by John Dryden
‘When nature prompted, and no law denied Promiscuous use of concubine and bride; Then Israel’s monarch after heaven’s own heart His vigorous warmth did variously impart To wives and slaves; and, wide as his command, Scattered his Maker’s image through the land. Of all the numerous progeny was none So beautiful, so brave as Absolon.’
The management of Absalom was a difficult matter. With all his transgressions, the rebel Monmouth was still beloved by his father, and Dryden could not have ventured to treat him as his prototype is treated by Scripture. He has extricated himself from the dilemma with abundant dexterity, but at some expense to his poem. The catastrophe required by poetical justice does not come to pass, and the conclusion is tame. All such defects, however, are forgotten in the splendour of the execution. The versification is the finest in its style that English literature had yet seen, the perfection of heroic verse. The sense is weighty and massive, as befits such an organ of expression, and, whatever may be thought of Dryden’s flatteries of individuals, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity with which he here expresses his political convictions. He unquestionably belonged to that class of mankind who cannot discern principles apart from persons, and his contempt for abstractions is pointedly expressed in one of his ringing couplets:
‘Thought they might ruin him they could create, Or melt him to that golden calf — a state.’
This is not a very high manifestation of the intellect in its application to political questions, but it bespeaks the class of persons who provide ballast for the vessel of the state in tempestuous times; and, on the whole, Absalom and Achitophel is a poem which the patriot as well as the admirer of genius may read with complacency. The royal side of the question could not be better put than in these lines placed in the mouth of David:
‘Thus long have I, by native mercy sway’d, My wrongs dissembled, my revenge delay’d; So willing to forgive the offending age, So much the father did the king assuage. But now so far my clemency they slight, The offenders question my forgiving right. That one was made for many, they contend; But ’tis to rule; for that’s a monarch’s end. They call my tenderness of blood, my fear; Though manly tempers can the longest bear. Yet since they will divert my native course, ’Tis time to shew I am not good by force. Those heap’d affronts, that haughty subjects bring, Are burdens for a camel, not a king. Kings are the public pillars of the state, Born to sustain and prop the nation’s weight: If my young Sampson will pretend a call To shake the column, let him share the fall. But oh, that he yet would repent and live! How easy ’tis for parents to forgive! With how few tears a pardon might be won From nature pleading for a darling son! Poor, pitied youth, by my paternal care Raised up to all the height his frame could bear! Had God ordain’d his fate for empire born, He would have given his soul another turn: Gull’d with a patriot’s name, whose modern sense Is one that would by law supplant his prince; The people’s brave, the politician’s tool; Never was patriot yet, but was a fool. Whence comes it, that religion and the laws Should more be Absolom’s than David’s cause? His old instructor, ere he lost his place, Was never thought endued with so much grace. Good heavens, how faction can a patriot paint! My rebel ever proves my people’s saint. Would they impose an heir upon the throne? Let Sanhedrims be taught to give their own. A king’s at least a part of government; And mine as requisite as their consent. Without my leave a future king to choose, Infers a right the present to depose. True, they petition me to approve their choice; But Esau’s hands suit ill with Jacob’s voice. My pious subjects for my safety pray; Which to secure, they take my power away. From plots and treasons heaven preserve my years, And save me most from my petitioners!’
It will be observed that ‘the right the present to depose,’ is mentioned by Dryden as something manifestly preposterous, and the derivation of it as a logical corollary from the Exclusion Bill is assumed to be a sufficient reductio ad absurdum of the latter. In the view of the majority of the nation, this was sound doctrine until the Revolution, which reduced Dryden’s poem from the rank of a powerful political manifesto to that of a brilliant exercise of fancy and dialectic. As such, it will never cease to please and to impress. The finest passages are, no doubt, those descriptive of character, whether carefully studied portraits or strokes against particular foibles imputed to the poet’s adversaries, such as this mock apology for the parsimonious kitchen of the Whig sheriff, Slingsby Bethel:
‘Such frugal virtue malice may accuse, But sure ’twas necessary to the Jews: For towns, once burnt, such magistrates require, As dare not tempt God’s providence by fire.’
The elaborate and glowing characters of Achitophel (Shaftesbury) and Zimri (Buckingham) it is needless to transcribe, as they are universally known. It may be remarked that the character of the turbulent and adventurous Shaftesbury does not match very well with that of the Ulyssean Achitophel of Scripture, but Dryden has wisely drawn from what he had before his eyes.
The Medal, which we have seen reason for attributing to the suggestion of Charles II. himself, appeared in March, 1682. It is a bitter invective against Shaftesbury, its theme the medal which his partisans had very naturally struck upon the occasion of his acquittal in the preceding autumn. It is entirely in a serious vein, and wants the grace and urbanity of some parts of Absalom and Achitophel, but is no way inferior as a piece of strong, vehement satire. Shaftesbury’s conduct as a minister, before his breach with the Court, is thus described:
‘Behold him now exalted into trust; His counsel’s oft convenient, seldom just: Even in the most sincere advice he gave He had a grudging still to be a knave. The frauds he learned in his fanatic years Made him uneasy in his lawful gears; At best, as little honest as he could, And, like white witches, mischievously good.’
The second part of Absalom and Achitophel appeared in November, 1682. It was mainly the work of Nahum Tate, who imitated his master’s versification with success, but has numerous touches from the pen of Dryden, who inserted a long passage of unparalleled satire against his adversaries, especially Settle and Shadwell:
‘Who by my means to all succeeding times Shall live in spite of their own doggrel rhymes.’
The character of Shadwell (Og) is well known, but it is impossible to avoid quoting a portion of it:
‘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 any thing 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 mayst live, avoiding pen and ink.” I see, I see, ’tis counsel given in vain, For treason, botch’d 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. Why should thy metre good King David blast? A psalm of his will surely be thy last. Darest thou presume in verse to meet thy foes, Thou, whom the penny pamphlet foil’d in prose? Doeg, whom God for mankind’s mirth has made, O’ertops thy talent in thy very trade; Doeg, to thee, thy paintings are so coarse, A poet is, though he’s the poet’s horse. 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 hang’d for nonsense is the devil. Hadst thou the glories of thy king exprest, Thy praises had been satire at the best; But thou in clumsy verse, unlickt, unpointed, Hast shamefully defiled 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 Absolom; And, for my foes, may this their blessing be, To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee!’
Only a month before the appearance of this annihilating attack, Dryden had devoted an entire poem to Shadwell, who had justly provoked him by a scandalous libel. The title of MacFlecknoe is derived from an Irish priest and, with the exception of some good lines pointed out by Southey and Lamb, a bad poet, already satirized by Marvell. It is a vigorous attack, but not equal to the passage in Absalom
and Achitophel, and chiefly memorable inasmuch as the machinery evidently suggested that of Pope’s Dunciad.
Dryden’s next poetical efforts, the dramatic excepted, were of quite another kind. Simultaneously with the second part of Absalom and Achitophel appeared Religio Laici, an argument for the faith of the Church of England as a juste milieu between Popery and Deism. In one respect this takes the highest place among the works of Dryden, for it is the most perfect example he has given of that reasoning in rhyme of which he was so great a master. There is not and could not be any originality in the reasonings themselves, but Pope’s famous couplet was never so finely illustrated, except by Pope himself:
‘True wit is nature to advantage drest; What oft was thought, but ne’er so well exprest.’
At the same time the poetry hardly rises to the height which the theme might have justified. There is little to captivate or astonish, but perpetual admiration attends upon the masterly conduct of the argument, and the ease with which dry and difficult propositions melt and glide in harmonious verse. The execution is singularly equable; but perhaps hardly maintains the elevation of the fine exordium:
‘Dim as the borrow’d beams of moon and stars To lonely, weary, wandering travellers, Is reason to the soul: and as, on high, Those rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here; so reason’s glimmering ray
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Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upwards to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear, When day’s bright lord ascends our hemisphere; So pale grows reason at religion’s sight, So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light. Some few, whose lamp shone brighter, have been led From cause to cause, to nature’s sacred head, And found that one First Principle must be: But what, or who, that universal He; Whether some soul, encompassing this ball, Unmade, unmoved; yet making, moving all; Or various atoms’ interfering dance Leap’d into form, the noble work of chance;
Or this great All was from eternity. —
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Not even the Stagyrite himself could see,
And Epicurus guess’d as well as he.
As blindly groped they for a future state, As rashly judged of providence and fate; But least of all could their endeavours find What most concern’d the good of human kind; For happiness was never to be found, But vanish’d from them like enchanted ground. One thought content the good to be enjoy’d; This very little accident destroy’d: The wiser madmen did for virtue toil, A thorny, or, at best, a barren soil:
In pleasure some their glutton souls would steep;
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But found their line too short, the well too deep,
And leaky vessels which no bliss could keep.
Thus anxious thoughts in endless circles roll, Without a centre where to fix the soul: In this wild maze their vain endeavours end: — How can the less the greater comprehend? Or finite reason reach infinity? For what could fathom God were more than he.’
Dryden’s next important poem brought obloquy upon him in his own day, and must be perused with mingled feelings in this. Between 1682 and 1687, the date of the publication of The Hind and the Panther, the laureate of the Church of England had, as we have seen, become a Roman Catholic, and most reasonably desired to justify this step to the world. The Court also expected his pen to be drawn in their service, and hence the double purpose which runs through the poem, of vindicating his personal change of conviction and of justifying the political measures to which James had had recourse for establishing the supremacy of his church. All this was perfectly natural; the extraordinary thing is that so great a master of ridicule should have been blind to the ludicrous character of the machinery which he devised to carry out his purpose. The comparison of the true church to the milk-white hind, and of the corrupt church to the beautiful but spotted panther, might have been employed with propriety as an ornament or illustration of the poem, but the endeavour to make it the groundwork of the entire piece is pregnant with absurdity. Animals may very well be introduced as actors in a fiction upon condition that they behave like animals; and their faculties may even be expanded to suit the author’s purpose so long as their exercise is confined to visible and concrete things; but the notion of a pair of quadrupeds discussing the sacraments, tradition, and the infallibility of the Pope, is only fit for burlesque, and constitutes, indeed, a running burlesque upon the poem. Dryden probably took up the idea without sufficient consideration, and when he had made some progress in his work he may well have been too enamoured with the beautiful but preposterous exordium to surrender it to common sense. Perverse and fantastic as is the plan of his poem, none of his works is richer in beauties of detail. ‘In none,’ says Macaulay, ‘can be found passages more pathetic and magnificent, greater ductility and energy of language, or a more pleasing and various music.’ The power of reasoning in rhyme is little inferior to that displayed in Religio Laici, and the narrative character of the piece allows of a diversified variety excluded by the simply didactic character of its predecessor. The invective against Calvinists and Socinians, typified by the wolf and the fox, is an average, and not beyond an average, example of Dryden’s matchless force. Near the end, it will be perceived, he suddenly bethinks himself that, as the apologist of James’s ostensible policy, it is his business to recommend not persecution but toleration, and he caps his objurgation with a passage conceived in a widely different spirit, a severe though unintentional reflection upon the practice of his own church:
‘O happy pair, how well you have increased! What ills in church and state have you redress’d! With teeth, untried, and rudiments of claws, Your first essay was on your native laws;
Those having torn with ease, and trampled down,
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Your fangs you fasten’d on the mitred crown,
And freed from God and monarchy your town.
What though your native kennel still be small, Bounded betwixt a puddle and a wall; Yet your victorious colonies are sent Where the north ocean girds the continent. Quicken’d with fire below, your monsters breed In fenny Holland, and in fruitful Tweed; And, like the first, the last affects to be Drawn to the dregs of a democracy. As, where in fields the fairy rounds are seen, A rank sour herbage rises on the green; So, springing where those midnight elves advance, Rebellion prints the footsteps of the dance.
Such are their doctrines, such contempt they show
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To heaven above, and to their prince below,
As none but traitors and blasphemers know.
God, like the tyrant of the skies, is placed, And kings, like slaves, beneath the crowd debased. So fulsome is their food, that flocks refuse To bite, and only dogs for physic use. As, where the lightning runs along the ground, No husbandry can heal the blasting wound; Nor bladed grass, nor bearded corn succeeds, But scales of scurf and putrefaction breeds; Such wars, such waste, such fiery tracks of dearth Their zeal has left, and such a teemless earth. But, as the poisons of the deadliest kind Are to their own unhappy coasts confined; As only Indian shades of sight deprive, And magic plants will but in Colchos thrive So presbytery and pestilential zeal Can only flourish in a commonweal. From Celtic woods is chased the wolfish crew; But ah! some pity e’en to brutes is due; Their native walks, methinks, they might enjoy, Curb’d of their native malice to destroy. Of all the tyrannies on human kind, The worst is that which persecutes the mind. Let us but weigh at what offence we strike; ’Tis but because we cannot think alike. In punishing of this, we overthrow The laws of nations and of nature too. Beasts are the subjects of tyrannic sway, Where still the stronger on the weaker prey; Man only of a softer mould is made, Not for his fellows’ ruin, but their aid; Created kind, beneficent and free, The noble image of the Deity.’
Dryden produced yet one more poem in the interest of the Court, his Britannia Rediviva, an official panegyric on the birth of the Prince of Wales, June, 1688. Literature has perhaps no more signal instance of adulation wasted and prediction f
alsified. Many lines are spirited, but others betray Dryden’s fatal insensibility to the ridiculous in his own person:
‘When humbly on the royal babe we gaze, The manly lines of a majestic face Give awful joy.’
The raptures of the Byzantine courtiers over the imperial infant Protus were nothing to this. Dryden did not want eloquence or dignity to celebrate the hero if he could have found him; it was his and our misfortune that when the hero did at last come to the throne the poet had disqualified himself from extolling him. The landing in Torbay and the triumphal march to London; the victory at the Boyne and the defence of Londonderry were transactions as worthy of epical treatment as any history records; but the only man in England who could have treated them epically deemed them rather matter for elegy; and to have indulged in elegy he must have fled to France. Public events and political and religious controversy were no longer for him: stripped of his means and position he betook himself to translation and playwriting as the readiest means of repairing his shattered fortunes, and it was not until the mellow sunset of his life that he turned to the compositions which, of all he ever wrote, have given the most delight and the least offence, his Fables. These, published at the beginning of 1700, include five adaptations from Chaucer, and three stories told after Boccaccio, as well as Alexander’s Feast, and a few other pieces. It would not be too much to say that this book achieved two things, either of which would have immortalized a poet: it fixed the standard of narrative poetry, except of the metrical romance or ballad class, and also that of heroic versification. The latter, indeed, was thought for a time to have been transcended by Pope, but modern ears have tired of the balanced seesaw of the Popian couplet, and crave the ease and variety of Dryden, restored to literature in Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini, and afterwards imitated by Keats in Lamia. The freedom which so great a master allows himself in rhyming should be a lesson to modern purists: final sounds so slightly akin as guard and prepared, placed and last, are of continual occurrence. In matters still more important than versification Dryden is in general equally admirable. He subjected himself to a severe test in competing with Chaucer — severer than he knew, for Chaucer was not yet, even by Dryden, valued at his full worth. In some respects Dryden certainly suffers greatly by the comparison. He is pre-eminently an intellectual poet, to whom the tree of knowledge had been the tree of life; there is perhaps scarcely a thought in his writings that charms by absolute simplicity and pure nature. Wherever, therefore, Chaucer is transparently simple and unaffected, we find him altered for the worse in Dryden. The very important part, however, of The Knight’s Tale which is concerned with courts, camps, and chivalry is even better in Dryden than in his model. He might have defined his sphere in the words of Ariosto, a poet who has many points of contact with him:
