AMONG MY BOOKS (continued 2)

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]

And this single verse from "Aurengzebe":—

"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]

Here is another of the same kind from "All for Love":—

"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.