object of private satire, and who they are that may properly be exposed
by name for public examples of vices and follies, and therefore I will
trouble your lordship no further with them. Of the best and finest
manner of satire, I have said enough in the comparison betwixt Juvenal
and Horace; it is that sharp well-mannered way of laughing a folly out of
countenance, of which your lordship is the best master in this age. I
will proceed to the versification which is most proper for it, and add
somewhat to what I have said already on that subject. The sort of verse
which is called “burlesque,” consisting of eight syllables or four feet,
is that which our excellent Hudibras has chosen. I ought to have
mentioned him before when I spoke of Donne, but by a slip of an old man’s
memory he was forgotten. The worth of his poem is too well known to need
my commendation, and he is above my censure. His satire is of the
Varronian kind, though unmixed with prose. The choice of his numbers is
suitable enough to his design as he has managed it; but in any other hand
the shortness of his verse, and the quick returns of rhyme, had debased
the dignity of style. And besides, the double rhyme (a necessary
companion of burlesque writing) is not so proper for manly satire, for it
turns earnest too much to jest, and gives us a boyish kind of pleasure.
It tickles awkwardly, with a kind of pain to the best sort of readers; we
are pleased ungratefully, and, if I may say so, against our liking. We
thank him not for giving us that unseasonable delight, when we know he
could have given us a better and more solid. He might have left that
task to others who, not being able to put in thought, can only makes us
grin with the excrescence of a word of two or three syllables in the
close. It is, indeed, below so great a master to make use of such a
little instrument. But his good sense is perpetually shining through all
he writes; it affords us not the time of finding faults: we pass through
the levity of his rhyme, and are immediately carried into some admirable
useful thought. After all, he has chosen this kind of verse, and has
written the best in it, and had he taken another he would always have
excelled; as we say of a court favourite, that whatsoever his office be,
he still makes it uppermost and most beneficial to himself.
The quickness of your imagination, my lord, has already prevented me; and
you know beforehand that I would prefer the verse of ten syllables, which
we call the English heroic, to that of eight. This is truly my opinion,
for this sort of number is more roomy; the thought can turn itself with
greater ease in a larger compass. When the rhyme comes too thick upon
us, it straitens the expression; we are thinking of the close when we
should be employed in adorning the thought. It makes a poet giddy with
turning in a space too narrow for his imagination; he loses many beauties
without gaining one advantage. For a burlesque rhyme I have already
concluded to be none; or, if it were, it is more easily purchased in ten
syllables than in eight. In both occasions it is as in a tennis-court,
when the strokes of greater force are given, when we strike out and play
at length. Tassoni and Boileau have left us the best examples of this
way in the “Seechia Rapita” and the “Lutrin,” and next them Merlin
Cocaius in his “Baldus.” I will speak only of the two former, because
the last is written in Latin verse. The “Secchia Rapita” is an Italian
poem, a satire of the Varronian kind. It is written in the stanza of
eight, which is their measure for heroic verse. The words are stately,
the numbers smooth; the turn both of thoughts and words is happy. The
first six lines of the stanza seem majestical and severe, but the two
last turn them all into a pleasant ridicule. Boileau, if I am not much
deceived, has modelled from hence his famous “Lutrin.” He had read the
burlesque poetry of Scarron with some kind of indignation, as witty as it
was, and found nothing in France that was worthy of his imitation; but he
copied the Italian so well that his own may pass for an original. He
writes it in the French heroic verse, and calls it an heroic poem; his
subject is trivial, but his verse is noble. I doubt not but he had
Virgil in his eye, for we find many admirable imitations of him, and some
parodies, as particularly this passage in the fourth of the Æneids—
“_Nec tibi diva parens_, _generis nec Dardanus auctor_,
_Perfide_; _sed duris genuit te cautibus horrens_
_Caucasus_, _Hyrrcanæque admôrunt ubera tigres_:”
which he thus translates, keeping to the words, but altering the sense:—
“_Non_, _ton père à Paris_, _ne fut point boulanger_:
_Et tu n’es point du sang de Gervais_, _l’horloger_;
_Ta mère ne fut point la maîtresse d’un coche_;
_Caucase dans ses flancs te forma d’une roché_;
_Une tigresse affreuse_, _en quelque antre écarté_,
_Te fit_, _avec son lait_, _succer sa cruauté_.”
And as Virgil in his fourth Georgic of the bees, perpetually raises the
lowness of his subject by the loftiness of his words, and ennobles it by
comparisons drawn from empires and from monarchs—
“_Admiranda tibi levium spectacula rerum_,
_Magnanimosque duces_, _totiusque ordine gentis_
_Mores et studia_, _et populos_, _et prælia dicam_;”
and again—
“_At genus immortale manet_, _multosque per annos_
_Stat fortuna domûs_, _et avi numerantur avorum_;”
we see Boileau pursuing him in the same flights, and scarcely yielding to
his master. This I think, my lord, to be the most beautiful and most
noble kind of satire. Here is the majesty of the heroic finely mixed
with the venom of the other, and raising the delight, which otherwise
would be flat and vulgar, by the sublimity of the expression. I could
say somewhat more of the delicacy of this and some other of his satires,
but it might turn to his prejudice if it were carried back to France.
I have given your lordship but this bare hint—in what verse and in what
manner this sort of satire may be best managed. Had I time I could
enlarge on the beautiful turns of words and thoughts which are as
requisite in this as in heroic poetry itself, of which the satire is
undoubtedly a species. With these beautiful turns I confess myself to
have been unacquainted till about twenty years ago. In a conversation
which I had with that noble wit of Scotland, Sir George Mackenzie, he
asked me why I did not imitate in my verses the turns of Mr. Waller and
Sir John Denham, of which he repeated many to me. I had often read with
pleasure, and with some profit, those two fathers of our English poetry,
but had not seriously enough considered those beauties which give the
last perfection to their works. Some sprinklings of this kind I had also
formerly in my plays; but they were casual, and not designed. But this
hint, thus seasonably given me, first made me sensible of my own wants,
and brought me afterwards to seek for the supply of them in other English
authors. I looked over the darling of my youth, the famous Cowley; there
I found, instead of them, the points of wit and quirks of epigram, even
in the “Davideis” (an heroic poem which is of an opposite nature to those
puerilities), but no elegant turns, either on the word or on the thought.
Then I consulted a greater genius (without offence to the manes of that
noble author)—I mean Milton; but as he endeavours everywhere to express
Homer, whose age had not arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true
sublimity, lofty thoughts which were clothed with admirable Grecisms and
ancient words, which he had been digging from the minds of Chaucer and
Spenser, and which, with all their rusticity, had somewhat of venerable
in them. But I found not there neither that for which I looked. At last
I had recourse to his master, Spenser, the author of that immortal poem
called the “Faerie Queen,” and there I met with that which I had been
looking for so long in vain. Spenser had studied Virgil to as much
advantage as Milton had done Homer, and amongst the rest of his
excellences had copied that. Looking farther into the Italian, I found
Tasso had done the same; nay, more, that all the sonnets in that language
are on the turn of the first thought—which Mr. Walsh, in his late
ingenious preface to his poems, has observed. In short, Virgil and Ovid
are the two principal fountains of them in Latin poetry. And the French
at this day are so fond of them that they judge them to be the first
beauties; _delicate_, _et bien tourné_, are the highest commendations
which they bestow on somewhat which they think a masterpiece.
An example of the turn of words, amongst a thousand others, is that in
the last book of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”:—
“_Heu_! _quantum scelus est_, _in viscera_, _viscera condi_!
_Congestoque avidum pinguescere corpore corpus_;
_Alteriusque animantem animantis vivere leto_.”
An example on the turn both of thoughts and words is to be found in
Catullus in the complaint of Ariadne when she was left by Theseus:—
“_Tum jam nulla viro juranti fæmina credat_;
_Nulla viri speret sermones esse fideles_;
_Qui_, _dum aliquid cupiens animus prægestit apisci_,
_Nil metuunt jurare_, _nihil promittere parcunt_:
_Sed simul ac cupidæ mentis satiata libido est_,
_Dicta nihil metuere_, _nihil perjuria curant_.”
An extraordinary turn upon the words is that in Ovid’s “Epistolæ
Heroidum” of Sappho to Phaon:—
“_Si_, _nisi quæ formâ poterit te digna videri_,
_Nulla futura tua est_, _nulla futura tua est_.”
Lastly a turn, which I cannot say is absolutely on words—for the thought
turns with them—is in the fourth Georgic of Virgil, where Orpheus is to
receive his wife from hell on express condition not to look on her till
she was come on earth:—
“Cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem;
Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes.”
I will not burthen your lordship with more of them, for I write to a
master who understands them better than myself; but I may safely conclude
them to be great beauties. I might descend also to the mechanic beauties
of heroic verse; but we have yet no English Prosodia, not so much as a
tolerable dictionary or a grammar (so that our language is in a manner
barbarous); and what Government will encourage any one, or more, who are
capable of refining it, I know not: but nothing under a public expense
can go through with it. And I rather fear a declination of the language
than hope an advancement of it in the present age.
I am still speaking to you, my lord, though in all probability you are
already out of hearing. Nothing which my meanness can produce is worthy
of this long attention. But I am come to the last petition of Abraham:
if there be ten righteous lines in this vast preface, spare it for their
sake; and also spare the next city, because it is but a little one.
I would excuse the performance of this translation if it were all my own;
but the better, though not the greater, part being the work of some
gentlemen who have succeeded very happily in their undertaking, let their
excellences atone for my imperfections and those of my sons. I have
perused some of the Satires which are done by other hands, and they seem
to me as perfect in their kind as anything I have seen in English verse.
The common way which we have taken is not a literal translation, but a
kind of paraphrase; or somewhat which is yet more loose, betwixt a
paraphrase and imitation. It was not possible for us, or any men, to
have made it pleasant any other way. If rendering the exact sense of
these authors, almost line for line, had been our business, Barten
Holyday had done it already to our hands; and by the help of his learned
notes and illustrations, not only Juvenal and Persius, but, what yet is
more obscure, his own verses might be understood.
But he wrote for fame, and wrote to scholars; we write only for the
pleasure and entertainment of those gentlemen and ladies who, though they
are not scholars, are not ignorant—persons of understanding and good
sense, who, not having been conversant in the original (or, at least, not
having made Latin verse so much their business as to be critics in it),
would be glad to find if the wit of our two great authors be answerable
to their fame and reputation in the world. We have therefore endeavoured
to give the public all the satisfaction we are able in this kind.
And if we are not altogether so faithful to our author as our
predecessors Holyday and Stapleton, yet we may challenge to ourselves
this praise—that we shall be far more pleasing to our readers. We have
followed our authors at greater distance, though not step by step as they
have done; for oftentimes they have gone so close that they have trod on
the heels of Juvenal and Persius, and hurt them by their too near
approach. A noble author would not be pursued too close by a translator.
We lose his spirit when we think to take his body. The grosser part
remains with us, but the soul is flown away in some noble expression, or
some delicate turn of words or thought. Thus Holyday, who made this way
his choice, seized the meaning of Juvenal, but the poetry has always
escaped him.
They who will not grant me that pleasure is one of the ends of poetry,
but that it is only a means of compassing the only end (which is
instruction), must yet allow that without the means of pleasure the
instruction is but a bare and dry philosophy, a crude preparation of
morals which we may have from Aristotle and Epictetus with more profit
than from any poet. Neither Holyday nor Stapleton have imitated Juvenal
in the poetical part of him, his diction, and his elocution. Nor, had
they been poets (as neither of them were), yet in the way they took, it
was impossible for them to have succeeded in the poetic part.
The English verse which we call heroic consists of no more than ten
syllables; the Latin hexameter sometimes rises to seventeen; as, for
example, this verse in Virgil:—
“Pulverulenta putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum.”
Here is the difference of no less than seven syllables in a line betwixt
the English and the Latin. Now the medium of these is about fourteen
syllables, because the dactyl is a more frequent foot in hexameters than
the spondee. But Holyday (without considering that he writ with the
disadvantage of four syllables less in every verse) endeavours to make
one of his lines to comprehend the sense of one of Juvenal’s. According
to the falsity of the proposition was the success. He was forced to
crowd his verse with ill-sounding monosyllables (of which our barbarous
language affords him a wild plenty), and by that means he arrived at his
pedantic end, which was to make a literal translation. His verses have
nothing of verse in them, but only the worst part of it—the rhyme; and
that, into the bargain, is far from good. But, which is more
intolerable, by cramming his ill-chosen and worse-sounding monosyllables
so close together, the very sense which he endeavours to explain is
become more obscure than that of his author; so that Holyday himself
cannot be understood without as large a commentary as that which he makes
on his two authors. For my own part, I can make a shift to find the
meaning of Juvenal without his notes, but his translation is more
difficult than his author. And I find beauties in the Latin to
recompense my pains; but in Holyday and Stapleton my ears, in the first
place, are mortally offended, and then their sense is so perplexed that I
return to the original as the more pleasing task as well as the more
easy.
This must be said for our translation—that if we give not the whole sense
of Juvenal, yet we give the most considerable part of it; we give it, in
general, so clearly that few notes are sufficient to make us
intelligible. We make our author at least appear in a poetic dress. We
have actually made him more sounding and more elegant than he was before
in English, and have endeavoured to make him speak that kind of English
which he would have spoken had he lived in England and had written to
this age. If sometimes any of us (and it is but seldom) make him express
the customs and manners of our native country rather than of Rome, it is
either when there was some kind of analogy betwixt their customs and
ours, or when (to make him more easy to vulgar understandings) we gave
him those manners which are familiar to us. But I defend not this
innovation; it is enough if I can excuse it. For (to speak sincerely)
the manners of nations and ages are not to be confounded; we should
either make them English or leave them Roman. If this can neither be
defended nor excused, let it be pardoned at least, because it is
acknowledged; and so much the more easily as being a fault which is never
committed without some pleasure to the reader.
Thus, my lord, having troubled you with a tedious visit, the best manners
will be shown in the least ceremony. I will slip away while your back is
turned, and while you are otherwise employed; with great confusion for
having entertained you so long with this discourse, and for having no
other recompense to make you than the worthy labours of my
fellow-undertakers in this work, and the thankful acknowledgments,
prayers, and perpetual good wishes of,
My Lord,
Your Lordship’s
Most obliged, most humble, and
Most obedient servant,
JOHN DRYDEN.
A DISCOURSE ON EPIC POETRY.
ADDRESSED TO THE MOST HONOURABLE
JOHN, LORD MARQUIS OF NORMANBY,
EARL OF MULGRAVE, ETC., AND KNIGHT OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER OF THE GARTER.
AN HEROIC poem (truly such) is undoubtedly the greatest work which the
soul of man is capable to perform. The design of it is to form the mind
to heroic virtue by example; it is conveyed in verse that it may delight
while it instructs. The action of it is always one, entire, and great.
The least and most trivial episodes or under-actions which are interwoven
in it are parts either necessary or convenient to carry on the main
design—either so necessary that without them the poem must be imperfect,
or so convenient that no others can be imagined more suitable to the
place in which they are. There is nothing to be left void in a firm
building; even the cavities ought not to be filled with rubbish which is
of a perishable kind—destructive to the strength—but with brick or stone
(though of less pieces, yet of the same nature), and fitted to the
crannies. Even the least portions of them must be of the epic kind; all
things must be grave, majestical, and sublime; nothing of a foreign
nature, like the trifling novels which Ariosto and others have inserted
in their poems, by which the reader is misled into another sort of
pleasure, opposite to that which is designed in an epic poem. One raises
the soul and hardens it to virtue; the other softens it again and unbends
it into vice. One conduces to the poet’s aim (the completing of his
work), which he is driving on, labouring, and hastening in every line;
the other slackens his pace, diverts him from his way, and locks him up
like a knight-errant in an enchanted castle when he should be pursuing
his first adventure. Statius (as Bossu has well observed) was ambitions
of trying his strength with his master, Virgil, as Virgil had before
tried his with Homer. The Grecian gave the two Romans an example in the
games which were celebrated at the funerals of Patroclus. Virgil
imitated the invention of Homer, but changed the sports. But both the
Greek and Latin poet took their occasions from the subject, though (to
confess the truth) they were both ornamental, or, at best, convenient
parts of it, rather than of necessity arising from it. Statius (who
through his whole poem is noted for want of conduct and judgment),
instead of staying, as he might have done, for the death of Capaneus,
Hippomedon, Tydeus, or some other of his Seven Champions (who are heroes
all alike), or more properly for the tragical end of the two brothers
whose exequies the next successor had leisure to perform when the siege
was raised, and in the interval betwixt the poet’s first action and his
second, went out of his way—as it were, on prepense malice—to commit a
fault; for he took his opportunity to kill a royal infant by the means of
a serpent (that author of all evil) to make way for those funeral honours
which he intended for him. Now if this innocent had been of any relation
to his Thebais, if he had either farthered or hindered the taking of the
town, the poet might have found some sorry excuse at least for detaining
the reader from the promised siege. On these terms this Capaneus of a
poet engaged his two immortal predecessors, and his success was
answerable to his enterprise.
If this economy must be observed in the minutest parts of an epic poem,
which to a common reader seem to be detached from the body, and almost
independent of it, what soul, though sent into the world with great
advantages of nature, cultivated with the liberal arts and sciences,
conversant with histories of the dead, and enriched with observations on
the living, can be sufficient to inform the whole body of so great a
work? I touch here but transiently, without any strict method, on some
few of those many rules of imitating nature which Aristotle drew from
Homer’s “Iliads” and “Odysses,” and which he fitted to the
drama—furnishing himself also with observations from the practice of the
theatre when it flourished under Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles (for
the original of the stage was from the epic poem). Narration, doubtless,
preceded acting, and gave laws to it. What at first was told artfully
was in process of time represented gracefully to the sight and hearing.
Those episodes of Homer which were proper for the stage, the poets
amplified each into an action. Out of his limbs they formed their
bodies; what he had contracted, they enlarged; out of one Hercules were
made infinity of pigmies, yet all endued with human souls; for from him,
their great creator, they have each of them the _divinæ particulam auræ_.
They flowed from him at first, and are at last resolved into him. Nor
were they only animated by him, but their measure and symmetry was owing
to him. His one, entire, and great action was copied by them, according
to the proportions of the drama. If he finished his orb within the year,
it sufficed to teach them that their action being less, and being also
less diversified with incidents, their orb, of consequence, must be
circumscribed in a less compass, which they reduced within the limits
either of a natural or an artificial day. So that, as he taught them to
amplify what he had shortened, by the same rule applied the contrary way
he taught them to shorten what he had amplified. Tragedy is the
miniature of human life; an epic poem is the draft at length. Here, my
lord, I must contract also, for before I was aware I was almost running
into a long digression to prove that there is no such absolute necessity
that the time of a stage-action should so strictly be confined to
twenty-four hours as never to exceed them (for which Aristotle contends,
and the Grecian stage has practised). Some longer space on some
occasions, I think, may be allowed, especially for the English theatre,
which requires more variety of incidents than the French. Corneille
himself, after long practice, was inclined to think that the time
allotted by the ancients was too short to raise and finish a great
action; and better a mechanic rule were stretched or broken than a great
beauty were omitted. To raise, and afterwards to calm, the passions; to
purge the soul from pride by the examples of human miseries which befall
the greatest; in few words, to expel arrogance and introduce compassion,
are the great effects of tragedy—great, I must confess, if they were
altogether as true as they are pompous. But are habits to be introduced
at three hours’ warning? Are radical diseases so suddenly removed? A
mountebank may promise such a cure, but a skilful physician will not
undertake it. An epic poem is not in so much haste; it works leisurely:
the changes which it makes are slow, but the cure is likely to be more
perfect. The effects of tragedy, as I said, are too violent to be
lasting. If it be answered, that for this reason tragedies are often to
be seen, and the dose to be repeated, this is tacitly to confess that
there is more virtue in one heroic poem than in many tragedies. A man is
humbled one day, and his pride returns the next. Chemical medicines are
observed to relieve oftener than to cure; for it is the nature of spirits
to make swift impressions, but not deep. Galenical decoctions, to which
I may properly compare an epic poem, have more of body in them; they work
by their substance and their weight.