The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches-2 [16]
him to carry it himself. Such tyranny as this, it may be thought, would justify resistance. Arimant does indeed venture to remonstrate:-- "This fatal paper rather let me tear, Than, like Bellerophon, my sentence bear." The answer of the lady is incomparable:-- "You may; but 'twill not be your best advice; 'Twill only give me pains of writing twice. You know you must obey me, soon or late. Why should you vainly struggle with your fate?" Poor Arimant seems to be of the same opinion. He mutters something about fate and free-will, and walks off with the billet-doux. In the Indian Emperor, Montezuma presents Almeria with a garland as a token of his love, and offers to make her his queen. She replies:-- "I take this garland, not as given by you; But as my merit's and my beauty's due; As for the crown which you, my slave, possess, To share it with you would but make me less." In return for such proofs of tenderness as these, her admirer consents to murder his two sons and a benefactor to whom he feels the warmest gratitude. Lyndaraxa, in the Conquest of Granada, assumes the same lofty tone with Abdelmelech. He complains that she smiles upon his rival. "Lynd. And when did I my power so far resign, That you should regulate each look of mine? Abdel. Then, when you gave your love, you gave that power. Lynd. 'Twas during pleasure--'tis revoked this hour. Abdel. I'll hate you, and this visit is my last. Lynd. Do, if you can: you know I hold you fast." That these passages violate all historical propriety, that sentiments to which nothing similar was ever even affected except by the cavaliers of Europe, are transferred to Mexico and Agra, is a light accusation. We have no objection to a conventional world, an Illyrian puritan, or a Bohemian seaport. While the faces are good, we care little about the back-ground. Sir Joshua Reynolds says that the curtains and hangings in an historical painting ought to be, not velvet or cotton, but merely drapery. The same principle should be applied to poetry and romance. The truth of character is the first object; the truth of place and time is to be considered only in the second place. Puff himself could tell the actor to turn out his toes, and remind him that Keeper Hatton was a great dancer. We wish that, in our own time, a writer of a very different order from Puff had not too often forgotten human nature in the niceties of upholstery, millinery, and cookery. We blame Dryden, not because the persons of his dramas are not Moors or Americans, but because they are not men and women;--not because love, such as he represents it, could not exist in a harem or in a wigwam, but because it could not exist anywhere. As is the love of his heroes, such are all their other emotions. All their qualities, their courage, their generosity, their pride, are on the same colossal scale. Justice and prudence are virtues which can exist only in a moderate degree, and which change their nature and their name if pushed to excess. Of justice and prudence, therefore, Dryden leaves his favourites destitute. He did not care to give them what he could not give without measure. The tyrants and ruffians are merely the heroes altered by a few touches, similar to those which transformed the honest face of Sir Roger de Coverley into the Saracen's head. Through the grin and frown the original features are still perceptible. It is in the tragi-comedies that these absurdities strike us most. The two races of men, or rather the angels and the baboons, are there presented to us together. We meet in one scene with nothing but gross, selfish, unblushing, lying libertines of both sexes, who, as a punishment, we suppose, for their depravity, are condemned to talk nothing but prose. But, as soon as we meet with people who speak in verse, we know that we are in society which would have enraptured the Cathos and Madelon of Moliere, in society for which Oroondates would have too little of the lover, and Clelia too much of the coquette. As Dryden was unable to render his plays interesting by means of that which