[1045] “The preposition in the end of the sentence, a common fault with him (Ben Johnson), and which I have but lately observed in my own writings,” p. 237. The form is, in my opinion, sometimes emphatic and spirited, though its frequent use appears slovenly. I remember my late friend, Mr. Richard Sharp, whose good taste is well known, used to quote an interrogatory of Hooker: “Shall there be a God to swear by, and none to pray to?” as an instance of the force which this arrangement, so eminently idiomatic, sometimes gives. It is unnecessary to say that it is derived from the German; and nothing but Latin prejudice can make us think it essentially wrong. In the passive voice, I think it better than in the active; nor can it always be dispensed with, unless we choose rather the feeble encumbering pronoun which.
Improvements in his style. 38. This Essay on Dramatic Poesy is written in dialogue; Dryden himself, under the name of Neander, being probably one of the speakers. It turns on the use of rhyme in tragedy, on the observation of the unities, and on some other theatrical questions. Dryden, at this time, was favourable to rhymed tragedies, which his practice supported. Sir Robert Howard having written some observations on that essay and taken a different view as to rhyme, Dryden published a defence of his essay in a masterly style of cutting scorn, but one hardly justified by the tone of the criticism, which had been very civil towards him; and, as he was apparently in the wrong, the air of superiority seems the more misplaced.
His critical character. 39. Dryden, as a critic, is not to be numbered with those who have sounded the depths of the human mind, hardly with those who analyse the language and sentiments of poets, and teach others to judge by showing why they have judged themselves. He scatters remarks, sometimes too indefinite, sometimes too arbitrary; yet his predominating good sense colours the whole; we find in them no perplexing subtlety, no cloudy nonsense, no paradoxes and heresies in taste to revolt us. Those he has made on translation in the preface to that of Ovid’s Epistles are valuable. “No man,” he says, “is capable of translating poetry, who besides a genius to that art, is not a master both of his author’s language and of his own. Nor must we understand the language only of the poet, but his particular turn of thoughts and expression, which are the characters that distinguish, and, as it were, individuate him from all other writers.”[1046] We cannot pay Dryden the compliment of saying that he gave the example as well as precept, especially in his Virgil. He did not scruple to copy Segrais in his discourse on Epic Poetry. “Him I follow, and what I borrow from him am ready to acknowledge to him; for, impartially speaking, the French are as much better critics than the English as they are worse poets.”[1047]
[1046] Vol. iii., p. 19.
[1047] P. 460. The quotations in this paragraph present two instances of the word to in an unauthorised usage; the second is a Gallicism; but the first has not even that excuse.
40. The greater part of his critical writings relates to the drama; a subject with which he was very conversant; but he had some considerable prejudices; he seems never to have felt the transcendent excellence of Shakspeare; and sometimes, perhaps, his own opinions, if not feigned, are biased by that sort of self-defence to which he thought himself driven in the prefaces to his several plays. He had many enemies on the watch; the Duke of Buckingham’s Rehearsal, a satire of great wit, had exposed to ridicule the heroic tragedies,[1048] and many were afterwards ready to forget the merits of the poet in the delinquencies of the politician. “What Virgil wrote,” he says, “in the vigour of his age, in plenty and in ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed by sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write; and my judges, if they are not very equitable, already prejudiced against me by the lying character which has been given them of my morals.”[1049]
[1048] This comedy was published in 1672; the parodies are amusing; and though parody is the most unfair weapon that ridicule can use, they are in most instances warranted by the original. Bayes, whether he resembles Dryden or not, is a very comic personage: the character is said by Johnson to have been sketched for Davenant; but I much doubt this report; Davenant had been dead some years before the Rehearsal was published, and could have been in no way obnoxious to its satire.
[1049] Vol. iii., p. 557.
Rymer on Tragedy. 41. Dryden will hardly be charged with abandoning too hastily our national credit, when he said the French were better critics than the English. We had scarcely anything worthy of notice to alledge beyond his own writings. The Theatrum Poetarum by Philips, nephew of Milton, is superficial in every respect. Thomas Rymer, best known to mankind as the editor of the Fœdera, but a strenuous advocate for the Aristotelian principles in the drama, published, in 1678, “The Tragedies of the last Age considered and examined by the Practice of the Ancients, and by the common Sense of all Ages.” This contains a censure of some plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakspeare and Jonson. “I have chiefly considered the fable or plot which all conclude to be the soul of a tragedy, which with the ancients is always found to be a reasonable soul, but with us for the most part a brutish, and often worse than brutish.”[1050] I have read only his criticisms on the Maid’s Tragedy, King and no King, and Rollo; and as the conduct and characters of all three are far enough from being invulnerable, it is not surprising that Rymer has often well exposed them.
[1050] P. 4.