North's Specimens of the British Critics.
No. III.
Dryden.
Sir Walter Scott's admirable Life of Dryden concludes with this passage:—"I have thus detailed the life, and offered some remarks on the literary character, of John Dryden; who, educated in a pedantic taste and a fanatical religion, was destined, if not to give laws to the stage of England, at least to defend its liberties; to improve burlesque into satire; to free translation from the fetters of verbal metaphrase, and exclude from it the license of paraphrase; to teach posterity the powerful and varied poetical harmony of which their language was capable; to give an example of the lyric ode of unapproached excellence; and to leave a name second only to those of Milton and of Shakspeare." Two names we miss, and muse where the immortal author of Waverley would have placed them; not surely below Dryden's—those of Chaucer and Spenser.
Let those Four names form a constellation—and the star Dryden, large and bright though it be, must not be looked for in the same region of the heavens. First in the second order of English poets—let glorious John keep the place assigned him by the greatest of Scotsmen. We desire not that he shall vacate the throne. But between the first order and the second, let that be remembered which seems here to have been forgotten, that immeasurable spaces intervene. "Second only to Shakspeare and Milton," implies near approach to them of another greatness inferior but in degree, and Dryden is thus lifted up in our imagination into the sphere of the Creators. On such mention of Milton, let us converse about him for a short half hour, and then venture to descend on Dryden, not with precipitation, but as in a balloon.
To an Englishman recollecting the poetical glories of his country, the Seventeenth Century often appears as the mother of one great name—Milton. Original and mighty poets express, at its highest, the mind of their time as it is localized on their own soil. With Elizabeth the splendour of the feudal and chivalrous ages for England finally sets. A world expires, and erelong a new world rises. The Wars which signalize the new period, contrast deeply with those which heretofore tore the land. Those were the factions of high lineages. Now, thought seizes the weapons of earthly warfare. The rights vesting in an English subject by the statutes of the country—the rights vesting in man, as the subject of civil government, by the laws of God and nature, are scanned by awakened reason, and put arms into men's hands. The highest of all the interests of the human being—higher than all others, as eternity excels time—Religion—is equally debated. The Protestant church is beleaguered by hostile sects—the Reformation subjected to the demand for a more searching and effective reform. Creed, worship, ecclesiastical discipline and government, all come into debate. A thraldom of opinion—a bondage of authority, that held for many centuries the nation bound together in no powerless union, is, upon the sudden, broken up. Men will know why they obey and why they believe; and human laws and divine truths are searched, as far as the wit of man is capable, to the roots. It is the spirit of the new time that has broken forth, and begins ambitiously, and riotously, to try its powers, but nobly, magnanimously, and heroically too. Milton owned and showed himself a son of the time. Gifted with powers eminently fitted for severe investigation—apt for learning, and learned beyond most men—of a temper adverse and rebellious to an assumed and ungrounded control—large-hearted and large-minded to comprehend the diverse interests of men—personally fearless—devout in the highest and boldest sense of the word; namely, as acknowledging no supreme law but from heaven, and as confiding in the immediate communication of divine assistance to the faithful servants of heaven—possessing, moreover, in amplest measure, that peculiar endowment of sovereign poets which enables them to stand up as the teachers of a lofty and tender wisdom, as moral prophets to the species, the clear faculty of profound self-inspection—he was prepared to share in the intellectual strife and change of that day, even had some interposing, pacific angel charmed away from the bosom of the land all other warfare and revolution—and to shine in that age's work, even had the muse never smiled upon his cradled forehead, never laid the magical murmurs of song on his chosen lips. He was a politician, a theologian of his age—amidst the demolition of established things, the clang of arms, and the streaming of blood, whether in the field or upon the scaffold, a thinker and a writer.
There are times that naturally produce real, others that naturally produce imitative poetry. Tranquil, stagnating times, produce the imitative; times that rouse in man self-consciousnesses, produce the real. All great poetry has a moral foundation. It is imagination building upon the great, deep, universal, eternal human will. Therefore profound sympathy with man, and profound intelligence of man, aided by, or growing out of, that profound sympathy, is vital to the true poet. But in stagnating times both sympathy with man sleeps, and the disclosure of man sleeps. Troubled times bring out humanity—show its terrible depths—also its might and grandeur—both ways its truth. A great poet seems to require his birth in an age when there are about him great self-revelations of man, for his vaticination. Moreover, his own particular being is more deeply and strongly stirred and shown to him in such a time. But the moral tempest may be too violent for poetry—as the Civil War of the Roses appeared to blast it and all letters—that of the Parliament contrariwise. The intellect of Milton, in the Paradise Lost, shows that it had seen "the giant-world enraged."
Happily for the literary fame of his country—for the solid exaltation in these latter ages of the sublime art which he cultivated—for the lovers of poetry who by inheritance or by acquisition speak the masculine and expressive language which he still ennobled—for the serene fame of the august poet himself—the political repose which a new change (the restoration of detruded and exiled royalty to its ancestral throne) spread over the land, by shutting up the public hopes of the civil and ecclesiastical republican in despair, and by crushing his faction in the dust, gave him back, in the visionary blindness of undecaying age, to "the still air of delightful studies," in order that, in seclusion from all "barbarous dissonance," he might achieve the work destined to him from the beginning—not less than the greatest ever achieved by man.
Educated by such a strife to power—and not more sublimely gifted than strenuously exercised—Milton had constantly carried in his soul the twofold consciousness of the highest destination. He knew himself born a great poet; and the names of great poets sounding through all time, rang in his ears. What Homer was to his people and to his language, he would be to his; and this was the lower vocation—glorious as earthly things may be glorious—and self-respecting while he thought of his own head as of one that shall be laurel-bound; yet magnanimous and public-spirited, while he trusted to shed upon his language and upon his country the beams of his own fame. This, we say, was his lower vocation, taken among thoughts and feelings high but merely human. But a higher one accompanied it. The sense of a sanctity native to the human soul, and indestructible—the assiduous hallowing of himself, and of all his powers, by religious offices that seek nothing lower than communion with the fountain-head of all holiness and of all good. And Milton, labouring "in the eye of his great taskmaster"—trained by all recluse and silent studies—trained by the turmoil raging around him of the times, and by his own share in the general contention—according to the self-dedication of his mind trained within the temple—he, stricken with darkness, and amidst the gloom of extinguished earthly hopes, assumed the singing robes of the poet.
The purpose of the Paradise Lost is wholly religious. He strikes the loudest, and, at the same time, the sweetest-toned harp of the Muse with the hand of a Christian theologian. He girds up all the highest powers of the human mind to wrestling with the most arduous question with which the human faculties can engage—the all-involving question—How is the world governed? Do we live under chance, or fate, or Providence? Is there a God? And is he holy, loving, wise, and just? He will