The Age of Dryden

We have now to consider the two plays of Dryden’s on which his fame as a dramatist principally rests, and which, if in some respects less interesting than his other dramatic writings, as less intensely characteristic of the man and his age, are for that very reason better equipped for competition for a place among the dramas of all time.

All for Love (1678) is, Dryden tells us, the only play he wrote entirely to please his own taste, and composed professedly in imitation of ‘the divine Shakespeare.’ He did not, as in his unfortunate alteration of Troilus and Cressida, select a piece of Shakespeare’s which, not understanding, he rashly thought himself able to improve, but, in a spirit of true reverence, set himself to copy one which he held in high esteem. It should be remembered, to the honour of Dryden’s critical judgment, that the two plays of Shakespeare’s most warmly commended by him, Antony and Cleopatra and Richard the Second, were generally underrated even by Shakespeare’s most devoted worshippers, until Coleridge taught us better. In All for Love he found a subject suitable to his genius, and, in our opinion, achieved very decidedly his best play. It is, indeed, almost as good as a play on the French model can be, inferior to its prototypes only from the lack of brilliant declamation, scarcely practicable without rhyme, but more than compensating this inferiority by the greater freedom and flexibility of its blank verse. Its defects are mainly those of its species, and would be less apparent if it did not so directly court comparison with one of the greatest examples of Shakespeare’s art. It would have been impossible for a greater genius than Dryden to have done justice to his theme within the confines prescribed by the classical drama. The demeanour of Antony during the period of his downfall, as recorded by history, is below the dignity of tragedy. Some weakness may be forgiven in a hero, but the heroism of the real Antony is swallowed up in weakness. We can but pity, and pity is largely leavened with contempt. There is but one remedy, to create a Cleopatra so wondrous and fascinating as fairly to counterbalance the empire which Antony throws away for her sake. Shakespeare’s art is equal to the occasion; his Cleopatra is dæmonic, and at the same time so intensely feminine that the purest and meekest of her sex may see much of themselves in her. She is at once an epitome and an encyclopædia, and the reader can hardly despise Antony for being the slave of a spell which he feels so strongly himself. Dryden’s Cleopatra wants this character of universality, which, indeed, none but Shakespeare could have given, and Shakespeare himself could not have given if in bondage to the unities. She is a fine, passionate, sensuous woman, a kind of Mary Stuart, interesting, but not to the point at which it could be felt that the world were well lost for her. The inferiority of Cleopatra reacts grievously upon Antony. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is so grand that her lover is exalted by the admiration which, in spite of her perfidies, she manifestly feels for him. The beloved of such a woman must be heroic, an impression skilfully assisted by the effect Antony produces upon the prudent and politic Augustus. Dryden’s Cleopatra can bestow no such patent of distinction. By so much as the chief personages are inferior to their exemplars, by so much also is the puny, starved action of Dryden’s tragedy, restricted to one day and seven characters, inferior to the opulence of Shakespeare’s, ranging over the Roman world, crowded with personages, and gathering up every trait from Plutarch that could contribute picturesqueness to its prodigality of incident and sentiment. Nor is Dryden entirely successful in the conduct of his plot. The introduction of Octavia is a happy idea, but she appears at too late a period of Antony’s history. The implication that his return to her could have availed him in so desperate an extremity is more contrary to historical truth and common reason than any of the anachronisms for which Dryden derides Elizabethan poets. The intrigue by which Dolabella is made to excite Antony’s jealousy is more worthy of comedy than of heroic tragedy, besides being inconsistent with the manly character of its promoter, Ventidius. This gallant veteran is indeed a fine creation; too fine, for he sometimes seems to eclipse Antony and Cleopatra both, and assumes more prominence in the action than Shakespeare would have allowed him. Alexas is the hasty and much marred outline of a character which might have been hardly less impressive had Dryden been at the pains to work out the conception adumbrated in the first act. When all these imperfections are admitted, and they should not be passed over in silence after Scott’s ill-judged parallel of Dryden’s performance with Shakespeare’s, it remains true that All for Love is a very fine play, energetic, passionate, and steeped in that atmosphere of nobility which half redeems the literary defects of The Conquest of Granada. The poetry is frequently very fine, as in Octavia’s speech to Antony, remarkable as perhaps the sole instance of genuine pathos throughout the entire range of Dryden’s dramatic writings:

‘Look on these;Are they not yours? or stand they thus neglectedAs they are mine? Go to him, children, go;Kneel to him, take him by the hand, speak to him;For you may speak, and he may own you, too,Without a blush; and so he cannot allHis children. Go, I say, and pull him to me,And pull him to yourselves, from that bad woman.You, Agrippina, hang upon his arms;And you, Antonia, clasp about his waist:If he will shake you off, if he will dash youAgainst the pavement, you must bear it, children,For you are mine, and I was born to suffer.’

Antony’s sarcasms upon Augustus reveal the ripening satirist of Absalom and Achitophel:

‘Ant. Octavius is the minion of blind chance,But holds from virtue nothing.Vent. Has he courage?Ant. But just enough to season him from coward.O, ’tis the coldest youth upon a charge,The most deliberate fighter! if he ventures,(As in Illyria once, they say, he did,To storm a town) ’tis when he cannot choose;When all the world have fixt their eyes upon him;And then he lives on that for seven years after;But, at a close revenge he never fails.Vent. I heard you challenged him.Ant. I did, Ventidius.What think’st thou was his answer? ’Twas so tame! —He said, he had more ways than one to die;I had not.Vent. Poor!Ant. He has more ways than one;But he would choose them all before that one.Vent. He first would choose an ague, or a fever.Ant. No; it must be an ague, not a fever;He has not warmth enough to die by that.Vent. Or old age and a bed.Ant. Ay, there’s his choice.He would live, like a lamp, to the last wink,And crawl upon the utmost verge of life.O, Hercules! Why should a man like this,Who dares not trust his fate for one great action,Be all the care of heaven? Why should he lord itO’er fourscore thousand men, of whom each oneIs braver than himself?Vent. You conquer’d for him:Philippi knows it; there you shared with himThat empire, which your sword made all your own.Ant. Fool that I was, upon my eagle’s wingsI bore this wren, till I was tired with soaring,And now he mounts above me.Good heavens, is this, – is this the man who braves me?Who bids my age make way? drives me before himTo the world’s ridge, and sweeps me off like rubbish?’

Don Sebastian (1690) is generally regarded as Dryden’s dramatic masterpiece. It did not please upon its first appearance, owing to its excessive length. Dryden ingenuously confesses that he was obliged to sacrifice twelve hundred lines, which he restored when the play was printed. Mr. Saintsbury more than hints a preference for All for Love, which we entirely share. Were even the serious part of the respective dramas of equal merit, the scale would be turned in favour of All for Love by the wretchedness of the comic scenes which constitute so large a portion of the rival drama. They are at best indifferent farce, and cannot be even called excrescences on the main action, inasmuch as they do not grow out of it at all. In unity of action, therefore, and uniformity of literary merit, All for Love excels its competitor, and its personages are more truthful and more interesting. Sebastian, though a gallant, chivalrous figure, takes no such hold on the imagination as Antony and Ventidius; and Almeyda, one of the least interesting of Dryden’s heroines, is a sorry exchange for Cleopatra. Muley Moloch and Benducar are wholly stagey. Nothing, then, remains but Dorax, and his capabilities are chiefly evinced in one great scene. Even this is in some respects inartificially conducted. The spectator is insufficiently prepared for it. The special ground of Dorax’s resentment comes upon us as a surprise; and his repentance is too hasty and sudden. A similar defect may be alleged against the whole of the tragic action. The centre of interest is gradually shifted, not intentionally, but from the author’s omission to foreshadow the events to come after the fashion of a masterpiece he must have studied, the Œdipus Tyrannus. At first all our interest is enlisted for Sebastian’s life, and it is with a sort of puzzlement that we feel ourselves at last listening to a story of incest. Muley Moloch and Benducar have disappeared, and their place is occupied by a new character, Alvarez. In every respect, therefore, regarded as a work of art, Don Sebastian fails to sustain comparison with All for Love, and there is no countervailing superiority in the diction, whose general nobility and spirit occasionally swell into bombast. The worst fault remains to be told: Dorax’s ludicrous escape from death by reason of being poisoned by two enemies at once. If either the Emperor or the Mufti would have let him alone he would never have lived to be reconciled to Sebastian, but the fiery drug of the one is neutralized by the icy bane of the other, and vice versâ. Dryden thinks it sufficient excuse that a similar incident is vouched for by Ausonius, but really there is nothing so farcical in the Rehearsal. On the whole, we cannot but consider Don Sebastian a very imperfect play, redeemed from mediocrity by the general vigour and animation of the diction, and the loftiness of soul which seldom forsakes Dryden, except when he wilfully panders to the popular taste.

But little space can here be devoted to Dryden’s other plays. Some are not worth criticism. The Mock Astrologer, largely borrowed from French and Spanish sources, contains some of his best lyrics. Many parts of Cleomenes are very noble, but it is somewhat heavy as a whole. King Arthur, a musical and spectacular drama, is an excellent specimen of its class. Dryden’s portion of Œdipus, written in conjunction with Lee, shows how finely he, like his model Lucan, could deal with the supernatural. This is by no means the case with his State of Innocence and Fall of Man, which is, nevertheless, one of his pieces most worthy of perusal. It measures the prodigious fall from the age of Cromwell to the age of Charles; while Dryden yet displays such fine poetical gifts as to command respect amid all the absurdities of his unintentional burlesque of Milton.

Dryden undeniably took up the profession of playwright without an effectual call. He became a dramatist, as clever men in our day become journalists, discerning in the stage the shortest literary cut to fame and fortune. He can hardly be said to have possessed any strictly dramatic gift in any exceptional degree, but he had enough of all to make a tolerable figure on the stage, and was besides a great poet and an admirable critic. His poetry redeems the defects of his serious plays, if we except such a mere pièce de circonstance as Amboyna. The best of them have very bad faults, but even the worst are impressed with the stamp of genius. It is only in comedy that his failure is sometimes utter and irretrievable; yet a perception of the humorous cannot be denied to the author of Amphitryon. But we nowhere find evidence of any supreme dramatic faculty, anything that would have constrained him to write plays if plays had not happened to be in fashion. As he was not born a dramatic poet he had to be made one, and he became one mainly in virtue of his eminent critical endowment. His prefaces are a most interesting study. They exhibit the steady advance of a slow, strong, sure mind from rudimentary conceptions to as just views of the requisites of dramatic poetry as could well be attained in an age encumbered with venerable fallacies. Dryden’s manly sense, homely sagacity, and piercing shrewdness, break through many trammels, as when, in the preface to All for Love, he vindicates his breach of the conventions of the French stage. In that to Troilus and Cressida he compares Shakespeare with Fletcher, and pronounces decidedly in favour of the former, a preference far from universal in his day. The preface to The Spanish Friar is the most remarkable of any, and shows how much he had learned and unlearned. We shall, nevertheless, find his special glory in his character as the most truly representative dramatist of his time. Otway might have been an Elizabethan, Dryden never could. If we seek for the dramatic author to whom he is on the whole nearest of kin, we may perhaps find him in Byron. Byron had no more genuine dramatic vocation than Dryden had, but, like Dryden, produced memorable works by force and flexibility of genius. From the theatrical point of view Dryden’s plays are greatly superior to Byron’s; if the latter’s rank higher as literature the main cause is the existence of more favourable conditions. Dryden’s worst faults would have been impossible in the nineteenth century; and his treatment of the supernatural, his frequent visitations of speculation, and the lofty tone of his heroic passages, prove that he could have drawn a Manfred, a Cain, or a Myrrha, if he had lived like Byron in a renovated age.

CHAPTER V.

DRAMATIC POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS

After Dryden, the metrical dramatists of the Restoration, as of other epochs, may be accurately divided into two classes, the poets and the playwrights. As was to be expected in an age when even genuine poetry drooped earthward, and prose seldom kindled into poetry, the latter class was largely in the majority. Only three dramatists can justly challenge the title of poet – Dryden, Otway, and Lee. In Dryden a mighty fire, half choked with its own fuel, struggles gallantly against extinction, and eventually evolves nearly as much flame as smoke. In Otway a pure and delicate flame hovers fitfully over a morass; in Lee the smothered fire breaks out, as Pope said of Lucan and Statius, ‘in sudden, brief, and interrupted flashes.’ Dryden was incomparably the most vigorous of the three, but Otway was the only born dramatist, and the little of genuine dramatic excellence that he has wrought claims a higher place than the more dazzling productions of his contemporary.

Otway (1651-1685).

Thomas Otway, son of the vicar of Woolbeding, was born at Trotton, near Midhurst, in Sussex, March 3rd, 1651. He was educated at Winchester and Christchurch, but (perhaps driven by necessity, for he says in the dedication to Venice Preserved, ‘A steady faith, and loyalty to my prince was all the inheritance my father left me’) forsook the latter ere his academical course was half completed to try his fortune as a performer on the stage, where he entirely failed. His first play, Alcibiades (1675), a poor piece, served to introduce him to Rochester and other patrons; and in the following year Don Carlos, founded upon the novel by Saint Réal, obtained, partly by the support of Rochester, with whom Otway soon quarrelled, a striking success, and is said to have produced more than any previous play. Two translations from the French followed; next (1678) came the unsuccessful comedy of Friendship in Fashion, and in 1680 Caius Marius, an audacious plagiarism from Romeo and Juliet. In the interim Otway had made trial of a military career, but the regiment in which he had obtained a commission was speedily disbanded, his pay was withheld, and he had to support himself by plundering Shakespeare. In the same year in which he had stooped so low he proved his superiority to all contemporary dramatists by his tragedy of The Orphan, in which he first displayed the pathos by which he has merited the character of the English Euripides. Johnson remarks that Otway ‘conceived forcibly, and drew originally, by consulting nature in his own breast;’ and it is known that he experienced the pangs of a seven years’ unrequited passion for the beautiful actress, Mrs. Barry. In 1681 he produced The Soldier’s Fortune, a comedy chiefly interesting for its allusions to his own military experiences. According to Downes, its success was extraordinary, and brought both profit and reputation to the theatre. If it brought any of the former to the author, this must have been soon exhausted, since in the dedication to Venice Preserved (1682) he speaks of himself as only rescued from the direst want by the generosity of the Duchess of Portsmouth. For this great play, as well as for The Orphan, he is said to have received a hundred pounds. The Atheist, a second part of The Soldier’s Fortune (1684), was probably unproductive; and in April, 1685, Otway died on Tower Hill, undoubtedly in distress, although, of the two accounts of his death, that which ascribes it to a fever caught in pursuing an assassin, is better authenticated than the more usual one which represents him as choked by a loaf which he was devouring in a state of ravenous hunger. Such a story, nevertheless, could not have obtained credit if his circumstances had not been known to have been desperate. It is not likely that he had much conduct or economy in his affairs, or was endowed in any degree with the severer virtues. The tone of his letters to Mrs. Barry, however, and the constancy of his seven years’ affection for her, seem to indicate a natural refinement of feeling, and if there is truth in the dictum,

‘He best can paint them, who can feel them most,’

the creator of Monimia and Belvidera must have been endowed with a heart tender in no common degree. ‘He was,’ we are told, ‘of middle size, inclinable to corpulency, had thoughtful, yet lively, and as it were speaking eyes.’

Otway’s reputation rests entirely on his two great performances, The Orphan and Venice Preserved. His other plays deserve no special notice, although Don Carlos, which is said to have for many years attracted larger audiences than either of his masterpieces, might have been a good play if it had not been written in rhyme. The action is highly dramatic, and the characters, though artless, are not ineffective; but the pathos in which the poet excelled is continually disturbed by the bombastic couplets, ever trembling on the brink of the ridiculous. The remorse of Philip after the murder of his wife and son is as grotesque an instance of the forcible feeble as could easily be found, and is a melancholy instance indeed of the declension of the English drama, when contrasted with the demeanour of Othello in similar circumstances. Otway, however, was yet to show that his faults were rather his age’s than his own. The fashion of rhyme must have had much to do with the bombast of Don Carlos, for in The Orphan, his next effort in serious tragedy, there is hardly any rant, even when the situation might have seemed to have excused the exaggerated expression of emotion. The central incident of this admirable tragedy – the deception of a maiden beloved by two brothers, through the personation of the favoured one by his rival – seems now to be held to exclude it from the stage. The objection would probably prove to be imaginary, for the play was performed as late as 1819, when no less an actress than Miss O’Neill represented Monimia, and the diction is in general of quite exemplary propriety for a play of the period. Its principal defect as a work of art is that the pathos springs almost solely from the situation, and that the personages have hardly any hold upon our sympathies except as sufferers from an unhappy fatality. So powerful is the situation, nevertheless, that the sorrows of Castalio and Monimia can never fail to move; the poet’s language, too, is at its best, simpler and more remote from extravagance than even in Venice Preserved. The description of the old hag is justly celebrated:

‘I spied a wrinkled hag, with age grown double,Picking dry sticks, and mumbling to herself;Her eyes with scalding rheum were galled and red;Cold palsy shook her head, her hands seemed withered,And on her crooked shoulders had she wraptThe tattered remnant of an old striped hanging,Which served to keep her carcase from the cold;So there was nothing of a piece about her;Her lower weeds were all o’er coarsely patchedWith different coloured rags, black, red, white, yellow,And seemed to speak variety of wretchedness.’

There are also delightful touches of poetry:

‘Oh, thou art tender all:Gentle and kind as sympathizing nature!When a sad story has been told, I’ve seenThy little breasts, with soft compassion swelled,Shove up and down and heave like dying birds.’

The opening speech of act iv., sc. 2, also reveals a feeling for nature unusual in Restoration poetry, and may be taken to symbolize Otway’s regrets for the country. The items of the description are in no way conventional, and would not have occurred to one without experience of rural life:

‘Wished morning’s come! And now upon the plainsAnd distant mountains, where they feed their flocks,The happy shepherds leave their homely huts,And with their pipes proclaim the new-born day.The lusty swain comes with his well-filled scripOf healthful viands, which, when hunger calls,With much content and appetite he eats,To follow in the fields his daily toil,And dress the grateful glebe that yields him fruits.The beasts that under the warm hedges slept,And weathered out the cold bleak night, are up,And looking towards the neighbouring pastures, raiseTheir voice, and bid their fellow-brutes good-morrow.The cheerful birds, too, on the tops of treesAssemble all in quires, and with their notesSalute and welcome up the rising sun.There’s no condition here so cursed as mine.’

Venice Preserved, Otway’s most memorable work, though inferior in mere poetry and unstudied simplicity to The Orphan, surpasses it in tragic grandeur, in variety of action, and in intensity of interest. It has the further great advantage that the interest does not entirely arise from the situation, but that at least one of the characters is a skilful piece of painting from the life, and very probably from the author. In Jaffier we have a vivid portrait of the man who is entirely governed by the affections, and who sways from ardent resolution to a weakness hardly distinguishable from treachery, as friendship and love alternately incline him. The little we know of Otway warrants the impression that he was such a man, and assuredly he could not have excited such warm interest in a character so feeble in his offence, so abject in his repentance, and in general so perilously verging on the despicable, without a keen sympathy with the subject of his portrait. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. Pierre, though an imposing figure, is much less subtly painted than his friend; and Belvidera, her husband’s evil genius, interests only through her sorrows. The ‘despicable scenes of low farce’ which eke the drama out, are a grievous blot upon it. M. Taine may be right in deeming some comic relief allowable, but such trash is neither relief nor comedy. The language of the serious portion of the play, however, is in general dignified and tragic. Perhaps the best conducted, as it is the best known, is that in which Pierre spurns the remorseful Jaffier:

‘Jaff. I must be heard, I must have leave to speak.Thou hast disgraced me, Pierre, by a vile blow:Had not a dagger done thee nobler justice?But use me as thou wilt, thou canst not wrong me,For I am fallen beneath the basest injuries;Yet look upon me with an eye of mercy,With pity and with charity behold me;Shut not thy heart against a friend’s repentance,But, as there dwells a godlike nature in thee,Listen with mildness to my supplications.Pier. What whining monk art thou? what holy cheat,That wouldst encroach upon my credulous ears,But cant’st thus vilely? Hence! I know thee not.Dissemble and be nasty: leave me, hypocrite.Jaff. Not know me, Pierre?Pier. No, know thee not: what art thou?Jaff. Jaffier, thy friend, thy once loved, valued friend,Though now deservedly scorned, and used most hardly.Pier. Thou Jaffier! thou my once loved, valued friend?By Heavens, thou liest! The man so called, my friend,Was generous, honest, faithful, just, and valiant,Noble in mind, and in his person lovely,Dear to my eyes and tender to my heart:But thou, a wretched, base, false, worthless coward,Poor even in soul, and loathsome in thy aspect;All eyes must shun thee, and all hearts detest thee.Pr’ythee avoid, nor longer cling thus round me,Like something baneful, that my nature’s chilled at.Jaff. I have not wronged thee, by these tears I have not,But still am honest, true, and hope, too, valiant;My mind still full of thee: therefore still noble.Let not thy eyes then shun me, nor thy heartDetest me utterly: oh, look upon me,Look back and see my sad, sincere submission!How my heart swells, as even ’twould burst my bosom,Fond of its goal, and labouring to be at thee!What shall I do – what say to make thee hear me?Pier. Hast thou not wronged me? Dar’st thou call thyselfJaffier, that once loved, valued friend of mine,And swear thou hast not wronged me? Whence these chains?Whence the vile death which I may meet this moment?Whence this dishonour, but from thee, thou false one?Jaff. All’s true, yet grant one thing, and I’ve done asking.Pier. What’s that?Jaff. To take thy life on such conditionsThe Council have proposed: thou and thy friendsMay yet live long, and to be better treated.Pier. Life! ask my life? confess! record myselfA villain, for the privilege to breathe,And carry up and down this cursèd cityA discontented and repining spirit,Burthensome to itself, a few years longer,To lose it, may be, at last in a lewd quarrelFor some new friend, treacherous and false as thou art!No, this vile world and I have long been jangling,And cannot part on better terms than now,When only men like thee are fit to live in’t.Jaff. By all that’s just —Pier. Swear by some other powers,For thou hast broke that sacred oath too lately.Jaff. Then, by that hell I merit, I’ll not leave thee,Till to thyself, at least, thou’rt reconciled,However thy resentments deal with me.Pier. Not leave me!Jaff. No; thou shalt not force me from thee.Use me reproachfully, and like a slave;Tread on me, buffet me, heap wrongs on wrongsOn my poor head; I’ll bear it all with patience,Shall weary out thy most unfriendly cruelty:Lie at thy feet and kiss them, though they spurn me,Till, wounded by my sufferings, thou relent,And raise me to thy arms with dear forgiveness.Pier. Art thou not —Jaff. What?Pier. A traitor?Jaff. Yes.Pier. A villain?Jaff. Granted.Pier. A coward, a most scandalous coward,Spiritless, void of honour, one who has soldThy everlasting fame for shameless life?Jaff. All, all, and more, much more: my faults are numberless.Pier. And wouldst thou have me live on terms like thine?Base as thou’rt false —Jaff. No; ’tis to me that’s granted.The safety of thy life was all I aimed at,In recompense for faith and trust so broken.Pier. I scorn it more, because preserved by thee:And as when first my foolish heart took pityOn thy misfortunes, sought thee in thy miseries,Relieved thy wants, and raised thee from thy stateOf wretchedness in which thy fate had plunged thee,To rank thee in my list of noble friends,All I received in surety for thy truthWere unregarded oaths; and this, this dagger,Given with a worthless pledge thou since hast stolen,So I restore it back to thee again;Swearing by all those powers which thou hast violated,Never from this cursed hour to hold communion,Friendship, or interest with thee, though our yearsWere to exceed those limited the world.Take it – farewell! – for now I owe thee nothing.Jaff. Say thou wilt live then.Pier. For my life, dispose itJust as thou wilt, because ’tis what I’m tired with.Jaff. O Pierre!Pier. No more.Jaff. My eyes won’t lose the sight of thee,But languish after thine, and ache with gazing.Pier. Leave me. – Nay, then thus, thus I throw thee from me,And curses, great as is thy falsehood, catch thee!’

Nathaniel Lee (1653-1691).