Benvenuto Cellini tells us that when, in his boyhood, he saw a salamander
come out of the fire, his grandfather forthwith gave him a sound beating,
that he might the better remember so unique a prodigy. Though perhaps in
this case the rod had another application than the autobiographer chooses
to disclose, and was intended to fix in the pupil's mind a lesson of
veracity rather than of science, the testimony to its mnemonic virtue
remains. Nay, so universally was it once believed that the senses, and
through them the faculties of observation and retention, were quickened
by an irritation of the cuticle, that in France it was customary to whip
the children annually at the boundaries of the parish, lest the true
place of them might ever be lost through neglect of so inexpensive a
mordant for the memory. From this practice the older school of critics
would seem to have taken a hint for keeping fixed the limits of good
taste, and what was somewhat vaguely called _classical_ English. To mark
these limits in poetry, they set up as Hermae the images they had made to
them of Dryden, of Pope, and later of Goldsmith. Here they solemnly
castigated every new aspirant in verse, who in turn performed the same
function for the next generation, thus helping to keep always sacred and
immovable the _ne plus ultra_ alike of inspiration and of the vocabulary.
Though no two natures were ever much more unlike than those of Dryden and
Pope, and again of Pope and Goldsmith, and no two styles, except in such
externals as could be easily caught and copied, yet it was the fashion,
down even to the last generation, to advise young writers to form
themselves, as it was called, on these excellent models. Wordsworth
himself began in this school; and though there were glimpses, here and
there, of a direct study of nature, yet most of the epithets in his
earlier pieces were of the traditional kind so fatal to poetry during
great part of the last century; and he indulged in that alphabetic
personification which enlivens all such words as Hunger, Solitude,
Freedom, by the easy magic of an initial capital.
"Where the green apple shrivels on the spray,
And pines the unripened pear in summer's kindliest ray,
Even here Content has fixed her smiling reign
With Independence, child of high Disdain.
Exulting 'mid the winter of the skies,
Shy as the jealous chamois, Freedom flies,
And often grasps her sword, and often eyes."
Here we have every characteristic of the artificial method, even to the
triplet, which Swift hated so heartily as "a vicious way of rhyming
wherewith Mr. Dryden abounded, imitated by all the bad versifiers of
Charles the Second's reign." Wordsworth became, indeed, very early the
leader of reform; but, like Wesley, he endeavored a reform within the
Establishment. Purifying the substance, he retained the outward forms
with a feeling rather than conviction that, in poetry, substance and form
are but manifestations of the same inward life, the one fused into the
other in the vivid heat of their common expression. Wordsworth could
never wholly shake off the influence of the century into which he was
born. He began by proposing a reform of the ritual, but it went no
further than an attempt to get rid of the words of Latin original where
the meaning was as well or better given in derivatives of the Saxon. He
would have stricken out the "assemble" and left the "meet together." Like
Wesley, he might be compelled by necessity to a breach of the canon; but,
like him, he was never a willing schismatic, and his singing robes were
the full and flowing canonicals of the church by law established.
Inspiration makes short work with the usage of the best authors and
ready-made elegances of diction; but where Wordsworth is not possessed by
his demon, as Molière said of Corneille, he equals Thomson in verbiage,
out-Miltons Milton in artifice of style, and Latinizes his diction beyond
Dryden. The fact was, that he took up his early opinions on instinct, and
insensibly modified them as he studied the masters of what may be called
the Middle Period of English verse.[2] As a young man, he disparaged
Virgil ("We talked a great deal of nonsense in those days," he said when
taken to task for it later in life); at fifty-nine he translated three
books of the Aeneid, in emulation of Dryden, though falling far short of
him in everything but closeness, as he seems, after a few years, to have
been convinced. Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the true
founder of the modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethan authority
save Milton, whose own English was formed upon those earlier models.
Keats denounced the authors of that style which came in toward the close
of the seventeenth century, and reigned absolute through the whole of the
eighteenth, as
"A schism,
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
... who went about
Holding a poor decrepit standard out,
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one Boileau!"
But Keats had never then[3] studied the writers of whom he speaks so
contemptuously, though he might have profited by so doing. Boileau would
at least have taught him that _flimsy_ would have been an apter epithet
for the _standard_ than for the mottoes upon it. Dryden was the author of
that schism against which Keats so vehemently asserts the claim of the
orthodox teaching it had displaced. He was far more just to Boileau, of
whom Keats had probably never read a word. "If I would only cross the
seas," he says, "I might find in France a living Horace and a Juvenal in
the person of the admirable Boileau, whose numbers are excellent, whose
expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just, whose language is pure,
whose satire is pointed, and whose sense is just. What he borrows from
the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good and almost
as universally valuable."[4]
Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a hundred and seventy years; in
the second class of English poets perhaps no one stands, on the whole, so
high as he; during his lifetime, in spite of jealousy, detraction,
unpopular politics, and a suspicious change of faith, his pre-eminence
was conceded; he was the earliest complete type of the purely literary
man, in the modern sense; there is a singular unanimity in allowing him a
certain claim to _greatness_ which would be denied to men as famous and
more read,--to Pope or Swift, for example; he is supposed, in some way or
other, to have reformed English poetry. It is now about half a century
since the only uniform edition of his works was edited by Scott. No
library is complete without him, no name is more familiar than his, and
yet it may be suspected that few writers are more thoroughly buried in
that great cemetery of the "British Poets." If contemporary reputation be
often deceitful, posthumous fame may be generally trusted, for it is a
verdict made up of the suffrages of the select men in succeeding
generations. This verdict has been as good as unanimous in favor of
Dryden. It is, perhaps, worth while to take a fresh observation of him,
to consider him neither as warning nor example, but to endeavor to make
out what it is that has given so lofty and firm a position to one of the
most unequal, inconsistent, and faulty writers that ever lived. He is a
curious example of what we often remark of the living, but rarely of the
dead,--that they get credit for what they might be quite as much as for
what they are,--and posterity has applied to him one of his own rules of
criticism, judging him by the best rather than the average of his
achievement, a thing posterity is seldom wont to do. On the losing side
in politics, it is true of his polemical writings as of Burke's,--whom in
many respects he resembles, and especially in that supreme quality of a
reasoner, that his mind gathers not only heat, but clearness and
expansion, by its own motion,--that they have won his battle for him in
the judgment of after times.
To us, looking back at him, he gradually becomes a singularly interesting
and even picturesque figure. He is, in more senses than one, in language,
in turn of thought, in style of mind, in the direction of his activity,
the first of the moderns. He is the first literary man who was also a man
of the world, as we understand the term. He succeeded Ben Jonson as the
acknowledged dictator of wit and criticism, as Dr. Johnson, after nearly
the same interval, succeeded him. All ages are, in some sense, ages of
transition; but there are times when the transition is more marked, more
rapid; and it is, perhaps, an ill fortune for a man of letters to arrive
at maturity during such a period, still more to represent in himself the
change that is going on, and to be an efficient cause in bringing it
about. Unless, like Goethe, he is of a singularly uncontemporaneous
nature, capable of being _tutta in se romita_, and of running parallel
with his time rather than being sucked into its current, he will be
thwarted in that harmonious development of native force which has so much
to do with its steady and successful application. Dryden suffered, no
doubt, in this way. Though in creed he seems to have drifted backward in
an eddy of the general current; yet of the intellectual movement of the
time, so far certainly as literature shared in it, he could say, with
Aeneas, not only that he saw, but that himself was a great part of it.
That movement was, on the whole, a downward one, from faith to
scepticism, from enthusiasm to cynicism, from the imagination to the
understanding. It was in a direction altogether away from those springs
of imagination and faith at which they of the last age had slaked the
thirst or renewed the vigor of their souls. Dryden himself recognized
that indefinable and gregarious influence which we call nowadays the
Spirit of the Age, when he said that "every Age has a kind of universal
Genius."[5] He had also a just notion of that in which he lived; for he
remarks, incidentally, that "all knowing ages are naturally sceptic and
not at all bigoted, which, if I am not much deceived, is the proper
character of our own."[6] It may be conceived that he was even painfully
half-aware of having fallen upon a time incapable, not merely of a great
poet, but perhaps of any poet at all; for nothing is so sensitive to the
chill of a sceptical atmosphere as that enthusiasm which, if it be not
genius, is at least the beautiful illusion that saves it from the
baffling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice unhappy he who, horn to
see things as they might be, is schooled by circumstances to see them as
people say they are,--to read God in a prose translation. Such was
Dryden's lot, and such, for a good part of his days, it was by his own
choice. He who was of a stature to snatch the torch of life that flashes
from lifted hand to hand along the generations, over the heads of
inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy to the stews.
As a writer for the stage, he deliberately adopted and repeatedly
reaffirmed the maxim that
"He who lives to please, must please to live."
Without earnest convictions, no great or sound literature is conceivable.
But if Dryden mostly wanted that inspiration which comes of belief in and
devotion to something nobler and more abiding than the present moment and
its petulant need, he had, at least, the next best thing to that,--a
thorough faith in himself. He was, moreover, a man of singularly open
soul, and of a temper self-confident enough to be candid even with
himself. His mind was growing to the last, his judgment widening and
deepening, his artistic sense refining itself more and more. He confessed
his errors, and was not ashamed to retrace his steps in search of that
better knowledge which the omniscience of superficial study had
disparaged. Surely an intellect that is still pliable at seventy is a
phenomenon as interesting as it is rare. But at whatever period of his
life we look at Dryden, and whatever, for the moment, may have been his
poetic creed, there was something in the nature of the man that would not
be wholly subdued to what it worked in. There are continual glimpses of
something in him greater than he, hints of possibilities finer than
anything he has done. You feel that the whole of him was better than any
random specimens, though of his best, seem to prove. _Incessu patet_, he
has by times the large stride of the elder race, though it sinks too
often into the slouch of a man who has seen better days. His grand air
may, in part, spring from a habit of easy superiority to his competitors;
but must also, in part, be ascribed to an innate dignity of character.
That this pre-eminence should have been so generally admitted, during his
life, can only be explained by a bottom of good sense, kindliness, and
sound judgment, whose solid worth could afford that many a flurry of
vanity, petulance, and even error should flit across the surface and be
forgotten. Whatever else Dryden may have been, the last and abiding
impression of him is, that he was thoroughly manly; and while it may be
disputed whether he was a great poet, it may be said of him, as
Wordsworth said of Burke, that "he was by far the greatest man of his
age, not only abounding in knowledge himself, but feeding, in various
directions, his most able contemporaries."[7]
Dryden was born in 1631. He was accordingly six years old when Jonson
died, was nearly a quarter of a century younger than Milton, and may have
personally known Bishop Hall, the first English satirist, who was living
till 1656. On the other side, he was older than Swift by thirty-six, than
Addison by forty-one, and than Pope by fifty-seven years. Dennis says
that "Dryden, for the last ten years of his life, was much acquainted
with Addison, and drank with him more than he ever used to do, probably
so far as to hasten his end," being commonly "an extreme sober man." Pope
tell us that, in his twelfth year, he "saw Dryden," perhaps at Will's,
perhaps in the street, as Scott did Burns. Dryden himself visited Milton
now and then, and was intimate with Davenant, who could tell him of
Fletcher and Jonson from personal recollection. Thus he stands between
the age before and that which followed him, giving a hand to each. His
father was a country clergyman, of Puritan leanings, a younger son of an
ancient county family. The Puritanism is thought to have come in with the
poet's great-grandfather, who made in his will the somewhat singular
statement that he was "assured by the Holy Ghost that he was elect of
God." It would appear from this that Dryden's self-confidence was an
inheritance. The solid quality of his mind showed itself early. He
himself tells us that he had read Polybius "in English, with the pleasure
of a boy, before he was ten years of age, and yet even then _had some
dark notions of the prudence with which he conducted his design_."[8] The
concluding words are very characteristic, even if Dryden, as men commonly
do, interpreted his boyish turn of mind by later self-knowledge. We thus
get a glimpse of him browsing--for, like Johnson, Burke, and the full as
distinguished from the learned men, he was always a random reader[9]--in
his father's library, and painfully culling here and there a spray of his
own proper nutriment from among the stubs and thorns of Puritan divinity.
After such schooling as could be had in the country, he was sent up to
Westminster School, then under the headship of the celebrated Dr. Busby.
Here he made his first essays in verse, translating, among other school
exercises of the same kind, the third satire of Persius. In 1650 he was
entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained there for seven
years. The only record of his college life is a discipline imposed, in
1652, for "disobedience to the Vice-Master, and contumacy in taking his
punishment, inflicted by him." Whether this punishment was corporeal, as
Johnson insinuates in the similar case of Milton, we are ignorant. He
certainly retained no very fond recollection of his Alma Mater, for in
his "Prologue to the University of Oxford," he says:--
"Oxford to him a dearer name shall be
Than his own mother university;
Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage,
He chooses Athens in his riper age."
By the death of his father, in 1654, he came into possession of a small
estate of sixty pounds a year, from which, however, a third must be
deducted, for his mother's dower, till 1676. After leaving Cambridge, he
became secretary to his near relative, Sir Gilbert Pickering, at that
time Cromwell's chamberlain, and a member of his Upper House. In 1670 he
succeeded Davenant as Poet Laureate,[10] and Howell as Historiographer,
with a yearly salary of two hundred pounds. This place he lost at the
Revolution, and had the mortification to see his old enemy and butt,
Shadwell, promoted to it, as the best poet the Whig party could muster.
If William was obliged to read the verses of his official minstrel,
Dryden was more than avenged. From 1688 to his death, twelve years later,
he earned his bread manfully by his pen, without any mean complaining,
and with no allusion to his fallen fortunes that is not dignified and
touching. These latter years, during which he was his own man again, were
probably the happiest of his life. In 1664 or 1665 he married Lady
Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. About a hundred
pounds a year were thus added to his income. The marriage is said not to
have been a happy one, and perhaps it was not, for his wife was
apparently a weak-minded woman; but the inference from the internal
evidence of Dryden's plays, as of Shakespeare's, is very untrustworthy,
ridicule of marriage having always been a common stock in trade of the
comic writers.
The earliest of his verses that have come down to us were written upon
the death of Lord Hastings, and are as bad as they can be,--a kind of
parody on the worst of Donne. They have every fault of his manner,
without a hint of the subtile and often profound thought that more than
redeems it. As the Doctor himself would have said, here is Donne outdone.
The young nobleman died of the small-pox, and Dryden exclaims
pathetically,--
"Was there no milder way than the small-pox,
The very filthiness of Pandora's box?"
He compares the pustules to "rosebuds stuck i' the lily skin about," and
says that
"Each little pimple had a tear in it
To wail the fault its rising did commit."
But he has not done his worst yet, by a great deal. What follows is even
finer:--
"No comet need foretell his change drew on,
Whose corpse might seem a constellation.
O, had he died of old, how great a strife
Had been who from his death should draw their life!
Who should, by one rich draught, become whate'er
Seneca, Cato, Numa, Caesar, were,
Learned, virtuous, pious, great, and have by this
An universal metempsychosis!
Must all these aged sires in one funeral
Expire? all die in one so young, so small?"
It is said that one of Allston's early pictures was brought to him, after
he had long forgotten it, and his opinion asked as to the wisdom of the
young artist's persevering in the career he had chosen. Allston advised
his quitting it forthwith as hopeless. Could the same experiment have
been tried with these verses upon Dryden, can any one doubt that his
counsel would have been the same? It should be remembered, however, that
he was barely turned eighteen when they were written, and the tendency of
his style is noticeable in so early an abandonment of the participial
_ed_ in _learned_ and _aged_. In the next year he appears again in some
commendatory verses prefixed to the sacred epigrams of his friend, John
Hoddesdon. In these he speaks of the author as a
"Young eaglet, who, thy nest thus soon forsook,
So lofty and divine a course hast took
As all admire, before the down begin
To peep, as yet, upon thy smoother chin."
Here is almost every fault which Dryden's later nicety would have
condemned. But perhaps there is no schooling so good for an author as his
own youthful indiscretions. After this effort Dryden seems to have lain
fallow for ten years, and then he at length reappears in thirty-seven
"heroic stanzas" on the death of Cromwell. The versification is smoother,
but the conceits are there again, though in a milder form. The verse is
modelled after "Gondibert." A single image from nature (he was almost
always happy in these) gives some hint of the maturer Dryden:--
"And wars, like mists that rise against the sun,
Made him but greater seem, not greater grow."
Two other verses,
"And the isle, when her protecting genius went,
Upon his obsequies loud sighs conferred,"
are interesting, because they show that he had been studying the early
poems of Milton. He has contrived to bury under a rubbish of verbiage one
of the most purely imaginative passages ever written by the great Puritan
poet.
"From haunted spring and dale,
Edged with poplar pale,
The parting genius is with sighing sent."
This is the more curious because, twenty-four years afterwards, he says,
in defending rhyme: "Whatever causes he [Milton] alleges for the
abolishment of rhyme, his own particular reason is plainly this, that
rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it nor the
graces of it: which is manifest in his _Juvenilia_, ... where his rhyme
is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age
when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every
man a rhymer, though not a poet."[11] It was this, no doubt, that
heartened Dr. Johnson to say of "Lycidas" that "the diction was harsh,
the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing." It is Dryden's excuse
that his characteristic excellence is to argue persuasively and
powerfully, whether in verse or prose, and that he was amply endowed with
the most needful quality of an advocate,--to be always strongly and
wholly of his present way of thinking, whatever it might be. Next we
have, in 1660, "Astraea Redux" on the "happy restoration" of Charles II.
In this also we can forebode little of the full-grown Dryden but his
defects. We see his tendency to exaggeration, and to confound physical
with metaphysical, as where he says of the ships that brought home the
royal brothers, that
"The joyful London meets
The princely York, himself alone a freight,
The Swiftsure groans beneath great Gloster's weight"
and speaks of the
"Repeated prayer
Which stormed the skies and ravished Charles from thence."
There is also a certain everydayness, not to say vulgarity, of phrase,
which Dryden never wholly refined away, and which continually tempts us
to sum up at once against him as the greatest poet that ever was or could
be made wholly out of prose.
"Heaven would no bargain for its blessings drive"
is an example. On the other hand, there are a few verses almost worthy of
his best days, as these:--
"Some lazy ages lost in sleep and ease,
No action leave to busy chronicles;
Such whose _supine felicity_ but makes
In story chasms, in epochas mistakes,
O'er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down,
Till with his silent sickle they are mown,"
These are all the more noteworthy, that Dryden, unless in argument, is
seldom equal for six lines together. In the poem to Lord Clarendon (1662)
there are four verses that have something of the "energy divine" for
which Pope praised his master.
"Let envy, then, those crimes within you see
From which the happy never must be free;
Envy that does with misery reside,
The joy and the revenge of ruined pride."
In his "Aurengzebe" (1675) there is a passage, of which, as it is a good
example of Dryden, I shall quote the whole, though my purpose aims mainly
at the latter verses:--
"When I consider life, 't is all a cheat;
Yet, fooled with Hope, men favor the deceit,
Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay;
To-morrow's falser than the former day,
Lies worse, and, while it says we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Strange cozenage! none would live past years again,
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain,
And from the dregs of life think to receive
What the first sprightly running could not give.
I'm tired of waiting for this chymic gold
Which fools us young and beggars us when old."
The "first sprightly running" of Dryden's vintage was, it must be
confessed, a little muddy, if not beery; but if his own soil did not
produce grapes of the choicest flavor, he knew where they were to be had;
and his product, like sound wine, grew better the longer it stood upon
the lees. He tells us, evidently thinking of himself, that in a poet,
"from fifty to threescore, the balance generally holds even in our colder
climates, for he loses not much in fancy, and judgment, which is the
effect of observation, still increases. His succeeding years afford him
little more than the stubble of his own harvest, yet, if his constitution
be healthful, his mind may still retain a decent vigor, and the gleanings
of that of Ephraim, in comparison with others, will surpass the vintage
of Abiezer."[12] Since Chaucer, none of our poets has had a constitution
more healthful, and it was his old age that yielded the best of him. In
him the understanding was, perhaps, in overplus for his entire good
fortune as a poet, and that is a faculty among the earliest to mature. We
have seen him, at only ten years, divining the power of reason in
Polybius.[13] The same turn of mind led him later to imitate the French
school of tragedy, and to admire in Ben Jonson the most correct of
English poets. It was his imagination that needed quickening, and it is
very curious to trace through his different prefaces the gradual opening
of his eyes to the causes of the solitary pre-eminence of Shakespeare. At
first he is sensible of an attraction towards him which he cannot
explain, and for which he apologizes, as if it were wrong. But he feels
himself drawn more and more strongly, till at last he ceases to resist
altogether, and is forced to acknowledge that there is something in this
one man that is not and never was anywhere else, something not to be
reasoned about, ineffable, divine; if contrary to the rules, so much the
worse for _them_. It may be conjectured that Dryden's Puritan
associations may have stood in the way of his more properly poetic
culture, and that his early knowledge of Shakespeare was slight. He tells
us that Davenant, whom he could not have known before he himself was
twenty-seven, first taught him to admire the great poet. But even after
his imagination had become conscious of its prerogative, and his
expression had been ennobled by frequenting this higher society, we find
him continually dropping back into that _sermo pedestris_ which seems, on
the whole, to have been his more natural element. We always feel his
epoch in him, that he was the lock which let our language down from its
point of highest poetry to its level of easiest and most gently flowing
prose. His enthusiasm needs the contagion of other minds to arouse it;
but his strong sense, his command of the happy word, his wit, which is
distinguished by a certain breadth and, as it were, power of
generalization, as Pope's by keenness of edge and point, were his,
whether he would or no. Accordingly, his poetry is often best and his
verse more flowing where (as in parts of his version of the twenty-ninth
ode of the third book of Horace) he is amplifying the suggestions of
another mind.[14] Viewed from one side, he justifies Milton's remark of
him, that "he was a good rhymist, but no poet." To look at all sides, and
to distrust the verdict of a single mood, is, no doubt, the duty of a
critic. But how if a certain side be so often presented as to thrust
forward in the memory and disturb it in the effort to recall that total
impression (for the office of a critic is not, though often so
misunderstood, to say _guilty_ or _not guilty_ of some particular fact)
which is the only safe ground of judgment? It is the weight of the whole
man, not of one or the other limb of him, that we want. _Expende
Hannibalem_. Very good, but not in a scale capacious only of a single
quality at a time, for it is their union, and not their addition, that
assures the value of each separately. It was not this or that which gave
him his weight in council, his swiftness of decision in battle that
outran the forethought of other men,--it was Hannibal. But this prosaic
element in Dryden will force itself upon me. As I read him, I cannot help
thinking of an ostrich, to be classed with flying things, and capable,
what with leap and flap together, of leaving the earth for a longer or
shorter space, but loving the open plain, where wing and foot help each
other to something that is both flight and run at once. What with his
haste and a certain dash, which, according to our mood, we may call
florid or splendid, he seems to stand among poets where Rubens does among
painters,--greater, perhaps, as a colorist than an artist, yet great here
also, if we compare him with any but the first.
We have arrived at Dryden's thirty-second year, and thus far have found
little in him to warrant an augury that he was ever to be one of the
_great_ names in English literature, the most perfect type, that is, of
his class, and that class a high one, though not the highest. If Joseph
de Maistre's axiom, _Qui n'a pas vaincu à trente ans, ne vaincra jamais_,
were true, there would be little hope of him, for he has won no battle
yet. But there is something solid and doughty in the man, that can rise
from defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, when we
are able to choose our position better, and the sun is at our back.
Hitherto his performances have been mainly of the _obbligato_ sort, at
which few men of original force are good, least of all Dryden, who had
always something of stiffness in his strength. Waller had praised the
living Cromwell in perhaps the manliest verses he ever wrote,--not _very_
manly, to be sure, but really elegant, and, on the whole, better than
those in which Dryden squeezed out melodious tears. Waller, who had also
made himself conspicuous as a volunteer Antony to the country squire
turned Caesar,
("With ermine clad and purple, let him hold
A royal sceptre made of Spanish gold,")
was more servile than Dryden in hailing the return of _ex officio_
Majesty. He bewails to Charles, in snuffling heroics,
"Our sorrow and our crime
To have accepted life so long a time,
Without you here."
A weak man, put to the test by rough and angry times, as Waller was, may
be pitied, but meanness is nothing but contemptible under any
circumstances. If it be true that "every conqueror creates a Muse,"
Cromwell was unfortunate. Even Milton's sonnet, though dignified, is
reserved if not distrustful. Marvell's "Horatian Ode," the most truly
classic in our language, is worthy of its theme. The same poet's Elegy,
in parts noble, and everywhere humanly tender, is worth more than all
Carlyle's biography as a witness to the gentler qualities of the hero,
and of the deep affection that stalwart nature could inspire in hearts of
truly masculine temper. As it is little known, a few verses of it may be
quoted to show the difference between grief that thinks of its object and
grief that thinks of its rhymes:--
"Valor, religion, friendship, prudence died
At once with him, and all that's good beside,
And we, death's refuse, nature's dregs, confined
To loathsome life, alas! are left behind.
Where we (so once we used) shall now no more,
To fetch day, press about his chamber-door,
No more shall hear that powerful language charm,
Whose force oft spared the labor of his arm,
No more shall follow where he spent the days
In war or counsel, or in prayer and praise.
* * * * *
I saw him dead; a leaden slumber lies,
And mortal sleep, over those wakeful eyes;
Those gentle rays under the lids were fled,
Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed;
That port, which so majestic was and strong,
Loose and deprived of vigor stretched along,
All withered, all discolored, pale, and wan,
How much another thing! no more That Man!
O human glory! vain! O death! O wings!
O worthless world! O transitory things!
Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed
That still, though dead, greater than Death he laid,
And, in his altered face, you something feign
That threatens Death he yet will live again."
Such verses might not satisfy Lindley Murray, but they are of that higher
mood which satisfies the heart. These couplets, too, have an energy
worthy of Milton's friend:--
"When up the armëd mountains of Dunbar
He marched, and through deep Severn, ending war."
"Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse
Shall the English soldier, ere he charge, rehearse."
On the whole, one is glad that Dryden's panegyric on the Protector was so
poor. It was purely official verse-making. Had there been any feeling in
it, there had been baseness in his address to Charles. As it is, we may
fairly assume that he was so far sincere in both cases as to be thankful
for a chance to exercise himself in rhyme, without much caring whether
upon a funeral or a restoration. He might naturally enough expect that
poetry would have a better chance under Charles than under Cromwell, or
any successor with Commonwealth principles. Cromwell had more serious
matters to think about than verses, while Charles might at least care as
much about them as it was in his base good-nature to care about anything
but loose women and spaniels. Dryden's sound sense, afterwards so
conspicuous, shows itself even in these pieces, when we can get at it
through the tangled thicket of tropical phrase. But the authentic and
unmistakable Dryden first manifests himself in some verses addressed to
his friend Dr. Charlton in 1663. We have first his common sense which has
almost the point of wit, yet with a tang of prose:--
"The longest tyranny that ever swayed
Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed
Their freeborn reason to the Stagyrite,
And made his torch their universal light.
_So truth, while only one supplied the state,
Grew scarce and dear and yet sophisticate.
Still it was bought, like emp'ric wares or charms,
Hard words sealed up with Aristotle's arms_."
Then we have his graceful sweetness of fancy, where he speaks of the
inhabitants of the New World:--
"Guiltless men who danced away their time,
Fresh as their groves and happy as their clime."
And, finally, there is a hint of imagination where "mighty visions of the
Danish race" watch round Charles sheltered in Stonehenge after the battle
of Worcester. These passages might have been written by the Dryden whom
we learn to know fifteen years later. They have the advantage that he
wrote them to please himself. His contemporary, Dr. Heylin, said of
French cooks, that "their trade was not to feed the belly, but the
palate." Dryden was a great while in learning this secret, as available
in good writing as in cookery. He strove after it, but his thoroughly
English nature, to the last, would too easily content itself with serving
up the honest beef of his thought, without regard to daintiness of flavor
in the dressing of it.[15] Of the best English poetry, it might be said
that it is understanding aërated by imagination. In Dryden the solid part
too often refused to mix kindly with the leaven, either remaining lumpish
or rising to a hasty puffiness. Grace and lightness were with him much
more a laborious achievement than a natural gift, and it is all the more
remarkable that he should so often have attained to what seems such an
easy perfection in both. Always a hasty writer,[16] he was long in
forming his style, and to the last was apt to snatch the readiest word
rather than wait for the fittest. He was not wholly and unconsciously
poet, but a thinker who sometimes lost himself on enchanted ground and
was transfigured by its touch. This preponderance in him of the reasoning
over the intuitive faculties, the one always there, the other flashing in
when you least expect it, accounts for that inequality and even
incongruousness in his writing which makes one revise his judgment at
every tenth page. In his prose you come upon passages that persuade you
he is a poet, in spite of his verses so often turning state's evidence
against him as to convince you he is none. He is a prose-writer, with a
kind of Aeolian attachment. For example, take this bit of prose from the
dedication of his version of Virgil's Pastorals, 1694: "He found the
strength of his genius betimes, and was even in his youth preluding to
his Georgicks and his Aeneis. He could not forbear to try his wings,
though his pinions were not hardened to maintain a long, laborious
flight; yet sometimes they bore him to a pitch as lofty as ever he was
able to reach afterwards. But when he was admonished by his subject to
descend, he came down gently circling in the air and singing to the
ground, like a lark melodious in her mounting and continuing her song
till she alights, still preparing for a higher flight at her next sally,
and tuning her voice to better music." This is charming, and yet even
this wants the ethereal tincture that pervades the style of Jeremy
Taylor, making it, as Burke said of Sheridan's eloquence, "neither prose
nor poetry, but something better than either." Let us compare Taylor's
treatment of the same image: "For so have I seen a lark rising from his
bed of grass and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get
to heaven and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back
by the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular
and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest than it
could recover by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings, till
the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the
storm was over, and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and
sing as if it had learned music and motion of an angel as he passed
sometimes through the air about his ministries here below." Taylor's
fault is that his sentences too often smell of the library, but what an
open air is here! How unpremeditated it all seems! How carelessly he
knots each new thought, as it comes, to the one before it with an _and_,
like a girl making lace! And what a slidingly musical use he makes of the
sibilants with which our language is unjustly taxed by those who can only
make them hiss, not sing! There are twelve of them in the first twenty
words, fifteen of which are monsyllables. We notice the structure of
Dryden's periods, but this grows up as we read. It gushes, like the song
of the bird itself,--
"In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."
Let us now take a specimen of Dryden's bad prose from one of his poems. I
open the "Annus Mirabilis" at random, and hit upon this:--
'Our little fleet was now engaged so far,
That, like the swordfish in the whale, they fought.
The combat only seemed a civil war,
Till through their bowels we our passage wrought.'
Is this Dryden, or Sternhold, or Shadwell, those Toms who made him say
that "dulness was fatal to the name of Tom"? The natural history of
Goldsmith in the verse of Pye! His thoughts did not "voluntary move
harmonious numbers." He had his choice between prose and verse, and seems
to be poetical on second thought. I do not speak without book. He was
more than half conscious of it himself. In the same letter to Mrs.
Steward, just cited, he says, "I am still drudging on, always a poet and
never a good one"; and this from no mock-modesty, for he is always
handsomely frank in telling us whatever of his own doing pleased him.
This was written in the last year of his life, and at about the same time
he says elsewhere: "What judgment I had increases rather than diminishes,
and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me that my
only difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into verse or to
give them the other harmony of prose; I have so long studied and
practised both, that they are grown into a habit and become familiar to
me."[17] I think that a man who was primarily a poet would hardly have
felt this equanimity of choice.
I find a confirmation of this feeling about Dryden in his early literary
loves. His taste was not an instinct, but the slow result of reflection
and of the manfulness with which he always acknowledged to himself his
own mistakes. In this latter respect few men deal so magnanimously with
themselves as he, and accordingly few have been so happily inconsistent.
_Ancora imparo_ might have served him for a motto as well as Michael
Angelo. His prefaces are a complete log of his life, and the habit of
writing them was a useful one to him, for it forced him to think with a
pen in his hand, which, according to Goethe, "if it do no other good,
keeps the mind from staggering about." In these prefaces we see his taste
gradually rising from Du Bartas to Spenser, from Cowley to Milton, from
Corneille to Shakespeare. "I remember when I was a boy," he says in his
dedication of the "Spanish Friar," 1681, "I thought inimitable Spenser a
mean poet in comparison of Sylvester's _Du Bartas_, and was rapt into an
ecstasy when I read these lines:--
'Now when the winter's keener breath began
To crystallize the Baltic ocean,
To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods,
And periwig with snow[18] the baldpate woods.'
I am much deceived if this be not abominable fustian." Swift, in his
"Tale of a Tub," has a ludicrous passage in this style: "Look on this
globe of earth, you will find it to be a very complete and fashionable
dress. What is that which some call _land_, but a fine coat faced with
green? or the _sea_, but a waistcoat of water-tabby? Proceed to the
particular works of creation, you will find how curious journeyman Nature
has been to trim up the vegetable _beaux_; observe how _sparkish a
periwig adorns the head of a beech_, and what a fine doublet of white
satin is worn by the birch." The fault is not in any inaptness of the
images, nor in the mere vulgarity of the things themselves, but in that
of the associations they awaken. The "prithee, undo this button" of Lear,
coming where it does and expressing what it does, is one of those touches
of the pathetically sublime, of which only Shakespeare ever knew the
secret. Herrick, too, has a charming poem on "Julia's petticoat," the
charm being that he lifts the familiar and the low to the region of
sentiment. In the passage from Sylvester, it is precisely the reverse,
and the wig takes as much from the sentiment as it adds to a Lord
Chancellor. So Pope's proverbial verse,
"True wit is Nature to advantage drest,"
unpleasantly suggests Nature under the hands of a lady's-maid.[19] We
have no word in English that will exactly define this want of propriety
in diction. _Vulgar_ is too strong, and _commonplace_ too weak. Perhaps
_bourgeois_ comes as near as any. It is to be noticed that Dryden does
not unequivocally condemn the passage he quotes, but qualifies it with an
"if I am not much mistaken." Indeed, though his judgment in substantials,
like that of Johnson, is always worth having, his taste, the negative
half of genius, never altogether refined itself from a colloquial
familiarity, which is one of the charms of his prose, and gives that air
of easy strength in which his satire is unmatched. In his "Royal Martyr"
(1669), the tyrant Maximin says to the gods:--
"Keep you your rain and sunshine in the skies,
And I'll keep back my flame and sacrifice;
_Your trade of Heaven shall soon be at a stand,
And all your goods lie dead upon your hand,_"--
a passage which has as many faults as only Dryden was capable of
committing, even to a false idiom forced by the last rhyme. The same
tyrant in dying exclaims:--
"And after thee I'll go,
Revenging still, and following e'en to th' other world my blow,
And, _shoving back this earth on which I sit,
I'll mount and scatter all the gods I hit._"