Dryden: Classical or Neoclassical?

Abstract

Dryden has been faulted for both defective and excessive decorum. Indecorous writing bothered nineteenth-century critics, such as Macaulay, especially; he loathed the 'filth' Dryden interpolated into his translation from Virgil. Twentieth-century readers in general have worried less about a lack of decorum in Dryden (though perhaps still worrying about prurience in Sigismonda and Guiscardo, as Wordsworth, for example, had done), or they have valued the way that Dryden moves among levels of diction and prized Absalom and Achitophel particularly.1 Excessive decorum, on the other hand, has worried twentieth-century critics, particularly those not influenced by T. S. Eliot. Though Housman loved Dryden's ability to write a 'pure, wholesome, racy English' on occasion, he thought that Dryden's insistence on correctness and splendour mostly led him to ruin his poems. Pound, taking nomen as omen, found aridity to be the chief characteristic of Dryden. And in a discussion of Gavin Douglas's translation of Virgil, C. S. Lewis offers a scathing critique of the false classicism of Dryden's translation. The burden of this paper will be to answer Lewis and to think through the examples from Dryden which he contemns.2 Probably Ezra Pound's enthusiasm was responsible for the new appreciation of Douglas in the first part of the twentieth century. Pound wrote, notoriously, that Douglas's translation is 'better than the original', and even when on another occasion he stopped to say why, he added only that Douglas was better than Virgil at descriptions of the sea.3 Still, by mid-century both Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard could take Douglas's importance for granted.4 Lewis does not invidiously contrast Virgil with Douglas's translation of Virgil as Pound did; instead, he invidiously contrasts Douglas's translation with Dryden's. His critical triangulation of Virgil, Douglas, and Dryden is roughly analogous to Keats's triangulation of Homer, Chapman, and Pope in the famous sonnet: both seek evidence in the earlier translation of an ancient writer's greatness and freshness that had become obscured by the later, overly classicizing translation. Lewis lists qualities in Douglas's translation that may strike us, he says, as very un-Virgilian: a certain cheerful briskness; admirable vividness; a delighted vision of Eneas' masculine beauty; and sensuous