By ALDOUS HUXLEY
ALL readers of the literary Press must often have noticed that the most ardently contested and the most prolonged controversies, among all those that fill correspondence columns with the rumour of inkpot wars, turn almost invariably upon subjects remote from actuality and of a nature profoundly trivial. Questions of philology and spelling, questions of dates and names and little odd facts—it is on such circumscribed arenas that month-long combats clash and sway and would go on clashing and swaying for ever if it were not for the editor's tyrannically-imposed peace. To the practical man, intent on the immediate, as well as to the philosopher in his abstract world of ideas, this preoccupation with facts that are irrelevant both to the money-maker and the seeker after truth seems at first sight quite incomprehensible. But the explanation is simple. We have leisure and we hate being bored. We must find something that will keep our mind busy without exhausting it. We might, to be sure, occupy ourselves by studying the Einstein theory; but the effort, the agony of trying to think abstractly! No, decidedly the Einstein theory is too much of a good thing. So we fall back on stamp collecting or on what is more absorbing even than stamp collecting—on the inexhaustible past. We turn to history, not for any ambitious Wellsian ideas about humanity, but for the anecdotes, the innumerable bits of Notes and Queryish information which a little patience and curiosity can pick up like shells on a dry beach. How pleasant it is and how restful, after an effort of abstract reasoning (if one has been unwise enough to make that effort), to turn to Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature or to the Literary Recreations of Sir Edward Cook! We are amused, absorbed, instructed, and all without the least expense of spirit. What song the sirens sang, what were Mr. Gladstone's favourite Latin quotations—these things we learn and a thousand more, pleasantly, effortlessly, without tears.
This, then, is my excuse and justification for directing attention to an incident so remote as the Popish Plot, to men so obscure as Settle and Pordage and Flecknoe—their very names are absurd, Dickensian. These long-dead days of controversy fairly bristle with curiosities of literature. We catch glimpses of odd fantastic men performing odd fantastic actions. We see, thrown up by the storm of political passion, strange traits of human psychology that float on the surface like grotesque fishes of the depths dislodged by a submarine earthquake. And so, as we cannot all be Newtons or Empedocleses, let us content ourselves with small things, finding the occupation and amusement we desire in the anecdotes and old wives' tales of history, so pleasant, so futile, so absorbingly human.
Our purpose is to do justice—a little more than justice, it may be—to a few of the minor characters in the drama of the Popish Plot. But with the best will in the world it is impossible not to mention the hero of the piece; Dryden is the Prince of Denmark of the Plot, and without at least a casual reference to his part the play has no sense at all.
Our curtain, then, goes up on the Autumn of 1681; for, in the approved style, we plunge in medias res. The Earl of Shaftesbury is in the Tower on a charge of High Treason. A Bill of Indictment is to be presented against him. It was in anticipation of this event and with the deliberate intention of turning public opinion against Shaftesbury that, on November 17th, Dryden published Absalom and Achitophel.
This was not by any means the first time that Shaftesbury had been attacked. For the past two years the Tory pamphleteers had made him the target of their most envenomed shafts. One at least of these anonymous satires, A Modest Vindication of the Earl of Shaftesbury in a Letter to a Friend concerning his being elected King of Poland, is worthy to be rescued from oblivion. Like almost every pamphleteer of the time, the author of this Modest Vindication seizes on the story that Shaftesbury had offered himself as a candidate for the throne vacated by the death of John Sobieski. The pamphlet opens with an admirable ironic eulogy of the Earl for "his unshaken obedience to every government he has been concerned in or lived under; his steady adherence to every religion that had but hopes to be established." We are now shown the Polish Diet debating on the choice of a king, who shall be capable not only of ruling Poland, but also of conquering and converting the Turk. "Upon these considerations you may imagine the eyes of the whole Diet were turned upon little England, and there upon whom so soon as the little lord of Shaftesbury?" The new king, Anthony I., draws up a list of the attendants whom he proposes to take with him. There is, of course, "Prince Prettyman Perkinoski (Monmouth), to cure the plica or King's evil of this country, in case our own majesty should fail of that virtue"; and finally, at the end of the list, "Jean Drydenurtzitz ... our Poet Laureate, for writing panegyrics upon Oliver Cromwell and libels against his present master, King Charles II."; and to be his deputy no less than Tom Shadworiski" (Shadwell). This tract, it must be remembered, was written after the production of The Spanish Friar and before the publication of Absalom and Achitophel. The author of the "Protestant Play" might still be thought to be a Whig.
The pamphlet ends up with the account of a vision wherein the king-elect sees first the figure of the Whore of Babylon, which changes into that of a murdered Justice of the Peace (Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey), "strangled by a crew of ruffians, who afterwards ran him through with his own sword, that it might be thought he hanged himself." This gives place to a troop of pilgrims armed with black bills (these pilgrims were one of the happiest products of Oates's rich imagination); and they in turn are followed by the hideous vision of the Doctor of Salamanca, Oates himself. All this so deeply impresses King Anthony that he gives up his imperial ambitions, preferring the task of confounding the Pope at home to that of converting the Turks in Poland.
To this same Polish legend and to a certain physical peculiarity, which was the delight of the Tory satirists, Shaftesbury owed one of his most popular nicknames, "Tapski." The "ski" was Polish, but the "Tap" was English and had a real existence. Shaftesbury suffered from an internal abscess, which had to be kept drained by a silver tube let into his side. For the Tories this tap represented all that was most loathsome, most repulsive, most Whiggish. They exulted in descriptions of it. When Shaftesbury wanted to make himself look important, so one pamphleteer assures us, he had only to turn off the tap in order to swell up to a prodigious size. Shaftesbury's Tap and that mysterious Black Box, reputed to contain the certificate of a marriage between Charles II. and Lucy Waters, were the two symbolic objects on which public imagination most greedily seized.
Dryden's satire was issued anonymously. But its authorship was evidently an open secret, for within three weeks of its publication a reply, called Towser the Second, in which Dryden is named as the author, made its appearance. The writer of this piece was the Whig journalist, Henry Care, "whose breeding," says Anthony Wood, "was in the nature of a petty Fogger, a little despicable Wretch, afterwards much reflected upon for a poor snivelling Fellow in the Observators published by Rog: L'Estrange." This person had been the writer of a newspaper entitled The Weekly Paquets of News from Rome, an anti-Catholic journal started in the height of the excitement caused by Titus Oates's evidence. He had been tried in 1680 for libelling Justice Scroggs. His later history is the sadly common tale of the poor Grub Street hack: at the accession of James II. "for bread and Money sake, and nothing else," he passed over to the side in power and turned his pen against the Protestants. Towser the Second is as little and despicable as its author. Towser-Dryden, brother to the original bad dog, Towser-L'Estrange, suffering from a worm "that of the Jebusites smells very strong," runs mad, snarls and snaps at all he meets, treats the whole world, the King included, "à la mode de Billingsgate."
Care's poem is only less stupid than the ponderous Some Reflections upon a late poem, by a Person of Honour, which appeared a few days later. The Person of Honour was Dryden's old enemy, the Duke of Buckingham. Goaded to exasperation by the onslaught made upon him in Absalom and Achitophel, Buckingham set out to overwhelm Dryden under mountains of moral indignation. He succeeded only in proving conclusively that his own share in The Rehearsal, in its own way a masterpiece, must have been extremely small.