Chapter III: The Rivals (2)

We have said nothing in reference to Regionalism—of that faction in the liberal camp which is always conspiring against the _monarchical_ unity of Italy, with a view of substituting a regional confederation of independent republics; nothing of the multitude of liberals who are clamoring for administrative decentralization, as a restoration, in part, of the independence in administration which was taken from the individual regions by political unity; nothing of the absolute impossibility of having a territorial army in Italy, for the reason that Regionalism might assert itself in a more material style, to the imminent peril of the government. We have simply narrated facts furnished by the liberals themselves—_by legal_ Italy, which assumes to be the nation. Narration has the force of demonstration in this instance, and clearly establishes the fact that Regionalism exists in the very core of Italy, nay, rules supreme, regulating politics, constituting parties, biassing every discussion, and threatening, in the long run, not only the unity of the nation but the monarchy personified in the unity.

This much established, a very reasonable doubt may be put forth as to whether the unity of Italy be accomplished, even among the liberals, who arrogated to themselves the right and the faculty to unite it, spite of the nature, the history, the traditions, the genius, and the diverse and contrary interests of the Peninsula. That there is a species of unity we do not question. But it is neither moral nor organic unity, such as forms one whole, ordained to a living purpose, founded on the same principle, agreeing in its operations, harmonious in its members. It is a mechanical and artificial unity, without bonds of life, without order in purpose, without concord in action, without harmony in its parts; in short, it is merely _fiscal_, not national, unity. This is a logical conclusion, derived entirely from a consideration of _legal_ Italy.

Our conclusion does not assume a more favorable aspect for the unity of Italy if we consider its passive subject—that is to say, the immense number of Italians who were united against their own wish; who never entered into the calculations of the demagogues; who, in deference to the Unity described above, have been outraged in the tenderest affections of the heart and in the most sacred rights of nature; who have gathered no other fruits from unity than regional, municipal, and domestic impoverishment; who perceive that, in the name of this unity, their nation is perverted and their religion vilified, and who consequently recognize in the government naught but an enemy of their purse, their conscience, their family, and their liberty.

From what has been said already the absurdity and, we will add, the malice of the accusation that the Papacy is the only obstacle to the perfection and enjoyment of political unity in Italy become quite apparent. The most powerful obstacle to such unity is not in the Papacy, but in the very nature of things; it is in the history of ages, in the varied character of the people, in the contrariety of the material and moral interests of the different portions of the country. Let liberalism eradicate from its bosom the gnawing worm of Regionalism; let it reconcile opposing interests, quiet regional passions, which are the seeds of civil war; and, having done this much, let it effect a unity with the _real_ country. Until this much be accomplished, to charge the Papacy with the ill success of the national unity is absurd. It is malicious, also, inasmuch as it manifestly tends to separate the people from the Catholic Church, making them regard the spiritual head of the church and their father in the faith as an enemy of their country. Nay, were the liberals successful in effecting their daring purpose, which is the separation of the people from the see of Peter, then indeed would the political unity of Italy receive its death-blow; then indeed would the bond which unites the Italian people be severed, the bond of one faith, the bond of the only unity they really can boast of—religious unity. It were well if the demagogues of Italy bestowed the necessary consideration upon the incomparable uniting force of religion to a people, instead of promoting and hailing with delight every measure devised to destroy it. Since they deem it advisable to affect Prussian and Russian ways and means, why do they not perceive the manifest wisdom of Bismarck’s measures against the Catholic Church?—measures the fundamental purpose of which is not the extinction of the church, as much as the establishment of a firm and lasting basis to the unity of the empire in a uniformity of worship—Protestant, of course. And with this intent were the Falk laws promulgated. Russia, too, fully alive to the importance of a religious uniformity as the indestructible basis of political unity, has peopled Siberia and the squalid prisons of the empire with non-conformists to the so-called _Orthodox_ creed of the land. Never yet was there a dynasty which did not find its main support and perpetuation in the religious unity of its subjects. True or false though the religion may have been, the principle of support was there. And Italy’s patriots, with the connivance, not to say the active concurrence, of a petty provincial dynasty, would perpetuate unity by sowing religious discord among the people; by making of a people, one in faith, in baptism, and actual religious profession, a discordant, divided multitude of Evangelicals, Calvinists, Waldensians, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Methodists. The discord produced in Italy to-day by Regionalism is a great and, in all probability, a fatal evil to the unity of the country. Add the religious disunion of the people to that caused by Regionalism, and the result will be simply chaotic.

The reader may add to these conclusions: If the Pope came to terms with Italy, as she now exists, would not the political unity of the country improve, not to say receive its formal perfection, in consequence? We answer, the hypothesis is inadmissible. Waiving the fact that, as governments are conceived nowadays, the Pope cannot be the subject of any one of them, and that he cannot in conscience accept terms from the Italian government without compromising rights which he is bound to maintain—though in fact they be trampled under foot and no human probability predict their restoration—it is sufficient for us that he declares a _Non possumus_. But admitting the supposition of a reconciliation, of a cession of imprescriptible rights, would the confusion which now predominates in Italy give place to order? Would the only beatitude to which Italy now aspires be realized? Would the political unity of the nation be established for ever? Would the war of interests cease? Would the interests themselves change their nature? Would the “more civilized” northerners of Italy leave off increasing their prosperity at the expense of the southerners, and these be content with contributing as taxpayers of the land, not as rulers? Would Sicilians and Calabrians live _en famille_ with Venetians and Ligurians? Would Turin, and Venice, and Modena, and Parma, and Florence, and Naples forget that they were once the flourishing capitals of separate, independent states, and be beatified in their present condition, simply the residence of a prefect, and he a favorite of an ill-favored ministry? The glory of being made the capital of Italy _presumably_ satisfies Rome. Think you, however, that the old city is never retrospective? If the puny provincial cities and regions, in struggling for their own regional interests and asserting their importance, cause people to yield to dark forebodings, and to re-peruse and reflect upon the history of the Italian states, what confusion could not the mistress of the world produce, were she to fall back upon her eighteen centuries of glory as the centre of Christendom?

The great obstacle to the enjoyment of political unity in Italy is not in the Vatican, but in the character, genius, history, traditions, and conflicting interests of the Italians themselves, and it is called Regionalism.

Footnote 1:

_Del Regionalismo in Italia—Civiltà Cattolica, Quad._ 656.

AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.
VIRGIL AND HORACE.—IV.

In passages of quiet beauty such as the first six books are full of—the _Odyssey_, we may call them, of the _Æneid_, as the last six are its _Iliad_—Conington is almost always happy. Take, for instance, the picture of the happy valley in Elysium (book vi. 703):

“Meantime, Æneas in the vale
A sheltered forest sees,
Deep woodlands where the evening gale
Goes whispering thro’ the trees,
And Lethe river which flows by
Those dwellings of tranquillity.
Nations and tribes in countless ranks
Were crowding to its verdant banks;
As bees afield in summer clear
Beset the flowerets far and near,
And round the fair white lilies pour,
The deep hum sounds the champaign o’er.”

In such lines, too, Mr. Morris, judging from his own poetry, should be at his best; and here again it is hard to choose between him and his predecessor:

“But down amid a hollow dale, meanwhile, Æneas sees
A secret grove, in thicket fair, with murmuring of the trees,
And Lethe’s stream that all along that quiet place doth wend;
O’er which there hovered countless folks and peoples without end.
And as when bees, amid the fields in summer-tide the bright,
Settle on diverse flowery things, and round the lilies white
Go streaming, so the fields were filled with mighty murmuring.”

Hypercriticism might here point out as a blemish the use of the same word “murmuring” to express the different sounds indicated in the Latin by the words _sonantia_ and _murmure_; these are just the delicacies to be looked for in Virgil and not to be overlooked by his translator. Moreover, the line,

“A secret grove, in thicket fair, with murmuring of the trees,”

asks considerable good-will and knowledge of the Latin to make it sound quite reasonable, and “diverse flowery things” we have some private doubts about. But “hovered” is certainly a better equivalent for “_volabant_” than “crowded,” which gives no hint of the shadowy, unsubstantial nature of these dwellers in the realms of Dis—_animæ, quibus altera fato corpora debentur_:

“Là, les peuples futurs sont des ombres légères,”

as Delille puts it by an anticipative paraphrase. Here Mr. Cranch may meet his antagonists on somewhat better terms, though still we seem to miss in his lines the poetical flavor, which he rarely catches throughout:

“Meanwhile, Æneas in a valley deep
Sees a secluded grove, with rustling leaves
And branches; there the river Lethe glides
Past many a tranquil home; and round about
Innumerable tribes and nations flit.
As in the meadows in the summer-time
The bees besiege the various flowers, and swarm
About the snow-white lilies; and the field
Is filled with murmurings soft.”

The pathos, too, of his author—that exquisite pathos of Virgil which pervades the _Æneid_ like a perfume, which one feels not more in the eloquent compression of the _En Priamus_ wherewith Æneas recognizes his country’s painted woes on the walls of the Carthaginian temple, or the passionate heartbreak of the

“O patria, o divûm domus, Ilium, et incluta bello
Mœnia Dardanidum,”

or the subtle, touching beauty of the epitaph on Æolus, scarcely to be read even now without a quiver of the eyelids:

“Domus alta sub Ida,
Lyrnessi domus alta, solo Laurente sepulcrum,”

than in the

“Vivite felices, quibus est fortuna peracta
Jam sua,”

of the farewell to Helenus, or the manly fortitude of the hero’s admonition to his son:

“Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis”

—the pathos of the _Æneid_ Prof. Conington has not been unsuccessful in preserving, as we might show in more quotations than we have room for. But for the expression of sublimity or intense emotion the octosyllabic verse is scarcely so apt; and in striving to do justice to the tragic grandeur of the second book, the passionate despair of the fourth, and the elevated majesty of the sixth, or even the splendid rhetoric of Juno and Turnus in the tenth and eleventh, Prof. Conington must often “have been made sensible,” as he says in his preface, “of the profound difference between the poetry of Scott and the poetry of Virgil.” In the battle-scenes, however, he takes his full revenge, and in his nimble-footed verse Turnus falls on with a fire and fury, or swift Camilla scours the plain with a grace and lightness, which most of his competitors toil after in vain. And in rendering those epigrammatic turns of phrase of which the _Æneid_ is full, and which are so characteristic a feature of Virgil’s style, we know of no version which surpasses his. Take such examples as these:

“Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem”:

“No safety can the vanquished find
Till hope of safety be resigned”;

“Mixtoque insania luctu
Et furiis agitatus amor et conscia virtus”:

“A warrior’s pride, a father’s pain,
In mingled madness glow”;

“Sed neque currentem se nec cognoscit euntem
Tollentemve manu saxumque immane moventem”

(how well in the heavy movement of the last line the sound echoes the sense!—a beauty which the translator certainly misses):

“Running, he knew not that he ran:
Nor, throwing, that he threw”;

the description of Turnus’ horses in book xii.:

“Qui candore nives anteirent, cursibus auras”:

“To match the whiteness of the snow,
The swiftness of the breeze”;

or Corœbus’ appeal to his comrades in book ii.:

“Dolus an virtus, quis in hoste requirat?”

“Who questions, when with foes we deal,
If craft or courage guides the steel?”

Have we not here all needful fidelity united to the air of genuine poetry? Compare Mr. Cranch’s versions of the first and last of these examples:

“The only safety of the vanquished is
To hope for none”;

and

“Whether we make use
Of stratagem or valor who inquires
In dealing with an enemy?”

If Æneas and Corœbus had harangued their fellow-Trojans in this wise, we doubt if they would have helped them so gallantly to make some of the finest poetry in the _Æneid_. There is no trumpet in such lines as these.

Nevertheless, in spite of many suspicious flavors of prose in his version, Mr. Cranch, we suppose, is to be called a poet. The Boston muses are liberal to their votaries, and do not ask that a man shall be Shakspere or Milton before crowning him with all their laurels. At least, we may fairly say that he is a gentleman of accomplishments and—we should be tempted to add culture, the proper term, we believe, for a person “in society” who knows all the things that are proper for “persons in society” to know, were it not that glib dilettanteism and newspaper sciolists have well-nigh sent that much-abused word into the Coventry of cant. Mr. Cranch is, moreover, a writer of much poetic taste and no little poetic faculty, as he has shown in many pleasant essays in many varieties of metre. Among the kinds of metre which he can write, however, his version of the _Æneid_ has not convinced us that blank-verse is included; or, to put it more agreeably, if not more justly, we are not persuaded that the kind of blank-verse he writes is best fitted to do justice to Virgil.

So much we are led to say, because in his preface Mr. Cranch hints that only a poet can or should attempt to translate the _Æneid_, and asserts that only in blank-verse can it be fitly translated at all. Into that interminable controversy as to whether any but a poet can translate a poet, or whether rhyme is a curb or a spur, a help or a hindrance, to the judicious translator who knows how to follow its inspiration, we do not propose to enter. But Mr. Cranch, in declaring against the rhymed couplet of Dryden and his followers, delivers himself in a way which to us seems to imply a curious misconception of Virgil’s manner, and leads us to anticipate on the threshold one of the points in which Mr. Cranch’s version most strikingly fails. “The incessantly-recurrent rhyme,” he says, “gives an appearance of antithesis which disturbs the very simplicity and directness of the original.” Adjectives are apt to be used somewhat vaguely—or, as our Western friends would say in their delightful, breezy idiom, “to be slung about with a looseness”—in speaking of the style of ancient writers, of which so few of us nowadays know enough to be justified in speaking at all. We have no desire to meddle more than is needful with these dangerous epithets, double-edged weapons as they are. But unless we have read Virgil quite amiss, he is especially fond of antithesis, which Mr. Cranch seems to think he is not; and he is not especially simple or direct, which Mr. Cranch seems to think he is. Not that he cannot be, as in truth he often is, both simple and direct; but that simplicity and directness are not the features of his style which we should select to characterize it, as we should select them, for example, to characterize the style of Homer. Whatever simplicity Virgil has belongs, we think, to the general conception and conduct of his story, by no means to the manner of his telling it, to the general quality of his thought or style. What directness he has belongs to the general movement of his verse and the necessities of epic composition, and is in spite of a tendency to dwell curiously on incidents not in the track of his narrative, to turn, as it were, from his epic path and linger over wayside flowers of rhetoric or sentiment—a tendency illustrated by that subtlety of allusion which all his critics have remarked, and the habit of hinting at two or three modes of expression while employing one. These characteristics of his poetry would naturally have resulted from the quality of his genius—the genius of taste the Abbé Delille calls it; he was the first of the _racinien_ poets, says Sainte-Beuve[2]—and the character of his time. The age he wrote for was one of extreme literary and social refinement, of keen philosophical speculation; the Latin he wrote in was already a literary language—as much so as the French of Racine or the English of Pope. The age of Augustus, in many points, was strikingly like that of Louis XIV. in France and of Charles II. or, still closer, of Queen Anne in England, as has been more than once pointed out. Sainte-Beuve, with his usual insight, has seized upon this resemblance to explain why Virgil, in the account of the shipwreck in the first book (vv. 81 _seq._), which is an ingenious cento from the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, should have dropped two of Homer’s most striking similes: that the pilot, struck by the falling mast, went overboard “like a diver,” and that the scattered swimmers—_rari nantes in gurgite vasto_—were borne like sea-birds on the wave. Virgil omits these images, says the French critic, just because they are so salient, so life-like, so frank and real. “Comparisons of that sort the age of Augustus, like the age of Louis XIV., rather eschewed. They were by no means to the taste of Frenchmen in the days of Saint-Evremond and Segrais (I use extreme terms purposely)—men of society, of the drawing-room, nice scholars who had been often in the Hôtel Rambouillet but little at sea, and to whom divers and sea-birds were unfamiliar sights. The Frenchman of that time preferred general descriptions to images too minutely particularized, and so, too, in a measure, did the Roman of the time of Augustus and the circle of Mæcenas. Mæcenas is not so far, either in taste or philosophy, from Saint-Evremond.”

With some reservations, much the same thing applies to the ages of Dryden and of Pope—to Pope’s age and to Pope himself more strictly, perhaps, than to Dryden or his time; so that one is half inclined to think it a caprice of literary destiny that Pope should have been set to translate Homer, and Dryden Virgil, rather than the reverse. Not that the result would have been a better Homer, if we may judge from Dryden’s sample work in the first book of the _Iliad_; a better Homer than Pope’s was perhaps not to be looked for in an age which in its poetry thought it fine to call a spade—about which it was apt to be only too plain-spoken in free fireside prose—an agricultural implement, and the bucolic person who wielded it a swain. Pope’s famous ironical essay in the _Guardian_ on his own and Ambrose Phillips’ pastorals is a curious illustration of the then passion for putting Nature into hoops and periwig. Phillips, in a dim, blundering way, is nearer right with his Cecilias and Rogers, who talk at least like ploughmen and milkmaids, than Pope with his gentle Delias and sprightly Sylvias, who converse like masquerading duchesses; but as all the world happened to be masquerading, the laugh was with Pope.

Yet, as between the Greek and Roman poet, it should seem that the former _ought_ to have been more congenial to Dryden, and the latter to Pope. In many of the points where Pope was farthest from Homer he was nearest to Virgil—not least in his love of antithesis, his epigram and point, his brilliant rhetoric, the studied elegance, nay, the artifice, of his style. Even in his most didactic vein he would scarcely have been so far from Virgil as in his most epic strain he was from Homer. Virgil is not averse to a bit of sermonizing _sub rosa_; he writes with a moral; his Æneas is a sort of fighting parson born before his time. One cannot help feeling, too, in his most impassioned moments, that he is writing with his eye on his style, as Pope always is, as we can never fancy Homer doing. Is the rhetorical artifice any less plain in

“O dolor atque decus magnum rediture parenti”

than in

“Daphne, our grief, our glory, now no more”?

Is the antithesis less pointed in

“Qui candore nives anteirent, cursibus auras”

than in

“Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind”?

There are hardly more lines of the kind in Pope than in the _Æneid_.

When, therefore, Mr. Cranch tells us that he has taken blank-verse rather than the rhymed couplet in order to avoid the appearance of antithesis, and to secure the clear simplicity and directness of his original, he shows us where to look for some of his failures. His simplicity is too often baldness, his directness not seldom prose, and to the pointedness of the Latin he does much less than ample justice. His blank-verse seems to us monotonous in its modulation and is not always correct. Lines like the following occur too often:

“Thou seekest counsel, gracious sovereign,
In matters which to none of us are dark
Nor needing our voices. All must own
They know what best concerns the public good,
Yet hesitate to speak.”

Indeed, we must confess that we are at a loss to know what Mr. Cranch means by saying: “I am far from pretending that my versification may not frequently fail to convey the movement of the Latin lines to the ear of those to whom they are familiar.” If he means that his versification often, or even sometimes, or at all, conveys the movement of the Latin lines to his own ear, then his ear must be as curiously constructed as the “arrected ears” he bestows on Æneas in the famous shepherd simile in the second book.[3]

But it is ungracious to linger on faults which we have only dwelt on because they seemed to flow from what we must take to be a misconception on the part of Mr. Cranch of the true spirit of his author. His version has certainly the merit of fidelity to the sense of the original, though this, it seems to us, is sometimes bought by a sacrifice of the spirit. His verse is, for the most part, what he claims it to be, smooth, flowing, and compact, though it does not recall to us, as to him, the best models of blank-verse, and he does not sin, as one other of our translators does, against that “supreme elegance” which is Virgil’s chief fascination. We find him best in the least essentially poetic passages, which is, perhaps, not so bad a sign as it appears. The speech of Juno in the tenth book is no unfavorable specimen of his best style:

“... Then, stung with rage,
The royal Juno spake: ‘Wherefore dost thou
Force me to break my silence deep, and thus
Proclaim in words my secret sorrow? Who
Of mortals or of gods ever constrained
Æneas to pursue these wars, and face
The Latian monarch as an enemy?
Led by the fates, he came to Italy;
Be it so: Cassandra’s raving prophecies
Impelled him. Was it we who counselled him
To leave his camp and to the winds commit
His life? or to a boy entrust his life
And the chief conduct of the war? or seek
A Tuscan league? or stir up tribes at peace?
What gods, what unrelenting power of mine,
Compelled him to this fraud? What part in this
Had Juno or had Iris, sent from heaven?
A great indignity it is, forsooth,
That the Italians should surround with flames
Your new and rising Troy, and that their chief,
Turnus, should on his native land maintain
His own, whose ancestor Pilumnus was,
Whose mother was the nymph Venetia.
What is it for the Trojans to assail
The Latins with their firebrands, and subdue
The alien fields and bear away their spoils?
Choose their wives’ fathers, and our plighted brides
Tear from our breasts? sue with their hands for peace,
Yet hang up arms upon their ships? Thy power
May rescue Æneas from the Greeks, and show
In place of a live man an empty cloud;
Or change his ships into so many nymphs.
Is it a crime for us to have helped somewhat
The Rutuli against him? Ignorant
And absent, as thou sayst, Æneas is;
Absent and ignorant, then, let him be.
Thou hast thy Paphos, thy Idalium too,
And lofty seat Cythera. Why, then, try
These rugged hearts, a city big with tears?
Do we attempt to overturn your loose,
Unstable Phrygian state? Is it we or he
Who exposed the wretched Trojans to the Greeks?
Who was the cause that Europe rose in arms
With Asia, or who broke an ancient league
By a perfidious theft? Did I command
When the Dardanian adulterer
Did violence to Sparta? Or did I
Supply him weapons and foment the war
By lust? Thou shouldst have then had fear for those
Upon thy side; but now too late thou bring’st
Idle reproaches and unjust complaints.”

In rendering the phrase _fovive cupidine bello_ (“or battles flame with passion fanned,” says Conington) Delille has a characteristic touch almost worthy of Segrais:

“Me vit-on allumer, pour embraser les terres
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?

Because, we answer, not only is Virgil’s tone—his coloring, his local atmosphere-conspicuously absent from Mr. Morris’ translation, not only is the tone of the latter as unlike the tone of the _Æneid_ as can well be, but it is even carefully, studiously, nay, laboriously, removed from it. It may be taken as a rule in translation that any word is out of place which violently disturbs the associations that belong to the original, the train of ideas raised by the original in the reader’s mind. For instance, when Mr. Theodore Martin makes use of the word “madrigal” in his translation of the _Carmen Amœbæum_ of Horace, we somehow feel that he has struck a false note; we are sensible of a discord. The word to the English reader brings up associations wholly foreign to Horace and his time, turns the thoughts of the English reader into a widely different track, and dispels the Horatian effect. Mr. Morris not only does this in single words, but his very design is based on doing it as often as he can; his entire vocabulary is carefully selected with a view to doing it uniformly throughout his work. From the stately towers of Ilium, city of the gods, the _arces Pergameæ and incluta bello mœnia Dardanidum_; from the splendid temples of Carthage; from the fertile plains of Hesperia, the royal city of Laurentum, and the mighty hundred-pillared palace of Picus; from the Ausonian battle-fields, ringing with the clatter of chariots, the clang of sword on helm and spear on buckler, the shouts and shocks of the contending heroes—from all the scenes and characters so familiar to us in the Virgilian story, Mr. Morris ushers us into a strange, remote, wild Westland, where all the famous doings we thought we knew so well are transformed in the most grotesque fashion. It is a land of “steads” and “firths,” of “meres” and “leas” and “fells,” he takes us into, inhabited not by a people but by “a folk,” who are not named but “hight”; who dwell in “garths” and “burgs” and worship “very godheads” in “fanes”; who never by any chance go anywhere, but either “wend” or “fare” when they are not engaged in “flitting”—a mysterious kind of locomotion which they sometimes achieve by means of “wains”—and who hold converse among themselves not in words but in “speech-lore,” which they at times condescend to speak, but very much prefer, when the rhyme will give them the ghost of a chance, “to waft” through “tooth-hedge” (_ore locutus_). In this mysterious region are neither times nor numbers, but only “tales” and “tides”; what would be mere tillers of the soil (_agricolæ_) in Virgil are here become “acre-biders” or “field-folk,” who for cattle have “merry, wholesome herds of neat” (_læta boum armenta_), and for horses “war-threatening herd-beasts.” Here things are rarely carried, but, like the “speech-lore” above spoken of, are “wafted” whenever humanly possible, and are never done or made when they can by any means be “dight.” Here we are puzzled to recognize our old friends, the Muses, under the disguise of “Song-maids”; we fairly cut those amiable sisters, the Furies, when they are introduced to us as the “Well-willers”; and of the heroes who roar and ruffle so gallantly through the battlefields of the _Æneid_ we have scarcely a glimpse, but instead a “tale” of “lads of war,” “begirded” with “war-gear” and led by “Dukes of man,” who are for ever falling on and smiting or being smitten by a “sort of fellows” dight in “war-weeds,” who fare around in “war-wains” and “deal out iron-bane” (_dant funera ferro_) with “shot-spears” or “weapon-smiths” and “wound-smiths” instead of simple javelins and swords. Following Mr. Morris’ lead, in short, we find ourselves in a land where Virgil would be as much at home as he would in Asgard or Valhalla, or as the hero Beowulf might be in Elysium. It is a pleasant land enough in its way, and the folk are entertaining folk, but we feel that we have left the _Æneid_ behind us.

It is far from our wish or aim to set Mr. Morris’ work in an unworthy or ridiculous light. Our respect for him is too great, our admiration too sincere, to treat any performance of his lightly. But some such impression as that we have given above is the chief one left on our mind by reading his _Æneids_. We are no longer in Italy but in Norseland, or, if in Italy, an Italy after the Gothic irruption; Æneas and Turnus, Pallas and Lausus, _fortisque Gygas fortisque Cloanthus_, are no longer Trojans or Rutules, but Norse jarls and vikings. They bear their Latin names, but that is all that is Latin about them: the hand is the hand of Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob. What associations connect themselves in the mind of the English reader with such words as “garth” and “burg” and “firth”? Are they not as unlike as possible to any that belong to Virgil? Do they not disturb and trouble, even totally obscure, the effect the English reader habitually derives from Virgil—these incongruous words dropped into the clear current of the poet’s manner—as a stone flung into a limpid pool may trouble and obscure it? What is there in common between Morris’ “lads of war in vain beleaguered” and Virgil’s _nequidquam obsessa juventus_?—between Morris’ “very Duke of man” and Virgil’s _ipsis ductoribus_? (v. 249). What impression is the English reader apt to get from phrases like “flitting by in wain”? It is certainly not that of a hero rushing to battle, but, if any—and we are not sure that upon our own mind any very tangible impression is left at all—rather of a bucolic ghost disappearing somewhere in a spectral hay-cart. To say Carthage is to be “Lady of all lands” is surely to produce an utterly different effect from that of _dea gentibus esse_ (i. 17); and they must have shrewder eyes than ours who can find in such lines as

“Lo! what was there to heave aloft in fashioning of Rome,”

or

“Those fed on good hap all things may because they deem they may,”

anything more than the shell of Virgil’s

“Tantæ molis erat Romanam condere gentem”

or,

“Hos successus alit; possunt quia posse videntur,”

where the pretence of verbal fidelity only makes the verbal affectation more annoyingly weak. These ever-recurring eccentricities of phrase tease the reader and spoil half his enjoyment. In a translator whose daily speech was of “trowing” instead of “trusting,” of “tale” for number or “sort” for company, of “wending” and “wafting,” and “folk” in the singular, and who used “very” rather profusely, and on slight provocation, as an adjective, and “feared” and “learned” as transitive verbs, and agreed with some modern great men in thinking grammar generally a bore, such lines as

“O Palinure, that _trowed_ the shies and soft seas overmuch”;

“These tidings hard for us to _trow_ unto our ears do win”;

“In all thou needest toil herein, from me the deed should _wend_”;

“A hundred more, and youths withal of age and _tale_ the same”;

“There with his hand he maketh sign and mighty speech he _wafts_”;

“From the open gates another _sort_ is come”;

“And her much _folk_ of Latin land were fain enow to wed”;

“Hard strive the _folk_ in smiting sea, and oar-blades brush the
main”;

“The straits besprent with many a _folk_”;

“To Helenus his _very_ thrall me very _thrall_ gave o’er”;

“So with their weapons every show of _very_ fight they stir”;

“But _learn_ me now who fain the sooth would wot”;

“About me senseless, _throughly feared_ with marvels grim and
great”;

“And many a saying furthermore of God-loved seers of old
_Fears_ her with dreadful memories”;

“Nor was he _worser_ than himself in such a pinch bestead”

—such lines in a translator to whom this dialect was still a living language would not seem unnatural. They would be simply the expression of the effect made by Virgil on the mind of that age, and so far, since every age has its own idiom, they would not necessarily be un-Virgilian at all. Even such extraordinary phrases as

“An ash ...
Round which, sore smitten by the steel, the _acre biders_ throng,
And strive in speeding of the axe,”

for

“Ornum
Cum ferro accisam crebrisque bipennibus instant
Eruere agricolæ certatim”;

or

“When Jove, a-looking down
From highest lift on sail-skimmed sea, and lands that round it lie,
And shores and many folk about in topmost burg of sky,
Stood still,”

for

“Cum Jupiter, æthere summo
Despiciens mare velivolum terrasque jacentes
Litoraque et latos populos, sic vertice cœli
Constitit”;

or

“An ancient mighty rock, indeed, which lay upon the lea,
Set for a landmark, _judge and end of acre-strife to be_,”

for

“Saxum antiquum, ingens, campo quod forte jacebat,
Limes agro positus, litem ut discerneret arvis”;

or,

“No footstrife but the armed hand must doom betwixt us twain,”

for

“Non cursu, certandum sævis est comminus armis”

—such phrases as these, if to any translator at any time they could have seemed a natural way of saying things, would not then, in such a translator’s version, have struck us with more than the passing and not unpleasant sense of quaintness which is part of the charm we find in the diction of a past age when used by its lawful owners. But when a poet of the nineteenth century sacrilegiously invades the tomb and seizes upon this castoff and moth-eaten verbal bravery of buried ages to bedeck himself withal, it is much as if he should come to make his bow in a modern drawing-room arrayed in the conventional dress-coat, Elizabethan ruff and trunks, Wellington boots, and a Vandyke hat. The novelty might please for a moment, but the incongruity must offend in the end. In the very time which Mr. Morris so much admires they knew this to be false art. “That same framing of his stile to an old rusticke language,” says Sir Philip Sidney in his _Apologie for Poesie_, speaking of _The Shepherd’s Calendar_, “I dare not alowe, since neither Theocritus in Greeke, Virgile in Latin, nor Sannazar in Italian did affect it.”

Still worse is it when our amateur of second-hand finery, the _bric-à-brac_ of language, selects such a poet as Virgil—Virgil, whose name is a synonym for supreme, for perfect elegance, whose “taste was his genius”—as a lay figure to drape with these shreds and tatters of an obsolete, fantastic verbiage, “mouldy-dull as Eld herself”—to quote and illustrate at once from Mr. Morris[5]—and smelling of the grave. This persistence in going out of the way to hunt for archaisms at once—to repeat a word which best hits our own feeling—teases the reader and distracts him. We seem to feel Mr. Morris amiably tugging our coat-sleeve at every turn to point out this or that fresh eccentricity of language. We fancy we see him chuckling and rubbing his hands gleefully here and there over the discovery of some more than usually exasperating way of violating the usages of modern speech. So vexed and harassed, it is impossible to get much taste of the _Æneid_; through this word-jugglery we catch such glimpses of it as of the painted scene a conjurer has set behind him to throw his tricks into relief Of a piece with this laborious renaissance of a forgotten tongue are the studied mispronunciations, such as Ænĕas for Ænēas and Erāto for Erăto:

“So did the Father Ænĕas, with all at stretch to hear”;

“To aid, Erāto, while I tell what kings, what deedful tide”;

the false rhymes, such as “wrath” and “forth,” “poured” and “abroad,” “abroad” and “reward,” which might be forgiven to the stress of so long and difficult a task had we not such reason for suspecting them to be intentional; the occasional use of phrases familiar, even low, and totally at variance with Virgil’s lofty and cultivated style, such as “gobbets of the men” for _frusta_, iii. 632; “Phrygian fellows” (_Phrygii comites_); “those Teucrian fellows”; “the other lads” for _juventus_; “but as they gave and took in talk” (_hac vice sermonum_); “he spake and footed it afore” (_dixit et ante tulit gressum_); “unlearned Æneas fell aquake” (_Horruit ... inscius Æneas_)—surely a most undignified proceeding for a hero; “so east and west he called to him, and _spake such words to tell_” (_dehinc talia fatur_)—the list is long, scarce a page but would swell it; or the compound epithets which Mr. Morris—herein, no doubt, taking his cue from Chapman, but not so happily or with such good reason—has coined profusely. “In the Augustan poets,” says Prof. Conington, “compound epithets are chiefly conspicuous by their absence, and a translator of an Augustan poet ought not to suffer them to be too prominent a feature of his style.” This assertion must be qualified with regard to Virgil, who, in imitation of his model, Homer, and in obedience, perhaps, to a supposed law of epic composition, has too many compounds to permit it to pass unchallenged—such, for instance, as _armisonus_ (_Palladis armisonæ_—“Pallas of the weapon-din”), _velivolus_ (“sail-skimmed”), _legifer_ (_legiferæ Cereri_—“Ceres wise of law”), _letifer_ (“deadly”), _cælicolus_ (“heaven-abider”), _laniger_ (“woolly”), _noctivagus_ (“nightly-straying”), and the like. Yet, not content to render these by English compounds even where it is not always expedient—since the compound form in our own language will often, from its strangeness in a familiar tongue, seem strained and awkward, where in the less familiar Latin it seems only natural and elegant[6]—Mr. Morris has introduced many other compounds of his own invention for which there is no authority in Virgil at all, which in many instances are discordant with his style and not seldom downright grotesque—such combinations as “hot-heart” for _ardens_, or “cold-hand in the war” (_frigidus bello_) or even “fate-wise,” “weapon-won,” “war-lord,” “battle-lord,” “air-high,” “star-smiting,” “outland-wrought,” “heaven-abider” (_cœlicolus_), “like-aged,” “goddess-led,” etc., which meet us at every turn. And what _are_ we to say of such inventions as “murder-wolf,” “death-stealth” (“on death-stealth onward the Trojan went”—_hic furio fervidus instat_), “dreaming-tide” for _somnus_, “war-Turnus,” “weapon-great,” “helpless-fain” for _nequidquam avidus_, “hero-gathered stone” (_lapis ipsi viri_), “anger-seas,” “wounding-craft,” “bit-befoaming,” “speech-masters,” or those others, if possible still more extraordinary, already mentioned, “weapon-smith,” “wound-smith,” “tooth-hedge”? These, and scores of other such we have marked for notice, are surely as little like Virgil as they are like any English that is spoken to-day; and they are scarcely less potent than Mr. Morris’ archaisms in disturbing and altering the Virgilian tone. Of a like effect are the quaint and unconsequential translations now and then of Latin names—as of _Musæ_ into “Song-maids,” _Eumenides_ into “Well-willers,” _Avernus_ into “Fowlless,” and soon—whereby for a perfectly familiar and intelligible term of the Latin is substituted in the English a grotesque and puzzling word, and which again stops the current of the story until the reader can readjust his mind to the novel ideas it awakes. The most unclassical of readers has his notions formed of the Muses and the Furies, at least, if not of the Eumenides; but of these Song-maids—who might as well be milk-maids—and of these Well-willers—who rather suggest well-diggers—he must form a new notion as he reads. And one might add, at the risk of seeming to split hairs, that in thus translating the word _Eumenides_ we lose much of the effect of that euphemism with which the Greeks, like all strongly imaginative peoples, sought to keep disagreeable subjects at arm’s length—the form τι παθεῖν, as a synonym for dying, is exactly paralleled by the Irish phrase “suffered,” applied to an executed rebel—or perhaps to ward off the wrath of these ticklish neighbors, as Celtic races, again, are in the habit of calling fairies “the good people.” A more substantial objection is that Mr. Morris seems capricious in the matter, for we see no particular reason for his translating one such name and others not at all—-why he should not give us Quail-land for Ortygia, or Chalk Island for Crete, as well as Westland for Hesperia, or Fowlless for Avernus.

It is a result of these affectations, or—for we are loath to press the charge of affectation against a poet whose own writing is so genuine and sincere—of these peculiarities of style, which have on the reader all the seeming and effect of affectation, that the pathos of Virgil, the one quality to which Mr. Morris should have been best fitted to do justice, he has greatly impaired. Affectation is fatal to pathos; one cannot have much feeling for the woes which are carefully set forth in verbal mosaic. Take but a single example—a passage in Virgil already referred to—which sets forth admirably that faculty the Latin poet has to so curious a degree of infusing sadness into mere words, but in which Mr. Morris is little behind him. It is the death of Æolus, which Mr. Morris renders thus:

“Thee also, warring Æolus, did that Laurentine field
See fallen and cumbering the earth with body laid alow;
Thou diest, whom the Argive hosts might never overthrow,
Nor that Achilles’ hand that wrought the Priam’s realm its wrack.
Here was thy meted mortal doom: high house ‘neath Ida’s back—
High house within Lyrnessus’ garth, grave in Laurentine lea.”

It only needs to compare this with the original to see how far it misses the pathos of the Latin; it needs only to compare it with Mr. Morris himself, where he has forgotten or failed to be sufficiently archaic, to see the reason of the miss. Take, again, the passage from the shipwreck in the second book already referred to:

“Now therewithal Æneas’ limbs grew weak with chilly dread;
He groaned, and, lifting both his palms aloft to heaven, he said:
O thrice and four times happy ye that had the fate to fall
Before your fathers’ faces there by Troy’s beloved wall!
Tydidĕs, thou of Danaan folk, the mightiest under shield,
Why might I never lay me down upon the Ilian field?
Why was my soul forbid release at thy most mighty hand,
Where eager Hector stooped and lay before Achilles’ wand,
Where huge Sarpedon fell asleep, where Simois rolls along
The shields of men and helms of men and bodies of the strong?”

The word “wand” for _telo_ has an odd look, but that may be forgiven to the rhyme; and the rest is simple, emotional, and true. In like happy moments of oblivion we catch an echo of _Jason_, as in the opening of book vii.: