Among My Books, First Series | Page 7

very curious to trace through his different prefaces the gradual opening
of his eyes to the causes of the solitary pre-eminence of Shakespeare.
At first he is sensible of an attraction towards him which he cannot
explain, and for which he apologizes, as if it were wrong. But he feels
himself drawn more and more strongly, till at last he ceases to resist
altogether, and is forced to acknowledge that there is something in this
one man that is not and never was anywhere else, something not to be
reasoned about, ineffable, divine; if contrary to the rules, so much the
worse for them. It may be conjectured that Dryden's Puritan
associations may have stood in the way of his more properly poetic
culture, and that his early knowledge of Shakespeare was slight. He
tells us that Davenant, whom he could not have known before he
himself was twenty-seven, first taught him to admire the great poet. But
even after his imagination had become conscious of its prerogative, and
his expression had been ennobled by frequenting this higher society,
we find him continually dropping back into that sermo pedestris which
seems, on the whole, to have been his more natural element. We always
feel his epoch in him, that he was the lock which let our language down
from its point of highest poetry to its level of easiest and most gently
flowing prose. His enthusiasm needs the contagion of other minds to
arouse it; but his strong sense, his command of the happy word, his wit,
which is distinguished by a certain breadth and, as it were, power of
generalization, as Pope's by keenness of edge and point, were his,
whether he would or no. Accordingly, his poetry is often best and his
verse more flowing where (as in parts of his version of the twenty-ninth

ode of the third book of Horace) he is amplifying the suggestions of
another mind.[14] Viewed from one side, he justifies Milton's remark
of him, that "he was a good rhymist, but no poet." To look at all sides,
and to distrust the verdict of a single mood, is, no doubt, the duty of a
critic. But how if a certain side be so often presented as to thrust
forward in the memory and disturb it in the effort to recall that total
impression (for the office of a critic is not, though often so
misunderstood, to say guilty or not guilty of some particular fact) which
is the only safe ground of judgment? It is the weight of the whole man,
not of one or the other limb of him, that we want. Expende Hannibalem.
Very good, but not in a scale capacious only of a single quality at a
time, for it is their union, and not their addition, that assures the value
of each separately. It was not this or that which gave him his weight in
council, his swiftness of decision in battle that outran the forethought of
other men,--it was Hannibal. But this prosaic element in Dryden will
force itself upon me. As I read him, I cannot help thinking of an ostrich,
to be classed with flying things, and capable, what with leap and flap
together, of leaving the earth for a longer or shorter space, but loving
the open plain, where wing and foot help each other to something that
is both flight and run at once. What with his haste and a certain dash,
which, according to our mood, we may call florid or splendid, he seems
to stand among poets where Rubens does among painters,--greater,
perhaps, as a colorist than an artist, yet great here also, if we compare
him with any but the first.
We have arrived at Dryden's thirty-second year, and thus far have
found little in him to warrant an augury that he was ever to be one of
the great names in English literature, the most perfect type, that is, of
his class, and that class a high one, though not the highest. If Joseph de
Maistre's axiom, _Qui n'a pas vaincu à trente ans, ne vaincra jamais_,
were true, there would be little hope of him, for he has won no battle
yet. But there is something solid and doughty in the man, that can rise
from defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, when we
are able to choose our position better, and the sun is at our back.
Hitherto his performances have been mainly of the obbligato sort, at
which few men of original force are good, least of all Dryden, who had
always something of stiffness in his strength. Waller had praised the
living Cromwell in perhaps the manliest verses he ever wrote,--not very

manly, to be sure, but really elegant, and, on the