From SCOTT'S

Life of Dryden

Published 1808

THE early habits of Dryden's education and poetical studies gave his researches somewhat too much of a metaphysical character; and it was a consequence of his mental acuteness, that his dramatic personages often philosophized or reasoned, when they ought only to have felt. The more lofty, the fiercer, the more ambitious feelings, seem also to have been his favourite studies. Perhaps the analytical mode in which he exercised his studies of human life tended to confine his observation to the more energetic feelings of pride, anger, ambition, 10 and other high-toned passions. He that mixes in public life must see enough of these stormy convulsions; but the finer and more imperceptible operations of love, in its sentimental modifications, if the heart of the author does not supply an example from its own feelings, cannot easily be studied at the expense of others. Dryden's bosom, it must be owned, seems to have afforded him no such means of information; the licence of his age, and perhaps the advanced period at which he commenced his literary career, had probably armed him against this more 20 exalted strain of passion. The love of the senses he has in many places expressed, in as forcible and dignified colouring as the subject could admit; but of a mere moral and sentimental passion he seems to have had little idea, since he frequently substitutes in its place the absurd, unnatural, and fictitious refinements of romance. In short, his love is always in indecorous nakedness, or sheathed in the stiff panoply of chivalry. The most pathetic verses which Dryden has composed, are unquestionably contained

in the epistle to Congreve, where he recommends his laurels, in such moving terms, to the care of his surviving friend. The quarrel and reconciliation of Sebastian and Dorax is also full of the noblest emotion. In both cases, however, the interest is excited by means of masculine and exalted passion, not of those which arise from the mere delicate sensibilities of our nature; and, to use a Scottish phrase, 'bearded men' weep at them, rather than Horace's audience of youths and maidens.

ΙΟ But if Dryden fails in expressing the milder and more tender passions, not only did the stronger feelings of the heart, in all its dark or violent workings, but the face of natural objects, and their operation upon the human mind, pass promptly in review at his command. External pictures, and their corresponding influence on the spectator, are equally ready at his summons; and though his poetry, from the nature of his subjects, is in general rather ethic and didactic, than narrative, yet no sooner does he adopt the latter style of composition, than his figures and his 20 landscapes are presented to the mind with the same vivacity as the flow of his reasoning, or the acute metaphysical discrimination of his characters.

Still the powers of observation and of deduction are not the only qualities essential to the poetical character. The philosopher may indeed prosecute his experimental researches into the arcana of nature, and announce them to the public through the medium of a friendly redacteur, as the legislator of Israel obtained permission to speak to the people by the voice of Aaron; but the poet has no 30 such privilege; nay, his doom is so far capricious, that, though he may be possessed of the primary quality of poetical conception to the highest possible extent, it is but like a lute without its strings, unless he has the subordinate, though equally essential, power of expressing what he feels and conceives, in appropriate and harmonious

language. With this power Dryden's poetry was gifted, in a degree surpassing in modulated harmony that of all who had preceded him, and inferior to none that has since written English verse. He first showed that the English language was capable of uniting smoothness and strength. The hobbling verses of his predecessors were abandoned even by the lowest versifiers; and by the force of his precept and example, the meanest lampooners of the year seventeen hundred wrote smoother lines than Donne and Cowley, the chief poets of the earlier half of the seventeenth 10 century. What was said of Rome adorned by Augustus, has been, by Johnson, applied to English poetry improved by Dryden; that he found it of brick, and left it of marble. This reformation was not merely the effect of an excellent ear, and a superlative command of gratifying it by sounding language; it was, we have seen, the effect of close, accurate, and continued study of the power of the English tongue. . . . In lyrical poetry Dryden must be allowed to have no equal. Alexander's Feast is sufficient to show his supremacy in that brilliant department. In this exquisite 20 production he flung from him all the trappings with which his contemporaries had embarrassed the ode. The language, lofty and striking as the ideas are, is equally simple and harmonious; without far-fetched allusions, or epithets, or metaphors, the story is told as intelligibly as if it had been in the most humble prose. The change of tone in the harp of Timotheus regulates the measure and the melody and the language of every stanza. The hearer, while he is led on by the successive changes, experiences almost the feelings of the Macedonian and his peers; nor 30 is the splendid poem disgraced by one word or line. unworthy of it, unless we join in the severe criticism of Dr. Johnson on the concluding stanzas. . . .

The satirical powers of Dryden were of the highest order. He draws his arrow to the head, and dismisses it

straight upon his object of aim. In this walk he wrought almost as great a reformation as upon versification in general; as will plainly appear, if we consider that the satire, before Dryden's time, bore the same reference to Absalom and Achitophel which an ode of Cowley bears to Alexander's Feast. Butler, and his imitators, had adopted a metaphysical satire, as the poets in the earlier part of the century had created a metaphysical vein of serious poetry. Both required store of learning to supply the 10 perpetual expenditure of extraordinary and far-fetched illustration; the object of both was to combine and hunt down the strangest and most fanciful analogies; and both held the attention of the reader perpetually on the stretch, to keep up with the meaning of the author. There can be no doubt that this metaphysical vein was much better fitted for the burlesque than the sublime. Yet the perpetual scintillation of Butler's wit is too dazzling to be delightful; and we can seldom read far in Hudibras without feeling more fatigue than pleasure. His fancy is employed 20 with the profusion of a spendthrift, by whose eternal round of banquetting his guests are at length rather wearied out than regaled. Dryden was destined to correct this among other errors of his age; to show the difference between burlesque and satire; and to teach his successors in that species of assault, rather to thrust than to flourish with their weapon. For this purpose he avoided the unvaried and unrelieved style of grotesque description and combination, which had been fashionable since the satires of Cleveland and Butler. To render the objects of his 30 satire hateful and contemptible, he thought it necessary to preserve the lighter shades of character, if not for the purpose of softening the portrait, at least for that of preserving the likeness. While Dryden seized, and dwelt upon, and aggravated, all the evil features of his subject, he carefully retained just as much of its laudable traits as

preserved him from the charge of want of candour, and fixed down the resemblance upon the party. And thus, instead of unmeaning caricatures, he presents portraits which cannot be mistaken, however unfavourable ideas they may convey of the originals. The character of Shaftesbury, both as Achitophel and as drawn in The Medal, bears peculiar witness to this assertion. While other court poets endeavoured to turn the obnoxious statesman into ridicule, on account of his personal infirmities and extravagancies, Dryden boldly confers upon him all the praise 10 for talent and for genius that his friends could have claimed, and trusts to the force of his satirical expression for working up even these admirable attributes with such a mixture of evil propensities and dangerous qualities, that the whole character shall appear dreadful, and even hateful, but not contemptible.

...

The Fables of Dryden are the best examples of his talents as a narrative poet; those powers of composition, description, and narration, which must have been called into exercise by the Epic Muse, had his fate allowed him to 20 enlist among her votaries.

Upon the whole, in introducing these romances of Boccaccio and Chaucer to modern readers, Dryden has necessarily deprived them of some of the charms which they possess for those who have perused them in their original state. With a tale or poem, by which we have been sincerely interested, we connect many feelings independent of those arising from actual poetical merit. The delight, arising from the whole, sanctions, nay sanctifies, the faulty passages; and even actual improvements, like supple- 30 ments to a mutilated statue of antiquity, injure our preconceived associations, and hurt, by their incongruity with our feelings, more than they give pleasure by their own excellence. But to antiquaries Dryden has sufficiently justified himself, by declaring his version made for