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The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay. Vol 2

E >> Edinburgh Review >> The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay. Vol 2




"As skilful divers to the bottom fall
Swifter than those who cannot swim at all;
So, in this way of writing without thinking,
Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking."

From this reproach some clever men of the world must be excepted,
and among them Dorset himself. Though by no means great poets,
or even good versifiers, they always wrote with meaning, and
sometimes with wit. Nothing indeed more strongly shows to what a
miserable state literature had fallen, than the immense
superiority which the occasional rhymes, carelessly thrown on
paper by men of this class, possess over the elaborate
productions of almost all the professed authors. The reigning
taste was so bad, that the success of a writer was in inverse
proportion to his labour, and to his desire of excellence. An
exception must be made for Butler, who had as much wit and
learning as Cowley, and who knew, what Cowley never knew, how to
use them. A great command of good homely English distinguishes
him still more from the other writers of the time. As for
Gondibert, those may criticise it who can read it. Imagination
was extinct. Taste was depraved. Poetry, driven from palaces,
colleges, and theatres, had found an asylum in the obscure
dwelling where a Great Man, born out of due season, in disgrace,
penury, pain and blindness, still kept uncontaminated a character
and a genius worthy of a better age.

Everything about Milton is wonderful; but nothing is so wonderful
as that, in an age so unfavourable to poetry, he should have
produced the greatest of modern epic poems. We are not sure that
this is not in some degree to be attributed to his want of sight.
The imagination is notoriously most active when the external
world is shut out. In sleep its illusions are perfect. They
produce all the effect of realities. In darkness its visions are
always more distinct than in the light. Every person who amuses
himself with what is called building castles in the air must have
experienced this. We know artists who, before they attempt to
draw a face from memory, close their eyes, that they may recall a
more perfect image of the features and the expression. We are
therefore inclined to believe that the genius of Milton may have
been preserved from the influence of times so unfavourable to it
by his infirmity. Be this as it may, his works at first enjoyed
a very small share of popularity. To be neglected by his
contemporaries was the penalty which he paid for surpassing them.
His great poem was not generally studied or admired till writers
far inferior to him had, by obsequiously cringing to the public
taste, acquired sufficient favour to reform it.

Of these, Dryden was the most eminent. Amidst the crowd of
authors who, during the earlier years of Charles the Second,
courted notoriety by every species of absurdity and affectation,
he speedily became conspicuous. No man exercised so much
influence on the age. The reason is obvious. On no man did the
age exercise so much influence. He was perhaps the greatest of
those whom we have designated as the critical poets; and his
literary career exhibited, on a reduced scale, the whole history
of the school to which he belonged,--the rudeness and
extravagance of its infancy,--the propriety, the grace, the
dignified good sense, the temperate splendour of its maturity.
His imagination was torpid, till it was awakened by his judgment.
He began with quaint parallels and empty mouthing. He gradually
acquired the energy of the satirist, the gravity of the moralist,
the rapture of the lyric poet. The revolution through which
English literature has been passing, from the time of Cowley to
that of Scott, may be seen in miniature within the compass of his
volumes.

His life divides itself into two parts. There is some debatable
ground on the common frontier; but the line may be drawn with
tolerable accuracy. The year 1678 is that on which we should be
inclined to fix as the date of a great change in his manner.
During the preceding period appeared some of his courtly
panegyrics--his Annus Mirabilis, and most of his plays; indeed,
all his rhyming tragedies. To the subsequent period belong his
best dramas,--All for Love, the Spanish Friar, and Sebastian,--
his satires, his translations, his didactic poems, his fables,
and his odes.

Of the small pieces which were presented to chancellors and
princes it would scarcely be fair to speak. The greatest
advantage which the Fine Arts derive from the extension of
knowledge is, that the patronage of individuals becomes
unnecessary. Some writers still affect to regret the age of
patronage. None but bad writers have reason to regret it. It is
always an age of general ignorance. Where ten thousand readers
are eager for the appearance of a book, a small contribution from
each makes up a splendid remuneration for the author. Where
literature is a luxury, confined to few, each of them must pay
high. If the Empress Catherine, for example, wanted an epic
poem, she must have wholly supported the poet;--just as, in a
remote country village, a man who wants a muttonchop is sometimes
forced to take the whole sheep;--a thing which never happens
where the demand is large. But men who pay largely for the
gratification of their taste, will expect to have it united with
some gratification to their vanity. Flattery is carried to a
shameless extent; and the habit of flattery almost inevitably
introduces a false taste into composition. Its language is made
up of hyperbolical commonplaces,--offensive from their
triteness,--still more offensive from their extravagance. In no
school is the trick of overstepping the modesty of nature so
speedily acquired. The writer, accustomed to find exaggeration
acceptable and necessary on one subject, uses it on all. It is
not strange, therefore, that the early panegyrical verses of
Dryden should be made up of meanness and bombast. They abound
with the conceits which his immediate predecessors had brought
into fashion. But his language and his versification were
already far superior to theirs.

The Annus Mirabilis shows great command of expression, and a fine
ear for heroic rhyme. Here its merits end. Not only has it no
claim to be called poetry, but it seems to be the work of a man
who could never, by any possibility, write poetry. Its affected
similes are the best part of it. Gaudy weeds present a more
encouraging spectacle than utter barrenness. There is scarcely a
single stanza in this long work to which the imagination seems to
have contributed anything. It is produced, not by creation, but
by construction. It is made up, not of pictures, but of
inferences. We will give a single instance, and certainly a
favourable instance,--a quatrain which Johnson has praised.
Dryden is describing the sea-fight with the Dutch--

"Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball;
And now their odours armed against them fly.
Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall,
And some by aromatic splinters die."

The poet should place his readers, as nearly as possible, in the
situation of the sufferers or the spectators. His narration
ought to produce feelings similar to those which would be excited
by the event itself. Is this the case here? Who, in a sea-
fight, ever thought of the price of the china which beats out the
brains of a sailor; or of the odour of the splinter which
shatters his leg? It is not by an act of the imagination, at
once calling up the scene before the interior eye, but by painful
meditation,--by turning the subject round and round,--by tracing
out facts into remote consequences,--that these incongruous
topics are introduced into the description. Homer, it is true,
perpetually uses epithets which are not peculiarly appropriate.
Achilles is the swift-footed, when he is sitting still. Ulysses
is the much-enduring, when he has nothing to endure. Every spear
casts a long shadow, every ox has crooked horns, and every woman
a high bosom, though these particulars may be quite beside the
purpose. In our old ballads a similar practice prevails. The
gold is always red, and the ladies always gay, though nothing
whatever may depend on the hue of the gold, or the temper of the
ladies. But these adjectives are mere customary additions. They
merge in the substantives to which they are attached. If they at
all colour the idea, it is with a tinge so slight as in no
respect to alter the general effect. In the passage which we
have quoted from Dryden the case is very different. "Preciously"
and "aromatic" divert our whole attention to themselves, and
dissolve the image of the battle in a moment. The whole poem
reminds us of Lucan, and of the worst parts of Lucan,--the sea-
fight in the Bay of Marseilles, for example. The description of
the two fleets during the night is perhaps the only passage which
ought to be exempted from this censure. If it was from the Annus
Mirabilis that Milton formed his opinion, when he pronounced
Dryden a good rhymer but no poet, he certainly judged correctly.
But Dryden was, as we have said, one of those writers in whom the
period of imagination does not precede, but follow, the period of
observation and reflection.

His plays, his rhyming plays in particular, are admirable
subjects for those who wish to study the morbid anatomy of the
drama. He was utterly destitute of the power of exhibiting real
human beings. Even in the far inferior talent of composing
characters out of those elements into which the imperfect process
of our reason can resolve them, he was very deficient. His men
are not even good personifications; they are not well-assorted
assemblages of qualities. Now and then, indeed, he seizes a very
coarse and marked distinction, and gives us, not a likeness, but
a strong caricature, in which a single peculiarity is protruded,
and everything else neglected; like the Marquis of Granby at an
inn-door, whom we know by nothing but his baldness; or Wilkes,
who is Wilkes only in his squint. These are the best specimens
of his skill. For most of his pictures seem, like Turkey
carpets, to have been expressly designed not to resemble anything
in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or in the waters
under the earth.

The latter manner he practises most frequently in his tragedies,
the former in his comedies. The comic characters are, without
mixture, loathsome and despicable. The men of Etherege and
Vanbrugh are bad enough. Those of Smollett are perhaps worse.
But they do not approach to the Celadons, the Wildbloods, the
Woodalls, and the Rhodophils of Dryden. The vices of these last
are set off by a certain fierce hard impudence, to which we know
nothing comparable. Their love is the appetite of beasts; their
friendship the confederacy of knaves. The ladies seem to have
been expressly created to form helps meet for such gentlemen. In
deceiving and insulting their old fathers they do not perhaps
exceed the license which, by immemorial prescription, has been
allowed to heroines. But they also cheat at cards, rob strong
boxes, put up their favours to auction, betray their friends,
abuse their rivals in the style of Billingsgate, and invite their
lovers in the language of the Piazza. These, it must be
remembered, are not the valets and waiting-women, the Mascarilles
and Nerines, but the recognised heroes and heroines who appear as
the representatives of good society, and who, at the end of the
fifth act, marry and live very happily ever after. The
sensuality, baseness, and malice of their natures is unredeemed
by any quality of a different description,--by any touch of
kindness,--or even by any honest burst of hearty hatred and
revenge. We are in a world where there is no humanity, no
veracity, no sense of shame,--a world for which any good-natured
man would gladly take in exchange the society of Milton's devils.
But as soon as we enter the regions of Tragedy, we find a great
change. There is no lack of fine sentiment there. Metastasio is
surpassed in his own department. Scuderi is out-scuderied. We
are introduced to people whose proceedings we can trace to no
motive,--of whose feelings we can form no more idea than of a
sixth sense. We have left a race of creatures, whose love is as
delicate and affectionate as the passion which an alderman feels
for a turtle. We find ourselves among beings, whose love is a
purely disinterested emotion,--a loyalty extending to passive
obedience,--a religion, like that of the Quietists, unsupported
by any sanction of hope or fear. We see nothing but despotism
without power, and sacrifices without compensation.

We will give a few instances. In Aurengzebe, Arimant, governor
of Agra, falls in love with his prisoner Indamora. She rejects
his suit with scorn; but assures him that she shall make great
use of her power over him. He threatens to be angry. She
answers, very coolly:

"Do not: your anger, like your love, is vain:
Whene'er I please, you must be pleased again.
Knowing what power I have your will to bend,
I'll use it; for I need just such a friend."

This is no idle menace. She soon brings a letter addressed to
his rival,--orders him to read it,--asks him whether he thinks it
sufficiently tender,--and finally commands him to carry it
himself. Such tyranny as this, it may be thought, would justify
resistance. Arimant does indeed venture to remonstrate:--

"This fatal paper rather let me tear,
Than, like Bellerophon, my sentence bear."

The answer of the lady is incomparable:--

"You may; but 'twill not be your best advice;
'Twill only give me pains of writing twice.
You know you must obey me, soon or late.
Why should you vainly struggle with your fate?"

Poor Arimant seems to be of the same opinion. He mutters
something about fate and free-will, and walks off with the
billet-doux.

In the Indian Emperor, Montezuma presents Almeria with a garland
as a token of his love, and offers to make her his queen. She
replies:--

"I take this garland, not as given by you;
But as my merit's and my beauty's due;
As for the crown which you, my slave, possess,
To share it with you would but make me less."

In return for such proofs of tenderness as these, her admirer
consents to murder his two sons and a benefactor to whom he feels
the warmest gratitude. Lyndaraxa, in the Conquest of Granada,
assumes the same lofty tone with Abdelmelech. He complains that
she smiles upon his rival.

"Lynd. And when did I my power so far resign,
That you should regulate each look of mine?

Abdel. Then, when you gave your love, you gave that power.

Lynd. 'Twas during pleasure--'tis revoked this hour.

Abdel. I'll hate you, and this visit is my last.

Lynd. Do, if you can: you know I hold you fast."

That these passages violate all historical propriety, that
sentiments to which nothing similar was ever even affected except
by the cavaliers of Europe, are transferred to Mexico and Agra,
is a light accusation. We have no objection to a conventional
world, an Illyrian puritan, or a Bohemian seaport. While the
faces are good, we care little about the back-ground. Sir Joshua
Reynolds says that the curtains and hangings in an historical
painting ought to be, not velvet or cotton, but merely drapery.
The same principle should be applied to poetry and romance. The
truth of character is the first object; the truth of place and
time is to be considered only in the second place. Puff himself
could tell the actor to turn out his toes, and remind him that
Keeper Hatton was a great dancer. We wish that, in our own time,
a writer of a very different order from Puff had not too often
forgotten human nature in the niceties of upholstery, millinery,
and cookery.

We blame Dryden, not because the persons of his dramas are not
Moors or Americans, but because they are not men and women;--not
because love, such as he represents it, could not exist in a
harem or in a wigwam, but because it could not exist anywhere.
As is the love of his heroes, such are all their other emotions.
All their qualities, their courage, their generosity, their
pride, are on the same colossal scale. Justice and prudence are
virtues which can exist only in a moderate degree, and which
change their nature and their name if pushed to excess. Of
justice and prudence, therefore, Dryden leaves his favourites
destitute. He did not care to give them what he could not give
without measure. The tyrants and ruffians are merely the heroes
altered by a few touches, similar to those which transformed the
honest face of Sir Roger de Coverley into the Saracen's head.
Through the grin and frown the original features are still
perceptible.

It is in the tragi-comedies that these absurdities strike us
most. The two races of men, or rather the angels and the
baboons, are there presented to us together. We meet in one
scene with nothing but gross, selfish, unblushing, lying
libertines of both sexes, who, as a punishment, we suppose, for
their depravity, are condemned to talk nothing but prose. But,
as soon as we meet with people who speak in verse, we know that
we are in society which would have enraptured the Cathos and
Madelon of Moliere, in society for which Oroondates would have
too little of the lover, and Clelia too much of the coquette.

As Dryden was unable to render his plays interesting by means of
that which is the peculiar and appropriate excellence of the
drama, it was necessary that he should find some substitute for
it. In his comedies he supplied its place, sometimes by wit, but
more frequently by intrigue, by disguises, mistakes of persons,
dialogues at cross purposes, hair-breadth escapes, perplexing
concealments, and surprising disclosures. He thus succeeded at
least in making these pieces very amusing.

In his tragedies he trusted, and not altogether without reason,
to his diction and his versification. It was on this account, in
all probability, that he so eagerly adopted, and so reluctantly
abandoned, the practice of rhyming in his plays. What is
unnatural appears less unnatural in that species of verse than in
lines which approach more nearly to common conversation; and in
the management of the heroic couplet Dryden has never been
equalled. It is unnecessary to urge any arguments against a
fashion now universally condemned. But it is worthy of
observation, that, though Dryden was deficient in that talent
which blank verse exhibits to the greatest advantage, and was
certainly the best writer of heroic rhyme in our language, yet
the plays which have, from the time of their first appearance,
been considered as his best, are in blank verse. No experiment
can be more decisive.

It must be allowed that the worst even of the rhyming tragedies
contains good description and magnificent rhetoric. But, even
when we forget that they are plays, and, passing by their
dramatic improprieties, consider them with reference to the
language, we are perpetually disgusted by passages which it is
difficult to conceive how any author could have written, or any
audience have tolerated, rants in which the raving violence of
the manner forms a strange contrast with the abject tameness of
the thought. The author laid the whole fault on the audience,
and declared that, when he wrote them, he considered them bad
enough to please. This defence is unworthy of a man of genius,
and after all, is no defence. Otway pleased without rant; and so
might Dryden have done, if he had possessed the powers of Otway.
The fact is, that he had a tendency to bombast, which, though
subsequently corrected by time and thought, was never wholly
removed, and which showed itself in performances not designed to
please the rude mob of the theatre.

Some indulgent critics have represented this failing as an
indication of genius, as the profusion of unlimited wealth, the
wantonness of exuberant vigour. To us it seems to bear a nearer
affinity to the tawdriness of poverty, or the spasms and
convulsions of weakness. Dryden surely had not more imagination
than Homer, Dante, or Milton, who never fall into this vice. The
swelling diction of Aeschylus and Isaiah resembles that of
Almanzor and Maximin no more than the tumidity of a muscle
resembles the tumidity of a boil. The former is symptomatic of
health and strength, the latter of debility and disease. If ever
Shakspeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him
along, but when he is hurrying his imagination along,--when his
mind is for a moment jaded,--when, as was said of Euripides, he
resembles a lion, who excites his own fury by lashing himself
with his tail. What happened to Shakspeare from the occasional
suspension of his powers happened to Dryden from constant
impotence. He, like his confederate Lee, had judgment enough to
appreciate the great poets of the preceding age, but not judgment
enough to shun competition with them. He felt and admired their
wild and daring sublimity. That it belonged to another age than
that in which he lived and required other talents than those
which he possessed, that, in aspiring to emulate it, he was
wasting, in a hopeless attempt, powers which might render him
pre-eminent in a different career, was a lesson which he did not
learn till late. As those knavish enthusiasts, the French
prophets, courted inspiration by mimicking the writhings,
swoonings, and gaspings which they considered as its symptoms, he
attempted, by affected fits of poetical fury, to bring on a real
paroxysm; and, like them, he got nothing but his distortions for
his pains.

Horace very happily compares those who, in his time, imitated
Pindar to the youth who attempted to fly to heaven on waxen
wings, and who experienced so fatal and ignominious a fall. His
own admirable good sense preserved him from this error, and
taught him to cultivate a style in which excellence was within
his reach. Dryden had not the same self-knowledge. He saw that
the greatest poets were never so successful as when they rushed
beyond the ordinary bounds, and that some inexplicable good
fortune preserved them from tripping even when they staggered on
the brink of nonsense. He did not perceive that they were guided
and sustained by a power denied to himself. They wrote from the
dictation of the imagination; and they found a response in the
imaginations of others. He, on the contrary, sat down to work
himself, by reflection and argument, into a deliberate wildness,
a rational frenzy.

In looking over the admirable designs which accompany the Faust,
we have always been much struck by one which represents the
wizard and the tempter riding at full speed. The demon sits on
his furious horse as heedlessly as if he were reposing on a
chair. That he should keep his saddle in such a posture, would
seem impossible to any who did not know that he was secure in the
privileges of a superhuman nature. The attitude of Faust, on the
contrary, is the perfection of horsemanship. Poets of the first
order might safely write as desperately as Mephistopheles rode.
But Dryden, though admitted to communion with higher spirits,
though armed with a portion of their power, and intrusted with
some of their secrets, was of another race. What they might
securely venture to do, it was madness in him to attempt. It was
necessary that taste and critical science should supply his
deficiencies.

We will give a few examples. Nothing can be finer than the
description of Hector at the Grecian wall:--

o d ar esthore phaidimos Ektor,
Nukti thoe atalantos upopia lampe de chalko
Smerdaleo, ton eesto peri chroi doia de chersi
Dour echen ouk an tis min erukakoi antibolesas,
Nosphi theun, ot esalto pulas puri d osse dedeei.--
Autika d oi men teichos uperbasan, oi de kat autas
Poietas esechunto pulas Danaioi d ephobethen
Neas ana glaphuras omados d aliastos etuchthe.

What daring expressions! Yet how significant! How picturesque!
Hector seems to rise up in his strength and fury. The gloom of
night in his frown,--the fire burning in his eyes,--the javelins
and the blazing armour,--the mighty rush through the gates and
down the battlements,--the trampling and the infinite roar of the
multitude,--everything is with us; everything is real.

Dryden has described a very similar event in Maximin, and has
done his best to be sublime, as follows:--

"There with a forest of their darts he strove,
And stood like Capaneus defying Jove;
With his broad sword the boldest beating down,
Till Fate grew pale, lest he should win the town,
And turn'd the iron leaves of its dark book
To make new dooms, or mend what it mistook."

How exquisite is the imagery of the fairy-songs in the Tempest
and the Midsummer Night's Dream; Ariel riding through the
twilight on the bat, or sucking in the bells of flowers with the
bee; or the little bower-women of Titania, driving the spiders
from the couch of the Queen! Dryden truly said, that

"Shakspeare's magic could not copied be;
Within that circle none durst walk but he."

It would have been well if he had not himself dared to step
within the enchanted line, and drawn on himself a fate similar to
that which, according to the old superstition, punished such
presumptuous interference. The following lines are parts of the
song of his fairies:--

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