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 drama— the 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 æsthetically. 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. 1. 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. 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 (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 nu incident in Hebrew history. Ode to the Memory of Mrs Anne Killigrew. Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies, Made in the last promotion of the blest ; Or, called to more superior bliss, Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine, But such as thy own voice did practise here, When thy first-fruits of poesy were given, To make thyself a welcome inmate there; While yet a young probationer, And candidate of heaven. If by traduction came thy mind, A soul so charming from a stock so good; But if thy pre-existing soul Was formed at first with myriads more, It did through all the mighty poets roll, Who Greek or Latin laurels wore, And was that Sappho last, which once it was before. O gracious God! how far have we (Nay, added fat pollutions of our own,) To increase the steaming ordures of the stage? What can we say to excuse our second fall? Let this thy vestal, Heaven, atone for all; Her Arethusian stream remains unsoiled, Unmixed with foreign filth and undefiled; Her wit was more than man; her innocence child. . . ... When in mid-air the golden trump shall sound, To raise the nations underground; When in the valley of Jehosophat The judging God shall close the book of Fate; And there the last assizes keep For those who wake, and those who sleep; From the four corners of the sky; When sinews o'er the skeletons are spread, Those clothed with flesh, and life inspires the dead; a (Miss) Anne Killigrew, daughter of a prebendary of Westminster (who was the brother of the two dramatists; see Vol. II.), died of smallpox in 1685, aged twenty-five. She painted pictures, and a volume of her poems was published after her death. The traducian or derivative theory of the origin of the individual soul is opposed to the creationist view. Jehosophat is neither the Vulgate nor the Douay spelling (Josaphat), nor yet that of the A.V. (Fehoshaphat). Satire on Shadwell. All human things are subject to decay; (From Mac-Flecknoe.) For Flecknoe and Shadwell, see page 784 of this volume and the first section of Vol. II.; and for Heywood and Shirley, unkindly comprehended in the same condemnation, pages 431 and 484. To my dear Friend, Mr Congreve, on his Comedy called 'The Double Dealer.' Well then, the promised hour is come at last, The present age of wit obscures the past : And thus, when Charles returned, our empire stood. But what we gained in skill we lost in strength. But both to Congreve justly shall submit, The satire, wit, and strength of manly Wycherly. For Tom the second reigns like Tom the first. [more. Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought, Tom the First and Tom the Second are apparently Thomas Shadwell and Thomas Rymer of the Fadera, also a dramatist, and the worst of all actual and possible critics. On Milton. Three poets, in three distant ages born, On Cromwell. His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone, For he was great ere Fortune made him so; And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, (From Heroic Stanzas.) Reason and Religion. Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars But guide us upward to a better day. (From Religie Laici.) It is worth noting the rhyming of stars with travellers. Hind and Panther Described. A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged, She feared no danger, for she knew no sin. She half commits who sins but in her will. (From The Hind and the Panther, Part i.) The Swallow. The swallow, privileged above the rest This merry chorister had long possessed Her summer seat, and feathered well her nest, |