Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 353, March 1845

This sort of explicit criticism, in a small way, is rather unsatisfactory; so let us look at a specimen of implicit on Milton. In Todd's edition are detailed the names of the translators of "Paradise Lost" into rhyme and prose. "We must not" says Sir Walter, "confound with these effusions of gratuitous folly an alteration or imitation planned and executed by John Dryden." We must not; therefore let "his gratuitous folly" stand aloof from theirs, and be judged of in itself. "The State of Innocence" is an Opera! "Had the subject been of a nature which admitted its being actually represented, we might conceive that Dryden, who was under engagements to the theatre, with which it was not always easy to comply, might have been desirous to shorten his own labour by adopting the story, sentiments, and language of a poem" (how kind and cool) "which he so highly esteemed, and which might probably have been new to the generality of his audience. But the costume of our first parents, had there been no other objection, must have excluded 'The State of Innocence' from the stage; and, accordingly, it was certainly never intended for representation." One cannot well help agreeing with Sir Walter in this pleasant passage; nevertheless, might not the opera have been indited with a view to representation? With what more rational purpose could it have been "planned and executed"? The stage directions are full and minute; and, if meant for perusal only, and to be part of the poem, they are beyond the ridiculous. As, for example —

"Scene I. represents a chaos, or a confused mass of matter; the stage is almost wholly dark. A symphony of warlike music is heard for some time; then from the heavens (which are opened) fall the rebellious angels, wheeling in air, and seeming transfixed with thunderbolts. The bottom of the stage being opened, receives the angels, who fall out of sight. Tunes of victory are played, and an hymn sung; angels discovered alone, brandishing their swords. The music ceasing, and the heavens being closed, the scene shifts, and, on a sudden, represents hell. Part of the scene is a lake of brimstone or rolling fire; the earth of a burnt colour. The fallen angels appear on the lake, lying prostrate; a tune of horror and lamentation is heard."

How all this might take with a mixed audience, we do not presume to conjecture, yet very great absurdities do sometimes take almost as well on as of the stage. Must "the costume of our first parents, had there been no other objection, have excluded the 'State of Innocence' from the stage?" True, Sir Charles Sedley, and other "men of wit and fashion about town," were not well received when exhibiting themselves naked on a balcony overhanging a great thoroughfare; but then they were drunk, and acted not only indecent but insulting, nay, threatening attitudes, accompanied with abjurgations and blasphemies, which was going injudiciously in advance of that age of refinement. Suppose Booth perfectly sober in Adam, and Nell Gwynne up merely to the proper pitch of vivacity in Eve, we do not see why the opera might not have had a run during the reign of the Merry Monarch. The first sight we have of Adam is, "as newly created, laid on a bed of moss and flowers, by a rock." He rises as he begins to utter his earliest soliloquy; and we believe it is an established rule, not to turn your back on – or in playhouse phrase – not to rump your audience. In such a case; however, considerable latitude would have been conceded by both sexes to our original; and what with shades and shrubs, and, above all, the rock, an adroit actor could have had little difficulty in accommodating to his posterity their progenitor. Of Eve our first glimpse is among "trees cut out on each side, with several fruits upon them; a fountain in the midst; at the far end the prospect terminating in walks." Nelly might have worn her famous felt chapeau, broad as a coach-wheel, as appropriately in that as in any other character, and contrived to amble about with sufficient decorum for those fastidious times. Besides, as custom soon reconciles people to the most absurd dress, so would it probably, before long, reconcile them to no dress at all. A full-bottomed wig in the mimic scene, on heroic representative of a class of men, who, off the boards, had always worn, not only their own hair, but a crop, was a sine qua non condition of historic success. In puris naturalibus would have been but to fall back on nature. Why, only couple of years ago, half a million of our countrymen and countrywomen of all ages, flocked by instalments, in a single season, to look at our First Parents fresh from the hands of a French painter, naked as you were born. Such is the power of Names. No imagination – not the least in the world – had that painter; no sense – not the least in the world – of the beautiful or of the sublime in the human figure. But the population, urban and rural alike, were unhappy till they had had a sight of Adam and Eve in Paradise. We cheerfully acknowledge that Adam was a very good-looking young fellow – bang up to the mark, six feet without his shoes-close upon thirteen stone. Had he been advertised as Major Adam of the Scots Greys, the brevet would have exhibited himself on that bank to empty benches. In like manner, with the fairest of her daughters, Eve. As Pope says,

"Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see,Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be."

Pious old gentlemen, however, pronounced her perfect, merely because they gazed on the image of the mother of mankind. Painted they both were in oils. But from what we saw – for we too were carried away by the general enthusiasm – we are justified in inferring that, under prudent management, our First Parents might be successfully got up alive during the summer season at our Adelphi.

We believe that "The State of Innocence" was written for the stage. But the playwright did not intend that Adam and Eve should be stark-naked in an acted opera. Strange to say, there is not a word in it about their naked majesty or innocence. Dryden, by his idea of an opera, was forced to depart from nature and Milton. Eve's dream, so characteristically narrated by her to Adam in the poem, is shadowed out by a vision passing before her asleep, in the opera. The stage direction gives: – "A vision, where a tree rises loaden with fruit; spirits rise with it, and draw a canopy out of the tree; and the spirits dance about the tree in deformed shapes; after the dance an angel enters, with a woman, habited like Eve." That is decisive.

But what of the opera? In the preface, Dryden says "I cannot, without injury to the deceased author of 'Paradise Lost,' but acknowledge, that the poem has received its entire foundation, part of the design, and many of the ornaments from him. What I have borrowed will be so easily discerned from my mean productions, that I shall not need to point the reader to the places." That avowal may be thought to set aside all criticism – but not so – for his illustrious editor says, "the probable motive therefore of this alteration was the wish, so common to genius, to exert itself upon a subject on which another had already attained brilliant success; or, as Dryden has termed a similar attempt, the desire to shoot in the bow of Ulysses." And he adds, that because Milton intended at first to model his poem into a dramatic form, "Dryden, conscious of his own powers, and enthusiastically admiring those of Milton, was induced to make an experiment on the forsaken plan of the blind bard, which, with his usual rapidity of conception and execution, he completed in the short space of one month." Wide-encroaching Walter would see nothing far wrong in Glorious John. It is not "the forsaken plan of the blind bard," nor any thing in the least like it. They are opposite as any things that "own antipathy in nature." But this is all mere nonsense. The opera is disgraceful to Dryden. It proves that he had no understanding of the "Paradise Lost."

"Ay, you may tag my verses, if you will." But had Milton lived to hear their taggery, wrathful fire would have been in his eyes.

The opera opens, as we saw, in chaos, the scene sinking into hell, and we have Lucifer "raising himself on the lake." His exclamatory speech, of some sixteen lines, on the lake is versified, not in Dryden's best manner, from that most sublime one of Satan on reaching with Beelzebub the burning marle, with some additions from Satan's first address to that angel, while yet they were lying side by side on the fiery flood. To those who have the First Book of the "Paradise Lost" by heart, this sort of transposition patchwork cannot but be most offensive. As if to give an air of originality, where everything is borrowed and blurred, Asmoday in Milton one of the lowest, is made one of the highest, and is substituted for Beelzebub – and to him Lucifer most unarchangel-like calls "Ho! Asmoday, awake!"

Asmoday answers in a short speech, very ill reported, formerly delivered by Milton's Beelzebub, concluding with a bit absolutely stolen from his Satan himself! Lucifer then observes to Asmoday, that "our troops, like scattered leaves in autumn, lie!" A poor plagiarism indeed from the famous description from Milton's own lips, and from Lucifer's incredibly absurd! Lucifer then announces —

"With wings expanded wide, ourselves we'll rear,And fly incumbent on the dusky air.Hell! thy new lord receive!Heaven cannot envy me an empire here."(Both fly to dry land.)

You remember the lines in Milton —

"Then with expanded wings he steers his flight,Aloft incumbent on the dusky air" —

and the other sublimities of the description – all here destroyed by the monstrous absurdity of making Lucifer paint his own projected flight. He then asks "the rest of the devils," "Are you on beds of down?" On beds of down our grandsires lay – but think of eider-ducks in heaven. Moloch says his say from the Miltonic Satan, with a slight new reading.

"Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven."

And Beelzebub approves the dictum.

"Moloch, in that all are resolved, like thee.The means are unprepared; but 'tis not fit,Our dark divan in public view should sit;Or what we plot against the Thunderer,The ignoble CROWD OF VULGAR DEVILS hear!"

Lucifer adopts this disdainful suggestion, and, great magician as he is, exclaims —

"A golden palace let be raised on high,To imitate – no, to outshine the sky!All mines are ours, and gold above the rest;Let this be done, and quick as 'twas exprest."

"A palace rises, where sit as in council, Lucifer, Asmoday, Moloch, Belial, Beelzebub, and Satan." Who he may be, deuce take us if we can tell. Up to the very moment of his making his appearance, we in our simple faith had believed Lucifer and Satan to be one devil – nay, the devil. We were taken quite aback by this unexplained phenomenon of Satan's acting the part of his own tail. In this capacity he makes but one speech – but it is the speech of the evening. One seldom hears such eloquence. Moloch having proposed battle, the mysterious stranger rises to second the motion.

"Satan.   I agreeWith this brave vote; and if in Hell there beTen more such spirits, heaven is our own again.We venture nothing, and may all obtain.Yet, who can hope but well, since our successMakes foes secure, and makes our dangers less?Seraph and Cherub, careless of their chargeAnd wanton, in full ease now live at large;Unguarded leave the passes of the sky,And all dissolved in hallelujahs lie."

In the "grand consult," as recorded by Milton, Beelzebub, after proposing the "perilous attempt," asks,

"But, first, whom we shall sendIn search of this new world? Whom shall we findSufficient? who shall tempt with wandering feetThe dark, unbottom'd, infinite abyss,And through the palpable obscure find outHis uncouth way, or spread his aery flight,Upborne with indefatigable wingsOver the vast abrupt, ere he arriveThe happy isle?"

And Satan is the self-chosen missionary of the religion of Hell. In Dryden Asmoday suggests the enterprise, and

"Moloch. This glorious enterprise – (rising up.)Lucifer. Rash angel, stay. (Rising, and laying his sceptre on Moloch's head.)That palm is mine, which none shall take away.Hot braves like thee may fight, but know not wellTo manage this, the last great stake of hell."

The council comes to a close – and Lucifer promises to be with them again,

"Before yon brimstone lake thrice ebb and flow."

Tides in the Mediterranean! a touch beyond Milton.

"Here, while the chiefs sit in the palace, may be expressed the sports of the devils, as flights and dancing in grotesque figures; and a song, expressing the change of their condition, what they enjoyed before, and how they fell bravely in battle, having deserved victory by their valour, and what they would have done if they had conquered."

What had Dryden purposed to achieve? Out of two books of a great epic, to edify one act of an opera. To invention of situation, character, or passion, he aspires not; all he had to do – since he must needs meddle – was to select, compress, and abridge, with some judgment and feeling, and to give the result – unhappy at the best – in his own vigorous verse and dearly-beloved rhyme. But beneath the majesty and imagination of Milton, his genius, strong as it was, broke down, and absolutely sunk beneath the level of that of common men. Yet not in awe, nor in reverence of a superior power; for there is no trepidation of spirit; on the contrary, with cool self-assurance he rants his way through the fiery gloom of hell. By his hands shorn of their beams, the fallen angels are, one and all, poor devils indeed. The Son of the Morning is seedy, and has lost all authority over the swell mob, which he vainly essays to recover by cracking Moloch's organ with his sceptre. Yet Sir Walter, blinded by his generous admiration of Dryden's great endowments, scruples not to say that "the scene of the consultation in Pandemonium, and of the soliloquy of Satan (not Satan, it seems, but Lucifer) on his arrival in the newly-created universe, would possess great merit did they not unfortunately remind us of the majestic simplicity of Milton." Oh, heavens and earth! the veritable Satan's soliloquy on Niphate's top!

"O thou, that with surpassing glory crown'd,Look'st from thy sole dominion like the GodOf this new world; at whose sight all the starsHide their diminish'd heads, to thee I call,But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,O Sun! to tell thee how I hate thy beams,That bring to my remembrance from what stateI fell, how glorious once above thy sphere,Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,Warring in heaven against heaven's matchless king!"

And so on for nearly a hundred lines, in many a changeful strain, arch-angelical all, of heaven-remembering passion, while ever, as thus he spoke,

"Each passion dimm'd his face,Thrice changed with pale, ire, envy, and despair;Which marr'd his borrow'd visage, and betray'dHim counterfeit, if any eye beheld;For heavenly minds, from such distempers foulAre ever clear."

The soliloquy of Dryden's Lucifer consists of twenty lines, taken almost at hap-hazard from that of Milton's, jumbled together without consideration, and mangled from the most multitudinous blank verse ever written, into rhymes much beneath the average merit of one who, at times, could indeed command "the long-majestic march and energy divine."

Adam and Eve fare little better than the angels under his reforming fingers. Milton, you remember, makes Adam tell Raphael the story of his birth, in language charmful to affable arch-angel's ear, albeit tuned to harmonies in heaven. Dryden burlesques that revelation into the following soliloquy, supposed to have been the first words spoken by human lips. Adam at once opens his mouth in the style of the age of refinement. After the fall, how degenerate kept growing on our father tongue, till it reached its acme in the barbarous lingo of Shakspeare! And how suited, here, the thought to the speech! How natural the natural theology of both! He anticipates Descartes.

"Adam. What am I? or from whence? For that I am (rising)I know, because I think; but whence I come,Or how this frame of mine began to be,What other being can disclose to me?I move, and see, and speak, discourse, and know;Though now I am, I was not always so.Then that from which I was, must be before,Whom, as my spring of being, I adore.How full of ornament is all I view,In all its parts! and seems as beautiful as new:O goodly order'd earth! O Power Divine!Of thee I am, and what I am is thine."

A day or two after, "a cloud descends with six angels in it, and when it is near the ground breaks, and, on each side, discovers six more." Raphael and Gabriel, sent to admonish and warn, discourse with Adam, the ten others standing at a distance. The conversation instantly assumes, and throughout sustains, an intensely controversial character, and Raphael and Gabriel, though two to one, and moreover angel versus man, are hard put to it on predestination and free-will. Adam is equipped with all the weapons of the schools, and uses them defensively, and most offensively, with all the dexterity of a veteran gladiator. But our disgust soon ceases, along with our deception; and we but see and hear John Dryden puzzling a brace of would-be wits at Wills's. The whole reads like a so-so bit of the Religio Laici. It ends thus: —

"Adam. Hard state of life! since heaven foreknows my will,Why am I not tied up from doing ill?Why am I trusted with myself at large,When he's more able to sustain the charge?Since angels fell, whose strength was more than mine,'Twould then more grace my frailty to confine.Foreknowing the success, to leave me free,Excuses him, and yet supports not me!"

This from Adam yet sinless in Paradise!

The loves of Adam and Eve are not perhaps absolutely coarse – at least not so for Dryden – but they are of the earth earthy, and the earth is not of the mould of Eden. Aiblins – not coarse, but verily coquettish, and something more, is Eve. And she is too silly.

"From each treeThe feather'd kinds peep down to look on me;And beasts with upcast eyes forsake their shade,And gaze as if I were to be obey'd.Sure I am somewhat which they wish to be,And cannot. I myself am proud of me."

A day or two after their marriage, Eve gives Adam a long description of her first emotions experienced in the nuptial bower. More warmly coloured than in her simplicity she seems to be aware of; and Adam, pleased with her innocent flattery, treats her with an Epithalamium.

"When to my arms thou brought'st thy virgin love,Fair angels sang our bridal hymn above:The Eternal, nodding, shook the firmament!And conscious nature gave her glad consent.Roses unbid, and every fragrant flowerFlew from their stalks to strew thy nuptial bower:The furr'd and feather'd kinds the triumph did pursue,And fishes leap'd above the streams the passing pomp to view."

Hats off – bravo – bravo – hurra – hurra! – Of such stuff is made, in the "State of Innocence," Dryden's implicit criticism on the Paradise Lost of Milton.

Peace be with his shade! and its forgiveness with us. It is dangerous to unite the functions of judge and executioner. The imperturbable bosom of the seated judge calmly gives forth the award of everlasting Justice, and the mandate for the punishment that must expiate or appease her violated majesty. But the judge who is obliged to turn lictor, and must step down from the tribunal to take his criminal farther in hand, undoubtedly runs a risk, when he feels his hand in, of being carried too far by his excited zeal. After all, we have stayed ours. And now, having discharged a principal part of our office, what remains, but that we turn round, heal with our right hand what our left has inflicted, and lift up Glorious John to the skies? And lift him up we will; and with good reason; for we are far indeed from being done with this first era of deliberate and formal criticism in English literature. Extol him to the clouds and to the stars we will, but not now; for lo! where another great name beckons!

The close of the seventeenth century for ever shut the eyes of John Dryden upon the clouded and fluctuating daylight of our sublunary world. It may have been, in the same year, that a solitary boy, then twelve years old, wrote five stanzas which any man might have been glad to have written – and which you have by heart – an "Ode to Solitude" – conspicuous in the annals of English poetry as the dawn-gleam of a new sun that was presently to arise, and to fill the region that Dryden had left.

A feeble frame has dedicated many a student. This, with other causes about this time, took the boy, Alexander Pope, from schools where he learned little, to commit him, under the guardian more than guiding love of indulgent parents, to his own management of his own studies. And study he did – instinctively, eagerly, ramblingly through books of sundry kinds – helping himself as he could to their languages – devouring more than he digested – wedding himself to the high and gracious muses – seeking for, and finding, his own extraordinary powers – and diminishing the small quantity of delicate health which nature had put in his keeping. He resigned himself to die, and was dying, when a strong interposition, among other sanatary measures, transferred him from the back of Pegasus to that of an earth-born horse.

Pope had a gentleness of spirit, which showed itself in his filial offices to his father and mother – to her the most, ill the prolonged wearing out of a beloved life. It appears in kindly relations to his friends, in charities, in the scheme of his life – contentedness in a bounded, quiet existence, a seclusion among books, and trees, and flowers. His life flowed on peaceably and gently, like the noble river upon which his modest dwelling looked. Ill health, as we said, often dedicates a student. The constitutional feebleness from which he suffered, might doubly favour his mind; as often the more delicate frame harbours the greater spirit; and as inaptitude for active and rough sports, throws the solitary boy upon the companionship of books, and upon the energies, avocations, and pleasures of his own intelligence and fancy. The little poem of his boyhood, and the first of his manhood, prophesy his tenor of life, and his literary career.

A commanding power, a predominant star in English literature – you might say that the last century belonged to him. Dryden reigned over his contemporaries. Pope, succeeding, took dominion over his own time and the following. The pupil of Dryden, and gratefully proud to proclaim the greatness of his master, and to own all obligations, he moulded himself nevertheless upon a type in his own mind. In the school of Dryden he is an original master. Dryden is, properly speaking, without imitators. His manner proceeds from his own genius, and baffles transcribers. But Pope completed an art which could be learned, and he left a world full of copyists.

A remarkable feature is the early acknowledgment of Pope by his contemporaries. At sixteen he is a poet for the world by his Pastorals, and at that age he has a literary adviser in Walsh and a literary patron in Trumbull. He does not seem to court. He is courted. He is the intimate friend, we do not know how soon, of scholars and polite writers, of men and women high in birth, in education, in station. Scarce twenty, by his "Essay on Criticism" he assumes a chair in the school of the Muses. At five-and-twenty, he is an acknowledged dictator of polite letters. So early, rapid, untroubled an ascension to fame, it would require some research to find a parallel to. Our literature has it not. And this acknowledgment, gratulation, triumph, which friends and circles, and the confined literary world of that day in this country could furnish, a whole age, and a whole country, and a whole world, the extended republic of letters, confirm.

In the judgment of England, in the eighteenth century, the reputation of Pope may be called the most dazzling in English literature. It was a nearer sun than Dryden, Milton, Shakspeare; as for Spenser and Chaucer, they were little better than fixed stars.

Great revolutions in the state of the heavens and of astronomical science have ensued. To say nothing of new luminaries that have come into birth, from the bosom of "chaos and unoriginal night," either we have wheeled round upon Shakspeare, or he upon us, in a surprising manner; the orb of Milton enlarges day by day; cheerily we draw large accessions of the gentlest light on Spenser; and old Father Geoffrey and we are sensibly approximating.