dryden's "mac flecknoe." a vindication

Dryden's "Mac Flecknoe." A VindicationAuthor(s): G. Thorn-DrurySource: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Jul., 1918), pp. 276-281Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3714227 .

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DRYDEN'S 'MAC FLECKNOE.' A VINDICATION1.

IN the course of what he describes as stating the case for Dryden's authorship of Mac Flecknoe 'clearly and impartially,' Mr Babington cites Scott's opinion that 'there existed no contemporary poet to whom so masterly a production could have been ascribed.' From this sentence he has omitted the words 'even with remote probability,' and with them, he seems to have given up all idea of dealing with such considerations as they suggest. He is free, therefore, to abstain from making any appeal to the 'ear' of those who are familiar with Dryden and Oldham, and need not attempt to explain how the latter, who in his published satires presses all sorts of words into the service as rhymes, and is very often content to get on without any, was able upon one occasion to achieve the almost uniform correctness of this poem.

Upon the broad question of its poetical qualities, Scott's view, in

agreement with that of every competent critic who has ever written upon Dryden, will satisfy most people, but in the aspect of the case presented by Mr Babington, in which personal character is so seriously involved, something more may, and, in the writer's judgment, ought to be said.

The morality of Dryden appears to vary in Mr Babington's estimate with the exigencies of his argument; for he, who we are invited on p. 31 of his paper to think 'would have been too magnanimous to chastise in 1682 a man who had died four years before,' is presented on p. 34 as one who, in circumstances of peculiar meanness, stole the best work of a dead friend, of whom he had written with affectionate regret.

It is not in these terms that Mr Babington states his conclusion, but he goes so far as to admit that it is 'a rather ugly one'; it is indeed, and he does not make it less hideous by describing the thievish conduct of which he accuses Dryden by any form of words such as 'adopted as his own.' This is the euphemism which he employs, and whether it was intended to do so or not, it cannot but suggest, even to those who know little more of Dryden and Oldham than their names, a ribald travesty of the second of the beautiful lines:

Farewell too little and too lately known, Whom I began to think, and call my own;

This is not the occasion for any review of the attacks that were made

1 See Dryden not the Author of ' Mac Flecknoe,' by Percy L. Babington, pp. 25 ff. ante.



G. THORN-DRURY

upon Dryden's life and work by some of his contemporaries: it is sufficient to say that his name remains, after all, one of the greatest in English literature, and when an odious charge such as this is brought against him, we have a right to require of his accuser some adequate measure of care, accuracy and knowledge.

Mr Babington tells us that in a MS.1 in the Bodleian Library, among other pieces copied out fair, in Oldham's writing, for the printer or to hand to friends, he found 'Mac Fleckno, A Satyr,' bearing the date 'A0 1678.' This discovery of what he takes to be the author's autograph MS. is the foundation of the indictment he has preferred against Dryden. He goes on to say that he is apparently the first person who has had occasion to make 'a thorough examination' of this MS.

It is submitted that something considerably short of a thorough examination of that portion of it upon which he relies for his conclusion will demonstrate that, so far from being the author's MS., it is only a

partial transcript and a bad one at that. To begin with, Mr Babington is mistaken in stating that he found

in the MS. 'Mac Fleckno, A Satyr,' if he intended to suggest, as every one would understand him to do, that it contains the complete poem. Mac Flecknoe as printed consists of 217 lines, of which 115 only, written on three pieces of paper, one of them separated by a number of leaves from the other two, are all that are there.

It is, comparatively speaking, a small point, but it should be noted that the other pieces in this MS., which Oldham published as his, and which bear dates, are dated, not as this particular piece is, with the year only, but with the month as well, with, in some cases, the addition (as Mr Babington noticed, without attaching any importance to the' fact) of the places where they were composed.

People who are interested in Dryden are aware that the Mac Flecknoe of 1682 has a number of obvious errors of the press, corrected in 16842, of which the following are perhaps the most striking.

(a) Sir Formals oratory Wit be thine: 1. 168. (For Wit read will)

(b) This is thy Promise, this thy wondrous way, 1. 187. (For Promise, read province,)

(c) He said: but his last words were scarcely heard; For Bruce and Longvil had a trap prepared, And down they sent the yet declining bard. 11. 211-3.

(For declining read declaiming) 1 Rawlinson, poet. 123; 14616 in the Summary Catalogue. 2 Miscellany Poems....By the most Eminent Hands...London, Printed for Jacob Tonson,

1684, where Mack Flecknoe, Absolom and Achitophel and The Medal, without in any case the author's name, occupy pp. 1-104.

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Dryden's' Mac Flecknoe.' A Vindication

All these errors occur in the Bodleian MS. which also introduces in 1. 41 the reading-truly surprising, if it were in the author's hand-' And

big with him' instead of hymn. Oldham may have been as unattractive a character as Mr Babington, his prospective editor, thinks him; he was not a born fool.

The year to which this piece is assigned in the MS. may or may not be correct. Oldham may have put upon it what he understood, but

mistakenly, to be the date of its composition; on the other hand, there is no apparent difficulty in supposing that Dryden did in fact write it in 1678, that it was circulated in MS. and in 1682 was printed from a

transcript containing errors, some of which appeared also in that copied by Oldham.

The description of him in the heading as 'the True Blew-Protestant Poet' was not, as far as is known, justified at the earlier date by anything Shadwell had then written.

If it be objected that the second of these suggestions with reference to the -date of composition is not feasible, because he and Dryden were

upon friendly terms at a later period, as is evidenced by Mr Babington's statement that the prologue to The True Widow was written in 1679, it should be remembered that the writing of prologues and epilogues was with Dryden a matter of business, and that though the precise date of it cannot now be ascertained, this particular prologue was, in all probability, produced before March 21st; 1678.

Mr Babington finds, so he says, much significance in the subject-matter of the poem; apparently, because 1678 is also the accepted date of Flecknoe's death.

If, which is open to doubt, the passage in the dedication of The Kind

Keeper about the poet of'scandalous memory' has any reference to him at all, it affords no ground whatever for supposing that he died in 1678, nor need anyone wonder, as Mr Babington does, whether words of Dryden in the same place suggested the form of anything alleged to have been written in that year, for the simple reason that The Kind Keeper appeared, not as he supposes in 1678, but in 16801.

One is not much impressed with the parallels: the pregnant brain, the 'vile uses' to which the writings of others may or ought to be put, Nature and Art, and even Hannibal as the implacable foe, strike one as

being mere common-places, and if it be urged that stress is to be laid rather on the names of particular persons that are introduced, one can

1 The dedication was probably written in the autumn of 1679, but here, as in the case of Dryden's Juvenal, the date on the title-page is adopted as that of publication.

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G. THORN-DRTURY

only say that most, if not all of them, are almost equally common-places of the period in like connexions: but whatever view may be taken of them, it is obvious that if Mac Flecknoe was available in 1678, the occurrence in it of words and phrases which it is sought to claim for Oldham by reference to his published writings, may point to a conclusion

quite different from that at which Mr Babington wishes to arrive.

Something must be said-a great deal less than might be-about the way in which, apart from any consideration of the Bodleian MS., this

charge has been presented. Scott, one feels sure, would have disclaimed, upon all grounds, the dis;-

tressing title of 'proto-editor,' which is conferred on him by Mr Babington, but the latter appears never to have heard of, or, at least, never to have consulted Malone's laborious work. If he will look at Malone's Dryden, he will find set out in full (I, 169) the statement from the last page of Mac Flecknoe, which he says has been overlooked or ignored by all editors, and (I, 170-3) a collation of the first edition, which, according to him, it does not appear that any of them has examined.

The statement that Scott thanks Malone for a transcript of the title-

page of it, is simply Mr Babington's invention, and there is, beyond the fact that he says it was published not by Tonson but by D. Green, no more ground for suggesting that Scott 'seems interested in Dryden's sudden change of publisher.' There was, of course, no change of publisher: the state of the text of the Mac Flecknoe of 1682 is sufficient to show that the publication was unauthorized, and there is no more mystery about it than there is about the appearance of other things, e.g. Oldham's A Satyr against Virtue, transcripts of which found their way into book- sellers' hands.

It is entirely misleading to suggest, as Mr Babington allows himself to do, that what he describes as two difficulties in connexion with the

authorship of Mac Flecknoe have never been recognised or dealt with as such by any editor of Dryden.

With regard to the first of these, it is true that we read in Scott

(Dryden I, 223), 'we cannot believe Shadwell's assertion,' but an impartial statement should have included the qualification of his disbelief which he expressed as follows (op. cit. x, 433-4), 'From this (Shadwell's) aver- ment, which is probably made far too broadly, we can only infer that

Dryden like Swift in the same predicament left his adversary to prove what he had no title to call upon him to confess; for that he seriously meant to disavow a performance of which he had from the beginning sufficiently avouched himself the author can hardly be supposed for a

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Dryden's 'Mac Flecknoe.' A Vindication

moment.' Mr Babington says 'All later editors have substantially endorsed Scott's views,' and, 'most other editors treat Shadwell as a

liar'; statements which, by the light of the passage just quoted, seem to require modification.

The second supposed difficulty hinges on the date, Oct. 4, 1682, which it is said is 'universally accepted' as the day on which Mac Flecknloe

appeared. The date in question was almost certainly obtained by Malone from

the title-page of the copy which was once Narcissus Luttrell's. That business-like collector was in the habit of inscribing upon his tracts the

prices he paid for those he bought-he generally succeeded in getting discount-and the date upon which each came into his possession: sometimes, but most certainly not always, this was also the date of

publication. It was most probably not so in the case of this poem, for in The Loyal Protestant of Thursday, February 9, 168k, in the course of an attack upon Shadwell, the following passage occurs-' he would send him (Shadwell) his Recantation next morning, with a Mac Flecknoe, and a brace of Lobsters for his Breakfast; All which he knew he had a

singular aversion for.' It is, of course, conceivable, though one is inclined to think that the expression 'a Mac Flecknoe' makes it unlikely, that the reference is only to a written copy of the poem, but the fact that it was in existence and apparently well-known early in 1682 disposes of the suggested difficulty of two attacks by Dryden upon Shadwell, with a very brief interval between them.

Mr Babington appears to be entirely unaware of

(a) the evidence contained in Mulgrave's Essay upon Poetry, 1682, which Dryden says he publicly valued before he knew who the author was1:

The Laureat here may justly claim our praise, Crown'd by Mac-Fleckno with immortal Bays;

Op. cit., p. 10.

(b) the repetition of this couplet in the second edition, of 1691, with two notes to explain that the Laureat is ' Mr D-n' and Mac-Fleckno 'A famous Poem of his.'

(c) the passage in The Laurel, A Poem On The Poet-Laureat, 1685,

pp. 21-2: Your too keen Satyr, does oblige your Foe, As harmless Tom's kind dulness still does you. Your Fleckno's kind, (tho' still severe enough) It arms him Cap-a-pe with Nonsense Proof.

1 Sylvae: Or, The Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies...1685, a3 verso: see also A Discourse on Epick Poetry, Malone, ii, 438.

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G. THORN-DRURY

(d) the thrice-repeated statement of Langbaine: Now that Mr. Dryden may not think himself slighted in not havingsome Verses

inserted in his Commendation; I will present the Reader with a Copy written by Mr. Flecknoe, and leave him to Judge of his Wit, and Mr. Dryden's Gratitude by comparing the Epistle Dedicatory to his Kind Keeper, and his Satyr call'd Mack Flecknoe, with the following Epigram.-An Account of the English Dramatick Poets. 1691, p. 176.

For whatever becomes of his own Pieces, his Name will contirue whilst Mr. Dryden's Satyr call'd Mack Flecknoe, shall remain in Vogue.--bid., p. i99.

Mr. Dryden, I dare presume, little imagined, when he writ that Satyr of Mack- Flecknoe, that the subject he there so much exposes and ridicules, should have ever lived t5 have succeeded him in wearing the Bays.-Ibid., p. 443.

His ignorance of contemporary publications leaves him in a ridiculous

position with regard to one part of his attack, which he has casually introduced in a foot-note (p. 26): he is aware of Sir A. Ward's statement that Dryden does inot appear to have acknowledged Mac Flecknoe before 1692, but rashly assuming that the knowledge of Sir Adolphus upon the

subject is rather less than his own, he has brought against this great master of plain English the absolutely preposterous charge of having in 1693, when he wrote 'and (if it be not too vain to mention anything of

my own) the poems of Absalom and Achitophel and Mac Flecknoe,'

'expressed himself so artfully' that he could always disclaim the second

poem, when the fact is he had himself published it under his own name in the previous year1.

Mr Babington has never, it would seem, heard of the suggested identification of Flecknoe as the 'R. F.,' the writer of A Letter to the Honourable Ed. Howard, Esq. occasioned by a Civiliz'd Epistle of Mr. Dryden's before his Second Edition of his Indian Emperour2 which it is thought may have provoked Dryden's ill will, and he is content to ascribe to Oldham attacks for which he makes no attempt to hint at a motive, beyond offering the amiable suggestion that one of them was due to the fact that the victim of it was at the time either seriously ill or recently dead !

The statements to which Mr Babington commits himself upon the

subjects of Rochester's Works, their editors (save the mark !), and their

contents, his idea that Giles Jacob was a contemporary of Oldham and a literary authority to be quoted with Dryden, and many other points in his paper, invite comment, but, as these are matters not directly con- cerned with his main purpose, it is withheld.

G. THORN-DRURY. LONDON.

1 Miscellany Poems: In Two Parts....Published by Mr. Dryden.... The Second Edition... 1692.

2 Gentleman's Magazine, Dec. 1850. Pepys' Diary, ed. Wheatley, vm, 108. Essays of Dryden, ed. Ker, i, 306.

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dryden's "mac flecknoe." a vindication

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