"The ghosts of traitors from the bridge descend, And sing their sabbath notes with feeble voice." There can be no sense, however, in which Annus Mirabilis can be called a good poem. It is confused, violent, and affected, full of crudities of style and thought, and its fine passages, brilliant as they are, are mere purple patches. The theme was twofold-the progress of our naval war with Holland, and that of the great fire of London. The character of Dryden's work now changed completely, and the change was coincident with the close of the first period of the classic epoch in England. Within a few months Cowley, Denham, and Davenant died, Waller was silent, Dryden turned his attention exclusively to the drama, and the only non-dramatic poetry produced was that of Milton, a magnificent survival from the romantic age. Late in 1663 Dryden had married the eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, a woman who proved to be silly and peevish; they were not destined to enjoy much happiness together. The personal life of Dryden, however, is very vague to us, and the trustworthy anecdotes preserved about him are singularly few. We know, however, that he stepped at once into the honours and into the consideration enjoyed by his lately deceased forerunners, that he was now in general parlance "Mr. Dryden the poet," and that in 1670 he was made laureate and historiographer-royal. He was gradually absorbed by the writing of plays, of which an account will be given in the next chapter, and about 1667 he entered into an agreement to supply the players of the king's theatre with three plays a year, on exceedingly favourable terms. Dryden was not able to keep his part of the contract, but he wrote enough to bring him in a large theatrical income, and this was a period of high prosperity with him. He was also intimate with the great literary nobles of the court, and sunned himself in their favour almost without an interval, until, in 1675, he had the misfortune to quarrel with the malignant Earl of Rochester. For fourteen years, however, after the publication of Annus Mirabilis, Dryden has to be treated exclusively as a dramatist. The peculiar character of his plays, however, was not without influence on his style as a poet. In the heroic plays, which were written in rhyme, he had an opportunity of increasing the volume and polishing the structure of his couplets, and in this way of preparing for his future and purely poetical triumphs. His plays, moreover, contained songs, which are valuable guides to the critic in estimating Dryden's progress as a metrist. "I feed a flame within," in the Maiden Queen of 1668, and "After the pangs of a desperate lover," and "Celimena, of my heart," both in An Evening's Love (1671), are the best instances of Dryden's early songs: "I feed a flame within, which so torments me, That it both pains my heart, and yet contents me: "Yet he, for whom I grieve, shall never know it; "Thus, to prevent my love from being cruel, My faith rewards my love, though he deny it.” In these, and still more in later and better examples, he shows that he possessed a genuine lyric grace, the existence of which we should otherwise scarcely have suspected. His songs are entirely unlike those of the earlier English dramatists, and remind us rather, in their grace and courtly turns of thought, of the kind of poetry introduced into France by Voiture and his friends These fourteen years of Dryden's exclusive attachment to drama mark a very low spot indeed in English poetical literature. Dryden himself had reached his fiftieth year without writing anything which was really admirable in any very supreme sense, or which, if I DRYDEN 13 he had died before 1680, could have secured his name a high place in human memory. What is of greatest importance to poetical students is to observe what progress Dryden made in the new prosody, and how by means of it he drew out those qualities which had been too much neglected in the verse of the previous ageease, intelligibility, and flexibility. The heroic plays were not wholly useless, if they merely trained the English ear, so long accustomed to discord, to enjoy such harmonious periods as these, in which we see Dryden at his best in 1670: "Ethereal music did her death prepare, Like joyful sounds of spousals in the air; But when (its work performed) the cloud withdrew, I sought her head, to bring it on my spear,— Of charming notes we heard the last resounds, Dryden's command over versification, moreover, is shown in the prologues and epilogues which he produced not merely for his own plays, but for those of others. His study of the drama of the Elizabethans presently led him to a certain change of opinion. While continuing to hold the couplet to be the proper vehicle for pure poetry, he began to be dissatisfied with rhyme on the stage. Mr. Saintsbury thinks that a tendency to overflow in the verse of the rhymed tragedy of Aureng-Zebe (1676), shows that Dryden was recurring to the form of Shakespeare. Whether this be so or not, in All for Love (1678) we find him returning to blank verse, in direct rivalry with the exquisite cadences of Antony and Cleopatra. From this time forth Dryden drew a careful distinction between the couplet, which was to be used for serious poetry of all non dramatic kinds, and blank verse, which, in spite of what Milton had said, was to be restricted to the theatre. His own dramatic blank verse, from this time onward, was more severe than any which had been used, except by Milton, since Ben Jonson. It was not characteristic of Dryden to invent forms of writing or to introduce fresh material to public consideration. He was never an innovator, since an innovator stands outside contemporary feeling, that he may direct it. This Dryden had no inclination to attempt; he always represented the public and was led by it, his function being, when the town had accepted a certain form or a certain taste, to bring his superlative gifts to the task of making that taste or form as classical and splendid as possible. Hence, when, at the age of fifty, he suddenly achieved the highest distinction in a field new to him, the field of satire, it came very naturally from the fact that the public had within two or three years past become strongly interested anew in that species of poetic work. We shall speak later on of those satires of Marvell and Oldham which led the way for Dryden. He so far surpassed those his forerunners, and made the style so completely his own, that we need not delay here for their consideration. It is valuable, however, to note that these less brilliant writers selected the form of political satire for Dryden, that the Scriptural tissue thrown as a light veil over the story was suggested by an anonymous tract, called Naboth's Vineyard, in 1679, and that the very name of Achitophel had been nailed upon Shaftesbury before the great poet stirred a hand. It is highly characteristic of Dryden that he should remain in watchful inaction until all the tools were forged which he needed, and that when he moved it was to produce a work of finished magnificence. When he did speak, it was as a master, and his wonderful fourfold group of satires forms the most faultless section of his work. The four famous Tory satires were published in quick succession, within the course of twelve months. The first part of Absalom and Achitophel appeared in November 1681, when Shaftesbury (Achitophel) was in the Tower; The Medal appeared in March 1682, after the bill of high treason against him, a bil! which Dryden's poem was intended to support, had been thrown out by the grand jury; Mac Flecknoe, which was specially directed against the Whig bard, Shadwell, is dated October 1682; and the ensuing month saw the publication of the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, written after the arrest of Monmouth (Absalom) at Stafford. The first of these four poems is the most important, and the longest too, and of the last only two hundred lines are certainly from Dryden's pen, the remainder being written under the poet's supervision by Nahum Tate. In the original Absalom and Achitophel there is but a thin strain of narrative or allegory, the story of the critical state of English affairs at the moment being told under a Hebrew disguise. The poem really consists of a series of satirical portraits, cut and polished like jewels, and flashing malignant light from all their facets. The sketch of Absalom is indulgent enough, for the secret love of the king to Monmouth was well known, but none of the other Whig leaders were spared,—Shaftesbury himself, "A fiery soul, which, working out its way, Fretted the pigmy body to decay, And o'er-informed the tenement of clay"; Zimri (Buckingham), whose death-piece was to be so magnificently added by Pope; Shimei (Slingsby Bethel), whose "business was, by writing, to persuade That kings were useless, and a clog to trade"; and Corah (Titus Oates), who proved his "saint-like" grace by "A church vermilion and a Moses' face," all these were drawn at full length, with a precision never approached by any of the popular "character "-makers of the preceding half-century, and in verse the like of which had never been heard in England for vigorous alternation of thrust and parry. The heroic couplet had become by this time, in Dryden's hands, a rapier of polished and tempered steel. |