[482]. Buch der Poet., ed. cit., p. 29.

[483]. I must here repeat, with additional emphasis, the caution and apology which I put in as to Spanish. I do not know anything of this language. I have been content to apply to Low Dutch the precept of a great High Dutchman, Entbehren sollst du. But for our purpose I believe it will be generally admitted that the renunciation is not fatal, important Dutch critics having, almost to a man, written in Latin.

CHAPTER IV.
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

DEAD WATER IN ENGLISH CRITICISM—MILTON—COWLEY—THE PREFATORY MATTER OF ‘GONDIBERT’—THE “HEROIC POEM”—DAVENANT’S ‘EXAMEN’—HOBBES’S ANSWER—DRYDEN—HIS ADVANTAGES—THE EARLY PREFACES—THE ‘ESSAY OF DRAMATIC POESY’—ITS SETTING AND OVERTURE—CRITES FOR THE ANCIENTS—EUGENIUS FOR THE “LAST AGE”—LISIDEIUS FOR THE FRENCH—DRYDEN FOR ENGLAND AND LIBERTY—‘CODA’ ON RHYMED PLAYS, AND CONCLUSION—CONSPICUOUS MERITS OF THE PIECE—THE MIDDLE PREFACES—THE ‘ESSAY ON SATIRE’ AND THE ‘DEDICATION OF THE ÆNEIS’—THE PARALLEL OF POETRY AND PAINTING—THE ‘PREFACE TO THE FABLES’—DRYDEN’S GENERAL CRITICAL POSITION—HIS SPECIAL CRITICAL METHOD—DRYDEN AND BOILEAU—RYMER—THE ‘PREFACE TO RAPIN’—THE ‘TRAGEDIES OF THE LAST AGE’—THE ‘SHORT VIEW OF TRAGEDY’—THE RULE OF TOM THE SECOND—SPRAT—EDWARD PHILLIPS—HIS ‘THEATRUM POETARUM’—WINSTANLEY’S ‘LIVES’—LANGBAINE’S ‘DRAMATIC POETS’—TEMPLE—BENTLEY—COLLIER’S ‘SHORT VIEW’—SIR T. P. BLOUNT—PERIODICALS: THE ‘ATHENIAN MERCURY,’ ETC.

The middle third, if not the whole first half, of the seventeenth century in England was too much occupied with civil and religious broils to devote attention to such a subject literary criticism. Dead water in English Criticism. Between the probable date of Jonson’s Timber (1625-37) and the certain one of Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) we have practically nothing substantive save the interesting prefatory matter to Gondibert (1650). Milton Milton, the greatest man of letters wholly of the time, must indeed during this time have conceived, or at least matured, that cross-grained prejudice against rhyme, which is more surprising in him than even in Campion, and which was itself even more open to Daniel’s strictures. For not only is Milton himself in his own practice a greater and more triumphant vindicator of rhyme than Campion, but Daniel’s strongest and soundest argument, “Why condemn this thing in order to establish that?” applies far more strongly to blank verse than to Campion’s artificial metres. Custom and Nature, those greater Cæsars to whom Daniel so triumphantly appealed, had already settled it, as they were to confirm it later, that rhymed and unrhymed verse, each obeying the natural evolution of English prosody, should be the twin horses to draw its car. But Milton never developed his antipathy to rhyme (which in all probability arose, mainly if not merely, from the fact that nearly all the most exquisite rhymers of his time, except himself, were Cavaliers) in any critical fashion, contenting himself with occasional flings and obiter dicta.[[484]]

Another poet of the time, Cowley, ought to have given us criticism of real importance. Cowley. He had the paramount, if not exclusive, literary interests which are necessary to a great critic; he had the knowledge; and he was perhaps the first man in England to possess the best kind of critical style—lighter than Daniel’s, and less pregnant, involved, and scholastic than Jonson’s—the style of well-bred conversational argument.[[485]] But he was a little bitten with the scientific as opposed to the literary mania, and, in his own person, he was perhaps too much of a Janus as regards literary tastes to be able to give—or indeed to take—a clear and single view. There were, as in Lope, two poets in Cowley, and each of these was wont to get in the way of the other. The one was a “metaphysical” of the high flight, who at least would, if he could, have been as intensely fantastic as Donne, and as gracefully fantastic as Suckling. The other was a classical, “sensible,” couplet-poet, who was working out Ben Jonson’s theories with even less admixture of Romanticism than that which tinged Ben Jonson’s practice. The entanglement of these was sufficiently detrimental to his poetry; but it would have been absolutely fatal to his criticism, which must either have perpetually contradicted itself or else have wandered in a maze, perplexing as perplexed.

It is with Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert, in the form of a Letter to Hobbes, and with Hobbes’s answer to it,[[486]] that England strikes once more into the main path of European critical development. The Prefatory matter of Gondibert. And it is of capital importance that, both the writers being exiled royalists, these documents were written at Paris in the year 1650. There was much interest there in English affairs, while, as we have seen, the habit of literary discussion had, for more than a generation, become ingrained in Frenchmen. When Davenant set himself to write Gondibert, he was doing exactly what Chapelain and Desmarets and the rest were doing; and when he and his greater friend exchanged their epistles, they were doing exactly what all the French literary world had been doing, not merely, as is commonly thought, from the time of the Cid dispute, but from one much earlier. Taking all things together, it was natural that the subject should be the Heroic Poem, which had been a favourite of Italian and French critics for some seventy years and more, but had been little touched in England, though the conclusion of Ben’s Discoveries shapes a course for it. Hints have been given before in this History that in the opinion of its writer the “Heroic Poem” had much in common with that entity which was long without a literary name, but which an admirable humourist has now enabled us to describe scientifically as a Boojum[[487]]—that is to say, it was not only something undiscoverable, but something which had a malign and, indeed, destructive influence on those who thought they had discovered it.

The “Heroic Poem” was to be neither pure Romance nor pure Epic, but a sort of medley between the two. The “Heroic Poem.” Or, rather, it was to be a thing of shreds and patches, strictly epic (or at least Virgilian-epical) in theory and rules, but borrowing from Romance whatever it could, as our Elizabethans would say, “convey cleanly” enough in the way of additional attractions. The shreds and patches, too, were not purely poetical: they were not taken simply from Homer and Virgil, nor even from Horace, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, and the rest down to that Musæus whom Scaliger thought so superior to the Chian. A great deal of ancient critical dictum was brought in, and as Aristotle and Horace had said less about Epic than about Drama, they were to be supplemented from others, especially by that treacherous and somewhat obscure passage of Petronius which has been commented on in its place. In fact the whole of this Heroic-Poem matter is a sort of satire on criticism by Kinds, in its attempt—and failure—to discover a kind. If the founders of the novel (who, indeed, in some notable cases were by no means free from the obsession) had persisted in constructing it on the lines of the Heroic Poem, it would indeed have been all up with Fiction. To read Tasso (who, as we might expect, is not the least reasonable) and others, from Ronsard and Du Bellay down to Desmarets and Le Bossu (both of whom, let it be remembered, wrote some time after Davenant)—to find even Dryden a Martha of “machinery,” and comforting himself with a bright new idea of getting the deorum ministeria out of the limited intelligences of angels, so that you might not know at once which side was going to win, as you do in the ordinary Christian Epic[[488]]—is curious. Nay, it is more—humorous, with that touch of “the pity of it” which humour nearly always has.

The ingenious knight, in explaining his performance and its principles to his friend the philosopher, takes a very high tone. Homer, Virgil, Lucan, and Statius are passed successively in review, and receive each his appropriate compliment, put with dignified reserves, especially in the two latter cases. Davenant’s Examen. Only two moderns are admitted—Tasso of the Italians—“for I will yield to their opinion who permit not Ariosto—no, not Du Bartas—in this eminent rank of the heroicks, rather than to make way by their admission for Dante, Marino, and others”[[489]]—and Spenser of our own men. But Tasso is roundly taken to task for his fairy-tale element, Spenser for his allegory and his archaism. And the faults of all from Homer downwards are charged against “the natural humour of imitation.”[[490]]

After a by no means despicable, but somewhat rhapsodical, digression on this—it is to be observed that Davenant uses “Imitation” in the frank modern sense—and an apology for it as “the dangerous fit of a hot writer,” he gives reasons, partly no doubt drawn from Italian and French sources, why he has made his subject (1) Christian, (2) antique but not historical, (3) foreign, (4) courtly and martial, (5) displaying the distempers of love and ambition. Then he expounds in turn his arrangement of five books (to correspond to acts), with cantos to answer to scenes,[[491]] his arguments, his quatrain-stanza. He asserts that “the substance is wit,” and discusses that matter at some length, and with a noteworthy hit at conceits, which reminds us that Davenant was à cheval between the First and the Second Caroline period. He indulges in not unpardonable loquacity about his poetic aspirations, with a fresh glance at the great poets of old, and brings in thereby, with some ingenuity but at too great length as a finale, the old prefatory matter of the Arts Poetic about the importance and dignity of poetry in the world, concluding exactly where most begin, with Plato and that “divine anger” of his which some have turned to the “unjust scandal of Poesie.” And so a pleasant echo of Sir Philip blends agreeably with the more prosaic tone, and time, and temper of Sir William.