The Age of Dryden. Richard Garnett

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СКАЧАТЬ dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.

      Some few, whose lamp shone brighter, have been led

      From cause to cause, to nature’s sacred head,

      And found that one First Principle must be:

      But what, or who, that universal He;

      Whether some soul, encompassing this ball,

      Unmade, unmoved; yet making, moving all;

      Or various atoms’ interfering dance

      Leap’d into form, the noble work of chance;

      As blindly groped they for a future state,

      As rashly judged of providence and fate;

      But least of all could their endeavours find

      What most concern’d the good of human kind;

      For happiness was never to be found,

      But vanish’d from them like enchanted ground.

      One thought content the good to be enjoy’d;

      This very little accident destroy’d:

      The wiser madmen did for virtue toil,

      A thorny, or, at best, a barren soil:

      Thus anxious thoughts in endless circles roll,

      Without a centre where to fix the soul:

      In this wild maze their vain endeavours end: —

      How can the less the greater comprehend?

      Or finite reason reach infinity?

      For what could fathom God were more than he.’

      Dryden’s next important poem brought obloquy upon him in his own day, and must be perused with mingled feelings in this. Between 1682 and 1687, the date of the publication of The Hind and the Panther, the laureate of the Church of England had, as we have seen, become a Roman Catholic, and most reasonably desired to justify this step to the world. The Court also expected his pen to be drawn in their service, and hence the double purpose which runs through the poem, of vindicating his personal change of conviction and of justifying the political measures to which James had had recourse for establishing the supremacy of his church. All this was perfectly natural; the extraordinary thing is that so great a master of ridicule should have been blind to the ludicrous character of the machinery which he devised to carry out his purpose. The comparison of the true church to the milk-white hind, and of the corrupt church to the beautiful but spotted panther, might have been employed with propriety as an ornament or illustration of the poem, but the endeavour to make it the groundwork of the entire piece is pregnant with absurdity. Animals may very well be introduced as actors in a fiction upon condition that they behave like animals; and their faculties may even be expanded to suit the author’s purpose so long as their exercise is confined to visible and concrete things; but the notion of a pair of quadrupeds discussing the sacraments, tradition, and the infallibility of the Pope, is only fit for burlesque, and constitutes, indeed, a running burlesque upon the poem. Dryden probably took up the idea without sufficient consideration, and when he had made some progress in his work he may well have been too enamoured with the beautiful but preposterous exordium to surrender it to common sense. Perverse and fantastic as is the plan of his poem, none of his works is richer in beauties of detail. ‘In none,’ says Macaulay, ‘can be found passages more pathetic and magnificent, greater ductility and energy of language, or a more pleasing and various music.’ The power of reasoning in rhyme is little inferior to that displayed in Religio Laici, and the narrative character of the piece allows of a diversified variety excluded by the simply didactic character of its predecessor. The invective against Calvinists and Socinians, typified by the wolf and the fox, is an average, and not beyond an average, example of Dryden’s matchless force. Near the end, it will be perceived, he suddenly bethinks himself that, as the apologist of James’s ostensible policy, it is his business to recommend not persecution but toleration, and he caps his objurgation with a passage conceived in a widely different spirit, a severe though unintentional reflection upon the practice of his own church:

      ‘O happy pair, how well you have increased!

      What ills in church and state have you redress’d!

      With teeth, untried, and rudiments of claws,

      Your first essay was on your native laws;

      What though your native kennel still be small,

      Bounded betwixt a puddle and a wall;

      Yet your victorious colonies are sent

      Where the north ocean girds the continent.

      Quicken’d with fire below, your monsters breed

      In fenny Holland, and in fruitful Tweed;

      And, like the first, the last affects to be

      Drawn to the dregs of a democracy.

      As, where in fields the fairy rounds are seen,

      A rank sour herbage rises on the green;

      So, springing where those midnight elves advance,

      Rebellion prints the footsteps of the dance.

      God, like the tyrant of the skies, is placed,

      And kings, like slaves, beneath the crowd debased.

      So fulsome is their food, that flocks refuse

      To bite, and only dogs for physic use.

      As, where the lightning runs along the ground,

      No husbandry can heal the blasting wound;

      Nor bladed grass, nor bearded corn succeeds,

      But scales of scurf and putrefaction breeds;

      Such wars, such waste, such fiery tracks of dearth

      Their zeal has left, and such a teemless earth.

      But, as the poisons of the deadliest kind

      Are to their own unhappy coasts confined;

      As only Indian shades of sight deprive,

      And magic plants will but in Colchos thrive

      So presbytery and pestilential zeal

      Can only flourish in a commonweal.

      From Celtic woods is chased the wolfish crew;

      But ah! some pity e’en to brutes is due;

      Their native walks, methinks, they might enjoy,

      Curb’d of their native malice to destroy.

      Of all the tyrannies on human kind,

      The worst is that which persecutes the mind.

      Let us but weigh at what offence we strike;

      ’Tis but because we cannot think alike.

      In punishing of this, we overthrow

      The laws of nations and of nature too.

      Beasts are the subjects of tyrannic sway,

      Where still the stronger on the weaker prey;

      Man only of a softer mould is made,

      Not for his fellows’ ruin, but their aid;

      Created kind, beneficent and free,

      The noble image of the Deity.’

      Dryden produced yet one more poem in the interest of the Court, his Britannia Rediviva, an official panegyric on the birth of the Prince of Wales, June, 1688. Literature has perhaps no more signal instance of adulation wasted and prediction falsified. Many lines are spirited, but others betray Dryden’s СКАЧАТЬ