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The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II by John Dryden

J >> John Dryden >> The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II



POETICAL WORKS

OF

JOHN DRYDEN.




With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes,

BY THE

REV. GEORGE GILFILLAN.



VOL. II.





M. DCCC. LV.



CRITICAL ESTIMATE

OF THE

GENIUS AND POETICAL WORKS OF JOHN DRYDEN.


In our Life of Dryden we promised to say something about the question,
how far is a poet, particularly in the moral tendency and taste of his
writings, to be tried--and either condemned or justified--by the
character and spirit of his age? To a rapid consideration of this
question we now proceed, before examining the constituent elements or
the varied fruits of the poet's genius.

And here, unquestionably, there are extremes, which every critic should
avoid. Some imagine that a writer of a former century should be tried,
either by the standard which prevails in the cultured and civilised
nineteenth, or by the exposition of moral principles and practice which
is to be found in the Scriptures. Now, it is obviously, so far as taste
is concerned, as unjust to judge a book written in the style and manner
of one age by the merely arbitrary and conventional rules established in
another, as to judge the dress of our ancestors by the fashions of the
present day. And in respect of morality, it is as unfair to visit with
the same measure of condemnation offences against decorum or decency,
committed by writers living before or living after the promulgation of
the Christian code, as it would be to class the Satyrs, Priapi, and
Bacchantes of an antique sculptor, with their imitations, by inferior
and coarser artists, in later times. There must be a certain measure of
allowance made for the errors of Genius when it was working as the
galley-slave of its tradition and period, and when it had not yet
received the Divine Light which, shining into the world from above, has
supplied men with higher aesthetic as well as spiritual models of
principles, and revealed man's body to be the temple of the Holy Ghost.
To look for our modern philanthropy in that "Greek Gazette," the Iliad
of Homer--to expect that reverence for the Supreme Being which the Bible
has taught us in the Metamorphoses of Ovid--or to seek that refinement
of manners and language which has only of late prevailed amongst us, in
the plays of Aristophanes and Plautus--were very foolish and very vain.
In ages not so ancient, and which have revolved since the dawn of
Christianity, a certain coarseness of thought and language has been
prevalent; and for it still larger allowance should be made, because it
has been applied to simplicity rather than to sensuality--to rustic
barbarism, not to civilised corruption--and carries along with it a
rough raciness, and a reference to the sturdy aboriginal beast--just as
acorns in the trough suggest the immemorial forests where they grew, and
the rich greenswards on which they fell.

In two cases, it thus appears, should the severest censor be prepared to
modify his condemnation of the bad taste or the impurity to be found in
writers of genius--first, in that of a civilization, perfect in its
kind, but destitute of the refining and sublimating element which a
revelation only can supply; and, secondly, in that of those ages in
which the lights of knowledge and religion are contending with the gloom
of barbarian rudeness. Perhaps there are still two other cases capable
of palliation--that of a mind so constituted as to be nothing, if not a
mirror of its age, and faithfully and irresistibly reflecting even its
vices and pollutions; or that of a mind morbidly in love with the
morbidities and the vile passages of human nature. But suppose the case
of a writer, sitting under the full blaze of Gospel truth, professedly a
believer in the Gospel, and intimately acquainted with its oracles,
living in a late and dissipated, not a rude and simple age--possessed of
varied and splendid talents, which qualified him to make as well as to
mirror, and with a taste naturally sound and manly, who should yet seek
to shock the feelings of the pious, to gratify the low tendencies, and
fire to frenzy the evil passions of his period--he is not to be shielded
by the apology that he has only conformed to the bad age on which he was
so unfortunate as to fall. Prejudice may, indeed, put in such a plea in
his defence; but the inevitable eye of common sense, distinguishing
between necessity and choice, between coarseness and corruption, between
a man's passively yielding to and actively inviting and encouraging the
currents of false taste and immorality which he must encounter, will
find that plea nugatory, and bring in against the author a verdict of
guilty.

Now this, we fear, is exactly the case of Dryden. He was neither a
"barbarian" nor a "Scythian." He was a conscious artist, not a high
though helpless reflector of his age. He had not, we think, like his
relative, Swift, originally any diseased delight in filth for its own
sake; was not--shall we say?--a natural, but an artificial _Yahoo_. He
wielded a power over the public mind, approaching the absolute, and
which he could have turned to virtuous, instead of vicious account--at
first, it might have been amidst considerable resistance and obloquy,
but ultimately with triumphant success. This, however, he never
attempted, and must therefore be classed, in this respect, with such
writers as Byron, whose powers gilded their pollutions, less than their
pollutions degraded and defiled their powers; nay, perhaps he should be
ranked even lower than the noble bard, whose obscenities are not so
gross, and who had, besides, to account for them the double palliations
of passion and of despair.

In these remarks we refer principally to Dryden's plays; for his poems,
as we remarked in the Life, are (with the exception of a few of the
Prologues, which we print under protest) in a great measure free from
impurity. We pass gladly to consider him in his genius and his poetical
works. The most obvious, and among the most remarkable characteristics
of his poetic style, are its wondrous elasticity and ease of movement.
There is never for an instant any real or apparent effort, any
straining for effect, any of that "double, double, toil and trouble," by
which many even of the weird cauldrons in which Genius forms her
creations are disturbed and bedimmed. That power of doing everything
with perfect and _conscious_ ease, which Dugald Stewart has ascribed to
Barrow and to Horsley in prose, distinguished Dryden in poetry. Whether
he discusses the deep questions of fate and foreknowledge in "Religio
Laici," or lashes Shaftesbury in the "Medal," or pours a torrent of
contempt on Shadwell in "MacFlecknoe," or describes the fire of London
in the "Annus Mirabilis," or soars into lyric enthusiasm in his "Ode on
the Death of Mrs Killigrew," and "Alexander's Feast," or paints a
tournament in "Palamon and Arcite," or a fairy dance in the "Flower and
the Leaf,"--he is always at home, and always aware that he is. His
consciousness of his own powers amounts to exultation. He is like the
steed who glories in that tremendous gallop which affects the spectator
with fear. Indeed, we never can separate our conception of Dryden's
vigorous and vaulting style from the image of a noble horse, devouring
the dust of the field, clearing obstacles at a bound, taking up long
leagues as a little thing, and the very strength and speed of whose
motion give it at a distance the appearance of smoothness. Pope speaks
of his

"Long resounding march, and energy divine."

Perhaps "_ease_ divine" had been words more characteristic of that
almost superhuman power of language by which he makes the most obstinate
materials pliant, melts down difficulties as if by the touch of magic,
and, to resume the former figure, comes into the goal without a hair
turned on his mane, or a single sweat-drop confessing effort or
extraordinary exertion. We know no poet since Homer who can be compared
to Dryden in this respect, except Scott, who occasionally, in "Marmion,"
and the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," exhibits the same impetuous ease and
fiery fluent movement. Scott does not, however, in general, carry the
same weight as the other; and the species of verse he uses, in
comparison to the heroic rhyme of Dryden, gives you often the impression
of a hard trot, rather than of a "long-resounding" and magnificent
gallop. Scott exhibits in his poetry the soul of a warrior; but it is of
a warrior of the Border--somewhat savage and coarse. Dryden can, for the
nonce at least, assume the appearance, and display the spirit, of a
knight of ancient chivalry--gallant, accomplished, elegant, and gay.

Next to this poet's astonishing ease, spirit, and elastic vigour, may be
ranked his clear, sharp intellect. He may be called more a logician than
a poet. He reasons often, and always acutely, and his rhyme, instead of
shackling, strengthens the movement of his argumentation. Parts of his
"Religio Laici" and the "Hind and Panther" resemble portions of Duns
Scotus or Aquinas set on fire. Indeed, keen, strong intellect, inflamed
with passion, and inspirited by that "ardour and impetuosity of mind"
which Wordsworth is compelled to allow to him, rather than creative or
original genius, is the differentia of Dryden. We have compared him to a
courser, but he was not one of those coursers of Achilles, who fed on no
earthly food, but on the golden barley of heaven, having sprung from the
gods--

[Greek: Xanthon kai Balion, to ama pnoiaesi, petesthaen.
Tous eteke Zephuro anemo Arpua Podargae.]

Dryden resembled rather the mortal steed which was yoked with these
immortal twain, the brood of Zephyr and the Harpy Podarga; only we can
hardly say of the poet what Homer says of Pedasus--

[Greek: Os kai thnaetos eon, epeth ippois athanatoisi.]

He was _not_, although a mortal, able to keep up with the immortal
coursers. His path was on the plains or table-lands of earth--never or
seldom in "cloudland, gorgeous land," or through the aerial altitudes
which stretch away and above the clouds to the gates of heaven. He can
hardly be said to have possessed the power of sublimity, in the high
sense of that term, as the power of sympathising with the feeling of the
Infinite. Often he gives us the impression of the picturesque, of the
beautiful, of the heroic, of the nobly disdainful--but never (when
writing, at least, entirely from his own mind) of that infinite and
nameless grandeur which the imaginative soul feels shed on it from the
multitudinous waves of ocean--from the cataract leaping from his rock,
as if to consummate an act of prayer to God--from the hum of great
assemblies of men--from the sight of far-extended wastes and
wildernesses--and from the awful silence, and the still more mysterious
sparkle of the midnight stars. This sense of the presence of the
_shadow_ of immensity--immensity itself cannot be felt any more than
measured--this sight like that vouchsafed to Moses of the "backparts" of
the Divine--the Divine itself cannot be seen--has been the inspiration
of all the highest poetry of the world--of the "Paradise Lost," of the
"Divina Commedia," of the "Night Thoughts," of Wordsworth and Coleridge,
of "Festus," and, highest far, of the Hebrew Prophets, as they cry,
"Whither can we go from Thy presence? whither can we flee from Thy
Spirit?" Such poets have resembled a blind man, who feels, although he
cannot see, that a stranger of commanding air is in the room beside him;
so they stand awe-struck in the "wind of the going" of a majestic and
unseen Being. This feeling differs from mysticism, inasmuch as it is
connected with a reality, while the mystic dreams a vague and
unsupported dream, and the poetry it produces is simply the irresistible
cry springing from the perception of this wondrous Some One who is
actually near them. The feeling is connected, in general, with a lofty
moral and religious nature; and yet not always, since, while wanting in
Dryden, we find it intensely discovered, although in an imperfect and
perverted shape, in Byron and Rousseau.

In Dryden certainly it exists not. We do not--and in this we have
Jeffrey's opinion to back us--remember a single line in his poetry that
can be called sublime, or, which is the same thing, that gives us a
thrilling shudder, as if a god or a ghost were passing by. Pleasure,
high excitement,--rapture even, he often produces; but such a feeling as
is created by that line of Milton,

"To bellow through the vast and boundless deep,"

never. Compare, in proof of this, the description of the tournament in
"Palamon and Arcite"--amazingly spirited as it is--to the description of
the war-horse in Job; or, if that appear too high a test, to the
contest of Achilles with the rivers in Homer; to the war of the Angels,
and the interrupted preparations for contest between Gabriel and Satan
in Milton; to the contest between Apollyon and Christian in the
"Pilgrim's Progress;" to some of the combats in Spenser; and to that
wonderful one of the Princess and the Magician in midair in the "Arabian
Nights," in order to understand the distinction between the most
animated literal pictures of battle and those into which the element of
imagination is strongly injected by the poet, who can, to the inevitable
shiver of human nature at the sight of struggle and carnage, add the far
more profound and terrible shiver, only created by a vision of the
concomitants, the consequences--the UNSEEN BORDERS of the bloody scene.
Take these lines, for instance:--

"They look anew: the beauteous form of fight
Is changed, and war appears a grisly sight;
Two troops in fair array one moment showed--
The next, a field with fallen bodies strowed;
Not half the number in their seats are found,
But men and steeds lie grovelling on the ground.
The points of spears are stuck within the shield,
The steeds without their riders scour the field;
The knights, unhorsed, on foot renew the fight--
The glittering faulchions cast a gleaming light;
Hauberks and helms are hew'd with many a wound,
Out-spins the streaming blood, and dyes the ground."

This is vigorous and vivid, but is not imaginative or suggestive. It
does not carry away the mind from the field to bring back thoughts and
images, which shall, so to speak, brood over, and aggravate the general
horror. It is, in a word, plain, good painting, but it is not poetry.
There is not a metaphor, such as "he _laugheth_ at the shaking of a
spear," in it all.

In connexion with this defect in imagination is the lack of natural
imagery in Dryden's poetry. Wordsworth, indeed, greatly overcharges the
case, when he says (in a letter to Scott), "that there is not a single
image from nature in the whole body of his poetry." We have this minute
taken up the "Hind and the Panther," and find two images from nature in
one page:--

"As where in fields the fairy rounds are seen,
A rank sour herbage rises on the green;
So," &c.

And a few lines down:--

"As where the lightning runs along the ground,
No husbandry can heal the blasting wound."

And some pages farther on occurs a description of Spring, not unworthy
of Wordsworth himself; beginning--

"New blossoms flourish and new flowers arise,
As _God had been abroad_, and walking there,
Had left his footsteps, and reform'd the year."

Still it is true, that, taking his writings as a whole, they are thin in
natural images; and even those which occur, are often rather the echoes
of his reading, than the results of his observation. And what Wordsworth
adds is, we fear, true; in his translation of Virgil, where Virgil can
be fairly said to have his eye upon his object, Dryden always spoils the
passage. The reason of this, apart from his want of high imaginative
sympathy, may be found in his long residence in London; and his lack of
that intimate daily familiarity with natural scenes, which can alone
supply thorough knowledge, or enkindle thorough love. Nature is not like
the majority of other mistresses. Her charms deepen the longer she is
known; and he that loves her most warmly, has watched her with the
narrowest inspection. She can bear the keenest glances of the
microscope, and to see all her glory would exhaust an antediluvian life.
The appetite, in her case, "grows with what it feeds on;" but such an
appetite was not Dryden's.

Another of his great defects is, in true tenderness of feeling. He has
very few passages which can be called pathetic. His Elegies and funeral
Odes, such as those on "Mrs Killigrew" and "Eleonora," are eloquent; but
they move you to admiration, not to tears. Dryden's long immersion in
the pollutions of the playhouses, had combined, with his long course of
domestic infelicity, and his employments as a hack author, a party
scribe, and a satirist, to harden his heart, to brush away whatever fine
bloom of feeling there had been originally on his mind, and to render
him incapable of even simulating the softer emotions of the soul. But
for the discovered fact, that he was in early life a lover of his
relative, Honor Driden, you would have judged him from his works
incapable of a pure passion. "Lust hard by Hate," being his twin idols,
how could he represent human, far less ethereal love; and how could he
touch those springs of holy tears, which lie deep in man's heart, and
which are connected with all that is dignified, and all that is divine
in man's nature? What could the author of "Limberham" know of love, or
the author of "MacFlecknoe" of pity?

Wordsworth, in that admirable letter to which we have repeatedly
referred, says, "Whenever his language is poetically impassioned, it is
mostly upon unpleasing subjects, such as the follies, vices, and crimes
of classes of men, or individuals." This is unquestionable. He never so
nearly reaches the sublime, as when he is expressing contempt. He never
rises so high, as in the act of trampling. He is a "good hater," and
expresses his hatred with a mixture of _animus_ and ease, of fierceness
and of trenchant rapidity, which makes it very formidable. He only, as
it were, waves off his adversaries disdainfully, but the very wave of
his hand cuts like a sabre. His satire is not savage and furious, like
Juvenal's; not cool, collected, and infernal, like that of Junius; not
rabid and reckless, like that of Swift; and never darkens into the
unearthly grandeur of Byron's: but it is strong, swift, dashing, and
decisive. Nor does it want deep and subtle touches. His pictures of
Shaftesbury and Buckingham are as delicately finished, as they are
powerfully conceived. He flies best at the highest game; but even in
dealing with Settles and Shadwells, he can be as felicitous as he is
fierce. No satire in the world contains lines more exquisitely inverted,
more ingeniously burlesqued, more artfully turned out of their
apparently proper course, like rays at once refracted and cooled, than
those which thus ominously panegyrise Shadwell:--

"His brows thick fogs, instead of glories grace,
And _lambent dulness_ play'd about his face.
As Hannibal did to the altar come,
Sworn by his sire, a mortal foe to Rome;
So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain,
That he till death true dulness would maintain."

Better still the following picture, in imitation of the Homeric or
Miltonic manner:--

"The Sire then shook the honours of his head,
And from his brows damps of oblivion shed
Full on the _filial dulness_--long he stood
Repelling from his breast the _raging_ God."

What inimitable irony in this epithet! The God of dulness _raging_! A
stagnant pool in a passion; a canal insane; a _mouton enrage_, as the
French says; or a snail in a tumultuous state of excitement, were but
types of the satirical ideas implied in these words. What a description
of labouring nonsense--of the Pythonic genius of absurdity, panting and
heaving on his solemnly ridiculous tripod!

The language and versification of Dryden have been praised, and justly.
His style is worthy of a still more powerful and original vein of genius
than his own. It is a masculine, clear, elastic, and varied diction,
fitted to express all feelings, save the deepest; all fancies, save the
subtlest; all passions, save the loftiest; all moods of mind, save the
most disinterested and rapt; to represent incidents, however strange;
characters, however contradictory to each other; shades of meaning,
however evasive: and to do all this, as if it were doing nothing, in
point of ease, and as if it were doing everything in point of felt and
rejoicing energy. No poetic style since can, in such respects, be
compared to Dryden's. Pope's to his is feeble--and Byron's forced. He
can say the strongest things in the swiftest way, and the most
felicitous expressions seem to fall unconsciously from his lips. Had his
matter, you say, but been equal to his manner, his thought in
originality and imaginative power but commensurate with the boundless
quantity, and no less admirable quality, of his words! His versification
deserves a commendation scarcely inferior. It is "all ear," if we may so
apply an expression of Shakspeare's. No studied rules,--no elaborate
complication of harmonies,--it is the mere sinking and swelling of the
wave of his thought as it moves onward to the shore of his purpose. And,
as in the sea, there are no furrows absolutely isolated from each other,
but each leans on, or melts into each, and the subsidence of the one is
the rise of the other--so with the versification of his better poetry.
The beginning of the "Hind and Panther," we need not quote; but it will
be remembered, as a good specimen of that peculiar style of running the
lines into one another, and thereby producing a certain free and noble
effect, which the uniform tinkle of Pope and his school is altogether
unable to reach; a style which has since been copied by some of our
poets--by Churchill, by Cowper, and by Shelley. The lines of the
artificial school, on the other hand, may be compared to _rollers_, each
distinct from each other,--each being in itself a whole,--but altogether
forming none. Pope, says Hazlitt, has turned Pegasus into a
rocking-horse.

We are, perhaps, nearly right when we call Dryden the most _eloquent_
and _rhetorical_ of English poets. He bears in this respect an analogy
to Lucretius among the Romans, who, inferior in polish to Virgil, was
incomparably more animated and energetic in style; who exhibited,
besides, traits of lofty imagination rarely met with in Virgil, and
never in Dryden; and who equalled the English poet in the power of
reasoning in verse, and setting the severe abstractions of metaphysical
thought to music. With the Shakspeares, Chaucers, Spensers, Miltons,
Byrons, Wordsworths, and Coleridges, the _Dii majorum gentium_ of the
Poetic Pantheon of Britain, Dryden ranks not, although towering far
above the Moores, Goldsmiths, Gays, and Priors. He may be classed with a
middle, but still high order, in which we find the names of Scott, as a
_poet_, Johnson, Pope, Cowper, Southey, Crabbe, and two or three others,
who, while all excelling Dryden in some qualities, are all excelled by
him in others, and bulk on the whole about as largely as he on the
public eye.

We come to make a few remarks, in addition to some we have already
incidentally made, on Dryden's separate works. And first of his Lyrics.
His songs, properly so called, are lively, buoyant, and elastic; yet,
compared to those of Shakspeare, they are of "the earth, earthy." They
are the down of the thistle, carried on a light breeze upwards.
Shakspeare's resemble aerial notes--snatches of superhuman
melody--descending from above. Compared to the warm-gushing songs of
Burns, Dryden's are cold. Better than his songs are his Odes. That on
the death of Mrs Killigrew has much divided the opinion of critics--Dr
Johnson calling it magnificent, and Warton denying it any merit. We
incline to a mediate view. It has bold passages; the first and the last
stanzas are very powerful, and the whole is full of that rushing
torrent-movement characteristic of the poet. But the sinkings are as
deep as the swellings, and the inequality disturbs the general effect.
This is still more true of "Threnodia Augustalis," the ode on the death
of Charles II. Not only is its spirit fulsome, and its statement of
facts grossly partial, but many of its lines are feeble, and the whole
is wire-spun. Yet what can be nobler in thought and language than the
following, descriptive of the joy at the king's partial recovery!--

"Men met each other with erected look,
The steps were higher that they took;
Each to congratulate his friend made haste,
And long inveterate foes saluted as they pass'd."

How admirably this last line describes that sudden solution of the
hostile elements in human nature-that swift sense of unity in society,
produced by some glad tidings or great public enthusiasm, when for an
hour the Millennium is anticipated, and the poet's wish, that

"Man wi' man, the warld o'er,
Shall brithers be, for a' that,"

is fulfilled!