Chapter IV: Dryden and His Contemporaries (1)

DEAD WATER IN ENGLISH CRITICISM—MILTON—COWLEY—THE PREFATORY MATTER OF
‘GONDIBERT’—THE “HEROIC POEM”—DAVENANT’S ‘EXAMEN’—HOBBES’S
ANSWER—DRYDEN—HIS ADVANTAGES—THE EARLY PREFACES—THE ‘ESSAY OF
DRAMATIC POESY’—ITS SETTING AND OVERTURE—CRITES FOR THE
ANCIENTS—EUGENIUS FOR THE “LAST AGE”—LISIDEIUS FOR THE FRENCH—DRYDEN
FOR ENGLAND AND LIBERTY—‘CODA’ ON RHYMED PLAYS, AND
CONCLUSION—CONSPICUOUS MERITS OF THE PIECE—THE MIDDLE PREFACES—THE
‘ESSAY ON SATIRE’ AND THE ‘DEDICATION OF THE ÆNEIS’—THE PARALLEL OF
POETRY AND PAINTING—THE ‘PREFACE TO THE FABLES’—DRYDEN’S GENERAL
CRITICAL POSITION—HIS SPECIAL CRITICAL METHOD—DRYDEN AND
BOILEAU—RYMER—THE ‘PREFACE TO RAPIN’—THE ‘TRAGEDIES OF THE LAST
AGE’—THE ‘SHORT VIEW OF TRAGEDY’—THE RULE OF TOM THE
SECOND—SPRAT—EDWARD PHILLIPS—HIS ‘THEATRUM POETARUM’—WINSTANLEY’S
‘LIVES’—LANGBAINE’S ‘DRAMATIC POETS’—TEMPLE—BENTLEY—COLLIER’S ‘SHORT
VIEW’—SIR T. P. BLOUNT—PERIODICALS: THE ‘ATHENIAN MERCURY,’ ETC.

The middle third, if not the whole first half, of the seventeenth century in England was too much occupied with civil and religious broils to devote attention to such a subject literary criticism. [Sidenote: _Dead water in English Criticism._] Between the probable date of Jonson’s _Timber_ (1625-37) and the certain one of Dryden’s _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ (1668) we have practically nothing substantive save the interesting prefatory matter to _Gondibert_ (1650). [Sidenote: _Milton_] Milton, the greatest man of letters wholly of the time, must indeed during this time have conceived, or at least matured, that cross-grained prejudice against rhyme, which is more surprising in him than even in Campion, and which was itself even more open to Daniel’s strictures. For not only is Milton himself in his own practice a greater and more triumphant vindicator of rhyme than Campion, but Daniel’s strongest and soundest argument, “Why condemn this thing in order to establish that?” applies far more strongly to blank verse than to Campion’s artificial metres. Custom and Nature, those greater Cæsars to whom Daniel so triumphantly appealed, had already settled it, as they were to confirm it later, that rhymed and unrhymed verse, each obeying the natural evolution of English prosody, should be the twin horses to draw its car. But Milton never developed his antipathy to rhyme (which in all probability arose, mainly if not merely, from the fact that nearly all the most exquisite rhymers of his time, except himself, were Cavaliers) in any critical fashion, contenting himself with occasional flings and _obiter dicta_.[484]

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Footnote 484:

The chief critical _loci_ in Milton are all among the best known
passages of his work. They are the peremptory anathema on rhyme in the
prose note added to _Paradise Lost_, in what Professor Masson has
settled to be the “Fifth Form of the First Edition”; the short Defence
of Tragedy, wholly on Italian principles but adapted to Puritan
understandings, prefixed to _Samson Agonistes_; the first description
of his own studies in _The Reason of Church Government_; the more
elaborate return upon that subject—a singular mixture of exquisite
phrasing and literary appreciation with insolent abuse—in the _Apology
for Smectymnuus_ (which is not, as some have thought, the same thing
as _The_ [Platonic] _Apology_) and divers clauses in the _Tractate of
Education_, especially the reference to “Castelvetro, Tasso, and
Mazzoni,” whom he credits with “sublime art,” and puts on a level with
Aristotle and Horace. We might add a few casual girds, such as that at
the supposed cacophony of Hall’s “Teach each” in the _Apology for
Smectymnuus_, which has been compared to Malherbe’s vellications of
Desportes (_cf. sup._, p. 245). A complete critical treatise from him
(if only he could have been prevailed upon to write in a good temper)
would have been of supreme interest: it is not so certain that it
would have been of supreme value, even if he had been in that temper.

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Another poet of the time, Cowley, ought to have given us criticism of real importance. [Sidenote: _Cowley._] He had the paramount, if not exclusive, literary interests which are necessary to a great critic; he had the knowledge; and he was perhaps the first man in England to possess the best kind of critical style—lighter than Daniel’s, and less pregnant, involved, and scholastic than Jonson’s—the style of well-bred conversational argument.[485] But he was a little bitten with the scientific as opposed to the literary mania, and, in his own person, he was perhaps too much of a Janus as regards literary tastes to be able to give—or indeed to take—a clear and single view. There were, as in Lope, two poets in Cowley, and each of these was wont to get in the way of the other. The one was a “metaphysical” of the high flight, who at least would, if he could, have been as intensely fantastic as Donne, and as gracefully fantastic as Suckling. The other was a classical, “sensible,” couplet-poet, who was working out Ben Jonson’s theories with even less admixture of Romanticism than that which tinged Ben Jonson’s practice. The entanglement of these was sufficiently detrimental to his poetry; but it would have been absolutely fatal to his criticism, which must either have perpetually contradicted itself or else have wandered in a maze, perplexing as perplexed.

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Footnote 485:

He has practically given us nothing but a slight apology for sacred
verse (common in his time and natural from the author of the
_Davideis_); with a slighter seasoning of the also familiar defence of
poetry from being mere “lying,” in the Preface to the folio edition of
his Poems; some still slighter remarks on Comedy in that to _Cutter of
Coleman Street_; and hardly more than a glance at literary education
in his _Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy_.
In this last we may feel a sort of gust of the same spirit which
appears in his disciple Sprat’s _History of the Royal Society_ (_v.
infra_).

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It is with Davenant’s Preface to _Gondibert_, in the form of a Letter to Hobbes, and with Hobbes’s answer to it,[486] that England strikes once more into the main path of European critical development. [Sidenote: _The Prefatory matter of_ Gondibert.] And it is of capital importance that, both the writers being exiled royalists, these documents were written at Paris in the year 1650. There was much interest there in English affairs, while, as we have seen, the habit of literary discussion had, for more than a generation, become ingrained in Frenchmen. When Davenant set himself to write _Gondibert_, he was doing exactly what Chapelain and Desmarets and the rest were doing; and when he and his greater friend exchanged their epistles, they were doing exactly what all the French literary world had been doing, not merely, as is commonly thought, from the time of the _Cid_ dispute, but from one much earlier. Taking all things together, it was natural that the subject should be the _Heroic Poem_, which had been a favourite of Italian and French critics for some seventy years and more, but had been little touched in England, though the conclusion of Ben’s _Discoveries_ shapes a course for it. Hints have been given before in this History that in the opinion of its writer the “Heroic Poem” had much in common with that entity which was long without a literary name, but which an admirable humourist has now enabled us to describe scientifically as a Boojum[487]—that is to say, it was not only something undiscoverable, but something which had a malign and, indeed, destructive influence on those who thought they had discovered it.

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Footnote 486:

Both these will be found in Chalmers’ _Poets_, vi. 349-372. Hobbes’s
_Answer_ is also in Molesworth’s ed. of the _Works_, iv. 443-458. It
is there followed by a short literary letter to Edward Howard of the
_British Princes_, the most egregious of Dryden’s egregious leash of
brothers-in-law. To these may be added the brief literary passage in
the chapter of “Intellectual Virtues” in the First Part of _Leviathan_
(ibid., iii. 58) and the “Brief” of the _Rhetoric_ (referred to
_supra_, vol. i. p. 40); ibid., vi. 416-510. I have a copy of the
first edition of this, anonymous and undated, but assigned to 1655-57
by bibliographers. It does not contain the shorter _Art of Rhetoric_,
which follows in Molesworth.

Footnote 487:

This Boojum, I fear, will disturb some of my friends. But I put him
under the protection of the Powder of Pimperlimpimp, and of the
Equinoctials of Queubus.

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The “Heroic Poem” was to be neither pure Romance nor pure Epic, but a sort of medley between the two. [Sidenote: _The “Heroic Poem.”_] Or, rather, it was to be a thing of shreds and patches, strictly epic (or at least Virgilian-epical) in theory and rules, but borrowing from Romance whatever it could, as our Elizabethans would say, “convey cleanly” enough in the way of additional attractions. The shreds and patches, too, were not purely poetical: they were not taken simply from Homer and Virgil, nor even from Horace, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, and the rest down to that Musæus whom Scaliger thought so superior to the Chian. A great deal of ancient critical dictum was brought in, and as Aristotle and Horace had said less about Epic than about Drama, they were to be supplemented from others, especially by that treacherous and somewhat obscure passage of Petronius which has been commented on in its place. In fact the whole of this Heroic-Poem matter is a sort of satire on criticism by Kinds, in its attempt—and failure—to discover a kind. If the founders of the novel (who, indeed, in some notable cases were by no means free from the obsession) had persisted in constructing it on the lines of the Heroic Poem, it would indeed have been all up with Fiction. To read Tasso (who, as we might expect, is not the least reasonable) and others, from Ronsard and Du Bellay down to Desmarets and Le Bossu (both of whom, let it be remembered, wrote some time after Davenant)—to find even Dryden a Martha of “machinery,” and comforting himself with a bright new idea of getting the _deorum ministeria_ out of the limited intelligences of angels, so that you might not know at once which side was going to win, as you do in the ordinary Christian Epic[488]—is curious. Nay, it is more—humorous, with that touch of “the pity of it” which humour nearly always has.

The ingenious knight, in explaining his performance and its principles to his friend the philosopher, takes a very high tone. Homer, Virgil, Lucan, and Statius are passed successively in review, and receive each his appropriate compliment, put with dignified reserves, especially in the two latter cases. [Sidenote: _Davenant’s_ Examen.] Only two moderns are admitted—Tasso of the Italians—“for I will yield to their opinion who permit not Ariosto—no, not Du Bartas—in this eminent rank of the heroicks, rather than to make way by their admission for Dante, Marino, and others”[489]—and Spenser of our own men. But Tasso is roundly taken to task for his fairy-tale element, Spenser for his allegory and his archaism. And the faults of all from Homer downwards are charged against “the natural humour of imitation.”[490]

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Footnote 488:

See the _Discourse on Satire_—Scott (in the edition revised by the
present writer) (London, 1882-93), xiii. 24 _sq._, or Ker (_ed. cit.
post_), ii. 33 _sq._

Footnote 489:

I do not smile so much as some may over “no, not Du Bartas.” But
though oases are far from rare in what may seem, to those who know it
not, this thirsty land of criticism, I hardly know a more delightful
“diamond of the desert” than the refusal to admit somebody else lest
you should have to admit Dante, and the subsequent “Dante, Marino,
_and others_.” When the eye is weary of italic print, or of a too
closely packed quarto page, or of François Hédelin, Abbé d’Aubignac,
in any type or _format_, it is pleasant half to shut it, and let the
dream of these “others” wave before one. I see that they must have
written in Italian; but other common measure, other link to bind them
both to the _Commedia_ and to the _Adone_, is yet to seek for me.

Footnote 490:

Lest the last note should lead any one to think that I wish to make
inept and ignoble game of Davenant, let me observe that he can write
admirable things, worthy a son, in double sense, of Oxford. Could
anything be happier than this of Spenser: “His _noble and most artful
hands_”? The mere selection of the epithets is good, the combination
of them famously so.

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After a by no means despicable, but somewhat rhapsodical, digression on this—it is to be observed that Davenant uses “Imitation” in the frank modern sense—and an apology for it as “the dangerous fit of a hot writer,” he gives reasons, partly no doubt drawn from Italian and French sources, why he has made his subject (1) Christian, (2) antique but not historical, (3) foreign, (4) courtly and martial, (5) displaying the distempers of love and ambition. Then he expounds in turn his arrangement of five books (to correspond to acts), with cantos to answer to scenes,[491] his arguments, his quatrain-stanza. He asserts that “the substance is wit,” and discusses that matter at some length, and with a noteworthy hit at conceits, which reminds us that Davenant was _à cheval_ between the First and the Second Caroline period. He indulges in not unpardonable loquacity about his poetic aspirations, with a fresh glance at the great poets of old, and brings in thereby, with some ingenuity but at too great length as a finale, the old prefatory matter of the _Arts Poetic_ about the importance and dignity of poetry in the world, concluding exactly where most begin, with Plato and that “divine anger” of his which some have turned to the “unjust scandal of Poesie.” And so a pleasant echo of Sir Philip blends agreeably with the more prosaic tone, and time, and temper of Sir William.

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Footnote 491:

This attempt to get Epic as close as possible to Drama—to work all the
kinds of Imitation back into one arch-kind—appears more or less
fitfully in the whole Neo-Classic school. And we shall never quite
understand the much discussed “Heroic Play,” till we take it in
conjunction with the “Heroic Poem.”

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Hobbes, as we should expect, is much briefer; and those bronze sentences of his (though he had not at this time quite brought them to their full ring and perfect circumscription) give no uncertain sound. [Sidenote: _Hobbes’s Answer._] He is not, he says, a poet (which is true), and when he assigns to _Gondibert_ “various experience, ready memory, clear judgment, swift and well-governed fancy,” it is obvious enough that all these might be there and yet poetry be absent. He divides the kinds of poetry “swiftly” enough, and ranges himself with his customary decision against those who “take for poesy whatsoever is writ in verse,” cutting out not merely didactic poetry, but sonnets, epigrams, and eclogues, and laying it down that “the subject of a poem is the manners of men.” “They that give entrance to fictions writ in prose err not so much,” but they err. And accordingly he begins the discussion of verse. He does not quarrel with Davenant, as Vida would have done, for deliberately eschewing Invocation; and rapidly comments on the plot, characters, description, &c., of the poem. On the head of diction he would not be Hobbes if he could or did spare a sneer at words of no sense, words “contunded by the schools,” and so forth. And since he _is_ Hobbes, there is piquancy in finding him at one with Walton in the objection to “strong lines.” He is rather striking on a subject which has been much dwelt on of late, the blunting of poetic phrase by use. And when he says that he “never yet saw poem that had so much shape of art, health of morality, and vigour of beauty and expression” as _Gondibert_—when, in the odd timorousness he had caught from Bacon, he adds, that it is only the perishableness of the modern tongues which will prevent it from lasting as long as the _Æneid_ or the _Iliad_—let us remember that, though criticism is one thing and compliment another, they sometimes live in a rather illicit _contubernium_. At any rate, there _is_ criticism, and real criticism, in the two pieces; and they are about the first substantial documents of it in English of which as much can be said for many years.[492]

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Footnote 492:

There is, of course, critical matter in Howell’s _Letters_, and in a
score or scores of other places; but it is of the kind that we must
_now_ neglect, or select from with the most jealous hand.

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Thus, although two of these four were of the greatest of our writers, the third an interesting failure of greatness, and the fourth far from contemptible, they were in all cases prevented, by this or that disqualification, from doing much in criticism.

Dryden, on the contrary, started with every advantage, except those of a body of English criticism behind him, and of a thorough knowledge of the whole of English literature. [Sidenote: _Dryden._] He was a poet nearly, if not quite, of the first class: and though his poetry had a strong Romantic spirit in virtue of its perennial quality, it took the form and pressure of the time so thoroughly and so kindly that there was no internal conflict. Further, he had what by no means all poets of the first class have had, a strong, clear, common-sense judgment, and a very remarkable faculty of arguing the point. And, finally, if he had few predecessors in English, and perhaps did not know much of those few except of Jonson, he was fairly, if not exactly as a scholar, acquainted with the ancients, and he had profited, and was to profit, by the best doctrine of the moderns.

[Sidenote: _His advantages._]

Moreover, from a certain not unimportant point of view, he occupies a position which is only shared in the history of criticism by Dante and (in some estimations, though not in all) by Goethe,—the position of the greatest man of letters in his own country, if not also in Europe, who is at the same time the greatest critic, and who is favoured by Fortune with a concentration of advantages as to time and circumstance. His critical excellence has indeed never been wholly overlooked, and, except by the unjuster partisanship of the early Romantic movement in England, generally admitted with cheerfulness.[493] The want, however, of that synoptic study of the subject, which it is the humble purpose of this book to facilitate, has too often prevented his full pre-eminence from being recognised. It may even be said that it is in criticism that Dryden best shows that original faculty which has often been denied him elsewhere. He borrows, indeed, as freely as everywhere: he copies, with a half ludicrous deference, the stock opinions of the critics and the criticasters in vogue; he gives us pages on pages of their pedantic trivialities instead of his own shrewd and racy judgments. But, despite of all this, there is in him (and with good luck we may perhaps not fail to disengage it) a vein and style in “judging of Authours” which goes straight back to Longinus, if it is not even independent of that great ancestry.[494]

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Footnote 493:

Of the great critical men of letters of 1800-1850 only Leigh Hunt—the
least of them—was just to Dryden; even Hazlitt is inadequate on him.
Among our _preceptistas_ of the same or a little later date, Keble
(_Præl._ v.) mildly perstringes Dryden’s inconsistency (“_male sibi
constat D._”), but rather as poet than as critic. Garbett, his
successor and opponent, a great admirer of Dryden’s style, and one who
expresses just regret at the want of common knowledge of it, is very
severe (_Præl._ x.) on his want of philosophical profundity and
sincerity. But the reverend Professor had found nearly as much fault
on this score with Longinus.

Footnote 494:

Dryden made no mistake about Longinus. He calls him, in the _Apology_
prefixed to _The State of Innocence_, “the greatest critic among the
Greeks after Aristotle,” cites him often, and parades and uses a long
passage of the Περὶ Ὕψους in the Preface to _Troilus and Cressida_.
The references are conveniently collected in Mr Ker’s index (_v.
inf._)

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This vein is perceptible[495] even in the slight critical essays which precede the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, though of course it is much more evident in the _Essay_ itself. [Sidenote: _The Early Prefaces._] In the preface to the _Rival Ladies_ (written, not indeed when Dryden was a very young man, but when, except for _Juvenilia_, he had produced extremely little) we find his critical path clearly traced, and still more in the three years later Preface to _Annus Mirabilis_. The principles of this path-making are as follows: Dryden takes—without perhaps a very laborious study of them, but, as has been said already, with an almost touching docility in appearance—the current theories and verdicts of the French, Italian (and Spanish?) critics whom we should by this time have sufficiently surveyed. He does not—he never did to the date of the glorious Preface to the _Fables_ itself—dispute the general doctrines of the sages from Aristotle downwards. But (and this is where the Longinian resemblance comes in) he never can help considering the individual works of literature almost without regard to these principles, and simply on the broad, the sound, the unshakable ground of the impression they make on him. Secondly (and this is where the resemblance to Dante comes in), he is perfectly well aware that questions of diction, metre, and the like are not mere catchpenny or claptrap afterthoughts, as ancient criticism was too apt to think them, but at the root of the pleasure which literature gives. Thirdly (and this is where, though Aristotle did not deny the fact, the whole criticism of antiquity, except that of Longinus, and most of that of modern times, swerves timorously from the truth), he knows that this delight, this transport, counts first as a criterion. Literature in general, poetry in particular, should, of course, instruct: but it _must_ delight.[496]

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Footnote 495:

Dryden’s critical work, which until recently was accessible with ease
only in Scott’s elaborate edition of his works, or in Malone’s less
bulky, but still bulky and not excessively common, edition of the
Prose, has recently been given, with quite admirable editorial matter,
by Professor Ker (2 vols., Oxford, 1900). I wish he had included one
or two more things, especially the _Heads of an answer to Rymer_; but
it must be admitted that the authenticity of these, though I think not
doubtful, is not absolutely certain, and the correct text still less
so. See note on Rymer _infra_, and my edition of Scott, xv. 378 _sq._,
for text and history.

Footnote 496:

_Defence of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy._ Scott, _ed. cit._, xi. 295:
Ker, i. 113.

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The “blundering, half-witted people,” as in one of his rare bursts of not absolutely cool contempt[497] he calls his own critics, who charged him with plagiarising from foreign authors, entirely missed these differences, which distinguish him from every foreign critic of his day, and of most days for long afterwards. He may quote—partly out of that genuine humility and generosity combined which make his literary character so agreeable; partly from an innocent parade of learning. But he never pays for what he borrows the slavish rent, or royalty, of surrendering his actual and private judgment.

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Footnote 497:

Preface to _Miscellanies_, ii.; Scott, _ed. cit._, xii. 295; Ker, i.
263. I wish that Dryden were alive for many reasons: not least because
he would certainly pay the debt that he owes to my friend Mr Ker
_magnificentissime_. No one has vindicated him better against the
half-witted blunderers. But I am not quite so much inclined as even Mr
Ker is to father his critical _style_ on Chapelain and La Mesnardière,
Sarrasin and Scudéry, or on Corneille himself. It is not till
Saint-Evremond, perhaps even till Fénelon, that I can find in French
the indescribable _omne tulit punctum_ as in him. And both, are his
inferiors.

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In the Preface to the _Rival Ladies_ the poet-critic takes (as indeed he afterwards himself fully acknowledged) a wrong line—the defence of what he calls “verse” (that is to say, rhymed heroic couplets, not blank verse) for play-writing. This was his mistress of the time; he rejoiced in her caresses, he wore her colours, he fought for her beauty—the enjoyment authorising the argument. But as he has nothing to say that has not been better said in the _Essay_, we may postpone the consideration of this. There is one of the slips of fact which can be readily excused to (and by) all but bad critics,—and which bad critics are chiefly bound to avoid, because accuracy of fact is their only title to existence—in his mention of “Queen” _Gorboduc_ and his addition that the dialogue in that play is rhymed; there is an interesting sigh for an Academy (Dryden, let it be remembered, was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society); and there is the well-known and very amiable, though rather dangerous, delusion that the excellence and dignity of rhyme were never known till Mr Waller taught it, and that John Denham’s _Cooper’s Hill_ not only is, but ever will be, the exact standard of good writing. But he knows Sidney and he knows Scaliger, and he knows already that Shakespeare “had a larger soul of poesy than any of our nation.” And a man who knows these three things in 1664 will go far.

The Preface to _Annus Mirabilis_[498] is again submissive in form, independent in spirit. Dryden obediently accepts the prescription for epic or “Heroic” poetry, and though he makes another slip of fact (or at least of term) by saying that Chapman’s _Homer_ is written in “Alexandrines or verses of six feet” instead of (as far as the _Iliad_ is concerned) in the fourteener, he is beautifully scholastic on the differences between Virgil and Ovid, the Heroic and the Burlesque, “Wit Writing” and “Wit Written.” But he does it with unconquerable originality, the utterance of his own impression, his own judgment, breaking through all this school-stuff at every moment; and also with a valuable (though still inadequate) account of “the Poet’s imagination.”[499]

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Footnote 498:

I have not thought it necessary to encumber the page with references
in the case of the shorter Essays, where any one can discover the
passages cited, whether he uses Scott, Malone, the originals, or Mr
Ker’s special collection, with no more labour than is good for him and
deserved by them. In the case of the longer pieces the references will
be given at least sufficiently often to make the locating of the
others easy, without turning the lower part of the page into a kind of
arithmetical table.

Footnote 499:

As including Invention, Fancy, and Elocution, but in itself merely
considered as synonymous with “Wit.” It was probably from this that
Addison (see below) started that Imagination theory of his which has
been so much overrated.

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Yet another point of interest is the avowed intention (carried out in the poem, to the disgust or at least distaste of Dr Johnson) of using technical terms. This, one of the neoclassic devices for attaining propriety, was, as we have seen, excogitated in Italy, and warmly championed by the Pléiade; but it had been by this time mostly abandoned, as it was later by Dryden himself.

[Sidenote: _The_ Essay of Dramatic Poesy.]

The _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ is much better known than it was only a couple of decades ago,[500] and it is perhaps superfluous to say that it is a dialogue in form, and that the interlocutors are Dryden himself (Neander), his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard (Crites), Sir Charles Sedley (Lisideius), and Lord Buckhurst (Eugenius). The two last, though at the time the wildest of scapegraces, were men of distinct poetic gift and varied literary faculty. And Howard, though no great poet, and possessing something of the prig, the coxcomb, and the pedant in his composition, was a man of some ability, of real learning of a kind, and of very distinct devotion to literature.

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Footnote 500:

When the present writer began his revision of Scott’s _Dryden_ in the
year 1881 there were no separate editions of the _Essay_ since the
originals. There are now, of annotated issues of it, either by itself
or with more or less of its author’s related work, no less than five
known to me,—those of Mr Thomas Arnold (Oxford, 1886), Mr Strunk (New
York, 1898), Mr Low (London, n. d.), Mr Nichol Smith (Glasgow, 1900),
and Professor Ker’s. The study of English literature in schools and
colleges has been much abused, very foolishly talked about by some of
its advocates, and no doubt not always wisely directed. But it is at
least something to be said for it that it has made such a masterpiece
as this known to probably a hundred persons for every one who knew it
twenty years ago.

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The _Essay_ was first published in 1668, but had been written, according to Dryden’s statement in his Preface to Lord Buckhurst, “in the country” (at his father-in-law Lord Berkshire’s seat of Charlton near Malmesbury), when the author was driven out of London by the Great Plague three years before. [Sidenote: _Its setting and overture._] He had, he says, altered some of his opinions; but it did not much matter in an Essay “where all I have said is problematical.” The “Address to the Reader” promises a second part dealing with Epic and Lyric, which never appeared, and of which only the Epic part is represented by later works. This is a pity, for while we have treatises on Drama and Epic _ad nauseam_, their elder and lovelier sister has been, “poor girl! neglected.” It begins with a picturesque setting, which represents the four interlocutors as having taken boat and shot the bridge, attracted by the reverberation of the great battle with the Dutch in the early part of June 1665, when Admiral Opdam’s flag-ship was blown up. Eugenius augurs victory from the gradual dying away of the noise; and Crites observes (in character) that he should like this victory better if he did not know how many bad verses he should have to read on it. Lisideius adds that he knows some poets who have got _epinikia_ and funeral elegies all ready for either event, and the dialogue proceeds for some time in the same way of literary banter, especial set being made at two poets (one of whom is certainly Wild, while the other _may_ be Flecknoe) with incidental sneers at Wither(s) and Cleveland. At last Crites brings it to something like the quarrel of Ancient _v._ Modern. Eugenius picks up the glove, but consents, at Crites’ suggestion, to limit the discussion to dramatic poetry,[501] and so the “dependence” is settled.

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Footnote 501:

One of the very earliest evidences of the interest in dramatic
criticism felt in England, immediately after the Restoration, must be
Pepys’ note that on September 1, 1660, when he was dining at the
Bullhead, there “rose ... a dispute between Mr Moore and Dr Clerke—the
former affirming that it was essential to a tragedy to have the
argument of it true, which the Doctor denied.” The question, on the
very English terms of another dinner and a bet, was to be settled by
Pepys himself three days later. He does not tell us whether he read up
for it; but on the 4th he decided for the Doctor (_Diary_, ed.
Wheatley, i. 233).

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Eugenius thinks that though modern plays are better than Greek or Roman, yet those of “the last age” (1600-1660) are better than “ours.” [Sidenote: _Crites for the Ancients._] As for epic and lyric, the last age must yield. And all the quartette agree that “the sweetness of English verse was never understanded or practised” by our fathers, and that some writers yet living first taught us to mould our thoughts into easy and significant words, to retrench the superfluities of expression, and to make our rhyme so properly a part of the verse that it should never mislead the sense. Lisideius having (with the consent of the company, subject to a slight scholastic objection from Crites) defined or described a play as “A just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind,” Crites takes up his brief for the ancients. His speech is a set one, extolling the classical conception of drama, and especially the modern-classical Unities,

but rather a panegyric than an argument, and particularly weak in this—that it takes no critical account of the modern drama at all. Except Ben Jonson, “the greatest man of the last age,” not a single modern dramatic writer of any country is so much as named.

Eugenius, though his discourse is livelier, falls into something the same fault, or at least the counterpart of it. [Sidenote: _Eugenius for the “last age.”_] He rallies the ancients unmercifully, and has very good game of the stock plots and characters in Terence; but his commendation of the moderns has a disappointing generality, and he lays himself rather open to the good-humoured but forcible interruption of Crites that he and Eugenius are never likely to come to an agreement, because the one regards change as in itself an improvement, and the other does not.

Still, Lisideius gives a new turn to the discussion by asking Eugenius why he puts English plays above those of other nations, and whether we ought not to submit our stage to the exactness of our next neighbours. [Sidenote: _Lisideius for the French._] Eugenius in reply commits the further and especial defence of the English to Neander, and Lisideius begins his part as eulogist of the French. For some forty years, he says, we have not had leisure to be good poets. The French have: and, by Richelieu’s patronage and Corneille’s example, have raised their theatre till it now surpasses ours, and the rest of Europe. Who have kept the Unities so well? Who have avoided “that absurd thing,” the English tragi-comedy, so completely? In tragedy they take well-known stories, and only manageable parts of them, while Shakespeare crams the business of thirty or forty years into two hours and a half. They make only one person prominent, they do as much as possible behind the scenes, keep dying off the stage altogether, and never end their plays with a conversion, or simple change of will. Nobody, with them, appears on the stage, unless he has some business there: and as for the beauty of their rhyme, why, that is “already partly received by us,” and it will, no doubt, when we write better plays, “exceedingly beautify them.”

To him, Neander—that is to say—Dryden himself.

There is a reminder (though the matter is quite different) of Daniel, and a comforting augury for English criticism, in the swift directness with which “the new critic” (as a Webbe of his own day might have called him) strikes at the heart of the question. [Sidenote: _Dryden for England and Liberty._] The French are more regular, he grants, and our irregularities are, in some cases, justly taxed. But, nevertheless, he is of opinion that neither our faults nor their virtues are sufficient to place them above us. For Lisideius himself has defined a play as a lively imitation _of nature_. And these beauties of the French stage are beauties, not natural, but thoroughly artificial. Before Molière, where are the humours of French comedy, save, perhaps, in _Le Menteur_ and a few others? Elsewhere they work in comedy only by the old way of quarrels and reconciliations, or by the conventions of Spanish intrigue-drama. “On which lines there is not above one play to be writ: they are too much alike to please often.”

Then, as to tragi-comedy. What is the harm of this? why should Lisideius “imagine the soul of man more heavy than his senses?” The eye can pass, and pass with relief, from an unpleasant to a pleasant object, in far less time than is required on the stage. He must have stronger arguments before he concludes that compassion and mirth destroy each other: and in the meantime he will hold that tragi-comedy is a more pleasant way than was known to the ancients, or any moderns who have eschewed it.

Next, and closely connected, as to single-plot _v._ plot + underplot. Why is the former to be preferred to the latter? Because it gives a greater advantage to the expression of passion? Dryden can only say that he thinks “their” verse the “coldest” he has ever read, and he supports this by a close and pleasant beating-up-the-quarters of _Cinna_ and _Pompey_, “not so properly to be called plays as long discourses on reason of state”; of _Polyeucte_, “as solemn as the long stops on an organ,” of their mighty tirades and _récits_. “Whereas in tragedy it is unnatural for any one either to speak or listen long, and in comedy quick repartee is the chiefest grace.” Yet again “they” are praised for making only one person considerable. Why? If variety is not mere confusion, is it not always pleasing?[502]

The question of narrative against represented action is treated with less boldness, and, therefore, with less success: but he comes to the sound, if not very improving, conclusion that, if we show too much action, the French show too little. He has an interesting rebuke, however, here to Ben Jonson, for reprehending “the incomparable Shakespeare.”[503] And he rises again, and makes a capital point, by citing Corneille’s own confession of the cramping effect of the Unities, enlarging whereon himself, he has an admirable exposure of the utterly unnatural conditions which observance of these Unities brings about. Then, after some remarks on prosody and the earlier use of rhyme in English—remarks partly true, partly vitiated by imperfect knowledge—he undertakes to produce plays as regular as theirs and with more variety, instancing _The Silent Woman_. Of this he is proceeding to a regular _examen_ when Eugenius requests a character of the author: and Neander, after a little mannerly excuse, not only complies with this request, but prefixes similar characters of Shakespeare and Fletcher.

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Footnote 502:

Here, to glance at the matter of Dryden and the Spaniards (_v. sup._,
p. 332, and _inf._, on Spence), is a _possible_ reminiscence of Lope’s
_Arte Nuevo_, 178-180—

_Que aquesta variedad deleyta mucho:
Buen exemplo nos da naturaleza,
Que por tal variedad tiene belleza._

Footnote 503:

Scott, xv. 337; Ker, i. 75.

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The first of these is universally, the second and third should be pretty well known. [Sidenote: Coda _on rhymed plays, and conclusion_.] It must be sufficient to say here that nothing like even the worst of the three (that of Beaumont and Fletcher, which wants the adequacy and close grip of the other two) had previously been seen in English, and not many things in any other language, while to this day, with all faults, the character of Shakespeare is one of the _apices_ of universal criticism. The characters are followed by the _examen_—also admirable and quite new in English, though with more pattern elsewhere. And he ends with a short peroration, the keynote of which is, “I ask no favour from the French.” Lisideius is going to reply; but Crites interrupting, diverts the discussion to a particular point already glanced at—the use of rhyme in plays. He (sensibly enough) declines to investigate very carefully whether this was a revival of the old English custom or an imitation of the French, but attacks its legitimacy with the usual, obvious, and fairly sound argument that since no man without premeditation speaks in rhyme, he ought not to do it on the stage, anticipating the retort, “neither does he speak blank verse” by urging that this at any rate is “nearest nature” or less _un_natural. Neander, taking up the glove for “his _new_-loved mistress,” practically admits the weakness of his case by first advancing the very argument as to blank verse which Crites has disallowed by anticipation. The rest of his answer is a mixture of true and not so true, of imperfect knowledge and ingenious argument, constantly open to reply, but always interesting as a specimen of critical advocacy. He represents himself as pursuing the discourse so eagerly that Eugenius had to remind him that “the boat stood still,” and that they had come to their destination at Somerset stairs. And with a pleasant final patch of description the dialogue closes.

In reading it we should keep in mind what he says a quarter of a century later to the same correspondent,[504] that he was at this time seeking his way “in a vast ocean” of criticism without other help than the pole-star of the ancients and the rules of the French stage amongst the moderns. [Sidenote: _Conspicuous merits of the piece._] He has given the reading of the pole-star to Crites, and has pointed out the dangers of mere dead-reckoning by it. He has put into the mouth of Sedley (with a touch of malice which that ingenious good-for-nothing must have noticed, and which it is to his credit that he did not resent) a similar reading of the bearings of the different French lights, and has shown how little they assisted the English mariner—indeed, how some of them actually led to rocks and quicksands, instead of warning off from them. In the mouth of Buckhurst, and in his own, he has put the patriotic apology, inclining it in the former case towards laudation of the past, and in the latter to defence of the present: and he has allowed divers excursions from the immediate subject—especially that on “verse,” or rhymed heroics, as a dramatic medium. One of the chief of the many merits of the piece is precisely this, that at the time Dryden had read less than at a later, and was less tempted to add quotations or comments. He was following chiefly a very safe guide—Corneille—and he bettered his guide’s instruction. It may be said boldly that, up to the date, nothing in the way of set appreciation—no, not in Longinus himself—had appeared equal to the three characters of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher; while almost greater still is the constant application of the “leaden rule,” the taking of book, author, kind, _as it is_, and judging it accordingly, instead of attempting to force everything into agreement or disagreement with a prearranged schedule of rules.

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Footnote 504:

In the _Discourse on Satire_. Scott, xiii. 3; Ker, ii. 17.

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After the publication of the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, Dryden (English literature can hardly give too many thanks for it) had more than thirty well-filled years of life allowed him; and to the very last, and at the very last, criticism had its full share of his labours. [Sidenote: _The Middle Prefaces._] The “Prefaces of Dryden” never fail to give valuable matter; and we shall have to notice most, if not all of them, though the notices may be of varying length. The immediate successor and, in fact, appendix to the _Essay_, the _Defence_ thereof, was only printed in one edition, the second, of _The Indian Emperor_, and is very far from being of the best. Sir Robert Howard was, as has been said, a man conceited and testy, as Shadwell’s nickname for him in _The Sullen Lovers_, Sir Positive Atall, hints. He seems to have been nettled by his part of Crites, and replied with some heat in a Preface to his own play, _The Duke of Lerma_. Dryden, who never quite learned the wisdom of Bacon’s _dictum_, “Qui replicat multiplicat,” and who at this time had not yet learnt the easy disdain of his later manner, riposted (1668) with more sense but with not much more temper. The piece (which was practically withdrawn later) contained, besides not too liberal asperities on Sir Robert’s own work, a further “defence of Rhyme,” not like Daniel’s, where it should be, but where it should not. It is redeemed by an occasional admission, in Dryden’s usual and invaluable manner, that he is quite aware of the other side, and by an unhesitating assertion of the primacy of Delight among the Objects of Poetry.

In none of the next three or four of the pieces do we find him quite at his best. For some few years, indeed, the popularity of his splendid, if sometimes a little fustianish, heroics, the profits of his connection with the theatre (which, added to other sources of revenue, made him almost a rich man in his way), and his association with the best society, seem to have slightly intoxicated him. He saw his error, like other wise men, all in good time, and even the error itself was not more than human and pardonable.

The Preface to _An Evening’s Love_ promises, but for the time postpones, an extension of the criticism of “the last age,” and intersperses some valuable remarks on the difference between Comedy and Farce, between Wit and Humour, with a good deal of egotism and some downright arrogance.[505] The _Essay of Heroic Plays_ prefixed to _The Conquest of Granada_ (1672) is as yet unconverted as to rhyme on the stage; but contains some interesting criticism of Davenant’s essays in the kind, and a curious defence (recurred to later) of supernatural “machinery.” The main gist of the Preface, besides its defence of the extravagances of Almanzor, is an elaborate adjustment of the Heroic Play to the rules of the much-talked-of Heroic Poem. But though there is a good deal of self-sufficiency here, it is as nothing to the drift of the Epilogue to the second part of the play, and of an elaborate Prose “Defence” of this Epilogue. Here Dryden takes up the position that in “the last age,” when men were dull and conversation low, Shakespeare and Fletcher had not, while Jonson did not avail himself of, access to that higher society which delighted to honour him, Dryden. Divers flings at the “solecisms,” “flaws in sense,” “mean writing,” “lame plots,” “carelessness,” “luxuriance,” “pedantry” of these poor creatures lead up to a statement that “_Gentlemen_ will now be entertained with the foibles _of each other_.” Never again do we find Dryden writing like this; and for his having done it at all Rochester’s “Black Will with a cudgel” exacted sufficient, as suitable, atonement in the Rose Alley ambuscade, even from the lowest point of view. From a higher, he himself made an ample apology to Shakespeare in the Prologue to _Aurungzebe_, and practically never repeated the offence.

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Footnote 505:

“I have further to add that I seldom use the wit and language of any
romance or play which I undertake to alter; because my own invention,
as bad as it is, can furnish me with nothing so dull as what is
there.” These invocations of Nemesis are seldom unheard by the acute
ears of that satiric Goddess.

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The curious _State of Innocence_ (1677) (a much better thing than rigid Miltonists admit) is preceded by an equally curious _Apology of Heroic Poetry_, in which, yet once more, we find the insufficient sense in which Imagination (here expressly limited to “Imaging”) was used; while the Preface to _All for Love_ (1678) is a very little ill-tempered towards an anonymous lampooner, who was, in fact, Rochester. _Troilus and Cressida_ (1679) was ushered by a set preliminary _Discourse on the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy_. No piece illustrates more remarkably that mixed mode of criticism in Dryden, to bring out which is our chief design. On a canvas, not it must be confessed of much interest, woven out of critical commonplaces from Aristotle and Longinus down to Rymer and Le Bossu, he has embroidered a great number of most valuable observations of his own, chiefly on Shakespeare and Fletcher, which culminate in a set description of Fletcher as “a limb of Shakespeare”—a thing happy in itself and productive of happy imitations since. The Preface to the translation of Ovid’s _Epistles_ (1680) chiefly consists of a fresh defence of that ingenious writer (for whom Dryden had no small fancy), and the Dedication to Lord Haughton of _The Spanish Friar_ (1681) is mainly notable for an interesting confession of Dryden’s changes of opinion about Chapman and Du Bartas (Sylvester rather), and a sort of apology for his own dallying with these Delilahs of the theatre in the rants of Almanzor and Maximin.

But that to the _Second Miscellany_, five years later, after a period chiefly occupied with the great political satires, ranges with the _Essay_, and not far below the _Fables_ Preface, among Dryden’s critical masterpieces. The thing is not long—less than twenty pages. But it gives a coherent and defensible, if also disputable, theory of translation, a singularly acute, and, it would appear, original contrast of the _faire_ of Ovid and of Claudian, more detailed studies of Virgil, Lucretius (singularly good), Horace, and Theocritus, and the best critical stricture in English on “Pindaric” verse. After it the note of the same year on Opera, which ushered _Albion and Albanius_, is of slight importance.

The Dedication of the Third Miscellany (specially named _Examen Poeticum_, as the second had been sub-titled _Sylvæ_) contains some interesting protests against indiscriminate critical abuse, the final formulation of a saying sketched before (“the corruption of a poet is the generation of a critic”), illustrated from Scaliger in the past and (not obscurely though not _nominatim_) from Rymer in the present; and, among other things, some remarks on prosody which might well have been fuller.

Between this and the Fables, besides some lesser things,[506] there appeared two of the longest and most ambitious in appearance of Dryden’s critical writings, the _Essay_ [strictly _Discourse_] _on Satire_ prefixed to the _Juvenal_, and the _Dedication of the Æneis_, with, between them, the first writing at any length by a very distinguished Englishman of letters, on the subject of pictorial art, in the shape of the _Parallel of Poetry and Painting_ prefixed to the translation of Du Fresnoy _De Arte Graphica_. [Sidenote: _The_ Essay on Satire _and the_ Dedication of the Æneis.] All, being Dryden’s, are, and could not but be, admirably written and full of interest. But the _Juvenal_ and _Virgil_ Prefaces are, in respect of permanent value, both intrinsically and representively injured by an excess of critical erudition. The time was perhaps not yet ripe for an honest and candid address straight to the English reader. The translator was bound to recommend himself to classical scholars by attention to the paraphernalia of what then regarded itself as scholarship (“other brides, other paraphernalia” no doubt), and to propitiate wits, and Templars, and the gentlemen of the Universities, with original or borrowed discourses on literary history and principle. Dryden fell in with the practice, and obliged his readers with large decoctions of Rigaltius and Casaubon, Dacier and Segrais, which are at any rate more palatable than the learned originals, but which make us feel, rather ruefully, that boiling down such things was not the work for which the author of _Absalom and Achitophel_ and of _The Essay on Dramatic Poesy_ was born.

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Footnote 506:

Lesser, but far from negligible; for the _Character of Saint-Evremond_
is both personally and critically interesting, and the critical
biographies of Lucian and Plutarch lead straight to Johnson.

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As for the _Parallel_, it is of course interesting as being nearly our first Essay, and that by a master hand, in a kind of criticism which has later given excellent results. [Sidenote: _The Parallel of Poetry and Painting._] But Dryden, as he most frankly admits, did not know very much about the matter, and his work resolves itself very mainly into a discussion of the principles of Imitation in general, applied in an idealist manner to the two arts in particular. Again we may say, “Not here, O Apollo!”

We have nothing left but the _Preface to the Fables_, the extraordinary merit of which has been missed by no competent critic from Johnson to Mr Ker. [Sidenote: _The_ Preface to the Fables.] The wonderful ease and urbanity of it, the artfully varied forms of reply to the onslaughts of Collier and others, are not more generally agreeable than are, in a special division, the enthusiastic eulogy of Chaucer (all the more entertaining because of its lack of mere pedantic accuracy in places), and the interesting, if again not always rigidly accurate, scraps of literary history. It winds up, as the _Essay_ had practically begun, a volume of critical writing which, if not for pure, yet for applied, mixed, and sweetened criticism, deserves to be put on the shelf—no capacious one—reserved for the best criticism of the world.