Part 22

End these my days, indwellers of the woods, Take this my life, ye deep and raging floods; Sun, never rise to clear me with thy light, Horror and darkness, keep a lasting night; Consume me, care, with thy intestine wars, And stay your influence o'er me, bright stars!

In vain the stars, indwellers of the woods, Care, horror, wars, I call, and raging floods, For all have sworn no night shall dim my sight.

MADRIGAL

This world a-hunting is, The prey poor man, the Nimrod fierce is Death; His speedy greyhounds are Lust, sickness, envy, care, Strife that ne'er falls amiss, With all those ills which haunt us while we breathe. Now if by chance we fly Of these the eager chase, Old age with stealing pace Casts up his nets, and there we panting die.

REASON AND FEELING

I know that all beneath the moon decays, And what by mortals in this world is brought, In Time's great periods shall return to naught; That fairest States have fatal nights and days. I know that all the Muse's heavenly lays, With toil of spirit, which are so dearly bought, As idle sounds, of few or none are sought,-- That there is nothing lighter than vain praise. I know frail beauty like the purple flower, To which one morn oft birth and death affords; That love a jarring is of minds' accords, Where sense and will envassal Reason's power: Know what I list, all this cannot me move, But that, alas! I both must write and love.

DEGENERACY OF THE WORLD

What hapless hap had I for to be born In these unhappy times, and dying days Of this now doting World, when Good decays, Love's quite extinct, and Virtue's held a-scorn! When such are only prized, by wretched ways, Who with a golden fleece them can adorn; When avarice and lust are counted praise, And bravest minds live orphan-like forlorn! Why was not I born in that golden age When gold was not yet known? and those black arts. By which base worldlings vilely play their parts, With horrid acts staining Earth's stately stage? To have been then, O Heaven! 't had been my bliss; But bless me now, and take me soon from this.

THE BRIEFNESS OF LIFE

Look, how the flower which ling'ringly doth fade, The morning's darling late, the summer's queen, Spoiled of that juice which kept it fresh and green, As high as it did raise, bows low the head: Right so my life, contentment being dead, Or in their contraries but only seen, With swifter speed declines than erst it spread, And, blasted, scarce now shows what it hath been. As doth the pilgrim, therefore, whom the night By darkness would imprison on his way,-- Think on thy home, my soul, and think aright, Of what's yet left thee of life's wasting day; Thy sun posts westward, passèd is thy morn, And twice it is not given thee to be born.

THE UNIVERSE

Of this fair volume which we World do name, If we the leaves and sheets could turn with care-- Of Him who it corrects and did it frame We clear might read the art and wisdom rare, Find out his power, which wildest powers doth tame, His providence, extending everywhere, His justice, which proud rebels doth not spare, In every page and period of the same. But silly we, like foolish children, rest Well pleased with colored vellum, leaves of gold, Fair dangling ribands, leaving what is best; On the great Writer's sense ne'er taking hold; Or if by chance we stay our minds on aught, It is some picture on the margin wrought.

ON DEATH

From 'Cypress Grove'

Death is a piece of the order of this all, a part of the life of this world; for while the world is the world, some creatures must die and others take life. Eternal things are raised far above this orb of generation and corruption where the First Matter, like a still flowing and ebbing sea, with diverse waves but the same water, keepeth a restless and never tiring current; what is below in the universality of its kind doth not in itself abide.... If thou dost complain there shall be a time in the which thou shalt not be, why dost thou not too grieve that there was a time in which thou wast not, and so that thou art not as old as the enlivening planet of Time?... The excellent fabric of the universe itself shall one day suffer ruin, or change like ruin, and poor earthlings, thus to be handled, complain!

JOHN DRYDEN

(1631-1700)

BY THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY

John Dryden, the foremost man of letters of the period following the Restoration, was born at Aldwinkle, a village of Northamptonshire, on August 9th, 1631. He died May 1st, 1700. His life was therefore coeval with the closing period of the fierce controversies which culminated in the civil war and the triumph of the Parliamentary party; that, in turn, to be followed successively by the iron rule of Cromwell, by the restoration of the exiled Stuarts, and the reactionary tendencies in politics that accompanied that event; and finally with the effectual exclusion from the throne of this same family by the revolution of 1688, leaving behind, however, to their successors a smoldering Jacobite hostility that perpetually plotted the overthrow of the new government and later broke out twice into open revolt. All these changes of fortune, with their changes of opinion, are faithfully reflected in the productions of Dryden. To understand him thoroughly requires therefore an intimate familiarity with the civil and religious movements which characterize the whole period. Equally also do his writings, both creative and critical, represent the revolution of literary taste that took place in the latter half of the seventeenth century. It was while he was in the midst of his intellectual activity that French canons of criticism became largely the accepted rules, by which the value of English productions was tested. This was especially true of the drama. The study of Dryden is accordingly a study of the political and literary history of his times to an extent that is correspondingly true of no other English author before or since.

His family, both on the father's and the mother's side, was in full sympathy with the party opposed to the court. The son was educated at Westminster, then under the mastership of Richard Busby, whose relentless use of the rod has made his name famous in that long line of flagellants who have been at the head of the great English public schools. From Westminster he went to Trinity College, Cambridge. There he received the degree of A. B. in January 1654. Later in that same decade--the precise date is not known--he took up his residence in London; and in London the rest of his life was almost entirely spent.

Dryden's first published literary effort appeared in a little volume made up of thirty-three elegies, by various authors, on the death of a youth of great promise who had been educated at Westminster. This was Lord Hastings, the eldest son of the Earl of Huntingdon. He had died of the small-pox. Dryden's contribution was written in 1649, and consisted of but little over a hundred lines. No one expects great verse from a boy of eighteen; but the most extravagant anticipations of sorry performance will fail to come up to the reality of the wretchedness which was here attained. It was in words like these that the future laureate bewailed the death of the young nobleman and depicted the disease of which he died:--

"Was there no milder way but the small-pox, The very filthiness of Pandora's box? So many spots, like naeves, our Venus soil? One jewel set off with so many a foil? Blisters with pride swelled, which through his flesh did sprout Like rosebuds, stuck in the lily-skin about. Each little pimple had a tear in it, To wail the fault its rising did commit; Which, rebel-like, with its own lord at strife, Thus made an insurrection 'gainst his life. Or were these gems sent to adorn his skin, The cabinet of a richer soul within? No comet need foretell his change drew on, Whose corps might seem a constellation."

Criticism cannot be rendered sufficiently vituperative to characterize properly such a passage. It is fuller of conceits than ever Cowley crowded into the same space; and lines more crabbed and inharmonious Donne never succeeded in perpetrating. Its production upsets all principles of prophecy. The wretchedest of poetasters can take courage, when he contemplates the profundity of the depth out of which uprose the greatest poet of his time.

Dryden is, in fact, an example of that somewhat rare class of writers who steadily improve with advancing years. Most poets write their best verse before middle life. Many of them after that time go through a period of decline, and sometimes of rapid decline; and if they live to reach old age, they add to the quantity of their production without sensibly increasing its value. This general truth is conspicuously untrue of Dryden. His first work gave no promise of his future excellence, and it was by very slow degrees that he attained to the mastery of his art. But the older he grew, the better he wrote; and the volume published a few months before his death, and largely composed almost under its shadow, so far from showing the slightest sign of failing power, contains a great deal of the best poetry he ever produced.

As Dryden's relatives were Puritans, and some of them held place under the government, it was natural that upon coming to London he should attach himself to that party. Accordingly it is no surprise to find him duly mourning the death of the great Protector in certain 'Heroic Stanzas Consecrated to the Memory of Oliver Cromwell.' The first edition bears the date of 1659, and so far as we know, the production was Dryden's second venture in poetry. It was written in the measure of Davenant's 'Gondibert,' and is by no means a poor piece of work, though it has been sometimes so styled. It certainly pays not simply a high but a discerning tribute to the genius of Cromwell. Before two years had gone by, we find its author greeting the return of Charles with effusive loyalty, and with predictions of prosperity and honor to attend his reign, which events were soon woefully to belie. The poet has been severely censured for this change of attitude. It is a censure which might be bestowed with as much propriety upon the whole population of England. The joyful expectations to which he gave utterance were almost universal; and no other charge can well be brought against him than that he had the ability and took the occasion to express sentiments which were felt by nearly the entire nation.

From this time on, Dryden appears more and more in the public eye, and slowly but steadily forged his way to the front as the representative man of letters of his time. In 1670 he was appointed to the two distinct offices of poet laureate and historiographer royal. Thenceforward his relations with the court became close, and so they did not cease to be until the expulsion of James II. In 1683 he received a further mark of royal favor, in being made collector of customs of the port of London. In the political controversies which subsequently arose, Dryden's writings faithfully represented the sentiments of the side he had chosen, and expressed their prejudices and aversions not merely with force but also with virulence. His first literary activity, however, was on neutral ground. After eighteen years of compulsory closing, the Restoration opened wide once more the doors of the theatre. Dryden, like every one else possessed of literary ability, began to write for the stage. His first play, a comedy entitled 'The Wild Gallant,' was brought out in February 1663; and for the eighteen years following, it was compositions of such nature that occupied the main portion of his literary life. During that time he produced wholly or in part twenty-two comedies and tragedies. His pieces must from the outset have met with a fair degree of success, otherwise the King's Company would not have entered into a contract with him, as it did in 1667, to furnish for them each year a fixed number of plays, in consideration of his receiving a certain share of the profits of the theatre.

Yet it cannot be said that Dryden was in any respect a dramatist of a high order. As a writer of comedy he was not only inferior to contemporaries and immediate successors like Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, but in certain ways he was surpassed by Shadwell, the very man whom he himself has consigned to a disagreeable immortality as the hero of the 'MacFlecknoe.' His comedies are not merely full of obscenity,--which seems to have been a necessary ingredient to suit them to the taste of the age,--but they are full of a peculiarly disagreeable obscenity. One of his worst offenses in this direction, and altogether his most impudent one, was his adaptation for the stage of Shakespeare's 'Tempest.' The two plays are worth reading together for the sake of seeing how easily a pure and perfect creation of genius can be vulgarized in language and spirit almost beyond the possibility of recognition. In his tragedies, however, Dryden was much more successful. Yet even these, in spite of the excellence of occasional passages, do not attain to a high rank. Indeed, thought and expression are at times extravagant, not to say stilted, to an extent which afterward led him himself to make them the subject of ridicule. It was in them, however, during these years that he perfected by degrees his mastery of heroic verse, of which later he was to display the capabilities in a way that had never previously been seen and has never since been surpassed.

A controversy in regard to the proper method of composing plays brought forward Dryden, at an early period in his literary career, as a writer of prose. In this he at once attained unusual eminence. In him appear for the first time united the two characters of poet and of critic. Ben Jonson had in a measure preceded him in this respect; but Jonson's criticism was not so much devoted to the examination of general principles as to the exposure of the hopeless, helpless obtuseness of the men who had a different opinion of his works from what he himself entertained. The questions discussed by Dryden were of a more general nature. With the Stuarts had come in French literary tastes and French literary methods. The age was supposed to be too refined to be pleased with what had satisfied the coarse palates of preceding generations. In stage-writing in particular, the doctrine of the unities, almost uniformly violated by Shakespeare and most of the Elizabethans, was now held up as the only correct method of composition that could be employed by any writer who sought to conform to the true principles of art. Along with this came the substitution in the drama of rhyme for blank verse. Upon the comparative merits of these two as employed in tragedy, arose the first controversy in which Dryden was engaged. This one was with his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard; for in 1663 Dryden had become the husband of the daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, thus marrying, as Pope expressed it, "misery in a noble wife." Dryden was an advocate of rhyme; and the controversy on this point began with the publication in 1668 of his 'Essay of Dramatic Poesy.' It was afterward carried on by both parties, in prefaces to the plays they successively published. The prefaces to these productions regularly became later the place where Dryden laid down his critical doctrines on all points that engaged his attention; and whether we agree with his views or not, we are always sure to be charmed with the manner in which they are expressed.

In 1667 Dryden published a long poem entitled 'Annus Mirabilis.' It was in the same measure as the stanzas on Oliver Cromwell. It gave him a good deal of reputation at the time; but though it is far from being a despicable performance, few there are now who read it and still fewer who re-read it. Far different has been the fate of his next work. It was not until 1681, when England was beginning to emerge slowly from the excitement and agitation growing out of the alleged Popish plot, that he brought out his 'Absalom and Achitophel,' without question the greatest combined poetical and political satire to be found in our tongue. Here it was that for the first time he fully displayed his mastery over heroic verse. The notion once so widely prevalent--for the vogue of which, indeed, Dryden himself is mainly responsible--that Waller and Denham brought this verse to perfection, it now requires both extensive and special ignorance of our earlier authors to entertain; but on the other hand, there is no question that he himself imparted to the line a variety, vigor, and sustained majesty of movement such as the verse in its modern form had never previously received. There is therefore a fairly full measure of truth in the lines in which he was characterized by Pope:--

"Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join The varying verse, the full resounding line, The long majestic march and energy divine."

These lines of Pope, it may be added, exemplify purposely two peculiarities of Dryden's versification,--the occasional use of the triplet instead of the regular couplet, and of the Alexandrine, or line of six feet, in place of the usual line of five.

The poem is largely an attack upon the Earl of Shaftesbury, who in it bears the title of Achitophel. The portrayal of this statesman, which is given in this volume, is ample evidence of that skill of the poet in characterization which has made the pictures he drew immortal. Perhaps even more effective was the description of the Duke of Buckingham, under the designation of Zimri. For attacking that nobleman Dryden had both political and personal reasons. Buckingham had now joined the opponents of the court. Ten years previously the poet himself had been brought by him on the stage, with the aid of others, in the play called "The Rehearsal." His usual actions had been mimicked, his usual expressions had been put into the mouth of the character created to represent him, who was styled Bayes. This title had been given him because Dryden figuratively wore the bays, or laurel, as poet laureate. The name henceforward stuck. Dryden's turn had now come; and it was in these following lines that he drew the unfaded and fadeless picture of this nobleman, whose reputation even then was notorious rather than famous, and whose intellect was motley-minded rather than versatile:--

"Some of their chiefs were princes of the land; In the front rank of these did Zimri stand, A man so various that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome. Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts and nothing long, But in the course of one revolving moon Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon; Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking. Blest madman, who could every hour employ With something new to wish or to enjoy! Railing and praising were his usual themes, And both, to show his judgment, in extremes: So over-violent or over-civil That every man with him was God or Devil. In squandering wealth was his peculiar art: Nothing went unrewarded but desert. Beggared by fools whom still he found too late, He had his jest, and they had his estate."

As an example of the loftier and more majestic style occasionally found in this poem, is the powerful appeal of Achitophel to Absalom. The latter, it is to be said, stands for the Duke of Monmouth, the eldest of the illegitimate sons of Charles II. Him many of the so-called country party, now beginning to be styled Whigs, were endeavoring to have recognized as the next successor to the throne, in place of the Roman Catholic brother of the king, James, Duke of York. As a favorite son of the monarch, he, though then in opposition, is treated tenderly by Dryden throughout; and this feeling is plainly visible in the opening of the address to him put into the mouth of Achitophel, in these words:--

"Auspicious prince, at whose nativity Some royal planet ruled the southern sky, Thy longing country's darling and desire, Their cloudy pillar and their guardian fire, Their second Moses, whose extended wand Divides the seas and shows the promised land, Whose dawning day in every distant age Has exercised the sacred prophet's rage, The people's prayer, the glad diviner's theme, The young men's vision and the old men's dream,-- Thee savior, thee the nation's vows confess, And never satisfied with seeing, bless."

Dryden followed up the attack upon Shaftesbury with a poem entitled 'The Medal.' This satire, which appeared in March 1682, was called forth by the action of the partisans of the Whig leader in having a medal struck commemorating his release from the Tower, after the grand jury had thrown out the charge of treason which had been brought against him. Both of these pieces were followed by a host of replies. Some of them did not refrain from personal attack, which indeed had a certain justification in the poet's own violence of denunciation. The most abusive of these was a poem by Thomas Shadwell, entitled 'The Medal of John Bayes.' Such persons as fancy Dryden's subsequent punishment of that dramatist unwarranted in its severity should in justice read this ferociously scurrilous diatribe, in which every charge against the poet that malice or envy had concocted and rumor had set afloat, was here industriously raked together; and to the muck-heap thus collected, the intimacy of previous acquaintance was doubtless enabled to contribute its due quota of malignant assertion and more malignant insinuation. Shadwell was soon supplied, however, with ample reason to regret his action. Dryden's first and best known rejoinder is 'MacFlecknoe, or a Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet T. S.' This production has always had the reputation in literature of being the severest personal satire in the language; but it requires now for its appreciation an intimate acquaintance with Shadwell's plays, which very few possess. It is further disfigured in places by a coarseness from which, indeed, none of the poet's writings were certain to be free. Its general spirit can be indicated by a brief extract from its opening paragraph. Flecknoe, it is to be said, was a feeble poet who had died a few years before. He is here represented as having long reigned over the kingdom of dullness, but knowing that his end was close at hand, determines to settle the succession to the State. Accordingly he fixes upon his son Shadwell as the one best fitted to take his place in ruling over the realm of nonsense, and in continuing the war with wit and sense. The announcement of his intention he begins in the following words:--

"--Tis resolved, for Nature pleads that he Should only rule who most resembles me. Shadwell alone my perfect image bears, Mature in dullness from his tender years; Shadwell alone of all my sons is he Who stands confirmed in full stupidity. The rest to some faint meaning make pretense, But Shadwell never deviates into sense."

Far more bitter, however, was the renewed attack which a month later Dryden inserted in the two hundred lines he contributed to the continuation of 'Absalom and Achitophel' that was written by Nahum Tate. In this second part, which came out in November 1682, he devoted himself in particular to two of his opponents, Settle and Shadwell, under the names respectively of Doeg and Og--"two fools," he says, in his energetic way,--