Think how these patches of colour would contrast with the sober design of French dissertation. Here lovers lay siege with metaphors; there a wooer, in order to magnify the beauties of his mistress, says that 'bloody hearts lie panting in her hand.' In every page harsh or vulgar words spoil the regularity of a noble style. Ponderous logic is broadly displayed in the speeches of princesses. "Two ifs,' says Lyndaraxa, 'scarce make one possibility." Dryden sets his college cap on the heads of these poor women. Neither he nor his characters are well brought up; they have taken from the French but the outer garb of the bar and the schools; they have left behind symmetrical eloquence, measured diction, elegance and delicacy. A while before, the licentious coarseness of the Restoration pierced the mask of the fine sentiments with which it was covered; now the rude English imagination breaks the oratorical mould in which it tried to enclose itself. Let us turn the picture. Dryden would keep the foundation of the old English drama, and retains the abundance of events, the variety of plot, the surprise of accident, and the physical representation of bloody or violent action. He kills as many people as Shakspeare. Unfortunately, all poets are not justified in killing. When they take their spectators among murders and sudden accidents, they ought to have a hundred hidden preparations. Fancy a sort of rapture and romantic folly, a most daring style, eccentric and poetical, songs, pictures, reveries spoken aloud, frank scorn of all verisimilitude, a mixture of tenderness, philosophy, and mockery, all the retiring charms of varied feelings, all the whims of a buoyant fancy; the truth of events matters little. No one before Cymbeline or As you Like it was a politician or a historian; no one took these military processions, these accessions of princes, seriously; the spectators were present at dissolving views. They did not demand that things should proceed after the laws of nature; on the contrary, they willingly did require that they should proceed against the laws of nature. The irrationality is the charm. That new world must be all imagination; if it was only so by halves, no one would care to rise to it. This is why we do not rise to Dryden's. A queen dethroned, then suddenly set up again; a tyrant who finds his lost son, is deceived, adopts a girl in his place; a young prince led to punishment, who snatches the sword of a guard, and recovers his crown: such are the romances which constitute the Maiden Queen and the Marriage à la Mode. We can imagine what a display classical dissertations make in this medley; solid reason beats down imagination, stroke after stroke, to the ground. We cannot tell if the matter be a true portrait or a fancy painting; we remain suspended between truth and fancy; we should like either to get up to 1 The first part of Almanzor and Almahide, iv. 2. 1. This same Lyndaraxa says also to Abdalla (4. 2), 'Poor women's thoughts are all extempore, and logical, and coarse;' in Act 2. 1, to the same lover, who entreats her to make him 'happy,' 'If I make you so, you shall pay my price.' heaven or down to earth, and we jump down as quick as possible from the clumsy scaffolding where the poet would perch us. On the other hand, when Shakspeare wishes to impress a doctrine, not raise a dream, he disposes us to it beforehand, but after another fashion. We naturally remain in doubt before a cruel action: we divine that the red irons which are about to put out the eyes of little Arthur are painted sticks, and that the six rascals who besiege Rome, are supernumeraries hired at a shilling a night. To conquer this mistrust we must employ the most natural style, circumstantial and rude imitation of the manners of the guardroom and of the alehouse; I could only believe in Jack Cade's sedition on hearing the dirty words of bestial lewdness and mobbish stupidity. You must let me have the jests, the coarse laughter, drunkenness, the manners of butchers and tanners, to make me imagine a mob or an election. So in murders, let me feel the fire of bubbling passion, the accumulation of despair or hate which have unchained the will and nerved the hand. When the unchecked words, the fits of rage, the convulsive ejaculations of exasperated desire, have brought me in contact with all the links of the inward necessity which has moulded the man and guided the crime, I shall no longer think whether the knife is bloody, because I shall feel with inner trembling the passion which has handled it. Must I verify the death of Shakspeare's Cleopatra? The strange laugh that bursts from her when the basket of saps is brought, the sudden tension of nerves, the flow of feverish words, the fitful gaiety, the coarse language, the torrent of ideas with which she overflows, have already made me sound all the depths of suicide,' and I have foreseen it from the beginning. This madness of an imagination, fired by climate and despotic power; these woman's, queen's, prostitute's nerves; this marvellous self-abandonment to all the raptures of invention and desire these cries, tears, foam on the lips, tempest of insults, actions, 1'He words me, girls; he words me, that I should not Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shalt be shown In Rome, as well as I: mechanic slaves, With greasy aprons, rules and hammers, shall Saucy lictors Will catch at us, like strumpets; and scald rhymers Ballad us out o' tune; the quick comedians Extemporally will stage us, and present Our Alexandrian revels; Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I' the posture of a whore. . . . Husband, I come : Now to that name my courage prove my title! emotions; this promptitude to murder, announce the rage with which she would rush against the least obstacle and be dashed to pieces. What does Dryden effect in this matter with his written phrases? What of the maid, speaking in the author's words, who bids her halfmad mistress 'call reason to assist you?' What of such a Cleopatra as his, designed after Lady Castlemaine,1 skilled in artifices and whimpering, voluptuous and a coquette, with neither the nobleness of virtue nor the greatness of crime: 'Nature meant me A wife; a silly, harmless, household dove, Nay, certainly, or at least this turtle-dove would not have tamed or kept an Antony; a woman without any prejudices alone could do it, by the superiority of boldness and the fire of genius. I can see already from the title of the piece why Dryden has softened Shakspeare: All for Love; or, the World well Lost. What a wretchedness, to reduce such events to a pastoral, to excuse Antony, to praise Charles II. indirectly, to bleat as in a sheepfold! And such was the taste of his contemporaries. When Dryden wrote the Tempest after Shakspeare, and the State of Innocence after Milton, he again spoiled the ideas of his masters; he turned Eve and Miranda into courtesans; he extinguished everywhere, under conventionalism and indecencies, the frankness, severity, delicacy, and charm of the original invention. By his side, Settle, Shadwell, Sir Robert Howard did worse. The Empress of Morocco, by Settle, was so admired, that the gentlemen and ladies of the court learned it by heart, to play at Whitehall before the king. And this was not a passing 3 I give to baser life. So; have you done? Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?'-Shakspeare's Antony and Cleopatra, 5. 2. These two last lines, referring to the asp, are sublime as the joke of a courtesan and an artist. 1'Come to me, come, my soldier, to my arms! With broken murmurs, and with amorous sighs, I'll say, you were unkind, and punish you, And mark you red with many an eager kiss.'—All for Love, v. 3. 1. All for Love, 4. 1. 3 Dryden's Miranda says, in the Tempest (2. 2): 'And if I can but escape with life, I had rather be in pain nine months, as my father threatened, than lose my longing.' Miranda has a sister; they quarrel, are jealous of each other, and so See also in The State of Innocence, 3. 1, the description which Eve gives of her happiness, and the ideas which her confidences suggest to Satan. on. VOL. II. B In vain poets fancy; although modified, the taste was to endure. rejected a part of the French alloy wherewith they had mixed their native metal; in vain they returned to the old unrhymed verses of Jonson and Shakspeare; in vain Dryden, in the parts of Antony, Ventidius, Octavia, Don Sebastian, and Dorax, recovered a portion of the old naturalness and energy; in vain Otway, who had real dramatic talent, Lee, or Southern attained a true or touching accent, so that once, in Venice Preserved, it was thought that the drama would be regenerated. The drama was dead, and tragedy could not replace it; or rather each one died by the other; and their union, which robbed them of strength in Dryden's time, enervated them also in the time of his successors. Literary style blunted dramatic truth; dramatic truth marred literary style; the work was neither sufficiently vivid nor sufficiently well written the author was too little of a poet or of an orator; he had neither Shakspeare's fire of imagination nor Racine's polish and art.1 He strayed on the boundaries of two dramas, and suited neither the half-barbarous men of art nor the well-polished men of the court. Such indeed was the audience, hesitating between two forms of thought, fed by two opposite civilisations. They had no longer the freshness of sense, the depth of impression, the bold originality and poetic folly of the cavaliers and adventurers of the Renaissance; nor will they ever acquire the aptness of speech, sweetness of manners, courtly habits, and cultivation of sentiment and thought which adorned the court of Louis XIV. They are quitting the age of solitary imagination and invention, which suits their race, for the age of reasoning and conversation, which does not suit their race: they lose their own merits, and do not acquire the merits of others. They were meagre poets and ill-bred courtiers, having lost the art of imagination and of good manners, at times dull or brutal, at times emphatic or stiff. For the production of fine poetry, race and age must concur. This race, diverging from its own age, and fettered at the outset by foreign imitation, formed its classical literature but slowly; it will only attain it after transforming its religious and political condition: the age will be that of English reason. Dryden inaugurates it by his other works, and the writers who appear in the reign of Queen Anne will give it its completion, its authority, and its splendour. V. But let us pause a moment longer to inquire whether, amid so many abortive and distorted branches, the old theatrical stock, abandoned by chance to itself, will not produce at some point a sound and living shoot. When a man like Dryden, so gifted, so well trained and experienced, works with a will, there is hope that he will some time succeed; and once, in part at least, Dryden did succeed. It would be treating him 1 This impotence reminds one of Casimir Delavigne, unjustly to be always comparing him with Shakspeare; but even on Shakspeare's ground, with the same materials, it is possible to create a fine work; only the reader must forget for a while the great inventor, the inexhaustible creator of vehement and original souls, and to consider the imitator on his own merits, without forcing an overwhelming comparison. There is vigour and art in this tragedy of Dryden, All for Love. 'He has informed us, that this was the only play written to please himself." And he had really composed it learnedly, according to history and logic. And what is better still, he wrote it in a manly style. In the preface he says: "The fabric of the play is regular enough, as to the inferior parts of it; and the unities of time, place, and action, more exactly observed, than perhaps the English theatre requires. Particularly, the action is so much one, that it is the only of the kind without episode, or underplot; every scene in the tragedy conducing to the main design, and every act concluding with a turn of it.' He did more; he abandoned the French ornaments, and returned to national tradition: 'In my style I have professed to imitate the divine Shakspeare; which that I might perform more freely, I have disincumbered myself from rhyme. . . . Yet, I hope, I may affirm, and without vanity, that, by imitating him, I have excelled myself throughout the play; and particularly, that I prefer the scene betwixt Antony and Ventidius in the first act, to anything which I have written in this kind.' Dryden was right; if Cleopatra is weak, if this feebleness of conception takes away the interest and mars the general effect, if the new rhetoric and the old emphasis at times suspend the emotion and destroy the likelihood, yet on the whole the drama stands erect, and what is more, moves on. The poet is skilful; he has planned, he knows how to construct a scene, to represent the internal struggle by which two passions contend for a human heart. We perceive the tragical vicissitude of the strife, the progress of a sentiment, the overthrow of obstacles, the slow growth of desire or wrath, to the very instant when the resolution, rising up of itself or seduced from without, rushes suddenly on one side. There are natural words; the poet thinks and writes too genuinely not to discover them at need. There are manly characters: he himself is a man; and beneath his courtier's pliability, his affectations as a fashionable poet, he has retained his stern and energetic character. Except for one scene of recrimination, his Octavia is a Roman matron; and when, even in Alexandria, in Cleopatra's palace, she comes to look for Antony, she does it with a simplicity and nobility, not to be surpassed. 'Cæsar's sister,' cries out Antony, accosting her. Octavia answers: 'That's unkind. Had I been nothing more than Cæsar's sister, 1 See the introductory notice, by Sir Walter Scott, of All for Love, v. 290. |