Hobbes and Lucretius very much alike in a certain "magisterial authority" of utterance. If he bowed to this authority in his earlier years, when he was at college, he was disposed later on to give it no more than casual, good natured recognition. He never altogether capitulated to any system of politics or morals or æsthetics. He was born and he died with an Olympian indifference to principles. Yet Hobbes and Lucretius both made powerful, permanent impressions upon his imagination. It was Hobbes who inspired his deep distrust of human beings in the mass and his lifelong intolerance of movements that threatened to disturb the peace. Hobbes gave him "the reason and political ornaments," according to the authors of The Censure of the Rota, for the Conquest of Granada, as well as language with which to defend the Stuart kings in satire. The Leviathan had blazed a sinister trail into the thicket of human nature and had revealed dismaying perspectives in what was taken for human history. Dryden has much to say about the State of Nature. On a few occasions he reverts with a kind of pleasure to a golden age among those happy isles Where in perpetual spring young Nature smiles; 1 Or among guiltless men, who danced away their time, Fresh as their groves, and happy as their clime. 1 To My Lord Chancellor, II. 135–6. 2 To Dr. Charleton, ll. 13-4. 2 And he has Almanzor say in the Conquest of Granada: But know that I alone am king of me. When wild in woods the noble savage ran. But most often the prehistoric rabble which he invokes is Blind as the Cyclops, and as wild as he; And the State of Innocence ends upon a note that is cold and ruthless, almost ominous, compared with the undaunted serenity that closes Paradise Lost. Says Raphael, ushering Adam and Eve out into the world, The rising winds urge the tempestuous air; There was also something sinister about the world of Lucretius as Dryden adopted it; for in his imagination he did adopt it. Times without number, in both his prose and his verse, the atoms came crowding upon the page; they were his unfailing 1 Astræa Redux, ll. 45-8. conceit. They flung themselves together into a "universal frame," a frame held together not so much by spirit or will (as to be sure Dryden felt bound each time to maintain) as by some godless, grinding power like music. In his fancy the machine was not to run forever. The pageant was to crumble. Chaos would some day reign again. But eternity promised him few of the comforts that it promised men like Milton. If Dryden ever thought of eternity at all, he thought of it as very great and empty. When Descartes for his purposes sharpened Aristotle's distinction between mind and matter he performed a doubtful service to philosophy, since more than a hundred years were required to make it plain that his distinction had been academic, and that mind and matter might not after all be mutually exclusive. In his own system the exclusions were absolute. An analogous distinction was being revived and emphasized in æsthetics during the seventeenth century. In poetry, fancy was being set against judgment, and although the two were supposed to be mutually enriching, they were more often taken to destroy each other. This distinction was of doubtful service to literature. As in philosophy the arid dualism of Descartes obscured the true function of the human spirit, so in literature the war between fancy and judgment hindered the true work of the imagination. Not that poetry in England suffered a total eclipse, as is often believed. A very great deal of brains and imagination went into the poetry of the latter seventeenth and early eight eenth centuries. But certain definite exclusions were made by all who touched the subject either as poets or as critics, and certain limitations were more or less freely acknowledged. Dryden grew up at a time when the air was filled with many diverse strains of verse, and no note was predominant. Yet as he reached maturity he became aware of something that might have been called "the new poetry." He came to distinguish four forward-looking poets among the throng: Cowley, Waller, Denham, and Davenant. And behind those Sons of Ben he was able to discern the forward-peering countenance of Hobbes. The new poetry was to be the work of sober wit, the issue of the conscious faculties. Wit had danced in with the conceit early in the century, but it had been tortured then as it was not to be tortured now. "Doctor Donne," a more fascinating man than the Augustans ever supposed, had been "the greatest wit," said Dryden at a later date, but "not the best poet of our nation." The current of conceits which had swept even Milton in had not much further to flow. "Ingenious Cowley!" cries Cowper in the Task, I cannot but lament thy splendid wit Yet even Cowley had his clear, free vein; and the cobwebs that he spun did not last long past the Restoration. Dryden, who indeed was never exempt from conceits as long as he lived, declared against them from the first. If the conceit survived in Augustan poetry, it survived in the circumlocution, which at least was civilized. The new poets were to have large audiences, and they needed to be understood when they spoke. As in comedy wit was to take the place of "humour," and pungent criticism of society was to supplant an endless elaboration of fantastic characters, so in all verse there was to be an effort to speak a language Consisting less in words and more in things: A language not affecting ancient times, Nor Latin shreds by which the pedant climbs, to use some lines written to James I by an excellent poet who early anticipated Dryden's style, Sir John Beaumont. If the word "wisdom" be taken not too seriously, the following passage from Dryden's prologue to Edipus may serve indirectly to express the new ideal. Says Dryden, speaking of ancient Greece, Then Sophocles with Socrates did sit, Eugenius, in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, makes a triumphant canvass of Dryden's first teachers in verse. The Greeks and Romans, he says, "can produce nothing . . . so even, sweet, and flowing, as Mr. Waller; nothing so majestic, so correct, as Sir John Denham; nothing so elevated, so copious, and full of spirit, as Mr. Cowley." |