VANITY FAIR
We have been keeping low company for so long that the reader may be
wondering: Were there no writers for ladies and gentlemen in the time of
Milton and Bunyan? The answer is, yes; and we should pay a brief visit
to that Vanity Fair which Bunyan saw through the bars of his prison.
There was a poet laureate, who did not go to prison but became the idol
of his age, and the most prosperous writer up to that time. John Dryden
was his name, and like Milton, he was born of a well-to-do Puritan
family, and received the best education going. He was twenty-seven years
old when Cromwell died, and he wrote heroic stanzas on the Lord
Protector. He attached himself to his cousin, an official of the Puritan
republic, expecting advancement; but he did not get it, so two years
later, when the “bonnie Prince Charlie” came back to be crowned, the
young poet welcomed him with a panegyric ode, several pages of ecstatic
compliment--
How shall I speak of that triumphant day
When you renewed the expiring pomp of May?
A month that owns an interest in your name,
You and the flowers are its peculiar claim.
I am following the life of Dryden by Professor Saintsbury, an eminent
scholar of the Tory way of thought, who has just immortalized himself by
publishing a whole volume devoted to the literature of alcoholic liquor.
This professor says everything that can be said in defense of Dryden,
but the best he can say about this “Astræa Redux” is that in order to
appreciate its beauties, you must forget the facts about the “bonnie
Prince Charlie” and his reign. The professor lists a few of the facts
you must forget: “the treaty of Dover and the closed exchequer, Madam
Carwell’s twelve thousand a year and Lord Russell’s scaffold.” That is
the way to read literature under the guidance of a leisure-class critic!
As we used to say when we were children: “Open your mouth and shut your
eyes, and I’ll give you something to make you wise!”
The elegant literature of that time was described by the term
“metaphysical,” which meant that the poet exhausted his imagination in
inventing quaint and startling conceits. For example, one of Dryden’s
noble patrons contracted smallpox, and the poet, describing his
appearance, records that
Each little dimple had a tear in it,
To wail the fault its rising did commit.
By such personal attention to the rich and powerful John Dryden became
the greatest poet of his century, and married the daughter of an earl.
He took to writing heroic plays in the style of his time, such
preposterous bombast that if I were to tell you about them you would
think I was making them up. Then he wrote society comedies, also in the
style of his time, which was such high-toned sex nastiness that if I
were to write it today I should be taken up by the Shuberts and the
Laskys, and paid as much as Cecil de Mille and Robert W. Chambers and
Elinor Glyn rolled into one.
The “Restoration comedies” were much the same thing as our “bedroom
farces,” except that they were long drawn out; the seventeenth century
audience was satisfied to listen to smart people gossiping about their
vices, while our audience wants to see the smart people climbing through
the transom in their pajamas. Also, the old comedies are difficult for
us to understand, because the language of polite obscenity changes from
age to age, and we don’t always know what Dryden and Congreve and
Wycherley are talking about. But we need not rack our brains; we may be
sure that all their witticisms have reference to fornication and
adultery. There was no other occupation for these “restored” ladies and
gentlemen--except gambling and eating and drinking, and cheating and
lying in order to get the money to pay for their elegant pleasures.
Dryden gained by this writing an income of a couple of thousand pounds a
year, which was the top-notch for a literary fellow in England. Also he
became poet laureate, and an intimate of the king; in short, he reached
the heights. But alas, greatness has its penalties, as the poet soon
discovered, caught in the poisonous intrigues of a vile court. He was
accused of having written a slanderous poem, and one of his noble
enemies hired some bullies to beat him up one night. Also, a muck-raking
parson by the name of Jeremy Collier came along and lashed him in a book
entitled “A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English
Stage.” To all his other literary and political enemies the poet showed
himself a voluble antagonist; but to the Reverend Jeremy he had nothing
to answer.
He began, apparently, to realize the seriousness of life, and took to
writing propaganda for his gang. He produced a series of political
tracts, satirical and didactic verses upon which he expended great
technical skill. Professor Saintsbury points out these literary
beauties; but again he specifies: in appreciating them, the reader has
to bear in mind that what Dryden proved today he may have disproved
yesterday, and he may prove something different tomorrow. Lacking this
acrobatic ability, I can only record my opinion, that these most famous
verses are snarling and odious quarrels, of exactly as much importance
to mankind as the yelps in a dog-fight.
One of them was a poem full of enraptured praise for the Anglican
church. The poet at this time was listed for a salary of a hundred
pounds a year as poet laureate; but the salary was badly in arrears, and
somebody must have pointed out to him that his new sovereign, King James
II, was an ardent Catholic. So the poet became converted to Catholicism,
and wrote an equally enraptured poem in praise of that. But, alas! it
was a bad guess; shortly afterwards His Most Catholic Majesty was kicked
out of England, and William of Orange was brought over, and the country
was Protestant again. This was the period when the Vicar of Bray had
such a hard time holding his job; and our court poet also suffered,
losing most of his perquisites, and having to go to work again.
He was an old man now, and decided to play safe; he made a verse
translation of Virgil, for which nobody could scold him. Nobody did, and
he died full of honors, and had a “sufficiently splendid funeral” in
Westminster Abbey, “with a great procession, preceded at the College by
a Latin oration, and by the singing of Exegi Monumentum to music.”
And so, if you like that sort of thing, there you have what you like;
and if you have Dryden’s talents, and are willing to sell them to the
ruling classes, I can drive you over to Hollywood any day, and introduce
you to the fellows who will start you off at twenty thousand a year, and
raise you to two hundred thousand as soon as you have begun to deliver
the goods.