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Dryden the Public Writer, 1660-1685
By George McFadden PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06350-8
CHAPTER 1
DRYDEN'S EARLY ATTITUDES TOWARD POLITICS AND THE HEROIC
I. THE EARLY VERSE
BECAUSE some members of Dryden's family had antiroyalist or Puritan associations, his early political sentiments have often been guessed at, with results in direct conflict with the evidence of his own writing. The boy John left his Northamptonshire home very early in his teens, on a King's Scholarship to Westminster School in London. There he lived for several highly formative years under the influence of the staunchly royalist master, Dr. Richard Busby. When King Charles I was executed in 1649, John Dryden was in his last year at Westminster; and as the King mounted the scaffold, Dryden and the other Westminster boys were assembled in prayer for him only a short distance away.
Shortly after, in his earliest printed poem, Dryden expressed warm royalist feeling coupled with a sense of the heroic. "Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings" appeared during the year of regicide in a memorial volume that drew contributions from a number of Westminster boys. In Dryden's poem Hastings (he was nineteen, the poet's age, at his death) is "this hero." The Civil War is "the nation's sin" — only so loathsome a crime could cause Heaven to remove the promising youth by so horrid an agency as the blisters of smallpox:
Who, Rebel-like, with their own Lord at strife,
Thus made an Insurrection 'gainst his life.
(61-62)
The anti-Civil War sentiment is as typical as the figure of speech — an early example of the poet's weakness for all-too-concrete comparisons between the physical and the psychic. The royalism is obvious in the metaphorical allusion, which makes monarchy part of the healthy order of nature.
The same theme of opposition to the Civil War and its promoters runs through the Heroic Stanzas for Cromwell's funeral (1658), which uses the stanza form introduced eight years before in Sir William Davenant's heroic poem, Gondibert. War is "our consumption"; Cromwell "fought to end our fighting." "Peace was the prize of all his toils and care." He deposed Mars (not Charles!), and "arms to gowns made yield." Further, he compelled the turbulent House of Commons to a sullen compliance, which persists still: "No civil broils have since his death arose." Cromwell too is "heroic" — an example
... to show
How strangely high endeavours may be blest,
Where Piety and valour joyntly goe.
(147-148)
This poem is an early instance, the most unlucky one so far as the poet was concerned, of Dryden's encomiastic manner. This praise of Cromwell became a reproach often thrown at him after the Restoration. Yet, as with Dryden's praise in general, this panegyric is both critically selective and strongly tendentious. Cromwell, he says, was old when power came to him unsought, too old to make the rash mistakes of youth, and too sincere to drag out the war for his own glory. So much for internal English affairs; the poet quickly moves abroad. Oliver Cromwell exacted tribute from greedy Holland (an early indication of Dryden's lifelong dislike of the Dutch) and kept all Europe in awe: "He made us freemen of the continent" (113). Finally, he extended English commerce, a theme already dear to the poet's heart as these fine lines give witness:
By his command we boldly crost the Line
And bravely fought where Southern Stans arise,
We trac'd the farre-fetchd Gold unto the mine
And that which brib'd our fathers made our prize.
(121-124)
Also important in its own way is the poet's theoretical basis for making a hero out of Cromwell. His heroic virtue was to understand and handle men as an artist does in a history painting, by creative intuition:
When absent, yet we conquer'd in his right;
For though some meaner Artist's skill were shown
In mingling colours, or in placing light,
Yet still the faire Designment was his own.
For from all tempers he could service draw;
The worth of each with its alloy he knew;
And as the Confident of Nature saw
How she Complexions did divide and brew.
Or he their single vertues did survay
By intuition in his own large brest,
Where all the rich Idea's of them lay,
That were the rule and measure to the rest.
(93-104)
This vision of the hero's intuitive sense of design is quite the same as Dryden's more famous praise of Shakespeare: "he was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily...." He already draws the contrast between the "lucky" inward look of genius and the calculating observation of art that he was to apply to the disadvantage of Jonson. Dryden, it is clear from the start, was one of those grateful souls who feel admiration keenly, as an intense pleasure. Yet the admiration he expresses seldom lacks control. His favorable comments on Cromwell refer to abilities and successes admitted (grudgingly, and along with some vicious innuendo) even by Clarendon in his hostile character of the Protector in the History of the Rebellion.
There seems no reason to doubt that in these early years Dryden regarded the exemplary hero not as a mere literary concept but as a valid basis for practical English politics. If the nation's leader were to be, instead of a vigorous usurper, an hereditary monarch, then, lest his virtue be "poison'd soon as born / With the too early thoughts of being King," it would be the poet's function to hold before his prince the heroic ideal and stimulate him to rise to it. This is what Dryden does in Astrcea Redux, his poem of welcome to Charles II, written immediately after the Restoration (May 1660). Recounting the exile's deprivations, he projects as a logical conclusion from them the wise future conduct of the King:
Inur'd to suffer ere he came to raigne
No rash procedure will his actions stain.
(87-88)
Dryden, in fact, sees Charles as a Prince Hal on the threshold of self-vindication and regal greatness. He is one who, in his exile,
... viewing Monarchs secret Arts of sway
A Royal Factor for their Kingdomes lay.
(77-78)
The suggestion is that Louis XIV will play the Hotspur to Charles's Hal, a most sanguine one indeed, but useful to save face, for England was already aware of "the long-grown wounds of ... intemperance" in Charles while he lived as a pensioner of Louis. A pleasing hope, to "exchange / His glorious deeds for my indignities," as Prince Hal tells his father, arguing, through the image Dryden picked up, that
Percy is but my factor, good my lord,
To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf.
(I Hen. TV, in. ii. 145-148)
Nevertheless it was an image that had some historical meaning. Dryden's program for Charles is that of the ideal Shakespearean king who preserves peace at home by fighting abroad. Like Henry V Charles will bind up the wounds of hateful Civil War through foreign conquest:
Some lazy Ages lost in sleep and ease
No action leave to busie Chronicles;
Such whose supine felicity but makes
In story Chasmes, in Epoche's mistakes;
O're whom Time gently shakes his wings of Down
Till with his silent sickle they are mown:
Such is not Charles his too too active age,
Which govern'd by the wild distemper'd rage
Of some black Star infecting all the Skies,
Made him at his own cost like Adam wise.
(105-114)
Already, one of Dryden's favorite images, the Fall in the Garden, suggests Charles's awareness of hard reality by its reference to Adam and his tasting the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, at the same time as it acknowledges the lost innocence of the King.
His disapproval of the Rump Parliament agrees with what he wrote in the Heroic Stanzas to Cromwell, but here, not surprisingly, his words are much stronger. He commends the General, "whom Providence design'd to loose / Those real bonds false freedom did impose," for concealing his intentions from the Rump:
To scape their eyes whom guilt had taught to fear,
And guard with caution that polluted nest
Whence Legion twice before was dispossest,
Once sacred house which when they enter'd in
They thought the place could sanctifie a sin....
Suffer'd to live, they are like Helots set
A vertuous shame within us to beget.
(180-184; 205-206)
The same idea of a national sin had appeared in the Hastings Ode of 1649. In the later poem we have the additional suggestion of a double profanation — the murder of an anointed king and the abuse of the institution of Parliament, honored through the centuries at Westminster. The poet looks for a cleansing of the "sacred house" as the Helots of the Rump are ousted; Parliament itself, however, figures in its full ancient dignity as a part of his vision of the restored nation. Continuity with the past, rather than a break with it, is Dryden's ideal in politics, as he will soon profess it to be in poetry.
Still concerned for the spread of English trade, and still hostile to the Dutch competitors, Dryden marvels that Charles should have embarked for England at the beach of Scheveline, and that "Batavia made / So rich amends for our impoverish'd Trade." In a mixture of irony and hyperbole he comments, "True Sorrow, Holland to regret a King." The entire peroration, beginning "And welcome now (Great Monarch) to your own," and ending in the cry of prophetic joy, "Oh Happy Age!" with which the poet acclaims the end of barbarism in a "joint growth of Armes and Arts" under a new Augustus, presents a highly idealized version of what in fact did come into being as the British Empire:
Our Nation with united Int'rest blest
Not now content to poize, shall sway the rest.
Abroad your Empire shall no Limits know,
But like the Sea in boundless Circles flow.
Your much lov'd Fleet shall with a wide Command
Besiege the petty Monarchs of the land.
(296-301)
Lest Dryden's vision of empire make him out a jingo before the fact, it must be said that the rest of Astræa Redux presents the picture of a king who is much too mild to play the role of conqueror. Clarendon's History of the Rebellion makes it clear that Charles Fs unwillingness to deal severely with his opponents had cost him his crown and his life, and cost England twenty years of anarchy, war, and autocratic oppression. Dryden accepts this uneasy parallel, but hopes for the best in lines that have a remarkable significance and foreshadow a major development of his own sensibility:
But you, whose goodness your discent doth show,
Your Heav'nly Parentage and earthly too;
By that same mildness which your Fathers Crown
Before did ravish, shall secure your own.
Not ty'd to rules of Policy, you find
Revenge less sweet then a forgiving mind....
Your Pow'r to Justice doth submit your Cause,
Your goodness only is above the Laws;
(256-261; 275-276)
The beginning of this passage shows the extent to which Dryden was a believer in divine right, and the extent to which he was not. Charles is God's anointed, as such his parentage is in heaven; yet the King's personal link with God is not in his royal power — which is subject to earthly law — but in his mercy or goodness, which alone is above the "rigid letter" of the law. The poet sees clearly that Charles's mercy, like his father's, is impolitic ("not tied to rules of policy" is his tactful way of putting it). He nevertheless puts his faith in the grateful response of a happy and united nation and hopes that the charm of Charles II's "life and blest example" of mercy (317) will win the hearts of all the people for the King. He counts on their loyalty and grateful affection — in a word, he counts on sentiment as a political force.
As everyone knows, Good King Charles continued to be kind, but his people were far from being united in gratitude to him — or in anything else. The honeymoon of May, 1660, that brought with it Charles Stuart and the flowers, expired rather soon. By coronation day, April 23, 1661, it was no longer true that
At home the hateful names of Parties cease
And factious Souls are weary'd into peace.
(312-313)
The deserving Old Cavaliers were not being rewarded for their loyalty, and the new servants of the Crown, such as Pepys, were experiencing the first qualms of what soon became a complete disillusionment with the King's capacity to get the business of the nation done. Awareness of their misgivings did not, of course, prevent Dryden and the rest of the poets from celebrating the anointing. Yet it is evident in To His Sacred Majesty, A Panegyrick on His Coronation that the best is being made of a rather disappointing case. Looking over Charles's first year of power, Dryden could point to very little accomplishment. Sedition, and the zealots who warmed it, he says, are not being subjected to the laws, but to the goodness, calmness, and patience of the King, and above all, to his short memory:
Among our crimes oblivion may be set,
But 'tis our Kings perfection to forget.
(87-88)
Charles has already indicated that the iron of a Caesar is alloyed in his nature by a paternal softness. He ventures his life like Julius; not in conquest, however, but on his private yacht; he builds like Augustus, but so far only a canal for his ducks. The poet avoids such mean terms and the punctured expectations they would bring to mind, and doggedly insists still that Charles is "born to command the mistress of the seas," and that his "pleasures serve for our defense," but these are slender gleanings; as he would need to do for thirty-five years, Dryden is using the panegyrist's chiaroscuro to set things in a good light.
What must be recognized (how seldom it has been!) is the selective and projective nature of Dryden's praise, in the Coronation Ode as elsewhere. We have lost the taste for praise, which is the outgrowth of generosity, preferring the forthright acknowledgment of merit, which is a vindication of justice and of rights we all share in and hope to rise by. An age that understood praise knew that there has to be something supererogatory in it, especially for kings and great persons. These, accustomed to the odor of incense in the air they breathed every day, required a supercharged draught before they could take a special pleasure in it. Informal as he was, Charles, like all the great, desired his favors to be received with extraordinary signs of gratitude — and not actual favors only, but possible ones as well. Such praise could go to almost any length without being overdone, provided it had some reference to reality and did not run so counter to it as to suggest irony, conscious or unconscious. Dryden's practice is to give full credit, and overflowing, for genuine good qualities (or good intentions) that the person exhibits, and further to imply the possession of qualities the person ought to have, according to the poet's hopeful idea of his role. Evelyn spoke to this point in defending a dedication he wrote to Clarendon: "greate persons, & such as are in place to doe greate & noble things, whatever their other defects may be, are to be panegyrized into the culture of those vertues, without which 'tis to be suppos'd they had neuer arriv'd to a power of being able to encourage them. ... nor is it properly adulation, but a civilitie due to their characters." Where Dryden has reason to be dissatisfied, he resorts to charitable imputation:
A noble Emulation heats your breast,
And your own fame now robbs you of your rest;
Good actions still must be maintain'd with good....
(75-77)
The truth here is that Charles passes little time in sleep; the imputation, that he is nobly concerned for his good name. A very proper suggestion — it is not Dryden's fault that Charles was up most nights drinking and gambling, or making love in the Whitehall apartments of Barbara Palmer, newly made Lady Castlemaine. A king with a tender conscience would read these lines as a reproof. What they truly were was a gentle reminder of how nobility is defined, in case the subject of the poem might deign to be taught the lesson.
In the Life of Pope, Dr. Johnson applauds Pope's wisdom or good fortune in avoiding merely occasional or commendatory verses. The privilege to select his own topics and publish in his own good time was never enjoyed by Dryden. He could and did, however, choose among occasions and especially among dedicatees for his poems, and if we look over his work as a whole we discover, not only a recurrent pattern of themes, but a remarkably consistent series of addresses to the same kinds of people for the same purposes, from 1649 to 1700. Today these addresses are notorious for extravagant flattery — because, of all the dedications written in the latter half of the seventeenth century, only Dryden's are read today; the dedications of others (Thomas Shadwell for example) are more flattering, not less. Almost none of Dryden's encomia lacks its own special mission, either literary or political — usually both. The normal function of one of his dedications, in fact, is to give exact direction to the play or poem that follows, and to zero it in, so to speak, on the target at which he aimed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dryden the Public Writer, 1660-1685 by George McFadden. Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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