The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays

With Goldsmith and Sheridan gayety came back to the English stage. In their prefaces and prologues both of them complain that the comic muse is dying and is being succeeded by “a mawkish drab of spurious breed who deals in sentimentals,” genteel comedy, to wit, who comes from France where comedy has now become so very elevated and sentimental that it has not only banished humor and Molière from the stage, but it has banished all spectators too. Goldsmith laments the disgusting solemnity that had lately infected literature and sneers at the moralizing comedies that deal with the virtues and distresses of private life instead of ridiculing its faults. Joseph Surface in “The School for Scandal” is Sheridan’s portrait of the sentimental, moralizing hypocrite, whose catchword is “the man of sentiment”; and whose habit of uttering lofty moralities is so ingrained that he vents them even when no one is present who can be deceived by them.

Surface: “The man who does not share in the distresses of a brother – even though merited by his own misconduct – deserves – ”

“O Lud,” interrupts Lady Sneerwell, “you are going to be moral, and forget that you are among friends.”

“Egad, that’s true,” rejoins Joseph, “I’ll keep that sentiment till I see Sir Peter.”

“The Critic” has a slap or two at sentimental comedy. A manuscript play has been submitted to Mr. Dangle, who reads this stage direction, “Bursts into tears and exit,” and naturally asks, “What is this, a tragedy?” “No,” explains Mr. Sneer, “that’s a genteel comedy, not a translation – only taken from the French: it is written in a style which they have lately tried to run down; the true sentimental and nothing ridiculous in it from the beginning to the end… The theatre, in proper hands, might certainly be made the school of morality; but now, I am sorry to say it, people seem to go there principally for their entertainment.” Another of these moral comedies is entitled “ ‘The Reformed Housebreaker’ where, by the mere force of humour, housebreaking is put in so ridiculous a light, that if the piece has its proper run.. bolts and bars will be entirely useless by the end of the season.”

Sheridan has often been called the English Beaumarchais. The comedies of Beaumarchais, “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro” were precisely contemporaneous with Sheridan’s, and, like the latter, they were a reaction against sentimentalism, against the so-called comédie larmoyante or tearful comedies of La Chaussée and other French dramatists. With Beaumarchais laughter and mirth returned once more to the French stage. He goes back for a model to Molière, as Sheridan goes back to English Restoration comedy, and particularly to Congreve, whom he resembles in the wit of his dialogue and the vivacity of his character painting, but whom he greatly excels in the invention of plot and situation. Congreve’s plots are intricate and hard to follow, highly improbable and destitute of climaxes. On the other hand, Sheridan is a master of plot. The duel scene in “The Rivals,” the auction scene and the famous screen scene in “The School for Scandal” are three of the most skilfully managed situations in English comedy. Congreve’s best play, “The Way of the World” (1700), was a failure on the stage. But whatever Sheridan’s shortcomings, a want of practical effectiveness, of acting quality, was never one of them. Sheridan revived society drama, what Lamb called the artificial comedy of the seventeenth century. Lydia Languish, with her romantic notions, and Mrs. Malaprop with her “nice derangement of epitaphs” are artificial characters. Bob Acres is for the most part delightfully natural, but his system of referential or sentimental swearing – “Odds blushes and blooms” and the like – is an artificial touch. The weakest feature of “The Rivals” is the underplot, the love affairs of Faulkland and Julia. Faulkland’s particular variety of jealousy is a “humor” of the Ben Jonsonian sort, a sentimental alloy, as Charles Lamb pronounced it, and anyway infinitely tiresome. In modern acting versions this business is usually abridged. As Jefferson played it, Julia’s part was cut out altogether, and Faulkland makes only one appearance (Act II, Scene I), where his presence is necessary for the going on of the main action.

There is one particular in which Congreve and Sheridan sin alike. They make all the characters witty. “Tell me if Congreve’s fools are fools indeed,” wrote Pope. And Sheridan can never resist the temptation of putting clever sayings into the mouths of simpletons. The romantic Miss Languish is nearly as witty as the very unromantic Lady Teazle. I need not quote the good things that Fag and Lucy say, but Thomas the coachman, and the stupid old family servant David say things equally good. It is David, e.g., who, when his master remarks that if he is killed in the duel his honor will follow him to the grave, rejoins, “Now that’s just the place where I could make shift to do without it.” Sir Anthony is witty, Bob Acres himself is witty, and even Mrs. Malaprop – foolish old woman – delivers repartees. Mrs. Malaprop’s verbal blunders, by the way, are a good instance of that artificial high polish so characteristic of Sheridan’s art. There are people in earlier comedies who make ludicrous misapplications of words – Shakespeare’s Dogberry, e.g., or Dame Quickly, but they do it naturally and occasionally. Sheridan reduces these accidents to a system – a science. No one in real life was ever so perseveringly and so brilliantly wrong as Mrs. Malaprop.

Dramatically this is out of character and is, therefore, a fault, though a fault easy to forgive since it results in so much clever talk. It is a fault, as I have said, which Congreve shares with Sheridan, his heir and continuator. Perhaps the lines of character are not cut quite so deep in Sheridan as in Congreve nor has his dialogue the elder dramatist’s condensed, epigrammatic solidity. But on the whole, “The Rivals” and “The School for Scandal” are better plays than Congreve ever wrote.

THE POETRY OF THE CAVALIERS

THE spirit of the seventeenth century Cavaliers has been made familiar to us by historians and romancers, but it did not find very adequate expression in contemporary verse. There are two perfect songs by Lovelace, “To Althea from Prison” and “To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars.” But if we look into collections like Charles Mackay’s “Songs of the Cavaliers,” we are disappointed. These consist mainly of political campaign songs little removed from doggerel, satires by Butler and Cleveland, and rollicking ballad choruses by Alexander Brome, Sir Roger L’Estrange, Sir Richard Fanshawe, who was Prince Rupert’s secretary; or haply by that gallant royalist gentleman, Arthur Lord Capel, executed, though a prisoner of war, after the surrender of Colchester. You may remember Milton’s sonnet “To the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester.” These were the marks of a Cavalier ballad: to abuse the Roundheads, to be convivial and profane, to profess a reckless daring in fight, devotion to the ladies, and loyalty to church and king. The gay courage of the Cavalier contrasted itself with the grim and stubborn valor of the Roundhead. The bitterest drop in the cup of the defeated kingsmen was that they were beaten by their social inferiors, by muckers and religious fanatics who cropped their hair, wore narrow bands instead of lace collars, and droned long prayers through their noses; people like the butcher Harrison and the leather-seller, Praise-God Barebones, and the brewers, cobblers, grocers and like mechanical trades who figured as the preachers in Cromwell’s New Model army. The usual commonplaces of anti-Puritan satire, the alleged greed and hypocrisy of the despised but victorious faction, their ridiculous solemnity, their illiteracy, contentiousness, superstition, and hatred of all liberal arts, are duly set forth in such pieces as “The Anarchie,” “The Geneva Ballad,” and “Hey then, up go we.” The most popular of all these was the famous song, “When the King enjoys his own again,” which Ritson indeed calls – but surely with much exaggeration – the most famous song of any time or country.

And though today we see WhitehallWith cobwebs hung around the wall,Yet Heaven shall make amends for allWhen the King enjoys his own again.

But somehow the finer essence of the Cavalier spirit escapes us in these careless verses. Better are the recorded sayings in prose of many gallant gentlemen in the King’s service. There, for instance, was Sir Edmund Verney, the royal standard bearer who was killed at Edgehill. He was offered his life by a throng of his enemies if he would deliver the standard. He answered that his life was his own, but the standard was his and their sovereign’s and he would not deliver it while he lived. At the outbreak of the war he had said to Hyde: “I have eaten his [the King’s] bread and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him; I choose rather to lose my life – which I am sure to do – to preserve and defend those things which are against my conscience to preserve and defend; for I will deal freely with you: I have no reverence for bishops for whom this quarrel subsists.”

And there was that high-hearted nobleman, the Marquis of Winchester, whose fortress of Basing House, with its garrison of five hundred men and their families, held out for years against the Parliament. It was continuously besieged from July, 1643, to November, 1645, and at one time Sir William Waller attacked it in vain, with a force of seven thousand. At last Cromwell took it by storm, whereupon the Marquis, made prisoner, “broke out and said that if the King had no more ground in England but Basing House, he would adventure as he did, and so maintain it to the uttermost; comforting himself in this disaster that Basing House was called Loyalty.” The sack of this great stronghold yielded over 200,000 pounds, and Clarendon says that on its every windowpane was written with a diamond point “Aimez Loyauté.”

The Cavalier spirit prolonged itself down into the Jacobite songs of the eighteenth century which centre about the two attempts of the Stuarts to regain their crown – in 1715 and in “the Forty-five.”

It was a’ for our rightfu’ KingThat we left fair Scotland’s strand:It was a’ for our rightfu’ KingThat we e’er saw Irish land.He turned his charger as he spake    Beside the river shore:He gave his bridle rein a shake,Cried “Adieu for evermore, my love;    Adieu for evermore.”

The Hanoverians have been good enough constitutional monarchs but without much appeal to the imagination. “I never can think of that German fellow as King of England,” says Harry Warrington in “The Virginians,” who has just been snubbed by George II, the sovereign who hated “boetry and bainting.” The Stuarts were bad kings, but they managed to inspire a passionate loyalty in their adherents, a devotion which went proudly into battle, into exile, and onto the scaffold: which followed them through their misfortunes and survived their final downfall. They were a native, or at least a Scottish dynasty; and Scotland, though upon the whole Presbyterian in religion and Whiggish in politics, was most tenacious of the Jacobite tradition. Consider the loss to British romance if the Stuarts had never reigned and sinned and suffered! Half of the Waverley novels and all the royalist songs, from Lovelace toasting in prison “the sweetness, mercy, majesty, and glories of his King,” down to Burns’s “Lament for Culloden” and the secret healths to “Charlie over the water.” Three centuries divide Chastelard, dying for Mary Stuart, from Walter Scott, paralytic, moribund, standing by the tomb of the Young Pretender in St. Peter’s and murmuring to himself of “Charlie and his men.” Nay, is there not even to-day a White Rose Society which celebrates yearly the birthday of St. Charles, the martyr: some few score gentlemen with their committees, organs, propaganda, still bent on dethroning the Hanoverians and bringing in some remote collateral descendant? thinnest ghost of legitimism, walking in the broad sunlight of the twentieth century, under the nose of crown and parliament, disregarded of all men except, here and there, a writer of humorous paragraphs for the newspapers?

For the passion of loyalty is extinct – extinct as the dodo. It was not patriotism, as we know it; nor was it the personal homage paid to great men, to the Cromwells, Washingtons, Bonapartes, and Bismarcks. It was a loyalty to the king as king, to a symbol, a fetich whom divinity doth hedge. In the political creed of the Stuarts, such homage was a prerogative of the crown, and right royally did they exact it, accepting all sacrifices and repaying them with neglect, ingratitude, and betrayal. Yes, loyalty is obsolete, and the Stuarts were unworthy of it. But no matter, it was a fine old passion.

After all, one of the finest things ever said of Charles I was said by a political opponent, the poet Andrew Marvell, Milton’s assistant in the secretaryship for foreign tongues, when speaking of the King’s dignified behavior upon the scaffold, he wrote: —

He nothing common did or mean,Upon that memorable sceneBut, with his keener eye,The axe’s edge did try;Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite,To vindicate his helpless right,But bowed his comely headDown as upon a bed.

The Cavalier stood for the church as well as for the king, but he was not commonly a deeply religions man. The church poetry of that generation is often sweetly or fervently devout, but it was written mostly by clergymen, like George Herbert or Herrick – a rather worldly parson: now and then by a college recluse, like Crashaw – who became a Roman Catholic priest; or sometimes by a layman like Vaughan – who was a doctor; or Francis Quarles, whose gloomy religious verses have little to distinguish them from Puritan poetry. These poets were royalists but hardly Cavaliers. The real Cavaliers, the courtly and secular poets like Suckling, Lovelace, Cleveland, and the rest, stood for the church for social reasons. It was the church of their class, ancient, conservative, aristocratic. Carlyle, of Scotch Presbyterian antecedents, speaks disrespectfully of the English Church, “with its singular old rubrics and its four surplices at All-hallowtide,” and describes the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 as “decent ceremonialism facing awful, devout Puritanism.” Charles II tried to persuade the Scotch Earl of Lauderdale to become an Episcopalian, assuring him that Presbyterianism was no religion for a gentleman. Says the spirit in Dipsychus: —

The Church of England I belong toAnd think dissenters not far wrong too;They’re vulgar dogs, but for his creedI hold that no man will be d – d.

The Cavalier was the inheritor of the mediaeval knight and the forerunner of the modern gentleman. To the stern Puritan conscience he opposed, as his guiding motive, the knightly sense of honor, a sort of artificial or aristocratic conscience. The Puritan looked upon himself as an instrument of the divine will. He acted as ever in his great taskmaster’s eye: his sword was the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. Hence his sturdy, sublime courage. You cannot lick a Calvinist who knows that God is with him. But honor is not so much a regard for God as for oneself – a finer kind of self-respect. Inferior in momentum to the Puritan’s sense of duty, there is something gallant and chivalrous about it. The Cavalier spirit was not so grave as the knight’s. Though he fought for church and king, there was lacking the vow of knighthood, the religious dedication of oneself to the service of the cross and of one’s feudal suzerain. But you notice how the Cavalier, like the knight, relates his honor to the service of his lady. Lovelace’s famous lines: —

I could not love thee, dear, so much,    Loved I not honour more,

may stand for the Cavalier motto.

Like the knight, the chevalier of the Middle Ages, the seventeenth century Cavalier too, as his name implies, was a horseman. Rupert’s cavalry was the strongest arm of the King’s service. Prince Rupert or Ruprecht, the nephew of the King, was the son of that Elizabeth Stuart, nicknamed the Queen of Hearts, whom Sir Henry Wotton celebrated in his lofty lines “On his Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia,”

You meaner beauties of the nightThat poorly satisfy our eyes,More by your number than your light;You common people of the skies;What are you when the moon shall rise?

The impetuous charges of Rupert’s cavalry won the day at Edgehill and all but won it at Marston Moor. But they were an undisciplined troop and much given to plunder – a German word, by the way, which Prince Rupert introduced into England. Perhaps you have seen the once popular engraving entitled “The Cavalier’s Pets.” A noble staghound is guarding a pair of riding boots, a pair of gauntlets, a pair of cavalry pistols and a wide hat with sweeping plume. The careless Cavalier songs have the air of being composed on horseback and written down on the saddle leather: riding ballads in a very different sense from the old riding ballads of the Scottish Border. Robert Browning has reproduced very exactly the characteristics of the species in his “Cavalier Tunes.” In “Give a Rouse” he presents the Cavalier drinking; in “Boot and Saddle” the Cavalier riding, and in all of them the Cavalier swearing, laughing, and cheering for the King.

Kentish Sir Byng stood for his King,Bidding the crop-headed Parliament swing;And, pressing a troop unable to stoopAnd see the rogues flourish and honest folk droop,Marched them along, fifty-score strong,Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song.God for King Charles! Pym and such carlesTo the Devil that prompts ’em their treasonous parles!Hampden to hell, and his obsequies’ knellServe Hazelrig, Fiennes, and young Harry as well!Hold by the right, you double your might;So, onward to Nottingham, fresh for the fight.

Indeed many modern poets, such as Burns, Scott, Browning, George Walter Thornbury, and Aytoun in his “Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers,” have caught and prolonged the ancient note, with a literary skill not often vouchsafed to the actual, contemporary singers.

Here, for instance, is a single stanza from Thornbury’s overlong ballad, “The Three Troopers”: —

Into the Devil Tavern three booted troopers strode,From spur to feather spotted and splashedWith the mud of a winter road.In each of their cups they dropped a crustAnd stared at the guests with a frown;Then drew their swords and roared, for a toast,“God send this Crum-well-down!”

The singing and fighting Cavalier was most nobly represented by James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, a hero of romance and a great partisan leader. With a handful of wild Irish and West Highland clansmen, – Gordons, Camerons, McDonalds, – with no artillery, no commissariat, and hardly any cavalry, Montrose defeated the armies of the Covenant, took the towns of Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, and in one brief and brilliant campaign, reconquered Scotland for the King. Nothing more romantic in the history of the Civil War than Montrose’s descent upon Clan Campbell at Inverlochy, rushing down from Ben Nevis in the early morning fogs upon the shores of wild Loch Eil. You may read of this exploit in Walter Scott’s “Legend of Montrose,” as you may read of the great Marquis’s death in Aytoun’s ballad, “The Execution of Montrose.” For his success was short. He could not hold his wild army together: with the coming of harvest the clansmen dispersed to the glens and hills. Montrose escaped to Holland and, after the death of the King, venturing once more into the Highlands, with a commission from Charles II, he was defeated, taken prisoner, sentenced to death in Edinburgh, hanged, drawn, and quartered. His head was fixed on an iron spike on the pinnacle of the tollbooth; one hand set over the gate of Perth and one over the gate of Stirling; one leg over the gate of Aberdeen, the other over the gate of Glasgow. Montrose wrote only a handful of poems, rough, soldierly pieces, – one on the night before his execution, one on learning, at the Hague, of the King’s death. But by far the best and the best known of these are the famous lines of which I will quote a part. You will notice that, under the form of a lover addressing his mistress, it is really the King speaking to his kingdom. You will notice also the fine Celtic boastfulness of the strain and the high-hearted courage of its most familiar passage – the gambler’s courage who stakes his all on a single throw.

My dear and only love, I pray that little world of theeBe governed by no other sway than purest monarchy;For if confusion have a part, which virtuous souls abhor,I’ll hold a synod in my heart and never love thee more.As Alexander I will reign and I will reign alone;My thoughts did ever more disdain a rival on my throne.He either fears his fate too much, or his deserts are small,Who dares not put it to the touch, to gain or lose it all,But if no faithless action stain thy love and constant word,I’ll make thee glorious by my pen and famous by my sword:I’ll serve thee in such noble ways was never heard before:I’ll crown and deck thee all with bays and love thee more and more.

I have dwelt almost exclusively upon the military and political aspect of Cavalier verse. A wider view would include the miscellaneous poetry, and especially the love poetry of Carew, Herrick, Waller, Haberton, Lovelace, Suckling, Cowley, and others, who, if not, strictly speaking, Cavaliers, were royalists. For the only poets in England who took the Parliament’s side were Milton, George Wither, and Andrew Marvell. Of those I have named, some had much to do with public affairs and others had little. Thomas Carew, the court poet, died before the outbreak of the Civil War. Herrick was a country minister in Devonshire, who was deprived of his parish by Parliament and spent the interregnum in London. Edmund Waller, a member of the House of Commons, intrigued for the king and came near losing his head; but, being a cousin of Oliver Cromwell and very rich, was let off with a heavy fine and went to France. Sir John Suckling, a very brilliant and dissipated court favorite, a very typical Cavalier, had raised a troop of horse for the King in the Bishops’ War: had conspired against Parliament, fled to the continent, and died at Paris by his own hand. Colonel Richard Lovelace fought in the royal armies, was twice imprisoned, spent all his large fortune in the cause and hung about London in great poverty, dying shortly before the Restoration. Cowley was a Cambridge scholar who lost his fellowship and went to France with the exiled court: became secretary to the queen, Henrietta Maria, and carried on correspondence in cipher between her and the captive King.

The love verses of these poets were in many keys: Carew’s polished, courtly, and somewhat artificial; Herrick’s warm, natural, sweet, but richly sensuous rather than passionate; Cowley’s coldly ingenious; Lovelace’s and Haberton’s serious and tender; Suckling’s careless, gay, and “agreeably impudent,” the poetry of gallantry rather than love, with a dash of cynicism: on its way to become the poetry of the Restoration wits.

ABRAHAM COWLEY

COWLEY has been constantly used to point a moral. He is the capital instance, in our literary history, of the instability of fame; or, rather, of the wide variation between contemporary rating and the judgment of posterity. Time has given its ironical answer to the very first line in the first poem of his collection: —

What shall I do to be forever known?

When Cowley died in 1667 and was buried in Westminster Abbey near the tombs of Chaucer and Spenser, he was, in general opinion, the greatest English poet since the latter. “Paradise Lost” appeared in that same year, but at this date Milton’s fame was not comparable with Cowley’s, his junior by ten years. Milton’s miscellaneous poems, first collected in 1645, did not reach a second edition till 1673. Meanwhile Cowley’s works went through eight impressions.

I believe that the only contemporaries who rivaled him in popularity were Herbert and Cleveland, for Waller did not come to his own until after Cowley’s death. Herbert’s “Temple,” posthumously printed in 1634, had already become a religious classic. Masson computes its annual sale at a thousand copies for the first twenty years of its publication. Of Cleveland’s poems eleven editions were issued during his lifetime – and none afterward. Apropos of the author’s arrest at Norwich in 1655 and his magniloquent letter to Cromwell on that occasion, Carlyle caustically remarks: “This is John Cleveland, the famed Cantab scholar, Royalist Judge Advocate, and thrice illustrious satirist and son of the muses, who had gone through eleven editions in those times, far transcending all Miltons and all mortals – and does not now need any twelfth edition that we hear of.” This was true till 1903 when Professor Berdan brought out the first modern and critical, and probably the final, edition of Cleveland. But neither Herbert nor Cleveland enjoyed anything like Cowley’s literary eminence. Cleveland was a sharp political lampooner whose verses had a temporary vogue like “M’Fingal” or “The Gospel according to Benjamin.” A few years later Butler did the same thing ten times as cleverly. Even “Hudibras” has lost much of its point, though its originality, learning, and wit have given it a certain sort of immortality, while Cleveland is utterly extinct. Herbert’s work is, of course, more permanent than Cleveland’s, and he is a truer poet than Cowley, though his appeal is to a smaller public, and he has but a single note.