SOURCE: "Narrative Transformations: Prior's Art of the Tale," in Studies in Philology, Vol. XC, No. 4, Fall, 1993, pp. 442-61.

[In the following essay, Nelson examines four of Prior's verse tales, comparing them to their sources, and explains how their adaptations benefitted from Prior's "refinements in narrator, theme, and characterization."]

In 1968 Bertrand Bronson published an imaginative dialogue between Matthew Prior and Samuel Johnson called "On Choosing Fit Subjects for Verse; or, Who Now Reads Prior?"¹ In their discussion Prior blames Johnson for his low current reputation as a writer, suggesting that it has never recovered from some of Johnson's statements in the Lives of the Poets. Johnson, on the other hand, defends himself by recalling several of his original comments in which he praised Prior's poetry, particularly the tales. These, he noted, were significant achievements, despite the existence in them of some "improprieties," which detract from such narratives as "Hans Carvel," "The Ladle," and "Paulo Purganti and his Wife," though without seriously undermining their literary value. Johnson singles out "Protogenes and Apelles" for special praise, declaring that it is the "one most unexceptionably superior example of[Prior's] skill" in the tale, a form in which he says "you have seldom been equalled in our tongue, and seldom perhaps in any other."² Bronson then has Johnson identify the general qualities that distinguish these poems "in supreme degree: humor, sophistication, wit, and sociability." And he mentions the importance for Prior of a "small, homogeneous, literate society [which] was the indispensable condition for such a precarious and delicate balance as [Prior] contrived to sustain in these tales."³ Thus, Bronson focuses our attention on the positive aspects of Johnson's discussion of Prior's poetry, with particular emphasis on his tales for which Prior was much admired in his own time.

With such appreciation as this from two eminent critics one might wonder why these tales have not been more discussed. Why, indeed, have they often been left out of the anthologies and ignored in discussions of eighteenth-century poetry?⁴ Various causes are undoubtedly at work, but we must admit that the "improprieties" themselves have probably contributed to this neglect, though this would scarcely seem to be an objection a modern reader might raise. Prior is, perhaps, not extreme enough for our taste, offering as he does a smiling, witty, and often wry account of human foibles rather than a savage condemnation of human evil or a bleak look at a meaningless universe. The bawdy joke that furnishes the climax in two of these tales may diminish their impact and significance, but this does not negate the powers he displays in narrating his tales and in creating character, dialogue, and scene. Prior borrows some of his plot elements, to be sure, but he remakes his sources and generates his own themes and values. His revisions of his sources are quite thorough. In doing so he expands the role of the narrator in the story, increases the complexity of the characters and their interrelationships, and treats his human figures with an unusual combination, at least for the time, of satire and sympathy. Despite a relatively simple surface, then, the art of these tales is complex and multifaceted, and will repay a closer look than has hitherto been made. I shall concentrate on the four tales that Johnson identified as especially effective, but many of my remarks will apply to several of his other narrative poems, all of which, I believe, put him on a par with his better recognized contemporaries, Swift and Gay.

The earliest of these tales, "Hans Carvel" (1701), is in some respects the least attractive. Prior found it in La Fontaine's contes in a rudimentary version and specifically noted its source in the title as "Monsieur De la Fontaine's Hans Carvel, Imitated." As the editors of Prior's works point out, "it is, however, a very free imitation, greatly expanded."⁵ Prior was, of course, fluent in French, having lived in France as a diplomat for several years (1697-99), so he was quite familiar with its literature as well as some of the writers. He himself has been called the "English La Fontaine,"⁶ though he imitates the French poet in only a very fewpoems; nevertheless, he has something of La Fontaine's gift for combining "seriousness and playfulness."⁷ La Fontaine's tale, drawn from Rabelais, runs to only forty-eight lines. In it he recounts the conventional story of an old man who, foolishly, marries a beautiful young woman who is not about to curtail her worldly activities after her marriage. Hans, fearing for his forehead, attempts to convince her of the danger and even sinfulness of her ways, but to no avail. One night the devil appears to him in a dream and promises to solve his problem with a magic ring. All Hans has to do is wear this ring and his troubles are gone. When Hans awakes, he finds that his finger, is, as La Fontaine puts it, "ou vous savez."⁸

Apart from the story itself, there is little additional characterization or description. Prior, on the other hand, expands both of these aspects of the tale and enriches its theme. He does this, in the first place, by portraying Hans's young wife in much greater detail. La Fontaine has little to say about her.⁹ Prior, in contrast, creates a typical London coquette who is enthralled with shopping, sleeping late, dressing long, and attending the theater. She displays something of a philosophical bent, too, when she maintains that she is not responsible for anything she might do:

 She made it plain, that Human Passion
Was order'd by Predestination;
That, if weak Women went astray,
Their Stars were more in Fault than They.
(1:184; II. 9-12)

The irony of her use of a form of Calvinistic justification for her actions, especially when she aligns it with the power of the stars, is obvious. In hoping to correct her behavior Hans gives her various moral and spiritual works, all of which

Stood unmolested on the Shelf.
An untouch'd Bible grac'd her Toilet:
No fear that Thumb of Her's should spoil it.
(11. 58-60)

Like Pope's Belinda, her confusion of spiritual and worldly values is manifest. The pristine condition of the books and the words like "unmolested" and "grac'd" that Prior employs to describe them comment ironically on the moral and spiritual quality of the young woman's behavior. A related quality is her love of the theater:

Whole Tragedies She had by Heart;
Enter'd into ROXANA'S Part:
To Triumph in her Rival's Blood,
The Action certainly was good.
How like a Vine young AMMON curl'd!
Oh that dear Conqu'ror of the World!
She pity'd BETTERTON in Age,
That ridicul'd the God-like Rage.
(11. 13-20)

Her passionate, sensual nature is evident in her appreciation of this play and, in setting the action in London with Lee's The Rival Queens (1677), a popular play about the life and death of Alexander the Great, Prior creates a woman who takes on a more fully realized existence than in the French version, though still an obvious stereotype. Her empathy with Roxana, who murdered her rival Statira, and her obvious delight in Alexander's physical attraction, underscore her very worldly interests.¹⁰ She does have an almost animal vitality that has a certain charm, like Chaucer's Alison, yet we also understand why her husband is worried.

Hans, too, is characterized more fully than in La Fontaine's version. Instead of the flat figure of the jealous elderly husband, Prior gives us a man who speaks to his wife in tones of distress, anger, bewilderment, and desperation. Hans urges her to reflect on the truisms of morality, such as

The Comforts of a Pious Life:
… how Transient Beauty was;
That All must die, and Flesh was Grass:
He bought Her Sermons, Psalms, and Graces;
And doubled down the useful Places.
(11. 48-52)

These commonplaces have no effect, of course, so Hans, confused and upset, has recourse to "Spells." The only remedy left, he decides, is to call on the devil for help. And he does this by rationalizing as his wife had for her own questionable activities. Prior's Hans, in contrast to La Fontaine's, absolves himself of any guilt in advance for what he is doing:

Tis but to hinder something Worse.
The End must justifie the Means:
He only Sins who III intends:
Since therefore 'tis to Combat Evil;
'Tis lawful to employ the Devil.
(11. 66-70)

As an example of special pleading this speech is a model of its kind. When the devil appears, he is contrasted with his description in the popular literature and superstitions of the time, the one used to frighten children into good behavior; this one, the narrator notes, seems "Like a grave Barrister at Law" (1. 78). In fact, Hans fails to recognize him, so Satan identifies himself. Their subsequent dialogue is a small masterpiece of wit and irony, a mockery of polite discourse. Hans begins by apologizing for not recognizing him:

                  Sir, your Slave:
I did not look upon your Feet:
You'll pardon Me:—Ay, now I see't:
And pray, Sir, when came You from Hell?
Our Friends there, did You leave Them well?
All well: but pr'ythee, honest HANS,
(Says SATAN) leave your Complaisance:
The Truth is this: I cannot stay
Flaring in Sun-shine all the Day:
For, entre Nous, We Hellish Sprites,
Love more the Fresco of the Nights;
And oft'ner our Receipts convey
In Dreams, than any other Way.
(11. 82-94)

Here we are in the fashionable world of the eighteenth century listening to the conversation of two fine, if rather pretentious, gentlemen. No such scene occurs in La Fontaine. Satan's urgent desire to help and Hans's ridiculous acceptance of it are delightfully rendered. So, as the devil has instructed, Hans has a dinner party that night at which he drinks heavily and is eventually carried off to bed by his servants. His dream and the ensuing discovery of the nature of the "ring" complete his humiliation.

The role of the narrator in this poem is not as prominent as it becomes in Prior's later poems. He makes only a few asides and comments on the action and the characters. He cites a proverb (deftly altered to fit the poetic line) when Hans thinks of using Satan to straighten up his wife's behavior: "For name Him and He's always near" (1. 72). He offers a brief ironic remark when he describes Hans, asleep and snoring, and his wife in bed after the party:

 In Bed then view this happy Pair;
And think how HYMEN Triumph'd there.
(11. 121-22)

In his later tales Prior more fully develops the narrator's function, where he uses him to introduce the story and occasionally to provide a moral for it. Here Prior remains relatively close to the point of the tales in his source; later he will significantly alter the theme, primarily through his narrator. "Hans Carvel," then, is Prior's enriched version of a conventional tale enlivened with freshly imagined characters and some amusing dialogue, though such additions scarcely redeem the bawdy joke at the end.

"The Ladle" (1704), though similar to "Hans" in its ribaldry, offers some further refinements in narrator, theme, and characterization. The story is adapted from the familiar tale of Baucis and Philemon as found in Ovid's Metamorphoses (8.626-724) and recently translated by Dryden for his Fables. The pious but poor couple, it will be recalled, are rewarded for their goodness and hospitality by Jupiter and Mercury, who visit the earth incognito and find no one else willing to share their substance with them. Angered by the rudeness and lack of charity they have encountered among the rest of the population, the gods flood the earth, saving only the modest house of the old couple, which is then transformed into a temple with them as priests. Moreover, in accordance with their wishes, Baucis and Philemon are allowed to die at the same time so neither will outlive the other. This is a tale told in Ovid's poem by the worthy Lelex to demonstrate the power and justice of the gods and to rebuke the scoffing unbelief of Pirithous. Prior, however, uses only the general outline of this story of divine retribution, focusing less upon the kindness and humility of his old people than upon the nature of their wishes and the way these are expressed.¹¹ He also adapts the ending of the tale to one he apparently found in another source, Edmund Gayton's Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixot (1654),¹² in which the ladle plays a significant part. This creates another amusing ending, but the whole poem offers a good deal more than jest.

One of Prior's chief additions to the story is a prominent narrator who contributes a long prologue and a moral at the end. Although Samuel Johnson declared that the prologue was "neither necessary nor pleasing, neither grave nor merry,"¹³ it does, nevertheless, focus our attention on the theme of the gods' visit and uses contemporary terms in which to discuss it, thus bringing the story into Prior's own world. The issue is the credibility of such divine visits to this world, as it appears to a sophisticated modern observer. The narrator begins,

The Scepticks think, 'twas long ago,
Since Gods came down Incognito,
To see Who were Their Friends or Foes,
And how our Actions fell or rose:
That since They gave Things their Beginning;
And set this Whirligig a Spinning;
Supine They in their Heav'n remain,
Exempt from Passion, and from Pain:
And frankly leave us Human Elves,
To cut and shuffle for our selves:
To stand or walk, to rise or tumble,
As Matter, and as Motion jumble.
(1:202; 11. 1-12)

These skeptics clearly represent a version of the deists and their idea of a creator who was, for some of them at least, simply a passive observer of the human world. A debate was then raging in England over the deists and freethinkers, like Charles Blount, John Toland, and Anthony Collins, and their skeptical doctrines.¹⁴ The narrator, of course, does not seriously enter this debate, but describes it from a mock-objective point of view, indicating that it is impossible to determine which side is right. He concludes that we may take whatever position pleases us, which, for the purposes of the story, will be that the gods do make such visits. The narrator's comments on the contentious nature of this dispute underscore its ridiculous side:

These Points, I say, of Speculation
(As 'twere to save or sink the Nation)
Men idly learned will dispute,
Assert, object, confirm, refute:
Each mighty angry, mighty right,
With equal Arms sustains the Fight;
'Till now no Umpire can agree 'em:
So both draw off, and sing Te Deum.
(11. 37-44)

The narrator mocks such self-righteous, futile disputation as well as the role of the gods in protecting their mythological heroes in fashionable painters like Veronese and Caracci, whose large paintings, he playfully suggests (11. 13-36), inflate the gods' power and care for their favorites on the earth.¹⁵ Art is a subject that Prior introduces into several of his tales, here clearly treating poets and painters who create such grandiose works glorifying the classical gods with some irony.

The moral of the story given by the narrator at the end (and in the 1709 edition of Prior's poetry set off by italics) transforms the central theme.¹⁶ In it the restless and generally misguided human quest for happiness becomes the focus, instead of Lelex's piety and the divine rewards for goodness. The narrator offers a penetrating critique of humanity's perennial desire to find ultimate satisfaction in more and more material or social goods, or whatever it is we believe we lack:

This Commoner has Worth and Parts,
Is prais'd for Arms, or lov'd for Arts:
His Head achs for a Coronet:
And Who is Bless'd that is not Great?
 Some Sense, and more Estate, kind Heav'n
To this well-lotted Peer has giv'n:
What then? He must have Rule and Sway:
And all is wrong, 'till He's in Play.
 The Miser must make up his Plumb,
And dares not touch the hoarded Sum:
The sickly Dotard wants a Wife,
To draw off his last Dregs of Life.
(11. 149-60)

From the upper classes to the lower, people create their own unhappiness through an insatiable need to discover the final answer to their search, the one thing needful to complete their felicity. This sounds Johnsonian, and a connection between the two writers has indeed been suggested.¹⁷

To build toward this idea Prior revised the story to give it a more contemporary, realistic dress. As in Ovid's tale, the gods arrive to find a farm where all seems well. The soil is prosperous, and the people are hospitable and industrious. Prior's gods, however, do not test the hospitality of their neighbors, nor, unlike the Ovidian originals, is his couple perfectly happy together. In fact, over the years they have experienced the usual domestic problems:

 The honest Farmer and his Wife,
To Years declin'd from Prime of Life,
Had struggl'd with the Marriage Noose;
As almost ev'ry Couple does:
Sometimes, My Plague! sometimes, My Darling!
Kissing to Day, to Morrow snarling;
Jointly submitting to endure
That Evil, which admits no Cure.
(11. 79-86)¹⁸

Using the half-line of the tetrameter couplet within which to focus the conflicts and contradictions of his ordinary humans, Prior plays off his realistic vision of marriage against the ideal one found in Ovid's tale. Such a jarring relationship, he implies, is inevitable within this human institution made up of imperfect beings. A stoical acceptance of our fate is the only solution.

Prior introduces further changes in the dinner the old couple prepare for the gods. Instead of dwelling at length on the homely fare they provide like Ovid, he depicts a more courtly and sophisticated scene, with less emphasis on its material nature.¹⁹ The gods greet the old couple as if they were in fashionable society without, of course, any warrant in the original:

 Jove made his Leg, and kiss'd the Dame:
Obsequious HERMES did the same.
Jove kiss'd the Farmer's Wife, You say.
He did—but in an honest way:
Oh! not with half that Warmth and Life,
With which He kiss'd AMPHITRYON'S Wife.
(11. 99-104)

The incongruity of manner and setting is the source of much of the ironic humor along with the narrator's allusion to Jove's amorous liaison with Alcmena (which produced Hercules). Their conversation at the dinner is also a model of contemporary discussion of politics and social reform, as they "Fight o'er the Wars; reform the State: / A thousand knotty Points they clear" (11. 96-97). Like the debate over the gods visiting the earth, such a discussion clearly leads nowhere. Although Prior loses some of the charm of Ovid's rustic meal and home in these alterations, he gains in keeping the narrator firmly in control and in maintaining a tone of playful irony. Prior's version, obviously, is quite a different poem from Ovid's.

Human folly dominates the ending of Prior's poem as he adapts the surprise that he found in Gayton and draws from it psychological and moral conclusions. After being received so kindly and hospitably, the gods give the couple three wishes for immediate fulfillment with no limitation on the content. The wife, after thanking the gods for their goodness, blurts out that she would like "A Ladle for our Silver Dish" (1. 135), exposing her thoughtlessness as well as her trivial and selfish materialism. The husband proves to be just as thoughtless, exclaiming in response to her foolish wish, that he would like to see the ladle "in [her] A[rse]" (1. 140). Both wishes are promptly fulfilled, so that the third must be used to remove the ladle. Such, Prior suggests, is the foolishness of human nature that, when it has happiness within its grasp, it will inevitably allow opportunity to go unrealized. The narrator draws the final moral then in the last ten lines of the poem, after detailing the various ways people let their obsessions rule their lives and bring about their own unhappiness:

 Against our Peace We arm our Will:
Amidst our Plenty, Something still
For Horses, Houses, Pictures, Planting,
To Thee, to Me, to Him is wanting.
That cruel Something unpossess'd
Corrodes, and levens all the rest.
That Something, if We could obtain,
Would soon create a future Pain:
And to the Coffin, From the Cradle,
'Tis all a WISTI, and all a LADLE.
(11. 161-70)

The elegiac tone for the fatal flaw in human nature that creates "all our woe" raises the level of the poem beyond the simple jest to a serious plane that manages to incorporate the humor without negating it. Comedy, satire, and seriousness fuse to produce light verse that transforms itself into something weightier without losing all of its charm.

"Paulo Purganti and His Wife: An Honest, but a Simple Pair" (1708) treats one of Prior's favorite subjects, the life of a couple and, in particular, their sexual relationship. No specific source for this tale has been identified, though La Fontaine's "Le Calendrier des Vieillards" (Contes, II, 8)²⁰ provides some parallels. La Fontaine, however, focuses on the conventional theme of the foolish old man who takes a young wife without being able to satisfy her physical needs. The old man, a judge in Italy, uses the large number of holy days to excuse himself from his marriage duties, and says that most other days may be unlucky or unpropitious for such activities. After his wife is captured by a pirate and learns about physical pleasure from him, she refuses to return to her husband, who soon dies from heartbreak. Prior's plot is quite different, since his central figure is an eminent doctor who uses his medical knowledge to suggest that his wife must be ill and in a fever when her desire becomes too importunate. Of course he is unable to withstand his wife's assault and eventually must give in, despite all the learned and moral barriers he raises in his defense. Prior, thus, does not use the disparity in age theme or the religious pretext in his tale.²¹ Its appeal comes from a greater exploration of character, particularly the woman's, as well as from a more original theme.

The doctor's wife is initially described as a very proper woman who has strong feelings about sexual virtue and propriety, both within marriage and without. She herself is chaste and faithful, and has little sympathy or tolerance for others' sins:

 On marry'd Men, that dare be bad,
She thought no Mercy should be had;
They should be hang'd, or starv'd, or flead,
Or serv'd like ROMISH Priests in SWEDE.—
In short, all Lewdness She defy'd:
And stiff was her Parochial Pride.

 Yet in an honest Way, the Dame
Was a great Lover of That same;
And could from Scripture take her Cue,
That Husbands should give Wives their Due.
(1:261; II. 47-56)

Without being a religious hypocrite the woman is still a striking and amusing anomaly because of the strength of her own sexual desire. Moreover, she supervises her husband's diet with great care, allowing him certain foods like "Oysters, Eggs, and Vermicelli" (65),²² but denying anything like wine and coffee, which may, it is hinted, weaken his sexual appetite. The doctor, too, is individualized through his speech and his actions. When resisting his wife's advances, he proves a skillful actor:

 The Doctor feign'd a strange Surprise:
He felt her Pulse: he view'd her Eyes:
That beat too fast: These rowl'd too quick:
She was, He said, or would be Sick:
He judg'd it absolutely good,

That She should purge and cleanse her Blood.
(11. 103-8)

Again Prior effectively manages the half-line of the couplet to suggest the urgent pace of the speech and action of the increasingly desperate doctor. In order to fend off his wife whose persistence is remarkable, the doctor brings to bear the authority of his learning with scholastic seriousness:

He rang'd his Tropes, and preach'd up Patience;
Back'd his Opinion with Quotations,
Divines and Moralists; and run ye on
Quite thro' from SENECA to BUNYAN.
(11. 138-41)

All is to no avail, naturally, in this unequal combat between the forces of nature and the eloquence of learning.

Once again Prior employs a narrator to enrich his tale. The first thirty-eight lines of the poem are his as he introduces the central concerns of the story. This prologue Samuel Johnson declared was "of more value than the Tale,"²³ probably because of the imaginative way in which Prior develops the ironic contrast between the "letter of the law" and the wife's sensual nature. He begins broadly philosophical:

Beyond the fix'd and settl'd Rules
Of Vice and Virtue in the Schools,
Beyond the Letter of the Law,
Which keeps our Men and Maids in Awe,
The better Sort should set before 'em
A Grace, a Manner, a Decorum;
Something, that gives their Acts a Light;
Makes 'em not only just, but bright.
(11. 1-8)²⁴

The narrator proceeds to take up the same question in painting as an analogy to general, human conduct, comparing one who lacks such "Grace" to a painter who draws well and according to rule, but who lacks the "Je ne scay quoy of Beauty" (1. 26) that will give his work the distinction of great art.²⁵ In real life, the narrator declares, though the popular preachers may not expose or identify such "Error," it will be brought to light and punished by the satiric wits, such as Wycherley and Congreve. Prior thus links his own art to that of the Restoration comic dramatists, a connection that is clearly appropriate. In the course of the story, the narrator adds further asides and comments on the action, referring to various classic and modern writers from Plutarch to Bunyan. He particularly uses historians like Livy and Philippe de Commines to lend a mock-serious tone to the battle between the doctor and his wife.²⁶ He also cites two contemporary doctors to support his view of his wife's disease:

 For a Distemper of this Kind,
(BLACKMORE and HANS are of my Mind)
If once it youthful Blood infects,
And chiefly of the Female Sex;
Is scarce remov'd by Pill or Potion;
What-e'er might be our Doctor's Notion.
(11. 113-18)²⁷

Such comments not only bring the action into modern England, but also lend it a certain universality by giving it a pseudo-scientific aura. Finally, near the end of the poem, the narrator remarks in a self-conscious intrusion that he must not digress or prolong the action too much:

 Reduce, my Muse, the wand'ring Song:
A Tale should never be too long.
(11. 150-51)

Without the witty, learned narrator, this tale would lose much of its richness, humor, and significance. Through him, we are given an amusing account of a conventional stereotype, the sexually insatiable woman married to a good, but rather passive and limitedintellectual who finds it impossible to resist the advances of his wife. Prior's version thus constitutes a largely original treatment of a common theme.

The final tale to be considered here, "Protogenes and Apelles," comes from another Latin source, Pliny's Natural History (XXXV, 36:81-83). Horace Walpole celebrated the superiority of Prior's version of this story of two Greek painters. Walpole declares that Prior reveals a superior artistic sensibility in comparison with Pliny's account of the rivalry "between two Dutch performers" (i.e., Protogenes and Apelles) who vie at drawing lines finer and straighter than the other. "But the English poet," Walpole asserts,

who could distinguish the emulation of genius from nice experiments about splitting hairs, took the story into his own hands, and in a less number of trials, and with bolder execution, comprehended the whole force of painting, and flung drawing, colouring, and the doctrine of light and shade into the noble contention of those two absolute masters.²⁸

Prior's expansion of the story, as Walpole accurately notes, broadens its significance for art as well as for human behavior. In Pliny's account the two artists compete at drawing one line on top of the other to show how precise each can be. After Apelles draws the first, Protogenes adds a second line much finer and in a different color. Apelles, however, is able to put on a third line in another color, forcing Protogenes to admit defeat. Prior, on the other hand, has Apelles draw a circle at first as his signature to let the other artist know he is in Rhodes. Protogenes then, when he returns home, adds color and shade to the circle to give it solidity and texture. Apelles acknowledges his rival's great ability and proclaims their joint mastery of drawing and painting to the glory of "the Arts of GREECE!" (1:465; 1. 84). Neither is said to have won the competition; both are masters in their field.

As usual, Prior employs a narrator to interpret his tale. In the prologue the narrator identifies the historical setting of the story in artistic terms as coming before the barbarity of "GOTHIC Forms" and "Monkish Rhimes / Had jangl'd their fantastic Chimes" (11. 3-6—even while using rhyme, of course). This epoch was a kind of golden age of art "When Poets wrote, and Painters drew, / As Nature pointed out the View" (11. 1-2). The specific Greek island where the action takes place provides the narrator with the occasion for another satiric aside. It is "on the flow'ry Lands of RHODES" where

Those Knights had fix'd their dull Abodes,
Who knew not much to paint or write,
Nor car'd to pray, nor dar'd to fight.
(11. 7-10)

The Middle Ages thus provides a contrast to the civilization that came before it in Greece, and, by implication, to Prior's own age. These were the dark ages that cared not for the arts or even for the religion to which they were supposedly dedicated. From such comments we know that we are in the presence of a witty, sophisticated narrator. Occasionally he interjects a comment on the action of the poem, as he does when he describes the housemaid who answers Apelles's ring at Protogenes's door:

If Young or Handsom, Yea or No,
Concerns not Me, or Thee to know.
(11. 27-28)

Such an interruption, of course, reminds us of the very thing he pretends to want to dismiss. When the maid invites Apelles to return at tea time to see her master, the narrator anticipates an objection a skeptical reader might make:

 Tea, says a Critic big with Laughter,
Was found some twenty Ages after:
Authors, before they write, shou'd read:
'Tis very true; but We'll proceed.
(11. 45-48)

He notes the anachronism, but insouciantly dismisses its importance and proceeds with his story without bothering to argue in his own defense. At the conclusion, then, the narrator draws the moral. It is not what one might expect:

That the distinguish'd Part of Men,
With Compass, Pencil, Sword, or Pen,
Shou'd in Life's Visit leave their Name,
In Characters, which may proclaim
That They with Ardor strove to raise
At once their Arts, and Countrey'sPraise:
And in their Working took great Care,
That all was Full, and Round, and Fair.
(11. 95-102)

Such a meaning is, of course, without precedent in Pliny. Prior leaves us with an image that not only echoes the circle Apelles drew and that Protogenes embellished, but also suggests the significance of personal fulfillment and self-realization in the arts as well as, more generally, in life. Thus, Prior's story takes on far broader implications than the original.

Perhaps the most interesting addition Prior makes to his source is in character development and interaction. The encounter between the maid or "Governante" and Apelles becomes the central focus of the action, not, as we might expect, the confrontation between the two artists. Protogenes only appears indirectly when the maid quotes his words to Apelles. She and the artist from Co (modern-day Kos) engage in a revealing and amusing interchange in which Prior conveys a remarkably rich sense of character and feeling in very few lines. When the maid tells Apelles that Protogenes is not at home, she reveals herself to be a wonderful combination of garrulity, politeness, and respectful modesty:

I hope, Sir, You intend to stay,
To see our VENUS: 'tis the Piece
The most renown'd throughout all GREECE,
So like th 'Original, they say:
But I have no great Skill that Way.
(11. 36-40)

Indeed, Prior puts a great deal more emphasis on her than is warranted either by his source or by the story itself. He seems to delight in drawing her portrait and dramatizing this encounter. When she takes the board with Apelles's circle on it to keep for her master to see, she promises,

I shall not fail to tell my Master:
And, Sir, for fear of all Disaster,
I'll keep it my own self: Safe bind,
Says the old Proverb, and Safe find.
So, Sir, as sure as Key or Lock—
Your Servant Sir—at Six a Clock.
(11. 61-66)

As a personality, she is as lively and interesting as the great artist Apelles, whose speech and behavior offer a subtle contrast with hers.²⁹ When she invites him to tea, he immediately accepts:

                 Fair Maiden, yes:
Reach me that Board. No sooner spoke
But done. With one judicious Stroke,
On the plain Ground APELLES drew
A Circle regularly true:
And will you please, Sweet-heart, said He,
To shew your Master this from Me?
By it He presently will know,
How Painters write their names at CO.
(11. 50-58)

Concise, familiar, decisive, and proud, Apelles is a living character in his own right, speaking and acting in his own idiom and for his own motives. Prior's presentation of these mixed characters, who are neither perfect nor evil nor absurd, as they interact in an ordinary situation is a tribute to his literary powers as well as to his sympathetic understanding of common and uncommon people. In this brief encounter between artist and maid, man and woman, Prior renders, in almost gratuitous fashion with no larger point or purpose, a delicate and nuanced portrait of a modestly dramatic scene, where the interaction itself with its sparks of human feeling takes on greater import than the subject of their conversation. The two artists never actually meet in the poem or discuss their artistic theories other than indirectly through their sketches. Art, clearly, takes second place to human relationships. For a witty and sometimes sharp satirist, Prior often found in the undistinguished as well as the distinguished, and their intersection, a genuine source of interest, admiration, and amusement.

These tales are, of course, not the only poems in which Prior reveals his powers as a narrative poet, others, like "Jinny the Just" (1708) and "An Epitaph" (1718), having long been recognized as among his finest. But the four tales discussed here reveal most clearly several characteristic themes and techniques that came to be associated with his most appealing work: a sophisticated narrator who comments urbanely on the action, vivid characters who engage in amusing and revealing dialogues, and a broad tone of acceptance for the mixed condition of human life. He seems to have been an instinctively dramatic poet who loved to explore and expose the ordinary and commonplace behind the unusual. In addition, Prior transplants his borrowed stories into English society, playing with the clash of time or culture that results. He thus gives a contemporary English twist to a rich tradition drawn from the French, Italian, and Latin literatures that he knew well. Moreover, the poise between delight and ridicule, between amused tolerance and incisive exposure, that we find in Prior's later poetry reflects his growth toward a fuller appreciation for the complexity of human nature. The longer he wrote, the less interested he was in stock characters and action, and the more concerned he came to be with depicting the amusing contradictions of human behavior without losing a sense of the intrinsic interest of even the most commonplace life. Prior, I believe, stands near the beginning of the spread of the democratizing spirit that increasingly empathized with common humanity. His poetry is not by any means revolutionary, but its wide-ranging sympathy for many people at different levels in society reflects some of that new spirit. It is a sympathy, however, that never loses its keen sense of realism. As a result, his wit, characters, dialogue, and reworking of older literature create a delightful narrative poetry that is worthy of our continuing attention and recognition. Samuel Johnson first noted Prior's achievement in the verse tale, and it would be our loss, as Bertrand Bronson implies, to ignore it.

Notes

¹ Published in Facets of the Enlightenment: Studies in English Literature and Its Contexts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 26-44.

² Ibid., 43, 40.

³ Ibid., 42. These points are not found in Johnson's discussion of Prior's tales in the Lives of the Poets.

⁴ None of the four tales makes it into The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), nor does Margaret Doody discuss any of them in her excellent study The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). A good many years ago John W. Draper surveyed eighteenth-century tales and mentioned Prior's work in this genre, citing "The Ladle" in particular as an example of concision in such narratives ("The Metrical Tale in Eighteenth-Century England," PMLA 52 [1937]: 396).

⁵ H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears eds., The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 2:880. All quotations of Prior's poetry are taken from this edition, which will be cited hereafter as Works. The first reference to each poem gives volume, page, and line numbers; subsequent references cite only lines.

⁶ Veronica Bassil, "The Faces of Griselda: Chaucer, Prior, and Richardson," TSLL 26 (Summer 1984): 162; see also, Charles K. Eves, Matthew Prior: Poet and Diplomatist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 217.

⁷ John C. Lapp, The Esthetics of Negligence: La Fontaine's Contes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 172. Lapp does not think much of La Fontaine's version of this story either, calling it "this rather unrewarding anecdote" (p. 137) taken from Rabelais.

⁸ La Fontaine, Contes et Nouvelles, ed. Edmond Pilon et Fernand Dauphin (Paris: Gamier Freres, 1958), 114.

⁹ La Fontaine merely says she is "du bon poil, ardente, et belle / Et propre a l'amoureux combat" (Contes, 113).

¹⁰ In the clinging ivy image Hans's wife echoes Statira's description of Alexander's sensual appeal:

From every pore of him a perfume falls,
He kisses softer than a southern wind,
Curls like a vine, and touches like a god.
(I.ii.42-44)

It is also true that The Rival Queens had by this time become the object of a good deal of mockery: "by the late 1690's most references [to the play] are humorous" (P. J. Vernon, Introduction to The Rival Queens [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970], xvii). Accordingly, many of Prior's readers would undoubtedly have understood the humor in this ironic allusion.

¹¹ Swift wrote another version of this story after Prior's, which may have influenced him. Pat Rogers believes that the "folk element in style and allusion [in Swift's poem] derives from Prior's free treatment of the same story in The Ladle (1704). Swift's opening lines answer directly to the start of The Ladle" (Jonathan Swift, The Complete Poems [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983], 633). Swift's poem, however, is quite different from Prior's version, changing Ovid's story into a religious satire.

In his "Observations on Ovid's Metamorphoses," a collection of notes that Prior may have intended to form into an essay before his untimely death, he mentions the parallels between this story and the biblical story of Lot and the two angels (Works 1:666). In this regard Prior appears to have been following George Sandys's moralized commentary on the Metamorphoses (see Ovid's 'Metamorphosis': Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970], 393). From such a note we can see the seriousness with which Prior interpreted classical poetry, so we should not be surprised that his own can be serious as well.

¹² Wright and Spears print the relevant passage from Gayton (Works 2:889).

¹³Lives of the Poets, 2 vols., The World's Classics (London: Oxford University Press, 1906; repr. 1967), 2:14.

¹⁴ Dryden, the Boyle lecturers, and others had attacked the deists from the late seventeenth century, and the controversy ran well into the eighteenth century. Phillip Harth has called this debate the "longest and most heated religious controversy of the eighteenth century" (Contexts of Dryden's Thought [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968], 61). Samuel Clarke, who was Boyle lecturer in 1704 and 1705, criticized the deists and Leibnitz in particular for advocating the notion that the universe was "a great machine, going on without the interposition of God, as a clock continues to go without the assistance of a clockmaker" (quoted by Franklin L. Baumer, Religion and the Rise of Scepticism [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960], 86). Such a metaphor, Baumer notes, was "quite common in intellectual circles by the late seventeenth century" (79).

¹⁵Works 1:203. Of course both Veronese and the Carracci (especially Annibale) were among the most admired painters of the time (see Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry From Dryden to Gray [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958], 163-65). Prior himself had a small sketch by Veronese, and Pope included both these artists among the six that he and Jervas should see in their imaginary voyage to Italy ("Epistle to Mr. Jervas" [1716]), the other four being Raphael, Guido Reni, Titian, and Correggio. Prior does not mean seriously to disparage Veronese and Carracci, but in a lightly mocking way to suggest that even the greatest painters depend upon a kind of inflation of their subject through mythological allusion and images.

¹⁶ Frances Mayhew Rippy notes the seriousness of the moral by relating it to Prior's "Serious Reflections" and Soloman. She points out that this moral is "distinctively his, as it often is in his serious meditations upon the vanity and frivolity of human wishes" (Matthew Prior [Boston: Twayne, 1986], 78-79).

¹⁷ Ian Jack, "The 'Choice of Life' in Johnson and Matthew Prior," JEGP 49 (1950): 523-30. Jack, however, focuses only on Johnson's debt in The Vanity of Human Wishes to Prior's Soloman or the Vanity of the World (1718).

¹⁸ In contrast to Prior, Ovid emphasizes the perfectly loving and harmonious nature of their relationship:

There Baucis and Philemon liv'd, and there
Had liv'd long marry'd, and a happy Pair:
Now old in Love, though little was their Store,
Inur'd to Want, their Poverty they bore,
Nor aim'd at Wealth, professing to be poor.
For Master or for Servant here to call,
Was all alike, where only Two were All.

Command was none, where equal Love was paid,
Or rather both commanded, both obey'd.

(Trans. John Dryden, The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958], 4:1566; 11. 32-40).

¹⁹ Prior's narrator pointedly remarks on his refusal to describe meals and banquets in elaborate detail in contrast to that usually found "In Epic sumptuous" (1. 109). Ovid dwells at length on the specific food Baucis and Philemon offer the gods, from the cabbage and bacon to the olives, cherries, endive, radishes, etc. In other words, they have put out all they have for their guests without knowing who the gods are, going so far as to try to seize their only goose, the "watchdog" of their property, to make a more substantial meal. The goose is too quick for them, of course, escaping to the protection of the strangers. At this point the gods reveal who they are and proceed to reward Baucis and Philemon for their generosity.

²⁰ La Fontaine took his story from Boccaccio (Decameron, II, 10), keeping quite close to his source and making a "plea for the rights of nature," according to Lapp, Esthetics of Negligence, 72.

²¹ These themes were central to La Fontaine's story. Because of the manifest differences between Prior's version and the French writer's, Wright and Spears conclude that "there is nothing to suggest that [Prior] was indebted to La Fontaine or Boccaccio" (Works 2:903).

²² These foods appear in P. V. Taberner's extensive list of aphrodisiacs in Appendix 1 of his Aphrodisiacs: The Science and the Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 257-62. They also appear in Byron's Don Juan (Canto 2, st. 170), where he describes the flowering of love between Juan and Haidee:

While Venus fills the heart, (without heart, really,
 Love, though good always, is not quite so good,)
Ceres presents a plate of vermicelli,—
 For Love must be sustained like flesh and blood,—
While Bacchus pours out wine, or hands a jelly:
 Eggs, oysters, too, are amatory food;
But who is their purveyor from above
Heaven knows,—it may be Neptune, Pan, or Jove.
(Don Juan, ed. Leslie A. Marchand [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958], 97).

²³Lives of the Poets 2:14.

²⁴ The epigraph, drawn from Cicero's On Moral Obligation, should have already alerted the reader to the serious intentions in the poem. The passage comes from Cicero's discussion of decorum or propriety in human behavior, a comprehensive virtue in Cicero's terms that includes "considerateness and self-control" together with "temperance, complete subjection of all the passions, and moderation in all things," and it is "inseparable from moralgoodness" (De Officis, Trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961], 97). Prior's poem is not philosophical, of course, but it clearly is more than fluff.

²⁵ This passage may remind us of Pope's similar remarks in the "snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art" passage in An Essay on Criticism (written ca. 1709), 11. 141-60. Like Prior, Pope fuses art and morality. Pope himself cites Quintilian, 2.13.6-7, to justify his praise of deviations from the rules. Samuel Holt Monk has documented the long tradition of commentators before Pope who had discussed the necessity for such a grace, or deviation from the rules, in order to achieve an effect beyond the mechanical or coldly perfect ("A Grace Beyond the Reach of Art," JHI 5 [1944]: 131-50; repr. in Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack, rev. ed. [Hamden, Conn.: Archon Bks., 1968], 38-62). Apelles, Monk points out, was the prototype of grace and ease in painting from Pliny down to the Renaissance (40-41).

²⁶ Commines's Memoirs cover primarily the reigns of Louis XI (1461-83) and Charles VIII (1483-98), both of whom he served as an adviser. His book is an important contribution to our understanding of early modern France. Both he and Livy wrote extensively about the warfare involved in their histories.

²⁷ Sir Richard Blackmore, although the butt of many wits' scorn because of his tedious epics like Prince Arthur (1695) and King Arthur (1697) as well as his Satyr Against Wit (1700), was nevertheless a well-known and respected physician who attended both King William and Queen Anne. Sir Hans Sloane, was, of course, a distinguished physician, scientist, and collector, who served as secretary and later president of the Royal Society. If Blackmore's name might evoke some sense of mockery, Sloane's would not.

²⁸ Quoted by Wright and Spears, Works 2:958 (from Walpole's Introduction to Aedes Walpolianae [1752]).

²⁹ Charles Eves links her (and others like her in Prior's poetry) with the "sprightly nymphs of charming impertinence [who] proclaim themselves true sisters to the Olivias, the Melanthes, the Millamants, [and] the Florimels of Restoration comedy" (Matthew Prior, p. 376). Prior certainly drew on the Restoration dramatists for his character portraits, though he usually displays greater sympathy for his subjects than they do.