D'avenant And A Club Of Wits

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Title:     D'avenant And A Club Of Wits
Author: Isaac Disraeli [More Titles by Disraeli]

CALAMITIES of Epic Poets--Character and Anecdotes of D'AVENANT--attempts a new vein of invention--the Critics marshalled against each other on the "Gondibert"--D'AVENANT'S sublime feelings of Literary Fame--attacked by a Club of Wits in two books of Verses--the strange misconception hitherto given respecting the Second Part--various specimens of the Satires on Gondibert, the Poet, and his Panegyrist HOBBES--the Poet's silence; and his neglect of the unfinished Epic, while the Philosopher keenly retorts on the Club, and will not allow of any authority in WIT.

 

The memoirs of epic poets, in as far as they relate to the history of their own epics, would be the most calamitous of all the suitors of the Muses, whether their works have reached us, or scarcely the names of the poets. An epic, which has sometimes been the labour of a life, is the game of the wits and the critics. One ridicules what is written; the other censures for what has not been written:--and it has happened, in some eminent instances, that the rudest assailants of him who "builds the lofty rhyme," have been his ungenerous contemporaries. Men, whose names are now endeared to us, and who have left their ΚΤΗΜΑ ΕΣ ΑΕΙ, which HOBBES so energetically translates "a possession for everlasting," have bequeathed an inheritance to posterity, of which they have never been in the receipt of the revenue. "The first fruits" of genius have been too often gathered to place upon its tomb. Can we believe that MILTON did not endure mortification from the neglect of "evil days," as certainly as Tasso was goaded to madness by the systematic frigidity of his critics? He who is now before us had a mind not less exalted than Milton or Tasso; but was so effectually ridiculed, that he has only sent us down the fragment of a great work.

One of the curiosities in the history of our poetry, is the GONDIBERT of D'AVENANT; and the fortunes and the fate of this epic are as extraordinary as the poem itself. Never has an author deserved more copious memoirs than the fertility of this man's genius claims. His life would have exhibited a moving picture of genius in action and in contemplation. With all the infirmities of lively passions, he had all the redeeming virtues of magnanimity and generous affections; but with the dignity and the powers of a great genius, falling among an age of wits, he was covered by ridicule. D'Avenant was a man who had viewed human life in all its shapes, and had himself taken them. A poet and a wit, the creator of the English stage with the music of Italy and the scenery of France; a soldier, an emigrant, a courtier, and a politician:--he was, too, a state-prisoner, awaiting death with his immortal poem in his hand;[1] and at all times a philosopher!

That hardiness of enterprise which had conducted him through life, brought the same novelty, and conferred on him the same vigour in literature.

D'Avenant attempted to open a new vein of invention in narrative poetry; which not to call epic, he termed heroic; and which we who have more completely emancipated ourselves from the arbitrary mandates of Aristotle and Bossu, have since styled romantic. Scott, Southey, and Byron have taught us this freer scope of invention, but characterised by a depth of passion which is not found in D'Avenant. In his age, the title which he selected to describe the class of his poetical narrative, was a miserable source of petty criticism. It was decreed that every poem should resemble another poem, on the plan of the ancient epic. This was the golden age of "the poet-apes," till they found that it was easier to produce epic writers than epic readers.

But our poet, whose manly genius had rejected one great absurdity, had the folly to adopt another. The first reformers are always more heated with zeal than enlightened by sagacity. The four-and-twenty chapters of an epic, he perceived, were but fantastical divisions, and probably, originally, but accidental; yet he proposed another form as chimerical; he imagined that by having only five he was constructing his poem on the dramatic plan of five acts. He might with equal propriety have copied the Spanish comedy which I once read, in twenty-five acts, and in no slender folio. "Sea-marks (says D'Avenant, alluding to the works of antiquity) are chiefly useful to coasters, and serve not those who have the ambition of discoverers, that love to sail in untried seas;" and yet he was attempting to turn an epic poem into a monstrous drama, from the servile habits he had contracted from his intercourse with the theatre! This error of the poet has, however, no material influence on the "Gondibert," as it has come down to us; for, discouraged and ridiculed, our adventurer never finished his voyage of discovery. He who had so nobly vindicated the freedom of the British Muse from the meanness of imitation, and clearly defined what such a narrative as he intended should be, "a perfect glass of nature, which gives us a familiar and easy view of ourselves," did not yet perceive that there is no reason why a poetical narrative should be cast into any particular form, or be longer or shorter than the interest it excites will allow.

More than a century and a half have elapsed since the first publication of "Gondibert," and its merits are still a subject of controversy; and indubitable proof of some inherent excellence not willingly forgotten. The critics are marshalled on each side, one against the other, while between these formidable lines stands the poet, with a few scattered readers;[2] but what is more surprising in the history of the "Gondibert," the poet is a great poet, the work imperishable!

The "Gondibert" has poetical defects fatal for its popularity; the theme was not happily chosen; the quatrain has been discovered by capricious ears to be unpleasing, though its solemnity was felt by Dryden.[3] The style is sometimes harsh and abrupt, though often exquisite; and the fable is deficient in that rapid interest which the story-loving readers of all times seem most to regard. All these are diseases which would have long since proved mortal in a poem less vital; but our poet was a commanding genius, who redeemed his bold errors by his energetic originality. The luxuriancy of his fancy, the novelty of his imagery, the grandeur of his views of human life; his delight in the new sciences of his age;--these are some of his poetical virtues. But, above all, we dwell on the impressive solemnity of his philosophical reflections, and his condensed epigrammatic thoughts. The work is often more ethical than poetical; yet, while we feel ourselves becoming wiser at every page, in the fulness of our minds we still perceive that our emotions have been seldom stirred by passion. The poem falls from our hands! yet is there none of which we wish to retain so many single verses. D'Avenant is a poetical Rochefoucault; the sententious force of his maxims on all human affairs could only have been composed by one who had lived in a constant intercourse with mankind.[4]

A delightful invention in this poem is "the House of Astragon," a philosophical residence. Every great poet is affected by the revolutions of his age. The new experimental philosophy had revived the project of Lord Bacon's learned retirement, in his philosophical romance of the Atalantis; and subsequently in a time of civil repose after civil war, Milton, Cowley, and Evelyn attempted to devote an abode to science itself. These tumults of the imagination subsided in the establishment of the Royal Society. D'Avenant anticipated this institution. On an estate consecrated to philosophy stands a retired building on which is inscribed, "Great Nature's Office," inhabited by sages, who are styled "Nature's Registers," busily recording whatever is brought to them by "a throng of Intelligencers," who make "patient observations" in the field, the garden, the river, on every plant, and "every fish, and fowl, and beast." Near at hand is "Nature's Nursery," a botanical garden. We have also "a Cabinet of Death," "the Monument of Bodies," an anatomical collection, which leads to "the Monument of vanished Minds," as the poet finely describes the library. Is it not striking to find, says Dr. Aikin, so exact a model of the school of Linnæus?

This was a poem to delight a philosopher; and Hobbes, in a curious epistle prefixed to the work, has strongly marked its distinct beauties. "Gondibert" not only came forth with the elaborate panegyric of Hobbes, but was also accompanied by the high commendatory poems of Waller and Cowley; a cause which will sufficiently account for the provocations it inflamed among the poetical crew; and besides these accompaniments, there is a preface of great length, stamped with all the force and originality of the poet's own mind; and a postscript, as sublime from the feelings which dictated it as from the time and place of its composition.

In these, this great genius pours himself out with all that "glory of which his large soul appears to have been full," as Hurd has nobly expressed it.[5] Such a conscious dignity of character struck the petulant wits with a provoking sense of their own littleness.

A club of wits caballed and produced a collection of short poems sarcastically entitled "Certain Verses written by several of the Author's Friends, to be reprinted in the Second Edition of 'Gondibert,'" 1653. Two years after appeared a brother volume, entitled "The Incomparable Poem of Gondibert vindicated from the Wit-Combats of Four Esquires; Clinias, Dametas, Sancho and Jack Pudding;"[6] with these mottoes:

Κοτεει και αοιδος αοιδω.
Vatum quoque gratia, rara est.
Anglicè,
One wit-brother
Envies another.

Of these rare tracts, we are told by Anthony Wood and all subsequent literary historians, too often mere transcribers of title-pages, that the second was written by our author himself. Would not one imagine that it was a real vindication, or at least a retort-courteous on these obliging friends. The irony of the whole volume has escaped their discovery. The second tract is a continuation of the satire: a mock defence, where the sarcasm and the pretended remonstrance are sometimes keener than the open attack. If, indeed, D'Avenant were the author of a continuation of a satire on himself, it is an act of felo de se no poet ever committed; a self-flagellation by an iron whip, where blood is drawn at every stroke, the most penitent bard never inflicted on himself. Would D'Avenant have bantered his proud labour, by calling it "incomparable?" And were it true, that he felt the strokes of their witty malignity so lightly, would he not have secured his triumph by finishing that "Gondibert," "the monument of his mind?" It is too evident that this committee of wits hurt the quiet of a great mind.

As for this series of literary satires, it might have been expected, that since the wits clubbed, this committee ought to have been more effective in their operations. Many of their papers were, no doubt, more blotted with their wine than their ink. Their variety of attack is playful, sarcastic, and malicious. They were then such exuberant wits, that they could make even ribaldry and grossness witty. My business with these wicked trifles is only as they concerned the feelings of the great poet, whom they too evidently hurt, as well as the great philosopher who condescended to notice these wits, with wit more dignified than their own.

Unfortunately for our "jeered Will," as in their usual court-style they call him, he had met with "a foolish mischance," well known among the collectors of our British portraits. There was a feature in his face, or rather no feature at all, that served as a perpetual provocative: there was no precedent of such a thing, says Suckling, in "The Sessions of the Poets"--

In all their records, in verse or in prose,
There was none of a Laureat who wanted a nose.

Besides, he was now doomed--

Nor could old Hobbes
Defend him from dry bobbs.

The preface of "Gondibert," the critical epistle of Hobbes, and the poems of the two greatest poets in England, were first to be got rid of. The attack is brisk and airy.

UPON THE PREFACE.

Room for the best of poets heroic,
If you'll believe two wits and a Stoic.
Down go the Iliads, down go the _Æneidos:
All must give place to the Gondiberteidos.
For to Homer and Virgil he has a just pique,
Because one's writ in Latin, the other in Greek;
Besides an old grudge (our critics they say so)
With Ovid, because his sirname was Naso.
If fiction the fame of a poet thus raises,
What poets are you that have writ his praises?
But we justly quarrel at this our defeat;
You give us a stomach, he gives us no meat.
A preface to no book, a porch to no house;
Here is the mountain, but where is the mouse?

This stroke, in the mock defence, is thus warded off, with a slight confession of the existence of "the mouse."

Why do you bite, you men of fangs
(That is, of teeth that forward hangs),
And charge my dear Ephestion
With want of meat? you want digestion.
We poets use not so to do,
To find men meat and stomach too.
You have the book, you have the house,
And mum, good Jack, and catch the mouse.

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.[7] 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 sex 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,[8] 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 shield.
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 harassed 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 damn'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 nobler 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 coarse appellatives of Dick, 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:

[1] 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 gratitude 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."

[2] 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 massiness 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 illustrious 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 classical 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 gods or monsters swell,
But human passions 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 analytical. 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 assuredly have criticised with little trouble.

[3] 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.

[4] 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 blushing shrink,
Unblushing senates act as no excess."

And these lines, taken as they occur:

"Truth's a discovery made by travelling minds."
"Honour's the moral conscience of the great."
"They grow so certain as to need no hope."
"Praise is devotion fit for mighty minds."

I conclude with one complete stanza, of the same cast of reflection. It may be inscribed in the library of the student, in the studio of the artist, in every place where excellence can only be obtained by knowledge.

"Rich are the diligent, who can command
Time, nature's stock! and, could his hour-glass fall,
Would, as for seed of stars, stoop for the sand,
And by incessant labour gather all!"

[5] Can one read such passages as these without catching some of the sympathies of a great genius that knows itself?

"He who writes an heroic poem leaves an estate entailed, and he gives a greater gift to posterity than to the present age; for a public benefit is best measured in the number of receivers; and our contemporaries are but few when reckoned with those who shall succeed.

"If thou art a malicious reader, thou wilt remember my preface boldly confessed, that a main motive to the undertaking was a desire of fame; and thou mayest likewise say, I may very possibly not live to enjoy it. Truly, I have some years ago considered that Fame, like Time, only gets a reverence by long running; and that, like a river, 'tis narrowest where 'tis bred, and broadest afar off.

"If thou, reader, art one of those who have been warmed with poetic fire, I reverence thee as my judge; and whilst others tax me with vanity, I appeal to thy conscience whether it be more than such a necessary assurance as thou hast made to thyself in like undertakings? For when I observe that writers have many enemies, such inward assurance, methinks, resembles that forward confidence in men of arms, which makes them proceed in great enterprise; since the right examination of abilities begins with inquiring whether we doubt ourselves."

Such a composition is injured by mutilation. He here also alludes to his military character: "Nor could I sit idle and sigh with such as mourn to hear the drum; for if the age be not quiet enough to be taught virtue a pleasant way, the next may be at leisure; nor could I (like men that have civilly slept till they are old in dark cities) think war a novelty." Shakspeare could not have expressed his feelings, in his own style, more eloquently touching than D'Avenant.

[6] It is said there were four writers. The Clinias and Dametas were probably Sir John Denham and Jo. Donne; Sir Allan Broderick and Will Crofts, who is mentioned by the clubs as one of their fellows, appear to be the Sancho and Jack Pudding. Will Crofts was a favourite with Charles II: he had been a skilful agent, as appears in Clarendon. [In the accounts of moneys disbursed for secret services in the reign of Charles II., published by the Camden Society, his name appears for 200l., but that of his wife repeatedly figures for large sums, "as of free guift." In this way she receives 700l. with great regularity for a series of years, until the death of Charles II.] Howell has a poem "On some who, blending their brains together, plotted how to bespatter one of the Muses' choicest sons, Sir William D'Avenant."

[7] The story was current in D'Avenant's time, and it is certain he encouraged the believers in its truth. Anthony Wood speaks of the lady as "a very beautiful woman, of a good wit and conversation, in which she was imitated by none of her children but by this William." He also notes Shakspeare's custom to lodge at the Crown Inn, Oxford, kept by her husband, "in his journies between Warwickshire and London." Aubrey tells the same tale, adding that D'Avenant "would sometimes, when he was pleasant over a glass of wine with his most intimate friends, e.g. Sam. Butler (author of 'Hudibras,' &c.,) say, that it seemed to him that he writ with the very same spirit that Shakspeare did, and was contented enough to be thought his son;" he adds that "his mother had a very light report." It was Pope who told Oldys the jesting story he had obtained from Betterton, of little Will running from school to meet Shakspeare, in one of his visits to Oxford, and being asked where he was running, by an old townsman, replied, to "see my godfather Shakspeare." "There's a good boy," said the old gentleman, "but have a care that you don't take God's name in vain."--ED.

[8] The scene where the story of "Gondibert" is placed, which the wits sometimes pronounced Lumber and Lumbery.

[The end]
Isaac Disraeli's essay: D'avenant And A Club Of Wits

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