinks, I should have somewhere heard ; But floods of woe have hurried it far olf Beyond my ken of soul."t And this single verse from " Aurengzebe " : — " Live still ! oh live ! live even to be unkind 1 " with its passionate eagerness and sobbing repetition, is worth a ship-load of the long-drawn treacle of modern self- compassion. Now and then, to be sure, we come upon something that makes us hesitate again whether, after all, Dryden was not grandiose rather than great, as in the two passages that next follow : — " He looks secure of death, superior greatness, Like Jove when he made Fate and said, Thou art The slave of my creation. "J * Rival Ladies. t Doii Sebastian. J Ibid. DRYDEN. 319 " I'm pleased with my own work ; Jove was not more With infant nature, when his spacious hand Had rounded this huge ball of earth and seas, To give it the first push and see it roll Along the vast abyss."* I should say that Dryden is more apt to dilate our fancy than our thought, as great poets have the gift of doing. But if he have not the potent alchemy that transmutes the lead of our commonplace associations into gold, as Shakespeare knows how to do so easily, yet his sense is always up to the sterling standard; and though he has not added so much as some have done to the stock of bullion which others afterwards coin and put into circulation, there are few who have minted so many phrases that are still a part of our daily currency. The first line of the following passage has been worn pretty smooth, but the succeeding ones are less familiar : — " Men are but children of a larger growth, Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too and full as vain ; And yet the soul, shut up in her dark room, Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing But, like a mole in earth, busy and blind, Works all her folly up and casts it outward In the world's open view."t The image is mixed and even contradictory, but the thought obtains grace for it. I feel as if Shakespeare would have written seeing for vieiving, thus gaining the strength of repetition in one verse and avoiding the sameness of it in the other. Dryden, I suspect, was not much given to correction, and, indeed, one of the great charms of his best writing is, that everything seems struck off at a heat, as by a superior man in the best mood of his talk. Where he rises, he generally becomes fervent rather than imagina tive ; his thought does not incorporate itself in metaphor, as in purely poetic minds, but repeats and reinforces itself in simile. Where he is imaginative, it is in that lower sense which the poverty of our language, for want of a * Cleomenes. t All for Love. 32° DRYDEN. better word, compels us to call picturesque, and even then he shows little of that finer instinct which suggests so much more than it tells, and works the more powerfully as it taxes more the imagination of the reader. In Donne's " Relic " there is an example of what I mean. He fancies some one breaking up his grave and spying " A bracelet of bright hair about the bone," — a verse that still shines there in the darkness of the tomb, after two centuries, like one of those inextinguishable lamps whose secret is lost.* Yet Dry den sometimes showed a sense of this magic of a mysterious hint, as in the "Spanish Friar":— " No, I confes?, you bade me not in words ; The dial spoke not, but it made shrewd signs, And pointed full upon the stroke of murder." This is perhaps a solitary example. Nor is he always so possessed by the image in his mind as unconsciously to choose even the picturesquely imaginative word. He has done so, however, in this passage from "Marriage & la Mode " :— " You ne'er must hope again to see your princess, Except as prisoners view fair walks and streets, And careless passengers going by their grates." But after all, he is best upon a level, table-land, it is true, and a very high level, but still somewhere between the loftier peaks of inspiration and the plain of everyday life. In those passages where he moralises he is always good, setting some obvious truth in a new light by vigorous phrase and happy illustration. Take this (from "CEdipus") as a proof of it : — * Dryden, with his wonted perspicacity, follows Ben Jonson in calling Donne "the greatest wit, though not the best poet, of our nation." — (Dedication of Eleonora). Even as a poet Donne 11 Had in him those brave translunary things That our first poets had." To open vistas for the imagination through the blind wall of the senses, as he could sometimes do, is the supreme function of poetry. DRYDEN. 321 " The gods are just, But how can finite measure infinite ? Reason ! alas, it does not know itself ! Yet man, vain man, would with his short-lined plummet Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice. "Whatever is, is in its causes just, Since all things are by fate. But purblind man Sees but a part o' th' chain, the nearest links, His eyes not carrying to that equal beam That poises all above." From the same play I pick an illustration of that ripened sweetness of thought and language which marks the natural vein of Dryden. One cannot help applying the passage to the late Mr. Quincy : — " Of no distemper, of no blast he died, But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long, E'en wondered at because he dropt no sooner ; Fate seemed to wind hi.n up for fourscore years ; Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more, Till, like a clock worn out with eating Time, The wheels of weary life at last stood still."* Here is another of the same kind from " All for Love : " — " Gone so soon ! Is Death no more ? He used him carelessly, With a familiar kindness ; ere he knocked, Ran to the door and took him in his arms, As who should say, You're welcome at all hours, A friend need give no warning." With one more extract from the same play, which is in every way his best, for he had, when he wrote it, been feeding on the bee-bread of Shakespeare, I shall conclude. Antony says, " For I am now so sunk from what I was, Thou fmd'st me at my lowest water-mark. The rivers that ran in and raised my fortunes Are all dried up, or take another course : What I have left is from my native spring ; I've a heart still that swells in scorn of Fate, And lifts me to niy banks. " * My own judgment is my sole warrant for attributing these extracts from (Edipus to Dryden rather than Lee. 149 322 DRYDEN. This is certainly, from beginning to end, in what used to be called the grand style, at once noble and natural. I have not undertaken to analyse any one of the plays, for (except in " All for Love ") it would have been only to expose their weakness. Dryden. had no constructive faculty ; and in every one of his longer poems that required a plot, the plot is bad, always more or less inconsistent with itself, and rather hitched-on to the subject than combining with it. It is fair to say, however, before leaving this part of Dryden's literary work, that Home Tooke thought " Don Sebastian" "the best play extant."* Gray admired the plays of Dryden, " not as dramatic compositions, but as poetry."f "There are as many things finely said in his plays as almost by anybody," said Pope to Spence. Of their rant, their fustian, their bombast, their bad English, of their innumerable sins against .Dryden's own better conscience both as poet and critic, I shall excuse myself from giving any instances.^ I like what is good in Dryden so much, and it is so good, that I think Gray was justified in always losing his temper when he heard "his faults criticised."§ It is as a satirist and pleader in verse that Dryden is best known, and as both he is in some respects unrivalled. His satire is not so sly as Chaucer's, but it is distinguished by the same good-nature. There is no malice in it. I shall not enter into his literary quarrels further than to say he * Recollections of Eogers, p. 165. t Nicholls's Reminiscences of Gray. Pickering's edition of Gray's Works, Vol. V. p. 35. + Let one suffice for all. In the "Royal Martyr," Porphyrius, awaiting his execution, says to Maximm, who had wished him for a son-in-law : — " Where'er thou stand'st, I'll level at that place My gushing blood, and spout it at thy face ; Thus not by marriage we our blood will join ; Nay, more, my arms shall throw my head at thine." " It is no shame," says Dryden himself, " to be a poet, though it is to be a bad one." § Gray, ubl supra, p. 38. DRYDEN. 323 seems to me, on the whole, to have been forbearing, which is the more striking as he tells us repeatedly that he was naturally vindictive. It was he who called revenge " the darling attribute of heaven." " I complain not of their lampoons and libels, though I have been the public mark for many years. I am vindictive enough to have repelled force by force, if I could imagine that any of them had ever reached me." It was this feeling of easy superiority, I suspect, that made him the mark for so much jealous vituperation. Scott is wrong in attributing his onslaught upon Settle to jealousy because one of the latter's plays had been performed at Court, — an honour never paid to any of Dryden's.* I have found nothing like a trace of jealousy in that large and benignant nature. In his vindication of the " Duke of Guise," he says, with honest confidence in himself : " Nay, I durst almost refer myself to some of the angry poets on the other side, whether I have not rather countenanced and assisted their beginnings than hindered them from rising." He seems to have been really as indifferent to the attacks on himself as Pope pretended to be. In the same vindication he says of the " Rehearsal," the only one of them that had any wit in it, and it has a great deal : " Much less am I concerned at the noble name of Bayes ; that 's a brat so like his own father that he cannot be mistaken for any other body. They might as reasonably have called Tom Sternhold Virgil, and the resemblance would have held as well." In his Essay on Satire he says : " And yet we know that in Christian charity all offences are to be forgiven as we expect the like pardon for those we daily commit against Almighty God. * Scott had never seen Pepys's Diary when he wrote this, or he would have left it unwritten : " Fell to discourse on the last night's work at Court, where the ladies and Duke of Monmouth acted the ' Indian Emperor,' wherein they told me these things most remark able that not any woman but the Duchess of Monmouth and Mrs. Cornwallis did anything but like fools and stocks, but that these two did do most extraordinary well ; that not any man did anything well but Captain O'Bryan, who spoke and did well, but above all things did dance most incomparably." — 14th January 1668. 324 DRYDEN. And this consideration has often made me tremble when I was saying our Lord's Prayer ; for the plain condition of the forgiveness which we beg is the pardoning of others the offences which they have done to us ; for which reason I have many times avoided the commission of that fault, even when I have been notoriously provoked.* And in another passage he says, with his usual wisdom : " Good sense and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant world has thought otherwise. Good-nature, by which I mean beneficence and candour, is the product of right reason, which of necessity will give allowance to the failings of others, by considering that there is nothing perfect in mankind." In the same Essay he gives his own receipt for satire : — " How easy it is to call rogue and villain, and that wittily ! but how hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of those opprobrious terms ! . . . This is the mystery of that noble trade. . . . Neither is it true that this fineness of raillery is offensive : a witty man is tickled while he is hurt in this manner, and a fool feels it not. . . . There is a vast difference between the slovenly butchering of a man and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place. A man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, of a bare hanging ; but to make a malefactor die sweetly was only belonging to her husband. I wish I could apply it to myself, if the reader would be kind enough to think it belongs to me. The character of Zimri in my ' Absalom ' is, in my opinion, worth the whole poem. It is not bloody, but it is ridiculous enough, and he for whom it was intended was too witty to resent it as an injury. ... I avoided the mention of great crimes, and applied myself to the representing of blind sides and little extravagances, to which, the wittier a man is, he is generally the more obnoxious." Dryden thought his genius led him that way. In his * See also that noble passage in the "Hind and Panther" (1573- 1591), where this is put into verse. Dryden always thought in prose. DRYDEN. 325 elegy on the satirist Oldham, whom Hallam, without reading him, I suspect, ranks next to Dryden,* he says : — " For sure our souls were near allied, and tliine Cast in the same poetic mould with mine ; One common note in either lyre did strike, And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike." His practice is not always so delicate as his theory ; but if he was sometimes rough, he never took a base advantage. He knocks his antagonist down, and there an end. Pope seems to have nursed his grudge, and then, watching his chance, to have squirted vitriol from behind a corner, rather glad than otherwise if it fell on the women of those he hated or envied. And if Dryden is never dastardly, as Pope often was, so also he never wrote anything so mali ciously depreciatory as Pope's unprovoked attack on Addi- son. Dryden's satire is often coarse, but where it is coarsest, it is commonly in defence of himself against attacks that were themselves brutal. Then, to be sure, he snatches the first ready cudgel, as in Shadwell's case, though even then there is something of the good-humour of conscious strength. Pope's provocation was too often the mere opportunity to say a biting thing, where he could do it safely. If his victim showed fight, he tried to smooth things over, as with Dennis. Dryden could forget that he had ever had a quarrel, but he never slunk away from any, least of all from one provoked by himself.t Pope's satire is too much occupied with the externals of manners, habits, personal defects, and peculiarities. Dryden goes right to the rooted character of the man, to the weaknesses of his nature, as where he says of Burnet : — • " Prompt to assail, and careless of defence, Invulnerable in his impudence, * Probably on the authority of this very epitaph, as if epitaphs were to be believed even under oath ! A great many authors live because we read nothing but their tombstones. Oldham was, to borrow one of Dryden's phrases, " a bad or, which is worse, an indifferent poet." t " He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate, easily forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere recon ciliation with them that had offended him." — CONGREVE. 326 DRYDEN. He dares the world, and, eager of a name, He thrusts about andjustles into fame. So fond of loud report that, not to miss Of being known (his last and utmost bliss). He rather would be known for what he is." It would be hard to find in Pope such compression of meaning as in the first, or such penetrative sarcasm as in the second of the passages I have underscored. Dry- den's satire is still quoted for its comprehensiveness of application, Pope's rather for the elegance of its finish and the point of its phrase than for any deeper qualities.* I do not remember that Dryden ever makes poverty a reproach, f He was above it, alike by generosity of birth and mind. Pope is always the parvenu, always giving himself the airs of a fine gentleman, and, like Horace Walpole and Byron, affecting superiority to professional literature. Dryden, like Lessing, was a hack-writer, and was proud, as an honest man has a right to be, of being able to get his bread by his brains. He lived in Grub Street all his life, and never dreamed that where a man of genius lived was not the best quarter of the town. " Tell his Majesty," said sturdy old Jonson, "that his soul lives in an alley." Dryden's prefaces are a mine of good writing and judi cious criticism. His obiter dicta have often the penetration, and always more than the equity, of Voltaire's, for Dryden never loses temper, and never altogether qualifies his judg ment by his self-love. " He was a more universal writer * Coleridge says excellently : " You will find this a good gauge or criterion of genius, — whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri ; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it where, a-building up to the very last verse ; whereas in Pope's Timon, etc., the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirised." (Table- Talk, ]92.) Some of Dryden's best satirical hits are let fall by seem ing accident in his prose," as where he says of his Protestant assailants, " Most of them love all whores but her of Bxbylon." They had first attacked him on the score of his private morals. t That he taxes Shadwell with it is only a seeming exception, as any careful reader will see. DRYDEN. 327 than Voltaire," said Home Tooke, and perhaps it is true that he had a broader view, though his learning was neither so extensive nor so accurate. My space will not afford many extracts, but I cannot forbear one or two. He says of Chaucer, that " he is a perpetual fountain of good sense,"* and likes him better than Ovid, — a bold confession in tha* day. He prefers the pastorals of Theocritus to those o^ Virgil. " Virgil's shepherds are too well-read in the philo sophy of Epicurus and of Plato ; " " there is a kind of rusticity in all those pompous verses, somewhat of a holi day shepherd strutting in his country buskins ; "+ " Theocritus is softer than Ovid, he touches the passions more delicately, and performs all this out of his own fund, without diving into the arts and sciences for a supply. Even his Doric dialect has an incomparable sweetness in his clownishness, like a fair shepherdess, in her country russet, talking in a Yorkshire tone."J Comparing Virgil's verse with that of some poets, he says, that his " numbers are perpetually varied to increase the delight of the reader, so that the same sounds are never repeated twice together. On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, though they write in styles different from each other, yet have each of them but one sort of music in their verses. All the versification and little variety of Claudian is included within the compass of four or five lines, and then he begins in the same tenor, perpetually closing his sense at the end of a verse and that verse commonly which they call golden, or two substantives and two adjectives with a verb betwixt them to keep the peace. Ovid, with all his sweetness, has as little variety of numbers and sound as he ; he is always, as it were, upon the hand-gallop, and his verse runs upon carpet-ground. "§ What a dreary half-century would have been saved to English poetry, could Pope have laid these sentences to heart ! Upon translation, no one has written so much and so well as Dryden in his various prefaces. Whatever has been said since is either expansion or variation of what * Preface to Fables. t Dedication of the Georgics. J Preface to second Miscellany. § Ibid. 328 DRYDEN. he had said before. His general theory may be stated as an aim at something between the literalness of metaphrase and the looseness of paraphrase. " Where I have enlarged," he says, " I desire the false critics would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but either they are secretly in the poet, or may be fairly deduced from him." Coleridge, with his usual cleverness of assimilation, has condensed him in a letter to Wordsworth : " There is no medium between a prose version and one on the avowed principle of compen sation in the widest sense, i.e. manner, genius, total effect."* I have selected these passages, not because they are the best, but because they have a near application to Dryden himself. His own characterisation of Chaucer (though too narrow for the greatest but one of English poets) is the best that could be given of himself : " He is a perpetual fountain of good sense." And the other passages show him a close and open-minded student of the art he professed. Has his influence on our literature, but especially on our poetry, been on the whole for good or evil 1 If he could have been read with the liberal understanding which he brought to the works of others, I should answer at once that it had been beneficial. But his translations and paraphrases, in some ways the best things he did, were done, like his plays, under contract to deliver a certain number of verses for a specified sum. The versification, of which he had learned the art by long practice, is excellent, but his haste has led him to fill out the measure of lines with phrases that add only to dilute, and thus the clearest, the most direct, the most manly versifier of his time became, without meaning it, the source (fons et origo malorum) of that poetic diction from which our poetry has not even yet recovered. I do not like to say it, but he has sometimes smothered the childlike simplicity of Chaucer under feather-beds of verbiage. What this kind of thing came to in the next century, when everybody ceremoniously took a bushel- basket to bring a wren's egg to market in, is only too sadly familiar. It is clear that his natural taste led Dryden to * Memoirs of Wordsworth, Vol. II. p. 74 (American edition). DRYDEN. 329 prefer directness and simplicity of style. If he was too often tempted astray by Artifice, his love of Nature betrays itself in many an almost passionate outbreak of angry remorse. Addison tells us that he took particular delight in the reading of our old English ballads. What he valued above all things was Force, though in his haste he is willing to make a shift with its counterfeit, Effect. As usual, he had a good reason to urge for what he did : " I will not excuse, but justify myself for one pretended crime for which I am liable to be charged by false critics, not only in this translation, but in many of my original poems, — that I Latinise too much. It is true that when I find an English word significant and sounding, I neither borrow from the Latin or any other language ; but when I want at home I must seek abroad. If sounding words are not of our growth and manufacture, who shall hinder me to import them from a foreign country ? I carry not out the treasure of the nation which is never to return ; but what I bring from Italy I spend in England : here it remains, and here it circulates ; for if the coin be good, it will pass from one hand to another. I trade both with the living and the dead for the enrichment of our native language. We have enough in England to supply our necessity ; but if we will have things of magnificence and splendour, we must get them by commerce. . , . Therefore, if I find a word in a classic author, I propose it to be naturalised by using it myself, and if the public approve of it the bill passes. But every man cannot distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry ; every man, therefore, is not fit to innovate."* This is admirably said, and with Dryden's accustomed penetration to the root of the matter. The Latin has given us most of our canorous words, only they must not be confounded with merely sonorous ones, still less with phrases that, instead of supplementing the sense, encumber it. It was of Latinising * A Discourse of Epick Poetry. "If the public approve." " On ne pent pas admettre dans le developpement des langues aucune revolution artifkielle et sciemment executee ; il n'y a pour elles ni conciles, ni assemblies deliberantes ; on ne les reforme pas comme une constitution vicieuse." — KENAN, De 1'Oiigine du Langage, p. 95. 330 DRYDEN. in this sense that Dryden was guilty. Instead of stabbing, he "with steel invades the life." The consequence was that by-and-by we have Dr. Johnson's poet, Savage, telling us, — " In front, a parlour meets my entering view, Opposed a room to sweet refection due ; " Dr. Blacklock making a forlorn maiden say of her " dear," who is out late, — " Or by some apoplectic fit deprest, Perhaps, alas ! he seeks eternal rest ; " and Mr. Bruce, in a Danish war-song, calling on the vikings to " assume their oars." But it must be admitted of Dryden that he seldom makes the second verse of a couplet the mere train-bearer to the first, as Pope was continually doing. In Dryden the rhyme waits upon the thought ; in Pope and his school the thought courtesies to the tune for which it is written. Dryden has also been blamed for his gallicisms.* He tried some, it is true, but they have not been accepted. I do not think he added a single word to the language, unless, as I suspect, he first used magnetism in its present sense of moral attraction. What he did in his best writing was to use the English as if it were a spoken, and not merely an ink-horn language ; as if it were his own to do what he pleased with it, as if it need not be ashamed of itself.t In this respect, his service to our prose was greater * This is an old complaint. Puttenham sighs over such innovation in Elizabeth's time, and Carew in James's. A language grows and is not made. Almost all the new-fangled words with which Jonson taxes Marston in his " Poetaster " are now current, t Like most idiomatic, as distinguished from correct writers, he knew very little about the language historically or critically. His prose and poetry swarm with locutions that would have made Lindley Murray's hair stand on end. How little he knew is plain from his criticising in Ben Jonson the use of ones in the plural, of "Though Heaven should speak with all his wrath," and be "as false English for are, though the rhyme hides it." Yet all are good English, and I have found them all in Dry den's own writing ! Of his sins against idiom I have a longer list than I have room for. And yet he is one of our highest authorities for real English. DRY DEN. 331 than any other man has ever rendered. He says he formed his style upon Tillotson's (Bossuet, on the other hand, formed his upon Corneille's) ; but I rather think he got it at Will's, for its great charm is that it has the various freedom of talk.* In verse, he had a pomp which, excellent in itself, became pompousness in his imitators. But he had nothing of Milton's ear for various rhythm and interwoven harmony. He knew how to give new modulation, sweet ness, and force to the pentameter ; but in what used to be called pindarics, I am heretic enough to think he generally failed. His so much praised " Alexander's Feast " (in parts of it, at least) has no excuse for its slovenly metre and awkward expression, but that it was written for music. He himself tells us, in the epistle dedicatory to " King Arthur," that the numbers of poetry and vocal music are sometimes so contrary, that in many places I have been obliged to cramp my verses and make them rugged to the reader that they may be harmonious to the hearer." His renowned ode suffered from this constraint, but this is no apology for the vulgarity of conception in too many passages.f Dryden's conversion to Romanism has been commonly taken for granted as insincere, and has therefore left an abiding stain on his character, though the other mud thrown at him by angry opponents or rivals brushed off so soon as it was dry. But I think his change of faith susceptible of several explanations, none of them in any way discreditable to him. Where Church and State are * To see what he rescued us from in pedantry on the one hand, and vulgarism on the other, read Feltham and Tom Brown — if you can. t " Cette ode mise en musique par Purcell (si je ne me trompe), passe en Angleterre pour le chef-d'oeuvre de la poesie la plus sublime et la plus variee ; et je vous avoue que, comme je sais mieux 1'anglais que le grec, j'aime cent fois mieux cette ode que tout Pindare." — VOLTAIIIE to M. DE CHABANON, 9 mars 1772. Dryden would have agreed with Voltaire. "When Chief-Justice Marlay, then a young Templar, "congratulated him on having produced the finest and noblest Ode that had ever been written in any language, ' You are right, ' young gentleman ' (replied Dryden), ' a nobler Ode never was produced, nor ever will.' " — MALONE. 332 DRYDEN. habitually associated, it is natural that minds even of a high order should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police.* Dryden, conservative by nature, had discovered before Joseph de Maistre, that Protestantism, so long as it justified its name by con tinuing to be an active principle, was the abettor of Republicanism. I think this is hinted in more than one passage in his preface to " The Hind and Panther." He may very well have preferred Romanism because of its elder claim to authority in all matters of doctrine, but I think he had a deeper reason in the constitution of his own mind. That he was "naturally inclined to scepticism in philosophy," he tells us of himself in the preface to the " Religio Laica"; but he was a sceptic with an imaginative side, and in such characters scepticism and superstition play into each other's hands. This finds a curious illustration in a letter to his sons, written four years before his death : " Towards the latter end of this month, September, Charles will begin to recover his perfect health, according to his Nativity, which, casting it myself, I am sure is true, and all things hitherto have happened accord ingly to the very time that I predicted them." Have we forgotten Montaigne's votive offerings at the shrine of Loreto ? Dryden was short of body, inclined to stoutness, and florid of complexion. He is said to have had " a sleepy eye," but was handsome and of a manly carriage. He " was not a very genteel man, he was intimate with none but poetical rnen.f He was said to be a very good man by all that knew him : he was as plump as Mr. * This was true of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and still more of Southey, who in some respects was not unlike Dryden. t Pope's notion of gentility was perhaps expressed in a letter from Lord Cobham to him : " I congratulate you upon the fine weather, 'T is a strange thing that people of condition and men of parts must enjoy it in common with the rest of the world." (Ruffhead's Pope, p. 276, note.) His lordship's nai've distinction between people of condition and men of parts is as good as Pope's between genteel and poetical men. I fancy the poet grinning savagely as he read it. DRYDEN. 333 Pitt, of a fresh colour and a down look, and not very eonversible." So Pope described him to Spence. He still reigns in literary tradition, as when at Will's his elbow-chair had the best place by the fire in winter, or on the balcony in summer, and when a pinch from his suuff-box made a young author blush with pleasure as would now-a-days a favourable notice in the Saturday Review. What gave and secures for him this singular eminence ? To put it in a single word, I think that his qualities and faculties were in that rare combination which makes character. This gave flavour to whatever he wrote, — a very rare quality. Was he, then, a great poet ? Hardly, in the narrowest definition. But he was a strong thinker who sometimes carried common sense to a height where it catches the light of a diviner air, and warmed reason till it had well-nigh the illuminating property of intuition. Certainly he is not, like Spenser, the poets' poet, but other men have also their rights. Even the Philistine is a man and a brother, and is entirely right so far as he sees. To demand more of him is to be unreasonable. And he sees, among other things, that a man who undertakes to write should first have a meaning perfectly defined to himself, and then should be able to set it forth clearly in the best words. This is precisely Dryden's praise,* and amid the rickety sentiment looming big through misty phrase which marks so much of modern literature, to read him is as bracing as a north-west wind. He blows the mind clear. In ripeness of mind and bluff heartiness of expression, he takes rank with the best. His phrase is always a short-cut to his sense, for his estate was too spacious for him to need that trick of winding the path of his thought about, and planting it out with clumps of epithet, by which the landscape-gardeners of literature give to a paltry half -acre the air of a park. In poetry, to be next-best is, in one sense, to be nothing ; and yet to be among the first in any kind of writing, as * " Nothing is truly sublime," he himself said, " that is not just and proper." 334 DRYDEN. Dryden certainly was, is to be one of a very small company. He had, beyond most, the gift of the right word. And if he does not, like one or two of the greater masters of song, stir our sympathies by that indefinable aroma so magical in arousing the subtile associations of the soul, he has this in common with the few great writers, that the winged seeds of his thought embed themselves in the memory and germinate there. If I could be guilty of the absurdity of recommending to a young man any author on whom to form his style, I should tell him that, next to having some thing that will not stay unsaid, he could find no safer guide than Dryden. Cowper, in a letter to Mr. Unwin (5th January 1782), expresses what I think is the common feeling about Dryden, that, with all his defects, he had that indefinable something we call Genius. " But I admire Dryden most [he had been speaking of Pope], who has succeeded by mere dint of genius, and in spite of a laziness and a carelessness almost peculiar to himself. His faults are numberless, and so are his beauties. His faults are those of a great man, and his beauties are such (at least sometimes) as Pope with all his touching and retouching could never equal." But, after all, perhaps no man has summed him up so well as John Dennis, one of Pope's typical dunces, a dull man outside of his own sphere, as men are apt to be, but who had some sound notions as a critic, and thus became the object of Pope's fear and therefore of his resentment. Dennis speaks of him as his " departed friend, whom I infinitely esteemed when living for the solidity of his thought, for the spring and the warmth and the beautiful turn of it ; for the power and variety and fulness of his harmony ; for the purity, the perspicuity, the energy of his expression ; and, whenever these great qualities are required, for the pomp and solemnity and majesty of his style."* * Dennis in a letter to Tonson, 1715. POPE. 335 POPE. IN 1675 Edward Phillips, the elder of Milton's nephews, published his " Theatrum Poetarum." In his Preface and elsewhere there can be little doubt that he reflected the aesthetic principles and literary judgments of his now illus trious uncle, who had died in obscurity the year before.* The great poet who gave to English blank verse the grand eur and compass of organ-music, and who in his minor poems kept alive the traditions of Fletcher and Shakespeare, died with no foretaste, and yet we may believe as confident as ever, of that "immortality of fame" which he tells his friend Diodati he was "meditating with the help of Heaven" in his youth. He who may have seen Shakespeare, who doubtless had seen Fletcher, and who perhaps personally knew Jonson,t lived to see the false school of writers whom he qualified as "good rhymists, but no poets," at once the idols and the victims of the taste they had corrupted. As he saw, not without scorn, how they found universal hear ing, while he slowly won his audience, fit though few, did he ever think of the hero of his own epic at the ear of Eve 1 It is not impossible ; but however that may be, he sowed in his nephew's book the dragon's teeth of that long war which, after the lapse of a century and a-half, was to end in the expulsion of the usurping dynasty and the restoration of the ancient and legitimate race whose claim rested on the grace of God. In the following passage surely the voice is Milton's, though the hand be that of Phillips: "Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse, even elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are one thing; true native poetry is another, in which there is a certain air and spirit, which, perhaps, the most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly apprehend ; much less is it attainable by * Tins was Thomas Warton's opinion. t Milton, a London boy, was in his eighth, seventeenth, and twenty-ninth years, respectively, when Shakespeare (1616), Fletcher (1625), and B. Jonson (1637) died. 336 POPE. any art or study." The man who speaks of elegancy as coming nearest, certainly shared, if he was not repeating, the opinions of him who thirty years before had said that " decorum " (meaning a higher or organic unity) was " the grand masterpiece to observe" in poetry.* It is upon this text of Phillips (as Chalmers has re marked) that Joseph Warton bases his classification of poets in the dedication to Young of the first volume of his essay on the " Genius and Writings of Pope," published in 1756. That was the earliest public and official declaration of war against the reigning mode, though private hostilities and re prisals had been going on for some time. Addison's panegyric of Milton in the "Spectator" was a criticism, not the less damaging because indirect, of the superficial poetry then in vogue. His praise of the old ballads con demned by innuendo the artificial elaboration of the draw ing-room pastoral by contrasting it with the simple sincerity of nature. Himself incapable of being natural except in prose, he had an instinct for the genuine virtues of poetry as sure as that of Gray. Thomson's " Winter " (1726) was a direct protest against the literature of Good Society, going as it did to prove that the noblest society was that of one's own mind, heightened by the contemplation of out ward nature. What Thomson's poetical creed was may be surely inferred from his having modelled his two principal poems on Milton and Spenser, ignoring rhyme altogether in the "Seasons," and in the "Castle of Indolence" rejecting the stiff mould of the couplet. In 1744 came Akenside's " Pleasures of Imagination," whose very title, like a guide- post, points away from the level highway of commonplace to mountain-paths and less domestic prospects. The poem was stiff and unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler births, and without it the " Lines written at Tintern Abbey " might never have been. Three years later Collins printed his little volume of Odes, advocating in theory and exemplifying in practice the natural supremacy of the imag ination (though he called it by its older name of fancy) as a * In his Tractate on Education. POPE. 337 test to distinguish poetry from verse-making. The whole Romantic School, in its germ, no doubt, but yet unmistak ably foreshadowed, lies already in the "Ode on the Super stitions of the Highlands." He was the first to bring back into poetry something of the antique fervour, and found again the long-lost secret of being classically elegant with out being pedantically cold. A skilled lover of music,* he rose from the general sing-song of his generation to a harmony that had been silent since Milton, and in him, to use his own words, "The force of energy is found, And the sense rises on the wings of sound." But beside his own direct services in the reformation of our poetry, we owe him a still greater debt as the inspirer of Gray, whose " Progress of Poesy," in reach, variety, and loftiness of poise, overflies all other English lyrics like an eagle. In spite of the dulness of contemporary ears, pre occupied with the continuous hum of the popular hurdy- gurdy, it was the prevailing blast of Gray's trumpet that more than anything else called men back to the legiti mate standard. f Another poet, Dyer, whose " Fleece" was * Milton, Collins, and Gray, our three great masters of harmony, were all musicians. t Wordsworth, who recognised forerunners in Thomson, Collins, Dyer, and Burns, and who chimes in with the popular superstition about Chatterton, is always somewhat niggardly in his appreciation of Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without Gray's tune in his ears, his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied modulation which is one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray, his verse sinks to something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the suggestion of one of his own finest lines, (" The light that never was on land or sea,") was due to Gray's " Orient hues nnborrowed of the sun." I believe it has not been noticed that among the verses in Gray's " Sonnet on the Death of West," which Wordsworth condemns as of no value, the second— "And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fires" — is one of Gray's happy reminiscences from a poet in some respects greater than either of them : — KO 338 POPE. published in 1753, both in the choice of his subject and his treatment of it gives further proof of the tendency among the younger generation to revert to simpler and purer models. Plainly enough, Thomson had been his chief model, though there are also traces of a careful study of Milton. Pope had died in 1744, at the height of his renown, the acknowledged monarch of letters, as supreme as Yoltaire when the excite ment and exposure of his coronation cere monies at Paris hastened his end a generation later. His fame, like Voltaire's, was European, and the style which he had carried to perfection was paramount throughout the cultivated world. The new edition of the " Dunciad," with the Fourth Book added, published the year before his death, though the substitution of Gibber for Theobald made the poem incoherent, had yet increased his reputation and confirmed the sway of the school whose recognised head he was, by the poignancy of its satire, the lucidity of its wit, and the resounding, if somewat uniform march, of its numbers. He had been translated into other languages living and dead. Voltaire had long before pronounced him " the best poet of England, and at present of all the world. "* It was the apotheosis of clearness, point, and " Jamque rubrum tremulis jubar ignibus erigere alte Cum cceptat natura." — Lucret. iv. 404, 405. Gray's taste was a sensitive divining-rod of the sources whether of pleasing or profound emotion in poetry. Though he prized pomp, he did not undervalue simplicity of subject or treatment, if only the witch Imagination had cast her spell there. Wordsworth loved solitude in his appreciations as well as in his daily life, and was the readier to find merit in obscurity, because it gave him the pleasure of being a first discoverer all by himself. Thus he addresses a sonnet to John Dyer. But Gray was one of "the pure and powerful minds" who had discovered Dyer during his lifetime, when the discovery of poets is more difficult. In 1753 he writes to Walpole — "Mr. Dyer has more poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number, but rough and injudicious." Dyer has one fine verse — " On the dark level of adversity." * MS. letter of Voltaire, cited by Warburton in his edition of Pope, vol. iv. p. 38, note. The date is 15th October 1726. I do not find it in Voltaire's Correspondence. POPE. 339 technical skill, of the ease that comes of practice, not of the fulness of original power. And yet, as we have seen, while he was in the very plenitude of his power, there was already a widespread discontent, a feeling that what " comes nearest," as Phillips calls it, may yet be infinitely far from giving those profounder and incalculable satisfactions of which the soul is capable in poetry. A movement was gathering strength which prompted " The age to quit their clogs By the known rules of virtuous liberty." Nor was it wholly confined to England. Symptoms of a similar reaction began to show themselves on the Continent, notably in the translation of Milton (1732) and the pub lication of the " Nibelungen Lied " (1757) by Bodmer, and the imitations of Thomson in France. Was it possible, then, that there was anything better than good sense, elegant diction, and the highest polish of style 1 Could there be an intellectual appetite which antithesis failed to satisfy ? If the horse would only have faith enough in his green spectacles, surely the straw would acquire, not only the flavour, but the nutritious properties of fresh grass. The horse was foolish enough to starve, but the public is wiser. It is surprising how patiently it will go on, for generation after generation, transmuting dry stubble into verdure in this fashion. The school which Boileau founded was critical and not creative. It was limited, not only in its essence, but by the capabilities of the French language and by the natural bent of the French mind, which finds a predominant satis faction in phrases if elegantly turned, and can make a despotism, political or a3sthetic, palatable with the pepper of epigram. The style of Louis XIV. did what his armies failed to do. It overran and subjugated Europe. It struck the literature of imagination with palsy, and it is droll enough to see Voltaire, after he had got some knowledge of Shakespeare, continually endeavouring to reassure himself about the poetry of the grand siecle, and all the time 340 POPE. asking himself, "Why, in the name of all the gods at once, is this not the real thing 1 " He seems to have felt that there was a dreadful mistake somewhere, when poetry must be called upon to prove itself inspired, above all when it must demonstrate that it is interesting, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Difficulty, according to Voltaire, is the tenth Muse ; but how if there were difficulty in reading as well as writing 1 It was something, at any rate, which an increasing number of persons were perverse enough to feel in attempting the productions of a pseudo-classicism, the classicism of red heels and periwigs. Even poor old Dennis himself had arrived at a kind of muddled notion that artifice was not precisely art, that there were depths in human nature which the most perfectly manufactured line of five feet could not sound, and pas sionate elations that could not be tuned to the lullaby seesaw of the couplet. The satisfactions of a conventional taste were very well in their own way, but were they, after all, the highest of which men were capable who had obscurely divined the Greeks, and who had seen Hamlet, Lear, and Othello upon the stage ? Was not poetry, then, something which delivered us from the dungeon of actual life, instead of basely reconciling us with it ? A century earlier the school of the cultists had established a dominion ephemeral, as it soon appeared, but absolute while it lasted. Du Bartas, who may, perhaps, as fairly as any, lay claim to its paternity,* had been called divine, and similar honours had been paid in turn to Gongora, Lilly, and Marini, who were in the strictest sense contemporaneous. The infection of mere fashion will hardly account satisfac torily for a vogue so sudden and so widely extended. It may well be suspected that there was some latent cause, something at work more potent than the fascinating man nerism of any single author in the rapid and almost * Its taste for verbal affectations is to be found in the Roman de la Rose, and (yet more absurdly forced) in Gauthier de Coinsy ; but in Du Bartas the research of efl'ect not seldom subjugates the thought as well as the phrase. POPE. 341 simultaneous diffusion of this purely cutaneous eruption. It is not improbable that, in the revival of letters, men whose native tongues had not yet attained the precision and grace only to be acquired by long literary usage, should have learned from a study of the Latin poets to value the form above the substance, and to seek in mere words a conjuring property which belongs to them only when they catch life and meaning from profound thought or powerful emotion. Yet this very devotion to expression at the expense of everything else, though its excesses were fatal to the innovators who preached and practised it, may not have been without good results in refining language and fitting it for the higher uses to which it was destined. The cultists went down before the implacable good sense of French criticism, but the defect of this criticism was that it ignored imagination altogether, and sent Nature about her business as an impertinent baggage whose household loom competed unlawfully with the machine-made fabrics, so exquisitely uniform in pattern, of the royal manufactories. There is more than a fanciful analogy between the style which Pope brought into vogue and that which for a time bewitched all ears in the latter half of the sixteenth century. As the master had made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low, so the disciples endeavoured to escape from what was common. This they contrived by the ready expedient of the periphrasis. They called everything something else. A boot with them was " The shining leather that encased the limb ;" coffee became " The fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown ; " and they were as liberal of epithets as a royal christening of proper names. Two in every verse, one to balance the other, was the smallest allowance. Here are four successive verses from " The Vanity of Human Wishes : "— " The encumbered oar scarce leaves the dreaded coast, Through purple billows and a. floating host. The bold Bavarian in a hiclcless hour Tries the dread summits of Ccesarian power." 342 POPE. This fashion perished also by its own excess, but the criticism which laid at the door of the master all the faults of his pupils was unjust. It was defective, moreover, in over looking how much of what we call natural is an artificial product, above all in forgetting that Pope had one of the prime qualities of a great poet in exactly answering the intellectual needs of the age in which he lived, and in reflecting its lineaments. He did in some not inadequate sense hold the mirror up to nature. His poetry is not a mountain-tarn, like that of Wordsworth ; it is not in sympathy with the higher moods of the mind ; yet it continues entertaining, in spite of all changes of mode. It was a mirror in a drawing-room, but it gave back a faithful image of society, powdered and rouged, to be sure, and intent on trifles, yet still as human in its own way as the heroes of Homer in theirs. For the popularity of Pope, as for that of Marini and his sect, circumstances had prepared the way. English litera ture for half a century after the Restoration showed the marks both of a moral reaction and of an artistic vassalage to France. From the compulsory saintship and cropped hair of the Puritans men rushed or sneaked, as their temperaments dictated, to the opposite cant of sensuality and a wilderness of periwig. Charles II. had brought back with him from exile French manners, French morals, and above all, French taste. Misfortune makes a shallow mind sceptical. It had made the king so ; and this, at a time when court patronage was the main sinew of authorship, was fatal to the higher qualities of literature. That Charles should have preferred the stately decorums of the French school, and should have mistaken its polished mannerism for style, was natural enough. But there was something also in the texture of the average British mind which prepared it for this subjugation from the other side of the Channel. No observer of men can have failed to notice the clumsy respect which the understanding pays to elegance of manner and savoir-faire, nor what an awkward sense of inferiority it feels in the presence of an accomplished worldliness. The POPE. 343 code of society is stronger with most persons than that of Sinai, and many a man who would not scruple to thrust his fingers in his neighbour's pocket would forego green peas rather than use his knife as a shovel. The submission with which the greater number surrender their natural likings for the acquired taste of what for the moment is called the World is a highly curious phenomenon, and, however destructive of originality, is the main safeguard of society and nurse of civility. Anyone who has witnessed the torments of an honest citizen in a foreign gallery before some hideous martyrdom which he feels it his duty to admire, though it be hateful to him as nightmare, may well doubt whether the gridiron of the saint were hotter than that of the sinner. It is only a great mind or a strong character that knows how to respect its own provincialism and can dare to be in fashion with itself. The bewildered clown with his "Am I Giles? or am I not 1 " was but a type of the average man who finds himself uniformed, drilled, and keeping step, whether he will or no, with the company into which destiny or chance has drafted him, and which is marching him inexorably away from everything that made him comfortable. The insularity of England, while it fostered pride and reserve, entailed also that sensitiveness to ridicule which haunts pride like an evil genius. "The English," says Barclay, writing half a century before the Restoration, " have for the most part grave minds, and withdrawn, as it were, into themselves for counsel \ they wonderfully admire themselves and the manners, genius, and spirit of their own nation. In salutation or in writing they endure not (unless haply imbued with foreign manners) to descend to those words of imaginary servitude which the refinement (blandities) of ages hath invented."* Yet their fondness of foreign fashions had long been the butt of native satirists. Everyone remembers Portia's merry pic ture of the English lord : " How oddly he is suited ! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in * Bardaii Satyricon, p. 382. Barclay had lived in France. 344 POPE. France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behaviour every where." But while she laughs at his bungling efforts to make himself a cosmopolite in externals, she hints at the persistency of his inward Anglicism: "He hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian." In matters of taste the Anglo-Saxon mind seems always to have felt a painful distrust of itself, which it betrays either in an affectation of burly contempt or in a pretence of admiration equally insincere. The young lords who were to make the future court of Charles II. no doubt found in Paris an elegance beside which the homely bluntness of native manners seemed rustic and underbred. They frequented a theatre where propriety was absolute upon the stage, though license had its full swing behind the scenes. They brought home with them to England debauched morals and that urbane discipline of manners which is so agreeable a substitute for discipline of mind. The word " genteel " came back with them, an outward symptom of the inward change. In the last generation, the men whose aim was success in the Other World had wrought a political revolution ; now, those whose ideal was prosperity in This World were to have their turn and to accomplish with their lighter weapons as great a change. Before the end of the seventeenth century John Bull was pretty well persuaded, in a bewildered kind of way, that he had been vulgar, and especially that his efforts in literature showed marks of native vigour, indeed, but of a vigour clownish and uncouth. He began to he ashamed of the provincialism which had given strength, if also something of limitation, to his character. Waller, who spent a whole summer in polishing the life out of ten lines to be written in the Tasso of the Duchess of York, expresses the prevailing belief as regarded poetry in the prologue to his "improvement" of the "Maid's Tragedy " of Beaumont and Fletcher. He made the play reasonable, as it was called, and there is a pleasant satire in the fact that it was refused a license because there was an immoral king in it. On the throne, to be sure — but on the stage ! Forbid it, decency ! POPE. 345 " Above our neighbours' our conceptions are, But faultless writing is the effect of care ; Our lines reformed, and not composed in haste, Polished like marble, would like marble last. Were we but less indulgent to our fau'ts, And patience had to cultivate our thoughts, Our Muse would flourish, and a nobler rage Would honour this than did the Grecian stage." It is a curious comment on these verses in favour of careful writing, that Waller should have failed even to express his own meaning either clearly or with propriety. He talks of " cultivating our thoughts," when he means " pruning our style ; " he confounds the Muse with the laurel, or at any rate makes her a plant, and then goes on with perfect equanimity to tell us that a nobler " rage " (that is madness) than that of Greece would follow the horticultural devices he recommends. It never seems to have occurred to Waller that it is the substance of what you polish, and not the polish itself, that insures duration. Dryden, in his rough-and-ready way, has hinted at this in his verses to Congreve on the " Double Dealer." He begins by stating the received theory about the improvement of English literature under the new regime, but the thin ice of sophistry over which Waller had glided smoothly gives way under his greater weight, and he finds himself in deep water ere he is aware. " Well, then, the promised hour has come at last, The present age in wit obscures the past ; Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ, Conquering with force of arm* and dint of wit Theirs was the giant race before the Flood ; And thus when Charles returned our Empire stood ; Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured, With rules of husbandry the rankness cured, Tamed us to manners when the stage was rude, And boisterous English wit with art endued ; * Usually printed arms, but Dryden certainly wrote arm, to correspond with dint, which he used in its old meaning of a downright blow. 346 POPE. Our age was cultivated thus at length, But what we gained in skill we lost in strength ; Our builders were with want of genius curst, The second temple was not like the first." There would seem to be a manifest reminiscence of Waller's verse in the half -scornful emphasis which Dryden lays on "cultivated.'' Perhaps he was at first led to give greater weight to correctness and to the restraint of arbitrary rules from a consciousness that he had a tendency to hyperbole and extravagance. But he afterwards became convinced that the heightening of discourse by passion was a very different thing from the exaggeration which heaps phrase on phrase, and that genius, like beauty, can always plead its privilege. Dryden, by his powerful example, by the charm of his verse, which combines vigour and fluency in a measure perhaps never reached by any other of our poets, and above all, because it is never long before the sunshine of his cheerful good sense breaks through the clouds of rhetoric, and gilds the clipped hedges over which his thought clambers like an unpruned vine — Dryden, one of the most truly English of English authors, did more than all others combined to bring about the triumphs of French standards in taste and French principles in criticism. But he was always like a deserter who cannot feel happy in the victories of the alien arms, and who would go back if he could to the camp where he naturally belonged. Between 1660 and 1700 more French words, I believe, were directly transplanted into our language than in the century and a-half since. What was of more consequence, French ideas came with them, shaping the form, and through that modifying the spirit, of our literature. Voltaire, though he came later, was steeped in the theories of art which had been inherited as traditions of classicism from the preceding generation. He had lived in England, and, I have no doubt, gives us a very good notion of the tone which was prevalent there in his time, an English version of the criticism imported from France. He tells us that Mr. Addison was the first Englishman who had POPE. 347 written reasonable tragedy. And in spite of the growling of poor old Dennis, whose sandy pedantry was not without an oasis of refreshing sound judgment here and there, this was the opinion of most persons at that day, except, it may be suspected, the judicious and modest Mr. Addison him self. Voltaire says of the English tragedians — and it will be noticed that he is only putting, in another way, the opinion of Dryden — " Their productions, almost all barbar ous, without polish, order, or probability, have astonishing gleams in the midst of their night ; ... is seems sometimes that nature is not made in England as it is elsewhere." Eh bien, the inference is that we must try and make it so ! The world must be uniform in order to be comfortable, and what fashion so becoming as the one we have invented in Paris ? It is not a little amusing that when Voltaire played master of ceremonies to introduce the bizarre Shakespeare among his countrymen, that other kind of nature made a profounder impression on them than quite pleased him. So he turned about presently and called his whilome protege a buffoon. The condition of the English mind at the close of the seventeenth century was such as to make it particularly sensitive to the magnetism which streamed to it from Paris. The loyalty of everybody, both in politics and religion, had been put out of joint. A generation of materialists, by the natural rebound which inevitably follows over-tension, was to balance the ultra-spiritualism of the Puritans. As always when a political revolution has been wrought by moral agencies, the plunder had fallen mainly to the share of the greedy, selfish, and unscrupulous, whose disgusting cant had given a taint of hypocrisy to piety itself. Religion, from a burning conviction of the soul, had grown to be with both parties a political badge, as little typical of the inward man as the scallop of a pilgrim. Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character. There seems to have been an universal scepticism, and in its worst form, that is, with an outward conformity in the interest of decorum and 348 POPE. order. There was an unbelief that did not believe even in itself. The difference between the leading minds of the former age and that which was supplanting it went to the very roots of the soul, Milton was willing to peril the success of his crowning work by making the poetry of it a stalking-horse for his theological convictions. What was that Fame, "Which the clear spirit doth raise To scorn delights and live laborious days," to the crown of a good preacher who sets " The hearts of men on fire To scorn the sordid world and unto heaven aspire ? " Dean Swift, who aspired to the mitre, could write a book whose moral, if it had any, was that one religion was as good as another, since all were political devices, and accepted a cure of souls when it was more than doubtful whether he believed that his follow-creatures had any souls to be saved, or, if they had, whether they were worth saving. The answer which Pulci's Margutte makes to Morgante, when he asked if he believed in Christ or Mahomet, would have expressed well enough the creed of the majority of that generation : — " To tell thee truly, My faith in black 's no greater than in azure, But I believe in capons, roast-meat, bouilli, And in good wine my faith's beyond all measure."* It was a carnival of intellect without faith, when men could be Protestant or Catholic, both at once, or by turns, or neither, as suited their interest, when they could swear one allegiance and keep on safe terms with the other, when prime ministers and commanders-in-chief could be intel ligencers of the Pretender, nay, when even Algernon Sidney himself could be a pensioner of France. What morality there was, was the morality of appearances, of the side that is turned toward men and not toward God. The very shame- lessness of Congreve is refreshing in that age of sham. * Morgante xviii. 115. POPE. 349 It was impossible that anything truly great, that is, great on the moral and emotional as well as the intel lectual side, should be produced by such a generation. But something intellectually great could be and was. The French rnind, always stronger in perceptive and analytic than in imaginative qualities, loving precision, grace, and finesse, prone to attribute an almost magical power to the scientific regulation whether of politics or religion, had brought wit and fancy and the elegant arts of society to as great perfection as was possible by the ct, priori method. Its ideal in literature was to conjure pas sion within the magic circle of courtliness, or to combine the appearance of careless ease and gaiety of thought with intellectual exactness of statement. The eternal watchful ness of a wit that never slept had made it distrustful of the natural emotions and the unconventional expression of them, and its first question about a sentiment was, Will it be safe? about a phrase, Will it pass with the Academy 1 The effect of its example on English literature would appear chiefly in neatness and facility of turn, in point and epigrammatic compactness of phrase, and these in conveying conventional sentiments and emotions, in appealing to good society rather than to human nature. Its influence would be greatest where its success had been most marked, in what was called moral poetry, whose chosen province was manners, and in which satire, with its avenging scourge, took the place of that profounder art whose office it was to purify, not the manners, but the source of them in the soul, by pity and terror. The mistake of the whole school of French criticism, it seems to me, Jay in its tendency to confound what was common with what was vulgar, in a too exclusive deference to authority at the expense of all free movement of the mind. There are certain defects of taste which correct themselves by their own extravagance. Language, I suspect, is more apt to be reformed by the charm of some master of it, like Milton, than by any amount of precept. The influence of second-rate writers for evil is at best ephemeral, for true 350 POPE. style, the joint result of culture and natural aptitude, is always in fashion, as fine manners always are, in whatever clothes. Perhaps some reform was needed when Quarles, who had no mean gift of poesy, could write, " My passion has BO April in her eyes : I cannot spend in mists ; I cannot mizzle ; My fluent brains are too severe to drizzle Slight drops."* Good taste is an excellent thing when it confines itself to its own rightful province of the proprieties, but when it attempts to correct those profound instincts out of whose judgments the higher principles of aesthetics have been form ulated, its success is a disaster. During the era when the French theory of poetry was supreme, we notice a decline from imagination to fancy, from passion to wit, from metaphor, which fuses image and thought in one, to simile, which sets one beside the other, from the supreme code of the natural sympathies to the parochial by-laws of etiquette. The imagination instinctively Platonises, and it is the essence of poetry that it should be unconventional, that the soul of it should subordinate the outward parts ; while the artificial method proceeds from a principle the reverse of this, making the spirit lackey the form. Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the epilogue to the " Maid's Tragedy ":— " Nor is't less strange such mighty wits as those Should use a style in tragedy like prose ; Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage Should speak their virtue and describe their rage." That it should be beneath the dignity of princes to speak in * Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led astray by the vices of Donne's mariner, he had good company in Herbert and Yaughan. In common with them, too, he had that luck of simpleness which is even more delightful than wit. In the same poem he says, — " Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples down In Abram's bosom, in the sacred down Of soft eternity." POPE. 351 anything but rhyme can only be paralleled by Mr. Puff's law that a heroine can go decorously mad only in white satin. Waller, I suppose, though with so loose a thinker one cannot be positive, uses "describe" in its Latin sense of limitation. Fancy Othello or Lear confined to this go- cart ! Phillips touches the true point when he says, " And the truth is, the use of measure alone, without any rime at all, would give more scope and liberty both to style and fancy than can possibly be observed in rime,"* But let us test Waller's method by an example or two. His monarch made reasonable, thus discourses : — " Courage our greatest failings does supply, And makes all good, or handsomely we die. Life is a thing of common use ; by heaven As well to insects as to monarchs given ; But for the crown, 'tis a more sacred thing ; I'll dying lose it, or I'll live a king. Come, Diphilus, we must together walk And of a matter of importance talk." [Exeunt. Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as here, merely removes prose to a proper ideal distance, where it is in keeping with more impassioned parts, but commonplace set to this rocking-horse jog irritates the nerves. There is nothing here to remind us of the older tragic style but the exeunt at the close. Its pithy conciseness and the relief which it brings us from his majesty's prosing give it an almost poetical savour. Aspatia's reflections upon suicide (or "suppressing our breath," as she calls it), in the play, will make few readers regret that Shakespeare was left to his own unassisted barbarism when he wrote Hamlet's soliloquy on the same topic : — " 'Twas in compassion of our woe That nature first made poisons grow, For hopeless wretches such as I Kindly providing means to die : As mothers do their children keep, So Nature feeds and makes us sleep. The indisposed she does invite To go to bed before 'tis night." * Preface to the The.atrum. 352 POPE. Correctness in this case is but a-synonyme of monotony, and words are chosen for the number of their syllables, for their rubbishy value to fill-in, instead of being forced upon the poet by the moaning which occupios the mind. Language becomes useful for its diluting properties, rather than as the medium by means of which the thought or fancy precipitate themselves in crystals upon a connecting thread of purpose. Let us read a few verses from Beaumont and Fletcher, that we may feel fully the difference between the rude and the reformed styles. This also shall be a speech of Aspatia's. Antiphila, one of her maidens, is working the story of Theseus and Ariadne in tapestry, for the older masters loved a picturesque background and knew the value of fanciful accessaries. Aspatia thinks the face of Ariadne not sad enough : — " Do it by me, Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia, And you shall find all true but the wild island. Suppose I stand upon the seabeach now, Mine arms thus, and my hair blown with the wind, Wild as that desert ; and let all about me Be teacher of my story. Do my face (If ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow) Thus, thus, Antiphila ; strive to make me look Like sorrow's monument ; and the trees about me Let them be dry and leafless ; let the rocks Groan with continual surges ; and behind me Make all a desolation." What instinctive felicity of versification ! what sobbing breaks and passionate repetitions are here ! We see what the direction of the new tendency was, but it would be an inadequate or a dishonest criticism that should hold Pope responsible for the narrow compass of the instrument which was his legacy from his immediate predecessors, any more than for the wearisome thrumming- over of his tune by those who came after him and who had caught his technical skill without his genius. The question properly stated is, How much was it possible to make of the material supplied by the age in which he lived 1 and how much did he make of it 1 Thus far, among the great English POPE. 353 poets who preceded him, we have seen actual life represented by Chaucer, imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life by Shakespeare, the interior life by Milton. But as every thing aspires to a rhythmical utterance of itself, so conventional life, a new phenomenon, was waiting for its poet. It found or made a most fitting one in Pope. He stands for exactness of intellectual expression, for perfect propriety of phrase (I speak of him at his best), and is a striking instance how much success and permanence of reputation depend on conscientious finish as well as on native endowment. Butler asks — " Then why should those who pick and choose The best of all the best compose, And join it by Mosaic art, In graceful order, part to part, To make the whole in beauty suit, Not merit as complete repute As those who, with less art and pain, Can do it with their native brain ? " Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps a man as an artist is this power of finding out what is " the best of all the best." I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with diffidence. I was brought up in the old superstition that he was the greatest poet that ever lived ; and when I came to find that I had instincts of my own, and my mind was brought in contact with the apostles of a more esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent desire for smashing the idols I had been brought up to worship, without any regard to their artistic beauty, which characterises youthful zeal. What was it to me that Pope was called a master of style 1 I felt, as Addison says in his Freeholder when answering an argument in favour of the Pretender because he could speak English and George I. could not, " that I did not wish to be tyrannised over in the best English that ever was spoken." The young demand thoughts that find an echo in their real and not their acquired nature, and care very little about the dress they are put in. It is later that we learn to like the conventional, as we do olives. There was a time when I 354 POPE. could not read Pope, but disliked him on principle as Old Roger Ascham seems to have felt about Italy, when he says, " I was once in Italy myself, but I thank God my abode there was only nine days." But Pope fills a very important place in the history of English poetry, and must be studied by everyone who would come to a clear knowledge of it. I have since read over every line that Pope ever wrote, and every letter written by or to him, and that more than once. If I have not come to the conclusion that he is the greatest of poets, I believe that I am at least in a condition to allow him every merit that is fairly his. I have said that Pope as a literary man represents precision and grace of expression ; but as a poet he represents something more, — nothing less, namely, than one of those eternal controversies of taste which will last as long as the imagination and understanding divide men between them. It is not a matter to be settled by any amount of argument or demonstration. There are born Popists or Wordsworthians, Lockists or Kantists, and there is nothing more to be said of the matter. Wordsworth was not in a condition to do Pope justice. A man brought up in sublime mountain solitudes, and whose nature was a solitude more vast than they, walking an earth which quivered with the throe of the French Revolution, the child of an era of profound mental and moral movement, it could not be expected that he should be in sympathy with the poet of artificial life. Moreover, he was the apostle of imagination, and came at a time when the school which Pope founded had degenerated into a mob of mannerists who wrote with ease, and who with their congenial critics united at once to decry poetry which brought in the dangerous innovation of having a soul in it. But however it may be with poets, it is very certain that a reader is happiest whose mind is broad enough to enjoy the natural school for its nature, and the artificial for its artificiality, provided they be only good of their kind. At any rate, we must allow that the man who can produce one perfect work is either a great genius or a very lucky one ; POPE. 355 and so far as we who read are concerned, it is of secondary importance which. And Pope has done this in the " Rape of the Lock." For wit, fancy, invention, and keeping, it has never been surpassed. I do not say there is in it poetry of the highest order, or that Pope is a poet whom anyone would choose as the companion of his best hours. There is no inspiration in it, no trumpet-call, but for pure entertainment it is unmatched. There are two kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must compel its age to understand it ; the second understands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told. Let us find strength and inspira tion in the one, amusement and instruction in the other, and be honestly thankful for both. The very earliest of Pope's productions gave indications of that sense and discretion, as well as wit, which after wards so eminently distinguished him. The facility of expression is remarkable, and we find also that perfect balance of metre, which he afterwards carried so far as to be wearisome. His pastorals were written in his sixteenth year, and their publication immediately brought him into notice. The following four verses from his first pastoral are quite characteristic in their antithetic balance : — ' ' You that, too wise for pride, too good for power, Enjoy the glory to be great no more, And carrying with you all the world can boast, To all the world illustriously are lost ! " The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of that future period of Pope's Correspondence with his Friends, when Swift, his heart corroding with disappointed ambition at Dublin, Bolingbroke raising delusive turnips at his farm, and Pope pretending not to feel the lampoons which imbittered his life, played together the solemn farce of affecting indifference to the world by which it would have agonised them to be forgotten, and wrote letters addressed to each other, but really intended for that posterity whose opinion they assumed to despise. 356 POPE. In these pastorals there is an entire want of nature. For example, in that on the death of Mrs. Tempest : — " Her fate is whispered by the gentle breeze And told in sighs to all the trembling trees ; The trembling trees, in every plain and wood, Her fate remurraur to the silver flood ; The silver flood, so lately calm, appears Swelled with new passion, and o'erflows with tears ; The winds and trees and floods her death deplore — Daphne, our grief ! our glory now no more ! " All this is as perfectly professional as the mourning of an undertaker. Still worse, Pope materialises and makes too palpably objective that sympathy which our grief forces upon outward nature. Milton, before making the echoes mourn for Lycidas, puts our feelings in tune, as it were, and hints at his own imagination as the source of this emotion in inanimate things, — " But, 0 the heavy change now thou are gone ! " In " Windsor Forest" we find the same thing again : — " Here his first lays majestic Denham sung, There the last numbers flowed from Cowley's tongue ; 0 early lost, what tears the river shed When the sad pomp along his banks was led ! His drooping swans on every note expire, And on his willows hung each muse's lyre ! " In the same poem he indulges the absurd conceit that, " Beasts urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue, And learn of man each other to undo ; " and in the succeeding verses gives some striking instances of that artificial diction, so inappropriate to poems descrip tive of natural objects and ordinary life, which brought verse-making to such a depth of absurdity in the course of the century. " With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler roves Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves ; Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o'ershade, And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade ; POPE. 357 He lifts the tube and levels with his eye, Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky : Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath, The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death ; Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare, They fall and leave their little lives in air." Now one would imagine that the tube of the fowler was a telescope instead of a gun. And think of the larks pre paring their notes like a country choir ! Yet even here there are admirable lines — " Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath," " They fall and leave their little lives in air," for example. In Pope's next poem, the " Essay on Criticism," the wit and poet become apparent. It is full of clear thoughts, compactly expressed. In this poem, written when Pope was only twenty-one, occur some of those lines which have become proverbial, such as — " A little learning is a dangerous thing ; " " For fools rush in where angels fear to tread ; " "True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed," " For each ill author is as bad a friend." In all of these we notice that terseness in which (regard being had to his especial range of thought) Pope has never been equalled. One cannot help being struck also with the singular discretion which the poem gives evidence of. I do not know where to look for another author in whom it appeared so early, and, considering the vivacity of his mind and the constantly besetting temptation of his wit, it is still more wonderful. In his boyish correspondence with poor old Wycherley, one would suppose him to be the man and Wycherley the youth. Pope's understanding was no less vigorous (when not the dupe of his nerves) than his fancy was lightsome and sprightly. I come now to what in itself would be enough to have immortalised him as a poet, the " Rape of the Lock," in 358 POPE. which, indeed, he appears more purely as poet than in any other of his productions. Elsewhere he has shown more force, more wit, more reach of thought, but nowhere such a truly artistic combination of elegance and fancy. His genius has here found its true direction, and the very same artificiality, which in his pastorals was unpleasing, heightens the effect, and adds to the general keeping. As truly as Shakespeare is the poet of man, as God made him, dealing with great passions and innate motives, so truly is Pope the poet of society, the delineator of manners, the exposer of those motives which may be called acquired, whose spring is in institutions and habits of purely worldly origin. The " Rape of the Lock " was written in Pope's twenty- fourth year, and the machinery of the Sylphs was added at the suggestion of Dr. Garth — a circumstance for which we can feel a more unmixed gratitude to him than for writing the " Dispensary." The idea was taken from that enter taining book, " The Count de Gabalis," in which Fouque afterwards found the hint for his " Undine ; " but the little sprites as they appear in the poem are purely the creation of Pope's fancy. The theory of the poem is excellent. The heroic is out of the question in fine society. It is perfectly true that almost every door we pass in the street closes upon its private tragedy, but the moment a great passion enters a man he passes at once out of the artificial into the human. So long as he continues artificial, the sublime is a conscious absurdity to him. The mock-heroic then is the only way in which the petty actions and sufferings of the fine world can be epically treated, and the contrasts continually sug gested with subjects of larger scope and more dignified treatment, makes no small part of the pleasure and sharpens the point of the wit. The invocation is admirable : — " Say, what strange motive, Goddess, could compel A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle ? 0 say what stranger cause, yet unexplored, Could make a gentle belle reject a lord ? " POPE. 359 The keynote of the poem is here struck, and we are able to put ourselves in tune with it. It is not a parody of the heroic style, but only a setting it in satirical juxtaposition with cares and events and modes of thought with which it is in comical antipathy, and while it is not degraded, they are shown in their triviality. The " clouded cane," as com pared with the Homeric spear, indicates the difference of scale, the lower plane of emotions and passions. The opening of the action, too, is equally good : — ' ' Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray, And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day, Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake, And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake ; Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground, And the pressed watch returned a silver sound." The mythology of the Sylphs is full of the most fanciful wit ; indeed, wit infused with fancy is Pope's peculiar merit. The Sylph is addressing Belinda : — " Know, then, unnumbered spirits round thee fly, The light militia of the lower sky ; These, though unseen, are ever on the wing, Hang o'er the box and hover round the ring. As now your own our beings were of old, And once enclosed in woman's beauteous mould ; Think not, when woman's transient breath is fled, That all her vanities at once are dead ; Succeeding vanities she still regards, And though she plays no more, o'erlooks the cards. For when the fair in all their pride expire, To their first elements their souls retire ; The sprites of fiery termagants in flame Mount up and take a salamander's name : Soft yielding nymphs to water glide away And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea ; The graver prude sinks downward to a gnome In search of mischief still on earth to roam ; The light coquettes in sylphs aloft repair And sport and flutter in the fields of air." And the contrivance by which Belinda is awakened is also perfectly in keeping with all the rest of the machinery :— 36o POPE. »• tefe said : when Shock, who thought she slept too long, Leaped up and waked his mistress with his tongue ; 'Twaa then, Belinda, if report say true, Thy eyes first opened on a billet-doux." Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope peeps out in the pleasantest little smiling ways, as where, in describing the toilet-table, he says : — " Here files of pins extend their shining rows, Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux." Or when, after the fatal lock has been severed, " Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes, And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies, Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last ; Or when rich china-vessels, fallen from high, In glittering dust and painted fragments lie ! " And so when the conflict begins : — " Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air ; Weighs the men's wits against the ladies' hair ; The doubtful beam long nods from side to side ; At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside." But more than the wit and fancy, I think, the perfect keeping of the poem deserves admiration. Except a touch of grossness, here and there, there is the most pleasing harmony in all the conceptions and images. The punish ments which he assigns to the sylphs who neglect their duty are charmingly appropriate and ingenious : — " Whatever spirit, careless of his charge, His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large, Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o'er take his sins ; Be stopped in vials or transfixed with pins, Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie, Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye ; Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain, While clogged he beats his silver wings in vain ; Or alum styptics with contracting power, Shrink his thin essence like a rivelled flower ; Or as Ixion fixed the wretch shall feel The giddy motion of the whirling wheel, In fumes of burning chocolate shall glow, And tremble at the sea that froths below 1 " POPE. 361 The speech of Thalestris, too, with its droll climax, is equally good : — " Methinks already I your tears survey, Already hear the horrid things they say, Already see you a degraded toast, And all your honour in a whisper lost ! How shall I then your helpless fame defend ? 'Twill then be infamy to seem your friend ! And shall this prize, the inestimable prize, Exposed through crystal to the gazing eyes, And heightened by the diamond's circling rays, On that rapacious hand for ever blaze ? Sooner shall grass in Hyde Park Circus grow, And wits take lodging in the sound of Bow ; Sooner let earth, air, sea, in chaos fall, Men, monkeys, lapdogs, parrots, perish all ! " So also Belinda's account of the morning omens : — " 'Twas this the morning omens seemed to tell ; Thrice from my trembling hand the patch-box fell ; The tottering china shook without a wind ; Nay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind." The idea of the goddess of Spleen, and of her palace where " The dreaded East is all the wind that blows," was a very happy one. In short, the whole poem more truly deserves the name of a creation than anything Pope ever wrote. The action is confined to a world of his own, the supernatural agency is wholly of his own contrivance, and nothing is allowed to overstep the limitations of the subject. It ranks by itself as one of the purest works of human fancy ; whether that fancy be strictly poetical or not is another matter. If we compare it with the " Mid summer Night's Dream," an uncomfortable doubt is suggested. The perfection of form in the " Rape of the Lock " is to me conclusive evidence that in it the natural genius of Pope found fuller and freer expression than in any other of his poems. The others are aggregates of brilliant passages rather than harmonious wholes. It is a droll illustration of the inconsistencies of human 362 POPE. nature, a more profound satire than Pope himself ever wrote, that his fame should chiefly rest upon the "Essay on Man." It has been praised and admired by men of the most opposite beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops and free-thinkers have met here on a common ground of sympathetic approval. And, indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things beyond a question — that Pope was not a great thinker ; and that wherever he found a thought, no matter what, he could express it so tersely, so clearly, and with such smoothness of versification, as to give it an everlasting currency. Hobbes's unwieldy Leviathan, left stranded there on the shore of the last age, and nauseous with the stench of its selfishness — from this Pope distilled a fragrant oil with which to fill the brilliant lamps of his philosophy — lamps like those in the tombs of alchemists, that go out the moment the healthy air is let in upon them. The only positive doctrines in the poem are the selfishness of Hobbes set to music, and the Pantheism of Spinoza brought down from mysticism to commonplace. Nothing can be more absurd than many of the dogmas taught in this " Essay on Man." For example, Pope affirms explicitly that instinct is something better than reason : — " See him from Nature rising slow to art, To copy instinct then was reason's part ; Thus, then, to man the voice of nature spake ; — Go, from the creatures thy instructions take ; Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield ; Learn from the birds the physic of the field : The arts of building from the bee receive ; Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave ; Learn of the little nautilus to sail ; Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving gale." I say nothing of the quiet way in which the general term " nature " is substituted for God, but how unutterably void of reasonableness is the theory that Nature would have left her highest product, man, destitute of that instinct with which she had endowed her other creatures ! As if reason were not the most sublimated form of instinct. The POPE. 363 accuracy on which Pope prided himself, and for which he is commended, was not accuracy of thought so much as of expression. And he cannot always even claim this merit, but only that of correct rhyme, as in one of the passages I have already quoted from the " Rape of the Lock," he talks of casting shrieks to heaven — a performance of some difficulty, except when cast is needed to rhyme with last. But the supposition is that in the "Essay on Man" Pope did not himself know what he was writing. He was only the condenser and epigrammatiser of Bolingbroke — a very fitting St. John for such a gospel. Or, if he did know, we can account for the contradictions by supposing that he threw in some of the commonplace moralities to conceal his real drift. Johnson asserts that Bolingbroke in private laughed at Pope's having been made the mouthpiece of opinions which he did not hold. But this is hardly probable when we consider the relations between them. It is giving Pope altogether too little credit for intelligence to suppose that he did not understand the principles of his intimate friend. The caution with which he at first concealed the authorship would argue that he had doubts as to the reception of the poem. When it was attacked on the score of infidelity, he gladly accepted Warburton's cham pionship, and assumed whatever pious interpretation he contrived to thrust upon it. The beginning of the poem is familiar to everybody : — " Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things To low ambition and the pride of kings ; Let us (since life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die) Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man, A mighty maze,— but not without a plan ; " To expatiate o'er a mighty maze is rather loose writing ; but the last verse, as it stood in the original editions, was, " A mighty maze of walks without a plan ; " and perhaps this came nearer Pope's real opinion than the verse he substituted for it. Warburton is careful not to 364 POPE. mention this variation in his notes. The poem is every where as remarkable for confusion of logic as it often is for ease of verse and grace of expression. An instance of both occurs in a passage frequently quoted : — " Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate ; All but the page prescribed, their present state ; From brutes what men, from men what spirits know, Or who would suffer being here below ? The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, Had he thy reason, would he skip and play ? Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. 0, blindness to the future kindly given That each may fill the circle meant by heaven ! "Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow fall, . Atoms or systems into ruin hurled, And now a bubble burst, and now a world ! " Now, if "heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate," why should not the lamb " skip and play," if he had the reason of man 1 Why, because he would then be able to read the book of fate. But if man himself cannot, why, then, could the lamb with the reason of man 1 For, if the lamb had the reason of man, the book of fate would still be hidden, so far as himself was concerned. If the inferences we can draw from appearances are equivalent to a know ledge of destiny, the knowing enough to take an umbrella in cloudy weather might be called so. There is a manifest confusion between what we know about ourselves and about other people ; the whole point of the passage being that we are always mercifully blinded to our oivn future, however much reason we may possess. There is also inaccuracy as well as inelegance in saying, " Heaven, Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow fall." To the last verse "Warburton, desirous of reconciling his author with Scripture, appends a note referring to Matthew x. 29 : " Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing 1 and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your POPE. 365 Father." It would not have been safe to have referred to the thirty -first verse: "Pear ye not, therefore, ye are, of more value than many sparrows." To my feeling, one of the most beautiful passages in the whole poem is that familiar one : — " Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind, His soul proud science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk or milky way : Yet simple Nature to his hope has given Behind the cloud-top hill a humble heaven ; Some safer world in depth of woods embraced, Some happier island in the watery waste, Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. To be contents his natural desire, He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire, But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company." But this comes in as a corollary to what went just before : — " Hope springs eternal in the human breast, Man never is but always to be blest ; The soul, uneasy, and confined from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come." Then follows immediately the passage about the poor Indian, who, after all, it seems, is contented with merely being, and whose soul, therefore, is an exception to the general rule. And what have the " solar walk " (as he calls it) and " milky way," to do with the affair ? Does our hope of heaven depend on our knowledge of astronomy 1 Or does he mean that science and faith are necessarily hostile 1 And, after being told that it is the " untutored mind" of the savage which " sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind," we are rather surprised that the lesson the poet intends to teach is that " All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul. That, changed through all, and yet in all the same, . Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame: Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees.' 366 POPE. So that we are no better off than the unturtored Indian, after the poet has tutored us. Dr. Warburtoii makes a rather lame attempt to ward off the charge of Spinozism from this last passage. He would have found it harder to show that the acknowledgment of any divine revelation would not overturn the greater part of its teachings. If Pope intended by his poem all that the bishop takes for granted in his commentary, we must deny him what is usually claimed as his first merit — clearness. If he did not, we grant him clearness as a writer at the expense of sincerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the difficulty would be, that Pope's precision of thought was no match for the fluency of his verse. Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speaking of Pope, that he who executes the best, no matter what his depart ment, will rank the highest, I think there are enough indications in these letters of Byron's, however, that they were written rather more against Wordsworth than for Pope. The rule he lays down would make Voltaire a greater poet, in some respects, than Shakespeare. Byron cites Petrarch as an example; yet if Petrarch had put nothing more into the sonnets than execution, there are plenty of Italian sonneteers who would be his match. But, in point of fact, the department chooses the man and not the man the department, and it has a great deal to do with our estimate of him. Is the department of Milton no higher than that of Butler 1 Byron took especial care not to write in the style he commended. But I think Pope has received quite as much credit in respect even of execu tion as he deserves. Surely execution is not confined to versification alone. What can be worse than this ? 11 At length Erasmus, that great, injured name, (The glory of the priesthood and the shame,) Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age, And drove those holy vandals off the stage." It would have been hard for Pope to have found a prettier piece of confusion in any of the small authors he laughed at than this image of a great, injured name stemming a torrent POPE. 367 and driving vandals off the stage. And in the following verses the image is helplessly confused : — " Kind self-conceit to some her glass applies, Which no one looks in with another's eyes, But, as the flatterer or dependant paint, Beholds himself a patriot, chief, or saint." The use of the word "applies" is perfectly un-English; and it seems that people who look in this remarkable glass see their pictures and not their reflections. Often, also, when Pope attempts the sublime, his epithets become curiously unpoetical, as where he says, in the Dunciad, " As, one hy one, at dread Medea's strain, The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain. " And not seldom he is satisfied with the music of the verse without much regard to fitness of imagery ; in the " Essay on Man," for example : — " Passions, like elements, though born to fight, Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite ; These 't is enough to temper and employ ; But what composes man can man destroy ? Suffice that reason keep to Nature's road, Subject, compound them, follow her and God. Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure's smiling train, Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain, These mixed with Art, and to due bounds confined, Make and maintain the balance of the mind." Here reason is represented as an apothecary compounding pills of "pleasure's smiling train" and the "family of pain." And in the Moral Essays, " Know God and Nature only are the same ; In man the judgment shoots at flying game, A bird of passage, gone as soon as found, Now in the moon, perhaps, now under ground." The "judgment shooting at flying game" is an odd image enough ; but I think a bird of passage, now in the moon and now underground, could be found nowhere — out of Goldsmith's Natural History, perhaps. An epigrammatic expression will also tempt him into saying something with out basis in truth, as where he ranks together "Macedonia's 368 POPE. madman and the Swede," and says that neither of them " looked forward farther than his nose," a slang phrase which may apply well enough to Charles XII., but certainly not to the pupil of Aristotle, who showed himself capable of a large political forethought. So, too, the rhyme, if correct, is a sufficient apology for want of propriety in phrase, as where he makes "Socrates bleed" But it is in his Moral Essays and parts of his Satires that Pope deserves the praise which he himself desired : — "Happily to steer From grave to gay, from lively to severe, Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease, Intent to reason, or polite to please." Here Pope must be allowed to have established a style of his own, in which he is without a rival. One can open upon wit and epigram at any page. " Behold, if Fortune or a mistress frowns, Some plunge in business, others have their crowns ; To ease the soul of one oppressive weight, This quits an empire, that embroils a state ; The same adust complexion has impelled, Charles to the convent, Philip to the field." Indeed, I think one gets a little tired of the invariable this set off by the inevitable tliat^ and wishes antithesis would let him have a little quiet now and then. In the first couplet, too, the conditional "frown" would have been more elegant. But taken as detached passages, how admir ably the different characters are drawn, so admirably that half the verses have become proverbial. This of Addison will bear reading again : — " Peace to all such ; but were there one whose fires True genius kindles and fair fame inspires ; Blest with each talent and each art to please, And born to write, converse, and live with ease ; Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne, View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes, And hate for arts that caused himself to rise, Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer ; POPE 369 Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike, Alike reserved to blame or to commend, A timorous foe and a suspicious friend ; Dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged, And so obliging that he ne'er obliged ; Like Cato give his little Senate laws, And sit attentive to his own applause, "While wits and templars every sentence raise, And wonder with a foolish face of praise ; — Who but must laugh if such a man there be ? Who would not weep if Atticus were he ? With the exception of the somewhat technical image in the second verse of Fame blowing the fire of genius, which too much puts us in mind of the frontispieces of the day, surely nothing better of its kind was ever written. How appli cable it was to Addison I shall consider in another place. As an accurate intellectual observer and describer of personal weaknesses, Pope stands by himself in English verse. In his epistle on the characters of women, no one who has ever known a noble woman, nay, I should almost say no one who ever had a mother or a sister, will find much to please him. The climax of his praise rather degrades than elevates. " 0, blest in temper, whose unclouded ray Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day, She who can love a sister's charms, or hear Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear, She who ne'er answers till a husband cools, Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules, Charms by accepting, by submitting sways, Yet has her humour most when she obeys ; Lets fops or fortune fly which way they will, Disdains all loss of tickets or codille, Spleen, vapours, or small-pox, above them all, And mistress of herself, though china fall." The last line is very witty and pointed — but consider what an ideal of womanly nobleness he must have had, who praises his heroine for not being jealous of her daughter, Addison, in commending Pope's " Essay on Criticism, " says, speaking of us " who live in the latter ages of the 152 370 POPE. world : " " We have little else to do left us but to represent the common sense of mankind, in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon lights." I think he has here touched exactly the point of Pope's merit, and, in doing so, tacitly excludes him from the position of poet, in the highest sense. Take two of Jeremy Taylor's prose sentences about the Countess of Carbery, the lady in Milton's " Comus : " " The religion of this excellent lady was of another constitution ; it took root downward in humility, and brought forth fruit upward in the substantial graces of a Christian, in charity and justice, in chastity and modesty, in fair friendships and sweetness of society. . . . And though she had the greatest judgment, and the greatest experience of things and persons I ever yet knew in a person of her youth and sex and circumstances, yet, as if she knew nothing of it, she had the meanest opinion of herself, and like a fair taper, when she shined to all the room, yet round about her station she had cast a shadow and a cloud, and she shined to everybody but herself." This is poetry, though not in verse. The plays of the elder dramatists are not without examples of weak and vile women, but they are not without noble ones either. Take these verses of Chapman, for example : — " Let no man value at a little price A virtuous woman's counsel : her winged spirit, Is feathered oftentimes with noble words And like her beauty, ravishing and pure ; The weaker body, still the stronger soul. O, what a treasure is a virtuous wife, Discreet and loving. Not one gift on earth Makes a man's life so nighly bound to heaven. She gives him double forces to endure And to enjoy, being one with him, Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense : If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short ; If he lament, she melts herself in tears ; If he be glad, she triumphs ; if he stir, She moves his way, in all things his sweet ape, Himself divinely varied without change. All store without her leaves a man but poor, And with her poverty is exceeding store." POPE. 371 Pope in the character I have read was drawing his ideal woman, for he says at the end that she shall be his muse. The sentiments are those of a bourgeois and of the back parlour, more tha'n of the poet's and the muse's bower. A man's mind is known by the company it keeps. Now it is very possible that the women of Pope's time were as bad as they could be ; but if God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. I grant the influence of the age, but there is a sense in which the poet is of no age, and Beauty, driven from every other home, will never be an outcast and a wanderer, while there is a poet's nature left, will never fail of the tribute at least of a song. It seems to me that Pope had a sense of the neat rather than of the beautiful. His nature delighted more in detecting the blemish than in enjoying the charm. However great his merit in expression, I think it impossible that a true poet could have written such a satire as the Dunciad, which is even nastier than it is witty. It is filthy even in a filthy age, and Swift himself could not have gone beyond some parts of it. One's mind needs to be sprinkled with some disinfecting fluid after reading it. I do not remember that any other poet ever made poverty a crime. And it is wholly without discrimination. De Foe is set in the pillory for ever ; and George Wither, the author of that charming poem, " Fair Virtue," classed among the dunces. And was it not in this age that loose Dick Steele paid his wife the finest compliment ever paid to woman, when he said " that to know her was a liberal education 1 " Even in the " Rape of the Lock," the fancy is that of a wit rather than of a poet. It might not be just to compare his Sylphs with the Fairies of Shakespeare ; but contrast the kind of fancy shown in the poem with that of Drayton's Nymphidia, for example. I will give one stanza of it, describing the palace of the Fairy : — " The walls of spiders' legs were made, Well mortised, and finely laid ; 372 POPE. (He was the master of his trade It curiously that builded) : The windows of the eyes of cats, And, for the roof, instead of slats, 'T is covered with the skins of bats, "With moonshine that are gilded." In the last line the eye and fancy of a poet are recognised. Personally we know more about Pope than about any of our poets. He kept no secrets about himself. If he did not let the cat out of the bag, he always contrived to give her tail a wrench so that we might know she was there. In spite of the savageness of his satires, his natural disposi tion seems to have been an amiable one, and his character as an author was as purely factitious as his style. Dr. Johnson appears to have suspected his sincerity ; but arti fice more than insincerity lay at the basis of his character. I think that there was very little real malice in him, and that his " evil was wrought from want of thought." When Dennis was old and poor, he wrote a prologue for a play to be acted for his benefit. Except Addison, he numbered among his friends the most illustrious men of his time. The correspondence of Pope is, on the whole, less interest ing than that of any other eminent English poet, except that of Southey, and their letters have the same fault of being laboured compositions. Southey's are, on the whole, the more agreeable of the two, for they inspire one (as Pope's certainly do not) with a sincere respect for the character of the writer. Pope's are altogether too full of the proclamation of his own virtues to be pleasant reading. It is plain that they were mostly addressed to the public, perhaps even to posterity. But letters, however carefully drilled to be circumspect, are sure to blab, and those of Pope leave in the reader's mind an unpleasant feeling of circumspection — of an attempt to look as an eminent literary character should rather than as the man really was. They have the unnatural constraint of a man in full dress sitting for his portrait, and endeavouring to look his best. We never catch him, if he can help it, at unawares. Among all Pope's correspondents, Swift shows in the most POPE. 373 dignified, and, one is tempted to say, the most amiable light. It is creditable to the Dean that the letters which Pope addressed to him are by far the most simple and straightforward of any that he wrote. No sham could encounter those terrible eyes in Dublin without wincing. I think, on the whole, that a revision of judgment would substitute "discomforting consciousness of the public" for "insincerity" in judging Pope's character by his letters. He could not shake off the habits of the author, and never, or almost never, in prose, acquired that knack of seeming carelessness that makes Walpole's elaborate compositions such agreeable reading. Pope would seem to have kept a commonplace book of phrases proper to this or that occa sion ; and he transfers a compliment, a fine moral sentiment, nay, even sometimes a burst of passionate ardour, from one correspondent to another, with the most cold-blooded im partiality. Were it not for this curious economy of his, no one could read his letters to Lady Wortley Montague without a conviction that they were written by a lover. Indeed, I think nothing short of the spretce injuria formce will account for (though it will not excuse) the savage vin- dictiveness he felt and showed towards her. It may be suspected also that the bitterness of caste added gall to his resentment. His enemy wore that impenetrable armour of superior rank which rendered her indifference to his shafts the more provoking that it was unaffected. Even for us his satire loses its sting when we reflect that it is not in human nature for a woman to have had two such utterly irreconcilable characters as those of Lady Mary before and after her quarrel with the poet. In any view of Pope's conduct in this affair, there is an ill-savour in his attempt ing to degrade a woman whom he had once made sacred with his love. Spenser touches the right chord when he says of the Rosalind who had rejected him — " Not, then, to her, that scorned thing so base, But to myself the blame, that lookt so high ; Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant To simple swain, sith her 1 may not love, 374 POPE. Yet that I may her honor paravant And praise her worth, though far my wit above , Such grace shall be some guerdon of the grief And long affliction which I have endured." In his correspondence with Aaron Hill, Pope, pushed to the wall, appears positively mean. He vainly endeavours to show that his personalities had all been written in the interests of literature and morality, and from no selfish motive. But it is hard to believe that Theobald would have been deemed worthy of his disgustful pre-eminence but for the manifest superiority of his edition of Shake speare, or that Addison would have been so adroitly disfigured unless through wounded self-love. It is easy to conceive the resentful shame which Pope must have felt when Addison so almost contemptuously disavowed all com plicity in his volunteer defence of Cato in a brutal assault on Dennis. Pope had done a mean thing to propitiate a man whose critical judgment he dreaded ; and the great man, instead of thanking him, had resented his interference as impertinent. In the whole portrait of Atticus one cannot help feeling that Pope's satire is not founded on knowledge, but rather on what his own sensitive suspicion divined of the opinions of one whose expressed preferences in poetry implied a condemnation of the very grounds of the satirist's own popularity. We shall not so easily give up the purest and most dignified figure of that somewhat vulgar generation, who ranks with Sidney and Spenser, as one of the few perfect gentlemen in our literary annals. A man who could command the unswerving loyalty of honest and impulsive Dick Steele could not have been a coward or a backbiter. The only justification alleged by Pope was of the flimsiest kind — namely, that Addison regretted the introduction of the sylphs in the second edition of the " Rape of the Lock," saying that the poem was merum sal before. Let anyone ask himself how he likes an author's emendations of any poem to which his ear had adapted itself in its former shape, and he will hardly think it needful to charge Addison with any mean motive POPE. 375 for his conservatism in this matter. One or two of Pope's letters are so good as to make us regret that he did not oftener don the dressing-gown and slippers in his corres pondence. One in particular, to Lord Burlington, describ ing a journey on horseback to Oxford with Lintot the bookseller, is full of a lightsome humour worthy of Cowper, almost worthy of Gray. Joseph Warton, in summing up at the end of his essay on the genius and writings of Pope, says that the largest part of his works " is of the didactic, moral, and satiric ; and, consequently, not of the most poetic species of poetry ; whence it is manifest that good sense and judgment were his characteristical excellences rather than fancy and inven tion" It is plain that in any strict definition there can be only one kind of poetry, and that what Warton really meant to say was that Pope was not a poet at all. This, I think, is shown by what Johnson says in his " Life of Pope," though he does not name Warton. The dispute on this point went on with occasional lulls for more than a half- century after Warton's death. It was renewed with peculiar acrimony when the Rev. W. L. Bowles diffused and confused Warton's critical opinions in his own peculiarly helpless way in editing a new edition of Pope in 1806. Bowles entirely mistook the functions of an editor, and maladroitly entangled his judgment of the poetry with his estimate of the author's character.* Thirteen years later, Campbell, in his " Specimens," controverted Mr. Bowles's estimate of Pope's character and position, both as man and poet. Mr. Bowles replied in a letter to Campbell on what he called " the invariable principles of poetry." This letter was in turn somewhat sharply criticised by Gilchrist in the Quarterly Review. Mr. Bowles made an * Bowles's Sonnets, well-nigh forgotten now, did more than his controversial writings for the cause he advocated. Their influence upon the coming generation was great (greater than we can well account for) and beneficial. Coleridge tells us that he made forty copies of them while at Christ's Hospital. Wordsworth's prefaces first made imagination the true test of poetry, in its more modern sense. But they drew little notice till later. 376 POPE. angry and unmannerly retort, among other things charging Gilchrist with the crime of being a tradesman's son, where upon the affair became what they call on the frontier a free fight, in which Gilchrist, Roscoe, the elder Disraeli, and Byron took part with equal relish, though with various for tune. The last shot, in what had grown into a thirty years' war, between the partisans of what was called the Old School of poetry and those of the New, was fired by Bowles in 1826. Bowles, in losing his temper, lost also what little logic he had, and though, in a vague way, aesthetically right, con trived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worse confusion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the scholarship nor the critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis. Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dreadful punishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of polemic prose. Bowles most happily exemplified in his own pamphlets what was really the turning-point of the whole controversy (though all the combatants more or less lost sight of it or never saw it) — namely, that without clear ness and terseness there could be no good writing, whether in prose or verse ; in other words, that, while precision of phrase presupposes lucidity of thought, yet good writing is an art as well as a gift. Byron alone saw clearly that here was the true knot of the question, though, as his object was mainly mischief, he was not careful to loosen it. The sincerity of Byron's admiration of Pope has been, it seems to me, too hastily doubted. What he admired in him was that patience in careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most of his contemporaries. Pope's assail ants went so far as to make a defect of what, rightly considered, was a distinguished merit, though the amount of it was exaggerated. The weak point in the case was that his nicety concerned itself wholly about the phrase, leaving the thought to be as faulty as it would, and that it seldom extended beyond the couplet, often not beyond a single verse. His serious poetry, therefore, at its best, is a succession of loosely strung epigrams, and no poet more POPE. 377 often than he makes the second line of the couplet a mere train-bearer to the first. His more ambitious works may be denned as careless thinking carefully versified. Lessing was one of the first to see this, and accordingly he tells us that "his greatj I will not say greatest, merit lay in what we call the mechanic of poetry."* Lessing, with his usual insight, parenthetically qualifies his statement ; for where Pope, as in the " Rape of the Loci," found a subject exactly level with his genius, he was able to make what, taken for all in all, is the most perfect poem in the language. It will hardly be questioned that the man who writes what is still piquant and rememberable, a century and a quarter after his death, was a man of genius. But there are two modes of uttering such things as cleave to the memory of mankind. They may be said or sung. I do not think that Pope's verse anywhere sings, but it should seem that the abiding presence of fancy in his best work forbids his exclusion from the rank of poet. The atmosphere in which he habitually dwelt was an essentially prosaic one, the language habitual to him was that of conversation and society, so that he lacked the help of that fresher dialect which seems like inspiration in the elder poets. His range of associations was of that narrow kind which is always vulgar, whether it be found in the village or the court. Certainly he has not the force and majesty of Dry den in his better moods, but he has a grace, a finesse, an art of being pungent, a sensitiveness to impressions, that would incline us to rank him with Voltaire (whom in many ways he so much resembles), as an author with whom the gift of writing was primary, and that of verse secondary. No other poet that I remember ever wrote prose which is so purely prose as his ; and yet, in any impartial criticism, the " Rape of the Lock " sets him even as a poet far above many men more largely endowed with poetic feeling and insight than he. * Briefe die neueste Litteratur betreffend, 1759, ii. Brief. See also his more elaborate criticism on the "Essay on Man" (Pope ein Metaphysiker), 1755. 373 POPE. A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the age in which he lived, and not a little, I think, for the influence of Swift. In his own province he still stands unapproachably alone. If to be the greatest satirist of individual men, rather than of human nature, if to be the highest expression which the life of the court and the ball-room has ever found in verse, if to have added more phrases to our language than any other but Shakespeare, if to have charmed four generations make a man a great poet, — then he is one. He was the chief founder of an artificial style of writing, which in his hands was living and powerful, because he used it to express artificial modes of thinking and an artificial state of society. Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be found wanting ; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivalled. Printed ly WALTER SCOTT, Felling, Xeivcavtle-on-Tync. TLe In SHILLING Monthly Volumes, Square 8vo. Well printed on fine toned paper, with Red-line Border, and strongly bound in Cloth. Each Volume contains from 300 to 350 pages. With Introductory Notices by WILLIAM SHARP, MATHILDE BLIND, WALTER LEWIN, JOHN HOGBEN, A. J. SYMINGTON, JOSEPH SKIPSEY, EVA HOPE, JOHN RICHMOND, ERNEST RHYS, PERCY E. PINKERTON, MRS. GARDEN, DEAN CARRINGTON, DR. J. BRADSHAW, FREDERICK COOPER, HON. RODEN NOEL, J. ADDINGTON SYMONDS, G. WILLIS COOKE, ERIC MACKAY, ERIC S. ROBERTSON, WILLIAM TIREBUCK, STUART J. REID, MRS. FREILIGRATH KROEKER, J. 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