by John Dryden
‘On Butler who can think without just rage, The glory and the scandal of the age? Fair stood his hopes when first he came to town, Met everywhere with welcomes of renown, Courted and loved by all, with wonder read, And promises of princely favour fed; But what reward for all had he at last, After a life of dull expectance passed? The wretch at summing up his misspent days Found nothing left but poverty and praise; Of all his gains by verse he could not save Enough to purchase flannel and a grave; Reduced to want, he in due time fell sick, Was fain to die, and be interred on tick; And well might bless the fever that was sent To rid him hence, and his worse fate prevent.’
These spirited verses are certainly exaggerated. Butler, though, as his biographer says, ‘personally known to few,’ partook on the same authority of the munificence of Dorset, and dying on September 25th, 1680, was buried on September 27th in the churchyard of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, at the expense of another friend, William Longueville, bencher of the Inner Temple, who had previously endeavoured to obtain his interment in Westminster Abbey, where, Atterbury being dean, a tardy monument was erected to him in 1721 by Alderman Barber. Very little is known of the latter years of his life, except that he lived in Rose Street, Covent Garden, and that he suffered much from the gout. He had published a second part of Hudibras in 1664, and a third in 1678, containing many allusions to events much later than the Civil War. He bequeathed his posthumous papers to Longueville, by whom they were carefully preserved, and a large portion eventually came to be published in 1759. They will be treated of in another place. Not much is known of Butler’s personal character and habits. He must evidently have been a man of extensive reading, and versed in several languages and literatures. It seems natural to attribute the neglect of so popular an author to some infirmity in his own temper, but the little testimony we have makes the other way. Wood describes him as ‘a boon and witty companion;’ and Aubrey says, ‘A severe and sound judgment, a good fellow.’ It must be remembered that he was forty-eight at the Restoration, and had spent almost all his life in the country; we shall also find reason to believe that he was neither enough of a churchman nor enough of a loyalist to be entirely agreeable to his own party.
The defect in Hudibras pointed out by Dr. Johnson, the want of logical sequence in the action, undoubtedly exists, but is almost inherent in the conception of such a performance. A more serious drawback, the disproportion between the hero’s deeds and his words, probably arises from the poem having been written at different periods of the author’s life. When he began to write his invention was lively and vigorous, but it naturally flagged after middle age, although his wit remained unimpaired. In the first and part of the second canto disquisition and adventure are so evenly blended that each supports the other; in the latter part of the poem the burden falls almost entirely upon the former. Hence the picturesque and cleverly varied incident of the bear-baiting, with the varied characters it brings upon the scene, will always be the favourite passage of the poem, unless an exception be made for the portraits of Hudibras and Ralpho. There is, however, considerable inconsistency in the character of Hudibras. He is represented as a fool, yet half the good things of the book are, from sheer necessity, put into his mouth. We are to suppose him a coward, yet he takes and deals cuffs and bangs in the spirit of a pugilist; and his attack upon the seven champions of bear-baiting, one of them an Amazon, is so far from cowardice, that it more resembles temerity. The more odious traits of his character hardly seem properly to belong to it; and in fact Butler probably commenced his poem without too curiously considering how he was to conduct it, or rather where it was to conduct him, and scribbled away in the spirit of his own maxim —
‘One for sense, and one for rhyme, Is quite sufficient at one time’ —
trusting to the humour ever springing up under his pen to redeem his verse from the imputation of doggrel. This it certainly did; for although Hudibras as a whole is rambling, ill-compacted, and wordy, the terseness of many individual passages is as remarkable as their humour:
‘A tool That knaves do work with, called a fool.’
‘Cerberus himself pronounce A leash of languages at once.’
‘Hudibras wore but one spur, As wisely knowing, could he stir To active trot one side of ‘s horse The other would not hang.’
‘For as on land there is no beast, But in some fish at sea’s exprest; So in the wicked there’s no vice Of which the saints have not a spice.’
‘Quoth she, There are no bargains driven, Nor marriages clapped up in heaven, And that’s the reason, as some guess, There is no heaven in marriages.’
Butler’s Hudibras may perhaps be best defined as a metrical parody upon Don Quixote, with a spice of allusion to the Faerie Queene, in which the nobility and pathos of the originals are designedly obliterated, and the humour exaggerated into farce to suit the author’s polemic purpose. His design is to kill Presbyterianism and Independency by ridicule, and he is consequently compelled to shut his eyes to everything in them except their occasional tendency to baseness, and their perpetual liability to cant. This is the constant Nemesis of the satirist; but Butler is even more of a caricaturist than the situation called for. The endurance of his poem to our own times, however, is sufficient proof that, although a caricature, it was not a libel, and amid the enthusiastic reaction of the Restoration it may well have passed for a fair portrait. The machinery is closely modelled upon Don Quixote. Presbyterianism is incarnated in the doughty justice of the peace, Sir Hudibras; Independency and new light sectarianism in general in his squire, Ralpho; and the two sally forth in quest of adventure quite in the style of Don Quixote and Sancho, except that the Don’s great aim is to deliver damsels, and Hudibras’s to imprison them. Though the scene appears to be laid in the west of England, there is no reason to doubt the tradition that the prototype of Hudibras’s satire was Butler’s master, the Bedfordshire magistrate, Sir Samuel Luke, who is evidently alluded to where a rhyme to Mameluke is left blank to be supplied by the reader’s ingenuity. If, as is more than probable, this worthy justice was given to suppressing bear-baitings, Butler would need no more material for his burlesque; and the first part of the poem, at all events, may well have been written while he was in Sir Samuel’s employment. It seems, from internal evidence, to have been composed before Cromwell had ejected the Long Parliament, and its general atmosphere almost precludes the idea of its having been written after the execution of Charles I. The second part has many allusions to later events. The description of Hudibras, mind and body, is so vivid and precise as to present internal evidence of having been drawn from a living model, while Ralpho is in comparison vague. Soon after sallying forth the pair find themselves at odds with a crowd about to revel in the amusement of bear-baiting, which they proceed to interrupt; not, as has been remarked, out of compassion to the bear, but out of grudge to the public. This brings on a fight, most amusingly described, but at somewhat too great length; the ‘fatal facility’ of the octosyllabic couplet being nowhere more conspicuous than in Butler’s humorous doggrel. After various turns of fortune, the knight and squire find themselves in the stocks, where they sit until Hudibras’s lady-love, a frolicsome widow with a jointure, appears to the rescue:
‘No sooner did the Knight perceive her, But straight he fell into a fever, Inflam’d all over with disgrace, To be seen by her in such a place; Which made him hang his head, and scowl, And wink, and goggle like an owl. He felt his brains begin to swim, When thus the Dame accosted him, This place (quoth she) they say’s enchanted, And with delinquent spirits haunted, That here are tied in chains, and scourged, Until their guilty crimes be purged: Look, there are two of them appear Like persons I have seen somewhere. Some have mistaken blocks and posts For spectres, apparitions, ghosts, With saucer-eyes, and horns, and some Have heard the Devil beat a drum: But if our eyes are not false glasses, That give a wrong account of faces, That beard and I should be acquainted, Before ’twas conjur’d and enchanted; For tho’ it be disfigured somewhat, As
if ‘t had lately been in combat, It did belong t’ a worthy Knight, Howe’er this goblin is come by it. When Hudibras the lady heard, Discoursing thus upon his beard, And speak with such respect and honour, Both of the beard, and the beard’s owner; He thought it best to set as good A face upon it as he cou’d, And thus he spoke: Lady, your bright And radiant eyes are in the right; The beard’s th’ identic beard you knew, The same numerically true: Nor is it worn by fiend or elf, But its proprietor himself. Oh Heav’ns! quoth she, can that be true? I do begin to fear ’tis you; Not by your individual whiskers, But by your dialect and discourse, That never spoke to man or beast In notions vulgarly exprest. But what malignant star, alas! Has brought you both to this sad pass? Quoth he, The fortune of the war, Which I am less afflicted for, Than to be seen with beard and face By you in such a homely case. Quoth she, Those need not be asham’d For being honourably maim’d; If he that is in battle conquer’d, Have any title to his own beard, Tho’ yours be sorely lugg’d and torn, It does your visage more adorn, Than if ‘twere prun’d, and starch’d and lander’d, And cut square by the Russian standard. A torn beard’s like a tatter’d ensign, That’s bravest which there are most rents in, That petticoat about your shoulders Does not so well become a soldier’s, And I’m afraid they are worse handled, Although i’ th’ rear, your beard the van led; And those uneasy bruises make My heart for company to ache, To see so worshipful a friend I’ th’ pill’ry set at the wrong end.’
The mischievous lady, nevertheless, only consents to liberate Hudibras upon condition that he shall administer a sound flogging to himself. Hudibras willingly promises this, and is released, but next day he thinks better of it, and consults Ralpho whether he is actually bound by his oath. Ralpho’s reply abounds with the pithy couplets so frequent in Hudibras, which have become a part of the language:
‘Oaths were not purposed, more than law, To keep the good and just in awe, But to confine the bad and sinful, Like moral cattle in a pinfold.’
‘The Rabbins write, when any Jew Did make to God or man a vow Which afterward he found untoward And stubborn to be kept, or too hard; Any three other Jews of the nation Might free him from his obligation. And have not two saints power to use A greater privilege than three Jews?’
‘Does not in Chancery every man swear What makes best for him in his answer?’
‘He that imposes an oath makes it, Not he that for convenience takes it; Then how can any man be said To break an oath he never made?’
‘That sinners may supply the place Of suff’ring saints is a plain case. Justice gives sentence many times On one man for another’s crimes. Our brethren of New England use Choice malefactors to excuse, And hang the guiltless in their stead, Of whom the churches have less need: As lately ‘t happened in a town, There liv’d a cobler, and but one, That out of doctrine could cut use, And mend men’s lives as well as shoes. This precious brother having slain, In times of peace, an Indian, (Not out of malice, but mere zeal, Because he was an infidel) The mighty Tottipottymoy Sent to our elders an envoy; Complaining sorely of the breach Of league, held forth by brother Patch, Against the articles in force Between both churches, his and ours, For which he crav’d the saints to render Into his hands, or hang th’ offender: But they maturely having weigh’d They had no more but him o’ th’ trade, (A man that serv’d them in a double Capacity, to teach and cobble,) Resolv’d to spare him; yet to do The Indian Hoghgan Moghgan too Impartial justice, in his stead did Hang an old weaver that was bed-rid.’
Hudibras, however, is but half convinced, or rather, doubts whether conviction can be brought to the minds of others. He bethinks himself of a middle course, and suggests that the whipping shall be inflicted by proxy, and that Ralpho shall be the proxy. To this Ralpho demurs, and an impending rupture is only averted by a new adventure, which seems invented for the purpose. When it is over Hudibras has profited by the interval of reflection to resolve to consult the wizard Sidrophel, who is apparently intended for Lilly. The scene affords Butler an opportunity of venting the dislike to physical science which he shared with so many other literary men, and to which he gave more definite expression in The Elephant in the Moon. The interview terminates in a scuffle, in which Hudibras overthrows Sidrophel, and, thinking he has killed him, makes off, leaving Ralpho, as he deems, to bear the brunt. The trusty squire, however, has already gone to the lady with the tale of Hudibras’s perjury, which insures the knight a warm reception. Here the action of the story ends, the remainder of the poem being chiefly occupied by ‘heroical epistles’ between the parties, which do not help it on, and by a digression on the downfall of the Rump, chiefly remarkable for allusions to politics of later date.
One of the most noticeable phenomena in Butler is, that after all this Cavalier poet is little of a Cavalier, and this assailant of Puritanism little of a Churchman. His loyalty is but hatred of anarchy, and his religion but hatred of cant. The genuineness of both these feelings is attested by the detached thoughts found among his papers; otherwise it might fairly have been doubted whether his motive for espousing the royalist cause had been any other than the infinitely greater scope which Puritanism and Republicanism offered to the shafts of a satirist. The follies of the Cavalier party proved that things may be absurd without being ridiculous; those of their opponents demonstrated that ridicule may justly attach to things not intrinsically absurd. It is clear, notwithstanding, from Butler’s prose remains, that he was constitutionally hostile to liberty in politics and to the inward light in religion, and that he obeyed his own sincere conviction in attacking them. But it is equally clear that his preference for monarchy was solely utilitarian, and that his preferences in religion were determined simply by taste. The ground of his acquiescence in the Church of England is thus frankly stated by himself in one of his detached thoughts:
‘Men ought to do in religion as they do in war. When a man of honour is overpowered, and must of necessity surrender himself up a prisoner, such are always wont to endeavour to do it to some person of command and quality, and not to a mere scoundrel. So, since all men are obliged to be of some church, it is more honourable, if there were nothing else in it, to be of that which has some reputation, than such a one as is contemptible, and justly despised by all the best of men.’
This is not the language of a very fervent churchman; and Butler’s royalism is like his religion, a pis aller. Nowhere does his aversion for Puritanism kindle into enthusiasm for its contrary, any more than his humour ever rises into poetry. In his verse he is a satirist; in his prose a sceptic; and his satire and his scepticism are alike rooted in a low opinion of human nature, and a disbelief that things can ever be much better than they are. He is a strong spirit, but of the earth, earthy. At the same time he is not one of the satirists who make their readers cynics; on the contrary, his hearty geniality puts the reader into good humour with mankind, and suggests that if there is not much to admire there is also but little to condemn. It is unnecessary to dilate on his peculiar merits, which are of universal notoriety. Few have enriched the language with so many familiar quotations; few have so much fancy along with a total absence of sentiment; few have been so fertile in odd rhymes and quaint illustrations and comparisons; few have so thoroughly combined the characters of wit and humorist.
In 1759 a quantity of MS. compositions of Butler’s, which had remained unpublished during his life, and had come into the possession of his friend Longueville, were edited by R. Thyer, librarian of the Chetham Library at Manchester. The most important, his characters in the manner of Theophrastus, and detached thoughts in prose, will be noticed along with the prose essayists. Of the metrical compositions, the most elaborate is The Elephant in the Moon, a satire on the appetite for marvels displayed by some of the members of the then infant Royal Society, which exists in two recensions, one in Hudibrastic, the other in heroic verse. The other pieces are also for the most part satirical, with a strong affinity to Hudibras, except where they parody the style of some poet of the day. They are alway
s clever, sometimes very humorous and pointed, and, with Marvell’s satires, form a transition from the unpolished quaintness of Donne to the weight and splendour of Dryden. Butler in one instance appears a downright plagiarist; in another he would seem, were the thing possible, to have been copied by a later and more illustrious writer. In his satire against rhyme, he writes: