When we want to see whether a man is a great poet or not, let us take him in his commonplaces, and see what he does with them. Here are four lines which are among the last that Dryden wrote; they occur in the address to the Duchess of Ormond, who was, it must be remembered, by birth Lady Margaret Somerset : O daughter of the rose, whose cheeks unite ΤΟ The ideas contained in these lines are as old, beyond all doubt, as the practice of love-making between persons of the Caucasian type of physiognomy, and the images in which those ideas are expressed are in themselves as well worn as the stones of the Pyramids. But I maintain that any poetical critic worth his salt could, without knowing who wrote them, but merely from the arrangement of the words, the rhythm and cadence of the line, and the manner in which the images are presented, write 'This is a poet, and probably a great poet', across them, and that he would 20 be right in doing so. When such a critic, in reading the works of the author of these lines, finds that the same touch is, if not invariably, almost always present; that in the handling of the most unpromising themes, the mots rayonnants, the mots de lumière are never lacking; that the suggested images of beauty never fail for long together; then he is justified in striking out the 'probably' and writing' This is a great poet'. If he tries to go further, and to range his great poets in order of merit, he will almost certainly fail. He cannot count up the beauties in 30 one, and then the beauties in the other, and strike the balance accordingly. He can only say, 'There is the faculty of producing those beauties; it is exercised under such conditions, and with such results, that there is no doubt of its being a native and resident faculty, not a mere casual inspiration of the moment; and this being so, I pronounce the man a poet, and a great one'. This can be said of Dryden, as it can be said of Shelley, or Spenser, or Keats, to name only the great English poets who are most dissimilar to him in subject and in style. All beyond this is treacherous speculation. The critic quits the assistance of a plain and catholic theory of poetry, and develops all sorts of private judgements, and not improbably private crotchets. The ideas which this poet works on 10 are more congenial to his ideas than the ideas which that poet works on; the dialect of one is softer to his ear than the dialect of another; very frequently some characteristic which has not the remotest connexion with his poetical merits or demerits makes the scale turn. Of only one poet can it be safely said that he is greater than the other great poets, for the reason that in Dryden's own words he is larger and more comprehensive than any of them. But with the exception of Shakespeare, the greatest poets in different styles are, in the eyes of a sound poetical criticism, 20 very much on an equality. Dryden's peculiar gift, in which no poet of any language has surpassed him, is the faculty of treating any subject which he does treat poetically. His range is enormous, and wherever it is deficient, it is possible to see that external circumstances had to do with the apparent limitation. That the author of the tremendous satire of the political pieces should be the author of the exquisite lyrics scattered about the plays; that the special pleader of Religio Laici should be the taleteller of Palamon and Arcite, are things which, the more 30 carefully I study other poets and their comparatively limited perfection, astonish me the more. From SIR WALTER RALEIGH'S Lecture on JOHN DRYDEN AND POLITICAL SATIRE ALL four of these great satires fall within a single year. Dryden was a well-known dramatist and poet, but he issued them all anonymously. They produced a sensation greater than any printed pamphlet had ever produced in England. I do not remember any other case of a pamphlet designed to achieve a particular end, pointed to the occasion, topical and allusive in every line, which gained at once, and retained ever after, a place among our great national classics. The effect it produced may be well measured by the poems written in its praise, while yet the author re- 10 mained unknown. The verse of Absalom, says Nathaniel Lee, is divinely good', each syllable is a soul. It is As if a Milton from the dead arose, Filed off the rust, and the right party chose. . . . What these praises mean is that Dryden was recognized at once, as he is recognized still, for the first of the moderns. He filed off the rust'; he discarded the antique poetic trappings, and proved that poetry could do work in the world. I confess that when I look through the collected poems of Dryden I am amazed by his completely modern 20 attitude to all the old traditions. Take a trivial but significant instance. In The Secular Masque he introduces a chorus of the heathen divinities, who describe the changes that time has wrought in the world. Diana celebrates the sport of hunting beloved by the court of James I, and then joins with Janus, Chronos, and Momus, in a festive chorus: Then our age was in its prime : Free from rage and free from crime. 30 The whole masque resembles nothing so much as a Drury Lane pantomime. And Dryden's innovations in language were, to his own age, no less startling. He was content to make use of the colloquial speech of the day, the speech in which men traffic, and quarrel, and discuss, but he used it with such intensity and conciseness that he raised it to a higher power. The satirists who came before him had either beaten the air, like the Elizabethans, or had been fanciful, grotesque, and metaphysical, like Butler and to Cleveland. They dressed themselves in cobwebs ; Dryden wore a suit of armour. Men of the world had been accustomed to deal with poetry as a very good thing in its own place, when you have the time and the taste for it. You cannot deal thus with what you fear. Dryden compelled them to find the time. If any one protests that the highest poetry, like the purest mathematics, can do no work, I do not desire to quarrel with him, so long as no attempt is made to deprive Dryden of the name of a great poet. Among the many 20 definitions of poetry it is wise to choose the broadest. To exclude from the name of poetry work which is artistically ordered in strong and polished verse by an imagination of extraordinary scope and power, is a wretched impoverishment of thought and of speech. ... One of the great fascinations of Dryden's satire is its perfect ease of application to our own time. The divisions of opinion, the foibles, and the characters that he describes are alive among us to-day. Only the power and the will to satirize them have grown feebler. One reason of this, 30 no doubt, is that our differences, for all their violence, are less fundamental and less tragic. A generation which had seen the king of England led to the block was in no danger of under-estimating the gravity of political differences. Almost all the political problems of to-day bear a likeness to the problems of the seventeenth century; but the colours of that earlier picture are darker and stronger. We are perhaps humaner than they; we are certainly more humanitarian. We do not behead those who are opposed to us, we do not even condemn them; we explain them. Explanation is a subtler kind of satire, and it is touched, as Dryden insisted that all good satire should be touched, with concession, and even with sympathy. But we have to pay for our gains; and we have lost the grand style.... The warfare of party has raged on, with varying fortunes, 10 for more than two hundred years since Dryden wielded his two-edged sword, and the honours are still divided. But it would be a mistake to regard Dryden as first and foremost a party man. No mere party pamphleteer ever has won, or ever could win, the place that he holds in English letters. He is of the centre; his party is the party of Aristophanes and of Rabelais. His best work is inspired by the sanity that inhabits at the heart of things. He lived in a turbulent age, and he was a fighter. But all extremists are his natural enemies. His weapons can be used, on 20 occasion, by either side. He hated wrong-headed theorists and fanatics, who commonly impose their alliance, a heavy burden, on the reforming party in the State. He also hated all contented and self-sufficient dullards, who for the most part have to be supported, a grievous weight, by the party that stands for the established order. He makes war on both, with laughter that flashes and cuts. There are many provinces of poetry, some where poetry is most at home, that are strange to him. His love lyrics are, with very few exceptions, a miracle of banality. His best 30 dramas just fall short of greatness. But in prose criticism, as in argumentative verse, and in metrical satire, he has not been surpassed. Not many authors have achieved the highest rank in three such diverse kinds. If Dryden has failed to captivate some lovers of poetry |