ably, that little had been discovered about Dryden because there was
little to discover; that Dryden was a very ordinary person who
happened to be a master of his craft, and that was all.

That conclusion is still generally accepted, particularly since the
romantic and typically nineteenth-century efforts of Macaulay and
Christie to paint a portrait of a sordid, villain poet, unscrupulous and
two-faced, have been discounted.

That he was the supreme craftsman is true, as it is true of other great
artists such as Bach and Haydn; that he was not a romantic figure in
the nineteenth-century manner, a Byron or even a Coleridge, nor even
in the seventeenth-century manner of Donne or Rochester is equally
true. But the man who wrote Religio Laici, who passed through
stages of vaingloriousness and fought with his pride, who came to
consider the sources of life and death in his Lucretius, who emerged
from the spiritual doubt of Anglicanism into the calm waters of faith,
a faith he stuck to in spite of all blandishments and pressing needs,--
this was no homme moyen sensuel, dull, phlegmatic, material to stuff
churchyards with, as Ford Madox Ford used to say. The quiet front
may have been successfully presented to his world over seventy long
years, but Dryden was a person susceptible to the terrors, doubts and
strange joys of the sensitive intellect, now the calculating businessman,
now the open-handed, open-hearted bon viveur; now the good parent,
now the lover of actresses. He is a lover of good company whose
greatest delight is the quiet retirement of country life, a playwright
happy in "bold bawdry" who is intensely occupied with religion--
a man in fact worth knowing more about, because it is seldom that a
great poet is also such a complete human being, so balanced, so coherent,
knowing the terrors, supping freely with them, but refusing to succumb
to their menacing.

This is what makes him so interesting, and why I have written this
book. Yet from one point of view it has been an unnecessary labour:
there already exists one life--and only one--in which the real John
Dryden is portrayed. That is the life by Sir Walter Scott. I have
read it many times, and never yet turned the last page without being
near tears--the tears forced from one by the presence of genius. Here
is one great writer devoting himself to another, not imposing himself
but for a brief space living himself into the other.

One further observation about this magnificent Life, which shame-
fully is unobtainable save in very large libraries: that is that the
observations Scott makes about Dryden, his shots in the dark, have
been in many instances fully substantiated by the researches of the last
forty years.

But it is those researches that have fortified me in the hopeless
endeavour of "improving" on Scott; for when we know things for

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