AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.
VIRGIL AND HORACE—II.
“Traduire Horace, et surtout le traduire en vers, est même devenu, depuis soixante ou quatre-vingts ans, et chez nous et en d’autres pays, une sorte de légère infirmité morale, et de douce maladie qui prend régulièrement un certain nombre d’hommes instruits au retour d’âge; c’est une envie de redevenir enfant, adolescent, de se reporter au temps des études qui nous étaient chères.” To translate Horace, says Sainte-Beuve, above all to translate him in verse, has become within the last sixty or eighty years, both in France and abroad, a kind of venial moral infirmity, a sort of mild fever, which periodically seizes a certain number of educated men as they find themselves growing old; and it has its source in the longing to renew our youth, to live over again the time of studies we were fond of.
Like all the sayings of that most delicate and spirituel of critics, this is so far true that most translations of Horace will be found, we think, to be the work of men advancing in life, and, in the majority of cases, to have grown up insensibly through a number of years. One does not sit down to a version of the Odes as to a version of the Æneid, beginning at the first line and going religiously through in order to the end. No; but we pick out an ode here and there, as the mood takes us and that fits the mood—some gay Ad Amphoram or Ad Asterien when we are young and sprightly, calidus juventâ; a nobler Ad Augustum or Ad Calliopen when we are older and graver, in the time of whitening locks—riding in the cars, it may be, walking in the street, smoking the after-dinner cigar; everywhere, in fact, that solitude gives us a chance to entertain the best of all good company. We turn it into such English as we can muster, and print it perhaps, or, better still, put it away in our portfolio; Horace must have had a prophetic eye on his coming translator when he gave that soundest of poetic counsels—unless Punch’s “Don’t” be sounder still:
“Nonumque prematur in annum
Membranis intus positis”—[[73]]
we put it away to be taken up again and again, lingered over fondly, touched up and polished, until the exact word is found for every elusive epithet, the precise equivalent for every tantalizing phrase, and the entire ode lies before us, its foreign garb bagging, indeed, a little here and there, but fitting as snugly as our art can make it, and we are content. That is a moment of such supreme satisfaction, of such tranquil triumph, as life but rarely yields. Less than any other that dabbles in ink has your true Horatian the fever of the type. His virtue is really—what virtue, alas! so seldom is in this perverse world—its own reward. Like Joubert, il s’inquiète de perfection bien plus que de gloire; to have hit upon what he feels to be a happy rendering is glory enough; enough that he and Horace should share his exultation; a felicitous adjective will put him in good-humor for a week. And so, before he well knows it, his portfolio is nearly full, and the notion first dawns upon him—the duty it almost seems—of sharing his good fortune with his fellows. “Rather would I have written the Quem tu Melpomene semel or the Donec gratus eram tibi,” cried Scaliger, “than to be king of Aragon.” Rather would I make a perfect translation of these or any other of the Odes, cries our Horatian, than to be king of all Spain, with all Cuba libre to boot—
“Quam si Libyam remotis
Gadibus jungas et uterque Pœnus
Serviat uni.”[[74]]
Somewhat in this wise, we fancy, have most versions of Horace come to be and to be printed; certainly, we incline to think, all the best versions. Thus, too, partly for the reason M. Sainte-Beuve gives, partly from the poet’s universality and the charm which lies in the very difficulty of the task—an impossibility Johnson called it, but it is one of those “sweet impossibilities” which ennoble failure—do we count so many renderings of single odes by famous men. There are few names eminent in English letters or statesmanship that are not thus allied to the genial Venusian—names, too, of the most diverse order. Not only poets like Cowper and Montgomery, Chatterton and Byron,[[75]] essayists like Addison, or dramatists like Congreve, Rowe, and Otway, but grave historians such as Mitford and Merivale, judges like Lord Thurlow and Sir Jeffrey Gilbert, philosophers like Atterbury and Sir William Temple, bitter satirists like Swift, tender sentimentalists like “Namby Pamby” Phillips, professors and prime ministers, doctors and divines, lords and lawyers, archdeacons and archtraitors, have joined in paying court to the freedman’s son. In his ante-room, or atrium, prim John Evelyn is jostled by tipsy Porson humming somewhat huskily one of the bacchanalian lyrics to a tune of his own (perhaps the Ad Sodales, i. 27, which that learned Theban has rendered with true Porsonian zest—a little too much so to quote); Warren Hastings there meets Edmund Burke in friendlier contest than at the bar of the House of Commons; Dr. Bentley takes issue with Archdeacon Wrangham over a doubtful reading; Mr. Gladstone leads a poetic opposition to Lord Derby in Englishing the Carmen Amabœum. In that modest cœnaculum we can greet these great men all on a familiar and equal footing, made one of them for the nonce by the fellowship of a common taste—nay, may even flatter ourselves that here, at least, we are at their level; that our poet’s door may even be opened to us sooner than to the tallest and wisest among them. It is true greatness has no prerogative in Horace; the meanest may win to his intimacy, be admitted to his penetralia, sooner than the mightiest. Of all the distinguished names we have quoted, few would have had much distinction as translators alone, though Bishop Atterbury’s versions, especially that of the Ad Melpomenen, iv. 2, are deservedly famous. Hastings’ translation of the Ad Grosphum, written during his passage from Bengal to England in 1785 (he was going home to the famous trial), merits notice for its curious adaptation to his Indian experiences:
“For ease the slow Mahratta spoils
And hardier Sikh erratic toils,
While both their ease forego....
“To ripened age Clive lived renowned,
With lacs enriched, with honors crowned,
His valor’s well-earned meed.
Too long, alas! he lived, to hate
His envied lot, and died too late
From life’s oppression freed.”
Another verse had perhaps a still more personal application; there is but a trace of it in the Latin:
“No fears his peace of mind annoy
Lest printed lies his fame destroy
Which labor’d years have won;
Nor pack’d committees break his rest,
Nor avarice sends him forth in quest
Of climes beneath the sun.”
The fashion of fitting Horace to contemporary persons and events was much in vogue in Hastings’ time and earlier. Creech tells us in his preface that he was advised “to turn the Satyrs to his own times.” It was carried out to the fullest extent in the well-known Horace in London of Horace and James Smith.
Within the past twenty-five or thirty years many complete versions of the Odes have been put forth, including those of H. G. Robinson, the Rev. W. Sewell (printed in Bohn’s Library), Lord Ravensworth, Mr. Whyte Melville, Mr. Theodore Martin, the late Prof. Conington, and the late Lord Lytton. Of these, Mr. Martin’s, which we should feel inclined to pronounce upon the whole the best, and the most notable Lord Lytton’s, have alone been reprinted here. In giving this pre-eminence to Mr. Martin’s work we are perhaps influenced by a strong individual liking, amounting even to a prepossession, in its favor, dating from that very potent time Sainte-Beuve speaks of—“le temps des études qui nous étaient chères.” When it first fell into our hands it was the only version we had yet seen which at all reproduced, even to a limited degree, for us its original’s charm. By many Prof. Conington’s translation, easy, fluent, and in the main faithful—just what, from his Æneid, one might expect it to be—will be preferred to Mr. Martin’s, which it certainly surpasses in single odes. As to the worst there need be no such doubt. The Rev. Mr. Sewell’s is not, perhaps, the worst possible version of the Odes, as one is half tempted to believe who remembers how it was recommended to the readers of the Dublin University Magazine long ago—how we relished that literary execution with all boyhood’s artless delight in slaughter! Time, alas! soon sobers that youthful vivacity of temper, and, better than Æsop, teaches us to respect the frogs whom it loves to revenge in kind. No; the possibilities and varieties of badness in this direction are unhappily too great for that; but it is as bad as need be—as need be, let us say, for admission to Bohn’s Library.[[76]] Great indulgence is certainly to be extended to translators of Horace; much is to be forgiven them; but one must finally draw the line, and probably most Horatians would feel like drawing the line at the Rev. Mr. Sewell.
It was in the process of pointing out this fact to that gentleman, in a review of his book in the magazine mentioned, that Mr. Martin some twenty years ago put forth, we believe, the first specimens of his own translation, which was completed and published some years later. Its success was immediate and deserved; for its positive no less than its comparative merits were great. Mr. Martin was one of the first to discern, or at least to put in acceptable practice, the true theory of translating the lighter odes—“a point of great difficulty,” as he truly says. “They are,” he adds, “mere vers de société invested by the language, for us, with a certain stateliness, but which were probably regarded with a very different feeling by the small contemporary circle to whom they were addressed. To catch the tone of these, to be light without being flippant, to be playful without being vulgar, demands a delicacy of touch which it is given to few to acquire, even in original composition, and which in translation is all but unattainable.” The graver odes have their own difficulties; but the skilful translator handles them more easily, we fancy, than the gay fluttering swarm of laughing Lydias and Neæras that flash athwart their statelier pomp like golden butterflies through the Gothic glooms of summer woods—butterflies whose glossy wings, alas! lose something of their down and brilliance at every, even the lightest and most loving, touch. The thought of a poem is always easier to transplant into other speech than its form. Ideas are essentially the same, whatever tongue interprets them—Homer’s Greek or Shakspeare’s English; but the infinite delicate shades of beauty or significance added to them by the subtle differences of words, by that beauty of their own and intrinsic value which, as Théophile Gautier puts it—himself a master of language—words have in the poet’s eyes apart from their meaning, like uncut and unset jewels, the deftest, most patient art of the translator toils in vain to catch. They vanish in his grasp like the bubble whose frail glories dazzle the eyes and mock the longing, chubby fingers of babyhood; to render them is like trying to paint the perfume of a flower.
Now, it is true enough, whatever iconoclasts like Stendhal may pretend, that in poetry thought cannot be divorced from form; it is the indissoluble union of both that makes the poem. Try to fancy any really great passage of verse expressed in other words, even of the same speech, and you see at once how important form is. Take once more Shakspeare’s
“Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty,”
and try to change or misplace a single word. One feels instantly that any change would be fatal; it almost seems, with such passages, as though noble thought and perfect word had been waiting for each other from all time until the high-priest of Apollo should come to wed them. To quote Sainte-Beuve again—the critic who wishes to instruct his readers can scarcely quote him too often: “Je conçois qu’on ne mette pas toute la poesie dans le métier, mais je ne conçois pas du tout que quand il s’agit d’un art on ne tienne nui compte de l’art lui-même et qu’on déprécie les parfaits ouvriers qui y excellent.”[[77]] Yet it is none the less true that a poem in which the idea is paramount is more susceptible of translation than one whose form is the chief element of its charm. One can imagine Wordsworth’s fine sonnet on Milton, “Milton, thou shouldst be with us at this hour,” being turned into Latin with comparatively little loss; indeed it has been so turned by one of the most accomplished of English scholars—Dr. Kennedy—into Alcaics of which the purity and finish make a fitting casket for that gem of poetry; though even here one feels the wide difference between the original of that immortal line,
“Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart,”
and the Latin
“Mens tua lumine
Fulgebat, ut sidus, remote,”
missing, as we do, the “lovely marriage of pure words,” that in the English is itself a poem. But take such a bit of verbal daintiness as George Darley’s “Sweet in her green dell the flower of beauty slumbers,” with its peculiar and saisissant rhythm, the perfection of verbal music; or Tennyson’s “Break, break, break,” where the poetry—and undeniable poetry it is—lies in a certain faint aroma of suggestion that seems to breathe from the very words, and try to reproduce the effect of them in other speech. As well try with earthly tools to rebuild Titania’s palace of leaf shadows and the gossamer, to weave her mantle on any mortal loom out of moonbeams and the mist.
Much the same is it to attempt to transfer to an English translation aught of the peculiar grace which invests Horace’s lightest lyrics with a charm we feel but cannot analyze, which resides in the choice of epithets, the arrangement of words, the cadence of the rhythm, the metrical form, and which yet is something more than any or all of these. The noble thought which lies embodied in the Justum et tenacem propositi virum we may not despair of rehabilitating, with somewhat of its proper majesty, in our own vernacular; but the shy, fugitive loveliness of that wildwood picnic to which the poet bids us, to forget the cares of life,
“Quo pinus et ingens albaque populus
Umbram hospitalem consociare amant
Ramis, et obliquo laborat
Lympha fugax trepidare rivo”
—what art can coax away from its native soil? Do we find it in Francis?—
“Where the pale poplar and the pine
Expel the sun’s intemperate beam;
In hospitable shades their branches twine,
And winds with toil, though swift, the tremulous stream”;
or in Creech—though Creech is here luckier than usual?—
“Where near a purling Spring doth glide
In winding Streams, and softly chide
The interrupting Pebble as it flows”;
or in Prout?—
“While onward runs the crooked rill,
Brisk fugitive, with murmur shrill”;
or in Lord Lytton?—
“Wherefore struggles and murmurs the rill
Stayed from flight by a curve in the shore.”
Even Mr. Martin gives it up, and presents us, instead of a translation, with a couplet which is very pretty English verse, but about as far from Horace as can be:
“Where runs the wimpling brook, its slumb’rous tune
Still murmuring as it runs to the hush’d ear of noon.”
It is passages such as this especially which have caused Horace to be called the untranslatable.
To come from theory to practice, it is in the lighter odes, and in those parts of all the odes the beauty of which in the original lies chiefly in expression, that all Horace’s translators have most conspicuously failed. Take Milton’s Ad Pyrrham, for example (Ode v.). The Ad Pyrrham is not only one of the most charming but also one of the most difficult of the minor odes, and for that reason among the oftenest translated. It is one of the many mitten-pieces wherein the inconstant bard seems to have taken a somewhat ostentatious delight in celebrating the numerous snubbings he had to put up with from the no less inconstant fair who were the objects of his brief and fitful homage. In it, as in the Ad Neæram (Epod. xv.) and the Ad Barinen (Carm. ii. 8), reproaches to the lady for her perfidy are mingled with self-gratulations on the poet’s own lucky escape and sinister warnings to his rival—the time-old strategy and solace of the discarded lover the world over. He has been shipwrecked, he says, on that treacherous sea of love; but having, the gods be praised! made shift to scramble ashore in safety, and got on some dry duds, sits in gleeful expectation of seeing his successor get a like ducking. The poem is simply a piece of mock heroics, for the counterpart of which we must look to such minglings of cynicism and sentiment as we find in the poetry of Praed and Thackeray and Locker, or, to a less degree, in many of Béranger’s lighter songs. The difference between the modern poets and the ancient is that in the former the sentiment is real, veiled under an affectation of cynicism: in the latter it is precisely the reverse. But, bearing that difference in mind, the translator may find in the methods of the poets named some hints for the handling of such odes as the Ad Pyrrham.
But how do the translators treat it? Take Milton’s famous version, which everybody knows:
“What slender youth bedewed with liquid odors
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou
In wreaths thy golden hair?
“Plain in thy neatness,” etc.
—’tis as solemn as a Quaker conventicle. Nor, with reverence be it said en passant, is it altogether free from graver faults; undeniably elegant as it is, this translation has had quite as much praise as it deserved. It is full of those Latin constructions Milton loved—“on faith and changed gods complain” for fidem mutatosque deos flebit, “always vacant” for semper vacuam, “unwonted shall admire” for emirabitur insolens, etc.—which are nowhere more out of place than in a translation from the Latin. Some, indeed, claim that they carry with them and impart a certain flavor of the original to those unacquainted with it; but this seems to us a view at once fallacious and superficial. The office of translation into any language is surely to reproduce the original in the idiom of that language as nearly as may be; and though the theory, like all theories, may be pressed to an excess—as we think Mr. Morris has pressed it, for example, in his translation of the Æneid—better that than such deformities as
“Always vacant, always amiable
Hopes thee.”
It is the suggestion not of Horace but of Milton here that is pleasant; it is because Milton’s natural English style is a highly Latinized and involved style that these oddities of his translation strike us less than in another. Sometimes, too, oddly enough for so good a scholar, he falls short of the full sense of his original. Potenti maris deo, the commentators tell us, means, not “the stern god of sea,” but “the god potent over the sea”; and “plain in thy neatness” for simplex munditiis misses the entire significance of the latter word, which implies something of grace and beauty. “Plain in thy neatness” suggests rather “Priscilla the Puritan maiden” than Pyrrha of the dull-gold hair. Ben Jonson’s
“Give me a look, give me a face
That makes simplicity a grace,”
hits Horace’s meaning exactly, and certainly far more poetically. Indeed, we often find in original English poetry much apter renderings than the translators give us. Prof. Conington knew this when he went to Shakspeare for “fancy free” as an equivalent for this very word vacuam we have been talking of—a perfect equivalent of its association did not make it a little un-Horatian—and to Matthew Arnold’s “salt, unplumbed, estranging sea” for the very best version we have seen of that most puzzling phrase (i. 3), “oceano dissociabili.”
This is, perhaps, a digression; but as we set out for a ramble, we have no apologies to make. Conington’s version, in the same metre as Milton’s, only rhyming the alternate lines, is not all so good as “fancy free,” though it gains from its rhyme a certain lightness lacking in that of Milton’s:
“What slender youth besprinkled with perfume
Courts you on roses in some grotto’s shade,
Fair Pyrrha? Say for whom
Your yellow hair you braid.
“So true, so simple! Ah! how oft shall he
Lament that faith can fail, that gods can change,
Viewing the rough black sea
With eyes to tempests strange,” etc.
So true, so simple! We are not much nearer to simplex munditiis than before. Martin is not here at his best, and Francis is unusually successful: “dress’d with careless art” and “consecrate the pictured storm” are felicities he does not always attain. Prout is chiefly noticeable for yielding to the almost irresistible temptation of a false beacon in intentata nites:
“I the false light forswear,
A shipwreck’d mariner”;
and Leigh Hunt’s, though but a paraphrase, is surely a very happy one:
“For whom are bound thy tresses bright
With unconcern so exquisite?”
and
“Though now the sunshine hour beguiles
His bark along thy golden smiles,
Trusting to see thee for his play
For ever keep smooth holiday,”
admirably elude, if they do not meet, the difficulties of the Latin. But in none of these, nor in any other rendering we have seen, is there any trace of that nuance of sarcasm or polite banter we seem to taste in the original. The only American version we remember to have met with is not in this respect more successful:
“In thy grotto’s cool recesses,
Dripping perfumes, lapped in roses,
Say what lissome youth reposes,
Pyrrha, wooing thy embrace?
Braid’st for whom those tawny tresses,
Simple in thy grace?
“Ah! how oft averted heaven
Will he weep, and thy dissembling.
And, poor novice, view with trembling
O’er the erewhile tranquil deep,
By the angry tempest driven,
Billowy tumult sweep;
“Now who in thy smile endearing
Basks, with foolish fondness hoping
To his love thou’lt e’er be open,
To his wooing ever kind,
Knowing not the fitful veering
Of the faithless wind?
“Hapless they rash troth who plight thee!
On the sacred wall my votive
Picture, set with pious motive,
Shows I hung in Neptune’s fane
My wet garments to the mighty
Monarch of the main.”
It may be said that this sly spirit of badinage which lurks, or to us, at least, seems to lurk, in the shadows of the lighter odes, like some tricksy Faun peering and disappearing through the thickets of Lucretilis, it is impossible to seize; that when we try it “the stateliness of the language” interposes itself like a wall, and we find ourselves becoming vulgar where Horace is playful, flippant where Horace is light. Doubtless this is so; what then? Because it is an impossibility, shall any loyal Horatian balk at it? It is just because of these impossibilities that translations are always in order, and will, to a certain extent, always be in demand. Translations of other poets pall; it is conceivable that a version of Virgil might be produced which human skill could not better. But no such thing being conceivable of Horace, every fresh version is a whet to curiosity and emulation; each separate ode hides its own agreeable secret, every epithet has its own individual surprise. Let there be no talk, then, of impossibilities; for our own part, to paraphrase what Hallam says of Lycidas, we look upon the ability to translate such odes as the Ad Pyrrham, so as to demonstrate their impossibility, a good test of a man’s capacity to translate Horace at all.
Another nice consideration for the translator of Horace is in respect of metre. Undoubtedly the translator who can retain the metrical movement of his original has gained so much towards reproducing his general effect. But with Horace this attempt may as well be abandoned at once. The Alcaic and the Sapphic stanza, much less the Asclepiad or the Archilochian, have never yet been, and for obvious reasons never will be, naturalized in our English verse, though poor Percival thought differently, and added one more to a life of failures. Tennyson, in his ode to Milton,
“Whose guardian-angels, Muriel, Abdiel,
Starred from Jehovah’s gorgeous armory,
Tow’r, as the deep-domed empyrean
Rings to the roar of an angel onset,”
gives us, perhaps, as good Alcaics as we have any right to look for in English (though “gōrgĕoŭs” is not a very gorgeous dactyl); yet how different from the Horatian cadence:
“Æquam memento rebus in arduis
Servare mentem, non secus in bonis
Ab insolenti temperatam
Lætitia, moriture Delli.”[[78]]
As for Sapphics, whether we take Canning’s Knife Grinder for our model or Mr. Swinburne’s
“All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close, and with eyes of iron,
Stood and beheld me,”
we are not much nearer to Horace’s melody:
“Scandit æratas vitiosa naves
Cura, nec turmas equitum relinquit
Ocior cervis, et agente nimbos
Ocior Euro.”[[79]]
But, at least, following that rule of compensation with which all good translators are familiar, some attempt may be made to suggest the metrical variety and richness of the Odes by a corresponding variety and grace in the English measures of the translation. It is here that the modern translators excel; indeed, it may be said that only within the last hundred years have translators had this adjunct at their command, for it is only during that period that English poets have begun to comprehend and master fully the resources and possibilities of English metre. Not that the earlier poets were at all deficient in the metrical sense; that their ears were not quick to catch the finest delicacies of verbal harmony. Not to mention a host of minor bards who knew how to marry “perfect music unto noble words,” Milton’s lyrics are melody itself. There is scarcely a more tunable couplet in the language than his
“Sweetest Shakspeare, fancy’s child,
Warbles his native woodnotes wild.”
The open vowels and liquid consonants fairly sing themselves. Nor was it for lack of experiment that they failed of
“Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony”
in words, as Shelley and Tennyson and Swinburne learned to do later. The attempt to naturalize the classical metres, for example, began at a very early period of our literary history, and many learned treatises were written to prove them your only proper vehicle for English poetry. Perhaps it was the ill-success of these efforts that made our poets so long shy of wandering in their metres away from the beaten track and the simplest forms. Up to the time of Campbell we may say that the iambus and the trochee reigned supreme in English verse; the anapest and the dactyl, of which such effective use has been made by the later poets, were either unknown or contemned. Suckling’s Session of the Poets, the metrical intention of which appears to be anapestic, shows what desperate work even the best lyrists could make when they strayed after strange metrical gods.[[80]]
It may be said, then, that until within a comparatively recent period Horace could not be properly translated into English verse at all. English verse was not yet ready to receive so noble a guest. Compare Martin’s or Conington’s versions with one of the earlier translations, and the truth of this, we think, will be apparent at once. Creech, indeed, seems to have had a dim notion of the truth, and his version shows a perceptible striving for metrical effect, at least in the arrangement of his stanza; but Creech had too little of the poetical faculty to make the effort with taste or success. Francis for the most part is content with the orthodox measures, and Father Prout was perhaps first to bring to the work this essential accomplishment of the Horatian translator. Prout’s metrical inventions are bold, and often elegant; and his versions, though free, are always spirited, and often singularly felicitous. Among the most striking of his metres is the one he employs for the Solvitur acris hiems (Carm. i. iv.):
“Now Venus loves to group
Her merry troop
Of maidens,
Who, while the moon peeps out,
Dance with the Graces round about
Their queen in cadence;
While far ’mid fire and noise
Vulcan his forge employs,
Where Cyclops grim aloft their ponderous sledges poise.”
A paraphrase that, not a translation; but not even Horace could find it in his heart to gainsay so graceful a paraphrase. Another effective metrical arrangement which shows off well Prout’s astonishing copiousness of rhyme is that of the Quum tu Lydia (i. 13):
“But where meet (thrice fortunate!)
Kindred hearts and suitable,
Strife comes ne’er importunate,
Love remains immutable;
On to the close they glide ‘mid scenes Elysian,
Through life’s delightful vision.”
Mr. Martin is here somewhat closer and not less skilful in handling his metre:
“Oh! trebly blest, and blest for ever,
Are they whom true affection binds,
In whom no doubts or janglings sever
The union of their constant minds;
But life in blended current flows
Serene and sunny to the close.”
Compare with these Francis, who is scarcely more literal than Prout, and not so literal as Martin:
“Thrice happy they whom love unites
In equal rapture and sincere delights,
Unbroken by complaints or strife
Even to the latest hours of life.”
Is not the advantage in point of poetry altogether on the side of the moderns, and is it not largely due to their superior mastery of rhythm? The passage, it may be said, has been paraphrased by Moore in the lines,
“There’s a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told,
When two that are linked in one heavenly tie,
With heart never changing and brow never cold,
Love on through all ills, and love on till they die.”
Both Mr. Martin and Prof. Conington have given close and successful attention to this part of their task. But it was left for Lord Lytton to attempt something like a systematic imitation of the Horatian metres. His plan, as set forth in his preface, “was in the first instance to attempt a close imitation of the ancient measure—the scansion being, of course (as in English or German hexameters and pentameters), by accent, not quantity—and then to make such modifications of flow and cadence as seemed to me best to harmonize the rhythm to the English ear, while preserving as much as possible that which has been called the type of the original.” Something of this kind, no doubt, Milton had in view in the measure he took for his Ad Pyrrham, and which the Wartons and Professor Conington adapted to the same purpose after him, the latter, however, adding the embellishment or, as Milton himself had called it, the “barbarous jingle” of rhyme. Milton’s measure (well known as that of Collins’ “Ode to Evening”), which consists of two unrhymed iambic pentameters, followed by two unrhymed iambic trimeters—or, to be “more English and less nice,” of two ordinary blank-verses followed by two three-foot verses—resembles Horace’s metre, which the grammarians would tell us is the third Asclepiadian strophe, “rather,” says Prof. Conington, “in the length of the respective lines than in any similarity of the cadences.” Lord Lytton attempted something more, and with only partial success, though the task, it must be owned, was not an easy one. Horace, in the Odes and Epodes, uses eighteen different varieties of metre, ranging from the grave sadness of what is called the first Archilochian strophe, the lovely measure in which one of the loveliest of all the Odes is written (iv. 7)—
“Diffugere nives; redeunt jam gramina campis
Arboribusque comæ,”[[81]]
to the quick sharpness of the first iambic strophe in which the poet mauls the unsavory Mævius. And not only this, but each of these metres is used by Horace to express widely differing moods of feeling. Thus, the same measure which in the beautiful lament for Quinctilius breathes the tenderest spirit of grief and resignation, serves equally well to guy Tibullus on his luckless loves, to sound “stern alarums” to the absent Cæsar, or to bid Virgil or Varius to “delightful meetings.” The Sapphic rises to the lofty height of the Carmen Seculare or stoops to chide a serving-boy for his super-serviceable zeal; is equally at home with an invocation to the gods or an invitation to dinner; while the Alcaic—what subject is there that in Horace’s hands the Alcaic cannot be made to sing?
This flexibility of the Latin metres Lord Lytton has recognized, and sought to meet by a corresponding variation of his own, “according as the prevalent spirit of the ode demanded lively and sportive or serious and dignified expression.” Thus, for the Alcaic stanza he employs “two different forms of rhythm”; one as in i. 9:
“See how white in the deep fallen snow stands Soracte;
Laboring forests no longer can bear up their burden;
And the rush of the rivers is locked,
Halting mute in the gripe of the frost”;
the other as in i. 34:
“Worshipper rare and niggard of the gods,
While led astray, in the Fool’s wisdom versed,
Now back I shift the sail,
Forced in the courses left behind to steer,”
or, with a slight modification, as in i. 35:
“Goddess who o’er thine own loved Antium reignest,
Present to lift Man, weighted with his sorrows
Down to life’s last degree,
Or change his haughtiest triumphs into graves.”
For the Sapphic, likewise, he has two varieties; for the statelier odes three lines of blank-verse and what may be called an English Adonic; for “the lighter odes a more sportive and tripping measure.” Thus, for iv. 2 he gives us:
“Julus, he who would with Pindar vie
Soars, with Dædalian art, on waxen wings,
And, falling, gives his name unto the bright
Deeps of an ocean”;
for iii. 14 a nearer approach to the Knife Grinder jingle:
“Nothing cools fiery spirits like a gray hair;
In every quarrel ’tis your sure peacemaker:
In my hot youth, when Plancus was the consul,
I was less patient.”
Lord Lytton’s experiment is full of interest to Horatians—as, indeed, what translation is not?—even the worst, even the Rev. Mr. Sewell’s, may be of use in teaching the translator how not to do it—and his failures, which are many, are scarcely less instructive than his successes, which seem to us fewer than for so bold an essay could be wished; but both alike are suggestive of many possibilities. It is in the lighter odes that he is least satisfactory, and we doubt if these can be done full justice to without the aid of rhyme. Horace’s grace of form in these is so delicate and exquisite that it taxes all the resources and embellishments of our English verse to give any adequate idea of it. Take, as an illustration of Lord Lytton’s method, and as giving, perhaps, the measure of his success, his version of that delicious little landscape, Ad Fontem Blandusiæ (iii. 13):
“Fount of Blandusia, more lucid than crystal,
Worthy of honeyed wine, not without flowers,
I will give thee to-morrow a kid
Whose front, with the budded horn swelling.
“Predicts to his future life Venus and battles;
Vainly! The lymph of thy cold running waters
He shall tinge with the red of his blood,
Fated child of the frolicsome people!
“The scorch of the Dogstar’s fell season forbears thee;
Ever friendly to grant the sweet boon of thy coolness
To the wild flocks that wander around,
And the oxen that reek from the harrow.
“I will give thee high rank and renown among fountains,
When I sing of the ilex o’erspreading the hollows,
Of rocks whence in musical fall
Leap thy garrulous silvery waters.”
This is better because more literal than Joseph Warton’s unrhymed version in the Miltonian stanza, with which it may be compared:
“Ye waves that gushing fall with purest streams,
Blandusian fount! to whom the products sweet
Of richest wines belong,
And fairest flowers of spring,
To thee a chosen victim will I slay—
A kid who, glowing in lascivious youth,
Just blooms with budding horn,
And, with vain thought elate,
Yet destines future war; but, ah! too soon
His reeking blood with crimson shall enrich
Thy pure, translucent flood
And tinge thy crystal clear.
Thy sweet recess the sun in midday hour
Can ne’er invade; thy streams the labor’d ox
Refresh with cooling draughts
And glad the wand’ring herds.
Thy name shall shine, with endless honors graced,
While in my shell I sing the nodding oak
That o’er thy cavern deep
Waves his embowering head.”
It would almost seem as if the author of this version had taken pains to rub out every Horatian characteristic. The pretty touch of the loquaces lymphæ is thus omitted, unless the first line be meant to do duty for it, while by such padding as “chosen victim” and “endless honors” Horace’s sixteen lines are diluted into twenty—a danger to which the unrhymed translator, constantly seeking by inversions and paraphrases to cover the baldness of his medium, is peculiarly liable. Whatever may be said to the contrary, rhyme compels conciseness, and helps to point quite as often as it entices to expansion. Prof. Conington’s version, in the same metre as Warton’s, but rhymed in alternate lines, will be found greatly superior to it, and is perhaps, on the whole, the best we have seen—better even than Mr. Martin’s, who cannot get his Latin into less than twenty-four octosyllabic lines. Instead of giving either, let us see if all that is essential in Horace cannot be given in the same number of lines of what is known as the Tennysonian stanza, which is somewhat less capacious than the Alcaics of the original, though, by a certain pensive grace, peculiarly fitted to render the sentiment of this delightful ode:
“Blandusian fount, as crystal clear,
Of garlands worthy and of wine,
A kid to-morrow shall be thine,
Whose swelling brows, just budding, bear
“The horns that presage love and strife;
How vainly! For his crimson blood
Shall stain the silver of thy flood
With all the herd’s most wanton life.
“The burning Dogstar’s noontide beam
Knows not thy secret nook; the ox
Parched from the plough, the fielding flocks,
Lap grateful coolness from thy stream.
“Thee, too, ‘mid storied founts my lay
Shall shrine: thy bending holm I’ll sing,
Shading the grottoed rocks whence spring
Thy laughing waters far away.”
Though terseness and fidelity are two of the chief merits claimed by the advocates of the unrhymed measures, it is just here that they oftenest fail; and Lord Lytton is no exception. Space permits us to give but few instances. “Trodden by all, and only trodden once,” is Lord Lytton’s version of calcanda semel, i. 28—seven English words for two Latin, and the sense then but vaguely given at best. Feriuntque summos Fulgura montes is in like manner diluted into
“The spots on earth most stricken by the lightning
Are its high places.”
Awkwardness of style, too, is a much more frequent characteristic of Lord Lytton’s renderings than we should look for either from his own command of style or the freedom which disuse of rhyme is claimed to ensure. For instance, in ii. 2:
“Him shall uplift, and on no waxen pinions,
Fame, the survivor,”
might surely have been bettered; and in the same ode a line in the stanza already quoted above, Latius regnes avidum domando Spiritum, is translated, “Wider thy realm a greedy soul subjected,” which would be scarcely intelligible without the Latin. “Bosom more seen through than glass” is by no means the neatest possible equivalent for per lucidior vitro, and such expressions as “closed gates of Janus vacant of a war,” “lest thou owe a mock,” “but me more have stricken with rapture,” are scarcely English.
Nevertheless, with all its faults and shortcomings, Lord Lytton’s essay is in some respects the most interesting translation of Horace that has yet appeared, and may pioneer the way to more fortunate results in the same direction. It has, at least, the raison d’être which Mr. Matthew Arnold denies to such translations as Wright’s and Sotheby’s Homer; it has a distinct and novel method of its own, and does not simply repeat the method and renew the faults and virtues of any predecessor. The American edition, it is worthy of remark, is printed in the old-fashioned way, with the Latin text to face the English—an innovation, or, more properly, a renovation, which will no doubt be welcome to lovers of the Venusian, whose love has outlived their memory, and who, though loyal to the spirit of our poet, are no longer so familiar with his letter as in the days, the far-off sunny days, when Horace was the heaviest task that life had yet laid upon us.
We have dwelt upon this subject at somewhat greater length than we intended; for to us it is full of a fascination we should be glad to hope we had made our readers in some sort share. But it has also a practical side which the most fanatical opponent of the classics, the most zealous upholder of utilitarian education, must recognize and admit. As a means of training in English composition, as an aid to discover the resources of our own tongue, there is no better practice than translating Horace into English verse, with due attention to his epithets. That, perhaps, may serve in some degree to reconcile the practical mind to his retention in the modern curriculum, even though Homer be kicked out of doors and Virgil sent flying through the window; for a practical man is none the worse equipped for business in being able to say what he means in “good set phrase.” To be sure it does not ask the pen of an Addison to write an order for a “hnd. trces. lard,” but we dare say if Mr. Richard Grant White were called upon to make out a bill of lading, he would do it none the worse for knowing all about the English language that is worth knowing, if not more than is worth telling. There are mysteries in our English speech that the Complete Letter-Writer, or even the “editorials” of the daily newspaper, do not quite explore, and some of these our old friend Horace may help us to find out. Fas est ab hoste doceri.