"Live still! oh live! live even to be unkind!"
with its passionate eagerness and sobbing repetition, is worth a
ship-load of the long-drawn treacle of modern self-compassion.
Now and then, to be sure, we come upon something that makes us hesitate
again whether, after all, Dryden was not grandiose rather than great, as
in the two passages that next follow:--
"He looks secure of death, superior greatness,
Like Jove when he made Fate and said, Thou art
The slave of my creation."[69]
"I'm pleased with my own work; Jove was not more
With infant nature, when his spacious hand
Had rounded this huge ball of earth and seas,
To give it the first push and see it roll
Along the vast abyss."[70]
I should say that Dryden is more apt to dilate our fancy than our
thought, as great poets have the gift of doing. But if he have not the
potent alchemy that transmutes the lead of our commonplace associations
into gold, as Shakespeare knows how to do so easily, yet his sense is
always up to the sterling standard; and though he has not added so much
as some have done to the stock of bullion which others afterwards coin
and put in circulation, there are few who have minted so many phrases
that are still a part of our daily currency. The first line of the
following passage has been worn pretty smooth, but the succeeding ones
are less familiar:--
"Men are but children of a larger growth,
Our appetites as apt to change as theirs,
And full as craving too and full as vain;
And yet the soul, shut up in her dark room,
Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing;
But, like a mole in earth, busy and blind,
Works all her folly up and casts it outward
In the world's open view."[71]
The image is mixed and even contradictory, but the thought obtains grace
for it. I feel as if Shakespeare would have written _seeing_ for
_viewing_, thus gaining the strength of repetition in one verse and
avoiding the sameness of it in the other. Dryden, I suspect, was not much
given to correction, and indeed one of the great charms of his best
writing is that everything seems struck off at a heat, as by a superior
man in the best mood of his talk. Where he rises, he generally becomes
fervent rather than imaginative; his thought does not incorporate itself
in metaphor, as in purely poetic minds, but repeats and reinforces itself
in simile. Where he _is_ imaginative, it is in that lower sense which the
poverty of our language, for want of a better word, compels us to call
_picturesque_, and even then he shows little of that finer instinct which
suggests so much more than it tells, and works the more powerfully as it
taxes more the imagination of the reader. In Donne's "Relic" there is an
example of what I mean. He fancies some one breaking up his grave and
spying
"A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,"--
a verse that still shines there in the darkness of the tomb, after two
centuries, like one of those inextinguishable lamps whose secret is
lost.[72] Yet Dryden sometimes showed a sense of this magic of a
mysterious hint, as in the "Spanish Friar":--
"No, I confess, you bade me not in words;
The dial spoke not, but it made shrewd signs,
And pointed full upon the stroke of murder."
This is perhaps a solitary example. Nor is he always so possessed by the
image in his mind as unconsciously to choose even the picturesquely
imaginative word. He has done so, however, in this passage from "Marriage
à la Mode":--
"You ne'er mast hope again to see your princess,
Except as prisoners view fair walks and streets,
And careless passengers going by their grates."
But after all, he is best upon a level, table-land, it is true, and a
very high level, but still somewhere between the loftier peaks of
inspiration and the plain of every-day life. In those passages where he
moralizes he is always good, setting some obvious truth in a new light by
vigorous phrase and happy illustration. Take this (from "Oedipus") as a
proof of it:--
"The gods are just,
But how can finite measure infinite?
Reason! alas, it does not know itself!
Yet man, vain man, would with his short-lined plummet
Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice.
Whatever is, is in its causes just,
Since all things are by fate. But purblind man
Sees but a part o' th' chain, the nearest links,
His eyes not carrying to that equal beam
That poises all above."
From the same play I pick an illustration of that ripened sweetness of
thought and language which marks the natural vein of Dryden. One cannot
help applying the passage to the late Mr. Quincy:--
"Of no distemper, of no blast he died,
But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long,
E'en wondered at because he dropt no sooner;
Fate seemed to wind him up for fourscore years;
Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more,
Till, like a clock worn out with eating Time,
The wheels of weary life at last stood still."[73]