The second point worthy of imitation in classical tragedy is the style.
Dryden, in fact, purifies his own, and renders it more clear, by
introducing close reasoning and precise words. He has oratorical
discussions like Corneille, well-delivered retorts, symmetrical, like
carefully parried arguments. He has maxims vigorously enclosed in the
compass of a single line, distinctions, developments, and the whole art
of special pleading. He has happy antitheses, ornamental epithets,
finely wrought comparisons, and all the artifices of the literary mind.
What is most striking is, that he abandons that kind of verse specially
appropriated to the English drama which is without rhyme, and the
mixture of prose and verse common to the old authors, for a rhymed
tragedy like the French, fancying that he is thus inventing a new
species, which he calls heroic play. But in this transformation the good
perished, the bad remains. For rhyme differs in different races. To an
Englishman it resembles a song, and transports him at once to an ideal
and fairy world. To a Frenchman it is only a conventionalism or an
expediency, and transports him at once to an antechamber or a
drawing-room; to him it is an ornamental dress and nothing more; if it
mars prose, it ennobles it; it imposes respect, not enthusiasm, and
changes a vulgar into a high-bred style. Moreover, in French
aristocratic verse everything is connected; pedantry, logical machinery
of every kind, is excluded from it; there is nothing more disagreeable
to well-bred and refined persons than the scholastic rust. Images are
rare, but always well kept up; bold poesy, real fantasy, have no place
in it; their brilliancy and divergencies would derange the politeness
and regular flow of the social world. The right word, the prominence of
free expressions, are not to be met with in it; general terms, always
rather threadbare, suit best the caution and niceties of select society.
Dryden sins heavily against all these rules. His rhymes, to an
Englishman's ear, scatter at once the whole illusion of the stage; they
see that the characters who speak thus are but speaking puppets; he
himself admits that his heroic tragedy is only fit to represent on the
stage chivalric poems like those of Ariosto and Spenser.
Poetic dash gives the finishing stroke to all likelihood. Would we
recognize the dramatic accent in this epic comparison?
"As some fair tulip, by a storm oppress'd
Shrinks up, and folds its silken arms to rest;
And, bending to the blast, all pale and dead,
Hears, from within, the wind sing round its head--
So, shrouded up, your beauty disappears:
Unveil, my love, and lay aside your fears,
The storm, that caused your fright, is pass'd and done."[403]
What a singular triumphal song are these _concetti_ of Cortez as he
lands:
"On what new happy climate are we thrown,
So long kept secret, and so lately known?
As if our old world modestly withdrew,
And here in private had brought forth a new."[404]
Think how these patches of color would contrast with the sober design of
French dissertation. Here lovers vie with each other in metaphors; there
a wooer, in order to magnify the beauties of his mistress, says that
"bloody hearts lie panting in her hand." In every page harsh or vulgar
words spoil the regularity of a noble style. Ponderous logic is broadly
displayed in the speeches of princesses. "Two ifs," says Lyndaraxa,
"scarce make one possibility."[405] Dryden sets his college cap on the
heads of these poor women. Neither he nor his characters are well
brought up; they have taken from the French but the outer garb of the
bar and the schools; they have left behind symmetrical eloquence,
measured diction, elegance and delicacy. Awhile before, the licentious
coarseness of the Restoration pierced the mask of the fine sentiments
with which it was covered; now the rude English imagination breaks the
oratorical mould in which it tried to enclose itself.
Let us look at the other side of the picture. Dryden would keep the
foundation of the old English drama, and retains the abundance of
events, the variety of plot, the unforeseen accidents, and the physical
representation of bloody or violent action. He kills as many people as
Shakespeare. Unfortunately, all poets are not justified in killing. When
they take their spectators among murders and sudden accidents, they
ought to have a hundred hidden preparations. Fancy a sort of rapture and
romantic folly, a most daring style, eccentric and poetical, songs,
pictures, reveries spoken aloud, frank scorn of all verisimilitude, a
mixture of tenderness, philosophy, and mockery, all the retiring charms
of varied feelings, all the whims of nimble fancy: the truth of events
matters little. No one who ever saw "Cymbeline" or "As you Like it"
looked at these plays with the eyes of a politician or a historian; no
one took these military processions, these accessions of princes,
seriously; the spectators were present at dissolving views. They did not
demand that things should proceed after the laws of nature; on the
contrary, they willingly did require that they should proceed against
the laws of nature. The irrationality is the charm. That new world must
be all imagination; if it was only so by halves, no one would care to
rise to it. This is why we do not rise to Dryden's. A queen dethroned,
then suddenly set up again; a tyrant who finds his lost son, is
deceived, adopts a girl in his place; a young prince led to punishment,
who snatches the sword of a guard, and recovers his crown; such are the
romances which constitute the "Maiden Queen" and the "Marriage à la
Mode." We can imagine what a display classical dissertations make in
this medley; solid reason beats down imagination, stroke after stroke,
to the ground. We cannot tell if the matter be a true portrait or a
fancy painting; we remain suspended between truth and fancy; we should
like either to get up to heaven or down to earth, and we jump down as
quick as possible from the clumsy scaffolding where the poet would perch
us.
On the other hand, when Shakespeare wishes to impress a doctrine, not
raise a dream, he attunes us to it beforehand, but after another
fashion. We naturally remain in doubt before a cruel action: we divine
that the red irons which are about to put out the eyes of little Arthur
are painted sticks, and that the six rascals that besiege Rome, are
supernumeraries hired at a shilling a night. To conquer this mistrust we
must employ the most natural style, circumstantial and rude imitation of
the manners of the guardroom and of the alehouse; I can only believe in
Jack Cade's sedition on hearing the dirty words of bestial lewdness and
mobbish stupidity. You must let me have the jests, the coarse laughter,
drunkenness, the manners of butchers and tanners, to make me imagine a
mob or an election. So in murders, let me feel the fire of bubbling
passion, the accumulation of despair or hate which have unchained the
will and nerved the hand. When the unchecked words, the fits of rage,
the convulsive ejaculations of exasperated desire, have brought me in
contact with all the links of the inward necessity which has moulded the
man and guided the crime, I no longer think whether the knife is bloody,
because I feel with inner trembling the passion which has handled it.
Have I to see if Shakespeare's Cleopatra be really dead? The strange
laugh that bursts from her when the basket of asps is brought, the
sudden tension of nerves, the flow of feverish words, the fitful gayety,
the coarse language, the torrent of ideas with which she overflows, have
already made me sound all the depths of suicide,[406] and I have
foreseen it as soon as she came on the stage. This madness of the
imagination, incited by climate and despotic power; these woman's,
queen's, prostitute's nerves; this marvellous self-abandonment to all
the fire of invention and desire--these cries, tears, foam on the lips,
tempest of insults, actions, emotions; this promptitude to murder,
announce the rage with which she would rush against the least obstacle
and be dashed to pieces. What does Dryden effect in this matter with his
written phrases? What of the maid speaking, in the author's words, who
bids her half-mad mistress "call reason to assist you?"[407] What if
such a Cleopatra as his, designed after Lady Castlemaine,[408] skilled
in artifices and whimpering, voluptuous and a coquette, with neither the
nobleness of virtue, nor the greatness of crime:
"Nature meant me
A wife; a silly, harmless household dove,
Fond without art, and kind without deceit."[409]
Nay, Nature meant nothing of the kind, or otherwise this turtle dove
would not have tamed or kept an Antony; a woman without any prejudices
alone could do it, by the superiority of boldness and the fire of
genius. I can see already from the title of the piece why Dryden has
softened Shakespeare: "All for Love; or, the World well Lost." What a
wretchedness, to reduce such events to a pastoral, to excuse Antony, to
praise Charles II indirectly, to bleat as in a sheepfold! And such was
the taste of his contemporaries. When Dryden wrote the "Tempest" after
Shakespeare, and the "State of Innocence" after Milton, he again spoiled
the ideas of his masters; he turned Eve and Miranda into
courtesans;[410] he extinguished everywhere, under conventionalism and
indecencies, the frankness, severity, delicacy, and charm of the
original invention. By his side, Settle, Shadwell, Sir Robert Howard did
worse. "The Empress of Morocco," by Settle, was so admired, that the
gentlemen and ladies of the court learned it by heart, to play at
Whitehall before the king. And this was not a passing fancy; although
modified, the taste was to endure. In vain poets rejected a part of the
French alloy wherewith they had mixed their native metal; in vain they
returned to the old unrhymed verses of Jonson and Shakespeare; in vain
Dryden, in the parts of Antony, Ventidius, Octavia, Don Sebastian, and
Dorax, recovered a portion of the old naturalness and energy; in vain
Otway, who had real dramatic talent, Lee and Southern, attained a true
or touching accent, so that once, in "Venice Preserved," it was thought
that the drama would be regenerated. The drama was dead, and tragedy
could not replace it; or rather each one died by the other; and their
union, which robbed them of strength in Dryden's time, enervated them
also in the time of his successors. Literary style blunted dramatic
truth; dramatic truth marred literary style; the work was neither
sufficiently vivid nor sufficiently well written; the author was too
little of a poet or of an orator; he had neither Shakespeare's fire of
imagination nor Racine's polish and art.[411] He strayed on the
boundaries of two dramas, and suited neither the half-barbarous men of
art nor the well-polished men of the court. Such indeed was the
audience, hesitating between two forms of thought, fed by two opposite
civilizations. They had no longer the freshness of feelings, the depth
of impression, the bold originality and poetic folly of the cavaliers
and adventurers of the Renaissance; nor will they ever acquire the
aptness of speech, gentleness of manners, courtly habits, and
cultivation of sentiment and thought which adorned the court of Louis
XIV. They are quitting the age of solitary imagination and invention,
which suits their race, for the age of reasoning and worldly
conversation, which does not suit their race; they lose their own
merits, and do not acquire the merits of others. They were meagre poets
and ill-bred courtiers, having lost the art of imagination and having
not yet acquired good manners, at times dull or brutal, at times
emphatic or stiff. For the production of fine poetry, race and age must
concur. This race, diverging from its own age, and fettered at the
outset by foreign imitation, formed its classical literature but slowly;
it will only attain it after transforming its religious and political
condition: the age will be that of English reason. Dryden inaugurates it
by his other works, and the writers who appear in the reign of Queen
Anne will give it its completion, its authority, and its splendor.