Her heedless innocence as little knew The wounds she gave, as those from Love she took; And Love lifts high each secret shaft he drew; Which at their stars he first in triumph shook. Love he had lik'd but never lodg'd before; Soon her opinion of his hurtless heart Affection turns to faith; and then love's fire If I do love (said she), that love, O Heaven! This said, her soul into her breast retires; With Love's vain diligence of heart she dreams Herself into possession of desires, And trusts unanchor'd Hope in fleeting streams : She thinks of Eden-life; and no rough wind She thinks if ever anger in him sway (The youthful warrior's most excused disease), Such chance her tears shall calm, as showers allay The accidental rage of winds and seas. Thus to herself in day-dreams Birtha talks: The duke (whose wounds of war are healthful grown To cure Love's wounds, seeks Birtha where she walks: Whose wandering soul seeks him to cure her own. JOHN DRYDEN. Born in Aldwinckle, Northamptonshire, in 1631. Made laureate in 1670, two years after the death of Davenant. Deposed at the Revolution. Died in 1700. (Reigns of Charles II. and James II.) "POETRY, to be just to itself, ought always to precede and be the herald of improvement," wrote Longfellow years ago in the pages of the North American Review. How little Dryden's work was the herald of improvement every earnest student of literature feels keenly. All his influence seemed to hasten the downward course of poetry in England. Dryden was neither true to himself nor to his genius. His splendid endowments fitted him to be a dictator to mankind, and he was himself governed by the worst tendencies of his age. A superb reasoner; a critic of learning and ability, possessing powers of satire which have never been surpassed; master of a prose style which was sinewy, flexible, and eloquent, and of a poetical versification remarkable for its clearness, its grace, its command of variations in metre-yet to Dryden there was not "That sublimer inspiration given That glows in Shakespeare's or in Milton's page- The record of Dryden's life proves that it was clearly his own choice that he missed the highest. The poetical achievement and moral dignity of his great contemporary, Milton, show that a man may, if he choose, emancipate himself from the influences of his age, and stem the tide of its evil. But in Dryden, from first to last, we see a lack of earnestness, of honesty of purpose, of “belief in and devotion to something nobler and more abiding than the present moment and its petulant need." Without such devotion a man's work cannot be called truly great. And yet, with all Dryden's fatal defects of soul, his intellectual services cannot be ignored:-he has been justly called both the glory and the shame of our literature. Dryden's grandfather was a baronet; his father a younger son of an ancient and honourable family, whose traditions were all Puritan. Little is known of his childhood, except that he was sturdy and precocious. Sent to Westminster school, he often felt the "classic rod" of Dr. Busby, but the boy's temperament was such that neither punishments nor abuse had much power to affect his serene self-confidence. He was very susceptible to praise, and in this we see the root of his subsequent literary methods. Dryden did not win many honours at Cambridge, whither he went at the age of nineteen, but he took his degree; and then, as his income was very small, he went to live in London as secretary to a kinsman, Here his career began. All his interests were with the Puritan party, and on the death of Cromwell he wrote an elegy strong in praise of republicanism. But Dryden was bent on personal advancement, and for the true welfare of England he had little regard; at heart he was a time-server and a political and religious turncoat. At the Restoration his hopes from the Puritan party were frustrated, and among the flatterers who sang the glories of the old order of things, he stood pre-eminent. In "Astrea Redux,” and other poems about Charles II., Dryden's tributes to the king's virtues and god-like qualities might almost rank as satire, if that were possible. In the beginning of Dryden's career he married a woman of rank and beauty, but little happiness came to him. Lady Elizabeth Howard was quick-tempered, and he was not domestic in his tastes, and much friction was, therefore, the inevitable result. A man who, to his wife's wish that she were a book that she might have more of his company, could reply: "Be an almanac then, my dear, that I may change you once a year,” could not be called a model husband. Attracted to the stage in the same way as Davenant had been, Dryden brought out his first play in 1662, but it fell flat. Successful with his third, and wishing to win the favour of a king who advocated the use of rhyme, Dryden soon began those rhyming dramas which have been so justly condemned. Pepys, though he censured the rhyme as breaking the sense, said that he and his wife returned home after the performance of one of these plays before the king, mightily contented. Dryden's plays were artificial; showed no insight into character; no pathos or tenderness, and, worst of all, they were disfigured by those obscenities which make them utterly unfit to be read. Pepys pronounced many of them "very smutty." During the year of the fire and the plague, when the theatres were closed, Dryden wrote that work which has won him distinction as a critic, "The Essay of Dramatic Poesy." In this he defended the use of rhyme, but profiting by the parodies of the Duke of Buckingham, Dryden soon changed his opinion of rhyme, and we find that whenever he employed blank verse he gained in both depth and range. |