[Illustration: Dryden]
August 9th.--The anniversary of the birth of JOHN DRYDEN. This great
poet was born in 1631, in the parish of Aldwinkle-All-Saints,
Northamptonshire, where his father, the third son of Sir Erasmus Dryden,
Bart., had a small estate. The poet’s third son, Erasmus Henry,
eventually succeeded to this baronetcy. All Dryden’s near connexions
appear to have attached themselves in the civil wars to the party of the
Parliament; and the poet himself, afterwards so celebrated for his
royalist strains, began also by exercising his talents on that side of
the question. The first verses by which he made himself much known, were
his ‘Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell,’ in which he
celebrated the memory of the Protector and his actions with no cold or
sparing panegyric. When the Restoration, however, a few months after,
brought other principles or professions into fashion, Dryden, with many
more, made no scruple to adopt the new creed. His Elegy on Cromwell was
followed by his ‘Astræa Redux,’ an effusion of thanksgiving ‘on the
happy Restoration and Return of his sacred Majesty Charles II.;’ and
that by a shorter piece on the coronation of the same monarch. As the
poet, however, was yet only in his twenty-ninth year, perhaps it may be
thought that he had not passed the age for the only change of political
opinion which is usually looked upon with indulgence--the first, namely,
which a man makes, or that in which he relinquishes the creed of
education and custom, for that of reason and experience. And it is at
least to be said for Dryden, that after this he distinguished himself by
no second apostacy, but, right or wrong, adhered steadily during the
remainder of his days to the colours under which he now took his place,
although he lived to see the time when it would certainly have been for
his worldly interest to have again changed sides, and when he would also
have had many and high examples to countenance him in so doing. It was
in the year after the publication of his ‘Astræa Redux’ that he first
appeared in the character of a dramatist, which he afterwards sustained
by so long a series of productions. His commencing effort in this line
was his play entitled ‘The Duke of Guise,’ It was in the ‘Annus
Mirabilis,’ however, which appeared in 1667, that his genius first broke
forth with any promise of that full effulgence at which it eventually
arrived. It is with the publication of this poem too that he may be
properly said to have entered upon authorship as a profession; and from
that event till the close of the century, his life may be described as
having been but one long literary labour, scarcely ever relieved by any
considerable interval of repose. We cannot here go over in detail the
names and dates of his manifold productions; but we may merely observe
that no fewer than twenty-eight dramas, and eight original poems of
considerable length, besides many minor effusions, and several volumes
of poetical translation from Chaucer, Boccaccio, Ovid, Theocritus,
Lucretius, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Virgil, together with no small
number of treatises in prose, in the shape of dedications, prefaces, and
other more elaborate disquisitions, attest the unwearied industry, as
well as the singular fertility of his mind. Such incessant exertions
were so far from exhausting his genius, that his powers continued not
only to do their work with unimpaired elasticity, but even apparently to
gather new vigour and dexterity to the last. His celebrated ‘Alexander’s
Feast,’ and his admirable Fables, (the latter, translations indeed, in
so far as the incidents are concerned, from Boccaccio and Chaucer, but
made by Dryden entirely his own by the embellishment and the filling
up,) were written when the illustrious author was on the verge of his
seventieth year, and suffering under poverty and accumulated
afflictions, from which he was relieved by death a few months
afterwards. He died on the 1st of May, 1700, and was buried in
Westminster Abbey, in a grave next to that of Chaucer. Among our English
poets Dryden stands at the head of the school to which he belongs,
which, however, is not that of the highly imaginative, but rather that
of the intense, energetic, and pointed, in feeling and expression. Pope,
who is to be classed as, in many respects, his pupil, has excelled him
in precision, regularity, and neatness of diction, and his wit, also, if
not more brilliant, is certainly more refined and unmixed; but he has
not approached Dryden either in the rich and varied music of his verse,
or in the cordiality of his indignant declamation, or in the exquisitely
free and easy flow of his merely discursive passages. There is nothing,
indeed, more perfect in the language than Dryden’s reasoning in rhyme.
Here, and in every thing else, his extraordinary command of expression
is one of the chief sources of his strength. Dryden’s vocabulary,
without comprehending the whole extent of the English tongue, is yet
complete for the demands of his particular range of composition.
Certainly few writers have wielded language with a more perfect mastery
of the weapon. And it is this which not only gives much of its power to
his poetry, but has also imparted to his prose style a charm that has
been rarely equalled. It deserves, however, to be remarked, that to his
affluence of words are probably to be in part ascribed some of his
defects as well as many of his excellences. As a dramatist he has almost
completely failed, and perhaps to a greater degree than he otherwise
would have done, simply because he was so consummate a rhetorician. In
his plays, as in all his other productions, he has given us sonorous
verse and splendid declamation in abundance, but little true
passion--many feats of art, but few touches of nature--much, in short,
to fill the ear, but almost nothing to move the heart. But on another
account also, indeed, Dryden was altogether unfitted to excel as a
dramatic writer. He wanted the power of forgetting and abstracting
himself from his merely personal feelings. But nearly every thing that
Dryden has written most forcibly--every thing he has done in which there
is really any passion, derives the chief portion of its animation from
its being the mere utterance of his own rage, or scorn, or exultation,
or other pervading sentiment at the moment. There is none of that
passing out of himself into another being, the capacity of which is the
soul of dramatic genius, and by the exertion of which a great dramatist
seems not to speak through his characters, but only, as it were, to
listen to what they say, and faithfully to write it down.
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