GENIUS AND POETICAL WORKS OF JOHN DRYDEN.


In our Life of Dryden we promised to say something about the question,
how far is a poet, particularly in the moral tendency and taste of his
writings, to be tried--and either condemned or justified--by the
character and spirit of his age? To a rapid consideration of this
question we now proceed, before examining the constituent elements or
the varied fruits of the poet's genius.

And here, unquestionably, there are extremes, which every critic should
avoid. Some imagine that a writer of a former century should be tried,
either by the standard which prevails in the cultured and civilised
nineteenth, or by the exposition of moral principles and practice which
is to be found in the Scriptures. Now, it is obviously, so far as taste
is concerned, as unjust to judge a book written in the style and manner
of one age by the merely arbitrary and conventional rules established in
another, as to judge the dress of our ancestors by the fashions of the
present day. And in respect of morality, it is as unfair to visit with
the same measure of condemnation offences against decorum or decency,
committed by writers living before or living after the promulgation of
the Christian code, as it would be to class the Satyrs, Priapi, and
Bacchantes of an antique sculptor, with their imitations, by inferior
and coarser artists, in later times. There must be a certain measure of
allowance made for the errors of Genius when it was working as the
galley-slave of its tradition and period, and when it had not yet
received the Divine Light which, shining into the world from above, has
supplied men with higher æsthetic as well as spiritual models of
principles, and revealed man's body to be the temple of the Holy Ghost.