Among My Books, First Series | Page 9

the
advantage that he wrote them to please himself. His contemporary, Dr.
Heylin, said of French cooks, that "their trade was not to feed the belly,
but the palate." Dryden was a great while in learning this secret, as
available in good writing as in cookery. He strove after it, but his
thoroughly English nature, to the last, would too easily content itself
with serving up the honest beef of his thought, without regard to
daintiness of flavor in the dressing of it.[15] Of the best English poetry,
it might be said that it is understanding aërated by imagination. In
Dryden the solid part too often refused to mix kindly with the leaven,
either remaining lumpish or rising to a hasty puffiness. Grace and
lightness were with him much more a laborious achievement than a
natural gift, and it is all the more remarkable that he should so often
have attained to what seems such an easy perfection in both. Always a
hasty writer,[16] he was long in forming his style, and to the last was
apt to snatch the readiest word rather than wait for the fittest. He was
not wholly and unconsciously poet, but a thinker who sometimes lost
himself on enchanted ground and was transfigured by its touch. This
preponderance in him of the reasoning over the intuitive faculties, the
one always there, the other flashing in when you least expect it,
accounts for that inequality and even incongruousness in his writing
which makes one revise his judgment at every tenth page. In his prose
you come upon passages that persuade you he is a poet, in spite of his
verses so often turning state's evidence against him as to convince you
he is none. He is a prose-writer, with a kind of Aeolian attachment. For
example, take this bit of prose from the dedication of his version of
Virgil's Pastorals, 1694: "He found the strength of his genius betimes,
and was even in his youth preluding to his Georgicks and his Aeneis.
He could not forbear to try his wings, though his pinions were not
hardened to maintain a long, laborious flight; yet sometimes they bore
him to a pitch as lofty as ever he was able to reach afterwards. But
when he was admonished by his subject to descend, he came down
gently circling in the air and singing to the ground, like a lark
melodious in her mounting and continuing her song till she alights, still
preparing for a higher flight at her next sally, and tuning her voice to
better music." This is charming, and yet even this wants the ethereal
tincture that pervades the style of Jeremy Taylor, making it, as Burke

said of Sheridan's eloquence, "neither prose nor poetry, but something
better than either." Let us compare Taylor's treatment of the same
image: "For so have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass and
soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven and
climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back by the loud
sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and
inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest than it could
recover by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings, till the
little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm
was over, and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing as
if it had learned music and motion of an angel as he passed sometimes
through the air about his ministries here below." Taylor's fault is that
his sentences too often smell of the library, but what an open air is here!
How unpremeditated it all seems! How carelessly he knots each new
thought, as it comes, to the one before it with an and, like a girl making
lace! And what a slidingly musical use he makes of the sibilants with
which our language is unjustly taxed by those who can only make them
hiss, not sing! There are twelve of them in the first twenty words,
fifteen of which are monsyllables. We notice the structure of Dryden's
periods, but this grows up as we read. It gushes, like the song of the
bird itself,--
"In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."
Let us now take a specimen of Dryden's bad prose from one of his
poems. I open the "Annus Mirabilis" at random, and hit upon this:--
'Our little fleet was now engaged so far, That, like the swordfish in the
whale, they fought. The combat only seemed a civil war, Till through
their bowels we our passage wrought.'
Is this Dryden, or Sternhold, or Shadwell, those Toms who made him
say that "dulness was fatal to the name of Tom"? The natural history