No. IV.

DRYDEN AND JONSON.

[In the course of his famous offensive-defensive apologia for Ben, Gifford has made an oblique attack on Dryden himself, and a pretty direct one upon Scott, for their respective attitudes towards his idol. I sympathise with Gifford so much in many ways-and not least in the admirable work which he did in this very respect of clearing away traditional folly, and worse than folly, in reference to Jonson-that it is with some reluctance that I can even run the risk of appearing to reflect on his judgment in this matter. But I am more especially bound here to defend Dryden and Dryden's great editor; and the grounds of defence are not wanting. Gifford, indeed, has not, in this special case, displayed the excessive virulence of which he sometimes was guilty. He was not likely to do so either towards the great Tory poet and satirist of the past, whose political opinions he shared, and whose literary manner he had copied as best he could, or towards one of the most important contributors to the Quarterly, with whom also he was in pretty general sympathy. But Gifford could not "take a side" moderately, and, acute as he was, he was apt to be not a little blinded by prejudice for and against. There is a ludicrous instance of this in his notes on The Alchemist, which I do not remember to have seen noticed anywhere. Annotating the word "Bonnibel," he must needs say that "Voltaire was accustomed to call his niece Madame Denis 'Belle-et-Bonne'; to say the truth she had quite as much goodness as beauty, and so had her uncle." There is no lack of things to say against Voltaire. But considering that "Belle-et-Bonne" was not the elderly, ill-conditioned, and ugly Madame Denis at all, but Reine de Varicourt, a young girl, who was really beautiful and really amiable, I rather tremble to think of the manner in which Gifford would have dealt with his own blunder, if it had been somebody else's.

But to business. In referring to Dryden's mention of Ben's later plays-The New Inn, The Magnetic Lady, etc.-as his "dotages," Gifford says truthfully enough that "though they want the freedom and vigour of his early performances, there is no sign of mental imbecility in them." And he goes on to upbraid a "want of generosity" in this "triumph over the poet's

declining years." He breaks out, later in his memoir, with "surprise and sorrow over Scott's references to Jonson in this edition, adding sincere regret at the "blind hatred" of Ben thus shown by "better natures," and so forth; and he returns to the subject again and again in his notes.

Of Scott's part in the matter it is not necessary to say more than that, although he knew and relished Ben he had probably not, at the time of editing Dryden, made a special study of him, and may have incidentally been too much influenced by the slanders which Malone and others, out of mistaken loyalty to Shakespeare, had been in the habit of flinging at Jonson. But the "cankered carle," as Scott himself called his old friend, whether with reference to this matter or not I forget, was scarcely just in imputing want of generosity to Dryden. It would have been most ungenerous if Dryden had used the word "dotage" during Ben's lifetime. But that lifetime had closed when Dryden was six years old, and no hard words were likely to pierce the stone-even the " common pavement stone"whereon the famous "O rare Ben Jonson " was written. As it was, it may be questioned whether Gifford's own ingenious litotes, "wanting the freedom and vigour of his early performances," does not say very much the same thing gingerly in half a score of words which Dryden's phrase says cavalierly in one. But the whole subject of Dryden's attitude to Jonson is an interesting one, and a short handling of it may enable me to give in outline and specimen what the plan of this revision prevents me from giving more fully, a notion of Dryden's critical method and habits.

It is perfectly evident to any careful reader of the two poets, who have perhaps more in common than any two other poets among the Di majores of English verse, that the younger had been an early and a diligent student of the elder. I have eschewed parallel passages in this edition, and I shall only cite here two out of many. The "horns like to choke him" in the "Cocklorrel" song of Jonson's Gipsies' Metamorphosed, appears in Dryden's earliest work. Many years later the odd phrase applied in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel to Settle, the "poet's horse," is as undoubtedly a reminiscence, though probably an unconscious and altered one, of "hourly sits the poet's horse," which occurs in No. lxi. of the Underwoods. Any one who has a taste for such things can multiply them ad infinitum. But both the merits and the defects of Dryden's critical character prevented him from taking up that position of unqualified encomiast which some people seem to think necessary in a critic if he is to escape the charge of "want of generosity." Further, it was a distinct habit of Dryden's to record, so to

speak, his critical progress in his critical deliverances, and altogether (in words which he would have probably accepted) to "decline to be a fool to-day because he had been a fool yesterday." It is therefore easy to produce from his writings instances of at least apparent inconsistency. Nor should I be disposed to deny that some not entirely legitimate influences worked on him in this matter. Although his first comedy is distinctly Jonsonian in scheme, he had early deserted-whether finding in himself no vocation for it or not-the "comedy of humours," and had at least attempted that of incident on the one side and smart dialogue on the other. Long before he actually quarrelled on a different matter with Shadwell, he had set himself in a kind of opposition to that writer, who deliberately took the standpoint of a "grandson" of Ben's. And we see from his remarks on Saint Evremont, ante, pp. 16, 17, that he was a good deal nettled at the preference which that acute and influential judge gave to the Jonsonian humourcomedy and its imitations. Yet we shall be far, I think, from finding any want of fairness or generosity to Jonson, as compared with Jonson's fellows, in his various allusions. Despite Dryden's just and magnificent eulogies of Shakespeare and others, it must never be forgotten that he was a little tainted by that frequent infirmity of not ignoble minds, the idea of progress. He did honestly think, not as a matter of personal conceit, that "we had changed all that" a little for the better— in taste, in "correctness," in art, if not in native genius. I do not know that we ought to regret this, for if it put him in a position not exactly true, it put him in one which is very valuable to us, and which it would not have been easy for us to gain unassisted. Let us see what he seems to have seen from this position.

In the earliest of his elaborate references to the subject, the Essay on Dramatic Poesy, only a bigoted admirer of Ben can find anything with which seriously to quarrel. It is true that the unlucky phrase "dotages" occurs here. But it occurs in the midst of a passage of appreciation, critical, indeed, but anything rather than grudging or hostile, the keynote of which is struck in the same sentences where the offending word comes, by the pronouncement that "he is the most learned and judicious writer which [sic] any theatre ever had." The context, moreover (containing the still more celebrated and early praise, which is also the last word on Shakespeare, and a warm eulogy of Fletcher), upholds the English dramatic school against both French and classic authors, and contains a particular "examen" of the Silent Woman, which is magnificently complimentary. Jonson is again both used as a weapon and complimented as a pattern in

the rather acrimonious dispute between the brothers-in-law, Dryden and Sir Robert Howard, which the Essay brought about. There existed, however, at the time, as we learn, not only from Dryden, but from Shadwell and others, a sort or sect of Jonsonians, some of whom were or pretended to be, if not actually his "sons," frequenters of the Mermaid and other groups where he presided, and who, extolling him above all young writers, naturally irritated, and were irritated by, those younger writers themselves. In the preface to the Mock Astrologer (1671), Dryden tells us that he "has been accused as an enemy of his [Ben's] writings," and argues, truly enough, that this is only because he does not admire Jonson blindly. As often happens, however, in similar cases, he is provoked into justifying the critical side of his appreciations with fresh strictures balanced by fewer praises. And somewhat later I must confess that he does seem to me to have spoken unadvisedly with his lips. The period of the Conquest of Granada was the only one when Dryden can be accused of being a little tête montée, a little off his balance. He was at the height of his besotment with his "new-loved mistress Rhyme"; he had obtained a great popularity for his heroic plays, and was likely to fall into the common mistake of trying to maintain it by depreciating others; his familiarity with Rochester and Dorset and others seems also to have a little disturbed his judgment (Rochester at least was cruelly kind enough to set matters right shortly), and he gave himself the airs of one who frequents better society than taverns and playhouses, and the homely lodgings where, as Shadwell's Oldwit tells us, Fletcher and his friends and his maid made merry, and the maid Joan "had her sack in a beer glass" like the rest. He had, moreover, a touch of that curious and already mentioned literary measles, the notion of "progress" in literature-the idea that the "modern" way is more refined, more cultured, more choice and knowing. This disease always has existed, always will exist; and though men of Dryden's strength generally take it in a milder form than weaklings, they are not wholly exempt from it. The epilogue to the second part of the Conquest of Granada and the Defence of it (from which it is unnecessary to quote, because they should be referred to here) show all these evil influences in full work, and, though they are not devoid of Dryden's usual genius, exhibit his taste and judgment at their very lowest. Some of the criticism is almost a contradiction to the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, and though the peroration of the Defence contains much that is true and redeems what has gone before it to some extent, it is only to some extent.

But this was Dryden's nadir in the matter, and he soon rose

from it. The Prologue to Aurengzebe, 1675, is a magnificent palinode to Shakespeare in particular, and the "greater dead" generally. The extremely interesting essay on the "Grounds. of Criticism in Tragedy," which serves as preface to Troilus and Cressida, and which was printed in 1679, shows Dryden once more as an elaborate critical appreciator of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson alike; and the same may be said of all his later references to the subject. In one of the last, the famous Epistle to Congreve, if that brilliant writer is too much complimented in reference to the three chiefs of the "giant race," the description of the three themselves is admirably true, just, and dutiful.

In short, as I have hinted before, it is necessary, not merely on this but on most critical subjects, to take Dryden as a whole. A born fighter, and apt to be specially enamoured of, or wroth with, the special subject he was defending or attacking, he was apt in individual utterances to be somewhat one-sided. Take these utterances together, and it will be rarely found that they go wrong on the whole.-ED.]

VOL. XVIII.

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