[Dryden]
Comedy has led us a long way; we must return on our steps and consider other kinds of writing. A higher spirit moves in the midst of the great current. In the history of this talent we shall find the history of the English classical spirit, its structure, its gaps, and its powers, its formation and its development.
[Section I.—Dryden's Début]
The subject of the following lines is a young man, Lord Hastings, who died of smallpox at the age of nineteen:
"His body was an orb, his sublime soul
Did move on virtue's and on learning's pole;
... Come, learned Ptolemy, and trial make
If thou this hero's altitude canst take.
... Blisters with pride swell'd, which through's flesh did sprout
Like rose-buds, stuck i' the lily skin about.
Each little pimple had a tear in it,
To wail the fault its rising did commit....
Or were these gems sent to adorn his skin,
The cabinet of a richer soul within?
No comet need foretell his change drew on
Whose corpse might seem a constellation."[376]
With such a pretty morsel, Dryden, the greatest poet of the classical age, makes his début.
Such enormities indicate the close of a literary age. Excess of folly in poetry, as excess of injustice in political matters, leads up to and foretell revolutions. The Renaissance, unchecked and original, abandoned the minds of men to the excitement and caprice of imagination, the eccentricities, curiosities, outbreaks of a fancy which only cares to content itself, breaks out into singularities, has need of novelties, and loves audacity and extravagance, as reason loves justice and truth. After the extinction of genius folly remained; after the removal of inspiration nothing was left but absurdity. Formerly disorder and internal enthusiasm produced and excused concetti and wild flights; thenceforth men threw them out in cold blood, by calculation and without excuse. Formerly they expressed the state of the mind, now they belie it. So are literary revolutions accomplished. The form, no longer original or spontaneous, but imitated and passed from hand to hand, outlives the old spirit which had created it, and is in opposition to the new spirit which destroys it. This preliminary strife and progressive transformation make up the life of Dryden, and account for his impotence and his failures, his talent and his success.
[Section II.—Dryden's Family and Education]
Dryden's beginnings are in striking contrast with those of the poets of the Renaissance, actors, vagabonds, soldiers, who were tossed about from the first in all the contrasts and miseries of active life. He was born in 1631 of a good family; his grand-father and uncle were baronets; Sir Gilbert Pickering, his first cousin, was created a baronet by Charles I, was a member of Parliament, chamberlain to the Protector, and one of his Peers. Dryden was brought up in an excellent school, under Dr. Busby, then in high repute; after which he passed four years at Cambridge. Having inherited by his father's death a small estate, he used his liberty and fortune only to remain in his studious life, and continued in seclusion at the University for three years more. These are the regular habits of an honorable and well-to-do family, the discipline of a connected and solid education, the taste for classical and complete studies. Such circumstances announce and prepare, not an artist, but a man of letters.