_Lucifer_: Is this the seat our conqueror has given?
And this the climate we must change for Heaven?
These regions and this realm my wars have got;
This mournful empire is the loser's lot:
In liquid burnings, or on dry to dwell,
Is all the sad variety of hell.
It is an early work; it is on the whole a feeble work; it is not
deserving of sustained comparison with "Paradise Lost." But "all the sad
variety of hell"! Dryden is already stirring; he has assimilated what he
could from Milton; and he has shown himself capable of producing as
splendid verse.
The capacity for assimilation, and the consequent extent of range, are
conspicuous qualities of Dryden. He advanced and exhibited his variety
by constant translation; and his translations of Horace, of Ovid, of
Lucretius, are admirable. His gravest defects are supposed to be
displayed in his dramas, but if these were more read they might be more
praised. From the point of view of either the Elizabethan or the French
drama they are obviously inferior; but the charge of inferiority loses
part of its force if we admit that Dryden was not quite trying to
compete with either, but was pursuing a direction of his own. He created
no character; and although his arrangements of plot manifest exceptional
ingenuity, it is the pure magnificence of diction, of poetic diction,
that keeps his plays alive:--
How I loved
Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours,
That danced away with down upon your feet,
As all your business were to count my passion.
One day passed by, and nothing saw but love;--
Another came, and still 'twas only love:
The suns were wearied out with looking on,
And I untired with loving.
I saw you every day and all the day;
And every day was still but as the first:
So eager was I still to see you more . . .
While within your arms I lay,
The world fell mould'ring from my hands each hour.
Such language is pure Dryden: it sounds, in Mr. van Doren's phrase,
"like a gong." _All for Love_, from which the lines are taken, is
Dryden's best play, and this is perhaps the highest reach. In general,
he is best in his plays when dealing with situations which do not demand
great emotional concentration; when his situation is more trivial, and
he can practise his art of making the small great. The back-talk between
the Emperor and his Empress Nourmahal, in _Aurungzebe_ is admirable
purple comedy:--
_Emperor_: Such virtue is the plague of human life:
A virtuous woman, but a cursed wife.
In vain of pompous chastity y'are proud:
Virtue's adultery of the tongue, when loud.
I, with less pain, a prostitute could bear,
Than the shrill sound of virtue, virtue hear.
In unchaste wives--
There's yet a kind of recompensing ease:
Vice keeps 'em humble, gives 'em care to please:
But against clamourous virtue, what defence?
It stops our mouths, and gives your noise pretence. . .
What can be sweeter than our native home?
Thither for ease, and soft repose, we come;
Home is the sacred refuge of our life:
Secure from all approaches but a wife.
If thence we fly, the cause admits no doubt:
None but an inmate foe could force us out.
Clamours, our privacies uneasy make:
Birds leave their nests disturbed, and beasts their haunts
forsake.
But drama is a mixed form; pure magnificence will not carry it through.
The poet who attempts to achieve a play by the single force of the word
provokes comparison, however strictly he confine himself to his
capacity, with poets of other gifts. Corneille and Racine do not attain
their triumphs by magnificence of this sort; they have concentration
also, and, in the midst of their phrases, an undisturbed attention to
the human soul as they knew it.
Nor is Dryden unchallenged in his supreme ability to make the
ridiculous, or the trivial, great.
Avez-vous observé que maints cercueils de vieilles
Sont presque aussi petits que celui d'un enfant?
Those lines are the work of a man whose verse is as magnificent as
Dryden's, and who could see profounder possibilities in wit, and in
violently joined images, than ever were in Dryden's mind. For Dryden,
with all his intellect, had a commonplace mind. His powers were, we
believe, wider, but no greater, than Milton's; he was confined by
boundaries as impassable, though less strait. He bears a curious
antithetical resemblance to Swinburne. Swinburne was also a master of
words, but Swinburne's words are all suggestions and no denotation; if
they suggest nothing, it is because they suggest too much. Dryden's
words, on the other hand, are precise, they state immensely, but their
suggestiveness is almost nothing.
That short dark passage to a future state;
That melancholy riddle of a breath,
That something, or that nothing, after death.
is a riddle, but not melancholy enough, in Dryden's splendid verse. The
question, which has certainly been waiting, may justly be asked:
whether, without this which Dryden lacks, verse can be poetry? What is
man to decide what poetry is? Dryden's use of language is not, like that
of Swinburne, weakening and demoralizing. Let us take as a final test
his elegy upon Oldham, which deserves not to be mutilated:--
Farewell, too little and too lately known,
Whom I began to think and call my own;
For sure our souls were near allied, and thine
Cast in the same poetic mould with mine.
One common note on either lyre did strike,
And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike.
To the same goal did both our studies drive;
The last set out the soonest did arrive.
Thus Nisus fell upon the slippery place,
Whilst his young friend performed and won the race.
O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might (what nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue.
But satire needs not those, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
A noble error, and but seldom made,
When poets are by too much force betrayed.
Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime,
Still showed a quickness; and maturing time
But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme.
Once more, hail, and farewell; farewell, thou young,
But ah! too short, Marcellus of our tongue!
Thy brows with ivy and with laurels bound;
But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around.
From the perfection of such an elegy we cannot detract; the lack of
nebula is compensated by the satisfying completeness of the statement.
Dryden lacked what his master Jonson possessed, a large and unique view
of life; he lacked insight, he lacked profundity. But where Dryden fails
to satisfy, the nineteenth-century does not satisfy us either; and where
that century has condemned him, it is itself condemned. In the next
revolution of taste it is possible that poets may turn to the study of
Dryden. He remains one of those who have set standards for English verse
which, it is desperate to ignore.
[Footnote 1: "John Dryden," by Mark van Doren (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Howe).]
II. THE METAPHYSICAL
POETS
By collecting these poems[2] from the work of a generation more often
named than read, and more often read than profitably studied, Professor
Grierson has rendered a service of some importance. Certainly the reader
will meet with many poems already preserved in other anthologies, at the
same time that he discovers poems such as those of Aurelian Townshend or
Lord Herbert of Cherbury here included. But the function of such an
anthology as this is neither that of Professor Saintsbury's admirable
edition of Caroline poets nor that of the "Oxford Book of English
Verse." Mr. Grierson's book is in itself a piece of criticism, and a
provocation of criticism; and we think that he was right in including so
many poems of Donne, elsewhere (though not in many editions) accessible,
as documents in the case of "metaphysical poetry." The phrase has long
done duty as a term of abuse, or as the label of a quaint and pleasant
taste. The question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed
a school (in our own time we should say a "movement"), and how far this
so-called school or movement is a digression from the main current.
Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but
difficult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses.
The poetry of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes
nearer than any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan, its feeling
often very close to that of Chapman. The "courtly" poetry is derivative
from Jonson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin; it expires in the
next century with the sentiment and witticism of Prior. There is finally
the devotional verse of Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after
by Christina Rossetti and Francis Thompson); Crashaw, sometimes more
profound and less sectarian than the others, has a quality which returns
through the Elizabethan period to the early Italians. It is difficult to
find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is
common to all the poets and at the same time important enough as an
element of style to isolate these poets as a group. Donne, and often
Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically
"metaphysical"; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a
figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it.
Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a
chess-board through long stanzas ("To Destiny"), and Donne, with more
grace, in "A Valediction," the comparison of two lovers to a pair of
compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the
content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought
which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.
On a round ball
A workeman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, _All_,
So doth each teare,
Which thee doth weare,
A globe, yea world by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.
Here we find at least two connexions which are not implicit in the first
figure, but are forced upon it by the poet: from the geographer's globe
to the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, some of
Donne's most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief
words and sudden contrasts--
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of
associations of "bright hair" and of "bone." This telescoping of images
and multiplied association is characteristic of the phrase of some of
the dramatists of the period which Donne knew: not to mention
Shakespeare, it is frequent in Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur, and is
one of the sources of the vitality of their language.
Johnson, who employed the term "metaphysical poets," apparently having
Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind, remarks of them that "the
most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together." The force of
this impeachment lies in the failure of the conjunction, the fact that
often the ideas are yoked but not united; and if we are to judge of
styles of poetry by their abuse, enough examples may be found in
Cleveland to justify Johnson's condemnation. But a degree of
heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the
poet's mind is omnipresent in poetry. We need not select for
illustration such a line as--
Notre âme est un trois-mâts cherchant son Icarie;
we may find it in some of the best lines of Johnson himself ("The
Vanity of Human Wishes"):--
His fate was destined to a barren strand,
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;
He left a name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral, or adorn a tale,
where the effect is due to a contrast of ideas, different in degree but
the same in principle, as that which Johnson mildly reprehended. And in
one of the finest poems of the age (a poem which could not have been
written in any other age), the "Exequy" of Bishop King, the extended
comparison is used with perfect success: the idea and the simile become
one, in the passage in which the Bishop illustrates his impatience to
see his dead wife, under the figure of a journey:--
Stay for me there; I will not faile
To meet thee in that hollow Vale.
And think not much of my delay;
I am already on the way,
And follow thee with all the speed
Desire can make, or sorrows breed.
Each minute is a short degree,
And ev'ry houre a step towards thee.
At night when I betake to rest,
Next morn I rise nearer my West
Of life, almost by eight houres sail,
Than when sleep breath'd his drowsy gale. . . .
But heark! My Pulse, like a soft Drum
Beats my approach, tells _Thee_ I come;
And slow howere my marches be,
I shall at last sit down by _Thee._
(In the last few lines there is that effect of terror which is several
times attained by one of Bishop King's admirers, Edgar Poe.) Again, we
may justly take these quatrains from Lord Herbert's Ode, stanzas which
would, we think, be immediately pronounced to be of the metaphysical
school:--
So when from hence we shall be gone,
And be no more, nor you, nor I,
As one another's mystery,
Each shall be both, yet both but one.
This said, in her up-lifted face,
Her eyes, which did that beauty crown,
Were like two starrs, that having faln down,
Look up again to find their place:
While such a moveless silent peace
Did seize on their becalmed sense,
One would have thought some influence
Their ravished spirits did possess.
There is nothing in these lines (with the possible exception of the
stars, a simile not at once grasped, but lovely and justified) which
fits Johnson's general observations on the metaphysical poets in his
essay on Cowley. A good deal resides in the richness of association
which is at the same time borrowed from and given to the word
"becalmed"; but the meaning is clear, the language simple and elegant.
It is to be observed that the language of these poets is as a rule
simple and pure; in the verse of George Herbert this simplicity is
carried as far as it can go--a simplicity emulated without success by
numerous modern poets. The _structure_ of the sentences, on the other
hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice; it is a
fidelity to thought and feeling. The effect, at its best, is far less
artificial than that of an ode by Gray. And as this fidelity induces
variety of thought and feeling, so it induces variety of music. We doubt
whether, in the eighteenth century, could be found two poems in
nominally the same metre, so dissimilar as Marvell's "Coy Mistress" and
Crashaw's "Saint Teresa"; the one producing an effect of great speed by
the use of short syllables, and the other an ecclesiastical solemnity by
the use of long ones:--
Love, thou art absolute sole lord
Of life and death.
If so shrewd and sensitive (though so limited) a critic as Johnson
failed to define metaphysical poetry by its faults, it is worth while to
inquire whether we may not have more success by adopting the opposite
method: by assuming that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the
Revolution) were the direct and normal development of the precedent age;
and, without prejudicing their case by the adjective "metaphysical,"
consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable,
which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared.
Johnson has hit, perhaps by accident, on one of their peculiarities,
when he observes that "their attempts were always analytic"; he would
not agree that, after the dissociation, they put the material together
again in a new unity.
It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and early
Jacobean poets expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is
not found in any of the prose, good as it often is. If we except
Marlowe, a man of prodigious intelligence, these dramatists were
directly or indirectly (it is at least a tenable theory) affected by
Montaigne. Even if we except also Jonson and Chapman, these two were
notably erudite, and were notably men who incorporated their erudition
into their sensibility: their mode of feeling was directly and freshly
altered by their reading and thought. In Chapman especially there is a
direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into
feeling, which is exactly what we find in Donne:--
in this one thing, all the discipline
Of manners and of manhood is contained;
A man to join himself with th' Universe
In his main sway, and make in all things fit
One with that All, and go on, round as it;
Not plucking from the whole his wretched part,
And into straits, or into nought revert,
Wishing the complete Universe might be
Subject to such a rag of it as he;
But to consider great Necessity.