The Age of Dryden

There are few English writers of eminence whom it is so difficult to realize satisfactorily to the mind’s eye as Dryden. Personal enough in one respect, his writings are singularly impersonal in another; he never paints, and seldom reveals himself, and the aid which letters or reminiscences might have afforded is almost entirely wanting. No one noted his conversation; his enemies’ attacks and his friends’ panegyrics are equally devoid of those traits of character which might have invested a shadowy outline with life and substance. The nearest approach to a portrait is Congreve’s, which leaves most of the character in the shade, and even this is somewhat suspicious, for Congreve was Dryden’s debtor for noble praise, and the vindication of Dryden’s repute had been imposed upon him by the poet himself. The qualities, however, which he commends are such as seem entirely reconcilable with the lymphatic temperament which, partly on his own authority (‘my conversation,’ he says, ‘is slow and dull, my humour saturnine and reserved’), we have seen reason to attribute to Dryden. We are told of his humanity and compassion, of his readiness to forgive injuries, of a friendship that exceeded his professions, of his diffidence in general society and horror of intrusiveness, of his patience in accepting corrections of his own errors, of which he must be allowed to have given a remarkable instance in his submission to Jeremy Collier. All these traits give the impression of one who, though by no means pedantic, was only a wit when he had the pen in his hand, and entirely correspond with his apparent aversion to intellectual labour, except under the pressure of want or the stimulus of Court favour. When at length he did warm to his work, we know from himself that thoughts crowded so rapidly upon him that his only difficulty was to decide what to reject. Such a man may well have appeared a negative character to his contemporaries, and the events of his life were not of a nature to force his virtues or his failings into notice. We can only say that there is no proof of his having been a bad husband; that there is clear evidence of his having been a good father; and that, although he took the wrong side in the political and religious controversies of his day, this is no reason why he may not, according to his light, have been a good citizen. His references to illustrious predecessors like Shakespeare and Milton, and promising young men like Congreve, indicate a real generosity of character. The moral defects of his writings, coarse licentiousness, unmeasured invective, and equally unmeasured adulation, belong to the age rather than to the man. On the whole, we may say that he was one whom we should probably have esteemed if we could have known him; but in whom, apart from his writings, we should not have discovered the first literary figure of his generation.

Dryden’s early poems, the Heroic Stanzas on the death of Cromwell, the Astraea Redux on the Restoration, the panegyric of Clarendon, and the verses on the Coronation, are greatly marred for modern readers by extravagant conceits, but are sobriety itself compared to the exploits of contemporary poets, especially the Pindaric. In a more important particular, Dryden, as Scott remarks, has observed a singular and happy delicacy. The topic of the Civil War is but slightly dwelt on; and, although Cromwell is extolled, his eulogist abstains from any reflections against those through whom he cut his way to greatness. Isolated couplets in the other poems occasionally display that perfection of condensed and pointed expression which Dryden habitually attained in his later poems:

‘Spain to your gift alone her Indies owes;For what the powerful takes not, he bestows:And France, that did an exile’s presence fear,May justly apprehend you still too near.’ —Astraea Redux.

These early attempts, however, were completely thrown into the shade by the Annus Mirabilis, a poem on the memorable events of 1666, written at Charlton, near Malmesbury, the seat of Lord Berkeley, where Dryden and his family had resorted in 1665 to escape the plague, and published in February, 1667. The author was then thirty-five, and, judged in the light of his subsequent celebrity, had as yet achieved surprisingly little either in quantity or quality. Youth is generally the most affluent season of poetical activity; and those poets whose claim to inspiration is the most unimpeachable – Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley – have irradiated their early writings with flashes of genius which their maturer skill hardly enabled them to eclipse. This cannot be said of Dryden, who of our great poets, unless Pope be an exception, probably owed least to inspiration and most to pains and practice. Even Pope at this age had produced The Rape of the Lock, The Temple of Fame, Eloisa to Abelard, and his translation of the Iliad, enough to have given him a high place among English poets. The Annus Mirabilis was the first production of Dryden that could have insured him remembrance with posterity, and even this is sadly disfigured with conceits. After all, the poet finds only two marvels of his wonderful year worthy of record – the Dutch war, which had been going on for two years, and which produced a much greater wonder in the year ensuing, when the Dutch sailed up to Gravesend and burned the English fleet; and the Great Fire of London. The treatment of the former is very tedious and dragging; there are many striking lines, but more conceits like the following, descriptive of the English attack upon the Dutch East Indiamen:

‘Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball,And now their odours armed against them fly;Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall,And some by aromatic splinters die.’

The second part, treating of the Fire of London, is infinitely better. Dryden exhibits one of the most certain marks of a good writer, he rises with his subject. Yet there is no lack of absurdities. The Deity extinguishes the conflagration precisely in the manner in which Dryden would have put out his own candle:

‘An hollow crystal pyramid he takes,In firmamental waters dipt above;Of it a broad extinguisher he makes,And hoods the flames that to their quarry drove.’

Nothing in Dryden is more amazing than his inequality. This stanza is succeeded by the following:

‘The vanquished fires withdraw from every place,Or, full with feeding, sink into a sleep;Each household genius shows again his face,And from the hearths the little Lares creep.’

Other quatrains are still better, as, for instance, this on the burning of St. Paul’s:

‘The daring flames peeped in, and saw from farThe awful beauties of the sacred quire;But since it was profaned by civil war,Heaven thought it fit to have it purged by fire.’

A thought so striking, that the reader does not pause to reflect that the celestial sentence would have been equally applicable to every cathedral in the country. Perhaps the following stanzas compose the passage of most sustained excellence. In them, as in the apostrophe to the Royal Society, in an earlier part of the poem, Dryden appears truly the vates sacer, and his poetry becomes prophecy:

‘Methinks already from this chymic flameI see a city of more precious mould;Rich as the town which gives the Indies name,With silver paved, and all divine with gold.‘Already labouring with a mighty fateShe shakes the rubbish from her mounting brow,And seems to have renewed her charter’s date,Which heaven will to the death of Time allow.‘More great than human now, and more august,Now deified she from her fires doth rise;Her widening streets on new foundations trust,And opening into larger parts she flies.‘Before, she like some shepherdess did show,Who sat to bathe her by a river’s side;Not answering to her fame, but rude and low,Nor taught the beauteous arts of modern pride.‘Now like a Maiden Queen she will beholdFrom her high turrets hourly suitors come;The East with incense and the West with goldWill stand like suppliants to receive her doom.‘The silver Thames, her own domestic flood,Shall bear her vessels like a sweeping train;And often wind, as of his mistress proud,With longing eyes to meet her face again.‘The wealthy Tagus, and the wealthier Rhine,The glory of their towns no more shall boast;And Seine, that would with Belgian rivers join,Shall find her lustre stained and traffic lost.‘The venturous merchant, who designed more far,And touches on our hospitable shore,Charmed with the splendour of this northern star,Shall here unlade him, and depart no more.’

For several years after Annus Mirabilis, Dryden produced but little poetry apart from his dramas. Fashion, Court encouragement, and the necessity of providing for his family, had bound him to what was then the most conspicuous and lucrative form of authorship. In one point of view he committed a great error in addicting himself to the drama. He was not naturally qualified to excel in it, and could only obtain even a temporary success by condescending to the prevalent faults of the contemporary stage, its bombast and its indecency. The latter transgression was eventually so handsomely confessed by himself that but little need be said of it. Bombast is natural to two classes of writers, the ardent and the phlegmatic, and those whose emotions require the most working up are frequently the worst offenders. Such was Dryden’s case, and his natural proclivity was much enhanced by his adoption of the new fashion of writing in rhyme, beloved at Court, but affording every temptation and every facility for straining after effect in the place of Nature. Mr. Saintsbury justly reminds us that Dryden was not forsaking the blank verse of Shakespeare and Fletcher, the secret of which had long been lost; nevertheless, although, as we shall see when we come to his critical writings, he pleaded very ingeniously for rhyme in 1665, his adoption of it was condemned by his maturer judgment and practice. It was, however, fortunate in the long run; his rhyming plays, of which we shall speak in another place, would not have been great successes in any metre, while practice in their composition, and the necessity of expressing the multitude of diverse sentiments required by bustling scenes and crowds of characters, gradually gave him that command of the heroic couplet which bestows such strength and brilliancy on his later writings. His ‘fourteen years of dramatic practice,’ as Mr. Saintsbury justly says, ‘acted as a filtering reservoir for his poetical powers, so that the stream, which, when it ran into them, was the turbid and rubbish-laden current of Annus Mirabilis, flowed out as impetuous, as strong, but clear and without base admixture, in the splendid verse of Absalom and Achitophel.’3

This great poem, published in November, 1681, at the height of the contest over the Exclusion Bill and its consequences, remains to this day the finest example of political satire in English literature. The theme was skilfully selected. James II. had not yet convinced the most sceptical of the justice and wisdom of the Exclusion Bill, and its advocates laboured under the serious disadvantage of having no strong claimant for the succession if they prevailed in setting the Duke of York aside. James’s son-in-law, the Prince of Orange, would not, it is safe to say, ever have been accepted by the nation as king if James’s folly and tyranny had not, years afterwards, given him the opportunity of presenting himself in the character of Deliverer; and, failing him, there was no one but the popular but unfortunately illegitimate Monmouth. The character of Absalom seemed exactly made for this handsome and foolish prince. The resemblance of his royal father to David, except in matters akin to the affair of Bathsheba, was not quite so obvious. Dryden might almost have been suspected of satirizing his master when he wrote:

‘When nature prompted, and no law deniedPromiscuous use of concubine and bride;Then Israel’s monarch after heaven’s own heartHis vigorous warmth did variously impartTo wives and slaves; and, wide as his command,Scattered his Maker’s image through the land.Of all the numerous progeny was noneSo beautiful, so brave as Absolon.’

The management of Absalom was a difficult matter. With all his transgressions, the rebel Monmouth was still beloved by his father, and Dryden could not have ventured to treat him as his prototype is treated by Scripture. He has extricated himself from the dilemma with abundant dexterity, but at some expense to his poem. The catastrophe required by poetical justice does not come to pass, and the conclusion is tame. All such defects, however, are forgotten in the splendour of the execution. The versification is the finest in its style that English literature had yet seen, the perfection of heroic verse. The sense is weighty and massive, as befits such an organ of expression, and, whatever may be thought of Dryden’s flatteries of individuals, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity with which he here expresses his political convictions. He unquestionably belonged to that class of mankind who cannot discern principles apart from persons, and his contempt for abstractions is pointedly expressed in one of his ringing couplets:

‘Thought they might ruin him they could create,Or melt him to that golden calf – a state.’

This is not a very high manifestation of the intellect in its application to political questions, but it bespeaks the class of persons who provide ballast for the vessel of the state in tempestuous times; and, on the whole, Absalom and Achitophel is a poem which the patriot as well as the admirer of genius may read with complacency. The royal side of the question could not be better put than in these lines placed in the mouth of David:

‘Thus long have I, by native mercy sway’d,My wrongs dissembled, my revenge delay’d;So willing to forgive the offending age,So much the father did the king assuage.But now so far my clemency they slight,The offenders question my forgiving right.That one was made for many, they contend;But ’tis to rule; for that’s a monarch’s end.They call my tenderness of blood, my fear;Though manly tempers can the longest bear.Yet since they will divert my native course,’Tis time to shew I am not good by force.Those heap’d affronts, that haughty subjects bring,Are burdens for a camel, not a king.Kings are the public pillars of the state,Born to sustain and prop the nation’s weight:If my young Sampson will pretend a callTo shake the column, let him share the fall.But oh, that he yet would repent and live!How easy ’tis for parents to forgive!With how few tears a pardon might be wonFrom nature pleading for a darling son!Poor, pitied youth, by my paternal careRaised up to all the height his frame could bear!Had God ordain’d his fate for empire born,He would have given his soul another turn:Gull’d with a patriot’s name, whose modern senseIs one that would by law supplant his prince;The people’s brave, the politician’s tool;Never was patriot yet, but was a fool.Whence comes it, that religion and the lawsShould more be Absolom’s than David’s cause?His old instructor, ere he lost his place,Was never thought endued with so much grace.Good heavens, how faction can a patriot paint!My rebel ever proves my people’s saint.Would they impose an heir upon the throne?Let Sanhedrims be taught to give their own.A king’s at least a part of government;And mine as requisite as their consent.Without my leave a future king to choose,Infers a right the present to depose.True, they petition me to approve their choice;But Esau’s hands suit ill with Jacob’s voice.My pious subjects for my safety pray;Which to secure, they take my power away.From plots and treasons heaven preserve my years,And save me most from my petitioners!’

It will be observed that ‘the right the present to depose,’ is mentioned by Dryden as something manifestly preposterous, and the derivation of it as a logical corollary from the Exclusion Bill is assumed to be a sufficient reductio ad absurdum of the latter. In the view of the majority of the nation, this was sound doctrine until the Revolution, which reduced Dryden’s poem from the rank of a powerful political manifesto to that of a brilliant exercise of fancy and dialectic. As such, it will never cease to please and to impress. The finest passages are, no doubt, those descriptive of character, whether carefully studied portraits or strokes against particular foibles imputed to the poet’s adversaries, such as this mock apology for the parsimonious kitchen of the Whig sheriff, Slingsby Bethel:

‘Such frugal virtue malice may accuse,But sure ’twas necessary to the Jews:For towns, once burnt, such magistrates require,As dare not tempt God’s providence by fire.’

The elaborate and glowing characters of Achitophel (Shaftesbury) and Zimri (Buckingham) it is needless to transcribe, as they are universally known. It may be remarked that the character of the turbulent and adventurous Shaftesbury does not match very well with that of the Ulyssean Achitophel of Scripture, but Dryden has wisely drawn from what he had before his eyes.

The Medal, which we have seen reason for attributing to the suggestion of Charles II. himself, appeared in March, 1682. It is a bitter invective against Shaftesbury, its theme the medal which his partisans had very naturally struck upon the occasion of his acquittal in the preceding autumn. It is entirely in a serious vein, and wants the grace and urbanity of some parts of Absalom and Achitophel, but is no way inferior as a piece of strong, vehement satire. Shaftesbury’s conduct as a minister, before his breach with the Court, is thus described:

‘Behold him now exalted into trust;His counsel’s oft convenient, seldom just:Even in the most sincere advice he gaveHe had a grudging still to be a knave.The frauds he learned in his fanatic yearsMade him uneasy in his lawful gears;At best, as little honest as he could,And, like white witches, mischievously good.’

The second part of Absalom and Achitophel appeared in November, 1682. It was mainly the work of Nahum Tate, who imitated his master’s versification with success, but has numerous touches from the pen of Dryden, who inserted a long passage of unparalleled satire against his adversaries, especially Settle and Shadwell:

‘Who by my means to all succeeding timesShall live in spite of their own doggrel rhymes.’

The character of Shadwell (Og) is well known, but it is impossible to avoid quoting a portion of it:

‘The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull,With this prophetic blessing – “Be thou dull;Drink, swear and roar; forbear no lewd delightFit for thy bulk; do any thing but write.Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men,A strong nativity – but for the pen;Eat opium, mingle arsenic in thy drink,Still thou mayst live, avoiding pen and ink.”I see, I see, ’tis counsel given in vain,For treason, botch’d in rhyme, will be thy bane;Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,’Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.Why should thy metre good King David blast?A psalm of his will surely be thy last.Darest thou presume in verse to meet thy foes,Thou, whom the penny pamphlet foil’d in prose?Doeg, whom God for mankind’s mirth has made,O’ertops thy talent in thy very trade;Doeg, to thee, thy paintings are so coarse,A poet is, though he’s the poet’s horse.A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull,For writing treason, and for writing dull.To die for faction is a common evil,But to be hang’d for nonsense is the devil.Hadst thou the glories of thy king exprest,Thy praises had been satire at the best;But thou in clumsy verse, unlickt, unpointed,Hast shamefully defiled the Lord’s anointed.I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes,For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes?But of King David’s foes, be this the doom,May all be like the young man Absolom;And, for my foes, may this their blessing be,To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee!’

Only a month before the appearance of this annihilating attack, Dryden had devoted an entire poem to Shadwell, who had justly provoked him by a scandalous libel. The title of MacFlecknoe is derived from an Irish priest and, with the exception of some good lines pointed out by Southey and Lamb, a bad poet, already satirized by Marvell. It is a vigorous attack, but not equal to the passage in Absalom and Achitophel, and chiefly memorable inasmuch as the machinery evidently suggested that of Pope’s Dunciad.

Dryden’s next poetical efforts, the dramatic excepted, were of quite another kind. Simultaneously with the second part of Absalom and Achitophel appeared Religio Laici, an argument for the faith of the Church of England as a juste milieu between Popery and Deism. In one respect this takes the highest place among the works of Dryden, for it is the most perfect example he has given of that reasoning in rhyme of which he was so great a master. There is not and could not be any originality in the reasonings themselves, but Pope’s famous couplet was never so finely illustrated, except by Pope himself:

‘True wit is nature to advantage drest;What oft was thought, but ne’er so well exprest.’

At the same time the poetry hardly rises to the height which the theme might have justified. There is little to captivate or astonish, but perpetual admiration attends upon the masterly conduct of the argument, and the ease with which dry and difficult propositions melt and glide in harmonious verse. The execution is singularly equable; but perhaps hardly maintains the elevation of the fine exordium:

‘Dim as the borrow’d beams of moon and starsTo lonely, weary, wandering travellers,Is reason to the soul: and as, on high,Those rolling fires discover but the sky,

And as those nightly tapers disappear,When day’s bright lord ascends our hemisphere;So pale grows reason at religion’s sight,So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.Some few, whose lamp shone brighter, have been ledFrom cause to cause, to nature’s sacred head,And found that one First Principle must be:But what, or who, that universal He;Whether some soul, encompassing this ball,Unmade, unmoved; yet making, moving all;Or various atoms’ interfering danceLeap’d into form, the noble work of chance;

As blindly groped they for a future state,As rashly judged of providence and fate;But least of all could their endeavours findWhat most concern’d the good of human kind;For happiness was never to be found,But vanish’d from them like enchanted ground.One thought content the good to be enjoy’d;This very little accident destroy’d:The wiser madmen did for virtue toil,A thorny, or, at best, a barren soil:

Thus anxious thoughts in endless circles roll,Without a centre where to fix the soul:In this wild maze their vain endeavours end: —How can the less the greater comprehend?Or finite reason reach infinity?For what could fathom God were more than he.’

Dryden’s next important poem brought obloquy upon him in his own day, and must be perused with mingled feelings in this. Between 1682 and 1687, the date of the publication of The Hind and the Panther, the laureate of the Church of England had, as we have seen, become a Roman Catholic, and most reasonably desired to justify this step to the world. The Court also expected his pen to be drawn in their service, and hence the double purpose which runs through the poem, of vindicating his personal change of conviction and of justifying the political measures to which James had had recourse for establishing the supremacy of his church. All this was perfectly natural; the extraordinary thing is that so great a master of ridicule should have been blind to the ludicrous character of the machinery which he devised to carry out his purpose. The comparison of the true church to the milk-white hind, and of the corrupt church to the beautiful but spotted panther, might have been employed with propriety as an ornament or illustration of the poem, but the endeavour to make it the groundwork of the entire piece is pregnant with absurdity. Animals may very well be introduced as actors in a fiction upon condition that they behave like animals; and their faculties may even be expanded to suit the author’s purpose so long as their exercise is confined to visible and concrete things; but the notion of a pair of quadrupeds discussing the sacraments, tradition, and the infallibility of the Pope, is only fit for burlesque, and constitutes, indeed, a running burlesque upon the poem. Dryden probably took up the idea without sufficient consideration, and when he had made some progress in his work he may well have been too enamoured with the beautiful but preposterous exordium to surrender it to common sense. Perverse and fantastic as is the plan of his poem, none of his works is richer in beauties of detail. ‘In none,’ says Macaulay, ‘can be found passages more pathetic and magnificent, greater ductility and energy of language, or a more pleasing and various music.’ The power of reasoning in rhyme is little inferior to that displayed in Religio Laici, and the narrative character of the piece allows of a diversified variety excluded by the simply didactic character of its predecessor. The invective against Calvinists and Socinians, typified by the wolf and the fox, is an average, and not beyond an average, example of Dryden’s matchless force. Near the end, it will be perceived, he suddenly bethinks himself that, as the apologist of James’s ostensible policy, it is his business to recommend not persecution but toleration, and he caps his objurgation with a passage conceived in a widely different spirit, a severe though unintentional reflection upon the practice of his own church: