‘Die for us both, I have not leisure now;’
or Almahide threatens to send her ghost to fetch back Almanzor’s scarf, as if she and her ghost were different beings; or Almanzor’s astounding menace to his mother’s spirit:
‘I’ll squeeze thee like a bladder there,
And make thee groan thyself away in air.’
So unequal is Dryden’s genius that the second of these monstrosities occurs in close proximity to the exquisite verses:
‘What precious drops are those
Which silently each other’s track pursue,
Bright as young diamonds in their infant dew?’
and the burlesque threat to the ghost is immediately succeeded by the noble couplet:
‘I am the ghost of her who gave thee birth,
The airy shadow of her mouldering earth.’
The beauties which are thickly sown throughout The Conquest of Granada owe, perhaps, something of their effect as poetry to the utter want of nature in the characters and of reason in the conduct of the play. In a drama aiming at the delineation of real men and women they would frequently have appeared absurdly inappropriate, but when it is once understood that the personages are the puppets and mouthpieces of the author, the question of dramatic propriety becomes irrelevant. Yet The Conquest of Granada is something more than a heap of glittering morsels of sentiment and wit. It possesses a unity of feeling which serves as cement for these scattered jewels. The ‘kind of generous and noble spirit animating it,’ to employ Mr. Saintsbury’s just description, maintains the reader at a level above the pitch of ordinary life. When he opens the book he rises, as he closes it he descends. He may laugh, but his amusement is unmingled with contempt; and ever and anon he comes upon the genuine heroic, unsuspected of sham, unspoiled by bombast. The soul of chivalry inspires the lines quoted with just applause by both Scott and Saintsbury:
‘Fair though you are
As summer mornings, and your eyes more bright
Than stars that twinkle on a winter’s night;
Though you have eloquence to warm and move
Cold age and fasting hermits into love;
Though Almahide with scorn rewards my care;
Yet than to change ’tis nobler to despair.
My love’s my soul, and that from fate is free,
’Tis that unchanged and deathless part of me.’
Aurengzebe (1675), Mr. Saintsbury considers ‘in some respects a very noble play.’ We should rather have called it an indifferent play with some noble passages more remarkable for eloquence than dramatic propriety. The characters, though by no means subtle or even natural, are better discriminated than in The Conquest of Granada; there is much less rant and bustle, yet quite enough to make one cordially echo Indamora’s naïve inquiry: