"Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball,
And now their odors armed against them fly;
Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall,
And some by aromatic splinters die."
Dear Dr. Johnson had his doubts about Shakespeare, but here at least was
poetry! This is one of the quatrains which he pronounces "worthy of our
author."[39]
But Dryden himself has said that "a man who is resolved to praise an
author with any appearance of justice must be sure to take him on the
strongest side, and where he is least liable to exceptions." This is true
also of one who wishes to measure an author fairly, for the higher wisdom
of criticism lies in the capacity to admire.
Leser, wie gefall ich dir?
Leser, wie gefällst du mir?
are both fair questions, the answer to the first being more often
involved in that to the second than is sometimes thought. The poet in
Dryden was never more fully revealed than in such verses as these:--
"And threatening France, placed like a painted Jove,[40]
Kept idle thunder in his lifted hand";
"Silent in smoke of cannon they come on";
"And his loud guns speak thick, like angry men";
"The vigorous seaman every port-hole plies,
And adds his heart to every gun he fires";
"And, though to me unknown, they sure fought well,
Whom Rupert led, and who were British born."
This is masculine writing, and yet it must be said that there is scarcely
a quatrain in which the rhyme does not trip him into a platitude, and
there are too many swaggering with that _expression forte d'un sentiment
faible_ which Voltaire condemns in Corneille,--a temptation to which
Dryden always lay too invitingly open. But there are passages higher in
kind than any I have cited, because they show imagination. Such are the
verses in which he describes the dreams of the disheartened enemy:--
"In dreams they fearful precipices tread,
Or, shipwrecked, labor to some distant shore,
Or in dark churches walk among the dead";
and those in which he recalls glorious memories, and sees where
"The mighty ghosts of our great Harries rose,
And armëd Edwards looked with anxious eyes."
A few verses, like the pleasantly alliterative one in which he makes the
spider, "from the silent ambush of his den," "feel far off the trembling
of his thread," show that he was beginning to study the niceties of
verse, instead of trusting wholly to what he would have called his
natural _fougue_. On the whole, this part of the poem is very good war
poetry, as war poetry goes (for there is but one first-rate poem of the
kind in English,--short, national, eager as if the writer were personally
engaged, with the rapid metre of a drum beating the charge,--and that is
Drayton's "Battle of Agincourt"),[41] but it shows more study of Lucan
than of Virgil, and for a long time yet we shall find Dryden bewildered
by bad models. He is always imitating--no, that is not the word, always
emulating--somebody in his more strictly poetical attempts, for in that
direction he always needed some external impulse to set his mind in
motion. This is more or less true of all authors; nor does it detract
from their originality, which depends wholly on their being able so far
to forget themselves as to let something of themselves slip into what
they write.[42] Of absolute originality we will not speak till authors
are raised by some Deucalion-and-Pyrrha process; and even then our faith
would be small, for writers who have no past are pretty sure of having no
future. Dryden, at any rate, always had to have his copy set him at the
top of the page, and wrote ill or well accordingly. His mind (somewhat
solid for a poet) warmed slowly, but, once fairly heated through, he had
more of that good-luck of self-oblivion than most men. He certainly gave
even a liberal interpretation to Molière's rule of taking his own
property wherever he found it, though he sometimes blundered awkwardly
about what was properly _his_; but in literature, it should be
remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus
makes it his own.[43]
Mr. Savage Landor once told me that he said to Wordsworth: "Mr.
Wordsworth, a man may mix poetry with prose as much as he pleases, and it
will only elevate and enliven; but the moment he mixes a particle of
prose with his poetry, it precipitates the whole." Wordsworth, he added,
never forgave him. The always hasty Dryden, as I think I have already
said, was liable, like a careless apothecary's 'prentice, to make the
same confusion of ingredients, especially in the more mischievous way. I
cannot leave the "Annus Mirabilis" without giving an example of this.
Describing the Dutch prizes, rather like an auctioneer than a poet, he
says that
"Some English wool, vexed in a Belgian loom,
And into cloth of spongy softness made,
Did into France or colder Denmark doom,
To ruin with worse ware our staple trade."
One might fancy this written by the secretary of a board of trade in an
unguarded moment; but we should remember that the poem is dedicated to
the city of London. The depreciation of the rival fabrics is exquisite;
and Dryden, the most English of our poets, would not be so thoroughly
English if he had not in him some fibre of _la nation boutiquière_. Let
us now see how he succeeds in attempting to infuse science (the most
obstinately prosy material) with poetry. Speaking of "a more exact
knowledge of the longitudes," as he explains in a note, he tells us that,
"Then we upon our globe's last verge shall go,
And view the ocean leaning on the sky;
From thence our rolling neighbors we shall know,
And on the lunar world securely pry."
Dr. Johnson confesses that he does not understand this. Why should he,
when it is plain that Dryden was wholly in the dark himself! To
understand it is none of my business, but I confess that it interests me
as an Americanism. We have hitherto been credited as the inventors of the
"jumping-off place" at the extreme western verge of the world. But Dryden
was beforehand with us. Though he doubtless knew that the earth was a
sphere (and perhaps that it was flattened at the poles), it was always a
flat surface in his fancy. In his "Amphitryon," he makes Alcmena say:--
"No, I would fly thee to the ridge of earth,
And leap the precipice to 'scape thy sight."
And in his "Spanish Friar," Lorenzo says to Elvira that they "will travel
together to the ridge of the world, and then drop together into the
next." It is idle for us poor Yankees to hope that we can invent
anything. To say sooth, if Dryden had left nothing behind him but the
"Annus Mirabilis," he might have served as a type of the kind of poet
America would have produced by the biggest-river-and-tallest-mountain
recipe,--longitude and latitude in plenty, with marks of culture
scattered here and there like the _carets_ on a proof-sheet.
It is now time to say something of Dryden as a dramatist. In the
thirty-two years between 1662 and 1694 he produced twenty-five plays, and
assisted Lee in two. I have hinted that it took Dryden longer than most
men to find the true bent of his genius. On a superficial view, he might
almost seem to confirm that theory, maintained by Johnson, among others,
that genius was nothing more than great intellectual power exercised
persistently in some particular direction which chance decided, so that
it lay in circumstance merely whether a man should turn out a Shakespeare
or a Newton. But when we come to compare what he wrote, regardless of
Minerva's averted face, with the spontaneous production of his happier
muse, we shall be inclined to think his example one of the strongest
cases against the theory in question. He began his dramatic career, as
usual, by rowing against the strong current of his nature, and pulled
only the more doggedly the more he felt himself swept down the stream.
His first attempt was at comedy, and, though his earliest piece of that
kind (the "Wild Gallant," 1663) utterly failed, he wrote eight others
afterwards. On the 23d February, 1663, Pepys writes in his diary: "To
Court, and there saw the 'Wild Gallant' performed by the king's house;
but it was ill acted, and the play so poor a thing as I never saw in my
life almost, and so little answering the name, that, from the beginning
to the end, I could not, nor can at this time, tell certainly which was
the Wild Gallant. The king did not seem pleased at all the whole play,
nor anybody else." After some alteration, it was revived with more
success. On its publication in 1669 Dryden honestly admitted its former
failure, though with a kind of salvo for his self-love. "I made the town
my judges, and the greater part condemned it. After which I do not think
it my concernment to defend it with the ordinary zeal of a poet for his
decried poem, though Corneille is more resolute in his preface before
'Pertharite,'[44] which was condemned more universally than this.... Yet
it was received at Court, and was more than once the divertisement of his
Majesty, by his own command." Pepys lets us amusingly behind the scenes
in the matter of his Majesty's divertisement. Dryden does not seem to see
that in the condemnation of something meant to amuse the public there can
be no question of degree. To fail at all is to fail utterly.
"_Tous les genres sont permis, hors le genre ennuyeux._"
In the reading, at least, all Dryden's comic writing for the stage must
be ranked with the latter class. He himself would fain make an exception
of the "Spanish Friar," but I confess that I rather wonder at than envy
those who can be amused by it. His comedies lack everything that a comedy
should have,--lightness, quickness of transition, unexpectedness of
incident, easy cleverness of dialogue, and humorous contrast of character
brought out by identity of situation. The comic parts of the "Maiden
Queen" seem to me Dryden's best, but the merit even of these is
Shakespeare's, and there is little choice where even the best is only
tolerable. The common quality, however, of all Dryden's comedies is their
nastiness, the more remarkable because we have ample evidence that he was
a man of modest conversation. Pepys, who was by no means squeamish (for
he found "Sir Martin Marall" "the most entire piece of mirth ... that
certainly ever was writ ... very good wit therein, not fooling"), writes
in his diary of the 19th June, 1668: "My wife and Deb to the king's
play-house to-day, thinking to spy me there, and saw the new play
'Evening Love,' of Dryden's, which, though the world commends, she likes
not." The next day he saw it himself, "and do not like it, it being very
smutty, and nothing so good as the 'Maiden Queen' or the 'Indian Emperor'
of Dryden's making. _I was troubled at it_." On the 22d he adds: "Calling
this day at Herringman's,[45] he tells me Dryden do himself call it but a
fifth-rate play." This was no doubt true, and yet, though Dryden in his
preface to the play says, "I confess I have given [yielded] too much to
the people in it, and am ashamed for them as well as for myself, that I
have pleased them at so cheap a rate," he takes care to add, "not that
there is anything here that I would not defend to an ill-natured judge."
The plot was from Calderon, and the author, rebutting the charge of
plagiarism, tells us that the king ("without whose command they should no
longer be troubled with anything of mine") had already answered for him
by saying, "that he only desired that they who accused me of theft would
always steal him plays like mine." Of the morals of the play he has not a
word, nor do I believe that he was conscious of any harm in them till he
was attacked by Collier, and then, (with some protest against what he
considers the undue severity of his censor) he had the manliness to
confess that he had done wrong. "It becomes me not to draw my pen in the
defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good
one."[46] And in a letter to his correspondent, Mrs. Thomas, written only
a few weeks before his death, warning her against the example of Mrs.
Behn, he says, with remorseful sincerity: "I confess I am the last man in
the world who ought in justice to arraign her, who have been myself too
much a libertine in most of my poems, which I should be well contented I
had time either to purge or to see them fairly burned." Congreve was less
patient, and even Dryden, in the last epilogue he ever wrote, attempts an
excuse:--
"Perhaps the Parson stretched a point too far,
When with our Theatres he waged a war;
He tells you that this very moral age
Received the first infection from the Stage,
But sure a banished Court, with lewdness fraught,
The seeds of open vice returning brought.
* * * * *
Whitehall the naked Venus first revealed,
Who, standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine,
The strumpet was adored with rites divine.
* * * * *
The poets, who must live by courts or starve,
Were proud so good a Government to serve,
And, mixing with buffoons and pimps profane,
Tainted the Stage for some small snip of gain."
Dryden least of all men should have stooped to this palliation, for he
had, not without justice, said of himself "The same parts and application
which have made me a poet might have raised me to any honors of the
gown." Milton and Marvell neither lived by the Court, nor starved.
Charles Lamb most ingeniously defends the Comedy of the Restoration as
"the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry," where there was no
pretence of representing a real world.[47] But this was certainly not so.
Dryden again and again boasts of the superior advantage which his age had
over that of the elder dramatists, in painting polite life, and
attributes it to a greater freedom of intercourse between the poets and
the frequenters of the Court.[48] We shall be less surprised at the
_kind_ of refinement upon which Dryden congratulated himself, when we
learn (from the dedication of "Marriage à la Mode") that the Earl of
Rochester was its exemplar: "The best comic writers of our age will join
with me to acknowledge that they have copied the gallantries of courts,
the delicacy of expression, and the decencies of behavior from your
Lordship." In judging Dryden, it should be borne in mind that for some
years he was under contract to deliver three plays a year, a kind of bond
to which no man should subject his brain who has a decent respect for the
quality of its products. We should remember, too, that in his day
_manners_ meant what we call _morals_, that custom always makes a larger
part of virtue among average men than they are quite aware, and that the
reaction from an outward conformity which had no root in inward faith may
for a time have given to the frank expression of laxity an air of honesty
that made it seem almost refreshing. There is no such hotbed for excess
of license as excess of restraint, and the arrogant fanaticism of a
single virtue is apt to make men suspicious of tyranny in all the rest.
But the riot of emancipation could not last long, for the more tolerant
society is of private vice, the more exacting will it be of public
decorum, that excellent thing, so often the plausible substitute for
things more excellent. By 1678 the public mind had so far recovered its
tone that Dryden's comedy of "Limberham" was barely tolerated for three
nights. I will let the man who looked at human nature from more sides,
and therefore judged it more gently than any other, give the only excuse
possible for Dryden:--
"Men's judgments are
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
Do draw the inward quality after them
To suffer all alike."
Dryden's own apology only makes matters worse for him by showing that he
committed his offences with his eyes wide open, and that he wrote
comedies so wholly in despite of nature as never to deviate into the
comic. Failing as clown, he did not scruple to take on himself the office
of Chiffinch to the palled appetite of the public. "For I confess my
chief endeavours are to delight the age in which I live. If the humour
of this be for low comedy, small accidents, and raillery, I will force my
genius to obey it, though with more reputation I could write in verse. I
know I am not so fitted by nature to write comedy; I want that gayety of
humour which is requisite to it. My conversation is slow and dull, my
humour saturnine and reserved: In short, I am none of those who endeavour
to break jests in company or make repartees. So that those who decry
my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit: Reputation
in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend."[49] For my own part,
though I have been forced to hold my nose in picking my way through these
ordures of Dryden, I am free to say that I think them far less morally
mischievous than that _corps-de-ballet_ literature in which the most
animal of the passions is made more temptingly naked by a veil of French
gauze. Nor does Dryden's lewdness leave such a reek in the mind as the
filthy cynicism of Swift, who delighted to uncover the nakedness of our
common mother.
It is pleasant to follow Dryden into the more congenial region of heroic
plays, though here also we find him making a false start. Anxious to
please the king,[50] and so able a reasoner as to convince even himself
of the justice of whatever cause he argued, he not only wrote tragedies
in the French style, but defended his practice in an essay which is by
far the most delightful reproduction of the classic dialogue ever written
in English. Eugenius (Lord Buckhurst), Lisideius (Sir Charles Sidley),
Crites (Sir E. Howard), and Neander (Dryden) are the four partakers in
the debate. The comparative merits of ancients and moderns, of the
Shakespearian and contemporary drama, of rhyme and blank verse, the value
of the three (supposed) Aristotelian unities, are the main topics
discussed. The tone of the discussion is admirable, midway between
bookishness and talk, and the fairness with which each side of the
argument is treated shows the breadth of Dryden's mind perhaps better
than any other one piece of his writing. There are no men of straw set up
to be knocked down again, as there commonly are in debates conducted upon
this plan. The "Defence" of the Essay is to be taken as a supplement to
Neander's share in it, as well as many scattered passages in subsequent
prefaces and dedications. All the interlocutors agree that "the sweetness
of English verse was never understood or practised by our fathers," and
that "our poesy is much improved by the happiness of some writers yet
living, who first taught us to mould our thoughts into easy and
significant words, to retrench the superfluities of expression, and to
make our rhyme so properly a part of the verse that it should never
mislead the sense, but itself be led and governed by it." In another
place he shows that by "living writers" he meant Waller and Denham.
"Rhyme has all the advantages of prose besides its own. But the
excellence and dignity of it were never fully known till Mr. Waller
taught it: he first made writing easily an art; first showed us to
conclude the sense, most commonly in distiches, which in the verse before
him runs on for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath
to overtake it."[51] Dryden afterwards changed his mind, and one of the
excellences of his own rhymed verse is, that his sense is too ample to be
concluded by the distich. Rhyme had been censured as unnatural in
dialogue; but Dryden replies that it is no more so than blank verse,
since no man talks any kind of verse in real life. But the argument for
rhyme is of another kind. "I am satisfied if it cause delight, for
delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy [he should have said
_means_]; instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy
only instructs as it delights.... The converse, therefore, which a poet
is to imitate must be heightened with all the arts and ornaments of
poesy, and must be such as, strictly considered, could never be supposed
spoken by any without premeditation.... Thus prose, though the rightful
prince, yet is by common consent deposed as too weak for the government
of serious plays, and, he failing, there now start up two competitors;
one the nearer in blood, which is blank verse; the other more fit for the
ends of government, which is rhyme. Blank verse is, indeed, the nearer
prose, but he is blemished with the weakness of his predecessor. Rhyme
(for I will deal clearly) has somewhat of the usurper in him; but he is
brave and generous, and his dominion pleasing."[52] To the objection that
the difficulties of rhyme will lead to circumlocution, he answers in
substance, that a good poet will know how to avoid them.
It is curious how long the superstition that Waller was the refiner of
English verse has prevailed since Dryden first gave it vogue. He was a
very poor poet and a purely mechanical versifier. He has lived mainly on
the credit of a single couplet,
"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed.
Lets in new light through chinks that Time hath made,"
in which the melody alone belongs to him, and the conceit, such as it is,
to Samuel Daniel, who said, long before, that the body's
"Walls, grown thin, permit the mind
To look out thorough and his frailty find."
Waller has made worse nonsense of it in the transfusion. It might seem
that Ben Jonson had a prophetic foreboding of him when he wrote: "Others
there are that have no composition at all, but a kind of tuning and
rhyming fall, in what they write. It runs and slides and only makes a
sound. Women's poets they are called, as you have women's tailors.
They write a verse as smooth, as soft, as cream
In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream.
You may sound these wits and find the depth of them with your
middle-finger."[53] It seems to have been taken for granted by Waller, as
afterwards by Dryden, that our elder poets bestowed no thought upon their
verse. "Waller was smooth," but unhappily he was also flat, and his
importation of the French theory of the couplet as a kind of thought-coop
did nothing but mischief.[54] He never compassed even a smoothness
approaching this description of a nightingale's song by a third-rate poet
of the earlier school,--
"Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note
Through the sleek passage of her open throat,
A clear, unwrinkled song,"--
one of whose beauties is its running over into the third verse. Those
poets indeed
"Felt music's pulse in all her arteries ";
and Dryden himself found out, when he came to try it, that blank verse
was not so easy a thing as he at first conceived it, nay, that it is the
most difficult of all verse, and that it must make up in harmony, by
variety of pause and modulation, for what it loses in the melody of
rhyme. In what makes the chief merit of his later versification, he but
rediscovered the secret of his predecessors in giving to rhymed
pentameters something of the freedom of blank verse, and not mistaking
metre for rhythm.
Voltaire, in his Commentary on Corneille, has sufficiently lamented the
awkwardness of movement imposed upon the French dramatists by the gyves
of rhyme. But he considers the necessity of overcoming this obstacle, on
the whole, an advantage. Difficulty is his tenth and superior muse. How
did Dryden, who says nearly the same thing, succeed in his attempt at the
French manner? He fell into every one of its vices, without attaining
much of what constitutes its excellence. From the nature of the language,
all French poetry is purely artificial, and its high polish is all that
keeps out decay. The length of their dramatic verse forces the French
into much tautology, into bombast in its original meaning, the stuffing
out a thought with words till it fills the line. The rigid system of
their rhyme, which makes it much harder to manage than in English, has
accustomed them to inaccuracies of thought which would shock them in
prose. For example, in the "Cinna" of Corneille, as originally written,
Emilie says to Augustus,--
"Ces flammes dans nos coeurs dès longtemps étoient nées,
Et ce sont des secrets de plus de quatre années."
I say nothing of the second verse, which is purely prosaic surplusage
exacted by the rhyme, nor of the jingling together of _ces, dès, étoient,
nées, des,_ and _secrets_, but I confess that _nées_ does not seem to be
the epithet that Corneille would have chosen for _flammes_, if he could
have had his own way, and that flames would seem of all things the
hardest to keep secret. But in revising, Corneille changed the first
verse thus,--
"Ces flammes dans nos coeurs _sans votre ordre_ étoient nées."
Can anything be more absurd than flames born to order? Yet Voltaire, on
his guard against these rhyming pitfalls for the sense, does not notice
this in his minute comments on this play. Of extravagant metaphor, the
result of this same making sound the file-leader of sense, a single
example from "Heraclius" shall suffice:--
"La vapeur de mon sang ira grossir la foudre
Que Dieu tient déja prête à le reduire en poudre."
One cannot think of a Louis Quatorze Apollo except in a full-bottomed
periwig, and the tragic style of their poets is always showing the
disastrous influence of that portentous comet. It is the _style perruque_
in another than the French meaning of the phrase, and the skill lay in
dressing it majestically, so that, as Cibber says, "upon the head of a
man of sense, _if it became him_, it could never fail of drawing to him a
more partial regard and benevolence than could possibly be hoped for in
an ill-made one." It did not become Dryden, and he left it off.[55]
Like his own Zimri, Dryden was "all for" this or that fancy, till he took
up with another. But even while he was writing on French models, his
judgment could not be blinded to their defects. "Look upon the 'Cinna'
and the 'Pompey,' they are not so properly to be called plays as long
discourses of reason of State, and 'Polieucte' in matters of religion is
as solemn as the long stops upon our organs; ... their actors speak by
the hour-glass like our parsons.... I deny not but this may suit well
enough with the French, for as we, who are a more sullen people, come to
be diverted at our plays, so they, who are of an airy and gay temper,
come thither to make themselves more serious."[56] With what an air of
innocent unconsciousness the sarcasm is driven home! Again, while he was
still slaving at these bricks without straw, he says: "The present French
poets are generally accused that, wheresoever they lay the scene, or in
whatever age, the manners of their heroes are wholly French. Racine's
Bajazet is bred at Constantinople, but his civilities are conveyed to him
by some secret passage from Versailles into the Seraglio." It is curious
that Voltaire, speaking of the _Bérénice_ of Racine, praises a passage in
it for precisely what Dryden condemns: "Il semble qu'on entende
_Henriette_ d'Angleterre elle-même parlant au marquis de _Vardes_. La
politesse de la cour de _Louis XIV_., l'agrément de la langue Française,
la douceur de la versification la plus naturelle, le sentiment le plus
tendre, tout se trouve dans ce peu de vers." After Dryden had broken
away from the heroic style, he speaks out more plainly. In the Preface
to his "All for Love," in reply to some cavils upon "little, and not
essential decencies," the decision about which he refers to a master of
ceremonies, he goes on to say: "The French poets, I confess, are strict
observers of these punctilios; ... in this nicety of manners does the
excellency of French poetry consist. Their heroes are the most civil
people breathing, but their good breeding seldom extends to a word of
sense. All their wit is in their ceremony; they want the genius which
animates our stage, and therefore 't is but necessary, when they cannot
please, that they should take care not to offend.... They are so careful
not to exasperate a critic that they never leave him any work, ... for no
part of a poem is worth our discommending where the whole is insipid, as
when we have once tasted palled wine we stay not to examine it glass by
glass. But while they affect to shine in trifles, they are often careless
in essentials.... For my part, I desire to be tried by the laws of my own
country." This is said in heat, but it is plain enough that his mind was
wholly changed. In his discourse on epic poetry he is as decided, but
more temperate. He says that the French heroic verse "runs with more
activity than strength.[57] Their language is not strung with sinews like
our English; it has the nimbleness of a greyhound, but not the bulk and
body of a mastiff. Our men and our verses overbear them by their weight,
and _pondere, non numero_, is the British motto. The French have set up
purity for the standard of their language, and a masculine vigor is that
of ours. Like their tongue is the genius of their poets,--light and
trifling in comparison of the English."[58]
Dryden might have profited by an admirable saying of his own, that "they
who would combat general authority with particular opinion must first
establish themselves a reputation of understanding better than other
men." He understood the defects much better than the beauties of the
French theatre. Lessing was even more one-sided in his judgment upon
it.[59] Goethe, with his usual wisdom, studied it carefully without
losing his temper, and tried to profit by its structural merits. Dryden,
with his eyes wide open, copied its worst faults, especially its
declamatory sentiment. He should have known that certain things can never
be transplanted, and that among these is a style of poetry whose great
excellence was that it was in perfect sympathy with the genius of the
people among whom it came into being. But the truth is, that Dryden had
no aptitude whatever for the stage, and in writing for it he was
attempting to make a trade of his genius,--an arrangement from which the
genius always withdraws in disgust. It was easier to make loose thinking
and the bad writing which betrays it pass unobserved while the ear was
occupied with the sonorous music of the rhyme to which they marched.
Except in "All for Love," "the only play," he tells us, "which he wrote
to please himself,"[60] there is no trace of real passion in any of his
tragedies. This, indeed, is inevitable, for there are no characters, but
only personages, in any except that. That is, in many respects, a noble
play, and there are few finer scenes, whether in the conception or the
carrying out, than that between Antony and Ventidius in the first
act.[61]
As usual, Dryden's good sense was not blind to the extravagances of his
dramatic style. In "Mac Flecknoe" he makes his own Maximin the type of
childish rant,
"And little Maximins the gods defy";
but, as usual also, he could give a plausible reason for his own mistakes
by means of that most fallacious of all fallacies which is true so far as
it goes. In his Prologue to the "Royal Martyr" he says:--
"And he who servilely creeps after sense
Is safe, but ne'er will reach an excellence.
* * * * *
But, when a tyrant for his theme he had,
He loosed the reins and let his muse run mad,
And, though he stumbles in a full career,
Yet rashness is a better fault than fear;
* * * * *
They then, who of each trip advantage take,
Find out those faults which they want wit to make."
And in the Preface to the same play he tells us: "I have not everywhere
observed the equality of numbers in my verse, partly by reason of my
haste, but more especially because I _would not have my sense a slave to
syllables_." Dryden, when he had not a bad case to argue, would have had
small respect for the wit whose skill lay in the making of faults, and
has himself, where his self-love was not engaged, admirably defined the
boundary which divides boldness from rashness. What Quintilian says of
Seneca applies very aptly to Dryden: "Velles eum suo ingenio dixisse,
alieno judicio."[62] He was thinking of himself, I fancy, when he makes
Ventidius say of Antony,--
"He starts out wide
And bounds into a vice that bears him far
From his first course, and plunges him in ills;
But, when his danger makes him find his fault,
Quick to observe, and full of sharp remorse,
He censures eagerly his own misdeeds,
Judging himself with malice to himself,
And not forgiving what as man he did
Because his other parts are more than man."
But bad though they nearly all are as wholes, his plays contain passages
which only the great masters have surpassed, and to the level of which no
subsequent writer for the stage has ever risen. The necessity of rhyme
often forced him to a platitude, as where he says,--
"My love was blind to your deluding art,
But blind men feel when stabbed so near the heart."[63]
But even in rhyme he not seldom justifies his claim to the title of
"glorious John." In the very play from which I have just quoted are these
verses in his best manner:--
"No, like his better Fortune I'll appear,
With open arms, loose veil, and flowing hair,
Just flying forward from her rolling sphere."
His comparisons, as I have said, are almost always happy. This, from the
"Indian Emperor," is tenderly pathetic:--
"As callow birds,
Whose mother's killed in seeking of the prey,
Cry in their nest and think her long away,
And, at each leaf that stirs, each blast of wind,
Gape for the food which they must never find."
And this, of the anger with which the Maiden Queen, striving to hide her
jealousy, betrays her love, is vigorous:--
"Her rage was love, and its tempestuous flame,
Like lightning, showed the heaven from whence it came."
The following simile from the "Conquest of Grenada" is as well expressed
as it is apt in conception:--
"I scarcely understand my own intent;
But, silk-worm like, so long within have wrought,
That I am lost in my own web of thought."
In the "Rival Ladies," Angelina, walking in the dark, describes her
sensations naturally and strikingly:--
"No noise but what my footsteps make, and they
Sound dreadfully and louder than by day:
They double too, and every step I take
Sounds thick, methinks, and more than one could make."
In all the rhymed plays[64] there are many passages which one is rather
inclined to like than sure he would be right in liking them. The
following verses from "Aurengzebe" are of this sort:--
"My love was such it needed no return,
Rich in itself, like elemental fire,
Whose pureness does no aliment require."
This is Cowleyish, and _pureness_ is surely the wrong word; and yet it is
better than mere commonplace. Perhaps what oftenest turns the balance in
Dryden's favor, when we are weighing his claims as a poet, is his
persistent capability of enthusiasm. To the last he kindles, and
sometimes _almost_ flashes out that supernatural light which is the
supreme test of poetic genius. As he himself so finely and
characteristically says in "Aurengzebe," there was no period in his life
when it was not true of him that
"He felt the inspiring heat, the absent god return."
The verses which follow are full of him, and, with the exception of the
single word _underwent_, are in his luckiest manner:--
"One loose, one sally of a hero's soul,
Does all the military art control.
While timorous wit goes round, or fords the shore,
He shoots the gulf, and is already o'er,
And, when the enthusiastic fit is spent,
Looks back amazed at what he underwent."[65]
Pithy sentences and phrases always drop from Dryden's pen as if unawares,
whether in prose or verse. I string together a few at random:--
"The greatest argument for love is love."
"Few know the use of life before 't is past."
"Time gives himself and is not valued."
"Death in itself is nothing; but we fear
To be we know not what, we know not where."
"Love either finds equality or makes it;
Like death, he knows no difference in degrees."
"That's empire, that which I can give away."
"Yours is a soul irregularly great,
Which, wanting temper, yet abounds in heat."
"Forgiveness to the injured does belong,
But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong."
"Poor women's thoughts are all extempore."
"The cause of love can never be assigned,
'T is in no face, but in the lover's mind."[66]
"Heaven can forgive a crime to penitence,
For Heaven can judge if penitence be true;
But man, who knows not hearts, should make examples."
"Kings' titles commonly begin by force,
Which time wears off and mellows into right."
"Fear's a large promiser; who subject live
To that base passion, know not what they give."
"The secret pleasure of the generous act
Is the great mind's great bribe."
"That bad thing, gold, buys all good things."
"Why, love does all that's noble here below."
"To prove religion true,
If either wit or sufferings could suffice,
All faiths afford the constant and the wise."
But Dryden, as he tells us himself,
"Grew weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme;
Passion's too fierce to be in fetters bound,
And Nature flies him like enchanted ground."
The finest things in his plays were written in blank verse, as vernacular
to him as the alexandrine to the French. In this he vindicates his claim
as a poet. His diction gets wings, and both his verse and his thought
become capable of a reach which was denied them when set in the stocks of
the couplet. The solid man becomes even airy in this new-found freedom:
Anthony says,
"How I loved,
Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours
That _danced away with down upon your feet_."
And what image was ever more delicately exquisite, what movement more
fadingly accordant with the sense, than in the last two verses of the
following passage?
"I feel death rising higher still and higher,
Within my bosom; every breath I fetch
Shuts up my life within a shorter compass,
_And, like the vanishing sound of bells, grows less
And less each pulse, till it be lost in air_."[67]
Nor was he altogether without pathos, though it is rare with him. The
following passage seems to me tenderly full of it:--
"Something like
That voice, methinks, I should have somewhere heard;
But floods of woe have hurried it far off
Beyond my ken of soul."[68]