John Dryden, the foremost man of letters of the period following the
Restoration, was born at Aldwinkle, a village of Northamptonshire, on
August 9th, 1631. He died May 1st, 1700. His life was therefore coeval
with the closing period of the fierce controversies which culminated
in the civil war and the triumph of the Parliamentary party; that, in
turn, to be followed successively by the iron rule of Cromwell, by the
restoration of the exiled Stuarts, and the reactionary tendencies in
politics that accompanied that event; and finally with the effectual
exclusion from the throne of this same family by the revolution of
1688, leaving behind, however, to their successors a smoldering
Jacobite hostility that perpetually plotted the overthrow of the new
government and later broke out twice into open revolt. All these
changes of fortune, with their changes of opinion, are faithfully
reflected in the productions of Dryden. To understand him thoroughly
requires therefore an intimate familiarity with the civil and
religious movements which characterize the whole period. Equally also
do his writings, both creative and critical, represent the revolution
of literary taste that took place in the latter half of the
seventeenth century. It was while he was in the midst of his
intellectual activity that French canons of criticism became largely
the accepted rules, by which the value of English productions was
tested. This was especially true of the drama. The study of Dryden is
accordingly a study of the political and literary history of his times
to an extent that is correspondingly true of no other English author
before or since.
His family, both on the father's and the mother's side, was in full
sympathy with the party opposed to the court. The son was educated at
Westminster, then under the mastership of Richard Busby, whose
relentless use of the rod has made his name famous in that long line
of flagellants who have been at the head of the great English public
schools. From Westminster he went to Trinity College, Cambridge. There
he received the degree of A. B. in January 1654. Later in that same
decade--the precise date is not known--he took up his residence in
London; and in London the rest of his life was almost entirely spent.
Dryden's first published literary effort appeared in a little volume
made up of thirty-three elegies, by various authors, on the death of a
youth of great promise who had been educated at Westminster. This was
Lord Hastings, the eldest son of the Earl of Huntingdon. He had died
of the small-pox. Dryden's contribution was written in 1649, and
consisted of but little over a hundred lines. No one expects great
verse from a boy of eighteen; but the most extravagant anticipations
of sorry performance will fail to come up to the reality of the
wretchedness which was here attained. It was in words like these that
the future laureate bewailed the death of the young nobleman and
depicted the disease of which he died:--
"Was there no milder way but the small-pox,
The very filthiness of Pandora's box?
So many spots, like naeves, our Venus soil?
One jewel set off with so many a foil?
Blisters with pride swelled, which through his flesh did sprout
Like rosebuds, stuck in the lily-skin about.
Each little pimple had a tear in it,
To wail the fault its rising did commit;
Which, rebel-like, with its own lord at strife,
Thus made an insurrection 'gainst his life.
Or were these gems sent to adorn his skin,
The cabinet of a richer soul within?
No comet need foretell his change drew on,
Whose corps might seem a constellation."
Criticism cannot be rendered sufficiently vituperative to characterize
properly such a passage. It is fuller of conceits than ever Cowley
crowded into the same space; and lines more crabbed and inharmonious
Donne never succeeded in perpetrating. Its production upsets all
principles of prophecy. The wretchedest of poetasters can take
courage, when he contemplates the profundity of the depth out of which
uprose the greatest poet of his time.
[Illustration: John Dryden.]
Dryden is, in fact, an example of that somewhat rare class of writers
who steadily improve with advancing years. Most poets write their best
verse before middle life. Many of them after that time go through a
period of decline, and sometimes of rapid decline; and if they live to
reach old age, they add to the quantity of their production without
sensibly increasing its value. This general truth is conspicuously
untrue of Dryden. His first work gave no promise of his future
excellence, and it was by very slow degrees that he attained to the
mastery of his art. But the older he grew, the better he wrote; and
the volume published a few months before his death, and largely
composed almost under its shadow, so far from showing the slightest
sign of failing power, contains a great deal of the best poetry he
ever produced.
As Dryden's relatives were Puritans, and some of them held place under
the government, it was natural that upon coming to London he should
attach himself to that party. Accordingly it is no surprise to find
him duly mourning the death of the great Protector in certain 'Heroic
Stanzas Consecrated to the Memory of Oliver Cromwell.' The first
edition bears the date of 1659, and so far as we know, the production
was Dryden's second venture in poetry. It was written in the measure
of Davenant's 'Gondibert,' and is by no means a poor piece of work,
though it has been sometimes so styled. It certainly pays not simply a
high but a discerning tribute to the genius of Cromwell. Before two
years had gone by, we find its author greeting the return of Charles
with effusive loyalty, and with predictions of prosperity and honor to
attend his reign, which events were soon woefully to belie. The poet
has been severely censured for this change of attitude. It is a
censure which might be bestowed with as much propriety upon the whole
population of England. The joyful expectations to which he gave
utterance were almost universal; and no other charge can well be
brought against him than that he had the ability and took the occasion
to express sentiments which were felt by nearly the entire nation.
From this time on, Dryden appears more and more in the public eye, and
slowly but steadily forged his way to the front as the representative
man of letters of his time. In 1670 he was appointed to the two
distinct offices of poet laureate and historiographer royal.
Thenceforward his relations with the court became close, and so they
did not cease to be until the expulsion of James II. In 1683 he
received a further mark of royal favor, in being made collector of
customs of the port of London. In the political controversies which
subsequently arose, Dryden's writings faithfully represented the
sentiments of the side he had chosen, and expressed their prejudices
and aversions not merely with force but also with virulence. His first
literary activity, however, was on neutral ground. After eighteen
years of compulsory closing, the Restoration opened wide once more the
doors of the theatre. Dryden, like every one else possessed of
literary ability, began to write for the stage. His first play, a
comedy entitled 'The Wild Gallant,' was brought out in February 1663;
and for the eighteen years following, it was compositions of such
nature that occupied the main portion of his literary life. During
that time he produced wholly or in part twenty-two comedies and
tragedies. His pieces must from the outset have met with a fair degree
of success, otherwise the King's Company would not have entered into a
contract with him, as it did in 1667, to furnish for them each year a
fixed number of plays, in consideration of his receiving a certain
share of the profits of the theatre.
Yet it cannot be said that Dryden was in any respect a dramatist of
a high order. As a writer of comedy he was not only inferior to
contemporaries and immediate successors like Wycherley, Congreve,
Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, but in certain ways he was surpassed by
Shadwell, the very man whom he himself has consigned to a disagreeable
immortality as the hero of the 'MacFlecknoe.' His comedies are not
merely full of obscenity,--which seems to have been a necessary
ingredient to suit them to the taste of the age,--but they are full of
a peculiarly disagreeable obscenity. One of his worst offenses in this
direction, and altogether his most impudent one, was his adaptation
for the stage of Shakespeare's 'Tempest.' The two plays are worth
reading together for the sake of seeing how easily a pure and perfect
creation of genius can be vulgarized in language and spirit almost
beyond the possibility of recognition. In his tragedies, however,
Dryden was much more successful. Yet even these, in spite of the
excellence of occasional passages, do not attain to a high rank.
Indeed, thought and expression are at times extravagant, not to say
stilted, to an extent which afterward led him himself to make them the
subject of ridicule. It was in them, however, during these years that
he perfected by degrees his mastery of heroic verse, of which later he
was to display the capabilities in a way that had never previously
been seen and has never since been surpassed.
A controversy in regard to the proper method of composing plays
brought forward Dryden, at an early period in his literary career, as
a writer of prose. In this he at once attained unusual eminence. In
him appear for the first time united the two characters of poet and of
critic. Ben Jonson had in a measure preceded him in this respect; but
Jonson's criticism was not so much devoted to the examination of
general principles as to the exposure of the hopeless, helpless
obtuseness of the men who had a different opinion of his works from
what he himself entertained. The questions discussed by Dryden were of
a more general nature. With the Stuarts had come in French literary
tastes and French literary methods. The age was supposed to be too
refined to be pleased with what had satisfied the coarse palates of
preceding generations. In stage-writing in particular, the doctrine of
the unities, almost uniformly violated by Shakespeare and most of the
Elizabethans, was now held up as the only correct method of
composition that could be employed by any writer who sought to conform
to the true principles of art. Along with this came the substitution
in the drama of rhyme for blank verse. Upon the comparative merits of
these two as employed in tragedy, arose the first controversy in which
Dryden was engaged. This one was with his brother-in-law, Sir Robert
Howard; for in 1663 Dryden had become the husband of the daughter of
the Earl of Berkshire, thus marrying, as Pope expressed it, "misery in
a noble wife." Dryden was an advocate of rhyme; and the controversy on
this point began with the publication in 1668 of his 'Essay of
Dramatic Poesy.' It was afterward carried on by both parties, in
prefaces to the plays they successively published. The prefaces to
these productions regularly became later the place where Dryden laid
down his critical doctrines on all points that engaged his attention;
and whether we agree with his views or not, we are always sure to be
charmed with the manner in which they are expressed.
In 1667 Dryden published a long poem entitled 'Annus Mirabilis.' It
was in the same measure as the stanzas on Oliver Cromwell. It gave him
a good deal of reputation at the time; but though it is far from being
a despicable performance, few there are now who read it and still
fewer who re-read it. Far different has been the fate of his next
work. It was not until 1681, when England was beginning to emerge
slowly from the excitement and agitation growing out of the alleged
Popish plot, that he brought out his 'Absalom and Achitophel,' without
question the greatest combined poetical and political satire to be
found in our tongue. Here it was that for the first time he fully
displayed his mastery over heroic verse. The notion once so widely
prevalent--for the vogue of which, indeed, Dryden himself is mainly
responsible--that Waller and Denham brought this verse to perfection,
it now requires both extensive and special ignorance of our earlier
authors to entertain; but on the other hand, there is no question that
he himself imparted to the line a variety, vigor, and sustained
majesty of movement such as the verse in its modern form had never
previously received. There is therefore a fairly full measure of truth
in the lines in which he was characterized by Pope:--
"Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long majestic march and energy divine."
These lines of Pope, it may be added, exemplify purposely two
peculiarities of Dryden's versification,--the occasional use of the
triplet instead of the regular couplet, and of the Alexandrine, or
line of six feet, in place of the usual line of five.
The poem is largely an attack upon the Earl of Shaftesbury, who in it
bears the title of Achitophel. The portrayal of this statesman, which
is given in this volume, is ample evidence of that skill of the poet
in characterization which has made the pictures he drew immortal.
Perhaps even more effective was the description of the Duke of
Buckingham, under the designation of Zimri. For attacking that
nobleman Dryden had both political and personal reasons. Buckingham
had now joined the opponents of the court. Ten years previously the
poet himself had been brought by him on the stage, with the aid of
others, in the play called "The Rehearsal." His usual actions had been
mimicked, his usual expressions had been put into the mouth of the
character created to represent him, who was styled Bayes. This title
had been given him because Dryden figuratively wore the bays, or
laurel, as poet laureate. The name henceforward stuck. Dryden's turn
had now come; and it was in these following lines that he drew the
unfaded and fadeless picture of this nobleman, whose reputation even
then was notorious rather than famous, and whose intellect was
motley-minded rather than versatile:--
"Some of their chiefs were princes of the land;
In the front rank of these did Zimri stand,
A man so various that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome.
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts and nothing long,
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon;
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blest madman, who could every hour employ
With something new to wish or to enjoy!
Railing and praising were his usual themes,
And both, to show his judgment, in extremes:
So over-violent or over-civil
That every man with him was God or Devil.
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art:
Nothing went unrewarded but desert.
Beggared by fools whom still he found too late,
He had his jest, and they had his estate."
As an example of the loftier and more majestic style occasionally
found in this poem, is the powerful appeal of Achitophel to Absalom.
The latter, it is to be said, stands for the Duke of Monmouth, the
eldest of the illegitimate sons of Charles II. Him many of the
so-called country party, now beginning to be styled Whigs, were
endeavoring to have recognized as the next successor to the throne, in
place of the Roman Catholic brother of the king, James, Duke of York.
As a favorite son of the monarch, he, though then in opposition, is
treated tenderly by Dryden throughout; and this feeling is plainly
visible in the opening of the address to him put into the mouth of
Achitophel, in these words:--
"Auspicious prince, at whose nativity
Some royal planet ruled the southern sky,
Thy longing country's darling and desire,
Their cloudy pillar and their guardian fire,
Their second Moses, whose extended wand
Divides the seas and shows the promised land,
Whose dawning day in every distant age
Has exercised the sacred prophet's rage,
The people's prayer, the glad diviner's theme,
The young men's vision and the old men's dream,--
Thee savior, thee the nation's vows confess,
And never satisfied with seeing, bless."
Dryden followed up the attack upon Shaftesbury with a poem entitled
'The Medal.' This satire, which appeared in March 1682, was called
forth by the action of the partisans of the Whig leader in having a
medal struck commemorating his release from the Tower, after the grand
jury had thrown out the charge of treason which had been brought
against him. Both of these pieces were followed by a host of replies.
Some of them did not refrain from personal attack, which indeed had a
certain justification in the poet's own violence of denunciation. The
most abusive of these was a poem by Thomas Shadwell, entitled 'The
Medal of John Bayes.' Such persons as fancy Dryden's subsequent
punishment of that dramatist unwarranted in its severity should in
justice read this ferociously scurrilous diatribe, in which every
charge against the poet that malice or envy had concocted and rumor
had set afloat, was here industriously raked together; and to the
muck-heap thus collected, the intimacy of previous acquaintance was
doubtless enabled to contribute its due quota of malignant assertion
and more malignant insinuation. Shadwell was soon supplied, however,
with ample reason to regret his action. Dryden's first and best known
rejoinder is 'MacFlecknoe, or a Satire on the True Blue Protestant
Poet T. S.' This production has always had the reputation in
literature of being the severest personal satire in the language; but
it requires now for its appreciation an intimate acquaintance with
Shadwell's plays, which very few possess. It is further disfigured in
places by a coarseness from which, indeed, none of the poet's writings
were certain to be free. Its general spirit can be indicated by a
brief extract from its opening paragraph. Flecknoe, it is to be said,
was a feeble poet who had died a few years before. He is here
represented as having long reigned over the kingdom of dullness, but
knowing that his end was close at hand, determines to settle the
succession to the State. Accordingly he fixes upon his son Shadwell as
the one best fitted to take his place in ruling over the realm of
nonsense, and in continuing the war with wit and sense. The
announcement of his intention he begins in the following words:--
"--Tis resolved, for Nature pleads that he
Should only rule who most resembles me.
Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years;
Shadwell alone of all my sons is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense."
Far more bitter, however, was the renewed attack which a month later
Dryden inserted in the two hundred lines he contributed to the
continuation of 'Absalom and Achitophel' that was written by Nahum
Tate. In this second part, which came out in November 1682, he devoted
himself in particular to two of his opponents, Settle and Shadwell,
under the names respectively of Doeg and Og--"two fools," he says, in
his energetic way,--
"That crutch their feeble sense on verse;
Who by my Muse to all succeeding times
Shall live in spite of their own doggerel rhymes."
Of Settle, whose poetry was possessed of much smoothness but little
sense, he spoke in a tone of contemptuous good-nature, though the
object of the attack must certainly have deemed the tender mercies of
Dryden to be cruel. It was in this way he was described, to quote a
few lines:--
"Spiteful he is not, though he wrote a satire,
For still there goes some thinking to ill-nature.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Let him be gallows-free by my consent,
And nothing suffer, since he nothing meant;
Hanging supposes human soul and reason,--
This animal's below committing treason:
Shall he be hanged who never could rebel?
That's a preferment for Achitophel.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Let him rail on; let his invective Muse
Have four-and-twenty letters to abuse,
Which if he jumbles to one line of sense,
Indict him of a capital offense."
But it was not till he came to the portraiture of Shadwell that he
gave full vent to the ferocity of his satire. He taunted him with the
unwieldiness of his bulk, the grossness of his habits, with his want
of wealth, and finally closed up with some lines into which he
concentrated all the venom of his previous attacks:--
"But though Heaven made him poor, with reverence speaking,
He never was a poet of God's making
The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull,
With this prophetic blessing--_Be thou dull_;
Drink, swear, and roar, forbear no lewd delight
Fit for thy bulk; do anything but write.
Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men;
A strong nativity--but for the pen;
Eat opium, mingle arsenic in thy drink,
Still thou mayest live, avoiding pen and ink.
I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain,
For treason, botched in rhyme, will be thy bane;
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck;
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.
* * * * *
"A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull,
For writing treason and for writing dull;
To die for faction is a common evil,
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.
Hadst thou the glories of thy King exprest,
Thy praises had been satires at the best;
But thou in clumsy verse, unlicked, unpointed,
Hast shamefully defied the Lord's anointed.
I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes,
For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes?
But of King David's foes be this the doom,--
May all be like the young man Absalom;
And for my foes may this their blessing be,--
To talk like Doeg and to write like thee."
Refinement of tone is not the distinguishing characteristic of satire
of this sort. It does not attack its object by delicate insinuation or
remote suggestion. It operates by heavy downright blows which crush by
the mere weight and power of the stroke. There was in truth in those
days a certain brutality not only permitted but expected in the way
men spoke of each other, and Dryden conformed in this as in other
respects to the manners and methods of his age. But of its kind the
attack is perfect. The blows of a bludgeon which make of the victim a
shapeless mass kill as effectively as the steel or poison which leaves
every feature undisturbed, and to the common apprehension it serves to
render the killing more manifest. At any rate, so long as a person has
been done to death, it makes comparatively little difference how the
death was brought about; and the object in this instance of Dryden's
attack, though a man of no mean abilities, has never recovered from
the demolition which his reputation then underwent.
In 1685 Charles II. died, and his brother James ascended the throne. In
the following year Dryden went over to the Roman Catholic Church. No
act of his life has met with severer censure. Nor can there be any
doubt that the time he took to change his religion afforded ground for
distrusting the sincerity of his motives. A king was on the throne who
was straining every nerve to bring the Church of England once more
under the sway of the Church of Rome. Obviously the adoption of the
latter faith would recommend the poet to the favor of the bigoted
monarch, and tend to advance his personal interests. There is no
wonder, therefore, that he should at the time have been accused of
being actuated by the unworthiest of reasons, and that the charge
should continue to be repeated to our day. Yet a close study of
Dryden's life and writings indicates that the step he took was a
natural if not an inevitable outcome of the processes through which
his opinions had been passing. He had been early trained in the strict
tenets of the Puritan party. From these he had been carried over to
the loose beliefs and looser life that followed everywhere hard upon
the Restoration. By the sentiments then prevailing he was profoundly
affected. Nothing in the writings of the first half of his literary
life is more marked--not even his flings at matrimony--than the
scoffing way in which he usually spoke of the clergy. His tone towards
them is almost always contemptuous, where it is not positively
vituperative. His famous political satire began with this line--
"In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin;"--
and a little later in the course of the same poem he observed that--
"Fraud was used, the sacrificer's trade,"
the "sacrificer" here denoting the priest. This feeling toward the
clergy never in truth deserted him entirely. But no one who reads
carefully his 'Religio Laici,' a poem published in 1682, can fail to
perceive that even then he had not only drifted far away from the
faith of his childhood, but had begun to be tormented and perplexed by
the insoluble problems connected with the life and destiny of man, and
with his relations to his Creator. The subject was not likely to weigh
less heavily upon him in the years that followed. To Dryden, as to
many before and since, it may have seemed the easiest method of
deliverance from the difficulties in which he found himself involved,
to cast the burden of doubts which disquieted the mind and depressed
the heart, upon a Church that undertakes to assume the whole
responsibility for the man's future on condition of his yielding to it
an unquestioning faith in the present.
An immediate result of his conversion was the production in 1687 of
one of his most deservedly famous poems, 'The Hind and the Panther.'
He began it with the idea of assisting in bringing about the
reconciliation between the Panther, typifying the Church of England,
and the Hind, typifying the Church of Rome. It is apparent that
before he finished it he saw that the project was hopeless. It is a
poem of over twenty-five hundred lines, of which the opening up to
line 150 is printed in this volume. Part of the passage here cited
contains, without professing it as an object, and probably without
intending it, the best defense that could be made for his change of
religion. The production in its entirety is remarkable for the skill
which its author displayed in carrying on an argument in verse. In
this he certainly had no superior among poets, perhaps no equal. The
work naturally created a great sensation in those days of fierce
political and religious controversy. Both it and its writer were made
the object of constant attack. A criticism, in particular, appeared
upon it in the shape of a dialogue in prose with snatches of verse
interspersed. It is usually known by the title of 'The Town Mouse and
the Country Mouse,' and was exalted at the time by unreasoning
partisanship into a wonderful performance. Even to the present day,
this dreary specimen of polemics is described as a very witty work by
those who have never struggled to read it. It was the production of
Charles Montagu, the future Earl of Halifax, and of Matthew Prior. A
story too is still constantly repeated that Dryden was much hurt by
the attacks of these two young men, to whom he had been kind, and wept
over their ingratitude. If he shed any tears at all upon the occasion,
they must have been due to the mortification he felt that any two
persons who had been admitted to his friendship should have been
guilty of twaddle so desperately tedious.
The flight of James and the accession of William and Mary threw Dryden
at once out of the favor of the court, upon which to a large extent he
had long depended for support. As a Jacobite he could not take the
oath of allegiance; but there is hardly any doubt that under any
circumstances he would have been deprived of the offices of place and
profit he held. In the laureateship he was succeeded by his old
antagonist Shadwell; and within a few years he saw the dignity of the
position still further degraded by the appointment to it of Nahum
Tate, one of the worst of the long procession of poetasters who have
filled it. Dryden henceforth belonged to the party out of power. His
feelings about his changed relations are shown plainly in the fine
epistle with which he consoled Congreve for the failure of his comedy
of the 'Double Dealer.' Yet displaced and unpensioned, and sometimes
the object of hostile attack, his literary supremacy was more absolute
than ever. All young authors, whether Whigs or Tories, sought his
society and courted his favor; and his seat at Will's coffee-house was
the throne from which he swayed the literary sceptre of England.
After the revolution of 1688 Dryden gave himself entirely up to
authorship. He first turned to the stage; and between 1690 and 1694
he produced five plays. With the failure in the last-mentioned year of
his tragi-comedy called 'Love Triumphant,' he abandoned writing for
the theatre. The period immediately following he devoted mainly to his
translation of Virgil, which was published in 1697. It was highly
successful; but far more reputation came to him from a large folio
volume that was brought out in November 1699, under the title of
'Fables.' Its contents consisted mainly of poetical narratives founded
upon certain stories of the 'Decameron,' and of the modernization of
some of the 'Canterbury Tales.' In certain ways these have been his
most successful pieces, and have made his name familiar to successive
generations of readers. Of the tales from Boccaccio, that of 'Cymon
and Iphigenia' is on the whole the most pleasing. The modernizations
of Chaucer were long regarded as superior to the original; and though
superior knowledge of the original has effectually banished that
belief, there is on the other hand no justification for the derogatory
terms which are now sometimes applied to Dryden's versions.
The verse in this volume was preceded by a long critical essay in
prose. Many of its views, especially those about the language of
Chaucer, have been long discarded; but the criticism will always be
read with pleasure for the genial spirit and sound sense which pervade
it, and the unstudied ease with which it is written. Cowley and Dryden
are in fact the founders of modern English prose; and the influence of
the latter has been much greater than that of the former, inasmuch as
he touched upon a far wider variety of topics, and for that reason
obtained a far larger circle of readers in the century following his
death. There was also the same steady improvement in Dryden's critical
taste that there was in his poetical expression. His admiration for
Shakespeare constantly improved during his whole life; and it is to be
noticed that in what is generally regarded as the best of his
plays--'All for Love,' brought out in the winter of 1677-78--he of his
own accord abandoned rhyme for blank verse.
The publication of the 'Fables' was Dryden's last appearance before
the public. In the following year he died, and was buried in
Westminster Abbey by the side of Chaucer and Cowley. After his death
his fame steadily increased instead of diminishing. For a long period
his superiority in his particular line was ungrudgingly conceded by
all, or if contested, was contested by Pope alone. His poetry indeed
is not of the highest kind, though usually infinitely superior to that
of his detractors. Still his excellences were those of the intellect
and not of the spirit. On the higher planes of thought and feeling he
rarely moves; to the highest he never aspires. The nearest he ever
approaches to the former is in his later work, where religious
emotion or religious zeal has lent to expression the aid of its
intensity. There is a striking example of this in the personal
references to his own experiences in the lines cited below from 'The
Hind and the Panther.' Something too of the same spirit can be found,
expressed in lofty language, in the following passage from the same
poem, descriptive of the unity of the Church of Rome as contrasted
with the numerous warring sects into which the Protestant body is
divided:--
"One in herself, not rent by schism, but sound,
Entire, one solid shining diamond,
Not sparkles shattered into sects like you:
One is the Church, and must be to be true,
One central principle of unity.
As undivided, so from errors free;
As one in faith, so one in sanctity.
Thus she, and none but she, the insulting rage
Of heretics opposed from age to age;
Still when the giant brood invades her throne,
She stoops from heaven and meets them half-way down,
And with paternal thunders vindicates her crown.
* * * * *
"Thus one, thus pure, behold her largely spread,
Like the fair ocean from her mother-bed;
From east to west triumphantly she rides,
All shores are watered by her wealthy tides.
The gospel sound diffused from Pole to Pole,
Where winds can carry and where waves can roll,
The selfsame doctrine of the sacred page
Conveyed to every clime, in every age."
But though Dryden's poetry is not of the highest class, it is of the
very highest kind in its class. Wherever the pure intellect comes into
play, there he is invariably excellent. There is never any weakness;
there is never any vagueness; there is never any deviation from the
true path into aimless digression. His words invariably go straight to
the mark, and not unfrequently with a directness and force that fully
merit the epithet of "burning" applied to them by the poet Gray. His
thoughts always rise naturally out of the matter in hand; and in the
treatment of the meanest subjects he is not only never mean, but often
falls without apparent effort into a felicity of phrase which holds
the attention and implants itself in the memory. The benefit of
exercise, for instance, is not a topic that can be deemed highly
poetical; but in his epistle on country life addressed to his cousin
John Driden, the moment he comes to speak of hunting and its salutary
results his expression at once leaves the commonplace, and embodies
the thought in these pointed lines:--
"So lived our sires, ere doctors learned to kill,
And multiply with theirs the weekly bill.
The first physicians by debauch were made;
Excess began, and sloth sustains the trade.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
By chase our long-lived fathers earned their food;
Toil strung the nerves and purified the blood:
But we their sons, a pampered race of men,
Are dwindled down to threescore years and ten.
Better to hunt in fields for health unbought
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.
The wise for cure on exercise depend;
God never made his work for man to mend."
In a similar way in 'Cymon and Iphigenia' the contempt which Dryden,
in common with the Tories of his time, felt for the English militia
force, found vent in the following vigorous passage, really
descriptive of them and their conduct though the scene is laid in
Rhodes:--
"The country rings around with loud alarms,
And raw in fields the rude militia swarms;
Mouths without hands; maintained at vast expense,
In peace a charge, in war a weak defense;
Stout once a month they march, a blustering band,
And ever, but in times of need, at hand:
This was the morn when, issuing on the guard,
Drawn up in rank and file they stood prepared
Of seeming arms to make a short essay,
Then hasten to be drunk, the business of the day."
In a world where what is feeble in expression is so often supposed to
indicate peculiar delicacy; where what is vague is so often deemed
peculiarly poetical; and where what is involved and crabbed and hard
to comprehend is thought to denote peculiar profundity,--it is a
pleasure to turn to a writer with a rank settled by the consensus of
successive generations, who thought clearly and wrote forcibly, who
knew always what he had to say and then said it with directness and
power. There are greater poets than he; but so long as men continue to
delight in vividness of expression, in majesty of numbers, in
masculine strength and all-abounding vigor, so long will Dryden
continue to hold his present high place among English authors.
The writings of Dryden constitute of themselves a literature. They
treat of a vast variety of topics in many different departments of
intellectual activity. The completest edition of his works was first
published in 1808 under the editorship of Walter Scott. It fills
twenty-one volumes, the first of which however is devoted to a
biography. The notes to this edition are generally excellent; the text
is very indifferent. A revised edition of it has been recently
published under the editorship of George Saintsbury. But easily
accessible is a single-volume edition of the poems alone, edited by W.
D. Christie, which furnishes a superior text, and is amply supplied
with all necessary annotations.
[Illustration: Signature (Thomas R. Lounsbury)]