Hobbes, as we should expect, is much briefer; and those bronze sentences of his (though he had not at this time quite brought them to their full ring and perfect circumscription) give no uncertain sound. Hobbes’s Answer. He is not, he says, a poet (which is true), and when he assigns to Gondibert “various experience, ready memory, clear judgment, swift and well-governed fancy,” it is obvious enough that all these might be there and yet poetry be absent. He divides the kinds of poetry “swiftly” enough, and ranges himself with his customary decision against those who “take for poesy whatsoever is writ in verse,” cutting out not merely didactic poetry, but sonnets, epigrams, and eclogues, and laying it down that “the subject of a poem is the manners of men.” “They that give entrance to fictions writ in prose err not so much,” but they err. And accordingly he begins the discussion of verse. He does not quarrel with Davenant, as Vida would have done, for deliberately eschewing Invocation; and rapidly comments on the plot, characters, description, &c., of the poem. On the head of diction he would not be Hobbes if he could or did spare a sneer at words of no sense, words “contunded by the schools,” and so forth. And since he is Hobbes, there is piquancy in finding him at one with Walton in the objection to “strong lines.” He is rather striking on a subject which has been much dwelt on of late, the blunting of poetic phrase by use. And when he says that he “never yet saw poem that had so much shape of art, health of morality, and vigour of beauty and expression” as Gondibert—when, in the odd timorousness he had caught from Bacon, he adds, that it is only the perishableness of the modern tongues which will prevent it from lasting as long as the Æneid or the Iliad—let us remember that, though criticism is one thing and compliment another, they sometimes live in a rather illicit contubernium. At any rate, there is criticism, and real criticism, in the two pieces; and they are about the first substantial documents of it in English of which as much can be said for many years.[[492]]
Thus, although two of these four were of the greatest of our writers, the third an interesting failure of greatness, and the fourth far from contemptible, they were in all cases prevented, by this or that disqualification, from doing much in criticism.
Dryden, on the contrary, started with every advantage, except those of a body of English criticism behind him, and of a thorough knowledge of the whole of English literature. Dryden. He was a poet nearly, if not quite, of the first class: and though his poetry had a strong Romantic spirit in virtue of its perennial quality, it took the form and pressure of the time so thoroughly and so kindly that there was no internal conflict. Further, he had what by no means all poets of the first class have had, a strong, clear, common-sense judgment, and a very remarkable faculty of arguing the point. And, finally, if he had few predecessors in English, and perhaps did not know much of those few except of Jonson, he was fairly, if not exactly as a scholar, acquainted with the ancients, and he had profited, and was to profit, by the best doctrine of the moderns.
His advantages.
Moreover, from a certain not unimportant point of view, he occupies a position which is only shared in the history of criticism by Dante and (in some estimations, though not in all) by Goethe,—the position of the greatest man of letters in his own country, if not also in Europe, who is at the same time the greatest critic, and who is favoured by Fortune with a concentration of advantages as to time and circumstance. His critical excellence has indeed never been wholly overlooked, and, except by the unjuster partisanship of the early Romantic movement in England, generally admitted with cheerfulness.[[493]] The want, however, of that synoptic study of the subject, which it is the humble purpose of this book to facilitate, has too often prevented his full pre-eminence from being recognised. It may even be said that it is in criticism that Dryden best shows that original faculty which has often been denied him elsewhere. He borrows, indeed, as freely as everywhere: he copies, with a half ludicrous deference, the stock opinions of the critics and the criticasters in vogue; he gives us pages on pages of their pedantic trivialities instead of his own shrewd and racy judgments. But, despite of all this, there is in him (and with good luck we may perhaps not fail to disengage it) a vein and style in “judging of Authours” which goes straight back to Longinus, if it is not even independent of that great ancestry.[[494]]
This vein is perceptible[[495]] even in the slight critical essays which precede the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, though of course it is much more evident in the Essay itself. The Early Prefaces. In the preface to the Rival Ladies (written, not indeed when Dryden was a very young man, but when, except for Juvenilia, he had produced extremely little) we find his critical path clearly traced, and still more in the three years later Preface to Annus Mirabilis. The principles of this path-making are as follows: Dryden takes—without perhaps a very laborious study of them, but, as has been said already, with an almost touching docility in appearance—the current theories and verdicts of the French, Italian (and Spanish?) critics whom we should by this time have sufficiently surveyed. He does not—he never did to the date of the glorious Preface to the Fables itself—dispute the general doctrines of the sages from Aristotle downwards. But (and this is where the Longinian resemblance comes in) he never can help considering the individual works of literature almost without regard to these principles, and simply on the broad, the sound, the unshakable ground of the impression they make on him. Secondly (and this is where the resemblance to Dante comes in), he is perfectly well aware that questions of diction, metre, and the like are not mere catchpenny or claptrap afterthoughts, as ancient criticism was too apt to think them, but at the root of the pleasure which literature gives. Thirdly (and this is where, though Aristotle did not deny the fact, the whole criticism of antiquity, except that of Longinus, and most of that of modern times, swerves timorously from the truth), he knows that this delight, this transport, counts first as a criterion. Literature in general, poetry in particular, should, of course, instruct: but it must delight.[[496]]
The “blundering, half-witted people,” as in one of his rare bursts of not absolutely cool contempt[[497]] he calls his own critics, who charged him with plagiarising from foreign authors, entirely missed these differences, which distinguish him from every foreign critic of his day, and of most days for long afterwards. He may quote—partly out of that genuine humility and generosity combined which make his literary character so agreeable; partly from an innocent parade of learning. But he never pays for what he borrows the slavish rent, or royalty, of surrendering his actual and private judgment.
In the Preface to the Rival Ladies the poet-critic takes (as indeed he afterwards himself fully acknowledged) a wrong line—the defence of what he calls “verse” (that is to say, rhymed heroic couplets, not blank verse) for play-writing. This was his mistress of the time; he rejoiced in her caresses, he wore her colours, he fought for her beauty—the enjoyment authorising the argument. But as he has nothing to say that has not been better said in the Essay, we may postpone the consideration of this. There is one of the slips of fact which can be readily excused to (and by) all but bad critics,—and which bad critics are chiefly bound to avoid, because accuracy of fact is their only title to existence—in his mention of “Queen” Gorboduc and his addition that the dialogue in that play is rhymed; there is an interesting sigh for an Academy (Dryden, let it be remembered, was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society); and there is the well-known and very amiable, though rather dangerous, delusion that the excellence and dignity of rhyme were never known till Mr Waller taught it, and that John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill not only is, but ever will be, the exact standard of good writing. But he knows Sidney and he knows Scaliger, and he knows already that Shakespeare “had a larger soul of poesy than any of our nation.” And a man who knows these three things in 1664 will go far.
The Preface to Annus Mirabilis[[498]] is again submissive in form, independent in spirit. Dryden obediently accepts the prescription for epic or “Heroic” poetry, and though he makes another slip of fact (or at least of term) by saying that Chapman’s Homer is written in “Alexandrines or verses of six feet” instead of (as far as the Iliad is concerned) in the fourteener, he is beautifully scholastic on the differences between Virgil and Ovid, the Heroic and the Burlesque, “Wit Writing” and “Wit Written.” But he does it with unconquerable originality, the utterance of his own impression, his own judgment, breaking through all this school-stuff at every moment; and also with a valuable (though still inadequate) account of “the Poet’s imagination.”[[499]]
Yet another point of interest is the avowed intention (carried out in the poem, to the disgust or at least distaste of Dr Johnson) of using technical terms. This, one of the neoclassic devices for attaining propriety, was, as we have seen, excogitated in Italy, and warmly championed by the Pléiade; but it had been by this time mostly abandoned, as it was later by Dryden himself.