The Essay of Dramatic Poesy.
The Essay of Dramatic Poesy is much better known than it was only a couple of decades ago,[[500]] and it is perhaps superfluous to say that it is a dialogue in form, and that the interlocutors are Dryden himself (Neander), his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard (Crites), Sir Charles Sedley (Lisideius), and Lord Buckhurst (Eugenius). The two last, though at the time the wildest of scapegraces, were men of distinct poetic gift and varied literary faculty. And Howard, though no great poet, and possessing something of the prig, the coxcomb, and the pedant in his composition, was a man of some ability, of real learning of a kind, and of very distinct devotion to literature.
The Essay was first published in 1668, but had been written, according to Dryden’s statement in his Preface to Lord Buckhurst, “in the country” (at his father-in-law Lord Berkshire’s seat of Charlton near Malmesbury), when the author was driven out of London by the Great Plague three years before. Its setting and overture. He had, he says, altered some of his opinions; but it did not much matter in an Essay “where all I have said is problematical.” The “Address to the Reader” promises a second part dealing with Epic and Lyric, which never appeared, and of which only the Epic part is represented by later works. This is a pity, for while we have treatises on Drama and Epic ad nauseam, their elder and lovelier sister has been, “poor girl! neglected.” It begins with a picturesque setting, which represents the four interlocutors as having taken boat and shot the bridge, attracted by the reverberation of the great battle with the Dutch in the early part of June 1665, when Admiral Opdam’s flag-ship was blown up. Eugenius augurs victory from the gradual dying away of the noise; and Crites observes (in character) that he should like this victory better if he did not know how many bad verses he should have to read on it. Lisideius adds that he knows some poets who have got epinikia and funeral elegies all ready for either event, and the dialogue proceeds for some time in the same way of literary banter, especial set being made at two poets (one of whom is certainly Wild, while the other may be Flecknoe) with incidental sneers at Wither(s) and Cleveland. At last Crites brings it to something like the quarrel of Ancient v. Modern. Eugenius picks up the glove, but consents, at Crites’ suggestion, to limit the discussion to dramatic poetry,[[501]] and so the “dependence” is settled.
Eugenius thinks that though modern plays are better than Greek or Roman, yet those of “the last age” (1600-1660) are better than “ours.” Crites for the Ancients. As for epic and lyric, the last age must yield. And all the quartette agree that “the sweetness of English verse was never understanded or practised” by our fathers, and that some writers yet living first taught us to mould our thoughts into easy and significant words, to retrench the superfluities of expression, and to make our rhyme so properly a part of the verse that it should never mislead the sense. Lisideius having (with the consent of the company, subject to a slight scholastic objection from Crites) defined or described a play as “A just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind,” Crites takes up his brief for the ancients. His speech is a set one, extolling the classical conception of drama, and especially the modern-classical Unities,
but rather a panegyric than an argument, and particularly weak in this—that it takes no critical account of the modern drama at all. Except Ben Jonson, “the greatest man of the last age,” not a single modern dramatic writer of any country is so much as named.
Eugenius, though his discourse is livelier, falls into something the same fault, or at least the counterpart of it. Eugenius for the “last age.” He rallies the ancients unmercifully, and has very good game of the stock plots and characters in Terence; but his commendation of the moderns has a disappointing generality, and he lays himself rather open to the good-humoured but forcible interruption of Crites that he and Eugenius are never likely to come to an agreement, because the one regards change as in itself an improvement, and the other does not.
Still, Lisideius gives a new turn to the discussion by asking Eugenius why he puts English plays above those of other nations, and whether we ought not to submit our stage to the exactness of our next neighbours. Lisideius for the French. Eugenius in reply commits the further and especial defence of the English to Neander, and Lisideius begins his part as eulogist of the French. For some forty years, he says, we have not had leisure to be good poets. The French have: and, by Richelieu’s patronage and Corneille’s example, have raised their theatre till it now surpasses ours, and the rest of Europe. Who have kept the Unities so well? Who have avoided “that absurd thing,” the English tragi-comedy, so completely? In tragedy they take well-known stories, and only manageable parts of them, while Shakespeare crams the business of thirty or forty years into two hours and a half. They make only one person prominent, they do as much as possible behind the scenes, keep dying off the stage altogether, and never end their plays with a conversion, or simple change of will. Nobody, with them, appears on the stage, unless he has some business there: and as for the beauty of their rhyme, why, that is “already partly received by us,” and it will, no doubt, when we write better plays, “exceedingly beautify them.”
To him, Neander—that is to say—Dryden himself.
There is a reminder (though the matter is quite different) of Daniel, and a comforting augury for English criticism, in the swift directness with which “the new critic” (as a Webbe of his own day might have called him) strikes at the heart of the question. Dryden for England and Liberty. The French are more regular, he grants, and our irregularities are, in some cases, justly taxed. But, nevertheless, he is of opinion that neither our faults nor their virtues are sufficient to place them above us. For Lisideius himself has defined a play as a lively imitation of nature. And these beauties of the French stage are beauties, not natural, but thoroughly artificial. Before Molière, where are the humours of French comedy, save, perhaps, in Le Menteur and a few others? Elsewhere they work in comedy only by the old way of quarrels and reconciliations, or by the conventions of Spanish intrigue-drama. “On which lines there is not above one play to be writ: they are too much alike to please often.”
Then, as to tragi-comedy. What is the harm of this? why should Lisideius “imagine the soul of man more heavy than his senses?” The eye can pass, and pass with relief, from an unpleasant to a pleasant object, in far less time than is required on the stage. He must have stronger arguments before he concludes that compassion and mirth destroy each other: and in the meantime he will hold that tragi-comedy is a more pleasant way than was known to the ancients, or any moderns who have eschewed it.