BOOKS.

JOHN DRYDEN.*

OUR debt to America in the matter of criticism and true scholar- ship applied to English literature grows greater year by year. Remember such criticism is never like foreign criticism, which, though interesting and attractive, always has something aloof, even if not something distracted in it. Our literature belongs to the Americans not by purchase or by study, but by the right of birth. Except perhaps in the matter of its thoroughness and intensity of application, it is quite indistinguishable from English criticism. An admirable example of the thoroughness, nay, of the exhaustive quality of American criticism, even when It is Inost sympathetic and least pedantic, is to be found in this delightful study of John Dryden. The present writer must confess to a personal interest in Mr. Van Doren's book because it happens that the American oritio's judgment, not merely in the whole, but in the parts, agrees in an uncanny way with his own. Again and again he finds Mr. Van Doren choosing for special admiration couplets and phrases in Dryden which have been the reviewer's life-long treasures. What is more, Dlr. Van Doren praises for exactly the same reasons, and dislikes for the same reasons, this or that manner of presentment. After a long search we can find two cases only in which, in our view, Mr. Van Doren has not been quite as lavish in his praise as he ought. The first case is that of "The State of Innocence." In that wonderful work Dryden not only achieved a great tour if force, but produced a poem in true sympathy with Milton. He took the glorious Miltonic blank verse and converted it into couplets which in vigour and poignancy are often supreme. It has been a silly fashion to deride Dryden's poem, but as a matter of fact the poet's unique power of argument in verse was never more magnificently shown than in the great argument as to fate and free-will conducted in Paradise by Maur and the affable Archangel, Raphael. Dryden fulls like a tiger on the greatest and most difficult metaphysical problem ever submitted to dialectic, and worries the insoluble and inscrutable with a passion that can only be described as heroic. Mr. Van Doren does not notice the couplet occurling in the "State of Innocence" which is perhaps as characteristic and as delightful as any single couplet of Dryden's. When Adam puts a very teasing and difficult theological crux to his archangelical dis- putant, Raphael, like many orthodox theologians before and since, replies by hinting that Adam, if not actually a blasphemer, is challenging much too freely the divine beneficence. On this Adam makes the best and truest of retorts—a retort which claims the full "liberty of prophesying." It is thus that he repudiates the suggestion that he questions the goodness of

God :— "Far, far from me, be banished such a thought ; I only argue to be bettor taught."

If the "State of Innocence," though it is mentioned, does not get full justice, in our opinion, still less, though the poem is often noted, does the magnificent dedication to the Duchess of Ormond of the modernized version of Chaucer's " Palamon and Arcite." In the present writer's opinion that poem is the very quintessence of Dryden, metrically, poetically, and intellectually. It shows him a great critic, a great poet, and a great English- man, intensely proud of his literature and of his race, yet always without pomposity or exaggeration. Above all, he stands forth a man in whom was exhibited the eternal truth that all the arts, and especially poetry, live through passion alone. .No passion, no poetry, is one of the few absolute truths with which mankind is acquainted. No man felt this and no man proved this better than Dryden. He can do what many painters and sculptors can do, but few men of letters. He can grow passionate over mere technique. He can he as wildly aMOrOua in the begetting of a new rhythm as a Lyrist singing of love or war. Even harder, be can approach a purely metaphysical argument with the ardour of a lover. He can put into a piece of literary criti- cism the energy of him who wrote "The Song of Deborah."

Take the magnificent lines in which he tears down and tramples on in his noble rage the suggestion that Chaucer was a sort of wild savage who could not be compared for a moment with the Greeks or Romans. Instead, with a note of pride that sounds like a trumpet, he tells ter that Chaucer will stand comparison

• The Poetry of John Dryden. By Mark Yea Doren. New York: Harcourt. Brace. autl /tows.

with all the poets of insolent Greece or haughty Rome. Chaucer need not fear either Homer or Virgil :—

" He match'il their Beauties where they most excel'; Of Love sang better, and of Arms as well."

Did over poet before or since receive a compliment so splendid, so magnificently expressed and conveyed with such stimulating zeal ? When the rumour of that couplet reached the grove or mead of the Elysian fields where gather the poets of all the lands and all the ages, not a cheek could have remained millushed. The least jealous hearts must have felt in secret and in silence, " Ah, that this had been said of me I"

It is in the lines to the Duchess that occur those wonderful verses which, even if they were a little above the physical merits of the lady to whom the poem is addressed, remain among the most high resounding in the whole of Dryden's Heroic Verse :—

" 0 true Plantagenet. 0 Race Divine,

(For Beauty still is fatal to the Line), Had Chaucer liv'd that Angel-Face to view, Sure he had drawn his Emily from You ;

Or had You liv'd to judge the doubtful Right, Your Noble Palamon had been the Knight : And Conqu'ring Theseus from his Side had sent

Your Gen'rous Lord, to guide the Theban Government."*

Tho poem to the Duchess of Ormond is characteristic of Dryden's defects as well as his merits. It contains some of his most striking faults of taste. Yet even these are magnificent. They must be marked as A I in the Register of Parnassus, Compliments Sub-sections. The Duchess's landing in Ireland is described with a whirlwind of bombast which positively takes away our breath :—

"Blue Triton gave the Signal from the Shore, The Ready Nereids heard, and swain before To smooth the Seas ; a soft Etesian Gale • But just inspied, and gently swell'd the Sail ; Portimus took his Turn' whose ample Hand Heav'd up the lightened Keel, and sunk the Sand, And steer'd the sacred Vessel to the Land. The Lend, if not restraned, had met Your Way, Projected out a Neck, and jutted to the Sea."

Of course that all now sounds utterly ridiculous, and one can imagine the kind of way in which Thackeray or Dickens would have chaffed its "snobbery." We are not going to defend it, but all the same every age must be allowed an occasional "jolly," and the jolly of Dryden's age consisted in bravura passages of the sort just quoted. Look at the engraved title-pages between 1680 and 1720 and you will find any amount of naked gentlemen with beards and enormous "wreathed horns," shouting for dear life while ladies with abundant charms and scanty clothing splash about in impossible water proclaiming somebody or other in ear-splitting tones. Their mouths are as shamelessly open as their bosoms, and they bellow as they romp. The designers and engravers probably did not suppose that they were great artists when they designed these plates, but they thoroughly enjoyed the ingenuity of their work. So no doubt did Dryden, although he did not for a moment think his compliments to the Duchess of Ormond equal to the best imaginative passages of Shakespeare or Milton.

Whichever way we turn, Mr. Van Doren is a safe as well as a sympathetic and stimulating guide. He realizes that when speaking about Dryden the extreme characteristic impression of the man written about is Energy. Energy in spirit as well as in form was Dryden's spiritual gift. Dryden could put energy into the description of a fly. Indeed, it is not too much to say of him that he touched nothing which he did not make vibrate with energy. His Prologues even of bad plays are stiff with it. Again, Mr. Van Doren has got hold of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in regard to Dryden and the couplet. The history of Dryden is the history of the couplet, and vice versa. Again, he shows how Dryden was always the great and conscious artist and craftsman in language and metre. Here indeed he could well have quoted Dryden's immortal comment "I trade both with the living and the dead for the enrichment of our tongue."

Though we arc proud to be able to pass on a quotation to Mr. Van Doren, we must admit that he has given us plenty where we thought we knew everything. For example, the present writer since he read Mr. Van Doren's book has been living upon that exquisite line in Dryden's " Epilogue Spoken at the Opening of the New House, March 26th, 1674 " :

" A country lip may have the velvet touch."

• Perhaps, after all. Dryden did not flatter unduly. Cromwell himself. when lie attended the Duchess to her coach at the door of the Palace of Whitehall, Laid her that she new 'the moat dangerous woman in England " I

Another expression of gratitude is due to Mr. Van Dorm

for a delightful quotation from a poem by the Earl of Roscommon. The noble poet described the energy of the best

seventeenth-century English poetry with wonderful acumen. We leave it, however, to our readers to discover this for themselves.

We have stood so long drawing the curtain in front of Mr, Van Doren's picture of Dryden that we have left ourselves very

little time in which to acquaint the onlookers with the portrait itself. Here are two good specimens of Mr. Van Doren's manna,

He is dealing with Dryden's power of self-criticism :—

" The Cyclops, the funeral games, and the gathering of the clans in the ,Eneid are handled in a manner worthy of the best heroic tradition, and every page without exception bristles with energy. Yet in the main the texture of the verse is coarse ; Dryden has made no advance in subtlety of speech, he is only applying standard formulas and securing standard results. Virgil has eluded him as Lucretius and Juvenal did not. Dryden was 'fixing his thoughts' on Homer in his last years and half- way projecting a new folio which should stand as a companion to the Virgil. He had a notion that Homer was more suited to his genius than Virgil, since he was more 'violent, impetuous, and full of fire.' He had done into English 'The Last Parting of Hector and Andromache' for the third Miscellany in 1693, and he included in the Fables a complete version of the first book of the Iliad_ He got no futher with Homer, which is to be regretted ; for although the two specimens he left behind are neither violent, impetuous, nor full of fire in a preternatural degree, they are honest and various as few translations are."

It is impossible here to touch upon an hundredth part of the delightful topics dealt with by Mr. Van Doren, and always, be it said, with the aid of apt quotation. One of the most excellent chapters is that entitled "The Journalist in Verse," for here he shows us Dryden's extraordinary power over his material and his quickness of thought. We take almost at random this wonderful passage from one of Dryden's blank- verse plays—lines which we may dedicate to those journalists who arc at present studying the Irish question :— " The genius of your Moors is mutiny ; They scarcely want a guide to move their madness ; Prompt to rebel on every weak pretence; Blustering when courted, crouching when oppressed ; Wise to themselves, and fools to all the world ; Restless in change, and perjured to a proverb. They love religion sweetened to the sense ;

A good, luxurious, palatable faith."

And now for a final word. We cannot quite agree that "The Hind and the Panther" has as much of journalism in verse as Mr. Van Doren seems to think—though possibly we are not correct in attributing this view to him, and he does not in reality mean to say so much as he seems to say. In our opinion "The Hind and the Panther" contains some of Dryden's most psi. sionate and so most poetical verse. The lines that begin-

" Ah, gracious God, how well dost thou provide For erring judgments an unerring Guide!" are surely much more than journalism in poetry. But this and other tempting matters must be left to our readers. All we need say is if they love good literature they must love Dryden, and if they love Dryden they must read Mr. Van Doren's book: and if they do read it, they must love us for having turned them into so green and so pleasant a pasture.