John Dryden - Delphi Poets Series

by John Dryden

  But, besides the society of these men of wit and pleasure, Dryden enjoyed the affection and esteem of the ingenious Cowley, who wasted his brilliant talents in the unprofitable paths of metaphysical poetry; of Waller and of Denham, who had done so much for English versification; of Davenant, as subtle as Cowley, and more harmonious than Denham, who, with a happier model, would probably have excelled both. Dryden was also known to Milton, though it may be doubted whether they justly appreciated the talents of each other. Of all the men of genius at this period, whose claims to immortality our age has admitted, Butler alone seems to have been the adversary of our author’s reputation.

  While Dryden was thus generally known and admired, the advancement of his fortune bore no equal progress to the splendour of his literary fame. Something was, however, done to assist it. The office of royal historiographer had become vacant in 1666 by the decease of James Howell, and in 1668 the death of Davenant opened the situation of poet-laureate. These two offices, with a salary of £200 paid quarterly, and the celebrated annual butt of canary, were conferred upon Dryden 18th August 1670. The grant bore a retrospect to the term after Davenant’s demise, and is declared to be to “John Dryden, master of arts, in consideration of his many acceptable services theretofore done to his present Majesty, and from an observation of his learning and eminent abilities, and his great skill and elegant style, both in verse and prose.” Thus was our author placed at the head of the literary class of his countrymen, so far as that high station could be conferred by the favour of the monarch.

  If we compute Dryden’s share in the theatre at £300 annually, which is lower than it was rated by the actors in their petition; if we make, at the same time, some allowance for those presents which authors of that time received upon presenting dedications, or occasional pieces of poetry; if we recollect, that Dryden had a small landed property, and that his wife, Lady Elizabeth had probably some fortune or allowance, however trifling, from her family, — I think we will fall considerably under the mark in computing the poet’s income, during this period of prosperity, at £600 or £700 annually; a sum more adequate to procure all the comforts, and many of the luxuries of life, than thrice the amount at present. We must, at the same time, recollect that though Dryden is nowhere censured for extravagance, poets are seldom capable of minute economy, and that Lady Elizabeth was by education, and perhaps by nature, unfitted for supplying her husband’s deficiencies. These halcyon days, too, were but of short duration. The burning of the theatre, in 1670, greatly injured the poet’s income from that quarter; his pension, like other appointments of the household establishment of Charles II., was very irregularly paid; and thus, if his income was competent in amount, it was precarious and uncertain.

  Leaving Dryden for the present in the situation which we have described, and which he occupied during the most fortunate period of his life, the next Section may open with an account of the public taste at this time, and of the revolution in it which shortly took place.

  SECTION III.

  Heroic Plays — The Rehearsal — Marriage à la Mode — The Assignation — Controversy with Clifford — with Leigh — with Ravenscroft — Massacre of Amboyna — State of Innocence.

  The rage for imitating the French stage, joined to the successful efforts of our author, had now carried the heroic or rhyming tragedy to its highest pitch of popularity. The principal requisites of such a drama are summed up by Dryden in the first two lines of the “Orlando Furioso,”

  “Le Donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese.”

  The story thus partaking of the nature of a romance of chivalry, the whole interest of the play necessarily turned upon love and honour, those supreme idols of the days of knight-errantry The love introduced was not of that ordinary sort, which exists between persons of common mould; it was the love of Amadis and Oriana, of Oroondates and Statira; that love which required a sacrifice of every wish, hope, and feeling unconnected with itself, and which was expressed in the language of prayer and of adoration. It was that love which was neither to be chilled by absence, nor wasted by time, nor quenched by infidelity. No caprice in the object beloved entitled her slave to emancipate himself from her fetters; no command, however unreasonable, was to be disobeyed; if required by the fair mistress of his affections, the hero was not only to sacrifice his interest, but his friend, his honour, his word, his country, even the gratification of his love itself, to maintain the character of a submissive and faithful adorer. Much of this mystery is summed up in the following speech of Almahide to Almanzor, and his answer, from which it appears, that a lover of the true heroic vein never thought himself so happy, as when he had an opportunity of thus showing the purity and disinterestedness of his passion. Almanzor is commanded by his mistress to stay to assist his rival, the king, her husband. The lover very naturally asks,

  Almanz. What recompence attends me, if I stay?

  Almah. You know I am from recompence debarred,

  But I will grant your merit a reward;

  Your flame’s too noble to deserve a cheat,

  And I too plain to practise a deceit.

  I no return of love can ever make,

  But what I ask is for my husband’s sake;

  He, I confess, has been ungrateful too,

  But he and I are ruined if you go;

  Your virtue to the hardest proof I bring;

  Unbribed, preserve a mistress and a king.

  Almanz. I’ll stop at nothing that appears so brave:

  I’ll do’t, and now I no reward will have.

  You’ve given my honour such an ample field,

  That I may die, but that shall never yield.

  The king, however, not perhaps understanding this nice point of honour, grows jealous, and wishes to dismiss the disinterested ally, whom his spouse’s beauty had enlisted in his service. But this did not depend upon him; for Almanzor exclaims,

  Almanz. I wonnot go; I’ll not be forced away:

  I came not for thy sake; nor do I stay.

  It was the queen who for my aid did send;

  And ’tis I only can the queen defend:

  I, for her sake, thy sceptre will maintain;

  And thou, by me, in spite of thee, shalt reign.

  The most applauded scenes in these plays turned upon nice discussions of metaphysical passion, such as in the days of yore were wont to be agitated in the courts and parliaments of love. Some puzzling dilemma, or metaphysical abstraction, is argued between the personages on the stage, whose dialogue, instead of presenting a scene of natural passion, exhibits a sort of pleading or combat of logic, in which each endeavours to defend his own opinion by catching up the idea expressed by the former speaker, and returning him his illustration, or simile, at the rebound; and where the lover hopes everything from his ingenuity, and trusts nothing to his passion. Thus, in the following scene between Almanzor and Almahide, the solicitations of the lover, and the denials of the queen, are expressed in the very carte and tierce of poetical argumentation:

  Almah. My light will sure discover those who talk. —

  Who dares to interrupt my private walk?

  Almanz. He, who dares love, and for that love must die.

  And, knowing this, dares yet love on, am I.

  Almah. That love which you can hope, and I can pay,

  May be received and given in open day;

  My praise and my esteem you had before;

  And you have bound yourself to ask no more.

  Almanz. Yes, I have bound myself; but will you take

  The forfeit of that bond, which force did make?

  Almah. You know you are from recompence debarred;

  But purest love can live without reward.

  Almanz. Pure love had need be to itself a feast;

  For, like pure elements, ‘twill nourish least.

  Almah. It therefore yields the only pure content;

  For it, like angels, needs no nourishment.

  To eat and drink can
no perfection be;

  All appetite implies necessity.

  Almanz. ‘Twere well, if I could like a spirit live;

  But, do not angels food to mortals give?

  What if some demon should my death foreshow,

  Or bid me change, and to the Christians go;

  Will you not think I merit some reward,

  When I my love above my life regard?

  Almah. In such a case your change must be allowed:

  I would myself dispense with what you vowed.

  Almanz. Were I to die that hour when I possess,

  This minute shall begin my happiness.

  Almah. The thoughts of death your passion would remove;

  Death is a cold encouragement to love.

  Almanz. No; from my joys I to my death would run,

  And think the business of my life well done:

  But I should walk a discontented ghost,

  If flesh and blood were to no purpose lost.

  This kind of Amoebaean dialogue was early ridiculed by the ingenious author of “Hudibras.”

  It partakes more of the Spanish than of the French tragedy, although it does not demand that the parody shall be so very strict, as to re-echo noun for noun, or verb for verb, which Lord Holland gives us as a law of the age of Lope de Vega. The English heroic poet did enough if he displayed sufficient point in the dialogue, and alertness in adopting and retorting the image presented by the preceding speech; though, if he could twist the speaker’s own words into an answer to his argument, it seems to have been held the more ingenious mode of confutation.

  While the hero of a rhyming tragedy was thus unboundedly submissive in love, and dexterous in applying the metaphysical logic of amorous jurisprudence it was essential to his character that he should possess all the irresistible courage, and fortune of a preux chevalier. Numbers, however unequal, were to be as chaff before the whirlwind of his valour; and nothing was to be so impossible that, at the command of his mistress, he could not with ease achieve. When, in the various changes of fortune which such tragedies demand, he quarrelled with those whom he had before assisted to conquer,

  ”Then to the vanquished part his fate he led,

  The vanquished triumphed, and the victor fled.”

  The language of such a personage, unless when engaged in argumentative dialogue with his mistress, was, in all respects, as magnificent and inflated as might beseem his irresistible prowess. Witness the famous speech of Almanzor:

  Almanz. To live!

  If from thy hands alone my death can be,

  I am immortal and a god to thee.

  If I would kill thee now, thy fate’s so low,

  That I must stoop ere I can give the blow:

  But mine is fixed so far above thy crown,

  That all thy men,

  Piled on thy back, can never pull it down:

  But, at my ease, thy destiny I send,

  By ceasing from this hour to be thy friend.

  Like heaven I need but only to stand still,

  And, not concurring to thy life, I kill,

  Thou canst no title to my duty bring;

  I’m not thy subject, and my soul’s thy king.

  Farewell. When I am gone,

  There’s not a star of thine dare stay with thee:

  I’ll whistle thy tame fortune after me;

  And whirl fate with me wheresoe’er I fly,

  As winds drive storms before them in the sky.

  It was expected by the audience, that the pomp of scenery, and bustle of action, in which such tremendous heroes were engaged, should in some degree correspond with their lofty sentiments and superhuman valour. Hence solemn feasts, processions, and battles by sea and land, filled the theatre. Hence, also, the sudden and violent changes of fortune, by which the hero and his antagonists are agitated through the whole piece. Fortune has been often compared to the sea; but in a heroic play, her course resembled an absolute Bay of Biscay, or Race of Portland, disturbed by an hundred contending currents and eddies, and never continuing a moment in one steady flow.

  That no engine of romantic surprise might be wanting, Dryden contends, that the dramatist, as he is not confined to the probable in character, so he is not limited by the bounds of nature in the action, but may let himself loose to visionary objects, and to the representation of such things as, not depending upon sense, leave free exercise for the imagination. Indeed, if ghosts, magicians, and demons, might with propriety claim a place anywhere, it must be in plays which throughout disclaim the common rules of nature, both in the incidents narrated, and the agents interested.

  Lastly, the action of the heroic drama was to be laid, not merely in the higher, but in the very highest walk of life. No one could with decorum aspire to share the sublimities which it annexed to character, except those made of the “porcelain clay of the earth,” dukes, princes, kings, and kaisars. The matters agitated must be of moment, proportioned to their characters and elevated station, the fate of cities and the fall of kingdoms.

  That the language, as well as actions and character of the dramatis personae, might be raised above the vulgar, their sentiments were delivered in rhyme, the richest and most ornate kind of verse, and the farthest removed from ordinary colloquial diction. Dryden has himself assigned the following reasons:— “The plot, the characters, the wit, the passions, the descriptions, are all exalted above the level of common converse, as high as the imagination of the poet can carry them, with proportion to verisimility. Tragedy, we know, is wont to image to us the minds and fortunes of noble persons, and to portray these exactly; heroic rhyme is nearest nature, as being the noblest kind of modern verse.

  Indignatur enim priratis et prope socco Dignis carminibus narrari coena Thyestae —

  says Horace: and in another place,

  Effutire leves indigna tragaedia versus. —

  Blank verse is acknowledged to be too low for a poem, nay more, for a paper of verses; but if too low for an ordinary sonnet, how much more for tragedy, which is by Aristotle, in the dispute betwixt the epic poesy and the dramatic, for many reasons he there alleges, ranked above it.”

  When we consider these various essentials of a rhyming play, we may perhaps, without impropriety define it to be a metrical romance of chivalry in form of a drama. The hero is a perfect knight-errant, invincible in battle, and devoted to his Dulcinea by a love, subtle, metaphysical and abstracted from all the usual qualities of the instinctive passion; his adventures diversified by splendid descriptions of bull-feasts, battles, and tournaments; his fortune undergoing the strangest, most causeless, and most unexpected varieties; his history chequered by the marvellous interference of ghosts, spectres, and hell itself; his actions effecting the change of empires, and his co-agents being all lords, and dukes, and noble princes, in order that their rank might, in some slight degree, correspond to the native exultation of the champion’s character.

  The reader may smile at this description, and feel some surprise, how compositions, involving such gross absurdities, were tolerated by an audience having pretence to taste and civilisation But something may be said for the heroic drama.

  Although the manners were preposterous, and the changes of fortune rapid and improbable, yet the former often attained a sublime, though forced elevation of sentiment; and the latter, by rapidity of transition and of contrast, served in no slight degree to interest as well as to surprise the audience. If the spectators were occasionally stunned with bombast, or hurried and confused by the accumulation of action and intrigue, they escaped the languor of a creeping dialogue, and the taedium of a barren plot, of which the termination is descried full three acts before it can be attained. Besides, if these dramas were sometimes extravagant, beautiful passages often occurred to atone for these sallies of fury. In others, ingenuity makes some amends for the absence of natural feeling, and the reader’s fancy is pleased at the expense of his taste. In representation, the beauty of the verse, assisted by the enunciation of such actors as Betterto
n and Mohun, gilded over the defects of the sense, and afforded a separate gratification. The splendour of scenery also, in which these plays claimed a peculiar excellence, afforded a different but certain road to popular favour; and thus this drama, with all its faults, was very far from wanting the usual requisites for success. But another reason for its general popularity may be sought in a certain correspondence with the manners of the time.

  Although in Charles the Second’s reign the age of chivalry was totally at an end, yet the sentiments, which had ceased to be motives of action, were not so obsolete as to sound totally strange to the public ear. The French romances of the lower class, such as “Cassandra,” “Cleopatra,” etc., were the favourite pastime of the ladies, and retained all the extravagancies of chivalrous sentiment, with a double portion of tedious form and metaphysical subtlety. There were occasionally individuals romantic enough to manage their correspondence and amours on this exploded system. The admired Mrs. Philips carried on an extensive correspondence with ingenious persons of both sexes, in which she called herself Orinda, and her husband, Mr. Wogan, by the title of Antenor. Shadwell, an acute observer of nature, in one of his comedies describes a formal coxcomb of this class, who courts his mistress out of the “Grand Cyrus,” and rejoices in an opportunity of showing, that his passion could subsist in despite of her scorn. It is probable he had met with such an original in the course of his observation. The Précieuses of Molière, who affected a strange mixture of the romantic heroine and modern fine lady, belong to the same class of oddities, and had their prototypes under the observation of the satirist. But even those who were above such foppery had been early taught to read and admire the conceits of Donne, and the metaphysical love-poems of Cowley. They could not object to the quaint and argumentative dialogues which we have described; for the course of their studies had formed their taste upon a model equally artificial and fantastic: and thus, what between real excellence, and false brilliancy, the age had been accustomed not only to admit, but to admire heroic plays.