Among my books
Lowell, James Russell, 1819-1891
ik"!l%'i»J|[i»IU;K!!!0'iSL^;^£»^iBiUliaiP,aU&^^^ rtr-S'<a^s3Sga45si4r'S^5sgM«^ f- ...'i>ufrvvA.-...\.-.H-i^A<vcLi^^^ CLo.., ., w X/^.vUa.AA..cu^..: .A.,.x:^^i.i.¥. '^..i^.kt.. 2236 Cornell University Library PS 2316.A13 1900 Among my books. 1924 022 154 359 The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022154359 AMONG MY BOOKS JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL ^^^^^^ 1 1 p i 1 BOSTON HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street 1900 A ■^xikl^ Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of UassachuBetts. Copyright, 1898, By MABEL LOWELL BURNETT. All rights reserved. 7%e Riverside Press, Camtridge, Mass., V. S, A. Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company, To F. D. L, Love comes and goes with music in his feet, And tunes young pulses to his roundelays ; Love brings thee this : will it persuade thee, Sweet, That he turns proser when he comes and stays? CONTENTS. Pagb Detden . 1 "WlTCHORATT 81 Shakespeare Once More 151 New England Two CENinRiEs Ago . . , 228 Lessing 291 Rousseau and the Sentimbntahsts . . . 349 DRYDEN.* Bbnvenuto Cellini tells us that when, in his boy- hood, he saw a salamander come out of the fire, his grandfather forthwith gave him a sound beating, that he might the better remember so unique a prodigy. Though perhaps in this case the rod had another application than the autobiographer chooses to disclose, and was intended to fix in the pupil's mind a lesson of veracity rather than of science, the testimony to its mnemonic virtue remains. Nay, so universally was it once beUeved that the senses, and through them the faculties of obser- vation and retention, were quickened by an irritation of the cuticle, that in France it was customary to whip the children annually at the boundaries of the parish, lest the true place of them might ever be lost through neg- lect of so iaexpensive a mordant for the memory. From this practice the older school of critics would seem to » The Dramatiok Works of .Tohn Dktden, Esq. In six volumes. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, in the Strand. MDCCXXXV. ISmo. The Critical and MisceUaneous Prose-Works of Johx Dryden, now first collected. With Notes and Illustrations. An Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, grounded on Original and Authentick Docu- ments ; and a Collection of his Letters, the greatest Part of which has never before been published. By Edmund Malone, Esq. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, in the Strand. 4 vols. 8vo. The Poetical Works of John Dkyden. (Edited by Mitford.) London; W. Pickering. 1832. 5 vols. 18mo. 1 i. 2 DEYDEN. have taken a hint for keeping fixed the limits of good taste, and what was somewhat vaguely called classical English. To mark these limits in poetry, they set up as Hermse the images they had made to them of Dryden, of Pope, and later of Goldsmith. Here they solemnly castigated every new aspirant in verse, who in turn per- formed the same function for the next generation, thus helping to keep always sacred and immovable the ne plus ultra alike of inspiration and of the vocabulary. Though no two natures were ever much more unlike than those of Dryden and Pope, and again of Pope and Goldsmith, and no two styles, except in such externals as could be easily caught and copied, yet it was the fashion, down even to the last generation, to advise young writers to form themselves, as it was called, on these excellent models. Wordsworth himself began in this school ; and though there were glimpses, here and there, of a direct study of nature, yet most of the epithets in his earlier pieces were of the traditional kind so fatal to poetry dur- ing great part of the last century ; and he indulged in that alphabetic personification which enlivens all such words as Hunger, Solitude, Freedom, by the easy magic of_an initial capital. _ " Where the green apple shrivels on the spray, And pines the unripened pear in summer's kindliest ray, Even here Content has fixed her smiling reign With Independence, child of high Disdain. Exulting 'mid the winter of the skies, Shy as the jealous chamois, Freedom flies, And often grasps her sword, and often eyes." Here we have every characteristic of the artificial method, even to theteipletj which Swift hated so heartily as "a vicious way of rhyming wherewith Mr. Dryden abounded, imitated by all the bad versifiers of Charles the Second's reign." Wordsworth became, indeed, very early the leader of reform ; but, like Wesley, he endeavored a re- DRYDEN. 3 form within the Establishment. Purifying the substance, he retained the outward forms with a feeling rather than conviction that, in poetry, substance and form are but manifestations of the same inward life, the one fused into the other in the vivid heat of their common expres- sion. Wordsworth could never wholly shake off the in- fluence of the century into which he was bom. He began by proposing a reform of the ritual, but it went no further than an attempt to get rid of the words of Latin original where the meaning was as well or better given in derivatives of the Saxon. He would have stricken out the " assemble " and left the " meet to- gether." Like Wesley, he might be compelled by neces- sity to a breach of the canon ; but, like him, he was never a willing schismatic, and his singing robes were the full and flowing canonicals of the church by law established. Inspiration makes short work with the usage of the best authors and ready-made elegances of diction ; but where Wordsworth is not possessed by his demon, as Molifere said of Corneille, he equals Thomson in verbiage, out-Miltons Milton in artifice of style, and Latinizes his diction beyond Drydem. The fact was, that he took up his early opinions on instinct, and insensibly modified them as he studied the masters of what may be called the Middle Period of English verse.* As a young man, he disparaged Virgil (" We talked a great deal of nonsense in those days," he said when taken to task for it later in life) ; at fifty-nine he translated three books of the ^neid, in emulation of Dryden, though falling far short of him in everything but closeness, as he seems, after a few years, to have been convinced. Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the true founder of the modem school, which admits no cis-Ehza- * His " Character of a Happy Warrior" (1806), one of his noblest poems, has a dash of Dryden in it, — still more his "Epistle to Sii George Beaumont {1811)." 4 DEYDEN. bethan authority save Milton, whose own English was formed upon those earlier models. Keats denounced the authors of that style which came in toward the close of the seventeenth century, and reigned absolute through the whole of the eighteenth, as " A schism, Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, who went about Holding a poor decrepit standard out, Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large The name of one Boileau! " But Keats had never then * studied the writers of whom he speaks so contemptuously, though he might have profited by so doing. Boileau would at least have taught him that flimsy would have been an apter epithet for the standard than for the mottoes upon it. Dryden was the author of that schism against which Keats so ve- hemently asserts the claim of the orthodox teaching it had displaced. He was far more just to Boileau, of whom Keats had probably never read a word. " If I would only cross the seas," he says, " I might find in France a living Horace and a Juvenal in the person of the admirable Boileau, whose numbers are excellent, whose expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just, whose language is pure, whose satire is pointed, and whose sense is just. What he borrows from the an- cients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good and almost as universally valuable." t Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a hundred and seventy years ; in the second class of English poets perhaps no one stands, on the whole, so high as he ; during his lifetime, in spite of jealousy, detraction, un- popular politics, and a suspicious change of faith, his pre-eminence was conceded ; he was the earliest com- * He studied Dryden's versification before writing his " Lamia." t On the Origin and Progress of Satire. See Johnson's countei opinion in his life of Dryden. DEYDEN. 5 plete type of the purely literary man, in the modern sense ; there is a singular unanimity in allowing him a, certain claim to greatness which would be denied to men as famous and more read, — to Pope or Swift, for exam- ple ; he is supposed, in some way or other, to have re- formed English poetry. It is now about half a century since the only uniform edition of his works was edited by Scott. No library is complete without him, no name is more familiar than his, and yet it may be suspected that few writers are more thoroughly buried in that great cemetery of the " British Poets.'' If contempo- rary reputation be often deceitful, posthumous fame may be generally trusted, for it is a verdict made up of the suffrages of the select men in succeeding generations. This verdict has been as good as unanimous in favor of Dryden. It is, perhaps, worth while to take a fresh ob- servation of him, to consider him neither as warning nor example, but to endeavor to make out what it is that has given so lofty and firm a position to one of the most unequal, inconsistent, and faulty writers that ever lived. He is a curious example of what we often re- mark of the living, but rarely of the dead, — that they get credit for what they might be quite as much as for what they are, — and posterity has applied to him one of his own rules of criticism, judging him by the best., rather than the average of his achievement, a thing pos- terity is seldom wont to do. On the losing side in poli- tics, it is true of his polemical writings as of Burke's, — whom in many respects he resembles, and especially in that supreme quality of a reasoner, that his mind gath- ers not only heat, but clearness and expansion, by its own motion, — that they have won his battle for him in the judgment of after times. To us, looking back at him, he gradually becomes a singularly interesting and even picturesque figure. He 6 DRYDEN. is, in more senses than one, in language, in turn of thought, in style of mind, in the direction of his activ- ity, the first of the modems. He is the first literary man who was also a man of the world, as we under- stand the term. He succeeded Ben Jonson as the ac- knowledged dictator of wit and criticism, as Dr. Johnson, after nearly the same interval, succeeded him. All ages are, in some sense, ages of transition ; but there are times when the transition is more marked, more rapid ; and it is, perhaps, an ill fortune for a man of letters to arrive at maturity during such a period, still more to represent in himself the change that is going on, and to be an efficient cause in bringing it about. Unless, like Goethe, he is of a singularly uncontemporaneous nature, capable of being tutta in se romita, and of running parallel with his time rather than being sucked into its current, he will be thwarted in that harmonious development of native force which has so much to do with its steady and suc- cessful application. Dryden suffered, no doubt, in this way. Though in creed he seems to have drifted back- ward in an eddy of the general current ; yet of the in- tellectual movement of the time, so far certainly as literature shared in it, he could say, with ^Eneas, not only that he saw, but that himself was a great part of it. That movement was, on the whole, a downward one, from faith to scepticism, from enthusiasm to cynicism, from the imagination to the understanding. It was in a direction altogether away from those springs of imagi- nation and faith at which they of the last age had slaked the thirst or renewed the vigor of their souls. Dryden himself recognized that indefinable and gregarious in- fluence which we call nowadays the Spirit of the Age, when he said that " every Age has a kind of universal Genius." * He had also a just notion of that in which * Essay on Dramatiok Poesy. DRYDEN. 7 he lived ; ior he remarks, incidentally, that " all know- ing ages are naturally sceptic and not at all bigoted, ■which, if I am not much deceived, is the proper charac- ter of our own." * It may be conceived that he was even painfully half-aware of having fallen upon a time incapable, not merely of a great poet, but perhaps of , any poet at all ; for nothing is so sensitive to the chil]/ of a sceptical atmosphere as that enthusiasm which, if it be not genius, is at least the beautiful illusion that saves it from the baffling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice unhappy he who, bom to see things as they might be, is schooled by circumstances to see them as people say they are, — to read God in a prose translation. Such was Dryden's lot, and such, for a good part of his days, it was by his own choice. He who was of a stat- ure to snatch the torch of life that flashes from lifted hand to hand along the generations, over the heads of inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy to the stews. As a writer for the stage, he deliberately adopted and repeatedly reaifirmed the maxim that " He who lives to please, must please to live." Without earnest convictions, no great or sound literature is conceivable. But if Dryden mostly wanted that in- spiration which comes of belief in and devotion to something nobler and more abiding than the present moment and its petulant need, he had, at least, the next best thing to that, — a thorough_fe,ith in himself. He was, moreover, a man^oiTsingularly open'"s6i51, and of a temper self-confident enough to be candid even with himself. His mind was growing to the last, his judg- m^ent widening and deepening, his artistic sense refining itself more and more. He confessed his errors, and was not ashamed to retrace his steps in search of that bet" * Life of Lucian. 8 DRYDEN. ter knowledge which the omniscience of superficial study had disparaged. Surely an intellect that is still pliable at seventy is a phenomenon as interesting as it is rare. But at whatever period of his life we look at Dryden, and whatever, for the moment, may have been his poetic creed, there was something in the nature of the man that would not be whoUy subdued to what it worked in. There are continual glimpses of something in him great- er than he, hints of possibilities finer than anything he has done. You feel that the whole of him was better than any random specimens, though of his best, seem to prove. Incessu patet, he has by times the large stride of the elder race, though it sinks too often into the slouch of a man who has seen better days. His grand air may, in part, spring from a habit of easy superiority to his competitors ; but must also, in part, be ascribed to an innate dignity of character. That this pre-emi- nence should have been so generally admitted, during his life, can only be explained by a bottom of good sense, kindliness, and sound judgment, whose solid worth could afford that many a flurry of vanity, petu- lance, and even error should flit across the surface and be forgotten. Whatever else Dryden may have been, the last and abiding impression of him is, that he was thoroughly manly ; and whUe it may be disputed wheth- er he was a great poet, it may be said of him, as Words- worth said of Burke, that " he was by far the greatest man of his age, not only abounding in knowledge him- self, but feeding, in various directions, his most able con- temporaries." * Dryden was bom in 1631. He was accordingly six years old when Jonson died, was nearly a quarter of a century younger than Milton, and may have personally * " The great man must have that intellect which puts in motion the intellect of others." — Landob, Im. Con., Diogenes and Plato. DRYDEN. 9 known Bishop Hall, the first English satirist, who was living till 1656. On the other side, he was older than Swift by thirty-six, than Addison by forty-one, and than Pope by fifty-seven years. Dennis says that " Dryden, for the last ten years of his life, was much acquainted with Addison, and drank with him more than he ever used to do, probably so far as to hasten his end," being commonly " an extreme sober man." Pope tell us that, in his twelfth year, he " saw Dryden," perhaps at Will's, perhaps in the street, as Scott did Bums. Dryden him. self visited Milton now and then, and was intimate with Davenant, who could tell him of Fletcher and Jonson from personal recollection. Thus he stands between the age before and that which followed him, giving a hand to each. His father was a country clergyman, of Puri- tan leanings, a younger son of an ancient county family. The Puritanism is thought to have come in with the poet's great-grandfather, who made in his will the some- what singular statement that he was "assured by the Holy Ghost that he was elect of God." It would appear from this that Dryden's self-confidence was an inheritance. The solid quality of his mind showed itself early. He him- self tells us that he had read Polybius " in English, with the pleasure of a boy, before he was ten years of age, and yet even then had some dark notions of the prudence with which he conducted his design!!'' * The concluding words are very characteristic, even if Dryden, as men common- ly do, interpreted his boyish tiu'n of mind by later self- knowledge. We thus get a glimpse of him browsing — for, like Johnson, Burke, and the full as distin- guislied from the learned men, he was always a random reader t — in his father's library, and painfully culling • Charaoterof Polybius (1692). t " For my own part, wlio must confess it to my shame that I never read anything but for pleasure." Life of Plutarch (1683). 1* 10 DEYDEN. here and there a spray of his own proper nutriment from among the stubs and thorns of Puritan divinity. After such schooling as could be had in the country, he was sent up to Westminster School, then under the headship of the celebrated Dr. Busby. Here he made his first essays in verse, translating, among other school exercises of the same kind, the third satire of Persius. In 1650 he was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained there for seven years. The only record of his college life is a discipline imposed, in 1652, for " disobedience to the Vice-Master, and contumacy in taking his punishment, inflicted by him." Whether this punishment was corporeal, as Johnson insinuates in the similar case of Milton, we are ignorant. He certainly retained no very fond recollection of his Alma Mater, for in his " Prologue to the University of Oxford " he says ; — " Oxford to him a dearer name shall be Than his own mother university; Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage, He chooses Athens in his riper age." By the death of his father, in 1654, he came into pos- session of a small estate of sixty pounds a year, from which, however, a third must be deducted, for his moth- er's dower, till 1676. After leaving Cambridge, he be- came secretary to his near relative, Sir Gilbert Pickering, at that time Cromwell's chamberlain, and a member of his Upper House. In 1670 he succeeded Davenant as Poet Laureate,* and Howell as Historiographer, with a yearly salary of two hundred pounds. This place he lost at the Revolution, and had the mortification to see his old enemy and butt, Shadwell, promoted to it, as the best poet the Whig party could muster. If William was * Gray says petulantly enough that " Dry den was as disgraceful to the office, from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his verses." — Geav to Mason, 19th December, 1757. DRYDEN. 11 obliged to read the verses of his official minstrel, Drydeu was more than avenged. From 1688 to his death, twelve years later, he earned his bread manfully by his pen, without any mean complaining, and with no allu- sion to his fallen fortunes that is not dignified and touching. These latter years, during which he was his own man again, were probably the happiest of his life. In 1664 or 1665 he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. About a hundred pounds a year were thus added to his income. The marriage is said not to have been a happy one, and per- haps it was not, for his wife was apparently a weak- minded woman ; but the inference from the internal evi- dence of Dryden's plays, as of Shakespeare's, is very untrustworthy, ridicule of marriage having always been a common stock in trade of the comic writers. The earliest of his verses that have come down to us were written upon the death of Lord Hastings, and are as bad as they can be, — a kind of parody on the worst of Donne. They have every fault of his manner, with- out a hint of the subtile and often profound thought that more than redeems it. As the Doctor himself would have said, here is Donne outdone. The young nobleman died of the smaU-pox, and Dryden exclaims pathetically, — " Was there no milder way than the small-pox, The very filthiness of Pandora's box? " He compares the pustules to " rosebuds stuck i' the lily skin about," and says that " Each little pimple had a tear in it To wail the fault its rising did commit." But he has not done his worst yet, by a great deal What follows is even finer : — " No comet need foretell his change drew on, Whose corpse might seem a constellation. 12 DEYDEN. 0, had he died of old, how great a strife Had been who from his death should draw their life ! Who should, by one rich draught, become whate'er Seneca, Cato, Numa, Csesar, were, Learned, virtuous, pious, great, and have by this An universal metempsychosis ! Must all these aged sires in one funeral Expire? all die in one so young, so small? " It is said that one of Allston's early pictures waa brought to him, after he had long forgotten it, and his opinion asked as to the wisdom of the young an.ist's per- severing in the career he had chosen. Allston advised his quitting it forthwith as hopeless. Could the same experiment have been tried with these verses upon Dry- den, can any one doubt that his counsel would have been the same ? It should be remembered, however, that he was barely turned eighteen when they were written, and the tendency of his style is noticeable in so early an abandonment of the participial ed in learned and aged. In the next year he appears again in some commendatory verses prefixed to the sacred epigrams of his friend, John Hoddesdon. In these he speaks of the author as a " Young eaglet, who, thy nest thus soon forsook, So lofty and divine a course hast took As all admire, before the down begin To peep, as yet, upon thy smoother chin." Here is almost every fault which Dryden's later nicety would have condemned. But perhaps there is no schooling so good for an author as his own youthful indiscretions. After this effort Dryden seems to have lain fallow for ten years, and then he at length reappears in thirty-seven " heroic stanzas " on the death of Crom- well. The versification is smoother, but the conceits are there again, though in a milder form. The verse is modelled after " Gondibert." A single image from na- DEYDEN. 13 tore (he was almost always happy in these) gives some hint of the maturer Dryden : — " And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, Made him but greater seem, not greater grow." Two other verses, " And the isle, when her protecting genius went, Upon his obsequies load sighs conferred," are interesting, because they show that he had been studying the early poems of Milton. " From haunted spring and dale, Edged with poplar pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent." This is the more curious because, twenty-four years after- wards, he says, in defending rhyme : " Whatever causes he [Milton] alleges for the abolishment of rhyme, his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent ; he had neither the ease of doing it nor the graces of it : which is manifest in his Juvenilia,, .... where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer, though not a poet."* It was this, no doubt, that heartened Dr. Johnson to say of " Lycidas " that " the diction was harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers impleasing.'' It is Dryden's excuse that his characteristic excellence is to argue persuasively and powerfully, whether in verse or prose, and that he was amply endowed with the most needful quality of an advocate, — to be always strongly and whoUy of his present way of thinking, whatever it might be. Next * Essay on the Origin and Progress of Satire. 14 DRYDEN. we have, in 1660, " Astrsea Redux " on the " happy res- toration " of Charles II. In this also we can forebode little of the full-grown Dryden but his defects. We see his tendency to exaggeration, and to confound physical with metaphysical, as where he says of the ships that • brought home the royal brothers, that " The joyful London meets The princely York, himself alone a freight, The Swiftsure groans beneath great Gloster's weight and speaks of the " Eepeated prayer Which stormed the skies and ravished Charles from thence." There is also a certain everydayness, not to say vul- garity, of phrase, which Dryden never whoUy refined away, and which continually tempts us to sum up at once against him as the greatest poet that ever was or could be made wholly out of prose. " Heaven would no bargain for its blessings drive " is an example. On the other hand, there are a few verses almost worthy of his best days, as these : — " Some lazy ages lost in sleep and ease, No action leave to busy chronicles ; Such whose supine felicity but makes In story chasms, in epochas mistakes, O'er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down, Till with his silent sickle they are mown." These are all the more noteworthy, that Dryden, un- less in argument, is seldom equal for six lines together. In the poem to Lord Clarendon (1662) there are four verses that have something of the " energy divine "' for which Pope praised his master. " Let envy, then, those crimes within you see From which the happy never must be free ; Envy that does with misery reside, The joy and the revenge of ruined pride." DRYDEN. 15 In his "Aurengzebe" (1675) there is a passage, of which, as it is a good example of Dryden, I shall quote the whole, though my purpose aims mainly at the latter verses : — • " When I consider life, 't is all a cheat ; Yet, fooled with Hope, men favor 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 blest With some new joys, outs 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 receive What the first sprightly running could not give. I 'm tired of waiting for this chymic gold Which fools us young and beggars us when old." The "^ first sprightly running" of Dryden's vintage was, it must be confessed, a little muddy, if not beery ; but if his own soil did not produce grapes of the choicest flavor, he knew where they were to be had ; and his product, like sound wine, grew better the longer it stood upon the lees. He tells us, evidently thinking of him- self, that in a poet, " from fifty to threescore, the bal- ance generally holds even in our colder climates, for he loses not much in fancy, and judgment, which is the ef- fect of observation, still increases. His succeeding years afford him little more than the stubble of his own har- vest, yet, if his constitution be healthful, his mind may still retain a decent vigor, and the gleanings of that of Ephraim, in comparison with others, will surpass the vintage of Abiezer." * Since Chaucer, none of our poets has had a constitution more healthful, and it was his old age that yielded the best of him. In him the under- standing was, perhaps, in overplus for his entire good fortune aa a. poet, and that is a faculty among the earli- * Dedication of the Georgios. 16 DRYDEN. est to mature. We have seen him, at only ten years, di- vining the power of reason in Polybius.* The same turn of mind led him later to imitate the French school of tragedy, and to admire in Ben Jonson the most correct of English poets. It was his imagination that needed quickening, and it is very curious to trace through his different prefaces the gradual opening of his eyes to the causes of the solitary pre-eminence of Shakespeare. At first he is sensible of an attraction towards him which he cannot explain, and for which he apologizes, as if it were wrong. But he feels himself drawn more and more strongly, till at last he ceases to resist altogether, and is forced to acknowledge that there is something in this one man that is not and never was anywhere else, some- thing not to be reasoned about, ineffable, divine ; if con- trary to the rules, so much the worse for them. It may be conjectured that Dryden's Puritan associations may have stood in the way of his more properly poetic cul- ture, and that his early knowledge of Shakespeare was slight. He tells us that Davenant, whom he could not have known before he himself was twenty-seven, first taught him to admire the great poet. But even after his imagination had become conscious of its prerogative, and his expression had been ennobled by frequenting this higher society, we find him continually dropping /back into that sermo pedestris which seems, on the whole, to have been his more natural element. We always feel his epoch in him, that he was the lock which let our lan- guage down from its point of highest poetry to its level of easiest and most gently flowing prose. His enthusiasm needs the contagion of other minds to arouse it ; but his strong sense, his command of the happy word, his wit, * Dryden's penetration is always remarkable. His general judg- ment of Polybius ooincldes remarkably with that of Mommsen. (Eom. Gesch. II. 448,86}.) BRYDEN. 17 which is distinguished by a certain breadth and, as it were, power of generalization, as Pope's by keenness of edge and point, were his, whether he would or no. Ac- cordingly, his poetry is often best and his verse more flowing where (as in parts of his version of the twenty- ninth ode of the third book of Horace) he is amplifying the suggestions of another mind.* Viewed from one side, he justifies Milton's remark of him, that " he was a good rhymist, but no poet." To look at all sides, and to distrust the verdict of a single mood, is, no doubt, the duty of a critic. But how if a certain side be so often presented as to thrust forward in the memory and dis- turb it in the effort to recall that total impression (for the office of a critic is not, though often so misunder- stood, to say guilty or not guilty of some particular fact) which is the only safe ground of judgment ? It is the weight of the whole man, not of one or the other limb of him, that we want. Expende Sannihalem. Very good, but not in a scale capacious only of a single quality at a time, for it is their union, and not their addition, that assures the value of each separately. It was not this or that which gave him his weight in council, his swiftness of decision in battle that outran the forethought of other men, — it was Hannibal. But this prosaic ele- ment in Dryden will force itself upon me. As I read him, I cannot help thinking of an ostrich, to be classed with flying things, and capable, what with leap and flap together, of leaving the earth for a longer or shorter space, but loving the open plain, where wing and foot help each other to something that is both flight and run at once. What with his haste and a certain dash, which, » " I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in English." Preface to Second Miscellany. Fox said that it " was better than the original." J. C. Scaliger said of Erasmus: " Ex alieno ingenio poeta, ex sno versiflcator." 18 DKYDEN. according to our mood, we may call florid or splendid, he seems to stand among poets where Eubens does among painters, — greater, perhaps, as a colorist than an artist, yet great here also, if we compare him with any but the first. We have arrived at Dryden's thirty-second year, and thus far have found little in him to warrant an augury that he was ever to be one of the great names in English literature, the most perfect type, that is, of his class, and that class a high one, though not the highest. If Joseph de Maistre's axiom, Qui n'a pas vairicu d, trente ans, ne vaincra jamais, were true, there would be little hope of him, for he has won no battle yet. But there is some- thing solid and doughty in the man, that can rise from defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, when we are able to choose our position better, and the sun is at our back. Hitherto his performances have been mainly of the dbbligato sort, at which few men of original force are good, least of all Dryden, who had always something of stiffness in his strength. Waller had praised the living Cromwell in perhaps the manliest verses he ever wrote, ■ — not very manly, to be sure, but really elegant, and, on the whole, better than those in which Dryden squeezed out melodious tears. Waller, who had also made himself conspicuous as a volunteer Antony to the country squire turned Csesar, (" With ermine clad and purple, let him hold A royal sceptre made of Spanish gold,") was more servile than Dryden in hailing the return of ex officio Majesty. He bewails to Charles, in snuffling heroics, " Our sorrow and our crime To have accepted life so long a time. Without you here." A weak man, put to the test by rough and angry times, DRYDEN. 19 as Waller was, may be pitied, but meanness is nothing but contemptible under any circumstances. If it be true that " every conqueror creates a Muse," Cromwell was unfortunate. Even Milton's sonnet, though dignified, is reserved if not distrustful. Marvell's " Horatian Ode," the most truly classic in our language, is worthy of its theme. The same poet's Elegy, in parts noble, and everywhere humanly tender, is worth more than all Car- lyle's biography as a witness to the gentler qualities of the hero, and of the deep affection that stalwart nature could inspire in hearts of truly masculine temper. As it is little linown, a few verses of it may be quoted to show^ the difference between grief that thinlts of its object and grief that thinks of its rhymes : — " Valor, religion, friendship, prudence died At once with him, and all that 's good beside, And we, death's refuse, nature's dregs, confined To loathsome life, alas ! are left behind. Where we (so once we used) shall now no more. To fetch day, press about his chamber-door, No more shall hear that powerful language charm. Whose force oft spared the labor of his arm, No more shall follow where he spent the days In war or counsel, or in prayer and praise. I saw him dead; a leaden slumber lies. And mortal sleep, over those wakeful eyes ; Those gentle rays under the lids were fled, Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed; That port, which so majestic was and strong, Loose and deprived of vigor stretched along. All withered, all discolored, pale, and wan. How much another thing ! no more That Man ! human glory ! vain ! death ! wings ! worthless world ! transitory things ! Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed That still, though dead, greater than Death he laid. And, in his altered face, you something feign That threatens Death he yet will live again." Such verses might not satisfy Lindley Murray, but 20 DRYDEN. they are of that higher mood which satisfies the heart These couplets, too, have an energy worthy of Milton's friend : — " When up the anned mountains of Dunbar He marched, and through deep Severn, ending war." " Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse Shall the English soldier, ere he charge, rehearse." On the whole, one is glad that Dryden's panegyric on the Protector was so poor. It was purely official verse- making. Had there been any feeling in it, there had been baseness in his address to Charles. As it is, we may fairly assume that he was so far sincere in both cases as to be thankful for a chance to exercise himself in rhyme, without much caring whether upon a funeral or a restoration. He might naturally enough expect that poetry would have a better chance under Charles than under CromweU, or any successor with Common- wealth principles. CromweU had more serious matters to think about than verses, while Charles might at least care as much about them as it was in his base good- nature to care about anything but loose women and spaniels. Dryden's sound sense, afterwards so conspicu- ous, shows itself even in these pieces, when we can get at it through the tangled thicket of tropical phrase. But the authentic and unmistakable Dryden first mani- fests himself iu some verses addressed to his friend Dr. Charlton in 1663. We have first his common sense which has almost the point of wit, yet with a tang of prose : — " The longest tyranny that ever swayed "Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed Their freeborn reason to the Stagyrite, And made his torch their universal light. So truth, while only one supplied the state, Grew scarce and dear and yet sophisticate. Still it was bought, like emp'ric wares oV charmn^ Bard words sealed up with Aristotle^ s arms." DRYDEN. 21 Then we have his graceful sweetness of fancy, where he speaks of the inhabitants of the New World : — " Guiltless men who danced away their time, Fresh as their groves and happy as their clime." And, finally, there is a hint of imagination where " mighty visions of the Danish race " watch round Charles sheltered in Stonehenge after the battle of Worcester. These passages might have been written by the Dryden whom we learn to know fifteen years later. They have the advantage that he wrote them to please himself. His contemporary, Dr. Heylin, said of French cooks, that " their trade was not to feed the beUy, but the palate." Dryden was a great -while in learning this secret, as available in good writing as in cookery. He strove after it, but his thoroughly English nature, to the last, wovdd too easily content itself with serving up the honest beef of his thought, without regard to daintiness of flavor in the dressing of it.* Of the best English poetry, it might be said that it is \uiderstanding aerated by imagination. In Dryden the solid part too often re- fused to mix kindly with the leaven, either remaining lumpish or rising to a hasty puflSness. Grace and light- ness were with him much more a laborious achievement than a natural gift, and it is all the more remarkable that he should so often have attained to what seems such an easy perfection in both. Always a hasty * In one of the last letters he ever wrote, thanking his cousin Mrs. Steward for a gift of marrow-puddings, he says : " A chine of honest bacon would please my appetite more than all the marrow-puddings ; for I like them better plain, having a very vulgar stomach." So of Cowley he says : " There was plenty enough, but ill sorted, whole pyra- mids of sweetmeats for boys and women, but little of solid meat for men." The physical is a truer antitype of the spiritual man than we are willing to admit, and the brain is often forced to acknowledge tha inconvenient oonntry-cousinship of the stomach. 22 DKYDEN. 