as to make his immediate and cordial attachment to the cause of restored
Royalty either very strange or very unhandsome. Not committed either by
strong personal convictions, or by acts, to the Puritan side, he hastened
to show that, whatever the older Northamptonshire Drydens and their
relatives might think of the matter, he, for one, was willing to be a
loyal subject of Charles, both in church and in state. This main point
being settled, he had only farther to consider into what particular walk
of industry, now that official employment under government was cut off, he
should carry his loyalty and his powers. The choice was not difficult.
There was but one career open for him, or suitable to his tastes and
qualifications--that of general authorship. We say "general authorship;"
for it is important to remark that Dryden was by no means nice in his
choice of work. He was ready for anything of a literary kind to which he
was, or could make himself, competent. He had probably a preference for
verse; but he had no disinclination to prose, if that article was in
demand in the market. He had a store of acquirements, academic and other,
that fitted him for an intelligent apprehension of whatever was going on
in any of the London circles of that day--the circle of the scholars, that
of the amateurs of natural science, or that of the mere wits and men of
letters. He was, in fact, a man of general intellectual strength, which he
was willing to let out in any kind of tolerably honest intellectual
service that might be in fashion. This being the case, he set the right
way to work to make himself known in quarters where such service was
going on. He had about 40_l._ a-year of inherited fortune; which means
something more than 120_l._ a-year with us. With this income to supply his
immediate wants, he went to live with Herringman, a bookseller and
publisher in the New Exchange. What was the precise nature of his
agreement with Herringman cannot be ascertained. His literary enemies used
afterwards to say that he was Herringman's hack and wrote prefaces for
him. However this may be, there were higher conveniences in being
connected with Herringman. He was one of the best known of the London
publishers of the day, was a personal friend of Davenant, and had almost
all the wits of the day as his customers and occasional visitors. Through
him, in all probability, Dryden first became acquainted with some of these
men, including Davenant himself, Cowley, and a third person of
considerable note at that time as an aristocratic dabbler in
literature--Sir Robert Howard, son of the Earl of Berkshire. That the
impression he made on these men, and on others in or out of the Herringman
circle, was no mean one, is proved by the fact that in 1663 we find him a
member of the Royal Society, the foundation of which by royal charter had
taken place in the previous year. The number of members was then one
hundred and fifteen, including such scientific celebrities of the time as
Boyle, Wallis, Wilkins, Christopher Wren, Dr. Isaac Barrow, Evelyn, and
Hooke, besides such titled amateurs of experimental science as the Duke of
Buckingham, the Marquis of Dorchester, the Earls of Devonshire, Crawford,
and Northampton, and Lords Brouncker, Cavendish, and Berkeley. Among the
more purely literary members were Waller, Denham, Cowley, and Sprat,
afterwards Bishop of Rochester. The admission of Dryden into such company
is a proof that already he was socially a man of mark. As we have Dryden's
own confession that he was somewhat dull and sluggish in conversation, and
the testimony of others that he was the very reverse of a bustling or
pushing man, and rather avoided society than sought it, we must suppose
that he had been found out in spite of himself. We can fancy him at
Herringman's, or elsewhere, sitting as one of a group with Davenant,
Howard, and others, taking snuff and listening, rather than speaking, and
yet, when he did speak, doing so with such judgment as to make his chair
one of the most important in the room, and impress all with the conviction
that he was a solid fellow. He seems also to have taken an interest in the
scientific gossip of the day about magnetism, the circulation of the
blood, and the prospects of the Baconian system of philosophy; and this
may have helped to bring him into contact with men like Boyle, Wren, and
Wallis. At all events, if the Society elected him on trust, he soon
justified their choice by taking his place among the best known members
of what was then the most important class of literary men--the writers for
the stage. His first drama, a lumbering prose-comedy entitled _The Wild
Gallant_, was produced at Killigrew's Theatre in February, 1662-3; and,
though its success was very indifferent, he was not discouraged from a
second venture in a tragi-comedy, entitled _The Rival Ladies_, written
partly in blank verse, partly in heroic rhyme, and produced at the same
theatre. This attempt was more successful; and in 1664 there was produced,
as the joint composition of Dryden and Sir Robert Howard, an attempt in
the style of the regular heroic or rhymed tragedy, called _The Indian
Queen_. The date of this effort of literary co-partnership between Dryden
and his aristocratic friend coincides with the formation of a more
intimate connexion between them, by Dryden's marriage with Sir Robert's
sister, Lady Elizabeth Howard. The marriage (the result, it would seem, of
a visit of the poet, in the company of Sir Robert, to the Earl of
Berkshire's seat in Wilts) took place in November, 1663; so that, when
_The Indian Queen_ was written, the two authors were already
brothers-in-law. The marriage of a man in the poet's circumstances with an
earl's daughter was neither altogether strange nor altogether such as to
preclude remark. The earl was poor, and able to afford his daughter but a
small settlement; and Dryden was a man of sufficiently good family, his
grandfather having been a baronet, and some of his living relations having
landed property in Northamptonshire. The property remaining for the
support of Dryden's brothers and sisters, however, after the subduction of
his own share, had been too scanty to keep them all in their original
station; and some of them had fallen a little lower in the world. One
sister, in particular, had married a tobacconist in London--a connexion
not likely to be agreeable to the Earl of Berkshire and his sons, if they
took the trouble to become cognisant of it. Dryden himself probably moved
conveniently enough between the one relationship and the other. If his
aristocratic brother-in-law, Sir Robert, could write plays with him, his
other brother-in-law, the tobacconist of Newgate-street, may have
administered to his comfort in other ways. It is known that the poet, in
his later life at least, was peculiarly fastidious in the article of
snuff, abhorring all ordinary snuffs, and satisfied only with a mixture
which he prepared himself; and it is not unlikely that the foundation of
this fastidiousness may have been laid in the facilities afforded him
originally in his brother-in-law's shop. The tobacconist's wife, of
course, would be pleased now and then to have a visit from her brother
John; but whether Lady Elizabeth ever went to see her is rather doubtful.
According to all accounts, Dryden's experience of this lady was not such
as to improve his ideas of the matrimonial state, or to give encouragement
to future poets to marry earls' daughters.
In consequence of the ravages of the Great Plague in 1665 and the
subsequent disaster of the Great Fire in 1666 there was for some time a
total cessation in London of theatrical performances and all other
amusements. Dryden, like most other persons who were not tied to town by
business, spent the greater part of this gloomy period in the country. He
availed himself of the interruption thus given to his dramatic labours to
produce his first writings of any moment out of that field, his _Annus
Mirabilis_ and his _Essay on Dramatic Poesy_. The first, an attempt to
invest with heroic interest, and celebrate in sonorous stanzas, the events
of the famous years 1665-6, including not only the Great Fire, but also
the incidents of a naval war then going on against the Dutch, must have
done more to bring Dryden into the favourable notice of the King, the Duke
of York, and other high personages eulogized in it, than anything he had
yet written. It was, in fact, a kind of short epic on the topics of the
year, such as Dryden might have been expected to write if he had been
already doing laureate's duty; and, unless Sir William Davenant was of
very easy temper, he must have been rather annoyed at so obvious an
invasion of his province, notwithstanding the compliment the poet had
paid him by adopting the stanza of his _Gondibert_, and imitating his
manner. Scarcely less effective in another way must have been the prose
_Essay on Dramatic Poesy_--a vigorous treatise on various matters of
poetry and criticism then much discussed. It contained, among other
things, a defence of the Heroic or Rhymed Tragedy against those who
preferred the older Elizabethan Tragedy of blank verse; and so powerful a
contribution was it to this great controversy of the day that it produced
an immediate sensation in all literary circles. Sir Robert Howard, who now
ranked himself among the partisans of blank verse, took occasion to
express his dissent from some of the opinions expounded in it; and, as
Dryden replied rather tartly, a temporary quarrel ensued between the two
brothers-in-law.
On the re-opening of the theatres in 1667 Dryden, his reputation increased
by the two performances just mentioned, stepped forward again as a
dramatist. A heroic tragedy called _The Indian Emperor_, which he had
prepared before the recess, and which, indeed, had then been acted, was
reproduced with great success, and established Dryden's position as a
practitioner of heroic and rhymed tragedy. This was followed by a comedy,
in mixed blank verse and prose, called _The Maiden Queen_; this by a
prose-comedy called _Sir Martin Mar-all_; and this again, by an
adaptation, in conjunction with Sir William Davenant, of Shakespeare's
_Tempest_. The two last were produced at Davenant's theatre, whereas all
Dryden's former pieces had been written for Killigrew's, or the King's
company. About this time, however, an arrangement was made which secured
Dryden's services exclusively for Killigrew's house. By the terms of the
agreement, Dryden engaged to supply the house with three plays every year,
in return for which, he was admitted a shareholder in the profits of the
theatre to the extent of one share and a-half. The first fruits of the
bargain were a prose-comedy called _The Mock Astrologer_ and two heroic
tragedies entitled _Tyrannic Love_ and _The Conquest of Granada_, the
latter being in two parts. These were all produced between 1668 and 1670,
and the tragedies, in particular, seem to have taken the town by storm,
and placed Dryden, beyond dispute, at the head of all the heroic
playwrights of the day.
The extent and nature of Dryden's popularity as a dramatist about this
time may be judged by the following extract from the diary of the
omnipresent Pepys, referring to the first performance of the _Maiden
Queen_:--"After dinner, with my wife to see the _Maiden Queene_, a new
play by Dryden, mightily commended for the regularity of it, and the
strain and wit; and the truth is, the comical part done by Nell [Nell
Gwynn], which is Florimell, that I never can hope to see the like done
again by man or woman. The King and Duke of York were at the play. But so
great a performance of a comical part was never, I believe, in the world
before as Nell do this, both as a mad girle, then most and best of all
when she comes in like a young gallant and hath the motions and carriage
of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I confess,
admire her." But even Nell's performance in this comedy was nothing
compared to one part of her performance afterwards in the tragedy of
_Tyrannic Love_. Probably there was never such a scene of ecstasy in a
theatre as when Nell, after acting the character of a tragic princess in
this play, and killing herself at the close in a grand passage of heroism
and supernatural virtue, had to start up as she was being borne off the
stage dead, and resume her natural character, first addressing her bearer
in these words:--
"Hold! are you mad? you d----d confounded dog:
I am to rise and speak the epilogue.",
and then running to the footlights and beginning her speech to the
audience:--
"I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye:
I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly.
Sweet ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil:
I'm what I was, a little harmless devil." &c. &c.
It is a tradition that it was this epilogue that effected Nell's conquest
of the king, and that he was so fascinated with her manner of delivering
it, that he went behind the scenes after the play was over and carried her
off. Ah! and it is two hundred years since that fascinating run to the
footlights took place, and the swarthy face of the monarch was seen
laughing, and the audience shrieked and clapped with delight, and Pepys
bustled about the boxes, and Dryden sat looking placidly on, contented
with his success, and wondering how much of it was owing to Nelly!
One can see how, even if the choice had been made strictly with a
reference to the claims of the candidates, it would have been felt that
Dryden, and not Butler, was the proper man to succeed Davenant in the
laureateship. If Butler had shewn the more original vein of talent in one
peculiar walk, Dryden had proved himself the man of greatest general
strength, in whom were more broadly represented the various literary
tendencies of his time. The author of ten plays, four of which were
stately rhymed tragedies, and the rest comedies in prose and blank verse;
the author, also, of various occasional poems, one of which, the _Annus
Mirabilis_, was noticeable on its own account as the best poem of current
history; the author, moreover, of one express prose-treatise, and of
various shorter prose dissertations in the shape of prefaces and the like
prefixed to his separate plays and poems, in which the principles of
literature were discussed in a manner at once masterly and adapted to the
prevailing taste: Dryden was, on the whole, far more likely to perform
well that part of a laureate's duties which consisted in supervising and
leading the general literature of his age than a man whose reputation,
though justly great, had been acquired by one continuous effort in the
single department of burlesque. Accordingly, Dryden was promoted to the
post, and Butler was left to finish, on his own scanty resources, the
remaining portion of his _Hudibras_, varying the occupation by jotting
down those scraps of cynical thought which were found among his posthumous
papers, and which show that towards the end of his days there were other
things that he hated and would have lashed besides Puritanism. Thus:--
"'Tis a strange age we've lived in and a lewd
As e'er the sun in all his travels viewed."
Again:
"The greatest saints and sinners have been made
Of proselytes of one another's trade."
Again:
"Authority is a disease and cure
Which men can neither want nor well endure."
And again, with an obvious reference to his own case:--
"Dame Fortune, some men's titular,
Takes charge of them without their care,
Does all their drudgery and work,
Like fairies, for them in the dark;
Conducts them blindfold, and advances
The naturals by blinder chances;
While others by desert and wit
Could never make the matter hit,
But still, the better they deserve,
Are but the abler thought to starve."
Dryden, at the time of his appointment to the laureateship, was in his
fortieth year. This is worth noting, if we would realize his position
among his literary contemporaries. Of those contemporaries there were some
who, as being his seniors, would feel themselves free from all obligations
to pay him respect. To octogenarians like Hobbes and Izaak Walton he was
but a boy; and even from Waller, Milton, Butler, and Marvel, all of whom
lived to see him in the laureate's chair, he could only look for that
approving recognition, totally distinct from reverence, which men of
sixty-five, sixty, and fifty-five, bestow on their full-grown juniors.
Such an amount of recognition he seems to have received from all of them.
Butler, indeed, does not seem to have taken very kindly to him; and it
stands on record, as Milton's opinion of Dryden's powers about this
period, that he thought him "a rhymer but no poet." But Butler, who went
about snarling at most things, and was irreverent enough to think the
Royal Society itself little better than a humbug, was not the man from
whom a laudatory estimate of anybody was to be expected; and, though
Milton's criticism is too precious to be thrown away, and will even be
found on investigation to be not so far amiss, if the moment at which it
was given is duly borne in mind, yet it is, after all, not Milton's
opinion of Dryden's general literary capacity, but only his opinion of
Dryden's claims to be called a poet. Dryden, on his part, to whose charge
any want of veneration for his great literary predecessors cannot be
imputed, and whose faculty of appreciating the most various kinds of
excellence was conspicuously large, would probably have been more grieved
than indignant at this indifference of men like Butler and Milton to his
rising fame. He had an unfeigned admiration for the author of _Hudibras_;
and there was not a man in England who more profoundly revered the poet of
_Paradise Lost_, or more dutifully testified this reverence both by acts
of personal attention and by written expressions of allegiance to him
while he was yet alive. It would have pained Dryden much, we believe, to
know that the great Puritan poet, whom he made it a point of duty to go
and see now and then in his solitude, and of whom he is reported to have
said, on reading the _Paradise Lost_, "This man cuts us all out, and the
ancients too," thought no better of him than that he was a rhymer. But,
however he may have felt himself related to those seniors who were
vanishing from the stage, or whose literary era was in the past, it was in
a conscious spirit of superiority that he confronted the generation of his
coevals and juniors, the natural subjects of his laureateship. If we set
aside such men as Locke and Barrow, belonging more to other departments
than to that of literature proper, there were none of these coevals or
juniors who were entitled to dispute his authority. There was the Duke of
Buckingham, a year or two older than Dryden, at once the greatest wit and
the greatest profligate about Charles's court, but whose attempts in the
comic drama were little more than occasional eccentricities. There were
the Earls of Dorset and Roscommon, both about Dryden's age, and both
cultivated men and respectable versifiers. There was Thomas Sprat,
afterwards Bishop of Rochester, and now chaplain to his grace of
Buckingham, five years younger than Dryden, his fellow-member in the Royal
Society, and with considerable pretensions to literary excellence. There
was the witty rake, Sir Charles Sedley, a man of frolic, like Buckingham,
some seven years Dryden's junior, and the author of at least three
comedies and three tragedies. There was the still more witty rake, Sir
George Etherege, of about the same age, the author of two comedies,
produced between 1660 and 1670, which, for ease and sprightly fluency,
surpassed anything that Dryden had done in the comic style. But "gentle
George," as he was called, was incorrigibly lazy; and it did not seem as
if the public would get anything more from him. In his place had come
another gentleman-writer, young William Wycherley, whose first comedy had
been written before Dryden's laureateship, though it was not acted till
1672, and who was already famous as a wit. Of precisely the same age as
Wycherley, and with a far greater _quantity_ of comic writing in him,
whatever might be thought of the quality, was Thomas Shadwell, whose bulky
body was a perpetual source of jest against him, though he himself vaunted
it as one of his many resemblances to Ben Jonson. The contemporary opinion
of these two last-named comic poets, Wycherley and Shadwell, after they
came to be better known, is expressed in these lines from a poem of
Rochester's:--
"Of all our modern wits none seem to me
Once to have touched upon true comedy
But hasty Shadwell and slow Wycherley.
Shadwell's unfinished works do yet impart
Great proofs of force of Nature, none of Art.
With just bold strokes he dashes here and there,
Showing great mastery with little care;
Scorning to varnish his good touches o'er,
To make the fools and women praise the more.
But Wycherley earns hard whate'er he gains;
He wants no judgment, and he spares no pains;
He frequently excels, and, at the least,
Makes fewer faults than any of the rest."
The author of these lines, the notorious Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was
also one of Dryden's literary subjects. He was but twenty-two years of age
when Dryden became laureate; but before ten years of that laureateship
were over he had blazed out, in rapid debauchery, his wretchedly-spent
life. Younger by three years than Rochester, and also destined to a short
life, though more of misery than of crime, was Thomas Otway, of whose six
tragedies and four comedies, all produced during the laureateship of
Dryden, one at least has taken a place in our dramatic literature, and is
read still for its power and pathos. Associated with Otway's name is that
of Nat. Lee, more than Otway's match in fury, and who, after a brief
career as a tragic dramatist and drunkard, became an inmate of Bedlam.
Another writer of tragedy, whose career began with Dryden's laureateship,
was John Crowne, "little starched Johnny Crowne," as Rochester calls him,
but whom so good a judge as Charles Lamb has thought worthy of
commemoration as having written some really fine things. Finally, the list
includes a few Nahum Tates, Elkanah Settles, Tom D'Urfeys, and other small
celebrities, in whose company we may place Aphra Behn, the poetess.
Doing our best to fancy this cluster of wits and play-writers, in the
midst of which, from his appointment to the laureateship in 1670, at the
age of thirty-nine, to his deposition from that office in 1688, at the age
of fifty-eight, Dryden is historically the principal figure, we can very
well see that not one of them all could wrest the dictatorship from him.
With an income from various sources, including his salary as laureate and
historiographer and his receipts from his engagement with Killigrew's
company, amounting in all to about 600_l._ a-year--which, according to Sir
Walter Scott's computation, means about 1,800_l._ in our value--he had,
during a portion of this time at least, all the means of external
respectability in sufficient abundance. His reputation as the first
dramatic author of the day was already made; and if, as yet, there were
others who had done as well or better as poets out of the dramatic walk,
he more than made up for this by the excellence of his prologues and
epilogues, and by his readiness and power as a prose-critic of general
literature. No one could deny that, though a rather heavy man in private
society, and so slow and silent among the wits of the coffee-house that,
but for the pleasure of seeing his placid face, the deeply indented
leather chair on which he sat would have done as well to represent
literature there as his own presence in it, John Dryden was, all in all,
the first wit of the age. There was not a Buckingham, nor an Etherege,
nor a Shadwell, nor a starched Johnny Crowne, of them all, that singly
would have dared to dispute his supremacy. And yet, as will happen, what
his subjects could not dare to do singly, or ostensibly, some of them
tried to compass by cabal and systematic depreciation on particular
points. In fact, Dryden had to fight pretty hard to maintain his place,
and had to make an example or two of a rebel subject before the rest were
terrified into submission.