The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II | Page 5

flies best at the highest game; but even in dealing with Settles and Shadwells, he can be as felicitous as he is fierce. No satire in the world contains lines more exquisitely inverted, more ingeniously burlesqued, more artfully turned out of their apparently proper course, like rays at once refracted and cooled, than those which thus ominously panegyrise Shadwell:--
"His brows thick fogs, instead of glories grace,?And lambent dulness play'd about his face.?As Hannibal did to the altar come,?Sworn by his sire, a mortal foe to Rome;?So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain,?That he till death true dulness would maintain."
Better still the following picture, in imitation of the Homeric or Miltonic manner:--
"The Sire then shook the honours of his head,?And from his brows damps of oblivion shed?Full on the filial dulness--long he stood?Repelling from his breast the raging God."
What inimitable irony in this epithet! The God of dulness raging! A stagnant pool in a passion; a canal insane; a _mouton enrag��_, as the French says; or a snail in a tumultuous state of excitement, were but types of the satirical ideas implied in these words. What a description of labouring nonsense--of the Pythonic genius of absurdity, panting and heaving on his solemnly ridiculous tripod!
The language and versification of Dryden have been praised, and justly. His style is worthy of a still more powerful and original vein of genius than his own. It is a masculine, clear, elastic, and varied diction, fitted to express all feelings, save the deepest; all fancies, save the subtlest; all passions, save the loftiest; all moods of mind, save the most disinterested and rapt; to represent incidents, however strange; characters, however contradictory to each other; shades of meaning, however evasive: and to do all this, as if it were doing nothing, in point of ease, and as if it were doing everything in point of felt and rejoicing energy. No poetic style since can, in such respects, be compared to Dryden's. Pope's to his is feeble--and Byron's forced. He can say the strongest things in the swiftest way, and the most felicitous expressions seem to fall unconsciously from his lips. Had his matter, you say, but been equal to his manner, his thought in originality and imaginative power but commensurate with the boundless quantity, and no less admirable quality, of his words! His versification deserves a commendation scarcely inferior. It is "all ear," if we may so apply an expression of Shakspeare's. No studied rules,--no elaborate complication of harmonies,--it is the mere sinking and swelling of the wave of his thought as it moves onward to the shore of his purpose. And, as in the sea, there are no furrows absolutely isolated from each other, but each leans on, or melts into each, and the subsidence of the one is the rise of the other--so with the versification of his better poetry. The beginning of the "Hind and Panther," we need not quote; but it will be remembered, as a good specimen of that peculiar style of running the lines into one another, and thereby producing a certain free and noble effect, which the uniform tinkle of Pope and his school is altogether unable to reach; a style which has since been copied by some of our poets--by Churchill, by Cowper, and by Shelley. The lines of the artificial school, on the other hand, may be compared to rollers, each distinct from each other,--each being in itself a whole,--but altogether forming none. Pope, says Hazlitt, has turned Pegasus into a rocking-horse.
We are, perhaps, nearly right when we call Dryden the most eloquent and rhetorical of English poets. He bears in this respect an analogy to Lucretius among the Romans, who, inferior in polish to Virgil, was incomparably more animated and energetic in style; who exhibited, besides, traits of lofty imagination rarely met with in Virgil, and never in Dryden; and who equalled the English poet in the power of reasoning in verse, and setting the severe abstractions of metaphysical thought to music. With the Shakspeares, Chaucers, Spensers, Miltons, Byrons, Wordsworths, and Coleridges, the Dii majorum gentium of the Poetic Pantheon of Britain, Dryden ranks not, although towering far above the Moores, Goldsmiths, Gays, and Priors. He may be classed with a middle, but still high order, in which we find the names of Scott, as a poet, Johnson, Pope, Cowper, Southey, Crabbe, and two or three others, who, while all excelling Dryden in some qualities, are all excelled by him in others, and bulk on the whole about as largely as he on the public eye.
We come to make a few remarks, in addition to some we have already incidentally made, on Dryden's separate works. And first of his Lyrics. His songs, properly so called, are lively, buoyant, and elastic; yet, compared to those of