Among the works of so voluminous a writer, we can only notice those which are distinguished by excellence, or by some strong peculiarity.
Dryden was more than thirty years of age when he commenced dramatic writer. His first piece, the Wild Gallant, met with so mortifying a reception, that he resolved never more to write for the stage. The hasty resolutions of anger are seldom kept, and are seldom worth keeping; but in the present instance it would have been well had he adhered to the first dictates of his resentment. We should not then have had to regret, that so large a portion of a great writer’s life and labour has been wasted on twenty-eight dramas: the comedies exhibiting much ribaldry and but little wit; with neither ingenuity nor interest in the fable; with no originality in the characters: the tragedies for the most part filled with the exaggerations of romance, and the hyperboles of an extravagant imagination, in the place of nature and pathos. His tragedy seldom touches the passions: his staple commodities are pompous language, poetical flights, and picturesque description. His characters all speak in one language—that of the author. Addison says, “It is peculiar to Dryden to make all his personages as wise, witty, elegant, and polite as himself.” In confirmation of the proofs internally afforded by his writings, that his taste for tragedy was not genuine, he expresses his contempt for Otway, master as that poet was of the tender passions. But however uncongenial with his natural talent dramatic composition might be, his temporary disgust soon passed away. In his Essay on Dramatic Poetry, he tells his patron, Dorset, that the writing of that treatise served as an amusement to him in the country, when he was driven from London by the plague; that he diverted himself with thinking on the theatres, as lovers do by ruminating on their absent mistresses. But whatever opinion he might entertain of his own tragic style, he was himself sensible that his talents did not lie in the line of comedy. “Those who decry my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit: reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend.” He retaliated on the criticisms levelled against his extravagances in tragedy, by an ostentatious display of defiance. We find in his Dedication of the Spanish Friar, “All that I can say for certain passages of my own Maximin and Almanzor is, that I knew they were bad enough to please when I wrote them.”
In 1671 he was publicly ridiculed on the stage in the Duke of Buckingham’s comedy of the Rehearsal. The character of Bayes was at first named Bilboa, and meant for Sir Robert Howard; but the representation of the piece in its original form was stopped by the plague in 1665: it was not reproduced till six years afterwards, when it appeared with alterations in ridicule of the pieces brought out in the interval, and with a correspondent change of the hero. Dryden affected to despise the satire. In the Dedication to his Translation of Juvenal, he says, “I answered not to the Rehearsal, because I knew the author sat to himself when he drew the picture, and was the very Bayes of his own farce.”
An Essay on Satire, said to be written jointly by Dryden and Lord Mulgrave, was first printed in 1679. This piece was handed about in manuscript, for some time before its publication. It contained reflections on the Duchess of Portsmouth and Lord Rochester. Anthony Wood says, that suspecting Dryden to be the author, the aggrieved parties hired three ruffians, who cudgelled the poet in Will’s coffee-house.
In 1680 a translation of Ovid’s Epistles into English came out: two of which, together with the Preface, were by Dryden. In the following year he published Absalom and Achitophel; a work of first-rate excellence as a political and controversial poem. Dr. Johnson ascribes to it “acrimony of censure, elegance of praise, artful delineation of character, variety and vigour of sentiments, happy turns of language, and pleasing harmony of numbers; and all these raised to such a height as can scarcely be found in any other English composition.” In the same year, the Medal, a satire, was given to the public. This piece was occasioned by the striking of a medal, on account of the indictment against Lord Shaftesbury being thrown out, and is a severe invective against that celebrated statesman.
In 1682 Dryden published ‘Religio Laici,’ in defence of revealed religion against Deists, Papists, and Presbyterians. Yet soon after the accession of James the Second, he became a Roman Catholic; and in the hope of promoting Popery, was employed on a translation of Maimbourg’s History of the League, on account of the parallel between the troubles of France and those of Great Britain. This extraordinary conversion exposed him to the ridicule of the wits, and especially to the gibes of the facetious and celebrated Tom Brown.
The Hind and Panther, a controversial poem in defence of the Romish church, appeared in 1687. The Hind represents the church of Rome, the Panther the church of England. The first part of the poem consists mostly of general characters and narration; which, says the author, “I have endeavoured to raise, and give it the majestic turn of heroic poetry. The second, being matter of dispute, and chiefly concerning church authority, I was obliged to make as plain and perspicuous as possibly I could, yet not wholly neglecting the numbers, though I had not frequent occasion for the magnificence of verse. The third, which has more of the nature of domestic conversation, is, or ought to be, more free and familiar than the two former. There are in it two episodes, or fables, which are interwoven with the main design; so that they are properly parts of it, though they are also distinct stories of themselves. In both of these I have made use of the commonplaces of satire, whether true or false, which are urged by the members of one church against another.” The absurdity of a fable exhibiting two beasts discoursing on theology, was ridiculed in the City Mouse and Country Mouse, a burlesque poem, the joint production of Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax, and Prior, who then put forth the first sample of his talents. Dryden is supposed to have been engaged for the translation of Varillas’s History of Heresies, but to have dropped the design, from a feeling of his own incompetency to theological controversy. Bishop Burnet, in his Reflections on the Ninth Book of the first Volume of M. Varillas’s History, classes together that work, and the Hind and Panther, as “such extraordinary things of their kind, that it will be but suitable to see the author of the worst poem become likewise the translator of the worst history that the age has produced.” Dr. Johnson supports the Bishop’s hostile criticism so far as to pronounce the scheme of the work injudicious and incommodious, and to censure the absurdity of making one beast advise another to rest her faith on a pope and council: but he allows it to be written “with great smoothness of metre, a wide extent of knowledge, and an abundant multiplicity of images; the controversy to be embellished with pointed sentences, diversified by illustrations, and enlivened by sallies of invective;” and a poem inlaid with such ornaments, however little worth the solid material might be, was but peevishly represented as “the worst that the age had produced.” Pope, a higher authority than the honest Bishop in such matters, considered it as the most correct specimen of Dryden’s versification. Malone has shown that Burnet was mistaken in attributing to our author the answer to Burnet’s Remarks on the History.
In 1688 Dryden published Britannia Rediviva, a poem on the birth of the Prince afterwards known by the title of the Pretender. The poem is to be noticed only for its extravagant and ill-timed adulation, which deservedly involved the author in the disgrace and fall of his party. But even had he not so identified himself with the ejected dynasty, his conversion to Popery disqualified him for holding his place. He was accordingly dispossessed of it; and the mortification of its being conferred on an object of his confirmed dislike, aggravated the pecuniary loss, which he could ill afford. Shadwell, his successor, was an old enemy, whom he had formerly stigmatized under the name of Og. In consequence of this appointment, Dryden again attacked him in a poem called MacFlecknoe; one of the severest as well as most witty satires in the English language. The poetry of the new laureat was so indifferent, as to give ample scope for ridicule:—
This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young
Was call’d to empire, and had governed long;