Well, then, we have once more—to wit a month ago—wheeled round and encountered face to face our two great masters, with whom we at first set out—John Dryden and Alexander Pope. We found them under a peculiar character, that of Avengers—to be imaged by the Pythean quelling with his divine and igneous arrows the Python, foul mud-engendered monster, burthening the earth and loathed by the light of heaven.
Dryden and Pope! Father and son—master and scholar—founder and improver. Who can make up his election, which of the two he prefers?—the free composition of Dryden that streams on and on, full of vigour and splendour, of reason and wit, as if verse were a mother tongue to him, or some special gift of the universal Mother—or the perfected art of Pope? Your choice changes as your own humour or the weathercock turns. If jolly Boreas, the son of the clear sky, as Homer calls him, career scattering the clouds, and stirring up life over all the face of the waters, grown riotous with exuberant power, you are a Drydenite. But if brightness and stillness fall together upon wood and valley, upon hill and lake, then the spirit of beauty possesses you, and you lean your ear towards Pope. For the spirit of beauty reigns in his musical style; and if he sting and kill, it is with an air and a grace that quite win and charm the lookers-on; and a sweetness persuades them that he is more concerned about embalming his victims to a perennial pulchritude after death, than intent upon ravishing from them the breath of a short-lived existence.
Dryden is all power—and he knows it. He soars at ease—he sails at ease—he swoops at ease—and he trusses at ease. In his own verse, not another approaches him for energy brought from familiar uses of expression. Witness the hazardous but inimitable—
"To file and polish God Almighty's fool,"
and a hundred others. Shakespeare and Milton are now and then (in blanks, as Tweedie used to say) all-surpassing by such a happiness. But Dryden alone moves unfettered in the fettering couplet—alone of those who have submitted to the fetters. For those who write distichs, running them into one another, head over heels, till you do not know where to look after the rhyme—these do not wear their fetters and with an all-mastering grace dance to the chime, but they break them and caper about, the fragments clanking dismally and strangely about their heels. Turn from the clumsy clowns to glorious John:—sinewy, flexible, well-knit, agile, stately-stepping, gracefully-bending, stern, stalwarth—or sitting his horse, "erect and fair," in career, and carrying his steel-headed lance of true stuff, level and steady to its aim, and impetuous as a thunderbolt. His strokes are like the shots of that tremendous ordnance—
"chain'd thunderbolts and hail
Of iron globes——
That whom they hit none on their feet might stand,
Though standing else as rocks."
But we are forgetting ourselves. We must not run into elongated criticism, however excellent, in a Supplement—and therefore gladden you all with a specimen—without note or comment—from the second part of Absalom and Achitophel.
"Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;
Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad,
And in one word, heroically mad:
He was too warm on picking-work to dwell,
But fagoted his notions as they fell,
And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well.
Spiteful he is not, though he wrote a satyr,
For still there goes some thinking to ill nature:
He needs no more than birds and beasts to think,
All his occasions are to eat and drink.
If he call rogue and rascal from a garret,
He means you no more mischief than a parrot:
The words for friend and foe alike were made,
To fetter them in verse is all his trade.
For almonds he'll cry whore to his own mother:
And call young Absalom king David's brother.
Let him be gallows-free by my consent,
And nothing suffer since he nothing meant;
Hanging supposes human soul and reason,
This animal's below committing treason:
Shall he be hang'd who never could rebel?
That's a preferment for Achitophel.
Railing in other men may be a crime,
But ought to pass for mere instinct in him:
Instinct he follows and no further knows,
For to write verse with him is to transprose.
'Twere pity treason at his door to lay,
Who makes heaven's gate a lock to its own key:
Let him rail on, let his invective Muse
Have four and twenty letters to abuse,
Which, if he jumbles to one line of sense,
Indict him of a capital offence,
In fire-works give him leave to vent his spight,
Those are the only serpents he can write;
The height of his ambition is, we know,
But to be master of a puppet-show,
On that one stage his works may yet appear,
And a month's harvest keeps him all the year.
"Now stop your noses, readers, all and some,
For here's a tun of midnight-work to come,
Og from a treason-tavern rowling home,
Round as a globe, and liquor'd every chink,
Goodly and great he sails behind his link;
With all this bulk there's nothing lost in Og,
For every inch that is not fool is rogue:
A monstrous mass of foul corrupted matter,
As all the devils had spew'd to make the batter,
When wine has given him courage to blaspheme,
He curses God, but God before curst him;
And, if man could have reason, none has more,
That made his paunch so rich, and him so poor.
With wealth he was not trusted, for heaven knew
What 'twas of old to pamper up a Jew;
To what would he on quail and pheasant swell,
That ev'n on tripe and carrion could rebel?
But though heaven made him poor, with reverence speaking,
He never was a poet of God's making;
The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull,
With this prophetic blessing—Be thou dull:
Drink, swear, and roar, forbear no lewd delight
Fit for thy bulk, do any thing but write:
Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men,
A strong nativity—but for the pen!
Eat opium, mimic arsenic in thy drink,
Still thou mayst live, avoiding pen and ink.
I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain,
For treason botcht in rhyme will be thy bane:
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck:
Why should thy metre good King David blast?
A psalm of his will surely be thy last.
Dar'st thou presume in verse to meet thy foes,
Thou whom the penny pamphlet foil'd in prose?
Doeg, whom God for mankind's mirth has made,
O'er-tops thy talent in thy very trade;
Doeg to thee, thy paintings are so coarse,
A poet is, though he's the poet's horse.
A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull
For writing treason, and for writing dull;
To die for faction is a common evil,
But to be hang'd for nonsense is the devil:
Had thou the glories of thy king exprest,
Thy praises had been satyr at the best;
But thou in clumsy verse, unlickt, unpointed,
Hast shamefully defy'd the Lord's anointed:
I will not rake the dunghill for thy crimes,
For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes?
But of King David's foes be this the doom,
May all be like the young man Absalom!
And for my foes, may this their blessing be,
To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee!"
This is the ne plus ultra of personal satire. Yet there are passages of comparable excellence in the Dunciad. Aha! what have we here? A contemptuous attack on Pope by—a Yankee-Cockney! What a cross! John Russell Lowell from Massachusets thus magpie-like chattereth at the Nightingale.
"Philip.—You talk about the golden age of Queen Anne. It was a French pinchbeck age.