BY THE REVEREND A. E. WINSHIP.

CHAPTER III.

Royal favors skip from small to great and back again by no law of ethics or Æsthetics, and if we flatter ourselves that we can account for the choice of some candidates for the poet’s pension we shall certainly find our wits tested in search of a philosophy to apply to Charles II., who, with equal felicity, placed the crown on the geniusless Davenant and the immortal Dryden.

John Dryden, with all his faults of verse and purpose, was the genius of his age, and remains one of the five names that star the diadem of English song. In circumstances that tended to enervate rhyme, at a time when the rebound from Puritanism paid a premium on license and licentiousness, when no element in national life had the electrical currents to stimulate literary, least of all poetic genius, John Dryden had the skill to attune the age in which he lived to a melodious key that harmonizes with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspere and Milton.

In character and record he is inexplicable. Born in the erratic days of Cromwell he is the most heartily English of all her “men of letters;” of strictest Puritan training, he died a devout Romanist; of cleanly life and chaste conversation, his verses are morally reckless; educated at Cambridge, where he remained for a seven years’ post-graduate course, he was noted for disloyalty to his Alma Mater; never wrote a line in praise of it, but went out of his way to endorse its rival—Oxford—to whom he owed nothing.

It was his unanticipated loyalty to royalty that led Charles II. to appoint him laureate to succeed Davenant, at the same time creating a post of literary honor and financial profit—historiographer—receiving £100 for each position. His honors cost him dearly in public favor. It was currently believed that he renounced the cause of the people for court favors, and Puritanism for self-advancement, and for a score of years he lost in popularity all that he won of financial ease and royal distinction.

His greatness consisted in the sublime tact with which he used the opportunity that disfavor brought him to immortalize himself in verse.

The Duke of Buckingham, the people’s favorite, ridiculed the laureate in scathing rhyme, which called forth vociferous applause from all the lesser poets whom envy and jealousy led to bitter hatred of the favorite of the court.

Dryden had the grit and genius to hurl the masterpiece of his age at the whole range of critics under the title of “Absalom and Achitophel,” and by sheer superiority of brilliancy and wit dethroned Buckingham and seated himself on the throne of popular favor. A specimen of his characterization may not be amiss.

Dryden was the first well-paid poet England ever had. For the translation of his fables he received £300, while for translating Virgil he received the fabulous sum of £1,200.

His most distinguished poem is his “Ode to St. Cecilia,” which he wrote at the age of seventy, at a single all-night sitting. In the evening hour the thought occurred to him and he could not drop his pen until at dawn the last word was on paper.

Wordsworth could not love Dryden, because there is not an image in all his poetry suggested by nature. While Chaucer seems to have been always out of doors, Dryden apparently never knew there was any out of doors. He could not create, could not be pathetic, but in power of argument, in satirical skill, in “declamatory magnificence,” he is without a peer in the language.

Thomas Shadwell, “mature in dullness from his tender years,” who only lives through the grace of Dryden’s crucifying satire, by a fortune no art can explain enjoyed the laurel that had decked the brow of Dryden for a generation. Without poetic merit he was skillful as a hater, shrewd as a schemer; he missed no opportunity to make Dryden wince until he made himself acknowledged as his rival, and when William and Mary ascended the throne the only way they could effectively snub the royalty they supplanted was to transfer the laurel from Dryden to Shadwell, who owed all the fame he ever enjoyed to his artful drawing of Dryden’s fire.

It is too bad that William and Mary were fated to divest their reign of all literary glory by bestowing the court honors first upon Shadwell and then upon Nahum Tate, who had some veins of merit, but no popular talent. Dryden praised him in his day, and the “Book of Common Prayer” and our church hymn books retain some choice lines that he wrote. Queen Anne retained him ten years, but he was almost universally regarded as stupid and juiceless in poetry, and at the age of sixty-five, poor, homeless, unable to earn a living, she ejected him from the laureateship, and he retired to the “Mint,” the prison for the better class of poor debtors. Thus, in poverty and humility ended the days of him who wrote our familiar hymn,

Nicholas Rowe, with no popular fervor of verse, won high favor in classic circles through an independent fortune and rare social gift. Pope’s friendship welcomed him to the circle of rare visits, while the Élite of Queen Anne’s reign courted him with royal art. Few men of real genius ever have been so splendidly rewarded as he. Swift and Addison were only second in their admiration to Pope, who wrote this tender epitaph:

Unknown as Rowe has proved to be to fame, he was blest with the respect of his contemporaries, which could not be said of his successor, Lawrence Eusden, then as well as now unknown to fame, and yet he wore the laureate wreath twelve years. Pope abused him in his “Dunciad,” Cooke in the “Battle of the Poets” has this couplet:

The rhetorician, Oldmixon, says he never met a poet with so much of the “ridiculum and fustian jumbled together, a sort of nonsense which so perfectly confounds all ideas that there is no distinct one left in the mind.” And yet the Georges I. and II. placed the laurel on his brow.

George II., with characteristic misfortune, selected Colley Cibber, whom Pope made famous—I had almost said infamous—in these lines:

His father, Caius Gabriel Cibber, an artist, sculptured the statues of two lunatics over the gates of Bedlam hospital. Although the artistic work was creditable, Pope made the father’s hand the medium of a savage attack on the son in the first book of the “Dunciad,” which was written for the purpose of making Eusden and Cibber, the laureates of George II., ridiculous. He thus introduces them as dunces:

And thus he makes the father’s art serve his wicked purpose:

His only literary work that has endured even in the knowledge of scholars was an admirable autobiography which would have honored his name had he the wit to let poetry alone.

Eusden and Cibber succeeded in one thing, they made the position of laureate thoroughly undesirable, so that when upon the latter’s death it was offered the author of the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Thomas Gray promptly declined it, but William Whitehead accepted, serving during the excitement preceding and attending the American Revolution. He became at once the target for the shafts of satire aimed by his fellow poets, Churchill endeavoring to persecute him as Pope had his predecessors. But Whitehead had the rare grace to bear all attacks in silence, living as comfortable and happy a life as though there had been no satirical buzzing. He knew he was not brilliant, and did not propose to make himself miserable over it. Churchill might rasp him as caustically as he chose, he would lose neither sleep nor peace of mind in consequence, and this sublime indifference ultimately silenced all critics, permitting him to enjoy thirty years of self-satisfied service.

At his death Thomas Warton, the senior of two poetic brothers, whom Hazlitt says was studious with ease and learned without affectation, reclaimed the position from the contempt in which it had been so long held. He achieved what should satisfy the aspiration of any man successfully challenging the public taste that had been the slave of the didactic school of poetry under Pope, imparting a love for the poetry of nature and the literary style of the Old English masters who lived out of doors. It is hard to think that at his death the laureateship sank lower than ever. It is humiliating to record that for a quarter of a century Henry James Pye bore the honors, ushering out the eighteenth and ushering in the nineteenth century, a man of whom Byron expressed the universal disdain when he wrote:

Three names grace the laureate record of the past seventy years, names of pioneers, each rapturously praised by admirers, and as violently condemned by critics—Southey, Wordsworth and Tennyson.

Taine, our racy French critic, places Southey in the first rank of his class of poets, a clever man, an indefatigable reader, inexhaustible writer, crammed with erudition, gifted in imagination, gifted like Victor Hugo for the freshness of his annotations and splendor of his picturesque curiosity. De Quincy criticises him as being too intensely objective, with too little exhibit of the mind as introverting upon its own thought and feelings. He is distinguished at once for his unwearying attacks upon the institutions of which the natural Englishman is proud. This is readily accounted for from the fact that at fourteen he was disgraced at Westminster school for writing a sarcastic article on corporal punishment, for which the publisher was prosecuted by the head-master, and that at Oxford University, where he took a partial course, he was annoyed by the exasperations of financial infelicities preventing high rank, and ultimately forcing him away from scholastic privileges.

As a critic, historian and antiquarian Southey held high rank among the scholars of the land, and yet he acquired his scholarly taste and vast learning by out of school studies.

He was preËminently one of those curious creatures of circumstance who are such because they have the tact to make unpromising events serve them. He was too active a democrat to hope for court favors, and too closely allied with the Unitarians to venture within the church, and therefore happily fell into association with Coleridge and his coterie. At the time Coleridge was scheming as a high-toned communist to send a colony to America to found a model, impracticable republic on the banks of the Susquehanna, from which all selfishness was to be banished, and Southey, at eighteen, attempted to raise money for that object, failing in which he was frequently a penniless youth.

To prevent the poverty stricken youth from marrying Mrs. Coleridge’s sister, his uncle shipped him to Lisbon, but it was too late, as the lad had already married her secretly on borrowed money.

He was sixty years of age before he was financially straight, and before he was eighty he died, leaving one of the finest libraries in Europe and an estate of £12,000. His library was the result of his habits of close study and devout love of books. Of himself he wrote:

A college chum befriended him in his youthful poverty and settled upon him an annuity of £160, which prevented suffering many times. He prided himself on early rising and was at his desk soon after rising, whether he had special work on hand or not. The morning after he had finished one of his leading poems he wrote the first hundred lines of a more successful one before breakfast. He worked almost literally every hour of every day of every month of every year of his life, until at seventy-six he broke down with softening of the brain.

William Wordsworth, a companion and admirer of Southey, succeeded him as laureate. He was good naturedly ridiculed by the literary world, but instead of being maddened thereby as Byron was, instead of being heart-broken and sent to an untimely grave as Keats was, he smiled serenely on his critics and studiously sought to write as his critics did not wish him to write, and thereby lived to enjoy a generous and widespread appreciation.

While others went to Greece and Rome, to history and mythology for heroes, he went into the streets, highways and byways, huts and hovels, and chose the rude and crude, the loveless and homeless for his poetic purpose. A more uniformly prosperous, serene, moral man never graced English authorship, and in his age he said with pride, “Whatever the world may think of me or of my poetry is now of little consequence; but one thing is a comfort in my old age, that none of my works … contain a line which I should wish to blot out because it panders to the baser passions of our nature.” Who could ask to have more said of him than that he was always correct in life, sweet in spirit, amiable in disposition, unwaveringly conscious that he was doing his utmost to make the world better?

Upon his death an effort was made to abolish the office of laureate, but it failed and Alfred Tennyson was selected, and has for thirty-five years poetized for the glory of England. It is popular in our day to make light of Tennyson’s verse, but it was not always thus, for our own classic Longfellow wrote:

The criticisms of no poet are so amusing. Ward (T. H.), who is unrivaled in general judicious criticism, calling from oblivion innumerable forgotten names, seems never to have so much as heard of him, while Taine, our French critic, who unceremoniously “skips” numerous poets of acknowledged rank, gives to scarcely one English poet so extended, clear, close, appreciative criticism as to Tennyson. Shaw in his “Literary Compendium” does not deign to mention him, while Bayard Taylor said “No English poet, with the possible exception of Byron, has so ministered to the natural appetite for poetry.” The average newspaper ridicules him as stupid, but one of our keenest critics says, “He can gather up his strength like a serpent in the gleaming coil of a line, or dart it out straight and free.”

When Tennyson appeared as a poet at the age of thirty-two he evidenced a rare poetic taste, unlike that which had hitherto catered to English readers. For a long time the poetry of England had been prosy in the extreme, metaphysical, monotonous, remorseful, dark and somber, and the appearance of a poet light, graceful and sentimental, was an event calculated to arouse the nation into joyous enthusiasm.

There was about his life, as in his stanzas, a poetic halo, living as he did in the Isle of Wight, away from the rivalries and annoyances of society. Queen Victoria appointed him laureate, out of respect to the public demand that he be thus honored.

It is three centuries since Spenser first wore the laurel. The first century embraced five names, three of whom—Spenser, Johnson and Dryden—were men of recognized superiority. The second had no poet of note. From the reign of the Prince of Orange to the independence of America there was no man of talent who consented to sing the praises of William, Mary, Anne or the Georges. The present century has been honored by scholarly, virtuous men, devoid of marked genius.

It is a delightful thing to be able to say that of the entire sixteen, dull as some of them have been, they have been almost unexceptionally men of recognized purity of character, in ages when poets were renowned for their laxity of morals.

[CONCLUDED.]