Dryden and the Scientific Image

Dryden and the Scientific ImageAuthor(s): George WatsonSource: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Jun., 1963), pp. 25-35Published by: The Royal SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/530899 .

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25

DRYDEN AND THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGE

By GEORGE WATSON

Lecturer in English, StJohn's College, Cambridge

[Plate 31

I OR one brief period, at all events, no one could speak of two cultures in

England, and that period was the Restoration. The decades that surround the founding of the Royal Society in i660 are full of the intellectual excitement that might ideally arise from the free interchange of ideas among scientists, poets, and philosophers. In no other age has it been so: no Eliza- bethan poet can be shown to have taken an active interest in scientific

discovery, unless we call geography a science-though it is conceivable that Ben Jonson, lecturing in rhetoric at Gresham College in London in the very centre of the ferment that eventually produced the Royal Society, had access to new scientific ideas. Bacon's Advancement of Learning (i605) was merely a manifesto for the public encouragement of knowledge, and for years after his death it remained unfulfilled. Milton wrote Paradise Lost indifferent, apparently, to the question whether the Ptolemaic or Copernican system were true, and probably preferred the discredited Ptolemaic system for no better reason than that, in its picturesque detail, it suited his epic purposes better. And the record of English poets and philosophers after the appearance of Newton's Principia in 1687 is hardly better. His Opticks of 1704, it is true, had a perceptible influence on eighteenth-century poets which has

already been studied*; but what is much more remarkable is the general avoidance of scientific discovery by the literary world of Augustan London. As the century progressed, some forms of experiment, and especially chemistry, had a gentlemanly vogue, and Dr Johnson (so Boswell tells us) attended with interest 'some experiments that were made by a physician at

Salisbury on the new kinds of air' in September 1783, and even allowed a

good word to be said for that unitarian radical, Joseph Priestley. But the

devastating fun that Swift makes of the whole Baconian inheritance in the third book of Gulliver's Travels is more representative of literary attitudes to science than this.

The fact is that neoclassical notions of the arts, which invaded England powerfully with the appearance of Rymer's Tragedies of the Last Age (1678), were hostile to science. The hostility is intelligible, though not excusable. The

* Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse, Princeton (I946).



Plate 3

JOHN DRYDEN, F.R.S. (I63I-I700)

From a portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery.

[Facing page 25



26

misunderstanding of Aristotle's claim in the ninth chapter of the Poetics that 'poetry tends to represent the general, history the particular' encouraged French and English critics in the late seventeenth century to insist upon generalized characters in drama-all kings to be uniformly kingly, all ladies

ladylike-and neo-Aristotelianism in this form readily sets poetry and science at odds with each other. Johnson's famous insistence in Rasselas that the poet should not number the streaks of the tulip sums up this aspect of neoclassical doctrine to perfection. Poets, in this view, make general and

edifying statements about mankind; scientists fuss over little details in the lower universe of rocks, plants, animals, and man in his physical properties alone. There could be no question which mattered more.

II But between the blank periods of Renaissance and Augustan indifference

to science, the Restoration offers a momentary proof of what co-operation between science and poetry might be like. The glimpse is no more than that. A host of literary men entered the Royal Society in the first few years of its official existence from I660, and took part in its early 'inquisitions': Evelyn, Cowley, Denham,Waller, Sprat, Dryden. It cannot be pretended that they greatly influenced the course of the Society, apart from Evelyn, who served for a time as Secretary. Cowley died soon after its foundation, in 1667; Denham in I669. Sprat did excellent service in public relations, defending the

Society against the common charge of free-thinking in a manifesto entitled, rather misleadingly, The History of the Royal-Society (1667). Dryden's brief career among the scientists is, in its way, the most revealing of all (i). The most intensely professional, perhaps, of all the great English poets, he was not one to widen the circle of his acquaintance without good cause or to

engage in enterprises without reward to himself. We can only guess at the motives which led him to join the Society in November 1662, at the

age of thirty-one, his youth all spent and still without a play or any major poem to his credit. The prestige of the Society, which had received its Royal Charter a few months before, and the varied talents and influence of its members, may have been reason enough for him. And yet his career as a Fellow could hardly have been less glorious. When the time came to appor- tion the Fellows into standing committees, in 1664, Dryden was made a member of two of them-one of them dedicated to a task parallel to that of the French Academy, and of abiding interest to him, that of 'improving the

English language'. But the records of the Society show that in I666 he was

reported delinquent in his attendance, and that in 1667 he was dropped-the



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very year in which his public career as a poet and critic began, with the appearance of the Annus Mirabilis in January and of the critical dialogue Of Dramatick Poesie in August, though his first play had been unsuccessfully performed as early as February 1663. From that time on Dryden's activity, so far as we can trace it now, was entirely given up to poetry, business, and family. There are only two substantial mentions of the Royal Society in all his writings. The first is the magnificent verse apostrophe in the Annus Mirabilis (stanzas 162-6). The reference to Boyle's theory of precious stones, in the third stanza of the same poem, with Dryden's accompanying note, characteristically misunderstands a difficult geological theory which Boyle had only recently published, for Dryden was never to prove adept at follow- ing the details of scientific discovery. His second mention of the Society is tantalizing rather than informative. In his 'Defence of An Essay of Dramatique Poesie', prefixed to the second edition of The Indian Emperour (I668), Dryden defends his dialogue against attacks by his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard in these extraordinary terms:

He is here pleased to charge me with being magisterial, as he has done in many other places of his preface [to The Great Favourite]. Therefore, in vindication of myself, I must crave leave to say that my whole discourse was sceptical, according to that way of reasoning which was used by Socrates, Plato, and all the Academics of old, which Tully and the best of the Ancients followed, and which is imitated by the modest inquisitions of the Royal Society. (2)

Dryden's strategy here is to defend himself by pleading that, in a dialogue, the author is not responsible for the views of any of his characters. The plea is not very convincing, in view of the clear identification of the character Neander with Dryden himself; but if the Royal Society imitated the dia- logues of Plato and Cicero in its first meetings-perhaps by conducting them as seminars rather than as lectures or paper-readings-then the influence of literary models upon our early scientific history may have been more powerful than we now have any way of determining.

III

Dryden's influence upon the Royal Society was probably negligible. The Society's influence upon him, on the other hand, was large enough to leave scattered traces of his early scientific association visible throughout a literary career that lasted for some forty years. No English poet, not even Mr W. H. Auden, has used scientific analogies so readily. No English critic, certainly, has



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employed them so abundantly. Dryden's works, and especially his criticism, are the largest single corpus of our literature to bear the stamp of scientific interest. In this sense, indeed, they are quite without parallel in Europe, for even imaginative writers like Pascal and Goethe, whose scientific interests were vastly more serious than Dryden's, do not call upon scientific images as readily as he. And yet the range of Dryden's scientific reference has not been much noticed, except by Samuel Johnson who, in a brilliant passage in his Life of Dryden (1779), observed the fact itself and drew his own intuitive conclusion:

His works abound with knowledge, and sparkle with illustrations. There is scarcely any science or faculty that does not supply him with occasional images and lucky similitudes; every page discovers a mind very widely acquainted both with art and nature, and in full possession of great stores of intellectual wealth.

And Johnson noticed too how occasional Dryden's scientific knowledge was: Of him that knows much, it is natural to suppose that he has read with diligence; yet I rather believe that the knowledge of Dryden was gleaned from accidental intelligence and various conversation, by a quick apprehension, a judicious selection, and a happy memory, a keen appetite of knowledge, and a powerful digestion . A mind like Dryden's, always curious,... had a more pleasant, perhaps a nearer, way to knowledge than by the silent progress of solitary reading.

This comment remains, within its own limits, definitive: 'accidental intelligence' is probably an accurate summary of Dryden's scientific interests. There is no reason to think he ever read any scientific book all the way through. His scientific imagery is all of a kind that could have been acquired by an intelligent and patient listener to discussions in the Royal Society in the early I66os, aided by what Johnson calls 'a powerful digestion'. It is largely drawn from physics and astronomy; and if it is based upon what Dryden heard at the Royal Society, then it suggests how powerfully the influence of Descartes was felt in English scientific circles in the reign of Charles II, and how much more modestly the native Baconian sources served than Sprat in his History claimed. The very first of Dryden's critical essays, the preface to his tragi-comedy The Rival Ladies (1664), contains a reference to Descartes's theory of light in the course of an effusive letter to his patron the Earl of Orrery, who was both statesman and dramatist:

Your Lordship's soul is an entire globe of light, breaking out on every side; and if I have only discovered one beam of it, 'tis not that the light



29

falls unequally, but because the body which receives it is of unequal parts (I.5).

In the age of Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil, such fulsome analogies are even com- moner than in Elizabethan poetry, and indeed Dryden himself, nearly thirty years later, compared another patron, the Earl of Dorset, to the rising sun: 'I was as soon as sensible as any man of that light, when it was but just shooting out, and beginning to travel upwards to the meridian' (II.73). But the compliment to Orrery is also an adaptation of Descartes's theory of

light in the fourth book of the Principia (1644) (sect. 28)-a work which

appeared in English in the same year as Dryden's Rival Ladies-where Descartes remarks that, though all light comes from the sun in a straight line, yet it is modified, in its effects, by the nature of the bodies it encounters. And the analogy, once made, is abandoned and never revived, to be replaced by another equally improbable; for at the end of the same preface Dryden compares the self-critical faculty of the poet to the digestive process of the stomach, which 'makes the best concoction when it strictly embraces the nourishment, and takes account of every little particle as it passes through'; and then extends the metaphor in manner that reminds us that, only a few

years before, he had been writing Metaphysical verses and indulging a

youthful taste for conceits: 'But as the best medicines may lose their virtue by being ill applied, so it is with verse, if a fit subject be not chosen for it' (1.9).

Much more suggestive of the atmosphere of the Royal Society, however, are the astronomical images that occur in the critical dialogue Of Dramatick Poesie (i668), which Dryden largely wrote soon after joining the Society, during his stay in Wiltshire in I665-6. The century offered excitement to a

poet who cared to take an interest in planetary discovery. The Copernican revolution had recently been confirmed by Gilbert, Galileo, and Descartes, and the telescope, invented in the Netherlands in about I608, was promptly used by Galileo two years later. Dryden employs it in a metaphor to explain the dramatic unity of time. Shakespeare's history plays, according to the character Lisideius, who is defending the regular French plays against the Elizabethan, are technical absurdities, for there the action of many years is

'cramped into a representation of two hours and a half, which is not to imitate or paint nature, but rather to draw her in miniature, to take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong end of a perspective [i.e. a tele-

scope], and receive her images not only much less, but infinitely more im-

perfect than the life' (I.47). The critical point is to be found, in essence, in Coreille's third Discours of i660, but the analogy of the telescope is entirely Dryden's and characteristically ingenious. Even more so is the appeal to



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Newton's first law of motion (as we now call it), which follows shortly after.

Dryden might have heard it from anyone who had read the Principia of Descartes, where it first appeared, but his language at this point is so close to Descartes as to suggest that he knew the passage itself. Descartes had written:

The first law of nature is that each individual thing continues as it is, and never changes except by encountering other things ... Once it begins to move, we have no reason to think it will ever cease to move with the same force, so long as it encounters nothing to retard or stop it (Principia, 11.37).

And yet no critic but Dryden would ever have used a law of physics, and a

recently enunciated law at that, to explain the nature of dramatic illusion:

What the philosophers say of motion, that when it is once begun it continues of itself, and will do so to eternity without some stop put to it, is clearly true on this occasion: the soul [of the audience], being already moved with the characters and fortunes of those imaginary persons, continues going of its own accord; and we are no more weary to hear what becomes of them when they are not on the stage than we are to listen to the news of an absent mistress (1.52).

No one has ever solved the problem of what dramatic illusion is like; but this bold image does suggest an extraordinary confidence, on the part of a

young dramatist, as to what can be achieved in the theatre. And so does the

reply of Neander, the character with whom Dryden clearly identifies himself in his defence of English plays against the French. Neander justifies the

'variety and copiousness' of Elizabethan plots, as against the 'barrenness' of the French, on the strange grounds that the native drama reflects the rich

complexity of the solar system. It is notable that Dryden, like Milton in Paradise Lost-a poem which, by an odd coincidence, appeared within a few weeks of his dialogue-should use the old, discredited Ptolemaic system as understood by medieval and Renaissance Europe, in which the primurn mobile, or the outer sphere enclosing the eight heavenly bodies and the fixed stars, imparts motion to the whole. Dryden makes no claim to believe it. He

merely reports it as hearsay-'they say . . .' It is simply an apt way of

characterizing the excellence of the plots of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher:

Ours [i.e. English plots], besides the main design, have under-plots or

by-concernments of less considerable persons and intrigues, which are carried on with the motion of the main plot; just as they say the orb of



3I

the fixed stars, and those of the planets, though they have motions of their own, are whirled about by the motion of the primum mobile, in which they are contained. That similitude expresses much of the English state; for if contrary motions may be found in nature to agree, if a planet can go east and west at the same time, one way by virtue of its own motion, the other by the force of the First Mover, it will not be difficult to imagine how the under-plot, which is only different, not contrary to the great design, may naturally be conducted along with it (1.59).

This full-blooded analogy between the structure of a play and the universe is

unique in neoclassical criticism. Rather less original, because based upon the familiar Horatian doctrine of an analogy between poetry and painting, is

Dryden's remark in the preface to Troilus and Cressida (I679) that the parts of a tragedy should all point to a single end, and that tragi-comedy is not admissible:

As in perspective, so in tragedy, there must be a point of sight in which all the lines terminate; otherwise the eye wanders, and the work is false (I.244).

The mathematical principles of linear perspective had been discovered by Florentine artists in the early fifteenth century; and trompe l'oeil devices, which exploited perspective for illusionist effect, were popular in seventeenth-

century baroque. It is interesting to see Dryden, who hardly mentions any major painter other than Poussin, revealing some understanding of current artistic techniques-though, since he never left England in his life, it is un-

likely that he ever saw the original of any major Renaissance painting. A few pages further on he returns to the more familiar world of mathematics and physics by comparing tragic catharsis to the principle of leverage:

Even in imperfect plots there are less degrees of nature, by which some faint emotions of pity and terror are raised in us: as a less engine will raise a less proportion of weight, though not so much as one of Archi- medes' making; for nothing can move our nature but by some natural reason, which works upon passions. And, since we acknowledge the effect, there must be something in the cause (I.247).

In the Life of Plutarch (1683), he returns to the metaphor of the telescope, but this time to justify the study of history, which he calls 'a prospective-glass carrying your soul to a vast distance, and taking in the farthest objects of antiquity' (II.4)-a far less striking use of the metaphor than in the essay OfDramatick Poesie. More arresting, and suggestive again of some knowledge



32

of Descartes's corpuscular theory of light in the Principia (IV.28f.), is the defence of biography that follows:

As the sunbeams, united in a burning-glass to a point, have greater force than when they are darted from a plain superficies, so the virtues and actions of one man, drawn together into a single story, strike upon our minds a stronger and more lively impression than the scattered relations of many men and many actions (11.7).

Again, Dryden had no need of any native source, whether Bacon or Boyle, to learn as much as this about the nature of light: any discussion in the Royal Society of Descartes's theory of light might have taught him enough. Two

years later, a sceptical reference to mathematics occurs in the preface to Tonson's second miscellany of poems, the Sylvae of I685: 'Many a fair precept in poetry is like a seeming demonstration in the mathematics: very specious in the diagram, but failing in the mechanic operation' (II.19). But Dryden's Cartesian sources appear most explicitly in the 'Discourse Concerning the

Original and Progress of Satire' prefixed to his translations of Juvenal and Persius in I693, where he compliments the Earl of Dorset on his faculty for

friendship-'a truth so generally acknowledged that it needs no proof: 'tis of the nature of a first principle, which is received as soon as it is proposed; and needs not the reformation which Descartes used to his' (1I.73). Descartes's first principle in his Discours de la methode (1637) was 'I exist'

(IV.ii); the reformation, as Dryden calls it, is the premise 'I think, therefore . . .' This is the one direct reference to Descartes in Dryden. But the very celebrity of the passage is enough to make us feel that Dryden had no need to read Descartes in order to pay such a compliment to a learned patron.

Dryden continues his compliment to Dorset with a reference to the

compass, a device which William Gilbert, Copernicus's first advocate in

England, had made a matter of scientific interest in his De magnete (I600):

When thus, as I may say, before the use of the loadstone, or knowledge of the compass, I was sailing in a vast ocean, without other help than the

pole-star of the Ancients, and the rules of the French stage among the Modems... (II.73).

And he uses the Copernican system later in the same Discours to describe the subordination of the sub-plot to the plot in tragi-comedy:

Thus the Copernican system of the planets makes the moon to be moved

by the motion of the earth, and carried about her orb, as a dependent of hers (II.145).



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Again the analogy is made without any commitment, on Dryden's part, to the Copernican system. And his very sceptical and eclectic temperament re- asserts itself in the course of the late 'Parallel betwixt Painting and Poetry' (I695) where, discussing the gift of invention in poet and painter, he calls it 'the gift of nature', and goes on, 'it depends on the influence of the stars, say the astrologers, on the organs of the body, say the naturalists: 'tis the particular gift of Heaven, say the divines, both Christians and heathens' (II.I94-5). And he returns, towards the end of the Parallel, to the comparison between a poem and the Copemican solar system-this time to explain the role of the hero in epic or tragedy:

He must outshine the rest of all the characters; he must appear the prince of them, like the sun in the Copernican system, encompassed with the less noble planets. Because the hero is the centre of the main action, all the lines from the circumference tend to him alone: he is the chief object of pity in the drama, and of admiration in the epic poem (II.I99).

The last of all Dryden's astronomical allusions-indeed his last scientific allusion of any kind-betrays his ignorance of the subject. Contesting Aristotle's claim that tragedy is superior to the epic in its concentration, he defends the epic, in his preface to his translation of the Aeneid (1697), in a confused analogy with the orbits of Saturn and the Moon:

A chariot may be driven round the pillar in less space than a large machine, because the bulk is not so great. Is the Moon a more noble planet than Saturn because she makes her revolution in less than thirty days, and he in little less than thirty years? Both their orbs are in proportion to their several magnitudes; and consequently the quickness or slowness of their motion, and the time of their circumvolutions, is no argument of the greater or less perfection (II.227).

Dryden's assumption that there is a direct correlation between the size of a heavenly body and the extent of its orbit suggests how amateur, to the end, his scientific interests remained.

IV The full effects of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century upon

English prose still remain to be studied, but its main effect is clear enough. The new scientists rejected imagery-not just the extravagant imagery of the metaphysical poets and of the baroque prose writers such as Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne, but all kinds of rhetorical analogy, whether similes, metaphors, or conceits. The stylistic revolution may be dated, with



34

an exactitude surprising in such matters, to the first years of the Restoration of I660. Between I66I and I665, for example (the dates of the first and second editions of the Vanity of Dogmatizing), Joseph Glanvill abandoned the exuberant style of his first draft, explaining that, after the lapse of three years, he now felt himself 'more gratified with manly sense, flowing in a natural and unaffected eloquence, than in the music and curi- osity of fine metaphors and dancing periods'. The preference for 'manliness' as against ornament could easily be paralleled in the period. The documents of the early Royal Society, selected by its eighteenth-century secretary Thomas Birch as The History of the Royal Society (1756-7), show the old style and the new jostling each other in the I66os, strangely indifferent to the age of Fellows: an early paper by Jonathan Goddard, for example, who was already a man in his forties, is an exact model of the new, bare style now thought to be most suitable to reports of scientific observations:

A milky white colour is produced by the mixture of spirit of wine impregnated with any resinous gum, as mastic, white benzoin, &c. with fair water: for which purpose the most transparent and crystalline gums are most advantageous ... (Vol. I. p. I );

whereas the young Christopher Wren, who was not yet thirty and might naturally be expected to take his place among the most modern in his taste for language, could report 'his hypothesis of Saturn' in these terms, in a letter of I October I66I read by Lord Brouncker to the Society:

And since you it is, that will not suffer me to continue in this peaceable humour, I shall not need to fear, that you will entertain any such sus- picion, especially since this kind of Saturn was long before hatched by your influence at White-Waltham, upon the observation of December, 1657, when first we had an apprehension, that the arms of Saturn kept their length, which produced this hypothesis, made first in two past- boards; not to say any thing of our attempts in wax, in Jan. I655 (p. 47).

The sprawling syntax, and the striking little metaphor of 'hatched', both point to an antiquated style; and even given that Wren's purpose here is partly complimentary-the letter is addressed to Sir Paul Neile, who had helped him with his observations-the contrast with Goddard's manner is still striking. Dryden's achievement in terms of this stylistic revolution, which occurred when he was about thirty years old, was to effect a com- promise which, unlike most compromises, was not dull. There is a brilliance of finish in his best prose which succeeds in blending Glanvill's alternatives of 'natural and unaffected eloquence' with 'fine metaphors and dancing periods'.



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The great virtue of Dryden's language, at its most masterful, is a controlled richness. No other Englishman of his century, perhaps, could have achieved an effect at once so baroque and yet so firmly designed as his apostrophe to the City of London after the Great Fire in his dedication to Annus Mirabilis: 'To you, therefore, this Year of Wonders isjustly dedicated, because you have made it so: you who are to stand a wonder to all years and ages, and who have built yourselves an immortal monument on your own ruins. You are now a Phoenix in her ashes and, as far as humanity can approach, a great emblem of the suffering Deity.' The enormous audacity of such language is fully matched by a sense of fitness. Raised in a tradition of teeming imagery, as his earliest poems show, he disciplined his style to the austerer tastes of the new age without utterly abandoning the Renaissance inheritance. It is not least among his triumphs that he even contrived to use the discoveries of science for rhetorical purposes which the scientists themselves could scarcely have approved.

REFERENCES

(I) cf Claude Lloyd, 'John Dryden and the Royal Society', Publications of the Modern Language Association ofAmerica, xlv (I930).

(2) Dryden, OfDramatic Poesy and Other CriticalEssays, edited by George Watson (I962), i, 123.

All subsequent references in the article are to this work.

I am deeply indebted to Miss Mary Hesse for expert advice about scientific knowledge in the seventeenth century.



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