John Dryden.
Of course we know John Dryden’s name a great deal better than we know Sir William Temple’s; better, perhaps, than we know any other name of that period. And yet do we know his poems well? Are there any that you specially cherish and doat upon? any that kindle your sympathies easily into blaze? any that give electric expression to your own poetic yearnings, and put you upon quick and enchanting drift into that empyrean of song whereto the great poets decoy us? I doubt if there is much of Dryden which has this subtle influence upon you; certainly it has not upon me.
There are the great Cecilia odes, which hold their places in the reading-books, with their
“Double—double—double beat
Of the thundering drum;”
and the royal
“Philip’s warlike son,
Aloft in awful state;
The lovely Thais by his side,
—Like a blooming Eastern bride
In flower of youth and beauty’s pride;”
all which we read over and over, always with an ambitious vocalism which the language invites, but, I think, with not much hearty unction.
And yet, notwithstanding the little that we recall of this man’s work, he did write an enormous amount of verse, in all metres, and of all lengths. All the poems that Milton ever published would hardly fill the space necessary for a full synopsis of what John Dryden wrote. But let us begin at the beginning.
This poet, and important man of letters, was born only a year or two later than John Bunyan, and in the same range of country—a little to the northward, in an old rectory of Aldwinckle (Northamptonshire), upon the banks of the river Nen. And this river flows thence northerly, in great loops, where sedges grow, past the tall spire of Oundle—past the grassy ruins of Fotheringay; and thence easterly, in other great loops, through flat lands, under the huge towers of Peterborough Cathedral. But the river singing among the sedges does not come into Dryden’s verse; nor does Fotheringay, with its tragic memories; nor do the noble woods of Lilford Park, or of that Rockingham Forest which, in the days of Dryden’s boyhood, must in many places have brought its spurs of oak timber and its haunts of the red-deer close down to the Nen banks. Indeed, Wordsworth says, with a little exaggeration, it is true, “there is not a single image from nature in the whole body of his [Dryden’s] works.”
He was a well-born boy, with titled kinsfolk, and had money at command for good courses in books. He was at Westminster School under Dr. Busby; was at Cambridge, where he fell one time into difficulties, which somehow angered him in a way that made him somewhat irreverent of his old college in after life. There are pretty traditions that in extreme youth he addressed some very earnest amatory verses to a certain Helen Driden, daughter of his baronet uncle at Canons-Ashby;[90] and there are hints dropped by some biographers of a rebuff to him; which, if it came about, did not pluck away the cheerfulness and self-approval that lay in him. It was in London, however, where he went after his father’s death, and when he was twenty-seven, that the first verse was written by him which made the literary world prick up its ears at sound of a new voice.
’Tis in eulogy of Cromwell, dying just then, and this is a bit of it:
“Swift and resistless thro’ the land he past,
Like that bold Greek, who did the East subdue,
And made to battles such heroic haste,
As if on wings of Victory he flew.
“He fought, secure of fortune as of fame:
Still by new maps the island might be shown,
Of conquests, which he strew’d where-e’er he came,
Thick as the galaxy with stars is strown.
“His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest,
His name, a great example stands, to show
How strangely high endeavors may be blest,
Where piety and valor jointly go.”
A short two years after, you will remember, and Charles II. came to his own and was crowned; and how does this eulogist of Cromwell treat his coronation? In a way that is worth our listening to; for, I think, a comparison of the Cromwellian verses with the Carolan eulogy gives us a key to John Dryden’s character:
“All eyes you draw, and with the eyes, the heart:
Of your own pomp yourself the greatest part:
Next to the sacred temple you are led,
Where waits a crown for your more sacred head:
The grateful choir their harmony employ,
Not to make greater, but more solemn joy.
Wrapt soft and warm your name is sent on high,
As flames do on the waves of incense fly:
Music herself is lost, in vain she brings
Her choicest notes to praise the best of kings;
Her melting strains in you a tomb have found,
And lie like bees in their own sweetness drown’d.”
No wonder that he came ultimately to have the place of Poet-laureate, and thereafter an extra £100 a year with it! No wonder that, with all his cleverness—and it was prodigious—he never did, and never could, win an unsullied reputation for sterling integrity and straightforward purpose.
I know that his latest biographer and advocate, Mr. Saintsbury, whose work you will be very apt to encounter in the little series edited by John Morley, sees poems like those I have cited with other eyes, and fashions out of them an agreeable poetic consistency very honorable to Dryden; but I cannot twist myself so as to view the matter in his way. I think rather of a conscienceless thrifty newspaper, setting forth the average every-day drift of opinion, with a good deal more than every-day skill.
Meantime John Dryden has married, and has married the daughter of an earl; of just how this came about we have not very full record; but there were a great many who wondered why she should marry him; and a good many more, as it appeared, who persisted in wondering why he should marry her. Such wonderments of wondering people overtake a good many matches. It is quite certain that it was not a marriage which went to make a domestic man of him; and I think you will search vainly through his poems for any indication of those home instincts which, like the “melting strains” he flung about King Charles,
“Lie like bees in their own sweetness drown’d.”
The only positive worldly good which seemed to come of this marriage was an occasional home at Charlton, in Wiltshire—an estate of the Earl of Berkshire, his father-in-law—where Dryden wrote, shortly after his marriage, his Annus Mirabilis, in which he gave to all the notable events of the year 1666 a fillip with his pen; and the odd conceits that lie in a single one of his stanzas keep yet alive a story of the capture by the British of a fleet of Dutch India ships:—
“Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball,
And now their odors armed against them fly;
Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall,
And some by aromatic splinters die.”
There are three hundred other stanzas in the poem, of the same make and rhythm, telling of fire, of plague, and of battles. I am not sure if anybody reads it nowadays; but if you do—and it is not fatiguing—you will find wonderful word-craft in it, which repeats the din and crash of battle, and paints the smouldering rage and the blazing power of the Great Fire of London in a way which certain boys, I well remember in old school days, thought represented the grand climacteric of poetic diction.