III THE TRUE FIRE The only qualities which Wordsworth could find in Dryden deserving to be called poetical were “a certain ardour and impetuosity of mind" and "an excellent ear." Whether or not Wordsworth stopped short of justice in his enumeration, he hit upon two virtues which are cardinal in Dryden, and confined himself with proper prudence to what in Dryden is more important than any other thing, his manner. His manner, embracing both an enthusiastic approach to any work and a technical dexterity in the performance of it, was constant. The channels through which his enthusiasm drove him were not always fitted for his passage, as we have been seeing; nor was his ease of motion always an advantage, inasmuch as his metrical felicity served at times only to accentuate his original error in choice of province. But when his material was congenial, and when he himself was thoroughly at home in his style, he was unexceptionable. Dryden was most at home when he was making statements. His poetry was the poetry of declaration. At his best he wrote without figures, without transforming passion. When Shakespeare's imagination was kindled his page thronged with images. When Donne was most genuinely pos sessed by his theme he departed in a passionate search for conceits. When Dryden became fired he only wrote more plainly. The metal of his genius was silver, and the longer it was heated the more silver it grew. Nausicaa fell in love with Odysseus because the goddess Athene had shed a strange grace about his head and shoulders and made him seem more presentable than he was. No one can be impressed by Dryden who sees him in disgaise. One must see him as he is: a poet of opinion, a poet of company, a poet of civilization. It is not to be inferred that he was without passion; no man ever had more. But his was not the passion that behaves like ecstasy; he never got outside himself. His passion was the passion of assurance. His great love was the love of speaking fully and with finality; his favorite subjects being personages and books. Personages he treated from a variety of motives, but always with honest delight. He celebrated public heroes real or supposed, sketched the characters of men in high places and in low, addressed elaborate compliments to benefactors or friends, described minds and actions both in fact and in fable with an endless relish. Books he treated from a single motive, admiration for them and their makers. Dryden was above all things a literary man. His mind could best be energized by contact with other minds; he himself could become preoccupied most easily with other poets. He sat down with indubitable pleasure to write his addresses to Howard, to Roscommon, to Lee, to Motteux, his laments for Oldham and Anne Killigrew, his pro logues and epilogues on Shakespeare, Jonson, and the present state of poetry. He was partial to literary history and literary parallels as subjects for poems, and no one in English has done better criticism in meter. In verse as in prose he earned Dr. Johnson's judgment that "the criticism of Dryden is the criticism of a poet." Personalities, actions, ideas, and art were Dryden's best material. But let it be said again, the story of Dryden's conquest of English poetry for the most part is the story not of his material but of his manner. It is the story of a poet who inherited a medium, perfected it by long manipulation, stamped it with his genius, and handed it on. That medium was heroic couplet verse. The utility of the heroic couplet had been established for all time in England by Chaucer. Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare had made various uses of it at the end of the sixteenth century, as had also the group of satirists which included Hall, Lodge, Marston, and Donne. It had grown more and more in favor during the early years of Dryden's century and had begun to adapt itself to the type of mind which Dryden represents long before he became of age poetically. This adaptation involved a number of characteristics, of which the end-stop, the best known, was only one; the others were a conformation of the sentence-structure to the metrical pattern, a tendency towards polysyllables within the line, a tendency towards emphatic words at the ends of lines, and a frequent use of balance with pronounced cæsura. The endstop, and the modification of sentence-structure to suit the length of measure, made for pointedness if not for brevity, and provided in the couplet a ratiocinative unit which served admirably as the basis for declarative or argumentative poems. The polysyllables made for speed and flexibility, and encouraged a Latinized, abstract vocabulary. The insistence upon important words for the closing of lines meant that the sense was not likely to trail off or be left hanging; and the use of balance promoted that air of spruce finality with which every reader of Augustan verse has long been familiar. Just when and in whom the couplet first reached a stage something like this is a matter that has not been settled. In France a similar development can be traced back pretty clearly to Malherbe, whose formula for perfect rhetorical poetry called, among other things, for a cæsura which should cut every verse into two equal parts. "As for the pauses, said Dryden in the dedication of the Æneis, "Malherbe first brought them into French within this last century; and we see how they adorn their Alexandrines." No formula like Malherbe's was contrived in England, but the first half of the seventeenth century there saw couplet verse invaded and conquered by the principles just specified. Credit for the innovation has been given to a number of different poets, none of whom can be said to deserve it wholly. Edward Fairfax, the translator of Tasso's Godfrey of Bulloigne (1600), is the earliest whom Dryden himself named among the reformers of English versification; in the preface to the Fables Waller is declared the "poetical son" of Fairfax. The stanzas of the Tasso end in couplets which often have the accent of the Augustans, but which more often have it not, tending less towards a monotony of balance than towards a monotony of series or "triplets" of adjectives and nouns. Michael Drayton at various times during his long career wrote couplets which come very near to having Dryden's ring; his England's Heroical Epistles (1597) afford the best examples. Drayton was a good Elizabethan, which suggests that there were many Elizabethans who could write Augustan couplets. Spenser did so in his Mother Hubberd's Tale; the closing couplets of Shakespeare's sonnets are curiously like Dryden and Pope, as here: For we, which now behold these present days, The Elizabethan satirists, particularly Joseph Hall, whose Virgidemiarum appeared in 1597-8, spoke occasionally in clear tones, though in general their expression was uneven, and such felicity as they permitted themselves to achieve was not contagious. Ben Jonson's influence on seventeenth century poetry was immense, and he was in large part responsible for the new form of heroic verse; but his chief influence was rather upon diction than upon meter. Sir John Beaumont, who died in 1627, wrote his Bosworth Field and other poems in couplets which not only for their own time but for any time are models of sweetness and clarity. The Metamorphoses of George Sandys (1621-6) was for a hundred years after its publication a landmark to |