Part 2 (1/2)

'When humbly on the royal babe we gaze, The manly lines of a majestic face Give awful joy.'

The raptures of the Byzantine courtiers over the imperial infant Protus were nothing to this. Dryden did not want eloquence or dignity to celebrate the hero if he could have found him; it was his and our misfortune that when the hero did at last come to the throne the poet had disqualified himself from extolling him. The landing in Torbay and the triumphal march to London; the victory at the Boyne and the defence of Londonderry were transactions as worthy of epical treatment as any history records; but the only man in England who could have treated them epically deemed them rather matter for elegy; and to have indulged in elegy he must have fled to France. Public events and political and religious controversy were no longer for him: stripped of his means and position he betook himself to translation and playwriting as the readiest means of repairing his shattered fortunes, and it was not until the mellow sunset of his life that he turned to the compositions which, of all he ever wrote, have given the most delight and the least offence, his _Fables_. These, published at the beginning of 1700, include five adaptations from Chaucer, and three stories told after Boccaccio, as well as _Alexander's Feast_, and a few other pieces. It would not be too much to say that this book achieved two things, either of which would have immortalized a poet: it fixed the standard of narrative poetry, except of the metrical romance or ballad cla.s.s, and also that of heroic versification. The latter, indeed, was thought for a time to have been transcended by Pope, but modern ears have tired of the balanced seesaw of the Popian couplet, and crave the ease and variety of Dryden, restored to literature in Leigh Hunt's _Story of Rimini_, and afterwards imitated by Keats in _Lamia_. The freedom which so great a master allows himself in rhyming should be a lesson to modern purists: final sounds so slightly akin as _guard_ and _prepared_, _placed_ and _last_, are of continual occurrence. In matters still more important than versification Dryden is in general equally admirable. He subjected himself to a severe test in competing with Chaucer--severer than he knew, for Chaucer was not yet, even by Dryden, valued at his full worth. In some respects Dryden certainly suffers greatly by the comparison. He is pre-eminently an intellectual poet, to whom the tree of knowledge had been the tree of life; there is perhaps scarcely a thought in his writings that charms by absolute simplicity and pure nature. Wherever, therefore, Chaucer is transparently simple and unaffected, we find him altered for the worse in Dryden. The very important part, however, of _The Knight's Tale_ which is concerned with courts, camps, and chivalry is even better in Dryden than in his model. He might have defined his sphere in the words of Ariosto, a poet who has many points of contact with him:

'Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori, Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto.'

If this is true of portions of _Palamon and Arcite_, it is still truer of _The Flower and the Leaf_ (then believed to be a genuine work of Chaucer's), throughout a most brilliant picture of natural beauty and courtly glitter, painted in language of chastened splendour. The other pieces modelled after Chaucer are of inferior interest, yet all excellent in their way. Two of the three tales from Boccaccio are acknowledged masterpieces, _Cymon and Iphigenia_ and _Theodore and Honoria_. The interest of the first chiefly consists in the narrative itself, and that of the second in the way of telling it. The story, indeed, though striking, is fantastic and hardly pleasing, but Dryden's treatment of it is perhaps the most perfect specimen in our language of _l'art de conter_.

An example of Dryden's descriptive power may be given in a pa.s.sage from _The Flower and the Leaf_:

'Thus while I sat intent to see and hear, And drew perfumes of more than vital air, All suddenly I heard the approaching sound Of vocal music, on the enchanted ground: An host of saints it seem'd, so full the choir; } As if the bless'd above did all conspire } To join their voices, and neglect the lyre. } At length there issued from the grove behind A fair a.s.sembly of the female kind: A train less fair, as ancient fathers tell, Seduced the sons of heaven to rebel.

I pa.s.s their forms, and every charming grace; Less than an angel would their worth debase: But their attire, like liveries of a kind, All rich and rare, is fresh within my mind.

In velvet white as snow the troop was gown'd, The seams with sparkling emeralds set around: Their hoods and sleeves the same; and purpled o'er With diamonds, pearls, and all the s.h.i.+ning store Of eastern pomp; their long-descending train With rubies edged, and sapphires, swept the plain.

High on their heads, with jewels richly set, Each lady wore a radiant coronet.

Beneath the circles, all the choir was graced With chaplets green on their fair foreheads placed; Of laurel some, of woodbine many more, And wreath of Agnus castus others bore: These last, who with those virgin crowns were dress'd, Appear'd in higher honour than the rest.

They danced around; but in the midst was seen } A lady of a more majestic mien; } By stature, and by beauty, mark'd their sovereign queen. } She in the midst began with sober grace; Her servants' eyes were fix'd upon her face, And as she moved or turn'd, her motions view'd, Her measures kept, and step by step pursued.

Methought she trod the ground with greater grace, With more of G.o.dhead s.h.i.+ning in her face; And as in beauty she surpa.s.s'd the choir, So, n.o.bler than the rest was her attire.

A crown of ruddy gold inclosed her brow, Plain without pomp, and rich without a show: A branch of Agnus castus in her hand She bore aloft (her sceptre of command;) Admired, adored by all the circling crowd, For wheresoe'er she turn'd her face, they bow'd.

And as she danced, a roundelay she sung, In honour of the laurel, ever young.

She raised her voice on high, and sung so clear, } The fawns came scudding from the groves to hear, } And all the bending forest lent an ear. } At every close she made, the attending throng Replied, and bore the burden of the song: So just, so small, yet in so sweet a note, It seem'd the music melted in the throat.'

One remarkable feature of the princ.i.p.al poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the infrequency of the casual visitations of the Muse. They seem to have hardly ever experienced an unsought lyrical inspiration, or to have sung merely for singing's sake. Hence Dryden is permitted to appear only twice in the _Golden Treasury_. His songs, to be treated of more fully when we consider the lyrical poetry of the period, though often instinct with true lyrical spirit, seem to have been deliberately composed for insertion in his plays, and the same is the case with almost the whole of what he would have called his occasional poetry. His two chief odes, _Alexander's Feast_ and the memorial verses to Anne Killigrew, were indubitably commissions; and it is probable that few of the epistles, elegies, dedications, and prologues which form so considerable a portion of his poetical works were composed without some similar inducement. As a whole, this collection is creditable to his powers of intellect, quickness of wit, and command of nervous masculine diction. It is frequently the work of a master, though conceived in the spirit of a journeyman. The adulation of the patron or the defunct is generally fulsome enough; yet some compliments are so graceful that it is difficult not to believe them sincere, as when he apostrophizes the d.u.c.h.ess of Ormond:

'O daughter of the Rose, whose cheeks unite The differing t.i.tles of the Red and White!

Who heaven's alternate beauty well display, The blush of morning and the milky way.'

Or the conclusion of his epistle to Kneller:

'More cannot be by mortal art exprest, But venerable age shall add the rest.

For Time shall with his ready pencil stand, Retouch your figures with his ripening hand, Mellow your colours, and imbrown the teint, Add every grace which Time alone can grant; To future ages shall your fame convey, And give more beauties than he takes away.'

Or these from the epistle to his kinsman, John Driden, more likely than any of the others to have been the unbought manifestation of genuine regard:

'O true descendant of a patriot line!

Who while thou shar'st their l.u.s.tre lendest thine!

Vouchsafe this picture of thy soul to see, 'Tis so far good as it resembles thee.

The beauties to the original I owe, Which when I miss my own defects I show; Nor think the kindred Muses thy disgrace; A poet is not born in every race; Two of a house few ages can afford, One to perform, another to record.

Praiseworthy actions are by thee embraced, And 'tis my praise to make thy praises last.'

The last couplet, excellent in sense, is an example of Dryden's one metrical defect. He is not sufficiently careful to vary his vowel-sounds.

Dryden's translations alone would give him a conspicuous place in English literature. The most important, his complete version of Virgil, has been improved upon in many ways, and yet after all it remains true, that 'Pitt is quoted, and Dryden read.' Had he never translated Virgil, his renderings or imitations of Juvenal, Horace, and others, would suffice to ent.i.tle him to no inconsiderable rank among those who have enriched their native literature from foreign stores. His principle of translation was correct, and accords with that of the greatest of English critics. Coleridge a.s.sured Wordsworth that there were only two legitimate systems of metrical translation, strict literality, or compensation carried to its fullest extent. Dryden most probably had not sufficient Latin to be literal; but in any case his genius would have disdained such trammels, not to mention the more prosaic, but not less potent consideration, that what is written for bread must usually be written in haste--a fact which weighed with Dryden when he discontinued rhyme in his tragedies. Thus thrown back on the system of compensation, he has richly repaid his authors for the beauties of which he has bereaved them, by the beauties which he has bestowed--or which, as he maintains, were actually latent in them--and has expressed many of their thoughts with even enhanced energy. He has, in fact, made them write very much as they would have written if they had been English poets of the seventeenth century, and his work is less translation than transfusion. They necessarily appear much metamorphosed from the originals, but the fault is less that of Dryden than of his age. Could he have attempted the same task in our day with equal resources of genius, and on the same principles of workmans.h.i.+p, he would have succeeded much better, for he would have enjoyed more comprehension of the spirit of his originals than was possible in the seventeenth century. The scholars.h.i.+p of that age had not vivified the information which it had ama.s.sed; the idealized, but still vital conceptions of the Renaissance had given place to inanimate conventionality; the people of Greece and Rome appeared to the moderns like people in books; and such warm, affectionate contact between the souls of the present and the past as afterwards inspired Sh.e.l.ley's versions from Homer and Euripides was in that age impossible.