Like a Comet burn'd,
That fires the Length of Ophiucus huge
In th' Artick Sky; and from his horrid hair
Shakes Pestilence and War.(II. 708-711)
Similarly, when Aeneas hastens to meet Turnus in the twelfth book, Miltonic translation and Miltonic original are brought together to show the similarity between Virgilian and Christian sublime:
Aeneas ... with Joy
Exults; and thunders terrible in Arms.
As great as Athos, or as Eryx great,
Or Father Apennine, when crown'd with Okes
He waves the ruffled Forest on his Brow,
And rears his snowy Summit to the Clouds.(902 ff.)
On th' other Side Satan allarm'd
Collecting all his Might, dilated stood;
Like Teneriff, or Atlas unremov'd:
His Stature reach'd the Sky, and on his Crest
Sat Horrour plum'd.(IV. 985-989)
In the light of such illustration, it is not surprising that Trapp, in the Preface, when he wishes to give the feel of the Virgilian sublime, quotes Milton's description of the creation:
Let there be Light, said God; and forthwith Light
Ethereal, first of Things, Quintessence pure,
Sprang from the Deep.(p. xxx)
When he wants to show what grandeur with propriety the English language can achieve (even in the teeth of Dryden's rendering of Virgil, which he pertinently censures), he chooses his prime examples from Milton: witness the account of Satan "Hurl'd headlong, flaming from th' ethereal Sky...." It was a bold undertaking by Trapp, for Pope's version of Homer, elegantly correct in couplets, was in the press. Many a man was to suffer more in The Dunciad for less.[4]
Trapp's immediate critical associates in England clearly are John Dennis and Joseph Addison, and the origins of Trapp's thinking in classical antiquity may be found in Longinus. Dennis had united Milton with the poets of antiquity as an example of the passionate effects of the religious sublime,[5] while Addison (who had already translated a fragment of Aeneid III into blank verse) in his Spectator papers on Paradise Lost had tastefully combined the structural formalism of Aristotelian criticism of the epic with enthusiastic comment on the grandeur and beauty of Milton's verse. To these must be added Trapp's favorite, Roscommon, who in An Essay on Translated Verse (1685)[6] had interposed an imitation of Milton to illustrate how English verses might rise to Roman greatness. But it would be unfair to Trapp merely to reduce him to a series of component sources. He adopts and adapts; and as far as the criticism of Virgil was concerned, his Preface and his notes are a refreshing plea for something that he felt had not been sufficiently emphasized in the Aeneid: the ever-varying energetic passion that Longinian criticism had claimed was an essential quality of the greatest literary works. Trapp's choice of Miltonic example is only one means by which he emphasises that to truly respond to the Aeneid (as to any major poem) was to be ravished by an overwhelming emotive experience. "The Art, and Triumph of Poetry are in nothing more seen, and felt, than in Moving the Passions," he comments in his "Remarks" on the tragical action of the fourth book to which he prefaced "An Essay upon the Nature, and Art of Moving the Passions in Tragedy, and Epic Poetry" (I. 377). "A Man cannot command his own Motions, while he reads This; The very Verses are alive" (II. 942) is a typical comment from his "Remarks" (on breaking the truce in the twelfth book). He introduces the third book by citing Horace: the poet's art is like magic, transporting us now to Thebes, now to Athens (I. 365). Sometimes he throws up his hands in rapture at the je ne sais quoi: "Some Beauties are the more so, for not being capable of Explanation. I feel it, tho' I cannot account for it" (I. 339). It is to the text the Preface lays the foundation for this kind of response in its emphasis on the emotive range of Virgil—on his power to burn and to freeze, to raise admiration, terror, and pity. "The Greek Poet knew little of the Passions, in comparison of the Roman" his argument runs, setting Virgil on the peak of Parnassus.
This enthusiastic excitement is firmly controlled in the Preface by the disciplines of more formal criticism, and here, inevitably, Trapp follows the same kind of standard authorities as Dryden in his translation. It would be untypical of the man not to give positive guarantees of his learning and respectability. He shows that he had absorbed the arguments of René le Bossu's Traité du Poème Epique (1675) and knows Jean Regnauld de Segrais' translation of the Aeneid (1668). He was familiar with René Rapin's Réflexions sur la Poétique d'Aristote (1674) and André Dacier's La Poétique d'Aristote Traduite en Français. Avec des Remarques (1692). The name of J. C. Scaliger intrudes, if only to be mentioned with distaste; for the pedantic querulousness of Scaliger's extended comparison of Homer with Virgil attracted Trapp no more than it did Addison, both critics, in the English humanistic tradition, being more concerned with an appreciative and elegant brevity than with exhaustive scholarship. It was necessary also to show some knowledge of the quarrel of the ancients and moderns; but Trapp is concerned with the integrity of European culture, not with the inane counting of points for or against past or present and not at all with scoring off personal antagonists. In comparison, he makes Swift, who always sneered at him, and even Pope seem sometimes trivial and bitchy.