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.
John Locke.
Another man who grew up in these times in England, and who from his study-window at Oxford (where he had been Lecturer on Rhetoric) saw the Great Fire of London in the shape of a vast, yellow, sulphurous-looking cloud, of portentous aspect, rolling toward the zenith, and covering half the sky, was Mr. John Locke.[93]