Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the epilogue to the “Maid’s Tragedy”:—
“Nor is’t less strange such mighty wits as those
Should use a style in tragedy like prose;
Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage,
Should speak their virtue and describe their rage.”
That it should be beneath the dignity of princes to speak in anything but rhyme can only be paralleled by Mr. Puff’s law that a heroine can go decorously mad only in white satin. Waller, I suppose, though with so loose a thinker one cannot be positive, uses “describe” in its Latin sense of limitation. Fancy Othello or Lear confined to this go-cart! Phillips touches the true point when he says, “And the truth is, the use of measure alone, without any rime at all, would give more scope and liberty both to style and fancy than can possibly be observed in rime.”[45] But let us test Waller’s method by an example or two. His monarch made reasonable, thus discourses:—
“Courage our greatest failings does supply,
And makes all good, or handsomely we die.
Life is a thing of common use; by heaven
As well to insects as to monarchs given;
But for the crown, ’t is a more sacred thing;
I’ll dying lose it, or I’ll live a king.
Come, Diphilus, we must together walk
And of a matter of importance talk.”
[Exeunt.
Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as here, merely removes prose to a proper ideal distance, where it is in keeping with more impassioned parts, but commonplace set to this rocking-horse jog irritates the nerves. There is nothing here to remind us of the older tragic style but the exeunt at the close. Its pithy conciseness and the relief which it brings us from his majesty’s prosing give it an almost poetical savor. Aspatia’s reflections upon suicide (or “suppressing our breath,” as she calls it), in the same play, will make few readers regret that Shakespeare was left to his own unassisted barbarism when he wrote Hamlet’s soliloquy on the same topic:—
“‘T was in compassion of our woe
That nature first made poisons grow,
For hopeless wretches such as I
Kindly providing means to die:
As mothers do their children keep,
So Nature feeds and makes us sleep.
The indisposed she does invite
To go to bed before ’tis night.”
Correctness in this case is but a synonyme of monotony, and words are chosen for the number of their syllables, for their rubbishy value to fill-in, instead of being forced upon the poet by the meaning which occupies the mind. Language becomes useful for its diluting properties, rather than as the medium by means of which the thought or fancy precipitate themselves in crystals upon a connecting thread of purpose. Let us read a few verses from Beaumont and Fletcher, that we may feel fully the difference between the rude and the reformed styles. This also shall be a speech of Aspatia’s. Antiphila, one of her maidens, is working the story of Theseus and Ariadne in tapestry, for the older masters loved a picturesque background and knew the value of fanciful accessaries. Aspatia thinks the face of Ariadne not sad enough:—
“Do it by me,
Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia,
And you shall find all true but the wild island.
Suppose I stand upon the seabeach now,
Mine arms thus, and my hair blown with the wind,
Wild as that desert; and let all about me
Be teachers of my story. Do my face
(If ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow)
Thus, thus, Antiphila; strive to make me look
Like sorrow’s monument; and the trees about me
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; and behind me
Make all a desolation.”
What instinctive felicity of versification! what sobbing breaks and passionate repetitions are here!
We see what the direction of the new tendency was, but it would be an inadequate or a dishonest criticism that should hold Pope responsible for the narrow compass of the instrument which was his legacy from his immediate predecessors, any more than for the wearisome thrumming-over of his tune by those who came after him and who had caught his technical skill without his genius. The question properly stated is, How much was it possible to make of the material supplied by the age in which he lived? and how much did he make of it? Thus far, among the great English poets who preceded him, we have seen actual life represented by Chaucer, imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life by Shakespeare, the interior life by Milton. But as everything aspires to a rhythmical utterance of itself, so conventional life, itself a new phenomenon, was waiting for its poet. It found or made a most fitting one in Pope. He stands for exactness of intellectual expression, for perfect propriety of phrase (I speak of him at his best), and is a striking instance how much success and permanence of reputation depend on conscientious finish as well as on native endowment. Butler asks,—