The Age of Dryden. Richard Garnett

for elegy; and to have indulged in elegy he must have fled to France. Public events and political and religious controversy were no longer for him: stripped of his means and position he betook himself to translation and playwriting as the readiest means of repairing his shattered fortunes, and it was not until the mellow sunset of his life that he turned to the compositions which, of all he ever wrote, have given the most delight and the least offence, his Fables. These, published at the beginning of 1700, include five adaptations from Chaucer, and three stories told after Boccaccio, as well as Alexander’s Feast, and a few other pieces. It would not be too much to say that this book achieved two things, either of which would have immortalized a poet: it fixed the standard of narrative poetry, except of the metrical romance or ballad class, and also that of heroic versification. The latter, indeed, was thought for a time to have been transcended by Pope, but modern ears have tired of the balanced seesaw of the Popian couplet, and crave the ease and variety of Dryden, restored to literature in Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini, and afterwards imitated by Keats in Lamia. The freedom which so great a master allows himself in rhyming should be a lesson to modern purists: final sounds so slightly akin as guard and prepared, placed and last, are of continual occurrence. In matters still more important than versification Dryden is in general equally admirable. He subjected himself to a severe test in competing with Chaucer – severer than he knew, for Chaucer was not yet, even by Dryden, valued at his full worth. In some respects Dryden certainly suffers greatly by the comparison. He is pre-eminently an intellectual poet, to whom the tree of knowledge had been the tree of life; there is perhaps scarcely a thought in his writings that charms by absolute simplicity and pure nature. Wherever, therefore, Chaucer is transparently simple and unaffected, we find him altered for the worse in Dryden. The very important part, however, of The Knight’s Tale which is concerned with courts, camps, and chivalry is even better in Dryden than in his model. He might have defined his sphere in the words of Ariosto, a poet who has many points of contact with him:

      ‘Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori,

      Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto.’

      If this is true of portions of Palamon and Arcite, it is still truer of The Flower and the Leaf (then believed to be a genuine work of Chaucer’s), throughout a most brilliant picture of natural beauty and courtly glitter, painted in language of chastened splendour. The other pieces modelled after Chaucer are of inferior interest, yet all excellent in their way. Two of the three tales from Boccaccio are acknowledged masterpieces, Cymon and Iphigenia and Theodore and Honoria. The interest of the first chiefly consists in the narrative itself, and that of the second in the way of telling it. The story, indeed, though striking, is fantastic and hardly pleasing, but Dryden’s treatment of it is perhaps the most perfect specimen in our language of l’art de conter.

      An example of Dryden’s descriptive power may be given in a passage from The Flower and the Leaf:

      ‘Thus while I sat intent to see and hear,

      And drew perfumes of more than vital air,

      All suddenly I heard the approaching sound

      Of vocal music, on the enchanted ground:

      At length there issued from the grove behind

      A fair assembly of the female kind:

      A train less fair, as ancient fathers tell,

      Seduced the sons of heaven to rebel.

      I pass their forms, and every charming grace;

      Less than an angel would their worth debase:

      But their attire, like liveries of a kind,

      All rich and rare, is fresh within my mind.

      In velvet white as snow the troop was gown’d,

      The seams with sparkling emeralds set around:

      Their hoods and sleeves the same; and purpled o’er

      With diamonds, pearls, and all the shining store

      Of eastern pomp; their long-descending train

      With rubies edged, and sapphires, swept the plain.

      High on their heads, with jewels richly set,

      Each lady wore a radiant coronet.

      Beneath the circles, all the choir was graced

      With chaplets green on their fair foreheads placed;

      Of laurel some, of woodbine many more,

      And wreath of Agnus castus others bore:

      These last, who with those virgin crowns were dress’d,

      Appear’d in higher honour than the rest.

      She in the midst began with sober grace;

      Her servants’ eyes were fix’d upon her face,

      And as she moved or turn’d, her motions view’d,

      Her measures kept, and step by step pursued.

      Methought she trod the ground with greater grace,

      With more of godhead shining in her face;

      And as in beauty she surpass’d the choir,

      So, nobler than the rest was her attire.

      A crown of ruddy gold inclosed her brow,

      Plain without pomp, and rich without a show:

      A branch of Agnus castus in her hand

      She bore aloft (her sceptre of command;)

      Admired, adored by all the circling crowd,

      For wheresoe’er she turn’d her face, they bow’d.

      And as she danced, a roundelay she sung,

      In honour of the laurel, ever young.

      At every close she made, the attending throng

      Replied, and bore the burden of the song:

      So just, so small, yet in so sweet a note,

      It seem’d the music melted in the throat.’

      One remarkable feature of the principal poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the infrequency of the casual visitations of the Muse. They seem to have hardly ever experienced an unsought lyrical inspiration, or to have sung merely for singing’s sake. Hence Dryden is permitted to appear only twice in the Golden Treasury. His songs, to be treated of more fully when we consider the lyrical poetry of the period, though often instinct with true lyrical spirit, seem to have been deliberately composed for insertion in his plays, and the same is the case with almost the whole of what he would have called his occasional poetry. His two chief odes, Alexander’s Feast and the memorial verses to Anne Killigrew, were indubitably commissions; and it is probable that few of the epistles, elegies, dedications, and prologues which form so considerable a portion of his poetical works were composed without some similar inducement. As a whole, this collection is creditable to his powers of intellect, quickness of wit, and command of nervous masculine diction. It is frequently the work of a master, though conceived in the spirit of a journeyman. The adulation of the patron or the defunct is generally fulsome enough; yet some compliments are so graceful that it is difficult not to believe them sincere, as when he apostrophizes the Duchess of Ormond:

      ‘O daughter of the Rose, whose cheeks unite

      The differing titles of the Red and White!

      Who heaven’s alternate beauty well display,

      The blush of morning and the milky way.’

      Or the conclusion of his epistle to Kneller:

      ‘More cannot be by mortal art exprest,

      But