The Columbia History of British Poetry (66 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 281
poet's irony saves us from the embarrassment of abandoning ourselves to belief in them. The sylphs delight us precisely because other components of the poetry allow us to limit our commitment to them. Those other components include irony, tonal variety, allusion, argument, conversation, topicalityall that would make its initial appeal to our education, our intelligence, and our knowledge of the world.
Samuel Johnson praised Dryden for inventing a language by which "we were taught . . . to think naturally and speak forcibly." If this means that in Dryden's language discourse and imagination are embodied in each other, then Johnson's praise describes the great satirical poems of Dryden's later career
Absalom and Achitophel, The Medal, MacFlecknoe, Religio Laici, The Hind and the Panther
. Dryden was almost fifty when he wrote the earliest of these, and had for many years been primarily at work writing and producing plays which enjoyed considerable contemporary favor but which have had no life in the English theater since.
Yet the continuities between the stages of Dryden's career are real ones: his interest in contemporary philosophical controversy and scientific discovery, his engagement in political argument both theoretical and polemical, his corresponding interest in religious dispute, again both theological and polemicalthese characteristic concerns are evident in the early poems celebrating the Restoration of Charles II and proposing a heroic version of England's new commercial and military enterprises; they are evident again in the heroic plays, which stage and debate the conflicts generated by vainglorious beings asserting the absolute freedom of their political and erotic wills. And they are evident finally in their most stylish and complex articulation in the great satires and discursive poems of Dryden's later career, poems in which he responded to the political crises that threatened the restored monarchy and generated constitutional debate of the first importance.
To a twentieth-century reader, perhaps the least familiar of the attitudes embodied in Dryden's work is his celebration of monarchical and aristocratic institutions against the challenges to those institutions inherent in the secularizing and commercializing tendencies of Enlightenment culture. Dryden's defense of the monarchy in the so-called Exclusion Crisis of the early 1680s gives us
Absalom and Achitophel
, a poem whose modernity is obvious in its attention to character and psychology, in its journalistic contemporaneity, in the high informality of its familiar address. Yet this claim for its stylistic modernity
 
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must be made in the face of Dryden's endorsement of the old-fashioned political theory of Sir Robert Filmer, who discovered the origins of political legitimacy in the transactions binding the fallen Adam to his unfortunate posterity. It is interesting that John Locke began to think through his arguments for an entirely secular basis for political legitimacy at about the time Dryden was defending the monarchy in traditional, and partly mystic, ways.
In fact, the clash of modern voice and traditional attitudes is apparent in all Dryden wrote. Early poems, like "To my honor'd friend, Dr. Charlton," "Astraea Redux," and "Annus Mirabilis," are marked by a genuine interest in contemporary scientific discovery, a sense that the work of men like Boyle and Gilbert and Harvey was worthy of celebration and could come to be part of the matter and the language of poetry. Indeed, there is a celebratory punctiliousness in Dryden's introduction of apparently scientific terminology from time to time into his verseand even a few footnotes to explain the new language, as in "Annus Mirabilis." But at the same time as he gestures in this way towards the modern moment, he can reveal his fondness for magical and mysterious assertion.
This is particularly obvious when he writes about the restoration to England's throne of Charles Stuart. This event Dryden could never think about in simply naturalistic terms, though he certainly understood the character of that kind of thinking. His political poetry becomes, therefore, problematicaland very interestingin its insistence that the monarchy is not to be entirely understood by the habits of mind either political or physical science requires, that the links between the king's doings and the actual world may sometimes be magical ones, and that they can be told about in the ways that myths are told.
It is not surprising, then, that Dryden's critics have often focused on the character of his skepticism, and have sought to understand whether or how he succeeded in resolving his skeptical inclinations with his mind's other essential characteristic, its preference for traditional forms of political and religious authority. In fact, Dryden's poetry is shaped at its very core by the dualities of his mind, and the strength of his writing is rooted precisely in his refusal to resolve intellectual and imaginative contradictions whose terms appealed to him with equal and opposing force. In this refusal his poems invite the contemplative attention of the reader and offer, as poetry, opportunities for a free-mindedness not
 
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to be anticipated in the initial, and very real, polemical intentions of the writer. Perhaps it is the surprising presence of the contemplative opportunity within the polemical occasion that is the distinguishing mark of Dryden's most original and imaginative writing.
In substance and intention Dryden's greatest poems are certainly warring documents, commissioned players on the king's side in the controversies of Restoration politics, informed by the terms of those controversies, and rhetorically shaped to the king's needs. The intricacies of argument and tone in the poems give evidence of the intricacies of Restoration politics, a few highlights of which may be schematized as follows. Within a contentious, postrevolutionary environment in which Englishmen understood their religious and political interests to be indistinguishable, a nominally Protestant but privately Catholic Stuart monarch, Charles II, had been restored to England's throne in 1660 on the invitation of a firmly Protestant Parliament. This Parliament had ten years earlier beheaded the restored king's father but had then been unable to sustain its experiment in republican government; Parliament's welcome to the new king was therefore much tempered by the sense of its own constitutional legitimacy as a sovereign arm of the English government. The new king, whose sexual generosity perhaps matched his political sophisticationor cynicismhad fathered some children but no legitimate ones, and so a succession crisis was inevitable; what the king
did
have was a brothera brother perhaps less cynical, but also less politically intelligent and certainly less willing to keep his Catholicism private. This brother would become the next kingmuch to the displeasure of the Protestant Parliament, some elements of which would, in the so-called Exclusion Crisis, unsuccessfully resist his claim to the throne.
The Parliament, always unhappy about the Catholic private preferences of Charles, would become downright hostile to the Catholic outspokenness of his brother James and would finally oust him in 1688. More, into this brewpot we also introduce continuous and raucous conflict among the English Protestant sects themselves, most of them radically in opposition to the episcopal establishment restored and empowered by Parliament and king; add also a pervasive fear among Englishmen of Catholic plotting against "internal security"; add McCarthy-like mountebanks inflaming those fears; add, quite possibly, some actual Catholic international intrigue lending some credibility to these mountebanks.
 
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These were some of the controversies out of which Restoration politics were formed. Now, if Dryden's verse contributions to them were entirely the polemical documents their first appearance indicates them to be, they might adequately be summarized as supporting the king's political position
Absalom and Achitophel
, for example, propagandizes for the king and against the cabal seeking to exclude his brother. And Dryden's support for the king in this Exclusion Crisis was entirely consistent with his supportin
Religio Laici
for the king's leniency toward the dissenting Protestant sects, a leniency displeasing to the king's harsher Anglican supporters in Parliament during the Exclusion crisis, as Steven Zwicker has shown. But leniency towards these sects in both
Absalom
and
Religio Laici
was not inconsistent with distaste for them, and Dryden's support for the king's politics conforms with his favoring an aristocratic ethos over what he imagines to be the new way of the Puritan, the revolutionary, the inner-light Protestant individualist, the businessman, the parliament man.
We see Dryden's aristocratic preferences in his approving portrait of the sexually vigorous, cavalier-like David/Charles in
Absalom and Achitophel
, in the corresponding disdain for the sexually monstrous Shaftesbury/Achitophel, and the pinched commercial puritanism of Shaftesbury's henchmenwe think of Shimei, his "cool kitchen" and his "hot brains." And we see this preference also in the outright social contempt Dryden expresses in
Religio Laici
for the "mechanick" classes and their inner-light protestant individualism: "The Book thus put in every vulgar hand, / Which each presum'd he best cou'd understand, / The
Common Rule
was made the
common
Prey; / And at the mercy of the
Rabble
lay." And in perhaps the most subtle moment in all of Dryden's polemical writing, the opening to
Absalom and Achitophel
, with its suave and outrageous defense of the king's promiscuityoutrageous precisely because it wittily asserts a biblical legitimacy for the libertine behavior condemned by Charles' Puritan antagoniststhis opening to
Absalom
in its sophisticated irony, its humor both reverential and irreverent, in its flaunting the king's very vulnerability as his prime strength, is Dryden's most characteristic expression of favor for an aristocratic ethos.
Indeed, John Traugott has pointed out the high libertine humor of Charles/David's resemblance to the rake of Restoration comedy ("The Rake's Progress from Court to Comedy: a Study in Comic Form,"
Studies in English Literature
, 1967). Ripe with a sense of royal and aristocratic entitlement, the lines describe a patriarchal fantasy simultane-
 
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ously Edenic, erotic, politicaland entirely sanctioned by the highest of authorities:
In pious times, e'er Priest-craft did begin,
Before
Polygamy
was made a sin;
When man, on many, multiply'd his kind,
E'r one to one was, cursedly, confin'd:
When Nature prompted, and no law deny'd
Promiscuous use of Concubine and Bride;
When,
Israels
Monarch, after Heaven's own heart,
His vigorous warmth did, variously, impart
To Wives and Slaves: And, wide as his Command,
Scatter'd his Maker's Image through the Land.
But, of course, Dryden's great poems are not only polemical documents. Their engagement in controversy is vigorous indeed, but they display a linguistic complexity taking them well beyond their plain argumentative intention. In their tonal variety alone, ranging as they do among the discursive, the conversational, the ironic, the vituperative, the elegiac and the lyrical, they display a range of attitudes far richer than the service of a political passion requires. For, in fact, in their linguistic richness, Dryden's political and religious satires participate in the central activity of the Enlightenment, the contemplative and critical examination of all claims of all authority.
Nor is this critical activity an effect merely of some "intellectual spirit"; it is impossible to disentangle that critical spirit from the extraordinary events of the age. In the civil wars, in the regicide, in the republican interlude, even in the fact of the "restoration," events themselves enforced challenges to all the old notions about the supernatural sanctioning of political and religious institutions, events alone would stimulate in the thoughtful and the imaginative nervous intimations of the contingency of our institutions, political and religiousintimations of their origins in human desires and deeds within a history that did not answer to the great idea announced in the shaping words of a divinity. Dryden's most interesting writing shadows forth this recognition even as it mounts a conservative defense of the king and his lords and the Church. Doing so, his polemic becomes his poetry.
Absalom and Achitophel
, for example, despite its easy and aristocratic dismissal of the king's Puritan enemies, despite the ironic ease of its opening joke, and despite its invocation of the biblical text itself in sup-

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