Occasional Soul--Stirring Verses
In truth, there is scarcely any other literary merit. If Dryden is a
skilled politician, a trained controversialist, well armed with
arguments, knowing all the ins and outs of discussion, versed in the
history of men and parties, this pamphleteering aptitude, practical and
English, confines him to the low region of everyday and personal
controversies, far from the lofty philosophy and speculative freedom
which give endurance and greatness to the classical style of his French
contemporaries. In the main, in this age, in England, all discussion was
fundamentally narrow. Except the terrible Hobbes, they all lack grand
originality. Dryden, like the rest, is confined to the arguments and
insults of sect and fashion. Their ideas were as small as their hatred
was strong; no general doctrine opened up a poetical vista beyond the
tumult of the strife; texts, traditions, a sad train of rigid reasoning,
such were their arms; the same prejudices and passions exist in both
parties. This is why the subject-matter fell below the art of writing.
Dryden had no personal philosophy to develop; he does but versify themes
given to him by others. In this sterility art soon is reduced to the
clothing of foreign ideas, and the writer becomes an antiquarian or a
translator. In reality, the greatest part of Dryden's poems are
imitations, adaptations, or copies. He translated Persius and Vergil,
with parts of Horace, Theocritus, Juvenal, Lucretius, and Homer, and put
into modern English several tales of Boccaccio and Chaucer. These
translations then appeared to be as great works as original
compositions. When he took the Æneid in hand, the nation, as Johnson
tells us, appeared to think its honor interested in the issue. Addison
furnished him with the arguments of every book, and an essay on the
Georgies; others supplied him with editions and notes; great lords vied
with one another in offering him hospitality; subscriptions flowed in.
They said that the English Vergil was to give England the Vergil of
Rome. This work was long considered his highest glory. Even so at Rome,
under Cicero, in the early dearth of national poetry, the translators of
Greek works were as highly praised as the original authors.
This sterility of invention alters or depresses the taste. For taste is
an instinctive system, and leads us by internal maxims, which we ignore.
The mind, guided by it, perceives connections, shuns discordances,
enjoys or suffers, chooses or rejects, according to general conceptions
which master it, but are not visible. These removed, we see the tact,
which they engendered, disappear; the writer is clumsy, because
philosophy fails him. Such is the imperfection of the stories handled by
Dryden, from Boccaccio and Chaucer. Dryden does not see that fairy tales
or tales of chivalry only suit a poetry in its infancy; that ingenuous
subjects require an artless style; that the talk of Reynard and
Chanticleer, the adventures of Palamon and Arcite, the transformations,
tournaments, apparitions, need the astonished carelessness and the
graceful gossip of old Chaucer. Vigorous periods, reflective antitheses,
here oppress these amiable ghosts; classical phrases embarrass them in
their too stringent embrace; they are lost to our sight; to find them
again, we must go to their first parent, quit the too harsh light of a
learned and manly age; we cannot pursue them fairly except in their
first style in the dawn of credulous thought, under the mist which plays
about their vague forms, with all the blushes and smiles of morning.
Moreover, when Dryden comes on the scene, he crushes the delicacies of
his master, hauling in tirades or reasonings, blotting out sincere and
self-abandoning tenderness. What a difference between his account of
Arcite's death and Chaucer's! How wretched are all his fine literary
words, his gallantry, his symmetrical phrases, his cold regrets,
compared to the cries of sorrow, the true outpouring, the deep love in
Chaucer! But the worst fault is that almost everywhere he is a copyist,
and retains the faults like a literal translator, with eyes glued on the
work, powerless to comprehend and recast it, more a rhymester than a
poet. When La Fontaine put Æsop or Boccaccio into verse, he breathed a
new spirit into them; he took their matter only: the new soul, which
constitutes the value of his work, is his, and only his; and this soul
befits the work. In place of the Ciceronian periods of Boccaccio, we
find slim, little lines, full of delicate raillery, dainty
voluptuousness, feigned artlessness, which relish the forbidden fruit
because it is fruit, and because it is forbidden. The tragic departs,
the relics of the Middle Ages are a thousand leagues away; there remains
nothing but the invidious gayety, Gallic and racy, as of a critic and an
epicurean. In Dryden, incongruities abound; and our author is so little
shocked by them that he imports them elsewhere, in his theological
poems, representing the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, as a hind,
and the heresies by various animals, who dispute at as great length and
as learnedly as Oxford graduates.[469] I like him no better in his
Epistles; as a rule, they are but flatteries, almost always awkward,
often mythological, interspersed with somewhat commonplace sentences. "I
have studied Horace," he says, "and hope the style of his Epistles is
not ill imitated here."[470] But don't believe him. Horace's Epistles,
though in verse, are genuine letters, brisk, unequal in movement, always
unstudied, natural. Nothing is further from Dryden than this original
and thorough man of the world, philosophical and lewd,[471] this most
refined and most nervous of epicureans, this kinsman (at eighteen
centuries' distance) of Alfred de Musset and Voltaire. Like Horace, an
author must be a thinker and a man of the world to write agreeable
morality, and Dryden was no more than his contemporaries either a man of
the world or a thinker.
But other characteristics, as eminently English, sustain him. Suddenly,
in the midst of the yawns which these Epistles occasioned, our eyes are
arrested. A true accent, new ideas, are brought out. Dryden, writing to
his cousin, a country gentleman, has lighted on an English original
subject. He depicts the life of a rural squire, the referee of his
neighbors, who shuns lawsuits and town doctors, who keeps himself in
health by hunting and exercise. Here is his portrait:
How bless'd is he, who leads a country life,
Unvex'd with anxious cares, and void of strife!...
With crowds attended of your ancient race,
You seek the champaign sports, or sylvan chase;
With well-breathed beagles you surround the wood,
Even then industrious of the common good;
And often have you brought the wily fox
To suffer for the firstlings of the flocks;
Chased even amid the folds, and made to bleed,
Like felons, where they did the murderous deed.
This fiery game your active youth maintain'd;
Not yet by years extinguish'd though restrain'd:...
"A patriot both the king and country serves;
Prerogative and privilege preserves:
Of each our laws the certain limit shows;
One must not ebb, nor t'other overflow;
Betwixt the prince and parliament we stand,
The barriers of the state on either hand;
May neither overflow, for then they drown the land
When both are full, they feed our bless'd abode;
Like those that water'd once the paradise of God.
Some overpoise of sway, by turns, they share;
In peace the people, and the prince in war:
Consuls of moderate power in calms were made;
When the Gauls came, one sole dictator sway'd.
Patriots, in peace, assert the people's right,
With noble stubbornness resisting might;
No lawless mandates from the court receive,
Nor lend by force, but in a body give."[472]
This serious converse shows a political mind, fed on the spectacle of
affairs, having in the matter of public and practical debates the
superiority which the French have in speculative discussions and social
conversation. So, amidst the dryness of polemics break forth sudden
splendors, a poetic fount, a prayer from the heart's depths; the English
well of concentrated passion is on a sudden opened again with a flow and
a spirit which Dryden does not elsewhere exhibit:
"Dim as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wand'ring travellers,
Is reason to the soul: and as on high
Those rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here; so Reason's glimm'ring ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear
When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere,
So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight,
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light."[473]
"But, gracious God! how well dost thou provide
For erring judgments an unerring guide!
Thy throne is darkness in th' abyss of light,
A blaze of glory that forbids the sight.
O teach me to believe Thee thus conceal'd,
And search no farther than Thyself reveal'd;
But her alone for my director take,
Whom Thou hast promised never to forsake!
My thoughtless youth was wing'd with vain desires;
My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,
Follow'd false lights; and when their glimpse was gone,
My pride struck out new sparkles of her own.
Such was I, such by nature still I am;
Be Thine the glory and be mine the shame!
Good life be now my task; my doubts are done."[474]
Such is the poetry of these serious minds. After having strayed in the
debaucheries and pomps of the Restoration, Dryden found his way to the
grave emotions of the inner life; though a Romanist, he felt like a
Protestant the wretchedness of man and the presence of grace: he was
capable of enthusiasm. Here and there a manly and soul-stirring verse
discloses, in the midst of his reasonings, the power of conception and
the inspiration of desire. When the tragic is met with, he takes to it
as to his own domain; at need, he deals in the horrible. He has
described the infernal chase, and the torture of the young girl worried
by dogs, with the savage energy of Milton.[475] As a contrast, he loved
nature: this taste always endures in England; the sombre, reflective
passions are unstrung in the grand peace and harmony of the fields.
Landscapes are to be met with amidst theological disputation:
"New blossoms flourish and new flowers arise,
As God had been abroad, and walking there
Had left his footsteps and reformed the year.
The sunny hills from far were seen to glow
With glittering beams, and in the meads below
The burnished brooks appeared with liquid gold to flow.
As last they heard the foolish Cuckoo sing,
Whose note proclaimed the holy day of spring."[476]
Under his regular versification the artist's soul is brought to
light;[477] though contracted by habits of classical argument, though
stiffened by controversy and polemics, though unable to create souls or
depict artless and delicate sentiments, he is a genuine poet: he is
troubled, raised by beautiful sounds and forms; he writes boldly under
the pressure of vehement ideas; he surrounds himself willingly with
splendid images; he is moved by the buzzing of their swarms, the glitter
of their splendors; he is, when he wishes it, a musician and a painter;
he writes stirring airs, which shake all the senses, even if they do not
sink deep into the heart. Such is his "Alexander's Feast," an ode in
honor of St. Cecilia's day, an admirable trumpet-blast, in which metre
and sound impress upon the nerves the emotions of the mind, a
masterpiece of rapture and of art, which Victor Hugo alone has come up
to.[478] Alexander is on his throne in the palace of Persepolis; the
lovely Thais sat by his side; before him, in a vast hall, his glorious
captains. And Timotheus sings:
"The praise of Bacchus, then, the sweet musician sung;
Of Bacchus ever fair, and ever young.
The jolly God in triumph comes;
Sound the trumpets, beat the drums;
Flush'd with a purple grace,
He shews his honest face.
Now, give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes,
Bacchus ever fair and young,
Drinking joys did first ordain;
Bacchus' blessings are a treasure,
Drinking is the soldier's pleasure:
Rich the treasure,
Sweet the pleasure;
Sweet is pleasure after pain."
And at the stirring sounds the king is troubled; his cheeks are glowing;
his battles return to his memory; he defies heaven and earth. Then a sad
song depresses him. Timotheus mourns the death of the betrayed Darius.
Then a tender song softens him; Timotheus lauds the dazzling beauty of
Thais. Suddenly he strikes the lyre again:
"A louder yet, and yet a louder strain.
Break his bands of sleep asunder,
And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder.
Hark, hark! the horrid sound
Has raised up his head;
As awaked from the dead,
And amazed, he stares around.
Revenge, revenge! Timotheus cries,
See the furies arise;
See the snakes, that they rear,
How they hiss in their hair!
And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!
Behold a ghastly band,
Each a torch in his hand!
Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain,
And unburied remain
Inglorious on the plain:
Give the vengeance due
To the valiant crew.
Behold how they toss their torches on high,
How they point to the Persian abodes,
And glittering temples of their hostile gods.--
The princes applaud, with a furious joy.
And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy;
Thais led the way,
To light him to his prey,
And, like another Helen, fired another Troy."[479]
Thus formerly music softened, exalted, mastered men; Dryden's verses
acquire again their power in describing it.