Among My Books Volume I Part 8

[63] Conquest of Grenada, Second Part.

[64] In most he mingles blank verse.

[65] Conquest of Grenada.

[66] This recalls a striking verse of Alfred de Musset:--

"La muse est toujours belle.

Meme pour l'insense, meme pour l'impuissant, _Car sa beaute pour nous, c'est notre amour pour elle._"

[67] Rival Ladies.

[68] Don Sebastian.

[69] Don Sebastian.

[70] Cleomenes.

[71] All for Love.

[72] Dryden, with his wonted perspicacity, follows Ben Jonson in calling Donne "the greatest wit, though not the best poet, of our nation." (Dedication of Eleonora.) Even as a poet Donne

"Had in him those brave translunary things That our first poets had."

To open vistas for the imagination through the blind wall of the senses as he could sometimes do, is the supreme function of poetry.

[73] My own judgment is my sole warrant for attributing these extracts from Oedipus to Dryden rather than Lee.

[74] Recollections of Rogers, p. 165.

[75] Nicholls's Reminiscences of Gray. Pickering's edition of Gray's Works, Vol. V. p. 35.

[76] Let one suffice for all. In the "Royal Martyr," Porphyrius.

awaiting his execution, says to Maximin, who had wished him for a son-in-law:--

"Where'er thou stand'st, I'll level at that place My gus.h.i.+ng blood, and spout it at thy face; Thus not by marriage we our blood will join; Nay, more, my arms shall throw my head at thine."

"It is no shame," says Dryden himself, "to be a poet, though it is to be a bad one."

[77] Gray, _ubi supra_, p. 38.

[78] Scott had never seen Pepys's Diary when he wrote this, or he would have left it unwritten: "Fell to discourse of the last night's work at Court, where the ladies and Duke of Monmouth acted the 'Indian Emperor,' wherein they told me these things most remarkable that not any woman but the d.u.c.h.ess of Monmouth and Mrs. Cornwallis did anything but like fools and stocks, but that these two did do most extraordinary well: that not any man did anything well but Captain O'Bryan, who spoke and did well, but above all things did dance most incomparably."--14th January, 1668.

[79] See also that n.o.ble pa.s.sage in the "Hind and Panther"

(1572-1591), where this is put into verse. Dryden always thought in prose.

[80] Probably on the authority of this very epitaph, as if epitaphs were to be believed even under oath! A great many authors live because we read nothing but their tombstones. Oldham was, to borrow one of Dryden's phrases, "a bad or, which is worse, an indifferent poet."

[81] "He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compa.s.sionate easily forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere reconciliation with them that had offended him."--Congress.

[82] Coleridge says excellently: "You will find this a good gauge or criterion of genius,--whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized." (Table-Talk, 192.) Some of Dryden's best satirical hits are let fall by seeming accident in his prose, as where he says of his Protestant a.s.sailants, "Most of them love all wh.o.r.es but her of Babylon." They had first attacked him on the score of his private morals.

[83] That he taxes Shadwell with it is only a seeming exception, as any careful reader will see.

[84] Preface to Fables.

[85] Dedication of the Georgics.

[86] Preface to Second Miscellany.

[87] Ibid.

[88] Memoirs of Wordsworth, Vol. II. p. 74 (American edition).

[89] A Discourse of Epick Poetry "If the _public_ approve." "On ne peut pas admettre dans le developpement des langues aucune revolution artificielle et sciemment executee; il n'y a pour elles ni conciles, ni a.s.semblees deliberantes; on ne les reforme pas comme une const.i.tution vicieuse."--Renan, De l'Origine du Langage, p 95.

[90] This is an old complaint. Puttenham sighs over such innovation in Elizabeth's time, and Carew in James's. A language grows, and is not made. Almost all the new-fangled words with which Jonson taxes Marston in his "Poetaster" are now current.

[91] Like most idiomatic, as distinguished from correct writers, he knew very little about the language historically or critically. His prose and poetry swarm with locutions that would have made Lindley Murray's hair stand on end. _How_ little he knew is plain from his criticising in Ben Jonson the use of _ones_ in the plural, of "Though Heaven should speak with all _his_ wrath," and be "as false English for _are_, though the rhyme hides it." Yet all are good English, and I have found them all in Dryden's own writing! Of his sins against idiom I have a longer list than I have room for. And yet he is one of our highest authorities for _real_ English.