The Three Devils: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's; With Other Essays

by David Masson

“Well sir, ’tis granted: I said Dryden’s rhymes
Were stolen, unequal—nay, dull, many times.
What foolish patron is there found of his
So blindly partial to deny me this?
But that his plays, embroidered up and down
With wit and learning, justly pleased the town,
In the same paper I as freely own.
Yet, having this allowed, the heavy mass
That stuffs up his loose volumes must not pass.
******
But, to be just, ’twill to his praise be found
His excellencies more than faults abound;
Nor dare I from his sacred temples tear
The laurel which he best deserves to wear.
******
And may I not have leave impartially
To search and censure Dryden’s works, and try
If these gross faults his choice pen doth commit
Proceed from want of judgment or of wit,
Or if his lumpish fancy doth refuse
Spirit and grace to his loose slattern muse?”

We have no doubt the opinion thus expressed by the scapegrace young earl was very general. Dryden’s own prose disquisitions on the principles of poetry may have helped to diffuse many of those notions of genuine poetical merit by which he was now tried. But, undoubtedly, what most of all tended to expose Dryden’s reputation to the perils of criticism was the increasing number of his dramatic competitors and the evident ability of some of them. True, most of those competitors were Dryden’s personal friends, and some of the younger of them, as Lee, Shadwell, Crowne, and Tate, were in the habit of coming to him for prologues and epilogues, with which to increase the attractions of their plays. On more than one occasion, too, Dryden clubbed with Lee or Shadwell in the composition of a dramatic piece. But, though thus on a friendly footing with most of his contemporary dramatists, and almost in a fatherly relation to some of them, Dryden found his popularity not the less affected by their competition. In the department of prose comedy, Etherege, whose last and best comedy, Sir Fopling Flutter, was produced in 1676, and Wycherley, whose four celebrated comedies were all produced between 1672 and 1677, had introduced a style compared with which Dryden’s best comic attempts were but heavy horse-play. Even the hulking Shadwell, who dashed off his comedies as fast as he could write, had a vein of coarse natural humour which Dryden lacked. It was in vain that Dryden tried to keep his pre-eminence against these rivals by increased strength of language, increased intricacy of plot, and an increased use of those indecencies upon which they all relied so much in their efforts to please. One comedy in which Dryden, trusting too confidently to this last element of success, pushed grossness to the utmost conceivable limit, was hissed off the stage. In tragedy, it is true, his position was more firm. But even in this department some niches were cut in the body of his fame. His friend Nat. Lee had produced one or two tragedies displaying a tenderness and a wild force of passion to which Dryden’s more masculine genius could not pretend; Crowne had also done one or two things of a superior character; and, though it was not till 1682 that Otway produced his Venice Preserved, he had already given evidence of his mastery of dramatic pathos. All this Dryden might have seen without allowing himself to be much disturbed, conscious as he must have been that in general strength he was still superior to all about him, however they might rival him in particulars. The deliberate resolution, however, of Rochester and some other aristocratic leaders of the fashion to make good their criticisms on his writings, by setting up first one and then another of the dramatists of the day as patterns of a higher style of art than his, provoked him out of his composure. To show what he could do, if called upon to defend his rights against pretenders, he made a terrible example of one poor wretch, who had been puffed for the moment into undue popularity. This unfortunate was Elkanah Settle, and the occasion of the attack was a heroic tragedy written by Settle, acted with great success both on the stage and at Whitehall, and published with illustrative woodcuts. On this performance Dryden made a most merciless onslaught in a prose-criticism prefixed to his next published play, tearing Settle’s metaphors and grammar to pieces. Settle replied with some spirit, but little effect, and was, in fact, “settled” for ever. Rochester next patronized Crowne and Otway for a time, but soon gave them up, and contented himself with assailing Dryden more directly in such lampoons as we have quoted. In the year 1679, however, suspecting Dryden to have had a share in the authorship of a poem, then circulating in manuscript, in which certain liberties were taken with his name, he caused him to be way-laid and beaten as he was going home one evening through Rose-alley to his house in Gerard-street. The poem, entitled An Essay on Satire, is usually printed among Dryden’s works; but it remains uncertain whether Dryden was really the author.

It was fortunate for Dryden and for English literature that, just about this time, when he was beginning to be regarded as a veteran among the dramatists, whose farther services in that department the town could afford to spare, circumstances led him, almost without any wish of his own, into a new path of literature. He was now arrived at the ripe age of fifty years, and, if an inventory had been made of his writings, they would have been found to consist of twenty-one dramas, with a series of critical prose-essays for the most part bound up with these dramas, but nothing in the nature of non-dramatic poetry, except a few occasional pieces, of which the Annus Mirabilis was still the chief. Had a discerning critic examined those works with a view to discover in what peculiar vein of verse Dryden, if he abandoned the drama, might still do justice to his powers, he would certainly have selected the vein of reflective satire. Of the most nervous and emphatic lines that could have been quoted from his plays a large proportion would have been found to consist of what may be called maxim metrically expressed; while in his dramatic prologues and epilogues, which were always thought among the happiest efforts of his pen, the excellence would have been found to consist in very much the same power of direct didactic declamation applied satirically to the humours, manners, and opinions of the day. Whether any critic, observing all this, would have been bold enough to advise Dryden to take the hint, and quit the drama for satirical, controversial, and didactic poetry, we need not inquire. Circumstances compelled what advice might have failed to bring about. After some twenty years of political stagnation, or rather of political confusion, relieved only by the occasional cabals of leading statesmen, and by rumours of Catholic and Protestant plots, the old Puritan feeling and the general spirit of civil liberty which the Restoration had but pent up within the vitals of England broke forth in a regular and organized form as modern English Whiggism. The controversy had many ramifications; but its immediate phase at that moment was an antagonism of two parties on the question of the succession to the crown after Charles should die—the Tories and Catholics maintaining the rights of the Duke of York as the legal heir, and the Whigs and Protestants rallying, for want of a better man, round Charles’s illegitimate son, the handsome and popular Duke of Monmouth, then a puppet in the hands of Shaftesbury, the recognised leader of the Opposition. Charles himself was forced by reasons of state to take part with his brother, and to frown on Monmouth; but this did not prevent the lords and wits of the time from distributing themselves pretty equally between the two parties, and fighting out the dispute with all the weapons of intrigue and ridicule. Shadwell, Settle, and some other minor poets, lent their pens to the Whigs, and wrote squibs and satires in the Whig service. Lee, Otway, Tate, and others, worked for the Court party. Dryden, as laureate and Tory, had but one course to take. He plunged into the controversy with the whole force of his genius; and in November, 1681, when the nation was waiting for the trial of Shaftesbury, then a prisoner in the Tower, he published his satire of Absalom and Achitophel, in which, under the thin veil of a story of Absalom’s rebellion against his father David, the existing political state of England was represented from the Tory point of view. Among the characters portrayed in it Dryden had the satisfaction of introducing his old critic, the Duke of Buckingham, upon whom he now took ample revenge.

The satire of Absalom and Achitophel, than which nothing finer of the kind had ever appeared in England, and which indeed surpassed all that could have been expected even from Dryden at that time, was the first of a series of polemical or satirical poems the composition of which occupied the last eight years of his laureateship. The Medal, a Satire against Sedition, appeared in March, 1682, as the poet’s comment on the popular enthusiasm occasioned by the acquittal of Shaftesbury; Mac Flecknoe, in which Shadwell, as poet-in-chief of the Whigs, received a thrashing all to himself, was published in October in the same year; and, a month later, there appeared the so-called Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel, written by Nahum Tate, under Dryden’s superintendence, and with interpolations from Dryden’s pen. In the same avowed character, as literary champion of the government and the party of the Duke of York, Dryden continued to labour during the remainder of the reign of Charles. His Religio Laici, indeed, produced early in 1683, and forming a metrical statement of the grounds and extent of his own attachment to the Church of England, can hardly have been destined for immediate political service. But the solitary play which he wrote about this period—a tragedy called The Duke of Guise—was certainly intended for political effect, as was also a translation from the French of a work on the history of French Calvinism.

How ill-requited Dryden was for these services appears but too clearly from evidence proving that, at this time, he was in great pecuniary difficulties. At the time when the king’s cast-off mistresses were receiving pensions of 10,000l. a-year, and when 130,000l. or more was squandered every year on secret court-purposes, Dryden’s salary as laureate remained unpaid for four years; and when, in consequence of his repeated solicitations, an order for part-payment of the arrears was at last issued in May 1684, it was for the miserable pittance of one quarter’s salary, due at midsummer 1680, leaving fifteen quarters, or 750l. still in arrears. It appears, however, from a document published for the first time by Mr. Bell, that an additional pension of 100l. a-year was at this time conferred on Dryden—that pension to date retrospectively from 1680, and the arrears to be paid, as convenient, along with the larger arrears of salary. How far Dryden benefited by this nominal increase of his emoluments from government, or whether any further portion of the arrears was paid up while Charles continued on the throne, can hardly be ascertained. Charles died in February, 1684-5, and Dryden, as in duty bound, wrote his funeral panegyric. In this Pindaric, which is entitled Threnodia Augustalis, the poet seems to hint, as delicately as the occasion would permit, at the limited extent of his pecuniary obligations to the deceased monarch.

“As, when the new-born phœnix takes his way
His rich paternal regions to survey,
Of airy choristers a numerous train
Attends his wondrous progress o’er the plain,
So, rising from his father’s urn,
So glorious did our Charles return.
The officious muses came along—
A gay harmonious choir, like angels ever young;
The muse that mourns him now his happy triumph sung.
Even they could thrive in his auspicious reign;
And such a plenteous crop they bore
Of purest and well-winnowed grain
As Britain never knew before:
Though little was their hire, and light their gain,
Yet somewhat to their share he threw.
Fed from his hand, they sung and flew,
Like birds of Paradise, that lived on morning dew.
Oh, never let their lays his name forget:
The pension of a prince’s praise is great.”

If there was any literary man in whose favour James II., on his accession, might have been expected to relax his parsimonious habits, it was Dryden. The poet had praised him and made a hero of him for twenty years, and had during the last four years been working for him incessantly. In acknowledgment of these services, James could not do otherwise than continue him in the laureateship; but this was all that he seemed inclined to do. In the new patent issued for the purpose, not only was there no renewal of the deceased king’s private grant of 100l. a-year, but even the annual butt of sherry, hitherto forming part of the laureate’s allowance, was discontinued, and the salary limited to the precise money payment of 200l. a-year. If, as is probable, the salary was now more punctually paid than it had been under Charles, the reduction may have been of less consequence. In March 1685-6, however, James opened his purse, and, by fresh letters patent, conferred on Dryden a permanent additional salary of 100l. a-year, thus raising the annual income of the laureateship to 300l. The explanation of this unusual piece of liberality on the part of James has been generally supposed to lie in the fact that, in the course of the preceding year, Dryden had proved the thorough and unstinted character of his loyalty by declaring himself a convert to the king’s religion. That Dryden’s passing over to the Catholic church was contemporaneous with the increase of his pension is a fact; but what may have been the exact relation between the two events is a question which one ought to be cautious in answering. Lord Macaulay’s view of the case is harsh enough. “Finding,” he says, “that, if he continued to call himself a Protestant, his services would be overlooked, he declared himself a Papist. The king’s parsimony instantly relaxed Dryden was gratified with a pension of one hundred pounds a-year, and was employed to defend his new religion both in prose and verse.” Sir Walter Scott’s view is more charitable, and, we believe, more just. He regards Dryden’s conversion as having been, in the main, honest to the extent professed by himself, though his situation and expectations may have co-operated to effect it. In support of this view Mr. Bell points out the fact that the pension granted by James was, after all, only a renewal of a pension granted by Charles, and which, not being secured by letters patent, had lapsed on that king’s decease. Dryden, it is also to be remarked, remained sufficiently staunch to his new faith during the rest of his life, and seems even to have felt a kind of comfort in it. Probably, therefore, the true state of the case is that conformity to the Catholic religion, at the time when Dryden embraced it, was the least troublesome mode of systematizing for his own mind a number of diverse speculations, personal and political, that were then perplexing him, and that, afterwards, in consequence of the very obloquy which his change of religion drew upon him from all quarters, he hugged his new creed more closely, so as to coil round him, for the first time in his life, a few threads of private theological conviction. This is not very different from the notion entertained by Sir Walter Scott, who argues that Dryden’s conversion was not, except in outward profession, a change from Protestant to Catholic belief, but rather, like that of Gibbon, a choice of Catholicism as the most convenient resting-place for a mind tired of Pyrrhonism, and disposed to cut short the process of emancipation from it by taking a decisive step at once.

At all events, Dryden showed sufficient polemical energy in the service of the religion which he had adopted. He became James’s literary factotum, the defender in prose and in verse of the worst measures of his rule; and he was ready to do battle with Stillingfleet, Burnet, or anyone else that dared to use a pen on the other side. As if to make the highest display of his powers as a versifier at a time when his character as a man was lowest, he published in 1687 his controversial allegory of The Hind and the Panther, by far the largest and most elaborate of his original poems. In this poem, in which the various churches and sects of the day figure as beasts—the Church of Rome as a “milk-white hind,” innocent and unchanged; the Church of England as a “panther,” spotted, but still beautiful; Presbyterianism as a haggard ugly “wolf;” Independency as the “bloody bear;” the Baptists as the “bristled boar;” the Unitarians as the “false fox;” the Freethinkers as the “buffoon ape;” and the Quakers as the timid “hare”—Dryden showed that, whatever his new faith had done for him, it had not changed his genius for satire. In fact, precisely as during James’s reign Dryden appears personally as a solitary giant, warring on the wrong side, so this poem remains as the sole literary work of any excellence in which the wretched spirit of that reign is fully represented. Dryden himself, as if he had thrown all his force into it, wrote little else in verse till the year 1688, when, on the occasion of the birth of James’s son, afterwards the Pretender, he made himself the spokesman of the exulting Catholics, and published his Britannia Rediviva.

“See how the venerable infant lies
In early pomp; how through the mother’s eyes
The father’s soul, with an undaunted view,
Looks out, and takes our homage as his due.
See on his future subjects how he smiles,
Nor meanly flatters, nor with craft beguiles;
But with an open face, as on his throne,
Assures our birthrights, and secures his own.”

Within a few months after these lines were written, the father, the mother, and the baby, were out of England, Dutch William was king, and the Whigs had it all to themselves. Dryden, of course, had to give up the laureateship; and, as William had but a small choice of poets, Shadwell was put in his place.