"[23] But the
passages I have thus far cited as specimens of our poet's coarseness (for
poet he surely was _intus_, though not always _in cute_) were written
before he was forty, and he had an odd notion, suitable to his healthy
complexion, that poets on the whole improve after that date. Man at
forty, he says, "seems to be fully in his summer tropic, ... and I
believe that it will hold in all great poets that, though they wrote
before with a certain heat of genius which inspired them, yet that heat
was not perfectly digested."[24] But artificial heat is never to be
digested at all, as is plain in Dryden's case. He was a man who warmed
slowly, and, in his hurry to supply the market, forced his mind. The
result was the same after forty as before. In "Oedipus" (1679) we find,
"Not one bolt
Shall err from Thebes, but more be called for, more,
_New-moulded thunder of a larger size!_"
This play was written in conjunction with Lee, of whom Dryden relates[25]
that, when some one said to him, "It is easy enough to write like a
madman," he replied, "No, it is hard to write like a madman, but easy
enough to write like a fool,"--perhaps the most compendious lecture on
poetry ever delivered.
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