"This little loss in our vast body shews
So small, that half _have never heard the news;
Fame's out of breath e'er she can fly so far
To tell 'em all that you have e'er made war_."[20]
And in the same play,
"That busy thing,
_The soul, is packing up_, and just on wing
Like parting swallows when they seek the spring,"
where the last sweet verse curiously illustrates that inequality (poetry
on a prose background) which so often puzzles us in Dryden. Infinitely
worse is the speech of Almanzor to his mother's ghost:--
"I'll rush into the covert of the night
And pull thee backward by the shroud to light,
Or else I'll squeeze thee like a bladder there,
And make thee groan thyself away to air."
What wonder that Dryden should have been substituted for Davenant as the
butt of the "Rehearsal," and that the parody should have had such a run?
And yet it was Dryden who, in speaking of Persius, hit upon the happy
phrase of "boisterous metaphors";[21] it was Dryden who said of Cowley,
whom he elsewhere calls "the darling of my youth,"[22] that he was "sunk
in reputation because he could never forgive any conceit which came in
his way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and small."[23] But the
passages I have thus far cited as specimens of our poet's coarseness (for
poet he surely was _intus_, though not always _in cute_) were written
before he was forty, and he had an odd notion, suitable to his healthy
complexion, that poets on the whole improve after that date. Man at
forty, he says, "seems to be fully in his summer tropic, ... and I
believe that it will hold in all great poets that, though they wrote
before with a certain heat of genius which inspired them, yet that heat
was not perfectly digested."[24] But artificial heat is never to be
digested at all, as is plain in Dryden's case. He was a man who warmed
slowly, and, in his hurry to supply the market, forced his mind. The
result was the same after forty as before. In "Oedipus" (1679) we find,
"Not one bolt
Shall err from Thebes, but more be called for, more,
_New-moulded thunder of a larger size!_"
This play was written in conjunction with Lee, of whom Dryden relates[25]
that, when some one said to him, "It is easy enough to write like a
madman," he replied, "No, it is hard to write like a madman, but easy
enough to write like a fool,"--perhaps the most compendious lecture on
poetry ever delivered. The splendid bit of eloquence, which has so much
the sheet-iron clang of impeachment thunder (I hope that Dryden is not in
the Library of Congress!) is perhaps Lee's. The following passage almost
certainly is his:--
"Sure 'tis the end of all things! Fate has torn
The lock of Time off, and his head is now
The ghastly ball of round Eternity!"
But the next, in which the soul is likened to the pocket of an indignant
housemaid charged with theft, is wholly in Dryden's manner:--
"No; I dare challenge heaven to turn me outward,
And shake my soul quite empty in your sight."
In the same style, he makes his Don Sebastian (1690) say that he is as
much astonished as "drowsy mortals" at the last trump,
"When, called in haste, _they fumble for their limbs_,"
and propose to take upon himself the whole of a crime shared with another
by asking Heaven _to charge the bill_ on him. And in "King Arthur,"
written ten years after the Preface from which I have quoted his
confession about Dubartas, we have a passage precisely of the kind he
condemned:--
"Ah for the many souls as but this morn
Were clothed with flesh and warmed with vital blood,
But naked now, or _shirted_ but with air."
Dryden too often violated his own admirable rule, that "an author is not
to write all he can, but only all he ought."[26] In his worst images,
however, there is often a vividness that half excuses them. But it is a
grotesque vividness, as from the flare of a bonfire. They do not flash
into sudden lustre, as in the great poets, where the imaginations of poet
and reader leap toward each other and meet half-way.
English prose is indebted to Dryden for having freed it from the cloister
of pedantry. He, more than any other single writer, contributed, as well
by precept as example, to give it suppleness of movement and the easier
air of the modern world. His own style, juicy with proverbial phrases,
has that familiar dignity, so hard to attain, perhaps unattainable except
by one who, like Dryden, feels that his position is assured. Charles
Cotton is as easy, but not so elegant; Walton as familiar, but not so
flowing; Swift as idiomatic, but not so elevated; Burke more splendid,
but not so equally luminous. That his style was no easy acquisition
(though, of course, the aptitude was innate) he himself tells us. In his
dedication of "Troilus and Cressida" (1679), where he seems to hint at
the erection of an Academy, he says that "the perfect knowledge of a
tongue was never attained by any single person. The Court, the College,
and the Town must all be joined in it. And as our English is a
composition of the dead and living tongues, there is required a perfect
knowledge, not only of the Greek and Latin, but of the Old German,
French, and Italian, and to help all these, a conversation with those
authors of our own who have written with the fewest faults in prose and
verse. But how barbarously we yet write and speak your Lordship knows,
and I am sufficiently sensible in my own English.[27] For I am often put
to a stand in considering whether what I write be the idiom of the
tongue, or false grammar and nonsense couched beneath that specious name
of _Anglicism_, and have no other way to clear my doubts but by
translating my English into Latin, and thereby trying what sense the
words will bear in a more stable language." _Tantae molis erat_. Five
years later: "The proprieties and delicacies of the English are known to
few; it is impossible even for a good wit to understand and practise them
without the help of a liberal education, long reading and digesting of
those few good authors we have amongst us, the knowledge of men and
manners, _the freedom of habitudes and conversation with the best company
of both sexes_, and, in short, without wearing off the rust which he
contracted while he was laying in a stock of learning." In the passage I
have italicized, it will be seen that Dryden lays some stress upon the
influence of women in refining language. Swift, also, in his plan for an
Academy, says: "Now, though I would by no means give the ladies the
trouble of advising us in the reformation of our language, yet I cannot
help thinking that, since they have been left out of all meetings except
parties at play, or where worse designs are carried on, our conversation
has very much degenerated."[28] Swift affirms that the language had grown
corrupt since the Restoration, and that "the Court, which used to be the
standard of propriety and correctness of speech, was then, and, I think,
has ever since continued, the worst school in England."[29] He lays the
blame partly on the general licentiousness, partly upon the French
education of many of Charles's courtiers, and partly on the poets. Dryden
undoubtedly formed his diction by the usage of the Court. The age was a
very free-and-easy, not to say a very coarse one. Its coarseness was not
external, like that of Elizabeth's day, but the outward mark of an inward
depravity. What Swift's notion of the refinement of women was may be
judged by his anecdotes of Stella. I will not say that Dryden's prose did
not gain by the conversational elasticity which his frequenting men and
women of the world enabled him to give it. It is the best specimen of
every-day style that we have. But the habitual dwelling of his mind in a
commonplace atmosphere, and among those easy levels of sentiment which
befitted Will's Coffee-house and the Bird-cage Walk, was a damage to his
poetry. Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome
for the character. He cannot always distinguish between enthusiasm and
extravagance when he sees them. But apart from these influences which I
have adduced in exculpation, there was certainly a vein of coarseness in
him, a want of that exquisite sensitiveness which is the conscience of
the artist. An old gentleman, writing to the Gentleman's Magazine in
1745, professes to remember "plain John Dryden (before he paid his court
with success to the great) in one uniform clothing of Norwich drugget. I
have eat tarts at the Mulberry Garden with him and Madam Reeve, when our
author advanced to a sword and Chadreux wig."[30] I always fancy Dryden
in the drugget, with wig, lace ruffles, and sword superimposed. It is the
type of this curiously incongruous man.
The first poem by which Dryden won a general acknowledgment of his power
was the "Annus Mirabilis," written in his thirty-seventh year. Pepys,
himself not altogether a bad judge, doubtless expresses the common
opinion when he says: "I am very well pleased this night with reading a
poem I brought home with me last night from Westminster Hall, of
Dryden's, upon the present war; a very good poem."[31] And a very good
poem, in some sort, it continues to be, in spite of its amazing
blemishes. We must always bear in mind that Dryden lived in an age that
supplied him with no ready-made inspiration, and that big phrases and
images are apt to be pressed into the service when great ones do not
volunteer. With this poem begins the long series of Dryden's prefaces, of
which Swift made such excellent, though malicious, fun that I cannot
forbear to quote it. "I do utterly disapprove and declare against that
pernicious custom of making the _preface_ a bill of fare to the book. For
I have always looked upon it as a high point of indiscretion in
monster-mongers and other retailers of strange sights to hang out a fair
picture over the door, drawn after the life, with a most eloquent
description underneath; this has saved me many a threepence.... Such is
exactly the fate at this time of _prefaces_.... This expedient was
admirable at first; our great Dryden has long carried it as far as it
would go, and with incredible success. He has often said to me in
confidence, 'that the world would never have suspected him to be so great
a poet, if he had not assured them so frequently, in his prefaces, that
it was impossible they could either doubt or forget it.' Perhaps it may
be so; however, I much fear his instructions have edified out of their
place, and taught men to grow wiser in certain points where he never
intended they should."[32] The _monster-mongers_ is a terrible thrust,
when we remember some of the comedies and heroic plays which Dryden
ushered in this fashion. In the dedication of the "Annus" to the city of
London is one of those pithy sentences of which Dryden is ever afterwards
so full, and which he lets fall with a carelessness that seems always to
deepen the meaning: "I have heard, indeed, of some virtuous persons who
have ended unfortunately, but never of any virtuous nation; Providence is
engaged too deeply when the cause becomes so general." In his "account"
of the poem in a letter to Sir Robert Howard he says: "I have chosen to
write my poem in quatrains or stanzas of four in alternate rhyme, because
I have ever judged them more noble and of greater dignity, both for the
sound and number, than any other verse in use amongst us.... The learned
languages have certainly a great advantage of us in not being tied to the
slavery of any rhyme.... But in this necessity of our rhymes, I have
always found the couplet verse most easy, though not so proper for this
occasion; for there the work is sooner at an end, every two lines
concluding the labor of the poet." A little further on: "They [the
French] write in alexandrines, or verses of six feet, such as amongst us
is the old translation of Homer by Chapman: all which, by lengthening
their chain,[33] makes the sphere of their activity the greater." I have
quoted these passages because, in a small compass, they include several
things characteristic of Dryden. "I have ever judged," and "I have always
found," are particularly so. If he took up an opinion in the morning, he
would have found so many arguments for it before night that it would seem
already old and familiar. So with his reproach of rhyme; a year or two
before he was eagerly defending it;[34] again a few years, and he will
utterly condemn and drop it in his plays, while retaining it in his
translations; afterwards his study of Milton leads him to think that
blank verse would suit the epic style better, and he proposes to try it
with Homer, but at last translates one book as a specimen, and behold, it
is in rhyme! But the charm of this great advocate is, that, whatever side
he was on, he could always find excellent reasons for it, and state them
with great force, and abundance of happy illustration. He is an exception
to the proverb, and is none the worse pleader than he is always pleading
his own cause. The blunder about Chapman is of a kind into which his
hasty temperament often betrayed him. He remembered that Chapman's
"Iliad" was in a long measure, concluded without looking that it was
alexandrine, and then attributes it generally to his "Homer." Chapman's
"Iliad" is done in fourteen-syllable verse, and his "Odyssee" in the very
metre that Dryden himself used in his own version,[35] I remark also what
he says of the couplet, that it was easy because the second verse
concludes the labor of the poet. And yet it was Dryden who found it hard
for that very reason. His vehement abundance refused those narrow banks,
first running over into a triplet, and, even then uncontainable, rising
to an alexandrine in the concluding verse. And I have little doubt that
it was the roominess, rather than the dignity, of the quatrain which led
him to choose it. As apposite to this, I may quote what he elsewhere says
of octosyllabic verse: "The thought can turn itself with greater ease in
a larger compass. When the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straightens
the expression: we are thinking of the close, when we should be employed
in adorning the thought. It makes a poet giddy with turning in a space
too narrow for his imagination."[36]
Dryden himself, as was not always the case with him, was well satisfied
with his work. He calls it his best hitherto, and attributes his success
to the excellence of his subject, "incomparably the best he had ever had,
_excepting only the Royal Family_." The first part is devoted to the
Dutch war; the last to the fire of London. The martial half is infinitely
the better of the two. He altogether surpasses his model, Davenant. If
his poem lack the gravity of thought attained by a few stanzas of
"Gondibert," it is vastly superior in life, in picturesqueness, in the
energy of single lines, and, above all, in imagination. Few men have read
"Gondibert," and almost every one speaks of it, as commonly of the dead,
with a certain subdued respect. And it deserves respect as an honest
effort to bring poetry back to its highest office in the ideal treatment
of life. Davenant emulated Spenser, and if his poem had been as good as
his preface, it could still be read in another spirit than that of
investigation. As it is, it always reminds me of Goldsmith's famous
verse. It is remote, unfriendly, solitary, and, above all, slow. Its
shining passages, for there are such, remind one of distress-rockets sent
up at intervals from a ship just about to founder, and sadden rather than
cheer.[37]
The first part of the "Annus Mirabilis" is by no means clear of the false
taste of the time,[38] though it has some of Dryden's manliest verses and
happiest comparisons, always his two distinguishing merits. Here, as
almost everywhere else in Dryden, measuring him merely as poet, we recall
what he, with pathetic pride, says of himself in the prologue to
"Aurengzebe":--
"Let him retire, betwixt two ages cast,
The first of this, the hindmost of the last."