Chapter L: Part II (8)

The half-lines respond to the imperfect verses in Virgil, which, in the fashion of the Chinese tailor, both Mr. Morris and his forerunner conscientiously copy. Phaer has other oddities, such as “Sybly” for Sibylla, “lymbo” for Hades, “Dei Phobus” for Deiphobus, and “Duke Æneas”; while every book is wound up with a _Deo Gratias_ by way of colophon. Let us hope it was not too fervently echoed by his readers. Indeed, Phaer’s version is better than its fame.

“After the associated labors of Phaer and Twynne,” says Warton in his _History of English Poetry_, “it is hard to say what could induce Richard Stanihurst, a native of Dublin, to translate the first four books of the _Æneid_ into English hexameters.” The remark shows less than the wonted perspicuity of the historian of English poetry. What induces any translation, except the belief (the fond belief!) that the work it aims to do has not yet been done? Master Stanihurst, like many other learned men then and since, was firmly persuaded that the hexameter was your only measure for a translation of Virgil. But there are hexameters and hexameters, and Master Stanihurst’s were unluckily of the other sort. A poet who proclaims his intention to “chaunt manhood and Garboiles,” and gives us

“With tentive list’ning each wight was settled in hark’ning”

for

“Conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant,”

or

“You bid me, ô princesse, to scarifie a festered old sore”

as an equivalent for

“Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem,”

must be content with “audience fit though few.” Sir Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey and a few other choice spirits, all bitten with the same flea, patted poor Stanihurst on the back and told him that what Nash called “his [and their] foul, lumbring, boisterous, wallowing measures” had “enriched and polished their native tongue.” But the rest of the world laughed with Nash, and may still for that matter; for Stanihurst’s version is full of conceits even droller than Phaer’s. “Bedlamite” for _furiatâ mente_, “Dandiprat hop-thumb” for _parvulus_, Jupiter “bussing his pretty, prating parrot”—_i.e._, Venus—and Priam girding on his sword Morglay, are some of them. The last shows how the glamour of the Gothic romances, in which Virgil figured sometimes as a magician—the _Sortes Virgilianæ_ long outlived their origin—still hung about even the learned, of whom Stanihurst was indisputably one— “eruditissimus ille nobilis” Camden calls him. It may be interesting to add that he was a Catholic, a friend of Campion the martyr, and died in exile because of it.

Stanihurst seems to have played the part of horrible example to all after-translators; for although Surrey’s metre has been repeatedly used, and Phaer’s of late by Mr. Morris, and we might add by Prof. Conington (for his octosyllabic verse is but a variation of the Alexandrine, which skipped capriciously from twelve syllables to sixteen[127]), the hexameter has never again, so far as we know, been applied to rendering the _Æneid_. Yet the measure which in English goes by that name seems far better adapted, _pace_ Mr. Arnold, to the pensive grace of Virgil than to the grave majesty of Homer. It may be true, as scholars contend, that it by no means reproduces the effect of the Greek or Roman hexameter, and it may be equally true, as other scholars tell us, that we have no conception of what was the effect of the Greek or Roman hexameter on the Greek or Roman ear—though the second objection might, in malicious hands, prove an embarrassment for the first. Yet as we read Homer and Virgil there is no doubt that hexameters can be—indeed, that such have been—constructed which do go far to reproduce the effect of Homer and Virgil, according to the modern reading, upon the modern ear. Grant that this is an entirely wrong effect; that either Homer or Virgil, hearing his verses read in modern fashion, would be sure to clap hands to ear, and cry out in an agony with Martial:

Footnote 127:

See Warton, _Hist. E. P._ sec. 1.

“Quem recitas, meus est, O Fidentine, libellus;
Sed male cum recitas, incipit esse tuus”;[128]

Footnote 128:

“My piece you’ve been spouting! I ne’er should have known:
Next time, if you love me, do say it’s your own.”

—Mart. _Epigr._ i. 39.

it is yet the only effect we are ever likely to get until the day of judgment; and what are you going to do about it? Of course it is hopeless to try to imitate Homer’s sonorous harmonies—the καλὰ τὰ Ὁμήρον ἔπη, as Maximus Tyrius calls them, the lovely Homeric words—the πολυφλοίς βοιο θαλάσσης and ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο. It is not in ours or any other tongue but Homer’s own to do it. But Mr. Arnold has shown that we can imitate afar off his rhythm and metrical effect, and why should we not do that? If anybody can give us hexameters that please the English ear and make it fancy, without being conscious of too much elongation, that it is listening to the faintest echo of Homer’s mighty lyre or Virgil’s silver string, why, let us have them, prithee, and a _fico_ for the grammarians.

In this desultory review of Virgilian translators we mean to confine ourselves to the _Æneid_; but we may say in passing that the _Eclogues_ were, about 1587, put into unrhymed Alexandrines by Abraham Fleming, who thus nearly anticipated the metre Prof. Newman, after much experimenting, hit on as the proper one to render Homer, and which, as Prof. Marsh says, has the disadvantage (or the merit?) to American ears of suggesting our own epic strain of _Yankee Doodle_. Fleming, however, as will be seen from the following quotation, taken from the beginning of his Fourth Eclogue, only dropped into our national music occasionally:

“O Muses of Sicilian ile, let’s greater matters singe!
Shrubs, groves, and bushes lowe delight and please not every man.
If we do singe of woods, the woods be worthy of a consul.”

While Virgil was thus engrossing the attention of Elizabethan scholars Horace lay comparatively neglected, although it was an era of translation, as transitional periods in the literature of a country are apt to be. Nearly all the Latin poets then extant were done into English before the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the Greek series began sonorously with Chapman’s Homer soon after. Even that most perfect of all actual or possible poets, as her courtiers called her—Queen Elizabeth—tried her hand at it in a translation of part of the _Hercules Œteus_ of Seneca. But no complete version of Horace seems to have appeared prior to Creech’s towards the end of the seventeenth century. In 1567, however, Thomas Drant published _Horace, his Arte of Poetrie, Pistles, and Satyres Englished_. In his preface is one quaint remark, to the truth of which all Horatians will bear witness: “Neyther any man which can judge can judge it one and the like laboure to translate Horace and to make and translate a love booke, a shril tragedie, or a smooth and platleuyled poesye. Thys I can truly say, of myne owne experyence, that I can sooner translate twelve verses out of the Greeke Homer than sixe out of Horace.”

The first version of the _Odes_ was that of Sir Thomas Hawkins, about 1630. This, though it seems to have been popular enough to go through several editions, was far from complete, the lighter odes being omitted as being “too wanton and loose.” Our own edition, which is the fourth, dated 1638, contains about two-thirds of the odes and epodes. Here and there we find a tolerably good verse:

“What man, what hero [Clio] wilt thou raise
With shrillest pipe or Lyra’s softer lays?
What god whose name in sportive straine
Echo will chaunt thee back againe?”[129]

Footnote 129:

_Carm._ i. 12.

This will compare not too disadvantageously with the latest version—Lord Lytton’s—which, indeed, is not especially good:

“What man, what hero, or what god select’st thou,
Theme for sweet lyre or fife sonorous, Clio,
Whose honored name shall that gay sprite-voice, Echo,
Hymn back rebounding?”

As a rule, however, Sir Thomas is stiff—a fault common to almost all translations of the easiest of lyrists up to a much later period. Yet in this century there were many versions of single odes, epistles, and satires, some of which have scarcely ever been surpassed. Such, for instance, were Ben Jonson’s rendering of Ode IV. 1, _Ad Venerem_, and Milton’s of I. 5, _Ad Pyrrhum_, severally included by Mr. Theodore Martin and Lord Lytton in their respective versions as beyond their skill to better; Dryden’s fine paraphrase of III. 29, _To Mæcenas_, which Mr. Martin, non sordidus auctor, pronounces finer than the original; and, on a lower plane, however, Roscommon’s version of the _Art of Poetry_. Of these, Milton’s has been said to touch the high-water mark of translation, and is indeed very elegant and close.

Ben Jonson’s set translations are often injured by a rigid strictness which Horace might have warned him against:

“Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus Interpres,”[130]

Footnote 130:

“Nor word for word translate with painful care.”
—Horat. _De Arte Poet._, Francis’ Trans.

and which evoked Dryden’s protest against “the jaw-breaking translations of Ben Jonson.” Yet even in fetters he danced better than most; and some of his translations, notably the one mentioned above and one of Martial, _Liber, amicorum dulcissima cura tuorum_, it would be hard to pick flaws in.

In Jonson’s day, however, there was no mean between word-for-word rendering and the loosest paraphrase, until Denham laid down something like the true rule in his verses to Fanshawe on the latter’s translation of Guarini:

“That servile path thou nobly dost decline
Of tracing word for word and line for line....
A new and nobler way thou dost pursue
To make translations, and translators too.
They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame,
True to his sense, but truer to his fame.”

Cowley, who translated largely from Horace, runs to the opposite extreme from Jonson: his versions are as much too free as Jonson’s are too close. Yet some of his single lines are unmatched for felicity and force:

“Hence ye profane, I hate ye all,
Both the great vulgar and the small”

(a phrase which has passed into a proverb) for _Odi profanum vulgus et arceo_; “The poor rich man’s emphatically poor” for _Magnas inter opes inops_; “From his toucht mouth the wanton torment slips” for _Fugientia captat Flumina_; and, best of all, perhaps, “He loves of homely littleness the ease” for Martial’s _Sordidaque in parvis otia rebus amet_—which shows how a deft translator can, without leaving his original, breathe into it, so to speak, a beauty it scarcely had—such lines as these make us regret either that Cowley did not translate more or that he was unable to transfer to his own poetry more of the same simple elegance of thought and word.

All of Cowley’s contemporaries were not so happy, however, as he in their attempts to better Horace, though many tried it. One of them, Sir Edward Sherburne, claps a periwig on Mt. Soracte:[131]

Footnote 131:

Horat. _Carm._ i. 9. One of the best versions of this ode is that of
Allan Ramsay, in the Scotch dialect.

“Seest thou not how Soracte’s head
(For all his height) stands covered
With a white periwig of snow,
While the laboring woods below
Are hardly able to sustain
The weight of winter’s feathered rain?”

He had evidently been reading and, with Dryden, admiring Sylvester’s _Du Bartas_:

“And when the winter’s keener breath began
To crystallize the Baltic Ocean,
To glaze the lake, to bridle up the floods,
And periwig with snow the bald-pate woods.”

The conceited style then in vogue was not well fitted to do justice to Horace’s _simplex munditiis_, although he was now universally read and esteemed—“The next best poet in the world to Virgil,” Cowley calls him—and has left the mark of his genial influence on all the writers of the time. One finds the Horatian sentiment running like a golden thread through the minor poetry of James and Charles I., at times informing whole poems with a pithiness of phrase and a dignity which Horace might call his own. Such are Marvell’s ode on _The Return of Cromwell_, such Shirley’s “The glories of our blood and state” and “Victorious men of earth, no more”—all three among the finest productions of their kind in the language.

After the Restoration the business of translation was resumed with vigor. Dryden in his Virgil, and, somewhat later, Pope in his Homer, set a fresh model which was followed by all their successors until Cowper’s Miltonic _Iliad_ came to break the spell and pave the way to the modern style, which aims to combine freedom with fidelity, ease of manner with correctness of meaning, and so far as possible to reproduce the author himself, form as well as matter. Creech’s Horace was hardly a success, being stiff and ungainly without being particularly close, and, while showing in its metre some sense of the poet’s rhythmical grace, scarcely attempted to render the characteristic delicacy of his wording—that _curiosa felicitas_ we all have heard of. In this—and indeed in every—respect the version of Dr. Francis, which came out about half a century later, was greatly superior as a whole to any previous one, and took with Horatians a position the best of its successors has found it hard to shake. Indeed, with such of the poet’s lovers as date from the golden age of Consul Plancus, Francis is still the paramount favorite, and you will talk to them in vain of the merits of Robinson or Lytton, of Conington’s fluent ease or Martin’s sprightly grace. Francis is in the main faithful, generally pleasing, and always respectable at least, but, like most of his rivals, he lacks a certain lightness of touch, an airy gayety of treatment in the minor odes which no one, we think, has hit off so well as Mr. Theodore Martin. They are, as that accomplished writer says, in many instances what would be called now _vers de société_, and their chief value rests in the poet’s inimitable charm of manner. Unless some notion of this can be given, the translator’s labor is lost, and he offers his readers but a withered posy from which color and perfume alike are fled.

ALBA’S DREAM.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “ARE YOU MY WIFE?” “A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,”
ETC.