Chapter XXI: Front Matter (21)

“Now who in thy smile endearing
Basks, with foolish fondness hoping
To his love thou’lt e’er be open,
To his wooing ever kind,
Knowing not the fitful veering
Of the faithless wind?

“Hapless they rash troth who plight thee!
On the sacred wall my votive
Picture, set with pious motive,
Shows I hung in Neptune’s fane
My wet garments to the mighty
Monarch of the main.”

It may be said that this sly spirit of badinage which lurks, or to us, at least, seems to lurk, in the shadows of the lighter odes, like some tricksy Faun peering and disappearing through the thickets of Lucretilis, it is impossible to seize; that when we try it “the stateliness of the language” interposes itself like a wall, and we find ourselves becoming vulgar where Horace is playful, flippant where Horace is light. Doubtless this is so; what then? Because it is an impossibility, shall any loyal Horatian balk at it? It is just because of these impossibilities that translations are always in order, and will, to a certain extent, always be in demand. Translations of other poets pall; it is conceivable that a version of Virgil might be produced which human skill could not better. But no such thing being conceivable of Horace, every fresh version is a whet to curiosity and emulation; each separate ode hides its own agreeable secret, every epithet has its own individual surprise. Let there be no talk, then, of impossibilities; for our own part, to paraphrase what Hallam says of Lycidas, we look upon the ability to translate such odes as the _Ad Pyrrham_, so as to demonstrate their impossibility, a good test of a man’s capacity to translate Horace at all.

Another nice consideration for the translator of Horace is in respect of metre. Undoubtedly the translator who can retain the metrical movement of his original has gained so much towards reproducing his general effect. But with Horace this attempt may as well be abandoned at once. The Alcaic and the Sapphic stanza, much less the Asclepiad or the Archilochian, have never yet been, and for obvious reasons never will be, naturalized in our English verse, though poor Percival thought differently, and added one more to a life of failures. Tennyson, in his ode to Milton,

“Whose guardian-angels, Muriel, Abdiel,
Starred from Jehovah’s gorgeous armory,
Tow’r, as the deep-domed empyrean
Rings to the roar of an angel onset,”

gives us, perhaps, as good Alcaics as we have any right to look for in English (though “gōrgĕoŭs” is not a very gorgeous dactyl); yet how different from the Horatian cadence:

“Æquam memento rebus in arduis
Servare mentem, non secus in bonis
Ab insolenti temperatam
Lætitia, moriture Delli.”[78]

As for Sapphics, whether we take Canning’s _Knife Grinder_ for our model or Mr. Swinburne’s

“All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close, and with eyes of iron,
Stood and beheld me,”

we are not much nearer to Horace’s melody:

“Scandit æratas vitiosa naves
Cura, nec turmas equitum relinquit
Ocior cervis, et agente nimbos
Ocior Euro.”[79]

But, at least, following that rule of compensation with which all good translators are familiar, some attempt may be made to suggest the metrical variety and richness of the _Odes_ by a corresponding variety and grace in the English measures of the translation. It is here that the modern translators excel; indeed, it may be said that only within the last hundred years have translators had this adjunct at their command, for it is only during that period that English poets have begun to comprehend and master fully the resources and possibilities of English metre. Not that the earlier poets were at all deficient in the metrical sense; that their ears were not quick to catch the finest delicacies of verbal harmony. Not to mention a host of minor bards who knew how to marry “perfect music unto noble words,” Milton’s lyrics are melody itself. There is scarcely a more tunable couplet in the language than his

“Sweetest Shakspeare, fancy’s child,
Warbles his native woodnotes wild.”

The open vowels and liquid consonants fairly sing themselves. Nor was it for lack of experiment that they failed of

“Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony”

in words, as Shelley and Tennyson and Swinburne learned to do later. The attempt to naturalize the classical metres, for example, began at a very early period of our literary history, and many learned treatises were written to prove them your only proper vehicle for English poetry. Perhaps it was the ill-success of these efforts that made our poets so long shy of wandering in their metres away from the beaten track and the simplest forms. Up to the time of Campbell we may say that the iambus and the trochee reigned supreme in English verse; the anapest and the dactyl, of which such effective use has been made by the later poets, were either unknown or contemned. Suckling’s _Session of the Poets_, the metrical intention of which appears to be anapestic, shows what desperate work even the best lyrists could make when they strayed after strange metrical gods.[80]

It may be said, then, that until within a comparatively recent period Horace could not be properly translated into English verse at all. English verse was not yet ready to receive so noble a guest. Compare Martin’s or Conington’s versions with one of the earlier translations, and the truth of this, we think, will be apparent at once. Creech, indeed, seems to have had a dim notion of the truth, and his version shows a perceptible striving for metrical effect, at least in the arrangement of his stanza; but Creech had too little of the poetical faculty to make the effort with taste or success. Francis for the most part is content with the orthodox measures, and Father Prout was perhaps first to bring to the work this essential accomplishment of the Horatian translator. Prout’s metrical inventions are bold, and often elegant; and his versions, though free, are always spirited, and often singularly felicitous. Among the most striking of his metres is the one he employs for the _Solvitur acris hiems_ (_Carm._ i. iv.):

“Now Venus loves to group
Her merry troop
Of maidens,
Who, while the moon peeps out,
Dance with the Graces round about
Their queen in cadence;
While far ’mid fire and noise
Vulcan his forge employs,
Where Cyclops grim aloft their ponderous sledges poise.”

A paraphrase that, not a translation; but not even Horace could find it in his heart to gainsay so graceful a paraphrase. Another effective metrical arrangement which shows off well Prout’s astonishing copiousness of rhyme is that of the _Quum tu Lydia_ (i. 13):

“But where meet (thrice fortunate!)
Kindred hearts and suitable,
Strife comes ne’er importunate,
Love remains immutable;
On to the close they glide ‘mid scenes Elysian,
Through life’s delightful vision.”

Mr. Martin is here somewhat closer and not less skilful in handling his metre:

“Oh! trebly blest, and blest for ever,
Are they whom true affection binds,
In whom no doubts or janglings sever
The union of their constant minds;
But life in blended current flows
Serene and sunny to the close.”

Compare with these Francis, who is scarcely more literal than Prout, and not so literal as Martin:

“Thrice happy they whom love unites
In equal rapture and sincere delights,
Unbroken by complaints or strife
Even to the latest hours of life.”

Is not the advantage in point of poetry altogether on the side of the moderns, and is it not largely due to their superior mastery of rhythm? The passage, it may be said, has been paraphrased by Moore in the lines,

“There’s a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told,
When two that are linked in one heavenly tie,
With heart never changing and brow never cold,
Love on through all ills, and love on till they die.”

Both Mr. Martin and Prof. Conington have given close and successful attention to this part of their task. But it was left for Lord Lytton to attempt something like a systematic imitation of the Horatian metres. His plan, as set forth in his preface, “was in the first instance to attempt a close imitation of the ancient measure—the scansion being, of course (as in English or German hexameters and pentameters), by accent, not quantity—and then to make such modifications of flow and cadence as seemed to me best to harmonize the rhythm to the English ear, while preserving as much as possible that which has been called the type of the original.” Something of this kind, no doubt, Milton had in view in the measure he took for his _Ad Pyrrham_, and which the Wartons and Professor Conington adapted to the same purpose after him, the latter, however, adding the embellishment or, as Milton himself had called it, the “barbarous jingle” of rhyme. Milton’s measure (well known as that of Collins’ “Ode to Evening”), which consists of two unrhymed iambic pentameters, followed by two unrhymed iambic trimeters—or, to be “more English and less nice,” of two ordinary blank-verses followed by two three-foot verses—resembles Horace’s metre, which the grammarians would tell us is the third Asclepiadian strophe, “rather,” says Prof. Conington, “in the length of the respective lines than in any similarity of the cadences.” Lord Lytton attempted something more, and with only partial success, though the task, it must be owned, was not an easy one. Horace, in the _Odes_ and _Epodes_, uses eighteen different varieties of metre, ranging from the grave sadness of what is called the first Archilochian strophe, the lovely measure in which one of the loveliest of all the _Odes_ is written (iv. 7)—

“Diffugere nives; redeunt jam gramina campis
Arboribusque comæ,”[81]

to the quick sharpness of the first iambic strophe in which the poet mauls the unsavory Mævius. And not only this, but each of these metres is used by Horace to express widely differing moods of feeling. Thus, the same measure which in the beautiful lament for Quinctilius breathes the tenderest spirit of grief and resignation, serves equally well to guy Tibullus on his luckless loves, to sound “stern alarums” to the absent Cæsar, or to bid Virgil or Varius to “delightful meetings.” The Sapphic rises to the lofty height of the _Carmen Seculare_ or stoops to chide a serving-boy for his super-serviceable zeal; is equally at home with an invocation to the gods or an invitation to dinner; while the Alcaic—what subject is there that in Horace’s hands the Alcaic cannot be made to sing?

This flexibility of the Latin metres Lord Lytton has recognized, and sought to meet by a corresponding variation of his own, “according as the prevalent spirit of the ode demanded lively and sportive or serious and dignified expression.” Thus, for the Alcaic stanza he employs “two different forms of rhythm”; one as in i. 9:

“See how white in the deep fallen snow stands Soracte;
Laboring forests no longer can bear up their burden;
And the rush of the rivers is locked,
Halting mute in the gripe of the frost”;

the other as in i. 34:

“Worshipper rare and niggard of the gods,
While led astray, in the Fool’s wisdom versed,
Now back I shift the sail,
Forced in the courses left behind to steer,”

or, with a slight modification, as in i. 35:

“Goddess who o’er thine own loved Antium reignest,
Present to lift Man, weighted with his sorrows
Down to life’s last degree,
Or change his haughtiest triumphs into graves.”

For the Sapphic, likewise, he has two varieties; for the statelier odes three lines of blank-verse and what may be called an English Adonic; for “the lighter odes a more sportive and tripping measure.” Thus, for iv. 2 he gives us:

“Julus, he who would with Pindar vie
Soars, with Dædalian art, on waxen wings,
And, falling, gives his name unto the bright
Deeps of an ocean”;

for iii. 14 a nearer approach to the _Knife Grinder_ jingle:

“Nothing cools fiery spirits like a gray hair;
In every quarrel ’tis your sure peacemaker:
In my hot youth, when Plancus was the consul,
I was less patient.”

Lord Lytton’s experiment is full of interest to Horatians—as, indeed, what translation is not?—even the worst, even the Rev. Mr. Sewell’s, may be of use in teaching the translator how not to do it—and his failures, which are many, are scarcely less instructive than his successes, which seem to us fewer than for so bold an essay could be wished; but both alike are suggestive of many possibilities. It is in the lighter odes that he is least satisfactory, and we doubt if these can be done full justice to without the aid of rhyme. Horace’s grace of form in these is so delicate and exquisite that it taxes all the resources and embellishments of our English verse to give any adequate idea of it. Take, as an illustration of Lord Lytton’s method, and as giving, perhaps, the measure of his success, his version of that delicious little landscape, _Ad Fontem Blandusiæ_ (iii. 13):

“Fount of Blandusia, more lucid than crystal,
Worthy of honeyed wine, not without flowers,
I will give thee to-morrow a kid
Whose front, with the budded horn swelling.

“Predicts to his future life Venus and battles;
Vainly! The lymph of thy cold running waters
He shall tinge with the red of his blood,
Fated child of the frolicsome people!

“The scorch of the Dogstar’s fell season forbears thee;
Ever friendly to grant the sweet boon of thy coolness
To the wild flocks that wander around,
And the oxen that reek from the harrow.

“I will give thee high rank and renown among fountains,
When I sing of the ilex o’erspreading the hollows,
Of rocks whence in musical fall
Leap thy garrulous silvery waters.”

This is better because more literal than Joseph Warton’s unrhymed version in the Miltonian stanza, with which it may be compared:

“Ye waves that gushing fall with purest streams,
Blandusian fount! to whom the products sweet
Of richest wines belong,
And fairest flowers of spring,
To thee a chosen victim will I slay—
A kid who, glowing in lascivious youth,
Just blooms with budding horn,
And, with vain thought elate,
Yet destines future war; but, ah! too soon
His reeking blood with crimson shall enrich
Thy pure, translucent flood
And tinge thy crystal clear.
Thy sweet recess the sun in midday hour
Can ne’er invade; thy streams the labor’d ox
Refresh with cooling draughts
And glad the wand’ring herds.
Thy name shall shine, with endless honors graced,
While in my shell I sing the nodding oak
That o’er thy cavern deep
Waves his embowering head.”

It would almost seem as if the author of this version had taken pains to rub out every Horatian characteristic. The pretty touch of the _loquaces lymphæ_ is thus omitted, unless the first line be meant to do duty for it, while by such padding as “chosen victim” and “endless honors” Horace’s sixteen lines are diluted into twenty—a danger to which the unrhymed translator, constantly seeking by inversions and paraphrases to cover the baldness of his medium, is peculiarly liable. Whatever may be said to the contrary, rhyme compels conciseness, and helps to point quite as often as it entices to expansion. Prof. Conington’s version, in the same metre as Warton’s, but rhymed in alternate lines, will be found greatly superior to it, and is perhaps, on the whole, the best we have seen—better even than Mr. Martin’s, who cannot get his Latin into less than twenty-four octosyllabic lines. Instead of giving either, let us see if all that is essential in Horace cannot be given in the same number of lines of what is known as the Tennysonian stanza, which is somewhat less capacious than the Alcaics of the original, though, by a certain pensive grace, peculiarly fitted to render the sentiment of this delightful ode:

“Blandusian fount, as crystal clear,
Of garlands worthy and of wine,
A kid to-morrow shall be thine,
Whose swelling brows, just budding, bear

“The horns that presage love and strife;
How vainly! For his crimson blood
Shall stain the silver of thy flood
With all the herd’s most wanton life.

“The burning Dogstar’s noontide beam
Knows not thy secret nook; the ox
Parched from the plough, the fielding flocks,
Lap grateful coolness from thy stream.

“Thee, too, ‘mid storied founts my lay
Shall shrine: thy bending holm I’ll sing,
Shading the grottoed rocks whence spring
Thy laughing waters far away.”

Though terseness and fidelity are two of the chief merits claimed by the advocates of the unrhymed measures, it is just here that they oftenest fail; and Lord Lytton is no exception. Space permits us to give but few instances. “Trodden by all, and only trodden once,” is Lord Lytton’s version of _calcanda semel_, i. 28—seven English words for two Latin, and the sense then but vaguely given at best. _Feriuntque summos Fulgura montes_ is in like manner diluted into

“The spots on earth most stricken by the lightning
Are its high places.”

Awkwardness of style, too, is a much more frequent characteristic of Lord Lytton’s renderings than we should look for either from his own command of style or the freedom which disuse of rhyme is claimed to ensure. For instance, in ii. 2:

“Him shall uplift, and on no waxen pinions,
Fame, the survivor,”

might surely have been bettered; and in the same ode a line in the stanza already quoted above, _Latius regnes avidum domando Spiritum_, is translated, “Wider thy realm a greedy soul subjected,” which would be scarcely intelligible without the Latin. “Bosom _more seen through_ than glass” is by no means the neatest possible equivalent for _per lucidior vitro_, and such expressions as “closed gates of Janus vacant of a war,” “lest thou owe a mock,” “but me more have stricken with rapture,” are scarcely English.

Nevertheless, with all its faults and shortcomings, Lord Lytton’s essay is in some respects the most interesting translation of Horace that has yet appeared, and may pioneer the way to more fortunate results in the same direction. It has, at least, the _raison d’être_ which Mr. Matthew Arnold denies to such translations as Wright’s and Sotheby’s Homer; it has a distinct and novel method of its own, and does not simply repeat the method and renew the faults and virtues of any predecessor. The American edition, it is worthy of remark, is printed in the old-fashioned way, with the Latin text to face the English—an innovation, or, more properly, a _re_novation, which will no doubt be welcome to lovers of the Venusian, whose love has outlived their memory, and who, though loyal to the spirit of our poet, are no longer so familiar with his letter as in the days, the far-off sunny days, when Horace was the heaviest task that life had yet laid upon us.

We have dwelt upon this subject at somewhat greater length than we intended; for to us it is full of a fascination we should be glad to hope we had made our readers in some sort share. But it has also a practical side which the most fanatical opponent of the classics, the most zealous upholder of utilitarian education, must recognize and admit. As a means of training in English composition, as an aid to discover the resources of our own tongue, there is no better practice than translating Horace into English verse, with due attention to his epithets. That, perhaps, may serve in some degree to reconcile the practical mind to his retention in the modern curriculum, even though Homer be kicked out of doors and Virgil sent flying through the window; for a practical man is none the worse equipped for business in being able to say what he means in “good set phrase.” To be sure it does not ask the pen of an Addison to write an order for a “hnd. trces. lard,” but we dare say if Mr. Richard Grant White were called upon to make out a bill of lading, he would do it none the worse for knowing all about the English language that is worth knowing, if not more than is worth telling. There are mysteries in our English speech that the _Complete Letter-Writer_, or even the “editorials” of the daily newspaper, do not quite explore, and some of these our old friend Horace may help us to find out. _Fas est ab hoste doceri._

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THE LITTLE CHAPEL AT MONAMULLIN.