conjecture, yet very great absurdities do sometimes take almost as well on
as of the stage. Must "the _costume_ of our first parents, had there been
no other objection, have excluded the 'State of Innocence' from the
stage?" True, Sir Charles Sedley, and other "men of wit and fashion about
town," were not well received when exhibiting themselves naked on a
balcony overhanging a great thoroughfare; but then they were drunk, and
acted not only indecent but insulting, nay, threatening attitudes,
accompanied with abjurgations and blasphemies, which was going
injudiciously in advance of that age of refinement. Suppose Booth
perfectly sober in Adam, and Nell Gwynne up merely to the proper pitch of
vivacity in Eve, we do not see why the opera might not have had a run
during the reign of the Merry Monarch. The first sight we have of Adam is,
"as newly created, laid on a bed of moss and flowers, by a rock." He rises
as he begins to utter his earliest soliloquy; and we believe it is an
established rule, not to turn your back on--or in playhouse phrase--not to
rump your audience. In such a case; however, considerable latitude would
have been conceded by both sexes to our original; and what with shades and
shrubs, and, above all, the rock, an adroit actor could have had little
difficulty in accommodating to his posterity their progenitor. Of Eve our
first glimpse is among "trees cut out on each side, with several fruits
upon them; a fountain in the midst; at the far end the prospect
terminating in walks." Nelly might have worn her famous felt chapeau,
broad as a coach-wheel, as appropriately in that as in any other
character, and contrived to amble about with sufficient decorum for those
fastidious times. Besides, as custom soon reconciles people to the most
absurd dress, so would it probably, before long, reconcile them to no
dress at all. A full-bottomed wig in the mimic scene, on heroic
representative of a class of men, who, off the boards, had always worn,
not only their own hair, but a crop, was _a sine qua non_ condition of
historic success. _In puris naturalibus_ would have been but to fall back
on nature. Why, only couple of years ago, half a million of our countrymen
and countrywomen of all ages, flocked by instalments, in a single season,
to look at our First Parents fresh from the hands of a French painter,
naked as you were born. Such is the power of Names. No imagination--not
the least in the world--had that painter; no sense--not the least in the
world--of the beautiful or of the sublime in the human figure. But the
population, urban and rural alike, were unhappy till they had had a sight
of Adam and Eve in Paradise. We cheerfully acknowledge that Adam was a
very good-looking young fellow--bang up to the mark, six feet without his
shoes-close upon thirteen stone. Had he been advertised as Major Adam of
the Scots Greys, the brevet would have exhibited himself on that bank to
empty benches. In like manner, with the fairest of her daughters, Eve. As
Pope says,
"Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see,
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be."
Pious old gentlemen, however, pronounced her perfect, merely because they
gazed on the image of the mother of mankind. Painted they both were in
oils. But from what we saw--for we too were carried away by the general
enthusiasm--we are justified in inferring that, under prudent management,
our First Parents might be successfully got up alive during the summer
season at our Adelphi.
We believe that "The State of Innocence" _was_ written for the stage. But
the playwright did not intend that Adam and Eve should be stark-naked in
an acted opera. Strange to say, there is not a word in it about their
naked majesty or innocence. Dryden, by his idea of an opera, was forced to
depart from nature and Milton. Eve's dream, so characteristically narrated
by her to Adam in the poem, is shadowed out by a vision passing before her
asleep, in the opera. The stage direction gives:--"A vision, where a tree
rises loaden with fruit; spirits rise with it, and draw a canopy out of
the tree; and the spirits dance about the tree in deformed shapes; after
the dance an angel enters, _with a woman_, HABITED LIKE EVE." That is
decisive.
But what of the opera? In the preface, Dryden says "I cannot, without
injury to the deceased author of 'Paradise Lost,' but acknowledge, that
the poem has received _its entire foundation, part of the design, and many
of the ornaments from him_. What I have borrowed will be so easily
discerned from my mean productions, that I shall not need to point the
reader to the places." That avowal may be thought to set aside all
criticism--but not so--for his illustrious editor says, "the probable
motive therefore of this alteration was the wish, so common to genius, to
exert itself upon a subject on which another had already attained
brilliant success; or, as Dryden has termed a similar attempt, the desire
to shoot in the bow of Ulysses." And he adds, that because Milton intended
at first to model his poem into a dramatic form, "Dryden, conscious of his
own powers, and enthusiastically admiring those of Milton, was induced to
make an experiment on the forsaken plan of the blind bard, which, with his
usual rapidity of conception and execution, he completed in the short
space of one month." Wide-encroaching Walter would see nothing far wrong
in Glorious John. It is not "the forsaken plan of the blind bard," nor any
thing in the least like it. They are opposite as any things that "own
antipathy in nature." But this is all mere nonsense. The opera is
disgraceful to Dryden. It proves that he had no understanding of the
"Paradise Lost."
"Ay, you may _tag_ my verses, if you will." But had Milton lived to hear
their taggery, wrathful fire would have been in his eyes.
The opera opens, as we saw, in chaos, the scene sinking into hell, and we
have Lucifer "raising himself on the lake." His exclamatory speech, of
some sixteen lines, on the lake is versified, not in Dryden's best manner,
from that most sublime one of Satan on reaching with Beelzebub the burning
marle, with some additions from Satan's first address to that angel, while
yet they were lying side by side on the fiery flood. To those who have the
First Book of the "Paradise Lost" by heart, this sort of transposition
patchwork cannot but be most offensive. As if to give an air of
originality, where everything is borrowed and blurred, Asmoday in Milton
one of the lowest, is made one of the highest, and is substituted for
Beelzebub--and to him Lucifer most unarchangel-like calls "Ho! Asmoday,
awake!"
Asmoday answers in a short speech, very ill reported, formerly delivered
by Milton's Beelzebub, concluding with a bit absolutely stolen from his
Satan himself! Lucifer then observes to Asmoday, that "our troops, _like
scattered leaves in autumn_, lie!" A poor plagiarism indeed from the
famous description from Milton's own lips, and from Lucifer's incredibly
absurd! Lucifer then announces--
"With wings expanded wide, ourselves we'll rear,
And fly incumbent on the dusky air.
Hell! thy new lord receive!
Heaven cannot envy me an empire here."
(_Both fly to dry land._)
You remember the lines in Milton--
"Then with expanded wings he steers his flight,
Aloft incumbent on the dusky air"--
and the other sublimities of the description--all here destroyed by the
monstrous absurdity of making Lucifer paint his own projected flight. He
then asks "the rest of the devils," "Are you on _beds of down_?" On beds
of down our grandsires lay--but think of eider-ducks in heaven. Moloch
says his say from the Miltonic Satan, with a slight new reading.
"Better to _rule_ in hell than serve in heaven."
And Beelzebub approves the dictum.
"Moloch, in that all are resolved, like thee.
The means are unprepared; but 'tis not fit,
Our dark divan in public view should sit;
Or what we plot against the Thunderer,
_The ignoble_ CROWD OF VULGAR DEVILS _hear_!"
Lucifer adopts this disdainful suggestion, and, great magician as he is,
exclaims--
"A golden palace let be raised on high,
To imitate--no, to outshine the sky!
All mines are ours, and gold above the rest;
Let this be done, and _quick as 'twas exprest_."
"A palace rises, where sit as in council, LUCIFER, Asmoday, Moloch,
Belial, Beelzebub, and SATAN." Who _he_ may be, deuce take us if we can
tell. Up to the very moment of his making his appearance, we in our simple
faith had believed Lucifer and Satan to be one devil--nay, the devil. We
were taken quite aback by this unexplained phenomenon of Satan's acting
the part of his own tail. In this capacity he makes but one speech--but it
is the speech of the evening. One seldom hears such eloquence. Moloch
having proposed battle, the mysterious stranger rises to second the
motion.
"_Satan._ I agree
With this brave vote; and if in Hell there be
_Ten more such spirits_, heaven is our own again.
We venture nothing, and may all obtain.
Yet, who can hope but well, since our success
Makes foes secure, and makes our dangers less?
_Seraph and Cherub, careless of their charge
And wanton, in full ease now live at large;
Unguarded leave the passes of the sky,
And all dissolved in hallelujahs lie._"
In the "grand consult," as recorded by Milton, Beelzebub, after proposing
the "perilous attempt," asks,
"But, first, whom we shall send
In search of this new world? Whom shall we find
Sufficient? who shall tempt with wandering feet
The dark, unbottom'd, infinite abyss,
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way, or spread his aery flight,
Upborne with indefatigable wings
Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive
The happy isle?"
And Satan is the self-chosen missionary of the religion of Hell. In Dryden
Asmoday suggests the enterprise, and
"_Moloch._ This glorious enterprise--(_rising up._)
_Lucifer._ Rash angel, stay. (_Rising, and laying his sceptre on
Moloch's head._)
That palm is mine, which none shall take away.
_Hot braves like thee may fight_, but know not well
To manage this, the last great stake of hell."
The council comes to a close--and Lucifer promises to be with them again,
"Before yon brimstone lake thrice ebb and flow."
Tides in the Mediterranean! a touch beyond Milton.
"Here, while the chiefs sit in the palace, may be expressed the sports of
the devils, as flights and dancing in grotesque figures; and a song,
expressing the change of their condition, what they enjoyed before, and
how they fell bravely in battle, having deserved victory by their valour,
and what they would have done if they had conquered."
What had Dryden purposed to achieve? Out of two books of a great epic, to
edify one act of an opera. To invention of situation, character, or
passion, he aspires not; all he had to do--since he must needs meddle--was
to select, compress, and abridge, with some judgment and feeling, and to
give the result--unhappy at the best--in his own vigorous verse and
dearly-beloved rhyme. But beneath the majesty and imagination of Milton,
his genius, strong as it was, broke down, and absolutely sunk beneath the
level of that of common men. Yet not in awe, nor in reverence of a
superior power; for there is no trepidation of spirit; on the contrary,
with cool self-assurance he rants his way through the fiery gloom of hell.
By his hands shorn of their beams, the fallen angels are, one and all,
poor devils indeed. The Son of the Morning is seedy, and has lost all
authority over the swell mob, which he vainly essays to recover by
cracking Moloch's organ with his sceptre. Yet Sir Walter, blinded by his
generous admiration of Dryden's great endowments, scruples not to say that
"the scene of the consultation in Pandemonium, and of the soliloquy of
Satan (not Satan, it seems, but Lucifer) on his arrival in the
newly-created universe, would possess great merit did they not
unfortunately remind us of the majestic simplicity of Milton." Oh, heavens
and earth! the veritable Satan's soliloquy on Niphate's top!
"O thou, that with surpassing glory crown'd,
Look'st from thy sole dominion like the God
Of this new world; at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminish'd heads, to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, _and add thy name_,
O SUN! to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,
Warring in heaven against heaven's matchless king!"
And so on for nearly a hundred lines, in many a changeful strain,
arch-angelical all, of heaven-remembering passion, while ever, as thus he
spoke,
"Each passion dimm'd his face,
Thrice changed with pale, ire, envy, and despair;
Which marr'd his borrow'd visage, and betray'd
Him counterfeit, if any eye beheld;
For heavenly minds, from such distempers foul
Are ever clear."
The soliloquy of Dryden's Lucifer consists of twenty lines, taken almost
at hap-hazard from that of Milton's, jumbled together without
consideration, and mangled from the most multitudinous blank verse ever
written, into rhymes much beneath the average merit of one who, at times,
could indeed command "the long-majestic march and energy divine."
Adam and Eve fare little better than the angels under his reforming
fingers. Milton, you remember, makes Adam tell Raphael the story of his
birth, in language charmful to affable arch-angel's ear, albeit tuned to
harmonies in heaven. Dryden burlesques that revelation into the following
soliloquy, supposed to have been _the first words spoken by human lips_.
Adam at once opens his mouth in the style of the age of refinement. After
the fall, how degenerate kept growing on our father tongue, till it
reached its acme in the barbarous lingo of Shakspeare! And how suited,
here, the thought to the speech! How natural the natural theology of both!
He anticipates Descartes.
"_Adam._ What am I? or from whence? _For that I am_ (rising)
_I know, because I think_; but whence I come,
Or how this frame of mine began to be,
What other being can disclose to me?
I move, and see, and speak, discourse, and know;
Though now I am, I was not always so.
Then that from which I was, must be before,
Whom, as my spring of being, I adore.
How full of ornament is all I view,
In all its parts! and seems as beautiful as new:
O goodly order'd earth! O Power Divine!
Of thee I am, and what I am is thine."
A day or two after, "a cloud descends with six angels in it, and when it
is near the ground breaks, and, on each side, discovers six more." Raphael
and Gabriel, sent to admonish and warn, discourse with Adam, the ten
others standing at a distance. The conversation instantly assumes, and
throughout sustains, an intensely controversial character, and Raphael and
Gabriel, though two to one, and moreover angel _versus_ man, are hard put
to it on predestination and free-will. Adam is equipped with all the
weapons of the schools, and uses them defensively, and most offensively,
with all the dexterity of a veteran gladiator. But our disgust soon
ceases, along with our deception; and we but see and hear John Dryden
puzzling a brace of would-be wits at Wills's. The whole reads like a so-so
bit of the _Religio Laici_. It ends thus:--
"_Adam._ Hard state of life! since heaven foreknows my will,
Why am I not tied up from doing ill?
Why am I trusted with myself at large,
When he's more able to sustain the charge?
Since angels fell, whose strength was more than mine,
'Twould then more grace my frailty to confine.
Foreknowing the success, to leave me free,
Excuses him, and yet supports not me!"
_This_ from Adam yet sinless in Paradise!
The loves of Adam and Eve are not perhaps absolutely coarse--at least not
so for Dryden--but they are of the earth earthy, and the earth is not of
the mould of Eden. Aiblins--not coarse, but verily coquettish, and
something more, is Eve. And she is too silly.
"From each tree
The feather'd kinds peep down to look on me;
And beasts with upcast eyes forsake their shade,
And gaze as if I were to be obey'd.
Sure I am somewhat which they wish to be,
And cannot. _I myself am proud of me._"
A day or two after their marriage, Eve gives Adam a long description of
her first emotions experienced in the nuptial bower. More warmly coloured
than in her simplicity she seems to be aware of; and Adam, pleased with
her innocent flattery, treats her with an Epithalamium.
"When to my arms thou brought'st thy virgin love,
Fair angels sang our bridal hymn above:
_The Eternal, nodding, shook the firmament!_
And conscious nature gave her glad consent.
Roses unbid, and every fragrant flower
Flew from their stalks to strew thy nuptial bower:
The furr'd and feather'd kinds the triumph did pursue,
And fishes leap'd above the streams the passing pomp to view."
Hats off--bravo--bravo--hurra--hurra!--Of such stuff is made, in the
"State of Innocence," Dryden's implicit criticism on the _Paradise Lost_
of Milton.
Peace be with his shade! and its forgiveness with us. It is dangerous to
unite the functions of judge and executioner. The imperturbable bosom of
the seated judge calmly gives forth the award of everlasting Justice, and
the mandate for the punishment that must expiate or appease her violated
majesty. But the judge who is obliged to turn lictor, and must step down
from the tribunal to take his criminal farther in hand, undoubtedly runs a
risk, when he feels his hand in, of being carried too far by his excited
zeal. After all, we have stayed ours. And now, having discharged a
principal part of our office, what remains, but that we turn round, heal
with our right hand what our left has inflicted, and lift up Glorious John
to the skies? And lift him up we will; and with good reason; for we are
far indeed from being done with this first era of deliberate and formal
criticism in English literature. Extol him to the clouds and to the stars
we will, but not now; for lo! where another great name beckons!
The close of the seventeenth century for ever shut the eyes of John Dryden
upon the clouded and fluctuating daylight of our sublunary world. It may
have been, in the same year, that a solitary boy, then twelve years old,
wrote five stanzas which any man might have been glad to have written--and
which you have by heart--an "Ode to Solitude"--conspicuous in the annals
of English poetry as the dawn-gleam of a new sun that was presently to
arise, and to fill the region that Dryden had left.
A feeble frame has dedicated many a student. This, with other causes about
this time, took the boy, ALEXANDER POPE, from schools where he learned
little, to commit him, under the guardian more than guiding love of
indulgent parents, to his own management of his own studies. And study he
did--instinctively, eagerly, ramblingly through books of sundry
kinds--helping himself as he could to their languages--devouring more than
he digested--wedding himself to the high and gracious muses--seeking for,
and finding, his own extraordinary powers--and diminishing the small
quantity of delicate health which nature had put in his keeping. He
resigned himself to die, and was dying, when a strong interposition, among
other sanatary measures, transferred him from the back of Pegasus to that
of an earth-born horse.
Pope had a gentleness of spirit, which showed itself in his filial offices
to his father and mother--to her the most, ill the prolonged wearing out
of a beloved life. It appears in kindly relations to his friends, in
charities, in the scheme of his life--contentedness in a bounded, quiet
existence, a seclusion among books, and trees, and flowers. His life
flowed on peaceably and gently, like the noble river upon which his modest
dwelling looked. Ill health, as we said, often dedicates a student. The
constitutional feebleness from which he suffered, might doubly favour his
mind; as often the more delicate frame harbours the greater spirit; and as
inaptitude for active and rough sports, throws the solitary boy upon the
companionship of books, and upon the energies, avocations, and pleasures
of his own intelligence and fancy. The little poem of his boyhood, and the
first of his manhood, prophesy his tenor of life, and his literary career.
A commanding power, a predominant star in English literature--you might
say that the last century belonged to him. Dryden reigned over his
contemporaries. Pope, succeeding, took dominion over his own time and the
following. The pupil of Dryden, and gratefully proud to proclaim the
greatness of his master, and to own all obligations, he moulded himself
nevertheless upon a type in his own mind. In the school of Dryden he is an
original master. Dryden is, properly speaking, without imitators. His
manner proceeds from his own genius, and baffles transcribers. But Pope
completed an art which could be learned, and he left a world full of
copyists.
A remarkable feature is the early acknowledgment of Pope by his
contemporaries. At sixteen he is a poet for the world by his PASTORALS,
and at that age he has a literary adviser in Walsh and a literary patron
in Trumbull. He does not seem to court. He is courted. He is the intimate
friend, we do not know how soon, of scholars and polite writers, of men
and women high in birth, in education, in station. Scarce twenty, by his
"ESSAY ON CRITICISM" he assumes a chair in the school of the Muses. At
five-and-twenty, he is an acknowledged dictator of polite letters. So
early, rapid, untroubled an ascension to fame, it would require some
research to find a parallel to. Our literature has it not. And this
acknowledgment, gratulation, triumph, which friends and circles, and the
confined literary world of that day in this country could furnish, a whole
age, and a whole country, and a whole world, the extended republic of
letters, confirm.
In the judgment of England, in the eighteenth century, the reputation of
Pope may be called the most dazzling in English literature. It was a
nearer sun than Dryden, Milton, Shakspeare; as for Spenser and Chaucer,
they were little better than fixed stars.
Great revolutions in the state of the heavens and of astronomical science
have ensued. To say nothing of new luminaries that have come into birth,
from the bosom of "chaos and unoriginal night," either we have wheeled
round upon Shakspeare, or he upon us, in a surprising manner; the orb of
Milton enlarges day by day; cheerily we draw large accessions of the
gentlest light on Spenser; and old Father Geoffrey and we are sensibly
approximating.
We have taken Pope's counsel. We have with some good-will reverted to
Nature, and so we come nearer to the poets of Nature. There may have been
other causes at work. The change has involved more than was just a
depreciation of Pope himself: as if he were an accomplished artist in a
limited sphere of art, and no poet. We dissent _toto corde et toto
coelo_. He was a spirit, muse-born, a hero of half celestial extraction,
and so by all rule a demigod.
His age confined him. A poet is not independent of his age. He may ride on
the van of the tide--no more. And we see that the greatest poets are but
the most entire expression of the age, taken at the best. How shall it be
otherwise? Their age is mother and nurse to them. And what air does a
poet respire, but the circulating, fanning, living, breeze of sympathy? He
more than all beings receives into his soul the souls of other men. So he
thrives and grows; and shall he not be a partaker in his age?
In an age thus to be described, that it refines instead of creating, and
that, in particular, it imposes the refinement elaborated by social, and
indeed aristocratical manners, upon genius, which should only refine
itself by tenderness and sanctity, and by love dwelling evermore in the
inextinguishable paradise of the beautiful--he who was fitted to his age
by much of his mind, by his wit, by fancy given more fully than
imagination, by inclination to the _limae labor_, by the susceptibility of
polish, by a reasonableness of understanding, by his perception of
manners, even by the delicacy of his habits--he, ALEXANDER POPE,
nevertheless, desired the greatnesses of poetry. At fourteen, he tries his
hand in practice on the lofty Statius--at five-and-twenty, upon the
sublime Homer. Judge of his poetical heart by his Preface to Shakspeare,
by his translation of Homer, preface and all. What was the translation of
Homer? Of all works, not creative, the one of most aspiring ambition, even
more than that of Pindar or AEschylus. The young poet who has launched on
the air the light self-buoyed, gracefully-floating Rape of the Lock, who
has dipped his pen in the pathos of love and religion for Eloisa, longs to
put in use the powers that kindle and struggle within him. He will do
something of greater design in weightier literature; he will, so as a poet
may, stir, melt, strengthen, instruct, exalt, and amplify the mind of his
country; and he makes the greatest of poets, the father of all
poetry--ENGLISH. He pledges himself, before his country, to the task, and
then trembles at the difficulties and magnitude of his undertaking, and
then sits down to it, and then delivers it accomplished.
Did Homer already speak English, through the organ of Chapman? If he did,
it was not English for England; least of all, for the England of Pope's
day. Fiery and eloquent, and creative as it is, Chapman's _Homer_ is hard
reading now, and somewhat rare. _Then_, the book was, for the general
capacity, precisely the same thing as if it were not. And Pope, no
grudging bestower of merited honours, awards generous praise to his
irregularly-great predecessor, amply acknowledging, with one word, in him
both native power and effectual sympathy with their unparagoned original.