What with his
haste and a certain dash, which, according to our mood, we may call
florid or splendid, he seems to stand among poets where Rubens does among
painters,--greater, perhaps, as a colorist than an artist, yet great here
also, if we compare him with any but the first.
We have arrived at Dryden's thirty-second year, and thus far have found
little in him to warrant an augury that he was ever to be one of the
_great_ names in English literature, the most perfect type, that is, of
his class, and that class a high one, though not the highest. If Joseph
de Maistre's axiom, _Qui n'a pas vaincu a trente ans, ne vaincra jamais_,
were true, there would be little hope of him, for he has won no battle
yet. But there is something solid and doughty in the man, that can rise
from defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, when we
are able to choose our position better, and the sun is at our back.
Hitherto his performances have been mainly of the _obbligato_ sort, at
which few men of original force are good, least of all Dryden, who had
always something of stiffness in his strength. Waller had praised the
living Cromwell in perhaps the manliest verses he ever wrote,--not _very_
manly, to be sure, but really elegant, and, on the whole, better than
those in which Dryden squeezed out melodious tears.
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