Vent. You conquer’d for him:
Philippi knows it; there you shared with him
That empire, which your sword made all your own.
Ant. Fool that I was, upon my eagle’s wings
I bore this wren, till I was tired with soaring,
And now he mounts above me.
Good heavens, is this,—is this the man who braves me?
Who bids my age make way? drives me before him
To the world’s ridge, and sweeps me off like rubbish?’
Don Sebastian (1690) is generally regarded as Dryden’s dramatic masterpiece. It did not please upon its first appearance, owing to its excessive length. Dryden ingenuously confesses that he was obliged to sacrifice twelve hundred lines, which he restored when the play was printed. Mr. Saintsbury more than hints a preference for All for Love, which we entirely share. Were even the serious part of the respective dramas of equal merit, the scale would be turned in favour of All for Love by the wretchedness of the comic scenes which constitute so large a portion of the rival drama. They are at best indifferent farce, and cannot be even called excrescences on the main action, inasmuch as they do not grow out of it at all. In unity of action, therefore, and uniformity of literary merit, All for Love excels its competitor, and its personages are more truthful and more interesting. Sebastian, though a gallant, chivalrous figure, takes no such hold on the imagination as Antony and Ventidius; and Almeyda, one of the least interesting of Dryden’s heroines, is a sorry exchange for Cleopatra. Muley Moloch and Benducar are wholly stagey. Nothing, then, remains but Dorax, and his capabilities are chiefly evinced in one great scene. Even this is in some respects inartificially conducted. The spectator is insufficiently prepared for it. The special ground of Dorax’s resentment comes upon us as a surprise; and his repentance is too hasty and sudden. A similar defect may be alleged against the whole of the tragic action. The centre of interest is gradually shifted, not intentionally, but from the author’s omission to foreshadow the events to come after the fashion of a masterpiece he must have studied, the Œdipus Tyrannus. At first all our interest is enlisted for Sebastian’s life, and it is with a sort of puzzlement that we feel ourselves at last listening to a story of incest. Muley Moloch and Benducar have disappeared, and their place is occupied by a new character, Alvarez. In every respect, therefore, regarded as a work of art, Don Sebastian fails to sustain comparison with All for Love, and there is no countervailing superiority in the diction, whose general nobility and spirit occasionally swell into bombast. The worst fault remains to be told: Dorax’s ludicrous escape from death by reason of being poisoned by two enemies at once. If either the Emperor or the Mufti would have let him alone he would never have lived to be reconciled to Sebastian, but the fiery drug of the one is neutralized by the icy bane of the other, and vice versâ. Dryden thinks it sufficient excuse that a similar incident is vouched for by Ausonius, but really there is nothing so farcical in the Rehearsal. On the whole, we cannot but consider Don Sebastian a very imperfect play, redeemed from mediocrity by the general vigour and animation of the diction, and the loftiness of soul which seldom forsakes Dryden, except when he wilfully panders to the popular taste.
But little space can here be devoted to Dryden’s other plays. Some are not worth criticism. The Mock Astrologer, largely borrowed from French and Spanish sources, contains some of his best lyrics. Many parts of Cleomenes are very noble, but it is somewhat heavy as a whole. King Arthur, a musical and spectacular drama, is an excellent specimen of its class. Dryden’s portion of Œdipus, written in conjunction with Lee, shows how finely he, like his model Lucan, could deal with the supernatural. This is by no means the case with his State of Innocence and Fall of Man, which is, nevertheless, one of his pieces most worthy of perusal. It measures the prodigious fall from the age of Cromwell to the age of Charles; while Dryden yet displays such fine poetical gifts as to command respect amid all the absurdities of his unintentional burlesque of Milton.
Dryden undeniably took up the profession of playwright without an effectual call. He became a dramatist, as clever men in our day become journalists, discerning in the stage the shortest literary cut to fame and fortune. He can hardly be said to have possessed any strictly dramatic gift in any exceptional degree, but he had enough of all to make a tolerable figure on the stage, and was besides a great poet and an admirable critic. His poetry redeems the defects of his serious plays, if we except such a mere pièce de circonstance as Amboyna. The best of them have very bad faults, but even the worst are impressed with the stamp of genius. It is only in comedy that his failure is sometimes utter and irretrievable; yet a perception of the humorous cannot be denied to the author of Amphitryon. But we nowhere find evidence of any supreme dramatic faculty, anything that would have constrained him to write plays if plays had not happened to be in fashion. As he was not born a dramatic poet he had to be made one, and he became one mainly in virtue of his eminent critical endowment. His prefaces are a most interesting study. They exhibit the steady advance of a slow, strong, sure mind from rudimentary conceptions to as just views of the requisites of dramatic poetry as could well be attained in an age encumbered with venerable fallacies. Dryden’s manly sense, homely sagacity, and piercing shrewdness, break through many trammels, as when, in the preface to All for Love, he vindicates his breach of the conventions of the French stage. In that to Troilus and Cressida he compares Shakespeare with Fletcher, and pronounces decidedly in favour of the former, a preference far from universal in his day. The preface to The Spanish Friar is the most remarkable of any, and shows how much he had learned and unlearned. We shall, nevertheless, find his special glory in his character as the most truly representative dramatist of his time. Otway might have been an Elizabethan, Dryden never could. If we seek for the dramatic author to whom he is on the whole nearest of kin, we may perhaps find him in Byron. Byron had no more genuine dramatic vocation than Dryden had, but, like Dryden, produced memorable works by force and flexibility of genius. From the theatrical point of view Dryden’s plays are greatly superior to Byron’s; if the latter’s rank higher as literature the main cause is the existence of more favourable conditions. Dryden’s worst faults would have been impossible in the nineteenth century; and his treatment of the supernatural, his frequent visitations of speculation, and the lofty tone of his heroic passages, prove that he could have drawn a Manfred, a Cain, or a Myrrha, if he had lived like Byron in a renovated age.
CHAPTER V.
DRAMATIC POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS.
After Dryden, the metrical dramatists of the Restoration, as of other epochs, may be accurately divided into two classes, the poets and the playwrights. As was to be expected in an age when even genuine poetry drooped earthward, and prose seldom kindled into poetry, the latter class was largely in the majority. Only three dramatists can justly challenge the title of poet—Dryden, Otway, and Lee. In Dryden a mighty fire, half choked with its own fuel, struggles gallantly against extinction, and eventually evolves nearly as much flame as smoke. In Otway a pure and delicate flame hovers fitfully over a morass; in Lee the smothered fire breaks out, as Pope said of Lucan and Statius, ‘in sudden, brief, and interrupted flashes.’ Dryden was incomparably the most vigorous of the three, but Otway was the only born dramatist, and the little of genuine dramatic excellence that he has wrought claims a higher place than the more dazzling productions of his contemporary.
Otway (1651-1685).
Thomas Otway, son of the vicar of Woolbeding, was born at Trotton, near Midhurst, in Sussex, March 3rd, 1651. He was educated at Winchester and Christchurch, but (perhaps driven by necessity, for he says in the dedication to Venice Preserved, ‘A steady faith, and loyalty to my prince was all the inheritance my father left me’) forsook the latter ere his academical course was half completed to try his fortune as a performer on the stage, where he entirely failed. His first play, Alcibiades (1675), a poor piece, served to introduce him to Rochester and other patrons; and in the following year Don Carlos, founded upon the novel by Saint Réal, obtained, partly by the support of Rochester, with whom Otway soon quarrelled, a striking success, and is said to have produced more than any previous play. Two translations from the French followed; next (1678) came the unsuccessful comedy of Friendship in Fashion, and in 1680 Caius Marius, an audacious plagiarism from Romeo and Juliet. In the interim Otway had made trial of a military career, but the regiment in which he had obtained a commission was speedily disbanded, his pay was withheld, and he had to support himself by plundering Shakespeare. In the same year in which he had stooped so low he proved his superiority to all contemporary dramatists by his tragedy of The Orphan, in which he first displayed the pathos by which he has merited the character of the English Euripides. Johnson remarks that Otway ‘conceived forcibly, and drew originally, by consulting nature in his own breast;’ and it is known that he experienced the pangs of a seven years’ unrequited passion for the beautiful actress, Mrs. Barry. In 1681 he produced The Soldier’s Fortune, a comedy chiefly interesting for its allusions to his own military experiences. According to Downes, its success was extraordinary, and brought both profit and reputation to the theatre. If it brought any of the former to the author, this must have been soon exhausted, since in the dedication to Venice Preserved (1682) he speaks of himself as only rescued from the direst want by the generosity of the Duchess of Portsmouth. For this great play, as well as for The Orphan, he is said to have received a hundred pounds. The Atheist, a second part of The Soldier’s Fortune (1684), was probably unproductive; and in April, 1685, Otway died on Tower Hill, undoubtedly in distress, although, of the two accounts of his death, that which ascribes it to a fever caught in pursuing an assassin, is better authenticated than the more usual one which represents him as choked by a loaf which he was devouring in a state of ravenous hunger. Such a story, nevertheless, could not have obtained credit if his circumstances had not been known to have been desperate. It is not likely that he had much conduct or economy in his affairs, or was endowed in any degree with the severer virtues. The tone of his letters to Mrs. Barry, however, and the constancy of his seven years’ affection for her, seem to indicate a natural refinement of feeling, and if there is truth in the dictum,