me; and you know before-hand, 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 "Secchia 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,[48] 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; Hyrcanæque admorûnt ubera tigres_:
which he thus translates, keeping to the words, but altering the sense:
Non, ton pere a Paris, ne fut point boulanger:
Et tu n'es point du sang de Gervais, l'horloger:
Ta mere ne fut point la maitresse d'un coché;
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 Georgick, 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 proelia dicam._
And again:
_At genus immortale manet; multosque per annos
Stat fortuna domus, 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,[49] 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 every where to express Homer, whose
age had not arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity,
lofty thoughts, which were cloathed with admirable Grecisms, and
ancient words, which he had been digging from the mines 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 "Fairy 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 excellencies 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
master-piece.
An example of the turn on 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 Georgick 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:
_Cùm 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 expence 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 excellencies 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 any thing 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 those 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 Stapylton, 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 Stapylton 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 dactyle is a more frequent foot in
hexameters than the spondee. But Holyday, without considering that he
wrote 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
Stapylton, 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.[50]
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 give 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 shewn 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 recompence 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.
_Aug. 18, 1692._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Our author's connection with this witty and accomplished nobleman
is fully traced in Dryden's Life. He was created Earl of Middlesex in
1675, and after the Revolution became Lord Chamberlain, and a knight of
the garter. Dryden alludes to these last honours in the commencement
of the dedication, which was prefixed to a version of the Satires of
Juvenal by our author and others, published in 1693.
[2] See Introduction to the "Essay on Dramatic Poetry."
[3] These Lyrical Pieces, after all, are only a few smooth songs, where
wit is sufficiently overbalanced by indecency.
[4] Alluding to Rochester's well-known couplet:
For pointed satire I would Buckhurst chuse;
The best good man, with the worst-natured muse.
_Allusion to Horace's 10th Satire, Book I._
The satires of Lord Dorset seem to have consisted in short lampoons, if
we may judge of those which have been probably lost, from such as are
known to us. His mock "Address to Mr Edward Howard, on his incomparable
and incomprehensible Poem, called the British Princes;" another to
the same on his plays; a lampoon on an Irish lady; and one on Lady
Dorchester,--are the only satires of his lordship's which have been
handed down to us. He probably wrote other light occasional pieces of
the same nature.
[5] Shooting at rovers, in archery, is opposed to shooting at butts: In
the former exercise the bowman shoots at random, merely to show how far
he can send an arrow.
[6] Probably meaning Sir Robert Howard, with whom our author was now
reconciled, and perhaps Sir William D'Avenant.
[7] The First Satire of Persius is doubtless levelled against bad
poets; but that author rather engages in the defence of satire, opposed
to the silly or bombastic verses of his contemporaries, than in
censuring freedoms used with private characters.
[8] The four sceptres were placed saltier-wise upon the reverse of
guineas, till the gold coinage of his present majesty.
[9]
_Sic Maro nec Calabri tentavit carmina Flacci,
Pindaricos posset cum superare modos;
Et Vario cessit Romani laude cothurni,
Cum posset tragico fortius ore loqui._
MART. _lib. VIII. epig. XVIII._
[10] "Would it be imagined," says Dr Johnson, "that, of this rival
to antiquity, all the satires were little personal invectives, and
that his longest composition was a song of eleven stanzas? The blame,
however, of this exaggerated praise falls on the encomiast, not upon
the author; whose performances are, what they pretend to be, the
effusions of a man of wit; gay, vigorous, and airy."
[11] Dryden's recollection seems here deficient. There is, no doubt, a
close imitation of the Iliad throughout the Jerusalem; but the death of
the Swedish Prince was so far from being the motive of Rinaldo's return
to the wars, that Rinaldo seems never to have heard either of that
person or of his fate until he was delivered from the garden of Armida,
and on his voyage to join Godfrey's army.
[12] Epic poems by Le Moyne, Chapelain, and Scuderi; of which it
may be enough to say, that they are in the stale, weary, flat, and
unprofitable taste of all French heroics.
[13] This passage is certainly inaccurate in one particular, and
probably in the rest. Sir Philip Sydney was killed at the battle of
Zutphen, 16th October, 1586, and the "Faery Queen" was then only
commenced. For, in a dialogue written by Bryskett, as Mr Malone
conjectures, betwixt 1584 and 1586, Spenser is introduced describing
himself as having undertaken a work in heroical verse, under the title
of a "Faerie Queene;" and it is clear that he continued to labour in
that task till 1594, when we learn, from his 80th sonnet, that he had
just composed six books:
After so long a race as I have run
Through Faery Land, which those six books compile,
Give leave to rest me, being half foredonne,
And gather to myself new breath awhile;
Then, as a steed refreshed after toyle,
Out of my prison will I break anew,
And stoutly will that second work assoyle,
With strong endevour, and attention due.
It was not, therefore, the death of Sir Philip Sydney which deprived
him of spirit to continue his captivating poem, since the greater part
was written after that event; but the poet's domestic misfortunes,
occasioned by Tyrone's rebellion, which seem at once to have ruined
his fortune, and broken his heart. See TODD'S _Life of Spenser_, and
MALONE'S Note on this passage.
It seems unlikely, that Sydney was Spenser's Prince Arthur. Upton more
justly considers Leicester, a worthless character, but the favourite
of Gloriana, (Queen Elizabeth,) and who aspired to share her bed and
throne, as depicted under that character. See TODD'S _Spenser_, Vol. I.
Life, p. clxviii.
[14] This was a charge brought against Spenser so early as the days of
Ben Jonson; who says, in his Discoveries, "Spenser, in affecting the
ancients, writ no language; yet I would have him read for his matter,
but as Virgil read Ennius." This has been generally supposed to apply
only to Spenser's "Pastorals;" but as in these he imitates rather a
coarse and provincial than an obsolete dialect, the limitation of
Jonson's censure is probably imaginary. It is probable, that, as the
style of poetry in the latter part of Queen Elizabeth's reign, and
in that of her successor, had become laboured and ornate, Spenser's
imitations of the old metrical romances had to his contemporaries an
antique air of rude and naked simplicity, although his "Faery Queen"
seems more intelligible to us than the compositions of Jonson himself.
Dryden, whose charge was afterwards echoed by Pope, probably adopted
it without very accurate investigation. Our idea of what is ancient
does not necessarily imply obscurity; on the contrary, I am afraid
that to modern ears the style of Addison sounds more antiquated than
that of Dr Johnson; so that simplicity may produce the same effect as
unintelligibility.
[15] Mr Rymer, who was pleased to call himself a critic, had promised
to favour the public with "some reflections on that Paradise Lost of
Milton, which some are pleased to call a poem, and to assert rhime
against the slender sophistry wherewith he attacks it." But this
promise, which is given in the end of his "Remarks on the Tragedies of
the last Age," he never filled up the measure of his presumption, by
attempting to fulfil.
[16]
_Dixeris egregie, notum si callida verbum
Reddiderit junctura novum_----
This passage, as our author observes, (p. 221. vol. iv.) is variously
construed by expositors; and the meaning which he there adopts, that
of "applying received words to a new signification," seems fully as
probable as that adopted in the text. Mr Malone has given the opinions
of Hurd, Beattie, and De Nores, upon this disputed passage.
[17] This resolution our author fortunately did not adhere to.
[18] The passages of Scripture, on which Dryden founds his idea of the
machinery of guardian angels, are the following, which I insert for the
benefit of such readers as may not have at hand the old-fashioned book
in which they occur.
"Then I lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold, a certain man
clothed in linen, whose loins were girded with fine gold of Uphaz:
His body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of
lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet
like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like
the voice of a multitude. And I Daniel alone saw the vision; for the
men that were with me saw not the vision; but a great quaking fell
upon them, so that they fled to hide themselves. Therefore I was left
alone, and saw this great vision, and there remained no strength in
me: for my comeliness was turned in me into corruption, and I retained
no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the
voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my face
towards the ground.