Discourses on Satire and on Epic Poetry

by John Dryden

I shall say more of this in the next article of their charge against him, which is—want of invention. In the meantime I may affirm, in honour of this episode, that it is not only now esteemed the most pleasing entertainment of the “Æneis,” but was so accounted in his own age, and before it was mellowed into that reputation which time has given it; for which I need produce no other testimony than that of Ovid, his contemporary:—

“Nec pars ulla magis legitur de corpore toto,
Quam non legitimo fædere junctus amor.”

Where, by the way, you may observe, my lord, that Ovid in those words, non legitimo fædere junctus amor, will by no means allow it to be a lawful marriage betwixt Dido and Æneas. He was in banishment when he wrote those verses, which I cite from his letter to Augustus. “You, sir,” saith he, “have sent me into exile for writing my ‘Art of Love’ and my wanton elegies; yet your own poet was happy in your good graces, though he brought Dido and Æneas into a cave, and left them there not over-honestly together: may I be so bold to ask your majesty is it a greater fault to teach the art of unlawful love than to show it in the action?” But was Ovid the court-poet so bad a courtier as to find no other plea to excuse himself than by a plain accusation of his master? Virgil confessed it was a lawful marriage betwixt the lovers; that Juno, the goddess of matrimony, had ratified it by her presence (for it was her business to bring matters to that issue): that the ceremonies were short we may believe, for Dido was not only amorous, but a widow. Mercury himself, though employed on a quite contrary errand, yet owns it a marriage by an innuendo—pulchramque uxorius urbem extruis. He calls Æneas not only a husband, but upbraids him for being a fond husband, as the word uxorius implies. Now mark a little, if your lordship pleases, why Virgil is so much concerned to make this marriage (for he seems to be the father of the bride himself, and to give her to the bridegroom); it was to make way for the divorce which he intended afterwards, for he was a finer flatterer than Ovid, and I more than conjecture that he had in his eye the divorce which not long before had passed betwixt the emperor and Scribonia. He drew this dimple in the cheek of Æneas to prove Augustus of the same family by so remarkable a feature in the same place. Thus, as we say in our home-spun English proverb, he killed two birds with one stone—pleased the emperor by giving him the resemblance of his ancestor, and gave him such a resemblance as was not scandalous in that age (for to leave one wife and take another was but a matter of gallantry at that time of day among the Romans). Neque hæc in fædera veni is the very excuse which Æneas makes when he leaves his lady. “I made no such bargain with you at our marriage to live always drudging on at Carthage; my business was Italy, and I never made a secret of it. If I took my pleasure, had not you your share of it? I leave you free at my departure to comfort yourself with the next stranger who happens to be shipwrecked on your coast; be as kind an hostess as you have been to me, and you can never fail of another husband. In the meantime I call the gods to witness that I leave your shore unwillingly; for though Juno made the marriage, yet Jupiter commands me to forsake you.” This is the effect of what he saith when it is dishonoured out of Latin verse into English prose. If the poet argued not aright, we must pardon him for a poor blind heathen, who knew no better morals.

I have detained your lordship longer than I intended on this objection, which would indeed weigh something in a Spiritual Court;—but I am not to defend our poet there. The next, I think, is but a cavil, though the cry is great against him, and hath continued from the time of Macrobius to this present age; I hinted it before. They lay no less than want of invention to his charge—a capital charge, I must acknowledge; for a poet is a maker, as the word signifies; and who cannot make—that is, invent—hath his name for nothing. That which makes this accusation look so strong at the first sight is that he has borrowed so many things from Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, and others who preceded him. But in the first place, if invention is to be taken in so strict a sense that the matter of a poem must be wholly new, and that in all its parts, then Scaliger hath made out, saith Segrais, that the history of Troy was no more the invention of Homer than of Virgil. There was not an old woman or almost a child, but had it in their mouths before the Greek poet or his friends digested it into this admirable order in which we read it. At this rate, as Solomon hath told us, there is nothing new beneath the sun. Who, then, can pass for an inventor if Homer as well as Virgil must be deprived of that glory! Is Versailles the less a new building because the architect of that palace hath imitated others which were built before it? Walls, doors and windows, apartments, offices, rooms of convenience and magnificence, are in all great houses. So descriptions, figures, fables, and the rest, must be in all heroic poems; they are the common materials of poetry, furnished from the magazine of nature: every poet hath as much right to them as every man hath to air or water:

“Quid prohibetis aquas? Usus communis aquarum est.”

But the argument of the work (that is to say, its principal action), the economy and disposition of it—these are the things which distinguish copies from originals. The Poet who borrows nothing from others is yet to be born; he and the Jews’ Messias will come together. There are parts of the “Æneis” which resemble some parts both of the “Ilias” and of the “Odysses;” as, for example, Æneas descended into hell, and Ulysses had been there before him; Æneas loved Dido, and Ulysses loved Calypso: in few words, Virgil hath imitated Homer’s “Odysses” in his first six books, and in his six last the “Ilias.” But from hence can we infer that the two poets write the same history? Is there no invention in some other parts of Virgil’s “Æneis?” The disposition of so many various matters, is not that his own? From what book of Homer had Virgil his episode of Nysus and Euryalus, of Mezentius and Lausus? From whence did he borrow his design of bringing Æneas into Italy? of establishing the Roman Empire on the foundations of a Trojan colony? to say nothing of the honour he did his patron, not only in his descent from Venus, but in making him so like her in his best features that the goddess might have mistaken Augustus for her son. He had indeed the story from common fame, as Homer had his from the Egyptian priestess. Æneadum genetriæ was no more unknown to Lucretius than to him; but Lucretius taught him not to form his hero, to give him piety or valour for his manners—and both in so eminent a degree that, having done what was possible for man to save his king and country, his mother was forced to appear to him and restrain his fury, which hurried him to death in their revenge. But the poet made his piety more successful; he brought off his father and his son; and his gods witnessed to his devotion by putting themselves under his protection, to be replaced by him in their promised Italy. Neither the invention nor the conduct of this great action were owing to Homer or any other poet; it is one thing to copy, and another thing to imitate from nature. The copier is that servile imitator to whom Horace gives no better a name than that of animal; he will not so much as allow him to be a man. Raffaelle imitated nature; they who copy one of Raffaelle’s pieces, imitate but him, for his work is their original. They translate him, as I do Virgil; and fall as short of him as I of Virgil. There is a kind of invention in the imitation of Raffaelle; for though the thing was in nature, yet the idea of it was his own. Ulysses travelled, so did Æneas; but neither of them were the first travellers: for Cain went into the land of Nod before they were born, and neither of the poets ever heard of such a man. If Ulysses had been killed at Troy, yet Æneas must have gone to sea, or he could never have arrived in Italy; but the designs of the two poets were as different as the courses of their heroes—one went home, and the other sought a home.

To return to my first similitude. Suppose Apelles and Raffaelle had each of them painted a burning Troy, might not the modern painter have succeeded as well as the ancient, though neither of them had seen the town on fire? For the drafts of both were taken from the ideas which they had of nature. Cities have been burnt before either of them were in being. But to close the simile as I began it: they would not have designed it after the same manner; Apelles would have distinguished Pyrrhus from the rest of all the Grecians, and showed him forcing his entrance into Priam’s palace; there he had set him in the fairest light, and given him the chief place of all his figures, because he was a Grecian and he would do honour to his country. Raffaelle, who was an Italian, and descended from the Trojans, would have made Æneas the hero of his piece, and perhaps not with his father on his back, his son in one hand, his bundle of gods in the other, and his wife following (for an act of piety is not half so graceful in a picture as an act of courage); he would rather have drawn him killing Androgeus or some other hand to hand, and the blaze of the fires should have darted full upon his face, to make him conspicuous amongst his Trojans. This, I think, is a just comparison betwixt the two poets in the conduct of their several designs. Virgil cannot be said to copy Homer; the Grecian had only the advantage of writing first. If it be urged that I have granted a resemblance in some parts, yet therein Virgil has excelled him; for what are the tears of Calypso for being left, to the fury and death of Dido? Where is there the whole process of her passion and all its violent effects to be found in the languishing episode of the “Odysses”? If this be to copy, let the critics show us the same disposition, features, or colouring in their original. The like may be said of the descent to hell, which was not of Homer’s invention either; he had it from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. But to what end did Ulysses make that journey? Æneas undertook it by the express commandment of his father’s ghost. There he was to show him all the succeeding heroes of his race, and next to Romulus (mark, if you please the address of Virgil) his own patron, Augustus Cæsar. Anchises was likewise to instruct him how to manage the Italian war, and how to conclude it with his honour—that is, in other words, to lay the foundations of that empire which Augustus was to govern. This is the noble invention of our author, but it hath been copied by so many sign-post daubers that now it is grown fulsome, rather by their want of skill than by the commonness.

In the last place. I may safely grant that by reading Homer, Virgil was taught to imitate his invention—that is to imitate like him (which is no more than if a painter studied Raffaelle that he might learn to design after his manner). And thus I might imitate Virgil if I were capable of writing an heroic poem, and yet the invention be my own; but I should endeavour to avoid a servile copying. I would not give the same story under other names, with the same characters, in the same order, and with the same sequel, for every common reader to find me out at the first sight for a plagiary, and cry, “This I read before in Virgil in a better language and in better verse.” This is like Merry-Andrew on the low rope copying lubberly the same tricks which his master is so dexterously performing on the high.

I will trouble your lordship but with one objection more, which I know not whether I found in Le Febvre or Valois, but I am sure I have read it in another French critic, whom I will not name because I think it is not much for his reputation. Virgil in the heat of action—suppose, for example, in describing the fury of his hero in a battle (when he is endeavouring to raise our concernments to the highest pitch)—turns short on the sudden into some similitude which diverts, say they, your attention from the main subject, and misspends it on some trivial image. He pours cold water into the caldron when his business is to make it boil.

This accusation is general against all who would be thought heroic poets, but I think it touches Virgil less than any; he is too great a master of his art to make a blot which may so easily be hit. Similitudes (as I have said) are not for tragedy, which is all violent, and where the passions are in a perpetual ferment; for there they deaden, where they should animate; they are not of the nature of dialogue unless in comedy. A metaphor is almost all the stage can suffer, which is a kind of similitude comprehended in a word. But this figure has a contrary effect in heroic poetry; there it is employed to raise the admiration, which is its proper business; and admiration is not of so violent a nature as fear or hope, compassion or horror, or any concernment we can have for such or such a person on the stage. Not but I confess that similitudes and descriptions when drawn into an unreasonable length must needs nauseate the reader. Once I remember (and but once) Virgil makes a similitude of fourteen lines, and his description of Fame is about the same number. He is blamed for both, and I doubt not but he would have contracted them had be lived to have reviewed his work; but faults are no precedents. This I have observed of his similitudes in general—that they are not placed (as our unobserving critics tell us) in the heat of any action, but commonly in its declining; when he has warmed us in his description as much as possibly he can, then (lest that warmth should languish) he renews it by some apt similitude which illustrates his subject and yet palls not his audience. I need give your lordship but one example of this kind, and leave the rest to your observation when next you review the whole “Æneis” in the original, unblemished by my rude translation; it is in the first hook, where the poet describes Neptune composing the ocean, on which Æolus had raised a tempest without his permission. He had already chidden the rebellious winds for obeying the commands of their usurping master; he had warned them from the seas; he had beaten down the billows with his mace; dispelled the clouds, restored the sunshine, while Triton and Cymothoe were heaving the ships from off the quicksands, before the poet would offer at a similitude for illustration:—