London he
recognises
to be
.
.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v09
255 (#279) ############################################
CHAPTER X
WRITERS OF BURLESQUE AND TRANSLATORS
As the seventeenth century drew to its close, there came into
being a strange underworld of letters, an inferno inhabited by
lettered vagabonds, who matched, in scholarship and scurrility,
the heroes of Petronius. Beggar students, tavern keepers, idlers
from the inns of court, adventurers who had trailed a pike in
Holland, flocked thither with spruce young squires who 'knew
the true manage of the hat,' and loungers fresh from the universities.
Thus, in the coffeehouses, there grew up a new public, for whose
amusement a new literature was invented. The old days of dignity
and leisure were passed. The wits of the town wrote, not to please
themselves, but to flatter the taste of their patrons, and many of
them succeeded so well as to echo in prose or verse the precise
accent of the tavern. A familiarity of speech and thought dis-
tinguished them all. They were ribald, they were agile, they were
fearless. They insolently attacked their great contemporaries.
They had, indeed, as little respect for high personages in life or
letters as for the English tongue, which they maltreated with light-
hearted ribaldry. The slang which they used—and they were all
masters in this kind—was not the curious slang of metaphor, such
as is enshrined in the pages of Cotgrave's Dictionary; rather, it
was composed of the catchwords which seemed worth a smile when
they were heard in the coffeehouse, but which instantly lost their
savour when they were put in print, and which today defy the
researches of the archaeologist. As they aimed, one and all, at
the same mark-popularity—they exhibit in their works no subtle
differences. The vanity of individual expression was not for them.
They admitted that the booksellers, who paid the piper, had
a perfect right to call the tune, and they sang and danced in loyal
obedience to the fashion of the moment. They wrote the slippered
doggerel, the easy prose, the flippant plays, that were asked of
them, and their names might be transposed on many title-pages
without any violation of justice or probability.
a
## p. 256 (#280) ############################################
256 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
In spirit and ambition, they were true cockneys. They readily
shook off the influences and associations of their childhood. Though
Tom Brown went to Christ Church from Shifnal, though Ned Ward
was a loyal son of Oxfordshire, though Peter Motteux first saw the
light at Rouen, London was their paradise. They saw through her
eyes, they spoke with her tongue. Most intimately at home in
Will's or Ned Ward's, they dragged their muse, as they would
still have called her, down to the level of sawdust and spilled wine.
Before all things, and at all times, they were anti-heroic. Their
jests never sparkled more brightly than when they were aimed at
authority. No poets, living or dead, were sacred in their careless
eyes. It seemed to them a legitimate enterprise to ridicule Vergil,
or to trick Homer out in the motley garments of the age. Aeneas
and Ulysses, esteemed heroes by many generations of men, were
for them no better than those who frequented Grub street or took
their pleasure in the Mall. And they found in travesty or burlesque
an admirable field for the exercise of their untidy talent.
In burlesque, Scarron was their openly acknowledged master.
They did not make any attempt to belittle the debt which they owed
to Le Virgile Travesti. They announced their obligation not merely
in their style, but in their titles, and, if this antic form of poetry
took some years in crossing the Channel, it flourished with amazing
energy after its passage. The success of Scarron himself is a
curiosity of literary history. The form was no new thing, when
Scarron made it his own. The reverse process, the exaltation of
paltry subjects by august treatment, such as was afterwards em-
ployed by John Philips in his Splendid Shilling, was not unknown
to the ancients. The trick of putting the gods and heroes of Greece
and Rome into dressing-gowns had been practised in Spain and
Italy before Scarron published, in 1648, the first book of his famous
Virgile. But, for France, and, so, for England, Scarron was a real
inventor. The artifice seemed simple enough when it was dis-
covered. It depended for its triumph upon nothing else than an
obvious contrast. To represent whatever had seemed sacred to
the tradition of the race as trivial and ludicrous was not a difficult
enterprise, while the anachronism which persuaded Vergil to speak
of oil-paintings and to quote Corneille was assured of a laugh.
The example of Scarron was quickly followed. Furetière, Dufresnoy,
d'Assoucy bastened to prove themselves possessed of this new
humour. Ovid, curled and barbered, was sent to pay his addresses
to the ladies of the court with M. de Boufflers. Not even Lucan
As to John Philips, cf. ante, p. 182.
## p. 257 (#281) ############################################
Scarron and his Imitators
257
or Juvenal escaped the outrage of parody. And the style of the
burlesques matched the irreverence of their thought. It was
familiar to baseness ; it flowed with the ease and swiftness of
a turbid stream. In brief, as Boileau said, Parnassus spoke the
language of the market, and Apollo, travestied, became a Tabarin.
The enthusiasm which Scarron's experiment aroused made an
easy conquest of courtier and scholar alike. From the capital,
it spread to the provinces, and, though none of his imitators is
worth remembrance, Scarron deserves his meed of praise. He did
an ill thing supremely well. In facility and suppleness, his Virgile
has never been surpassed. His humour, such as it is, is tireless
and inexhaustible. Moreover, if he be happy in his raillery, his
work, as French admirers have said, is not without some value as
a piece of criticism. He touches with a light hand the weakness of
the lachrymose hero. He turns the light of the prevailing ‘good
sense' upon Vergil's many simplicities, for which few will thank
him; and, even in the very act of burlesque, he pays his victim
the compliment of a scrupulously close adherence to his text.
The fashion was already overpast in France, when Charles
Cotton made his first experiment in English burlesque. In 1664,
was published under the title Scarronides, or Virgil Travestie,
a mock-poem on the first book of the Aeneid. To this, Cotton
added the fourth book six years later, and, presently, put some of
Lucian's dialogues into ‘English fustian,' with the title Burlesque
upon Burlesque: or the Scoffer Scoff"d. Of these experiments in
the new craft, no more can be said than that they were better than
the base imitations which speedily followed. Cotton, at any rate,
was a man of letters, with a sense of style and variety, and if
he stooped to play the tune which the tavern-haunters demanded,
he played it with some skill and energy. He uses the artifices
which they all use. He mixes ancient and modern inextricably.
He measures the distance which Aeneas rowed by a familiar
standard, "twixt Parson's Dock and Billingsgate. ' As to Dido's
temple, 'I cannot liken any to it,' says he, 'unless 't be Pancras, if
you know it. ' The humour is forced and barren; but those French
critics are in the wrong, who declare that Cotton was content
merely to translate Scarron. If his theory of burlesque was
Scarron's, the application of it was all his own.
Cotton's success did not long remain unchallenged. Within a
year, one Monsey of Pembroke hall, Cambridge, gave to the world
his own Scarronides, a mock-poem, being the second and seventh
books of Vergil's Aeneid, which he dedicated, by what, no doubt,
17
E. L. IX.
CH. X.
## p. 258 (#282) ############################################
258 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
he thought a great stroke of humour, to ‘Lady Ann Dido, Countess
of Carthage. It is a work without character, scrupulously fashioned
according to the pattern of the hour; and a reference to James
Hind proves that this author also has learned the lesson of
anachronism. Then John Phillips, a true habitant of Grub street,
paraphrased, in bis Maronides, the fifth and sixth books of the
Aeneid. In a preface, he attempts a timid defence of his temerity.
'I leave the world to determine,' says he, 'whether it be not reason
that he that has caused us so often to cry when we were Boys,
ought not to make us laugh as much now we are men. ' As Phillips
travestied him, Vergil does not make us laugh, and the justification
fails. The experiment, in truth, differed little from the others,
save that its author, for the moment a zealous royalist, put the
puritans in hell. There they all lie, Haselrigge and Pym, Hugh
Peters, the chief of English rogues, Bradshaw,
in a Squarr
Of burning Canvas, lin'd with Tarr,
and Cromwell himself,
that Devil of a Devil,
Whose Noddle was the Mint of Evil.
The licence which John Phillips allowed himself in his treatment
of Vergil was vastly increased by the author of The Irish Hudibras,
or Fingallian Prince, who boldly adapted the sixth book of the
Aeneid to his own time, and turned it to a high encomium of
William III, 'this present Monarch, England's timely Redeemer,
whom Heaven long preserve. '
Nor was Vergil the only one of the poets attacked in England
with wanton insolence. In 1664, James Scudamore's Homer à
la Mode, A Mock Poem upon the first and second Books of Homer's
Iliads, came upon the town. The version is free from the brutality
which disgraced many of its rivals, and gives promise of better
things. The promise remained unfulfilled, for the author, who was
bred at Christ Church, had but just taken his degree when he was
drowned in the Wye, 'to the great reluctancy of all those who were
acquainted with his pregnant parts. The author of Homerides: or
Homer's First Book Moderniz'd, who, some fifty years later, essayed
Scudamore's task over again, need not awaken our curiosity. He
showed a spark of self-knowledge when he called himself Sir Iliad
Doggerell, and a complete ignorance of literary fitness, when he
regretted that Pope did not give Homer 'the English air as well
as tongue. ' Ovid, better suited to the methods of burlesque, did
but tempt the makers of travesties to a wilder extravagance.
## p. 259 (#283) ############################################
Hudibras and Hudibrastic Verse
259
'Naso Scarronomimus,' the writer of Ovidius Exulans, can scarcely
persuade the sorry tit of his humour to move for all his thwackings,
and even Alexander Radcliffe, a captain, an inns-of-court-man and
a poet, who, in The Ramble, An Anti-Heroic Poem, gave proof of
a rough vigour and freshness, fails to arouse a laugh by his Ovid
Travestie. To send Ulysses to Scotland as a volunteer, for the
suppression of rebellion, and to leave him loitering at an inn on the
homeward road, is an artifice which no literary fashion can justify.
In truth, the taste of the dying seventeenth century was not our
taste, and we can only wonder at the indiscretion of our ancestors.
Meanwhile, Samuel Butler had discovered in Hudibras the real
purpose of burlesque? If Scarron had done nothing else than to
inspire, at a distance, this work of genius, we should still owe him
a debt of gratitude. It was not for Butler to ridicule the ancient
mythologies; he saw before his eyes the follies and pretensions
of his own time and country awaiting castigation. And so, he
turned the travesty magnificently to the uses of satire. He
employed the artifices of contrast and anachronism beloved by
the imitators of Scarron to exhibit in the clear light of absurdity
the hypocrisy and meanness of presbyterians. He, too, expressed
the high in terms of the low.
he low. His work is the masterpiece
of its kind, unique and incomparable. It is idle to praise its
technical perfection. The resource and ingenuity of the author's
rimes, the tireless exuberance of his wit, his easy movement, his
bold extravagance are qualities unmatched elsewhere in literature.
Nor does his wisdom lag behind his wit. He concentrates into
aphorisms the fruit of his keen observation with so happy a skill
that a great part of his work has passed into the possession of all
Englishmen. Thousands quote him with assurance who have
never turned the pages of Hudibras, who would care not a fig
for his fable or his satire, even if they understood them. And,
though he won instant acceptance, he defied imitation. When he
had fashioned his masterpiece, he broke the mould; and, for that
very reason, perhaps, he became the prey of the parodists.
There is nothing that looks so easy as perfection, and the
coffeehouse poets, easily beguiled, thought it no shame to express
themselves and their politics in Hudibrastic verse. If they could
not rival the master, they could at least pretend to mimicry in
halting octosyllables. The boldest of them all was Ned Ward, who
combined the crafts of publican and poet. Born in Oxfordshire in
1667, he was, says his biographer, ‘of low extraction and little
1 Cf. ante, vol. VIII, chap. Ir.
17--2
## p. 260 (#284) ############################################
260 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
education. Whatever his extraction may have been, he cleverly
picked up his knowledge of letters as he went along. He did not
scruple to call one of his books Vulgus Britannicus, and he be-
lieved in the singularity of 'an Egyptian Magi. ' In his youth, he
had travelled in the West Indies, a fact commemorated by Pope,
'or shipp'd with Ward to Ape and Monkey Lands. ' But he early
settled to the professions which suited him best. His first experi-
ment in inn-keeping was made in Moorfields. He presently moved
to Fulwood rents, where he opened a punch-shop and tavern, “but in
a genteel way,' says Giles Jacob, “and with his wit, humour, and good
liquor, has afforded his guests pleasurable entertainment. ' Whatever
he did was, doubtless, done in a 'genteel way,' and the guests who
found pleasure in his entertainment were, one and all, sound tories
and high churchmen. A big, burly man, he showed a practical faith
in his own ale and his own punch, and, while he gossiped at the
fireside with his clients, never let a day pass without a verse :
So Ned, divided, writes and brews,
To try if darling gain accrues
More from his Mash-Tub than his Muse.
His mash-tub had the better of it. Not only did it fill his pocket;
it did not put him into the pillory. Twice, for his muse's sake, he
faced the angry mob at the Royal Exchange and at Charing Cross.
‘As thick as eggs at Ward in pillory,' says Pope; but his humour
carried him safely through the vicissitudes of politics, and he died
at his tavern, a prosperous potman and scurrile poet, in 1731.
He was a journalist in verse. His Hudibras Redivivus is a
gazette in rime, which was inspired by the moment, and was
published in parts. The ingenious Ward begins his preface with
an apology. "Tho' I have made bold,' he says, 'to borrow a Title
from one of the best poems that ever was published in the English
Tongue-yet I would not have the world expect me such a wizard
as to conjure up the spirit of the inimitable Butler. He need not
have been in doubt. He was no wizard, but a pedestrian jogtrot
writer of doggerel, whom criticism could not affright nor opposition
baulk. Yet his Hudibras is a wonderful achievement. Its facile
fluent ease marks the versifier who could write two hundred lines
standing on one foot. His language is common enough. Neither
Brown nor Motteux surpasses him in knowledge of the slang which
was heard in the tavern or at the street corner. Had he lived to-
day, he might have been an ornament of the sporting press. Living
when he did, he supported the cause of church and state in such
couplets as jingled in the brain, and tripped readily to the tongue.
## p. 261 (#285) ############################################
Ned Ward
261
For popular government he had a hearty contempt :
a
For he that will oblige the throng,
Must ne'er hold one opinion long,
But turn his doctrine and his creed,
As often as the Cause has need.
Among those upon whom he poured out his contempt are 'prophet
Dan' with 'the scoundrel Freedom of his Pen,' all whigs and all
dissenters. He believed, like an eminent statesman, that the
one object of the whigs was to make themselves ‘masters for life'
of England and all that it contained :
A man of sense, with half an Eye,
(Says he) may easily descry,
Thro' all their conscientious Cant,
What in reality they want;
Which is, believe me, in a word,
All that the Kingdom can afford.
Compromise he hated, and impartiality. He professed a deep
distrust of moderation, which was no better in his eye than a
‘modish cant;' with which fools disguise 'their spite, their venom,
and their lies. ' The book is tedious in its facility. It weighs upon
the reader's spirit with the heaviness of all dead controversies.
Even where he protests against the debtors' prison, where
men for poverty alone
Must wear these doublets made of stone,
he wins your reluctant approval. He is at his best when he describes
the taverns and shops of the town, their picturesque signs, and
the strange characters who throng the streets, the campaign
wenches and the ale-wives, the lame mumpers and the disabled
seamen. Here, he spoke with an authority which none of his
colleagues in Grub street could rival. If he had but a casual
acquaintance with the English tongue, he knew London and its
slang like the tavern keeper that he was. Whatever were his
shortcomings, his industry was prodigious. Vulgus Britannicus
rivalled his Hudibras in dulness and prolixity. The Republican
Procession, in which, among others, he ridicules Marlborough,
'a great Pretender to the trick of State,' is merry only on the
title-page. He poured forth broadsides, satires, prose and verse
with an equal hand. Impartially, he sang the praises of a Derby-
Ale-House and the New Tunbridge Wells at Islington. The love
of good living and high principles breathes in all that he wrote.
The pity is that a sound inspiration found so poor and graceless
an expression. Now and then, he could sing a song in the true
## p. 262 (#286) ############################################
262 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
Rabelaisian strain, as in his Wine and Wisdom: or the Tipling
Philosophers:
Wise Thales the Father of all
The Greek Philosophicall Crew,
Ere he gaz'd at the Heavens, would call
For a chirruping Bottle or two.
In fifty stanzas, he thus extolled what was, assuredly, the more
profitable of his two trades, and, for the moment, endowed his
doggerel with a rollicking sincerity.
It is, as has been said, by his sketches of London and its streets
that Ned Ward saves his Hudibrastic experiments from dulness,
and there, in the sights and sounds about him, he found the
material best suited to his talent. Whatever disloyalty the hacks
of Grub street may have shown to the English language, they were
constant in their devotion to the London, which was their world.
Ned Ward, in his London Spy, and Tom Brown, in his Amusements
Serious and Comical, have bequeathed to us a picture of the
town whose merit is wholly independent of literature. They are
the true descendants of Dekker and Nashe, from whom they are
separated by less than a century of time. Between them are many
centuries of style and thought. The London which Dekker and
Nashe describe is enwrapped in an atmosphere of dark mystery and
impenetrable gloom. They see the seven deadly sins ever before
them, and deplore the iniquity of their city with the solemn
eloquence of prophets. Satire is their lightest weapon. They
condemn even where they admire. It is in no spirit of flippancy
that Dekker denounces the cruelty of this ‘now once-againe New-
reared-Troy. ' Nashe's voice is the voice of a sincerely repentant
sinner. 'London,' he cries, 'lay off thy gorgeous attire and cast
downe thy selfe before God in contrition and prayer, least hee cast
thee downe in his indignation into hell-fire. '
Ned Ward and Tom Brown could not look upon the life about
them with the grave eyes of their predecessors. It was not for
them to be censorious or to hope for better things. If only the
city of their habitation were a place of pleasant resort, they cared
not for its morals. And they wrote of it in the easy style of
the trained reporter. Their temperament in no sense diminishes
the value of their sketch. They have shown us a London infinitely
more supple, infinitely commoner and, at the same time, far closer
to our own than the London of Dekker and Nashe. The cockney
with his nimbler wit and paltrier ideals had intervened, and fixed for
all time certain lineaments of the city. No longer is it dominated
## p. 263 (#287) ############################################
The London Spy.
Tom Brown 263
2
a
>
by gallant or beau or gull. Those who throng the taverns of the
time are either impostors, such as Radcliffe paints in The Ramble,
or mere citizens meanly ambitious of cutting a dash. In brief, it
seems perfectly consonant with the prevailing manners that Ned
Ward should keep an ale-house, or that Motteux, the translator of
Rabelais, should desert literature for the selling of China goods.
The London Spy is, undoubtedly, Ward's masterpiece. After
two centuries, it still keeps the fresh stamp of truth. Its design,
if design it may be called, is of the simplest. A citizen, who,
'after a tedious confinement in a country Hutt,' breaking loose from
'the scholar's gaol, his study,' revisits London. There he meets an old
schoolfellow, who shows him the sights, and especially the taverns,
of the town. It is a Gulls Horn-book of another age, written with
a plain simplicity, and with scarce a touch of satire. The two friends
range from Billingsgate, where they observe the 'oars' and ‘scullers,'
who tout by the waterside, and note 'the stink of sprats and the
unteneable clamours of the wrangling society,' to Hummun’sTurkish
bath. They wander from the Quaker's tavern in Fish lane to
that hideous inferno the Poultry compter, from the Wits' coffee-
house, where the cockney sketches for his friend a character of the
modern poets, to Bartholomew Fair, now stripped of its glory. By
the way, they encounter many strange personages, such as the
highwayman, who has good friends in Newgate,' and is 'well
acquainted with the ostlers about Bishopsgate and Smithfield, and
gains from them intelligence of what booties go out that are
worth attempting. The book is written with a directness and
simplicity which command belief, and ends, as in duty bound,
with a description of the death and funeral of Dryden, who was
the master of them all, and who impressed his laws upon his liege
subjects, like the dictator that he was.
Tom Brown followed hard upon the heels of Ned Ward, and,
in his Amusements Serious and Comical Calculated for the
Meridian of London, pictured the London that he saw, with less
truth than Ward, and greater wit.
London he recognises to be
.
a world by itself, and he imagines 'what an Indian would think
of such a motley herd of people, thus anticipating Macaulay’s
imagined New Zealander. He sketches the city, and those whom
he and his Indian encounter-the alderman, the usurer, the broker
and the rest—with a good-humoured enthusiasm. For him, the
playhouse is ‘an enchanted island. When they walk in the Mall,
'
he persuades his Indian to exclaim 'I never beheld in my life so
great a flight of birds. ' Much of the book is the comedy of the
## p. 264 (#288) ############################################
264 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
age translated into a light-fingered prose. Tom Brown finds it as
bard as Ned Ward finds it to keep away from the taverns and
gaming-houses, and, in his exposure of the many rascals who lay in
waiting for the unwary traveller, he sets a fashion speedily followed
in The Cheats of London and a vast library of similar chapbooks.
He was, in truth, well fitted by character and training to do the
work of Grub street. Educated at Christ Church, he won an
instant fame by a pleasant trick of writing Latin verse, and it is
said that many pieces were extant of his composition, bearing
other names. Even in his youth, his cynic temper preferred money to
fame, and no sooner had he left the university for London than he
was ready to hire himself out to the highest bidder. Nothing came
amiss to his facile brain. To show his touch with the classics, he
translated Persius and mimicked Horace. The example of Rabelais
was ever before him, and he followed John Phillips in imitating the
prognostications of Pantagruel. His epigrams, in Latin or English,
are rather coarse than witty. The best of his work is journalism,
illuminated always by the light of scholarship. There is no topic
so bare that he will not embroider it with tags from the classics.
His favourite artifice was to indite letters from the dead to the
living, an artifice which gave him the chance to ridicule ‘Tom'
D'Urfey, ‘Joe' Harris the player, and even the great Dryden himself.
The death of ‘tbe gallant Dundee' inspired him to imitate Cowley's
pindarics, though, as he said himself, he was ill acquainted with
that kind of writing. He suffered at once from excessive praise
and ill-deserved blame. “Without partiality, we may say,' wrote
Sam Briscoe, his bookseller, ‘for satyrical Prose or Verse, Mr Brown
was not inferior to Petronius, Martial, or any other of the witty
ancients. ' These were his models, truly; but his works testify how
far he fell short of their performance. On the other hand, a grave
injustice was done to him, as it has been to many another, by the
thoughtless, who fathered upon him ‘all the pamphlets good and bad,
Lampoons, Trips, London Spies, and the like insignificant Trifles. '
His lively humour won him the name of 'Tom Brown the facetious'
and the epithet, not wholly complimentary, still clings to him.
The enemy, who said of him that he had less the Spirit of a Gentle-
man than the rest, and more of a Scholar,' spiced his malice with
the truth. What, indeed, had a gentleman to make in Grub
street? However, with all his faults, Tom Brown was a real man of
letters, who, had he not been 'too lazy in his temper to write much
would have builded himself a better monument. ' In character, he
was careless and independent. He did his best to live by his pen,
## p. 265 (#289) ############################################
The New Art of Translation 265
and, when his pen failed him, he turned pedagogue. At no time
would he rely upon the caprices of a patron. 'I am one of the first
of the Suburban class,' he boasted, 'that has ventur'd out without
making an application to a nobleman's porter, and tiring him out
with showing him his master's name. ' For the rest, he wrote the
famous epigram upon Dr Fell, and died, at last, repentant and
absolved. He confessed on his death-bed that he had 'complied
too much with the Libertinism of the time,' and extorted a promise
from his bookseller, who speedily went back upon his word, to
expunge 'all prophane, undecent passages' from his works, when
he came to reprint them.
The career of Tom Brown is characteristic of Grub street and
of his age. From one-incomparably the best-you may learn all.
But, by a curious irony, neither poverty nor the bottle impaired
the tireless industry of the hacks. Though the standard of style
which they set up for themselves was not a high one, they never
feared to put their talent to the test. They fought for causes
good or evil with a kind of ferocity. None of them disdained the
weapons of the wits. We have seen how Ned Ward expressed his
opinions and his prejudices in Hudibrastic verse. The gathered
pamphlets of Roger L'Estrange, written, for the most part, in
defence of himself and the high church party, would fill a shelf.
John Phillips, whom Milton trained for wiser purposes, disgraced
himself for ever by selling a hireling pen to Titus Oates. If there
is nothing so transient as dead controversy, it must yet be admitted
that these writers were artists in their own style. Their skill in
invective, their assumption of passionate conviction, their out-
spoken contempt for the enemy of the moment, cannot but claim
our admiration. But in nothing did they display their marvellous
energy so clearly as in the task of translation. Here, again, they
recall the enterprise of the Elizabethans. They do not challenge
comparison with their predecessors. They recognised that each
age must look at the classics through its own eyes. They knew,
also, that the France and Spain of their time had provided a
treasure-house of masterpieces, which their skill and knowledge
could unlock. And, when they had taken these masterpieces from
their treasure-house, they did not scruple to trick them out in
the familiar, parti-coloured style of their own Grub street. It
seems, indeed, as though the fashion of translation changed as
rapidly as the fashion of hats and coats. Though the Plutarch
of North and Holland, the Montaigne of Florio, the Seneca of
Lodge were less than a century old, they appeared fantastic, if not
## p. 266 (#290) ############################################
266 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
unintelligible, to the contemporaries of Dryden. The 'several
hands,' the 'persons of quality,' who presumed to do again the tasks
valiantly performed by their grandsires, aimed less at a splendour
of effect than at a uniform neatness. The one licence they permitted
themselves, as we shall see, was an incorrigible licence of slang.
They thought that their habit of speech was perfectly suited to the
heroes and gods of antiquity. They clipped their words in trans-
lating the classics, as they clipped them in an insolent pamphlet.
They possessed not the smallest sense of propriety, and believed
that there was no writer, ancient or modern, whose meaning could
not be adequately expressed in their vernacular. Thus, it mattered
not who gazed in their mirror; it gave back always the same
reflection. Their theory of translation was, of course, the theory
of Dryden, who marshalled them for the fray. "The Qualification
of a Translator worth reading,' said he, ‘must be a Mastery of the
Language he translates out of, and that he translates into; but if a
deficiencie be allowed in either, it is in the Original. ' And it was
in the original, were it Latin or Greek, that many of them were
deficient. Like the Elizabethans, they, too, sought what help they
could find in French versions of their author. Nor was it for them
to disobey Dryden's second injunction. ‘A Translator,' wrote the
master, 'that would write with any force or spirit of an Original,
must never dwell on the words of an author. ' So lightly did they
dwell upon their authors' words, that, in many specimens, it is not
easy to distinguish between translation and burlesque.
By the preferences of these writers we come to know the taste of
the booksellers and of the town. They were not animated by the spirit
of adventure or by the ambition of instructing kings and nobles in
high policy, which moved the Elizabethans. Their sole object was to
profit themselves by pleasing the public. Petronius, to whom they
owed a special allegiance, was easily taught to speak their dialect.
The first version we owe to William Burnaby and another hand. In
the second, Tom Brown, captain Ayloffe and others are said to have
given their aid, though it is not clear what they contributed, and
a comparison of the two by no means justifies the bookseller's claim
that the second is ‘wholly new. ' Though much of Petronius is lost
in the process of translation, the work is done with a sympathy and
an energy which we expect from the authentic descendants of
Ascyltus and Eumolpus. Here is no dwelling on the words of the
author. The book may be read from beginning to end, as though it
were an independent and original romance. The version of Lucian
by several eminent bands displays precisely the same qualities.
## p. 267 (#291) ############################################
John Phillips
267
Deprived of its atmosphere, it wears the aspect of an English
work. The ‘eminent hands’—
Tom Brown, John Phillips, Walter
Moyle and the rest—handled the English tongue with ease and
familiarity, and, if they owed more to the French of d’Ablancourt
than to the Greek of Lucian, they have had no difficulty in trans-
posing their author into the guise of their own place and time. The
work, done under Dryden's eye, was journey-work, if you will, and
defaced by a tone of commonness. But it has a character which
removes it by many leagues from the crib, and Dryden, no doubt,
speaks truth when he places the translators among the finer spirits
of the age. ” Walter Moyle and Sir Henry Sheeres deserve whatever
praise he could give them, but let it not be forgotten that it is
the facetious Tom Brown, whom Dryden could not mention with
honour, that bore the brunt of the work.
John Phillips, whose travesties have already been mentioned,
was eminent among the translators of the time. He took his share
in Englishing Lucian and Plutarch, and the folios to which he put
his name were neither few nor slight. He was bred in classical
learning by his uncle John Milton, whose influence he early
shook off. For many years, he seems to have gained his liveli-
hood by his pen, and was as versatile as he was industrious.
What Aubrey calls his ‘jiggish phancy' inspired him to the
making of almanacks, the inditing of satires and to the conduct
of political controversy. A loyal disciple of Rabelais, he composed
a sermon with a passage from Gargantua for his text, and embraced
the doctrine of Pantagruel with a constant heart. His policy shifted
with the convenience of the hour. He approached Cromwell cap
in hand when it suited him, and afterwards, in a travesty, set the
Protector in hell. He shouted for the king at the restoration, and
hailed the infamous Oates as the saviour of his country. He
naturally incurred the hatred of Anthony à Wood, both for his
own sake and on account of Milton, that villainous leading
incendiary. But, whatever blots there may have been upon his
honour, he was tireless in industry. He died, so to say, with
a pen in his hand. At seventy years of age, he is described by
Dunton as a gentleman of good learning, and well born; and will
write you a design off in a very little time, if the gout or claret
does not stop him. ' For many years, he edited a grave periodical,
The Present State of Europe, and, in the compass and extent of
bis translations, he was a near rival to Philemon Holland. To
provide two vast folios in a year is a triumph of persistence, if
no other merit be claimed for it.
## p. 268 (#292) ############################################
268 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
-
And John Phillips's versions are always workmanlike. La Cal-
prenède's Pharamond was once, no doubt, 'a fam'd romance,'
though it is no more likely to find readers today than Madeleine de
Scudery's Almahide, or The Captive Queen; and Phillips's task, in
Englishing both, was faithfully performed. His chief lack is a lack of
distinction. There is not a page that most of the other hacks might
not have written with equal ease. For ease is its chief characteristic
- ease of phrase, ease of movement. With the same nonchalance,
he Englished Tavernier's Voyages in the East, Ludolphus’s History
of Aethiopia, Grelot’s Voyage to Constantinople and many
another forgotten work of travel or fiction. Besides these monu-
ments of energy, a version of Scarron's Typhon seems but
the solace of a summer's afternoon. None of these, as we have
said, bears the sole and individual mark of Phillips's talent.
There is one book-his translation of Don Quixote—which, for
good or evil, is all his own. Not even Ned Ward, whose inappro-
priate courage persuaded him to turn the masterpiece of Cervantes
into Hudibrastic verse, committed so great an outrage on a noble
original as did John Phillips when he made The History of the most
Renowned Don Quixote English 'according to the humour of our
Modern Language. It is difficult to describe this rash experiment.
'
Imagine Hamlet turned into the lingo of the music hall, and fitted
with occasional songs and dances, and you will have a faint
impression of Phillips's impropriety. Little as he respected his
author, he respected still less the time and place of his incom-
parable romance. He has reduced to the level of his own Grub
street the style and manner of Cervantes. His work is less a
translation than a travesty. He has treated Don Quixote as
Scarron treated the Aeneid. He has composed a debased fantasia
of his own upon a wellknown and beautiful theme. In other
words, he has employed an imagery as vulgar as the slang of the
tavern can make it. Rosinante, in his eyes, is a 'Dover post-horse,'
the inn keeper is 'as true a thief as ever sung psalm at Tyburn. '
The fish which Don Quixote has for his supper is ‘so ill-dress’d
as if it had been cook'd in Ram Alley or White-Fryers. ' Such
humour as anachronism will afford may be found on every page,
and, as though it were not enough to create a confusion of time,
Phillips never ceases to confound the Spain of the age of Cervantes
with the England of his own. The sail of the windmill throws the
knight sprawling, says he, 'at the distance of more yards than
would have measured Long Megg of Lincoln a gown and petticoat. '
He likens the lovers to 'young citizens and their wives in an Epsom
## p. 269 (#293) ############################################
John Phillips's Don Quixote
269
coach'; in his version, Tolosa masquerades as Betty, “the daughter
of a Cobbler in Southwark, that kept a stall under a Chandler's
shop in Kent street'; and, by way of a crowning absurdity, the lady
tells Don Ferdinand 'to read Baxter's Saints' Everlasting Rest. '
ow, he merely hints at a false comparison, as when he says that
Cardenio held his Lucinda 'as the Lobster held the Hair upon
Salisbury Plain. ' Now, he seems to exhaust his ingenuity in a
single passage. When the inn keeper tells Don Quixote that he,
too, had been a knight errant, he boasts, in Phillips's travesty, how
he himself had pursu'd the same Chace of Honour in his youth, travelling
through all parts of the World in search of bold Adventures; to which
purpose he had left no corner unvisited of the King's Bench Rules, the
Skulking Holes of Alsatia, the Academy of the Fleet, the Colledge of New-
gate, the Parliews of Turnbull, and Pickt Hatch, the Bordellos of St Giles's,
Banstead-Downs, Newmarket-Heath: . . . not a Publick Bowling Green
where he had not exercis'd his heels; nor an Execution-crowd, nor a Hedge-
Tavern, where he had not employ'd his pauming, topping, cogging fingers.
:
This is monumental, but it is not Cervantes. And by how many
leagues is it removed from the splendid simplicity of Shelton!
Worse still, the ingenious Phillips makes Don Quixote an
occasion for setting forth his preferences and his animosities. He
packs his pages with modern instances. He drags in Hobbes and
the Protector by the heels; nor does he lose a chance of insulting
Milton, to whom he owed such scholarship as he possessed. Thus
it is that Don Diego di Miranda describes his son's attainments:
he is a great admirer of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius—but as for the modern
poets he allows very few to be worth a straw; among the rest he has a
particular Peek against Du Bartas, and Paradise Lost, which he says has
neither Rhime nor Reason.
To defend such a work as Phillips's Don Quixote is not easy.
There is a flippant irreverence in its jests and gibes which criticism
is forced to condemn. No man has a right thus licentiously to
transform a masterpiece of literature. The very readiness with
which a writer of burlesque can achieve a laugh should warn him
that the laugh is not worth achievement. Yet, when all is said that
can be said in dispraise, we cannot but acknowledge the supreme
skill with which Phillips has performed his task. His zest never
flags, his imagery never grows tired. On every page he has a
fresh, if perverse, simile. With untiring energy, he illustrates
Cervantes from the life of the taverns which he frequented. The
vigour and levity of his style are amazing; his understanding of
the original is seldom at fault, and, though it may be said that the
## p. 270 (#294) ############################################
270 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
book should never have been done, it must be added that it is done
exceedingly well. For, if it gives us a very blurred picture of
Don Quixote, it presents the clear image of the most flippant,
restless and debauched mind of an age which ill understood the
punctilio of life or letters.
Peter Motteux, a fitting companion in literature for John
Phillips, differed widely from him in blood and breeding. His
youthful steps were not encouraged by a great poet. Thrown
early upon a country whose language he did not understand, he
was compelled to make a double conquest, first of a speech
which was not his own, and then of the town in which he was an
enforced exile. Born in 1663 at Rouen, he came to England when
the edict of Nantes was revoked, and speedily found a place among
English men of letters. So swift a change of nationality is almost
without parallel in the history of literature. The author of
Gramont is no near rival, since he was but four when he was
carried to France, and a Frenchman he remained, in all save blood,
till the end. Motteux's achievement was far more wonderful.
He left France at the age of twenty-two, probably with no training
either in English or in literature, and, within a few years, he was
writing with precisely the same accent as any other haunter of the
coffeehouses. In the preface to his Rabelais, he fears that he has
'not given his Author the graces of the English language in every
place,' and protests that he has not followed the example of
Lucullus, who wrote a book in Greek and scattered some false
Greek in it, to let the world know it was not written by a Greek.
Motteux was not guilty of a similar indiscretion. What errors may
be found in his diction, he assures us, have crept in without his
intent. He need have had no fear, nor have offered his reader any
apology. Motteux had many faults. Gallicism was not among
thein. He compared himself, proudly enough, with Livius Andro-
nicus, a Greek, and Terence, a Carthaginian, who chose Latin
for their tongue, and if he could not vie with them in purity
of style, he surpassed them, doubtless, in fluency. There was
no task to which he did not turn a ready hand. He wrote
plays, after the prescribed model, and without the smallest
distinction. He furnished the plays of others with doggerel
prologues. He edited The Gentleman's Journal, for which Le
Mercure Galant of his own land served as a model, and
was not refused the assistance of the great. Congreve and Prior
both condescend to his pages, and, as it was Dryden under whose
banner he fought, so it is the influence of Dryden which governs
## p. 271 (#295) ############################################
6
Motteux and his Translation of Rabelais 271
his journal. Frenchman though he was, he differs little enough from
his neighbours in Grub street. He might sign their works or they
his without much detriment to either side. Nevertheless, he played
a part in the literary history of his time. If he won the approval
of Dryden and Steele, he was deemed worthy the rancour of Pope,
who celebrates him as a bore,
Talkers I've learned to bear, Motteux I knew,
and, in The Art of Sinking, puts him among the eels, 'obscene
authors that wrap themselves up in their own mud, but are
mighty nimble and pert.
' And then, to prove an astonishing
adaptability, Motteux turned an honest tradesman, and sold
China and Japan wares 'cheap for a quick return. ' He did not
return to the craft of letters, and, after six years of honourable
dealing, died a mysterious and shameful death.
Had it not been for his translation of Rabelais, Motteux’s
name would not have outlived this crowning scandal. His trans-
lation gives him a place in history. The work has many faults.
It is 'nimble and pert,' like its author, and Rabelais himself
was never for a moment either pert or nimble. A still worse
fault is its diffuseness, a fault of which Motteux appears to have
been wholly unconscious. His style is as far from the Latin gravity
of the original as from the humourous eloquence of Sir Thomas
Urquhart. He is able neither to represent the one nor to carry on
the tradition of the other. Between him and the knight of Cromarty
there is not merely the difference which separates the English of
Elizabeth (for Urquhart was a belated Tudor) from the English
of Dutch William, but the difference which parts an erudite and
curious Scots pedant from the trivial, boisterous frequenter of
Will's. Motteux's phrase is simple to tawdriness. He drags
Rabelais down to his own level, and in nothing does he prove
his lack of taste so clearly as in his use of slang. Now, slang, to
the translator of Rabelais, is indispensable. The romance of
Pantagruel and Panurge cannot be turned out of its own into
any other tongue save by an artist in strange words. Urquhart
was perfectly equipped for the task, because his interest in oddly
coloured speech never tired, and because, when he was himself
at a loss, he made a liberal use of Cotgrave's Dictionary. Thus
it was that his slang had ever a literary flavour; it had already
won the freedom of humane letters; the dust of the street corner
was not thick upon it. Motteux’s slang was of another kind. It
lacked literary association. The quickwitted Frenchman had
.
picked it up in the gutter or the tavern; he had caught it fresh
## p. 272 (#296) ############################################
272 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
minted from the vulgar brains of his friends; and, though it was
lively enough to gain an instant laugh, it long since lost its humour.
Motteux makes free and frank acknowledgment of the source of
his common talk, as he calls it.
'Far be it from me,' he writes, ‘for all this to value myself upon hitting
the Words of Cant, in which my drolling Author is so luxuriant, for though
such words have stood me in good stead, I scarce can forbear thinking myself
unhappy in having insensibly hoarded up so much Gibberish and Billingsgate
trash in my memory; nor could I forbear asking myself as an Italian
Cardinal said on another account. . . Where the devil didst thon make up all
these fripperies ? '
He made them up in Grub street; and, when he had contrived
them, they were ill suited to his purpose.
The only literary sources from which he gathered his 'words
of Cant' were the travesties. He was no better able than John
Phillips to escape the anachronisms of Cotton and Radcliffe.
Though he had a finer restraint than the rascal who burlesqued
Don Quixote, he could not forbear to treat the text of Rabelais
with the same kind of wantonness.
CHAPTER X
WRITERS OF BURLESQUE AND TRANSLATORS
As the seventeenth century drew to its close, there came into
being a strange underworld of letters, an inferno inhabited by
lettered vagabonds, who matched, in scholarship and scurrility,
the heroes of Petronius. Beggar students, tavern keepers, idlers
from the inns of court, adventurers who had trailed a pike in
Holland, flocked thither with spruce young squires who 'knew
the true manage of the hat,' and loungers fresh from the universities.
Thus, in the coffeehouses, there grew up a new public, for whose
amusement a new literature was invented. The old days of dignity
and leisure were passed. The wits of the town wrote, not to please
themselves, but to flatter the taste of their patrons, and many of
them succeeded so well as to echo in prose or verse the precise
accent of the tavern. A familiarity of speech and thought dis-
tinguished them all. They were ribald, they were agile, they were
fearless. They insolently attacked their great contemporaries.
They had, indeed, as little respect for high personages in life or
letters as for the English tongue, which they maltreated with light-
hearted ribaldry. The slang which they used—and they were all
masters in this kind—was not the curious slang of metaphor, such
as is enshrined in the pages of Cotgrave's Dictionary; rather, it
was composed of the catchwords which seemed worth a smile when
they were heard in the coffeehouse, but which instantly lost their
savour when they were put in print, and which today defy the
researches of the archaeologist. As they aimed, one and all, at
the same mark-popularity—they exhibit in their works no subtle
differences. The vanity of individual expression was not for them.
They admitted that the booksellers, who paid the piper, had
a perfect right to call the tune, and they sang and danced in loyal
obedience to the fashion of the moment. They wrote the slippered
doggerel, the easy prose, the flippant plays, that were asked of
them, and their names might be transposed on many title-pages
without any violation of justice or probability.
a
## p. 256 (#280) ############################################
256 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
In spirit and ambition, they were true cockneys. They readily
shook off the influences and associations of their childhood. Though
Tom Brown went to Christ Church from Shifnal, though Ned Ward
was a loyal son of Oxfordshire, though Peter Motteux first saw the
light at Rouen, London was their paradise. They saw through her
eyes, they spoke with her tongue. Most intimately at home in
Will's or Ned Ward's, they dragged their muse, as they would
still have called her, down to the level of sawdust and spilled wine.
Before all things, and at all times, they were anti-heroic. Their
jests never sparkled more brightly than when they were aimed at
authority. No poets, living or dead, were sacred in their careless
eyes. It seemed to them a legitimate enterprise to ridicule Vergil,
or to trick Homer out in the motley garments of the age. Aeneas
and Ulysses, esteemed heroes by many generations of men, were
for them no better than those who frequented Grub street or took
their pleasure in the Mall. And they found in travesty or burlesque
an admirable field for the exercise of their untidy talent.
In burlesque, Scarron was their openly acknowledged master.
They did not make any attempt to belittle the debt which they owed
to Le Virgile Travesti. They announced their obligation not merely
in their style, but in their titles, and, if this antic form of poetry
took some years in crossing the Channel, it flourished with amazing
energy after its passage. The success of Scarron himself is a
curiosity of literary history. The form was no new thing, when
Scarron made it his own. The reverse process, the exaltation of
paltry subjects by august treatment, such as was afterwards em-
ployed by John Philips in his Splendid Shilling, was not unknown
to the ancients. The trick of putting the gods and heroes of Greece
and Rome into dressing-gowns had been practised in Spain and
Italy before Scarron published, in 1648, the first book of his famous
Virgile. But, for France, and, so, for England, Scarron was a real
inventor. The artifice seemed simple enough when it was dis-
covered. It depended for its triumph upon nothing else than an
obvious contrast. To represent whatever had seemed sacred to
the tradition of the race as trivial and ludicrous was not a difficult
enterprise, while the anachronism which persuaded Vergil to speak
of oil-paintings and to quote Corneille was assured of a laugh.
The example of Scarron was quickly followed. Furetière, Dufresnoy,
d'Assoucy bastened to prove themselves possessed of this new
humour. Ovid, curled and barbered, was sent to pay his addresses
to the ladies of the court with M. de Boufflers. Not even Lucan
As to John Philips, cf. ante, p. 182.
## p. 257 (#281) ############################################
Scarron and his Imitators
257
or Juvenal escaped the outrage of parody. And the style of the
burlesques matched the irreverence of their thought. It was
familiar to baseness ; it flowed with the ease and swiftness of
a turbid stream. In brief, as Boileau said, Parnassus spoke the
language of the market, and Apollo, travestied, became a Tabarin.
The enthusiasm which Scarron's experiment aroused made an
easy conquest of courtier and scholar alike. From the capital,
it spread to the provinces, and, though none of his imitators is
worth remembrance, Scarron deserves his meed of praise. He did
an ill thing supremely well. In facility and suppleness, his Virgile
has never been surpassed. His humour, such as it is, is tireless
and inexhaustible. Moreover, if he be happy in his raillery, his
work, as French admirers have said, is not without some value as
a piece of criticism. He touches with a light hand the weakness of
the lachrymose hero. He turns the light of the prevailing ‘good
sense' upon Vergil's many simplicities, for which few will thank
him; and, even in the very act of burlesque, he pays his victim
the compliment of a scrupulously close adherence to his text.
The fashion was already overpast in France, when Charles
Cotton made his first experiment in English burlesque. In 1664,
was published under the title Scarronides, or Virgil Travestie,
a mock-poem on the first book of the Aeneid. To this, Cotton
added the fourth book six years later, and, presently, put some of
Lucian's dialogues into ‘English fustian,' with the title Burlesque
upon Burlesque: or the Scoffer Scoff"d. Of these experiments in
the new craft, no more can be said than that they were better than
the base imitations which speedily followed. Cotton, at any rate,
was a man of letters, with a sense of style and variety, and if
he stooped to play the tune which the tavern-haunters demanded,
he played it with some skill and energy. He uses the artifices
which they all use. He mixes ancient and modern inextricably.
He measures the distance which Aeneas rowed by a familiar
standard, "twixt Parson's Dock and Billingsgate. ' As to Dido's
temple, 'I cannot liken any to it,' says he, 'unless 't be Pancras, if
you know it. ' The humour is forced and barren; but those French
critics are in the wrong, who declare that Cotton was content
merely to translate Scarron. If his theory of burlesque was
Scarron's, the application of it was all his own.
Cotton's success did not long remain unchallenged. Within a
year, one Monsey of Pembroke hall, Cambridge, gave to the world
his own Scarronides, a mock-poem, being the second and seventh
books of Vergil's Aeneid, which he dedicated, by what, no doubt,
17
E. L. IX.
CH. X.
## p. 258 (#282) ############################################
258 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
he thought a great stroke of humour, to ‘Lady Ann Dido, Countess
of Carthage. It is a work without character, scrupulously fashioned
according to the pattern of the hour; and a reference to James
Hind proves that this author also has learned the lesson of
anachronism. Then John Phillips, a true habitant of Grub street,
paraphrased, in bis Maronides, the fifth and sixth books of the
Aeneid. In a preface, he attempts a timid defence of his temerity.
'I leave the world to determine,' says he, 'whether it be not reason
that he that has caused us so often to cry when we were Boys,
ought not to make us laugh as much now we are men. ' As Phillips
travestied him, Vergil does not make us laugh, and the justification
fails. The experiment, in truth, differed little from the others,
save that its author, for the moment a zealous royalist, put the
puritans in hell. There they all lie, Haselrigge and Pym, Hugh
Peters, the chief of English rogues, Bradshaw,
in a Squarr
Of burning Canvas, lin'd with Tarr,
and Cromwell himself,
that Devil of a Devil,
Whose Noddle was the Mint of Evil.
The licence which John Phillips allowed himself in his treatment
of Vergil was vastly increased by the author of The Irish Hudibras,
or Fingallian Prince, who boldly adapted the sixth book of the
Aeneid to his own time, and turned it to a high encomium of
William III, 'this present Monarch, England's timely Redeemer,
whom Heaven long preserve. '
Nor was Vergil the only one of the poets attacked in England
with wanton insolence. In 1664, James Scudamore's Homer à
la Mode, A Mock Poem upon the first and second Books of Homer's
Iliads, came upon the town. The version is free from the brutality
which disgraced many of its rivals, and gives promise of better
things. The promise remained unfulfilled, for the author, who was
bred at Christ Church, had but just taken his degree when he was
drowned in the Wye, 'to the great reluctancy of all those who were
acquainted with his pregnant parts. The author of Homerides: or
Homer's First Book Moderniz'd, who, some fifty years later, essayed
Scudamore's task over again, need not awaken our curiosity. He
showed a spark of self-knowledge when he called himself Sir Iliad
Doggerell, and a complete ignorance of literary fitness, when he
regretted that Pope did not give Homer 'the English air as well
as tongue. ' Ovid, better suited to the methods of burlesque, did
but tempt the makers of travesties to a wilder extravagance.
## p. 259 (#283) ############################################
Hudibras and Hudibrastic Verse
259
'Naso Scarronomimus,' the writer of Ovidius Exulans, can scarcely
persuade the sorry tit of his humour to move for all his thwackings,
and even Alexander Radcliffe, a captain, an inns-of-court-man and
a poet, who, in The Ramble, An Anti-Heroic Poem, gave proof of
a rough vigour and freshness, fails to arouse a laugh by his Ovid
Travestie. To send Ulysses to Scotland as a volunteer, for the
suppression of rebellion, and to leave him loitering at an inn on the
homeward road, is an artifice which no literary fashion can justify.
In truth, the taste of the dying seventeenth century was not our
taste, and we can only wonder at the indiscretion of our ancestors.
Meanwhile, Samuel Butler had discovered in Hudibras the real
purpose of burlesque? If Scarron had done nothing else than to
inspire, at a distance, this work of genius, we should still owe him
a debt of gratitude. It was not for Butler to ridicule the ancient
mythologies; he saw before his eyes the follies and pretensions
of his own time and country awaiting castigation. And so, he
turned the travesty magnificently to the uses of satire. He
employed the artifices of contrast and anachronism beloved by
the imitators of Scarron to exhibit in the clear light of absurdity
the hypocrisy and meanness of presbyterians. He, too, expressed
the high in terms of the low.
he low. His work is the masterpiece
of its kind, unique and incomparable. It is idle to praise its
technical perfection. The resource and ingenuity of the author's
rimes, the tireless exuberance of his wit, his easy movement, his
bold extravagance are qualities unmatched elsewhere in literature.
Nor does his wisdom lag behind his wit. He concentrates into
aphorisms the fruit of his keen observation with so happy a skill
that a great part of his work has passed into the possession of all
Englishmen. Thousands quote him with assurance who have
never turned the pages of Hudibras, who would care not a fig
for his fable or his satire, even if they understood them. And,
though he won instant acceptance, he defied imitation. When he
had fashioned his masterpiece, he broke the mould; and, for that
very reason, perhaps, he became the prey of the parodists.
There is nothing that looks so easy as perfection, and the
coffeehouse poets, easily beguiled, thought it no shame to express
themselves and their politics in Hudibrastic verse. If they could
not rival the master, they could at least pretend to mimicry in
halting octosyllables. The boldest of them all was Ned Ward, who
combined the crafts of publican and poet. Born in Oxfordshire in
1667, he was, says his biographer, ‘of low extraction and little
1 Cf. ante, vol. VIII, chap. Ir.
17--2
## p. 260 (#284) ############################################
260 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
education. Whatever his extraction may have been, he cleverly
picked up his knowledge of letters as he went along. He did not
scruple to call one of his books Vulgus Britannicus, and he be-
lieved in the singularity of 'an Egyptian Magi. ' In his youth, he
had travelled in the West Indies, a fact commemorated by Pope,
'or shipp'd with Ward to Ape and Monkey Lands. ' But he early
settled to the professions which suited him best. His first experi-
ment in inn-keeping was made in Moorfields. He presently moved
to Fulwood rents, where he opened a punch-shop and tavern, “but in
a genteel way,' says Giles Jacob, “and with his wit, humour, and good
liquor, has afforded his guests pleasurable entertainment. ' Whatever
he did was, doubtless, done in a 'genteel way,' and the guests who
found pleasure in his entertainment were, one and all, sound tories
and high churchmen. A big, burly man, he showed a practical faith
in his own ale and his own punch, and, while he gossiped at the
fireside with his clients, never let a day pass without a verse :
So Ned, divided, writes and brews,
To try if darling gain accrues
More from his Mash-Tub than his Muse.
His mash-tub had the better of it. Not only did it fill his pocket;
it did not put him into the pillory. Twice, for his muse's sake, he
faced the angry mob at the Royal Exchange and at Charing Cross.
‘As thick as eggs at Ward in pillory,' says Pope; but his humour
carried him safely through the vicissitudes of politics, and he died
at his tavern, a prosperous potman and scurrile poet, in 1731.
He was a journalist in verse. His Hudibras Redivivus is a
gazette in rime, which was inspired by the moment, and was
published in parts. The ingenious Ward begins his preface with
an apology. "Tho' I have made bold,' he says, 'to borrow a Title
from one of the best poems that ever was published in the English
Tongue-yet I would not have the world expect me such a wizard
as to conjure up the spirit of the inimitable Butler. He need not
have been in doubt. He was no wizard, but a pedestrian jogtrot
writer of doggerel, whom criticism could not affright nor opposition
baulk. Yet his Hudibras is a wonderful achievement. Its facile
fluent ease marks the versifier who could write two hundred lines
standing on one foot. His language is common enough. Neither
Brown nor Motteux surpasses him in knowledge of the slang which
was heard in the tavern or at the street corner. Had he lived to-
day, he might have been an ornament of the sporting press. Living
when he did, he supported the cause of church and state in such
couplets as jingled in the brain, and tripped readily to the tongue.
## p. 261 (#285) ############################################
Ned Ward
261
For popular government he had a hearty contempt :
a
For he that will oblige the throng,
Must ne'er hold one opinion long,
But turn his doctrine and his creed,
As often as the Cause has need.
Among those upon whom he poured out his contempt are 'prophet
Dan' with 'the scoundrel Freedom of his Pen,' all whigs and all
dissenters. He believed, like an eminent statesman, that the
one object of the whigs was to make themselves ‘masters for life'
of England and all that it contained :
A man of sense, with half an Eye,
(Says he) may easily descry,
Thro' all their conscientious Cant,
What in reality they want;
Which is, believe me, in a word,
All that the Kingdom can afford.
Compromise he hated, and impartiality. He professed a deep
distrust of moderation, which was no better in his eye than a
‘modish cant;' with which fools disguise 'their spite, their venom,
and their lies. ' The book is tedious in its facility. It weighs upon
the reader's spirit with the heaviness of all dead controversies.
Even where he protests against the debtors' prison, where
men for poverty alone
Must wear these doublets made of stone,
he wins your reluctant approval. He is at his best when he describes
the taverns and shops of the town, their picturesque signs, and
the strange characters who throng the streets, the campaign
wenches and the ale-wives, the lame mumpers and the disabled
seamen. Here, he spoke with an authority which none of his
colleagues in Grub street could rival. If he had but a casual
acquaintance with the English tongue, he knew London and its
slang like the tavern keeper that he was. Whatever were his
shortcomings, his industry was prodigious. Vulgus Britannicus
rivalled his Hudibras in dulness and prolixity. The Republican
Procession, in which, among others, he ridicules Marlborough,
'a great Pretender to the trick of State,' is merry only on the
title-page. He poured forth broadsides, satires, prose and verse
with an equal hand. Impartially, he sang the praises of a Derby-
Ale-House and the New Tunbridge Wells at Islington. The love
of good living and high principles breathes in all that he wrote.
The pity is that a sound inspiration found so poor and graceless
an expression. Now and then, he could sing a song in the true
## p. 262 (#286) ############################################
262 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
Rabelaisian strain, as in his Wine and Wisdom: or the Tipling
Philosophers:
Wise Thales the Father of all
The Greek Philosophicall Crew,
Ere he gaz'd at the Heavens, would call
For a chirruping Bottle or two.
In fifty stanzas, he thus extolled what was, assuredly, the more
profitable of his two trades, and, for the moment, endowed his
doggerel with a rollicking sincerity.
It is, as has been said, by his sketches of London and its streets
that Ned Ward saves his Hudibrastic experiments from dulness,
and there, in the sights and sounds about him, he found the
material best suited to his talent. Whatever disloyalty the hacks
of Grub street may have shown to the English language, they were
constant in their devotion to the London, which was their world.
Ned Ward, in his London Spy, and Tom Brown, in his Amusements
Serious and Comical, have bequeathed to us a picture of the
town whose merit is wholly independent of literature. They are
the true descendants of Dekker and Nashe, from whom they are
separated by less than a century of time. Between them are many
centuries of style and thought. The London which Dekker and
Nashe describe is enwrapped in an atmosphere of dark mystery and
impenetrable gloom. They see the seven deadly sins ever before
them, and deplore the iniquity of their city with the solemn
eloquence of prophets. Satire is their lightest weapon. They
condemn even where they admire. It is in no spirit of flippancy
that Dekker denounces the cruelty of this ‘now once-againe New-
reared-Troy. ' Nashe's voice is the voice of a sincerely repentant
sinner. 'London,' he cries, 'lay off thy gorgeous attire and cast
downe thy selfe before God in contrition and prayer, least hee cast
thee downe in his indignation into hell-fire. '
Ned Ward and Tom Brown could not look upon the life about
them with the grave eyes of their predecessors. It was not for
them to be censorious or to hope for better things. If only the
city of their habitation were a place of pleasant resort, they cared
not for its morals. And they wrote of it in the easy style of
the trained reporter. Their temperament in no sense diminishes
the value of their sketch. They have shown us a London infinitely
more supple, infinitely commoner and, at the same time, far closer
to our own than the London of Dekker and Nashe. The cockney
with his nimbler wit and paltrier ideals had intervened, and fixed for
all time certain lineaments of the city. No longer is it dominated
## p. 263 (#287) ############################################
The London Spy.
Tom Brown 263
2
a
>
by gallant or beau or gull. Those who throng the taverns of the
time are either impostors, such as Radcliffe paints in The Ramble,
or mere citizens meanly ambitious of cutting a dash. In brief, it
seems perfectly consonant with the prevailing manners that Ned
Ward should keep an ale-house, or that Motteux, the translator of
Rabelais, should desert literature for the selling of China goods.
The London Spy is, undoubtedly, Ward's masterpiece. After
two centuries, it still keeps the fresh stamp of truth. Its design,
if design it may be called, is of the simplest. A citizen, who,
'after a tedious confinement in a country Hutt,' breaking loose from
'the scholar's gaol, his study,' revisits London. There he meets an old
schoolfellow, who shows him the sights, and especially the taverns,
of the town. It is a Gulls Horn-book of another age, written with
a plain simplicity, and with scarce a touch of satire. The two friends
range from Billingsgate, where they observe the 'oars' and ‘scullers,'
who tout by the waterside, and note 'the stink of sprats and the
unteneable clamours of the wrangling society,' to Hummun’sTurkish
bath. They wander from the Quaker's tavern in Fish lane to
that hideous inferno the Poultry compter, from the Wits' coffee-
house, where the cockney sketches for his friend a character of the
modern poets, to Bartholomew Fair, now stripped of its glory. By
the way, they encounter many strange personages, such as the
highwayman, who has good friends in Newgate,' and is 'well
acquainted with the ostlers about Bishopsgate and Smithfield, and
gains from them intelligence of what booties go out that are
worth attempting. The book is written with a directness and
simplicity which command belief, and ends, as in duty bound,
with a description of the death and funeral of Dryden, who was
the master of them all, and who impressed his laws upon his liege
subjects, like the dictator that he was.
Tom Brown followed hard upon the heels of Ned Ward, and,
in his Amusements Serious and Comical Calculated for the
Meridian of London, pictured the London that he saw, with less
truth than Ward, and greater wit.
London he recognises to be
.
a world by itself, and he imagines 'what an Indian would think
of such a motley herd of people, thus anticipating Macaulay’s
imagined New Zealander. He sketches the city, and those whom
he and his Indian encounter-the alderman, the usurer, the broker
and the rest—with a good-humoured enthusiasm. For him, the
playhouse is ‘an enchanted island. When they walk in the Mall,
'
he persuades his Indian to exclaim 'I never beheld in my life so
great a flight of birds. ' Much of the book is the comedy of the
## p. 264 (#288) ############################################
264 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
age translated into a light-fingered prose. Tom Brown finds it as
bard as Ned Ward finds it to keep away from the taverns and
gaming-houses, and, in his exposure of the many rascals who lay in
waiting for the unwary traveller, he sets a fashion speedily followed
in The Cheats of London and a vast library of similar chapbooks.
He was, in truth, well fitted by character and training to do the
work of Grub street. Educated at Christ Church, he won an
instant fame by a pleasant trick of writing Latin verse, and it is
said that many pieces were extant of his composition, bearing
other names. Even in his youth, his cynic temper preferred money to
fame, and no sooner had he left the university for London than he
was ready to hire himself out to the highest bidder. Nothing came
amiss to his facile brain. To show his touch with the classics, he
translated Persius and mimicked Horace. The example of Rabelais
was ever before him, and he followed John Phillips in imitating the
prognostications of Pantagruel. His epigrams, in Latin or English,
are rather coarse than witty. The best of his work is journalism,
illuminated always by the light of scholarship. There is no topic
so bare that he will not embroider it with tags from the classics.
His favourite artifice was to indite letters from the dead to the
living, an artifice which gave him the chance to ridicule ‘Tom'
D'Urfey, ‘Joe' Harris the player, and even the great Dryden himself.
The death of ‘tbe gallant Dundee' inspired him to imitate Cowley's
pindarics, though, as he said himself, he was ill acquainted with
that kind of writing. He suffered at once from excessive praise
and ill-deserved blame. “Without partiality, we may say,' wrote
Sam Briscoe, his bookseller, ‘for satyrical Prose or Verse, Mr Brown
was not inferior to Petronius, Martial, or any other of the witty
ancients. ' These were his models, truly; but his works testify how
far he fell short of their performance. On the other hand, a grave
injustice was done to him, as it has been to many another, by the
thoughtless, who fathered upon him ‘all the pamphlets good and bad,
Lampoons, Trips, London Spies, and the like insignificant Trifles. '
His lively humour won him the name of 'Tom Brown the facetious'
and the epithet, not wholly complimentary, still clings to him.
The enemy, who said of him that he had less the Spirit of a Gentle-
man than the rest, and more of a Scholar,' spiced his malice with
the truth. What, indeed, had a gentleman to make in Grub
street? However, with all his faults, Tom Brown was a real man of
letters, who, had he not been 'too lazy in his temper to write much
would have builded himself a better monument. ' In character, he
was careless and independent. He did his best to live by his pen,
## p. 265 (#289) ############################################
The New Art of Translation 265
and, when his pen failed him, he turned pedagogue. At no time
would he rely upon the caprices of a patron. 'I am one of the first
of the Suburban class,' he boasted, 'that has ventur'd out without
making an application to a nobleman's porter, and tiring him out
with showing him his master's name. ' For the rest, he wrote the
famous epigram upon Dr Fell, and died, at last, repentant and
absolved. He confessed on his death-bed that he had 'complied
too much with the Libertinism of the time,' and extorted a promise
from his bookseller, who speedily went back upon his word, to
expunge 'all prophane, undecent passages' from his works, when
he came to reprint them.
The career of Tom Brown is characteristic of Grub street and
of his age. From one-incomparably the best-you may learn all.
But, by a curious irony, neither poverty nor the bottle impaired
the tireless industry of the hacks. Though the standard of style
which they set up for themselves was not a high one, they never
feared to put their talent to the test. They fought for causes
good or evil with a kind of ferocity. None of them disdained the
weapons of the wits. We have seen how Ned Ward expressed his
opinions and his prejudices in Hudibrastic verse. The gathered
pamphlets of Roger L'Estrange, written, for the most part, in
defence of himself and the high church party, would fill a shelf.
John Phillips, whom Milton trained for wiser purposes, disgraced
himself for ever by selling a hireling pen to Titus Oates. If there
is nothing so transient as dead controversy, it must yet be admitted
that these writers were artists in their own style. Their skill in
invective, their assumption of passionate conviction, their out-
spoken contempt for the enemy of the moment, cannot but claim
our admiration. But in nothing did they display their marvellous
energy so clearly as in the task of translation. Here, again, they
recall the enterprise of the Elizabethans. They do not challenge
comparison with their predecessors. They recognised that each
age must look at the classics through its own eyes. They knew,
also, that the France and Spain of their time had provided a
treasure-house of masterpieces, which their skill and knowledge
could unlock. And, when they had taken these masterpieces from
their treasure-house, they did not scruple to trick them out in
the familiar, parti-coloured style of their own Grub street. It
seems, indeed, as though the fashion of translation changed as
rapidly as the fashion of hats and coats. Though the Plutarch
of North and Holland, the Montaigne of Florio, the Seneca of
Lodge were less than a century old, they appeared fantastic, if not
## p. 266 (#290) ############################################
266 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
unintelligible, to the contemporaries of Dryden. The 'several
hands,' the 'persons of quality,' who presumed to do again the tasks
valiantly performed by their grandsires, aimed less at a splendour
of effect than at a uniform neatness. The one licence they permitted
themselves, as we shall see, was an incorrigible licence of slang.
They thought that their habit of speech was perfectly suited to the
heroes and gods of antiquity. They clipped their words in trans-
lating the classics, as they clipped them in an insolent pamphlet.
They possessed not the smallest sense of propriety, and believed
that there was no writer, ancient or modern, whose meaning could
not be adequately expressed in their vernacular. Thus, it mattered
not who gazed in their mirror; it gave back always the same
reflection. Their theory of translation was, of course, the theory
of Dryden, who marshalled them for the fray. "The Qualification
of a Translator worth reading,' said he, ‘must be a Mastery of the
Language he translates out of, and that he translates into; but if a
deficiencie be allowed in either, it is in the Original. ' And it was
in the original, were it Latin or Greek, that many of them were
deficient. Like the Elizabethans, they, too, sought what help they
could find in French versions of their author. Nor was it for them
to disobey Dryden's second injunction. ‘A Translator,' wrote the
master, 'that would write with any force or spirit of an Original,
must never dwell on the words of an author. ' So lightly did they
dwell upon their authors' words, that, in many specimens, it is not
easy to distinguish between translation and burlesque.
By the preferences of these writers we come to know the taste of
the booksellers and of the town. They were not animated by the spirit
of adventure or by the ambition of instructing kings and nobles in
high policy, which moved the Elizabethans. Their sole object was to
profit themselves by pleasing the public. Petronius, to whom they
owed a special allegiance, was easily taught to speak their dialect.
The first version we owe to William Burnaby and another hand. In
the second, Tom Brown, captain Ayloffe and others are said to have
given their aid, though it is not clear what they contributed, and
a comparison of the two by no means justifies the bookseller's claim
that the second is ‘wholly new. ' Though much of Petronius is lost
in the process of translation, the work is done with a sympathy and
an energy which we expect from the authentic descendants of
Ascyltus and Eumolpus. Here is no dwelling on the words of the
author. The book may be read from beginning to end, as though it
were an independent and original romance. The version of Lucian
by several eminent bands displays precisely the same qualities.
## p. 267 (#291) ############################################
John Phillips
267
Deprived of its atmosphere, it wears the aspect of an English
work. The ‘eminent hands’—
Tom Brown, John Phillips, Walter
Moyle and the rest—handled the English tongue with ease and
familiarity, and, if they owed more to the French of d’Ablancourt
than to the Greek of Lucian, they have had no difficulty in trans-
posing their author into the guise of their own place and time. The
work, done under Dryden's eye, was journey-work, if you will, and
defaced by a tone of commonness. But it has a character which
removes it by many leagues from the crib, and Dryden, no doubt,
speaks truth when he places the translators among the finer spirits
of the age. ” Walter Moyle and Sir Henry Sheeres deserve whatever
praise he could give them, but let it not be forgotten that it is
the facetious Tom Brown, whom Dryden could not mention with
honour, that bore the brunt of the work.
John Phillips, whose travesties have already been mentioned,
was eminent among the translators of the time. He took his share
in Englishing Lucian and Plutarch, and the folios to which he put
his name were neither few nor slight. He was bred in classical
learning by his uncle John Milton, whose influence he early
shook off. For many years, he seems to have gained his liveli-
hood by his pen, and was as versatile as he was industrious.
What Aubrey calls his ‘jiggish phancy' inspired him to the
making of almanacks, the inditing of satires and to the conduct
of political controversy. A loyal disciple of Rabelais, he composed
a sermon with a passage from Gargantua for his text, and embraced
the doctrine of Pantagruel with a constant heart. His policy shifted
with the convenience of the hour. He approached Cromwell cap
in hand when it suited him, and afterwards, in a travesty, set the
Protector in hell. He shouted for the king at the restoration, and
hailed the infamous Oates as the saviour of his country. He
naturally incurred the hatred of Anthony à Wood, both for his
own sake and on account of Milton, that villainous leading
incendiary. But, whatever blots there may have been upon his
honour, he was tireless in industry. He died, so to say, with
a pen in his hand. At seventy years of age, he is described by
Dunton as a gentleman of good learning, and well born; and will
write you a design off in a very little time, if the gout or claret
does not stop him. ' For many years, he edited a grave periodical,
The Present State of Europe, and, in the compass and extent of
bis translations, he was a near rival to Philemon Holland. To
provide two vast folios in a year is a triumph of persistence, if
no other merit be claimed for it.
## p. 268 (#292) ############################################
268 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
-
And John Phillips's versions are always workmanlike. La Cal-
prenède's Pharamond was once, no doubt, 'a fam'd romance,'
though it is no more likely to find readers today than Madeleine de
Scudery's Almahide, or The Captive Queen; and Phillips's task, in
Englishing both, was faithfully performed. His chief lack is a lack of
distinction. There is not a page that most of the other hacks might
not have written with equal ease. For ease is its chief characteristic
- ease of phrase, ease of movement. With the same nonchalance,
he Englished Tavernier's Voyages in the East, Ludolphus’s History
of Aethiopia, Grelot’s Voyage to Constantinople and many
another forgotten work of travel or fiction. Besides these monu-
ments of energy, a version of Scarron's Typhon seems but
the solace of a summer's afternoon. None of these, as we have
said, bears the sole and individual mark of Phillips's talent.
There is one book-his translation of Don Quixote—which, for
good or evil, is all his own. Not even Ned Ward, whose inappro-
priate courage persuaded him to turn the masterpiece of Cervantes
into Hudibrastic verse, committed so great an outrage on a noble
original as did John Phillips when he made The History of the most
Renowned Don Quixote English 'according to the humour of our
Modern Language. It is difficult to describe this rash experiment.
'
Imagine Hamlet turned into the lingo of the music hall, and fitted
with occasional songs and dances, and you will have a faint
impression of Phillips's impropriety. Little as he respected his
author, he respected still less the time and place of his incom-
parable romance. He has reduced to the level of his own Grub
street the style and manner of Cervantes. His work is less a
translation than a travesty. He has treated Don Quixote as
Scarron treated the Aeneid. He has composed a debased fantasia
of his own upon a wellknown and beautiful theme. In other
words, he has employed an imagery as vulgar as the slang of the
tavern can make it. Rosinante, in his eyes, is a 'Dover post-horse,'
the inn keeper is 'as true a thief as ever sung psalm at Tyburn. '
The fish which Don Quixote has for his supper is ‘so ill-dress’d
as if it had been cook'd in Ram Alley or White-Fryers. ' Such
humour as anachronism will afford may be found on every page,
and, as though it were not enough to create a confusion of time,
Phillips never ceases to confound the Spain of the age of Cervantes
with the England of his own. The sail of the windmill throws the
knight sprawling, says he, 'at the distance of more yards than
would have measured Long Megg of Lincoln a gown and petticoat. '
He likens the lovers to 'young citizens and their wives in an Epsom
## p. 269 (#293) ############################################
John Phillips's Don Quixote
269
coach'; in his version, Tolosa masquerades as Betty, “the daughter
of a Cobbler in Southwark, that kept a stall under a Chandler's
shop in Kent street'; and, by way of a crowning absurdity, the lady
tells Don Ferdinand 'to read Baxter's Saints' Everlasting Rest. '
ow, he merely hints at a false comparison, as when he says that
Cardenio held his Lucinda 'as the Lobster held the Hair upon
Salisbury Plain. ' Now, he seems to exhaust his ingenuity in a
single passage. When the inn keeper tells Don Quixote that he,
too, had been a knight errant, he boasts, in Phillips's travesty, how
he himself had pursu'd the same Chace of Honour in his youth, travelling
through all parts of the World in search of bold Adventures; to which
purpose he had left no corner unvisited of the King's Bench Rules, the
Skulking Holes of Alsatia, the Academy of the Fleet, the Colledge of New-
gate, the Parliews of Turnbull, and Pickt Hatch, the Bordellos of St Giles's,
Banstead-Downs, Newmarket-Heath: . . . not a Publick Bowling Green
where he had not exercis'd his heels; nor an Execution-crowd, nor a Hedge-
Tavern, where he had not employ'd his pauming, topping, cogging fingers.
:
This is monumental, but it is not Cervantes. And by how many
leagues is it removed from the splendid simplicity of Shelton!
Worse still, the ingenious Phillips makes Don Quixote an
occasion for setting forth his preferences and his animosities. He
packs his pages with modern instances. He drags in Hobbes and
the Protector by the heels; nor does he lose a chance of insulting
Milton, to whom he owed such scholarship as he possessed. Thus
it is that Don Diego di Miranda describes his son's attainments:
he is a great admirer of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius—but as for the modern
poets he allows very few to be worth a straw; among the rest he has a
particular Peek against Du Bartas, and Paradise Lost, which he says has
neither Rhime nor Reason.
To defend such a work as Phillips's Don Quixote is not easy.
There is a flippant irreverence in its jests and gibes which criticism
is forced to condemn. No man has a right thus licentiously to
transform a masterpiece of literature. The very readiness with
which a writer of burlesque can achieve a laugh should warn him
that the laugh is not worth achievement. Yet, when all is said that
can be said in dispraise, we cannot but acknowledge the supreme
skill with which Phillips has performed his task. His zest never
flags, his imagery never grows tired. On every page he has a
fresh, if perverse, simile. With untiring energy, he illustrates
Cervantes from the life of the taverns which he frequented. The
vigour and levity of his style are amazing; his understanding of
the original is seldom at fault, and, though it may be said that the
## p. 270 (#294) ############################################
270 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
book should never have been done, it must be added that it is done
exceedingly well. For, if it gives us a very blurred picture of
Don Quixote, it presents the clear image of the most flippant,
restless and debauched mind of an age which ill understood the
punctilio of life or letters.
Peter Motteux, a fitting companion in literature for John
Phillips, differed widely from him in blood and breeding. His
youthful steps were not encouraged by a great poet. Thrown
early upon a country whose language he did not understand, he
was compelled to make a double conquest, first of a speech
which was not his own, and then of the town in which he was an
enforced exile. Born in 1663 at Rouen, he came to England when
the edict of Nantes was revoked, and speedily found a place among
English men of letters. So swift a change of nationality is almost
without parallel in the history of literature. The author of
Gramont is no near rival, since he was but four when he was
carried to France, and a Frenchman he remained, in all save blood,
till the end. Motteux's achievement was far more wonderful.
He left France at the age of twenty-two, probably with no training
either in English or in literature, and, within a few years, he was
writing with precisely the same accent as any other haunter of the
coffeehouses. In the preface to his Rabelais, he fears that he has
'not given his Author the graces of the English language in every
place,' and protests that he has not followed the example of
Lucullus, who wrote a book in Greek and scattered some false
Greek in it, to let the world know it was not written by a Greek.
Motteux was not guilty of a similar indiscretion. What errors may
be found in his diction, he assures us, have crept in without his
intent. He need have had no fear, nor have offered his reader any
apology. Motteux had many faults. Gallicism was not among
thein. He compared himself, proudly enough, with Livius Andro-
nicus, a Greek, and Terence, a Carthaginian, who chose Latin
for their tongue, and if he could not vie with them in purity
of style, he surpassed them, doubtless, in fluency. There was
no task to which he did not turn a ready hand. He wrote
plays, after the prescribed model, and without the smallest
distinction. He furnished the plays of others with doggerel
prologues. He edited The Gentleman's Journal, for which Le
Mercure Galant of his own land served as a model, and
was not refused the assistance of the great. Congreve and Prior
both condescend to his pages, and, as it was Dryden under whose
banner he fought, so it is the influence of Dryden which governs
## p. 271 (#295) ############################################
6
Motteux and his Translation of Rabelais 271
his journal. Frenchman though he was, he differs little enough from
his neighbours in Grub street. He might sign their works or they
his without much detriment to either side. Nevertheless, he played
a part in the literary history of his time. If he won the approval
of Dryden and Steele, he was deemed worthy the rancour of Pope,
who celebrates him as a bore,
Talkers I've learned to bear, Motteux I knew,
and, in The Art of Sinking, puts him among the eels, 'obscene
authors that wrap themselves up in their own mud, but are
mighty nimble and pert.
' And then, to prove an astonishing
adaptability, Motteux turned an honest tradesman, and sold
China and Japan wares 'cheap for a quick return. ' He did not
return to the craft of letters, and, after six years of honourable
dealing, died a mysterious and shameful death.
Had it not been for his translation of Rabelais, Motteux’s
name would not have outlived this crowning scandal. His trans-
lation gives him a place in history. The work has many faults.
It is 'nimble and pert,' like its author, and Rabelais himself
was never for a moment either pert or nimble. A still worse
fault is its diffuseness, a fault of which Motteux appears to have
been wholly unconscious. His style is as far from the Latin gravity
of the original as from the humourous eloquence of Sir Thomas
Urquhart. He is able neither to represent the one nor to carry on
the tradition of the other. Between him and the knight of Cromarty
there is not merely the difference which separates the English of
Elizabeth (for Urquhart was a belated Tudor) from the English
of Dutch William, but the difference which parts an erudite and
curious Scots pedant from the trivial, boisterous frequenter of
Will's. Motteux's phrase is simple to tawdriness. He drags
Rabelais down to his own level, and in nothing does he prove
his lack of taste so clearly as in his use of slang. Now, slang, to
the translator of Rabelais, is indispensable. The romance of
Pantagruel and Panurge cannot be turned out of its own into
any other tongue save by an artist in strange words. Urquhart
was perfectly equipped for the task, because his interest in oddly
coloured speech never tired, and because, when he was himself
at a loss, he made a liberal use of Cotgrave's Dictionary. Thus
it was that his slang had ever a literary flavour; it had already
won the freedom of humane letters; the dust of the street corner
was not thick upon it. Motteux’s slang was of another kind. It
lacked literary association. The quickwitted Frenchman had
.
picked it up in the gutter or the tavern; he had caught it fresh
## p. 272 (#296) ############################################
272 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
minted from the vulgar brains of his friends; and, though it was
lively enough to gain an instant laugh, it long since lost its humour.
Motteux makes free and frank acknowledgment of the source of
his common talk, as he calls it.
'Far be it from me,' he writes, ‘for all this to value myself upon hitting
the Words of Cant, in which my drolling Author is so luxuriant, for though
such words have stood me in good stead, I scarce can forbear thinking myself
unhappy in having insensibly hoarded up so much Gibberish and Billingsgate
trash in my memory; nor could I forbear asking myself as an Italian
Cardinal said on another account. . . Where the devil didst thon make up all
these fripperies ? '
He made them up in Grub street; and, when he had contrived
them, they were ill suited to his purpose.
The only literary sources from which he gathered his 'words
of Cant' were the travesties. He was no better able than John
Phillips to escape the anachronisms of Cotton and Radcliffe.
Though he had a finer restraint than the rascal who burlesqued
Don Quixote, he could not forbear to treat the text of Rabelais
with the same kind of wantonness.
