Dryden: Professional Man of Letters

Dryden: Professional Man of Letters IGeorge G. Faile In his brilliant and doctrinaire essay on Dryden Lord Macaulay represented the poel as the most eminent of the writers of his age who, "by obsequiously cringing to the public taste, had acquired sufficient favour to reform it." According to Macaulay, Dryden's influence was counterbalanced by the influence of the age upon him, for "on no man did the age exercise so much influence." As Macaulay's very low opinion of the temper of the Restoration period is ouly too familiar, it is obvious that his statement was intended as one of his many slurs upon Dryden's integrity. But if we discount the deep-rooted partisanship of his Whiggism there is an intrinsic truth in his argument that may be turned to Dryden's advantage. This reciprocal flow of ideas between Dryden and his age serves to confirm the opinion that he was at the hub of contemporary intellectual activity. His business was literature, and he brought to his professional practice what Dr. Johnson later called "great stores of intellectual wealth," tireless energy in the pursuit of his aims, and uncompromising faith in the diguity and integrity of his chosen field of activity. If we add to these his innate poetic sensibility, which manifests itself in virtually all his critical utterances, we have a portrait of a man who rendered to his language and his literature services the magnitude of which makes accurate assessment very difficult. Any final assessment of Dryden's contributions to English literature should be made, not exclusively in terms of his services to poetry, to drama, to literary criticism, or to our knowledge of the intellectual history of an age, but in terms of his position as professional man of letters. In the forty years that followed the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the offices of the literary arts, which had lost their true identity amid the political and religious upheavals of the Interregnum, were given a new definition and focus. Literature began to reassert its normal 444 GEORGE G. FALLE function within a larger social and cultural context. The revival of the patronal system, a responsibility normally attendant upon a monarchic regime, the body of poetry occasioned by that system, and the Court's dilettante interest in arts and letters-these resulted in a close identification of the professional writer with the public life of his day. The genuine literary interests and endowments of such men as the Duke of Buckingham and the Earls of Rochester, Mulgrave, and Roscommon made possible ali immediate connection between the social amenities of the urban life of the Court and those of the rising middle class from which the most significant literary figures of the age were drawn. Although much of the satire of the late Restoration period reflects bitter political and, in some cases, personal animus, practising writers, whether aristocratic or bourgeois, enjoyed for the most part a mutual respect and admiration. The common interest in matters literary and aesthetic, although observing certain lines of social demarcation, worked towards the establishment of a healthy intellectual milieu of which a middle-class poet, dramatist, and critic was the leading spokesman and arbiter. Dryden's professional career was a consistent exemplification of Hobbes's aim, defined in the critical essays and in relevant passages in Leviathan, to establish the practice of letters as a normal human activity. Poetry as the verbal consequence of a theoretical furor poelieus or divine affiatus had failed to pass the new empirical and Cartesian musters. The very delicate balance between thought and sensibility in the work of Donne and members of the metaphysical school had given their poetry a special aesthetic validity of its own; but such concinnities were too fragile and subtle to serve as the basis for a poetic which might survive within the new Cartesian frame of ideas. By the mid-century it was clear that a new corporate body of critical principle which would stand in some reasonable relationship to Baconian empiricism and Cartesian rationalism was a positive necessity. Davenant and Hobbes, in their joint definition of the terms of the "new aesthetic," attempted to fill this need. But Hobbes...