Richard Garnett

“ Tyrannic Love, Dryden’s first considerable attempt in ‘heroic tragedy,’ is very remarkable as a proof of to what extraordinary absurdities a vigorous intellect may be liable, and also how these may be dignified by energy of expression. ‘The rants of Maximin,’ says Johnson, ‘have long been the sport of criticism;’ but so spirited and sonorous is the diction, that, inconsistent as seems the alliance of admiration with derision, such actually is the mingled feeling which they excite in the quiet of the closet. ”

“ Of dramatic art as Shakespeare or the Greeks understood it there is not a trace; the pivot of the action is the property, fitter for a fairy tale than a tragedy, possessed by Indamora, of compelling every one who sees her to fall in love with her. Neither pity nor terror can be excited on such terms; if Aristotle’s criterion be sound, Aurengzebe is no tragedy at all. ”

“ Dryden’s Cleopatra wants this character of universality, which, indeed, none but Shakespeare could have given, and Shakespeare himself could not have given if in bondage to the unities. She is a fine, passionate, sensuous woman, a kind of Mary Stuart, interesting, but not to the point at which it could be felt that the world were well lost for her. The inferiority of Cleopatra reacts grievously upon Antony. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is so grand that her lover is exalted by the admiration which, in spite of her perfidies, she manifestly feels for him. ”

“ If Wycherley is the satirist of Restoration comedy, Congreve is its wit; but at the same time he betrays a vein of much deeper feeling than Wycherley, and, notwithstanding the contrary opinion of Hazlitt, his characters appear to us more easily appreciated and more readily remembered. His insight into women in particular is so considerable that it is a real loss that he never attempted to paint a noble one, who would indeed have looked strangely amid the crowd of his heartless, or frivolous, or absurd people, but whom he might have rendered a true dramatic success. ”

“ This is true religion, which is the perfection of human nature, and the joy and delight of every one that feels it active and strong within him: it is true, this is not arrived at all at once; and it will have an unhappy alloy, hanging long even about a good man; but, as those ill mixtures are the perpetual grief of his soul, so it is his chief care to watch over and to mortify them; he will be in a continual progress, still gaining ground upon himself; and as he attains to a good degree of purity, he will find a noble flame of life and joy growing upon him. ”

“ It is to Marvell’s honour that he succeeds best with a fine subject. When, in his poems on the events of the Commonwealth, he escapes from mere sarcasm and negation, and speaks nobly upon really noble themes, he soars far above the Marvell of the Restoration, though even here his verse is marred by lapses into the commonplace, and by his besetting infirmity of an inability to finish with effect, leaving off like a speaker who sits down rather from the failure of his voice than the exhaustion of his theme. ”

“ As a huge glacier takes longer to melt than a small one, the quaint and involved periods of the Elizabethan pulpit stood out longer than ordinary prose against the disintegrating influence of seventeenth century taste, and while the new movement was triumphant in most branches of literature, it in general only affected the style of the sermon so far as to chasten and mellow it, leaving it still that sonorous dignity and that flavour of the antique with which stately and impressive eloquence can rarely dispense. ”

“ Much space has here been given to Pepys, and not unreasonably, for his will be to all ages the classical model of the diary, and a model to which not only no one ever will attain, but to which no one will endeavour to attain. Such transparent candour and artless naïveté will hardly in any future age of the world be found united to his parts and knowledge. He is as supreme in his own sphere as Milton in his; and another Milton is more likely to appear than another Pepys. ”

“ It seemed then a highly desirable thing to bring these two classics together, and Dryden was perfectly competent to do whatever was expected of him. He would hardly have succeeded so well with the Greek writers, even had his knowledge of the language been more extensive; but he was well qualified to reproduce the more distinctive qualities of Roman poetry, its dignity, sometimes rising into majesty, its manly sense, its vehemence, pregnancy, and terseness. ”

“ So great an endowment is genius, that neither the effect produced nor the fame achieved by all the eloquent and learned divines of Charles II.’s age can be for an instant compared to the achievement of a poor and almost illiterate mechanic, whom Macaulay classes with Milton as one of the only two men of that period—he might have excepted Thomas Burnet—to whom had been vouchsafed any considerable measure of imagination. ”

“ And these qualities were aided by the otherwise objectionable form selected by the poet. His blank-verse plays, far superior as works of art, contain few such eloquent passages as his rhyming tragedies. Rhyme helped him on, as a riderless runaway horse is spurred by the thunder of his own hoofs. Even where his thought is poor, its poverty is veiled by the brilliancy of the diction—a brilliancy which he could hardly have attained by the use of any other form ”

“ His praise of trimming, which to more fiery spirits must have seemed an ignoble policy, rings with the eloquence and passion of the most genuine conviction:
‘Our Trimmer adores the Goddess Truth, though in all ages she has been scurvily used, as well as those that worshipped her. ’Tis of late become such a ruining virtue that mankind seems to be agreed to commend and avoid it; yet the want of practice, which repeals the other laws, has no influence upon the law of truth, because it has root in heaven, and an intrinsic value in itself that can never be impaired. ”

“ It renounces all pretence to nature, reason, and probability; on the other hand, it delights with a crowd of striking sentiments and images, and enchains the attention with perpetual bustle and variety. It is to one of Shakespeare’s plays as a bit of shining glass is to a plant of which every fibre is the creation of a natural law. ”

“ Burnet’s mind was the mind of a poet; he had just enough science to misguide him, and more than enough learning to gloss over the vagaries of his science. He is quite as much at home in expounding the catastrophe of the future, the final conflagration, as the watery catastrophe of which he believes the traces to be visible everywhere around him. ”

“ A nation, and especially one that is powerful, cannot recede from its own right, as a private man, from the knowledge of his own weakness, and inability to defend himself, must come under the protection of a greater power than his own. The strength of a nation is not in the magistrate, but the strength of the magistrate is in the nation. The wisdom, industry, and valour of a prince may add to the glory and greatness of a nation, but the foundation and substance will always be in itself. ”

“ He was one of that hopelessly inconsistent class of persons, the believers in the divine right of a republic as the sole form of political institution consistent with reason, who in the same breath assert and take away the nation’s right to choose its own form of government by forbidding its exercise unless the form has the allowance of a theory impersonated in themselves. On the principle of popular sovereignty, no form of government could be more legitimate than the Restoration monarchy, which, nevertheless, Ludlow was always seeking to overthrow. ”

“ He has nothing of the passion which sometimes raises Congreve so near to the confines of tragedy, nor has he the airy gaiety of Farquhar; but his animal spirits are abundant and unforced, and his humour has a true Flemish exuberance. His characters are always lively and well discriminated, but the only type he can be said to have created is the model fop, Lord Foppington in The Relapse, and even he is partly borrowed from Etheredge’s Sir Fopling Flutter. He is nevertheless a most perfect portrait, and gives real literary distinction to what would otherwise have been a mere comedy of intrigue. ”

“ There is sufficient evidence that even Shakespeare was by no means indifferent to the good opinion of Elizabeth and James, but neither of these sovereigns was sufficiently the drama’s patron to be the drama’s legislator. It was otherwise with Charles II., a man of wit, taste, and polish, inaccessible to the deeper emotions of humanity, and without a grain of poetry in his composition. Such a man must have found the Elizabethan drama intolerable. ”

“ The Anglo-Spanish drama soon disappeared, and its place in serious dramatic literature was taken by a genre most intimately associated with the name of Dryden, its most brilliant practitioner, and upon whose desertion it crumbled into dust.
Dryden himself has told us in few words what he understands by an heroic play, and the definition exempts him from much of the criticism to which he might otherwise have been held liable: ‘An heroic play ought to be an imitation, in little, of an heroic poem.’ In other words, it must have an epical element as well as a dramatic. ”

“ Those of Pepys, somehow, always seem worthy of being perpetuated. However trivial they may sometimes be, they are saved by the writer’s admirable manner, and the contagious earnestness of his conviction that they are in truth of deep concern. The reader, moreover, is continually exercised by the problem whether his author is really aware of the display he is making of himself. If he is, he is a miracle of courage; if not, his obtuseness is equally extraordinary. The Diary, besides, is no less admirable as a delineation of the macrocosm than of the microcosm. ”

“ Youth is generally the most affluent season of poetical activity; and those poets whose claim to inspiration is the most unimpeachable—Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley—have irradiated their early writings with flashes of genius which their maturer skill hardly enabled them to eclipse. This cannot be said of Dryden, who of our great poets, unless Pope be an exception, probably owed least to inspiration and most to pains and practice. ”

“ By so much as the chief personages are inferior to their exemplars, by so much also is the puny, starved action of Dryden’s tragedy, restricted to one day and seven characters, inferior to the opulence of Shakespeare’s, ranging over the Roman world, crowded with personages, and gathering up every trait from Plutarch that could contribute picturesqueness to its prodigality of incident and sentiment. ”

“ Violent indeed is the transition from John Bunyan to Aphra Behn, but in fact the living fiction of the age is almost summed up in these two names. But for the demonstration of the contrary afforded by the state of French literature since 1830, one would almost have been inclined to formulate it as a maxim that the drama and the novel cannot flourish together. The almost utter barrenness of the Restoration age in the latter class of literature is certainly very remarkable. All needful conditions seemed present in a teeming national life, clever writers, and a public that craved to be amused. ”

“ The intrigue by which Dolabella is made to excite Antony’s jealousy is more worthy of comedy than of heroic tragedy, besides being inconsistent with the manly character of its promoter, Ventidius. This gallant veteran is indeed a fine creation; too fine, for he sometimes seems to eclipse Antony and Cleopatra both, and assumes more prominence in the action than Shakespeare would have allowed him. Alexas is the hasty and much marred outline of a character which might have been hardly less impressive had Dryden been at the pains to work out the conception adumbrated in the first act. ”

“ Poetry makes melody, not melody poetry; and the only explanation is, that the age preceding that of the Restoration was poetical, and the Restoration age was prosaic. It could not well have been otherwise if, as all critics agree, the special literary mission of the Restoration period was to prune the luxuriance of English prose, and by introducing conciseness, perspicuity, and logical order, to render it a fit instrument for narrative, reasoning, and the despatch of business. ”

“ Much might be said in censure or compassion of his lamentably distorted views of divine things; but one thing cannot be said: there is not from first to last the slightest symptom of cant. The book is more sincere than Rousseau’s Confessions, but could not, like that book, have helped a Carlyle or a George Eliot to learn that there was something in them. As Pilgrim’s Progress may be termed a prosaic Divine Comedy, so might the Bunyan of Grace Abounding rank as a prosaic Augustine, but an Augustine without a Monica. With the rarest exceptions, self is its beginning, middle, and end ”

“ Impartiality is the last virtue to be expected from a busy actor in a troubled age, but Burnet approaches it as nearly as can with any reason be demanded. It is hardly in human nature that he should be entirely fair to adversaries by whom he had himself been maligned, but his intention of being so is very apparent. The most impartial and generally the most valuable portion of his work is his narrative up to the Revolution. ”

“ In the former particular the Restoration dramatists compare not unfavourably with their predecessors, always excepting Shakespeare; they fail not as dramatists, but as poets. The whole Elizabethan drama is steeped in an atmosphere of poetry. To say nothing of its chief representatives, take up such satires as The Return from Parnassus, or such merely occasional pieces as the academical play on Timon which preceded Shakespeare’s, and you will not doubt that you are reading the work of a poet. ”

“ They exhibit the steady advance of a slow, strong, sure mind from rudimentary conceptions to as just views of the requisites of dramatic poetry as could well be attained in an age encumbered with venerable fallacies. Dryden’s manly sense, homely sagacity, and piercing shrewdness, break through many trammels, as when, in the preface to All for Love, he vindicates his breach of the conventions of the French stage. In that to Troilus and Cressida he compares Shakespeare with Fletcher, and pronounces decidedly in favour of the former, a preference far from universal in his day. ”