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DRYDEN

WITCHCRAFT

SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE

NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO

LESSING

ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS

DRYDEN.

"Where the green apple shrivels on the spray, And pines the unripened pear in summer's kindliest ray, Even here Content has fixed her smiling reign With Independence, child of high Disdain. Exulting 'mid the winter of the skies, Shy as the jealous chamois, Freedom flies, And often grasps her sword, and often eyes."

Here we have every characteristic of the artificial method, even to the triplet, which Swift hated so heartily as "a vicious way of rhyming wherewith Mr. Dryden abounded, imitated by all the bad versifiers of Charles the Second's reign." Wordsworth became, indeed, very early the leader of reform; but, like Wesley, he endeavored a reform within the Establishment. Purifying the substance, he retained the outward forms with a feeling rather than conviction that, in poetry, substance and form are but manifestations of the same inward life, the one fused into the other in the vivid heat of their common expression. Wordsworth could never wholly shake off the influence of the century into which he was born. He began by proposing a reform of the ritual, but it went no further than an attempt to get rid of the words of Latin original where the meaning was as well or better given in derivatives of the Saxon. He would have stricken out the "assemble" and left the "meet together." Like Wesley, he might be compelled by necessity to a breach of the canon; but, like him, he was never a willing schismatic, and his singing robes were the full and flowing canonicals of the church by law established. Inspiration makes short work with the usage of the best authors and ready-made elegances of diction; but where Wordsworth is not possessed by his demon, as Moli?re said of Corneille, he equals Thomson in verbiage, out-Miltons Milton in artifice of style, and Latinizes his diction beyond Dryden. The fact was, that he took up his early opinions on instinct, and insensibly modified them as he studied the masters of what may be called the Middle Period of English verse. As a young man, he disparaged Virgil ; at fifty-nine he translated three books of the Aeneid, in emulation of Dryden, though falling far short of him in everything but closeness, as he seems, after a few years, to have been convinced. Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the true founder of the modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethan authority save Milton, whose own English was formed upon those earlier models. Keats denounced the authors of that style which came in toward the close of the seventeenth century, and reigned absolute through the whole of the eighteenth, as

"A schism, Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, ... who went about Holding a poor decrepit standard out, Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large The name of one Boileau!"

As a writer for the stage, he deliberately adopted and repeatedly reaffirmed the maxim that

"He who lives to please, must please to live."

"Oxford to him a dearer name shall be Than his own mother university; Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage, He chooses Athens in his riper age."

The earliest of his verses that have come down to us were written upon the death of Lord Hastings, and are as bad as they can be,--a kind of parody on the worst of Donne. They have every fault of his manner, without a hint of the subtile and often profound thought that more than redeems it. As the Doctor himself would have said, here is Donne outdone. The young nobleman died of the small-pox, and Dryden exclaims pathetically,--

"Was there no milder way than the small-pox, The very filthiness of Pandora's box?"

He compares the pustules to "rosebuds stuck i' the lily skin about," and says that

"Each little pimple had a tear in it To wail the fault its rising did commit."

But he has not done his worst yet, by a great deal. What follows is even finer:--

"No comet need foretell his change drew on, Whose corpse might seem a constellation. O, had he died of old, how great a strife Had been who from his death should draw their life! Who should, by one rich draught, become whate'er Seneca, Cato, Numa, Caesar, were, Learned, virtuous, pious, great, and have by this An universal metempsychosis! Must all these aged sires in one funeral Expire? all die in one so young, so small?"

"Young eaglet, who, thy nest thus soon forsook, So lofty and divine a course hast took As all admire, before the down begin To peep, as yet, upon thy smoother chin."

Here is almost every fault which Dryden's later nicety would have condemned. But perhaps there is no schooling so good for an author as his own youthful indiscretions. After this effort Dryden seems to have lain fallow for ten years, and then he at length reappears in thirty-seven "heroic stanzas" on the death of Cromwell. The versification is smoother, but the conceits are there again, though in a milder form. The verse is modelled after "Gondibert." A single image from nature gives some hint of the maturer Dryden:--

"And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, Made him but greater seem, not greater grow."

Two other verses,

"And the isle, when her protecting genius went, Upon his obsequies loud sighs conferred,"

are interesting, because they show that he had been studying the early poems of Milton. He has contrived to bury under a rubbish of verbiage one of the most purely imaginative passages ever written by the great Puritan poet.

"From haunted spring and dale, Edged with poplar pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent."

"The joyful London meets The princely York, himself alone a freight, The Swiftsure groans beneath great Gloster's weight"

and speaks of the

"Repeated prayer Which stormed the skies and ravished Charles from thence."

There is also a certain everydayness, not to say vulgarity, of phrase, which Dryden never wholly refined away, and which continually tempts us to sum up at once against him as the greatest poet that ever was or could be made wholly out of prose.

"Heaven would no bargain for its blessings drive"

is an example. On the other hand, there are a few verses almost worthy of his best days, as these:--

These are all the more noteworthy, that Dryden, unless in argument, is seldom equal for six lines together. In the poem to Lord Clarendon there are four verses that have something of the "energy divine" for which Pope praised his master.

"Let envy, then, those crimes within you see From which the happy never must be free; Envy that does with misery reside, The joy and the revenge of ruined pride."

In his "Aurengzebe" there is a passage, of which, as it is a good example of Dryden, I shall quote the whole, though my purpose aims mainly at the latter verses:--

"When I consider life, 't is all a cheat; Yet, fooled with Hope, men favor the deceit, Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay; To-morrow's falser than the former day, Lies worse, and, while it says we shall be blest With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. Strange cozenage! none would live past years again, Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain, And from the dregs of life think to receive What the first sprightly running could not give. I'm tired of waiting for this chymic gold Which fools us young and beggars us when old."

"Our sorrow and our crime To have accepted life so long a time, Without you here."

A weak man, put to the test by rough and angry times, as Waller was, may be pitied, but meanness is nothing but contemptible under any circumstances. If it be true that "every conqueror creates a Muse," Cromwell was unfortunate. Even Milton's sonnet, though dignified, is reserved if not distrustful. Marvell's "Horatian Ode," the most truly classic in our language, is worthy of its theme. The same poet's Elegy, in parts noble, and everywhere humanly tender, is worth more than all Carlyle's biography as a witness to the gentler qualities of the hero, and of the deep affection that stalwart nature could inspire in hearts of truly masculine temper. As it is little known, a few verses of it may be quoted to show the difference between grief that thinks of its object and grief that thinks of its rhymes:--

Such verses might not satisfy Lindley Murray, but they are of that higher mood which satisfies the heart. These couplets, too, have an energy worthy of Milton's friend:--

"When up the arm?d mountains of Dunbar He marched, and through deep Severn, ending war."

"Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse Shall the English soldier, ere he charge, rehearse."

On the whole, one is glad that Dryden's panegyric on the Protector was so poor. It was purely official verse-making. Had there been any feeling in it, there had been baseness in his address to Charles. As it is, we may fairly assume that he was so far sincere in both cases as to be thankful for a chance to exercise himself in rhyme, without much caring whether upon a funeral or a restoration. He might naturally enough expect that poetry would have a better chance under Charles than under Cromwell, or any successor with Commonwealth principles. Cromwell had more serious matters to think about than verses, while Charles might at least care as much about them as it was in his base good-nature to care about anything but loose women and spaniels. Dryden's sound sense, afterwards so conspicuous, shows itself even in these pieces, when we can get at it through the tangled thicket of tropical phrase. But the authentic and unmistakable Dryden first manifests himself in some verses addressed to his friend Dr. Charlton in 1663. We have first his common sense which has almost the point of wit, yet with a tang of prose:--

Then we have his graceful sweetness of fancy, where he speaks of the inhabitants of the New World:--

"Guiltless men who danced away their time, Fresh as their groves and happy as their clime."

"In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."

Let us now take a specimen of Dryden's bad prose from one of his poems. I open the "Annus Mirabilis" at random, and hit upon this:--

'Our little fleet was now engaged so far, That, like the swordfish in the whale, they fought. The combat only seemed a civil war, Till through their bowels we our passage wrought.'

Is this Dryden, or Sternhold, or Shadwell, those Toms who made him say that "dulness was fatal to the name of Tom"? The natural history of Goldsmith in the verse of Pye! His thoughts did not "voluntary move harmonious numbers." He had his choice between prose and verse, and seems to be poetical on second thought. I do not speak without book. He was more than half conscious of it himself. In the same letter to Mrs. Steward, just cited, he says, "I am still drudging on, always a poet and never a good one"; and this from no mock-modesty, for he is always handsomely frank in telling us whatever of his own doing pleased him. This was written in the last year of his life, and at about the same time he says elsewhere: "What judgment I had increases rather than diminishes, and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into verse or to give them the other harmony of prose; I have so long studied and practised both, that they are grown into a habit and become familiar to me." I think that a man who was primarily a poet would hardly have felt this equanimity of choice.

'Now when the winter's keener breath began To crystallize the Baltic ocean, To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods, And periwig with snow the baldpate woods.'

"True wit is Nature to advantage drest,"

a passage which has as many faults as only Dryden was capable of committing, even to a false idiom forced by the last rhyme. The same tyrant in dying exclaims:--

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