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"Pre-Augustan" Lucretius?: Lucy Hutchinson's "De Rerum Natura"

Lucy Hutchinson's Translation of Lucretius: De Rerum Natura by Hugh de Quehen; Lucy
Hutchinson
Review by: David Hopkins
Arion, Third Series, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Winter, 1998), pp. 124-133
Published by: Trustees of Boston University
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"Pre-Augustan" Lucretius?:
Lucy Hutchinson's De Rerum Natura

DAVID HOPKINS

Hugh de Quehen, editor, Lucy Hutchinson's Translation of

Lucretius: De Rerum Natura. (University of Michigan Press,
1996) viii + 246 pages, cl. $38.50.

-L/UCY HUTCHINSON (1620-81) is best known today

as the author of the lively and informative prose Memoirs of her
husband, Colonel John Hutchinson, the prominent Parliamentar
ian and Regicide who died in 1664, imprisoned on suspicion of
plotting against Charles II. Verse by Lucy Hutchinson, however,
also survives in various manuscript collections. As David Nor

brook has recently shown, a lengthy parodie reply to Edmund

Waller's "Panegyrick toMy Lord Protector," to be found among
the Additional Manuscripts in the British Library, is very probably
her work. And a sequence of twenty-four Elegies on her husband,
in the Nottinghamshire archives, laments her bereave
preserved
ment in ways that also reveal her and long-standing knowl
deep

edge of classical
literature. Hutchinson, the daughter of
enlightened believers inwomen's education, had been taught both
French and Latin from an early age, and her MS Commonplace
Book, also preserved in the Nottinghamshire archives, contains
lengthy transcriptions from Sir John Denham's and Sidney Godol
phin's translations of Virgil, as well as her own renderings of lines
from Ovid's Heroides. The most extensive product of her classical
studies, however, was a version of Lucretius' De Rerum
complete
Natura in iambic pentameter in a
couplets, preserved, partly
scribal hand and partly inHutchinson's holograph, in the British
Library as Additional Manuscript 19333. This translation?prob
ably the first complete rendering of Lucretius in English?has
been known to specialists for some time. But though short extracts
have appeared in anthologies, it has never before been printed in
its entirety.

Professor de Quehen's elegantly produced volume provides the

first complete scholarly edition of Hutchinson's translation. De

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 David Hopkins 125

Quehen's editing is conservative: ampersands and abbreviations

are expanded and obvious mistakes corrected, but the manuscript

spelling and punctuation are preserved, on the grounds that to
modernize either would be to run the risk of straitjacketing
Hutchinson's "long, loosely coordinated sentences" and of simpli
fying her syntactical and verbal ambiguities. The editor provides
concise annotation, designed to explain features of Lucretius'
original which are likely to puzzle first-time readers, to gloss the
most obvious difficulties inHutchinson's English, and to provide
selective illustrations of her most striking departures from the lit
eral meaning of the Latin. Much of this material is useful, though
the elementary nature of some of the information about Lucretius
squares rather oddly with the severely unmodernized text: readers
who require the former are unlikely to be able to take the latter
easily in their stride.
Hutchinson emerges from de Quehen's as a con
presentation
scientious translator who did her best to render a notoriously diffi
cult text as as a to
accurately possible, making scrupulous attempt
find clear and consistent English equivalents for Lucretius' techni
cal terminology, and occasionally anticipating, by purely intuitive
means, the findings of later scholarship. Some of her apparent
howlers are shown to be interpretations derived in good faith from
the commentaries in the editions available to her, or accurate ren

of textual current in the seventeenth century, but

derings readings
rejected by later editors. An appendix to the edition provides a
seventeenth-century prose translation (from Bodleian MS Rawlin
son D. 314) of the celebrated passage on sexual intercourse from
Lucretius' Book 4 which was partly omitted and partly censored
by Hutchinson on the grounds that it would better become the
"obsceane art" of "a midwife then a nicer Professor de Que
pen."
hen's lucid introduction provides a brief biography of Hutchin
son, and places the translation in the larger context of her work
and intellectual milieu.
In 1675, many years after the composition of her Lucretius,
Hutchinson presented the manuscript to the Presbyterian states
man Arthur Annesley, first Earl of Anglesey (1614-86), whose
favour," she says, she had "in so many wayes
"benign experiencd"
after the death of her husband. It is in the Dedicatory Epistle to
Annesley, usefully included in de Quehen's edition, that she offers
an account of her motives for Lucretius, and of her ret
translating
rospective feelings about the enterprise in later life. Near the

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 126 "PRE-AUGUSTAN" LUCRETIUS?

beginning of the Epistle, Hutchinson forcefully declares her

abhorrence of "all the Atheisms and impieties in [De Rerum
Natura]" and says that she "translated it only out of youthfull
curiositie, to understand things that [she] heard so much discourse
of at second hand, but without the least inclination to propagate
any of the wicked pernitious doctrines in it."When making the
translations, she tells Annesley, she did not "employ any serious
studie in" "such vaine Philosophy," for she "turnd [De Rerum
Natura] into English in a roome where [her] children practizd the
severall quallities they were taught with their Tutors" and "num
bred the sillables of [her] translation by the threds of the canvas
[she] wrought in, and sett them downe with a pen and inke that
stood by [her]." In retrospect, she says, the whole enterprise of
"understanding this crabbed poet" has become "her shame,"
since, in her judgment, Lucretius, like other thinkers of classical
antiquity, merely corrupts the modern world with his "foolish and
impious invention," and serves only to "puddle all the streames of
Truth .
. . with . . . mud." Lucretius' on the gods,
Pagan teachings
on the physical structure of the universe, and on morality and eth
ics, though they may prove useful in helping to undermine the fan
ciful inventions of pagan mythology, are themselves "so silly,
foolish, and false, that nothing but his Lunacy can extenuate the
crime of his arrogant ignorance." It is, she says, "a lamentation,
and horror, that in these dayes of the Gospell, Men should be
found so presumptuously wicked, to studie and adhere to his and
his masters ridiculous, impious, execrable doctrines, reviving the

foppish casuall dance of attorns, and deniing the Sovereigne

Wisedome of God in the greate Designe of the whole Universe and
every creature in it." The main benefit of her study of Lucretius
was, therefore, that she "learnt to abhorre him, and dread a wan

ton dalliance with impious bookes." The task of translating De

Rerum Natura, she concludes, "shewd [her] that sencelesse super
stitions drive carnall reason into Ath?isme, which though Policy
restreins some from avowing so impudently as this Dog, yet vast is
their number, who make it a specious pretext within themselves,
to think religion is nothing at all but an invention to reduce the
ignorant vulgar into order and Government."

Such remarks clearly place Lucy Hutchinson at some distance

from poet-and philosopher-contemporaries like Pierre Gassendi,
Walter Charleton, Thomas Stanley, and Abraham Cowley, who

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 David Hopkins 127

were seeking to establish various kinds of rapprochement or com

mon ground between the doctrines of Epicurus (of which Lucre
tius was a prime source) and their own Christian beliefs.
Charleton's Epicurus' Morals (1656), for example?a book which
did much to popularize Gassendi's positive revaluation of Epicure
anism for English readers?depicts the Epicurean search for ata
raxia, the state of freedom from mental and physical anxiety which
alone can guarantee happiness and lasting pleasure, in terms which
bring it to close to Christian asceticism. His book thus offers what
Howard Jones has described as "an ethical scheme which neatly
combines the pursuit of the Epicurean ideal with the cultivation of
the highest Christian values." And for the Abraham Cowley of
Essays in Verse and Prose (1668), the Epicurean command to
"enjoy the present hour" could be reconciled without much diffi
culty with Christ's exhortation (Matthew 6:34) to "take ... no
thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the
things of itself." Even John Dryden, in the translations from
Lucretius published in Sylvae (1685)?versions which make no
simple attempt to "Christianize" Lucretius or to tone down the
Latin poet's mortalism and materialism?sees, and affirms in the

language of his versions, many overlaps between the Lucretian and

Christian denunciations of worldly ambition, sexual anguish, fac
ile hedonism, and anxious self-absorption.
One wishes that, in his Introduction, Professor de Quehen had
examined at greater length the discrepancy between Lucy Hutch
inson's prose denunciations of Lucretius and the care lavished on
the translation itself. Fuller and more precise information, for
would have been welcome on the date of her version, and
example,
the exact circumstances inwhich itwas composed. How informed
and one wonders, was the "discourse of Lucretius
sympathetic,
which the young Lucy Hutchinson had heard "at second hand?"
Was her version executed or after Gassendi's seminal reval
before
uation of Epicureanism was popularized in print in England? How
much was her view of Lucretius colored by the popular association
of Epicurean ideas with the notorious Thomas Hobbes, whose
Leviathan was published in 1651? Scholars now seem agreed that
Thomas Franklin Mayo (in Epicurus in England 1650-1725
[1934]) was wrong to date Hutchinson's translation as early as the
1630s. De Quehen cites a poem by Sir Aston Cokayn, published in
1658, which may refer to Hutchinson's on the
work-in-progress

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 128 "PRE-AUGUSTAN" LUCRETIUS?

Lucretius, and which would thus seem to imply that the transla
tion was made in the 1650s. De Quehen associates Hutchinson's
interest in Lucretius with the spread of Epicurean ideas by the
Newcastle Circle of royalist ?migr?s, and with the larger dissemi
nation of atomistic ideas inmid-seventeenth century England. But
the association is rather loosely established: Hutchinson's transla
tion is aligned with a set of ideas which were "in the air" at
(roughly) the same time, rather than being precisely located at a
specific moment in an exactly defined personal, intellectual, and
social context. Perhaps no further certainties are to be had on the
matter. Nevertheless, amore detailed and precise setting out of the
possibilities would have been welcome.
Whatever the exact circumstances of the translation's composi
tion, the question of Lucy Hutchinson's relation to her task
remains one
How, asks, could a translator
problematic. produce
such a "perceptive and imaginative" response to a text whose sen

timents she seems to have so

thoroughly deplored? Can a success

ful translation be composed in as distanced and hostile spirit as?

if her testimony is to be trusted?Hutchinson seems to have com

posed her Lucretius} Should one suspect (with the Times Literary
Supplement reviewer of de Quehen's edition) that Hutchinson's
claim to have made her translation to "understand" De
merely
Rerum Natura, and with no sympathy whatever for the "impious
doctrines" which it contains, was made "perhaps disingenu
Was she, of her achievement, at
ously?" perhaps, secretly prouder
least as a feat of scholarship, than she dared to admit?
A possible parallel suggests itself between Hutchinson and a
later seventeenth-century translator of Lucretius, the Oxford

scholar Thomas Creech (1659-1700). The notes to Creech's

English translation (1682, revised 1683) and edition (1695) o? De
Rerum Natura abound in passionate refutations of Lucretius'

"Heathen Calumnies," yet his translation was acknowledged at

the time as a conspicuously convincing and lucid rendering of
Lucretius' text, and continued to be reprinted as the "standard"
complete English Lucretius until the end of the eighteenth century.
Such was the discrepancy between translation and authorial com
mentary, that it came to be widely believed that Creech was more
drawn to Lucretian sentiments than his prose protesta
secretly
tions suggest?a belief which was confirmed for many when
Creech committed suicide, after a prolonged bout of melancholia.

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 David Hopkins 129

"Creech," commented one contemporary dismissively, "died as he

had lived, like a true Atheist."
The degree to which one is perplexed by an apparently extreme
mismatch between a translator's prose pronouncements and his

practical achievement is, I imagine, likely to vary according to the

kind of writer one believes the translator to be, and the degree of
imaginative commitment and engagement which one feels to be
evidenced in the rhythms, phrasing and tone of his translation
itself. A translator who has found a convincing English voice for a
controversial original, recreating him inways that give his words a
new power and urgency for the translator's own contempo
point,
raries must?it seems reasonable to "identified
presume?have
with" his original at a more profound and personal level than a
translator whose seems characterized
end-product by decent duti

fulness rather than by an ungainsayably authoritative rhetoric and

verse-music. "Identification" with one's original, however, though
itmay seem unqualified and absolute for the duration of a particu
lar poem, might be strictly temporary, and quite compatible with
other, very different, commitments on other occa
imaginative
sions. Dryden, for example, seems to have been able, in what he
called his "hot fits" of translation, to inhabit the mind and vision
of a number of different predecessors?all of very different styles
and temperaments from himself and from each other?with equal
conviction and persuasiveness. To ask whether Dryden "really
believed" the sentiments which he translated on different occa
sions is thus a more (and, as formulated, less relevant)
complex
question than itmight at first appear. Translation seems, for Dry
den, to have been a matter of temporarily discovering and activat
ing various sympathies and susceptibilities within himself, which
he felt no simple pressure to unify or homogenize into any single,
overall system of belief or commitment. Thus, if our primary inter
est is in Dryden-the-artist rather than Dryden-the-man-of-the-bio

graphical-record, "what Dryden believed" seems more usefully

interpreted as the sum total of the tones and sentiments with
which he could align himself persuasively in the act of poetic com
position than as any particular set of beliefs or doctrines to which
he may have subscribed in his everyday life.
The qualities of Lucy Hutchinson's Lucretius, however, would
indicate that her imaginative engagements with her original were
conducted at (so to speak) a considerably lower emotional and
artistic temperature than Dryden's. Her version, to be sure, has a

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 130 "PRE-AUGUSTAN" LUCRETIUS?

freshness of phrasing, coherence of decorum, and?despite local

uncertainties?an overall rhythmic momentum which make it, in
my judgment, more pleasurable reading in long stretches than any
of thetwentieth-century versions. It was thus well worth
reprinting on its intrinsic merits as well as for its historical and cul
tural interest. (Though Creech's version, itmight be said in paren
thesis, is both superior as verse and of even greater historical
interest: a reprint of his translation would have been even more
welcome.) But Hutchinson's Lucretius quite lacks the confidently
achieved artistry and effect of passionate imaginative commitment
which consistently characterize Dryden's versions of the Latin
poet?the finest, by far, of English renderings.
It is thus unfortunate that Professor de Quehen, in his edition
and in an accompanying article (Studies in Philology 93 (1996),
288-303), has chosen to praise Hutchinson's Lucretius in terms
that implicitly denigrate the achievement of Dryden and his
school. Hutchinson's heroic couplets, he argues, should not be
criticized, as they were by H. A. J.Munro, for failing to achieve
the "ease," "balance," and "flow" with which we are familiar from
those of the English Augustans. Hutchinson's couplets abound in
enjambments, "apostrophations" (compressions of two syllables
into one), triplets, and syllabic irregularities: roughly one line in a
hundred of her translation has more or less than five feet. These
features, de Quehen argues, should been seen as conscious artistry,
and as the signs of commitment to a distinctively "pre-Augustan"
rather than as hamfisted amateurishness. Hutchinson's
poetics,
lack of interest in achieving an Augustan "balance," he suggests,
make for admirable concision; her enjambments allow the con
struction of an impression of forward "surge," and of unified
rather than strings of discrete two-line units; and
verse-paragraphs
her hypermetrical lines, rather than merely being the result of
incompetence, often have specifically expressive function, with
sound felicitously echoing sense.
Such arguments, I believe, rest on reductive assumptions about
Augustan poetic practice which are no less misleading for being so
common. For, pace de Quehen, the Augustans' demand for "ease,"

"flow," and amount, at their best, to far more than a

"harmony"

merely formalistic and authoritarian demand for "stylishness,"

smoothness, balance, and metrical evenness at all costs.
regularity,
It is thus wide of the mark to posit a simple distinction between an

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 David Hopkins 131

"balance" and and a

"Augustan" "regularity" "pre-Augustan"
"freedom" and "flow."

The point can be neatly illustrated by setting nearly any passage

from Hutchinson's Lucretius beside Dryden's rendering of the
same lines. Near the end of Book 3 o? De Rerum Natura, Lucretius
is arguing against the fear of death. The individual, he asserts,
ceases to exist when soul and body part in death. Even if the atoms
which composed that individual should, by chance, recombine at
some future date to form a new person, the pains and pleasures of
that second person will be unknown to the first, because of the gap
that lies between. In Lucy Hutchinson's version, the argument
proceeds as follows:

For when we looke backe on vast ages gone,

And on the matters various motion,
Tis easie to believe the seeds have bene
In the same positures oft, that now they'are in.
But tis not to our memories disclosd
Because lifes pawses oft are interpos'd
Inwhich with diverse wandring motions they
Long time devested of all sences stray.
To future woes ordeind, men must survive
In that time when those evills may arrive.
Now, since death doth our former beings cease,
And this which the like troubles may distresse
Prohibitts to have bene before, wee see
Theres nothing to be feard in death, and he
Who hath no being, feeles noe calamitie.
Inmen, whom never-failing death deprives
Of mortall being, whither unborne their lives
Never begin, or spun out vanish thus
The difference is not aniething to us.
(Book 3.931-49)

Dryden renders the same passage thus:

For backward if you look, on that long space

Of Ages past, and view the changing face
Of Matter, tost and variously combin'd
In sundry shapes, 'tis easie for the mind
From then t'infer, that Seeds of things have been

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 132 "PRE-AUGUSTAN" LUCRETIUS?

In the same order as are now seen:

they
Which yet our dark remembrance cannot trace,
Because a pause of Life, a space
gaping
Has come betwixt, where memory lies dead,
And all the wandring motions from the sence are fled.
For who so e're shall inmisfortunes live
Must Be, when those misfortunes shall arrive;
And since theMan who Is not, feels not woe,
(For death exempts him, and wards off the blow,
Which we, the living, only feel and bear)
What is there left for us in death to fear?
When once that pause of life has come between,
'Tis just the same as we had never been.
("Against the Fear of Death," 31-48)

Which of the two renderings creates a more consistently plausible

English impression of the passionately argued conviction which
has always been thought to characterize Lucretius? Which passage
uses to more effect, the on
enjambment expressive reinforcing

rushing sweep of the argument, to which the couplet rhymes serve

as a subtle rather than an
underlying counterpoint, obtrusively

foregrounded resting-place for the ear?Which

passage directs the
reader more clearly to the precise points?both within each line,
and in the argument's overall trajectory?which most demand
conceptual and vocal emphasis, and which thereby give the pas
sage its point and meaning? Which passage captures both the
poignancy and triumph of Lucretius' assertion of the absolute
chasm between and sense moves, even
being non-being? Dryden's
more boldly than Hutchinson's, across line-endings, and his pas
contains none of the see-saw antitheses that are
sage popularly
associated with verse. Hutchinson's conso
"Augustan" couplet
nantal clashes and hypermetrical lines (934,945,947) seem to have
no particular expressive function, whereas Dryden's interpolated
Alexandrine (40) tellingly suggests the "wandring motions" which
it describes.
To argue for Dryden's overwhelming superiority, in this pas
sage as throughout his Lucretian translations, is not to denigrate
the very real achievements of Lucy Hutchinson's version. Nor, for

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 David Hopkins 133

the reasons already indicated, is itmerely to apply inappropriate

"Augustan" standards of "correctness" to her "pre-Augustan"
verse. But it surely does Hutchinson little service to her gen
praise
uine, but ultimately modest, at the expense of
accomplishment
translated verse of quite a different order of critical insight, imagi
native engagement, and artistic creativity.

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