Vigorous genius: Dryden in his letters
John Dryden (1631-1700), Playwright, Poet Laureate and Critic
Samuel Johnson wrote in his “Life of Dryden”: “[the poet] appears to have had a mind very comprehensive by nature, and much enriched with acquired knowledge. His compositions are the effects of a vigorous genius operating upon large materials.” John Dryden (1631-1700), born in Northamptonshire, attended Westminster School under the gravely learned headmaster Richard Busby, who fined boys for speaking English rather than Latin at dinner. Dryden sent his younger son to Westminster, and told his old dominus that his son “is allwayes gratefully acknowledging your fatherly kindnesse to him; & very willing to his poore power, to do all things which may continue it.”
Dryden himself graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge. Under Oliver Cromwell he became, along with John Milton and Andrew Marvell, a Secretary of the French and Latin Tongues. He married in 1663 and was the devoted father of three sons, but also had an affair in the 1670s with the actress Anne Reeves. Dryden twice radically changed allegiance: from Oliver Cromwell to Charles II and from Protestant to Catholic. Despite his connection to Cromwell during the Commonwealth, he was loyal to the Stuart monarchy and kept in touch with the exiled Jacobites. When the Dutch Protestant William III became king in 1688, Dryden changed his religion and lost the lucrative offices of Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal.
Now Stephen Bernard and John McTague have collected his letters in The Correspondence of John Dryden (Manchester University Press, 2022, 324 pp., £90). The editors of this volume have made superb transcriptions of an extremely difficult text. They provide a general introduction to the book and to each of the letters, with valuable explanatory notes and portraits of the correspondents. The editorial matter, with some long passages in Greek, is often much longer than the letters. The archaic spelling (“woon” for one, “dus” for does) and obsolete words (“smickering” for an amorous inclination) are hard to decipher. Some words have even changed their meaning. “Specious” once meant pleasing to the eye; “resentment” meant respectful feeling for another. This book is destined only for devoted scholars.
This volume contains 63 letters from Dryden, including 16 to his publisher Jacob Tonson, 17 to his young cousin Elizabeth Steward, and 15 letters to him. His main subjects are apologies for not responding sooner; his poetry and translations, relations to other playwrights, requests for money from patrons and publisher, and ill health. The letters do not illuminate the meaning of his poetry, but striking phrases and witty retorts leap out of the dull sentences. Dryden was not a great letter writer, and his conventional sentiments are as formal as his chest-length Restoration wig. His biographer Sir Walter Scott dismissed them as “singularly uninteresting.” But the editors defend them—and justify their book—by stating that the letters “represent Dryden in his many facets: wit, man of letters, bon vivant, patron, client, a politically and religiously conscientious family man.” The elaborate flattery of the correspondents resembles the rituals of Japanese courtiers vying to see who can bow the lowest.
Seeking patronage, Dryden with mock humility tells Chesterfield, “I have not the least consideration of any profit in this Address, but onely of honouring my self by dedicating to you.” The Earl, in a polite reversal of flattery, maintains, “I consider that the greatest men are desirous of being distinguished by some marke of your esteem . . . in having [their] inconsiderable name placed (by so great a man) in front of one of his Works.” Not to be outdone in false humility, Dryden counters with, “I can not pretend to acknowledg, as I ought, the noble present [cash], which I have receiv’d from your Lordship, any more, than I can pretend to have deserv’d it.” His letters were more effective than the approach direct, for Dryden said that when he tried to beseech a Lord, “he is allwayes in a crowd, and my modesty makes me commonly the last to assault him.”
An early letter diplomatically attempts to patch up a quarrel between his friends. One of them “engaged mee heartily and humbly to beg your pardon for those unbeseeming expressions, the violence of his distempers forced him to vtter.” He tells Tonson, the publisher and bookseller from whom he’s always attempting to extract payment, that the notes and prefaces to his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid “shall be short [and profitable] because you shall get the more by saveing paper.” In 1684 he told Tonson, with a nod to Horace’s phrase “Homer nods”: “Homer shall sleep on for me: I will not now meddle with him.” Fifteen years later he compares Homer and Virgil, and plans to translate the Iliad: “I find him a Poet more according to my Genius than Virgil: and Consequently hope I may do him more justice, in his fiery way of writeing; which as it is liable to more faults, so it is capable of more beauties, than the exactness, & sobriety of Virgil.” In a cheeky backhanded compliment, he informs Tonson (who also published Shakespeare and Milton), “Upon triall I find all of your trade are Sharpers & you not more than others; therefore I have not wholly left you.”
In Dryden’s time critics made vicious personal as well as literary attacks, and he laments, that we poor poets are “at the Mercy of Wretched Scribblers: And when they cannot fasten upon our Verses, they fall upon our Morals, our Principles of State and Religion.” He is happy that the savage Thomas Rymer “has not fallen upon me, as severely and as wittily as he has upon Shakespeare and [John] Fletcher.” But Dryden himself writes of a hapless hack who so “notoriously bungled: that he has plac’d the words as confus’dly, as if he had studied to do so. . . . The cross-graind, confusd verse put him so much out of patience, that he wou’d not suspect it of any sence.” Dryden recalls that the amusing dramatist Nathaniel Lee, soon to be admitted to Bedlam, “was then upon the Verge of Madness, yet made a Sober, and a Witty Answer to a Bad Poet, who told him, It was an easie thing to write like a Madman: No, said he, ’tis very difficult to write like a Madman, but ’tis a very easy matter to write like a Fool.”
Dryden was on congenial, even chummy terms with contemporary poets and playwrights. He bends the knee to the notorious Earl of Rochester, who scorned the “clapping fools” in the audience and wrote the obscene play Sodom, in which the actors were actually supposed to have sex on stage: “it is not for me to contend any way with your Lordship, who can write better on the meanest Subject than I can on the best.” He would never enter the lists in prose with “Easy” Etherege, another outrageous rake and “the undoubted best Author of it wch our nation has produc’d.” He affirms that if William Wycherley’s “versification prove as well as his wit, I shall believe it will be extraordinary.” He informs Tonson, “I am Mr. Congreve’s true Lover, & desire you to tell him how kindly I take his often Remembrances of me.” The women think Congreve’s The Double Dealer “has exposed their Bitchery too much; & the Gentlemen, are offended with him; for the discovery of their follyes.” But the play “is defended onely by the best Judges, who, you know, are commonly the fewest.”
His letters to his cousin Elizabeth, threatening a visit with a present of his poems, are gentle, charming and include a witty comparison: “Old men are not so insensible of beauty, as it may be, you young Ladies think. For my own part, I must needs acknowledge that your fair Eyes had made me your Slave. . . . Ere the summer be passd, I may come down to you with a Volume in my hand, like a Dog out of the water, with a Duck in his Mouth.” Often confiding in his sympathetic relation, the “old decrepid Man” and “Old Cripple” refers to his illness and fear of death: “finding that Gods time for ending our miseries is not yet . . . I hope to recover more health according to my Age.” Four months before his death from gangrene, he complains to a young woman poet that he is plagued by a painful skin disease. His health at present “is worse than usual, by a St. ANTHONY’s Fire in one of my Legs; tho’ the Swelling is much abated, yet the Pain is not wholly gone, and I am too weak to stand upon it.”
Dryden surprises us with an outburst of crude humor when describing a “fat Old woman” in a crowded coach whose “backside talkd; & that discourse was not over savoury to the Nose.” Her urgent stops to pee irritated the coachman, who “turnd her out, in a very dirty place, where she was to wade up to the Anckles, before she cou’d reach the Next hedge” to relieve herself. Despite this low jest, he justly declared, “[I] have done my best to improve the Language, & Especially the Poetry.”
In his “Life of Pope,” Samuel Johnson concluded his famous comparison of the two great satirists —which recalled Dryden’s comparison of Homer and Virgil—with a grand rhetorical flourish: “If the flights of Dryden therefore are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing. If of Dryden’s fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope’s the heat is more regular and constant. Dryden often surpasses expectation, and Pope never falls below it. Dryden is read with frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight.”
Jeffrey Meyers will publish James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist on February 7, 2024 and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath in August or September 2024, both with Louisiana State University Press.
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