Translation and the Poet's Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646-1726

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T R A N S L AT I O N A N D T H E P O E T ’ S L I F E

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Translation and the Poet’s Life The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646–1726 PAUL D AV I S

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Paul Davis 2008 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Davis, Paul. Translation and the poet’s life:the ethics of translating in English culture, 1646–1726/Paul Davis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN–13: 978–0–19–929783–2 (acid-free paper) 1. Translators—Great Britain—Biography. 2. Poets, English—Early modern, 1500–1700—Biography. 3. Poets, English—18th century—Biography. 4. Translating and interpreting—England—History—17th century—Case studies. 5. Translating and interpreting—England—History—18th century—Case studies. 6. Translating and interpreting—Philosophy. 7. Classical poetry—Translations into English—History and criticism. I. Title. PR131.D38 2008 820.9—dc22 2008009775 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–929783–2 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements It has taken me seven years to write this book. For some of that time— between 2002 and 2004—it looked as if I wouldn’t be able to Wnish it. I am grateful to those who helped get me back into the state of mind and bodily condition to do so: David Briant, Mary Heley, Kevin Jones, Alison Light, and Jon Parkin. Just as I was restarting the project, Line Cottegnie`s invited me to give a paper to the graduate seminar at Universite´ de Paris III (La Sorbonne Nouvelle). Latterly, friends and colleagues have read drafts and oVered encouragement, corrections, and advice (not all of which I have heeded): Rachel Bowlby, Stuart Gillespie, John Mullan, Philip West, and in particular Colin Burrow and David Hopkins. At UCL, Tim Langley and Pete Swaab supplied references and Welded queries Xung at them in corridors, and Henry Woudhuysen kept telling me to Wnish the thing. Oli Harris helped with the bibliography and illustrations. At OUP, Sophie Goldsworthy and Andrew McNeillie supported the book when it was largely virtual, and Jacqueline Baker stayed patient as it slowly became actual. The two anonymous readers for the press showed that ‘constructive criticism’ is not a polite Wction, and my mother, Bela Cunha, that the art of copy editing is not dead. Some paragraphs in Chapter 3 are adapted from essays originally published in The Seventeenth Century and Translation and Literature, and I am grateful to the editors of these journals for permission to re-use this material. Akane was there at the beginning, and she and Theo are here at the end. This is theirs.


Contents Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Abbreviations A Note on the Text

v viii ix x

Introduction 1 Wanting Voices I John Denham II Henry Vaughan 2 The Secret Lives of Abraham Cowley 3 Dryden and the Bounds of Liberty 4 Pope’s Family Trade

1 17 19 40 75 127 235

Bibliography Index

291 315

List of Illustrations 1. Anonymous portrait of John Denham (c.1661) By permission of the Librarian of the Senate House Library, University of London 2. The death of Priam, from Dryden, The Works of Virgil (1697) By permission of the Librarian of the Senate House Library, University of London 3. Cupid Punished, from Andrea Alciati, Emblems (1546) By permission of the Librarian of the Senate House Library, University of London 4. Abraham Cowley by Sir Peter Lely (c.1666–7) By permission of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery 5. John Dryden by Sir Godfrey Kneller (1697) By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge 6. Aeneas carrying Anchises out of Troy, from Dryden, Works of Virgil (1697) By permission of the Librarian of the Senate House Library, University of London 7. The Cyclopes at work, from Dryden, Works of Virgil (1697) By permission of the Librarian of the Senate House Library, University of London 8. Alexander Pope by Jonathan Richardson the elder (c.1737) By permission of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery

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Abbreviations B M R G W CE H S TE

The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, ed. T. H. Banks (New Haven, 1928) The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford, 1914; 2nd edn., 1957) Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (Harmondsworth, 1976; 2nd edn., 1983) Abraham Cowley: The Essays and Other Prose Writings, ed. A. B. Gough (Oxford, 1915) The English Writings of Abraham Cowley, ed. A. R. Waller, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1906) The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley, CA, 1956–2000) The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 5 vols. (Harlow, 1995–2005) The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1956) The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope, gen. ed. John Butt, 11 vols. (1939–68)

A Note on the Text Denham is quoted throughout in the text of The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, ed. T. H. Banks (New Haven, 1928), abbreviated as B; Vaughan’s prose in The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford, 1914; 2nd edn., 1957), abbreviated as M, and his verse in Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (Harmondsworth, 1976; 2nd edn., 1983), abbreviated as R; and Pope in The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope, gen. ed. John Butt, 11 vols. (1939–68), abbreviated as TE. In the cases of the other two poets considered here—Cowley and Dryden—the textual situation is more complicated. No satisfactory text of Cowley currently exists; a complete edition is underway at the University of Delaware Press, but it has not yet reached the works upon which Chapter 2 is mainly based: for the poems I have used The English Writings of Abraham Cowley, ed. A. R. Waller, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1906), abbreviated as W, which has no line numbers, and is therefore cited by volume and page number alone; but for the prose and in particular the Essays I have preferred the later and more carefully annotated Abraham Cowley: The Essays and Other Prose Writings, ed. A. B. Gough (Oxford, 1915), abbreviated as G. Where Dryden is concerned, The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley, CA, 1956–2000) is now complete, and I have accordingly used it as my standard text, abbreviated as CE. The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 5 vols. (Harlow, 1995–2005) has far superior editorial matter, but lacks the Works of Virgil, and presents the text in modernized form. Regular reference is made to this edition, abbreviated as H, in the notes. Where classical poets are concerned, a reasonable degree of certainty now exists about which editions Dryden used in making his translations, but this is not the case for the other translators I discuss. Furthermore, early-modern editions of Latin and Greek authors commonly present the text in a manner which would put obstacles in the path of the non-specialist reader, in particular making heavy use of abbreviated forms. I have therefore quoted classical poets in the editions of the Loeb

A Note on the Text

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Classical Library. Germane instances of discrepancy between modern and early-modern states of the text are addressed in the body of my arguments. Translations not otherwise attributed are also from the Loeb editions, revised where necessary to bring out particular points of emphasis.


Introduction Ten years ago, maybe even Wve, I could have begun this book about translation by complaining there aren’t enough books about translation. I could have protested, like Lawrence Venuti at the start of The Scandals of Translation (1998), that ‘Translation is stigmatized as a form of writing’ and insisted, as Peter France did a year earlier introducing the proceedings of a conference on ‘Poetry, Culture, and Translation’, that ‘theorists and critics of translation’ are similarly ‘ghettoized’.1 Alas, such a ringing opening is out of the question now. It may be that two of the three instances of stigmatization given by Venuti still obtain; that translation remains ‘discouraged by copyright law’ and ‘exploited by publishers and corporations, governments and religious organisations’. But the third—that it is ‘depreciated by the academy’2—patently does not. Not now that the three books which Venuti brought out between 1992 and 1998 have made ‘the translator’s invisibility’ so highly visible,3 and The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (2000) edited by France is already being supplanted by The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (2005– ), in Wve volumes and a million words, which he is co-editing. Not now that the journal in which France lamented the ghettoization of translation critics, Translation and Literature (1990– ), a forum for ‘articles, notes and reviews on literary translation of all kinds and periods’, has won three British Academy Learned Journal awards inside a decade, and the series in which Venuti’s books appeared, Routledge’s ‘Translation Studies’, runs to over a dozen volumes.4 Not now that other publishers have followed suit with series on 1 Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation (1998), p. 1; Peter France, ‘Introduction: Poetry, Culture, and Translation’, in Translation and Literature, 6 (1997), 4–7 (at 7). 2 Venuti, Scandals of Translation, 1. 3 Lawrence Venuti (ed.), Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (1992); The Translator’s Invisibility (1995); Scandals of Translation. 4 The series, whose general editors are Susan Bassnett and Andre´ Lefevere, began with Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992), and Lefevere (ed.), Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook (1992).

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Translation and the Poet’s Life

‘Translation Theories Explained’ and ‘Topics in Translation’,5 and there is even an academic imprint—St. Jerome Publishing in Manchester— publishing nothing but books on translation. Not now that highly lucrative postgraduate courses in the history, theory, and practice of translation have mushroomed in British and American universities, including my own, University College London. The translations which were the Wrst to catch this recent surge of critical interest in the practice and have been carried furthest into the cultural mainstream by it are the ones treated in this book: the versions of the classics produced between the Civil War and the early decades of the eighteenth century, during the so-called ‘Augustan’ age.6 Over this period, English poets of the Wrst rank devoted more of their time and creative energies to translating than they had ever done before and have ever done since. This was the golden age of poetic translation in England, and its treasures are far from secret. The two richest of them— Dryden’s ‘Aeneis’ (1697) and Pope’s Iliad (1715–20)—have lately acceded to the highest honour within the gift of commercial publishing: induction into the pantheon of ‘Penguin Classics’.7 Even the less glittering—John Denham’s versions of Virgil, Cowley’s of Anacreon and Pindar and Horace, and John Oldham’s of Horace and Juvenal— are now on show in anthologies.8 Certainly academics have made detailed

5 The former, at St. Jerome Publishing (Manchester), launched in 1997 with Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire and Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Translation and Literary Criticism; the latter, at ‘Multilingual Matters’ (Clevedon, Philadelphia, PA, and Adelaide), includes Peter Newmark’s spicy Paragraphs on Translation (1993). 6 Here, and throughout this book, I use the term ‘Augustan’ as a convenient and recognizable shorthand for the period, on the grounds that English writers engaged over these years in notably intricate and sustained ways with the culture of Augustan Rome; I do not mean by using it to endorse the further claim—defended, for instance, in Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (Oxford, 1983), and refuted by Howard D. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England (Princeton, 1978) and Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge, 1993)—that the English ‘Augustans’ found in that culture ‘a concentrated image of a life and civilization to which they more or less consciously aspired’ (Reuben Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford, 1959), p. 176). 7 Virgil’s Aeneid, Translated by John Dryden, ed. Frederick M. Keener (Harmondsworth, 1997); The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, ed. Steven Shankman (Harmondsworth, 1996). 8 ‘Over a third of the entries’ in The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation, ed. Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule (Oxford, 1995), ‘carry a date between 1660 and 1800’, Gordon Braden calculated when reviewing it in Translation and Literature, 6 (1997), 111–17 (at 115–16); and the ratio is not much lower in its predecessor, The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation, ed. Charles Tomlinson (Oxford, 1980), in spite of its larger remit.

Introduction

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reckonings of their value.9 Written in the main by scholars with a training in classical philology, these accounts have revealed that what were once assumed to be slips or howlers actually follow from the particular working methods of Augustan translators: their habit of weaving information from commentaries on the poets they were translating into the fabric of their translations, for instance, or of ‘transplanting’ into a translation of one poet a memorable cadence or snippet of phrasing from a parallel scene in another.10 I share the classicist’s formation of the scholars who developed this method, and aim to maintain the high standards of scholarship they set. However, in the strengths of their method lie its weakness: well equipped to demonstrate the sophistication of the contacts between particular ‘moderns’ and particular ‘ancients’—Dryden and Lucretius, say, or Pope and Horace—it has had the eVect of subsuming the study of Augustan translations from the classics into the larger discipline of ‘reception studies’.11 No account of Augustan poetic translation has so far been oVered which takes as its organizing principle and the object of its inquiry the relationship between English poets and translation itself as a distinctive mode of imaginative conduct. This relationship Translation and the Poet’s Life sets out to explore. A fundamental objection immediately suggests itself: namely, that translation is not in fact ‘a distinctive mode of imaginative conduct’. Certainly, for many modern theorists it is anything but. ‘All writing is 9 Lawrence Venuti, ‘The Destruction of Troy: Translation and Royalist Cultural Politics in the Interregnum’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 23 (1993), 197–219; Tom Mason, ‘Abraham Cowley and the Wisdom of Anacreon’, The Cambridge Quarterly, 19 (1990), 103–37; Stella P. Revard, ‘Cowley’s Pindarique Odes and the Politics of the Inter-regnum [sic]’, Criticism, 35 (1993), 391–418; David Hopkins, ‘Cowley’s Horatian Mice’, in Horace Made New, ed. Charles Martindale and David Hopkins (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 103–26; Paul Hammond, John Oldham and the Renewal of Classical Culture (Cambridge, 1983). 10 Awareness of the Wrst of these practices among modern scholars dates from J. McG. Bottkol’s ground-breaking essay ‘Dryden’s Latin Scholarship’, Modern Philology, 40 (1943), 241–54; for discussion of the second, in relation to the presence of Ovid within Pope’s Iliad in particular, see Felicity Rosslyn, ‘Heroic Couplet Translation: A Unique Solution?’, in Essays and Studies: Translating Literature, ed. Susan Bassnett (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 41–63. 11 Hence the fact that some of the best early discussions of Augustan poetic translations appeared in collections of essays treating the reception of particular classical poets across the ages: Charles Martindale (ed.), Virgil and his InXuence: Bimillenial Studies (Bristol, 1984); Charles Martindale (ed.), Ovid Renewed: Ovidian InXuences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1988); Charles Martindale and David Hopkins (eds.), Horace Made New: Horatian InXuences on British Writing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1993).

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translation’12 is the slogan of those trained by ‘poststructuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man [to] explode the binary opposition between ‘‘original’’ and ‘‘translation’’ ’13 and undermine ‘concepts of . . . ‘‘originality’’ ’ as ‘naively romantic’.14 The author is dead, long live the translator. Meanwhile, for those who take their lead from the hermeneutical ideas of the German Romantics Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘All reading is translation.’15 Indeed all speech: ‘ ‘‘Translation’’, properly understood, is’ only ‘a special case of the arc of communication which every successful speech-act closes within a given language’.16 Such maximizing deWnitions have been dismissed as ‘so generalized’ as to verge on ‘mere conceptual wordplay’.17 But at a less totalizing level, editors confronted by the practicalities of compiling anthologies have also reported diYculties in deciding what is and is not a translation. In his Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation, which came out in swinging 1966, George Steiner was permissive, allowing in any piece ‘in which a poem in another language (or in an earlier form of one’s own language) is the vitalizing, shaping presence’.18 But Charles Tomlinson found ‘good reason . . . at this point in our history’—cynically laissezfaire 1980—to legislate in his Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation against ‘the liberties of the imitation and of other relations more tenuous still’.19 Most recently, in 1995, during the grey days of the Major government, Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule adopted a rainbow policy in their Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation, where ‘the term ‘‘after’’ shows up with some frequency in the annotations, sometimes simply identifying a translation as being on the free side, sometimes designating an ‘‘imitation’’ . . . sometimes covering an even more distant sort of connection’.20

12 Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (New Haven, 1993), pp. 7–8. 13 Lawrence Venuti, ‘Introduction’ to Venuti (ed.), Rethinking Translation, 1–17 (at 6). 14 Theo Hermans, ‘Introduction: Translation Studies and a New Paradigm’, in Hermans (ed.), The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation (Sydney, 1985), p. 7. 15 Barnstone, Poetics of Translation, 7. 16 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford and New York, 1975; repr., 1992; rev. edn., 1998), p. 47. 17 Barnstone, Poetics of Translation, 23. 18 George Steiner (ed.), The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation (1966), p. 34. 19 Tomlinson (ed.), The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation, x: Tomlinson is endorsing the deWnition of translation given by Donald Davie in a tightly argued paper for the Open University, ‘Poetry in Translation’. 20 Gordon Braden’s review, Translation and Literature, 6 (1997), 113.

Introduction

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Moreover, these diYculties of categorization apply most sharply in the case of the Augustan age. Take Dryden and Pope, the bedrock of this book. Dryden’s editors, Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, have shown that not only loose reminiscences of the moods of classical poems but formal renderings of phrases or whole lines from them occur throughout his ostensibly ‘original’ poetry;21 and Reuben Brower said much the same of Pope in a classic study published Wfty years ago: ‘the line between translation and imitation is hard to draw in [his] Iliad, and it is often no clearer in more original poems since [he] is constantly reworking some remembered line or phrase or motif from another poet’.22 Probably no watertight theoretical distinction between ‘translation’ and ‘imitation’ is possible. Without one, though, a study of translation across the entire Augustan period would appear unfeasible: include imitations and it would become unmanageably vast, exclude some and not others and it would quickly lose cogency, cut them out altogether and what would remain to write about? Unlovely scholarly renderings aplenty (Barton Holyday’s Juvenal, Luke Milbourne’s Virgil, and the like) but rather fewer of the versions readers have most admired and enjoyed: certainly almost none of Dryden’s, it being his normal practice to intercalate ‘literal renderings which remind us immediately of the Latin which they are shadowing’ with ‘some additional ideas which may be in the spirit of what he takes his original to be, but cannot be immediately authorized by the Latin or its accompanying glosses’.23 (Tomlinson made space for Dryden in his anthology by excluding, in the end, not all imitations but ‘large-scale works of imitation’.)24 Yet if these problems of classiWcation can never be wholly resolved, the methods and objectives of this study should serve to mitigate, if not substantially annul, their eVects. My intention is to bring to light the personal and cultural signiWcances of translation for the Wve principal Augustan poet-translators: Denham and Henry Vaughan, Cowley, Dryden, and Pope. So when I refer to translation as ‘a distinctive mode of imaginative conduct’, my claim is not that it is such in any strictly 21 To pick a single poem at random, of Britannia Rediviva (1688), l. 133—‘Breath’d honour on his eyes, and her own Purple Light’—Paul Hammond notes (H iii. 208) ‘Translating lumenque iuventae/purpureum et laetos oculis adXarat honores (Aen. i. 590–1)’, and of l. 306 (ibid., 215)—‘Beyond the Sunny walks, and the circling Year’— that it is ‘From Virgil: extra anni solisque vias (Aen. vi. 796)’, a phrase Dryden had already translated at Annus Mirabilis (1667), l. 639 and Threnodia Augustalis (1685), l. 353. 22 Brower, Pope: The Poetry of Allusion, 283. 23 Paul Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (Oxford, 1999), p. 146. 24 Tomlinson (ed.), The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation, x.

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logical sense but that the poets studied in this book treated it as such. What concerns me is what they saw themselves as doing in particular cases, and on that basis a practicable dividing line can be drawn up between translation and imitation. Thus, for example, I exclude from consideration Cowley’s notoriously free renderings of Pindar, since he professed himself in the preface to them ‘not so enamoured of the Name of Translator, as not to wish to be Something Better, though it want yet a name’,25 but do consider his later versions of Virgil, Horace, and others in which he more patiently accommodated himself to that ‘Name’. Similarly, I treat Pope’s Homer but not his Imitations of Horace, since his correspondence clearly shows that he conceived of the two in contrastive terms, grumbling regularly about the former as unrewarding drudgery, but delighting in the latter, not so much ‘translated’ as ‘parody’d’ (as he told Swift),26 as richly creative endeavours. As those examples indicate, much of what made translation feel ‘distinctive’ for Augustan poets was negative: the imposition of severe constraints on their imaginative freedom, a sense of belatedness pregnant with suspicions of inferiority, sheer toilsomeness. To date, however, commentators have been chary of admitting as much, and perhaps understandably so: certainly, those scholarly pioneers who undertook the task of validating translation as a properly creative activity would have been poorly advised to emphasize such matters. But those of us who come after them are free to explore parts of the terrain they opened up into which they could not aVord to venture. Nor are these infertile regions. The pejorative views of translation canvassed, if not endorsed, at various times and in some measure by every one of the major poettranslators of the Augustan period are not as inhospitable to critical inquiry as they might seem from a distance. When such views were expressed by contemporary critics and cultural commentators, as they frequently were, the intention was of course to denigrate; that imitative practices were the norm in Augustan poetic culture arguably served to intensify mistrust of translation as an aberrantly extreme variant of those practices. Readers brought up to discriminate the several gradations of writerly indebtedness—to tell apart (in Ben Jonson’s orthodox formulation) a poet ‘able to convert the substance, or Riches of an other Poet, to his own use’ from ‘a Creature, that swallowes, what it takes in, crude, 25 Preface to Pindarique Odes (1656); G 19. 26 Pope to Swift, 2 April 1733 (referring to ‘The Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace Paraphrased’); S iii. 366.

Introduction

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raw, or indigested’27—reacted sharply against (what they felt to be) undynamic, untransformative deference to the ancients.28 But this potentially hostile environment put the poets I shall be considering on their mettle: turning to translation goaded them into strenuous eVorts of self-presentation and self-inquiry which they might not have made had they remained within the accepted parameters of imitative conduct. The degrading images of the translator widely current in their time challenged them to Wnd new answers to questions integral to their understandings of themselves and the standing of the poet in their culture: questions about vocation and career, fame and happiness, responsibility and freedom. Translating brought them to remodel their lives as poets and hence ‘the poet’s life’ as a cultural construct. Those remodellings are the subject of this book. As a microcosm of such revisionary endeavour, more largely described in the chapters which follow, consider Pope’s reappropriation of a hostile remark made by Matthew Prior about Dryden’s transformation during the mid-1680s from topical satirist to translator of the classics. In ‘A Satyr on the Modern Translators’ (1685), the (then) Whig controversialist mocked the Tory Laureate for having ‘turned the malice of a spiteful satire j To the safe innocence of a dull translator’.29 That was intended to bury Dryden, of course, not praise him: by ‘safe’ Prior meant ‘insipid’ not ‘peaceable’, and by ‘innocence’ not ‘purity’ but ‘ingenuousness’.30 Pope, though, spent much of his career exploring the Wne line which divides the vicious senses of ‘safe’, ‘innocent’, and even ‘dull’ from their virtuous neighbours;31 and a series of allusions in 27 Ben Jonson, Timber: Or, Discoveries; in Works, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–52), viii. 638. 28 The scholarship on the early-modern poetics of imitation is mountainous; peaks particularly worth scaling include Richard S. Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven, 1981), Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982) and, for imitation in the classical poets from whom early-modern poets learned to imitate, Stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge, 1998). 29 ‘A Satyr on the Modern Translators’, ll. 45–6; in The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1959). 30 Compare Christopher Ricks’s attack on modern critical theorists who use the word ‘innocent’ (of antiquated ‘humanist’ commentators) to mean ‘naı¨ve’: ‘the loss of innocence must entail not only experience but also nocence, harmfulness’; in ‘Literary Principles as against Theory’, collected in Essays in Appreciation (Oxford, 1996), pp. 311–32 (at 320). 31 The place where he most concertedly does this is in The Dunciad (1728–43): Pope’s complex and ambivalent outlook on the dunces as denizens of the hinterland between the aYrmative and pejorative senses of ‘innocence’ is best elicited by Emrys Jones in his classic essay ‘Pope and Dulness’, reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack (Hamden, CT, 1968), pp. 612–51.

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his writings before and during his Homeric period show him repositioning Prior’s couplet as the cornerstone of an interior debate about where the translator stands on that line. Most obviously when he wryly suggested in a letter sent to John Caryll on 25 September 1714, with the ink on the Homer contract still wet: If I had never so much natural malice, a laborious translation would extinguish all such impetuous emotions. I should be in Dryden’s case, of whom it was said: He turned the malice of a spiteful satire To the safe innocence of a dull translator.32

But also in ‘Lines on Solitude and Retirement’, one of the sequence of rewrites of Wycherley poems which constitute early essays in ‘translation’ broadly conceived, in which, when Pope sings the praises of the man who ‘In Safety, Innocence, and full Repose, j . . . the true Worth of his Creation knows’, the implied identiWcation of the translator with that ‘happy man’ is less explicit and therefore less hedged around with irony. And most distantly and suggestively in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735), where Prior’s three terms of abuse recur in their praising equivalents as Pope commemorates his father: Born to no Pride, inheriting no Strife, Nor marrying Discord in a Noble Wife, Stranger to Civil and Religious Rage, The Good Man walk’d innoxious thro’ his Age. No Courts he saw, no Suits would try, Nor dar’d an Oath, nor hazarded a Lye: Un-learn’d, he knew no Schoolman’s subtle Art, No Language, but the Language of the Heart.

‘Safe’ has been revised to ‘Nor dar’d an Oath, nor hazarded a Lye’, ‘Innocence’ to ‘innoxious’, ‘dull’ to ‘Un-learned’. The full story of the link Pope intuited there and elsewhere between his revered father and the Wgure of the translator reconstructed as a model of poetic goodness (as opposed to greatness) is told in Chapter 4, ‘Pope’s Family Trade’. The form in which Augustan poets generally encountered pejorative Wgurations of the translator was metaphor. Not all metaphors for translation in the period were wholly abusive, of course, but a number of those which circulated most widely were substantially so, and the

32 S i. 255.

Introduction

9

majority of the rest were at least edged with depreciative connotation.33 Again, this may be why modern commentators concerned to establish the literary credentials of translation have been so reluctant to discuss them. Certainly, the only metaphor which has been examined in any depth by such commentators is the one which in Augustan critical parlance redounded most uniformly to the translator’s credit: that of translation as reincarnation or regeneration, whose impact in particular on Dryden’s theory and practice has been Wnely measured in a series of studies.34 Perhaps, too, this whole line of inquiry has been given a bad name by the reductive use of another of the central metaphors in Augustan translation discourse—that of the translator as imperialist adventurer—made by theorists on the increasingly inXuential postcolonialist wing of ‘Translation Studies’. This metaphor occurs for the most part in commendatory poems or other forms of publishing advertisement. Yet no allowance is made for the inXationary eVects of panegyrical decorum when instances of it are quoted as proof that Augustan translators were guilty of (in the cry of the leader of this critical pack) ‘ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissicism and imperialism’.35 To be sure, such critical malpractice is regrettable, but it is not suYcient grounds for the abandonment of an entire Weld of research. However, it may be that there are more inchoate but also more fundamental reasons why commentators have been slow to exploit the metaphorical riches of Augustan translation discourse: reasons arising out of the nature of metaphor itself. In the introduction to their Oxford Book of Classical Verse in English Translation, Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule appear to suggest as much. Their meditation on the translator’s art moves lithely among metaphors recurrently applied to it down the centuries, but they begin with a caveat against their own way of proceeding: ‘Translation is doomed to metaphor.’36 Doomed primarily in the sense of being etymologically fated: ‘The words 33 A basic taxonomy is provided in Theo Hermans, ‘Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse on Translation’, in Manipulation of Literature, ed. Hermans, 103–35. 34 Dryden’s uses of this motif in his Wnal translation volume—Fables Ancient and Modern (1700)—have been emphasized by Charles Tomlinson, Poetry and Metamorphosis (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 3–4, by Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 207–17, and by David Hopkins, ‘Translation, Metempsychosis, and the Flux of Nature’, in Dryden and the World of Neoclassicism, ed. Wolfgang Gortschacher and Holger Klein (Tubingen, 2001), pp. 145–54; I oVer a reconsideration of it from a new perspective at the end of Chapter 3: ‘Dryden and the Bounds of Liberty’ (pp. 222–33). 35 Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility, 62–3; and compare, for instance, Robinson, Translation and Empire, 46–62. 36 The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in English Translation, ed. Poole and Maule, xxxv.

10


are bound together in their very roots: we get ‘‘translation’’ from a Latin word for carrying something across, and ‘‘metaphor’’ from its Greek equivalent.’37 But also, more loosely, just ‘condemned’, and this presumably because, metaphor having been repudiated by philosophers including Plato and Locke as an impediment to the proper conduct of reasoning, any subject discussed predominantly by way of metaphor may be considered a province of unveriWable speculation, sheer whimsy. Of course, that hostile estimation has not gone unchallenged within the annals of intellectual history: an alternative outlook whose adherents include Aristotle and Wittgenstein validates metaphor as ‘a form of thought’ and not merely ‘a form of speech’.38 The latter so-called ‘cognitive’ account predominates over the former ‘semantic’ one in modern language philosophy,39 and a modern literary critic might well be expected to adopt it, the more so if that critic was trained (as I was) in the school of ‘practical criticism’ established by I. A. Richards, whose lectures on The Philosophy of Rhetoric are widely credited as a source of the ‘preference for the cognitive over the semantic approach’ to metaphor in the modern academy.40 Then again, to bring up the name of Richards is to raise doubts about treating metaphor as a form of thought in the particular context of this study. For he himself labelled the contention that ‘thought is metaphoric’ a distinctively ‘modern theory’, and speciWcally contrasted it with ‘eighteenth-century assumptions’—he might just as well have said Augustan—‘that Wgures are a mere embellishment or added beauty’, ‘that the plain meaning, the tenor, is what alone really matters’ and that this plain meaning ‘is something that, ‘‘regardless of the Wgures’’, might be gathered by the patient reader’.41 The premise of that contrast, though, was the theory that a catastrophic ‘dissociation of sensibility’ (in T. S. Eliot’s phrase) occurred within English culture at some point in the seventeenth century, sundering ratiocination from rhetoric, thought from eloquence. That theory is now generally recognized as simplistic at best, if not entirely erroneous, and yet the notion persists (perhaps unconsciously) in some quarters that Augustan poets regarded simile and metaphor as mere frippery with 37 The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in English Translation, ed. Poole and Maule, xxxv. 38 Raymond W. Gibbs, The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding (Cambridge, 1994), p. 122. 39 This is reXected, for instance, in the balance of the essays collected in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago, 1978); those by Donald Davidson (pp. 29–45) and Max Black (pp. 181–92) debate the relative merits of the two positions. 40 David S. Miall, ‘Introduction’ to Metaphor: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Miall (Brighton, 1982), p. xii. 41 I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1936; repr., 1965), p. 100.

Introduction

11

which to trick out the rational armatures of their poems. Aversion to metaphor was indeed an aspect of the soi-disant rationalism of Restoration and eighteenth-century culture, but as Paul Fussell pointed out getting on for half a century ago, while ‘the Royal Society. . . tried to purge descriptive and expository language of Wgure’, ‘seeking is one thing, succeeding another’.42 Augustan poets occasionally adopted the anti-metaphorical idiom in their public pronouncements, but their practice tells a diVerent story. To take an example closely germane in the present circumstances: replying to the French Homerist Anne Dacier, who had gone into ‘combate’, as she put it, with ‘two or three Similes’ in the Preface to his Iliad, Pope claimed that ‘to combate a Simile is no more than to Wght with a shadow, since a Simile is no better than the shadow of an Argument’,43 but that claim is itself underwritten by a simile; one, moreover, which indicates the centrality of Wgurative language to the processes of human reasoning (seeing through a glass darkly, how should we feel our way towards truth if not through shadows?). The best recent critical studies of Pope recognize that in his poems metaphor ‘like a shadow, proves the substance true’ (as ‘envy’ does ‘merit’ in An Essay on Criticism),44 not merely in the sense of conWrming their arguments but also, when Pope is writing at his highest pitch of inspiration, of ‘proving’ those arguments in the most thoroughly dynamic sense of that verb: trying them, testing them, and so ultimately transforming them, as changes of temperature or pressure do the physical properties of metals.45 Each of the case studies of Augustan poet-translators which make up the four chapters of this book is constructed around a metaphor which was expansively current in translation discourse during the period and which, I seek to show, had particular signiWcance for the poet under discussion: the Wguration of the translator as an exile (Chapter 1: John Denham and Henry Vaughan); the link between translating and the revelation of secrets (Chapter 2: Abraham Cowley); the comparison of translators to slaves (Chapter 3: Dryden); and the alignment of translation with trade (Chapter 4: Pope). But metaphoric thinking about 42 Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (Oxford, 1965), p. 139. 43 ‘Postscript’ to the Homer; TE vii. 393. 44 An Essay on Criticism (1711), l. 467. 45 See, for instance, Felicity Rosslyn, ‘ ‘‘Dipt in the rainbow’’: Pope on Women’, in The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 51–62, and Pat Rogers, ‘A Drama of Mixed Feelings: The Epistle to Arbuthnot’, in Essays on Pope (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 93–7.

12


translation in Augustan culture is typically pluralistic (as all metaphorical thought is inclined to be); accordingly, discussion of these primary metaphors naturally ramiWes to encompass subsidiary ones with which they interfused for the poets at issue, including: translator as child (Vaughan, Pope); translator as agent of divine judgement (Vaughan) or victim of predestination (Dryden); translation as political loyalty (Denham), personal friendship (Cowley, Pope), or sexual congress (Dryden); translation as transcendence (Vaughan, Cowley, Dryden); translation as horticulture (Cowley, Pope); and translation as metamorphosis (Dryden). Finally, I extend the sense of ‘metaphor’ to cover the various forms of association, whether assimilative or contrastive, which the subjects of my case studies discerned between translation and other poetic modes: funeral elegy (Denham, Vaughan); the essay (Cowley); satire (Dryden, Pope). One or two of these metaphors are well nigh exclusive to the poet who uses them, and owe their interest to their idiosyncrasy: for example, the apocalyptic vision of the translator which informs Vaughan’s rendering of ‘The Tenth Satire of Juvenal’ (1646). Most, though, and certainly those which provide the principal points of reference in my Wve case studies, are what is called, in the inXuential schematization of the ‘cognitive approach’ developed by a trio of contemporary American philosophers of language, George LakoV, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner, ‘basic conceptual metaphors’.46 Such metaphors, they argue, help structure thought within particular cultures but without coercing it into uniformity; their longevity and power are functions of the room for manoeuvre, potential for creative variation on the part of individual language users, inherent in them. Thus, in the case of ‘Life is a Journey’, the ‘knowledge’ which the metaphor invokes ‘has a skeletal structure rich enough to distinguish journeys from other kinds of activities, but not so rich as to rule out any particular kind of journey’; the metaphor therefore ‘permits not just a single simpleminded conceptualisation of life but rather a rich and varied one. Because our knowledge of journeys includes options for types of journeys, the metaphorical understanding of life in terms of a journey includes options for a corresponding variety of understandings of life.’47 Too much existing discussion of ‘the metaphorics of translation’, particularly within the domain of ‘Translation 46 George LakoV and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980); George LakoV and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago, 1989). 47 LakoV and Turner, More than Cool Reason, 61.

Introduction

13

Studies’, treats metaphors as ‘simpleminded conceptualisations’.48 The central contention of this book is that the Wve greatest Augustan theorists and practitioners of the translator’s art availed themselves to the full of the options for variety permitted by their culture’s ‘conceptual metaphors’ for translation—between the child as an emblem of powerlessness in the world and otherworldly power (Vaughan), for instance, or the slave as a Wgure of shameful dependency and of shameless licence (Dryden), or trade as acquisitive self-interest and as charitable cooperation (Pope)—and were thereby brought to develop newly ‘rich and varied’ understandings of ‘the poet’s life’. This happened in the interplay between their theorizing about translation and practice of it. The precise form such interplay takes is particular to each poet, but in every case it provides the point of entry for my discussions; poet-translators from whose work it is absent or in respect of whom evidence of its presence is lacking are innately unsuited to the style of inquiry pursued in this book. In practice, fortunately, only one who would otherwise fall within my remit has had to be excluded on these grounds: Sir Richard Fanshawe, whose most achieved renderings can stand comparison with those of Denham and Vaughan, if not Cowley, Dryden, or Pope, but whose disinclination to reXect on his own poetic practices disqualiWes him from extended treatment in these pages (he has a walk-on part in my accounts of his political and imaginative confre`res Denham and Cowley in Chapters 1 and 2). Conversely, it is because Dryden is so pre-eminent among Augustan translators both in the domains of theory and practice, and because the interplay between the two over the course of his singularly long and varied translation career is so subtle and sustained, that the chapter devoted to him is written at double length. In Dryden’s work as a translator, forms of that interplay which occur more isolatedly or intermittently in the cases of Denham, Vaughan, Cowley, and Pope become systematic and attain their highest pitch of intensity: notably, the twin tendencies to inXect critical metaphors for translation in response to the temper and concerns of the poet being translated, and to highlight areas or aspects of the 48 In addition to the case of ‘ethnocentric’ or ‘imperialist’ metaphors, mentioned above, there is that of gendered metaphors: Lori Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, in Rethinking Translation, ed. Venuti, 57–74, for instance, claims that a ‘distinction between writing and translating—marking, that is, the one to be original and ‘‘masculine’’, the other to be derivative and ‘‘feminine’’ ’ obtains in translation discourse from the seventeenth century to the twentieth (the essay has subsequently been canonized in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (2000), doubtless widely used as a textbook in ‘Translation Studies’ modules here and in America).

14


poems being translated which have a potential reXexive pertinence to the situation of the translator built into them. Such reXexiveness is not always plainly apparent; it sometimes has to be teased out. It may be therefore that not all the instances I describe will avoid seeming to some readers to be in the eye of the beholder. But there are three reasons why an increased incidence of self-referentiality is inherently probable in Augustan poetic translations from the classics. First, because the dominant Wgurations of the translator in Augustan discourse positively invited comparison with the deWning concerns of the poets of ancient Greece and Rome: few educated seventeenth-century readers encountering Denham’s suggestion that literalist translators are aZicted with ‘want of . . . voice’ (to cite an instance explored in Chapter 1) would have needed reminding how central the predicament of voicelessness is to Ovid’s explorations of suVering in the Metamorphoses or his exploration of his own exilic suVerings in the Tristia. Secondly, because translating naturally promotes self-consciousness: however involved a translator becomes with his original, he remains more external to it, and correspondingly more visible to himself, than he would be if engaged upon an ‘original’ composition. But it is the third reason which has the most bearing on my particular project: namely, that for the English Augustans who translated them the classics of Greek and Latin poetry were, in a signiWcant measure, poems about ‘the poet’s life’. In Augustan poetic culture consideration of the various ethical matters subsumed under that rubric was conducted almost entirely in terms established by the poets of Augustan Rome (the bible played a role too, of course, as we shall see). When Cowley and Dryden translated Horace’s poems of rural retirement (to take a case considered in Chapters 2 and 3) the reXections those poems contain on the dangers of ambition were inescapably ones they applied to their own conduct as poets; and the same was true for Pope (as I show in Chapter 4) of the analysis of heroic striving contained in Homer’s Iliad. The fact that poetry written in the European vernaculars lacked this innate quality of ethical reXexiveness is what has led me to exclude translations of such poetry from this study, as well as the fact that my linguistic expertise is in ancient Greek and Latin rather than medieval Portuguese (from which Fanshawe translated Camoens’s Lusiads) or Renaissance Italian (from which Thomas Stanley translated pastoral erotica by Guarini and Tasso).49 49 On the translations produced by members of the Stanley circle during the Interregnum, see Mario Praz, ‘Stanley, Sherburne and Ayres as Translators and Imitators of

Introduction

15

The Wve case studies which follow are essays in an uncommon variant of literary biography, one which seeks to elicit the signiWcances for a given writer not of their personal relationships or the public events of their time but of a particular literary practice. In principle, any genre or mode could be studied in this way, and most orthodox literary biographies aimed at the academic market involve some thinking along these lines (few scholars have written the life of Shakespeare, for instance, without wondering how his early years as a poet relate to his subsequent career as a dramatist, or Victorian scholars the life of Thomas Hardy without asking what it meant for him to turn from novels to lyric poetry in his Wnal years). But translation as it was conceived during the Augustan period especially lends itself to this style of analysis. An innately controversial activity, its specialized and extreme moral character made it a natural medium of self-examination for the poets who practised it. It is no accident that Denham, Vaughan, Cowley, Dryden, and Pope all took up translating at moments of crisis or transformation in their lives: when they were in dire straits or at a fork in the road. My primary concern in this book is to uncover the part translation played in posing and resolving these personal dilemmas. But the stories told here also form part of a larger cultural narrative. Claims for the singular signiWcance of particular historical periods as ‘transitional’ are easily exaggerated: all periods of history are periods of transition in one sense or another. It is, however, with good reason that the Augustan age has been so often pinpointed as crucial to the transition from early-modern to modern constructions of the poet’s life: the waning of the high Renaissance model of the poet as counsellor of kings, and the emergence of an enlightenment understanding of the poet as a professionalized individual.50 With these larger cultural tendencies and developments Wgurations of the translator particularly intersected. Translating changed the direction of the lives of Wve of the major poets of the Augustan age, and in doing so helped shape the future of the poet’s life. Italian, Spanish and French Poets’, Modern Language Review, 20 (1925), 280–94, and most recently Stella P. Revard, ‘Thomas Stanley and ‘‘A Register of Friends’’ ’, in Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, MO, 2000), pp. 148–72. 50 See in particular Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740 (Oxford, 1997).


chapter 1 Wanting Voices

Anonymous portrait of John Denham (c.1661)

I

John Denham: ‘A nameless Thing’

In 1648 John Denham told Richard Fanshawe: Such is our Pride, our Folly, or our Fate That few but such as cannot write, Translate. But what in them is want of Art, or voice, In thee is either Modesty or Choice.1

Actually, as Denham later reported when dedicating his collected Poems and Translations (1668) to Charles II, the poem which begins with these lines, ‘To Sir Richard Fanshaw upon his Translation of Pastor Fido’, though Wrst published with the work it commends, was composed in 1643 or 1644. ‘Two or three years’ later while Charles I was under house arrest at Caversham in the summer of 1647, he came across the verses and told Denham he ‘liked them well’.2 What particularly pleased the king perhaps was Denham’s aristocratic disdain for those unblueblooded hacks who, lacking the ‘voice’ or individuated selfhood of the authentic writer, resorted to borrowing someone else’s in order to make themselves heard in the increasingly—and regrettably from Denham’s point of view and Charles’s—democratized ‘public sphere’ of the English polity.3 Denham may have had in mind, for instance, Thomas May, later immortalized by Marvell as a ‘gazette writer’ who vented his spleen at being passed over for the oYce of Poet Laureate when it fell vacant on the death of Ben Jonson by translating Lucan, the doyen of classical republican poets.4 Whatever their original target, though, Denham’s lines acquired between the time he discussed them with the king and their appearance in print a new and unwelcome 1 ‘To Sir Richard Fanshaw’, ll. 1–4. 2 B 59. 3 For the application of this term, derived from the work of the sociologist Jurgen Habermas, to the literary and political culture of England in the Civil War period, see in particular David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 93–139. 4 ‘Tom May’s Death’, ll. 55–60; in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (Harlow, 2003).

20


pertinence to his own situation. For, in the summer of 1648, a few months after Fanshawe’s translation of Il Pastor Fido was published, Denham’s role as factor for encrypted royalist correspondence in London was discovered by parliament, and he was forced to Xee across the Channel to join the Prince of Wales in exile at The Hague. The ‘association between exile and speechlessness’5 ran deep in early-modern English culture; inaugurated by Ovid’s self-presentation in his exile poetry as ‘lost for words’ (‘verba mihi desunt’) and having ‘unlearned the power of speech’ (‘dedicique loqui’),6 it recurs throughout the work of the Elizabethan poets and dramatists who witnessed the exoduses of their Catholic and Puritan countrymen, and was a particular obsession for Shakespeare whose Mowbray departs into exile at the beginning of Richard II with a sustained meditation on its ‘linguistic consequences’:7 The language I have learnt these forty years, My native English, now I must forgo, And now my tongue’s use is to me no more Than an unstringed viol or harp, Or like a cunning instrument cased up, Or, being open, put into his hands That knows no touch to tune the harmony. Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue, Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips, And dull unfeeling barren ignorance Is made my jailer to attend on me.8

Now Denham’s tongue too was ‘unstringed’.9 An outcast from his native land, his property forfeit, his stake in the public life of the nation cancelled, he was prey to the condition of disenfranchisement he had scorned May and his ilk for seeking to rectify by translating: ‘want of voice’. During the period of his exile, Denham published just two works: a revised edition of his loco-descriptive political allegory Cooper’s Hill (1655) and The Destruction of Troy (1656), a translation of the Wrst half 5 Jane Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 68. 6 Epistulae ex Ponto, III vii. 1; Tristia, III xiv. 46. 7 Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, 66–71 reads the speech suggestively against the background of contemporary constructions of exile and debates about monolingualism and multilingualism. 8 Richard II, I. iii. 153–63. 9 For the persistence of an emphasis on linguistic loss within mid-century accounts of exile, see Christopher D’Addario, Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 4–6.

Wanting Voices: Denham

21

of Book II of the Aeneid,10 which also originated in earlier work, the manuscript rendering of Books II to VI copied out in 1636 into Lucy Hutchinson’s commonplace book.11 He was far from alone among exiled royalists in turning translator in his speechlessness; in fact, the wave of expatriations that followed the defeat of the king’s party in the Civil War may be said to have played a key role in instigating what is now generally recognized as the golden age of poetic translation in English culture. The Wrst poets to preach and practise the Augustan doctrine of free translation were to a man (at this stage, they were all men) aZicted, in some measure, with exilic want of voice. Fanshawe himself worked on the translations from Horace he had begun in his youth and his version of Il Pastor Fido as he traipsed around the Channel Islands with the Prince of Wales’s entourage in 1646–7, while his version of Camoens’s Lusiads dates from the months he spent in 1653 living in retirement under licence at Tankersley Park near SheYeld.12 Another case in point I shall consider at length in the second section of this chapter: Henry Vaughan, who translated Juvenal’s tenth satire and selections from Ovid’s exile poetry between 1647 and 1651 after having been forced to return from cosmopolitan London to lick his warwounds in darkest Breconshire, his native county but by this time a stronghold of radical protestantism. There is Cowley too, the subject of Chapter 2, who produced his ‘libertine’ renderings of Pindar on Jersey in 1651 where he was performing one of his many clandestine services to the exiled court of Henrietta Maria, and his later renderings of Virgil, Horace, and Martial after he had gone into voluntary retirement, a kind of ‘self-exile’, at the Restoration. To these celebrated names a number of 10 The following discussion is limited to this translation; others are included in Denham’s Poems and Translations (1668), notably ‘The Passion of Dido for Aeneas’ and ‘Sarpedon’s Speech to Glaucus’ from Iliad XII. Of these the latter is sometimes treated as an Interregnum production, as, for instance, implicitly by Peter Davidson who includes it among the ‘Poems of War and Revolution’ in his Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625–1660 (Oxford, 1998), though it was in fact Wrst printed in 1668 and no earlier manuscript version survives; and while the former doubtless originated in Denham’s earlier manuscript version of Aeneid II–VI, it is substantially revised and no Wrm evidence exists as to when the revision was undertaken. Denham’s editor suggests 1653, but the only support for this claim is Aubrey’s remark that while staying with the Duke of Pembroke at Wilton the poet ‘translated’ a ‘booke of Virgil’s Aeneis and also burlesqu’t it’, a remark most safely understood in relation to The Destruction of Troy, as it generally has been by Aubrey’s editors (e.g. Brief Lives, ed. John Buchanan Brown (Harmondsworth, 2000), p. 107). 11 Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD.HU.1. 12 The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe, ed. Peter Davidson, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1997), i. xiii, xxi–ii.

22


lesser ones may be added, three of whom will make Xeeting appearances over the course of this book: Mildmay Fane, Edward Sherburne, and Thomas Stanley. The existence of an aYnity between translation and exile within the culture of mid-century royalism has been common scholarly knowledge for some time. Generally, it has been understood as a response to censorship. In Censorship and Interpretation (1984), Annabel Patterson posited a relation between Cowley’s work encoding and decoding Henrietta Maria’s correspondence with the king and his translations of Pindar. Writing in the voice of an ancient predecessor rather than his own enabled Cowley, she contended, to comment covertly on the state of his nation when as a proscribed poet he was no longer able to do so directly: the obliquities of the translations, referrable in the Wrst instance to the reputed mysteriousness of Pindaric poetics, also functioned as a necessary means of evading a parliamentary ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’.13 It would be diYcult to overstate the inXuence of this critical paradigm on subsequent research into classical translation in seventeenth-century England. Generalizing Patterson’s thesis, Lois Potter in her study of the royalist literary underground Secret Rites and Secret Writing (1989) added translation to the roster of modes of encrypted discourse exploited by supporters of the king during the Interregnum;14 after which uncovering illicit but deniable political implications between the lines of royalist versions of the classics rapidly developed into a thriving critical industry. Indeed, what might be termed the cryptographic poetics of translation soon became the dominant explanation of the mode’s appeal not just for royalists exiled in the Interregnum but for poets exiled in more or less Wgurative senses throughout the Augustan age, notably the two Roman Catholic ‘internal emigre´s’ who were its greatest translators: Dryden and Pope.15

13 Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison, WI, 1984), pp. 144–57. 14 Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 52–7. 15 The Wrst commentator to read Dryden’s translations in this way was Steven Zwicker, in Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry (Princeton, 1984), chs. 5 and 6; discussion of Pope’s translations as covertly oppositional has centred particularly on the ‘politically suggestive’ extracts he chose to begin his Homeric career, in particular ‘The Episode of Sarpedon’, for which see Julian Ferraro, ‘Political Discourse in Alexander Pope’s Episode of Sarpedon: Variations on the Theme of Kingship’, Modern Language Review, 88 (1993), 15–25 and latterly Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth (Oxford, 1996), pp. 59–63.


23

Some successful readings of individual translations, bringing to light their ideological dimensions, have been produced using this approach. But it can have a disintegrating eVect on the works to which it is applied, leading to over-concentration on isolated cases of topicality at the expense of more sustained imaginative tendencies. In the next chapter, I return to Patterson’s original thesis about Cowley, and seek to show that the relevance of ‘secrecy’ to his translations was not narrowly sectarian but more expansively ethical, encompassing the entire spectrum of moral concerns that was compacted into early-modern usage of the noun and its cognates. My aim in this chapter is to broaden and deepen our understanding of the association between the condition of exile and the practice of translation. To broaden it by exploring not an association, singular, but associations, plural: of the two Wgures I shall be considering—Denham and Vaughan—the Wrst was exiled in a variety of diVerent senses over the course of the Interregnum and the second in a sharply paradoxical one. And to deepen it by showing that in their practice of translation, Denham and Vaughan did not seek simply to evade the penalties of exile but rather came to inhabit it as it was complexly conceptualized in early-modern literature and thought: as a state compounded of losses and gains. In particular, I am going to suggest, each found in his capacity as a translator a use for exilic speechlessness. ‘At its best translation’, according to Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule, ‘will always have answered the real need for another voice’;16 the two case studies which follow are of poets in whom it answered a need for want of voice. No one better illustrates the dangers of calibrating translation against a prematurely uniWed conception of exile than John Denham. It was in 1653 that he undertook the bulk of the work of revising a portion of his manuscript rendering of Book II of the Aeneid into the form it would later take as The Destruction of Troy. He spent that year on the Earl of Pembroke’s estate at Wilton. Between 1648 and 1653 Denham had been living hand-to-mouth as an itinerant member of the royalist diaspora on the continent; lack of money eventually compelled him to return to England to compound for his estate, and the Committee on Compounding committed him into Pembroke’s care. Whether or not the poet entirely desisted from crypto-royalist activity during his stay at 16 The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation, ed. Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule (Oxford, 1995), xliv.

24


Wilton remains uncertain: ‘although . . . his loyalty [to the crown] was never called in question by his important contemporaries’, his modern biographer nervously observes, ‘a reader of the documents surviving from this time cannot escape the suspicion that Denham, like many another impoverished or dispirited Royalist, at least ‘‘co-operated’’ with the Cromwellian authorities during the next several years’.17 But some elements in the exiled royalist community believed his accommodation with the republic was rather more thoroughgoing than even those queasy inverted commas imply: ‘the state’s poet’, he was being called in Paris at about this time.18 By 1655, though, he was in London and apparently embroiled in royalist conspiracy; an order was issued on 9 June banishing him from the capital. Then again, unlike his fellow conspirators he was permitted to choose the location of his banishment, in an apparent sign that he continued to enjoy ‘favouritism’ from some organs of the republic.19 Finally, shortly after The Destruction of Troy was published in February 1656, Denham was once again an exile in the full sense of the word, turning up Wrst in October of that year in Paris and then in June 1657 in the entourage of the Duke of Buckingham at Brussels. No account is taken of this complicated personal history of exile in the inXuential essay connecting Denham’s work as a translator with his royalist experience of defeat published by Lawrence Venuti: ‘The Destruction of Troy: Translation and Royalist Cultural Politics in the Interregnum’.20 Applying the cryptographic template, Venuti argues that many of the features of the translation, in particular Denham’s handling of the death of Priam, were intended tacitly to provide succour for ‘the displaced royalist segment of the Caroline aristocracy’.21 But was Denham in fact ‘displaced’ when he was working on The Destruction of Troy? The status he enjoyed on the Earl of Pembroke’s estate at Wilton is not easy to pin down: in theory, he was under house arrest or at least on probation, but in practice appears to have been ‘kindly entertayned’,22 as another royalist translator living there at the time, 17 Brendan O’Hehir, Harmony from Discords: The Life of John Denham (Berkeley, CA, 1968), p. 99. 18 Ibid., 100, explaining that the phrase meant ‘poet laureate of the Commonwealth, the state being the term that since 1649 had replaced in antimonarchist circles the realm or the kingdom.’ 19 Ibid. 114. 20 Lawrence Venuti, ‘The Destruction of Troy: Translation and Royalist Cultural Politics in the Interregnum’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 23 (1993), 197–219. 21 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (1995), p. 57. 22 Quoted in O’Hehir, Harmony from Discords, 99.


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Christopher Wase, subsequently told Aubrey. He was something between a charity case, a guest, and a friend. What he certainly was not is an exile in any sharply literal sense of the term, and he may not even have been one Wguratively speaking. Students of his verse should particularly remember this. For it is with regard to his life as a poet that Denham’s sojourn in the home of one of the members of Cromwell’s council of state was most deWnitively not a time of alienation or deprivation: as his Edwardian editor noted with a measure of detachment in which distaste was possibly latent, he ‘had now presumably more ease and leisure than he had had for some years previously, and he evidently cultivated it in a more extensive writing of poetry’.23 If exile was, in the dominant conventional understanding, ‘a linguistically barren state’,24 Denham while he was on Pembroke’s estate ‘seems to have occupied himself chieXy with literature, and his stay at Wilton was possibly one of the most fruitful periods of his career’.25 The general pertinence of the story of The Destruction of Troy to the subject of exile is readily apparent. For early-modern readers, it was the archetypal narrative of displacement, outranking even Ovid’s exile poetry.26 But it was also particularly germane to Denham’s ambiguously exilic status in 1653. In a secular analogue of the eVect his more hotly protestant compatriots reported the bible having on their hearts, Virgil’s narrative of the sack of Troy was adapted to probe whatever guilty conscience Denham had over the contrast between his past as an exile in the purest sense, wandering penniless across Europe with his royal master, and his present as a notionally displaced royalist at his ‘ease and leisure’ on the country estate of one of the pillars of the Cromwellian regime. Consider, to begin with, the Wgure of Sinon. What enables him to persuade the Trojans to take the wooden horse into their city is his lethally accurate impersonation of an exile. For a republican reader of Virgil, this deception would doubtless bring to mind the subterfuge returned royalists like Denham were regularly suspected of: conspiring to bring down the Xedgling republic after having compounded for their estates and purportedly gone into retirement. But for a royalist in

23 B 15. 24 Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile, 56. 25 O’Hehir, Harmony from Discords, 99. 26 Ovid’s own mind naturally goes back to the Virgilian scene when describing his last night at Rome in Tristia I iii; reasons why Ovid’s exile poetry was comparatively slighted by seventeenth-century readers are considered in the next section of this chapter, at pp. 58–60.


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Denham’s position it might raise a more personally discomWting possibility: that his own exilic credentials were as forged as Sinon’s; that, having ‘ ‘‘co-operated’’ ’ with the Cromwellian regime, he was an exile from unkinged England (as Sinon is from Greece) only in name. There are signs Denham was aware of this potential reverberation, and took steps to silence it. Certainly, the speech in which Sinon assumes his exilic persona is among those parts of the translation Denham most heavily revised, and some of the revisions look like attempts to dissociate himself from Sinon. Whereas in the manuscript, for instance, Sinon had thrown himself on the mercy of the Trojans with the words ‘Yet shall I fall a sacriWce more greate j To a foes revenge then to a friends deceit’,27 in the printed text he claims instead: ‘Incensed Troy a wretched Captive seeks j To sacriWce, a Fugitive, the Greeks’.28 As has been well documented, translators in this period commonly removed the proper names from their originals in order to create space for topical under-meanings to emerge (‘king’, rather than ‘Priam’, more readily signals ‘Charles I’); here Denham reverses the technique, insulating himself against contamination by Sinon’s mendacity. His most striking revision, however, produces the opposite eVect, suggesting a desire somewhere in Denham to wallow in the shame of his resemblance to Sinon. As Sinon’s exilic rhetoric rises to its crescendo, Denham upgrades the rather plain ‘though my harder fortunes may disgrace j And make me poore, they cannot make me base’29 to the more nobly philosophic ‘though my outward state, misfortune hath j Deprest thus low, it cannot reach my Faith’.30 That ‘Faith’ (of which I shall have more to say later) is a bitter travesty (Sinon is utterly dishonest), but what is being travestied in Denham’s English is not simple ‘honesty’ (as in Virgil) but ‘loyalty’ in a larger quasisacral sense, the true royalist’s cardinal virtue. If Sinon stirred up Denham’s half-suppressed qualms about the lessening visibility of his commitment to the royalist cause, the central Wgure in The Destruction of Troy, Aeneas, would seem to have oVered him a means of quieting or at least deXecting them. Because, famously, the translation stops at the moment of Priam’s death, Denham’s Aeneas is not the prototypical Roman hero who leaves Troy at the end of Book II with his father, Anchises, on his shoulders: quintessential embodiment of pietas, of national identity sustained even in the crisis of exile. Rather, 27 28 29 30

Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD.HU.1, p. 7. The Destruction of Troy, ll. 69–70. Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD.HU.1, p. 7. The Destruction of Troy, ll. 77–8.


27

he is an atavistic quasi-Achillean Wgure who, ignoring the admonition of Hector’s ghost to abandon Troy, throws himself vengefully and despairingly into the doomed Wght against the invading Greeks. Probably Denham did not continue to the point of Aeneas’s departure from Troy because to do so in 1656 might have implied conWdence in the survival not of the Stuart dynasty but of the Protectorate: Cromwell’s assumption of personal power in the spring of 1653 had instigated a literary trend for comparisons between him and Aeneas/Augustus, what David Norbrook has termed ‘Protectoral Augustanism’,31 a trend which reached its apogee in the months immediately leading up to the publication of The Destruction of Troy, in Edmund Waller’s A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector (1655). But the Achillean Aeneas also powerfully appealed to Denham. A throwback to what Virgil represents as a primitive model of heroism, he could by virtue of his simplicity help assuage the anxieties provoked in Denham by his complicated career of exile. The crude magniWcence of the furor which drives Aeneas at this early stage of his development permitted Denham to indulge a fantasy of disambiguated political identity at a time when allegiances—chief among them his own—were increasingly obfuscated by pragmatism and subterfuge. Certainly, Denham’s eager responsiveness to that furor produces some of the best moments in The Destruction of Troy; as, for instance, when Aeneas rouses his few comrades in arms to make a last stand: Are you resolv’d to follow one who dares Tempt all extreams? The state of Our aVairs You see: The Gods have left us, by whose aid Our Empire stood; nor can the Xame be staid: Then let us fall amidst our Foes; this one Relief the vanquisht have, to hope for none.32

The Wrst couplet is rashly audacious after the manner of Marlowe (Virgil’s Aeneas mentions only one ‘extream’) and the rest achieve a plainness in which stony despair and Xinty daring are convincingly compacted: the static, near-identical rhymes (‘aid’ j ‘staid’; ‘one’ j ‘none’), inartistic under diVerent circumstances, are conducive here, as is the starkly stipulative last line. A further revision three couplets later completes the eVect: ‘Darkness our Guide, Despair our Leader was’,33 31 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, ch. 7: ‘King Oliver? Protectoral Augustanism and its critics, 1653–1658’. 32 The Destruction of Troy, ll. 337–42. 33 Ibid., l. 348.

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for Virgil’s ‘nox atra cava circumvolat umbra’ [‘black night hovers around with its sheltering shade’],34 left untranslated in the manuscript. The precise rhetorical patterning of that line looks ahead to Dryden,35 but in fact comparison with Dryden’s version of this passage points up by contrast the Achillean power of Denham’s conception of Aeneas: The passive Gods behold the Greeks deWle Their Temples, and abandon to the Spoil Their own Abodes: we, feeble few, conspire To save a sinking town, involv’d in Fire. Then let us fall, but fall amidst our Foes, Despair of life, the Means of living shows.36

This makes clear, as Denham does not, that Aeneas’s despair entails theological error: ‘the passive Gods’ are those of the Epicurean cosmology later espoused by Dido but which Aeneas’s own destined progress through the poem countermands. However, this clariWcation of the place occupied by the episode within the larger conceptual framework of the Aeneid comes at the price of abstracting Aeneas’s despair, mitigating its experiential force. The neutering eVect is clinched in Dryden’s Wnal line which, muZed into paradox and transferring the ultimate emphasis from the desire for death on to the possibility of survival, shows up poorly against Denham’s more literal rendering of Aeneas’s ‘una salus victis nullam sperare salutem’.37 In the end, though, Aeneas was not a Wgure with whom Denham could wholeheartedly identify either; like Sinon, he broached the problematic aspects of Denham’s quasi-exilic situation at Wilton. He does, after all, eventually give up his glorious assault on the Greeks. In Virgil it is Aeneas himself (not the narrator) who is recounting the fall of Troy; mindful that Dido and the rest of his Carthaginian audience might equate his retirement from the fray with surrender, he pre-empts the charge with a formal profession of his commitment to a code of unreconstructed heroism. Plainly, this was a fraught moment for Denham, himself lately retired from active royalist service, and when revising Aeneas’s speech he introduced a note of nervous over-insistence. ‘My Countreys funeral Xame j And Troys 34 Aeneid ii. 360. 35 For further instances of Denham’s improved couplet technique in the printed as against the manuscript versions of his Virgil, see Robin Sowerby, The Augustan Art of Poetry (Oxford, 2006), pp. 97–100. 36 ‘The Second Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 471–6. 37 Aeneid ii. 354.


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cold ashes I attest, and call j To witness for my self ’ that ‘No Foes, no Death, nor Danger I declined’, Denham’s Aeneas declares in both the manuscript and printed translations, but whereas in 1636 he concluded by protesting: ‘And had fate pleased, deserved noe lesse to Wnd j My death’38 (i.e. than those of his compatriots who died Wghting the Greeks), in 1656 he concluded by protesting too much: ‘Did, and deserv’d no less, my Fate to Wnd.’39 The substitution of the activist ‘Did’ for the more patient ‘And had fate pleased’ was achieved at some cost to the Xuency of the couplet, since ‘declin’d j Did’ jars, both phonetically and syntactically. As a rule, Denham’s revisions improve the metrical shape of his verse, but the minor deformation here is suggestively inward with Aeneas’s ‘survivor guilt’ at having escaped with his life from the wreck of Troy. Would Denham have produced it had he not himself ‘retired’ from Wghting for the king, Wrst into exile and then into a series of increasingly attenuated modes of opposition to the parliamentary invaders who had destroyed his nation? So far I have been considering the relations between Denham’s convoluted personal history of exile and the content of The Destruction of Troy. But my intention in this book, as outlined in the introduction, is to explore the signiWcances of translation as a distinctive mode of imaginative conduct. Accordingly, I turn now from what translating Virgil’s account of the destruction of Troy meant to the ‘exiled’ Denham to what translation itself meant to him. Venuti has called Denham’s ‘discursive strategy’ as a translator ‘Xuency’, and characterized it as a ‘bid to restore aristocratic culture to its dominant position’ in England. ‘Fluency’ served this end in two ways: Wrst, because in aiming to translate Virgil into English which Xows ‘naturally and easily’ Denham was invoking an aesthetic standard already inscribed with the interests of the courtly e´lite; and secondly, because through this ‘eVect’ of naturalness Denham naturalized the sectarian dimension of his reading of Virgil, its ‘subtle allusions to English settings and institutions, strengthening the historical analogy between the fall of Troy and the defeat of the royalist party’.40 Yet whether The Destruction of Troy actually is a free translation is open to question. In the preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680), having quoted Denham’s lines to Fanshawe advocating freedom, Dryden observed that he ‘advis’d more Liberty than he took himself ’.41 38 39 40 41

Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD.HU.1, p. 19. The Destruction of Troy, ll. 420–1. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 60–1. CE i. 117.

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Statistics bear out that claim.42 What in Virgil occupies 558 lines Denham covers in 549; Dryden himself, for comparison, would later take 760. This general impression is conWrmed by the evidence of particular lines; as we have already seen, even some of the best moments in The Destruction of Troy arise when Denham is translating more or less word for word. For Denham, then, ‘the translator’s invisibility’ (to adopt Venuti’s phrase) may have been something more than an illusion created through ‘Xuency’ to mask the operations of ideology. His desire to eVace himself through translation may have had real substance. In the remainder of this discussion I relate that desire to his ambiguous situation at Wilton. Far from launching in The Destruction of Troy a smoothly purposive campaign to restore the cultural dominance of the Caroline aristocracy, Denham struggled to use his role as a translator, I shall argue, to extricate himself from the dilemmas of his exilic identity. In so far as he was successful, it was because he found in translation not a way out of the wilderness of exile for royalism in the future, but a way he could avoid feeling at home in the republican present. A way to make the transition to considering Denham’s conduct as a translator is indicated by a remark of Sinon’s which I quoted earlier, suggesting Denham felt a particular aYnity for it. For when Sinon says to the Trojans ‘though my outward state, misfortune hath j Deprest thus low, it cannot reach my Faith’, his profession culminates in a term integral not only to Cavalier ideology but also to contemporary critical discourse about translation. ‘Faith’ had for some time been underwriting claims that translation was an inherently royalist endeavour; and Sinon’s words broach the special pertinence of such claims to the situation of exiled royalists during the Interregnum. Fidelity in translation lines up with Stoical imperviousness to the vicissitudes of ‘misfortune’; even in the depths of the ‘Cavalier winter’ keepers of the royalist faith translate faithfully. Yet Denham was on record as favouring free translation, embracing the necessity of change if culture is to be perpetuated across time. That he suspected this position might appear incompatible with unbending loyalism is intimated by his decision to steer clear of cognates of ‘faith’ in ‘To Sir Richard Fanshawe’, even though his commendation of Fanshawe for avoiding the ‘servile 42 Thus, O’Hehir, Harmony from Discords, 107–8: ‘in all stages of his translation [i.e. both the manuscript and printed versions] Denham always comes quite close—at some cost, no doubt—to equalling the number of lines of his original’.


31

path . . . j Of tracing word by word, and line by line’ depends on Horace’s famous dictum ‘Nec verbo verbum curabis reddere Wdus j Interpres’: ‘nor word for word too faithfully translate’, as the Earl of Roscommon would later translate it.43 Already in 1643 or 1644, Denham was reluctant to countenance the idea that one could be too faithful. But relegating faithfulness as a translatorial ideal became more controversial during the Interregnum. Witness a contemporary translation praise-poem, largely unknown nowadays by comparison with Denham’s commendation of Fanshawe but which merits consideration alongside it, where relations between royalism and translation are concerned since it featured in a volume central to the modelling of Cavalier literary identity in the 1650s:44 Humphrey Moseley’s edition of William Cartwright’s Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with other Poems (1651). William Cartwright’s ‘Upon the Translation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseide by Sir Francis Kinaston’ was Wrst published, together with the translation it commended, in 1639. Kynaston died in 1642 and Cartwright himself in 1643. As reprinted in 1651, therefore, the poem naturally took on fresh resonance, becoming subsumed into the project of royalist memorialism which Moseley’s volume as a whole was designed to further. Viewed in this light, Cartwright’s commendation of Kynaston’s Wdelity as a translator takes on polemical deWnition: Tis to your happy cares we ow, that we Read Chaucer now without a Dictionary; Whose Faithfull Quill such constant light aVords That we now read his Thoughts, who read his Words45

Chaucer, who was on the verge of becoming obsolete because his fourteenth-century English was no longer intelligible to most of his seventeenth-century compatriots, has been rescued from oblivion by Kynaston’s ‘Faithfull Quill’. The depredations of historical change have been arrested by an exemplary feat of imaginative loyalty; in Cartwright’s term, a term which powerfully synthesized conceptions of royalist virtue, Kynaston is ‘constant’. Monumentally so; for he remedied Chaucer’s 43 Dryden records this translation in the preface to Ovid’s Epistles immediately before quoting from Denham’s verses to Fanshawe; CE i. 116. 44 Warren Chernaik, ‘Books as Memorials: The Politics of Consolation’, The Yearbook of English Studies (1991), 207–17. 45 ‘Upon the Translation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseide by Sir Francis Kinaston’, ll. 7–8; in Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with other Poems by Mr William Cartwright (1651), sig. Q7v .

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obsolescence not (as Dryden later would) by translating him into modern English but by translating him into Latin. He put his honoured forefather out of the power of change by putting his works into a language beyond changing; snatched him from the jaws of death by making him speak in a dead tongue. This sets a forbiddingly absolute standard of immovable ‘faith’ for the translator; and its political implications, already suggested by Cartwright’s terms of praise, are further underscored by a circumstantial consideration so fundamental to his poem that he nowhere troubles to make it explicit but of which no royalist reader in 1651 would have needed reminding: the work of Chaucer’s which Kynaston had translated was ‘Troilus and Criseide’, an archetypal narrative of faithlessness. Given the special prestige of Moseley’s Cartwright volume in royalist circles and Denham’s own particular investment in contemporary critical debate about translating poetry, it is highly likely he came across this poem at some point after his return to England in 1653. If so, he surely would have been somewhat unnerved to Wnd a style of translatorial conduct so antithetical to the one he had himself publicly espoused being clinchingly aligned with the prime imperatives for a royalist exile of ‘faith’ and ‘constancy’. Perhaps he reXected that Cartwright’s image of Kynaston as a paragon of Wdelity was a luxury aVordable in the context of poetic eulogy but not in the murky climate of subterfuge and surveillance returning royalists were required to weather under the Protectorate. No one could be expected to wield a transparently ‘Faithfull Quill’ in the twilight world of internal exile; indeed, for those like Denham who were kept constantly under surveillance by Thurloe’s secret service, the consequences of Kynaston’s utter candour—‘we read [Chaucer’s] Thoughts, who read his Words’—might have been reason to shudder. Yet ideals are especially apt to linger in the minds of those forced to live by the codes of pragmatism; and so it proved with Denham, to judge from the preface to The Destruction of Troy. Whether as a result of reading ‘Upon the Translation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseide by Sir Francis Kinaston’ in particular or because of his more general familiarity with the royalist cultural priorities articulated in Cartwright’s poem, Denham’s commitment to free translation came under pressure from his recognition of faithfulness and constancy as literary-political virtues. Historians of translation commonly pair Denham’s preface to The Destruction of Troy with his praise poem to Fanshawe. With some reason, of course: broadly speaking, the distinction drawn in the later work between translating ‘Language into Language’ and ‘Poesie into


33

Poesie’ does indeed echo the contrast in the earlier one between preserving ‘the Ashes’ of the original and its ‘Flame’. However, the excitement, not to say bravado, which marked Denham’s Wrst proclamation of translatorial liberty is signally lacking in its successor; at times, in fact, it seems as if Denham is consciously revising his previous discussion, reining it in. Certainly, he Wgures himself as translator rather more guardedly than he had Fanshawe, and his increased circumspection may be related to his experiences as an exile in the intervening years. In particular, whereas he had congratulated Fanshawe for ‘Foording’ Guarini’s ‘current, where thou Wnd’st it low; j Let[ting] in thine own to make it rise and Xow’,46 Denham now disavows where he himself is concerned that buoyant declaration of autonomy: Neither have I any where oVered such violence to his sense, as to make it seem mine, and not his. Where my expressions are not so full as his, either our Language, or my Art were defective (but I rather suspect my self;) but where mine are fuller than his, they are but the impressions which the often reading of him, hath left upon my thoughts; so that if they are not his own Conceptions, they are at least the results of them.47

The disparity between those two passages reXects the disparity in status between Virgil and Guarini. Still, it Wnds expression in Denham’s changed handling of the lexis of property; more speciWcally, the sort of possessive pronominal phrases (‘thine own’, ‘mine, and not his’, ‘his own’) which had become acutely controversial during the Civil War, since both sides declared that they were Wghting in defence of property rights (parliamentarians those of the subject, royalists those of the king), to safeguard what was sloganistically referred to as ‘meum and tuum’.48 An undercurrent of absolutism runs through Denham’s image of Fanshawe swelling Guarini’s trickle of inspiration to a Xood; in Cooper’s Hill (1642) he had compared the determination of parliament to stop the king ‘enjoying his own’ (as the royalist cry went) to the eVorts of ‘husbandmen’ to force a river into ‘a new, or narrow course’, with catastrophic consequences: No longer then within his banks he dwells, First to a Torrent, then a Deluge swells 46 ‘To Sir Richard Fanshaw’, ll. 25–6. 47 Preface to The Destruction of Troy; B 160. 48 For the centrality of this phrase in debates about taxation and the royal prerogative in the Civil War period, see Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (Basingstoke, 1992), pp. 174–7.

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Translation and the Poet’s Life Stronger, and Wercer by restraint he roars, And knows no bound, but makes his powers his shores49

But if there had once been something invasive about Denham’s understanding of the translator’s freedom, his insistence that he has not ‘any where oVered such violence to [Virgil’s] sense, as to make it seem mine, and not his’ amounts to a recantation. Now, indeed, it is the property of the translator not the original author that is under threat: even those ‘Conceptions’ which appear at Wrst glance to be Denham’s turn out on reXection to be Virgil’s. Ultra-royalists had similarly contended, in the legal disputes over taxation and royal prerogative which led up to the Civil War, that the subject’s property originally belonged to the crown, and might be resumed by the monarch whenever suYcient need arose.50 By 1656, of course, it was parliament rather than the king doing the ‘resuming’. The ‘violence’ of expropriation Denham said he had not inXicted on Virgil he perhaps meant readers to gather had been inXicted on him and other former exiles required by parliament to compound for their estates in exchange for being allowed to return to their native land. But Denham was not simply scoring a sectarian point. Rather, translation, in bringing sharply into focus ethical and political questions about property, touched the sorest point of his circumstance as an erstwhile royalist outlaw now enjoying the largesse of a Cromwellian magnate. Had parliament in fact ‘oVered . . . violence’ to Denham in sequestrating his estate? Whether or not submission on the part of the defeated to the de facto authority of their conquerors constituted a voluntary act was a matter of some controversy in contemporary political theory; Thomas Hobbes had lately insisted in Chapter 20 of Leviathan (1651) on the freedom of such accommodations. Moreover, the particular terms meted out to Denham by the Committee for Compounding were comparatively generous. Four-Wfths of his estate was forfeit, but the remaining Wfth was held in trust for the support of Denham’s three children, to be disbursed by their guardian Colonel John Fielder, member of the Rump parliament for St Ives. And Denham himself, of course, was handed over into the custody—if that is the word—of Pembroke.51 In such circumstances, if asked what was ‘mine, and not his’, it would have been Xamboyant of Denham to answer ‘nothing’. Yet to retain property, even at one remove, in Cromwellian England, and 49 Cooper’s Hill, ll. 355–8. 50 Burgess, Politics of the Ancient Constitution, 206–7. 51 Kelliher, ‘John Denham’ (ODNB).


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certainly to take one’s ‘ease and leisure’ on the estate of one of the Protectorate’s leading dignitaries, was to have some stake in the kingless nation. Denham’s eVorts to suppress his agency as translator, to divest himself of his property in The Destruction of Troy, hint that he harboured some guilt on this score. Since to author is, in some measure, to authorize, it now behoved Denham to widen the gap he had sought to close a decade earlier when praising Fanshawe between authors and translators. Witness, further, his apology for what he has changed in Virgil’s text: his equity in the translation. It begins conventionally enough, with the familiar clothing metaphor: ‘as speech is the apparel of our thoughts, so are there certain Garbs and Modes of speaking, which vary with the times’. However, both the source and content of the classical watchword Denham goes on to cite introduce a measure of anxiety: ‘this I think Tacitus means, by that which he calls Sermonem temporis istius auribus accommodatum’ (‘speech accommodated to the ears of the time’).52 To accommodate himself to changing times in his conduct as a translator would testify to Denham’s freedom as a poet, but to do so in his political conduct might be evidence of faithless opportunism. That Denham was aware of this uncomfortable analogy is suggested by his decision to cite as authority here Tacitus, and not Horace whose insistence in the Ars Poetica that it is ‘usus, j quem penes arbitrium est et ius et norma loquendi’ (‘usage, in whose hands lies the judgement, the right and rule of speech’) more readily came to the minds of seventeenth-century English poets seeking justiWcation for policies of modernization.53 For Tacitus was, notoriously, the historian of self-protective duplicity in an age of arbitrary power,54 as Denham reminded his readers by professing uncertainty about the meaning of the phrase he quotes (‘this I think Tacitus means’). His own accommodation with the Protectorate, readers might be prompted to suppose, was as strategic as those Tacitus had described courtiers of the brutally capricious Roman emperors making in the Annals; an implication further supported by Denham’s subsequent reference to the verbal alterations through which he brought Virgil to ‘speak not only as a man of this Nation, but as a man 52 B 160. 53 Ars Poetica, 71–2; for the central role this phrase played, for instance, in Dryden’s campaign for ‘Restoration modernism’, see Paul Hammond, ‘Figures of Horace in Dryden’s Literary Criticism’, in Horace Made New: Horatian InXuences on British Writing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1993), ed. Charles Martindale and David Hopkins, pp. 127–47 (at 134–5). 54 R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Court-Centred Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c.1590–1630’, in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 21–44 (at 30–7).

36


of this age’ as ‘this disguise I have put upon him’.55 All of which serves to negate the translator’s autonomy: what he adds to his original, far from proving the authenticity of his authorial voice as Denham had once aYrmed on behalf of Fanshawe, is to be discounted as the poetic equivalent of lip-service, a sheerly expedient accommodation to unruly vicissitude. For Denham, as translator and as internal exile, what is of true consequence is that ‘faith’ be maintained in spite of such accommodation, beneath that ‘disguise’. The tangled lines of association I have been paying in between Denham’s self-images as translator and exile lead ultimately to what is by far the most celebrated part of The Destruction of Troy: namely, its ending. Denham closed the translation at the moment of Priam’s death, with a couplet which stuck in Dryden’s memory (he imported its second line wholesale into his ‘Aeneis’) and which continues to preoccupy modern commentators: On the cold earth lies th’ unregarded King, A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing.56

Since the episode of Priam’s death is one of the passages omitted from the 1636 manuscript, we cannot be certain that these striking lines are informed by Denham’s horror at the regicide, but scholars have generally assumed that they are. Liberties Denham takes in preceding lines support this assumption.57 Interestingly, however, the famous Wnal line itself is a rather literal rendering: Denham passes up the chance to linger wrathfully or tearfully over the king’s corpse, instead keeping chastely to the length and shape of Virgil’s ‘avolsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus’. The one signiWcant change is ‘thing’ for ‘corpus’: ‘king’ j ‘thing’ was a ‘favourite republican rhyme’,58 used to underscore the simple materiality of the monarch’s body.59 The political implications of Denham’s decision to end The Destruction of Troy on this note of desacralization have been much discussed, in the context of the ‘ideological tug-of-war’ over Virgil underway at this time between adherents to the traditional monarchist form of Augustanism and pioneers of the rival ‘Protectoral’ strain.60 But the literary resonances of that decision, 55 B 160. 56 The Destruction of Troy, ll. 548–9. 57 Venuti, ‘The Destruction of Troy’, 207–11. 58 David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 310. 59 For details of this emphasis in Milton’s defences of the regicide in particular, see Joad Raymond, ‘The King is a Thing’, in Milton and the Terms of Liberty, ed. Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 69–94. 60 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 311.


The death of Priam, from Dryden, The Works of Virgil (1697)

37

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its reXexive relation to Denham’s sense of self as a poet and more particularly as a translator, have gone largely unremarked.61 The opposition between the ensouled body and a sheerly material carcass was Denham’s favourite metaphorical vehicle for contrasting free with literal translation: Wrst, in the Fanshawe panegyric where ‘since nothing can beget j A vital spirit, but a vital heat’ verbal translators ‘but preserve the Ashes’ and only ‘thou the Flame’;62 but latterly and more explicitly in the best-known passage of the preface to The Destruction of Troy: ‘Poesie is of so subtile a spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput mortuum.’63 The metaphor is from alchemy: the verbal translator, incapable of transmuting his original into poetic gold, seeks to palm oV on his readers a lump of corrupt metal. Denham calls such unregenerate verse a ‘Caput mortuum’ because the dissolution of metal was commonly referred to by alchemists as ‘beheading’. But he surely had somewhere in his mind’s eye the ‘headless Carkass’ of Charles I in particular: in some contemporary alchemical manuals the metal dissolved as a necessary prelude to regeneration was referred to as ‘the king’. A few even feature images of a crowned head being lopped oV.64 For a parliamentarian writer the relevance of this alchemical motif in 1656 was clear: ‘the regicide was the Wrst step in the process of alchemical renovation and liberation’. Marvell imagines the republic as the transmutation of dissolved monarchy, it has lately been suggested, in ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’.65 But, of course, for royalists that narrative was to be resisted. Their readiest recourse was to look ahead to a future restoration at which monarchy would be regenerated in the person of the prince of Wales. Denham, though, does the opposite: ending his translation with Priam/Charles I’s death, he freezes political time at the crisis of dissolution, with the king a thing and his spirit not regenerated but just Xown, evaporated. As the verbal translator debases the ‘poesie’ of his 61 Paul Hammond passingly connects Denham’s phrase with his image of a literal translation as a ‘Caput mortuum’ when discussing Dryden’s re-use of Denham’s line, in Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (Oxford, 1999), pp. 239–40. 62 ‘To Sir Richard Fanshaw’, ll. 13–14, 23. 63 B 159. 64 Lyndy Abraham and Michael Wilding, ‘The Alchemical Republic: A Reading of ‘‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’’ ’, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. Martin Dzelzainis and Warren Chernaik (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 94–122 (I quote from 103; for ‘the king’ in alchemical terminology, see 103–9). 65 Ibid., 103.


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original to a ‘Caput mortuum’, so parliament, spilling the ‘subtile . . . spirit’ of monarchy, has reduced England to mere republican matter. A royalist exile minded to translate might regard that analogy as sanctioning either freedom or literalism. On the face of it, translating freely becomes an act of resistance against the desacralized republican state. But then again, to give such evidence of poetic spirit might be to lend cogency to the claims of the king’s murderers that they had regenerated England from the base metal of monarchy into an aureate polity. Conversely, a poet who translated literally in the Interregnum would be accepting that his imaginative capacities had been pulverized by parliament’s botched experiment in political alchemy; and yet such an acceptance would be consistent with pure royalist doctrine, which held that the spirit which animated the king’s body also animated the body politic. The regicide reduces not only the king but every one of his loyal subjects to a ‘Caput mortuum’; it makes the English a nation of verbal translators and verbal translation in turn a sign of loyalty—‘faith’—to the king’s memory: a mode of unregenerate materiality congenial to any poet properly dispirited by the desacralization of his king’s body to a thing. Dryden was endorsing this latter logic when, reaching the moment of Priam’s death in his ‘Aeneis’, he carried over entirely unchanged into his version—translated word for word, in utter ‘want of voice’—Denham’s description of the Trojan king as ‘A headless Carcass, and a nameless Thing’.66 In doing so, he also Wttingly honoured Denham. For a vision of the translator as a Wgure of exemplary dispiritedness, a speechless paragon, informs The Destruction of Troy. Among the emotions exiles may experience, historians of diaspora have reported, is deep shame at beginning to feel at home in their substitute habitation; for Jews in particular, before the foundation of modern Israel, continuing to feel exiled from Jerusalem, refusing to think of anywhere else on earth as home, could be a critical priority.67 At a time when, sojourning on Pembroke’s estate at Wilton, he had begun to look to some like the Cromwellian ‘state’s poet’, the want of voice of a ‘too faithful’ translator oVered John Denham a way of becoming instead the poet of the no-state that (according to royalist theory) was Interregnum England. 66 ‘The Second Book of the Aeneis’, l. 763; he underscored the eVect with a marginal note: ‘This whole line is taken from Sir John Denham’; previously, in the preface to Sylvae (1685), Dryden had instinctively conXated the line with the passage about the ‘Caput mortuum’ in the preface to The Destruction of Troy when observing that ‘a good Poet is no more like himself, in a dull Translation than his Carcass would be to his living body’ (CE iii 4). 67 Paul Tabori, The Anatomy of Exile (1972), pp. 17–18, 55–6.

II

Henry Vaughan: ‘Languaged like our infancy’

COSMOPOLI TANI SMS Henry Vaughan was exiled home. Born in South Wales in 1621, he left at the age of seventeen for Jesus College, Cambridge, moving on two years later to London where he enrolled at the Inns of Court and like many of his fellow ‘students’ spent less time over his law books than he did attempting to make his name in literary circles. Then, just as he was beginning to achieve recognition as a poet, the Civil War broke out, and his father recalled him from the capital to Brecknockshire. At some point in 1642, the year he turned twenty-one, Vaughan arrived back in his childhood home.68 The poet himself left little record of his feelings at this turn of events, saying only in a letter to his prospective biographer John Aubrey in 1694 that he had been ‘designed by my father for the study of the Law, which the sudden eruption of our late civil warres wholie frustrated’.69 The poet’s modern biographer, Canon Hutchinson, compared the case of Aubrey himself, who was likewise compelled by his father to give up the student’s life in London and return to his family home in the country, and who later remembered the experience as one of traumatic dislocation: My father sent for me into the country again; where I conversed with none but servants and rustiques and soldiers quartred, to my great griefe (Odi prophanum vulgus et arceo), for in those dayes fathers were not acquainted with their children. It was a most sad life to me, then in the prime of my youth, not to have the beneWtt of an ingeniose conversation and scarce any good bookes—almost a

68 Alan Rudrum, ‘Henry Vaughan’ (ODNB). 69 Vaughan to Aubrey, 1673; M 687; for the arguments over the precise dating of Vaughan’s movements in this period of his life, see Robert Wilcher, ‘ ‘‘Feathering Some Slower Hours’’: Henry Vaughan’s Verse Translations’, Scintilla, 4 (2000), 142–62 (at 143 n. 2).

Wanting Voices: Vaughan

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consumption. This sad life I did lead in the country till 1646, at which time I gott (with much adoe) leave of my father to lett me goe to the Middle Temple.70

Certainly, the poems Vaughan wrote in the capital, and immediately after leaving it, show how highly he prized the ‘ingeniose conversation’ of his metropolitan acquaintances; he would, too, have heartily seconded the anti-populist sentiments conveyed by Aubrey’s Horatian tag, ‘Odi prophanum vulgus et arceo’, even though his own links with the Cavalier literary e´lite in pre-Civil-War London were somewhat precarious. In fact, however, Vaughan’s alienation outstripped Aubrey’s. On his return he took a job as clerk to Judge Sir Marmaduke Lloyd, the Chief Justice of the South Breconshire circuit, only to lose it soon afterwards when Lloyd was removed from oYce because of his royalist sympathies. Whereupon Vaughan enlisted, and fought at the Battle of Rowton Heath in September 1645. Forced to surrender as a member of the royalist garrison at Beeston Castle in November, he was probably imprisoned for a brief period.71 But it was from ‘the late 1640s’ that Vaughan was most decidedly ‘an exile in a strange land’.72 Stuck at home and unemployed, he could only watch as the religious topography of his native county underwent a transformation as sudden and severe as that which the war had inXicted on its physical landscape.73 Following the passage in February 1650 of the ‘Act for the Better Propagation and Preaching of the Gospel in Wales’, Brecknock underwent a programme of ‘de-Anglicanization’, and among those parish priests ejected from their livings by the hated ‘propagators’ were Vaughan’s close friend Thomas Powell and his twin brother Thomas.74 Over these years, Vaughan too was transformed: from the Cavalier wannabe of his early verse into the religious visionary of Silex Scintillans (1650/1655). One way to describe this conversion would be to say that exile, from being Vaughan’s predicament, became his vocation.

70 Quoted in F. E. Hutchinson, Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation (Oxford, 1947; repr., 1971), p. 48. 71 Ibid., 63–5. 72 Stevie Davies, Henry Vaughan (Bridgend, 1995), p. 21. 73 Vaughan’s later poetic response to the militarization of his native county is studied by Chris Fitter, ‘Henry Vaughan’s Landscapes of Military Occupation’, Essays in Criticism, 42 (1992), 123–47. 74 For the impact of the Propagation Act on Vaughan personally and the biblicist resistance mounted against it in his verse, see Philip West, Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans: Scripture Uses (Oxford, 2001), ch. 4: ‘True Lights and New Lights: Vaughan’s ‘‘White Sunday’’ and the False Prophets of the 1650s’.

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His deWning achievements as a religious poet are narratives of displacement, stumbling pilgrimages back home to God. ‘Cast j Here under clouds’, ‘transplanted’ from the ‘everlasting hills’,75 the poet of Silex ‘knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where’;76 he constantly exhorts himself to ‘Wll thy breast with home’,77 but is always liable to make a ‘longer stay’ or else to ‘mind j One path, and stray j Into another, or to none’,78 and so needs guiding lights—stars, the saints, the Holy Spirit—to ‘show me home, and put me in the way’.79 These are staple Christian motifs, and they were especially current throughout Vaughan’s lifetime. Outcast Anglicans, though, could feel inhibited from employing them, so insistently had Puritans Wgured themselves in their struggles with the Caroline ecclesiastical establishment as latterday Israelites journeying out of the Egypt of episcopacy towards a promised land of the enfranchised spirit. Vaughan’s concentration on biblical narratives of exile, in particular the wanderings of Jacob, marks him out among mid-century Anglicans.80 But what was most idiosyncratic about his interest in exile (and will prove most central to my argument) was his tendency, arising out of the hermetic interests he shared with his brother Thomas, to equate the ‘country j Far beyond the stars’81 to which the pilgrim poet longs to return with the soul’s sinless pre-existence of which ‘glimmers’ and ‘glimpses’ remain in childhood.82 For Vaughan, in the words of ‘The Retreat’, his deWnitive exile poem, the way to come home to God is not through ‘forward motion’ but by taking ‘backward steps’ to ‘angel-infancy’.83 Between returning to Brecknock in 1642 and starting work on Silex in 1647 or 1648 Vaughan’s principal poetic outlet was translation. Already, in Poems with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646), the translation was given its own title page and was a hundred or so lines longer than all the volume’s original poems put together.84 But it was in 75 ‘Man’s Fall and Recovery’, ll. 1–5. 76 ‘Man’, l. 18. 77 ‘The ProVer’, l. 45. 78 ‘The Resolve’, ll. 2–4. 79 ‘Retirement (I)’, l. 11. 80 West, Scripture Uses, ch. 2: ‘Patriarchs and Pilgrims’. 81 ‘Peace’, ll. 1–2. 82 The classic treatment of the signiWcances of childhood in Vaughan’s spirituality is L. C. Martin, ‘Henry Vaughan and the Theme of Infancy’, in Essential Articles for the Study of Henry Vaughan, ed. Alan Rudrum (Hamden, CT, 1987), pp. 46–58; for the singularity of Vaughan’s amalgamation of the Christian trope of exile with a mystical Wguration of the child, see Philip Edwards, Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 78–84. 83 ‘The Retreat’, ll. 2, 29–30. 84 This is pointed out by Jonathan F. S. Post, in Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton, 1982), p. 19.


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Olor Iscanus (1651) that Vaughan committed himself most Wrmly to the role of translator. Twenty-Wve of the collection’s forty-six pieces are translations, while two of its original poems themselves have a connection with the practice: ‘Monsieur Gombauld’, in praise of the French author whose romance Endimion Vaughan knew from Richard Hirst’s recent translation;85 and most importantly ‘To my Learned Friend, Mr T. Powell, Upon His Translation of Malvezzi’s Christian Politician’, which I shall consider at length shortly. The notoriously convoluted publication history of Olor Iscanus makes it impossible to assign precise dates to the translations collected in it: we cannot know for sure whether they belong to the Wrst stage in the volume’s composition (before the writing of the dedication in December 1647) or the second (during the three-year interim preceding publication). It may be safely assumed, however, that Vaughan was working on at least some of them until a matter of months before he composed the earliest of the lyrics included in the Wrst edition of Silex; and it is even possible that the end of the phase of his career in which he most devoted himself to translating overlapped with the beginning of his new life as a religious poet.86 What follows is an inquiry into the relation between the two; more speciWcally, an examination of the part translation played in making the Vaughan who was exiled to his childhood home into the Vaughan who took as one of his central themes the spiritual predicament of exile from childhood. As a number of commentators have pointed out, Vaughan himself implied a link between his work as a translator and his subsequent conversion by the way he structured the bloc of translations within Olor Iscanus. Four versions of exile poems by Ovid come Wrst, followed by an idyll by the late-antique poet Ausonius, not himself a Christian but the tutor of one, St Paulinus of Nola, and Wnally by selections from two of the Christian poets to whom proscribed royalists most often turned for consolation during the Civil War period: Boethius and Casimire Sarbiewski, the so-called ‘Horatius Redivivus’.87 Early-modern poets had always exploited the running orders of their collections as a means of self-presentation but the practice took on special signiWcance in the Civil War period for those struggling to retain a sense of order within 85 An Excellent Fancy Wrst composed in French by the Mounsieur Gombauld. And now Elegantly Interpreted, by Richard Hurst (1639); see further the headnote to the poem in R 481. 86 Vaughan’s Wnal volume, Thalia Rediviva (1678), includes a number of poetic translations, but these are generally assumed to have been left over from Olor. 87 Maren-SoWe Rostvig, ‘Casimire Sarbiewski and the English Ode’, Studies in Philology, 51 (1954), 443–60 (at 445).

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their careers against the background of chaotic disorder in the state.88 Vaughan’s purpose is clear: ‘an obvious arc . . . carries the reader chronologically forward from the initial works of pagan authors to those of writers who are increasingly more Christian in focus’.89 But that is a conversion narrative outlined in the broadest of brushstrokes; my point of entry into the Wner details of the relationship between Vaughan the translator and Vaughan the religious poet is the poem about Thomas Powell’s translation of Malvezzi which I mentioned a moment ago. This poem has never featured in any account of Vaughan’s involvement with translation, and it is not only the simple fact of its being about translation that makes that neglect surprising. There is also the identity of its addressee: Thomas Powell, rector of Cantref until his eviction by the propagators, was a long-standing friend of Vaughan’s, a neighbour and fellow ‘Anglican survivalist’ with whom we know the poet associated closely throughout his ‘exile’ and who facilitated the publication of Olor Iscanus. Then too, there is the matter of its date: the strong likelihood is that Vaughan wrote the poem either late in 1646 or early in 1647, that is, after his debut as a translator with ‘The Tenth Satire of Juvenal’ but before he had gone far with the sequence of translations which would eventually be published in Olor. Which makes ‘To my Learned Friend, Mr T. Powell’ a good place to look for clues about why Vaughan chose to deepen his commitment to translating. Powell’s ‘Translation of Malvezzi’s Christian Politician’ was never actually published; Vaughan apparently read it in manuscript. Almost certainly a rival rendering of the same work—The pourtract of the Christian-favourite (1647)—spiked Powell’s guns. The market for translations of works by Virgilio Malvezzi (1599–1654) was crowded during the Civil War period; the brand of Christian neo-Stoicism retailed by the Bolognese diplomat and sometime Spanish ambassador to England particularly appealed to royalists shivering in the ‘Cavalier winter’: the frontispiece of Robert Ashley’s translation of David Persecuted (1647) superimposed the face of Charles I on to the body of the Jewish king.90 Powell himself tried his hand again a few years later, successfully this time: Stoa Triumphans; or Two Sober Paradoxes was entered by 88 Annabel Patterson, ‘Jonson, Marvell, and Miscellaneity?’, in Poems in their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. Neil Fraistat (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986), pp. 95–118. 89 Post, Unfolding Vision, 58. 90 The frontispiece, by William Marshall, the engraver made notorious by Milton’s lines about him in Poems (1645), is reproduced and discussed in Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 161.


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Humphrey Moseley in the Stationer’s Register on 28 April 1651, immediately before Olor Iscanus, which is what has led scholars to conclude that Powell was the ‘friend’ whom Vaughan thanks in the dedication for overseeing the publication of his volume.91 The second of the sober paradoxes referred to in the title is ‘The Praise of Banishment’, a subject whose pertinence for Powell had lately been redoubled when the propagators removed him from his cure. In the preface he was explicit about the exilic origins of the translation, describing it as ‘the production of some spare time, when I was debarred from better imployment, to witt, the exercise of my function and ministry’.92 More importantly, in the present context, he also implied a relation between exile and the practice of translation itself. What he hoped to achieve by translating Malvezzi’s book, Powell explained to his fellow Anglican suVerer David Gwin in the dedication, was to make it more widely current within ‘the Common-wealth of learning’.93 That phrase taps into a prime vein of consolation for early-modern exiles: the contention that in ceasing to belong to the particular nation into which they happened to have been born, they became instead citizens of a larger and nobler commonwealth; what Seneca had called, in passages of his epistles and moral essays which Renaissance writers had drummed into them at school, the ‘maior respublica’. Reading was considered the main way into this greater polity; contemporary manuals of consolation urged exiles to think of reading not as a leisure pursuit (otium) but as a continuation of civic engagement (negotium) by another purer means.94 Powell’s remark aligns translation with this socialized or activist model of reading,95 the ‘intensiWed discourse’ prescribed for the exile;96 and indeed what more natural denizen could there be of the ‘maior respublica’, what more natural participant in ‘the conversation of the whole world’,97 than the translator? In the work of neo-Stoics such as Malvezzi, cosmopolitan ideas commonly take on a Christian colouring: the ‘Common-wealth of learning’ 91 Eluned Brown, ‘ ‘‘Learned friend and fellow prisoner’’: Thomas Powell and Welsh Royalists’, National Library of Wales Journal, 18 (1973–4), 374–82 (at 374). 92 Stoa Triumphans (1651), sig. A3r . 93 Ibid., A3r-v . 94 This activist model of study has been strongly emphasized in recent accounts of the literature of ‘retirement’ in the Civil War period: see, for instance, James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 201–32. 95 This model of translation remains current in modern theory: see, for instance, Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Translation and Literary Criticism (Manchester, 1997). 96 Andrew ShiZett, Stoicism, Politics and Literature in the Age of Milton (Cambridge, 1998), p. 69. 97 Quoted from Thomas Lodge’s translation of Seneca; ibid., 5–6.

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merges with the communion of the saints. Powell takes the eVect to an apocalyptic extreme in ‘The Praise of Banishment’. There Vaughan would have read that ‘Though wise men reside among the vulgar in this elementary world, yet they have another within them full of various images and noble ideas, springing from the purer spirits of the heart’;98 also that ‘Ignorance is a veil that hinders us to know this truth: he that should have the happinesse to remove this veile, but for a moment, would be astonished to see a strange Metamorphosis, he should see a new heaven, and a new world’;99 and finally that the citizens of the cosmopolis are like ‘the Inhabitants of the seven caelestiall spheares, which convey their inXuence by motion and light into this nether world [and] are never Wxt in their own Countrey, but are erratick and itinerant’.100 Suggestive enough in itself where Vaughan’s self-understanding as an exile is concerned, this blend of apocalypticism and cosmopolitanism becomes doubly so when it Wlters through into Powell’s thinking about translation. A free approach was particularly necessary in the case of Malvezzi because: His style is right Laconick, strict and succinct: so farre that his brevity doth sometimes cloud his sense, and makes each period a Riddle to some capacities; so that I am bold (now and then) to enlarge the roome to let in more light; for his own words doe scarce bring us home to his meaning:101

‘Enlarging’ Malvezzi’s style, Powell releases him from the conWnes of his native tongue, brings him ‘home’ to an ampler translatorial community; and this community is construed in an apocalyptic language that is striated with hermeticism: it is a world of light gone into through ‘cloud’ and by solving ‘a Riddle’. ‘To my Learned Friend, Mr T. Powell’ predates Stoa Triumphans. But the same complex of apocalyptic and Stoic ideas Powell applied to translation in his Malvezzi rendering informs the Wguration of the translator developed in Vaughan’s poem. Doubtless the two had discussed their shared involvement in translating and their shared experience of exile, consoled each other by conversing about translating themselves into ‘the conversation of the whole world’.102 At

98 Stoa Triumphans, sig. C4r . 99 Ibid., C5r . 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., B2v . 102 This may oVer a glimpse into the social side of Vaughan’s experience as an internal e´migre´ in Breconshire which Alan Rudrum has suggested scholars have tended to overlook: see his essay ‘Resistance, Collaboration and Silence: Henry Vaughan and Breconshire


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any rate, Vaughan takes it for granted that translation is inherently exilic, putting a conceited twist on the association when he tells Powell: ‘by your learned hand (amidst the coil) j Outlandish plants thrive in our thankless soil’.103 Unable himself any longer to thrive in the ‘soil’ (both ‘earth’ and ‘corruption’) of his homeland, Powell has nevertheless fruitfully transplanted the exotic Malvezzi into English. For Vaughan, as for Powell, the ground of that association is cosmopolitanism: ‘You have enlarged his praise’, he tells his learned friend, using the verb to connote transcendence as Powell does in connection with Malvezzi’s laconic style. Most importantly, Vaughan, like Powell, inXects this cosmopolitan understanding of translation with apocalyptic and hermetic accents. Addressing Malvezzi directly in an apostrophe, he employs an elaborate eschatological conceit to underscore the Italian author’s good fortune in having been translated not into Latin, which some might consider the lingua franca of the ‘maior respublica’, but into English, the authentic language of the cosmopolis. Had it been ‘some Cardinal’ who translated him, ‘then thou must pack to Rome, where thou mightst lie j Ere thou shouldst have new clothes eternally’;104 but because it was an Englishman: thou mayst run Through any clime as well known as the sun, And in thy several dresses like the year Challenge acquaintance with each peopled sphere.105

In Latin, the language employed in Roman Catholic ritual to block the laity’s access to the word of God, Malvezzi would have been condemned to sleep out eternity in irredeemable error (‘lie’) rather than awaking to eternal redemption on the Last Day in ‘new clothes’, the white of those who have washed themselves in the blood of the Lamb. But since he has been reclothed in English, he is free to enter into fellowship ‘with each peopled sphere’: primarily ‘each inhabited nation’, but also—given that Vaughan has earlier compared Malvezzi’s works in their original Italian to ‘stars which near the poles do steer’ and so are ‘but in one part of the globe seen clear’106 (and has also just mentioned the number ‘seven’)107—‘the inhabitants of the seven

Royalism’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination (Columbia, MO, 1999), pp. 102–18 (at 103). 103 ‘To my Learned Friend, Mr T. Powell, Upon His Translation of Malvezzi’s Christian Politician’, ll. 7–8. 104 Ibid., ll. 19–22. 105 Ibid., ll. 25–8. 106 Ibid., ll. 15–16. 107 Ibid., l. 23.

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caelestiall sphaeres’ with whom Powell identiWes the citizens of the ‘Commonwealth of learning’ in ‘The Praise of Banishment’.108 The appeal of this way of thinking about translation for Powell and Vaughan is self-evident. But what made it attractive made it dangerous. That exiles, deprived of their sense of national identity, are driven to fashion substitute forms of communality is well documented. Equally familiar, though, is the tendency of these alternative socialities to deteriorate into factionalism and cliquishness. ‘Exile is a jealous state’, Edward Said observed in his classic essay on the subject: ‘it is in the drawing of lines around you and your compatriots that the least attractive aspects of being in exile emerge: an exaggerated sense of group solidarity, and a passionate hostility to outsiders, even those who may be in the same predicament as you’.109 The inWghting among the royalist exiles in France, particularly between the Jermyn faction and the Clarendon party, which signiWcantly hampered eVorts to bring about a Stuart restoration, is a case in point.110 But the literary variants of surrogate grouping that exiles construct are just as liable to this vice of jealous exclusivity; for all its apparent universality, the translatorial cosmopolis envisaged by Vaughan and Powell is no exception. In the passage I have just discussed, Vaughan could fairly be accused of solacing himself with what Said calls the ‘thumping language of national pride’111 when he claims that, by translating Malvezzi into English, Powell made him ‘through any clime as well known as the sun’. But it is an earlier occurrence of the apocalyptic model of translation in Vaughan’s writings that best illustrates the potential pitfalls of this style of thought. For Vaughan had been drawn to this vision from the outset of his career as a translator, when discussing his version of ‘The Tenth Satire of Juvenal’ in the preface to his Poems (1646), and what it originally oVered him was the consolation of sectarian revenge in his exilic suVerings. In ‘To All Ingenious Lovers of Poesy’ Vaughan Xourishes his rendering of Juvenal as proof of his determination to ‘out-wing these dull Times, and soare above the drudgerie of durty Intelligence’—the political tittle-tattle retailed in pamphlets and newsbooks. He has ‘borrowed’ the ancient satire, he informs his fellow ‘reWned spirits’, ‘to feather some slower Houres’. In fact, though, that profession of 108 Stoa Triumphans, sig. C5r . 109 Edward Said, ‘ReXections on Exile’, in ReXections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA, 2000), p. 178. 110 GeoVrey Smith, The Cavaliers in Exile, 1640–1660 (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 115–32. 111 Said, ReXections on Exile, 177.


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transcendence was a blind. To speak of feathering hours to make them Xy faster is to construe them as arrows, and Vaughan meant for Juvenal’s barbs to Wnd contemporary targets: It is one of his, whose Roman Pen had as much true Passion, for the inWrmities of that state, as we should have Pitty, to the distractions of our owne: Honest (I am sure) it is, and oVensive cannot be, except it meet with such Spirits that will quarrel with Antiquitie, or purposely Arraigne themselves;112

To the more zealous members of the Long Parliament, and certainly to the architects of the execution of the Earl of StraVord (up to and including Charles I himself ), Vaughan’s pointed handling of Sejanus’s fall might well have proved oVensive,113 while his contemptuous reference to ‘Spirits that will quarrel with Antiquitie’ was clearly aimed at ‘the ‘‘mechanick preachers’’ of royalist propaganda’, whose lack of Xuency in Latin is at one with their ignorant disregard of the established traditions of church and monarchy.114 Vaughan set the seal on his assault against these Puritan preachers with an apocalyptic metaphor: ‘these indeed may think, that they have slept out so many Centuries in this Satyre, and are now awaked’, he fulminated; ‘which, had it been still Latine, perhaps their Nap had been Everlasting’.115 They do not expect to be resurrected but to sleep for ever, the heresy of mortalism being the theological corollary of their materialistic understanding of politics; but Vaughan in his capacity as translator, resurrecting Juvenal, brings them before the judgement seat of satire to be damned for all eternity. It is an extremely bold conceit, one reminiscent of the self-interested conception of the apocalypse which Vaughan would later excoriate the socalled ‘Welsh Saints’ Vavasour Powell, Morgan Llwyd, and Walter Craddock for preaching in his home county. Some of the angriest lyrics in Silex are counter-thrusts against this reductive and sectarian strain of millenarianism.116 In one of them, ‘The Men of War’, though, Vaughan acknowledges its seductive power, praying that God will give him ‘a sweet, revengeless, quiet mind, j And to my greatest haters kind’, deliver him from the temptation to ‘Enact for saints my self and mine’.117 In his early conduct as a translator, Vaughan had yielded to that temptation. 112 M 2. 113 Wilcher, ‘Vaughan’s Verse Translations’, 145–51. 114 James D. Simmonds, Masques of God, Form and Theme in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan (Pittsburgh, PA, 1972), p. 87; Wilcher, ‘Vaughan’s Verse Translations’, 145. 115 R 31. 116 West, Scripture Uses, 181–229 (I quote from 184). 117 ‘The Men of War’, ll. 12, 43–4.

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‘To my Learned Friend, Mr T. Powell’ does not repeat the mistake. What reductive elements persist in its rhetoric of universality are at least nationalistic (and in no very vengeful sense) rather than sectarian; and they pale into insigniWcance by comparison with the remarkable new ingredient Vaughan now introduces into his thinking about translation as a mode of transcendent communitarianism: namely, childhood. He makes the connection in the Wrst couplet, a couplet which draws this apparently minor and occasional piece from the peripheries of the canon of Vaughan’s verse towards its centre, not only thematically but also formally, exemplifying as it does a characteristic noted by a number of commentators in Vaughan’s most achieved and deWnitive poems: that they seem somehow to culminate in their densely suggestive openings. Here is the couplet: We thank you, worthy Sir, that now we see Malvezzi languaged like our infancy

Noting that Vaughan cannot have meant by that last phrase ‘put into our native tongue’ since the language he spoke as an infant was ‘very likely Welsh’, editors gloss it: ‘put into language as pure and simple as our infancy’.118 But in what sense? If merely that of clarity, eYcient communicativeness, then the ornate phrase is something of a sledgehammer to crack so small a nut of meaning: ‘language’ as a verb is found in only one other place in Vaughan’s poems,119 while ‘infancy’, of course, is not a word Vaughan ever used lightly, and the trisyllable weighs the more heavily in this case for being rhymed against the monosyllable ‘see’. Such unbalanced rhymes readily take on a tincture of burlesque; it is diYcult to avoid the thought that Vaughan employs one here as the metrical sign of the mystical simplicity of childhood: that wisdom which appears foolish in the eyes of the world. The more so once we notice that this unheralded couplet has growing secretly within it the seed of the foremost expression in Vaughan’s verse of that mystical simplicity, which itself occurs in a poem written in heroic couplets and beginning with a rhyme between a monosyllable in its Wrst line and the trisyllable ‘infancy’ in its second: Happy those early days! when I Shined in my Angel-infancy.120 118 R 497. 119 Again in a translation, interestingly: Vaughan’s rendering of Ausonius’s ‘Cupido Cruciatur’, where Adonis is referred to at one point as ‘that prince whose Xower j Hath sorrow languaged on him to this hour’ (ll. 19–20). 120 ‘The Retreat’, ll. 1–2.


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Somewhere in his mind’s eye, when he credited Powell with having ‘languaged’ Malvezzi ‘like our infancy’, Vaughan was seeing translation as a way ‘to travel back j And tread again that ancient track’121 leading towards primal innocence. Translation, of course, has a natural connection with childhood: the signiWcances of that connection for Pope are considered in Chapter 4. Usually it connoted humility; as when Dryden aligned himself with Aeneas’s child, Ascanius, by choosing as epigraph for his Works of Virgil (1697) the line ‘sequiturque patrem non passibus aequis’ describing how the boy follows his father out of the wreck of Troy. For Vaughan, though, to associate translation with childhood is not to deprecate but to dignify the translator. To his way of thinking, no more glorious destiny for the poet is possible than that of returning to the language of infancy and enabling readers to follow in one’s ‘backward steps’. Yet the ‘language’ of ‘infancy’ is no language at all. For Vaughan’s collocation of the two awakens the dormant etymological root of ‘infancy’, from the Latin ‘infans’: ‘speechless’ or ‘unspeaking’. Silence was what Vaughan found most golden about infancy; children in his poems should not be heard but see. The angel-infant in ‘The Retreat’ has become separated from his ‘Wrst love’ (Christ) and his ‘glorious train’ (the angels and saints),122 and it is the advent of language which exiled him from that heavenly community. The poem is divided into two paragraphs, one of twenty lines, the other of eleven, but it is also bisected, at exactly its midpoint (line 16), by the catastrophic moment when the child, progressing beyond silent contemplative wonder, begins to make ‘sinful sound’, falls from vision to verbalization:123 When on some gilded cloud, or Xower My gazing soul would dwell an hour, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity; Before I taught my tongue to wound My conscience with a sinful sound124

121 Ibid., ll. 21–2. 122 ‘The Retreat’, ll. 8, 24. 123 The wish expressed in ‘Come, Come, what do I here’—‘Strike these lips dumb’—is fundamental with Vaughan. 124 ‘The Retreat’, ll. 11–16.

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Unsealing his lips to speak, the child—‘infant’ now no more—opens the Xoodgates of sin: by the next line, he has mastered ‘the black art to dispense j A several sin to every sense’.125 A similar equation of purity with pre-verbalness underlies the majority of Vaughan’s uses of ‘infant’. One instance can stand for many: the only one of his poems which has the word in its title, ‘The Burial of an Infant’. In this great lyric, the root meaning of ‘infans’ is constantly if (of course) unspokenly present, an undocumented source of its widely admired unity. It is established at the outset: ‘Blest infant bud, whose blossom-life j Did only look about, and fall’,126 that is, ‘only looked as opposed to speaking, and so fell (died) before you could fall (sin) by beginning to speak’; and Vaughan’s subsequent references to the infant’s oral life are carefully premised upon it: at ‘Wearied out in a harmless strife j Of tears, and milk, the food of all’ (the mouth used for the harmless act of drinking), then at ‘Sweetly didst thou expire: thy soul j Flew home unstained by his new kin’ (died as painlessly as its breath had been pure because unstained by verbal intercourse with sinful human speakers), and Wnally at ‘Softly rest all thy virgin-crumbs! j Lapped in the sweets of thy young breath’ (again, the breath is sweet because no words have yet been carried on it).127 In his early ‘secular’ poems, Vaughan frequently deprecates himself as speechless, aZicted with ‘want of . . . voice’ in the pejorative sense deployed by Denham in ‘To Sir Richard Fanshaw’: inautonomous, bereft of selfhood. Echo, the mythological prototype of voicelessness, is the muse of Olor Iscanus: in ‘Upon Mr Fletcher’s Plays, Published, 1647’ Vaughan is ‘a faint echo unto poetry’ and in ‘To the Most Excellently Accomplished, Mrs K. Philips’ he is ‘a weak echo unto your wit’,128 while in the volume’s concluding poem, ‘Ad Echum’, he formally oVers himself as the nymph’s disciple, Echo’s echo. But the opening couplet of ‘To my Learned Friend, Mr T. Powell’ suggests a new orientation for his feelings of voicelessness, pointing towards their conversion into the mystical ‘infancy’ of the poet of Silex, whose verse is humbly ‘copied’ from scripture,129 ‘groans j Of my Lord’s penning’.130 Translation is the catalyst

125 ‘The Retreat’, ll. 17–18. 126 ‘The Burial of an Infant’, ll. 1–2. 127 Ibid., ll. 3–4, 5–6, 9–10. 128 ‘Upon Mr Fletcher’s Plays, Published, 1647’, l. 12; ‘To the Most Excellently Accomplished, Mrs K. Philips’, l. 38. 129 ‘The Dedication’, l. 16. 130 ‘Holy Scriptures’, ll. 10–11.


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for that transformation. Vaughan Wgures the translator (Powell is merely the vehicle for the Wguration) as doing what he would later say in ‘Childhood’ anyone who ‘would God’s face see’ must do: ‘live twice’ as an infant,131 get back to a pre-verbal state. Forced to abandon his monoglot outlook on the world, he resembles the infant yet to acquire Xuency in his native tongue; to translate is to escape not merely the conWnes of one’s nationality, but the entire sinful isolation of the self. Now, too, the transcendent community to which the translator accedes is no longer a thinly disguised sect or faction but authentically universal: ‘our infancy’ is not just Vaughan’s and Powell’s but that of the entire ‘glorious train’ of undegenerate creation to which all mankind originally belongs and whose other members range (under the terms of Vaughan’s eschatology which Stevie Davies has rightly called ‘hospitable’)132 from the stones, ‘these dumb creatures . . . so true’,133 through the ‘saints’ who ‘overcome j . . . when set at naught and dumb’134 to the archetype of this salviWc ‘infancy’, the head of this body of the unspeaking, who, challenged by Pilate to defend himself against the accusations of the Jews, ‘answered never a word to him’—Christ.135 Vaughan still had the manuscript of Powell’s translation of Malvezzi’s Christian Politician in his possession in 1673,136 but it has since been lost. We can be reasonably sure, though, that in it Malvezzi was not in fact ‘languaged like our infancy’. Even the visionary poet of Silex remains exiled from the apocalyptic community of the infant for all but his most ecstatic instants of apperception;137 and it is hard to imagine a mere translator coming home to it. How, then, are we to deal with Vaughan’s mystical 131 ‘Child-hood’, ll. 35–6. 132 Concluding her Wne account of ‘The Book’, in Henry Vaughan, 148–50, she writes: ‘The hospitality of [Vaughan’s] God contrasts with the sparsely populated Heavens greedily awaited by some Calvinist sects, who had calculated that a hundred thousand males and ten thousand females were to be admitted as the elect. By contrast, Vaughan’s ample Heaven extends the sense of community and fellowship into the green world: a house of many, and rooted, mansions’ (at 150); the classic treatment of Vaughan’s theological singularity in allowing for the redemption of non-human creation is Alan Rudrum, ‘Henry Vaughan, the Liberation of the Creatures, and SeventeenthCentury English Calvinism’, The Seventeenth Century, 4 (1989), 33–54. 133 ‘The Stone’, l. 12. 134 ‘The Men of War’, ll. 19–20. 135 Matthew 27: 14. 136 Vaughan to Aubrey, 7 July 1673; M 690–1. 137 On this pessimistic aspect of Vaughan’s use of ‘the persona of child’ in Silex, see further Laura Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh, PA, 1978), pp. 173–5.

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conception of translatorial infancy? Does it bear on his actual practice as a translator, or is it of merely theoretical interest? Should it concern readers of Vaughan’s poetry, or only students of his spirituality? One might compare Walter Benjamin’s similarly utopian view of translation as a means of annulling the curse of babel, reassembling the primal ‘adamic’ language, shards of which lie scattered throughout our multifarious national tongues; only in a ‘temporary’ or ‘provisional’ sense, he makes clear, could any single translation eVect this ‘solution of foreignness’, and even the most achieved only ‘points the way to . . . the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulWlment of languages’.138 In the second half of my discussion of Vaughan, I am going to argue that his translations are informed by a ‘temporary’ or ‘provisional’ variant of the ideal of ‘angel-infancy’ elaborated in Silex. But in an extreme sense: the variant in question ‘points the way’ to that ideal not by partially realizing it but by diametrically inverting it. The triangle of associations connecting translation, exile, and childhood, so hopefully conWgured in ‘To my Learned Friend, Mr T. Powell’, recurs within Vaughan’s Olor translations, but in a conWguration of despair. The eVect can be described in theological terms. It is a principle of divine economy that the source of suVering is also the source of healing, that sin and redemption come into the world through the same means: a woman (Eve/Mary) or a tree (the Tree of Knowledge/the Cross). This economy was deeply ingrained in Vaughan’s imagination: discovering new instances of it is one of his primary pleasures in Silex; as, for instance, when, in ‘Joy of my life! while left me here’, he compares ‘God’s saints’ to: our pillar-Wres Seen as we go, They are that City’s shining spires We travel to; A swordlike gleam Kept man for sin First out ; this beam Will guide him in.139

In Vaughan’s Olor translations, infancy is what keeps him out of his home as a poet; in Silex it is what guides him in. 138 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations (1955), trans. Harry Zohn (1973), pp. 70–83 (at 75–6). 139 ‘Joy of my life! while left me here’, ll. 17, 25–32.


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SECOND CHI LDHOOD When Vaughan was an infant, Thomas Powell was already a teenager; the person the poet actually shared his earliest years with was his twin brother, Thomas. As twins, they may well have developed a language of infancy: ‘a wordless mutual understanding which can seem telepathic to outsiders’.140 Hopes of recovering that ‘intimate communion’ perhaps did something to moderate the pain of Vaughan’s exile from London. But when he got back to Newton he did not Wnd his twin at home: Thomas was up at Oxford and had not been called away from his studies by their father. Vaughan left no direct record of his feelings about his brother’s absence, telling Aubrey only (with what may be considered an assumed insouciance) that ‘my brother continued [at Oxford] for ten or 12 years, and (I thinke) he could be noe lesse than Mr of Arts.’141 But it is reasonable to suppose that being back in his childhood home without his twin brother redoubled the poet’s sense of that ‘forfeit of wholeness’ which the commentator most mindful of the part being a twin played in his imaginative formation—Stevie Davies—suggests the gradual loosening of his intense bond with Thomas involved for Vaughan.142 Henry’s situation also surely exacerbated whatever there was in his attitude towards Thomas of the ‘desperate covert hostility, the need to sheer away from the constraint of the twin-knot’ which is a recognized element of ‘the pathology of twin-psychology’:143 he, the elder son, was back in apron strings while his younger brother was oV making his way in the world. Vaughan was ‘drawn to the translator’s art’, according to Davies, as ‘a kind of textual twinning’;144 and another critic—Robert Wilcher—building on her distinction between the inward-looking or ‘centripetal’ Henry and the outgoing or ‘centrifugal’ Thomas,145 has lately detected in one of Vaughan’s translations in Olor Iscanus traces of ‘the anguished experience of abandonment that overtook him when he found himself back in his childhood home without the support of that more self-suYcient ‘‘centrifugal twin’’ upon whom he had always been dependent for a secure sense of his own identity’.146 ‘Ovid ex Ponto IV iii’ is the third of the four 140 142 144 146

Davies, Henry Vaughan, 35. 141 M 687. Davies, Henry Vaughan, 33. 143 Ibid., 33–4. Ibid., 33, 113. 145 Ibid., 36. Wilcher, ‘Vaughan’s Verse Translations’, 156.

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translations from Ovid’s exile poetry which begin the sequence of Olor renderings. Vaughan subtitled it ‘To his Inconstant Friend, Translated for the Use of All the Judases of this Touch-stone Age’, and the friend in question is a childhood friend. In Ovid they have been ‘united in friendship almost since they were boys’ (‘paene puer puero iunctus amicitia’) and lived ‘in close union in the same household’ (‘densoque domesticus usu’). That wasn’t close enough for Vaughan, though, who did away with Ovid’s ‘almost’ and took other steps to deepen the intimacy of the pair: Yet know (though deaf to this) that I am he Whose years and love had the same infancy With thine, thy deep familiar, that did share Souls with thee, and partake thy joys or care, Whom the same roof lodged, and my Muse those nights So solemnly endeared to her delights147

‘Thy deep familiar’, ‘that did share j Souls with thee’, ‘Whom the same roof lodged’—all are additions or accentuations on Vaughan’s part, and all make particular sense in connection with Thomas. It is natural to think of identical twins as sharing souls; Powell, in the dedicatory poem he supplied for Olor, found Henry and Thomas ‘so like in souls as bodies’.148 Such resemblance can cause unease, even dread, in onlookers, and ‘Thy deep familiar’, where the adjective summons the occult sense of the noun, catches the shared sense of dark anomalousness identical twins may feel as a result. Whether or not Vaughan had Thomas speciWcally in mind when he wrote those lines, they shed considerable light on the larger question which concerns me: what part translation as a mode of poetic childishness played in Vaughan’s conversion from exiled poet to poet of exile. For they are informed by an outlook on childhood which inverts with striking force and precision the visionary one characteristic of his religious verse. Here again Vaughan employs the ‘heterotonic’149 rhyme on ‘infancy’ which in Silex will become the signature tune of the child’s wise foolishness. But in this case its burlesque eVect is bitterly literal: the incommensurateness of monosyllable and polysyllable enacts the poet’s jarring discovery of his 147 ‘Ovid ex Ponto IV iii’, ll. 21–6. 148 ‘Upon the Most Ingenious Pair of Twins, Eugenius Philalethes, and the Author of these Poems’, l. 2. 149 Apparently, this term and the unlovelier ‘anisobaric’ are the only designations ever suggested for such rhymes: see Eric GriYths, ‘ ‘‘Blanks, misgivings, fallings from us’’ ’, in Adam Piette and Katy Price (eds.), The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson (Great Wilbraham, 2007), pp. 55–83 (at 68–9).


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friend’s inconstancy, of diVerence in someone he had expected to Wnd ‘the same’. It convicts Vaughan as a fool for not realizing his friend would abandon him in his exile: that ‘he’ would no longer remain as he was in their ‘infancy’. Likewise, the root etymological sense of infancy is again elicited, but to the opposite of the mystical eVect of transcendence achieved in ‘The Retreat’, ‘The Burial of an Infant’, and ‘To my Learned Friend, Mr T. Powell’. What draws it out is the phrase ‘(though deaf to this)’, to which it is connected both semantically and acoustically: in a travesty of the ideal of infancy as a state of originary unspeaking commonality, Vaughan is rendered infant in the mundane sense that his complaints about his friend’s callous indiVerence to his suVerings fall on deaf ears. Like Echo, to whom he will pledge himself at the end of Olor, he has been forcibly returned to a condition of pre-verbal being, hollowed out to ‘want of . . . voice’ by unrequited love. Infantilized. This despondent conception of infancy extends beyond ‘Ovid ex Ponto IV iii’ to the other three of Vaughan’s translations from Ovid’s exile poetry; it is the nub of a narrative which binds the quartet together as a coherent subgroup within the larger unit of the Olor renderings. The version of Ausonius’s ‘Cupido Cruciatur’ which immediately follows them (as I shall conclude by arguing) forms a coda to that narrative; the remaining translations, from Boethius and Casimire Sarbiewski, have no substantive relation to it and are therefore extraneous to my discussion. Why translating Ovid’s exile poetry in particular should have prompted Vaughan to reXect on childhood is a question I shall answer in a moment; why he did not continue this train of reXection into his renderings from Boethius and Casimire was perhaps because of its tone. It appears that translating Ovid and Ausonius, poets who had not heard, or else not accepted, the message of Christian hope, permitted Vaughan to explore the vengeful desires and inclinations to despair that exile aroused in him; and he may have felt impeded from airing such sentiments when translating poems of Christian consolation. Certainly, his versions of Boethius and Casimire are not entirely cleansed of anger and despondency,150 but they are couched in a more exemplary mode than the pagan pieces which precede them, the distinction being particularly underscored by Vaughan’s move from 150 In fact, the latest student of the Boethius versions concludes that they entirely fail to achieve transcendence: Jonathan Nauman, ‘Boethius and Henry Vaughan: the Consolatio Translations of Olor Iscanus’, in Of Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton and in Honor of Alan Rudrum, ed. Donald R. Dickson and Holly Faith Nelson (Cranbury, NJ, 2004), pp. 192–201.

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decasyllabics in the Ovid and Ausonius to octosyllabics for all but the Wrst of his thirteen extracts from the Consolatio and all seven of his selections from the ‘Jesuit Horace’. Children didn’t much interest Ovid. In ‘Ex Ponto IV iii’ Vaughan chose to translate one of the few poems of Ovid’s which has childhood as a central concern. However, Ovid’s exile poetry had itself acquired a particular association with childhood in seventeenth-century England. ‘The Tristia were often among the Wrst Latin poems studied at school.’151 Thus, for instance, in A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole (1660), Charles Hoole prescribes ‘Ovid’s little book de tristibus’ for study in ‘the Wrst halfe year’ of the ‘Fourth form’ immediately after students have received their grounding in grammar; only in the second half of that year are they to be exposed to any other poetry, portions of the Metamorphoses carefully selected for their ‘pleasing and proWtable Arguments’.152 What it was about the exile poems that made them especially suitable for impressionable young minds was indicated by the greatest of Ovid’s Renaissance editors, Daniel Heinsius. ‘Libri Tristium, & qui de Ponto inscribuntur’, he explained in the headnote on them in his 1629 edition of Ovid, ‘quo ab omni aVectione . . . magis alieni sunt, eo magis commendari juventuti debent’ (‘the books of the Tristia and those written from the Black Sea, because they are so free of aVectation, ought therefore to be recommended to the young’).153 This remark of Heinsius set the terms in which the exile verse was read for at least the next century: it gets quoted again and again in subsequent editions of Ovid, notably the one by Borchard Cnipping on which Dryden and other Restoration translators of Ovid principally relied;154 and its inXuence can still be felt in the cribs of the Tristia aimed at the school market which proliferated around the turn of the eighteenth century. Nicholas Bailey, for instance, was responding to the implications of Heinsius’s use of the adjective ‘alienus’ (‘strange’, ‘foreign’) when he observed that exile had alienated Ovid from his former stylistic vices: ‘this Book is most unexceptionable as to its being put into the Hands of Youth, of any of his Writings, being . . . Written at a Time when both his advanc’d Age and SuVerings had taken him down from those wanton 151 Colin Burrow, ‘Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance Afterlives’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 301–19 (at 308–9). 152 A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole (1660), pp. 156, 161. 153 Ovidii Nasonis Opera, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1629), i. sig. *8r . 154 P. Ovidii Nasonis Opera Omnia, 3 vols. (Leiden, 1670), iii. sig. *6r .


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and amorous Flights that his Genius in his Youth and Prosperity had carried him to’.155 A thick stripe of condescension runs through such remarks. To suppose that Ovid’s exile poems are free of the stylistic aVectation and lubricious innuendo characteristic of the Amores and the Metamorphoses is to move towards a view of them as works of artless simplicity.156 It is to treat their expressions of misery as entirely candid and unself conscious: childish. (It is no accident that Hoole calls the Tristia a ‘little book’.) One way of accounting for the surprising paucity of translations from the exile poetry published in Vaughan’s lifetime would be to say that poets were reluctant to associate themselves in print with Ovid’s mawkish litany of sobs and whines. The versions of the Tristia and the Epistulae de Ponto which had the Weld almost entirely to themselves between their publication in the 1630s and the turn of the century157 were the work of an Oxford scholar—Wye Saltonstall—whose depressive temperament made him impervious to such scruples.158 When another translation did Wnally appear, The Two First Books of Ovid de Tristibus; with part of the Third (1697), its translator, the Cambridge scholar Thomas Ball, omitted great swathes of the text on the grounds that Ovid was ‘so melted with his Sorrows, that his Complaints discover a Weakness, which is better hid’.159 The intervening decades included those of the ‘Cavalier winter’, and yet no royalist poet apart from Vaughan went into print as a translator of the exile verse over that period. Even Mildmay Fane, no very stout opponent of selfindulgence,160 steered clear: Otia Sacra (1648) contains translations 155 Ovid’s Tristia (1706), sig. A2r . 156 Modern commentators take the opposite view, concentrating on the artfulness of Ovid’s despair: see, for instance, Gareth Williams, ‘Ovid’s Exile Poetry: Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto, and Ibis’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Hardie, 233–48. 157 Saltonstall’s Tristia (1633) was reprinted in 1637, 1665, 1672, and 1681 for want of competition from any more readable alternative than Zachary Catlin’s De Tristibus (1639), while his De Ponto (1639), reissued in 1640, went altogether unchallenged until the eighteenth century; see further Stuart Gillespie and Robert Cummings, ‘A Bibliography of Ovidian Translations and Imitations in English’, Translation and Literature, 13 (2004), 207–18 (at 208–11). 158 Saltonstall went up to Queen’s College, Oxford in 1619 but failed to graduate; after a period at Gray’s Inn spent (like Vaughan) trying to launch himself on a literary career in the capital, he returned to the dreaming spires in 1625 where he quickly subsided into impecunious melancholia: Sarah Annes Brown, ‘Wye Saltonstall’ (ODNB). 159 Thomas Ball, Two Books of Elegies: In Imitation of the Two First Books of Ovid de Tristibus; with part of the Third (1697), sig. A4r . 160 His modern editor describes him as ‘actively welcoming the inner life of fantasy and daydream’; in The Poetry of Mildmay Fane, 2nd Earl of Westmoreland, ed. Tom Cain (Manchester, 2001), p. 10.

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from the manly Horace and Martial rather than the weak exilic Ovid, and invokes the precedent of the Tristia only once and then in a tellingly juvenile connection—Fane’s ‘De Tristibus’ is a toy versicle inscribed ‘To a Cat bore me Company in ConWnement’. That Vaughan alone among banished or sequestrated royalists published translations from Ovid’s exile poems is poignantly apt. In doing so he actualized the paradoxical circumstances of his particular exile: recalled to his childhood home, he went back to a body of poems redolent of childhood, one he perhaps Wrst encountered while studying alongside his brother, Thomas, in Matthew Herbert’s rectory at nearby Llangattock. The quartet of renderings from the Tristia and the De Ponto lead oV the sequence of translations in Olor Iscanus not just as the starting-point of an arc from pagan Ovid to Christian Boethius and Casimire but also because they mark the advent in a practical sense of what Vaughan would later yearn for under a mystical aspect in Silex Scintillans: his second childhood. His decision to place Tristia V iii at the head of the sequence, though it comes last of the four in Ovid, draws out this connection. Vaughan subtitled it ‘To his Fellow-Poets at Rome upon the Birth-day of Bacchus’, but in fact it is set not on Bacchus’s birthday but on his re-birthday: having been born prematurely when the appearance of his father, Zeus, ‘in his full Olympian splendour’, replete with lightning and thunderbolts destroyed his mother, Semele, the infant Bacchus was sewn back into a slit in one of Zeus’s thighs and reborn some time later.161 This fact, mentioned in passing in Ovid in a participial complement to the main clause (‘scilicet hanc legem nentes fatalia Parcae j stamina bis genito bis cecinere tibi’), is given priority in the sentence and its grammatical construction by Vaughan: ‘But thou wert twice-born, and the Fates to thee j (To make all sure) doubled thy misery’.162 But it is not only the association of Ovid’s exile poetry with childhood in general which is activated in Vaughan’s selections from it; the charges of childishness particularly levelled against it are too. It appears that Vaughan found in Ovid’s exile verse a vehicle for exploring the selfdivisions provoked in him by his exile home: between his ‘longing’ for the ‘intimate communion’ he had enjoyed with Thomas in infancy, and his need to ‘sheer away from’ it as an impediment to ‘full individuation’.163 At Wrst, his Ovid is indeed ‘melted with his own Sorrows’: translating the concluding lines of Tristia V iii, Vaughan redoubled the 161 R 506. 162 ‘Ovid Tristia V iii’, ll. 25–6. 163 Davies, Henry Vaughan, 33.


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lachrymosity of what was already in the original a rather maudlin parting request to the poet’s former friends: And let one of you (touched with my sad name) Mixing his wine with tears, lay down the same, And (sighing) to the rest this thought commend, O! where is Ovid now our banished friend?164

Ovid’s name is not ‘sad’ in the Latin nor does he visualize his friends as ‘touched’ with it, or ‘sighing’ over his fate, while the two tear-choked parentheses in which Vaughan couches those additions were likewise of his own imagining. However, that passage is signiWcantly untypical of Vaughan’s Ovidian quartet as a whole: a counterpoint to the piercingly unsentimental tone which is its home key. Vaughan’s Ovid is not ‘melted’ but caustic. The satirical accents in Ovid’s exilic voice made themselves clear to Vaughan,165 and certainly, to anyone who has waded through Saltonstall’s sickly renderings, the anger of Vaughan’s versions is a tonic. But admirers of Silex Scintillans may Wnd that anger discomWting in the extreme. For the particular object of it is Vaughan’s vision of himself as a child. Consider the second of the four translations: ‘Ovid ex Ponto III vii: To his Friends (after his many Solicitations), Refusing to Petition Caesar for his Releasement’. The original of this poem was a locus classicus for the ‘association between exile and speechlessness’, beginning as it does ‘Verba mihi desunt’. ‘Words fail me’ would be only slightly too chatty (it is, after all, an epistle) but Vaughan gives the quasi-biblical ‘You have consumed my language’,166 and his version of the poem is a miniature bildungsroman: the growth of an exiled poet’s mind from infancy to experience. The moment of maturation occurs at the start of the second paragraph and is announced in a sarcastic inversion of the motif shortly to become staple in Silex at junctures of spiritual rebirth: But I am now awaked; forgive my dream Which made me cross the proverb and the stream, And pardon, friends, that I so long have had Such good thoughts of you, I am not so mad As to continue them.167 164 ‘Tristia V iii’, ll. 51–4. 165 They have done to modern commentators too: see, for instance, Jo-Marie Claasen, Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Boethius (1999), pp. 139–46. 166 ‘Ex Ponto III vii’, l. 1. 167 Ibid., ll. 9–13; Rudrum glosses line 10: ‘Vaughan is probably thinking of a saying like ‘swmming against the stream (or current, or ride)’, meaning here, ‘I can no longer

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The dream the poet so prides himself on having awoken from here is the one Vaughan will long to perpetuate in Silex: that of understanding like a child. Ovid gave Vaughan the hint for this repudiation of childishness, the adjective ‘novella’ (‘inexperienced’), when contrasting his own tolerance for suVering with that of a newly harnessed bull which ‘objects to the plough and wrenches his inexperienced neck from the yoke’ (‘detractat aratrum, j subtrahit et duro colla novella iugo’); but Vaughan made explicit the implication of the adjective’s diminutive form (the bull has a thin neck and is therefore young) and generalized the episode into an archetype of a child’s temper tantrum by declining to stipulate the species of juvenile animal at issue: ‘’Tis for some young beast j To kick his bands, or wish his neck released j From the sad yoke.’168 Thereafter, additional minor insinuations not in the original conWrm that it is for Vaughan rather than Ovid that accustoming oneself to the suVerings of exile is a matter of suppressing whatever remains of the child in that self; as, notably, when he interposes at the head of the series of rhetorical questions Ovid uses to make the case for despair (‘Why did I ever hope for mercy?’ and so on), as if in prećis of that argument, one informed by the assumption that hope, like our mother’s milk, is something from which we must be weaned: ‘Why nurse I sorrows then?’169 Or, again, there is the last of the four: ‘Ovid Tristia III iii’. In this case Vaughan’s refusal to suVer the child in himself occurs obliquely, takes a form possibly too dark for him to have brought to full consciousness. ‘To his Wife at Rome, When he was Sick’ (as Vaughan subtitled it) begins with ‘a surprising intimacy of [his] own making’—‘Dearest!’— one Vaughan otherwise reserved for ‘the divine’.170 But by choosing to translate this particular poem what Vaughan was contemplating losing which may be intimately dear to a husband was not only a wife but also the children she would be expected to bear him. Ovid’s letter to his wife is about posterity, yet children are conspicuously absent. The poet desires not merely death but annihilation: ‘I wish my soul died with my breath j And that no part of me were free from death’.171 ‘No part of me’, not even that part—children—through which (as much as through their eternal souls) men were held in the elegaic tradition to cheat death. Ovid’s hopes of futurity are rooted solely and solidly in his literary rather than his bodily issue: ‘my books . . . j . . . strong and lasting battle on believing that you are my friend in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence’ (R 508). 168 ‘Ex Ponto III vii’, ll. 19–21. 169 Ibid., l. 39. 170 West, Scripture Uses, 8–9. 171 Ovid Tristia III iii’, ll. 65–6.


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monuments of me’.172 Both of those passages Vaughan reproduced more or less word for word; yet, as his echoic self-presentations in Olor Iscanus make clear, he did not believe he had so far written anything which would deserve to live beyond his death, and so could not share in Ovid’s conWdent expectation of literary immortality. He could, however, reasonably hope to achieve what passed for biological immortality by fathering a child. To translate Tristia III iii so literally, preserving its childless conception of posterity so untransformed, was to abandon that hope or at least contemplate its abandonment. This would be telling enough if we suppose (as scholars generally have) that Vaughan’s versions of Ovid date from early in the Wrst phase of the composition of Olor, before his marriage to Catherine Wise. But the sobering possibility also exists that Vaughan composed or revised his translation of Tristia III iii during the second phase of the volume’s composition, by which time he was father certainly to one or two, and perhaps to three or all four, of his children from his Wrst marriage: Thomas, Lucy, Frances, and Catherine. Throughout his translations from Ovid’s exile verse, then, Vaughan is antagonistic towards childhood: at a Wgurative level, he conXates childlikeness with childishness; and in real children, whether or not he himself yet had any, he Wnds no consolation. What would soon become Vaughan’s most abundant source of hope as a poet of spiritual exile is choked oV in these early secular responses to his predicament. Over and over again, with macabre precision, as if he were halfconscious of traducing what it was in his deepest nature to treasure, Vaughan denigrates those childhood potentialities back to which the exiled poet of Silex will journey: dream, hope, silence. He does so, moreover, not merely at a thematic level but also on the plane of his poetic self-understanding; and most particularly in his self-understanding as a translator. Just as his ideal hopes of recovering infant ‘wholeness’ had found a natural outlet in his theorizing about translation, most childlike of imaginative modes, so it was in his practice as a translator that Vaughan vented the hostility towards the child in himself, the fears of appearing childish, occasioned in him by the disappointment of those hopes at the time of his return to Brecknock. The association Vaughan repeatedly underscores in the Ovid translations between exile and infancy in the root sense is inherently reXexive; his angry repudiations of want of voice generally occur, as we 172 Ibid., ll. 83–4.

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have seen, in additions or interpolations, thereby implying a rejection of the vision of the translator as infant which he had glimpsed in ‘To my Learned Friend, Mr T. Powell’ and within which so much of his future self as the poet of Silex lay recluse. Vaughan formally signals that rejection in the opening paragraph of ‘Ovid ex Ponto III vii’, immediately before he pronounces himself ‘now awaked’. Present in this passage are all the elements of the model of translation he elaborated when praising Powell’s rendering of Malvezzi—exile, apocalypticism, infancy—only in a sardonic rather than a visionary conWguration: You grant, you knew my suit: my Muse, and I Had taught it you in frequent elegy, That I believe (yet sealed) you have divined Our repetitions, and forestalled my mind, So that my thronging elegies, and I Have made you (more than poets) prophesy.173

The added parenthesis ‘(more than poets)’ makes clear that the lines mark a poetic choice of life. That poets have the power to prophesy was, of course, a given in Vaughan’s lifetime. Here, though, he repudiates that power, sarcastically attributing it to the ungrateful friends who have abandoned him in his exile and whom he conXates, it appears, with the ‘mechanick preachers’ attacked in the preamble to his ‘Tenth Satire of Juvenal’ and soon to begin swarming all over his native region. In fact, the lines are twinned with that earlier passage by their underlying apocalyptic conceit: when Vaughan says he believes that the recipients of his letters have ‘divined’ their contents ‘(yet sealed)’ he makes those letters sound like the sealed rolls of the Book of Revelation. Partly this lends Vaughan’s verdict on the treachery of his friends the force of the Last Judgment, much as he had fantasized about wakening the selfproclaimed saints from their ‘Everlasting Nap’ to hear the trump of their Juvenalian doom. But it also credits the poet’s betrayers with the capacity to ‘divine’ that Judgment without breaking the seals, and the reason they can do this is because Vaughan’s complaints against them are so lamely predictable. The remarkable noun Vaughan chose for that predictability construes it as that of an ‘infant’ translator. His monotonous moaning missives are ‘repetitions’. By continuing to write them, the poet was wasting his breath. But now he has ‘awaked’ from the dream that his complaints will be heard, and that awakening is enacted 173 ‘Ex Ponto III vii’, ll. 1–8.


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in his conduct as a translator. In this passage Vaughan has departed drastically and often from his Ovidian original, done anything but repeat it: recovered from want of voice, he is speaking up loudly. How the poet who prided himself in that passage and throughout his translations from Ovid’s exile verse on facing up to the facts of his exile home in a spirit of hardbitten realism became the poet of Silex, whose highest aspiration is to be one of those ‘travellers’ who ‘dream homes of their own’,174 who rejects the ‘smooth seducements’ of accommodation to present political realities, exhorting himself instead to ‘Wll thy breast with home; think on thy dream’,175 is not a question literary criticism alone can answer. Some necessary causes of this conversion may suggest themselves to the academic student of Vaughan’s poetry, but not a suYcient understanding of its causation. We can, though, venture a little further along this line of inquiry, towards the outermost limit of the literary critic’s jurisdiction, by looking at one more of Vaughan’s translations, the one which immediately follows the quartet from Ovid, which caps its meditation on the aspects and values of childhood, and which invokes (what was for Vaughan) the supreme pattern of despair translated into hope: ‘Ausonii Cupido, Edyl. 6’, as it was listed in Olor, or, to give the original’s full title, ‘Cupido Cruciatur’. This is much the least discussed and least understood of Vaughan’s Olor translations: those from Ovid have received extensive treatment, of course, and even those from Boethius and Casimire, uncongenial though they are in many respects to modern literary critics, have found students if not admirers;176 ‘Ausonii Cupido, Edyl. 6’, however, remains largely undiscovered country. Jonathan F. S. Post ignored it completely in his inaugurative Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (1982), and in the most recent account of Vaughan’s translations Wilcher still ventures just one short and rather sketchy paragraph.177 Yet there are a number of reasons to suspect that ‘Ausonii Cupido, Edyl. 6’ was crucial to Vaughan’s poetic and spiritual development. To begin with, there is its placement within the sequence of translations in Olor; following the selections from Ovid and preceding those from Boethius and Casimire, it represents the midpoint, the capital as it were, of the arc the sequence describes from pagan to Christian: the site of conversion. In one sense, this is a simple 174 ‘The Pilgrimage’, ll. 1, 8–9. 175 ‘The ProVer’, l. 45. 176 On the former, see Nauman, ‘Boethius and Henry Vaughan’, in Of Paradise and Light, ed. Dickson and Nelson, 192–201; and on the latter, Maren-SoWe Rostvig, ‘Casimire Sarbiewski and the English Ode’, Studies in Philology, 51 (1954), 443–60. 177 Wilcher, ‘Vaughan’s Verse Translations’, 156–7.

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matter of chronology. Then again, Ausonius was a Wgure who naturally embodied controversy over the relative merits of paganism and Christianity within the culture of late-antique Europe, and who did so particularly for Vaughan. A fourth-century French rhetorician, he was the tutor of the future convert and saint, Paulinus, whose biography, complete with letters to and from his former teacher debating his conversion, Vaughan would soon translate.178 Finally, there is the fact that ‘Cupido Cruciatur’ belongs to a mode—biblical travesty—redolent of conversion, or at least apostasy. Ausonius opposed Paulinus’s conversion to Christianity; in ‘Cupido Cruciatur’ he reversed it, poetically speaking: profaned the sacred narrative of the Passion, converted the supreme manifestation of God’s love for mankind into an amorous escapade from pagan mythology. A spin-oV from the Aeneid, one of the poetic remora which swam down the centuries on the back of Virgil’s fame, ‘Cupido Cruciatur’ was in Vaughan’s day well regarded, and a particular favourite among sequestrated royalists: Thomas Stanley published a version in his Poems and Translations (1647), which Vaughan may even have known and which certainly provides a useful point of comparison.179 The poem is set in the Virgilian underworld, speciWcally the ‘Welds of mourning’ (‘Lugentes Campi’) where the ghosts of women betrayed or abandoned by their lovers wander endlessly bemoaning their fate. Their complaints are interrupted by the arrival of Cupid whom, despite the gloom and his feeble eVorts at disguise, they immediately recognize and, after a brief chase, capture. They tie him to a myrtle tree, ‘hateful from the vengeance of the gods’ (‘invidiosa deum poenis’),180 subject him to a mocktrial and, having found him guilty of causing their suVerings, proceed to punish him. Or at least to exact such punishment as ghosts are capable of: brandishing airy swords at him, pricking him with their bodkins (only for his blood to turn to roses) or singeing his skin with the torches they carry. Finally, his mother, Venus, joins in (she blames Cupid for 178 Primitive Holiness, set forth in the Life of blessed Paulinus, the most Reverend and Learned Bishop of Nola (1654); the place of this work within Vaughan’s self-understanding as ‘Anglican survivalist’ is discussed in Post, Unfolding Vision, 135–42, which, however, does not make the connection with Vaughan’s previous engagement with Ausonius. 179 Stanley appears to have come across the poem whilst translating the ‘Basia’ of Joannes Secundus in the edition of Dominici Baudii Amores edente Petro Scriverio (Leiden, 1638): ‘Cupido Cruciatur’ is printed, together with the Pervigilium Veneris, in the second part of this compound edition; for Stanley’s use of it, see the notes to his translations of Secundus, in The Poems and Translations of Thomas Stanley, ed. G. Crump (Oxford, 1962), p. 392. 180 ‘Cupido Cruciatur’, l. 57.


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Cupid punished, from Andrea Alciati, Emblems (1546)

inducing her to commit adultery with Mars), whipping him with a garland of roses. Then, suddenly, the women change their minds and release him, having come round to the view that Fate was responsible for their deaths; at which point the poem evaporates in a haze of insubstantiality. Cupid dreamed the whole thing, it turns out, and he leaves the underworld by the ivory gate through which, at the end of Book VI of the Aeneid, its inhabitants send false visions up to the world above. Connections between this rather strange poem and Vaughan’s selections from Ovid are not far to seek. The ‘mourning Welds’ are the mythological counterpart to the psychological landscape of the Tristia and the Ex Ponto, while the rejected lovers themselves are inherently

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Ovidian and exilic Wgures: they include several—Ariadne, Canace, Dido, Phaedra, Sappho—whose causes Ovid had taken up in Heroides, where much of the groundwork for his own later self-presentation as exile was laid.181 Lastly, and most notably in the present connection, the poem’s protagonist—Cupid—is a child. But if ‘Cupido Cruciatur’ presented Vaughan with a number of congenial concerns and motifs, it oVered few indications about how they were interrelated, or what their total eVect might be. Structurally speaking, the poem is a mess. Ausonius himself conceded that he had failed to realize his vision in a prefatory epistle to his son which Stanley (but not Vaughan) included in his translation. A painting of Cupid being cruciWed struck him powerfully: ‘This Piece for Art and Argument I Wrst admir’d, then transferr’d my excesse of admiration to the folly of Poetizing. I like nothing of it but the Title; yet I commend my Errour to Thee: we love our own Blemishes and Scars, and not content to sin alone aVect that others love them too.’182 But the poem’s structural incoherence is the key to its signiWcance for Vaughan. Combining ‘excess’ with ‘Errour’ (‘structural miscellaneousness’, not just ‘failure’), ‘Cupido Cruciatur’ is itself dreamlike as well as being set in a dream-world. It is badly in need of interpretation, one of the traditional functions of the translator. Vaughan makes eVorts to discover its internal logic; nevertheless, a residual dreaminess survives. This property of resistant latency is what makes ‘Ausonii Cupido, Edyl. 6’ so suggestive as a guide to Vaughan’s state of mind as his conversion neared. Growing secretly within it is the seed of the poet he would soon Xower into. Vaughan’s attempted rationalization of the poem proceeds along the lines we might expect from reading his Ovid versions. He wants to make it an object lesson about the dangers of solipsism and delusion, the contagion of fantasy from which exiles are signally at risk. The opening lines are once again diagnostic. Vaughan immediately focuses, with the eye of a future doctor, on the atmosphere of the mourning Welds, the miasma of melancholy breathed in and out by ‘the sad, thoughtful ghosts’.183 Terms for air and breath recur throughout the Wrst two periods of the translation, none directly warranted by Ausonius’s original phrasing and most underscored by rhyme or 181 For the relation between the Heroides and the exile verse, see, for instance, Stephen Harrison, ‘Ovid and Genre: Evolutions of an Elegist’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Hardie, 79–94 (at 89–90). 182 Stanley, Poems and Translations, ed. Crump, 132. 183 ‘Ausonius Cupido’, l. 3.


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assonance: ‘In those blest Welds of everlasting air j (Where to a myrtlegrove the souls repair j Of deceased lovers)’; ‘each accosts j The other with a sigh, whose very breath j Would break a heart’; and ‘A sickly dull air fans them, which can have j When most in force scarce breath to build a wave’ (my emphases).184 ‘Sickly’, in that culminating instance, broaches the personal signiWcance of these atmospherics of self-pity for Vaughan, whose health had given way under the burden of his misfortunes. It is as if he were listening anxiously for the death-rattle of ‘despair’ (the word to which his repetitions of ‘air’tend, and which will duly culminate the sequence four lines later) in his own lungs. Certainly, Vaughan doses the poem at regular intervals with the poetic equivalent of an antiintoxicant, underscoring again and again the status of the ghostly cast-oV women as impotent fantasists;185 as, most notably, when he interpolates an extended simile at the critical moment when they capture Cupid: As in a dream we strive To voice our thoughts, & vainly would revive Our entranced tongues, but can not speech enlarge ’Til the soul wakes and reassumes her charge, So joyous of their prize, they Xock about And vainly swell with an imagined shout.186

Here again Vaughan disavows ‘dream’, subordinating it strictly to the ‘charge’ of the reasoning ‘soul’; here again the disavowal is enacted in his translatorial conduct: adding the simile, he ‘wakes’ from the sleep of literalism, breaks his Ausonian ‘trance’, ‘reassumes charge’; and here again, indeed more explicitly than in previous examples, it is tantamount to disavowing the child in himself. The spectral deserted women, able to raise only ‘an imagined shout’, are ‘infant’; Vaughan does what they cannot: Wnds his voice. But if, from one perspective, the triad of exile, translation, and childhood appears, in Vaughan’s version of ‘Cupido Cruciatur’, locked more tightly than ever into a somnophobic conWguration, an alternative outlook is also possible in which ‘Ausonii Cupido, Edyl. 6’ begins the 184 Ibid., ll. 1–3, 4–6, 11–12. 185 He may have been taking a hint from the tradition of editorial commentary on the poem: in the edition used by Stanley, for instance, the French scholar Elias Vineti notes Ausonius’s repeated application of the adjective ‘inanis’ to the ghosts and their activities, commenting ‘apud mortuos verarum rerum sunt tantum umbrae & eYgies [‘among the dead are found only shadows and simulacra of true things’] (Dominici Baudii Amores, sig. P4r ). 186 ‘Ausonius Cupido’, ll. 67–72.

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process of loosening that emotional log-jam. For Ausonius’s excessive, miscellaneous vision overstretches the interpretative framework into which Vaughan attempts to compress it. In particular, there is the question of how Cupid is to be Wtted into that framework. If the ghostly rejected women Wgure childishness, how is their hostility towards the actual child in the poem to be understood? The translation provides no deWnite answer to this question; its presentation of Cupid is signally unstable. Partly Vaughan inculpates him, suggesting he comes to the mourning Welds to gloat at the women, ‘To see these trophies of his wanton bow’ (Ausonius provides no motivation for his arrival).187 But subsequent references (more in the spirit of the original) to the impish deity as ‘Rash, unadvised boy!’ and ‘the wag’188 put a gloss of Cavalier indulgence, such as is more consistently applied in Stanley’s version, on his erotic mischief-making. Then, when Vaughan reaches the point where the women themselves exonerate Cupid, far from suppressing its implications, he ampliWes them. Ausonius says they ‘prefer to blame the cruelty of Fate for their deaths’ (‘funera crudeli malunt adscribere fato’) and ‘pardon and forgive the boy’s oVences’ (‘condonatas puero dimittere culpas’);189 Vaughan that ‘with joint consent j Fate is made guilty, and he innocent’.190 Of course, it is the women who ‘make’ Cupid innocent, countermanding their own previous verdict; their Wckleness was perhaps uppermost in Vaughan’s thoughts. Yet his elision of the second ‘made’ and his positioning of ‘innocent’ at the rhyme combine to broach his (soon to be) favourite conception of childhood as a ‘harmless age’.191 Seeing Cupid in this light brings into focus a reading of Ausonius’s poem which runs counter to that Vaughan was essaying when he derided the ‘injured ladies’ as infantile fantasists; indeed, which runs counter to the entire drift of world-weariness, disenchantment, un-childishness or anti-childlikeness, we have been following in Vaughan’s exile translations. Once Cupid becomes innocent, the phantoms who persecute him become Wgures of experience, understood not as disabused prudence but as dispirited pragmatism. They become early embodiments of the principle, axiomatic throughout Silex, that ‘seeing much . . . make[s] staid eyes’; forerunners of the jaundiced ‘worldlings’ in ‘Child-hood’

187 ‘Ausonius Cupido’, l. 55. 189 ‘Cupido Cruciatur’, l. 98. 191 ‘Child-hood’, l. 31.

188 Ibid., ll. 56, 67. 190 ‘Ausonius Cupido’, ll. 129–30.


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who, ‘Checking the poor child for his play’, ‘gravely cast themselves away’192 (exile themselves from the land of the living to the grave by their deathly ‘gravity’). On this reading, ‘Cupido Cruciatur’, far from warning that those who suVer abandonment are at risk of infantilizing themselves through delusion and fantasy, cautions that they may be driven, in their determination to avoid such solipsism, to solace themselves with a vengeful—infanticidal—‘realism’. The consolations that the poem exposes as false are not those of regression (‘backward steps’) to childishness but of progression (‘forward motion’) away from childlikeness. The relevance of this possible reading of Ausonius’s poem to the interrelations of exile and childhood as I have been plotting them within Vaughan’s Olor translations is clear enough. But in order to elicit its signiWcance with regard to the larger matter of the relation between Vaughan’s work as a translator and his imminent conversion we need to introduce another feature of Cupid’s role in ‘Cupido Cruciatur’, the last and most consequential of the factors which prevented Vaughan from developing a single coherent response to the infant god of love: his status as an analogue of the cruciWed Christ. The analogy is nowhere made explicit in Vaughan’s translation, but it is of course a constant underpresence, and occasionally comes close to the surface. For example, at the point where Cupid is ‘condemned, while with united fury j They all assail him’ as ‘a thief at bar’.193 This passage Vaughan considerably expanded, ostensibly to political eVect (his Cupid is another lone innocent destroyed by a mob, like Sejanus/ StraVord in ‘The Tenth Satire of Juvenal’) but with Christological resonance too, both because of the particular details he elected to emphasize (Cupid, like Christ, is treated like ‘a thief ’) and, more generally, because for Vaughan the ultimate exemplar of this Cavalier style of heroism, the supreme innocent ‘slain by the crowd’,194 is Christ. Or, again, when Vaughan describes Cupid’s rose-scourged body as ‘bedewed . . . j With a thin bloody sweat’195 (Ausonius has ‘purpureum . . . rorem’, ‘purple dew’; Stanley, characteristically, preserves the decadent poeticism)196, the mingled blood and 192 Ibid., ll. 17, 27, 29–30. 193 ‘Ausonius Cupido’, ll. 88–9: Vaughan may have been prompted to recall the inherent Christological potential of this scene by Ausonius’s reference at this point to Cupid as ‘Love’—‘reus est sine crimine, iudice nullo j accusatur Amor’ (‘Love is found guilty without charge, condemned without a judge’). 194 ‘Jacob’s Pillow, and Pillar’, l. 21. 195 Ibid., ll. 124–5. 196 ‘Cupido Cruciatur’, l. 90.

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sweat which streams down Christ’s body during the Passion being a prime focus of devotion for conformist English men and women, and particularly so for Vaughan. The signature motifs of restorative springing liquids found throughout Silex ultimately derive from this iconographic source: ‘What springs of sweat, and blood did drown thee!’,197 it is no surprise to Wnd Vaughan exclaiming in ‘The Passion’. To extrapolate these latent parallels between Cupid and Christ is to uncover beneath Ausonius’s scene of pagan mythology a sacred image whose power of suggestion in terms of Vaughan’s future poetic and religious development could scarcely be overstated: a Passion combined with a Nativity; not just the cruciWed Christ but the Christ-child cruciWed. That image is the way out of the crisis of hopelessness recorded in the Ovid translations. Jonathan Post once brilliantly suggested that Vaughan in those translations tacitly aligns his suVerings with those of Christ: ‘by beginning the sequence with Bacchus and ending with Judas, Vaughan slyly insinuates that we see the camaraderie of the former occasion, which once included himself, as, in fact, a Last Supper of sorts’.198 ‘Slyly’, presumably, because to do so openly would risk blasphemy. But it was usual meditative practice for early-modern Christians to identify with Christ in their suVerings; with the crucial proviso that they also identiWed themselves with Christ’s betrayers and cruciWers. Dying with Christ, in the hope of being reborn with Him, entailed this dual engagement in the Passion. In so far as ‘Ausonii Cupido, Edyl. 6’ culminates the Passion narrative which underlies Vaughan’s Ovid translations, therefore, it brings Vaughan to the brink of such cruciWxal selfunderstanding. The train of theological thought would go as follows: betrayed by his friends, ‘the Judases of this Touch-stone Age’, Vaughan has been driven by the despair that betrayal induced in him to become a betrayer in his turn, not a Judas but a Simon Peter; denying the possibility of redemption, the hopeful child in himself, and denying Christ in denying that child (three times over, as it happens; in the second, third, and fourth of the Ovid translations). In this apostasy, however, lie the roots of his conversion; on the principle of divine economy most perfectly exempliWed in the Passion. It was the child in Vaughan that ‘died’ in exile; and it is in his love of ‘angel-infancy’ that he will be reborn in Silex. 197 ‘The Passion’, l. 23.

198 Post, Unfolding Vision, 61.


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Will be. Vaughan did not extrapolate the Christological potentialities of ‘Cupido Cruciatur’ in the manner I have outlined. The cruciWed vision of the poem is no more than latent in his translation: a dream that evaporates before the waking mind can quite grasp it. Vaughan has the words which could give him new life on the tip of his tongue in ‘Ausonii Cupido, Edyl. 6’ but no ears as yet to hear them. Actually, he turns a deaf ear to them. When at the end of the poem Cupid Xies out of the underworld through the gate of ivory, portal of false visions, Vaughan draws the consolatory moral: As in a dream with dangers we contest, And Wctious pains seem to aZict our rest, So frighted only in these shades of night Cupid (got loose) stole to the upper light199

That most pains are Wctious, dreams that vanish once we recognize how the mind makes suVerings of what are in truth matters of indiVerence or even consummations devoutly to be wished (poverty, ugliness, anonymity), was a staple tenet of Stoic consolation. Vaughan’s Wrst resort in exile had been to this Stoic terrain, to translate one of the archetypal poetic recensions of it ( Juvenal’s tenth satire) and he would end his exile translations by revisiting it, in his renderings of Boethius and Casimire. There he aVects to commit himself to the path of moderated desire and the golden mean: neither fear The future, nor too much give ear To present joys; and give no scope To grief, nor much to Xattering hope. For when these rebels reign, the mind Is both a prisoner, and stark blind.200

But Vaughan’s future did not lie in this philosophical middle way. Rather, he was destined to go down the road of extremes rejected in the last of those lines, with its references to captivity and blindness (which he added), the road marked out by the Wgure of the cruciWed infant god of Love. Becoming a poet of exile for Vaughan would mean laying his suVerings in all their extremeness at the foot of the cross, not minimizing them through feats of rationality. It would 199 ‘Ausonius Cupido’, ll. 131–4. 200 ‘Boethius Consolation of Philosophy I vii’, ll. 23–8.

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mean acknowledging the childish immoderation of his despair in order that it might be transformed, under the aspect of the Passion, into a childlike completeness of hope. The dream Vaughan dismissed at the end of his translation of ‘Cupido Cruciatur’ he would in Silex Scintillans awake and Wnd truth.

chapter 2 The Secret Lives of Abraham Cowley

Abraham Cowley by Sir Peter Lely (c.1666–7)

‘ 82 ’ Abraham Cowley was working as a secret agent when he took up translation. Having followed Queen Henrietta Maria into exile in France some time between the summer of 1644 and the spring of 1646, the poet had, through the good oYces of his former patron, Henry, Lord Jermyn, the queen’s chamberlain, been given responsibility for overseeing Her Majesty’s encrypted correspondence with the king in England and her other relatives and supporters throughout Europe. According to his friend and biographer Thomas Sprat, Cowley ‘ciphered and deciphered, with his own hand, the greatest part of all the letters that passed between their Majesties, and managed a vast intelligence in many other parts, which for some years together took up all his days and two or three nights every week’.1 When the execution of Charles I reduced the size of this task, the queen found supplementary uses for what Sprat terms Cowley’s ‘unsuspected secrecy’,2 sending him abroad on a number of clandestine missions. In 1651 the poet found himself in Jersey, where ‘he had no other Books to direct’ him but an edition of ‘Pindars Works’; struck by ‘the height’ of Pindar’s ‘Invention’ and ‘the Majesty of his Style’, Cowley ‘try’d immediately to imitate it in English’.3 His volume of Pindarique Odes was published in 1656: translations of the First Nemean and the Second Olympian, together with twelve original poems in the Pindaric mode. The habit of connecting Cowley’s interest in translation with his experiences as a spy dates back to the beginnings of modern scholarship on the poet: ‘Unfortunate poet! Reduced to acting as amanuensis and translator of secret documents’,4 exclaimed Arthur Nethercot in 1931. That he meant to imply Cowley’s work as a translator was as unrewardingly mechanical as manipulating the simple substitution codes employed by Henrietta Maria and her correspondents5 is conWrmed by the proportions of Nethercot’s biography: he oVers only passing 1 Thomas Sprat, ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of Abraham Cowley’, in Works (1668), sig. a3r . 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., b1r . 4 A. H. Nethercot, Abraham Cowley: The Muse’s Hannibal (1931), p. 115. 5 For details of the often ‘absurdly easy’ cyphers used by the royalists, see Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 38–41.

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remarks on the translations from classical poets—Greek and Latin, classical and post-classical—which make up a substantial part of Cowley’s output in his later years. Recently, however, commentators have taken a less dim view of the link between Cowley’s work as a translator and his career as a spy. Annabel Patterson’s suggestion that ‘habits of mind induced’ in Cowley ‘by years of living with conspiracy, with necessarily encoded documents, were surely part of the structure of his motivation’ in the Pindarique Odes was the prelude to a reading of them as politically astute and poetically subtle.6 So inXuential has her account of cryptographic method in Cowley’s translations proved that another commentator has lately spoken of the Greek monarchs and heroes featured in those of Pindar’s odes which Cowley translated—Theron, Chromius, Oedipus, and Hercules—as ‘ciphers’ for Charles I without feeling the need to elaborate on the metaphor.7 A strong historical rationale exists for this line of interpretation. The authors of the encryption manuals which circulated among disaVected Cavaliers at home and abroad do indeed speak readily of ‘translating’ coded communications;8 and the corollary—that translation from the classics could provide an outlet for covert expressions of proscribed political views—was also widely recognized, though few were tactless enough to discuss the process openly, as an anonymous friend of the unfortunate Christopher Wase (Denham’s fellow guest at Wilton) did when commending the royalist sentiments obliquely articulated within Wase’s translation of Sophocles’s Electra (1649): ‘For ’tis but Sophocles repeated, and j Eccho cannot be guilty or arraign’d.’9 The paradigm of classical translation as encrypted oppositional discourse nevertheless brings with it a risk of anachronism: it is sometimes applied with reference to the delimited understanding of the category of the political that prevails in modern liberal democracies. For early-modern authors, the root sense of the adjective (from the Greek ‘polis’) remained pressingly current: politics was the entire public or social dimension of their work rather than just their views on the Oath of Engagement or the Westminster Assembly. Quite what public or society poets should be addressing became a fraught question during the seventeenth century as (the Wction of ) national unity collapsed and (many commentators 6 Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison, WI, 1984), p. 157. 7 Stella P. Revard, ‘Cowley’s Pindarique Odes and the Politics of the Inter-regnum’ [sic], Criticism 35 (1993), 391–418 (at 403). 8 Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing, 44–53. 9 Quoted in ibid., 53.

The Secret Lives of Abraham Cowley

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agree) the concept of private life solidiWed.10 To read widely in translation discourse over Cowley’s lifetime is to recognize that narrowly political variations on the cryptographic theme in fact represent only one aspect of a broader and deeper metaphorical association between translation and secrecy which engages fundamental questions about public responsibility and private gratiWcation in the life of the poet. John Kerrigan has urged readers intent on navigating the complex crosstides of Renaissance thought about privacy and publicity to keep in view ‘the important . . . distinction between the socially produced (and socially productive) quality called secrecy and suspect, anti-social solitude’.11 Connotations of illicitness did not predominate within early-modern usages of ‘secret’ as they have come to in the modern age; secrecy was accepted as indispensable to many forms of social relation, binding together the practitioners of particular trades, or clients to their patrons, and members of families or friends to each other. Then again, the precise whereabouts of the dividing line between such ‘socially productive’secrecy, and ‘anti-social’ reticences or protectionisms shifted over time. Particularly so during the period of Cowley’s literary maturity when new imperatives of openness in technological spheres of knowledge coexisted uneasily with traditional canons of discretion in moral conduct; when the impetus towards free communication which informs Bacon’s Advancement of Learning came up against the predisposition towards cautious obliquity which informs his essay ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’. Translation lay on this cultural faultline. On the one hand, translators could be construed as participants in the Baconian war on anti-social ‘secretists’: heroic excavators of hoarded knowledge. Witness the pair of commendatory poems written by William Davenant ‘To the Lord Cary of Lepington upon his Translation of Malvezzi’ and ‘To the Duke of Monmouth on his Translation of Bentivoglio’. Malvezzi and Bentivoglio both wrote on the art of politics and, being Italian and Spanish respectively, were citizens of states conventionally identiWed by English readers with the hugger-mugger of Machiavellianism. But Davenant sets Cary and Monmouth’s eVorts of political decyphering within a larger Baconian context of natural-philosophico-theological enlightenment. 10 See, for instance, Barbara Everett, ‘The Shooting of the Bears: Poetry and Politics in Andrew Marvell’, in Poets in their Time (Oxford, 1991), pp. 32–71 (at 36–7); and lately Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD, 2005). 11 John Kerrigan, ‘Secrecy and Gossip in Twelfth Night’, in Histoire et Secret a` la Renaissance, ed. François Larroque (Paris, 1997), pp. 179–99 (at 195).

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His description of Cary scorning ‘their threats, that would keep knowledge in disguise’ to ‘communicate, j From darker Dialects of a strange Land, j Wisdom’12 is pregnant with the utopianism now recognized as part of Bacon’s legacy to the Royal Society; while the anti-Catholicism latent within such utopianism sounds in Davenant’s praise of Monmouth for serving ‘plain Meate up, and in uncover’d Plate’, whereas ‘those’ (i.e. Catholic priests) ‘who dress’ knowledge ‘in a Forraigne Tongue’ (i.e. the bible in Latin) ‘Bring Meate in cover’d Plate to make men long.’13 Equally, though, translation could be a form of ‘socially produced (and socially productive) secrecy’. The free translator as Denham and Cowley imagined him was intimate with his original: ‘Chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend’, the Earl of Roscommon would soon advise in his Essay on Translated Verse (1684).14 A good translator, like a good friend, got to the heart of the poet he was translating, what Denham termed his ‘Flame’ and Dryden his ‘distinguishing character’. He could save Virgil or Horace or Ovid from the melancholy fate which in Bacon’s essay ‘Of Friendship’ memorably befalls those like the Emperor Commineus’s ‘Wrst master’ Duke Charles the Hardy who ‘communicate secrets with none’: that of becoming ‘cannibals of their own hearts’.15 Quite as much as an opportunity to settle their political scores, it was the prospect of friendly intimacy that drew proscribed poets to translation during the troubled middle decades of the seventeenth century. Free translation recommended itself to these poets as a literary form of the ‘civil shrift or confession’16 (once more in Bacon’s phrase) which friends make to each other. From which it follows that such translation may be as much about concealment as revelation. The privy information which passes between translator and translated may remain within the seal of translation. For what are friends for if not to keep each other’s secrets? This chapter explores the relations between Cowley’s work as a translator and the unstable position translation occupied within his culture where the rival claims of secrecy and openness are concerned. Those contrastive but entangled qualities were lifelong 12 ‘To the Lord Cary of Lepington, upon his Translation of Malvezzi’, ll. 46, 50–2; in The Shorter Poems of William Davenant, ed. A. M. Gibbs (Oxford, 1972). 13 ‘To the Earle of Monmouth, upon his Translation of Bentivoglio’, ll. 13–16. 14 Wentworth Dillon, Fourth Earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse (1684), l. 96; in Augustan Critical Writing, ed. David Womersley (Harmondsworth, 1997). 15 Bacon, The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 141, 139. 16 Ibid., 139.


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concerns for Cowley. The hinterland between them is the home ground of his imagination. As the author of A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy (1661) and of panegyrical odes to the Royal Society, the institution which embodied that philosophy, as well as to particular practitioners of it, he is often considered a doctrinaire anti-secretist, ‘the foremost poet of the new science’.17 But Cowley’s apparent commitment to openness and transparency in matters of natural philosophy is strikingly at odds with the temperamental disposition towards secrecy which he himself and his contemporaries observed in his social and personal life. Having been a secret agent during the Interregnum, he retired after the Restoration— not once but twice. During this Wnal phase of his ‘secret life’, Cowley returned once more to translation; and translation (I am going to suggest) brought Cowley’s self-divisions over secrecy and openness to a head. It provided a focus for those self-divisions, made them matters of daily practice. As Cowley translated, ethical questions relating to the preservation and dissemination of secrets which were integral to his understanding of his self and his culture became absorbed into the tissue of his poetic technique. His preoccupation with those questions considerably predated his involvement with the coded correspondence of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, and it outlasted that involvement. It appears, in some sense, to have been innate to his being as much as a product of the times he lived through; and it culminated in the work in which Cowley took Wnal stock of his life as a poet, the work which will mainly concern me here: the posthumously published Several Discourses, by Way of Essays in Verse and Prose (1668). The story of Cowley’s secret lives begins at the start of his life as a poet. From the Wrst he was teetering on the thin line between ‘socially productive secrecy’ and ‘anti-social solitude’. The beginning of a Renaissance poet’s career was a stressful time; how to break the silence of anonymity, and declare themselves as candidates for fame, was a question which pressed in upon poets from Spenser to Pope.18 Most opted for some variant of Milton’s ‘bitter constraint’ or ‘sad occasion dear’:19 a hack printer had brought out an edition of their work in mangled form, so that the 17 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (1995), p. 241. 18 Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley, CA, 1983), p. 13. 19 ‘Lycidas’ (1637), l. 6.

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publication of an authoritative text had now become necessary; or the death of a close personal friend or a distinguished public Wgure meant it was no longer decent for them to remain silent. Notso Cowley. In ‘A Vote’ (that is, ‘vow’), composed at the age of thirteen, he commits himself to the ethic of rural Horatianism, like many another poet in these ‘Halcyon Dayes’; more unusually, however, he tackles head-on the ironies implicit in his decision to publish a poem about his desire for privacy. He has been forced to do so, Cowley explains, to prevent his philosophical attraction to the secret life being misconstrued as politically or religiously illicit: Lest the misconstring world should chance to say, I durst not but in secret murmurs pray, To whisper Jove’s eare, How much I wish that funerall, Or gape at such a great ones fall, This let all ages heare, And future tymes in my soules picture see What I abhorre, what I desire to bee.20

The accusations canvassed here were to bedevil Cowley for much of his career; and already these lines inspire little conWdence about his chances of disproving them. One need not be much of a sceptic to suspect that it is not ‘the misconstring world’ but rather the poet himself for whom the division between privacy and Machiavellian subterfuge (‘in secret murmurs pray. . . j How much I wish that funerall’) or Popish chicanery (‘whisper Jove’s eare’) has become blurred. Hence the second and third lines in particular: praying in private, ‘alone and apart’ as the bible recommends, was the prime instance of innocuous secrecy in earlymodern culture; in later years, when Cowley received the copy of George MacKenzie’s Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Publick Employment (1665) which John Evelyn sent him on its publication, he cannot have been surprised to Wnd MacKenzie reminding his readers that ‘God almighty. . . hath commanded us to retire into our Closets (the most solitary of all our rooms) and to make these yet more retired, hath ordained us to close our doors behind us when we make any religious applications to him; promising that he who seeth in secret, will reward us openly.’21 Yet the adolescent Cowley glamorizes even his prayers into 20 W ii. 48. 21 Public and Private Life in the Seventeenth Century: The MacKenzie–Evelyn Debate, ed. Brian Vickers (New York, 1986), p. 51.


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plots, sacriWcing syntactic coherence to savour the eVect in two interchangeable phrases, ‘in secret murmurs pray’ and ‘To whisper Jove’s eare’. Readers, ‘misconstring’ or otherwise, would have found plenty in Cowley’s subsequent writings to suggest that he was prey to what C. P. Snow once called ‘the euphoria of secrecy’.22 In the preface to Poetical Blossoms (1636), commenting on the doubts some readers had (apparently) expressed about the authorship of his earliest published pieces, Cowley lingered over the image of himself as a cypher, a front for an older, more established poet: ‘a Pipe, which never sounds but when ’tis blowed in . . . not . . . Abraham Cowley, but Authorem anonymum’.23 In The Mistress (1647), motifs of the clandestine recur in poem after poem; as, for instance, in ‘Honour’, whose speaker hopes to outXank his beloved’s scruples ‘By the night’s obscurity, j And obscurer secresie’;24 or ‘The vain love’, whose speaker, in his ‘Covetous Passion’, ‘did approve j The Hoording up, not Use of Love’;25 or ‘Maidenhead’, whose speaker, searching for what he supposes can never be found, namely, a chaste woman, compares himself to an alchemist who, though he ‘his great secret miss j (For neither it in Art or Nature is) j Yet things well worth his toyle he gains: j And does his Charge and Labour pay j With good unsought experiments by the way.’26 Love, for Cowley, is covert activity; the scenarios he favours from the sonneteer’s traditional repertoire are those involving the suppression of the feelings or identities of lovers, scenarios whose conspiratorial resonances he never fails to amplify. Thus, in ‘Love Undiscovered’, the speaker’s ‘Love’s so great, that it might prove j Dang’rous, to tell her that I love’;27 in ‘Silence’, the speaker lays a ‘Curse on this Tongue, that has my Heart betray’d, j And his great Secret open laid!’;28 and in ‘Love’s Visibility’, the speaker fears that if his face doesn’t betray him ‘But keep the secret wisely, yet, j Like Drunkenness, into the Tongue ’twill get’.29 Finally, there is ‘Written in Juice of Lemmon’, the master instance which extrapolates this tendency to its logical conclusion, a love letter whose contents will become visible only when it is held up to a Wre, and whose quintessentially Cowleian author dares ‘write Poetry’ to his beloved only ‘Whilst what I write I do not see.’30 22 Quoted in Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (Oxford, 1984), p. 283. 23 ‘To the Reader’; W ii. 3. 24 W i. 145. 25 Ibid., 82. 26 Ibid., 129. 27 Ibid., 99. 28 Ibid., 131. 29 Ibid., 123. 30 Ibid., 72.

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As well as being a recurrent theme in Cowley’s poems, secretiveness is an indigenous property of their style, evident in particular in a rhythmic mannerism—signature tune—which he developed early in his career and never lost. This was the habit of interposing bracketed phrases in the opening periods of his poems. ‘The Frailty’: I know ’tis sordid, and ’tis low; (All this as well as you I know) Which I so hotly now pursue (I know all this as well as you)31

‘Acme and Septimius, out of Catullus’: Whilst on Septimius panting Breast, (Meaning nothing less then Rest) Acme leaned her loving head Thus the pleas’d Septimius said.32

‘On the Queen’s Repairing Somerset House’: When God (the Cause to Me and Men unknown) Forsook the Royal Houses, and his Own And both abandon’d to the Common Foe33

‘Ode upon Dr Harvey’: Coy Nature (which remained, though aged grown, A beauteous virgin still, enjoyed by none, Nor seen unveiled by anyone), When Harvey’s violent passion she did see, Began to tremble and to Xee;34

Every one of these bracketed phrases has some bearing on the subject of secrecy: the two in ‘The Frailty’ show that the speaker is privy to the tawdry reality of his own desires; the one in ‘Acme and Septimius’ reveals that the speaker is in on the ulterior sexual motives of Acme’s seemingly innocent gesture; the one in ‘On the Queen’s Repairing Somerset House’ aYrms the impenetrable mysteriousness of God’s decision not to intervene to prevent the Civil War; and the one in the ‘Ode upon Dr Harvey’describes the inscrutability of Nature. Brackets, of course, are the natural orthographic sign of secrecy: they invite a phonetic dip in the reading voice, sotto voce complicity between writer and reader, and they 31 W i. 113. 33 Ibid., 433.

32 Ibid., 419. 34 Ibid., 416.


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look like private chambers of meaning, as Renaissance writers on privacy recognized.35 George MacKenzie was employing a familiar mimetic eVect in the passage on prayer I quoted earlier when he wrote of closets as ‘(the most solitary of all our rooms)’. Cowley’s heavy reliance on brackets at the openings of his poems is telling: it is as if he instinctively recoiled from the shock of self-revelation entailed in beginning to write; as if the potential extent and variety of his audience oppressed him, so that he could not proceed until he had miniaturized that audience at least in his own mind, condensed it into an e´lite, a secret society. Two examples of the habit from Cowley’s prose prefaces support this contention: his conWding to the ‘Reader (I know not yet whether Gentle or no)’ of his juvenilia that ‘Some, I know, have been angry. . . at my Poetical Boldness’36 in publishing so early; and to that of the Wrst two books of Libri Plantarum that ‘(to confess to thee as a Friend, for such I will presume thee)’ the ‘pleasing Solaces of literature’ consoled his ‘wearisomeness of humane AVairs’.37 In a sense, then, by appointing Cowley to superintend Henrietta Maria’s encrypted correspondence, Henry Jermyn was showing himself to be a sensitive reader of the poet’s work, earning the reputation for exquisite poetic taste so lavishly bestowed on him by the many poets to whom he had acted as patron. But the appointment made Cowley prey to the charges he had foreseen being brought against him in ‘A Vote’; from now on, his philosophical esteem for the secret life would be inextricably bound up with covert political activity. When the poet returned to England in the summer of 1654, following the passage of the Act of Oblivion granting amnesty to former adherents of the King’s cause, he did so at the behest of his Stuart paymasters who ‘thought Wt’, as Sprat reports, ‘that he should . . . under pretence of privacy and retirement . . . take occasion of giving notice of the posture of things in this nation’.38 But the Cromwellian intelligence services didn’t fall for the ruse: ‘82’ (as Cowley was codenamed) was kept under regular surveillance by the double-agent Colonel Joseph BampWeld and eventually arrested on the orders of the spymaster Thurloe on 12 April 1655.

35 On relations between brackets and privacy in this period, see John Lennard, But I Digress (Oxford, 1991), pp. 78–89. 36 W ii. 3. 37 Works, 6th edn. (1689), pt. II, sig. A2r , pt. III, sig. b2v . 38 Works (1668), sig. a3r .

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Epicureanism and espionage had converged. The adolescent fantasies Cowley had fearfully indulged in ‘A Vote’ were being acted out. At which point, Cowley’s career of poetic and political secretiveness intersects with the ideology of openness promulgated by disciples of Baconianism and the new science. For the poet’s hefty bail was paid by a scientist: Dr Charles Scarborough. The two had met at Cambridge; both contributed to Voces Votivae (1640), a volume of verse by students and fellows of the university congratulating Charles I and Henrietta Maria on the birth of an heir. They renewed their acquaintance at Oxford in the late 1630s, by which time Scarborough was studying under the great anatomist William Harvey. But since then, their paths had diverged drastically: while Cowley was criss-crossing Europe on undercover missions for Henrietta Maria, Scarborough had distanced himself from his former monarchist associates, reached an accommodation with the republican authorities, and devoted himself to becoming seriously rich. Financially and politically, science had been the remaking of him: anatomy, to be precise, which had come to epitomize the Baconian understanding of natural philosophy as a quest to uncover secrets. (The verb ‘to anatomize’ was already in common use as a catch-all term for that endeavour.) Cowley had long been interested in medicine, as the imagery of his early poems amply demonstrates; and now he urgently needed to invest himself with some of the air of openness which the discipline of anatomy could confer on its practitioners. Under Scarborough’s supervision, he began undertaking ‘anatomical dissections’, as a Wrst step towards exchanging his infamy as a convicted spy for respectability as a ‘doctor of physic’, an honour eventually bestowed on him at Oxford on 2 December 1657. In short, Scarborough oVered Cowley a means of laundering his secretive past. These considerations lend an edge of personal actuality to the seemingly disinterested panoptic conceits of the ode ‘To Dr Scarborough’, which Cowley published shortly after his release from prison. The poem opens with an apocalyptic vision of England as it would have looked had ‘Gods All-mighty Hand j At the same time’ as Civil War was ravaging the nation also ‘let loose Diseases rage’.39 ‘Sure the unpeopled Land j Would now untill’d, desert, and naked stand’, cries Cowley: But Thou by Heaven wert sent This Desolation to prevent, A Medi’cine and a Counter-poyson to the Age, 39 W i. 197.


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Scarce could the Sword dispatch more to the Grave, Then Thou didst save; By wondrous Art, and by successful care The Ruines of a Civil War thou dost alone repair.40

Yet the tone here is not only sweepingly prophetic but also intimately private: Scarborough must indeed have seemed ‘by Heaven . . . sent’ to Cowley when he turned up out of the blue to pay the astronomical sum of the poet’s bail. So too, the ‘Ruines of a Civil War’ which Scarborough is credited with the power to repair are not only those inXicted on the bodies of English men and women in general by the metaphorical civil war of disease, but also those inXicted on Cowley in particular by his conviction as a royalist spy following the actual Civil War. How Scarborough is to eVect the repair of these latter ‘Ruines’ emerges from patterns of metaphor in the main body of the ode. Cowley persistently Wgures the anatomist as a paragon of openness and transparency, in the hope that some of these virtues will rub oV on him as he praises them. In the second strophe, for instance, Scarborough’s success in curing a patient of ‘The cruel Stone’—that is, gallstone—by breaking or melting it is compared to Moses’s action of striking a rock in the desert, so that for the thirsty Israelites ‘straight the Waters freely Xow’.41 At the anatomist’s command, the body’s stony silence is broken, and speech gushes forth. Similarly, in the fourth strophe, the interior workings of the body, the human microcosm, are said to be as clearly visible to Scarborough as the operations of the macrocosm were to the mathematician Archimedes who ‘in his Sphere of Glass j Saw the whole Scene of Heav’enly Motions pass’: ‘thou know’st all so well that’s done within’, Cowley avers, ‘As if some living Chrystal Man thou’dst seen.’42 But the most striking examples of this metaphorical economy, those which attach the anti-secretive connotations of anatomy most closely to Cowley himself, are the linked pair of similes in the second and third strophes which depict the diseased body as a city under siege. In the Wrst of these, ‘The subtle Ague, that for sureness sake j Takes its own times th’ assault to make, j And at each battery the whole Fort does shake’, upon Wnding the body’s defences reinforced by Scarborough, ‘When thy strong Guards, and works it spies, j Trembles for it self, and Xies.’43 A spy reconnoitring the body to Wnd its weak spot, the ague is forced to 40 Ibid., 197–8. 42 Ibid., 199.

41 Ibid., 198. 43 Ibid., 198.

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abandon its mission by Scarborough’s vigilance, just as Thurloe had put paid to Cowley’s hopes of inWltrating London in order ‘under pretence of privacy and retirement’ to reconnoitre ‘the posture of things in this nation’ on behalf of the exiled Stuart court. All of which implies that Cowley’s commitment to the practice of anatomy is tantamount to a repudiation of his former covert political activities, an implication conWrmed when he further extrapolates the siege/disease motif in the next strophe. This time the infection has penetrated the inner sanctum of the body, and Scarborough must draw it out: The Plague it self, that proud Imperial Ill Which destroys Towns, and does whole Armies kill, If thou but succour the besieged Heart, Calls its poysons forth, and does depart, As if it fear’d no less thy Art, Then Aarons Incense, or then Phineas dart.44

The general scenario of these lines, together with particular elements of their phrasing, recalls the notorious passage in the preface to Cowley’s Poems, published a few months earlier, in which the poet publicly aYrmed his submission to the de facto authority of the republic: Now though in all Civil Dissensions, when they break into open hostilities, the War of the Pen is allowed to accompany that of the Sword, and every one is in a manner obliged with his Tongue, as well as Hand, to serve and assist the side which he engages in; yet when the event of battel, and the unaccountable Will of God has determined the controversie, and that we have submitted to the conditions of the Conqueror, we must lay down our Pens as well as Arms, we must march out of our Cause it self, and dismantle that, as well as our Towns and Castles, of all the Works and FortiWcations of Wit and Reason by which we defended it.45

After the Restoration (as we shall see) these words would come back to haunt Cowley; Charles II never forgave him for them. But for a convicted spy out on bail in 1656 the idea that the poet’s new life studying anatomy under Scarborough had extruded the poison of disaVection from his heart was (one might say) just what the doctor ordered. Thurloe, however, wasn’t convinced: Cowley remained under surveillance after he was released into Scarborough’s care. Whether or not the poet used his new-found devotion to anatomy as cover for further subversive activity has not been 44 W i. 198–9.

45 G 9.


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established.46 But if we try to imagine how the Scarborough ode might have sounded to Thurloe we can see why he was not persuaded Cowley’s conversion to anatomy was more than skin-deep. What would particularly have fed the spymaster’s suspicions, in fact, were the passages I’ve just quoted. Hearing Cowley compare Scarborough to Moses, for instance, might it not have occurred to Thurloe that the situation of royalists during the Interregnum closely paralleled that of the Israelites whom, after years wandering in the desert, Moses eventually led to the promised land (i.e. the Restoration)? As for Cowley’s protracted conceit aligning Scarborough’s successes against disease with the defence of a besieged city, this would have been guaranteed to prick up Thurloe’s ears. The image of London as a garrison town, blockaded against the king by the forces of rebellion (conventionally Wgured as a ‘Plague’) had been a staple of royalist propaganda since Charles I abandoned the city in 1640. Then too, in the preface to the English translation of William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, published in 1653, the heart had notoriously been described as the king of the body. So when Thurloe came to Cowley’s account of how Scarborough roots out every trace of ‘Plague’ from ‘the besieged Heart, j Calls its poysons forth’, he might well have put two and two together and got four. (One can only hope that poor Scarborough didn’t.) Finally, there is the fact that the ‘To Dr Scarborough’ is one of the series of imitations of Pindar which form a subsection of Poems (1656). The template for these is established in the two formal translations from Pindar which precede them; and if Thurloe looked back to those translations, and Cowley’s extensive commentary on them, his suspicious eye might have been drawn to Cowley’s repeated insistence on Pindar’s obscurity: the complexity of his metrics, the unelaborated nature of his transitions from subject to subject, and the essential elusiveness of his meaning. Cowley’s foregrounding of these hieroglyphical properties of Pindaric poetics might have led Cromwell’s spymaster, as it has led modern commentators, to look for (and Wnd) encrypted royalist suggestion throughout the Pindarique Odes. But it is the second and more famous of the diptych of odes which Cowley addressed to anatomists during the time he spent training to become one that best illustrates the conXict between his expedient enthusiasm for scientiWc canons of openness and his innate poetic taste for secrecy. More signiWcantly, where the argument of this chapter 46 For further details of Cromwellian suspicions that Cowley’s ‘retirement’ was a cover for conspiracy, see Nethercot, The Muse’s Hannibal, 145–8.

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as a whole is concerned, the ‘Ode upon Dr Harvey’ indicates that Cowley’s secretiveness was particularly bound up with his classicism. Though it was not published until after the Restoration, in Verses on Several Occasions (1663), the Harvey ode dates from the same period as ‘To Dr Scarborough’, having been written (commentators surmise on the evidence of the description of Harvey’s physical and mental decline in the Wnal strophe) shortly before the scientist’s death on 3 June 1657. The poem is generally said to epitomize Cowley’s commitment to Baconianism and the new science. So it does, up to a point: Cowley presents Harvey as a staunch Baconian, implacably opposed to the deductive methods of the scholastics, tossing aside Aristotle and immersing himself instead in the Book of Nature, since he ‘wisely thought ’twas Wt, j Not to read comments only upon it, j But on th’ original itself to look.’47 (Actually, this is a bit of an exaggeration: to judge from the preface to his Anatomical Exercitations, Harvey saw himself as reforming rather than rejecting Aristotelianism.) In particular, Cowley’s Harvey is an ultra-zealous convert to Bacon’s campaign against the ‘secretists’. Had his anatomical researches not been interrupted by the Civil War, according to the ode’s Wnal strophe, Harvey would have added to the many ‘useful secrets’ he uncovered ‘thousands more’.48 Bacon was given to lamenting the slow pace of anatomical experimentation; the dissecters were too cautious in his view: ‘they inquire not of the diversities of the parts, the secrecies of the passages, and the seats or nestings of the humours’.49 But this is not an accusation that could be levelled at Cowley’s Harvey; he pursues his inquiries deep into the ‘smallest Wbres of a plant, j For which the eye-beam’s point doth sharpness want’.50 So relentless is his pursuit of a feminized personiWcation of Nature in the Wrst two strophes of the ode, so Werce his determination to lay bare her innermost secrets, that it amounts for one commentator—Jonathan Sawday—to a ‘rape’.51 Possibly so;52 but Cowley is not an accessory to Harvey’s crime. Unlike other contemporary poets who praised the anatomist in starkly misogynistic terms for enforcing his male will over a recalcitrantly 47 W i. 417. 48 Ibid., 418. 49 Quoted in Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 94. 50 W i. 416. 51 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 236. 52 For a contrary view of Harvey’s relation to Nature not as ‘ravishment against her will’ but ‘fruitful intercourse’, see Peter Pesic, ‘Proteus Unbound: Francis Bacon’s Successors and the Defense of Experiment’, Studies in Philology, 98 (2001), 428–56, at 440–3 (I quote from 442).


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secretive female world,53 Cowley is torn between Baconian admiration of Harvey’s inquisitorial candour on the one hand and his poetic attraction towards Nature’s fugitive liquidity on the other. The node of that tension is the ode’s mythological scheme. Cowley Wgures Harvey’s encounter with Nature as an hybrid of the Virgilian myth of Proteus and Aristaeus and the Ovidian myth of Daphne and Apollo. The presence of the former is no surprise: the epyllion inset within the fourth book of the Georgics which recounts how the shepherd Aristaeus, having lost his swarm of bees to an infection, constrains Proteus, the god of change, to reveal to him the secret of replenishing it, had been the preferred mythological prototype of the experimenter’s forceful quest to uncover the truths beneath the shifting appearances of things ever since Bacon Wrst employed the parallel in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and De Sapientia Veterum (1609). Other publicists of the new science who made use of it included Walter Charleton and Joseph Glanvill. They did so as much because of its provenance as because of its content: the Georgics which (notionally) furnishes a wealth of practical information about agriculture might be thought of as a protoBaconian work. In that capacity it would later feature on the curriculum of the school Cowley suggested setting up in his Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy (1661), where students were to be fed an unmitigated diet of classical didactic, ‘good Poets . . . who have purposely treated of solid and learned, that is, Natural Matters’: ‘Varro, Cato, Columella, Pliny, part of Celsus, and of Seneca, Cicero de Divinatione, de Natura Deorum . . . Virgil’s Georgicks, Grotius, Nemesianus, Manilius’.54 However, by splicing the fable of Proteus and Aristaeus together with Ovid’s story of Daphne and Apollo, Cowley problematized its Baconian function. Early-modern readers of course recognized that the Virgilian fable was itself not uniformly didactic in character and intention; enfolded into it, after all, is an account of Orpheus’s loss of Eurydice which, far from imparting ‘solid’ information on ‘Natural Matters’, epitomizes the tendency in ancient poetry against which Cowley speciWcally intended to safeguard the budding Baconians at his scientiWc academy, that of ‘indulging to the weakness of the world, and feeding it either with the follies of Love, or with the Fables of gods and Heroes’.55 How easily the fantasy and eroticism of Orpheus and Eurydice could rub oV on the quasi-Baconian narrative which 53 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 231–8.

54 G 40.

55 Ibid.

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encloses it is shown by William Temple’s translation of ‘The Fable of Aristaeus’, published in 1670 but probably composed no more than a few years after Cowley’s ode to Harvey. Temple instinctively Ovidianized the fable, stuYng his translation with the sort of pagan erotica which Cowley was soon to congratulate Thomas Hobbes and the fellows of the Royal Society for having banished from English poetry. But for a part-time poet such as Temple to do this in a translation undertaken for his own enjoyment—in the privacy of his own home, so to speak—was one thing; for someone to do it in a work propounding the public beneWts of the new science would be another matter altogether. The thrill of the chase might tacitly be acknowledged as part of the appeal of experimenting, provided it was clear that catching up with Nature, bringing to light her secrets, remained the overriding objective. When it was invoked in scientiWc contexts, the erotic charge of the encounter between Aristaeus and Proteus needed to stay latent. Cowley’s decision to bring it to the surface in the ‘Ode upon Dr Harvey’ by grafting on to Virgil’s narrative of that encounter the lubricious tale of Daphne and Apollo reveals a lot about his attitude towards secrecy. It leaves the ode seesawing between aYrmation of the scientist’s robustly masculine resolve to penetrate Nature’s disguise, and collusion in the wily feminine manoeuvres Nature resorts to in the hope of protecting her secrets from the scientist. First, because introducing the myth of Daphne and Apollo necessarily divides Cowley’s loyalties, bifurcates his point of view: he becomes aligned not only with Harvey, ‘our Apollo’, the god of healing and poetry, but also with Nature, since Daphne, having been saved from Apollo’s unwelcome attentions by being transformed into a laurel tree, was then nominated by the god as the emblem of poetic fame. Then too because by enfolding the familiar Baconian application of the fable of Proteus within a second myth—and an explicitly Ovidian one at that—Cowley redoubles Nature’s metamorphic elusiveness: instead of Wguring that elusiveness, Proteus is now just one instance of it. And Wnally because Cowley’s action of combining the two myths into a new complex compound is itself testament to the imagination’s protean powers of mystiWcation and deferral, and thus makes the ‘Ode upon Dr Harvey’ fundamentally complicit with the secretiveness of Nature. All of which perhaps helps to explain a striking feature of the ode’s climax: as Cowley describes it, the crucial moment when Nature at last gives up her secrets to public view retains undertones of privacy. The ode’s most recent editors, David Hopkins and Tom


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Mason, gloss the verb ‘descried’ in Cowley’s notorious description of Harvey holding ‘slippery Proteus in a chain, j Till all her mighty Mysteries she descried’ as ‘revealed, made known’.56 Certainly that must be the primary sense; and yet ‘descried’ can also mean ‘saw’, indeed does so elsewhere in Cowley’s poems when secrecy is at issue.57 For all Harvey’s eVorts, some part of Cowley in the end keeps Nature’s ‘Mysteries’ for her eyes only. Of course, this reading directly countermands the professed intention of the ode; it is a subtext. A secret. A HIGHER CONVERSATI ON The Restoration did not put an end to Cowley’s travails over his secret life during the Interregnum. On the contrary, it deepened them. Before, he had been dogged by accusations of crypto-royalism; now, it was allegations of having reached a clandestine accommodation with the Cromwellian regime that haunted him.58 The notorious passage in the preface to his Poems (1656) about laying down pens and arms, marching out of the royalist cause and dismantling it of all ‘the FortiWcations of Wit and Reason by which we defended it’ could always be brought up by his rivals in the heated jostle for patronage among returning Cavaliers, but the Wnal straw appears to have been the disastrous Wrst night of Cowley’s comedy The Cutter of Coleman-Street (1661) whose audience hissed what they took to be its anti-Cavalier subtexts.59 Charles I had once promised Cowley the lucrative sinecure of the mastership of the Savoy as reward for his secret service on behalf of Queen Henrietta Maria, and the grant had initially been conWrmed in the afterglow of the Restoration. But Charles II rescinded it in 1662. At which point Cowley again retired from public life, though in a manner which provided new grounds for suspecting his taste for privacy; which, in fact, brought the poet to embody the entire complex of dubieties that in seventeenthcentury English culture surrounded ‘the secret life’. First, there was the way he announced his decision—in the pindaric dream-vision ‘The Complaint’ that concludes his Verses on Several 56 Abraham Cowley: Selected Poems, ed. David Hopkins and Tom Mason (Manchester, 1994), p. 89. 57 As, for instance, in ‘My Heart Discovered’: ‘I through her Breast her Heart espy, j As Souls in hearts do souls descry’; W i. 79. 58 Thomas Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 250–5. 59 Nethercot, The Muse’s Hannibal, 204–5.

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Occasions (1663). The poem tells how ‘the melancholy Cowley’, while languishing in ‘a Bow’r for sorrow made’, is visited by a Muse in ‘a wondrous Hieroglyphick Robe’ who reproves him for having been so slow to extricate himself from the embrace of the capital, in particular what the Muse calls, employing only the thinnest veil of allegory, ‘The Rachel, for which twice seven years and more, j Thou didst with Faith and Labour serve.’60 Readers easily cracked the code, and Cowley paid a heavy price for failing to conceal the role the loss of the Savoy played in his renunciation of public life. ‘The Complaint’ seems to have become a byword for shameful self-pity: already in an anonymous ‘Session of the Poets’ which began to circulate in manuscript shortly after its publication it is being referred to as ‘his pitiful Melancholy’. The author of this satire was apparently an admirer of Cowley: it is more in sorrow than anger that he observes the poet has ruined his reputation by publishing ‘The Complaint’.61 But for readers less well-disposed towards Cowley and sceptical about the moral credentials of retirement, his ‘pitiful Melancholy’ doubtless conWrmed his status as one of those ‘degraded Courtiers, who, after they have been outed of the public Employments’, in the words of George MacKenzie, ‘harangue against what they have lost, to satisWe, not their reason but their revenge’.62 Then there was Cowley’s choice of location. First, in 1663, he went to Barn Elms, the rural suburb in Surrey where Donne and Sidney before him had retired. But if he hoped to present himself as the latest in a distinguished line of poets who had risen above the smoke and stir of public aVairs, Cowley was stymied by the changing cultural geography of the region. Barn Elms had by now become a destination of choice for fashionable Londoners on pastoral awaydays: Pepys—inevitably—goes several times to watch the ‘gallant ladies and people, come with bottles and baskets and chairs . . . to sup under the trees by the waterside’.63 So in 1665 Cowley was forced to re-retire, twenty miles further up the Thames to Chertsey. However, Chertsey functioned altogether less ideally than Barn Elms as a mythopoeic emblem of withdrawal. In fact, had one of Cowley’s enemies been asked to choose a place which would emblematize the controversial indurations of his 60 W i. 435–6, 438. 61 Quoted in Nethercot, The Muse’s Hannibal, 215. 62 Quoted in Alan De Gooyer’s Wne essay ‘Sensibility and Solitude in Cowley’s Familiar Essay’, Restoration, 25 (2001), 1–18 (at 7). 63 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. C. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols. (1971– 83), viii. 236.


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secret life, he could scarcely have done better than Chertsey. It had formerly been home to a community of Benedictine monks, and retirement continued to be stigmatized in Cowley’s lifetime by association with Roman Catholic monasticism which energetic English Protestants were brought up to regard as a cover for idleness and duplicity.64 The nature of the risk Cowley was taking may be gathered by considering the parallel case of Thomas Fairfax’s withdrawal to Nun Appleton, another site with a monastic prehistory. Even Marvell’s brilliant eVorts in the nunnery episode of ‘Upon Appleton House’ to prevent his patron’s retirement being construed as a retreat to cloistered vice were not enough to prevent Fairfax being suspected in some Cromwellian circles of using his secret life as a blind for involvement in conspiracy on behalf of the crypto-Catholic Stuart dynasty.65 Of course, Cowley’s movements were watched much less closely than those of the military hero Fairfax; the stakes were lower in his retirement. But the poet’s situation in 1665 was not dissimilar in kind to that of the former LordGeneral of the parliamentary armies in 1650; moreover, Cowley, unlike Fairfax, had an established record of camouXaging espionage on behalf of the ‘popish’ Stuarts as Epicureanism. One of the ways Cowley tried to exonerate his retirement was by translating. Most obviously, as a translator he could assemble a classical pedigree for his act of withdrawal. Immediately preceding ‘The Complaint’ within the running order of Verses upon Several Occasions—as if to suggest that he was already convinced of the moral case for retirement before his loss of patronage made it Wnancially expedient—Cowley positioned a sequence of six renderings of passages of classical verse inculcating the virtues of privacy, among them a number of the most hallowed poetic variations on this philosophic theme, notably ‘The praises of Country Life’ from Book II of Virgil’s Georgics and Claudian’s ‘Old Man of Verona’. But it is not only the content of these translations which worked to alleviate the stigma surrounding Cowley’s withdrawal; potentially, the ethical status of translation as a mode did too. For royalist exiles during the Interregnum (as we saw in the last chapter) translation could connote a superior mode of sociality; going into a selfexile which risked appearing self-indulgent, Cowley drew on this diVuse 64 The classic account of this and other styles of attack on the ethic of retirement in early-modern culture is Brian Vickers, ‘Leisure and Idleness in the Renaissance: The Ambivalence of Otium’, Renaissance Studies, 4 (1990), 1–37 and 107–54. 65 See Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker, ‘High Summer at Nun Appleton, 1651: Andrew Marvell and Lord Fairfax’s Occasions’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 247–69.

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sense of the translator’s role as one which preserves fellowship even in isolation. A passage weighing up the competing claims of engagement and retreat by Cowley’s moral master Francis Bacon, a passage which (as we shall see) stuck fast in Cowley’s mind, focuses this intuition. It occurs at the beginning of his essay ‘Of Friendship’; having quoted Aristotle’s axiom that ‘Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god’, an axiom central to early-modern debates about otium and negotium,66 Bacon commented: it is most true that a natural and secret hatred and aversation towards society, in any man, hath somewhat of the savage beast; but it is most untrue that it should have any character at all of the divine nature, except it proceed, not out of a pleasure in solitude, but out of a love and desire to sequester a man’s self for a higher conversation.67

Primarily, of course, the interlocutor Bacon envisaged for this ‘higher conversation’ was God, as revealed either in the pages of scripture or the works of Nature. He was broaching the conception of the natural philosopher as a ‘priest of nature’ which underpins the quasi-monastic models of retired scientiWc community68 proposed in the decades leading up to the institution of the Royal Society by William Petty, John Evelyn, and Cowley himself who had envisaged in his Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy a ‘Philosophical Colledge’ two or three miles outside London and staVed by thirty-Wve unmarried experimenters.69 But, for Cowley, among the high-minded friends with whom such spiritual ‘conversation’ in rural retirement might secondarily be enjoyed were the poets of the classical pantheon: the string of translations in Verses upon Several Occasions have the air of a catena or ‘personal psalm’, a pagan analogue of the chains of biblical or patristic texts constructed by medieval and early-modern Christians ‘to prove that any doctine’—in this case, that of the secret life—‘is both ancient and enduring’.70 But if a commitment to the practice of translation understood in these terms is to exempt a retiring poet from the strictures against ‘antisocial solitude’, that commitment must entail willingness to enter into a 66 Aside from Bacon, it is quoted and discussed by, for instance, Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1628) and Thomas Stanley, in his History of Philosophy (1655–60). 67 Bacon, Essays, ed. Pitcher, 138. 68 Steven Shapin, ‘ ‘‘The Mind is its own Place’’: Science and Solitude in SeventeenthCentury England’, Science in Context, 4 (1990), 191–218 (at 202–3). 69 G 28. 70 Philip West, Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans: Scripture Uses (Oxford, 2001), p. 73.


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genuine ‘conversation’, as opposed to a thinly disguised soliloquy. Bacon underlines the diVerence when insisting that, as well as the consolation of aVective sympathy, a true friendship should bear a ‘second fruit’, less immediately palatable perhaps, for the ‘understanding’, that of uncompromisingly disinterested counsel: certain it is that the light that a man receiveth by counsel from another is drier and purer than that which cometh from his own understanding and judgement, which is ever infused and drenched in his aVections and customs. So as there is as much diVerence between the counsel that a friend giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a Xatterer.71

Translators who choose their authors as they might friends should beware contaminating the works of these authors with their own desires and predilections. Avoiding this danger is especially important when (as it did for Cowley) the act of translation serves a purpose of implying that withdrawal need not entail solipsism. Yet it would not require a particularly hostile reader to conclude that Cowley didn’t avoid it. Here the exception proves the rule. In a classic essay on ‘The Country Mouse’, the version of the latter part of Horace, Satires II. vi which comes Wrst in the series of translations contained in Verses upon Several Occasions, David Hopkins savoured Cowley’s response to his Horatian original as ‘an act of self-knowledge and self-criticism’: realizing that Horace had ‘ended his sixth Sermo with a fable which was both intended to reinforce and, simultaneously, to subject to humorous exposure earnest Epicurean vows of the kind enunciated in the Wrst half of the poem’, Cowley undertook in translating the poem a ‘journey of self-discovery and gentle self-mockery’.72 Quite so: witness, for instance, the moment when the city mouse, seeking to persuade the country mouse to accompany him to the metropolis to feast on ‘the Cakes and Pies of London’, asks (with a mousely nod to Aristotle): Why should a Soul, so virtuous and so great, Lose it self thus in an Obscure retreat? Let savage Beasts lodg in a Country Den, You should see Towns, and Manners know, and men:73 71 Bacon, Essays, ed. Pitcher, 142. 72 David Hopkins, ‘Cowley’s Horatian Mice’, in Horace Made New, ed. Charles Martindale and David Hopkins (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 103–26 (at 125–6). 73 ‘The Country Mouse: A Paraphrase upon Horace 2 Book, Satyr 6’, ll. 15–18.

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This lets the fresh air of humour into a debate conducted in Cowley’s lifetime for the most part with stiXing seriousness, not least in connection with Cowley himself. But ‘The Country Mouse’ is, as I say, the exception. As a rule, Cowley’s evocations of the ethic of privacy manifest an ‘uniform commitment and earnestness’, in Hopkins’s forgiving phrase (a less kindly disposed reader might call them sanctimonious).74 That was said of the Several Discourses, by Way of Essays, Cowley’s last and most sustained apology for retirement, a volume it can be ‘a slightly monotonous experience’ to read from cover to cover.75 But signs of a similar earnestness can already be found in Cowley’s conduct as a translator in the Verses upon Several Occasions. Here Cowley regularly elides diVerences between his original authors on the subject of the secret life, and more particularly diVerences between their ways of approaching that subject and his own. He makes them perform in an unqualiWed sense the role which Bacon and other early-modern moralists argued a true friend should fulWl only in a carefully delimited extent: that of ‘another self ’. This tendency is most Xagrantly on show in the last of the translations, ‘A Paraphrase on an Ode in Horace’s third Book’; in particular, in the boldest of the liberties Cowley takes with his Horatian original, the interpolated period that begins the third strophe: Let all the World, slave to this Tyrant be, Creature to this Disguised Deitie, Yet it shall never conquer me. A Guard of Virtues will not let it pass, And wisdom is a Tower of stronger brass.76

The uninXectedly self-righteous tone Cowley strikes here is altogether foreign to Horace’s poetic and moral sensibility, serving to illuminate only by contrast the wit and tact Horace employs in the original of this ode as elsewhere in his verse when articulating the relation between his own individual privacy and the larger ethical superiority of retirement.77 But the most telling case concerns ‘O fortunatos nimium, &c.’, from Book II of Virgil’s Georgics. This is the longest of the translations contained in Verses upon Several Occasions, and its original was for 74 Hopkins, ‘Cowley’s Horatian Mice’, 125–6. 75 Ibid., 126. 76 ‘A Paraphrase on an Ode in Horace’s third Book, beginning thus, Inclusam Danaen turris ahenea’, ll. 16–20. 77 Charles Martindale describes the centrality of self-directed irony in Horace’s work, in his ‘Introduction’ to Horace Made New, 1–26 (at 13–16).


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early-modern readers the single most prestigious classical apology for the country life. To a certain degree, too, the Virgilian passage was naturally adapted to serve Cowley’s personal purposes of disjoining retirement from anti-social solitude. Framed within the georgic rather than the pastoral mode, it conceives the countryman’s life as one of socially productive agricultural work rather than arcadian idling:78 a prototype for the programme of technological ‘improvement’ outlined by Samuel Hartlib and other proponents of what has been termed ‘the georgic revolution’ in mid-seventeenth-century English culture.79 But it also hints at a higher vision, implying that rural existence fosters intellectual and spiritual enlightenment: hieratic insight into the natural order such as Bacon in his most utopian moments envisaged the natural philosopher attaining. In Virgil, however, each of these conducive emphases is attended with discomWting ramiWcations: in the case of the former, he makes clear that the productivity of the farmer is achieved only through harsh and unremitting labour; and in the case of the latter, he presents the order of Nature as substantially violent and chaotic. These awkward elements in Virgil’s conception of country life Cowley, whether consciously or unconsciously, suppresses. Witness, with regard to the Wrst, the following passage. Virgil: agricola incurvo terram dimovit aratro: hinc anni labor, hinc patriam parvosque nepotes sustinet, hinc armenta boum meritosque iuvencos. nec requies, quin aut pomis exuberet annus aut fetu pecorum aut Cerealis mergite culmi, proventuque oneret sulcos atque horrea vincat.80

Cowley: Mean while, the prudent Husbandman is found, In mutual duties striving with his ground, And half the year he care of that does take, That half the year grateful returns does make. Each fertil moneth does some new gifts present, And with new work his industry content. 78 Pastoral had become closely associated for early-modern English writers, those of an energetically protestant cast of mind in particular, with the disreputable aspects of otium; see Peter Lindenbaum, Changing Landscapes: Anti-Pastoral Sentiment in the English Renaissance (Athens, GA, 1986). 79 Antony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton, 1985), ch. 4: ‘New Science and the Georgic Revolution’. 80 Georgics ii. 513–18.

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Translation and the Poet’s Life This, the young Lamb, that the soft Fleece doth yield, This, loads with Hay, and that, with Corn the Field:81

Virgil puts the accent on the arduousness of the farmer’s existence, conveyed in particular by actively physical verbs—providing for his compatriots and relatives is a matter of ‘bearing up’ (‘sustinet’), while even Nature’s fertility is construed as ‘burdening’ or ‘oppressing’ (‘oneret’, ‘vincat’)—and encapsulated in a programmatic discrimination between pastoral ‘requies’ and georgic ‘labor’. Cowley, by contrast, dissipates the force of those verbs and so erodes the discrimination: the forthright ‘dimovit’ (‘rakes up’) becomes the indirect passive ‘is found . . . striving’, and even then the ‘striving’ is ‘In mutual duties’, a competition to be the most obliging; ‘take’ and ‘make’, in themselves non-speciWc, are further thinned out by Cowley’s inclusion in each case of the auxiliary ‘does’; and whilst ‘oneret’ does survive in ‘loads’, its unwelcome connotations have previously been neutralized by the supplementary translations ‘present’ and ‘yield’. But it is ‘content’ which is most revealing. Like ‘present’ before it, it can be both verb and noun, and as a noun was a staple term in contemporary expositions of Epicurean calm of mind. The verbal form is required by the grammar, but the nominal sense is also suggested; ‘industry’ and ‘content’ oVer to come together in apposition, in an eVect symptomatic of Cowley’s selective hearing of the passage as a whole: georgic energy is stilled to pastoral tableau, hard physical labour to philosophic ease. Where the idea of country life as intellectually or spiritually enlightening is concerned, Cowley again hears in Virgil what he wants to hear. Virgil: Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae, quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus amore, accipiant caelique vias et sidera monstrent, defectus solis varios lunaeque labores; unde tremor terris, qua vi maria alta tumescant obicibus ruptis rursusque in se ipsa residant82

Cowley: ’Tis true, the Wrst desire which does controul All the inferiour wheels that move my Soul, Is, that the Muse me her high Priest would make; 81 ‘Virg. Georg? O fortunatos nimium, &c. A Translation out of Virgil’, ll. 23–8. 82 Georgics ii. 475–80.


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Into her holyest Scenes of Myst’ry take, And open there to my mind’s purged eye Those wonders which to Sense the Gods deny: How in the Moon such change of shapes is found: The Moon, the changing Worlds eternal bound. What shakes the solid Earth, what strong disease Dares trouble the Wrm Centre’s antient ease; What makes the Sea retreat, and what advance: Varieties too regular for chance.83

Predictably, Cowley maximizes the occult possibilities of the Wrst three lines, expanding Virgil’s wish that the muses will reward his devotion to their ‘holy things’ (‘sacra’) by taking him to themselves (‘accipiant’) into a full-blown rite of initiation. But in the other half of the passage he adopts a minimizing approach, taming to pleasant ‘wonders’ what are in Virgil some rather menacing elements of Nature the philosopher-poet is given to observe. The phrase ‘defectus solis’ (‘the lapses of the sun’), with its troubling implication of ‘defects’ in creation, Cowley omits altogether, while ‘change of shapes’ is rather decorous for ‘labores’, and whatever discomfort may attach to the idea of the moon’s instability is countermanded by Cowley’s closing reference to it as an immutable Wxture (‘eternal bound’), a view with which the movement of the verse itself sides through the calmative repetition ‘How in the Moon . . . j The Moon’. But it is the next two couplets which have the most sedative eVect. At Wrst glance, Cowley’s metaphorical description of earthquakes as a ‘strong disease’ appears to escalate Virgil’s ‘tremor terris’, but reading on we hear that it is the ‘ease’ part of ‘disease’ which is given the Wnal word at the rhyme, completing a series of three interpolated reaYrmations of the very quality of Wxity whose precariousness is ostensibly at issue (‘the solid Earth’; ‘the Wrm Centre’s’; ‘antient ease’). That rhyme is then prolonged into ‘Sea retreat’, further softening a line which already lulls Virgil’s catastrophic tidal wave to the regular ebb and Xow of the ocean, and Wnally into ‘Varieties’ in the closing line, a snugly rationalist axiom entirely contrary to the tone of the Virgilian passage and italicized for the beneWt of readers looking to restock their commonplace books. That run of assonance on open vowels is not only easeful in itself; it ensures that ‘ease’, together with its philosophic analogue ‘retreat’, susurrate reassuringly beneath

83 ‘Virg. Georg? O fortunatos nimium, &c.’, ll. 34–43.

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Cowley’s verse, even as Virgil describes the cataclysmic metereological anomalies which make the life of rural retreat one of anything but ease. Cowley made those translations before he had left London for Barn Elms. Far from suggesting that he was someone who could be trusted to reconcile ‘solitude’ with the practice of ‘socially produced (and socially productive)’ virtues, they indicate that even before he had retired to the secret life he was predisposed towards the solipsistic habits of mind which opponents of otium claimed it encouraged.84 To move from the Verses upon Several Occasions to the work Cowley produced at Barn Elms and Chertsey and which will concern me for the remainder of this chapter—Several Discourses, by Way of Essays, in Verse and Prose (1668)—is to observe how living that life deepened his self-absorption. Partly the latter volume grew out of the former, reprinting, for instance, its six translations; but that ostensible continuity masks a hardening and narrowing of Cowley’s outlook. Consider, to begin with, his treatment of Montaigne. More perhaps than any other ‘modern’, Montaigne inherited the strain of self-aware attraction towards retirement as a philosophic ideal which Horace had chivvied Cowley into adopting in ‘The Country Mouse’. But Cowley was seemingly no longer in the mood for such ‘humorous self-exposure’.85 He refers to Montaigne by name twice in the Essays, both times humourlessly rooting out ironies in Montaigne’s estimation of the secret life. The Wrst comes in ‘Of Solitude’ where, discussing Scipio’s decision to retire from Rome ‘to the middle of a wood neer Linternum’ when he was at the height of his power, Cowley remarks: This would be no wonder if it were as truly as it is colourably and wittily said by Monsieur de Montagne. That Ambition itself might teach us to love Solitude; there’s nothing does so much hate to have Companions. ’Tis true, it loves to have its Elbows free, it detests to have Company on either side, but it delights above all Things in a Train behind, I, and Ushers too before it.86

The distinction is nice enough, but no sympathetic reader of Montaigne would make it; impervious to Montaigne’s eloquence and wit, Cowley sternly chops logic. The second case, from the beginning of ‘Of Greatness’, is yet more po-faced: 84 See Jean-Marie Goulemot, ‘Literary Practices: Publicizing the Private’, in Roger Chartier (ed.), Passions of the Renaissance, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1989), vol. iii of A History of Private Life, pp. 363–95 (at 365–6). 85 Hopkins, ‘Cowley’s Horatian Mice’, 125. 86 G 129–30.


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Since we cannot attain to Greatness (saies the Sieur de Montagn) let’s have our revenge by railing at it: this he spoke but in Jest. I believe he desired it no more then I do, and had less reason, for he enjoyed so plentiful and honourable a fortune in a most excellent Country, as allowed him all the real conveniences of it, seperated and purged from the Incommodities. If I were but in his condition, I should think it hard measure, without being convinced of any crime, to be sequestred from it and made one of the Principal OYcers of State.87

This is at once critically unresponsive and morally unappealing. Cowley again overrides Montaigne’s wit, brusquely elevating ‘reason’ above mere jest (‘but in Jest’), whereas the capacity to entangle the two delicately and to humane eVect is integral to the method of the Essais. Worse still, he reports the fact that Montaigne was not subject to any authentic ‘Incommodities’ during his retirement, a fact wryly and winningly acknowledged by Montaigne himself at regular intervals, in a spirit not far removed from vindictive sarcasm. Inconsistency, which Montaigne embraces as humanly inevitable, Cowley proves unable or unwilling to tolerate when it comes into contact with his beloved secret life. Montaigne’s scepticism about that life was in large part self-directed: it was his own retiringness he demystiWed as pusillanimity or displaced ambition. It is diYcult not to suspect that it was to avoid confronting the possibility that the same might be true of him that Cowley shut his ears to his great predecessor. He had, after all, lately rehearsed his own failure to ‘attain to Greatness’ in the preface to Plantarum Libri Duo (1662) where, reviewing his career in the person of an imagined enemy, he berated himself for having dissipated his talent in the minor mode of amatory lyric instead of completing his epic Davideis.88 However, as in the Verses upon Several Occasions, so in the Discourses, by Way of Essays, it is Cowley’s conduct as a translator that most brings to light solipsistic tendencies in his privateness. In addition to the sustained passages carried over from the earlier volume, there are intersown throughout the Essays a multitude of brief quoted extracts of classical verse, lasting between a couple and half a dozen lines each, most of which Cowley translates; in these shorter snippets of translation (which have never attracted any critical comment) Cowley’s solipsism manifests itself in a newly extreme form. Plainly, translation on so small 87 Ibid., 178. 88 Works, 6th edn. (1689), sig. b2v : ‘dost thou, like an Apostate Jew, loathing manner return to the Leeks and Garlic of Egypt’.

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a scale particularly enables the sort of selective repointing of the original text which we have observed Cowley applying to the makarismos from Book II of Virgil’s Georgics. No longer need discrepant tonalities be redescribed; in this procrustean mode, they can simply be lopped oV.89 Ostensibly, such fragmentary quotations tell of the deliciously informal relation the retired translator enjoys with his ancient poet friends: they are on Wrst-name terms, as it were, beyond standing on the fuller ceremonies required in public intercourse. Equally, however, in translatorial friendships as in other kinds, such innocent lowerings of guards may entail less benign blurrings of boundaries. There is a thin line between being on the same wavelength and tuning out diVerence, feeling that you are forever taking the words right out of a friend’s mouth and putting words into that friend’s mouth. In the inset translated fragments in his Essays, Cowley repeatedly crosses that line. A case in point is the maxim he quotes from ‘Hor. Epist. I. 1. 18’ at the outset of ‘Of Obscurity’: Nam neque Divitibus contingunt gaudia solis, Nec vixit male, qui natus moriensque Fefellit. God made not pleasures only for the Rich Nor have those men without their share too liv’d, Who both in Life and Death the world deceiv’d.90

Cowley goes on to underline that he has ‘literally translated’ the lines91— surprisingly, given his notoriously extreme commitment to free methods of translation. Probably he meant to convey an impression of unbuttoned informality, as if his version were not yet dressed up for public consumption; but it is not so much gracefully en de´shabille as slovenly. For Cowley has misremembered Horace: the lines he quotes are from Epistles I. 17 not 18. Moreover, this misremembering leads on to misrepresentation: whereas the eighteenth epistle, to Lollius, is indeed a paean to the secret life, containing as it does the celebrated line ‘Secretum iter et fallentis semita vitae’, one of the pillars of the poetic culture of privacy in England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, its predecessor, to Scaeva, is an apology for Horace’s worldly success, his high standing with Maecenas and other Augustan 89 For some suggestive recent remarks about the moral perils and possibilities of quotation, in the context of relations between writers, see Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of InXuence in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Oxford, 2002), pp. 36–7. 90 G 136. 91 Ibid.


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dignitaries. To be sure, that apology is subject to the customary Horatian ironies and ambivalences; nevertheless, the epistle hinges on an encounter, originally reported by Diogenes Laertius, between the Cynic Diogenes and Aristippus, in which Diogenes’s asceticism is trumped by Aristippus’s urbanity. Scrubbing vegetables for his dinner, Diogenes remarks: ‘If Aristippus could be content to dine on greens, he would not want to live with princes’; to which Aristippus replies: ‘If Diogenes knew how to live with princes, he would not want to eat greens.’92 Horace begins his account of this exchange at line 13; the lines Cowley quotes as evidence of Horace’s ‘commendation of those who live and dye so obscurely, that the world takes no notice of them’ are 9 and 10. Or consider an example from the next essay, ‘Of Agriculture’. In support of his contention that ‘Poets . . . were alwayes the most faithful and aVectionate friends’ to ‘the Country Life’ since ‘Poetry was born among the Shepherds’, Cowley adduced the elegaic couplet: Nescio qua Natale solum dulcedine Musas Ducit, & immemores non sinit esse sui. The Muses still love their own Native place, T’has secret Charms which nothing can deface.93

Again, he was misquoting: the original has ‘cunctos’ (‘all’) not ‘Musas’. But it is astonishing that Cowley should invoke this particular couplet at all. It comes from one of Ovid’s exile poems.94 No classical poet comes less readily to mind as an advocate of country life and rural values than Ovid; his was an urban muse, and this is nowhere clearer than in the poems he wrote after his exile from Rome: the Tristia and the Epistulae Ex Ponto persistently undercut and invert key tenets of the ruralist poetic ethos. For the exiled Ovid, Rome rather than rus is the site of otium;95 in the distant wastes of Tomis, he Wnds not an isolated golden world of Saturnian ‘quies’ but a laborious and militaristic environment which exceeds the worst that the Epicurean sapiens could say of the metropolis. On only one occasion in the entire exilic corpus does Ovid attempt to make his existence on the Black Sea coast Wt the poetic template of an exemplary ruralism, and even there his vision of himself leaning on a crook watching his sheep graze or yoking his oxen to the plough is 92 Horace, Epistles I xvii. 13–15. 93 G 148–9. 94 Epistulae ex Ponto I iii. 35–6. 95 See, for instance, Tristia III ii. 9–10 where the poet remembers himself at Rome as ‘fugax rerum securaque in otia’, ‘mollis et inpatiens . . . laboris’ (‘Xeeing public business, care-free and leisured, soft and incapable of toil’).

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Xeeting and Xagrantly unreal, ‘a pathetic daydream’ in the words of one modern commentator.96 The particular one of the exile epistles from which Cowley quotes is absolutely in line with this general tendency: writing to RuWnus, Ovid thanks his friend for his attempted consolations but insists they are powerless to assuage the longing all men (‘cunctos’) feel for their native land (‘natale solum’)—that is, in Ovid’s case, Rome. Indeed, the very next words after those Cowley translates are: ‘quid melius Roma?’ (‘what is better than Rome?’).97 So extreme is Cowley’s misappropriation of his original in this latter case that it demands further explanation. Can he really have been unaware of the misWt between the original import of Ovid’s lines and the end to which he himself was putting them? In so learned a poet such ignorance seems implausible; especially given that Ovid’s question (‘quid melius Roma?’) would naturally have reminded Cowley that as translator he was in the position of respondent to his original. Then again, to suppose that Cowley knew full well what he was doing is to convict him of insensitivity on a grand scale. Ovid’s question was rhetorical, appealing for the consolation of friendly sympathy, so the answer implied by Cowley’s translation—‘the countryside’—is doubly unwelcome. Cowley drowns out Ovid’s longing for his urban home with his own highminded aVection for country life. That would be translation as shouting match not ‘higher conversation’. No, a third alternative somewhere in between those two extremes is required: that Cowley was semi-conscious of being at cross purposes with Ovid. The phrase ‘secret Charms which nothing can deface’ may be germane in a sense opposite to the one Cowley consciously designed: he sets his public face as a translator against urban practices and values; privately, though, Ovid’s account of the city as an emotionally and poetically nourishing environment gives him pause. To revert once more to Bacon’s terms, does Cowley here make ‘a civil shrift or confession’ to Ovid of his secret discontentments with the secret life: did London retain for him ‘secret Charms’, and his voluntary retirement sometimes feel like enforced exile? The likelihood of these conjectures may be enhanced by considering a Wnal case. It concerns not an inset fragment of translation but a more sustained rendering, the second of the three pieces Cowley appended to ‘Of Agriculture’, and is the most notorious instance of selective quotation 96 The poem in question is Epistulae ex Ponto I viii; I quote the reading of G. D. Williams, in Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid’s Exile Poetry (Cambridge, 1994), p. 28; for Tomis as a travesty of the pastoral rus, see further ch. 1 passim. 97 Epistulae ex Ponto, I iii. 37.


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in the Essays. For, in his version of Horace’s Second Epode, Cowley chose not to translate the Wnal four lines of the poem which reveal that the preceding hymn to retired rural ‘contentment’ was spoken by ‘AlWus’, a moneylender, who far from practising what he has just preached, reneges on his Epicurean commitments forthwith, returning post-haste to Rome and his avaricious ways. This twist in the poem’s tail was recognized in seventeenth-century editions of Horace as integral to its purposes and eVects;98 it represents a more astringent version of the ‘self-exposure’ Horace essayed in ‘The Country Mouse’. Yet Cowley’s act of censorship is not the knock-down proof it might at Wrst appear of his having treated Horace not as a friend but a flatterer. Others of his alterations reverse its eVects, suggesting that Cowley took the force of the epode’s ironic frame and, what is more, that he related it to his own circumstances. The alterations in question involve the use of diction with Wnancial undertones at points in the Epicurean portion of the poem where no such undertones are present in the original. These terms cluster especially thickly near the beginning of the translation, as if Cowley were intent on establishing a pulse of monetary undermeaning from the outset. Thus, Cowley’s farmer enjoys an autumn which is ‘Rich as well as Gay’ whereas in Horace the season is more poetically personiWed as ‘crowned with ripened fruits’ (‘decorum mitibus pomis caput’);99 Cowley’s farmer ‘to the Gods repays’ ‘large shares’ of his produce, whereas Horace’s ‘honours’ Priapus and Silvanus (though the verb employed on this occasion, ‘muneretur’, did have a Wnancial application);100 and Cowley’s farmer reclines ‘His careless head on the fresh Green . . . j His head uncharg’d with Fear or with Design’, whereas in Horace he merely ‘lies on the matted turf’ (‘iacere . . . j . . . in tenaci gramine’).101 Each of those examples occurs within some twenty lines of the opening description of the Epicurean countryman as ‘Like the Wrst golden Mortals Happy he j From Business and the cares of Money free!’102 Of course, the apparent contradiction has an underlying rationale: Cowley was enforcing the Epicurean paradox that (to quote from Dryden’s later version of the epode) ‘rich in humble Poverty, is he, j Who leads a 98 The edition of Horace compiled by Cornelius Schrevelius, for instance, oVers two notes on it, concluding that the poet meant by it to illustrate (with a measure of ironic self-reference) the division between principles and practice in human conduct: see Q. Horatius Flaccus cum commentariis selectissimis (Leiden, 1663), p. 306 (the page is reproduced opposite H ii 197). 99 ‘Horat? Epodon. Beatus ille qui procul, &c.’, l. 19/Horace, ‘Epode II’. 17. 100 ‘Horat? Epodon. Beatus ille qui procul, &c.’, ll. 23–4/Horace, ‘Epode II’. 21. 101 ‘Horat? Epodon. Beatus ille qui procul, &c.’, l. 28/Horace, ‘Epode II’. 23–4. 102 ‘Horat? Epodon. Beatus ille qui procul, &c.’, l. 4.

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quiet country life!’103 But that it also betokens a less conscious and functional response on Cowley’s part to the ending of Horace’s poem, something closer to the survival of painful sensation in an amputated limb, is intimated by the Wrst and most concerted instance of Wnancial undermeaning in the translation. It comes a scant ten lines after the pronouncement of the farmer’s immunity to ‘the cares of Money’, culminating the initial survey of his practices of husbandry: Sometimes the beauteous Marriagable Vine He to the lusty Bridegroom Elm does joyn; Sometimes he lops the barren Trees around, And grafts new Life into the fruitful wound; Sometimes he sheers his Flock, and sometimes he Stores up the Golden Treasures of the Bee.104

When Cowley monetarized apiculture in that last line, choosing ‘Stores up’ for ‘condit’ (‘hides’) and ‘Golden Treasures’ for ‘pressa . . . mella’ (‘pressed honey’),105 he was perhaps thinking mainly of the pedigree bees had in classical verse as archetypes of commercial industriousness.106 But he also had somewhere in his mind’s ear biblical admonitions about where such industriousness might lead. Either those in Matthew’s gospel: Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.107

Or those of St Luke, whose account of ‘the poor rich man’ Cowley invoked in ‘Of the Shortness of Life’: he seems to have been satisWed at last, he confesses he had enough for many years, he bids his soul take its ease, and yet for all that, God says to him, Thou Fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee, and the things thou hast laid up, whom shall they belong to?108

103 ‘From Horace, Epod. 2d’, ll. 2–3. 104 ‘Horat? Epodon’, ll. 11–16. 105 Horace, ‘Epode II’. 15. 106 For this tradition, stemming in particular from Book IV of Virgil’s Georgics, see Claire Preston, Bee (2006), pp. 55–8. 107 Matthew 6: 19–21. 108 G 207–8; Cowley is quoting, then paraphrasing, Luke 12: 20–1: ‘But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those


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There the biblical reference is preceded by one to the passage in Seneca’s seventeenth moral epistle where, hearing of the sudden death of his acquaintance Senecio ‘who from a very mean beginning by great industry. . . had attained to extraordinary Riches’, the philosopher ‘cries, out of Virgil’: Insere nunc Melibœe pyros, pone ordine vites, Go Melibœus, now, Go graV thy Orchards and thy Vineyards plant; Behold the Fruit!109

For Cowley, committed as he was in the Essays to extolling the virtues of agricultural activities such as grafting and planting, that sequence of quotations broaches an unwelcome possibility: that husbandry might be a form of hoarding. He all but acknowledged as much in his contemporaneous ‘Ode to the Royal Society’ (1667), where he spoke of the Baconian natural philosopher setting oV for the countryside ‘to see j The Riches which doe hoorded for him lie j In Natures endless Treasurie’, before adding nervously (in a bracket, needless to say) that he surveys those riches with a ‘( . . . curious but not covetous Eye)’.110 But he could not shake oV the suspicion. In his translation of Horace’s Second Epode it returns, and now in relation not just to agriculture but to the poetic husbandry Cowley himself was performing in the Essays. The bee’s work of honey-making had particular poetic resonance, especially in Horatian contexts, since Horace had compared himself in Odes IV. 2, which Cowley had translated in his Pindarique Odes, to ‘the Matinian bee, that gathers the pleasant thyme laboriously around full many a grove and the banks of well-watered Tiber’.111 As a translator, Cowley buzzes from Virgil to Horace to Ovid to Martial, from georgic to ode to epistle to satire, compiling a treasury of golden eloquence in favour of private life. But part of him feared he was hoarding the honey of the classics and so frittering away his treasure in heaven.

things be, which thou hast provided? j So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.’ 109 G 207; the reference is to Seneca, Epistulae ad Lucilium, xvii (which in turn quotes Virgil, Eclogues i. 73). 110 W i. 448. 111 Horace, Odes IV ii. 28–32.

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Translation and the Poet’s Life T H E L ANGUAG E O F THE HEART

Cowley didn’t live to publish the Several Discourses, by Way of Essays. They were seen through the press by his literary executor, Thomas Sprat, as the Wnal part of his posthumous edition of The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley in Verse and Prose (1668). In his will Cowley had charged Sprat: to trouble himself with ye Collection and Revision of all such writings of mine (whether printed before or not) as hee shall think Wt to be published, Beseeching him not to let any passe wch hee shall iudge unworthy of ye name of his Friend, and most especially nothing (if any of yt kind have escaped my pen) wch may give the least oVence in point of Religion or good Manners.112

This was an especially delicate task in the case of Cowley, given how central to judgements about the worth of his ‘name’ questions of privacy and publicity had become. But it is not certain that the poet chose wisely in appointing Sprat to undertake it. To his credit, Sprat did decide to keep Cowley’s private correspondence out of the public domain, calling it too familiar ‘to go abroad into the streets’,113 a description vindicated by the few of the poet’s letters that have survived in autograph. For they manifest in pathetically extreme form the distinctive tic of introductory bracketing I described earlier in Cowley’s poems; even the privacy of correspondence, it seems, the poet felt the need to redouble: Sr (W ch is a little Grave between you & mee, but Sr —) Dear Fuscus, (I hope the compellation will a little puzzle you) There was so great reason (I must confesse) at this time for ye breaking of y r word w th mee, y t I thought you would have kept it.114

But Sprat’s discretion over Cowley’s letters was somewhat out of character; he conspicuously did not share the poet’s retiring disposition. Sprat was the Restoration equivalent of a PR man: absolutely at home in the new ‘public sphere’, he found his metier in the work of cultural branding for which he is nowadays best known, The History of the Royal Society (1667). He himself may have been acknowledging the disparity 112 The will is printed as the second of a group of ‘Documents Relating to Abraham Cowley or his Family’, in Nethercot, The Muse’s Hannibal, 296–8 (I quote from 297). 113 Works (1668), sig. C1r . 114 Allan Pritchard, ‘Six Letters by Cowley’, Review of English Studies, 71 (1967), 253–63 (at 259, 260, 262).


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between his temperament and that of his secretive poetic friend when at the end of the ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Mr Abraham Cowley’ which he set at the forefront of his edition, he foresaw: ‘Perhaps it may be judged, that I have spent too many words on a private man.’115 Consider their respective attitudes to the anti-secretive strain in Baconian natural philosophy. Sprat was fundamentalist about transparency; though he conceded in the History that the Royal Society had so far made little progress in gathering together into a single body of knowledge the multitude of ‘secrets’ held by practitioners of the various trades,116 since the owners of those secrets were unwilling for them to ‘become common, and so they be depriv’d of the gain, which else they should be sure of, if they kept them to themselves’, he remained conWdent that these antiquated habits would soon be overcome: ‘the Royal Society will be able by degrees to purchase such extraordinary inventions, which are now close lock’d up in Cabinets; and then bring them into one common Stock, which shall be on all occasions expos’d to all men’s use’.117 In the event, far from defeating the secretiveness of the artisans, the fellows of the Royal Society soon afterwards began to ape it: the late 1660s saw the Wrst major intellectual property disputes among scientists, and by February 1668 the situation had become so intolerable that the Secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, was obliged to institute the practice of recording the dates and times when he Wrst received information about particular inventions on slips of paper which were then locked inside a black box, known as the ‘Depositary of Inventions’, as a safeguard against future accusations of plagiarism.118 It was a development Cowley had foreseen in his Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy where he proposed ‘That there shall be kept a Register under lock and key, and not to be seen but by the Professors, of all the Experiments that succeed, signed by the persons who made the tryall.’119 Even in the ‘Ode to the Royal Society’ which he wrote to puV the History Cowley is not at one with Sprat over secrecy. The ode does not speciWcally address the eVorts of the fellows to amass trade secrets, but it 115 Works (1668), sig. C4v . 116 For the background to this endeavour, see William Eamon, ‘Arcana Disclosed: The Advent of Printing, the Book of Secrets Tradition and the Development of Experimental Science in the Sixteenth Century’, History of Science, 22 (1984), 111–50. 117 Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667), p. 75. 118 Rob IliVe, ‘ ‘‘In the Warehouse’’: Privacy, Property and Priority in the Early Royal Society’, History of Science, 30 (1992), 29–68, esp. 34–9. 119 G 37.

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does revisit the related topic of experimental curiosity. Again, as in the ‘Ode upon Dr Harvey’, the topic aroused complicated and contradictory feelings in Cowley: Natures great Workes no distance can obscure, No smalness her near Objects can secure Y’ have taught the curious Sight to press Into the privatest recess Of her imperceptible Littleness. Y’ have learned to Read her smallest Hand, And well begun her deepest Sense to understand.120

What did Sprat make of this, one wonders. Maybe he thought it was ‘onmessage’: after all, the image in the last two lines of scientists decyphering the small print of Nature might be read as a reformed cryptographer’s mea culpa. Other features of the passage, though, should have given him pause, notably the next three lines, ‘Y’ have taught the curious Sight to press j Into the privatest recess j Of her imperceptible Littleness’, whose miniaturist acoustic of sibilance and internal rhyme bespeaks sensual pleasure derived from the thought of conWned spaces. If Sprat picked up on this, he might also have remembered where else in English poetry such pleasure had recently been taken: in the verse of royalists such as Herrick and Lovelace who had cloistered their imaginations into nano-environments, whether natural (grasshoppers, snails) or artiWcial (painted miniatures, lockets), to Wnd refuge from the horriWc new openness of their nation, a nation, as they saw it, engaged in disembowelling—dissecting—itself in civil war. On one occasion, while Cowley was still alive, Sprat had taken it upon himself to act as the public face of his retiring friend. SigniWcantly, the episode involved a translation, the one in which Cowley had privately entertained doubts about the philosophic purity of his withdrawal: ‘The Country Mouse’. He had not translated all of Horace, Satires II. 6 but just the Wnal third of the poem. The eighty lines he left out detail Horace’s reasons for preferring the quiet of his Sabine farm to the hubbub of Rome, and culminate in a short transitional passage which explains that the tale of the country mouse is told by Horace’s rustic neighbour ‘Cervius’. At some point between 1663 and 1666, Sprat supplied a rendering of these eighty lines to stand at the head of Cowley’s translation; the composite version appeared as the second of two treatments of Satires II. 6 in Alexander Brome’s The Poems of 120 W i. 451–2.


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Horace . . . rendred in English verse by several persons (1666). Sprat adopted the method that would later become known as ‘allusion’ (after Rochester’s ‘An Allusion to Horace’), Wnding modern equivalents for the people and places who feature in the original: the Forum becomes ‘Westminster’, Maecenas ‘the Lord Chancellor’, and so forth. ‘Cervius’ becomes ‘C—’, transparently code for Cowley (he is named immediately below as the translator of ‘The Country Mouse’). In Horace genial irony plays around Cervius: he is a horny-handed rustic with a taste for ‘old wives’ tales’ (‘anilis j . . . fabellas’) who doesn’t just ‘tell’ (‘narrat’ or ‘dicit’) his story but ‘rattles it oV ’ (‘garrit’). That presentation meshes with the strand of ‘gentle self-mockery’ which runs throughout Cowley’s translation, but Sprat evidently worried about the eVect such ‘humorous self-exposure’ might have on his friend’s public reputation. Cowley’s retirement could not be a laughing matter: either it was principled or it would be culpable. Accordingly, Sprat, through a series of additions and adjustments, repositions Cervius as an ascetic who ‘Forsook the world with me’ and employs ‘old Stories’ only his ‘Rough Morals [to] allay’ (for the beneWt of those who cannot match his rigorist abstinence) and even then under protest: ‘Yet not that all our talk should stories be, j But onely when they genuine come and free.’121 That may be regarded as a rehearsal for the larger programme of damage limitation Sprat undertook in his posthumous edition of Cowley’s Works; particularly in the ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Mr Abraham Cowley’ and most particularly through his strategic handling within it of the Discourses, by Way of Essays. The general task Sprat sets himself is to honour his friend as ‘a private man’ whilst dissociating him from the various disreputable forms of ‘anti-social solitude’—in short, to disentangle the knotted strands of the poet’s secret life. The diYculties Sprat faced in this endeavour are indicated at the outset by the adjective which comes to his mind when he wants to praise the poet’s management of Henrietta Maria’s encrypted correspondence. Cowley’s ‘secrecy’ was, says Sprat, ‘unsuspected’; by which, of course, he meant ‘complete’ or ‘absolute’, but the negative formulation is telling. The only suspect element of Cowley’s secret life directly considered by Sprat is the poet’s rumoured accommodation with the Cromwellian regime, which Sprat called with typical bullishness ‘the only part of his life, that was liable to misinterpretation, even by the confession of those that 121 The Poems of Horace . . . rendred in English verse by several persons (1666), p. 286.

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envied his Fame’.122 Alas, that conWdence turns out to be misplaced as the ‘Account’ proceeds. No matter that Sprat has pointed out that ‘it was one of the greatest helps to the Kings aVairs, about the latter end of that Tyranny, that many of his best friends dissembled their Counsels’,123 Cowley’s clandestine past continues to haunt his friend’s well-intentioned prose. So when Sprat tries to say that Cowley was unassuming, it comes out as: ‘None but his intimate Friends ever discovered he was a great Poet, by his discourse’; and when he tries to say that Cowley wore his erudition lightly, it comes out as: ‘His learning . . . sat exceeding close and handsomely upon him.’124 The business of vindicating Cowley’s ‘earnest aVection for Obscurity and Retirement’125 becomes most complicated when Sprat reaches the period of his Wnal retirement at Chertsey. Here Sprat had to Wght on two fronts at once: against those who accused the poet of treachery during the Interregnum and those who criticized him for subsiding into ‘pitiful Melancholy’ when his hopes of preferment after the Restoration were dashed. His recent experience of propagandizing for the new science, in the History of the Royal Society, suggested to him a means of killing these two birds with one stone. When he said Cowley withdrew to Chertsey ‘to search into the secrets of Divine and Humane Knowledge’,126 Sprat was employing the semi-technical language used in Baconian contexts to refer to Weld-trips, the ‘redeWned and relegitimized solitude’ of the scientist, ‘an intermittent retreat, temporally linked to active work in a public forum’.127 The temporary privacy of the natural philosopher is justiWable in so far as it is intended to issue in discoveries freely communicated to the public; similarly, by publishing the works Cowley produced at Chertsey, Sprat would justify his friend’s retiring ways to Restoration men and women. Libri Plantarum Wts this scientiWc bill reasonably well: much of the Wrst Wve of its six books is comprised of botanical information not too heavily poeticized to have been of interest to the ‘georgical committee’ of the Royal Society. But for Sprat the Essays too manifest the spirit of scientiWc communicativeness he emphasized in the History. In Libri Plantarum, Cowley revealed the secrets of the Xora and fauna he had observed at Barn Elms and Chertsey; in the Essays, he would lay bare the secrets of his own interior landscape. He would open

122 Works (1668), sig. b3v . 124 Ibid., C2r (my emphases). 125 Ibid., C2v . 123 Ibid., b4r . 127 Shapin, ‘ ‘‘The Mind is its own Place’’, 203. 126 Ibid., C3r .


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himself up to public scrutiny, anatomize himself. Such is the implication of Sprat’s highly tactical claim that Cowley conceived the Essays ‘as a real Character of his own thoughts, upon the point of his Retirement’,128 echoing as it does the title of the work, published that very year and excitedly discussed while in manuscript for some time previously within the scientiWc circles to which Sprat had access, which above any other instantiated the Royal Society’s aspiration towards communicative transparency: John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668). The allusion is a brilliant public relations coup: ‘real characters’ are codes, but codes designed not for sectarian purposes of obfuscation but rather to facilitate unimpeded communication across boundaries of nationality. Reception of the Essays has generally borne out Sprat’s view of them as unsecretive. They have long been considered Cowley’s most accessible productions. Since the early eighteenth century, Cowley’s fame has been in steep decline, in large part because of the perceived obscurantism of his writing, its enigmatic imagery and recondite learning,129 and the Essays alone have bucked this trend.130 Pope famously remarked in his imitation of ‘The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace’ that he had ‘Forgot [Cowley’s] epic’ (i.e. the Davideis) as well as his ‘Pindaric art, j But still I love the language of his heart’;131 and that phrase, taken from the Wrst to refer to the Essays, has echoed ever since through critical estimates of the work, notably those of Joseph Warton, William Cowper, and Charles Lamb. But these views may tell us more about the enduring appeal of the image of the writer as a Wgure of rural openness and sincerity, the image Sprat meant to aYx to Cowley, than they do about the actual characteristics of the Essays themselves. Certainly, Pope was given to conferring on other writers the quality of ingenuous openness which he lacked himself. Arbuthnot, Gay, Parnell—all get cast at one time or another in Pope’s poems or letters as artless unpackers of their hearts. Perhaps Cowley did intend to speak ‘the language of his heart’ in the Essays; after all, he had 128 Works (1668), sig. C3r . 129 See A. H. Nethercot, ‘The Reputation of Abraham Cowley (1660–1800)’, PMLA (1923), 588–641, esp. 627–8 quoting Hugh Blair and Lord Kames deploring how ‘obscure’ Cowley’s conceits and metric are and commenting on his fondness for ‘aenigma’. 130 Ibid., 629–33. 131 On the general importance of Cowley’s Essays for Pope, see Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731–1743 (Toronto, 1969), pp. 80–5.

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been aware since ‘AVote’that there might be something disreputable about his addiction to privacy. But if this was his intention, I am going to conclude by arguing that he failed—if failure it was—to realize it. The Essays create an eVect of openness and transparency, but they do not, in the end, clear up the mysteries of Cowley’s secret life. What revelations they oVer are bound up with further concealments; every private chamber to which we are admitted contains another locked door. In this respect, they bear comparison with earlier Renaissance negotiations of privacy, exhibiting the simultaneous and contradictory impulses towards decryption and encryption which informed the design of Elizabethan closets, sonnets, and lockets.132 Their hybrid and havering title suggests as much: not ‘Discourses’ or ‘Essays’ but ‘Discourses, by Way of Essays’. Whether it was Cowley’s idea or Sprat’s,133 it is, on the face of it, strongly redolent of a commitment to transparency. ‘Discourse’ had lately become a keyword of the new science’s communicative ethos, the conversational civility so central to the self-presentation of the experimenters; hence, for instance, Boyle’s ‘An Epistolical Discourse . . . inviting all true Lovers of Vertue and Mankind to a free and generous Communication of their Secrets and Receits in Physick’ (1655),134 a formulation Cowley was probably remembering when he congratulated Evelyn (in an epistle) for having made ‘a free communication of the Art and Knowledge’ of horticulture in Kalendarium Hortense (1664).135 ‘Essay’ too had acquired particular scientiWc resonance in recent years, again owing mainly to Boyle’s powerful example: in ‘A Proemial Essay. . . with some Considerations touching Experimental Essays in General’, preWxed to Certain Physiological Essays, written at distant Times, and on several occasions (1661) he embraced the term as his preferred generic marker for his experimental narratives. However, its use was somewhat problematic. Boyle adopted it because of its traditional associations with anti-dogmatic modes of thought, as a corrective to what ‘has long seemed to me none of the least impediments of the real advancement of Natural Philosophy, that men have been so forward to write Systems of it’.136 By 1668, though, Boyle’s 132 See, for instance, Orest Ranum, ‘The Refuges of Intimacy’, in Chartier (ed.), Passions of the Renaissance, 207–63; and Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago, 1991), pp. 67–110. 133 In ‘Of My Self ’, Cowley refers to ‘these precedent discourses’; G 216. 134 Robert Boyle’s Wrst publication, this appeared anonymously among a series of Chymical, Medicinal, and Chyrurgical Addresses Made to Samuel Hartlib, Esq. (1655); I quote the full title as it appeared on the contents page. 135 In ‘The Garden’; G 169–70. 136 Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays, Written at Distant Times and on Several Occasions (1661), p. 3.


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disinclination to systematize had begun to conXict with eVorts—including Sprat’s—to consolidate the public image of the Royal Society. The initial burst of optimism surrounding the Society’s foundation had given way to anxieties about how little the fellows had to show for their eVorts. Where were the promised inventions and discoveries, the technological advances which the new experimental procedures were supposed to enable? Boyle represented the Society’s best hope of answering these inconvenient questions; yet Boyle was increasingly reluctant, for a complex of scientiWc and religious reasons which Michael Hunter has termed ‘scrupulosity’,137 to make large claims for his work in print. He refused to doctor the results of his experiments to enhance their impact, and what few hypotheses he did permit himself to advance he hedged round with caveats about the need for further trials. His essayistic habits of mind were coming to seem less like exemplary aversion to dogmatism and more like extreme fastidiousness, a dysfunctional reticence uncomfortably reminiscent of the ‘secretists’ (whose protectionist and cryptographic practices Boyle did indeed perpetuate in his alchemical researches).138 One way to interpret the ‘by way of ’ in Cowley’s title, then, is as a mark of the work’s divided loyalties to ‘free communication’ on the one hand and introverted ‘scrupulosity’ on the other.139 This division of loyalties is particularly felt in the Essays when Cowley is translating. It opens widest wherever in the translations Cowley uses the word around which debate about his ‘aVection for Obscurity’ had throughout his life as a poet circled: namely, ‘secret’. Whether as a noun or an adjective, in English or in Latin, it occurs in Wve of the eleven 137 Michael Hunter, Robert Boyle, 1627–91: Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge, 2000), esp. ch. 4: ‘Casuistry in Action: Robert Boyle’s Confessional Interviews with Gilbert Burnet and Edward StillingXeet, 1691’ and ch. 9: ‘The Reluctant Philanthropist: Robert Boyle and the ‘‘Communication of Secrets and Receits in Physick’’ ’. 138 For ‘dysfunctional’ elements in Boyle’s personality, ‘the ‘‘unintentional’’ or ‘‘irrational’’ dimension to Boyle’s intellectual outlook’, see Hunter, ibid., ch. 3: ‘The Conscience of Robert Boyle: Functionalism, ‘‘Dysfunctionalism’’ and the Task of Historical Understanding’ (I quote from 59) on Boyle’s secretiveness as an alchemist see, for instance, L. M. Principe, ‘Robert Boyle’s Alchemical Secrecy: Codes, Ciphers and Concealments’, Ambix, 39 (1992), 63–74. 139 The title proved inXuential, being copied, for instance, by Nicholas Culpeper, in his Essayes, or Moral Discourses on several subjects (1671) and also by the ‘Person of Honour’ responsible for Moral Essays and Discourses, Upon several Subjects (1690); the latter explicitly acknowledges Cowley’s example (at p. 18), and tension between publicity and privacy is intrinsic to the former: ‘in extolling the subject which I handle, I do in some sort prompt a greater expectation in point of performance then I desire the Reader should have for my abilities, since howsoever this book comes now to be published, it was but the result of my private thoughts’ (p. 3).

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Essays. The Wve include ‘Of Liberty’140 and ‘Of My Self ’, the essays with which the volume opens and closes, as well as ‘Of Agriculture’, much the most substantial of the essays and the one around which the sequence as a whole pivots. Here cognates of ‘secret’ occur on three occasions, and every time Cowley is translating: in the Wrst two cases, snippets of quotation inset within the essay; in the third, one of the whole poems appended to it. As we reach the heart of the volume, it seems, we are reaching the heart of the mystery. The secrets of Cowley’s secret life are about to be ours. First, Cowley reports the ‘satisfaction’ of looking round about him, and seeing nothing but the eVects and improvements of his own Art and Diligence; to be always gathering of some Fruits of it, and at the same time to behold others ripening, and others budding: to see all his Fields and Gardens covered with the beauteous Creatures of his own Industry; and to see, like God, that all his Works are Good. —Hinc atque hinc glomerantur Oreades; ipsi Agricolae tacitum pertentant gaudia pectus. On his heart-strings a secret Joy does strike.141

Then (in a passage I touched on in the last section) he places himself in a long line of poets who have found country life congenial to the production of verse: Poetry was Born among the Shepherds. Nescio qua Natale solum dulcedine Musas Ducit, & immemores non sinit esse sui. The Muses still love their own Native place, T’ has secret Charms which nothing can deface.142 The truth is, no other place is proper for their work; one might as well undertake to Dance in a Crowd, as to make good Verses in the midst of Noise and Tumult.

Finally, he conWdes that most people are unhappy because they enslave themselves to money and success: Only, because they know not how, aright, That great, but secret, happiness to prize That’s laid up in a Little, for the Wise.143 140 This is the only case not considered in detail here: ‘Anger, Hatred, Jealousie, Fear, Envy, Grief . . . are the secret, but constant Tyrants and Torturers of [great men’s] life’; G 118. 141 Ibid., 145. 142 Ibid., 148–9. 143 ‘A Paraphrase upon the 10th Epistle of the Wrst Book of Horace’; ibid., 165.


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Deciphering out of Latin, Cowley divulges secrets. Or does he? To compare his translations with their originals is to Wnd in each case that their clarifying force is counterbalanced by a mystifying eVect. For in each case choice of the word ‘secret’ is far from straightforwardly indicated by the Latin: ‘tacitum’, in the Wrst, means ‘silent’ but in the sense (as the context makes clear) of ‘calm’ rather than ‘watchful’ or ‘guarded’; ‘nescio qua’, in the second, means ‘I know not what’, but once again context establishes this as a candid admission of baZement (‘something or other’) rather than calculated unforthcomingness; and, as for the third, well, in the third there is no warrant whatsoever in the original (Horace’s Epistle to Fuscus Aristius) for Cowley’s phrase ‘great, but secret, happiness’. If Cowley’s insistence on the secrecy of the secrets referred to in those three passages is, in one sense, only to be expected, given what we have seen of his personal disposition, in another sense, when set against a broader cultural background, it demands further explanation. For the secrets at issue were anything but secret as far as Cowley’s potential readers were concerned. That the life of rural retirement is the source of true happiness, and that riches and power lead inevitably to misery were among the most hackneyed properties of Restoration thought. A hundred other contemporary essayists and translators had rehashed this staple Stoico-Epicurean fare before Cowley. In fact, a good proportion of Cowley’s readers might already have copied into their commonplace books one or more previous English translations of the passages of classical poetry extolling the secret life which he translates. So familiar were these passages that they were commonly referred to at this time by their opening phrases, their nicknames, as it were: ‘Beatus ille’ and ‘O fortunatos nimium’, for instance, for Horace’s second epode and the passage from Virgil’s Georgics which Cowley translates after ‘Of Agriculture’. In emphasizing the secrecy of the wisdoms contained in such passages, then, Cowley was risking bathos. He more or less said so himself; as, for instance, when he remarked of the watchword ‘Bene qui latuit, bene vixit, He has lived well, who has lain well hidden’, in ‘Of Obscurity’, that it is ‘a most vulgar saying’,144 and most strikingly when he began ‘Of Solitude’ by observing: ‘Numquam minus solus, quam cum solus [‘one is never less alone than when one is alone’] is now become a very vulgar saying. Every Man and almost every Boy for these seventeen hundred years, has had it in his mouth.’145 144 Ibid., 137.

145 Ibid., 129.

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Cowley left that last saying untranslated, declined to decipher it. Of course, its syntax and vocabulary are so basic that no serviceably educated male reader would have needed a translation. But female readers, a key market for translators in the Restoration, might have felt the lack of one. This tiny exclusionary gesture on Cowley’s part suggests a reason why he interposed the word ‘secret’ into the three passages of translation from ‘Of Agriculture’; namely, to assuage his disgust at hearing the sacred credos of ‘the secret life’ being chewed over by the unwashed masses. How powerfully Cowley experienced that disgust is suggested by the almost Swiftian force of his phrasing. (‘Every Man and almost everyboy. . . has had it in his mouth’). To refuse to translate ‘Numquam minus solus, quam cum solus’ was, albeit in no more than a symbolic extent, to resist the process of its vulgarization into cant; to snatch this pearl of classical wisdom back from the swine. Similarly, by inserting the word ‘secret’ into the three translated passages in ‘Of Agriculture’, Cowley was moving to seal the ‘joy’ of self-suYciency, the ‘Charms’ of ruralism, and the ‘happiness’ of poverty back into the possession of a Wt audience though few, even as he seemingly opened them up for more general consumption. However many people mouthed Virgil’s or Horace’s or Martial’s praise of retirement and solitude, Cowley was impressing on his readers, only a minority of illuminati went on to digest that praise, to become inward with it, and so could truly be said to know the secrets of the secret life. Otherwise, why had his own ‘AVection for Obscurity’ occasioned so much suspicious comment? In short, Cowley’s translations were designed to be self-frustrating; to countermand their own deciphering power. The secrets which Cowley’s Essays purport to reveal are, in a weak sense, common knowledge already (the resemblance of the volume to a commonplace book has special force in this respect) but in a stronger sense beyond being deciphered by Cowley or any other translator. The relation between this self-frustrating quality in Cowley’s conduct as a translator within the Essays and the vexed history of his taste for the secret life is made most explicit in the opening section of ‘Of Obscurity’. The passage in question is especially diVuse and circuitous—essayistic—in its movement, and so quotation at length is necessary: Nam neque Divitibus contingunt gaudia solis, Nec vixit male, qui natus moriensque Fefellit. God made not pleasures only for the Rich, Nor have those men without their share too liv’d, Who both in Life and Death the world deceiv’d.


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This seems a strange Sentence thus literally translated, and looks as if it were in vindication of the men of business (for who else can Deceive the world?) whereas it is in commendation of those who live and dye so obscurely, that the world takes no notice of them. This Horace calls deceiving the world, and in another place uses the same phrase. Secretum iter & Fallentis semita vitae. The secret tracks of the Deceiving Life. It is very elegant in Latine, but our English word will hardly bear up to that sence, and therefore Mr. Broom translates it very well, Or from a Life, led as it were by stealth. Yet we say in our Language, a thing deceives our sight, when it passes before us unperceived, and we may say well enough out of the same Authour, Sometimes with sleep, sometimes with wine we strive, The cares of Life and troubles to Deceive. But that is not to deceive the world, but to deceive our selves, as Quintilian saies, Vitam fallere, To draw on still, and amuse, and deceive our Life, till it be advanced insensibly to the fatal Period, and fall into that Pit which Nature hath prepared for it. The meaning of all this is no more than that most vulgar saying, Bene qui latuit, bene vixit, He has lived well, who has lain well hidden. Which if it be a truth, the world (I’le swear) is suYciently deceived: For my part, I think it is, and that the pleasantest condition of Life, is in Incognito. What a brave Privilege is it to be free from all Contentions, from all Envying and being Envyed, from receiving and from paying all kind of Ceremonies? It is in my mind, a very delightful pastime, for two good and agreeable friends to travail up and down together, in places where they are by no body known, nor know any body. It was the case of Aeneas and his Achates, when they walkt invisibly about the Welds and streets of Carthage, Venus her self A vail of thickned Air around them cast, That none might know, or see them as they past.146

‘This seems a strange Sentence thus literally translated’—but a sense of estrangement was what Cowley wanted to create. To translate so literally that the meaning of the passage being translated is signiWcantly obscured, indeed diametrically inverted, is tantamount to leaving that passage untranslated, as Cowley had done in the case of ‘Numquam minus solus, quam cum solus’ in ‘Of Solitude’, or to translating it in a manner which simultaneously establishes that its true meaning remains 146 Ibid., 136–8.

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secret, as Cowley had done in the cases of the three passages in ‘Of Agriculture’. Having created this sense of estrangement through his handling of the Wrst ‘Sentence’ from Horace, Cowley redoubles it by translating the second, ‘Secretum iter & Fallentis semita vitae’ in an equally literal manner, as ‘The secret tracks of the Deceiving Life’, and then compounds the eVect by adding, for the beneWt of any readers still under the impression that they were being let in on an Horatian secret, that ‘our English word’ (i.e. ‘Deceiving’) ‘will hardly bear up’ to the ‘sence’ of the ‘Latine’. To top matters oV, Cowley invokes Brome’s alternative translation which, far from shedding light on the situation, further obscures matters, since any phrase ending ‘as it were’ can make only a limited claim to elucidate, while ‘stealth’ suVers from the same disadvantages as a translation of ‘Fallentis’ as ‘Deceiving’. Granted, Cowley then makes some attempt to clarify his uses of ‘deceive’, but the clariWcation he oVers is, by his own admission, not to the point (‘But that is not to deceive the world, but to deceive our selves’) and he soon abandons the attempt, with the verbal equivalent of a shrug and a rather sheepish witticism: ‘The meaning of all this is no more than that vulgar saying, Bene qui latuit, bene vixit, He has lived well, who has lain well hidden. Which if it be a truth, the world (I’le swear) is suYciently deceived.’ One can only imagine what Sprat made of those indurating obfuscations, and especially of the part played in them by Cowley’s insistent use of the verb ‘deceive’, likely as it was to put back in question the probity of his secret life. There’s something compulsive about the way Cowley returns again and again to the verb, his repeated eVorts to clear away the build-up of pejoration from around it and restore it to an original purity of signiWcation. That he fails, as his own Wnal turn on the word concedes, is a matter of some consequence for estimations of his ‘aVection for Obscurity and Retirement’. Compare the passage in the ‘Paraphrase on an Ode in Horace’s third Book’, originally in Verses upon Several Occasions and now appended to ‘Of Avarice’, where Cowley had written that the rich man ‘Deceives himself ’ in desiring to grow ever richer. Was the poet similarly self-deceived in his desire for privacy? Certainly, that desire no longer rests squarely on unimpeachable foundations of classical ethics: Horace’s example has receded somewhat into an unrecoverable past. Of course, it could be said that the failure is not Cowley’s but that of the ‘vulgar’ he glancingly refers to at the end of the passage, for whom the pristine ‘truth’ of Horace’s words will always be out of reach and the life of retirement


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nothing more than ‘the deceiving life’ in the debased understanding of the phrase. There’s some truth in this: a vein of intellectual e´litism runs through the passage. To put it in terms of the quintessentially Cowleian emblem of friendship invoked a moment later—Aeneas and Achates walking ‘invisibly about the Welds and streets of Carthage’, shielded by ‘A vail of thickned Air’—Cowley was prepared to run the risk of casting a cloud of moral opprobrium over the secret life in the hope of being left alone to enjoy it with the classical poets whom, in the act of translation, he befriended. But it would be underplaying the sheer extremeness and oddity of Cowley’s writing here to regard the passage as a straightforward case of a die-hard royalist Wnding refuge from the public sphere in classical learning. The serpertine perplexities of Cowley’s prose just don’t feel so purposive; on the contrary, he seems implicated in the confusions they enact. More than that, though: Cowley’s failure to make himself clear potentially reXects too on the ethical thought he is trying to clarify. Relevant in this context is the relation between translatability and cogency of argument postulated by one of Cowley’s intellectual heroes, Thomas Hobbes. In Chapter 8 of Leviathan, while discussing ‘InsigniWcant Speech’, Hobbes addresses the ‘intention to deceive by obscurity’, citing as a cardinal instance the language of the ‘Schoolemen’ who ‘converse in questions of matters incomprehensible’. As a touchstone of the unintelligibility of their amalgam of neo-Aristotelianism and Roman Catholic dogma, what he elsewhere termed their ‘dark science’, he proposes translation. Anyone not yet convinced that ‘their words are without any thing correspondent to them in the mind’ should: take a Schoole-man into his hands, and see if he can translate any one chapter concerning any diYcult point; as the Trinity; the Deity; the nature of Christ; Transubstantiation; Free-will, &c. into any of the moderne tongues, so as to make the same intelligible; or into any tolerable Latine, such as they were acquainted withall, that lived when the Latine tongue was vulgar.147

In the praise-poem ‘To Mr. Hobs’ included in his Pindarique Odes, Cowley had enthusiastically endorsed this view of the language of the school-men as ‘nought but Words’, ‘empty Air’;148 but might the same be said of the classical watchwords of ‘the secret life’? Did Cowley’s inability to translate those watchwords into intelligible modern English 147 Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Oxford, 1991), p. 59.

148 W i. 188.

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reveal that the ethic of retirement was a ‘dark science’? This is the discomWting possibility Cowley’s translatorial travails over ‘deceive’ in ‘Of Obscurity’ Wnally canvass: that he had been (to adapt Hobbes’s phrase) ‘deceived by obscurity’. In this passage what we are listening in on are Cowley’s self-divisions on the score of his retiringness teetering on the edge of consciousness, of being acknowledged and confronted. To revert to Sprat’s scientiWc paradigm, and the example of Boyle, Cowley declines to suppress those results of his research into his own ‘aVection for Obscurity and Retirement’ which do not support the hypothesis of its moral functionality. The Wnal occurrence of the word ‘secret’ in the Essays, and so the Wnal occasion in his life when Cowley used the word around which that life had so recurrently orbited, comes in the last of the essays, ‘Of My Self ’, and completes his resistance to functional accounts of his addiction to privacy. In fact, it appears almost to parody the application of imperatives of scientiWc openness to the practice of moral self-scrutiny. The ‘wall impervious’ that ‘Divides the very Parts within, j And doth the Heart of man ev’n from its self conceal’,149 thrown down in the ‘Ode upon Dr Harvey’, is here triumphantly resurgent. The language of the heart proves untranslatable. Why Cowley so desired to live the secret life is a secret he keeps from himself: As far as my Memory can return back into my past Life, before I knew, or was capable of guessing what the world, or glories, or business of it were, the natural aVections of my soul gave me a secret bent of aversion from them, as some Plants are said to turn away from others, by an Antipathy imperceptible to themselves, and inscrutable to mans understanding.150

‘A secret bent of aversion’ from ‘the world’: in other words, a secret inclination to secrecy. The tautology seems peculiarly characteristic of Cowley, but in fact he was once again remembering Aristotle’s axiom that ‘Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god’, as glossed by Bacon’s remark in ‘Of Friendship’ that ‘a secret hatred and aversation towards society’ has indeed ‘somewhat of the savage beast’ about it ‘except it proceed . . . out of a love and desire to sequester a man’s self for a higher conversation’. As we saw earlier, that remark held out to Cowley an ideal of himself as a devotee of the secret life and more particularly as a practitioner of one of its deWnitive literary modes: translation. In this culminating and clearest echo of Bacon’s words, 149 W i. 417.

150 G 216.


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however, Cowley rejects that classic alibi for his lifelong secretiveness. For whilst the eVect of his repointing of Bacon’s line of argument is to deny that his ‘aversation towards society’ makes him a ‘savage beast’, what Cowley says it makes him instead is not a god but a plant. In all probability a rather unXattering kind of plant too—a cabbage. In early-modern botany, the prime instance of antipathy in the plant kingdom was the cabbage’s ‘enmity’, as Thomas Browne called it in Nature’s Cabinet Unlock’d (1657), towards the vine.151 Not only Browne but also Burton in the Anatomy of Melancholy invokes the cabbage Wrst when addressing the subject of vegetal antipathy.152 Naturally enough: such antipathy was often considered a form of melancholy, and the cabbage personiWes melancholy (so to speak) because of its unrivalled power to cause ‘troublesome dreams’ and ‘send up black vapours to the brain’.153 Why the cabbage should be so averse to the vine was, though, no longer so ‘inscrutable to mans understanding’ as Cowley makes out. Browne, not one to clear up a mystery unless it was absolutely necessary, records some exemplary new-scientiWc rationales for the phenomenon: that cabbages and vines need the same kind of soil to Xourish, or rely on the same kinds of nutriment, and so forth.154 So Cowley was being wilfully obscurantist in defence of the cabbage’s secrets and his own, but his wilfulness winningly combines deWance with humility. At the end of a lifetime of being pressured to explain his ‘AVection for Obscurity and Retirement’, Cowley asserts the unknowability of the sources of that aVection; yet he does so at the price of transforming it into a sheer vegetal melancholy. Transforming it or translating it—describing the metamorphosis of Ovid’s Cyparissus into the cypress tree (another symbol of melancholy) in Book VI of the Libri Plantarum, Cowley had applied to it the verb ‘transferre’ and Aphra Behn, translating the passage for the English version of the poem in the sixth edition of Cowley’s Works (1689), had the wit to give the literal ‘translate’.155 But such vegetal metamorphosis is not ‘translation’ of the gratifyingly transcendent kind imagined by Bacon on behalf of denizens of the secret life. Cowley translates himself not up the scale of being to a ‘higher conversation’ 151 Thomas Browne, Nature’s Cabinet Unlock’t (1657), p. 88. 152 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York, 2000), p. 79. 153 Ibid., 220. 154 Browne, Nature’s Cabinet Unlock’t, 107–8. 155 Works (1689), p. 142.

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but down it beneath will and consciousness to the level of the blankly appetitive; strips away the higher two of his three souls, leaving only the vegetative one human beings share with plants and stones. In his ‘Ode upon Dr Harvey’, Cowley once told how ‘Coy Nature’, ‘When Harvey’s violent passion she did see’, in a desperate eVort to escape his dissecting attentions, ‘Took sanctu’ary, like Daphne, in a tree’;156 at the end of his life as a poet, he went further still down the ladder of creation to Wnd sanctuary from those—including himself—who were violently passionate to know the secrets of his secret life. 156 W i. 416.

chapter 3 Dryden and the Bounds of Liberty

John Dryden by Sir Godfrey Kneller (1697)

L AT I TU DE When the anonymous editor of Poems on AVairs of State (1697) declared ‘there is no where a greater Spirit of Liberty to be found, than in those who are Poets’ it’s safe to say he wasn’t thinking of John Dryden. Whoever the editor was, he was a Whig. The ‘design’ of his anthology was ‘to remove those pernicious Principles which lead us directly to Slavery’, a fate England had only narrowly escaped during the Restoration, and ‘to promote a Publick and Generous Spirit’ such as had been then ‘almost a shame to the Possessor, if not a certain Ruine’.1 Accordingly, he gave pride of place to ‘Mr. Milton’ and ‘Mr. Marvell’, those twin pillars of opposition to ‘popery’ and ‘arbitrary government’. Dryden, whom Whigs accused of prostituting his pen to the absolutist desires of his royal masters, was represented by just one poem: Heroique Stanza’s (1659), the funeral panegyric he had contributed, while he was employed alongside Milton and Marvell in the Secretariat for Foreign Tongues, to a memorial volume for Cromwell. The evident incompatibility of its republican sentiments with Dryden’s subsequent career as an apologist for monarchy made this poem a godsend for his many enemies; it was reprinted three times at the height of the Exclusion Crisis and resurfaced again in the aftermath of Dryden’s conversion to the conventionally ‘slavish’ faith of Roman Catholicism.2 Its appearance in Poems on AVairs of State was surely intended once more to underline Dryden’s oVences against the ‘Spirit of Liberty’ by reminding readers how thoroughly he had once been infused with that spirit. In fact, of course, there was no single deWnitive ‘Spirit of Liberty’ abroad in English political culture over the years Dryden spent at the turbulent heart of that culture in his capacity as Poet Laureate, but rather a plurality of competing ‘Rhetorics of Liberty’.3 Tories, quite as much as Whigs, saw and talked of themselves as defenders of ‘liberty’

1 Poems on AVairs of State (1697), sigs. A2v --A3r . 2 Paul Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (Oxford, 1999), p. 74 and n. 22. 3 I borrow this phrase from the title of Tim Harris’s classic essay ‘ ‘‘Lives, Liberties and Estates’’: Rhetorics of Liberty in the Reign of Charles II’, in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (Oxford, 1990), pp. 217–41.

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in the Restoration crisis. In seeking to alter the line of succession, the Exclusionists, like the parliamentarians who had deposed and killed Charles I, were threatening the entire basis of law and custom upon which English liberties were founded; it was the supporters of James II’s lineal right to the throne who were safeguarding ‘liberty and property’.4 Yet adducing this alternative Tory rhetoric does little to obviate the accusation that Dryden lacked the spirit of liberty. No one deployed the parallel between 1641 and 1681 against Shaftesbury and his cohorts to more devastating eVect than the author of Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The Medal (1682). Yet Dryden was conspicuously reluctant to attach the word ‘liberty’ to the platform of values and measures advocated by the Tories. Uniquely among Tory propagandists, he showed no interest in reclaiming from the Whigs that most potent and contested term. Wherever it occurs in Dryden’s Laureate verse, in fact, with one carefully circumscribed exception, ‘liberty’ is a dirty word. He used it only eight times. The earliest of these usages, in Astraea Redux (1660), inaugurates the pejorative tone: ‘The Rabble’ during the Interregnum ‘such Freedom did enjoy, j As Winds at Sea that use it to destroy’, Dryden contends; ‘Blind as the Cyclops, and as wild as he, j They own’d a lawless salvage Libertie’.5 The next four come in Absalom and Achitophel. Only one is in Dryden’s voice, elaborating on the image of Charles I’s subjects as ‘Adam-wits, too fortunately free’ who ‘Began to dream they wanted libertie’;6 the remaining three occur inside reported speech, as though Dryden preferred not to have the word in his mouth. First, Achitophel (Shaftesbury) reports to Absalom (Monmouth) that on the streets ‘’tis the general Cry j Religion, Common-wealth and Liberty’7 (i.e. of the ‘lawless salvage’ variety): Shaftesbury is cynically exploiting the mob’s reverence for the totemic word to enhance his own power, and the only question for Dryden is who is the most guilty. The Wnal two uses of the word are in Monmouth’s speech replying to Shaftesbury’s suggestion that he rebel against his father the king. Both are aYrmative, but in a strictly theoretical sense—Charles II’s subjects already enjoy liberty: ‘what Pretence have I j To take up Arms for Publick Liberty? j My Father Governs with unquestion’d Right; j The Faiths Defender, 4 Harris, ‘ ‘‘Lives, Liberties and Estates’’ ’, 231–5. 5 Astraea Redux (1660), ll. 43–6. 6 Absalom and Achitophel (1681), ll. 51–2. 7 Ibid., ll. 291–2.

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and Mankinds Delight’;8 and even if, hypothetically speaking, they didn’t, whatever commitment Monmouth might feel to the ideal of ‘Publick Liberty’ is far outweighed by his more tangible obligations to his father: ‘Natures Holy Bands j Woud Curb my Spirits, and Restrain my Hands: j The People might assert their Liberty, j But what was Right in them, were Crime in me.’9 Dryden had prefaced Monmouth’s speech with the observation that ‘Loyal Blood within him strugled still’;10 the proof is Monmouth’s refusal (as yet) to swallow the intoxicating spirit of liberty oVered him by Shaftesbury. The only place in his poems where Dryden speaks of liberty with approval in his own voice is in Religio Laici (1682). He is discussing whether belief in the Holy Trinity should be obligatory for members of the Church of England: Shall I speak plain, and in a Nation free Assume an honest Layman’s Liberty? I think (according to my little Skill, To my own Mother-Church submitting still:) That many have been sav’d, and many may, Who never heard this Question brought in play. Th’ unletter’d Christian, who believes in gross, Plods on to heaven; and ne’er is at a loss:11

But how much liberty is actually being claimed here? Dryden’s personal commitment to free speech is held in check by the interrogative shape of the Wrst couplet’s syntax and by his self-deprecating reference in the second to ‘my little Skill’. At a more general level too, his insistence on the individual believer’s freedom of interpretation in certain areas of doctrine is heavily qualiWed by the style of his submission to ecclesiastical authority. Certainly, to readers whose ‘Spirit of Liberty’ was more hotly protestant, that submission would have seemed incipiently ‘popish’, occurring as it does, in contravention of the libertarian views classically expressed in Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), before publication.12 But moderate as well as radical readers of the poem might have found Dryden’s image of ‘Th’ unletter’d Christian, who believes in gross’ and ‘Plods on to heaven’ oVensively 8 Ibid., ll. 315–17. 9 Ibid., ll. 341–2. 10 Ibid., l. 314. 11 Religio Laici (1682), ll. 316–23. 12 Preface to Religio Laici; CE ii. 98–9.

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tepid as a description of the emancipated lay Protestant: if ‘in gross’ primarily means ‘in a general way, without going into details’,13 its proximity to ‘Plods’ also invites the sense ‘stupidly’, or ‘crudely’. Readers who noted such marks of ambivalence in Dryden’s commitment to protestant liberty would no doubt have been unsurprised to Wnd that he subsequently rescinded that commitment upon converting to Roman Catholicism. For the Wnal use of ‘liberty’ in Dryden’s poems occurs in The Hind and the Panther (1687), concluding his account of how Charles II’s use of the crown’s prerogative powers to free nonconformists from the laws which enforced Anglican unity has decomposed the Church of England into a plethora of ungovernable sects. It is powerfully axiomatic: ‘More liberty begets desire of more, j The hunger still encreases with the store.’14 There is, though, one area of Dryden’s life as a poet in which he enjoys a reputation as a champion of liberty: his theory and practice of translation. That he culminated the movement towards free translation in English poetic culture, instigated during the royalist exile by Denham, Fanshawe, and Cowley, is recorded as a fact in the histories of translation which have proliferated in such numbers in recent years. It is a truism, too, for modern commentators who have rescued his translations from the neglect in which they once languished.15 Like many another truism, though, this one is irrefutable ‘in gross’ whilst being potentially misleading on a Wner scale. Witness the history of poetic translation across the Augustan era provided by one of Dryden’s Wnest readers: Samuel Johnson. Whilst Johnson begins his treatment of Dryden as a translator by observing that ‘Fanshaw, Denham, Waller and Cowley’ had not succeeded in ‘breaking the shackles of verbal interpretation’,16 he doesn’t quite go on to say Dryden did. First there were the literalists such as Ben Jonson who ‘thought it necessary to copy Horace almost word for word’ and George Sandys who ‘struggled to comprise every book of his English Metamorphoses in the same number of verses with the original’. Then came Cowley, who ‘saw that such ‘‘copyers’’ were a ‘‘servile race’’ ’ and ‘asserted his liberty’, but he ‘spread his wings so

13 Thus Hammond at H ii. 127. 14 The Hind and the Panther (1687), i. 519–20. 15 A recent statement of this view is Charles Tomlinson, ‘Why Dryden’s Translations Matter’, Translation and Literature, 10 (2001), 3–20. 16 Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Dryden’, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905; repr., New York, 1967), i. 373.


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boldly that he left his authors’. Finally: ‘It was reserved for Dryden to Wx the limits of poetical liberty, and give us just rules and examples of translation.’17 After successive periods of excessive constraint and excessive freedom, what Dryden establishes is limited liberty. Or, as Johnson puts it in his closing summary of Dryden’s principal achievements as a poet, in the memorable phrase from which the title of this chapter is taken: ‘the true bounds of a translator’s liberty’.18 The force of that remark has not been taken in modern critical accounts of Dryden as a theorist and practitioner of translation, even those produced by commentators working within the general framework of the portrait of Dryden painted in Johnson’s ‘Life’. Liberty, rather than boundedness, has been the keynote of these accounts. For understandable reasons: sharply conscious of lingering ‘Romantic’ prejudice against translation as an inherently uncreative mode, the pioneering commentators who set out in the 1970s and 1980s to revive interest in Dryden’s translations naturally emphasized areas where he freely elaborates his originals over and above passages where he closely replicates them. Practically speaking too, instances of free translation lend themselves more readily to critical analysis than do examples of literalism. Nevertheless, constraint is integral to translation as a mode; it was especially recognized as such in Dryden’s lifetime, a period notable for its obsessive preoccupation with the several forms of unfreedom—political, religious, and moral—which were ranged under the rubric ‘slavery’. The spirit of the age was largely deWned by the plastic currency of this complex word, and this is one reason why Dryden is the age’s deWnitive writer: he was repeatedly accused of being a slave and wrote brilliantly and fascinatedly (as we shall see) about the condition of slavery. In so far as the signiWcances of unfreedom in Dryden’s thinking about translation have become lost to view, therefore, a serious imbalance has been introduced into our understanding of it. This chapter aims to redress that imbalance: Wrst, by showing how tightly bound up liberty is with boundedness in Dryden’s thinking about translation; and secondly, by arguing that translation’s inherent capacity to Wgure personal and cultural dilemmas surrounding deprivations or resignations of liberty was among the things that particularly drew Dryden to the practice. 17 Ibid., 421–2.

18 Ibid., 469.

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Johnson probably had in mind the famous passage in the preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680) where Dryden disavows ‘Metaphrase, or turning an Authour word by word, and Line by Line, from one Language into another’ at one extreme and ‘Imitation, where the Translator (if now he has not lost that Name) assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sence, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion’ at the other, and espouses a median posture of ‘Paraphrase, or Translation with Latitude, where the Authour is kept in view by the Translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly follow’d as his sense’.19 Modern critical recensions of this passage dwell on its advocacy of freedom at the expense of its insistence on constraint;20 but contemporary readers, and certainly those who had watched the recent progress of Dryden’s career, might well have done the opposite. The alternative phrases Dryden oVers for ‘Paraphrase’ and ‘Imitation’—‘Translation with Latitude’ and the ‘libertine way of rendring Authours’21—align the two modes respectively with the ‘Latitude-men’ who rose to prominence within the Church of England a decade or so earlier oVering liberty of opinion on a limited range of peripheral questions of doctrine, and the cadre of debauched aristocrats led by the Earl of Rochester who had lately been conducting what one commentator has termed a ‘libertine oVensive’ in London.22 Dryden’s preference for latitude over libertinism reXects broad changes in the temper of English culture at the turn of the 1680s as Charles II ended his dalliance with the libertarian policy of ‘indulging’ the sects and reverted to the ‘middle way’ of Anglican tradition. But it also implied that Dryden was changing direction personally. Rochester had been his patron in the early 1670s, and the sex comedies Dryden produced over those years did much to set the licentious cultural tone of the decade.23 Subsequently, though, Rochester had turned against Dryden, lampooning him (probably in 19 CE i. 114. 20 Even Paul Hammond’s careful paraphrase of the passage evokes rather more fully the perils of ‘Metaphrase’than those of ‘Imitation’; in Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 144. 21 CE i. 117. 22 Maximilian Novak, ‘Margery Pinchwife’s ‘‘London Disease’’: Restoration Comedy and the Libertine OVensive of the 1670s’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 10 (1977), 1–23. 23 As Nicholas von Maltzahn has lately shown, Dryden’s involvement in libertine culture was not exclusively dramatic: The State of Innocence, his operatic rewrite of Paradise Lost, was circulating in manuscript in 1674 in a version ‘best read . . . as a precocious and outstanding contribution to English libertine literature in the 1670s’; see his ‘Dryden’s Milton and the Theatre of the Imagination’, in John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Oxford, 2000), pp. 32–56 (I quote from 39).


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1676) in ‘An Allusion to Horace’—signiWcantly, a ‘libertine’ rendering of Satires I. x. Dryden had taken his initial revenge in the preface to All For Love (1679), sneering at ‘Men of pleasant Conversation . . . ambitious to distinguish themselves from the Herd of Gentlemen, by their Poetry’.24 Now he gives his more considered response to Rochester’s brilliant and brutal attack: bringing down the curtain on his career of dramatic libertinism, Dryden pledges himself to a new life as a translator, one to be lived within stricter ‘bounds of liberty’. One of Dryden’s earliest translations appears to signal his fulWlment of that pledge. ‘Ovid’s Elegies, Book II Elegy the Nineteenth’, in Miscellany Poems (1684), has attracted little comment, but in one respect it stands out within the body of Dryden’s work as a translator: it is his only line-forline rendering. Leaving aside the envoi of its Wnal couplet, the translation lasts, like its original, sixty lines. In general, Dryden’s translations of Ovid fall somewhere between ‘Paraphrase’ and ‘Imitation’, and appropriately so, in light of Ovid’s special aYnity with Xux and vicissitude.25 So why the exception in this particular case? The answer lies in the subject matter of the original poem. Ovid urges Corinna’s husband to deny him free access to her; in the absence of such impediments, the pleasure he takes in the aVair has dwindled away almost to nothing; only by being made subject to restraint will he rediscover his desire. In adopting a posture of ‘metaphrase’, Dryden matched form to content, bounded himself as Ovid wants his adulterous desires bounded. This reXexiveness is lightly underscored as Ovid’s urgings reach their peak: In short, be Jealous as the Devil in Hell; And set my Wit on work to cheat thee well. The sneaking City Cuckold is my Foe, I scorn to strike, but when he Wards the blow. Look to thy hits, and leave oV thy Conniving, I’ll be no Drudge to any Wittall living; I have been patient and forborn thee long, In hope thou wou’dst not pocket up thy wrong: If no AVront can rouse thee, understand I’ll take no more Indulgence at thy hand.26 24 CE xiii. 14. 25 Relations between metamorphosis and free translation are explored in David Hopkins, ‘Translation, Metempsychosis, and the Flux of Nature’, in Dryden and the World of Neoclassicism, ed. Wolfgang Gortschacher and Holger Klein (Tubingen, 2001), pp. 145–54; I return to the subject in the last section of this chapter (pp. 221–33). 26 ‘Ovid’s Elegies, Book II Elegy the Nineteenth’, ll. 43–52.

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‘Set my Wit on work’ was Dryden’s idea, while at ‘I’ll be no Drudge’ he invokes the noun which would shortly become central (as we shall see) to his thinking about translation as menial toil. Again too, as in the preface to Ovid’s Epistles, Dryden connects the translator’s boundedness with a larger cultural narrative about liberty. It revolves around the word ‘Indulgence’ which inevitably recalls Charles II’s two Declarations of Indulgence (1662, 1672) suspending the provisions of the so-called ‘Clarendon Code’ against nonconformists. Anglican churchmen and ‘old cavaliers’ considered those declarations self-defeatingly libertine: by refusing to bound himself within the parliamentary laws of the realm, Charles put himself in the power of the natural enemies of monarchy. For their part, some of the dissenters ostensibly emancipated by the declarations had been reluctant to take indulgence at the King’s hand, fearing that to do so was to endorse the King’s right to suspend parliamentary law and so in eVect to enslave themselves to an absolutist monarch. The parallels with the situation in Ovid’s poem are precise. For Corinna’s husband read Charles II, and for her lover the nonconformists: the former has undermined his own authority by being so indulgent; the latter is reduced to the condition of a slave—a ‘Drudge’27—by being so libertinely indulged. In love and politics, liberty arises out of boundedness; subjugation facilitates emancipation. In love and politics and in translation. But ‘Ovid’s Elegies, Book II Elegy the Nineteenth’ is apprenticework. Dryden was in his early Wfties when it was published, but he had come late to translating, and there is something jejune about the way he correlates theme and mode in the piece. As we shall see in the last section of this chapter, Dryden occasionally uses literalism to mimetic eVect in his later translations, but less ostentatiously. More generally too, translation remained for him throughout his career a medium for exploring paradoxes involving liberty, but in this early case those paradoxes serve the ends of a rather brittle wit. Little is yet at stake for Dryden himself in them and in the idea that translation enacts them. Only when translation, instead of being a tributary of Dryden’s ‘original’ work, became part of the mainstream of his genius, and only when the entanglements of liberty and boundedness, instead of being 27 Dryden uses the word to connote sexual slavery, a sense ‘not in OED’, as Hammond records in his note on this occurrence (H ii. 193), but which was in common use in Restoration erotic verse, and was a particular favourite with Dryden; see also ‘The Sixth Satire of Juvenal’, l. 46.


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the stuV of witty ‘clenches’, became for him matters of pressing personal concern, would Dryden make his conduct as a translator a means of searching inquiry into ‘the bounds of liberty’. The transformation is most apparent in the translations he produced after the ‘Glorious’ Revolution when his own liberty was narrowly bounded: especially in The Works of Virgil (1697) and Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), the subjects of the second and third sections of this chapter. But it began to take eVect in the sequence of translations which Dryden provided for Sylvae (1685), and which marks the point at which translation became central to his life as a poet. THE LINKS OF LOVE By this time Dryden had come to think of himself as a slave. As Poet Laureate he served what he increasingly recognized as a corrupt and venal court, and to supplement his public income (when Charles II remembered to pay it) he was forced to cater to the debauched tastes of Restoration theatre audiences.28 Casting around for a way to free himself from these shameful dependencies, one possibility Dryden considered was retiring from London to the life of a scholar-poet in Oxford: in the series of prologues and epilogues he wrote during the 1670s and early 1680s for theatrical performances which took place there in the summers, he sought to charm the dons into granting him refuge among the ivory towers. But not even academic vanity is absolutely reliable: the hoped-for fellowship or mastership was not forthcoming.29 It is possible to think of Dryden’s translations in Sylvae as a continuation by another means of his failed assault on Oxford. As we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, translation connoted transcendence for Vaughan and Cowley, and the nature of the pieces Dryden chose to translate for Sylvae suggests he wanted to activate that connotation. As a number of commentators have shown, these pieces are linked by a shared concern with the philosophy of Epicurus, and in particular his account of mental freedom. How to achieve ataraxia, ‘freedom from anxiety’ or ‘dispassionate equanimity’, is the primary subject of the Wve extracts from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, the epic of Epicureanism, 28 David Hopkins, John Dryden (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 91–4. 29 For the whole story of Dryden’s campaign for a position at Oxford, see James Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven, 1987), pp. 270–6.

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which lie at the heart of the sequence, and an overt preoccupation too in the four odes by Horace which come after them, examples of what Restoration readers took to be his philosophic vein; it even has an underlying role in the two episodes from Virgil’s Aeneid which begin the sequence.30 The years immediately leading up to the publication of Sylvae were the ‘high tide’ of Epicurean inXuence in English culture,31 and Dryden clearly informed himself carefully about Epicurus’s ideas, taking advantage of the latest scholarship.32 There seems little doubt, either, that he partly saw in himself the ‘slave’ of Epicurean theory: the man who shackles himself to erroneous or excessive desires. Passages in the Sylvae translations describing this antithesis of Epicurean contentment—‘the unhappy man’, as it were—are recognizably fraught with personal signiWcance: as when, in ‘From Horace, Epod 2d’, Dryden reorientates Horace’s criticism of those who earn their living in the law courts so that it also points at those who are ‘brib’d with hopes’ and furnish ‘servile Salutations’ at the courts of kings.33 But Dryden’s response to Epicureanism was far from one-dimensional. The decade or so before Sylvae also witnessed a spate of attacks on Epicurus; in what was a profoundly sceptical age,34 the philosopher’s increasing celebrity brought an inevitable backlash. One example must stand for many.35 Epictetus Junior; Or, Maximes of Modern Morality (1670), the Wrst English translation of La Rochefoucauld, features a particularly caustic triptych on the moderation of desire which is the key to attaining ataraxia: Moderation in Prosperity is either a dreadful apprehension of losing what a man is possess’d of, or a fear of that shame which attends extravagance and excess. It may also be said, that a moderate person is one whose humours are in a certain indisturbance, as being becalm’d by the satisfaction of his mind. We may further give this Character of Moderation, that it is a fear of disparagement and contempt, which attends those who are besotted with their own felicity. It is a vain Ostentation of a resolute mind. In Wne, to give it yet a more pertinent deWnition, we may aYrm, that the moderation of men in their highest 30 Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 150–79. 31 I borrow the designation from the title of the chapter on the period in T. H. Mayo, Epicurus in England, 1650–1725 (Dallas, TX, 1934), pp. 77–96. 32 Paul Hammond, ‘The Integrity of Dryden’s Lucretius’, Modern Language Review, 78 (1983), 1–23. 33 ‘From Horace, Epod. 2d’, ll. 14–17. 34 John Spurr, England in the 1670s (Oxford, 2000), pp. 84–117. 35 This paragraph draws on my essay ‘Dryden and the Consolations of Philosophy’, The Seventeenth Century, 15 (2000), 217–43; for further cases of sceptical depreciation of Epicurean ethics in the 1670s and 1680s, see 218–24.


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advancements is Ambition of seeming greater, than those things whereby they are advanc’d. How can a man forbear laughing at this Virtue, and the opinion generally conceived of it? How fondly is it imagined, that Ambition is oppos’d, and in a manner reduc’d to a certain mediocrity by Moderation, when they never meet together, the latter being truly but a certain Sloth, demission of Spirit, and a defect of Courage? So that it may justly be said, that Moderation is a certain depression of the Soul, as Ambition is the elevation of it.36

There is no evidence that Dryden had read this particular work (though he seems to have known another production by its translator, John Davies of Kidwelly);37 but its sceptical ethos has much in common with that of the heroic plays he produced in the late 1670s which dramatize ‘the way in which men and women are bound by their physical selves, even while mind and spirit may aspire to lofty ideals or may attempt to impose moral and social duties which are at odds with the raw urgency of desire’.38 More recently, during the Exclusion Crisis, he had worked alongside the Tory propagandist Roger L’Estrange in whose Seneca’s Morals Abstracted (1678) ideals of moderation and withdrawal were exploited to lend a philosophic veneer to arguments for political inactivity.39 In The Medal (1682), one of his last major poems before Sylvae, Dryden implied the Whigs were up to the same philosophical trick: disguising their eVorts to remove control of the succession from the king as Epicurean therapy intended to free him from the slavery of his high oYce, ‘ease him by degrees of publique Care’.40 The complex interrelations of Epicureanism with Restoration rhetorics of liberty bear fully on Dryden’s translations in Sylvae. The sequence constitutes a multifaceted inquiry into the Epicurean model of mental freedom and its pertinence to Dryden at a point in his career when he was confronting a choice of life. This inquiry takes place not only at the level of content but also of conduct: it particularly involved Dryden in weighing up alternative conceptions of his role as translator. The quickest way to see this is to consider the moment in the sequence where the ideal of ataraxia is most explicitly subjected to sceptical scrutiny: at the end of the last of the translations, ‘From Horace, Epod 2d’. The ending 36 Epictetus Junior; Or Maximes of Modern Morality (1670), pp. 18–19. 37 Davis, ‘Dryden and the Consolations of Philosophy’, 222. 38 Paul Hammond, John Dryden: A Literary Life (Basingstoke, 1991), p. 54. 39 On Dryden’s association with L’Estrange, see Winn, Dryden and His World, 343, 348, 374 and Phillip Harth, Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda in its Contexts (Princeton, 1993), on Seneca’s Morals Abstracted, see further Davis, ‘Dryden and the Consolations of Philosophy’, 222–3. 40 The Medal (1682), l. 231; for ‘ease’ and ‘care’ as keywords in the Epicurean lexis of Sylvae, see Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 168–70.

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of Horace’s second epode was the most famous thing about it: a twist which reveals that the praises of the Epicurean ‘happy man’ contained in the body of the poem were in fact spoken by one ‘AlWus’, a moneylender who subsequently returned to Rome and his usurious ways. Cowley left it oV when translating the poem, in line with his general tendency (analysed in the last chapter) to mute discordant elements in the Horatian vision of rural privacy. But Dryden restores it, and does so in a manner which suggests he was rejecting the Cowleian equation of translation with transcendence: This Morecraft said within himself; Resolv’d to leave the wicked Town, And live retir’d upon his own; He call’d his Mony in: But the prevailing love of pelf, Soon split him on the former shelf, And put it out again.41

‘Morecraft’ was originally the name of the usurer in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Scornful Lady. By choosing a name for AlWus which originated in the theatre, Dryden invoked the aspect of his poetic life which most closely tied him to ‘the wicked Town’,42 and so by extension conceded he might prove as Wckle a convert to philosophic liberty as Horace’s moneylender. However, the allusion shows Dryden questioning not just the feasibility of the ideal of ataraxia in his case but its worth; not just whether he can attain ‘freedom from disturbance’ but whether he ought to try. For the name Morecraft also has an association with the poet and translator who acts as the central focus for antiEpicurean elements in Sylvae and their signiWcance for Dryden’s selfunderstanding: John Oldham. Oldham had died at the age of thirty in December 1683, and his death provided ‘the Wnal stimulus that made Dryden reconsider his past career, and confront his life afresh’.43 In ‘To the Memory of Mr Oldham’ the 52-year-old Dryden contrasted the fervid energy of the young satirist and translator with his own polished correctness: 41 ‘From Horace, Epod. 2d’, ll. 96–102. 42 In the closely contemporaneous ode ‘To the Pious Memory of . . . Mrs Anne Killigrew’, Dryden confesses to being ‘hurry’d down j This lubrique and adult’rate age jj T’increase the steaming Ordures of the Stage’ (ll. 62–5). 43 Paul Hammond, John Oldham and the Renewal of Classical Culture (Cambridge, 1983), p. 214.


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Thy generous fruits, though gather’d ere their prime Still shew’d a quickness; and maturing time But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of Rime.44

Such ‘quickness’, impassioned engagement, is the opposite of the detached equanimity of Epicurus’s ‘happy man’; and if Dryden is ‘mellow’ here, he is so in a pejorative rather than an ideal sense: the ‘dull sweets of Rime’, suited to the weak palates of the aged, are the prosodic equivalent of the Epicurean virtue of moderation seen through sceptical eyes. Oldham’s quickness was primarily apparent in his satirical writings, the quasi-apocalyptic Satyrs upon the Jesuits (1679) and ‘A Satyr Against Vertue’ which mimics Rochesterian ‘rant’;45 but it also informed his work as a translator. The urgent voice of Juvenal was more congenial than the mellow accents of Horace to Oldham’s temper: he published notably sympathetic renderings of the third and thirteenth of Juvenal’s satires in Poems, and Translations (1683), and even when he did attempt some of Horace’s odes they came out sounding like Juvenalian invective. Thus, for instance, Horace’s plangent autumnal reXection on the inevitability of death in ‘Book II. Ode XIV’, the famous ‘Eheu fugaces’, becomes in Oldham’s version as caustic a corrective to the vanity of human wishes as the Sejanus episode from Juvenal’s tenth satire which the translator was plainly remembering: The busie, restless Monarch of the times, which now Keeps such a pother, and so much ado To Wll Gazettes alive, And after in some lying Annal to survive; Ev’n He, ev’n that great mortal Man must die, And stink, and rot as well as thou, and I46

It was in ‘A Satyr in Imitation of the Third of Juvenal’ that Oldham had used the name Morecraft: the satirist’s adversarius, declaring his ‘Resolve to quit the nauseous Town’, identiWes ‘thriving Morecraft’ as the epitome of the degradations of London.47 So when Dryden used it at the 44 ‘To the Memory of Mr Oldham’ (1684), ll. 19–21. 45 Raman Selden, ‘Rochester and Oldham: ‘High Rants in Profaneness’, in Reading Rochester, ed. Edward Burns (Liverpool, 1995), pp. 187–206; Selden is careful to point out that ‘Oldham had no desire to embrace the cult of libertinism espoused by the court wits’, but was drawn to Rochesterian ‘rant’ as a way of ‘giving his writing an errant impetus’ (191). 46 ‘Paraphrase upon Horace, Book II. Ode XIV’, 25–30; in The Poems of John Oldham, ed. Raman Selden and Harold Brooks (Oxford, 1987). 47 ‘A Satyr in Imitation of the Third of Juvenal’, ll. 35–6.

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end of ‘From Horace Epod. 2d’, he was setting against the Epicurean prescription of how to recover from the ‘degradations’ of his public career an alternative diagnosis deriving from the example of Oldham: instead of therapeutic moderation, what he might need was a dose of the young poet’s impassioned satiric quickness. The place in Sylvae where the spirit of Oldham is most directly present is in the Wrst of the translations, ‘The entire episode of Nisus and Euryalus’. In ‘To the Memory of Mr Oldham’, Dryden had compared their relationship to the friendship between Virgil’s two heroes: Oldham was Euryalus, the younger of the two who wins the foot-race at the heroic games in memory of Aeneas’s father, Anchises, in Book V of the Aeneid, and Dryden was Nisus, his older friend who trips up Euryalus’s rivals, enabling him to triumph. Now Dryden translated that passage together with the later one in Book IX which completes the story of Nisus and Euryalus in the Aeneid: when they volunteer to penetrate the lines of the besieging Rutulian forces by night and get word to Aeneas of the Trojans’ desperate plight but die in the attempt. Virgil oVers a ‘double perspective’ on this episode,48 presenting the youthful zeal of the heroes at once as gloriously extreme and tragically excessive. The latter emphasis is underpinned by Epicurean suggestion, signalled by occurrences of the keywords ‘contentus’ and ‘quies’ at the beginning and end of the passage: when Nisus and Euryalus, carried away by their contempt for the slumbering Rutulians, give themselves up to slaughter, until eventually they are discovered by an enemy patrol and cut down, it is possible to see them as enslaved by their passions. This analysis registers in Dryden’s translation,49 but it is notable how strongly he reinforces the opposite line of interpretation. More than Virgil he thrills to the heroic quickness of the precocious young friends, ‘focalizing’ the narrative through their point of view where Virgil does not: both when they volunteer for the mission at the nocturnal council in the Trojan camp, and again when they are slaughtering the Rutulians. Looked at through the ardent eyes of Nisus and Euryalus, the assembled 48 For ‘double perspective’ in Virgil’s presentation of Aeneas’s arrival in Italy, see Richard Jenkyns, Virgil’s Experience (Oxford, 1998), pp. 513–64; the idea that the Aeneid is written in ‘two voices’, one of imperial gloriWcation and the other of elegaic lament, originated, of course, in Adam Parry’s classic essay ‘The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid’, Arion, 2 (1963), 66–80; in recent Virgilian scholarship, these have been further subdivided and augmented, beginning with R. O. A. M. Lyne, Further Voices in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford, 1987). 49 Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 152–6.


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Trojan leaders and the slumbering Rutulians become in Dryden’s translation exemplars of Epicurean ataraxia as sceptics saw it: ‘Sloth’, ‘demission of Spirit’, or ‘defect of Courage’. In the Wrst case, describing the council as taking place while ‘every living thing lay void of care’,50 Dryden responded to Epicurean resonance in Virgil’s ‘Cetera . . . animalia somno j laxabant curas et corda oblita laborum’;51 but whereas Virgil distinguishes the unnaturally wakeful Trojan councillors from the other sleeping animals, Dryden suppressed that distinction by substituting ‘every’ for ‘Cetera’ and went on to amalgamate the councillors further into the generally fatigued environment by saying of them (without support from Virgil) that each ‘sustains a Shield j Which his o’relabour’d Arm can hardly rear; j And leans upon a long projected Spear’.52 The eVect is even more marked in the case of the Rutulians: they are a ‘careless Hoast’, ‘in Sleep supine; j Dissolv’d in Ease’, ‘securely drench’d in Sleep and Wine’;53 and while ‘careless’, ‘Dissolv’d’, ‘Ease’, and ‘securely’ have no equivalents in Virgil, all are staple elements of Dryden’s Epicurean diction in Sylvae. But Oldham’s inXuence in Sylvae extends beyond ‘The entire episode of Nisus and Euryalus’; in so far as he represented for Dryden an impassioned model of poetic selfhood to be contrasted with the dispassionate one deriving from the theories of Epicurus, his presence is pervasive. Particularly so in the group of translations which lie at the centre of the sequence and are generally regarded as its masterpieces: those from Lucretius. Oldham never translated Lucretius, and yet, as Dryden describes him, the author of the De Rerum Natura was a poet after Oldham’s passionate red-blooded heart. Dryden begins his account of Lucretius in the preface with a long passage detailing the characteristics of the Roman poet’s voice, and this account comes Wnally to rest on the noun he had applied a year earlier to Oldham: ‘quickness’. The ‘distinguishing Character of Lucretius’, according to Dryden, ‘is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his Opinions’: 50 ‘The Entire Episode of Nisus and Euryalus’, l. 177. 51 For ‘void of care’ as an Epicurean formulation elsewhere in Sylvae, see ‘Lucretius: The Beginning of the Second Book’, 23, and ‘From Horace, Epod. 2d’, 4; for an explication of the Epicurean allusions in Virgil’s night-scene, which clariWes how Dryden has overturned their original signiWcation, see further Joseph Farrell, ‘The Virgilian Intertext’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 222–38 (at 234–5). 52 ‘The Entire Episode of Nisus and Euryalus’, ll. 185–7. 53 Ibid., ll. 308, 124–5, 195.

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he seems to disdain all manner of Replies, and is so conWdent of his cause, that he is before hand with his Antagonists; Urging for them, whatever he imagin’d they cou’d say, and leaving them as he supposes, without an objection for the future. All this too, with so much scorn and indignation, as if he were assur’d of the Triumph, before he enter’d into the Lists. From this sublime and daring Genius of his, it must of necessity come to pass, that his thoughts must be Masculine, full of Argumentation, and that suYciently warm. From the same Wery temper proceeds the loftiness of his Expressions, and the perpetual torrent of his Verse, where the barrenness of his Subject does not too much constrain the quickness of his Fancy.54

Plainly, on this understanding, there is signiWcant potential for conXict between the style of the De Rerum Natura and its substance, Lucretius’s ‘Wery temper’ and the ideals of disinterest and disengagement he wrote his epic to inculcate. Dryden’s reference to ‘the perpetual torrent of his Verse’ implies as much: in Epicurus’s Morals (1656), a digest produced by Walter Charleton which we know Dryden consulted,55 the disturbances of passion from which the Epicurean seeks to free himself are compared to ‘a Torrent or rapid River’.56 Such conXict is central to modern commentary on the poem,57 but Dryden is ahead of his time in broaching the possibility: not until the turn of the eighteenth century would it be clearly understood that (in the words of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, grandson of Dryden’s Achitophel) ‘the cold Lucretius makes use of inspiration, when he writes against it’.58 Perhaps it was reading Dryden’s translations which brought Shaftesbury to that recognition; certainly, the passages of Lucretius that Dryden chose to translate are ones in which the discrepancy between his poetic voice and his philosophical commitments is sharply felt. The longest and most admired of them, ‘Lucretius: Against the Fear of Death’, is a case in point.59 Modern scholars single this passage out when discussing Lucretius’s mastery of the modes of invective and diatribe and its incompatibility with his dispassionate Epicurean ideals.60 Dryden exacerbates 54 CE iii. 10. 55 This was established by Hammond, ‘The Integrity of Dryden’s Lucretius’, 6–7; see also his headnote to ‘Lucretius: The Beginning of the First Book’: H ii. 306. 56 Walter Charleton, Epicurus’s Morals (1656), sig. E2v . 57 See, for instance, Peter Toohey, Epic Lessons: An Introduction to Ancient Didactic Poetry (1996), pp. 93–106. 58 Shaftesbury, ‘A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm’ (1708), in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Philip Ayres, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1999), ii. 31. 59 Fine demonstrations of its special achievement can be found in Hopkins, John Dryden, 113–21, and Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 164–70. 60 See, for instance, E. J. Kenney (ed.), The ‘De Rerum Natura’ of Lucretius: Book Three (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 11–15.


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this quickness.61 Discussing the passage in the preface, he particularly praised ‘the Prosopopeia of Nature, who is brought in speaking to her Children, with so much authority and vigour’62 about the foolish wastefulness of anxiety about death; but when Dryden has Nature berate one of those ‘children’ as ‘ungrateful wretch, thou vain, j Thou mortal thing’ or deride another as ‘thou Martyr fool, thou covetous of pain’,63 a reader may feel the line has been crossed which divides even the most vigorous application of maternal authority from more extreme forms of ‘scorn and indignation’. It comes as no surprise to discover that Dryden later re-used phrases from ‘Lucretius: Against the Fear of Death’ when translating Oldham’s favourite, Juvenal.64 However, it is in connection not with the fear of death but with sexual desire, the other of the two great passions for which Dryden claimed his Lucretian extracts provide philosophical ‘Antidotes’,65 that his special attunement to the quickness of Lucretius’s voice comes furthest into conXict with his attraction to the Epicurean understanding of liberty. Dryden’s decision to translate ‘Lucretius: The Fourth Book Concerning the Nature of Love’ was controversial. The previous English translator of the De Rerum Natura, Thomas Creech, a fellow of All Souls at the university where Dryden had lately been hoping to grow old repenting his racy poetic past, omitted most of the passages on sex ‘for Reasons’, as he said in his preface, ‘obvious enough’.66 Seeking to counter the equally obvious reasons why he had not followed Creech’s high-minded Oxonian example which might have occurred to readers who knew him from his sex comedies, Dryden claimed in the preface that Lucretius ‘has given the truest and most Philosophical account both of the Disease and Remedy, which I ever found in any Author: For which reasons I Translated him’.67 Lucretius’s descriptions of sexual desire are so ‘lively, and alluring’ only in order to warn readers thoroughly against what Epicurus had identiWed as one of the major obstacles to the 61 The classic account of Dryden’s attunement to the invective urgency of Lucretius’s style in this translation in particular as well as more generally is Emrys Jones, ‘ ‘‘A Perpetual Torrent’’: Dryden’s Lucretian Style’, in Augustan Studies: Essays in Honor of Irvin Ehrenpreis, ed. Douglas Lane Patey and Timothy Keegan (Newark, DE, 1985), pp. 47–62. 62 CE iii. 12. 63 ‘Translation of the Latter Part of the Third Book of Lucretius: Against the Fear of Death’, ll. 123–4, 150. 64 See in particular ‘The Tenth Satire of Juvenal’, ll. 167–71 and editorial commentary at H iv. 108, 109. 65 Preface to Sylvae; CE iii. 12. 66 Thomas Creech, T. Lucretius Carus The Epicurean Philosopher (Oxford, 1682), sig. b3v . 67 CE iii. 12.

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achievement of mental freedom, and in this Dryden has followed him: both ‘have carried the Poetical part no farther, than the Philosophical exacted’.68 This claim obviously sorts with Dryden’s wish to reposition himself in Sylvae as a learned poet, thereby distancing himself from his lubricious dramatic past. But it is highly dubious. Dryden himself had acknowledged moments earlier ‘without the least Formality of an excuse’ that he had translated the passage because ‘it pleas’d me’,69 which begs the question of whether the ‘pleasure’ at issue was of the approved Epicurean variety, that which results from ‘chasing away those vain, superstitious and deluding opinions, which would occasion very great disquiet in the mind’, or something closer to the ‘brutish Voluptuousness’ which was what opponents of Epicurus said he meant by the word.70 The passage from ‘Lucretius: The Fourth Book Concerning the Nature of Love’ which has given readers most pleasure is the description of sexual intercourse at the beginning. Its (Wrst) climax comes when: the Youthful pair more clossely joyn, When hands in hands they lock, and thighs in thighs they twine; Just in the raging foam of full desire, When both press on, both murmur, both expire, They gripe, they squeeze, their humid tongues they dart, As each wou’d force their way to t’other’s heart: In vain; they only cruze about the coast, For bodies cannot pierce, nor be in bodies lost: As sure they strive to be, when both engage, In that tumultuous momentany rage; So ’tangled in the Nets of Love they lie, Till Man dissolves in the excess of joy.71

It would take a very high-minded reader to regard Dryden’s evident fascination in this passage with motifs of sexual constraint as philosophically instrumental. Concentration on desire as enslavement, instead of being a means to a philosophical end, has become a poetic end in itself. Only two of the Wve verbs of constriction Dryden employs in the Wrst three couplets (‘joyn’, ‘lock’, ‘twine’, ‘gripe’, ‘squeeze’) have equivalents in Lucretius, and he supplements 68 CE iii. 13. 69 Ibid., 12. 70 These two descriptions are taken, respectively, from Charleton’s Epicurus’s Morals, and from Nathaniel Ingelo’s romance Bentivolio and Urania: The Second Part (1682), as quoted in Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 160. 71 ‘Lucretius: Concerning the Nature of Love’, ll. 71–82.


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them with sweatily entangled repetitions (‘thighs in thighs they twine’ is particularly suggestive—a tongue-twister). Nor is Lucretius the direct source for Dryden’s culminating image of the lovers ‘’tangled in the Nets of Love’; in the original they merely ‘cling together in the couplings of Venus’ (‘in Veneris compagibus haerent’).72 What seems to have caught Dryden’s keen eye at this point is the gloss for ‘compagibus’ provided by the editor of the text of Lucretius he was using: ‘vinculis’ (‘chains’).73 When Lucretius does refer to ‘the strong knots of Venus’ (‘validos Veneris . . . nodos’) some forty lines later, in the course of advising that it is easier to avoid ‘being lured into the snares of love’ (‘plagas in amoris ne laciamur’) than to break free once ‘caught in the toils’ (‘captum retibus ipsis’),74 Dryden pulls the thought of Venus’s net this way and that in his imagination, binding the lovers tighter and tighter. Now they must not merely, as in the original, ‘get out’ (‘exire’) of one set of knots but attempt what he calls (with a twinkle) the ‘wondrous diYcult’ exploit of releasing themselves twice over: ‘To struggle thro’ the streights, and break th’ involving Net’.75 Underlying all these Wgures of erotic boundedness is the scene in Book VIII of the Odyssey where Aphrodite and Ares, surprised by Hephaestus in the act of committing adultery, are enmeshed by the blacksmith god in a net of Wne chain. That scene plays a part in two more of the extracts Dryden chose to translate in Sylvae: ‘Lucretius: The Beginning of the First Book’ and ‘The Speech of Venus to Vulcan’ from Book VIII of the Aeneid. There was precedent for connecting these passages, particularly in Montaigne’s essay ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’.76 But for Montaigne the nub of the association is Venus’s erotic power generally, not the particular role of constraint in sexuality. He warmed to the vocabulary Lucretius uses to describe her conquest of Mars, especially ‘that noble circumfusa’77 when Venus is pictured 72 De Rerum Natura iv. 1113. 73 So Hammond acutely suggests in his editorial note on the phrase: H ii. 336. 74 De Rerum Natura iv. 1146–8. 75 ‘Lucretius: Concerning the Nature of Love’, ll. 132–3. 76 The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, NC, 1942), p. 23: ‘there will be forty lines more of Virgil . . . to answer those of Lucretius; I mean those very lines which Montaigne has compar’d in those two poets’. 77 ‘Quand je rumine ce, rejicit, pascit, inhians, molli, fovet, medullas, labefacta, pendet, percurrit, et cette noble circumfusa . . . j’ay desdain de ces menues pointes et allusions verbales, qui nasquirent depuis’: quoted in Tom Mason, ‘ ‘‘Et versus digitos habet’’: Dryden, Montaigne, Lucretius, Virgil, and Boccaccio in Praise of Venus’, Translation and Literature, 10 (2001), 89–109 (at 95).

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‘bending around him from above’.78 Dryden, though, adds an extra point of view on this participle, looks at it from Mars’s angle too, and what he sees when he does this is his favourite scenario of sexual servitude: There while thy curling limbs about him move, Involv’d and fetter’d in the links of Love, When wishing all, he nothing can deny, Thy Charms in that auspicious moment try; With winning eloquence our peace implore, And quiet to the weary World restore.79

The second line is Dryden’s own doing.80 Apparently rather tautologous, it in fact discriminates with a connoisseur’s eye for detail the stages in Mars’s progressive subjugation. ‘Involv’d’ and ‘fetter’d’ are not exactly interchangeable, for Dryden has activated the decorous Latinity of the former, contrasting it with the blunter Saxon of the latter: one minute Mars is deliciously ‘involved’ in Venus’s limbs, a willing accomplice in his own passivity; the next, as she breaks oV at the ‘auspicious moment’ to make her request, he Wnds himself powerless to deny her anything, more Xatly ‘fettered’ to her will. ‘The links of Love’ completes the process, ‘links’ transforming ‘limbs’ from the preceding line, in an acoustic metamorphosis suggestive of the physical change which comes over Venus, as her previously ‘curling limbs’ stiVen into immobility, become until Mars grants her request as unyielding and cold to the touch as iron. Bearing in mind that Dryden read Lucretius as a kind of satirist, what transpires in the passages I have been analysing might be considered a variant of the imaginative economy to which modern commentators on Augustan satire are increasingly attuned, whereby the poet inadvertently comes to manifest sympathy—even fondness—for the targets of his wrath.81 The most celebrated case is that of Pope’s Dunciad which, as 78 De Rerum Natura i. 39. 79 ‘Lucretius: The Beginning of the First Book’, ll. 53–8. 80 Though Lucretius has described Mars as ‘aeterno devinctus volnere amoris’ (‘chained by the eternal wound of love’) half a dozen lines earlier (modern editions tend to read ‘devictus’, ‘conquered’): De Rerum Natura i. 34. 81 It is well described by Felicity Rosslyn, at the outset of an essay which tunes in to notes of wonder and aVection in Pope’s attitude towards the ostensible targets of the Epistle to a Lady: ‘Satire is . . . the most double of genres. The poet’s conscious mind is so fully taken up with his moral purpose that his subconscious seems free to ramble oV to what ambiguous regions it will. And usually the regions it chooses are those where moral distinctions are bereft of meaning, where the enemy extends the satirist a hearty welcome as ‘‘Mon semblable, mon fre`re’’, and nothing is, but what is not’: ‘ ‘‘Dipt in the rainbow’’: Pope on Women’, in The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 51–62 (at 51).


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Emrys Jones showed in a classic essay, is in many respects charmed by the dunces it ostensibly exists to anathematize.82 But such dysfunctional aYnities have been detected in Dryden’s satires too, notably in the portrait of ‘Zimri’ (Buckingham) in Absalom and Achitophel.83 The Lucretius translations, I suggest, are analogous. It is not that Dryden had altogether lost interest or faith in the Epicurean model of liberty; rather, the very force of his conscious commitment to that model when translating Lucretius appears to have freed him, on some less conscious plane, to explore its obverse. If, however, Dryden’s aYnity with the slavishly impassioned antithesis of Epicurus’s ‘happy man’ may be called dysfunctional in terms of his professed design in the Lucretius translations, its relation to the poetic choice of life confronting him at the time of Sylvae should not be considered simply deleterious. On the contrary, the partial failure of Dryden’s project to relaunch himself as a philosophical poet was a substantially beneWcent development. Montaigne related his taste for Virgil’s and Lucretius’s verses about Venus to his advanced years. As a youth, in rude health and high spirits, he had needed frequent cautions to keep him on the straight and narrow, but now as an old man he was only too cautious, too strait-laced, too narrow-minded. Once he had needed to defend himself against ‘volupte´’; now he was under attack from ‘temperance’. Reading sexually stimulating poetry was one way he resisted the onset of frigidity (‘stupidite´’), both physiological and ethical. We might not easily think of Dryden as having to take such measures; he is not a writer generally regarded as threatened by temperance. That the works he produced deep into his old age retain much of what Montaigne called the ‘allegresse’ of youth has become a truism: his literary executor, William Congreve, bequeathed to subsequent generations the idea that Dryden was ‘an improving Writer to his last; improving even in Fire and Imagination, as well as in Judgement’, and Augustan, Romantic, and modern commentators have agreed that ‘youthful Wre’ is a notable element particularly of his Wnal volume, Fables.84 But it could have been otherwise. Central to what has been called Dryden’s 82 Emrys Jones, ‘Pope and Dulness’, in Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack (Hamden, CT, 1968), pp. 612–51. 83 An exemplary reading of the ‘Zimri’ portrait in these terms is provided by David Hopkins, in John Dryden, 82: ‘some lines in the portrait seem to be written in a spirit closer to wonder and delight than to censorious hostility. Rather than regarding the chaotic contradictions of Zimri’s behaviour simply as anathema, a threat to all he holds dear, Dryden sometimes suggests by his tone that he is fascinated and bemused by the spectacle.’ 84 Ibid., 168.

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‘crisis . . . both professional and private’85 during the early 1680s was shame over his public career and the character of much of his work. This shame might have tipped over into self-hatred. In horror at his laxity, Dryden might have been driven to the opposite extreme of fastidiousness, becoming (in Montaigne’s terms) ‘dried up and weighed down by wisdom’. His courtship of Oxford, and subordinations of the ‘poetical’ to the ‘philosophical’ in the preface to Sylvae, suggest the danger. But while Dryden sometimes talks as if he had set out in Sylvae to teach himself a ‘leçon . . . de temperance’, the translations themselves tell a diVerent story. Dryden knew—and Oldham reminded him—that ‘dispassionate equanimity’ could be a ‘dull sweet’. Impassioned ‘quickness’, a satirical and incipiently sexual energy,86 is Dryden’s ‘distinguishing character’ (to use his own favoured phrase) as a poet, as he would increasingly come to recognize in later years, particularly after 1688 when his ‘sharp Sting’ was drawn by censorship, as he complained in the prologue to Amphitryon (1690), and the ‘Rage’ and ‘Noble Vigour’ of his ‘Manhood’ taken away.87 In so far as they restored his faith in such quickness, therefore, the poets he translated in Sylvae—Virgil and even Horace but most of all Lucretius— saved Dryden from denying his nature as a poet. Did Dryden see it this way? Not in a fully conscious sense perhaps; but there are glimmers. Witness the line he added to ‘The Speech of Venus to Vulcan’ which recalls that in bending her blacksmith husband to her will Venus ‘commands’ an ‘artist and his art’; or again, in ‘Lucretius: The Beginning of the First Book’, his decision to apply to Venus’s inspiring eVect on the poet the anglicized variant of the verb (‘infusa’) that Virgil uses to describe her subjugation of Vulcan: ‘assist my Muse and me, j Infusing Verses’.88 But Wgures of sexual enfettering have a reXexive pertinence not merely to poetic inspiration in general but, more particularly and precisely, to the role of the translator. A successful act of translation might well be described as one in which the translator is ‘involved’ by and with his original author in ‘the links of Love’. It was with this sort of idea in mind that the Romantic critic and 85 Hammond, Oldham and the Renewal of Classical Culture, 212. 86 Dryden’s apparent liking for the spelling ‘satyr’ in passages of self-presentation (as, for instance, in the prologue to Amphitryon (1690), l. 3, in a passage discussed here and further below, at pp. 200–1, 205–6) implictly compacts the two, since a satyr is a beast of prodigious sexual appetite. 87 Prologue to Amphitryon (1690), ll. 1, 4, 10. 88 ‘The Speech of Venus to Vulcan’, l. 42; ‘Lucretius: The Beginning of the First Book’, ll. 39–40.


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journalist John Wilson, praising ‘Lucretius: The Beginning of the First Book’ as the equal of ‘any piece of translation in the language’, suggested that Dryden had been ‘called to his task by desire . . . under the sting of the poetical oestrum’.89 Dryden too appears to have come to regard translation as he had practised it in Sylvae as a mode of impassioned dependency. For, looking back on his conduct as a translator at the beginning of the preface, he applied to it what is the master image in the writings of Epicurus for the disturbances of passion which impede the attainment of mental freedom: For this last half Year I have been troubled with the disease (as I may call it) of Translation; the cold Prose Wts of it (which are always the most tedious with me) were spent in The History of the League, the hot (which succeeded them) in this Volume of Verse Miscellanies. The truth is, I fancied to myself a kind of ease in the change of the Paroxism; never suspecting but that the humour wou’d have wasted itself in two or three Pastorals of Theocritus, and as many Odes of Horace. But Wnding, or at least thinking I found, something that was more pleasing in them than my ordinary productions, I encourag’d my self to renew my old acquaintance with Lucretius and Virgil; and immediately Wx’d upon some parts of them which had most aVected me in the reading.90

The fear of death, sexual desire, avarice, ambition, anger: each is referred to as a ‘disease’ or said to act upon the mind as a fever does upon the body in Dryden’s selections from Virgil, Horace, and Lucretius.91 But, for the Dryden of Sylvae, the ‘feverish thirst of life’ is, Wnally, just that: thirst for life. At a time when the poet’s life was losing its savour for Dryden, he rediscovered its ‘quickness’ through the passionate involvements of translation. 89 Quoted in Mason, ‘Et versus digitos habet’, 95. 90 CE iii. 4. 91 To quote only the two instances whose phrasing this passage from the preface most precisely recalls: at the end of ‘Lucretius: Against the Fear of Death’, man struggles to shake oV ‘his ill’, his ruling passion, but ‘The shaking Fit returns and hangs upon him still’ (ll. 289–90: the ‘Wt’ was Dryden’s idea; Lucretius’s diagnosis is vaguer: just ‘morbi . . . aeger’, ‘sick . . . with a disease’); while at the beginning of ‘Lucretius: Concerning the Nature of Love’, the progress of sexual infatuation is broken down into two phases: ‘The Feaver of the Soul shot from the fair, j And the cold Ague of succeeding care’ (ll. 13–14: both the ‘Feaver’ and the symptomatic alternation of ‘burning’ and ‘cold’ were added by Dryden; Lucretius’s lover suVers only ‘frigida cura’, ‘freezing anxiety’). A further subsidiary point of comparison between Dryden’s self-Wguration as translator and his descriptions of the ‘unhappy man’ is that like those who labour beneath a ‘weight of cares’ and, ‘Uneasie both in Countrey and in Town’, ‘search a place to lay their burden down’, but Wnd ‘no relief ’ (‘Lucretius: Against the Fear of Death’, ll. 272, 277–8, 282) Dryden ‘fancied to myself a kind of ease in the change of the Paroxism’, but discovered that his Wts continued whichever ancient poet he was translating.

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Translation and the Poet’s Life ‘ B U T S L AVE S W E A R E ’

The ‘Glorious’ Revolution made Dryden a slave. Not, of course, in the strictly material sense of being ‘kept in prison, or bonds’ to which Thomas Hobbes had attempted to limit usage of the word in Leviathan, but in the looser sense broadly current in seventeenth-century English which Hobbes believed had played a major part in stirring up the unrest which led to the Civil War. Parliamentarians had maintained that Ship Money and Charles I’s other ‘irregular impositions’ turned his subjects into slaves by interfering with their property rights. Now, in Williamite England, Roman Catholics could say the same, liable as they were to double taxes and other supererogatory measures such as being prohibited from owning weapons or horses and from living within ten miles of Westminster. Dryden apparently escaped the last of these penalties through a loophole,92 and modern historians have emphasized how haphazardly the penal laws against Catholics were applied, partly owing to the spirit of religious pluralism which increasingly deterred the English from persecuting their countrymen, and partly because of the limitations of early-modern bureaucracy.93 Yet ‘although the laws were normally laxly enforced, there was always the possibility that they might be enforced in full’;94 and under the terms of one of the period’s most inXuential rhetorics of liberty, derived from classical republican sources and therefore dubbed ‘neo-roman’ by its chief modern expositor, Quentin Skinner, being ‘subject or liable’ to enslavement was the same as being enslaved.95 In 1688, neither stone walls and iron bars nor even watertight legislation were needed to make Dryden and his fellow Roman Catholics slaves. Slavery is a persistent concern in the works Dryden produced in the immediate aftermath of the revolution and the loss of his public employments which followed from his refusal to reconvert to Protestantism. A conceit in the prologue he supplied for Thomas Betterton’s adaptation of Fletcher’s The Prophetess (1690), for instance, plays knowledgeably (as Walter Scott noted) on the ‘fashion at this time to have black boys in 92 Winn, Dryden and His World, 436–7. 93 See, for instance, John Bossy, ‘English Catholics after 1688’, in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel, and N. Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), pp. 369–87. 94 John Miller, Popery and Politics in England 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973), p. 20. 95 Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 38–44 (at 42).


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attendance, decorated with silver collars’ in picturing William III’s conquering troops returning home from Ireland with male Roman Catholic sex slaves in tow: Each brings his Love, a Bogland Captive home, Such proper Pages, will long Trayns become: With Copper-Collars, and with brawny Backs, Quite to put down the Fashion of our Blacks.96

But it is in Dryden’s major work from this Wrst phase of his life as a ‘cast poet’, his translations from Juvenal and Persius, that references to slavery bulk largest. There are twenty-four in total: thirteen in the Juvenal, eleven in the Persius. Many are just direct translations: both satirists use ‘servus’ and its cognates freely, the former in social and political connections, the latter as part of a philosophical discourse. But an instance from Juvenal’s Wrst satire suggests how Dryden consolidated this preexisting concern. When Juvenal describes how a newly aZuent freedman claims a place of honour at the theatre ‘quamvis j Natus ad Euphratem, molles quod in aure fenestrae j Arguerint’97 (‘although I was born by the Euphrates, which the soft holes in my ears would prove’), Dryden not only clariWes the allusion in his verse, giving ‘Tho born a slave, tho my torn Ears are bor’d’, but also appends a note containing a brief history of the practice of ear-boring: ‘The ears of all slaves were bored as a mark of their servitude, which custom is still usual in the East Indies, and in other parts, even for whole nations, who bore prodigious holes in their ears, and wear vast weights at them.’98 Of course, those were pointed accentuations. The prologue to The Prophetess was banned for its obvious political animus,99 and even the ostensibly erudite annotation in ‘The First Satire of Juvenal’ chimes with a staple refrain of anti-Williamite political rhetoric: like the free men of the East Indies who unwittingly mark themselves as slaves, the Whigs who invited William of Orange to ‘liberate’ them from the ‘popish’ tyrant James II have branded the ‘whole nation’ as a Dutch colony. Dryden’s fascination with slavery, which (as we saw in the last section) had once cut athwart his ideological commitments, was now running in parallel with them. His thinking on the subject consequently gained clarity but lost nuance; in particular, the Wgure of the slave no longer brought him to ask searching questions about his poetic identity 96 Prologue to The Prophetess, ll. 32–5. 98 ‘The First Satire of Juvenal’, l. 159.

97 Satires i. 103–5. 99 Winn, Dryden and His World, 444.

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and cultural role. Whereas the courtier in ‘From Horace, Epod 2d.’ who ‘To servile salutations runs’ was in part Dryden himself, the ‘Xatt’ring Servile Rout’ in his version of Juvenal’s third satire who ‘Refugies at Wrst . . . purchase here: j And, soon as Denizen’d, . . . domineer’100 are manifestly the Dutch immigrants who had followed William of Orange to London. This new disambiguated idiom reaches a peak in the ‘Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’, when Dryden puts a stop to the serpentine complexities of his comparison between the three principal Roman satirists by suddenly lashing out at Horace: [ Juvenal’s] Thoughts are sharper; his Indignation against Vice is more vehement; his Spirit has more of the Commonwealth Genius; he treats Tyranny and all the Vices attending it as they deserve, with the utmost rigour: And consequently a Noble Soul is better pleas’d with a Zealous Vindicator of Roman Liberty; than with a Temporizing Poet, a well Manner’d Court Slave, and a Man who is often afraid of Laughing in the right place: Who is ever decent, because he is naturally servile.101

‘Slave’ and ‘servile’ function there simply as expletives. The contrast with Dryden’s attunement in the Sylvae translations to nuances in Horace’s thinking about liberty is marked, nor would it require a particularly Whiggish reader to detect a whiV of opportunism about this outburst of zeal for the ‘Commonwealth Genius’ Dryden had made his name Wghting on behalf of the Stuart monarchy. Publication of The Satires of Juvenal and Persius (1692) marks a watershed in Dryden’s life as a proscribed poet. In the years immediately following his loss of the Laureate he had turned for the Wrst and only time in his career to translating poets of imperial as opposed to republican Rome. Thereafter he returned to the Augustan era: Wrst to Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his contributions to Examen Poeticum (1693), and then a year or so later to the greatest of the Augustans, when he signed the contract with Tonson to translate the complete Works of Virgil (1697). The distinction is sharply salient in the present context. When Juvenal was writing, under the ‘tyrant’ Domitian, and even more so when Persius was, during the reign of the infamous Nero, questions surrounding freedom and slavery presented themselves in black and white. In that climate, as Dryden had observed in the ‘Discourse Concerning Satire’, delicate Horatian ironies could no

100 ‘The Third Satire of Juvenal’, ll. 129–31.

101 CE iv. 65.


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longer be aVorded: ‘Little Follies were out of doors, when Oppression was to be scourg’d instead of Avarice: It was no longer time to turn into Ridicule, the false Opinions of Philosophers; when the Roman liberty was to be asserted.’102 The clarity of Dryden’s denunciations of slavery in the Juvenal translations answered to his initial shocked sense of the condition of England under William III as analogous to that of Rome under the emperors. With time, though, that sense of emergency appears to have waned, and Dryden took up the alternative analogue for the age which Roman history provided: the period of Rome’s transition from republic to principate, a period in which it was not clear what exactly ‘the Roman Liberty’ was and whether or not it needed ‘to be asserted’. The poet around whom disagreement over these questions among early-modern historians and critics particularly swirled was Virgil. Engagement with Virgil detached Dryden from the splendid simplicities of his Juvenal, reuniting him with his sceptical outlook on ‘the Spirit of Liberty’. This can readily be seen by comparing the outburst against Horace as a ‘Court Slave’ which I quoted a moment ago from the ‘Discourse Concerning Satire’ with the parallel passage in the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’ which concludes Dryden’s discussion of Virgil’s attitude towards Augustus: But, to return from my long rambling: I say, that Virgil having maturely weigh’d the Condition of the Times in which he liv’d: that an entire Liberty was not to be retriev’d: that the present Settlement had the prospect of a long continuance in the same Family, or those adopted into it: that he held his Paternal Estate from the Bounty of the Conquerour, by whom he was likewise enrich’d, esteem’d and cherish’d: that this Conquerour, though of a bad kind, was the very best of it: that the Arts of Peace Xourish’d under him: that all Men might be happy if they would be quiet: that now he was in possession of the whole, yet he shar’d a great part of his Authority with the Senate: that he would be chosen into the Ancient OYces of the Commonwealth, and Rul’d by the Power which he deriv’d from them; and Prorogued his Government from time to time: Still, as it were, threatening to dismiss himself from Publick Cares, which he exercis’d more for the common Good, than for any delight he took in greatness: These things, I say, being consider’d by the Poet, he concluded it to be the interest of his Country to be so Govern’d: To infuse an awful Respect into the People towards such a Prince: By that respect to conWrm their Obedience to him; and by that Obedience to make them Happy.103 102 Ibid.

103 CE v. 281.

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This majestic vaulted sentence bucks the trend of Dryden’s late prose style towards informal conversational structures, the vast and variously decorated arc of its parenthetical clauses a formal analogue for the complex multiplicity of Virgil’s thinking about Augustus and ‘the Roman Liberty’. That ‘an entire Liberty’ is not ‘to be retriev’d’, only gradations of more or less bounded freedom, is not a notion Dryden entertained while under the inXuence of Juvenal. Entertaining it here entails seeing England’s recent political history not through the monochrome lens of Jacobite propaganda but in pragmatical shades of grey; for a number of the considerations Dryden supposes reconciled Virgil to the bounding of Rome’s liberties imply he himself should reach a similar accommodation with the Williamite regime. In particular, ‘that the present Settlement had the prospect of a long continuance in the same Family, or those adopted into it’ and that ‘he would be chosen into the Ancient OYces of the Commonwealth’ broach what were for Jacobites the two most inconvenient facts about William III: his relation to the Stuart dynasty as the husband of James II’s daughter Mary, and the Convention parliament’s legitimation of his claim to the throne. However, my concern is not with the political dimension of Dryden’s Virgilian discourse of liberty but with its poetic ramiWcations, and in particular its intersection with his self-understanding as a translator.104 The site of that intersection is a passage near the end of the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’ where Dryden addresses a ‘diYculty’ he now considers ‘insuperable to all Translators’: We are bound to our Author’s Sense, though with the latitudes already mention’d (for I think it not so sacred, as that one Iota must not be added or diminished, on pain of an Anathema). But Slaves we are; and labour on another Man’s Plantation; we dress the Vine-yard, but the Wine is the Owners: If the Soil be sometimes Barren, then we are sure of being scourg’d: If it be fruitful, and our Care succeeds, we are not thank’d; for the proud Reader will only say, the poor drudge has done his duty.105

This is extraordinary. Horace’s warning ‘Odi imitatores servum pecus’ (‘despise the servile Xock of imitators’) was the quotation of choice throughout Dryden’s lifetime for those wishing to denigrate translators; 104 On the topical implications of Dryden’s remarks about Virgil and ‘the Roman Liberty’, see further Steven Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry (Princeton, 1984), ch. 6, and Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics (Oxford, 1996), pp. 201–15. 105 CE v. 334.


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it had lately been deployed against Dryden himself by Matthew Prior, serving as the epigraph for his session-poem ‘A Satyr on the Modern Translators’ (1685) where Dryden appears ‘at the head’ of a ‘Gang’ of translating ‘Drudges’.106 Yet Dryden here embraces the designation of the translator as slave. Not only that; in the course of doing so he speciWcally negates an alternative metaphorical Wguration widely used at this time to dignify the translator. Theorists of empire, chief among them Locke, contended that colonizers who ‘improved’ (purportedly) uncultivated land in the New World through the exercise of their labour thereby earned rights of ownership,107 and this argument had been extended to cover the imperial exploits of the translator. It was particularly apposite where the poet being translated was one conventionally regarded as ‘rough’ in either a prosodic or conceptual sense; hence, John Evelyn had applied it when praising Thomas Creech’s Lucretius, and Bevil Higgons as recently as 1693 when praising Dryden himself for tackling the notoriously recondite Persius: we at distance gloomy Persius view’d, But none approach’d, and his rough Tracts pursu’d, Till mighty Dryden ventur’d Wrst on Shoar, And the dark unknown Region did explore: Drest by thy artful Hand, he does appear Bright and perspicuous, as he is severe: With this rich Present you oblige our Isle108

Now Dryden repudiates this defence: no matter how hard he labours to cultivate his original, ownership of it will continue to reside in its author. The translator is not an imperialist but a colonial. Plainly, this claim has sectarian valency: Jacobites and non-jurors insisted that William of Orange’s accession to the throne by conquest rather than lineal right had made the English slaves. Yet Dryden was not just scoring a political point; ‘But Slaves we are’ is more than a Jacobite rallying cry. Elements of the passage’s style already suggest its special amplitude of vision: notably, its quasi-ceremonial way with the collective pronoun, and the ritual pulse set in train by its spare parallel clauses. But its viticultural images in particular spread roots far and wide 106 ‘A Satyr on the Modern Translators’, ll. 2, 23; in The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1959). 107 Barbara Arneil, Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford, 1996), pp. 136–8. 108 ‘To Mr. Dryden on his Translation of Persius’, ll. 5–11; in Dryden: The Critical Heritage, ed. James and Helen Kinsley (1971), p. 207.

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throughout Dryden’s intellectual culture and spiritual formation, as well as deep into his previous criticism and poetry.109 They descend from those used in the Old Testament to warn the Israelites of the consequences of defection from God’s law, as, for instance, at Deuteronomy 28: 30–3: ‘thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof . . . The fruit of thy land, and all thy labours, shall a nation thou knowest not eat up.’ Dryden had been thinking of his nation in these terms long before the ‘Glorious’ Revolution, since the start of his career in fact; and the catastrophic lapse had been perpetrated not by his political enemies, the rebellious forefathers of the Restoration Whigs who ran riot in the Civil War period, but by his poetic heroes, the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists he honoured as ‘our Fathers in Wit’. For the originary instance in Dryden’s writings of this conceit of imaginative dispossession comes in An Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) when he observes of Jonson, Shakespeare, and Fletcher that they had: ruin’d their Estates themselves before they came to their childrens hands. There is scarce an Humour, a Character, or any kind of Plot, which they have not us’d. All comes sullied or wasted to us: and were they to entertain this Age, they could not now make so plenteous treatments out of such decay’d fortunes.110

To register the presence of this passage and others like it behind Dryden’s description thirty years later of translators as ‘Slaves’ condemned to ‘labour on another Man’s Plantation’ is to become aware of that description functioning as a myth of the rise of translation in late seventeenth-century England. A decade after being deprived of the post of Historiographer-Royal, Dryden frames for his nation a narrative, at once spiritual biography, political history, and literary retrospect, that has translation at its heart and as its conclusion. As William III has been sent to scourge the nation for its long intoxication with ‘the Spirit of Liberty’, so English poets must atone for the licence of their fathers in wit by translating. At the end of a century of imaginative and political proXigacy, the servile labour of translation is Dryden’s cultural destiny. That is a Virgilian myth. A common style of wit in Augustan translation discourse involved discussing the practice in metaphorical terms derived from the characteristic concerns of the author being translated: as when, for instance, Charles Cotton commended his friend 109 In what follows I draw on my earlier analysis of the passage in ‘ ‘‘But slaves we are’’: Dryden and Virgil, Translation and the ‘‘Gyant Race’’ ’, Translation and Literature, 10 (2001), 110–27 (at 113–16). 110 CE xvii. 73.


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Edmund Prestwich’s version of Seneca’s tragedy Hippolytus (1651) by comparing Prestwich to the healing Wgure of Aesculapius who breathes life back into the dismembered corpse of the young hero.111 But Dryden here deploys the trope in unusually complicated form. The general tenor of his discussion is recognizably Virgilian but its particular inXection signiWcantly distorts the resemblance. Dispossession and work are primary concerns in Virgil’s poems: in the Georgics and the Aeneid (to simplify for now questions pursued in more detail below) the latter is the cure for the former. The archetypal Virgilian narrative involves the reconstitution of national identity in times of crisis through ‘labor’: a complex of endeavour and suVering. But to equate such culturally reparative eVort with slavery would be to take an extreme view. On the face of it, an extremely hostile view: only the most implacable Whigs believed that the Virgilian ethic of ‘labor’ was a charter for Augustan absolutism. But also, potentially, an extremely approving view: within the framework of Dryden’s biblical conceit slavery takes on aYrmative overtones,112 engaging the claims made by St Augustine and other Christian allegorists that Virgil’s labouring heroes are prototypes of self-denying submission to the mysterious ends of divinity. Dryden’s self-understanding as an enslaved translator is formed, one might say, from a doubly exposed image of Virgil: a deeply jaundiced outlook and a highly idealized vision. ‘But Slaves we are’: the inversion itself is audible either as a sceptic’s demystiWcation or a devotee’s credo. What follows is an inquiry into the relations between Dryden’s response to Virgil as a poet of work and his understanding of his own work of translating Virgil. In his circumstances of dispossession, did Dryden Wnd spiritual purpose, or at least cultural meaning, in the servitude of translation? Or did he experience it merely as the hard labour to which the historically downtrodden were sentenced? Did the Virgilian ethic of ‘labor’ enable him to dignify his role as translator? Or did his role as translator attune him to sheerly menial countertones in that ethic? My attempt to answer these questions falls into two halves, one devoted to the Georgics and one to the Aeneid. But the two are 111 ‘To my Worthy Friend, Mr Edmund Prestwich, on His Translation of Hippolytus, 1651’, in Poems of Charles Cotton, 1630–1687, ed. John Beresford (1923). 112 For a concise account of the several ways in which ‘Christianity gave a certain moral dignity to servitude’, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1966; repr. Oxford, 1988), pp. 84–90; and for more detailed discussion, Dale Martin, Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity (New Haven, 1990).

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interlinked, and the former is by no means intended merely as introduction to the latter. For it is a founding premise of my argument that the Georgics lies at the centre of Dryden’s understanding of Virgil, and that neglect of this fact by modern commentators, who continue overwhelmingly to favour the ‘Aeneis’,113 has had deleterious consequences. From Wrst to last in his career Dryden nominated the Georgics as his favourite of Virgil’s poems, telling his brother-in-law Robert Howard in the prose ‘Account’ of Annus Mirabilis (1667) that it was ‘the Divinest part of all his writings’,114 calling its four books ‘more perfect in their kind, than even his Divine Aeneids’ in the preface to Sylvae,115 and Wnally pronouncing it ‘the best Poem of the best Poet’ when dedicating his version to the Earl of ChesterWeld.116 Unless we take this preference seriously, we cannot properly understand either Dryden’s Georgics or his ‘Aeneis’, for in translating the epic Dryden gave full weight to Virgil’s statement in the proem that its subject is the ‘labores’ of Aeneas. For Dryden the two poems formed a diptych about the meaning and value of the work of ‘culture’, a question which particularly preoccupied him in his servitude as he practised what was by convention the most sheerly laborious form of poetic endeavour: translation. The analogy between the poet’s work and that of the husbandman in the Georgics was a staple ingredient of the imitatio Vergilii tradition which shaped the thinking of early-modern poets about their careers. When, at the outset of his translation, Dryden paired ‘the Poet’s and the Ploughman’s Cares’ where Virgil had spoken only of ‘uninstructed rustics’ (‘ignarosque . . . agrestis’)117 the eVect would barely have registered with contemporary readers. However, the signiWcance of the association was changing. Whereas for a poet of the high Renaissance such as Spenser it had connoted the poet’s obligation to undertake ‘a series of cultivating labours with the purpose of redeeming a land and a history from the eVects of time’s disorders’,118 in Dryden’s lifetime the 113 A case in point is Hammond’s Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, which oVers a superb account of the ‘Aeneis’ stretching over sixty-Wve pages, as against a dozen or so pages devoted to the Georgics, all but a few sentences of which address a single passage, ‘O fortunatos nimium’ in Book II; an honourable exception to the rule was Keith Walker’s decision to print the translation of the Georgics in its entirety in his selected edition of Dryden in the ‘Oxford Authors’ series. 114 CE i. 54–5. 115 CE iii. 10. 116 CE v. 137. 117 ‘The First Book of the Georgics’, l. 61; Georgics i. 41. 118 William A. Sessions, ‘Spenser’s Georgics’, English Literary Renaissance, 10 (1980), 202–38 (at 203).


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arduousness and potential futility of such labours was gradually downgraded as the twin spirits of technological progressivism and moral meliorism began to take hold. Although ‘expropriations, forced and voluntary sales, enclosures, and the expulsion of tenants so greatly accelerated as a result of the Civil War that the economic pressures practically forced land-and-rent-holders to increase the eYciency of their operations’, thereby making agriculture an increasingly slavish business for those who actually worked the land, the talk of the advocates of the new science and later of the ideologues of Whig modernity was mostly of ‘journeying resolutely into the future’ and ‘setting human hands and minds to the control of history’.119 The impact of such Whiggish optimism on interpretation of the Georgics at around the time Dryden was translating the poem emerges most clearly from considering the case of the poet and critic who is regularly cited as particularly exemplifying that optimism and who has been credited with setting the course of English thought about georgic for much of the eighteenth century: Joseph Addison.120 When Dryden found himself too exhausted from his labours on the Virgil to write a critical introduction to the Georgics, Jacob Tonson commissioned Addison to supply one; and according to Addison agriculture, as Virgil describes it, is anything but labour-intensive. The central premise of his ‘Essay on the Georgics’ is that Virgil generally ‘conceals the Precept in a description, and represents his Country-Man performing the Action in which he would instruct the reader’:121 ‘Country-Man’ not ‘farmer’, ‘Action’, not ‘work’, ‘would instruct’ not ‘instructs’. What follows from this premise becomes clear in that bible of optimistic Whiggery: The Spectator. When writing about work as Mr. Spectator, one commentator has observed, Addison ‘came close to sentimentalising the rewards of honest toil’ and ‘forgot . . . the fatigue, frustration, and failure that can accompany such eVort’. In this ‘onesided concentration on positive results’122 selective interpretation of the Georgics played a key role. The paper published on Friday 20 August 1714 on ‘the Art of Planting’ is characteristic. Though it starts out by aYrming that ‘no one of the Sons of Adam ought to think himself 119 Antony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton, 1985), pp. 124, 139. 120 John Chalker, The English Georgic (1969), p. 17: ‘both early and mid-century critics . . . see the Georgics through Addisonian spectacles’. 121 Joseph Addison, ‘Essay on the Georgics’; in CE v. 150. 122 Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Joseph Addison’s Sociable Animal (Providence, RI, 1971), p. 33.

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exempt from that Labour and Industry which were denounced to our Wrst Parent, and in him to all Posterity’, it soon settles into accentuating the positive results of that primal curse, ending with a leisurely perambulation of ‘those Shades which our own Industry has raised’.123 As the motto for the essay Addison chose four lines from the part of Book IV which he had previously rendered in his ‘Translation of all Virgil’s Fourth Georgick, except the Story of Aristaeus’ for The Annual Miscellany (1694). The lines in question describe how the bee-keeper must strew the area around his hives with Xowers and irrigate it well in order to prevent his bees from swarming: Ipse thymum tinosque ferens de montibus altis Tecta serat late circum, cui talia curae; Ipse labore manum duro terat, ipse feracis Figat humo plantas et amicos inriget imbris.124

In fact, Virgil’s repetitions of ‘ipse’ impress the bee-keeper’s duties upon him in no uncertain terms.125 This work is not to be delegated; his livelihood depends on it.126 But Addison’s mind was so taken up with ‘the fragrant context of Xowers that makes the bees want to stay at home’ he all but forgot the labour it costs the bee-keeper to produce it:127 Wild Thyme and Pine-Trees from the barren hill Transplant, and nurse ’em in the neighbouring soil, Set fruit-trees around, nor e’er indulge thy sloth, But water ’em, and urge their shady growth.128

It is not just that this redoubles the pleasurable ambience of the original scene, in particular by the addition of the pastoral adjective ‘shady’ (slurring ‘imbris’ into ‘umbra’), nor even that it relaxes Virgil’s most toilsome insistence ‘ipse labore manum duro terat’ (‘himself harden his hand with laborious toil’) by inverting it into the negative; Addison

123 The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), iv. 595. 124 Georgics iv. 112–15. 125 M. C. J. Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics (Princeton, 1979), p. 249. 126 For details of why ‘swarming’ is ‘not in the interests of the beekeeper’, see Claire Preston, Bee (2006), 34–6. 127 Georgics, ed. Mynors, ad loc. (p. 272). 128 ‘Translation of all Virgil’s Fourth Georgick, except the Story of Aristaeus’, ll. 133–6; in Joseph Addison, Miscellaneous Works, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 2 vols. (1914).


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actually encourages sloth whilst professing to encourage work. For he has half-rhymed ‘indulge’ with ‘urge’. Elements of the Addisonian attitude to the Georgics are present in Dryden’s early critical remarks about the poem. When he told his brother-in-law Robert Howard it was ‘the Divinest part’ of Virgil in the preamble to Annus Mirabilis, he was primarily praising its ‘excellent Images of Nature’, and singled out a number of descriptive set-pieces which translators would subsequently cherry-pick in the Tonson miscellanies, including ‘the battle of the bulls’ over a heifer from the section of Book III rendered by an anonymous contributor to Examen Poeticum (1693) as ‘Amor omnibus idem: Or, the Force of Love in all Creatures’ and in particular ‘the country’, the ‘soft’ vision of rural life in Book II which had been inXuentially excerpted by Cowley in his Essays.129 In subsequent years, however, Dryden’s reading of the Georgics began to darken. ‘Hard’ aspects of Virgil’s presentation of agriculture gradually impressed themselves on his work in concert with his increasing sense of the arduousness of the labour of husbanding English culture enjoined on him as Poet Laureate. In Britannia Rediviva (1688), for instance, uncertainty over the future of the Stuart dynasty is expressed through allusion to those parts of the Georgics which stress the hostile unpredictability of the environment in which the farmer must work: ‘Poets are not Prophets, to foreknow j What Plants will take the Blite, and what will grow.’130 After the ‘Glorious’ Revolution, the Georgics comes to focus Dryden’s sense of the failure of his poetic husbandry: in ‘To my Dear Friend Mr Congreve, On his Comedy called The Double Dealer’ (1694), Charles II’s (and by implication his Laureate’s) apparent success in curing ‘the rankness’ of English soil with ‘Rules of Husbandry’ turns out in retrospect only to have dried it out, making new work for Congreve who must restore its ‘strength’.131 By the time Dryden had completed his translation of the poem, this darkening trend was irreversible. Now he justiWed his high claims for the poem in a striking new way: ‘They are not I confess the most specious part of Virgil’, he told ChesterWeld; ‘but in revenge they are his Masterpiece in which he has not onely out done all other Poets, but him self ’.132 ‘In revenge’ is suddenly violent, the more so since it unnecessarily duplicates ‘but’. Not 129 CE i. 54–5. 130 Britannia Rediviva, ll. 71–2. 131 ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve, On his Comedy called The Double Dealer’, ll. 7–13. 132 Letters, ed. Ward, 86.

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merely is the Georgics no longer to be valued for its descriptive ‘beauties’; it is in some sense to be read as Virgil’s revenge against what is ‘specious’. ChesterWeld was doubtless puzzled by this turn of phrase (assuming it registered with him) but a modern Virgilian might well be able to make sense of it. Much recent commentary on the Georgics has detected within the poem a conXict or counterpoint of voices akin to that between the famous ‘Two Voices of Vergil’s Aeneid ’—‘imperial’ or ‘elegaic’, pro- and anti-Augustan—posited by Adam Parry in an essay which did much to set the tone of twentieth-century scholarship on the epic. In the Georgics the two voices reXect contrastive outlooks on ‘labor’, an ‘optimistic’ conWdence in the power of human industry to transform the natural environment, and a ‘pessimistic’ awareness that eVort alone, however unrelenting, may not be suYcient to overcome the obstacles which stand in the way of such ‘culture’. The former issues in the sort of descriptive ‘beauties’ admired by Addison and before him by Cowley; the latter gives rise to drivingly didactic passages and, when even ceaseless eVort seems doomed to failure, to outbreaks of almost nihilistic despondency. Commentators of course continue to disagree as to which of these two voices Wnally predominates, but for those of a ‘pessimistic’ bent the riposte oVered in certain parts of the poem to the ‘soft’ vision of country life can seem sardonic, vengeful. (Some would say, too, that in repudiating that vision Virgil was rejecting or at least superceding his own reWned ‘neoteric’ poetic formation: ‘he has out done . . . him self ’.) Dryden’s translation of the Georgics is sharply attuned to pessimistic notes in Virgil’s treatment of ‘labor’. So sharply in fact as to approximate ‘labor’ with slavery in a number of respects. In a brief discussion which Dryden scholars ought to have better heeded, GeoVrey Hill has pointed out that when translating phrases which feature cognates of the word, ‘Though not excluding all reference to ‘‘sweet Vicissitudes of Rest and Toyl’’ that ‘‘Make easy Labour’’, Dryden places considerable emphasis upon the bare and bitter subsistence.’ For example: ‘Where Virgil writes that Winter, the farmer’s lazy time, ‘‘loosens the weight of care’’ (‘‘hiems curasque resolvit’’) Dryden reworks it as ‘‘Forget their Hardships, and recruit for more’’.’133 This emphasis is further ingrained into the translation by Dryden’s habitual use of labour-intensive epithets when rendering Virgil’s noun ‘agricola’: ‘lab’ring Husband’, ‘lab’ring Swain’, 133 GeoVrey Hill, The Enemy’s Country: Words, Contexture, and Other Circumstances of Language (Oxford, 1991), p. 8.


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‘toiling Swain’, ‘lab’ring Hand’, ‘lab’ring Hind’. Such epithets potentially conXict with the status of Virgil’s husbandman as a landholder, which is crucial to his function as an exemplar of the self-suYcient rustic Romanitas which lay at the heart of Augustus’s programme of cultural renewal and is in some measure advocated in the Georgics.134 But in drawing out other slavish undertones, Dryden was more in sympathy with his original. Thus, for instance, he frequently escalates the military metaphors Virgil applies to husbandry, metaphors in which the plight of ‘the slave laborers that would have worked the estates he is describing . . . may be implied’;135 as in Book I where the farmer is admonished that ‘unless the Land with daily Care j Is exercis’d, and with an Iron War, j Of Rakes and Harrows’,136 it will soon be overrun by sterile weeds; or again when he is instructed to ‘thrash the Wood j For Mast of Oak’ and ‘the Spoil j Of bloody Myrtles’;137 and even in Book II, ostensibly the most ‘optimistic’,138 where Dryden urges the husbandman to ‘invade’ his potentially ‘lawless’ vines with ‘crooked Steel’ and ‘persecute’ them with his ‘Pruning Knife’.139 Most of all, though, Dryden exacerbates the violent measures the husbandman takes to control his working animals, measures which inevitably broach the traditional equation of animals with slaves in Roman literary culture;140 as when he oVers advice about what to do about a diseased sheep: ‘Revenge the Crime; and take the Traytor’s head, j E’re in the faultless Flock the dire Contagion spread’,141 or again about how to discipline 134 The classic statement of this view of the poem is L. P. Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey (Cambridge, 1969); for a brief survey of the ways in which subsequent scholarship has problematized notions of the poem’s Augustanism, see R. J. Tarrant, ‘Poetry and Power: Virgil’s Poetry in Contemporary Context’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Martindale, 169–87 (at 175–7). 135 William Fitzgerald, Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination (Cambridge, 2000), p. 3. 136 ‘The First Book of the Georgics’, ll. 231–3: this example is noted by Colin Burrow, as evidence of Dryden’s ‘habitual working-up of Virgil’s metaphors’; in ‘Virgil in English Translation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Martindale, 21–37 (at 28). 137 ‘The First Book of the Georgics’, ll. 409–12. 138 This designation rests on the presence within the book of ‘O fortunatos nimium’, but R. F. Thomas has nevertheless disputed it, pointing out that even in Book II ‘man succeeds in transforming the natural order’ only ‘by exercising a quasi-military force over the plants’: Georgics, ed. Thomas 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1988), i. 20. 139 ‘The Second Book of the Georgics’, ll. 507–9, 562–3. 140 Fitzgerald, Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination, 99–102. 141 ‘The Third Book of the Georgics’, ll. 709–10: for one contemporary reader’s reaction to the ferocity of these lines, see my essay ‘ ‘‘Dogmatical’’ Dryden: Translating the Georgics in the Age of Politeness’, Translation and Literature, 8 (1999), 28–53 (at 30–1).

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brood mares: ‘Their Bodies harass; sink ’em when they run; j And fry their melting Marrow in the Sun. j Starve ’em, when Barns beneath their burden groan, j And winnow’d ChaV, by western winds is blown.’142 Those last two examples are both from Book III, generally regarded as the most ‘pessimistic’ in the poem. Here Virgil comes closest to presenting the husbandman and the environment he is attempting to cultivate as locked into a vicious cycle of mutual enslavement: condemned to hard labour by the capricious natural forces which threaten his tenure of his land, the farmer responds by seeking ever more violently to coerce those natural forces to his will. It is signiWcant therefore that ‘The Third Book of the Georgics’ was the part of his translation of Virgil that Dryden chose to publish in the Annual Miscellany (1694) as a sample of his work in progress.143 Within the running order of the miscellany it was immediately followed by Addison’s version of Book IV, and the two form an exemplary contrast. The point where Dryden left oV, the note he left on his readers’ minds, is the darkest in the Georgics. A virulent infection has decimated the farmer’s herd of cattle. ‘The plague’ was one of the passages Dryden had drawn to Howard’s attention thirty years earlier, and the fact that Thucydides and Lucretius had treated the same theme conWrmed its status as a setpiece. Yet, handsomely as Dryden capitalizes on the local opportunities for imagistic display oVered by the episode, he is also concerned to bring out its structural signiWcance within Virgil’s antiphonal exploration of ‘labor’. Concluding Book III, it is naturally counterpointed against the conclusion of the previous book: ‘O fortunatos nimium’, for contemporary readers the primary ‘beauty’ of the Georgics.144 Virgil especially promotes this link when describing how the farmer unyokes his last surviving bullock and in utter despair abandons the ploughshare in the half-turned furrow. What has all his hard work been for? Dryden: Now what avails his well-deserving Toil To turn the Glebe, or smooth the rugged Soil? And yet he never supt in solemn State, Nor undigested Feasts did urge his fate; Nor day, to Night luxuriously did joyn; 142 ‘The Third Book of the Georgics’, ll. 214–17. 143 So he told Tonson: see Letters, ed. Ward, 64; the decision of the Longman editors not to include this translation in the fourth volume of Poems is regrettable, given its evident quality and centrality to Dryden’s concerns in 1693–4. 144 A Wne reading of Dryden’s version of this passage can be found in Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 197–207.


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Nor surfeited on rich Campanian Wine. Simple his Beverage; homely was his Food: The wholsom Herbage, and the running Flood: No dreadful Dreams awak’d him with aVright; His Pains by Day, secur’d his Rest by Night.145

What Dryden has recognized is that Virgil’s description of the bull’s simple fare and habits ‘recalls 2. 461–74’ where it was the husbandman who abstained from rich foods and clothing.146 Dryden concerts and ampliWes the parallel, drawing on staple items of Epicurean diction from his translations of Lucretius and Horace as well as from ‘the country’ itself (‘Nor . . . luxuriously’, ‘Nor surfeited’, ‘No dreadful Dreams’). Wit latent in the analogy does something to alleviate the pessimism of the lines;147 but Dryden goes further than Virgil in training the despairing tonality of this scene upon the earlier passage’s idealized vision of the countryman’s work as harmonized with the laws of Nature. His Wnal line in particular, both in its philosophic terminology (‘secur’d’, ‘Rest’) and its formal poise, bitterly reprises that ideal.148 There was a weight of personal feeling behind that reprise: the image of the countryman as Epicurean sapiens seemed more than ever now an unattainable ideal to Dryden. In his version of ‘the country’ he Wrmly ‘locates this happiness not in a realizable countryside but in an idealized pastoral’;149 indeed, he sometimes makes the detachment of the ‘happy man’ from reality seem culpable. When rendering Virgil’s celebrated wish to Wnd refuge in the shady glens of Haemus (‘ingenti ramorum protegat umbra’),150 for instance, Dryden gives ‘cover my Retreat from Human Race’,151 where double syntax and the interchangeability of ‘human’ and ‘humane’ in early-modern English combine to air the traditional Baconian objection to withdrawal as inhumane (the ‘Retreat’ is ‘from human Race’ as well as covered from it). The point is driven home some lines later when Dryden inverts the 145 ‘The Third Book of the Georgics’, ll. 784–93. 146 Georgics, ed. Mynors, ad loc. 147 Mynors points out ‘how completely the animals are thought of as though they were men’ (ibid.). 148 Compare the line Dryden would later use to sum it up in his version of ‘O fortunatos nimium’: ‘And after toilsome Days, a soft repose at Night’; ‘The Second Book of the Georgics’, l. 664. 149 Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 198. 150 Georgics ii. 489. 151 ‘The Second Book of the Georgics’, l. 697.‘

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order of Virgil’s claim that the ‘happy man’ is free from pity for the poor and envy of the rich (‘neque ille j aut doluit miserans inopem aut invidit habenti’),152 and so contrives for the Wnal emphasis to fall on the complacency of philosophic disinterest (an eVect underscored perhaps by the pomp of the alexandrine): ‘Nor envies he the Rich their heapy Store, j Nor his own Peace disturbs with Pity for the Poor’.153 The couplet has satiric force: Dryden had employed the very same rhyme in his version of ‘The Third Satire of Juvenal’ when bridling at the fact that ‘the Rich have still a Gibe in store: j And will be monstrous witty on the Poor.’154 Whilst the poet was not exactly reduced to poverty after 1688, country life had a particular association with his straitened Wnancial circumstances: his cousins John Driden of Chesterton and Elizabeth Steward sent him gifts of rural produce and oVered him hospitality in the Northamptonshire countryside.155 But it is elsewhere in ‘The Third Book of the Georgics’ that Dryden’s sensitivity to pessimistic elements in Virgil’s rural vision comes most closely—and also most complicatedly—into relation with his own working conditions. What should the farmer do with an old warhorse long since retired to stud and now past performing even this lesser labour? But worn with Years, when dire Diseases come, Then hide his not Ignoble Age, at Home: In peace t’enjoy his former Palms and Pains; And gratefully be kind to his Remains. For when his Blood no Youthful Spirits move, He languishes and labours in his Love. And when the sprightly Seed shou’d swiftly come, Dribling he drudges, and defrauds the Womb.156

This was not the only old warhorse to whose ‘Remains’ Dryden implored someone to ‘be kind’ in 1694; that year also saw the publication of his conversation poem ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’, with its entreaty to the young stallion of the London stage to ‘Be kind to my Remains; and oh defend, j Against Your Judgment, Your departed Friend!’157 The Wrst commentator to note this link claimed it led Dryden to overturn ‘Virgil’s 152 Georgics ii. 498–9. 153 ‘The Second Book of the Georgics’, ll. 713–14. 154 ‘The Third Satire of Juvenal’, ll. 248–9. 155 For Dryden’s periods of rustication to his Northamptonshire familial roots, see Winn, Dryden and His World, 500–9. 156 ‘The Third Book of the Georgics’, ll. 151–8. 157 ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’, ll. 72–3.


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injunction not to feel pity for the old stallion’;158 in fact, however, the relevant phrase in the original is rendered ambiguous by its word order: the editor of Dryden’s text of Virgil reports that Servius took the key phrase ‘Nec turpi ignosce senectae’ to mean ‘either, don’t hide his ignoble age’ (‘nec ignosce turpi senectae’) or ‘hide his not ignoble age’ (‘ignosce senectae non turpi’).159 When translating that phrase, Dryden opts for the more pitiful of those readings, but the more hard-headed one registers across later lines. The passage is written in two voices, with the break occurring in between the Wrst and second pairs of couplets: ‘For’ oVers to construe their relation as causal, but it is far from clear how grateful kindness to the stallion’s ‘Remains’ could follow from so contemptuous an attitude towards the beast as is articulated in Dryden’s atavistically alliterative account of its impotence (‘languishes . . . labours . . . Love’; ‘Dribling . . . drudges . . . defrauds’). The nearest thing to pity possible for the horse from this latter point of view would appear to be that it is not worth the labour it would cost the farmer to slaughter it. It is particularly against himself as a translator that Dryden’s contemptuous tone is targeted. ‘Drudge’ was the verb he had throughout his career been in the habit of applying to what he experienced as menial aspects of his own work. There is reason to suspect, in fact, that it functioned for him in this regard almost as a kind of personal moniker, perhaps because of its homophony with the opening of his name (‘Dryd’ j ‘drud’), a homophony Dryden liked to underline with alliteration, as in this case and that of another overlaboured—enslaved—beast in Book I: ‘the drudging Ass is driv’n, with Toyl, j To neighb’ring Towns with Apples and with Oyl’.160 Initially it had been as a playwright dependent on the debauched tastes of Restoration theatre

158 Judith Sloman, in Dryden: The Poetics of Translation (Toronto, 1985), p. 14. 159 Virgilius Maronis Opera, ed. Carolus Ruaeus (Charles de la Rue), 2nd edn. (Amsterdam, 1690), sig. Z1r ; de la Rue favours the second reading, on the grounds that ‘Ennius, Plutarch, Ausonius, &c. praise old horses, and say that they are to be treated gently, & rewarded with comfort for their mitigating deeds’; modern commentators, by contrast, mostly prefer the Wrst reading; thus, for instance, Georgics, ed. Thomas, ad loc.: ‘A gerontophile tradition . . . interprets nec as et non . . . which makes nonsense, since pity hardly suits abde domo’; see also Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth, 179. 160 ‘The First Book of the Georgics’, ll. 367–8; other occurrences of ‘drudge’ in alliterative phrases in Dryden’s post-1688 translations include ‘The Fourth Satire of Persius’, ll. 74–5: ‘Thus fares the Drudge: but thou, whose life’s a Dream j Of lazy Pleasures’, and ‘Palamon and Arcite’, i. 580 where Arcite returns disguised as a slave to Athens, ‘ProVering for hire his service at the gate, j To drudge, draw Water, and to run or wait.’

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audiences that Dryden labelled himself a drudge;161 but by this time he was using the term almost exclusively to connote his subjugated estate as a translator: in the passage I quoted earlier from the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’, and in two letters to Elizabeth Steward where he speaks of himself as ‘still drudging on’ at the Virgil and ‘drudgeing at a Book of Miscellanyes’, meaning Fables.162 We might think of such usages as encompassing Dryden’s twin senses of being ‘bound’, imaginatively, ‘to his author’s sense’, and, Wnancially, to Tonson who paid him by the line for his translations. But Dryden’s response to Virgil’s decrepit stallion brings to light further diversity in his understanding of translation as slavish labour. His two-sided identiWcation with the labouring horse and the farmer who works it entails a recognition on his part that the traYc of slavery in the case of his translation of Virgil was not all one way. This recognition sounds in the most complicatedly reXexive phrase Dryden applies to the horse: his Wnal allegation (which, needless to say, he added to Virgil) that it ‘defrauds the womb’. Siring oVspring was construed in early-modern culture as coinage, and the metaphor was regularly extended to the processes of literary creation, so the natural analogue for translation considered as impotent drudgery would be fraud. But the literal economic sense of the word is also strongly activated, as it is elsewhere in Dryden’s Georgics which habitually connects the Wnancial realities of agriculture with those of translation.163 Dryden grumbled in letters he sent to Tonson during their negotiations over payment for the Virgil that the bookseller was defrauding him, underpaying him or paying him in debased coin;164 yet here it is by implication Dryden who is doing the defrauding. Compare the passage near the end of the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’ which immediately precedes the confession-cum-profession ‘But slaves we are’: ‘From the beginning of the First Georgic to the end of the last Aeneid; I found the diYculty of Translation growing on me in every succeeding Book’, Dryden is ‘bound’ to report: 161 See, for instance, the Prologue to An Evening’s Love (1668), ll. 1–10: ‘When Wrst our Poet set himself to write, j Like a young Bridegroom on his Wedding-night j He layd about him, and did so bestir him j His Muse could never lye in quiet for him: j But now his Honey-moon is gone and past, j Yet the ungrateful drudgery must last: j And he is bound, as civil Husbands do, j To strain himself, in complaisance to you: j To write in pain, and counterfeit a bliss, j Like the faint smackings of an after kiss.’ 162 Letters, ed. Ward, 109, 113. 163 Hill, The Enemy’s Country, 5–7. 164 Letters, ed. Ward, 75, 77, 80.


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For Virgil, above all Poets, had a stock, which I may call almost inexhaustible, of Wgurative, Elegant, and Sounding Words. I who inherit but a small portion of his Genius, and write in a language so much inferiour to the Latin, have found it very painful to vary Phrases, when the same sense returns upon me. Even he himself, whether out of necessity or choice, has often Express’d the same thing in the same words; and often repeated two or three whole Verses which he had us’d before. Words are not so easily Coyn’d as Money: And yet we see that the Credit not only of Banks, but of Exchequers cracks, when little comes in, and much goes out. Virgil call’d upon me in every line for some new word: And I paid so long, that I was almost Banckrupt: So that the latter end must needs be more burdensom than the beginning or the middle: And consequently, the Twelfth Aeneid cost me double the time of the First and Second. What had become of me, if Virgil had tax’d me with another Book? I had certainly been reduc’d to pay the Publick in hammer’d Money, for want of Mill’d; that is in the same old Words which I had us’d before: And the Receivers must have been forc’d to have taken any thing, where there was so little to be had.165

It is, of course, no accident that Dryden identiWes the laboriousness of his task as particularly setting in ‘from the beginning of the First Georgic’, and the analogy continues in his reference to ‘the diYculty of translation growing on me’, a variation on the play on words most famously deployed in Adam and Eve’s discussion of their ‘growing work’ in the ‘separation scene’ of Paradise Lost.166 Like Eve, anxious that their ‘work’ of husbanding Eden ‘under our labour grows’, Dryden feels oppressed by the ‘almost inexhaustible’ linguistic fertility of Virgil. Unlike Eve’s, though, Dryden’s work of husbanding the garden of Virgil’s verse partakes of the curse of ‘Labour and Industry. . . denounced to our Wrst Parent, and in him to all Posterity’. Even in its original form the Virgilian garden bore some of the marks of that curse, of having been created in part through menially repetitive labour. But only some of Virgil’s repetitions betoken his enslavement to ‘necessity’; others arose out of free ‘choice’. How much more Dryden is enslaved he concedes in the minutiae of his style: its passive pronominal phrases (‘growing on me’, ‘returns upon me’, ‘call’d upon me’) and especially its constant drag of repetition evident in those phrases and again at ‘has often Express’d . . . and often repeated’. In this passage Dryden Wnally professes to have avoided selling the public short, paying them in ‘hammer’d Money’, but only just: ‘I . . . have found it very painful to vary Phrases’ barely wrests variation, the mark of creative work, out of repetition, that of menial labour. Between the lines of his portrait of the 165 CE v. 334

166 Paradise Lost, ix. 202.

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superannuated steed, though, even that limited conWdence deserted Dryden. But I shall end this section by considering the passage which must constitute the Wnal test of any translator’s response to the theme of ‘labor’ in the Georgics: the originary myth of work provided in Book I, sometimes referred to as Virgil’s ‘theodicy’. From the outset, Dryden is pessimistic. Virgil begins by saying ‘pater ipse colendi j haud facilem esse viam voluit’167 (‘Jupiter himself willed that the path of husbandry should not be smooth’), but Dryden ampliWes that into two couplets and its rhetoric of understatement (‘haud facilem’) into overt exigency: The Sire of Gods and Men, with hard Decrees, Forbids our Plenty to be bought with Ease; And wills that Mortal Men, inur’d to toil, Shou’d exercise, with pains, the grudging Soil:168

‘Inur’d to toil’, ‘exercise, with pains’, and ‘grudging Soil’ are all Dryden’s own work, toilsomely spinning out the implications of ‘haud facilem’. Moreover, they tip the balance towards meniality not only in semantic terms but also formally. For these phrases recur from the previous verse paragraph which oVered a more optimistic assessment of agricultural endeavour: Nor is the ProWt small, the Peasant makes; Who smooths with harrows, or who pounds with Rakes The crumbling Clods: Nor Ceres from on high Regards his Labours with a grudging Eye; Nor his, who plows across the furrow’d Grounds, And on the Back of Earth inXicts new Wounds: For he, with frequent Exercise, Commands Th’ unwilling Soil, and tames the stubborn Lands.169

Already there Dryden had relegated into the negative what was in Virgil an energetically positive aYrmation, signalled by the doubly intensive ‘Multum adeo’, whilst also characteristically escalating the violence of cultivation, at ‘on the Back of Earth inXicts new Wounds’ (the equivalent phrase in Virgil addresses the practicalities of ploughing and has no particular metaphoric resonance). Now he rakes over whatever frail shoots of optimism survived those wintry blasts by reworking 167 Georgics i. 121–2. 169 Ibid., ll. 137–44.

168 ‘The First Book of the Georgics’, ll. 183–6.


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‘Nor . . . j . . . with a grudging Eye’ as ‘the grudging Soil’ and ‘he, with frequent Exercise, Commands’ as ‘Mortal Men . . . j Shou’d exercise, with pains’. Once again, debate about the ethical status of ‘labor’ is dissolved into the minutiae of Dryden’s style, as competition between variation and repetition. But this time the former serves the latter: the new emphasis the varied phrasings work to underscore falls upon the menial—repetitive—aspects of labour. In Virgil the ‘theodicy’ ends with an epigrammatic formulation which ranks among his most celebrated and controverted remarks on the subject of work: ‘labour omnia vicit j improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas’.170 A modern editor postulates two possible translations, one extremely optimistic, the other extremely pessimistic: either ‘unXinching, or grim, labour overcame all diYculties’, or ‘insatiable toil occupied all areas of existence’.171 Dryden gives: ‘(What cannot endless Labour, urg’d by need?)’.172 A rhetorical question expecting the answer ‘everything’? At Wrst glance perhaps; but look again and darker tints come into focus, particularly surrounding the adjective ‘endless’. The word Dryden was translating is ‘improbus’, and debate raged in early-modern editions of Virgil over its meaning. The editor Dryden chieXy relied on, ‘Ruaeus’, records a slew of paraphrases suggested by his predecessors: ‘juxta Servium, magnus: juxta Pomponium, continuus: juxta Ascensium, modum nesciens, & quasi insatiabilis: juxta Ramirem, improbatus: juxta alios, incommodus, importunus, diYcilis’173 (i.e. ‘great’, ‘continuous’, ‘immoderate and (so to speak) insatiable’, ‘shameful’, and ‘inconvenient, importunate, diYcult’). Finally, he favoured Servius’s optimistic ‘magnus’, from which Dryden’s ‘endless’ too may derive, if we take it as an hyperbole, heroic diction for ‘long’. But ‘endless’ can be a pejorative too, may combine a number of the other editors’ pessimistic paraphrases. I have been documenting some senses in which labour in Dryden’s translation of the Georgics is pejoratively ‘endless’—incessant, unrelenting, and so potentially meaningless—senses compacted in a single summative line from what is supposedly the most optimistic book of the poem: ‘Thus in a Circle runs the Peasant’s Pain.’174 The particular form of ‘labor’ at issue in that line is viticulture, the branch of husbandry with which Dryden was aligning translation when he spoke of himself in the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’ as a labourer on 170 Georgics i. 145–6. 171 Georgics, ed. Thomas, ad loc. 172 ‘The First Book of the Georgics’, l. 218; Dryden uses the present tense (‘cannot’) because the text of Virgil he was translating from reads ‘vincit’ not ‘vicit’. 173 Virgilius Maronis Opera, sig. Niir . 174 ‘The Second Book of the Georgics’, l. 556.

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another man’s plantation, dressing a vineyard to produce wine which not he but the owner (the author of the original) will drink. Dryden boosted the association when translating the passage: Some Peasants, not t’omit the nicest Care, Of the same Soil their Nursery prepare, With that of their Plantation; lest the Tree, Translated, should not with the Soil agree.175

It was a signiWcant choice: viticulture is described by Virgil as the most labour-intensive branch of husbandry; he speciWcally counterpoints it against olive-growing, the task described immediately after it, for which only ‘small endeavours’ are needed and which is the province of the ‘happy man’ of ‘O fortunatos nimium’.176 Growing vines is all-year-round work: the soil of the vineyard must be dug over three or four times, in the winter as well as the spring, and no sooner has one year’s vintage been harvested than the husbandman must begin pruning his vines in preparation for the next. As we may by now expect, Dryden scales up this toilsomeness, foregrounding its slavish undertones: his favoured terms for the viticulturalist, severally denominated in Virgil ‘fossor’ (‘digger’), ‘agricola’ (‘farmer’), ‘rusticus’ (‘countryman’), and ‘vinitor’ (‘vine-dresser’), are ‘peasant’ and ‘hind’, and his references to labour, more frequent than Virgil’s, are regularly shifted over towards the servile pole of its spectrum of connotation by the addition of some cognate of ‘pain’. Thus, for instance, near the beginning of the episode, where Virgil speaks of the ‘stout delver who loosens and stirs the acres’ (‘labefacta movens robustus iugera fossor’),177 Dryden, cued perhaps by the etymological relation between ‘labefacta’ and ‘labor’, gives ‘the painful Toyl j Of delving Hinds’.178 All of which emphasis on laborious perpetuity culminates in Dryden’s rendering of the lines about timely pruning. Virgil expresses the injunction positively, using groups of intensive particles (‘ac iam’, ‘iam tum’: ‘But already’, ‘already then’) to convey the energetic preparedness of the ‘keen countryman’ (‘acer . . . rusticus’) who ‘extends his care to the coming year’ (‘curas venientem extendit in annum’).179 Dryden, though, puts it into the 175 ‘The Second Book of the Georgics’, ll. 358–61. 176 For the contrast between ‘the olive, which needs almost no human assistance, and the vine, which needs so much’, see further the headnote to ii. 420–57, in Georgics, ed. Mynors (at 156). 177 Georgics ii. 264. 178 ‘The Second Book of the Georgics’, ll. 356–7. 179 Georgics ii. 403–6.


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negative, construing it as a debilitating imposition, and he does so in verse which is itself (to borrow a favourite verb of his) ‘overlaboured’: E’en in the lowest Months, when Storms have shed From Vines the hairy Honours of their Head; Not then the drudging Hind his Labour ends: But to the coming Year his Care extends:180

That Wnal rhyme, extending ‘ends’ into ‘extends’, is exhaustedly mimetic; rhyme not as craftsmanship but as what Dryden was sometimes prepared to concur with Milton in calling it: ‘slavery’.181 ‘Endless labour urg’d by need’: the wording is obviously germane to the economic realities of Dryden’s situation as a translator. It is a ‘phrase which even as he hit upon its clinching felicity’, according to GeoVrey Hill, ‘must have struck home with infelicitous force of circumstance’.182 True; but what is especially felicitous about it, what makes its relation to Dryden’s infelicitous circumstances especially striking, is that it is not ‘clinching’. Dryden’s line enacts the endlessness it describes. Three times over in fact: grammatically (he has turned Virgil’s statement into a question), orthographically (he has put it into brackets), and syntactically (‘cannot’ looks like an auxiliary and so leaves us expecting a main verb which never arrives). Its triple unendingness contrasts sharply with the conclusive, axiomatic feel of Virgil’s formulation and, given the celebrity of that formulation and its inherent reXexiveness, this contrast acquires emblematic force as a reXection on the diVerence between original poetic work and the labour of translation. The translator reworks what his original author had apparently clinchingly laboured: Dryden turns Virgil’s ‘endless labours’—the (notionally) immortal products of his genius (‘labour’ could still mean ‘work’ in this sense in Restoration English)—into never-ending, repetitive process (no translation can hope to be conclusive: the reasons which make one necessary in the present will inevitably make others necessary in the future). The change might be regarded optimistically: ‘works’ which might otherwise become objectiWed the translator through his painful labour brings back to organic life. I shall take up this line of thought in connection with Dryden’s version of ‘Pygmalion and the Statue’ in Fables (1700) in the 180 ‘The Second Book of the Georgics’, ll. 558–61. 181 As, for instance, in the ‘Account’ of Annus Mirabilis where, comparing the ‘learned Languages’ (i.e. Latin and Greek) to English, he remarked that they ‘have, certainly, a great advantage of us, in not being tied to the slavery of any Rhyme’: CE i. 51. 182 Hill, The Enemy’s Country, 6.

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Wnal section of this chapter. But the generally pessimistic drift of Dryden’s Georgics leads to the opposite conclusion: the translator embodies the failure of ‘culture’ understood as the project to overcome the impermanence of the natural. He gives the lie to the distinction between labour and work ingrained in a number of languages and central to theorizing about the subject from Aristotle through Locke and Adam Smith to Marx, ‘between ponein and egazesthai’ in Greek, ‘between laborare and facere or fabricari’ in Latin, ‘between travailler and ouvrer’ in French, and ‘between arbeiten and werken’ in German: In all these cases, the equivalents for labor have an unequivocal connotation of bodily experiences, of toil and trouble . . . labor is an activity which corresponds to the biological processes of the body. . . By laboring, men produce the vital necessities that must be fed into the life process of the human body. And since this life process, though it leads us from birth to death in a rectilinear progress of decay, is in itself circular, the laboring activity itself must follow the cycle of life, the circular movement of our bodily functions, which means that the laboring activity never comes to an end as long as life lasts; it is endlessly repetitive.183

Labouring over the Georgics brought Dryden to know that to the poet’s work too there may be no end. THE EPI C O F L ABOUR ‘Labor’ is a central theme and value of the Aeneid. There are seventyfour uses of the noun in the poem; for comparison, among other qualities commonly regarded as deWnitive of Virgil’s epic, ‘gloria’ and its cognates occur twenty-four times, ‘virtus’ thirty-eight times, and even ‘pietas’ and ‘pius’ only Wfty-nine times.184 ‘Labor’ is prominent in programmatic passages, at the beginnings and ends of books and other narrative divisions, and particularly so in Book I, the Wrst of whose thirteen uses of the word announces that the subject of the epic will be the ‘labores’ of Aeneas. The prevalence of the term suggests that the ethic of the Aeneid is broadly continuous with that of the Georgics, and indeed a stripe of georgic simile in the epic identiWes Aeneas with 183 Hannah Arendt, ‘Labor, Work, Action’ (1964), in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (Harmondsworth, 2003), pp. 167–81 (at 170–1). 184 Susan Scheinberg Kristol, Labor and Fortuna in Virgil’s Aeneid (London and New York, 1990), p. 7.


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the husbandman struggling to fashion culture under adverse conditions. Plainly, however, signiWcant discriminations operate within that general continuity; epic decorum dictates that the semantic Weld of ‘labor’ cannot extend as far in the direction of meniality in the Aeneid as it does in the Georgics. In Virgil’s epic the main currents of the word’s meaning Xow together with its use in contemporary deWnitions of Romanitas;185 and under the terms of this ideology the willingness of the Romans to undertake ‘labor’ was what distinguished them from naturally slavish races. As Cicero put it in a representative passage from the Tenth Philippic, ‘All other nations can bear slavery, our state alone cannot’: they ‘shun labour and pain’ (‘laborem doloremque fugiunt’) ‘to be free of which they can put up with any state of aVairs, whereas we have been so trained and our minds so imbued with the examples of our ancestors that we refer all our thoughts and acts to the standard of dignity and virtue’ (‘dignitatem et . . . virtutem’).186 ‘Labor’ is self-denying eVort or endeavour performed in the service of a greater cause, typically ‘libertas’ or ‘patria’. This amalgam of Stoic fortitude and republican activism provides a general framework for interpreting usages of the noun in the Aeneid: the Trojans are specially associated with it, particularly in the senses relating to endurance in adversity, while other nations, notably the Carthaginians and the Italians, have little experience of it.187 As for Aeneas personally, applications of ‘labor’ to him, either in his own speeches or those of other characters in the epic, both human and divine, are of crucial importance in setting the frequently remarked Stoic tone of his heroism.188 But if the Aeneid is informed by this Roman understanding of ‘labor’, it also inspects that understanding. Virgil does not permit the glorious end of Aeneas’s ‘labores’ pre-emptively to obscure their painful laboriousness in and of themselves; he compacts ‘labor’ quite as insistently with ‘dolor’ (‘pain’) as with ‘opus’ (‘work’ of a creative or fulWlling quality) or ‘cura’ (‘public responsibility’).189 Then too, the higher purpose putatively served by the ‘labores’ of the Trojans is serially deferred and substantially elusive: they are in search of a new homeland, but what 185 Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture (Princeton, 1996), pp. 121–5. 186 Quoted in Kristol, Labor and Fortuna, 79. 187 Ibid., 118–37. 188 The classic account is C. M. Bowra, ‘Aeneas and the Stoic Ideal’, repr. in Philip Hardie (ed.), Virgil: Critical Assessments of Classical Authors, vol. iii: The Aeneid (1999), pp. 204–17. 189 On the relations between ‘labor’ and its variously aYrmative or pejorative quasisynonyms in the poem, see Kristol, Labor and Fortuna, 51–108.

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Wnding it will involve, where exactly it is located and how they are to possess themselves of it, are matters of which Aeneas remains crucially uncertain, not only in the Wrst ‘Odyssean’ half of the epic during which he is regularly misdirected by ambiguous portents and prophecies but also after the ghost of Anchises has shown him the apparently conclusive parade of Roman heroes at the end of Book VI. Even at the maximally Roman moment at the end of Book VIII when Aeneas shoulders the emblematic shield fashioned for him by Vulcan, thereby symbolically assuming his nation’s destiny,190 he remains ignorant (‘ignarus’) of the meaning of the prophetic designs in which that destiny is inscribed.191 These twin emphases on the experienced painfulness of Aeneas’s ‘labores’ and the persistent recessiveness of their larger purpose connect Virgil’s presentation of those labours with the ‘pessimistic’ extreme of his exploration of work in the Georgics. Indeed, it is tempting to suppose that Dryden had these aspects of the Aeneid somewhere in mind when he framed the epithet ‘endless labour’ in translating Virgil’s ‘theodicy’. Certainly, ‘Wnis’ and ‘labor’ are persistently collocated in the epic, as a sequence of possible endings for the suVerings of the Trojans prove illusory. Whilst the Aeneid ‘in contrast to the Iliad and the Odyssey has no role for a slave’,192 Aeneas may be said to ‘labour on another Man’s Plantation’, in Dryden’s phrase: destined to die before reaching Rome, he will not even (strictly speaking) reap the rewards of his endeavour and endurance through his descendants, since, under the terms of Jupiter’s concession to Juno at the end of the poem, the Trojans are to be subsumed into the Italian nation (‘commixti corpore tantum j subsident Teucri’),193 losing their particular identity and history. For all the Trojan blood shed to cultivate the soil of Italy, the ‘wine’, in the long run of history, will remain ‘the owner’s’. Translations of the Aeneid leading up to Dryden’s manifest considerable anxiety about the epic’s preoccupation with ‘labor’. How Aeneas’s heroic status was to be reconciled with the evident laboriousness of his predicament was a pressing question at a time when the Aeneid was the preserve of an aristocratic readership habituated to deWning itself 190 Philip Hardie, Vergil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford, 1986), pp. 336–76. 191 Aeneid viii. 730; the force of Aeneas’s ignorance is redoubled if we bear in mind the implied contrast with the previous ecphrasis, in Book I, where, scanning the images on the walls of Dido’s temple at Carthage, he had also evinced ‘wonder’ (‘miraturque’) but with full knowledge of the scenes depicted, those of the Trojans’ ‘labores’, in the sense not of their future glories but of their past suVerings. 192 Jenkyns, Virgil’s Experience, 16. 193 Aeneid xii. 835–6.


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through its ability to ‘live idly and without manuall labour’.194 John Ogilby made his translation against the background of a Civil War fought (in the opinion of royalist ideologues) against a rabble of upstart ‘mechanics’. Accordingly, he removed any trace of toil from the proem, opting for the conventionally heroic ‘dangers’ for ‘labores’, and in other consequential contexts oVered determinedly abstract and value-laden equivalents for the term: the advice Ogilby’s Aeneas gives Ascanius before setting oV for his Wnal battle with Turnus is ‘Valour, true Honour [‘‘verumque laborem’’], learn (my Boy) from me, j Fortune from others’,195 where the reward for unXinching endurance substitutes for the business of enduring in a turn of phrase calculated to encourage royalist readers labouring abroad or at home in the unfortunate circumstances of the Interregnum.196 However, the anxieties Ogilby suppressed burst out into the open in an alternative mode of Virgilian reception which Xourished throughout the early decades of Dryden’s career: travesty.197 In Charles Cotton’s Scarronides (Book I, 1664; Book IV, 1665–6) and its followers such as John Phillips’s Maronides and Maurice Atkins’s Cataplus; Or, Aeneas his Descent into Hell (both 1672), the august Roman veneer of the term is stripped away, uncovering ‘irksome toil’ beneath decorous epic labour (to invoke the contrast deployed by Adam in his debate with Eve in the ‘separation scene’ of Paradise Lost).198 Instead of struggling to dissociate Aeneas from his ‘labour-sweating Seamen’,199 Cotton and his followers (ironically) celebrate Virgil’s hero for working as hard as the lesser Trojans: when Palinurus is drowned at the end of Book V, for instance, Phillips’s Aeneas immediately recognizes ‘’Twas time . . . for him to work, j The which he did like any Turk; j And streight though night, and hard put to’t’,200 and Atkins’s Aeneas likewise mucks in uncomplainingly with his men when Misenus needs burying early in Book VI, ‘Nor was [he] idle seen j But labour’d with tool sharp and keen’.201 Most suggestive of all, 194 Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), p. 72; quoted in Thomas Rutter, ‘Fit Hamlet, Fat Hamlet, and the Problems of Aristocratic Labour’, Cahiers Elizabethains, 68 (2005), 27–33 (at 30). 195 The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (1654), sig. 4B3r . 196 For the centrality of ‘honour’ to the codes of royalist identity, see J. G. Marston, ‘Gentry Honour and Royalism in Early Stuart England’, Journal of British Studies, 13 (1973), 22–43. 197 On the popularity of such travesties, and the cultural causes of that popularity, see most recently Tanya Caldwell, ‘Restoration Parodies of Virgil and English Literary Values’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 69 (2006), 383–401. 198 Paradise Lost ix. 235–43. 199 Cataplus, p. 3. 200 Maronides, p. 24. 201 Cataplus, 27.

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engaging real questions surrounding Aeneas’s heroic agency given his submissive relation to the gods, is Cotton’s rendering of the crucial programmatic sequence in the proem, ‘quidve . . . regina deum . . . j insignem pietate virum, tot adire labores j impulerit’: ‘What . . . did Juno mean j To use an Honest Fellow thus? j (To curry him like Pelts at Tanners) j Have Goddesses no better Manners?’202 To read the proem of Dryden’s ‘Aeneis’ is to register the special interest in ‘labor’ which his conviction of the primacy of the Georgics in the Virgilian canon should lead us to expect, and also an attunement to pessimistic undertones in the theme consonant with that which I documented in the last section in his rendering of the Georgics. He introduces the word as early as line four, preferring to recast Virgil’s participial phrase describing Aeneas as ‘multum . . . et terris iactatus et alto’ (‘much buVeted on land and at sea’) into the epithet ‘Long labours’203 rather than wait another half a dozen lines for the inaugural reference to Aeneas’s ‘tot . . . labores’. Rendering the latter, Dryden draws out its several possible signiWcations in a sequence of clauses: ‘Involv’d his anxious Life in endless Cares, j Expos’d to Wants, and hurry’d into Wars’.204 Finally, he adds the word ‘labour’ once again when expanding the formulation with which Virgil brings the proem to a close, ‘tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem’ (‘so huge was the struggle to build the Roman nation’), into the couplet ‘Such Time, such Toil requir’d the Roman Name, j Such length of Labour for so vast a Frame’.205 A common drift underlies these examples of intensiWed attention: Dryden insists on the material dimensions of Aeneas’s ‘labor’ rather than abstracting or conceptualizing it into conformity with an epic code of value. ‘Long labours’ instigates the tendency, emphasizing quantity over quality (‘great’ would have been quite possible for ‘multum’), an emphasis whose signiWcance is redoubled when we remember that Dryden has borrowed the epithet from The Faerie Queene, a poem commonly regarded by late seventeenth-century commentators as failing to achieve the purposive unity proper to epic because of the meandering shapelessness of the travails of its heroes. Time is further accented in Dryden’s treatment of ‘tot . . . labores’, in particular through the strikingly un-elevated ‘hurry’d into’, while ‘Expos’d to Wants’ consolidates the tendency of de-idealization, 202 Scarronides, p. 3. 203 Aeneid i. 3/‘The First Book of the Aeneis’, l. 4. 204 ‘The First Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 15–16. 205 Aeneid i. 33/‘The First Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 48–9.


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stretching the norms of epic diction to encompass the material facts of Aeneas’s predicament. But it is the last case that best illustrates the total eVect of Dryden’s approach. Not only does he triplicate ‘tantae molis’ into ‘Such Time’, ‘such Toil’, and ‘Such length of Labour’, each of which construes the epithet materially rather than morally, he further arranges a provocative contrast between those concrete turns of phrase and the signally abstracted rendering he goes on to provide of ‘Romanam . . . gentem’: not ‘the Roman nation’ or ‘the Roman race’ but ‘the Roman Name’.206 How, the contrast brings us to ask, should the irreducibly physical suVerings of Aeneas’s ‘labor’ be measured against their glorious but intangible ‘end’? As with the Georgics, so in the case of the Aeneid, Dryden’s selfunderstanding as labouring translator appears to have played a particular role in sensitizing him to these pessimistic undertones in the Virgilian ethic of ‘labor’. Witness the remarkable passage in the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’ where he aligns his work of translating Virgil with Aeneas’s most powerfully emblematic labour: the moment at the end of Book II where he raises his father, Anchises, on to his shoulders and carries him out of the burning wreck of Troy. Dryden is measuring his performance as a translator of Virgil’s epic against those of his predecessors: ‘Some of our Country-men have translated Episodes and other parts of Virgil, with great Success’; however, ‘’tis one thing to take pains on a Fragment, and Translate it perfectly; and another thing to have the weight of a whole Author on my shoulders’.207 This has generally been taken to imply that Dryden’s reverence for Virgil is akin to that which Aeneas displays towards his father. But the particular nub of the comparison is not ‘pietas’ but ‘labor’. As if in response to a feature of the term repeatedly activated in the Aeneid, ‘its ability to convey both active and passive meanings’,208 Dryden contrasts the active craftsmanship of those translators who ‘take pains’ over an episode of the epic (‘labor’ as ‘opus’) with his own passively pained labouring beneath ‘the weight of a whole author’ (‘labor’ as ‘dolor’). The contrast is further enhanced by 206 Hammond’s comment is exemplary: ‘syntactically ‘‘so vast a Frame’’ appears to refer back to ‘‘Name’’, seeing the name itself, the reputation, as a construction, and so focusing not on the physical but on the conceptual structure of ‘‘Rome’’ ’; in Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 241. 207 CE v. 325–6. 208 Kristol, Labor and Fortuna, 22; she goes on to oVer ‘pain’ as one instance of an English noun which can convey ‘both the active and the passive sense of labor’: ‘an individual can ‘‘take pains’’ or ‘‘have something to show for his pains’’ (active), or he can ‘‘feel pain’’ (passive)’.

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Aeneas carrying Anchises out of Troy, from Dryden, Works of Virgil (1697)


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Dryden’s use of ‘have’ to govern that last phrase rather than more volitional alternatives like ‘take up’ or ‘lift’, and also by the sudden jolt from abstraction to concrete particularity at ‘my shoulders’ (after ‘one thing’, ‘a fragment’, ‘another thing’, and ‘a whole Author’, we expect an indeWnite pronoun). All this Xies in the face of the orthodox outlook on what was for seventeenth-century readers the quintessential tableau of Virgilian heroism. The image of Aeneas carrying his father on his shoulders had broad currency within emblem books and allegorizations of the Aeneid as a compendium of proto-Christian ethics, and authors who interpreted the scene along these lines eVaced the thought of Anchises’s bodily weight. Even the minority who retained Virgil’s word ‘onus’ took care to append suitably abstracting adjectives: the legend in Alciati’s massively inXuential Emblemata, for instance, has Aeneas bearing the ‘dulce parentis onus’ (‘the sweet burden of his father’).209 Yet Dryden was not misrepresenting Virgil; on the contrary, he was demonstrating a brilliant inwardness with the original episode. What Aeneas says immediately before taking his father on to his shoulders is ‘ergo age, care pater, cervici imponere nostrae; j ipse subibo umeris, nec me labor iste gravabit’, and the words Virgil collocates with ‘labor’ in those two lines, ‘imponere’, ‘subibo’, and ‘gravabit’, combine to confer upon it a strongly concrete sense.210 Dryden may have been alerted to this by the prose ‘interpretatio’ in his edition of Virgil where ‘nec me labor iste gravabit’ is paraphrased as ‘nec istud pondus me premet’ (‘nor will that weight crush me’).211 Nevertheless, the potential ramiWcations of his insight appear to have daunted him. For his actual version of the key lines beats a fascinating half-retreat from it: Haste, my dear Father, (’tis no time to wait,) And load my Shoulders with a willing Fraight.212

That Dryden did not risk ‘weight’ for ‘labor’ outright was no doubt in consideration of epic decorum, but the word remains within earshot, summoned by the rhyme of its homophone ‘wait’ with its quasi-synonym ‘Fraight’. But most interesting is ‘willing’. Without a direct equivalent in 209 Quoted in James D. Garrison, Pietas from Vergil to Dryden (University Park, PA, 1992), p. 51. 210 Aeneid ii. 707–8; Kristol, Labor and Fortuna, 27 cites the passage as the one clear case of Virgil activating the putative root sense of ‘labor’ as ‘physical load’ advocated by some philologists. 211 Virgilius Maronis Opera, sig. R2r . 212 ‘The Second Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 962–3.

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the original, it is most readily understood as a translation of the intensive pronoun ‘ipse’ in Aeneas’s ‘ipse subibo umeris’, reading that intensive as a reaYrmation of Aeneas’s autonomy. Yet if Dryden was intent on shoring up Aeneas’s heroism against the servile potentialities of his physical posture, he has somewhat botched the eVect, there being a certain irony in using the adjective ‘willing’ as a transferred epithet to insist that the hero’s will has not been transferred away from his control. Nor is it beyond the bounds of possibility that a reader might take ‘willing’ to refer not only notionally but actually to Anchises. The immediately preceding section of the episode has, after all, been concerned with Anchises’s unwillingness to leave Troy, an unwillingness abandoned only three lines earlier when, observing the tongue of Xame that descended upon the head of Ascanius, he told Aeneas ‘nec, nate, tibi comes ire recuso’ (‘I do not refuse, my son, to accompany you’).213 The mixed signals given oV by that pivotal instance are indicative of the general tenor of Dryden’s response in the ‘Aeneis’ to the idea of Virgil’s hero as labouring. He occasionally hints at a baldly material analysis, but its general consequences are not fully elaborated; rather, heterodox intimations of Aeneas’s passivity or subjection are oVset, if not countermanded, by recurrences of the more orthodox styles of moral exegesis. The situation could hardly have been otherwise, given the dominance of those Stoico-Christian orthodoxies within the tradition of Virgilian commentary which substantially formed Dryden’s approach to the Aeneid. For every case where Dryden equates ‘labor’ with ‘pondus’, sheer bodily oppressedness, there are several where, following the more usual preference of his editor ‘Ruaeus’ for terms like ‘conatus’ (‘attempt’), ‘diYcultas’, or ‘cura’ (‘responsibility’), he aligns it with tokens or concomitants of heroic value such as ‘endeavour’, ‘Danger’ or ‘alarms’.214 If we want to pursue further Dryden’s alertness to subversive undercurrents in the ethos of ‘labor’ within the Aeneid, and in particular the relation of that alertness to his self-understanding as a labouring translator, we must look beyond situations where the quality of Aeneas’s heroism is overtly at issue. Neoclassical commentators had attacked Virgil for emasculating his hero, making him lachrymose and submissive, charges which Dryden devotes considerable space in the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’ to refuting; had he himself dwelt more explicitly on the servile undertones of Aeneas’s ‘labores’ he 213 Aeneid ii. 704. 214 ‘The Second Book of the Aeneis’, l. 518 (‘endeavour’); ‘The Sixth Book of the Aeneis’, l. 156 (‘danger’); ‘The Ninth Book of the Aeneis’, l. 261 (‘alarms’).


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would have risked opening a new front in this critical war on his poetic master. Dryden’s exploration of a sceptical perspective on ‘labor’ within the ‘Aeneis’ therefore takes place more obliquely, is deXected into areas of Virgil’s epic less subject (then as now) to close critical surveillance: the nebulous regions inhabited by the chthonic powers who have been compelled into the service of the Olympian gods and in particular the subterranean prisons of the epic’s cosmic underclass, the giants. By way of introduction to this economy of deXection, consider Dryden’s handling of the episode which features perhaps the single most celebrated locution about ‘labor’ in Virgil’s epic: Aeneas’s encounter with the Sibyl at the beginning of Book VI. Cognates of ‘labor’ recur dynamically over the course of this scene, which brings to a form of crisis the questions about activity and passivity, endeavour and aZiction, ends and endlessness, diVusely aired around the word over the Wrst half of the epic. At the heart of the exchange is Aeneas’s description of himself as prepared for any eventuality however laborious: ‘non ulla laborum, j o virgo, nova mi facies inopinave surgit; j omnia precepi atque animo mecum ante peregi’ (‘no form of labour comes upon me, O Sibyl, as strange or unanticipated; I have already foreseen and inwardly taken thought for every possibility’).215 As has long been recognized, ‘this is Stoic language’.216 But for some modern commentators the remark savours of overconWdence, a narrowly ‘optimistic’ estimation of ‘labor’ as always superable given suYcient persistence or patience.217 When the Sibyl picks up on the word in her reply, admonishing Aeneas that while descending into the underworld may be easy, reascending thereafter to the land of the living, ‘hoc opus, hic labor est’, her famous formulation constitutes, it has been suggested, a retort upon the hero’s Stoic complacency, meaning ‘not merely a task . . . but a labor surpassing his expectations’;218 in fact, as she describes it moments later, ‘insano . . . labore’, ‘a mad undertaking’.219 Translators before Dryden recognized the Stoic nature of Aeneas’s self-presentation in the episode: Ogilby, for instance, recorded in a marginal note that ‘some interpreters will have the Poet mean this in relation to the Stoics’,220 while John Boys invoked the noun made central to the lexis of early-modern Stoicism by Lipsius’s 215 Aeneid vi. 103–5. 216 Aeneidos Liber Sextus, ed. R. G. Austin, ad loc. (p. 74); Bowra, ‘Aeneas and the Stoic Ideal’, in Hardie (ed.), Virgil: Critical Assessments, iii. 210. 217 Kristol, Labor and Fortuna, 57. 218 Aeneid vi. 129; Kristol, Labor and Fortuna, 57. 219 Aeneid vi. 135. 220 Virgil’s Aeneids, sig. 2V2r .


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De Constantia: ‘No dangers unto mee j Are strange, or, Virgin, shake my Constancie j ’Gainst worst of accidents I am prepar’d.’221 Neither, though, drew out the contrast between Aeneas’s understanding of ‘labor’ and the Sibyl’s; indeed, Ogilby’s euphemistic rendering of ‘insano . . . labore’ as ‘unpleasing labours’ reaYrms the gentrifying outlook the original epithet may be taken to revise. On the evidence of his handling of the Sibyl’s particular phrases involving ‘labor’, Dryden does only slightly better: ‘In this the Task, and mighty Labour lies’ orchestrates ‘hoc opus, hic labor est’ as an heroic crescendo rather than a georgic reduplication, and even ‘so hard a Toil’, whilst it is altogether more candid than Ogilby, scarcely exhausts the corrective potential of ‘insano’.222 Taken as a whole, though, Dryden’s version of the scene does communicate something of the quasi-satiric energy modern readers have found in it. His Aeneas is quite the Stoic: no Terror to my view, No frightful Face of Danger can be new. Inur’d to suVer, and resolv’d to dare, The Fates, without my Pow’r, shall be without my Care.223

Dryden was perhaps trying to redress any overconWdence in Aeneas’s words with that Wnal line, an addition which substitutes for Aeneas’s vaunts of prescience a deterministic awareness that his fate is ultimately beyond his control. But the passage has a formulaic quality: it seems at best to be going through the Stoic motions, and may even imply Aeneas’s orthodoxy is jejune. The penultimate line sounds prim when set against the bitterly experienced variation on it Dryden produced when rendering Aeneas’s Wnal advice to his son, Ascanius, to learn from him ‘verum laborem’: ‘In Camps to suVer, and in Fields to dare’,224 while in the Wnal line Aeneas clinches his putative triumph (in a swelling alexandrine) with a turn on words (‘without’ as ‘beyond’ and as ‘lacking’) of which it might be said (as Dryden did in the preface to Sylvae when recanting a pun in ‘The entire episode of Mezentius and Lausus’) that ‘Virgil wou’d not have said it, though Ovid wou’d’.225 Contrast Dryden’s powerfully engaged description a few lines

221 222 223 224 225

Aeneas his Descent into Hell (1662), sig. B3r . ‘The Sixth Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 195, 204. Ibid., ll. 155–8. ‘The Twelfth Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 645. CE iii. 9.


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earlier of the Sibyl’s ‘labor’ of prophecy. Already in the original the keynote of this passage is extreme involuntariness; amalgamating georgic ‘imagery from horse-breaking’ with tropes suggestive of ‘sexual assault’,226 Virgil presents the Sibyl as a disturbingly unwilling medium for the divine purposes she is coerced into foretelling. But Dryden considerably accentuates her subjugation: Strugling in vain, impatient of her Load, And lab’ring underneath the pond’rous God, The more she strove to shake him from her Breast, With more, and far superior Force he press’d: Commands his Entrance, and without Controul, Usurps her Organs, and inspires her Soul.227

‘Lab’ring’ is Dryden’s addition, and the insistently material construction put upon the Sibyl’s labour by ‘Load’, ‘pond’rous’, and ‘underneath’ shows her operating as an alternative focus for the subversive intuitions about the ethic of ‘labor’ which Dryden had tentatively explored in connection with Aeneas’s shouldering of Anchises. Here again, Dryden’s deepened attention to labour as servitude accompanies perceptible self-identiWcation on his part. Virgil’s application of the word ‘vates’ (‘prophet j poet’) to the Sibyl made her a natural ‘surrogate for the author’;228 but it appears Dryden associated her not just with the inspired poet in general but with the instrumental Wgure of the translator in particular. The Earl of Roscommon had invoked this Virgilian passage in his Essay on Translated Verse (1684) when warning prospective translators against becoming altogether enthralled to their original authors, and residues of his version of the scene cross-fertilize Dryden’s translation of it.229 When, in that astringently sceptical last line, Dryden jammed ‘Usurps her Organs’ up against ‘inspires her Soul’, he had somewhere in mind his own subservience as a translator. 226 Aeneidos Liber Sextus, ed. Austin, headnote to ll. 77–97 (p. 66); Don Fowler, ‘Masculinity under Threat? The Poetics and Politics of Inspiration in Latin Poetry’, in Cultivating the Muse, ed. Efrossini Spentzou (Oxford, 2002), pp. 141–59 (at 149), commenting on vi. 77–80. 227 ‘The Sixth Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 120–5. 228 Fowler, ‘Masculinity under Threat?’, in Cultivating the Muse, ed. Spentzou, 149. 229 Dryden’s ‘convulsive Rage possess’d j Her trembling Limbs’ may arise out of Roscommon’s ‘Beware what Spirit rages in your breast. j For ten inspir’d ten thousand are Possest’, and his reference to how ‘Her staring Eyes with sparkling Fury rowl’ out of Roscommon’s mention of her ‘Rowling Eyes’ (Virgil describes her hair, breast and voice but not her eyes): ‘The Sixth Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 74–5, 78; Wentworth Dillon, Fourth Earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse (1684), ll. 298–9, 292; in Augustan Critical Writing, ed. David Womersley (Harmondsworth, 1997).

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Of course, the Sibyl has to be forced to serve the Olympian gods; she bridles at being broken in. ‘Impatient of her Load’, she is a natural avatar for whatever impatience Dryden felt as he ‘labour’d under such discouragements’, ‘strugling with Wants, oppress’d with sickness, curb’d in my Genius’.230 The point might be put narrowly, on the basis of ‘usurps’ in particular: the ‘God’ whom Virgil’s prophetess is ‘strugling’ to ‘shake’ ‘from her breast’ may in part be the god of Whig propaganda whose ‘Protestant wind’ blew William of Orange safely over to England to usurp (as Dryden and other Jacobites saw it) James II. But larger and knottier imaginative aYliations are also at stake. Out of the Sibyl’s cave chaotic impulses well up in Dryden which shake the foundations of his commitment to Virgil as a poet of order. That commitment had been lifelong: Virgilian echo and allusion informed Dryden’s Laureate attacks on the self-indulgent libertarianism of the Exclusionist Whigs, and Virgil provided the prime model in his critical writings for self-denial in twinned aesthetic and ethical senses: ‘cutting back the potential excesses of individual emotion’.231 But an undertow of resistance to such ‘retrenchment’ (in Dryden’s georgic term)232 had increasingly made itself felt in Dryden’s Virgilianism in recent years: as, for instance, when (as we saw earlier) he thrilled to the savage vigour of the selfdestructive young heroes in ‘The entire episode of Nisus and Euryalus’. Now through the Sibyl these atavistic energies are released into the open. Exacerbating her impotence, Dryden’s voice becomes potently enraged, according to a process we have already seen at work in the episode of the decrepit warhorse in ‘The Third Book of the Georgics’ and which recurs wherever abasement or passivity is at issue in the ‘Aeneis’. Most strikingly, and with the most far-reaching implications for understanding the place of Dryden’s Virgil in his life as a poet, in connection with the giants. THE GIANT RACE In ‘Dryden’, one of his posthumously published ‘Sketches of English Poets in Rhymes’, Hartley Coleridge attributes to the poet ‘a mind of 230 ‘Postscript’ to The Works of Virgil; CE vi. 807. 231 Burrow, ‘Virgil in English Translation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Martindale, 28. 232 In the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’, Dryden speaks of ‘the sober retrenchments of [Virgil’s] Sense’; CE v. 326.


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giant mould’, before expanding on the suggestion with particular reference to Dryden’s circumstances after 1688: His life was long, and when his head was grey, His fortune broken, and usurp’d his bay, His dauntless genius own’d no cold dismay; Nor in repining notes of vain regret He made his crack’d pipe pitifully fret, But when cashier’d and laid upon the shelf, To shame the court excell’d his former self, Who meant to clip, but imp’d his moulted wings, And cured him of his ancient itch of praising kings. He sat gigantic on the shore of time, And watch’d the ingress of encroaching slime, Nor dream’d how much of evil or of good Might work amid the far unfathom’d Xood.233

This is a powerful eVort of mythopoesis, but very much of its age: sympathizing with giants recognizably forms part of the larger Romantic taste for rebels and outcasts; other expressions of what might be termed ‘gigantophilia’ among the Romantics include Keats’s description of the titans in Hyperion as ‘pent in regions of laborious breath; jj Without a motion, save of their big hearts j Heaving in pain’,234 and, of course, Frankenstein, which Mary Shelley once described in a letter to Leigh Hunt as ‘a book in defence of Polypheme’.235 Dryden, we may suppose, would have thought diVerently. Giants had rather lower standing—as it were—in early-modern literary culture. The traditional interpretation of their assault on Olympus as a type of Satan’s rebellion against God had been underscored by Milton’s use of gigantomachic language in the War in Heaven episode of Paradise Lost; and they were demonized in secular contexts too: Cowley, for instance, chose them to crown his list of the forces of superstition—‘Gods, Devils, Nymphs, Witches, and Giants Race’—which the new rationalist Spirit of the Age, as particularly manifested in Davenant’s Gondibert (1651), would 233 ‘Dryden’, 1, 24–36, in Poems (1851): this suggestive poem seems not to be known to Dryden scholars; it was not included in Dryden: The Critical Heritage, ed. James and Helen Kinsley, and I have never seen it quoted or discussed in modern Dryden scholarship: I owe a gigantic debt of gratitude to my colleague Dr Peter Swaab for drawing it to my attention. 234 Hyperion, ii. 20–7, in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (Harlow, 1970); this paragraph and the next three recast material from ‘Dryden and Virgil, Translation and ‘‘the Gyant Race’’ ’. 235 Quoted in Timothy Webb, ‘Shelley and the Cyclops’, Keats–Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 23 (1972), 31–7 (at 34); this article also records other instances of gigantophilia in the writings of the Byron–Shelley circle.

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shortly consign to oblivion.236 Dryden himself had made considerable political capital, during his career as Poet Laureate, out of the established view of the giants as Wgures of atavistic violence and anarchic disaVection; most notably in Astraea Redux (1660) where he aligned those who rose up against Charles I in the Civil War with ‘the bold Typhoeus’ who ‘scal’d the Sky, j And forc’d great Jove from his own Heaven to Xy’ and also with ‘the Cyclops’ who, ‘Blind . . . and . . . wild’, ‘own’d a lawless salvage Libertie’.237 But references to the giants in Dryden’s later writings betoken a diVerent attitude. In particular, there is the famous opening of ‘To My Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’ where Dryden looks back to the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists as ‘the Gyant Race, before the Flood’ (that is, the Civil War) and laments that, when the proXigate imaginative energy of their ‘boistrous English Wit’ was ‘Tam’d . . . to manners’ by the classicizing and Francophiliac tendencies Charles II introduced into English culture at the Restoration, ‘what we gain’d in skill we lost in strength’.238 Hartley Coleridge’s poem, an account of literary-historical transition incorporating gigantic and diluvian motifs, appears to stem from memories of that passage. But whereas he sees Dryden as a giant whose dominion is being inundated by the ‘Xood’ of Williamite ‘slime’, Dryden himself was regretting his involvement, as one of the principal arbiters of late seventeenth-century literary taste, in defeating the primal strength of his literary forebears. In ‘To My Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’ Dryden wishes he were gigantic; it is in the ‘Aeneis’ that he becomes so. On the face of it, this may seem a surprising claim. Dryden’s treatment of the cosmological aspects of the Aeneid has received scant critical attention, certainly by comparison with his response to its political dimensions, but what little comment has been passed on his handling of the chthonic or gigantic powers in the Virgilian cosmos has made it seem as if Dryden retained the view of those powers he had expressed in his Stuart panegyrics. Thus, for instance, his version of the moment when Triton calms ‘the Gigantomachic storm’239 sent against Aeneas’s 236 ‘To Sir William Davenant, Upon his two Wrst Books of Gondibert, Wnished before his voyage to America’ l. 3; in Gondibert, ed. David F. Gladish (Oxford, 1971). 237 Astraea Redux, ll. 37–8, 45–6. 238 ‘To My Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’, ll. 5, 9, 10, 12; for the central importance of this poem, and especially its negotiations between ‘smoothness’ and ‘strength’, to Dryden’s creative personality, see Eric GriYths, ‘Dryden’s Past’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1994), 113–49 (at 113–17). 239 For the gigantomachic resonances of the storm in Virgil, see Hardie, Cosmos and Imperium, 90–7.


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Xeet by Juno in Book I has been described by one modern commentator as an ‘almost Hobbesian . . . celebration of order, the order of monarchy’.240 But this is a rather special case: Virgil explicitly compares the winds of the storm to a plebeian mob, and only the most wild-eyed radical would have put a positive construction on that comparison. Moreover, outside the immediate vicinity of Virgil’s political metaphor, Dryden manifests some sympathy with the gigantic winds, entering into their delight at being released, for instance, with a pair of playful, Arielish verbs—‘The raging Wings rush through the hollow Wound, j And dance aloft in Air, and skim along the Ground’—in contravention of Virgil’s militaristic emphasis: ‘venti, velut agmine facto, j qua data porta, ruunt et terras turbine perXant’ (‘the winds rush out through the gap like an army drawn up for battle, and rage over the world in stormblasts’).241 The gigantophile tendency faintly in evidence there is more strongly apparent when Dryden is dealing with cases of gigantic activity for which Virgil does not explicitly stipulate a political interpretation. A remarkable example concerns Typhoeus. No giant’s name had been more thoroughly blackened in Renaissance mythography: George Sandys was only repeating what was commonly said elsewhere when he anatomized Typhoeus with grim relish in the notes to his version of the Metamorphoses (1632) as the archetype of rebellious ambition, ‘having a hundred heads in regard of his divided forces; Wery mouthes, of his inXamed intents; a girdle of serpents for his pestilent malice, and seiges; iron hands, best suting with slaughter, Eagles talons, with rapin; and a body covered with feathers, in regard of perpetuall rumours, secret intelligences, fears and suspitions’.242 That Dryden selected him out of all the giants to represent the roundheads in Astraea Redux was inevitable. Yet, to Virgil’s passing mention of Typhoeus in Book IX of the Aeneid, in connection with the collapse of a rock-tower near Arima, the earthquake-prone region where he was traditionally held to have been imprisoned, Dryden responded with an extraordinary eVusion of sentiment. What Virgil wrote was ‘durumque cubile j inarime Iovis armipotens imposta Typhoeo’ (‘Jove laid Arima over Typhoeus—a hard 240 T. W. Harrison, ‘Dryden’s Aeneid’, in Dryden’s Mind and Art, ed. Bruce King (Edinburgh, 1969), pp. 143–67 (at 167). 241 ‘The First Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 122–3/Aeneid i. 82–3. 242 George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphoses Englished (New York, 1976), pp. 190–1; Milton used Typhoeus as a mythological double for Satan both in his early allegory of the Gunpowder Plot, ‘In Quintum Novembris’, and in Paradise Lost.

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bed’),243 where ‘durumque cubile’ perhaps Xickers with fellow-feeling. Given that inch, Dryden took this mile: Typhoeus thrown beneath, by Jove’s Command, Astonish’d at the Flaw, that shakes the Land, Soon shifts his weary Side, and scarce awake, With Wonder feels the weight press lighter on his Back.244

Dryden gives Typhoeus a breather from his eternity of suVocating oppression: by raising him from grammatical subordination in the ablative absolute ‘imposta Typhoeo’ to the head of the sentence, and particularly by ‘focalizing’ the lines through his point of view.245 The giant’s relief at suddenly being able to uncoil his cramped limbs, thanks to the shifting of the land mass above him, sounds in the stretch of halfrhymes and alliterations ‘awake, j . . . Wonder . . . weight . . . lighter’ which revel in the room for manoeuvre they Wnd within their limited acoustic space; and then too in the passage’s ending on an alexandrine, the syllabic equivalent of an increase in leg-room. (Preferring the decasyllabic couplet over the octosyllabic for translating Juvenal, Dryden had given as his reason that ‘this sort of Number is more Roomy. The Thought can turn it self with greater ease, in a larger compass.’)246 But it is in ‘The Eighth Book of the Aeneis’ that Dryden’s selfidentiWcation with the giants comes to a head, and intersects most consequentially with his thinking about ‘labor’ in Virgil’s epic and his own labour of translating it. Unsurprisingly so, since Book VIII of the Aeneid is where giants feature most prominently and in most suggestive relation to the larger symbology of the poem. It contains the moment when Aeneas’s Atlantean heredity is revealed,247 as well as two sustained and interrelated episodes of gigantism: the story of Hercules’s conquest of the giant Cacus, and the scene in which Vulcan commissions the Cyclopes to smelt a shield for Aeneas. Together, these episodes extend and sharpen the cosmological axis of the epic’s political ideology, ‘Virgil’s recurrent use of Gigantomachic allusion to align the history of Rome and her ancestors with a cosmic conXict between the 243 Aeneid ix. 715–16. 244 ‘The Ninth Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 969–72. 245 Coined by the French narratologist Gerard Genette (see Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane Lewin (Ithaca, NY, 1980), pp. 189–94), this term is increasingly current in accounts of the multifariousness of narrative sympathies in Virgil’s epic; see in particular D. P. Fowler, ‘Deviant focalisation in Virgil’s Aeneid ’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 36 (1990), 42–63. 246 ‘Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’; CE iv. 82. 247 Aeneid viii. 127–42/‘The Eighth Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 169–86.


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forces of chaos and Olympian order’.248 But Virgil nowhere makes this explicit; only recently has research among the recondite sources of the episodes, conducted in particular by Philip Hardie,249 enabled modern commentators to understand their bearing upon the main action of the epic. The oblique nature of that bearing was a boon for Dryden; it allowed him room for imaginative manoeuvre. In the caves of Cacus and the Cyclopes, prototypical habitats of the poetic unconscious, Dryden could indulge to their chaotic full his gigantic predispositions. That he saw the two episodes as a diptych about ‘labor’ is apparent from the outset. When Virgil’s Evander tells Aeneas the Arcadians are propitiating Hercules because he ‘rescued us from dangers’ (‘periclis j servati’), Dryden’s adds ‘The Labours of a God we recompence.’250 Succeeding lines consolidate this emphasis, as when Dryden’s Evander says, ‘Time, long expected, eas’d us of our Load: j And brought the needful presence of a God’,251 investing Hercules’s conquest of Cacus with Atlantean resonance. One of Hercules’s original seven labours involved temporarily relieving Atlas of his cosmic load; now, in confronting Cacus, he shoulders the monstrous burden of the Arcadians who share Aeneas’s Atlantean descent. Dryden perhaps recalled Ovid’s connection of these two Herculean myths in Book I of the Fasti. At any rate, the cumulative eVect of his alterations is to pair Aeneas and Hercules as heroes labouring to free the destined locus of Roman civilization from anarchic forces (Turnus and Cacus).252 Which makes it all the more remarkable that, later in the speech, as Evander describes the actual moment of Cacus’s defeat, Dryden should suddenly, and with little to no prompting from Virgil, swerve the sympathies of the narrative over to the side of the giant: The Heroe stood Averse, with planted Feet, and from the right, Tugg’d at the solid Stone with all his might. Thus heav’d, the Wx’d Foundations of the Rock Gave way: Heav’n echo’d at the ratling Shock. Tumbling it choak’d the Flood: On either side The Banks leap backward; and the Streams divide. The Sky shrunk upward with unusual Dread: 248 249 250 251 252

Hardie, Cosmos and Imperium, 94. Ibid., 105–10 (Cyclopes), 110–18, 213–19 (Hercules and Cacus). Aeneid viii. 188–9/‘The Eighth Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 251. ‘The Eighth Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 264–5. G. Karl Galinsky, The Herakles Theme (Oxford, 1972), p. 133.

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Translation and the Poet’s Life And trembling Tyber div’d beneath his Bed. The Court of Cacus stands reveal’d to sight; The Cavern glares with new admitted Light. So the pent Vapours with a rumbling Sound Heave from below; and rend the hollow Ground: A sounding Flaw succeeds; And from on high, The Gods, with Hate beheld the neather Sky: The Ghosts repine at violated Night; And curse th’ invading Sun; and sicken at the sight.253

That last couplet crosses more fully and feelingly to the view from inside Cacus’s cave than do the corresponding four words in the original, elaborating an image of Hercules as the aggressor which no modern editor Wnds so much as intimated in Virgil: ‘repine’, ‘curse’, and ‘sicken at the sight’ all stem from ‘trepident’ (‘tremble’), ‘violated’, and ‘invading’ from ‘immiso’ (‘sent in’). Moreover, ‘sicken at the sight’ has recurred from Dryden’s strikingly pathetic rendering of Dido’s death at the end of Book IV: ‘Thrice op’d her heavy Eyes, and sought the Light, j But having found it, sicken’d at the sight; j And clos’d her Lids at last, in endless Night.’254 Fainter echoes in earlier lines air similarly heterodox analogies: hearing that Hercules ‘Tugg’d at the solid Stone with all his might’ we may recall how, at the beginning of Book III, Aeneas ‘tug’d with all my Strength’ at the bleeding myrtle plant he discovered on the Thracian coast, thereby desecrating the metamorphosed corpse of Polydorus;255 Wnally and most disorientatingly, ‘The Court of Cacus stands reveal’d to sight’ may remind us of the exposure of the innermost apartments of Priam’s citadel at the hands of Pyrrhus during the sack of Troy: ‘A mighty Breach is made; the Rooms conceal’d j Appear, and all the Palace is reveal’d.’256 Dryden’s interest in the second of Book VIII’s two gigantic episodes went back several years. Invoking it in Threnodia Augustalis (1685), his funeral elegy for Charles II, he had identiWed himself with the shield Vulcan orders the Cyclopes to fashion for Aeneas: Heroes in heaven’s peculiar mould are cast, They and their poets are not formed in haste; Man was the Wrst in God’s design, and man was made the last. 253 ‘The Eighth Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 312–28. 254 ‘The Fourth Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 990–2. 255 ‘The Third Book of the Aeneis’, l. 51: the connection between the two passages is strengthened by Dryden’s description of the ‘Myrtle’ two lines later as ‘violated’. 256 ‘The Second Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 661–2.


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False heroes, made by Xattery so, Heaven can strike out, like sparkles, at a blow; But ere a Prince is to perfection brought, He costs omnipotence a second thought. With toil and sweat, With hardening cold and forming heat The Cyclops did their strokes repeat, Before th’ impenetrable shield was wrought.257

Both Dryden and James II have been laboured to perfection by the craftsmanship of omnipotence, providentially toughened against future assaults by the misfortunes they have previously suVered. Succeeding years, however, would expose that Stoico-Christian Wgure as too conceited by half. By the time Dryden returned to the episode in the ‘Aeneis’, the focus of his self-identiWcation within it had moved from ‘the cosmic icon’ symbolizing the glory of Roman imperium to the Cyclopes whose ‘slave-labour’258 manufactures it. At Wrst, responding to Virgil’s introductory comparison of the gigantic labourers to maidservants, Dryden opted for burlesque: his Cyclopes ‘rise, j With yawning Mouths, and with half open’d Eyes’ to ‘ply the DistaV by the winking Light’,259 where ‘half open’d’ and ‘winking’ oVer fatigue brought on by overworking as a corrective to the high-Xown allegorizations of the Cyclopes’ monocularity proposed by contemporary mythographers.260 But soon such broad mockery of their sub-heroic estate gives way to a more nuanced outlook, a volatile compound of melancholy and indignation at their having been brought so low. Vulcan arrives at the cave: The Cyclops here their heavy Hammers deal; Loud Strokes, and hissings of tormented Steel Are heard around: The boyling Waters roar; And smoaky Flames thro’ fuming Tunnels soar. Hether, the Father of the Fire, by Night, 257 Threnodia Augustalis (1685), ll. 432–42. 258 Virgil: Aeneid VIII, ed. K. W. Gransden, ad loc. 259 Aeneid viii. 409–14/‘The Eighth Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 543–5. 260 In Mystagogus Poeticus; Or, The Muses Interpreter, for instance, the doyen of English mythographers, Alexander Ross, records Servius’s contention that Polyphemus was wise, having one eye in the centre of his forehead, before suggesting instead that his single eye meant he looked ‘only to things present’ and ‘wanted the eye of providence, which looks to future dayes, and prevents them’; Wnally, he refers to claims of a political signiWcance, to wit that the Cyclopes Wgured the deWciencies of imperial Rome, lacking the twin eyes, or consuls, of the republic (I quote from the text as edited by John R. Glenn (New York, 1987), s.v. ‘Cyclopes’, p. 305).

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Translation and the Poet’s Life Through the brown Air precipitates his Flight. On their Eternal Anvils here he found The Brethren beating, and the Blows go round: A load of pointless Thunder now there lies Before their Hands, to ripen for the Skies: These Darts, for angry Jove, they dayly cast: Consum’d on Mortals with prodigious waste.261

This is no orderly workshop of providential purposes but a sweatshop Hell. Dryden has ampliWed Virgil’s anthropomorphic ‘gemitus’ (‘groans’), for the sounds struck from the anvil, and ‘anhelat’ (‘pants’) for those of the furnace, into a sustained acoustic of excruciation: ‘hissings’, ‘tormented’, and ‘roar’ all re-echo from the depths of Tartarus where, in Book VI, Aeneas witnessed the Titans being eternally tortured. Dryden’s Cyclopes are at work on ‘A load of . . . Thunder’ whereas Virgil’s have just one unWnished thunderbolt to hand, and the diVerence is of emblematic as against descriptive phrasing: Dryden’s giants are bowed down under what the poet regularly in his translations calls ‘the load of life’.262 Their being so is cause for sorrow in the penultimate line where ‘they dayly cast’ stirs memories of the world they have lost, in which they cast—threw—their thunderbolts for themselves instead of having to cast—forge—them to be thrown by Jupiter; and it becomes grounds for anger in the Wnal line, at ‘with prodigious waste’, where the focalization of the passage reaches its most strongly deviant. As well as loosely ‘vast’ or ‘huge’, ‘prodigious’ means speciWcally ‘monstrous’ or ‘gigantic’, and so indicts Jupiter of the anarchic violence for which the Cyclopes are being punished. Most densely representative, though, of Dryden’s complex response to the Cyclopes’ servile estate is his reference to their half-Wnished thunderbolts as ‘pointless’. Virgil says only that ‘pars imperfecta manebat’ (‘part of it remained to be completed’)263 and, in so far as he gives any indication about what remained to be done, makes it sound like a matter of further polishing rather than aYxing the point itself. Dryden seems to have taken the idea of the thunder being pointless from Wenceslas Hollar’s engraving of the instant of Vulcan’s arrival which had Wrst appeared in Ogilby’s translation, and was subsequently (in common with the others in the series) reprinted in his own. In other respects the image has little in common with Dryden’s view of the scene: 261 ‘The Eighth Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 555–66. 262 See, for instance, ‘Lucretius: Against the Fear of Death’, ll. 135–7; ‘The Tenth Satire of Juvenal’, ll. 550–3; and ‘Palamon and Arcite’, ii. 265–6. 263 Aeneid viii. 428.


The Cyclopes at work, from Dryden, Works of Virgil (1697)

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Hollar’s Cyclopes are rather unprodigious creatures whose one-eyedness, the principal token of their monstrosity, has been carefully deemphasized by the play of shadow, and whose lithe and unmassive bodies are politely free of the thick mat of hair attributed to the giants in early-modern encyclopaedias of myth.264 Nor do they look much like slaves: their ragged attire and the bent back of the Cyclops on the extreme right evoke the physical eVort of their work as blacksmiths, but Vulcan’s gesture of greeting is courteous not domineering. The thunderbolt they are in the process of hammering upon their anvil is, however, demonstrably pointless: its point can be seen lying on the ground in a central position where it naturally invites the onlooker’s gaze. But why it particularly caught Dryden’s eye, surely, was because it emblematizes the emasculation of the Cyclopes, situated as it is between the legs of the leftmost of them, directly underneath a pendent strip of his loincloth, and pointing downwards towards his feet. The plates in Dryden’s Virgil feature dedications to subscribers who had prepaid for their copies of the translation at the highest rate; as has been well documented, satiric or panegyrical inXections occasionally arise out of the Wt between the subject of an image and the identity of its dedicatee.265 The subscriber ‘honoured’ in this case was ‘Christopher Rich of Gray’s Inn’, a lawyer turned theatre manager. Initially a silent partner in the Duke’s Company, Rich had assumed control in 1693 and set about aggressively restructuring it, with a view to ‘enhancing proWts by stringently cutting costs’. His reforms struck at the actors’ working practices,266 notably the custom whereby an actor who Wrst performed a role was held to ‘own’ it in perpetuity.267 Discontent with Rich’s ‘tyrannical ways and pinchpenny management’268 boiled over during the season of 1694: under the leadership of Thomas Betterton, the players petitioned the Lord Chamberlain for relief from innovations ‘tending to the ruine & destruction’ of the Company, summing up their grievances by alleging, in an allusion to the ambiguity of the Latin noun ‘servus’ (‘servant’/‘slave’) so current in Restoration debates about 264 Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus, s.v. ‘Gigantes’ (342). 265 This mode of analysis was pioneered by Steven Zwicker, in his Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry, 190–6. 266 Judith Milhous, ‘Christopher Rich’ (ODNB). 267 Judith Milhous, Betterton and the Management of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1695–1708 (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, 1979), pp. 65–7. 268 The description is Milhous’s (ibid., 51); a partial defence of Rich’s reforms is attempted by his biographer Paul Sawyer, in Christopher Rich of Drury Lane (Lanham, MD, 1986), pp. 12–20.


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liberty,269 that Rich was ‘treateing us not as . . . the Kings & Queenes servants but the Claimers slaves’.270 Dryden nowhere directly comments on this de´baˆcle, but he and Betterton were friends: he had recently supplied the prologue for Betterton’s adaptation of The Prophetess (1690),271 and in the season of 1695–6 (even as Dryden was completing ‘The Eighth Book of the Aeneis’)272 the new company which Betterton had established after breaking with Rich performed The Husband his own Cuckold by Dryden’s eldest son, John.273 It stretches credulity to suppose that Dryden connected Rich to the scene in the Cyclopes’ cave with no thought for recent events at the Duke’s Company. The parallels between the two extend to some delicious points of detail: the traditionary rights Rich was intent on stripping from the actors dated back, past the hiatus in theatrical practice during the Interregnum, to the time of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher, ‘the giant race before the Xood’; and the principal defender of those rights, Betterton, was the theatrical world’s last surviving link with the Elizabethan giants, having in his youth been taught by William Davenant ‘an approach to such plays as Hamlet and Henry VIII preserved in a direct line back to Shakespeare’.274 What went for Betterton and his fellow ‘rebels’ (as Rich and the other patentees consistently describe them in their ‘Response to the Petition of the Players’) in the Duke’s Company also went for Dryden: he had long thought of himself as a slave labourer in the theatre and now did so in 269 See in particular Hobbes’s reliance on this ambiguity when arguing that there is no essential diVerence between the conditions of a slave and a servant, in ch. 3 of The Elements of Law (1640): ‘The Romans . . . comprehended all under the name of servus; whereof such as they loved and durst trust, were suVered to go at liberty, and admitted to places of OYce, both neer to their Persons, and in their aVaires abroad; the rest were kept chained, or otherwise restrained with natural impediments to their resistance [ . . . ] A Master therefore is to be supposed to have no less right over those, whose Bodies he leaveth at Liberty, than over those he keepeth in Bonds and Imprisonment, and hath absolute Dominion over both, and may say of his servant, that he is his, as he may of any other thing’ (pp. 86–7). 270 The petition is reprinted in its entirety as Appendix A in Milhous, Betterton and the Management of Lincoln’s Inn Fields; the passage quoted is at 227. 271 For details of this controversial collaboration (the prologue was banned as seditious), see Winn, Dryden and His World, 441–2. 272 Ibid., 483; Letters, ed. Ward, 80–1. 273 Milhous, Betterton and the Management of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 101; in subsequent years, however, Dryden became somewhat disillusioned with Betterton’s company: he records his disappointment with their performances of Congreve’s The Way of the World in a letter to his cousin Elmes Steward of 23 February 1700, which ‘may have been a factor in his agreeing to do a last piece of theatrical writing for [Rich’s company at] Drury Lane’ (Winn, Dryden and His World, 509). 274 Judith Milhous, ‘Thomas Betterton’ (ODNB); elsewhere in the article, Milhous refers to Betterton as an ‘obstinately shadowy Titan’!

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respect of his working conditions as a translator. Rich was one of the new breed of cultural entrepreneurs who would come into their own in the early decades of the eighteenth century, and his name inevitably made him a byword for the perceived money-mindedness of such men. Another, though, was Jacob Tonson. It was at around the time Dryden was working on ‘The Eighth Book of the Aeneis’, that his relations with his bookseller were at their most strained: ‘when [it] is Wnishd’, he told Tonson in an ‘icy’ missive of 29 October 1695, ‘I expect Wfty pounds in good silver; not such as I have had formerly. I am not obligd to take gold, neither will I; nor stay for it beyond four and twenty houres after it is due.’275 Possibly Dryden was using Rich to settle a score with Tonson. Certainly, the Cyclopes are in some measure Dryden himself. When he took Hollar’s hint about the point of their unWnished thunderbolt, the poet had somewhere in view his own condition in Williamite England. The image of himself as emasculated, a ‘drudge’ in his favoured sexual sense of the term, recurs compulsively throughout Dryden’s later writings, and in elaborating it the poet commonly strikes a tone in which self-contempt and self-aYrmation, shame and rage, interchange and interfuse much as they do in his description—part burlesque, part invective—of the Cyclopes and their ‘pointless Thunder’. Most saliently, there is the passage from the prologue to Amphitryon (1690) in which Dryden complains about having his work subjected to scrutiny by the censor: The lab’ring Bee, when his sharp Sting is gone, Forgets his Golden Work, and turns a Drone: Such is a Satyr, when you take away That Rage in which his Noble Vigour lay. What gain you by not suVering him to teize ye? He neither can oVend you, now, nor please ye. The Honey-bag, and Venome, lay so near, That both, together, you resolv’d to tear; How can he show his Manhood, if you bind him To box, like Boys, with one Hand ty’d behind him?276

Virgil had compared the labours of bees to those of the Cyclopes in Book IV of the Georgics.

275 Letters, ed. Ward, 77, quoted in Winn, Dryden and His World, 481; on the worsening relations between Dryden and Tonson over this ‘troubled winter’, see 480–3. 276 Prologue to Amphitryon (1690), ll. 1–11.


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That he had suggests the full and Wnal signiWcance of Dryden’s Cyclopean self-identiWcation. More radical in its implications than the poet’s other accesses of gigantophile sentiment, even his sympathy for the arch-rebel Typhoeus and Cacus, the monstrous avatar of hostility to Roman civilization, this self-identiWcation is fundamentally anti-Virgilian. For Virgil’s Cyclopes diVer in one key respect from the other representatives of the giant race who appear in the Aeneid: they are not, in point of fact, slaves. Competing traditions of Cyclopean mythology existed,277 but Virgil followed Hesiod in whose Theogony the Cyclopes, instead of Wghting alongside their fellow titans in the assault on Olympus and being eventually defeated and enslaved, break ranks with their rebellious brothers and go over to the side of the Olympians, enrolling as Jupiter’s armourers.278 In short, the Virgilian Cyclopes have willingly submitted their chaotic powers to the discipline of cosmic order. This is central to the meaning of their manufacture of Aeneas’s shield within the larger symbological design of the Aeneid: ‘The caves of Aeolus and of the Cyclopes are both presented as centres of immense elemental power’, as Philip Hardie has pointed out; ‘with the essential diVerence that in the Wrst that power is used irresponsibly, whereas in the second it is the instrument of a divine providence.’279 It is also what connects the Cyclopes with the bees: both sacriWce their private interests, labouring selXessly for the greater good. In which connection, they Wgure the ideal of Romanitas280 as self-restraint and submission to the gods which for early-modern readers was pregnant with Christian implication. To revert to the terms of the passage from the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’ with which I began this discussion, the Cyclopes conform to the spiritually aYrmative sense of Dryden’s deWnition of translators as slaves: they are resigned to serving out the curse of dispossession which their irresponsible proXigacy has brought down on their heads. 277 For details of these rival traditions, and an argument about the importance of the diVerences between them for an understanding of the Phaecian episode of the Odyssey, see Frederick Ahl and Hanna M. Roisman, The Odyssey Re-Formed (Ithaca, NY, 1996), pp. 92–121, esp. 117–20. 278 Hesiod, Theogony, ed. M. L. West (Oxford, 1966), pp. 139–53, 501; the names Virgil gives to the Wrst two of his Cyclopes—Brontes and Steropes—are Hesiodic (Aeneid VIII, ed. Gransden, 140). 279 Hardie, Cosmos and Imperium, 105. 280 To what extent Virgil endorses this ideal in his presentation of the bees is a perennial subject of debate among commentators; a survey of views is provided in the opening pages of Jasper GriYn, ‘The Fourth Georgic, Virgil, and Rome’, Greece and Rome, 26 (1979), 61–80.

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Not only was the distinctive self-discipline of the Virgilian Cyclopes recognized in Dryden’s day; it had acquired a speciWcally poetic valency. That Virgil laboured his poems with singular diligence and care, reshaped and polished them with tireless perfectionism, was increasingly central to his pre-eminence for neoclassical commentators: Ben Jonson’s Tibullus, in Poetaster (1601), was expressing what would remain a truism of literary criticism throughout the seventeenth century when he praised Virgil’s works as being ‘with such judgement laboured’.281 Dryden played a central role in consolidating this line of argument within English poetic culture, particularly in naturalizing the tendency, instigated in Reńe´ Rapin’s Comparaison des Poe`mes d’Home`re et Virgile (1660), to equate Virgil’s poetic of indefatigable self-scrutiny with the laborious self-denying mode of heroism he attributed to Aeneas: ‘The very Heroes shew their Authors’, as he would clinchingly put it in the preface to Fables (1700); ‘Achilles is hot, impatient, revengeful . . . Aeneas patient, considerate, careful of his People, and merciful to his Enemies; ever submissive to the Will of Heaven.’282 Equally current, however, as an analogue for Virgil’s abstemious poetics were the labouring Cyclopes. When, for instance, in ‘Of Poetry’ (1700), the critic and translator Samuel Cobb was attacking the epics of Richard Blackmore as insuYciently laboured, it came naturally to him to invoke the gigantic blacksmiths in salutary contrast. All ‘Wre’ and raging out of control, the author of Prince Arthur is the Typhoeus of English verse, whereas the true follower of Virgil ‘Must sleep less Nights, Vulcanian Labours prove, j Like Cyclops, forging Thunder for a Jove’.283 The cave of the Cyclopes, then, is a site of seismic activity in Dryden’s relations with Virgil. The tremors registered far and wide throughout his Georgics and ‘Aeneis’ along the faultline of ‘labor’ reach a peak of violence in the boiling depths of Etna, unsettling Dryden’s lifelong devotion to the poet he called his ‘master’. For in deploring the Cyclopes’ subservient condition, indeed all but goading them to rise up against their Olympian oppressors, Dryden was, in a sense, undermining the entire Virgilian ethos, simultaneously moral and poetic, of laborious self-abnegation. Witness his choice of the adjective ‘pointless’ 281 Poetaster, V. i. 118–19, quoted in Robin Sowerby, The Augustan Art of Poetry (Oxford, 2006), p. 77; further instances of praise for the Virgilian virtue of ‘judgement’ being expressed through the lexis of ‘labor’ within the ancient and early-modern critical traditions are recorded on pp. 29–36. 282 CE vii. 30. 283 Poetae Britannici (1700), p. 215.


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to hone the image of the Cyclopes as emasculated. In the many critical essays and prefaces where Dryden holds up Virgil’s poems as exemplars of craftsmanship he particularly adduces their lack of ‘points’. Samuel Johnson gives as his deWnition of the noun in this critical sense ‘A sting of an epigram’: the satirist’s sharp riposte or piquant bon mot. The Wrst two instances he cites are from Dryden, and it was indeed a staple ingredient of Dryden’s critical terminology. The metaphor has to do with bees, of course, but also with spears and, by extension, thunderbolts: satirists Xing barbs at their enemies, taking the law out of Jupiter’s hands. Thomas Drant’s preface to his translation of Horace’s Satires (1566) traces the root of ‘satire’ back to the Arabic for spear,284 and if this etymology no longer attracted suYcient support in the Restoration to feature in the section of the ‘Discourse of the Original and Progress of Satire’ where Dryden assesses the various proposed derivations of the term, it survived among the critical connotations of ‘point’. But ‘points’ belong in satire not epic. They are small-scale gratiWcations which those undertaking long poetic labours should deny themselves. Lucan and Tasso did not—the Pharsalia is full of ‘points, and . . . somewhat which had more of the sting of an epigram, than of the dignity and state of an Heroick Poem’, and Gerusalemme Liberata of ‘Conceipts, points of Epigram, and Witticisms; all which are not only below the Dignity of Heroick verse, but contrary to its Nature’285—and Dryden depreciated them both as a result. Virgil, by contrast, is ‘every where above Conceipts of Epigrammatick Wit’.286 He is a paragon of pointlessness. Like his self-disciplinarian Cyclopes, he eschews the casting of pointed barbs, does not fulminate, though he ‘cou’d have written sharper Satires, than either Horace or Juvenal’, according to Dryden, ‘if he wou’d have employ’d his Talent, that way’.287 That claim was made in passing in the ‘Discourse of . . . Satire’ where Dryden was engaged not with Virgil but with Juvenal and Persius, translating whose poems had given him plenty of vent for what he would soon identify in ‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’ as his irresistible predisposition towards invective: ‘Satire will have room, where e’re I write.’288 But Virgil’s putative abstention from satire became a more 284 John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford, 1996), pp. 130–1. 285 CE xi. 11; CE iv. 13. 286 Preface to Sylvae; CE iii. 7. 287 ‘Discourse of the Original and Progress of Satire’; CE iv. 64. 288 ‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’, l. 94.

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pressing concern for Dryden once it was his obligation as a translator to emulate it. By the time he came to write the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’, after four years of ‘pointless’ labour, he was picking up crumbs of satire in Virgil’s epic he had not even noticed in fatter Juvenalian times. But were they really there, or was he seeing things? Dryden’s concern to unearth deposits of satiric energy in the Aeneid gives rise to one of the most suggestive and original passages in what can seem at times a somewhat tired and derivative essay. ‘I could not but take notice’, he observes of the funeral games in Book V, ‘of some Favourite Families to which [Virgil] gives the Victory and awards the Prizes, in the Person of his Heroe.’ And: I likewise either found or form’d an Image to my self of the contrary kind; that those who lost the Prizes, were such as had disoblig’d the Poet, or were in disgrace with Augustus, or Enemies to Maecenas: And this was the Poetical Revenge he took: For genus irritabile Vatum, as Horace says. When a Poet is thoroughly provok’d, he will do himself Justice, however dear it cost him, Animamque in Vulnere ponit. I think these are not bare Imaginations of my own, though I Wnd no trace of them in the Commentatours: But one Poet may judge of another by himself. The Vengeance we defer, is not forgotten.289

The contrast with his earlier conviction is painfully stark, bearing in mind what was at stake for Dryden personally in the unspoken question underlying these remarks. Is it permissible for a poet who defers to Virgil as his ethical and stylistic model to take ‘Poetical Revenge’ on his enemies? Dryden struggles to keep his doubts at bay, but loyalty to Virgil prevents him from simply overriding them, and so the prose wriggles on the hook of uncertainty (‘ . . . either found or form’d an Image . . . ’, ‘I think these are not . . . though I Wnd no trace . . . But one Poet may. . . ’). The uncertainty is irreducibly Virgilian: the poet of ‘labor’ has deferred his vengeance so painstakingly that not just blockish commentators but even a fellow poet cannot be absolutely certain he ever took it. The Wnal epigrammatic deWance with which Dryden brings the passage to a ‘point’ is something of a bluV. In 1685, as Dryden was beginning his career as a translator, the Xedgling Whig wit Matthew Prior had warned him that in abandoning the controversial terrain of Absalom and Achitophel for classic ground, he had ‘turned the malice of a spiteful satire j To the safe innocence of a dull translator’.290 That, clearly, was a prejudiced view. I showed in the Wrst 289 CE v. 283. 290 ‘A Satyr on the Modern Translators’, ll. 45–6.


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section of this chapter how strong were the links between Dryden’s satirical writing of the early 1680s and his translations in Sylvae; how he precisely resisted the urge to launder his vices as a public poet with philosophic ‘innocence’. Subsequently too, in the immediate aftermath of his proscription Dryden vented plenty of spleen against his persecutors in his versions of Juvenal. Nevertheless, there is a germ of truth in Prior’s claim of an opposition between the roles of satirist and translator. Virgil particularly actualizes it. DiVerent understandings of the translator’s function are suggested by the experience of translating diVerent poets. Ovid, with his imaginative and stylistic commitment to Xux, encouraged Dryden to approach the task of translating him from a Pythagorean perspective. By contrast, translating Virgil, the epitome of ‘pointless’ self-discipline in style and morality, brought Dryden particularly to engage with the self-sacriWcial aspects of the translator’s oYce, those which furthest remove it from the self-aYrmative norms of poetic conduct most associated with satire. Dispossession, even enslavement, were predicaments Dryden had a habit of imagining himself into long before they became his in fact, and translating Virgil particularly fed this habit. With the ‘Tory revenge’ against the defeated Exclusionists in full spate and his own fame at its peak, as if he needed to mortify himself in his good fortune, he selected as one of the two eclogues he rendered in Miscellany Poems (1684) the ninth, in which the shepherd Moeris laments having been ‘Kick’d out’ of his lands and the ‘decay’ of his poetic ‘voice’.291 But in his mature Virgilian vision, once he was actually dispossessed, the notes of disgust in his fascination with the ethic of ‘retrenchment’ came increasingly to the fore. Among the possible consequences of his proscription he feared most was a diminution of his potency as a poet: a drawing of his sting, a blunting of his thunder. Translating Virgil appears to have exacerbated these anxieties. To espouse Virgil’s ethical and stylistic code now might entail normalizing an estrangement from that ‘rage’ in which Dryden believed ‘his noble vigour lay’. It might be to collaborate with the eVorts of the Williamite censors to trammel the instinctive and insubordinate energies of his genius. Hence Dryden’s reductive attitude in the ‘Aeneis’ towards self-sacriWce and obedience ‘to 291 ‘The Ninth Pastoral’, ll. 7, 73: those and other strikingly vigorous phrasings led Annabel Patterson momentarily to forget that this translation in fact predates Dryden’s own dispossession by several years; see her discussion in Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Oxford, 1988), pp. 188–9.

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the will of heaven’, his tendency ‘to present actions as ‘‘ordain’d by Fate’’, rather than struggling to render Virgil’s delicate elisions of human and divine agency’,292 and thus to make all the epic’s human personages, up to and including Aeneas, seem what he has Latinus call himself near the end: ‘Slave to Fate’.293 Such reductiveness needs to be understood as part of a larger poetic economy: scourging himself with images of impotence, Dryden keeps up his poetic powers. ‘But slaves we are’: the inversion is deWant as well as resigned. Nowhere does Dryden’s satiric masculinity make itself more felt in the Virgil than when he is exaggerating hints of emasculation. What Dryden oVers instead of Virgil’s ‘elisions’ of autonomy and dependence is a meeting of the most extreme forms of those notionally antithetical qualities. A consummate rhetoric of aggressive passivity marks the places where Dryden engages most deeply and reXexively with the Virgilian ethic of ‘labor’. The cave of the Cyclopes is the epicentre of that engagement. It is commonly said of translators that they stand on the shoulders of giants, but for Dryden, labouring under Virgil’s ‘whole weight’, translating was like being a giant. Of the places in Dryden’s work as a translator where he uses the verb ‘translate’, one, in ‘Of the Pythagorean Philosophy’, has received extensive critical comment, in connection with the Ovidian model of translation as literary renewal I alluded to a moment ago. I discussed another, in the account of viticulture in ‘The Second Book of the Georgics’, earlier. A third occurs within Dryden’s version of ‘The Fable of Acis, Polyphemus and Galatea, from the Thirteenth Book of the Metamorphoses’, which he composed some eighteen months before signing the contract for the Virgil. The story of the ‘Cyclops, who deW’d th’ Aetherial Throne, j And thought no Thunder louder than his own’294 but is brought low by his infatuation with an icily unresponsive water-nymph was tailor-made for Dryden, past master that he was by now in the management of hybrid tonalities, and he comfortably matches Ovid’s brilliance at interlacing grotesquerie with pathos. But a diVerent note is introduced, at once wider-ranging and more personal, when, concluding his plaint, Dryden’s Polyphemus says to Galatea: oh I burn with Love, and thy Disdain Augments at once my Passion, and my pain. 292 Burrow, ‘Virgil in English Translation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Martindale, 29. 293 ‘The Twelfth Book of the Aeneis’, l. 62. 294 ‘The Fable of Acis, Polyphemus, and Galatea’, ll. 17–18.


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Translated Aetna Xames within my Heart, And thou, Inhumane, wilt not ease my smart.295

‘Translated’ there means ‘transported’, Dryden’s editors report, and has no direct equivalent in the original.296 But the probability of a reXexive pun should no more be ignored in this case than in its later counterpart in ‘Of the Pythagorean Philosophy’. Collocating ‘Aetna’ and ‘Translated ’, Dryden discovers the Sicilian volcano as an emblematic site of translation. In Virgil’s Etna incendiary gigantic impulses are indeed ‘translated’: transported, displaced, deferred. But translating Virgil didn’t douse the Xames in Dryden’s Cyclopean heart. LI CENCE In the preface to his Wnal volume of translations, Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), Dryden famously turns away from Virgil, pronouncing the ‘Vehemence’ of Homer ‘more suitable to my Temper’.297 He turns away too from the Virgilian Wguration of the translator as slave. No longer labouring under ‘the weight of a whole Author’, he picks ‘fragments’, and his account of how he came to choose them makes it clear that pleasure rather than duty was the operative principle: From translating the First of Homer’s Iliads (which I intended as an Essay to the whole Work) I proceeded to the Translation of the Twelfth Book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, because it contains, among other Things, the Causes, the Beginning, and Ending, of the Trojan War: Here I ought in reason to have stopp’d; but the Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses lying next in my way, I could not balk ’em. When I had compass’d them, I was so taken with the former Part of the Fifteenth Book (which is the Master-piece of the whole Metamorphoses) that I enjoyn’d my self the pleasing Task of rendering it into English. And now I found, by the Number of my Verses, that they began to swell into a little Volume; which gave me an Occasion of looking backward on some Beauties of my Author, in his former Books: There occur’d to me the Hunting of the Boar, Cinyras and Myrrha, the good-natur’d Story of Baucis and Philemon, with the rest, which I hope I have translated closely enough, and given them the same Turn of Verse, which they had in the Original; and this, I may say without vanity, is not the Talent of every Poet:298

295 Ibid., ll. 185–8. 297 CE vii. 30.

296 H v. 303. 298 Ibid., 24.

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Only once is an attitude of Virgilian self-denial so much as suggested, and then only in order to be denied: translating ‘the Fifteenth Book’ of the Metamorphoses is a ‘Task’ but a ‘pleasing’ one which Dryden ‘enjoyn’d my self ’. Otherwise the prose conjures a riot of self-gratiWcation: Dryden zigzags across the Metamorphoses as the mood takes him, in deWance of chronological sequence (from ‘the Twelfth Book’ on to ‘the Fifteenth’ and then ‘backward’ to the ‘former Books’) and ultimately of rationality itself (at ‘Here I ought in reason to have stopp’d; but . . . ’, ‘in reason’ is more than throwaway). When he describes having ‘found, by the Number of my Verses, that they began to swell into a little Volume’, Dryden’s verbs combine to imply that the impulse to translate is as inimical to reasonable self-control as the sexual impulse itself. Talking about Ovid, Dryden writes Ovidian prose: transgressively pleasureseeking and deWantly self-willed. Ovid is the presiding spirit of Fables: eight of the sixteen translations it contains are from the Metamorphoses and all but one of the remainder are from Chaucer and Boccaccio whom Dryden aligns with Ovid in the preface. A narrative therefore suggests itself about the changing place of translation in the Wnal years of Dryden’s poetic life: after struggling to conform himself to a vision of the translator as the epitome of the Virgilian poetic and ethic of laborious ‘retrenchment’, Dryden now breaks out into an opposite Ovidian understanding of translation as self-indulgent play. There is some truth in this idea. A number of scholars have convincingly argued that Dryden’s thinking about metamorphosis fused with his reXections on his own conduct as a translator as he worked on Fables,299 leading him to take liberties in his Wnal volume which put many of the versions it contains—though not so much those from Ovid, interestingly, as those from Chaucer and Boccaccio300—beyond the scope of ‘imitation’ as he himself understood it, let alone the 299 Tomlinson, Poetry and Metamorphosis, 3; Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 207–17; David Hopkins, ‘Dryden on Translation: Theory and Practice’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. iii, ed. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (Oxford, 2005), pp. 55–66 (at 63–5). 300 Of the translations from Chaucer, Dryden’s most recent editors comment: ‘D. sometimes keeps close to Chaucer (with occasional lines retained verbatim), sometimes omits material, but more often paraphrases and expands on the original, providing a much looser rendering than he did with his classical translations’ (headnote to ‘Palamon and Arcite’; H v. 100); and of those from Boccaccio that ‘In turning Boccaccio’s prose narrative into verse, D. often translates rather loosely’, so much so indeed that ‘the notes below which record D.’s additions should be taken as approximate indications of passages which have no direct source in the Italian, while passages not so marked are often fairly free paraphrases’ (headnote to ‘Sigismonda and Guiscardo’; H v. 221).


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altogether more restricted deWnition of ‘translation’ applied in this book. However, Dryden did not in Fables altogether abandon the concern with ‘the bounds of liberty’ which I have been suggesting informed his theory and practice of translation over the preceding two decades. Certainly that concern no longer takes the form it had in the Virgil, but it mutates rather than dies out. That Dryden remained fascinated with the subject of slavery in his Wnal volume is statistically evident: in fact, there are roughly twice as many occurrences of ‘slave’ and its cognates in the eight thousand or so lines of translation in Fables as feature in the eighteen thousand or so of The Works of Virgil. There are eleven in ‘The First Book of Homer’s Ilias’ alone which, as Howard Erskine-Hill has pointed out, Dryden appears to treat as a digest of the literal and Wgurative senses of ‘slavery’.301 But throughout the volume the word itself or synonyms for it recur in memorably paradoxical formulations about liberty: from the Wrst of the translations, ‘Palamon and Arcite’, where Palamon (still imprisoned, unlike Arcite, and so, unlike Arcite, still near Emily) ‘Nor dares he hope his Fetters to remove, j Nor ever wishes to be free from Love’302 (a couplet with no equivalent in Chaucer), to the last of them, ‘Cymon and Iphigenia’, where Lysimachus, the principal magistrate on Rhodes, is ‘A Slave to Fame, but more a Slave to Love: j Restraining others, yet himself not free, j Made impotent by Pow’r, debas’d by Dignity!’303 (none of which stems from Boccaccio). My aim in what follows is twofold: to show that translation continues to function in Fables as the practical medium of Dryden’s inquiry into the interrelations of liberty and boundedness, and that in the Wnal phase of his career as a translator Dryden brought this inquiry to a conclusion which both follows naturally from habits and emphases developed over the course of that career and also breaks radically from them. The straightest line of argument in support of the Wrst of those claims runs through two of the Chaucer versions. Interest in deterministic shapes of thought had long been an aspect of Dryden’s larger preoccupation with the bounds of liberty: in The State of Innocence (to cite a single striking example) Adam wonders even before the Fall ‘Why am I not tied up from doing ill?’304 (‘tied up’ not just ‘tied’). 301 Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Pope and Slavery’, in Erskine-Hill (ed.), Alexander Pope: World and Word (Oxford, 1998), pp. 27–53 (at 28–9). 302 ‘Palamon and Arcite’, ii. 5–8. 303 ‘Cymon and Iphigenia’, ll. 459–61. 304 The State of Innocence (1677), IV. i. 113.

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A series of studies have shown that this interest comes to a head in ‘Palamon and Arcite’ and ‘The Cock and the Fox’.305 What has not been recognized, though, is how closely Dryden ties theoretical debate about divine foreknowledge and human freedom inside the tales to his own practical negotiations between liberty and constraint in translating them. In the case of ‘Palamon and Arcite’, the main technical resource involved is literalism. Repeatedly, when rendering lines of a deterministic bent, Dryden reproduces their original rhyme words; as, for instance, when Chaucer’s knight is moved by the bloody spectacle of Palamon and Arcite’s Wght in the forest to aver that ‘For sure, whate’er we Mortals hate or love, j Or hope, or fear, depends on Pow’rs above’,306 and again when Theseus addresses the combatants after parting them: ‘As therefore both are equal in Degree, j The Lot of both be left to Destiny.’307 The crowning instance comes in Theseus’s Wnal speech of cosmological speculation over which commentators are agreed Dryden took special care.308 When in Chaucer the Athenian king, enumerating the disasters that human kind is heir to, asks rhetorically ‘What maketh this but Jupiter the king’ and recommends as the best course of action in the circumstances ‘To maken vertu of necessitee’,309 Dryden did not merely preserve the original rhyme words but replicated both lines virtually in their entirety: What makes all this, but Jupiter the King, At whose Command we perish, and we spring? Then ’tis our best, since thus ordain’d to die, To make a Vertue of Necessity.310

Virtually: since translating literally in such circumstances is so vivaciously germane, it already betokens emancipation as much as resignation, 305 See in particular two essays by Tom Mason: ‘A Noble Poem of the Epique Kind? Palamon and Arcite: Neoclassic Theory and Poetical Experience’, in Dryden and the World of Neoclassicism, ed. Gortschacher and Klein, 181–92 (esp. 186–9), and ‘Dryden’s The Cock and the Fox and Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, Translation and Literature, 16 (2007), 1–28. 306 ‘Palamon and Arcite’, ii. 218–19. 307 Ibid., ii. 401–2. 308 The three best short surveys of Dryden’s life and work all conclude with readings of his version of this speech: see Hopkins, John Dryden, 196–200, the same author’s more recent John Dryden: Writers and their Work (Tavistock, 2004), pp. 97–9, and Hammond, Dryden: A Literary Life, 165–8. 309 ‘The Knight’s Tale’, ll. 3035, 3042; I quote from the text of the edition used by Dryden, as reprinted in CE vii. 188, 190. 310 ‘Palamon and Arcite’, iii. 1082–5.


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but the two minor liberties Dryden takes (adding an ‘all’ and an ‘a’) leave no doubt that he is making an imaginative virtue of translatorial necessity. The same may be said of the other two examples; for in taking over Chaucer’s rhyme words Dryden deftly alters their grammatical function: Chaucer’s Theseus employs ‘destine’ as a direct object (‘ech of you shall have his destine’),311 Dryden’s as an indirect object (‘The Lot of both be left to Destiny’), and ‘hate’ and ‘love’ are nouns when Chaucer’s narrator observes that ‘Be it warre, peace, hate or love, j All is ruled by the sight above’,312 but verbs in Dryden’s close rendering of those lines. Verbalizing nouns: a better grammatical analogue for the Wnding of freedom within fatedness it would be hard to imagine. These techniques recur in ‘The Cock and the Fox’, but Dryden also adds new ones, particularly in the central section where Chanticleer holds forth on the topics of predestination and free will. As Dryden renders it, this set-piece of theorizing on those subjects becomes a tour de force of variations on them in translatorial practice: I cannot boult this Matter to the Bran, As Bradwardin and holy Austin can: If Prescience can determine Actions so That we must do, because he did foreknow. Or that foreknowing, yet our choice is free, Not forc’d to Sin by strict necessity: This strict necessity they simple call, Another sort there is conditional. The Wrst so binds the Will, that Things foreknown By Spontaneity, not Choice, are done. Thus Galley-Slaves tug willing, at their Oar, Consent to work, in prospect of the Shore; But wou’d not work at all, if not constrain’d before.313

This begins with the basic rhyme word eVect, ‘Bran j holy Austin can’ reconWguring ‘bren j As can . . . holy. . . Austin’.314 Then, over the course of the next three couplets, Dryden elaborates it, moving the keywords ‘necessity’ and ‘free’ into the rhyme position when Chaucer has them within the line, and vice versa: ‘(Nedely clepe I simple necessite) j Or if the free choice be graunted me’315 becomes ‘yet our choice is free, j Not 311 312 313 314 315

‘The Knight’s Tale’, l. 1842; in CE vii. 112. Ibid., ll. 1671–2; in CE vii. 100. ‘The Cock and the Fox’, ll. 523–36. ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, ll. 3230–1; in CE vii. 316. Ibid., ll. 3245–6, 3251; in CE vii. 318.

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forc’d to Sin by strict necessity: j This strict necessity they simple call’. Making and unmaking rhymes is a natural way for a poet to pose questions about freedom and necessity, but by tightening up Chaucer’s internal chime of ‘free’ against ‘necessity’ into a full terminal—and ‘heterotonic’—rhyme Dryden does so with particular intensity: is it that necessary limits on freedom are being more forthrightly acknowledged,316 or does the polysyllable, given the last word, threaten to swallow up the monosyllable altogether? The next Wve lines map the bounds of liberty equally intricately but in diVerent ways. Formulating the idea that ‘Galley-Slaves tug willing, at their Oar’ once ‘in prospect of the Shore’ but ‘wou’d not work at all, if not constrain’d before’ as a triplet is to the point on Dryden’s view (stated in the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’) that triplets ‘bound the Sense’.317 The image itself is Dryden’s, and may have translatorial undertones, stemming from Roscommon’s insistence that translating is as much about perspiration as inspiration: ‘Take pains the genuine Meaning to explore, j There Sweat, there Strain, tug the laborious Oar’.318 But the acme is ‘Things foreknown j By Spontaneity, not Choice, are done.’ By ‘Spontaneity’ Dryden must mean ‘unfreely’, whereas (then as now) the ‘accepted meaning of the word’, his editors explain, ‘is spontaneous, or voluntary and unconstrained, action’.319 In short, he produces an extreme emphasis on unfreedom by taking an extreme liberty with the English language, freeing himself from the bonds laid upon him by its historical development. Also from those laid upon him by his author, since (it can hardly be necessary to add) the line has no equivalent in Chaucer. That meeting of extremes of necessitarianism and libertarianism goes beyond merely showing that Dryden continues to chart the bounds of liberty in his conduct of translation in Fables, reaching towards the second and larger of my two claims: that in his Wnal volume this endeavour takes on a new and radical complexion. The remainder of this chapter is an attempt to describe this new tone. By way of

316 Compare Christopher Ricks’s remark about Milton’s rhyme of ‘free’ against ‘libertie’ in the couplet which concludes ‘Sonnet XII’ (its Wnal line will become important to my argument later): ‘liberty comprehends its aYliations: it rhymes (and with ‘‘free’’, moreover)’; ‘George Crabbe’s Thoughts of ConWnement’, in Ricks, Essays in Appreciation (Oxford, 1996), pp. 67–89 (at 69). 317 CE v. 331. 318 An Essay on Translated Verse, ll. 179–80. 319 H v. 355.


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introduction, consider the terms Dryden used to describe his progress on Fables in a letter he sent Elizabeth Steward on 2 February 1699: In the mean time, betwixt my intervals of physique and other remedies which I am using for my gravell, I am still drudging on: always a Poet, and never a good one. I pass my time sometimes with Ovid, and sometimes with our old English poet, Chaucer; translating such stories as best please my fancy; and intend besides them to add somewhat of my own: so that it is not impossible, but ere the summer be pass’d, I may come down to you with a volume in my hand, like a dog out of the water, with a duck in his mouth320

Here once again is Dryden’s signature verb—‘drudging’—but he moves from calling himself a drudge one moment to presenting himself as an idler (‘I pass my time sometimes with Ovid, and sometimes . . . ’) and pleasure-seeker (‘translating such stories as best please my fancy’) the next, with no apparent sense of strain. The hedonistic Ovidian understanding of the translator’s role occurs not in opposition to the servile Virgilian model but in alignment with it. The conjunction is conWrmed when Dryden pictures himself arriving to stay with Mrs Steward in the country ‘with a volume in my hand, like a dog out of the water, with a duck in his mouth’. The image is one of subjection, in that the duck carried back—translated—by the dog is not his but his owner’s to eat, but it is also an image whose sportive tone underlines the emancipated condition of its creator. Dryden’s compound self-presentation in the letter might be explained as a means of negotiating his obligatedness to Mrs Steward. But the three elements of that self-presentation—drudgery, idleness, and animality—have much to tell us too about the nature of the volume Dryden would shortly deliver to her, sharing as they do a common association with the Wgure whom its title would immediately have brought to her literary mind and indeed to the minds of less literate contemporary readers:321 namely, Aesop. It is no longer fashionable to think of Dryden’s Fables as Aesopian. The only book-length study has no index entry for ‘Aesop’, while the collection’s most recent editors exclude Aesopianism from the roster of possible inXuences or informing traditions provided in their introductory

320 Letters, ed. Ward, 109. 321 Elizabeth Steward was ‘a Poetess’, as Dryden carefully acknowledged; ibid., 113.

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headnote.322 Granted, ‘fable’ was a ‘notoriously hydra-headed’ term in late seventeenth-century English culture.323 But this was the period when Aesopianism was at its height in English letters;324 to call a volume of poems Fables without meaning to refer in some measure to Aesop would have been unthinkable at any point between the Interregnum and the middle of the eighteenth century. Dryden keeps the kinship lightly in evidence: Aesop goes unmentioned in the preface but is occasionally brought forward into view within the translations themselves; as, for instance, in ‘Palamon and Arcite’ when Dryden clariWes Arcite’s statement that ‘We stryve as did the houndes for the boon; j They foughte al day, and yet hir part was noon’ into ‘Like Aesop’s hounds contending for the Bone, j Each pleaded Right, and wou’d be Lord alone’,325 or in ‘The Character of a Good Parson’ when, this time with no inducement from Chaucer, he invokes the Aesopian fable of the traveller, the sun, and the wind as proof of the power of love to reclaim hardened sinners,326 and most obviously when he gives his version of ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, centrally positioned within the volume as the tenth of its nineteen pieces,327 the Aesopian title ‘The Cock and the Fox’. Prompted by such references to reXect on possible connections between Dryden and Aesop, readers apprised of the former’s unhappy circumstances would naturally have recalled the one thing about the latter, besides his being the founding father of fable, which everyone with so much as a smattering of education knew about him: he was a slave. This fact inescapably informed attitudes towards fable throughout Dryden’s lifetime.328 Printed at the front of most early-modern editions of Aesop, including in all likelihood the one Dryden used as a schoolboy at Westminster,329 was a folk biography, Vita Aesopi, which ‘traditionally served as introduction’330 to the mode and within which Aesop’s 322 Cedric D. Reverand II, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode (Philadelphia, PA, 1988); H v. 32–7. 323 Mark Loveridge, A History of Augustan Fable (Cambridge, 1998), p. 2. 324 Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power (Durham, NC, 1991), pp. 85–109. 325 ‘The Knight’s Tale’, ll. 1177–8; in CE vii. 74; ‘Palamon and Arcite’, i. 342–3. 326 ‘The Character of a Good Parson’, ll. 34–7. 327 There is no conclusive evidence that Dryden was responsible for the ordering of Fables, as Steven Zwicker has lately reminded us (‘Dryden and the Dissolution of Things’, in John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Hammond and Hopkins, 308–29, at 326 and n. 20); most commentators silently assume, though, that he was; for the signiWcances of the volume’s running order generally, see Reverand, Final Poetic Mode, and for the ramiWcations of the central placement of ‘The Cock and the Fox’ in particular, Jayne Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1740 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 123. 328 Patterson, Fables of Power, 14–32. 329 For Aesop as a Westminster school-text, see Lewis, English Fable, 36–7. 330 Patterson, Fables of Power, 16.


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servile estate was accorded central signiWcance. Following Aesop from Greece across the Hellenistic diaspora, as he is sold from master to master, until eventually the Samian philosopher Xanthus sets him free, it is largely composed of anecdotes of his witty responses to questions or accusations put by his owners. These responses generally take the form of fables, and Oliver Goldsmith was retailing the perennial explanation why when he observed in the recension of the Vita he supplied for Thomas Bewick’s Select Fables (1784) that ‘Aesop’s Situation as a Slave might suggest this Method to him; for what would have been scornfully rejected if delivered in an authoritative Style by a Slave was received with avidity in the form of a Fable.’331 The idea of fable as ‘a slave’s medium’ underpinned the tradition of politically subversive Aesopianism which ran strong in the second half of the seventeenth century,332 from John Ogilby’s crypto-royalist Fables of Aesop Paraphras’d in English Verse (1651) to Roger L’Estrange’s crypto-Jacobite Fables of Aesop, with Other Eminent Mythologists (1692). Dryden had deftly traded on the mode’s association with ‘the ethos of the underdog’333 in his Aesopian apologetic The Hind and the Panther (1687) to further his presentation of England’s Roman Catholics as a persecuted and powerless minority. Now ‘the prudently oblique genre of fable’ oVered him the chance to maintain his Jacobite principles whilst presenting himself as a poor drudge incapable of threatening the mighty Williamite state.334 That, though, is putting the matter defensively. The relevance to Dryden of fable’s status as the mode of the downtrodden extends beyond the topical innuendoes about William III’s standing army and so forth which may be detected here and there in Fables. It aVected the fundamentals of Dryden’s sense of self, and fostered in him a spirit not of cautious obliquity but of untrammelled self-expression. For Aesop was a prime example of the slave understood not as a constrained and dependent Wgure but as the embodiment of liberty in its most extreme form. The Vita Aesopi, picaresque and persistently scatological, locates him squarely within the tradition of the ‘trickster slave’ who lives life ‘naturally’, pursuing his instinctual desires and bodily needs without qualm or scruple, and so has an inbuilt advantage over his masters, hampered as they are by social conventions and proprieties. Aesopian 331 Quoted in Lewis, English Fable, 79. 332 I take the phrase from Loveridge, Augustan Fable, 67; the classic account of the tradition is Patterson, Fables of Power. 333 Loveridge, Augustan Fable, 65. 334 Thus Sloman, Dryden: The Poetics of Translation, 157–9.

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fable, with its concentration on the animal aspects of human being, is the medium of such ‘natural liberty’. This way of thinking about slaves has received little attention in academic accounts of the vicissitudes of liberty in seventeenth-century England; overwhelmingly, historians and literary historians have concentrated on the so-called ‘neo-Roman’ tradition, and for writers in that tradition, chief among them Milton, ‘the concept of liberty is always deWned . . . by contrast with the condition of slavery’.335 The ‘liberty’ of the slave is not in fact liberty but ‘licence’: the shameful irresponsibility of one who lacks the capacity for rational self-control which sets men apart from animals. As Milton said of the critics of Tetrachordon (1645), Aesopically mutating them into ‘owls’, ‘cuckoos’, ‘asses’, and ‘dogs’ (since their opposition to divorce amounted, in his view, to a charter for animalistic fornication within godless marriages), ‘Licence they mean when they cry Libertie.’336 But Dryden was no ‘neo-Roman’, as we saw in the Wrst section of this chapter, and ‘licence’ for him was no bugbear. On the contrary, he naturalized the term ‘poetic licence’ within the English critical lexicon in a run of essays he wrote during the late 1670s, evincing none of the misgivings about it felt even by contemporary critics as averse as he was to the Miltonic understanding of liberty: the Earl of Roscommon, for instance, who lamented in An Essay on Translated Verse that ‘The Priviledge that Ancient Poets claim’ had ‘Now turn’d to License by too just a Name’.337 Indeed, Dryden went close to guying Milton’s line about using ‘Libertie’ to mean ‘Licence’ when he wrote in ‘The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence’, the preface to his operatic rewrite of Paradise Lost: ‘Poetique Licence I take to be the Liberty, which Poets have assum’d to Themselves in all ages, of speaking things in Verse, which are beyond the severity of Prose.’338 More recently, he had connected such poetic licence with the Wgure of the slave, in a vigorous and notably personal treatment of the trickster Sosia in his adaptation of Plautus’s comedy Amphitryon (1690), a central source for the type of the paradoxically free servus in English literary culture.339 In particular, Dryden’s Sosia has a facility with what the poet 335 Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 39; on Milton in particular as a ‘neo-Roman’, see Quentin Skinner, ‘John Milton and the Politics of Slavery’, Prose Studies, 23 (2000), 1–22. 336 ‘Sonnet XII’, l. 14. 337 An Essay on Translated Verse, ll. 320–1. 338 CE xii. 96. 339 For Plautine inXuence over the presentation of slaves in the comedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, see Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 106–9, 115–19, 126–8.


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himself had several times identiWed in his critical writings as a prime token of an uncontrollably licentious wit: the Ovidian catechresis or ‘turn on words’. With the confusions created by Mercury’s having disguised himself in Sosia’s likeness at their height, for instance, the slave protests to his master Amphitryon: ‘You won’t give a Man leave to speak Poetically now; or else I wou’d say, That I was arriv’d at the Door, before I came thither.’340 Dryden would deplore such ‘glittering triXes’ again in the preface to Fables, though his own translations of Ovid are liberally scattered with them.341 But the bearing of the Plautine servus as an embodiment of poetic licence upon Fables becomes clearest when we consider the personal attack on Dryden, launched by Jeremy Collier in A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), which importantly catalyzed the poet’s self-understanding in his final collection. According to Collier, licence was endemic in English dramatic culture throughout the reigns of Charles II and James II. Central to his argument is a running contrast with the drama of the ancient world; Christian playwrights ought naturally to observe higher standards of morality than their heathen forebears, and yet ‘notwithstanding the Latitudes of Paganism, the Roman and Greek Theatres were much more inoVensive than ours’.342 Dryden was the worst oVender, even by comparison with Plautus, ‘the most exceptionable’ of the ancients. In Plautus ‘the Men who talk intemperately are generally Slaves’, whereby ‘the Fault is much extenuated. For Wrst, the representation is more Naturall this way; And which is still better, ’tis not likely to pass into Imitation: Slaves and Clowns are not big enough to spread Infection; and set up an ill Fashion.’343 Dryden, though, observes no such decorum: licentiousness in his plays is no respecter of divisions of class or gender. It is not an aspect of characterization, but must instead be referred to the playwright himself: Dryden’s is an innately slavish

340 Amphitryon, III. i. 74–7. 341 The classic account of this aspect of Dryden’s Ovidian versions is David Hopkins, ‘Dryden and Ovid’s ‘‘Wit out of season’’ ’, in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian InXuences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 167–90. 342 Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (Menston, 1971), p. 15. 343 Ibid., 16–17.

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imagination. This attack drew a complicated response from Dryden. It is on his mind from the start in Fables, in the preface, and remains so at the end, in the ‘Poeta Loquitur’ which introduces the Wnal translation, ‘Cymon and Iphigenia’; in between, it probably motivated the most conspicuous plot adjustment Dryden makes to any of his originals: the interposition of a hasty marriage before Sigismunda and Guiscardo consummate their love in the Wrst of his three selections from Boccaccio.344 Partly, Dryden knew Collier was right: some years beforehand the poet had admitted his involvement in lowering the cultural tone of ‘this lubrique and adulterate age’ in his ode ‘To the Memory of Anne Killigrew’ (1686), and now he makes a further recantation of his theatrical past, ‘the Scandal I have given by my loose Writings’.345 But he also felt Collier’s motives were impure, and particularly that the vindictiveness of his attack was incommensurate with a clergyman’s duty of forgiveness. The jostling of these opposed attitudes made it hard for Dryden to rid his mind of the troublesome priest. But there was a more deep-lying reason too: Collier’s line of attack had become snagged in an interior debate Dryden was having about pleasure and responsibility in the poet’s life. Integral to that debate was translation, and its potential links with slavery in the Aesopian or Plautine understanding of the condition. It is in the last two paragraphs of the preface that Dryden formally responds to Collier, inviting him to ‘be glad of my Repentance’ and lamenting that ‘a Divine might have employ’d his Pains to better purpose, than in the Nastiness of Plautus and Aristophanes’;346 more suggestive, though, is the earlier passage, beginning with an allusion to the title of Collier’s work, which considers its allegations more reflectively: In general I will only say, that I have written nothing which savours of Immorality or Profaneness; at least, I am not conscious to my self of any such Intention. If there happen to be found an irreverent Expression, or a Thought too wanton, they are crept into my Verses through my Inadvertency: If the Searchers Wnd any in the Cargo, let them be stav’d or forfeited, like Counterbanded Goods; at least, let their Authors be answerable for them, as being but imported Merchandise and not of my own Manufacture.347

344 Reverand, Final Poetic Mode, 110. 346 Ibid., 46. 347 Ibid., 27.

345 CE vii. 38.


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‘I am not conscious to myself of any such Intention’, ‘they are crept into my Verses through my Inadvertency’: Dryden pleads not guilty on grounds of diminished responsibility. Only a translator, he is not ‘answerable’ for the poetic ‘Goods’ he traYcks; they are ‘imported’, not of his ‘Manufacture’. That mercantile self-Wguration broadly correlates with the passage in the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’ where Dryden had declared ‘I trade both with the Living and the Dead, for the enrichment of our Native Language’, casting himself as a peaceably industrious citizen and disavowing the alternative heroic and imperialist models of translation which he implicitly aligned with William III’s humanly and Wnancially wasteful European expansionism: ‘I carry not out the Treasure of the Nation, which is never to return: but what I bring from Italy, I spend in England.’348 But in this later instance the equation of translator and trader takes a new and provocative form. The suggestion that merchants not be held accountable for the commodities they imported would have commanded little assent among Dryden’s readers, and certainly none from Collier, reminiscent as it is of the notoriously laissez-faire practices of the Dutch whose (reputed) willingness to do obeisance to pagan gods in exchange for trading concessions in the Americas had been widely denounced as atheistical by English commentators (not least Dryden himself ) during the period of the Anglo-Dutch wars.349 Dryden’s attempted self-exculpation risks compounding his guilt: he attributes to himself as a translator the very irresponsibility, want of autonomy, from which ‘the Slave’s license’ was traditionally held to derive.350 That passage is recognizably continuous with the main lines of Dryden’s self-presentation in the preface to Fables. Wantonness and inadvertency are twinned at the heart of the preface’s metaphorics and in the tissues of its style. The account of how the extracts came to be chosen which I began this section by quoting is a case in point, with its underlying sexual Wguration (‘they began to swell into a little Volume’) and its string of involuntary verbal formulations (‘I could not balk ’em’, ‘I was so taken with’, ‘now I found’). A similar compound of 348 CE v. 336; the buried slur against William depends on the proverbial idea that the treasure of a nation is its people: that the English were being exported in droves to die on European battleWelds in ‘William’s Wars’ was a central plank of Tory and Jacobite rhetoric in the 1690s, for which see Craig Rose, England in the 1690s (Oxford, 1999), pp. 117–22. 349 See, for instance, the prologue to Amboyna (1672), ll. 18–19: ‘They have no more Religion, faith—then you; j Interest’s the God they worship in their State.’ 350 Fitzgerald, Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination, 41–7.

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self-gratiWcation and unconsciousness informs what commentators have noted are the dominant tropes of the preface’s rhetoric: garrulousness and digression.351 But the tone is set by its celebrated opening conceit: ’Tis with a Poet as with a Man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he supposes, in casting up the Cost beforehand: But, generally speaking, he is mistaken in his Account, and reckons short of the Expence he Wrst intended: He alters his Mind as the Work proceeds, and will have this or that Convenience more, of which he had not thought when he began. So has it hapned to me; I have built a House where I intended but a Lodge: Yet with better Success than a certain Nobleman, who beginning with a Dog-kennel, never liv’d to Wnish the Palace he had contriv’d.352

The equation of poetry with architecture, as deployed by Ben Jonson and his ‘sons’, generally inculcates the poet’s duty of rational mastery over his materials;353 Dryden himself had applied it to that eVect as recently as the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’, speaking of an ‘heroick poem’ as ‘a Wrm Building’ in which ‘even the Cavities ought not to be Wll’d with Rubbish, which is of a perishable kind, destructive to the strength: But with Brick or Stone, though of less pieces, yet of the same Nature, and Wtted to the Cranies’.354 Here, though, he inverts this function. The strength of his desire for ‘this or that convenience more’ carried him further and further away from his original design, until the volume took on a life of its own. Dryden has been mastered by his creation, an upheaval in the balance of power he articulates through the Wrst of the preface’s sequence of inadvertent verbal phrases: ‘So has it hapned to me; I have built a House, where I intended but a Lodge’. How Wtting, too, that this exposition of pleasure-centred involuntariness should culminate in an Aesopian scenario where the division between a ‘Dog-kennel’ and a ‘Palace’, the domains of human rationality and animal—slavish—instinctuality, is thrown down.

351 Reverand, Final Poetic Mode, 6–7; Steven Zwicker, ‘Dissolution of Things’, in John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Hammond and Hopkins, 308–9, 320–8; Anne Cotterill, ‘Dryden’s Fables and the Judgement of Art’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dryden, ed. Zwicker, 259–78 (at 259–62). 352 CE vii. 24. 353 On Dryden’s uses of the analogy over the course of his career, see Robert W. McHenry, ‘Dryden’s Architectural Metaphors and Restoration Architecture’, Restoration, 9 (1985), 61–74. 354 CE v. 267.


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DEATHL ESS SUBSTANCE The hinterland between volitional and involuntary states is a prime habitat of the translations in Fables. Those which mainly concern me here, the selections from the Metamorphoses, especially enabled Dryden to explore this hinterland, moments of metamorphosis being (among other things) points of intersection between fully selfconscious states and semi-conscious or substantially unconscious ones. The penumbras of sentience Ovid’s heroes and heroines pass through in becoming birds and beasts or trees, rivers, and stones clearly fascinated Dryden, and a series of commentators have shown how adeptly he elicits them.355 To their instances, I shall add just one personal favourite, from ‘Cinyras and Myrrha’. Torn between her incestuous desire for her father and her repugnance at that desire, Myrrha spends a sleepless night: But no Repose cou’d wretched Myrrha Wnd, Her Body rouling, as she roul’d her Mind: Mad with Desire, she ruminates her Sin, And wishes all her Wishes o’er again: Now she despairs, and now resolves to try; Wou’d not, and wou’d again, she knows not why; Stops, and returns, makes and retracts the Vow; Fain wou’d begin, but understands not how.356

As Dryden’s editors point out, this ‘imitates and extends the mimetic rhetorical patterning’ in the corresponding lines of the original, the gamut of Wgures of repetition and antithesis Ovid uses to convey Myrrha’s self-division.357 Better yet, though, it imitates and extends a superb Ovidian joke. ‘Ruminates’ is the punchline, the Latinate trisyllable standing out from what is a pacy passage composed almost exclusively of colloquial monosyllables and disyllables. Ovid says that

355 See in particular Charles Tomlinson’s treatment of Io’s retransformation from heifer to woman, in Poetry and Metamorphosis, 15–16; David Hopkins’s account of the transformations at the end of ‘Ceyx and Alcyone’, in ‘Dryden and Ovid’s ‘‘Wit out of Season’’ ’, 188–9; and Paul Hammond’s discussion of the passage about the growth of the human embryo in ‘Of the Pythagorean Philosophy’, in ‘John Dryden: The Classicist as Sceptic’, The Seventeenth Century, 4 (1989), 165–87 (at 179–81). 356 ‘Cinyras and Myrrha’, ll. 128–33. 357 H v. 274.

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Myrrha ‘is consumed by an ungoverned passion’ (‘igni j carpitur indomito’)358 and Dryden recognized the strongly animal aroma of the verb ‘carpitur’: it is the standard term for the grazing of sheep and cattle in the Georgics. Attempting to justify herself earlier (in a passage which I shall consider in more detail shortly), Myrrha had asked why the laws against incest were ‘Made not for any other Beast, but Man?’ and argued that ‘All Creatures else are of a happier Kind’ since no ‘Thoughts of Sin disturb their Peace of Mind’.359 Ovid’s ‘carpitur’ treats her like one of the farm animals she envies, a ‘lusty Ram’ or ‘salacious Goat’360—a ruminant. But Dryden’s ‘ruminates’ goes one better: equivocating between meditation and mastication, the Wgurative and literal senses of ‘chewing the cud’, it catches Myrrha on the cusp of forswearing the moral responsibilities which come with human self-consciousness for the simpler unreXectively physical pleasures of an animal mode of being. The capacity of metamorphosis to bring to light gradations of consciousness and will made it by extension a natural vehicle for mapping the bounds of liberty. Given the ubiquitous association in classical philosophy and literature between slaves and animals,361 transgressions across the line supposedly dividing men from beasts inevitably promoted awareness of the similarly porous nature of the boundary which theoretically separated the free from the enslaved. The ‘polar opposition between slave and free’ in ancient cultures in fact ‘coexisted with a spectrum of relations haunted, to varying degrees, with the specter of servility’, and metamorphic Wctions enabled the Greeks and Romans to engage with this discomWting reality.362 From the beast fables of Phaedrus and Aesop through Apuleius’s Golden Ass to Ovid’s epic itself, metamorphosis came to function as a ‘site where anxieties caused by the presence of slaves in human society are enacted and negotiated’.363 Dryden’s particular and personal interest in the equation of animal and slave equipped him to pick up this subtext. But he was not particularly concerned to draw it out in his Wrst group of translations from the Metamorphoses, the three included in Examen Poeticum. Not until Fables, breaking out after his long labours on the Virgil and under 358 Metamorphoses x. 369–70. 359 ‘Cinyras and Myrrha’, ll. 42, 49, 51. 360 Ibid., ll. 45–6. 361 Some source texts for this equation are supplied in Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 110–14. 362 See in particular Fitzgerald, Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination, ch. 5: ‘Enslavement and metamorphosis’ (I quote from 87). 363 Ibid., 111.


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renewed attack on the score of his putative licentiousness, did it become central to his understanding of Ovid and Ovidian self-understanding. The place where this sensitivity is most concentratedly apparent is at the climax of ‘Ceyx and Alcyone’. Desolate after the death of Ceyx, Alcyone throws herself oV a headland only to be transformed into a seabird; then, as she strives to ‘print a Kiss, the last essay of Love’364 on her husband’s corpse, he too metamorphoses. But the birds they become are keening birds: ‘Her Bill, tho’ slender, sends a creaking Noise; j And imitates a lamentable Voice.’365 The couple’s transformation has failed to free them from their mournful past: The Gods their Shapes to Winter-Birds translate, But both obnoxious to their former Fate.366

‘Obnoxious’ is one of those moments of conspicuous Latinity which are so telling in Dryden’s translations: it means ‘subject to’, but its etymological root has strong connotations of ‘slavish’. Among Roman moralists and historians ‘obnoxius’ was the preferred term for the several forms of dependency (whether actual or notional) on the will of another person which they grouped together as slavery: thus, for instance, Sallust in Bellum Catilinae protested that ‘ever since our republic submitted to the jurisdiction and control of a few powerful persons, the rest of us have been obnoxii, living in subservience to them’, while Seneca deWned slavery in De BeneWciis as the condition in which the bodies of persons ‘are obnoxia, at the mercy of their masters, to whom they are ascribed’.367 ‘Obnoxius’ is indeed what Dryden was translating: Ovid wrote ‘fatis obnoxius isdem’, and there is evidence elsewhere in the Metamorphoses that he used the adjective to mean ‘servile’.368 The literalism is mimetic: Dryden is ‘obnoxious’ to the ‘Fate’ of the ‘former’ Ovidian version of the scene. He underscores the reXexive eVect with the rhyme ‘translate/Fate’, a rhyme whose reason we have already seen him acknowledging in ‘Palamon and Arcite’ and ‘The Cock and the Fox’, and which his poetic ‘son’ Pope would later recognize in his turn, 364 ‘Ceyx and Alcyone’, l. 485. 365 Ibid., ll. 478–9. 366 Ibid., ll. 490–1. 367 Quoted, in the course of a discussion of the centrality of the term, in Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 42–4. 368 At Metamorphoses v. 235–6, Perseus petriWes the cringing Phineus: ‘sed tamen os timidum vultus in marmore supplex j submissae manus faciesque obnoxia mansit’ (‘Now the cowardly face was Wxed in marble, the pleading hands, his entire subservient attitude’); Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary records this example under sense II.D of ‘obnoxius’ meaning ‘slavish’ or ‘mean-spirited’.

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notably when lamenting in the Wnal version of The Dunciad (1743) that ‘Hiberian Politics’ had been ‘O Swift! thy fate j And Pope’s, ten years to comment and translate’.369 The interrelation of metamorphosis with the processes of emancipation and enslavement is central to ‘Cinyras and Myrrha’. As David Hopkins showed some years ago in an inaugurative essay, Dryden, in preparing his translation, attended closely to the tale’s involvement in debates about natural law and natural liberty, especially in the writings of Montaigne.370 For Montaigne, Myrrha was a victim of the human tendency to generalize prematurely and repressively when framing moral codes; her case shows that (in Hopkins’s formulation) ‘what we call Natural Law is merely the improper imputation of universal validity to the system of practices to which we are most accustomed’.371 Dryden draws this analysis into his verse, protracting Myrrha’s protest against the parochialism of her culture’s sexual norms over nine lines and characteristically bringing it to turn upon the word ‘slave’: All Creatures else are of a happier Kind, Whom nor ill-natur’d Laws from Pleasure bind, Nor Thoughts of Sin disturb their Peace of Mind. But Man, a Slave of his own making lives; The Fool denies himself what Nature gives: Too busie Senates, with an over-care To make us better than our Kind can bear, Have dash’d a Spice of Envy in the Laws, And straining up too high, have spoil’d the Cause.372

As Myrrha contemplates bursting the bounds of enslaving law, then, so Dryden breaks his dependency on Ovid; more particularly, he casts his translation of the epigrammatic lines which clinch her appeal from human to natural law in the form of the variation on the norms of heroic couplet verse which looks most like a departure from a parochial standard to a more universal one: the triplet.373 He avails himself of the 369 The Dunciad in Four Books, iii. 331–2; I quote from the Longman edition prepared by Valerie Rumbold (Harlow, 1999). 370 David Hopkins, ‘Nature’s Laws and Man’s: The Story of Cinyras and Myrrha in Ovid and Dryden’, Modern Language Review, 80 (1985), 786–801 (esp. 794–7). 371 Ibid., 795; for the reference in Montaigne, see The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. Michael Screech (Harmondsworth, 1987), pp. 654–5. 372 ‘Cinyras and Myrrha’, ll. 52–7. 373 On such rhymes more generally in Dryden, see Christopher Ricks’s eVervescent essay ‘Dryden’s Triplets’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dryden, ed. Zwicker, 92–110,


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pleasures of a fuller measure. But in doing so is he emancipating himself from an ‘ill-natur’d’ prosodic law or taking a slavish licence? Dryden can no more extricate himself from uncertainty on this score than Myrrha can. When later in her self-examination orthodox morality gains the upper hand, and she recoils in horror from her longing ‘to kiss’ Cinyras ‘and more, if more I might’, Dryden again employs a triplet, but now in a spirit of self-accusation: More, impious Maid! What more canst thou design? To make a monstrous Mixture in thy Line? And break all Statutes Humane and Divine?374

Monstrous mixtures in the line is just what later readers, notably Swift and (on a very Wne balance) Samuel Johnson, would come to consider Dryden’s triplets: breaks from the ‘lawful bounds’375 of the heroic couplet symptomatic of the licentious turn of a mind willing and able to conform itself so sympathetically to the contours of a mind like Myrrha’s. But that is only the thin end of the passage’s wedge of reXexive resonance. For translation may itself be construed as a means of escaping ‘the system of’—imaginative or moral—‘practices to which we are most accustomed’ and acceding to some larger and more authentic ‘Natural’ vision. It had been thus construed, I suggested in Chapters 1 and 2, by Henry Vaughan during his internal exile and by Abraham Cowley in his retirement. They used the construction aYrmatively, but a pejorative understanding of it had subsequently become current in the Restoration. Indeed, for some cultural conservatives, imaginative cosmopolitanism was the root of all the licentious evils of the Civil War period. In a famous passage of Behemoth (1682), for instance, Hobbes laid the blame for the ‘rebellion’ against Charles I on those Jacobean ‘democratical gentlemen’ who immersed themselves as university undergraduates in studying ancient Greek and Roman republican political thought, thereby coming to believe that the entire traditionary system of monarchist practices in their native land could be simply set aside, and England at a which touches brieXy on their relation to the subject of ‘liberty’, though not in relation to Fables and not in the present connection with ‘Natural Law’. 374 ‘Cinyras and Myrrha’, ll. 82, 83–5. 375 Johnson, ‘Dryden’, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. Hill, i. 468: the phrase refers in the Wrst instance to ‘the English alexandrine’ but Johnson goes on to say that ‘the eVect of the triplet is the same’; the passage as a whole is Wnely nuanced, and certainly does not anathematize triplets, though the weight of testimony is on the negative side; for Swift’s rather blunter hostility, see ibid., 467 n. 5.

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stroke translated to Periclean Athens or Ciceronian Rome.376 As we saw in the Wrst section of this chapter, it had occurred to Dryden that translation might free him from his conWnement to the dramatic and satiric system of Restoration culture at a time when he precisely thought of himself as (in Myrrha’s phrase to conjure with) ‘a Slave of his own making’. In having her contend that man’s repression of his natural desire for pleasure robs him of his ‘Peace of Mind’, Dryden makes Myrrha sound like an aspirant to the Epicurean ideal of ataraxia:377 indeed, her rhyme ‘lives’/‘gives’, in connection with a personiWed ‘Nature’ and the self-enslaving ‘Fool’ who refuses her beneWcence, recurs from the passage which he nominated in the preface to Sylvae as a supreme distillation of Epicurean wisdom, the ‘Prosopopeia of Nature’ in ‘Lucretius: Against the Fear of Death’. The path to philosophical emancipation Dryden had once contemplated taking as a cosmopolitan translator now appears as the highway to bestial licence: the superstitious forebodings to which the unenlightened masses enslave themselves turn out to include the taboo against incest. But it is the tale which immediately precedes ‘Cinyras and Myrrha’, forming with it a diptych set on Cyprus, the island of Venus, and centrally concerned with themes of emancipation and illicit pleasure, that has most to tell us about Dryden’s thinking about metamorphosis, translation, and the bounds of liberty. ‘Pygmalion and the Statue’ is the shortest of the Fables translations and one of the few Dryden does not discuss or even mention by name in the preface; it has been correspondingly neglected by commentators, even those who have written admiringly about others of the Ovid translations.378 Yet it deserves to be ranked among the masterpieces of the volume. Both Pygmalion and the statue, as Dryden imagines them, are slaves of sorts. Already in the original the sculptor is, Ovid suggests, prey to an unusual strain of the ‘servitium amoris’ commonly described in Latin love elegy ‘through which the lover-poet presents himself as eager (or forced) to throw away his manly Roman autarky and become a slave to a woman’.379 And his preference for the statue over 376 Behemoth or the Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tonnies (Chicago, 1990), pp. 2–3, 23, 56. 377 H v. 270, note to l. 51, citing (among other analogues) ‘Lucretius: Concerning the Nature of Love’, 110–15, and ‘Horace: Epode II’, 3–4. 378 No essay or article has been devoted to it (unlike the majority of the Fables), and it is not addressed in Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, nor in either of the surveys of Dryden’s career—John Dryden (1986) and John Dryden: Writers and their Work (2004)—produced by the most sensitive reader of his Ovid: David Hopkins. 379 Alison Sharrock, ‘Ovid and the Discourses of Love: The Amatory Works’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 150–62 (at 158).


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Xesh-and-blood women readily invites thought about attitudes towards slaves, those human objects. Dryden enhances these aspects of the tale, particularly through his treatment of the passage detailing how Pygmalion woos the statue with ‘little presents, just as any lover would court his mistress’.380 Ovid stipulates the customary shells, pebbles, and small birds, but Dryden makes some signiWcant reWnements, upgrading the ‘teretesque lapillos’ (‘smooth pebbles’) to ‘orient pearls’ and specifying the species of the ‘parva volucres’ (‘small birds’) as well as the manner in which they are accessorized: ‘Parrots, imitating Humane Tongue, j And Singing-birds in Silver Cages hung’.381 The Wrst of these changes insinuates servitude in so far as the eroticized luxury which ‘orient’ primarily connotes was part and parcel of the larger association of eastern cultures with absolutism within the late seventeenth-century imaginary:382 the statue is an Asiatic potentate before whom her creator slavishly grovels. But it is the detail Dryden adds in the case of the birds that brings the subject of dependency to the fore, as the pivot on which the tale’s various engagement with ontological mobility turns. Consider especially ‘hung’. We may at first glance take the verb to govern ‘Cages’ but it actually governs the birds themselves. Yet to talk of ‘hanging’ birds is to think of them as mere matter like the ‘Pendants’ or ‘Pearls’that Pygmalion hangs (here Ovid does use ‘pendent’)383 from the statue’s ‘Ears’ and around ‘her Neck’ four lines later. And to think that of these particular breeds of birds would be doubly reductive, an act not merely of objectiWcation but also, in some measure, of self-objectiWcation, since they can sing and even mimic human speech. Dryden himself is inevitably implicated in this complex economy of objectiWcation. Ovid’s story of a sculptor infatuated with his own creation had often been construed as an allegory about art, either an admonition about the artist’s rivalry with Nature or a celebration of it, and Dryden’s imitative parrots are readily compatible with that interpretative tradition. What is more, caged birds, and

380 Jane Miller, ‘Some Versions of Pygmalion’, in Ovid Renewed, ed. Martindale, 205–14, 279–82 (at 207); she points out that ‘Propertius’ gives the same kinds of gifts to his beloved (at 281 n. 16). 381 ‘Pygmalion and the Statue’, ll. 39, 41–2. 382 See Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 71–3. 383 Metamorphoses, x. 265: ‘aure leves bacae, redimicula pectore pendent’.

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parrots most particularly, could stand for the proscribed or imprisoned poet in early-modern culture, especially in Aesopian contexts.384 If Dryden partly considered the tale of Pygmalion as a fable about the poet’s vocation, what it had to say on the subject generally would have gone double for the particular form his own practice of that vocation principally took during the years he spent singing in cultural captivity: namely, translation. For while the poet engaged in ‘original’ composition, imitating Nature, is at one remove from her, the translator, imitating an imitation, is at two: the works he makes objectify twice over. Then too, translation had been conventionally associated with the matters of inanimateness and animation which lie at the heart of Pygmalion’s story, ever since Denham in his preface to The Destruction of Troy accused literalist translators of draining the ‘spirit’ from their originals, leaving only a ‘Caput mortuum’. The metaphor was subsequently developed (as I mentioned in Chapter 1) by Dryden himself when in the preface to Sylvae (1685) he described a successful translation as preserving ‘the spirit which animates the whole’ body of its author, and a failed one as a ‘Carcass’. In short, it would have been quite natural for Dryden to apply to a Wne poem lifelessly translated the striking epithet he applies at one point to the statue: ‘th’ inanimated Fair’.385 Moments later Venus viviWes it, and in translation too, under the aegis of the goddess of pleasure, what is inanimate may be animated. Such a miracle had ensued in Fables, so Dryden gives us to believe in the preface: with Venus in the imaginative ascendant, new life was breathed into the bodies of dead poets and in turn into the rigidifying body of their 68-year-old translator, ‘a Cripple in my Limbs’, whose passion for Ovid and the others kept him ‘as vigorous as ever in the Faculties of my Soul’.386 Dryden registers awareness of the analogy in ‘inanimated’. Five-syllable words are rare in his couplet verse, and extremely so in narrative contexts where their tendency to clog up the rhythm is especially unwelcome. But in this case Dryden precisely wanted to ‘unsupple’ the line, if I may be permitted to coin the negative form of the lovely rare verb he had used to describe the rebirth of the human race from the stones Deucalion and Pyrrha throw over their shoulders after the Xood in ‘The First Book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses’: 384 Patterson, Fables of Power, 45–50. 385 ‘Pygmalion and the Statue’, l. 69. 386 CE vii. 26.


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The Stones (a Miracle to Mortal View, But long Tradition makes it pass for true) Did Wrst the Rigour of their Kind expell, And, suppl’d into softness, as they fell, Then swell’d, and swelling, by degrees grew warm; And took the Rudiments of Humane Form.387

‘Inanimate’, though, would have achieved the same eVect and was altogether more current. So why ‘inanimated’? Because, I think, as well as the sense apparent here, ‘not endowed with life’,388 it could also mean the opposite, be a passive form of the verb to ‘inanimate’: ‘To animate; to quicken’. Or at least it could have done so once: Samuel Johnson says the verb ‘is not in use’, citing no instance after Donne. In fact, though, it became obsolete—‘inanimated’—only very shortly before Fables, to judge from OED, which lists examples from Rushden’s Further Discourse of Bees (1679) and the Defence of Liberty against Tyrants (1689). A minor distortion in the space-time continuum of language, then, would suYce to make it possible for ‘th’ inanimated Fair’ to mean ‘the animated fair’—a distortion such as Venus eVects in the domain of ontology when she puts the Wnishing touch to the statue’s metamorphosis from veined stone to veined Xesh. Still, it is not, strictly speaking, a case of ambiguity: the secondary meaning is unavailable historically and logically. Its being so is what makes the epithet a fully appropriate poetic analogue for the statue’s transformation, which comes about through the power of transgressive desire, wielded Wrst by Pygmalion and then on his behalf by Venus. That is, the poetic licence needed to call back from the dead the verb ‘to inanimate’ in the sense of ‘to animate’ is akin to the licentious erotic energy which within the tale itself achieves the dissolution of the boundary between stone and skin. In Ovid, this licentiousness is scarcely subject to moral scrutiny: Pygmalion’s desire is primarily represented as exquisite or fantastical. But Dryden emphasizes the illicitness of that desire; not to a moralistic end (as Renaissance allegorizers of Ovid once did) but in a spirit of irony. His Pygmalion returns from Venus’s shrine ‘impudent in Hope’389 (the broadly resonant formulation was Dryden’s own) and his shameless faith is appropriately 387 ‘The First Book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, ll. 536–41; this passage is the only instance cited by Samuel Johnson under the verbal form of ‘supple’. 388 The gloss given in H v. 264. 389 ‘Pygmalion and the Statue’, l. 73.

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rewarded. When Venus brings the statue to life, Dryden strongly intimates, she emancipates it in the fullest possible extent, gives it not just its liberty but licence. As Ovid describes it, the transformation process is uniformly one of softening, unsurprisingly enough; Dryden, however, reverses this emphasis at the critical juncture. One moment the statue is becoming putty in Pygmalion’s hands—‘It seem’d, the Breast beneath his Fingers bent’—the next, when ‘He felt again’, in a doubletake added by Dryden his Fingers made a Print, ’Twas Flesh, but Flesh so Wrm, it rose against the Dint:390

The purpose of that counterintuitive last line is apparent in its being an alexandrine, a case of the ‘licence’ which Dryden said he took in his Virgil when he especially wanted to convey ‘Majesty’ and which he considered a mainstay of ‘Masculine’ poetic style.391 Dryden’s Pygmalion, it seems, has got more than he bargained for from Venus: the statue has not only crossed the line dividing stone from human Xesh but also that which divides soft female Xesh from the Wrm male variety.392 Having given up his dominance over his art’s object, he is in danger (especially if ‘rose against’ suggests uprising) of becoming to her what the knight agrees to be when he is ‘turn’d . . . the Wife’ at the end of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’: a ‘Subject-Servant’.393 Or what that hybrid noun strains to stop short of but husbands regularly are to their wives in Fables: her ‘Slave’.394 Considering all the reXexive pertinences I have discussed in ‘Cinyras and Myrrha’ and ‘Pygmalion and the Statue’, it is tempting to think of 390 ‘Pygmalion and the Statue’, ll. 80, 81–2. 391 Dedication of the ‘Aeneis’; CE v. 322. 392 Further masculinizing touches in Dryden’s presentation of the transformed statue include his phallic rendering of Ovid’s ‘saliunt temptatae pollice venae’ (‘the veins pulsed beneath his testing Wnger’) as ‘Presses the Pulse, and feels the leaping Vein’ (l. 89)—‘leap’ means ‘mount’ in the context of animal sexuality throughout his Georgics, while in ‘Lucretius: Concerning the Nature of Love’ ‘good wives’ are advised like ‘the Females of the four foot kind’ to ‘Receive the leapings of their Males behind’ (ll. 274–5); also his removal of the conventionally feminizing modesty and timidity (‘erubuit timidumque’) which in Ovid the Wrst sight of her lover occasions in the statue—in Dryden she reacts with rather more lively ‘surprize’ (l. 95). 393 ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, ll. 518, 520 (the Wrst line is an addition, the second imparts a metamorphic Xavour to ‘’Than have I gote of you the mastry’); compare the similar concern with shadings of dependency when Palamon vows to Venus that he is ‘A Servant to thy Sex, a Slave to thee’: ‘Palamon and Arcite’, iii. 157. 394 To cite just the most proximate instance, King Arthur is described as being ‘to Nuptial Ties a Slave’ at the start of the tale (l. 65).


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them as allegories of translation. They breathe a ‘Spirit of Liberty’, to be sure, but not one any of Dryden’s fellow Jacobites nor the Whig editor of Poems on AVairs of State nor even those who held a Miltonian view of freedom would have congratulated Dryden for manifesting. By the translator’s liberty, they might have gathered from these tales as from the similarly pleasure-centred style of his self-presentation in the preface, Dryden meant licence. Desiring his originals, the translator reviviWes them, but like Myrrha’s and Pygmalion’s that desire is illicit, trespassing across boundaries—between languages, between the dead and the living. The new life which comes of such violations of taboo is correspondingly licentious, like that of the masculinized statue or of Myrrha’s child, Adonis, who is destined to bind even Venus herself in ‘the links of Love’ and who at the end of the tale ‘ripe for Birth, distends with deadly Throws j The swelling Rind’ of his dendriWed mother ‘and pushes into Life’.395 That is one of a number of strikingly forceful evocations of birth in Fables; its full implications emerge when in ‘Of the Pythagorean Philosophy’ Dryden uses the same verb to describe the birth of the human ‘Creature’ in general as an escape from captivity: when the Mothers Throws begin to come, The Creature, pent within the narrow Room, Breaks his blind Prison, pushing to repair His stiZed Breath, and draw the living Air;396

As a translator, Dryden too was involved in the struggle to ‘repair j . . . stiZed Breath’, to release his original authors from conWnement in ‘the narrow Room’ of their native languages. At the end of his long career of translating he had come to think that what would survive of the poems he repaired was life in this ‘pushing’ licentious form, a sheer desiring impelledness onward. In On Late Style, his last book, left unWnished at his recent death, Edward Said challenged the dominant understanding of ‘last works’ as reXecting ‘a special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity’. ‘What’, he asked, ‘of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, diYculty, and unresolved contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce the serenity of ‘‘ripeness is all’’?’397 Said’s instances of this alternative conception of late style are Mozart and Beethoven, Thomas Mann, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, C. P. Cavafy, and Theodor Adorno. 395 ‘Cinyras and Myrrha’, ll. 355–7. 396 ‘Of the Pythagorean Philosophy’, ll. 330–3. 397 Edward Said, On Late Style (2006), pp. 6, 7.

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But his questions also bear suggestively on the case of Dryden. The Shakespearean or Sophoclean model of serene lateness has often been applied to Fables, its spirit deWned as one of ‘mellow, Christian Epicureanism in old age’.398 Particularly in his Wnal understanding of translation, it has been suggested, ‘the 68-year-old Dryden’ arrived at ‘serene acceptance’ of ‘the larger processes of nature, in which—in a perpetual cycle of annihilation and renewal—destruction, despair, and decay, are constantly counterpointed by the possibility of rebirth and new hope’.399 But if there is hope in the passage in ‘Of the Pythagorean Philosophy’ where Dryden explicitly ties translation to those processes it is (to adapt the phrase he applies to Pygmalion’s prayer to Venus) ‘impudent . . . hope’: Then to be born, is to begin to be Some other Thing we were not formerly: And what we call to Die, is not t’ appear, Or be the Thing that formerly we were. Those very Elements which we partake, Alive, when Dead, some other Bodies make: Translated grow, have Sense, or can Discourse, But death on deathless Substance has no force.400

The utter amorality of the processes of natural vicissitude is unXinchingly registered here: the Eucharist through which Dryden hoped to come to new life is profanely regurgitated in the third couplet (‘Elements’, ‘partake’),401 as too in the Wnal line (it completes the verse paragraph) are great biblical aYrmations of immortality such as ‘death hath no more dominion’ and ‘O death, where is thy sting?’.402 ‘Deathless Substance’ is what lives on, and by collocating ‘deathless’ with ‘death’ Dryden drowns out the positive sense ‘immortal’ with the privative one Milton’s Adam employs when bitterly lamenting that God has let him go on living after the Fall (‘Can he make deathless death?’).403 The licentious energy that

398 Sloman, Dryden: The Poetics of Translation, 147. 399 Hopkins, John Dryden: Writers and their Work, 102. 400 ‘Of the Pythagorean Philosophy’, ll. 390–7. 401 H v. 541 n.; and see further Hopkins, ‘Translation, Metempsychosis, and the Flux of Nature’, in Dryden and the World of Neoclassicism, ed. Gortschacher and Klein, 151. 402 Romans 6: 9; 1 Corinthians 15: 55. 403 Paradise Lost x. 796–8; the allusion, originally noted by J. R. Mason in his unpublished doctoral dissertation ‘To Milton through Dryden and Pope’ (Cambridge, 1987), is recorded in the note on the line in H v. 541.


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circulates in Dryden’s translations from Ovid in Fables is that of deathless substance. He revels in it, and it liberated him—to a ‘slave’s license’. Translating Wnally took Dryden to the outlying region those in his unhappy circumstances were conventionally supposed to inhabit: beyond the bounds of liberty.


chapter 4 Pope’s Family Trade

Alexander Pope by Jonathan Richardson the elder (c.1737)

‘ THE S ON OF A T RA DER ’ In ‘Mr Pope’s Welcome from Greece’, the congratulatory poem which John Gay addressed to his friend on the occasion of the appearance of the Wnal volume of his Iliad, Pope returns to Twickenham from ‘Homer-land’ to a welcome Wt for a king: Hark how the guns salute from either Shore As thy trim vessel cuts the Thames so fair: Shouts answering Shouts from Kent and Essex roar, And bells break loud thro every gust of Air: BonWres do blaze, & Bones & Cleavers ring As at the coming of a mighty King.1

Looking ahead to the same occasion in a letter to William Broome on 16 February 1719, Pope himself had imagined it rather diVerently: ‘I hope to conclude my long labour with more ease than triumph, better pleased with a conscientious discharge of all my debts and duties, than with any vain praise the world may give me.’2 Underlying both Gay’s fantastical prophecy and Pope’s lugubrious prediction is the metaphor of translation as a sea voyage which launched scores of commendatory poems to translators in the Augustan age. But whereas Gay construes Pope’s Homeric voyage as a translatio imperii—the imperium in question being that of the Stuarts, as David Nokes has shown3—Pope pictures himself landing on home soil not to the acclaim of a conquering king-across-the-water but with the weary relief of a storm-battered merchant. His reference to his Iliad as ‘my long labour’, echoing the ‘Long Labours, both by Sea and Land’ which Aeneas must bear before winning ‘The Latian Realm, and . . . the destin’d Town’ in the opening lines of Dryden’s ‘Aeneis’, brings into play the customary equation of translation and imperial conquest. But that equation is immediately revised by the mercantile associations of the phrase ‘a conscientious discharge of all my debts and duties’. The second sense of ‘discharge’ as a verb in Johnson’s Dictionary is ‘To unload; to disembark’; and in eighteenth-century usage even the 1 ‘Mr Pope’s Welcome from Greece’, ll. 19–24; in John Gay, Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton Dearing and Charles Beckwith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1974). 2 S ii. 3. 3 David Nokes, John Gay: A Profession of Friendship (Oxford, 1995), pp. 293–8.

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general Wnancial senses of the verb were freighted with not-quite-dead metaphors of maritime traYc: under ‘To clear a debt by payment’, for instance, Johnson cites Locke: ‘When foreign trade imports more than our commodities will pay for, we contract debts beyond sea; and those are paid with money, when they will not take our goods to discharge them.’ From ‘discharge’, the air of the quayside and the counting-house wafts over to ‘duties’, which Pope uses primarily in the Wrst sense given by Johnson, ‘That to which a man is by any natural or legal obligation bound’, but which in the circumstances smacks also of the seventh: ‘Tax; impost; custom; toll.’ That is about as close as Pope ever came to comparing the practice of translation with the business of trade. To read through his correspondence and the autobiographical passages of his poems is to Wnd him aligning translation with warfare, conversation, conspiracy, slavery, friendship, courtship and marriage but never explicitly with trade. Yet he can scarcely have been unaware of the mercantile connotations which clung to translating in his culture. Poems translated from foreign tongues had been compared to commodities imported from exotic climes, and the poets who translated them to intrepid or foolhardy merchants, at least since classical times; but such images circulated as never before in translation discourse from around the turn of the eighteenth century as trade rose to prominence as a determinant in geopolitics and a topic of conversation in drawing-rooms. Moreover, they circulated extensively in Pope’s immediate vicinity; as when, in a letter of 5 February 1706, the Restoration poet and dramatist William Wycherley thanked Pope for pruning his verse to suit politer eighteenth-century audiences— an endeavour which may be thought of as Pope’s apprenticeship in translation—by saying ‘you have made more of it by making it less, as the Dutch are said to burn half the Spices they bring home to inhance the Price of the remainder’.4 That was said in jest, but Pope’s enemies were in earnest when they levelled similar charges of proWteering against him in connection with the Homer. Thomas Burnet and George Duckett set what became a Wrm precedent in Homerides (1715), before so much as the Wrst volume of the translation had been published, when they travestied a notorious scene of exchange in Homer’s epic (of which I shall have more to say later) to warn 4 S i. 13.

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subscribers that they were being tricked into accepting substandard wares: But Saturn’s Son in the mean Season, From Glaucus stole away his Reason, Who changed with Diomede (O Ass!) His Arms of Gold, for his of Brass; Now the great Objection I have to these Lines, is an Apprehension that I have, lest your Subscribers should take this to be the State of the Case between you and them; and imagine that you have changed away your Brass for their Gold.5

Little wonder, then, that Pope nowhere openly identiWed himself in his capacity as a translator with mercantile practices and values. Privately, however, he did, I am going to suggest in this chapter, and did so persistently and systematically; the metaphor of translation as trade is left unspoken in Pope’s mass of remarks about the Homer because it goes without saying, was more fundamental to his translatorial selfunderstanding than those metaphorical Wgurations he did publicly espouse. The idea that by taking up translation he was going into the poetic branch of trade aroused complicated and contradictory feelings in Pope, broached dilemmas about his vocation which he would never entirely resolve but which especially preoccupied him at this crucial stage in his formation as a poet. On the face of it, this may seem a surprising claim. It is a truism of Pope scholarship that he was hostile towards the rising mercantile class in eighteenth-century England. Generations of literary critics and cultural historians have plundered his poems for quotable instances of the contemporary ‘civic humanist’ preference for inherited wealth over riches earned through trade;6 in Pope’s writings, we are used to being told, merchants are acquisitive and self-interested, while landowners are paragons of disinterested magnanimity. Such expressions of economic dualism used to be taken straight. Nowadays it is more usual to treat them as examples of ideological mystiWcation or false consciousness; to point out that Pope was himself deeply invested in the market economics he professed to despise. Thus, for Laura Brown, in the ‘Epistle to Burlington’, ‘a concrete programme for mercantile capitalist expansion’ 5 [Thomas Burnet and George Duckett], Homerides: Or, A Letter to Mr. Pope, Occasion’d by his intended Translation of Homer (1715), p. 29. 6 The classic account of competition between these two models of wealth in eighteenthcentury culture is J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), chs. 13 and 14.

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masquerades as ‘a neoclassical system of aesthetic valuation’, while according to Brean Hammond the ‘contempt for the entire commercial base of professional publishing’ Pope articulates in The Dunciad is ‘a case of hating for arts that caused himself to rise’.7 Either way, though, the last thing Pope would do is think of himself as a trader. There is much truth to this truism; indeed, where Pope’s later works are concerned, it is not far short of the whole truth. Once Pope had assumed a leading role in the Bolingbrokean ‘Country’ campaign against the corruptions of the Walpolean Wnancial system, ‘trade’ increasingly became a dirty word in his lexicon. Yet we should be careful not to retroject the thoroughgoing distaste for mercantilism characteristic of his writings from The Dunciad onwards back on to the works he produced before the watershed in his career which that satirical masterpiece in many ways represents. References to trade and traders in the poems Pope published during his Homeric period, particularly those which coincide with his Wrst forays into the Iliad between 1709 and 1713, suggest that at this inaugurative moment in his career as a translator his outlook on mercantile culture was far from uniformly hostile. Consider the merchant mentioned in passing early in the third canto of The Rape of the Lock (1712): Mean while, declining from the noon of day, The sun obliquely shoots his burning ray; The hungry Judges soon the sentence sign, And wretches hang that jury-men may dine; The merchant from th’Exchange returns in peace, And the long labours of the Toilet cease.8

The second of these couplets, among the most famous in the poem, strikingly departs from the tone of genteel criticism Pope generally adopts towards Belinda and her world. Decorous drawing-room ironies suddenly give way to a sharper mode of institutional satire; Pope the social butterXy is transformed into Pope the stinging scorpion.9 7 Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1985), p. 124; Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740 (Oxford, 1997), p. 209. 8 The Rape of the Lock iii. 19–24. 9 For a discussion of one contemporary response to the poem which substantially originated in the sharper and broader satirical tonality of the couplet, see Tom Keymer, ‘Reception, and The Rape of the Lock, and Richardson’, in Alexander Pope: World and Word, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill (Oxford, 1998), pp. 141–75 (at 162–4).


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Then, as suddenly as the new tone of thought appeared, it is gone: the next couplet re-establishes the norm of ironic obliquity. In fact, the irony involved in the line about the merchant is Wne to the point of evanescence. What exactly is he doing wrong? To say that he should not have gone to the Exchange in the Wrst place is merely to beg the larger question about Pope’s attitude to trade. Neither for Pope nor for the majority of his readers was ‘th’Exchange’ primarily a pejorative until after the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720. The irony seems rather to derive from ‘peace’ which, in the circumstances, takes on undertones of ‘complacence’ or ‘blithe ignorance’: the merchant has no knowledge of or interest in anything beyond the progress of his investments; his eyes are closed to the larger legal injustices, detailed in the previous couplet, upon which the practices of mercantilism are founded and which those practices in turn help to perpetuate. Yet to take the word in this sense is to read strongly against the grain of its literal meaning. That meaning has its own shadow of irony: war is bad for business; merchants want peace at any price, even if it entails the loss of their country’s honour, as some of the more bellicose Whigs were arguing the ‘Tory peace’ (shortly to be cemented by the Treaty of Utrecht) would. Pope himself registered in Windsor Forest (1713) a measure of shame at certain of the treaty’s provisions which redounded considerably to the nation’s proWt and not at all to its virtue.10 As a whole, though, Windsor Forest speaks powerfully for peace; the range and depth of its vision of an irenical England under Queen Anne it has lately taken Pat Rogers two full-length books to elicit.11 Pope was at this period a poet of peace. At the very least, then, the line about the peaceable merchant in The Rape of the Lock is a case of an irony ‘true, in some degree, in both senses’, as William Empson rightly observed the best ironies are;12 and it might even be argued that the plain reading has the upper hand over the ironic one. For the positive literal sense of ‘peace’ is reinforced by its collocation with ‘Exchange’ and ‘returns’. The latter reviviWes the dead metaphor of sociability contained in the former: ostensibly employed as a verb, it leads a ghostly double-life as a noun, not only in the narrow Wnancial 10 For the poem’s implied attack on the Asiento clause which guaranteed English merchants a share in the proWts accruing from the trade in slaves from the West Indies, see Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Pope and Slavery’, in Pope: World and Word, ed. Erskine-Hill, 27–53 (at 37–9). 11 Pat Rogers, The Symbolic Design of ‘Windsor Forest’: Iconography, Pageant, and Prophecy in Pope’s Early Work (Newark, DE, 2004); Pat Rogers, Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts: History, Politics, and Mythology in the Age of Queen Anne (Oxford, 2005). 12 William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935; repr., 1995), p. 51.

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sense of ‘Repayment of money laid out in commodities for sale’ but also in the broader moral senses of ‘Repayment; retribution; requital’ or ‘Act of restoring or giving back; restitution’.13 This conception of the merchant as a Wgure of irenic reciprocity stems from a branch of eighteenth-century mercantile thought to which few modern literary historians have seriously attended. One who has— Howard Weinbrot—has called it the ‘theology of trade’.14 A salutary corrective to the anti-imperialist Wxation of current literary scholarship in this Weld, the phrase points to the presence of substructures of religious sentiment within eighteenth-century mercantilism. God had providentially scattered the resources necessary for human life across the face of the globe, the argument went, in order to foster in mankind a creaturely awareness of interdependence. Trading nations collaborated to their mutual advantage in a reciprocal mechanism of charity. In the words of Edward Young’s Imperium Pelagi (1741): Heaven diVerent Growths to diVerent Lands imparts That all may stand in Need of All, And Interest draw around the Ball, A Net to catch and join all human Hearts.15

Of course, this ‘theological’ understanding did not go unchallenged by merchants’ experiences of vying with their foreign competitors for shares of lucrative markets;16 neither, though, was it Xatly invalidated by those experiences. An ideal it may have been, but it had its power. Among the most famous articulations of it is Joseph Addison’s Spectator paper of 19 May 1711 about a visit to the Exchange, the very name of the place inevitably setting in train an optimistic sequence of associations: Nature seems to have taken a particular Care to disseminate her Blessings among the diVerent Regions of the World, with an Eye to this mutual Intercourse and TraYck among Mankind, that the Natives of the several Parts of the Globe might have a kind of Dependence upon one another, and be united together by their common Interest. Almost every Degree produces something peculiar to it. The Food often grows in one Country, and the Sauce in another. 13 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), s.v. ‘Return’, senses 5, 8, and 9. 14 Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge, 1993), p. 265; according to Weinbrot, however, the theology of trade was anathema to ‘the squirearchic Pope’ (ibid.). 15 Quoted in ibid., 268. 16 Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978), pp. 118–23.


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The Fruits of Portugal are corrected by the Products of Barbadoes: The Infusion of a China Plant sweetned with the Pith of an Indian Cane: The Philippick Islands give a Flavour to our European Bowls. The single Dress of a Woman of Quality is often the Product of an hundred Climates. The MuV and the Fan come together from the diVerent Ends of the Earth. The Scarf is sent from the Torrid Zone, and the Tippet from beneath the Pole. The Brocade Petticoat rises out of the Mines of Peru, and the Diamond Necklace out of the Bowels of Indostan.17

It has long been recognized that Pope guyed this passage in his description of Belinda’s toilette in the Wrst canto of The Rape of the Lock; what the description of the merchant returning in peace from the Exchange later in the poem suggests is that for the young Pope—for Pope as he was when he turned to translation—the theology of trade was not only a laughing matter. However, the word which summons this style of thought in Pope’s work is not ‘trade’ itself but ‘commerce’. He appears to have distinguished carefully between the two nouns, deploying the former in a narrowly pecuniary sense, often in satirical contexts, and reserving the latter for broader, more aYrmative discussions of mutuality. For Pope ‘trade’ is usually service of Mammon, whereas ‘commerce’ can be worship of God. Witness, for instance, his account of the origins of traYc in Book III of An Essay on Man (1733): Great Nature spoke; observant Men obey’d; Cities were built, Societies were made: Here rose one little state; another near Grew by like means, and join’d, thro’ love and fear. Did here the trees with ruddier burdens bend, And there the streams in purer rills descend? What War could ravish, Commerce could bestow, And he return’d a friend, who came a foe. Converse and Love mankind might strongly draw, When Love was Liberty, and Nature Law.18

‘Commerce’ there starts out as a synonym for the nuts-and-bolts business of trade: the ‘ruddier’ fruit of one Xedgling state is exchanged for the ‘purer’ water of another; but the word’s meaning is successively expanded—theologized—as Pope equates it with ‘friend’, ‘Converse

17 The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), i. 294–5. 18 An Essay on Man iii. 199–208.

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and Love’ and ‘Nature’ (‘return’d’ too seems once again to encompass suggestions of reciprocity) until it becomes a general term for the various manifestations of benevolent human mutuality. In this instance from Pope’s middle period, the element of idealism in so expansive an understanding of commerce is strongly marked: the passage is Wrmly assigned to a prehistoric past, imaginable only in conditional terms (‘could’, ‘might’). Trade in Hanoverian England, the reader versed in contemporary attacks on the Walpolean Wnancial system would gather, is a rather less exalted business. But in Pope’s earlier writings, commerce in the broad benevolent sense is a viable goal not only for merchants but also for poets. For Pope as he was when he entered his Homeric period it constituted, in fact, the archetype of the poet’s life well lived. His early poems and letters are rich in repudiations of the selWsh contest for fame and eVorts to elaborate a more cooperative prototype of poetic conduct. ‘If no basis bear my rising name, j But the fall’n ruins of another’s fame’, as the closing lines of The Temple of Fame have it, ‘Then teach me, heav’n! to scorn the guilty bays, j Drive from my breast that wretched lust of praise.’ That Pope ‘would surely have been as much discomWted as cheered’ had this prayer been fulWlled is no reason to doubt, as Maynard Mack has Wnely observed, that it was ‘heartfelt’.19 True, as his career went on Pope was to evince, in Samuel Johnson’s celebrated phrase, a ‘voracity of fame’,20 but then, as Johnson always insisted, failure to live up to one’s best resolutions is no proof of their insincerity. The part the experience of translating Homer played in bringing Pope to revise his early hopes for a sociable mode of poetic endeavour will be the subject of the second and third sections of this chapter, but for now I want to insist on the mercantile dimension of those hopes. For when the young Pope entertained them, the word ‘commerce’ came naturally to his mind. On 2 July 1706, for instance, he wrote to his friend and fellow author William Walsh: I wou’d beg your opinion too as to another point: It is how far the liberty of Borrowing may extend? I have defended it sometimes by saying, that it seems not so much the Perfection of Sense, to say things that have never been said before, as to express those best that have been said oftenest; and that Writers in the case of borrowing from others, are like Trees which of themselves wou’d produce only one sort of Fruit, but by being grafted upon others, may yield 19 Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, 1985), p. 167. 20 Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Pope’, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905; repr., New York, 1967), iii. 210.


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variety. A mutual commerce makes Poetry Xourish; but then Poets like Merchants shou’d repay with something of their own what they take from others; not like Pyrates, make prize of all they meet. I desire you to tell me sincerely, if I have not stretch’d this Licence too far in these Pastorals? I hope to become a Critic by your Precepts, and a Poet by your Example. Since I have seen your Eclogues, I cannot be much pleas’d with my own; however you have not taken away all my Vanity, so long as you give me leave to profess my self j Your, &c.21

In themselves the metaphors in this passage are thoroughly conventional: grafting and commerce already had long histories as tropes for imitation.22 But they fecundate the entire passage which teemingly enacts the ‘mutual commerce’ to which Pope pledges himself. ‘I hope to become a Critic by your Precepts, and a Poet by your Example’, ‘Since I have seen your Eclogues, I cannot be much pleas’d with my own’, ‘you have not taken away my Vanity, so long as you give me leave to profess my self j Your, &c.’: Pope’s benevolent traYc with Walsh in the letter’s constantly interchanging pronouns is continuous with the mutuality he hopes for between himself and the poets of the classical past. This is correspondence as ‘Commerce’ in the comprehensive sense long since archaic to the more disabused Pope of An Essay on Man: ‘Converse’ blended with ‘friend[ship]’ blended with ‘Love’. The variant of imaginative traYc explicitly at issue in that letter is allusion. But translation—the macrocosm to allusion’s microcosm— also shadows Pope’s remarks. Pope’s ‘Pastorals’ are situated in the hinterland between the two practices. When he wondered aloud to Walsh whether he had not stretched a poet’s ‘Licence’ to borrow from his predecessors too far, Pope was perhaps acknowledging that allusions to Virgil’s Eclogues cluster with such density in his ‘Pastorals’ that the poems hover for long periods between the conditions of ‘original’ work and translation. Certainly, the metaphors Pope adduces to defend his record as a borrower were equally current within his culture as means of establishing moral standards for the conduct of the relationship between translators and their originals. Katherine Philips’s translation of Corneille’s La Mort de Pompeé, for instance, had been hailed in its textual preliminaries as an exemplar of successful poetic grafting: ‘Corneille, now made English, so doth thrive, j As Trees transplanted do much 21 S i. 19–20. 22 For some examples in critical discussion of Restoration drama, see Paulina Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 32–130.

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lustier live’, wrote the pseudonymous Philo-Phillipa in her commendatory poem ‘To the Excellent Orinda’.23 But most signiWcantly, as we saw in the last chapter, the poet whom Pope took above all others as his role model—Dryden—had construed translation as peaceable imaginative commerce in the dedication of the ‘Aeneis’: I carry not out the Treasure of the Nation, which is never to return: but what I bring from Italy, I spend in England: Here it remains, and here it circulates: for if the Coyn be good, it will pass from one hand to another. I Trade both with the Living and the Dead for the enrichment of our Native Language.24

This makes its point by contrast with grandiose militaristic conceptions of the translator, just as Pope would later do in his remark to Broome about discharging his ‘debts and duties’ at the end of his ‘long’ Homeric ‘labours’. The parallel is no surprise: as the most diligent and insightful student of Dryden’s career, Pope cannot but have recognized the pivotal role played in it by the idea that translating might oVer a quieter alternative to the heroic image of the poet as apologist of empire, an idea all the more striking for having arisen in connection with Virgil, the primary exemplar of that image. The misgivings about high imperialistic models of poetic vocation which Dryden experienced most powerfully in his late Wfties and sixties equally troubled Pope, but at the opposite end of his life as a poet: in his twenties and early thirties. In any case, the Drydenian estimate of translation as ‘mutual commerce’ in the quasi-theological sense had achieved broad currency within eighteenth-century English culture. Connotations of irenicism and sociability were Wrmly attached to the practice by the time Pope took it up, making it an exception to the rule that collaborative forms of authorship were increasingly stigmatized in his lifetime.25 In most other literary contexts, ‘originality’ was becoming the hallmark of achievement, and authors were gradually acquiring the legal means of defending their imaginative property.26 Pope, of course, exploited these new opportunities with particular diligence and skill.27 But the feeling persisted that translation was properly a collective undertaking. In two related senses: the translator and the poet being translated were thought of as cooperating, and translators were thought of as naturally banding 23 Quoted in Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation, 38. 24 CE v. 336. 25 Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation, 134–6. 26 Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, 19–47. 27 David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, ed. James McLaverty (Oxford, 1991), pp. 237–51.


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together in groups. So much so that translations in this period which are the work of single poets commonly end with an invitation to others to participate by emending or polishing the text. These various expectations of sociability particularly applied to translations from the ancient Greek and Roman classics. In part out of necessity: like the huge stones which the heroes of ancient epics throw at each other, ‘So vast that twelve strong Men of modern Days j Th’ enormous weight from earth cou’d hardly raise’,28 the monuments of the classical literary landscape were a burden beyond the capacity of any one modern writer to bear. But a virtue could also be made of the necessity; some observers of the eighteenth-century literary scene oVered the collaborative ethos of classical translation as an antidote to the virus of party animosity poisoning relations among the citizens of the republic of letters. On 22 September 1730 the Grub-Street Journal carried an article which declared ‘It were very much to be wished, that all the choicest flowers of the Ancients were transplanted into our English soil, under the management of skilful undertakers’, and expressed the hope that ‘the poetical generation, instead of ranging themselves into parties, and tearing one another’s little name in pieces, would close amically in a design of such usefulness’. Even Swift, that most unsentimental analyst of human egotism, once spoke of poetic commerce with the classical world in a letter to Pope as ‘an art in which faction hath nothing to do’.29 In the event, though, faction would have plenty to do with Pope’s Homer: Addison’s covert sponsorship of Thomas Tickell’s rival version of the Iliad taught Pope one of his Wrst lessons about the diYculty of realizing his cherished vision of mutuality among writers; and his subsequent unhappy experience of translating the Odyssey in collaboration with William Broome and Elijah Fenton gave him another. Nor was it only brute biographical facts which threatened Pope’s vision of translation as benevolent interdependence; as we shall see in the second and third sections of this chapter, more broadly poetic considerations also contributed to what was a gradual process of disillusionment, considerations arising from the treatment of autonomy and sociality in the heroic worlds of Homer’s epics. But we cannot hope to understand what it cost Pope to distance himself from the image of the translator as a merchant traYcking sociably with his poetic peers in the modern present and the ancient past unless we Wrst appreciate the strength and depth of the appeal that image held for him, so I shall conclude this section by considering at some length the primary source 28 Dryden, ‘The Twelfth Book of the Aeneis’, ll. 1302–3. 29 Memoirs of the Society of Grub-Street, 2 vols. (1737), i. 204–5; S ii. 199.

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of that appeal: a Wgure whose inXuence over Pope’s attitude towards the poet’s life at this early stage arguably outranked even that of Dryden. Not his poetic ‘father’ but his biological one.30 Alexander Pope senior was a merchant. During the 1660s and 1670s, the decades when London achieved pre-eminence as a hub for international commerce, he and his brother William had established a proWtable import–export business. They imported linen from Flanders, some for sale in England, but most to be re-exported to the colonial markets to which, under the terms of the Restoration trade laws, English merchants enjoyed grossly preferential access.31 In the aftermath of the ‘Glorious’ Revolution, however, Pope and Pope ceased business, chieXy because of the ‘bleak trading outlook for a Roman Catholic’ following the reinforcement of the penal legislation by the government of William and Mary, together with ‘what were sure to seem to any foresighted business man the certain prospects of war with France, impeding crosschannel trade’.32 If this was a blow for Alexander Pope senior, it would in time prove something of a boon for his poetic son. The Wnancial nitty-gritty of his father’s past could be an embarrassment for Pope, an embarrassment on which the poet’s enemies were quick to capitalize, notably his nemesis, Edmund Curll, who crowed in the preface to his (supposedly) unauthorized edition of the poet’s correspondence: ‘Mr Pope is the son of a trader, and so is Mr. Curll.’33 But in Pope’s imaginary, his father’s forced retirement from ‘trade’ in the narrow monetary sense freed him to embody the more comprehensive virtues of peaceable humane ‘commerce’ for which the poet honoured him in the famous eulogy that Wnally found a home in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735):

30 On Pope as the ‘son’ of Dryden, the classic essay is Christopher Ricks, ‘Allusion: the Poet as Heir’, in Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (Canberra, 1976), revised as ‘Dryden and Pope’, in Allusion to the Poets (Oxford, 2002), pp. 9–42; see also more recently Jane Spencer, Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon, 1660–1830 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 43–5; and for an account of the diYculties Pope had to negotiate in claiming his Drydenian patrimony, Valerie Rumbold, ‘Plotting Parallel Lives: Pope’s ‘‘A Parallel of the Characters of Mr. Dryden and Mr. Pope’’ ’, in John Dryden: His Poems, His Plays, His Poets, ed. Claude Rawson and Aaron Santesso (Cranbury, NJ, 2004), pp. 235–62. 31 Further details about Alexander Pope senior’s career can be found in George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1934), pp. 29–32. 32 Mack, Life, 21–4. 33 Quoted and discussed in Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 73–4.


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Born to no Pride, inheriting no Strife, Nor marrying Discord in a Noble Wife, Stranger to Civil and Religious Rage, The Good Man walk’d innoxious thro’ his Age. No Courts he saw, no Suits would try, Nor dar’d an Oath, nor hazarded a Lye: Un-learn’d, he knew no Schoolman’s subtle Art, No Language, but the Language of the Heart.34

I say that this passage ‘Wnally found a home’ in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot because it was first drafted nearly twenty years earlier, around the time of Alexander Pope senior’s death on 23 October 1717. Which is to say when Pope was roughly halfway through translating the Iliad. That is not the only respect in which the course of Pope’s relationship with his father intersected provocatively with his progress on the Homer; not the only reason why the Wlial motifs which routinely clustered around the activity of translation over the period covered in this book possessed, in Pope’s particular case, literal pertinence. There is also the fact that it was through translation that Pope achieved Wnancial independence, a fact often presented in literary histories of the eighteenth century as evidence of the decline of aristocratic patronage, whereas actually, before he struck Homeric gold, Pope was dependent not on handouts from noble patrons but on an allowance from his father. That allowance came from Alexander Pope senior’s share of the proWts from the linen business—some £10,000, according to the estimate of Pope’s biographer35—and even as Pope, through his own poetic traYc with Homer, was in the process of freeing himself from dependence on those proWts, he inherited most of what remained of them on the occasion of his father’s death. The years Pope spent on the Homer translation were, then, a natural time for him to take stock of his relationship with his father; while the mercantile resonances which attached to the practice of translating made it a natural place for him to do so. Among the sketches for the eulogy I quoted a moment ago is a line, prudently cancelled as too much of a hostage to critical fortune, in

34 An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, ll. 393–9; the emphasis on mutuality is perhaps clearer in cancelled drafts of the passage: ‘inheriting no Strife, j Nor marrying Discord in a noble wife’, for instance, once read ‘never in a strife j w th . . . Friend, neighbor or Wife’—see The Last and Greatest Art: Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack (Newark, DE, 1984), p. 436. 35 Mack, Life, 24.

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which Pope wonders which of ‘ye virtues’ of his ‘christian Father’ had been passed on to him.36 There are signs in Pope’s writings during his Homeric period that he hoped by becoming a translator to inherit his father’s benevolent habits of mutual commerce. Witness the exchange of letters the poet had with Bolingbroke after the latter’s return from exile at the Jacobite court at St Germain-en-Laye in the summer of 1723. ‘Sure I am’, his lordship had written in the Wrst letter he sent to Pope after being translated across the Channel from France back to England, Sure I am you must not look on your translations of Homer as the great Work of your Life. You owe a great deal more to your self, to your Country, to the present Age, and to Posterity: Prelude with translations if you please, but after translating what was writ three Thousand Years ago, it is incombent upon you that you write, because you are able to Write, what will deserve to be translated three Thousand years hence into Languages as yet perhaps unform’d.37

Somewhere behind this there were once good intentions, but they’ve all gone to hell. The weight of Bolingbroke’s thwarted political aspirations, his eight years of enforced absence from English public life, is brought to bear in his prose, which is calibrated as if for the Xoor of parliament rather than friendly correspondence; hence the crescendo ‘to your self, to your Country, to the present Age, and to Posterity’. That Pope’s ‘self ’ is all but drowned out there, being excluded from the acoustic inner circle to which ‘Country’, ‘present’, and ‘Posterity’ belong, is only the Wrst sign of how little thought Bolingbroke takes for his friend’s capacity to bear the heavy expectations he seeks to shoulder oV on to him. Another is ‘Prelude with translations if you please’: it treats the Homer, to which Pope had by this time devoted eleven years of his life, as the hors-d’oeuvres of his poetic career, as though he were guaranteed the remainder of the biblical three score years and ten in which to bring on the main course—a joint of epic beef, presumably—whereas in fact the poet, crippled by the effects of Pott’s disease, had grown up (as he told Joseph Spence) ‘in a full expectation of death in a short time’.38 Finally, there is Bolingbroke’s insistence that it was ‘incombent upon’

36 Mack (ed.), The Last and Greatest Art, 434. 37 Bolingbroke to Pope, 18 February 1724; S ii. 219. 38 Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1966), i. 30.


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Pope to write works which future generations should not willingly let die. For an ‘incombent’ duty was not so abstract a burden then as it would be now: as authority for the primary sense of the adjective, ‘Resting upon; lying upon’, Johnson adduces the example of Milton’s Satan ‘incumbent on the dusky air j That felt unusual weight’.39 Yet, in Pope, Bolingbroke was addressing a man whose ‘spine and vertebrae had collapsed both sideways and backwards into what is clinically called a kyphoscoliosis’.40 The poet’s Wnely indignant reply was almost two months in the making: A severe Wt of illness (a sort of intermitting Fever) has made me unWt for all sorts of Writing and application. You will see (I fear) the eVects of it in this Letter, which will be almost enough to convince you that all those mighty hopes of the Improvement of the English Language, and the glory of its Poetry, must rest upon some abler Prop than your Servant. To answer Wrst to your Lordship’s Charge against me as a translator Convict; I do confess I don’t translate Homer as a great Work, but as an easy one, which I really Wnd less diYcult than it seems Mr de Sacy does to write Pliny into French Prose. Whatever expectations my own Vanity, or your Partiality, might give me of a better fate than my predecessors in Poetry; I own I am already arriv’d to an Age which more awakens my diligence to live Satisfactorily, than to write unsatisfactorily, to my self: more to consult my happiness, than my Fame; or (in defect of happiness) my Quiet. [ . . . ] What you call a happy Author is the unhappiest Man; and from the same cause, that Men are generally miserable from aiming at a State more perfect than Man is capable of. Victor virum Volitare per ora may indeed sound nobly in the Ears of the Ambitious, whether in the Field, the State, or the Study; But sure that Consideration (to a Man’s self ) is not of such weight, as to sacriWce to that alone all the more attainable and the more reasonable aims of our Being. To write well, lastingly well, Immortally well, must not one leave Father and Mother and cleave unto the Muse? Must not one be prepared to endure the reproaches of Men, want and much Fasting, nay Martyrdom in its Cause. ’Tis such a Task as scarce leaves a Man time to be a good Neighbour, an useful friend, nay to plant a Tree, much less to save his Soul.41

The indignation of this is ‘Wne’ both in the sense of being admirable— Pope writes lastingly well against ambitions of writing lastingly well— and in that of being minutely braided into the prose; so much so that it did indeed, alas, prove no more than ‘almost enough’, as Pope dryly 39 Johnson, Dictionary, s.v. ‘Incumbent’; Paradise Lost i. 225–6. 40 Mack, Life, 153. 41 Pope to Bolingbroke, 9 April 1724; S ii. 226.

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predicts, to convince Bolingbroke to rein in his mighty hopes. Among the points at which the poet manages a thrust against the phrasing of Bolingbroke’s letter without giving oVence to his lordship’s ears are ‘must rest upon some abler Prop than your Servant’, which deplores Bolingbroke’s neglect of the relevant physical facts, whilst seeming only to deplore the existence of those physical facts, and ‘To write well, lastingly well, Immortally well’, whose resemblance to the successive inXations of Bolingbroke’s ‘to your self, to your Country, to the present Age, and to Posterity’ may or may not be accidental. But the passage is not merely reactive. In the process of revising Bolingbroke’s grandiose quasi-Miltonic understanding of poetic vocation, Pope implies a contrary account which centres on the practice of translation and comes to revolve around the person of Pope’s father. In later years, the poet would speak of Bolingbroke as his ‘guide’, and strike out on the path to fame his lordship outlined for him, notably in the Imitations of Horace; but here the viscount’s inXuence over him takes second place behind that of Alexander Pope senior, whose involvement in this debate about choices of poetic life surfaces in his son’s observation that to fulWl Bolingbroke’s heroic prescription he would have to ‘leave Father and Mother and cleave unto the Muse’. Thereafter, as forcefully as Bolingbroke speaks against the practice of translation, Pope’s merchant father speaks for it. The ‘more attainable and the more reasonable aims of our Being’ with which Pope oVers to equate it, those of good neighbourliness and useful friendship, are recognizably the soul-saving works of Christian mutuality which in the Arbuthnot epitaph the poet honoured his father for performing. Fourteen years after that exchange of letters with Bolingbroke, and more than a decade after his career as a translator came to an end with the appearance of the Wnal volume of the Odyssey in 1726, Pope published a second verse memorial of his father, in The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace (1737). The subject left implicit in the earlier epitaph—the nature of Pope’s moral inheritance from his tradesman father—is treated explicitly in this later passage; and once again Pope’s experiences as a translator crucially impinge on his consideration of that subject. By then, Pope had apparently ceased to construe as altogether benign the inXuence which the complex of associations running between Alexander Pope senior, trade, and translation had exerted over his own sense of poetic self. ‘Tax’d and Wn’d’ as a Roman Catholic under the Williamite regime, Alexander Pope senior ‘stuck to Poverty with Peace of Mind’, while ‘the Muses help’d’ Pope himself ‘to


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undergo’ similar persecution under George I, and since it is particularly ‘(thanks to Homer)’ that ‘I live and thrive’,42 translation is implicitly paralleled, as it had been in the letter to Bolingbroke, with the quietistic virtues the poet praised his father for exemplifying in his retirement. But the following paragraph sets that parallel in a darker light, as quietism elides into servility, and the inXuence of Pope’s father is challenged by that of another father Wgure—Milton—urging the poet to a more heroically self-assertive application of his genius than translating: Years foll’wing Years, steal something ev’ry day, At last they steal us from our selves away; In one our Frolicks, one Amusements end, In one a Mistress drops, in one a Friend: This subtle Thief of Life, this paltry Time, What will it leave me, if it snatch my Rhime? If ev’ry Wheel of that unweary’d Mill That turn’d ten thousand Verses, now stands still.43

As has long been recognized, Pope’s reference to Time as a ‘subtle Thief of Life’ alludes to Milton’s seventh sonnet, where it is called ‘the subtle thief of youth’;44 but it is when Pope speaks of himself as an ‘unweary’d Mill’ turning out ‘Rhime’ that the presence of Milton most strongly makes itself felt. Slaves turn mills, and, notoriously, Milton had excoriated rhyme in a prefatory note to the second edition of Paradise Lost as ‘bondage’. Since translations as well as rhymes are ‘turn’d’, though, slavishly so in the view of many commentators, and since ‘Pope has just been talking about Homer’, his use of the verb here is in all likelihood equivocal.45 It is his decision to translate Homer’s epics (into couplets, of course) rather than writing one of his own, as much as his taste for rhyme, which Pope exposes to a blast of Miltonic contempt, as a betrayal of the nobility of the poet’s calling. Is it mere happenstance that Pope uses to describe his poetic gifts at this point the mildly reductive synecdoche ‘Rhime’ which his mother Edith once told Joseph Spence was Alexander Pope senior’s ‘word for verses’, as she reminisced about how her ‘honest merchant’ husband would ‘set’ their

42 43 44 45

The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated, ll. 64, 67–8. Ibid., ll. 72–9. Milton, ‘Sonnet VII’, l. 1. Erskine-Hill, ‘Pope and Slavery’, in Pope: World and Word, ed. Erskine-Hill, 52.

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son ‘to make English verses when very young’ and ‘send him back to new turn’ those he deemed of shoddy manufacture?46 That passage was written with the beneWt of hindsight, long after the Homer was completed. Its image of translation as menial labour— trade in the abusive sense in which writers of a culturally conservative bent (including, of course, Pope himself ) spoke of literature having been ‘made a trade’ in early eighteenth-century England—reXects the heroic role Pope had come to see himself as performing within his culture in the late 1730s. By then he had irrevocably abandoned the humbler commercial model of the poet’s life bequeathed to him by his father, and committed himself instead to wielding the ‘sacred weapon’47 of satire in the battle against Walpolean corruption. But that drastic shift in Pope’s sense of self took place gradually—too gradually, in fact, for the tastes of his ‘patriot’ friends and acquaintances.48 The remaining two sections of this chapter explore the part Pope’s experiences as a translator played in laying the groundwork for it. Pope read Homer’s epics, I am going to argue, as sustained meditations on the relative merits of heroism and commerce, self-realization and mutuality. Time and again, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, his verse comes sharply to life—deepens to psychological intimacy and quickens with moral urgency—in episodes where such questions are to the fore. His responses to these episodes amount to a crucial phase in his development as a poet, a watershed in his spiritual autobiography. Homer brought Pope to detach himself—in full knowledge that doing so entailed as much loss as gain—from a commercial, translatorial understanding of his vocation, and so prepared him to embrace the more contentious, heroic self-image which begins to take shape in the Wrst major work he published after completing the Homer: The Dunciad (1728).

46 Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters, i. 7: ‘Mr Pope’s father was an honest merchant and dealt in Hollands wholesale was no poet, but he used to set him to make English verses when very young. He was pretty diYcult in being pleased and used often to send him back to new turn them. ‘‘These are not good rhymes’’ [he would say], for that was my husband’s word for verses.’ 47 Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogue II, l. 212. 48 For a narrative of Pope’s initial resistance to involving himself in this campaign, see Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 68–95.


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‘ B ROT H E R S I N T H E F I E L D ’ : T H E I L I A D For a poet concerned, as Pope was, to reconcile his vocation with forms of humane interdependence such as friendship and neighbourliness, the Iliad is not obviously congenial reading. Far from nourishing visions of ‘mutual commerce’, it represents the supreme and originary testament in European culture to the spirit of heroic competition. Eighteenth-century readers who shared the young Pope’s commitment to the ideal of benevolent sociality, identifying themselves with such ‘ ‘‘modern’’ characteristics . . . as ‘‘manners’’, ‘‘politeness’’, ‘‘taste’’, and other terms denoting increased capacity for civilised intercourse’,49 considered the poem an atavistic monstrosity. Taking their cue from the commentators who formed the anti-Homer camp in the querelle d’Home`re which raged on both sides of the English Channel throughout Pope’s lifetime, they particularly deplored its destructively individualistic code of heroism.50 In response to such criticisms, Pope conceded in the preface to his translation that the Iliad was set in an age ‘when a Spirit of Revenge and Cruelty, join’d with the practice of Rapine and Robbery, reign’d thro’ the World’.51 But that concession entailed for him a crucial mitigating distinction, one which it had only recently become possible to make. Until about the turn of the eighteenth century, commentators spoke as if Homer lived in or at most shortly after the age in which the events of the Iliad occur; they readily aligned him with the practices and values of the world he describes. Indeed, this was the starting-point for many defences of the poem; Homer could not have been expected to know better than his barbarous benighted heroes: in the words of Reńe´ Rapin, ‘Moderation and Justice were Virtues not known in those dark times in which Homer writ.’52 By the time Pope came to translate the poem, however, the increasingly historicist character of classical scholarship, soon to issue in Thomas Blackwell’s Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735), had begun to undermine this supposition.53 Gradually a gap of generations 49 For an analysis of the historical and ideological processes which induced Pope’s contemporaries to see themselves in this light, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The SigniWcance of 1688: Some ReXections on Whig History’, in The Revolutions of 1688, ed. Robert Beddard (Oxford, 1991), pp. 271–93 (I quote from 285). 50 Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue, ch. 6: ‘Homeric Wars’. 51 TE vii. 14. 52 Reńe´ Rapin, ‘A Comparison of Homer and Virgil’, in The Whole Critical Works of Monsieur Rapin, trans. Basil Kennet, 2nd edn. (1716), i. 129. 53 See Howard Clarke, Homer’s Readers: A Historical Introduction to the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey’ (Newark, NJ, 1981), pp. 103–5.

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opened up between the Homeric era and that of the Iliad. This gap is integral to Pope’s translation of the poem which is built on the understanding, articulated at several points in the critical paraphernalia, that ‘Homer copied the Manners and Customs of the Age he writ of, rather than of that he lived in.’54 That temporal hiatus was attended, in Pope’s view, by a concomitant moral disjunction. The Iliad occupies not only two historical periods but two moral planes; ethically as well as temporally, it is bi-located. The code of heroic self-realization which governs the conduct of the Greek and Trojan warriors themselves is constantly being counterpointed against a later, more civilized Homeric mentality; each revises, and is in turn revised by, the other. This belief was not without its dangers: taken to extremes, it would have permitted Pope to transform the Iliad into the sort of self-conscious literary work, featuring ironic play between the viewpoints of its author and characters, which could be relied on to go over well with eighteenth-century audiences. Then again, few modern Homerists would dispute that the events of the Iliad are indeed calibrated against two competing scales of value; as Oliver Taplin among others has recently shown, the narrator is adept at communicating a ‘subjective’ take on events whilst ostensibly limiting himself to the procedures of ‘objective’ narration.55 But for my particular purposes the question of whether Pope was right or wrong to believe he could detect the presence of an Homeric mentality within the Iliad is somewhat beside the point. What matters is that, as Pope describes it, Homer’s mentality is mercantile in the expansive and incipiently spiritual sense elaborated by contemporary exponents of the ‘theology of trade’. Though his choice of subject had made him by popular repute ‘the Poet of . . . Contention’,56 in Thomas Parnell’s phrase, for Pope Homer was by nature a poet of ‘Commerce’. Early-modern commentators on Homer understood from ancient biographies of the poet, and more particularly from his presentation of Demodocus in the Odyssey which they took to be a thinly veiled selfportrait, that the creator of the Iliad was a nomadic bard who traded his poetic gifts for hospitality in the various lands through which he travelled. This fact had seriously embarrassed the Wrst English translator 54 ‘An Essay on Homer’s Battles’; TE vii. 257. 55 Oliver Taplin, Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad (Oxford, 1992), pp. 110–28, 230–40. 56 TE vii. 35.


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of the Homeric epics, George Chapman, and been employed by a second, Thomas Hobbes, as a means of puncturing dangerously inXated reverence for ‘Homeros Sophos’.57 Swift mischievously alluded to it when guying Pope over the lucrativeness of his Homer translations. Pope himself, though, considered Homer’s mendicancy a virtue. In the Wgure of the needy wandering singer he found an exemplar of the poet’s life made consonant with humane mutualities. So much is apparent from the long note he oVered in connection with the Wgure of Tychius, the leather-dresser whom Homer credits in passing in Book VII with manufacturing Ajax’s shield: I shall ask leave here to transcribe the Story of this Tychius, as we have it in the ancient Life of Homer attributed to Herodotus. ‘‘Homer falling into Poverty, determined to go to Cuma, as he past thro’ the Plain of Hermus, came to a Place called The New Wall, which was a Colony of the Cumaeans. Here (after he had recited Wve Verses in Celebration of Cuma) he was received by a Leather-dresser, whose Name was Tychius, into his House, where he shew’d to his Host and his Company, a Poem on the Expedition of Amphiaraus, and his Hymns. The Admiration he there obtain’d procur’d him a present Subsistance. They shew to this Day with great Veneration the Place where he sate when he recited his Verses, and a Poplar which they aYrm to have grown there in his Time.’’ If there be any thing in this Story, we have reason to be pleas’d with the grateful Temper of our Poet, who took this Occasion of immortalising the Name of an ordinary Tradesman, who had obliged him. The same Account of his Life takes notice of several other Instances of his Gratitude in the same kind.58

Received into Tychius’s house as a stranger years earlier, Homer recognizes his chance to reciprocate by giving the leather-dresser a walk-on part in the Iliad, conferring on him the fame reserved by modern poets for kings and patrons. He gives extraordinary poetic ‘returns’ for the kindness of ‘an ordinary Tradesman’, exemplifying the ‘conscientious discharge of . . . debts and duties’ which Pope told Broome, in a letter written more or less concurrently with this note, it was his highest ambition to perform through his Iliad. The force of Pope’s attraction towards this image of Homer is demonstrated by his having taken over the anecdote about Tychius from Herodotus’s biography of the poet, a work described in the ‘Essay on Homer’ (written by Parnell, but overseen by Pope himself) which introduces the translation, as blatantly unreliable.59 57 Paul Davis, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Translations of Homer: Epic and Anticlericalism in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, The Seventeenth Century, 12 (1997), 231–55. 58 TE vii. 377. 59 Ibid., 39.

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Tychius, though, is an extremely peripheral Wgure in the Iliad; if Homer’s disposition to mutual commerce made itself felt to Pope only at such peripheries, it would have been no more than a footnote to his translation. But in fact he believed that it was integrally related to the central heroic concerns of Homer’s epic. Here again it is important to discriminate between ‘trade’ in the narrow pecuniary sense and its ampler ethical counterpart ‘commerce’. The only modern commentator who has addressed the subject of economics in Pope’s Iliad—Peter Connolly—has insisted that, whereas there are ‘traces in the language of the [original] poem of a developing contract society and hints of a private economy in commodities’,60 Pope systematically expunged these traces in accordance with his ‘aristocratic’ ideological preference for inherited over mercantile wealth. Homer’s heroes occasionally buy and sell things in an incipiently commercial fashion; Pope’s give gifts without a thought for their material value, in a spirit of heroic magnanimity. Even in strictly Wnancial terms the point seems to me overstated. Connolly particularly adduces the episode of Diomedes and Glaucus in Book VI in which the two heroes recognize, at the point of combat, that their ‘Grandsires have been Guests of Old’ and so instead of Wghting exchange arms. In material terms, it is a markedly unequal exchange—Diomedes’s armour is brass, Glaucus’s gold—and Homer (on Connolly’s reading of the passage) emphasizes this inequality, observing that in order to get Glaucus to agree to the deal Zeus ‘stole away his wits’,61 in a phrase which ‘seems to mock the gift-exchange from a commercial point of view’.62 But Pope, unwilling ‘to allow the narrator’s comment to criticize heroic ethics . . . puts a generous construction on it’.63 True enough, if we limit our attention to Pope’s claim in the verse that ‘Brave Glaucus then each narrow Thought resign’d, j ( Jove warm’d his Bosom and enlarg’d his Mind)’64 but to read that couplet against the long note Pope appended to it is to arrive at a more nuanced view: I wonder the Curious have not remark’d from this Place, that the Proportion of the Value of Gold to Brass in the Time of the Trojan War, was but as an hundred to nine; allowing these Armours of equal Weight; which as they belong’d to Men of equal Strength, is a reasonable Supposition. As to this manner of computing the 60 Peter J. Connolly, ‘The Ideology of Pope’s Iliad ’, Comparative Literature, 40 (1988), 358–83 (at 362). 61 Iliad vi. 234. 62 ‘The Ideology of Pope’s Iliad ’, 366. 63 Ibid. 64 TE vii. 340.


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Value of the Armour by Beeves or Oxen, it might be either because the Money was anciently stamp’d with those Figures, or (which is most probable in this Place) because in those Times they generally purchased by Exchange of Commodities, as we see by a Passage near the end of the seventh Book.65

Pope’s calculation that gold was ‘but’ some ten times more valuable than brass at the time of the Trojan War was doubtless intended in part to indict his own age of a more inXated preference for the glittering over the useful, and ‘I wonder the Curious have not remark’d . . . ’ may carry a sardonic charge, implying that only commentators of a pedantic scholarly disposition descend to such grubby Wnancial speculations. Nevertheless, ‘in those Times they generally purchased by Exchange of Commodities’ is plain enough. In any case, Connolly cannot be right when he says that ‘the ideological matrix that organizes Pope’s understanding of Homeric society’ is an absolute dichotomy between ‘‘Generosity’’ or ‘‘self-suYciency’’ and ‘‘commerce’’ or ‘‘owing’’, together with an unyielding conviction that only the former are attributes proper to a hero’.66 In Pope’s translation of the Iliad, only one hero deWnes himself by his absolute ‘self-suYciency’, his utter antagonism towards the ethos of ‘commerce’, and that hero is Achilles, whose aversion to mutuality lies for Pope at the heart of his disastrous career in the poem. This can be most quickly seen by looking at Pope’s version of the ‘embassy’ episode in Book IX. The Greeks having been driven back to their ships under a ferocious assault led by Hector, Agamemnon convenes a council to decide on their next move; Nestor advises that an embassy be sent to Achilles in a last-ditch attempt to persuade him to return to the fray, and Odysseus, Ajax, and Achilles’s childhood friend Phoenix are chosen to carry out the plan. Their strategy is twofold: they appeal to Achilles’s fellow feeling for his suVering compatriots, and they oVer him ‘an exhaustless Store’ of ‘Presents’67 provided by Agamemnon. Achilles rebuVs them; even ‘gifts as many in number as there are grains of sand or specks of dust’, he declares, would not be enough to win him over. In Pope’s translation, that monumentally self-consistent statement of deWance is hedged round with two appositional phrases which set it in contrasting lights, make it the focus of a miniature debate about autonomy and mutuality: Tho’ Bribes were heap’d on Bribes, in Number more Than Dust in Fields, or Sands along the Shore; 65 TE vii. 341.

66 Ibid., 371.

67 Pope, Iliad ix. 343.

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Translation and the Poet’s Life Should all these OVers for my Friendship call; ’Tis he that oVers, and I scorn them all.68

‘Bribes . . . heap’d on Bribes’ would not be out of place in the satires on Walpolean Wnance which Pope was to begin publishing in a little over a decade; it makes Achilles sound staunchly principled, immune to corruption. ‘OVers for my Friendship’, on the other hand, complicates that simple picture, implying that Achilles’s refusal to bargain with his compatriots cannot easily be disentangled from a larger refusal to enter into relations of humane interdependence; that, in Pope’s mercantile terminology, his distaste for ‘trade’ in the strict monetary sense may stem from or entail a distaste for ‘commerce’ in the expansive ethical one. This implication is made explicit in the message Pope’s Achilles (in another line for which there is no warrant in the original Greek) instructs the ambassadors to deliver to Agamemnon: ‘Tell him, all Terms, all Commerce I decline.’69 In that line, Pope realizes the gap between ‘the Manners and Customs of the Age’ Homer ‘writ of ’ and those of the age ‘he lived in’ as a division between the voice of Achilles and that of the Iliad’s narrator. Achilles spits out the word ‘Commerce’ as if it were wholly and inescapably pejorative; but Pope makes audible to the reader aYrmative connotations of the term to which Achilles is at this stage of the epic deaf. The story of how this division is resolved, how Achilles, after isolating himself in heroic solipsism Wrst through his wrath at Agamemnon and then in grief over the death of Patroclus, is brought to acknowledge a measure of interrelatedness with his fellow men, is the moral pith of Homer’s epic in Pope’s translation.70 The ‘failure of philophrosyne (thinking like a social man)’71 which Achilles commits in the embassy episode is reversed in the Wnal scene of the poem when he is once again visited by an ambassador—Priam—intent on persuading him to set aside a resolution—not to return the corpse of Hector to the Trojans for burial—on which he has staked his heroic integrity. Like Odysseus, Nestor, and Phoenix before him, Priam appeals to Achilles in part by material means, a fact which Pope (pace Connolly) emphasizes: Homer’s Priam is ‘desperate to ransom’ Hector; Pope’s calculates that ‘all . . . the

68 Pope, Iliad ix. 506–9. 69 Ibid., 489. 70 For a reading of Pope’s treatment of Achilles in these terms, see Felicity Rosslyn, ‘ ‘‘Awed by Reason’’: Pope on Achilles’, The Cambridge Quarterly (1980), 189–202. 71 Ibid., 198.


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Stores he could employ’ may not be enough (in a powerfully bald line) ‘For one last Look to buy him back to Troy!’72 In the event, however, the Trojan king has no need to haggle over Wnancial detail, for he succeeds in establishing broader ties of commerce between himself and Achilles such as Achilles’s own compatriots had previously tried and failed to establish. What makes the difference is the new sense of self Achilles has acquired through his suVerings ‘as a man among men, rather than set apart, by an eVort of will, from those he most resembles’.73 And it was surely with this in mind that Pope said in his note on the speech in which Achilles accedes to Priam’s request that ‘There is not a more beautiful Passage in the whole Ilias . . . Homer to shew that Achilles was not a mere Soldier, here draws him as a Person of excellent Sense and sound Reason.’74 The moral trajectory described by Achilles in Pope’s Iliad parallels that which Pope would outline for himself, shortly after completing the translation, in the letter to Bolingbroke which I discussed in the last section. As Achilles abandons superhuman autonomy in favour of a more humane mutuality, so Pope disavowed Miltonic ambitions of writing ‘Immortally well’, ambitions which entail separating himself from his fellow man in heroic singularity, in favour of a social mode of poetic conduct instantiated by translation. Pope, it would seem, learned from Achilles’s error; interpreting Achilles’s career in the Iliad as an allegory about poetic vocation, he put the mercantile moral of that allegory into practice by becoming a translator. But ‘allegory’ is right: eighteenth-century readers increasingly thought of allegory as a mode whose monochrome clarities had little purchase on quotidian human reality, and Achilles is indeed a Wgure whose development takes place on a scale which could fairly be called simplifying in its grandeur. Even when he is eventually brought to acknowledge the ‘common Cares that nourish Life’,75 he does so with a tragic massiveness, uncommonly. Inhabiting a plane of stark absolutes, what self-identiWcation he invited from Pope was rather abstract in quality. For insight into the more private and practical resonances which questions of autonomy and mutuality in the Iliad had for Pope’s sense of poetic self we must turn to the heroes whose conduct more approachably raises those questions: those who cling on to their heroic self-consistency less

72 Pope, Iliad xxiv. 290. 74 TE viii. 564.

73 Rosslyn, ‘ ‘‘Awed by Reason’’ ’, 200. 75 Pope, Iliad xxiv. 756.


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monumentally than Achilles, and for whom qualifying that self-consistency out of fellow feeling involves a less seismic upheaval. So far as these lesser, more accessible heroes are concerned, up to and including Hector whom Pope found ‘amiable’, the disjunction between the brutally individualistic mores Pope attributed to the age Homer ‘writ of ’, and the more civilized ethos of commerce he associated with the age Homer ‘writ in’ yawns less widely than it does in relation to Achilles. Whereas Achilles embodies that disjunction in all its epochal grandeur, being torn to the point of disintegration between the two codes of value, the other Greek and Trojan warriors evince it in more mundane and muddled form. They are half-evolved: unstable amalgams of past and future, ruled for the most part by the imperatives of heroic self-realization, yet capable on occasion of acting under the inXuence of embryonic variants of sociality. Only on occasion: instances of mutual commerce among the heroes of the Iliad are rare; generally they Wght one against one, and survive or perish according to their own physical accomplishments. The topos of the aristeia predominates in the poem’s battle scenes. Owing to their rarity, however, exceptions to this rule, moments when the individualistic logic of combat is delayed or disrupted, had aroused considerable controversy among the commentators and previous translators who helped shape Pope’s understanding of the epic. The encounter of Diomedes and Glaucus in Book VI was one such moment. But the majority involve not the entire avoidance of conXict so much as the emergence of rudimentary forms of socialization within it: two or more heroes Wghting collaboratively or a wounded hero being rescued by one or more of his comrades. An episode which features both these types of mutuality, and which had occasioned a correspondingly sharp dispute within the critical tradition, is that of Ajax and Teucer in Book VIII. In the Wrst half of this episode, in what Pope pointed out in a note was ‘a new Circumstance of Battel’,76 the archer Teucer shelters behind the bulwark of Ajax’s massive shield, emerging only brieXy to Wre oV bursts of arrows before retreating again ‘beneath the sev’nfold Orb’;77 in the second half, having imprudently taken aim at Hector, hit his charioteer Archeptolemus instead and been laid low by a rock thrown by the great Trojan in revenge, the ‘batter’d Archer’ is shielded by Ajax before being carried ‘groaning’ from the battleWeld to the safety of ‘the Shore’ by two of his compatriots,78 Alastor and Mecistheus. 76 TE vii. 412.

77 Pope, Iliad viii. 324.

78 Ibid., 400.


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By the time Pope came to translate this episode, a tradition existed of relating it to the possibility of non-emulative relations among artists. Dryden had twice invoked it in this connection: Wrst, in the Defence of an Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668), when insisting (contrary to suggestions that he valued himself above his ancient and modern predecessors) ‘I . . . Wght under their protection, as Homer reports of little Teucer, who shot the Trojans from under the large buckler of Ajax Telamon’; and then in ‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’ (1694), where he once more spoke of himself as writing under the aegis of his great forebears (in this case speciWcally Shakespeare) ‘like Teucer under Ajax’79 as a prelude to Wguring his relationship with Kneller, his peer in the sister art of painting, as similarly cooperative. However, neither of those apparently positive applications of the episode was free of ambiguity. In the case of the latter, Dryden, having begun by casting himself as Teucer to Kneller’s Ajax, ends up playing Ajax to Kneller’s Teucer, just as, having initially implied that the relationship between poetry and painting was one of complementarity, he concludes by underscoring the superiority of his art over Kneller’s.80 In the former, meanwhile, the rhetorically self-deprecating quality of Dryden’s putative identiWcation with Teucer is evident from his condescending description of the archer as ‘little’. That description derives not from the Homeric text of the episode but from George Chapman’s translation of it; and Chapman, powerfully attracted as he was to the ‘Achillean’ or ultra-individualistic wing of Homeric heroism, was no admirer of Teucer: as well as demoting the archer in stature, he also appended to Homer’s simile likening Teucer to ‘an unhappie child that doth to mother run’ the scornful explanatory gloss ‘when he knows full well he some shrewd turne hath done’.81 Pope’s translation of the episode was shaped by that contentious prehistory. It could hardly have been otherwise: he knew Dryden’s writings better than those of any other poet, and he was himself famously ‘little’. For all his eVorts to pre-empt hostile references to his ‘Pygmaean’ statute by making comic capital out of it himself, as, for instance, when he proposed the establishment of a ‘Club of Little Men’ in The Guardian, his enemies continued to mine this ready seam of abuse. The opportunity 79 ‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’, l. 78. 80 Cedric D. Reverand II, ‘Dryden on Dryden in ‘‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’’ ’, Papers on Language and Literature, 17 (1981), 164–80. 81 ‘The Eighth Booke of Homer’s Iliads’, ll. 232–3; in Chapman’s Homer, ed. Allardyce Nichol, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1956; repr., Princeton, 2000).

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of belittling him as Teucer was one they could not be expected to pass up: a precedent had been set in Homerides (as we have seen) for identifying Pope with disreputable Homeric characters for polemical ends, and so obvious was this particular identiWcation that Pope had (almost certainly)82 pre-empted it in A Compleat Key to the What D’ye Call It (1715), a mock-attack on the farce he had co-authored with Gay. There he presciently imagined how the scene might be used to destroy his pretentions to literary sociability: he was Teucer to Gay’s Ajax, shielded from the brickbats thrown at their farce by his Scriblerian colleague whom he had manoeuvred into taking sole responsibility for its authorship. Other commentators were not ashamed to borrow the conceit: J. D. Breval, for instance, in whose farce The Confederates (1717), the same identiWcations, Pope as ‘a malevolent and diminutive Teucer’, Gay as ‘a burly Ajax’, are used in support of the same argument, only now applied to Pope and Gay’s failed collaborative drama Three Hours after Marriage (1717).83 Whether or not because he was mindful of his own resemblance to the archer, it appears at Wrst glance that Pope set out in translating the episode of Ajax and Teucer to remove the dubieties of earlier versions. His Teucer is not ‘little’ but ‘young’;84 and a long and carefully framed note explains the military practicalities of the situation—Teucer ‘being an excellent Archer, and using only the Bow, could not wear any Arms which would incumber him, and render him less expedite in his Archery. Homer to secure him from the Enemy, represents him standing behind Ajax’s Shield, and shooting from thence’—before celebrating the commerce of the two heroes as one of the ‘tender Circumstances’ which ‘soften the Horrors of a Battle, and diVuse a sort of Serenity over the Soul of the Reader’.85 There is, Pope urges, a ‘wonderful Tenderness in the Simile with which [Homer] illustrates the Retreat of Teucer behind the Shield of Ajax’,86 likening the archer to a child Wnding refuge in the arms of its mother. Lest it be thought eVeminating, Pope, translating the conceit, quietly masculinized it:87 82 Most commentators now accept that this pamphlet was the work of Pope and Gay; for a discussion of the evidence, see Nokes, John Gay, 184–5 n. 70. 83 Ibid., 1–2. 84 Pope, Iliad viii. 320. 85 TE vii. 412. 86 Ibid. 87 G. S. Kirk’s comment on the simile is sharply germane to the case of Pope: ‘The touching image of the child clinging to its mother hints at Teukros’ fragility as well as his dependence’; in The Iliad: A Commentary, 6 vols. (Cambridge, 1985–93), ii. 322.


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Secure behind the Telamonian Shield The skilful Archer wide survey’d the Field, With ev’ry Shaft some hostile Victim slew, Then close beneath the sev’nfold Orb withdrew. The conscious Infant so, when Fear alarms, Retires for Safety to the Mother’s Arms. Thus Ajax guards his Brother in the Field, Moves as he moves, and turns the shining Shield.88

‘Brother in the Field’: Ajax and Teucer are, in point of domestic fact, only half-brothers; but, the added phrase implies, a full fraternity exists between them in the broader metaphorical sense. Teucer is no dependent of Ajax but his equal; the two move together as one in mutually beneWcial commerce. All of which is consistent with the hypothesis that Pope was intent on obviating hostility to his diminutive alter ego. But one detail tells against that hypothesis: a vestige of Chapman’s derision lingers in Pope’s verse. For to compare Teucer to a ‘conscious Infant’ is to invite speculation about what he is conscious of, to psychologize his conduct, and since the adjective usually connotes guilty self-awareness in epic contexts, ideas of shame and disgrace, while not stipulated as in Chapman’s translation, are in the oYng. Pope’s Teucer is ‘conscious’ not just of danger but of his reaction to that danger; not just of a reason to ‘Fear’ but of his ‘Fear’ itself. That insinuation is developed in Pope’s treatment of the second half of the episode. Chapman, surprisingly, had given a neutral account of the moment when, after Teucer has been wounded by Hector, Ajax ‘neglected not to aid his brother thus deprest, j But came and saft him with his shield’.89 Not so Pope: The Bowstring burst beneath the pondrous Blow, And his numb’d Hand dismiss’d his useless Bow. He fell: But Ajax his broad Shield display’d, And screen’d his Brother with a mighty Shade; Till great Alastor, and Mecistheus, bore The batter’d Archer groaning to the Shore.90

The major addition to Homer here is ‘with a mighty Shade’, and it’s a remarkable one. To begin with, the phrase superbly visualizes the scene, introducing a play of chiaroscuro (the term was on the verge of achieving 88 Pope, Iliad viii. 321–8. 89 ‘The Eighth Booke of Homer’s Iliads’, ll. 286–7. 90 Pope, Iliad viii. 395–400.

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currency in English in Pope’s day) consonant with Pope’s painterly conception of Homeric style. But in Pope’s Homer, aids to visualization frequently double as aids to interpretation.91 So it proves in this case; indeed, such is the interpretative force of the phrase that its visual dimension might fairly be considered, to borrow a term used in discussion of the nineteenth-century novel, a ‘realist alibi’. Coming across the epithet ‘mighty Shade’, readers familiar with the diction of Augustan epic in general and Pope’s Iliad in particular will think Wrst not of real shade but of the metaphorical application of the noun, standard throughout the translation, to refer to a dead person, a ghost.92 Pope employs the epithet in that sense in a group of scenes signiWcantly related to this one: in Book V, for instance, as Aeneas defends the corpse of Pandarus: ‘O’er the fall’n Trunk his ample Shield display’d, j He hides the Hero with his mighty Shade’, and again (in slightly altered form) in Book XVII as Ajax protects the body of Patroclus: ‘Meanwhile great Ajax (his broad Shield display’d) j Guards the dead Hero with the dreadful Shade’.93 Falling across the bodies of Pandarus and Patroclus, the shadows cast by the shields of Aeneas and Ajax vividly emblematize the fates of the dead heroes: their passage from the realms of light ‘to the Shades of Death’.94 Teucer, however, is not dead; nor, since he is destined to survive the war, can Pope’s description of Ajax’s ‘mighty Shade’ playing over the archer’s wounded body be taken as an example of prolepsis.95 Rather, it forges an associative link between the unusual mode of commerce which obtains between Ajax and Teucer, two living heroes, and what is the most common variant of mutuality on the Homeric battleWeld: the solidarity surviving heroes feel with their fallen comrades. Pope’s intuition of such a link constitutes at once a searching inquiry into the meaning of the Ajax–Teucer episode itself within the context of the Iliad, and a dynamic reappraisal of its traditional capacity to Wgure 91 Peter J. Connolly, ‘Pope’s Iliad: Ut Pictura Translatio’, Studies in English Literature, 21 (1981), 439–55. 92 Among many other instances, see in particular xxiii. 115–16, where Achilles, dreaming of the dead Patroclus, ‘with his longing Arms essay’d j In vain to grasp the visionary Shade’, and the Wnal couplet of the translation: ‘Such Honours Ilion to her Hero paid, j And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s Shade’ (xxiv. 1015–16). 93 Pope, Iliad v. 365–6; xvii. 143–4. 94 Iliad xvi. 734. 95 Elsewhere, Pope does employ shadow as a miniature chronicle of a death foretold: when, for instance, moments before killing him, Hector strikes the helmet of Achilles oV Patroclus’s head, Pope pauses to describe ‘That Plume, which never stoop’d to Earth before, j Long us’d, untouch’d, in Wghting Fields to shine, j And shade the Temples of the Man divine’ (xvi. 961–3)—Patroclus is but a shadow of Achilles, and wearing the armour of his greater friend will be the death of him.


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moral questions about commerce and competition among writers. By implying that Ajax’s fellow feeling for Teucer in a sense entails the archer’s death, Pope was being true to the most fundamental if also the ‘most dazzlingly alien’ feature of the sympathy warriors in the Iliad experience for each other. That sympathy is grounded in a shared consciousness of their mortality; sometimes this consciousness issues in actions Pope would have esteemed as humane, sponsoring the nearest thing in the Iliad to compassion as he would have understood it. But it can also lead in the opposite direction, to ‘an unusually complex form of revenge’: in Homeric heroes, the ‘recognition that things must die’, themselves included, may produce ‘an urge to universalise that recognition’, ‘the wish to aYrm this shared mortality by bringing death’.96 This dark variant of fellow feeling is taken to its stygian extreme (inevitably) by Achilles. In Book XXI, he returns to the battleWeld after the death of Patroclus, possessed by a brutalizing sense of the subjection of everything human to the undiscriminating power of mortality; in the course of the aristeia which follows, he is supplicated in turn by Tros and Lycaon, and slaughters both without a second thought, not because he doesn’t pity them in their mortal weakness but because he does. But that is Achilles, and Tros and Lycaon are Trojans. For Pope to align Ajax’s commerce with Teucer, his compatriot, with that brutal Achillean mode of fellow feeling, to imply that he achieves mutuality with the archer only by treating him as if he were already dead—by, in a sense, killing him—is quite extraordinary. Extraordinary enough as an interpretation of the Ajax–Teucer episode itself, it becomes even more so if we suppose that Pope had somewhere in mind the episode’s traditional literary aYliations. The likelihood that he did is increased by the fact that the topos of sympathy between living and dead heroes to which he oVers to assimilate it was itself already invested with literary resonances. Once again the key Wgure is Dryden. Looking ahead to the end of his long and contentious literary life in ‘To My Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’ (1694), the old poet had implored his young prote´ge´: Be kind to my Remains; and oh defend, Against Your Judgement, Your departed Friend! Let not the Insulting Foe my Fame pursue; But shade those Lawrels which descend to You:97 96 Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, 1993), pp. 22–5 (I quote from 23). 97 ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’, ll. 72–5.

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Congreve was to defend Dryden’s ‘Remains’—at once his physical body and the corpus of his writings—against the critical attentions of his many adversaries (and his own better ‘judgement’), as the heroes of the Iliad shield the corpses of their fallen compatriots against enemy warriors hunting for spoils. This analogy is Wrmly embedded in Pope’s Iliad, in the form of systematic allusion: in Book XVI, for instance, Pope’s Glaucus incites his fellow Trojans to ‘save from hostile Rage [the] lov’d Remains’ of Sarpedon, and after Hector has killed Patroclus in Book XVII, Pope’s Menelaus, himself beaten back by the ferocity of the fray over the corpse, exhorts Ajax ‘oh my Friend! j Haste, and Patroclus’ lov’d Remains defend’.98 In light of which, two conclusions suggest themselves about Pope’s version of the Ajax–Teucer episode. Both undermine its capacity to Wgure poetic mutuality but with varying degrees of sceptical force. The milder one is that benevolent commerce between poets truly eventuates only when one of the two involved is dead, when the pitiless glare of authentic judgement is refracted through a lens of nostalgia. ‘The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth’, as Pope famously observed in the preface to his Works (1717); only in death can such belligerent competition be replaced by mutually beneWcial exchange. The harsher reading gives full weight to the fact that Teucer is not actually killed by Ajax’s kindness, merely diminished or demoted in his being: by extension, for poets in general and the translator Pope in particular, huddled Teucer-like under the protection of Homer, to abandon the individualistic contest for fame in search of the solace of mutuality is to risk being reduced while still alive to what Achilles bitterly discovers Patroclus has become in death: an ‘Aerial Semblance, and an empty Shade!’99 The self-divisions I have been describing in Pope’s response to intimations of mutuality in the Iliad come to a head in his treatment of the hero who more than any other instantiates the virtues of ‘commerce’ in the epic: namely, Hector. The hyper-individualism of the Homeric warrior which so troubled eighteenth-century readers is muted in the case of the Trojan chief who is presented in a number of scenes as the guardian of his city and his people. More signiWcantly where Pope in particular is concerned, to these signs of social motivation are added vestiges of familial feeling. The two come together in the ‘idea of the character’ of Hector which Pope provides in a note early in Book III, where the hero’s ruling 98 Pope, Iliad xvi. 668; xvii. 129–30. 99 Ibid., xxiii. 125.


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passion is ‘the aVection he bears to his parents and his kindred, and his desire of defending them’.100 Much the most celebrated instance of that domestic aVection was the episode from Book VI which Dryden had lately translated in Examen Poeticum (1693) as ‘The Last Parting of Hector and Andromache’. Commentators from Erasmus to Rapin had singled out the exchange in which Andromache, holding in her arms ‘the baby Astyanax, Hector’s son and his father’s darling’, tries to prevent her husband from returning to the battleWeld, appealing to his ‘feelings through the child’, as ‘one of the most delicate and Wnished pieces in Homer; . . . touching, tender, and natural’;101 and indeed ‘the domestic aspect of this scene involving an infant is unparalleled in epic poetry. It is diYcult to imagine Virgil, Spenser, or Milton attempting anything like it, let alone succeeding in the attempt.’102 Pope accentuated that aspect, bringing Andromache’s prophecy of Hector’s death to a peak, for instance, in a line twisted into an almost unsayable cadence under the pressure of familial loss: ‘A Widow I, an helpless Orphan He’.103 Moreover, he enacted the Wlial commerce of the scene in his conduct as he translated it, playing Astyanax to Dryden’s Hector in a note—‘The utmost I can pretend is to have avoided a few modern phrases and deviations from the original, which have escaped that great man’104— and realizing his kinship with his poetic father in a series of allusions within his verse: ‘helpless orphan’ itself is inherited from Dryden (Pope is no poetic orphan) but perhaps the most notable case comes when Hector foresees Andromache ‘trembling, weeping, captive led!’ after the fall of Troy and groaning beneath ‘the load of life’,105 that last phrase being (as I showed in the last chapter) a particular signature tune of Dryden’s. Yet in that scene Hector’s capacity for mutuality and his martial heroism are Xatly opposed. It was a later episode, one which takes place not inside the city walls but on the battleWeld, which brought Pope to reXect most searchingly on the relation between those two aspects of Hector’s character. The episode in question is connected with that of Ajax and Teucer, following on from it though not immediately 100 TE, vii. 191. 101 The phrases are taken from Erasmus’s description of the scene, in De Copia Verborum ac Rerum (1534), quoted in Robin Sowerby, ‘ ‘‘The Last Parting of Hector and Andromache’’ ’, in John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Oxford, 2000), pp. 240–63 (at 241). 102 Ibid., 242. 103 Pope, Iliad vi. 513. 104 TE vii. 349. 105 Pope, Iliad vi. 579, 584.

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succeeding it. Part of the aristeia of Ajax in Book XIV, it describes how Hector, having wounded Teucer, is himself laid low by Teucer’s protector Ajax and then, like Teucer, shielded by his compatriots before being carried to the safety of the banks of the river Xanthus: Polydamas, Agenor the divine, The pious Warrior of Anchises’ Line, And each bold Leader of the Lycian Band; With cov’ring Shields (a friendly Circle) stand. His mournful Followers with assistant Care, The groaning Hero to his Chariot bear; His foaming Coursers, swifter than the Wind, Speed to the Town, and leave the War behind. When now they touch’d the Mead’s enamel’d Side, Where gentle Xanthus rolls his easy Tyde, With watry Drops the Chief they sprinkle round, Plac’d on the Margin of the Xow’ry Ground.106

‘The pious Warrior of Anchises’ Line’ is, of course, Aeneas. Homer mentioned him second in the list of Hector’s Wve rescuers and by name alone, whereas he accorded three of the others (Agenor, Sarpedon, and Glaucus) the dignity of an heroic epithet. Pope, by contrast, keen to relate Hector to the socialized Virgilian mode of heroism of which Aeneas is the destined epitome, gives the hero of the Aeneid pride of rhetorical place as the last of a crescendo of individuated rescuers trimmed to three, elevates him above his colleagues in a line of his own, refers to him by means of an honoriWc periphrasis (since his name goes without saying) and, most signiWcant of all, anticipates Virgil in attaching to him the adjective ‘pious’, that future hallmark of the epic hero’s willingness to sacriWce self-realization in pursuit of collective goals. Hector’s gestating social instincts elicit a reciprocal response from the hero who will bring them fully to birth in the epic tradition. However, this emphasis on the protoVirgilian dimension of the scene does not go uncontested. An air of unreality hangs over Pope’s description of the landscape to which Hector is transported by his ‘friendly Circle’, and the phrases which most give it oV are ones for which Pope rather than Homer is responsible: ‘gentle Xanthus rolls his easy Tyde’ (Homer has only ‘eddying Xanthus’), ‘the Margin of the Xow’ry Ground’ (instead of just ‘ground’), and ‘they touch’d the Mead’s enamel’d Side’ (for ‘they reached the ford of the fair-Xowing 106 Pope, Iliad xiv. 499–510.


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river’). ‘Easy’, ‘Xow’ry’, ‘enamel’d’: this is a domain of fantasy, saccharine and incipiently amorous, an Homeric bower of bliss. It is a mirage of commerce in a desert of contention. As with Ajax and Teucer in Book VIII, so here Pope’s ambivalent response to this episode of brotherhood among heroes arises out of his sensitivity to its aYliations with other scenes in the epic. What immediately precedes Hector’s rescue in Book XIV is the Olympian interlude in which Juno uses the magic girdle of Venus to seduce and sedate Jupiter on Mount Ida so that she can continue to assist the Greeks in contravention of his edict that the immortals should no longer intervene in the war. Apparently, Pope connected the two; certainly, the banks of the Xanthus where Hector is laid to convalesce bear some resemblance, as he describes them, to Ida’s magical and erotic slopes where ‘Thick new-born Vi’lets a soft Carpet spread, j And clust’ring Lotos swell’d the rising Bed’107 as Jupiter nods oV in post-orgasmic stupor. But the sexual hoodwinking of the king of the gods had long unsettled Homeric commentators, and it unsettled Pope. He provides four notes on the scene which try out a variety of approaches to it. The Wrst and last are dignifying, respectively adducing Eustathius’s allegorical interpretation, and suggesting that Milton ‘imitated the several beautiful parts of this episode’ when depicting the bower of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. The second, however, lets oV ironic steam, acknowledging that Jupiter’s eVort ‘to prove the ardour of his passion’ for Juno ‘by the instances of its warmth to other women’ may appear ‘pretty singular’ but pointing out that ‘to be known, or thought to have been successful with a good many, is what some moderns have found no unfortunate qualiWcation in gaining a lady’. The third frankly concedes that it is ‘a Fiction of very great Absurdity, that the supreme Being should be laid aside in a female Embrace’, adding that it is in order ‘to divert his Reader from reXecting on his Boldness’ that Homer ‘pours forth a great Variety of poetical Ornaments’ in the scene.108 Pope carried that unstable compound of tones over into his reading of the rescue of Hector by Aeneas and the other members of his ‘friendly Circle’. This too is for him a beautiful episode but one striated with burlesque, richly poetical but Wnally a fiction. In a world of war, eZorescences of mutual commerce among men are touched with divinity; but to take shelter in a friendly circle may be to be rendered oblivious (as Jupiter is when 107 Ibid., 396–8.

108 TE viii. 181.

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encircled by Juno in Venus’s sleep-inducing ‘zone’) to the ineluctable facts of contention. Pope’s pairing of those scenes is darkly insightful about the heroic life as it is lived in the Iliad. Generally in Homer’s epic heroes either live or die; few are wounded and survive. Consequently, a certain unreality attaches to those such as Teucer and Hector who do, a mild strain of that ‘charmed immunity to real, deep suVering’109 which infects the heroes who are spirited away in the midst of combat by divine intervention: most notoriously, Paris and Aeneas whom Venus saves from the clutches of Menelaus and Diomedes in Books III and V. What Pope’s enhancement of that unreality suggests the Iliad taught him about the poet’s life may be gathered by considering the role which the Homeric motifs of encircling and shading I have been examining would shortly go on to play in the mock-epic of poetic life that was beginning to incubate in his mind as he came towards the end of his Iliad translation. For such motifs are endemic in The Dunciad, a central nexus for Pope’s ambivalent estimation of the dunces as living unreal but charmed lives. The goddess of Dulness wears ‘A veil of fogs’ and she sheds these vapours protectively around her favourites: ‘shading’ or ‘clouding’, ‘circling’, ‘covering’, and ‘curtaining’ are her principal modes of activity.110 Like the beneWciaries of such divine commerce in the Iliad, the dunces thereby pass into an altered state of being, a privileged state but one correspondingly denuded of meaning. Wrapped in her ‘kind cloud’, they live ‘safe and unseen’,111 beyond the violent contention for fame, in what is a markedly socialized, convivial poetic world. But, like Hector encompassed by his friendly circle or Aeneas lovingly enveloped in Venus’s veil, since life for the poet as for the Homeric hero is predicated on strife and suVering,112 they are only half-alive. The translator risks a similar fate. In The Dunciad, Pope looks back on the years he spent translating as the period in which he had come closest to being a dunce himself, nominating it as his ‘fate’ in the coming age of Dulness foretold in Book III for ‘ten years to comment and translate’.113 Of course, that is a simpliWcation, a hindsighted and 109 Taplin, Homeric Soundings, 135 (commenting in particular on the Paris–Diomedes– Aphrodite episode). 110 For instance: The Dunciad ii. 314 (shading, covering), 405–10 (encircling); iii. 3 (curtaining, encircling), 72 (covering, shading); iv. 227, 254 (clouding), 356 (clouding, covering). 111 Ibid., iv. 289–90. 112 Jasper GriYn, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford, 1980), pp. 179–205. 113 The Dunciad iii. 331–2.


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strategic concession to the commonplace slur against translators which the creative achievement of the Homer translations disproves. Yet no small part of that achievement, I have been suggesting, was Pope’s searchingly reXexive engagement with scenes of heroic commerce in the Iliad, and that engagement appears to have brought him to wonder whether embracing translation as a mode of poetic mutuality might not entail a duncely demotion of his poetic self. He had spoken of himself in The Spectator of 12 June 1712, at around the time of his Wrst forays into Homer’s epic, as ‘one of those of whom Seneca says, Tam Umbratiles sunt, ut putent in turbido esse quicquid in luce est’, and that self-portrait as a shadow-man, ‘Wtter for a Corner than a full light’,114 was not only an idealistic disavowal of contention but also a pragmatic acknowledgement that his crippled body showed to best advantage in dim light. Pope, who was ‘not able to dress or undress himself and neither went to bed nor rose without help’,115 had much need of the healing mutuality experienced by Teucer and Hector when their brothers in the Weld shade their battered bodies. But he also suffered anxieties about losing his autonomy born of the extent of that need. Translating particularly involved him in charting the borderline where interdependence and dependency meet. Which may be why, latent in the epitaph he wrote for his father, is not only a vision of the poet’s life as benevolent translatorial commerce but also one of that life as uncontending translatorial dulness. Jemmy the passage’s terms of praise a little and they yield the three staple items of duncely diction which Matthew Prior had used to mock Dryden for retiring from ‘spiteful satire’ to the ‘safe innocence of a dull translator’ in the couplet of his ‘Satyr on the Modern Translators’ which (as I showed in the introduction) persistently preoccupied Pope: for ‘No Courts he saw, no Suits would try’, ‘safe’; for ‘innoxious’, ‘innocence’; and for ‘Un-learn’d’, ‘dull’. ‘ THE W INDI NG WAY ’: THE ODYSSE Y The Odyssey is an epic of commerce. Voyaging from country to country, and making his way among alien peoples through exchanges of gifts, Odysseus is a prototype of the maritime trader; when later epic poets

114 S i. 147. 115 Johnson, ‘Life of Pope’, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. Hill, iii. 197.

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wanted to give the journeys of their heroes a Xavour of mercantile contemporaneity, Homer’s sea wanderer helped obviate the resulting problems of decorum. Journeying from Hell through Chaos to Earth in Book II of Paradise Lost, Satan is compared to ‘merchants’ who ‘bring j Their spicy drugs’ from ‘Bengara, or the isles j Of Ternate and Tidore’ and to ‘Ulysses’ who ‘on the larboard shunned j Charybdis, and by th’ other whirlpool steered’.116 For Pope, Odysseus Wgured not just trade in the narrow monetary sense but the ampler moral reciprocities of commerce. Contrasting his character as it appears in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Pope observed that, in the latter, Homer ‘shows him not in that full light of glory but in the shade of common life, with a mixture of such qualities as are requisite to all the lowest accidents of it, strugling with misfortunes, and on a level with the meanest of mankind’.117 As we have seen, the ‘shade of common life’, a safe refuge of humane interdependence, is where Pope liked to think of his ‘honest merchant’ father living out his days after he had retired, and the environment for which the poet professed himself most suited as one of Seneca’s ‘Umbratiles’. Odysseus may be identiWed with such mutuality in two respects: Wrst because, unlike the self-determining heroes of the Iliad, his fate is closely bound up with that of a community, the ‘etairoi’ or ‘comrades’ who accompany him for much of his journey; and secondly because his capacity to forge social bonds with the inhabitants—whether divine or human—of the various foreign lands he pitches up on is essential to his survival. Protesting in later years against Edmund Curll’s (alleged) theft of his correspondence, Pope spoke of ‘the commerce of man with man’ the rascally bookseller had violated as ‘most necessary’.118 The story of Odysseus is one of ‘necessary commerce’. Moreover, that commerce has an explicitly poetic dimension. One of the things that Odysseus trades for assistance from the strangers he encounters in his wanderings is poetry: invited to feast with the Phaeacians in Book VII, he accedes to their king Alcinous’s request that he recount his adventures since leaving Troy. Initially he is reluctant to do so, but his reluctance serves to emphasize how far he has evolved since the Iliad: what it has cost him to learn to acknowledge the ‘debts and duties’ of reciprocity over and above the pleasures of self-realization. It also serves to discriminate him from the professional bard who appears 116 Paradise Lost ii. 638–40, 1019–20. 117 TE x. 386. 118 Preface to the quarto edition of Letters (1737), repr. in S i. xl.


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at the feast, Demodocus, who has no choice but to earn his food by singing and whom commentary tradition regarded as Homer’s alias.119 In terms of Pope’s favourite distinction, if Demodocus Wgures the Homeric poet as an exponent of trade, Odysseus is Homer as exemplar of commerce, Homer in the sociable guise Pope had conferred on him when retailing from Herodotus the anecdote about Tychius the leatherdresser: a poet who ‘returns’ his imaginative gifts for charitable hospitality, one for whom poetry is not a superhuman and singular quest for greatness on the Miltonic model but a mode of ‘common’ humane goodness. Odysseus held out to Pope a gratifying vision of the prehistory of the poet’s life as originally compatible with what he had a few years earlier described to Bolingbroke as ‘the more attainable and the more reasonable aims of our Being’: ‘to be a good Neighbour, an useful friend’, and even perhaps ‘to save his Soul’. Ostensibly, these connotations of sociality attaching to the Odyssey were realized in Pope’s manner of translating it. The Iliad he had confronted alone, in a poetic form of single combat which his enemies considered as arrogantly grandiose as the aristeias of the epic’s heroes: the authors of Homerides, for instance, called it ‘somewhat bold, and almost prodigious for a single Man to undertake a Work, which not all the Poets of our Island durst jointly attempt’.120 Now, setting out on the Odyssey, Pope enlisted as ‘etairoi’ the scholar-poets William Broome and Elijah Fenton; venturing upon a work informed by an ethos of collaborativeness, he adopted the collaborative ethic which the translator was popularly held to embody. Except that the collaboration was to be kept secret. Broome and Fenton had agreed, in the hope of maximizing the returns of the translation, that subscribers should be given the impression that it was to be the work of Pope and Pope alone. For a while, their shared possession of this secret consolidated the bond between the three translators: their early exchanges of letters are models of the sort of civilized intercourse which early eighteenth-century Englishmen prided themselves on their capacity to sustain. Grumbles at the general impossibility of the task Wnd a sympathetic echo; particular problems of rendering are shared and halved. Soon, however, Broome and Fenton began to bridle at their invisibility. News of their involvement in the 119 See, for instance, John Ogilby, Homer His Odyssey (1665), sig. N4r : ‘the ancient grammarians believe that he doth describe himself here under the name of Demodocus, as Didymus and Eustathius observe’. 120 Homerides, 5.

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translation, divulged at Wrst by Broome to close friends, eventually became public knowledge. Pope had no choice but to acknowledge their participation but he declined to specify its extent, reasoning that were he to reveal quite how much of the translation he had outsourced—no less than half the poem—subscriptions would drop oV considerably. But Broome and to a lesser extent Fenton were unpersuaded; they suspected Pope was running scared from the comparisons which would inevitably follow once readers were told precisely which books were his work and which the work of his unsung adjutants. As Broome archly put it in the concluding note to the translation, on the face of it a paean to Pope, the parts of the work performed by him and Fenton might have ‘the good fortune not to be distinguished from’ those undertaken by Pope.121 Certainly, Pope had nothing to gain and everything to lose from such comparisons, as well as reason to fear that they would not be made in a spirit of impartiality; even so, as his biographer is forced to concede, his commerce with Broome and Fenton ‘was a shabby business all round’.122 The gradual failure of that commerce can be charted against references to episodes of Homeric cooperation in Broome’s letters to Fenton: in particular, that of Ajax and Teucer. On 29 May 1722 he had written with the bluV wit which was his usual mode of expressing fellow feeling with his more retiring co-translator: ‘I am glad you have translated the Wrst of the Odyssey. You stand in the front of the battle, and the array of critics will naturally fall Wrst upon you. I have translated the second, and shall therefore, like Teucer, be sheltered behind the shield of an Ajax.’123 But by 3 May 1728 the ambivalences latent within that Homeric analogue for literary cooperation had come to the fore. Having now broken altogether from Pope, Broome repeated to Fenton J. D. Breval’s charge against Pope’s treatment of his sometime collaborator Gay, a charge whose relevance to their own case needed no explication: ‘Mr Pope . . . wounds from behind Gay, and like Teucer in Homer, puts Gay in the front of the battle, and shoots his arrows lurking under the shield of Ajax.’124 Nowhere in their correspondence, however, did Broome and Fenton Wgure their involvement with Pope through analogues from the Odyssey; they were not prepared to see themselves as his ‘etairoi’. Vanity may have played a part in this: Odysseus’s companions are altogether slighter Wgures than even the 121 TE x. 378. 123 S ii. 121.

122 Mack, Life, 414. 124 Ibid., 489.


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minor heroes of the Iliad. Then too, the many scenes of cooperation in Homer’s second epic had not achieved the resonance of their rarer counterparts in its predecessor where estimations of the poet’s life were concerned. Yet the Odyssey is actually the richer of the two poems in reXections on the problems of socialization. To say that it is systematically concerned with the virtues of interdependence is to point to its persistent examination of those virtues not to its uniform exempliWcation of them. As the Homeric scholars whom Broome and Fenton consulted on Pope’s behalf were regularly troubled to observe, faultlines are constantly opening within Odysseus’s relationship with his companions, as older Iliadic modes of heroic singularity threaten to split apart the veneer of his necessarily socialized self. When dealing with such fraught episodes Broome repeatedly takes the line of interpretation which puts Odysseus’s conduct in the best light and that of his compatriots in the worst. A prime case in point occurs in Book XII where Odysseus’s comrades, in spite of his warnings, slaughter the Oxen of the Sun while he is away propitiating the gods. In a note Broome seizes on their actions as suYcient justiWcation for their (notoriously casual) deaths later in the poem: ‘there is a poetical justice observ’d in the whole relation, and by the piety of Ulysses, and the guilt of his companions, we acknowledge the equity when we see them perish, and Ulysses preserv’d from all his dangers’.125 But his translation is even more implacable. In Homer it is made clear that when Eurylochus persuades the ‘etairoi’ to ignore Odysseus’s advice and kill the oxen he does so out of hunger, and Broome does not remove this suggestion, but he does all but override it by ending Eurylochus’s speech on a powerfully demagogic note: ‘Why seize ye not yon beeves, and Xeecy prey? j Arise unanimous; arise and slay!’126 There is no warrant in Homer for ‘seize’ or ‘slay’ nor for the exultant and bloodthirsty Wnal cadence; but what particularly damns Eurylochus is the Miltonism ‘unanimous’. In Book VI of Paradise Lost, the archangel Raphael describes how Satan stirred up ‘angel with angel [to] war’ when they had previously been ‘wont to meet j So oft, in festivals of joy and love j Unanimous’;127 the murderous consensus of the ‘etairoi’ is a bitter travesty of such angelic unanimity. Nor did Broome shy away from the knock-on eVect of that echo: namely, that Odysseus is not merely rebelled against but godlike in being so. On the contrary, he had already made it plain at the beginning of the episode by putting into Odysseus’s mouth as he leaves his companions a Xagrant quotation of God’s anathema 125 TE x. 450.

126 Pope, Odyssey xii. 409–10.

127 Paradise Lost vi. 92–5.

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against eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘O friends be wise! nor dare the Xocks destroy j Of these fair pastures: If ye touch, ye die.’128 The contrast with Pope’s practice is striking. He claimed to have overseen and where necessary revised the work of his collaborators but, since the manuscripts of their original versions are lost,129 it is no longer possible to verify that claim. Some commentators have detected considerable evidence of Pope’s hand in books of the poem assigned in the Wrst instance to Broome and Fenton; most notably, in the present context, Hester Jones in a subtle account of the translation’s ‘prominent emphasis on friendship, among poets as well as among characters in Homer’.130 But my own practice will be conservative: I shall limit my remarks to parts of the poem known to have been translated by Pope. One reason why is that the books for which Pope was solely responsible are distinguished from those undertaken by Broome and Fenton, ironically enough, by the anxieties they manifest about Odysseus’s relations with his companions. Consider, for instance, his response to the moment at the end of Book IX when Odysseus sets oV alone to explore the land of the Cyclopes, leaving his companions behind to guard the ships. Broome furnished Pope with a note conWdently identifying this separation as Odysseus’s characteristically prudent response to prior instances of untrustworthiness on the part of the ‘etairoi’: A very suYcient reason may be assign’d, why Ulysses here goes in person to search this land: He dares not, as Eustathius remarks, trust his companions; their disobedience among the Ciconians, and their unworthy conduct among the Lotophagi, have convinc’d him that no conWdence is to be repos’d in them: This seems probable, and upon this probability Homer proceeds to bring about the punishment of Polyphemus, which the wisdom of Ulysses eVects, and it is an action of importance, and consequently ought to be perform’d by the Heroe of the Poem.131

Connecting Odysseus’s decision to separate himself from his comrades with his resumption of heroic pre-eminence in the poem, this brings out into the open the tension between his ostensible socialization and the 128 Pope, Odyssey xii. 382; compare Genesis 3: 3—‘Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die’—echoed in Eve’s remark to Satan in the temptation scene of Paradise Lost: ‘of the fruit of this fair tree amidst j The garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat j Thereof, nor shall ye touch it, lest ye die’ (ix. 661–3). 129 TE vii. lv. 130 Hester Jones, ‘Pope’s Homer: The Shadow of Friendship’, in Pope: World and Word, ed. Erskine-Hill, 55–68 (at 55). 131 TE ix. 314.


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self-possession of the Iliadic hero, then resolves that tension decisively in favour of Odysseus’s individual ‘importance’. Pope, though, did not take Broome’s word for it; his translation puts back into the balance what his collaborator’s note purported to have settled. He strikes out on his own to explore further the question of Odysseus’s culpability for deserting his companions: when the sacred dawn Arising glitter’d o’er the dewy lawn, I call’d my fellows, and these words addrest. My dear associates, here indulge your rest: While, with my single ship, adventurous I Go forth, the manners of yon men to try; Whether a race unjust, of barb’rous might, Rude, and unconscious of a stranger’s right; Or such who harbour pity in their breast, Revere the Gods, and succour the distrest?132

As in Broome’s version of Eurylochus’s speech from the Oxen of the Sun episode, Milton has a signiWcant presence in these lines. But whereas Broome used Paradise Lost to close down the potential complexities of that episode, demonizing the ‘etairoi’ and deifying Odysseus, Pope’s reminiscences of Milton’s epic serve to increase the scope for ambivalence inherent in this scene. For not only is the part of Paradise Lost to which he principally alludes concerned with human rather than superhuman agents, making it more naturally adapted to sponsor debate, it is also the one in which questions of heroic autonomy and humane mutuality are most perplexedly at issue: namely, the so-called ‘separation scene’ which immediately precedes the Fall in Book IX. Odysseus’s reference to his compatriots as ‘My dear associates’ recalls Adam’s tender apostrophizing of Eve, in response to her suggestion that they divide their gardening labours, as ‘Sole Eve, associate sole, to me beyond j Compare above all living creatures dear’.133 But the wider logic of the parallel between the scenes prompts us to identify him not with Adam but with Eve: both initiate separations in the name of heroic integrity (the adjective ‘single’ is as integral to Eve’s self-presentation as it is to Odysseus’s).134 This three-dimensional 132 Pope, Odyssey ix. 197–206. 133 Paradise Lost ix. 227–8. 134 As, for instance, at 322–6: ‘If this be our condition, thus to dwell j In narrow circuit straitened by a Foe, j Subtle or violent, we not endued j Single with like defence, wherever met, j How are we happy?’; and again at 337–9: ‘Let us not then suspect our happy state j Left so imperfect by the Maker wise, j As not secure to single or combined.’

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quality in the echo is crucial. For Pope, this Homeric separation scene raises the same notoriously complex questions about self-suYciency and interdependence as its Miltonic counterpart. There are signs, too, that he arranged for it to do so with the widening divisions between himself and his co-translators somewhere in mind. At any rate, Odysseus’s aYrmation of his heroic singularity hinges upon the polysyllable ‘adventurous’, summoning Milton’s description of his epic in the proem as ‘my adventurous song’,135 an epithet which crystallizes the vauntingly aspirational understanding of poetic vocation against which Pope pitched the social model of authorship he particularly associated with translation. Milton himself used that adjective to canvass a possible kinship between his own ambition and Satan’s, and Pope here elaborates that possibility.136 The heroic singleness of Pope’s Odysseus, going forth alone to ‘try’ an unknown ‘race’, resembles not only that of Eve but also that of Satan when, at the end of the consult in Pandaemonium, he sets oV for the ‘seat j Of some new race called Man’, having previously schemed to ensure that the ‘enterprise’ is one ‘None shall partake with me’.137 These Miltonic equations are not out of place, the Cyclopes episode being the point in the Odyssey where vestiges of Odysseus’s Achillean individualism bring his companions closest to disaster, as Eve’s does humankind and Satan’s does his fellow devils. The episode ends with Odysseus taunting Polyphemus in Iliadic style before the boat carrying him and his men to safety is quite out of range of the furious Cyclops’ missiles, deaf to the entreaties of his compatriots. Pope calls those entreaties ‘mild’, pressing aptly on the adjective which more than any other in Milton advances the claims of humane interdependence over against those of heroic autonomy: Adam’s initial answer to Eve’s proposal that they separate, for instance, is introduced by the narrator as ‘mild’.138 The progress of Odysseus’s relationship with his ‘etairoi’ is counterpointed against the other form of commerce he is required to practise during his wanderings: his interactions with alien beings and races. These interactions are necessary but perilous; in particular, they actualize the risk 135 Paradise Lost i. 13. 136 Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford, 1993) argues that sensitivity to such transgressive implications is the mark of a ‘Romantic reader’ of Milton’s epic; for Romantic elaborations of the parallel between Milton and Satan, see pp. 257–79. 137 Paradise Lost ii. 347–8, 465–6. 138 Ibid., ix. 226.


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of demotion or annulment of self latent in scenes of cooperation in the Iliad. In the explicitly magical world of the Odyssey, to accept hospitality is often to become in a literal sense what warriors in the Iliad plucked from battle by human or divine intervention are Wguratively transformed into: shadows of their former selves. Pope had needed to draw out deep-lying structural associations to uncover that possibility when translating the earlier epic; now he was required only to point up concerns already present in Homer and exhaustively underscored by generations of commentators. The archetypal case is that of Circe. Those of Odysseus’s companions who sat down at her table ‘in the luscious feast themselves . . . lost’139—both ‘tucked in heartily’ and ‘de-humanized themselves’. That is a double meaning absolutely in line with the tradition of commentary on the episode: allegorists and moralizers of Homer had for centuries been seeing in Circe the threats oVered by social pleasure to the integrity of the self. This view had particularly been emphasized in recent years by Milton, who returned obsessively in his poems and prose to Circean scenarios and who for Pope (as we have seen) Wgured unyielding self-determination in the imaginative life. But Pope put a more personal inXexion on the idea that Circe unselves her guests with another equivocal turn of phrase in the next couplet. The instrument she uses to do so, just a ‘wand’ in Homer, is ‘her circling wand’ in Pope,140 the favourite adjective articulating the suspicion distantly compassed in the mimetic reference to Hector’s rescuers in Book xiv of the Iliad as ‘(a friendly Circle)’, and soon to underwrite the presentation of the selXess anti-heroes of The Dunciad— social circles can be blackly magical. The incautiously open response of the ‘etairoi’ to the overtures of commerce made by Circe and other magical beings they encounter such as the Lotus-eaters might be considered justiWcation for Odysseus’s wariness of entering too far into ‘common life’ with his companions. That was the implication underlying Broome’s note on the Oxen of the Sun episode. But it is not a logic Pope allows. Variants of the pejorative undertones audible in his versions of scenes where Odysseus separates himself from his imprudent shipmates recur even when it is illusory traYc with superhuman powers he declines. Here again, Pope proves negatively capable: fully apprised of the dangers of sociality, he nevertheless maintains his misgivings about Odysseus’s singularity. Even where Circe’s feast is concerned: Odysseus’s refusal to succumb to her charms—join her circle—was for the majority of Homer’s editors and 139 Pope, Odyssey x. 274.

140 Ibid., 276.

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previous English translators, most notably George Chapman, evidence of his exemplary Stoic self-possession.141 Pope is not so sure. Circe ‘in vain invites’ Odysseus ‘the feast to share’ while he remains ‘silent and apart’,142 but subsequent innuendoes somewhat degrade the dignity of that posture. In Homer, for instance, Circe protests that Odysseus will not ‘touch food or wine’, and Pope not only expands that phrase into two transferred epithets which develop its potential to sow doubt about the hero’s self-imposed isolation—‘Untouch’d before’ him are ‘the cates divine j And unregarded . . . the rosy wine’143 (‘unregarded’ in particular is tinged with pathos)—but assigns it as he does so to the narrative voice, thereby lending whatever doubt is sown increased authority. Most strikingly of all, whereas Homer ascribes Odysseus’s abstinence to sympathy for his (brutishly transformed) companions—‘what rightthinking man’, he has him ask Circe, ‘could bring himself to eat and drink before he had won freedom for his comrades?’—Pope overturns that emphasis by describing Odysseus (again in the narrative voice) as keeping a ‘hoard of grief ’ for them ‘close harbour’d at his heart’.144 Fellow feeling has been recast as solipsism. The ambivalences I have been examining in Pope’s estimation of Odysseus’s commerce with human and superhuman personages come to a head at the point in the poem where those twin strands of problematic mutuality converge: the scene in Book XIII in which, having Wnally made landfall on Ithaca, Odysseus meets the goddess Athena disguised as a local shepherd boy. Occurring at the midpoint of the epic, this has been called ‘a cardinal moment’ in Pope’s translation, ‘emblematic of the whole poem’.145 Certainly, it was one of his chosen points of access into Homer’s work: he cherry-picked it along with two other extracts for inclusion in Steele’s Poetical Miscellanies (1713). That Pope made ‘The Arrival of Ulysses in Ithaca’ part of his apprenticeship in the translator’s art is apt because the encounter between Odysseus and Athena is reXexively pertinent to that art as he was inclined to conWgure it at the outset of his Homeric 141 For the prehistory of this line of interpretation, see W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme (Oxford, 1968), pp. 118–27; and for Chapman’s Stoic Odysseus in particular, Phyllis B. Bartlett, ‘The Heroes of Chapman’s Homer’, Review of English Studies (1941), 257–80. 142 Pope, Odyssey x, 445. 143 Ibid., 447–8. 144 Ibid., 446. 145 Jones, ‘Pope’s Homer’, in Pope: World and Word, ed. Erskine-Hill, 60.


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period: as an art of sociable goodness. ‘At the core of ’ this encounter is ‘the discovery of aYnity amidst apparent diVerence’; and, as Hester Jones has well seen, ‘Such an experience, too, informs Pope’s translation.’146 Man and goddess converse, as the young Pope hoped he might with the ‘divine’ Homer. Yet there is nothing callow or sentimental about his reading of the scene; whatever its general conduciveness to his ideals of poetic interdependence, he gives due weight to the particular aspects of it which problematize those ideals. For reciprocity is far from immediately or easily achieved between Odysseus and Athena. Though the goddess’s initial approach through disguise and deceit betokens a sympathetic attunement to the habits of wary indirection Odysseus has acquired over his long years of wandering, his inability or unwillingness to break those habits even after she reveals to him that he has indeed reached his homeland considerably exasperates her. When he spins her a yarn about being an exile banished from his native Crete for having murdered a fellow Cretan soldier in a dispute over spoils from the Trojan war, she berates him as ‘crafty’, ‘greedy for deceit’, and ‘cunning and mendacious by nature’.147 Pope’s version of Athena’s speech is one of the highlights of his Odyssey. Indefatigable reviser though he was, he transferred the passage as it had appeared in 1713 virtually unchanged into the complete translation. No wonder: O still the same Ulysses! she rejoin’d, In useful craft successfully reWn’d! Artful in speech, in action, and in mind! SuYc’d it not, that thy long labours past Secure thou seest thy native shore at last? But this to me? who, like thy self, excell In arts of counsel, and dissembling well. To me, whose wit exceeds the pow’rs divine, No less than mortals are surpass’d by thine. Know’st thou not me? who made thy life my care, Thro’ ten years wand’ring, and thro’ ten years war148

Pope softens Athena’s accusations, modulating her voice into a tone of disappointment. Her desire for trustful closeness with Odysseus sounds in the verse whose formal iambic pulse (ictus) is all but stilled for lines at a time, its rhythms tuned instead to the more private wavelengths (accent) of her speech; as particularly around the questions ‘But this 146 Ibid., 65.

147 Odyssey xiii. 291–5.

148 Ibid., 333–43.

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to me?’ and ‘Know’st thou not me?’ (both added by Pope), which are not only extremely colloquial in themselves but also instigate virtually unscannable sequences of monosyllables. Counterpointed against these mutings, however, is a single discordant note: a sharp stab at Odysseus. Once again—or rather already here—allusion to Milton is Pope’s weapon. ‘O still the same Ulysses!’, on one level an expression of amused respect for Odysseus’s powers of self-possession, simultaneously damns him as self-possessive. For it is Satan who prides himself on being ‘still the same’; who, having arrived in Hell at the beginning of Paradise Lost—a home he doesn’t recognize as his home, as Odysseus fails to recognize Ithaca—declares: ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself j Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. j What matter where, if I be still the same.’149 The echo is an unobtrusive one, involving common-or-garden lexis rather than grander more recognizably Miltonic polysyllables such as ‘unanimous’, ‘associate’, or ‘adventurous’. That it was in some sense self-directed on Pope’s part is suggested by his having reinforced throughout Odysseus’s exchanges with Athena the connections between the hero’s ‘artful’ deceits and those of writers. Only in Pope, for instance is the ‘ready tale’ he tells her about being from Crete called a ‘bold Wction’, proof of the fertility of this ‘inventive hero’ in inventio, the early-modern poet’s primary faculty.150 When Pope turned back to his early version of ‘The Arrival of Ulysses in Ithaca’ sometime in 1725 it surely struck him as sadly prescient of developments in his poetic career over the twelve years since its composition. He was bitterly experienced now in the dangers and deceptions of commerce, like Odysseus, and increasingly set in the ways of watchful self-possession around which debates over his character have revolved since Samuel Johnson said of him (adapting a line from one of Edward Young’s satires) that ‘ ‘‘He hardly took tea without a stratagem.’’ ’151 Embroiled in a number of professional rivalries and hatreds, he had made many enemies and lost a few friends, not least, as in the cases of Addison and Broome, in consequence of his involvement in the notionally cooperative practice of translation. There is nothing surprising about this prescience, for it was a deWning feature of the young Pope that he was old before his time. At the age of twenty-nine, in the Preface

149 Paradise Lost i. 254–6. 150 Pope, Odyssey xiii. 305–6. 151 Johnson, ‘Life of Pope’, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. Hill, iii. 200.


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to his Works (1717), he observed: ‘In this oYce of collecting my pieces, I am altogether uncertain, whether to look upon myself as a man building a monument, or burying the dead.’152 Partly he feared his crippled body could not last long; but he also identiWed closely with the worldweariness of the superannuated Wgures from Restoration culture who were his early mentors and friends: Thomas Betterton, William Wycherley, Samuel Garth, Sir William Trumbull, William Walsh.153 Their long years of being buVeted in the storms of contention set oV the mutual commerce Pope enjoyed with them, establishing what was to become a recurrent pattern of ‘discordia concors’ in his understanding of the poet’s life. In one ratio or another, pragmatism and idealism would continue to mingle in Pope’s attitudes towards competition and cooperation throughout his career; as, for instance, when he bewailed the fact that Curll had made ‘the most necessary commerce of man with man, unsafe and to be dreaded’154 by pirating his correspondence, even as he himself practised Odyssean ‘craft’ in his traYc with the bookseller, passing him a smattering of carefully revised letters through intermediaries as a means of justifying his own subsequent edition. Within such larger continuities, however, the Homer marks a watershed in this area of Pope’s self-understanding, as is suggested by his response to the last and most painfully germane of Odysseus’s serial departures from candour in his ‘commerce of man with man’: his Xawed reconciliation with his father, Laertes. Pope was surely induced to reserve the task of translating Book XXIV of the Odyssey for himself, rather than leaving it to Broome or Fenton, as much by the presence within it of this great scene of Wlial pathos as by the fact of its being the concluding book of the poem. Certainly, there are signs in his translation that the scene had passed far into his heart. It particularly prompted him to return at the end of his Homeric period to the question he had Wrst asked himself during its early stages a decade or so earlier when drafting the epitaph which eventually ended up in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot: which of ‘y e virtues’ of his ‘Christian father’ had he inherited? Laertes, as he appears in Homer’s version of the scene, already has much in common with Alexander Pope senior—he has retired from public life and is a devoted and adept gardener—and Pope strengthens the link by stipulating, as he always did when speaking 152 In The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, vol. i, ed. Norman Ault (Oxford, 1936), p. 295. 153 Mack, Life, 88–117. 154 S i. xl.

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of his father, that the plot of land the old man is cultivating was no ancestral possession but one he had ‘purchas’d with his pain’.155 More signiWcantly, where my present purposes are concerned, he added another point of similarity: an association with trade. Whereas Homer’s Laertes, deceived by Odysseus’s disguise, asks him: ‘Where is the swift ship moored that brought you here?’,156 Pope’s immediately assumes he is ‘a merchant in pursuit of gain’.157 Further evidence of his mercantile frame of mind emerges in his response to Odysseus’s claim to be Eperitus, a native of Alybas who took Odysseus into his home when he arrived there Wve years earlier: Thy ancient friend, oh stranger, is no more! Full recompence thy bounty else had born; For ev’ry good man yields a just return: So civil rights demand; and who begins The track of friendship, not pursuing, sins.158

This is Xagrantly anachronistic. The merit of extending xenia or hospitality to strangers in the Homeric world inhered, in the view of the majority of eighteenth-century Homerists, in its being done out of innate magnanimity rather than legal obligation; Madame Dacier had pointed out as much in a note on this very speech, calling the ethic outlined by Laertes ‘un precepte que les hommes naturellement genereux n’oublient jamais & que les autres ne peuvent apprendre’.159 An eighteenth-century English linen merchant, on the other hand, might well insist on respect for his ‘civil rights’, including those which guaranteed the inviolability of his property; especially if, being a Roman Catholic like Alexander Pope senior, he was subject to special rates of taxation on that property. He might also have as his watchword ‘ev’ry good man yields a just return’, using ‘return’ (as Pope had done in connection with the merchant in The Rape of the Lock) at once in its narrowly Wnancial and its broadly moral senses, to encompass both ‘trade’ and ‘commerce’. In linking his father with Laertes, Pope was linking himself with Odysseus. Always an ambivalent identiWcation, as we have seen, it is uniquely so at this juncture. Some eleven books after his return to Ithaca, Odysseus Wnally goes to visit his father; then, Wnding him lonely 155 Pope, Odyssey xxiv. 236. 156 Odyssey xxiv. 299. 157 Pope, Odyssey xxiv. 350. 158 Ibid., 329–33. 159 Anne Dacier, L’Odysseé d’Home`re traduite en Francois, avec de remarques, 3 vols., (Amsterdam, 1717), iii. 317.


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and grief-stricken over the loss of his son, he masquerades as ‘Eperitus’, revealing himself only when his deceit has caused Laertes to scoop up ‘the dark dust’ with ‘both his hands’ and ‘pour it over his grey hair with ceaseless groaning’.160 Elsewhere in the epic Odysseus’s notorious habit of lying about his identity can be excused as a prudent resource given his vulnerability: when he tells Athena in Book XIII that he is a Cretan soldier he is not certain that he has made it back to Ithaca, and even the other Cretan aliases he assumes once he knows he has, when talking to Eumaeus in Book XIV and Penelope in Book XIX, are explicable since the suitors remain to be defeated. But why lie now? This question had long exercised Homer’s editors, and in his own note Pope left no room for doubt about the seriousness of the charge facing Odysseus: ‘It has been objected, that Ulysses here acts contrary to Wlial piety, and permits a tender father to continue in his sorrows, when it was in his power immediately to make him happy, by a discovery of his person.’161 His response, at the level of annotation, was threefold: Wrst, he wheeled out Eustathius, the heaviest piece of artillery at the eighteenth-century Homerist’s disposal, who ‘solves the objection by saying that Ulysses delay’d the discovery, lest the suddenness of joy should prove fatal to Laertes’; secondly, he adopted (without acknowledgement) Dacier’s quintessentially neoclassical and Stoicizing argument that ‘this procedure excellently agrees with the general character of Ulysses, who is upon all emergencies master of his passions, and remarkable for disguise and an artful dissimulation’; and thirdly, anticipating the modern habit of emphasizing the primacy of narrative concerns in Homer, he suggested that ‘this disguise has a very happy eVect in this place, it holds us in a pleasing suspence, and makes us wait with attention to see the issue of the interview’.162 It’s an exemplary note, blending erudition with responsiveness. Yet Pope the critic didn’t entirely convince Pope the poet. In Homer: ‘Odysseus debated in his heart and mind whether he should kiss and embrace his father, and tell him everything, how he had returned home to his native land, or whether he should test him Wrst with questions. The latter seemed to him the better course of action, to try him with mocking words.’ Which in Pope becomes: Doubtful he stood, if instant to embrace His aged limbs, to kiss his rev’rend face, With eager transport to disclose the whole, 160 Odyssey xxiv. 316–17.

161 TE x. 363.

162 Ibid., 363–4.

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Translation and the Poet’s Life And pour at once the torrent of his soul? Not so: his judgment takes the winding way Of question distant, and of soft essay, More gentle methods on weak age employs, And moves the sorrows to enhance the joys.163

This tries hard to take the word of the scholars for Odysseus’s innocence. By referring to ‘the torrent of his soul’, Pope implies a contrast with ‘the Xow of soul’, a commonplace for conviviality in Augustan verse, suggesting, with Eustathius, that for Odysseus to reveal himself at once to his father would be not to bathe Laertes in joy but to drown him in it. And by making ‘his judgment’, rather than just ‘he’, the grammatical subject of the period in which Odysseus reaches his decision to test his father, Pope aligns himself with Dacier’s claim that in delaying the revelation Odysseus was ‘mastering his passions’ in the approved Stoic fashion. But doubts creep in. Partly because the dualistic psychology Pope imposes on the lines may incline us to suspect that Odysseus, like Cloe in An Epistle to a Lady, ‘wants a heart’164 (fancy phonetic footwork is not enough to reconcile ‘Not so’ and ‘soft’). But mostly because the phrases Pope interpolates to describe the operation of Odysseus’s judgement let in to this Homeric garden an unwelcome Miltonic guest. In Milton’s presentation of Satan, the father of lies, elements of devilishness within Odysseus’s ‘craft’ left darkly latent by Homer are systematically clariWed. However much he may have wanted to, Pope could not get this out of his mind. Translating nothing that is in Homer, ‘his judgment takes the winding way j Of question distant, and of soft essay’ instead renders into Augustan diction the serpentine preamble to Satan’s ‘assay’ of Eve in Paradise Lost: ‘With tract oblique j At Wrst, as one who sought access, but feared j To interrupt, sidelong he works his way.’165 Not even when Odysseus does eventually reveal himself, when he and Laertes are reconciled, were Pope’s doubts quelled; on the contrary, it is here, in his translation, that the divergence between the son’s ‘winding way’ of circumspect self-possession and the father’s straight ‘track’ of traderly open-handedness seems widest: He ran, he seiz’d him with a strict embrace, With thousand kisses wander’d o’er his face, I, I am he; oh father rise! behold Thy son, so long desir’d, so long detain’d, Restor’d, and breathing in his native land.166 163 Pope, Odyssey xxiv. 275–82. 165 Paradise Lost ix. 510–12.

164 An Epistle to a Lady, l. 160. 166 Pope, Odyssey xxiv. 373–8.


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There is no mistaking the pressure of feeling under which these lines were formed: ‘I, I am he; oh’, buckles into sheer impassioned sound, an arhythmic evacuation of monosyllables and hiatuses. But Pope did not yield to the temptation of sentimentality which this scene of homecoming presented to him, most Wlial of poets, at the end of his own Homeric odyssey. His version of the scene is fraught with recognition of the distance Odysseus’s long years of wandering have put between him and his father, and also with awareness of the force of that recognition for his own case. Witness the high point of the passage, one of the coldest peaks of Pope’s Homer: ‘With thousand kisses wander’d o’er his face’. From one perspective, this is sunny: Odysseus’s travels are at an end; where once he had wandered the face of the earth, now his lips map the lines of his aged father’s face. But from another it is bleakly forbidding: Odysseus’s wanderings are not over; he has not yet come home to his father, and may never do so. This second reading comes to predominate if we hear in the line an echo of Dryden’s great translation of the passage from Book IV of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura about the impossibility of achieving union within human love:167 Form, feature, colour, whatsoe’er delight Provokes the Lovers endless appetite, These Wll no space, nor can we thence remove With lips, or hands, or all our instruments of love: In our deluded grasp we nothing Wnd, But thin aerial shapes, that Xeet before the mind. As he who in a dream with drought is curst, And Wnds no real drink to quench his thirst, Runs to imagin’d Lakes his heat to steep, And vainly swills and labours in his sleep; So Love with fantomes cheats our longing eyes, Which hourly seeing never satisWes; Our hands pull nothing from the parts they strain, But wander o’re the lovely limbs in vain:168 167 A search of the Chadwyck-Healey ‘English Poetry’ database turned up no occurrences of this phrase in erotic or amatory contexts prior to the Dryden example; thereafter, it begins to feature in the lexicon of love poetry, suggesting that Dryden’s usage was innovative and originary: Broome’s Anacreon includes ‘To wander o’er thy beauteous limbs’, and Aaron Hill’s ‘North Star’ has ‘giv’n him leave to wander o’er her breast’, while Mark Pattison’s ‘Dido to Aeneas’, signiWcantly, appears to register the Odyssean aspects of the Lucretian passage which are the starting-point for Pope’s allusion: ‘But if you’ ad rather wander o’er the Deep, j Than in these longing Arms be lull’d asleep’. 168 ‘Lucretius: Concerning the Nature of Love’, ll. 57–70.

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The allusion is a natural one, for Lucretius’s lovers are indeed amatory Odysseuses, forever en route, never coming home: a few lines later ‘They gripe, they squeeze, their humid tongues they dart, j As each would force their way to t’others heart: j In vain; they only cruze about the coast, j For bodies cannot pierce, nor be in bodies lost.’169 But to appreciate its full salience we need to compare the moment at the end of the Iliad when the same passage had come to Pope’s mind’s ear, as Hecuba angrily sought to prevent Priam from pleading with Achilles for the return of Hector’s body. How could he ‘face j (Oh Heart of Steel!) the Murd’rer of thy Race!’, she raged; how ‘view that deathful eye, and wander o’er j Those Hands, yet red with Hector’s noble Gore!’.170 There what Pope was particularly invoking was Lucretius’s insistence on the ghostly insubstantiality of objects of desire, a theme literally pertinent to Priam’s case: his gaze and touch wander o’er Achilles’s bloody hands in hopes of being reunited with Hector, but Hector, whom Achilles’s murderous embrace has made a phantom, slips from his father’s loving grasp. Though more latent, the spectral dimension of the Lucretian passage is arguably more integral to the case of Odysseus and Laertes; Pope used it to twin the endings of Homer’s epics as impeded reconciliations. Laertes has for years believed Odysseus dead, and the son who returns to him is indeed so changed from the one he knew as to be dead to his father. Their embrace, while loving, is ‘strict’ because, like that of the lovers who ‘strain’ at each other in Lucretius, it is ultimately thwarted. By the time he came to describe that embrace, Pope knew himself similarly thwarted in his desire for unity with his late father. Complications in his practice of social commerce, coupled with the fruitful complexity of his exchanges with Homer on the subject, had cured Pope—if cure it was—of his reluctance to live the life of heroic contention to which his poetic gifts destined him. In the section of sketches for the epitaph on his father where he wrote that he would have been ‘Happy! thrice happy’ had he inherited his ‘virtues’, Pope had singled out among those virtues that ‘My christian Father held it for a rule j It was a Sin to call our Brother Fool.’171 Now he was about to give up the trade of translation and publish a poem—The Dunciad—in which he would call more of his brothers fools than any poet had done before or has done since. 169 ‘Lucretius: Concerning the Nature of Love’, ll. 75–8. 170 Pope, Iliad xxiv. 247–50. 171 Mack (ed.), The Last and Greatest Art, 435.

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Index of References to Translation and the Translator Translation and alchemy 38–9 and apiculture 109 and apocalypse 46–50, 64 and aristaeia 275 and childhood 13, 51–5, 56–74, 249–50, 251–4 and collaboration 246–7, 275–7 and cosmopolitanism 46–8, 224–6 and cryptography 22, 77–81 and dependency 151, 273 and determinism 209–12, 223–4 and empire 9, 157, 237, 246 and Etna 207 and exile 22–3, 39, 45–74 and fame 250–2, 268, 272 and ‘Xuency’ 29–30 and friendship 80, 95–7, 104, 106, 252 and impotence 168–70 and innocence 7–8, 51–2 and ‘invisibility’ 1, 30 and irresponsibility 218–20 and labor 181–4, 187–8 and liberty 132–7, 230–3 and Latinity 221, 223 and literalism 29–32, 36, 38–9, 121–2, 135–6, 210–11 and loyalty 30–2, 36, 39 and memorialism 31–2 and misquotation 104–6 and money 170–1, 175, 249 and property 33–6, 157 and retirement 95–109, 251–3 and royalism 30–4

and satire 202–5 and science 124–6 and secrecy 81, 118–26 and sex 135–6, 150–1, 169–70, 219–20 and sleep 50, 65, 69–70 and snobbery 122–3 and sociability 246–9, 275–6, 282–4 and solipsism 96–7, 103–4 and transcendence 95–6, 137, 140, 150 and ‘Translation Studies’ 9, 12–13 and viticulture 173–5 and ‘want of voice’ 20, 23, 39 as conversation 96–7 as drudgery 136, 169–72, 175–6 as fraud 170–1 as hoarding 109 as metamorphosis 125–6, 223–4, 228–33 as metempsychosis 9 and n., 205, 232–3 as reanimation 159, 228–30 as self-abnegation 159, 201–2, 205, 208 as self-indulgence 208, 213 as slavery 156–9, 199–200, 253 as trade 13, 218–19, 237–9, 246–9, 252–4 as twinship 56–7 translator, the as Aeneas 181–3, 272 as Aesculapius 159

316 translator, the (cont.) as Aesop 213, 218 as ass 169 as cyclops 201 as Diomedes 238–9 as dunce 272–3 as Echo 53, 57–8 as giant 206–7

Index of References as Hector 272 as ‘infant’ 50–3, 64–5 as Myrrha 231 as Odysseus 282–3 as Pygmalion 227–8, 231 as Sibyl 187–8 as Stoic 30 as Teucer 268, 276

General Index Addison, Joseph 161–4, 166, 242, 247, 284 Aesop 213–16, 222 Alciati, Andrea 67, 183 alexandrines 168, 186, 192, 230 Anacreon 2, 167n. anatomy 86–93 Arbuthnot, John 115 Arendt, Hannah 176 Aristotle 10, 96, 97, 124 Ashley, Robert 44 Atkins, Maurice 179 Aubrey, John 21n., 25, 40–1, 55 Ausonius 43, 65–74 translated by Stanley 67, 70, 72 translated by Vaughan 69–73 Bacon, Francis 79–80, 90–1, 96–9, 106, 124–5 Bailey, Nicholas 58–9 Ball, Thomas 59 BampWeld, Col. Joseph 85 Behn, Aphra 125 Benjamin, Walter 54 Bentivoglio, Guido 79 Betterton, Thomas 152, 198–9, 285 Bewick, Thomas 215 Blackmore, Richard 202 Blackwell, Thomas 255 Boccaccio, Giovanni 208–9, 213 translated by Dryden 209, 218 Boethius 43, 57, 60, 65, 73 translated by Vaughan 73 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John (Wrst Viscount of ) 250–3, 261, 275 Boyle, Robert 116–17, 124 Boys, John 185

brackets 84–5, 110 Breval, J. D. 264, 276 Brome, Alexander 112, 122 Broome, William 237, 246, 275–8, 281, 284, 285 Brower, Reuben 5 Brown, Laura 239–40 Browne, Thomas 125 Burnet, Thomas 238 Burrow, Colin 165n. Burton, Robert 96n., 125 cabbage 125 Camoens, Luis 14, 21 Cartwright, William 31–2 Caryll, John 8 Chapman, George 257, 263–5, 282 Charles I 19, 26, 38, 44, 49, 77, 78, 81, 86, 93, 130, 152, 190, 225 Charles II 19, 88, 93, 130, 132, 134, 136, 137, 163, 190, 194, 217 Charleton, Walter 91, 144 Chaucer, GeoVrey 31–2, 208, 210–18, 230 translated by Dryden 209–12, 230 ChesterWeld, Philip Stanhope (2nd Earl of ) 160, 163–4 childhood 50–74 Cicero 177 Cnipping, Borchard 58 Cobb, Samuel 202 Coleridge, Hartley 188, 190 Collier, Jeremy 217–19 commerce 243–5 Congreve, William 149, 268 Connolly, Peter J. 258–60

318

General Index

Cotton, Charles 158–9, 179–80 Cowley, Abraham 12–15, 21–3, 77–126 The Cutter of Coleman Street 93 Libri Plantarum 85, 103, 114, 125 The Mistress 83 ‘Ode to the Royal Society’ 109, 111–12 Pindarique Odes 77–8, 109 ‘To Dr Scarborough’ 86–9 ‘To Mr. Hobs’ 123 Poetical Blossoms 83, 85 ‘A Vote’ 82–3 Preface to Poems 88 A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy 81, 96, 111 Several Discourses by Way of Essays in Verse and Prose 102–26 ‘Horat? Epodon. Beatus ille qui procul, & c.’ 106–9 ‘Of the Shortness of Life’ 108–9 ‘Of Solitude’ 102 ‘Of Greatness’ 102–3 ‘Of Liberty’ 118 ‘Of Myself ’ 118, 124–6 ‘Of Obscurity’ 104–5, 119, 120–3 ‘Of Agriculture’ 105–9, 118–20 Verses upon Several Occasions 95–102 ‘The Complaint’ 93–4 ‘The Country Mouse’ 97–8, 102, 112–13 ‘Ode upon Dr Harvey’ 84, 89–93, 124, 126 ‘O fortunatos nimium, & c.’ 98–102 ‘A Paraphrase on an Ode in Horace’s third book’ 98 Cowper, William 115 Craddock, Walter 49

Creech, Thomas 145, 157 Curll, Edmund 248, 274, 285 cyclopes 195–203, 206–7, 278–80 Dacier, Anne 11, 286–8 Davenant, William 79–80, 189, 199 Davies, John of Kidwelly 139 Davies, Stevie 53 and n., 55 Denham, John 12–15, 19–39 Cooper’s Hill 20, 33–4 The Destruction of Troy 20–1, 23–4, 25–31, 32–9 Poems and Translations 19 ‘To Sir Richard Fanshaw upon his Translation of Pastor Fido’ 19–20, 32–3, 38 Driden, John 168 Dryden, John 12–15, 22, 28–30, 39, 127–233, 237, 246, 248, 263, 267–9, 273, 289 Absalom and Achitophel 130–1 Amphitryon 216–17 Annus Mirabilis 160, 163 Astraea Redux 130, 190 Britannia Rediviva 163 correspondence 170, 200, 213 Defence of an Essay of Dramatick Poesie 263 An Essay of Dramatick Poesie 158 Religio Laici 131–2 ‘The Fable of Acis, Polyphemus and Galatea’ 206–7 Fables 207–33 Preface 207–8, 218–20 ‘Ceyx and Alcyone’ 223 ‘The Character of a Good Parson’ 214 ‘Cinyras and Myrrha’ 221–2, 224–6 ‘The Cock and the Fox’ 211–12, 214 ‘Of the Pythagorean Philosophy’ 231–2

General Index ‘Palamon and Arcite’ 209–11, 214 ‘Pygmalion and the Statue’ 226–30 Heroique Stanza’s 129 The Hind and the Panther 132, 215 The Medal 139 ‘Ovid’s Elegies, Book II Elegy the Nineteenth’ 135–6 Preface to Ovid’s Epistles 29–30, 134–5 Prologue to Amphitryon 150, 200 Prologue to The Prophetess 152–3 The Satires of Juvenal and Persius 153–5, 203–4 ‘Discourse of the Original and Progress of Satire’ 154–5, 203 ‘The First Satire of Juvenal’ 153 ‘The Third Satire of Juvenal’ 168 The State of Innocence 209 Sylvae 137–51 Preface 143–4, 151, 186 ‘The Speech of Venus to Vulcan’ 147, 150 ‘The Entire Episode of Nisus and Euryalus’ 142–3 ‘Lucretius: Against the Fear of Death’ 144–5, 226 ‘Lucretius: The Beginning of the First Book’ 150 ‘Lucretius: Concerning the Nature of Love’ 145–8, 289–90 ‘From Horace. Epod. 2d’ 139–40 ‘To the Memory of Mr. Oldham’ 140–1 ‘To my Dear Friend, Mr. Congreve’ 163, 168, 190, 267–8

319

‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’ 203, 263 The Works of Virgil 152–207 ‘The Ninth Eclogue’ 205 ‘The First Book of the Georgics’ 164–5, 172–6 ‘The Second Book of the Georgics’ 165, 167–8 ‘The Third Book of the Georgics’ 165–9 Dedication of the ‘Aeneis’ 155–9, 170–1, 204, 246 ‘The Second Book of the Aeneis’ 182–4 ‘The Sixth Book of the Aeneis’ 185–8 ‘The Eighth Book of the Aeneis’ 193–207 ‘The Ninth Book of the Aeneis’ 191–2 Dryden, John, junior 199 Duckett, George 238 Eliot, T. S. 10 Empson, William 241 Epicureanism 137–51, 167–8, 226 Epicurus 137–8, 141, 143, 145–6, 149, 151 Erskine-Hill, Howard 2n., 209 Eustathius 271, 287–8 Evelyn, John 82, 96, 116, 157 exile 19–74 fable 213–16 Fairfax, Thomas 95 Fane, Mildmay 22, 59–60 Fanshawe, Richard 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 29, 30–3, 35, 36, 38, 132 Fenton, Elijah 247, 275–8, 285 Fielder, Col. John 34 Fletcher, John 140, 152, 158, 199 France, Peter 1 Fussell, Paul 11

320

General Index

Garth, Samuel 285 Gay, John 115, 237, 264, 276 giants 188–203 Glanvill, Joseph 91 Goldsmith, Oliver 215 GriYths, Eric 56n., 238n. Guarini, Giovanni Battista 14, 33 Gwin, David 45 Hammond, Brean 240 Hammond, Paul 5, 38n., 136n., 144n., 147n., 160n., 166n., 181n., 221n. Hardie, Philip 193, 201 Hartlib, Samuel 99 Harvey, William 86, 89–93 Heinsius, Daniel 58 Henrietta Maria 22, 77, 81, 85, 86, 93, 113 Hermans, Theo 9n. Herodotus 257, 275 Herrick, Robert 112 Hesiod 201 Higgons, Bevil 157 Hill, GeoVrey 164, 175 Hirst, Richard 43 Hobbes, Thomas 34, 92, 123–4, 152, 191, 199n., 225, 257 Hollar, Wenceslas 196–8, 200 Holyday, Barten 5 Homer 6, 8, 14, 207, 209, 247, 249, 253–4, 255–90 translated by Broome 277–8 translated by Chapman 257, 263, 265, 282 translated by Dryden 209 translated by Hobbes 257 translated by Ogilby 275n. translated by Pope 258–72, 279–90 Hoole, Charles 58, 59 Hopkins, David 5, 83n., 92–3, 97–8, 144n., 149n., 221n., 224

Horace 2, 3, 6, 14, 21, 31, 35, 60, 80, 98, 102, 104–5, 107–9, 112–13, 119–23, 135, 137–42, 150–1, 154–6, 167, 203–4 translated by Cowley 97–8, 102, 104–5, 107–9, 118–19, 121–2 translated by Dryden 138, 140–2, 154 translated by Oldham 141 translated by Sprat 112–13 Howard, Robert 160, 163, 166 Hunt, Leigh 189 Hunter, Michael 117 Hutchinson, F. E. 40 Hutchinson, Lucy 21 imitation 3–7, 113, 208–9, 244–6 James II 130, 153, 156, 188, 195, 217 Jermyn, Henry 48, 77, 85 Johnson, Mark 12 Johnson, Samuel 132–4, 203, 225 and n., 229, 237–8, 244, 251, 284 Jones, Hester 278, 283 Jonson, Ben 6–7, 19, 132, 158, 199, 202, 220 Juvenal 2, 5, 12, 21, 42, 48–9, 64, 72–3, 145, 153–5, 168, 192, 203, 205 translated by Dryden 145n., 154, 168 translated by Oldham 141 translated by Vaughan 48–9 Kerrigan, John 79 Kneller, Sir Godfrey 263 Kynaston, Francis 31–2 kyphoscoliosis 251 LakoV, George 12 Lamb, Charles 115

General Index La Rochefoucauld, François de 138 L’Estrange, Roger 139, 215 liberty 129–32, 137, 152, 155–6 Epicurean conception of 137–8 Latitudinarian conception of 131–2 ‘neo-roman’ conception of 216 licence 216–19, 225, 229–33 Lipsius, Justus 185–6 Lloyd, Sir Marmaduke 41 Llwyd, Morgan 49 Locke, John 10, 157, 176, 238 Lovelace, Richard 112 Lucan 19, 203 Lucretius 3, 137, 143–51, 157, 166–7, 226, 289 translated by Creech 145 translated by Dryden 144–8, 150, 289–90 MacKenzie, George 82, 85, 94 Mack, Maynard 244 Malvezzi, Virgilio 44–7 Marvell, Andrew 19, 38, 95, 129 Martial 21, 60, 109, 120 Maule, Jeremy 4, 9, 23 May, Thomas 19, 20 metaphor 8–14 Milbourne, Luke 5 Milton, John 81, 129, 131, 175, 189, 216, 232, 251–3, 271, 277, 279, 279–81, 284, 288 Monmouth, Henry Cary (2nd Earl of ) 79–80 Montaigne, Michel de 102–3, 147, 149–50 Moseley, Humphrey 31–2, 45 Nethercot, A. H. 77 Nokes, David 237 Norbrook, David 27 Ogilby, John 179, 185–6, 196, 215, 275n.

321

Oldenburg, Henry 111 Oldham, John 2, 140–5, 150 Ovid 14, 20, 21, 25, 43, 55–66, 68, 80, 91–2, 105–7, 109, 125, 154, 206–8, 221–33 translated by Cowley 105–7 translated by Dryden 135–6, 206–7, 221–33 translated by Vaughan 55–6, 60–4 Parnell, Thomas 115, 256, 257 Parry, Adam 164 Patterson, Annabel 22–3, 78 Paulinus, St 43, 66 Pembroke, Philip Herbert (6th Earl of ) 23–5, 34, 39 Pepys, Samuel 94 Persius 153–4, 157, 203 Petty, William 96 Philips, Katherine 245–6 Phillips, John 179 Pindar 2, 6, 21, 22, 77–8, 89 Plato 10 Plautus 216–18 poet’s life, the 7–8, 13–15, 151, 218, 244, 248, 254, 257, 277, 285 Achilles and 261 Ajax and Teucer and 266–8 Baconianism and 96, 114–15, 125–6 duncely model of 272–3 Hector and 269, 273 Homeric model of 14, 256–7 Horatian model of 14, 82, 109, 140 Miltonic model of 252–3, 261, 275, 280–1 Spenserian model of 160 Odysseus and 273–5 Ovidian model of 59–61, 105–6, 208, 213 Virgilian model of 160–1, 202–6

322

General Index

Poole, Adrian 4, 9, 23 Pope, Alexander 2, 5–6, 7–8, 11, 12–15, 22, 115, 223–4, 233–90 correspondence 8, 244–5, 250–2, 274, 276, 285 The Dunciad 148–9, 224, 254, 272–3, 281 Epistle to a Lady 288 Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot 8, 248–50, 285, 290 An Essay on Man 243–4 The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace 115 Homer translation 255–90 Preface and notes 255–9, 264, 271, 274, 278, 287 Iliad Bk. VI (Diomedes and Glaucus) 258–9, 262 Bk. VI (Hector and Andromache) 268–9 Bk. VII (Tychius) 257 Bk. VIII (Ajax and Teucer) 262–8 Bk. IX (embassy to Achilles) 259–60 Bk. XIV (wounding of Hector) 269–72 Bk. XIV (Jupiter and Juno) 272–3 Bk. XXIV (Priam and Achilles) 260–1, 290 Odyssey Bk. IX (Cyclopes) 278–80 Bk. X (Circe) 281–2 Bk. XII (Oxen of the Sun) 277–8 Bk. XIII (Odysseus and Athena) 282–4 Bk. XXIV (Odysseus and Laertes) 285–90 The Rape of the Lock 240–2

The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace 252–3 The Temple of Fame 244 Pope, Alexander snr 248–50, 252–4, 285–90 Pope, Edith 253–4 Post, Jonathan F. S. 66, 72 Potter, Lois 22 Powell, Thomas 41, 44–8, 51, 53, 55, 56, 64 Powell, Vavasour 49 Prestwich, Edmund 159 Prior, Matthew 7–8, 157, 204–5, 273 Rapin, Reńe´ 202, 255, 269 retirement 93–8 rhymes ‘heterotonic’ 50, 56–7, 212 triplet 212, 224–5 Rich, Christopher 198–200 Richards, I. A. 10 Ricks, Christopher 7n., 212n. Rochester, John Wilmot (2nd Earl of ) 113, 134–5, 141 Rogers, Pat 241 Roscommon, Wentworth Dillon (4th Earl of ) 31, 80, 187 and n., 212, 216 Ross, Alexander 195n. Rosslyn, Felicity 148n. Royal Society, the 11, 80–1, 92, 96, 111–12, 114–15, 117 Ruaeus, Carolus 169n., 173, 184 Said, Edward 48, 231 Sallust 223 Saltonstall, Wye 59, 61 Sandys, George 132, 191 Sarbiewski, Casimire 43, 57, 60, 65 Sawday, Jonathan 90 Scarborough, Charles 86–9 Scott, Sir Walter 152

General Index secrecy 79–84, 111–26 self-pity 59–60, 69, 94 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 45, 91, 109, 139, 159, 223, 273, 274 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1st Earl of ) 130–1 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper (3rd Earl of ) 144 Shakespeare, William 15, 20, 158, 199, 232, 263 Shelley, Mary 189 Sherburne, Edward 22 Skinner, Quentin 152, 223n. slavery 137, 146–8, 150–4, 156–9, 177–8, 198–9, 209, 214–20, 223, 226 Christian conception of 159 and n. Epicurean conception of 138, 149 ‘neo-roman’ conception of 152, 216, 223 Plautine conception of 216–17 Snow, C. P. 83 Spence, Joseph 250, 253–4 Spenser, Edmund 81, 160 Sprat, Thomas 77, 85, 110–17, 122, 124 Stanley, Thomas 14, 22, 66 and n., 68–71 Steiner, George 4 Steward, Elizabeth 168, 170, 213 stoicism 44–5, 73, 119, 186, 192, 230, 282 StraVord, Thomas Wentworth (Wrst Earl of ) 49 Swaab, Pete 189n. Swift, Jonathan 6, 225, 247, 257 Tacitus 35 Taplin, Oliver 256 Tasso, Torquato 14, 203 Temple, Sir William 92 Thucydides 166 Thurloe, John 32, 85, 88–9

323

Tickell, Thomas 247 Tomlinson, Charles 4, 5, 221n. Tonson, Jacob 154, 161, 163, 170, 200 trade 239–44, 248, 254 travesty 179–80 Trumbull, William 285 Turner, Mark 12 Vaughan, Henry 12–15, 21, 40–74 Olor Iscanus 42–5, 52, 57, 60 ‘Ad Echum’ 52, 57 ‘Ausonii Cupido, Edyl. 6’ 57, 64–74 ‘Boethius Consolation of Philosophy I vii’ 73 ‘Ovid ex Ponto III vii’ 61–2, 63–4 ‘Ovid ex Ponto IV iii’ 55–7 ‘Ovid Tristia III iii’ 62–3 ‘To my Learned Friend, Mr T. Powell, Upon his Translation of Malvezzi’s Christian Politician’ 42, 44–7, 49–50, 54, 56, 63 ‘To the Most Excellently Accomplished, Mrs K. Philips’ 52 ‘Tristia V iii’ 60–1 ‘Upon Mr Fletcher’s Plays, Published, 1647’ 52 Poems with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished 42, 48–9, Silex Scintillans 41–2, 52, 60, 63, 64, 72–4 ‘The Burial of an Infant’ 52, 56 ‘Child-hood’ 52, 70–1 ‘The Dedication’ 52 ‘Holy Scriptures’ 52 ‘Jacob’s Pillow, and Pillar’ 71–2 ‘Joy of my life! while left me here’ 54 ‘The Men of War’ 49, 53 ‘The Passion’ 72

324

General Index

Vaughan, Henry (cont.) ‘The Retreat’ 50–2, 56 ‘The Stone’ 53 Venuti, Lawrence 1, 24, 29–30 Virgil 2, 5, 12, 21, 25, 25–30, 33–9, 52, 67, 80, 92, 95, 98–102, 119–20, 138, 142–3, 147, 150, 155–6, 158–207, 245–6, 270 translated by Addison 162–3 translated by Boys 185–6 translated by Cowley 98–102 translated by Denham 25–9, 36–9 translated by Dryden 142–3, 164–70, 172–6, 180–8, 190–206 translated by Ogilby 179, 185–6

Walker, Keith 160n. Waller, Edmund 27, 132 Walsh, William 244–5, 285 Warton, Joseph 115 Wase, Christopher 25, 78 Weinbrot, Howard D. 2n., 242 Wilcher, Robert 55, 65 Wilkins, John 115 William III 153–5, 156–8, 188, 215, 219 Wilson, John 151 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 10 work 160–76, 177–207 Wycherley, William 8, 238, 285 Young, Edward 242, 284

Translation and the Poet's Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646-1726

Translation and the Poet's Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646-1726

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Ethics and Politics of Translating (Benjamins Translation Library)

Translating China (Topics in Translation)

Ethics and Politics of Translating

Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (Translation Transnation)

Translation, Lingustics, Culture: A French-english Handbook (Topics in Translation)

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Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology

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The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture

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The Public Life of Ethics

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Ethics and Qualities of Life

Romantic poets culture psoterity

Spinoza's Book of Life dom and redemption in the 'Ethics'

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Translation and the Poet's Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646-1726