CHAPTER IV.
DRYDEN AND THE RESTORATION DRAMA.
Dryden occupies an unique position as by far the most important representative of a department of literature for which, on his own showing, he had little natural qualification, and in which he had little ambition to excel. Only one of his numerous plays, he tells us, was written to please himself. But he wanted reputation, money, and Court favour, and these inducements directed him to the most popular and lucrative department of the Muses’ province. Here, as elsewhere, his progress was slow. His first play, The Wild Gallant (1663), has come down to us in an amended version; in its original form it is pronounced by Pepys ‘as poor a thing as I ever saw in my life.’ Dryden might long have remained an unsuccessful dramatist but for the invention of rhyming tragedy, which, though in itself an objectionable form, suited his talent to perfection. The management of the heroic couplet was and always continued the strongest of all his strong points, and his genius for rhetoric was stimulated to the utmost by the facilities afforded by this sonorous form of metre. Hence The Indian Emperor (1665) was a great success, and determined the main course of Dryden’s dramatic activity for some years. It necessarily brought him nearer to the French drama, and gave a French character to the drama of the day, not really in harmony with the taste of the English public, and from which Dryden ultimately freed himself. The opinion of the day was prepared to go in the direction of classicism as far as Jonson, but not as far as Corneille. The French traveller Sorbière having in 1663 censured the irregularity of the English stage, was answered by Sprat, who asserts the superiority of his countrymen, and points out the fundamental difference in the taste of the two nations. ‘The French,’ he says, ‘for the most part take only one or two great men, and chiefly insist upon some one remarkable accident of their story; to this end they admit no more persons than will serve to adorn that: and they manage all in rhyme, with long speeches, almost in the way of dialogues, in making high ideas of honour, and in speaking noble things. The English on their side make their chief plot to consist in a greater variety of actions, and, besides the main design, add many little contrivances. By this means their scenes are shorter, their stage fuller, many more persons of different humours are introduced. And in carrying on of this they generally do only confine themselves to blank verse.’ Sprat then proceeds to point out the advantages of the English method; and it is evident that neither he nor the public imagined themselves to be on the eve of such serious modifications of the national drama as actually took place—modifications to be chiefly attributed to the taste of the Court, and the more easily effected from the paucity of theatres.
The inferiority of the Restoration drama to the Elizabethan is one of the commonplaces of criticism, perhaps even one of its platitudes, and cannot be admitted without some qualification. Yet, as the broad general statement of a fact, it is undeniable, and the fact is a proof that the elements which preserve a play as literature for posterity are not those which fit it for the contemporary stage. In every play of serious purpose there is, or should be, an earthly part and a spiritual, dramatic craftsmanship and poetical inspiration. In the former particular the Restoration dramatists compare not unfavourably with their predecessors, always excepting Shakespeare; they fail not as dramatists, but as poets. The whole Elizabethan drama is steeped in an atmosphere of poetry. To say nothing of its chief representatives, take up such satires as The Return from Parnassus, or such merely occasional pieces as the academical play on Timon which preceded Shakespeare’s, and you will not doubt that you are reading the work of a poet. Read through, on the other hand, the best plays of the representative dramatists of the Restoration, and you will generally find the poetical element concentrated in a few brilliant passages. In the Elizabethan age, it is evident, men lived at such a height of heroic and romantic sentiment that the purveyors of public entertainment could not but be poets. In the Restoration era, on the other hand, men habitually lived, breathed, and wrote prose; and when the dramatist would be a poet, he had to set himself to the task. To convince ourselves that the distinction between poetry and prose is not artificial, as Carlyle seemed to think, but essential, we have only to consider the widely different influence of Elizabethan and Restoration drama upon the after world. Both, excepting the works of Shakespeare, are virtually dead as acted drama. But in losing the stage the Restoration drama has lost everything, while the Elizabethan is yet a living and working force. It powerfully co-operated in the splendid revival of English poetry at the end of last century; it is at this moment an inspirer and a nurse of young genius. It is inconceivable that the Restoration drama as a whole should inspire anyone, or that it should count for anything as a factor in future developments of literature. One is a perennial plant, which may die down to the root in ungenial seasons, but will assuredly put forth new flowers; the other is a fossil, curious and in some measure beautiful, but devoid of vital force. And for this, the merely intellectual merits of both being so considerable, no reason can be given but that one is on the whole poetical, and therefore living, the other on the whole prosaic, and therefore inert. Hence we may prophesy of the success of the endeavour of Ibsen, and other men of distinguished talent, to produce dramas conceived in an entirely realistic spirit, and entirely devoted to the problems of modern society. Such competitions will be valuable pièces justificatives for the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, but they will be extinct as literary forces long ere the end of the twentieth.
This, nevertheless, is to be said for the Restoration dramatists, that their art is not an imitation of an extinct form of the drama, but is at least something new, really expressive of the sentiments of their generation. The imitation of Shakespeare could only have produced gross unreality, which must have degenerated still further into mere inanity. The playwrights did what the contemporary painters should have done, they fell back, in a measure, upon realism when high imagination was no longer possible. If they had gone further in this direction their works would have possessed more intrinsic merit, and have claimed a more important place in the history of culture. Their tragedies would not so often have been rendered unnatural by the employment of rhyme, and their comedies would have exhibited the manners and the morals of the English nation, and not merely of the playgoing part of it. It cannot be believed that the comedy of that age affords anything like so faithful a picture of the seventeenth century as Fielding’s novels do of the eighteenth. The realistic tendency was chiefly conspicuous in the closer approach to the language of common life, and in the more logical character even of appeals to emotion. The extravagant transports of heroes and heroines only betray that true imagination had grown cold; but the manly nervous sense and the almost forensic reasoning so often found in their company show that a new stratum had really been touched.
Another consideration should not be overlooked in the comparison between the Elizabethan and the Restoration drama, that the debasement of the latter is exaggerated from the seeming abruptness of the metamorphosis undergone by the former. Passing from the stage of Shakespeare to the stage of Dryden, we appear to have suddenly entered a new world. The representatives of the drama seem instantaneously transformed by some Circean potion into beings of a lower type. We do not immediately remember that the gradual development which would have interpreted the apparent prodigy was rudely interrupted by the Civil War and the Commonwealth. If the interval between Shirley and Dryden had been continuously occupied by popular dramatists, we should have observed the change slowly coming on, and have watched the older form shading off into the newer by gradations not more violent than those by which the latter subsequently passed into the drama of the eighteenth century. As it is, the poets of Charles II.’s time seem the authors of a revolution of which they were merely the instruments. The younger portion of their audiences, on whose suffrages they had mainly to rely, had scarcely so much as seen a play. The spells of authority and tradition were broken, or at least so grievously impaired as to be unable to withstand the seduction of French example. Honest Samuel Pepys would not have so easily pronounced the Midsummer Night’s Dream ‘a mean thing’ if the romantic drama had not been absolutely extinct for him. And, taking a broad view of the revolution in popular taste, we must admit that, however deplorable in itself, it had some good sides. It tended to bring England more into harmony with the general current of European taste and thought, and repressed the tendency of our noble literature to fanciful and eccentric insularity. In the long run, moreover, it was serviceable to the English drama by providing a substitute, however inferior, for the old vein now unproductive. The want of such a resource killed the drama of Spain. Spanish dramatists, until the nineteenth century, were unable to accommodate themselves to any dramatic form but the national one, every phase of which had been completely exemplified before the end of the seventeenth century. In consequence, the Spanish theatre of the eighteenth century did not produce a single tolerable piece until, near the termination of the epoch, a playwright arose who was capable of profiting by French example.
Another extenuation of the departure of the Restoration dramatists from the better traditions of the English stage is the strength as well as the suddenness of the new influence to which they were subjected. It came from the Court, and the Court dispensed the playwright’s daily bread. There is sufficient evidence that even Shakespeare was by no means indifferent to the good opinion of Elizabeth and James, but neither of these sovereigns was sufficiently the drama’s patron to be the drama’s legislator. It was otherwise with Charles II., a man of wit, taste, and polish, inaccessible to the deeper emotions of humanity, and without a grain of poetry in his composition. Such a man must have found the Elizabethan drama intolerable. He no doubt honestly agreed with his laureate, who coolly says: ‘At his return he found a nation lost as much in barbarism as in rebellion; and, as the excellency of his nature forgave the one, so the excellency of his manners reformed the other. The desire of imitating so great a pattern first awakened the dull and heavy spirits of the English from their natural reservedness.’ With every allowance for adulation, there can be no doubt that Dryden in a considerable measure believed himself a reformer. Charles had his Paladins in the field of letters. ‘The favour,’ says Dryden elsewhere, ‘which heroic plays have lately found upon our theatres has been wholly derived to them from the countenance and approbation they have received at Court.’ We may well feel thankful that the experiment of Gallicizing the native genius of England should have been tried so fairly, and have broken down so utterly, under such patronage as Charles’s and in such hands as Dryden’s. We have not quite seen the last of it, but where Corneille and Molière failed Goncourt and Zola are not likely to succeed.
This may at least be said for Dryden, that the romantic drama was for a time in a state of suspended animation, and that the only question was what successor should fill its place. For a short time two foreign schools seemed contending for the prize. Dryden’s own allegiance in his first piece, The Wild Gallant, was given to the Spanish drama, a form exceedingly attractive from its brisk action, sudden vicissitudes, and dexterous development of intrigue. But the Spanish drama cannot be naturalized in England for two reasons, one creditable to English genius, the other the reverse. A play of intrigue is necessarily a play of incident, and allows little room for the development of character; but Englishmen are ‘humoursome,’ and enjoy the discrimination of character to the nicest shades. If we judged the two nations solely by their dramas, we should say that all Spaniards were exactly alike, and no two Englishmen. The other reason is that Englishmen do not particularly excel in the contrivance of incident, and that few even of our best dramatists could rival the ingenuity of third-rate Spanish playwrights. The Anglo-Spanish drama soon disappeared, and its place in serious dramatic literature was taken by a genre most intimately associated with the name of Dryden, its most brilliant practitioner, and upon whose desertion it crumbled into dust.
Dryden himself has told us in few words what he understands by an heroic play, and the definition exempts him from much of the criticism to which he might otherwise have been held liable: ‘An heroic play ought to be an imitation, in little, of an heroic poem.’ In other words, it must have an epical element as well as a dramatic. The experiment was worth making, as it proved that neither branch of the poetic art gained anything by invading the other’s territory. Compared with the art of Shakespeare or of Sophocles, the art of Dryden in this department seems a tawdry caricature. All the higher qualities of the dramatist are absent, being, in fact, inconsistent with the demands of epic poetry, while epic dignity is equally sacrificed to the exigencies of drama. Without constant hurry and bustle, such pieces would be intolerable. They require, as Dryden tacitly admits by the quotation from Ariosto, which he adduces as expressive of his guiding principle, a constant succession of adventures. Such incessant agitation leaves no place for the development of character; the actors come on the stage ready labelled; or if, like Nourmahal in Aurengzebe, they disclose a new trait, the sudden novelty produces the effect of complete metamorphosis. The pieces could only be regarded as splendid puppet-shows, were not the failings of the dramatist so frequently redeemed by the poet. It so chanced that the Coryphæus of this unnatural style was the most splendid poetical declaimer (unless Byron be excepted) that England ever produced, and his pieces resound with tirades not merely brilliant in diction and sonorous in versification, but now fiery with mettlesome spirit, now weighty with manly sense. And these qualities were aided by the otherwise objectionable form selected by the poet. His blank-verse plays, far superior as works of art, contain few such eloquent passages as his rhyming tragedies. Rhyme helped him on, as a riderless runaway horse is spurred by the thunder of his own hoofs. Even where his thought is poor, its poverty is veiled by the brilliancy of the diction—a brilliancy which he could hardly have attained by the use of any other form; and if the employment of rhyme seems, as it is, unnatural, the form at least harmonizes with the substance, and they produce between them an illusive effect of a species of art which may possibly be legitimate, as the ordinary rules evidently do not apply. We must also remember how this subornation of the judgment, not imperceptible or ineffective in the closet, was aided on the stage by the most potent appeals to the senses.
Tyrannic Love, Dryden’s first considerable attempt in ‘heroic tragedy,’ is very remarkable as a proof of to what extraordinary absurdities a vigorous intellect may be liable, and also how these may be dignified by energy of expression. ‘The rants of Maximin,’ says Johnson, ‘have long been the sport of criticism;’ but so spirited and sonorous is the diction, that, inconsistent as seems the alliance of admiration with derision, such actually is the mingled feeling which they excite in the quiet of the closet. On the stage they must have passed off much better by the aid of scenery, costume, and emphatic declamation; and success on the boards, it must be remembered, was invariably Dryden’s first object. The same consideration which explains, though it does not excuse, his indecency, palliates his bombast. He wrote to live, and could not afford to produce unactable dramas. A much more interesting performance than Tyrannic Love is his Conquest of Granada (1669-1670). It is a touchstone of ‘heroic tragedy,’ a crucial test of what it can and what it cannot do. It renounces all pretence to nature, reason, and probability; on the other hand, it delights with a crowd of striking sentiments and images, and enchains the attention with perpetual bustle and variety. It is to one of Shakespeare’s plays as a bit of shining glass is to a plant of which every fibre is the creation of a natural law. Yet the glass is not a displeasing object, neither is the play.
The worst offence of The Conquest of Granada, after all, is not its bombast, but its bathos. It is true that both spring from the same root, that want of genuine creative imagination which in attempting the great only achieves the big, which a small oversight easily converts into the laughable. But apart from this failing, which Dryden shares with most epic poets of the second rank, it is difficult to acquit him of a singular insensibility to the ridiculous. This is evinced among other things by the entire conception of one of his most serious and elaborate works, The Hind and the Panther, and it requires all the gravity and obvious conviction of his preface to The Conquest of Granada to convince us that he did not occasionally mean to burlesque his own principles. The rapid changes of fortune, the constant fallings into and out of love, the odd predicaments in which heroes and heroines continually find themselves, frequently produce the effect of the broadest comedy—an effect much assisted by the extraordinary rants of the principal speakers; as when Lyndaraxa desires the personage who has first stabbed her and then himself to