“L’ombre me repondit d’un air satisfait!”
as though the celestial phantom had been a small girl bribed with a tart to answer. To the post-academic Gaul, shivering in the chaste but chilly shadow of that awful Pantheon of the verbal proprieties, the “Marguerite aux yeulx rians et verds” whom his forebears loved to sing would be but a green-eyed monster indeed. Ronsard’s parodies of Pindar were no worse than Ambrose Philips’ travesties of the deep-mouthed Theban—the sparrow-hawk aping the eagle—and not much worse, indeed, than West’s or even Wheelwright’s, or any other imitation of the inimitable that we have seen. But the badness of the one is thoroughly French and of his time, even to his bragging that it was his noble birth which enabled him to reproduce Pindar, wherein Horace, for lack of that virtue, had failed; the badness of the other as thoroughly English and of his age. And what more salient instance could be given of this natural difference in mental constitution, in “the way of looking at things,” than Voltaire’s treatment of the scene in Hamlet where the sentinel answers the question, “Have you had quiet guard?” by the familiar household idiom, “Not a mouse stirring”? “Pas un souris qui trotte” the author of Zaire makes it, and proceeds to inform his countrymen that this Shakspeare was a drunken savage.
Now, while there is no such radical difference between English and American ways of thought as between English and French ways, there is still difference enough to justify us in giving place to Mr. Cranch’s blank-verse Æneid, as being à priori another thing from the English blank-verse Æneids of forty or one hundred and forty years ago. So, without more ado, let us repeat that these three versions of the last decade are sufficiently unlike one another or any that have gone before to warrant attentive notice.
In choosing for the vehicle of his attempt the octosyllabic line—the well-known metre of Scott’s Marmion—Prof. Conington turned his back intrepidly on all the traditions. Scarcely any rhythm we have would seem at first blush worse fitted to give the unlearned reader an adequate idea of the sonorous march of the Latin hexameter or of the stately melody of Virgil’s verse, of the dignity of his sentiments, or the noble gravity of his style. For him who uses such a metre to render the Æneid one half anticipates the need of some such frank confession as that Ronsard, in a fit of remorse, or perhaps a verbal indigestion over his own inconceivable pedantry, puts at the end—at the end, mark you—of one of his never-ending series of odes:
“Les François qui mes vers liront,
S’ils ne sont et Grecs et Romains,
En lieu de ce livre, ils n’auront
Qu’un pesant faix entre les mains”—
which for our present purpose we may paraphrase: My excellent reader, if you don’t know Virgil as well as I do, you will find very little of him here, and if you do you will find still less. But Professor Conington soon puts away from us all such forebodings. He gives us, in spite of his metre, for the most part, in rare instances, by the help of it, a great deal of Virgil—more, on the whole, than almost any other of the poet’s translators. He has put the story of the Æneid into bright and animated English verse which may be read with pleasure as a poem for itself, and is yet strictly faithful to the sense and spirit of its original, as close as need be—wonderfully close in many parts—to its language, often skilfully suggestive of some of the most salient peculiarities of its form, and only failing conspicuously, where all translations most conspicuously fail, in rendering the poet’s manner, because the manner of any poet—and we mean by manner that union of thought and form of the poet’s way of seeing with his way of saying things which is the full manifestation of his genius—only failing here because this part of any poet it is next to impossible to reproduce in a foreign tongue, and because the vehicle chosen by Prof. Conington, so opposite in every way to Virgil’s vehicle, increased that difficulty tenfold. But a translation of a long narrative poem is not like the translation of a brief lyric. Is the former to be written for those who understand the original and care for no translation, or for those who, not understanding the original, ask first of the translator that he shall not put them to sleep, and, second, that he shall give them all that his author gives as nearly as possible in the same manner? Two of these demands Prof. Conington’s version fully meets, and it comes as near to the third as was consistent with a metre which gave him the best chance of combining the other two. If any translation of Virgil can hope to be popular it is his; and we hold to the belief that it will share with Dryden’s, which, if only for its author’s sake, will live, the affections of the unlatined English reader for long to come.
As might be expected, it is in battle-pieces and in scenes of swift and animated action, to which Scott’s metre naturally lends itself, and with which it is as naturally associated, that this version chiefly excels. Take, for example, the onset in the eleventh book: