Transcribed from the 1888 Cassell & Company edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY.
* * * * *
DISCOURSES ON SATIRE
AND ON
EPIC POETRY.
BY
JOHN DRYDEN.
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
_LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_.
1888.
INTRODUCTION.
DRYDEN’S discourses upon Satire and Epic Poetry belong to the latter
years of his life, and represent maturer thought than is to be found in
his “Essay of Dramatic Poesie.” That essay, published in 1667, draws its
chief interest from the time when it was written. A Dutch fleet was at
the mouth of the Thames. Dryden represents himself taking a boat down
the river with three friends, one of them his brother-in-law Sir Robert
Howard, another Sir Charles Sedley, and another Charles Sackville Lord
Buckhurst to whom, as Earl of Dorset, the “Discourse of Satire” is
inscribed. They go down the river to hear the guns at sea, and judge by
the sound whether the Dutch fleet be advancing or retreating. On the way
they talk of the plague of Odes that will follow an English victory;
their talk of verse proceeds to plays, with particular attention to a
question that had been specially argued before the public between Dryden
and his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard. The question touched the use
of blank verse in the drama. Dryden had decided against it as a
worthless measure, and the chief feature of the Essay, which was written
in dialogue, was its support of Dryden’s argument. But in that year
(1667) “Paradise Lost” was published, and Milton’s blank verse was the
death of Dryden’s theories. After a few years Dryden recanted his error.
The “Essay of Dramatic Poesie” is interesting as a setting forth in 1667
of mistaken critical opinions which were at that time in the ascendant,
but had not very long to live. Dryden always wrote good masculine prose,
and all his critical essays are good reading as pieces of English. His
“Essay of Dramatic Poesie” is good reading as illustrative of the
weakness of our literature in the days of the influence of France after
the Restoration. The essays on Satire and on Epic Poetry represent also
the influence of the French critical school, but represent it in a larger
way, with indications of its strength as well as of its weakness. They
represent also Dryden himself with a riper mind covering a larger field
of thought, and showing abundantly the strength and independence of his
own critical judgment, while he cites familiarly and frequently the
critics, little remembered and less cared for now, who then passed for
the arbiters of taste.
If English literature were really taught in schools, and the eldest boys
had received training that brought them in their last school-year to a
knowledge of the changes of intellectual fashion that set their outward
mark upon successive periods, there is no prose writing of Dryden that
could be used by a teacher more instructively than these Discourses on
Satire and on Epic Poetry. They illustrate abundantly both Dryden and
his time, and give continuous occasion for discussion of first
principles, whether in disagreement or agreement with the text. Dryden
was on his own ground as a critic of satire; and the ideal of an epic
that the times, and perhaps also the different bent of his own genius,
would not allow him to work out, at least finds such expression as might
be expected from a man who had high aspirations, and whose place, in
times unfavourable to his highest aims, was still among the master-poets
of the world.
The Discourse on Satire was prefixed to a translation of the satires of
Juvenal and Persius, and is dated the 18th of August, 1692, when the
poet’s age was sixty-one. In translating Juvenal, Dryden was helped by
his sons Charles and John. William Congreve translated one satire; other
translations were by Nahum Tate and George Stepney. Time modern reader
of the introductory discourse has first to pass through the unmeasured
compliments to the Earl of Dorset, which represent a real esteem and
gratitude in the extravagant terms then proper to the art of dedication.
We get to the free sea over a slimy shore. We must remember that Charles
the Second upon his death was praised by Charles Montague, who knew his
faults, as “the best good man that ever filled a throne,” and compared to
God Himself at the end of the first paragraph of Montague’s poem. But
when we are clear of the conventional unmeasured flatteries, and Dryden
lingers among epic poets on his way to the satirists, there is equal
interest in the mistaken criticisms, in the aspirations that are blended
with them, and in the occasional touches of the poet’s personality in
quiet references to his critics. The comparisons between Horace and
Juvenal in this discourse, and much of the criticism on Virgil in the
discourse on epic poetry, are the utterances of a poet upon poets, and
full of right suggestions from an artist’s mind. The second discourse
was prefixed in 1697—three years before Dryden’s death—to his translation
of the Æneid.
H. M.
A DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGINAL AND PROGRESS OF SATIRE:
ADDRESSED TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
CHARLES, EARL OF DORSET AND MIDDLESEX,
LORD CHAMBERLAIN OF HIS MAJESTY’S HOUSEHOLD, KNIGHT OF THE MOST NOBLE
ORDER OF THE GARTER, ETC.
MY LORD,
THE wishes and desires of all good men, which have attended your lordship
from your first appearance in the world, are at length accomplished, from
your obtaining those honours and dignities which you have so long
deserved. There are no factions, though irreconcilable to one another,
that are not united in their affection to you, and the respect they pay
you. They are equally pleased in your prosperity, and would be equally
concerned in your afflictions. Titus Vespasian was not more the delight
of human kind. The universal empire made him only more known and more
powerful, but could not make him more beloved. He had greater ability of
doing good, but your inclination to it is not less: and though you could
not extend your beneficence to so many persons, yet you have lost as few
days as that excellent emperor; and never had his complaint to make when
you went to bed, that the sun had shone upon you in vain, when you had
the opportunity of relieving some unhappy man. This, my lord, has justly
acquired you as many friends as there are persons who have the honour to
be known to you. Mere acquaintance you have none; you have drawn them
all into a nearer line; and they who have conversed with you are for ever
after inviolably yours. This is a truth so generally acknowledged that
it needs no proof: it is 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; for we doubt not, neither can we properly say, we
think we admire and love you above all other men: there is a certainty in
the proposition, and we know it. With the same assurance I can say, you
neither have enemies, nor can scarce have any; for they who have never
heard of you can neither love or hate you; and they who have, can have no
other notion of you than that which they receive from the public, that
you are the best of men. After this, my testimony can be of no farther
use, than to declare it to be daylight at high noon: and all who have the
benefit of sight can look up as well and see the sun.
It is true, I have one privilege which is almost particular to myself,
that I saw you in the east at your first arising above the hemisphere: I
was as soon sensible as any man of that light when it was but just
shooting out and beginning to travel upwards to the meridian. I made my
early addresses to your lordship in my “Essay of Dramatic Poetry,” and
therein bespoke you to the world; wherein I have the right of a first
discoverer. When I was myself in the rudiments of my poetry, without
name or reputation in the world, having rather the ambition of a writer
than the skill; when I was drawing the outlines of an art, without any
living master to instruct me in it—an art which had been better praised
than studied here in England; wherein Shakespeare, who created the stage
among us, had rather written happily than knowingly and justly; and
Jonson, who, by studying Horace, had been acquainted with the rules, yet
seemed to envy to posterity that knowledge, and, like an inventor of some
useful art, to make a monopoly of his learning—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 amongst the moderns (which are
extremely different from ours, by reason of their opposite taste), yet
even then I had the presumption to dedicate to your lordship—a very
unfinished piece, I must confess, and which only can be excused by the
little experience of the author and the modesty of the title—“An Essay.”
Yet I was stronger in prophecy than I was in criticism: I was inspired to
foretell you to mankind as the restorer of poetry, the greatest genius,
the truest judge, and the best patron.
Good sense and good nature are never separated, though the ignorant world
has thought otherwise. Good nature, by which I mean beneficence and
candour, is the product of right reason; which of necessity will give
allowance to the failings of others by considering that there is nothing
perfect in mankind; and by distinguishing that which comes nearest to
excellency, though not absolutely free from faults, will certainly
produce a candour in the judge. It is incident to an elevated
understanding like your lordship’s to find out the errors of other men;
but it is your prerogative to pardon them; to look with pleasure on those
things which are somewhat congenial and of a remote kindred to your own
conceptions; and to forgive the many failings of those who, with their
wretched art, cannot arrive to those heights that you possess from a
happy, abundant, and native genius which are as inborn to you as they
were to Shakespeare, and, for aught I know, to Homer; in either of whom
we find all arts and sciences, all moral and natural philosophy, without
knowing that they ever studied them.
There is not an English writer this day living who is not perfectly
convinced that your lordship excels all others in all the several parts
of poetry which you have undertaken to adorn. The most vain and the most
ambitions of our age have not dared to assume so much as the competitors
of Themistocles: they have yielded the first place without dispute; and
have been arrogantly content to be esteemed as second to your lordship,
and even that also with a _longo_, _sed proximi intervallo_. If there
have been, or are, any who go farther in their self-conceit, they must be
very singular in their opinion; they must be like the officer in a play
who was called captain, lieutenant, and company. The world will easily
conclude whether such unattended generals can ever be capable of making a
revolution in Parnassus.
I will not attempt in this place to say anything particular of your lyric
poems, though they are the delight and wonder of the age, and will be the
envy of the next. The subject of this book confines me to satire; and in
that an author of your own quality, whose ashes I will not disturb, has
given you all the commendation which his self-sufficiency could afford to
any man—“The best good man, with the worst-natured muse.” In that
character, methinks, I am reading Jonson’s verses to the memory of
Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric: where good
nature—the most godlike commendation of a man—is only attributed to your
person, and denied to your writings; for they are everywhere so full of
candour, that, like Horace, you only expose the follies of men without
arraigning their vices; and in this excel him, that you add that
pointedness of thought which is visibly wanting in our great Roman.
There is more of salt in all your verses than I have seen in any of the
moderns, or even of the ancients: but you have been sparing of the gall;
by which means you have pleased all readers and offended none. Donne
alone, of all our countrymen, had your talent, but was not happy enough
to arrive at your versification; and were he translated into numbers and
English, he would yet be wanting in the dignity of expression. That
which is the prime virtue and chief ornament of Virgil, which
distinguishes him from the rest of writers, is so conspicuous in your
verses that it casts a shadow on all your contemporaries; we cannot be
seen, or but obscurely, while you are present. You equal Donne in the
variety, multiplicity, and choice of thoughts; you excel him in the
manner and the words. I read you both with the same admiration, but not
with the same delight. He affects the metaphysics, not only in his
satires, but in his amorous verses, where Nature only should reign; and
perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy,
when he should engage their hearts and entertain them with the softnesses
of love. In this (if I may be pardoned for so bold a truth) Mr. Cowley
has copied him to a fault: so great a one, in my opinion, that it throws
his “Mistress” infinitely below his “Pindarics” and his later
compositions, which are undoubtedly the best of his poems and the most
correct. For my own part I must avow it freely to the world that I never
attempted anything in satire wherein I have not studied your writings as
the most perfect model. I have continually laid them before me; and the
greatest commendation which my own partiality can give to my productions
is that they are copies, and no farther to be allowed than as they have
something more or less of the original. Some few touches of your
lordship, some secret graces which I have endeavoured to express after
your manner, have made whole poems of mine to pass with approbation: but
take your verses all together, and they are inimitable. If, therefore, I
have not written better, it is because you have not written more. You
have not set me sufficient copy to transcribe; and I cannot add one
letter of my own invention of which I have not the example there.
It is a general complaint against your lordship, and I must have leave to
upbraid you with it, that, because you need not write, you will not.
Mankind that wishes you so well in all things that relate to your
prosperity, have their intervals of wishing for themselves, and are
within a little of grudging you the fulness of your fortune: they would
be more malicious if you used it not so well and with so much generosity.
Fame is in itself a real good, if we may believe Cicero, who was perhaps
too fond of it; but even fame, as Virgil tells us, acquires strength by
going forward. Let Epicurus give indolency as an attribute to his gods,
and place in it the happiness of the blest: the Divinity which we worship
has given us not only a precept against it, but His own example to the
contrary. The world, my lord, would be content to allow you a seventh
day for rest; or, if you thought that hard upon you, we would not refuse
you half your time: if you came out, like some great monarch, to take a
town but once a year, as it were for your diversion, though you had no
need to extend your territories. In short, if you were a bad, or, which
is worse, an indifferent poet, we would thank you for our own quiet, and
not expose you to the want of yours. But when you are so great, and so
successful, and when we have that necessity of your writing that we
cannot subsist entirely without it, any more (I may almost say) than the
world without the daily course of ordinary Providence, methinks this
argument might prevail with you, my lord, to forego a little of your
repose for the public benefit. It is not that you are under any force of
working daily miracles to prove your being, but now and then somewhat of
extraordinary—that is, anything of your production—is requisite to
refresh your character.
This, I think, my lord, is a sufficient reproach to you, and should I
carry it as far as mankind would authorise me, would be little less than
satire. And indeed a provocation is almost necessary, in behalf of the
world, that you might be induced sometimes to write; and in relation to a
multitude of scribblers, who daily pester the world with their
insufferable stuff, that they might be discouraged from writing any more.
I complain not of their lampoons and libels, though I have been the
public mark for many years. I am vindictive enough to have repelled
force by force if I could imagine that any of them had ever reached me:
but they either shot at rovers, and therefore missed; or their powder was
so weak that I might safely stand them at the nearest distance. I
answered not the “Rehearsal” because I knew the author sat to himself
when he drew the picture, and was the very Bayes of his own farce;
because also I knew that my betters were more concerned than I was in
that satire; and, lastly, because Mr. Smith and Mr. Johnson, the main
pillars of it, were two such languishing gentlemen in their conversation
that I could liken them to nothing but to their own relations, those
noble characters of men of wit and pleasure about the town. The like
considerations have hindered me from dealing with the lamentable
companions of their prose and doggerel. I am so far from defending my
poetry against them that I will not so much as expose theirs. And for my
morals, if they are not proof against their attacks, let me be thought by
posterity what those authors would be thought if any memory of them or of
their writings could endure so long as to another age. But these dull
makers of lampoons, as harmless as they have been to me, are yet of
dangerous example to the public. Some witty men may perhaps succeed to
their designs, and, mixing sense with malice, blast the reputation of the
most innocent amongst men, and the most virtuous amongst women.
Heaven be praised, our common libellers are as free from the imputation
of wit as of morality, and therefore whatever mischief they have designed
they have performed but little of it. Yet these ill writers, in all
justice, ought themselves to be exposed, as Persius has given us a fair
example in his first Satire, which is levelled particularly at them; and
none is so fit to correct their faults as he who is not only clear from
any in his own writings, but is also so just that he will never defame
the good, and is armed with the power of verse to punish and make
examples of the bad. But of this I shall have occasion to speak further
when I come to give the definition and character of true satires.
In the meantime, as a counsellor bred up in the knowledge of the
municipal and statute laws may honestly inform a just prince how far his
prerogative extends, so I may be allowed to tell your lordship, who by an
undisputed title are the king of poets, what an extent of power you have,
and how lawfully you may exercise it over the petulant scribblers of this
age. As Lord Chamberlain, I know, you are absolute by your office in all
that belongs to the decency and good manners of the stage. You can
banish from thence scurrility and profaneness, and restrain the
licentious insolence of poets and their actors in all things that shock
the public quiet, or the reputation of private persons, under the notion
of humour. But I mean not the authority which is annexed to your office,
I speak of that only which is inborn and inherent to your person; what is
produced in you by an excellent wit, a masterly and commanding genius
over all writers: whereby you are empowered, when you please, to give the
final decision of wit, to put your stamp on all that ought to pass for
current and set a brand of reprobation on clipped poetry and false coin.
A shilling dipped in the bath may go for gold amongst the ignorant, but
the sceptres on the guineas show the difference. That your lordship is
formed by nature for this supremacy I could easily prove (were it not
already granted by the world) from the distinguishing character of your
writing, which is so visible to me that I never could be imposed on to
receive for yours what was written by any others, or to mistake your
genuine poetry for their spurious productions. I can farther add with
truth, though not without some vanity in saying it, that in the same
paper written by divers hands, whereof your lordship’s was only part, I
could separate your gold from their copper; and though I could not give
back to every author his own brass (for there is not the same rule for
distinguishing betwixt bad and bad as betwixt ill and excellently good),
yet I never failed of knowing what was yours and what was not, and was
absolutely certain that this or the other part was positively yours, and
could not possibly be written by any other.
True it is that some bad poems, though not all, carry their owners’ marks
about them. There is some peculiar awkwardness, false grammar, imperfect
sense, or, at the least, obscurity; some brand or other on this buttock
or that ear that it is notorious who are the owners of the cattle, though
they should not sign it with their names. But your lordship, on the
contrary, is distinguished not only by the excellency of your thoughts,
but by your style and manner of expressing them. A painter judging of
some admirable piece may affirm with certainty that it was of Holbein or
Vandyck; but vulgar designs and common draughts are easily mistaken and
misapplied. Thus, by my long study of your lordship, I am arrived at the
knowledge of your particular manner. In the good poems of other men,
like those artists, I can only say, “This is like the draught of such a
one, or like the colouring of another;” in short, I can only be sure that
it is the hand of a good master: but in your performances it is scarcely
possible for me to be deceived. If you write in your strength, you stand
revealed at the first view, and should you write under it, you cannot
avoid some peculiar graces which only cost me a second consideration to
discover you: for I may say it with all the severity of truth, that every
line of yours is precious. Your lordship’s only fault is that you have
not written more, unless I could add another, and that yet greater, but I
fear for the public the accusation would not be true—that you have
written, and out of a vicious modesty will not publish.
Virgil has confined his works within the compass of eighteen thousand
lines, and has not treated many subjects, yet he ever had, and ever will
have, the reputation of the best poet. Martial says of him that he could
have excelled Varius in tragedy and Horace in lyric poetry, but out of
deference to his friends he attempted neither.
The same prevalence of genius is in your lordship, but the world cannot
pardon your concealing it on the same consideration, because we have
neither a living Varius nor a Horace, in whose excellences both of poems,
odes, and satires, you had equalled them, if our language had not yielded
to the Roman majesty, and length of time had not added a reverence to the
works of Horace. For good sense is the same in all or most ages, and
course of time rather improves nature than impairs her. What has been,
may be again; another Homer and another Virgil may possible arise from
those very causes which produced the first, though it would be impudence
to affirm that any such have yet appeared.
It is manifest that some particular ages have been more happy than others
in the production of great men in all sorts of arts and sciences, as that
of Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and the rest, for stage-poetry
amongst the Greeks; that of Augustus for heroic, lyric, dramatic,
elegiac, and indeed all sorts of poetry in the persons of Virgil, Horace,
Varius, Ovid, and many others, especially if we take into that century
the latter end of the commonwealth, wherein we find Varro, Lucretius, and
Catullus; and at the same time lived Cicero and Sallust and Cæsar. A
famous age in modern times for learning in every kind was that of Lorenzo
de Medici and his son Leo the Tenth, wherein painting was revived, and
poetry flourished, and the Greek language was restored.
Examples in all these are obvious, but what I would infer is this—that in
such an age it is possible some great genius may arise to equal any of
the ancients, abating only for the language; for great contemporaries
whet and cultivate each other, and mutual borrowing and commerce makes
the common riches of learning, as it does of the civil government.
But suppose that Homer and Virgil were the only of their species, and
that nature was so much worn out in producing them that she is never able
to hear the like again, yet the example only holds in heroic poetry; in
tragedy and satire I offer myself to maintain, against some of our modern
critics, that this age and the last, particularly in England, have
excelled the ancients in both those kinds, and I would instance in
Shakespeare of the former, of your lordship in the latter sort.
Thus I might safely confine myself to my native country. But if I would
only cross the seas, I might find in France a living Horace and a Juvenal
in the person of the admirable Boileau, whose numbers are excellent,
whose expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just, whose language is
pure, whose satire is pointed and whose sense is close. What he borrows
from the ancients, he repays with usury of his own in coin as good and
almost as universally valuable: for, setting prejudice and partiality
apart, though he is our enemy, the stamp of a Louis, the patron of all
arts, is not much inferior to the medal of an Augustus Cæsar. Let this
be said without entering into the interests of factions and parties, and
relating only to the bounty of that king to men of learning and merit—a
praise so just that even we, who are his enemies, cannot refuse it to
him.
Now if it may be permitted me to go back again to the consideration of
epic poetry, I have confessed that no man hitherto has reached or so much
as approached to the excellences of Homer or of Virgil; I must farther
add that Statius, the best versificator next to Virgil, knew not how to
design after him, though he had the model in his eye; that Lucan is
wanting both in design and subject, and is besides too full of heat and
affectation; that amongst the moderns, Ariosto neither designed justly
nor observed any unity of action, or compass of time, or moderation in
the vastness of his draught: his style is luxurious without majesty or
decency, and his adventures without the compass of nature and
possibility. Tasso, whose design was regular, and who observed the roles
of unity in time and place more closely than Virgil, yet was not so happy
in his action: he confesses himself to have been too lyrical—that is, to
have written beneath the dignity of heroic verse—in his episodes of
Sophronia, Erminia, and Armida. His story is not so pleasing as
Ariosto’s; he is too flatulent sometimes, and sometimes too dry; many
times unequal, and almost always forced; and, besides, is full of
conceits, points of epigram, and witticisms; all which are not only below
the dignity of heroic verse, but contrary to its nature: Virgil and Homer
have not one of them. And those who are guilty of so boyish an ambition
in so grave a subject are so far from being considered as heroic poets
that they ought to be turned down from Homer to the “Anthologia,” from
Virgil to Martial and Owen’s Epigrams, and from Spenser to Flecknoe—that
is, from the top to the bottom of all poetry. But to return to Tasso: he
borrows from the invention of Boiardo, and in his alteration of his poem,
which is infinitely for the worse, imitates Homer so very servilely that
(for example) he gives the King of Jerusalem fifty sons, only because
Homer had bestowed the like number on King Priam; he kills the youngest
in the same manner; and has provided his hero with a Patroclus, under
another name, only to bring him back to the wars when his friend was
killed. The French have performed nothing in this kind which is not far
below those two Italians, and subject to a thousand more reflections,
without examining their “St. Louis,” their “Pucelle,” or their “Alaric.”
The English have only to boast of Spenser and Milton, who neither of them
wanted either genius or learning to have been perfect poets; and yet both
of them are liable to many censures. For there is no uniformity in the
design of Spenser; he aims at the accomplishment of no one action; he
raises up a hero for every one of his adventures, and endows each of them
with some particular moral virtue, which renders them all equal, without
subordination or preference: every one is most valiant in his own legend:
only we must do him that justice to observe that magnanimity, which is
the character of Prince Arthur, shines throughout the whole poem, and
succours the rest when they are in distress. The original of every
knight was then living in the court of Queen Elizabeth, and he attributed
to each of them that virtue which he thought was most conspicuous in
them—an ingenious piece of flattery, though it turned not much to his
account. Had he lived to finish his poem in the six remaining legends,
it had certainly been more of a piece; but could not have been perfect,
because the model was not true. But Prince Arthur, or his chief patron
Sir Philip Sidney, whom he intended to make happy by the marriage of his
Gloriana, dying before him, deprived the poet both of means and spirit to
accomplish his design. For the rest, his obsolete language and the ill
choice of his stanza are faults but of the second magnitude; for,
notwithstanding the first, he is still intelligible—at least, after a
little practice; and for the last, he is the more to be admired that,
labouring under such a difficulty, his verses are so numerous, so various
and so harmonious, that only Virgil, whom he professedly imitated, has
surpassed him among the Romans, and only Mr. Waller among the English.
As for Mr. Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his subject
is not that of an heroic poem, properly so called. His design is the
losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous, like that of all
other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and his human persons
are but two. But I will not take Mr. Rymer’s work out of his hands: he
has promised the world a critique on that author wherein, though he will
not allow his poem for heroic, I hope he will grant us that his thoughts
are elevated, his words sounding, and that no man has so happily copied
the manner of Homer, or so copiously translated his Grecisms and the
Latin elegances of Virgil. It is true, he runs into a flat of thought,
sometimes for a hundred lines together, but it is when he has got into a
track of Scripture. His antiquated words were his choice, not his
necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser, as Spencer did Chaucer. And
though, perhaps, the love of their masters may have transported both too
far in the frequent use of them, yet in my opinion obsolete words may
then be laudably revived when either they are more sounding or more
significant than those in practice, and when their obscurity is taken
away by joining other words to them which clear the sense—according to
the rule of Horace for the admission of new words. But in both cases a
moderation is to be observed in the use of them; for unnecessary coinage,
as well as unnecessary revival, runs into affectation—a fault to be
avoided on either hand. Neither will I justify Milton for his blank
verse, though I may excuse him by the example of Hannibal Caro and other
Italians who have used it; for, whatever causes he alleges for the
abolishing of rhyme (which I have not now the leisure to examine), his
own particular reason is plainly this—that rhyme was not his talent; he
had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it: which is manifest
in his “Juvenilia” or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is
always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age when
the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a
rhymer, though not a poet.
By this time, my lord, I doubt not but that you wonder why I have run off
from my bias so long together, and made so tedious a digression from
satire to heroic poetry; but if you will not excuse it by the tattling
quality of age (which, as Sir William Davenant says, is always
narrative), yet I hope the usefulness of what I have to say on this
subject will qualify the remoteness of it; and this is the last time I
will commit the crime of prefaces, or trouble the world with my notions
of anything that relates to verse. I have then, as you see, observed the
failings of many great wits amongst the moderns who have attempted to
write an epic poem. Besides these, or the like animadversions of them by
other men, there is yet a farther reason given why they cannot possibly
succeed so well as the ancients, even though we could allow them not to
be inferior either in genius or learning, or the tongue in which they
write, or all those other wonderful qualifications which are necessary to
the forming of a true accomplished heroic poet. The fault is laid on our
religion; they say that Christianity is not capable of those
embellishments which are afforded in the belief of those ancient
heathens.
And it is true that in the severe notions of our faith the fortitude of a
Christian consists in patience, and suffering for the love of God
whatever hardships can befall in the world—not in any great attempt, or
in performance of those enterprises which the poets call heroic, and
which are commonly the effects of interest, ostentation, pride, and
worldly honour; that humility and resignation are our prime virtues; and
that these include no action but that of the soul, whereas, on the
contrary, an heroic poem requires to its necessary design, and as its
last perfection, some great action of war, the accomplishment of some
extraordinary undertaking, which requires the strength and vigour of the
body, the duty of a soldier, the capacity and prudence of a general, and,
in short, as much or more of the active virtue than the suffering. But
to this the answer is very obvious. God has placed us in our several
stations; the virtues of a private Christian are patience, obedience,
submission, and the like; but those of a magistrate or a general or a
king are prudence, counsel, active fortitude, coercive power, awful
command, and the exercise of magnanimity as well as justice. So that
this objection hinders not but that an epic poem, or the heroic action of
some great commander, enterprised for the common good and honour of the
Christian cause, and executed happily, may be as well written now as it
was of old by the heathens, provided the poet be endued with the same
talents; and the language, though not of equal dignity, yet as near
approaching to it as our modern barbarism will allow—which is all that
can be expected from our own or any other now extant, though more
refined; and therefore we are to rest contented with that only
inferiority, which is not possibly to be remedied.
I wish I could as easily remove that other difficulty which yet remains.
It is objected by a great French critic as well as an admirable poet, yet
living, and whom I have mentioned with that honour which his merit exacts
from me (I mean, Boileau), that the machines of our Christian religion in
heroic poetry are much more feeble to support that weight than those of
heathenism. Their doctrine, grounded as it was on ridiculous fables, was
yet the belief of the two victorious monarchies, the Grecian and Roman.
Their gods did not only interest themselves in the event of wars (which
is the effect of a superior Providence), but also espoused the several
parties in a visible corporeal descent, managed their intrigues and
fought their battles, sometimes in opposition to each other; though
Virgil (more discreet than Homer in that last particular) has contented
himself with the partiality of his deities, their favours, their counsels
or commands, to those whose cause they had espoused, without bringing
them to the outrageousness of blows. Now our religion, says he, is
deprived of the greatest part of those machines—at least, the most
shining in epic poetry. Though St. Michael in Ariosto seeks out Discord
to send her amongst the Pagans, and finds her in a convent of friars,
where peace should reign (which indeed is fine satire); and Satan in
Tasso excites Soliman to an attempt by night on the Christian camp, and
brings a host of devils to his assistance; yet the Archangel in the
former example, when Discord was restive and would not be drawn from her
beloved monastery with fair words, has the whip-hand of her, drags her
out with many stripes, sets her on God’s name about her business, and
makes her know the difference of strength betwixt a nuncio of heaven and
a minister of hell. The same angel in the latter instance from Tasso (as
if God had never another messenger belonging to the court, but was
confined, like Jupiter to Mercury, and Juno to Iris), when he sees his
time—that is, when half of the Christians are already killed, and all the
rest are in a fair way to be routed—stickles betwixt the remainders of
God’s host and the race of fiends, pulls the devils backward by the
tails, and drives them from their quarry; or otherwise the whole business
had miscarried, and Jerusalem remained untaken. This, says Boileau, is a
very unequal match for the poor devils, who are sure to come by the worst
of it in the combat; for nothing is more easy than for an Almighty Power
to bring His old rebels to reason when He pleases. Consequently what
pleasure, what entertainment, can be raised from so pitiful a machine,
where we see the success of the battle from the very beginning of it?
unless that as we are Christians, we are glad that we have gotten God on
our side to maul our enemies when we cannot do the work ourselves. For
if the poet had given the faithful more courage, which had cost him
nothing, or at least have made them exceed the Turks in number, he might
have gained the victory for us Christians without interesting Heaven in
the quarrel, and that with as much ease and as little credit to the
conqueror as when a party of a hundred soldiers defeats another which
consists only of fifty.
This, my lord, I confess is such an argument against our modern poetry as
cannot be answered by those mediums which have been used. We cannot
hitherto boast that our religion has furnished us with any such machines
as have made the strength and beauty of the ancient buildings.
But what if I venture to advance an invention of my own to supply the
manifest defect of our new writers? I am sufficiently sensible of my
weakness, and it is not very probable that I should succeed in such a
project, whereof I have not had the least hint from any of my
predecessors the poets, or any of their seconds or coadjutors the
critics. Yet we see the art of war is improved in sieges, and new
instruments of death are invented daily. Something new in philosophy and
the mechanics is discovered almost every year, and the science of former
ages is improved by the succeeding. I will not detain you with a long
preamble to that which better judges will, perhaps, conclude to be little
worth.
It is this, in short—that Christian poets have not hitherto been
acquainted with their own strength. If they had searched the Old
Testament as they ought, they might there have found the machines which
are proper for their work, and those more certain in their effect than it
may be the New Testament is in the rules sufficient for salvation. The
perusing of one chapter in the prophecy of Daniel, and accommodating what
there they find with the principles of Platonic philosophy as it is now
Christianised, would have made the ministry of angels as strong an engine
for the working up heroic poetry in our religion as that of the ancients
has been to raise theirs by all the fables of their gods, which were only
received for truths by the most ignorant and weakest of the people.
It is a doctrine almost universally received by Christians, as well
Protestants as Catholics, that there are guardian angels appointed by God
Almighty as His vicegerents for the protection and government of cities,
provinces, kingdoms, and monarchies; and those as well of heathens as of
true believers. All this is so plainly proved from those texts of Daniel
that it admits of no farther controversy. The prince of the Persians,
and that other of the Grecians, are granted to be the guardians and
protecting ministers of those empires. It cannot be denied that they
were opposite and resisted one another. St. Michael is mentioned by his
name as the patron of the Jews, and is now taken by the Christians as the
protector-general of our religion. These tutelar genii, who presided
over the several people and regions committed to their charge, were
watchful over them for good, as far as their commissions could possibly
extend. The general purpose and design of all was certainly the service
of their great Creator. But it is an undoubted truth that, for ends best
known to the Almighty Majesty of Heaven, His providential designs for the
benefit of His creatures, for the debasing and punishing of some nations,
and the exaltation and temporal reward of others, were not wholly known
to these His ministers; else why those factious quarrels, controversies,
and battles amongst themselves, when they were all united in the same
design, the service and honour of their common master? But being
instructed only in the general, and zealous of the main design, and as
finite beings not admitted into the secrets of government, the last
resorts of Providence, or capable of discovering the final purposes of
God (who can work good out of evil as He pleases, and irresistibly sways
all manner of events on earth, directing them finally for the best to His
creation in general, and to the ultimate end of His own glory in
particular), they must of necessity be sometimes ignorant of the means
conducing to those ends, in which alone they can jar and oppose each
other—one angel, as we may suppose (the Prince of Persia, as he is
called), judging that it would be more for God’s honour and the benefit
of His people that the Median and Persian monarchy, which delivered them
from the Babylonish captivity, should still be uppermost; and the patron
of the Grecians, to whom the will of God might be more particularly
revealed, contending on the other side for the rise of Alexander and his
successors, who were appointed to punish the backsliding Jews, and
thereby to put them in mind of their offences, that they might repent and
become more virtuous and more observant of the law revealed. But how far
these controversies and appearing enmities of those glorious creatures
may be carried; how these oppositions may be best managed, and by what
means conducted, is not my business to show or determine: these things
must be left to the invention and judgment of the poet, if any of so
happy a genius be now living, or any future age can produce a man who,
being conversant in the philosophy of Plato as it is now accommodated to
Christian use (for, as Virgil gives us to understand by his example, that
is the only proper, of all others, for an epic poem), who to his natural
endowments of a large invention, a ripe judgment, and a strong memory,
has joined the knowledge of the liberal arts and sciences (and
particularly moral philosophy, the mathematics, geography, and history),
and with all these qualifications is born a poet, knows, and can practise
the variety of numbers, and is master of the language in which he
writes—if such a man, I say, be now arisen, or shall arise, I am vain
enough to think that I have proposed a model to him by which he may build
a nobler, a more beautiful, and more perfect poem than any yet extant
since the ancients.
There is another part of these machines yet wanting; but by what I have
said, it would have been easily supplied by a judicious writer. He could
not have failed to add the opposition of ill spirits to the good; they
have also their design, ever opposite to that of Heaven; and this alone
has hitherto been the practice of the moderns: but this imperfect system,
if I may call it such, which I have given, will infinitely advance and
carry farther that hypothesis of the evil spirits contending with the
good. For being so much weaker since their fall than those blessed
beings, they are yet supposed to have a permitted power from God of
acting ill, as from their own depraved nature they have always the will
of designing it—a great testimony of which we find in Holy Writ, when God
Almighty suffered Satan to appear in the holy synod of the angels (a
thing not hitherto drawn into example by any of the poets), and also gave
him power over all things belonging to his servant Job, excepting only
life.
Now what these wicked spirits cannot compass by the vast disproportion of
their forces to those of the superior beings, they may by their fraud and
cunning carry farther in a seeming league, confederacy, or subserviency
to the designs of some good angel, as far as consists with his purity to
suffer such an aid, the end of which may possibly be disguised and
concealed from his finite knowledge. This is indeed to suppose a great
error in such a being; yet since a devil can appear like an angel of
light, since craft and malice may sometimes blind for a while a more
perfect understanding; and lastly, since Milton has given us an example
of the like nature, when Satan, appearing like a cherub to Uriel, the
intelligence of the sun, circumvented him even in his own province, and
passed only for a curious traveller through those new-created regions,
that he might observe therein the workmanship of God and praise Him in
His works—I know not why, upon the same supposition, or some other, a
fiend may not deceive a creature of more excellency than himself, but yet
a creature; at least, by the connivance or tacit permission of the
Omniscient Being.