John Dryden - Delphi Poets Series

by John Dryden

  This is not very decent; yet this is one of the pages in which criticism prevails most over brutal fury.

  He proceeds: “He has a heavy hand at fools, and a great felicity in writing nonsense for them. Fools they will be, in spite of him. His king, his two emperesses, his villain, and his sub-villain, nay, his hero, have all a certain natural cast of the father — their folly was born and bred in them, and something of the Elkanah will be visible.”

  This is Dryden’s general declamation; I will not withhold from the reader a particular remark. Having gone through the first act, he says: “To conclude this act with the most rumbling piece of nonsense spoken yet:

  ”To flatt’ring lightning our feign’d smiles conform,

  Which, back’d with thunder, do but gild a storm.

  “Conform a smile to lightning, make a smile imitate lightning, and flattering lightning: lightning, sure, is a threatening thing. And this lightning must gild a storm. Now, if I must conform my smiles to lightning, then my smiles must gild a storm too: to gild with smiles, is a new invention of gilding. And gild a storm by being backed with thunder. Thunder is part of the storm; so one part of the storm must help to gild another part, and help by backing; as if a man would gild a thing the better for being backed, or having a load upon his back. So that here is gilding by conforming, smiling, lightning, backing, and thundering. The whole is as if I should say thus: I will make my counterfeit smiles look like a flattering stonehorse, which, being backed with a trooper, does but gild the battle. I am mistaken, if nonsense is not here pretty thick sown. Sure the poet writ these two lines aboard some smack in a storm, and, being sea-sick, spewed up a good lump of clotted nonsense at once.”

  Here is, perhaps, a sufficient specimen; but as the pamphlet, though Dryden’s, has never been thought worthy of republication, and is not easily to be found, it may gratify curiosity to quote it more largely:

  ”Whene’er she bleeds,

  He no severer a damnation needs,

  That dares pronounce the sentence of her death,

  Than the infection that attends that breath.

  “That attends that breath. The poet is at breath again; breath can never scape him; and here he brings in a breath that must be infectious with pronouncing a sentence; and this sentence is not to be pronounced till the condemned party bleeds; that is, she must be executed first, and sentenced after; and the pronouncing of this sentence will be infectious; that is, others will catch the disease of that sentence, and this infecting of others will torment a man’s self. The whole is thus: when she bleeds, thou needest no greater hell or torment to thyself, than infecting of others by pronouncing a sentence upon her. What hodge-podge does he make here! Never was Dutch grout such clogging, thick, indigestible stuff. But this is but a taste to stay the stomach; we shall have a more plentiful mess presently.

  “Now to dish up the poet’s broth, that I promised:

  ”For when we’re dead, and our freed souls enlarg’d,

  Of nature’s grosser burden we’re discharg’d,

  Then gently, as a happy lover’s sigh,

  Like wand’ring meteors through the air we’ll fly,

  And in our airy walk, as subtle guests,

  We’ll steal into our cruel fathers’ breasts,

  There read their souls, and track each passion’s sphere:

  See how revenge moves there, ambition here!

  And in their orbs view the dark characters

  Of sieges, ruins, murders, blood, and wars.

  We’ll blot out all those hideous draughts, and write

  Pure and white forms; then with a radiant light

  Their breasts encircle, till their passions be

  Gentle as nature in its infancy;

  Till, soften’d by our charms, their furies cease,

  And their revenge resolves into a peace.

  Thus by our death their quarrel ends,

  Whom living we made foes, dead we’ll make friends.

  “If this be not a very liberal mess, I will refer myself to the stomach of any moderate guest. And a rare mess it is, far excelling any Westminster white-broth. It is a kind of giblet porridge, made of the giblets of a couple of young geese, stodged full of meteors, orbs, spheres, track, hideous draughts, dark characters, white forms, and radiant lights; designed not only to please appetite, and indulge luxury, but it is also physical, being an approved medicine to purge choler: for it is propounded by Morena, as a receipt to cure their fathers of their cholerick humours; and, were it written in characters as barbarous as the words, might very well pass for a doctor’s bill. To conclude: it is porridge, ’tis a receipt, ’tis a pig with a pudding in the belly, ’tis I know not what: for, certainly, never any one that pretended to write sense, had the impudence before to put such stuff as this into the mouths of those that were to speak it before an audience, whom he did not take to be all fools; and, after that, to print it too, and expose it to the examination of the world. But let us see what we can make of this stuff:

  “For when we’re dead, and our freed souls enlarg’d —

  “Here he tells us what it is to be dead; it is to have our freed souls set free. Now, if to have a soul set free, is to be dead; then to have a freed soul set free, is to have a dead man die.

  “Then gentle, as a happy lover’s sigh —

  “They two like one sigh, and that one sigh like two wandering meteors,

  “Shall fly through the air —

  “That is, they shall mount above like falling stars, or else they shall skip like two Jacks with lanterns, or Will with a wisp, and Madge with a candle.

  “And in their airy walk steal into their cruel fathers’ breasts, like subtle guests. So that their fathers’ breasts must be in an airy walk, an airy walk of a flier. And there they will read their souls, and track the spheres of their passions. That is, these walking fliers, Jack with a lantern, &c. will put on his spectacles, and fall a reading souls, and put on his pumps and fall a tracking of spheres; so that he will read and run, walk and fly, at the same time! Oh! Nimble Jack! Then he will see, how revenge here, how ambition there — The birds will hop about. And then view the dark characters of sieges, ruins, murders, blood, and wars, in their orbs: track the characters to their forms! Oh! rare sport for Jack! Never was place so full of game as these breasts! You cannot stir, but flush a sphere, start a character, or unkennel an orb!”

  Settle’s is said to have been the first play embellished with sculptures; those ornaments seem to have given poor Dryden great disturbance. He tries, however, to ease his pain by venting his malice in a parody:

  “The poet has not only been so impudent to expose all this stuff, but so arrogant to defend it with an epistle; like a saucy booth-keeper, that, when he had put a cheat upon the people, would wrangle and fight with any that would not like it, or would offer to discover it; for which arrogance our poet receives this correction; and, to jerk him a little the sharper, I will not transpose his verse, but by the help of his own words transnonsense sense, that, by my stuff, people may judge the better what his is:

  ”Great boy, thy tragedy and sculptures done,

  From press and plates, in fleets do homeward come;

  And in ridiculous and humble pride,

  Their course in ballad-singers’ baskets guide,

  Whose greasy twigs do all new beauties take,

  From the gay shows thy dainty sculptures make.

  Thy lines a mess of rhyming nonsense yield,

  A senseless tale, with flattering fustian fill’d.

  No grain of sense does in one line appear,

  Thy words big bulks of boist’rous bombast bear,

  With noise they move, and from play’rs’ mouths rebound,

  When their tongues dance to thy words’ empty sound.

  By thee inspir’d the rumbling verses roll,

  As if that rhyme and bombast lent a soul:

  And with that soul they seem taught duty too;

  To huffing words does humble nonsen
se bow,

  As if it would thy worthless worth enhance,

  To th’ lowest rank of fops thy praise advance,

  To whom, by instinct, all thy stuff is dear:

  Their loud claps echo to the theatre:

  From breaths of fools thy commendation spreads,

  Fame sings thy praise with mouths of loggerheads.

  With noise and laughing each thy fustian greets,

  ’Tis clapt by choirs of empty-headed cits,

  Who have their tribute sent, and homage given,

  As men in whispers send loud noise to heaven.

  “Thus I have daubed him with his own puddle: and now we are come from aboard his dancing, masking, rebounding, breathing fleet; and, as if we had landed at Gotham, we meet nothing but fools and nonsense.”

  Such was the criticism to which the genius of Dryden could be reduced, between rage and terrour; rage with little provocation, and terrour with little danger. To see the highest minds thus levelled with the meanest, may produce some solace to the consciousness of weakness, and some mortification to the pride of wisdom. But let it be remembered, that minds are not levelled in their powers but when they are first levelled in their desires. Dryden and Settle had both placed their happiness in the claps of multitudes.

  An Evening’s Love, or the Mock Astrologer, a comedy, 1671, is dedicated to the illustrious duke of Newcastle, whom he courts by adding to his praises those of his lady, not only as a lover but a partner of his studies. It is unpleasing to think how many names, once celebrated, are since forgotten. Of Newcastle’s works nothing is now known but his Treatise on Horsemanship.

  The preface seems very elaborately written, and contains many just remarks on the fathers of English drama. Shakespeare’s plots, he says, are in the hundred novels of Cinthio; those of Beaumont and Fletcher in Spanish Stories; Jonson only made them for himself. His criticisms upon tragedy, comedy, and farce, are judicious and profound. He endeavours to defend the immorality of some of his comedies by the example of former writers; which is only to say, that he was not the first, nor, perhaps, the greatest offender. Against those that accused him of plagiarism he alleges a favourable expression of the king: “He only desired that they, who accuse me of thefts, would steal him plays like mine;” and then relates how much labour he spends in fitting for the English stage what he borrows from others.

  Tyrannick Love, or the Virgin Martyr, 1672, was another tragedy in rhyme, conspicuous for many passages of strength and elegance, and many of empty noise and ridiculous turbulence. The rants of Maximin have been always the sport of criticism; and were, at length, if his own confession may be trusted, the shame of the writer.

  Of this play he takes care to let the reader know, that it was contrived and written in seven weeks. Want of time was often his excuse, or, perhaps, shortness of time was his private boast, in the form of an apology.

  It was written before the Conquest of Granada, but published after it. The design is to recommend piety: “I considered that pleasure was not the only end of poesy; and that even the instructions of morality were not so wholly the business of a poet, as that precepts and examples of piety were to be omitted; for to leave that employment altogether to the clergy, were to forget that religion was first taught in verse, which the laziness or dulness of succeeding priesthood turned afterwards into prose.” Thus foolishly could Dryden write, rather than not show his malice to the parsons.

  The two parts of the Conquest of Granada, 1672, are written with a seeming determination to glut the publick with dramatick wonders; to exhibit, in its highest elevation, a theatrical meteor of incredible love and impossible valour, and to leave no room for a wilder flight to the extravagance of posterity. All the rays of romantick heat, whether amorous or warlike, glow in Almanzor, by a kind of concentration. He is above all laws; he is exempt from all restraints; he ranges the world at will, and governs wherever he appears. He fights without inquiring the cause, and loves, in spite of the obligations of justice, of rejection by his mistress, and of prohibition from the dead. Yet the scenes are, for the most part, delightful; they exhibit a kind of illustrious depravity, and majestick madness; such as, if it is sometimes despised, is often reverenced, and in which the ridiculous is mingled with the astonishing.

  In the epilogue to the second part of the Conquest of Granada, Dryden indulges his favourite pleasure of discrediting his predecessors; and this epilogue he has defended by a long postscript. He had promised a second dialogue, in which he should more fully treat of the virtues and faults of the English poets, who have written in the dramatick, epick, or lyrick way. This promise was never formally performed; but, with respect to the dramatick writers, he has given us in his prefaces, and in this postscript, something equivalent; but his purpose being to exalt himself by the comparison, he shows faults distinctly, and only praises excellence in general terms.

  A play thus written, in professed defiance of probability, naturally drew down upon itself the vultures of the theatre. One of the criticks that attacked it was Martin Clifford, to whom Sprat addressed the Life of Cowley, with such veneration of his critical powers as might naturally excite great expectations of instruction from his remarks. But let honest credulity beware of receiving characters from contemporary writers. Clifford’s remarks, by the favour of Dr. Percy, were, at last, obtained; and that no man may ever want them more, I will extract enough to satisfy all reasonable desire.

  In the first letter his observation is only general: “You do live,” says he, “in as much ignorance and darkness as you did in the womb: your writings are like a Jack-of-all-trades’ shop; they have a variety, but nothing of value; and if thou art not the dullest plant-animal that ever the earth produced, all that I have conversed with are strangely mistaken in thee.”

  In the second, he tells him that Almanzor is not more copied from Achilles than from Ancient Pistol: “But I am,” says he, “strangely mistaken if I have not seen this very Almanzor of yours in some disguise about this town, and passing under another name. Pr’ythee tell me true, was not this Huffcap once the Indian Emperor? and, at another time, did he not call himself Maximin? Was riot Lyndaraxa once called Almeira? I mean under Montezuma the Indian Emperor. I protest and vow they are either the same, or so alike that I cannot, for my heart, distinguish one from the other. You are, therefore, a strange unconscionable thief; thou art not content to steal from others, but dost rob thy poor wretched self too.”

  Now was Settle’s time to take his revenge. He wrote a vindication of his own lines; and, if he is forced to yield any thing, makes reprisals upon his enemy. To say that his answer is equal to the censure, is no high commendation. To expose Dryden’s method of analyzing his expressions, he tries the same experiment upon the description of the ships in the Indian Emperor, of which, however, he does not deny the excellence; but intends to show, that, by studied misconstruction, every thing may be equally represented as ridiculous. After so much of Dryden’s elegant animadversions, justice requires that something of Settle’s should be exhibited. The following observations are, therefore, extracted from a quarto pamphlet of ninety-five pages:

  ”Fate after him below with pain did move,

  And victory could scarce keep pace above.

  “These two lines, if he can show me any sense or thought in, or any thing but bombast and noise, he shall make me believe every word in his observations on Morocco sense.

  “In the Empress of Morocco were these lines:

  ”I’ll travel then to some remoter sphere,

  Till I find out new worlds, and crown you there.

  “On which Dryden made this remark:

  “‘I believe our learned author takes a sphere for a country: the sphere of Morocco; as if Morocco were the globe of earth and water; but a globe is no sphere neither, by his leave,’ &c. So sphere must not be sense, unless it relate to a circular motion about a globe, in which sense the astronomers use it. I would desire him to expound those lines in Granada:

  ”I’ll t
o the turrets of the palace go,

  And add new fire to those that fight below.

  Thence, hero-like, with torches by my side,

  (Far be the omen though) my love I’ll guide.

  No, like his better fortune I’ll appear,

  With open arms, loose veil, and flowing hair.

  Just flying forward from my rowling sphere.

  “I wonder, if he be so strict, how he dares make so bold with sphere himself, and be so critical in other men’s writings. Fortune is fancied standing on a globe, not on a sphere, as he told us in the first act.

  “Because ‘Elkanah’s similes are the most unlike things to what they are

  compared in the world,’ I’ll venture to start a simile in his Annus

  Mirabilis: he gives this poetical description of the ship called the

  London:

  ”The goodly London in her gallant trim,

  The phoenix-daughter of the vanquisht old,

  Like a rich bride does on the ocean swim,

  And on her shadow rides in floating gold.

  Her flag aloft spread ruffling in the wind,

  And sanguine streamers seem’d the flood to fire:

  The weaver, charm’d with what his loom design’d,

  Goes on to sea, and knows not to retire.

  With roomy decks, her guns of mighty strength,

  Whose low-laid mouths each mounting billow laves,

  Deep in her draught, and warlike in her length,

  She seems a sea-wasp flying on the waves.

  “What a wonderful pother is here, to make all these poetical beautifications of a ship! that is a phoenix in the first stanza, and but a wasp in the last: nay, to make his humble comparison of a wasp more ridiculous, he does not say it flies upon the waves as nimbly as a wasp, or the like, but it seemed a wasp. But our author at the writing of this was not in his altitudes, to compare ships to floating palaces: a comparison to the purpose, was a perfection he did not arrive to till his Indian Emperor’s days. But, perhaps, his similitude has more in it than we imagine; this ship had a great many guns in her, and they, put all together, made the sting in the wasp’s tail; for this is all the reason I can guess, why it seem’d a wasp. But, because we will allow him all we can to help out, let it be a phoenix sea-wasp, and the rarity of such an animal may do much towards heightening the fancy.