Palamon and Arcite | Page 8

gift of five hundred pounds. The
preface to the volume is one of Dryden's best efforts in prose. It is
mainly concerned with critical comment on Chaucer and Boccaccio;
and, though it lacks the accuracy of modern scholarship, it is full of a
keen appreciation of his great forerunners.
The work of Dryden in Palamon and Arcite may seem to us
superfluous, for a well-educated man in the nineteenth century is
familiar with his Chaucer in the original; but in the sixteenth century
our early poets were regarded as little better than barbarians, and their
language was quite unintelligible. It was, therefore, a distinct addition
to the literature of his age when he rescued from oblivion the Knight's
Tale, the first of the Canterbury Tales, and gave it to his world as
Palamon and Arcite.
Here, as in his translations, Dryden catches the spirit of his original and
follows it; but he does not track slavishly in its footprints. In this
particular poem he follows his leader more closely than in some of his
other paraphrases, and the three books in which he divides his Palamon
and Arcite_ scarcely exceed in length the original Knight's Tale_. The
tendency toward diffuse expansion, an excess of diluting epithets,
which became a feature of eighteenth-century poetry, Dryden has
sensibly shunned, and has stuck close to the brisk narrative and pithy
descriptions of Chaucer. If the subject in hand be concrete description,
as in the Temple of Mars, Dryden is at his best, and surpasses his
original; but if the abstract enters, as in the portraiture on the walls, he
expands, and when he expands he weakens. To illustrate:
"The smiler with the knif under the cloke"
has lost force when Dryden stretches it into five verses:
"Next stood Hypocrisy, with holy leer; Soft smiling, and demurely
looking down, But hid the dagger underneath the gown: The

assassinating wife, the household fiend, And far the blackest there, the
traitorfriend."
The anachronisms in the poem are Chaucer's. When he put this story of
Greek love and jealousy and strife into the mouth of his Knight, he was
living in the golden age of chivalry; and he simply transferred its
setting to this chivalrous story of ancient Greece. The arms, the lists,
the combat, the whole environment are those of the England of Edward
III, not the Athens of Theseus. Dryden has left this unchanged,
realizing the charm of its mediaeval simplicity. As Dryden gives it to
us the poem is an example of narrative verse, brisk in its movement,
dramatic in its action, and interspersed with descriptive passages that
stimulate the imagination and satisfy the sense.
Coming as it did in the last years of his life, the poem found him with
his vocabulary fully developed and his versification perfected; and
these are points eminently essential in narrative verse. When Dryden
began his literary career, he had but just left the university, and his
speech smacked somewhat of the pedantry of the classical scholar of
the times. Then came the Restoration with its worship of French phrase
and its liberal importation. His easy-going life as a Bohemian in the
early sixties strengthened his vernacular, and his association with the
wits at Will's Coffee House developed his literary English. A happy
blending of all these elements, governed by his strong common sense,
gave him at maturity a vocabulary not only of great scope, but of
tremendous energy and vitality.
At the time of the production of Palamon and Arcite Dryden had, by
long practice, become an absolute master of the verse he used. As we
have seen, his early work was impregnated with the peculiarities of the
Marinists; and even after the ascendency of French taste at the
Restoration he still dallied with the stanza, and was not free from
conceits. But his work in the heroic drama and in satire had determined
his verse form and developed his ability in its use. In this poem, as in
the bulk of his work, he employs the unenjambed pentameter distich;
that is, a couplet with five accented syllables in each verse and with the
sense terminating with the couplet. Dryden's mastery of this couplet

was marvelous. He did not attain to the perfect polish of Pope a score
of years later, but he possessed more vitality; and to this strength must
be added a fluent grace and a ready sequence which increased the
beauty of the measure and gave to it a nervous energy of movement.
The great danger that attends the use of the distich is monotony; but
Dryden avoided this. By a constant variation of cadence, he threw the
natural pause now near the start, now near the close, and now in the
midst of his verse, and in this way developed a rhythm that never
wearies