Among My Books Volume I Part 3

It is pleasant to follow Dryden into the more congenial region of heroic plays, though here also we find him making a false start. Anxious to please the king,[50] and so able a reasoner as to convince even himself of the justice of whatever cause he argued, he not only wrote tragedies in the French style, but defended his practice in an essay which is by far the most delightful reproduction of the cla.s.sic dialogue ever written in English. Eugenius (Lord Buckhurst), Lisideius (Sir Charles Sidley), Crites (Sir E. Howard), and Neander (Dryden) are the four partakers in the debate. The comparative merits of ancients and moderns, of the Shakespearian and contemporary drama, of rhyme and blank verse, the value of the three (supposed) Aristotelian unities, are the main topics discussed. The tone of the discussion is admirable, midway between bookishness and talk, and the fairness with which each side of the argument is treated shows the breadth of Dryden's mind perhaps better than any other one piece of his writing. There are no men of straw set up to be knocked down again, as there commonly are in debates conducted upon this plan. The "Defence" of the Essay is to be taken as a supplement to Neander's share in it, as well as many scattered pa.s.sages in subsequent prefaces and dedications. All the interlocutors agree that "the sweetness of English verse was never understood or practised by our fathers," and that "our poesy is much improved by the happiness of some writers yet living, who first taught us to mould our thoughts into easy and significant words, to retrench the superfluities of expression, and to make our rhyme so properly a part of the verse that it should never mislead the sense, but itself be led and governed by it." In another place he shows that by "living writers" he meant Waller and Denham.

"Rhyme has all the advantages of prose besides its own. But the excellence and dignity of it were never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it: he first made writing easily an art; first showed us to conclude the sense, most commonly in distiches, which in the verse before him runs on for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath to overtake it."[51] Dryden afterwards changed his mind, and one of the excellences of his own rhymed verse is, that his sense is too ample to be concluded by the distich. Rhyme had been censured as unnatural in dialogue; but Dryden replies that it is no more so than blank verse, since no man talks any kind of verse in real life. But the argument for rhyme is of another kind. "I am satisfied if it cause delight, for delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy [he should have said _means_]; instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it delights.... The converse, therefore, which a poet is to imitate must be heightened with all the arts and ornaments of poesy, and must be such as, strictly considered, could never be supposed spoken by any without premeditation.... Thus prose, though the rightful prince, yet is by common consent deposed as too weak for the government of serious plays, and, he failing, there now start up two compet.i.tors; one the nearer in blood, which is blank verse; the other more fit for the ends of government, which is rhyme. Blank verse is, indeed, the nearer prose, but he is blemished with the weakness of his predecessor. Rhyme (for I will deal clearly) has somewhat of the usurper in him; but he is brave and generous, and his dominion pleasing."[52] To the objection that the difficulties of rhyme will lead to circ.u.mlocution, he answers in substance, that a good poet will know how to avoid them.

It is curious how long the superst.i.tion that Waller was the refiner of English verse has prevailed since Dryden first gave it vogue. He was a very poor poet and a purely mechanical versifier. He has lived mainly on the credit of a single couplet,

"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed.

Lets in new light through c.h.i.n.ks that Time hath made,"

in which the melody alone belongs to him, and the conceit, such as it is, to Samuel Daniel, who said, long before, that the body's

"Walls, grown thin, permit the mind To look out thorough and his frailty find."

Waller has made worse nonsense of it in the transfusion. It might seem that Ben Jonson had a prophetic foreboding of him when he wrote: "Others there are that have no composition at all, but a kind of tuning and rhyming fall, in what they write. It runs and slides and only makes a sound. Women's poets they are called, as you have women's tailors.

They write a verse as smooth, as soft, as cream In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream.

You may sound these wits and find the depth of them with your middle-finger."[53] It seems to have been taken for granted by Waller, as afterwards by Dryden, that our elder poets bestowed no thought upon their verse. "Waller was smooth," but unhappily he was also flat, and his importation of the French theory of the couplet as a kind of thought-coop did nothing but mischief.[54] He never compa.s.sed even a smoothness approaching this description of a nightingale's song by a third-rate poet of the earlier school,--

"Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note Through the sleek pa.s.sage of her open throat, A clear, unwrinkled song,"--

one of whose beauties is its running over into the third verse. Those poets indeed

"Felt music's pulse in all her arteries ";

and Dryden himself found out, when he came to try it, that blank verse was not so easy a thing as he at first conceived it, nay, that it is the most difficult of all verse, and that it must make up in harmony, by variety of pause and modulation, for what it loses in the melody of rhyme. In what makes the chief merit of his later versification, he but rediscovered the secret of his predecessors in giving to rhymed pentameters something of the freedom of blank verse, and not mistaking metre for rhythm.

Voltaire, in his Commentary on Corneille, has sufficiently lamented the awkwardness of movement imposed upon the French dramatists by the gyves of rhyme. But he considers the necessity of overcoming this obstacle, on the whole, an advantage. Difficulty is his tenth and superior muse. How did Dryden, who says nearly the same thing, succeed in his attempt at the French manner? He fell into every one of its vices, without attaining much of what const.i.tutes its excellence. From the nature of the language, all French poetry is purely artificial, and its high polish is all that keeps out decay. The length of their dramatic verse forces the French into much tautology, into bombast in its original meaning, the stuffing out a thought with words till it fills the line. The rigid system of their rhyme, which makes it much harder to manage than in English, has accustomed them to inaccuracies of thought which would shock them in prose. For example, in the "Cinna" of Corneille, as originally written, Emilie says to Augustus,--

"Ces flammes dans nos coeurs des longtemps etoient nees, Et ce sont des secrets de plus de quatre annees."

I say nothing of the second verse, which is purely prosaic surplusage exacted by the rhyme, nor of the jingling together of _ces, des, etoient, nees, des,_ and _secrets_, but I confess that _nees_ does not seem to be the epithet that Corneille would have chosen for _flammes_, if he could have had his own way, and that flames would seem of all things the hardest to keep secret. But in revising, Corneille changed the first verse thus,--

"Ces flammes dans nos coeurs _sans votre ordre_ etoient nees."

Can anything be more absurd than flames born to order? Yet Voltaire, on his guard against these rhyming pitfalls for the sense, does not notice this in his minute comments on this play. Of extravagant metaphor, the result of this same making sound the file-leader of sense, a single example from "Heraclius" shall suffice:--

"La vapeur de mon sang ira grossir la foudre Que Dieu tient deja prete a le reduire en poudre."

One cannot think of a Louis Quatorze Apollo except in a full-bottomed periwig, and the tragic style of their poets is always showing the disastrous influence of that portentous comet. It is the _style perruque_ in another than the French meaning of the phrase, and the skill lay in dressing it majestically, so that, as Cibber says, "upon the head of a man of sense, _if it became him_, it could never fail of drawing to him a more partial regard and benevolence than could possibly be hoped for in an ill-made one." It did not become Dryden, and he left it off.[55]

Like his own Zimri, Dryden was "all for" this or that fancy, till he took up with another. But even while he was writing on French models, his judgment could not be blinded to their defects. "Look upon the 'Cinna'

and the 'Pompey,' they are not so properly to be called plays as long discourses of reason of State, and 'Polieucte' in matters of religion is as solemn as the long stops upon our organs; ... their actors speak by the hour-gla.s.s like our parsons.... I deny not but this may suit well enough with the French, for as we, who are a more sullen people, come to be diverted at our plays, so they, who are of an airy and gay temper, come thither to make themselves more serious."[56] With what an air of innocent unconsciousness the sarcasm is driven home! Again, while he was still slaving at these bricks without straw, he says: "The present French poets are generally accused that, wheresoever they lay the scene, or in whatever age, the manners of their heroes are wholly French. Racine's Bajazet is bred at Constantinople, but his civilities are conveyed to him by some secret pa.s.sage from Versailles into the Seraglio." It is curious that Voltaire, speaking of the _Berenice_ of Racine, praises a pa.s.sage in it for precisely what Dryden condemns: "Il semble qu'on entende _Henriette_ d'Angleterre elle-meme parlant au marquis de _Vardes_. La politesse de la cour de _Louis XIV_., l'agrement de la langue Francaise, la douceur de la versification la plus naturelle, le sentiment le plus tendre, tout se trouve dans ce peu de vers." After Dryden had broken away from the heroic style, he speaks out more plainly. In the Preface to his "All for Love," in reply to some cavils upon "little, and not essential decencies," the decision about which he refers to a master of ceremonies, he goes on to say: "The French poets, I confess, are strict observers of these punctilios; ... in this nicety of manners does the excellency of French poetry consist. Their heroes are the most civil people breathing, but their good breeding seldom extends to a word of sense. All their wit is in their ceremony; they want the genius which animates our stage, and therefore 't is but necessary, when they cannot please, that they should take care not to offend.... They are so careful not to exasperate a critic that they never leave him any work, ... for no part of a poem is worth our discommending where the whole is insipid, as when we have once tasted palled wine we stay not to examine it gla.s.s by gla.s.s. But while they affect to shine in trifles, they are often careless in essentials.... For my part, I desire to be tried by the laws of my own country." This is said in heat, but it is plain enough that his mind was wholly changed. In his discourse on epic poetry he is as decided, but more temperate. He says that the French heroic verse "runs with more activity than strength.[57] Their language is not strung with sinews like our English; it has the nimbleness of a greyhound, but not the bulk and body of a mastiff. Our men and our verses overbear them by their weight, and _pondere, non numero_, is the British motto. The French have set up purity for the standard of their language, and a masculine vigor is that of ours. Like their tongue is the genius of their poets,--light and trifling in comparison of the English."[58]

Dryden might have profited by an admirable saying of his own, that "they who would combat general authority with particular opinion must first establish themselves a reputation of understanding better than other men." He understood the defects much better than the beauties of the French theatre. Lessing was even more one-sided in his judgment upon it.[59] Goethe, with his usual wisdom, studied it carefully without losing his temper, and tried to profit by its structural merits. Dryden, with his eyes wide open, copied its worst faults, especially its declamatory sentiment. He should have known that certain things can never be transplanted, and that among these is a style of poetry whose great excellence was that it was in perfect sympathy with the genius of the people among whom it came into being. But the truth is, that Dryden had no apt.i.tude whatever for the stage, and in writing for it he was attempting to make a trade of his genius,--an arrangement from which the genius always withdraws in disgust. It was easier to make loose thinking and the bad writing which betrays it pa.s.s un.o.bserved while the ear was occupied with the sonorous music of the rhyme to which they marched.

Except in "All for Love," "the only play," he tells us, "which he wrote to please himself,"[60] there is no trace of real pa.s.sion in any of his tragedies. This, indeed, is inevitable, for there are no characters, but only personages, in any except that. That is, in many respects, a n.o.ble play, and there are few finer scenes, whether in the conception or the carrying out, than that between Antony and Ventidius in the first act.[61]

As usual, Dryden's good sense was not blind to the extravagances of his dramatic style. In "Mac Flecknoe" he makes his own Maximin the type of childish rant,

"And little Maximins the G.o.ds defy";

but, as usual also, he could give a plausible reason for his own mistakes by means of that most fallacious of all fallacies which is true so far as it goes. In his Prologue to the "Royal Martyr" he says:--

"And he who servilely creeps after sense Is safe, but ne'er will reach an excellence.

But, when a tyrant for his theme he had, He loosed the reins and let his muse run mad, And, though he stumbles in a full career, Yet rashness is a better fault than fear; * * * * *

They then, who of each trip advantage take, Find out those faults which they want wit to make."

And in the Preface to the same play he tells us: "I have not everywhere observed the equality of numbers in my verse, partly by reason of my haste, but more especially because I _would not have my sense a slave to syllables_." Dryden, when he had not a bad case to argue, would have had small respect for the wit whose skill lay in the making of faults, and has himself, where his self-love was not engaged, admirably defined the boundary which divides boldness from rashness. What Quintilian says of Seneca applies very aptly to Dryden: "Velles eum suo ingenio dixisse, alieno judicio."[62] He was thinking of himself, I fancy, when he makes Ventidius say of Antony,--

"He starts out wide And bounds into a vice that bears him far From his first course, and plunges him in ills; But, when his danger makes him find his fault, Quick to observe, and full of sharp remorse, He censures eagerly his own misdeeds, Judging himself with malice to himself, And not forgiving what as man he did Because his other parts are more than man."

But bad though they nearly all are as wholes, his plays contain pa.s.sages which only the great masters have surpa.s.sed, and to the level of which no subsequent writer for the stage has ever risen. The necessity of rhyme often forced him to a plat.i.tude, as where he says,--

"My love was blind to your deluding art, But blind men feel when stabbed so near the heart."[63]

But even in rhyme he not seldom justifies his claim to the t.i.tle of "glorious John." In the very play from which I have just quoted are these verses in his best manner:--

"No, like his better Fortune I'll appear, With open arms, loose veil, and flowing hair, Just flying forward from her rolling sphere."

His comparisons, as I have said, are almost always happy. This, from the "Indian Emperor," is tenderly pathetic:--

"As callow birds, Whose mother's killed in seeking of the prey, Cry in their nest and think her long away, And, at each leaf that stirs, each blast of wind, Gape for the food which they must never find."

And this, of the anger with which the Maiden Queen, striving to hide her jealousy, betrays her love, is vigorous:--

"Her rage was love, and its tempestuous flame, Like lightning, showed the heaven from whence it came."

The following simile from the "Conquest of Grenada" is as well expressed as it is apt in conception:--

"I scarcely understand my own intent; But, silk-worm like, so long within have wrought, That I am lost in my own web of thought."

In the "Rival Ladies," Angelina, walking in the dark, describes her sensations naturally and strikingly:--

"No noise but what my footsteps make, and they Sound dreadfully and louder than by day: They double too, and every step I take Sounds thick, methinks, and more than one could make."

In all the rhymed plays[64] there are many pa.s.sages which one is rather inclined to like than sure he would be right in liking them. The following verses from "Aurengzebe" are of this sort:--

"My love was such it needed no return, Rich in itself, like elemental fire, Whose pureness does no aliment require."

This is Cowleyish, and _pureness_ is surely the wrong word; and yet it is better than mere commonplace. Perhaps what oftenest turns the balance in Dryden's favor, when we are weighing his claims as a poet, is his persistent capability of enthusiasm. To the last he kindles, and sometimes _almost_ flashes out that supernatural light which is the supreme test of poetic genius. As he himself so finely and characteristically says in "Aurengzebe," there was no period in his life when it was not true of him that

"He felt the inspiring heat, the absent G.o.d return."

The verses which follow are full of him, and, with the exception of the single word _underwent_, are in his luckiest manner:--

"One loose, one sally of a hero's soul, Does all the military art control.

While timorous wit goes round, or fords the sh.o.r.e, He shoots the gulf, and is already o'er, And, when the enthusiastic fit is spent, Looks back amazed at what he underwent."[65]

Pithy sentences and phrases always drop from Dryden's pen as if unawares, whether in prose or verse. I string together a few at random:--