Later Poems and Purpose.
Far on in 1682, when our Dryden was waxing oldish, and when he had given over play-going for somewhat more of church-going, he wrote, in the same verse with his satires, and with the same ringing couplets of sound, a defence of the moderate liberal churchmanship that does not yield to ecclesiastic fetters, and that thinks widely. A little later, in 1687, he writes in a more assured vein, assuming bold defence of Romanism—as it existed in that day in England—to which faith he had become a convert. This last is a curiously designed poem, showing how little he had the arts of construction in hand; it is a long argument between a Hind and a Panther, in the shades of a forest. Was ever ecclesiasticism so recommended before? Yet there are brave and unforgetable lines in it: instance the noble rhythm, and the noble burden of that passage beginning—like a trumpet note—
“What weight of ancient witness can prevail,
If private reason hold the public scale?”
And again the fine tribute to “the Church:”
“Thus one, thus pure, behold her largely spread,
Like the fair ocean from her mother bed;
From East to West triumphantly she rides;
All shores are watered by her wealthy tides;
The Gospel-sound, diffused from pole to pole
Where winds can carry, and where waves can roll;
The self-same doctrine of the sacred page
Conveyed to every clime, in every age.”
I think Bishop Heber had a reverent and a stealthy look upon these lines when he wrote a certain stanza of his “Greenland’s icy mountains.”
The enemies of Dryden did not fail to observe that between the dates of the two professions of faith named, Charles II. had died, summoning a Papist priest, at the very last, to give him a chance—and, it is feared, a small one—of reconcilement with Heaven; furthermore, these enemies remembered that the bigot James II. had come to the throne, full of Papist zeal and of a poor hope to bring all England to a great somerset of faith. Did Dryden undergo an innocent change? Maybe; may not be. Certainly neither Lord Macaulay, nor Elkanah Settle, nor Saintsbury, nor you, nor I, have the right to go behind the veil of privacy which in such matters is every man’s privilege.
How odd it seems that this Papist convert of James II.’s time, and author of so many plays that outranked Etherege in rankness, should have put the Veni, Creator, of Charlemagne (if it be his) into such reverent and trenchant English as carries it into so many of our hymnals.
“Creator Spirit, by whose aid
The world’s foundations first were laid,
Come, visit every humble mind;
Come, pour thy joys on humankind;
From sin and sorrow set us free,
And make thy temples worthy thee.”
Nor was this all of Dryden’s translating work. He roamed high and low among all the treasures of the ancients. Theocritus gave his tangle of sweet sounds to him, and Homer his hexameters; Juvenal and Horace and Ovid were turned into his verse; and Dryden’s Virgil is the only Virgil of thousands of readers. He sought motive, too, in Boccaccio and Chaucer; and within times the oldest of us can remember his “Flower and Leaf” and his “Palamon and Arcite” were more read and known than the poems of like name attributed to Chaucer. But in the newer and more popular renderings and printings of the old English poet, Chaucer has come to his own again, and rings out his tales with a lark-like melody that outgoes in richness and charm all the happy paraphrases of Dryden.
A still more dangerous task our poet undertook in the days of his dramatic work. I have in my library some half dozen of Dryden’s plays—yellowed and tattered, and of the imprint of 1710 or thereabout—and among them is one bearing this title, The Tempest, originally written by William Shakespeare, and altered and improved by John Dryden; and the story of Antony and Cleopatra underwent the same sort of improvement—dangerous work for Dryden; dangerous for any of us. And yet this latter, under name of “All for Love,” was one of Dryden’s greatest successes, and reckoned by many dramatic critics of that day far superior to Shakespeare.
One more extract from this voluminous poet and we shall leave him; it was written when he was well toward sixty, and when his dramatic experiences were virtually ended; it is from an ode in memory of Mistress Killigrew, a friend and a poetess. In the course of it he makes honest bewailment, into which it would seem his whole heart entered:
“O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of Poesy?
Made prostitute and profligate the muse,
Debased to each obscene and impious use,
Whose harmony was first ordained above
For tongues of angels, and for hymns of love?”
And again, a verselet that is full of all his most characteristic manner:
“When in mid-air the golden trump shall sound,
To raise the nations under ground;
When in the Valley of Jehoshaphat,
The judging God shall close the book of Fate;
And there the last assizes keep,
For those who wake and those who sleep:
When rattling bones together fly,
From the four corners of the sky;
When sinews o’er the skeletons are spread,
Those clothed with flesh, and life inspires the dead;
The sacred poets first shall hear the sound,
And foremost from the tomb shall bound,
For they are covered with the lightest ground;
And straight, with inborn vigor, on the wing,
Like mounting larks, to the new morning sing.
Then thou, sweet Saint, before the quire shall go,
As Harbinger of Heaven, the way to show,
The way which thou so well hast learnt below!”
We have given much space to our talk about Dryden. Is it because we like him so well? By no means. It is because he was the greatest master among the literary craftsmen of his day; it is because he wrought in so many and various forms, and always with a steady, unflinching capacity for toil, which knew no shake or pause; it is because he had a marvellously keen sense for all the symphonies of heroic language, and could always cheat and charm the ear with his reverberant thunders; it is because he spanned a great interval of English letters, covering it with various accomplishment; criticising keenly, and accepted as a critic; judging fairly, and accepted as a judge in the great court of language; teaching, by his example, of uses and fashions of use, which were heeded by his contemporaries, and which put younger men upon the track of better and worthier achievement.
Again, it is because he, more than any other of his epoch, represented in himself and in what he wrought, the drift and bent and actualities of the time. There were changes of dynasties, and he put into language, for all England, the lamentation over the old and the glorification of the new; there were plagues and conflagrations and upbuildings of desolated cities—and the fumes and the flames and the din of all these get speech of him, and such color as put them in undying record upon the roll of history; there were changes of faith, and vague out-reaches for some sure ground of religious establishment—and his poems tell of the struggle, and in his own personality represent the stress of a whole nation’s doubts; there are battles raging round the coasts—and the echo of them, in some shape of trumpet blare or shrill military resonance, seems never to go out of his poems; dissoluteness rules in the court and in the city, infecting all—and Dryden wallows with them through a score of his uncanny dramas.
Put his poems together in the order of their composition, and without any other historic data whatever, they would show the changes and quavers and sudden enthusiasms and bestialities and doubts and growth of the National Life. But they would most rarely show the noble impulses that kindle hope and foretoken better things to come—rarely the elevating purpose that commands our reverence.
No fictitious character of his is a live one to-day; you can hardly recall one if you try.[92] No couplet or verselet of his is so freighted with a serene or hopeful philosophy as to make our march the blither by reason of it down the corridors of time. No blast of all his fanfaron of trumpets sounds the opening of the gates upon any Delectable Mountains. A great, clever, literary worker! I think that is all we can say of him. And when you or I pass under his monument in the corner of Westminster Abbey, we will stand bowed respectfully, but not with any such veneration, I think, as we expect to carry to the tomb of Milton or of Chaucer; and if one falls on Pope—what then? I think we might pause—waver; more polish here—more power there—the humanities not radiant in either; and so we might safely sidle away to warm ourselves before the cenotaph of Goldsmith.