of the Trinity, he could find no difficulty in accepting all the dogmas of the Catholic Church: Good life be now my task: my doubts are done : (What more could fright my faith, than three in one?) Disguis'd in mortal mold and infancy? That the great Maker of the world could die? And after that trust my imperfect sense, Can I my reason to my faith compel, And shall my sight, and touch, and taste rebel? } (Page 219, lines 78-86.) Dryden has sketched his own religious development in the following lines of The Hind and the Panther: My thoughtless youth was wing'd with vain desires, My manhood, long misled by wand'ring fires, Follow'd false lights; and, when their glimpse was gone, My pride struck out new sparkles of her own. Be thine the glory, and be mine the shame. (Page 219, lines 72-77.) Here the "thoughtless youth" apparently refers to a period of boyish indifference to religion; the "false lights" and "wand'ring fires" to a manhood of philosophic scepticism, probably of the fashionable type, based on the doctrines of Hobbes; and the "new sparkles" to the poet's attempts, of which we see something in Religio Laici, to reason himself into an acceptance of the Anglican doctrines. For these sparkles he exchanged the clear light of authority and constant tradition that he found in the Catholic Church. Perhaps, without being too fantastic, we may apply the same passage to Dryden's literary development. In his early poems he followed the “false lights” of the school of Cowley; later he "struck out new sparkles of his own" in the bombastic tirades of the heroic plays; at last he adopted an ideal of chastened elegance of style, and of literary construction limited by exact rules, imposed by critical authority, which is in all essentials that of the school of Boileau. These doctrines he was unable to carry out consistently in practice, so that his later poems and plays show many departures from them. This partial failure he excused, somewhat inadequately, by the necessity of accommodating his productions to the taste of the British public; a writer to whom the new theories were fundamentally congenial would have been able to make the public taste bow to him. So the adoption of Catholicism made no change in Dryden's temperament; the sceptic peers out from beneath the robes of the convert. His later writings show little of the devout spirit that we expect in a man who has been converted to a new religion in his mature years; they are full of the same coarseness, the same sneers at 1 Scott understands "false lights" as referring to Dryden's early "puritanical tenets," and the "new sparkles" to his philosophie scepticism. (Life of Dryden, in Scott-Saintsbury edition, i. 255-263.) Professor Firth, on the contrary, explains "false lights" as "the fashionable scepticism of the period, based on the theories of Hobbes." (See note in Select Poems by Dryden, ed. Christie and Firth, Oxford, 1893, page 283.) This view is the more probable, although it entirely omits to take account of Dryden's Puritan period in his young manhood. It would be attractive to see a reference to this in "wand'ring fires," but Dryden's language seems to indicate that these were contemporary with the "false lights," not precedent to them. In general the passare is so vague, perhaps intentionally, that it must not be rigorously interpreted as an account of each stage in Dryden's mental development priests and their office, that soil his earlier work. But Dryden's intellectual acceptance of the principle of authority, both in literature and in religion, was sincere and lasting. Dryden gained no new offices or pensions as the price of his adoption of Catholicism: whether, without this change of faith, he would have been deprived of those he already possessed, it would be idle to discuss. His conversion bore fruit in his longest original poem, The Hind and the Panther, published in April, 1687. The plot of this work is absurd enough: the gentle and inoffensive Hind, representing the Catholic Church, and the fierce yet beautiful Panther, representing the Church of England, discuss between them questions of controversial divinity; the debate ending, of course, in the triumph of the Hind. But the poetic style of the piece places it very high among Dryden's compositions. A certain emotional fervor fills the debate, very different from the dry, intellectual, detached tone of Religio Laici. More than this, in his address to the Deity, defending his own sincerity, Dryden rises to true pathos, even to sublimity: What weight of ancient witness can prevail, Whom thou hast promis'd never to forsake! (Pages 218, 219, lines 62-71.) In consequence of his conversion Dryden was employed to defend, against Stillingfleet, a paper by Anne Hyde (the first wife of James. II), announcing her adoption of Catholieism, which was published in 1686 by the command of the king. He also translated from the French the Life of St. Francis Xavier of the Jesuit Bouhours. Only one more poem written by Dryden during the short reign of James II need here be mentioned. In Britannia Rediviva he celebrates the birth of a son to the king on June 10, 1688. This production, though written in the heroic couplet, is of essentially the same sort as Threnodia Augustalis: sentiments made to order, with far-fetched imagery, prevent it from having any value as literature. IV The Revolution of 1688 brought ruin to all Dryden's worldly prosperity. As a Catholie, he could not take the oaths required of all office-holders under William and Mary. Already an old man, he was deprived of all his positions and pensions, and thrown back on his pen for support. He accepted the situation with dignity, making no attempt to conciliate the new government, but, except for a few petulant expressions, refraining from attacks on it, and applied himself manfully to work. Had he died just before the Revolution, his name would survive as that of the greatest writer of the Restoration period, but his character would apparently have little in it to attract men's love. Twelve years of toil remained to him, years hampered by old age, by poverty, and by illness. By his performance during this period Dryden showed himself still the undisputed prince of English letters; his character, meanwhile, acquired a dignity in which it had hitherto been lacking, and commands our respect and admiration. Dryden's first impulse was to return to the writing of plays, by which he had won his early fame. Between the years 1689 and 1693 he produced Don Sebastian, Amphitryon, King Arthur (an opera), Cleomenes (with Southerne), and Love Triumphant. These dramas, notably Don Sebastian, contain work in no way inferior to that of the poet's earlier period, but they contribute no new elements of importance for the study of his genius, and may be dismissed without further analysis. They did not suffice to reëstablish their author's reputation as the chief English dramatist; the last of them, indeed, was a complete failure. In his skill as a translator Dryden found a surer resource. Encouraged by his success with shorter pieces, he now undertook, aided by friends, a complete version of Juvenal and Persius, which appeared in October, 1692. He himself translated five of the sixteen satires of Juvenal, and the whole of Persius, and contributed an elaborate dedicatory preface, in which, following Casaubon, Heinsius, Dacier, and other critics, he gives an account of the rise of Roman satire and an analysis of its chief authors. In the next year, 1693, he translated three selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses and the episode of Hector and Andromache from the Iliad, and wrote a preface for a third miscellany volume, Examen Poeticum, published by Tonson. Dryden's powers of invective and of sententious moralizing fitted him to be the translator of Juvenal and Persius; though his versions are far from literal, they well reproduce in English the vigorous declamation of the Roman satire. With Ovid also, a writer of easy, rapid, somewhat rhetorical verse, Dryden had much in common. Near the close of 1693 Dryden embarked on the greatest single task of his life, the translation of the complete works of Virgil, which occupied practically all his time for more than three years. The work was published by subscription, and was issued from Tonson's press in a handsome folio volume, early in July, 1697. To aid Dryden, Addison furnished an Essay on the Georgics, and the arguments in prose for the whole work; Dr. Knightly Chetwood wrote the Life of Virgil and the Preface to the Pastorals. The volume was illustrated with the same engravings that had once adorned the work of Ogleby, a previous translator whom Dryden heartily despised, but the plates were touched up for the occasion, and each was decorated with the arms of a subscriber to the book. In Dryden's correspondence with Tonson there are frequent references to the contract between them, but these are unfortunately so vague that we do not know precisely how much the poet received for his labors. In Spence's Anecdotes Pope is quoted as saying that the sum was about £1200, and this is not inconsistent with what we can gather from Dryden's own words. This reward, though small in comparison with the profit of about £9000 that Pope received from his Homer, was good pay for a literary man in those days. Dryden often writes to his publisher in a testy tone, once protesting, for example: "Upon trial, I find all of your trade are sharpers, and you not more than others; therefore I have not wholly left you." Despite many revolutions of public taste, Dryden's Virgil still remains practically without a rival as the standard translation of the greatest Roman poet; the only one that, like two or three versions of Homer, has become an English classic. It has, indeed, almost none of the grace and tenderness, or the high seriousness, of the Latin original, to which Wordsworth attained in large measure in his Laodamia. Thus the marvelous verse, Sunt lacrima rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt, disappears entirely in Dryden's commonplace: Our known disasters fill ev'n foreign lands: (Page 530, lines 646-649.) Wordsworth, on the other hand, catches the Virgilian spirit in the lines: — -Yet tears to human suffering are due; (Cambridge edition, page 527, lines 164-167.) Dryden is least satisfactory in his treatment of the Pastorals and of those portions of the Georgics of which the charm, for modern readers, consists less in the subject matter than in the exquisite delicacy of the treatment, and the haunting melody of the rhythm. His Æneid, however, is a masterpiece of rapid narrative. The buoyant, flowing verse carries the reader forward with a glorious energy, and, at its best, has something of Virgil's own noble simplicity. The following passage, though deformed in one line by Dryden's fondness for antithesis, is a favorable example of his power: She thus replied: "The chaste and holy race (Pages 603, 604, lines 758-773.) At times the veteran satirist indulges his genius. The following triplet on Drances might be the portrait of a Whig leader: Factious and rich, bold at the council board, (Page 678, lines 512-514.) More than this, Dryden inserts into his translation certain sly attacks on the reigning English monarch. (He had resisted, by the way, Tonson's request that he dedicate the volume to William III, though Tonson had "prepared the book for it" by having the engraver make the portrait of Æneas resemble that of the king.) In the following lines, describing criminals scourged by the Fury, the words in italics have no warrant in the Latin:1 Then they, who brothers' better claim disown, (Page 604, lines 824, 825.) And the portraits of the rival kings of the bees, which are much altered and expanded from the original, are obviously meant to suggest James and William: With ease distinguish'd is the regal race: 1 1 The editor is here indebted to a writer in Notes and Queries, series II. vii. 168, and series II. x. 263. Shap'd to his size, and godlike to behold, And like their grisly prince appears his gloomy race. (Page 478, lines 137-145.) A musical society in London had for some years maintained the custom of celebrating November 22, the Feast of Saint Cecilia, by a public performance of vocal and instrumental music. Dryden, in 1687, had written an ode for this occasion; he now, ten years later, furnished another and a greater one, Alexander's Feast. This fine ode, which stands at the head of English lyric poetry between Milton and Gray, is to-day by far the best known of Dryden's poems. Yet, familiar as Alexander's Feast has become by ceaseless reprinting in schoolbooks and anthologies, it may be doubted whether many readers appreciate its full excellence. Brought up on the traditions of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, we instinctively expect in lyric poetry either the expression of elevated moral or philosophical ideas, of intense passion, or of a delight in sensuous beauty. Dryden gives us none of these, but a rapid series of flashlight pictures, each expressed in verse that by its music suggests the scene described. The poem is rather a narrative than a pure lyric. No English poem is more full of life and animation; few show a more youthful spirit than this ode by the weary satirist and dramatist of sixty-six. Dryden's last years were cheered by the success of his Virgil, which reached a second edition within a few months after its first publication, and were saddened by the attacks of a few critics and rivals. To Milbourne, who assailed his Virgil, and Blackmore, who attacked his character, he paid comparatively little attention, judging correctly that their words would not affect public opinion. The case was different with Jeremy Collier, who in 1698 published his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, in which be arraigns the whole school of the Restoration dramatists, and Dryden chief among the number. To the charges Dryden manfully pleaded guilty, though he rightly accused Collier of exaggeration; and, somewhat lamely, excused his own sins in part by the general corruption of the times. The comparatively large profits of the Virgil did not free Dryden from the need of further exertion. He thought of undertaking a translation of the Iliad, and translated the first book "as an essay to the whole work (page 740). But, perhaps deterred by a consciousness of his defective knowledge of Greek, he turned back to translate further selections from Ovid; to put into modern English some tales from Chaucer, whom he had long loved with a truly sympathetic insight; and to clothe in heroic verse three stories from Boccaccio, to whom he was led by his study of Chaucer. The result of this work, more congenial and more desultory than the long struggle with Virgil, was a volume published in 1700, entitled Fables, Ancient and Modern. These products of the poet's old age have an enduring charm. The harshness and asperity of the great satirist are gone; there remain a clear, melodious diction, and a frank, kindly spirit, which show Dryden to be a kinsman of Chaucer and of William Morris. Sorely battered by the storms of life, conscious that he had often played a part not worthy of his great powers, he appeared just before his death as "the idle singer of an empty day." Dryden passed away, after a short illness, on May 1, 1700. He died poor, leaving no personal property of any account, but not neglected. Vanbrugh and other friends |