Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 353, March 1845

Without undervaluing, then, the effects of the Revolution of 1688; without discrediting the motives of many of the patriots who combined to shake off the oppressive tyranny and Romish bigotry of James II., it may safely be affirmed, that it was George III., Lord Bute, and Mr Pitt, who put the British constitution upon its right, and the only durable and beneficial, basis, and worked out the Revolution itself to its appropriate and beneficent effects. This is the great and important moral of English history during the eighteenth century; this is the conclusion forced on the mind by the perusal of Walpole's Memoirs, and his vehement abuse of Lord Bute and George III. for their dismissal of the Whigs from power. Doubtless, they acted from selfish motives in doing so. The king wanted to regain his prerogative, the minister to secure his power; but still it was, on the part of both, a step in the right direction. But for the resolute stand which they made against the Whig oligarchy – but for their wisdom in throwing themselves on the property of the nation to withstand its debasement, a domineering party would have become omnipotent, the people would have been irrecoverably plunged in the slough of corruption, and the liberties of England lost for ever, according to all former experience, in the firmly established despotism consequent on a successful revolution. George III. said, on the first decisive parliamentary division which gave a majority to the Tories in 1761 – "At length, then, we have a king on the throne in England." Posterity will add – at length the foundations of a free constitution were laid on a durable and practicable basis.

NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS

No. II

Dryden and Pope

Specimens of the British Critics are unavoidably an irregular history of Criticism in this island; and such a history of our Criticism is unavoidably one, too, of our Poetry. The first name in our series is Dryden. See what we have written, and you find half of our paper is on Shakspeare. Pope is our next worthy; and of three or four pillars on which his name as a critic rests, one is his character of the Protagonist. Thus, for this earlier part of a new Age, the Presidents of Criticism are the two Kings of Verse.

When the poet is a critic, how shall we sever in him the two Arts? If his prose is explicit, his verse is implicit criticism; and there was thus a reason for speaking somewhat especially of Dryden's character as a tragedian in drawing his character as a critic. But indeed the man, the critic, and the poet, are one, and must be characterized as a whole; only you may choose which aspect shall be principal. In studying his works you are struck, throughout, with a mind loosely disciplined in its great intellectual powers. In his critical writings, principles hastily proposed from partial consideration, are set up and forgotten. He intends largely, but a thousand causes restrain and lame the execution. Milton, in unsettled times, maintained his inward tranquillity of soul – and "dwelt apart." Dryden, in times oscillating indeed and various, yet quieter and safer, discloses private disturbance. His own bark appears to be borne on continually on a restless, violent, whirling, and tossing stream. It never sleeps in brightness on its own calm and bright shadow. An unhappy biography weaves itself into the history of the inly dwelling Genius.

His treatment of "The Tempest" shows that he wanted intelligence of highest passion and imagination. One powerful mind must have discernment of another; and he speaks best of Shakspeare when most generally. Then we might believe that he understood him in all the greatness of his might; but our belief cannot support itself among the many outrages offered by him to nature, in a blind or wanton desecration of her holiest revealments to her inspired priest. In the sense stated above, his transformation of "The Tempest," is an implicit criticism of "The Tempest." And, assuredly, there is no great rashness of theorizing in him who finds in this barbarous murder, evidence to a lack of apprehension in Dryden, for some part of the beauty which he swept away. It would be unjustifiable towards the man to believe that, for the lowest legitimate end of a playwright – money – or for the lower, because illegitimate end, the popular breath of a day amongst a public of a day – he voluntarily ruined one of the most delicate amongst the beautiful creations with which the divine muse, his own patroness, had enlarged and adorned the bright world of mind – ruined it down to the depraved, the degraded, the debased, the grovelling, the vulgar taste of a corrupt court and town. "The Inchanted Island" is a dolorous document ungainsayable, to the appreciation, in particulars, by that Dryden who could, in generals, laud Shakspeare so well – of that Shakspeare. And if, by Dryden, then by the age which he eminently led, and for which he created, and for which he – destroyed.

"The Inchanted Island," and "The State of Innocence" come under no criticism. They are literary FACINORA. No rational account – no theory of them can be given. There they are – melancholy, but instructive facts. They express the revolution of the national spirit, on the upper degrees of the social scale. That which thirty, twenty, ten years before was impossible, happens. The hewing in pieces of Shakspeare, to throw him into the magical caldron, to reproduce him, not in youth but in dotage, shows a death, but not yet the consequent life. Stupendous and sweet Nature whom we possessed, has vanished – fled heavenward – resolved into a dew – gone, into the country. At least, she is no longer in town! It may safely be averred, that no straining of the human intellect can compute the interval overleaped betwixt those originals, and these transcriptions. It is no translation, paraphrase, metaphrase. It is as if we should catch a confused and misapprehending glimpse of something that is going on in Jupiter. It is a transference from one order of beings to another; who have some intellectual processes in common, but are allied by no sympathy. The sublime is gone! The beautiful is gone! The rational is gone! The loving is gone! The divine is not here! Nor the angelical! Nor the human! Alas! not even the diabolical! All is corrupted! banished! obliterated!

We have seen Dryden complaining of Shakspeare's language and style – of the language as antiquated from the understanding of an audience in his own day – of the whole style as being "so pestered with the figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure." And we were aware of the modest self-attribution, "I have refined the language," in Drydenising Troilus and Cressida, "which before was obsolete." And Samuel Johnson corroborates and enlarges the self-praise. "Dryden was the first who refined the language of poetry."

At this day, such expressions fill the younger votary – creative or critical – of our vernacular muse with astonishment and perplexity, and set an older one upon thinking. Such assertions, it must be said, are "unintelligible" now, because a nobler unfolding of time, a happy return of our educated mind to the old and to the natural, has "antiquated" the literary sentiment, which Dryden and Johnson shared, and which they so confidently proposed to fitly-prepared readers.

Shakspeare obsolete! There is not a writer of to-day – whose WORDS are nearer to our hearts. Our own are hardly as intimate there, as HIS are—

"You are my true and honourable wife,As dear to me as are the ruddy dropsThat visit my sad heart,"

says the troubled Brutus to Portia, who has expressed a misdoubting of his true and clear affection for her.

Is this "antiquated" English, and thence "unintelligible?"

"Viola.– My father had a daughter loved a man,As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,I should your lordship.Duke.—And what's her history?Viola.—A blank, my lord. She never told her love.****Duke.– But died thy sister of her love, my boy?Viola.– I am all the daughters of my father's house,And all the brothers, too.""Miranda.– I am a foolTo weep at what I am glad of.Ferdinand.– Where should this music be?I' th' air? – or th' earth?It sounds no more; and sure it waits uponSome god o' th' island. Sitting on a bank,Weeping again the king my father's wreck,This music crept by me upon the waters,Allaying both their fury and my passionWith its sweet air. Thence have I follow'd it,Or it hath drawn me, rather. But 'tis gone —No! it begins again.****The ditty does remember my drown'd father.This is no mortal business, nor no soundThat the earth owes. – I hear it now above me."

Here we have an "antiquated" touch or two of what would have distressed Dryden. "Passion" is used in the old strong general sense of powerful, possessing emotion – in this example, filial sorrow; and lower down, we have the obsolete "OWES" for the modern "OWNS," which two vitiating reliques of antiquity, along with that "pestering," "affected," and "obscure" figure, "crept by me upon the waters," would explain, without doubt, the impossibility which the reader feels himself under, of deriving any pleasure from the passage, and, to speak strictly, of discovering any signification in it!!

Assuredly we do not design transcribing whole Shakspeare, in order to contradicting a rash word of Dryden's. It might not be politic, either; for we should now and then meet with hard sentences, which might seem, like unlucky witnesses, to give evidence against the party that brings them before the tribunal. They would not. It is not in twenty places, or not in a hundred, that the obsoleteness of a word or phrase makes Shakspeare hard, nor any thing in the world but his wit, his intellect in excess, that occasionally runs away with him, and wraps up his meaning in a phraseology of his own creating; enigmas that are embarrassing to disinvolve again – which might, indeed, be an antiquated manner of his age, but not an obsolete dictionary and grammar. Neither is it required of us to convince the reader, by copious extracts, that he really understands Shakspeare, one or other of whose volumes he has always in his pocket, and whose English he sits hearing by the hour, lisped, mouthed, and legitimately spoken upon the stage, and still fancying that he understands what he hears. But it seemed not altogether out of place, when the criticism of style is moved, and Shakspeare's English challenged, to recall into the liveliest consciousness of the reader, for a moment, the principal feature of the case, which is, without doubt, that Shakspeare is, in all our literature, the writer in whom this highest art of writing – namely – start not, good, innocent reader! for it must one day be said – THE ART OF SIMPLICITY – reaches its height; that magical art of steeping the words and idioms that fall from every lip at every minute, in music, and beauty, and pathos, and power, so that the familiar sound slips along the well-known inlets into the soul, and we are – "took ere we are 'ware."

Otherwise, for the general fact, that he, the reader of 1845, does understand, without much difficulty, the dramatic poet whom, in 1665, the gulf of years and the mutations of speech from father to son had rendered "unintelligible" – for the general verity of this unforeseen and improbable, but indisputable fact, the reader's recollection of his own personal history since he was eight or ten years old, may be left satisfactorily to vouch.

Neither was it, perhaps, unreasonable to snatch the occasion of alleging and manifesting the momentous and instructive truth —that the intenser working of the mind finds out, in every age, the perpetuities of a language.

Let us take our place for a moment in the Age of our poetry, which began with Dryden inclusive, and ended, or began ending, with Cowper exclusive. It was the UNCREATIVE age of our poetry; or, if you insist upon a denomination positively grounded, the IMITATIVE; or it was the unimpassioned, or it was the rational. Only the stage – losing passion, and not being the place for reason – went mad; as with Nat Lee. However, it retained something like a creative energy in Otway – and, moreover, Cato was really and afflictingly a rational play. – The mere musical flow of the verse took the place of ever varying expression; and the name used as nearly equivalent with a good verse, at least for describing that which a verse should ordinarily be, is a smooth verse. Concurrent in time and cause was the invasion of the ten syllabled rhymed couplet, which, in place of the old diversified measures, took possession – off the stage – of our poetry. With all this went a transformation of the language accepted in verse; a severing and setting apart, as if a consecrating of the Parnassian dialect, which formerly was always caught up fresh from the lap of nature, at the risk, no doubt, of pulling weeds amongs the flowers.

In the incidental enunciations of criticism, we may easily gather notices of the movement this way, in the double matter of the language and the verse. In both, it receives, as it should do, the same name and description. It is the disengaging of Refinement – its birth from the bosom of Barbarism – distinct as mother and daughter. Shakspeare and Milton are the two great barbarous kings with a numerous court. If we try to give ourselves account of this Refinement and to vindicate for it the title, we are at a loss for names and notions. A Refinement which places the sluts of Dryden and his contemporaries above Imogen and Miranda, and above Eve. One hangs down the head in shame and perplexity. The history of England affords us a key in the name of Charles II. The Court, the Town, and Life-in-doors, are the words that resolve the mystery. The Muses that were Powers of Fell, and Flood, and Forest, and Field, that went with man wherever he went – in cottage and palace, in divan and in dungeon, in the student's or the miser's chamber, on the battle-plain, and at the dance of bacchanals – and when and wheresoever man spoke, heard their own mother-tongue, they were beguiled and imprisoned within the pale of artificial society and of high life. They had to learn the breeding of the drawing-room. Their auditors, in short, were gentlemen and ladies, who never forgot that they were such in the sudden overpowering consciousness of their being men and women.

There was therefore not only a denaturation, but an enervation of our poetry. There grew a dainty, fastidious, easily-loathing taste, betokening that the robust health of the older day – its healthy hunger, and its blood glowing and bounding like a forester's – was gone by. Never to come again? No! not so bad as that. We mark main lines. We have not room for the filling-up. The last century closing, opened another Age, and we of to-day renovate and reinvigorate ourselves the best we may.

England surely did not bring up the Heroic Tragedy on its unsown soil. It was foreign falsehood that overcame English truth and sincerity. A factitious excitement that induced a false pitch throughout. On the old French stage, there were these two eminent characteristics of tragedy: Whatever the subject – if Œdipus, and the Plague raging – there must be a love-tale; and the most impassioned persons most continually dissert. Generally, Dryden's heroic plays have these two marks – both disnaturings of tragedy. We conceive in Dryden's age, and in himself as participant, a pampered taste that cannot relish the wholesome simple meats which Nature, "good cateress," provides for her beloved, healthy, naturally-living children. That is to say, a vitiation of taste, by indulged excesses; the wine and high feasting of their own theatre – which really made them unapt for understanding Shakspeare. For in such things men understand by force of delight, and if delight deserts them intelligence does too. The writings of the great creative poets – of Homer, Dante, Chaucer, and the rest – always give you the impression that they possessed nature by observation and sympathy – outward nature and man's nature – that this, as it were, stood in their soul – the great perpetually-present original – from which they drew fancifully varied portraiture. It is there as their standard of reference, when they read other poets. In Dryden, it is not so. You know neither what he draws from, nor to what he refers in those extraordinary heroic tragedies which resemble nothing – no men and no women, that were, are, or shall be. The impossible hero, the impossible heroine, and their extravagant sentiments, afford scope for a strife and a torture of thought, which is an inseparable medley of wit and argumentation; wit reasoning, and logic jesting; a strange confusion of mental actions, with an unfavourable result; for this result is neither TRUTH nor MIRTH; but very CHIMERA – changing colour like the chameleon – shape like the clouds, and substance like the contents of an alchemist's crucible. Wit that to nonsense nearly is allied, if the thin partitions are not often actually broken down. Where you should have the living blood that flows through the living heart – the affections, the passions, and the actions that mould man and his world – you find sporting and rejoicing in their own elastic vigour, their adroitness and buoyancy, and in their wonderful starts and capricious bounds, aimless flights and aerial gambols – the bold, the keen, the nimble, the strenuous faculties, summoned together to compose the masculine, ranging, intrepid, various, piercing, and comprehensive Intellect – long the acknowledged sovereign-master of that high literature, which Milton had now left, and which Pope did not yet occupy.

Dryden dealt in the same incomprehensible way with Milton as with Shakspeare. In that famous falsifying epigram, the poet of Paradise Lost is greater than Homer and Virgil rolled into one; and his name is frequently mentioned with seeming reverence in those off-hand Prefaces. Yet even in such critical passages there is no just approbation of his genius. Thus, in the preface to "The State of Innocence," he says – "The original being undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." This age! One of the greatest, &c.! The age of Charles II.! And what has become of the other great, noble, and sublime, poems which that age has produced? These wavering words were written the year Milton died; and Dennis, or some one else, tells us that, twenty years after, Dryden confessed that he had not then been sensible of half the extent of his excellence. But what, twenty years after, does he say? —

"As for Mr Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his subject is not of an heroic poem, properly so called. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous like that of all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and human persons are but two. But I will not take Mr Rhymer's work out of his hands; he has promised the world a critique on that author, wherein, though he will not allow his poem for heroic, I hope he will grant us that his thoughts are elevated, his words sounding, and that no man has so happily copied the manner of Homer, or so copiously translated his Grecisms, and the Latin elegancies of Virgil. It is true he runs into a flat of thoughts, sometimes for a hundred lines together, but it is when he has got into a track of Scripture. His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser, as Spenser did Chaucer. And though, perhaps, the love of their master may have transported both too far in the frequent use of them, yet, in my opinion, obsolete words may there be laudably revived, when either they are more sounding or more significant than those in practice; and when their obscurity is taken away, by joining other words to them which clear the sense, according to the rule of Horace, for the admission of new words. But, in both cases, a moderation is to be observed in the use of them: for unnecessary coinage, as well as unnecessary revival, runs into affectation; a fault to be avoided on either hand. Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse, though I may excuse him, by the example of Hannibal Caro, and other Italians, who have used it; for whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme, (which I have not now the leisure to examine,) his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it; which is manifest in his 'Juvenilia,' or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer though not a poet."

The general effect of this captious passage is far from pleasant. It leaves us in doubt of the sincerity of Courts, and Towns, and Dryden's admiration of Mr Milton. "His subject is not that of a heroic poem, properly so called." Milton did not call it a heroic poem. But it is an epic poem, and a divine. "The event is not prosperous." Assuredly not. For that matter, neither, to our minds, is that of the Iliad. It seems not a little unreasonable to complain that in Paradise Lost, the "human persons are but two." Dryden "will not take Mr Rhymer's work out of his hands, who has promised us a critique on that author;" and he hopes Mr Rhymer will grant so and so – look pray again at what Dryden hopes Mr Rhymer will grant to Mr Milton. Mr Rhymer had promised to favour the public "with some reflections on that Paradise Lost of Milton, which some are pleased to call a poem." But this promise, says best Sir Walter, "he never filled up the measure of his presumption by attempting to fulfil." Milton running on a flat of thought for a hundred lines together on a track of Scripture! In his poem, by unnecessary coinage of new, and unnecessary revival of old words, running into affectation! Milton not to be justified for his blank verse, no not even by the example of the illustrious and immortal Hannibal Caro! Then he took to it in despair, for rhyme was not his talent! His rhyme forced and constrained in the Hymn on the Nativity – in Lycidas – in L'Allegro – in Il Penseroso!

In the same Essay on Satire – Dryden talks, not very intelligibly, about "the beautiful turns of words and thoughts, which are as requisite in this as in heroic poetry itself;" but with which he confesses himself to have been unacquainted till about twenty years before, when "that noble wit of Scotland," Sir George Mackenzie, asked him why he did not imitate "the turns of Mr Waller and Sir John Denham, of which he repeated many to me." The memory of that "noble wit of Scotland" is far from being honoured – nay, it is execrated by his countrymen – by the common people we mean – and, in the long run, they are no bad judges of merit. He was, we believe, no great shakes as a lawyer, either within or without the bar; and, like many other well-born, weak-minded men, had a taste for elegant literature and vulgar blood. Of his "voluminous works, historical and juridical," we know less than nothing; but his "Essays on several moral subjects," have more than once fallen out of our hands. Sir Walter says, "he was an accomplished scholar, of lively talents, and ready elocution, and very well deserved the appellation of a 'noble wit of Scotland.'" "The Bluidy Mackenyie," reciting to Dryden many "beautiful turns" from Waller and Denham – and Dryden calling the poetasters "those two fathers of our English poetry," in the same page where he is writing of Milton! At Sir George's behest, in Cowley, even in his "Davideis," an heroic poem, he sought in vain for "elegant turns, either on the word or on the thought;" and his search was equally fruitless in the "Paradise Lost" – for, as Milton "endeavours every where to express Homer, whose age had not yet arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty thoughts, which were clothed with admirable Grecisms, and ancient words which he had been digging from the mines of Chaucer and Spenser; and which, with all their rusticity, had somewhat of venerable in them. But I found not there neither, that for which I looked." His search through Spenser and Tasso is more fortunate; Virgil and Ovid are the two principal fountains of them in Latin poetry; and "the French, at this day, are so fond of them, that they judge them to be first beauties; delicate et bien tourné, are the highest commendations which they bestow on somewhat which they think a masterpiece."