which transmits them to posterity, and propagates them in the human race. Such is the merit of these poems; they please by their good expressions. In a full and solid web stand out cleverly knotted or sparkling threads. Here Dryden has gathered in one line a long argument; there a happy metaphor has opened up a new perspective under the principal idea; further on, two similar words, united together, have struck the mind with an unforeseen and cogent proof; elsewhere a hidden comparison has thrown a tinge of glory or shame on the person who least expected it. These are all artifices or successes of a calculated style, which chains the attention, and leaves the mind persuaded or convinced.

IX.

In truth, there is scarcely any other literary merit. If Dryden is a skilled politician, a trained controversialist, well armed with arguments, knowing all the ins and outs of discussion, versed in the history of men and parties, this pamphleteering aptitude, practical and English, confines him to the low region of everyday and personal combats, far from the lofty philosophy and speculative freedom which give endurance and greatness to the classical style of his French contemporaries. In this age, in England, all discussion was fundamentally narrow. Except the terrible Hobbes, they all lack grand originality. Dryden, like the rest, is confined to the arguments and insults of sect and fashion. Their ideas were as small as their hatred was strong; no general doctrine opened up beyond the tumult of the strife a poetical vista; texts, traditions, a sad train of rigid reasoning, such were their arms; prejudice and passion swayed both parties. This is why the subject-matter fell below the art of writing. Dryden had no personal philosophy to de

1 'Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ,
Conquering with force of arms and dint of wit:
Theirs was the giant race, before the flood.
And thus, when Charles return'd, our empire stood.
Like Janus, he the stubborn soil manured,
With rules of husbandry the rankness cured;
Tamed us to manners, when the stage was rude,
And boisterous English wit with art endued. . . .
But what we gain'd in skill we lost in strength,
Our builders were with want of genius curst;
The second temple was not like the first.'

Epistle 12 to Congreve, xi. 59.

2 Held up the buckler of the people's cause

velop; he does but versify themes given to him by others. In this sterility art soon is reduced to the clothing of foreign ideas, and the writer becomes an antiquarian or a translator. In fact, the greatest part of Dryden's poems are imitations, adaptations, or copies. He translated Persius, Virgil, part of Horace, Theocritus, Juvenal, Lucretius, and Homer, and put into modern English several tales of Boccacio and Chaucer. These translations then appeared to be as great works as original compositions. When he took the Eneid in hand, the nation, as Johnson tells us, appeared to think its honour interested in the issue. Addison furnished him with the arguments of every book, and an essay on the Georgics; others supplied him with editions and notes; great lords vied with one another in offering him hospitality; subscriptions flowed in. They said that the English Virgil was to give England the Virgil of Rome. This work was long considered his highest glory. Even so at Rome, under Cicero, in the early dearth of national poetry, the translators of Greek works were as highly praised as the original authors.

This sterility of invention alters or depresses the taste. For taste is an instinctive system, and leads us by internal maxims, which we ignore. The mind, guided by it, perceives connections, shuns discordances, enjoys or suffers, chooses or rejects, according to general conceptions which master it, but are not visible. These removed, we see the tact, which they engendered, disappear; the writer is clumsy, because philosophy fails him. Such is the imperfection of the stories handled by Dryden, from Boccacio and Chaucer. Dryden does not see that fairy tales or tales of chivalry only suit a poetry in its infancy; that ingenious subjects require an artless style; that the talk of Renard and Chanticleer, the adventures of Palamon and Arcite, the transformations, tournaments, apparitions, need the astonished carelessness and the graceful gossip of old Chaucer. Vigorous periods, reflective antitheses, here oppress these amiable ghosts; classical phrases embarrass them in their too stringent embrace; they are lost to our sight; to find them again, we must go to their first parent, quit the too harsh light of a learned and manly age; we cannot pursue them fairly except in their first style in the dawn of credulous thought, under the mist which plays about their vague forms, with all the blushes and smile of morning. Moreover, when Dryden comes on the scene, he crushes the delicacies of his master, hauling in tirades or reasonings, blotting out sincere and self-abandoning tenderness. What a difference between his account of Arcite's death and Chaucer's! How wretched are all his fine words, his gallantry, his symmetrical phrases, his cold regrets, compared to the cries of sorrow, the true outpouring, the deep love in Chaucer! But the worst fault is that almost everywhere he is a copyist, and retains the faults like a literal translator, with eyes glued on the work, powerless to comprehend and recast it, more a rhymester than a poet. When La Fontaine put Æsop or Boccacio into

verse, he breathed a new spirit into them; he took their matter only: the new soul, which constitutes the value of his work, is his, and only his; and this soul befits the work. In place of the Ciceronian periods of Boccacio, we find slim, little lines, full of delicate raillery, dainty voluptuousness, feigned frankness, which relish the forbidden fruit because it is fruit, and because it is forbidden. The tragic departs, the relics of the middle-ages are a thousand leagues away; there remains nothing but the jeering gaiety, Gallic and racy, as of a critic and an epicurean. In Dryden, incongruities abound; and our author is so little shocked by them, that he imports them elsewhere, in his theological poems, representing the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, as a hind, and the heresies by various animals, who dispute at as great length and as learnedly as Oxford graduates.1 I like him no better in his Epistles; as a rule, they are but flatteries, almost always awkward, often mythological, interspersed with somewhat vulgar sentences. 'I have studied Horace,' he says, and hope the style of his Epistles is not ill imitated here.' Do not imagine it to be true. Horace's Epistles, though in verse, are genuine letters, brisk, unequal in movement, always unstudied, natural. Nothing is further from Dryden than this original and sociable spirit, philosophical and lewd, the most refined and the most nervous of epicureans, a kinsman (at eighteen centuries' distance) of Alfred de Musset and Voltaire. Like Horace, an author must be a thinker and a man of the world to write agreeable morality, and Dryden was no more than his contemporaries a thinker or a man of the world.

2

But other no less English characteristics sustain him. Suddenly, in the midst of the yawns which these Epistles excited, our eyes are arrested. A true accent, new ideas, are brought out. Dryden, writing to his cousin, a country gentleman, has lighted on an English original subject. He depicts the life of a rural squire, the referee of his neighbours, who shuns lawsuits and town doctors, who keeps himself in health by hunting and exercise. Here is his portrait:

'How bless'd is he, who leads a country life,

To suffer for the firstlings of the flocks;

Chased even amid the folds, and made to bleed,

Like felons, where they did the murderous deed.

1 Though Huguenots contemn our ordination, succession, ministerial vocation, etc. (The Hind and the Panther, Part ii. v. 139), such are the harsh words we often find in his books.

2 Preface to the Religio Laici.

3 What Augustus says about Horace is charming, but cannot be quoted, even in Latin.

This fiery game your active youth maintain'd;

Not yet by years extinguish'd though restrain'd: . . .
A patriot both the king and country serves ;
Prerogative and privilege preserves:

Of each our laws the certain limit show;

One must not ebb, nor t'other overflow:
Betwixt the prince and parliament we stand,
The barriers of the state on either hand;

May neither overflow, for then they drown the land.
When both are full, they feed our bless'd abode ;
Like those that water'd once the paradise of God.
Some overpoise of sway, by turns, they share;
In peace the people, and the prince in war:
Consuls of moderate power in calms were made;
When the Gauls came, one sole dictator sway'd.
Patriots, in peace, assert the people's right,
With noble stubbornness resisting might;
No lawless mandates from the court receive,
Nor lend by force, but in a body give.'1

This serious converse shows a political mind, fed on the spectacle of affairs, having in the matter of public and practical debates the superiority which the French have in speculative discussions and social conversation. So, amidst the dryness of polemics break forth sudden splendours, a poetic fount, a prayer from the heart's depths; the English well of concentrated passion is on a sudden opened again with a flow and a dash which Dryden does not elsewhere exhibit:

'Dim as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars

To lonely, weary, wand'ring travellers,

Is reason to the soul: and as on high
Those rolling fires discover but the sky,

Not light us here; so Reason's glimm'ring ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,

But guide us upward to a better day.

And as those nightly tapers disappear

When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere,
So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight,
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.' 2
'But, gracious God! how well dost thou provide
For erring judgments an unerring guide!
Thy throne is darkness in th' abyss of light,
A blaze of glory that forbids the sight.

O teach me to believe Thee thus conceal'd,
And search no farther than Thy self reveal'd;
But her alone for my director take,

Whom Thou hast promised never to forsake!

My thoughtless youth was wing'd with vain desires;
My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,

1 1 Epistle 15, xi. 75.

* Beginning of Religio Laici.

Follow'd false lights; and when their glimpse was gone,

My pride struck out new sparkles of her own.

Such was I, such by nature still I am;

Be Thine the glory and be mine the shame!

Good life be now my task; my doubts are done.'1

Such is the poetry of these serious minds. After having strayed in the debaucheries and pomps of the Restoration, Dryden found his way to the grave emotions of inner life; though a Romanist, he felt like a Protestant the wretchedness of man and the presence of grace: he was capable of enthusiasm. Here and there a manly and effective verse discloses, in the midst of his reasonings, the power of conception and the inspiration of desire. When the tragic is met with, he takes to it as to his own domain; at need, he deals in the horrible. He has described the infernal chase, and the torture of the young girl worried by dogs, with the savage energy of Milton.2 As a contrast, he loved nature: this taste always endures in England; the sombre, reflective passions are unstrung in the wide peace and harmony of the fields. Landscapes are to be met with amidst theological disputation:

'New blossoms flourish and new flowers arise,
As God had been abroad, and walking there
Had left his footsteps and reformed the year.
The sunny hills from far were seen to glow

With glittering beams, and in the meads below

The burnished brooks appeared with liquid gold to flow.
As last they heard the foolish Cuckoo sing,
Whose note proclaimed the holy-day of spring."

4

Under his regular versification the artist's soul is brought to light; though contracted by habits of classical argument, though stiffened by controversy and polemics, though unable to create souls or to depict artless and delicate sentiments, he is a genuine poet: he is troubled, raised by beautiful sounds and forms; he writes boldly under the pressure of vehement ideas; he surrounds himself willingly with splendid images; he is moved by the buzzing of their swarms, the glitter of their splendours; he is, when he wishes it, a musician and a painter; he writes stirring airs, which shake all the senses, even if they do not sink deep into the heart. Such is his Alexander's Feast, an ode in honour of St. Cecilia's day, an admirable trumpet-blast, in which metre and sound impress upon the nerves the emotions of the mind, a masterpiece of rapture and of art, which Victor Hugo alone has come up

1 The Hind and the Panther, Part i. v. 64-75.

4

2 Theodore and Honoria, xi.

3 The Hind and the Panther, Part iii. v. 553-560.
For her the weeping heavens become serene,
For her the ground is clad in cheerful green,
For her the nightingales are taught to sing,
And nature for her has delayed the spring.'

These charming verses on the Duchess of York remind one of those of La Fontaine on the Princess of Conti.