Parenthesis at the Center: The Complex Embrace of The Hind and the Panther

Entered in the Stationers’ Register on May 27, 1687, Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther appeared in a highly charged, hostile environment. It occasioned a flood of abusive pamphlets: the readers greeted it not unlike the boorish sectarian beasts at the “wat’ring place” who stared at the Hind, “Survey’d her part by part, and sought to find / The ten-horn’d monster . . . / Such as the Wolfe and Panther had design’d” (I, 536–38). ¹ As the laureate’s awaited defense of his conversion to Roman Catholicism and of James II’s Declaration of Indulgence, the poem faced a readership as unindulgent as can be imagined. Hardly surprising, then, is its heavy armor of confrontational preface, of fabular, oriental mystery, and “nocturnal howlings” from “bestial citizens” which dramatically distinguish the poem from the tones of vernal mildness and thanksgiving being orchestrated to celebrate James’ project. ² Here is a depiction less of toleration than violence barely restrained.

But the hostile atmosphere (anticipated and real) presented the poet with interesting strategic and aesthetic terms which have not been sufficiently appreciated. The history of its reception, in fact, is a record of outrage and bewilderment that reaches from the barrage of contemporary parodies, through Johnson’s disapproval of its mixed satiric and heroic modes, Saintsbury’s reluctant pronouncement of its “desultory” character, to C. S. Lewis’ notorious remark that a design blending beast fable and theological controversy suggests a mind “bordering on aesthetic insanity.” ³ Modern scholarship has been more energetic in appreciating the poem’s historical and political context and the ways Dryden engaged the fabulist tradition, ⁴ yet the poem still impresses as an extravagant, vagrant jumble of poetic techniques and voices. More than one scholar has stumbled over the poem’s biblical and literary allusion, its historical, prophetic, and satiric vision, confessing with James Winn that “Dryden must bear some of the blame for the long history of misreadings this difficult poem has endured.” ⁵ Its original readers, prepared for another well-honed attack along the lines of Absalom and Achitophel, found only an embarrassing “New-converted Hero, Mr. Bayes” who “hath subdued his Understanding” to zeal. They were rebuffed by the poem’s savage darkness, by the extravagant unreason of a distracted author “in the flower of his Romantick Conceptions,” whose “Brains, indeed, have been a long time used to Chimera’s,” capable only of “Ornaments and Superfluencies of Invention and Satyr.” As one contemporary wrote in 1687, “take away the Railing, and no Argument remains: so that one may beat the Bush a whole day, and after so much labour, only spring a Butterfly, or start an Hedg-hog.” ⁶ Like more recent students of the poem, they were uncomfortable with such ambiguous models of heroism as a hind (even if she is a church), a narrator at once confessional and viciously satiric, and a “British Lyon” by the end demystified to the view of street gossips. “What, do you make a fable of your religion?” a shocked Johnson asks Bayes in Montagu and Prior’s The Hind and the Panther Transversed (1687), the most influential contemporary attack; and so have wondered many.

The contemporary reader had an instinct, though, for where the action was. And his sharp nose for tracking the beast to its lair points in useful directions for thinking about this poem written so intensely into its historical moment. Dryden’s contemporaries were well versed in the various languages and idioms of public discourse, in the allusive vocabulary from several decades of lampooning the laureate, and in the details of his current personal and political vulnerability. They may complain of groping in the dark, of feeling hoodwinked trying to navigate the unsteady ground of the poem. Yet their parodies, transversions, jingles, and admonitions to the laureate, when read together, reveal a coherent set of expectations which Dryden must have been writing into and around, and a consistent set of phrases and images from the poem—traces on the trail—which we can be sure the poet meant for them to see. In...