# Miscellanies (Swinburne)/A Relic of Dryden

APPENDIX.
I.
A RELIC OF DRYDEN.
Two of the most illustrious names in the whole history of letters stand inscribed among theirs who have recorded their protest against the curious impertinence of research which insists on tracking, recovering, and preserving the slightest and least worthy fragments or remnants of a great man's work. It would be difficult to strike the balance of acrimony between the several rebukes administered to this surely not unnatural even if not wholly reasonable appetite of the mind, as habitual probably among grateful students as among 'curious impertinents,' by Voltaire on the one hand and by Landor on the other. And it was on the reissue in Scott's edition of all the miscellaneous work which did least honour to the hand and does least credit to the memory of Dryden that the great English critic and poet expended the sharpest expression of his fiery contempt. Yet something, I venture to think, may be pleaded on behalf of the curious in almost all cases of the kind. They are at least not parallel or comparable with such atrocious profanation of the inmost privacies and most secret sanctities of life and death as many years since was so grandly stigmatized by Lord Tennyson 'after reading a Life and Letters.' What a man has once given to the public eye is his no longer, to be taken back at pleasure or cancelled on change of mind. And whatever concerning in any way so great a name as Dryden's may be discovered and recorded at this distance ​of time cannot but be of some small interest at least to all students of English literature.
It is but too certain, on the other hand,—and I should be the last to question or dispute the certainty,—that no lover of Dryden's fame could wish to see any addition made to the already too long list of his comedies. Rather might we reasonably desire, were it possible, to strike off several of these from the roll and erase the record of their perpetration for ever. Why then, it will most properly and inevitably be asked,—why then be at pains to unearth an ugly and unsavoury relic of the Restoration—a word for which history, whether French or English, reads Degradation—on the chance that we may discover in such miry clay the impression of Dryden's great dishonoured hand? there were surely stains enough already on the broad hard outlines of its giant strength. And certainly, if I had but stumbled across a new sample of his indecent impotence and laborious incapacity in the heavy ploughed field of low comedy or farce, I should have had no thought but to let it lie. But if indeed there be anything of Dryden's in a long-forgotten play which was issued in his lifetime under cover of his approbation as containing a scene supplied by his own hand, it must be sought in one of two passages where the style suddenly changes from the roughest farce to the gravest and most high-toned rhetoric of which comedy can properly be capable.
In the year 1675 the too copious comic literature of the period was enlarged by the publication of 'The Mistaken Husband. A Comedie, as it is Acted by His Majesties servants At the Theatre-Royall. By a Person of Quality.—Hæc placuit semel.—[Hor.]' I should hardly have thought so, even then: at all events, we have no reason to suppose that on a tenth repetition it was found equally pleasing. Between title-page and prologue we find our only reason for taking notice of it, in the following address of 'the Bookseller to the Reader.'
"This Play was left in Mr. Dryden's hands many years since: The Author of it was unknown to him, and return'd not to claim ​it; 'Tis therefore to be presum'd that he is dead. After Twelve years expectation, Mr. Dryden gave it to the Players, having upon perusal of it, found that it deserv'd a better Fate than to be buried in obscurity: I have heard him say, that finding a Scene wanting, he supply'd it; and many have affirm'd, that the stile of it' (of the play, that is, in general; not by any means of the additional scene) 'is proper to the Subject, which is that the French call Basse Comedy (sic). The turns of it are natural,' (I should be loth to bet on the chance of any reader's agreement with the bookseller on this point) and the resemblance of one man to another, has not only been the foundation of this, but of many other Plays. Plautus his Amphitrion, was the Original of all, and Shakespear and Moliere have copied him with success. Nevertheless, if this Play in it self should be a trifle, which you have no reason to suspect, because that incomparable Person would not from his Ingenious labours lose so much time as to write a whole Scene in it, which in it self sufficiently makes you amends, for Poetry being like Painting, where, if a great Master have but touch'd upon an ordinary Piece, he makes it of Value to all understanding Men; as I doubt not but this will be by his Additions: As it is, I am resolv'd to detain you no longer from it, but subscribe myself,
"Your very Humble Servant, 'R. Bentley.'
After this somewhat Gampian example of publisher's English, the prologue naturally follows; and no reader who considers the date will be surprised to learn that neither prologue nor epilogue is presentable to eyes polite. Nor does either of these effusions-though certainly this is not an inevitable corollary to be inferred from the preceding proposition-show any trace whatever of the laureate's master-hand. Nor, again, will any reader who takes account of the subject and the model indicated by the admiring publisher be much amazed at the information that even under the regency of Nell Gwyn and Barbara Palmer some passages of this 'Orphan Play'—as the pathetic prologue defines it—may have seemed almost exceptionally outrageous even to an audience not yet chaste enough—as in our own pure and happy period—to applaud the rankest ribaldry of foreign farces, while proscribing for ​moral and decorous reasons the purest masterpieces of foreign tragedy. Not that there is any great harm in this homebred farce, though it is extravagant in every sense at all points; rough and ready, coarse and boisterous, nautically jocose and erotic—rather flagrant of Wapping than fragrant of Whitehall. But it is as far from the deliberate and elaborate brutality of Wycherley, Shadwell, and Dryden himself, in their best and worst comedies, as from the daintier naughtiness and graceless grace of Etherege. Nor has it anything—in speaking of an English work produced in any but the age of Rochester it would be happily superfluous to certify that it had nothing—of the 'unspeakable' and ultra-Turkish taint which in that noble poet's contemporary alteration of Fletcher's Valentinian is rank enough to commend it even to the abnormal appetite of a moralist after the order of Petronius. But in an honest way' (as Prior has it) there is here undoubtedly no stint of that same'—in other words, of broad rampant full-blown merriment, playing noisily about the nuptial couch of a plebeian Alcmena. 'A younger brother,' as he describes himself, 'of the house of Mercury,' being in love with an usurer's daughter, whose 'father sent her husband of an errand, no man knows whither,' nine years before the action of the comedy begins, takes advantage of such a personal resemblance to the bridegroom as precludes the necessity of supernatural juggling or miraculous disguise to impose upon father and daughter alike the belief that the wanderer has returned in his person, rich enough to 'get children in embroidered coats'. As no deity could here be called in to loose the knot, 'to gild the pill,' and to announce the nativity of a Hercules, the playwright has hit on a happily ingenious device wherewith to reconcile controversy and to conciliate morality for this, unlike his politer fellows of the more courtly stage, the honest unknown has actually been at pains to accomplish by the expedient of assimilating the household arrangements of his Amphitryon and Alcmena to those of the couple corresponding to that Grecian pair in the scriptural record of Christian mythology. The ​Amphitryon or rather the Joseph of this new version of an old tale was 'surpriz'd upon his Wedding-day, and separated from her'—his virgin bride—'by her Father': so that when on his return he finds himself supplanted or anticipated by the intervention of a 'Jupiter-Scapin,' who has won his way to the heart of his Alcmena by means no less energetic than ingenious, he is able as well as ready to resign her to a rival so deserving, on the ground that 'he has been above seven years away beyond Sea, and has never Writ her word he was alive; so that in Law the Marriage is void.' And thus is Morality reconciled with the Comic Muse; surely to the no small comfort of the moral reader, who on his way towards this desirable consummation will have come across too many 'a little piece of sculduddery, which after all' (as Nanty Ewart well puts it) 'does nobody any harm,' and means none; which unhappily is more than can be said for all Dryden's own writings. The rude honest humour of the main action is quite unlike the heavy weary movement of his joyless and shameless, witless and thankless labours in the comic line. But here if anywhere is surely something of the noble grace and simple strength of his more firm and serious manner, effective and serviceable always, even when most hasty, crude, and conventional in details of expression.
Alcmena, be it understood, has just detected the false Amphitryon by the difference of his voice from that of her long since vagabond bridegroom.
If this pretty passage be thought too gentle in its tone for the generally untender Muse of Dryden, I would refer the objector to an equally simple and graceful dialogue in verse between Leonidas and Palmyra in the chaotic tragicomedy of Marriage à la Mode.
A fellow-student whose verdict on such a question carries no light weight with it would assign to Dryden rather this than the scene which I proceed to transcribe at full length, literatè as before and punctatim, having been inclined for my own part to exclaim on a first reading of it, 'either John Dryden or the Devil.'
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