The Age of Dryden Part 3

Thou sweet beguiler of my lonely hours, Which thus glide unperceiv'd, with silent course: Thou gentle spell, which undisturb'd dost keep My breast, and charm intruding care asleep: They say thou'rt poor, and un-endow'd, what tho'?

For thee, I this vain, worthless world forego: Let wealth and honour be for fortune's slaves, The alms of fools, and prize of crafty knaves: To me thou art, whate'er th'ambitious crave, And all that greedy misers want or have.

In youth or age, in travel or at home; Here, or in town, at London, or at Rome; Rich, or a beggar, free, or in the Fleet, What'er my fate is, 'tis my fate to write."'

Oldham's talent, depending upon masculine sense and vigour of expression rather than upon the more ethereal graces of poetry, was of the kind to expand and mellow by age and practice. Had he lived longer he would undoubtedly have left a name conspicuous in English literature. As it is, he can only be regarded as a bright satellite revolving at a respectful distance around the all-illumining orb of Dryden. Before pa.s.sing to Marvell and Butler, the only two really original poets after Dryden besides the veterans Cowley and Waller, who belong to the preceding period, it will be convenient to despatch a group of minor bards, whose inclusion in the standard collections of poetry, involving memoirs by a master of biography, has given them more celebrity than they in most instances deserve.

[Sidenote: Lord Rochester (1647-1680).]

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), is princ.i.p.ally known to posterity by his vices and his repentance. The latter has helped to preserve the memory of the former, which have also left abiding traces in a number of poems not included in his works, and some of which, it may be hoped, are wrongly attributed to him. For a number of years Rochester obtained notoriety as, after Buckingham, the most dissolute character of a dissolute age; but at the same time a critic and a wit, potent to make or mar the fortunes of men of letters. 'Sure,' says Mr.

Saintsbury, 'to play some monkey trick or other on those who were unfortunate enough to be his intimates.' Many a literary cabal was instigated by him, many a libel and lampoon flowed from his pen, among others, _The Session of the Poets_, correctly characterized by Johnson as 'merciless insolence.' Worn out by a life of excess, he died at thirty-three, and his penitence, largely due to the arguments and exhortations of Burnet, afforded the latter material for a narrative which Johnson, entirely opposed as he was to the author's political and ecclesiastical principles, declares that 'the critic ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its piety.'

Rochester's acknowledged poems fall into two divisions of unequal merit.

The lyrical and amatory are in general very insipid. The more serious pieces, especially when expressing the discomfort of a sated votary of pleasure, frequently want neither force nor weight. Four particularly fine lines, quoted without indication of authors.h.i.+p in Goethe's _Wahrheit und Dichtung_, have frequently occasioned speculation as to their origin. They come from Rochester's _Satyr against Mankind_, and read:

'Then Old Age and Experience, hand in hand, Lead him to Death, and make him understand, After a search so painful and so long, That all his life he has been in the wrong.'

Goldsmith's 'best-natured man, with the worst-natured muse,' is purloined from Rochester, who is also the propounder of the paradox, 'All men would be cowards if they durst.' Some of his songs are not devoid of merit. After all, however, nothing of his is so well known as the antic.i.p.atory epitaph on Charles II., ascribed sometimes to him, sometimes to Buckingham, and very likely due to neither:

'Here lies our mutton-eating king, Whose word no man relies on; Who never said a foolish thing, And never did a wise one.'

Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon (1633?-1684), was a very different character, both as a man and as a poet. He is accused of no fault but a love of gaming, and the purity of his Muse merited the well-known eulogium:

'In all Charles's days Roscommon only boasts unsullied bays.'

But he has nothing of the salt and savour of Rochester's more serious poetry, and is at best an elegant versifier, who, in his only considerable original poem, the _Essay on Translated Verse_, thinks justly, reasons clearly, and expresses himself with considerable spirit when the subject requires. The most original feature of his literary character is his preference in a rhyming age for blank verse, which he enforces in theory, but is far from recommending by his practice. In his rhymed pieces he is a better versifier than poet, and in his blank verse the contrary. Milton's eyes were just closed; Shakespeare and Fletcher were still acted; but the secret of beautiful versification, apart from rhyme, seems to have been entirely lost.

[Sidenote: John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghams.h.i.+re (1649-1721).]

Poetry afforded a subject for verse to another n.o.ble writer, John Sheffield, successively Earl of Mulgrave, Marquis of Normanby, and Duke of Buckinghams.h.i.+re (1649-1721), who achieved real if moderate distinction as soldier, statesman, and scholar. As a poet his reputation rests entirely upon his _Essay on Poetry_, which contains many just thoughts expressed in pleasing numbers, although the author's deference to the conventional dicta of criticism leads him into idolatry, not only of Homer and Virgil, but of Bossu. To have fostered the genius of Pope by judicious praise is the highest distinction of 'Granville the polite and knowing Walsh.' Congreve, to be treated more fully as a dramatist, stands somewhat higher than these as an inditer of heroic couplets; but a severer criticism must be pa.s.sed, if any criticism is needed, upon Pomfret, Duke, Stepney, and the other versifiers of the day who have burrowed their way into the stock collections of poetry.

[Sidenote: Andrew Marvell (1621-1678).]

Andrew Marvell was a virtuous man whose good qualities contrast so forcibly with the characteristic failings of his age, that he appears by contrast even more virtuous than he actually was. His integrity made him the hero of legend, for, although the Court would no doubt have been glad to gain him, it is hardly credible that the prime minister should by the king's order have personally waited upon him 'up two pair of stairs in a little court in the Strand.' But the apocryphal anecdote attests the real veneration inspired by his independence in a venal age.

Born in the neighbourhood of Hull on March 31st, 1621, he studied at Cambridge, travelled for some years on the Continent, and settled down about 1650 as tutor to the daughter of Lord Fairfax. At this period he wrote his exquisite poem, _The Garden_, and other pieces of a similar character. He also wrote in 1650 the poem on Cromwell's return from Ireland, which may have gained for him in 1653 the appointment of tutor to Cromwell's ward, William Dutton. Other pieces of a like description followed, and in 1657 Marvell became joint Latin secretary with Milton, an office for which Milton had recommended him four years previously.

His poem on the Protector's death in the following year is justly declared by Mr. Firth to be 'the only one distinguished by an accent of sincerity and personal affection.' He was elected for Hull to Richard Cromwell's Parliament, and continued to sit for the remainder of his life. He was the last Member of Parliament who received a salary from his const.i.tuents, to whose interests he in return attended so diligently that upwards of three hundred letters from him upon their concerns and general politics are extant in the Hull archives.

Marvell could scarcely be called a republican. He had been devoted to the Protectorate, and would probably have been easily reconciled to the Restoration if the government had been ably and honestly conducted. In wrath at the general maladministration he betook himself to satires, which circulated in ma.n.u.script. At first he attacked Clarendon, but eventually concluded that the only remedy would be the final expulsion of the house of Stuart. In 1672 and 1673 he appeared in print as a prose controversialist with _The Rehearsal Transprosed_, a witty attack on a work by Parker, Bishop of Oxford, wherein, in the author's own words, 'the mischiefs and inconveniences of toleration were represented, and all pretences pleaded in behalf of liberty of conscience fully answered.' He silenced his opponent, and escaped being himself silenced through the interposition of Charles II., whose native good sense and easiness of temper inclined him to toleration, and who promoted the freedom of Nonconformists as a means of obtaining liberty for the Church of Rome. Marvell, however, was not to be reconciled, and in 1677 put forth an anonymous pamphlet to prove, what was but too true, that a design had long been on foot to establish absolute monarchy and subvert the Protestant religion. His sudden death on August 18th, 1678, was attributed to poison, but, according to a physician who wrote some years afterwards, was occasioned by that prejudice of the faculty against Peruvian bark which is recorded by Temple and Evelyn.

As a writer of prose, Marvell is both powerful and humorous, but is not a Junius or a Pascal to impart permanent interest to transitory themes, and make the topics of the day topics for all time. As a poet he ranks with those who have been said to be stars alike of evening and of morning. His earliest and most truly poetical compositions belong in spirit to the period of Charles I., when the strains of the Elizabethan lyric were yet lingering. After pa.s.sing through a transition stage of manly verse still breathing a truly poetical spirit, but mainly concerned with public affairs, he settles down as a satirist endowed with all the vigour, but, at the same time, with all the prosaic hardness of the Restoration. His most inspired poem, _Thoughts in a Garden_, written under the Commonwealth, and originally composed in Latin, nevertheless rings like a voice from beyond the Civil Wars. Here are the three loveliest of nine lovely stanzas:

'What wondrous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious cl.u.s.ters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons as I pa.s.s, Ensnared with flowers, I fall on gra.s.s.

'Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade.

'Here at the fountain's sliding foot, Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, Casting the body's vest aside My soul into the boughs does glide: There, like a bird, it sits and sings, There whets and claps its silver wings, And, till prepared for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light.'

'These wonderful verses,' says Mr. Palgrave of the entire poem, 'may be regarded as a test of any reader's insight into the most poetical aspects of poetry.'

As a satirist it is Marvell's error to confound satire with lampoon. He has the _saeva indignatio_ which makes the avenger, but spends too much of it upon individuals. Occasionally some fine personification gives promise of better things, but the poet soon relapses into mere personalities. This may be attributed in great measure to the circ.u.mstances under which these compositions appeared. They could only be circulated clandestinely, and the writer may be excused if he did not labour to exalt what he himself regarded as mere fugitive poetry. The most celebrated of these pieces are the series of _Advices to a Painter_, in which the persons and events of the day are described to an imaginary artist for delineation in fitting, and therefore by no means flattering, colours. It is to Marvell's honour that he succeeds best with a fine subject. When, in his poems on the events of the Commonwealth, he escapes from mere sarcasm and negation, and speaks n.o.bly upon really n.o.ble themes, he soars far above the Marvell of the Restoration, though even here his verse is marred by lapses into the commonplace, and by his besetting infirmity of an inability to finish with effect, leaving off like a speaker who sits down rather from the failure of his voice than the exhaustion of his theme. The panegyric on Cromwell's anniversary, and the poem on his death, abound nevertheless with fine, though faulty pa.s.sages, of which the following may serve as an example:

'O human glory vain! O Death! O wings!

O worthless world! O transitory things!

Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed, That still, though dead, greater than death he laid, And in his altered face you something feign That threatens Death he yet will live again.

Not much unlike the sacred oak which shoots To heaven its branches, and through earth its roots, Whose s.p.a.cious boughs are hung with trophies round, And honoured wreaths have oft the victor crowned, When angry Jove darts lightning through the air At mortal sins, nor his own plant will spare, It groans and bruises all below, that stood So many years the shelter of the wood.

The tree, erewhile foreshortened to our view, When fallen shows taller yet than as it grew; So shall his praise to after times increase, When truth shall be allowed, and faction cease; And his own shadows with him fall; the eye Detracts from objects than itself more high; But when Death takes from them that envied state, Seeing how little, we confess how great.'

Marvell's position as the satirist of his era from the Puritan and Republican point of view, was filled upon the Cavalier side by Samuel Butler, who, if general reputation and excellence in his own walk of verse are to be allowed as criterions, may claim to be the third poet of the age after Milton and Dryden. It is true that Butler, though endowed with abundance of fancy, was, strictly speaking, no poet; that he is entirely dest.i.tute of the dignity and tenderness which Marvell can display with a congenial theme; and that he possesses nothing of Dryden's power of exalting unpromising subjects into poetry. But he infinitely surpa.s.ses Marvell when they meet on the common ground of satire; and though he cannot be said to surpa.s.s Dryden, their methods are so different that no proper comparison can be drawn. When writing in Dryden's manner Butler is respectable, but he has the field of burlesque epic entirely to himself. Supremacy in a low style of composition is a surer pa.s.sport to fame than moderate merit in a high one. With all the defects of Restoration literature, it had a faculty for producing masterpieces, and it must be admitted that Butler's _Hudibras_ stands as decidedly at the head of its cla.s.s as _Paradise Lost_, or _Absalom and Achitophel_, or _Pilgrim's Progress_, or Pepys's _Diary_ at the head of theirs.

[Sidenote: Samuel Butler (1612-1680).]

Samuel Butler was born near Worcester in 1612. His father, a small farmer, procured him a good education at the Worcester Grammar School.

His first employment was that of clerk to a country justice named Jefferys. He afterwards entered the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Kent, at Wrest, in Bedfords.h.i.+re, and subsequently acted as clerk to various justices of the peace, one of whom, Sir Samuel Luke, of Cople Hoo, near Bedford, served as the original of Hudibras. It is curious to reflect that John Bunyan was at the same time going through his spiritual conflicts in the same county. He seems to have also travelled in France and Holland. He published nothing until 1659, when an anonymous tract in favour of the restoration of the monarchy, ent.i.tled _Mola Asinaria_, appeared from his pen. The service was recompensed by the appointment of secretary to the Earl of Carbury, Lord President of Wales, who made him steward of Ludlow Castle, where _Comus_ had been performed nearly thirty years before. He resigned this charge upon contracting what seemed a wealthy marriage, but the lady's money was lost, and, notwithstanding the great literary success _Hudibras_, the remainder of the author's life was spent in poverty. The first part of _Hudibras_, stated in the t.i.tle to have been written during the Civil War, and if so at least fifteen years old, was published in 1663. Its success was instantaneous, though neither the Puritans nor Mr. Pepys could quite see the joke. The merit of the performance, however, was fully apparent to a better and more influential judge, the king, who encouraged the author by giving numerous copies away, though history does not say at whose expense. But this was all he gave, and the poet who had rendered such essential service to the royalist cause by his writings was as completely neglected by the Court as if he had been John Milton. It is indeed said that he was in receipt of a pension of 100 at his death; but this seems contradicted by the letter, already quoted, of Dryden to the Lord High Treasurer within two years after Butler's death, where he says: "Tis enough for one age to have neglected Mr. Cowley and starved Mr. Butler.'[5] Oldham's lines, written at the same time, are still more emphatic:

'On Butler who can think without just rage, The glory and the scandal of the age?

Fair stood his hopes when first he came to town, Met everywhere with welcomes of renown, Courted and loved by all, with wonder read, And promises of princely favour fed; But what reward for all had he at last, After a life of dull expectance pa.s.sed?

The wretch at summing up his misspent days Found nothing left but poverty and praise; Of all his gains by verse he could not save Enough to purchase flannel and a grave; Reduced to want, he in due time fell sick, Was fain to die, and be interred on tick; And well might bless the fever that was sent To rid him hence, and his worse fate prevent.'

These spirited verses are certainly exaggerated. Butler, though, as his biographer says, 'personally known to few,' partook on the same authority of the munificence of Dorset, and dying on September 25th, 1680, was buried on September 27th in the churchyard of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, at the expense of another friend, William Longueville, bencher of the Inner Temple, who had previously endeavoured to obtain his interment in Westminster Abbey, where, Atterbury being dean, a tardy monument was erected to him in 1721 by Alderman Barber. Very little is known of the latter years of his life, except that he lived in Rose Street, Covent Garden, and that he suffered much from the gout. He had published a second part of _Hudibras_ in 1664, and a third in 1678, containing many allusions to events much later than the Civil War. He bequeathed his posthumous papers to Longueville, by whom they were carefully preserved, and a large portion eventually came to be published in 1759. They will be treated of in another place. Not much is known of Butler's personal character and habits. He must evidently have been a man of extensive reading, and versed in several languages and literatures. It seems natural to attribute the neglect of so popular an author to some infirmity in his own temper, but the little testimony we have makes the other way. Wood describes him as 'a boon and witty companion;' and Aubrey says, 'A severe and sound judgment, a good fellow.' It must be remembered that he was forty-eight at the Restoration, and had spent almost all his life in the country; we shall also find reason to believe that he was neither enough of a churchman nor enough of a loyalist to be entirely agreeable to his own party.

The defect in _Hudibras_ pointed out by Dr. Johnson, the want of logical sequence in the action, undoubtedly exists, but is almost inherent in the conception of such a performance. A more serious drawback, the disproportion between the hero's deeds and his words, probably arises from the poem having been written at different periods of the author's life. When he began to write his invention was lively and vigorous, but it naturally flagged after middle age, although his wit remained unimpaired. In the first and part of the second canto disquisition and adventure are so evenly blended that each supports the other; in the latter part of the poem the burden falls almost entirely upon the former. Hence the picturesque and cleverly varied incident of the bear-baiting, with the varied characters it brings upon the scene, will always be the favourite pa.s.sage of the poem, unless an exception be made for the portraits of Hudibras and Ralpho. There is, however, considerable inconsistency in the character of Hudibras. He is represented as a fool, yet half the good things of the book are, from sheer necessity, put into his mouth. We are to suppose him a coward, yet he takes and deals cuffs and bangs in the spirit of a pugilist; and his attack upon the seven champions of bear-baiting, one of them an Amazon, is so far from cowardice, that it more resembles temerity. The more odious traits of his character hardly seem properly to belong to it; and in fact Butler probably commenced his poem without too curiously considering how he was to conduct it, or rather where it was to conduct him, and scribbled away in the spirit of his own maxim--

'One for sense, and one for rhyme, Is quite sufficient at one time'--

trusting to the humour ever springing up under his pen to redeem his verse from the imputation of doggrel. This it certainly did; for although _Hudibras_ as a whole is rambling, ill-compacted, and wordy, the terseness of many individual pa.s.sages is as remarkable as their humour:

'A tool That knaves do work with, called a fool.'

'Cerberus himself p.r.o.nounce A leash of languages at once.'

'Hudibras wore but one spur, As wisely knowing, could he stir To active trot one side of 's horse The other would not hang.'

'For as on land there is no beast, But in some fish at sea's exprest; So in the wicked there's no vice Of which the saints have not a spice.'

'Quoth she, There are no bargains driven, Nor marriages clapped up in heaven, And that's the reason, as some guess, There is no heaven in marriages.'

Butler's _Hudibras_ may perhaps be best defined as a metrical parody upon _Don Quixote_, with a spice of allusion to the _Faerie Queene_, in which the n.o.bility and pathos of the originals are designedly obliterated, and the humour exaggerated into farce to suit the author's polemic purpose. His design is to kill Presbyterianism and Independency by ridicule, and he is consequently compelled to shut his eyes to everything in them except their occasional tendency to baseness, and their perpetual liability to cant. This is the constant Nemesis of the satirist; but Butler is even more of a caricaturist than the situation called for. The endurance of his poem to our own times, however, is sufficient proof that, although a caricature, it was not a libel, and amid the enthusiastic reaction of the Restoration it may well have pa.s.sed for a fair portrait. The machinery is closely modelled upon _Don Quixote_. Presbyterianism is incarnated in the doughty justice of the peace, Sir Hudibras; Independency and new light sectarianism in general in his squire, Ralpho; and the two sally forth in quest of adventure quite in the style of Don Quixote and Sancho, except that the Don's great aim is to deliver damsels, and Hudibras's to imprison them. Though the scene appears to be laid in the west of England, there is no reason to doubt the tradition that the prototype of Hudibras's satire was Butler's master, the Bedfords.h.i.+re magistrate, Sir Samuel Luke, who is evidently alluded to where a rhyme to _Mameluke_ is left blank to be supplied by the reader's ingenuity. If, as is more than probable, this worthy justice was given to suppressing bear-baitings, Butler would need no more material for his burlesque; and the first part of the poem, at all events, may well have been written while he was in Sir Samuel's employment. It seems, from internal evidence, to have been composed before Cromwell had ejected the Long Parliament, and its general atmosphere almost precludes the idea of its having been written after the execution of Charles I. The second part has many allusions to later events. The description of Hudibras, mind and body, is so vivid and precise as to present internal evidence of having been drawn from a living model, while Ralpho is in comparison vague. Soon after sallying forth the pair find themselves at odds with a crowd about to revel in the amus.e.m.e.nt of bear-baiting, which they proceed to interrupt; not, as has been remarked, out of compa.s.sion to the bear, but out of grudge to the public. This brings on a fight, most amusingly described, but at somewhat too great length; the 'fatal facility' of the octosyllabic couplet being nowhere more conspicuous than in Butler's humorous doggrel. After various turns of fortune, the knight and squire find themselves in the stocks, where they sit until Hudibras's lady-love, a frolicsome widow with a jointure, appears to the rescue:

'No sooner did the Knight perceive her, But straight he fell into a fever, Inflam'd all over with disgrace, To be seen by her in such a place; Which made him hang his head, and scowl, And wink, and goggle like an owl.

He felt his brains begin to swim, When thus the Dame accosted him, This place (quoth she) they say's enchanted, And with delinquent spirits haunted, That here are tied in chains, and scourged, Until their guilty crimes be purged: Look, there are two of them appear Like persons I have seen somewhere.

Some have mistaken blocks and posts For spectres, apparitions, ghosts, With saucer-eyes, and horns, and some Have heard the Devil beat a drum: But if our eyes are not false gla.s.ses, That give a wrong account of faces, That beard and I should be acquainted, Before 'twas conjur'd and enchanted; For tho' it be disfigured somewhat, As if 't had lately been in combat, It did belong t' a worthy Knight, Howe'er this goblin is come by it.

When Hudibras the lady heard, Discoursing thus upon his beard, And speak with such respect and honour, Both of the beard, and the beard's owner; He thought it best to set as good A face upon it as he cou'd, And thus he spoke: Lady, your bright And radiant eyes are in the right; The beard's th' identic beard you knew, The same numerically true: Nor is it worn by fiend or elf, But its proprietor himself.

Oh Heav'ns! quoth she, can that be true?

I do begin to fear 'tis you; Not by your individual whiskers, But by your dialect and discourse, That never spoke to man or beast In notions vulgarly exprest.

But what malignant star, alas!

Has brought you both to this sad pa.s.s?

Quoth he, The fortune of the war, Which I am less afflicted for, Than to be seen with beard and face By you in such a homely case.

Quoth she, Those need not be asham'd For being honourably maim'd; If he that is in battle conquer'd, Have any t.i.tle to his own beard, Tho' yours be sorely lugg'd and torn, It does your visage more adorn, Than if 'twere prun'd, and starch'd and lander'd, And cut square by the Russian standard.

A torn beard's like a tatter'd ensign, That's bravest which there are most rents in, That petticoat about your shoulders Does not so well become a soldier's, And I'm afraid they are worse handled, Although i' th' rear, your beard the van led; And those uneasy bruises make My heart for company to ache, To see so wors.h.i.+pful a friend I' th' pill'ry set at the wrong end.'