BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH I JOHN DRYDEN is the greatest and the most representative English man of letters of the last quarter of the seventeenth century. From the death of Milton in 1674 to his own in 1700 no other writer can compare with him in versatility and power; indeed, in the varied character of his work, as dramatist, satirist, controversialist, translator, and critic, he has few rivals in the entire history of English literature. Though he composed his most important original poems to serve some passing political purpose, he made them immortal by his literary genius. Half unconsciously he became the founder of a literary school that retained its preeminence for more than a hundred years after his death. Any account of his life should deal primarily with his writings and with the political events that gave the occasion for many of them; at the same time it should pay due heed to Dryden's own personality, which has not always been treated with the respect that it deserves. Dryden was by profession a writer, not a hero or prophet; he suffers by the inevitable comparison with his great contemporary Milton. Yet, beneath his superficial inconsistency he had a large general honesty and uprightness, and the fierce invective of his satires must not blind us to his kindliness and generosity. Though not heroic, Dryden is eminently lovable. Dryden's parents were landed gentry. His father, Erasmus Dryden, third son of Sir Erasmus Dryden, baronet, married on October 21, 1630, Mary, daughter of the Reverend Henry Pickering, rector of Aldwincle All Saints, in Northamptonshire. John Dryden, the first of the fourteen children of this marriage, is said to have been born on August 9, 1631,' at the parsonage house of Aldwincle All Saints, the residence of his mother's parents. He was brought up under strongly Puritan influences, since both the Drydens and the Pickerings took the side of the Parliament in its conflict against Charles I. He was educated first at Westminster School in London, under the famous master, Dr. Busby, to whom he later sent his own sons; and next at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in July, 1650, and where he took his bachelor's degree in January, 1654. The Conclusion Book of Trinity College records that in July, 1652, Dryden was disciplined for "his disobedience to the vice master, and his contumacy in taking his punishment inflicted by him." A pleasanter glimpse of the young poet is given in a letter quoted by Mr. Christie: "Dryden . . . was reckoned a man of good parts and learning while in college: he had . . . read over and very well understood all the Greek and Latin poets. He stayed to take his bachelor's degree, but his head was too roving and active, or what else you 'll call it, to confine himself to a college life; and so he left it and went to London into gayer company, and set up for a poet, which he was as well qualified for as any man.” 2 While at school and college Dryden had made some trifling experiments in writing verse. At Westminster School he had translated, as “a Thursday-night's exercise,"3 the 1 Malone points out that this date rests on no better authority than a note by Pope, first printed in the 1735 edition of his works. See Select Poems by Dryden, ed. Christie and Firth, Oxford, 1893, page xvi. Third Satire of Persius, and had composed in honor of his deceased schoolmate, Lord Hastings, an elegy which is still preserved. In 1650 he prefixed a short complimentary poem to Sion and Parnassus, a collection of religious poems by his friend John Hoddesdon. In 1655 he wrote a curious letter to his cousin Honor Driden, mingling verse and prose in a strain of conventional and not too delicate gallantry. These early pieces are full of extravagant conceits of the school of Cowley, and show at the best only a boyish dexterity in copying a prevailing literary fashion. Nothing is known of Dryden's life between 1654 and 1658. In June, 1654, his father had died, leaving to him, as the eldest son, landed property which yielded about forty pounds a year, enough at that time to support a single man in decent comfort. A year later, if the heading of the letter to Honor Driden be correct, he was still at Cambridge. From this fantastic epistle, which indicates nothing more than a college flirtation, some critics have strangely concluded that the young poet was seriously in love with his cousin. Whether he continued to reside in Cambridge, or returned to his father's estate after 1655, cannot positively be determined. If Shadwell is correct in speaking of him, "when he came first to town," as "a raw young fellow of seven and twenty,"1 he did not remove to London and "set up for a poet" until 1658. Dryden's life after his settlement in London may be conveniently divided into three periods: the first ending in 1681, the second in 1688, and the third with his death in 1700. In the first period, after a few occasional poems, Dryden chose the drama as the most profitable field of literary work, and by his success in it became the leading English man of letters of his time. In 1681, having from a number of causes become thoroughly dissatisfied with his occupation as a playwright, he turned to satire and controversial writing, both in prose and verse, and brought his consummate literary skill to the service of the royal power and the Tory party. By the Revolution of 1688, he was deprived of his position as a court favorite, and thrown back upon his pen for support. After some attempts, only partially successful, to recover his position as a popular dramatist, he found a congenial occupation as a translator of the Greek and Latin poets, and as a modernizer of Chaucer. II When Dryden settled in London, his first patron was his own cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, a favorite of Oliver Cromwell, and one of the peers nominated by him to his upper house. The great Protector himself was nearing his end; he died on September 3, 1658, after a short illness, but the Puritan government still seemed firmly established in England. Thus we are not surprised to find that Dryden's first important work was A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness Oliver, Lord Protector of England, Scotland, & Ireland, which was probably written soon after Cromwell's funeral on November 23, 1658. In this elegy he adopts the four-line stanza that Davenant had brought into prominence by his Gondibert. His style, simpler and more direct than in his earlier poems, shows the influence of the study of Davenant, and also, no doubt, of Denham and Waller. As a young, ambitious literary man, Dryden began his career by copying authors of established reputation. This imitative method he followed to some extent through his whole life, modifying and developing his own numbers by the constant reading of earlier poets. The critical faculty was always a prominent element in his genius. Yet in stanzas like that which concludes the poem, he already shows that vigorous, rapid verse which remains his distinguishing characteristic among English poets : 1 See The Medal of John Bayes. His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest; (Page 7, lines 145-148.) At the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, Dryden joined the Royalist party, and expressed his loyalty to the new government in three poems, Astræa Redux, and addresses, To his Sacred Majesty, and To my Lord Chancellor, written in the heroic couplet, and published in the years 1660, 1661, and 1662. The contrast between his earlier praise of Cromwell and the adulation of royalty in these poems is certainly offensive to a modern reader. But Dryden's change of heart, though emphasized by his ability to clothe his opinions with rhetorical, hyperbolic flourishes that pleased his contemporaries, and with a vigorous verse that still has a certain charm, merely reflected that of the majority of people about him. Nobody thinks of drawing up an indictment against the English nation for its inconstancy, and only Dryden's later eminence has caused him to be singled out for special censure. Henceforth Dryden will be, with the possible exception of a few months in 1680–81, a consistent member of the Tory party. Dryden's change of politics had been accompanied by his forming new associations. He became intimate with the family of Thomas Howard, Earl of Berkshire, a loyalist noble, at least three of whose sons, Edward, Robert, and James, were dabblers in literature. With Sir Robert Howard, the sixth son, he began a friendship that lasted, despite an interruption caused by a quarrel on literary questions, until Sir Robert's death in 1698.1 This alliance with a loyalist family was cemented by Dryden's marriage, on December 1, 1663, with the Lady Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of the house. Scandal, unsupported by any conclusive evidence, reports that Dryden's wife was no better than she should be, and even that the poet was forced into marriage with her by her "brawny brothers." Though it is needless to enter into the details of this somewhat unsavory subject, a few general remarks may throw light on the situation. The numberless sneers at marriage in Dryden's writings are merely a reflection of the literary fashion of the time, and prove nothing as to his own experience. More important is the fact that in the numerous letters which have been preserved from his later years, Dryden refers only casually to his wife, and never with any expressions of affection. His own character, at least in his earlier life, was probably not different from that of the licentious young noblemen whose associate he was proud to proclaim himself. His long intrigue with the actress Anne Reeve was a never-failing subject for jest from his opponents. On the other hand, both Dryden and his wife show in their letters a charming parental tenderness for their three sons. Perhaps Dryden's marriage may be dismissed as one of convenience, good or bad, which had at all events no disastrous results. It seems to have brought Dryden some addition to his income, in the form of a small estate in Wiltshire. At about this time Dryden gained the favor of the Duke of Monmouth (an illegitimate son of Charles II) and of his duchess, to whom in 1667 he dedicated The Indian Emperor, and to whom he gives the title, in Absalom and Achitophel (line 34), of "the charming Annabel." Meanwhile Dryden had been doing literary hack work, writing prefaces and the like, 1 Some complimentary verses, prefixed to an edition of Howard's poems published in 1660, are the first token of this friendship. The chief attack on the character of Dryden's wife is contained in a scurrilous tract, Satyr to his Muse, by the author of Absalom and Achitophel, published in 1682, nineteen years after the date of the marriage. On the whole subject, see Scott's Life of Dryden, and the notes to it by Saintsbury, in Scott-Saintsbury edition, i. 74-78. for the bookseller Herringman, who issued his Astræa Redux in 1660 and remained his publisher until 1679. Of these minor labors no record remains. Dryden was not a man with a mission; he had no new thoughts to give to the world, and no intense emotions that clamored for utterance. He merely desired, like thousands of young men of our own day, to make his way in the world by writing, for which he felt a natural inclination, and he was ready to adopt whatever literary form seemed likely to be profitable, financially and socially. Had he lived now, he would have become a journalist. In the years following the Restoration, the only branch of literature that promised steady and adequate remuneration was the drama; and to this, notwithstanding that he felt little inborn talent for it, he soon turned his almost undivided attention. Dryden's work for the stage falls into three fairly distinct divisions. After a period of apprenticeship and experiment, he won immense success as the chief writer of a new type of drama, the "heroic play;" his most famous work of this class is The Conquest of Granada, acted in 1670 (1671?). Next, dissatisfied with the plays that had brought him popularity, he developed, after a new series of experiments, a type of tragedy that imitated the methods of dramatic construction used by Corneille and Racine, but the style and character-drawing of Shakespeare. His finest production of this sort is All for Love, acted in 1677. After All for Love Dryden adopted no new dramatic methods; he merely used anew devices of which he had already tried the effect. In 1660 there was an immediate revival of the theater, which had ceased to exist in England on the suppression of stage-plays by Parliament in 1642. The traditions of the old drama survived, and one prominent writer, Sir William Davenant, connected the old time with the new. On the other hand, upon the return of the king and his followers from their exile in France, French fashions, and to a less extent French ideas, became a potent influence in the new English drama, which, even more than that of the time of Charles I, depended on the court for support. Without attempting an elaborate analysis of the drama at the time Dryden began his career, we may distinguish in it at least five different types. (1) The English comedy of humor, descended from Ben Jonson. This deals primarily with the lower orders of society; it presents men and women marked by one predominant trait, or humor. (2) Comedy of manners, represented in the old drama, for example, by several plays of Shirley. This deals primarily with the higher ranks of society, and depends for its effect largely on the reproduction of the superficial manners of cultivated circles. This type was soon strongly affected by French models, notably the works of Molière. (3) Comedy of intrigue, depending for its effect on an involved plot, full of unexpected turns of fortune. Some comedies of Shakespeare and of Beaumont and Fletcher, such for instance as Twelfth Night, approach this type. In the Restoration period, however, the type owed much to Spanish influence, both directly and through the French drama: hence such comedies came to be known as "Spanish plots.” (4) Romantic tragedy, derived from the work of Beaumont and Fletcher. (5) Tragedy of the "classic" type, obedient to the rules of the Renaissance dramatic critics. This form of drama, though it was well known to the Elizabethan dramatists, had never become really popular on the English stage before the closing of the theaters. In France, however, after the appearance of Corneille's Cid in 1636, it won a decisive victory, and through the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine it powerfully affected the practice of the Restoration playwrights. Fully as important as the direct influence of the French drama on the English was the influence of the dramatic rules just mentioned, which had been developed by a succession 1 The statement that he engaged in them rests only on the authority of Shadwell. of Italian and French critics, and had been adopted as guiding principles by French dramatists. Of them the most important were the famous three unities, of time, place, and action. The first prescribes that the time of action of a play shall not exceed one day; the second, that the scene of action shall remain unchanged, or at least not depart from the limits of a single city; the third, that each drama must have one central plot, to which all subordinate intrigues, if they exist, must directly contribute. French literature made its influence felt on the drama in two more ways. In the first place, French tragedy was invariably written in rhymed verse. English dramatists, when they came to imitate this practice, could fortify themselves by occasional precedents in their own predecessors of "the former age." Again, the favorite prose fiction of the time was the French chivalrous romances of Calprenède and Mlle. de Scudéry. These vast works, extending through some dozen volumes apiece, treat of the adventures of gallant knights and faithful ladies; their scene may be in ancient Greece or Persia, or in barbarian Turkey, but the sentiments expressed in them are those of elaborate, ceremonial gallantry, akin to the artificial etiquette of the French court. Love and honor are the foundation of every plot, in fact, the only emotions recognized by the heroes and heroines. Evidently, when such fictions were the favorite reading of English ladies and gentlemen, their spirit would soon make itself felt upon the stage. Finally, Dryden's dramatic work will be greatly affected by the "heroic poem," or artificial epic, of which Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered is the best example. This literary form was a favorite subject of discussion in Dryden's time, and was regarded as "the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform." 1 The romances that have just been mentioned are, in large measure, heroic poems told in prose, so that their influence coöperates with that of the heroic poem in the strict sense. Dryden's work as a dramatist was essentially eclectic. He himself was by temper, as we have seen, a critic rather than a creative artist, and in his criticism two currents may be distinguished. Keenly sensible to literary merit wherever he found it, he was a devoted admirer of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ben Jonson. On the other hand, through his logical, analytic, somewhat scholastic temperament, he recognized the power of the new French criticism, with its hard and fast rules of dramatic construction. Hence in his own dramatic work he constantly tried to combine elements which he had found effective in other dramatists, in a form which should not too far diverge from the dictates of the current dramatic criticism. In The Wild Gallant (1663), his first comedy, written in prose, Dryden attempted to unite humor studies, imitated from Jonson, and wit combats, probably suggested by Fletcher, in a Spanish plot, constructed with some regard to the three unities. His next work, The Rival Ladies (1663 or 1664), he wrote mainly in blank verse, and again constructed a Spanish plot, which he decorated with a few scenes in the "new way" of the heroic couplet, introduced into the English drama principally by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery. He also assisted his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, in the composition of The Indian Queen, a tragedy, or more strictly an "heroic play," written entirely in the rhymed couplet. Encouraged by the success of this piece, he composed independently a sequel to it, The Indian Emperor (1664 or 1665), a drama of the same species. These heroic plays" are the one type of English drama in which Dryden excels all other writers; his succeeding works of the same sort are Tyrannic Love (1669), The Conquest of Granada (1670 or 1671), and Aureng-Zebe (1675). Briefly, they aim to reproduce on the stage the effect of an heroic poem. They are all, like The Indian Emperor, written 1 See Dedication of the Eneis, page 487. |