A History of English Literature

or at least the couplets, generally end-stopt, and in securing a general
regular movement, mainly by eliminating pronounced pauses within the line,
except for the frequent organic cesura in the middle. This process, like
other pseudo-classical tendencies, was furthered by Ben Jonson, who used
the couplet in more than half of his non-dramatic verse; but it was
especially carried on by the wealthy politician and minor poet Edmund
Waller (above, page 164), who for sixty years, from 1623 on, wrote most of
his verse (no very great quantity) in the couplet. Dryden and all his
contemporaries gave to Waller, rather too unreservedly, the credit of
having first perfected the form, that is of first making it (to their
taste) pleasingly smooth and regular. The great danger of the couplet thus
treated is that of over-great conventionality, as was partly illustrated by
Dryden's successor, Pope, who carried Waller's method to the farthest
possible limit. Dryden's vigorous instincts largely saved him from this
fault; by skilful variations in accents and pauses and by terse
forcefulness of expression he gave the couplet firmness as well as
smoothness. He employed, also, two other more questionable means of
variety, namely, the insertion (not original with him) of occasional
Alexandrine lines and of frequent triplets, three lines instead of two
riming together. A present-day reader may like the pentameter couplet or
may find it frigid and tedious; at any rate Dryden employed it in the
larger part of his verse and stamped it unmistakably with the strength of
his strong personality.
In satiric and didactic verse Dryden is accepted as the chief English
master, and here 'Absalom and Achitophel' is his greatest achievement. It
is formally a narrative poem, but in fact almost nothing happens in it; it
is really expository and descriptive--a very clever partisan analysis of a
situation, enlivened by a series of the most skilful character sketches
with very decided partisan coloring. The sketches, therefore, offer an
interesting contrast with the sympathetic and humorous portraits of
Chaucer's 'Prolog.' Among the secrets of Dryden's success in this
particular field are his intellectual coolness, his vigorous masculine
power of seizing on the salient points of character, and his command of
terse, biting phraseology, set off by effective contrast.
Of Dryden's numerous comedies and 'tragi-comedies' (serious plays with a
sub-action of comedy) it may be said summarily that some of them were among
the best of their time but that they were as licentious as all the others.
Dryden was also the chief author of another kind of play, peculiar to this
period in England, namely the 'Heroic' (Epic) Play. The material and spirit
of these works came largely from the enormously long contemporary French
romances, which were widely read in England, and of which a prominent
representative was 'The Great Cyrus' of Mlle. de Scudery, in ten volumes of
a thousand pages or more apiece. These romances, carrying further the
tendency which appears in Sidney's 'Arcadia,' are among the most
extravagant of all products of the romantic imagination--strange melanges
of ancient history, medieval chivalry, pastoralism, seventeenth century
artificial manners, and allegory of current events. The English 'heroic'
plays, partly following along these lines, with influence also from
Fletcher, lay their scenes in distant countries; their central interest is
extravagant romantic love; the action is more that of epic adventure than
of tragedy; and incidents, situations, characters, sentiments, and style,
though not without power, are exaggerated or overstrained to an absurd
degree. Breaking so violently through the commonplaceness and formality of
the age, however, they offer eloquent testimony to the irrepressibility of
the romantic instinct in human nature. Dryden's most representative play of
this class is 'Almanzor and Almahide, or the Conquest of Granada,' in two
long five-act parts.