verse, he breathed a new spirit into them; he took their matter only: the new soul, which constitutes the value of his work, is his, and only his; and this soul befits the work. In place of the Ciceronian periods of Boccacio, we find slim, little lines, full of delicate raillery, dainty voluptuousness, feigned frankness, which relish the forbidden fruit because it is fruit, and because it is forbidden. The tragic departs, the relics of the middle-ages are a thousand leagues away; there remains nothing but the jeering gaiety, Gallic and racy, as of a critic and an epicurean. In Dryden, incongruities abound; and our author is so little shocked by them, that he imports them elsewhere, in his theological poems, representing the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, as a hind, and the heresies by various animals, who dispute at as great length and as learnedly as Oxford graduates.1 I like him no better in his Epistles; as a rule, they are but flatteries, almost always awkward, often mythological, interspersed with somewhat vulgar sentences. 'I have studied Horace,' he says, and hope the style of his Epistles is not ill imitated here.' Do not imagine it to be true. Horace's Epistles, though in verse, are genuine letters, brisk, unequal in movement, always unstudied, natural. Nothing is further from Dryden than this original and sociable spirit, philosophical and lewd, the most refined and the most nervous of epicureans, a kinsman (at eighteen centuries' distance) of Alfred de Musset and Voltaire. Like Horace, an author must be a thinker and a man of the world to write agreeable morality, and Dryden was no more than his contemporaries a thinker or a man of the world. But other no less English characteristics sustain him. Suddenly, in the midst of the yawns which these Epistles excited, our eyes are arrested. A true accent, new ideas, are brought out. Dryden, writing to his cousin, a country gentleman, has lighted on an English original subject. He depicts the life of a rural squire, the referee of his neighbours, who shuns lawsuits and town doctors, who keeps himself in health by hunting and exercise. Here is his portrait : 'How bless'd is he, who leads a country life, Unvex'd with anxious cares, and void of strife! . . . And often have you brought the wily fox To suffer for the firstlings of the flocks; Chased even amid the folds, and made to bleed, Like felons, where they did the murderous deed. 1 Though Huguenots contemn our ordination, succession, ministerial vocation, etc. (The Hind and the Panther, Part ii. v. 139), such are the harsh words we often find in his books. 2 Preface to the Religio Laici. 3 What Augustus says about Horace is charming, but cannot be quoted, even in Latin. This fiery game your active youth maintain'd; Of each our laws the certain limit show; May neither overflow, for then they drown the land. This serious converse shows a political mind, fed on the spectacle of affairs, having in the matter of public and practical debates the superiority which the French have in speculative discussions and social conversation. So, amidst the dryness of polemics break forth sudden. splendours, a poetic fount, a prayer from the heart's depths; the English well of concentrated passion is on a sudden opened again with a flow and a dash which Dryden does not elsewhere exhibit: 'Dim as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars To lonely, weary, wand'ring travellers, Is reason to the soul: and as on high Not light us here; so Reason's glimm'ring ray But guide us upward to a better day. And as those nightly tapers disappear When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere, O teach me to believe Thee thus conceal'd, But her alone for my director take, Whom Thou hast promised never to forsake! My thoughtless youth was wing'd with vain desires; 1 Epistle 15, xi. 75. 2 Beginning of Religio Laici. Follow'd false lights; and when their glimpse was gone, My pride struck out new sparkles of her own. Such was I, such by nature still I am; Be Thine the glory and be mine the shame! Good life be now my task; my doubts are done.'1 Such is the poetry of these serious minds. After having strayed in the debaucheries and pomps of the Restoration, Dryden found his way to the grave emotions of inner life; though a Romanist, he felt like a Protestant the wretchedness of man and the presence of grace: he was capable of enthusiasm. Here and there a manly and effective verse discloses, in the midst of his reasonings, the power of conception and the inspiration of desire. When the tragic is met with, he takes to it as to his own domain; at need, he deals in the horrible. He has described the infernal chase, and the torture of the young girl worried by dogs, with the savage energy of Milton. As a contrast, he loved nature: this taste always endures in England; the sombre, reflective passions are unstrung in the wide peace and harmony of the fields. Landscapes are to be met with amidst theological disputation: 2 'New blossoms flourish and new flowers arise, The burnished brooks appeared with liquid gold to flow. 3 Whose note proclaimed the holy-day of spring.'" Under his regular versification the artist's soul is brought to light;1 though contracted by habits of classical argument, though stiffened by controversy and polemics, though unable to create souls or to depict artless and delicate sentiments, he is a genuine poet: he is troubled, raised by beautiful sounds and forms; he writes boldly under the pressure of vehement ideas; he surrounds himself willingly with splendid images; he is moved by the buzzing of their swarms, the glitter of their splendours; he is, when he wishes it, a musician and a painter; he writes stirring airs, which shake all the senses, even if they do not sink deep into the heart. Such is his Alexander's Feast, an ode in honour of St. Cecilia's day, an admirable trumpet-blast, in which metre and sound impress upon the nerves the emotions of the mind, a masterpiece of rapture and of art, which Victor Hugo alone has come up 1 The Hind and the Panther, Part i. v. 64-75. 3 The Hind and the Panther, Part iii. v. 553–560. 4 2 Theodore and Honoria, xi. For her the weeping heavens become serene, These charming verses on the Duchess of York remind one of those of La Fontaine on the Princess of Conti. to.1 Alexander is on his throne in the palace of Persepolis; the lovely Thais sate by his side; before him, in a vast hall, his glorious captains. And Timotheus sings: 'The praise of Bacchus, then, the sweet musician sung ; Of Bacchus ever fair, and ever young. The jolly God in triumph comes; He shews his honest face. Now, give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes. Bacchus, ever fair and young, Drinking joys did first ordain; Drinking is the soldier's pleasure; Rich the treasure, Sweet the pleasure; Sweet is pleasure after pain.' And at the stirring sounds the king is troubled; his cheeks are glowing; his battles return to his memory; he defies heaven and earth. Then a sad song depresses him. Timotheus mourns the death of the betrayed Darius. Then a tender song softens him; Timotheus lauds the dazzling beauty of Thais. Suddenly he strikes the lyre again: 'A louder yet, and yet a louder strain. Break his bands of sleep asunder, And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder. Has raised up his head; As awaked from the dead, And amazed, he stares around. See the snakes, that they rear, How they hiss in their hair! And the sparkles that flash from their eyes! Behold a ghastly band, Each a torch in his hand! Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain, Thus already music softened, exalted, mastered men; Dryden's verses acquire power in describing it. X. This was one of his last works; brilliant and poetical, it was born amidst the greatest sadness. The king for whom he had written was deposed and in exile; the religion which he had embraced was despised and oppressed; a Roman Catholic and a royalist, he was bound to a conquered party, which the nation resentfully and mistrustfully considered as the natural enemy of liberty and reason. He had lost the two places which were his support; he lived wretchedly, burdened with a family, obliged to support his son abroad; treated as a hireling by a coarse publisher, forced to ask him for money to pay for a watch which he could not get on credit, beseeching Lord Bolingbroke to protect him against Tonson's insults, rated by this shopkeeper when the promised page was not finished on the stated day. His enemies persecuted him with pamphlets; the Puritan Collier lashed his comedies unfeelingly; he was damned without pity, but conscientiously. He had long been in ill health, crippled, constrained to write much, reduced to exaggerate flattery in order to earn from the great the indispensable money which the publishers would not give him:1 'What Virgil wrote in the vigour of his age, in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write; and my judges, if they are not very equitable, already prejudiced against me, by the lying character which has been given them of my morals.'" Although well meant for his own part, he knew that his conduct had not always been worthy, and that all his writings would not endure. Born between two epochs, he had oscillated between two forms of life and two forms of thought, having reached the perfection of neither, having kept the faults of both; having found in surrounding manners no support worthy of his character, and in surrounding ideas no subject worthy of his talent. If he had founded criticism and good style, this criticism had only found scope in pedantic treatises or unconnected prefaces; this good style continued out of the track in inflated tragedies, dispersed over multiplied translations, scattered in occasional pieces, in odes written to order, in party poems, meeting only here and there an afflatus capable of employing it, and a subject capable of sustaining it. What efforts for such a moderate result! For a long time gravel and gout left him no peace; erysipelas seized one of his legs. In April 1700 he tried to go out; a slight inflammation in one of his toes became, from neglect, a gangrene;' the doctor would have tried amputation, but he decided that what remained him of health and happiness was not worth the pain. He died at the age of sixty-nine. 1 He was paid two hundred and fifty guineas for ten thousand lines. |