If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if favoured with a private view, refrain from laughing? Believe me, dear Pisos, quite like such pictures would be a book, whose idle fancies shall be shaped like a sick man’s dreams, so that neither head nor foot can be assigned to a single shape. “Painters and poets,” you say, “have always had an equal right in hazarding anything.” We know it: this licence we poets claim and in our turn we grant the like; but not so far that savage should mate with tame, or serpents couple with birds, lambs with tigers
Works with noble beginnings and grand promises often have one or two purple patches so stitched on as to glitter far and wide, when Diana’s grove and altar, and The winding stream a-speeding ’mid fair fields or the river Rhine, or the rainbow is being described.a For such things there is a place, but not just now. Perhaps, too, you can draw a cypress. But what of that, if you are paid to paint a sailor swimming from his wrecked vessel in despair?a That was a winejar, when the moulding began: why, as the wheel runs round, does it turn out a pitcher? In short, be the work what you will, let it at least be simple and uniform.
Most of us poets, O father and ye sons worthy of the father, deceive ourselves by the semblance of truth. Striving to be brief, I become obscure. Aiming at smoothness, I fail in force and fire. One promising grandeur, is bombastic; another, over-cautious and fearful of the gale, creeps along the ground. The man who tries to vary a single subject in monstrous fashion, is like a painter adding a dolphin to the woods, a boar to the waves. Shunning a fault may lead to error, if there be lack of art. Near the Aemilian School, at the bottom of the row,b there is a craftsman who in bronze will mould nails and imitate waving locks, but is unhappy in the total result, because he cannot represent a whole figure. Now if I wanted to write something, I should no more wish to be like him, than to live with my nose turned askew, though admired for my black eyes and black hair
Take a subject, ye writers, equal to your strength; and ponder long what your shoulders refuse, and what they are able to bear. Whoever shall choose a theme within his range, neither speech will fail him, nor clearness of order. Of order, this, if I mistake not, will be the excellence and charm that the author of the long-promised poem shall say at the moment what at that moment should be said, reserving and omitting much for the present, loving this point and scorning that Moreover, with a nice taste and care in weaving words together, you will express yourself most happily, if a skilful setting makes a familiar word new. If haply one must betoken abstruse things by novel terms, you will have a chance to fashion words never heard of by the kiltedb Cethegi, and licence will be granted, if used with modesty
while, words, though new and of recent make, will win acceptance, if they spring from a Greek fount and are drawn therefrom but sparingly.c Why indeed shall Romans grant this licence to Caecilius and Plautus, and refuse it to Virgil and Varius? And why should I be grudged the right of adding, if I can, my little fund, when the tongue of Cato and of Ennius has enriched our mother-speech and brought to light new terms for things? It has ever been, and ever will be, permitted to issue words stamped with the mint-mark of the day. As forests change their leaves with each year’s decline, and the earliest drop offd: so with words the old race dies, and, like the young of human kind, the new-born bloom and thrive. We are doomed to death—we and all things ours; whether Neptune, welcomed within the land, protects our fleets from northern gales—a truly royal work—or a marsh, long a waste where oars were plied, feeds neighbouring towns and feels the weight of the plough; or a river has changed the course which brought ruin to corn-fields and has learnt a better patha: all mortal things shall perish, much less shall the glory and glamour of speech endure and live. Many terms that have fallen out of use shall be born again, and those shall fall that are now in repute, if Usage so will it, in whose hands lies the judgement, the right and the rule of speech
In what measure the exploits of kings and captains and the sorrows of war may be written, Homer has shown.c Verses yoked unequally first embraced lamentation, later also the sentiment of granted prayerd: yet who first put forth humble elegiacs, scholars dispute, and the case is still before the court. Rage armed Archilochus with his own iambus: this foot comic sock and high buskins alike adopted, as suited to alternate speech, able to drown the clamours of the pit, and by nature fit for action.e To the lyre the Muse granted tales of gods and children of gods, of the victor in boxing, of the horse first in the race, of the loves of swains, and of freedom over winef If I fail to keep and do not understand these well-marked shifts and shades of poetic forms.
Why am I hailed as poet? Why through false shame do I prefer to be ignorant rather than to learn? A theme for Comedy refuses to be set forth in verses of Tragedy; likewise the feast of Thyestes scorns to be told in strains of daily life that well nigh befit the comic sock. Let each style keep the becoming place allotted it. Yet at times even Comedy raises her voice, and an angry Chremes storms in swelling tones; so, too, in Tragedy Telephus and Peleus often grieve in the language of prose, when, in poverty and exile, either hero throws aside his bombasta and Brobdingnagianb words, should he want his lament to touch the spectator’s heart.
Note: These 3 lines are contained with a curly bracket in the margin
Note: These 3 lines are contained
with a curly bracket in the margin