The Columbia History of British Poetry (67 page)

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Page 286
port of the legitimacy of the succession of James
Absalom
itselt is alert to all that is problematic in the very notion of political legitimacy, and its alertness complicates the poem's polemical intention. Its polemical position is based on the notion that divine sanction is the source of "right"; all opposition to sanctioned authority is therefore easily mythologized as a version of Satan's original rebellion against the highest of authoritieshence the resonances of Milton's
Paradise Lost
that Dryden archly admits into his poem. But nowhere in Dryden's poem do its biblical and mythic resonances infuse its narrative as they infuse Milton's; biblical allusion functions merely to make of the poem a kind of
roman à clef
, a witty guide to the main players in the Exclusion Crisis, not authentic evidence of the intersection of eternity and time, of the sacred and the historical.
Indeed, the Exclusion Crisis spawned a host of polemical narratives based upon the irresistibly scandalous resemblance of the sexual careers of God's David and England's Charles, and you could make use of the analogy whether you were for or against the king. This polemical flexibility of the Bible story would of course tend to undermine its authority as a guide to God's sanctioning will, as Michael McKeon implies in an important discussion ("Historicizing,
Absalom and Achitopbel
," in
The New Eighteenth Century
, 1987). This is why it is possible to see in Dryden's use of the sacred mythology in
Absalom and Achitophel
more than a suggestion of a keen, libertine wit. We immediately turn our attention to the secular components of the poem, and these finally consume our interest: the portrayal of character; the willing consideration of prudential as well as providential styles of argument in support of the king's right; the conflicting portraits of the king, vigorous and weary, merciful and ruthless; the strangely elegiac presentation of the king's aristocratic supporters, which seems to acknowledge the unrestored losses many of them incurred in their loyalty throughout the Interregnum.
Certainly Dryden prefers the older alternatives: the organic polity whose king and lords and commons are bound to each other in ties as old and authoritative as those binding Adam's issue to the consequences of Adam's sin. But the poem's imaginative life is in its oblique representation of those preferences. We notice how the confident wit of the poem's opening is alert to the idea that man in history and not God in heaven declares and defines what is then taken to be sacred ethics: is not polygamy
made
a sin at some point in time, that point at which priestcraft begins? And priestcraft, plainly, is
begun
we would now say "con-
 
Page 287
structed"here on earth. After all, what priests here construed to be sinful in David's lust was precisely what earlier warmed the very heart of Heaven. With good reason Ruth Salvaggio (in her
Dryden's Dualities
) has seen in these witty lines an inspired doubletalk.
To be sure, at the end of his poem Dryden has his sovereign assert his authority with a magically victorious raising of his arm, as if the royal gesture were itself a political act. As he threatens to unleash "the fury of a patient man," Charles/David raises his arm, the insurrection ends, the Almighty nods in consent, thunder rolls, a new series of Time begins, and "willing Nations [know] their Lawfull Lord." But, of course, Charles prevailed by power and policy, not by magic; the raising of the arm that ends the poem is only his entirely legal proroguing of Parliament in 1682, and the "Series of New Time" it initiated was abruptly curtailed six years later when James II fled for France to engender a line of "pretenders" to the throne.
Dryden's penchant for the magical and mythological certification of his political preferences, the deep connection between those modes of imagining and his conservative preference for king and cavalierthese are obvious. But accompanying these habits, subjecting them to a contemplative irony, enriching them into thought, are the brave invitations to free speculation that Dryden issues to his ideal audience. For the most part, this audience does not yet wear its old devotions merely as the masks that cover smiles of contempt (as Gibbon quipped about the philosophical sophisticates of the late Republic), but among Dryden's readers were those who possessed the libertine awareness that a set of masks might be all we have to defend, and that in their defense we discover, construct, and scrutinize our beings. Dryden is not uninterested in pleasing such readers.
Dryden gave to his other great poem on political and religious controversy the title
Religio Laici
an adequate translation of which, in the light of what the poem actually does, would be "the character of a pious Christian, born into the Anglican communion, educated in classical philosophy, grounded in Christian theology and in Church history, alert to and free-minded about contemporary theological controversy, but holding decided opinions on the political implications of one's religious choices." All readers of this poem notice its extraordinary tonal sweep, its corresponding range of feeling, and the continuo of reasoning upon which its rhetorical and affective structure is founded.
 
Page 288
The poem's opening reveals the profound piety of its author, evident in his hymnlike consideration of reason's limitations against revelation's power. But his is no ''inner-light" fanaticism, dismissing reason's claims; instead, in language of exquisite logical and figural precision, he demonstrates what Martin Price in
To the Palace of Wisdom
has called "the precarious but valuable function of reason."
Dim, as the borrow'd beams of Moon and Stars
To
lonely, weary
, wandring
Travellers
,
Is
Reason
to the
Soul
: And as on high,
Those rowling Fires
discover
but the Sky
Not light us
here
, So
Reason
's glimmering Ray
Was lent, not to
assure
our
doubtfull
way,
But
guide
us upward to a
better Day
.
And as those nightly Tapers disappear
When Day's bright Lord ascends our Hemisphere;
So pale grows
Reason
at
Religions
sight;
So
dyes
, and so
dissolves
in
Supernatural Light
.
To say that the starlight of Reason is extinguished by the daylight of Revelation was a common way of speech in Dryden's day but the idea is deliberated here in such poised argument, its poetry structured by such careful sequencing of the most ordinary of logical pointers"And as," "so," "not to," "but to," "And as," "so," "so," "so"that the common trope astonishes both with its discursive aptness and what seems to be its original visual force. And yet, if the reasonableness of Dryden's lay speaker is as obvious as his eloquence (so that we can imagine Locke, the empiricist, at ease with his conversation), we still cannot miss this speaker's readiness for religious and political brawling.
Recall his social contempt for those "horny fists" he saw mauling the pages of the sacred texts, and listen to the bite of the poem's close. Defending his choice of a "plain style" for his poem, he notes that "while from
Sacred Truth
I do not swerve, /
Tom Sternhold
's or
Tom Shadwell
's
Rhimes
will serve." This swipe at Sternhold's popular versions of the Psalms and at Shadwell's bad plays obviously contrasts with the dignified piety of the poem's opening and reminds us that in Dryden's day one's religious experience can never be dissociated from one's social being, that engaging in controversy is inevitable and responsible, and that controversy properly calls upon one's passions and preferences as well as one's reason and piety.
 
Page 289
The poem inquires into the implications of the biblical criticism of the great French Catholic scholar Father Simon, who showed that the sacred texts themselves are imperfect "editions." What, for example, might this mean for the Protestant insistence upon one's private encounter with the biblical text? Does it, indeed, strengthen the Catholic insistence upon the authority of "traditions" and upon the pope's infallibility? And can the Anglican Church have anything useful to say to Simon's challenge, given its own project of being both Protestant and institutionally authoritativeif not infallible? Dryden's answers to these questions are not easy to pin down, but what emerges finally in the poetry is a portrait of the man asking theman intellectual and social being, both adroit and engaged; cosmopolitan but rooted in his own culture; in framing his opinions, independent of Church and State, but counting it important to seek accord with their institutions.
The urbane voice in which these contraries are apparently resolved is, perhaps, itself the grand fantasy of the poem, its central poetic creation. But, after all, the resolutions are only apparent ones, and the speaker settles the central issues only by dismissing themby saying that he speaks for himself, but also submits to his Mother Church; that the Bible itself is clear enough on all important matters; that you don't even need to be able read it in order to be saved ("Th'unletter'd
Christian
who believes in
gross
/ Plods on to Heaven; and ne'er is at a loss"), and that those few who want a more precise guide to its meanings are essentially engaged in nothing more than literary criticism.
Were
Religio Laici
entirely the discursive inquiry it pretends to be, these concessions would seem to undermine the poem's whole project. But, in fact, they are the poem's major statement. For they say that between religion's heavenly and its earthly manifestations, there is a great divide; that claims to authority are very difficult to authenticate; and that even very high authorities, like the patristic writer, and later saint, Athanasiuswhom Dryden, in rejecting his insistence upon the damnation of even virtuous heathens, historicizes as Arius's overzealous antagonist and personalizes as "th'Egyptian bishop," "the good, old Man"were also particular people, inhabiting particular places at particular times, working out their ideas in relation to particular tasks and particular situations. Dryden's life gives no clearer evidence of this understanding than in his own conversion in 1685 to Roman Catholi-
 
Page 290
cism upon the accession to the throne of the unfortunateand CatholicKing James II.
In his
Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot
Alexander Pope honors Dryden, reminds us that two generations separate them, and in a telling parenthesis, still establishes a link with his great predecessor:
But why then publish?
Granville
the polite,
And knowing
Walsh
, would tell me I could write;
Well-natur'd
Garth
inflam'd with early praise,
And
Congreve
lov'd, and
Swift
endur'd my Lays;
The Courtly
Talbot, Somers, Sheffield
read,
Ev'n mitred
Rochester
would nod the head,
And
St. John's
self (great
Dryden's
friends before)
With open arms receiv'd one Poet more.
As he reveals his link to Dryden to be somehow constituted in their friendships (he himself was twelve years old at Dryden's death, and it is only in legend that the two were said to have met), Pope seems to envision the literary life as an ideal unity of society and mind. But we are struck also by a harshness that accompanies this vision of the sociable imagination: "Why then publish?" is the exasperated question Pope puts to his own career, nor is it a question he comes to answer in
Arbuthnot
in terms that accord with the high positives implied in the poem's vision of the literary life as conducted within his circle of good readers, good writers and good friends.
They
ought to have been audience enough, Pope says, for certainly their approval and their love embody the discrimination and the generosity that, as Pope would have it, privilege the life of the imagination.
In fact, Pope's own career becomes a central topic of the great satirical poems of his last decade and a half; in them, attack directed outward and scrutiny of himself are joined together to clarify and vindicate his career's deviations from the path suggested by these grand fantasies of humanism. In dramatizing, in the satires, epistles, "moral essays"and in the ongoing project of
The Dunciad
why he publishes, Pope will show us a literary life that is a warfare upon earth, a devotion to satire not in easy accord with the geniality of mind he professes to admire, and finally a reinvention of satire and sociability in which the meanest of the traditional genres attains the grandeur of epic, and the most pleasant of the virtues reveals the power of the heroic.

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