DRYDEN. 267 



Unless, like Goethe, he is of a singularly uncontempo- 

 raneous nature, capable of being tutta in se romita, and of 

 running parallel with his time rather than be sucked into 

 its current, he will be thwarted into that harmonious 

 development of native force which has so much to do with 

 its steady and successful application. Dry den suffered, no 

 doubt, in this way. Though in creed he seems to have 

 drifted backward in an eddy of the general current ; yet of 

 the intellectual movement of the time, so far certainly as 

 literature shared in it, he could say, with ^neas, not only 

 that he saw, but that himself was a great part of it. That 

 movement was, on the whole, a downward one, from faith to 

 scepticism, from enthusiasm to cynicism, from the imagination 

 to the understanding. It was in a direction altogether away 

 from those springs of imagination and faith at which they of 

 the last age had slaked the thirst or renewed the vigour of 

 their souls. Dryden himself recognised that indefinable and 

 gregarious influence which we call nowadays the Spirit of 

 the Age, when he said that &quot; every Age has a kind of uni 

 versal Genius.&quot;* He had also a just notion of that in which 

 he lived ; for he remarks, incidentally, that &quot; all knowing 

 ages are naturally sceptic and not at all bigoted, which, if I 

 am not much deceived, is the proper character of our own.&quot;t 

 It may be conceived that he was even painfully half-aware 

 of having fallen upon a time incapable, not merely of a 

 great poet, but perhaps of any poet at all; for nothing 

 is so sensitive to the chill of a sceptical atmosphere as that 

 enthusiasm, which, if it be not genius, is at least the 

 beautiful illusion that saves it from the baffling quibbles 

 of self-consciousness. Thrice unhappy he who, born to see 

 things as they might be, is schooled by circumstances to see 

 them as people say they are, to read God in a prose 

 translation. Such was Dryden s lot, and such, for a good 

 part of his days, it was by his own choice. He who was of 

 a stature to snatch the torch of life that flashes from lifted 

 hand to hand along the generations, over the heads of 

 inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy to the stews. 

 * Essay on Dramatick Poesy. t Life of Lucian. 



