Unless, like Goethe, he is of a singularly uncontemporaneous
nature, capable of being _tutta in se romita_, and of running parallel
with his time rather than being sucked into its current, he will be
thwarted in that harmonious development of native force which has so much
to do with its steady and successful application. Dryden suffered, no
doubt, in this way. Though in creed he seems to have drifted backward in
an eddy of the general current; yet of the intellectual movement of the
time, so far certainly as literature shared in it, he could say, with
Aeneas, not only that he saw, but that himself was a great part of it.
That movement was, on the whole, a downward one, from faith to
scepticism, from enthusiasm to cynicism, from the imagination to the
understanding. It was in a direction altogether away from those springs
of imagination and faith at which they of the last age had slaked the
thirst or renewed the vigor of their souls. Dryden himself recognized
that indefinable and gregarious influence which we call nowadays the
Spirit of the Age, when he said that "every Age has a kind of universal
Genius."[5] He had also a just notion of that in which he lived; for he
remarks, incidentally, that "all knowing ages are naturally sceptic and
not at all bigoted, which, if I am not much deceived, is the proper
character of our own.
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