On the whole matter, I thought fit to steer betwixt the two extremes of paraphrase and literal translation; to keep as near my author as I could, without losing all his graces, the most eminent of which are in the beauty of his words; and those words, I must add, are always figurative. Such of these as would retain their elegance in our tongue, I have endeavoured to graff on it; but most of them are of necessity to be lost, because they will not shine in any but their own. Virgil has sometimes two of them in a line; but the scantiness of our heroic verse is not capable of receiving more than one; and that too must expiate for many others which have none. Such is the difference of the languages, or such my want of skill in chusing words. Yet I may presume to say, and I hope with as much reason as the French translator, that, taking all the materials of this divine author, I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age. I acknowledge, with Ségrais, that I have not succeeded in this attempt according to my desire: yet I shall not be wholly without praise, if in some sort I may be allowed to have copied the clearness, the purity, the easiness, and the magnificence, of his style. But I shall have occasion to speak farther on this subject before I end the Preface.
When I mentioned the Pindaric line, I should have added, that I take another licence in my verses: for I frequently make use of triplet rhymes, and for the same reason, because they bound the sense. And therefore I generally join these two licences together, and make the last verse of the triplet a Pindaric:[82] for, besides the majesty which it gives, it confines the sense within the barriers of three lines, which would languish if it were lengthened into four. Spenser is my example for both these privileges of English verses; and Chapman has followed him in his translation of Homer. Mr Cowley has given into them after both; and all succeeding writers after him. I regard them now as the Magna Charta of heroic poetry, and am too much an Englishman to lose what my ancestors have gained for me. Let the French and Italians value themselves on their regularity; strength and elevation are our standard. I said before, and I repeat it, that the affected purity of the French has unsinewed their heroic verse. The language of an epic poem is almost wholly figurative: yet they are so fearful of a metaphor, that no example of Virgil can encourage them to be bold with safety. Sure they might warm themselves by that sprightly blaze, without approaching it so close as to singe their wings; they may come as near it as their master. Not that I would discourage that purity of diction in which he excels all other poets. But he knows how far to extend his franchises, and advances to the verge, without venturing a foot beyond it. On the other side, without being injurious to the memory of our English Pindar, I will presume to say, that his metaphors are sometimes too violent, and his language is not always pure. But, at the same time, I must excuse him; for, through the iniquity of the times, he was forced to travel, at an age when, instead of learning foreign languages, he should have studied the beauties of his mother-tongue, which, like all other speeches, is to be cultivated early, or we shall never write it with any kind of elegance.[83] Thus, by gaining abroad, he lost at home; like the painter in the "Arcadia," who, going to see a skirmish, had his arms lopped off, and returned, says Sir Philip Sidney, well instructed how to draw a battle, but without a hand to perform his work.
There is another thing in which I have presumed to deviate from him and Spenser. They both make hemisticks, (or half verses,) breaking off in the middle of a line. I confess there are not many such in the "Fairy Queen;" and even those few might be occasioned by his unhappy choice of so long a stanza. Mr Cowley had found out, that no kind of staff is proper for a heroic poem, as being all too lyrical: yet, though he wrote in couplets, where rhyme is freer from constraint, he frequently affects half verses; of which we find not one in Homer, and I think not in any of the Greek poets, or the Latin, excepting only Virgil; and there is no question but he thought he had Virgil's authority for that licence. But, I am confident, our poet never meant to leave him, or any other, such a precedent: and I ground my opinion on these two reasons: first, we find no example of a hemistick in any of his Pastorals or Georgics; for he had given the last finishing strokes to both these poems: but his Æneïs he left so incorrect, at least so short of that perfection at which he aimed, that we know how hard a sentence he passed upon it: and, in the second place, I reasonably presume, that he intended to have filled up all those hemisticks, because in one of them we find the sense imperfect:
Quem tibi jam Trojâ——
which some foolish grammarian has ended for him with a half line of nonsense:
----peperit fumante Crëusa:
for Ascanius must have been born some years before the burning of that city; which I need not prove. On the other side, we find also, that he himself filled up one line in the Sixth Æneïd, the enthusiasm seizing him, while he was reading to Augustus:
Misenum Æolidem, quo non præstantior alter
Ære ciere viros——
to which he added, in that transport, Martemque accendere cantu: and never was any line more nobly finished; for the reasons which I have given in the Book of Painting. On these considerations I have shunned hemisticks; not being willing to imitate Virgil to a fault, like Alexander's courtiers, who affected to hold their necks awry, because he could not help it.[84] I am confident your lordship is by this time of my opinion, and that you will look on those half lines hereafter, as the imperfect products of a hasty Muse: like the frogs and serpents in the Nile; part of them kindled into life, and part a lump of unformed unanimated mud.
I am sensible that many of my whole verses are as imperfect as those halves, for want of time to digest them better: but give me leave to make the excuse of Boccace, who, when he was upbraided that some of his novels had not the spirit of the rest, returned this answer, that Charlemagne, who made the paladins, was never able to raise an army of them. The leaders may be heroes, but the multitude must consist of common men.