JOHN DRYDEN (1631 – 1700)
John
Dryden is rightly considered as “the father of English Criticism”. He was the
first to teach the English people to determine the merit of composition upon
principles. With Dryden, a new era of criticism began. Before, Dryden, there
were only occasional utterances on the critical art. (Eg. Ben Jonson and Philip
Sidney) Though Dryden’s criticism was of scattered nature; he paid attention to
almost all literary forms and expressed his views on them. Except An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden
wrote no formal treatise on criticism. His critical views are found mostly in
the prefaces to his poetical works or to those of others.
Nature of poetry
Dryden
upholds Aristotle’s definition of poetry as a process of imitation. It imitates
facts past or present, popular beliefs, superstitions and things in their ideal
form. Dryden defends Shakespeare’s use of the supernatural founded on popular
beliefs. For, it is still an imitation though of other men’s fancies. According
to him, poetry and painting are not only true imitations of nature but of the
best nature (i.e) a much greater criticism.
Function of poetry
The
final end of poetry, according to Dryden is delight and transport rather than
instruction. To realize it, it does not merely imitate life, but offers its own
of it – ‘a beautiful resemblance of the whole’. The poet is neither a teacher
nor a bare imitator – a photographer – but a creator. He is one who, with life
or nature as his raw material, produces a new thing altogether, resembling the
original in its basis but different from it in the super structure – a work of
art rather than a copy.
Dramatic poetry
Drama
claimed most of Dryden’s attention.On the introduction of unpalatable or
incredible scenes such as battles and deaths on the stage, he says that death
can never be imitated to a just height and it can be avoided. He sees nothing
wrong in other physical action – battles, duels and the like.
Dryden
does not subscribe to the accepted interpretation of the three Unities; that
the plot should be single, the time of action twenty four hours, and the place
the same everywhere (where scene leads to scene in unbroken chain). He favours
the weaving of a sub plot into the main plot. He feels that the plot time can
be increased a little more to allow for greater maturity of the plot. In the
same way, the unity of place cannot be maintained as the time taken by the
events of the play determines the location of the scene and the unity of place
can be waived. Dryden considers the unites of Time and Place too rigorous and
they leave little scope for the development of plot and character.
Tragedy
Dryden’s
definition of tragedy is the same as Aristotle’s: ‘an imitation of one, entire,
great and probable action; not told but represented, which by moving in us fear
and pity is conducive to the purging of those two emotions in our minds’.
Dryden merely follows Aristotle and Horace in his remarks on the tragic hero
and other characters in Tragedy. Dryden has no use for the group of characters
called ‘chorus’ in the Greek Tragedy.
Comedy
Dryden
has not much of his own to say on comedy. Following Aristotle, he calls it ‘a
representation of human life in inferior persons and low subjects. To the
question whether comedy delights or instructs, Dryden says that the first end
of comedy is delight and instruction only the second. The persons in comedy are
of a lower quality, the action is little and the faults and vices are but the
sallies of youth and frailties of human nature; they are not premeditated
crimes. Dryden wanted English comedy to be more refined than it was. According
to him, Ben Jonson had only specialized in ‘humour’ and what it lacked was
‘wit’. As repartee is ‘one of the chiefest graces of comedy’, the greatest
pleasure of the audience is ‘a chance
exchange of wit, kept up on both sides, and swiftly managed’. Beaumont and
Fletcher were adept in the art. What Dryden wanted in comedy was ‘refined
laughter’ rather than the coarse one arising out of the display of ‘humours’ or
eccentric traits in individuals. While in a comedy of ‘humours’ the spectators
laughed at the ‘humourous’ character, in a comedy of wit (or comedy of manners
as it grew) they laughed with the witty one.
Epic
Dryden
is with the French critics in considering the epic superior to the tragedy. He
asks, ‘what virtue is there in a tragedy which is not contained in an epic
poem. He stresses that the epic is certainly the greatest work of human nature.
Aristotle had preferred the tragedy to the epic. Regarding the visual appeal of
the tragedy, Dryden urges three points: that it is the actor’s work as much as
the poet’s and so the poet alone cannot deserve credit for it that the stage is
handicapped to show many things – big armies, for instance – in words; and that
while we have leisure to digest what we read in the epic, we miss many beauties
of a play in the performance. Dryden disagrees with Aristotle again in
insisting on a moral in the epic.
Satire
In
the first instance, the satire must have unity of design, confining itself for
that purpose to one subject or principally one. In other words, the satirist
should choose one vice or folly for his target, as the epic poet chooses one
character for his specialpraise and make all others subservient to it as the
epic poet does the other characters. In the same way, he should extol ‘someone
precept of moral virtue’. For the manner of the satire, Dryden would prefer
‘fine raillery’.
Criticism
According
to Dryden, a critic has to understand that a writer writes to his own age and
people of which he himself is a product. He advocates a close study of the
ancient models not to imitate them blindly as a thorough going neo-classicist
would do but to recapture their magic to treat them as a torch to enlighten our
own passage. It is the spirit of the classics that matters more than their rules.
Yet these rules are not without their value, for without rules, there can be no
art. Besides invention (the disposition of a work), there are two other parts
of a work – design (or arrangement) and expression. Dryden mentions the
appropriate rules laid down by Aristotle. But it is not the observance of rules
that makes a work great but its capacity to delight and transport. It is not
the business of criticism to detect petty faults but to discover those great
beauties that make it immortal.
The Value of his
criticism
Dryden’s
criticism is partly a restatement of the precepts of Aristotle, partly a plea
for French neo-classicism and partly a deviation from both under the influence
of Longinus and Saint Evremond. From Aristotle he learnt a respect for rules.
French Neo-classicism taught him to prefer the epic to tragedy, to insist on a
moral in it and many of the things. And to Longinus and Saint Evremond he owed
a respect for his own judgement.
Dryden is a liberal classicist who
would adjust the rules of the ancients to the genius of the age, to which a
poet writes.
ali sher bhayo(pakistan).
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