Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a hundred and seventy years;
in the second class of English poets perhaps no one stands, on the
whole, so high as he; during his lifetime, in spite of jealousy,
detraction, unpopular politics, and a suspicious change of faith, his
preeminence was conceded; he was the earliest complete type of the
purely literary man, in the modern sense; there is a singular
unanimity in allowing him a certain claim to greatness which would be
denied to men as famous and more read--to Pope or Swift, for example;
he is supposed, in some way or other, to have reformed English poetry.
It is now about half a century since the only uniform edition of his
works was edited by Scott. No library is complete without him, no name
is more familiar than his, and yet it may be suspected that few
writers are more thoroughly buried in that great cemetery of the
"British Poets."
[Footnote 36: From the first essay in the first series entitled "Among
My Books." Copyright, 1870, by James Russell Lowell. Published by
Houghton, Mifflin Company.]
If contemporary reputation be often deceitful, posthumous fame may be
generally trusted, for it is a verdict made up of the suffrages of the
select men in succeeding generations. This verdict has been as good as
unanimous in favor of Dryden. It is, perhaps, worth while to take a
fresh observation of him, to consider him neither as warning nor
example, but to endeavor to make out what it is that has given so
lofty and firm a position to one of the most unequal, inconsistent,
and faulty writers that ever lived. He is a curious example of what we
often remark of the living, but rarely of the dead--that they get
credit for what they might be quite as much as for what they are--and
posterity has applied to him one of his own rules of criticism,
judging him by the best rather than the average of his achievement, a
thing posterity is seldom wont to do. On the losing side in politics,
it is true of his polemical writings as of Burke's--whom in many
respects he resembles, and especially in that supreme quality of a
reasoner, that his mind gathers not only heat, but clearness and
expansion, by its own motion--that they have won his battle for him in
the judgment of after times.
To us, looking back at him, he gradually becomes a singularly
interesting and even picturesque figure. He is, in more senses than
one, in language, in turn of thought, in style of mind, in the
direction of his activity, the first of the moderns. He is the first
literary man who was also a man of the world, as we understand the
term. He succeeded Ben Jonson as the acknowledged dictator of wit and
criticism, as Dr. Johnson, after nearly the same interval, succeeded
him. All ages are, in some sense, ages of transition; but there are
times when the transition is more marked, more rapid; and it is,
perhaps, an ill fortune for a man of letters to arrive at maturity
during such a period, still more to represent in himself the change
that is going on, and to be an efficient cause in bringing it about.
Unless, like Goethe, he is of a singularly uncontemporaneous nature,
capable of being _tutta in se romita_, and of running parallel with
his time rather than being sucked into its current, he will be
thwarted in that harmonious development of native force which has so
much to do with its steady and successful application. Dryden
suffered, no doubt, in this way. Tho in creed he seems to have drifted
backward in an eddy of the general current; yet of the intellectual
movement of the time, so far certainly as literature shared in it, he
could say, with AEneas, not only that he saw, but that himself was a
great part of it.
That movement was, on the whole, a downward one, from faith to scepticism,
from enthusiasm to cynicism, from the imagination to the understanding. It
was in a direction altogether away from those springs of imagination and
faith at which they of the last age had slaked the thirst or renewed the
vigor of their souls. Dryden himself recognized that indefinable and
gregarious influence which we call nowadays the spirit of the age, when he
said that "every age has a kind of universal genius." He had also a just
notion of that in which he lived; for he remarks, incidentally, that "all
knowing ages are naturally sceptic and not at all bigoted, which, if I am
not much deceived, is the proper character of our own." It may be conceived
that he was even painfully half-aware of having fallen upon a time
incapable, not merely of a great poet, but perhaps of any poet at all; for
nothing is so sensitive to the chill of a skeptical atmosphere as that
enthusiasm which, if it be not genius, is at least the beautiful illusion,
that saves it from the baffling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice
unhappy he who, born to see things as they might be, is schooled by
circumstances to see them as people say they are--to read God in a prose
translation. Such was Dryden's lot, and such, for a good part of his days,
it was by his own choice. He who was of a stature to snatch the torch of
life that flashes from lifted hand to hand along the generations, over the
heads of inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy to the stews....
But at whatever period of his life we look at Dryden, and whatever,
for the moment, may have been his poetic creed, there was something in
the nature of the man that would not be wholly subdued to what it
worked in. There are continual glimpses of something in him greater
than he, hints of possibilities finer than anything he has done. You
feel that the whole of him was better than any random specimens, tho
of his best, seem to prove. _Incessu patet_, he has by times the large
stride of the elder race, tho it sinks too often into the slouch of a
man who has seen better days. His grand air may, in part, spring from
a habit of easy superiority to his competitors; but must also, in
part, be ascribed to an innate dignity of character. That this
preeminence should have been so generally admitted, during his life,
can only be explained by a bottom of good sense, kindliness, and sound
judgment, whose solid worth could afford that many a flurry of vanity,
petulance, and even error should flit across the surface and be
forgotten. Whatever else Dryden may have been, the last and abiding
impression of him is that he was thoroughly manly; and while it may be
disputed whether he was a great poet, it may be said of him, as
Wordsworth said of Burke, "that he was by far the greatest man of his
age, not only abounding in knowledge himself, but feeding, in various
directions, his most able contemporaries."