The “Restoration comedies” were much the same thing as our “bedroom farces,” except that they were long drawn out; the seventeenth century audience was satisfied to listen to smart people gossiping about their vices, while our audience wants to see the smart people climbing through the transom in their pajamas. Also, the old comedies are difficult for us to understand, because the language of polite obscenity changes from age to age, and we don’t always know what Dryden and Congreve and Wycherley are talking about. But we need not rack our brains; we may be sure that all their witticisms have reference to fornication and adultery. There was no other occupation for these “restored” ladies and gentlemen—except gambling and eating and drinking, and cheating and lying in order to get the money to pay for their elegant pleasures.
Dryden gained by this writing an income of a couple of thousand pounds a year, which was the top-notch for a literary fellow in England. Also he became poet laureate, and an intimate of the king; in short, he reached the heights. But alas, greatness has its penalties, as the poet soon discovered, caught in the poisonous intrigues of a vile court. He was accused of having written a slanderous poem, and one of his noble enemies hired some bullies to beat him up one night. Also, a muck-raking parson by the name of Jeremy Collier came along and lashed him in a book entitled “A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage.” To all his other literary and political enemies the poet showed himself a voluble antagonist; but to the Reverend Jeremy he had nothing to answer.
He began, apparently, to realize the seriousness of life, and took to writing propaganda for his gang. He produced a series of political tracts, satirical and didactic verses upon which he expended great technical skill. Professor Saintsbury points out these literary beauties; but again he specifies: in appreciating them, the reader has to bear in mind that what Dryden proved today he may have disproved yesterday, and he may prove something different tomorrow. Lacking this acrobatic ability, I can only record my opinion, that these most famous verses are snarling and odious quarrels, of exactly as much importance to mankind as the yelps in a dog-fight.
One of them was a poem full of enraptured praise for the Anglican church. The poet at this time was listed for a salary of a hundred pounds a year as poet laureate; but the salary was badly in arrears, and somebody must have pointed out to him that his new sovereign, King James II, was an ardent Catholic. So the poet became converted to Catholicism, and wrote an equally enraptured poem in praise of that. But, alas! it was a bad guess; shortly afterwards His Most Catholic Majesty was kicked out of England, and William of Orange was brought over, and the country was Protestant again. This was the period when the Vicar of Bray had such a hard time holding his job; and our court poet also suffered, losing most of his perquisites, and having to go to work again.
He was an old man now, and decided to play safe; he made a verse translation of Virgil, for which nobody could scold him. Nobody did, and he died full of honors, and had a “sufficiently splendid funeral” in Westminster Abbey, “with a great procession, preceded at the College by a Latin oration, and by the singing of Exegi Monumentum to music.”
And so, if you like that sort of thing, there you have what you like; and if you have Dryden’s talents, and are willing to sell them to the ruling classes, I can drive you over to Hollywood any day, and introduce you to the fellows who will start you off at twenty thousand a year, and raise you to two hundred thousand as soon as you have begun to deliver the goods.
CHAPTER XL
GLORY PROPAGANDA
In order to make a consecutive story we have followed the development of English art for a century and a half. We now go back to cover the same period on the Continent, where a new ruling class has acquired wealth and power and has ordered a supply of new artists.
The difference between France and England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be summed up briefly. The English revolt against the Catholic machine was successful, therefore the spirit of the English race expanded, and new art forms were created. In France, on the other hand, the Catholic machine succeeded in crushing the Protestants; something over fifty thousand were slaughtered on St. Bartholomew’s Eve; and therefore the art of France was held within the mold of the classical tradition. The Elizabethan drama grew out of the old miracle and mystery plays, a native product, crude, but popular and democratic. There existed such a native drama also in France; but it was scorned and repressed by authority, and cultured art followed the tragedies of Seneca, a Roman millionaire of the time of Nero, who had of course derived from the Greeks.
It may seem strange that Catholic absolutism should have made Greek and Latin art forms a part of its sacred dogma; but so it was. The doctors of the church in the Middle Ages had put together a theology, in part from the early Christian fathers, and in part from Athenian and Alexandrian philosophers. It was for denying Ptolemy’s doctrine that the sun moved round the earth that Galileo was forced to recant under threat of torture by the pope; and it was for denying the sacred “three unities,” derived from Aristotle’s “Poetics,” that playwrights were critically tortured by the priests of orthodox culture.