"Of the making of many books there is no end," said the Wise Man of old. Of the making of good books there is frequently an end, say we. The good books of one year may be counted on the fingers of one hand. Among those of the present year none ranks higher than Taine's "Art in Greece," a translation of which, by Mr. John Durand, is published by Messrs. Holt & Williams. The French are a nation of critics, and Taine is the critic of the French. This could not have been said with truth during the lifetime of Sainte-Beuve, but since his death it is true. There is nothing, apparently, which Taine is not competent to criticise, so subtle is his intellect, and so wide the range of his studies, but what he is most competent to criticise is Art. We have heard great things of a History of English Literature by him, but as it has not yet appeared in an English dress (although Messrs. Holt & Williams have a translation of it in press) we shall reserve our decision until it appears. Art, it seems to us, is the specialty to which Taine has devoted himself, with the enthusiasm peculiar to his countrymen, and a thoroughness peculiar to himself. Others may have accumulated greater stores of art-knowledge—the knowledge indispensable to the historian of Art, and the biographer of artists—but none has so saturated himself with the spirit of Art as Taine. We may not always agree with him, but he is always worth listening to, and what he says is worthy of our serious consideration. We think he is too philosophical sometimes, but then the fault may be in us. It may be that we are so accustomed to the materialism of the English critics that we fail, at first, to apprehend the spirituality of this most refined and refining of Frenchmen. No English critic could have written his "Art in Greece," because no English critic could put himself in his place. We know what the English think of Greek Art, or may, with a little reading: what Taine thinks of it is—that it is what it is, simply because the Greeks were what they were. Before he tells us what Greek Art is, he tells us what the Greeks were. Nor does he stop here, but goes on to tell us, or rather begins by telling us, what kind of a country it was in which they dwelt, what skies shone over them, what mountains looked down upon them, in the shadow of what trees they walked within sight of the wine-dark sea. He begins at the beginning, as the children say. Whether he succeeds in convincing us that it was Greece alone which made the Greeks what they were, depends somewhat upon the cast of our minds, and somewhat upon our power to resist his eloquence. We think, ourselves, that he lays too much stress upon the mere outward environment of the Grecian people. The influence exercised over their lives, by the Institutions which grew up out of these lives—the influence, in short, of their purely physical culture—is admirably described, as is also the difference between this culture and ours:
"Modern people are Christian, and Christianity is a religion of second growth which opposes natural instinct. We may liken it to a violent contraction which has inflected the primitive attitude of the human mind. It proclaims, in effect, that the world is sinful, and that man is depraved—which certainly is indisputable in the century in which it was born. According to it, man must change his ways. Life here below is simply an exile; let us turn our eyes upward to our celestial home. Our natural character is vicious; let us stifle natural desires and mortify the flesh. The experience of our senses and the knowledge of the wise are inadequate and delusive; let us accept the light of revelation, faith and divine illumination. Through penitence, renunciation and meditation let us develop within ourselves the spiritual man; let our life be an ardent awaiting of deliverance, a constant sacrifice of will, an undying yearning for God, a revery of sublime love, occasionally rewarded with ecstasy and a vision of the infinite. For fourteen centuries the ideal of this life was the anchorite or monk. If you would estimate the power of such a conception and the grandeur of the transformation it imposes on human faculties and habits, read, in turn, the great Christian poem and the great pagan poem, one the 'Divine Comedy' and the other the 'Odyssey' and the 'Iliad.' Dante has a vision and is transported out of our little ephemeral sphere into eternal regions; he beholds its tortures, its expiations and its felicities; he is affected by superhuman anguish and horror; all that the infuriate and subtle imagination of the lover of justice and the executioner can conceive of he sees, suffers and sinks under. He then ascends into light; his body loses its gravity; he floats involuntarily, led by the smile of a radiant woman; he listens to souls in the shape of voices and to passing melodies; he sees choirs of angels, a vast rose of living brightness representing the virtues and the celestial powers; sacred utterances and the dogmas of truth reverberate in ethereal space. At this fervid height, where reason melts like wax, both symbol and apparition, one effacing the other, merge into mystic bewilderment, the entire poem, infernal or divine, being a dream which begins with horrors and ends in ravishment. How much more natural and healthy is the spectacle which Homer presents! We have the Troad, the isle of Ithica and the coasts of Greece; still at the present day we follow in his track; we recognize the forms of mountains, the color of the sea; the jutting fountains, the cypress and the alders in which the sea-birds perched; he copied a steadfast and persistent nature: with him throughout we plant our feet on the firm ground of truth. His book is a historical document; the manners and customs of his contemporaries were such as he describes; his Olympus itself is a Greek family."
The manifest inferiority of our mixed languages to their one simple language is stated in the following paragraph, with which we must leave Taine for the present:
"Almost the whole of our philosophic and scientific vocabulary is foreign; we are obliged to know Greek and Latin to make use of it properly, and, most frequently, employ it badly. Innumerable terms find their way out of this technical vocabulary into common conversation and literary style, and hence it is that we now speak and think with words cumbersome and difficult to manage. We adopt them ready made and conjoined, we repeat them according to routine; we make use of them without considering their scope and without a nice appreciation of their sense; we only approximate to that which we would like to express. Fifteen years are necessary for an author to learn to write, not with genius, for that is not to be acquired, but with clearness, sequence, propriety and precision. He finds himself obliged to weigh and investigate ten or twelve thousand words and diverse expressions, to note their origin, filiation and relationships, to rebuild on an original plan, his ideas and his whole intellect. If he has not done it, and he wishes to reason on rights, duties, the beautiful, the State or any other of man's important interests, he gropes about and stumbles; he gets entangled in long, vague phrases, in sonorous common-places, in crabbed and abstract formulas. Look at the newspapers and the speeches of our popular orators. It is especially the case with workmen who are intelligent but who have had no classical education; they are not masters of words, and, consequently, of ideas; they use a refined language which is not natural to them; it is a perplexity to them and consequently confuses their minds; they have had no time to filter it drop by drop. This is an enormous disadvantage, from which the Greeks were exempt. There was no break with them between the language of concrete facts and that of abstract reasoning, between the language spoken by the people and that of the learned; the one was a counterpart of the other; there was no term in any of Plato's dialogues which a youth, leaving his gymnasia, could not comprehend; there is not a phrase in any of Demosthenes' harangues which did not readily find a lodging-place in the brain of an Athenian peasant or blacksmith. Attempt to translate into Greek one of Pitt's or Mirabeau's discourses, or an extract from Addison or Nicole, and you will be obliged to recast and transpose the thought; you will be led to find for the same thoughts, expressions more akin to facts and to concrete experience; a flood of light will heighten the prominence of all the truths and of all the errors; that which you were wont to call natural and clear will seem to you affected and semi-obscure, and you will perceive by force of contrast why, among the Greeks, the instrument of thought being more simple, it did its office better and with less effort."
Among the good books of the year, two belong to a special walk of letters in which we have not hitherto excelled the English Translation. There are periods in the history of English Poetry when translation has played an important part. Such a period occurred just before the Shakspearean era, and it was noted for translations from the Latin poets. Chapman was the first English writer to perceive the greatness of the Greek poets, and, like the poet that he was, he attempted to translate the father of poets, Homer. Chapman's Homer is a noble work, with all its faults; but it is not what Homer should be in English. It was followed by other translations mostly of the Latin poets, the best, perhaps, being Dryden's Virgil, until, finally, the English mind returned to Homer, or supposed it did, in the pretty, musical numbers of Pope. Who will may read Pope's Homer. We cannot. Nor Cowper's either, although it contains some good, manly writing. We can read Lord Derby's Homer, or could, until Mr. Bryant published his translation of the "Iliad," when the necessity no longer existed. No English translation of Homer will compare with Mr. Bryant's; and we are glad that we are soon to have the whole of the "Odyssey," as we already have the whole of the "Iliad." The first volume of Mr. Bryant's translation of the "Odyssey" (J.R. Osgood & Co.) fully sustains the reputation of the writer. It is so admirably done, that, if we did not know to the contrary, we should think we were reading an original poem. The stiffness which generally inheres in translations is wanting; nowhere is there any sense of restraint, but everywhere a delightful sense of ease—the freedom of one great poet shining through the freedom of another great poet, as the sun shines through the sky. It is the ideal English translation of Homer; and we congratulate Mr. Bryant upon having finished it (for we believe he has); and congratulate ourselves that it is the work of an American poet.
We offer the like congratulation to Mr. Bayard Taylor for his translation of "Faust," which occupies the same place, as regards German Poetry, that Mr. Bryant's translation of Homer does to Greek Poetry. The difficulty of the task which Mr. Taylor set himself, the task of rendering the original in the measures of the original, was never met before by any English translator of "Faust"—never even attempted, we believe—and, to say that he has accomplished it, is to say that Mr. Taylor is a very skilful poet—how skilful we never knew before, highly as we have always valued his poetical powers. He enables us to understand the Intention of Goethe in "Faust," as no one besides himself has done; and, among the obligations that we owe him for the enjoyment he has given us, we must not forget the obligation we are under to him for his Notes. They are scholarly, and to the point. There is not one too many, not one which we could afford to lose, now that we have it. What might have been written, under the pretense of Notes—what another translator might not have been able to resist writing—is fearful to think of—Life is so short, and Goethe's Art so long!
The year has been fertile in American verse. How much Poetry it has produced is a question into which we do not care to enter. It has witnessed the publication of two volumes by Mr. Bret Harte; of one volume by Mr. John Hay; and of one volume by Mr. William Winter. The title of Mr. Winter's volume, "My Witness," (J.R. Osgood & Co.) is a happy one. It is not every American writer who can afford to place his verse on the stand as his witness; and it is not every American writer whose verse will substantiate what he is so desirous of proving, viz., that he is an American poet.
Mr. Winter is not without faults—what American writer is?—but he endeavors to write simply. The virtue of simplicity—always a rare one, and never so rare as at present—he possesses. We have Tennyson, who is not simple; we have Browning, who is not simple; we have Swinburne, who is not simple; and we have Mr. Joaquin Miller, who is not simple.
Mr. Winter's book has its defects—among which we observe an occasional lapse into Latinity—but with all its defects it is a very poetical book. Mr. Winter reminds us, more than any recent American poet, of the English poets of the reigns of Charles the First and Second. He has, at his best, all their graces of style, and he has, at all times, the grace of Purity, to which they laid no claim. With the exception of Carew (whom, we dare say, he has never read), Mr. Winter is the daintiest and sweetest of amatory poets. He has the fancy of Carew, without his artificiality; he has Carew's sweetness, without his grossness of suggestion.
There is a tinge of sadness in some of Mr. Winter's poems, and the critics, we suppose, will censure him for it. If so, they will be in the wrong. The poet has the right to express his moods, sad or merry, and he is no more to be judged by his sad moods than his merry ones. He is to be judged by both, and the sum of both—if the critic is able to add it up—is the poet. As far as he is revealed in his book, that is, but no further. There is such a thing as Dramatic Poetry, as some critics are aware, and there is such a thing as Representative Poetry, as few critics are aware. The former deals with the passions, the latter with those shadowy and evanescent sensations which we call feelings. Mr. Winter is not a dramatic poet, but he is, in his own way, a representative poet. His poem "Lethe" represents one set of feelings; "The White Flag" another; and "Love's Queen" another. We like the last best. For, while we believe the others to be equally genuine, they do not impress us as being the best expression of his genius. What we feel most after finishing his volume, what seems to us most characteristic of his poetry, is loveliness—the tender loveliness that lingers in the mind after we have seen the sun-set of a quiet summer evening, or after we have heard music on a dreamy summer night. If this poetic melancholy be treason, the critics may make the most of it. Mr. Winter has nothing to fear. He has the authority of the greatest poets with which to defend himself, and confute the critics.