an incident so remote as the Popish Plot, to men so obscure as Settle
and Pordage and Flecknoe--their very names are absurd, Dickensian.
These long-dead days of controversy fairly bristle with curiosities
of literature. We catch glimpses of odd fantastic men performing odd
fantastic actions. We see, thrown up by the storm of political passion,
strange traits of human psychology that float on the surface like
grotesque fishes of the depths dislodged by a submarine earthquake.
And so, as we cannot all be Newtons or Empedocleses, let us content
ourselves with small things, finding the occupation and amusement we
desire in the anecdotes and old wives' tales of history, so pleasant,
so futile, so absorbingly human.
Our purpose is to do justice--a little more than justice, it may be--to
a few of the minor characters in the drama of the Popish Plot. But with
the best will in the world it is impossible not to mention the hero of
the piece; Dryden is the Prince of Denmark of the Plot, and without at
least a casual reference to his part the play has no sense at all.
Our curtain, then, goes up on the Autumn of 1681; for, in the approved
style, we plunge _in medias res_. The Earl of Shaftesbury is in the
Tower on a charge of High Treason. A Bill of Indictment is to be
presented against him. It was in anticipation of this event and with
the deliberate intention of turning public opinion against Shaftesbury
that, on November 17th, Dryden published _Absalom and Achitophel_.
This was not by any means the first time that Shaftesbury had been
attacked. For the past two years the Tory pamphleteers had made him
the target of their most envenomed shafts. One at least of these
anonymous satires, _A Modest Vindication of the Earl of Shaftesbury in
a Letter to a Friend concerning his being elected King of Poland_, is
worthy to be rescued from oblivion. Like almost every pamphleteer of
the time, the author of this Modest Vindication seizes on the story
that Shaftesbury had offered himself as a candidate for the throne
vacated by the death of John Sobieski. The pamphlet opens with an
admirable ironic eulogy of the Earl for "his unshaken obedience to
every government he has been concerned in or lived under; his steady
adherence to every religion that had but hopes to be established." We
are now shown the Polish Diet debating on the choice of a king, who
shall be capable not only of ruling Poland, but also of conquering and
converting the Turk. "Upon these considerations you may imagine the
eyes of the whole Diet were turned upon little England, and there upon
whom so soon as the little lord of Shaftesbury?" The new king, Anthony
I., draws up a list of the attendants whom he proposes to take with
him. There is, of course, "Prince Prettyman Perkinoski (Monmouth), to
cure the plica or King's evil of this country, in case our own majesty
should fail of that virtue"; and finally, at the end of the list, "Jean
Drydenurtzitz ... our Poet Laureate, for writing panegyrics upon Oliver
Cromwell and libels against his present master, King Charles II."; and
to be his deputy no less than Tom Shadworiski" (Shadwell). This tract,
it must be remembered, was written after the production of _The Spanish
Friar_ and before the publication of _Absalom and Achitophel_. The
author of the "Protestant Play" might still be thought to be a Whig.
The pamphlet ends up with the account of a vision wherein the
king-elect sees first the figure of the Whore of Babylon, which changes
into that of a murdered Justice of the Peace (Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey),
"strangled by a crew of ruffians, who afterwards ran him through with
his own sword, that it might be thought he hanged himself." This gives
place to a troop of pilgrims armed with black bills (these pilgrims
were one of the happiest products of Oates's rich imagination); and
they in turn are followed by the hideous vision of the Doctor of
Salamanca, Oates himself. All this so deeply impresses King Anthony
that he gives up his imperial ambitions, preferring the task of
confounding the Pope at home to that of converting the Turks in Poland.
To this same Polish legend and to a certain physical peculiarity, which
was the delight of the Tory satirists, Shaftesbury owed one of his most
popular nicknames, "Tapski." The "ski" was Polish, but the "Tap" was
English and had a real existence. Shaftesbury suffered from an internal
abscess, which had to be kept drained by a silver tube let into his
side. For the Tories this tap represented all that was most loathsome,
most repulsive, most Whiggish. They exulted in descriptions of it. When
Shaftesbury wanted to make himself look important, so one pamphleteer
assures us, he had only to turn off the tap in order to swell up to
a prodigious size. Shaftesbury's Tap and that mysterious Black Box,
reputed to contain the certificate of a marriage between Charles
II. and Lucy Waters, were the two symbolic objects on which public
imagination most greedily seized.
Dryden's satire was issued anonymously. But its authorship was
evidently an open secret, for within three weeks of its publication
a reply, called _Towser the Second_, in which Dryden is named as the
author, made its appearance. The writer of this piece was the Whig
journalist, Henry Care, "whose breeding," says Anthony Wood, "was in
the nature of a petty Fogger, a little despicable Wretch, afterwards
much reflected upon for a poor snivelling Fellow in the Observators
published by Rog: L'Estrange." This person had been the writer of
a newspaper entitled _The Weekly Paquets of News from Rome_, an
anti-Catholic journal started in the height of the excitement caused
by Titus Oates's evidence. He had been tried in 1680 for libelling
Justice Scroggs. His later history is the sadly common tale of the poor
Grub Street hack: at the accession of James II. "for bread and Money
sake, and nothing else," he passed over to the side in power and turned
his pen against the Protestants. _Towser the Second_ is as little and
despicable as its author. Towser-Dryden, brother to the original bad
dog, Towser-L'Estrange, suffering from a worm "that of the Jebusites
smells very strong," runs mad, snarls and snaps at all he meets, treats
the whole world, the King included, "à la mode de Billingsgate."
Care's poem is only less stupid than the ponderous _Some Reflections
upon a late poem, by a Person of Honour_, which appeared a few days
later. The Person of Honour was Dryden's old enemy, the Duke of
Buckingham. Goaded to exasperation by the onslaught made upon him
in _Absalom and Achitophel_, Buckingham set out to overwhelm Dryden
under mountains of moral indignation. He succeeded only in proving
conclusively that his own share in _The Rehearsal_, in its own way a
masterpiece, must have been extremely small.
Early in 1682 _The Reflections_ were followed by Samuel Pordage's
_Azaria and Hushai_. Twenty years before Pordage had proved himself the
possessor of a certain ingenuity by his feat of turning the philosophy
of Jacob Boehme into English-rhymed couplets. There are even a few
passable passages in the _Mundorum Explicatio_. But in this satire
of his later years he seems to have lost such cunning as he may once
have possessed. The sole merit of the piece is a certain dull restraint
of language, an avoidance of the drosser scurrilities. He is very
temperate, for instance, in what he says of Dryden:
The falling glory of the Jewish stage.
Sweet was the Muse that did his wit inspire,
Had he not let his hackney Muse for hire.
Zimri, we know, he had no cause to praise,
Because he dubb'd him with the name of Bayes,
Because he durst with his proud wit engage,
And brought his follies on the public stage.
But the next Whig satire to appear has real merits. Settle's _Absalom
Senior_ is the one good thing produced by the Whigs in their battle
with Dryden. Dryden himself had grudgingly to admit that Settle was
something of a poet.
Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;
Spurred boldly on and dashed through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad
And in a word, heroically mad.
He was too warm on picking-work to dwell,
But fagoted his notions as they fell,
And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well.
This is not altogether just. The verse of _Absalom Senior_ does
more than rhyme and rattle; it has a music of its own, and there
are passages that are curiously Elizabethan in their conception and
execution. Take, for example, this character of the Duke of York, the
Absalom Senior of the poem:
The mercy and the clemency divine,
Those sacred sparks, which in mild David shine,
Were all put out and left a starless night.
A long farewell to all that's good and brave!
Not cataracts more headstrong; as the grave
Inexorable; sullen and untuned
As Pride deposed; not Lucifer unthroned
More unforgiving.
It is hardly credible that this should have been written in 1682.
It reads like the work of some minor poet in the "giant age before
the flood," a contemporary of the grave Lord Brooke. Here again is
something no poet of the Restoration has any business to write, a
simile in which Settle compares the papist plotter to the alchemist:
Who though he see his bursting limbecks crack,
And at one blast, one fatal minute's wrack,
The forward hope of sweating years expire,
With sad, yet painful, hand new-lights the fire.
Pale, lean and wan, does health, wealth, all consume;
And for the great elixir yet to come
Toils and hopes on.
The poem opens with a history of the ceaseless Catholic efforts, ever
since the time of Henry VIII., to recapture England for the old faith.
This serves as a preface to the main body of the piece, which deals
with the Popish Plot. There is the usual portrait gallery, imitated
from _Absalom and Achitophel_, of the most important figures on either
side. This spirited description of Lauderdale is worth quoting:
Let not that hideous bulk of honour 'scape,
Nadab that sets the gazing crowds agape;
The old kirk-founder, whose hoarse croak could sing
The Saints, the Cause, no Bishop and no King.
By the triumphant Saul he was employed
A huge fang-tusk to gore poor David's side,
Like a proboscis in the tyrant's jaw
To rend and root through government and law.
Settle mentions Dryden in connection with Amiel, the Duke of
Buckingham. It is pleasant to note that, like Pordage, he pays tribute,
albeit a somewhat equivocal one, to Dryden's poetical genius:
But Amiel had, alas, the fate to hear
An angry poet play his chronicler;
A poet rais'd above oblivion's shade,
By his recorded verse immortal made.
No muse could more heroic deeds rehearse;
H' had with an equal, all-applauding verse
Great David's sceptre and Saul's javelin praised.
A pyramic to his saint Interest he rais'd.
The rest of the remarks about Dryden are not so edifying; they refer to
that subject, so fruitful of raillery, the poet's marriage with Lady
Howard, whom Settle, repeating scandal, describes as
Laura, in faithful constancy confined
To Ethiop's envoy and to all mankind.
The poem ends with a long list of eulogies addressed to the chiefs of
the Country Party, dull as such eulogies always are and are always
bound to be. For, while we listen to abuse and defamation of almost
any kind with pleasure, we are apt to find the recital of a man's
virtues extremely tedious; a fact well known to newspaper proprietors,
for whom moral indignation--or mud slinging, for the terms are
usually synonymous--is spiritual meat and drink, as well as material
bread-and-butter.
The publication of _Absalom Senior_ was the high-water mark of Settle's
life. In 1673, at the age of twenty-five, he had all the appearances
of a great man: he was the author of _The Empress of Morocco_. But he
was very definitely one of those who have had greatness thrust upon
them. The success of his fantastic tragedy, gravely judged by the most
advanced undergraduate opinion of the day to be superior to anything
Dryden had written, was wholly due to the prodigies of log-rolling
performed by that shifty and malicious patron of the arts, Wilmot,
Earl of Rochester. Rochester, who had for a time bestowed his favours
upon Dryden, suddenly threw him over and exalted Elkanah Settle in his
place. He had _The Empress of Morocco_ specially produced at Court
before its appearance on the public stage, and himself contributed
a Prologue. The "boom" was so well organised that the public for a
time actually took Elkanah seriously. The Empress and her infamous
gallant, Grimalhaz, stamped about the stage giving rhymed utterance to
sentiments of an unheard of turpitude.
GRIMALHAZ: Have you considered, madam, what you've done?
EMPRESS: Poisoned my husband, sir, and if you need
Examples to instruct you in the deed,
I'll make my actions plainer understood,
Copying his death on all the royal blood.
Loud and prolonged applause, bursting out again with redoubled fury
when the Empress hisses into the ear of this new Macbeth:
and your next step t'a throne
Must be, dear sir, the murder of my son.
The applause died away and with it the cat-calls of Settle's three
envious rivals, Dryden, Crowne, and Shadwell. Then came _Absalom
Senior_, and for its author the deserved laureateship of Whiggery. But
a year later things took an awkward turn for the Country Party; Settle
recanted and wrote a history of the Popish Plot, in which he gave
Oates his full due as a scoundrel. When James II. came to the throne
he wrote a fawning Coronation Ode in the hope of placating one whom he
had himself so short a time before called "inexorable as the grave."
He even went so far as to publish a panegyric of Judge Jefferies.
Inch by inch he was sinking deeper into the slough of Grub Street.
With the Revolution he gave up politics (they seemed altogether too
unsafe) and applied for the post of City Laureate. Lord Mayor's Shows
were now immortalised to the extent of "living in Settle's numbers one
day more." Grown old and very miserable, he was reduced to writing
puppet plays, better works of art--who knows?--than the proud Empress
of his youth; and we find him at last "hissing in his own dragon" at
Bartholomew Fair. He was seventy-six when he died in 1724, having
survived long enough to be the target of Pope's barbed malice.
_Absalom Senior_ closes the first act of the drama. The second opens
with Dryden's _Medal_. This personal attack on Shaftesbury roused
more fury among the Whigs than even _Absalom and Achitophel_. In a
single day Edmund Hickeringill wrote and sent to press a long retort
called _The Mushroom_. "... And if any man think or say that it is a
wonder if this book and verses were composed and writ in one day, and
sent to the press, since it would employ the pen of a ready writer to
copy this book in a day--it may be so. But it is a truth, as certain
as the sun in the firmament, and which, if need be, the bookseller,
printer, and other worthy citizens that are privy to it can avouch for
an infallible truth--_Deo soli gloria_--when a divine hand assists, one
of despicable, dull and inconsiderate parts may do wonders, which God
usually performs by most weak and unlikely instruments." Hickeringill
is a charming character; but he hardly comes within the scope of our
article. He is not so much a man of letters as a mental case.
Pordage once again stepped forward and dealt a perfectly ineffective
blow. He was followed by a new and more truculent champion, Shadwell.
Shadwell laid about him with a will. Of Dryden's poetical powers he
says condescendingly: "He has an easiness in rhyme and a knack of
versifying and can make a slight thing seem pretty and clinquant." On
the other hand, he is wholly lacking in originality, and even in his
satires has done nothing but "turn the Observator into rhyme." When he
is not writing in rhyme, "in which he has a kind of excellence," he is
completely insipid. He has no sense of comedy.
Thou never mak'st, but art a standing Jest.
So much for Dryden's literary reputation; now for his character. At
this point Shadwell throws the moral indignation about so freely that
we are forced to hold our noses and to avert our eyes.
Left scathless by the clumsy grossness of Shadwell's attack, Dryden
retorted murderously with _MacFlecknoe_.
But enough of Shadwell. He has his meed of fame and recognition. His
body lies in Westminster Abbey and his plays have been resurrected in
the "Mermaid" Edition. Who was Flecknoe? What manner of man was that
grandiose figure who
In Prose and Verse was own'd without dispute
Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute?
There must be many who, like myself, have cherished a sneaking hope
that this is an ungenerous judgment, that Flecknoe is not so bad
after all. Might one not even discover him, edit him, unearth buried
beauties? Alas, one has but to read a few of his many works to realise
that Dryden was only speaking the modest truth!
We catch our first glimpse of him at some date about the year 1645,
when Andrew Marvell, on his travels in Rome, climbed up three pair of
stairs and
found at last a chamber, as 'twas said,
But seemed a coffin set on the stair's head,
the lodgment of Richard Flecknoe, Irishman, priest, poet, and musician.
A strange figure:
as thin
He stands, as if he only fed had been
With consecrated wafers, and the Host
Hath sure more flesh and blood than he can boast;
This basso-relievo of a man--
Who, as a camel tall, yet easily can
The needle's eye thread through without any stitch.
No sooner is Marvell within the basso-relievo's clutches than
Straight, without further information
In hideous verse, he, in a dismal tone,
Begins to exorcise, as if I were
Possessed;
and so it goes on
Till the tyrant, weary to persecute,
Left off and tried to allure me with his lute.
Desperate measures have now to be taken; Marvell asks the man to dinner
and for a little time, at least, secures a respite. But not for long;
the poet,
Satisfied with eating, but not tame,
Turns to recite; though judges most severe,
After the assizes' dinner, mild appear
And on full stomach do condemn but few,
Yet he more strict my sentence doth renew,
And draws out of the black box of his breast
Ten quire of paper, in which he was dressed.
It is a sad example of that all too frequent inconsistency between a
man's art and life that the best poem Flecknoe ever wrote should be _To
Silence_:
Still-born Silence, thou that art
Floodgate of the deeper heart,
Offspring of a heavenly kind,
Frost oth' mouth and thaw oth' mind.
There is a certain absurd charm about this reckless mixture of
conceits, a charm which would have melted Marvell's heart, if he had
heard the piece, as it later melted Lamb's. For what is almost the
first and the last time, Flecknoe's poetic method, which is the method
of Marvell himself and of all the seventeenth-century metaphysicals
reduced to the absurd, actually comes off. Only once again was he ever
to produce anything faintly resembling poetry, and that is in this
stanza about the ant:
That small republique too, at home,
Where thou'rt perhaps some magistrate--
Little think'st thou, when thou dost come,
There's greater in the world than that.
But this is exceptional; his average poetic level is exemplified by
such lines as:
Now to the woodlands, now to th' champains, where
With subtile nets and pitfalls slyly made
She innocently silly fowls betrayed,
While the more lofty inhabitants oth' skies
Sh' allured to ground with brightness of her eyes,
or by that astonishing couplet on Phœbus, which runs:
From 's harnessing of 's horses in the East,
Unto 's unharnessing of them in the West.
From Rome Flecknoe carried his juvenile verses to Constantinople, to
Portugal, to Brazil, to Flanders. But no amount of travel could cure
him of his fatal habit of writing. Re-established in England after the
Restoration, he turned an unlimited leisure to the worst account. He
was the author of four plays, only one of which was put upon the stage,
and that was duly damned. He contented himself by printing the others
with a list of the actors he would have liked to see in the different
parts, if he had been able to get them performed--a touching piece of
naïveté which does much to endear him to us.
Of his prose works the most ambitious is a little collection of
_Enigmaticall Characters_, of which perhaps the choicest is this on
the Drunkard. The Drunkard's wit "is rather the hog's-head than his
own, savouring more of Heidelberg than of Helican and he being rather a
drunken than a good companion."
Flecknoe dies, like the lady on whose decease he wrote an ode, "died as
having nothing else to do," in the year 1678.
Such was Flecknoe. Shadwell's claim to being ranked as Flecknoe's son
is amply substantiated by his own protest that in _MacFlecknoe_ "he had
been represented as an Irishman, though Mr. Dryden knew very well that
he had not set eyes on the country till he was three and twenty and had
remained in it then only for four months."
Dryden followed up _MacFlecknoe_ with the character of Og in the Second
Part of _Absalom and Achitophel_. Shadwell was unable to reply; he
could only faintly complain.
With Part the Second of _Absalom and Achitophel_ the drama of the
Popish Plot comes to an end. The curtain falls on this last orgy
of murder. All the minor characters are now dead--for Doeg and
Mephibosheth lie bleeding by the side of the monstrous Og--and only the
hero remains alive. Turning with a bow to the audience, he delivers
the epilogue, in which he explains, with the best of good humour,
exactly why it is that he, Dryden, is still alive and all the rest lie
punctured about him.
"How easy it is," so runs the epilogue, "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 these opprobrious
terms! There is still 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, 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."
ARCHITECTURE AS FORM IN CIVILISATION
By PROFESSOR W. R. LETHABY
Towns and Civilisation are two words for nearly one thing; the City is
the manifestation of the spirit and its population is the larger body
it builds for its soul. To build cities and live in them properly is
the great business of large associations of men. The outward and the
made must always be exact pictures of the mind and the makers. Not only
is this so at any given stage, but it is so all the more in a going
concern, for the outward is always reacting again on the inward, so
that the concrete becomes a mould for the spiritual. Man builds towns
so that the towns shall build his sons. As the old Greek said, "The
city teaches the man."
William Morris says somewhere that the religions of antiquity were the
worshipping of cities. It may seem strange this idea of city worship,
but it explains much in the history of art, and we need something of
similar sort even now: this and other worships besides and beyond.
Before the recognition of the universal and the national we require a
much deepened sense of the civic. _Here_ comes before the _Beyond_.
Almost the greatest question of the time is the one of finding wells
for the refreshment of our vitality--the inducing of national spirit,
town spirit, and home spirit. Such spirit is a very subtle essence,
and yet it dwells in houses and cities are its reservoirs. In the Army
it has always been recognised that the foundation of the whole vast
violent business is _spirit_. The children of war are wiser than the
children of peace. As an example take this scrap from the experience of
a new soldier: "The private is taught from the beginning that the first
duty of a soldier is obedience, the second cleanliness, and the third
may be gathered from this short dialogue between a drill sergeant and a
squad of recruits:
"What is the third duty of a soldier?" asks the sergeant. "Honesty,
sobriety, and self-respect," we reply. "And what is self-respect?"
"Keeping your buttons bright."