Collected Essays (26 page)

1938

PART III

Some Characters

[1]

POETRY FROM LIMBO

M
ISS
G
UINEY
began this magnificently thorough anthology in 1913.
*1
Her work was nearly finished when she died in 1920, and it was completed by her friend, Mr Edward O’Brien, who brought up to date the biographical and bibliographical notes. Miss Guiney in her introduction makes the modest claim that the value of the collection is as much historical as literary; the scholar must decide on that, but the general reader will be astounded by its wealth of little-known poetry.

The term recusant has been given the widest possible meaning – to include any Catholic who suffered from the civil power for his faith, but the contributions have been wisely confined to those which have some bearing on Catholic doctrine or ideals. Many of the poets, of course, are familiar: More himself. Constable, Lodge, Southwell, Surrey; some have been known only to specialists, and a few make their appearance for the first time in print. It is by no means a purely heroic company, and far from a saintly one – here is the turncoat Alabaster and cowardly, light-headed Copley, who, when he was a student in Rome – so Father Parsons reported – went up to the pulpit to preach with a rose in his mouth. It is a pleasant irony that this Bye Plot conspirator, who made a confession implicating his friends, should have been the author of the fine stoic lines:

Here, too, are the merely unattractive or the grotesque – Myles Hogarde, of Pudding Lane, with his eye for other men’s errors, and Pickering, the too-careful Dominican of the Pilgrimage of Grace, who tried to rewrite the popular songs of that wild and hopeful year in a seemly and pedantic way:

It is interesting to watch how, among these unprofessional poets, the heroic and the uncertain, the rash and the too politic, the main themes change. At first the theme is social – the decay of charity and hospitality: the greed for wealth. Men who were born in the pre-capitalist age describe with indignation the new capitalist spirit – which they still hope to see pass:

This is the theme, too, of the magnificent and anonymous marching song of the Pilgrims of Grace: it is astonishingly explicit in a poem by William Forrest, who inventories in minute detail the old just wages for a winter or a summer day, and such post-Reformation abuses as paying a woman less than a man for the same work. As time goes on, this theme vanishes: people can no longer remember the old social system; if the subject re-emerges, as in one of Lodge’s poems, it is in the form of nostalgia for something which will never return:

This was the swan-song of the social conscience among Roman Catholic poets.

The subject of martyrdom next began to take the principal place as the Douai victims accumulated: the peril of informers, the activities of Topcliffe, the warder knocking at the cell-door; and the anonymous author of
Calvary Mount
recounts the whole routine of martyrdom, from the stretching of the joints to the last horrible ride. Again we notice the concreteness of the expression, which became yet barer with the years, until in a poem, not printed here as it dates from 1646, we read:

A practised poet, of course, dealt very differently and most exquisitely with the same material:

but we can be glad that those others – who were only poets by accident – stuck to the bare fact.

It is not till the second half of this period that the third subject emerges – the doctrinal. The social changes had been obvious from the start and martyrdoms did not take place in a corner: it needed time for men to feel the weight of the sacramental loss. It was not really oppressive until they had reached that state described by Constable in a sonnet outside the scheme of this book: ‘Hope, like the hyena coming to be old.’ An anonymous poet writes on ‘the new learning’; William Blundell of Crosby carefully notes the changes one by one and concludes in a tone which reminds us of his cavalier descendant:

And Constable in a sonnet describes the Blessed Sacrament with the exactness of a theologian – again we note the admirable, almost prosaic precision of these poets, which seems more alive to us today than the rich imagery of Spenser.

Only occasionally do I feel inclined to quarrel with the editor – for the suggestion that the lovely singable lament over Walsingham may have been written by Southwell (surely it lacks altogether the heavy intellectual ground-swell of his poetry?) and for the inclusion of so much of Surrey’s beautiful and inapposite verse. This is to draw the net too wide – the mainspring of his poetry was mainly aristocratic. It wasn’t the faith he missed in prison so much as the ‘palme play’ at Windsor, the cry of hounds, ‘the wanton talk, the divers change of play’, the favour of a Court. He seems more out of place in the company of the martyrs than the coward Copley or poor uncertain Alabaster: dying a patrician death on Tower Hill, unacquainted with that dingy cell in Newgate which was known to more base-born recusants as Limbo.

1939

AN UNHEROIC DRAMATIST

R
OGER
B
OYLE
, Earl of Orrery, is one of the great bores of literature, and it can hardly have been a labour of love for Mr Clark to edit for the first time eight ponderous heroic plays, hardly lightened by two attempts at comedy. Yet all admirers of the period will be grateful: there is a peculiar satisfaction in seeing one more gap in Restoration scholarship filled with such immense efficiency: no crack between the bricks. Not for them the rather hollow excuse that Orrery was the pioneer of heroic drama in England. They will read with gorged satisfaction that one of these plays.
The Tragedy of Zoroastes
, has never before been printed and that Orrery’s first play (Mr Clark leaves us in no doubt of this).
The Generall
, has been previously printed only in a private edition of eighty copies. Another great booming bogus piece,
The Tragedy of King Saul
, is added to the Orrery canon for the first time. All this, with the really magnificent notes on Restoration stage-craft, is a not unworthy harvest of eight years’ labour.
*2

Roger Boyle (let us extend praise as far as it will go) was not always a worse poet than was Lee in his earliest plays: there are a few charming lines to be unearthed in
The Generall
(Mr Clark curiously prefers the maturer, emptier
Henry the Fifth
):

It is very minor poetry, of course, but it does shine out among the heroic sentiments. Otherwise the chief pleasure in this his best play is in the period note. Surfeited with action on the screen, one finds a curious charm in the passivity and irrelevance of a scene which opens: ‘Filadin: Lett us then of our mistresses discourse.’

Roger Boyle was not the man for heroic drama. Dryden with his inalterable belief in authority which took him logically by way of Cromwell to the Catholic Church, yes: Lee with the turbulent generous mind that brought him to Bedlam, yes: but we are aware of too great a gap between the man and his poetry when we get as low as Settle, and Boyle presents us with the same incongruity. Mr Clark has written his life in greater detail, though with infinitely less charm, than Eustace Budgell (to whose eighteenth-century biography he might surely have paid the tribute of a footnote), and the portrait he rather stiffly draws is that of a very polite man, a man who lived on the dubious borderline between patronage and treachery. He played no part in the Civil War in England, being fortunate enough to be occupied in Ireland against the Catholic rebels: on the King’s death he began to correspond with Charles II, but Cromwell got possession of the letters and in a remarkable scene, which Mr Clark should have given in detail, presented him with the choice between the Tower and a command in Ireland. Boyle, of course, took the command, and on Cromwell’s death began again his political moves. But he was forestalled by Monck: the patriot always moves faster than the politic. Nevertheless he became a friend of the King, wrote plays at the Royal command and, when he had the gout, served in Ireland, intrigued against Ormonde, and died unlamented by Burnet at the age of fifty-nine.

A man quite remarkably free from the impediments of friendship, how can he do else but write a little hollowly on that favourite heroic theme?

Burnet, if not his chaplain Morrice, saw through his pretence to religion, and there is one moment in
The Generall
when a somewhat similar dramatic situation allows a direct comparison with Dryden. It will be remembered how Don Sebastiano dealt with the theme of suicide:

But hear the politic accents of Burnet’s ‘very fickle and false man’ in the character of Altemara:

Without religion and without friendship, Orrery tried to write heroic dramas: the succession of plays, one imitated from the other, soon palled, even on Pepys, and he tried his hand at comedy.
Guzman
is quite unreadable buffoonery, but of
Mr Anthony
it is just possible to say that it is as good as the worst of D’Urfey. He was, if that is in his favour, a clean writer, but then he seems to have had as little passion as he had religion.

1937

DOCTOR OATES OF SALAMANCA

M
ISS
L
ANE
is to be congratulated on her courage in undertaking so grim and unrelieved a work as a biography of Titus Oates (a work that has deterred biographers for nearly two hundred and fifty years) as well as on her skill and scholarship. No biographer can ever have been able to claim with more likelihood of truth that his work is definitive.
*3

It is interesting sometimes to speculate on how our ideas of a period would be modified if one character or one episode were removed. A man like Titus Oates occurs like a slip of the tongue, disclosing the unconscious forces, the night-side of an age we might otherwise have thought of in terms of Dryden discussing the art of dramatic poesy, while his Thames boatmen rested on their oars and the thunder of an indeterminate sea battle came up from the Medway no louder than the noise of swallows in a chimney. The reach of human nature in his day, if Oates had not enlightened us, would not have extended much lower than the amiable vices of the Court: Rochester acting Dr Bendo, Sedley prancing naked on the Epsom balcony, sin fluttering with the unimportance of a fan through the delicate cadences of Etherege’s prose, that played so charmingly with the same counters, the Park, the Mulberry Gardens, the game of ombre, and as night falls ‘’tis now but high Mall, Madam, the most entertaining time of all the evening’. And reaching the other way, would our hand have extended, without the martyrs of the Plot, much further than the piety of Bunyan? Until Oates came on the scene, it seemed hardly a period for courage any more than for evil. The career of Oates ploughed up the age and exposed the awful unchanging potentialities of human nature.

If we wished to present a portrait of evil in human terms it would be hard to find a more absolute example than the Salamanca doctor. At no point in his career does he seem to have been touched by any form of idealism. At no point is it possible to say that he was led on by a false fanaticism, or that he did wrong with any idea that right might come. His career was one of unexampled squalor, from his snotty-nosed childhood. ‘I thought that he would have been a natural,’ his mother is said to have reported, ‘for his Nose always run and he slabbered at the mouth, and his Father could not endure him; and when he came home at night the Boy would use to be in the Chimney corner, and my Husband would cry take away this snotty Fool, and jumble him about, which made me often weep, because you know he was my child.’ Yet the early years are the lighter side of Oates’s life. So long as he was unsuccessful we can be entertained by the grotesqueness of his career: expelled from school, sent down from Cambridge, turned out of his living, wanted for his first perjury (he had coveted a schoolmaster’s post at Hastings and therefore brought against the poor man an accusation of committing an unnatural offence in the church porch), a chaplain in the Navy and expelled again. The shadows fall with his success – his ‘conversion’ to Catholicism, his stay at St Omer’s College, and last the Plot itself.