Where their vast courts the mother-strumpets keep,
And undisturbed by watch, in silence sleep.
Near these, a nursery erects its head,
Where queens are formed, and future heroes bred;
Where unfledged actors learn to laugh and cry,
Where infant punks their tender voices try,
And little Maximins the gods defy.
The passage from Cowley is by no means despicable verse. But it is a
commonplace description of commonly poetic objects; it has not the
element of _surprise_ so essential to poetry, and this Dryden provides.
A clever versifier might have written Cowley's lines; only a poet could
have made what Dryden made of them. It is impossible to dismiss his
verses as "prosaic"; turn them into prose and they are transmuted, the
fragrance is gone. The reproach of the prosaic, levelled at Dryden,
rests upon a confusion between the emotions considered to be
poetic--which is a matter allowing considerable latitude of fashion--and
the _result_ of personal emotion in poetry; and, in the third place,
there is the emotion _depicted_ by the poet in some kinds of poetry, of
which the "Testaments" of Villon is an example. Again, there is the
intellect, the originality and independence and clarity of what we
vaguely call the poet's "point of view." Our valuation of poetry, in
short, depends upon several considerations, upon the permanent and upon
the mutable and upon the transitory. When we try to isolate the
essentially poetic, we bring our pursuit in the end to something
insignificant; our standards vary with every poet whom we consider. All
we can hope to do, in the attempt to introduce some order into our
preferences, is to clarify our reasons for finding pleasure in the
poetry that we like.
With regard to Dryden, therefore, we can say this much. Our taste in
English poetry has been largely founded upon a partial perception of the
value of Shakespeare and Milton, a perception which dwells upon
sublimity of theme and action. Shakespeare had a great deal more; he had
nearly everything to satisfy our various desires for poetry. The point
is that the depreciation or neglect of Dryden is not due to the fact
that his work is not poetry, but to a prejudice that the material, the
feelings, out of which he built is not poetic. Thus Matthew Arnold
observes, in mentioning Dryden and Pope together, that "their poetry is
conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived in the
soul." Arnold was, perhaps, not altogether the detached critic when he
wrote this line; he may have been stirred to a defence of his own
poetry, conceived and composed in the soul of a mid-century Oxford
graduate. Pater remarks that Dryden--
"Loved to emphasize the distinction between poetry and prose, the
protest against their confusion coming with somewhat diminished effect
from one whose poetry was so prosaic."
But Dryden was right, and the sentence of Pater is cheap journalism.
Hazlitt, who had perhaps the most uninteresting mind of all our
distinguished critics, says--
"Dryden and Pope are the great masters of the artificial style of poetry
in our language, as the poets of whom I have already treated--Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton--were of the natural."
In one sentence Hazlitt has committed at least four crimes against
taste. It is bad enough to lump Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and
Milton together under the denomination of "natural"; it is bad to commit
Shakespeare to one style only; it is bad to join Dryden and Pope
together; but the last absurdity is the contrast, of Milton, our
greatest master of the _artificial_ style, with Dryden, whose style
(vocabulary, syntax, and order of thought) is in a high degree natural.
And what all these objections come to, we repeat, is a repugnance for
the material out of which Dryden's poetry is built.
It would be truer to say, indeed, even in the form of the unpersuasive
paradox, that Dryden is distinguished principally by his poetic ability.
We prize him, as we do Mallarmé, for what he made of his material. Our
estimate is only in part the appreciation of ingenuity: in the end the
result is poetry. Much of Dryden's unique merit consists in his ability
to make the small into the great, the prosaic into the poetic, the
trivial into the magnificent. In this he differs not only from Milton,
who required a canvas of the largest size, but from Pope, who required
one of the smallest. If you compare any satiric "character" of Pope with
one of Dryden, you will see that the method and intention are widely
divergent. When Pope alters, he diminishes; he is a master of miniature.
The singular skill of his portrait of Addison, for example, in the
"Epistle to Arbuthnot," depends upon the justice and reserve, the
apparent determination not to exaggerate. The genius of Pope is not for
caricature. But the effect of the portraits of Dryden is to transform
the object into something greater, as were transformed the verses of
Cowley quoted above.
A fiery soul, which working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay:
And o'er informed the tenement of clay.
These lines are not merely a magnificent tribute. They create the object
which they contemplate; the poetry is purer than anything in Pope except
the last lines of the "Dunciad." Dryden is in fact much nearer to the
master of comic creation than to Pope. As in Jonson, the effect is far
from laughter; the comic is the material, the result is poetry. The
Civic Guards of 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 defence;
Stout once a month they march, a blust'ring 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.
Sometimes the wit appears as a delicate flavour to the magnificence,
as in "Alexander's Feast":--
Sooth'd with the sound the king grew vain;
Fought all his battles o'er again;
And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain.
The great advantage of Dryden over Milton is that while the former is
always in control of his ascent, and can rise or fall at will (and how
masterfully, like his own Timotheus, he directs the transitions!), the
latter has elected a perch from which he cannot afford to fall, and from
which he is in danger of slipping.
food alike those pure
Intelligential substances require
As doth your Rational; and both contain
Within them every lower faculty
Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste,
Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate,
And corporeal to incorporeal turn.
Dryden might have made poetry out of that; his translation from
Lucretius is poetry. But we have an ingenious example, on which to test
our contrast of Dryden and Milton: it is Dryden's "Opera," called _The
State of Innocence and Fall of Man_, of which Nathaniel Lee neatly says
in his preface:--
Milton did the wealthy mine disclose,
And rudely cast what you could well dispose:
He roughly drew, on an old-fashioned ground,
A chaos, for no perfect world were found,
Till through the heap, your mighty genius shined.
In the author's preface Dryden acknowledges his debt generously
enough:--
"The original being undoubtedly, one of the greatest, most
noble, and most sublime poems, which either this age or nation
has produced."