Other translations of the Æneid there were during the eighteenth century, among them one by another Oxford professor of poetry, Hawkins, but none have survived. Pope’s translation of Homer, which was published soon after Pitt’s Æneid, diverted attention to the Greek poet, and gave him with translators a pre-eminence over his Latin rival which only within a few years he can be said to have lost. Pope had no imitators, however, till long after. Even more absolutely than Dryden he swayed the sceptre of poetry in his time; and the presumptuous wight who had ventured to challenge his sovereignty or to measure strength with “that poetical wonder, the translation of the Iliad, a performance which no age or nation can pretend to rival,” gods—critical gods—and men and booksellers would have laughed to scorn. It is true, Addison, that most uneasy “brother near the throne,” was shrewdly suspected of meditating such a design under the cloak of his friend and follower, Tickell, and even went so far as to publish—so ran the current gossip of the coffee-houses—a version of the first book of the Iliad in Tickell’s name. But the scheme stopped there; Pope’s triumph was too splendid and overwhelming, and his great work calmly defied competition, until the spell of his honeyed couplet was broken, and Cowper could find a hearing for his ponderous Miltonic periods, a full half-century after Pope’s death. The battle which soon thereafter came to be joined between the partisans of the Popian and Cowperian methods—both of them, as Mr. Arnold assures us, really on a complete equality of error—had the effect of keeping Homer in the foreground and Virgil in the shade, despite the praiseworthy versions of the latter by Simmons in rhymed couplets about 1817, and Kennedy in blank-verse some thirty years later, until the critical furore created by the appearance of Prof. Conington’s Æneid about ten years since once more turned the tide and brought our Mantuan to the front.
Conington’s translation, by the novelty of its metre, the freshness of its treatment, the spirit of its movement, its union of fidelity and grace, took the public ear and at once won a popularity which, if we may judge from the fact that a new edition has been lately advertised, it has not yet lost nor is destined speedily to lose. Moreover, its peculiar metre gave rise to a discussion among the critics, which has no doubt had its share in bringing out the two additional versions by Mr. Cranch and Mr. Morris at brief intervals after Professor Conington’s, the former at Boston, the latter in England and reprinted here. Each of these three versions has that “proper reason for existing” in novelty of method and manner which Mr. Arnold demands, and without which, indeed, multiplied translations are but cumberers of the book-stall and a weariness to the flesh. Of Mr. Cranch this assertion may sound a trifle odd, since his work upon its face presents little that is new. In place of the galloping octosyllabics of Prof. Conington or the resurrected Alexandrines of Mr. Morris, he offers us only the familiar blank-verse which Kennedy and Trapp and Brady used, or misused, before him; he has no theories to illustrate, but translates his author as faithfully as he knows how, and his rendering is neither so exceedingly good nor so excessively bad as to give it any claim to originality upon that score. But then it is the first American translation of Virgil, and that is surely novelty enough.
For as each age, so every country, looks at a classic author through spectacles of its own. “Each age,” as Conington well says in his preface, “will naturally think that it understands an author whom it studies better than the ages which have gone before it”; and it is for this reason, he adds, “that the great works of antiquity require to be translated afresh from time to time to preserve their interest as part of modern literary culture.” But it is not alone that each age will understand an author better than preceding ages; it will understand him differently; it will see him in another light, from far other points of view, modified and interpreted by its own spirit. What Heyne says of the poet is in a measure true of the translator—that he has the genius of his era, which must necessarily qualify his work. We have sometimes fancied even that this business of translation was a kind of metempsychosis through which the poet’s soul shall speak to many different times and lands through forms and in voices changing to suit the moods of each. This, of course, is only one of those fantastic notions which a writer must sometimes be indulged in, if he is to be kept in reasonable good-humor. But we think we may venture to say that two nations translating for themselves what antiquity has to say to them will insensibly find its utterances modified for each of them by their natural modes of thought. Nay, may we not go further and say that no two human minds will find precisely the same message in Homer or Virgil or Horace—so infinite are the gradations of thought, so innumerable the shades of meaning and suggestion in a word. Of Virgil this is especially true; for he has, says Prof. Conington, “that peculiar habit, ... common to him and Sophocles, of hinting at two or three modes of expression while actually employing one.”
It is just for this reason that repeated translations of a great author are not only useful but desirable; that, to quote Conington again, “it is well that we should know how our ancestors of the Revolution period conceived of Virgil; it is well that we should be obliged consciously to realize how we conceive of him ourselves.” How true this is no one can fail to perceive who contrasts Dryden’s method in any given passage with Conington’s. The sense of Virgil may be given with equal exactness by each—we say may be, which is rather stretching a point, for, in respect of verbal fidelity, the two versions are not to be compared—the interpretation may be equally poetical, but there will remain a subtle something which stamps each, and which we can only say is the flavor of the time. Or, again, compare the Abbé Delille’s French version with Dryden’s English—perhaps a fairer comparison; for both are equally free, though by no means equally acquainted with their author, and both to a certain extent belonged to the same school of composition. Nor are they so very far apart as they seem in point of time; the century or so which divides them was a very much longer period in England than in France. Charles II. was nearer to Louis XV. than to George III. in point of taste. Yet how different from Dryden’s Virgil, or from any Englishman’s, is Delille’s, even though he does not find in his text such enchanting gallicisms as Jean Regnault de Segrais could twist out of the lines,
“Ubi templum illi centumque Sabæo
Thure calent aræ, sertisque recentibus halant”:[[176]]
“Dans le temple où toujours quelque Amant irrité
Accuse dans ses vœux quelque jeune Beauté.”
This is an extreme case, no doubt, and there are Frenchmen even who would not be beyond laughing at it. We are not to forget, as we laugh at it ourselves, that Segrais was not unknown in the Hôtel Rambouillet, and that although his own poetry was not all of this order, not even his Æneid—Saint-Evremond liked it—he also wrote novels which not even the Hôtel Rambouillet could read. But when that really able man and accomplished scholar, Cardinal Du Perron, turns Horace’s lines in the charming farewell to Virgil (Carm. i. 3):
“Ventorumque regat Pater