He had a considerable faculty for translating poetry, and its exercise made one of his favourite recreations. Having adopted the literal theory of the art, he kept strictly to the original metres, and thus fettered, got over the ground with more grace and ease than might have been expected. His first attempt with English hexameters was in a version of Schiller’s “Walk,” privately printed in 1842. He had come to love the poem through its association in his mind with a favourite stroll up the side of Table Mountain; and a translation of it in the Edinburgh Review leaving, as he thought, something to be desired, he tried his hand, and distributed the result “among his friends as his Christmas sugar plum.” The various acknowledgments made an amusing collection. One lady said that she “found it difficult to get into the step of the Walk.” Another correspondent declared that the Walk had got into a Run through ceaseless borrowing. A third qualified his encomium upon the ideas by adding, “To the verse I am averse.” Joanna Baillie, however, and her sister were delighted with both the substance and form of the poem, and it was included among Whewell’s “English Hexameter Translations” in 1847.
His success encouraged him, after twenty years, to undertake an indefinitely more difficult task. Pope’s Iliad he described happily as “a magnificent adumbration” of the original; but he aimed rather at producing a “fac-simile,” in
“Hexameters no worse than daring Germany gave us.”
His version should come as near as he could bring it to a photograph of a grand piece of architecture; and as a measure of its fidelity, he printed in italics all the words not in the text. Whewell remarked that it was “curious to see how few he had managed to make them,” and preferred his translation to any other with which he was acquainted. But English hexameters were a hobby of the Master of Trinity, who accordingly viewed with partiality what Tennyson called the “burlesque barbarous experiment” of thus lamely rendering “the strong-wing’d music of Homer.”
De Morgan, too, was one of the “averse.” “Many thanks for the hexameters,” he wrote, on receiving an instalment of the Collingwood Iliad; “they are as good as they can be, but all the logic in the world does not make me feel them to be English metre, and they give satisfaction only by reminding one of the Greek: just as, mark you, a flute-player—which I have been these forty-five years—only plays Haydn and Mozart because he has the assistance of the orchestral accompaniment which arises in his head with the melody. The hexameter, it is clear, does not fix itself in the popular mind. The popular mind knows neither quantity nor accent, but that which is to last bites its own way in, without any effort.”
Yet Herschel’s translation is not without merit. It is disfigured neither by affectation nor by magniloquence, and it catches here and there something of the greatness of the unapproached original. Let us take two specimens; this from the “Shield of Achilles”:—
“There he depicted the earth, and the canopied sky, and the ocean;
There the unwearied sun, and the full-orb’d moon in their courses.
All the configured stars, which gem the circuit of heaven,
Pleiads and Hyads were there, and the giant force of Orion.