The Three Devils: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's Part 6

"'Tis a strange age we've lived in and a lewd As e'er the sun in all his travels viewed."

Again:

"The greatest saints and sinners have been made Of proselytes of one another's trade."

Again:

"Authority is a disease and cure Which men can neither want nor well endure."

And again, with an obvious reference to his own case:--

"Dame Fortune, some men's t.i.tular, Takes charge of them without their care, Does all their drudgery and work, Like fairies, for them in the dark; Conducts them blindfold, and advances The naturals by blinder chances; While others by desert and wit Could never make the matter hit, But still, the better they deserve, Are but the abler thought to starve."

Dryden, at the time of his appointment to the laureates.h.i.+p, was in his fortieth year. This is worth noting, if we would realize his position among his literary contemporaries. Of those contemporaries there were some who, as being his seniors, would feel themselves free from all obligations to pay him respect. To octogenarians like Hobbes and Izaak Walton he was but a boy; and even from Waller, Milton, Butler, and Marvel, all of whom lived to see him in the laureate's chair, he could only look for that approving recognition, totally distinct from reverence, which men of sixty-five, sixty, and fifty-five, bestow on their full-grown juniors.

Such an amount of recognition he seems to have received from all of them.

Butler, indeed, does not seem to have taken very kindly to him; and it stands on record, as Milton's opinion of Dryden's powers about this period, that he thought him "a rhymer but no poet." But Butler, who went about snarling at most things, and was irreverent enough to think the Royal Society itself little better than a humbug, was not the man from whom a laudatory estimate of anybody was to be expected; and, though Milton's criticism is too precious to be thrown away, and will even be found on investigation to be not so far amiss, if the moment at which it was given is duly borne in mind, yet it is, after all, not Milton's opinion of Dryden's general literary capacity, but only his opinion of Dryden's claims to be called a poet. Dryden, on his part, to whose charge any want of veneration for his great literary predecessors cannot be imputed, and whose faculty of appreciating the most various kinds of excellence was conspicuously large, would probably have been more grieved than indignant at this indifference of men like Butler and Milton to his rising fame. He had an unfeigned admiration for the author of _Hudibras_; and there was not a man in England who more profoundly revered the poet of _Paradise Lost_, or more dutifully testified this reverence both by acts of personal attention and by written expressions of allegiance to him while he was yet alive. It would have pained Dryden much, we believe, to know that the great Puritan poet, whom he made it a point of duty to go and see now and then in his solitude, and of whom he is reported to have said, on reading the _Paradise Lost_, "This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too," thought no better of him than that he was a rhymer. But, however he may have felt himself related to those seniors who were vanis.h.i.+ng from the stage, or whose literary era was in the past, it was in a conscious spirit of superiority that he confronted the generation of his coevals and juniors, the natural subjects of his laureates.h.i.+p. If we set aside such men as Locke and Barrow, belonging more to other departments than to that of literature proper, there were none of these coevals or juniors who were ent.i.tled to dispute his authority. There was the Duke of Buckingham, a year or two older than Dryden, at once the greatest wit and the greatest profligate about Charles's court, but whose attempts in the comic drama were little more than occasional eccentricities. There were the Earls of Dorset and Roscommon, both about Dryden's age, and both cultivated men and respectable versifiers. There was Thomas Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, and now chaplain to his grace of Buckingham, five years younger than Dryden, his fellow-member in the Royal Society, and with considerable pretensions to literary excellence. There was the witty rake, Sir Charles Sedley, a man of frolic, like Buckingham, some seven years Dryden's junior, and the author of at least three comedies and three tragedies. There was the still more witty rake, Sir George Etherege, of about the same age, the author of two comedies, produced between 1660 and 1670, which, for ease and sprightly fluency, surpa.s.sed anything that Dryden had done in the comic style. But "gentle George," as he was called, was incorrigibly lazy; and it did not seem as if the public would get anything more from him. In his place had come another gentleman-writer, young William Wycherley, whose first comedy had been written before Dryden's laureates.h.i.+p, though it was not acted till 1672, and who was already famous as a wit. Of precisely the same age as Wycherley, and with a far greater _quant.i.ty_ of comic writing in him, whatever might be thought of the quality, was Thomas Shadwell, whose bulky body was a perpetual source of jest against him, though he himself vaunted it as one of his many resemblances to Ben Jonson. The contemporary opinion of these two last-named comic poets, Wycherley and Shadwell, after they came to be better known, is expressed in these lines from a poem of Rochester's:--

"Of all our modern wits none seem to me Once to have touched upon true comedy But hasty Shadwell and slow Wycherley.

Shadwell's unfinished works do yet impart Great proofs of force of Nature, none of Art.

With just bold strokes he dashes here and there, Showing great mastery with little care; Scorning to varnish his good touches o'er, To make the fools and women praise the more.

But Wycherley earns hard whate'er he gains; He wants no judgment, and he spares no pains; He frequently excels, and, at the least, Makes fewer faults than any of the rest."

The author of these lines, the notorious Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was also one of Dryden's literary subjects. He was but twenty-two years of age when Dryden became laureate; but before ten years of that laureates.h.i.+p were over he had blazed out, in rapid debauchery, his wretchedly-spent life. Younger by three years than Rochester, and also destined to a short life, though more of misery than of crime, was Thomas Otway, of whose six tragedies and four comedies, all produced during the laureates.h.i.+p of Dryden, one at least has taken a place in our dramatic literature, and is read still for its power and pathos. a.s.sociated with Otway's name is that of Nat. Lee, more than Otway's match in fury, and who, after a brief career as a tragic dramatist and drunkard, became an inmate of Bedlam.

Another writer of tragedy, whose career began with Dryden's laureates.h.i.+p, was John Crowne, "little starched Johnny Crowne," as Rochester calls him, but whom so good a judge as Charles Lamb has thought worthy of commemoration as having written some really fine things. Finally, the list includes a few Nahum Tates, Elkanah Settles, Tom D'Urfeys, and other small celebrities, in whose company we may place Aphra Behn, the poetess.

Doing our best to fancy this cl.u.s.ter of wits and play-writers, in the midst of which, from his appointment to the laureates.h.i.+p in 1670, at the age of thirty-nine, to his deposition from that office in 1688, at the age of fifty-eight, Dryden is historically the princ.i.p.al figure, we can very well see that not one of them all could wrest the dictators.h.i.+p from him.

With an income from various sources, including his salary as laureate and historiographer and his receipts from his engagement with Killigrew's company, amounting in all to about 600_l._ a-year--which, according to Sir Walter Scott's computation, means about 1,800_l._ in our value--he had, during a portion of this time at least, all the means of external respectability in sufficient abundance. His reputation as the first dramatic author of the day was already made; and if, as yet, there were others who had done as well or better as poets out of the dramatic walk, he more than made up for this by the excellence of his prologues and epilogues, and by his readiness and power as a prose-critic of general literature. No one could deny that, though a rather heavy man in private society, and so slow and silent among the wits of the coffee-house that, but for the pleasure of seeing his placid face, the deeply indented leather chair on which he sat would have done as well to represent literature there as his own presence in it, John Dryden was, all in all, the first wit of the age. There was not a Buckingham, nor an Etherege, nor a Shadwell, nor a starched Johnny Crowne, of them all, that singly would have dared to dispute his supremacy. And yet, as will happen, what his subjects could not dare to do singly, or ostensibly, some of them tried to compa.s.s by cabal and systematic depreciation on particular points. In fact, Dryden had to fight pretty hard to maintain his place, and had to make an example or two of a rebel subject before the rest were terrified into submission.

He was first attacked in the very field of his greatest triumphs, the drama. The attack was partly directed against himself personally, partly against that style of heroic or rhymed tragedy of which he was the advocate and representative. There had always been dissenters from this new fas.h.i.+on; and among these was the Duke of Buckingham, who had a natural genius for making fun of anything. a.s.sisted, it is said, by his chaplain Sprat, and by Butler, who had already satirized this style of tragedy by writing a dialogue in which two cats are made to caterwaul to each other in heroics, the duke had amused his leisure by preparing a farce in which heroic plays were held up to ridicule. In the original draft of the farce Davenant was made the b.u.t.t under the name of Bilboa; but, after Davenant's death, the farce was recast, and Dryden subst.i.tuted under the name of Bayes. The plot of this famous farce, _The Rehearsal_, is much the same as that of Sheridan's _Critic_. The poet Bayes invites two friends, Smith and Johnson, to be present at the rehearsal of a heroic play which he is on the point of bringing out, and the humour consists in the supposed representation of this heroic play, while Bayes alternately directs the actors, and expounds the drift of the play and its beauties to Smith and Johnson, who all the while are laughing at him, and thinking it monstrous rubbish. Conceive a farce like this, written with amazing cleverness, and full of absurdities, produced in the very theatre where the echoes of Dryden's last sonorous heroics were still lingering, and acted by the same actors; conceive it interspersed with parodies of well-known pa.s.sages from Dryden's plays, and with allusions to characters in those plays; conceive the actor who played the part of Bayes dressed to look as like Dryden as possible, instructed by the duke to mimic Dryden's voice, and using phrases like "i'gad" and "i'fackins," which Dryden was in the habit of using in familiar conversation; and an idea may be formed of the sensation made by _The Rehearsal_ in all theatrical circles on its first performance in the winter of 1671. Its effect, though not immediate, was decisive.

From that time the heroic or rhymed tragedy was felt to be doomed. Dryden, indeed, did not at once recant his opinion in favour of rhymed tragedies; but he yielded so far to the sentence p.r.o.nounced against them as to write only one more of the kind.

Though thus driven out of his favourite style of the rhymed tragedy, he was not driven from the stage. Bound by his agreement with the King's Company to furnish three plays a-year, he continued to make dramatic writing his chief occupation; and almost his sole productions during the first ten years of his laureates.h.i.+p were ten plays. Three of these were prose-comedies; one, a tragi-comedy, in blank verse and prose; one, an opera in rhyme; five, tragedies in blank verse; and one, the rhymed tragedy above referred to. It will be observed that this was at the rate of only one play a-year, whereas, by his engagement, he was to furnish three. The fact was that the company were very indulgent to him, and let him have his full share of the receipts, averaging 300_l._ a-year, in return for but a third of the stipulated work. Notwithstanding this, we find them complaining, in 1679, that Dryden had behaved unhandsomely to them in carrying one of his plays to the other theatre, and so injuring their interests. As, from that year, none of Dryden's plays were produced at the King's Theatre, but all at the Duke's, till 1682, when the two companies were united, it is probable that in that year the bargain made with Killigrew terminated. It deserves notice, by the way, that the so-called "opera" was one ent.i.tled _The State of Innocence; or, The Fall of Man_, founded on Milton's _Paradise Lost_, and brought out in 1674-5, immediately after Milton's death. That this was an equivocal compliment to Milton's memory Dryden himself lived to acknowledge. He confessed to Dennis, twenty years afterwards, that at the time when he wrote that opera "he knew not half the extent of Milton's excellence." A striking proof of Dryden's veneration for Milton, when we consider how high his admiration of Milton had been even while Milton was alive!

Of these dramatic productions of Dryden during the first ten years of his laureates.h.i.+p some were very carefully written. Thus _Marriage -la-mode_, performed in 1672, is esteemed one of his best comedies; and of the rhymed tragedy, _Aurung-Zebe_, performed in 1675, he himself says in the Prologue--

"What verse can do he has performed in this, Which he presumes the most correct of his."

The tragedy of _All for Love_, which followed _Aurung-Zebe_, in 1678, and in which he falls back on blank verse, is p.r.o.nounced by many critics to be the very best of all his dramas; and perhaps none of his plays has been more read than the _Spanish Friar_, written in 1680. Yet it may be doubted if in any of these plays Dryden achieved a degree of immediate success equal to that which had attended his _Tyrannic Love_ and his _Conquest of Granada_, written before his laureates.h.i.+p. This was not owing so much to the single blow struck at his fame by Buckingham's _Rehearsal_ as to the growth of that general spirit of criticism and disaffection which pursues every author after the public have become sufficiently acquainted with his style to expect the good, and look rather for the bad, in what he writes.

Thus, we find one critic of the day, Martin Clifford, who was a man of some note, addressing Dryden, a year or two after his laureates.h.i.+p, in this polite fas.h.i.+on: "You do live in as much ignorance and darkness as you did in the womb; your writings are like a Jack-of-all-trades' shop; they have a variety, but nothing of value; and, if thou art not the dullest plant-animal that ever the earth produced, all that I have conversed with are strangely mistaken in thee." This onslaught of Mr. Clifford's is clearly to be regarded as only that gentleman's; but what young Rochester said and thought about Dryden at this time is more likely to have been what was said and thought generally by the critical part of the town.

"Well sir, 'tis granted: I said Dryden's rhymes Were stolen, unequal--nay, dull, many times.

What foolish patron is there found of his So blindly partial to deny me this?

But that his plays, embroidered up and down With wit and learning, justly pleased the town, In the same paper I as freely own.

Yet, having this allowed, the heavy ma.s.s That stuffs up his loose volumes must not pa.s.s.

But, to be just, 'twill to his praise be found His excellencies more than faults abound; Nor dare I from his sacred temples tear The laurel which he best deserves to wear.

And may I not have leave impartially To search and censure Dryden's works, and try If these gross faults his choice pen doth commit Proceed from want of judgment or of wit, Or if his lumpish fancy doth refuse Spirit and grace to his loose slattern muse?"

We have no doubt the opinion thus expressed by the scapegrace young earl was very general. Dryden's own prose disquisitions on the principles of poetry may have helped to diffuse many of those notions of genuine poetical merit by which he was now tried. But, undoubtedly, what most of all tended to expose Dryden's reputation to the perils of criticism was the increasing number of his dramatic compet.i.tors and the evident ability of some of them. True, most of those compet.i.tors were Dryden's personal friends, and some of the younger of them, as Lee, Shadwell, Crowne, and Tate, were in the habit of coming to him for prologues and epilogues, with which to increase the attractions of their plays. On more than one occasion, too, Dryden clubbed with Lee or Shadwell in the composition of a dramatic piece. But, though thus on a friendly footing with most of his contemporary dramatists, and almost in a fatherly relation to some of them, Dryden found his popularity not the less affected by their compet.i.tion. In the department of prose comedy, Etherege, whose last and best comedy, _Sir Fopling Flutter_, was produced in 1676, and Wycherley, whose four celebrated comedies were all produced between 1672 and 1677, had introduced a style compared with which Dryden's best comic attempts were but heavy horse-play. Even the hulking Shadwell, who dashed off his comedies as fast as he could write, had a vein of coa.r.s.e natural humour which Dryden lacked. It was in vain that Dryden tried to keep his pre-eminence against these rivals by increased strength of language, increased intricacy of plot, and an increased use of those indecencies upon which they all relied so much in their efforts to please. One comedy in which Dryden, trusting too confidently to this last element of success, pushed grossness to the utmost conceivable limit, was hissed off the stage. In tragedy, it is true, his position was more firm. But even in this department some niches were cut in the body of his fame. His friend Nat. Lee had produced one or two tragedies displaying a tenderness and a wild force of pa.s.sion to which Dryden's more masculine genius could not pretend; Crowne had also done one or two things of a superior character; and, though it was not till 1682 that Otway produced his _Venice Preserved_, he had already given evidence of his mastery of dramatic pathos. All this Dryden might have seen without allowing himself to be much disturbed, conscious as he must have been that in general strength he was still superior to all about him, however they might rival him in particulars. The deliberate resolution, however, of Rochester and some other aristocratic leaders of the fas.h.i.+on to make good their criticisms on his writings, by setting up first one and then another of the dramatists of the day as patterns of a higher style of art than his, provoked him out of his composure. To show what he could do, if called upon to defend his rights against pretenders, he made a terrible example of one poor wretch, who had been puffed for the moment into undue popularity. This unfortunate was Elkanah Settle, and the occasion of the attack was a heroic tragedy written by Settle, acted with great success both on the stage and at Whitehall, and published with ill.u.s.trative woodcuts. On this performance Dryden made a most merciless onslaught in a prose-criticism prefixed to his next published play, tearing Settle's metaphors and grammar to pieces.

Settle replied with some spirit, but little effect, and was, in fact, "settled" for ever. Rochester next patronized Crowne and Otway for a time, but soon gave them up, and contented himself with a.s.sailing Dryden more directly in such lampoons as we have quoted. In the year 1679, however, suspecting Dryden to have had a share in the authors.h.i.+p of a poem, then circulating in ma.n.u.script, in which certain liberties were taken with his name, he caused him to be way-laid and beaten as he was going home one evening through Rose-alley to his house in Gerard-street. The poem, ent.i.tled _An Essay on Satire_, is usually printed among Dryden's works; but it remains uncertain whether Dryden was really the author.

It was fortunate for Dryden and for English literature that, just about this time, when he was beginning to be regarded as a veteran among the dramatists, whose farther services in that department the town could afford to spare, circ.u.mstances led him, almost without any wish of his own, into a new path of literature. He was now arrived at the ripe age of fifty years, and, if an inventory had been made of his writings, they would have been found to consist of twenty-one dramas, with a series of critical prose-essays for the most part bound up with these dramas, but nothing in the nature of non-dramatic poetry, except a few occasional pieces, of which the _Annus Mirabilis_ was still the chief. Had a discerning critic examined those works with a view to discover in what peculiar vein of verse Dryden, if he abandoned the drama, might still do justice to his powers, he would certainly have selected the vein of reflective satire. Of the most nervous and emphatic lines that could have been quoted from his plays a large proportion would have been found to consist of what may be called _maxim_ metrically expressed; while in his dramatic prologues and epilogues, which were always thought among the happiest efforts of his pen, the excellence would have been found to consist in very much the same power of direct didactic declamation applied satirically to the humours, manners, and opinions of the day. Whether any critic, observing all this, would have been bold enough to advise Dryden to take the hint, and quit the drama for satirical, controversial, and didactic poetry, we need not inquire. Circ.u.mstances compelled what advice might have failed to bring about. After some twenty years of political stagnation, or rather of political confusion, relieved only by the occasional cabals of leading statesmen, and by rumours of Catholic and Protestant plots, the old Puritan feeling and the general spirit of civil liberty which the Restoration had but pent up within the vitals of England broke forth in a regular and organized form as modern English Whiggism.

The controversy had many ramifications; but its immediate phase at that moment was an antagonism of two parties on the question of the succession to the crown after Charles should die--the Tories and Catholics maintaining the rights of the Duke of York as the legal heir, and the Whigs and Protestants rallying, for want of a better man, round Charles's illegitimate son, the handsome and popular Duke of Monmouth, then a puppet in the hands of Shaftesbury, the recognised leader of the Opposition.

Charles himself was forced by reasons of state to take part with his brother, and to frown on Monmouth; but this did not prevent the lords and wits of the time from distributing themselves pretty equally between the two parties, and fighting out the dispute with all the weapons of intrigue and ridicule. Shadwell, Settle, and some other minor poets, lent their pens to the Whigs, and wrote squibs and satires in the Whig service. Lee, Otway, Tate, and others, worked for the Court party. Dryden, as laureate and Tory, had but one course to take. He plunged into the controversy with the whole force of his genius; and in November, 1681, when the nation was waiting for the trial of Shaftesbury, then a prisoner in the Tower, he published his satire of _Absalom and Achitophel_, in which, under the thin veil of a story of Absalom's rebellion against his father David, the existing political state of England was represented from the Tory point of view. Among the characters portrayed in it Dryden had the satisfaction of introducing his old critic, the Duke of Buckingham, upon whom he now took ample revenge.

The satire of _Absalom and Achitophel_, than which nothing finer of the kind had ever appeared in England, and which indeed surpa.s.sed all that could have been expected even from Dryden at that time, was the first of a series of polemical or satirical poems the composition of which occupied the last eight years of his laureates.h.i.+p. _The Medal, a Satire against Sedition_, appeared in March, 1682, as the poet's comment on the popular enthusiasm occasioned by the acquittal of Shaftesbury; _Mac Flecknoe_, in which Shadwell, as poet-in-chief of the Whigs, received a thras.h.i.+ng all to himself, was published in October in the same year; and, a month later, there appeared the so-called _Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel_, written by Nahum Tate, under Dryden's superintendence, and with interpolations from Dryden's pen. In the same avowed character, as literary champion of the government and the party of the Duke of York, Dryden continued to labour during the remainder of the reign of Charles.

His _Religio Laici_, indeed, produced early in 1683, and forming a metrical statement of the grounds and extent of his own attachment to the Church of England, can hardly have been destined for immediate political service. But the solitary play which he wrote about this period--a tragedy called _The Duke of Guise_--was certainly intended for political effect, as was also a translation from the French of a work on the history of French Calvinism.

How ill-requited Dryden was for these services appears but too clearly from evidence proving that, at this time, he was in great pecuniary difficulties. At the time when the king's cast-off mistresses were receiving pensions of 10,000_l._ a-year, and when 130,000_l._ or more was squandered every year on secret court-purposes, Dryden's salary as laureate remained unpaid for four years; and when, in consequence of his repeated solicitations, an order for part-payment of the arrears was at last issued in May 1684, it was for the miserable pittance of one quarter's salary, due at midsummer 1680, leaving fifteen quarters, or 750_l._ still in arrears. It appears, however, from a doc.u.ment published for the first time by Mr. Bell, that an additional pension of 100_l._ a-year was at this time conferred on Dryden--that pension to date retrospectively from 1680, and the arrears to be paid, as convenient, along with the larger arrears of salary. How far Dryden benefited by this nominal increase of his emoluments from government, or whether any further portion of the arrears was paid up while Charles continued on the throne, can hardly be ascertained. Charles died in February, 1684-5, and Dryden, as in duty bound, wrote his funeral panegyric. In this Pindaric, which is ent.i.tled _Threnodia Augustalis_, the poet seems to hint, as delicately as the occasion would permit, at the limited extent of his pecuniary obligations to the deceased monarch.

"As, when the new-born phoenix takes his way His rich paternal regions to survey, Of airy choristers a numerous train Attends his wondrous progress o'er the plain, So, rising from his father's urn, So glorious did our Charles return.

The officious muses came along-- A gay harmonious choir, like angels ever young; The muse that mourns him now his happy triumph sung.

Even they could thrive in his auspicious reign; And such a plenteous crop they bore Of purest and well-winnowed grain As Britain never knew before: Though little was their hire, and light their gain, Yet somewhat to their share he threw.

Fed from his hand, they sung and flew, Like birds of Paradise, that lived on morning dew.

Oh, never let their lays his name forget: The pension of a prince's praise is great."

If there was any literary man in whose favour James II., on his accession, might have been expected to relax his parsimonious habits, it was Dryden.

The poet had praised him and made a hero of him for twenty years, and had during the last four years been working for him incessantly. In acknowledgment of these services, James could not do otherwise than continue him in the laureates.h.i.+p; but this was all that he seemed inclined to do. In the new patent issued for the purpose, not only was there no renewal of the deceased king's private grant of 100_l._ a-year, but even the annual b.u.t.t of sherry, hitherto forming part of the laureate's allowance, was discontinued, and the salary limited to the precise money payment of 200_l._ a-year. If, as is probable, the salary was now more punctually paid than it had been under Charles, the reduction may have been of less consequence. In March 1685-6, however, James opened his purse, and, by fresh letters patent, conferred on Dryden a permanent additional salary of 100_l._ a-year, thus raising the annual income of the laureates.h.i.+p to 300_l._ The explanation of this unusual piece of liberality on the part of James has been generally supposed to lie in the fact that, in the course of the preceding year, Dryden had proved the thorough and unstinted character of his loyalty by declaring himself a convert to the king's religion. That Dryden's pa.s.sing over to the Catholic church was contemporaneous with the increase of his pension is a fact; but what may have been the exact relation between the two events is a question which one ought to be cautious in answering. Lord Macaulay's view of the case is harsh enough. "Finding," he says, "that, if he continued to call himself a Protestant, his services would be overlooked, he declared himself a Papist. The king's parsimony instantly relaxed Dryden was gratified with a pension of one hundred pounds a-year, and was employed to defend his new religion both in prose and verse." Sir Walter Scott's view is more charitable, and, we believe, more just. He regards Dryden's conversion as having been, in the main, honest to the extent professed by himself, though his situation and expectations may have co-operated to effect it. In support of this view Mr. Bell points out the fact that the pension granted by James was, after all, only a renewal of a pension granted by Charles, and which, not being secured by letters patent, had lapsed on that king's decease. Dryden, it is also to be remarked, remained sufficiently staunch to his new faith during the rest of his life, and seems even to have felt a kind of comfort in it. Probably, therefore, the true state of the case is that conformity to the Catholic religion, at the time when Dryden embraced it, was the least troublesome mode of systematizing for his own mind a number of diverse speculations, personal and political, that were then perplexing him, and that, afterwards, in consequence of the very obloquy which his change of religion drew upon him from all quarters, he hugged his new creed more closely, so as to coil round him, for the first time in his life, a few threads of private theological conviction. This is not very different from the notion entertained by Sir Walter Scott, who argues that Dryden's conversion was not, except in outward profession, a change from Protestant to Catholic belief, but rather, like that of Gibbon, a choice of Catholicism as the most convenient resting-place for a mind tired of Pyrrhonism, and disposed to cut short the process of emanc.i.p.ation from it by taking a decisive step at once.

At all events, Dryden showed sufficient polemical energy in the service of the religion which he had adopted. He became James's literary factotum, the defender in prose and in verse of the worst measures of his rule; and he was ready to do battle with Stillingfleet, Burnet, or anyone else that dared to use a pen on the other side. As if to make the highest display of his powers as a versifier at a time when his character as a man was lowest, he published in 1687 his controversial allegory of _The Hind and the Panther_, by far the largest and most elaborate of his original poems.

In this poem, in which the various churches and sects of the day figure as beasts--the Church of Rome as a "milk-white hind," innocent and unchanged; the Church of England as a "panther," spotted, but still beautiful; Presbyterianism as a haggard ugly "wolf;" Independency as the "b.l.o.o.d.y bear;" the Baptists as the "bristled boar;" the Unitarians as the "false fox;" the Freethinkers as the "buffoon ape;" and the Quakers as the timid "hare"--Dryden showed that, whatever his new faith had done for him, it had not changed his genius for satire. In fact, precisely as during James's reign Dryden appears personally as a solitary giant, warring on the wrong side, so this poem remains as the sole literary work of any excellence in which the wretched spirit of that reign is fully represented. Dryden himself, as if he had thrown all his force into it, wrote little else in verse till the year 1688, when, on the occasion of the birth of James's son, afterwards the Pretender, he made himself the spokesman of the exulting Catholics, and published his _Britannia Rediviva_.

"See how the venerable infant lies In early pomp; how through the mother's eyes The father's soul, with an undaunted view, Looks out, and takes our homage as his due.

See on his future subjects how he smiles, Nor meanly flatters, nor with craft beguiles; But with an open face, as on his throne, a.s.sures our birthrights, and secures his own."

Within a few months after these lines were written, the father, the mother, and the baby, were out of England, Dutch William was king, and the Whigs had it all to themselves. Dryden, of course, had to give up the laureates.h.i.+p; and, as William had but a small choice of poets, Shadwell was put in his place.

The concluding period of Dryden's career, extending from the Revolution to his death in 1701, exhibits him as a Tory patriarch lingering in the midst of a Whig generation, and still, despite the change of dynasty, retaining his literary pre-eminence. For a while, of course, he was under a cloud; but after it had pa.s.sed away he was at liberty to make his own terms with the public. The country could have no literature except what he and such as he chose to furnish. Locke, Sir William Temple, and others, indeed, were now in a position to bring forward speculations smothered during the previous reigns, and to scatter seeds that might spring up in new literary forms. Burnet, Tillotson, and others might represent Whiggism in the Church. But all the especially literary men whose services were available at the beginning of the new reign were men who, whatever might be their voluntary relations to the new order of things, had been more or less trained in the school of the Restoration, and accustomed to the supremacy of Dryden. The Earl of Rochester, the Earl of Roscommon, the Duke of Buckingham, Etherege, and poor Otway, were dead; but Shadwell, Settle, Lee, Crowne, Tate, Wycherley, the Earl of Dorset, Tom D'Urfey, and Sir Charles Sedley, were still alive. Shadwell, coa.r.s.e and fat as ever, enjoyed the laureates.h.i.+p till his death in 1692, when Nahum Tate was appointed to succeed him. Settle had degenerated in the City showman. Lee, liberated from Bedlam, continued to write tragedies till April 1692, when he tumbled over a bulk going home drunk at night through Clare Market, and was killed or stifled among the snow. "Little starched Johnny Crowne" kept up the respectability of his character. Wycherley lived as a man of fas.h.i.+on about town, and wrote no more. Sedley and the Earl of Dorset were also idle; and Tom D'Urfey made small witticisms, and called them "pills to purge melancholy." Among such men Dryden, so long as he cared to be seen among them, held necessarily his old place. Nor were there any of the younger men, as yet known, in whom the critics recognised, or who recognised in themselves, any t.i.tle to renounce allegiance to the ex-laureate. Thomas Southerne had begun his prolific career as a dramatist in 1682, when Dryden furnished him with a prologue to his first play; but, though after the Revolution he made more money by his dramas than ever Dryden had made by his, he was ashamed to admit the fact to Dryden himself. Matthew Prior, twenty-four years of age at the Revolution, had made his first literary appearance before it, in no less important a character than that of one of Dryden's political antagonists; but, though _The Town and Country Mouse_ had been a decided hit, and Dryden himself was said to have winced under it, no one pretended that the author was anything more than a clever young man who had sat in Dryden's company and turned his opportunities to account. Five years after the Revolution, Congreve produced his first comedy at the age of twenty-four; but it was Congreve's greatest boast in after life that that comedy had won him the warm praises of Dryden, and laid the foundation of the extraordinary friends.h.i.+p which subsisted between them during Dryden's last years, when they used to walk together and dine together as father and son. During these last years Dryden, had he been willing to see merit in any other comedies than those of his young friend Congreve, might have hailed his equal in Vanbrugh, and his superior in Farquhar, then beginning to write for the stage. Among their coevals, destined to some distinction, he might have marked Colley Cibber, Nicholas Rowe, and John Philips, the pleasing parodist of Milton. Of the epics of Blackmore he had quite enough, at least three of those performances having been given to the world before Dryden died. At the time of Dryden's death his kinsman, Jonathan Swift, was thirty-three years of age; Richard Steele was thirty; Daniel Defoe was thirty; Addison was twenty-nine; Shaftesbury, the essayist, was twenty-nine; Bolingbroke was twenty-two; and Parnell, the poet, twenty-one. With these men a new literary movement was to take its origin; but they had hardly yet begun their work; and there was not one of them, Swift excepted, that would not, in the height of his subsequent fame, have been proud to acknowledge his obligations to Dryden. Alexander Pope, the next Englishman that was to take a place in general literature as high as that occupied by Dryden, had been born only in the year of the Revolution, and was consequently but a precocious boy of thirteen when Dryden left the scene. _Virgilium tantum vidit_, as he used himself to say.

Living, a hale patriarch, among these newer men, Dryden partly influenced them, and was partly influenced by them. On the one hand, it was from his chair in Will's Coffee-house that those literary decrees were issued which still ruled the judgment of the town; and for a young author, on visiting Will's, to receive a pinch from Dryden's snuff-box was equivalent to his formal admission into that society of wits. On the other hand, the times were so changed and the men were so changed that Dryden, dictator though he was, had to yield in some points, and defend himself in others.

His cousin Swift, whom he had offended by an unfavourable judgment given in private on some of his poems, was the only man who would have made a general attack upon his literary reputation; but the moral character of his writings was a subject on which adverse criticism was likely to be more general. At first, indeed, there was little perceptible improvement in the moral tone of the literature of the Revolution, as compared with that of the Restoration--the elder dramatists, such as Shadwell, still writing in the fas.h.i.+on to which they had been accustomed, and the younger ones, such as Congreve and Vanbrugh, deeming it a point of honour to be as immoral as their predecessors. In the course of a few years, however, what with the influence of a Whig court, what with other causes, a more delicate taste crept in, and people became ashamed of what their fathers had delighted in. Dryden lived to see the beginnings of this important change, and, with many expressions of regret for his own past delinquencies in this respect, to welcome the appearance of a purer literature.

Those of Dryden's writings which were produced during the twelve years of his life subsequent to the Revolution const.i.tute an important part of his literary remains, not merely in point of bulk, but also in respect of a certain general peculiarity of their character. They may be described as for the most part belonging to the department of pure, as distinct from that of controversial, literature. Dryden did not indeed wholly abandon satire and controversy after the Revolution; but his aim after that period seemed rather to be to produce such literature as would at once be acceptable to the public and earn for himself most money with the least trouble. Deprived of his laureates.h.i.+p, and so rendered almost entirely dependent on his pen at a time when age was creeping upon him and the expenses of his family were greater than ever, he was obliged to make considerations of economy paramount in his choice of work. As was natural, he fell back at first on the drama; and his five last plays, two of which are tragedies, one an opera, and two comedies, were all produced between 1689 and 1694. The profits of these dramas, however, were insufficient; and he was obliged to eke them out by all those devices of dedication to private n.o.blemen, execution of literary commissions for elegiac poems, and the like, which then formed part of the professional author's means of livelihood. Sums of 50_l._, 100_l._, and even, in one or two cases, 500_l._, were earned by Dryden in this disagreeable way from earls, squires, and clubs of gentlemen. His poem of _Eleonora_ was a 500_l._ commission, executed for the Earl of Abingdon, who wanted a poem in memory of his deceased wife, and, without knowing anything of Dryden personally, applied to him to write it, just as now, in a similar case, a commission might be given to a popular sculptor for a _post mortem_ statue. In spite of the utmost allowance for the custom of the time, no one knowing the circ.u.mstances, can read the poem now, without disgust; and it does show a certain lowness of mind in Dryden to have been able, under any pressure of necessity, to write for hire such extravagances as that poem contains respecting a person he had never seen. Far more honourable were Dryden's earnings by work done for Jacob Tonson, the publisher. His dealings with Tonson had begun before the Revolution; but after the Revolution Tonson was his mainstay. First came several volumes of miscellanies, consisting of select poems, published and unpublished, with sc.r.a.ps of prose and translation. Then, catching at the hint furnished by the success of some of the sc.r.a.ps of translation from the Latin and Greek poets, Dryden and Tonson found it mutually advantageous to prosecute that vein. Juvenal and Persius were translated under Dryden's care; and in 1697, after three years of labour, he gave to the world his completed translation of _Virgil_. Looking about for a task to succeed this, he undertook to furnish Tonson with so many thousands of lines of narrative verse, to be published under the t.i.tle of _Fables_. Where the fables came from Tonson did not care, provided they would sell; and Dryden, with his rapid powers of versification, soon produced versions of some tales of Chaucer and Boccaccio which answered the purpose exceedingly well. They were printed in 1699. Of the other poems written by Dryden in his last years his _Alexander's Feast_ is the most celebrated. He continued his literary labours till within a few days of his death, which happened on the 1st of May, 1701.

When we inquire what it is that makes Dryden's name so important as to ent.i.tle it to rank, as it seems to do, the fifth in the series of great English poets after Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, we find that it is nothing else than the fact, brought out in the preceding sketch, that, steadily and industriously, for a period of forty-two years, he kept in the front of the national literature, such as it then was. It is because he represents the entire literary development of the Restoration--it is because he fills up the whole interval between 1658 and 1701, thus connecting the age of Puritanism and Milton with the age of the Queen Anne wits--that we give him such a place in such a list. The reason is a chronological one, rather than one of strict comparison of personal merits. Though we place Dryden fifth in the list, after Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, it is not necessarily because we regard him as the co-equal of those men in genius; it is only because, pa.s.sing onward in time, we find his the next name of very distinguished magnitude after theirs. Personally there is no one that would compare Dryden with Shakespeare or Milton; and there are not many now that would compare him with Chaucer or Spenser. On the whole, if the estimate is one of general intellectual strength, he takes rank only with the first of the second cla.s.s, as with the Jonsons, the Fletchers, and others of the Elizabethan age; while, if the estimate have regard to genuine poetic or imaginative power, he sinks below even these. Yet, if historical reasons only are regarded, Dryden has perhaps a better right to his place in the list than any of the others. At least as strictly as Chaucer is the representative of the English literature of the latter half of the fourteenth century, far more strictly than Spenser and Shakespeare are the representatives of the literature of their times, and in a more broad and obvious manner than Milton is the literary representative of the Commonwealth, Dryden represents the literary activity of the reigns of Charles II. and James II., and of the greater part of that of William III. Davenant, Butler, Waller, Etherege, Otway, Wycherley, Southerne, Prior, and Congreve, are names leading us over the same period, and ill.u.s.trating perhaps more exquisitely than Dryden some of its individual characteristics; but for a solid representative of the period as a whole, resuming in himself all its more prominent characteristics in one substantial aggregate, we are obliged to take Dryden. Twelve years of his literary life he laboured as a strong junior among the Davenants, the Butlers, and the Wallers, qualifying himself to set them aside; eighteen years more were spent in acknowledged lords.h.i.+p over the Ethereges, Otways, and Wycherleys, who occupied the middle of the period; and during the twelve concluding years he was a patriarch among the Southernes, and Priors, and Congreves, in whose lives the period wove itself into the next.

And yet, personally as well as historically, Dryden is a man of no mean importance. Not only is he the largest figure in one era of our literature; he is a very considerable figure also in our literature as a whole. To begin with the most obvious, but at the same time not the least noteworthy, of his claims, the _quant.i.ty_ of his contributions to our literature was large. He was a various and voluminous writer. In Scott's collected edition of his works they fill seventeen octavo volumes. About seven of these volumes consist of dramas, with accompanying prefaces and dedications, the number of dramas being in all twenty-eight. Two volumes more embrace the polemical poems, the satires, and the poems of contemporary historical allusion, written chiefly between 1681 and 1683.

One volume is filled with odes, songs, and lyrical pieces, written at various times. The Fables, or Metrical Tales, redacted in his old age from Chaucer and Boccaccio, occupy a volume and a half. Three volumes and a half are devoted to the translations from the cla.s.sic poets, including the Translation of Virgil. The remaining two volumes consist of miscellaneous prologues, epilogues, and witty pieces of verse, and of miscellaneous prose-writings, original and translated, including the critical Essay on Dramatic Poetry. Considered as a whole, the matter of the seventeen volumes is a goodly contribution from one man as respects both extent and variety. Spread over forty-two years, it does not argue that excessive industry which Scott, of all men in the world, has found in it; but it fairly ent.i.tles Dryden to take his place among those writers who deserve regard for the quant.i.ty of their writings, in addition to whatever regard they may be ent.i.tled to on the score, of quality. And it is a fact worth noting, and remarked by Scott more than once, that most writers who have taken a high place in literature have been voluminous--have not only written well, but also written much. Moreover there are two ways of writing much. One may write much and variously, or one may write much all of one kind. Dryden was various as well as voluminous.

Of all that Dryden wrote, however, there is but a comparatively small portion that has won for itself a permanent place in our literature; and in this he differs from other writers that have been equally voluminous.

It is indeed a significant fact about Dryden that the proportion of that part of his matter which survives, or deserves to survive, to that part which was squandered away on the age it was first written for, and there ended, is unusually small. In Shakespeare there is very little that is felt to be of such inferior quality as not to be worth reading in due time and place. In Milton there is, if we consider only his poetry, still less.

All Chaucer, almost, is felt to be worth preservation by those who like Chaucer; all Wordsworth, almost, by those who like Wordsworth. But, except for library purposes, there is no admirer of Dryden that would care to save more than a small select portion of what he wrote. His satires and polemical poems; one or two of his odes; his Translation of Virgil; his fables; one of his comedies, and one of his tragedies, by way of specimen of his dramatic powers; a complete set of his prologues, for the sake of their allusions to contemporary manners and humours; and a few pieces of his prose, to show his style of criticism:--these would together form a collection not much more than a fourth part of the whole, and which would require to be yet farther winnowed, were the purpose to leave only what is sterling and in Dryden's best manner. Mr. Bell's edition, which comprise in three volumes all Dryden's original non-dramatic poetry, and the best collection of his prologues and epilogues yet made, is itself a surfeit of matter. It is such an edition of Dryden as ought to be included in a series of the English poets intended to be complete; but even in it there is more of dross than of ore.

What is the reason of this? How is it that in Dryden the proportion of what is now rubbish to what is still precious as a literary possession is so much greater than in most other writers of great celebrity? There are two reasons for it. The first is, that originally, and in its own nature, much of the matter that Dryden put forth was not of a kind for which his genius was fitted. Whatever his own imagination constructed on the large scale was mean and conventional. Wherever, as in his translations of Virgil and his imitations of Chaucer and Boccaccio, he employed his powers of language and verse in refurbis.h.i.+ng matter invented by others, the poetical substance of his writings is valuable; but the sheer produce of his own imagination, as in his dramas, is in general such stuff as nature disowns and no creature can take pleasure in. There is no fine power of dramatic story, no exquisite invention of character or circ.u.mstance, no truth to nature in ideal landscape: at the utmost, there is conventional dramatic situation, with an occasional flash of splendid imagery such as may be struck out in the heat of heroic declamation. Thus--