Halleck's New English Literature · Chapter 55John Dryden, 1631-1700
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[Illustration: JOHN DRYDEN. From the painting by Sir Godfrey Knellwe, National Portrait Gallery.]
[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF DRYDEN. From a print.]
Life.—John Dryden was born in 1631 in the small village of Aldwinkle, in the northern part of Northamptonshire. Few interesting facts concerning his life have come down to us. His father was a baronet; his mother, the daughter of a rector. Young Dryden graduated from Cambridge in 1654.
During his entire life, Dryden was a professional literary man; and with his pen he made the principal part of his living. This necessity often forced him against his own better judgment to cater to the perverted taste of the Restoration. When he found that plays had more market value than any other kind of literature, he agreed to furnish three plays a year for the king's actors, but was unable to produce that number. For fifteen years in the prime of his life, Dryden did little but write plays, the majority of which are seldom read to-day. His only important poem during his dramatic period was Annus Mirabilis (The Wonderful Year, 1666), memorable for the great London fire and for naval victories over the Dutch.
By writing the greatest political satire in the language at the age of fifty, he showed the world where his genius lay. During the last twenty years of his life, he produced but few plays. His greatest satires, didactic poems, and lyrics belong to this period. In his last years he wrote a spirited translation of Vergil, and retold in his own inimitable way various stories from Chaucer and Boccaccio and Ovid. These stories were published in a volume entitled Fables, Ancient and Modern. Dryden died in 1700 and was buried in Westminster Abbey beside Chaucer.
It is difficult to speak positively of Dryden's character. He wrote a poem in honor of the memory of Cromwell, and a little later another poem, Astraea Redux, welcoming Charles II. He argued in stirring verse in favor of the Episcopal religion when that was the faith of the court; but after the accession of James II., who was a Catholic, Dryden wrote another poem to prove the Catholic Church the only true one. He had been appointed poet laureate in 1670, but the Revolution of 1688, which drove James from the throne, caused Dryden to lose the laureateship. He would neither take the oath of fealty to the new government nor change his religion. In spite of adversity and the loss of an income almost sufficient to support him, he remained a Catholic for the rest of his life and reared his sons in that faith.
He seems to have been of a forgiving disposition and ready to acknowledge his own faults. He admitted that his plays were disfigured with coarseness. He was very kind to young writers and willing to help them with their work. In his chair at Will's Coffee House, discoursing to the wits of the Restoration about matters of literary art, he was one of the most prominent figures of the age.
His Prose.—Although to the majority of people Dryden is known only as a poet, his influence on prose has been so far-reaching as to entitle him to be called one of the founders of modern prose style.
The shortening of sentences has been a striking feature in the development of modern English prose. Edmund Spenser averages about fifty words to each of his prose sentences; Richard Hooker, about forty-one. One of the most striking sentences in Milton's Areopagitica contains ninety-five words, although he crowds over three hundred words into some of his long sentences. The sentences in some of Dryden's pages average only twenty-five words in length. Turning to Macaulay, one of the most finished masters of modern prose, we find that his sentences average twenty-two words. Dryden helped also to free English prose from the inversions, involutions, and parenthetical intricacies of earlier times. His influence on both prose and poetry were much the same. In verse he adopted the short, easily understood unit of the classical couplet; and in prose, the short, direct sentence.
Dryden's prose deals chiefly with literary criticism. Most of his prose is to be found in the prefaces to his plays and poems. His most important separate prose composition is his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, a work which should be read by all who wish to know some of the foundation principles of criticism.
Satiric Poetry.—No English writer has surpassed Dryden in satiric verse. His greatest satire is Absalom and Achitophel, in which, under the guise of Old Testament characters, he satirizes the leading spirits of the Protestant opposition to the succession of James, the brother of Charles II., to the English throne. Dryden thus satirizes Achitophel, the Earl of Shaftesbury:—
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide; Else, why should he, with wealth and honor blest, Refuse his age the needful hours of rest? Punish a body which he could not please, Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease? And all to leave what with his toil he won To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son. * * * * * In friendship false, implacable in hate, Resolved to ruin or to rule the state."
Zimri, the Duke of Buckingham, is immortalized thus:—
"Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long."
Mac Flecknoe is another satire of almost as great merit, directed against a certain Whig poet by the name of Shadwell. He would have been seldom mentioned in later times, had it not been for two of Dryden's lines:—
"The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense."
All for Love, one of Dryden's greatest plays, shows the delicate keenness of his satire in characterizing the cold-blooded Augustus Caesar, or Octavius, as he is there called. Antony has sent a challenge to Octavius, who replies that he has more ways than one to die. Antony rejoins:—
"He has more ways than one; But he would choose them all before that one. Ventidius. He first would choose an ague or a fever. Antony. No; it must be an ague, not a fever; He has not warmth enough to die by that."
Dryden could make his satire as direct and blasting as a thunderbolt. He thus describes his publisher:—
"With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair, With two left legs, and Judas-colored hair, And frowsy pores that taint the ambient air."
Argumentative or Didactic Verse.—Dryden is a master in arguing in poetry. He was not a whit hampered by the restrictions of verse. They were rather an advantage to him, for in poetry he could make more telling arguments in briefer compass than in prose. The best two examples of his power of arguing in verse are Religio Laici, written in 1682, to uphold the Episcopal religion, and The Hind and the Panther, composed in 1687, to vindicate the Catholic church. Verse of this order is called didactic, because it endeavors to teach or to explain something. The age of the Restoration delighted in such exercises of the intellect vastly more than in flights of fancy or imagination.
Lyrical Verse.—While most of Dryden's best poetry is either satiric or didactic, he wrote three fine lyrical poems: Alexander's Feast, A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, and An Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew. All are distinguished by remarkable beauty and energy of expression. Alexander's Feast is the most widely read of Dryden's poems. The opening lines of the Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew seem almost Miltonic in their conception, and they show great power in the field of lyrical poetry. Mistress Killigrew was a young lady of rare accomplishments in both poetry and painting, who died at the age of twenty-five. Dryden thus begins her memorial ode:—
"Thou youngest virgin daughter of the skies, Made in the last promotion of the blest; Whose palms, new plucked from Paradise, In spreading branches more sublimely rise, Rich with immortal green above the rest: * * * * * Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine, Since Heaven's eternal year is thine."
Some of his plays have songs and speeches instinct with lyrical force. The following famous lines on the worth of existence are taken from his tragedy of Aurengzebe:—
"When I consider'd life, 'tis all a cheat, Yet, fool'd with hope, men favor the deceit, Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay: To-morrow's falser than the former day, Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blest With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. Strange cozenage! none would live past years again; Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain. And, from the dregs of life, think to receive What the first sprightly running could not give. I'm tir'd with waiting for this chemic gold, Which fools us young and beggars us when old."
General Characteristics.—In point of time, Dryden is the first great poet of the school of literary artists. His verse does not tolerate the unpruned irregularities and exaggerations of many former English poets. His command over language is remarkable. He uses words almost as he chooses, but he does not invest them with the warm glow of feeling. He is, however, something more than a great word artist. Many of his ideas bear the stamp of marked originality.
In the field of satiric and didactic poetry, he is a master. The intellectual, not the emotional, side of man's nature appeals strongly to him. He heeds not the song of the bird, the color of the rose, nor the clouds of evening.
Although more celebrated for his poetry than for his prose, he is the earliest of the great modern prose stylists, and he displays high critical ability.