his death in 1701, exhibits him as a Tory patriarch lingering in the midst
of a Whig generation, and still, despite the change of dynasty, retaining
his literary pre-eminence. For a while, of course, he was under a cloud;
but after it had passed away he was at liberty to make his own terms with
the public. The country could have no literature except what he and such
as he chose to furnish. Locke, Sir William Temple, and others, indeed,
were now in a position to bring forward speculations smothered during the
previous reigns, and to scatter seeds that might spring up in new
literary forms. Burnet, Tillotson, and others might represent Whiggism in
the Church. But all the especially literary men whose services were
available at the beginning of the new reign were men who, whatever might
be their voluntary relations to the new order of things, had been more or
less trained in the school of the Restoration, and accustomed to the
supremacy of Dryden. The Earl of Rochester, the Earl of Roscommon, the
Duke of Buckingham, Etherege, and poor Otway, were dead; but Shadwell,
Settle, Lee, Crowne, Tate, Wycherley, the Earl of Dorset, Tom D'Urfey, and
Sir Charles Sedley, were still alive. Shadwell, coarse and fat as ever,
enjoyed the laureateship till his death in 1692, when Nahum Tate was
appointed to succeed him. Settle had degenerated in the City showman. Lee,
liberated from Bedlam, continued to write tragedies till April 1692, when
he tumbled over a bulk going home drunk at night through Clare Market, and
was killed or stifled among the snow. "Little starched Johnny Crowne" kept
up the respectability of his character. Wycherley lived as a man of
fashion about town, and wrote no more. Sedley and the Earl of Dorset were
also idle; and Tom D'Urfey made small witticisms, and called them "pills
to purge melancholy." Among such men Dryden, so long as he cared to be
seen among them, held necessarily his old place. Nor were there any of
the younger men, as yet known, in whom the critics recognised, or who
recognised in themselves, any title to renounce allegiance to the
ex-laureate. Thomas Southerne had begun his prolific career as a dramatist
in 1682, when Dryden furnished him with a prologue to his first play; but,
though after the Revolution he made more money by his dramas than ever
Dryden had made by his, he was ashamed to admit the fact to Dryden
himself. Matthew Prior, twenty-four years of age at the Revolution, had
made his first literary appearance before it, in no less important a
character than that of one of Dryden's political antagonists; but, though
_The Town and Country Mouse_ had been a decided hit, and Dryden himself
was said to have winced under it, no one pretended that the author was
anything more than a clever young man who had sat in Dryden's company and
turned his opportunities to account. Five years after the Revolution,
Congreve produced his first comedy at the age of twenty-four; but it was
Congreve's greatest boast in after life that that comedy had won him the
warm praises of Dryden, and laid the foundation of the extraordinary
friendship which subsisted between them during Dryden's last years, when
they used to walk together and dine together as father and son. During
these last years Dryden, had he been willing to see merit in any other
comedies than those of his young friend Congreve, might have hailed his
equal in Vanbrugh, and his superior in Farquhar, then beginning to write
for the stage. Among their coevals, destined to some distinction, he might
have marked Colley Cibber, Nicholas Rowe, and John Philips, the pleasing
parodist of Milton. Of the epics of Blackmore he had quite enough, at
least three of those performances having been given to the world before
Dryden died. At the time of Dryden's death his kinsman, Jonathan Swift,
was thirty-three years of age; Richard Steele was thirty; Daniel Defoe was
thirty; Addison was twenty-nine; Shaftesbury, the essayist, was
twenty-nine; Bolingbroke was twenty-two; and Parnell, the poet,
twenty-one. With these men a new literary movement was to take its origin;
but they had hardly yet begun their work; and there was not one of them,
Swift excepted, that would not, in the height of his subsequent fame, have
been proud to acknowledge his obligations to Dryden. Alexander Pope, the
next Englishman that was to take a place in general literature as high as
that occupied by Dryden, had been born only in the year of the Revolution,
and was consequently but a precocious boy of thirteen when Dryden left the
scene. _Virgilium tantum vidit_, as he used himself to say.
Living, a hale patriarch, among these newer men, Dryden partly influenced
them, and was partly influenced by them. On the one hand, it was from his
chair in Will's Coffee-house that those literary decrees were issued
which still ruled the judgment of the town; and for a young author, on
visiting Will's, to receive a pinch from Dryden's snuff-box was equivalent
to his formal admission into that society of wits. On the other hand, the
times were so changed and the men were so changed that Dryden, dictator
though he was, had to yield in some points, and defend himself in others.
His cousin Swift, whom he had offended by an unfavourable judgment given
in private on some of his poems, was the only man who would have made a
general attack upon his literary reputation; but the moral character of
his writings was a subject on which adverse criticism was likely to be
more general. At first, indeed, there was little perceptible improvement
in the moral tone of the literature of the Revolution, as compared with
that of the Restoration--the elder dramatists, such as Shadwell, still
writing in the fashion to which they had been accustomed, and the younger
ones, such as Congreve and Vanbrugh, deeming it a point of honour to be as
immoral as their predecessors. In the course of a few years, however, what
with the influence of a Whig court, what with other causes, a more
delicate taste crept in, and people became ashamed of what their fathers
had delighted in. Dryden lived to see the beginnings of this important
change, and, with many expressions of regret for his own past
delinquencies in this respect, to welcome the appearance of a purer
literature.
Those of Dryden's writings which were produced during the twelve years of
his life subsequent to the Revolution constitute an important part of his
literary remains, not merely in point of bulk, but also in respect of a
certain general peculiarity of their character. They may be described as
for the most part belonging to the department of pure, as distinct from
that of controversial, literature. Dryden did not indeed wholly abandon
satire and controversy after the Revolution; but his aim after that period
seemed rather to be to produce such literature as would at once be
acceptable to the public and earn for himself most money with the least
trouble. Deprived of his laureateship, and so rendered almost entirely
dependent on his pen at a time when age was creeping upon him and the
expenses of his family were greater than ever, he was obliged to make
considerations of economy paramount in his choice of work. As was natural,
he fell back at first on the drama; and his five last plays, two of which
are tragedies, one an opera, and two comedies, were all produced between
1689 and 1694. The profits of these dramas, however, were insufficient;
and he was obliged to eke them out by all those devices of dedication to
private noblemen, execution of literary commissions for elegiac poems, and
the like, which then formed part of the professional author's means of
livelihood. Sums of 50_l._, 100_l._, and even, in one or two cases,
500_l._, were earned by Dryden in this disagreeable way from earls,
squires, and clubs of gentlemen. His poem of _Eleonora_ was a 500_l._
commission, executed for the Earl of Abingdon, who wanted a poem in memory
of his deceased wife, and, without knowing anything of Dryden personally,
applied to him to write it, just as now, in a similar case, a commission
might be given to a popular sculptor for a _post mortem_ statue. In spite
of the utmost allowance for the custom of the time, no one knowing the
circumstances, can read the poem now, without disgust; and it does show a
certain lowness of mind in Dryden to have been able, under any pressure of
necessity, to write for hire such extravagances as that poem contains
respecting a person he had never seen. Far more honourable were Dryden's
earnings by work done for Jacob Tonson, the publisher. His dealings with
Tonson had begun before the Revolution; but after the Revolution Tonson
was his mainstay. First came several volumes of miscellanies, consisting
of select poems, published and unpublished, with scraps of prose and
translation. Then, catching at the hint furnished by the success of some
of the scraps of translation from the Latin and Greek poets, Dryden and
Tonson found it mutually advantageous to prosecute that vein. Juvenal and
Persius were translated under Dryden's care; and in 1697, after three
years of labour, he gave to the world his completed translation of
_Virgil_. Looking about for a task to succeed this, he undertook to
furnish Tonson with so many thousands of lines of narrative verse, to be
published under the title of _Fables_. Where the fables came from Tonson
did not care, provided they would sell; and Dryden, with his rapid powers
of versification, soon produced versions of some tales of Chaucer and
Boccaccio which answered the purpose exceedingly well. They were printed
in 1699. Of the other poems written by Dryden in his last years his
_Alexander's Feast_ is the most celebrated. He continued his literary
labours till within a few days of his death, which happened on the 1st of
May, 1701.
When we inquire what it is that makes Dryden's name so important as to
entitle it to rank, as it seems to do, the fifth in the series of great
English poets after Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, we find
that it is nothing else than the fact, brought out in the preceding
sketch, that, steadily and industriously, for a period of forty-two years,
he kept in the front of the national literature, such as it then was. It
is because he represents the entire literary development of the
Restoration--it is because he fills up the whole interval between 1658 and
1701, thus connecting the age of Puritanism and Milton with the age of the
Queen Anne wits--that we give him such a place in such a list. The reason
is a chronological one, rather than one of strict comparison of personal
merits. Though we place Dryden fifth in the list, after Chaucer, Spenser,
Shakespeare, and Milton, it is not necessarily because we regard him as
the co-equal of those men in genius; it is only because, passing onward in
time, we find his the next name of very distinguished magnitude after
theirs. Personally there is no one that would compare Dryden with
Shakespeare or Milton; and there are not many now that would compare him
with Chaucer or Spenser. On the whole, if the estimate is one of general
intellectual strength, he takes rank only with the first of the second
class, as with the Jonsons, the Fletchers, and others of the Elizabethan
age; while, if the estimate have regard to genuine poetic or imaginative
power, he sinks below even these. Yet, if historical reasons only are
regarded, Dryden has perhaps a better right to his place in the list than
any of the others. At least as strictly as Chaucer is the representative
of the English literature of the latter half of the fourteenth century,
far more strictly than Spenser and Shakespeare are the representatives of
the literature of their times, and in a more broad and obvious manner than
Milton is the literary representative of the Commonwealth, Dryden
represents the literary activity of the reigns of Charles II. and James
II., and of the greater part of that of William III. Davenant, Butler,
Waller, Etherege, Otway, Wycherley, Southerne, Prior, and Congreve, are
names leading us over the same period, and illustrating perhaps more
exquisitely than Dryden some of its individual characteristics; but for a
solid representative of the period as a whole, resuming in himself all
its more prominent characteristics in one substantial aggregate, we are
obliged to take Dryden. Twelve years of his literary life he laboured as a
strong junior among the Davenants, the Butlers, and the Wallers,
qualifying himself to set them aside; eighteen years more were spent in
acknowledged lordship over the Ethereges, Otways, and Wycherleys, who
occupied the middle of the period; and during the twelve concluding years
he was a patriarch among the Southernes, and Priors, and Congreves, in
whose lives the period wove itself into the next.
And yet, personally as well as historically, Dryden is a man of no mean
importance. Not only is he the largest figure in one era of our
literature; he is a very considerable figure also in our literature as a
whole. To begin with the most obvious, but at the same time not the least
noteworthy, of his claims, the _quantity_ of his contributions to our
literature was large. He was a various and voluminous writer. In Scott's
collected edition of his works they fill seventeen octavo volumes. About
seven of these volumes consist of dramas, with accompanying prefaces and
dedications, the number of dramas being in all twenty-eight. Two volumes
more embrace the polemical poems, the satires, and the poems of
contemporary historical allusion, written chiefly between 1681 and 1683.
One volume is filled with odes, songs, and lyrical pieces, written at
various times. The Fables, or Metrical Tales, redacted in his old age from
Chaucer and Boccaccio, occupy a volume and a half. Three volumes and a
half are devoted to the translations from the classic poets, including the
Translation of Virgil. The remaining two volumes consist of miscellaneous
prologues, epilogues, and witty pieces of verse, and of miscellaneous
prose-writings, original and translated, including the critical Essay on
Dramatic Poetry. Considered as a whole, the matter of the seventeen
volumes is a goodly contribution from one man as respects both extent and
variety. Spread over forty-two years, it does not argue that excessive
industry which Scott, of all men in the world, has found in it; but it
fairly entitles Dryden to take his place among those writers who deserve
regard for the quantity of their writings, in addition to whatever regard
they may be entitled to on the score, of quality. And it is a fact worth
noting, and remarked by Scott more than once, that most writers who have
taken a high place in literature have been voluminous--have not only
written well, but also written much. Moreover there are two ways of
writing much. One may write much and variously, or one may write much all
of one kind. Dryden was various as well as voluminous.
Of all that Dryden wrote, however, there is but a comparatively small
portion that has won for itself a permanent place in our literature; and
in this he differs from other writers that have been equally voluminous.
It is indeed a significant fact about Dryden that the proportion of that
part of his matter which survives, or deserves to survive, to that part
which was squandered away on the age it was first written for, and there
ended, is unusually small. In Shakespeare there is very little that is
felt to be of such inferior quality as not to be worth reading in due time
and place. In Milton there is, if we consider only his poetry, still less.
All Chaucer, almost, is felt to be worth preservation by those who like
Chaucer; all Wordsworth, almost, by those who like Wordsworth. But, except
for library purposes, there is no admirer of Dryden that would care to
save more than a small select portion of what he wrote. His satires and
polemical poems; one or two of his odes; his Translation of Virgil; his
fables; one of his comedies, and one of his tragedies, by way of specimen
of his dramatic powers; a complete set of his prologues, for the sake of
their allusions to contemporary manners and humours; and a few pieces of
his prose, to show his style of criticism:--these would together form a
collection not much more than a fourth part of the whole, and which would
require to be yet farther winnowed, were the purpose to leave only what is
sterling and in Dryden's best manner. Mr. Bell's edition, which comprise
in three volumes all Dryden's original non-dramatic poetry, and the best
collection of his prologues and epilogues yet made, is itself a surfeit of
matter. It is such an edition of Dryden as ought to be included in a
series of the English poets intended to be complete; but even in it there
is more of dross than of ore.
What is the reason of this? How is it that in Dryden the proportion of
what is now rubbish to what is still precious as a literary possession is
so much greater than in most other writers of great celebrity? There are
two reasons for it. The first is, that originally, and in its own nature,
much of the matter that Dryden put forth was not of a kind for which his
genius was fitted. Whatever his own imagination constructed on the large
scale was mean and conventional. Wherever, as in his translations of
Virgil and his imitations of Chaucer and Boccaccio, he employed his powers
of language and verse in refurbishing matter invented by others, the
poetical substance of his writings is valuable; but the sheer produce of
his own imagination, as in his dramas, is in general such stuff as nature
disowns and no creature can take pleasure in. There is no fine power of
dramatic story, no exquisite invention of character or circumstance, no
truth to nature in ideal landscape: at the utmost, there is conventional
dramatic situation, with an occasional flash of splendid imagery such as
may be struck out in the heat of heroic declamation. Thus--
"I am as free as Nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran."
Dryden's natural powers, as all his critics have remarked, lay not so much
in the imaginative as in the didactic, the declamatory, and the
ratiocinative. What Johnson claims for him, and what seems to have been
claimed for him in his own lifetime, was the credit of being one of the
best reasoners in verse that ever wrote. Lord Macaulay means very much the
same thing when he calls Dryden a great "critical poet," and the founder
of the "critical school of English poetry." Probably Milton meant
something of the kind when he said that Dryden was a rhymer, but no poet.
It was in declamatory and didactic rhyme, with all that could consist with
it, that Dryden excelled. It was in the metrical utterance of weighty
sentences, in the metrical conduct of an argument, in vehement satirical
invective, and in such passages of lyric passion as depended for their
effect on rolling grandeur of sound, that he was pre-eminently great. Even
his imagination worked more powerfully, and his perceptions of physical
circumstance became keener and truer, under the influence of polemical
rage, the pursuit of terse maxim, or the passion for sonorous declamation.
Thus--
"And every shekel which he can receive
Shall cost a limb of his prerogative."
Or, in his character of Shaftesbury,--
"Of these the false Achitophel was first:
A name to all succeeding ages curst;
For close designs and crooked counsels fit;
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit;
Restless, unfixed in principles and place;
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace;
A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity,
Pleased with the danger when the waves went high,
He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands, to boast his wit.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide."
Or, in the lines which he sent to Tonson the publisher as a specimen of
what he could do in the way of portrait-painting if Tonson did not send
him supplies--
"With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair,
With two left legs, and Judas-coloured hair,
And frowzy pores that taint the ambient air."
And, again, in almost every passage in the noble ode on Alexander's Feast,
_e.g._--
"With ravished ears
The monarch hears;
Assumes the god,
Affects to nod,
And seems to shake the spheres."
In satire, in critical disquisition, in aphoristic verse, or in lyrical
grandiloquence, Dryden was in his natural element; and one reason why, of
all the matter of his voluminous works, so small a portion is of permanent
literary value, is that, in his attempts after literary variety, he could
not or would not restrict himself within these proper limits of his
genius.
But, besides this, Dryden was a slovenly worker within his own field. Even
of what he could do best he did little continuously in a thoroughly
careful manner. In his best poem there are not twenty consecutive lines
without some logical incoherence, some confusion of metaphor, some
inaccuracy of language, or some evident strain of the meaning for the sake
of the metre. His strength lies in passages and weighty interspersed
lines, not in whole poems. Even in Dryden's lifetime this complaint was
made. It was hinted at in _The Rehearsal_; Rochester speaks of Dryden's
"slattern muse;" and Blackmore, who criticised Dryden in his old age,
expresses the common opinion distinctly and deliberately--
"Into the melting-pot when Dryden comes,
What horrid stench will rise, what noisome fumes!
How will he shrink, when all his lewd allay
And wicked mixture shall be purged away!
When once his boasted heaps are melted down,
A chest-full scarce will yield one sterling crown;
But what remains will be so pure, 'twill bear
The examination of the moot severe."
This is true, though it was Blackmore who said it. Dryden's slovenliness,
however, consisted not so much in a disposition to spare pains as in a
constitutional robustness which rendered artistic perfection all but
impossible to him even when he laboured hardest to attain it. One's notion
of Dryden is that he was originally a _robust_ man, who, when he first
engaged in poetry, could produce nothing better than strong stanzas of
rather wooden sound and mechanism, but who, by perseverance and continual
work, drilled his genius into higher susceptibility and a conscious
aptitude and mastery in certain directions, so that, the older he grew, he
became mellower, more musical, and more imaginative, what had been
robustness at first having by long practice been subdued into flexibility
and nerve. It is stated of Dryden that, in his earlier life at least, he
used, as a preparation for writing, to induce on himself an artificial
state of languor by taking medicine or letting blood. The trait is
characteristic. Dryden's whole literary career was a metaphor of it. Had
he died before 1670, or even before 1681, when his _Annus Mirabilis_ was
still his most ambitious production, he would have been remembered as
little more than a robust versifier; but, living as he did till 1701, he
performed work which has entitled him to rank among English poets. As a
contributor to the actual body of our literature, and as a man who
produced by his influence a lasting effect on its literary methods,
Dryden's place is certainly high.
DEAN SWIFT.
DEAN SWIFT.[7]
In dividing the history of English literature into periods it is customary
to take the interval between the year 1688 and the year 1727 as
constituting one of those periods. This interval includes the reigns of
William III., Anne, and George I. If we do not bind ourselves too
precisely to the year 1727 as closing the period, the division is proper
enough. There _are_ characteristics about the time thus marked out which
distinguish it from previous and from subsequent portions of our literary
history. Dryden, Locke, and some other notabilities of the Restoration,
lived into this period, and may be regarded as partly belonging to it; but
the names more peculiarly representing it are those of Swift, Burnet,
Addison, Steele, Pope, Shaftesbury, Gay, Arbuthnot, Atterbury, Prior,
Parnell, Bolingbroke, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, Rowe, Defoe, and
Cibber. The names in this cluster disperse themselves over the three
reigns which the period includes, some of them having already been known
as early as the accession of William, while others survived the first
George and continued to add to their celebrity during the reign of his
successor; but the most brilliant portion of the period was from 1702 to
1714, when Queen Anne was on the throne. Hence the name of "Wits of Queen
Anne's reign," commonly applied to the writers of the whole period.