DRYDEN AND MODERN STYLE.
SUCH cheap reprints of Dryden as the " Globe Edition" mark, we trust, the coming-back of a taste for poets who were the delight of days that did not know the lurid tints of Byron, or the artfully natural music of Tennyson. The recoil from the stiff squareness of line, the balanced antithesis, and the polished wit which threatened to make poetry sink to the level of acrostics, is at last going to the opposite extreme of mystic feebleness. The wave of Romanticism which brought Byron, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, has also brought a crowd of imitators, who threaten to make life a burden by their wailing incoherency ; by their affected use of antique phrases ; by their lackadaisical laments for nothing in particular ; and by their general inability to say plain things in plain words, or to write with the simplicity, the vigour, and the homely richness which were once the crowning glories of English verse. The pre-Raphaelites are pictorially taking the side of the Ritualists, who in turn are depraving taste by their glorifications of a barbaric art, because it sets off the tenets of the sacerdotal mythology. Mr. Rossetti's considerable capacity for writing verse is wedded to a passion for obscurity of thought and feeling. Mr. Swinburne's genius for melodious utterance is united to a vicious taste that too often disfigures pure English as well as pure thought. The great genius of Mr. Browning is linked with such contempt for the intelligence of the English people, that he shovels rough jottings out of his note-book, calls them poetry instead of conundrums, and thus leaves the mystic product for the wonder of all coming time. But we reach the height of artistic barbarity only when we go to the bodyguard of critics who wait on these potentates, and salute them in words that ordinary minds would scarcely use to qualify Dante. The preference of Swin- burne to Shelley has become a common-place instead of a joke. An artistic sect, in fact, has risen to preach a gospel, to make converts, to hurl anathemas, and to issue sentences of excom- munication. We see the evangel revealed in such signs as the haunting of studios, the dilettantism, the petty form of fetish- ism which is called the worship of Art, the belief in mythical saints, the capacity for attending to the trivialities of Ritualism, and the -weak denunciation of all windows that do not happen to be peaked. All this betrays a feebleness of mental backbone, a tendency to moral curvature of the spine, which will draw forth the laughter of the next generation. We owe to that weakness the copies of medieval barbarity which the more fanatical office-bearers of the pre-Raphaelite sect place on the walls of the Exhibitions, not only with perfect gravity, but with loud rebukes to those old- fashioned people who doubt whether the colouring of the green sngels, with grimy, woeful faces, and bodies so limp that they could be folded up in a carpet-bag, is quite equal to the colouring of Titian. We are indebted to the high priests of the .same sect for verses in which some pretty sentiment is expressed with the stammering feebleness of a devotee who is half a self- indulgent Pagan and half a monk ; who worships Venus one Lour, and sings matins the next ; who fancies that the very trees -cannot be poetical unless they be scented with incense, nor the daylight unless it be brightened by the twinkle of red tapers, set In brass candlesticks ; who would bring back dead forms of thought and a dead phraseology, as the Ritualists try to galvanise the corpse of a dead creed. Yet, we repeat, the feeble tunefulness of half-monkish, half-Pagan sentimentality is praised in words that would suffice to laud the higher flights of Dante. Such is Romanticism run mad. It is not a whit more sane or less ludicrous than the classical monstrosity that, in Westminster Abbey, represents Chatham declaiming to astonished nymphs and sea-horses, which do not understand a word of English, and were never in the House of Lords in their lives. The next age will laugh as heartily at the carefully simulated insanity which breaks -out in pre-Raphaelite verse and picture as we laugh at the grotesque struggles of the fat, fox-hunting, church-going, old- port stupidity of the Georgian era to imitate the sculptured Paganism of Greece. We need a new Dunciad to place on the gibbet of epigrammatic scorn those sectaries who write and paint -as if they fancied that the first duty of art was, not to be trite, but to be queer, and who look down with Pharisaic -contempt on the simple, straightforward mind which, like Opie, mixes its colours, not with theories, but with brains. Less than the wit of a Pope would make the whole of England ring with laughter at the feeble copies of half-barbaric art which the sect is placing on stained window and in puffed books. A hearty burst of contempt from the lungs of- Common-sense would blow these phantoms of a diseased imagination into nothingness. Meanwhile, the best advice that can be given to the high priests -of the sect is that they should clear their minds of Cant.
In the midst of a misty Romanticism, we repeat that we see a pre-eminently healthy sign in the republication of such classics as Dryden. No better medicine than a dose of Dryden could be pre- scribed for any man who is suffering from the measles of artistic ritualism. He will, no doubt, find the fare so coarse and rough that he will at first be revolted, and, pitching A bsolom and Achitophel to the other side of the room, he will fall back for solace on some -feeble, flimsy, undefined, and shrieking spectre, which has not got the gift of articulate speech. But we assure the patient that the cure will be complete if the dose be taken daily for a month. Dryden's muscular genius, his flesh-and-blood figures, and his -manly English, will seem strangely real and healthful, after the hot air and the mysticism of verses which, like precociously Evangelical children, are too good to live. We take Dryden 'because he is singled out by the Sect as a frightful example of depravity. The Rubens of poetry, he shocks all who love refinement, grace, soft music, tenderness, the sweetness of life, the half-heard notes which link, as with unseen chains, the louder harmonies of song and colour. He disgusts many who do not lie ill of the pre-Raphaelite measles, and criticism was wont to deny that he was a poet at all. Milton said that Dryden was "a rhymer, but no poet," and criticism has been saying much the same thing ever since. Nor would it be difficult to write a scathing review of all that came from his pen, or to show how -wooden is much of the verse that he meant to be poetical, how hard are even the loftiest notes of his song, and how short are the flights that he can take even when his power of wing is at its best. If we go to' him for that indefinable, impalpable, but unmistakable something called poetry, he will not bear a comparison, we do not say with Barns, or Shelley, or Coleridge, but with far smaller men. It is almost ludicrous to pass from Tennyson's Two Voices to -those parts of the Hind and the Panther in which Dryden tries to pierce a little below the superficial crust of dogmatic theology. The new poet is profounder than the old even as a philo- sopher, and he states the best of the floating arguments
for a life to come with a power which might be envied by a mere theologian ; but he never forgets that the first office of a poet is to sing, and the hues of poetry and philosophy are shot through and through each other, so that the tints come and go, vanish and glisten, as they move. The lines of Dryden, on the other hand, simply give a rather shallow logic the voice of vigorous declamation, which might almost as well have taken the form of prose as of verse. So far, Dryden was no poet.
But those mystic sectaries who flaunt that fact contemptuously forget to ask how far it was the result of Dryden's own lack of native power, and how far it is due to the age in which he lived. Every one who can sing at all in these days sings with some degree of melody. The smallest scrap of verse in a magazine or a news- paper, although signed by an unknown hand, is more free from scientific or prosaic thoughts and words, and more swiftly breaks into song, than the occasional verses even of Dryden and Pope. But is it possible that self-conceit can be so .Olympian as to fancy that what is easy to the puniest throats of these days would lie beyond the compass of Dryden's vocal powers, if Dryden were living at the present time ? The truth is that such a man could have sung any tune of which he had heard the key-note. A poet is, of all men, the most susceptible to the impressions of his day. Keats, in whom the poetic temperament hid almost a diseased strength, said that he often found himself like an instrument on which the passing wind made music ; and such, in less degree, is the experience of minds more robustly made. It is the secret of that recoil from the artificial melody of Pope which reached its full force after the French Revolution. When thought grew deeper, feelings more natural, and the revolt against the sacerdotal sanctities of the Church more loud than they had been since the Reformation, the poetry of the age took the same hue and note. Men went back to the old ballads for snatches of wild barbaric melody, at the bidding of the impulse which made Rousseau paradoxically prefer a life of savagery to such civilisation as kings, monks, priests, soldiers, and statesmen had brought to France. And when poetry became more natural, less obedient to the petty rules of the schools, and bolder in its flights, it did but follow the age, and give voice to what all meu were feeling. There is not the slightest reason to imagine that Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge would have sung as they did if they had been born a hundred years earlier, and it is highly probable that they would have cast in their lot with the school which was richest in epigram and wit. In fact, Byron did wish that his age would permit him to follow in the footsteps of Pope, for whom he had an extravagant and even perverse admiration. He first gained fame as a copyist- of the Dunciad, but he soon found that the wailings of Childe Harold were more to the mind of a discon- tented time than any number of exotic epigrams, and so he put aside, with a half-affected sigh, the dream of rivalling the Moral Essays. In precisely the same fashion did another set of influences draw Dryden away from mysticism and music to epigram and heroics. He fell on an age which is perhaps the most contemptible in the whole range of English history, with the doubtful exception of the time that prepared men for the worship of George IV. The manly dignity and earnestness of Elizabeth's reign had fled away as if for ever. The moral austerity of Puritanism had been
driven into hiding by that Blessed Restoration which furnished Eng- land with a King who became the pensioner of France by divine right ; with a Court which was guided by a well filled harem, and sanctified by a platoon of apostolically ordained right reverend fathers in God ; with a licence which had dropped the veil of decorum when crossing the Channel from France, and had sunk into a swinish grossness. Loyalty could do nothing higher than desecrate the remains of the prince of English rulers, soldiers, and statesmen. Religion blossomed into no higher flower of sanctity than the composition of a liturgy in honour of a Blessed Martyr who had united some family virtue, some grace of manner, some taste for the picturesque points of dress, and some turn for rhetorical
piety, to a remarkable talent for telling lies. No great man could have lived in the political or the courtly atmosphere. Great-
ness betook itself to the loneliness of the study. The grim Hebrew earnestness of Puritanism fled into the twilight of conventicles, away from the influences which would have softened the rigour of its fanaticism, and away also from the classes which it would have braced into a manliness that would have smitten dead the lingering sacerdotalism of the English people. In high places patriotism and religion were meaningless names. The realities were to be found only among the classes which lay far from Court and fashion. Philosophy had in the hands of Hobbes become a reasoned plea for absolutism, and theprofounder parts of his system had as yet done nothing higher than cast doubt on all the sanctities of life. Theologians busied themselves with blustering little incredibilities that have happily at last passed away from the view of all men who do not wait on priests.
Such was the time of Dryden, and the higher flowers of poetry could not bloom in that atmosphere. One great poet did, indeed, still live, and still sing with Hebrew majesty and sublimity ; but he was blind, poor, and lonely,—" with darkness and with dangers compassed round, and solitude." He had drawn the tone of his inspiration from a nobler time, and his organ music seemed so monotonous and so dull to the men who were the exemplars of taste, that they went after the light fiddling band which was led by Dryden. The author of Absolom and Achitophel was admi- rably fitted to be the laureate of such an age. Burdened by no small scruples or deep convictions, apt to catch any tune that might happen to be liked by the crowd, gifted with extraordinary force of brain, with wit, and with such a mastery over the mechan- ism of words as comes to few men in a whole race, he said, with incomparable power, what the triflers of the Court, the intriguers of the Parliament House, the loungers of the green-room, the literary dictators of the coffeehouses were thinking or feeling about the narrow strip of life which lay between Whitehall and Temple Bar. London called for heroic comedies, spiced with sonorous rhetoric and indecency ; and what it demanded Dryden gave. The taste for personal satire inevitably gathered the strength of a passion in the neighbourhood of a Court and a Senate where life was one long scandal ; and Dryden lashed the sins, the follies, the frailties, the infirmities of courtier, politician, and poet with a whip such as had been wielded by the satirists neither of Greece nor of Rome. A time which had lost an ear for the deeper melodies of life could still cheer rhetorical bravuras, sounding verse, and feats of rhythmical " execution,"—just as people who turn wearily away from the austere sublimities of Sebastian Bach or Haydn may be moved to superficial admiration by the brilliancy of Verdi ; and so Dryden wrote odes like Alexander's Feast, which, although enormously over-praised, is still a fine piece of artificial music. Such was the office that Dryden did for his age. But he could have done far higher work if there bad been any call. His taste was pure, as he showed by his reverence for Shake- speare and Milton, at a time when the one was deemed a barbarian and the other a pedant. And the compass of his song grew with every year of his life. His poems are on a heightening scale of excellence, and his finest glow of song is to be found in the Fables which he wrote at a time of life when the voice usually begins to fail. Had he been born a hundred and fifty years later he would have written as mystically, as musically, and as poetically as the age could have wished.
Now, however, the chief value of Dryden comes from his ruddy, sturdy English health. Whatever may have been the sins of the Restoration, it was not a time of hypocrisy, and indeed it spoke its mind with astonishing frankness. It called the earth to inspect its rascality, and Dryden took the inventory in the spirit of the day. Nor was it an age of puny sentimentality, or of sickly analysis of motives. Even its blackguardism was eminently healthful in comparison with the diseased curiosity of some less depraved times ; and here, again, it found in Dryden a faithful secretary. He spoke out with a downright frankness and sim- plicity, which bring the refreshment of common-sense to a mind• tired of the artificially tortuous subtlety of writers who only half know what they mean, and who waste time in micro- scopically examining their own small souls. And the English of Dryden is for all time a model of the manly, straightforward, rapid, vigorous style which misty sectaries would kill if they could. His coarseness will hurt no one who is not already vicious, and the study of his healthy simplicity and vigour would help to exterminate a poetical sect which draws much of its inspiration from a diseased self-consciousness and self-conceit. We do not, indeed, go to him for the higheit notes of song. His poetry has not the sunny, healthful gaiety of Chaucer, whose verse recalls the green fields and the voice of birds ; nor does it reach the same rank as Speuser's, which seems to come from fairyland ; nor has it any kinship with that of Shakespeare, whose touch awakes whatever is musical in life or thing ; or with that of Milton, whose cathedral music peals forth a fit jubilation to the hierarchies of blazing seraphim that he saw with the inner eye, which was only filled with a more heavenly radiance when it was shut out from the light of day. Dryden stands in a far lower place, but in his own circle he has no superior ; and, as the satirist, the reasoner in verse, the magnificent declaimer, the master of descriptive epigram, he will draw forth the homage of distant generations, long after some pretentious names of later days shall have slept in forgetfulness.
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