English Literature
acts, he was apparently a timeserver, catering to a depraved audience in
his dramas, and dedicating his work with much flattery to those who were
easily cajoled by their vanity into sharing their purse and patronage. In
this, however, he only followed the general custom of the time, and is
above many of his contemporaries.
Dryden was born in the village of Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, in 1631. His
family were prosperous people, who brought him up in the strict Puritan
faith, and sent him first to the famous Westminster school and then to
Cambridge. He made excellent use of his opportunities and studied eagerly,
becoming one of the best educated men of his age, especially in the
classics. Though of remarkable literary taste, he showed little evidence of
literary ability up to the age of thirty. By his training and family
connections he was allied to the Puritan party, and his only well-known
work of this period, the "Heroic Stanzas," was written on the death of
Cromwell:
His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone,
For he was great ere Fortune made him so;
And wars, like mists that rise against the sun,
Made him but greater seem, not greater grow.
In these four lines, taken almost at random from the "Heroic Stanzas," we
have an epitome of the thought, the preciseness, and the polish that mark
all his literary work.
This poem made Dryden well known, and he was in a fair way to become the
new poet of Puritanism when the Restoration made a complete change in his
methods. He had come to London for a literary life, and when the Royalists
were again in power he placed himself promptly on the winning side. His
"Astraea Redux," a poem of welcome to Charles II, and his "Panegyric to his
Sacred Majesty," breathe more devotion to "the old goat," as the king was
known to his courtiers, than had his earlier poems to Puritanism.
In 1667 he became more widely known and popular by his "Annus Mirabilis," a
narrative poem describing the terrors of the great fire in London and some
events of the disgraceful war with Holland; but with the theaters reopened
and nightly filled, the drama offered the most attractive field to one who
made his living by literature; so Dryden turned to the stage and agreed to
furnish three plays yearly for the actors of the King's Theater. For nearly
twenty years, the best of his life, Dryden gave himself up to this
unfortunate work. Both by nature and habit he seems to have been clean in
his personal life; but the stage demanded unclean plays, and Dryden
followed his audience. That he deplored this is evident from some of his
later work, and we have his statement that he wrote only one play, his
best, to please himself. This was _All for Love_, which was written in
blank verse, most of the others being in rimed couplets.
During this time Dryden had become the best known literary man of London,
and was almost as much a dictator to the literary set which gathered in the
taverns and coffeehouses as Ben Jonson had been before him. His work,
meanwhile, was rewarded by large financial returns, and by his being
appointed poet laureate and collector of the port of London. The latter
office, it may be remembered, had once been held by Chaucer.
At fifty years of age, and before Jeremy Collier had driven his dramas from
the stage, Dryden turned from dramatic work to throw himself into the
strife of religion and politics, writing at this period his numerous prose
and poetical treatises. In 1682 appeared his _Religio Laici_ (Religion of a
Layman), defending the Anglican Church against all other sects, especially
the Catholics and Presbyterians; but three years later, when James II came
to the throne with schemes to establish the Roman faith, Dryden turned
Catholic and wrote his most famous religious poem, "The Hind and the
Panther," beginning:
A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,
Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged;
Without unspotted, innocent within,
She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.
This hind is a symbol for the Roman Church; and the Anglicans, as a
panther, are represented as persecuting the faithful. Numerous other
sects--Calvinists, Anabaptists, Quakers--were represented by the wolf,
boar, hare, and other animals, which gave the poet an excellent chance for
exercising his satire. Dryden's enemies made the accusation, often since
repeated, of hypocrisy in thus changing his church; but that he was sincere
in the matter can now hardly be questioned, for he knew how to "suffer for
the faith" and to be true to his religion, even when it meant misjudgment
and loss of fortune. At the Revolution of 1688 he refused allegiance to
William of Orange; he was deprived of all his offices and pensions, and as
an old man was again thrown back on literature as his only means of
livelihood. He went to work with extraordinary courage and energy, writing
plays, poems, prefaces for other men, eulogies for funeral occasions,--
every kind of literary work that men would pay for. His most successful
work at this time was his translations, which resulted in the complete
_Aeneid_ and many selections from Homer, Ovid, and Juvenal, appearing in
English rimed couplets. His most enduring poem, the splendid ode called
"Alexander's Feast," was written in 1697. Three years later he published
his last work, _Fables_, containing poetical paraphrases of the tales of
Boccaccio and Chaucer, and the miscellaneous poems of his last years. Long
prefaces were the fashion in Dryden's day, and his best critical work is
found in his introductions. The preface to the _Fables_ is generally
admired as an example of the new prose style developed by Dryden and his
followers.
From the literary view point these last troubled years were the best of
Dryden's life, though they were made bitter by obscurity and by the
criticism of his numerous enemies. He died in 1700 and was buried near
Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.
WORKS OF DRYDEN. The numerous dramatic works of Dryden are best left in
that obscurity into which they have fallen. Now and then they contain a bit
of excellent lyric poetry, and in _All for Love_, another version of
_Antony and Cleopatra_, where he leaves his cherished heroic couplet for
the blank verse of Marlowe and Shakespeare, he shows what he might have
done had he not sold his talents to a depraved audience. On the whole,
reading his plays is like nibbling at a rotting apple; even the good spots
are affected by the decay, and one ends by throwing the whole thing into
the garbage can, where most of the dramatic works of this period belong.
The controversial and satirical poems are on a higher plane; though, it
must be confessed, Dryden's satire often strikes us as cutting and
revengeful, rather than witty. The best known of these, and a masterpiece
of its kind, is "Absalom and Achitophel," which is undoubtedly the most
powerful political satire in our language. Taking the Bible story of David
and Absalom, he uses it to ridicule the Whig party and also to revenge
himself upon his enemies. Charles II appeared as King David; his natural
son, the Duke of Monmouth, who was mixed up in the Rye House Plot, paraded
as Absalom; Shaftesbury was Achitophel, the evil Counselor; and the Duke of
Buckingham was satirized as Zimri. The poem had enormous political
influence, and raised Dryden, in the opinion of his contemporaries, to the
front rank of English poets. Two extracts from the powerful
characterizations of Achitophel and Zimri are given here to show the style
and spirit of the whole work.
(SHAFTESBURY)
Of these the false Achitophel was first;
A name to all succeeding ages cursed:
For close designs and crooked counsels fit;
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit;
Restless, unfixed in principles and place;
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace:
A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pygmy body to decay....
A daring pilot in extremity,
Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high
He sought the storms: but for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
Else why should he, with wealth and honor blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?
Punish a body which he could not please;
Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?
And all to leave what with his toil he won,
To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son....
In friendship false, implacable in hate;
Resolved to ruin or to rule the state;...
Then seized with fear, yet still affecting fame,
Usurped a patriot's all-atoning name.
So easy still it proves in factious times
With public zeal to cancel private crimes.
(THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM)
Some of their chiefs were princes of the land;
In the first rank of these did Zimri stand,
A man so various, that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts and nothing long;
But, in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon;
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blest madman, who could every hour employ
With something new to wish or to enjoy!
Railing and praising were his usual themes,
And both, to show his judgment, in extremes:
So over-violent, or over-civil,
That every man with him was God or devil.
Of the many miscellaneous poems of Dryden, the curious reader will get an
idea of his sustained narrative power from the _Annus Mirabilis_. The best
expression of Dryden's literary genius, however, is found in "Alexander's
Feast," which is his most enduring ode, and one of the best in our
language.
As a prose writer Dryden had a very marked influence on our literature in
shortening his sentences, and especially in writing naturally, without
depending on literary ornamentation to give effect to what he is saying. If
we compare his prose with that of Milton, or Browne, or Jeremy Taylor, we
note that Dryden cares less for style than any of the others, but takes
more pains to state his thought clearly and concisely, as men speak when
they wish to be understood. The classical school, which followed the
Restoration, looked to Dryden as a leader, and to him we owe largely that
tendency to exactness of expression which marks our subsequent prose
writing. With his prose, Dryden rapidly developed his critical ability, and
became the foremost critic[178] of his age. His criticisms, instead of
being published as independent works, were generally used as prefaces or
introductions to his poetry. The best known of these criticisms are the
preface to the _Fables_, "Of Heroic Plays," "Discourse on Satire," and
especially the "Essay of Dramatic Poesy" (1668), which attempts to lay a
foundation for all literary criticism.
DRYDEN'S INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE. Dryden's place among authors is due
partly to his great influence on the succeeding age of classicism. Briefly,
this influence may be summed up by noting the three new elements which he
brought into our literature. These are: (1) the establishment of the heroic
couplet as the fashion for satiric, didactic, and descriptive poetry; (2)
his development of a direct, serviceable prose style such as we still
cultivate; and (3) his development of the art of literary criticism in his
essays and in the numerous prefaces to his poems. This is certainly a large
work for one man to accomplish, and Dryden is worthy of honor, though
comparatively little of what he wrote is now found on our bookshelves.