The Age of Dryden

‘O happy pair, how well you have increased!What ills in church and state have you redress’d!With teeth, untried, and rudiments of claws,Your first essay was on your native laws;

What though your native kennel still be small,Bounded betwixt a puddle and a wall;Yet your victorious colonies are sentWhere the north ocean girds the continent.Quicken’d with fire below, your monsters breedIn fenny Holland, and in fruitful Tweed;And, like the first, the last affects to beDrawn to the dregs of a democracy.As, where in fields the fairy rounds are seen,A rank sour herbage rises on the green;So, springing where those midnight elves advance,Rebellion prints the footsteps of the dance.

God, like the tyrant of the skies, is placed,And kings, like slaves, beneath the crowd debased.So fulsome is their food, that flocks refuseTo bite, and only dogs for physic use.As, where the lightning runs along the ground,No husbandry can heal the blasting wound;Nor bladed grass, nor bearded corn succeeds,But scales of scurf and putrefaction breeds;Such wars, such waste, such fiery tracks of dearthTheir zeal has left, and such a teemless earth.But, as the poisons of the deadliest kindAre to their own unhappy coasts confined;As only Indian shades of sight deprive,And magic plants will but in Colchos thriveSo presbytery and pestilential zealCan only flourish in a commonweal.From Celtic woods is chased the wolfish crew;But ah! some pity e’en to brutes is due;Their native walks, methinks, they might enjoy,Curb’d of their native malice to destroy.Of all the tyrannies on human kind,The worst is that which persecutes the mind.Let us but weigh at what offence we strike;’Tis but because we cannot think alike.In punishing of this, we overthrowThe laws of nations and of nature too.Beasts are the subjects of tyrannic sway,Where still the stronger on the weaker prey;Man only of a softer mould is made,Not for his fellows’ ruin, but their aid;Created kind, beneficent and free,The noble image of the Deity.’

Dryden produced yet one more poem in the interest of the Court, his Britannia Rediviva, an official panegyric on the birth of the Prince of Wales, June, 1688. Literature has perhaps no more signal instance of adulation wasted and prediction falsified. Many lines are spirited, but others betray Dryden’s fatal insensibility to the ridiculous in his own person:

‘When humbly on the royal babe we gaze,The manly lines of a majestic faceGive awful joy.’

The raptures of the Byzantine courtiers over the imperial infant Protus were nothing to this. Dryden did not want eloquence or dignity to celebrate the hero if he could have found him; it was his and our misfortune that when the hero did at last come to the throne the poet had disqualified himself from extolling him. The landing in Torbay and the triumphal march to London; the victory at the Boyne and the defence of Londonderry were transactions as worthy of epical treatment as any history records; but the only man in England who could have treated them epically deemed them rather matter for elegy; and to have indulged in elegy he must have fled to France. Public events and political and religious controversy were no longer for him: stripped of his means and position he betook himself to translation and playwriting as the readiest means of repairing his shattered fortunes, and it was not until the mellow sunset of his life that he turned to the compositions which, of all he ever wrote, have given the most delight and the least offence, his Fables. These, published at the beginning of 1700, include five adaptations from Chaucer, and three stories told after Boccaccio, as well as Alexander’s Feast, and a few other pieces. It would not be too much to say that this book achieved two things, either of which would have immortalized a poet: it fixed the standard of narrative poetry, except of the metrical romance or ballad class, and also that of heroic versification. The latter, indeed, was thought for a time to have been transcended by Pope, but modern ears have tired of the balanced seesaw of the Popian couplet, and crave the ease and variety of Dryden, restored to literature in Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini, and afterwards imitated by Keats in Lamia. The freedom which so great a master allows himself in rhyming should be a lesson to modern purists: final sounds so slightly akin as guard and prepared, placed and last, are of continual occurrence. In matters still more important than versification Dryden is in general equally admirable. He subjected himself to a severe test in competing with Chaucer – severer than he knew, for Chaucer was not yet, even by Dryden, valued at his full worth. In some respects Dryden certainly suffers greatly by the comparison. He is pre-eminently an intellectual poet, to whom the tree of knowledge had been the tree of life; there is perhaps scarcely a thought in his writings that charms by absolute simplicity and pure nature. Wherever, therefore, Chaucer is transparently simple and unaffected, we find him altered for the worse in Dryden. The very important part, however, of The Knight’s Tale which is concerned with courts, camps, and chivalry is even better in Dryden than in his model. He might have defined his sphere in the words of Ariosto, a poet who has many points of contact with him:

‘Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori,Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto.’

If this is true of portions of Palamon and Arcite, it is still truer of The Flower and the Leaf (then believed to be a genuine work of Chaucer’s), throughout a most brilliant picture of natural beauty and courtly glitter, painted in language of chastened splendour. The other pieces modelled after Chaucer are of inferior interest, yet all excellent in their way. Two of the three tales from Boccaccio are acknowledged masterpieces, Cymon and Iphigenia and Theodore and Honoria. The interest of the first chiefly consists in the narrative itself, and that of the second in the way of telling it. The story, indeed, though striking, is fantastic and hardly pleasing, but Dryden’s treatment of it is perhaps the most perfect specimen in our language of l’art de conter.

An example of Dryden’s descriptive power may be given in a passage from The Flower and the Leaf:

‘Thus while I sat intent to see and hear,And drew perfumes of more than vital air,All suddenly I heard the approaching soundOf vocal music, on the enchanted ground:

At length there issued from the grove behindA fair assembly of the female kind:A train less fair, as ancient fathers tell,Seduced the sons of heaven to rebel.I pass their forms, and every charming grace;Less than an angel would their worth debase:But their attire, like liveries of a kind,All rich and rare, is fresh within my mind.In velvet white as snow the troop was gown’d,The seams with sparkling emeralds set around:Their hoods and sleeves the same; and purpled o’erWith diamonds, pearls, and all the shining storeOf eastern pomp; their long-descending trainWith rubies edged, and sapphires, swept the plain.High on their heads, with jewels richly set,Each lady wore a radiant coronet.Beneath the circles, all the choir was gracedWith chaplets green on their fair foreheads placed;Of laurel some, of woodbine many more,And wreath of Agnus castus others bore:These last, who with those virgin crowns were dress’d,Appear’d in higher honour than the rest.

She in the midst began with sober grace;Her servants’ eyes were fix’d upon her face,And as she moved or turn’d, her motions view’d,Her measures kept, and step by step pursued.Methought she trod the ground with greater grace,With more of godhead shining in her face;And as in beauty she surpass’d the choir,So, nobler than the rest was her attire.A crown of ruddy gold inclosed her brow,Plain without pomp, and rich without a show:A branch of Agnus castus in her handShe bore aloft (her sceptre of command;)Admired, adored by all the circling crowd,For wheresoe’er she turn’d her face, they bow’d.And as she danced, a roundelay she sung,In honour of the laurel, ever young.

At every close she made, the attending throngReplied, and bore the burden of the song:So just, so small, yet in so sweet a note,It seem’d the music melted in the throat.’

One remarkable feature of the principal poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the infrequency of the casual visitations of the Muse. They seem to have hardly ever experienced an unsought lyrical inspiration, or to have sung merely for singing’s sake. Hence Dryden is permitted to appear only twice in the Golden Treasury. His songs, to be treated of more fully when we consider the lyrical poetry of the period, though often instinct with true lyrical spirit, seem to have been deliberately composed for insertion in his plays, and the same is the case with almost the whole of what he would have called his occasional poetry. His two chief odes, Alexander’s Feast and the memorial verses to Anne Killigrew, were indubitably commissions; and it is probable that few of the epistles, elegies, dedications, and prologues which form so considerable a portion of his poetical works were composed without some similar inducement. As a whole, this collection is creditable to his powers of intellect, quickness of wit, and command of nervous masculine diction. It is frequently the work of a master, though conceived in the spirit of a journeyman. The adulation of the patron or the defunct is generally fulsome enough; yet some compliments are so graceful that it is difficult not to believe them sincere, as when he apostrophizes the Duchess of Ormond:

‘O daughter of the Rose, whose cheeks uniteThe differing titles of the Red and White!Who heaven’s alternate beauty well display,The blush of morning and the milky way.’

Or the conclusion of his epistle to Kneller:

‘More cannot be by mortal art exprest,But venerable age shall add the rest.For Time shall with his ready pencil stand,Retouch your figures with his ripening hand,Mellow your colours, and imbrown the teint,Add every grace which Time alone can grant;To future ages shall your fame convey,And give more beauties than he takes away.’

Or these from the epistle to his kinsman, John Driden, more likely than any of the others to have been the unbought manifestation of genuine regard:

‘O true descendant of a patriot line!Who while thou shar’st their lustre lendest thine!Vouchsafe this picture of thy soul to see,’Tis so far good as it resembles thee.The beauties to the original I owe,Which when I miss my own defects I show;Nor think the kindred Muses thy disgrace;A poet is not born in every race;Two of a house few ages can afford,One to perform, another to record.Praiseworthy actions are by thee embraced,And ’tis my praise to make thy praises last.’

The last couplet, excellent in sense, is an example of Dryden’s one metrical defect. He is not sufficiently careful to vary his vowel-sounds.

Dryden’s translations alone would give him a conspicuous place in English literature. The most important, his complete version of Virgil, has been improved upon in many ways, and yet after all it remains true, that ‘Pitt is quoted, and Dryden read.’ Had he never translated Virgil, his renderings or imitations of Juvenal, Horace, and others, would suffice to entitle him to no inconsiderable rank among those who have enriched their native literature from foreign stores. His principle of translation was correct, and accords with that of the greatest of English critics. Coleridge assured Wordsworth that there were only two legitimate systems of metrical translation, strict literality, or compensation carried to its fullest extent. Dryden most probably had not sufficient Latin to be literal; but in any case his genius would have disdained such trammels, not to mention the more prosaic, but not less potent consideration, that what is written for bread must usually be written in haste – a fact which weighed with Dryden when he discontinued rhyme in his tragedies. Thus thrown back on the system of compensation, he has richly repaid his authors for the beauties of which he has bereaved them, by the beauties which he has bestowed – or which, as he maintains, were actually latent in them – and has expressed many of their thoughts with even enhanced energy. He has, in fact, made them write very much as they would have written if they had been English poets of the seventeenth century, and his work is less translation than transfusion. They necessarily appear much metamorphosed from the originals, but the fault is less that of Dryden than of his age. Could he have attempted the same task in our day with equal resources of genius, and on the same principles of workmanship, he would have succeeded much better, for he would have enjoyed more comprehension of the spirit of his originals than was possible in the seventeenth century. The scholarship of that age had not vivified the information which it had amassed; the idealized, but still vital conceptions of the Renaissance had given place to inanimate conventionality; the people of Greece and Rome appeared to the moderns like people in books; and such warm, affectionate contact between the souls of the present and the past as afterwards inspired Shelley’s versions from Homer and Euripides was in that age impossible.

So great and versatile were Dryden’s powers that, after all that has been said, his performances as a lyric poet, as a dramatist, and as a critic remain to be spoken of, and his rank in each has to be recognized as that of the foremost writer of his country in his own day. These will be treated in their appropriate places. The present is, perhaps, the most appropriate for a few words on his position as a poet. It is most difficult to determine whether he and his successor, Pope, should be placed at the bottom of the first class, or at the head of the second class of great English poets. If the very highest gifts of all – originality, creative imagination, unstudied music, unconscious inspiration, lofty ideal, the power to interpret nature, are essential conditions of rank in the first class, then assuredly Dryden and Pope must be contented with the second. If not positively excluded by the very nature of the case – if deficiency in the very highest qualities can be compensated by consummate excellence in all the rest – if intellect will supply the place of inspiration, and art that of nature – then they stand so high above the average of the second rank that it seems injurious not to place them in the first. The principle of exclusion, logically carried out, might involve the elevation above them of other writers whom we instinctively feel to be their inferiors; too absolute an insistence, on the other hand, upon the claims of intellectual power and perfect execution as qualifications for supreme poetical rank, must result in preferring Pope to Dryden. Inferior to his successor in both these respects, Dryden may still justly be preferred to him on the ground of his more ample endowment with that divine insanity without which, as Plato truly says, no one can be a poet. But this consideration cannot be invoked in his favour against Pope without admitting his inferiority to poets of the very first order; and it may be seriously questioned whether any poet can belong to the first order who is so exclusively a town poet as Dryden and Pope, and has so little knowledge of nature. The resemblances and contrasts between him and Pope have been frequently discussed; there are two other poets with whom comparison is less hackneyed and not unprofitable. In fecundity, in versatility, in energy, in the frequent application of his poetry to public affairs, in his influence on contemporary literature, position as head of a school, and incontestable superiority to all the poets around him, no less, unfortunately, in bombast and incomprehensible breaches of good taste, he strongly reminds us of Victor Hugo. Hugo, undoubtedly, was a much greater lyrical poet than Dryden, and was enkindled by spontaneous inspirations which never visited Dryden; yet the two are essentially of the same genus; the differences between them are rather characteristic of their eras than of themselves; and while Hugo’s imagination would have pined in the seventeenth century, Dryden’s intellect and Dryden’s modesty would have been highly serviceable to Hugo in the nineteenth. Another poet, whose talent and career offer many analogies to Dryden’s, is one whom Dryden himself disparages upon metrical grounds. Claudian, like Dryden, is a remarkable instance of a poet owing a large portion of his fame to his dexterous treatment of occasional subjects. As Dryden drew material for his most powerful writings from the political and religious controversies of his day, so Claudian found his themes in the exploits of Stilicho and the misdeeds of Rufinus. Both have made uninteresting subjects attractive by admirable treatment; both are greatly indebted to art and little to nature; both in their latter days4 sought relief from politics in more ideal compositions, Dryden in his Fables, Claudian in his Rape of Proserpine, a poem imbued with the characteristic qualities of Dryden.

Among the greatest services which Dryden rendered to our language and literature are to be reckoned his improvements in heroic versification, of which he has left an unsurpassed model.

‘Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to joinThe varying verse, the full majestic line,The long-resounding march, and energy divine.’

His changes, nevertheless, were not always improvements. He is too uniform, though not absolutely uniform, in confining the sense to the couplet; and, in adding dignity to Chaucer’s verse, he has lost something of its sweetness. Leigh Hunt well observes: ‘Though Dryden’s versification is noble, beautiful, and so complete of its kind that to an ear uninstructed in the metre of the old poet all comparison between the two in this respect seems out of the question and even ludicrous, yet the measure in which Dryden wrote not only originated, but attained to a considerable degree of its beauty in Chaucer; and the old poet’s immeasurable superiority in sentiment and imagination, not only to Dryden, but to all, up to a very late period, who have written in the same form of verse, left him in possession of beauties, even in versification, which it remains for some future poet to amalgamate with Dryden’s in a manner worthy of both, and so carry England’s noble heroic rhyme to its pitch of perfection.’ It need not be said that Pope’s magnificent eulogy solely respects Dryden as a rhyming poet. His blank verse, though in general good enough for the stage, and better than that of most of his contemporaries, is utterly destitute of the sweetness and variety of the Elizabethans.

Dryden’s works were edited with exemplary zeal and fidelity by Sir Walter Scott. The standard modern edition is Mr. Saintsbury’s; the one most convenient for general use, Mr. Christie’s.

CHAPTER II.

POETS CONTEMPORARY WITH DRYDEN

Oldham (1653-1683).

The contemporary of Dryden who approached him most nearly in satiric force, and, generally speaking, in the borderland between poetry and prose, was John Oldham (1653-1683). Not much is known of his life. The son of a Nonconformist minister, he nevertheless obtained a university education, but after leaving college was glad to accept the position of usher in Archbishop Whitgift’s free school at Croydon. Coming to town he filled the post of tutor in various families, and by his Satires upon the Jesuits (1681) gained the acquaintance of Dryden and other men of letters and the patronage of the Earl of Kingston, who seemed likely to provide for him, but at whose seat in Nottinghamshire he died of the smallpox, December, 1683.

Oldham’s poems consist partly of odes, formal and elaborate compositions, and partly of the satires which in his age in some measure supplied the place of the modern journal and review. A secret and unconscious harmony pervades all branches of the contemporary art of every epoch; and in the stately and somewhat stilted lyrics of Oldham and his compeers we discern the counterpart of the elaborate frontispieces with temples and triumphal arches, chariots and cornucopias, tritons and nereids, which the engravers of the age prefixed to its literature. The engraving is hardly art, and the verse is hardly poetry; we are nevertheless conscious of a vigour and a substance which command respect. The work is compact and solid at any rate, and displays much of the force of the Giants, if little of the inspiration of the Gods. Oldham would fain be extravagant in praise of wine; but there is not the least trace of genuine Bacchic frenzy in his laboured dithyramb. The epicedion on his friend Mouvent is a serious composition indeed, forty-two mortal stanzas, with, nevertheless, sufficient good things to justify the praise bestowed on it by Pope. The ode to Ben Jonson is remarkable as expressing the feelings of the men of the Restoration towards the poet who they really thought had reformed the stage, and delivered it from the reprehensible licentiousness of Shakespeare. Like Oldham’s other lyrical compositions, it abounds with most dissonant lines, but has also some noble ones, as these, for example:

‘Let meaner spirits stoop to low precarious fame,Content on gross and coarse applause to liveAnd what the dull and senseless rabble give;Thou didst it still with noble scorn contemn,Nor wouldst that wretched alms receive,The poor subsistence of some bankrupt, sordid name:Thine was no empty vapour, raised beneath,And formed of common breath,The false and foolish fire, that’s whisked aboutBy popular air, and glares awhile, and then goes out;But ’twas a solid, whole, and perfect globe of light,That shone all over, was all over bright,And dared all sullying clouds, and feared no darkening night.’

Oldham’s principal celebrity, however, is derived from his satires. He had the knack of stinging invective, and has been not unjustly compared to Churchill. His Satires on the Jesuits exactly suited the time of the Popish Plot, at present they repel by their one-sidedness. All satire, except that inspired by fancy, is apt to become repulsive by its natural tendency to dwell upon the meanest and lowest aspects of human nature; and this is pre-eminently the case with Oldham, who is always ridiculing or denouncing, always drawing his illustrations from the base and offensive, and seldom diversifies his low matter with an ennobling thought. Yet he evinces so much manly sense, and his style is so nervous, that it is impossible not to admire his vigour, and wish him a more inviting subject. His metre and rhyme frequently stand in need of Dryden’s generous apology:

‘O early ripe! to thy abundant storeWhat could advancing age have added more?It might, what Nature never gives the young,Have taught the smoothness of thy native tongue.But satire needs not these, and wit will shineThrough the harsh cadence of a rugged line.’

All this notwithstanding, Oldham had the root of the matter in him, and has described, as only a poet could, the ambition, the toil, and the triumph of a poet:

‘’Tis endless, Sir, to tell the many waysWherein my poor deluded self I please:How, when the fancy lab’ring for a birth,With unfelt throes, brings its rude issue forth:How, after, when imperfect, shapeless thoughtIs, by the judgment, into fashion wrought:When at first search, I traverse o’er my mind,None, but a dark and empty void I find:Some little hints, at length, like sparks break thence,And glimm’ring thoughts, just dawning into sense:Confus’d, awhile, the mixt ideas lieWith nought of mark to be discover’d by;Like colours undistinguish’d in the night,Till the dusk images mov’d to the light,Teach the discerning faculty to choose,Which it had best adopt, and which refuse.Here rougher strokes, touch’d with a careless dash,Resemble the first setting of a face:There finish’d draughts in form more full appear,And in their justness ask no further care,Meanwhile, with inward joy, I proud am grown,To see the work successfully go on;And prize myself in a creating-power,That could make something, what was nought before.Sometimes a stiff unwieldy thought I meet,Which to my laws, will scarce be made submit:But when, after expense of pains and time,’Tis manag’d well, and taught to yoke in rhime,In triumph, more than joyful warriors would,Had they some stout and hardy foe subdu’d:And idly think, less goes to their command,That makes arm’d troops in well-placed order stand,Than to the conduct of my words, when theyMarch in due ranks, are set in just array.

Then straight I grow a strange exalted thing,And equal in conceit at least a king:As the poor drunkard, when wine stums his brains,Anointed with that liquor, thinks he reigns;Bewitch’d by these delusions, ’tis I write,(The tricks some pleasant devil plays in spite)And when I’m in the freakish trance, which I,Fond silly wretch, mistake for ecstacy,I find all former resolutions vain,And thus recant them, and make new again.“What was’t I rashly vow’d? shall ever IQuit my beloved mistress, Poetry?Thou sweet beguiler of my lonely hours,Which thus glide unperceiv’d, with silent course:Thou gentle spell, which undisturb’d dost keepMy breast, and charm intruding care asleep:They say thou’rt poor, and un-endow’d, what tho’?For thee, I this vain, worthless world forego:Let wealth and honour be for fortune’s slaves,The alms of fools, and prize of crafty knaves:To me thou art, whate’er th’ambitious crave,And all that greedy misers want or have.In youth or age, in travel or at home;Here, or in town, at London, or at Rome;Rich, or a beggar, free, or in the Fleet,What’er my fate is, ’tis my fate to write.”’

Oldham’s talent, depending upon masculine sense and vigour of expression rather than upon the more ethereal graces of poetry, was of the kind to expand and mellow by age and practice. Had he lived longer he would undoubtedly have left a name conspicuous in English literature. As it is, he can only be regarded as a bright satellite revolving at a respectful distance around the all-illumining orb of Dryden. Before passing to Marvell and Butler, the only two really original poets after Dryden besides the veterans Cowley and Waller, who belong to the preceding period, it will be convenient to despatch a group of minor bards, whose inclusion in the standard collections of poetry, involving memoirs by a master of biography, has given them more celebrity than they in most instances deserve.