Annals Australasia, January-February 2006
Milton could have been forgiven for ordering away so impertinent a petitioner. Instead, he treated Dryden’s request with sardonic amusement: ‘Aye, you may tag my verses, if you will.’ Perhaps he predicted that the result would leave the Thames resolutely damp, as indeed, it did.1 But the very fact that Dryden approached the older man as a suppliant (while enjoying official privileges far beyond anything Milton had secured for himself in his days as bureaucrat to regicides) indicates in itself the progress of Dryden’s own political philosophy, and the nature of his posthumous standing.
For Dryden has never been wholly ignored since his death in 1700; nor has he been roundly derided. Unlike Donne, he did not have to wait three centuries for championship by T.S. Eliot. Unlike various other seventeenth-century figures such as Abraham Cowley, he never dropped out of the canon for good. Unlike Milton, he never became an object of modish execration. Every major nineteenth-century English writer esteemed Dryden; none – except for Sir Walter Scott, who wrote Dryden’s life – seems to have loved him. A few among the longer Dryden satires, usually
Is it too much to hope for a mild increase in both the size and the enthusiasm of Dryden’s audience? It could well be argued that we may, in the early twenty-first century, be experiencing just the right planetary alignment for such a revival. Two Dryden-related Festschriften appeared in, respectively, 2000 and 2004. As a corollary of this, no-one – save those for whom all Dead White Males are Satan’s spawn – hates Dryden enough to want to suppress him. Still, there are three positive reasons, as well as this negative reason, for suspecting that Dryden’s time might come again.
The first is narrowly technical. Only those literary editors whose livelihoods depend on the relevant pretence now imagine that vers libre amounts (in the average practitioner’s hands) to anything more than a peculiarly Orwellian form of slavery. Part of the pleasure in Dryden’s verse comes from the poet’s faultless ear for rhythm and almost faultless ear for vowel sounds. Verse with these merits can only prosper in a cultural environment where, not before time, the confessional chopped-up-prose vacuities of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and John Berryman – ‘three persons in one nature’, as theologians put it – have slipped from the height of vogue. (Equally worth reviving in such an environment: Ronald Knox’s deft Dryden parody, Absolute and Abitofhell.)
The second is narrowly ecclesial. As late as the 1960s Anglicanism retained some kind of intellectual stature. It then hospitably housed, after all, both Eliot and C. S. Lewis. While this stature lasted, there clung – in numerous critics’ opinion – to the Catholic convert Dryden an aroma of Bad Form, if not indeed of treachery. This is not an aroma capable of surviving into our time. These days England’s Established Church is (to put the matter with as much restraint as possible) in the last incontinent stages of senile dementia, too weak even to deter those scavengers – whether oleaginous sodomites or happy-clappy yahoos – who quarrel over its heritage. Elizabeth II and Prince Charles, who could once be credited with some knowledge of Christian doctrine, now burble about infidels’ ‘diversity’ with at least as much enthusiasm as any multicultural commissar. For that cultivated remnant among liberal arts students capable of serious thought, and that still smaller remnant capable of separating religious allegiance from careerism, the question which overwhelmed Dryden and drove him away from his mild Protestant upbringing is as urgent as ever: where can active, visible religious authority be found? Hence these crisp lines from Dryden’s The Medal (1682):
The third reason for optimism about Dryden’s future is geographical. Even as the British were tending to take him for granted – rather like an old piece of furniture insufficiently objectionable to be worth repairing – he attracted some brilliant belated disciples in the British Empire. Best known of these, need one say, was Roy Campbell, whose strenuously masculine taunts made him a true successor to Dryden, though not at all a crude imitator. Yet Campbell has been so well defended in recent times (conspicuously by his biographer Joseph Pearce) that it seems only fair to shine the light of appreciation on one now largely unread even in, and entirely unread outside, his native Australia: James McAuley (1917-76).2 McAuley, after a youth dabbling in Trotskyism, anarchism and Baudelaireanism, converted in adulthood (like Dryden) to Rome. He emerged not solely with a lyric muse of rare elegance, but with a coruscating satiric gift. This is McAuley on H.V. Evatt, an aspiring Australian Prime Minister of great promise during the 1940s, who descended during the 1950s into a twilight world of paranoia, sycophancy towards Molotov, and sectarian parochialism such as had once convinced Klansmen that Pius XI would sail up the Mississippi in a submarine:
Having been born in 1631, Dryden spent his teens under the Civil War’s shadow. His first public performances included an ode (1659) to the recently deceased Cromwell. Given his subsequent closeness to Charles II, this poem afterwards inspired various accusations that Dryden had turned his coat. He had done no such thing; he never once wavered from the monarchical idea. Cromwell had in fact been a much more effective, because more ruthless, monarch than Charles I ever had. Furthermore, in 1659 the prospect of a competent Cromwellian dynasty seemed feasible, until Richard (‘Tumbledown Dick’) Cromwell destroyed it.
The decade after 1660’s Stuart restoration proved at once the most active, and among the least artistically significant, of Dryden’s life. His full poetic gift had yet to ripen, and while he could never be called one of nature’s dramatists, the drama alone provided for him (in that pre-copyright era) a living as well as a voice. Most of his early theatrical triumphs are undoubtedly unrevivable, since whereas he later made of the iambic couplet a vibrant thing, the couplets in his youthful plays tend to write the text for him. Even then, admittedly, he had a self-satirising comic sense which now might gain him postmodernist approval: as when the character of Valeria in Tyrannick Love (1668) – played by none other than Nell Gwynn – emerged near the end from her insensible state, and declaimed:
Among the many quiet oddities of Dryden’s life is the way his role as brilliant controversialist had been forced on him. After the early 1660s’ flush of Restoration optimism, he did not seek it out. Accepting the Poet Laureateship from Charles II’s hands in 1668, he shunned illusions about Charles’s reliability. The man who in Absalom and Achitophel growled of an unscrupulous opponent ‘he’ll cry whore to his own mother’ knew Charles for what he was: perfectly capable – with the utmost good nature – of calling black white and a square a circle, if by such falsehoods he could keep from having to ‘go on [his] travels again’. Despite or because of his acute brain, Charles lacked (just as most of his Roundhead and Whig foes lacked) an ability to concede the Civil War’s origins: not in royal despotism, but in embarrassing royal weakness.
Then sovereign, poet and England alike suddenly had to contemplate the eruption of Titus Oates.
Dryden remained a Protestant in 1678, the year Oates embarked on that epic campaign of perjury which almost at once began to be called ‘the Popish Plot’. (‘Like McCarthyism in our time’, to quote the late A.L. Rowse’s preposterous simile.) An Oates, by definition, cannot at first be conceived; therefore he cannot be guarded against. To the almost calisthenic nature of his mendacity, Oates added so exceptional a disregard for hygiene that his more affectionate friends called him ‘Old Snotty Nose.’ Initially Dryden had no reason to assume what he and everyone else afterwards learned: namely, that each word spoken by Oates was a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’. Moreover, one could reject 50% or 99% of Oates’s testimony, and still believe – on the ‘no smoke without fire’ principle – that some Catholic plot, such as Oates raved about, might have been hatched to assassinate the King. This appears to have been Dryden’s position at first. It also appears to have been the King’s own attitude, until the last of the judicial massacres. (When visiting the bedroom of his neglected Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza, Charles kissed the portraits there of various Catholic martyrs. This gesture might have gained in poignancy had not these martyrs’ death-warrants all been signed by Charles himself.)
By 1681 much had changed; even Charles had reluctantly forsaken the belief that the cleverest form of statesmanship consists of hoping the alligator eats you last. By 1685, the year of his sudden death, Charles had – permanently, it seemed – drained the swamp. The leading Whigs had fled (like ‘Achitophel’ Shaftesbury), or perished of natural causes (like Oates’s fellow-perjurer William Bedloe), or been beheaded, or in one case obligingly committed suicide. Dryden could give rein, unmolested, to his boisterous satire. Absalom and Achitophel, The Medal, and MacFlecknoe – three panels of one triptych – were all printed in the early 1680s, though MacFlecknoe (his onslaught upon hack poet and opium-eater Thomas Shadwell) could well have been written around 1676, and it became public knowledge against Dryden’s will. May a respectful dissenting voice be heard against the general estimate which ranks MacFlecknoe in quality alongside, or even above, the other two? That it features Dryden at his most quotable must be admitted:
When Charles’s brother succeeded as James II, not a dog barked. The Monmouth Rebellion against James failed in everything it undertook. Early in James’s reign Dryden took the step which – his writings show – he had long planned, and became a Catholic. One thing about his ‘spiritual Aeneid’ (Ronald Knox’s phrase) is clear: outside factors may have helped it along, including the newly gentle political climate, but it fundamentally derived from pitiless cerebration. In Religio Laici (1684) he essayed, as best he could, a reasonable defence of unreason. Anglicanism he found increasingly incoherent, and Catholicism – because it permitted, under certain conditions, political revolt – potentially frightening. To a man of Dryden’s temper, frighteningness trumped incoherence any day of the week. He argued his way to Rome, as Newman would do more than a century and a half later. Pope, at his very best, may have surpassed Dryden in pure poetic genius; but Dryden never stooped to Pope’s theory that ‘whatever is, is right’, a sentiment so blatantly idiotic as to have escaped the notice of even T-shirt manufacturers.
Precious little is known about Dryden’s dealings with his new co-religionists. No doubt, like many another convert, he sometimes ruffled cradle-Catholics’ feathers. And no doubt he, in turn, felt angered by that truculent minority of cradle-Catholics whose Catholicism is less a severe creed of steel-white logic, than a kind of infinitely soothing wallpaper. Some co-religionists were not merely truculent but menacing. During the Popish Plot, a few perfidious cradle-Catholics – having decided that if the prospect of hanging concentrated the mind wonderfully, the prospect of hanging and disembowelling concentrated it still more – betrayed other cradle-Catholics to the Oates-Bedloe-Shaftesbury murder-machine. It is not for us, dwelling in physical comfort, to judge them; though we may perhaps hope to avoid the archival immortality of one Yorkshire Catholic trimmer, who assured the authorities: ‘My opinion is, Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher died much mistaken.’4
Few predicted that within four years of James’s accession, Dryden’s dreams would be blasted: 1688 And All That. Above all, few predicted that James himself (setting an unhappy precedent followed by the Austro-German monarchies in 1918 and Spain’s Alfonso XIII in 1931) would simply let the orb and sceptre fall from his trembling fingers, rather than offer a decent resistance. A cruel fate, that James – once considered fit to serve in battle with Marshal Turenne – should have deteriorated to so panic-stricken a figure, assailed by frequent nosebleeds, as to provoke during his French exile the cruel quip at Versailles: ‘When one sees him, one knows why he is here.’
Christopher Hollis (whose prose benefits from his having been a friend of Evelyn Waugh) describes with harsh accuracy Dryden’s situation after James’s departure:
No one who has ploughed through the dreary pages of these meritless and disgraceful libels can have any wish save to advise others not similarly to waste their time. Yet it is an interesting mark of the stupidity of Dryden’s enemies that the accusation which they most frequently levelled at him was the one accusation which mere silence could absolutely refute. They all said that he would recant his political and religious opinions in order to keep his job. … [T]here was a real risk in obstinate persistence in recusancy. Oates was still alive; the Plot was only seven years [past] … the swearing might begin, and the blood might flow, again. If so, there was little doubt that Dryden would have been one of the first to swing and that Whig noblemen, outdoing even Rochester, their prototype, would have answered with the halter the scathing sarcasms of Absalom and Achitophel, which they were not capable of answering with the pen.
Sometimes the post-Laureateship Dryden subjected domesticity – with his spouse in mind? – to seething vehemence that makes The Duchess of Malfi resemble The Brady Bunch. An excerpt (1693) from his translation of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire:
When Dryden died, even those who had reviled him admitted that Westminster Abbey alone deserved to house him. But obviously a Catholic funeral rite, in public, could not be envisaged. There occurred a compromise which almost any Englishman, and absolutely no Spaniard or Frenchman, will understand. Those present – drawing on happy childhood memories of being flogged by schoolmasters into a state of classical scholarship – sang an ode from Horace’s third book, before burying Dryden alongside (no other companion in death seemed adequate) Chaucer. Thus Dryden escaped, not only when he was on the earth but when he was in it, what Chesterton called ‘the degrading servitude of being a child of his time.’
NOTES
(3) 'Groupers' refers to those Australian trade unionists w ho during the late 1940s and early 1950s had fought communism, often successfully, on the waterfront and elsewhere. Evatt alternated between grovelling to the Groupers and betraying them, not without effect on certain Groupers' morale.
(4) This utterance, like the vignette of Charles II in Catherine of Braganza’s room, can be found in J. P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London, 1972). Fisher and More were not canonised till 1935. Information on Oates’s hygiene occurs in Jane Lane, Titus Oates (London, 1949).
R. J. Stove lives in Melbourne, and is a Contributing Editor of The American Conservative.
© Annals Australasia, 2006
... our own worship is only true at home,
(Chesterton phrased the point more crisply still: ‘How can a man know what he wants, how can he even want what he wants, if it will not remain the same while he wants it?’)
And true but for the time; ‘tis hard to know
How long we please it shall continue so;
This side to-day, and that to-morrow burns;
So all are God Almighties in their turns.
A tempting doctrine, plausible and new;
What fools our fathers were, if this be true!
The traitors’ tribune, bigots’ Galahad,
No surprise, then, that McAuley actually called one of his masterpieces A Letter to John Dryden. If it is to McAuley’s credit that he – like Campbell – mimicked Dryden’s style with panache, it is to Dryden’s credit that his elemental originality remains, notwithstanding such followers. Of how many other artists can that be said?
The greatest blot this country ever had.
Through curious turns he spiralled as he grew,
But all his windings had a left-hand screw ...
Now all – the fools, the knaves, the operators,
The gelded groupers3 and the grouper-haters –
Turned zombie by the threat of liquidation
Must work the bankrupt socialist plantation.
Hold, are you mad, you damned confounded dog?
It may nevertheless be asked why All For Love (1677), written after Dryden had abandoned theatrical rhyme for blank verse, has been so completely overshadowed by Antony and Cleopatra, Dryden’s avowed model. (Can anyone now alive remember a full professional performance of it?) Shakespeare may give the theme, by a slight margin, greater tragic magnificence; but Dryden is at least broadly comparable.
I am to rise and speak the epilogue ...
I’ll not one word say
To excuse his [Dryden’s] godly, out-of-fashion play;
A play which, if you dare but twice sit out,
You’ll all be slandered and be thought devout.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
Unfortunately it is hard in 2006 to take on trust Dryden’s description of Shadwell as the world’s worst poet, when our eyes have seen the glory of the coming of Allen Ginsberg. Still (a resurrected Dryden could well retort), even Ginsberg’s antics as junkie, trash-mystic, and advocate of the North American Man-Boy Love Association were anticipated avant la lettre by one of Absalom and Achitophel’s most damning passages:
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes,
For who would read thy life who reads thy rhymes?
He could not fight for his king, for his king would not stay to be fought for, and he scorned to deny his principles by recognising a usurper. … As so often happens after liberty has won her glorious victories, the press was submitted to a censorship such as it had never known in the unregenerate days of tyranny … Encouraged by this, little animals who had not dared to attack Dryden, when he was still unshackled and might deal back to them such blows as he had dealt to Og and Stillingfleet and Doeg [earlier antagonists, the first and third fictional, the second an Anglican bishop], now dodged in to give their little nips.
Even the Soviets, it will be remembered, feared to kill Solzhenitsyn; Dryden, for his part, stayed alive and free, albeit stripped of the Laureate’s title. Maybe the comparative bloodlessness of William III’s coup, at least in England – as opposed to Ireland and Scotland – inspired the new government to spare the ex-Laureate its worst aggression. In any case, Dryden (a quiet and diffident talker, along with so many other vociferous writers) had close friends – including the young Congreve, plus a few bookish Whigs whose bookishness overcame their Whiggery – and devoted children, though little comfort could be found from his wife. Mrs Dryden spent her last eleven years as a certified lunatic. One does wonder if Eliot’s own marital circumstances in 1932 impaired his acumen when discussing Dryden’s work.
Mistaken blessing, which old age they call,
He seldom wrote like this. Mostly, at least when among admirers, he enjoyed old age as much as anyone can. And by a strange quirk – although forced once more to write simply to live – he discovered a delicacy and grace of which his resolute attacks on ‘the Whig dogs’ had given no hint.
’Tis a long, nasty, darksome hospital,
A ropey chain of rheums; a visage rough,
Deformed, unfeatured, and a skin of buff …
The skull and forehead one bold barren plain;
And gums unarmed to mumble meat in vain,
Besides the eternal drivel that supplies
The dropping beard, from nostrils, mouth, and eyes.
His wife and children loathe him, and what’s worse,
Himself does his offensive carrion curse!
(1) Dryden’s revision turns Lucifer from a Fallen Spirit into a whining sourpuss:
'Is this the seat our conqueror has given?
(2) No full-length account of McAuley’s life exists. Editor, historian and ex-parliamentarian Peter Coleman wrote a powerful but unduly short tribute, The Heart of James McAuley (Sydney, 1980). To call Cassandra Pybus’s The Devil and James McAuley (Brisbane, 1999) a contemptible exercise in romantic fiction would be to pay it undue respect.
And this the climate we must change for heaven?
These regions and this realm my wars have got;
This mournful empire is the loser’s lot.'