With his praises of others, and of himself, is always intermingled a strain of discontent and lamentation, a sullen growl of resentment, or a querulous murmur of distress. His works are undervalued, his merit is unrewarded, and “he has few thanks to pay his stars that he was born among Englishmen.” To his criticks he is sometimes contemptuous, sometimes resentful, and sometimes submissive. The writer who thinks his works formed for duration, mistakes his interest when he mentions his enemies. He degrades his own dignity by showing that he was affected by their censures, and gives lasting importance to names, which, left to themselves, would vanish from remembrance. From this principle Dryden did not often depart; his complaints are, for the greater part, general; he seldom pollutes his page with an adverse name. He condescended, indeed, to a controversy with Settle, in which he, perhaps, may be considered rather as assaulting than repelling; and since Settle is sunk into oblivion, his libel remains injurious only to himself.
Among answers to criticks, no poetical attacks, or altercations, are to be included; they are, like other poems, effusions of genius, produced as much to obtain praise as to obviate censure. These Dryden practised, and in these he excelled.
Of Collier, Blackmore, and Milbourne, he has made mention in the preface to his Fables. To the censure of Collier, whose remarks may be rather termed admonitions than criticisms, he makes little reply; being, at the age of sixty-eight, attentive to better things than the claps of a playhouse. He complains of Collier’s rudeness, and the “horseplay of his raillery;” and asserts, that “in many places he has perverted by his glosses the meaning” of what he censures; but in other things he confesses that he is justly taxed; and says, with great calmness and candour, “I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts or expressions of mine that can be truly accused of obscenity, immorality, or profaneness, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, he will be glad of my repentance.” Yet, as our best dispositions are imperfect, he left standing in the same book a reflection on Collier of great asperity, and, indeed, of more asperity than wit.
Blackmore he represents as made his enemy by the poem of Absalom and Achitophel, which “he thinks a little hard upon his fanatick patrons;” and charges him with borrowing the plan of his Arthur from the preface to Juvenal, “though he had,” says he, “the baseness not to acknowledge his benefactor, but instead of it to traduce me in a libel.”
The libel in which Blackmore traduced him, was a Satire upon Wit; in which, having lamented the exuberance of false wit, and the deficiency of true, he proposes that all wit should be recoined before it is current, and appoints masters of assay who shall reject all that is light or debased:
’Tis true, that, when the coarse and worthless dross
Is purg’d away, there will be mighty loss:
E’en Congreve, Southern, manly Wycherley,
When thus refin’d, will grievous sufferers be;
Into the melting-pot when Dryden comes,
What horrid stench will rise, what noisome fumes!
How will he shrink, when all his lewd allay,
And wicked mixture, shall be purg’d away!
Thus stands the passage in the last edition; but in the original there was an abatement of the censure, beginning thus:
But what remains will be so pure, ‘twill bear
Th’ examination of the most severe.
Blackmore, finding the censure resented, and the civility disregarded, ungenerously omitted the softer part. Such variations discover a writer who consults his passions more than his virtue; and it may be reasonably supposed that Dryden imputes his enmity to its true cause.
Of Milbourne he wrote only in general terms, such as are always ready at the call of anger, whether just or not: a short extract will be sufficient. “He pretends a quarrel to me, that I have fallen foul upon priesthood; if I have, I am only to ask pardon of good priests, and am afraid his share of the reparation will come to little. Let him be satisfied that he shall never be able to force himself upon me for an adversary; I contemn him too much to enter into competition with him.
“As for the rest of those who have written against me, they are such scoundrels that they deserve not the least notice to be taken of them. Blackmore and Milbourne are only distinguished from the crowd by being remembered to their infamy.”
Dryden, indeed, discovered, in many of his writings, an affected and absurd malignity to priests and priesthood, which naturally raised him many enemies, and which was sometimes as unseasonably resented as it was exerted. Trapp is angry that he calls the sacrificer in the Georgicks “the holy butcher:” the translation is, indeed, ridiculous; but Trapp’s anger arises from his zeal, not for the author, but the priest; as if any reproach of the follies of paganism could be extended to the preachers of truth.
Dryden’s dislike of the priesthood is imputed by Langbaine, and, I think, by Brown, to a repulse which he suffered when he solicited ordination; but he denies, in the preface to his Fables, that he ever designed to enter into the church; and such a denial he would not have hazarded, if he could have been convicted of falsehood.
Malevolence to the clergy is seldom at a great distance from irreverence of religion, and Dryden affords no exception to this observation. His writings exhibit many passages, which, with all the allowance that can be made for characters and occasions, are such as piety would not have admitted, and such as may vitiate light and unprincipled minds. But there is no reason for supposing that he disbelieved the religion which he disobeyed. He forgot his duty rather than disowned it. His tendency to profaneness is the effect of levity, negligence, and loose conversation, with a desire of accommodating himself to the corruption of the times, by venturing to be wicked as far as he durst. When he professed himself a convert to popery, he did not pretend to have received any new conviction of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.
The persecution of criticks was not the worst of his vexations; he was much more disturbed by the importunities of want. His complaints of poverty are so frequently repeated, either with the dejection of weakness sinking in helpless misery, or the indignation of merit claiming its tribute from mankind, that it is impossible not to detest the age which could impose on such a man the necessity of such solicitations, or not to despise the man who could submit to such solicitations without necessity.
Whether by the world’s neglect, or his own imprudence, I am afraid that the greatest part of his life was passed in exigencies. Such outcries were, surely, never uttered but in severe pain. Of his supplies or his expenses no probable estimate can now be made. Except the salary of the laureate, to which king James added the office of historiographer, perhaps with some additional emoluments, his whole revenue seems to have been casual; and it is well known that he seldom lives frugally who lives by chance. Hope is always liberal; and they that trust her promises make little scruple of revelling to-day on the profits of the morrow.
Of his plays the profit was not great; and of the produce of his other works very little intelligence can be had. By discoursing with the late amiable Mr. Tonson, I could not find that any memorials of the transactions between his predecessor and Dryden had been preserved, except the following papers:
“I do hereby promise to pay John Dryden, esq. or order, on the 25th of March, 1699, the sum of two hundred and fifty guineas, in consideration of ten thousand verses, which the said John Dryden, esq. is to deliver to me, Jacob Tonson, when finished, whereof seven thousand five hundred verses, more or less, are already in the said Jacob Tonson’s possession. And I do hereby further promise and engage myself, to make up the said sum of two hundred and fifty guineas three hundred pounds sterling to the said John Dryden, esq. his executors, administrators, or assigns, at the beginning of the second impression of the said ten thousand verses.
“In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal, this 20th day of March, 1698-9.
“JACOB TONSON.
”Sealed and delivered, being
first duly
stampt, pursuant
to the acts of parliament for
that purpose, in the presence
of
”BEN. PORTLOCK,
”WILL. CONGREVE.”
“March 24, 1698.
“Received then of Mr. Jacob Tonson the sum of two hundred sixty-eight pounds fifteen shillings, in pursuance of an agreement for ten thousand verses, to be delivered by me to the said Jacob Tonson, whereof I have already delivered to him about seven thousand five hundred, more or less; he, the said Jacob Tonson, being obliged to make up the foresaid sum of two hundred sixty-eight pounds fifteen shillings three hundred pounds, at the beginning of the second impression of the foresaid ten thousand verses;
“I say, received by me,
“JOHN DRYDEN.
“Witness, CHARLES DRYDEN.”
Two hundred and fifty guineas, at 1l, 1s. 6d. is 268l. 15s.
It is manifest, from the dates of this contract, that it relates to the volume of Fables, which contains about twelve thousand verses, and for which, therefore, the payment must have been afterwards enlarged.
I have been told of another letter yet remaining, in which he desires Tonson to bring him money, to pay for a watch which he had ordered for his son, and which the maker would not leave without the price.
The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence. Dryden had probably no recourse in his exigencies but to his bookseller. The particular character of Tonson I do not know; but the general conduct of traders was much less liberal in those times than in our own; their views were narrower, and their manners grosser. To the mercantile ruggedness of that race, the delicacy of the poet was sometimes exposed. Lord Bolingbroke, who in his youth had cultivated poetry, related to Dr. King, of Oxford, that one day, when he visited Dryden, they heard, as they were conversing, another person entering the house. “This,” said Dryden, “is Tonson. You will take care not to depart before he goes away; for I have not completed the sheet which I promised him; and if you leave me unprotected, I must suffer all the rudeness to which his resentment can prompt his tongue.”
What rewards he obtained for his poems, besides the payment of the bookseller, cannot be known. Mr. Derrick, who consulted some of his relations, was informed that his Fables obtained five hundred pounds from the dutchess of Ormond; a present not unsuitable to the magnificence of that splendid family; and he quotes Moyle, as relating that forty pounds were paid by a musical society for the use of Alexander’s Feast.
In those days the economy of government was yet unsettled, and the payments of the exchequer were dilatory and uncertain: of this disorder there is reason to believe that the laureate sometimes felt the effects; for, in one of his prefaces he complains of those, who, being intrusted with the distribution of the prince’s bounty, suffer those that depend upon it to languish in penury.
Of his petty habits or slight amusements, tradition has retained little. Of the only two men, whom I have found, to whom he was personally known, one told me, that at the house which he frequented, called Will’s Coffee-house, the appeal upon any literary dispute was made to him; and the other related, that his armed chair, which in the winter had a settled and prescriptive place by the fire, was in the summer placed in the balcony, and that he called the two places his winter and his summer seat. This is all the intelligence which his two survivers afforded me.
One of his opinions will do him no honour in the present age, though in his own time, at least in the beginning of it, he was far from having it confined to himself. He put great confidence in the prognostications of judicial astrology. In the appendix to the Life of Congreve is a narrative of some of his predictions wonderfully fulfilled; but I know not the writer’s means of information, or character of veracity. That he had the configurations of the horoscope in his mind, and considered them as influencing the affairs of men, he does not forbear to hint:
The utmost malice of the stars is past.
Now frequent trines the happier lights among,
And high-rais’d Jove, from his dark prison freed,
Those weights took off that on his planet hung,
Will gloriously the new-laid works succeed.
He has, elsewhere, shown his attention to the planetary powers; and, in the preface to his Fables, has endeavoured obliquely to justify his superstition, by attributing the same to some of the ancients. The letter, added to this narrative, leaves no doubt of his notions or practice.
So slight and so scanty is the knowledge which I have been able to collect concerning the private life and domestick manners of a man whom every English generation must mention with reverence as a critick and a poet.
Dryden may be properly considered as the father of English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine upon principles the merit of composition. Of our former poets, the greatest dramatist wrote without rules, conducted through life and nature by a genius that rarely misled, and rarely deserted him. Of the rest, those who knew the laws of propriety had neglected to teach them.
Two Arts of English Poetry were written in the days of Elizabeth by Webb and Puttenham, from which something might be learned, and a few hints had been given by Jonson and Cowley; but Dryden’s Essay on Dramatick Poetry was the first regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing.
He who, having formed his opinions in the present age of English literature, turns back to peruse this dialogue, will not, perhaps, find much increase of knowledge, or much novelty of instruction; but he is to remember that critical principles were then in the hands of a few, who had gathered them partly from the ancients, and partly from the Italians and French. The structure of dramatick poems was not then generally understood. Audiences applauded by instinct, and poets, perhaps, often pleased by chance.
A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own lustre. Of an opinion which is no longer doubted, the evidence ceases to be examined. Of an art universally practised, the first teacher is forgotten. Learning once made popular is no longer learning; it has the appearance of something which we have bestowed upon ourselves, as the dew appears to rise from the field which it refreshes.
To judge rightly of an author, we must transport ourselves to his time, and examine what were the wants of his contemporaries, and what were his means of supplying them. That which is easy at one time was difficult at another. Dryden at least imported his science, and gave his country what it wanted before; or rather, he imported only the materials and manufactured them by his own skill.
The Dialogue on the Drama was one of his first essays of criticism, written when he was yet a timorous candidate for reputation, and, therefore, laboured with that diligence which he might allow himself somewhat to remit, when his name gave sanction to his positions, and his awe of the publick was abated, partly by custom, and partly by success. It will not be easy to find, in all the opulence of our language, a treatise so artfully variegated with successive representations of opposite probabilities, so enlivened with imagery, so brightened with illustrations. His portraits of the English dramatists are wrought with great spirit and diligence. The account of Shakespeare may stand as a perpetual model of encomiastick criticism; exact without minuteness, and lofty without exaggeration. The praise lavished by Longinus, on the attestation of the heroes of Marathon by Demosthenes, fades away before it. In a few lines is exhibited a character, so extensive in its comprehension, and so curious in its limitations, that nothing can be added, diminished, or reformed; nor can the editors and admirers of Shakespeare, in all their emulation of reverence, boast of much more than of having diffused and paraphrased this epitome of excellence, of having changed Dryden’s gold for baser metal, of lower value though of greater bulk.
In this, and in all his other essays on the same subject, the criticism of Dryden is the criticism of a poet; not a dull collection of theorems, nor a rude detection of faults, which, perhaps, the censor was not able to have committed; but a gay and vigorous dissertation, where delight is mingled with instruction, and wh
ere the author proves his right of judgment by his power of performance.
The different manner and effect with which critical knowledge may be conveyed, was, perhaps, never more clearly exemplified than in the performances of Rymer and Dryden. It was said of a dispute between two mathematicians, “malim cum Scaligero errare, quam cum Clavio recte sapere;” that “it was more eligible to go wrong with one, than right with the other.” A tendency of the same kind every mind must feel at the perusal of Dryden’s prefaces and Rymer’s discourses. With Dryden we are wandering in quest of truth; whom we find, if we find her at all, drest in the graces of elegance; and, if we miss her, the labour of the pursuit rewards itself; we are led only through fragrance and flowers. Rymer, without taking a nearer, takes a rougher way; every step is to be made through thorns and brambles; and truth, if we meet her, appears repulsive by her mien, and ungraceful by her habit. Dryden’s criticism has the majesty of a queen; Rymer’s has the ferocity of a tyrant.
As he had studied with great diligence the art of poetry, and enlarged or rectified his notions, by experience perpetually increasing, he had his mind stored with principles and observations; he poured out his knowledge with little labour; for of labour, notwithstanding the multiplicity of his productions, there is sufficient reason to suspect that he was not a lover. To write con amore, with fondness for the employment, with perpetual touches and retouches, with unwillingness to take leave of his own idea, and an unwearied pursuit of unattainable perfection, was, I think, no part of his character.
Complete Works of Samuel Johnson Page 446
