The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II | Page 4

within the shield,?The steeds without their riders scour the field;?The knights, unhorsed, on foot renew the fight--?The glittering faulchions cast a gleaming light;?Hauberks and helms are hew'd with many a wound,?Out-spins the streaming blood, and dyes the ground."
This is vigorous and vivid, but is not imaginative or suggestive. It does not carry away the mind from the field to bring back thoughts and images, which shall, so to speak, brood over, and aggravate the general horror. It is, in a word, plain, good painting, but it is not poetry. There is not a metaphor, such as "he laugheth at the shaking of a spear," in it all.
In connexion with this defect in imagination is the lack of natural imagery in Dryden's poetry. Wordsworth, indeed, greatly overcharges the case, when he says (in a letter to Scott), "that there is not a single image from nature in the whole body of his poetry." We have this minute taken up the "Hind and the Panther," and find two images from nature in one page:--
"As where in fields the fairy rounds are seen,?A rank sour herbage rises on the green;?So," &c.
And a few lines down:--
"As where the lightning runs along the ground,?No husbandry can heal the blasting wound."
And some pages farther on occurs a description of Spring, not unworthy of Wordsworth himself; beginning--
"New blossoms flourish and new flowers arise,?As God had been abroad, and walking there,?Had left his footsteps, and reform'd the year."
Still it is true, that, taking his writings as a whole, they are thin in natural images; and even those which occur, are often rather the echoes of his reading, than the results of his observation. And what Wordsworth adds is, we fear, true; in his translation of Virgil, where Virgil can be fairly said to have his eye upon his object, Dryden always spoils the passage. The reason of this, apart from his want of high imaginative sympathy, may be found in his long residence in London; and his lack of that intimate daily familiarity with natural scenes, which can alone supply thorough knowledge, or enkindle thorough love. Nature is not like the majority of other mistresses. Her charms deepen the longer she is known; and he that loves her most warmly, has watched her with the narrowest inspection. She can bear the keenest glances of the microscope, and to see all her glory would exhaust an antediluvian life. The appetite, in her case, "grows with what it feeds on;" but such an appetite was not Dryden's.
Another of his great defects is, in true tenderness of feeling. He has very few passages which can be called pathetic. His Elegies and funeral Odes, such as those on "Mrs Killigrew" and "Eleonora," are eloquent; but they move you to admiration, not to tears. Dryden's long immersion in the pollutions of the playhouses, had combined, with his long course of domestic infelicity, and his employments as a hack author, a party scribe, and a satirist, to harden his heart, to brush away whatever fine bloom of feeling there had been originally on his mind, and to render him incapable of even simulating the softer emotions of the soul. But for the discovered fact, that he was in early life a lover of his relative, Honor Driden, you would have judged him from his works incapable of a pure passion. "Lust hard by Hate," being his twin idols, how could he represent human, far less ethereal love; and how could he touch those springs of holy tears, which lie deep in man's heart, and which are connected with all that is dignified, and all that is divine in man's nature? What could the author of "Limberham" know of love, or the author of "MacFlecknoe" of pity?
Wordsworth, in that admirable letter to which we have repeatedly referred, says, "Whenever his language is poetically impassioned, it is mostly upon unpleasing subjects, such as the follies, vices, and crimes of classes of men, or individuals." This is unquestionable. He never so nearly reaches the sublime, as when he is expressing contempt. He never rises so high, as in the act of trampling. He is a "good hater," and expresses his hatred with a mixture of animus and ease, of fierceness and of trenchant rapidity, which makes it very formidable. He only, as it were, waves off his adversaries disdainfully, but the very wave of his hand cuts like a sabre. His satire is not savage and furious, like Juvenal's; not cool, collected, and infernal, like that of Junius; not rabid and reckless, like that of Swift; and never darkens into the unearthly grandeur of Byron's: but it is strong, swift, dashing, and decisive. Nor does it want deep and subtle touches. His pictures of Shaftesbury and Buckingham are as delicately finished, as they are powerfully conceived. He