Part 3 (1/2)

Our next play is a worse one, but much more pretentious. It is the _Usurper_, of 1668, the first of four dramas published by the Hon.

Edward Howard, one of Dryden's aristocratic brothers-in-law. Edward Howard is memorable for a couplet constantly quoted from his epic poem of _The British Princes_:

_A vest as admired Vortiger had on, Which from a naked Pict his grandsire won_.

Poor Howard has received the laughter of generations for representing Vortiger's grandsire as thus having stripped one who was bare already.

But this is the wickedness of some ancient wag, perhaps of Dryden himself, who loved to laugh at his brother-in-law. At all events, the first (and, I suppose, only) edition of _The British Princes_ is before me at this moment, and the second of these lines certainly runs:

_Which from this island's foes his grandsire won_.

Thus do the critics, leaping one after another, like so many sheep, follow the same wrong track, in this case for a couple of centuries.

The _Usurper_ is a tragedy, in which a Parasite, ”a most perfidious villain,” plays a mysterious part. He is led off to be hanged at last, much to the reader's satisfaction, who murmurs, in the words of R.L.

Stevenson, ”There's an end of that.”

But though the _Usurper_ is dull, we reach a lower depth and muddier lees of wit in the _Carnival_, a comedy by Major Thomas Porter, of 1664. It is odd, however, that the very worst production, if it be more than two hundred years old, is sure to contain some little thing interesting to a modern student. The _Carnival_ has one such peculiarity. Whenever any of the characters is left alone on the stage, he begins to soliloquise in the stanza of Gray's _Churchyard Elegy_. This is a very quaint innovation, and one which possibly occurred to brave Major Porter in one of the marches and counter-marches of the Civil War.

But the man who perseveres is always rewarded, and the fourth play in our volume really repays us for pus.h.i.+ng on so far. Here is a piece of wild and ghostly poetry that is well worth digging out of the Duke of Newcastle's _Humorous Lovers_:

_At curfew-time, and at the dead of night, I will appear, thy conscious soul to fright, Make signs, and beckon thee my ghost to follow To sadder groves, and churchyards, where we'll hollo To darker caves and solitary woods, To fatal whirlpools and consuming floods; I'll tempt thee to pa.s.s by the unlucky ewe, Blasted with cursed droppings of mildew; Under an oak, that ne'er bore leaf, my moans Shall there be told thee by the mandrake's groans; The winds shall sighing tell thy cruelty, And how thy want of love did murder me; And when the c.o.c.k shall crow, and day grow near, Then in a flash of fire I'll disappear_.

But I cannot persuade myself that his Grace of Newcastle wrote those lines himself. Published in 1677, they were as much of a portent as a man in trunk hose and a slashed doublet. The Duke had died a month or two before the play was published; he had grown to be, in extreme old age, the most venerable figure of the Restoration, and it is possible that the _Humorous Lovers_ may have been a relic of his Jacobean youth. He might very well have written it, so old was he, in Shakespeare's lifetime. But the Duke of Newcastle was never a very skilful poet, and it is known that he paid James s.h.i.+rley to help him with his plays. I feel convinced that if all men had their own, the invocation I have just quoted would fly back into the works of s.h.i.+rley, and so, no doubt, would the following quaintest bit of conceited fancy. It is part of a fantastical feast which Boldman promises to the Widow of his heart:

_The twinkling stars shall to our wish Make a grand salad in a dish; Snow for our sugar shall not fail, Fine candied ice, comfits of hail; For oranges, gilt clouds will squeeze; The Milky Way we'll turn to cheese; Sunbeams we'll catch, shall stand in place Of hotter ginger, nutmegs, mace; Sun-setting clouds for roses sweet, And violet skies strewed for our feet; The spheres shall for our music play, While spirits dance the time away_.

This is extravagant enough, but surely very picturesque. I seem to see the supper-room of some Elizabethan castle after an elaborate royal masque. The d.u.c.h.ess, who has been dancing, richly attired in sky-coloured silk, with gilt wings on her shoulders, is attended to the refreshments by the florid Duke, personating the river Thamesis, with a robe of cloth of silver around him. It seems the sort of thing a poet so habited might be expected to say between a galliard and a coranto.

At first sight we seem to have reached a really good rhetorical play when we arrive at Bancroft's tragedy of _Sertorius_, published in 1679, and so it would be if Dryden and Lee had never written. But its seeming excellence is greatly lessened when we recollect that _All for Love_ and _Mithridates_, two great poems which are almost good plays, appeared in 1678, and inspired our poor imitative Bancroft.

_Sertorius_ is written in smooth and well-sustained blank verse, which is, however, nowhere quite good enough to be quoted. I suspect that John Bancroft was a very interesting man. He was a surgeon, and his practice lay particularly In the theatrical and literary world. He acquired, it is said, from his patients ”a pa.s.sion for the Muses,”

and an inclination to follow in the steps of those whom he cured or killed. The dramatist Ravenscroft wrote an epilogue to _Sertorius_, in which he says that--

_Our Poet to learned critics does submit, But scorns those little vermin of the pit, Who noise and nonsense vent instead of wit_,

and no doubt Bancroft had aims more professional than those of the professional playwrights themselves. He wrote three plays, and lived until 1696. One fancies the discreet and fervent poet-surgeon, laden with his secrets and his confidences. Why did he not write memoirs, and tell us what it was that drove Nat Lee mad, and how Otway really died, and what Dryden's habits were? Why did he not purvey magnificent indiscretions whispered under the great periwig of Wycherley, or repeat that splendid story about Etheredge and my Lord Mulgrave? Alas!

we would have given a wilderness of _Sertoriuses_ for such a series of memoirs.

The volume of plays is not exhausted. Here is Weston's _Amazon Queen_, of 1667, written in pompous rhymed heroics; here is _The Fortune Hunters_, a comedy of 1689, the only play of that brave fellow, James Carlile, who, being brought up an actor, preferred ”to _be_ rather than to _personate_ a hero,” and died in gallant fight for William of Orange, at the battle of Aughrim; here is _Mr. Anthony_, a comedy written by the Right Honourable the Earl of Orrery, and printed in 1690, a piece never republished among the Earl's works, and therefore of some special interest. But I am sure my reader is exhausted, even if the volume is not, and I spare him any further examination of these obscure dramas, lest he should say, as Peter Pindar did of Dr.

Johnson, that I

_Set wheels on wheels in motion--such a clatter!

To force up one poor nipperkin of water; Bid ocean labour with tremendous roar To heave a c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l upon the sh.o.r.e_.

I will close, therefore, with one suggestion to the special student of comparative literature--namely, that it is sometimes in the minor writings of an age, where the bias of personal genius is not strongly felt, that the general phenomena of the time are most clearly observed. _The Amazon Queen_ is in rhymed verse, because in 1667 this was the fas.h.i.+onable form for dramatic poetry; _Sertorius_ is in regular and somewhat restrained blank verse, because in 1679 the fas.h.i.+on had once more chopped round. What in Dryden or Otway might be the force of originality may be safely taken as the drift of the age in these imitative and floating nonent.i.ties.

A CENSOR OF POETS

The Lives of The Most Famous English Poets, _or the Honour of Parna.s.sus; in a Brief Essay of the Works and Writings of above Two Hundred of them, from the Time of K. William the Conqueror, to the Reign of His Present Majesty King James II. Written by William Winstanley. Licensed June 16, 1686. London, Printed by H. Clark, for Samuel Mans.h.i.+p at the Sign of the Black Bull in Cornhil,_ 1687.

A maxim which it would be well for ambitious critics to chalk up on the walls of their workshops is this: never mind whom you praise, but be very careful whom you blame. Most critical reputations have struck on the reef of some poet or novelist whom the great censor, in his proud old age, has thought he might disdain with impunity. Who recollects the admirable treatises of John Dennis, acute, learned, sympathetic? To us he is merely the sore old bear, who was too stupid to perceive the genius of Pope. The grace and discrimination lavished by Francis Jeffrey over a thousand pages, weigh like a feather beside one sentence about Wordsworth's _Excursion_, and one tasteless sneer at Charles Lamb. Even the mighty figure of Sainte-Beuve totters at the whisper of the name Balzac. Even Matthew Arnold would have been wiser to have taken counsel with himself before he laughed at Sh.e.l.ley. And the very unimportant but sincere and interesting writer, whose book occupies us to-day, is in some respects the crowning instance of the rule. His literary existence has been sacrificed by a single outburst of petulant criticism, which was not even literary, but purely political.