John Dryden - Delphi Poets Series

by John Dryden

  ‘Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori, Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto.’

  If this is true of portions of Palamon and Arcite, it is still truer of The Flower and the Leaf (then believed to be a genuine work of Chaucer’s), throughout a most brilliant picture of natural beauty and courtly glitter, painted in language of chastened splendour. The other pieces modelled after Chaucer are of inferior interest, yet all excellent in their way. Two of the three tales from Boccaccio are acknowledged masterpieces, Cymon and Iphigenia and Theodore and Honoria. The interest of the first chiefly consists in the narrative itself, and that of the second in the way of telling it. The story, indeed, though striking, is fantastic and hardly pleasing, but Dryden’s treatment of it is perhaps the most perfect specimen in our language of l’art de conter.

  An example of Dryden’s descriptive power may be given in a passage from The Flower and the Leaf:

  ‘Thus while I sat intent to see and hear, And drew perfumes of more than vital air, All suddenly I heard the approaching sound Of vocal music, on the enchanted ground:

  An host of saints it seem’d, so full the choir;

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  As if the bless’d above did all conspire

  To join their voices, and neglect the lyre.

  At length there issued from the grove behind A fair assembly of the female kind: A train less fair, as ancient fathers tell, Seduced the sons of heaven to rebel. I pass their forms, and every charming grace; Less than an angel would their worth debase: But their attire, like liveries of a kind, All rich and rare, is fresh within my mind. In velvet white as snow the troop was gown’d, The seams with sparkling emeralds set around: Their hoods and sleeves the same; and purpled o’er With diamonds, pearls, and all the shining store Of eastern pomp; their long-descending train With rubies edged, and sapphires, swept the plain. High on their heads, with jewels richly set, Each lady wore a radiant coronet. Beneath the circles, all the choir was graced With chaplets green on their fair foreheads placed; Of laurel some, of woodbine many more, And wreath of Agnus castus others bore: These last, who with those virgin crowns were dress’d, Appear’d in higher honour than the rest.

  They danced around; but in the midst was seen

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  A lady of a more majestic mien;

  By stature, and by beauty, mark’d their sovereign queen.

  She in the midst began with sober grace; Her servants’ eyes were fix’d upon her face, And as she moved or turn’d, her motions view’d, Her measures kept, and step by step pursued. Methought she trod the ground with greater grace, With more of godhead shining in her face; And as in beauty she surpass’d the choir, So, nobler than the rest was her attire. A crown of ruddy gold inclosed her brow, Plain without pomp, and rich without a show: A branch of Agnus castus in her hand She bore aloft (her sceptre of command;) Admired, adored by all the circling crowd, For wheresoe’er she turn’d her face, they bow’d. And as she danced, a roundelay she sung, In honour of the laurel, ever young.

  She raised her voice on high, and sung so clear,

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  The fawns came scudding from the groves to hear,

  And all the bending forest lent an ear.

  At every close she made, the attending throng Replied, and bore the burden of the song: So just, so small, yet in so sweet a note, It seem’d the music melted in the throat.’

  One remarkable feature of the principal poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the infrequency of the casual visitations of the Muse. They seem to have hardly ever experienced an unsought lyrical inspiration, or to have sung merely for singing’s sake. Hence Dryden is permitted to appear only twice in the Golden Treasury. His songs, to be treated of more fully when we consider the lyrical poetry of the period, though often instinct with true lyrical spirit, seem to have been deliberately composed for insertion in his plays, and the same is the case with almost the whole of what he would have called his occasional poetry. His two chief odes, Alexander’s Feast and the memorial verses to Anne Killigrew, were indubitably commissions; and it is probable that few of the epistles, elegies, dedications, and prologues which form so considerable a portion of his poetical works were composed without some similar inducement. As a whole, this collection is creditable to his powers of intellect, quickness of wit, and command of nervous masculine diction. It is frequently the work of a master, though conceived in the spirit of a journeyman. The adulation of the patron or the defunct is generally fulsome enough; yet some compliments are so graceful that it is difficult not to believe them sincere, as when he apostrophizes the Duchess of Ormond:

  ‘O daughter of the Rose, whose cheeks unite The differing titles of the Red and White! Who heaven’s alternate beauty well display, The blush of morning and the milky way.’

  Or the conclusion of his epistle to Kneller:

  ‘More cannot be by mortal art exprest, But venerable age shall add the rest. For Time shall with his ready pencil stand, Retouch your figures with his ripening hand, Mellow your colours, and imbrown the teint, Add every grace which Time alone can grant; To future ages shall your fame convey, And give more beauties than he takes away.’

  Or these from the epistle to his kinsman, John Driden, more likely than any of the others to have been the unbought manifestation of genuine regard:

  ‘O true descendant of a patriot line! Who while thou shar’st their lustre lendest thine! Vouchsafe this picture of thy soul to see, ’Tis so far good as it resembles thee. The beauties to the original I owe, Which when I miss my own defects I show; Nor think the kindred Muses thy disgrace; A poet is not born in every race; Two of a house few ages can afford, One to perform, another to record. Praiseworthy actions are by thee embraced, And ’tis my praise to make thy praises last.’

  The last couplet, excellent in sense, is an example of Dryden’s one metrical defect. He is not sufficiently careful to vary his vowel-sounds.

  Dryden’s translations alone would give him a conspicuous place in English literature. The most important, his complete version of Virgil, has been improved upon in many ways, and yet after all it remains true, that ‘Pitt is quoted, and Dryden read.’ Had he never translated Virgil, his renderings or imitations of Juvenal, Horace, and others, would suffice to entitle him to no inconsiderable rank among those who have enriched their native literature from foreign stores. His principle of translation was correct, and accords with that of the greatest of English critics. Coleridge assured Wordsworth that there were only two legitimate systems of metrical translation, strict literality, or compensation carried to its fullest extent. Dryden most probably had not sufficient Latin to be literal; but in any case his genius would have disdained such trammels, not to mention the more prosaic, but not less potent consideration, that what is written for bread must usually be written in haste — a fact which weighed with Dryden when he discontinued rhyme in his tragedies. Thus thrown back on the system of compensation, he has richly repaid his authors for the beauties of which he has bereaved them, by the beauties which he has bestowed — or which, as he maintains, were actually latent in them — and has expressed many of their thoughts with even enhanced energy. He has, in fact, made them write very much as they would have written if they had been English poets of the seventeenth century, and his work is less translation than transfusion. They necessarily appear much metamorphosed from the originals, but the fault is less that of Dryden than of his age. Could he have attempted the same task in our day with equal resources of genius, and on the same principles of workmanship, he would have succeeded much better, for he would have enjoyed more comprehension of the spirit of his originals than was possible in the seventeenth century. The scholarship of that age had not vivified the information which it had amassed; the idealized, but still vital conceptions of the Renaissance had given place to inanimate conventionality; the people of Greece and Rome appeared to the moderns like people in books; and such warm, affectionate contact between the souls of the present and the past as afterwards inspired Shelley’s v
ersions from Homer and Euripides was in that age impossible.

  So great and versatile were Dryden’s powers that, after all that has been said, his performances as a lyric poet, as a dramatist, and as a critic remain to be spoken of, and his rank in each has to be recognized as that of the foremost writer of his country in his own day. These will be treated in their appropriate places. The present is, perhaps, the most appropriate for a few words on his position as a poet. It is most difficult to determine whether he and his successor, Pope, should be placed at the bottom of the first class, or at the head of the second class of great English poets. If the very highest gifts of all — originality, creative imagination, unstudied music, unconscious inspiration, lofty ideal, the power to interpret nature, are essential conditions of rank in the first class, then assuredly Dryden and Pope must be contented with the second. If not positively excluded by the very nature of the case — if deficiency in the very highest qualities can be compensated by consummate excellence in all the rest — if intellect will supply the place of inspiration, and art that of nature — then they stand so high above the average of the second rank that it seems injurious not to place them in the first. The principle of exclusion, logically carried out, might involve the elevation above them of other writers whom we instinctively feel to be their inferiors; too absolute an insistence, on the other hand, upon the claims of intellectual power and perfect execution as qualifications for supreme poetical rank, must result in preferring Pope to Dryden. Inferior to his successor in both these respects, Dryden may still justly be preferred to him on the ground of his more ample endowment with that divine insanity without which, as Plato truly says, no one can be a poet. But this consideration cannot be invoked in his favour against Pope without admitting his inferiority to poets of the very first order; and it may be seriously questioned whether any poet can belong to the first order who is so exclusively a town poet as Dryden and Pope, and has so little knowledge of nature. The resemblances and contrasts between him and Pope have been frequently discussed; there are two other poets with whom comparison is less hackneyed and not unprofitable. In fecundity, in versatility, in energy, in the frequent application of his poetry to public affairs, in his influence on contemporary literature, position as head of a school, and incontestable superiority to all the poets around him, no less, unfortunately, in bombast and incomprehensible breaches of good taste, he strongly reminds us of Victor Hugo. Hugo, undoubtedly, was a much greater lyrical poet than Dryden, and was enkindled by spontaneous inspirations which never visited Dryden; yet the two are essentially of the same genus; the differences between them are rather characteristic of their eras than of themselves; and while Hugo’s imagination would have pined in the seventeenth century, Dryden’s intellect and Dryden’s modesty would have been highly serviceable to Hugo in the nineteenth. Another poet, whose talent and career offer many analogies to Dryden’s, is one whom Dryden himself disparages upon metrical grounds. Claudian, like Dryden, is a remarkable instance of a poet owing a large portion of his fame to his dexterous treatment of occasional subjects. As Dryden drew material for his most powerful writings from the political and religious controversies of his day, so Claudian found his themes in the exploits of Stilicho and the misdeeds of Rufinus. Both have made uninteresting subjects attractive by admirable treatment; both are greatly indebted to art and little to nature; both in their latter days sought relief from politics in more ideal compositions, Dryden in his Fables, Claudian in his Rape of Proserpine, a poem imbued with the characteristic qualities of Dryden.

  Among the greatest services which Dryden rendered to our language and literature are to be reckoned his improvements in heroic versification, of which he has left an unsurpassed model.

  ‘Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join The varying verse, the full majestic line, The long-resounding march, and energy divine.’

  His changes, nevertheless, were not always improvements. He is too uniform, though not absolutely uniform, in confining the sense to the couplet; and, in adding dignity to Chaucer’s verse, he has lost something of its sweetness. Leigh Hunt well observes: ‘Though Dryden’s versification is noble, beautiful, and so complete of its kind that to an ear uninstructed in the metre of the old poet all comparison between the two in this respect seems out of the question and even ludicrous, yet the measure in which Dryden wrote not only originated, but attained to a considerable degree of its beauty in Chaucer; and the old poet’s immeasurable superiority in sentiment and imagination, not only to Dryden, but to all, up to a very late period, who have written in the same form of verse, left him in possession of beauties, even in versification, which it remains for some future poet to amalgamate with Dryden’s in a manner worthy of both, and so carry England’s noble heroic rhyme to its pitch of perfection.’ It need not be said that Pope’s magnificent eulogy solely respects Dryden as a rhyming poet. His blank verse, though in general good enough for the stage, and better than that of most of his contemporaries, is utterly destitute of the sweetness and variety of the Elizabethans.

  Dryden’s works were edited with exemplary zeal and fidelity by Sir Walter Scott. The standard modern edition is Mr. Saintsbury’s; the one most convenient for general use, Mr. Christie’s.

  CHAPTER II. POETS CONTEMPORARY WITH DRYDEN.

  Oldham (1653-1683).

  The contemporary of Dryden who approached him most nearly in satiric force, and, generally speaking, in the borderland between poetry and prose, was John Oldham (1653-1683). Not much is known of his life. The son of a Nonconformist minister, he nevertheless obtained a university education, but after leaving college was glad to accept the position of usher in Archbishop Whitgift’s free school at Croydon. Coming to town he filled the post of tutor in various families, and by his Satires upon the Jesuits (1681) gained the acquaintance of Dryden and other men of letters and the patronage of the Earl of Kingston, who seemed likely to provide for him, but at whose seat in Nottinghamshire he died of the smallpox, December, 1683.

  Oldham’s poems consist partly of odes, formal and elaborate compositions, and partly of the satires which in his age in some measure supplied the place of the modern journal and review. A secret and unconscious harmony pervades all branches of the contemporary art of every epoch; and in the stately and somewhat stilted lyrics of Oldham and his compeers we discern the counterpart of the elaborate frontispieces with temples and triumphal arches, chariots and cornucopias, tritons and nereids, which the engravers of the age prefixed to its literature. The engraving is hardly art, and the verse is hardly poetry; we are nevertheless conscious of a vigour and a substance which command respect. The work is compact and solid at any rate, and displays much of the force of the Giants, if little of the inspiration of the Gods. Oldham would fain be extravagant in praise of wine; but there is not the least trace of genuine Bacchic frenzy in his laboured dithyramb. The epicedion on his friend Mouvent is a serious composition indeed, forty-two mortal stanzas, with, nevertheless, sufficient good things to justify the praise bestowed on it by Pope. The ode to Ben Jonson is remarkable as expressing the feelings of the men of the Restoration towards the poet who they really thought had reformed the stage, and delivered it from the reprehensible licentiousness of Shakespeare. Like Oldham’s other lyrical compositions, it abounds with most dissonant lines, but has also some noble ones, as these, for example:

  ‘Let meaner spirits stoop to low precarious fame, Content on gross and coarse applause to live And what the dull and senseless rabble give; Thou didst it still with noble scorn contemn, Nor wouldst that wretched alms receive, The poor subsistence of some bankrupt, sordid name: Thine was no empty vapour, raised beneath, And formed of common breath, The false and foolish fire, that’s whisked about By popular air, and glares awhile, and then goes out; But ’twas a solid, whole, and perfect globe of light, That shone all over, was all over bright, And dared all sullying clouds, and feared no darkening night.’