Dryden's Palamon and Arcite - Джеффри Чосер

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with his wife to Charleton. He lived there for two years, and during that time wrote three productions that illustrate the three departments of literature to which he devoted himself: Annus Mirabilis, a narrative and descriptive poem on the fire of 1666 and the sea fight with the Dutch, the Essay on Dramatic Poesy, his first attempt at literary criticism in prose, and the Maiden Queen, a drama. In Annus Mirabilis we find the best work yet done by him. Marinist quaintness still clings here and there, and he has temporarily deserted the classical distich for a quatrain stanza; but here, for the first time, we taste the Dryden of the Satires and the Fables. His Essay on Dramatic Poesy started modern prose. Hitherto English prose had suffered from long sentences, from involved sentences, and from clumsy Latinisms or too bald vernacular. Dryden happily united simplicity with grace, and gave us plain, straightforward sentences, musically arranged in well-ordered periods. This was the vehicle in which he introduced literary criticism, and he continued it in prefaces to most of his plays and subsequent poems.

      At this same time he not only discussed the drama, but indulged in its production; and for a score of years from the early sixties he devoted himself almost exclusively to the stage. It was the most popular and the most profitable mode of expression. He began with a comedy, the Wild Gallant, in 1662. It was a poor play and was incontinently condemned. He then developed a curious series of plays, of which the Indian Emperor, the Conquest of Grenada, and Aurengzebe are examples. He professedly followed French methods, observed the unities, and used the rhymed couplet. But they were not French; they were a nondescript incubation by Dryden himself, and were called heroic dramas. They were ridiculed in the Duke of Buckingham's farce, the Rehearsal; but their popularity was scarcely impaired.

      In 1678 Dryden showed a return to common sense and to blank verse in All for Love, and, though it necessarily suffers from its comparison with the original, Shakspere's Antony and Cleopatra, it nevertheless possesses enough dramatic power to make it his best play. He had preceded this by rewriting Milton's Paradise Lost as an opera, in the State of Innocence, and he followed it in 1681 with perhaps his best comedy, the Spanish Friar.

      Dryden was now far the most prominent man of letters in London. In 1670 he had been appointed Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal with a salary of two hundred pounds and a butt of sack. His connection with the stage had been a decided financial success, and he was in receipt of an income of about seven hundred pounds, which at modern values would approximate $15,000. His house on Gerard Street, Soho, backed upon Leicester's gardens. There he spent his days in writing, but the evening found him at Will's Coffee House. In this famous resort of the wits and writers of the day the literary dictator of his generation held his court. Seated in his particular armchair, on the balcony in summer, by the fire in winter, he discoursed on topics current in the literary world, pronounced his verdict of praise or condemnation, and woe to the unfortunate upon whom the latter fell. A week before Christmas, in 1679, as Dryden was walking home from an evening of this sort, he was waylaid by masked ruffians in Rose Alley and was beaten to unconsciousness. The attack was supposed to have been incited by Rochester, who smarted under an anonymous satire mistakenly attributed to Dryden.

      Though wrongly accused of this particular satire, it was not long before he did turn his attention to that department of verse. It was the time of the restless dissent of the Whigs from the succession of James; and in 1681 Dryden launched Absalom and Achitophel, one of the most brilliant satires in our language, against Shaftesbury and his adherents, who were inciting Monmouth to revolt. He found an admirable parallel in Absalom's revolt from his father David, and he sustained the comparison. The Scriptural names concealed living characters, and Shaftesbury masked as Achitophel, the evil counsellor, and Buckingham as Zimri. Feeling ran high. Shaftesbury was arrested and tried, but was acquitted, and his friends struck off a medal in commemoration. In 1682, therefore, came Dryden's second satire, the Medal. These two political satires called forth in the fevered state of the times a host of replies, two of the most scurrilous from the pens of Shadwell and Settle. Of these two poor Whigs the first was drawn and quartered in MacFlecnoe, while the two were yoked for castigation in Part II. of Absalom and Achitophel, which appeared in 1682. Dryden possessed preëminently the faculty for satire. He did not devote himself exclusively to an abstract treatment, nor, like Pope, to bitter personalities; he blends and combines the two methods most effectively. Every one of his brisk, nervous couplets carries a sting; every distich is a sound box on the ear.

      We reach now a most interesting period in Dryden's career and one that has provoked much controversy. In 1681 he published a long argument in verse, entitled Religio Laici (the Religion of a Layman), in which he states his religious faith and his adherence to the Church of England. When King James came to the throne in 1685 he made an immediate attempt to establish the Roman Catholic faith; and now Dryden, too, turned Romanist, and in 1687 supported his new faith in the long poetical allegory, the Hind and the Panther. Of course his enemies cried turncoat; and it certainly looked like it. Dryden was well into manhood before the religious instinct stirred in him, and then, once waking, he naturally walked in the beaten track. But these instincts, though roused late, possessed the poet's impetuosity; and it was merely a natural intensifying of the same impulse that had brought him into the Church of England, which carried him to a more pronounced religious manifestation, and landed him in the Church of Rome. His sincerity is certainly backed by his acts, for when James had fled, and the staunch Protestants William and Mary held the throne, he absolutely refused to recant, and sacrificed his positions and emoluments. He was stripped of his royal offices and pensions, and, bitter humiliation, the laurel, torn from his brow, was placed on the head of that scorned jangler in verse, Shadwell.

      Deprived now of royal patronage and pensions, Dryden turned again to the stage, his old-time purse-filler; and he produced two of his best plays, Don Sebastian and Amphitryon. The rest of his life, however, was to be spent, not with the drama, but in translation and paraphrase. Since 1684 he had several times published Miscellanies, collections of verse in which had appeared fragments of translations. With that indefatigable energy which characterized him, he now devoted himself to sustained effort. In 1693 he published a translation of Juvenal, and in the same year began his translation of Virgil, which was published in 1697. The work was sold by subscription, and the poet was fairly well paid. Dryden's translations are by no means exact; but he caught the spirit of his poet, and carried something of it into his own effective verse.

      Dryden was not great in original work, but he was particularly happy in adaptation; and so it happened that his best play, All for Love, was modeled on Shakspere's Antony and Cleopatra, and his best poem, Palamon and Arcite, was a paraphrase of the Knight's Tale of Chaucer. Contrary to the general taste of his age, he had long felt and often expressed great admiration for the fourteenth-century poet. His work on Ovid had first turned his thought to Chaucer, he tells us, and by association he linked with him Boccaccio. As his life drew near its close he turned to those famous old story-tellers, and in the Fables gave us paraphrases in verse of eight of their most delightful tales, with translations from Homer and Ovid, a verse letter to his kinsman John Driden, his second St. Cedlia's Ode, entitled Alexander's Feast, and an Epitaph.

      The Fables were published in 1700. They were his last work. Friends of the poet, and they were legion, busied themselves at the beginning of that year in the arrangement of an elaborate benefit performance for him at the Duke's Theater; but Dryden did not live to enjoy the compliment. He suffered severely from gout; a lack of proper treatment induced mortification, which spread rapidly, and in the early morning of the first of May, 1700, he died.

      He had been the literary figurehead of his generation, and the elaborate pomp of his funeral attested his great popularity. His body lay in state for several days and then with a great procession was borne, on the 13th of May, to the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. The last years of his life had been spent in fond study of the work of Chaucer, and so it happened that just three hundred years after the death of elder bard Dryden was laid to rest by the side of his great master.

      

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