Well, then, we have once more--to wit a month ago--wheeled round and
encountered face to face our two great masters, with whom we at first set
out--John Dryden and Alexander Pope. We found them under a peculiar
character, that of Avengers--to be imaged by the Pythean quelling with his
divine and igneous arrows the Python, foul mud-engendered monster,
burthening the earth and loathed by the light of heaven.
Dryden and Pope! Father and son--master and scholar--founder and improver.
Who can make up his election, which of the two he prefers?--the free
composition of Dryden that streams on and on, full of vigour and
splendour, of reason and wit, as if verse were a mother tongue to him, or
some special gift of the universal Mother--or the perfected art of Pope?
Your choice changes as your own humour or the weathercock turns. If jolly
Boreas, the son of the clear sky, as Homer calls him, career scattering
the clouds, and stirring up life over all the face of the waters, grown
riotous with exuberant power, you are a Drydenite. But if brightness and
stillness fall together upon wood and valley, upon hill and lake, then the
spirit of beauty possesses you, and you lean your ear towards Pope. For
the spirit of beauty reigns in his musical style; and if he sting and
kill, it is with an air and a grace that quite win and charm the
lookers-on; and a sweetness persuades them that he is more concerned about
embalming his victims to a perennial pulchritude after death, than intent
upon ravishing from them the breath of a short-lived existence.
Dryden is all power--and he knows it. He soars at ease--he sails at
ease--he swoops at ease--and he trusses at ease. In his own verse, not
another approaches him for energy brought from familiar uses of
expression. Witness the hazardous but inimitable--
"To file and polish God Almighty's fool,"
and a hundred others. Shakespeare and Milton are now and then (_in
blanks_, as Tweedie used to say) all-surpassing by such a happiness. But
Dryden alone moves unfettered in the fettering couplet--alone of those who
have submitted to the fetters. For those who write distichs, running them
into one another, head over heels, till you do not know where to look
after the rhyme--these do not wear their fetters and with an all-mastering
grace dance to the chime, but they break them and caper about, the
fragments clanking dismally and strangely about their heels. Turn from the
clumsy clowns to glorious John:--sinewy, flexible, well-knit, agile,
stately-stepping, gracefully-bending, stern, stalwarth--or sitting his
horse, "erect and fair," in career, and carrying his steel-headed lance of
true stuff, level and steady to its aim, and impetuous as a thunderbolt.
His strokes are like the shots of that tremendous ordnance--
"chain'd thunderbolts and hail
Of iron globes----
That whom they hit none on their feet might stand,
Though standing else as rocks."
But we are forgetting ourselves. We must not run into elongated criticism,
however excellent, in a SUPPLEMENT--and therefore gladden you all with a
specimen--without note or comment--from the second part of _Absalom and
Achitophel_.
"Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;
Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad,
And in one 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. }
Spiteful he is not, though he wrote a satyr,
For still there goes some thinking to ill nature:
He needs no more than birds and beasts to think,
All his occasions are to eat and drink.
If he call rogue and rascal from a garret,
He means you no more mischief than a parrot:
The words for friend and foe alike were made,
To fetter them in verse is all his trade.
For almonds he'll cry whore to his own mother:
And call young Absalom king David's brother.
Let him be gallows-free by my consent,
And nothing suffer since he nothing meant;
Hanging supposes human soul and reason,
This animal's below committing treason:
Shall he be hang'd who never could rebel?
That's a preferment for Achitophel.
Railing in other men may be a crime,
But ought to pass for mere instinct in him:
Instinct he follows and no further knows,
For to write verse with him is to transprose.
'Twere pity treason at his door to lay,
Who makes heaven's gate a lock to its own key:
Let him rail on, let his invective Muse
Have four and twenty letters to abuse,
Which, if he jumbles to one line of sense,
Indict him of a capital offence,
In fire-works give him leave to vent his spight,
Those are the only serpents he can write;
The height of his ambition is, we know,
But to be master of a puppet-show,
On that one stage his works may yet appear,
And a month's harvest keeps him all the year.
"Now stop your noses, readers, all and some, }
For here's a tun of midnight-work to come, }
Og from a treason-tavern rowling home, }
Round as a globe, and liquor'd every chink,
Goodly and great he sails behind his link;
With all this bulk there's nothing lost in Og,
For every inch that is not fool is rogue:
A monstrous mass of foul corrupted matter,
As all the devils had spew'd to make the batter,
When wine has given him courage to blaspheme,
He curses God, but God before curst him;
And, if man could have reason, none has more,
That made his paunch so rich, and him so poor.
With wealth he was not trusted, for heaven knew
What 'twas of old to pamper up a Jew;
To what would he on quail and pheasant swell,
That ev'n on tripe and carrion could rebel?
But though heaven made him poor, with reverence speaking,
He never was a poet of God's making;
The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull,
With this prophetic blessing--Be thou dull:
Drink, swear, and roar, forbear no lewd delight
Fit for thy bulk, do any thing but write:
Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men,
A strong nativity--but for the pen!
Eat opium, mimic arsenic in thy drink,
Still thou mayst live, avoiding pen and ink.
I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain,
For treason botcht in rhyme will be thy bane:
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck:
Why should thy metre good King David blast?
A psalm of his will surely be thy last.
Dar'st thou presume in verse to meet thy foes,
Thou whom the penny pamphlet foil'd in prose?
Doeg, whom God for mankind's mirth has made,
O'er-tops thy talent in thy very trade;
Doeg to thee, thy paintings are so coarse,
A poet is, though he's the poet's horse.
A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull
For writing treason, and for writing dull;
To die for faction is a common evil,
But to be hang'd for nonsense is the devil:
Had thou the glories of thy king exprest,
Thy praises had been satyr at the best;
But thou in clumsy verse, unlickt, unpointed,
Hast shamefully defy'd the Lord's anointed:
I will not rake the dunghill for thy crimes,
For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes?
But of King David's foes be this the doom,
May all be like the young man Absalom!
And for my foes, may this their blessing be,
To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee!"
This is the _ne plus ultra_ of personal satire. Yet there are passages of
comparable excellence in the _Dunciad_. Aha! what have we here? A
contemptuous attack on Pope by--a Yankee-Cockney! What a cross! JOHN
RUSSELL LOWELL from Massachusets thus magpie-like chattereth at the
Nightingale.
"_Philip._--You talk about the golden age of Queen Anne. It was a
French pinchbeck age.
"_John._--Stay, not so fast. I like the writers of that period, for
the transparency of their style, and their freedom from affection. If
I may trust my understanding of your meaning, our modern versifiers
have only made the simple discovery, that an appearance of antiquity
is the cheapest passport to respect. But the cheapest which we
purchase with subservience is too dear. You yourself have no such
prejudice against the Augustan age of English literature. I have
caught you more than once with the _Tatler_ in your hand, and have
heard you praising Dryden's prefaces.
"_Philip._--You and I have very different notions of what poetry is,
and of what its object should be. You may claim for Pope the merit of
an envious eye, which could turn the least scratch upon the character
of a friend into a fester, of a nimble and adroit fancy, and of an
ear so niggardly that it could afford but one invariable caesura to
his verse; but, when you call him poet, you insult the buried majesty
of all earth's noblest and choicest spirits. Nature should lead the
true poet by the hand, and he has far better things to do than to
busy himself in counting the warts upon it, as Pope did. A cup of
water from Hippocrene, tasting, as it must, of innocent pastoral
sights and sounds, of the bleat of lambs, of the shadows of leaves
and flowers that have leaned over it, of the rosy hands of children
whose privilege it ever is to paddle in it, of the low words of
lovers who have walked by its side in the moonlight, of the tears of
the poor Hagars of the world who have drunk from it, would choke a
satirist. His thoughts of the country must have a savour of Jack
Ketch, and see no beauty but in a hemp field. Poetry is something to
make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of
beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls; not by picking
out the petty faults of our neighbours to make a mock of. Shall that
divine instinct, which has in all ages concerned itself only with
what is holiest and fairest in life and nature, degrade itself to go
about seeking for the scabs and ulcers of the putridest spirits, to
grin over with a derision more hideous even than the pitiful quarry
it has moused at? Asmodeus's gift, of unroofing the dwellings of his
neighbours at will, would be the rarest outfit for a satirist, but it
would be of no worth to a poet. To the satirist the mere outward
motives of life are enough. Vanity, pride, avarice--these, and the
other external vices, are the strings of his unmusical lyre. But the
poet need only unroof his own heart. All that makes happiness or
misery under every roof of the wide world, whether of palace or
hovel, is working also in that narrow yet boundless sphere. On that
little stage the great drama of life is acted daily. There the
creation, the tempting, and the fall, may be seen anew. In that
withdrawing closet, solitude whispers her secrets, and death uncovers
his face. There sorrow takes up her abode, to make ready a pillow and
a resting-place for the weary head of love, whom the world casts out.
To the poet nothing is mean, but every thing on earth is a fitting
altar to the supreme beauty.
"But I am wandering. As for the poets of Queen Anne's reign, it is
enough to prove what a kennel standard of poetry was then
established, that Swift's smutchy verses are not even yet excluded
from the collections. What disgusting stuff, too, in Prior and
Parnell! Yet Swift, perhaps, as the best writer of English whom that
period produced. Witness his prose. Pope treated the English language
as the image-man has served the bust of Shakspeare yonder. To rid it
of some external soils, he has rubbed it down till there is no
muscular expression left. It looks very much as his own 'mockery king
of snow' must have done after it had begun to melt. Pope is for ever
mixing water with the good old mother's milk of our tongue. You
cannot get a straightforward speech out of him. A great deal of his
poetry is so incased in verbiage, that it puts me in mind of those
important-looking packages which boys are fond of sending to their
friends. We unfold envelope after envelope, and at last find a couple
of cherry-stones. But in Pope we miss the laugh which in the other
case follows the culmination of the joke. He makes Homer lisp like
the friar in Chaucer and Ajax and Belinda talk exactly alike.
"_John._--Well, we are not discussing the merits of Pope, but of the
archaisms which have been introduced into modern poetry. What you say
of the Bible has some force in it. The forms of speech used in our
version of it will always impress the mind, even if applied to an
entirely different subject. What else can you bring forward?
"_Philip._--Only the fact, that, by going back to the more natural
style of the Elizabethan writers, our verse has gained in harmony as
well as strength. No matter whether Pope is describing the cane of a
fop, or the speech of a demigod, the pause must always fall on the
same syllable, and the sense be chopped off by the same rhyme.
Achilles cannot gallop his horses round the walls of Troy, with
Hector dragging behind his chariot, except he keep time to the
immitigable seesaw of the couplet."
Master Lowell gives tongue with a plagiarism from Southey. In his _Life of
Cowper_ that great writer somewhat rashly says, "The age of Pope was the
golden age of poets--but it was the pinchbeck age of poetry." What is
pardonable in Southey is knoutable in his ape. Think of one American
Cantab playfully rating and complimenting another on having caught him
more than once with the _Tatler_ in his hand, and with having heard him
praising Dryden's prefaces! What liberality--nay, what universality of
taste! Absolutely able, in the reaches of his transatlantic soul, to
relish Dryden's prefaces! But in his appeal from Philip drunk to Philip
sober, Philip cannot, crop-sick, but nauseate the thought of Pope being a
poet.
The whole dialogue--somewhat of the longest--_tedious_ exceedingly--is
polluted with similar impudencies. "The strong point in Pope's displays of
sentiment, is in the graceful management of a cambric handkerchief. You do
not believe a word that Heloise says, and feel all the while that she is
squeezing out her tears as if from a half-dry sponge." Such is the effect
of too copious draughts from that Hippocrene which alternately discharges
cock-tail and mint-julep. John, however, does not go the whole hog with
Philip. He erects his ears to their full length, and brays thus--"_I do
not think that you do Pope justice!_" and then does Pope justice as
follows: "_His translation of Homer is as bad as it can be, I admit!_" I
ADMIT! "But surely you cannot deny the merit of lively and ingenious
fancy to his 'Rape of the Lock;' nor of knowledge of life, and a certain
polished classicalness, to his epistles and satires. His portraits are
like those of Copley, of fine gentlemen and ladies, whose silks and satins
are the best part of them." But poor, cautious, timid, trimming,
turn-about John cannot so conciliate bully Philip, who squabashes at once
both poet and critic.
"_Philip._--I cannot allow the parallel. In Copley's best pictures,
the drapery, though you may almost hear it rustle, is wholly a
subordinate matter. Witness some of those in our College-hall here at
Cambridge--that of Madam Boylston especially. I remember being once
much struck with the remark of a friend, who convinced me of the
fact, that Copley avoided the painting of wigs whenever he could,
thus getting a step nearer nature. Pope would have made them a
prominent object. I grant what you say about the 'Rape of the Lock,'
but this does not prove that Pope was a poet. If you wish an instance
of a _poet's_ fancy, look into the 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' I can
allow that Pope has written what is entertaining, but surely not
poetical. Show me a line that makes you love God and your neighbour
better, that inclines you to meekness, charity, and forbearance, and
I will show you a hundred that make it easier for you to be the
odious reverse of all these. In many a Pagan poet there is more
Christianity. No poet could write a 'Dunciad,' or even read it. You
have persuaded yourself into thinking Pope a poet, as, in looking for
a long time at a stick which we believe to be an animal of some kind,
we fancy that it is stirring. His letters are amusing, but do not
increase one's respect for him. When you speak of his being
classical, I am sure that you jest."
The waves of the Atlantic have wafted acorns dropped from the British oak
to the Western shores, and a wide and strong grove is growing up there. We
feel our kindred with the fellow-beings of our tongue, and rejoice with a
natural and keen interest in every thing true, great, and good that is
produced within the States. Powers are moving there, that may, that do,
want much tempering; but of which, when tempered, we augur high things.
One such tempering is reverence of the past, and Pope is one of the great
names which England tenders to young America. We augur ill, and are uneasy
for our cousins or nephews, when we see them giving themselves airs, and
knowing better than their betters. What are we to think, when instead of
the fresh vigour which should rise on the soil of the self-governed, we
find repetition, for the worse, of the feeblest criticisms which have
disgraced some of our own weaklings? This presumptuous youngling talks
technically, and does not know what he is talking about. Pope has _not_
but one invariable caesura to his verse. He has an ordinary range of four
places for his caesura, and the variety and music which he manages to give
his verse under that scheme, dictated by a sensitive ear, is truly
wonderful. That Pope is only a satirist, and can find nothing in humanity
but its faults, infirmities, and disgraces to feed upon with delight, is a
shameful falsehood. He is as generous in praise as he is galling in
sarcasm; and the voice of Christian Europe has pronounced him a moral and
religious poet. It is rather strange to see the stickler for the beauty
and exaltation of poetry, diligent in purifying and ennobling the taste of
his countrymen, by raking in the dirt for disgusting and loathsome images,
to express his slanderous character of a writer, eminent among the best
for purity and refinement. We take leave of Mr Lowell with remarking, that
his affected and hyperbolical praises heaped on the old English dramatists
are as nauseous as any ignorant exaggeration can be, bombastically
protruded on us at second-hand, from an article in an old number of the
_Retrospective Review_, from which most of the little he knows is taken,
and in the taking, turned into most monstrous nonsense.
Friends of our soul! Permit us, now, in this our Supplement, to suggest to
your recollection, that Satire is public or private. Public satire is, or
would he, authoritative, robed, magisterial censure. Private satire is
private warfare--the worst plague of the state, and the overthrow of all
right law. It is worse. For when baron besieges baron, there is high
spirit roused, and high deeds are achieved. But private malice in verse is
as if the gossiping dames of a tea-table were armed with daggers instead
of words, to kill reputations--the School for Scandal turned into a
tragedy. We are groaning now over the inferior versifiers. To the Poets,
to the mighty ones, we forgave every thing, a month ago. We say then,
again, that although duly appointed to this Chair of Justice in which we
sit, and having our eyes bandaged like the Goddess whose statue is in the
corner of the hall, yet our hands are open, and we are willing--as in all
well-governed kingdoms judges have been willing--to take bribes. But we
let it be known, we must be bribed high. Juvenal, Persius, Horace, Dryden,
and Pope have soothed the itching of our palms to our heart's content; and
each has gained his cause in or impartial court. Nay, we are very much
afraid, that if that gall-fed, parricidal ruffian, Archilochus, who
twisted his verses into a halter for noosing up his wife's father--a
melancholy event to which the old gentleman, it is said, lent a
helping-hand--were more to us than a tradition, we should be in danger of
finding in the poignancy of his iambics a sauce too much to our relish.
_Avec cette sauce_--cried the French gastronome, by the ecstasy of his
palate bewitched out of his moral discretion--_Avec cette sauce on
mangerait son pere!_
But leaving these imaginative heights, and walking along the level ground
of daily life, common sense, and sane criticism, we go on to assert that
private satire, lower than the highest, is intolerable. The grandeur of
moral indignation in Juvenal, never is altogether without a secret inkling
of disquietude at the bottom of the breast. It may be the Muse's
legitimate and imposed office to smite the offending city; but it is never
her joyous task. The judge never gladly puts on the black cap. The reality
oppresses us--we are sore and sick in the very breath of the contagion,
even if we escape untainted by it. The power of poetry possesses us for
the time, and we must submit. Perhaps it is right, if the Muse be a great
_magistra vitae_, that she should present life under all its aspects, and
school us in all its disciplines; and the direct, real, official censure
of manners may be a necessary part of her calling. But how differently
does the indirect censure affect us! Shakspeare creating Iago, censures
wily, treacherous, envious, malignant, cold-blooded villany, where and
whensoever to be found. He does not fix the brand upon the forehead of a
time, or of a profession, or of a man, or of a woman; but of a devil who
is incarnate in every time, who exercises every profession, is an innate,
is the householder rather, now in the steeled breast of a man, and now in
woman's softest bosom. This ubiquitous possibility of the Mark's
occurring--the ignorance of the archer where his gifted arrow will
strike--ennobles, aggrandizes his person and his work. It does not weaken
the service which the poet is called upon to render to humanity, by
showing himself the foe of her foes. And we, the spectators of the
drama--what is that strangely balanced and harmonized conflict of
emotions, by means of which we at once loathe and endure the poisonous
confidant of the Moor? From the depths of the heart abhorring the odious,
execrable man, whilst our fancy hovers, fascinated, about the marvellous
creation! Yet we do not call Shakspeare here a Satirist. The distinction
is broad. The Satirist is, in the most confined, or in the most
comprehensive sense--PERSONAL.
And now we doubt not, readers beloved, that while you have been enjoying
these our reflections on Satire, you may likewise have been dimly
foreseeing the purposed end towards which our drift is setting in, as on a
strong tide. We have been dealing with first-raters. In them the power of
the poetry reconciles us to the matter--mitigates the repugnancy otherwise
ready to wait, in a well-constituted mind, upon a series of thoughts and
images which studiously persevere in venting the passions of hate and
scorn. The curse of the Muse on all middling poets--and upon Parnassus one
is tempted to ascribe to the middle zone of the mountain, all those who do
not cluster about one of the summits--the common curse seems to fall with
tenfold violence upon the middling Satirist. The great poet has authority,
magistery, masterdom, seated in his high spirit; and when he chooses to
put forth his power, we bow before him, or stoop our heads from the
descending bolt. But if one not thus privileged leap uncalled into the
awful throne, to hurl self-dictated judgments, this arrogant usurpation of
supremacy; justly offends and revolts us. For he who censures the age, or
any notable division of contemporary society, in verse, does in fact
arrogate to himself an unappealable superiority. He speaks, or affects to
speak, muse-inspired, as a prophet, oracularly. He does not enquire, he
thunders. Now, the thunder of a scold is any thing but agreeable--and we
exclaim--
"Demens! qui nimbos et non imitabile fulmen
AEre et cornipedum cursu simularat equorum."
Poets are the givers of renown. Their word is fame. But fame is good and
ill; and therefore they speak Eulogy and Satire. They are the tongues of
the world. The music of verse makes way for Lear's words to all our
hearts. It makes way for the Satirist's to the heart, where they are to be
mortal. If mankind justly moved condemn, the Poet will find voice for that
condemnation. Wo be to those who by goading provoke him, who is the organ
of the universal voice, to visit his own wrong, to wreak his own vengeance
on their heads! The wrong, the wrath is private; but the voice retains its
universality, and they are withered as if by the blast of the general hate
or scorn--
"He was not for an age, but for all time,"
said one poet of another. There are two ways of belonging to one's age.
You are born of it--you die with it. Johnson disclaims for Shakspeare the
co-etaneousness by birth and by death. He is the son of all time; and the
inheritor of all time. His mind is the mind of ages deceased, and of ages
unborn; and his writings remain to each succeeding generation, as fresh as
if it had witnessed their springing into existence. They take no date.