Latin translation would cultivate the English, as Greek translation had cultivated
the Romans. The success of Dryden’s Sylvae (1685), a selection from Horace,
Theocritus, Lucretius and Virgil, encouraged him to do a complete Virgil for Tonson
the bookseller. Couplets could at last be properly heroic:
Arms, and the Man I sing, who, forc’d by Fate,
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting Hate;
Expell’d and exil’d, left the Tr o j a nShoar:
Long labours, both by Sea and Land, he bore;
And in the doubtful War, before he won
The Latian Realm, and built the destin’d Town: Latium, in Italy
His banish’d gods restor’d to Rites Divine,
And setl’d sure Succession in his Line;
From whence the Race ofAlban Fathers come, rulers descended from Aeneas
And the long Glories of majestick Rome
The proclamatory flourish of this opening recalls the fanfares of Henry Purcell
(1659–1695),Dryden’s collaborator in these years, or the ornate woodcarving of
Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721). ‘I looked on Virgil’, Dryden wrote in the preface to
the Sylvae, ‘as a succinct and grave majestic writer, who weighed not only every
thought,but every word and syllable: who was still aiming to crowd his sense into as
narrow a compass as possibly he could ...’. Yet in his Aeneid Dryden chose to ‘pursue
the excellence and forsake the brevity’, for English is less compact than Latin. The
preface to the Sylvae gives his policy:
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. Translation is a kind of
drawing after the life; where everyone will acknowledge there is a double sort of likeness,
a good one and a bad. ‘Tis one thing to draw the outlines true, the features like, the
proportions exact, the colouring itself perhaps tolerable; and another thing to make all
these graceful, by the posture, the shadowings, and, chiefly, by the spirit which animates
the whole.
This animating spirit can be felt in the prophecy in which Aeneas’s father exalts
the rule of Rome above the arts of Greece:
‘Let others better mould the running mass
Of metals, and inform the breathing brass,
And soften into flesh a marble face;
Plead better at the bar; describe the skies,
And when the stars ascend, and when they rise.
But, Rome! ’tis thine alone, with awful sway,
To rule mankind, and make the world obey:
Disposing peace and war thy own majestic way.
To tame the proud, the fettered slave to free,
These are imperial arts, and worthy thee.’ (VI.1168–77)England too is to excel in empire rather than art. Dryden’s artful Dedication can also
be read sideways, as accepting the rule of William III. Ever a political writer, he read
his times and his readers well, as in the last jocular Chorus to the Secular Masque
(1700):
All, all, of a piece throughout:
Thy Chase had a Beast in View;
Thy wars brought nothing about;THE RESTORATION 173