5 - The Consolations of Philosophy

Summary

Dryden offers no single or simple solution to the question of how one might survive the influence of the disruptive and anarchic powers embodied in such figures as Venus, Mars, and Fortune. What he provides is a series of imagined consolatory voices, some of them expressing sentiments close to those to which he seems to have been committed as a man, some of them drawing on the wisdom of the classical and medieval worlds, and some of them offering a subtle combination – though never a simple identification – of the two. Dryden continued to be buffeted by adversity to the end of his life, as, having been born under the malevolent influence of Saturn, he would have expected. But to give convincing expression to imaginative consolations in itself perhaps provides some evidence that one has felt their power, and Dryden's ability to depict the harsh laws of nature and the capricious rule of the gods with the conspicuous zest and lightness of touch that we have already witnessed indicates that he was, at least in the exercise of his art, far from merely daunted or paralysed by their sway. The very confidence and freedom of his art indicate that he had, at least in some measure, and on one level, taken his own imaginative consolations to heart.

As we have seen, Dryden's earlier writing often anticipates the vivid and dispassionate evocations of the disruptive forces that are so prominent in his later writing. But the explicit consolations against anarchy and chaos in his earlier work often take a somewhat conventional and partisan form, identifying such tendencies rather narrowly with the forces of political and religious dissent that threaten the Stuart regime. A dominant tendency in the earlier poems is to celebrate monarchical government and the divine Providence that, these works suggest, had brought about the Restoration and continued to bless and sanction the Stuart monarchy. When the classical gods are evoked, they are often presented with conscious and playful artifice as beneficent powers supportive of monarchy and social order. They are deployed, together with a panoply of biblical allusion and typology, to suggest an intimate connection between monarchy and divinity.