"Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be."
Pious old gentlemen, however, pronounced her perfect, merely because they gazed on the image of the mother of mankind. Painted they both were in oils. But from what we saw--for we too were carried away by the general enthusiasm--we are justified in inferring that, under prudent management, our First Parents might be successfully got up alive during the summer season at our Adelphi.
We believe that "The State of Innocence" _was_ written for the stage. But the playwright did not intend that Adam and Eve should be stark-naked in an acted opera. Strange to say, there is not a word in it about their naked majesty or innocence. Dryden, by his idea of an opera, was forced to depart from nature and Milton. Eve's dream, so characteristically narrated by her to Adam in the poem, is shadowed out by a vision passing before her asleep, in the opera. The stage direction gives:--"A vision, where a tree rises loaden with fruit; spirits rise with it, and draw a canopy out of the tree; and the spirits dance about the tree in deformed shapes; after the dance an angel enters, _with a woman_, HABITED LIKE EVE." That is decisive.
But what of the opera? In the preface, Dryden says "I cannot, without injury to the deceased author of 'Paradise Lost,' but acknowledge, that the poem has received _its entire foundation, part of the design, and many of the ornaments from him_. What I have borrowed will be so easily discerned from my mean productions, that I shall not need to point the reader to the places." That avowal may be thought to set aside all criticism--but not so--for his illustrious editor says, "the probable motive therefore of this alteration was the wish, so common to genius, to exert itself upon a subject on which another had already attained brilliant success; or, as Dryden has termed a similar attempt, the desire to shoot in the bow of Ulysses." And he adds, that because Milton intended at first to model his poem into a dramatic form, "Dryden, conscious of his own powers, and enthusiastically admiring those of Milton, was induced to make an experiment on the forsaken plan of the blind bard, which, with his usual rapidity of conception and execution, he completed in the short space of one month." Wide-encroaching Walter would see nothing far wrong in Glorious John. It is not "the forsaken plan of the blind bard," nor any thing in the least like it. They are opposite as any things that "own antipathy in nature." But this is all mere nonsense. The opera is disgraceful to Dryden. It proves that he had no understanding of the "Paradise Lost."