but, partly from this very cause, there was a greater appetite than ever for translations. For translation or at least for a peculiar kind of version which ranged from tolerably free translation to the loosest possible paraphrase-Dryden's genius, both creative and critical, was peculiarly suited. He had indeed, by one of his characteristic processes of critical evolution, arrived at a regular theory of it which was perhaps better justified by his practice than in itself. According to this theory the translator frankly disclaims all literal fidelity, and endeavours to rearrange or recreate the work in his hands, so as to produce something that seems to him to stand in the same relation to the language of the time and the probable readers of his own day as that in which the original stood in regard to those to whom it was addressed. He had, in the early volumes of a series of Miscellanies, begun this process on divers classical authors, almost as soon as the time of his first great satires. In this latest period he carried it out, partially or exclusively, in three works of importance-a translation of Juvenal and Persius, executed partly by himself, partly by others; the famous version of Virgil, and his last and greatest book of verse, the Fables, of which the most considerable portions were what he called 'translations' of Chaucer and Boccaccio. The Virgil is believed to have brought him in as much as £1200; the Fables were sold for the far more inadequate initial price of two hundred and fifty guineas. Moreover, during nearly the whole of his later literary life Dryden derived an income-small and uncertain in amount, but no doubt useful to him from the supply of prologues and epilogues, according to the demand of the time, for plays other than his own As these pieces were specially addressed ad vulgus, some of the less estimable features of his language and sentiment appear in them; but hardly any part of his work shows more triumphantly his almost miraculous power of literary adjustment, the trumpet-ring and echo of his verse, and the clear, shrewd, solid strength of his sense and thought. Although in these years his literary primacy was not really disputed by any competent judgment, he naturally had his share, and more than his share, of the controversial amenities of the roughest and fiercest period of political strife in English history; while very late in his life (1698) he was assailed from another side and in the house of his political friends, having to bear no small part of the brunt of Jeremy Collier's famous onslaught on the Profaneness and Immorality of the Stage. He had not merely the good sense but (as everything tends to show) the sincere good feeling to plead guilty, at most claiming extenuating circumstances. Otherwise the last years of his life were fairly happy. All his family survived him-though all followed him at no great distance of time, death being in the case of his wife and youngest son preceded by impaired sanity. Some of his connec tions, both of the older and newer generations, were his fast friends to the last. However much he might be abused by mere snarlers or by political and religious partisans, everybody felt-and he knew that everybody felt-that he had succeeded to much more than the position of Ben Jonson as not merely official but actual head of English poetry and English literature; while all the best of the younger men of letters (except Swift, his kinsman, and the recipient of an imagined affront were his hearty admirers. It was while the Fables were still in the first flush of success that he died (from mortification of the toe caused by gout) on 1st May 1700, and was splendidly buried in Westminster Abbey. Even those who, like Macaulay earlier and Mr Leslie Stephen later, have taken, for political or other reasons, an unfairly low view of Dryden's moral character, admit his possession of not a few moral virtues-modesty; absence of jealousy, conceit, or arrogance; family affection. Others, acknowledging that some of the degradation of a rather degraded time affected him, regard him as on the whole in need of very little whitewashing even morally. His intellectual and literary greatness, if not always fully or properly recognised, had scarcely ever been denied by any competent authority. His position can spare the aid of the historic estimate, but is largely heightened, widened, and strengthened thereby. In himself, and without any account taken of independence of his predecessors or influence on those who came after him, Dryden is a dramatist of singular variety, volume, and (at his best) vigour; a prose-writer forcible, agreeable, and adequate to his subject as are few; a poet wanting only in the highest and rarest atmosphere of poetry; and in all these departments a master at once of the formal and the material constituents of literature. Hardly any one, except Lucretius, can argue in verse as he can; no one has a securer and defter grasp of the weapons of satire; in declamation (an inferior kind, no doubt) he has hardly a superior. Whether we look at the variety of his gifts or at the excellences of their individual expression, his contribution to English literature approves itself at once. But when we supplement this mere 'tasting' by an orderly examination of the state of that literature before and after his time, enjoyment becomes definite appreciation. We no longer, in a phrase of his own, 'like grossly,' but accurately, and with discrimination of what he did. In every one of the three departments it is allimportant to notice that Dryden by no means displaced or rejected the great Elizabethan work, preference (and just preference) of which has made some judges unjust to him. If one or two men of the giant race,' such as Milton and Browne, survived till he was no longer young, they were but survivals; and even as such they passed away before he reached his own perfection. As a poet he is to be compared not with Milton, hardly even with Cowley, but with D'Avenant on the one hand and Chamberlayne on the other; as a prosewriter and a dramatist hardly with any one of his forerunners, seeing that he represents in each class a new style rising on the already broken-down ruins of the past. Practically, with a decision and unanimity rare at such crises, the Restoration turned over a new leaf in all three volumes; and it was of the utmost importance that such a master as Dryden was there to set the copy on the blanks. It was also extremely fortunate that he was not a precocious writer, and that he was (beyond almost all other men of letters in any way his equals) in the habit of reconstructing his theory and practice from time to time. But, like all great poets, he was born with certain secrets which he did not indeed discover or apply very early, but which gave an unmistakable impress to his work when, and almost before, it became mature. In poetry the chief of these was the mastery of a singularly strong and nervous line, which, by the agency partly of the new-stopped or mainly-stopped couplet, was girded up from the flaccid looseness into which both the blank-verse practice of the later dramatists and the luxuriantly overlapped couplet of the poets from Wither to Chamberlayne, had plunged the decasyllable. Something of this appears even in the Heroic Stanzas, but it is much more conspicuous in the three couplet poems above referred to and in Annus Mirabilis. Up, however, to the date of the latter Dryden's versification worked a little stiffly. It still needed expletives like 'do' and ‘did ;' still had recourse to effective but obvious tricks, such as the scattering of identical emphatic words like 'you' and 'your' in different places of the line. His fifteen years' practice in dramacouplet at first, then blank-verse-relieved him of this; and when he reappeared with Absalom and Achitophel there was hardly a formal blemish left on his verse-for the uses of the triplet and the Alexandrine, to which he resorted to avoid monotony, cannot be called blemishes. In the twenty years that remained to him he improved even on this standard; he certainly adjusted it to wider ranges of subject than political and controversial matters could afford. And while the exquisite lines to the Duchess of Ormond in his latest volume take up the device of 'you' which has been noticed in him forty years before, they employ it, in common with other devices, after such a fashion of combined grace and grandeur as nothing but the very topmost summits of poetic workmanship can excel. Nor, though the couplet is Dryden's chief medium, is it by any means the only one of which he is a master. His 'Pindarics'-the irregularly rhymed stanzas which Cowley had made fashionable-are, not merely in the universally known Alexander's Feast, but in the partly better Ode on Mrs Anne Killigrew and other places, the finest of their kind. His lighter lyrics (in his playsongs chiefly), though they never have the sweetest or airiest charm of those of the poets of Charles the First's time, or even that of the best pieces of Dorset and Rochester, Sedley and Afra Behn, have been as a rule much undervalued; and he gave no small assistance to the reintroduction of the triple-foot, anapæstic or dactylic, into English poetry for purposes superior to those of doggerel and ballad. The diction and the subjects of this verse were of equal importance. As far as the latter head is concerned, Dryden's accomplishment in verseargument was of course not unmixedly beneficial to English literature. It made poetry attempt as a main business what is really a main business of prose; and it gave, if not countenance, yet pretext to a deplorable family of verse didactics. But it was in itself too consummate not to conquer time' (as Landor put it), and it by no means prevented the poet from doing much besides arguing. Dryden's narration is admirable, his discourse in non-argumentative ways superb; and his description has since the days of Wordsworth been unduly depreciated. He cannot (or at least he does not) attempt to describe with the elaboration of the modern word-painter; but he is equal to the images he attempts to reproduce, and his single epithets are often admirably luminous and suggestive. Undoubtedly, however, his great claim, next to his versification, lies in his diction. He rejects the euphuistic promiscuousness of his forerunners without falling into the mere vulgarity of some of his immediate contemporaries, or into the grayness and lack of colour of standard eighteenth-century English. He has not the slightest horror either of a new word or of a foreign word or of an archaic word, yet by a half-instinctive process of selection he has arranged a vocabulary which, though no doubt there can never be any final standard of English, perhaps approaches that ideal as near as any that can be mentioned. So at least thought Charles James Fox, who, when he undertook his History of James II., resolved to use no word which was not to be found in Dryden. Dryden's practice belies Fox's theory. 6 But The combination of these gifts with a far smaller portion of the true 'poetic fire' than has been assigned to Dryden by all but one-sided criticism would have sufficed to secure an altogether unusually high level of merit. It is not even true that (as Landor qualifies the praise given above by saying) he is never tender or sublime.' He is not often tender, but he is sometimes; he is sublime not seldom. But the intellectual and artistic qualities of his verse are no doubt on the whole above the emotional. His best poems have been glanced at already, but a short catalogue of all the more important, with dates and a brief note of the subject, &c., of each, may be useful. Heroic Stanzas, quatrains on Cromwell's death (1658); Astræa Redux, on the king's return, and, like the two following, in heroic couplets (1660); Panegyric on the Coronation (1661); To My Lord Chancellor (New Year's Day 1662); Annus Mirabilis (winter of 1666), quatrains; Absalom and Achitophel, with its sequels, all in couplets, and all written and published between November 1681 and November 1682; Religio Laici, religiousphilosophical couplets (1682); Threnodia Augustalis, a Pindaric on the death of Charles II. (1685); The Hind and the Panther, an allegorical polemic in couplets on the quarrel between the Anglican and Roman Churches, with side-hits at the Protestant sects and obnoxious persons like Burnet (1687); Britannia Rediviva, also couplets (1688); Eleonora, an epicede on Lady Abingdon, written to order, but with splendid passages, in couplets (1692). The dates of the great translations and of the Fables (which included rehandlings of the Knight's, Nun's, Priest's, and Wife of Bath's Tales from Chaucer; of The Flower and the Leaf; and of the stories of Sigismonda, Honoria, and Cymon, from Boccaccio) have been given above. Dryden's minor poems, which are very numerous, are scattered over the whole forty years of his literary life, and in many places-his plays, those of others, the Miscellanies which he edited, and the various books for which, as compliments or commendations or otherwise, they were specially written. It will have been observed from this catalogue— and indeed it is generally known-that the larger part of Dryden's poetical work is written in the heroic or decasyllabic couplet, to which he gave an entirely new stamp, and which, directly or through the refined but not in all ways improved form given to it by Pope, became the reigning metre of English verse for nearly a hundred and fifty years. And attention has been drawn already to the importance of his dramatic work in reference to this. That work falls into four classes-comedies or tragi-comedies, heroic plays, later blank-verse dramas, and operas. Dryden's comedies have, in the general opinion, been ranked lowest among his works; and with some excuse. His touch was scarcely light enough for the kind; and, perhaps here only, he never worked out a distinct form of his own. His comedies, tragi-comedies, and (in the useful French limitation of the word) dramas float between the humour-comedy of Jonson, the romanticprosaic comedy of Beaumont and Fletcher, and the brilliant new comedy of manners which, quite early in his career, Etherege aimed at, and which, late in that career, Congreve and Vanbrugh triumphantly achieved. This uncertainty of scheme and spirit is not helped by the very frequent coarseness of language and incident or by the indistinctness of comic character. But in one particular situation-the pair of light-o'-loves who flirt and bicker but are really very fond of each other-Dryden is not unsuccessful; while in one figure of an affected coquette, the Melantha of Marriage à la Mode (1672), he has borrowed little from any one else, and has lent a great deal to one of Congreve's masterpieces, Millamant. The drawbacks of his comedy appear at once in his earliest play, The Wild Gallant (1663), and have not disappeared in his last, the tragi-comic Love Triumphant of 1694. Its merits appear chiefly in Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen (1667), where Nell Gwynne's acting undoubtedly helped, but by no means wholly created, the attractive part of Florimel, one of the flirts above mentioned; the also-mentioned Marriage à la Mode; The Spanish Friar (1681); and Amphitryon (1690). The blank-verse tragedies, which he produced after giving up rhyme, undoubtedly contain his noblest work in dramathe bold, but not wholly too bold, attempt on the subject of Antony and Cleopatra called All for Love, or the World Well Lost (1678) ; the carefully wrought and admirably written Don Sebastian (1690); and the fine rhetorical Cleomenes (1692), his last play but one. These, however, are inevitably brought into contrast with the Elizabethan masterpieces, and suffer accordingly. The operas, Albion and Albanius (1685) and King Arthur (1691), contain good work, especially in the lyric parts; but they are mainly curiosities, historically interesting as marking a transition from the masque. A curiosity, again, is the rhymed or 'tagged' dramatisation of Paradise Lost, called The State of Innocence (1674), which Dryden also called an opera, and which is said to have been good-naturedly though half-contemptuously authorised by Milton himself. Curiosities of a less agreeable kind occur in the Shakesperean alterations of The Tempest, after D'Avenant (1667), and of Troilus and Cressida (1679); but some of Dryden's drama is only 'curious' in a worse sense still. The heroic play deserves separate treatment for many reasons- -the chief being its pre-eminent serviceableness in perfecting his verse, its odd historical isolation as a kind immensely popular for a time and then chiefly laughed at, and its close connection with the admirable Essay of Dramatic Poesy. He did not exactly invent it; it is one of those literary kinds which, in a famous phrase, were never directly invented by any one, but 'growed.' The heroic play has something to do with the long-winded but universally read French novels of the Scudéry class; something with the French tragedy of Corneille and his earlier contemporaries; much with the out-at-heel degradation of blank-verse in the last plays written immediately before the closing of the theatres in 1642; much also with the growing distaste for remote imaginative conceit and emotion, the growing fancy for sharp intellectual rally and repartee. The first example of it in its high-flown sentiment, rhetorical style, and non-natural situation is D'Avenant's Siege of Rhodes, which, safeguarded by its title of 'opera,' actually preceded the Restoration and the reopening of the theatre generally (1656). It was written for nearly forty years after that date. But its flourishing time was from 1665 to 1680, and all its best examples were mainly or wholly Dryden's work. He it was who first achieved the hectoring, ringing tenor of its couplet tirades, and the sharp battledore-and-shuttlecock (so admirably ridiculed by Butler and in the Rehearsal, and always on the point of burlesquing itself) of its single-line interchanges of speech. The Indian Queen, which he wrote in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, appeared as early as January 1664; The Indian Emperor, by himself, and far superior, followed in 1665. But he made much farther advances to the eccentric perfection which the thing admitted in Tyrannic Love, or the Royal Martyr (1669), on the story of St Catharine, and the two parts of The Conquest of Granada (1670), all three of which are triumphs of preposterous situation and sentiment, carried off by the most extraordinary bravado of poetical rhetoric, which not seldom becomes, for moments, actual poetry of a high class. His last, and in some ways his greatest, heroic or rhymed tragedy was Aurengzebe (1675), a play interesting because of its contemporary if remote subject, and though not possessing the furia and sweep of its two predecessors, including passages (one especially) which display at nearly their best Dryden's masterly fashion of writing and his criticismnot subtle or profound, but strong and true and everlasting-of life. The transition to his prose is all the easier because, as was noted above, the first considerable example of that prose, the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, is in part a defence of rhymed plays. Congreve represents Dryden as acknowledging indebtedness to Tillotson; but Dryden was too proud a man to be a vain one, and it is very difficult to trace the indebtedness chronologically as well as aesthetically. It is certain that for years past there had been, unconsciously or consciously, both a vague desire for and actual attempts at a style less gorgeous but more generally useful than the styles of Milton, Taylor, and Browne, less intricate and cumbrous than that of Clarendon, easier and more conversational than that of Hobbes. Beginnings of such a style are found as far back as Jonson; Cowley's essays mark a great advance in it. But these essays were not published early. The real bringers of it about were a group of men—Tillotson, Temple, Halifax, South, Dryden himself, and one or two more-who were all born about the year 1630. For the perfecting of such a style the essay, with its freedom from stiff rhetorical rules of argument and its wide liberty, offered special advantages; and Dryden, who, if he did not require, always preferred, a model, found in Corneille's examens of his own plays one for the adjustment of the essay to purposes of literary criticism. Most of the long succession of essays, prefaces, and so forth with which he followed up the Essay of Dramatic Poesy itself are, like it, devoted to literary subjects, with, naturally enough, a strong admixture of political and other polemic, in the period from the Popish Plot to the Revolution. But whatever the subject, the style is the same, or rather it adjusts itself to almost any subject with slight variations. Fault has been found with it (by Coleridge) for not possessing a 'stricter and purer grammar;' but this comes from the mistaken notion that English grammar has a 'sealed pattern' lying somewhere stored up and not to be varied from, instead of being, as it really is, in the main an induction from the practice of the best writers. At first he was perhaps a little too colloquial; but as this fault grew upon his contemporaries he himself corrected it. He was at first also too much given to the use of foreign words; but though he, wisely, never gave this up, he used it later with an equally wise moderation. His diction has the same clear-cut force and form that it possesses in poetry; and the mould of his sentences, with its not excessive or monotonous antithesis, its easy swing and vibration, and the clenching stroke at the end, reminds one in no unpleasant way of his management of the couplet. The great character of his prose throughout is its combination of ease that is never (or hardly ever) slipshod with weight which is still more rarely 'loaded' or clumsy. Here, as in verse, he improved continually to the last; and his prose Preface to the Fables, with its opening epistle to the Duke of Ormond, is as much a 'diploma-piece' of his style in this harmony as the verses to the Duchess (given at page 801) are of his fashion of poetry. In both he was for his time a perfect master of the game; and in such mastery he is very unlikely to be excelled at any time, whatsoever may be the changes that come over English literature. I. Dryden's Poems.-The first group of illustrative extracts are from Dryden's poetry other than dramatic, the second from his dramas, the third from his prose. Character of Shaftesbury. Of these the false Achitophel was first; Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high, In friendship false, implacable in hate; Then, seized with fear, yet still affecting fame, Oh! had he been content to serve the crown And lent the crowd his arm to shake the tree. (From Absalom and Achitophel.) It is significant that Dryden avoids the spelling Ahithophel, which the Authorised Version had long made the stereotyped English spelling, and clings to Achitophel, the spelling not merely of the Latin Vulgate but of the (Catholic) Douay version. Abbethdin, 'father of the house of justice,' was the Hebrew title of a Jewish supreme judge. The Duke of Buckingham. Some of their chiefs were princes of the land: That every man with him was god or devil. (From Absalom and Achitophel.) Shaftesbury's Address to Monmouth. Auspicious prince, at whose nativity Some royal planet ruled the southern sky, Thy longing country's darling and desire, Their cloudy pillar and their guardian fire; Their second Moses, whose extended wand Divides the seas, and shews the promised land; Whose dawning day in every distant age Has exercised the sacred prophet's rage: The people's prayer, the glad diviner's theme, The young men's vision, and the old men's dream; Thee saviour, thee, the nation's vows confess, And, never satisfied with seeing, bless: Swift unbespoken pomps thy steps proclaim, And stammering babes are taught to lisp thy name: How long wilt thou the general joy detain, Starve and defraud the people of thy reign? Content ingloriously to pass thy days, Like one of virtue's fools that feeds on praise; Till thy fresh glories, which now shine so bright, Grow stale, and tarnish with our daily sight; Believe me, royal youth, thy fruit must be Or gathered ripe, or rot upon the tree : Heaven has to all allotted, soon or late, Some lucky revolution of their fate; Whose motions, if we watch and guide with skill, (For human good depends on human will,) Our fortune rolls as from a smooth descent, And from the first impression takes the bent; But if unseized, she glides away like wind, And leaves repenting folly far behind. Now, now she meets you with a glorious prize, And spreads her locks before you as she flies! Had thus old David, from whose loins you spring, Not dared, when fortune called him to be king, At Gath an exile he might still remain, And heaven's anointing oil had been in vain. Let his successful youth your hopes engage, But shun the example of declining age; Behold him setting in his western skies, The shadows lengthening as the vapours rise. He is not now as when on Jordan's sand The joyful people thronged to see him land, Covering the beach and blackening all the strand! (From Absalom and Achitophel) Jordan's sand is simply for the English coast, and refers to no incident in Hebrew history. Ode to the Memory of Mrs Anne Killigrew. Or, called to more superior bliss, Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine, |