Chapter IV: Part 4

"Modern people are Christian, and Christianity is a
religion of second growth which opposes natural instinct.
We may liken it to a violent contraction which has
inflected the primitive attitude of the human mind. It
proclaims, in effect, that the world is sinful, and that
man is depraved--which certainly is indisputable in the
century in which it was born. According to it, man must
change his ways. Life here below is simply an exile;
let us turn our eyes upward to our celestial home. Our
natural character is vicious; let us stifle natural
desires and mortify the flesh. The experience of our
senses and the knowledge of the wise are inadequate and
delusive; let us accept the light of revelation, faith
and divine illumination. Through penitence, renunciation
and meditation let us develop within ourselves the
spiritual man; let our life be an ardent awaiting of
deliverance, a constant sacrifice of will, an undying
yearning for God, a revery of sublime love, occasionally
rewarded with ecstasy and a vision of the infinite.
For fourteen centuries the ideal of this life was the
anchorite or monk. If you would estimate the power of
such a conception and the grandeur of the transformation
it imposes on human faculties and habits, read, in turn,
the great Christian poem and the great pagan poem, one
the 'Divine Comedy' and the other the 'Odyssey' and the
'Iliad.' Dante has a vision and is transported out of our
little ephemeral sphere into eternal regions; he beholds
its tortures, its expiations and its felicities; he is
affected by superhuman anguish and horror; all that the
infuriate and subtle imagination of the lover of justice
and the executioner can conceive of he sees, suffers and
sinks under. He then ascends into light; his body loses
its gravity; he floats involuntarily, led by the smile
of a radiant woman; he listens to souls in the shape of
voices and to passing melodies; he sees choirs of angels,
a vast rose of living brightness representing the virtues
and the celestial powers; sacred utterances and the
dogmas of truth reverberate in ethereal space. At this
fervid height, where reason melts like wax, both symbol
and apparition, one effacing the other, merge into mystic
bewilderment, the entire poem, infernal or divine, being
a dream which begins with horrors and ends in ravishment.
How much more natural and healthy is the spectacle which
Homer presents! We have the Troad, the isle of Ithica and
the coasts of Greece; still at the present day we follow
in his track; we recognize the forms of mountains, the
color of the sea; the jutting fountains, the cypress and
the alders in which the sea-birds perched; he copied a
steadfast and persistent nature: with him throughout we
plant our feet on the firm ground of truth. His book is
a historical document; the manners and customs of his
contemporaries were such as he describes; his Olympus
itself is a Greek family."

The manifest inferiority of our mixed languages to their one simple language is stated in the following paragraph, with which we must leave Taine for the present:

"Almost the whole of our philosophic and scientific
vocabulary is foreign; we are obliged to know Greek and
Latin to make use of it properly, and, most frequently,
employ it badly. Innumerable terms find their way out of
this technical vocabulary into common conversation and
literary style, and hence it is that we now speak and
think with words cumbersome and difficult to manage.
We adopt them ready made and conjoined, we repeat
them according to routine; we make use of them without
considering their scope and without a nice appreciation
of their sense; we only approximate to that which we
would like to express. Fifteen years are necessary for
an author to learn to write, not with genius, for that
is not to be acquired, but with clearness, sequence,
propriety and precision. He finds himself obliged to
weigh and investigate ten or twelve thousand words and
diverse expressions, to note their origin, filiation and
relationships, to rebuild on an original plan, his ideas
and his whole intellect. If he has not done it, and he
wishes to reason on rights, duties, the beautiful, the
State or any other of man's important interests, he
gropes about and stumbles; he gets entangled in long,
vague phrases, in sonorous common-places, in crabbed
and abstract formulas. Look at the newspapers and the
speeches of our popular orators. It is especially the
case with workmen who are intelligent but who have had no
classical education; they are not masters of words, and,
consequently, of ideas; they use a refined language which
is not natural to them; it is a perplexity to them and
consequently confuses their minds; they have had no
time to filter it drop by drop. This is an enormous
disadvantage, from which the Greeks were exempt. There
was no break with them between the language of concrete
facts and that of abstract reasoning, between the
language spoken by the people and that of the learned;
the one was a counterpart of the other; there was no term
in any of Plato's dialogues which a youth, leaving his
gymnasia, could not comprehend; there is not a phrase in
any of Demosthenes' harangues which did not readily find
a lodging-place in the brain of an Athenian peasant or
blacksmith. Attempt to translate into Greek one of Pitt's
or Mirabeau's discourses, or an extract from Addison or
Nicole, and you will be obliged to recast and transpose
the thought; you will be led to find for the same
thoughts, expressions more akin to facts and to concrete
experience; a flood of light will heighten the prominence
of all the truths and of all the errors; that which you
were wont to call natural and clear will seem to you
affected and semi-obscure, and you will perceive by force
of contrast why, among the Greeks, the instrument of
thought being more simple, it did its office better and
with less effort."

Among the good books of the year, two belong to a special walk of letters in which we have not hitherto excelled the English Translation. There are periods in the history of English Poetry when translation has played an important part. Such a period occurred just before the Shakspearean era, and it was noted for translations from the Latin poets. Chapman was the first English writer to perceive the greatness of the Greek poets, and, like the poet that he was, he attempted to translate the father of poets, Homer. Chapman's Homer is a noble work, with all its faults; but it is not what Homer should be in English. It was followed by other translations mostly of the Latin poets, the best, perhaps, being Dryden's Virgil, until, finally, the English mind returned to Homer, or supposed it did, in the pretty, musical numbers of Pope. Who will may read Pope's Homer. We cannot. Nor Cowper's either, although it contains some good, manly writing. We can read Lord Derby's Homer, or could, until Mr. Bryant published his translation of the "Iliad," when the necessity no longer existed. No English translation of Homer will compare with Mr. Bryant's; and we are glad that we are soon to have the whole of the "Odyssey," as we already have the whole of the "Iliad." The first volume of Mr. Bryant's translation of the "Odyssey" (J.R. Osgood & Co.) fully sustains the reputation of the writer. It is so admirably done, that, if we did not know to the contrary, we should think we were reading an original poem. The stiffness which generally inheres in translations is wanting; nowhere is there any sense of restraint, but everywhere a delightful sense of ease--the freedom of one great poet shining through the freedom of another great poet, as the sun shines through the sky. It is the ideal English translation of Homer; and we congratulate Mr. Bryant upon having finished it (for we believe he has); and congratulate ourselves that it is the work of an American poet.

We offer the like congratulation to Mr. Bayard Taylor for his translation of "Faust," which occupies the same place, as regards German Poetry, that Mr. Bryant's translation of Homer does to Greek Poetry. The difficulty of the task which Mr. Taylor set himself, the task of rendering the original in the measures of the original, was never met before by any English translator of "Faust"--never even attempted, we believe--and, to say that he has accomplished it, is to say that Mr. Taylor is a very skilful poet--how skilful we never knew before, highly as we have always valued his poetical powers. He enables us to understand the _Intention_ of Goethe in "Faust," as no one besides himself has done; and, among the obligations that we owe him for the enjoyment he has given us, we must not forget the obligation we are under to him for his _Notes_. They are scholarly, and to the point. There is not one too many, not one which we could afford to lose, now that we have it. What _might_ have been written, under the pretense of _Notes_--what another translator might not have been able to resist writing--is fearful to think of--Life is so short, and Goethe's Art so long!

The year has been fertile in American verse. How much Poetry it has produced is a question into which we do not care to enter. It has witnessed the publication of two volumes by Mr. Bret Harte; of one volume by Mr. John Hay; and of one volume by Mr. William Winter. The title of Mr. Winter's volume, "My Witness," (J.R. Osgood & Co.) is a happy one. It is not every American writer who can afford to place his verse on the stand as his witness; and it is not every American writer whose verse will substantiate what he is so desirous of proving, viz., that he is an American poet.

Mr. Winter is not without faults--what American writer is?--but he endeavors to write simply. The virtue of simplicity--always a rare one, and never so rare as at present--he possesses. We have Tennyson, who is not simple; we have Browning, who is not simple; we have Swinburne, who is not simple; and we have Mr. Joaquin Miller, who is not simple.

Mr. Winter's book has its defects--among which we observe an occasional lapse into Latinity--but with all its defects it is a very _poetical_ book. Mr. Winter reminds us, more than any recent American poet, of the English poets of the reigns of Charles the First and Second. He has, at his best, all their graces of style, and he has, at all times, the grace of Purity, to which they laid no claim. With the exception of Carew (whom, we dare say, he has never read), Mr. Winter is the daintiest and sweetest of amatory poets. He has the fancy of Carew, without his artificiality; he has Carew's sweetness, without his grossness of suggestion.

There is a tinge of sadness in some of Mr. Winter's poems, and the critics, we suppose, will censure him for it. If so, they will be in the wrong. The poet has the right to express his moods, sad or merry, and he is no more to be judged by his sad moods than his merry ones. He is to be judged by both, and the sum of both--if the critic is able to add it up--is the poet. As far as he is revealed in his book, that is, but no further. There is such a thing as Dramatic Poetry, as some critics are aware, and there is such a thing as Representative Poetry, as few critics are aware. The former deals with the passions, the latter with those shadowy and evanescent sensations which we call feelings. Mr. Winter is not a dramatic poet, but he is, in his own way, a representative poet. His poem "Lethe" represents one set of feelings; "The White Flag" another; and "Love's Queen" another. We like the last best. For, while we believe the others to be equally genuine, they do not impress us as being the best expression of his genius. What we feel most after finishing his volume, what seems to us most characteristic of his poetry, is loveliness--the tender loveliness that lingers in the mind after we have seen the sun-set of a quiet summer evening, or after we have heard music on a dreamy summer night. If this poetic melancholy be treason, the critics may make the most of it. Mr. Winter has nothing to fear. He has the authority of the greatest poets with which to defend himself, and confute the critics.

_ART._

THE PRODIGAL SON, BY EDOUARD DUBUFE.

The sublime lesson of forgiveness, inculcated by the story of the Prodigal Son, is among the earliest and most familiar in the memories of a nation of Bible readers like our own. Every one of us, perhaps unconsciously, carries in mind a simple, straight-forward conception of this subject, formed in early childhood--a time when the imagination rarely goes beyond an attempt to realize the unlooked for forgiveness of the once deserted parent, or the captivating visions of adventure suggested by the changing fortunes of the wanderer during his absence in a "far country."

With the painter the picture is his vision, and the panels are the realities. As a man of a different order of thought would have chosen another incident of the story for illustration, so also would a painter of a less independent school have permitted himself to be bound down by the historical facts of the architectural and costume fashions of the time of narration. Dubufe has so far discarded the unities of time and place, if any can _really_ be said to exist--as no date was fixed in the relation of the parable by Christ--that he has adopted the mingled costumes of Europe and the East, which obtained in the fifteenth century, and has placed his figures in a Corinthian porch under the light of Italian skies. Apart from the conception and the "telling of the story," about which there will be various opinions, this picture may be justly regarded as a magnificent work of art.

The great David, a pupil of whose pupil Edouard Dubufe was, and Horace Vernet, appear to have been the guides selected by him, rather than the greatest of his masters--Paul Delaroche. The influence of both is to be traced in this work, although it may be said to take rank above any production of either of them. In drawing, color, and composition, rendering of textures, and the exhibition of the resources of the palette, now better known to French painters than ever before, the picture leaves nothing to be desired. The faces of the principal figures are full of that "expression to the life" in which the English are justly considered to excel, while the admirable focus of the groups, the color, and interest, are as un-English as excellent. Fault-finding in more than one or two unimportant details would be hypercriticism where so much is perfect, and it becomes our happy privilege, in this notice, to commend and to point out, to "lay" readers about Art, the manifold beauties of its technical execution. A critical examination will show that the composition is on the pyramidal principle, and the arrangement of groups principally in threes. In the central portion of the canvas, where the marble pillars of the porch fall off in perspective, the Profligate stands holding up a golden cup in his right hand, as in the act of proposing a toast. His red costume and commanding figure attract the eye, and the attention falls at once and equally on him and on the magnificent woman whose arms embrace his neck, and whose eyes, as her chin rests close on his breast, gaze with dangerous fascination into his face. Her dress is of rich white satin, and, with the delicate green and gold sheen of her rival's robe--she with whom the Prodigal's right hand toys in caress--makes up a wonderfully brilliant prismatic chord, having the effect of focusing the richer, but not less gorgeous, pigments spread everywhere on the canvas. The faces of the women are very beautiful, and are made voluptuous by a subtle art which, through all their beauty, tells a story of unrestrained lives of passion and pleasure.

The face of the magnificent creature at the Prodigal's left hand is a wondrous piece of drawing. It is thrown back against him and from the spectator, in order that she may look up into his face--at the moment a dissipated, spiritless face, without even the flush of the wine which dyes her's so rosily--a face at once weak and weary, and yet revealing a possible intensity, indeed, the face of a French woman who "has lived," rather than that of a man.

Up to this centre leads the other groups. Below, and seated on the rich rugs which cover the marble pavement, musicians and singers pause to listen to impassioned words from a laurel-crowned poet, while further on a sort of orchestra plays time for the sensuous dance of lithe-bodied Oriental dancers--each woman of them more ravishing than the other. Minor incidents, like dice-play and love-making, give interest to the remaining space, and keep up the revel.

Throughout, the drawing is true, and good, and graceful. The hands of the figures demand especial mention. The hand of one of the women, near the central group, grasped by her lover at the wrist as he kisses her shoulder, is particularly exquisite in form and color; the more remarkable, perhaps, because the position of it is so trying in nature and so difficult to draw.

The type of feature chosen for the women, the dancing girls excepted, is essentially Gallic. As remarked before, the face of the Prodigal, also, is French; but the musicians and the poet have faces of their own which seem to belong to the university of genius. The mere revelers, curiously enough, have a likeness to the figures in some old Italian pictures; one of them looks like a copy of Judas Iscariot, made younger.

A distant city and mountains fill up the background, and, on the extreme right of the near middle distance, flights of marble steps ascend to a grand doorway, where servants are seen loitering within easy call of their masters.

It was by a sublime inspiration that Dubufe painted the accessory panels in monotone. In that on the right, a dismal sky, filled with rolling clouds and sad presaging ravens flying, over-shadows the outcast, seated on a rock in an attitude of listless dejection, with the swine feeding at his feet. In the panel on the left he is seen in the close embrace of his merciful parent. His head is bowed in humility, and, in an agony of remorse and shame, while the old house-dog sniffs at him for an obtrusive mendicant who has no business with such affectionate welcome.

Let us congratulate ourselves that this picture has come to our country, as yet so barren of great works, and pray that the noble school of art of which this is so admirable an exponent, may find favor, not only with our painters, but with those who call themselves connoisseurs, in preference to unmeaning works of microscopic finish, or slick examples of boudoir and millinery painting.

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"_THE ALDINE PRESS._"--JAMES SUTTON & CO., _Printers and Publishers, 23 Liberty St., N.Y._