Among My Books, First Series | Page 3

they might be quite as much as
for what they are,--and posterity has applied to him one of his own
rules of criticism, judging him by the best rather than the average of his
achievement, a thing posterity is seldom wont to do. On the losing side
in politics, it is true of his polemical writings as of Burke's,--whom in
many respects he resembles, and especially in that supreme quality of a
reasoner, that his mind gathers not only heat, but clearness and
expansion, by its own motion,--that they have won his battle for him in
the judgment of after times.
To us, looking back at him, he gradually becomes a singularly
interesting and even picturesque figure. He is, in more senses than one,

in language, in turn of thought, in style of mind, in the direction of his
activity, the first of the moderns. He is the first literary man who was
also a man of the world, as we understand the term. He succeeded Ben
Jonson as the acknowledged dictator of wit and criticism, as Dr.
Johnson, after nearly the same interval, succeeded him. All ages are, in
some sense, ages of transition; but there are times when the transition is
more marked, more rapid; and it is, perhaps, an ill fortune for a man of
letters to arrive at maturity during such a period, still more to represent
in himself the change that is going on, and to be an efficient cause in
bringing it about. Unless, like Goethe, he is of a singularly
uncontemporaneous nature, capable of being tutta in se romita, and of
running parallel with his time rather than being sucked into its current,
he will be thwarted in that harmonious development of native force
which has so much to do with its steady and successful application.
Dryden suffered, no doubt, in this way. Though in creed he seems to
have drifted backward in an eddy of the general current; yet of the
intellectual movement of the time, so far certainly as literature shared
in it, he could say, with Aeneas, not only that he saw, but that himself
was a great part of it. That movement was, on the whole, a downward
one, from faith to scepticism, from enthusiasm to cynicism, from the
imagination to the understanding. It was in a direction altogether away
from those springs of imagination and faith at which they of the last
age had slaked the thirst or renewed the vigor of their souls. Dryden
himself recognized that indefinable and gregarious influence which we
call nowadays the Spirit of the Age, when he said that "every Age has a
kind of universal Genius."[5] He had also a just notion of that in which
he lived; for he remarks, incidentally, that "all knowing ages are
naturally sceptic and not at all bigoted, which, if I am not much
deceived, is the proper character of our own."[6] It may be conceived
that he was even painfully half-aware of having fallen upon a time
incapable, not merely of a great poet, but perhaps of any poet at all; for
nothing is so sensitive to the chill of a sceptical atmosphere as that
enthusiasm which, if it be not genius, is at least the beautiful illusion
that saves it from the baffling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice
unhappy he who, horn to see things as they might be, is schooled by
circumstances to see them as people say they are,--to read God in a
prose translation. Such was Dryden's lot, and such, for a good part of

his days, it was by his own choice. He who was of a stature to snatch
the torch of life that flashes from lifted hand to hand along the
generations, over the heads of inferior men, chose rather to be a
link-boy to the stews.
As a writer for the stage, he deliberately adopted and repeatedly
reaffirmed the maxim that
"He who lives to please, must please to live."
Without earnest convictions, no great or sound literature is conceivable.
But if Dryden mostly wanted that inspiration which comes of belief in
and devotion to something nobler and more abiding than the present
moment and its petulant need, he had, at least, the next best thing to
that,--a thorough faith in himself. He was, moreover, a man of
singularly open soul, and of a temper self-confident enough to be
candid even with himself. His mind was growing to the last, his
judgment widening and deepening, his artistic sense refining itself
more and more. He confessed his errors, and was not ashamed to
retrace his steps in search of that better knowledge which the
omniscience of superficial study had disparaged. Surely an intellect that
is still pliable at seventy is a phenomenon as interesting as it is rare.
But at