“The only safety of the vanquished is
To hope for none”;
and
“Whether we make use
Of stratagem or valor who inquires
In dealing with an enemy?”
If Æneas and Corœbus had harangued their fellow-Trojans in this wise, we doubt if they would have helped them so gallantly to make some of the finest poetry in the Æneid. There is no trumpet in such lines as these.
Nevertheless, in spite of many suspicious flavors of prose in his version, Mr. Cranch, we suppose, is to be called a poet. The Boston muses are liberal to their votaries, and do not ask that a man shall be Shakspere or Milton before crowning him with all their laurels. At least, we may fairly say that he is a gentleman of accomplishments and—we should be tempted to add culture, the proper term, we believe, for a person “in society” who knows all the things that are proper for “persons in society” to know, were it not that glib dilettanteism and newspaper sciolists have well-nigh sent that much-abused word into the Coventry of cant. Mr. Cranch is, moreover, a writer of much poetic taste and no little poetic faculty, as he has shown in many pleasant essays in many varieties of metre. Among the kinds of metre which he can write, however, his version of the Æneid has not convinced us that blank-verse is included; or, to put it more agreeably, if not more justly, we are not persuaded that the kind of blank-verse he writes is best fitted to do justice to Virgil.
So much we are led to say, because in his preface Mr. Cranch hints that only a poet can or should attempt to translate the Æneid, and asserts that only in blank-verse can it be fitly translated at all. Into that interminable controversy as to whether any but a poet can translate a poet, or whether rhyme is a curb or a spur, a help or a hindrance, to the judicious translator who knows how to follow its inspiration, we do not propose to enter. But Mr. Cranch, in declaring against the rhymed couplet of Dryden and his followers, delivers himself in a way which to us seems to imply a curious misconception of Virgil’s manner, and leads us to anticipate on the threshold one of the points in which Mr. Cranch’s version most strikingly fails. “The incessantly-recurrent rhyme,” he says, “gives an appearance of antithesis which disturbs the very simplicity and directness of the original.” Adjectives are apt to be used somewhat vaguely—or, as our Western friends would say in their delightful, breezy idiom, “to be slung about with a looseness”—in speaking of the style of ancient writers, of which so few of us nowadays know enough to be justified in speaking at all. We have no desire to meddle more than is needful with these dangerous epithets, double-edged weapons as they are. But unless we have read Virgil quite amiss, he is especially fond of antithesis, which Mr. Cranch seems to think he is not; and he is not especially simple or direct, which Mr. Cranch seems to think he is. Not that he cannot be, as in truth he often is, both simple and direct; but that simplicity and directness are not the features of his style which we should select to characterize it, as we should select them, for example, to characterize the style of Homer. Whatever simplicity Virgil has belongs, we think, to the general conception and conduct of his story, by no means to the manner of his telling it, to the general quality of his thought or style. What directness he has belongs to the general movement of his verse and the necessities of epic composition, and is in spite of a tendency to dwell curiously on incidents not in the track of his narrative, to turn, as it were, from his epic path and linger over wayside flowers of rhetoric or sentiment—a tendency illustrated by that subtlety of allusion which all his critics have remarked, and the habit of hinting at two or three modes of expression while employing one. These characteristics of his poetry would naturally have resulted from the quality of his genius—the genius of taste the Abbé Delille calls it; he was the first of the racinien poets, says Sainte-Beuve[[2]]—and the character of his time. The age he wrote for was one of extreme literary and social refinement, of keen philosophical speculation; the Latin he wrote in was already a literary language—as much so as the French of Racine or the English of Pope. The age of Augustus, in many points, was strikingly like that of Louis XIV. in France and of Charles II. or, still closer, of Queen Anne in England, as has been more than once pointed out. Sainte-Beuve, with his usual insight, has seized upon this resemblance to explain why Virgil, in the account of the shipwreck in the first book (vv. 81 seq.), which is an ingenious cento from the Iliad and Odyssey, should have dropped two of Homer’s most striking similes: that the pilot, struck by the falling mast, went overboard “like a diver,” and that the scattered swimmers—rari nantes in gurgite vasto—were borne like sea-birds on the wave. Virgil omits these images, says the French critic, just because they are so salient, so life-like, so frank and real. “Comparisons of that sort the age of Augustus, like the age of Louis XIV., rather eschewed. They were by no means to the taste of Frenchmen in the days of Saint-Evremond and Segrais (I use extreme terms purposely)—men of society, of the drawing-room, nice scholars who had been often in the Hôtel Rambouillet but little at sea, and to whom divers and sea-birds were unfamiliar sights. The Frenchman of that time preferred general descriptions to images too minutely particularized, and so, too, in a measure, did the Roman of the time of Augustus and the circle of Mæcenas. Mæcenas is not so far, either in taste or philosophy, from Saint-Evremond.”
With some reservations, much the same thing applies to the ages of Dryden and of Pope—to Pope’s age and to Pope himself more strictly, perhaps, than to Dryden or his time; so that one is half inclined to think it a caprice of literary destiny that Pope should have been set to translate Homer, and Dryden Virgil, rather than the reverse. Not that the result would have been a better Homer, if we may judge from Dryden’s sample work in the first book of the Iliad; a better Homer than Pope’s was perhaps not to be looked for in an age which in its poetry thought it fine to call a spade—about which it was apt to be only too plain-spoken in free fireside prose—an agricultural implement, and the bucolic person who wielded it a swain. Pope’s famous ironical essay in the Guardian on his own and Ambrose Phillips’ pastorals is a curious illustration of the then passion for putting Nature into hoops and periwig. Phillips, in a dim, blundering way, is nearer right with his Cecilias and Rogers, who talk at least like ploughmen and milkmaids, than Pope with his gentle Delias and sprightly Sylvias, who converse like masquerading duchesses; but as all the world happened to be masquerading, the laugh was with Pope.