Part 1 (2/2)

These early attempts, however, were completely thrown into the shade by the _Annus Mirabilis_, a poem on the memorable events of 1666, written at Charlton, near Malmesbury, the seat of Lord Berkeley, where Dryden and his family had resorted in 1665 to escape the plague, and published in February, 1667. The author was then thirty-five, and, judged in the light of his subsequent celebrity, had as yet achieved surprisingly little either in quant.i.ty or quality. Youth is generally the most affluent season of poetical activity; and those poets whose claim to inspiration is the most unimpeachable--Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Sh.e.l.ley--have irradiated their early writings with flashes of genius which their maturer skill hardly enabled them to eclipse. This cannot be said of Dryden, who of our great poets, unless Pope be an exception, probably owed least to inspiration and most to pains and practice. Even Pope at this age had produced _The Rape of the Lock_, _The Temple of Fame_, _Eloisa to Abelard_, and his translation of the Iliad, enough to have given him a high place among English poets. The _Annus Mirabilis_ was the first production of Dryden that could have insured him remembrance with posterity, and even this is sadly disfigured with conceits. After all, the poet finds only two marvels of his wonderful year worthy of record--the Dutch war, which had been going on for two years, and which produced a much greater wonder in the year ensuing, when the Dutch sailed up to Gravesend and burned the English fleet; and the Great Fire of London. The treatment of the former is very tedious and dragging; there are many striking lines, but more conceits like the following, descriptive of the English attack upon the Dutch East Indiamen:

'Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball, And now their odours armed against them fly; Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, And some by aromatic splinters die.'

The second part, treating of the Fire of London, is infinitely better.

Dryden exhibits one of the most certain marks of a good writer, he rises with his subject. Yet there is no lack of absurdities. The Deity extinguishes the conflagration precisely in the manner in which Dryden would have put out his own candle:

'An hollow crystal pyramid he takes, In firmamental waters dipt above; Of it a broad extinguisher he makes, And hoods the flames that to their quarry drove.'

Nothing in Dryden is more amazing than his inequality. This stanza is succeeded by the following:

'The vanquished fires withdraw from every place, Or, full with feeding, sink into a sleep; Each household genius shows again his face, And from the hearths the little Lares creep.'

Other quatrains are still better, as, for instance, this on the burning of St. Paul's:

'The daring flames peeped in, and saw from far The awful beauties of the sacred quire; But since it was profaned by civil war, Heaven thought it fit to have it purged by fire.'

A thought so striking, that the reader does not pause to reflect that the celestial sentence would have been equally applicable to every cathedral in the country. Perhaps the following stanzas compose the pa.s.sage of most sustained excellence. In them, as in the apostrophe to the Royal Society, in an earlier part of the poem, Dryden appears truly the _vates sacer_, and his poetry becomes prophecy:

'Methinks already from this chymic flame I see a city of more precious mould; Rich as the town which gives the Indies name, With silver paved, and all divine with gold.

'Already labouring with a mighty fate She shakes the rubbish from her mounting brow, And seems to have renewed her charter's date, Which heaven will to the death of Time allow.

'More great than human now, and more august, Now deified she from her fires doth rise; Her widening streets on new foundations trust, And opening into larger parts she flies.

'Before, she like some shepherdess did show, Who sat to bathe her by a river's side; Not answering to her fame, but rude and low, Nor taught the beauteous arts of modern pride.

'Now like a Maiden Queen she will behold From her high turrets hourly suitors come; The East with incense and the West with gold Will stand like suppliants to receive her doom.

'The silver Thames, her own domestic flood, Shall bear her vessels like a sweeping train; And often wind, as of his mistress proud, With longing eyes to meet her face again.

'The wealthy Tagus, and the wealthier Rhine, The glory of their towns no more shall boast; And Seine, that would with Belgian rivers join, Shall find her l.u.s.tre stained and traffic lost.

'The venturous merchant, who designed more far, And touches on our hospitable sh.o.r.e, Charmed with the splendour of this northern star, Shall here unlade him, and depart no more.'

For several years after _Annus Mirabilis_, Dryden produced but little poetry apart from his dramas. Fas.h.i.+on, Court encouragement, and the necessity of providing for his family, had bound him to what was then the most conspicuous and lucrative form of authors.h.i.+p. In one point of view he committed a great error in addicting himself to the drama. He was not naturally qualified to excel in it, and could only obtain even a temporary success by condescending to the prevalent faults of the contemporary stage, its bombast and its indecency. The latter transgression was eventually so handsomely confessed by himself that but little need be said of it. Bombast is natural to two cla.s.ses of writers, the ardent and the phlegmatic, and those whose emotions require the most working up are frequently the worst offenders. Such was Dryden's case, and his natural proclivity was much enhanced by his adoption of the new fas.h.i.+on of writing in rhyme, beloved at Court, but affording every temptation and every facility for straining after effect in the place of Nature. Mr. Saintsbury justly reminds us that Dryden was not forsaking the blank verse of Shakespeare and Fletcher, the secret of which had long been lost; nevertheless, although, as we shall see when we come to his critical writings, he pleaded very ingeniously for rhyme in 1665, his adoption of it was condemned by his maturer judgment and practice.

It was, however, fortunate in the long run; his rhyming plays, of which we shall speak in another place, would not have been great successes in any metre, while practice in their composition, and the necessity of expressing the mult.i.tude of diverse sentiments required by bustling scenes and crowds of characters, gradually gave him that command of the heroic couplet which bestows such strength and brilliancy on his later writings. His 'fourteen years of dramatic practice,' as Mr. Saintsbury justly says, 'acted as a filtering reservoir for his poetical powers, so that the stream, which, when it ran into them, was the turbid and rubbish-laden current of _Annus Mirabilis_, flowed out as impetuous, as strong, but clear and without base admixture, in the splendid verse of _Absalom and Achitophel_.'[3]

This great poem, published in November, 1681, at the height of the contest over the Exclusion Bill and its consequences, remains to this day the finest example of political satire in English literature. The theme was skilfully selected. James II. had not yet convinced the most sceptical of the justice and wisdom of the Exclusion Bill, and its advocates laboured under the serious disadvantage of having no strong claimant for the succession if they prevailed in setting the Duke of York aside. James's son-in-law, the Prince of Orange, would not, it is safe to say, ever have been accepted by the nation as king if James's folly and tyranny had not, years afterwards, given him the opportunity of presenting himself in the character of Deliverer; and, failing him, there was no one but the popular but unfortunately illegitimate Monmouth. The character of Absalom seemed exactly made for this handsome and foolish prince. The resemblance of his royal father to David, except in matters akin to the affair of Bathsheba, was not quite so obvious.

Dryden might almost have been suspected of satirizing his master when he wrote:

'When nature prompted, and no law denied Promiscuous use of concubine and bride; Then Israel's monarch after heaven's own heart His vigorous warmth did variously impart To wives and slaves; and, wide as his command, Scattered his Maker's image through the land.

Of all the numerous progeny was none So beautiful, so brave as Absolon.'

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