And glorious must their triumph be!
Such was the temper of men who had looked with philosophic composure and curiosity on the movements of the sometimes well-nigh frenzied abolitionists. The blow at the integrity of the nation fired their cool patriotism to white heat.
What lightness of touch Bryant had is shown in that exquisite lyric ‘The Stream of Life.’ He could be conventional, as in the love poem where he celebrates ‘the gentle season’ when ‘nymphs relent,’ and very sensibly advises the young lady ’ere her bloom is past, to secure her lover.’ He was not strong in wit or humor. The verses ‘To a Mosquito’ might have been read with good effect to a party of well-fed clubmen after dinner, but finding them in the same volume with ‘A Forest Hymn’ gives one an uncomfortable surprise, like finding a pun in Lowell’s Cathedral. That Bryant could write agreeable narrative verse, ‘The Children of the Snow’ and ‘Sella’ bear witness. That he is at his best in meditative poems, lofty characterizations of Nature, grand visions of Life and Death, is proved by hundreds of felicitous verses which have become an inalienable part of our young literature.
He never really excelled the work of his youth. Bryant will always be known as the author of ‘Thanatopsis.’ This great vision of Death is his stateliest poem and his best, the most felicitous of phrase and the loftiest in imagery. Written by a stoic, magnificently stoical in tone, it offers but a stoic’s comfort after all. Perhaps this is a secret of its popularity, on the theory that while professed pagans are few the instinct towards paganism still exists, and most among those who say least about it.
V
LATEST POETICAL WORK THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY
The collected edition of Bryant’s poems of 1854 contains a handful of translations, twelve from the Spanish, four from the German, one each from the French, the Provençal, the Portuguese, and the Greek. In 1864 a translation of the fifth book of the Odyssey was printed in the volume entitled Thirty Poems. The praise which it called out gave Bryant the impulse to further experiments of the same sort; and after the death of his wife (in 1866), when the necessity was upon him of forgetting his grief so far as possible in some engrossing work, he undertook a version of the Iliad and the Odyssey entire.
He gave himself methodically to the task, translating about forty lines a day. Later he increased the daily stint to seventy-five lines. He chose blank verse because ‘the use of rhyme in a translation is a constant temptation to petty infidelities.’
Bryant retained the misleading Latin forms of proper names. Worsley says: ‘Not even Mr. Gladstone’s example can now make Juno, Mercury, and Venus admissible in Homeric story.’ But Worsley confessed his own inability to write Phoibos, Apollôn, and Kirké. Bryant’s argument for his course looks specious: ‘I was translating from Greek into English, and I therefore translated the names of the gods, as well as the other parts of the poem.’ Probably he had an affection for the old nomenclature, a sentiment like Macaulay’s, who ‘never could reconcile himself to seeing the friends of his boyhood figure as Kleon, and Alkibiadês, and Poseidôn, and Odysseus.’[6]
An enthusiastic admirer of Bryant declares that in the opinion of ‘competent critics’ his versions of Homer ‘will hold their own with the translations of Pope, Chapman, Newman, or the late Earl Derby.’ Much depends on the question of what a ‘competent critic’ is, and which one of several competent critics is to be taken as final authority. Competent critics, who, by the way, seldom agree, have a habit of agreeing on anything sooner than the merits of a version of Homer. And when one remembers the fearful attack made by Matthew Arnold on Newman (‘Any vivacities of expression which may have given him pain I sincerely regret’)—he may well hesitate to take as a compliment the statement that Bryant will ‘hold his own’ with Newman.
The question of the higher merit of the poem rests with the experts at last. Pessimists all, they are discouragingly hostile to metrical versions of the Iliad. Yet the most uncompromising of them would hardly deny a lay reader the privilege of enjoying Homer, in so far as possible, through the medium of Bryant’s blank verse. They might even be persuaded to admit that this version has a peculiar adaptability to the needs of the public; that the clarity and beauty of the English, the dignified ease of the measure, the sustained energy and vigor of the performance as a whole, fit Bryant’s Homer in a high degree to the use for which it was intended. The argument from popularity, that always unsafe and often vicious argument, has a measure of force here. Granting that Homer in any honest translation is better than no Homer at all, may not the uncompromising scholars be called on to rejoice that this more than honest, nay, this admirable translation of the Iliad has sold to the extent of many thousands of copies? Where there are so many buyers, there must be readers not a few.