Books: Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope
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Samuel Johnson >> Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope
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In a gay French company, where every one sang a little song or
stanza, of which the burden was "Bannissons la Melancolie," 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 crie
Bannissons la Melancolie."
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 Phaedra 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 moestus, ait; summi conviva Tonantis
Jam cum coelitibus (si modo credis) eris.
Ille gemens, si vera mihi solatia praebes,
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.
About this time began the long-continued controversy between Collier
and the poets. In the reign of Charles I. the Puritans had raised a
violent clamour against the drama, which they considered as an
entertainment not lawful to Christians, an opinion held by them in
common with the Church of Rome; and Prynne published
"Histriomastix," a huge volume in which stage-plays were censured.
The outrages and crimes of the Puritans brought afterwards their
whole system of doctrine into disrepute, and from the Restoration
the poets and players were left at quiet; for to have molested them
would have had the appearance of tendency to puritanical malignity.
This danger, however, was worn away by time, and Collier, a fierce
and implacable non-juror, knew that an attack upon the theatre would
never make him suspected for a Puritan; he therefore (1698)
published "A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the
English Stage," I believe with no other motive than religious zeal
and honest indignation. He was formed for a controvertist, with
sufficient learning, with diction vehement and pointed, though often
vulgar and incorrect, with unconquerable pertinacity, with wit in
the highest degree and sarcastic, and with all those powers exalted
and invigorated by just confidence in his cause. Thus qualified and
thus incited, he walked out to battle, and assailed at once most of
the living writers, from Dryden to Durfey. His onset was violent;
those passages, which, while they stood single, had passed with
little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together,
excited horror. The wise and the pious caught the alarm, and the
nation wondered why it had so long suffered irreligion and
licentiousness to be openly taught at the public charge.
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