"Gone so soon!
Is Death no more? He used him carelessly,
With a familiar kindness; ere he knocked,
Ran to the door and took him in his arms,
As who should say, You're welcome at all hours,
A friend need give no warning."
With one more extract from the same play, which is in every way his best,
for he had, when he wrote it, been feeding on the bee-bread of
Shakespeare, I shall conclude. Antony says,
"For I am now so sunk from what I was,
Thou find'st me at my lowest water-mark.
The rivers that ran in and raised my fortunes
Are all dried up, or take another course:
What I have left is from my native spring;
I've a heart still that swells in scorn of Fate,
And lifts me to my banks."
This is certainly, from beginning to end, in what used to be called the
_grand_ style, at once noble and natural. I have not undertaken to
analyze any one of the plays, for (except in "All for Love") it would
have been only to expose their weakness. Dryden had _no_ constructive
faculty; and in every one of his longer poems that required a plot, the
plot is bad, always more or less inconsistent with itself, and rather
hitched-on to the subject than combining with it. It is fair to say,
however, before leaving this part of Dryden's literary work, that Horne
Tooke thought "Don Sebastian" "the best play extant."[74]
Gray admired the plays of Dryden, "not as dramatic compositions, but as
poetry."[75] "There are as many things finely said in his plays as almost
by anybody," said Pope to Spence. Of their rant, their fustian, their
bombast, their bad English, of their innumerable sins against Dryden's
own better conscience both as poet and critic, I shall excuse myself from
giving any instances.[76] I like what is good in Dryden so much, and it
_is_ so good, that I think Gray was justified in always losing his temper
when he heard "his faults criticised."[77]
It is as a satirist and pleader in verse that Dryden is best known, and
as both he is in some respects unrivalled. His satire is not so sly as
Chaucer's, but it is distinguished by the same good-nature. There is no
malice in it. I shall not enter into his literary quarrels further than
to say that he seems to me, on the whole, to have been forbearing, which
is the more striking as he tells us repeatedly that he was naturally
vindictive. It was he who called revenge "the darling attribute of
heaven." "I complain not of their lampoons and libels, though I have been
the public mark for many years. I am vindictive enough to have repelled
force by force, if I could imagine that any of them had ever reached me."
It was this feeling of easy superiority, I suspect, that made him the
mark for so much jealous vituperation. Scott is wrong in attributing his
onslaught upon Settle to jealousy because one of the latter's plays had
been performed at Court,--an honor never paid to any of Dryden's.[78] I
have found nothing like a trace of jealousy in that large and benignant
nature. In his vindication of the "Duke of Guise," he says, with honest
confidence in himself: "Nay, I durst almost refer myself to some of the
angry poets on the other side, whether I have not rather countenanced and
assisted their beginnings than hindered them from rising." He seems to
have been really as indifferent to the attacks on himself as Pope
pretended to be. In the same vindication he says of the "Rehearsal," the
only one of them that had any wit in it, and it has a great deal: "Much
less am I concerned at the noble name of Bayes; that's a brat so like his
own father that he cannot be mistaken for any other body. They might as
reasonably have called Tom Sternhold Virgil, and the resemblance would
have held as well." In his Essay on Satire he says: "And yet we know that
in Christian charity all offences are to be forgiven as we expect the
like pardon for those we daily commit against Almighty God. And this
consideration has often made me tremble when I was saying our Lord's
Prayer; for the plain condition of the forgiveness which we beg is the
pardoning of others the offences which they have done to us; for which
reason I have many times avoided the commission of that fault, even when
I have been notoriously provoked."[79] And in another passage he says,
with his usual wisdom: "Good sense and good-nature are never separated,
though the ignorant world has thought otherwise. Good-nature, by which I
mean beneficence and candor, is the product of right reason, which of
necessity will give allowance to the failings of others, by considering
that there is nothing perfect in mankind." In the same Essay he gives his
own receipt for satire: "How easy it is to call rogue and villain, and
that wittily! but how hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a
knave, without using any of those opprobrious terms!... This is the
mystery of that noble trade.... Neither is it true that this fineness of
raillery is offensive: a witty man is tickled while he is hurt in this
manner, and a fool feels it not.... There is a vast difference between
the slovenly butchering of a man and the fineness of a stroke that
separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place. A
man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain
piece of work, of a bare hanging; but to make a malefactor die sweetly
was only belonging to her husband. I wish I could apply it to myself, if
the reader would be kind enough to think it belongs to me. The character
of Zimri in my 'Absalom' is, in my opinion, worth the whole poem. It is
not bloody, but it is ridiculous enough, and he for whom it was intended
was too witty to resent it as an injury.... I avoided the mention of
great crimes, and applied myself to the representing of blind sides and
little extravagances, to which, the wittier a man is, he is genrally the
more obnoxious."
Dryden thought his genius led him that way. In his elegy on the satirist
Oldham, whom Hallam, without reading him, I suspect, ranks next to
Dryden,[80] he says:--
"For sure our souls were near allied, and thine
Cast in the same poetic mould with mine;
One common note in either lyre did strike,
And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike."
His practice is not always so delicate as his theory; but if he was
sometimes rough, he never took a base advantage. He knocks his antagonist
down, and there an end. Pope seems to have nursed his grudge, and then,
watching his chance, to have squirted vitriol from behind a corner,
rather glad than otherwise if it fell on the women of those he hated or
envied. And if Dryden is never dastardly, as Pope often was, so also he
never wrote anything so maliciously depreciatory as Pope's unprovoked
attack on Addison. Dryden's satire is often coarse, but where it is
coarsest, it is commonly in defence of himself against attacks that were
themselves brutal. Then, to be sure, he snatches the first ready cudgel,
as in Shadwell's case, though even then there is something of the
good-humor of conscious strength. Pope's provocation was too often the
mere opportunity to say a biting thing, where he could do it safely. If
his victim showed fight, he tried to smooth things over, as with Dennis.
Dryden could forget that he had ever had a quarrel, but he never slunk
away from any, least of all from one provoked by himself.[81] Pope's
satire is too much occupied with the externals of manners, habits,
personal defects, and peculiarities. Dryden goes right to the rooted
character of the man, to the weaknesses of his nature, as where he says
of Burnet:--
"Prompt to assail, and careless of defence,
Invulnerable in his impudence,
He dares the world, and, eager of a name,
He thrusts about and _justles into fame_.
So fond of loud report that, not to miss
Of being known (his last and utmost bliss),
_He rather would be known for what he is_."
It would be hard to find in Pope such compression of meaning as in the
first, or such penetrative sarcasm as in the second of the passages I
have underscored. Dryden's satire is still quoted for its
comprehensiveness of application, Pope's rather for the elegance of its
finish and the point of its phrase than for any deeper qualities.[82] I
do not remember that Dryden ever makes poverty a reproach.[83] He was
above it, alike by generosity of birth and mind. Pope is always the
_parvenu_, always giving himself the airs of a fine gentleman, and, like
Horace Walpole and Byron, affecting superiority to professional
literature. Dryden, like Lessing, was a hack-writer, and was proud, as an
honest man has a right to be, of being able to get his bread by his
brains. He lived in Grub Street all his life, and never dreamed that
where a man of genius lived was not the best quarter of the town. "Tell
his Majesty," said sturdy old Jonson, "that his soul lives in an alley."
Dryden's prefaces are a mine of good writing and judicious criticism. His
_obiter dicta_ have often the penetration, and always more than the
equity, of Voltaire's, for Dryden never loses temper, and never
altogether qualifies his judgment by his self-love. "He was a more
universal writer than Voltaire," said Horne Tooke, and perhaps it is true
that he had a broader view, though his learning was neither so extensive
nor so accurate. My space will not afford many extracts, but I cannot
forbear one or two. He says of Chaucer, that "he is a perpetual fountain
of good sense,"[84] and likes him better than Ovid,--a bold confession in
that day. He prefers the pastorals of Theocritus to those of Virgil.
"Virgil's shepherds are too well read in the philosophy of Epicurus and
of Plato"; "there is a kind of rusticity in all those pompous verses,
somewhat of a holiday shepherd strutting in his country buskins";[85]
"Theocritus is softer than Ovid, he touches the passions more delicately,
and performs all this out of his own fund, without diving into the arts
and sciences for a supply. Even his Doric dialect has an incomparable
sweetness in his clownishness, like a fair shepherdess, in her country
russet, talking in a Yorkshire tone."[86] Comparing Virgil's verse with
that of some other poets, he says, that his "numbers are perpetually
varied to increase the delight of the reader, so that the same sounds are
never repeated twice together. On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, though
they write in styles different from each other, yet have each of them but
one sort of music in their verses. All the versification and little
variety of Claudian is included within the compass of four or five lines,
and then he begins again in the same tenor, perpetually closing his sense
at the end of a verse, and that verse commonly which they call golden, or
two substantives and two adjectives with a verb betwixt them to keep the
peace. Ovid, with all his sweetness, has as little variety of numbers and
sound as he; he is always, as it were, upon the hand-gallop, and his
verse runs upon carpet-ground."[87] What a dreary half-century would have
been saved to English poetry, could Pope have laid these sentences to
heart! Upon translation, no one has written so much and so well as Dryden
in his various prefaces. Whatever has been said since is either expansion
or variation of what he had said before. His general theory may be stated
as an aim at something between the literalness of metaphrase and the
looseness of paraphase. "Where I have enlarged," he says, "I desire the
false critics would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine,
but either _they are secretly in the poet_, or may be fairly deduced from
him." Coleridge, with his usual cleverness of _assimilation_, has
condensed him in a letter to Wordsworth: "There is no medium between a
prose version and one on the avowed principle of _compensation_ in the
widest sense, i.e. manner, genius, total effect."[88]
I have selected these passages, not because they are the best, but
because they have a near application to Dryden himself. His own
characterization of Chaucer (though too narrow for the greatest but one
of English poets) is the best that could be given of himself: "He is a
perpetual fountain of good sense." And the other passages show him a
close and open-minded student of the art he professed. Has his influence
on our literature, but especially on our poetry, been on the whole for
good or evil? If he could have been read with the liberal understanding
which he brought to the works of others, I should answer at once that it
had been beneficial. But his translations and paraphrases, in some ways
the best things he did, were done, like his plays, under contract to
deliver a certain number of verses for a specified sum. The
versification, of which he had learned the art by long practice, is
excellent, but his haste has led him to fill out the measure of lines
with phrases that add only to dilute, and thus the clearest, the most
direct, the most manly versifier of his time became, without meaning it,
the source (_fons et origo malorum_) of that poetic diction from which
our poetry has not even yet recovered. I do not like to say it, but he
has sometimes smothered the childlike simplicity of Chaucer under
feather-beds of verbiage. What this kind of thing came to in the next
century, when everybody ceremoniously took a bushel-basket to bring a
wren's egg to market in, is only too sadly familiar. It is clear that his
natural taste led Dryden to prefer directness and simplicity of style. If
he was too often tempted astray by Artifice, his love of Nature betrays
itself in many an almost passionate outbreak of angry remorse. Addison
tells us that he took particular delight in the reading of our old
English ballads. What he valued above all things was Force, though in his
haste he is willing to make a shift with its counterfeit, Effect. As
usual, he had a good reason to urge for what he did: "I will not excuse,
but justify myself for one pretended crime for which I am liable to be
charged by false critics, not only in this translation, but in many of my
original poems,--that I Latinize too much. It is true that when I find an
English word significant and sounding, I neither borrow from the Latin or
any other language; but when I want at home I must seek abroad. If
sounding words are not of our growth and manufacture, who shall hinder me
to import them from a foreign country? I carry not out the treasure of
the nation which is never to return; but what I bring from Italy I spend
in England: here it remains, and here it circulates; for if the coin be
good, it will pass from one hand to another. I trade both with the living
and the dead for the enrichment of our native language. We have enough in
England to supply our necessity; but if we will have things of
magnificence and splendor, we must get them by commerce.... Therefore, if
I find a word in a classic author, I propose it to be naturalized by
using it myself, and if the public approve of it the bill passes. But
every man cannot distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry; every man,
therefore, is not fit to innovate."[89] This is admirably said, and with
Dryden's accustomed penetration to the root of the matter. The Latin has
given us most of our canorous words, only they must not be confounded
with merely sonorous ones, still less with phrases that, instead of
supplementing the sense, encumber it. It was of Latinizing in this sense
that Dryden was guilty. Instead of stabbing, he "with steel invades the
life." The consequence was that by and by we have Dr. Johnson's poet,
Savage, telling us,--
"In front, a parlor meets my entering view,
Opposed a room to sweet refection due";
Dr. Blacklock making a forlorn maiden say of her "dear," who is out
late,--
"Or by some apoplectic fit deprest
Perhaps, alas! he seeks eternal rest";
and Mr. Bruce, in a Danish war-song, calling on the vikings to "assume
their oars." But it must be admitted of Dryden that he seldom makes the
second verse of a couplet the mere trainbearer to the first, as Pope was
continually doing. In Dryden the rhyme waits upon the thought; in Pope
and his school the thought courtesies to the tune for which it is
written.
Dryden has also been blamed for his gallicisms.[90] He tried some, it is
true, but they have not been accepted.
I do not think he added a single word to the language; unless, as I
suspect, he first used _magnetism_ in its present sense of moral
attraction. What he did in his best writing was to use the English as if
it were a spoken, and not merely an inkhorn language; as if it were his
own to do what he pleased with it, as if it need not be ashamed of
itself.[91]
In this respect, his service to our prose was greater than any other man
has ever rendered. He says he formed his style upon Tillotson's (Bossuet,
on the other hand, formed _his_ upon Corneille's); but I rather think he
got it at Will's, for its great charm is that it has the various freedom
of talk.[92] In verse, he had a pomp which, excellent in itself, became
pompousness in his imitators. But he had nothing of Milton's ear for
various rhythm and interwoven harmony. He knew how to give new
modulation, sweetness, and force to the pentameter; but in what used to
be called pindarics, I am heretic enough to think he generally failed.
His so much praised "Alexander's Feast" (in parts of it, at least) has no
excuse for its slovenly metre and awkward expression, but that it was
written for music. He himself tells us, in the epistle dedicatory to
"King Arthur," "that the numbers of poetry and vocal music are sometimes
so contrary, that in many places I have been obliged to cramp my verses
and make them ragged to the reader that they may be harmonious to the
hearer." His renowned ode suffered from this constraint, but this is no
apology for the vulgarity of conception in too many passages.[93]
Dryden's conversion to Romanism has been commonly taken for granted as
insincere, and has therefore left an abiding stain on his character,
though the other mud thrown at him by angry opponents or rivals brushed
off so soon as it was dry. But I think his change of faith susceptible of
several explanations, none of them in any way discreditable to him. Where
Church and State are habitually associated, it is natural that minds even
of a high order should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a
subtler mode of police.[94] Dryden, conservative by nature, had
discovered before Joseph de Maistre, that Protestantism, so long as it
justified its name by continuing to be an active principle, was the
abettor of Republicanism. I think this is hinted in more than one passage
in his preface to "The Hind and Panther." He may very well have preferred
Romanism because of its elder claim to authority in all matters of
doctrine, but I think he had a deeper reason in the constitution of his
own mind. That he was "naturally inclined to scepticism in philosophy,"
he tells us of himself in the preface to the "Religio Laici"; but he was
a sceptic with an imaginative side, and in such characters scepticism and
superstition play into each other's hands. This finds a curious
illustration in a letter to his sons, written four years before his
death: "Towards the latter end of this month, September, Charles will
begin to recover his perfect health, according to his Nativity, which,
casting it myself, I am sure is true, and all things hitherto have
happened accordingly to the very time that I predicted them." Have we
forgotten Montaigne's votive offerings at the shrine of Loreto?
Dryden was short of body, inclined to stoutness, and florid of
complexion. He is said to have had "a sleepy eye," but was handsome and
of a manly carriage. He "was not a very genteel man, he was intimate with
none but poetical men.[95] He was said to be a very good man by all that
knew him: he was as plump as Mr. Pitt, of a fresh color and a down look,
and not very conversible." So Pope described him to Spence. He still
reigns in literary tradition, as when at Will's his elbow-chair had the
best place by the fire in winter, or on the balcony in summer, and when a
pinch from his snuff-box made a young author blush with pleasure as would
now-a-days a favorable notice in the "Saturday Review." What gave and
secures for him this singular eminence? To put it in a single word, I
think that his qualities and faculties were in that rare combination
which makes character. This gave _flavor_ to whatever he wrote,--a very
rare quality.
Was he, then, a great poet? Hardly, in the narrowest definition. But he
was a strong thinker who sometimes carried common sense to a height where
it catches the light of a diviner air, and warmed reason till it had
wellnigh the illuminating property of intuition. Certainly he is not,
like Spenser, the poets' poet, but other men have also their rights. Even
the Philistine is a man and a brother, and is entirely right so far as he
sees. To demand more of him is to be unreasonable. And he sees, among
other things, that a man who undertakes to write should first have a
meaning perfectly defined to himself, and then should be able to set it
forth clearly in the best words. This is precisely Dryden's praise,[96]
and amid the rickety sentiment looming big through misty phrase which
marks so much of modern literature, to read him is as bracing as a
northwest wind. He blows the mind clear. In ripeness of mind and bluff
heartiness of expression, he takes rank with the best. His phrase is
always a short-cut to his sense, for his estate was too spacious for him
to need that trick of winding the path of his thought about, and planting
it out with clumps of epithet, by which the landscape-gardeners of
literature give to a paltry half-acre the air of a park. In poetry, to be
next-best is, in one sense, to be nothing; and yet to be among the first
in any kind of writing, as Dryden certainly was, is to be one of a very
small company. He had, beyond most, the gift of the right word. And if he
does not, like one or two of the greater masters of song, stir our
sympathies by that indefinable aroma so magical in arousing the subtile
associations of the soul, he has this in common with the few great
writers, that the winged seeds of his thought embed themselves in the
memory and germinate there. If I could be guilty of the absurdity of
recommending to a young man any author on whom to form his style, I
should tell him that, next to having something that will not stay unsaid,
he could find no safer guide than Dryden.
Cowper, in a letter to Mr. Unwin (5th January, 1782), expresses what I
think is the common feeling about Dryden, that, with all his defects, he
had that indefinable something we call Genius. "But I admire Dryden most
[he had been speaking of Pope], who has succeeded by mere dint of genius,
and in spite of a laziness and a carelessness almost peculiar to himself.
His faults are numberless, and so are his beauties. His faults are those
of a great man, and his beauties are such (at least sometimes) as Pope
with all his touching and retouching could never equal." But, after all,
perhaps no man has summed him up so well as John Dennis, one of Pope's
typical dunces, a dull man outside of his own sphere, as men are apt to
be, but who had some sound notions as a critic, and thus became the
object of Pope's fear and therefore of his resentment. Dennis speaks of
him as his "departed friend, whom I infinitely esteemed when living for
the solidity of his thought, for the spring and the warmth and the
beautiful turn of it; for the power and variety and fulness of his
harmony; for the purity, the perspicuity, the energy of his expression;
and, whenever these great qualities are required, for the pomp and
solemnity and majesty of his style."[97]
Footnotes:
[1] The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq. In six volumes. London:
Printed for Jacob Tonson, in the Strand. MDCCXXXV. 18mo.
The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose-Works of John Dryden, now first
collected. With Notes and Illustrations. An Account of the Life and
Writings of the Author, grounded on Original and Authentick
Documents; and a Collection of his Letters, the greatest Part of
which has never before been published. By Edmund Malone, Esq. London:
T. Cadell and W. Davies, in the Strand. 4 vols. 8vo.
The Poetical Works of John Dryden. (Edited by Mitford.) London: W.
Pickering. 1832. 6 vols. 18mo.
[2] His "Character of a Happy Warrior" (1806), one of his noblest
poems, has a dash of Dryden in it,--still more his "Epistle to Sir
George Beaumont (1811)."
[3] He studied Dryden's versification before writing his "Lamia."
[4] On the Origin and Progress of Satire. See Johnson's
counter-opinion in his life of Dryden.
[5] Essay on Dramatick Posey.
[6] Life of Lucian.
[7] "The great man must have that intellect which puts in motion the
intellect of others."--Landor, _Im. Con._, Diogenes and Plato.
[8] Character of Polybius (1692).
[9] "For my own part, who must confess it to my shame that I never
read anything but for pleasure." Life of Plutarch (1683).
[10] Gray says petulantly enough that "Dryden was as disgraceful to
the office, from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have
been from his verses."--Gray to Mason, 19th December, 1757.
[11] Essay on the Origin and Progress of Satire.
[12] Dedication of the Georgics.
[13] Dryden's penetration is always remarkable. His general judgment
of Polybius coincides remarkably with that of Mommsen. (Röm. Gesch.
II. 448, _seq_.)
[14] "I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in English."
Preface to Second Miscellany. Fox said that it "was better than the
original." J.C. Scaliger said of Erasmus: "Ex alieno ingenio poeta,
ex suo versificator."
[15] In one of the last letters he ever wrote, thanking his cousin
Mrs. Steward for a gift of marrow-puddings, he says: "A chine of
honest bacon would please my appetite more than all the
marrow-puddings; for I like them better plain, having a very vulgar
stomach." So of Cowley he says: "There was plenty enough, but ill
sorted, whole pyramids of sweetmeats for boys and women, but little
of solid meat for men." The physical is a truer antitype of the
spiritual man than we are willing to admit, and the brain is often
forced to acknowledge the inconvenient country-cousinship of the
stomach.
[16] In his preface to "All for Love," he says, evidently alluding to
himself: "If he have a friend whose hastiness in writing is his
greatest fault, Horace would have taught him to have minced the
matter, and to have called it readiness of thought and a flowing
fancy." And in the Preface to the Fables he says of Homer: "This
vehemence of his, I confess, is more suitable to my temper." He makes
other allusions to it.
[17] Preface to the Fables.
[18] _Wool_ is Sylvester's word. Dryden reminds us of Burke in this
also, that he always quotes from memory and seldom exactly. His
memory was better for things than for words. This helps to explain
the length of time it took him to master that vocabulary at last so
various, full, and seemingly extemporaneous. He is a large quoter,
though, with his usual inconsistency, he says, "I am no admirer of
quotations." (Essay on Heroic Plays.)
[19] In the _Epimetheus_ of a poet usually as elegant as Gray
himself, one's finer sense is a little jarred by the
"Spectral gleam their snow-white _dresses_."
[20] This probably suggested to Young the grandiose image in his
"Last Day" (B. ii.):--
"Those overwhelming armies....
Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn
Roused the broad front and called the battle on."
This, to be sure, is no plagiarism; but it should be carried to
Dryden's credit that we catch the poets of the next half-century
oftener with their hands in his pockets than in those of any one
else.
[21] Essay on Satire.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Preface to Fables. Men are always inclined to revenge themselves
on their old idols in the first enthusiasm of conversion to a purer
faith. Cowley had all the faults that Dryden loads him with, and yet
his popularity was to some extent deserved. He at least had a theory
that poetry should soar, not creep, and longed for some expedient, in
the failure of natural wings, by which he could lift himself away
from the conventional and commonplace. By beating out the substance
of Pindar very thin, he contrived a kind of balloon which, tumid with
gas, did certainly mount a little, _into_ the clouds, if not above
them, though sure to come suddenly down with a bump. His odes,
indeed, are an alternation of upward jerks and concussions, and smack
more of Chapelain than of the Theban, but his prose is very
agreeable,--Montaigne and water, perhaps, but with some flavor of the
Gascon wine left. The strophe of his ode to Dr. Scarborough, in which
he compares his surgical friend, operating for the stone, to Moses
striking the rock, more than justifies all the ill that Dryden could
lay at his door. It was into precisely such mud-holes that Cowley's
Will-o'-the-Wisp had misguided him. Men may never wholly shake off a
vice but they are always conscious of it, and hate the tempter.
[24] Dedication of Georgics.
[25] In a letter to Dennis, 1693.
[26] Preface to Fables.
[27] More than half a century later, Orrery, in his "Remarks" on
Swift, says: "We speak and we write at random; and if a man's common
conversation were committed to paper, he would be startled _for_ _to_
find himself guilty in _so few_ sentences of so many solecisms and
such false English." I do not remember _for to_ anywhere in Dryden's
prose. _So few_ has long been denizened; no wonder, since it is
nothing more than _si peu_ Anglicized.
[28] Letter to the Lord High Treasurer.
[29] Ibid. He complains of "manglings and abbreviations." "What does
your Lordship think of the words drudg'd, disturb'd, rebuk'd,
fledg'd, and a thousand others?" In a contribution to the "Tatler"
(No. 230) he ridicules the use of _'um_ for _them_, and a number of
slang Footnote: phrases, among which is _mob_. "The war," he says,
"has introduced abundance of polysyllables, which will never be able
to live many more campaigns." _Speculations, operations,
preliminaries, ambassadors, pallisadoes, communication,
circumvallation, battalions_, are the instances he gives, and all are
now familiar. No man, or body of men, can dam the stream of language.
Dryden is rather fond of _'em_ for _them_, but uses it rarely in his
prose. Swift himself prefers _'tis_ to _it is_, as does Emerson
still. In what Swift says of the poets, he may be fairly suspected of
glancing at Dryden, who was his kinsman, and whose prefaces and
translation of Virgil he ridicules in the "Tale of a Tub." Dryden is
reported to have said of him, "Cousin Swift is no poet." The Dean
began his literary career by Pindaric odes to Athenian Societies and
the like,--perhaps the greatest mistake as to his own powers of which
an author was ever guilty. It was very likely that he would send
these to his relative, already distinguished, for his opinion upon
them. If this was so, the justice of Dryden's judgment must have
added to the smart. Swift never forgot or forgave: Dryden was
careless enough to do the one, and large enough to do the other.
[30] Both Malone and Scott accept this gentleman's evidence without
question, but I confess suspicion of a memory that runs back more
than eighty-one years, and recollects a man before he had any claim
to remembrance. Dryden was never poor, and there is at Oxford a
portrait of him painted in 1664, which represents him in a superb
periwig and laced band. This was "before he had paid his court with
success to the great." But the story is at least _ben trovato_, and
morally true enough to serve as an illustration. Who the "old
gentleman" was has never been discovered. Of Crowne (who has some
interest for us as a sometime student at Harvard) he says: "Many a
cup of metheglm have I drank with little starch'd Johnny Crown; we
called him so, from the stiff, unalterable primness of his long
cravat." Crowne reflects no more credit on his Alma Mater than
Downing. Both were sneaks, and of such a kind as, I think, can only
be produced by a debauched Puritanism. Crowne, as a rival of Dryden,
is contemptuously alluded to by Cibber in his "Apology."
[31] Diary, III. 390. Almost the only notices of Dryden that make him
alive to me I have found in the delicious book of this
Polonius-Montaigne, the only man who ever had the courage to keep a
sincere journal, even under the shelter of cipher.
[32] Tale of a Tub, Sect. V. Pepys also speaks of buying the "Maiden
Queen" of Mr. Dryden's, which he himself, in his preface, seems to
brag of, and indeed is a good play.--18th January, 1668.
[33] He is fond of this image. In the "Maiden Queen" Celadon tells
Sabina that, when he is with her rival Florimel, his heart is still
her prisoner, "it only draws a longer chain after it." Goldsmith's
fancy was taken by it; and everybody admires in the "Traveller" the
extraordinary conceit of a heart dragging a lengthening chain. The
smoothness of too many rhymed pentameters is that of thin ice over
shallow water; so long as we glide along rapidly, all is well; but if
we dwell a moment on any one spot, we may find ourselves knee-deep in
mud. A later poet, in trying to improve on Goldsmith, shows the
ludicrousness of the image:--
"And round my heart's leg ties its galling chain."
To write imaginatively a man should have--imagination!
[34] See his epistle dedicatory to the "Rival Ladies" (1664). For the
other side, see particularly a passage in his "Discourse on Epic
Poetry" (1697).
[35] In the same way he had two years before assumed that Shakespeare
"was the first who, to shun the pains of continued rhyming, invented
that kind of writing which we call blank verse!" Dryden was never, I
suspect, a very careful student of English literature. He seems never
to have known that Surrey translated a part of the "Aeneid" (and with
great spirit) into blank verse. Indeed, he was not a scholar, in the
proper sense of the word, but he had that faculty of rapid
assimilation without study, so remarkable in Coleridge and other rich
minds, whose office is rather to impregnate than to invent. These
brokers of thought perform a great office in literature, second only
to that of originators.
[36] Essay on Satire. What he has said just before this about Butler
is worth noting. Butler had had a chief hand in the "Rehearsal," but
Dryden had no grudges where the question was of giving its just
praise to merit.
[37] The conclusion of the second canto of Book Third is the best
continuously fine passage. Dryden's poem has nowhere so much meaning
in so small space as Davenant, when he says of the sense of honor
that,
"Like Power, it grows to nothing, growing less."
Davenant took the hint of the stanza from Sir John Davies. Wyatt
first used it, so far as I know, in English.
[38] Perhaps there is no better lecture on the prevailing vices of
style and thought (if thought this frothy ferment of the mind may be
called) than in Cotton Mather's "Magnalia." For Mather, like a true
provincial, appropriates only the mannerism, and, as is usual in such
cases, betrays all its weakness by the unconscious parody of
exaggeration.
[39] The Doctor was a capital judge of the substantial value of the
goods he handled, but his judgment always seems that of the thumb and
forefinger. For the shades, the disposition of colors, the beauty of
the figures, he has as good as no sense whatever. The critical parts
of his Life of Dryden seem to me the best of his writing in this
kind. There is little to be gleaned after him. He had studied his
author, which he seldom did, and his criticism is sympathetic, a
thing still rarer with him. As illustrative of his own habits, his
remarks on Dryden's reading are curious.
[40] Perhaps the hint was given by a phrase of Corneille, _monarque
en peinture_. Dryden seldom borrows, unless from Shakespeare, without
improving, and he borrowed a great deal. Thus in "Don Sebastian" of
suicide:--
"Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls,
And give them furloughs for the other world;
But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand
In starless nights and wait the appointed hour."
The thought is Cicero's, but how it is intensified by the "starless
nights"! Dryden, I suspect, got it from his favorite, Montaigne, who
says, "Que nous ne pouvons abandonner cette garnison du monde, sans
le commandement exprez de celuy qui nous y a mis." (L. ii. chap. 3.)
In the same play, by a very Drydenish verse, he gives new force to an
old comparison:--
"And I should break through laws divine and human.
And think 'em cobwebs spread for little man,
_Which all the bulky herd of Nature breaks_."
[41] Not his solemn historical droning under that title, but
addressed "To the Cambrio-Britons on their harp."
[42] "Les poëtes euxmêmes s'animent et s'échauffent par la lecture
des autres poëtes. Messieurs de Malherbe, Corneille, &c., se
disposoient au travail par la lecture des poëtes qui étoient de leur
gout."--Vigneul, Marvilliana, I. 64, 65.
[43] For example, Waller had said,
"Others may use the ocean as their road,
Only the English _make it their abode_;
* * * * *
We _tread on billows with a steady foot_"--
long before Campbell. Campbell helps himself to both thoughts,
enlivens them into
"Her march is o'er the mountain wave,
Her home is on the deep,"
and they are his forevermore. His "leviathans afloat" he _lifted_
from the "Annus Mirabilis"; but in what court could Dryden sue?
Again, Waller in another poem calls the Duke of York's flag
"His dreadful streamer, like a comet's hair";
and this, I believe, is the first application of the celestial
portent to this particular comparison. Yet Milton's "imperial ensign"
waves defiant behind his impregnable lines, and even Campbell flaunts
his "meteor flag" in Waller's face. Gray's bard might be sent to the
lock-up, but even he would find bail.
"C'est imiter quelqu'un que de planter des choux."
[44] Corneille's tragedy of "Pertharite" was acted unsuccessfully in
1659. Racine made free use of it in his more fortunate "Andromaque."
[45] Dryden's publisher.
[46] Preface to the Fables.
[47] I interpret some otherwise ambiguous passages in this charming
and acute essay by its title: "On the _artificial_ comedy of the last
century."
[48] See especially his defence of the epilogue to the Second Part of
the "Conquest of Granada" (1672).
[49] Defence of an Essay on Dramatick Poesy.
[50] "The favor which heroick plays have lately found upon our
theatres has been wholly derived to them from the countenance and
approbation they have received at Court." (Dedication of "Indian
Emperor" to Duchess of Monmouth.)
[51] Dedication of "Rival Ladies."
[52] Defence of the Essay. Dryden, in the happiness of his
illustrative comparisons, is almost unmatched. Like himself, they
occupy a middle ground between poetry and prose,--they are a cross
between metaphor and simile.
[53] Discoveries.
[54] What a wretched rhymer he could be we may see in his
_alteration_ of the "Maid's Tragedy" of Beaumont and Fletcher:--
"Not long since walking in the field,
My nurse and I, we there beheld
A goodly fruit; which, tempting me,
I would have plucked: but, trembling, she,
Whoever eat those berries, cried,
In less than half an hour died!"
What intolerable seesaw! Not much of Byron's "fatal facility" in
_these_ octosyllabics!
[55] In more senses than one. His last and best portrait shows him
in his own gray hair.
[56] Essay on Dramatick Poesy.
[57] A French hendecasyllable verse runs exactly like our ballad
measure:--
A cobbler there was and he lived in a stall, ...
_La raison, pour marcher, n'a souvent qu'une voye._
(Dryden's note.)
The verse is not a hendecasyllable. "Attended watchfully to her
recitative (Mile. Duchesnois), and find that, in nine lines out of
ten, 'A cobbler there was,' &c, is the tune of the French
heroics."--_Moore's Diary_, 24th April, 1821.
[58] "The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except
among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not
support it, differs in nothing from prose."--Gray to West.
[59] Diderot and Rousseau, however, thought their language unfit for
poetry, and Voltaire seems to have half agreed with them. No one has
expressed this feeling more neatly than Fauriel: "Nul doute que l'on
ne puisse dire en prose des choses éminemment poétiques, tout comme
il n'est que trop certain que l'on peut en dire de fort prosaiques en
vers, et même en excellents vers, en vers élégamment tournés, et en
beau langage. C'est un fait dont je n'ai pas besoin d'indiquer
d'exemples: aucune littérature n'en fournirait autant que le
nôtre."--Hist. de la Poésie Provençale, II. 237.
[60] Parallel of Poetry and Painting.
[61] "Il y a seulement la scène de _Ventidius_ et d'_Antoine_ qui est
digne de Corneille. C'est là le sentiment de milord Bolingbroke et
de tous les bons auteurs; c'est ainsi que pensait
Addisson."--Voltaire to M. De Fromont, 15th November, 1735.
[62] Inst. X., i. 129.
[63] Conquest of Grenada, Second Part.
[64] In most he mingles blank verse.
[65] Conquest of Grenada.
[66] This recalls a striking verse of Alfred de Musset:--
"La muse est toujours belle.
Même pour l'insensé, même pour l'impuissant,
_Car sa beaute pour nous, c'est notre amour pour elle._"
[67] Rival Ladies.
[68] Don Sebastian.
[69] Don Sebastian.
[70] Cleomenes.
[71] All for Love.
[72] Dryden, with his wonted perspicacity, follows Ben Jonson in
calling Donne "the greatest wit, though not the best poet, of our
nation." (Dedication of Eleonora.) Even as a poet Donne
"Had in him those brave translunary things
That our first poets had."
To open vistas for the imagination through the blind wall of the
senses as he could sometimes do, is the supreme function of poetry.
[73] My own judgment is my sole warrant for attributing these
extracts from Oedipus to Dryden rather than Lee.
[74] Recollections of Rogers, p. 165.
[75] Nicholls's Reminiscences of Gray. Pickering's edition of Gray's
Works, Vol. V. p. 35.
[76] Let one suffice for all. In the "Royal Martyr," Porphyrius.
awaiting his execution, says to Maximin, who had wished him for a
son-in-law:--
"Where'er thou stand'st, I'll level at that place
My gushing blood, and spout it at thy face;
Thus not by marriage we our blood will join;
Nay, more, my arms shall throw my head at thine."
"It is no shame," says Dryden himself, "to be a poet, though it is to
be a bad one."
[77] Gray, _ubi supra_, p. 38.
[78] Scott had never seen Pepys's Diary when he wrote this, or he
would have left it unwritten: "Fell to discourse of the last night's
work at Court, where the ladies and Duke of Monmouth acted the
'Indian Emperor,' wherein they told me these things most remarkable
that not any woman but the Duchess of Monmouth and Mrs. Cornwallis
did anything but like fools and stocks, but that these two did do
most extraordinary well: that not any man did anything well but
Captain O'Bryan, who spoke and did well, but above all things did
dance most incomparably."--14th January, 1668.
[79] See also that noble passage in the "Hind and Panther"
(1572-1591), where this is put into verse. Dryden always thought in
prose.
[80] Probably on the authority of this very epitaph, as if epitaphs
were to be believed even under oath! A great many authors live
because we read nothing but their tombstones. Oldham was, to borrow
one of Dryden's phrases, "a bad or, which is worse, an indifferent
poet."
[81] "He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate easily
forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere
reconciliation with them that had offended him."--Congress.
[82] Coleridge says excellently: "You will find this a good gauge or
criterion of genius,--whether it progresses and evolves, or only
spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri; every line
adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building
up to the very last verse; whereas in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two
or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the
twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of
overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is
satirized." (Table-Talk, 192.) Some of Dryden's best satirical hits
are let fall by seeming accident in his prose, as where he says of
his Protestant assailants, "Most of them love all whores but her of
Babylon." They had first attacked him on the score of his private
morals.
[83] That he taxes Shadwell with it is only a seeming exception, as
any careful reader will see.
[84] Preface to Fables.
[85] Dedication of the Georgics.
[86] Preface to Second Miscellany.
[87] Ibid.
[88] Memoirs of Wordsworth, Vol. II. p. 74 (American edition).
[89] A Discourse of Epick Poetry "If the _public_ approve." "On ne
peut pas admettre dans le developpement des langues aucune révolution
artificielle et sciemment executée; il n'y a pour elles ni conciles,
ni assemblées délibérantes; on ne les réforme pas comme une
constitution vicieuse."--Renan, De l'Origine du Langage, p 95.
[90] This is an old complaint. Puttenham sighs over such innovation
in Elizabeth's time, and Carew in James's. A language grows, and is
not made. Almost all the new-fangled words with which Jonson taxes
Marston in his "Poetaster" are now current.
[91] Like most idiomatic, as distinguished from correct writers, he
knew very little about the language historically or critically. His
prose and poetry swarm with locutions that would have made Lindley
Murray's hair stand on end. _How_ little he knew is plain from his
criticising in Ben Jonson the use of _ones_ in the plural, of "Though
Heaven should speak with all _his_ wrath," and be "as false English
for _are_, though the rhyme hides it." Yet all are good English, and
I have found them all in Dryden's own writing! Of his sins against
idiom I have a longer list than I have room for. And yet he is one of
our highest authorities for _real_ English.
[92] To see what he rescued us from in pedantry on the one hand, and
vulgarism on the other, read Feltham and Tom Brown--if you can.
[93] "Cette ode mise en musique par Purcell (si je ne me trompe),
passe en Angleterre pour le chef-d'oeuvre de la poésie la plus
sublime et la plus variée; et je vous avoue que, comme je sais mieux
l'anglais que le grec, j'aime cent fois mieux cette ode que tout
Pindare."--Voltaire to M. De Chabanon, 9 mars, 1772.
Dryden would have agreed with Voltaire. When Chief-Justice Marlay,
then a young Templar, "congratulated him on having produced the
finest and noblest Ode that had ever been written in any language,
You are right, young gentleman' (replied Dryden), 'a nobler Ode never
_was_ produced, nor ever _will_.'"--Malone.
[94] This was true of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and still more of
Southey who in some respects was not unlike Dryden.
[95] Pope's notion of gentility was perhaps expressed in a letter
from Lord Cobham to him: "I congratulate you upon the fine weather.
'T is a strange thing that people of condition and men of parts must
enjoy it in common with the rest of the world." (Ruffhead's Pope, p
276, _note_.) His Lordship's naive distinction between people of
condition and men of parts is as good as Pope's between genteel and
poetical men. I fancy the poet grinning savagely as he read it.
[96] "Nothing is truly sublime," he himself said, "that is not just
and proper."
[97] Dennis in a letter to Tonson, 1715.