'A Particular Adroitness and Off-hand Readiness'

For years, with plenty of interruptions, I’ve tried working my way through John Dryden’s prolific output – poems, plays, translations, essays, letters. Much of it is lost on me, especially among the plays. His verse and essays are what I most enjoy, but a play, Amphitryon,or the Two Sosias, a Comedy (1690), is what I’ve been reading most recently. Dryden adapted it from a play by Moliere which has its roots in Plautus. Its musical accompaniment was composed by Henry Purcell. I’ll remind skeptics what T.S. Eliot wrote in his 1922 essay on Dryden:

“If the prospect of delight be wanting (which alone justifies the perusal of poetry) we may let the reputation of Dryden sleep in the manuals of literature. To those who are genuinely insensible of his genius (and these are probably the majority of living readers of poetry) we can only oppose illustrations of the following proposition: that their insensibility does not merely signify indifference to satire and wit, but lack of perception of qualities not confined to satire and wit and present in the work of other poets whom these persons feel that they understand.”

In other words, if you misread Dryden you’ll likely misread a lot of other good poets. I wouldn’t go that far but Eliot is no fool. Amphitryon is an exercise in sex shenanigans but not sexy. One can’t imagine a general audience enjoying it today, though the play was popular in its time – popular enough for a theater critic and theologian, Jeremy Collier, to publish a tract, “A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage” (1698), condemning the morality of Dryden and other playwrights. I’ll launch no defense of the play but merely note that Dryden’s language is often tartly amusing. One example: a character says, “In sadness, I think they are both jugglers: here is nothing, and here is nothing; and then hiccius doccius, and they are both here again.”

I’m reminded of the way audiences today make fun of mimes and their rather precious artform. As a university freshman I saw a performance by Marcel Marceau, so I'm sympathetic to their contempt. Dryden’s jugglers are our mimes.

What interested me most was hiccius doccius, defined by the OED as “a formula used by jugglers in performing their feats; hence, ‘a cant word for a juggler; one that plays fast and loose’ (Johnson).” In other words, the counterpart today to a magician saying “Abracadabra!” Speculating on the etymology of the phrase, Dr. Johnson says in his Dictionary, “corrupted, I fancy, from hic est doctus, this or here is the learned man.” Or just mock-Latin gibberish. Another swipe at jugglers. Naturally, I thought of William Hazlitt’s admiring “The Indian-Jugglers”:  

“Cleverness is a certain knack or aptitude at doing certain things, which depend more on a particular adroitness and off-hand readiness than on force or perseverance, such as making puns, making epigrams, making extempore verses, mimicking the company, mimicking a style, &c. Cleverness is either liveliness and smartness, or something answering to sleight of hand, like letting a glass fall sideways off a table, or else a trick, like knowing the secret spring of a watch. Accomplishments are certain external graces, which are to be learnt from others, and which are easily displayed to the admiration of the beholder, viz. dancing, riding, fencing, music, and so on. These ornamental acquirements are only proper to those who are at ease in mind and fortune.” 

I’ll only add that Eliot in his Dryden essay tells us that Hazlitt “had perhaps the most uninteresting mind of all our distinguished critics.”