tion not only continue but increase through each year of a long life, then Dryden was truly an artist, and Taine is unjust. Dryden's devotion cannot be called into question. Whether or not the legend be accurate that he was "too roving and active to confine himself to college life" and that he hastened to set himself up in London, it is plain that he, like Ovid, would sooner or later have found it impossible to keep out of poetry. Whenever his career began, it engrossed him solely and entirely. In later years he liked to review this career; his conception of it was dramatic, if not theatrical. He saw himself on a great stage, prominent, almost alone. He carried with him to London, and always kept by him there, an "adamantine confidence," as Dr. Johnson put it, not simply in himself, for he knew what modesty was, but in the powers which study and practice had convinced him were his. Pride of profession, scorn of competitors, devotion to his trade sustained him. Goldsmith made his way into the mid-eighteenth century literary world by a good-humored unconventionality that brought relief to sufferers from the prevailing gentilities and rotundities. Dryden, also without violence of bluster, forced himself upon his world through sheer display of confidence and a large, steady assumption of authority. There was a growing demand for poetry which could be read and generally discussed. Dryden believed that he could supply the smoothest and most powerful variety. He was not long in convincing London that he was right.

It was brought against Dryden by Shadwell, in

The Medal of John Bayes, that he had served as a hack to Herringman the bookseller during his first few years in London, writing "prefaces to books for meat and drink." It is probable that Shadwell exaggerated the meanness of the relation, if it existed at all. Dryden's private income was not large, and he must have turned at an early stage to writing for money, without, indeed, the spiritual support of Dr. Johnson's avowal that no man except a blockhead ever wrote for anything else. Any connection with Herringman in these years of his apprenticeship would have been valuable in that it would have placed him in one of the main currents of poetic production, Herringman being almost the chief publisher of poems and plays at the Restoration. Somewhere, at least, Dryden was learning what was being written, and coming to feel at home in society; without which knowledge and feeling he could not have gone very far.

Personally, Dryden seems never to have prepossessed anyone. His youth had not been precocious, and his maturity found him more mellow than splendid. He was genial in his old age, without any great allowance of spontaneous humor. His mind always remained warm and strong. Pope told Spence that he "was not a very genteel man; he was intimate with none but poetical men." He pretended to be nothing other than what above all things he was, a writer. He did not profess to be a hero; he disliked holding himself rigid. "Stiffness of opinion," he wrote in the dedication of Don Sebastian, "is the effect of pride, and not of philosophy. . . . The

use.

ruggedness of a stoic is only a silly affectation of being a god. ... True philosophy is certainly of a more pliant nature, and more accommodated to human A wise man will never attempt an impossibility." Dryden's inconsistencies have generally been deplored. But it is precisely to his unending powers of renewal that we owe that serenity and that freshness in which he never fáils us. "As I am a man," he told the Earl of Mulgrave in 1676, in the dedication of Aureng-Zebe, "I must be changeable; and sometimes the gravest of us all are so, even upon ridiculous accidents. Our minds are perpetually wrought on by the temperament of our bodies; which makes me suspect they are nearer allied, than either our philosophers or school-divines will allow them to be. . . . An ill dream, or a cloudy day, has power to change this wretched creature, who is so proud of a reasonable soul, and make him think what he thought not yesterday."

II

FALSE LIGHTS

Dr. Johnson's brilliant example seems nearly to have established for all time the procedure of persons who would criticise the poetry of Dryden. The procedure consists in moving swiftly through his works, line by line and page by page, noting down what passages are in shocking taste and what passages are unexceptionable, and at the end qualifying on the basis of the first the praise which ought naturally to fall to the second. There has been good reason for this. No critic has felt that he could afford to commend Dryden in general without proving that he had taken into account the worst of him in particular. No critic has been willing to go on record as in any way approving the more flagant stanzas of the Annus Mirabilis, the more impossible speeches of the heroic plays, or the more meretricious portions of the Virgil and other journey-work. Such caution has been warranted by the fact that Dryden is more unequal than almost any English poet who has written voluminously. But now it seems worth while to proceed a little further and ask whether Dryden held any theories which might have been responsible for the obvious defects in his product. For it is evident that the unhappy passages to which exception has

False

lighto

invariably been taken are not passages wherein the poet's attention seems to have lagged, or his spirits drooped. They are rather, in fact, his most careful and ambitious performances; Dryden never dozed. Nor can they be explained as indiscretions of youth. They are found everywhere throughout his works, from first to last. It is plain that Dryden was following false lights when he committed his offenses against taste. Either he was pursuing ends which by nature he was unqualified to reach, he was attempting the impossible, he was speaking a language which was not instinctive; or he was reaching ends which were hardly worth reaching, he was sedulously perfecting a language which though native was not gauged for sterling utterance. Good literature is the effect of adequate form applied to genuine material. The poetry in Dryden which is not good can be explained by errors which he made first in choosing his material and second in cultivating his form. On the one hand, false lights led him to employ two kinds of materials which in his case were spurious first, the materials of the fancy, in works like Annus Mirabilis; second, the materials of the human passions, in works like the heroic plays and the tragedies. The results were absurdity and bathos. On the other hand, false lights led him to give excessive attention to the form of his verse at times when the matter was of little import, as in the Virgil. The results were artificiality and monotony. The purpose of the present chapter is to follow Dryden as he pursues his wandering fires, and to sweep away the rubbish which he leaves