Part 12

In consequence of the ravages of the Great Plague in 1665 and the subsequent disaster of the Great Fire in 1666 there was for some time a total cessation in London of theatrical performances and all other amusements. Dryden, like most other persons who were not tied to town by business, spent the greater part of this gloomy period in the country. He availed himself of the interruption thus given to his dramatic labours to produce his first writings of any moment out of that field, his _Annus Mirabilis_ and his _Essay on Dramatic Poesy_. The first, an attempt to invest with heroic interest, and celebrate in sonorous stanzas, the events of the famous years 1665-6, including not only the Great Fire, but also the incidents of a naval war then going on against the Dutch, must have done more to bring Dryden into the favourable notice of the King, the Duke of York, and other high personages eulogized in it, than anything he had yet written. It was, in fact, a kind of short epic on the topics of the year, such as Dryden might have been expected to write if he had been already doing laureate's duty; and, unless Sir William Davenant was of very easy temper, he must have been rather annoyed at so obvious an invasion of his province, notwithstanding the compliment the poet had paid him by adopting the stanza of his _Gondibert_, and imitating his manner. Scarcely less effective in another way must have been the prose _Essay on Dramatic Poesy_--a vigorous treatise on various matters of poetry and criticism then much discussed. It contained, among other things, a defence of the Heroic or Rhymed Tragedy against those who preferred the older Elizabethan Tragedy of blank verse; and so powerful a contribution was it to this great controversy of the day that it produced an immediate sensation in all literary circles. Sir Robert Howard, who now ranked himself among the partisans of blank verse, took occasion to express his dissent from some of the opinions expounded in it; and, as Dryden replied rather tartly, a temporary quarrel ensued between the two brothers-in-law.

On the re-opening of the theatres in 1667 Dryden, his reputation increased by the two performances just mentioned, stepped forward again as a dramatist. A heroic tragedy called _The Indian Emperor_, which he had prepared before the recess, and which, indeed, had then been acted, was reproduced with great success, and established Dryden's position as a practitioner of heroic and rhymed tragedy. This was followed by a comedy, in mixed blank verse and prose, called _The Maiden Queen_; this by a prose-comedy called _Sir Martin Mar-all_; and this again, by an adaptation, in conjunction with Sir William Davenant, of Shakespeare's _Tempest_. The two last were produced at Davenant's theatre, whereas all Dryden's former pieces had been written for Killigrew's, or the King's company. About this time, however, an arrangement was made which secured Dryden's services exclusively for Killigrew's house. By the terms of the agreement, Dryden engaged to supply the house with three plays every year, in return for which, he was admitted a shareholder in the profits of the theatre to the extent of one share and a-half. The first fruits of the bargain were a prose-comedy called _The Mock Astrologer_ and two heroic tragedies entitled _Tyrannic Love_ and _The Conquest of Granada_, the latter being in two parts. These were all produced between 1668 and 1670, and the tragedies, in particular, seem to have taken the town by storm, and placed Dryden, beyond dispute, at the head of all the heroic playwrights of the day.

The extent and nature of Dryden's popularity as a dramatist about this time may be judged by the following extract from the diary of the omnipresent Pepys, referring to the first performance of the _Maiden Queen_:--"After dinner, with my wife to see the _Maiden Queene_, a new play by Dryden, mightily commended for the regularity of it, and the strain and wit; and the truth is, the comical part done by Nell [Nell Gwynn], which is Florimell, that I never can hope to see the like done again by man or woman. The King and Duke of York were at the play. But so great a performance of a comical part was never, I believe, in the world before as Nell do this, both as a mad girle, then most and best of all when she comes in like a young gallant and hath the motions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I confess, admire her." But even Nell's performance in this comedy was nothing compared to one part of her performance afterwards in the tragedy of _Tyrannic Love_. Probably there was never such a scene of ecstasy in a theatre as when Nell, after acting the character of a tragic princess in this play, and killing herself at the close in a grand passage of heroism and supernatural virtue, had to start up as she was being borne off the stage dead, and resume her natural character, first addressing her bearer in these words:--

"Hold! are you mad? you d----d confounded dog: I am to rise and speak the epilogue.",

and then running to the footlights and beginning her speech to the audience:--

"I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye: I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly. Sweet ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil: I'm what I was, a little harmless devil." &c. &c.

It is a tradition that it was this epilogue that effected Nell's conquest of the king, and that he was so fascinated with her manner of delivering it, that he went behind the scenes after the play was over and carried her off. Ah! and it is two hundred years since that fascinating run to the footlights took place, and the swarthy face of the monarch was seen laughing, and the audience shrieked and clapped with delight, and Pepys bustled about the boxes, and Dryden sat looking placidly on, contented with his success, and wondering how much of it was owing to Nelly!

One can see how, even if the choice had been made strictly with a reference to the claims of the candidates, it would have been felt that Dryden, and not Butler, was the proper man to succeed Davenant in the laureateship. If Butler had shewn the more original vein of talent in one peculiar walk, Dryden had proved himself the man of greatest general strength, in whom were more broadly represented the various literary tendencies of his time. The author of ten plays, four of which were stately rhymed tragedies, and the rest comedies in prose and blank verse; the author, also, of various occasional poems, one of which, the _Annus Mirabilis_, was noticeable on its own account as the best poem of current history; the author, moreover, of one express prose-treatise, and of various shorter prose dissertations in the shape of prefaces and the like prefixed to his separate plays and poems, in which the principles of literature were discussed in a manner at once masterly and adapted to the prevailing taste: Dryden was, on the whole, far more likely to perform well that part of a laureate's duties which consisted in supervising and leading the general literature of his age than a man whose reputation, though justly great, had been acquired by one continuous effort in the single department of burlesque. Accordingly, Dryden was promoted to the post, and Butler was left to finish, on his own scanty resources, the remaining portion of his _Hudibras_, varying the occupation by jotting down those scraps of cynical thought which were found among his posthumous papers, and which show that towards the end of his days there were other things that he hated and would have lashed besides Puritanism. Thus:--

"'Tis a strange age we've lived in and a lewd As e'er the sun in all his travels viewed."

Again:

"The greatest saints and sinners have been made Of proselytes of one another's trade."

Again:

"Authority is a disease and cure Which men can neither want nor well endure."

And again, with an obvious reference to his own case:--

"Dame Fortune, some men's titular, Takes charge of them without their care, Does all their drudgery and work, Like fairies, for them in the dark; Conducts them blindfold, and advances The naturals by blinder chances; While others by desert and wit Could never make the matter hit, But still, the better they deserve, Are but the abler thought to starve."

Dryden, at the time of his appointment to the laureateship, was in his fortieth year. This is worth noting, if we would realize his position among his literary contemporaries. Of those contemporaries there were some who, as being his seniors, would feel themselves free from all obligations to pay him respect. To octogenarians like Hobbes and Izaak Walton he was but a boy; and even from Waller, Milton, Butler, and Marvel, all of whom lived to see him in the laureate's chair, he could only look for that approving recognition, totally distinct from reverence, which men of sixty-five, sixty, and fifty-five, bestow on their full-grown juniors. Such an amount of recognition he seems to have received from all of them. Butler, indeed, does not seem to have taken very kindly to him; and it stands on record, as Milton's opinion of Dryden's powers about this period, that he thought him "a rhymer but no poet." But Butler, who went about snarling at most things, and was irreverent enough to think the Royal Society itself little better than a humbug, was not the man from whom a laudatory estimate of anybody was to be expected; and, though Milton's criticism is too precious to be thrown away, and will even be found on investigation to be not so far amiss, if the moment at which it was given is duly borne in mind, yet it is, after all, not Milton's opinion of Dryden's general literary capacity, but only his opinion of Dryden's claims to be called a poet. Dryden, on his part, to whose charge any want of veneration for his great literary predecessors cannot be imputed, and whose faculty of appreciating the most various kinds of excellence was conspicuously large, would probably have been more grieved than indignant at this indifference of men like Butler and Milton to his rising fame. He had an unfeigned admiration for the author of _Hudibras_; and there was not a man in England who more profoundly revered the poet of _Paradise Lost_, or more dutifully testified this reverence both by acts of personal attention and by written expressions of allegiance to him while he was yet alive. It would have pained Dryden much, we believe, to know that the great Puritan poet, whom he made it a point of duty to go and see now and then in his solitude, and of whom he is reported to have said, on reading the _Paradise Lost_, "This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too," thought no better of him than that he was a rhymer. But, however he may have felt himself related to those seniors who were vanishing from the stage, or whose literary era was in the past, it was in a conscious spirit of superiority that he confronted the generation of his coevals and juniors, the natural subjects of his laureateship. If we set aside such men as Locke and Barrow, belonging more to other departments than to that of literature proper, there were none of these coevals or juniors who were entitled to dispute his authority. There was the Duke of Buckingham, a year or two older than Dryden, at once the greatest wit and the greatest profligate about Charles's court, but whose attempts in the comic drama were little more than occasional eccentricities. There were the Earls of Dorset and Roscommon, both about Dryden's age, and both cultivated men and respectable versifiers. There was Thomas Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, and now chaplain to his grace of Buckingham, five years younger than Dryden, his fellow-member in the Royal Society, and with considerable pretensions to literary excellence. There was the witty rake, Sir Charles Sedley, a man of frolic, like Buckingham, some seven years Dryden's junior, and the author of at least three comedies and three tragedies. There was the still more witty rake, Sir George Etherege, of about the same age, the author of two comedies, produced between 1660 and 1670, which, for ease and sprightly fluency, surpassed anything that Dryden had done in the comic style. But "gentle George," as he was called, was incorrigibly lazy; and it did not seem as if the public would get anything more from him. In his place had come another gentleman-writer, young William Wycherley, whose first comedy had been written before Dryden's laureateship, though it was not acted till 1672, and who was already famous as a wit. Of precisely the same age as Wycherley, and with a far greater _quantity_ of comic writing in him, whatever might be thought of the quality, was Thomas Shadwell, whose bulky body was a perpetual source of jest against him, though he himself vaunted it as one of his many resemblances to Ben Jonson. The contemporary opinion of these two last-named comic poets, Wycherley and Shadwell, after they came to be better known, is expressed in these lines from a poem of Rochester's:--

"Of all our modern wits none seem to me Once to have touched upon true comedy But hasty Shadwell and slow Wycherley. Shadwell's unfinished works do yet impart Great proofs of force of Nature, none of Art. With just bold strokes he dashes here and there, Showing great mastery with little care; Scorning to varnish his good touches o'er, To make the fools and women praise the more. But Wycherley earns hard whate'er he gains; He wants no judgment, and he spares no pains; He frequently excels, and, at the least, Makes fewer faults than any of the rest."

The author of these lines, the notorious Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was also one of Dryden's literary subjects. He was but twenty-two years of age when Dryden became laureate; but before ten years of that laureateship were over he had blazed out, in rapid debauchery, his wretchedly-spent life. Younger by three years than Rochester, and also destined to a short life, though more of misery than of crime, was Thomas Otway, of whose six tragedies and four comedies, all produced during the laureateship of Dryden, one at least has taken a place in our dramatic literature, and is read still for its power and pathos. Associated with Otway's name is that of Nat. Lee, more than Otway's match in fury, and who, after a brief career as a tragic dramatist and drunkard, became an inmate of Bedlam. Another writer of tragedy, whose career began with Dryden's laureateship, was John Crowne, "little starched Johnny Crowne," as Rochester calls him, but whom so good a judge as Charles Lamb has thought worthy of commemoration as having written some really fine things. Finally, the list includes a few Nahum Tates, Elkanah Settles, Tom D'Urfeys, and other small celebrities, in whose company we may place Aphra Behn, the poetess.

Doing our best to fancy this cluster of wits and play-writers, in the midst of which, from his appointment to the laureateship in 1670, at the age of thirty-nine, to his deposition from that office in 1688, at the age of fifty-eight, Dryden is historically the principal figure, we can very well see that not one of them all could wrest the dictatorship from him. With an income from various sources, including his salary as laureate and historiographer and his receipts from his engagement with Killigrew's company, amounting in all to about 600_l._ a-year--which, according to Sir Walter Scott's computation, means about 1,800_l._ in our value--he had, during a portion of this time at least, all the means of external respectability in sufficient abundance. His reputation as the first dramatic author of the day was already made; and if, as yet, there were others who had done as well or better as poets out of the dramatic walk, he more than made up for this by the excellence of his prologues and epilogues, and by his readiness and power as a prose-critic of general literature. No one could deny that, though a rather heavy man in private society, and so slow and silent among the wits of the coffee-house that, but for the pleasure of seeing his placid face, the deeply indented leather chair on which he sat would have done as well to represent literature there as his own presence in it, John Dryden was, all in all, the first wit of the age. There was not a Buckingham, nor an Etherege, nor a Shadwell, nor a starched Johnny Crowne, of them all, that singly would have dared to dispute his supremacy. And yet, as will happen, what his subjects could not dare to do singly, or ostensibly, some of them tried to compass by cabal and systematic depreciation on particular points. In fact, Dryden had to fight pretty hard to maintain his place, and had to make an example or two of a rebel subject before the rest were terrified into submission.

He was first attacked in the very field of his greatest triumphs, the drama. The attack was partly directed against himself personally, partly against that style of heroic or rhymed tragedy of which he was the advocate and representative. There had always been dissenters from this new fashion; and among these was the Duke of Buckingham, who had a natural genius for making fun of anything. Assisted, it is said, by his chaplain Sprat, and by Butler, who had already satirized this style of tragedy by writing a dialogue in which two cats are made to caterwaul to each other in heroics, the duke had amused his leisure by preparing a farce in which heroic plays were held up to ridicule. In the original draft of the farce Davenant was made the butt under the name of Bilboa; but, after Davenant's death, the farce was recast, and Dryden substituted under the name of Bayes. The plot of this famous farce, _The Rehearsal_, is much the same as that of Sheridan's _Critic_. The poet Bayes invites two friends, Smith and Johnson, to be present at the rehearsal of a heroic play which he is on the point of bringing out, and the humour consists in the supposed representation of this heroic play, while Bayes alternately directs the actors, and expounds the drift of the play and its beauties to Smith and Johnson, who all the while are laughing at him, and thinking it monstrous rubbish. Conceive a farce like this, written with amazing cleverness, and full of absurdities, produced in the very theatre where the echoes of Dryden's last sonorous heroics were still lingering, and acted by the same actors; conceive it interspersed with parodies of well-known passages from Dryden's plays, and with allusions to characters in those plays; conceive the actor who played the part of Bayes dressed to look as like Dryden as possible, instructed by the duke to mimic Dryden's voice, and using phrases like "i'gad" and "i'fackins," which Dryden was in the habit of using in familiar conversation; and an idea may be formed of the sensation made by _The Rehearsal_ in all theatrical circles on its first performance in the winter of 1671. Its effect, though not immediate, was decisive. From that time the heroic or rhymed tragedy was felt to be doomed. Dryden, indeed, did not at once recant his opinion in favour of rhymed tragedies; but he yielded so far to the sentence pronounced against them as to write only one more of the kind.

Though thus driven out of his favourite style of the rhymed tragedy, he was not driven from the stage. Bound by his agreement with the King's Company to furnish three plays a-year, he continued to make dramatic writing his chief occupation; and almost his sole productions during the first ten years of his laureateship were ten plays. Three of these were prose-comedies; one, a tragi-comedy, in blank verse and prose; one, an opera in rhyme; five, tragedies in blank verse; and one, the rhymed tragedy above referred to. It will be observed that this was at the rate of only one play a-year, whereas, by his engagement, he was to furnish three. The fact was that the company were very indulgent to him, and let him have his full share of the receipts, averaging 300_l._ a-year, in return for but a third of the stipulated work. Notwithstanding this, we find them complaining, in 1679, that Dryden had behaved unhandsomely to them in carrying one of his plays to the other theatre, and so injuring their interests. As, from that year, none of Dryden's plays were produced at the King's Theatre, but all at the Duke's, till 1682, when the two companies were united, it is probable that in that year the bargain made with Killigrew terminated. It deserves notice, by the way, that the so-called "opera" was one entitled _The State of Innocence; or, The Fall of Man_, founded on Milton's _Paradise Lost_, and brought out in 1674-5, immediately after Milton's death. That this was an equivocal compliment to Milton's memory Dryden himself lived to acknowledge. He confessed to Dennis, twenty years afterwards, that at the time when he wrote that opera "he knew not half the extent of Milton's excellence." A striking proof of Dryden's veneration for Milton, when we consider how high his admiration of Milton had been even while Milton was alive!

Of these dramatic productions of Dryden during the first ten years of his laureateship some were very carefully written. Thus _Marriage a-la-mode_, performed in 1672, is esteemed one of his best comedies; and of the rhymed tragedy, _Aurung-Zebe_, performed in 1675, he himself says in the Prologue--

"What verse can do he has performed in this, Which he presumes the most correct of his."

The tragedy of _All for Love_, which followed _Aurung-Zebe_, in 1678, and in which he falls back on blank verse, is pronounced by many critics to be the very best of all his dramas; and perhaps none of his plays has been more read than the _Spanish Friar_, written in 1680. Yet it may be doubted if in any of these plays Dryden achieved a degree of immediate success equal to that which had attended his _Tyrannic Love_ and his _Conquest of Granada_, written before his laureateship. This was not owing so much to the single blow struck at his fame by Buckingham's _Rehearsal_ as to the growth of that general spirit of criticism and disaffection which pursues every author after the public have become sufficiently acquainted with his style to expect the good, and look rather for the bad, in what he writes. Thus, we find one critic of the day, Martin Clifford, who was a man of some note, addressing Dryden, a year or two after his laureateship, in this polite fashion: "You do live in as much ignorance and darkness as you did in the womb; your writings are like a Jack-of-all-trades' shop; they have a variety, but nothing of value; and, if thou art not the dullest plant-animal that ever the earth produced, all that I have conversed with are strangely mistaken in thee." This onslaught of Mr. Clifford's is clearly to be regarded as only that gentleman's; but what young Rochester said and thought about Dryden at this time is more likely to have been what was said and thought generally by the critical part of the town.

"Well sir, 'tis granted: I said Dryden's rhymes Were stolen, unequal--nay, dull, many times. What foolish patron is there found of his So blindly partial to deny me this? But that his plays, embroidered up and down With wit and learning, justly pleased the town, In the same paper I as freely own. Yet, having this allowed, the heavy mass That stuffs up his loose volumes must not pass.

* * * * *

But, to be just, 'twill to his praise be found His excellencies more than faults abound; Nor dare I from his sacred temples tear The laurel which he best deserves to wear.

* * * * *

And may I not have leave impartially To search and censure Dryden's works, and try If these gross faults his choice pen doth commit Proceed from want of judgment or of wit, Or if his lumpish fancy doth refuse Spirit and grace to his loose slattern muse?"