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Spanish Friar, but I confess that I rather wonder at than envy those who can be amused by it. His comedies lack everything that a comedy should have,--lightness, quickness of transition, unexpectedness of incident, easy cleverness of dialogue, and humorous contrast of character brought out by identity of situation. The comic parts of the
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Maiden Queen seem to me Dryden's best, but the merit even of these is Shakespeare's, and there is little choice where even the best is only tolerable. The common quality, however, of all Dryden's comedies is their nastiness, the more remarkable because we have ample evidence that he was a man of modest conversation. Pepys, who was by no means squeamish (for he found
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Sir Martin Marall
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), writes in his diary of the 19th June, 1668:
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My wife and Deb to the king's play-house to-day, thinking to spy me there, and saw the new play 'Evening Love,' of Dryden's, which, though the world commends, she likes not. The next day he saw it himself,
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On the 22d he adds:
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Calling this day at Herringman's,[45] he tells me Dryden do himself call it but a fifth-rate play. This was no doubt true, and yet, though Dryden in his preface to the play says,
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I confess I have given [yielded] too much to the people in it, and am ashamed for them as well as for myself, that I have pleased them at so cheap a rate, he takes care to add,
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The plot was from Calderon, and the author, rebutting the charge of plagiarism, tells us that the king (
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) had already answered for him by saying,
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Of the morals of the play he has not a word, nor do I believe that he was conscious of any harm in them till he was attacked by Collier, and then, (with some protest against what he considers the undue severity of his censor) he had the manliness to confess that he had done wrong.
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It becomes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one. [46] And in a letter to his correspondent, Mrs. Thomas, written only a few weeks before his death, warning her against the example of Mrs. Behn, he says, with remorseful sincerity:
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I confess I am the last man in the world who ought in justice to arraign her, who have been myself too much a libertine in most of my poems, which I should be well contented I had time either to purge or to see them fairly burned.
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Perhaps the Parson stretched a point too far, When with our Theatres he waged a war; He tells you that this very moral age Received the first infection from the Stage, But sure a banished Court, with lewdness fraught, The seeds of open vice returning brought. * * * * * Whitehall the naked Venus first revealed, Who, standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine, The strumpet was adored with rites divine. * * * * * The poets, who must live by courts or starve, Were proud so good a Government to serve, And, mixing with buffoons and pimps profane, Tainted the Stage for some small snip of gain.
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The same parts and application which have made me a poet might have raised me to any honors of the gown. Milton and Marvell neither lived by the Court, nor starved. Charles Lamb most ingeniously defends the Comedy of the Restoration as
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where there was no pretence of representing a real world.[47] But this was certainly not so. Dryden again and again boasts of the superior advantage which his age had over that of the elder dramatists, in painting polite life, and attributes it to a greater freedom of intercourse between the poets and the frequenters of the Court.[48] We shall be less surprised at the _kind_ of refinement upon which Dryden congratulated himself, when we learn (from the dedication of
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Marriage à la Mode ) that the Earl of Rochester was its exemplar:
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The best comic writers of our age will join with me to acknowledge that they have copied the gallantries of courts, the delicacy of expression, and the decencies of behavior from your Lordship. In judging Dryden, it should be borne in mind that for some years he was under contract to deliver three plays a year, a kind of bond to which no man should subject his brain who has a decent respect for the quality of its products. We should remember, too, that in his day _manners_ meant what we call _morals_, that custom always makes a larger part of virtue among average men than they are quite aware, and that the reaction from an outward conformity which had no root in inward faith may for a time have given to the frank expression of laxity an air of honesty that made it seem almost refreshing. There is no such hotbed for excess of license as excess of restraint, and the arrogant fanaticism of a single virtue is apt to make men suspicious of tyranny in all the rest. But the riot of emancipation could not last long, for the more tolerant society is of private vice, the more exacting will it be of public decorum, that excellent thing, so often the plausible substitute for things more excellent. By 1678 the public mind had so far recovered its tone that Dryden's comedy of
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Limberham