Chapter 23

"That crutch their feeble sense on verse; Who by my Muse to all succeeding times Shall live in spite of their own doggerel rhymes."

Of Settle, whose poetry was possessed of much smoothness but little sense, he spoke in a tone of contemptuous good-nature, though the object of the attack must certainly have deemed the tender mercies of Dryden to be cruel. It was in this way he was described, to quote a few lines:--

"Spiteful he is not, though he wrote a satire, For still there goes some thinking to ill-nature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Let him be gallows-free by my consent, And nothing suffer, since he nothing meant; Hanging supposes human soul and reason,-- This animal's below committing treason: Shall he be hanged who never could rebel? That's a preferment for Achitophel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Let him rail on; let his invective Muse Have four-and-twenty letters to abuse, Which if he jumbles to one line of sense, Indict him of a capital offense."

But it was not till he came to the portraiture of Shadwell that he gave full vent to the ferocity of his satire. He taunted him with the unwieldiness of his bulk, the grossness of his habits, with his want of wealth, and finally closed up with some lines into which he concentrated all the venom of his previous attacks:--

"But though Heaven made him poor, with reverence speaking, He never was a poet of God's making The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull, With this prophetic blessing--_Be thou dull_; Drink, swear, and roar, forbear no lewd delight Fit for thy bulk; do anything but write. Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men; A strong nativity--but for the pen; Eat opium, mingle arsenic in thy drink, Still thou mayest live, avoiding pen and ink. I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain, For treason, botched in rhyme, will be thy bane; Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck; 'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.

* * * * *

"A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull, For writing treason and for writing dull; To die for faction is a common evil, But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil. Hadst thou the glories of thy King exprest, Thy praises had been satires at the best; But thou in clumsy verse, unlicked, unpointed, Hast shamefully defied the Lord's anointed. I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes, For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes? But of King David's foes be this the doom,-- May all be like the young man Absalom; And for my foes may this their blessing be,-- To talk like Doeg and to write like thee."

Refinement of tone is not the distinguishing characteristic of satire of this sort. It does not attack its object by delicate insinuation or remote suggestion. It operates by heavy downright blows which crush by the mere weight and power of the stroke. There was in truth in those days a certain brutality not only permitted but expected in the way men spoke of each other, and Dryden conformed in this as in other respects to the manners and methods of his age. But of its kind the attack is perfect. The blows of a bludgeon which make of the victim a shapeless mass kill as effectively as the steel or poison which leaves every feature undisturbed, and to the common apprehension it serves to render the killing more manifest. At any rate, so long as a person has been done to death, it makes comparatively little difference how the death was brought about; and the object in this instance of Dryden's attack, though a man of no mean abilities, has never recovered from the demolition which his reputation then underwent.

In 1685 Charles II. died, and his brother James ascended the throne. In the following year Dryden went over to the Roman Catholic Church. No act of his life has met with severer censure. Nor can there be any doubt that the time he took to change his religion afforded ground for distrusting the sincerity of his motives. A king was on the throne who was straining every nerve to bring the Church of England once more under the sway of the Church of Rome. Obviously the adoption of the latter faith would recommend the poet to the favor of the bigoted monarch, and tend to advance his personal interests. There is no wonder, therefore, that he should at the time have been accused of being actuated by the unworthiest of reasons, and that the charge should continue to be repeated to our day. Yet a close study of Dryden's life and writings indicates that the step he took was a natural if not an inevitable outcome of the processes through which his opinions had been passing. He had been early trained in the strict tenets of the Puritan party. From these he had been carried over to the loose beliefs and looser life that followed everywhere hard upon the Restoration. By the sentiments then prevailing he was profoundly affected. Nothing in the writings of the first half of his literary life is more marked--not even his flings at matrimony--than the scoffing way in which he usually spoke of the clergy. His tone towards them is almost always contemptuous, where it is not positively vituperative. His famous political satire began with this line--

"In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin;"--

and a little later in the course of the same poem he observed that--

"Fraud was used, the sacrificer's trade,"

the "sacrificer" here denoting the priest. This feeling toward the clergy never in truth deserted him entirely. But no one who reads carefully his 'Religio Laici,' a poem published in 1682, can fail to perceive that even then he had not only drifted far away from the faith of his childhood, but had begun to be tormented and perplexed by the insoluble problems connected with the life and destiny of man, and with his relations to his Creator. The subject was not likely to weigh less heavily upon him in the years that followed. To Dryden, as to many before and since, it may have seemed the easiest method of deliverance from the difficulties in which he found himself involved, to cast the burden of doubts which disquieted the mind and depressed the heart, upon a Church that undertakes to assume the whole responsibility for the man's future on condition of his yielding to it an unquestioning faith in the present.

An immediate result of his conversion was the production in 1687 of one of his most deservedly famous poems, 'The Hind and the Panther.' He began it with the idea of assisting in bringing about the reconciliation between the Panther, typifying the Church of England, and the Hind, typifying the Church of Rome. It is apparent that before he finished it he saw that the project was hopeless. It is a poem of over twenty-five hundred lines, of which the opening up to line 150 is printed in this volume. Part of the passage here cited contains, without professing it as an object, and probably without intending it, the best defense that could be made for his change of religion. The production in its entirety is remarkable for the skill which its author displayed in carrying on an argument in verse. In this he certainly had no superior among poets, perhaps no equal. The work naturally created a great sensation in those days of fierce political and religious controversy. Both it and its writer were made the object of constant attack. A criticism, in particular, appeared upon it in the shape of a dialogue in prose with snatches of verse interspersed. It is usually known by the title of 'The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,' and was exalted at the time by unreasoning partisanship into a wonderful performance. Even to the present day, this dreary specimen of polemics is described as a very witty work by those who have never struggled to read it. It was the production of Charles Montagu, the future Earl of Halifax, and of Matthew Prior. A story too is still constantly repeated that Dryden was much hurt by the attacks of these two young men, to whom he had been kind, and wept over their ingratitude. If he shed any tears at all upon the occasion, they must have been due to the mortification he felt that any two persons who had been admitted to his friendship should have been guilty of twaddle so desperately tedious.

The flight of James and the accession of William and Mary threw Dryden at once out of the favor of the court, upon which to a large extent he had long depended for support. As a Jacobite he could not take the oath of allegiance; but there is hardly any doubt that under any circumstances he would have been deprived of the offices of place and profit he held. In the laureateship he was succeeded by his old antagonist Shadwell; and within a few years he saw the dignity of the position still further degraded by the appointment to it of Nahum Tate, one of the worst of the long procession of poetasters who have filled it. Dryden henceforth belonged to the party out of power. His feelings about his changed relations are shown plainly in the fine epistle with which he consoled Congreve for the failure of his comedy of the 'Double Dealer.' Yet displaced and unpensioned, and sometimes the object of hostile attack, his literary supremacy was more absolute than ever. All young authors, whether Whigs or Tories, sought his society and courted his favor; and his seat at Will's coffee-house was the throne from which he swayed the literary sceptre of England.

After the revolution of 1688 Dryden gave himself entirely up to authorship. He first turned to the stage; and between 1690 and 1694 he produced five plays. With the failure in the last-mentioned year of his tragi-comedy called 'Love Triumphant,' he abandoned writing for the theatre. The period immediately following he devoted mainly to his translation of Virgil, which was published in 1697. It was highly successful; but far more reputation came to him from a large folio volume that was brought out in November 1699, under the title of 'Fables.' Its contents consisted mainly of poetical narratives founded upon certain stories of the 'Decameron,' and of the modernization of some of the 'Canterbury Tales.' In certain ways these have been his most successful pieces, and have made his name familiar to successive generations of readers. Of the tales from Boccaccio, that of 'Cymon and Iphigenia' is on the whole the most pleasing. The modernizations of Chaucer were long regarded as superior to the original; and though superior knowledge of the original has effectually banished that belief, there is on the other hand no justification for the derogatory terms which are now sometimes applied to Dryden's versions.

The verse in this volume was preceded by a long critical essay in prose. Many of its views, especially those about the language of Chaucer, have been long discarded; but the criticism will always be read with pleasure for the genial spirit and sound sense which pervade it, and the unstudied ease with which it is written. Cowley and Dryden are in fact the founders of modern English prose; and the influence of the latter has been much greater than that of the former, inasmuch as he touched upon a far wider variety of topics, and for that reason obtained a far larger circle of readers in the century following his death. There was also the same steady improvement in Dryden's critical taste that there was in his poetical expression. His admiration for Shakespeare constantly improved during his whole life; and it is to be noticed that in what is generally regarded as the best of his plays--'All for Love,' brought out in the winter of 1677-78--he of his own accord abandoned rhyme for blank verse.

The publication of the 'Fables' was Dryden's last appearance before the public. In the following year he died, and was buried in Westminster Abbey by the side of Chaucer and Cowley. After his death his fame steadily increased instead of diminishing. For a long period his superiority in his particular line was ungrudgingly conceded by all, or if contested, was contested by Pope alone. His poetry indeed is not of the highest kind, though usually infinitely superior to that of his detractors. Still his excellences were those of the intellect and not of the spirit. On the higher planes of thought and feeling he rarely moves; to the highest he never aspires. The nearest he ever approaches to the former is in his later work, where religious emotion or religious zeal has lent to expression the aid of its intensity. There is a striking example of this in the personal references to his own experiences in the lines cited below from 'The Hind and the Panther.' Something too of the same spirit can be found, expressed in lofty language, in the following passage from the same poem, descriptive of the unity of the Church of Rome as contrasted with the numerous warring sects into which the Protestant body is divided:--

"One in herself, not rent by schism, but sound, Entire, one solid shining diamond, Not sparkles shattered into sects like you: One is the Church, and must be to be true, One central principle of unity. As undivided, so from errors free; As one in faith, so one in sanctity. Thus she, and none but she, the insulting rage Of heretics opposed from age to age; Still when the giant brood invades her throne, She stoops from heaven and meets them half-way down, And with paternal thunders vindicates her crown.

* * * * *

"Thus one, thus pure, behold her largely spread, Like the fair ocean from her mother-bed; From east to west triumphantly she rides, All shores are watered by her wealthy tides. The gospel sound diffused from Pole to Pole, Where winds can carry and where waves can roll, The selfsame doctrine of the sacred page Conveyed to every clime, in every age."

But though Dryden's poetry is not of the highest class, it is of the very highest kind in its class. Wherever the pure intellect comes into play, there he is invariably excellent. There is never any weakness; there is never any vagueness; there is never any deviation from the true path into aimless digression. His words invariably go straight to the mark, and not unfrequently with a directness and force that fully merit the epithet of "burning" applied to them by the poet Gray. His thoughts always rise naturally out of the matter in hand; and in the treatment of the meanest subjects he is not only never mean, but often falls without apparent effort into a felicity of phrase which holds the attention and implants itself in the memory. The benefit of exercise, for instance, is not a topic that can be deemed highly poetical; but in his epistle on country life addressed to his cousin John Driden, the moment he comes to speak of hunting and its salutary results his expression at once leaves the commonplace, and embodies the thought in these pointed lines:--

"So lived our sires, ere doctors learned to kill, And multiply with theirs the weekly bill. The first physicians by debauch were made; Excess began, and sloth sustains the trade. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . By chase our long-lived fathers earned their food; Toil strung the nerves and purified the blood: But we their sons, a pampered race of men, Are dwindled down to threescore years and ten. Better to hunt in fields for health unbought Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught. The wise for cure on exercise depend; God never made his work for man to mend."

In a similar way in 'Cymon and Iphigenia' the contempt which Dryden, in common with the Tories of his time, felt for the English militia force, found vent in the following vigorous passage, really descriptive of them and their conduct though the scene is laid in Rhodes:--

"The country rings around with loud alarms, And raw in fields the rude militia swarms; Mouths without hands; maintained at vast expense, In peace a charge, in war a weak defense; Stout once a month they march, a blustering band, And ever, but in times of need, at hand: This was the morn when, issuing on the guard, Drawn up in rank and file they stood prepared Of seeming arms to make a short essay, Then hasten to be drunk, the business of the day."

In a world where what is feeble in expression is so often supposed to indicate peculiar delicacy; where what is vague is so often deemed peculiarly poetical; and where what is involved and crabbed and hard to comprehend is thought to denote peculiar profundity,--it is a pleasure to turn to a writer with a rank settled by the consensus of successive generations, who thought clearly and wrote forcibly, who knew always what he had to say and then said it with directness and power. There are greater poets than he; but so long as men continue to delight in vividness of expression, in majesty of numbers, in masculine strength and all-abounding vigor, so long will Dryden continue to hold his present high place among English authors.

The writings of Dryden constitute of themselves a literature. They treat of a vast variety of topics in many different departments of intellectual activity. The completest edition of his works was first published in 1808 under the editorship of Walter Scott. It fills twenty-one volumes, the first of which however is devoted to a biography. The notes to this edition are generally excellent; the text is very indifferent. A revised edition of it has been recently published under the editorship of George Saintsbury. But easily accessible is a single-volume edition of the poems alone, edited by W. D. Christie, which furnishes a superior text, and is amply supplied with all necessary annotations.

FROM 'THE HIND AND THE PANTHER'

A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged, Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged; Without unspotted, innocent within, She feared no danger, for she knew no sin. Yet had she oft been chased with horns and hounds, And Scythian shafts, and many winged wounds Aimed at her heart; was often forced to fly, And doomed to death, though fated not to die.

Not so her young; for their unequal line Was hero's make, half human, half divine. Their earthly mold obnoxious was to fate, The immortal part assumed immortal state. Of these a slaughtered army lay in blood, Extended o'er the Caledonian wood, Their native walk; whose vocal blood arose And cried for pardon on their perjured foes. Their fate was fruitful, and the sanguine seed, Endued with souls, increased the sacred breed. So captive Israel multiplied in chains, A numerous exile, and enjoyed her pains. With grief and gladness mixed, their mother viewed Her martyred offspring and their race renewed; Their corps to perish, but their kind to last, So much the deathless plant the dying fruit surpassed.

Panting and pensive now she ranged alone, And wandered in the kingdoms once her own. The common hunt, though from their rage restrained By sovereign power, her company disdained, Grinned as they passed, and with a glaring eye Gave gloomy signs of secret enmity. 'Tis true she bounded by and tripped so light, They had not time to take a steady sight; For truth has such a face and such a mien As to be loved needs only to be seen.

The bloody Bear, an independent beast, Unlicked to form, in groans her hate expressed. Among the timorous kind the quaking Hare Professed neutrality, but would not swear. Next her the buffoon Ape, as atheists use, Mimicked all sects and had his own to chuse; Still when the Lion looked, his knees he bent, And paid at church a courtier's compliment. The bristled baptist Boar, impure as he, But whitened with the foam of sanctity, With fat pollutions filled the sacred place, And mountains leveled in his furious race; So first rebellion founded was in grace. But since the mighty ravage which he made In German forests had his guilt betrayed, With broken tusks and with a borrowed name, He shunned the vengeance and concealed the shame, So lurked in sects unseen. With greater guile False Reynard fed on consecrated spoil; The graceless beast by Athanasius first Was chased from Nice, then by Socinus nursed, His impious race their blasphemy renewed, And Nature's King through Nature's optics viewed; Reversed they viewed him lessened to their eye, Nor in an infant could a God descry. New swarming sects to this obliquely tend, Hence they began, and here they all will end.

What weight of ancient witness can prevail, If private reason hold the public scale? But gracious God, how well dost thou provide For erring judgments an unerring guide! Thy throne is darkness in the abyss of light, A blaze of glory that forbids the sight. O teach me to believe thee thus concealed, And search no farther than thy self revealed, But her alone for my director take, Whom thou hast promised never to forsake! My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires; My manhood, long misled by wandering fires, Followed false lights; and when their glimpse was gone, My pride struck out new sparkles of her own. Such was I, such by nature still I am; Be thine the glory and be mine the shame! Good life be now my task; my doubts are done; What more could fright my faith than Three in One? Can I believe eternal God could lie Disguised in mortal mold and infancy, That the great Maker of the world could die? And after that, trust my imperfect sense Which calls in question his omnipotence? Can I my reason to my faith compel, And shall my sight and touch and taste rebel? Superior faculties are set aside; Shall their subservient organs be my guide? Then let the moon usurp the rule of day, And winking tapers show the sun his way; For what my senses can themselves perceive I need no revelation to believe. Can they, who say the Host should be descried By sense, define a body glorified, Impassible, and penetrating parts? Let them declare by what mysterious arts He shot that body through the opposing might Of bolts and bars impervious to the light, And stood before his train confessed in open sight. For since thus wondrously he passed, 'tis plain One single place two bodies did contain; And sure the same omnipotence as well Can make one body in more places dwell. Let Reason then at her own quarry fly; But how can finite grasp infinity?

'Tis urged again, that faith did first commence By miracles, which are appeals to sense, And thence concluded, that our sense must be The motive still of credibility. For latter ages must on former wait, And what began belief must propagate.

But winnow well this thought, and you shall find 'Tis light as chaff that flies before the wind. Were all those wonders wrought by power Divine As means or ends of some more deep design? Most sure as means, whose end was this alone, To prove the Godhead of the Eternal Son. God thus asserted: Man is to believe Beyond what Sense and Reason can conceive, And for mysterious things of faith rely On the proponent Heaven's authority. If then our faith we for our guide admit, Vain is the farther search of human wit; As when the building gains a surer stay, We take the unuseful scaffolding away. Reason by sense no more can understand; The game is played into another hand. Why choose we then like bilanders to creep Along the coast, and land in view to keep, When safely we may launch into the deep? In the same vessel which our Savior bore, Himself the pilot, let us leave the shore, And with a better guide a better world explore. Could he his Godhead veil with flesh and blood And not veil these again to be our food? His grace in both is equal in extent; The first affords us life, the second nourishment.