Voice and Context in Eighteenth-Century Verse

Order in Variety

Allan Ingram, Joanna Fowler, Allan Ingram, Joanna Fowler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137487629
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137487636
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays reassesses the importance of verse as a medium in the long eighteenth century, and as an invitation for readers to explore many of the less familiar figures dealt with, alongside the received names of the standard criticism of the period.

Part I

Form and Influence

1

Pope’s Horatian Voice

Nigel Wood

There is a reassuring motive for choosing to translate a famous author in that you are servant to the master voice, relaying as innocently and accurately as you can past sentiments and tropes. In the wake of this irreproachable impulse, on the other hand, one might discover less obedient traces, not quite graffiti, but – because not announced – perhaps more insidious projections of the self; the ‘strong’ authors need to be misprized in order that their complex literariness might survive, but also that the imitator is no plagiarist. Interpretation has to intervene and not only at the micro level, but also in constructing the wider perspective, where the source text does not fit and, issuing from that dissonance, a cross-cultural dialogue emerges. In Wolfgang Iser’s phrase, ‘translatability is motivated by the need to cope with a crisis that can no longer be alleviated by the mere assimilation or appropriation of other cultures’. This gesture could be a form of ‘therapy for a growing awareness of cultural pathology’.¹ The spectrum of cross-cultural adherence embraces imitation as well as academic translation, and the effect of ‘coping’ and negotiating is only a difference of degree. Pope’s Imitations of Horace offer us some material for reassurance in that the ethics of retirement and its apparently apolitical consequences are very much part of what is overt about the very form of the literary choice: the inclusion of the Horace text interleaved with Pope’s own and the adoption of Horace’s own conversational register. It is homage of an intricate kind, and the refusal to represent his own voice as standing alone is perhaps evidence of such intricacy; it might not do, however, to rest on the assumption that the later author was simply in thrall to the earlier, and this chapter will explore the consequences of focusing on the moment of Pope’s imitating: its immediacy and synchronic position as well as its more universal significance.

This is also part of the developing debate about the literary imitation in the period: the extent to which it was quasi-translation, substantially motivated by the aim of rendering the source, yet demonstrating one’s own reading in the process, or, more radically, a display of enfranchisement where a familiar source was defaced or eventually left behind. Horace’s example exhibited both varieties, using Lucilius’s outspokenness as sanction for his own temerity or the liberal attacks of Old Comedy as a template for a ‘low’ vocabulary and dramatic alternations of tone. On the other hand, these models were unartful, even if effective, as he ventures in Satires, I.iv.38–62 and I.x.1–24.² This contest between art and direct truth-telling is embedded in two established modes of regarding satire itself: is it principally strategic, always using the contemporary for vivid examples but only to point to recurrent faults and a transcendent ethics, or is it really motivated by the need to name names and expose vice in particular? For analysts of the genre, there is a similar oscillation between a formalist approach, where particulars are merely elements in a larger scheme, and a historical focus, where the satiric fiction is wielded only to denounce real villains and temporizers.³ Pope’s Horace Imitations are variously examined as a series of neo-classical gestures, returning the reader from the Augustan precedent to a carefully cultivated self-image, and yet this puts in the shade a number of personal anxieties and political nuances that were also prime motives.

I

In the second volume of Pope’s 1735 Works, the idea of adopting Horace’s example – stylistically and philosophically – grew to maturity. In the ‘Advertisement’ to the Horatian pieces, Pope provides his own context for turning to the poet: ‘The Occasion of publishing these Imitations was the Clamour raised on some of my Epistles. An Answer from Horace was both more full, and of more Dignity, than any I cou’d have made in my own person’.⁴ There then follows as ‘Satire 1’, his version of Satire, II.i, and then, as ‘Satire 2’, Satire, II.ii. The section is rounded off with imitations of the second and fourth of John Donne’s own Satires, although Horace’s preoccupation with courtly pretension shines through in both.⁵ Both Horace satires had appeared before: Satire, II.i in 1733, and Satire, II.ii in 1734. Donne’s Satire IV had appeared in 1733 as The Impertinent; Or a Visit to the Court. A Satyr. By an Eminent Hand. As the ‘Advertisement’ makes clear, the gesture of collecting together his two appropriations of Horace – with two satires of Donne – is a form of defence and redress. In his Of Taste, the early title for his Epistle To The Right Honourable Richard Earl of Burlington, published in a prepossessing 16 page folio in December 1731, there seemed to some an inappropriate allusion, in his portrait of the arriviste Timon, to the sudden wealth of James Brydges, the first Duke of Chandos, and the ‘Clamour’ refers to this unfortunate – and probably opportunistic – mischief-making.⁶ In the third edition of the poem, now entitled Of The False Taste (January 1732), Pope included an exculpatory letter, where he confesses to the ‘pain’ that this ‘Clamour’ had caused him: ‘This way of Satire is dangerous, as long as Slander rais’d by Fools of the lowest Rank, can find any Countenance from those of a Higher.’⁷ The dignity of the Horatian voice was thus part of a rather localized debate about the place of satire in the Hanoverian regime; Pope felt that his own ethos had been questioned, and – for the second volume of his 1739 Works – the ‘Advertisement’ to the Imitations concludes with a tag from Horace’s own Satire, II.i (line 70), capitalized in the parallel Latin text of the 1735 edition: ‘Uni aequus Virtuti atque ejus Amicis’ (‘kindly only to virtue and her friends’), and rendered at line 121 of Pope’s poem as ‘TO VIRTUE ONLY, and HER FRIENDS, A FRIEND’.⁸ That same volume commences with a full version of his An Essay on Man (pp. 1–58), a formal grouping of the ‘Ethic Epistles’ followed by various ‘Epistles’, and then the ‘Satires of Horace Imitated, with Satires of Dr Donne Versify’d by the Same Hand’ (pp. 109–61). As a statement in its own right, this volume merits a close eye on its immediate context and its codes.

II

It is tempting to regard Pope’s adoption of Horace’s example as somehow inevitable. For Reuben Brower, the process of these Imitations was not simply one of ‘mimicking’ a style: ‘Both poets disclaimed interest or influence in affairs of state, although their friendship with the “great” made their role and their poetry seem politically significant to others.’⁹ The equivalence of his architecturally restrained Twickenham villa with Horace’s Sabine Farm also signals themes of rural retirement and its non-aligned virtues and clear-sighted perspective, and it establishes a distance between those who owe their artistic prominence to the favour of those in power, on the one hand, and intrinsic poetic qualities on the other.¹⁰

However, there was not complete agreement as to just what Horace’s example actually might mean. We get no direct colouring on this from what we know of the Horace volumes that Pope possessed: the Heinsius Elzevir (1629) and Desprez Opera (1695) were standard editions, and are unannotated in the Hartlebury Castle copies; Alexander Cunningham’s Poemata (1721) and the Ben Jonson translation of The Art of Poetry (1640) simply show an interest in, and deep engagement with, the original.¹¹ As Frank Stack has shown, Horace could be the theorist of poetic effect (due in the main to his Art of Poetry) and also the proud individualist, freed from party and consistent allegiance, yet also a politically aligned commentator and sometimes a writer constantly searching for the authentic self, outside of personae and the republic of letters.¹² This elusiveness could be tactical (and rhetorically astute) or, eventually, a hindrance for a satirist.

That Horace failed to stir John Dryden is explicable on two counts; first, there was a lack of heroic aspiration – follies were identified and corrected but rarely excoriated – and also the severity and incisiveness of attack was muted by an inevitable servility. Horace educates and this is no negligible virtue, for ‘Satire is of the nature of moral philosophy, as being instructive’, and he is ‘more copious’ than Juvenal ‘and profitable in his instructions of human life’.¹³ His verse is, however, of a ‘low’ style, fit often for his subject, yet still pedestrian.¹⁴ Dryden, though, in terms that would have resounded with the dedicatee of his ‘Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’ (1692; title-page – 1693), Charles Sackville, sixth Earl of Dorset, identified him as a ‘temporizing poet, a well-mannered court slave […] ever decent, because he is naturally servile’.¹⁵ Indeed, these are the sentiments of Persius’s first Satire that Dryden imitated in his Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis (1693). The comparison with his mentor, Lucilius, is unflattering:

Unlike in method, with concealed design,

Did crafty Horace his low numbers join;

And with a sly insinuating grace

Laughed at his friend, and looked him in the face[.]¹⁶

Lucilius – as did ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Professor Bill Overton, 1946–2012: A Personal Memoir
• Introduction
• Part I Form and Influence
• Part II Science and Nature
• Part III Women’s Verse and Genres
• Part IV Self and Others
• Bibliography
• Index