Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 1

by John Wilson

But why, we ask, did Dryden suffer a ribald king and court to debase and degrade him, and strangle his immortal strain? Because he was poor! But could he not have died of cold, thirst, and hunger—of starvation? Have not millions of men and women done so, rather than sacrifice their conscience? And shall we grant to a great poet that indulgence which many a humble hind would have flung with scorn in our teeth, and rather than have availed himself of it, faced the fagot, or the halter, or the stake set within the sea-flood? But it is satisfactory to know that Dryden, though still glorious John, was not a Great Poet. He was seldom visited by the pathetic or the sublime—else had his genius held fast its integrity—been ribald to no ribald—and indignantly kicked to the devil both court and king. But what a master of reasoning in verse! And of verse what a volume of fire! "The long-resounding march and energy divine." Pope, again, with the common frailties of humanity, was an ethereal creature—and played on his own harp with finest taste, and wonderful execution. We doubt, indeed, if such a finished style has ever been heard since from any one of the King Apollo's musicians. His versification may be monotonous, but without a sweet and potent charm only to ears of leather. That his poetry has no passion is the creed of critics "of Cambyses' vein;" "Heloïse" and "The Unfortunate Lady" have made the world's heart to throb. As for Imagination, we shall continue till such time as that Faculty has been distinguished from Fancy, to see it shining in "The Rape of the Lock," with a lambent lustre; if high intellect be not dominant in his "Epistles" and his "Essay on Man," you will look for it in vain in the nineteenth century; all other Satires seem complimentary to their victims when read after "The Dunciad"—and could a man, whose heart was not heroic, have given us another Iliad, which, all unlike as it is to the Greek, may be read with transport, even after Homer's?

We have not yet, it would seem, found the object of our search—a Great Poem. Let us extend our quest into the Elizabethan age. We are at once sucked into the theatre. With the whole drama of that age we are conversant and familiar; but whether we understand it or not, is another question. It aspires to give representations of Human Life in all its infinite varieties, and inconsistencies, and conflicts, and turmoils produced by the Passions. Time and space are not suffered to interpose their unities between the Poet and his vast design, who, provided he can satisfy the spectators by the pageant of their own passions moving across the stage, may exhibit there whatever he wills from life, death, or the grave. 'Tis a sublime conception—and sometimes has given rise to sublime performance; but has been crowned with full success in no hands but those of Shakespeare. Great as was the genius of many of the dramatists of that age, not one of them has produced a Great Tragedy. A Great Tragedy indeed! What! without harmony or proportion in the plan—with all puzzling perplexities and inextricable entanglements in the plot—and with disgust and horror in the catastrophe? As for the characters, male and female—saw ye ever such a set of swaggerers and rantipoles as they often are in one act—Methodist preachers and demure young women at a love-feast in another—absolute heroes and heroines of high calibre in a third—and so on, changing and shifting name and nature, according to the laws of the Romantic Drama forsooth—but in hideous violation of the laws of nature—till the curtain falls over a heap of bodies huddled together, without regard to age or sex, as if they had been overtaken in liquor. We admit that there is gross exaggeration in the picture; but there is always truth in a tolerable caricature—and this is one of a tragedy of Webster, Ford, or Massinger.

It is satisfactory to know that the good sense, and good feeling, and good taste of the people of England, will not submit to be belaboured by editors and critics into unqualified admiration of such enormities. The Old English Drama lies buried in the dust with all its tragedies. Never more will they move across the stage. Scholars read them, and often with delight, admiration, and wonder; for genius is a strange spirit, and has begotten strange children on the body of the Tragic Muse. In the closet it is pleasant to peruse the countenances, at once divine, human, and brutal, of the incomprehensible monsters—to scan their forms, powerful though misshapen—to watch their movements, vigorous though distorted—and to hold up one's hands in amazement on hearing them not seldom discourse most excellent music. But we should shudder to see them on the stage enacting the parts of men and women—and call for the manager. All has been done for the least deformed of the tragedies of the Old English Drama that humanity could do, enlightened by the Christian religion; but nature has risen up to vindicate herself against such misrepresentations as they afford; and sometimes finds it all she can do to stomach Shakespeare.

But the monstrosities we have mentioned are not the worst to be found in the Old English Drama. Others there are that, till civilised Christendom fall back into barbarous Heathendom, must for ever be unendurable to human ears, whether long or short—we mean the obscenities. That sin is banished for ever from our literature. The poet who might dare to commit it, would be immediately hooted out of society, and sent to roost in barns among the owls. But the Old English Drama is stuffed with ineffable pollutions; and full of passages that the street-walker would be ashamed to read in the stews. We have not seen that volume of the Family Dramatists which contains Massinger. But if made fit for female reading, his plays must be mutilated and mangled out of all likeness to the original wholes. To free them even from the grossest impurities, without destroying their very life, is impossible; and it would be far better to make a selection of fine passages, after the manner of Lamb's Specimens—but with a severer eye—than to attempt in vain to preserve their character as plays, and at the same time to expunge all that is too disgusting, perhaps, to be dangerous to boys and virgins. Full-grown men may read what they choose—perhaps without suffering from it; but the modesty of the young clear eye must not be profaned—and we cannot, for our own part, imagine a Family Old English Dramatist.

And here again bursts upon us the glory of the Greek Drama. The Athenians were as wicked, as licentious, as polluted, and much more so, we hope, than ever were the English; but they debased not with their gross vices their glorious tragedies. Nature in her higher moods alone, and most majestic aspects, trod their stage. Buffoons, and ribalds, and zanies, and "rude indecent clowns," were confined to comedies; and even there they too were idealised, and resembled not the obscene samples that so often sicken us in the midst of "the acting of a dreadful thing" in our old theatre. They knew that "with other ministrations, thou, O Nature!" teachest thy handmaid Art to soothe the souls of thy congregated children—congregated to behold her noble goings-on, and to rise up and depart elevated by the transcendent pageant. The Tragic muse was in those days a Priestess—tragedies were religious ceremonies; for all the ancestral stories they celebrated were under consecration—the spirit of the ages of heroes and demigods descended over the vast amphitheatre; and thus were Æschylus, and Sophocles, and Euripides, the guardians of the national character, which, we all know, was, in spite of all it suffered under, for ever passionately enamoured of all the forms of greatness.

Forgive us—spirit of Shakespeare! that seem'st to animate that high-brow'd bust—if indeed we have offered any show of irreverence to thy name and nature; for now, in the noiselessness of midnight, to our awed but loving hearts do both appear divine! Forgive us—we beseech thee—that on going to bed—which we are just about to do—we may be able to compose ourselves to sleep—and dream of Miranda and Imogen, and Desdemona and Cordelia. Father revered of that holy family! by the strong light in the eyes of Innocence we beseech thee to forgive us!—Ha! what old ghost art thou—clothed in the weeds of more than mortal misery—mad, mad, mad—come and gone—was it Lear?

We have found then, it seems—at last—the object of our search—a Great Poem—ay—four Great Poems—"Lear"—"Hamlet"—"Othello"—"Macbeth." And was the revealer of those high mysteries in his youth a deer-stealer in the parks of Warwickshire, a linkboy in London streets? And died he before his grand climacteric in a dimmish sort of a middle-sized tenement in Stratford-on-Avon, of a surfeit from an overdose of home-brewed humming ale? Such is the tradition.

Had we a daughter—an only daughter—we should wish her to be like

"Heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb."

In that one line has Wordsworth done an unappreciable service to Spenser. He has improved upon a picture in "The Fairy Queen"—making "the beauty still more beauteous," by a single touch of a pencil dipped in moonlight, or in sunlight tender as Luna's smiles. Through Spenser's many nine-lined stanzas the lovely lady glides along her own world—and our eyes follow in delight the sinless wanderer. In Wordsworth's one single celestial line we behold her neither in time nor space—an immortal omnipresent idea at one gaze occupying the soul.