With all its cost of sorrow to thy Child.
AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.
VIRGIL AND HORACE—III.
The work of translation seems in an odd way to enlist that mimetic impulse which is so strong an element of human nature, and which is really at the bottom of so much of human rivalry. To wish to do as much as others in any given line of effort is but an after-thought, a secondary motion of the mind; the initial instinct is to do the same as they. That men do not rest at this; that they are not content with merely duplicating what they see done about them, like the late lamented Mr. Pongo; that they are for ever seeking “to better their instruction,” is due to that further instinctive yearning for perfection which helps to differentiate them from Mr. Pongo, and interferes so sadly with many most ingenious and scientific schemes for recreating the universe without a Creator. All literatures, it may be said, all poets, begin with translation—that is, with imitation of some other literature or poet. Alcæus and Sophron, no doubt, are but Horace and Theocritus to the unknown who went before them; Homer is first, doubtless, only because we know not the greater than Homer—rapt from us by the irrevocable years—whom Homer may have copied, as Virgil copied Homer.
This, however, is a law of literature which was known as long ago as the days of Solomon, at least. What is not so obvious, and even more curious as well as more to the present point, is why translators under certain conditions should be so fond of repeating one another in regard to any particular bit of work.
For a generation or so some one of the poets who are the favorite objects of the translator’s zeal will be neglected and seemingly forgotten. Then some day appears a version which attracts attention and gets talked of, and, presto! a dozen pens are in eager chase to rival or surpass it. Now it is Homer which is thus brought into notice, and we have Professor Newman, Lord Derby, Mr. Wright, Mr. Worsley, Mr. Dart, Professor Blackie, Mr. Bryant—what muse shall catalogue the host?—giving us in quick succession and in every kind of metre their versions of the Iliad or Odyssey, or both? Again it is Virgil, and within a brief interval Professor Conington, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Cranch have done the Æneid into English. Or once more Horace sways the hour, and in a twinkling or thereabouts a dozen translations of the Odes are smoking hot from the press on the critic’s table, and bewildering him to choose among their various merits. Within the last half-century, nay, within the last twenty-five years, we have seen just this revolution. Is it because our own is so peculiarly one of those transitional periods in the history of a literature which are most favorable to translation—indeed, most provocative of it; one of those intervals when the national imagination is, as it were, lying fallow after the exhaustion of some great creative epoch, and intellectual effort takes chiefly the form of criticism, which in one sense translation is? Well, such generalizations are as perilous as they are fascinating and we must not yield to them too rashly. In this case, if we did yield, we should be told, no doubt, that translation was no more a peculiarity of a transitional period than of a creative one; that the notion of such divisions in the history of a literature is preposterous and but another invention of the arch-enemy, like comparative philology and the Eastern question, to set the mildest and wisest of sages—even ourselves, beloved reader—thirsting for each other’s blood; or that, finally, an epoch which has produced Tennyson and Browning, De Vere and Arnold, Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, and—let nothing tempt us back to our own side of the Atlantic, where poets grow like pumpkins, big and little, in every garden patch; yet surely, if originality goes for anything, we may add—Tupper—that a time so prolific of poetic genius is not to be counted a transitional period at all.
This, or something like it, we should no doubt hear, if we ventured upon putting forth as our own the enticing proposition we have but modestly thrown out as a suggestion to the reader. And if we were not withheld by that providential want of time and opportunity which so often saves us from our rasher selves, we should no doubt go on to make the venture even now: to assert that, in spite of Tennyson and Browning, in spite even of Matthew Arnold—in one sense a truer voice of his time than either of them—in spite of the pagan and mediæval renaissance piloted by that wonderfully clever coterie of the Rossettis, the present can in no sense be called a creative epoch in our literature, as we call creative the two epochs of which Shakspeare and Wordsworth are, broadly speaking, the representative names—representative, however, in different ways and in widely different degrees; that it is, on the contrary, a true transitional period, as the period of Pope and Dryden was transitional, and for analogous reasons; and that, because it is so, the art of translation flourishes now as then. Nor should we forget, in saying this, the numerous translations which marked the Elizabethan era. But it is to be noted that while all, or nearly all, the then extant classics were turned into English before the close of the Elizabethan era, translations of any one of them were not repeated, and precisely for this reason: that the age, being a creative epoch, made its main effort in the direction of knowledge, and not of criticism—sought to acquire ideas, and not to arrange them, as was the case with the translating periods which came after it. Then, too, it was the virtual beginning of our literature, when translation, as we have said, came natural to it. Chaucer two hundred years before was a creative poet, if the term may be used, in a time that was not creative, a time that was not his, a time whose sluggishness not even his pregnant genius could inform; Chaucer was the glad premature swallow of a lingering, long-delaying spring, whose settled sunshine came to us only with Spenser’s later bird-song,
“Preluding those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth