FOOTNOTES:

‘When I would praise an author, the untowardDamned sense says Virgil, but the rhyme says Howard.’

This is undoubtedly Boileau’s ‘La raison dit Virgile, et la rime Quinault.’ InCat and Puss, on the other hand, an amusing parody of the rhyming tragedy of his day, he observes of the feline Lothario:

‘At once his passion was both false and true,And the more false, the more in earnest grew.’

Can Tennyson, who borrowed and improved so much, have been to Butler for

‘His honour rooted in dishonour stood,And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true’?

FOOTNOTES:[5]Mr. Churton Collins, by a clerical error, printsWaller.

[5]Mr. Churton Collins, by a clerical error, printsWaller.

It is entirely in keeping with the solid and terrestrial character of Restoration literature in general, that no description of poetry should manifest so grievous a lapse from the standard of the preceding age as the lyrical. The decline of the drama has attracted more attention, partly from the violent contrast of two schools which had hardly one principle or one method in common, partly because our own age had but imperfectly realized the exceeding wealth in song of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, until Mr. Arthur Bullen showed what unsuspected treasures of poetry were hidden in old music books. Whatever else an Elizabethan or Jacobean lyric may be, it is almost certain to be melodious. The average Restoration lyric is correct enough in scansion, but the melody is conventional, poor and thin. Here and there, and especially in Dryden, we are surprised by a fine exception; but as a rule the Restoration song is deficient alike in the simple spontaneity which inspired such pieces asCome live with me and be my love, and in the more intricate harmonies of its predecessors. It was as though a blight had suddenly fallen upon the nation, and men’s ears had become incapable of distinguishing between sweetness and smoothness. So, indeed, they had as respected the music of verse; but how little technical music, whether vocal orinstrumental, was neglected, even in private circles, we may learn from Pepys’sDiary, and it is a remarkable proof how little this music and the music of poetry have to do with each other, that this age of degeneracy in the one produced the greatest of all English masters, Purcell, in the other; while the still more hopelessly unmelodious age of the first Georges was the age of Handel. Poetry makes melody, not melody poetry; and the only explanation is, that the age preceding that of the Restoration was poetical, and the Restoration age was prosaic. It could not well have been otherwise if, as all critics agree, the special literary mission of the Restoration period was to prune the luxuriance of English prose, and by introducing conciseness, perspicuity, and logical order, to render it a fit instrument for narrative, reasoning, and the despatch of business.

Such lyric as the age possessed is almost entirely comprehended in Dryden; for Marvell, of whom we must nevertheless speak, belongs in spirit to a former age. The songs in Dryden’s plays, to be mentioned shortly, prove that he was by no means destitute of spontaneous lyrical feeling; but he no doubt succeeded best when, having first penetrated himself with a theme sufficiently stirring to generate the enthusiastic mood which finds its natural expression in song, he sat down to frame a fitting accompaniment by the aid of all the resources of metrical art. The principal examples of this lyrical magnificence which he has given us are the elegy on Anne Killigrew and the two odes on St. Cecilia’s Day. Of the first of these two latter, Johnson says that ‘it is lost in the splendour of the second,’ and such is the fact; but had Dryden produced no other lyric, he would still have ranked as a fine lyrical poet. Of the second ode, better known asAlexander’s Feast, it is needless to say anything, for all readers of poetry have it by heart, and all recognize its claim to rank among thegreatest odes in the language—the greatest, perhaps, until Wordsworth and Shelley wrote, and little, if at all, behind even them. Johnson, indeed, prefers the memorial ode on Anne Killigrew, and if all the stanzas equalled the first he would be right; but this is impossible; as he himself remarks, ‘An imperial crown cannot be one continued diamond.’ The inevitable falling off, nevertheless, would have been less apparent if Dryden had shown more judgment in the selection of his topics, or at least more tact in handling them. The morals of the age were, indeed, bad enough, as he well knew who had helped to make them so; but such frank treatment of a disagreeable theme jars exceedingly with an ode devoted to the celebration of chastity and virtue. Notwithstanding this flaw, the entire ode deserves Mr. Saintsbury’s eulogy, ‘As a piece of concerted music in verse it has not a superior.’ The hyperbolical praise of Anne Killigrew’s now forgotten poems is explained, and in some measure excused, by the fact that it was written to be prefixed to them. The first stanza, appropriate to thousands beside its ostensible subject, appeals to the general human heart, and indicates the high-water mark of Restoration poetry:

‘Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies,Made in the last promotion of the blest,Whose palms, new-plucked from Paradise,In spreading branches more sublimely rise,Rich with immortal green above the rest:Whether, adopted to some neighbouring star,Thou roll’st above us in thy wandering race,Or in procession fixed and regularMov’st with the heavens’ majestic pace;Or, called to more superior bliss,Thou tread’st with seraphims the vast abyss:Whatever happy region is thy place,Cease thy celestial song a little space;Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine,Since Heaven’s eternal year is thine.Hear then a mortal Muse thy praise rehearseIn no ignoble verse;But such as thy own voice did practise here,When thy first fruits of Poesy were given,To make thyself a welcome inmate thereWhile yet a young probationerAnd candidate of heaven.’

The poet who so excelled in majestic artificial harmonies was also the one poet of his day who could occasionally sing as the bird sings. Dryden has never received sufficient praise for his songs, inasmuch as these are mostly hidden away in his dramas, and not always adapted for quotation. The following, with a manifest political meaning, is a good example of his simple ease and melody:

‘A choir of bright beauties in spring did appearTo choose a May-lady to govern the year;All the nymphs were in white, and the shepherds in green;The garland was given, and Phyllis was queen:But Phyllis refused it, and sighing did say,I’ll not wear a garland while Pan is away.‘While Pan and fair Syrinx are fled from our shore,The Graces are vanished, and Love is no more:The soft God of Pleasure that warmed our desires,Has broken his bow and extinguished his fires;And vows that himself and his mother will mournTill Pan and fair Syrinx in triumph return.‘Forbear your addresses and court us no more,For we will perform what the Deity swore;But if you dare think of deserving our charms,Away with your sheep-hooks, and take to your arms;Then laurels and myrtles your brows shall adornWhen Pan and his son and fair Syrinx return.’

‘While Pan and fair Syrinx are fled from our shore,The Graces are vanished, and Love is no more:The soft God of Pleasure that warmed our desires,Has broken his bow and extinguished his fires;And vows that himself and his mother will mournTill Pan and fair Syrinx in triumph return.

‘Forbear your addresses and court us no more,For we will perform what the Deity swore;But if you dare think of deserving our charms,Away with your sheep-hooks, and take to your arms;Then laurels and myrtles your brows shall adornWhen Pan and his son and fair Syrinx return.’

The following song is fromThe Mock Astrologer:

‘You charmed me not with that fair face,Though it was all divine;To be another’s is the graceThat makes me wish you mine.The gods and fortune take their partWho like young monarchs fight,And boldly dare invade that heartWhich is another’s right.First, mad with hope, we undertakeTo pull up every bar;But, once possessed, we feebly makeA dull defensive war.Now every friend is turned a foe,In hope to get our store:And passion makes us cowards growWhich made us brave before.’

The Muse who could mourn to such purpose for Anne Killigrew might have been expected to soar high in celebrating and lamenting Charles II., parts of whose history and character certainly lent themselves to poetry. Whether from haste, indifference, or whatever reason, Dryden was clearly unable to penetrate himself with the subject, and it is perhaps to his honour that his composition should so little simulate an inspiration he was evidently far from feeling. The choice of subjects is judicious, but the treatment is in general inanimate and perfunctory, except when the poet is going to say something absurd, and then his motto isPecca fortiter. There is, perhaps, nothing nearer burlesque in all Dryden’s rhyming plays than this couplet:

‘Ere a prince is to perfection brought,He costs Omnipotence a second thought.’

The poet is also weighted by having to flatter Charles and his successor at the same time. The concluding lines, however, eulogizing James’s care for the navy, will always echo in the heart of Britain:

‘Behold even the remoter shoresA conquering navy proudly spread:The British cannon formidably roars,While, starting from his oozy bed,The asserted Ocean rears his reverend headTo view and recognize his ancient Lord again,And with a willing hand restoresThe fasces of the main.’

This latter fine phrase had occurred already inAstraea ReduxandAnnus Mirabilis.

Andrew Marvell, though unequal, is an excellent lyric poet. His best song,Where the remote Bermudas ride, is such a household word that we select a less known piece:

‘Ye living lamps, by whose dear lightThe nightingale does sit so late,And studying all the summer night,Her matchless songs does meditate;‘Ye country comets, that portendNo war nor prince’s funeral,Shining unto no other endThan to presage the grass’s fall;‘Ye glowworms, whose officious flameTo wandering mowers shows the way,That in the night have lost their aim,And after foolish fires do stray;‘Your courteous lights in vain you waste,Since Juliana here is come;For she my mind hath so displaced,That I shall never find my home.’

‘Ye living lamps, by whose dear lightThe nightingale does sit so late,And studying all the summer night,Her matchless songs does meditate;

‘Ye country comets, that portendNo war nor prince’s funeral,Shining unto no other endThan to presage the grass’s fall;

‘Ye glowworms, whose officious flameTo wandering mowers shows the way,That in the night have lost their aim,And after foolish fires do stray;

‘Your courteous lights in vain you waste,Since Juliana here is come;For she my mind hath so displaced,That I shall never find my home.’

In fancy as in melody this and Marvell’s other gems belong to the age of Charles I. Apart from Dryden, the Restoration has little to show beside three songs of genuine inspiration in the plays of Crowne, to be mentioned in his place as a middling dramatist; Sir Charles Sedley’s charming verses to Chloris; others, mostly from the same handMotteux, and, strange to say, the Dryasdust Rymer, which have found a harbour in Mr. Arthur Bullen’sMusa Proterva; a few songs of Rochester’s and Aphra Behn’s; some few carols in Mr. Ebsworth’s collections; and the elegant and animatedTo all you ladies now at landof Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset (1637-1706), less known for his occasional verses, these excepted, than as the arbiter of taste and the benefactor of needy men of letters.

It was but natural that the lyrists, like the dramatists, should endeavour to make up in bombastic extravagance for their deficiencies in simplicity and truth to nature. An appropriate instrument was at hand in the Pindaric ode, the miscreation of a true poet, Cowley. So little were the genuine characteristics of Pindaric versification then understood even by scholars, that it is no wonder that Cowley should have conceived them to be equivalent to absolute irregularity. His own compositions are not within our province; but it may be remarked that they are distinguished from the Pindarics of Charles II.’s time by the preponderance of what was then called wit, which we should describe as a perverse ingenuity in discovering superficial resemblances between dissimilar things. It is impossible not to admire in a measure some of the feats of this kind performed by Cowley, Crashaw, and Donne; but common sense intimates that the real criterion of the merit of a comparison is its justice. The movement, nevertheless, had considerable significance as indicating the exhaustion of the old forms of poetry. It had triumphed in Italy and in Spain in the persons of Marino and Gongora, with most disastrous effects on the literature of those countries. Fortunate it was for England that this fashion arrived late, and before it could take much root was dislodged by the saner methods of France. Pindarics, however, went on existing, but with comparatively little wit, and even lesspoetry. Sprat, of whom we shall have to speak as the historian of the Royal Society, was perhaps the most conspicuous practitioner. The following lines on Prometheus are a bright example of his amalgam of poetry and wit:

‘Along he brought the sparkling coalFrom some celestial chimney[6]stole;Quickly the plundered stars he left,And as he hastened down,With the robbed flames his hands still shone,And seemed as if they were burnt for the theft.’

Congreve is equally absurd in his personification of Sleep:

‘An ancient sigh he sits upon,Whose memory of sound is long since gone,And purposely annihilated for his throne.’

This poet, nevertheless, who, as pointed out by Dr. Johnson and Mr. Gosse, has the critical merit of having given the English Pindaric a regular structure, was capable of much better things. The opening of the ode which yields the above choicemorceau(To Mrs. Arabella Hunt, Singing) is in a fine strain of poetry:

‘Let all be hushed, each softest motion cease,Be every loud tumultuous thought at peace,And every ruder gasp of breathBe calm, as in the arms of death:And then, most fickle, most uneasy part,Thou restless wanderer, my heart,Be still; gently, ah gently, leave,Thou busy, idle thing, to heave:Stir not a pulse; and let my blood,That turbulent unruly flood,Be softly staid:Let me be all, but my attention, dead.Go, rest, unnecessary springs of life,Leave your officious toil and strife;For I would hear her voice, and tryIf it be possible to die.’

FOOTNOTES:[6]It should be noted that this word is not so absurd as it may appear to the modern reader. Chimney (Fr.cheminée) here means the fireplace, not the flue. ‘The mantle of thechimneyin his hall.’—Walton,Life of George Herbert.

[6]It should be noted that this word is not so absurd as it may appear to the modern reader. Chimney (Fr.cheminée) here means the fireplace, not the flue. ‘The mantle of thechimneyin his hall.’—Walton,Life of George Herbert.

Dryden occupies an unique position as by far the most important representative of a department of literature for which, on his own showing, he had little natural qualification, and in which he had little ambition to excel. Only one of his numerous plays, he tells us, was written to please himself. But he wanted reputation, money, and Court favour, and these inducements directed him to the most popular and lucrative department of the Muses’ province. Here, as elsewhere, his progress was slow. His first play,The Wild Gallant(1663), has come down to us in an amended version; in its original form it is pronounced by Pepys ‘as poor a thing as I ever saw in my life.’ Dryden might long have remained an unsuccessful dramatist but for the invention of rhyming tragedy, which, though in itself an objectionable form, suited his talent to perfection. The management of the heroic couplet was and always continued the strongest of all his strong points, and his genius for rhetoric was stimulated to the utmost by the facilities afforded by this sonorous form of metre. HenceThe Indian Emperor(1665) was a great success, and determined the main course of Dryden’s dramatic activity for some years. It necessarily brought him nearer to the French drama, and gave a French character to the drama of the day, not really in harmony with the taste of theEnglish public, and from which Dryden ultimately freed himself. The opinion of the day was prepared to go in the direction of classicism as far as Jonson, but not as far as Corneille. The French traveller Sorbière having in 1663 censured the irregularity of the English stage, was answered by Sprat, who asserts the superiority of his countrymen, and points out the fundamental difference in the taste of the two nations. ‘The French,’ he says, ‘for the most part take only one or two great men, and chiefly insist upon some one remarkable accident of their story; to this end they admit no more persons than will serve to adorn that: and they manage all in rhyme, with long speeches, almost in the way of dialogues, in making high ideas of honour, and in speaking noble things. The English on their side make their chief plot to consist in a greater variety of actions, and, besides the main design, add many little contrivances. By this means their scenes are shorter, their stage fuller, many more persons of different humours are introduced. And in carrying on of this they generally do only confine themselves to blank verse.’ Sprat then proceeds to point out the advantages of the English method; and it is evident that neither he nor the public imagined themselves to be on the eve of such serious modifications of the national drama as actually took place—modifications to be chiefly attributed to the taste of the Court, and the more easily effected from the paucity of theatres.

The inferiority of the Restoration drama to the Elizabethan is one of the commonplaces of criticism, perhaps even one of its platitudes, and cannot be admitted without some qualification. Yet, as the broad general statement of a fact, it is undeniable, and the fact is a proof that the elements which preserve a play as literature for posterity are not those which fit it for the contemporary stage. In every play of serious purpose there is, or should be, anearthly part and a spiritual, dramatic craftsmanship and poetical inspiration. In the former particular the Restoration dramatists compare not unfavourably with their predecessors, always excepting Shakespeare; they fail not as dramatists, but as poets. The whole Elizabethan drama is steeped in an atmosphere of poetry. To say nothing of its chief representatives, take up such satires asThe Return from Parnassus, or such merely occasional pieces as the academical play onTimonwhich preceded Shakespeare’s, and you will not doubt that you are reading the work of a poet. Read through, on the other hand, the best plays of the representative dramatists of the Restoration, and you will generally find the poetical element concentrated in a few brilliant passages. In the Elizabethan age, it is evident, men lived at such a height of heroic and romantic sentiment that the purveyors of public entertainment could not but be poets. In the Restoration era, on the other hand, men habitually lived, breathed, and wrote prose; and when the dramatist would be a poet, he had to set himself to the task. To convince ourselves that the distinction between poetry and prose is not artificial, as Carlyle seemed to think, but essential, we have only to consider the widely different influence of Elizabethan and Restoration drama upon the after world. Both, excepting the works of Shakespeare, are virtually dead as acted drama. But in losing the stage the Restoration drama has lost everything, while the Elizabethan is yet a living and working force. It powerfully co-operated in the splendid revival of English poetry at the end of last century; it is at this moment an inspirer and a nurse of young genius. It is inconceivable that the Restoration drama as a whole should inspire anyone, or that it should count for anything as a factor in future developments of literature. One is a perennial plant, which may die down to the root in ungenial seasons,but will assuredly put forth new flowers; the other is a fossil, curious and in some measure beautiful, but devoid of vital force. And for this, the merely intellectual merits of both being so considerable, no reason can be given but that one is on the whole poetical, and therefore living, the other on the whole prosaic, and therefore inert. Hence we may prophesy of the success of the endeavour of Ibsen, and other men of distinguished talent, to produce dramas conceived in an entirely realistic spirit, and entirely devoted to the problems of modern society. Such competitions will be valuablepièces justificativesfor the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, but they will be extinct as literary forces long ere the end of the twentieth.

This, nevertheless, is to be said for the Restoration dramatists, that their art is not an imitation of an extinct form of the drama, but is at least something new, really expressive of the sentiments of their generation. The imitation of Shakespeare could only have produced gross unreality, which must have degenerated still further into mere inanity. The playwrights did what the contemporary painters should have done, they fell back, in a measure, upon realism when high imagination was no longer possible. If they had gone further in this direction their works would have possessed more intrinsic merit, and have claimed a more important place in the history of culture. Their tragedies would not so often have been rendered unnatural by the employment of rhyme, and their comedies would have exhibited the manners and the morals of the English nation, and not merely of the playgoing part of it. It cannot be believed that the comedy of that age affords anything like so faithful a picture of the seventeenth century as Fielding’s novels do of the eighteenth. The realistic tendency was chiefly conspicuous in the closer approach to the language of common life, and in the more logicalcharacter even of appeals to emotion. The extravagant transports of heroes and heroines only betray that true imagination had grown cold; but the manly nervous sense and the almost forensic reasoning so often found in their company show that a new stratum had really been touched.

Another consideration should not be overlooked in the comparison between the Elizabethan and the Restoration drama, that the debasement of the latter is exaggerated from the seeming abruptness of the metamorphosis undergone by the former. Passing from the stage of Shakespeare to the stage of Dryden, we appear to have suddenly entered a new world. The representatives of the drama seem instantaneously transformed by some Circean potion into beings of a lower type. We do not immediately remember that the gradual development which would have interpreted the apparent prodigy was rudely interrupted by the Civil War and the Commonwealth. If the interval between Shirley and Dryden had been continuously occupied by popular dramatists, we should have observed the change slowly coming on, and have watched the older form shading off into the newer by gradations not more violent than those by which the latter subsequently passed into the drama of the eighteenth century. As it is, the poets of Charles II.’s time seem the authors of a revolution of which they were merely the instruments. The younger portion of their audiences, on whose suffrages they had mainly to rely, had scarcely so much as seen a play. The spells of authority and tradition were broken, or at least so grievously impaired as to be unable to withstand the seduction of French example. Honest Samuel Pepys would not have so easily pronounced theMidsummer Night’s Dream‘a mean thing’ if the romantic drama had not been absolutely extinct for him. And, taking a broadview of the revolution in popular taste, we must admit that, however deplorable in itself, it had some good sides. It tended to bring England more into harmony with the general current of European taste and thought, and repressed the tendency of our noble literature to fanciful and eccentric insularity. In the long run, moreover, it was serviceable to the English drama by providing a substitute, however inferior, for the old vein now unproductive. The want of such a resource killed the drama of Spain. Spanish dramatists, until the nineteenth century, were unable to accommodate themselves to any dramatic form but the national one, every phase of which had been completely exemplified before the end of the seventeenth century. In consequence, the Spanish theatre of the eighteenth century did not produce a single tolerable piece until, near the termination of the epoch, a playwright arose who was capable of profiting by French example.

Another extenuation of the departure of the Restoration dramatists from the better traditions of the English stage is the strength as well as the suddenness of the new influence to which they were subjected. It came from the Court, and the Court dispensed the playwright’s daily bread. There is sufficient evidence that even Shakespeare was by no means indifferent to the good opinion of Elizabeth and James, but neither of these sovereigns was sufficiently the drama’s patron to be the drama’s legislator. It was otherwise with Charles II., a man of wit, taste, and polish, inaccessible to the deeper emotions of humanity, and without a grain of poetry in his composition. Such a man must have found the Elizabethan drama intolerable. He no doubt honestly agreed with his laureate, who coolly says: ‘At his return he found a nation lost as much in barbarism as in rebellion; and, as the excellency of his nature forgave the one, so the excellency of his mannersreformed the other. The desire of imitating so great a pattern first awakened the dull and heavy spirits of the English from their natural reservedness.’ With every allowance for adulation, there can be no doubt that Dryden in a considerable measure believed himself a reformer. Charles had his Paladins in the field of letters. ‘The favour,’ says Dryden elsewhere, ‘which heroic plays have lately found upon our theatres has been wholly derived to them from the countenance and approbation they have received at Court.’ We may well feel thankful that the experiment of Gallicizing the native genius of England should have been tried so fairly, and have broken down so utterly, under such patronage as Charles’s and in such hands as Dryden’s. We have not quite seen the last of it, but where Corneille and Molière failed Goncourt and Zola are not likely to succeed.

This may at least be said for Dryden, that the romantic drama was for a time in a state of suspended animation, and that the only question was what successor should fill its place. For a short time two foreign schools seemed contending for the prize. Dryden’s own allegiance in his first piece,The Wild Gallant, was given to the Spanish drama, a form exceedingly attractive from its brisk action, sudden vicissitudes, and dexterous development of intrigue. But the Spanish drama cannot be naturalized in England for two reasons, one creditable to English genius, the other the reverse. A play of intrigue is necessarily a play of incident, and allows little room for the development of character; but Englishmen are ‘humoursome,’ and enjoy the discrimination of character to the nicest shades. If we judged the two nations solely by their dramas, we should say that all Spaniards were exactly alike, and no two Englishmen. The other reason is that Englishmen do not particularly excel in the contrivance of incident, andthat few even of our best dramatists could rival the ingenuity of third-rate Spanish playwrights. The Anglo-Spanish drama soon disappeared, and its place in serious dramatic literature was taken by agenremost intimately associated with the name of Dryden, its most brilliant practitioner, and upon whose desertion it crumbled into dust.

Dryden himself has told us in few words what he understands by an heroic play, and the definition exempts him from much of the criticism to which he might otherwise have been held liable: ‘An heroic play ought to be an imitation, in little, of an heroic poem.’ In other words, it must have an epical element as well as a dramatic. The experiment was worth making, as it proved that neither branch of the poetic art gained anything by invading the other’s territory. Compared with the art of Shakespeare or of Sophocles, the art of Dryden in this department seems a tawdry caricature. All the higher qualities of the dramatist are absent, being, in fact, inconsistent with the demands of epic poetry, while epic dignity is equally sacrificed to the exigencies of drama. Without constant hurry and bustle, such pieces would be intolerable. They require, as Dryden tacitly admits by the quotation from Ariosto, which he adduces as expressive of his guiding principle, a constant succession of adventures. Such incessant agitation leaves no place for the development of character; the actors come on the stage ready labelled; or if, like Nourmahal inAurengzebe, they disclose a new trait, the sudden novelty produces the effect of complete metamorphosis. The pieces could only be regarded as splendid puppet-shows, were not the failings of the dramatist so frequently redeemed by the poet. It so chanced that the Coryphæus of this unnatural style was the most splendid poetical declaimer (unless Byron be excepted) that Englandever produced, and his pieces resound with tirades not merely brilliant in diction and sonorous in versification, but now fiery with mettlesome spirit, now weighty with manly sense. And these qualities were aided by the otherwise objectionable form selected by the poet. His blank-verse plays, far superior as works of art, contain few such eloquent passages as his rhyming tragedies. Rhyme helped him on, as a riderless runaway horse is spurred by the thunder of his own hoofs. Even where his thought is poor, its poverty is veiled by the brilliancy of the diction—a brilliancy which he could hardly have attained by the use of any other form; and if the employment of rhyme seems, as it is, unnatural, the form at least harmonizes with the substance, and they produce between them an illusive effect of a species of art which may possibly be legitimate, as the ordinary rules evidently do not apply. We must also remember how this subornation of the judgment, not imperceptible or ineffective in the closet, was aided on the stage by the most potent appeals to the senses.

Tyrannic Love, Dryden’s first considerable attempt in ‘heroic tragedy,’ is very remarkable as a proof of to what extraordinary absurdities a vigorous intellect may be liable, and also how these may be dignified by energy of expression. ‘The rants of Maximin,’ says Johnson, ‘have long been the sport of criticism;’ but so spirited and sonorous is the diction, that, inconsistent as seems the alliance of admiration with derision, such actually is the mingled feeling which they excite in the quiet of the closet. On the stage they must have passed off much better by the aid of scenery, costume, and emphatic declamation; and success on the boards, it must be remembered, was invariably Dryden’s first object. The same consideration which explains, though it does not excuse, his indecency, palliates his bombast. He wrote to live, and could not afford to produce unactable dramas.A much more interesting performance thanTyrannic Loveis hisConquest of Granada(1669-1670). It is a touchstone of ‘heroic tragedy,’ a crucial test of what it can and what it cannot do. It renounces all pretence to nature, reason, and probability; on the other hand, it delights with a crowd of striking sentiments and images, and enchains the attention with perpetual bustle and variety. It is to one of Shakespeare’s plays as a bit of shining glass is to a plant of which every fibre is the creation of a natural law. Yet the glass is not a displeasing object, neither is the play.

The worst offence ofThe Conquest of Granada, after all, is not its bombast, but its bathos. It is true that both spring from the same root, that want of genuine creative imagination which in attempting the great only achieves the big, which a small oversight easily converts into the laughable. But apart from this failing, which Dryden shares with most epic poets of the second rank, it is difficult to acquit him of a singular insensibility to the ridiculous. This is evinced among other things by the entire conception of one of his most serious and elaborate works,The Hind and the Panther, and it requires all the gravity and obvious conviction of his preface toThe Conquest of Granadato convince us that he did not occasionally mean to burlesque his own principles. The rapid changes of fortune, the constant fallings into and out of love, the odd predicaments in which heroes and heroines continually find themselves, frequently produce the effect of the broadest comedy—an effect much assisted by the extraordinary rants of the principal speakers; as when Lyndaraxa desires the personage who has first stabbed her and then himself to

‘Die for us both, I have not leisure now;’

or Almahide threatens to send her ghost to fetch backAlmanzor’s scarf, as if she and her ghost were different beings; or Almanzor’s astounding menace to his mother’s spirit:

‘I’ll squeeze thee like a bladder there,And make thee groan thyself away in air.’

So unequal is Dryden’s genius that the second of these monstrosities occurs in close proximity to the exquisite verses:

‘What precious drops are thoseWhich silently each other’s track pursue,Bright as young diamonds in their infant dew?’

and the burlesque threat to the ghost is immediately succeeded by the noble couplet:

‘I am the ghost of her who gave thee birth,The airy shadow of her mouldering earth.’

The beauties which are thickly sown throughoutThe Conquest of Granadaowe, perhaps, something of their effect as poetry to the utter want of nature in the characters and of reason in the conduct of the play. In a drama aiming at the delineation of real men and women they would frequently have appeared absurdly inappropriate, but when it is once understood that the personages are the puppets and mouthpieces of the author, the question of dramatic propriety becomes irrelevant. YetThe Conquest of Granadais something more than a heap of glittering morsels of sentiment and wit. It possesses a unity of feeling which serves as cement for these scattered jewels. The ‘kind of generous and noble spirit animating it,’ to employ Mr. Saintsbury’s just description, maintains the reader at a level above the pitch of ordinary life. When he opens the book he rises, as he closes it he descends. He may laugh, but his amusement is unmingled with contempt; and ever and anon he comes upon the genuine heroic, unsuspected of sham, unspoiled by bombast. The soul of chivalry inspires the lines quoted with just applause by both Scott and Saintsbury:

‘Fair though you areAs summer mornings, and your eyes more brightThan stars that twinkle on a winter’s night;Though you have eloquence to warm and moveCold age and fasting hermits into love;Though Almahide with scorn rewards my care;Yet than to change ’tis nobler to despair.My love’s my soul, and that from fate is free,’Tis that unchanged and deathless part of me.’

Aurengzebe(1675), Mr. Saintsbury considers ‘in some respects a very noble play.’ We should rather have called it an indifferent play with some noble passages more remarkable for eloquence than dramatic propriety. The characters, though by no means subtle or even natural, are better discriminated than inThe Conquest of Granada; there is much less rant and bustle, yet quite enough to make one cordially echo Indamora’s naïve inquiry:

‘Are there yet more Morats, more fighting kings?’

Nor are choice examples of bathos wanting. Aurengzebe finely says:

‘I need not haste the end of life to meet,The precipice is just beneath my feet.’

Nourmahal replies:

‘Think not my sense of virtue is so small,I’ll rather leap down first and break your fall.’

The first act opens with a striking couplet:

‘The night seems doubled with the fear she brings,And o’er the citadel now spreads her wings.’

To which immediately succeeds:

‘The morning, as mistaken, turns about,And all her early fires again go out.’

Dryden was probably betrayed into these lapses, not so much by mere haste and carelessness, as by the trick of the heroic metre, which in dialogue almost enforces balanced antithesis.

Nearly allAurengzebeis composed in this brilliant snip-snap, where the ball of a fine sentiment, tossed from one character to another, comes back in a retort, to be returned in a repartee. Of dramatic art as Shakespeare or the Greeks understood it there is not a trace; the pivot of the action is the property, fitter for a fairy tale than a tragedy, possessed by Indamora, of compelling every one who sees her to fall in love with her. Neither pity nor terror can be excited on such terms; if Aristotle’s criterion be sound,Aurengzebeis no tragedy at all. If, however, we are content to regard it as a medley of fine things, a model of spirited declamation and sonorous versification, it claims high praise. Great must have been the intellectual strength which could thus thunder and dazzle through five acts of unabated energy: and the sentiments, considered merely as such, lose nothing of their effect from being placed in the mouths of puppets, and misplaced even there. Take, for instance, the most famous passage in the play, one of the finest in all Dryden:

‘When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat;Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit;Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay;To-morrow’s falser than the former day;Lies worse, and while it says, we shall be blestWith some new joys, cuts off what we possest.Strange cozenage! None would live past years again,Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;And from the dregs of life think to receiveWhat the first sprightly runnings could not give.’

This potent quintessence of the experience of age is ill assigned to Aurengzebe, a young prince at the outset of a splendid career; but the word remains while the lip is forgotten, and has taken its place among the treasures of English poetry. Among other claims to notice,Aurengzebeis remarkable as one of the few English dramas in which a living foreign potentate is brought upon the stage, and, less exceptionally, for its entire perversion of the truth of history. The generous and filial part here ascribed to the unnatural and cold-blooded Aurengzebe was really performed by his unfortunate brother Dara. To have crowned Dara, however, would have involved an equal violation of historical truth, to have killed him a violation of what the dramatists of Dryden’s day considered more important, poetical justice.

Marriage à la Mode(1673), the first fair example of Dryden’s comedy, is a more satisfactory exhibition of his power as a dramatist, if a piece adding little to his fame as a poet. Mr. Saintsbury justly remarks that ‘Scott’s general undervaluing of Dryden’s comic pieces is very evident’ in his prefatory notice. Mr. Saintsbury himself, though warmly appreciative of ‘Dryden’s only original excursion into the realms of the higher comedy,’ might, we think, have said even more in its favour. The situation of the spouses, fancying themselves tired of each other while their affection only needs the fillip of jealousy, is comic in a high degree, and the brisk intricacy of the action, with only four actors to sustain it, manifests great ingenuity and deftness in dramatic construction. The serious section of the play is certainly much less meritorious than the comic, to which it is a mere appendage. Written in most slovenlyblank verse, it entirely wants the fire and energy of Dryden’s heroic plays. Its fault is rather sterility than extravagance; with some exceptions, it appears tame and bald. But these exceptions are very fine. The scene between Leonidas and Palmyra (act ii., sc. 1) is like a morsel of Theocritus, allying the charm of pastoral innocence to the wit and point of an accomplished court-poet. It is remarkable how surely, at this period of his career, Dryden rises when he resorts to rhyme; but even the careless blank verse of this play, in general merely a foil to the comic part, sometimes sparkles with strokes worthy of a great poet:

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