Among My Books Volume I Part 4

"The greatest argument for love is love."

"Few know the use of life before 't is past."

"Time gives himself and is not valued."

"Death in itself is nothing; but we fear To be we know not what, we know not where."

"Love either finds equality or makes it; Like death, he knows no difference in degrees."

"That's empire, that which I can give away."

"Yours is a soul irregularly great, Which, wanting temper, yet abounds in heat."

"Forgiveness to the injured does belong, But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong."

"Poor women's thoughts are all extempore."

"The cause of love can never be a.s.signed, 'T is in no face, but in the lover's mind."[66]

"Heaven can forgive a crime to penitence, For Heaven can judge if penitence be true; But man, who knows not hearts, should make examples."

"Kings' t.i.tles commonly begin by force, Which time wears off and mellows into right."

"Fear's a large promiser; who subject live To that base pa.s.sion, know not what they give."

"The secret pleasure of the generous act Is the great mind's great bribe."

"That bad thing, gold, buys all good things."

"Why, love does all that's n.o.ble here below."

"To prove religion true, If either wit or sufferings could suffice, All faiths afford the constant and the wise."

But Dryden, as he tells us himself,

"Grew weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme; Pa.s.sion's too fierce to be in fetters bound, And Nature flies him like enchanted ground."

The finest things in his plays were written in blank verse, as vernacular to him as the alexandrine to the French. In this he vindicates his claim as a poet. His diction gets wings, and both his verse and his thought become capable of a reach which was denied them when set in the stocks of the couplet. The solid man becomes even airy in this new-found freedom: Anthony says,

"How I loved, Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours That _danced away with down upon your feet_."

And what image was ever more delicately exquisite, what movement more fadingly accordant with the sense, than in the last two verses of the following pa.s.sage?

"I feel death rising higher still and higher, Within my bosom; every breath I fetch Shuts up my life within a shorter compa.s.s, _And, like the vanishing sound of bells, grows less And less each pulse, till it be lost in air_."[67]

Nor was he altogether without pathos, though it is rare with him. The following pa.s.sage seems to me tenderly full of it:--

"Something like That voice, methinks, I should have somewhere heard; But floods of woe have hurried it far off Beyond my ken of soul."[68]

And this single verse from "Aurengzebe":--

"Live still! oh live! live even to be unkind!"

with its pa.s.sionate eagerness and sobbing repet.i.tion, is worth a ship-load of the long-drawn treacle of modern self-compa.s.sion.

Now and then, to be sure, we come upon something that makes us hesitate again whether, after all, Dryden was not grandiose rather than great, as in the two pa.s.sages that next follow:--

"He looks secure of death, superior greatness, Like Jove when he made Fate and said, Thou art The slave of my creation."[69]

"I'm pleased with my own work; Jove was not more With infant nature, when his s.p.a.cious hand Had rounded this huge ball of earth and seas, To give it the first push and see it roll Along the vast abyss."[70]

I should say that Dryden is more apt to dilate our fancy than our thought, as great poets have the gift of doing. But if he have not the potent alchemy that trans.m.u.tes the lead of our commonplace a.s.sociations into gold, as Shakespeare knows how to do so easily, yet his sense is always up to the sterling standard; and though he has not added so much as some have done to the stock of bullion which others afterwards coin and put in circulation, there are few who have minted so many phrases that are still a part of our daily currency. The first line of the following pa.s.sage has been worn pretty smooth, but the succeeding ones are less familiar:--

"Men are but children of a larger growth, Our appet.i.tes as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too and full as vain; And yet the soul, shut up in her dark room, Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing; But, like a mole in earth, busy and blind, Works all her folly up and casts it outward In the world's open view."[71]

The image is mixed and even contradictory, but the thought obtains grace for it. I feel as if Shakespeare would have written _seeing_ for _viewing_, thus gaining the strength of repet.i.tion in one verse and avoiding the sameness of it in the other. Dryden, I suspect, was not much given to correction, and indeed one of the great charms of his best writing is that everything seems struck off at a heat, as by a superior man in the best mood of his talk. Where he rises, he generally becomes fervent rather than imaginative; his thought does not incorporate itself in metaphor, as in purely poetic minds, but repeats and reinforces itself in simile. Where he _is_ imaginative, it is in that lower sense which the poverty of our language, for want of a better word, compels us to call _picturesque_, and even then he shows little of that finer instinct which suggests so much more than it tells, and works the more powerfully as it taxes more the imagination of the reader. In Donne's "Relic" there is an example of what I mean. He fancies some one breaking up his grave and spying

"A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,"--

a verse that still shines there in the darkness of the tomb, after two centuries, like one of those inextinguishable lamps whose secret is lost.[72] Yet Dryden sometimes showed a sense of this magic of a mysterious hint, as in the "Spanish Friar":--

"No, I confess, you bade me not in words; The dial spoke not, but it made shrewd signs, And pointed full upon the stroke of murder."

This is perhaps a solitary example. Nor is he always so possessed by the image in his mind as unconsciously to choose even the picturesquely imaginative word. He has done so, however, in this pa.s.sage from "Marriage a la Mode":--

"You ne'er mast hope again to see your princess, Except as prisoners view fair walks and streets, And careless pa.s.sengers going by their grates."

But after all, he is best upon a level, table-land, it is true, and a very high level, but still somewhere between the loftier peaks of inspiration and the plain of every-day life. In those pa.s.sages where he moralizes he is always good, setting some obvious truth in a new light by vigorous phrase and happy ill.u.s.tration. Take this (from "Oedipus") as a proof of it:--

"The G.o.ds are just, But how can finite measure infinite?

Reason! alas, it does not know itself!

Yet man, vain man, would with his short-lined plummet Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice.

Whatever is, is in its causes just, Since all things are by fate. But purblind man Sees but a part o' th' chain, the nearest links, His eyes not carrying to that equal beam That poises all above."

From the same play I pick an ill.u.s.tration of that ripened sweetness of thought and language which marks the natural vein of Dryden. One cannot help applying the pa.s.sage to the late Mr. Quincy:--

"Of no distemper, of no blast he died, But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long, E'en wondered at because he dropt no sooner; Fate seemed to wind him up for fourscore years; Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more, Till, like a clock worn out with eating Time, The wheels of weary life at last stood still."[73]

Here is another of the same kind from "All for Love":--

"Gone so soon!

Is Death no more? He used him carelessly, With a familiar kindness; ere he knocked, Ran to the door and took him in his arms, As who should say, You're welcome at all hours, A friend need give no warning."

With one more extract from the same play, which is in every way his best, for he had, when he wrote it, been feeding on the bee-bread of Shakespeare, I shall conclude. Antony says,

"For I am now so sunk from what I was, Thou find'st me at my lowest water-mark.

The rivers that ran in and raised my fortunes Are all dried up, or take another course: What I have left is from my native spring; I've a heart still that swells in scorn of Fate, And lifts me to my banks."

This is certainly, from beginning to end, in what used to be called the _grand_ style, at once n.o.ble and natural. I have not undertaken to a.n.a.lyze any one of the plays, for (except in "All for Love") it would have been only to expose their weakness. Dryden had _no_ constructive faculty; and in every one of his longer poems that required a plot, the plot is bad, always more or less inconsistent with itself, and rather hitched-on to the subject than combining with it. It is fair to say, however, before leaving this part of Dryden's literary work, that Horne Tooke thought "Don Sebastian" "the best play extant."[74]