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百年哈佛经典第13卷：伊尼亚德(英文原版)试读：
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
PUBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO, the friend of Augustus and the great representative poet of the first age of the Roman Empire, was a man of humble origin. Born Oct. 15, B. C. 70, the son of a small farmer near Mantua in Northern Italy, he was educated at Cremona, Milan, and Rome. Probably as a result of the turmoil of the Civil Wars, Virgil seems to have returned to his native district, where he was engaged for some time in writing his “Eclogues.” Though he was never a soldier, and though there is no evidence of his having taken any part in politics, he suffered severely from the results of the wars. His father’s farm lay within the territory which was confiscated by the Triumvirs for the purpose of bestowing grants of land upon their soldiers, and Virgil succeeded in having it restored only through the personal intervention of Octavianus, the future emperor. But a change of governors deprived him of protection, and he was forced to desert his heritage in peril of death, escaping only by swimming the river Mincio. The rest of his life was spent farther south, in Rome, Naples, Sicily, and elsewhere. As he gained reputation he became the possessor of a large fortune, bestowed upon him by the generosity of friends and patrons, the most distinguished of whom, apart from Augustus, was Mæcenas, the center of the literary society of the day. The “Eclogues” had been finished in B. C. 37, and in B. C. 30 he published his great poem on farming, the “Georgics.” It is characteristic of his laborious method of composition that this work of little more than 2,000 lines occupied him for seven years.
The completion of the “Georgics” established Virgil’s position as the chief poet of his time; and at this momentous date, when, the Civil Wars over, the victorious Augustus was laying the foundations of imperial government, the poem which was to be the supreme expression of the national life was begun. At the end of eleven years Virgil had written the whole of the “æneid,” and planned to devote three more to its final revision. But this revision was never accomplished, for returning from Athens with Augustus in B. C. 19, he was seized with illness and died on September 21. He was buried at Naples, where his tomb was long a place of religious pilgrimage.
The modern appreciation of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” has tended to carry with it a depreciation of the “æneid,” the spirit of which appeals less forcibly to the taste of our time. But it is foolish to lose sight of the splendor of a poet who, for nearly two thousand years, has been one of the most powerful factors in European culture. “The concurrent testimony of the most refined minds of all times,” says one of the finest of his critics, “marks him out as one of the greatest masters of the language which touches the heart or moves the manlier sensibilities, who has ever lived. A mature and mellow truth of sentiment, a conformity to the deeper experiences of life in every age, a fine humanity as well as a generous elevation of feeling, and some magical charm of music in his words, have enabled them to serve many minds in many ages as a symbol of some swelling thought or overmastering emotion, the force and meaning of which they could scarcely define to themselves.”
The subtler elements of the exquisite style of Virgil no translator can ever hope to reproduce; but Dryden was a master of English versification, and the content of Virgil’s epic is here rendered in vigorous and nervous couplets. “Despite many revolutions of public taste,” says Professor Noyes, Dryden’s latest editor, “Dryden’s Virgil still remains practically without a rival as the standard translation of the greatest Roman poet; the only one that, like two or three versions of Homer, has become an English classic.”
Dryden’s “Dedication” is an excellent example of his prose style, and gives an interesting view of the method and standpoint of the greatest of English seventeenth century critics.TO THE MOST HONORABLE JOHN， LORD MARQUIS OF NORMANBY EARL OF MULGRAVE， &C.AND KNIGHT OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER OF THE GARTER
AHEROIC poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform. The design of it is to form the mind to heroic virtue by example. ’Tis convey’d in verse, that it may delight, while it instructs: the action of it is always one, entire, and great. The least and most trivial episodes, or underactions, which are interwoven in it, are parts either necessary or convenient to carry on the main design; either so necessary, that, without them, the poem must be imperfect, or so convenient, that no others can be imagin’d more suitable to the place in which they are. There is nothing to be left void in a firm building; even the cavities ought not to be fill’d with rubbish, (which is of a perishable kind, destructive to the strength,) but with brick or stone, tho’ of less pieces, yet of the same nature, and fitted to the crannies. Even the least portions of them must be of the epic kind: all things must be grave, majestical, and sublime; nothing of a foreign nature, like the trifling novels which Ariosto and others have inserted in their poems; by which the reader is misled into another sort of pleasure, opposite to that which is design’d in an epic poem. One raises the soul, and hardens it to virtue; the other softens it again, and unbends it into vice. One conduces to the poet’s aim, the completing of his work, which he is driving on, laboring and hast’ning in every line; the other slackens his pace, diverts him from his way, and locks him up, like a knight-errant, in an enchanted castle, when he should be pursuing his first adventure. Statius, as Bossu has well observ’d, was ambitious of trying his strength with his master Virgil, as Virgil had before tried his with Homer. The Grecian gave the two Romans an example, in the games which were celebrated at the funerals of Patroclus. Virgil imitated the invention of Homer, but chang’d the sports. But both the Greek and Latin poet took their occasions from the subject; tho’ to confess the truth, they were both ornamental, or at best convenient parts of it, rather than of necessity arising from it. Statius, who, thro’ his whole poem, is noted for want of conduct and judgment, instead of staying, as he might have done, for the death of Capaneus, Hippomedon, Tydeus, or some other of his seven champions, (who are heroes all alike), or more properly for the tragical end of the two brothers, whose exequies the next successor had leisure to perform when the siege was rais’d, and in the interval betwixt the poet’s first action and his second, went out of his way, as it were on prepense malice, to commit a fault. For he took his opportunity to kill a royal infant by the means of a serpent (that author of all evil), to make way for those funeral honors which he intended for him. Now if this innocent had been of any relation to his Thebais; if he had either farther’d or hinder’d the taking of the town; the poet might have found some sorry excuse at least, for detaining the reader from the promis’d siege. On these terms, this Capaneus of a poet ingag’d his two immortal predecessors; and his success was answerable to his enterprise.
If this economy must be observ’d in the minutest parts of an epic poem, which, to a common reader, seem to be detach’d from the body, and almost independent of it; what soul, tho’ sent into the world with great advantages of nature, cultivated with the liberal arts and sciences, conversant with histories of the dead, and enrich’d with observations of the living, can be sufficient to inform the whole body of so great a work? I touch here but transiently, without any strict method, on some few of those many rules of imitating nature which Aristotle drew from Homer’s Iliads and Odysses, and which he fitted to the drama; furnishing himself also with observations from the practice of the theater when it flourish’d under æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles: for the original of the stage was from the epic poem. Narration, doubtless, preceded acting, and gave laws to it; what at first was told artfully, was, in process of time, represented gracefully to the sight and hearing. Those episodes of Homer which were proper for the stage, the poets amplified each into an action; out of his limbs they form’d their bodies; what he had contracted, they enlarg’d; out of one Hercules were made infinite of pigmies, yet all endued with human souls; for from him, their great creator, they have each of them the divin particulam aur. They flow’d from him at first, and are at last resolv’d into him. Nor were they only animated by him, but their measure and symmetry was owing to him. His one, entire, and great action was copied by them according to the proportions of the drama. If he finish’d his orb within the year, if suffic’d to teach them, that their action being less, and being also less diversified with incidents, their orb, of consequence, must be circumscrib’d in a less compass, which they reduc’d within the limits either of a natural or an artificial day; so that, as he taught them to amplify what he had shorten’d, by the same rule, applied the contrary way, he taught them to shorten what he had amplified. Tragedy is the miniature of human life; an epic poem is the draught at length. Here, my Lord, I must contract also; for, before I was aware, I was almost running into a long digression, to prove that there is no such absolute necessity that the time of a stage action should so strictly be confin’d to twenty-four hours as never to exceed them, for which Aristotle contends, and the Grecian stage has practic’d. Some longer space, on some occasions, I think, may be allow’d, especially for the English theater, which requires more variety of incidents than the French. Corneille himself, after long practice, was inclin’d to think that the time allotted by the ancients was too short to raise and finish a great action: and better a mechanic rule were stretch’d or broken, than a great beauty were omitted. To raise, and afterwards to calm the passions, to purge the souls from pride, by the examples of human miseries, which befall the greatest; in few words, to expel arrogance, and introduce compassion, are the great effects of tragedy; great, I must confess, if they were altogether as true as they are pompous. But are habits to be introduc’d at three hours’ warning? Are radical diseases so suddenly remov’d? A mountebank may promise such a cure, but a skilful physician will not undertake it. An epic poem is not in so much haste; it works leisurely; the changes which it makes are slow; but the cure is likely to be more perfect. The effects of tragedy, as I said, are too violent to be lasting. If it be answer’d that, for this reason, tragedies are often to be seen, and the dose to be repeated, this is tacitly to confess that there is more virtue in one heroic poem than in many tragedies. A man is humbled one day, and his pride returns the next. Chymical medicines are observ’d to relieve oft’ner than to cure; for ’tis the nature of spirits to make swift impressions, but not deep. Galenical decoctions, to which I may properly compare an epic poem, have more of body in them; they work by their substance and their weight. It is one reason of Aristotle’s to prove that tragedy is the more noble, because it turns in a shorter compass; the whole action being circumscrib’d within the space of four-and-twenty hours. He might prove as well that a mushroom is to be preferr’d before a peach, because it shoots up in the compass of a night. A chariot may be driven round the pillar in less space than a large machine, because the bulk is not so great. Is the Moon a more noble planet than Saturn, because she makes her revolution in less than thirty days, and he in little less than thirty years? Both their orbs are in proportion to their several magnitudes; and consequently the quickness or slowness of their motion, and the time of their circumvolutions, is no argument of the greater or less perfection. And, besides, what virtue is there in a tragedy which is not contain’d in an epic poem, where pride is humbled, virtue rewarded, and vice punish’d; and those more amply treated than the narrowness of the drama can admit? The shining quality of an epic hero, his magnanimity, his constancy, his patience, his piety, or whatever characteristical virtue his poet gives him, raises first our admiration. We are naturally prone to imitate what we admire; and frequent acts produce a habit. If the hero’s chief quality be vicious, as, for example, the choler and obstinate desire of vengeance in Achilles, yet the moral is instructive: and, besides, we are inform’d in the very proposition of the Iliads that this anger was pernicious; that it brought a thousand ills on the Grecian camp. The courage of Achilles is propos’d to imitation, not his pride and disobedience to his general, nor his brutal cruelty to his dead enemy, nor the selling his body to his father. We abhor these actions while we read them; and what we abhor we never imitate. The poet only shews them, like rocks or quicksands, to be shunn’d.
By this example the critics have concluded that it is not necessary the manners of the hero should be virtuous. They are poetically good, if they are of a piece: tho’, where a character of perfect virtue is set before us, ’tis more lovely; for there the whole hero is to be imitated. This is the æneas of our author; this is that idea of perfection in an epic poem which painters and statuaries have only in their minds, and which no hands are able to express. These are the beauties of a god in a human body. When the picture of Achilles is drawn in tragedy, he is taken with those warts, and moles, and hard features, by those who represent him on the stage, or he is no more Achilles; for his creator, Homer, has so describ’d him. Yet even thus he appears a perfect hero, tho’ an imperfect character of virtue. Horace paints him after Homer, and delivers him to be copied on the stage with all those imperfections. Therefore, they are either not faults in a heroic poem, or faults common to the drama. After all, on the whole merits of the cause, it must be acknowledg’d that the epic poem is more for the manners, and tragedy for the passions. The passions, as I have said, are violent; and acute distempers require medicines of a strong and speedy operation. Ill habits of the mind are like chronical diseases, to be corrected by degrees, and cur’d by alteratives; wherein, tho’ purges are sometimes necessary, yet diet, good air, and moderate exercise have the greatest part. The matter being thus stated, it will appear that both sorts of poetry are of use for their proper ends. The stage is more active; the epic poem works at greater leisure, yet is active too, when need requires; for dialogue is imitated by the drama from the more active parts of it. One puts off a fit, like the quinquina, and relieves us only for a time; the other roots out the distemper, and gives a healthful habit. The sun enlightens and cheers us, dispels fogs, and warms the ground with his daily beams; but the corn is sow’d, increases, is ripen’d, and is reap’d for use in process of time, and in its proper season. I proceed from the greatness of the action to the dignity of the actors; I mean to the persons employ’d in both poems. There likewise tragedy will be seen to borrow from the epopee; and that which borrows is always of less dignity, because it has not of its own. A subject, ’tis true, may lend to his sovereign; but the act of borrowing makes the king inferior, because he wants, and the subject supplies. And suppose the persons of the drama wholly fabulous, or of the poet’s invention, yet heroic poetry gave him the examples of that invention, because it was first, and Homer the common father of the stage. I know not of any one advantage which tragedy can boast above heroic poetry, but that it is represented to the view, as well as read, and instructs in the closet, as well as on the theater. This is an uncontended excellence, and a chief branch of its prerogative; yet I may be allow’d to say, without partiality, that herein the actors share the poet’s praise. Your Lordship knows some modern tragedies which are beautiful on the stage, and yet I am confident you would not read them. Tryphon the stationer complains they are seldom ask’d for in his shop. The poet who flourish’d in the scene is damn’d in the ruelle; nay more, he is not esteem’d a good poet by those who see and hear his extravagances with delight. They are a sort of stately fustian, and lofty childishness. Nothing but nature can give a sincere pleasure; where that is not imitated, ’tis grotesque painting; the fine woman ends in a fish’s tail.
I might also add that many things which not only please, but are real beauties in the reading, would appear absurd upon the stage; and those not only the speciosa miracula, as Horace calls them, of transformations, of Scylla, Antiphates, and the Læstrygons, which cannot be represented even in operas; but the prowess of Achilles or æneas would appear ridiculous in our dwarf heroes of the theater. We can believe they routed armies, in Homer or in Virgil; but ne Hercules contra duos in the drama. I forbear to instance in many things which the stage cannot, or ought not to represent; for I have said already more than I intended on this subject, and should fear it might be turn’d against me, that I plead for the preeminence of epic poetry because I have taken some pains in translating Virgil, if this were the first time that I had deliver’d my opinion in this dispute. But I have more than once already maintain’d the rights of my two masters against their rivals of the scene, even while I wrote tragedies myself, and had no thoughts of this present undertaking. I submit my opinion to your judgment, who are better qualified than any man I know to decide this controversy. You come, my Lord, instructed in the cause, and needed not that I should open it. Your Essay of Poetry, which was publish’d without a name, and of which I was not honor’d with the confidence, I read over and over with much delight, and as much instruction, and, without flattering you, or making myself more moral than I am, not without some envy. I was loth to be inform’d how an epic poem should be written, or how a tragedy should be contriv’d and manag’d, in better verse, and with more judgment, than I could teach others. A native of Parnassus, and bred up in the studies of its fundamental laws, may receive new lights from his contemporaries; but ’tis a grudging kind of praise which he gives his benefactors. He is more oblig’d than he is willing to acknowledge; there is a tincture of malice in his commendations; for where I own I am taught, I confess my want of knowledge. A judge upon the bench may, out of good nature, or at least interest, encourage the pleadings of a puny counselor; but he does not willingly commend his brother sergeant at the bar, especially when he controls his law, and exposes that ignorance which is made sacred by his place. I gave the unknown author his due commendation, I must confess; but who can answer for me and for the rest of the poets who heard me read the poem, whether we should not have been better pleas’d to have seen our own names at the bottom of the title-page? Perhaps we commended it the more, that we might seem to be above the censure. We are naturally displeas’d with an unknown critic, as the ladies are with the lampooner, because we are bitten in the dark, and know not where to fasten our revenge. But great excellencies will work their way thro’ all sorts of opposition. I applauded rather out of decency than affection; and was ambitious, as some yet can witness, to be acquainted with a man with whom I had the honor to converse, and that almost daily, for so many years together. Heaven knows if I have heartily forgiven you this deceit. You extorted a praise which I should willingly have given, had I known you. Nothing had been more easy than to commend a patron of a long standing. The world would join with me, if the encomiums were just; and, if unjust, would excuse a grateful flatterer. But to come anonymous upon me, and force me to commend you against my interest, was not altogether so fair, give me leave to say, as it was politic; for by concealing your quality, you might clearly understand how your work succeeded, and that the general approbation was given to your merit, not your titles. Thus, like Apelles, you stood unseen behind your own Venus, and receiv’d the praises of the passing multitude; the work was commended, not the author; and I doubt not this was one of the most pleasing adventures of your life.
I have detain’d your Lordship longer than I intended in this dispute of preference betwixt the epic poem and the drama, and yet have not formally answer’d any of the arguments which are brought by Aristotle on the other side, and set in the fairest light by Dacier. But I suppose, without looking on the book, I may have touch’d on some of the objections; for, in this address to your Lordship, I design not a treatise of heroic poetry, but write in a loose epistolary way, somewhat tending to that subject, after the example of Horace, in his First Epistle of the Second Book, to Augustus Cæsar, and of that to the Pisos, which we call his Art of Poetry; in both of which he observes no method that I can trace, whatever Scaliger the Father or Heinsius may have seen or rather think they had seen. I have taken up, laid down, and resum’d as often as I pleas’d, the same subject; and this loose proceeding I shall
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