This fiery game your active youth maintain'd; Not yet by years extinguish'd though restrain'd:... Prerogative and privilege preserves: Of each our laws the certain limit show; One must not ebb, nor t'other overflow: May neither overflow, for then they drown the land. This serious converse shows a political mind, fed on the spectacle of affairs, having in the matter of public and practical debates the superiority which the French have in speculative discussions and social conversation. So, amidst the dryness of polemics break forth sudden splendours, a poetic fount, a prayer from the heart's depths; the English well of concentrated passion is on a sudden opened again with a flow and a dash which Dryden does not elsewhere exhibit: 'Dim as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars To lonely, weary, wand'ring travellers, Is reason to the soul: and as on high Those rolling fires discover but the sky, Not light us here; so Reason's glimm'ring ray But guide us upward to a better day. And as those nightly tapers disappear When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere, But, gracious God! how well dost thou provide Whom Thou hast promised never to forsake! My thoughtless youth was wing'd with vain desires; Follow'd false lights; and when their glimpse was gone, My pride struck out new sparkles of her own. Such was I, such by nature still I am; Be Thine the glory and be mine the shame! Good life be now my task; my doubt are done."1 Such is the poetry of these serious minds. After having strayed in the debaucheries and pomps of the Restoration, Dryden found his way to the grave emotions of inner life; though a Romanist, he felt like a Protestant the wretchedness of man and the presence of grace: he was capable of enthusiasm. Here and there a manly and effective verse discloses, in the midst of his reasonings, the power of conception and the inspiration of desire. When the tragic is met with, he takes to it as to his own domain; at need, he deals in the horrible. He has described the infernal chase, and the torture of the young girl worried by dogs, with the savage energy of Milton. As a contrast, he loved nature: this taste always endures in England; the sombre, reflective passions are unstrung in the wide peace and harmony of the fields. Landscapes are to be met with amidst theological disputation: 'New blossoms flourish and new flowers arise, 4 Under his regular versification the artist's soul is brought to light; though contracted by habits of classical argument, though stiffened by controversy and polemics, though unable to create souls or to depict artless and delicate sentiments, he is a genuine poet: he is troubled, raised by beautiful sounds and forms; he writes boldly under the pressure of vehement ideas; he surrounds himself willingly with splendid images; he is moved by the buzzing of their swarms, the glitter of their splendours; he is, when he wishes it, a musician and a painter; he writes stirring airs, which shake all the senses, even if they do not sink deep into the heart. Such is his Alexander's Feast, an ode in honour of St. Cecilia's day, an admirable trumpet-blast, in which metre and sound impress upon the nerves the emotions of the mind, a masterpiece of rapture and of art, which Victor Hugo alone has come up 1 The Hind and the Panther, Part i. v. 64–75. 4 2 Theodore and Honoria, xi. 3 The Hind and the Panther, Part iii. v. 553–560. These charming verses on the Duchess of York remind one of those of La Fontaine on the Princess of Conti. to. Alexander is on his throne in the palace of Persepolis; the lovely Thais sate by his side; before him, in a vast hall, his glorious captains. And Timotheus sings: The praise of Bacchus, then, the sweet musician sung; Of Bacchus ever fair, and ever young. The jolly God in triumph comes; He shews his honest face. Now, give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes. Bacchus, ever fair and young, Drinking joys did first ordain; Drinking is the soldier's pleasure; Rich the treasure, Sweet the pleasure; Sweet is pleasure after pain.' And at the stirring sounds the king is troubled; his cheeks are glowing; his battles return to his memory; he defies heaven and earth. Then a sad song depresses him. Timotheus mourns the death of the betrayed Darius. Then a tender song softens him; Timotheus lauds the dazzling beauty of Thais. Suddenly he strikes the lyre again: 'A louder yet, and yet a louder strain. Break his bands of sleep asunder, And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder. Has raised up his head; As awaked from the dead, And amazed, he stares around. See the snakes, that they rear, How they hiss in their hair! And the sparkles that flash from their eyes! Behold a ghastly band, Each a torch in his hand! Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain, Thus already music softened, exalted, mastered men; Dryden's verses acquire power in describing it. X. This was one of his last works; brilliant and poetical, it was born amidst the greatest sadness. The king for whom he had written was deposed and in exile; the religion which he had embraced was despised and oppressed; a Roman Catholic and a royalist, he was bound to a conquered party, which the nation resentfully and mistrustfully considered as the natural enemy of liberty and reason. He had lost the two places which were his support; he lived wretchedly, burdened with a family, obliged to support his son abroad; treated as a hireling by a coarse publisher, forced to ask him for money to pay for a watch which he could not get on credit, beseeching Lord Bolingbroke to protect him against Tonson's insults, rated by this shopkeeper when the promised page was not finished on the stated day. His enemies persecuted him with pamphlets; the Puritan Collier lashed his comedies unfeelingly; he was damned without pity, but conscientiously. He had long been in ill health, crippled, constrained to write much, reduced to exaggerate flattery in order to earn from the great the indispensable money which the publishers would not give him:1 'What Virgil wrote in the vigour of his age, in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write; and my judges, if they are not very equitable, already prejudiced against me, by the lying character which has been given them of my morals.'" Although well meant for his own part, he knew that his conduct had not always been worthy, and that all his writings would not endure. Born between two epochs, he had oscillated between two forms of life and two forms of thought, having reached the perfection of neither, having kept the faults of both; having found in surrounding manners no support worthy of his character, and in surrounding ideas no subject worthy of his talent. If he had founded criticism and good style, this criticism had only found scope in pedantic treatises or unconnected prefaces; this good style continued out of the track in inflated tragedies, dispersed over multiplied translations, scattered in occasional pieces, in odes written to order, in party poems, meeting only here and there an afflatus capable of employing it, and a subject capable of sustaining it. What efforts for such a moderate result! For a long time gravel and gout left him no peace; erysipelas seized one of his legs. In April 1700 he tried to go out; a slight inflammation in one of his toes became, from neglect, a gangrene;' the doctor would have tried amputation, but he decided that what remained him of health and happiness was not worth the pain. He died at the age of sixty-nine. He was paid two hundred and fifty guineas for ten thousand lines. CHAPTER III. The Revolution. I. The moral revolution of the seventeenth century-It advances side by side with the political revolution. II. Brutality of the people - Gin-Riots-Corruption of the great-Political manners-Treasons under William III. and Anne-Morality under Walpole and Bute-Private manners-The roysterers-The atheists-Chesterfield's Letters-His polish and morality-Gay's Beggars' Opera-His elegance and satire. III. Principles of civilisation în France and England-Conversation in France; how it ends in a revolution-Moral sense in England; how it ends in a reformation. IV. Religion-Visible signs-Its profound sentiment-Religion popular-Life like-Arians-Methodists. V. The pulpit-Mediocrity and efficacy of preaching-Tillotson-His heaviness and solidity-Barrow-His abundance and minuteness- -South-His harshness and energy-Comparison of French and English preachers. VI. Theology-Comparison of the French and English apology for religionSherlock, Stillingfleet, Clarke-Theology not speculative but moral—The greatest minds are on the side of Christianity-Impotence of speculative philosophy-Berkeley, Newton, Locke, Hume, Reid-Development of moral philosophy-Smith, Pine, Hutcheson. VII. The Constitution-Sentiment of right-Locke's Essay on GovernmentTheory of personal right accepted-Maintained by temperament, pride, and interest-Theory of personal right applied-Put in practice by elections, the press, the tribunals. VIII. Parliamentary eloquence-Its energy and harshness - Lord ChathamJunius-Fox-Sheridan-Pitt-Burke. IX. Issue of the century's labours-Economic and moral transformation-Comparison of Reynolds' and Lely's portraits-Contrary doctrines and tendencies in France and England - Revolutionists and Conservatives Judgment of Burke and the English people on the French Revolution. W I. ITH the constitution of 1688 a new spirit appears in England. Slowly, gradually, the moral revolution accompanies the social: man changes with the state, in the same sense and for the same causes; character moulds itself to the situation; and little by little, in manners and in literature, we trace the empire of a serious, reflective, moral spirit, capable of discipline and independence, which can alone maintain and give effect to a constitution. |