Chapter XLI: Section VII: How Literature in England is Occupied with

Politics and Religion

"A man," says La Bruyère, "born a Frenchman and a Christian finds himself constrained in satire; great subjects are forbidden to him; he essays them sometimes, and then turns aside to small things, which he elevates by the beauty of his genius and his style." It was not so in England. Great subjects were given up to vehement discussion; politics and religion, like two arenas, invited every talent and every passion to boldness and to battle. The king, at first popular, had roused opposition by his vices and errors, and bent before public discontent as before the intrigue of parties. It was known that he had sold the interests of England to France; it was believed that he would deliver up the consciences of Protestants to the Papists. The lies of Oates, the murder of the magistrate Godfrey, his corpse solemnly paraded in the streets of London, had inflamed the imagination and prejudices of the people; the judges, blind or intimidated, sent innocent Roman Catholics to the scaffold, and the mob received with insults and curses their protestations of innocence. The king's brother had been dismissed from his offices, and it was proposed to exclude him from the throne. The pulpit, the theatre, the press, the hustings, resounded with discussions and recriminations. The names of Whigs and Tories arose, and the loftiest debates of political philosophy were carried on, enlivened by the feeling of present and practical interests, embittered by the rancor of old and wounded passions. Dryden plunged in; and his poem of "Absalom and Achitophel" was a political pamphlet. "They who can criticise so weakly," he says in the preface, "as to imagine that I have done my worst, may be convinced at their own cost that I can write severely with more ease than I can gently." A Biblical allegory, suited to the taste of the time, hardly concealed the names, and did not hide the men. He describes the tranquil old age and incontestable right of King David;[459] the charm, pliant humor, popularity of his natural son Absalom;[460] the genius and treachery of Achitophel,[461] who stirs up the son against the father, unites the clashing ambitions, and reanimates the conquered factions. There is hardly any wit here; there is no time to be witty in such contests; think of the roused people who listened, men in prison or exile who are waiting: fortune, liberty, life was at stake. The thing is to strike the nail on the head, hard, not gracefully. The public must recognize the characters, shout their names as they recognize the portraits, applaud the attacks which are made upon them, rail at them, hurl them from the high rank which they covet. Dryden passes them all in review:

"In the first rank of these did Zimri[462] stand, A man so various that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts and nothing long; But in the course of one revolving moon Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon; Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking. Blest madman, who could every hour employ With something new to wish or to enjoy! Railing and praising were his usual themes; And both, to show his judgment, in extremes: So over-violent, or over-civil, That every man with him was God or devil. In squandering wealth was his peculiar art; Nothing went unrewarded but desert. Beggared by fools whom still he found too late, He had his jest, and they had his estate. He laugh'd himself from Court; then sought relief By forming parties, but could ne'er be chief: For spite of him, the weight of business fell On Absalom and wise Achitophel; Thus wicked but in will, of means bereft, He left not faction, but of that was left....

"Shimei,[463] whose youth did early promise bring Of zeal to God and hatred to his King; Did wisely from expensive sins refrain And never broke the Sabbath but for gain: Nor ever was he known an oath to vent, Or curse, unless against the government."

Against these attacks their chief, Shaftesbury, made a stand; when accused of high treason he was declared not guilty by the grand jury, in spite of all the efforts of the court, amidst the applause of a great crowd; and his partisans caused a medal to be struck, bearing his face, and boldly showing on the reverse London Bridge and the Tower, with the sun rising and shining through a cloud. Dryden replied by his poem of the "Medal," and the violent diatribe overwhelmed the open provocation:

"Oh, could the style that copied every grace And plow'd such furrows for an eunuch face, Could it have formed his ever-changing will, The various piece had tired the graver's skill! A martial hero first, with early care, Blown like a pigmy by the winds, to war; A beardless chief, a rebel ere a man, So young his hatred to his Prince began. Next this (how wildly will ambition steer!) A vermin wriggling in the usurper's ear; Bartering his venal wit for sums of gold, He cast himself into the saint-like mould, Groaned, sighed, and prayed, while godliness was gain, The loudest bag-pipe of the squeaking train."

The same bitterness envenomed religious controversy. Disputes on dogma, for a moment cast into the shade by debauched and sceptical manners, had broken out again, inflamed by the bigoted Roman Catholicism of the prince, and by the just fears of the nation. The poet who in "Religio Laici" was still an Anglican, though lukewarm and hesitating, drawn on gradually by his absolutist inclinations, had become a convert to Romanism, and in his poem of "The Hind and the Panther" fought for his new creed. "The nation," he says in the preface, "is in too high a ferment for me to expect either fair war or even so much as fair quarter from a reader of the opposite party." And then, making use of mediaeval allegories, he represents all the heretical sects as beasts of prey, worrying a white hind of heavenly origin; he spares neither coarse comparisons, gross sarcasms, nor open objurgations. The argument is close and theological throughout. His hearers were not wits, who cared to see how a dry subject could be adorned; they were not theologians, only by accident and for a moment, animated by mistrustful and cautious feelings, like Boileau in his "Amour de Dieu." They were oppressed men, barely recovered from a secular persecution, attached to their faith by their sufferings, ill at ease under the visible menaces and ominous hatred of their restrained foes. Their poet must be a dialectician and a schoolman; he needs all the sternness of logic; he is immeshed in it, like a recent convert, saturated with the proofs which have separated him from the national faith, and which support him against public reprobation, fertile in distinctions, pointing with his finger at the weaknesses of an argument, subdividing replies, bringing back his adversary to the question, thorny and unpleasing to a modern reader, but the more praised and loved in his own time. In all English minds there is a basis of gravity and vehemence; hate rises tragic, with a gloomy outbreak, like the breakers of the North Sea. In the midst of his public strife Dryden attacks a private enemy, Shadwell, and overwhelms him with immortal scorn.[464] A great epic style and solemn rhyme gave weight to his sarcasm, and the unlucky rhymester was drawn in a ridiculous triumph on the poetic car, whereon the muse sets the heroes and the gods. Dryden represented the Irishman Mac Flecknoe, an old king of folly, deliberating on the choice of a worthy successor, and choosing Shadwell as an heir to his gabble, a propagator of nonsense, a boastful conqueror of common sense. From all sides, through the streets littered with paper, the nations assembled to look upon the young hero, standing near the throne of his father, his brow surrounded with thick fogs, the vacant smile of satisfied imbecility floating over his countenance:

"The hoary prince in majesty appear'd, High on a throne of his own labours rear'd. At his right hand our young Ascanius sate, Rome's other hope, and pillar of the state; His brows thick fogs instead of glories grace, And lambent dulness play'd around his face. As Hannibal did to the altars come, Sworn by his sire, a mortal foe to Rome; So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain, That he, till death, true dulness would maintain; And, in his father's right and realm's defence, Ne'er to have peace with wit nor truce with sense. The king himself the sacred unction made, As king by office and as priest by trade. In his sinister hand, instead of ball, He placed a mighty mug of potent ale."

His father blesses him:

"'Heavens bless my son! from Ireland let him reign To far Barbadoes on the western main; Of his dominion may no end be known, And greater than his father's be his throne; Beyond Love's Kingdom let him stretch his pen! He paused, and all the people cried Amen. Then thus continued he: 'My son, advance Still in new impudence, new ignorance. Success let others teach, learn thou from me. Pangs without birth and fruitless industry. Let Virtuosos in five years be writ; Yet not one thought accuse thy toil of wit.... Let them be all by thy own model made Of dulness and desire no foreign aid, That they to future ages may be known, Not copies drawn, but issue of thy own: Nay, let thy men of wit too be the same, All full of thee and differing but in name.... Like mine thy gentle numbers feebly creep; Thy tragic Muse gives smiles, thy comic sleep. With whate'er gall thou setst thyself to write, Thy inoffensive satires never bite; In thy felonious heart though venom lies, It does but touch thy Irish pen, and dies. Thy genius calls thee not to purchase fame In keen Iambics, but mild Anagram. Leave writing plays, and choose for thy command Some peaceful province in Acrostic land. There thou may'st wings display, and altars raise, And torture one poor word ten thousand ways; Or, if thou wouldst thy different talents suit, Set thy own songs, and sing them to thy lute.' He said, but his last words were scarcely heard. For Bruce and Longville had a trap prepared, And down they set the yet declaiming bard. Sinking he left his drugget robe behind, Borne upwards by a subterranean wind. The mantle fell to the young prophet's part, With double portion of his father's art."[465]

Thus the insulting masquerade goes on, not studied and polished like Boileau's "Lutrin," but rude and pompous, inspired by a coarse poetical afflatus, as you may see a great ship enter the muddy Thames, with spread canvas, cleaving the waters.