The London of Dryden.
But let us not forget where we are in our English story; it is London that has been all aflame in that dreadful year of 1666. Thirteen thousand houses have been destroyed, eighty odd churches, and some four hundred acres of ground in the central part of the city have been burned over. The fire had followed swiftly upon the devastating plague of the previous year, which Dryden had gone into Wiltshire to avoid. It is doubtful, indeed, if he came back soon enough to see the great blaze with his own eyes; “chemical fire,” the poet calls it, and it licked up the poison of the plague; but it did not lick up the leprosy of Charles’ court. There was a demand for plays, and for plays of a bad sort; and Dryden met the demand. Never was there an author more apt to divine what the public did want, and more full of literary contrivances to meet it. Dryden knew all the purveyors of this sort of intellectual repast, and all their methods, and soon became a king among them; and to be a king among the playwrights was to have a very large sovereignty in that time. Everybody talked of the plays; all of Royalist faith went to the plays, if they had money; and money was becoming more and more plentiful. There had been the set-back, it is true, of the Great Fire; but English commerce was making enormous strides in these days. There was a pathetic folding of the hands and dreary forecastings directly after the disaster, as after all such calamities. But straight upon this the city grew, with wider streets and taller houses, and in only a very few years the waste ground was covered again, and the new temple of St. Paul’s rising, under the guidance of Sir Christopher Wren, into those grand proportions of cupola and dome, which, in their smoked and sooty majesty, dominate the city of London to-day.
Houses of nobles and of rich merchants which stood near to Cornhill and Lombard Street, and private gardens which had occupied areas thereabout—now representing millions of pounds in value—were crowded away westward by the new demands of commerce. In Dryden’s day there were ducal houses looking upon Lincoln’s Inn Fields; and others, with pleasure grounds about them, close upon Covent Garden Square. Americans go to that neighborhood now, in early morning, to catch sight of the immense stores of fruit and vegetables which are on show there upon market-days; and they are well repaid for such visit; yet the houses are dingy, and a welter of straw and mud and market débris stretches to the doors; but the stranger, picking his way through this, and through Russell Street to the corner of Bow Street, will find, close by, the site of that famous Will’s Coffee-house, where Dryden lorded it so many years, and whose figure there—in the chimney-corner, with his pipe, laying down the law between the whiffs, and conferring honors by offering a pinch from his snuff-box—Scott has made familiar to the whole world.
It was an earlier sort of club-house, where the news in the Gazette was talked of, and the last battle—if there were a recent one—and the last play, and the last scandal of the court. Its discussions and potations made away with a good many nights, and a good many pipes and bottles, and was not largely provocative of domesticity. But it does not appear that the Lady Elizabeth—Dryden’s wife—ever made remonstrances on this score; indeed, Mr. Green, the historian, would intimate that my lady had distractions of her own, not altogether wise or worthy; but we prefer to believe the best we can of her.
To this gathering-place at Covent Garden Etherege and Wycherley found their way—all writing men, in fact; even the great Buckingham perhaps—before his quarrel; and Dorset, fellow-member with Dryden, of the Royal Society; maybe Butler too, when he found himself in London; and poor Otway,[91] hoping to meet some one generous enough to pay his score for him; and the young Congreve, proud in his earlier days to get a nod from the great Dryden; and, prouder yet, when, at a later time, he was honored by that tender and pathetic epistle from the Laureate:
“Already I am worn with cares and age,
And just abandoning the ungrateful stage;
But you, whom every muse and grace adorn,
Whom I foresee to better fortune born,
Be kind to my remains; and O defend,
Against your judgment, your departed friend!”
I said that he wrote plays; wrote them by the couple—by the dozen—by the score possibly.
You do not know them; and I hope you never will know them to love them. They have fallen away from literature—never acted, and rarely read. He could not plot a story, and he had not the dramatic gift. One wonders how a theatreful could have listened to their pomposity and inflation and exaggerations. But they did, and they filled Dryden’s pockets. There were scenic splendors, indeed, about many of them which delighted the pit, and which the poet loved as accompaniments to the roll of his sonorous verse; there were, too, fragments here and there, with epithet and characterization that showed his mastership; and sometimes the most graceful of lyrics budded out from the coarse groundwork of the play, as fair in sound as they were foul in thought.
In private intercourse Dryden is represented to have been a man of courteous speech, never low and ribald—as were many of the royal favorites; and when he undertook playwriting to order, to meet the profligate tastes of the court, he could not, like some lesser playwrights, disguise double-meanings and vulgarities under a flimsy veil of courtliness; but by his very sincerity he made all his lewdness rank, and all his indelicacies brutal. This will, and should, I think, keep his plays away from our reading-desks.
Dryden’s satires, written later, show a better and far stronger side of his literary quality; and Buckingham, long after his lineaments shall have faded from a mob of histories, will stand preserved as Zimri, in the strong pickle of Dryden’s verse; you will have met the picture, perhaps without knowing it, for the magnificent courtier, who wrote “The Rehearsal:”
“A man so various that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind’s epitome:
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;
Was everything by starts, and nothing long,
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon;
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.”
A man who writes in that way about a peer of England was liable to write of lesser men in a manner that would stir hot blood; and he did. Once upon a time this great king at “Will’s” was waylaid and sorrily cudgelled; which is an experience that—however it may come about—is not elevating in its effects, nor does it increase our sense of a man’s dignity; for it is an almost universal fact that the men most worthy of respect, in almost any society, are the men who never do get quietly cudgelled.