Discourses on Satire and on Epic Poetry

by John Dryden

But I have said enough, and it may be too much, on this subject. Will your lordship be pleased to prolong my audience only so far till I tell you my own trivial thoughts how a modern satire should be made? I will not deviate in the least from the precepts and examples of the ancients, who were always our best masters; I will only illustrate them, and discover some of the hidden beauties in their designs, that we thereby may form our own in imitation of them. Will you please but to observe that Persius, the least in dignity of all the three, has, notwithstanding, been the first who has discovered to us this important secret in the designing of a perfect satire—that it ought only to treat of one subject; to be confined to one particular theme, or, at least, to one principally? If other vices occur in the management of the chief, they should only be transiently lashed, and not be insisted on, so as to make the design double. As in a play of the English fashion which we call a tragicomedy, there is to be but one main design, and though there be an under-plot or second walk of comical characters and adventures, yet they are subservient to the chief fable, carried along under it and helping to it, so that the drama may not seem a monster with two heads. Thus the Copernican system of the planets makes the moon to be moved by the motion of the earth, and carried about her orb as a dependent of hers. Mascardi, in his discourse of the “Doppia Favola,” or double tale in plays, gives an instance of it in the famous pastoral of Guarini, called Il Pastor Fido, where Corisca and the Satyr are the under-parts; yet we may observe that Corisca is brought into the body of the plot and made subservient to it. It is certain that the divine wit of Horace was not ignorant of this rule—that a play, though it consists of many parts, must yet be one in the action, and must drive on the accomplishment of one design—for he gives this very precept, Sit quod vis simplex duntaxat, et unum; yet he seems not much to mind it in his satires, many of them consisting of more arguments than one, and the second without dependence on the first. Casaubon has observed this before me in his preference of Persius to Horace, and will have his own beloved author to be the first who found out and introduced this method of confining himself to one subject.

I know it may be urged in defence of Horace that this unity is not necessary, because the very word satura signifies a dish plentifully stored with all variety of fruits and grains. Yet Juvenal, who calls his poems a farrago (which is a word of the same signification with satura), has chosen to follow the same method of Persius and not of Horace; and Boileau, whose example alone is a sufficient authority, has wholly confined himself in all his satires to this unity of design. That variety which is not to be found in any one satire is at least in many, written on several occasions; and if variety be of absolute necessity in every one of them, according to the etymology of the word, yet it may arise naturally from one subject, as it is diversely treated in the several subordinate branches of it, all relating to the chief. It may be illustrated accordingly with variety of examples in the subdivisions of it, and with as many precepts as there are members of it, which all together may complete that olla or hotch-potch which is properly a satire.

Under this unity of theme or subject is comprehended another rule for perfecting the design of true satire. The poet is bound, and that ex officio, to give his reader some one precept of moral virtue, and to caution him against some one particular vice or folly. Other virtues, subordinate to the first, may be recommended under that chief head, and other vices or follies may be scourged, besides that which he principally intends; but he is chiefly to inculcate one virtue, and insist on that. Thus Juvenal, in every satire excepting the first, ties himself to one principal instructive point, or to the shunning of moral evil. Even in the sixth, which seems only an arraignment of the whole sex of womankind, there is a latent admonition to avoid ill women, by showing how very few who are virtuous and good are to be found amongst them. But this, though the wittiest of all his satires, has yet the least of truth or instruction in it; he has run himself into his old declamatory way, and almost forgotten that he was now setting up for a moral poet.

Persius is never wanting to us in some profitable doctrine, and in exposing the opposite vices to it. His kind of philosophy is one, which is the Stoic, and every satire is a comment on one particular dogma of that sect, unless we will except the first, which is against bad writers; and yet even there he forgets not the precepts of the “porch.” In general, all virtues are everywhere to be praised and recommended to practice, and all vices to be reprehended and made either odious or ridiculous, or else there is a fundamental error in the whole design.

I have already declared who are the only persons that are the adequate 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—