"A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull,
For writing treason and for writing dull;
To die for faction is a common evil,
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.
Hadst thou the glories of thy King exprest,
Thy praises had been satires at the best;
But thou in clumsy verse, unlicked, unpointed,
Hast shamefully defied the Lord's anointed.
I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes,
For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes?
But of King David's foes be this the doom,—
May all be like the young man Absalom;
And for my foes may this their blessing be,—
To talk like Doeg and to write like thee."
Refinement of tone is not the distinguishing characteristic of satire of this sort. It does not attack its object by delicate insinuation or remote suggestion. It operates by heavy downright blows which crush by the mere weight and power of the stroke. There was in truth in those days a certain brutality not only permitted but expected in the way men spoke of each other, and Dryden conformed in this as in other respects to the manners and methods of his age. But of its kind the attack is perfect. The blows of a bludgeon which make of the victim a shapeless mass kill as effectively as the steel or poison which leaves every feature undisturbed, and to the common apprehension it serves to render the killing more manifest. At any rate, so long as a person has been done to death, it makes comparatively little difference how the death was brought about; and the object in this instance of Dryden's attack, though a man of no mean abilities, has never recovered from the demolition which his reputation then underwent.
In 1685 Charles II. died, and his brother James ascended the throne. In the following year Dryden went over to the Roman Catholic Church. No act of his life has met with severer censure. Nor can there be any doubt that the time he took to change his religion afforded ground for distrusting the sincerity of his motives. A king was on the throne who was straining every nerve to bring the Church of England once more under the sway of the Church of Rome. Obviously the adoption of the latter faith would recommend the poet to the favor of the bigoted monarch, and tend to advance his personal interests. There is no wonder, therefore, that he should at the time have been accused of being actuated by the unworthiest of reasons, and that the charge should continue to be repeated to our day. Yet a close study of Dryden's life and writings indicates that the step he took was a natural if not an inevitable outcome of the processes through which his opinions had been passing. He had been early trained in the strict tenets of the Puritan party. From these he had been carried over to the loose beliefs and looser life that followed everywhere hard upon the Restoration. By the sentiments then prevailing he was profoundly affected. Nothing in the writings of the first half of his literary life is more marked—not even his flings at matrimony—than the scoffing way in which he usually spoke of the clergy. His tone towards them is almost always contemptuous, where it is not positively vituperative. His famous political satire began with this line—
"In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin;"—
and a little later in the course of the same poem he observed that—
"Fraud was used, the sacrificer's trade,"
the "sacrificer" here denoting the priest. This feeling toward the clergy never in truth deserted him entirely. But no one who reads carefully his 'Religio Laici,' a poem published in 1682, can fail to perceive that even then he had not only drifted far away from the faith of his childhood, but had begun to be tormented and perplexed by the insoluble problems connected with the life and destiny of man, and with his relations to his Creator. The subject was not likely to weigh less heavily upon him in the years that followed. To Dryden, as to many before and since, it may have seemed the easiest method of deliverance from the difficulties in which he found himself involved, to cast the burden of doubts which disquieted the mind and depressed the heart, upon a Church that undertakes to assume the whole responsibility for the man's future on condition of his yielding to it an unquestioning faith in the present.
An immediate result of his conversion was the production in 1687 of one of his most deservedly famous poems, 'The Hind and the Panther.' He began it with the idea of assisting in bringing about the reconciliation between the Panther, typifying the Church of England, and the Hind, typifying the Church of Rome. It is apparent that before he finished it he saw that the project was hopeless. It is a poem of over twenty-five hundred lines, of which the opening up to line 150 is printed in this volume. Part of the passage here cited contains, without professing it as an object, and probably without intending it, the best defense that could be made for his change of religion. The production in its entirety is remarkable for the skill which its author displayed in carrying on an argument in verse. In this he certainly had no superior among poets, perhaps no equal. The work naturally created a great sensation in those days of fierce political and religious controversy. Both it and its writer were made the object of constant attack. A criticism, in particular, appeared upon it in the shape of a dialogue in prose with snatches of verse interspersed. It is usually known by the title of 'The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,' and was exalted at the time by unreasoning partisanship into a wonderful performance. Even to the present day, this dreary specimen of polemics is described as a very witty work by those who have never struggled to read it. It was the production of Charles Montagu, the future Earl of Halifax, and of Matthew Prior. A story too is still constantly repeated that Dryden was much hurt by the attacks of these two young men, to whom he had been kind, and wept over their ingratitude. If he shed any tears at all upon the occasion, they must have been due to the mortification he felt that any two persons who had been admitted to his friendship should have been guilty of twaddle so desperately tedious.
The flight of James and the accession of William and Mary threw Dryden at once out of the favor of the court, upon which to a large extent he had long depended for support. As a Jacobite he could not take the oath of allegiance; but there is hardly any doubt that under any circumstances he would have been deprived of the offices of place and profit he held. In the laureateship he was succeeded by his old antagonist Shadwell; and within a few years he saw the dignity of the position still further degraded by the appointment to it of Nahum Tate, one of the worst of the long procession of poetasters who have filled it. Dryden henceforth belonged to the party out of power. His feelings about his changed relations are shown plainly in the fine epistle with which he consoled Congreve for the failure of his comedy of the 'Double Dealer.' Yet displaced and unpensioned, and sometimes the object of hostile attack, his literary supremacy was more absolute than ever. All young authors, whether Whigs or Tories, sought his society and courted his favor; and his seat at Will's coffee-house was the throne from which he swayed the literary sceptre of England.
After the revolution of 1688 Dryden gave himself entirely up to authorship. He first turned to the stage; and between 1690 and 1694 he produced five plays. With the failure in the last-mentioned year of his tragi-comedy called 'Love Triumphant,' he abandoned writing for the theatre. The period immediately following he devoted mainly to his translation of Virgil, which was published in 1697. It was highly successful; but far more reputation came to him from a large folio volume that was brought out in November 1699, under the title of 'Fables.' Its contents consisted mainly of poetical narratives founded upon certain stories of the 'Decameron,' and of the modernization of some of the 'Canterbury Tales.' In certain ways these have been his most successful pieces, and have made his name familiar to successive generations of readers. Of the tales from Boccaccio, that of 'Cymon and Iphigenia' is on the whole the most pleasing. The modernizations of Chaucer were long regarded as superior to the original; and though superior knowledge of the original has effectually banished that belief, there is on the other hand no justification for the derogatory terms which are now sometimes applied to Dryden's versions.