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To the peculiar spirit of the heroic drama--to its strength as well
as to its weakness--no metrical form could have been more closely
adapted than the heroic couplet. It was neither flexible nor delicate;
but in the hands of Dryden, even more than in those of Davenant, it
became an incomparably vigorous and effective weapon of declamation.
As the most unmistakable and the most glaring mark of the new method
it was naturally placed in the forefront of the battle waged by Dryden
in defence of the heroic drama. It seems, indeed, to have struck him
as the strongest advantage possessed by the Restoration drama over the
Elizabethan, and as that which alone was wanting to place the
Elizabethan drama far ahead both of the Greek and of the French.
The claims of rhyme to Dryden's regard would seem to have been twofold.
On the one hand, he thought that it served to "bound and circumscribe"
the luxuriance of the poet's fancy. [Footnote: Dedication to _The Rival
Ladies_: _English Garner_, iii. 492.] On the other hand, it went to
"heighten" the purely dramatic element and to "move that admiration
which is the delight of serious plays" and to which "a bare imitation"
will not suffice. [Footnote: _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_: ib. 582] Both
grounds of defence will seem to the modern reader questionable enough.
Howard at once laid his finger upon the weak spot of the first. "It
is", he said, "no argument for the matter in hand. For the dispute is
not what way a man may write best in; but which is most proper for the
subject he writes upon. And, if this were let pass, the argument is
yet unsolved in itself; for he that wants judgment in the liberty of
his fancy may as well shew the want of it in its confinement."
[Footnote: _Preface to Four New Plays_: ib. 498.] Besides, he adds in
effect on the next page, so far from "confining the fancy" rhyme is
apt to lead to turgid and stilted writing.
The second argument stands on higher ground. It amounts to a plea for
the need of idealization; and, so far, may serve to remind us that the
extravagances of the heroic drama had their stronger, as well as their
weaker, side. No one, however, will now be willing to admit that the
cause of dramatic idealization is indeed bound up with the heroic
couplet; and a moment's thought will show the fallacy of Dryden's
assumption that it is. In the first place, he takes for granted that,
the further the language of the drama is removed from that of actual
life, the nearer the spirit of it will approach to the ideal. An
unwarrantable assumption, if there ever was one; and an assumption,
as will be seen, that contains the seeds of the whole eighteenth-century
theory of poetic diction. In the second place--but this is, in truth,
only the deeper aspect of the former plea--Dryden comes perilously
near to an acceptance of the doctrine that idealization in a work of
art depends purely on the outward form and has little or nothing to
do with the conception or the spirit. The bond between form and matter
would, according to this view, be purely arbitrary. By a mere turn of
the hand, by the substitution of rhyme for prose--or for blank verse,
which is on more than "measured" or harmonious prose--the baldest
presentment of life could be converted into a dramatic poem. From the
grosser forms of this fallacy Dryden's fine sense was enough to save
him. Indeed, in the remarks on Jonson's comedies that immediately
follow, he expressly rejects them; and seldom does he show a more
nicely balanced judgment than in what he there says on the limits of
imitation in the field of art. But in the passage before us--in his
assertion that "the converse must be heightened with all the arts and
ornaments of poetry"--it is hard to resist a vision of the dramatist
first writing his dialogue in bald and skimble-skamble prose, and then
wringing his brains to adorn it "with all the arts" of the dramatic
_gradus_. Here again we have the seeds of the fatal theory which
dominated the criticism and perverted the art of the eighteenth century;
the theory which, finding in outward form the only distinction between
prose and poetry, was logically led to look for the special themes of
poetic art in the dissecting-room or the pulpit, and was driven to
mark the difference by an outrageous diction that could only be called
poetry on the principle that it certainly was not prose; the theory
which at length received its death-blow from the joint attack of
Wordsworth and Coleridge.
It remains only to note the practical issue of the battle of the metres.
In the drama the triumph of the heroic couplet was for the moment
complete; but it was short-lived. By 1675, the date of _Aurungzebe_,
Dryden proclaimed himself already about to "weary of his long-loved
mistress, Rhyme"; and his subsequent plays were all written in blank
verse or prose. But the desertion of "his mistress" brought him little
luck; and the rest of his tragedies show a marked falling off in that
splendid vigour which went far to redeem even the grossest absurdities
of his heroic plays. A more sensitive, though a weaker, genius joined
him in the rejection of rhyme; and the example of Otway--whose two
crucial plays belong to 1680 and 1682--did perhaps more than that of
Dryden himself, more even than the assaults of _The Rehearsal_, to
discredit the heroic drama. With the appearance of _Venice Preserved_,
rhyme ceased to play any part in English tragedy. But at the same time,
it must be noted, tragedy itself began to drop from the place which
for the last century it had held in English life. From that day to
this no acting tragedy, worth serious attention, has been written for
the English stage.
The reaction against rhyme was not confined to the drama. The epic,
indeed--or what in those days passed for such--can hardly be said to
have come within its scope. In the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ Dryden--and
this is one of the few judgments in which Howard heartily agrees with
him--had denounced rhyme as "too low for a poem"; [Footnote: _English
Garner_, iii. p. 567.] by which, as the context shows, is meant an
epic. This was written the very year in which _Paradise Lost_, with
its laconic sneer at rhyme as a device "to set off wretched matter and
lame metre", was given to the world. That, however, did not prevent
Dryden from asking, and obtaining, leave to "tag its verses" into an
opera; [Footnote: The following will serve as a sample of Dryden's
improvements on his model:--
Seraph and Cherub, careless of their charge
And wanton in full ease, now live at large,
Unguarded leave the passes of the sky,
And all dissolved in Hallelujahs lie.
--_Dramatic Works_, i. p. 596.]
nor did it deter Blackmore--and, at a much later time, Wilkie [Footnote:
Blackmore's _King Arthur_ was published in 1695; Wilkie's
_Epigoniad_--the subject of a patriotic puff from Hume--in 1757.]--from
reverting to the metre that Milton had scorned to touch. It is not
till the present century that blank verse can be said to have fairly
taken seisin of the epic; one of the many services that English poetry
owes to the genius of Keats.
In the more nondescript kinds of poetry, however, the revolt against
rhyme spread faster than in the epic. In descriptive and didactic
poetry, if anywhere, rhyme might reasonably claim to hold its place.
There is much to be said for the opinion that, in such subjects, rhyme
is necessary to fix the wandering attention of the reader. Yet, for
all that, the great efforts of the reflective muse during the next
century were, with hardly an exception, in blank verse. It is enough
to recall the _Seasons_ of Thomson, the discourses of Akenside and
Armstrong, and the _Night Thoughts_ of the arch-moralist Young.
[Footnote: It may be noted that Young's blank verse has constantly the
run of the heroic couplet.] In the case of Young--as later in that of
Cowper--this is the more remarkable, because his Satires show him to
have had complete command of the mechanism of the heroic couplet. That
he should have deliberately chosen the rival metre is proof--a proof
which even the exquisite work of Goldsmith is not sufficient to
gainsay--that, by the middle of the eighteenth century the heroic
couplet had been virtually driven from every field of poetry, save
that of satire.
We may now turn to the second of the two themes with which Dryden is
mainly occupied in the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_. What are the
conventional restrictions that surround the dramatist, and how far are
they of binding force?
That the drama is by nature a convention--more than this, a convention
accepted largely with a view to the need of idealization--the men of
Dryden's day were in no danger of forgetting. The peril with them was
all the other way. The fashion of that age was to treat the arbitrary
usages of the classical theatre as though they were binding for all
time. Thus, of the four men who take part in the dialogue of the
_Essay_, three are emphatically agreed in bowing down before the three
unities as laws of nature. Dryden himself (Neander) is alone in
questioning their divinity: a memorable proof of his critical
independence; but one in which, as he maliciously points out, he was
supported by the greatest of living dramatists. Corneille could not
be suspected of any personal motive for undertaking the defence of
dramatic license. Yet he closed his _Discourse of the Three Unities_
with the admission that he had "learnt by experience how much the
French stage was constrained and bound up by the observance of these
rules, and how many beauties it had sacrificed". [Footnote: Il est
facile aux speculatifs d'etre severes; mais, s'ils voulaient donner
dix ou douze poemes de cette nature au public, ils elargiraient
peut-etre les regles encore plus que je ne sais, si tot qu'ils auraient
reconnu par l'experience quelle contrainte apporte leur exactitude et
combien de belles choses elle bannit de notre theatre--_Troisieme
Discours Euvres_, xii. 326. See Dryden's Essay _English Garner_, iii
546. On the next page is a happy hit at the shifts to which dramatists
were driven in their efforts to keep up the appearance of obedience
to the Unity of Place: "The street, the window, the two houses and the
closet are made to walk about, and the persons to stand still."] When
the two leading masters of the 'Classical Drama', the French and the
English, joined hands to cast doubt upon the sacred unities, its
opponents might well feel easy as to the ultimate issue of the dispute.
Dryden was not the man to bound his argument by any technical question,
even when it touched a point so fundamental as the unities. Nothing
is more remarkable in the _Essay_, as indeed in all his critical work,
than the wide range which he gives to the discussion. And never has
the case against--we can hardly add, for--the French drama been stated
more pointedly than by him. His main charge, as was to be expected,
is against its monotony, and, in close connection with that, against
its neglect of action and its preference for declamation.
Having defined the drama as "a just and lively image of human nature,
in its actions, passions and traverses of fortune", [Footnote: _English
Garner_, iii 513, ib. 567] he proceeds to test the claims of the French
stage by that standard. Its characters, he finds, are wanting in variety
and nature. Its range of passion and humour is lamentably narrow.
[Footnote: Ib. 542-4.] Its declamations "tire us with their length;
so that, instead of grieving for their imaginary heroes, we are
concerned for our own trouble, as we are in the tedious visits of bad
company; we are in pain till they are gone". [Footnote: English Garner,
iil 542.] The best tragedies of the French--_Cinna and Pompey_--"are
not so properly to be called Plays as long discourses of Reason of
State". [Footnote: Ib. 543.] Upon their avoidance of action he is
hardly less severe. "If we are to be blamed for showing too much of
the action"--one is involuntarily reminded of the closing scene of
_Tyrannic Love_ and of the gibes in _The Rehearsal_--"the French are
as faulty for discovering too little of it ". [Footnote: Ib. 545.]
Finally, on a comparison between the French dramatists and the
Elizabethans, Dryden concludes that "in most of the irregular Plays
of Shakespeare or Fletcher ... there is a more masculine fancy, and
greater spirit in all the writing, than there is in any of the French".
[Footnote: Ib. 548.]
Given the definition with which he starts--but it is a definition that
no Frenchman of the seventeenth or eighteenth century would have
admitted--it is hard to see how Dryden could have reached a
substantially different result. Nor, if comparisons of this sort are
to be made at all, is there much--so far, at least, as Shakespeare is
concerned--to find fault with in the verdict with which he closes. Yet
it is impossible not to regret that Dryden should have failed to
recognize the finer spirit and essence of French tragedy, as conceived
by Corneille: the strong-tempered heroism of soul, the keen sense of
honour, the consuming fire of religion, to which it gives utterance.
The truth is that Dryden stood at once too near, and too far from, the
ideals of Corneille to appreciate them altogether at their just value.
Too near because he instinctively associated them with the heroic
drama, which at the bottom of his heart he knew to be no better than
an organized trick, done daily with a view to "elevate and surprise".
Too far, because, in spite of his own candid and generous temper, it
was well-nigh impossible for the Laureate of the Restoration to
comprehend the highly strung nature of a man like Corneille, and his
intense realization of the ideal.
But, if Dryden is blind to the essential qualities of Corneille, he
is at least keenly alive to those of Shakespeare. It is a memorable
thing that the most splendid tribute ever offered to the prince of
Elizabethans should have come from the leading spirit of the
Restoration. It has often been quoted, but it will bear quoting once
again.
"Shakespeare was the man who, of all modern and perhaps ancient poets,
had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature
were still present to him; and he drew them not laboriously, but
luckily. When he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel
it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning give him the great
commendation. He was naturally learned. He needed not the spectacles
of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her there. I
cannot say he is everywhere alike. Were he so, I should do him injury
to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat,
insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling
into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is
presented to him. No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his
wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,
Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi."
[Footnote: _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_. _English Garner_, iii. 549.]
The same keenness of appreciation is found in Dryden's estimate of
other writers who might have seemed to lie beyond the field of his
immediate vision. Of Milton he is recorded to have said: "He cuts us
all out, and the ancients too". [Footnote: The anecdote is recorded
by Richardson, who says the above words were written on the copy of
_Paradise Lost_ sent by Dorset to Milton. Dryden, _Poetic Works_, p.
161. Comp. _Dramatic Works_, i. 590; _Discourse on Satire_, p. 386.]
On Chaucer he is yet more explicit. "As he is the father of English
poetry, so I hold him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians
held Homer, or the Romans Virgil. He is a perpetual fountain of good
sense; learned in all sciences, and therefore speaks properly on all
subjects. As he knew what to say, so he knows also when to leave off,
a continence which is practised by few writers, and scarcely by any
of the ancients, excepting Virgil and Horace ... Chaucer followed
nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go beyond her." [Footnote:
See _Preface to Fables_, below.]
This points to what was undoubtedly the most shining quality of Dryden,
as a critic: his absolute freedom from preconceived notions, his
readiness to "follow nature" and to welcome nature in whatever form
she might appear. That was the more remarkable because it ran directly
counter both to the general spirit of the period to which he belonged
and to the prevailing practice of the critics who surrounded him. The
spirit of the Restoration age was critical in the invidious, no less
than in the nobler, sense of the word. It was an age of narrow ideals
and of little ability to look beyond them. In particular, it was an
age of carping and of fault-finding; an age within measurable distance
of the pedantic system perfected in France by Boileau, [Footnote:
Boileau's _Art Poetique_ was published in 1674. A translation made by
Soame, with the aid of Dryden, was published in 1683.] and warmly
adopted by a long line of English critics from Roscoromon and
Buckinghamshire to the Monthly Reviewers and to Johnson. Such writers
might always have "nature" on their lips; but it was nature seen through
the windows of the lecture room or down the vista of a street.
With Dryden it was not so. With him we never fail to get an unbiassed
judgment; the judgment of one who did not crave for nature "to advantage
dressed", but trusted to the instinctive freshness of a mind, one of
the most alert and open that ever gave themselves to literature. It
is this that puts an impassable barrier between Dryden and the men of
his own day, or for a century to come. It is this that gives him a
place among the great critics of modern literature, and makes the
passage from him to the schoolmen of the next century so dreary a
descent.
Dryden's openness of mind was his own secret. The comparative method
was, in some measure, the common property of his generation. This, in
fact, was the chief conquest of the Restoration and Augustan critics.
It is the mark that serves to distinguish them most clearly from those
of the Elizabethan age. Not that the Elizabethans are without
comparisons; but that the parallels they saw were commonly of the
simplest, not to say of the most childish, cast. Every sentence of
Meres' critical effort--or, to be rigorously exact, every sentence but
one--is built on "as" and "so"; but it reads like a parody--a
schoolmaster's parody--of Touchstone's improvement on Orlando's verses
in praise of Rosalind. Shakespeare is brought into line with Ovid,
Elizabeth with Achilles, and Homer with William Warner. This, no doubt,
is an extreme instance; but it is typical of the artless methods dear
to the infancy of criticism. In Jonson's _Discoveries_, such comparisons
as there are have indisputable point; but they are few, and, for the
most part, they are limited to the minuter matters of style.
It is with the Restoration that the comparative method first made its
way into English criticism; and that both in its lawful and less lawful
use. The distinction must be jealously made; for there are few matters
that lend themselves so readily to confusion and misapprehension as
this. Between two men, or two forms of art, a comparison may be run
either for the sake of placing the one above the head of the other,
or for the sake of drawing out the essential differences between the
one and the other. The latter method is indispensable to the work of
the critic. Without reference, express or implied, to other types of
genius or to other ways of treatment it is impossible for criticism
to take a single step in definition either of an author, or a movement,
or a form of art. In a vague and haphazard fashion, even the
Elizabethans were comparative. Meres was so in his endless stream of
classical parallels; Sidney, after a loftier strain, in his defence
of harmonious prose as a form of poetry. And it is the highest
achievement of modern criticism to have brought science and order into
the comparative method, and largely to have widened its scope. In this
sense, comparison _is_ criticism; and to compare with increased
intelligence, with a clearer consciousness of the end in view, is to
reform criticism itself, to make it a keener weapon and more effective
for its purpose.
A comparison of qualities, however, is one thing, and a comparison
between different degrees of merit is quite another. The former is the
essence of criticism; the latter, one of the most futile pastimes that
can readily be imagined. That each man should have his own preferences
is right enough. It would be a nerveless and unprofitable mind to which
such preferences were unknown. More than that, some rough
classification, some understanding with oneself as to what authors are
to be reckoned supreme masters of their craft, is hardly to be avoided.
The mere fact that the critic lays stress on certain writers and
dismisses others with scant notice or none at all, implies that in
some sense he has formed an estimate of their relative merits. But to
drag this process from the background--if we ought not rather to say,
from behind the scenes--to the very foot-lights, to publish it, to
insist upon it, is as irrelevant as it would be for the historian--
and he, too, must make his own perspective--to explain why he has
recorded some events and left others altogether unnoticed. All this
is work for the dark room; it should leave no trace, or as little as
may be, upon the finished picture. Criticism has suffered from few
things so much as from its incurable habit of granting degrees in
poetry with honours. "The highest art", it has been well said, "is the
region of equals."
It must be admitted that the Restoration critics had an immoderate
passion for classing authors according to their supposed rank in the
scale of literary desert. A glance at _The Battle of the Books_--a
faint reflection of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns--is
enough to place this beyond dispute. Dryden himself is probably as
guilty as any in this matter. His parallel between Juvenal and Horace,
his comparison of Homer with Virgil, are largely of the nature of an
attempt to show each poet to his proper place, to determine their due
order of precedence in the House of Fame. In the early days of criticism
this was perhaps to be expected. Men were feeling their way to the
principles; and the shortest road might naturally seem to lie through
a comparative table of the men. They were right in thinking that the
first step was to ascertain what qualities, and what modes of treatment,
give lasting pleasure in poetry; and, to do this, they could not but
turn to compare the works of individual poets. But they were wrong in
supposing that they could learn anything by striking the balance between
the merits of one poet, as a sum total, and the merits of another.
The fault was, no doubt, largely in the Restoration critics themselves;
and it is a fault which, so long as the competitive instinct holds
sway with men, will never be entirely unknown. But its hold on the men
of Dryden's day was in great measure due to the influence of the French
critics, and to the narrow lines which criticism had taken in France.
No one can read Boileau's _Art Poetique_, no one can compare it with
the corresponding _Essay_ of Pope, without feeling that the purely
personal element had eaten into the heart of French criticism to a
degree which could never have been natural in England, and which, even
in the darkest days of English literature, has seldom been approached.
But at the same time it will be felt that never has England come nearer
to a merely personal treatment of artistic questions than in the century
between Dryden and Johnson; and that it was here, rather than in the
adoption of any specific form of literature--rather, for instance,
than in the growth of the heroic drama--that the influence of France
is to be traced.
Side by side, however, with the baser sort of comparisons, we find in
the Restoration critics no small use of the kind that profits and
delights. Rymer's _Remarks on the Tragedies of the Former Age_ are an
instance of the comparative method, in its just sense, as employed by
a man of talent. The essays of Dryden abound in passages of this nature,
that could only have been written by a man of genius. They may have
a touch of the desire to set one form of art, or one particular poet,
in array against another. But, when all abatements have been made,
they remain unrivalled samples of the manner in which the comparative
vein can be worked by a master spirit. To the student of English
literature they have a further interest--notably, perhaps, the
comparison between Juvenal and Horace and the eulogy of Shakespeare--as
being among the most striking examples of that change from the Latinized
style of the early Stuart writers to the short, pointed sentence
commonly associated with French; the change that was inaugurated by
Hobbes, but only brought to completion by Dryden.
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