The Dramatic Works of John Dryden, Volume 1 / With a Life of the Author

by Walter Scott

The occasional poetry of Dryden is marked strongly by masculine character. The Epistles vary with the subject; and are light, humorous, and satirical, or grave, argumentative, and philosophical, as the case required. In his Elegies, although they contain touches of true feeling, especially where the stronger passions are to be illustrated, the poet is often content to substitute reasoning for passion, and rather to show us cause why we ought to grieve, than to set us the example by grieving himself. The inherent defect in Dryden's composition becomes here peculiarly conspicuous; yet we should consider, that, in composing elegies for the Countess of Abingdon, whom he never saw, and for Charles II., by whom he had been cruelly neglected, and doubtless on many similar occasions, Dryden could not even pretend to be interested in the mournful subject of his verse; but attended, with his poem, as much in the way of trade, as the undertaker, on the same occasion, came with his sables and his scutcheon. The poet may interest himself and his reader, even to tears, in the fate of a being altogether the creation of his own fancy, but hardly by a hired panegyric on a real subject, in whom his heart acknowledges no other interest than a fee can give him. Few of Dryden's elegiac effusions, therefore, seem prompted by sincere sorrow. That to Oldham may be an exception; but, even there, he rather strives to do honour to the talents of his departed friend, than to pour out lamentations for his loss. Of the Prologues and Epilogues we have spoken fully elsewhere.[19] Some of them are coarsely satirical, and others grossly indelicate. Those spoken at Oxford are the most valuable, and contain much good criticism and beautiful poetry. But the worst of them was probably well worth the petty recompence which the poet received.[20] The songs and smaller pieces of Dryden have smoothness, wit, and when addressed to ladies, gallantry in profusion, but are deficient in tenderness. They seem to have been composed with great ease; thrown together hastily and occasionally; nor can we doubt that many of them are now irrecoverably lost. Mr. Malone gives us an instance of Dryden's fluency in extempore composition, which was communicated to him by Mr. Walcott. "Conversation, one day after dinner, at Mrs. Creed's, running upon the origin of names, Mr. Dryden bowed to the good old lady, and spoke extempore the following verses:—

"So much religion in your name doth dwell,
Your soul must needs with piety excel.
Thus names, like [well-wrought] pictures drawn of old,
Their owners' nature and their story told.—
Your name but half expresses; for in you
Belief and practice do together go.
My prayers shall be, while this short life endures,
These may go hand in hand, with you and yours;
Till faith hereafter is in vision drowned,
And practice is with endless glory crowned."

The Translations of Dryden form a distinguished part of his poetical labours. No author, excepting Pope, has done so much to endenizen the eminent poets of antiquity. In this sphere, also, it was the fate of Dryden to become a leading example to future poets, and to abrogate laws which had been generally received although they imposed such trammels on translation as to render it hardly intelligible. Before his distinguished success showed that the object of the translator should be to transfuse the spirit, not to copy servilely the very words of his original, it had been required, that line should be rendered for line, and, almost, word for word. It may easily be imagined, that, by the constraint and inversion which this cramping statute required, a poem was barely rendered not Latin, instead of being made English, and that, to the mere native reader, as the connoisseur complains in "The Critic", the interpreter was sometimes "the harder to be understood of the two." Those who seek examples, may find them in the jaw-breaking translations of Ben Jonson and Holyday. Cowley and Denham had indeed rebelled against this mode of translation, which conveys pretty much the same idea of an original, as an imitator would do of the gait of another, by studiously stepping after him into every trace which his feet had left upon the sand. But they assumed a licence equally faulty, and claimed the privilege of writing what might be more properly termed imitations, than versions of the classics. It was reserved to Dryden manfully to claim and vindicate the freedom of a just translation; more limited than paraphrase, but free from the metaphrastic severity exacted from his predecessors.

With these free yet unlicentious principles, Dryden brought to the task of translation a competent knowledge of the language of the originals, with an unbounded command of his own. The latter is, however, by far the most marked characteristic of his Translations. Dryden was not indeed deficient in Greek and Roman learning; but he paused not to weigh and sift those difficult and obscure passages, at which the most learned will doubt and hesitate for the correct meaning. The same rapidity, which marked his own poetry, seems to have attended his study of the classics. He seldom waited to analyse the sentence he was about to render, far less scrupulously to weigh the precise purport and value of every word it contained. If he caught the general spirit and meaning of the author, and could express it with equal force in English verse, he cared not if minute elegancies were lost, or the beauties of accurate proportion destroyed, or a dubious interpretation hastily adopted on the credit of a scholium. He used abundantly the licence he has claimed for a translator, to be deficient rather in the language out of which he renders, than of that into which he translates. If such be but master of the sense of his author, Dryden argues, he may express that sense with eloquence in his own tongue, though he understand not the nice turns of the original. "But without the latter quality he can never arrive at the useful and the delightful, without which reading is a penance and fatigue."[21] With the same spirit of haste, Dryden if often contented to present to the English reader some modern image, which he may at once fully comprehend, instead of rendering precisely a classic expression, which might require explanation or paraphrase. Thus the pulchra Sicyonia, or buskins of Sicyon, are rendered,

"Diamond-buckles sparkling in their shoes."

By a yet more unfortunate adaptation of modern technical phraseology, the simple direction of Helenus,

"Læva tibi tellus, et longo læva pelantur
Æquora circuitu: dextrum fage lillus et undas,"

is translated,

"Tack to the larboard, and stand off to sea,
Veer starboard sea and land:"

—a counsel which, I shrewdly suspect, would have been unintelligible, not only to Palinurus, but to the best pilot in the British navy.[22] In the same tone, but with more intelligibility, if not felicity, Dryden translates palatia coeli in Ovid, the Louvre of the sky; and, in the version of the first book of Homer, talks of the court of Jupiter in the phrases used at that of Whitehall. These expressions, proper to modern manners, often produce an unfortunate confusion between the age in which the scene is laid, and the date of the translation. No judicious poet is willing to break the interest of a tale of ancient times, by allusions peculiar to his own period: but when the translator, instead of identifying himself as closely as possible with the original author, pretends to such liberty, he removes us a third step from the time of action, and so confounds the manners of no less than three distinct eras,—that in which the scene is laid, that in which the poem was written, and that, finally, in which the translation was executed. There are passages in Dryden's Æneid, which, in the revolution of a few pages, transport our ideas from the time of Troy's siege to that of the court of Augustus, and thence downward to the reign of William the Third of Britain.