Among My Books, First Series | Page 2

feeling rather than conviction that, in poetry, substance
and form are but manifestations of the same inward life, the one fused
into the other in the vivid heat of their common expression.

Wordsworth could never wholly shake off the influence of the century
into which he was born. He began by proposing a reform of the ritual,
but it went no further than an attempt to get rid of the words of Latin
original where the meaning was as well or better given in derivatives of
the Saxon. He would have stricken out the "assemble" and left the
"meet together." Like Wesley, he might be compelled by necessity to a
breach of the canon; but, like him, he was never a willing schismatic,
and his singing robes were the full and flowing canonicals of the
church by law established. Inspiration makes short work with the usage
of the best authors and ready-made elegances of diction; but where
Wordsworth is not possessed by his demon, as Molière said of
Corneille, he equals Thomson in verbiage, out-Miltons Milton in
artifice of style, and Latinizes his diction beyond Dryden. The fact was,
that he took up his early opinions on instinct, and insensibly modified
them as he studied the masters of what may be called the Middle Period
of English verse.[2] As a young man, he disparaged Virgil ("We talked
a great deal of nonsense in those days," he said when taken to task for it
later in life); at fifty-nine he translated three books of the Aeneid, in
emulation of Dryden, though falling far short of him in everything but
closeness, as he seems, after a few years, to have been convinced.
Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the true founder of the
modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethan authority save Milton,
whose own English was formed upon those earlier models. Keats
denounced the authors of that style which came in toward the close of
the seventeenth century, and reigned absolute through the whole of the
eighteenth, as
"A schism, Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, ... who went about
Holding a poor decrepit standard out, Marked with most flimsy mottoes,
and in large The name of one Boileau!"
But Keats had never then[3] studied the writers of whom he speaks so
contemptuously, though he might have profited by so doing. Boileau
would at least have taught him that flimsy would have been an apter
epithet for the standard than for the mottoes upon it. Dryden was the
author of that schism against which Keats so vehemently asserts the
claim of the orthodox teaching it had displaced. He was far more just to
Boileau, of whom Keats had probably never read a word. "If I would
only cross the seas," he says, "I might find in France a living Horace

and a Juvenal in the person of the admirable Boileau, whose numbers
are excellent, whose expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just,
whose language is pure, whose satire is pointed, and whose sense is just.
What he borrows from the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in
coin as good and almost as universally valuable."[4]
Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a hundred and seventy years;
in the second class of English poets perhaps no one stands, on the
whole, so high as he; during his lifetime, in spite of jealousy, detraction,
unpopular politics, and a suspicious change of faith, his pre-eminence
was conceded; he was the earliest complete type of the purely literary
man, in the modern sense; there is a singular unanimity in allowing him
a certain claim to greatness which would be denied to men as famous
and more read,--to Pope or Swift, for example; he is supposed, in some
way or other, to have reformed English poetry. It is now about half a
century since the only uniform edition of his works was edited by Scott.
No library is complete without him, no name is more familiar than his,
and yet it may be suspected that few writers are more thoroughly buried
in that great cemetery of the "British Poets." If contemporary reputation
be often deceitful, posthumous fame may be generally trusted, for it is a
verdict made up of the suffrages of the select men in succeeding
generations. This verdict has been as good as unanimous in favor of
Dryden. It is, perhaps, worth while to take a fresh observation of him,
to consider him neither as warning nor example, but to endeavor to
make out what it is that has given so lofty and firm a position to one of
the most unequal, inconsistent, and faulty writers that ever lived. He is
a curious example of what we often remark of the living, but rarely of
the dead,--that they get credit for what