Lives of the English Poets : Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope

Prior fell to railing at the performer with all the terms of reproach that he could collect, till the Frenchman, ceasing from his song, began to expostulate with him for his harsh censure of a man who was confessedly the ornament of the stage.  “I know all that,” says the ambassador, “mais il chante si haut, que je ne sçaurois vous entendre.”

In a gay French company, where every one sang a little song or stanza, of which the burden was “Bannissons la Mélancolie,” when it came to his turn to sing, after the performance of a young lady that sat next him, he produced these extemporary lines:—

“Mais cette voix, et ces beaux yeux,Font Cupidon trop dangereux,Et je suis triste quand je crieBannissons la Mélancolie.”

Tradition represents him as willing to descend from the dignity of the poet and statesman to the low delights of mean company.  His Chloe probably was sometimes ideal: but the woman with whom he cohabited was a despicable drab of the lowest species.  One of his wenches, perhaps Chloe, while he was absent from his house, stole his plate and ran away, as was related by a woman who had been his servant.  Of his propensity to sordid converse, I have seen an account so seriously ridiculous, that it seems to deserve insertion.

“I have been assured that Prior, after having spent the evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Swift, would go and smoke a pipe and drink a bottle of ale with a common soldier and his wife in Long Acre before he went to bed, not from any remains of the lowness of his original, as one said, but I suppose that his faculties—

“‘—strained to the height,In that celestial colloquy sublime,Dazzled and spent, sunk down, and sought repair.’”

Poor Prior; why was he so strained, and in such want of repair, after a conversation with men not, in the opinion of the world, much wiser than himself?  But such are the conceits of speculatists, who strain their faculties to find in a mine what lies upon the surface.  His opinions, so far as the means of judging are left us, seem to have been right; but his life was, it seems, irregular, negligent, and sensual.

Prior has written with great variety, and his variety has made him popular.  He has tried all styles, from the grotesque to the solemn, and has not so failed in any as to incur derision or disgrace.  His works may be distinctly considered as comprising Tales, Love Verses, Occasional Poems, “Alma,” and “Solomon.”

His tales have obtained general approbation, being written with great familiarity and great sprightliness; the language is easy, but seldom gross, and the numbers smooth, without appearance of care.  Of these tales there are only four: “The Ladle,” which is introduced by a preface, neither necessary nor pleasing, neither grave nor merry.  “Paulo Purganti,” which has likewise a preface, but of more value than the tale.  “Hans Carvel,” not over-decent; and “Protogenes and Apelles,” an old story mingled, by an affectation not disagreeable, with modern images.  “The Young Gentleman in Love” has hardly a just claim to the title of a tale.  I know not whether he be the original author of any tale which he has given us.  The adventure of Hans Carvel has passed through many successions of merry wits, for it is to be found in Ariosto’s “Satires,” and is perhaps yet older.  But the merit of such stories is the art of telling them.

In his amorous effusions he is less happy; for they are not dictated by nature or by passion, and have neither gallantry nor tenderness.  They have the coldness of Cowley, without his wit, the dull exercises of a skilful versifier, resolved at all adventures to write something about Chloe, and trying to be amorous by dint of study.  His fictions, therefore, are mythological.  Venus, after the example of the Greek epigram, asks when she was seen naked and bathing.  Then Cupid is mistaken; then Cupid is disarmed; then he loses his darts to Ganymede; then Jupiter sends him a summons by Mercury.  Then Chloe goes a-hunting with an ivory quiver graceful at her side; Diana mistakes her for one of her nymphs, and Cupid laughs at the blunder.  All this is surely despicable; and even when he tries to act the lover without the help of gods or goddesses, his thoughts are unaffecting or remote.  He talks not “like a man of this world.”

The greatest of all his amorous essays is “Henry and Emma,” a dull and tedious dialogue, which excites neither esteem for the man nor tenderness for the woman.  The example of Emma, who resolves to follow an outlawed murderer wherever fear and guilt shall drive him, deserves no imitation; and the experiment by which Henry tries the lady’s constancy is such as must end either in infamy to her or in disappointment to himself.

His occasional poems necessarily lost part of their value, as their occasions, being less remembered, raised less emotion, Some of them, however, are preserved by their inherent excellence.  The burlesque of Boileau’s ode on Namur has in some parts such airiness and levity as will always procure it readers, even among those who cannot compare it with the original.  The epistle to Boileau is not so happy.  The “Poems to the King,” are now perused only by young students, who read merely that they may learn to write; and of the “Carmen Seculare,” I cannot but suspect that I might praise or censure it by caprice without danger of detection; for who can be supposed to have laboured through it?  Yet the time has been when this neglected work was so popular that it was translated into Latin by no common master.

His poem on the Battle of Ramillies is necessarily tedious by the form of the stanza.  An uniform mass of ten lines thirty-five times repeated, inconsequential and slightly connected, must weary both the ear and the understanding.  His imitation of Spenser, which consists principally in I ween and I weet, without exclusion of later modes of speech, makes his poem neither ancient nor modern.  His mention of Mars and Bellona, and his comparison of Marlborough to the eagle that bears the thunder of Jupiter, are all puerile and unaffecting; and yet more despicable is the long tale told by Louis in his despair of Brute and Troynovante, and the teeth of Cadmus, with his similes of the raven and eagle and wolf and lion.  By the help of such easy fictions and vulgar topics, without acquaintance with life, and without knowledge of art or nature, a poem of any length, cold and lifeless like this, may be easily written on any subject.

In his epilogues to Phædra and to Lucius he is very happily facetious; but in the prologue before the queen the pedant has found his way with Minerva, Perseus, and Andromeda.

His epigrams and lighter pieces are, like those of others, sometimes elegant, sometimes trifling, and sometimes dull; among the best are the “Chamelion” and the epitaph on John and Joan.

Scarcely any one of our poets has written so much and translated so little: the version of Callimachus is sufficiently licentious; the paraphrase on St. Paul’s Exhortation to Charity is eminently beautiful.

“Alma” is written in professed imitation of “Hudibras,” and has at least one accidental resemblance: “Hudibras” wants a plan because it is left imperfect; “Alma” is imperfect because it seems never to have had a plan.  Prior appears not to have proposed to himself any drift or design, but to have written the casual dictates of the present moment.

What Horace said when he imitated Lucilius, might be said of Butler by Prior; his numbers were not smooth nor neat.  Prior excelled him in versification; but he was, like Horace, inventore minor; he had not Butler’s exuberance of matter and variety of illustration.  The spangles of wit which he could afford he knew how to polish; but he wanted the bullion of his master.  Butler pours out a negligent profusion, certain of the weight, but careless of the stamp.  Prior has comparatively little, but with that little he makes a fine show.  “Alma” has many admirers, and was the only piece among Prior’s works of which Pope said that he should wish to be the author.

“Solomon” is the work to which he entrusted the protection of his name, and which he expected succeeding ages to regard with veneration.  His affection was natural; it had undoubtedly been written with great labour; and who is willing to think that he has been labouring in vain?  He had infused into it much knowledge and much thought; had often polished it to elegance, often dignified it with splendour, and sometimes heightened it to sublimity: he perceived in it many excellences, and did not discover that it wanted that without which all others are of small avail—the power of engaging attention and alluring curiosity.

Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults; negligence or errors are single and local, but tediousness pervades the whole; other faults are censured and forgotten, but the power of tediousness propagates itself.  He that is weary the first hour is more weary the second, as bodies forced into motion, contrary to their tendency, pass more and more slowly through every successive interval of space.  Unhappily this pernicious failure is that which an author is least able to discover.  We are seldom tiresome to ourselves; and the act of composition fills and delights the mind with change of language and succession of images.  Every couplet, when produced, is new, and novelty is the great source of pleasure.  Perhaps no man ever thought a line superfluous when he first wrote it, or contracted his work till his ebullitions of invention had subsided.  And even if he should control his desire of immediate renown, and keep his work nine years unpublished, he will be still the author, and still in danger of deceiving himself: and if he consults his friends he will probably find men who have more kindness than judgment, or more fear to offend than desire to instruct.  The tediousness of this poem proceeds not from the uniformity of the subject, for it is sufficiently diversified, but from the continued tenor of the narration; in which Solomon relates the successive vicissitudes of his own mind without the intervention of any other speaker or the mention of any other agent, unless it be Abra; the reader is only to learn what he thought, and to be told that he thought wrong.  The event of every experiment is foreseen, and therefore the process is not much regarded.  Yet the work is far from deserving to be neglected.  He that shall peruse it will be able to mark many passages to which he may recur for instruction or delight; many from which the poet may learn to write and the philosopher to reason.

If Prior’s poetry be generally considered, his praise will be that of correctness and industry, rather than of compass of comprehension or activity of fancy.  He never made any effort of invention: his greater pieces are only tissues of common thoughts; and his smaller, which consist of light images or single conceits, are not always his own.  I have traced him among the French epigrammatists, and have been informed that he poached for prey among obscure authors.  The “Thief and Cordelier” is, I suppose, generally considered as an original production, with how much justice this epigram may tell, which was written by Georgius Sabinus, a poet now little known or read, though once the friend of Luther and Melancthon:—

“De Sacerdote Furem consolante“Quidam sacrificus furem comitatus euntem   Huc ubi dat sontes carnificina neci.Ne sis mœstus, ait; summi conviva Tonantis   Jam cum coelitibus (si modo credis) eris.Ille gemens, si vera mihi solatia præbes,   Hospes apud superos sis meus oro, refert.Sacrificus contra; mihi non convivia fas est   Ducere, jejunas hac edo luce nihil.”

What he has valuable he owes to his diligence and his judgment.  His diligence has justly placed him amongst the most correct of the English poets; and he was one of the first that resolutely endeavoured at correctness.  He never sacrifices accuracy to haste, nor indulges himself in contemptuous negligence, or impatient idleness; he has no careless lines, or entangled sentiments; his words are nicely selected, and his thoughts fully expanded.  If this part of his character suffers an abatement, it must be from the disproportion of his rhymes, which have not always sufficient consonance, and from the admission of broken lines into his “Solomon;” but perhaps he thought, like Cowley, that hemistichs ought to be admitted into heroic poetry.

He had apparently such rectitude of judgment as secured him from everything that approached to the ridiculous or absurd; but as law operates in civil agency, not to the excitement of virtue, but the repression of wickedness, so judgment in the operations of intellect can hinder faults, but not produce excellence.  Prior is never low, nor very often sublime.  It is said by Longinus of Euripides, that he forces himself sometimes into grandeur by violence of effort, as the lion kindles his fury by the lashes of his own tail.  Whatever Prior obtains above mediocrity seems the effort of struggle and of toil.  He has many vigorous, but few happy lines; he has everything by purchase, and nothing by gift; he had no nightly visitations of the Muse, no infusions of sentiment or felicities of fancy.  His diction, however, is more his own than of any among the successors of Dryden; he borrows no lucky turns, or commodious modes of language, from his predecessors.  His phrases are original, but they are sometimes harsh; as he inherited no elegances, none has he bequeathed.  His expression has every mark of laborious study, the line seldom seems to have been formed at once; the words did not come till they were called, and were then put by constraint into their places, where they do their duty, but do it sullenly.  In his greater compositions there may be found more rigid stateliness than graceful dignity.

Of versification he was not negligent.  What he received from Dryden he did not lose; neither did he increase the difficulty of writing by unnecessary severity, but uses triplets and alexandrines without scruple.  In his preface to “Solomon” he proposes some improvements by extending the sense from one couplet to another with variety of pauses.  This he has attempted, but without success; his interrupted lines are unpleasing, and his sense, as less distinct, is less striking.  He has altered the stanza of Spenser as a house is altered by building another in its place of a different form.  With how little resemblance he has formed his new stanza to that of his master these specimens will show:—

SPENSER   “She flying fast from Heaven’s fated face,And from the world that her discovered wide,Fled to the wasteful wilderness space,From living eyes her open shame to hide,And lurked in rocks and caves long unespied.But that fair crew of knights, and Una fair,Did in that castle afterwards abide,To rest themselves, and weary powers repair,Where store they found of all that dainty was and rare?”PRIOR   “To the close rock the frightened raven flies,Soon as the rising eagle cuts the air;The shaggy wolf unseen and trembling lies,When the hoarse roar proclaims the lion near.Ill-starred did we our forts and lines forsake,To dare our British foes to open fight:Our conquest we by stratagem should make;Our triumph had been founded in our flight.’Tis ours by craft and by surprise to gain;’Tis theirs to meet in arms, and battle in the plain.”

By this new structure of his lines he has avoided difficulties; nor am I sure that he has lost any of the power of pleasing, but he no longer imitates Spencer.  Some of his poems are written without regularity of measures; for, when he commenced poet, he had not recovered from our Pindaric infatuation; but he probably lived to be convinced that the essence of verse is order and consonance.  His numbers are such as mere diligence may attain; they seldom offend the ear, and seldom soothe it; they commonly want airiness, lightness, and facility.  What is smooth is not soft.  His verses always roll, but they seldom flow.

A survey of the life and writings of Prior may exemplify a sentence which he doubtless understood well when he read Horace at his uncle’s, “The vessel long retains the scent which it first receives.”  In his private relaxation he revived the tavern, and in his amorous pedantry he exhibited the college.  But on higher occasions and nobler subjects, when habit was overpowered by the necessity of reflection, he wanted not wisdom as a statesman, or elegance as a poet.

CONGREVE

William Congreve descended from a family in Staffordshire of so great antiquity, that it claims a place among the few that extend their hue beyond the Norman Conquest, and was the son of William Congreve, second son of Richard Congreve, of Congreve and Stratton.  He visited, once at least, the residence of his ancestors; and, I believe, more places than one are still shown in groves and gardens, where he is related to have written his Old Bachelor.

Neither the time nor place of his birth is certainly known.  If the inscription upon his monument be true, he was born in 1672.  For the place, it was said by himself that he owed his nativity to England, and by everybody else that he was born in Ireland.  Southern mentioned him with sharp censure as a man that meanly disowned his native country.  The biographers assigned his nativity to Bardsa, near Leeds, in Yorkshire, from the account given by himself, as they suppose, to Jacob.  To doubt whether a man of eminence has told the truth about his own birth is, in appearance, to be very deficient in candour; yet nobody can live long without knowing that falsehoods of convenience or vanity, falsehoods from which no evil immediately visible ensues, except the general degradation of human testimony, are very lightly uttered, and once uttered are sullenly supported.  Boileau, who desired to be thought a rigorous and steady moralist, having told a pretty lie to Louis XIV., continued it afterwards by false dates; thinking himself obliged in honour, says his admirer, to maintain what, when he said it, was so well received.  [Congreve was baptised at Bardsey, February 10, 1670.]

Wherever Congreve was born, he was educated first at Kilkenny, and afterwards at Dublin, his father having some military employment that stationed him in Ireland; but after having passed through the usual preparatory studies, as may be reasonably supposed, with great celerity and success, his father thought it proper to assign him a profession, by which something might be gotten, and about the time of the Revolution sent him, at the age of sixteen, to study law in the Middle Temple, where he lived for several years, but with very little attention to statutes or reports.  His disposition to become an author appeared very early, as he very early felt that force of imagination, and possessed that copiousness of sentiment, by which intellectual pleasure can be given.  His first performance was a novel called “Incognita; or, Love and Duty Reconciled;” it is praised by the biographers, who quote some part of the preface, that is, indeed, for such a time of life, uncommonly judicious.  I would rather praise it than read it.

His first dramatic labour was The Old Bachelor, of which he says, in his defence against Collier, “That comedy was written, as several know, some years before it was acted.  When I wrote it I had little thoughts of the stage; but did it to amuse myself in a slow recovery from a fit of sickness.  Afterwards, through my indiscretion it was seen, and in some little time more it was acted; and I, through the remainder of my indiscretion suffered myself to be drawn into the prosecution of a difficult and thankless study, and to be involved in a perpetual war with knaves and fools.”

There seems to be a strange affectation in authors of appearing to have done everything by chance.  The Old Bachelor was written for amusement in the languor of convalescence.  Yet it is apparently composed with great elaborateness of dialogue, and incessant ambition of wit.  The age of the writer considered, it is indeed a very wonderful performance; for, whenever written, it was acted (1693) when he was not more than twenty-one years old; and was then recommended by Mr. Dryden, Mr. Southern, and Mr. Maynwaring.  Dryden said that he never had seen such a first play; but they found it deficient in some things necessary to the success of its exhibition, and by their greater experience fitted it for the stage.  Southern used to relate of one comedy, probably of this, that when Congreve read it to the players he pronounced it so wretchedly, that they had almost rejected it; but they were afterwards so well persuaded of its excellence that, for half a year before it was acted, the manager allowed its author the privilege of the house.

Few plays have ever been so beneficial to the writer, for it procured him the patronage of Halifax, who immediately made him one of the commissioners for licensing coaches, and soon after gave him a place in the Pipe-office, and another in the Customs, of six hundred pounds a year.  Congreve’s conversation must surely have been at least equally pleasing with his writings.

Such a comedy, written at such an age, requires some consideration.  As the lighter species of dramatic poetry professes the imitation of common life, of real manners, and daily incidents, it apparently presupposes a familiar knowledge of many characters, and exact observation of the passing world; the difficulty, therefore, is to conceive how this knowledge can be obtained by a boy.

But if The Old Bachelor be more nearly examined, it will be found to be one of those comedies which may be made by a mind vigorous and acute, and furnished with comic characters by the perusal of other poets, without much actual commerce with mankind.  The dialogue is one constant reciprocation of conceits or clash of wit, in which nothing flows necessarily from the occasion, or is dictated by nature.  The characters, both of men and women, are either fictitious and artificial, as those of Heartwell and the ladies, or easy and common, as Wittol, a tame idiot; Bluff, a swaggering coward; and Fondlewife, a jealous Puritan; and the catastrophe arises from a mistake, not very probably produced, by marrying a woman in a mask.  Yet this gay comedy, when all these deductions are made, will still remain the work of very powerful and fertile faculties; the dialogue is quick and sparkling, the incidents such as seize the attention, and the wit so exuberant that it “o’er-informs its tenement.”

Next year he gave another specimen of his abilities in The Double Dealer, which was not received with equal kindness.  He writes to his patron the Lord Halifax a dedication, in which he endeavours to reconcile the reader to that which found few friends among the audience.  These apologies are always useless: de gestibus non est disputandem.  Men may be convinced, but they cannot be pleased, against their will.  But though taste is obstinate, it is very variable, and time often prevails when arguments have failed.  Queen Mary conferred upon both those plays the honour of her presence; and when she died soon after, Congreve testified his gratitude by a despicable effusion of elegiac pastoral, a composition in which all is unnatural and yet nothing is new.

In another year (1695) his prolific pen produced Love for Love, a comedy of nearer alliance to life, and exhibiting more real manners, than either of the former.  The character of Foresight was then common.  Dryden calculated nativities; both Cromwell and King William had their lucky days; and Shaftesbury himself, though he had no religion, was said to regard predictions.  The Sailor is not accounted very natural, but he is very pleasant.  With this play was opened the New Theatre, under the direction of Betterton, the tragedian, where he exhibited two years afterwards (1687) The Mourning Bride, a tragedy, so written as to show him sufficiently qualified for either kind of dramatic poetry.  In this play, of which, when he afterwards revised it, he reduced the versification to greater regularity; there is more bustle than sentiment; the plot is busy and intricate, and the events take hold on the attention; but, except a very few passages, we are rather amused with noise and perplexed with stratagem, than entertained with any true delineation of natural characters.  This, however, was received with more benevolence than any other of his works, and still continues to be acted and applauded.

But whatever objections may be made either to his comic or tragic excellence, they are lost at once in the blaze of admiration, when it is remembered that he had produced these four plays before he had passed his twenty-fifth year, before other men, even such as are some time to shine in eminence, have passed their probation of literature, or presume to hope for any other notice than such as is bestowed on diligence and inquiry.  Among all the efforts of early genius, which literary history records, I doubt whether any one can be produced that more surpasses the common limits of nature than the plays of Congreve.