There were some unsavory names which crept into the opening of our last
chapter; but they were sweet in the nostrils of Charles II. Of such were
Buckingham, Rochester, Etherege, Dorset, and the Castelmaine. And we made
a little moral counterpoise by the naming of Baxter’s _Saints’ Rest_, and
of Tillotson, and of the healthful, noble verse of Andrew Marvell, by
which we wished to impress upon our readers the fact that the whole world
of England in that day was not given over to French court-dances and to
foul-mouthed poets; but that the Puritan leaven was still working, even in
literary ways, and that there were men of dignity, knowledge, culture, and
rank, who never bowed down to such as the pretty Duchess of Portsmouth.
We had our glimpse of that witty buffoon Samuel Butler, who made clever
antics in rhyme; and I think, we listened with a curious eagerness to what
Samuel Pepys had to say of his play-going, and of the black patches with
which his pretty wife set forth her beauty. Then came Bunyan, with his
great sermonizing in barns and woods, and that far finer sermonizing which
in the days of his jailhood took shape in the immortal story of Christian
and Great-heart. He died over a grocer’s shop, in Snow Hill, London (its
site now all effaced by the great Holborn Viaduct), whither he had gone on
a preaching bout in the year 1688, only a few months before James II. was
driven from his throne. It is worth going out by the City Road--only a
short walk from Finsbury Square--to the cemetery of Bunhill Fields, where
Bunyan was buried--to see the marble figure of the tinker preacher
stretched upon the monument modern admirers have built, and to see
Christian toiling below, with his burden strapped to his back.
_Three Good Prosers._
In the course of that old _Pepys’ Diary_--out of which we had our
regalement--there is several times mention of Thomas Fuller;[87] among
others this:
“I sat down reading in Fuller’s _English Worthies_; being much
troubled that (though he had some discourse with me about my family
and armes) he says nothing at all. But I believe, indeed, our family
were never considerable.”
Honest Pepys! Shrewd Dr. Fuller, and a man not to be forgotten! He was a
“Cavalier parson” through the Civil-War days; was born down in
Northamptonshire in the same town where John Dryden, twenty-three years
later, first saw the light. He was full of wit, and full of knowledges;
people called him--as so many have been and are called--“a walking
library;” and his stout figure was to be seen many a time, in the
Commonwealth days, striding through Fleet Street, and by Paul’s Walk, to
Cheapside. There is quaint humor in his books, and quaintness and aptness
of language. Coleridge says he was “the most sensible and least prejudiced
great man of his time.”
Sir Thomas Browne,[88] a doctor, and the author of the _Religio Medici_
and _Urn-Burial_, was another delightful author of the Civil-War times,
whose life reached almost through the reign of Charles II.; yet he was not
a war man--in matter of kings or of churches. Serenities hung over him in
all those times wherein cannon thundered, and traitors (so called) were
quartered, and cathedrals despoiled. He loved not great cities. London
never magnetized him; but after his thorough continental travel and his
doctorate at Leyden, he planted himself in that old, crooked-streeted city
of Norwich, in Norfolk; and there, under the shadow of the stupendous
mound and Keep (which date from the early Henrys) he built up a home, of
which he made a museum--served the sick--reared a family of ten children,
and followed those meditative ways of thought which led him through
sepulchral urns, and the miracles of growth, and the Holy Scriptures, away
from all the “decrees of councils and the niceties of the schools” to the
altitudes he reaches in the _Religio Medici_.
I must excerpt something to show the humors of this Norwich doctor, and it
shall be this:
“Light that makes things seen makes some things invisible. Were it
not for darkness, and the shadow of the earth, the noblest part of
Creation had remained unseen, and the stars in Heaven as invisible
as on the Fourth day when they were created above the horizon with
the Sun, and there was not an eye to behold them. The greatest
mystery of Religion is expressed by adumbration, and in the noblest
part of Jewish types we find the Cherubim _shadowing_ the Mercy
Seat. Life itself is but the Shadow of Death, and souls departed but
the Shadows of the Living. The sun itself is but the dark
_Simulacrum_, and light but the shadow of God.”
If there were no other reason for our love of the best writings of Sir
Thomas Browne, it would be for this--that in some scarce distinguishable
way he has inoculated our “Elia” of a later day with something very like
his own quaint egoisms and as quaint garniture of speech. How Charles Lamb
must have enjoyed him, and joyed in the meditation--of a twilight--on the
far-reaching, mystic skeins of thought which so keen a reader would ravel
out from the stores of the _Urn-Burial_! And with what delighted sanction
the later writer permits, here and there, the tender solemnities of the
elder to shine through and qualify his own periods; not through
imitativeness, conscious or unconscious, but because the juices from the
mellow fruitage of the old physician have been quietly assimilated by the
stuttering clerk of the India House, and so his thought burgeons--by very
necessity--into that kindred leafage of phrase which lifts and sways in
the gentle breezes of his always gentle purpose.
Another name, of a man far less lovable, but perhaps more widely known, is
that of Sir William Temple.[89] He was of excellent family, born in
London, highly cultivated, and lived all through the reign of Charles
II., and much beyond. He represented England, in diplomatic ways, often
upon the Continent, and with great success; he negotiated the so-called
Triple Alliance; he also brought about that royal marriage of the daughter
of the Duke of York (afterward James II.), with William of Orange, and so
gave to England that royal couple, William and Mary. He had great dignity;
he had wealth; a sort of earlier Edward Everett--as polished and cold and
well-meaning and fastidious; looking rather more to the elegance of his
speech than to the burden of it; always making show of Classicism--nothing
if not correct; cautious; keeping well out of harm’s way, and all
pugnacious expressions of opinion; courteous to strong Churchmen;
courteous to Papists; bowing low to my Lady Castelmaine; very considerate
of Cromwellians who had power; moulding his habit and speech so as to show
no ugly angles of opinion anywhere, but only such convenient roundness as
would roll along life’s level easily to the very end. You will not be in
the way of encountering much that he wrote, though he had the reputation
in those days, and long after, of writing excellently well. “He was the
first writer,” said Johnson, “who gave cadence to English prose.”
Among his essays is one on “Ancient and Modern Learning,” showing the
pretensions of a scholastic man, whose assumptions brought about a
controversy into which Richard Bentley, a rare young critic, entered, and
out of which grew eventually Swift’s famous _Battle of the Books_.
Temple also wrote on gardens, with a safer swing for his learning and his
taste; traces of what his taste was in such matters are still discernible
about his old home of Moor Park, in Surrey. It lies some forty miles from
London, on the way to Southampton and the Isle of Wight, near the old town
of Farnham, where there is a venerable bishop’s palace worth the seeing; a
mile away one may find the terraces of Sir William’s old garden, and the
mossy dial under which he ordered his heart to be buried. Another
interest, moreover, attaches to these Moor Park gardens, which will make
them doubly worth a visit. On their terraces and under their trees used to
pace and meditate that strange creature Jonathan Swift, who was in his
young days a _protégé_ or secretary of Sir William Temple; and there,
too, in the same shade, and along the same terraces, used to stroll and
meditate in different mood, poor Mistress Hester Johnson, the “Stella” of
Swift’s life-long love-dream.
We shall meet these people again. But I leave Sir William Temple,
commending to your attention a delightful little essay of Charles Lamb, in
his volume of Elia, upon “The Genteel Style in Writing.” It gives a fair
though flattering notion of the ways of Sir William’s life, and of the way
of his work.
_John Dryden._
Of course we know John Dryden’s name a great deal better than we know Sir
William Temple’s; better, perhaps, than we know any other name of that
period. And yet do we know his poems well? Are there any that you
specially cherish and doat upon? any that kindle your sympathies easily
into blaze? any that give electric expression to your own poetic
yearnings, and put you upon quick and enchanting drift into that empyrean
of song whereto the great poets decoy us? I doubt if there is much of
Dryden which has this subtle influence upon you; certainly it has not upon
me.
There are the great Cecilia odes, which hold their places in the
reading-books, with their
“Double--double--double beat
Of the thundering drum;”
and the royal
“Philip’s warlike son,
Aloft in awful state;
The lovely Thais by his side,
--Like a blooming Eastern bride
In flower of youth and beauty’s pride;”
all which we read over and over, always with an ambitious vocalism which
the language invites, but, I think, with not much hearty unction.
And yet, notwithstanding the little that we recall of this man’s work, he
did write an enormous amount of verse, in all metres, and of all lengths.
All the poems that Milton ever published would hardly fill the space
necessary for a full synopsis of what John Dryden wrote. But let us begin
at the beginning.
This poet, and important man of letters, was born only a year or two later
than John Bunyan, and in the same range of country--a little to the
northward, in an old rectory of Aldwinckle (Northamptonshire), upon the
banks of the river Nen. And this river flows thence northerly, in great
loops, where sedges grow, past the tall spire of Oundle--past the grassy
ruins of Fotheringay; and thence easterly, in other great loops, through
flat lands, under the huge towers of Peterborough Cathedral. But the river
singing among the sedges does not come into Dryden’s verse; nor does
Fotheringay, with its tragic memories; nor do the noble woods of Lilford
Park, or of that Rockingham Forest which, in the days of Dryden’s boyhood,
must in many places have brought its spurs of oak timber and its haunts of
the red-deer close down to the Nen banks. Indeed, Wordsworth says, with a
little exaggeration, it is true, “there is not a single image from nature
in the whole body of his [Dryden’s] works.”
He was a well-born boy, with titled kinsfolk, and had money at command for
good courses in books. He was at Westminster School under Dr. Busby; was
at Cambridge, where he fell one time into difficulties, which somehow
angered him in a way that made him somewhat irreverent of his old college
in after life. There are pretty traditions that in extreme youth he
addressed some very earnest amatory verses to a certain Helen Driden,
daughter of his baronet uncle at Canons-Ashby;[90] and there are hints
dropped by some biographers of a rebuff to him; which, if it came about,
did not pluck away the cheerfulness and self-approval that lay in him. It
was in London, however, where he went after his father’s death, and when
he was twenty-seven, that the first verse was written by him which made
the literary world prick up its ears at sound of a new voice.
’Tis in eulogy of Cromwell, dying just then, and this is a bit of it:
“Swift and resistless thro’ the land he past,
Like that bold Greek, who did the East subdue,
And made to battles such heroic haste,
As if on wings of Victory he flew.
“He fought, secure of fortune as of fame:
Still by new maps the island might be shown,
Of conquests, which he strew’d where-e’er he came,
Thick as the galaxy with stars is strown.
“His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest,
His name, a great example stands, to show
How strangely high endeavors may be blest,
Where piety and valor jointly go.”
A short two years after, you will remember, and Charles II. came to his
own and was crowned; and how does this eulogist of Cromwell treat his
coronation? In a way that is worth our listening to; for, I think, a
comparison of the Cromwellian verses with the Carolan eulogy gives us a
key to John Dryden’s character:
“All eyes you draw, and with the eyes, the heart:
Of your own pomp yourself the greatest part:
Next to the sacred temple you are led,
Where waits a crown for your more sacred head:
The grateful choir their harmony employ,
Not to make greater, but more solemn joy.
Wrapt soft and warm your name is sent on high,
As flames do on the waves of incense fly:
Music herself is lost, in vain she brings
Her choicest notes to praise the best of kings;
Her melting strains in you a tomb have found,
And lie like bees in their own sweetness drown’d.”
No wonder that he came ultimately to have the place of Poet-laureate, and
thereafter an extra £100 a year with it! No wonder that, with all his
cleverness--and it was prodigious--he never did, and never could, win an
unsullied reputation for sterling integrity and straightforward purpose.
I know that his latest biographer and advocate, Mr. Saintsbury, whose work
you will be very apt to encounter in the little series edited by John
Morley, sees poems like those I have cited with other eyes, and fashions
out of them an agreeable poetic consistency very honorable to Dryden; but
I cannot twist myself so as to view the matter in his way. I think rather
of a conscienceless thrifty newspaper, setting forth the average every-day
drift of opinion, with a good deal more than every-day skill.
Meantime John Dryden has married, and has married the daughter of an earl;
of just how this came about we have not very full record; but there were a
great many who wondered why she should marry him; and a good many more, as
it appeared, who persisted in wondering why he should marry her. Such
wonderments of wondering people overtake a good many matches. It is quite
certain that it was not a marriage which went to make a domestic man of
him; and I think you will search vainly through his poems for any
indication of those home instincts which, like the “melting strains” he
flung about King Charles,
“Lie like bees in their own sweetness drown’d.”
The only positive worldly good which seemed to come of this marriage was
an occasional home at Charlton, in Wiltshire--an estate of the Earl of
Berkshire, his father-in-law--where Dryden wrote, shortly after his
marriage, his _Annus Mirabilis_, in which he gave to all the notable
events of the year 1666 a fillip with his pen; and the odd conceits that
lie in a single one of his stanzas keep yet alive a story of the capture
by the British of a fleet of Dutch India ships:--
“Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball,
And now their odors armed against them fly;
Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall,
And some by aromatic splinters die.”
There are three hundred other stanzas in the poem, of the same make and
rhythm, telling of fire, of plague, and of battles. I am not sure if
anybody reads it nowadays; but if you do--and it is not fatiguing--you
will find wonderful word-craft in it, which repeats the din and crash of
battle, and paints the smouldering rage and the blazing power of the
Great Fire of London in a way which certain boys, I well remember in old
school days, thought represented the grand climacteric of poetic diction.
_The London of Dryden._
But let us not forget where we are in our English story; it is London that
has been all aflame in that dreadful year of 1666. Thirteen thousand
houses have been destroyed, eighty odd churches, and some four hundred
acres of ground in the central part of the city have been burned over. The
fire had followed swiftly upon the devastating plague of the previous
year, which Dryden had gone into Wiltshire to avoid. It is doubtful,
indeed, if he came back soon enough to see the great blaze with his own
eyes; “chemical fire,” the poet calls it, and it licked up the poison of
the plague; but it did not lick up the leprosy of Charles’ court. There
was a demand for plays, and for plays of a bad sort; and Dryden met the
demand. Never was there an author more apt to divine what the public did
want, and more full of literary contrivances to meet it. Dryden knew all
the purveyors of this sort of intellectual repast, and all their methods,
and soon became a king among them; and to be a king among the playwrights
was to have a very large sovereignty in that time. Everybody talked of the
plays; all of Royalist faith went to the plays, if they had money; and
money was becoming more and more plentiful. There had been the set-back,
it is true, of the Great Fire; but English commerce was making enormous
strides in these days. There was a pathetic folding of the hands and
dreary forecastings directly after the disaster, as after all such
calamities. But straight upon this the city grew, with wider streets and
taller houses, and in only a very few years the waste ground was covered
again, and the new temple of St. Paul’s rising, under the guidance of Sir
Christopher Wren, into those grand proportions of cupola and dome, which,
in their smoked and sooty majesty, dominate the city of London to-day.
Houses of nobles and of rich merchants which stood near to Cornhill and
Lombard Street, and private gardens which had occupied areas
thereabout--now representing millions of pounds in value--were crowded
away westward by the new demands of commerce. In Dryden’s day there were
ducal houses looking upon Lincoln’s Inn Fields; and others, with pleasure
grounds about them, close upon Covent Garden Square. Americans go to that
neighborhood now, in early morning, to catch sight of the immense stores
of fruit and vegetables which are on show there upon market-days; and they
are well repaid for such visit; yet the houses are dingy, and a welter of
straw and mud and market _débris_ stretches to the doors; but the
stranger, picking his way through this, and through Russell Street to the
corner of Bow Street, will find, close by, the site of that famous Will’s
Coffee-house, where Dryden lorded it so many years, and whose figure
there--in the chimney-corner, with his pipe, laying down the law between
the whiffs, and conferring honors by offering a pinch from his
snuff-box--Scott has made familiar to the whole world.
It was an earlier sort of club-house, where the news in the _Gazette_ was
talked of, and the last battle--if there were a recent one--and the last
play, and the last scandal of the court. Its discussions and potations
made away with a good many nights, and a good many pipes and bottles, and
was not largely provocative of domesticity. But it does not appear that
the Lady Elizabeth--Dryden’s wife--ever made remonstrances on this score;
indeed, Mr. Green, the historian, would intimate that my lady had
distractions of her own, not altogether wise or worthy; but we prefer to
believe the best we can of her.
To this gathering-place at Covent Garden Etherege and Wycherley found
their way--all writing men, in fact; even the great Buckingham
perhaps--before his quarrel; and Dorset, fellow-member with Dryden, of the
Royal Society; maybe Butler too, when he found himself in London; and poor
Otway,[91] hoping to meet some one generous enough to pay his score for
him; and the young Congreve, proud in his earlier days to get a nod from
the great Dryden; and, prouder yet, when, at a later time, he was honored
by that tender and pathetic epistle from the Laureate:
“Already I am worn with cares and age,
And just abandoning the ungrateful stage;
But you, whom every muse and grace adorn,
Whom I foresee to better fortune born,
Be kind to my remains; and O defend,
Against your judgment, your departed friend!”
I said that he wrote plays; wrote them by the couple--by the dozen--by the
score possibly.
You do not know them; and I hope you never will know them to love them.
They have fallen away from literature--never acted, and rarely read. He
could not plot a story, and he had not the dramatic gift. One wonders how
a theatreful could have listened to their pomposity and inflation and
exaggerations. But they did, and they filled Dryden’s pockets. There were
scenic splendors, indeed, about many of them which delighted the pit, and
which the poet loved as accompaniments to the roll of his sonorous verse;
there were, too, fragments here and there, with epithet and
characterization that showed his mastership; and sometimes the most
graceful of lyrics budded out from the coarse groundwork of the play, as
fair in sound as they were foul in thought.
In private intercourse Dryden is represented to have been a man of
courteous speech, never low and ribald--as were many of the royal
favorites; and when he undertook playwriting to order, to meet the
profligate tastes of the court, he could not, like some lesser
playwrights, disguise double-meanings and vulgarities under a flimsy veil
of courtliness; but by his very sincerity he made all his lewdness rank,
and all his indelicacies brutal. This will, and should, I think, keep his
plays away from our reading-desks.
Dryden’s satires, written later, show a better and far stronger side of
his literary quality; and Buckingham, long after his lineaments shall have
faded from a mob of histories, will stand preserved as Zimri, in the
strong pickle of Dryden’s verse; you will have met the picture, perhaps
without knowing it, for the magnificent courtier, who wrote “The
Rehearsal:”
“A man so various that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind’s epitome:
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;
Was everything by starts, and nothing long,
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon;
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.”
A man who writes in that way about a peer of England was liable to write
of lesser men in a manner that would stir hot blood; and he did. Once upon
a time this great king at “Will’s” was waylaid and sorrily cudgelled;
which is an experience that--however it may come about--is not elevating
in its effects, nor does it increase our sense of a man’s dignity; for it
is an almost universal fact that the men most worthy of respect, in almost
any society, are the men who never do get quietly cudgelled.
_Later Poems and Purpose._
Far on in 1682, when our Dryden was waxing oldish, and when he had given
over play-going for somewhat more of church-going, he wrote, in the same
verse with his satires, and with the same ringing couplets of sound, a
defence of the moderate liberal churchmanship that does not yield to
ecclesiastic fetters, and that thinks widely. A little later, in 1687, he
writes in a more assured vein, assuming bold defence of Romanism--as it
existed in that day in England--to which faith he had become a convert.
This last is a curiously designed poem, showing how little he had the arts
of construction in hand; it is a long argument between a Hind and a
Panther, in the shades of a forest. Was ever ecclesiasticism so
recommended before? Yet there are brave and unforgetable lines in it:
instance the noble rhythm, and the noble burden of that passage
beginning--like a trumpet note--
“What weight of ancient witness can prevail,
If private reason hold the public scale?”
And again the fine tribute to “the Church:”
“Thus one, thus pure, behold her largely spread,
Like the fair ocean from her mother bed;
From East to West triumphantly she rides;
All shores are watered by her wealthy tides;
The Gospel-sound, diffused from pole to pole
Where winds can carry, and where waves can roll;
The self-same doctrine of the sacred page
Conveyed to every clime, in every age.”
I think Bishop Heber had a reverent and a stealthy look upon these lines
when he wrote a certain stanza of his “Greenland’s icy mountains.”
The enemies of Dryden did not fail to observe that between the dates of
the two professions of faith named, Charles II. had died, summoning a
Papist priest, at the very last, to give him a chance--and, it is feared,
a small one--of reconcilement with Heaven; furthermore, these enemies
remembered that the bigot James II. had come to the throne, full of Papist
zeal and of a poor hope to bring all England to a great somerset of faith.
Did Dryden undergo an innocent change? Maybe; may not be. Certainly
neither Lord Macaulay, nor Elkanah Settle, nor Saintsbury, nor you, nor I,
have the right to go behind the veil of privacy which in such matters is
every man’s privilege.
How odd it seems that this Papist convert of James II.’s time, and author
of so many plays that outranked Etherege in rankness, should have put the
_Veni, Creator_, of Charlemagne (if it be his) into such reverent and
trenchant English as carries it into so many of our hymnals.
“Creator Spirit, by whose aid
The world’s foundations first were laid,
Come, visit every humble mind;
Come, pour thy joys on humankind;
From sin and sorrow set us free,
And make thy temples worthy thee.”
Nor was this all of Dryden’s translating work. He roamed high and low
among all the treasures of the ancients. Theocritus gave his tangle of
sweet sounds to him, and Homer his hexameters; Juvenal and Horace and Ovid
were turned into his verse; and Dryden’s _Virgil_ is the only Virgil of
thousands of readers. He sought motive, too, in Boccaccio and Chaucer; and
within times the oldest of us can remember his “Flower and Leaf” and his
“Palamon and Arcite” were more read and known than the poems of like name
attributed to Chaucer. But in the newer and more popular renderings and
printings of the old English poet, Chaucer has come to his own again, and
rings out his tales with a lark-like melody that outgoes in richness and
charm all the happy paraphrases of Dryden.
A still more dangerous task our poet undertook in the days of his dramatic
work. I have in my library some half dozen of Dryden’s plays--yellowed
and tattered, and of the imprint of 1710 or thereabout--and among them is
one bearing this title, _The Tempest, originally written by William
Shakespeare, and altered and improved by John Dryden_; and the story of
Antony and Cleopatra underwent the same sort of improvement--dangerous
work for Dryden; dangerous for any of us. And yet this latter, under name
of “All for Love,” was one of Dryden’s greatest successes, and reckoned by
many dramatic critics of that day far superior to Shakespeare.
One more extract from this voluminous poet and we shall leave him; it was
written when he was well toward sixty, and when his dramatic experiences
were virtually ended; it is from an ode in memory of Mistress Killigrew, a
friend and a poetess. In the course of it he makes honest bewailment, into
which it would seem his whole heart entered:
“O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of Poesy?
Made prostitute and profligate the muse,
Debased to each obscene and impious use,
Whose harmony was first ordained above
For tongues of angels, and for hymns of love?”
And again, a verselet that is full of all his most characteristic manner:
“When in mid-air the golden trump shall sound,
To raise the nations under ground;
When in the Valley of Jehoshaphat,
The judging God shall close the book of Fate;
And there the last assizes keep,
For those who wake and those who sleep:
When rattling bones together fly,
From the four corners of the sky;
When sinews o’er the skeletons are spread,
Those clothed with flesh, and life inspires the dead;
The sacred poets first shall hear the sound,
And foremost from the tomb shall bound,
For they are covered with the lightest ground;
And straight, with inborn vigor, on the wing,
Like mounting larks, to the new morning sing.
Then thou, sweet Saint, before the quire shall go,
As Harbinger of Heaven, the way to show,
The way which thou so well hast learnt below!”
We have given much space to our talk about Dryden. Is it because we like
him so well? By no means. It is because he was the greatest master among
the literary craftsmen of his day; it is because he wrought in so many and
various forms, and always with a steady, unflinching capacity for toil,
which knew no shake or pause; it is because he had a marvellously keen
sense for all the symphonies of heroic language, and could always cheat
and charm the ear with his reverberant thunders; it is because he spanned
a great interval of English letters, covering it with various
accomplishment; criticising keenly, and accepted as a critic; judging
fairly, and accepted as a judge in the great court of language; teaching,
by his example, of uses and fashions of use, which were heeded by his
contemporaries, and which put younger men upon the track of better and
worthier achievement.
Again, it is because he, more than any other of his epoch, represented in
himself and in what he wrought, the drift and bent and actualities of the
time. There were changes of dynasties, and he put into language, for all
England, the lamentation over the old and the glorification of the new;
there were plagues and conflagrations and upbuildings of desolated
cities--and the fumes and the flames and the din of all these get speech
of him, and such color as put them in undying record upon the roll of
history; there were changes of faith, and vague out-reaches for some sure
ground of religious establishment--and his poems tell of the struggle,
and in his own personality represent the stress of a whole nation’s
doubts; there are battles raging round the coasts--and the echo of them,
in some shape of trumpet blare or shrill military resonance, seems never
to go out of his poems; dissoluteness rules in the court and in the city,
infecting all--and Dryden wallows with them through a score of his uncanny
dramas.
Put his poems together in the order of their composition, and without any
other historic data whatever, they would show the changes and quavers and
sudden enthusiasms and bestialities and doubts and growth of the National
Life. But they would most rarely show the noble impulses that kindle hope
and foretoken better things to come--rarely the elevating purpose that
commands our reverence.
No fictitious character of his is a live one to-day; you can hardly recall
one if you try.[92] No couplet or verselet of his is so freighted with a
serene or hopeful philosophy as to make our march the blither by reason of
it down the corridors of time. No blast of all his fanfaron of trumpets
sounds the opening of the gates upon any Delectable Mountains. A great,
clever, literary worker! I think that is all we can say of him. And when
you or I pass under his monument in the corner of Westminster Abbey, we
will stand bowed respectfully, but not with any such veneration, I think,
as we expect to carry to the tomb of Milton or of Chaucer; and if one
falls on Pope--what then? I think we might pause--waver; more polish
here--more power there--the humanities not radiant in either; and so we
might safely sidle away to warm ourselves before the cenotaph of
Goldsmith.
_John Locke._
Another man who grew up in these times in England, and who from his
study-window at Oxford (where he had been Lecturer on Rhetoric) saw the
Great Fire of London in the shape of a vast, yellow, sulphurous-looking
cloud, of portentous aspect, rolling toward the zenith, and covering half
the sky, was Mr. John Locke.[93]
We are too apt, I think, to dismiss this author from our thoughts as a man
full only of dreary metaphysic subtleties; and support the belief with the
story that our Jonathan Edwards read his treatise on the _Human
Understanding_ with great delight at the age of fourteen. Yet Locke,
although a man of the keenest and rarest intellect--which almost
etherialized his looks--was possessed of a wonderful deal of what he would
have called “hard, round-about sense;” indeed it would be quite possible
to fill a whole calendar with bits of his printed talk that would be as
pitpat and common-sensical as anything in _Poor Richard’s Almanac_.
Moreover, he could, on occasions, tell a neat and droll story, which would
set the “table in a roar.”
Some facts in the life of this great thinker and writer are worth our
remembering, not only by reason of the fame of his books, but because in
all those years whose turbulent rush and corrupting influences have shown
themselves in our pages, John Locke lived an upright, manly,
self-respecting life, though brought into intimate relations with many
most prominent at court. He was born in Western England, north of the
Mendip Hills; and after fourteen years of quiet country life, and kind
parental training, among the orchard slopes of Somersetshire, went to
Westminster School; was many years thereafter at Oxford; studied medicine;
met Lord Ashley (afterward the great Shaftesbury--first party-leader in
English parliamentary history), who was so taken by the pale, intellectual
face of the young Doctor that he carried him off to London, and domiciled
him in his great house upon the Strand. There Locke directed the studies
of Ashley’s son; and presently--such was my Lord’s confidence in him--was
solicited to find a wife for the young gentleman;[94] which he did, to the
great acceptance of all parties, by taking him off into Rutlandshire, and
introducing him to a pretty daughter of the Earl of Rutland. Fancy the
author of an _Essay Concerning the Human Understanding_ setting off in a
coach, with six long-tailed Flemish horses, for a four days’ journey into
the north of England--with a young scion of the Ashleys--upon such an
errand as that! Our doctors in metaphysics do not, I believe, engage in
similar service; yet I suppose nice observation would disclose great and
curious mental activities in the evolution of such schemes.
The philosopher must have known Dryden, both being early members of the
Royal Society; but I have a fancy that Locke was a man who did not--save
on rarest occasions--take a pipe and a mug at such a place as Will’s
Coffee-house. His tastes led him more to banquets at Exeter House. There
was foreign travel, also, in which he accomplished himself in continental
languages and socialities; he had offers of diplomatic preferment, but his
doubtful health (always making him what over-well people call a fussy man)
forbade acceptance; else we might have had in him another Sir William
Temple. Shaftesbury interested him in his scheme of new planting the
Carolina colony in America; and John Locke drew up rules for its political
guidance. Some of these sound very drolly now. Thus--no man was to be a
freeman of Carolina unless he acknowledged a God, and agreed that he was
to be publicly and solemnly worshipped. The members of one church were not
to molest or persecute those of another. Again, “no one shall be permitted
to plead before a court of justice for money or reward.” What a howling
desert this would make of most of our courts!
Again, he writes with great zest upon the subject of Education, and almost
with the warmth of that old Roger Ascham, whose maxims I cited in one of
our earlier talks:
“Till you can find a school wherein it is possible for the master to
look after the manners of his scholars, and can show as great
effects of his care of forming their minds to virtue, and their
carriage to good breeding, as of forming their tongues to the
learned languages, you must confess that you have a strange value
for words, to hazard your sons’ innocence and virtue for a little
Greek and Latin.”
And again:
“I know not why anyone should waste his time and beat his head about
the Latin grammar, who does not intend to be a critic, or make
speeches, and write despatches in it. If his use of it be only to
understand some books writ in it without a critical knowledge of the
tongue itself, reading alone will attain his end, without charging
his mind with the multiplied rules and intricacies of grammar.”…
“If there may be any reasons against children’s making Latin themes
at school, I have much more to say and of more weight against their
making verses--verses of any sort. For if he has no genius to
poetry, ’tis the most unreasonable thing in the world to torment a
child and waste his time about that which can never succeed: and if
he have a poetic vein--methinks the parents should labor to have it
stifled: for if he proves a successful rhymer, and get once the
reputation of a wit, I desire it may be considered what company and
places he is likely to spend his time in--nay, and his estate too.”
By which I am more than ever convinced that Locke did not sup often with
Dryden at “Will’s,” and that you will find no pleasant verselets--look as
hard as you may--on a single page of his discourse on the _Human
Understanding_.
When Charles grew suspicious of Shaftesbury, and the Earl was shorn of his
power, no little of the odium fell upon his _protégé_; and for a time
there was an enforced--or at least a very prudent--exile for Locke, at one
time in France and at another in Holland. It was on these absences that
his pen was busiest. In 1689 he returned to England in the trail of
William III.; came to new honors under that monarch; published his great
work, which had been simmering in his brain for ten years or more; made a
great fame at home and abroad, and wrote wisely on many topics. Meanwhile
his old enemy, the asthma, was afflicting him sorely. London smoke was a
torture to him; but when he went only so little distance away (twenty
miles northward) as the country home of his friends Sir Francis and Lady
Masham, a delightful calm came to him. He was given his own apartment
there; never did hosts more enjoy a guest; and never a guest enjoyed more
the immunities and kindnesses which Sir Francis and Lady bestowed upon
him. Twelve or fourteen years of idyllic life for the philosopher
followed, in the wooded alleys and upon the charming lawns of the old
manor-house of Oates, in the county of Essex; there were leisurely, coy
journeys to London; there were welcoming visits from old friends; there
was music indoors, and music--of the birds--without. Bachelors rarely come
to those quietudes and joys of a home-life which befell the old age of
Locke, and equipped all his latter days with such serenities as were a
foretaste of heaven.
He does not lie in Westminster Abbey: I think he would have rebelled among
the poets: he sleeps more quietly in the pretty church-yard of
High-Lavor, a little way off, northward, from the New Park of Epping
Forest.
_End of the King and Others._
The lives of these two men--Dryden and Locke--have brought us past the
whole reach of Charles II.’s reign. That ignoble monarch has met his fate
courageously; some days before the immediate end he knew it was coming,
and had kind words for those about him.
He died on a Friday,[95] and on the Sunday before had held great revel in
the famous gallery of Whitehall; next day came the warnings, and then the
blow--paralytic, or other such--which shrivelled his showy powers, and
brought his swarthy face to a whiteness and a death-like pallor that
shocked those gay people who belonged in the palace. Then came the
scourging with hot iron, and the administration of I know not what foul
drugs that belonged to the blind medication of that day--all in vain;
there were suspicions of poison; but the poison he died of was of his own
making, and he had been taking it ever since boyhood.
A Catholic priest came to him stealthily and made the last promises to him
he was ever to hear. To a courtier, who came again and again, he
apologized--showing his courtesy to the last. “I’m an awful time in
dying,” he said; and to somebody else--his brother, perhaps--“don’t let
poor Nell Gwynne starve;” and so died.
James, the successor, was not loved--scarce by anyone; bigoted, obstinate,
selfish, he ran quickly through the short race of which the histories will
tell you. Only three years of it, or thereabout, and then--_presto!_ like
the changing of the scenes at Drury Lane Theatre in one of the splendid
spectacles of the day--James scuds away, and Cousin William (with his wife
Mary, both of the blood royal of England) comes in, and sets up a fashion
of rule, and an assured Protestant succession of regal names which is not
ended yet.
And now, in closing this talk, I will summon into presence once again some
of the notable personages who have given intellectual flavor to the years
we have gone over, and will call the roll of a few new names among those
actors who are to take in swift succession the places of those who
disappear. At the date where we now are--1688--the date of the last
English Revolution (who, pray, can predict the next?), the date of John
Bunyan’s death, the date of Alexander Pope’s birth--excellent
remembrancers, these!--at this epoch, I say, of the incoming of William
and Mary, all those dramatic writers--of whom we made mention as having
put a little tangled fringe of splendor about the great broidery of
Shakespeare’s work--were gone. So was Herrick, with his sweet poems, and
his pigs and tankards; and Howell, and Wotton, and the saintly George
Herbert, and dear, good, old Izaak Walton--all comfortably dead and
buried. So were Andrew Marvell, and the author of _Hudibras_. Archbishop
Laud was gone long since to the scaffold, with the fullest acquiescence of
all New Englanders; Jeremy Taylor gone--if ever man had right of way
there--to heaven; Milton dead; Cowley dead; Waller dead.
Old, ear-cropped Prynne, of the _Histriomastix_, was still living--close
upon seventy--grim and gray, and as pugnacious as a bull-terrier. Among
others lingering upon the downhill side of life were Robert Boyle and that
John Evelyn, whose love of the fields and gardens and trees had put long
life in his blood and brain. Sir William Temple, too, had still some years
of elegant distinction to coquet with; our old friend of the Pepysian
journal was yet alert--his political ambitions active, his eye-sight
failing--never thinking, we may be sure, that his pot-luck of a _Diary_
would keep him more savory with us to-day than all his wigs and his
coaches, and his fine acquaintance, and his great store of bric-à-brac.
Isaac Newton was not fifty yet, but had somehow lost that elasticity and
searchingness of brain which had untwisted the sunbeams, and solved the
riddle of gravitation. Bishop Burnet, and that William Penn whose name
ought to hold place on any American file of England’s worthies, were in
the full vigor of middle age. Daniel De Foe was some eight and twenty, and
known only as a sharp trader, who had written a few pamphlets, and who was
enrolled in those soldier ranks which went to greet William III. on his
arrival at Torbay.
Matthew Prior was still younger, and had made no show of those graces and
that art which gave him later an ambassador’s place, and a tomb and
monument in the “Poet’s Corner” of the Abbey. Jonathan Swift, then scarce
twenty-one, is unheard of as yet, and is nursing quietly the power and the
bitterness with which, through two succeeding reigns, he is to write and
rave and rage.
Still more youthful are those two promising lads, Addison and Steele,
listening with their sharp young ears to the fine verses of Mr. Dryden,
and watching and waiting for the day when they, too, shall say somewhat to
be of record for ages after them. And so, with these bright young fellows
at the front, and the excellent gray-heads I have named at the rear, we
ring down the curtain upon our present entertainment with an “_Exeunt
omnes!_”