human
Ces flammes dans nos coeurs _sans votre ordre_ étoient nées.
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Heraclius
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La vapeur de mon sang ira grossir la foudre Que Dieu tient déja prête à le reduire en poudre.
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this or that fancy, till he took up with another. But even while he was writing on French models, his judgment could not be blinded to their defects.
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Look upon the 'Cinna' and the 'Pompey,' they are not so properly to be called plays as long discourses of reason of State, and 'Polieucte' in matters of religion is as solemn as the long stops upon our organs; ... their actors speak by the hour-glass like our parsons.... I deny not but this may suit well enough with the French, for as we, who are a more sullen people, come to be diverted at our plays, so they, who are of an airy and gay temper, come thither to make themselves more serious. [56] With what an air of innocent unconsciousness the sarcasm is driven home! Again, while he was still slaving at these bricks without straw, he says:
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The present French poets are generally accused that, wheresoever they lay the scene, or in whatever age, the manners of their heroes are wholly French. Racine's Bajazet is bred at Constantinople, but his civilities are conveyed to him by some secret passage from Versailles into the Seraglio. It is curious that Voltaire, speaking of the _Bérénice_ of Racine, praises a passage in it for precisely what Dryden condemns:
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Il semble qu'on entende _Henriette_ d'Angleterre elle-même parlant au marquis de _Vardes_. La politesse de la cour de _Louis XIV_., l'agrément de la langue Française, la douceur de la versification la plus naturelle, le sentiment le plus tendre, tout se trouve dans ce peu de vers. After Dryden had broken away from the heroic style, he speaks out more plainly. In the Preface to his
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All for Love, in reply to some cavils upon
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the decision about which he refers to a master of ceremonies, he goes on to say:
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The French poets, I confess, are strict observers of these punctilios; ... in this nicety of manners does the excellency of French poetry consist. Their heroes are the most civil people breathing, but their good breeding seldom extends to a word of sense. All their wit is in their ceremony; they want the genius which animates our stage, and therefore 't is but necessary, when they cannot please, that they should take care not to offend.... They are so careful not to exasperate a critic that they never leave him any work, ... for no part of a poem is worth our discommending where the whole is insipid, as when we have once tasted palled wine we stay not to examine it glass by glass. But while they affect to shine in trifles, they are often careless in essentials.... For my part, I desire to be tried by the laws of my own country. This is said in heat, but it is plain enough that his mind was wholly changed. In his discourse on epic poetry he is as decided, but more temperate. He says that the French heroic verse
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He understood the defects much better than the beauties of the French theatre. Lessing was even more one-sided in his judgment upon it.[59] Goethe, with his usual wisdom, studied it carefully without losing his temper, and tried to profit by its structural merits. Dryden, with his eyes wide open, copied its worst faults, especially its declamatory sentiment. He should have known that certain things can never be transplanted, and that among these is a style of poetry whose great excellence was that it was in perfect sympathy with the genius of the people among whom it came into being. But the truth is, that Dryden had no aptitude whatever for the stage, and in writing for it he was attempting to make a trade of his genius,--an arrangement from which the genius always withdraws in disgust. It was easier to make loose thinking and the bad writing which betrays it pass unobserved while the ear was occupied with the sonorous music of the rhyme to which they marched. Except in
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All for Love,
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he tells us,