Chapter 5

His comparisons, as I have said, are almost always happy. This, from the "Indian Emperor," is tenderly pathetic:--

"As callow birds, Whose mother's killed in seeking of the prey, Cry in their nest and think her long away, And, at each leaf that stirs, each blast of wind, Gape for the food which they must never find."

And this, of the anger with which the Maiden Queen, striving to hide her jealousy, betrays her love, is vigorous:--

"Her rage was love, and its tempestuous flame, Like lightning, showed the heaven from whence it came."

The following simile from the "Conquest of Grenada" is as well expressed as it is apt in conception:--

"I scarcely understand my own intent; But, silk-worm like, so long within have wrought, That I am lost in my own web of thought."

In the "Rival Ladies," Angelina, walking in the dark, describes her sensations naturally and strikingly:--

"No noise but what my footsteps make, and they Sound dreadfully and louder than by day: They double too, and every step I take Sounds thick, methinks, and more than one could make."

In all the rhymed plays[64] there are many passages which one is rather inclined to like than sure he would be right in liking them. The following verses from "Aurengzebe" are of this sort:--

"My love was such it needed no return, Rich in itself, like elemental fire, Whose pureness does no aliment require."

This is Cowleyish, and _pureness_ is surely the wrong word; and yet it is better than mere commonplace. Perhaps what oftenest turns the balance in Dryden's favor, when we are weighing his claims as a poet, is his persistent capability of enthusiasm. To the last he kindles, and sometimes _almost_ flashes out that supernatural light which is the supreme test of poetic genius. As he himself so finely and characteristically says in "Aurengzebe," there was no period in his life when it was not true of him that

"He felt the inspiring heat, the absent god return."

The verses which follow are full of him, and, with the exception of the single word _underwent_, are in his luckiest manner:--

"One loose, one sally of a hero's soul, Does all the military art control. While timorous wit goes round, or fords the shore, He shoots the gulf, and is already o'er, And, when the enthusiastic fit is spent, Looks back amazed at what he underwent."[65]

Pithy sentences and phrases always drop from Dryden's pen as if unawares, whether in prose or verse. I string together a few at random:--

"The greatest argument for love is love."

"Few know the use of life before 't is past."

"Time gives himself and is not valued."

"Death in itself is nothing; but we fear To be we know not what, we know not where."

"Love either finds equality or makes it; Like death, he knows no difference in degrees."

"That's empire, that which I can give away."

"Yours is a soul irregularly great, Which, wanting temper, yet abounds in heat."

"Forgiveness to the injured does belong, But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong."

"Poor women's thoughts are all extempore."

"The cause of love can never be assigned, 'T is in no face, but in the lover's mind."[66]

"Heaven can forgive a crime to penitence, For Heaven can judge if penitence be true; But man, who knows not hearts, should make examples."

"Kings' titles commonly begin by force, Which time wears off and mellows into right."

"Fear's a large promiser; who subject live To that base passion, know not what they give."

"The secret pleasure of the generous act Is the great mind's great bribe."

"That bad thing, gold, buys all good things."

"Why, love does all that's noble here below."

"To prove religion true, If either wit or sufferings could suffice, All faiths afford the constant and the wise."

But Dryden, as he tells us himself,

"Grew weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme; Passion's too fierce to be in fetters bound, And Nature flies him like enchanted ground."

The finest things in his plays were written in blank verse, as vernacular to him as the alexandrine to the French. In this he vindicates his claim as a poet. His diction gets wings, and both his verse and his thought become capable of a reach which was denied them when set in the stocks of the couplet. The solid man becomes even airy in this new-found freedom: Anthony says,

"How I loved, Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours That _danced away with down upon your feet_."

And what image was ever more delicately exquisite, what movement more fadingly accordant with the sense, than in the last two verses of the following passage?

"I feel death rising higher still and higher, Within my bosom; every breath I fetch Shuts up my life within a shorter compass, _And, like the vanishing sound of bells, grows less And less each pulse, till it be lost in air_."[67]

Nor was he altogether without pathos, though it is rare with him. The following passage seems to me tenderly full of it:--

"Something like That voice, methinks, I should have somewhere heard; But floods of woe have hurried it far off Beyond my ken of soul."[68]

And this single verse from "Aurengzebe":--

"Live still! oh live! live even to be unkind!"

with its passionate eagerness and sobbing repetition, is worth a ship-load of the long-drawn treacle of modern self-compassion.

Now and then, to be sure, we come upon something that makes us hesitate again whether, after all, Dryden was not grandiose rather than great, as in the two passages that next follow:--

"He looks secure of death, superior greatness, Like Jove when he made Fate and said, Thou art The slave of my creation."[69]

"I'm pleased with my own work; Jove was not more With infant nature, when his spacious hand Had rounded this huge ball of earth and seas, To give it the first push and see it roll Along the vast abyss."[70]

I should say that Dryden is more apt to dilate our fancy than our thought, as great poets have the gift of doing. But if he have not the potent alchemy that transmutes the lead of our commonplace associations into gold, as Shakespeare knows how to do so easily, yet his sense is always up to the sterling standard; and though he has not added so much as some have done to the stock of bullion which others afterwards coin and put in circulation, there are few who have minted so many phrases that are still a part of our daily currency. The first line of the following passage has been worn pretty smooth, but the succeeding ones are less familiar:--

"Men are but children of a larger growth, Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too and full as vain; And yet the soul, shut up in her dark room, Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing; But, like a mole in earth, busy and blind, Works all her folly up and casts it outward In the world's open view."[71]

The image is mixed and even contradictory, but the thought obtains grace for it. I feel as if Shakespeare would have written _seeing_ for _viewing_, thus gaining the strength of repetition in one verse and avoiding the sameness of it in the other. Dryden, I suspect, was not much given to correction, and indeed one of the great charms of his best writing is that everything seems struck off at a heat, as by a superior man in the best mood of his talk. Where he rises, he generally becomes fervent rather than imaginative; his thought does not incorporate itself in metaphor, as in purely poetic minds, but repeats and reinforces itself in simile. Where he _is_ imaginative, it is in that lower sense which the poverty of our language, for want of a better word, compels us to call _picturesque_, and even then he shows little of that finer instinct which suggests so much more than it tells, and works the more powerfully as it taxes more the imagination of the reader. In Donne's "Relic" there is an example of what I mean. He fancies some one breaking up his grave and spying

"A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,"--

a verse that still shines there in the darkness of the tomb, after two centuries, like one of those inextinguishable lamps whose secret is lost.[72] Yet Dryden sometimes showed a sense of this magic of a mysterious hint, as in the "Spanish Friar":--

"No, I confess, you bade me not in words; The dial spoke not, but it made shrewd signs, And pointed full upon the stroke of murder."

This is perhaps a solitary example. Nor is he always so possessed by the image in his mind as unconsciously to choose even the picturesquely imaginative word. He has done so, however, in this passage from "Marriage à la Mode":--

"You ne'er mast hope again to see your princess, Except as prisoners view fair walks and streets, And careless passengers going by their grates."

But after all, he is best upon a level, table-land, it is true, and a very high level, but still somewhere between the loftier peaks of inspiration and the plain of every-day life. In those passages where he moralizes he is always good, setting some obvious truth in a new light by vigorous phrase and happy illustration. Take this (from "Oedipus") as a proof of it:--

"The gods are just, But how can finite measure infinite? Reason! alas, it does not know itself! Yet man, vain man, would with his short-lined plummet Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice. Whatever is, is in its causes just, Since all things are by fate. But purblind man Sees but a part o' th' chain, the nearest links, His eyes not carrying to that equal beam That poises all above."

From the same play I pick an illustration of that ripened sweetness of thought and language which marks the natural vein of Dryden. One cannot help applying the passage to the late Mr. Quincy:--

"Of no distemper, of no blast he died, But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long, E'en wondered at because he dropt no sooner; Fate seemed to wind him up for fourscore years; Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more, Till, like a clock worn out with eating Time, The wheels of weary life at last stood still."[73]

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

"Gone so soon! Is Death no more? He used him carelessly, With a familiar kindness; ere he knocked, Ran to the door and took him in his arms, As who should say, You're welcome at all hours, A friend need give no warning."

With one more extract from the same play, which is in every way his best, for he had, when he wrote it, been feeding on the bee-bread of Shakespeare, I shall conclude. Antony says,

"For I am now so sunk from what I was, Thou find'st me at my lowest water-mark. The rivers that ran in and raised my fortunes Are all dried up, or take another course: What I have left is from my native spring; I've a heart still that swells in scorn of Fate, And lifts me to my banks."

This is certainly, from beginning to end, in what used to be called the _grand_ style, at once noble and natural. I have not undertaken to analyze any one of the plays, for (except in "All for Love") it would have been only to expose their weakness. Dryden had _no_ constructive faculty; and in every one of his longer poems that required a plot, the plot is bad, always more or less inconsistent with itself, and rather hitched-on to the subject than combining with it. It is fair to say, however, before leaving this part of Dryden's literary work, that Horne Tooke thought "Don Sebastian" "the best play extant."[74]

Gray admired the plays of Dryden, "not as dramatic compositions, but as poetry."[75] "There are as many things finely said in his plays as almost by anybody," said Pope to Spence. Of their rant, their fustian, their bombast, their bad English, of their innumerable sins against Dryden's own better conscience both as poet and critic, I shall excuse myself from giving any instances.[76] I like what is good in Dryden so much, and it _is_ so good, that I think Gray was justified in always losing his temper when he heard "his faults criticised."[77]

It is as a satirist and pleader in verse that Dryden is best known, and as both he is in some respects unrivalled. His satire is not so sly as Chaucer's, but it is distinguished by the same good-nature. There is no malice in it. I shall not enter into his literary quarrels further than to say that he seems to me, on the whole, to have been forbearing, which is the more striking as he tells us repeatedly that he was naturally vindictive. It was he who called revenge "the darling attribute of heaven." "I complain not of their lampoons and libels, though I have been the public mark for many years. I am vindictive enough to have repelled force by force, if I could imagine that any of them had ever reached me." It was this feeling of easy superiority, I suspect, that made him the mark for so much jealous vituperation. Scott is wrong in attributing his onslaught upon Settle to jealousy because one of the latter's plays had been performed at Court,--an honor never paid to any of Dryden's.[78] I have found nothing like a trace of jealousy in that large and benignant nature. In his vindication of the "Duke of Guise," he says, with honest confidence in himself: "Nay, I durst almost refer myself to some of the angry poets on the other side, whether I have not rather countenanced and assisted their beginnings than hindered them from rising." He seems to have been really as indifferent to the attacks on himself as Pope pretended to be. In the same vindication he says of the "Rehearsal," the only one of them that had any wit in it, and it has a great deal: "Much less am I concerned at the noble name of Bayes; that's a brat so like his own father that he cannot be mistaken for any other body. They might as reasonably have called Tom Sternhold Virgil, and the resemblance would have held as well." In his Essay on Satire he says: "And yet we know that in Christian charity all offences are to be forgiven as we expect the like pardon for those we daily commit against Almighty God. And this consideration has often made me tremble when I was saying our Lord's Prayer; for the plain condition of the forgiveness which we beg is the pardoning of others the offences which they have done to us; for which reason I have many times avoided the commission of that fault, even when I have been notoriously provoked."[79] And in another passage he says, with his usual wisdom: "Good sense and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant world has thought otherwise. Good-nature, by which I mean beneficence and candor, is the product of right reason, which of necessity will give allowance to the failings of others, by considering that there is nothing perfect in mankind." In the same Essay he gives his own receipt for satire: "How easy it is to call rogue and villain, and that wittily! but how hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of those opprobrious terms!... This is the mystery of that noble trade.... Neither is it true that this fineness of raillery is offensive: a witty man is tickled while he is hurt in this manner, and a fool feels it not.... There is a vast difference between the slovenly butchering of a man and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place. A man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, of a bare hanging; but to make a malefactor die sweetly was only belonging to her husband. I wish I could apply it to myself, if the reader would be kind enough to think it belongs to me. The character of Zimri in my 'Absalom' is, in my opinion, worth the whole poem. It is not bloody, but it is ridiculous enough, and he for whom it was intended was too witty to resent it as an injury.... I avoided the mention of great crimes, and applied myself to the representing of blind sides and little extravagances, to which, the wittier a man is, he is genrally the more obnoxious."

Dryden thought his genius led him that way. In his elegy on the satirist Oldham, whom Hallam, without reading him, I suspect, ranks next to Dryden,[80] he says:--

"For sure our souls were near allied, and thine Cast in the same poetic mould with mine; One common note in either lyre did strike, And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike."

His practice is not always so delicate as his theory; but if he was sometimes rough, he never took a base advantage. He knocks his antagonist down, and there an end. Pope seems to have nursed his grudge, and then, watching his chance, to have squirted vitriol from behind a corner, rather glad than otherwise if it fell on the women of those he hated or envied. And if Dryden is never dastardly, as Pope often was, so also he never wrote anything so maliciously depreciatory as Pope's unprovoked attack on Addison. Dryden's satire is often coarse, but where it is coarsest, it is commonly in defence of himself against attacks that were themselves brutal. Then, to be sure, he snatches the first ready cudgel, as in Shadwell's case, though even then there is something of the good-humor of conscious strength. Pope's provocation was too often the mere opportunity to say a biting thing, where he could do it safely. If his victim showed fight, he tried to smooth things over, as with Dennis. Dryden could forget that he had ever had a quarrel, but he never slunk away from any, least of all from one provoked by himself.[81] Pope's satire is too much occupied with the externals of manners, habits, personal defects, and peculiarities. Dryden goes right to the rooted character of the man, to the weaknesses of his nature, as where he says of Burnet:--

"Prompt to assail, and careless of defence, Invulnerable in his impudence, He dares the world, and, eager of a name, He thrusts about and _justles into fame_. So fond of loud report that, not to miss Of being known (his last and utmost bliss), _He rather would be known for what he is_."

It would be hard to find in Pope such compression of meaning as in the first, or such penetrative sarcasm as in the second of the passages I have underscored. Dryden's satire is still quoted for its comprehensiveness of application, Pope's rather for the elegance of its finish and the point of its phrase than for any deeper qualities.[82] I do not remember that Dryden ever makes poverty a reproach.[83] He was above it, alike by generosity of birth and mind. Pope is always the _parvenu_, always giving himself the airs of a fine gentleman, and, like Horace Walpole and Byron, affecting superiority to professional literature. Dryden, like Lessing, was a hack-writer, and was proud, as an honest man has a right to be, of being able to get his bread by his brains. He lived in Grub Street all his life, and never dreamed that where a man of genius lived was not the best quarter of the town. "Tell his Majesty," said sturdy old Jonson, "that his soul lives in an alley."

Dryden's prefaces are a mine of good writing and judicious criticism. His _obiter dicta_ have often the penetration, and always more than the equity, of Voltaire's, for Dryden never loses temper, and never altogether qualifies his judgment by his self-love. "He was a more universal writer than Voltaire," said Horne Tooke, and perhaps it is true that he had a broader view, though his learning was neither so extensive nor so accurate. My space will not afford many extracts, but I cannot forbear one or two. He says of Chaucer, that "he is a perpetual fountain of good sense,"[84] and likes him better than Ovid,--a bold confession in that day. He prefers the pastorals of Theocritus to those of Virgil. "Virgil's shepherds are too well read in the philosophy of Epicurus and of Plato"; "there is a kind of rusticity in all those pompous verses, somewhat of a holiday shepherd strutting in his country buskins";[85] "Theocritus is softer than Ovid, he touches the passions more delicately, and performs all this out of his own fund, without diving into the arts and sciences for a supply. Even his Doric dialect has an incomparable sweetness in his clownishness, like a fair shepherdess, in her country russet, talking in a Yorkshire tone."[86] Comparing Virgil's verse with that of some other poets, he says, that his "numbers are perpetually varied to increase the delight of the reader, so that the same sounds are never repeated twice together. On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, though they write in styles different from each other, yet have each of them but one sort of music in their verses. All the versification and little variety of Claudian is included within the compass of four or five lines, and then he begins again in the same tenor, perpetually closing his sense at the end of a verse, and that verse commonly which they call golden, or two substantives and two adjectives with a verb betwixt them to keep the peace. Ovid, with all his sweetness, has as little variety of numbers and sound as he; he is always, as it were, upon the hand-gallop, and his verse runs upon carpet-ground."[87] What a dreary half-century would have been saved to English poetry, could Pope have laid these sentences to heart! Upon translation, no one has written so much and so well as Dryden in his various prefaces. Whatever has been said since is either expansion or variation of what he had said before. His general theory may be stated as an aim at something between the literalness of metaphrase and the looseness of paraphase. "Where I have enlarged," he says, "I desire the false critics would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but either _they are secretly in the poet_, or may be fairly deduced from him." Coleridge, with his usual cleverness of _assimilation_, has condensed him in a letter to Wordsworth: "There is no medium between a prose version and one on the avowed principle of _compensation_ in the widest sense, i.e. manner, genius, total effect."[88]