Au flambeau de l’amour les torches de la guerre.”
In the speech of Turnus in the eleventh book the Trojans become “brigands” and “barbarous assassins,” quite as if the Rutuli chief were a deputy of the Left Centre addressing his friends on the Right. If the good abbé had written a few years later he would no doubt have made them Communists. But his speech of Juno, though rather free, has many fine touches; and, indeed, the French seems to hit off the women’s part of the Æneid better than our English. Thus, the dumb rage with which Juno must have listened to Venus is well hinted in the line,
“Junon muette écoute auprès de son époux,”
though it is by no means so literal as Cranch’s.
Of the three translators of Virgil we are now considering, Mr. Morris certainly brought to his task the greatest natural and acquired gifts. Nay, had we been asked from the ranks of living English writers to pick out the one who could give us Virgil most fitly, with least loss of majesty or beauty, in an English dress, we think we should have named the author of Jason and the Earthly Paradise. For Mr. Morris is not only a poet—a poet of very nearly the first order; whereas Mr. Cranch, we are constrained to say in the teeth of the Boston muses, is hardly more than a poet by brevet—he is also a classical scholar who, in point of general acquirements at least, is a rival whom even Prof. Conington would respect. Since the time of Dryden, and not excepting him, we know of no English poet—unless, perhaps, Pope and the present laureate—whose natural genius should seem to have fitted him so well as Mr. Morris to interpret the Æneid. His own poetry shows many of the most distinctive qualities of Virgil’s verse: its elegance, its pathos, its pregnant allusiveness, above all the pensive grace, the under-note of tender sadness, that runs through all the strain of the Æneid, the underlying motif of its theme. And though the form of narrative verse, in which Mr. Morris has chiefly exercised his powers, is sufficiently remote in tone and spirit from the tone and spirit of epic narrative, yet here and there, as in passages of Jason and of the Lovers of Gudrun, he has come as near to striking the true epic note as any modern poet we recall, unless it be Mr. Matthew Arnold in his admirable and touching fragment of Sohrab and Rustum. Add to this his minute and well-digested knowledge of classic mythology and legend, and his rare mastery of the Saxon and Romance elements of the language, in which so much of its tear-compelling power resides—what Joubert might have called les entrailles des mots—his possession of the secret, so hard to learn, of the sweetness of short and simple words,[[4]] and we had every reason to expect from Mr. Morris a version of the Æneid which should be in the highest degree original, elegant, and fresh, which should even take rank as the best English translation of Virgil’s poem that had yet appeared. That pre-eminence, indeed, has by many English critics been assigned to it; but to their verdict we cannot assent.
Fresh and original this version certainly is; for it is altogether unlike any that has preceded it, in conception, in method, in treatment, we might almost say in metre, since Mr. Morris’ long Alexandrines are, in metrical effect, no more the Alexandrines of Phaer than those of Chapman. Elegant it is, too, so far as regards artistic workmanship and finish; that everything that Mr. Morris sets his hand to is sure to have. But it is not the elegance of Virgil; it is not even the elegance of the Earthly Paradise. The final grace of proportion and fitness it has not, and in spite of many and singular beauties—of beauties which scarcely any living English writer that we know of, except Mr. Morris, could give us—it is not to us, upon the whole, a satisfactory version. Nay, it is most unsatisfactory, and it is so because of the two qualities which should otherwise have made its chief charm—its freshness and its originality; because to the attainment of these Mr. Morris seems to us to have sacrificed the most important quality of all in a translation—fidelity to the spirit of his author.
We need go no farther than the title-page to read the story of his design and, as we incline to hold, his failure. “The Æneids of Virgil done into English verse” is what he offers us, and the affectation of the title runs through the performance and mars it. If from the result we may derive the intent, Mr. Morris set out to produce such a version of the Æneid as might have been written anywhere between the time of Chaucer and Phaer, had any poet then lived who joined to the simplicity and freshness of his own age the culture and self-consciousness of ours. At least, this is the only way we can account for Mr. Morris’ choice of the peculiar style in which he has seen fit to couch, we might almost say to smother, his version—a style which is not, indeed, the style of Chaucer, or of Phaer, or of Chapman (to whom it has been rashly referred by an English critic in the Saturday Review), or, for the matter of that, of any other English author we are acquainted with, living or dead; but which is nevertheless plainly inspired by the same effort in the direction of mediævalism and the earlier manner that has borne such pleasant fruit in the author’s former productions. But the effort is here carried, it seems to us, to “a wasteful and ridiculous excess,” and is, besides, quite out of place in a translation where the writer is not free to form his own manner, but is bound to the manner of his original; unless, indeed, Mr. Morris finds in the style of Virgil the same effect of quaintness and antiquity which he has striven but too successfully to give his translation, and that he is too good a scholar to permit us to believe. Virgil’s style was that of his age, and his unfrequent archaisms, such as faxo for fecero, aulai for aulæ, and the like, can scarcely have produced on the reader of the Augustan era any stronger impression of quaintness than such poetical forms as “spake” and “drave” and “brake” produce on us when we meet them in English poetry today. We must, therefore, assume that Mr. Morris aimed at some such reproduction of the literary manner of a past age as Thackeray gives us in Esmond, or Balzac, with still greater ingenuity but much worse art, in the Contes Drolatiques. This, and a resolve to use only Saxon words as far as possible—a right idea in the main, perhaps, for translation from the Latin, certainly a most interesting and instructive one—and (a less useful idea) to say nothing in the common way which could at all be said out of the common, seem to have been his controlling influences. To these he has subordinated all else but verbal fidelity, and the result is a queer composite production of a strong mediæval flavor—a romanticized Æneid which one of the seekers after the Earthly Paradise might have told his comrades
“Under the lime-trees’ shade
By some sweet stream that knows not of the sea,”
but which, except for fidelity to its meaning, seems to us hardly nearer being Virgil’s Æneid than Pope’s Iliad was to being Homer’s. Close it certainly is; we may say marvellously close. Indeed, so far as we have been able to collate, it surpasses in this respect all previous rhymed versions, even Conington’s, and falls but little below any of those in blank-verse. Not only does it render the Latin line for line—no trifling task, even for the Alexandrine, with its unvarying fourteen syllables against the average fifteen of the hexameter—but not seldom word for word. Moreover, notwithstanding its exactness, it reads as smoothly and as spiritedly as an original poem; it is everywhere set off with those verbal graces of which Mr. Morris is a master, and the metre, which has many merits for the purpose, is throughout handled with admirable skill. Wherein and how, then, does it fail of giving us Virgil?