Part 45

While Dryden met with such indifferent success in his willing efforts to supply the demand of the age for low comedy, he struck upon a really popular and profitable vein in heroic tragedy. _Tyrannic Love, or the Royal Martyr_, a Roman play dealing with the persecution of the Christians by Maximin, in which St Catherine is introduced, and with her some supernatural machinery, was produced in 1669. It is in rhymed couplets, but the author again did not trust solely for success to them; for, besides the magic incantations, the singing angels, and the view of Paradise, he made Nell Gwyn, who had stabbed herself as Valeria, start to life again as she was being carried off the stage, and speak a riotous epilogue, in violent contrast to the serious character of the play. _Almanzor and Almahide, or the Conquest of Granada_, a tragedy in two parts, was written in 1669 to 1670. The historical background is taken chiefly from Mlle de Scudéry's romance of _Almahide_, but Dryden borrows freely from other books of hers and her contemporaries. This piece seems to have given the crowning touch of provocation to the wits, who had never ceased to ridicule the popular taste for these extravagant heroic plays. Dryden almost invited burlesque in his epilogue to the second part of _The Conquest of Granada_, in which he charged the comedy of the Elizabethan age with coarseness and mechanical humour, and its conceptions of love and honour with meanness, and claimed for his own time and his own plays an advance in these respects. _The Rehearsal_, written by the duke of Buckingham, with the assistance, it was said, of Samuel Butler, Martin Clifford, Thomas Sprat and others, and produced in 1671, was a severe and just punishment for this boast. Davenant was originally the hero, but on his death in 1668 the satire was turned upon Dryden, who is here unmercifully ridiculed under the name of Bayes, the name being justified by his appointment in 1670 as poet laureate and historiographer to the king (with a pension of £300 a year and a butt of canary wine). It is said that _The Rehearsal_ was begun in 1663 and ready for representation before the plague. But this probably only means that Buckingham and his friends had resolved to burlesque the absurdities of Davenant's operatic heroes in _The Siege of Rhodes_, and the extravagant heroics of _The Indian Queen_. Materials accumulated upon them as the fashion continued, and by the time Dryden had produced his _Tyrannic Love_, and his _Conquest of Granada_, he had so established himself as the chief offender as to become naturally the central figure of the burlesque. Later Dryden fully avenged himself on Buckingham by his portrait of Zimri in _Absalom and Achitophel_. His immediate reply is contained in the preface "Of Heroic Plays" and the "Defence of the Epilogue," printed in the first edition (1672) of his _Conquest of Granada_. In these, so far from laughing with his censors, he addresses them from the eminence of success. "But I have already swept the stakes; and, with the common good fortune of prosperous gamesters, can be content to sit quietly; to hear my fortune cursed by some, and my faults arraigned by others, and to suffer both without reply." Heroic verse, he assures them, is so established that few tragedies are likely henceforward to be written in any other metre. In the course of a year or two _The Conquest of Granada_ was attacked also by Elkanah Settle, on whom Dryden revenged himself later, making him the "Doeg" of the second part of _Absalom and Achitophel_.

His next tragedy, _Amboyna_ (1673), an exhibition of certain atrocities committed by the Dutch on English merchants in the East Indies, put on the stage to inflame the public mind in view of the Dutch war, was written, with the exception of a few passages, in prose, and those passages in blank verse. An opera which he wrote in rhymed couplets, called _The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man_, an attempt to turn part of _Paradise Lost_ into rhyme, as a proof of its superiority to blank verse, was prefaced by an "Apology for Heroique Poetry and Poetique Licence," and entered at Stationers' Hall in 1674, but it was never acted. The redeeming circumstance about the performance is the admiration professed by the adapter for his original, which he pronounces "undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." Dryden is said to have had the elder poet's leave "to tag his verses." In _Aurengzebe_, which was Dryden's last, and also his best, rhymed tragedy, he borrowed from contemporary history, for the Great Mogul was still living. In the prologue he confessed that he had grown weary of his long-loved mistress rhyme and retracted, with characteristic frankness, his disparaging contrast of the Elizabethan with his own age. But the stings of _The Rehearsal_ had stimulated him to do his utmost to justify his devotion to his mistress, and he claims that _Aurengzebe_ is "the most correct" of his plays. It was entered at Stationers' Hall and probably acted in 1675, and published in the following year.

After the production of _Aurengzebe_ he seems to have rested for an interval from writing, enabled to do so, probably by an additional pension of £100 granted to him by the king. During this interval he would seem to have reconsidered the principles of dramatic composition, and to have made a particular study of the works of Shakespeare. The fruits of this appeared in _All for Love, or the World Well Lost_, a version of the story of Antony and Cleopatra, produced in 1678, which must be regarded as a very remarkable departure for a man of his age, and a wonderful proof of undiminished openness and plasticity of mind. In his previous writings on dramatic theory, Dryden, while admiring the rhyme of the French dramatists as an advance in art, did not give unqualified praise to the regularity of their plots; he was disposed to allow the irregular structure of the Elizabethan dramatists, as being more favourable to variety both of action and of character. But now, in frank imitation of Shakespeare, he abandoned rhyme, and, if we might judge from _All for Love_, and the precepts laid down in his "Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy," prefixed to _Troilus and Cressida_ (1679), the chief point in which he aimed at excelling the Elizabethans was in giving greater unity to his plot. He upheld still the superiority of Shakespeare to the French dramatists in the delineation of character, but he thought that the scope of the action might be restricted, and the parts bound more closely together with advantage. _All for Love_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_ are two excellent plays for the comparison of the two methods. Dryden gave all his strength to _All for Love_, writing the play for himself, as he said, and not for the public. Carrying out the idea expressed in the title, he represents the two lovers as being more entirely under the dominion of love than Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare's Antony is moved by other impulses than the passion for Cleopatra; it is his master motive, but it has to maintain a struggle for supremacy; "Roman thoughts" strike in upon him even in the very height of the enjoyment of his mistress's love, he chafes under the yoke, and breaks away from her of his own impulse at the call of spontaneously reawakened ambition. Dryden's Antony is so deeply sunk in love that no other impulse has power to stir him; it takes much persuasion and skilful artifice to detach him from Cleopatra even in thought, and his soul returns to her violently before the rupture has been completed. On the other hand, Dryden's Cleopatra is so completely enslaved by love for Antony that she is incapable of using the calculated caprices and meretricious coquetries which Shakespeare's Cleopatra deliberately practises as the highest art of love, the surest way of maintaining her empire over her great captain's heart. It is with difficulty that Dryden's Cleopatra will agree, on the earnest solicitation of a wily counsellor, to feign a liking for Dolabella to excite Antony's jealousy, and she cannot keep up the pretence through a few sentences. The characters of the two lovers are thus very much contracted, indeed almost overwhelmed, beneath the pressure of the one ruling motive. And as Dryden thus introduces a greater regularity of character into the drama, so he also very much contracts the action, in order to give probability to this temporary subjugation of individual character. The action of Dryden's play takes place wholly in Alexandria, within the compass of a few days; it does not, like Shakespeare's, extend over several years, and present incessant changes of scene. Dryden chooses, as it were, a fragment of a historical action, a single moment during which motives play within a narrow circle, the culminating point in the relations between his two personages. He devotes his whole play, also, to those relations; only what bears upon them is admitted. In Shakespeare's play we get a certain historical perspective, in which the love of Antony and Cleopatra appears in its true proportions beneath the firmament that overhangs human affairs. In Dryden's play this love is our universe; all the other concerns of the world retire into a shadowy, indistinct background. If we rise from a comparison of the plays with an impression that the Elizabethan drama is a higher type of drama, taking Dryden's own definition of the word as "a just and lively image of human nature," we rise also with an impression of Dryden's power such as we get from nothing else that he had written since his _Heroic Stanzas_, twenty years before.

It was twelve years before Dryden produced another tragedy worthy of the power shown in _All for Love_. _Don Sebastian_ was acted and published in 1690. In the interval, to sum up briefly Dryden's work as a dramatist, he wrote _Oedipus_ (pr. 1679) and _The Duke of Guise_ (pr. 1683) in conjunction with Nathaniel Lee; _Troilus and Cressida_ (1679); _The Spanish Friar_ (1681); _Albion and Albanius_, an opera (1685); _Amphitryon_ (1690). In _Troilus and Cressida_ he follows Shakespeare closely in the plot, but the dialogue is rewritten throughout, and not for the better. The versification and the language of the first and the third acts of _Oedipus_, which with the general plan of the play were Dryden's contribution to the joint work, bear marked evidence of his recent study of Shakespeare. The _Duke of Guise_ provided an obvious parallel with contemporary English politics. Henry III. was identified with Charles II., and Monmouth with the duke. The lord chamberlain refused to license it until the political situation was less disturbed. The plot of _Don Sebastian_ is more intricate than that of _All for Love_. It has also more of the characteristics of his heroic dramas; the extravagance of sentiment and the suddenness of impulse remind us occasionally of _The Indian Emperor_; but the characters are much more elaborately studied than in Dryden's earlier plays, and the verse is sinewy and powerful. It would be difficult to say whether _Don Sebastian_ or _All for Love_ is his best play; they share the palm between them. Dryden's subsequent plays are not remarkable. Their titles and dates are--_King Arthur_, an opera (1691), for which Purcell wrote the music; _Cleomenes_ (1692); _Love Triumphant_ (1694).

Soon after Dryden's abandonment of heroic couplets in tragedy, he found new and more congenial work for his favourite instrument in satire. As usual the idea was not original to Dryden, though he struck in with his majestic step and energy divine, and immediately took the lead. The pioneer was Mulgrave in his _Essay on Satire_, an attack on Rochester and the court, which was circulated in MS. in 1679. Dryden himself was suspected of the authorship, and it is not impossible that he gave some help in revising it; but it is not likely that he attacked the king on whom he was dependent for the greater part of his income, and Mulgrave in a note to his _Art of Poetry_ in 1717 expressly asserts Dryden's ignorance. Dryden, however, was attacked in Rose Street, Covent Garden, and severely cudgelled by a company of ruffians who were generally supposed to have been hired by Rochester. In the same year Oldham's satire on the Jesuits had immense popularity, chiefly owing to the excitement about the Popish plot. Dryden took the field as a satirist towards the close of 1681, on the side of the court, at the moment when Shaftesbury, baffled in his efforts to exclude the duke of York from the throne as a papist, and secure the succession of the duke of Monmouth, was waiting his trial for high treason. _Absalom and Achitophel_ produced a great stir. Nine editions were sold in rapid succession in the course of a year. There was no compunction in Dryden's ridicule and invective. Delicate wit was not one of Dryden's gifts; the motions of his weapon were sweeping, and the blows hard and trenchant. The advantage he had gained by his recent studies of character was fully used in his portraits of Shaftesbury and Buckingham, Achitophel and Zimri. In these portraits he shows considerable art in the introduction of redeeming traits to the general outline of malignity and depravity. It is not impossible that the fact that his pension had not been paid since the beginning of 1680 weighed with him in writing this satire to gain the favour of the court. In a play produced in 1681, _The Spanish Friar_, he had written on the other side, gratifying the popular feeling by attacking the Roman Catholic priesthood.

Three other satires followed _Absalom and Achitophel_, one of them hardly inferior in point of literary power. _The Medall_; a _Satyre against Sedition_ (March 1682) was written in ridicule of the medal struck to commemorate Shaftesbury's acquittal. Then Dryden had to take vengeance on the literary champions of the Whig party who had opened upon him with all their artillery. Their leader, Shadwell, had attacked him in _The Medal of John Bayes_, which Dryden answered in October 1682 by _Mac Flecknoe, or a Satyr upon the True-Blew Protestant Poet, T.S._ This satire, in which Shadwell filled the title-rôle, served as the model of the _Dunciad_. To the second part of _Absalom and Achitophel_ (November 1682), written chiefly by Nahum Tate, he contributed a long passage of invective against Robert Ferguson, one of Monmouth's chief advisers, Elkanah Settle, Shadwell and others. _Religio Laici_, which appeared in the same month, though nominally an exposition of a layman's creed, and deservedly admired as such, was not without a political purpose. It attacked the Papists, but declared the "fanatics" to be still more dangerous.

Dryden's next poem in heroic couplets was in a different strain. On the accession of James, in 1685, he became a Roman Catholic. There has been much discussion as to whether this conversion was or was not sincere. It can only be said that the coincidence between his change of faith and his change of patron was suspicious, and that Dryden's character for consistency is certainly not of a kind to quench suspicion. The force of the coincidence cannot be removed by such pleas as that his wife had been a Roman Catholic for several years, or that he was converted by his son, who was converted at Cambridge, even if there were any evidence for these statements. Scott defended Dryden's conversion,--as Macaulay denounced it, from party motives. It is worth while, however, to notice that in his earlier defence of the English Church he exhibits a desire for the definite guidance of a presumably infallible creed, and the case for the Roman Church brought forward at the time may have appeared convincing to a mind singularly open to new impressions. At the same time nothing can be clearer than that Dryden always regarded his literary powers as a means of subsistence, and had little scruple about accepting a brief on any side. _The Hind and the Panther_, published in 1687, is an ingenious argument for Roman Catholicism, put into the mouth of "a milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged." There is considerable beauty in the picture of this tender creature, and its enemies in the forest are not spared. One can understand the admiration that the poem received when such allegories were in fashion. It was the chief cause of the veneration with which Dryden was regarded by Pope, who, himself educated in the Roman Catholic faith, was taken as a boy of twelve to see the veteran poet in his chair of honour and authority at Wills's coffee-house. It was also very open to ridicule, and was treated in this spirit by Prior and Montagu, the future earl of Halifax, in _The Hind and the Panther transversed to the story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse_. Dryden's other literary services to James were a savage reply to Stillingfleet--who had attacked two papers published by the king immediately after his accession, one said to have been written by his late brother in advocacy of the Church of Rome, the other by his late wife explaining the reasons for her conversion--and a translation of a life of Xavier in prose. He had written also a panegyric of Charles, _Threnodia Augustalis_, and a poem in honour of the birth of James II.'s heir, under the title of _Britannia rediviva_ (1688).

Dryden did not abjure his new faith on the Revolution, and so lost his office and pension as laureate and historiographer royal. For this act of constancy he deserves credit, if the new powers would have considered his services worth having after his frequent apostasies. His rival Shadwell reigned in his stead. Dryden was once more thrown mainly upon his pen for support. He turned again to the stage and wrote the plays already enumerated. A great feature in the last decade of his life was his translations from the classics. _Ovid's Epistles translated_ appeared in 1680; and numerous translations from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucretius and Theocritus appeared in the four volumes of _Miscellany Poems_--_Miscellany Poems_ (1684), _Sylvae_ (1685), _Examen poeticum_ (1693), _The Annual Miscellany_ (1694 by the "most eminent hands"); in 1693 was published the verse translation of the _Satires_ of Juvenal and of Persius by "Mr Dryden and several other eminent hands," which contained his "Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire"; and in 1697 Jacob Tonson published his most important translation, _The Works of Virgil_. The book, which was the result of three years' labour, was a vigorous, rather than a close, rendering of Virgil into the style of Dryden. Among other notable poems of this period are the two "Songs for St Cecilia's Day," written for a London musical society for 1687 and 1697, and published separately. The second of these is the famous ode on "Alexander's Feast." The well-known paraphrase of _Veni, Creator Spiritus_ was posthumously printed, and his "Ode to the memory of Anne Killigrew," called by Dr Johnson the noblest ode in the language, was written in 1686.

His next work was to render some of Chaucer's and Boccaccio's tales and Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ into his own verse. These translations appeared in November 1699, a few months before his death, and are known by the title of _Fables, Ancient and Modern_. The preface, which is an admirable example of Dryden's prose, contains an excellent appreciation of Chaucer, and, incidentally, an answer to Jeremy Collier's attack on the stage. Thus a large portion of the closing years of Dryden's life was spent in translating for bread. He had a windfall of 500 guineas from Lord Abingdon for a poem on the death of his wife in 1691, and he received liberal presents from his cousin John Driden and from the duke of Ormonde, but generally he was in considerable pecuniary straits. Besides, his three sons held various posts in the service of the pope at Rome, and he could not well be on good terms with both courts. However, he was not molested in London by the government, and in private he was treated with the respect due to his old age and his admitted position as the greatest of living English poets. He held a small court at Wills's coffee-house, where he spent his evenings; here he had a chair by the fire in winter and by the window in summer; Congreve, Vanbrugh and Addison were among his admirers, and here Pope saw the old poet of whom he was to be the most brilliant disciple. He died at his house in Gerrard Street, London, on the 1st of May 1700 and was buried on the 13th of the month in Westminster Abbey. Dryden's portrait, by Sir G. Kneller, is in the National Portrait Gallery.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--_The Comedies, Tragedies and Operas written by John Dryden, Esq._ (2 vols., 1701) was published by Tonson, who also issued the poet's _Dramatick Works_ (6 vols., 1717), edited by Congreve. _Poems on Various Occasions and Translations from Several Authors_ (1701), also published by Tonson, was very incomplete, and although other editions followed there was no satisfactory collection until the edition of the _Works_ (18 vols., 1808, 2nd ed. 1821) by Sir Walter Scott, who supplied historical and critical notes with a life of the author. This, as revised and corrected by G. Saintsbury (18 vols., Edinburgh, 1882-1893), remains the standard edition. _His Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works_ (4 vols., 1800) were edited by Edmund Malone, who collected industriously the materials for a life of Dryden. Convenient partial modern editions are the _Poetical Works_ (Globe edition, 1870) edited by W. D. Christie with an excellent "life"; _The Best Plays of John Dryden_ (Mermaid series, 2 vols.), edited by G. Saintsbury; and _Essays of John Dryden_ (2 vols., 1900, Oxford), edited by W. P. Ker. Besides the critical and biographical matter in these editions see Dr Johnson's _Lives of the Poets; Dryden_ (English Men of Letters series, 1881), by G. Saintsbury; A. Beljame, _Le Public et les hommes de lettres en Angleterre 1660-1744_ (2nd ed. Paris, 1897); A. W. Ward, _History of English Dramatic Literature_ (new ed. 1899), vol. iii. pp. 346-392; J. Churton Collins, _Essays and Studies_; W. J. Courthope, _History of English Poetry_, vol. iv. (1903), chap, xiv., and L. N. Chase, _The English Heroic Play_ (New York, 1903). See also ENGLISH LITERATURE. (W. M.; M. BR.)

DRYOPITHECUS (Gr. [Greek: drys], oak, [Greek: pithêkos], ape, "the ape of the oak-woods"), the name of an extinct ape or monkey from Miocene deposits of France, believed to be allied to the baboons, but perhaps with some affinity to the higher apes.

DRY ROT, a fungoid disease in timber which occasions the destruction of its fibres, and reduces it eventually to a mass of dry dust. It is produced most readily in a warm, moist, stagnant atmosphere, while common or wet rot is the result of the exposure of wood to repeated changes of climatic conditions. The most formidable of the dry rot fungi is the species _Merulius lacrymans_, which is particularly destructive of coniferous wood; other species are _Polyporus hybridus_, which thrives in oak-built ships, and _P. destructor_ and _Thelephora puteana_, found in a variety of wooden structures.