John Dryden - Delphi Poets Series

by John Dryden

  ”O that your brows my laurel had sustained!

  Well had I been deposed, if you had reigned:

  The father had descended for the son;

  For only you are lineal to the throne.

  Thus, when the state one Edward did depose,

  A greater Edward in his room arose:

  But now not I, but poetry, is cursed;

  For Tom the second reigns like Tom the first.

  But let them not mistake my patron’s part,

  Nor call his charity their own desert.”

  From the letter to Tonson above referred to, it would seem that the dedication of the Third Miscellany gave offence to Queen Mary, being understood to reflect upon her government, and that she had commanded Rymer to return to the charge, by a criticism on Dryden’s plays. But the breach does not appear to have become wider; and Dryden has elsewhere mentioned Rymer with civility.

  The Third Miscellany contained, of Dryden’s poetry, a few songs, the first book, with part of the ninth and sixteenth books of the Metamorphoses, and the parting of Hector and Andromache, from the Iliad. It was also to have had the poem of Hero and Leander, from the Greek; but none such appeared, nor is it clear whether Dryden ever executed the version, or only had it in contemplation. The contribution, although ample, was not satisfactory to old Jacob Tonson, who wrote on the subject a most mercantile expostulatory letter to Dryden, which is fortunately the minutiae of a literary bargain in the 17th century. Tonson, with reference to Dryden having offered a strange bookseller six hundred lines for twenty guineas, enters into a question in the rule of three, by which he discovers, and proves, that for fifty guineas he has only 1446 lines, which he seems to take more unkindly, as he had not counted the lines until he had paid the money; from all which Jacob infers, that Dryden ought, out of generosity, at least to throw him in something to the bargain, especially as he had used him more kindly in Juvenal, which, saith the said Jacob, is not reckoned so easy to translate as Ovid. What weight was given to this supplication does not appear; probably very little, for the translations were not extended, and as to getting back any part of the copy-money, it is not probable Tonson’s most sanguine expectation ever reached that point. Perhaps the songs were thrown in as a make-weight. There was a Fourth Miscellany published in 1694; but to this Dryden only gave a version of the third Georgic, and his Epistle to Sir Godfrey Kneller, the requital of a copy of the portrait of Shakespeare.

  In 1963, Dryden addressed the beautiful lines to Congreve, on the cold reception of his “Double Dealer.” He was himself under a similar cloud, from the failure of “Love Triumphant,” and therefore in a fit mood to administer consolation to his friend. The epistle contains, among other striking passages, the affecting charge of the care of his posthumous fame, which Congreve did not forget when Dryden was no more.

  But, independently of occasional exertions, our author, now retired from the stage, had bent his thoughts upon one great literary task, the translation of Virgil. This weighty and important undertaking was probably suggested by the experience of Tonson, the success of whose “Miscellanies” had taught him the value placed by the public on Dryden’s translations from the classics. From hints thrown out by contemporary scheme was meditated, even before 1964; but in that year the poet, in a letter to Dennis, speaks of it as under his immediate contemplation. The names of Virgil and Dryden were talismans powerful to arrest the eyes of all that were literary in England, upon the progress of the work. Mr. Malone has recorded the following particulars concerning it, with pious enthusiasm.

  “Dr. Johnson has justly remarked, that the nation seemed to consider its honour interested in the event. Mr. Gilbert Dolben gave him the various editions of his author: Dr. Knightly Chetwood furnished him with the life of Virgil, and the Preface to the Pastorals; and Addison supplied the arguments of the several books, and an Essay on the Georgics. The first lines of this great poet which he translated, he wrote with a diamond on a pane of glass in one of the windows of Chesterton House, in Huntingdonshire, the residence of his kinsman and namesake, John Driden, Esq. The version of the first Georgic, and a great part of the last Aeneid, was made at Denham Court, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir William Bowyer, Baronet; and the seventh Æneid was translated at Burleigh, the noble mansion of the Earl of Exeter. These circumstances, which must be acknowledged to be of no great importance, I yet have thought it proper to record, because they will for ever endear those places to the votaries of the Muses, and add to them a kind of celebrity, which neither the beauties of nature, nor the exertions of art, can bestow.”

  Neither was the liberality of the nation entirely disproportioned to the general importance attached to the translation of Virgil, by so eminent a poet. The researches of Mr. Malone have ascertained, in some degree, the terms. There were two classes of subscribers, the first set of whom paid five guineas apiece to adorn the work with engravings; beneath each of which, in due and grateful remembrance, was blazoned the arms of a subscriber: this class amounted to one hundred and one persons, a list of whom appears in this edition, in vol. xiii., and presents an assemblage of noble names, few of whom are distinguished more to their credit than by the place they there occupy. The second subscribers were two hundred and fifty in number, at two guineas each. But from these sums was to be deducted the expense of the engravings, though these were only the plates used for Ogilby’s Virgil, a little retouched. Besides the subscriptions, it would seem, that Dryden received from Tonson fifty pounds for each Book of the “Georgics” and “Æneid,” and probably the same for the Pastorals collectively. On the other hand, it is probable that Jacob charged a price for the copies delivered to the subscribers, which, with the expense of the plates, reduced Dryden’s profit to about twelve or thirteen hundred pounds; — a trifling sum when compared to what Pope received for the “Iliad,” which was certainly between £5,000 and £6,000; yet great in proportion to what the age of Dryden had ever afforded, as an encouragement to literature. It must indeed be confessed, that the Revolution had given a new impulse and superior importance to literary pursuits. The semi-barbarous age, which succeeded the great civil war, had been civilised by slow degrees. It is true, the king and courtiers, among their disorderly and dissolute pleasures, enumerated songs and plays, and, in the course of their political intrigues, held satires in request; but they had neither money nor time to spare for the encouragement or study of any of the higher and more elaborate departments of poetry. Meanwhile, the bulk of the nation neglected verse, as what they could not understand, or, with puritanical bigotry, detested as sinful the use, as well as the abuse, of poetical talent. But the lapse of thirty years made a material change in the manners of the English people. Instances began to occur of individuals, who, rising at first into notice for their proficience in the fine arts, were finally promoted for the active and penetrating talents, which necessarily accompany a turn towards them. An outward reformation of manners, at least the general abjuration of grosser profligacy, was also favourable to poetry, —

  Still first to fly where sensual joys invade.

  This was wrought, partly by the religious manners of Mary; partly by the cold and unsocial temper of William, who shunned excess, not perhaps because it was criminal, but because it was derogatory; partly by the political fashion of the day, which was to disown the profligacy that marked the partisans of the Stuarts; but, most of all, by the general increase of good taste, and the improvement of education. All these contributed to the encouragement of Dryden’s great undertaking, which promised to rescue Virgil from the degraded version of Ogilby, and present him in a becoming form to a public, now prepared to receive him with merited admiration.

  While our author was labouring in this great work, and the public were waiting the issue with impatience and attention, a feud, of which it is now impossible to trace the cause, arose between the bard and his publisher. Their union before seems to have been of a nature more friendly than interest alone could have begotten; for Dryden, in one l
etter, talks with gratitude of Tonson’s affording him his company down to Northamptonshire; and this friendly intimacy Jacob neglected not to cultivate, by those occasional compliments of fruit and wine, which are often acknowledged in the course of their correspondence. But a quarrel broke out between them, when the translation of Virgil had advanced so far as the completion of the seventh Aeneid; at which period Dryden charges Tonson bitterly, with an intention, from the very beginning, to deprive him of all profit by the second subscriptions; alluding, I presume, to the price which the bookseller charged him upon the volumes delivered to the subscribers. The bibliopolist seems to have bent before the storm, and pacified the incensed bard, by verbal submission, though probably without relaxing his exactions and drawbacks in any material degree. Another cause of this dissension appears to have been the Notes upon “Virgil,” for which Tonson would allow no additional emolument to the author, although Dryden says, “that to make them good, would cost six months’ labour at least,” and elsewhere tells Tonson ironically, that, since not to be paid, they shall be short, “for the saving of the paper.” I cannot think that we have sustained any great loss by Tonson’s penurious economy on this occasion. In his prefaces and dedications, Dryden let his own ideas freely forth to the public; but in his Notes upon the Classics, witness those on “Juvenal” and “Persius,” he neither indulged in critical dissertations on particular beauties and defects, nor in general remarks upon the kind of poetry before him; but contented himself with rendering into English the antiquarian dissertations of Dacier and other foreign commentators, with now and then an explanatory paraphrase of an obscure passage. The parodies of Martin Scriblerus had not yet consigned to ridicule the verbal criticism, and solemn trifling, with which the ancient schoolmen pretended to illustrate the classics. But beside the dispute about the notes in particular, and the various advantages which Dryden suspected Tonson of attempting in the course of the transaction, he seems to have been particularly affronted at a presumptuous plan of that publisher (a keen Whig, and secretary of the Kit-cat club) to drive him into inscribing the translation of Virgil to King William. With this view, Tonson had an especial care to make the engraver aggravate the nose of Aeneas in the plates into a sufficient resemblance of the hooked promontory of the Deliverer’s countenance; and, foreseeing Dryden’s repugnance to this favourite plan, he had recourse, it would seem, to more unjustifiable means to further it; for the poet expresses himself as convinced that, through Tonson’s means, his correspondence with his sons, then at Rome, was intercepted. I suppose Jacob, having fairly laid siege to his author’s conscience, had no scruple to intercept all foreign supplies, which might have confirmed him in his pertinacity. But Dryden, although thus closely beleaguered, held fast his integrity; and no prospect of personal advantage, or importunity on the part of Tonson, could induce him to take a step inconsistent with his religious and political sentiments. It was probably during the course of these bickerings with his publisher, that Dryden, incensed at some refusal of accommodation on the part of Tonson, sent him three well-known coarse and forcible satirical lines, descriptive of his personal appearance:

  ”With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair,

  With two left legs, and Judas-coloured hair,

  And frowzy pores, that taint the ambient air.”

  “Tell the dog,” said the poet to the messenger, “that he who wrote these can write more.” But Tonson, perfectly satisfied with this single triplet, hastened to comply with the author’s request, without requiring any further specimen of his poetical powers. It would seem, however, that when Dryden neglected his stipulated labour, Tonson possessed powers of animadversion, which, though exercised in plain prose, were not a little dreaded by the poet. Lord Bolingbroke, already a votary of the Muses, and admitted to visit their high priest, was wont to relate, that one day he heard another person enter the house. “This,” said Dryden, “is Tonson: you will take care not to depart before he goes away: for I have not completed the sheet which I promised him; and if you leave me unprotected, I shall suffer all the rudeness to which his resentment can prompt his tongue.” But whatever occasional subjects of dissension arose between Dryden and his bookseller appears always to have brought them together, after the first ebullition of displeasure had subsided. There might, on such occasions, be room for acknowledging faults on both sides; for, if we admit that the bookseller was penurious and churlish, we cannot deny that Dryden seems often to have been abundantly captious, and irascible. Indeed, as the poet placed, and justly, more than a mercantile value upon what he sold, the trader, on his part, was necessarily cautious not to afford a price which his returns could not pay; so that while, in one point of view, the author sold at an inadequate price, the purchaser, in another, really got no more than value for his money. That literature is ill recompensed, is usually rather the fault of the public than the bookseller, whose trade can only exist by buying that which can be sold to advantage. The trader, who purchased the “Paradise Lost” for ten pounds, had probably no very good bargain.

  However fretted by these teasing and almost humiliating discussions, Dryden continued steadily advancing in his great labour; and about three years after it had been undertaken, the translation of Virgil, “the most noble and spirited,” said Pope, “which I know in any language,” was given to the public in July 1697. So eager was the general expectation, that the first edition was exhausted in a few months, and a second published early in the next year. “It satisfied,” says Johnson, “his friends, and, for the most part, silenced his enemies.” But, although this was generally the case, there wanted not some to exercise the invidious task of criticism, or rather of malevolent detraction. Among those, the highest name is that of Swift; the most distinguished for venomous and persevering malignity, that of Milbourne.

  In his Epistle to Prince Posterity, prefixed to the “Tale of a Tub,” Swift, in the character of the dedicator, declares, “upon the word of a sincere man, that there is now actually in being a certain poet called John Dryden, whose translation of Virgil was lately printed in a large folio, well-bound, and, if diligent search were made, for aught I know, is yet to be seen.” In his “Battle of the Books,” he tells us, “that Dryden, who encountered Virgil, soothed the good ancient by the endearing title of ‘father,’ and, by a large deduction of genealogies, made it appear, that they were nearly related, and humbly proposed an exchange of armour; as a mark of hospitality, Virgil consented, though his was of gold, and cost an hundred beeves, the other’s but of rusty iron. However, this glittering armour became the modern still worse than his own. Then they agreed to exchange horses; but, when it came to the trial, Dryden was afraid, and utterly unable to mount.” A yet more bitter reproach is levelled by the wit against the poet, for his triple dedication of the Pastorals, Georgics, and Aeneid, to three several patrons, Clifford, Chesterfield, and Mulgrave. But, though the recollection of the contemned Odes, like the spretae injuria formae of Juno, still continued to prompt these overflowings of Swift’s satire, he had too much taste and perception of poetry to attempt, gravely, to undermine, by a formal criticism, the merits of Dryden’s Virgil.

  This was reserved for Luke Milbourne, a clergyman, who, by that assurance, has consigned his name to no very honourable immortality. This person appears to have had a living at Great Yarmouth, which, Dryden hints, he forfeited by writing libels on his parishioners; and from another testimony, he seems to have been a person of no very strict morals. Milbourne was once an admirer of our poet, as appears from his letter concerning “Amphitryon,” vol. viii. But either poetical rivalry, for he had also thought of translating Virgil himself, or political animosity, for he seems to have held revolution principles, or deep resentment for Dryden’s sarcasms against the clergy, or, most probably, all these united, impelled Milbourne to publish a most furious criticism, entitled, “Notes on Dryden’s Virgil, in a Letter to a Friend.” “And here,” said he, “in the first place, I must needs own Jacob Tonson’s ingenuity to be
greater than the translator’s, who, in the inscription of his fine gay (title) in the front of the book, calls it very honestly Dryden’s Virgil, to let the reader know, that this is not that Virgil so much admired in the Augustaean age, an author whom Mr. Dryden once thought untranslatable, but a Virgil of another stamp, of a coarser allay; a silly, impertinent, nonsensical writer, of a various and uncertain style, a mere Alexander Ross, or somebody inferior to him; who could never have been known again in the translation, if the name of Virgil had not been bestowed upon him in large characters in the frontispiece, and in the running title. Indeed, there is scarce the magni nominis umbra to be met with in this translation, which being fairly intimated by Jacob, he needs add no more, but si populus vult decipi, decipiatur.”

  With an assurance which induced Pope to call him the fairest of critics, not content with criticising the production of Dryden, Milbourne was so ill advised as to produce, and place in opposition to it, a rickety translation of his own, probably the fragments of that which had been suppressed by Dryden’s version. A short specimen, both of his criticism and poetry, will convince the reader, that the powers of the former were, as has been often the case, neutralised by the insipidity of the latter; for who can rely on the judgment of a critic so ill qualified to illustrate his own precepts? I take the remarks on the tenth Eclogue, as a specimen, at hazard. “This eclogue is translated in a strain too luscious and effeminate for Virgil, who might bemoan his friend, but does it in a noble and a manly style, which Mr. Ogilby answers better than Mr. D., whose paraphrase looks like one of Mrs. Behn’s, when somebody had turned the original into English prose before.