DAPHNAIDES:
OR THE ENGLISH LAUREL, FROM CHAUCER TO TENNYSON.
[Concluded.]
Dorset was still Lord Chamberlain when the death of Shadwell placed the laurel again at his disposal. Had he listened to Dryden, William Congreve would have received it. Of all the throng of young gentlemen who gathered about the chair of the old poet at Wills's, Congreve was his prime favorite. That his advice was not heeded was long a matter of pensive regret:—
"Oh that your brows my laurel had sustained!
Well had I been deposed, if you had reigned!
The father had descended for the son;
For only you are lineal to the throne.
Thus, when the state one Edward did depose,
A greater Edward in his room arose."[1]
The choice fell upon Nahum Tate:—
"But now not I, but poetry is cursed;
For Tom the Second reigns like Tom the First."
What particular quality recommended Tate we are not wholly able to explain. Dryden alleges "charity" as the single impulse of the appointment,—not the merit or aptitude of the candidate. But throughout life Dorset continued to countenance Nahum, serving as standing dedicatee of his works, and the prompter of several of them. We have remarked the want of judgment which Lord Dorset exhibited in his anxious patronage of the scholars and scribblers of his time,—a trait which stood the Blackmores, Bradys, and Tates in good stead.
But there was still another reason why Tate was preferred to Congreve. Dorset was too practised a courtier not to study the tastes of his master to good purpose. A liking for the stage, or a lively sense of poetic excellence, was not among the preferences of King William. The Laureate was sub-purveyor of amusement for the court; but there was no longer a court to amuse, and the King himself never once in his reign entered a theatre. The piety of Queen Mary rendered her a rare attendant at the play-house. Plays were therefore no longer wanted. A playwright could not amuse. Congreve was a dramatist who had never exhibited even passable talent for other forms of poetical composition. But Tate's limited gifts, displayed to Dorset's satisfaction in various encomiastic verses addressed to himself, were fully equal to the exigencies of the office under the new order of things; he was by profession a eulogist, not a dramatist. He was a Tory; and the King was out of humor with the Whigs. He was pretentiously moral and exemplary of life and pen, and so suited the Queen. The duties of the office were conformed, as far as practicable, to the royal tastes. Their scene was transferred from the play-house to the church. On the anniversaries of the birthdays of the two sovereigns, and upon New Year's day, the Laureate was expected to have ready congratulatory odes befitting the occasion, set to music by the royal organist, and sung after service in the Chapel Royal of St. James. Similar duties were required when great victories were to be celebrated, or national calamities to be deplored. In short, from writing dramas to amuse a merry monarch and his courtiers, an office not without dignity, the Laureate sunk into a hired writer of adulatory odes; a change in which originated that prevalent contempt for the laurel which descended from the era of Tate to that of Southey.
And yet the odes were in no sense more thoroughly Pindaric than in the circumstance of their flatteries being bought and paid for at a stated market value. The triumphal lyrics of Pindar himself were very far from being those spontaneous and enthusiastic tributes to the prowess of his heroes, which the vulgar receive them for. Hear the painful truth, as revealed by the Scholiast.[2] Pytheas of AEgina had conquered in rough-and-tumble fight all antagonists in the Pancratium. Casting about for the best means of perpetuating his fame, he found the alternative to lie between a statuette to be erected in the temple of the hero-god, or one of the odes of the learned Theban. Choosing the latter, he proceeded to the poet's shop, cheapened the article, and would have secured it without hesitation, had not the extortionate bard demanded the sum of three drachmas,[3] nearly equal to half a dollar, for the poem, and refused to bate a fraction. The disappointed bargainer left, and was for some days decided in favor of the brazen image, which could be had at half the price. But reflecting that what Pindar would give for his money was a draft upon universal fame and immortality, while the statue might presently be lost, or melted down, or its identity destroyed, his final determination was in favor of the ode,—a conclusion which time has justified. Nor was the Bard of the Victors ashamed of his mercenary Muse. In the Second Isthmian Ode, we find an elaborate justification of his practice of praising for pay,—a practice, he admits, unknown to primitive poets, but rendered inevitable, in his time, by the poverty of the craft, and the degeneracy of the many, with whom, in the language of the Spartan sage, "money made the man." With this Pindaric precedent, therefore, for selling Pindaric verses, it is no wonder, if the children of the Muse, in an age still more degenerate than that of their great original, found ample excuse for dealing out their wares at the best market. When such as Dryden and Pope lavished in preface and dedication their encomiums upon wealth and power, and waited eagerly for the golden guineas the bait might bring them, we have no right to complain of the Tates and Eusdens for prostituting their neglected Muses for a splendid sum certain per annum. Surely, if royalty, thus periodically and mercenarily eulogized, were content, the poet might well be so. And quite as certainly, the Laureate stipend never extracted from poet panegyric more fulsome, ill-placed, and degrading, than that which Laureate Dryden volunteered over the pall of Charles II.[4]