'Dogmatical' Dryden: Translating the Georgics in the Age of Politeness

Abstract

'Dogmatical' is not an adjective we would nowadays think of applying to John Dryden. Since Philip Harth began his Contexts of Dryden 's Thought (1968) by saying that 'Most discussions of Dryden's characteristic thought are governed by a set of assumptions about his scepticism . . . which have been accepted ... for the past thirty years',2 thirty more years have passed and little has changed. Defining the 'dogmatical way' of Lucretius in the Preface to Sylvae (1685) as 'a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his opinions', Dryden famously contrasted his own 'natural diffidence and scepticism';3 and today's leading commentators on his work continue to take him at his word. For David Hopkins he is an ambivalent or unsystematic writer, an explorer of contradictory voices.4 For Cedric D. Reverand II and Paul Hammond he is a 'subversive' poet whose mature works interrogate our desire 'to make connections, discover inherent systems of value, and build theories', the author of 'fictions which exhibit both their materials and their gaps' in order to provoke their readers 'to reflect on how their own conceptual and political worlds are constructed'.5 There are, without doubt, good grounds for believing that Dryden was 'inclin'd to Scepticism' (Preface to Religio Laid; Poems, II, 86). The Restoration court, the court he served and has come to symbolize, was awash with sceptical ideas, imbibed during its years of exile in Paris, where the writings of the ancient sceptics were much in vogue. In the early stages of his career, he was an enthusiastic propagandist for the newly-founded Royal Society, whose scrupulous experimental procedures would, he announced, put an end to the epistemological 'tyranny' 'wherein our ancestors betrayed / Their free-born reason' to the archdogmatist Aristotle, 'And made his torch their universal light' ('To my Honoured Friend Dr. Charleton', 1-4). Later, in his satirical masterpieces, he attacked Shaftesbury as a dogmatical democrat, who 'Maintains the multitude can never err, / And sets the people in the papal chair' (The Medal, 86-7). Even his own eventual submission to papal discipline, his