John Dryden - Delphi Poets Series

by John Dryden

  ”O for a muse of fire, that would ascend

  The brightest heaven of invention!

  A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,

  And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

  Then should the warlike Cromwell like himself

  Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,

  Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire

  Crouch for employment.”

  No sooner had this great man passed away, and an earnest age with him, and Charles mounted the throne, than from the darkest recesses of the stews and the taverns, from the depths within depths of Alsatia or Paris, the whole tribe of dancers, fiddlers, drabs, mimes, stage-players, and playwrights, knowing that their enemy was dead, and their hour of harvest had come, emerged in swarming multitudes — multitudes swelled by the vast tribe of play-goers, who had been counting the hours since a Falstaff had made them laugh, an Ophelia made them weep, and a Lear made them tremble. And had this only issued in the revival of the drama of Shakspeare and Johnson, few could have had much to say in objection; for that, in general, was as pure as it was powerful. But, alas, besides them there had been a Beaumont, a Fletcher, and a Massinger, with their unutterable abominations. Nay, the king and courtiers had imported from France a taste which required for its gratification a licentiousness still more abandoned, and to be cast, besides, into forms and shapes, as stiff, stately, and elaborate as the material was vile, and were not contented with pollution unless served up in a new, piquant, and unnatural manner. Our poet understood this movement of his time right well, and determined to conform to it. He knew that he could, better than any man living, pander to the popular appetite for the melodramatic, for the grandiloquent, and for the obscene. He knew the taste of Charles, and that he, above all cooks, could dress up a ragout of that putrid perfection which his king relished. And he set himself with his whole might so to do, and for thirty years and more continued his degradation of genius — a degradation unexampled, whether we consider the powers of the writer, the coarseness, quantity, and elaboration of the pollutions he perpetrated, or the length of time in which he was employed, in thus “profaning the God-given strength and marring the lofty line.”

  His other biographers — Dr Johnson, alone, with brevity and seeming reluctance — have enumerated and characterised all Dryden’s plays. We have decided only to speak of them very generally, and that for the following reasons: — 1st, We are reprinting none of them; 2dly, From what we have read of them, we are certain that, even as works of art, they are utterly unworthy of their author, and that in morals they are, as a whole, a disgrace to human nature. We are not the least lenient or indulgent of critics. We have every wish to pity the errors, and to bear with the frequent escapades and aberrations of genius. But when we see, as in Dryden’s case, what we are forced to consider either a deliberate and systematic attempt to poison the sources of virtue, or, at least, an elaborate and incessant habit of conformity to the bad tastes of a bad age, we can think of no plea fully available for his defence. Vain to say, “he wrote for bread.” He did not — he wrote only for the luxuries, not the staff of life. Vain to say, “he consulted the taste of his audience, and suited their atmosphere.” But why did he select that atmosphere as his? And why so much gratuitous and superfluous iniquity in his works? “But he wrote to gratify his monarch.” This would form a good enough excuse for a Sporus, “a white curd of ass’ milk,” but not for a strong man like Dryden. But he was “no worse than others of his age.” Pitiful apology! since, being the ablest man of his day, and therefore bound to be before it, he was in reality behind it, his plays excelling all contemporary productions in wickedness as well as in wit. But his own “conduct was latterly irreproachable.” This we doubt, and Scott doubts so too. But even though it were true, it were damaging, because it would deprive him of the plea of passion, and reduce him from the warm human painter to the cold demon-like sculptor of unclean and abominable ideas. It never can be forgotten, that whenever Dryden translated a filthy play, he made it filthier than in the original, and that he has once and again scattered his satyr-like fancies in spots such as the Paradise of Milton, and the Enchanted Isle of Shakspeare, which every imagination and every heart previously had regarded as holy ground. The only extenuating circumstance we can mention is, that his pruriency was latterly in part relinquished and much deplored by himself, and that his poetry is, on the whole, free from it. In our critical paper, prefixed to the Second Volume, we intend to examine the question, how far an author’s faults are, or are not, to be charged upon his age.

  His next poem was “Annus Mirabilis,” published in 1667, and counted justly one of his most vigorous, though also one of the faultiest of his poems. It includes glowing, although somewhat quaint and fantastic, descriptions of the Dutch War and the Great Fire in London. In 1668, by the death of Sir William Davenant, the post of Poet-Laureate became vacant, and Dryden was appointed to it. He was also appointed historiographer-royal. The salary of these two offices amounted to £200 a year, besides the famous annual butt of canary, while his profits from the theatre were equivalent to £300. His whole income was thus, at the very least, equal to a thousand pounds of our money — a great sum for a poet in that or in any age. He published, the same year, an Essay on “Dramatic Poetry,” vindicating his own practice of rhymed heroic verse in plays; — a stupid French innovation, which all the ingenuity of a Dryden defended in vain. It was cast into the shape of a dialogue, — the Duke of Dorset being one of the respondents, — and formed the first specimen of Dryden’s easy, rambling, but most vivid, vigorous, and entertaining prose. No one was ever more ready than he to render reasons for his writings, — for their faults as well as merits, — and to show by more ingenious arguments, that, if they failed, they ought to have succeeded.

  At this time we may consider Dryden’s prosperity, although not his powers, to have culminated. He had a handsome income, a run of unparalleled popularity as a playwright; he was Poet-Laureate, a favourite at court, and on terms of intimacy with many of the nobility, and many of the eminent men of letters. The public would have at that time bid high for his very snuff-papers, and were thankful for whatever garbage he chose to throw at them from the stage. How different his position from that of the great blind old man, at this time residing in Bunhill-fields in obscurity and sorrow, and preparing to put off his tabernacle, and take his flight to the Heavens of God! The one heard every night the “claps of multitudes,” — the other the whispers of angels, saying to his soul, “Sister-spirit, come away.” The one was revelling in reputation, — the other was listening to the far-off echoes of a coming fame as wide as the world, and as permanent as the existence of man. To do Dryden justice, he admired Milton; and although he did, and that, too, immediately after Milton departed, venture to travestie the “Paradise Lost” into a rhymed play, as dull as it is disgusting; and although he knew that Milton had called him, somewhat harshly, a “good rhymer, but no poet,” yet he praised his genius at a time when it was as little appreciated, as was the grandeur of his character.

  But now the slave, in the chariot of Dryden’s triumph, was about to appear. First came, in 1671, the “Rehearsal,” a play concocted among various wits of the time, including Sprat, Clifford, poor Butler, of “Hudibras,” and chiefly the Duke of Buckingham. The object of this play was to turn rhymed heroic tragedy, and especially the great playwright of the day, under the name of Bayes, his person, manners, conversation, and habits, into unmitigated ridicule. The plan has often since been followed, with various success. Minor wits have delighted in clubbing their small but poisoned missiles, and in aiming flights of minnikin arrows at the Gullivers of their different periods. Thus Pope was assailed by the “Dunces,” whom he afterwards preserved in amber — that terrible old lion, Bentley, by Boyle and his associates; and Wordsworth, by the critics or criticasters of his day. Dryden acted with greater prudence than any of those we have named, except indeed Bentley, who, being assailed upon poin
ts involving the integrity of his scholarship, and on which demonstrative contradiction was possible, felt himself compelled to leave his lair, and to rend his enemies in pieces. But Dryden — feeling on this occasion, at least, that a squib, however personal and severe, cannot harm any man worthy of the name; and that the very force of the laughter it produces, drives out the sting — determined to answer it by silence, and to bide his time. “Zimri,” in Absalom and Achitophel, shows how deep had been his secret oath of vengeance, and how carefully the sweltered “venom” had been kept, in which at last he baptizes Buckingham, and embalms him at the same time for the wonder and contempt of posterity. Here is the danger of the smaller wits in a controversy of this kind. Their squibs excite a sensation at the moment, and sometimes annoy the assaulted giant much, and his friends and publishers more; but he continues to live and grow, while their spiteful effusions perish; or worse, are preserved to the everlasting shame of their authors, on the lowest shelf of the records of their enemy’s fame.

  Two years after, occurred the famous controversy between Dryden and Settle. Poor Elkanah Settle seemed raised up like another Mordecai to poison the peace and disturb the false self-satisfaction of Dryden, — raised up, rather — shall we say? — to wean the poet from a sphere where his true place and power were not, and to prepare him for other stages, where he was yet destined far more powerfully to play his part. At all events, this should have been his inference from the success of Settle. It should have taught him that a scene where a pitiful poetaster, backed by mob-favour and the word of a Rochester, could eclipse his glory, was no scene for him; and he ought instantly, with proud humility, to have left the theatre for ever. Instead of this, he fell into a violent passion with one who, like himself, had levelled his desires to the “claps of multitudes,” and had ravished the larger share of the coveted prize! And so there commenced a long and ludicrous controversy — dishonourable to Settle much; to Rochester and Dryden more — between a mere insolent twaddler and a man of real and transcendent genius. The particulars of the struggle are too humiliating and contemptible to deserve a minute record. Suffice it, that Dryden, assisted by his future foe, Shadwell, wrote a scurrilous attack on Settle, and his successful play, “The Empress of Morocco;” to which Settle, nothing daunted, replied in terms of equal coarseness, and that Rochester, the patron of Settle, became mixed up in the fray, till, having been severely handled by Dryden in his “Essay on Satire,” — a production generally, and we think justly, attributed to Mulgrave and Dryden in conjunction, — he took a mean and characteristic revenge. He hired bravoes, who, waiting for Dryden as he was returning, on the 18th December 1679, from Will’s coffee-house to his own house in Gerard Street, rushed out and severely beat and wounded him. That Dryden was the author of the lines on Rochester has been doubted, although we think they very much resemble a rough and hurried sketch from his pen; that Rochester deserved the truculent treatment he received in them, this anecdote sufficiently proves. It was partly, indeed, the manner of the age. Had this nobleman existed now, and been pilloried by a true and powerful pen, he would, in addition to his own anonymous assaults, have stirred up a posse of his creatures to assist him in seeking, by falsehoods, hypercriticisms, and abuse, to diminish the influence and take away the good name of his opponent. The Satanic spirit is always the same — its weapons and instruments are continually changing.

  Soon after this, Dryden translated the Epistles of Ovid, thus breathing himself for the far greater efforts which were before him. His mind seems, for a season, to have balanced between various poetic plans. On the one hand, the finger of his good genius showed him the fair heights of epic song, waiting to be crowned by the coming of a new Virgil; on the other side, the fierce fires of his passions pointed him downwards to his many rivals and foes — the Cliffords, Leighs, Ravenscrofts, Rochesters, and Settles — who seemed lying as a mark for his satiric vengeance. He meditated, we know, an epic on Arthur, the hero of the Round Table, and had, besides, many arrears of wrath lying past for discharge; but circumstances arose which turned his thoughts away, for a season, in a different direction from either Arthur or his personal foes.

  The political aspects of the times were now portentous in the extreme. Charles II. had, partly by crime, partly by carelessness, and partly by ill-fortune, become a most unpopular monarch, and the more so, because the nation had no hope even from his death, since it was sure to hand them over to the tender mercies of his brother, who had all his faults, and some, in addition, of his own, without any of his merits. There was but one hope, and that turned out a mere aurora borealis, connected with the Duke of Monmouth, who, through his extraction by a bend sinister from Charles, as well as through his popular manners, Protestant principles, and gracious exterior, had become such a favourite with the people, that strong efforts were made to exclude the Duke of York, and to exalt him to the succession. These, however, were unsuccessful; and Shaftesbury, their leading spirit, was accused of treason, and confined to the Tower. It was at this crisis, when the nobility of the land were divided, when its clergy were divided, when its literary men were divided, — not in a silent feud, but in a raging rupture, that Dryden, partly at the instigation of the Court, partly from his own impulse, lifted up his powerful pen, — the sceptre of the press, — and, with wonderful facility and felicity, wrote, and on the 17th November 1681, published, the satire of “Absalom and Achitophel.” Its poetical merits — the choice of the names and period, although this is borrowed from a previous writer — the appearance of the poem at the most critical hour of the crisis — and, above all, the portraitures of character, so easy and so graphic, so free and so fearless, distinguished equally by their animus and their animation, and with dashes of generous painting relieving and diversifying the general caricature of the style, — rendered it instantly and irresistibly popular. It excited one universal cry — from its friends, of admiration, and from its enemies, of rage. Imitations and replies multiplies around it, and sounded like assenting or like angry echoes. It did not, indeed, move the grand jury to condemn Shaftesbury; but when, on his acquittal, a medal was struck by his friends, bearing on one side the head and name of Shaftesbury, and on the other, the sun obscured by a cloud rising over the Tower and City of London, Dryden’s aid was again solicited by the Court and the King in person, to make this the subject of a second satire; and, with great rapidity, he produced “The Medal — a Satire against Sedition,” which, completing and colouring the photograph of Shaftesbury, formed the real Second Part of “Absalom and Achitophel.” What bore that name came a year afterwards, when the times were changed, was written partly by a feebler hand — Nahum Tate; and flew at inferior game — Dryden’s own personal rivals and detractors.

  The principal of these was Shadwell, who had been an early friend of Dryden’s, and who certainly possessed a great deal of wit and talent, if he did not attain to the measure of poetic genius. His principal power lay in low comedy — his chief fault lay in his systematic and avowed imitation of the rough and drunken manners of Ben Jonson. In the eye of Dryden — whose own habits were convivial, although not to the same extent — the real faults of his opponent were his popularity as a comic writer, and his politics. Shadwell was a zealous Protestant, and the bitterest of the many who replied to the “Medal.” For this he became the hero of “MacFlecknoe” — a masterly satire, holding him up to infamy and contempt — besides sitting afterwards for the portrait of Og, in the second part of “Absalom and Achitophel.” Shadwell had, by and by, his revenge, by obtaining the laureateship, after the Revolution, in room of Dryden, and no doubt used the opportunity of drowning the memory of defeat in the butt of generous canary which had now for ever passed the door of his formidable rival.

  Dryden’s circumstances, at this time, were considerably straitened. His pension as laureate was not regularly paid; the profits from the theatre had somewhat fallen off. He tried in various ways, by prefacing a translation of “Plutarch’s Lives,” by publishing a miscellany of
versions from Greek and Latin authors, and by writing prologues to plays and prefaces to books, to supply his exhausted exchequer. His good-humoured but heartless monarch set him on another task, for which he was never paid, writing a translation of Maimbourg’s “History of the League,” the object of which was to damage Shaftesbury and his party, by branding them as enemies to monarchy. In 1682 he wrote his “Religio Laici.”

  Not long after, in February 1684, Charles II. became, for the first time in his life, serious, as he felt death — the proverbial terror of kings — rapidly rushing upon him. He tried to hide the great and terrible fact from his eyes under the shield of a wafer. He died suddenly — a member of the “holy Roman Catholic Church,” — and much regretted by all his mistresses; and apparently by Dryden, who had been preparing the opera of “Albion and Albanius,” to commemorate the king’s triumph over the Whigs, when this event turned his harp into mourning, and his organ into the voice of them that weep. He set himself to write a poem which should at once express regret for the set, and homage to the rising, sun. This was his “Threnodia Augustalis,” a very unequal poem, but full of inimitable passages, and discovering all that careless greatness which characterised the genius of the poet.