D’AVENANT
AND A CLUB OF WITS.
Calamities of Epic Poets—Character and Anecdotes of D’Avenant—attempts a new vein of invention—the Critics marshalled against each other on the “Gondibert”—D’Avenant’s sublime feelings of Literary Fame—attacked by a Club of Wits in two books of Verses—the strange misconception hitherto given respecting the Second Part—various specimens of the Satires on Gondibert, the Poet, and his Panegyrist Hobbes—the Poet’s silence; and his neglect of the unfinished Epic, while the Philosopher keenly retorts on the Club, and will not allow of any authority in Wit.
The memoirs of epic poets, in as far as they relate to the history of their own epics, would be the most calamitous of all the suitors of the Muses, whether their works have reached us, or scarcely the names of the poets. An epic, which has sometimes been the labour of a life, is the game of the wits and the critics. One ridicules what is written; the other censures for what has not been written:—and it has happened, in some eminent instances, that the rudest assailants of him who “builds the lofty rhyme,” have been his ungenerous contemporaries. Men, whose names are now endeared to us, and who have left their ΚΤΗΜΑ ΕΣ ΑΕΙ, which Hobbes so energetically translates “a possession for everlasting,” have bequeathed an inheritance to posterity, of which they have never been in the receipt of the revenue. “The first fruits” of genius have been too often gathered to place upon its tomb. Can we believe that Milton did not endure mortification from the neglect of “evil days,” as certainly as Tasso was goaded to madness by the systematic frigidity of his critics? He who is now before us had a mind not less exalted than Milton or Tasso; but was so effectually ridiculed, that he has only sent us down the fragment of a great work.
One of the curiosities in the history of our poetry, is the Gondibert of D’Avenant; and the fortunes and the fate of this epic are as extraordinary as the poem itself. Never has 404 an author deserved more copious memoirs than the fertility of this man’s genius claims. His life would have exhibited a moving picture of genius in action and in contemplation. With all the infirmities of lively passions, he had all the redeeming virtues of magnanimity and generous affections; but with the dignity and the powers of a great genius, falling among an age of wits, he was covered by ridicule. D’Avenant was a man who had viewed human life in all its shapes, and had himself taken them. A poet and a wit, the creator of the English stage with the music of Italy and the scenery of France; a soldier, an emigrant, a courtier, and a politician:—he was, too, a state-prisoner, awaiting death with his immortal poem in his hand;[321] and at all times a philosopher!
That hardiness of enterprise which had conducted him through life, brought the same novelty, and conferred on him the same vigour in literature.
D’Avenant attempted to open a new vein of invention in 405 narrative poetry; which not to call epic, he termed heroic; and which we who have more completely emancipated ourselves from the arbitrary mandates of Aristotle and Bossu, have since styled romantic. Scott, Southey, and Byron have taught us this freer scope of invention, but characterised by a depth of passion which is not found in D’Avenant. In his age, the title which he selected to describe the class of his poetical narrative, was a miserable source of petty criticism. It was decreed that every poem should resemble another poem, on the plan of the ancient epic. This was the golden age of “the poet-apes,” till they found that it was easier to produce epic writers than epic readers.
But our poet, whose manly genius had rejected one great absurdity, had the folly to adopt another. The first reformers are always more heated with zeal than enlightened by sagacity. The four-and-twenty chapters of an epic, he perceived, were but fantastical divisions, and probably, originally, but accidental; yet he proposed another form as chimerical; he imagined that by having only five he was constructing his poem on the dramatic plan of five acts. He might with equal propriety have copied the Spanish comedy which I once read, in twenty-five acts, and in no slender folio. “Sea-marks (says D’Avenant, alluding to the works of antiquity) are chiefly useful to coasters, and serve not those who have the ambition of discoverers, that love to sail in untried seas;” and yet he was attempting to turn an epic poem into a monstrous drama, from the servile habits he had contracted from his intercourse with the theatre! This error of the poet has, however, no material influence on the “Gondibert,” as it has come down to us; for, discouraged and ridiculed, our adventurer never finished his voyage of discovery. He who had so nobly vindicated the freedom of the British Muse from the meanness of imitation, and clearly defined what such a narrative as he intended should be, “a perfect glass of nature, which gives us a familiar and easy view of ourselves,” did not yet perceive that there is no reason why a poetical narrative should be cast into any particular form, or be longer or shorter than the interest it excites will allow.
More than a century and a half have elapsed since the first publication of “Gondibert,” and its merits are still a subject of controversy; and indubitable proof of some inherent excellence not willingly forgotten. The critics are marshalled on each side, one against the other, while between these formidable 406 lines stands the poet, with a few scattered readers;[322] but what is more surprising in the history of the “Gondibert,” the poet is a great poet, the work imperishable!