The concluding period of Dryden’s career, extending from the Revolution to his death in 1701, exhibits him as a Tory patriarch lingering in the midst of a Whig generation, and still, despite the change of dynasty, retaining his literary pre-eminence. For a while, of course, he was under a cloud; but after it had passed away he was at liberty to make his own terms with the public. The country could have no literature except what he and such as he chose to furnish. Locke, Sir William Temple, and others, indeed, were now in a position to bring forward speculations smothered during the previous reigns, and to scatter seeds that might spring up in new literary forms. Burnet, Tillotson, and others might represent Whiggism in the Church. But all the especially literary men whose services were available at the beginning of the new reign were men who, whatever might be their voluntary relations to the new order of things, had been more or less trained in the school of the Restoration, and accustomed to the supremacy of Dryden. The Earl of Rochester, the Earl of Roscommon, the Duke of Buckingham, Etherege, and poor Otway, were dead; but Shadwell, Settle, Lee, Crowne, Tate, Wycherley, the Earl of Dorset, Tom D’Urfey, and Sir Charles Sedley, were still alive. Shadwell, coarse and fat as ever, enjoyed the laureateship till his death in 1692, when Nahum Tate was appointed to succeed him. Settle had degenerated in the City showman. Lee, liberated from Bedlam, continued to write tragedies till April 1692, when he tumbled over a bulk going home drunk at night through Clare Market, and was killed or stifled among the snow. “Little starched Johnny Crowne” kept up the respectability of his character. Wycherley lived as a man of fashion about town, and wrote no more. Sedley and the Earl of Dorset were also idle; and Tom D’Urfey made small witticisms, and called them “pills to purge melancholy.” Among such men Dryden, so long as he cared to be seen among them, held necessarily his old place. Nor were there any of the younger men, as yet known, in whom the critics recognised, or who recognised in themselves, any title to renounce allegiance to the ex-laureate. Thomas Southerne had begun his prolific career as a dramatist in 1682, when Dryden furnished him with a prologue to his first play; but, though after the Revolution he made more money by his dramas than ever Dryden had made by his, he was ashamed to admit the fact to Dryden himself. Matthew Prior, twenty-four years of age at the Revolution, had made his first literary appearance before it, in no less important a character than that of one of Dryden’s political antagonists; but, though The Town and Country Mouse had been a decided hit, and Dryden himself was said to have winced under it, no one pretended that the author was anything more than a clever young man who had sat in Dryden’s company and turned his opportunities to account. Five years after the Revolution, Congreve produced his first comedy at the age of twenty-four; but it was Congreve’s greatest boast in after life that that comedy had won him the warm praises of Dryden, and laid the foundation of the extraordinary friendship which subsisted between them during Dryden’s last years, when they used to walk together and dine together as father and son. During these last years Dryden, had he been willing to see merit in any other comedies than those of his young friend Congreve, might have hailed his equal in Vanbrugh, and his superior in Farquhar, then beginning to write for the stage. Among their coevals, destined to some distinction, he might have marked Colley Cibber, Nicholas Rowe, and John Philips, the pleasing parodist of Milton. Of the epics of Blackmore he had quite enough, at least three of those performances having been given to the world before Dryden died. At the time of Dryden’s death his kinsman, Jonathan Swift, was thirty-three years of age; Richard Steele was thirty; Daniel Defoe was thirty; Addison was twenty-nine; Shaftesbury, the essayist, was twenty-nine; Bolingbroke was twenty-two; and Parnell, the poet, twenty-one. With these men a new literary movement was to take its origin; but they had hardly yet begun their work; and there was not one of them, Swift excepted, that would not, in the height of his subsequent fame, have been proud to acknowledge his obligations to Dryden. Alexander Pope, the next Englishman that was to take a place in general literature as high as that occupied by Dryden, had been born only in the year of the Revolution, and was consequently but a precocious boy of thirteen when Dryden left the scene. Virgilium tantum vidit, as he used himself to say.
Living, a hale patriarch, among these newer men, Dryden partly influenced them, and was partly influenced by them. On the one hand, it was from his chair in Will’s Coffee-house that those literary decrees were issued which still ruled the judgment of the town; and for a young author, on visiting Will’s, to receive a pinch from Dryden’s snuff-box was equivalent to his formal admission into that society of wits. On the other hand, the times were so changed and the men were so changed that Dryden, dictator though he was, had to yield in some points, and defend himself in others. His cousin Swift, whom he had offended by an unfavourable judgment given in private on some of his poems, was the only man who would have made a general attack upon his literary reputation; but the moral character of his writings was a subject on which adverse criticism was likely to be more general. At first, indeed, there was little perceptible improvement in the moral tone of the literature of the Revolution, as compared with that of the Restoration—the elder dramatists, such as Shadwell, still writing in the fashion to which they had been accustomed, and the younger ones, such as Congreve and Vanbrugh, deeming it a point of honour to be as immoral as their predecessors. In the course of a few years, however, what with the influence of a Whig court, what with other causes, a more delicate taste crept in, and people became ashamed of what their fathers had delighted in. Dryden lived to see the beginnings of this important change, and, with many expressions of regret for his own past delinquencies in this respect, to welcome the appearance of a purer literature.
Those of Dryden’s writings which were produced during the twelve years of his life subsequent to the Revolution constitute an important part of his literary remains, not merely in point of bulk, but also in respect of a certain general peculiarity of their character. They may be described as for the most part belonging to the department of pure, as distinct from that of controversial, literature. Dryden did not indeed wholly abandon satire and controversy after the Revolution; but his aim after that period seemed rather to be to produce such literature as would at once be acceptable to the public and earn for himself most money with the least trouble. Deprived of his laureateship, and so rendered almost entirely dependent on his pen at a time when age was creeping upon him and the expenses of his family were greater than ever, he was obliged to make considerations of economy paramount in his choice of work. As was natural, he fell back at first on the drama; and his five last plays, two of which are tragedies, one an opera, and two comedies, were all produced between 1689 and 1694. The profits of these dramas, however, were insufficient; and he was obliged to eke them out by all those devices of dedication to private noblemen, execution of literary commissions for elegiac poems, and the like, which then formed part of the professional author’s means of livelihood. Sums of 50l., 100l., and even, in one or two cases, 500l., were earned by Dryden in this disagreeable way from earls, squires, and clubs of gentlemen. His poem of Eleonora was a 500l. commission, executed for the Earl of Abingdon, who wanted a poem in memory of his deceased wife, and, without knowing anything of Dryden personally, applied to him to write it, just as now, in a similar case, a commission might be given to a popular sculptor for a post mortem statue. In spite of the utmost allowance for the custom of the time, no one knowing the circumstances, can read the poem now, without disgust; and it does show a certain lowness of mind in Dryden to have been able, under any pressure of necessity, to write for hire such extravagances as that poem contains respecting a person he had never seen. Far more honourable were Dryden’s earnings by work done for Jacob Tonson, the publisher. His dealings with Tonson had begun before the Revolution; but after the Revolution Tonson was his mainstay. First came several volumes of miscellanies, consisting of select poems, published and unpublished, with scraps of prose and translation. Then, catching at the hint furnished by the success of some of the scraps of translation from the Latin and Greek poets, Dryden and Tonson found it mutually advantageous to prosecute that vein. Juvenal and Persius were translated under Dryden’s care; and in 1697, after three years of labour, he gave to the world his completed translation of Virgil. Looking about for a task to succeed this, he undertook to furnish Tonson with so many thousands of lines of narrative verse, to be published under the title of Fables. Where the fables came from Tonson did not care, provided they would sell; and Dryden, with his rapid powers of versification, soon produced versions of some tales of Chaucer and Boccaccio which answered the purpose exceedingly well. They were printed in 1699. Of the other poems written by Dryden in his last years his Alexander’s Feast is the most celebrated. He continued his literary labours till within a few days of his death, which happened on the 1st of May, 1701.
When we inquire what it is that makes Dryden’s name so important as to entitle it to rank, as it seems to do, the fifth in the series of great English poets after Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, we find that it is nothing else than the fact, brought out in the preceding sketch, that, steadily and industriously, for a period of forty-two years, he kept in the front of the national literature, such as it then was. It is because he represents the entire literary development of the Restoration—it is because he fills up the whole interval between 1658 and 1701, thus connecting the age of Puritanism and Milton with the age of the Queen Anne wits—that we give him such a place in such a list. The reason is a chronological one, rather than one of strict comparison of personal merits. Though we place Dryden fifth in the list, after Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, it is not necessarily because we regard him as the co-equal of those men in genius; it is only because, passing onward in time, we find his the next name of very distinguished magnitude after theirs. Personally there is no one that would compare Dryden with Shakespeare or Milton; and there are not many now that would compare him with Chaucer or Spenser. On the whole, if the estimate is one of general intellectual strength, he takes rank only with the first of the second class, as with the Jonsons, the Fletchers, and others of the Elizabethan age; while, if the estimate have regard to genuine poetic or imaginative power, he sinks below even these. Yet, if historical reasons only are regarded, Dryden has perhaps a better right to his place in the list than any of the others. At least as strictly as Chaucer is the representative of the English literature of the latter half of the fourteenth century, far more strictly than Spenser and Shakespeare are the representatives of the literature of their times, and in a more broad and obvious manner than Milton is the literary representative of the Commonwealth, Dryden represents the literary activity of the reigns of Charles II. and James II., and of the greater part of that of William III. Davenant, Butler, Waller, Etherege, Otway, Wycherley, Southerne, Prior, and Congreve, are names leading us over the same period, and illustrating perhaps more exquisitely than Dryden some of its individual characteristics; but for a solid representative of the period as a whole, resuming in himself all its more prominent characteristics in one substantial aggregate, we are obliged to take Dryden. Twelve years of his literary life he laboured as a strong junior among the Davenants, the Butlers, and the Wallers, qualifying himself to set them aside; eighteen years more were spent in acknowledged lordship over the Ethereges, Otways, and Wycherleys, who occupied the middle of the period; and during the twelve concluding years he was a patriarch among the Southernes, and Priors, and Congreves, in whose lives the period wove itself into the next.
And yet, personally as well as historically, Dryden is a man of no mean importance. Not only is he the largest figure in one era of our literature; he is a very considerable figure also in our literature as a whole. To begin with the most obvious, but at the same time not the least noteworthy, of his claims, the quantity of his contributions to our literature was large. He was a various and voluminous writer. In Scott’s collected edition of his works they fill seventeen octavo volumes. About seven of these volumes consist of dramas, with accompanying prefaces and dedications, the number of dramas being in all twenty-eight. Two volumes more embrace the polemical poems, the satires, and the poems of contemporary historical allusion, written chiefly between 1681 and 1683. One volume is filled with odes, songs, and lyrical pieces, written at various times. The Fables, or Metrical Tales, redacted in his old age from Chaucer and Boccaccio, occupy a volume and a half. Three volumes and a half are devoted to the translations from the classic poets, including the Translation of Virgil. The remaining two volumes consist of miscellaneous prologues, epilogues, and witty pieces of verse, and of miscellaneous prose-writings, original and translated, including the critical Essay on Dramatic Poetry. Considered as a whole, the matter of the seventeen volumes is a goodly contribution from one man as respects both extent and variety. Spread over forty-two years, it does not argue that excessive industry which Scott, of all men in the world, has found in it; but it fairly entitles Dryden to take his place among those writers who deserve regard for the quantity of their writings, in addition to whatever regard they may be entitled to on the score, of quality. And it is a fact worth noting, and remarked by Scott more than once, that most writers who have taken a high place in literature have been voluminous—have not only written well, but also written much. Moreover there are two ways of writing much. One may write much and variously, or one may write much all of one kind. Dryden was various as well as voluminous.
Of all that Dryden wrote, however, there is but a comparatively small portion that has won for itself a permanent place in our literature; and in this he differs from other writers that have been equally voluminous. It is indeed a significant fact about Dryden that the proportion of that part of his matter which survives, or deserves to survive, to that part which was squandered away on the age it was first written for, and there ended, is unusually small. In Shakespeare there is very little that is felt to be of such inferior quality as not to be worth reading in due time and place. In Milton there is, if we consider only his poetry, still less. All Chaucer, almost, is felt to be worth preservation by those who like Chaucer; all Wordsworth, almost, by those who like Wordsworth. But, except for library purposes, there is no admirer of Dryden that would care to save more than a small select portion of what he wrote. His satires and polemical poems; one or two of his odes; his Translation of Virgil; his fables; one of his comedies, and one of his tragedies, by way of specimen of his dramatic powers; a complete set of his prologues, for the sake of their allusions to contemporary manners and humours; and a few pieces of his prose, to show his style of criticism:—these would together form a collection not much more than a fourth part of the whole, and which would require to be yet farther winnowed, were the purpose to leave only what is sterling and in Dryden’s best manner. Mr. Bell’s edition, which comprise in three volumes all Dryden’s original non-dramatic poetry, and the best collection of his prologues and epilogues yet made, is itself a surfeit of matter. It is such an edition of Dryden as ought to be included in a series of the English poets intended to be complete; but even in it there is more of dross than of ore.
What is the reason of this? How is it that in Dryden the proportion of what is now rubbish to what is still precious as a literary possession is so much greater than in most other writers of great celebrity? There are two reasons for it. The first is, that originally, and in its own nature, much of the matter that Dryden put forth was not of a kind for which his genius was fitted. Whatever his own imagination constructed on the large scale was mean and conventional. Wherever, as in his translations of Virgil and his imitations of Chaucer and Boccaccio, he employed his powers of language and verse in refurbishing matter invented by others, the poetical substance of his writings is valuable; but the sheer produce of his own imagination, as in his dramas, is in general such stuff as nature disowns and no creature can take pleasure in. There is no fine power of dramatic story, no exquisite invention of character or circumstance, no truth to nature in ideal landscape: at the utmost, there is conventional dramatic situation, with an occasional flash of splendid imagery such as may be struck out in the heat of heroic declamation. Thus—
“I am as free as Nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.”
Dryden’s natural powers, as all his critics have remarked, lay not so much in the imaginative as in the didactic, the declamatory, and the ratiocinative. What Johnson claims for him, and what seems to have been claimed for him in his own lifetime, was the credit of being one of the best reasoners in verse that ever wrote. Lord Macaulay means very much the same thing when he calls Dryden a great “critical poet,” and the founder of the “critical school of English poetry.” Probably Milton meant something of the kind when he said that Dryden was a rhymer, but no poet. It was in declamatory and didactic rhyme, with all that could consist with it, that Dryden excelled. It was in the metrical utterance of weighty sentences, in the metrical conduct of an argument, in vehement satirical invective, and in such passages of lyric passion as depended for their effect on rolling grandeur of sound, that he was pre-eminently great. Even his imagination worked more powerfully, and his perceptions of physical circumstance became keener and truer, under the influence of polemical rage, the pursuit of terse maxim, or the passion for sonorous declamation. Thus—
“And every shekel which he can receive
Shall cost a limb of his prerogative.”