THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN I THE MAKING OF THE POET The world has not been inclined to make way for John Dryden the poet. When he died in 1700, the generalissimo of English verse, it seemed certain to the survivors that the momentum of his name would keep his works forever rolling abreast of the generations. But before a single century had passed, he had begun to live rather in the stiffness than in the strength of his eminence; and another century saw him laid carefully away among the heroes. Since Dryden was laid away, the world has not been exactly incurious about his tarnished remains. It was the fashion a hundred years ago to classify the poets, and level them into orders; at such times Dryden was likely to be sent with Pope to seek the second level. The nineteenth century, anxious to know what past poets had been great and why, sounded Dryden to the depths for notes which it could recognize; Lowell went eagerly through him, thinking to decide once for all how much of a poet he was, and revising his judgment at every tenth page. Latterly the critics with historical bent and eclectic taste have been busy either at placing Dryden in time or at explaining his imperfections by an appeal to the shortcomings of the audience for which he wrote. This tasting and this research have done much to lay bare huge flaws and inequalities in the surface which Dryden presented to posterity. Little has been done in the way of exploring the large spirit which worked beneath that surface, or in surveying other surfaces less conspicuous. The embattled seventeenth century left a number of bruised and defective monuments, none of which is more engaging than the poetry of John Dryden. The story of Dryden's poetry is the story of a sinewy mind attacking bulky materials. Since we know next to nothing about Dryden's mind before it ripened, the story naturally begins for us with the materials which are known to have lain at hand during the years of his growth. The thirty years, from 1631 to 1660, during which Dryden came slowly to his maturity, saw many slender volumes of fine verse published in England, the work of Milton, Herbert, Randolph, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Crashaw, Vaughan, and Herrick. Yet after Ben Jonson no one poetic personality was dominant in these years, and there flowed no current powerful enough to draw young writers in. Of the nine poets who have just been named, six had done their work in comparative isolation, and the other three had been content to toss off courtly trifles. Dryden is temperamentally akin to none of them, and it is unlikely that they impressed him in his youth; although it must be remembered that his first considerable poem, the Heroic Stanzas of 1659, contains in the thirty-fifth stanza a faint echo of Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity: But first, the Ocean, as a tribute, sent That Giant-Prince of all her watery herd; Other poets, past and present, he gradually became acquainted with before 1660. Jonson must always have been to an extent congenial. Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare he was not prepared so early to admire. But by Sylvester he was "rapt into ecstasy"; and Quarles and Wither furnished him thin nourishment. There were hundreds of plays to be read. He was not ignorant of Fairfax's translation of Tasso. Soon or late he came to know Michael Drayton, whose label for Samuel Daniel, "too much historian in verse," Dryden adopted for Lucan in the preface to Annus Mirabilis; and whose apostrophe to Daniel, And thou, the sweet Museus of these times, curiously anticipates Dryden's own verses in honor of John Oldham. We may be certain that he read an abundance of very bad poetry in his green, unknowing youth. Professor Saintsbury has shown that he was acquainted with Edward Benlowes, almost the worst poet England has pro duced. The poems of William Cartwright which were collected in 1651 include, among some respectable complimentary pieces, two on smallpox which if seen by Dryden before 1649 could have inspired his unhappy effusion on Lord Hastings. The "Clevelandisms" which Lisideius damns in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy in 1668 probably were not anathema to Dryden a dozen years before. Had Dryden never indulged in more than random reading among the poets, it is safe to say that he would never himself have become a poet of dimensions. No one was better aware of what he needed to read than he. "Mere poets," he wrote in the postcript to the Notes and Observations on the Empress of Morocco (1674), “are as sottish as mere drunkards are, who live in a continual mist, without seeing or judging anything clearly. A man should be learned in several sciences, and should have a reasonable, philosophical, and in some measure a mathematical head, to be a complete and excellent poet; and besides this, should have experience in all sorts of humours and manners of men. . . . Mr. Settle having never studied any sort of learning but poetry, . . . as you may find by his writings, must make very lame work on 't." Although Dryden was speaking here of dramatic poets, it is fair to accept these sentences as trustworthy guides through the twists and turns of his culture. "For my own part, who must confess it to my shame, . . . I never read anything but for pleasure," he declared in the Life of Plutarch (1683). But pleasure for him meant the satisfying of intellec tual curiosity as well as it meant diversion; from the beginning, there can be no doubt, he was pleased to read widely and was avid of information. "He's a man of general learning," sneered Settle. Dryden was not an exact or patient scholar, nor was he obsessed with the pedantry that had produced works like Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy earlier in the century. Although he loved learning and argument and could not refrain from literary history and criticism, although he loaded his poems with science and mythology and theology, he was never weighed down with learned lumber. In the Rehearsal he is represented with a common-place book in his hand from which he is ever drawing the happiest images and sentences of Persius, Seneca, Horace, Juvenal, Claudian, Pliny, Plutarch, and Montaigne. Though this may not be a true likeness, it brings into relief a bent of Dryden's which must have been apparent early in his career. Congreve records that he had an unfailing memory, and Dr. Johnson was inclined to attribute his large stock of information rather to "accidental intelligence and various conversation" than to diligent and solitary reading. However he may have come by his lore, he came by it eagerly, at a time when the old was mingling with the new, and all the surfaces of knowledge were being broken rapidly into fresh forms. It is not known exactly when Dryden entered Westminster School, or in detail what he did there. But a good deal is known, both generally about the character of English schools in those days and |