Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
from the 1888 Cassell & Company edition.

DISCOURSES ON SATIRE AND ON EPIC POETRY

by John Dryden

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 AEneid.

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 Caesar. 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.

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