DRYDEN AND THE RESTORATION DRAMA.
Dryden occupies an unique position as by far the most important
representative of a department of literature for which, on his own
showing, he had little natural qualification, and in which he had little
ambition to excel. Only one of his numerous plays, he tells us, was
written to please himself. But he wanted reputation, money, and Court
favour, and these inducements directed him to the most popular and
lucrative department of the Muses' province. Here, as elsewhere, his
progress was slow. His first play, _The Wild Gallant_ (1663), has come
down to us in an amended version; in its original form it is pronounced
by Pepys 'as poor a thing as I ever saw in my life.' Dryden might long
have remained an unsuccessful dramatist but for the invention of rhyming
tragedy, which, though in itself an objectionable form, suited his
talent to perfection. The management of the heroic couplet was and
always continued the strongest of all his strong points, and his genius
for rhetoric was stimulated to the utmost by the facilities afforded by
this sonorous form of metre. Hence _The Indian Emperor_ (1665) was a
great success, and determined the main course of Dryden's dramatic
activity for some years. It necessarily brought him nearer to the French
drama, and gave a French character to the drama of the day, not really
in harmony with the taste of the English public, and from which Dryden
ultimately freed himself. The opinion of the day was prepared to go in
the direction of classicism as far as Jonson, but not as far as
Corneille. The French traveller Sorbiere having in 1663 censured the
irregularity of the English stage, was answered by Sprat, who asserts
the superiority of his countrymen, and points out the fundamental
difference in the taste of the two nations. 'The French,' he says, 'for
the most part take only one or two great men, and chiefly insist upon
some one remarkable accident of their story; to this end they admit no
more persons than will serve to adorn that: and they manage all in
rhyme, with long speeches, almost in the way of dialogues, in making
high ideas of honour, and in speaking noble things. The English on their
side make their chief plot to consist in a greater variety of actions,
and, besides the main design, add many little contrivances. By this
means their scenes are shorter, their stage fuller, many more persons of
different humours are introduced. And in carrying on of this they
generally do only confine themselves to blank verse.' Sprat then
proceeds to point out the advantages of the English method; and it is
evident that neither he nor the public imagined themselves to be on the
eve of such serious modifications of the national drama as actually took
place--modifications to be chiefly attributed to the taste of the Court,
and the more easily effected from the paucity of theatres.
The inferiority of the Restoration drama to the Elizabethan is one of
the commonplaces of criticism, perhaps even one of its platitudes, and
cannot be admitted without some qualification. Yet, as the broad general
statement of a fact, it is undeniable, and the fact is a proof that the
elements which preserve a play as literature for posterity are not those
which fit it for the contemporary stage. In every play of serious
purpose there is, or should be, an earthly part and a spiritual,
dramatic craftsmanship and poetical inspiration. In the former
particular the Restoration dramatists compare not unfavourably with
their predecessors, always excepting Shakespeare; they fail not as
dramatists, but as poets. The whole Elizabethan drama is steeped in an
atmosphere of poetry. To say nothing of its chief representatives, take
up such satires as _The Return from Parnassus_, or such merely
occasional pieces as the academical play on _Timon_ which preceded
Shakespeare's, and you will not doubt that you are reading the work of a
poet. Read through, on the other hand, the best plays of the
representative dramatists of the Restoration, and you will generally
find the poetical element concentrated in a few brilliant passages. In
the Elizabethan age, it is evident, men lived at such a height of heroic
and romantic sentiment that the purveyors of public entertainment could
not but be poets. In the Restoration era, on the other hand, men
habitually lived, breathed, and wrote prose; and when the dramatist
would be a poet, he had to set himself to the task. To convince
ourselves that the distinction between poetry and prose is not
artificial, as Carlyle seemed to think, but essential, we have only to
consider the widely different influence of Elizabethan and Restoration
drama upon the after world. Both, excepting the works of Shakespeare,
are virtually dead as acted drama. But in losing the stage the
Restoration drama has lost everything, while the Elizabethan is yet a
living and working force. It powerfully co-operated in the splendid
revival of English poetry at the end of last century; it is at this
moment an inspirer and a nurse of young genius. It is inconceivable that
the Restoration drama as a whole should inspire anyone, or that it
should count for anything as a factor in future developments of
literature. One is a perennial plant, which may die down to the root in
ungenial seasons, but will assuredly put forth new flowers; the other
is a fossil, curious and in some measure beautiful, but devoid of vital
force. And for this, the merely intellectual merits of both being so
considerable, no reason can be given but that one is on the whole
poetical, and therefore living, the other on the whole prosaic, and
therefore inert. Hence we may prophesy of the success of the endeavour
of Ibsen, and other men of distinguished talent, to produce dramas
conceived in an entirely realistic spirit, and entirely devoted to the
problems of modern society. Such competitions will be valuable _pieces
justificatives_ for the intellectual history of the nineteenth century,
but they will be extinct as literary forces long ere the end of the
twentieth.
This, nevertheless, is to be said for the Restoration dramatists, that
their art is not an imitation of an extinct form of the drama, but is at
least something new, really expressive of the sentiments of their
generation. The imitation of Shakespeare could only have produced gross
unreality, which must have degenerated still further into mere inanity.
The playwrights did what the contemporary painters should have done,
they fell back, in a measure, upon realism when high imagination was no
longer possible. If they had gone further in this direction their works
would have possessed more intrinsic merit, and have claimed a more
important place in the history of culture. Their tragedies would not so
often have been rendered unnatural by the employment of rhyme, and their
comedies would have exhibited the manners and the morals of the English
nation, and not merely of the playgoing part of it. It cannot be
believed that the comedy of that age affords anything like so faithful a
picture of the seventeenth century as Fielding's novels do of the
eighteenth. The realistic tendency was chiefly conspicuous in the closer
approach to the language of common life, and in the more logical
character even of appeals to emotion. The extravagant transports of
heroes and heroines only betray that true imagination had grown cold;
but the manly nervous sense and the almost forensic reasoning so often
found in their company show that a new stratum had really been touched.
Another consideration should not be overlooked in the comparison between
the Elizabethan and the Restoration drama, that the debasement of the
latter is exaggerated from the seeming abruptness of the metamorphosis
undergone by the former. Passing from the stage of Shakespeare to the
stage of Dryden, we appear to have suddenly entered a new world. The
representatives of the drama seem instantaneously transformed by some
Circean potion into beings of a lower type. We do not immediately
remember that the gradual development which would have interpreted the
apparent prodigy was rudely interrupted by the Civil War and the
Commonwealth. If the interval between Shirley and Dryden had been
continuously occupied by popular dramatists, we should have observed the
change slowly coming on, and have watched the older form shading off
into the newer by gradations not more violent than those by which the
latter subsequently passed into the drama of the eighteenth century. As
it is, the poets of Charles II.'s time seem the authors of a revolution
of which they were merely the instruments. The younger portion of their
audiences, on whose suffrages they had mainly to rely, had scarcely so
much as seen a play. The spells of authority and tradition were broken,
or at least so grievously impaired as to be unable to withstand the
seduction of French example. Honest Samuel Pepys would not have so
easily pronounced the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ 'a mean thing' if the
romantic drama had not been absolutely extinct for him. And, taking a
broad view of the revolution in popular taste, we must admit that,
however deplorable in itself, it had some good sides. It tended to bring
England more into harmony with the general current of European taste and
thought, and repressed the tendency of our noble literature to fanciful
and eccentric insularity. In the long run, moreover, it was serviceable
to the English drama by providing a substitute, however inferior, for
the old vein now unproductive. The want of such a resource killed the
drama of Spain. Spanish dramatists, until the nineteenth century, were
unable to accommodate themselves to any dramatic form but the national
one, every phase of which had been completely exemplified before the end
of the seventeenth century. In consequence, the Spanish theatre of the
eighteenth century did not produce a single tolerable piece until, near
the termination of the epoch, a playwright arose who was capable of
profiting by French example.
Another extenuation of the departure of the Restoration dramatists from
the better traditions of the English stage is the strength as well as
the suddenness of the new influence to which they were subjected. It
came from the Court, and the Court dispensed the playwright's daily
bread. There is sufficient evidence that even Shakespeare was by no
means indifferent to the good opinion of Elizabeth and James, but
neither of these sovereigns was sufficiently the drama's patron to be
the drama's legislator. It was otherwise with Charles II., a man of wit,
taste, and polish, inaccessible to the deeper emotions of humanity, and
without a grain of poetry in his composition. Such a man must have found
the Elizabethan drama intolerable. He no doubt honestly agreed with his
laureate, who coolly says: 'At his return he found a nation lost as much
in barbarism as in rebellion; and, as the excellency of his nature
forgave the one, so the excellency of his manners reformed the other.
The desire of imitating so great a pattern first awakened the dull and
heavy spirits of the English from their natural reservedness.' With
every allowance for adulation, there can be no doubt that Dryden in a
considerable measure believed himself a reformer. Charles had his
Paladins in the field of letters. 'The favour,' says Dryden elsewhere,
'which heroic plays have lately found upon our theatres has been wholly
derived to them from the countenance and approbation they have received
at Court.' We may well feel thankful that the experiment of Gallicizing
the native genius of England should have been tried so fairly, and have
broken down so utterly, under such patronage as Charles's and in such
hands as Dryden's. We have not quite seen the last of it, but where
Corneille and Moliere failed Goncourt and Zola are not likely to
succeed.
This may at least be said for Dryden, that the romantic drama was for a
time in a state of suspended animation, and that the only question was
what successor should fill its place. For a short time two foreign
schools seemed contending for the prize. Dryden's own allegiance in his
first piece, _The Wild Gallant_, was given to the Spanish drama, a form
exceedingly attractive from its brisk action, sudden vicissitudes, and
dexterous development of intrigue. But the Spanish drama cannot be
naturalized in England for two reasons, one creditable to English
genius, the other the reverse. A play of intrigue is necessarily a play
of incident, and allows little room for the development of character;
but Englishmen are 'humoursome,' and enjoy the discrimination of
character to the nicest shades. If we judged the two nations solely by
their dramas, we should say that all Spaniards were exactly alike, and
no two Englishmen. The other reason is that Englishmen do not
particularly excel in the contrivance of incident, and that few even of
our best dramatists could rival the ingenuity of third-rate Spanish
playwrights. The Anglo-Spanish drama soon disappeared, and its place in
serious dramatic literature was taken by a _genre_ most intimately
associated with the name of Dryden, its most brilliant practitioner, and
upon whose desertion it crumbled into dust.
Dryden himself has told us in few words what he understands by an heroic
play, and the definition exempts him from much of the criticism to which
he might otherwise have been held liable: 'An heroic play ought to be an
imitation, in little, of an heroic poem.' In other words, it must have
an epical element as well as a dramatic. The experiment was worth
making, as it proved that neither branch of the poetic art gained
anything by invading the other's territory. Compared with the art of
Shakespeare or of Sophocles, the art of Dryden in this department seems
a tawdry caricature. All the higher qualities of the dramatist are
absent, being, in fact, inconsistent with the demands of epic poetry,
while epic dignity is equally sacrificed to the exigencies of drama.
Without constant hurry and bustle, such pieces would be intolerable.
They require, as Dryden tacitly admits by the quotation from Ariosto,
which he adduces as expressive of his guiding principle, a constant
succession of adventures. Such incessant agitation leaves no place for
the development of character; the actors come on the stage ready
labelled; or if, like Nourmahal in _Aurengzebe_, they disclose a new
trait, the sudden novelty produces the effect of complete metamorphosis.
The pieces could only be regarded as splendid puppet-shows, were not the
failings of the dramatist so frequently redeemed by the poet. It so
chanced that the Coryphaeus of this unnatural style was the most splendid
poetical declaimer (unless Byron be excepted) that England ever
produced, and his pieces resound with tirades not merely brilliant in
diction and sonorous in versification, but now fiery with mettlesome
spirit, now weighty with manly sense. And these qualities were aided by
the otherwise objectionable form selected by the poet. His blank-verse
plays, far superior as works of art, contain few such eloquent passages
as his rhyming tragedies. Rhyme helped him on, as a riderless runaway
horse is spurred by the thunder of his own hoofs. Even where his thought
is poor, its poverty is veiled by the brilliancy of the diction--a
brilliancy which he could hardly have attained by the use of any other
form; and if the employment of rhyme seems, as it is, unnatural, the
form at least harmonizes with the substance, and they produce between
them an illusive effect of a species of art which may possibly be
legitimate, as the ordinary rules evidently do not apply. We must also
remember how this subornation of the judgment, not imperceptible or
ineffective in the closet, was aided on the stage by the most potent
appeals to the senses.
_Tyrannic Love_, Dryden's first considerable attempt in 'heroic
tragedy,' is very remarkable as a proof of to what extraordinary
absurdities a vigorous intellect may be liable, and also how these may
be dignified by energy of expression. 'The rants of Maximin,' says
Johnson, 'have long been the sport of criticism;' but so spirited and
sonorous is the diction, that, inconsistent as seems the alliance of
admiration with derision, such actually is the mingled feeling which
they excite in the quiet of the closet. On the stage they must have
passed off much better by the aid of scenery, costume, and emphatic
declamation; and success on the boards, it must be remembered, was
invariably Dryden's first object. The same consideration which explains,
though it does not excuse, his indecency, palliates his bombast. He
wrote to live, and could not afford to produce unactable dramas. A much
more interesting performance than _Tyrannic Love_ is his _Conquest of
Granada_ (1669-1670). It is a touchstone of 'heroic tragedy,' a crucial
test of what it can and what it cannot do. It renounces all pretence to
nature, reason, and probability; on the other hand, it delights with a
crowd of striking sentiments and images, and enchains the attention with
perpetual bustle and variety. It is to one of Shakespeare's plays as a
bit of shining glass is to a plant of which every fibre is the creation
of a natural law. Yet the glass is not a displeasing object, neither is
the play.
The worst offence of _The Conquest of Granada_, after all, is not its
bombast, but its bathos. It is true that both spring from the same root,
that want of genuine creative imagination which in attempting the great
only achieves the big, which a small oversight easily converts into the
laughable. But apart from this failing, which Dryden shares with most
epic poets of the second rank, it is difficult to acquit him of a
singular insensibility to the ridiculous. This is evinced among other
things by the entire conception of one of his most serious and elaborate
works, _The Hind and the Panther_, and it requires all the gravity and
obvious conviction of his preface to _The Conquest of Granada_ to
convince us that he did not occasionally mean to burlesque his own
principles. The rapid changes of fortune, the constant fallings into and
out of love, the odd predicaments in which heroes and heroines
continually find themselves, frequently produce the effect of the
broadest comedy--an effect much assisted by the extraordinary rants of
the principal speakers; as when Lyndaraxa desires the personage who has
first stabbed her and then himself to
'Die for us both, I have not leisure now;'
or Almahide threatens to send her ghost to fetch back Almanzor's scarf,
as if she and her ghost were different beings; or Almanzor's astounding
menace to his mother's spirit:
'I'll squeeze thee like a bladder there,
And make thee groan thyself away in air.'
So unequal is Dryden's genius that the second of these monstrosities
occurs in close proximity to the exquisite verses:
'What precious drops are those
Which silently each other's track pursue,
Bright as young diamonds in their infant dew?'
and the burlesque threat to the ghost is immediately succeeded by the
noble couplet:
'I am the ghost of her who gave thee birth,
The airy shadow of her mouldering earth.'
The beauties which are thickly sown throughout _The Conquest of Granada_
owe, perhaps, something of their effect as poetry to the utter want of
nature in the characters and of reason in the conduct of the play. In a
drama aiming at the delineation of real men and women they would
frequently have appeared absurdly inappropriate, but when it is once
understood that the personages are the puppets and mouthpieces of the
author, the question of dramatic propriety becomes irrelevant. Yet _The
Conquest of Granada_ is something more than a heap of glittering morsels
of sentiment and wit. It possesses a unity of feeling which serves as
cement for these scattered jewels. The 'kind of generous and noble
spirit animating it,' to employ Mr. Saintsbury's just description,
maintains the reader at a level above the pitch of ordinary life. When
he opens the book he rises, as he closes it he descends. He may laugh,
but his amusement is unmingled with contempt; and ever and anon he
comes upon the genuine heroic, unsuspected of sham, unspoiled by
bombast. The soul of chivalry inspires the lines quoted with just
applause by both Scott and Saintsbury:
'Fair though you are
As summer mornings, and your eyes more bright
Than stars that twinkle on a winter's night;
Though you have eloquence to warm and move
Cold age and fasting hermits into love;
Though Almahide with scorn rewards my care;
Yet than to change 'tis nobler to despair.
My love's my soul, and that from fate is free,
'Tis that unchanged and deathless part of me.'
_Aurengzebe_ (1675), Mr. Saintsbury considers 'in some respects a very
noble play.' We should rather have called it an indifferent play with
some noble passages more remarkable for eloquence than dramatic
propriety. The characters, though by no means subtle or even natural,
are better discriminated than in _The Conquest of Granada_; there is
much less rant and bustle, yet quite enough to make one cordially echo
Indamora's naive inquiry:
'Are there yet more Morats, more fighting kings?'
Nor are choice examples of bathos wanting. Aurengzebe finely says:
'I need not haste the end of life to meet,
The precipice is just beneath my feet.'
Nourmahal replies:
'Think not my sense of virtue is so small,
I'll rather leap down first and break your fall.'
The first act opens with a striking couplet:
'The night seems doubled with the fear she brings,
And o'er the citadel now spreads her wings.'
To which immediately succeeds:
'The morning, as mistaken, turns about,
And all her early fires again go out.'
Dryden was probably betrayed into these lapses, not so much by mere
haste and carelessness, as by the trick of the heroic metre, which in
dialogue almost enforces balanced antithesis.
Nearly all _Aurengzebe_ is composed in this brilliant snip-snap, where
the ball of a fine sentiment, tossed from one character to another,
comes back in a retort, to be returned in a repartee. Of dramatic art as
Shakespeare or the Greeks understood it there is not a trace; the pivot
of the action is the property, fitter for a fairy tale than a tragedy,
possessed by Indamora, of compelling every one who sees her to fall in
love with her. Neither pity nor terror can be excited on such terms; if
Aristotle's criterion be sound, _Aurengzebe_ is no tragedy at all. If,
however, we are content to regard it as a medley of fine things, a model
of spirited declamation and sonorous versification, it claims high
praise. Great must have been the intellectual strength which could thus
thunder and dazzle through five acts of unabated energy: and the
sentiments, considered merely as such, lose nothing of their effect from
being placed in the mouths of puppets, and misplaced even there. Take,
for instance, the most famous passage in the play, one of the finest in
all Dryden:
'When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat;
Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit;
Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay;
To-morrow's falser than the former day;
Lies worse, and while it says, we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Strange cozenage! None would live past years again,
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;
And from the dregs of life think to receive
What the first sprightly runnings could not give.'
This potent quintessence of the experience of age is ill assigned to
Aurengzebe, a young prince at the outset of a splendid career; but the
word remains while the lip is forgotten, and has taken its place among
the treasures of English poetry. Among other claims to notice,
_Aurengzebe_ is remarkable as one of the few English dramas in which a
living foreign potentate is brought upon the stage, and, less
exceptionally, for its entire perversion of the truth of history. The
generous and filial part here ascribed to the unnatural and cold-blooded
Aurengzebe was really performed by his unfortunate brother Dara. To have
crowned Dara, however, would have involved an equal violation of
historical truth, to have killed him a violation of what the dramatists
of Dryden's day considered more important, poetical justice.
_Marriage a la Mode_ (1673), the first fair example of Dryden's comedy,
is a more satisfactory exhibition of his power as a dramatist, if a
piece adding little to his fame as a poet. Mr. Saintsbury justly remarks
that 'Scott's general undervaluing of Dryden's comic pieces is very
evident' in his prefatory notice. Mr. Saintsbury himself, though warmly
appreciative of 'Dryden's only original excursion into the realms of the
higher comedy,' might, we think, have said even more in its favour. The
situation of the spouses, fancying themselves tired of each other while
their affection only needs the fillip of jealousy, is comic in a high
degree, and the brisk intricacy of the action, with only four actors to
sustain it, manifests great ingenuity and deftness in dramatic
construction. The serious section of the play is certainly much less
meritorious than the comic, to which it is a mere appendage. Written in
most slovenly blank verse, it entirely wants the fire and energy of
Dryden's heroic plays. Its fault is rather sterility than extravagance;
with some exceptions, it appears tame and bald. But these exceptions are
very fine. The scene between Leonidas and Palmyra (act ii., sc. 1) is
like a morsel of Theocritus, allying the charm of pastoral innocence to
the wit and point of an accomplished court-poet. It is remarkable how
surely, at this period of his career, Dryden rises when he resorts to
rhyme; but even the careless blank verse of this play, in general merely
a foil to the comic part, sometimes sparkles with strokes worthy of a
great poet:
'_Pol._ He is a prince, and you are meanly born.
_Leon._ Love either finds equality, or makes it.'
'For this glory, after I have seen
The canopy of state spread wide above
In the abyss of heaven, the court of stars,
The blushing morning, and the rising sun,
What greater can I see?'
--a thought borrowed from Menander.
Continuing our survey of Dryden's plays, rather according to subject
than to chronological order, we arrive at the tragi-comedy of _The
Spanish Friar_ (1681), one of the most esteemed of his lighter pieces,
but whose praise, we must agree with Mr. Saintsbury, has outstripped its
desert. The comic portion is certainly very drastic, but it is not
comedy of a high order. It exhibits a distinct declension from _Marriage
a la Mode_, where the quartette of _Mitschuldiger_ are well
individualized personages. The sinners in _The Spanish Friar_ are of the
most ordinary type--a stage rake, a stage coquette, a stage miser, and a
stage friar. Dominick is, indeed, exceedingly amusing, but is more
farcical than truly comic. He is painted in broad, staring colours,
without delicacy of gradation, with the same brush as the author's
Morats and Almanzors, only dipped into a different paint. Like so many
of Dryden's personages, he is better adapted for the stage than the
closet. Every word and gesture would tell in the hands of a good actor,
and in Dryden's time the stage was richer in first-class performers than
it ever was before, and probably than it has ever been since. Dryden
himself, it must be recorded, attached a high value to his piece, and
Dryden was an excellent critic of himself as well as of others. The
merit on which he lays chief stress, however, is the ingenious blending
of the tragic and comic action. 'The tragic part,' says Mr. Churton
Collins, 'helps out the comic, and the comic relieves naturally and
appropriately the tragic. In this work, tragi-comedy, from an artistic
point of view, has achieved perhaps its highest success.' This, however,
is the achievement of a playwright; in one passage alone do we find the
poet. It is the highly imaginative series of descriptions of the distant
noises from the Moorish camp, boding assault to the beleaguered city, of
the panic in the city itself, and of the far-off, uncertain battle:
'From the Moorish camp, an hour and more,
There has been heard a distant humming noise,
Like bees disturbed, and arming in their hives.'
'Never was known a night of such distraction;
Noise so confused and dreadful, jostling crowds,
That run, and know not whither; torches gliding,
Like meteors, by each other in the streets.'
'From the Moors' camp the noise grows louder still:
Rattling of armour, trumpets, drums, and atabals;
And sometimes peals of shouts that rend the heavens,
Like victory; then groans again, and howlings,
Like those of vanquished men, but every echo
Goes fainter off, and dies in distant sounds.'
The next play of Dryden's which it is necessary to notice here might
have ranked among his masterpieces if it had been entirely or even
principally his own. It is sufficient praise for him to have followed
Plautus and Moliere with no unequal steps, and while borrowing, as he
could not help, the substance of his piece from them, to have enriched
their groundwork with original conceptions of his own. The plot of
_Amphitryon_ may be considered common property. A better subject for the
comic theatre cannot be conceived than the equivocations occasioned by
Jupiter's assumption of Amphitryon's appearance, doubled, and, as it
were, parodied over again by the comic poet's happy thought of
introducing Mercury in the disguise of Amphitryon's valet. It is
surprising that the theme should not have attracted the best poets of
the Athenian Middle Comedy. So far as we know, however, it was only
treated by a single author, and he not one of the highest reputation,
Archippus. How far Plautus translated Archippus must remain a question,
but considering that the Greek play attained no especial reputation,
while the Latin is one of the best we have, it is only fair to give
Plautus credit for having introduced a good deal of his own. His comedy
has unfortunately reached us in a mutilated condition, wanting,
probably, not less than three hundred verses in the fourth act, but
enough remains to show how the action was conducted. Moliere, the
greatest of comic poets, could not fail to improve upon his model. The
substance of the piece admitted of no material alteration, but Moliere
has greatly enriched and embellished it--first by the happy idea of the
prologue between Mercury and Night, for which, however, he is as much
indebted to Lucian as he is to Plautus for the rest--and even more by
the amusing scene between Sosia and Cleanthis. His play, unlike most of
his other performances, is written in a lyrical metre, and the language
is a model of elegance, harmony, and polish. Dryden, writing in prose or
negligent blank verse, could not rival Moliere in this respect; but
while losing nothing of the _vis comica_ of either of his predecessors,
he has heightened the humour of the piece by a still further elaboration
of the hints given by Moliere. He was himself well acquainted with
Lucian, from whom he has borrowed several additional strokes; and he has
doubled the entertainment of the situation between Sosia and Cleanthis
by the creation of Phaedra, whose intrigue with Mercury makes the comedy
of errors absolutely complete.
We have now to consider the two plays of Dryden's on which his fame as a
dramatist principally rests, and which, if in some respects less
interesting than his other dramatic writings, as less intensely
characteristic of the man and his age, are for that very reason better
equipped for competition for a place among the dramas of all time.
_All for Love_ (1678) is, Dryden tells us, the only play he wrote
entirely to please his own taste, and composed professedly in imitation
of 'the divine Shakespeare.' He did not, as in his unfortunate
alteration of _Troilus and Cressida_, select a piece of Shakespeare's
which, not understanding, he rashly thought himself able to improve,
but, in a spirit of true reverence, set himself to copy one which he
held in high esteem. It should be remembered, to the honour of Dryden's
critical judgment, that the two plays of Shakespeare's most warmly
commended by him, _Antony and Cleopatra_ and _Richard the Second_, were
generally underrated even by Shakespeare's most devoted worshippers,
until Coleridge taught us better. In _All for Love_ he found a subject
suitable to his genius, and, in our opinion, achieved very decidedly his
best play. It is, indeed, almost as good as a play on the French model
can be, inferior to its prototypes only from the lack of brilliant
declamation, scarcely practicable without rhyme, but more than
compensating this inferiority by the greater freedom and flexibility of
its blank verse. Its defects are mainly those of its species, and would
be less apparent if it did not so directly court comparison with one of
the greatest examples of Shakespeare's art. It would have been
impossible for a greater genius than Dryden to have done justice to his
theme within the confines prescribed by the classical drama. The
demeanour of Antony during the period of his downfall, as recorded by
history, is below the dignity of tragedy. Some weakness may be forgiven
in a hero, but the heroism of the real Antony is swallowed up in
weakness. We can but pity, and pity is largely leavened with contempt.
There is but one remedy, to create a Cleopatra so wondrous and
fascinating as fairly to counterbalance the empire which Antony throws
away for her sake. Shakespeare's art is equal to the occasion; his
Cleopatra is daemonic, and at the same time so intensely feminine that
the purest and meekest of her sex may see much of themselves in her. She
is at once an epitome and an encyclopaedia, and the reader can hardly
despise Antony for being the slave of a spell which he feels so strongly
himself. Dryden's Cleopatra wants this character of universality, which,
indeed, none but Shakespeare could have given, and Shakespeare himself
could not have given if in bondage to the unities. She is a fine,
passionate, sensuous woman, a kind of Mary Stuart, interesting, but not
to the point at which it could be felt that the world were well lost for
her. The inferiority of Cleopatra reacts grievously upon Antony.
Shakespeare's Cleopatra is so grand that her lover is exalted by the
admiration which, in spite of her perfidies, she manifestly feels for
him. The beloved of such a woman must be heroic, an impression skilfully
assisted by the effect Antony produces upon the prudent and politic
Augustus. Dryden's Cleopatra can bestow no such patent of distinction.
By so much as the chief personages are inferior to their exemplars, by
so much also is the puny, starved action of Dryden's tragedy, restricted
to one day and seven characters, inferior to the opulence of
Shakespeare's, ranging over the Roman world, crowded with personages,
and gathering up every trait from Plutarch that could contribute
picturesqueness to its prodigality of incident and sentiment. Nor is
Dryden entirely successful in the conduct of his plot. The introduction
of Octavia is a happy idea, but she appears at too late a period of
Antony's history. The implication that his return to her could have
availed him in so desperate an extremity is more contrary to historical
truth and common reason than any of the anachronisms for which Dryden
derides Elizabethan poets. The intrigue by which Dolabella is made to
excite Antony's jealousy is more worthy of comedy than of heroic
tragedy, besides being inconsistent with the manly character of its
promoter, Ventidius. This gallant veteran is indeed a fine creation; too
fine, for he sometimes seems to eclipse Antony and Cleopatra both, and
assumes more prominence in the action than Shakespeare would have
allowed him. Alexas is the hasty and much marred outline of a character
which might have been hardly less impressive had Dryden been at the
pains to work out the conception adumbrated in the first act. When all
these imperfections are admitted, and they should not be passed over in
silence after Scott's ill-judged parallel of Dryden's performance with
Shakespeare's, it remains true that _All for Love_ is a very fine play,
energetic, passionate, and steeped in that atmosphere of nobility which
half redeems the literary defects of _The Conquest of Granada_. The
poetry is frequently very fine, as in Octavia's speech to Antony,
remarkable as perhaps the sole instance of genuine pathos throughout the
entire range of Dryden's dramatic writings:
'Look on these;
Are they not yours? or stand they thus neglected
As they are mine? Go to him, children, go;
Kneel to him, take him by the hand, speak to him;
For you may speak, and he may own you, too,
Without a blush; and so he cannot all
His children. Go, I say, and pull him to me,
And pull him to yourselves, from that bad woman.
You, Agrippina, hang upon his arms;
And you, Antonia, clasp about his waist:
If he will shake you off, if he will dash you
Against the pavement, you must bear it, children,
For you are mine, and I was born to suffer.'
Antony's sarcasms upon Augustus reveal the ripening satirist of _Absalom
and Achitophel_:
'_Ant._ Octavius is the minion of blind chance,
But holds from virtue nothing.
_Vent._ Has he courage?
_Ant._ But just enough to season him from coward.
O, 'tis the coldest youth upon a charge,
The most deliberate fighter! if he ventures,
(As in Illyria once, they say, he did,
To storm a town) 'tis when he cannot choose;
When all the world have fixt their eyes upon him;
And then he lives on that for seven years after;
But, at a close revenge he never fails.
_Vent._ I heard you challenged him.
_Ant._ I did, Ventidius.
What think'st thou was his answer? 'Twas so tame!--
He said, he had more ways than one to die;
I had not.
_Vent._ Poor!
_Ant._ He has more ways than one;
But he would choose them all before that one.
_Vent._ He first would choose an ague, or a fever.
_Ant._ No; it must be an ague, not a fever;
He has not warmth enough to die by that.
_Vent._ Or old age and a bed.
_Ant._ Ay, there's his choice.
He would live, like a lamp, to the last wink,
And crawl upon the utmost verge of life.
O, Hercules! Why should a man like this,
Who dares not trust his fate for one great action,
Be all the care of heaven? Why should he lord it
O'er fourscore thousand men, of whom each one
Is braver than himself?
_Vent._ You conquer'd for him:
Philippi knows it; there you shared with him
That empire, which your sword made all your own.
_Ant._ Fool that I was, upon my eagle's wings
I bore this wren, till I was tired with soaring,
And now he mounts above me.
Good heavens, is this,--is this the man who braves me?
Who bids my age make way? drives me before him
To the world's ridge, and sweeps me off like rubbish?'
_Don Sebastian_ (1690) is generally regarded as Dryden's dramatic
masterpiece. It did not please upon its first appearance, owing to its
excessive length. Dryden ingenuously confesses that he was obliged to
sacrifice twelve hundred lines, which he restored when the play was
printed. Mr. Saintsbury more than hints a preference for _All for Love_,
which we entirely share. Were even the serious part of the respective
dramas of equal merit, the scale would be turned in favour of _All for
Love_ by the wretchedness of the comic scenes which constitute so large
a portion of the rival drama. They are at best indifferent farce, and
cannot be even called excrescences on the main action, inasmuch as they
do not grow out of it at all. In unity of action, therefore, and
uniformity of literary merit, _All for Love_ excels its competitor, and
its personages are more truthful and more interesting. Sebastian,
though a gallant, chivalrous figure, takes no such hold on the
imagination as Antony and Ventidius; and Almeyda, one of the least
interesting of Dryden's heroines, is a sorry exchange for Cleopatra.
Muley Moloch and Benducar are wholly stagey. Nothing, then, remains but
Dorax, and his capabilities are chiefly evinced in one great scene. Even
this is in some respects inartificially conducted. The spectator is
insufficiently prepared for it. The special ground of Dorax's resentment
comes upon us as a surprise; and his repentance is too hasty and sudden.
A similar defect may be alleged against the whole of the tragic action.
The centre of interest is gradually shifted, not intentionally, but from
the author's omission to foreshadow the events to come after the fashion
of a masterpiece he must have studied, the _Oedipus Tyrannus_. At
first all our interest is enlisted for Sebastian's life, and it is with
a sort of puzzlement that we feel ourselves at last listening to a story
of incest. Muley Moloch and Benducar have disappeared, and their place
is occupied by a new character, Alvarez. In every respect, therefore,
regarded as a work of art, _Don Sebastian_ fails to sustain comparison
with _All for Love_, and there is no countervailing superiority in the
diction, whose general nobility and spirit occasionally swell into
bombast. The worst fault remains to be told: Dorax's ludicrous escape
from death by reason of being poisoned by two enemies at once. If either
the Emperor or the Mufti would have let him alone he would never have
lived to be reconciled to Sebastian, but the fiery drug of the one is
neutralized by the icy bane of the other, and _vice versa_. Dryden
thinks it sufficient excuse that a similar incident is vouched for by
Ausonius, but really there is nothing so farcical in the _Rehearsal_. On
the whole, we cannot but consider _Don Sebastian_ a very imperfect play,
redeemed from mediocrity by the general vigour and animation of the
diction, and the loftiness of soul which seldom forsakes Dryden, except
when he wilfully panders to the popular taste.
But little space can here be devoted to Dryden's other plays. Some are
not worth criticism. _The Mock Astrologer_, largely borrowed from French
and Spanish sources, contains some of his best lyrics. Many parts of
_Cleomenes_ are very noble, but it is somewhat heavy as a whole. _King
Arthur_, a musical and spectacular drama, is an excellent specimen of
its class. Dryden's portion of _Oedipus_, written in conjunction with
Lee, shows how finely he, like his model Lucan, could deal with the
supernatural. This is by no means the case with his _State of Innocence
and Fall of Man_, which is, nevertheless, one of his pieces most worthy
of perusal. It measures the prodigious fall from the age of Cromwell to
the age of Charles; while Dryden yet displays such fine poetical gifts
as to command respect amid all the absurdities of his unintentional
burlesque of Milton.
Dryden undeniably took up the profession of playwright without an
effectual call. He became a dramatist, as clever men in our day become
journalists, discerning in the stage the shortest literary cut to fame
and fortune. He can hardly be said to have possessed any strictly
dramatic gift in any exceptional degree, but he had enough of all to
make a tolerable figure on the stage, and was besides a great poet and
an admirable critic. His poetry redeems the defects of his serious
plays, if we except such a mere _piece de circonstance_ as _Amboyna_.
The best of them have very bad faults, but even the worst are impressed
with the stamp of genius. It is only in comedy that his failure is
sometimes utter and irretrievable; yet a perception of the humorous
cannot be denied to the author of _Amphitryon_. But we nowhere find
evidence of any supreme dramatic faculty, anything that would have
constrained him to write plays if plays had not happened to be in
fashion. As he was not born a dramatic poet he had to be made one, and
he became one mainly in virtue of his eminent critical endowment. His
prefaces are a most interesting study. They exhibit the steady advance
of a slow, strong, sure mind from rudimentary conceptions to as just
views of the requisites of dramatic poetry as could well be attained in
an age encumbered with venerable fallacies. Dryden's manly sense, homely
sagacity, and piercing shrewdness, break through many trammels, as when,
in the preface to _All for Love_, he vindicates his breach of the
conventions of the French stage. In that to _Troilus and Cressida_ he
compares Shakespeare with Fletcher, and pronounces decidedly in favour
of the former, a preference far from universal in his day. The preface
to _The Spanish Friar_ is the most remarkable of any, and shows how much
he had learned and unlearned. We shall, nevertheless, find his special
glory in his character as the most truly representative dramatist of his
time. Otway might have been an Elizabethan, Dryden never could. If we
seek for the dramatic author to whom he is on the whole nearest of kin,
we may perhaps find him in Byron. Byron had no more genuine dramatic
vocation than Dryden had, but, like Dryden, produced memorable works by
force and flexibility of genius. From the theatrical point of view
Dryden's plays are greatly superior to Byron's; if the latter's rank
higher as literature the main cause is the existence of more favourable
conditions. Dryden's worst faults would have been impossible in the
nineteenth century; and his treatment of the supernatural, his frequent
visitations of speculation, and the lofty tone of his heroic passages,
prove that he could have drawn a Manfred, a Cain, or a Myrrha, if he had
lived like Byron in a renovated age.