Part 20

The opera opens, as we saw, in chaos, the scene sinking into hell, and we have Lucifer "raising himself on the lake." His exclamatory speech, of some sixteen lines, on the lake is versified, not in Dryden's best manner, from that most sublime one of Satan on reaching with Beelzebub the burning marle, with some additions from Satan's first address to that angel, while yet they were lying side by side on the fiery flood. To those who have the First Book of the "Paradise Lost" by heart, this sort of transposition patchwork cannot but be most offensive. As if to give an air of originality, where everything is borrowed and blurred, Asmoday in Milton one of the lowest, is made one of the highest, and is substituted for Beelzebub--and to him Lucifer most unarchangel-like calls "Ho! Asmoday, awake!"

Asmoday answers in a short speech, very ill reported, formerly delivered by Milton's Beelzebub, concluding with a bit absolutely stolen from his Satan himself! Lucifer then observes to Asmoday, that "our troops, _like scattered leaves in autumn_, lie!" A poor plagiarism indeed from the famous description from Milton's own lips, and from Lucifer's incredibly absurd! Lucifer then announces--

"With wings expanded wide, ourselves we'll rear, And fly incumbent on the dusky air. Hell! thy new lord receive! Heaven cannot envy me an empire here." (_Both fly to dry land._)

You remember the lines in Milton--

"Then with expanded wings he steers his flight, Aloft incumbent on the dusky air"--

and the other sublimities of the description--all here destroyed by the monstrous absurdity of making Lucifer paint his own projected flight. He then asks "the rest of the devils," "Are you on _beds of down_?" On beds of down our grandsires lay--but think of eider-ducks in heaven. Moloch says his say from the Miltonic Satan, with a slight new reading.

"Better to _rule_ in hell than serve in heaven."

And Beelzebub approves the dictum.

"Moloch, in that all are resolved, like thee. The means are unprepared; but 'tis not fit, Our dark divan in public view should sit; Or what we plot against the Thunderer, _The ignoble_ CROWD OF VULGAR DEVILS _hear_!"

Lucifer adopts this disdainful suggestion, and, great magician as he is, exclaims--

"A golden palace let be raised on high, To imitate--no, to outshine the sky! All mines are ours, and gold above the rest; Let this be done, and _quick as 'twas exprest_."

"A palace rises, where sit as in council, LUCIFER, Asmoday, Moloch, Belial, Beelzebub, and SATAN." Who _he_ may be, deuce take us if we can tell. Up to the very moment of his making his appearance, we in our simple faith had believed Lucifer and Satan to be one devil--nay, the devil. We were taken quite aback by this unexplained phenomenon of Satan's acting the part of his own tail. In this capacity he makes but one speech--but it is the speech of the evening. One seldom hears such eloquence. Moloch having proposed battle, the mysterious stranger rises to second the motion.

"_Satan._ I agree With this brave vote; and if in Hell there be _Ten more such spirits_, heaven is our own again. We venture nothing, and may all obtain. Yet, who can hope but well, since our success Makes foes secure, and makes our dangers less? _Seraph and Cherub, careless of their charge And wanton, in full ease now live at large; Unguarded leave the passes of the sky, And all dissolved in hallelujahs lie._"

In the "grand consult," as recorded by Milton, Beelzebub, after proposing the "perilous attempt," asks,

"But, first, whom we shall send In search of this new world? Whom shall we find Sufficient? who shall tempt with wandering feet The dark, unbottom'd, infinite abyss, And through the palpable obscure find out His uncouth way, or spread his aery flight, Upborne with indefatigable wings Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive The happy isle?"

And Satan is the self-chosen missionary of the religion of Hell. In Dryden Asmoday suggests the enterprise, and

"_Moloch._ This glorious enterprise--(_rising up._) _Lucifer._ Rash angel, stay. (_Rising, and laying his sceptre on Moloch's head._) That palm is mine, which none shall take away. _Hot braves like thee may fight_, but know not well To manage this, the last great stake of hell."

The council comes to a close--and Lucifer promises to be with them again,

"Before yon brimstone lake thrice ebb and flow."

Tides in the Mediterranean! a touch beyond Milton.

"Here, while the chiefs sit in the palace, may be expressed the sports of the devils, as flights and dancing in grotesque figures; and a song, expressing the change of their condition, what they enjoyed before, and how they fell bravely in battle, having deserved victory by their valour, and what they would have done if they had conquered."

What had Dryden purposed to achieve? Out of two books of a great epic, to edify one act of an opera. To invention of situation, character, or passion, he aspires not; all he had to do--since he must needs meddle--was to select, compress, and abridge, with some judgment and feeling, and to give the result--unhappy at the best--in his own vigorous verse and dearly-beloved rhyme. But beneath the majesty and imagination of Milton, his genius, strong as it was, broke down, and absolutely sunk beneath the level of that of common men. Yet not in awe, nor in reverence of a superior power; for there is no trepidation of spirit; on the contrary, with cool self-assurance he rants his way through the fiery gloom of hell. By his hands shorn of their beams, the fallen angels are, one and all, poor devils indeed. The Son of the Morning is seedy, and has lost all authority over the swell mob, which he vainly essays to recover by cracking Moloch's organ with his sceptre. Yet Sir Walter, blinded by his generous admiration of Dryden's great endowments, scruples not to say that "the scene of the consultation in Pandemonium, and of the soliloquy of Satan (not Satan, it seems, but Lucifer) on his arrival in the newly-created universe, would possess great merit did they not unfortunately remind us of the majestic simplicity of Milton." Oh, heavens and earth! the veritable Satan's soliloquy on Niphate's top!

"O thou, that with surpassing glory crown'd, Look'st from thy sole dominion like the God Of this new world; at whose sight all the stars Hide their diminish'd heads, to thee I call, But with no friendly voice, _and add thy name_, O SUN! to tell thee how I hate thy beams, That bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere, Till pride and worse ambition threw me down, Warring in heaven against heaven's matchless king!"

And so on for nearly a hundred lines, in many a changeful strain, arch-angelical all, of heaven-remembering passion, while ever, as thus he spoke,

"Each passion dimm'd his face, Thrice changed with pale, ire, envy, and despair; Which marr'd his borrow'd visage, and betray'd Him counterfeit, if any eye beheld; For heavenly minds, from such distempers foul Are ever clear."

The soliloquy of Dryden's Lucifer consists of twenty lines, taken almost at hap-hazard from that of Milton's, jumbled together without consideration, and mangled from the most multitudinous blank verse ever written, into rhymes much beneath the average merit of one who, at times, could indeed command "the long-majestic march and energy divine."

Adam and Eve fare little better than the angels under his reforming fingers. Milton, you remember, makes Adam tell Raphael the story of his birth, in language charmful to affable arch-angel's ear, albeit tuned to harmonies in heaven. Dryden burlesques that revelation into the following soliloquy, supposed to have been _the first words spoken by human lips_. Adam at once opens his mouth in the style of the age of refinement. After the fall, how degenerate kept growing on our father tongue, till it reached its acme in the barbarous lingo of Shakspeare! And how suited, here, the thought to the speech! How natural the natural theology of both! He anticipates Descartes.

"_Adam._ What am I? or from whence? _For that I am_ (rising) _I know, because I think_; but whence I come, Or how this frame of mine began to be, What other being can disclose to me? I move, and see, and speak, discourse, and know; Though now I am, I was not always so. Then that from which I was, must be before, Whom, as my spring of being, I adore. How full of ornament is all I view, In all its parts! and seems as beautiful as new: O goodly order'd earth! O Power Divine! Of thee I am, and what I am is thine."

A day or two after, "a cloud descends with six angels in it, and when it is near the ground breaks, and, on each side, discovers six more." Raphael and Gabriel, sent to admonish and warn, discourse with Adam, the ten others standing at a distance. The conversation instantly assumes, and throughout sustains, an intensely controversial character, and Raphael and Gabriel, though two to one, and moreover angel _versus_ man, are hard put to it on predestination and free-will. Adam is equipped with all the weapons of the schools, and uses them defensively, and most offensively, with all the dexterity of a veteran gladiator. But our disgust soon ceases, along with our deception; and we but see and hear John Dryden puzzling a brace of would-be wits at Wills's. The whole reads like a so-so bit of the _Religio Laici_. It ends thus:--

"_Adam._ Hard state of life! since heaven foreknows my will, Why am I not tied up from doing ill? Why am I trusted with myself at large, When he's more able to sustain the charge? Since angels fell, whose strength was more than mine, 'Twould then more grace my frailty to confine. Foreknowing the success, to leave me free, Excuses him, and yet supports not me!"

_This_ from Adam yet sinless in Paradise!

The loves of Adam and Eve are not perhaps absolutely coarse--at least not so for Dryden--but they are of the earth earthy, and the earth is not of the mould of Eden. Aiblins--not coarse, but verily coquettish, and something more, is Eve. And she is too silly.

"From each tree The feather'd kinds peep down to look on me; And beasts with upcast eyes forsake their shade, And gaze as if I were to be obey'd. Sure I am somewhat which they wish to be, And cannot. _I myself am proud of me._"

A day or two after their marriage, Eve gives Adam a long description of her first emotions experienced in the nuptial bower. More warmly coloured than in her simplicity she seems to be aware of; and Adam, pleased with her innocent flattery, treats her with an Epithalamium.

"When to my arms thou brought'st thy virgin love, Fair angels sang our bridal hymn above: _The Eternal, nodding, shook the firmament!_ And conscious nature gave her glad consent. Roses unbid, and every fragrant flower Flew from their stalks to strew thy nuptial bower: The furr'd and feather'd kinds the triumph did pursue, And fishes leap'd above the streams the passing pomp to view."

Hats off--bravo--bravo--hurra--hurra!--Of such stuff is made, in the "State of Innocence," Dryden's implicit criticism on the _Paradise Lost_ of Milton.

Peace be with his shade! and its forgiveness with us. It is dangerous to unite the functions of judge and executioner. The imperturbable bosom of the seated judge calmly gives forth the award of everlasting Justice, and the mandate for the punishment that must expiate or appease her violated majesty. But the judge who is obliged to turn lictor, and must step down from the tribunal to take his criminal farther in hand, undoubtedly runs a risk, when he feels his hand in, of being carried too far by his excited zeal. After all, we have stayed ours. And now, having discharged a principal part of our office, what remains, but that we turn round, heal with our right hand what our left has inflicted, and lift up Glorious John to the skies? And lift him up we will; and with good reason; for we are far indeed from being done with this first era of deliberate and formal criticism in English literature. Extol him to the clouds and to the stars we will, but not now; for lo! where another great name beckons!

The close of the seventeenth century for ever shut the eyes of John Dryden upon the clouded and fluctuating daylight of our sublunary world. It may have been, in the same year, that a solitary boy, then twelve years old, wrote five stanzas which any man might have been glad to have written--and which you have by heart--an "Ode to Solitude"--conspicuous in the annals of English poetry as the dawn-gleam of a new sun that was presently to arise, and to fill the region that Dryden had left.

A feeble frame has dedicated many a student. This, with other causes about this time, took the boy, ALEXANDER POPE, from schools where he learned little, to commit him, under the guardian more than guiding love of indulgent parents, to his own management of his own studies. And study he did--instinctively, eagerly, ramblingly through books of sundry kinds--helping himself as he could to their languages--devouring more than he digested--wedding himself to the high and gracious muses--seeking for, and finding, his own extraordinary powers--and diminishing the small quantity of delicate health which nature had put in his keeping. He resigned himself to die, and was dying, when a strong interposition, among other sanatary measures, transferred him from the back of Pegasus to that of an earth-born horse.

Pope had a gentleness of spirit, which showed itself in his filial offices to his father and mother--to her the most, ill the prolonged wearing out of a beloved life. It appears in kindly relations to his friends, in charities, in the scheme of his life--contentedness in a bounded, quiet existence, a seclusion among books, and trees, and flowers. His life flowed on peaceably and gently, like the noble river upon which his modest dwelling looked. Ill health, as we said, often dedicates a student. The constitutional feebleness from which he suffered, might doubly favour his mind; as often the more delicate frame harbours the greater spirit; and as inaptitude for active and rough sports, throws the solitary boy upon the companionship of books, and upon the energies, avocations, and pleasures of his own intelligence and fancy. The little poem of his boyhood, and the first of his manhood, prophesy his tenor of life, and his literary career.

A commanding power, a predominant star in English literature--you might say that the last century belonged to him. Dryden reigned over his contemporaries. Pope, succeeding, took dominion over his own time and the following. The pupil of Dryden, and gratefully proud to proclaim the greatness of his master, and to own all obligations, he moulded himself nevertheless upon a type in his own mind. In the school of Dryden he is an original master. Dryden is, properly speaking, without imitators. His manner proceeds from his own genius, and baffles transcribers. But Pope completed an art which could be learned, and he left a world full of copyists.

A remarkable feature is the early acknowledgment of Pope by his contemporaries. At sixteen he is a poet for the world by his PASTORALS, and at that age he has a literary adviser in Walsh and a literary patron in Trumbull. He does not seem to court. He is courted. He is the intimate friend, we do not know how soon, of scholars and polite writers, of men and women high in birth, in education, in station. Scarce twenty, by his "ESSAY ON CRITICISM" he assumes a chair in the school of the Muses. At five-and-twenty, he is an acknowledged dictator of polite letters. So early, rapid, untroubled an ascension to fame, it would require some research to find a parallel to. Our literature has it not. And this acknowledgment, gratulation, triumph, which friends and circles, and the confined literary world of that day in this country could furnish, a whole age, and a whole country, and a whole world, the extended republic of letters, confirm.

In the judgment of England, in the eighteenth century, the reputation of Pope may be called the most dazzling in English literature. It was a nearer sun than Dryden, Milton, Shakspeare; as for Spenser and Chaucer, they were little better than fixed stars.

Great revolutions in the state of the heavens and of astronomical science have ensued. To say nothing of new luminaries that have come into birth, from the bosom of "chaos and unoriginal night," either we have wheeled round upon Shakspeare, or he upon us, in a surprising manner; the orb of Milton enlarges day by day; cheerily we draw large accessions of the gentlest light on Spenser; and old Father Geoffrey and we are sensibly approximating.

We have taken Pope's counsel. We have with some good-will reverted to Nature, and so we come nearer to the poets of Nature. There may have been other causes at work. The change has involved more than was just a depreciation of Pope himself: as if he were an accomplished artist in a limited sphere of art, and no poet. We dissent _toto corde et toto coelo_. He was a spirit, muse-born, a hero of half celestial extraction, and so by all rule a demigod.

His age confined him. A poet is not independent of his age. He may ride on the van of the tide--no more. And we see that the greatest poets are but the most entire expression of the age, taken at the best. How shall it be otherwise? Their age is mother and nurse to them. And what air does a poet respire, but the circulating, fanning, living, breeze of sympathy? He more than all beings receives into his soul the souls of other men. So he thrives and grows; and shall he not be a partaker in his age?

In an age thus to be described, that it refines instead of creating, and that, in particular, it imposes the refinement elaborated by social, and indeed aristocratical manners, upon genius, which should only refine itself by tenderness and sanctity, and by love dwelling evermore in the inextinguishable paradise of the beautiful--he who was fitted to his age by much of his mind, by his wit, by fancy given more fully than imagination, by inclination to the _limæ labor_, by the susceptibility of polish, by a reasonableness of understanding, by his perception of manners, even by the delicacy of his habits--he, ALEXANDER POPE, nevertheless, desired the greatnesses of poetry. At fourteen, he tries his hand in practice on the lofty Statius--at five-and-twenty, upon the sublime Homer. Judge of his poetical heart by his Preface to Shakspeare, by his translation of Homer, preface and all. What was the translation of Homer? Of all works, not creative, the one of most aspiring ambition, even more than that of Pindar or Æschylus. The young poet who has launched on the air the light self-buoyed, gracefully-floating Rape of the Lock, who has dipped his pen in the pathos of love and religion for Eloisa, longs to put in use the powers that kindle and struggle within him. He will do something of greater design in weightier literature; he will, so as a poet may, stir, melt, strengthen, instruct, exalt, and amplify the mind of his country; and he makes the greatest of poets, the father of all poetry--ENGLISH. He pledges himself, before his country, to the task, and then trembles at the difficulties and magnitude of his undertaking, and then sits down to it, and then delivers it accomplished.

Did Homer already speak English, through the organ of Chapman? If he did, it was not English for England; least of all, for the England of Pope's day. Fiery and eloquent, and creative as it is, Chapman's _Homer_ is hard reading now, and somewhat rare. _Then_, the book was, for the general capacity, precisely the same thing as if it were not. And Pope, no grudging bestower of merited honours, awards generous praise to his irregularly-great predecessor, amply acknowledging, with one word, in him both native power and effectual sympathy with their unparagoned original.

Let us reflect, also, that after all a true translation of Homer into English is, in all probability, a thing impossible. Why did not Milton leave us half a book, or some fifty verses, that we might know what the utmost poetical power, and the utmost mastery of our speech, and the utmost resources of our verse, could effect? The inspiring expressive music of the original tongue clothes the simplest and most unadorned word and phrase in wealth, splendour, gorgeous majesty, prodigal magnificence; and this, not with any incongruence or disharmony, any more than Eve's GOLDEN tresses were excessive ornament, unmeet for the primitive simplicity of Eden. The same exhilaration and vivification of the hearing soul, which this perpetual music infuses, united to the same simplicity of the thought and the words, will not easily be found in English. Again, rhyme seems wanted to the richness of the harmony. Yet how shall rhyme allow that utmost freedom and range in the flow of the thought which marks the now majestically, now impetuously sweeping, Homeric river? That measure, so _measured_, and yet so free; large, various, capacious--that hexameter is despair. Meanwhile no nation concludes to forego the incorporation of the great foreign works of literature into its own, merely for such discouragement, merely because the adequate representation lies wholly out of reach. We have gained much in bringing over the powerful matter, if we must leave the style behind, and yet the style is almost a part of the matter.

Homer is out of hand--Iliad and Odyssey. The Mæonian sun has ripened the powers of the occidental poet. And Pope--_aged thirty-seven_--declares that henceforward he will write _from_, as well as _to_, his own mind. The "ESSAY ON MAN" follows. It expresses that graver study of the universal subject, MAN, which appeared to Pope, now self-known, to be, for the time of poetical literature to which he came, the most practicable--for his own ability the aptest; and it embodies that part of anthropology which doubtless was the most congenial to his own inclination--the philosophical contemplation of man's nature, estate, destiny.

The success of this enterprise was astonishing. Be the philosophy what and whose it may, the poem revived to the latest age of poetry the phenomenon of the first, when precept and maxim were modulated into verse, that they might write themselves in every brain, and live upon every tongue.

The spirit and sweetness of the verse, the lucid and vivid expression, the pregnant brevity of the meanings, the marrying of ardent and lofty poetical imagings to moral sentiments and reflections, of which every bosom is the birth-home, the pious will of the argument, which humbles the proud and rebellious human intellect under the absolute rectitude and benevolence of the Deity--nor least of all, the pleasure of receiving easily, as in a familiar speech, thoughts that _were_ high, and _might be_ abstruse, that, at all events, wore a profound and philosophical air--with strokes intervening of a now playful, now piercing, but always adroit wit--and with touches, here and there strewn between, of natural painting, and of apt unsought pathos--these numerous and excellent qualifications met upon the subject of all subjects nearest to all--MAN--speedily made the first great, original, serious writing of Pope a textbook and a manual for its branch of ethico-theosophy, in every house where there were books in England. These powerful excellences of this great poem did more. They inwove its terse, vigorous, clear, significant, wise, loving, noble, beautiful, and musical sentences--east, west, north, south--with all memories, the mature and the immature--even as in that old, brave day of the world or ever books were.