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 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; “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 Sir Thomas Browne, 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 Another name, of a man far less lovable, but perhaps more widely known, is that of Sir William Temple. 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 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 are the great Cecilia odes, which hold their places in the reading-books, with their 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 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 ’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 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 “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 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. 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 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 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, “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 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 “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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 He does not lie in Westminster Abbey: I think he would have rebelled among the poets: he sleeps 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, 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 Old, ear-cropped Prynne, of the Histriomastix, was still living—close upon seventy—grim and gray, and as pugnacious as a bull-terrier. Among 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 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!” |