(1631-1700)
4.2.2. The Poet and the Creative Process
4.2.5. Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy
4.2.6. The Dramatic Unities of Time and Place
4.2.7. Rhyme and Verisimilitude
4.2.8. Delight and Instruction
Dryden was the major literary figure in both literature and criticism of during the Restoration and later 17th century, and the most influential critic of the whole century. Criticism during the Jacobean age and the Commonwhealth will fail to justly appraise or even recognize the great works of the age. It is an undeveloped genre, and the information about literature often consists of a "roll-call" of authors, a bare list of names and works with some laudatory comment appended to them. There is not even a single detailed study or commentary of a literary work. Dryden will do much to change this situation; his success is also the success of criticism in English letters.
Being a writer as well as a critic, Dryden always wrote criticism to some practical end concerning his own works. Much of his critical work is to be found in prefaces to his own works. Besides, he was a professional writer. He was not a nobleman writing for his pleasure: he had to live from his work and in the age he wrote in this meant that he had to find some patron or other to take him under his protection. He had to flatter, and this explains not only the nature of his writing, but also sometimes that of his criticism. Sometimes his reasoning is flawed by this need to flatter. As in the critics we have studied up to now, we find in Dryden an interest in the general issues of criticism rather than in a close reading of particular texts (although he will provide one of the first of such readings, that of Jonson's The Silent Woman). He wants to rely on both authority and common sense, and often seems at a loss when the two seem to go against each other. We call Dryden a neoclassical critic, just as Boileau, although in fact there are wide differences between them. Dryden meditates on the neoclassical rules, which he feels to be right in the main, but then he also wants to find a critical justification for the great tradition of English poetry, which lay beyond those rules. It is to his credit that he thought over the principles of French neo-Classicism and did not apply them mechanically to the English letters. According to T.S. Eliot, Dryden's great work consists not so much in the originality of his principles as in having realized the need to affirm the native tradition, as opposed to the overwhelming French influence. His best-known work, the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, partly reflects this tension in Dryden's commitments. Its dialogue form has often been criticised as inconclusive, but actually, as in most dialogues, there is a spokesman more weighty than the others. Dryden carries about his task with efficiency, stating his own ideas but leaving some leeway for difference of opinion. Neander's overall statement on the rules is that they can add to the perfection of a work, but that they will not improve a work which does not already contain some degree of perfection or genius in it. And we may find writers like Shakespeare, Dryden believes, who did not follow the rules but are nevertheless obviously superior to any "regular" writer. Shakespeare disconcerts Dryden, who recognises his superiority but is more at ease with Ben Jonson. In Dryden, then, we find a "liberal" neoclassicist, although he is most coherent when he is dealing with that which can be understood and reduced to rule. His relaxation is to a great extent both a refusal to believe in the universal application in the neoclassic principles and an inability to provide new and more comprehensive principles. Because his most cogent statement on the rules (following Rapin) is that
1. [i]f the rules be well considered, we shall find them to be made only to reduce nature into method . . . they are founded upon good sense and sound reason, rather than on authority.
Dryden is not a great analyst of texts nor an important literary historian, but some of his works are significant steps in the development of both directions in criticism. Dryden's importance as a critic comes from his place in history at the start of the long neoclassical era, whose principles he helped determine; he contributed a great deal to raise the standards of criticism and to define the role of the discipline. As he says himself,
2. they wholly mistake the nature of criticism who think its business is principally to find fault. Criticism , as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant a standard of judging well; the chiefest part of which is to observe those excellencies which should delight a reasonable reader.
And of course his ideas also give us insights into his own work.
4.2.2. The Poet and the Creative Process
The way the work is "moulded to shape" is through "fancy moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be distinguished and then either chosen or rejected by the judgement." In Dryden, and indeed in all the 18th-century critics after him, fancy is sometimes synonymous with imagination and sometimes identified as a special kind of imagination. "Wit" is also used to refer to this faculty. Fancy and imagination will become different concepts in Coleridge. So we have two opposite principles at work in the writer's mind: fancy and judgement (cf. the different accounts of the creative process in Sidney, Bacon, and Hobbes). We may note that fancy is subordinate to judgement, although it seems to be assigned a more relevant role than in Hobbes' theory. Fancy is synthetic, while judgement is analytic, as Hobbes had said and Locke will reaffirm.
Of course, Dryden has to give fancy its due in the composition of a work. But it is something he mistrusts. It is too lawless, and there is a danger that it may get out of hand. Strictures placed during the process of composition, such as the rules or the use of rhyme, are a good means to restrict the impulse of fancy and allow judgement to become dominant. While writing, "fancy, memory and judgement are then extended in the rack" (Orrery 2). Writing is a painstaking activity, one which demands the utmost of the writer's capabilities.
In the preface to his poem Annus Mirabilis (1667), Dryden gave an account of the phases of the creative process, which we can profitably compare with the inventio , dispositio and elocutio of classical rhetoric. To compose an epic poem, he says, a poet needs wit. "Wit" in the eighteenth century did not suggest the gift of the quick repartee or the bon mot, as it does today; rather, it stood for the creative faculty of the human mind, above all the aspect defined by Hobbes as "fancy," the ability to see the resemblances between different objects. Dryden defines wit as imagination, as the ability to find the right memory or the right metaphor we are looking for:
3. But to proceed from wit in the general notion of it to the proper wit of an heroic or historical poem, I judge it chiefly to consist in the delightful imaging of persons, actions, passions, or things . . . it is some lively and apt description, dressed in such a colours of speech, that it sets before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly and more delightfully than nature. So then, the first happiness of the poet's imagination is properly invention or finding the thought ; the second is fancy, or the variation, deriving or molding of that thought, as the judgement represents it proper to the subject; the third is elocution, or the art of clothing and adorning that thought so found and varied, in apt, significant and sounding words: the quickness of the imagination is seen in the invention, the fertility in the fancy, and the accuracy in the expression. (10)
Writers in dramatic style, such as Ovid and all playwrights, must excel in invention and fancy; those speaking in his own voice, like Virgil, must cultivate their expression. So, there are different creative faculties in the human mind, and each kind of work may demand a special development of one or other. Dryden feels at times the need to specialise: he wrote works in practically all genres except the novel, but he seems to think that each writer excels in a particular kind of writing. He complains that the Ancients were either tragedians or comedians, and that it is easier to attain perfection in this way, writing only the kind of thing one does best. This natural gift has to be controlled by technique. The good writer must be a born genius (here Dryden refers us to Longinus), and he must know the emotions he is depicting. But he must not be carried away by them because probably the audience would not follow him. Dryden believes that poetry is an art for witty men, and not for madmen. Passion would blur the differences between characters, and it is judgement which keeps them separate. We can compare this analytical labor of the judgement to Hobbes once again. Dryden's interest in the successful objectification of the poet's emotions is an interesting prefiguration of later aesthetic theories (e.g. Schopenhauer's).
Of course we have the classical models to guide us. To copy their ways is not a fault, rather a virtue. In the Essay of Dramatic Poesy we find this phrase as a commendation of Ben Jonson: "He was not only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all the others" (28).
But true imitation must be original and improve the models. Dryden believes that poetry has a historical development, and he wishes "that poetry may not go backward, when all other arts and sciences are advancing." We may profit from the models and the experience of the ancients and try to go beyond them. All great writers have borrowed from others, without their being less original for it. He traces the Homeric influence in Virgil, for instance. The neoclassical era is not particularly sensitive to originality and invention, but nevertheless Dryden believes that other things being equal, originality is to be preferred to good imitation, and is a greater proof of genius.
One word on the subject of progress in literature: Dryden, as many other critics of his time, seems to believe in a cyclical alternance of barbarian ages with ages of refinement and progress. They believe themselves to be in the equivalent of the Roman empire. Shakespeare is Dryden's Homer, and Jonson is his Virgil. He does not seem to believe that the heighths of the classical age can be reached again; even the language is too unstable for great works and inferior to Greek. Like Pope, Dryden believed that writing in English is like writing on sand, compared to the writing on marble of the Ancients.
Rhyme is for Dryden something more than a mere ornament. It is a way of consciously controlling the process of composition: because of the superior attention it requires, rhyme demands a greater consciousness on the part of the poet, and less abandonment to the inspiration of his fancy. Rhyme
4. bounds and circumscribes the fancy. . . . the fancy then gives leisure to the judgement to come in, which, seeing so heavy a tax imposed, is ready to cut off all unnecessary expenses" (Dryden, Orrery 6).
Rhyme, then, is not a mere "embroidery of sense," it is a means of clarifying the thought.
We shall see that Dryden initially favoured the use of rhyme in plays when the appropriateness of this convention coming from France is being debated. Verse is right; it is only unnatural when it is forced. Rhyme is superior to blank verse, which Dryden believed was invented by Shakespeare. Paradoxically, he recognizes that it is blank verse which is the tradition natural to English. However, Dryden's statement on rhyme does not end here. We may note that he accepts blank verse in the less serious types of plays. And in later years, he was to modify his views, and he came to recognize that blank verse was a suitable vehicle for serious drama. In the prologue to Aureng-Zebe (1676), he admits to growing "weary of his long-loved mistress, rhyme" and recognizes Shakespeare's superiority. And in the preface to All for Love (1678), an imitation of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, he admits that blank verse is more suitable for a Shakespearean imitation, even if it is a tragedy.
Maybe the neoclassical preference for the heroic couplet is the reason for this change: couplets of alexandrines, the staple of French classical drama, are all right for the French language, but the English heroic couplet does not lend itself so easily to the portrayal of conversation. It is best fit to long series of meditative or essayistic verses, and it is here where it will triumph; English drama reverts to blank verse and then to prose.
Dryden also writes a miniature history of modern prosody. Although he is a bit patronizing on Chaucer, he is readier than most people in his age to recognise his genius. However, at the time Chaucer's language was still unknown (Dryden laughs at the first news of a reconstruction of Chaucer's regular metrics in the preface to his translation), so Dryden does not recognize his merits as a versifier, and considers Waller and Denham (who are minor poets from our point of view) to be the first great versifiers of the English language. Waller is the inventor of the couplet: he "first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly in distychs" (Orrery 5). Dryden will insist on the connection between form and sense: in this way form will impose itself directly on sense. Couplets and quatrains must contain a unit of sense. On the other hand, he opposes the strict equality of syllables in all lines, a reasonable thing to do, since stressing certain weak syllables and making them count for measure is unnatural to English.
Dryden opposes Aristotle in believing that the soul of a play is not to be found in its plot, but rather in its author's language, in diction and thought. Dryden wants a literature written in a pure language, one which is free from neologism and pedantry alike. However, he accepts coinages from Latin. Like Swift whose complaints will be much the same, he longs for an academy with an authority to decide on linguistic matters.
We find in the age of Dryden a growing reaction against the Ramist conception of rhetoric. If rhetoric is just an addition of ornamental words, it is better to do away with it. The cartesian and the empiricist ideas coincide here. Fancy will seen as something which plays with words, while judgement defines the real relationships between things. One of the most notable phenomena of the age is the definition of the language of science in opposition to rhetoric. The Royal Society inspires the works of John Wilkins (Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, 1668) and Thomas Sprat, who advocates a "mathematical plainness" in style: one word, one thing. These ideas will be satirized in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, where the wise men in Laputa carry with them all the objects they want to speak about and merely point to them. For Locke, the most influential philosopher during the eighteenth century, eloquence misleads judgement, instead of directing it. All these writers mistrust literature, poetry, rhetoric, which they consider empty words. There is a growing emphasis on reason which will be felt in literary theory as well.
Dryden discusses character and plot as technical difficulties faced by the writer, sometimes working one against the other. This conception is very characteristic of British criticism. We can compare it with E. M. Forster's account in Aspects of the Novel (1927), which describes how the plot seems to lead the writer in one direction and the characters in a different one. For both Forster and Dryden, it is the poet's art to respect both the decorum of the characters and the causally necessary, natural solution to the plot. The writer, Dryden says, is like a god to his characters, having prescience and power of determination. But it is difficult to use them in a way altogether convincing, working as a whole.
We may note that decorum and rule are for Dryden a means of giving formal integrity to the work: that is, they are not only content, but form as well; their aim is not to depict the world as it is, but to give unity to the work. Dryden, like many later critics, is conscious of two different tendencies present in a work: although he does not use these terms, we might call them the mimetic tendency (the relationship between an element in the work and reality) and the structural tendency (the coherence of the work imposing its own conventions, the concern for formal integrity).
He opposes the strongly conventionalized characters and plots of Roman comedies, asking for a wider imitation of nature, although he also appreciates the advantages of patterning and of structural simplicity in current French plays, and he believes some of Shakespeare's plays to be "ridiculously cramped" with incident. But the interest of the plot and the characters is also to be found in variety and not simply in a well-defined structure. In variety we recognize real life, and this is one of the advantages of the English approach to dramatic art.
The story itself is the least important part of a poet's work, the one which lends it most easily to imitation. It is a material which must be worked on, finding suitable characters and style. Aristotle, Dryden points out, placed plot first of all elements in a play as the basis on which the others are built, and not as the most important one to determine the quality of a play. For Dryden, it is the characters' language which is the most important element in a play.
Dryden repeats Aristotle's theory on the unity of action, but understanding it in a wider sense than many neoclassical critics. There can be unity in a play with two lines of action, if they are causally linked. Dryden introduces in English criticism the criterion of unity used by Corneille, the contrast between the suspense of the partial actions and the final repose of the mind of the audience when the whole of the action is completed. He demands that beginning, middle and end follow each other in a necessary way:
5. a fable ought to have a beginning, middle, and an end, all just and natural, so that that part which is the middle, could not naturally be the beginning or end, and so of the rest: all are depending on one another, like the links of a curious chain.
This does not happen, he says, in Spanish plots;
6. as in perspective, so in tragedy there must be a point of sight in which all the lines terminate; otherwise the eye wanders, and the work is false ("Grounds" 167).
It is the moral that directs the whole action of the play to one centre.
Dryden also repeats Aristotle's doctrine on characters. Manners must be apparent (shown in action and discourse), suitable, resemblant, and constant. Characters derive from manners, but they must be a suitable composite of manners, and not be grounded on a single trait. We may compare this conception, once again, to E. M. Forster's well-known opposition between flat and round characters (Aspects of the Novel).
4.2.5. The Essay of Dramatic Poesy
In 1663, a Frenchman called Sorbière published a book on England, in which he made fun of the state of both the science and the arts in that country. Thomas Sprat, of the Royal Society, answered back with a treatise on the new science which was being developed in England. Dryden wrote his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), a meditation on the nature and conventions of drama which was an answer to Sorbière (who had criticised English drama for not following the unities) as well as to French dramatic theory and practice in general. It is a defense of the English theatrical ways, presenting them at least as an alternative to the classical and the French styles. Something can be said for them, and not just against them, and we may well think that Neander's arguments for English drama are the strongest. However, it is not clear which is the drama Dryden is defending, because he answers Sorbière's attack against current English theatre with an appeal to Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, the writers of the "last age", fifty years his predecessors. Dryden's comments on earlier playwrights are important not only in themselves, but also because they are at the start of a tradition of valuation of English literature, "dearest moments in the history of national self-appreciation" for Sampson. Dryden set the rules for Shakespearean criticism for the next century and a half; and if his admiration for Ben Jonson seems excessive to us now, we still use many of his views of the differences between both writers, in whom he saw an entirely different force at work. For us, there is little doubt that French drama in Dryden's time was superior to whatever was being written in England and to anything written for the English stage for centuries afterwards; Molière, Corneille and Racine are far better playwrights than the Restoration comedians (Congreve, Vanbrugh, Sedley, Wycherley) and they are above Dryden himself as a tragedian.
In any case, Dryden expounds in a fair enough way the reasons for and against the dramatic practice of both countries, as well as of that of the Ancients, and re-states the classical doctrine on drama. Dryden retains an openness to contrary argument which almost approaches scepticism, although it would be more accurate to define his views as probabilistic rather than sceptic (Wimsatt and Brooks 193). Dryden was accused of inconclusiveness, and he retorted with the Defence of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), and there he alludes to the Aristotelian difference between demonstrative and probabilistic arguments: the latter Aristotle had said to be proper to rhetoric. It is up to the talent of each fictional speaker to convince us of the rightness of his opinions. They are Crities, Eugenius, Lisideius, and Neander. Although Neander is generally recognised as Dryden's spokesman and as the more cogent speaker of all, all are allowed to have their say, and the dialogue is not brought to a conclusion through the victory of Neander's argument: we leave the four friends still debating the issues. And in the Defence of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden says that his argument is not demonstrative but probabilistic: it is up to the reader to decide which of the speakers he will side with. Crites defends and extreme Classicist position, although he is not blind to the merits of modern versification. Lisideius and Eugenius accept the same Classical premises as Crites, but say that modern poets have profited from the experience and imitation of the Classics and follow rules more exactly. Lisideius adds that the rules have been best followed by French drama, which is to be regarded as the model. Neander ("new man") insists on the need of liveliness-which he feels is lacking in Classical and French plays-rather than plain verisimilitude. He approves as well of Corneille's phrase, "il est facile aux speculatifs d'estre severes," and he is concerned with the excessive rigidity that critical principles, divorced of actual dramatic practice, tend to impose on drama.
4.2.6. The Dramatic Unities of Time and Place
The three unities, Dryden observes, ought to be followed in all regular plays. But he is tolerant enough with plays which are moderately irregular.
In the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Crites repeats the account of the unities given by Corneille (without his qualifications on the difficulty of the enterprise). The unities aim at verisimilitude; the space and time of representation must be as close as possible to those of the feigned action. Any distortion must be supposed to fall between the acts, plots have to begin "in medias res", narration must be restricted to events simultaneous with the action if possible, etc.
In time we find that the coincidence of times works all right in dealing with the precipitate events at the conclusion of a play, but makes the complication seem artificial or else rely too much on narrative.
Dryden follows Corneille in showing how the unities of space and time are mutually related, and regularity in one favours regularity in the other. This may be helped through the "liaison des scènes." Place (and time, too) remains the same inside each act,
7. and that you may know it to be the same, the stage is so supplied with persons that it is never empty all the time. (Dramatic Poesy 28).
But the view of the question give by Crites is much qualified in the debate by the advocates of the moderns. The disadvantages of regularity are pointed out: there is a danger of narrowness and monotony. The "liaison des scènes" is only possible in French plays because their plots contain little action and their scenes are very long. This also demands an excessive use of monologue, which is unnatural. One main end of theatre, delight, is not sufficiently attended to in Greek or French plays.
4.2.7. Rhyme and Verisimilitude
Dryden held an interesting debate with his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, on the property of rhyme in plays and its relationship to verisimilitude. Howard opposed the use of rhyme, which he believed to break the illusion of reality which any play ought to produce. Dryden defended the use of rhyme. He believes that the end of a play is not so much to give a faithful imitation of human life as to give a heightened image of reality. Rhyme works in that way: it guides the attention and gives greater tightness to speeches. Besides, Dryden says, blank verse (which was proposed by Howard as a subsitute for rhyme) is not "natural," either. Howard based his attack on rhyme on the principle that if a play is to trick our minds into a fictive reality, then the use of rhyme worked against that, because men do not speak in rhyme; we will not believe that it is the character who is actually speaking. Dryden's answer is categorical: we are never tricked in a play into believing that we are facing a real scene; and it is the author, not the characters, whom we consider to be speaking in the last analysis. In the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, even Crites acknowledges that dramatic verisimilitude deceives us because we desire to be deceived, and that we know all the time that we are being deceived. We will have to keep this in mind when we discuss the definition of the audience's role as a "willing suspension of disbelief" in nineteenth-century criticism.
Howard was also against following of the three unities, also for the sake of verisimilitude: he believed that too much use must be made of coincidence to concentrate an action in so restricted a space and time. Paradoxically, Dryden holds the opposite: the unities produce an effect of verisimilitude.
Actually, Dryden's position is not incoherent; only, verisimilitude as such is not the only thing at stake here. Howard, we may note, is for a relaxation of the formalities of theatre: no rhyme, no rules, whereas Dryden appreciates the value which they have in the making of a work of art, because of the tightness they impose on experience, the concentration, the dramatic intensity, the heightened attention of the audience. Dryden sees that the essence of art is more than just imitation of real life. Drama is not trompe-l'il, that extreme of mimetic trickery. Verisimilitude is all right, it is relevant to the question, but we need something more than just verisimilitude, something which rhyme and a concentrated action help to shape. A tragedy is always natural as a tragedy:
8. The plot, the characters, the wit, the descriptions, are all exalted above the level of common converse, as high as the imagination of the poet can carry them with proportion to verisimility. (Dramatic Poesy 71)
Verse , then, is natural to tragedy, even if it is not natural to life:
9. Verse, 'tis true, is not the effect of sudden thought; but this hinders not that sudden thought may be represented in verse. (72)
4.2.8. Delight and Instruction
In his definition of a play in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden says it is
10. a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind. (25)
So, once again we meet a version of the Horatian ""productive delight." Elsewhere Dryden writes:
11. these two ends may be thus distinguished. The chief end of the poet is to please, for his immediate reputation depends on it. The great end of the poet is to instruct, which is performed by making pleasure the vehicle of that instruction; for poetry is an art, and all arts are made to profit. (Answer to Rhymer 148)
But in later pronouncements, Dryden asserts that
12. delight is the chief, if not the only end of poesy; instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it delights,
or that instruction is the end of tragedy,
13. but in comedy it is not so; for the chief end of it is divertisement and delight, and that so much, that it is disputed . . . whether instruction be any part of its employment.
Dryden does not believe comedy to be grounded on any serious principle such as moral instruction. Here Dryden sides with Heinsius in declaring that comedy has amusement and delight as its only aim, far from the serious concerns of tragedy. Comedy works not on the best impulses of the audience, but on the worst, making them laugh. The pleasure coming from comedy is a "malicious pleasure"; comedy may instruct, but it is a secondary purpose: its main duty is to please. But he often changed opinions on this subject, alternately stressing or playing down the responsibilities and moral requirements of drama. In this sense he is not the typical neoclassical critic. The general attitude towards comedy is that it ought to provide moral instruction. Sidney and Jonson had even defended comedy without laughter. Others defend, of course, laughter, such as Molière and Pope. Dryden affirms that Ben Jonson did not require creative wit, being satisfied with humour. He believes that as far as wit is concerned, modern playwrights are superior to Jonson. His characters are funny, but not witty. They do not make us laugh willingly: we laugh at them. They are at once more realistic, and more approximate to real conversation. Dryden distinguishes between a comedy of wit and a comedy of humours, and he prefers a mixture of the two.
In A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, written in his old age (1693), Dryden asserts that pleasure is only a secondary end to poetry. It is only a means to the real end, which is instruction. Conversely, the aim of the poet is to please, but not everything that pleases is good. Dryden believes that the quality of a work is inherent to it, that it comes from its having certain qualities; he mistrusts to some extent the judgement of the audience. The dramatist must not be a slave to the taste of the audience.
So we find in Dryden all the gamut of combinations between the poles of delight and instruction. Instruction comes unconsciously from the admiration produced by the events in the plot. The soul of the spectator is wound insensibly into the pratice of that which it admires.
In the late 1670s, Dryden receives strong influence from the French critics Boileau, Rapin and Le Bossu, and also from the extreme classicism of another Englishman, Rymer. In his Tragedies of the Last Age, Thomas Rymer had introduced the term "poetic justice" and had insisted that it had to be respected in all plays. Many were ready to agree with him for a long time, such as Dennis, and Addison, who still exaggerate the concept. Rymer launched some silly attacks on Shakespeare, criticising him for his moral faults and his ignorance of the unities. Dryden had a respect for Rymer which we cannot understand today: but then we must not forget that Dryden himself was a great rewriter and "improver" of Shakespearean plays (All for Love, The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida, etc.). But Dryden, while accepting poetic justice, is not an extreme advocate of it. And he makes some interesting observations on the conflicts it arises in tragedy, when it runs against sympathy. The aim of tragedy is to instruct by example. Dryden proposes love as the most suitable theme to move the pity of the audience, a subject which "was almost unknown to the Ancients." The poet must labour to arouse pity for the criminal, and not for the victim, and terror must come from the punishment of the criminal we pity: this idea introduces some complexity beyond the simplicity of poetic justice.
We may note that the favourite theatrical emotions of the Neoclassic age, when a new ethics of benevolence is developing, are poetic justice, pity, melodrama, the pleasure of compassion of injured innocence. All are in direct opposition to Aristotle's catharsis and his basic requirements for tragedy. Now a sentimentalized version of catharsis is fashionable : it is understood to be the abating of pride and anger through fear and pity. The stage is ready for the development of sentimental drama and bourgeois tragedy or melodrama (George Lillo, The London Merchant, 1731; Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers, 1722).
Dryden wrote a long essay on satire: A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693). He follows Horace and the French critic Dacier, who had undertaken a similar enterprise before.
Dryden's definition of satire, following Daniel Heinsius, has a strong Aristotelian flavour:
14. Satire is a kind of poetry, without a series of action, invented for the purging of our minds; in which human vices , ignorance and error, and all things besides, which are produced from them, in every man, are severely reprehended; partly dramatically, partly simply; but for the most time figuratively and occultly. . . . It ought only to treat of one subject; to be confined to a particular theme, or, at least, to one principally (Satire 268- 269).
Satire is not libel or slander: it is concerned with the castigation of universal vice through its manifestation in individuals (cf. A's comedy vs. lampoon or poetry vs. history). Nevertheless, satires will still be concerned with attack to particular persons on concrete occasions (f.i., Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel ).
Dryden traces the independent development of satire in Greece and Rome, the similar restrictions placed by law upon it, the influence on Roman satire not of Greek satire, but of Greek Old Comedy. He classifies the types of satire, following those previous writers, according to the poet who first developed them. We have then Menippean (or Varronian) satire, which mixes verse with prose and serious philosophical matters with pleasantries, parodies and obscenity. The term became popular once more with Northop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. Frye expands the term to include works of intellectual or philosophical parody and disquisition such as Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, Voltaire's Candide, Swift's Tale of a Tub and Gulliver.
The other main styles in satire were developed by Persius, who writes invective and insults against vice rather than satire, and above all by Horace and Juvenal. Horace is more profitable, and Juvenal more delightful. Also, they castigate different things: Horace folly, Juvenal vice. Horace's instructions are more general:
15. [Horace] had found out the skill of Virgil, to hide his sentences to give you the virtue of them without showing them in their full extent, which is the ostentation of a poet, and not his art" (Satire 256).
However, Dryden finds that Horace's wit is insipid, and that Juvenal is sharper. Horace specialises in fine mockery, Juvenal is more direct and pungent. Dryden's conclusion is that although Horatian satire is the best kind of satire, both in tone and in objects, Horace has carried it to less perfection than Juvenal, who writes more successfully an inferior kind of satire.
Dryden's creative work shades off into his imitations and his translations. He was not only an important translator in his age, but also a theoriser of translation, above all in his later years. He translated from Boileau to Chaucer an Boccaccio (Fables ).
In the preface to his translation of Ovid's Epistles (1680), he distinguishes three kinds of translation (a distinction similar to that made by Ascham in his Schoolmaster ):
· metaphrase is "turning an author word by word and line by line from one language into the other." This is not always possible, and moreover the sense is often obscured.
· paraphrase is "translation with latitude," which nonetheless preserves the original sense.
· We have imitation when the author abandons both the words and the sense of the original whenever he thinks it fit. There are some authors who cannot be translated, only imitated. Indeed, it is impossible, he says, to translate poetry literally. We must keep to the most faithful translation whenever we can, but this is not always possible. So, the translator of poetry must be a poet as well as an accomplished speaker of both languages.
16. A translator is to make his author appear as charming as possibly he can provided he maintains his character, and makes him not unlike himself. (195).
It is a difficult enterprise, and the good translator has a previous experience both as critic and creator.