No More Learning

If they at
all colour the idea, it is with a tinge so slight as in no respect
to alter the general effect. In the passage which we have quoted from
Dryden the case is very different. "Preciously" and "aromatic" divert
our whole attention to themselves, and dissolve the image of the battle
in a moment. The whole poem reminds us of Lucan, and of the worst parts
of Lucan,--the sea-fight in the Bay of Marseilles, for example. The
description of the two fleets during the night is perhaps the only
passage which ought to be exempted from this censure. If it was from
the Annus Mirabilis that Milton formed his opinion, when he pronounced
Dryden a good rhymer but no poet, he certainly judged correctly. But
Dryden was, as we have said, one of those writers in whom the period of
imagination does not precede, but follow, the period of observation and
reflection.

His plays, his rhyming plays in particular, are admirable subjects for
those who wish to study the morbid anatomy of the drama. He was utterly
destitute of the power of exhibiting real human beings. Even in the far
inferior talent of composing characters out of those elements into
which the imperfect process of our reason can resolve them, he was very
deficient. His men are not even good personifications; they are not
well-assorted assemblages of qualities. Now and then, indeed, he seizes
a very coarse and marked distinction, and gives us, not a likeness, but
a strong caricature, in which a single peculiarity is protruded, and
everything else neglected; like the Marquis of Granby at an inn-door,
whom we know by nothing but his baldness; or Wilkes, who is Wilkes only
in his squint. These are the best specimens of his skill. For most of
his pictures seem, like Turkey carpets, to have been expressly designed
not to resemble anything in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or
in the waters under the earth.

The latter manner he practises most frequently in his tragedies, the
former in his comedies. The comic characters are, without mixture,
loathsome and despicable. The men of Etherege and Vanbrugh are bad
enough. Those of Smollett are perhaps worse. But they do not approach
to the Celadons, the Wildbloods, the Woodalls, and the Rhodophils of
Dryden. The vices of these last are set off by a certain fierce hard
impudence, to which we know nothing comparable. Their love is the
appetite of beasts; their friendship the confederacy of knaves. The
ladies seem to have been expressly created to form helps meet for such
gentlemen. In deceiving and insulting their old fathers they do not
perhaps exceed the license which, by immemorial prescription, has been
allowed to heroines. But they also cheat at cards, rob strong boxes, put
up their favours to auction, betray their friends, abuse their rivals
in the style of Billingsgate, and invite their lovers in the language
of the Piazza. These, it must be remembered, are not the valets and
waiting-women, the Mascarilles and Nerines, but the recognised heroes
and heroines who appear as the representatives of good society, and who,
at the end of the fifth act, marry and live very happily ever after. The
sensuality, baseness, and malice of their natures is unredeemed by any
quality of a different description,--by any touch of kindness,--or even
by any honest burst of hearty hatred and revenge. We are in a world
where there is no humanity, no veracity, no sense of shame,--a world for
which any good-natured man would gladly take in exchange the society of
Milton's devils. But as soon as we enter the regions of Tragedy, we find
a great change. There is no lack of fine sentiment there. Metastasio
is surpassed in his own department. Scuderi is out-scuderied. We are
introduced to people whose proceedings we can trace to no motive,--of
whose feelings we can form no more idea than of a sixth sense. We have
left a race of creatures, whose love is as delicate and affectionate
as the passion which an alderman feels for a turtle. We find ourselves
among beings, whose love is a purely disinterested emotion,--a loyalty
extending to passive obedience,--a religion, like that of the Quietists,
unsupported by any sanction of hope or fear. We see nothing but
despotism without power, and sacrifices without compensation.

We will give a few instances. In Aurengzebe, Arimant, governor of Agra,
falls in love with his prisoner Indamora. She rejects his suit with
scorn; but assures him that she shall make great use of her power over
him. He threatens to be angry. She answers, very coolly:

"Do not: your anger, like your love, is vain:
Whene'er I please, you must be pleased again.
Knowing what power I have your will to bend,
I'll use it; for I need just such a friend. "

This is no idle menace. She soon brings a letter addressed to
his rival,--orders him to read it,--asks him whether he thinks it
sufficiently tender,--and finally commands him to carry it himself. Such
tyranny as this, it may be thought, would justify resistance. Arimant
does indeed venture to remonstrate:--

"This fatal paper rather let me tear,
Than, like Bellerophon, my sentence bear. "

The answer of the lady is incomparable:--

"You may; but 'twill not be your best advice;
'Twill only give me pains of writing twice.
You know you must obey me, soon or late.
Why should you vainly struggle with your fate? "

Poor Arimant seems to be of the same opinion. He mutters something about
fate and free-will, and walks off with the billet-doux.

In the Indian Emperor, Montezuma presents Almeria with a garland as a
token of his love, and offers to make her his queen. She replies:--

"I take this garland, not as given by you;
But as my merit's and my beauty's due;
As for the crown which you, my slave, possess,
To share it with you would but make me less. "

In return for such proofs of tenderness as these, her admirer consents
to murder his two sons and a benefactor to whom he feels the warmest
gratitude. Lyndaraxa, in the Conquest of Granada, assumes the same lofty
tone with Abdelmelech. He complains that she smiles upon his rival.

"Lynd. And when did I my power so far resign,
That you should regulate each look of mine?

Abdel. Then, when you gave your love, you gave that power.

Lynd. 'Twas during pleasure--'tis revoked this hour.

Abdel. I'll hate you, and this visit is my last.

Lynd. Do, if you can: you know I hold you fast. "

That these passages violate all historical propriety, that sentiments to
which nothing similar was ever even affected except by the cavaliers of
Europe, are transferred to Mexico and Agra, is a light accusation. We
have no objection to a conventional world, an Illyrian puritan, or a
Bohemian seaport. While the faces are good, we care little about the
back-ground. Sir Joshua Reynolds says that the curtains and hangings
in an historical painting ought to be, not velvet or cotton, but merely
drapery. The same principle should be applied to poetry and romance. The
truth of character is the first object; the truth of place and time is
to be considered only in the second place. Puff himself could tell the
actor to turn out his toes, and remind him that Keeper Hatton was
a great dancer. We wish that, in our own time, a writer of a very
different order from Puff had not too often forgotten human nature in
the niceties of upholstery, millinery, and cookery.

We blame Dryden, not because the persons of his dramas are not Moors or
Americans, but because they are not men and women;--not because love,
such as he represents it, could not exist in a harem or in a wigwam, but
because it could not exist anywhere. As is the love of his heroes, such
are all their other emotions. All their qualities, their courage, their
generosity, their pride, are on the same colossal scale. Justice and
prudence are virtues which can exist only in a moderate degree, and
which change their nature and their name if pushed to excess. Of justice
and prudence, therefore, Dryden leaves his favourites destitute. He
did not care to give them what he could not give without measure. The
tyrants and ruffians are merely the heroes altered by a few touches,
similar to those which transformed the honest face of Sir Roger de
Coverley into the Saracen's head. Through the grin and frown the
original features are still perceptible.

It is in the tragi-comedies that these absurdities strike us most.
The two races of men, or rather the angels and the baboons, are there
presented to us together. We meet in one scene with nothing but
gross, selfish, unblushing, lying libertines of both sexes, who, as
a punishment, we suppose, for their depravity, are condemned to talk
nothing but prose. But, as soon as we meet with people who speak in
verse, we know that we are in society which would have enraptured the
Cathos and Madelon of Moliere, in society for which Oroondates would
have too little of the lover, and Clelia too much of the coquette.

As Dryden was unable to render his plays interesting by means of that
which is the peculiar and appropriate excellence of the drama, it was
necessary that he should find some substitute for it. In his comedies he
supplied its place, sometimes by wit, but more frequently by intrigue,
by disguises, mistakes of persons, dialogues at cross purposes,
hair-breadth escapes, perplexing concealments, and surprising
disclosures. He thus succeeded at least in making these pieces very
amusing.

In his tragedies he trusted, and not altogether without reason, to
his diction and his versification. It was on this account, in all
probability, that he so eagerly adopted, and so reluctantly abandoned,
the practice of rhyming in his plays. What is unnatural appears less
unnatural in that species of verse than in lines which approach more
nearly to common conversation; and in the management of the heroic
couplet Dryden has never been equalled. It is unnecessary to urge any
arguments against a fashion now universally condemned. But it is worthy
of observation, that, though Dryden was deficient in that talent which
blank verse exhibits to the greatest advantage, and was certainly the
best writer of heroic rhyme in our language, yet the plays which have,
from the time of their first appearance, been considered as his best,
are in blank verse. No experiment can be more decisive.

It must be allowed that the worst even of the rhyming tragedies contains
good description and magnificent rhetoric. But, even when we forget that
they are plays, and, passing by their dramatic improprieties, consider
them with reference to the language, we are perpetually disgusted by
passages which it is difficult to conceive how any author could have
written, or any audience have tolerated, rants in which the raving
violence of the manner forms a strange contrast with the abject tameness
of the thought. The author laid the whole fault on the audience, and
declared that, when he wrote them, he considered them bad enough to
please. This defence is unworthy of a man of genius, and after all, is
no defence. Otway pleased without rant; and so might Dryden have done,
if he had possessed the powers of Otway. The fact is, that he had a
tendency to bombast, which, though subsequently corrected by time
and thought, was never wholly removed, and which showed itself in
performances not designed to please the rude mob of the theatre.

Some indulgent critics have represented this failing as an indication
of genius, as the profusion of unlimited wealth, the wantonness of
exuberant vigour. To us it seems to bear a nearer affinity to the
tawdriness of poverty, or the spasms and convulsions of weakness. Dryden
surely had not more imagination than Homer, Dante, or Milton, who
never fall into this vice. The swelling diction of Aeschylus and Isaiah
resembles that of Almanzor and Maximin no more than the tumidity of a
muscle resembles the tumidity of a boil. The former is symptomatic
of health and strength, the latter of debility and disease. If ever
Shakspeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along,
but when he is hurrying his imagination along,--when his mind is for a
moment jaded,--when, as was said of Euripides, he resembles a lion, who
excites his own fury by lashing himself with his tail. What happened
to Shakspeare from the occasional suspension of his powers happened
to Dryden from constant impotence. He, like his confederate Lee, had
judgment enough to appreciate the great poets of the preceding age, but
not judgment enough to shun competition with them. He felt and admired
their wild and daring sublimity. That it belonged to another age than
that in which he lived and required other talents than those which
he possessed, that, in aspiring to emulate it, he was wasting, in
a hopeless attempt, powers which might render him pre-eminent in a
different career, was a lesson which he did not learn till late. As
those knavish enthusiasts, the French prophets, courted inspiration by
mimicking the writhings, swoonings, and gaspings which they considered
as its symptoms, he attempted, by affected fits of poetical fury,
to bring on a real paroxysm; and, like them, he got nothing but his
distortions for his pains.

Horace very happily compares those who, in his time, imitated Pindar
to the youth who attempted to fly to heaven on waxen wings, and who
experienced so fatal and ignominious a fall. His own admirable good
sense preserved him from this error, and taught him to cultivate a
style in which excellence was within his reach. Dryden had not the same
self-knowledge. He saw that the greatest poets were never so successful
as when they rushed beyond the ordinary bounds, and that some
inexplicable good fortune preserved them from tripping even when they
staggered on the brink of nonsense. He did not perceive that they were
guided and sustained by a power denied to himself. They wrote from
the dictation of the imagination; and they found a response in the
imaginations of others. He, on the contrary, sat down to work himself,
by reflection and argument, into a deliberate wildness, a rational
frenzy.

In looking over the admirable designs which accompany the Faust, we
have always been much struck by one which represents the wizard and the
tempter riding at full speed. The demon sits on his furious horse as
heedlessly as if he were reposing on a chair. That he should keep his
saddle in such a posture, would seem impossible to any who did not
know that he was secure in the privileges of a superhuman nature. The
attitude of Faust, on the contrary, is the perfection of horsemanship.
Poets of the first order might safely write as desperately as
Mephistopheles rode. But Dryden, though admitted to communion with
higher spirits, though armed with a portion of their power, and
intrusted with some of their secrets, was of another race. What they
might securely venture to do, it was madness in him to attempt. It
was necessary that taste and critical science should supply his
deficiencies.

We will give a few examples. Nothing can be finer than the description
of Hector at the Grecian wall:--

o d ar esthore phaidimos Ektor,
Nukti thoe atalantos upopia lampe de chalko
Smerdaleo, ton eesto peri chroi doia de chersi
Dour echen ouk an tis min erukakoi antibolesas,
Nosphi theun, ot esalto pulas puri d osse dedeei.
--Autika d oi men teichos uperbasan, oi de kat autas
Poietas esechunto pulas Danaioi d ephobethen
Neas ana glaphuras omados d aliastos etuchthe.

What daring expressions! Yet how significant! How picturesque! Hector
seems to rise up in his strength and fury. The gloom of night in his
frown,--the fire burning in his eyes,--the javelins and the
blazing armour,--the mighty rush through the gates and down
the battlements,--the trampling and the infinite roar of the
multitude,--everything is with us; everything is real.

Dryden has described a very similar event in Maximin, and has done his
best to be sublime, as follows:--

"There with a forest of their darts he strove,
And stood like Capaneus defying Jove;
With his broad sword the boldest beating down,
Till Fate grew pale, lest he should win the town,
And turn'd the iron leaves of its dark book
To make new dooms, or mend what it mistook. "

How exquisite is the imagery of the fairy-songs in the Tempest and the
Midsummer Night's Dream; Ariel riding through the twilight on the
bat, or sucking in the bells of flowers with the bee; or the little
bower-women of Titania, driving the spiders from the couch of the Queen!
Dryden truly said, that

"Shakspeare's magic could not copied be;
Within that circle none durst walk but he. "

It would have been well if he had not himself dared to step within
the enchanted line, and drawn on himself a fate similar to that
which, according to the old superstition, punished such presumptuous
interference. The following lines are parts of the song of his
fairies:--

"Merry, merry, merry, we sail from the East,
Half-tippled at a rainbow feast.
In the bright moonshine, while winds whistle loud,
Tivy, tivy, tivy, we mount and we fly,
All racking along in a downy white cloud;
And lest our leap from the sky prove too far,
We slide on the back of a new falling star,
And drop from above
In a jelly of love. "

These are very favourable instances. Those who wish for a bad one may
read the dying speeches of Maximin, and may compare them with the last
scenes of Othello and Lear.

If Dryden had died before the expiration of the first of the periods
into which we have divided his literary life, he would have left a
reputation, at best, little higher than that of Lee or Davenant. He
would have been known only to men of letters; and by them he would have
been mentioned as a writer who threw away, on subjects which he was
incompetent to treat, powers which, judiciously employed, might have
raised him to eminence; whose diction and whose numbers had sometimes
very high merit, but all whose works were blemished by a false taste,
and by errors of gross negligence. A few of his prologues and epilogues
might perhaps still have been remembered and quoted. In these little
pieces he early showed all the powers which afterwards rendered him the
greatest of modern satirists. But, during the latter part of his
life, he gradually abandoned the drama. His plays appeared at longer
intervals. He renounced rhyme in tragedy. His language became less
turgid--his characters less exaggerated. He did not indeed produce
correct representations of human nature; but he ceased to daub such
monstrous chimeras as those which abound in his earlier pieces. Here and
there passages occur worthy of the best ages of the British stage. The
style which the drama requires changes with every change of character
and situation. He who can vary his manner to suit the variation is the
great dramatist; but he who excels in one manner only will, when that
manner happens to be appropriate, appear to be a great dramatist; as the
hands of a watch which does not go point right once in the twelve hours.
Sometimes there is a scene of solemn debate. This a mere rhetorician may
write as well as the greatest tragedian that ever lived. We confess
that to us the speech of Sempronius in Cato seems very nearly as good
as Shakspeare could have made it. But when the senate breaks up, and we
find that the lovers and their mistresses, the hero, the villain, and
the deputy-villain, all continue to harangue in the same style, we
perceive the difference between a man who can write a play and a man who
can write a speech. In the same manner, wit, a talent for description,
or a talent for narration, may, for a time, pass for dramatic genius.
Dryden was an incomparable reasoner in verse. He was conscious of his
power; he was proud of it; and the authors of the Rehearsal justly
charged him with abusing it. His warriors and princesses are fond of
discussing points of amorous casuistry, such as would have delighted a
Parliament of Love. They frequently go still deeper, and speculate on
philosophical necessity and the origin of evil.

There were, however, some occasions which absolutely required this
peculiar talent. Then Dryden was indeed at home. All his best scenes are
of this description. They are all between men; for the heroes of Dryden,
like many other gentlemen, can never talk sense when ladies are in
company. They are all intended to exhibit the empire of reason
over violent passion. We have two interlocutors, the one eager and
impassioned, the other high, cool, and judicious. The composed and
rational character gradually acquires the ascendency. His fierce
companion is first inflamed to rage by his reproaches, then overawed
by his equanimity, convinced by his arguments, and soothed by his
persuasions. This is the case in the scene between Hector and Troilus,
in that between Antony and Ventidius, and in that between Sebastian and
Dorax. Nothing of the same kind in Shakspeare is equal to them, except
the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, which is worth them all three.

Some years before his death, Dryden altogether ceased to write for the
stage. He had turned his powers in a new direction, with success
the most splendid and decisive. His taste had gradually awakened his
creative faculties. The first rank in poetry was beyond his reach; but
he challenged and secured the most honourable place in the second. His
imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich; it enabled him to run,
though not to soar. When he attempted the highest flights, he became
ridiculous; but, while he remained in a lower region, he out-stripped
all competitors.

All his natural and all his acquired powers fitted him to found a good
critical school of poetry. Indeed he carried his reforms too far for
his age. After his death our literature retrograded; and a century was
necessary to bring it back to the point at which he left it. The general
soundness and healthfulness of his mental constitution, his information,
of vast superficies, though of small volume, his wit scarcely inferior
to that of the most distinguished followers of Donne, his eloquence,
grave, deliberate, and commanding, could not save him from disgraceful
failure as a rival of Shakspeare, but raised him far above the level of
Boileau. His command of language was immense. With him died the secret
of the old poetical diction of England,--the art of producing rich
effects by familiar words. In the following century it was as completely
lost as the Gothic method of painting glass, and was but poorly supplied
by the laborious and tesselated imitations of Mason and Gray. On the
other hand, he was the first writer under whose skilful management the
scientific vocabulary fell into natural and pleasing verse. In this
department, he succeeded as completely as his contemporary Gibbons
succeeded in the similar enterprise of carving the most delicate flowers
from heart of oak. The toughest and most knotty parts of language became
ductile at his touch. His versification, in the same manner, while it
gave the first model of that neatness and precision which the following
generation esteemed so highly, exhibited at the same time, the last
examples of nobleness, freedom, variety of pause, and cadence. His
tragedies in rhyme, however worthless in themselves, had at least served
the purpose of nonsense-verses; they had taught him all the arts of
melody which the heroic couplet admits. For bombast, his prevailing
vice, his new subjects gave little opportunity; his better taste
gradually discarded it.

He possessed, as we have said, in a pre-eminent degree the power of
reasoning in verse; and this power was now peculiarly useful to him. His
logic is by no means uniformly sound. On points of criticism, he always
reasons ingeniously; and when he is disposed to be honest, correctly.
But the theological and political questions which he undertook to treat
in verse were precisely those which he understood least. His arguments,
therefore, are often worthless. But the manner in which they are stated
is beyond all praise. The style is transparent. The topics follow each
other in the happiest order.
The objections are drawn up in such a
manner that the whole fire of the reply may be brought to bear on them.
The circumlocutions which are substituted for technical phrases are
clear, neat, and exact. The illustrations at once adorn and elucidate
the reasoning. The sparkling epigrams of Cowley, and the simple
garrulity of the burlesque poets of Italy, are alternately employed, in
the happiest manner, to give effect to what is obvious or clearness to
what is obscure.

His literary creed was catholic, even to latitudinarianism; not from any
want of acuteness, but from a disposition to be easily satisfied. He was
quick to discern the smallest glimpse of merit; he was indulgent even to
gross improprieties, when accompanied by any redeeming talent. When he
said a severe thing, it was to serve a temporary purpose,--to support an
argument, or to tease a rival. Never was so able a critic so free
from fastidiousness. He loved the old poets, especially Shakspeare. He
admired the ingenuity which Donne and Cowley had so wildly abused. He
did justice, amidst the general silence, to the memory of Milton. He
praised to the skies the school-boy lines of Addison. Always looking on
the fair side of every object, he admired extravagance on account of the
invention which he supposed it to indicate; he excused affectation
in favour of wit; he tolerated even tameness for the sake of the
correctness which was its concomitant.

It was probably to this turn of mind, rather than to the more
disgraceful causes which Johnson has assigned, that we are to attribute
the exaggeration which disfigures the panegyrics of Dryden. No writer,
it must be owned, has carried the flattery of dedication to a greater
length. But this was not, we suspect, merely interested servility: it
was the overflowing of a mind singularly disposed to admiration,--of a
mind which diminished vices, and magnified virtues and obligations. The
most adulatory of his addresses is that in which he dedicates the State
of Innocence to Mary of Modena. Johnson thinks it strange that any
man should use such language without self-detestation. But he has not
remarked that to the very same work is prefixed an eulogium on Milton,
which certainly could not have been acceptable at the Court of Charles
the Second. Many years later, when Whig principles were in a great
measure triumphant, Sprat refused to admit a monument of John Phillips
into Westminster Abbey--because, in the epitaph, the name of Milton
incidentally occurred. The walls of his church, he declared, should not
be polluted by the name of a republican! Dryden was attached, both
by principle and interest, to the Court. But nothing could deaden his
sensibility to excellence. We are unwilling to accuse him severely,
because the same disposition, which prompted him to pay so generous a
tribute to the memory of a poet whom his patrons detested, hurried him
into extravagance when he described a princess distinguished by the
splendour of her beauty and the graciousness of her manners.

This is an amiable temper; but it is not the temper of great men. Where
there is elevation of character, there will be fastidiousness. It
is only in novels and on tombstones that we meet with people who are
indulgent to the faults of others, and unmerciful to their own; and
Dryden, at all events, was not one of these paragons. His charity was
extended most liberally to others; but it certainly began at home. In
taste he was by no means deficient. His critical works are, beyond all
comparison, superior to any which had, till then, appeared in England.
They were generally intended as apologies for his own poems, rather than
as expositions of general principles; he, therefore, often attempts
to deceive the reader by sophistry which could scarcely have
deceived himself. His dicta are the dicta, not of a judge, but of an
advocate:--often of an advocate in an unsound cause. Yet, in the very
act of misrepresenting the laws of composition, he shows how well he
understands them. But he was perpetually acting against his better
knowledge. His sins were sins against light. He trusted that what was
bad would be pardoned for the sake of what was good. What was good, he
took no pains to make better. He was not, like most persons who rise to
eminence, dissatisfied even with his best productions. He had set up no
unattainable standard of perfection, the contemplation of which might
at once improve and mortify him. His path was not attended by an
unapproachable mirage of excellence, for ever receding, and for ever
pursued. He was not disgusted by the negligence of others; and he
extended the same toleration to himself. His mind was of a slovenly
character,--fond of splendour, but indifferent to neatness. Hence most
of his writings exhibit the sluttish magnificence of a Russian noble,
all vermin and diamonds, dirty linen and inestimable sables. Those
faults which spring from affectation, time and thought in a great
measure removed from his poems. But his carelessness he retained to the
last. If towards the close of his life he less frequently went wrong
from negligence, it was only because long habits of composition
rendered it more easy to go right. In his best pieces we find false
rhymes,--triplets, in which the third line appears to be a mere
intruder, and, while it breaks the music, adds nothing to the
meaning,--gigantic Alexandrines of fourteen and sixteen syllables,
and truncated verses for which he never troubled himself to find a
termination or a partner.

Such are the beauties and the faults which may be found in profusion
throughout the later works of Dryden. A more just and complete estimate
of his natural and acquired powers,--of the merits of his style and of
its blemishes,--may be formed from the Hind and Panther, than from any
of his other writings. As a didactic poem, it is far superior to the
Religio Laici. The satirical parts, particularly the character of
Burnet, are scarcely inferior to the best passages in Absalom and
Achitophel. There are, moreover, occasional touches of a tenderness
which affects us more, because it is decent, rational, and manly, and
reminds us of the best scenes in his tragedies. His versification sinks
and swells in happy unison with the subject; and his wealth of
language seems to be unlimited. Yet, the carelessness with which he has
constructed his plot, and the innumerable inconsistencies into which
he is every moment falling, detract much from the pleasure which such
various excellence affords.

In Absalom and Achitophel he hit upon a new and rich vein, which he
worked with signal success. They ancient satirists were the subjects
of a despotic government. They were compelled to abstain from political
topics, and to confine their attention to the frailties of private life.
They might, indeed, sometimes venture to take liberties with public men,

"Quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina. "

Thus Juvenal immortalised the obsequious senators who met to decide the
fate of the memorable turbot. His fourth satire frequently reminds us of
the great political poem of Dryden; but it was not written till Domitian
had fallen: and it wants something of the peculiar flavour which belongs
to contemporary invective alone. His anger has stood so long that,
though the body is not impaired, the effervescence, the first cream,
is gone. Boileau lay under similar restraints; and, if he had been free
from all restraints, would have been no match for our countryman.

The advantages which Dryden derived from the nature of his subject he
improved to the very utmost. His manner is almost perfect. The style
of Horace and Boileau is fit only for light subjects. The Frenchman
did indeed attempt to turn the theological reasonings of the Provincial
Letters into verse, but with very indifferent success. The glitter of
Pope is gold. The ardour of Persius is without brilliancy. Magnificent
versification and ingenious combinations rarely harmonise with the
expression of deep feeling. In Juvenal and Dryden alone we have the
sparkle and the heat together. Those great satirists succeeded in
communicating the fervour of their feelings to materials the most
incombustible, and kindled the whole mass into a blaze, at once dazzling
and destructive. We cannot, indeed, think, without regret, of the part
which so eminent a writer as Dryden took in the disputes of that period.
There was, no doubt, madness and wickedness on both sides. But there was
liberty on the one, and despotism on the other. On this point, however,
we will not dwell. At Talavera the English and French troops for a
moment suspended their conflict, to drink of a stream which flowed
between them. The shells were passed across from enemy to enemy without
apprehension or molestation. We, in the same manner, would rather
assist our political adversaries to drink with us of that fountain of
intellectual pleasure, which should be the common refreshment of both
parties, than disturb and pollute it with the havoc of unseasonable
hostilities.

Macflecnoe is inferior to Absalom and Achitophel only in the subject. In
the execution it is even superior. But the greatest work of Dryden was
the last, the Ode on Saint Cecilia's Day. It is the masterpiece of the
second class of poetry, and ranks but just below the great models of the
first. It reminds us of the Pedasus of Achilles--

os, kai thnetos eon, epeth ippois athanatoisi.

By comparing it with the impotent ravings of the heroic tragedies we may
measure the progress which the mind of Dryden had made. He had learned
to avoid a too audacious competition with higher natures, to keep at
a distance from the verge of bombast or nonsense, to venture on no
expression which did not convey a distinct idea to his own mind. There
is none of that "darkness visible" of style which he had formerly
affected, and in which the greatest poets only can succeed. Everything
is definite, significant, and picturesque. His early writings resembled
the gigantic works of those Chinese gardeners who attempt to rival
nature herself, to form cataracts of terrific height and sound, to
raise precipitous ridges of mountains, and to imitate in artificial
plantations the vastness and the gloom of some primeval forest. This
manner he abandoned; nor did he ever adopt the Dutch taste which Pope
affected, the trim parterres, and the rectangular walks. He rather
resembled our Kents and Browns, who imitating the great features of
landscape without emulating them, consulting the genius of the place,
assisting nature and carefully disguising their art, produced, not a
Chamouni or a Niagara, but a Stowe or a Hagley.

We are, on the whole, inclined to regret that Dryden did not accomplish
his purpose of writing an epic poem. It certainly would not have been
a work of the highest rank. It would not have rivalled the Iliad, the
Odyssey, or the Paradise Lost; but it would have been superior to the
productions of Apollonius, Lucan, or Statius, and not inferior to the
Jerusalem Delivered. It would probably have been a vigorous narrative,
animated with something of the spirit of the old romances, enriched with
much splendid description, and interspersed with fine declamations and
disquisitions. The danger of Dryden would have been from aiming too
high; from dwelling too much, for example, on his angels of kingdoms,
and attempting a competition with that great writer who in his own
time had so incomparably succeeded in representing to us the sights and
sounds of another world. To Milton, and to Milton alone, belonged the
secrets of the great deep, the beach of sulphur, the ocean of fire, the
palaces of the fallen dominations, glimmering through the everlasting
shade, the silent wilderness of verdure and fragrance where armed angels
kept watch over the sleep of the first lovers, the portico of diamond,
the sea of jasper, the sapphire pavement empurpled with celestial roses,
and the infinite ranks of the Cherubim, blazing with adamant and gold.
The council, the tournament, the procession, the crowded cathedral, the
camp, the guard-room, the chase, were the proper scenes for Dryden.

But we have not space to pass in review all the works which Dryden
wrote. We, therefore, will not speculate longer on those which he might
possibly have written. He may, on the whole, be pronounced to have been
a man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a
sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who
succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who, in that
department, succeeded pre-eminently; and who with a more independent
spirit, a more anxious desire of excellence, and more respect for
himself, would, in his own walk, have attained to absolute perfection.




HISTORY. (May 1828. )

"The Romance of History. England. " By Henry Neele.
London, 1828.

To write history respectably--that is, to abbreviate despatches, and
make extracts from speeches, to intersperse in due proportion epithets
of praise and abhorrence, to draw up antithetical characters of great
men, setting forth how many contradictory virtues and vices they united,
and abounding in "withs" and "withouts"--all this is very easy. But
to be a really great historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual
distinctions. Many scientific works are, in their kind, absolutely
perfect. There are poems which we should be inclined to designate as
faultless, or as disfigured only by blemishes which pass unnoticed in
the general blaze of excellence. There are speeches, some speeches of
Demosthenes particularly, in which it would be impossible to alter a
word without altering it for the worse. But we are acquainted with
no history which approaches to our notion of what a history ought to
be--with no history which does not widely depart, either on the right
hand or on the left, from the exact line.

The cause may easily be assigned. This province of literature is a
debatable land. It lies on the confines of two distinct territories.
It is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers; and, like other
districts similarly situated, it is ill defined, ill cultivated, and ill
regulated. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the
Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and
absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes
theory.

History, it has been said, is philosophy teaching by examples.
Unhappily, what the philosophy gains in soundness and depth the examples
generally lose in vividness. A perfect historian must possess an
imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and
picturesque. Yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself
with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying
deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and
ingenious reasoner. Yet he must possess sufficient self-command to
abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis. Those who
can justly estimate these almost insuperable difficulties will not think
it strange that every writer should have failed, either in the narrative
or in the speculative department of history.

It may be laid down as a general rule, though subject to considerable
qualifications and exceptions, that history begins in novel and ends
in essay. Of the romantic historians Herodotus is the earliest and the
best. His animation, his simple-hearted tenderness, his wonderful talent
for description and dialogue, and the pure sweet flow of his language,
place him at the head of narrators. He reminds us of a delightful child.
There is a grace beyond the reach of affectation in his awkwardness, a
malice in his innocence, an intelligence in his nonsense, an insinuating
eloquence in his lisp. We know of no writer who makes such interest
for himself and his book in the heart of the reader. At the distance
of three-and-twenty centuries, we feel for him the same sort of pitying
fondness which Fontaine and Gay are said to have inspired in society.
He has written an incomparable book. He has written something better
perhaps than the best history; but he has not written a good history;
he is, from the first to the last chapter, an inventor. We do not here
refer merely to those gross fictions with which he has been reproached
by the critics of later times. We speak of that colouring which is
equally diffused over his whole narrative, and which perpetually leaves
the most sagacious reader in doubt what to reject and what to receive.
The most authentic parts of his work bear the same relation to his
wildest legends which Henry the Fifth bears to the Tempest. There was
an expedition undertaken by Xerxes against Greece; and there was an
invasion of France. There was a battle at Plataea; and there was
a battle at Agincourt. Cambridge and Exeter, the Constable and the
Dauphin, were persons as real as Demaratus and Pausanias. The harangue
of the Archbishop on the Salic Law and the Book of Numbers differs much
less from the orations which have in all ages proceeded from the right
reverend bench than the speeches of Mardonius and Artabanus from those
which were delivered at the council-board of Susa. Shakspeare gives us
enumerations of armies, and returns of killed and wounded, which are
not, we suspect, much less accurate than those of Herodotus. There are
passages in Herodotus nearly as long as acts of Shakspeare, in which
everything is told dramatically, and in which the narrative serves only
the purpose of stage-directions. It is possible, no doubt, that the
substance of some real conversations may have been reported to the
historian. But events which, if they ever happened, happened in ages and
nations so remote that the particulars could never have been known to
him, are related with the greatest minuteness of detail. We have all
that Candaules said to Gyges, and all that passed between Astyages and
Harpagus. We are, therefore, unable to judge whether, in the account
which he gives of transactions respecting which he might possibly have
been well informed, we can trust to anything beyond the naked outline;
whether, for example, the answer of Gelon to the ambassadors of the
Grecian confederacy, or the expressions which passed between Aristides
and Themistocles at their famous interview, have been correctly
transmitted to us. The great events are, no doubt, faithfully related.
So, probably, are many of the slighter circumstances; but which of them
it is impossible to ascertain. The fictions are so much like the facts,
and the facts so much like the fictions, that, with respect to many most
interesting particulars, our belief is neither given nor withheld, but
remains in an uneasy and interminable state of abeyance. We know that
there is truth; but we cannot exactly decide where it lies.

The faults of Herodotus are the faults of a simple and imaginative
mind. Children and servants are remarkably Herodotean in their style of
narration. They tell everything dramatically. Their "says hes" and "says
shes" are proverbial. Every person who has had to settle their disputes
knows that, even when they have no intention to deceive, their reports
of conversation always require to be carefully sifted. If an educated
man were giving an account of the late change of administration, he
would say--"Lord Goderich resigned; and the King, in consequence, sent
for the Duke of Wellington. " A porter tells the story as if he had been
hid behind the curtains of the royal bed at Windsor: "So Lord Goderich
says, 'I cannot manage this business; I must go out. ' So the
King says,--says he, 'Well, then, I must send for the Duke of
Wellington--that's all. '" This is in the very manner of the father of
history.

Herodotus wrote as it was natural that he should write. He wrote for a
nation susceptible, curious, lively, insatiably desirous of novelty
and excitement; for a nation in which the fine arts had attained their
highest excellence, but in which philosophy was still in its infancy.
His countrymen had but recently begun to cultivate prose composition.
Public transactions had generally been recorded in verse. The first
historians might, therefore, indulge without fear of censure in the
license allowed to their predecessors the bards. Books were few. The
events of former times were learned from tradition and from popular
ballads; the manners of foreign countries from the reports of
travellers. It is well known that the mystery which overhangs what is
distant, either in space or time, frequently prevents us from censuring
as unnatural what we perceive to be impossible. We stare at a dragoon
who has killed three French cuirassiers, as a prodigy; yet we read,
without the least disgust, how Godfrey slew his thousands, and Rinaldo
his ten thousands. Within the last hundred years, stories about China
and Bantam, which ought not to have imposed on an old nurse, were
gravely laid down as foundations of political theories by eminent
philosophers. What the time of the Crusades is to us, the generation of
Croesus and Solon was to the Greeks of the time of Herodotus. Babylon
was to them what Pekin was to the French academicians of the last
century.

For such a people was the book of Herodotus composed; and, if we may
trust to a report, not sanctioned indeed by writers of high authority,
but in itself not improbable, it was composed, not to be read, but to
be heard. It was not to the slow circulation of a few copies, which the
rich only could possess, that the aspiring author looked for his reward.
The great Olympian festival,--the solemnity which collected multitudes,
proud of the Grecian name, from the wildest mountains of Doris, and the
remotest colonies of Italy and Libya,--was to witness his triumph. The
interest of the narrative, and the beauty of the style, were aided
by the imposing effect of recitation,--by the splendour of the
spectacle,--by the powerful influence of sympathy. A critic who could
have asked for authorities in the midst of such a scene must have been
of a cold and sceptical nature; and few such critics were there. As was
the historian, such were the auditors,--inquisitive, credulous, easily
moved by religious awe or patriotic enthusiasm. They were the very
men to hear with delight of strange beasts, and birds, and trees,--of
dwarfs, and giants, and cannibals--of gods, whose very names it was
impiety to utter,--of ancient dynasties, which had left behind them
monuments surpassing all the works of later times,--of towns like
provinces,--of rivers like seas,--of stupendous walls, and temples, and
pyramids,--of the rites which the Magi performed at daybreak on the tops
of the mountains,--of the secrets inscribed on the eternal obelisks of
Memphis. With equal delight they would have listened to the
graceful romances of their own country. They now heard of the exact
accomplishment of obscure predictions, of the punishment of crimes over
which the justice of heaven had seemed to slumber,--of dreams, omens,
warnings from the dead,--of princesses, for whom noble suitors contended
in every generous exercise of strength and skill,--of infants, strangely
preserved from the dagger of the assassin, to fulfil high destinies.

As the narrative approached their own times, the interest became still
more absorbing. The chronicler had now to tell the story of that
great conflict from which Europe dates its intellectual and political
supremacy,--a story which, even at this distance of time, is the most
marvellous and the most touching in the annals of the human race,--a
story abounding with all that is wild and wonderful, with all that is
pathetic and animating; with the gigantic caprices of infinite wealth
and despotic power--with the mightier miracles of wisdom, of virtue,
and of courage. He told them of rivers dried up in a day,--of
provinces famished for a meal,--of a passage for ships hewn through the
mountains,--of a road for armies spread upon the waves,--of monarchies
and commonwealths swept away,--of anxiety, of terror, of confusion, of
despair! --and then of proud and stubborn hearts tried in that extremity
of evil, and not found wanting,--of resistance long maintained against
desperate odds,--of lives dearly sold, when resistance could be
maintained no more,--of signal deliverance, and of unsparing revenge.
Whatever gave a stronger air of reality to a narrative so well
calculated to inflame the passions, and to flatter national pride, was
certain to be favourably received.

Between the time at which Herodotus is said to have composed his
history, and the close of the Peloponnesian war, about forty years
elapsed,--forty years, crowded with great military and political events.
The circumstances of that period produced a great effect on the
Grecian character; and nowhere was this effect so remarkable as in the
illustrious democracy of Athens. An Athenian, indeed, even in the
time of Herodotus, would scarcely have written a book so romantic and
garrulous as that of Herodotus. As civilisation advanced, the citizens
of that famous republic became still less visionary, and still less
simple-hearted. They aspired to know where their ancestors had been
content to doubt; they began to doubt where their ancestors had thought
it their duty to believe. Aristophanes is fond of alluding to this
change in the temper of his countrymen. The father and son, in the
Clouds, are evidently representatives of the generations to which they
respectively belonged. Nothing more clearly illustrates the nature of
this moral revolution than the change which passed upon tragedy. The
wild sublimity of Aeschylus became the scoff of every young Phidippides.
Lectures on abstruse points of philosophy, the fine distinctions of
casuistry, and the dazzling fence of rhetoric, were substituted for
poetry. The language lost something of that infantine sweetness which
had characterised it. It became less like the ancient Tuscan, and more
like the modern French.

The fashionable logic of the Greeks was, indeed, far from strict. Logic
never can be strict where books are scarce, and where information is
conveyed orally.