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Man at forty, he says, "seems to be fully in his summer tropic, ... and I believe that it will hold in all great poets that, though they wrote before with a certain heat of genius which inspired them, yet that heat was not perfectly digested." But artificial heat is never to be digested at all, as is plain in Dryden's case.
Modern delicacy of taste and intellectual purity although we hold them in possession, and may add to their sheen before we hand them on to our children are no more to be placed to our personal credits than Dryden's satire, Pope's epigram, Marlborough's battles, Burke's speeches, and the victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Intellectual delicacy has grown like our political constitution.
But the most curious passage is that in which Collier resents some uncivil reflections thrown by Cassandra, in Dryden's Cleomenes, on the calf Apis and his hierophants. The words "grass-eating, foddered god," words which really are much in the style of several passages in the Old Testament, give as much offence to this Christian divine as they could have given to the priests of Memphis.
It is not necessary to credit the Scripture with much of Dryden's spirit, nor with much of his style, and certainly not with his attitude toward his fellows; but it is a constant surprise in reading Dryden to discover how familiar he was with the King James version. Walter Scott insists that Dryden was at heart serious, that "his indelicacy was like the forced impudence of a bashful man."
After dinner, with my wife, to the King's house to see "The Mayden Queene," a new play of Dryden's, mightily commended for the regularity of it, and the strain and wit; and, the truth is, there is a comical part done by Nell,
Settle, in order to reduce the growing reputation of Shadwell, but their interest being now so opposite, they became poetical enemies, in which Settle was, no doubt, over-matched. He wrote a poem, however, called Azaria and Hushai, in five sheets, 4to. designed as an answer to Mr. Dryden's poem called Absalom and Achitophel.
His petty poems are seldom worth the cost of criticism; sometimes the thoughts are false and sometimes common. In his verses on Lady Gethin, the latter part is in imitation of Dryden's ode on Mrs.
Of a very different order is the important critical treatise which comes next, Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, to which are prefixed as prolegomena Dryden's Dedicatory Epistle to The Rival Ladies, Sir Robert Howard's Preface to Four New Plays, and, as supplementary, Howard's Preface to The Duke of Lerma, and Dryden's Defence of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy.
Gray admired the plays of Dryden, "not as dramatic compositions, but as poetry." "There are as many things finely said in his plays as almost by anybody," said Pope to Spence. Of their rant, their fustian, their bombast, their bad English, of their innumerable sins against Dryden's own better conscience both as poet and critic, I shall excuse myself from giving any instances.
In the light of the events in which we live, man is not merely the most discordant creature on earth: he is also the most ferocious animal that exists. Dryden's famous lines read like a satire: From harmony, from heavenly harmony. This universal frame began; From harmony to harmony, through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man.
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