DRYDEN. 313 



genius of their poets, light and trifling in comparison of 

 the English.&quot;* 



Dryden might have profited by an admirable saying of 

 his own, that &quot; they who would combat general authority 

 with particular opinion must first establish themselves a 

 reputation of understanding better than other men.&quot; He 

 understood the defects much better than the beauties of the 

 French theatre. Lessing was even more one-sided in his 

 judgment upon it.f Goethe, with his usual wisdom, studied 

 it carefully without losing his temper, and tried to profit by 

 its structural merits. Dryden, with his eyes wide open, 

 copied its worst faults, especially its declamatory sentiment. 

 He should have known that certain things can never be 

 transplanted, and that among these is a style of poetry 

 whose great excellence was that it was in perfect sympathy 

 with the genius of the people among whom it came into 

 being. But the truth is, that Dryden had no aptitude 

 whatever for the stage, and in writing for it he was 

 attempting to make a trade of his genius, an arrangement 

 from which the genius always withdraws in disgust. It 

 was easier to make loose thinking and the bad writing 

 which betrays it pass unobserved while the ear was 

 occupied with the sonorous music of the rhyme to which 

 they marched. Except in u All for Love,&quot; &quot; the only 

 play,&quot; he tells us, &quot; which he wrote to please himself,&quot;;}! 

 there is no trace of real passion in any of his tragedies. 

 This, indeed, is inevitable, for there are no characters, but 



* &quot; The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except 

 among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not 

 support it, differs in nothing from prose.&quot; GHAY to WEST. 



t Diderot and Rousseau, however, thought their language unfit for 

 poetry, and Voltaire seems to have half agreed with them. No one 

 has expressed this feeling more neatly than Fauriel : &quot; Nul doute 

 que Ton ne puisse dire en prose des choses eminemment poetiques, 

 tout comme il n est que trop certain que Ton peut en dire de fort 

 prosaiques en vers, et meme en excellents vers, en vers elegamment 

 tournes, et en beau langage. C est un fait dont je n ai pas besoin 

 d indiquer d exemples : aucune litterature n en fournirait autant que 

 le ndtre.&quot; Hist, de la Poesie Prove^ale, II. 237. 



J Parallel of Poetry and Painting. 



