by John Dryden
”The sin was of our native growth, ’tis true;
The scandal of the sin was wholly new.
Misses there were, but modestly concealed,
Whitehall the naked Goddess first revealed;
Who standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine,
The strumpet was adored with rites divine.”
This torrent of licentiousness had begun in some degree to abate, even upon the accession of James II., whose manners did not encourage the same general licence as those of Charles. But after the Revolution, when an affectation of profligacy was no longer deemed a necessary attribute of loyalty, and when it began to be thought possible that a man might have some respect for religion without being a republican, or even a fanatic, the licence of the stage was generally esteemed a nuisance. It then happened, as is not uncommon, that those, most bustling and active to correct public abuses, were men whose intentions may, without doing them injury, be estimated more highly than their talents. Thus, Sir Richard Blackmore, a grave physician, residing and practising on the sober side of Temple-Bar, was the first who professed to reform the spreading pest of poetical licentiousness, and to correct such men as Dryden, Congreve, and Wycherly. This worthy person, compassionating the state to which poetry was reduced by his contemporaries, who used their wit “in opposition to religion, and to the destruction of virtue and good manners in the world,” resolved to rescue the Muses from this unworthy thraldom, “to restore them to their sweet and chaste mansions, and to engage them in an employment suited to their dignity.” With this laudable view he wrote “Prince Arthur, an Epic Poem,” published in 1695. The preface contained a furious, though just, diatribe, against the licence of modern comedy, with some personal reflections aimed at Dry den directly. This the poet felt more unkindly, as Sir Richard had, without acknowledgment, availed himself of the hints he had thrown out in the “Essay upon Satire,” for the management of an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur. He bore, however, the attack, without resenting it, until he was again assailed by Sir Richard in his “Satire upon Wit,” written expressly to correct the dissolute and immoral performances of the writers of his time. With a ponderous attempt at humour, the good knight proposes, that a bank for wit should be established, and that all which had hitherto passed as current, should be called in, purified in the mint, re-coined, and issued forth anew, freed from alloy.
This satire was published in 1700, as the title-page bears; but Mr. Luttrell marks his copy 23rd November 1699. It contains more than one attack upon our author. Thus, we are told (wit being previously described as a malady),
”Vanine, that looked on all the danger past,
Because he ‘scaped so long, is seized at last;
By p —— , by hunger, and by Dryden bit,
He grins and snarls, and, in his dogged fit,
Froths at the mouth, a certain sign of wit.”
Elsewhere the poet complains, that the universities,
”debauched by Dryden and his crew,
Turn bawds to vice, and wicked aims pursue.”
Again, p. 14 —
”Dryden condemn, who taught men how to make,
Of dunces wits, an angel of a rake.”
But the main offence lies in the following passage: —
”Set forth your edict; let it be enjoined,
That all defective species be recoined;
St. E — m — t and R — r both are fit
To oversee the coining of our wit.
Let these be made the masters of essay,
They’ll every piece of metal touch and weigh,
And tell which is too light, which has too much allay.
’Tis true, that when the coarse and worthless dross
Is purged away, there will be mighty loss.
E’en Congreve, Southerne, manly Wycherly,
When thus refined, will grievous sufferers be.
Into the melting-pot when Dryden comes,
What horrid stench will rise, what noisome fumes!
How will he shrink, when all his lewd allay,
And wicked mixture, shall be purged away?
When once his boasted heaps are melted down,
A chest-full scarce will yield one sterling crown.
Those who will D — n — s melt, and think to find
A goodly mass of bullion left behind,
Do, as the Hibernian wit, who, as ’tis told,
Burnt his gilt feather, to collect the gold.
* * * * *
But what remains will be so pure, ‘twill bear
The examination of the most severe;
’Twill S — r’s scales, and Talbot’s test abide,
And with their mark please all the world beside.”
These repeated attacks at length called down the vengeance of Dryden. who thus retorted upon him in the preface to the Fables: —
“As for the City Bard, or Knight Physician, I hear his quarrel to me is, that I was the author of ‘Absalom and Achitophel,’ which he thinks, is a little hard on his fanatic patrons in London.
“But I will deal the more civilly with his two poems, because nothing ill is to be spoken of the dead; and, therefore, peace be to the manes of his ‘Arthurs.’ I will only say, that it was not for this noble knight that I drew the plan of an epic poem on King Arthur, in my preface to the translation of Juvenal. The guardian angels of kingdoms were machines too ponderous for him to manage; and therefore he rejected them, as Dares did the whirl bats of Eryx, when they were thrown before him by Entellus: yet from that preface, he plainly took his hint; for he began immediately upon the story, though he had the baseness not to acknowledge his benefactor, but, instead of it, to traduce me in a libel.”
Blackmore, who had perhaps thought the praise contained in his two last couplets ought to have allayed Dryden’s resentment, finding that they failed in producing this effect, very unhandsomely omitted them in his next edition, and received, as will presently be noticed, another flagellation, in the last verses Dryden ever wrote.
But a more formidable champion than Blackmore had arisen, to scourge the profligacy of the theatre. This was no other than the celebrated Jeremy Collier, a nonjuring clergyman, who published, in 1698, “A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage.” His qualities as a reformer are described by Dr. Johnson in language never to be amended. “He was formed for a controvertist; with sufficient learning; with diction vehement and pointed, though often vulgar and incorrect; with unconquerable pertinacity; with wit in the highest degree keen and sarcastic; and with all those powers exalted and invigorated by the just confidence in his cause.
“Thus qualified, and thus incited, he walked out to battle, and assailed at once most of the living writers, from Dryden to Durfey. His onset was violent: those passages, which while they stood single, had passed with little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together caught the alarm, and the nation wondered why it had so long suffered irreligion and licentiousness charge.”
Notwithstanding the justice of this description, there is a strange mixture of sense and nonsense in Collier’s celebrated treatise. Not contented with resting his objections to dramatic immorality and religion, Jeremy labours to confute the poets of the 17th century, by drawing them into comparison with Plautus and Aristophanes, which is certainly judging of one crooked line by another. Neither does he omit, like his predecessor Prynne, to marshal against the British stage those fulminations directed by the fathers of the Church against the Pagan theatres; although Collier could not but know, that it was the performance of the heathen ritual, and not merely the action of the drama, which rendered it sinful for the early Christians to attend the theatre. The book was, however, of great service to dramatic poetry, which, from that time, was less degraded by licence and indelicacy.
Dryden, it may be believed, had, as his comedies well deserved, a liberal share of the general censure; but, however he might have felt the smart of Collier’s severity, he had the magnanimity to acknowledg
e its justice. In the preface to the Fables, he makes the amende honorable. “I shall say the less of Mr. Collier, because in many things he has taxed me justly; and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine, which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance. It becomes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one.” To this manly and liberal admission, he has indeed tacked a complaint, that Collier had sometimes, by a strained interpretation, made the evil sense of which he complained; that he had too much “horse-play in his raillery;” and that, “if the zeal for God’s house had not eaten him up, it had at least devoured some part of his good manners and civility.” Collier seems to have been somewhat pacified by this qualified acknowledgment, and, during the rest of the controversy, turned his arms chiefly against Congreve, who resisted, and spared, comparatively at least, the sullen submission of Dryden.
While these controversies were raging, Dryden’s time was occupied with the translations or imitations of Chaucer and Boccacio. Among these, the “Character of the Good Parson” is introduced, probably to confute Milbourne, Blackmore, and Collier, who had severally charged our author with the wilful and premeditated contumely thrown upon the clergy in many passages of his satirical writings. This too seems to have inflamed the hatred of Swift, who, with all his levities, was strictly attached to his order, and keenly jealous of its honours. Dryden himself seems to have been conscious of his propensity to assail churchmen. “I remember,” he writes to his sons, “the counsel you gave me in your letter; but dissembling, although lawful in some cases, is not my talent; yet, for your sake, I will struggle with the plain openness of my nature, and keep in my just resentments against that degenerate order.” Milbourne, and other enemies of our author, imputed this resentment against the clergy, to his being refused orders when he wished to take them, in the reign of Charles, with a view to the Provostship of Eton, or some Irish preferment. But Dryden assures us, that he never had any thoughts of entering the Church. Indeed, his original offences of this kind may be safely ascribed to the fashionable practice, after the Restoration, of laughing at all that was accounted serious before that period.
And when Dryden became a convert to the Catholic faith, he was, we have seen, involved in an immediate and furious controversy with the clergy of the Church of England. Thus, an unbeseeming strain of raillery, adopted in wantonness, became aggravated, by controversy, into real dislike and animosity. But Dryden, in the “Character of a Good Parson,” seems determined to show that he could estimate the virtue of the clerical order. He undertook the task at the instigation of Mr. Pepys, the founder of the Library in Magdalen College, which bears his name; and has accomplished it with equal spirit and elegance; not forgetting, however, to make his pattern of clerical merit of his own jacobitical principles.
Another very pleasing performance, which entered [into] the Miscellany called “The Fables,” is the epistle to John Driden of Chesterton, the poet’s cousin. The letters to Mrs. Steward show the friendly intimacy in which the relations had lived, since the opposition of the Whigs to King William’s government in some degree united that party in conduct, though not in motive, with the favourers of King James. Yet our author’s strain of politics, as at first expressed in the epistle, was too severe for his cousin’s digestion. Some reflections upon the Dutch allies, and their behaviour in the war, were omitted, as tending to reflect upon King William; and the whole piece, to avoid the least chance of giving offence, was subjected to the revision of Montague, with a deprecation of his displeasure, an entreaty of his patronage, and the humiliating offer, that, although repeated correction had already purged the spirit out of the poem, nothing should stand in it relating to public affairs. without Mr. Montague’s permission. What answer “full-blown Bufo” returned to Dryden’s petition, does not appear; but the author’s opposition principles were so deeply woven in with the piece, that they could not be obliterated without tearing it to pieces. His model of an English member of parliament votes in opposition, as his Good Parson is a nonjuror, and the Fox in the fable of Old Chaucer is translated into a puritan. The epistle was highly acceptable to Mr. Driden of Chesterton, who acknowledged the immortality conferred on him, by “a noble present,” which family tradition states to have amounted to £500. Neither did Dryden neglect so fair an opportunity to avenge himself on his personal, as well as his political adversaries. Milbourne and Blackmore receive in the epistle severe chastisement for their assaults upon his poetry and private character:
”What help from art’s endeavours can we have?
Guibbons but guesses, nor is sure to save;
But Maurus sweeps whole parishes, and peoples every grave,
And no more mercy to mankind will use
Than when he robbed and murdered Maro’s muse.
Wouldst thou be soon despatched, and perish whole,
Trust Maurus with thy life, and Milbourne with thy soul”
Referring to another place, what occurs upon the style and execution of the Fables, I have only to add, that they were published early in spring 1700, in a large folio, and with the “Ode to Saint Cecilia.” The epistle to Driden of Chesterton, and a translation of the first Iliad, must have move than satisfied the mercantile calculations of Tonson, since they contained seventeen hundred verses above the quantity which Dryden had contracted to deliver. In the preface, the author vindicates himself with great spirit against his literary adversaries; makes his usual strong and forcible remarks on the genius of the authors whom he had imitated; and, in this his last critical work, shows all the acumen which had so long distinguished his powers. The Fables were dedicated to the last Duke of Ormond, the grandson of the Barzillai of “Absalom and Achitophel,” and the son of the heroic Earl of Ossory; friends both, and patrons of Dryden’s earlier essays. There is something affecting in a connection so honourably maintained; and the sentiment, as touched by Dryden, is simply pathetic. “I am not vain enough to boast, that I have deserved the value of so illustrious a line; but my fortune is the greater, that for three descents they have been pleased to distinguish my poems from those of other men; and have accordingly made me their peculiar care. May it be permitted me to say, that as your grandfather and father were cherished monarchs, so I have been esteemed and patronised by the grandfather, the father, and the son, descended from one of the most ancient, most conspicuous, and most deserving families in Europe.”
There were also prefixed to the “Fables,” those introductory verses addressed to the beautiful Duchess of Ormond, which have all the easy, felicitous, and sprightly gallantry, demanded on such occasions. The incense, it is said, was acknowledged by a present of £500; a donation worthy of the splendid house of Ormond. The sale of the “Fables” was surprisingly slow: even the death of the author, which has often sped away a lingering impression, does not seem to have increased the demand; and the second edition was not printed till 1713, when, Dryden and all his immediate descendants being no more, the sum stipulated upon that event was paid by Tonson to Lady Sylvius, daughter of one of Lady Elizabeth Dryden’s brothers, for the benefit of his widow, then in a state of lunacy. — See Appendix, vol. xviii.
The end of Dryden’s labours was now fast approaching; and, as his career began upon the stage, it was in some degree doomed to terminate there. It is true, he never recalled his resolution to write no more plays; but Vanbrugh having about this time revised and altered for the Drury-lane theatre, Fletcher’s lively comedy of “The Pilgrim,” it was agreed that Dryden, or, as one account says, his son Charles, should have the profits of a third night on condition of adding to the piece a Secular Masque, adapted to the supposed termination of the seventeenth century; a Dialogue in the Madhouse between two Distracted Lovers; and a Prologue and Epilogue. The Secular Masque contains a beautiful and spirited deline
ation of the reigns of James I., Charles I., and Charles II., in which the influence of Diana, Mars, and Venus, are supposed to have respectively predominated. Our author did not venture to assign a patron to the last years of the century, though the expulsion of Saturn might have given a hint for it. The music of the Masque is said to have been good; at least it is admired by the eccentric author of John Buncle. The Prologue and Epilogue to “The Pilgrim,” were written within twenty days of Dryden’s death; and their spirit equals that of any of his satirical compositions. They afford us the less pleasing conviction, that even the last fortnight of Dryden’s life was occupied in repelling or retorting the venomed attacks of his literary foes. In the Prologue, he gives Blackmore a drubbing which would have annihilated any author of ordinary modesty; but the knight was as remarkable for his powers of endurance, as some modern pugilists are said to be, for the quality technically called bottom. After having been “brayed in a mortar,” as Solomon expresses it, by every wit of his time, Sir Richard not only survived to commit new offences against ink and paper, but had his faction, his admirers, and his panegyrists, among that numerous and sober class of readers, who think that genius consists in good intention. In the Epilogue, Dryden attacks Collier, but with more courteous weapons: it is rather a palliation than a defence of dramatic immorality, and contains nothing personally offensive to Collier. Thus so dearly was Dryden’s preeminent reputation purchased, that even his last hours were embittered with controversy; and nature, over-watched and worn out, was, like a besieged garrison, forced to obey the call to arms, and defend reputation even with the very last exertion of the vital spirit.