Calamities And Quarrels Of Authors Part 48

Among the personal foibles of D'Avenant appears a desire to disguise his humble origin; and to give it an air of lineal descent, he probably did not write his name as his father had done. It is said he affected, at the cost of his mother's honour, to insinuate that he was the son of Shakspeare, who used to bait at his father's inn.[327]

These humorists first reduce D'Avenant to "Old Daph."

Denham, come help me to laugh, At old Daph, Whose fancies are higher than chaff.

Daph swells afterwards into "Daphne;" a change of s.e.x inflicted on the poet for making one of his heroines a man; and this new alliance to Apollo becomes a source of perpetual allusion to the bays--

Cheer up, small wits, now _you_ shall crowned be,-- Daphne himself is turn'd into a tree.

One of the club inquires about the situation of _Avenant_--

----where now it lies, Whether in Lombard,[328] or the skies.

Because, as seven cities disputed for the birth of Homer, so after ages will not want towns claiming to be _Avenant_--

Some say by _Avenant_ no place is meant, And that our Lombard is without descent; And as, by _Bilk_, men mean there's nothing there, So come from _Avenant_, means from _no where_.

Thus _Will_, intending _D'Avenant_ to grace, Has made a notch in's name like that in's face.

D'Avenant had been knighted for his good conduct at the siege of Gloucester, and was to be tried by the Parliament, but procured his release without trial. This produces the following sarcastic epigram:--

UPON FIGHTING WILL.

The King knights Will for fighting on his side; Yet when Will comes for fighting to be tried, There is not one in all the armies can Say they e'er felt, or saw, this fighting man.

Strange, that the Knight should not be known i' th' field; A face well charged, though nothing in his s.h.i.+eld.

Sure fighting Will like _basilisk_ did ride Among the troops, and all that _saw_ Will died; Else how could Will, for fighting, be a Knight, And none alive that ever saw Will fight?

Of the malignancy of their wit, we must preserve one specimen. They probably hara.s.sed our poet with anonymous despatches from the Club: for there appears another poem on D'Avenant's anger on such an occasion:--

A LETTER SENT TO THE GOOD KNIGHT.

Thou hadst not been thus long neglected, But we, thy four best friends, expected, Ere this time, thou hadst stood corrected.

But since that planet governs still, That rules thy tedious fustain quill 'Gainst nature and the Muses' will; When, by thy friends' advice and care, 'Twas hoped, in time, thou wouldst despair To give ten pounds to write it fair; Lest thou to all the world would show it, We thought it fit to let thee know it: Thou art a d.a.m.n'd insipid poet!

These literary satires contain a number of other "pasquils,"

burlesquing the characters, the incidents, and the stanza, of the GONDIBERT: some not the least witty are the most gross, and must not be quoted; thus the wits of that day were poetical suicides, who have shortened their lives by their folly.

D'Avenant, like more than one epic poet, did not tune to his ear the _names_ of his personages. They have added, to show that his writings are adapted to an easy musical singer, the names of his heroes and heroines, in these verses:--

Hurgonil, Astolpho, Borgia, Goltha, Tibalt, Astragon, Hermogild, Ulfinor, Orgo, Thula.

And "epithets that will serve for any substantives, either in this part or the next."

Such are the labours of the idlers of genius, envious of the n.o.bler industry of genius itself!--How the great author's spirit was nourished by the restoratives of his other friends, after the bitter decoctions prescribed by these "Four," I fear we may judge by the unfinished state in which "Gondibert" has come down to us. D'Avenant seems, however, to have guarded his dignity by his silence; but Hobbes took an opportunity of delivering an exquisite opinion on this Club of Wits, with perfect philosophical indifference. It is in a letter to the Hon. EDWARD HOWARD, who requested to have his sentiments on another heroic poem of his own, "The British Princes."

"My judgment in poetry hath, you know, been once already censured, by very good wits, for commending 'Gondibert;' but yet they have not, I think, disabled my testimony. For, _what authority is there in wit_?

A jester may have it; a man in drink may have it, and be fluent over-night, and wise and dry in the morning. What is it? or who can tell whether it be better to have it, or be without it, especially if it be a pointed wit? I will take my liberty to praise what I like, as well as they do to reprehend what they do not like."

The stately "Gondibert" was not likely to recover favour in the court of Charles the Second, where man was never regarded in his true greatness, but to be ridiculed; a court where the awful presence of Clarendon became so irksome, that the worthless monarch exiled him; a court where nothing was listened to but wit at the cost of sense, the injury of truth, and the violation of decency; where a poem of magnitude with new claims was a very business for those volatile arbiters of taste; an epic poem that had been travestied and epigrammed, was a national concern with them, which, next to some new state-plot, that occurred oftener than a new epic, might engage the monarch and his privy council. These were not the men to be touched by the compressed reflections and the ideal virtues personified in this poem. In the court of the laughing voluptuary the manners as well as the morals of these satellites of pleasure were so little heroic, that those of the highest rank, both in birth and wit, never mentioned each other but with the vulgar familiarity of nicknames, or the coa.r.s.e appellatives of d.i.c.k, Will, and Jack! Such was the era when the serious "Gondibert" was produced, and such were the judges who seem to have decided its fate.

FOOTNOTES:

[321] D'Avenant commenced his poem during his exile at Paris. The preface is dated from the Louvre; the postscript from Cowes Castle, in the Isle of Wight, where he was then confined, expecting his immediate execution. The poem, in the first edition, 1651, is therefore abruptly concluded. There is something very affecting and great in his style on this occasion. "I am here arrived at the middle of the third book.

But it is high time to strike sail and cast anchor, though I have run but half my course, when at the helm I am threatened with _death_; who, though he can visit us but once, seems troublesome; and even in the innocent may beget such a gravity, as diverts the music of verse. Even in a worthy design, I shall ask leave to desist, when I am interrupted by so great an experiment as _dying_;--and 'tis an experiment to the most experienced; for no man (though his mortifications may be much greater than mine) can say _he has already died_."--D'Avenant is said to have written a letter to Hobbes about this time, giving some account of his progress in the third book. "But why (said he) should I trouble you or myself with these thoughts, when I am pretty certain I shall be hanged next week?"--A stroke of the gaiety of temper of a very thoughtful mind; for D'Avenant, with all his wit and fancy, has made the profoundest reflections on human life.

The reader may be interested to know, that after D'Avenant's removal from Cowes to the Tower, to be tried, his life was saved by the grat.i.tude of two aldermen of York, whom he had obliged. It is delightful to believe the story told by Bishop Newton, that D'Avenant owed his life to Milton; Wood, indeed, attributes our poet's escape to both; at the Restoration D'Avenant interposed, and saved Milton. Poets, after all, envious as they are to a brother, are the most generously-tempered of men: they libel, but they never hang; they will indeed throw out a sarcasm on the man whom they saved from being hanged. "Please your Majesty," said Sir John Denham, "do not hang George Withers--that it may not be said I am the worst poet alive."

[322] It would form a very curious piece of comparative criticism, were the opinions and the arguments of all the critics--those of the time and of the present day--thrown into the smelting-pot. The ma.s.siness of some opinions of great authority would be reduced to a thread of wire; and even what is accepted as standard ore might shrink into "a gilt sixpence." On one side, the condemners of D'Avenant would be Rymer, Blackwall, Granger, Knox, Hurd, and Hayley; and the advocates would be Hobbes, Waller, Cowley, Dr. Aikin, Headley, &c. Rymer opened his Aristotelian text-book. He discovers that the poet's first lines do not give any light into his design (it is probable D'Avenant would have found it hard to have told it to Mr. Rymer); that it has neither proposition nor invocation--(Rymer might have filled these up himself); so that "he chooses to enter into the top of the house, because the mortals of mean and satisfied minds go in at the door;"

and then "he has no hero or action so ill.u.s.trious that the _name_ of the poem prepared the reader for its reception."

D'Avenant had rejected the marvellous from his poem--that is, the machinery of the epic: he had resolved to compose a tale of human beings for men. "This was," says Blackwall, another of the cla.s.sical flock, "like lopping off a man's limb, and then putting him upon running races." Our formal critics are quite lively in their dulness on our "adventurer." But poets, in the crisis of a poetical revolution, are more legitimate judges than all such critics. Waller and Cowley applaud D'Avenant for this very omission of the epical machinery in this new vein of invention:--

"Here no bold tales of G.o.ds or monsters swell, But human pa.s.sions such as with us dwell; _Man is thy theme_, his virtue or his rage, Drawn to the life in each elaborate page."

WALLER.

"Methinks heroic poesy, till now, Like some fantastic fairy-land did show, _And all but man, in man's best work had place_."

COWLEY.

Hurd's discussion on "Gondibert," in his "Commentaries," is the most important piece of criticism; subtle, ingenious, and exquisitely a.n.a.lytical. But he holds out the fetter of authority, and he decides as a judge who expounds laws; not the best decision, when new laws are required to abrogate obsolete ones. And what laws invented by man can be immutable?

D'Avenant was thus tried by the laws of a country, that of Greece or Rome, of which, it is said, he was not even a denizen.

It is remarkable that all the critics who condemn D'Avenant could not but be struck by his excellences, and are very particular in expressing their admiration of his genius. I mean all the critics who have read the poem: some a.s.suredly have criticised with little trouble.

[323] It is written in the long four-lined stanzas, which Dryden adopted for his _Annus Mirabilis_; nearly 2000 of such stanzas are severe trials for the critical reader.--ED.

[324] I select some of these lines as examples.

Of Care, who only "seals her eyes in cloisters," he says,

"She visits cities, but she dwells in thrones."

Of learned Curiosity, eager, but not to be hurried--the student is

"Hasty to know, though not by haste beguiled."

He calls a library, with sublime energy,

"The monument of vanish'd minds."

Never has a politician conveyed with such force a most important precept:

------------"The laws, Men from themselves, but not from power, secure."

Of the Court he says,

"There prosperous power sleeps long, though suitors wake."

"Be bold, for number cancels bashfulness; Extremes, from which a King would blus.h.i.+ng shrink, Unblus.h.i.+ng senates act as no excess."

And these lines, taken as they occur: