Chapter I: A New Irelander (5)

Other translations of the _Æneid_ there were during the eighteenth century, among them one by another Oxford professor of poetry, Hawkins, but none have survived. Pope’s translation of Homer, which was published soon after Pitt’s _Æneid_, diverted attention to the Greek poet, and gave him with translators a pre-eminence over his Latin rival which only within a few years he can be said to have lost. Pope had no imitators, however, till long after. Even more absolutely than Dryden he swayed the sceptre of poetry in his time; and the presumptuous wight who had ventured to challenge his sovereignty or to measure strength with “that poetical wonder, the translation of the _Iliad_, a performance which no age or nation can pretend to rival,” gods—critical gods—and men and booksellers would have laughed to scorn. It is true, Addison, that most uneasy “brother near the throne,” was shrewdly suspected of meditating such a design under the cloak of his friend and follower, Tickell, and even went so far as to publish—so ran the current gossip of the coffee-houses—a version of the first book of the _Iliad_ in Tickell’s name. But the scheme stopped there; Pope’s triumph was too splendid and overwhelming, and his great work calmly defied competition, until the spell of his honeyed couplet was broken, and Cowper could find a hearing for his ponderous Miltonic periods, a full half-century after Pope’s death. The battle which soon thereafter came to be joined between the partisans of the Popian and Cowperian methods—both of them, as Mr. Arnold assures us, really on a complete equality of error—had the effect of keeping Homer in the foreground and Virgil in the shade, despite the praiseworthy versions of the latter by Simmons in rhymed couplets about 1817, and Kennedy in blank-verse some thirty years later, until the critical _furore_ created by the appearance of Prof. Conington’s _Æneid_ about ten years since once more turned the tide and brought our Mantuan to the front.

Conington’s translation, by the novelty of its metre, the freshness of its treatment, the spirit of its movement, its union of fidelity and grace, took the public ear and at once won a popularity which, if we may judge from the fact that a new edition has been lately advertised, it has not yet lost nor is destined speedily to lose. Moreover, its peculiar metre gave rise to a discussion among the critics, which has no doubt had its share in bringing out the two additional versions by Mr. Cranch and Mr. Morris at brief intervals after Professor Conington’s, the former at Boston, the latter in England and reprinted here. Each of these three versions has that “proper reason for existing” in novelty of method and manner which Mr. Arnold demands, and without which, indeed, multiplied translations are but cumberers of the book-stall and a weariness to the flesh. Of Mr. Cranch this assertion may sound a trifle odd, since his work upon its face presents little that is new. In place of the galloping octosyllabics of Prof. Conington or the resurrected Alexandrines of Mr. Morris, he offers us only the familiar blank-verse which Kennedy and Trapp and Brady used, or misused, before him; he has no theories to illustrate, but translates his author as faithfully as he knows how, and his rendering is neither so exceedingly good nor so excessively bad as to give it any claim to originality upon that score. But then it is the first American translation of Virgil, and that is surely novelty enough.

For as each age, so every country, looks at a classic author through spectacles of its own. “Each age,” as Conington well says in his preface, “will naturally think that it understands an author whom it studies better than the ages which have gone before it”; and it is for this reason, he adds, “that the great works of antiquity require to be translated afresh from time to time to preserve their interest as part of modern literary culture.” But it is not alone that each age will understand an author better than preceding ages; it will understand him differently; it will see him in another light, from far other points of view, modified and interpreted by its own spirit. What Heyne says of the poet is in a measure true of the translator—that he has the genius of his era, which must necessarily qualify his work. We have sometimes fancied even that this business of translation was a kind of metempsychosis through which the poet’s soul shall speak to many different times and lands through forms and in voices changing to suit the moods of each. This, of course, is only one of those fantastic notions which a writer must sometimes be indulged in, if he is to be kept in reasonable good-humor. But we think we may venture to say that two nations translating for themselves what antiquity has to say to them will insensibly find its utterances modified for each of them by their natural modes of thought. Nay, may we not go further and say that no two human minds will find precisely the same message in Homer or Virgil or Horace—so infinite are the gradations of thought, so innumerable the shades of meaning and suggestion in a word. Of Virgil this is especially true; for he has, says Prof. Conington, “that peculiar habit, ... common to him and Sophocles, of hinting at two or three modes of expression while actually employing one.”

It is just for this reason that repeated translations of a great author are not only useful but desirable; that, to quote Conington again, “it is well that we should know how our ancestors of the Revolution period conceived of Virgil; it is well that we should be obliged consciously to realize how we conceive of him ourselves.” How true this is no one can fail to perceive who contrasts Dryden’s method in any given passage with Conington’s. The sense of Virgil may be given with equal exactness by each—we say _may_ be, which is rather stretching a point, for, in respect of verbal fidelity, the two versions are not to be compared—the interpretation may be equally poetical, but there will remain a subtle something which stamps each, and which we can only say is the flavor of the time. Or, again, compare the Abbé Delille’s French version with Dryden’s English—perhaps a fairer comparison; for both are equally free, though by no means equally acquainted with their author, and both to a certain extent belonged to the same school of composition. Nor are they so very far apart as they seem in point of time; the century or so which divides them was a very much longer period in England than in France. Charles II. was nearer to Louis XV. than to George III. in point of taste. Yet how different from Dryden’s Virgil, or from any Englishman’s, is Delille’s, even though he does not find in his text such enchanting gallicisms as Jean Regnault de Segrais could twist out of the lines,

“Ubi templum illi centumque Sabæo
Thure calent aræ, sertisque recentibus halant”:[176]

“Dans le temple où toujours quelque Amant irrité
Accuse dans ses vœux quelque jeune Beauté.”

This is an extreme case, no doubt, and there are Frenchmen even who would not be beyond laughing at it. We are not to forget, as we laugh at it ourselves, that Segrais was not unknown in the Hôtel Rambouillet, and that although his own poetry was not all of this order, not even his _Æneid_—Saint-Evremond liked it—he also wrote novels which not even the Hôtel Rambouillet could read. But when that really able man and accomplished scholar, Cardinal Du Perron, turns Horace’s lines in the charming farewell to Virgil (_Carm._ i. 3):

“Ventorumque regat Pater
Obstrictis aliis præter Iapygia,”

into this sort of thing:

“Ainsi des vents l’humide Père
Ton cours heureusement tempere,
Tenant ses enfants emplumez
Si bien sous la clef enfermez
Excepté l’opportun Zephyr,”

we have a version which no doubt seems correct and poetical enough to a Frenchman, but to an English mind suggests nothing so much as a damp and aged poultry-fancier locking up his chickens in the hen-house out of the rain. And a countryman of the cardinal can make nothing more of the “laughing eyes” of Dante’s Piccarda:

“Ond’ ella pronta e con _occhi ridenti_,”[177]

than

“L’ombre me repondit _d’un air satisfait_!”

as though the celestial phantom had been a small girl bribed with a tart to answer. To the post-academic Gaul, shivering in the chaste but chilly shadow of that awful Pantheon of the verbal proprieties, the “Marguerite aux yeulx rians et verds” whom his forebears loved to sing would be but a green-eyed monster indeed. Ronsard’s parodies of Pindar were no worse than Ambrose Philips’ travesties of the deep-mouthed Theban—the sparrow-hawk aping the eagle—and not much worse, indeed, than West’s or even Wheelwright’s, or any other imitation of the inimitable that we have seen. But the badness of the one is thoroughly French and of his time, even to his bragging that it was his noble birth which enabled him to reproduce Pindar, wherein Horace, for lack of that virtue, had failed; the badness of the other as thoroughly English and of his age. And what more salient instance could be given of this natural difference in mental constitution, in “the way of looking at things,” than Voltaire’s treatment of the scene in _Hamlet_ where the sentinel answers the question, “Have you had quiet guard?” by the familiar household idiom, “Not a mouse stirring”? “_Pas un souris qui trotte_” the author of _Zaire_ makes it, and proceeds to inform his countrymen that this Shakspeare was a drunken savage.

Now, while there is no such radical difference between English and American ways of thought as between English and French ways, there is still difference enough to justify us in giving place to Mr. Cranch’s blank-verse _Æneid_, as being _à priori_ another thing from the English blank-verse _Æneids_ of forty or one hundred and forty years ago. So, without more ado, let us repeat that these three versions of the last decade are sufficiently unlike one another or any that have gone before to warrant attentive notice.

In choosing for the vehicle of his attempt the octosyllabic line—the well-known metre of Scott’s _Marmion_—Prof. Conington turned his back intrepidly on all the traditions. Scarcely any rhythm we have would seem at first blush worse fitted to give the unlearned reader an adequate idea of the sonorous march of the Latin hexameter or of the stately melody of Virgil’s verse, of the dignity of his sentiments, or the noble gravity of his style. For him who uses such a metre to render the _Æneid_ one half anticipates the need of some such frank confession as that Ronsard, in a fit of remorse, or perhaps a verbal indigestion over his own inconceivable pedantry, puts at the end—at the _end_, mark you—of one of his never-ending series of odes:

“Les François qui mes vers liront,
S’ils ne sont et Grecs et Romains,
En lieu de ce livre, ils n’auront
Qu’un pesant faix entre les mains”—

which for our present purpose we may paraphrase: My excellent reader, if you don’t know Virgil as well as I do, you will find very little of him here, and if you do you will find still less. But Professor Conington soon puts away from us all such forebodings. He gives us, in spite of his metre, for the most part, in rare instances, by the help of it, a great deal of Virgil—more, on the whole, than almost any other of the poet’s translators. He has put the story of the _Æneid_ into bright and animated English verse which may be read with pleasure as a poem for itself, and is yet strictly faithful to the sense and spirit of its original, as close as need be—wonderfully close in many parts—to its language, often skilfully suggestive of some of the most salient peculiarities of its form, and only failing conspicuously, where all translations most conspicuously fail, in rendering the poet’s manner, because the manner of any poet—and we mean by manner that union of thought and form of the poet’s way of seeing with his way of saying things which is the full manifestation of his genius—only failing here because this part of any poet it is next to impossible to reproduce in a foreign tongue, and because the vehicle chosen by Prof. Conington, so opposite in every way to Virgil’s vehicle, increased that difficulty tenfold. But a translation of a long narrative poem is not like the translation of a brief lyric. Is the former to be written for those who understand the original and care for no translation, or for those who, not understanding the original, ask first of the translator that he shall not put them to sleep, and, second, that he shall give them all that his author gives as nearly as possible in the same manner? Two of these demands Prof. Conington’s version fully meets, and it comes as near to the third as was consistent with a metre which gave him the best chance of combining the other two. If any translation of Virgil can hope to be popular it is his; and we hold to the belief that it will share with Dryden’s, which, if only for its author’s sake, will live, the affections of the _unlatined_ English reader for long to come.

As might be expected, it is in battle-pieces and in scenes of swift and animated action, to which Scott’s metre naturally lends itself, and with which it is as naturally associated, that this version chiefly excels. Take, for example, the onset in the eleventh book:

“Meantime the Trojans near the wall,
The Tuscans and the horsemen all,
In separate troops arrayed;
Their mettled steeds the champaign spurn,
And, chafing, this and that way turn;
Spears bristle o’er the fields, that burn
With arms on high displayed.
Messapus and the Latian force,
And Coras and Camilla’s horse,
An adverse front array;
With hands drawn back they couch the spear,
And aim the dart in full career;
The tramp of heroes strikes the ear,
Mixed with the charger’s neigh.
Arrived within a javelin’s throw,
The armies halt a space; when, lo!
Sudden they let their good steeds go
And meet with deafening cry;
Their volleyed darts fly thick as snow,
Dark-shadowing all the sky.”

The Latin could scarcely be given with more spirit or closeness; though in neither respect does Morris fall short of his predecessor, from whom in manner, however, he differs _toto cœlo_:

“But in meanwhile the Trojan folk the city draw anigh,
The Tuscan dukes and all their horse in many a company
Well ordered; over all the plain, neighing, the steed doth fare,
Prancing and champing on the bit that turns him here and here.
And far and wide the lea is rough with iron harvest now,
And with the weapons tost aloft the level meadows glow.
Messapus and the Latins swift, lo! on the other hand,
And Coras with his brother-lord, and maid Camilla’s band,
Against them in the field; and, lo! far back their arms they fling
In couching of the level spears, and shot-spears brandishing.
All is afire with neigh of steeds and onfall of the men.
And now, within a spear-shot come, short up they rein, and then
They break out with a mighty cry and spur the maddened steeds;
And all at once from every side the storm of spear-shot speeds,
As thick as very snowing is, and darkens down the sun.”

It would be hard to say which version is closer to the original. Conington leaves out the epithet _celeres_ which Virgil bestows on the Latins, and also—a graver omission—that brother whom Virgil makes attend him like his shadow (_et cum fratre Coras_) in every battle-field of the _Æneid_. This fraternal warrior Morris gives us, indeed, but not very intelligibly, as Coras’ “brother-lord.” On the other hand, although Morris renders the Latin line for line, he is not so concise as Conington, who puts Virgil’s fifteen hexameters into twenty of his short lines as opposed to fifteen of Morris’ long ones. Virgil has nothing of Morris’ “iron harvest”; here—

“Tum late ferreus hastis
Horret ager, campique armis sublimibus ardent”—

we should give Conington the preference, while Morris excels in rendering the verse:

“Adventusque virum fremitusque ardescit equorum.”

In Morris’ version four words are to be specially noted: _folk_, _dukes_, _maid_, and _very_. They contain the key to his method, and we shall recur to them again.

Our American’s blank-verse here helps him to no greater degree of fidelity than either of his rivals, while even patriotism must own his version, as compared with theirs, a trifle tame:

“Meanwhile, the Trojan troops, the Etruscan chiefs,
And all the cavalry approach the walls,
In order ranged. The coursers leap and neigh
Along the fields, and fight against the curb,
And wheel about. An iron field of spears
Bristles afar, and lifted weapons blaze.
Upon the other side the Latins swift,
Messapus, Coras, and his brother come,
Also Camilla’s wing; in hostile ranks
They threaten with their lances backward drawn,
And shake their javelins. On the warriors press,
And fierce and fiercer neigh the battle steeds.
Advancing now within a javelin’s throw,
Each army halted; then, with sudden shouts,
They cheer and spur their fiery horses on.
From all sides now the spears fly thick and fast
As showers of sleet, and darken all the sky.”

The word “cavalry” here is too modern in its associations to suit us entirely, nor strikes us as highly poetical.

“Wave, Munich, all thy banners wave,
And charge with all thy _chivalry_,”

is the way Campbell put it. Again, the rendering of the line _Adventusque virum fremitusque ardescit equorum_ is less exact than Morris’, if not than Conington’s, and much less poetical than either; and were it not for the printer’s aid, we should be unable to tell such blank-verse as “Messapus, Coras, and his brother come, also Camilla’s wing,” from the very prosiest of prose. Mr. Cranch, like Prof. Conington, omits Camilla’s attribute of _virginis_—though that is, perhaps, better than to call her, as Dryden does, a “virago”—and turns Virgil’s snow into sleet, no doubt having in mind Gray’s

“Iron sleet of arrowy shower
Hurtles in the darkened air,”

or the “sharp sleet of arrowy shower” in _Paradise Regained_.

It may be of interest to set side by side with these English translations the French version of Delille. It will show us, at least, where Mr. Morris went, perhaps, for his “iron harvest”:

“Mais déjà les Troyens, déjà les fiers Toscans
Pour attaquer vers Lausente ont déployé leurs rangs;
Ils marchent; le coursier de sa tête hautaine
Bat l’air, ronge le frein, et bondit dans la plaine;
Les champs sont hérissés d’une moisson de fer,
Et chaque javelot fait partir un éclair.
Et Messape, et Coras et son valeureux frère,
Et la chaste Camille et sa troupe légère,
Se présentent ensemble. On voit de toutes parts
Et s’alonger la lance et s’agiter les dards.
Sous les pas des guerriers les champs poudreux gémissent;
Et soldats et coursiers de colère frémissent.
Enfin, à la distance où le trait peut porter,
Les partis ennemis viennent de s’arrêter:
On s’écrie, on s’élance, et d’un essor rapide.
Chacun pousse en avant son coursier intrépide.
Plus pressés que la neige au retour des hivers
Des nuages de traits en obscurci les airs.”

In a future number we purpose concluding our present examination and taking a final leave of the translators.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE HOME-RULE CANDIDATE.

_A STORY OF “NEW IRELAND.”_

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE LITTLE CHAPEL AT MONAMULLIN,” “THE ROMANCE OF A
PORTMANTEAU,” ETC., ETC.