ON TWO PASSAGES IN DRYDEN.
I have met with a notion in Dryden's Poems, which reads very like a blunder. It occurs in the "Spanish Friar," as follows:—
"There is a pleasure sure in being mad,
Which none but madmen know."
And again in this couplet:
"And frantic men in their mad actions show
A happiness, that none but madmen know;"
There is a description of madness to which all men are more or less subject, and which Pascal alludes to in one of his "Pensées:"
"Les hommes sont si nécessairement fous, que ce serait être fou par un autre tour de folie, que de ne pas être fou:"
or, as Boileau has it in the couplet:
"Tous les hommes sont fous, et malgré leurs soins,
Ne diffèrent, entre eux, que du plus ou du moins."
There is another sort of madness which is described by Terence as
—— "cum ratione insanire."
And there is a third species of it, which Dryden himself speaks of in the well-known line adopted from Seneca:
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied."
Now, it is obvious that, in the passages above quoted from Dryden, he does not refer to any of these three kinds of madness. As a man, he could say in regard to the first:
"Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto."
As a man of the world his whole life was an exemplification of the second; for no one knew better than he how to be mad by rule. And as one of our greatest wits he was entitled to claim a near alliance to that madness which is characteristic of men of genius. It is clear, therefore, that, in the lines quoted above, he speaks of that total deprivation of reason, which is emphatically described as stark, staring madness; and hence the blunder. In point of fact, Dryden either knew the pleasure and happiness of which he speaks, as belonging to that sort of madness, or he did not know them. If he knew them, then by his own showing he was a madman. If he did not know them, how could he affirm that none but madmen knew them?
Should my view of this matter be incorrect, I shall be thankful to any of your readers who will take the trouble to set me right.
HENRY H. BREEN.
St. Lucia, April 15. 1851.