THOMAS E. MARESCA OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS $5.00 POEMS BY THOMAS E. MARESCA Recent critical studies of Alexander Pope have sought to define his poetic accom­ plishment in terms of a broadened aware­ ness of what the eighteenth century called wit. That Pope's achievement can be lo­ cated in wit is still generally agreed; but it now seems clear that the fullest signifi­ cance of his poetry can be found in the more serious meaning the Augustans at­ tached to that word: the ability to discern and articulate—to "invent," in the classical sense—the fundamental order of the world, of society, and of man, and to express that order fittingly in poetry. Mr. Maresca maintains that it is Pope's success in this sort of invention that is the manifest accomplishment of his Imitations of Horace. And Mr. Maresca finds that, for these purposes, the Renaissance vision of Horace served Pope well by providing a concordant mixture of rational knowledge and supernatural revelation, reason and faith in harmonious balance, and by offer­ ing as well all the advantages of applying ancient rules to modern actions. Within the expansive bounds of such traditions Pope succeeded in building the various yet one universe of great poetry. Thomas E. Maresca is assistant professor of English at the Ohio State University, POPE'S POEMS For his epistles, say they, are weighty and powerful; hut his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible. H COR. io: 10 POPE'S HORATIAN POEMS BY THOMAS E. MARESCA OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 1966 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 66-23259 MEIS DEBETUR Preface THIS BOOK is an attempt to read some eighteenth-century poems; it is much more a learning experiment on my part than any sort of finished criticism. Such value as it may possess seems to me to rest less in the answers it gives than in the questions it asks, less in the questions than in the poems it asks them of. I am grateful to the editors of ELH for permission to reprint the Fortescue essay, which appeared, in slightly different form, in that journal. I want to thank Don Cameron Allen, Robert C. Elliott, Albert J. Kuhn, and especially Earl R. Wasserman for their comments and criticism: without their help this study could have been neither started nor finished. T.E.M. August 22, 1965 [vii] Table of Contents Introduction 3 I. HORACE 7 II. THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF SATIRE The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated 37 III. APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot 73 IV. THE RULES OF POETRY AND THE LAWS OF LIFE The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated 117 V. HUMAN MAKER AND DIVINE The First Epistle of the First Book of Horace, Imitated 151 Epilogue: Speculations 195 Appendix A: Table of Index Guides 205 Appendix B: Two Structural Experiments: The Poem as Sermon 211 Index 225 POPE'S HORATIAN POEMS Introduction ll translation I suppose may be reduced to these three heads. / First, that of metaphrase, or turning Aw an author word by word, and line by line, from one language into another. Thus, or near this manner, was Horace his "Art of Poetry" translated by Ben Jonson. The second way is that of paraphrase, or translation with lati­ tude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense; and that too is admitted to be ampli­ fied, but not altered. The third way is that of imitation, where the translator (if he now has not lost that name) assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion; taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the groundwork, as he pleases.1 Despite the fact that Dryden's distinctions are familiar enough to amount almost to cliche, they have only infre­ quently been applied seriously in any criticism of Pope's Imitations of Horace, where they would seem to be par­ ticularly useful.2 This is not, I suggest, because of any limitation inherent in the distinctions themselves, but more directly in this case because readers have been unsure of the precise nature of the "words and sense" that Dryden frees the poet to vary and forsake, and all too often because they have been almost completely unaware of what is involved in the "groundwork" on which he is to build.3 Our one thing needful has been, and is, an investigation of the Horace the eighteenth century and Pope saw or thought they saw—it amounts to the same thing—in the satires and epistles. Only in this light can Dryden's remarks start making sense when applied to Pope's poems. [3] INTRODUCTION Recent critical studies of Pope have sought to define his poetic accomplishment in terms of a broadened awareness of what the eighteenth century called wit and what we more pretentiously label mythopoeia. We have moved be­ yond ideas of decorum and form as final explanations of what happens in a Pope poem, beyond an understanding of Pope's artistry as an exercise in laughter and style. That his achievement can be located in wit, we are still agreed; but it now seems clear that the fullest significance of Pope's poetry must be found in that more serious meaning the Augustans attached to wit: the ability to discern and articulate—to "invent" in the classical sense—the funda­ mental order of the world, of society, of man, and to express that order fittingly in poetry. The following study concerns itself with the serious ethical and aesthetic content of the Imitations of Horace, with what they say about Pope's view of his world and his art. It tries to discover how Pope used the Horace his culture gave him and to understand the nature of the wit of these poems. It is, quite simply, an investigation of what the Imitations of Horace are about. 1. Preface to the Translation of Ovid's Epistles, in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1900), I, 237; The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford, 1958), I, 182. All quotations from Dryden's prose will be taken from Ker; all quotations from his poetry will be taken from Kinsley. 2. In fact, criticism of these poems has tended to be directly antithetical to the spirit of Dryden's remarks; most often the Imitations have been considered from the standpoint of their validity as translations, and praised or condemned, according to the reader's bias, for slavishly following or cavalierly abandoning Horace. Samuel Johnson's was the first major criticism of these poems as a group, and his comments established the tone and basis of most subsequent appraisals: "The Imitations of Horace seem to have been written as relaxations of his genius. This employment became his favorite by its facility; the plan was ready to his hand, and nothing was required but to accommodate as he could the sentiments of an old author to recent facts or familiar images; but what is easy is seldom excellent: such imitations cannot give pleasure to common readers. The man of learning may be sometimes surprised and delighted by an unexpected parallel; but the comparison requires knowledge of the original, which will [4] INTRODUCTION likewise often detect strained applications. Between Roman images and English manners there will be an irreconcileable dissimilitude, and the work will be generally uncouth and party-coloured; neither original nor translated, neither ancient nor modern" (Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birk­ beck Hill [3 vols.; Oxford, 1905], III, 278). 3. This has been largely due to critical failure to consider the differences between the twentieth-century and the eighteenth-century view of Horace. Our contemporary critics have tended to see Horace as a fellow spirit, as a "cultivated man of the world," urbane, sophisticated, sensitive, unmarked by a sense of sin—all of which, as I hope the next chapter will show, is far from the eighteenth century's conception of him. An important exception to this attitude is Aubrey Williams' perceptive essay, "Pope and Horace: The Second Epistle of the Second Book," in Restoration and Eighteenth- Century Literature, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago, 1963), po. 309-22. [5] Chapter I Horace O UNDERSTAND the Horace of the Imitations properly, it is essential to approach him through the Ttexts and editions available to Pope, to place him in the general framework of thought provided by neoclassical critical documents. This Horace is not the playful Epicurean twentieth-century critics have posited, but a poet who took life and literature seriously. "Aut prodesse volunt, aut delectare Poetae," he had said; and the eighteenth century believed him. Critic after critic echoes the Horatian dictum; critic after critic traces the origin of poetry to Holy Writ and explains that Moses was the first poet, that from the beginning of time poetry conveyed morality, philosophy, science, and God's law to the minds and hearts of men.1 They claimed for it a present function as impressive as its pedigree: Tasso, for instance, toyed with the speculation of Maximus Tyrius, "that philosophy and poetry were one thing, double in name but single in essence,"2 and then went on to prefer poetry, as teacher, to scholastic philoso­ phy—"to move readers in this way with images, as do the mystic theologian and the poet, is a much more noble work than to teach by means of demonstrations, which is the function of the scholastic theologian." 3 Ben Jonson asserts no less: for him, poetry combines the learning of philosophy, divinity, and statesmanship, and teaches all of them well.