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DRYDEN. Continues 3 - Footnotes 1-97 |
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_ DRYDEN Continues 3 - Footnotes 1-97 [1] The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq. In six volumes. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, in the Strand. MDCCXXXV. 18mo. The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose-Works of John Dryden, now first collected. With Notes and Illustrations. An Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, grounded on Original and Authentick Documents; and a Collection of his Letters, the greatest Part of which has never before been published. By Edmund Malone, Esq. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, in the Strand. 4 vols. 8vo. The Poetical Works of John Dryden. (Edited by Mitford.) London: W. Pickering. 1832. 6 vols. 18mo. [2] His "Character of a Happy Warrior" (1806), one of his noblest poems, has a dash of Dryden in it,--still more his "Epistle to Sir George Beaumont (1811)." [3] He studied Dryden's versification before writing his "Lamia." [4] On the Origin and Progress of Satire. See Johnson's counter-opinion in his life of Dryden. [5] Essay on Dramatick Posey. [6] Life of Lucian. [7] "The great man must have that intellect which puts in motion the intellect of others."--Landor, _Im. Con._, Diogenes and Plato. [8] Character of Polybius (1692). [9] "For my own part, who must confess it to my shame that I never read anything but for pleasure." Life of Plutarch (1683). [10] Gray says petulantly enough that "Dryden was as disgraceful to the office, from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his verses."--Gray to Mason, 19th December, 1757. [11] Essay on the Origin and Progress of Satire. [12] Dedication of the Georgics. [13] Dryden's penetration is always remarkable. His general judgment of Polybius coincides remarkably with that of Mommsen. (Roem. Gesch. II. 448, _seq_.) [14] "I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in English." Preface to Second Miscellany. Fox said that it "was better than the original." J.C. Scaliger said of Erasmus: "Ex alieno ingenio poeta, ex suo versificator." [15] In one of the last letters he ever wrote, thanking his cousin Mrs. Steward for a gift of marrow-puddings, he says: "A chine of honest bacon would please my appetite more than all the marrow-puddings; for I like them better plain, having a very vulgar stomach." So of Cowley he says: "There was plenty enough, but ill sorted, whole pyramids of sweetmeats for boys and women, but little of solid meat for men." The physical is a truer antitype of the spiritual man than we are willing to admit, and the brain is often forced to acknowledge the inconvenient country-cousinship of the stomach. [16] In his preface to "All for Love," he says, evidently alluding to himself: "If he have a friend whose hastiness in writing is his greatest fault, Horace would have taught him to have minced the matter, and to have called it readiness of thought and a flowing fancy." And in the Preface to the Fables he says of Homer: "This vehemence of his, I confess, is more suitable to my temper." He makes other allusions to it. [17] Preface to the Fables. [18] _Wool_ is Sylvester's word. Dryden reminds us of Burke in this also, that he always quotes from memory and seldom exactly. His memory was better for things than for words. This helps to explain the length of time it took him to master that vocabulary at last so various, full, and seemingly extemporaneous. He is a large quoter, though, with his usual inconsistency, he says, "I am no admirer of quotations." (Essay on Heroic Plays.) [19] In the _Epimetheus_ of a poet usually as elegant as Gray himself, one's finer sense is a little jarred by the "Spectral gleam their snow-white _dresses_." [20] This probably suggested to Young the grandiose image in his "Last Day" (B. ii.):-- "Those overwhelming armies.... Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn Roused the broad front and called the battle on." This, to be sure, is no plagiarism; but it should be carried to Dryden's credit that we catch the poets of the next half-century oftener with their hands in his pockets than in those of any one else. [21] Essay on Satire. [22] Ibid. [23] Preface to Fables. Men are always inclined to revenge themselves on their old idols in the first enthusiasm of conversion to a purer faith. Cowley had all the faults that Dryden loads him with, and yet his popularity was to some extent deserved. He at least had a theory that poetry should soar, not creep, and longed for some expedient, in the failure of natural wings, by which he could lift himself away from the conventional and commonplace. By beating out the substance of Pindar very thin, he contrived a kind of balloon which, tumid with gas, did certainly mount a little, _into_ the clouds, if not above them, though sure to come suddenly down with a bump. His odes, indeed, are an alternation of upward jerks and concussions, and smack more of Chapelain than of the Theban, but his prose is very agreeable,--Montaigne and water, perhaps, but with some flavor of the Gascon wine left. The strophe of his ode to Dr. Scarborough, in which he compares his surgical friend, operating for the stone, to Moses striking the rock, more than justifies all the ill that Dryden could lay at his door. It was into precisely such mud-holes that Cowley's Will-o'-the-Wisp had misguided him. Men may never wholly shake off a vice but they are always conscious of it, and hate the tempter. [24] Dedication of Georgics. [25] In a letter to Dennis, 1693. [26] Preface to Fables. [27] More than half a century later, Orrery, in his "Remarks" on Swift, says: "We speak and we write at random; and if a man's common conversation were committed to paper, he would be startled _for_ _to_ find himself guilty in _so few_ sentences of so many solecisms and such false English." I do not remember _for to_ anywhere in Dryden's prose. _So few_ has long been denizened; no wonder, since it is nothing more than _si peu_ Anglicized. [28] Letter to the Lord High Treasurer. [29] Ibid. He complains of "manglings and abbreviations." "What does your Lordship think of the words drudg'd, disturb'd, rebuk'd, fledg'd, and a thousand others?" In a contribution to the "Tatler" (No. 230) he ridicules the use of _'um_ for _them_, and a number of slang Footnote: phrases, among which is _mob_. "The war," he says, "has introduced abundance of polysyllables, which will never be able to live many more campaigns." _Speculations, operations, preliminaries, ambassadors, pallisadoes, communication, circumvallation, battalions_, are the instances he gives, and all are now familiar. No man, or body of men, can dam the stream of language. Dryden is rather fond of _'em_ for _them_, but uses it rarely in his prose. Swift himself prefers _'tis_ to _it is_, as does Emerson still. In what Swift says of the poets, he may be fairly suspected of glancing at Dryden, who was his kinsman, and whose prefaces and translation of Virgil he ridicules in the "Tale of a Tub." Dryden is reported to have said of him, "Cousin Swift is no poet." The Dean began his literary career by Pindaric odes to Athenian Societies and the like,--perhaps the greatest mistake as to his own powers of which an author was ever guilty. It was very likely that he would send these to his relative, already distinguished, for his opinion upon them. If this was so, the justice of Dryden's judgment must have added to the smart. Swift never forgot or forgave: Dryden was careless enough to do the one, and large enough to do the other. [30] Both Malone and Scott accept this gentleman's evidence without question, but I confess suspicion of a memory that runs back more than eighty-one years, and recollects a man before he had any claim to remembrance. Dryden was never poor, and there is at Oxford a portrait of him painted in 1664, which represents him in a superb periwig and laced band. This was "before he had paid his court with success to the great." But the story is at least _ben trovato_, and morally true enough to serve as an illustration. Who the "old gentleman" was has never been discovered. Of Crowne (who has some interest for us as a sometime student at Harvard) he says: "Many a cup of metheglm have I drank with little starch'd Johnny Crown; we called him so, from the stiff, unalterable primness of his long cravat." Crowne reflects no more credit on his Alma Mater than Downing. Both were sneaks, and of such a kind as, I think, can only be produced by a debauched Puritanism. Crowne, as a rival of Dryden, is contemptuously alluded to by Cibber in his "Apology." [31] Diary, III. 390. Almost the only notices of Dryden that make him alive to me I have found in the delicious book of this Polonius-Montaigne, the only man who ever had the courage to keep a sincere journal, even under the shelter of cipher. [32] Tale of a Tub, Sect. V. Pepys also speaks of buying the "Maiden Queen" of Mr. Dryden's, which he himself, in his preface, seems to brag of, and indeed is a good play.--18th January, 1668. [33] He is fond of this image. In the "Maiden Queen" Celadon tells Sabina that, when he is with her rival Florimel, his heart is still her prisoner, "it only draws a longer chain after it." Goldsmith's fancy was taken by it; and everybody admires in the "Traveller" the extraordinary conceit of a heart dragging a lengthening chain. The smoothness of too many rhymed pentameters is that of thin ice over shallow water; so long as we glide along rapidly, all is well; but if we dwell a moment on any one spot, we may find ourselves knee-deep in mud. A later poet, in trying to improve on Goldsmith, shows the ludicrousness of the image:-- "And round my heart's leg ties its galling chain." To write imaginatively a man should have--imagination! [34] See his epistle dedicatory to the "Rival Ladies" (1664). For the other side, see particularly a passage in his "Discourse on Epic Poetry" (1697). [35] In the same way he had two years before assumed that Shakespeare "was the first who, to shun the pains of continued rhyming, invented that kind of writing which we call blank verse!" Dryden was never, I suspect, a very careful student of English literature. He seems never to have known that Surrey translated a part of the "Aeneid" (and with great spirit) into blank verse. Indeed, he was not a scholar, in the proper sense of the word, but he had that faculty of rapid assimilation without study, so remarkable in Coleridge and other rich minds, whose office is rather to impregnate than to invent. These brokers of thought perform a great office in literature, second only to that of originators. [36] Essay on Satire. What he has said just before this about Butler is worth noting. Butler had had a chief hand in the "Rehearsal," but Dryden had no grudges where the question was of giving its just praise to merit. [37] The conclusion of the second canto of Book Third is the best continuously fine passage. Dryden's poem has nowhere so much meaning in so small space as Davenant, when he says of the sense of honor that, "Like Power, it grows to nothing, growing less." Davenant took the hint of the stanza from Sir John Davies. Wyatt first used it, so far as I know, in English. [38] Perhaps there is no better lecture on the prevailing vices of style and thought (if thought this frothy ferment of the mind may be called) than in Cotton Mather's "Magnalia." For Mather, like a true provincial, appropriates only the mannerism, and, as is usual in such cases, betrays all its weakness by the unconscious parody of exaggeration. [39] The Doctor was a capital judge of the substantial value of the goods he handled, but his judgment always seems that of the thumb and forefinger. For the shades, the disposition of colors, the beauty of the figures, he has as good as no sense whatever. The critical parts of his Life of Dryden seem to me the best of his writing in this kind. There is little to be gleaned after him. He had studied his author, which he seldom did, and his criticism is sympathetic, a thing still rarer with him. As illustrative of his own habits, his remarks on Dryden's reading are curious. [40] Perhaps the hint was given by a phrase of Corneille, _monarque en peinture_. Dryden seldom borrows, unless from Shakespeare, without improving, and he borrowed a great deal. Thus in "Don Sebastian" of suicide:-- "Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls, The thought is Cicero's, but how it is intensified by the "starless nights"! Dryden, I suspect, got it from his favorite, Montaigne, who says, "Que nous ne pouvons abandonner cette garnison du monde, sans le commandement exprez de celuy qui nous y a mis." (L. ii. chap. 3.) In the same play, by a very Drydenish verse, he gives new force to an old comparison:-- "And I should break through laws divine and human.
[42] "Les poetes euxmemes s'animent et s'echauffent par la lecture des autres poetes. Messieurs de Malherbe, Corneille, &c., se disposoient au travail par la lecture des poetes qui etoient de leur gout."--Vigneul, Marvilliana, I. 64, 65. [43] For example, Waller had said, "Others may use the ocean as their road, long before Campbell. Campbell helps himself to both thoughts, enlivens them into "Her march is o'er the mountain wave, and they are his forevermore. His "leviathans afloat" he _lifted_ from the "Annus Mirabilis"; but in what court could Dryden sue? Again, Waller in another poem calls the Duke of York's flag "His dreadful streamer, like a comet's hair"; and this, I believe, is the first application of the celestial portent to this particular comparison. Yet Milton's "imperial ensign" waves defiant behind his impregnable lines, and even Campbell flaunts his "meteor flag" in Waller's face. Gray's bard might be sent to the lock-up, but even he would find bail. "C'est imiter quelqu'un que de planter des choux." [44] Corneille's tragedy of "Pertharite" was acted unsuccessfully in 1659. Racine made free use of it in his more fortunate "Andromaque." [45] Dryden's publisher. [46] Preface to the Fables. [47] I interpret some otherwise ambiguous passages in this charming and acute essay by its title: "On the _artificial_ comedy of the last century." [48] See especially his defence of the epilogue to the Second Part of the "Conquest of Granada" (1672). [49] Defence of an Essay on Dramatick Poesy. [50] "The favor which heroick plays have lately found upon our theatres has been wholly derived to them from the countenance and approbation they have received at Court." (Dedication of "Indian Emperor" to Duchess of Monmouth.) [51] Dedication of "Rival Ladies." [52] Defence of the Essay. Dryden, in the happiness of his illustrative comparisons, is almost unmatched. Like himself, they occupy a middle ground between poetry and prose,--they are a cross between metaphor and simile. [53] Discoveries. [54] What a wretched rhymer he could be we may see in his _alteration_ of the "Maid's Tragedy" of Beaumont and Fletcher:-- "Not long since walking in the field, What intolerable seesaw! Not much of Byron's "fatal facility" in _these_ octosyllabics! [55] In more senses than one. His last and best portrait shows him in his own gray hair. [56] Essay on Dramatick Poesy. [57] A French hendecasyllable verse runs exactly like our ballad measure:-- A cobbler there was and he lived in a stall, ... (Dryden's note.) The verse is not a hendecasyllable. "Attended watchfully to her recitative (Mile. Duchesnois), and find that, in nine lines out of ten, 'A cobbler there was,' &c, is the tune of the French heroics."--_Moore's Diary_, 24th April, 1821. [58] "The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose."--Gray to West. [59] Diderot and Rousseau, however, thought their language unfit for poetry, and Voltaire seems to have half agreed with them. No one has expressed this feeling more neatly than Fauriel: "Nul doute que l'on ne puisse dire en prose des choses eminemment poetiques, tout comme il n'est que trop certain que l'on peut en dire de fort prosaiques en vers, et meme en excellents vers, en vers elegamment tournes, et en beau langage. C'est un fait dont je n'ai pas besoin d'indiquer d'exemples: aucune litterature n'en fournirait autant que le notre."--Hist. de la Poesie Provencale, II. 237. [60] Parallel of Poetry and Painting. [61] "Il y a seulement la scene de _Ventidius_ et d'_Antoine_ qui est digne de Corneille. C'est la le sentiment de milord Bolingbroke et de tous les bons auteurs; c'est ainsi que pensait Addisson."--Voltaire to M. De Fromont, 15th November, 1735. [62] Inst. X., i. 129. [63] Conquest of Grenada, Second Part. [64] In most he mingles blank verse. [65] Conquest of Grenada. [66] This recalls a striking verse of Alfred de Musset:-- "La muse est toujours belle.
[68] Don Sebastian. [69] Don Sebastian. [70] Cleomenes. [71] All for Love. [72] Dryden, with his wonted perspicacity, follows Ben Jonson in calling Donne "the greatest wit, though not the best poet, of our nation." (Dedication of Eleonora.) Even as a poet Donne "Had in him those brave translunary things To open vistas for the imagination through the blind wall of the senses as he could sometimes do, is the supreme function of poetry. [73] My own judgment is my sole warrant for attributing these extracts from Oedipus to Dryden rather than Lee. [74] Recollections of Rogers, p. 165. [75] Nicholls's Reminiscences of Gray. Pickering's edition of Gray's Works, Vol. V. p. 35. [76] Let one suffice for all. In the "Royal Martyr," Porphyrius. awaiting his execution, says to Maximin, who had wished him for a son-in-law:-- "Where'er thou stand'st, I'll level at that place "It is no shame," says Dryden himself, "to be a poet, though it is to be a bad one." [77] Gray, _ubi supra_, p. 38. [78] Scott had never seen Pepys's Diary when he wrote this, or he would have left it unwritten: "Fell to discourse of the last night's work at Court, where the ladies and Duke of Monmouth acted the 'Indian Emperor,' wherein they told me these things most remarkable that not any woman but the Duchess of Monmouth and Mrs. Cornwallis did anything but like fools and stocks, but that these two did do most extraordinary well: that not any man did anything well but Captain O'Bryan, who spoke and did well, but above all things did dance most incomparably."--14th January, 1668. [79] See also that noble passage in the "Hind and Panther" (1572-1591), where this is put into verse. Dryden always thought in prose. [80] Probably on the authority of this very epitaph, as if epitaphs were to be believed even under oath! A great many authors live because we read nothing but their tombstones. Oldham was, to borrow one of Dryden's phrases, "a bad or, which is worse, an indifferent poet." [81] "He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate easily forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere reconciliation with them that had offended him."--Congress. [82] Coleridge says excellently: "You will find this a good gauge or criterion of genius,--whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized." (Table-Talk, 192.) Some of Dryden's best satirical hits are let fall by seeming accident in his prose, as where he says of his Protestant assailants, "Most of them love all whores but her of Babylon." They had first attacked him on the score of his private morals. [83] That he taxes Shadwell with it is only a seeming exception, as any careful reader will see. [84] Preface to Fables. [85] Dedication of the Georgics. [86] Preface to Second Miscellany. [87] Ibid. [88] Memoirs of Wordsworth, Vol. II. p. 74 (American edition). [89] A Discourse of Epick Poetry "If the _public_ approve." "On ne peut pas admettre dans le developpement des langues aucune revolution artificielle et sciemment executee; il n'y a pour elles ni conciles, ni assemblees deliberantes; on ne les reforme pas comme une constitution vicieuse."--Renan, De l'Origine du Langage, p 95. [90] This is an old complaint. Puttenham sighs over such innovation in Elizabeth's time, and Carew in James's. A language grows, and is not made. Almost all the new-fangled words with which Jonson taxes Marston in his "Poetaster" are now current. [91] Like most idiomatic, as distinguished from correct writers, he knew very little about the language historically or critically. His prose and poetry swarm with locutions that would have made Lindley Murray's hair stand on end. _How_ little he knew is plain from his criticising in Ben Jonson the use of _ones_ in the plural, of "Though Heaven should speak with all _his_ wrath," and be "as false English for _are_, though the rhyme hides it." Yet all are good English, and I have found them all in Dryden's own writing! Of his sins against idiom I have a longer list than I have room for. And yet he is one of our highest authorities for _real_ English. [92] To see what he rescued us from in pedantry on the one hand, and vulgarism on the other, read Feltham and Tom Brown--if you can. [93] "Cette ode mise en musique par Purcell (si je ne me trompe), passe en Angleterre pour le chef-d'oeuvre de la poesie la plus sublime et la plus variee; et je vous avoue que, comme je sais mieux l'anglais que le grec, j'aime cent fois mieux cette ode que tout Pindare."--Voltaire to M. De Chabanon, 9 mars, 1772. Dryden would have agreed with Voltaire. When Chief-Justice Marlay, then a young Templar, "congratulated him on having produced the finest and noblest Ode that had ever been written in any language, You are right, young gentleman' (replied Dryden), 'a nobler Ode never _was_ produced, nor ever _will_.'"--Malone. [94] This was true of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and still more of Southey who in some respects was not unlike Dryden. [95] Pope's notion of gentility was perhaps expressed in a letter from Lord Cobham to him: "I congratulate you upon the fine weather. 'T is a strange thing that people of condition and men of parts must enjoy it in common with the rest of the world." (Ruffhead's Pope, p 276, _note_.) His Lordship's naive distinction between people of condition and men of parts is as good as Pope's between genteel and poetical men. I fancy the poet grinning savagely as he read it. [96] "Nothing is truly sublime," he himself said, "that is not just and proper." [97] Dennis in a letter to Tonson, 1715. _ |
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