The Poetical Works of John Dryden Volume I Part 5

What injuries soe'er upon us fall, Yet still the same religion answers all.

Religion wheedled us to civil war, Drew English blood, and Dutchmen's now would spare.

Be gull'd no longer; for you'll find it true, They have no more religion, faith! than you.

Interest's the G.o.d they wors.h.i.+p in their state, And we, I take it, have not much of that 20 Well monarchies may own religion's name, But states are atheists in their very frame.

They share a sin; and such proportions fall, That, like a stink, 'tis nothing to them all.

Think on their rapine, falsehood, cruelty, And that what once they were, they still would be.

To one well-born the affront is worse and more, When he's abused and baffled by a boor.

With an ill grace the Dutch their mischiefs do; They've both ill nature and ill manners too. 30 Well may they boast themselves an ancient nation; For they were bred ere manners were in fas.h.i.+on: And their new commonwealth has set them free Only from honour and civility.

Venetians do not more uncouthly ride, Than did their lubber state mankind bestride.

Their sway became them with as ill a mien, As their own paunches swell above their chin.

Yet is their empire no true growth but humour, And only two kings'[33] touch can cure the tumour. 40 As Cato fruits of Afric did display, Let us before our eyes their Indies lay: All loyal English will like him conclude; Let Caesar live, and Carthage be subdued.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 32: 'Satire:' the same nearly with his prologue to 'Amboyna.']

[Footnote 33: 'Two kings:' alluding to projected union between France and England.]

TO HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE d.u.c.h.eSS,[34]

ON THE MEMORABLE VICTORY GAINED BY THE DUKE OVER THE HOLLANDERS, JUNE 3, 1665. AND ON HER JOURNEY AFTERWARDS INTO THE NORTH.

Madam, When, for our sakes, your hero you resign'd To swelling seas, and every faithless wind; When you released his courage, and set free A valour fatal to the enemy; You lodged your country's cares within your breast (The mansion where soft love should only rest): And, ere our foes abroad were overcome, The n.o.blest conquest you had gain'd at home.

Ah, what concerns did both your souls divide!

Your honour gave us what your love denied: 10 And 'twas for him much easier to subdue Those foes he fought with, than to part from you.

That glorious day, which two such navies saw, As each unmatch'd might to the world give law.

Neptune, yet doubtful whom he should obey, Held to them both the trident of the sea: The winds were hush'd, the waves in ranks were cast, As awfully as when G.o.d's people pa.s.s'd; Those, yet uncertain on whose sails to blow, These, where the wealth of nations ought to flow. 20 Then with the duke your highness ruled the day: While all the brave did his command obey, The fair and pious under you did pray.

How powerful are chaste vows! the wind and tide You bribed to combat on the English, side.

Thus to your much-loved lord you did convey An unknown succour, sent the nearest way.

New vigour to his wearied arms you brought (So Moses was upheld while Israel fought), While, from afar, we heard the cannon play,[35] 30 Like distant thunder on a s.h.i.+ny day.

For absent friends we were ashamed to fear When we consider'd what you ventured there.

s.h.i.+ps, men, and arms, our country might restore, But such a leader could supply no more.

With generous thoughts of conquest he did burn, Yet fought not more to vanquish than return.

Fortune and victory he did pursue, To bring them as his slaves to wait on you.

Thus beauty ravish'd the rewards of fame, 40 And the fair triumph'd when the brave o'ercame.

Then, as you meant to spread another way By land your conquests, far as his by sea, Leaving our southern clime you march'd along The stubborn North, ten thousand Cupids strong.

Like commons the n.o.bility resort In crowding heaps, to fill your moving court: To welcome your approach the vulgar run, Like some new envoy from the distant sun; And country beauties by their lovers go, 50 Blessing themselves, and wondering at the show.

So when the new-born Phoenix first is seen, Her feather'd subjects all adore their queen; And while she makes her progress through the east, From every grove her numerous train's increased; Each poet of the air her glory sings, And round him the pleased audience clap their wings.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 34: 'The d.u.c.h.ess:' daughter to the great Earl of Clarendon; married privately to Duke of York. For account of this victory, see Hume or Macaulay. The d.u.c.h.ess accompanied the duke to Harwich, and thence made a progress north-wards, referred to here.]

[Footnote 35: 'Heard the cannon play:' the cannon were heard in London a hundred miles from Lowestoff where the battle was fought.]

ANNUS MIRABILIS:

THE YEAR OF WONDERS, 1666.

AN HISTORICAL POEM.

AN ACCOUNT OF THE ENSUING POEM, IN A LETTER TO THE HONOURABLE SIR ROBERT HOWARD.

Sir,--I am so many ways obliged to you, and so little able to return your favours, that, like those who owe too much, I can only live by getting further into your debt. You have not only been careful of my fortune, which was the effect of your n.o.bleness, but you have been solicitous of my reputation, which is that of your kindness. It is not long since I gave you the trouble of perusing a play for me, and now, instead of an acknowledgment, I have given you a greater, in the correction of a poem. But since you are to bear this persecution, I will at least give you the encouragement of a martyr; you could never suffer in a n.o.bler cause. For I have chosen the most heroic subject which any poet could desire: I have taken upon me to describe the motives, the beginning, progress, and successes, of a most just and necessary war; in it, the care, management, and prudence of our king; the conduct and valour of a royal admiral, and of two incomparable generals; the invincible courage of our captains and seamen; and three glorious victories, the result of all. After this I have, in the Fire, the most deplorable, but withal the greatest, argument that can be imagined: the destruction being so swift, so sudden, so vast and miserable, as nothing can parallel in story. The former part of this poem, relating to the war, is but a due expiation for my not having served my king and country in it. All gentlemen are almost obliged to it; and I know no reason we should give that advantage to the commonalty of England, to be foremost in brave actions, which the n.o.bles of France would never suffer in their peasants. I should not have written this but to a person who has been ever forward to appear in all employments, whither his honour and generosity have called him. The latter part of my poem, which describes the Fire, I owe, first to the piety and fatherly affection of our monarch to his suffering subjects; and, in the second place, to the courage, loyalty, and magnanimity of the city: both which were so conspicuous, that I wanted words to celebrate them as they deserve. I have called my poem Historical, not Epic, though both the actions and actors are as much heroic as any poem can contain. But since the action is not properly one, nor that accomplished in the last successes, I have judged it too bold a t.i.tle for a few stanzas, which are little more in number than a single Iliad, or the longest of the aeneids. For this reason (I mean not of length, but broken action, tied too severely to the laws of history) I am apt to agree with those who rank Lucan rather among historians in verse, than Epic poets: in whose room, if I am not deceived, Silius Italicus, though a worse writer, may more justly be admitted. I have chosen to write my poem in quatrains, or stanzas of four in alternate rhyme, because I have ever judged them more n.o.ble, and of greater dignity, both for the sound and number, than any other verse in use amongst us; in which I am sure I have your approbation. The learned languages have certainly a great advantage of us, in not being tied to the slavery of any rhyme; and were less constrained in the quant.i.ty of every syllable, which they might vary with spondees or dactyls, besides so many other helps of grammatical figures, for the lengthening or abbreviation of them, than the modern are in the close of that one syllable, which often confines, and more often corrupts, the sense of all the rest. But in this necessity of our rhymes, I have always found the couplet verse most easy, though not so proper for this occasion: for there the work is sooner at an end, every two lines concluding the labour of the poet; but in quatrains he is to carry it further on, and not only so, but to bear along in his head the troublesome sense of four lines together. For those who write correctly in this kind must needs acknowledge, that the last line of the stanza is to be considered in the composition of the first. Neither can we give ourselves the liberty of making any part of a verse for the sake of rhyme, or concluding with a word which is not current English, or using the variety of female rhymes; all which our fathers practised: and for the female rhymes, they are still in use among other nations; with the Italian in every line, with the Spaniard promiscuously, with the French alternately; as those who have read the Alarique, the Pucelle, or any of their later poems, will agree with me. And besides this, they write in Alexandrius, or verses of six feet; such as amongst us is the old translation of Homer by Chapman: all which, by lengthening of their chain, makes the sphere of their activity the larger. I have dwelt too long upon the choice of my stanza, which you may remember is much better defended in the preface to Gondibert; and therefore I will hasten to acquaint you with my endeavours in the writing. In general, I will only say, I have never yet seen the description of any naval fight in the proper terms which are used at sea: and if there be any such, in another language, as that of Lucan in the third of his Pharsalia, yet I could not avail myself of it in the English; the terms of art in every tongue bearing more of the idiom of it than any other words. We hear indeed among our poets, of the thundering of guns, the smoke, the disorder, and the slaughter; but all these are common notions. And certainly, as those who, in a logical dispute, keep in general terms, would hide a fallacy; so those who do it in any poetical description, would veil their ignorance.

Descriptas servare vices operumque colores, Cur ego, si nequeo ignoroque, Poeta salutor?

For my own part, if I had little knowledge of the sea, yet I have thought it no shame to learn: and if I have made some few mistakes, it is only, as you can bear me witness, because I have wanted opportunity to correct them; the whole poem being first written, and now sent you from a place, where I have not so much as the converse of any seaman.

Yet though the trouble I had in writing it was great, it was more than recompensed by the pleasure. I found myself so warm in celebrating the praises of military men, two such especially as the prince[36] and general, that it is no wonder if they inspired me with thoughts above my ordinary level. And I am well satisfied, that, as they are incomparably the best subject I ever had, excepting only the royal family, so also, that this I have written of them is much better than what I have performed on any other. I have been forced to help out other arguments; but this has been bountiful to me: they have been low and barren of praise, and I have exalted them, and made them fruitful; but here--_Omnia sponte sua reddit justissima tellus_. I have had a large, a fair, and a pleasant field; so fertile that, without my cultivating, it has given me two harvests in a summer, and in both oppressed the reaper.

All other greatness in subjects is only counterfeit; it will not endure the test of danger; the greatness of arms is only real; other greatness burdens a nation with its weight, this supports it with its strength.

And as it is the happiness of the age, so it is the peculiar goodness of the best of kings, that we may praise his subjects without offending him. Doubtless, it proceeds from a just confidence of his own virtue, which the l.u.s.tre of no other can be so great as to darken in him; for the good or the valiant are never safely praised under a bad or a degenerate prince. But to return from this digression to a further account of my poem; I must crave leave to tell you, that as I have endeavoured to adorn it with n.o.ble thoughts, so much more to express those thoughts with elocution. The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit in the poet, or wit-writing (if you will give me leave to use a school-distinction) is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after: or, without metaphor, which searches over all the memory for the species or ideas of those things which it designs to represent. Wit written is that which is well designed, the happy result of thought, or product of imagination. But to proceed from wit, in the general notion of it, to the proper wit of an heroic or historical poem; I judge it chiefly to consist in the delightful imaging of persons, actions, pa.s.sions, or things. It is not the jerk or sting of an epigram, nor the seeming contradiction of a poor ant.i.thesis (the delight of an ill-judging audience in a play of rhyme) nor the jingle of a more poor Paronomasia; neither is it so much the morality of a grave sentence, affected by Lucan, but more sparingly used by Virgil; but it is some lively and apt description, dressed in such colours of speech, that it sets before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly, and more delightfully than nature. So then the first happiness of the poet's imagination is properly invention or finding of the thought; the second is fancy, or the variation, deriving or moulding of that thought, as the judgment represents it proper to the subject; the third is elocution, or the art of clothing and adorning that thought, so found and varied, in apt, significant, and sounding words: the quickness of the imagination is seen in the invention, the fertility in the fancy, and the accuracy in the expression. For the two first of these, Ovid is famous among the poets; for the latter, Virgil. Ovid images more often the movements and affections of the mind, either combating between two contrary pa.s.sions, or extremely discomposed by one. His words therefore are the least part of his care; for he pictures nature in disorder, with which the study and choice of words is inconsistent. This is the proper wit of dialogue or discourse, and consequently of the drama, where all that is said is to be supposed the effect of sudden thought; which, though it excludes not the quickness of wit in repartees, yet admits not a too curious election of words, too frequent allusions, or use of tropes, or, in fine, anything that shows remoteness of thought or labour in the writer.

On the other side, Virgil speaks not so often to us in the person of another, like Ovid, but in his own: he relates almost all things as from himself, and thereby gains more liberty than the other, to express his thoughts with all the graces of elocution, to write more figuratively, and to confess as well the labour as the force of his imagination.

Though he describes his Dido well and naturally, in the violence of her pa.s.sions, yet he must yield in that to the Myrrha, the Biblis, the Althaea, of Ovid; for as great an admirer of him as I am, I must acknowledge, that if I see not more of their souls than I see of Dido's, at least I have a greater concernment for them: and that convinces me that Ovid has touched those tender strokes more delicately than Virgil could. But when action or persons are to be described, when any such image is to be set before us, how bold, how masterly are the strokes of Virgil! We see the objects he presents us with in their native figures, in their proper motions; but so we see them, as our own eyes could never have beheld them so beautiful in themselves. We see the soul of the poet, like that universal one of which he speaks, informing and moving through all his pictures:

--Totamque infusa per artus Mens agitat molem, et magno so corpore miscet.

We behold him embellis.h.i.+ng his images, as he makes Venus breathing beauty upon her son aeneas.

--lumenque juventae Purpureum, et laetos oculis afflarat honores: Quale ma.n.u.s addunt ebori decus, aut ubi flavo Argentum Pariusve lapis circundatur auro.

See his Tempest, his Funeral Sports, his Combat of Turnus and aeneas: and in his Georgics, which I esteem the divinest part of all his writings, the Plague, the Country, the Battle of the Bulls, the Labour of the Bees, and those many other excellent images of nature, most of which are neither great in themselves, nor have any natural ornament to bear them up: but the words wherewith he describes them are so excellent that it might be well applied to him, which was said by Ovid, _Materiam superabat opus_: the very sound of his words has often somewhat that is connatural to the subject; and while we read him, we sit, as in a play, beholding the scenes of what he represents. To perform this, he made frequent use of tropes, which you know change the nature of a known word, by applying it to some other signification; and this is it which Horace means in his epistle to the Pisos:

Dixeris egregie, notum si callida verb.u.m Reddiderit junctura novum--

But I am sensible I have presumed too far to entertain you with a rude discourse of that art, which you both know so well, and put into practice with so much happiness. Yet before I leave Virgil, I must own the vanity to tell you, and by you the world, that he has been my master in this poem: I have followed him everywhere, I know not with what success, but I am sure with diligence enough: my images are many of them copied from him, and the rest are imitations of him. My expressions also are as near as the idioms of the two languages would admit of in translation. And this, sir, I have done with that boldness, for which I will stand accountable to any of our little critics, who, perhaps, are no better acquainted with him than I am. Upon your first perusal of this poem, you have taken notice of some words which I have innovated (if it be too bold for me to say refined) upon his Latin; which, as I offer not to introduce into English prose, so I hope they are neither improper, nor altogether inelegant in verse; and, in this, Horace will again defend me.

Et nova, fictaque nuper, habebunt verba fidem, si Graeco fonte cadunt, parce detorta--

The inference is exceeding plain: for if a Roman poet might have liberty to coin a word, supposing only that it was derived from the Greek, was put into a Latin termination, and that he used this liberty but seldom, and with modesty; how much more justly may I challenge that privilege to do it with the same prerequisites, from the best and most judicious of Latin writers! In some places, where either the fancy or the words were his, or any other's, I have noted it in the margin, that I might not seem a plagiary; in others I have neglected it, to avoid as well tediousness, as the affectation of doing it too often. Such descriptions or images well wrought, which I promise not for mine, are, as I have said, the adequate delight of heroic poesy; for they beget admiration, which is its proper object; as the images of the burlesque, which is contrary to this, by the same reason beget laughter: for the one shows nature beautified, as in the picture of a fair woman, which we all admire; the other shows her deformed, as in that of a lazar, or of a fool with distorted face and antique gestures, at which we cannot forbear to laugh, because it is a deviation from nature. But though the same images serve equally for the Epic poesy, and for the historic and panegyric, which are branches of it, yet a several sort of sculpture is to be used in them. If some of them are to be like those of Juvenal, _Stantes in curribus aemiliani_, heroes drawn in their triumphal chariots, and in their full proportion; others are to be like that of Virgil, _Spirantia mollius oera_: there is somewhat more of softness and tenderness to be shown in them. You will soon find I write not this without concern. Some, who have seen a paper of verses, which I wrote last year to her Highness the d.u.c.h.ess, have accused them of that only thing I could defend in them. They said, I did _humi serpere_, that I wanted not only height of fancy, but dignity of words, to set it off. I might well answer with that of Horace, _Nunc non erat his locus_; I knew I addressed them to a lady, and accordingly I affected the softness of expression, and the smoothness of measure, rather than the height of thought; and in what I did endeavour, it is no vanity to say I have succeeded. I detest arrogance; but there is some difference betwixt that and a just defence. But I will not further bribe your candour, or the reader's. I leave them to speak for me; and, if they can, to make out that character, not pretending to a greater, which I have given them.

And now, sir, it is time I should relieve you from the tedious length of this account. You have better and more profitable employment for your hours, and I wrong the public to detain you longer. In conclusion, I must leave my poem to you with all its faults, which I hope to find fewer in the printing by your emendations. I know you are not of the number of those, of whom the younger Pliny speaks; _Nec sunt parum multi, qui carpere amicos suos judicium vocant_: I am rather too secure of you on that side. Your candour in pardoning my errors may make you more remiss in correcting them; if you will not withal consider that they come into the world with your approbation, and through your hands.