only compet to affect Englishmen powerfully, as Homer affected Greeks powerfully; but this direction is not enough, and can give no real guidance. . . . Evidently the translator needs some more practical directions than these. No one can tell him how Homer affected the Greeks; but there are those who I can tell him how Homer affects them. These are scholars, Scholars the who possess, at the same time with knowledge of Greek, ent tribunal. adequate poetical taste and feeling. No translation will seem to them of much worth compared with the original; but they alone can say whether the translation produces more or less the same effect upon them as the original. They are the only competent tribunal in this matter: the Greeks are dead; the unlearned Englishman has not the data for judging; and no man can safely confide in his own single judgment of his own work. M. ARNOLD, On Translating Homer, 1861-1862. SUBJECT MATTER SUBJECTS Three kinds of this [Poesy] have been three several kinds. of poetry. The chief both in antiquity and excellency were they Excellencies that did imitate the inconceivable excellencies of God. Such were David. . . . of God. Matters The second kind is of them that deal with matters philosophi philosophical; either moral cal. What may be and should be or natural. . . or astro nomical . . . or historical . . . which who mislike, the fault is in their judgments quite out of taste, and not in the sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge. [T]he third, indeed right poets, . . . betwixt whom and these second is such a kind of difference as betwixt the meaner sort of painters (who counterfeit only such faces as are set before them) and the more excellent, who having no law but wit, bestow that in colours upon you which is fittest for the eye to see. . . . For these third be they which most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be. These be they that, as the first and most noble sort, may justly be termed Vates, so these are waited on in the excellentest languages and best understandings with the fore-described name of poets. Heroic, etc. tions. These be subdivided into sundry more special denominaThe most notable be the heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satiric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, and certain others, some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with, some by the sorts of verses they liked best to write in. Sir P. SIDNEY, Apology for Poetry, c. 1583. Poetry is not debarred from any matter which may be Subject expressed by pen or speech. W. WEBBE, Discourse of English Poetry, 1586. matter not circum scribed. poetry. [N]ow it is time to speak of the matter or subject of Matter or poesy, which to mine intent is whatsoever witty and delicate subject of conceit of man meet or worthy to be put in written verse, for any necessary use of the present time, or good instruction of the posterity. But the chief and principal is the laud, honour, and glory of the immortal gods (I speak now in phrase of the Gentiles); secondly, the worthy gests of noble princes, the memorial and registry of all great fortunes, the praise of virtue and reproof of vice, the instruction of moral doctrines, the revealing of sciences, natural and other profitable arts, the redress of boisterous and sturdy courages by persuasion, the consolation and repose of temperate minds: finally, the common solace of mankind in all his travails and cares of this transitory life; and in this last sort being used for recreation only, may allowably bear matter not always of the gravest or of any great commodity or profit, but rather in some sort vain, dissolute, or wanton, so it be not very scandalous and of evil example. G. PUTTENHAM, Art of English Poesy, 1589. Poesy ought not to be employed upon any unworthy Subject must matter and subject, nor used to vain purposes. not be unworthy. Poesy is Ib. nothing else but FEIGNED HISTORY. poetry. The division of poesy which is aptest in the propriety Divisions of thereof (besides those divisions which are common unto it with history, as feigned chronicles, feigned lives, and the appendices of history, as feigned epistles, feigned orations, and the rest) is into poesy narrative, representative, and allusive. The narrative is a mere imitation of history with Narrative. the excesses before remembered, choosing for subject commonly wars and love, rarely state, and sometimes Representapleasure or mirth. Representative is as a visible history, tive. Allusive. A fiction not to be preferred to true deeds. An epic poem to consist altogether of a fiction. and is an image of actions as if they were present, as F. BACON, Advancement of Learning, 1605. Many would bound the boundless liberty of a poet, binding him only to the birth of his own brains, affirming that there can be no perfection but in a fiction, not considering that the ancients, upon whose example they ground their opinion, did give faith unto those fables, whereby they would abuse our credulity, not only as to true history but as to true divinity, since containing the greatness of their gods and grounds of their religion, which they in their own kind did strive superstitiously to extol; so that hereby they would either make our religion or our affection thereunto inferior unto theirs, and imaginary matters to be more celebrated than true deeds, whose envied price, affectionately looked upon, must beget a generous emulation in any virtuous reader's mind. The treasures of poesy cannot be better bestowed than upon the apparelling of truth, and truth cannot be better apparelled to please young lovers than with the excellencies of poesy. I would allow that an epic poem should consist altogether of a fiction, that the poet, soaring above the course of nature, making the beauty of virtue to invite and the horror of vice to affright the beholders, may liberally furnish his imaginary man with all the qualities requisite for the accomplishing of a perfect creature, having power to dispose of all things at his own pleasure. But it is more agreeable with the gravity of a tragedy upon a true Satire and that it be grounded upon a true history, where the greatness Tragedy to be grounded of a known person, urging regard, doth work the more powerfully upon the affections. As for the satirist and history. epigrammatist, they may mix both the two, who shadowing epigram. truth with fables, and discovering true persons with feigned names, may, by alluding to antiquity, tax the modern times. I have heard some with a pretended theological austerity condemn the reading of fictions, as only breathing a contagious dissoluteness to empoison the spirits, where such works must be acknowledged as the chief springs of learning, Fictions the chief springs both for profit and pleasure, showing things as they should of learning. be, where histories represent them as they are, many times making vice to prosper and virtue to prove miserable: I like not the Alexander of Curtius so well as the Cyrus of Xenophon, who made it first appear unto the world with what grace and spirit a poem might be delivered in prose. Sir W. ALEXANDER, Anacrisis, 1634. an historian. Lucan, who chose to write the greatest actions that ever The poet not were allowed to be true (which for fear of contemporary witnesses, obliged him to a very close attendance upon fame), did not observe that such an enterprise rather beseemed an historian than a poet: for wise poets think it more worthy to seek out truth in the passions, than to Truth in the record the truth of actions; and practise to describe man- rather than kind just as we are persuaded or guided by instinct, not particular persons, as they are lifted or levelled by the force Mankind, of fate, it being nobler to contemplate the general history not particu of nature than a selected diary of fortune. Sir W. DAVENANT, Preface to Gondibert, 1650. passions the truth of actions. lar persons. As philosophers have divided the universe, their subject, Divisions of into three regions,-celestial, aerial, and terrestrial,-so the poetry poets (whose work it is, by imitating human life in delightful and measured lines, to avert men from vice and incline them to virtuous and honourable actions) have lodged themselves in the three regions of mankind-Court, City, correspond and Country-correspondent in some proportion to those to court, three regions of the world. city,country. |