Part 55 (1/2)

She gadereth floures, party white and rede, To make a subtil garland for hir hede, And as an angel hevenly she song.”

In this quotation from Chaucer I have not changed the old spelling into modern as I did in the chapter on Chaucer, so that you may see the difference between the two styles more clearly.

If you can see the difference between these two quotations you can see the difference between the poetry of Dryden's age and all that went before him. It is the difference between art and nature. Chaucer sings like a bird, Dryden like a trained concert singer who knows that people are listening to him. There is room for both in life. We want and need both.

If you can feel the difference between Chaucer and Dryden you will understand in part what I meant by saying that Dryden was the expression of his time. For in Restoration times the taste was for art rather than for natural beauty. The taste was for what was clever, witty, and polished rather than for the simple, stately grandeur of what was real and true. Poetry was utterly changed. It no longer went to the heart but to the brain.

Dryden's poetry does not make the tears start to our eye or the blood come to our cheek, but it flatters our ear with its smoothness and elegance; it tickles our fancy with its wit.

You will understand still better what the feeling of the times was when I tell you that Dryden, with the help of another poet, re-wrote Shakespeare's Tempest and made it to suit the fas.h.i.+on of the day. In doing so they utterly spoiled it. As literature it is worthless; as helping us to understand the history of those times it is useful. But although The Tempest, as re-written by Dryden, is bad, one of the best of his plays is founded upon another of Shakespeare's. This play is called All for Love or the World Well Lost, and is founded upon Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. It is not written in Dryden's favorite heroic couplet but in blank verse. ”In my style,” he says, ”I have professed to imitate the divine Shakespeare, which, that I might perform more freely, I have disenc.u.mbered myself from rhyme. Not that I condemn my former way, but that this is more proper to my present purpose.” And when you come to read this play you will find that, master as Dryden was of the heroic couplet, he could write, too, when he chose, fine blank verse.

Perhaps the best-known of all Dryden's shorter poems is the ode called Alexander's Feast. It was written for a London musical society, which gave a concert each year on St. Cecilia's day, when an original ode was sung in her honor. Dryden in this ode, which was sung in 1697, pictures Timotheus, the famous Greek musician and poet, singing before Alexander, at a great feast which was held after the conquest of Persia. Alexander listens while

”The lovely Thais, by his side, Sate like a blooming Eastern Bride, In flower of youth and beauty's pride.

Happy, happy, happy pair!

None but the brave, None but the brave, None but the brave deserves the fair!”

As Timotheus sings he stirs at will his hearers' hearts to love, to pity, or to revenge.

”Timotheus, to his breathing flute And sounding lyre, Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire.”

But those were heathen times. In Christian times came St.

Cecilia and she

”Enlarged the former narrow bounds, And added length to solemn sounds, With nature's Mother-wit, and arts unknown before.

Let old Timotheus yield the prize.

Or both divide the crown: He raised a mortal to the skies She drew an angel down.”

Dryden was a great poet, and he dominated his own age and the age to come. But besides being a poet he was a great prose-writer.

His prose is clear and fine and almost modern. We do not have to follow him through sentences so long that we lose the sense before we come to the end. ”He found English of brick and left it marble,” says a late writer, and when we read his prose we almost believe that saying to be true. He was the first of modern critics, that is he was able to judge the works of others surely and well. And many of his criticisms of men were so true that we accept them now even as they were accepted then. Here is what he says of Chaucer in his preface to The Fables:--

”He [Chaucer] must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive nature, because as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken into the compa.s.s of his Canterbury Tales the various manners and humours (as we now call them) of the whole English nation, in his age. Not a single character has escaped him. All his pilgrims are severally distinguished from each other; and not only in their inclinations, but in their very physiognomies persons. . . . The matter and manner of their tales, and of their telling are so suited to their different educations, humours, and callings, that each of them would be improper in any other mouth. Even the grave and serious characters are distinguished by their several sorts of gravity.

Their discourses are such as belong to their age, their calling, and their breeding; such as are becoming to them and to them only. Some of his persons are vicious, and some virtuous; some are unlearned, or (as Chaucer calls them) lewd, and some are learned. Even the ribaldry of the low characters is different: the Reeve, the Miller, and the Cook are several men, and distinguished from each other as much as the mincing Lady- Prioress and the broad-speaking, gap-toothed Wife of Bath. . . .

It is sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is G.o.d's plenty. We have our forefathers and great-grand-dames all before us, as they were in Chaucer's days. Their general characters are still remaining in mankind, and even in England, though they are called by other names than those of monks, and friars, and canons, and lady abbesses, and nuns; for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature though everything is altered.”

The Fables was the last book Dryden wrote. He was growing to be an old man, and a few months after it was published he became very ill. ”John Dryden, Esq., the famous poet, lies a-dying,”

said the newspapers on the 30th April, 1700. One May morning he closed his eyes for ever, just as

”Aurora had but newly chased the night, And purpled o'er the sky with blus.h.i.+ng light.”

Chapter LXI DEFOE--THE FIRST NEWSPAPERS

TO almost every house in the land, as regular as the milk man, more regular than the postman, there comes each morning the newspaper boy. To most of us breakfast means, as well as things to eat, mother pouring out the tea and father reading the newspaper. As mother pa.s.ses father's tea she says, ”Anything in the paper, John?” And how often he answers, ”Nothing, nothing whatever.”

Although father says there is nothing in the paper there is a great deal of reading in it, that we can see. And now comes the question, Who writes it all? Who writes this thin, flat book of six or eight great pages which every morning we buy for a penny or a halfpenny? But perhaps you think it does not matter who writes the newspapers, for the newspaper is not literature.

Literature means real books with covers--dear possessions to be loved and taken care of, to be read and read again. But a newspaper is hardly read at all when it is crumpled up and used to light the fire. And no one minds, for who could love a newspaper, who cares to treasure it, and read it again and yet again?