drama. The attack was partly directed against himself personally, partly
against that style of heroic or rhymed tragedy of which he was the
advocate and representative. There had always been dissenters from this
new fashion; and among these was the Duke of Buckingham, who had a natural
genius for making fun of anything. Assisted, it is said, by his chaplain
Sprat, and by Butler, who had already satirized this style of tragedy by
writing a dialogue in which two cats are made to caterwaul to each other
in heroics, the duke had amused his leisure by preparing a farce in which
heroic plays were held up to ridicule. In the original draft of the farce
Davenant was made the butt under the name of Bilboa; but, after Davenant's
death, the farce was recast, and Dryden substituted under the name of
Bayes. The plot of this famous farce, _The Rehearsal_, is much the same as
that of Sheridan's _Critic_. The poet Bayes invites two friends, Smith
and Johnson, to be present at the rehearsal of a heroic play which he is
on the point of bringing out, and the humour consists in the supposed
representation of this heroic play, while Bayes alternately directs the
actors, and expounds the drift of the play and its beauties to Smith and
Johnson, who all the while are laughing at him, and thinking it monstrous
rubbish. Conceive a farce like this, written with amazing cleverness, and
full of absurdities, produced in the very theatre where the echoes of
Dryden's last sonorous heroics were still lingering, and acted by the same
actors; conceive it interspersed with parodies of well-known passages from
Dryden's plays, and with allusions to characters in those plays; conceive
the actor who played the part of Bayes dressed to look as like Dryden as
possible, instructed by the duke to mimic Dryden's voice, and using
phrases like "i'gad" and "i'fackins," which Dryden was in the habit of
using in familiar conversation; and an idea may be formed of the sensation
made by _The Rehearsal_ in all theatrical circles on its first performance
in the winter of 1671. Its effect, though not immediate, was decisive.
From that time the heroic or rhymed tragedy was felt to be doomed. Dryden,
indeed, did not at once recant his opinion in favour of rhymed tragedies;
but he yielded so far to the sentence pronounced against them as to write
only one more of the kind.
Though thus driven out of his favourite style of the rhymed tragedy, he
was not driven from the stage. Bound by his agreement with the King's
Company to furnish three plays a-year, he continued to make dramatic
writing his chief occupation; and almost his sole productions during the
first ten years of his laureateship were ten plays. Three of these were
prose-comedies; one, a tragi-comedy, in blank verse and prose; one, an
opera in rhyme; five, tragedies in blank verse; and one, the rhymed
tragedy above referred to. It will be observed that this was at the rate
of only one play a-year, whereas, by his engagement, he was to furnish
three. The fact was that the company were very indulgent to him, and let
him have his full share of the receipts, averaging 300_l._ a-year, in
return for but a third of the stipulated work. Notwithstanding this, we
find them complaining, in 1679, that Dryden had behaved unhandsomely to
them in carrying one of his plays to the other theatre, and so injuring
their interests. As, from that year, none of Dryden's plays were produced
at the King's Theatre, but all at the Duke's, till 1682, when the two
companies were united, it is probable that in that year the bargain made
with Killigrew terminated. It deserves notice, by the way, that the
so-called "opera" was one entitled _The State of Innocence; or, The Fall
of Man_, founded on Milton's _Paradise Lost_, and brought out in 1674-5,
immediately after Milton's death. That this was an equivocal compliment
to Milton's memory Dryden himself lived to acknowledge. He confessed to
Dennis, twenty years afterwards, that at the time when he wrote that opera
"he knew not half the extent of Milton's excellence." A striking proof of
Dryden's veneration for Milton, when we consider how high his admiration
of Milton had been even while Milton was alive!
Of these dramatic productions of Dryden during the first ten years of his
laureateship some were very carefully written. Thus _Marriage a-la-mode_,
performed in 1672, is esteemed one of his best comedies; and of the rhymed
tragedy, _Aurung-Zebe_, performed in 1675, he himself says in the
Prologue--
"What verse can do he has performed in this,
Which he presumes the most correct of his."
The tragedy of _All for Love_, which followed _Aurung-Zebe_, in 1678, and
in which he falls back on blank verse, is pronounced by many critics to be
the very best of all his dramas; and perhaps none of his plays has been
more read than the _Spanish Friar_, written in 1680. Yet it may be doubted
if in any of these plays Dryden achieved a degree of immediate success
equal to that which had attended his _Tyrannic Love_ and his _Conquest of
Granada_, written before his laureateship. This was not owing so much to
the single blow struck at his fame by Buckingham's _Rehearsal_ as to the
growth of that general spirit of criticism and disaffection which pursues
every author after the public have become sufficiently acquainted with his
style to expect the good, and look rather for the bad, in what he writes.
Thus, we find one critic of the day, Martin Clifford, who was a man of
some note, addressing Dryden, a year or two after his laureateship, in
this polite fashion: "You do live in as much ignorance and darkness as you
did in the womb; your writings are like a Jack-of-all-trades' shop; they
have a variety, but nothing of value; and, if thou art not the dullest
plant-animal that ever the earth produced, all that I have conversed with
are strangely mistaken in thee." This onslaught of Mr. Clifford's is
clearly to be regarded as only that gentleman's; but what young Rochester
said and thought about Dryden at this time is more likely to have been
what was said and thought generally by the critical part of the town.
"Well sir, 'tis granted: I said Dryden's rhymes
Were stolen, unequal--nay, dull, many times.
What foolish patron is there found of his
So blindly partial to deny me this?
But that his plays, embroidered up and down
With wit and learning, justly pleased the town,
In the same paper I as freely own.
Yet, having this allowed, the heavy mass
That stuffs up his loose volumes must not pass.
* * * * *
But, to be just, 'twill to his praise be found
His excellencies more than faults abound;
Nor dare I from his sacred temples tear
The laurel which he best deserves to wear.
* * * * *
And may I not have leave impartially
To search and censure Dryden's works, and try
If these gross faults his choice pen doth commit
Proceed from want of judgment or of wit,
Or if his lumpish fancy doth refuse
Spirit and grace to his loose slattern muse?"
We have no doubt the opinion thus expressed by the scapegrace young earl
was very general. Dryden's own prose disquisitions on the principles of
poetry may have helped to diffuse many of those notions of genuine
poetical merit by which he was now tried. But, undoubtedly, what most of
all tended to expose Dryden's reputation to the perils of criticism was
the increasing number of his dramatic competitors and the evident ability
of some of them. True, most of those competitors were Dryden's personal
friends, and some of the younger of them, as Lee, Shadwell, Crowne, and
Tate, were in the habit of coming to him for prologues and epilogues, with
which to increase the attractions of their plays. On more than one
occasion, too, Dryden clubbed with Lee or Shadwell in the composition of a
dramatic piece. But, though thus on a friendly footing with most of his
contemporary dramatists, and almost in a fatherly relation to some of
them, Dryden found his popularity not the less affected by their
competition. In the department of prose comedy, Etherege, whose last and
best comedy, _Sir Fopling Flutter_, was produced in 1676, and Wycherley,
whose four celebrated comedies were all produced between 1672 and 1677,
had introduced a style compared with which Dryden's best comic attempts
were but heavy horse-play. Even the hulking Shadwell, who dashed off his
comedies as fast as he could write, had a vein of coarse natural humour
which Dryden lacked. It was in vain that Dryden tried to keep his
pre-eminence against these rivals by increased strength of language,
increased intricacy of plot, and an increased use of those indecencies
upon which they all relied so much in their efforts to please. One comedy
in which Dryden, trusting too confidently to this last element of success,
pushed grossness to the utmost conceivable limit, was hissed off the
stage. In tragedy, it is true, his position was more firm. But even in
this department some niches were cut in the body of his fame. His friend
Nat. Lee had produced one or two tragedies displaying a tenderness and a
wild force of passion to which Dryden's more masculine genius could not
pretend; Crowne had also done one or two things of a superior character;
and, though it was not till 1682 that Otway produced his _Venice
Preserved_, he had already given evidence of his mastery of dramatic
pathos. All this Dryden might have seen without allowing himself to be
much disturbed, conscious as he must have been that in general strength he
was still superior to all about him, however they might rival him in
particulars. The deliberate resolution, however, of Rochester and some
other aristocratic leaders of the fashion to make good their criticisms on
his writings, by setting up first one and then another of the dramatists
of the day as patterns of a higher style of art than his, provoked him out
of his composure. To show what he could do, if called upon to defend his
rights against pretenders, he made a terrible example of one poor wretch,
who had been puffed for the moment into undue popularity. This unfortunate
was Elkanah Settle, and the occasion of the attack was a heroic tragedy
written by Settle, acted with great success both on the stage and at
Whitehall, and published with illustrative woodcuts. On this performance
Dryden made a most merciless onslaught in a prose-criticism prefixed to
his next published play, tearing Settle's metaphors and grammar to pieces.
Settle replied with some spirit, but little effect, and was, in fact,
"settled" for ever. Rochester next patronized Crowne and Otway for a time,
but soon gave them up, and contented himself with assailing Dryden more
directly in such lampoons as we have quoted. In the year 1679, however,
suspecting Dryden to have had a share in the authorship of a poem, then
circulating in manuscript, in which certain liberties were taken with his
name, he caused him to be way-laid and beaten as he was going home one
evening through Rose-alley to his house in Gerard-street. The poem,
entitled _An Essay on Satire_, is usually printed among Dryden's works;
but it remains uncertain whether Dryden was really the author.
It was fortunate for Dryden and for English literature that, just about
this time, when he was beginning to be regarded as a veteran among the
dramatists, whose farther services in that department the town could
afford to spare, circumstances led him, almost without any wish of his
own, into a new path of literature. He was now arrived at the ripe age of
fifty years, and, if an inventory had been made of his writings, they
would have been found to consist of twenty-one dramas, with a series of
critical prose-essays for the most part bound up with these dramas, but
nothing in the nature of non-dramatic poetry, except a few occasional
pieces, of which the _Annus Mirabilis_ was still the chief. Had a
discerning critic examined those works with a view to discover in what
peculiar vein of verse Dryden, if he abandoned the drama, might still do
justice to his powers, he would certainly have selected the vein of
reflective satire. Of the most nervous and emphatic lines that could have
been quoted from his plays a large proportion would have been found to
consist of what may be called _maxim_ metrically expressed; while in his
dramatic prologues and epilogues, which were always thought among the
happiest efforts of his pen, the excellence would have been found to
consist in very much the same power of direct didactic declamation applied
satirically to the humours, manners, and opinions of the day. Whether any
critic, observing all this, would have been bold enough to advise Dryden
to take the hint, and quit the drama for satirical, controversial, and
didactic poetry, we need not inquire. Circumstances compelled what advice
might have failed to bring about. After some twenty years of political
stagnation, or rather of political confusion, relieved only by the
occasional cabals of leading statesmen, and by rumours of Catholic and
Protestant plots, the old Puritan feeling and the general spirit of civil
liberty which the Restoration had but pent up within the vitals of England
broke forth in a regular and organized form as modern English Whiggism.
The controversy had many ramifications; but its immediate phase at that
moment was an antagonism of two parties on the question of the succession
to the crown after Charles should die--the Tories and Catholics
maintaining the rights of the Duke of York as the legal heir, and the
Whigs and Protestants rallying, for want of a better man, round Charles's
illegitimate son, the handsome and popular Duke of Monmouth, then a puppet
in the hands of Shaftesbury, the recognised leader of the Opposition.
Charles himself was forced by reasons of state to take part with his
brother, and to frown on Monmouth; but this did not prevent the lords and
wits of the time from distributing themselves pretty equally between the
two parties, and fighting out the dispute with all the weapons of intrigue
and ridicule. Shadwell, Settle, and some other minor poets, lent their
pens to the Whigs, and wrote squibs and satires in the Whig service. Lee,
Otway, Tate, and others, worked for the Court party. Dryden, as laureate
and Tory, had but one course to take. He plunged into the controversy with
the whole force of his genius; and in November, 1681, when the nation was
waiting for the trial of Shaftesbury, then a prisoner in the Tower, he
published his satire of _Absalom and Achitophel_, in which, under the thin
veil of a story of Absalom's rebellion against his father David, the
existing political state of England was represented from the Tory point of
view. Among the characters portrayed in it Dryden had the satisfaction of
introducing his old critic, the Duke of Buckingham, upon whom he now took
ample revenge.
The satire of _Absalom and Achitophel_, than which nothing finer of the
kind had ever appeared in England, and which indeed surpassed all that
could have been expected even from Dryden at that time, was the first of a
series of polemical or satirical poems the composition of which occupied
the last eight years of his laureateship. _The Medal, a Satire against
Sedition_, appeared in March, 1682, as the poet's comment on the popular
enthusiasm occasioned by the acquittal of Shaftesbury; _Mac Flecknoe_, in
which Shadwell, as poet-in-chief of the Whigs, received a thrashing all to
himself, was published in October in the same year; and, a month later,
there appeared the so-called _Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel_,
written by Nahum Tate, under Dryden's superintendence, and with
interpolations from Dryden's pen. In the same avowed character, as
literary champion of the government and the party of the Duke of York,
Dryden continued to labour during the remainder of the reign of Charles.
His _Religio Laici_, indeed, produced early in 1683, and forming a
metrical statement of the grounds and extent of his own attachment to the
Church of England, can hardly have been destined for immediate political
service. But the solitary play which he wrote about this period--a tragedy
called _The Duke of Guise_--was certainly intended for political effect,
as was also a translation from the French of a work on the history of
French Calvinism.
How ill-requited Dryden was for these services appears but too clearly
from evidence proving that, at this time, he was in great pecuniary
difficulties. At the time when the king's cast-off mistresses were
receiving pensions of 10,000_l._ a-year, and when 130,000_l._ or more was
squandered every year on secret court-purposes, Dryden's salary as
laureate remained unpaid for four years; and when, in consequence of his
repeated solicitations, an order for part-payment of the arrears was at
last issued in May 1684, it was for the miserable pittance of one
quarter's salary, due at midsummer 1680, leaving fifteen quarters, or
750_l._ still in arrears. It appears, however, from a document published
for the first time by Mr. Bell, that an additional pension of 100_l._
a-year was at this time conferred on Dryden--that pension to date
retrospectively from 1680, and the arrears to be paid, as convenient,
along with the larger arrears of salary. How far Dryden benefited by this
nominal increase of his emoluments from government, or whether any further
portion of the arrears was paid up while Charles continued on the throne,
can hardly be ascertained. Charles died in February, 1684-5, and Dryden,
as in duty bound, wrote his funeral panegyric. In this Pindaric, which is
entitled _Threnodia Augustalis_, the poet seems to hint, as delicately as
the occasion would permit, at the limited extent of his pecuniary
obligations to the deceased monarch.
"As, when the new-born phoenix takes his way
His rich paternal regions to survey,
Of airy choristers a numerous train
Attends his wondrous progress o'er the plain,
So, rising from his father's urn,
So glorious did our Charles return.
The officious muses came along--
A gay harmonious choir, like angels ever young;
The muse that mourns him now his happy triumph sung.
Even they could thrive in his auspicious reign;
And such a plenteous crop they bore
Of purest and well-winnowed grain
As Britain never knew before:
Though little was their hire, and light their gain,
Yet somewhat to their share he threw.
Fed from his hand, they sung and flew,
Like birds of Paradise, that lived on morning dew.
Oh, never let their lays his name forget:
The pension of a prince's praise is great."
If there was any literary man in whose favour James II., on his accession,
might have been expected to relax his parsimonious habits, it was Dryden.
The poet had praised him and made a hero of him for twenty years, and had
during the last four years been working for him incessantly. In
acknowledgment of these services, James could not do otherwise than
continue him in the laureateship; but this was all that he seemed inclined
to do. In the new patent issued for the purpose, not only was there no
renewal of the deceased king's private grant of 100_l._ a-year, but even
the annual butt of sherry, hitherto forming part of the laureate's
allowance, was discontinued, and the salary limited to the precise money
payment of 200_l._ a-year. If, as is probable, the salary was now more
punctually paid than it had been under Charles, the reduction may have
been of less consequence. In March 1685-6, however, James opened his
purse, and, by fresh letters patent, conferred on Dryden a permanent
additional salary of 100_l._ a-year, thus raising the annual income of the
laureateship to 300_l._ The explanation of this unusual piece of
liberality on the part of James has been generally supposed to lie in the
fact that, in the course of the preceding year, Dryden had proved the
thorough and unstinted character of his loyalty by declaring himself a
convert to the king's religion. That Dryden's passing over to the Catholic
church was contemporaneous with the increase of his pension is a fact; but
what may have been the exact relation between the two events is a question
which one ought to be cautious in answering. Lord Macaulay's view of the
case is harsh enough. "Finding," he says, "that, if he continued to call
himself a Protestant, his services would be overlooked, he declared
himself a Papist. The king's parsimony instantly relaxed Dryden was
gratified with a pension of one hundred pounds a-year, and was employed to
defend his new religion both in prose and verse." Sir Walter Scott's view
is more charitable, and, we believe, more just. He regards Dryden's
conversion as having been, in the main, honest to the extent professed by
himself, though his situation and expectations may have co-operated to
effect it. In support of this view Mr. Bell points out the fact that the
pension granted by James was, after all, only a renewal of a pension
granted by Charles, and which, not being secured by letters patent, had
lapsed on that king's decease. Dryden, it is also to be remarked, remained
sufficiently staunch to his new faith during the rest of his life, and
seems even to have felt a kind of comfort in it. Probably, therefore, the
true state of the case is that conformity to the Catholic religion, at the
time when Dryden embraced it, was the least troublesome mode of
systematizing for his own mind a number of diverse speculations, personal
and political, that were then perplexing him, and that, afterwards, in
consequence of the very obloquy which his change of religion drew upon him
from all quarters, he hugged his new creed more closely, so as to coil
round him, for the first time in his life, a few threads of private
theological conviction. This is not very different from the notion
entertained by Sir Walter Scott, who argues that Dryden's conversion was
not, except in outward profession, a change from Protestant to Catholic
belief, but rather, like that of Gibbon, a choice of Catholicism as the
most convenient resting-place for a mind tired of Pyrrhonism, and disposed
to cut short the process of emancipation from it by taking a decisive step
at once.
At all events, Dryden showed sufficient polemical energy in the service of
the religion which he had adopted. He became James's literary factotum,
the defender in prose and in verse of the worst measures of his rule; and
he was ready to do battle with Stillingfleet, Burnet, or anyone else that
dared to use a pen on the other side. As if to make the highest display of
his powers as a versifier at a time when his character as a man was
lowest, he published in 1687 his controversial allegory of _The Hind and
the Panther_, by far the largest and most elaborate of his original poems.
In this poem, in which the various churches and sects of the day figure as
beasts--the Church of Rome as a "milk-white hind," innocent and unchanged;
the Church of England as a "panther," spotted, but still beautiful;
Presbyterianism as a haggard ugly "wolf;" Independency as the "bloody
bear;" the Baptists as the "bristled boar;" the Unitarians as the "false
fox;" the Freethinkers as the "buffoon ape;" and the Quakers as the timid
"hare"--Dryden showed that, whatever his new faith had done for him, it
had not changed his genius for satire. In fact, precisely as during
James's reign Dryden appears personally as a solitary giant, warring on
the wrong side, so this poem remains as the sole literary work of any
excellence in which the wretched spirit of that reign is fully
represented. Dryden himself, as if he had thrown all his force into it,
wrote little else in verse till the year 1688, when, on the occasion of
the birth of James's son, afterwards the Pretender, he made himself the
spokesman of the exulting Catholics, and published his _Britannia
Rediviva_.
"See how the venerable infant lies
In early pomp; how through the mother's eyes
The father's soul, with an undaunted view,
Looks out, and takes our homage as his due.
See on his future subjects how he smiles,
Nor meanly flatters, nor with craft beguiles;
But with an open face, as on his throne,
Assures our birthrights, and secures his own."
Within a few months after these lines were written, the father, the
mother, and the baby, were out of England, Dutch William was king, and the
Whigs had it all to themselves. Dryden, of course, had to give up the
laureateship; and, as William had but a small choice of poets, Shadwell
was put in his place.