to remark, that Dryden's criticism, taken in the mass, is so heterogeneous that it is easy to understand how one might come to conclude that there is no connecting thread running through it. The reasons for this apparent illogicality are not far to seek one has merely to consider Dryden's character, the nature of the period in which he lived, and his relations with the controling spirits of this period. Dryden was a man of the world, preeminently endowed with a genius for being "all things to all men." In the scientific and philosophical circles of the Royal Society, among the wits of the coffee-house, with the lords and ladies of the court, in correspondence with the most learned and highest placed in the land, everywhere and in all manners of discourse, his fine intellectual urbanity won its way. In politics, philosophy, and art, as well as in religion, he seemed predestined by nature to become a supreme conformist.

For a man of this type the second half of the seventeenth century was, from one point of view, peculiarly dangerous: its entire atmosphere seemed calculated to jeopardize his intellectual integrity. Of one feature of his situation Dryden was himself painfully conscious; in the prologue to Aurengzebe he wrote:

"Let him retire, between two ages cast,

The first of this, the hindmost of the last."

He was drawn one way by the age of romanticism, another, by the age of reason. His early associations and natural inclinations assimilated him to the Elizabethans; the associations of his later life drew him toward the classicists. But his intellectual life was complicated even more by the fact that in his day, in literature as well as in politics and religion, numerous factions were battling for the supremacy. Controversialist tho he was, Dryden was exactly the sort of man to see things from all angles, to detect, and sympa

thize with, a certain amount of truth in the contentions of each of the contending parties.

Under certain conceivable circumstances, it is true, we might imagine even a man like Dryden, wide-minded and readily moulded, living, even in times of greatest unrest, an even and regular intellectual life. Bobertag ventures the opinion that if Lessing had achieved a literary and social success comparable with Dryden's, he would not have remained the implacable reformer that we know him. On the other hand, we can figure to ourselves what would have been the result had Dryden been born into a world which could have given him a single, simple ideal, and then, laboring always in one direction, had never had occasion to change his allegiance; no doubt he would, under these circumstances, have escaped the chief part of the blame heaped upon him by some of his biographers. Even supposing him successful and popular, had success been permanent, one can imagine his development quite different from what it actually was. Imagine him, for example, like Congreve, above the necessity of writing for a living, or, like Addison, always the poet of a strong and popular party; under such circumstances, again, his evolution would have been evenly logical, and the inconsistencies of his theory would not have become puzzles for modern historians.

But the course of Dryden's life was diametrically opposed to all that we have been imagining. Not only did this versatile poet live at a time when the intellectual, religious, and political worlds were divided by sharply contesting factions, but within the forty years of his activity he past thro three crises, from each of which a new faction

1 Suppose, for example, that he had been a young man at the beginning, instead of at the end, of the Puritan revolution: might not his career have resembled that of Milton?

emerged victorious with new policies and new creeds. The expression "past thro" I use deliberately. Dryden was not in a position to stand aloof and watch untroubled the conflict of parties and opinions. Except during the last ten years of his life and for a short period between 1675 and 1680, he felt obliged to place himself in the service of whatever party happened to be in power. And he rendered no half-hearted service. With his urbanity, his genius for quick sympathy and ready conformity, when once he had adopted the cause of a party or sect, that party or sect became a part of himself; he let by-gones be by-gones, loved those he had formerly hated and hated those he had formerly loved. It is easy to understand how a man like this, writing under his particular circumstances, came to produce criticism too diverse in character to exhibit any easily discovered principle of development.

But even if Dryden's environment was too unstable, and his adjustment to that environment too immediate, to permit a simple and logical development of his critical theory, the statement of Hamelius that his critical works exhibit no principle of growth, still appears, a priori, extremely improbable. The honestly expressed opinions of a really great man would naturally be organically connected. We are to infer, then, from the statement of Hamelius, either that Dryden's views were falsified, so tampered with in their expression that they were torn from their natural relations, or that his intellectual life was so weak as not to be able to organize and vitalize them in the first place. The truth of this statement would, therefore, imply either dishonesty or utter shallowness in Dryden's critical works. Both of these implications are inconsistent with a true reading of Dryden's character. It would be impossible to overemphasize the fact that Dryden was no mere turn-coat. Biographers who have written him down as such have not

taken the trouble to follow the subtle workings of his mind. With him changes are never sudden, or schematic and doctrinaire, as they would have been if deliberately entered upon. This is especially noticeable in the development of his critical theory: a new tendency appears first, perhaps, in a chance phrase; in the next essay it may have grown into a paragraph, and later it may become the inspiring theory of an entire work or series of works. His environment, we have seen, was constantly changing: if he changed with it, it was not because he was dishonest, but because his urbanity was merely the social expression of a versatile intellect which made it easy, even natural, for him to adapt himself to any belief or policy. This he did, inwardly, with a thoro, largely unconscious, assimilation of the new view, and outwardly, with a naïve frankness which, with a sympathetic student, will go far to atone for lack of consistency. Because his changes were genuine it never occurred to him to resort to the subterfuges employed by the dishonest and insincere. It would be difficult indeed to suppose that there is discernible no law of development connecting the various utterances of a man of this sort.

The following study is an attempt to prove that belief in such a law of development has a solid basis in fact. I shall try to show, first, that Dryden's literary criticism, far from being an inchoate mass of unrelated opinions, divides itself into five clearly marked periods; and, second, that in each of these periods Dryden wrote just the sort of criticism one would expect from a man of his type in his particular environment. I shall try to characterize the criticism of each period and indicate its relations, on the one hand, to our author's general literary output, and, on the other, to the main factors which conditioned his external life. The discussion, therefore, divides itself into five parts corresponding to the five periods of Dryden's critical activity.

THE FIRST PERIOD.

The first period of Dryden's critical development includes the essays written before the close of the year 1665. Up to this time Dryden is still young; he has not achieved any notable success, has not become the literary representative of any party. Hence he has not settled upon any theoretic scheme of things. Naturally, then, the criticism of this period is not dominated by one idea; its general spirit is tentative. Dryden is still free to develop and express all the feelings of a young poet's mind. Among these the most characteristic is enthusiasm for great literature, especially for the drama of the Elizabethans. Hence tho this period presents no system, it is, in a sense, characterized by a free utterance of the romantic spirit.

Dryden's first important piece of criticism was the epistle dedicatory to The Rival Ladies (1664). In this essay Dryden appears, first of all, as the sturdy Englishman. The English is a noble language, and in his play he has endeavored to distinguish it from "the tongue of pedants and that of affected travelers." Occasionally he takes a fling at the French; what the English admit of theirs is but "the basest of their men, the extravagances of their fashions, and the frippery of their merchandise." It is here that we find, in its first form, the celebrated eulogy of Shakespeare: in the very act of blaming him for the introduction of blank verse Dryden speaks of his great predecessor as the one "who, with some errors not to be avoided in that age, had undoubtedly a larger soul of poesy than ever any other of our nation." On the other hand Dryden exhibits some traits of the rationalist. He would like a "more certain measure" of the English tongue, "as they have in France, where they have an academy erected for that purpose.'

11, 5. All references without titles are to Ker's edition of the essays.

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