"If he was not of the best age of Roman poetry, he was at least of that which preceded it; and he himself refined it to that degree of perfection, both in the language and the thoughts, that he left an easy task to Virgil; who as he succeeded him in time, so he copied his excellences; for the method of the Georgics is plainly derived from him. Lucretius had chosen a subject naturally crabbed; he, therefore, adorned it with poetical descriptions, and precepts of morality, in the beginning and ending of his books, which you see Virgil has imitated with great success in those four books, which, in my opinion, are more perfect in their kind than even his divine Æneid. The turn of his verses he has likewise followed in those places where Lucretius has most laboured, and some of his very lines he has transplanted into his own works, without much variation. If I am not mistaken, the distinguishing character of Lucretius, (I mean of his soul and genius,) is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his opinions. He is every where confident of his own reason, and assuming an absolute command, not only over his vulgar reader, but even his patron Memmius. For he is always bidding him attend, as if he had the rod over him; and using a magisterial authority while he instructs him. From his time to ours, I know none so like him as our poet and philosopher of Malmesbury. This is that perpetual dictatorship which is exercised by Lucretius, who, though often in the wrong, yet seems to dealbona fidewith his reader and tells him nothing but what he thinks; in which plain sincerity, I believe, he differs from our Hobbes, who could not but be convinced, or at least doubt of some eternal truths, which he has opposed. But for Lucretius, he seems to disdain all manner of replies, and is so confident of his cause, that he is beforehand with his antagonists; urging for them whatever he imagined they could say, and leaving them, as he supposes, without an objection for the future; all this too, with so much scorn and indignation, as if he were assured of the triumph before he entered intothe lists. From this sublime and daring genius of his, it must of necessity come to pass, that his thoughts must be masculine, full of argumentation, and that sufficiently warm. From the same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness of his expressions, and the perpetual torrent of his verse, where the barrenness of his subject does not too much constrain the quickness of his fancy. For there is no doubt to be made, but that he could have been every where as poetical as he is in his descriptions, and in the moral part of his philosophy, if he had not aimed more to instruct, in his system of nature, than to delight. But he was bent on making Memmius a materialist, and teaching him to defy an invisible power; in short, he was so much an atheist, that he forgot sometimes to be a poet. These are the considerations which I had of that author, before I attempted to translate some parts of him. And, accordingly, I laid by my natural diffidence and scepticism for a while, to take up that dogmatical way of his, which, as I said, is so much his character as to make him that individual poet. As for his opinions concerning the mortality of the soul, they are so absurd, that I cannot if I would, believe them. I think a future state demonstrable even by natural arguments; at least, to take away rewards and punishments, is only a pleasing prospect to a man who resolves before hand not to live morally. But, on the other side, the thought of being nothing after death is a burden insupportable to a virtuous man, even though a heathen. We naturally aim at happiness, and cannot bear to have it confined to the shortness of our present being; especially when we consider that virtue is generally unhappy in this world, and vice fortunate; so that it is hope of futurity alone, that makes this life tolerable in expectation of a better. Who would not commit all the excesses to which he is prompted by his natural inclinations, if he may do them with security while he is alive, and be incapable of punishment after he is dead? If he be cunning and secret enough to avoid the laws, there is no band of morality to restrain him; for fame and reputation are weak ties; many men have not the least sense of them. Powerful men are only awed by them, as they conduce to their interest, and that not always, when a passion is predominant; and no man will be contained within the bounds of duty when he may safely transgress them. These are my thoughts abstractedly, and without entering into the notions of our Christian faith, which is the proper business of divines."But there are other arguments in this poem (which I have turned into English) not belonging to the mortality of the soul, which are strong enough to a reasonable man, to make him less in love with life, and consequently in less apprehension of death. Such are the natural satiety proceeding from a perpetual enjoyment of the same things; the inconveniences of old age, which make him incapable of corporeal pleasures, the decay of understanding and memory, which render him contemptible, and useless to others. These, and many other reasons, so pathetically urged, so beautifully expressed, so adorned with examples, and so admirably raised by theprosopopeiaof nature, who is brought in speaking to her children with so much authority and vigour, deserve the pains I have taken with them, which, I hope, have not been unsuccessful or unworthy of my author; at least, I must take the liberty to own, that I was pleased with my own endeavours, which but rarely happens to me; and that I am not dissatisfied upon the review of any thing I have done in this author."
"If he was not of the best age of Roman poetry, he was at least of that which preceded it; and he himself refined it to that degree of perfection, both in the language and the thoughts, that he left an easy task to Virgil; who as he succeeded him in time, so he copied his excellences; for the method of the Georgics is plainly derived from him. Lucretius had chosen a subject naturally crabbed; he, therefore, adorned it with poetical descriptions, and precepts of morality, in the beginning and ending of his books, which you see Virgil has imitated with great success in those four books, which, in my opinion, are more perfect in their kind than even his divine Æneid. The turn of his verses he has likewise followed in those places where Lucretius has most laboured, and some of his very lines he has transplanted into his own works, without much variation. If I am not mistaken, the distinguishing character of Lucretius, (I mean of his soul and genius,) is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his opinions. He is every where confident of his own reason, and assuming an absolute command, not only over his vulgar reader, but even his patron Memmius. For he is always bidding him attend, as if he had the rod over him; and using a magisterial authority while he instructs him. From his time to ours, I know none so like him as our poet and philosopher of Malmesbury. This is that perpetual dictatorship which is exercised by Lucretius, who, though often in the wrong, yet seems to dealbona fidewith his reader and tells him nothing but what he thinks; in which plain sincerity, I believe, he differs from our Hobbes, who could not but be convinced, or at least doubt of some eternal truths, which he has opposed. But for Lucretius, he seems to disdain all manner of replies, and is so confident of his cause, that he is beforehand with his antagonists; urging for them whatever he imagined they could say, and leaving them, as he supposes, without an objection for the future; all this too, with so much scorn and indignation, as if he were assured of the triumph before he entered intothe lists. From this sublime and daring genius of his, it must of necessity come to pass, that his thoughts must be masculine, full of argumentation, and that sufficiently warm. From the same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness of his expressions, and the perpetual torrent of his verse, where the barrenness of his subject does not too much constrain the quickness of his fancy. For there is no doubt to be made, but that he could have been every where as poetical as he is in his descriptions, and in the moral part of his philosophy, if he had not aimed more to instruct, in his system of nature, than to delight. But he was bent on making Memmius a materialist, and teaching him to defy an invisible power; in short, he was so much an atheist, that he forgot sometimes to be a poet. These are the considerations which I had of that author, before I attempted to translate some parts of him. And, accordingly, I laid by my natural diffidence and scepticism for a while, to take up that dogmatical way of his, which, as I said, is so much his character as to make him that individual poet. As for his opinions concerning the mortality of the soul, they are so absurd, that I cannot if I would, believe them. I think a future state demonstrable even by natural arguments; at least, to take away rewards and punishments, is only a pleasing prospect to a man who resolves before hand not to live morally. But, on the other side, the thought of being nothing after death is a burden insupportable to a virtuous man, even though a heathen. We naturally aim at happiness, and cannot bear to have it confined to the shortness of our present being; especially when we consider that virtue is generally unhappy in this world, and vice fortunate; so that it is hope of futurity alone, that makes this life tolerable in expectation of a better. Who would not commit all the excesses to which he is prompted by his natural inclinations, if he may do them with security while he is alive, and be incapable of punishment after he is dead? If he be cunning and secret enough to avoid the laws, there is no band of morality to restrain him; for fame and reputation are weak ties; many men have not the least sense of them. Powerful men are only awed by them, as they conduce to their interest, and that not always, when a passion is predominant; and no man will be contained within the bounds of duty when he may safely transgress them. These are my thoughts abstractedly, and without entering into the notions of our Christian faith, which is the proper business of divines.
"But there are other arguments in this poem (which I have turned into English) not belonging to the mortality of the soul, which are strong enough to a reasonable man, to make him less in love with life, and consequently in less apprehension of death. Such are the natural satiety proceeding from a perpetual enjoyment of the same things; the inconveniences of old age, which make him incapable of corporeal pleasures, the decay of understanding and memory, which render him contemptible, and useless to others. These, and many other reasons, so pathetically urged, so beautifully expressed, so adorned with examples, and so admirably raised by theprosopopeiaof nature, who is brought in speaking to her children with so much authority and vigour, deserve the pains I have taken with them, which, I hope, have not been unsuccessful or unworthy of my author; at least, I must take the liberty to own, that I was pleased with my own endeavours, which but rarely happens to me; and that I am not dissatisfied upon the review of any thing I have done in this author."
Lucretius is a poet of a sublimer order than Dryden. Yet have they psychical affinities. The rush of poetical composition characterizes both—a ready pomp and splendour—more prodigality than economy—bold felicity rather than finish, though neither is that wanting—mastery of language and measure—touches from the natural world, that fall in more as a colouring of style, than the utterances of a heart imbued with a deep love of nature. Indeed, if the genial belongs to the physiognomy of Dryden's writing, the cordial is hardly a constituent in the character of either poet, although at need both can find eloquent expression even for the pathetic. In both, if in different measure, a sceptical vein is inherent; but in Lucretius this arms itself in logic, and he appears in his cosmogony as a philosophical atheist. In Dryden it might seem rather a humour leaned to, because on that side lies the pleasure of mockery and scoffing. Lucretius pleads his philosophy like a man who is incredulous in earnest. But you can seldom say what it is that Dryden embraces with seriousness,unless it be, in his better and happier undertakings, his own part in executing the work. The subject-matter might seem almost always rather accidentally brought to him, than affectionately sought by him; once out of his hands, it is dismissed from his heart; he often seems utterly to have forgotten opinions and persons in whom, not long before, he had taken the liveliest interest—careless of inconsistencies even in the same essay, assuredly one of the most self-contradicting of mortals. No man, some say, has a right to question another's religious faith, but all men have a right to judge of the professed principles on which it has been adopted, when those principles have been triumphantly propounded to the public in controversial treatises of elaborate verse. To reason powerfully not only in verse but rhyme, is no common achievement, and such fame is justly Dryden's; but how would the same reasoning have looked in prose? His controversy with Stillingfleet shows—but so so. Does Lucretius write from a strong heart and a seduced understanding? Or, is it now to be quoted as a blameable unbelief that ridded itself of the Greek and Roman Heaven and Hell? There is one great and essential difference on the side of the Epicurean. An original poet, he seems to speak from a sweeping contemplation of the universe. We grudge that the boundless exuberance of painting should go to decorate the argumentation of an unfruitful system of doctrine. We want the sympathy with the purpose of the poet, that should for us harmonize the poem. He often strikes singularly high tones. Witness, among many other great passages, his argument on death, and his thunderstorm. And had the description of the heifer bemoaning and seeking her lost calf been Virgil's, we should have thought it had sprung from the heart of rural simplicity and love. Dryden and Lucretius agree in the negligent indifference which they show, when mere argumentation is in hand, to smoothness and ornament, and also in the wonderful facility with which they compel logical forms to obey the measure. There they are indeed truly great.
Lucretius's magnificent opening has invited Dryden to put forth his happiest strength. The profuse eloquence and beauty of the original is rendered. The passage, which may compete with any piece of translation in the language, is, with Dryden, a fragment:—
"Delight of human kind, and gods above,Parent of Rome, propitious Queen of Love;Whose vital power, air, earth, and sea supplies,And breeds whate'er is born beneath the rolling skies;For every kind, by thy prolific might,Springs, and beholds the regions of the light.Thee, goddess, thee the clouds and tempests fear,And at thy pleasing presence disappear;For thee the land in fragrant flowers is drest;For thee the ocean smiles, and smooths her wavy breast,And heaven itself with more serene and purer light is blest.For when the rising spring adorns the mead,And a new scene of nature stands display'd,When teeming buds, and cheerful greens appear,And western gales unlock the lazy year;The joyous birds thy welcome first express,Whose native songs thy genial fire confess;Then savage beasts bound o'er their slighted food,Struck with thy darts, and tempt the raging flood.All nature is thy gift; earth, air, and sea;Of all that breathes; the various progeny,Stung with delight, is goaded on by thee.O'er barren mountains, o'er the flowery plain,The leafy forest, and the liquid main,Extends thy uncontroll'd and boundless reign;Through all the living regions dost thou move,And scatter'st, where thou goest, the kindly seeds of love.Since, then, the race of every living thingObeys thy power; since nothing new can springWithout thy warmth, without thy influence bear,Or beautiful or lovesome can appear;Be thou my aid, my tuneful song inspire,And kindle with thy own productive fire;While all thy province, Nature, I survey,And sing to Memmius an immortal layOf heaven and earth, and every where thy wondrous power display:To Memmius, under thy sweet influence born,Whom thou with all thy gifts and graces dost adorn;The rather then assist my muse and me,Infusing verses worthy him and thee.Meantime on land and sea let barbarous discord cease,And lull the listening world in universal peace.To thee mankind their soft repose must owe,For thou alone that blessing canst bestow;Because the brutal business of the warIs managed by thy dreadful servant's care;Who oft retires from fighting fields, to proveThe pleasing pains of thy eternal love;And panting on thy breast, supinely lies,While with thy heavenly form he feeds his eyes.When, wishing all, he nothing can deny,Thy charms in that auspicious moment try;With winning eloquence our peace implore,And quiet to the weary world restore."
Excellent English! and excellently representative of the Latin!
Dryden sometimes estranges his language from vulgar use by a Latinism; (he, himself, insists upon this, as a deliberate act of enriching our poor and barbarous tongue;) and in his highest writings, even where he has good matter that will sustain itself at due poetical height, here and there he has touches of an ornamental, imitative, and false poetical diction. But that is not his own style—not the style which he uses where he is fully himself. This is pure English, simple, masculine; turned into poetry by a true life of expression, and by the inhering melody of the numbers. That Lucretian Exordium he must have written in one of his happiest veins—under the sting of the poetical œstrum. It is an instance where he was called to his task by desire.
In his greatest undertaking—his Translation of Virgil—he often had to write when the fervour was low and slack. The task was to be driven on; and it was luck if the best places of his author fell to the uncertain hour of his own inspiration. So possibly we may understand why sometimes, when his original seems to challenge a full exertion of power, he comes short of himself. The weariness of the long labour must often apologise for languor, where the claims of the matter are less importunate. But it is not easy—when culling for comparison some of the majestic or softer strains into which Virgil has thrown his full soul, which he has wrought with his most loving and exquisite skill—wholly to shut the door of belief against the uncharitable suggestion,—that the Translator less livelily apprehended, than you yourself do, some Virgilian charm, which lay away from his own manner of thinking, and feeling, and of poetical art.
The story, so marvellous and pathetic, of the Thracian harper-king, and his bride stung by the serpent, is from of old the own tale of lovers and poets. The heart of the Lover dares the terrific and unimaginable road; and the voice and hand of the Minstrel subdue all impossibilities. Virgil was fortunate in a link, which gave to his Italian Man of the Fields an interest in the antique, strange, and touching Hellenic tradition; and he has improved his opportunity worthily of his theme, of his work, and of himself. The dexterous episode of Aristæus, visited with a plague in his bee-hives, for his fault in the death of Eurydice, ends, and by endingconsummates, the poem which took life in the soul of the Mincian ploughboy, and to which the chief artist of Augustan Rome was content in bequeathing the perpetual trust of his fame. Impassioned, profound tenderness,—the creating high and pure spirit of beauty—the outwardly watchful and sensitive eye and ear—with tones at will fetched by listening imagination from the great deep of the wonderful, the solemn, the sublime,—these, and crowning these, that sweet, and subtle, and rare mastery, which avails, through translucent words, to reveal quick or slow motions and varying hues of the now visible mind—which on the stream of articulate sounds rolls along, self-evolving, and changing as the passion changes, a power of music,—these all are surprisingly contained within theSeventy-Five Verseswhich unfold the anger of Orpheus, now a forlorn and yet powerful ghost, and of the Nymphs, once her companions, for the twice-lost Eurydice.
It is a hard but a fair trial to set the Translator against the best of his author. It is to be presumed that Dryden, matched against the best of Virgil, has done his best. We have not room for the whole diamond, but shall display one or two of the brightest facets. Who has forgotten that shrinking of the awed and tender imagination, which shuns the actual telling that Eurydice died? Which announces her as doomed to die—Moritura!then says merely that she did not see in the deep grass the huge water-snake before her feet guarding the river-bank along which she fled! and then turns to pour on the ear the clamorous wail of her companions.
"Illa quidem, dum te fugeret per flumina præceps,Immanem ante pedes hydrummoriturapuellaServantem ripas altâ non vidit in herbâ."
At this first losing of Eurydice, the impetuous, wild wail of the Nymph-sisterhood may, in the verse of the Mantuan, be heard with one burst, swelling and ringing over how many hills, champaigns, and rivers!
At chorus æqualis Dryadum clamore supremosImplerunt montes; flerunt Rhodopeiæ arces,Altaque Pangaea, ac Rhesi Mavortia tellus,Atque Getæ, atque Hebrus, et Actias Orithyia.
That the vivid emphasis of a stormy sorrow—given to a picture of sound in the foregoing verses, by that distinctiveness of the multitudinous repetition—declines in the melodious four English representatives to a greatly more generalized expression, must, one may think, be ascribed to Dryden's despair of reconciling in his own rougher tongue the geography and the music. Nevertheless, the version is evidently and successfully studied, to mourn and complain.
But all her fellow nymphs the mountains tearWith loud lament, and break the yielding air:The realms of Mars remurmur all around,And echoes to the Athenian shores resound.
It is good, but hardly reaches the purpose of the original clamour, so passionate, dirge-like, unearthly, and supernatural—at once telling the death—as they say that in some countries the king's death is never told in words, but with a clangour of shrieks only from the palace-top, which is echoed by voices to voices on to the borders of his kingdom—at once, we say, supplying this point of the relation, and impressing upon you the superhuman character of the mourners, who are able not only to deplore, but likewise mysteriously and mightily to avenge.
The next three lines are also, as might be presumed, at the height, for they describe the paragon of lovers and harpers harping his affliction of love—
Ipse cavâ solans ægrum testudine amorem,Te dulcis conjux, te solo in litore secum,Te veniente die, te decedente, canebat!
Musical, dolorous iteration, iteration! Musical, woe-begone iteration, iteration! What have we in English?
"The unhappy husband, husband now no more,Did, on his tuneful harp, his loss deplore,And sought his mournful mind with music to restore.On thee, dear wife, in desarts all alone,He call'd, sigh'd, sang; his griefs with day begun,Nor were they finish'd with the setting sun."
Studied verses undoubtedly—musical, and mournful, and iterative. The two triplets of rhyme have unquestionably this meaning; and the bold choice of the homely-affectionate, "dear wife," to render the more ornate "dulcis conjux," is of a sincere simplicity, and as good English as may be. We see here a poetical method of equivalents—for "ontheehecall'd, sigh'd, sang," is intended to render the urgency and incessancy ofTe, Te, Te, Te!But the singular and purely Virgilian artifice of construction in the second and third line, is abandoned without hope of imitation.
Orpheus goes down into hell.
"Tænarias etiam fauces, alta ostia Ditis,Et caligantem nigrâ formidine lucumIngressus, Manesque adiit, Regemque tremendum,Nesciaque humanis precibus mansuescere corda.""Even to the dark dominions of the nightHe took his way, thro' forests void of light,And dared amidst the trembling ghosts to sing,And stood before the inexorable king."
They are good verses, and might satisfy an English reader who knew not the original: albeit they do not attain—how should they?—to the sullen weight of dark dread that loads the Latin Hexameters. Look at that—REGEMQUE TREMENDUM! And then, still, the insisting upon something more! To what nameless Powers do they belong—those unassigned hearts, that are without the experience and intelligence of complying with human prayers?
The infatuation—dementia—which, on the verge of the rejoined light, turns back too soon the head of Orpheus towards her who follows him, is by Virgil said to be
"Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes!"
A verse awful by the measure which it preserves between the human of the first half—ignoscenda quidem—and the infernal of the second half—scirent si ignoscere Manes. It places before us, in comparison, the Flexible, which lives in sunshine upon the earth—and the Inflexible, which reigns in the gloom of Erebus underneath it.
What does Dryden? He takes down the still, severe majesty of Virgil by too much of the Flexible—by a double dose of humanity.
"A faultwhich easy pardon might receive,Were lovers judges, or could Hell forgive."
It is remarkable that he has himself quoted the line of Virgil with great praise, as one that approaches, within measure, to an Ovidian "turn." He has himself overstepped the measure, and made it quite Ovidian.
The four verses which describe the fault of Orpheus, and the perception of it in hell, are unsurpassed:—
"Restitit; Eurydicenque suam jam luce sub ipsâ,Immemor, heu! victusque animi respexit. Ibi omnisEffusus labor: atque immitis rupta tyranniFœdera: terque fragor stagnis auditus Avernis."
Only note the growing pathos from the beloved name to the naming of the dread act.Eurydicen—suam—jam luce sub ipsâ—immemor—heu!—victusque animi—RESPEXIT. Five links! Look, too, what a long way on in the verse that sin of backward-looking has brought you. There shall hardly be found another verse in Virgil which has a pause of that magnitude at that advance, in the measure. It is a great stretching on of the thought against the law of music, which usually controls you to place the logical in coincidence with the musical—stop; but here you are urged on into the very midst, and beyond the midst, of the last dactyl—a musical sleight which must needs heighten that feeling, impressed by the grammatical structure, of a voluntary delay,—of unwillingness to utter the word fraught with inevitable death—that mortalRESPEXIT! After this, there is here no poured out toil—no clashing and rending—No! here is the deep note of victory—the proclamation sounding out from the abyss that the prize which was carried off isregained. Thrice down—down—as low as the pools of Avernus breaks out a peal—
"Terque fragor stagnis auditus Avernis."
This is the master with whom—and this the language, and this the measure with which—our translator competes—"imparibus armis."
"For, near the confines of ethereal light,And longing for the glimmering of a sight,The unwary lover cast his eyes behind,Forgetful of the law, nor master of his mind.Straight all his hopes exhaled in empty smoke,And his long toils were forfeit for a look.Three flashes of blue lightning gave the signOf covenants broke, three peals of thunder join."
The falling off—the failure at the end is deplorable indeed; yet Dryden recovers himself, and much of what follows is very fine.
The outline of the Iliad interests man's everyday heart. A wife carried off—the retaliation—an invasion or siege—a fair captive withheld from ransom—a displeased God sending a plague—a high prince wronged, offended, sullenly withdrawn to his tent—war prosperous and adverse—a dear friend lost and wailed—a general by his death reconciled—that death avenged—a dead son redeemed by his father, and mourned by his people,—To receive all this sufferance into the heart's depths, wants no specific association—no grounding historical knowledge. By virtue of those anthropical elements—which are, by a change of accidents, one to him and you, Homer, who happens to be a Greek, makes you one, and a Trojan too, or rather you are with him in the human regions, and that fact sufficeth for all your soul's desires. But, though no critic, and unversed in the laws of Epos, which by the way are only discoverable in the poem which he created in obedience to them, and that were first revealed to him from heaven by its inspiring genius—nevertheless, you are affected throughout all your being by those laws, and but by them could not have been made "greater than you know," by the Iliad. For the main action, or Achilleid, though you may not know it, has four great steps. From Achilles' wrong by Agamemnon to the death of Patroclus, is a movement of one tenor. From the death of Patroclus to the death of Hector, is an entirely new movement, though causally bound in the closest manner to that antecedent. The Games and Funeral of Patroclus is an independent action. The Restoration of Hector's body is a dependent, and necessarily springing action, having a certain subsistency within itself. To the whole the seat of moving power is the bosom of Achilles. All the parts have perfect inter-obligation. Cut away any one, and there would be not a perilous gash, but a detruncation fatal to the living frame. There is vital integrity from the beginning to the end. Nowhere can you stop till the great poet stops. Then you obtain rest—not glad rest; for say not that the Iliad ends happily. The spirit of war sits on the sepulchral mound of Hector expecting its prey, and the topmost towers of Ilion, in the gloom of doom, lower with the ruining that shall soon hide Mount Ida in a night of dust.
Forbid it, ye muses all! that we should whisper a word in dispraise of Maro. But for what it is, not for what it is not, we love the Æneid. The wafting over sea from an Asiatic to an Italian soil, and the setting there of the acorn, which by the decree of the Destinies shall, in distant ages, grow up into Rome, and the overshadowing Roman Empire—this majestic theme appeals to the reason, and to the reason taught in the history of the world. It is a deliberate, not an impassioning interest. And how dominionless over our sympathy has the glowing and tender-hearted Virgil, perhaps unavoidably, made the Hero, who impersonates his rational interest! How unlike is this Æneas to that Achilles, round whose young head, sacred to glory, Homer has gathered, as about one magnetic centre, his tearful, fiery, turbulent, majestic, and magnanimous humanities!
Confess we must, reluctantly, that Æneas chills the Æneid. It was not that Virgil had embraced a design greater than his poetical strength. But it was in more than one respectunfortunately, unpoetically, conditioned. That political foundation itself is to be made good by aggressive arms; and by tearing a betrothed and enamoured beautiful bride from the youthful and stately chivalrous prince, her lover, slain in fight against the invaders; whilst the poor girl is to be made over to a widower, of whose gallantry the most that we know is his ill-care of his wife, and his running away from his mistress.
And thus, alas! it cannot be denied, the design of theÆneisis carried through without our great natural sympathies, as respects its end—against them as respects its means. An insuperable difficulty! Did Virgil mistake, then, in taking the subject? One hardly dares say so. The national tradition offers to the national Epic poet the national Epic transaction; and he accepts the offer. In doing so he allies by his theme his own to the Homeric Epos. With all this, however, we do feel that fiery, and all-powerful, and all-comprehensive genius projects the outline of theIliadupon the canvass; whilst in this poetical history of the Trojan plantation in Italy, we can ascribe to the general disposition and invention hardly more than a prudent and skilful intelligence. But the poetical soul, the creative fire then enters to possess the remainder of the task. Was, after all, a pitched battle not exactly the thing in the world the most kindly to the feelings and the best meted to the understanding of the poet, commissioned to renown with verse the people who fought more, and more successful, pitched battles than any other in the world?
Were Virgil to write now, and you had to allot him his theme, what would it be? A romance of knight-errantry? You would allot him none. You would leave him free to the suggestions of his own delicious spirit. But he thought himself bound to the Latin Epos. To speak in true critical severity, theÆneishas no Hero. It has aHEROINE. And who, pray, isSHE? The seven-hilled Queen of the World. Like another Cybele, with her turreted diadem, and gods for her children, in her arms and in her lap. Herself heaven-descended—Imperial Rome.
The two prophetical episodes—the Muster of the pre-existing ghosts before the eyes of the great human ancestor, Anchises, in his Elysium—and those anticipatory narrative Embossings of the Vulcanian shield, become in this view integral and principal portions of the poem. That reviewing beside that Elysian river, of the souls that are to animate Roman breasts, and to figure in Roman chronicles, gave opportunity to Virgil of one Prophecy that mingled mourning with triumph, and triumph with mourning. Victorious over the Punic—victorious over the Gallic foe—carrying to the temple the arms which he, a leader, stripped from a leader—the third consecrator of such spoils—goes Marcellus. But who is He that moves at the side of the hero? A youth, distinguished by his beauty and by his lustrous arms. The Souls throng, with officious tumult, about him—and how much he resembles his great companion! But on his destined brow sits no triumphal lustre—mists and night cling about his head. Who is it? Æneas enquires—and Anchises would fain withhold the reply. It is the descendant of that elder Marcellus; and promises, were fatal decrees mutable, to renew the prowess and praises of his famed progenitor. Fatal decrees might not change, and the nephew of Augustus, the destined successor of his reign, and the hopes of the Romans—OBIIT. You have often wept over Virgil's verses—here are Dryden's:—
"Æneas here beheld, of form divine,A godlike youth in glittering armour shine,With great Marcellus keeping equal pace;But gloomy were his eyes, dejected was his face.He saw, and wond'ring, ask'd his airy guide,What and of whence was he, who press'd the hero's side?'His son, or one of his illustrious nameHow like the former, and almost the same!Observe the crowds that compass him around;All gaze, and all admire, and raise shouting sound:But hov'ring mists around his brows are spread,And night, with sable shades, involve his head.''Seek not to know (the ghost replied with tears)The sorrows of thy sons in future years.This youth (the blissful vision of a day)Shall just be shown on earth, then snatch'd away.The gods too high had raised the Roman state,Were but their gifts as permanent as great.What groans of men shall fill the Martian field!How fierce a blaze his flaming pile shall yield!What funeral pomp shall floating Tyber see,When, rising from his bed, he views the sad solemnity!No youth shall equal hopes of glory give,No youth afford so great a cause to grieve.The Trojan honour, and the Roman boast,Admired when living, and adored when lost!Mirror of ancient faith in early youth!Undaunted worth, inviolable truth!No foe, unpunish'd, in the fighting-fieldShall dare thee, foot to foot, with sword and shield.Much less in arms oppose thy matchless force,When thy sharp spurs shall urge thy foaming horse.Ah! couldst thou break through Fate's severe decree,A new Marcellus shall arise in thee!Full canisters of fragrant lilies bring,Mix'd with the purple roses of the spring;Let me with funeral flowers his body strow;This gift which parents to their children owe,This unavailing gift, at least, I may bestow!'"
Here is an excellent flow. The sorrow and the pride and the public love which are the life of the original, are all taken to heart by the translator, who succeeds in imparting to you the most touching of poetical eulogies. You find, as usually every where, that the vigorous purpose of the original is maintained, and well rendered, but that certain Virgilian fascinations, which—whether they bewitch your heart or your fancy or our ear, you do not know—are hardly given you back. Thus it might be very hard to say what you have found that you cannot forget again, in such a verse as that which introduces to your eye the subject of the more effusive praise.
"Atque hic Æneas, una namque ire videbatEgregium formâ juvenem, et fulgentibus armis."
Yet you do not again forget that second line.
Dryden's rendering is equivalent for the meaning, and unblameable.
"Æneas here beheld ofform divine,A godlike youth in glittering armour shine."
The phrase is even heightened; but it does not loiter, like that other, in your memory. The very heightening has injured the image—the shadow that shone brighter in simple words.
The shadow then thrown across—
"Sedfronslæta parum"—
is well given, with a variation, by—
"But gloomy were hiseyes."
The lightlessness is feelingly placed where the chief light should be.
The unequalled
"Ostendent terris hunc tantum Fata,"
so fully signifying the magnitude of the gift offered and withdrawn—so sadly the brief promise, and all so concisely, meets with a soft and bright rendering in
"Theblissful visionof a day."
But Dryden's "shownonearth," less positively affirms the loss fallen upon the earth, than the Latin "shall show to the nations."
The praise involving the recollection of the manners which were—
"Heu pietas! heu prisca fides! invictaque belloDextera!"
is given with admirable fervour.
"Mirror of ancient faith, in early youthUndaunted worth! inviolable truth!"
As forthose three wordsthat smote, as the tradition goes, the heart of the too deeply concerned auditress, the bereaved mother herself, to swooning—
"Tu Marcellus eris!"—
they are no doubt, in their overwhelming simplicity, untransferable to our uncouth idiom; and our ears may thank Dryden for the skill with which, by a "New Marcellus," and an otherwise explanatory paraphrase, he has kept the Virgilian music. Meantime the passionate vehemence of the breaking away from that prophecy of intolerable grief—the call for the bestrewment of flowers—
"Manibus date lilia plenis," &c.—
mustbe weakened, if the moment of the transition is to fall, as we see it in Dryden, at the interval between verse and verse, and not, as we have just seen it with Virgil, at the juncture within the verse of hemistich with hemistich.
"Tu Marcellus eris.—Manibus date lilia plenis," &c.
There is a pause in that line, during which the mother, had she not swooned, might have calmed her heart!
It is usual to discover that Virgil wants originality—that he transcribes his battles from Homer. In truth, it was not easy, with fights of the Homeric ages, to do otherwise. However, Virgil has done otherwise, if any one will be at the pains to look.
For instance, an incident, not in the battles by the Xanthus, is the following:—
A powerful Tuscan warrior, infuriated by the ill fighting of his men, distinguishes himself by an extraordinary feat. Clasping round the body, and so unhorsing a lighter antagonist, he rides off with him; snaps the javelin, which his captive still grasps, near the head, and with its point probes and aims for a vulnerable place. The unfortunate Latine, as he lies across the horse's neck, struggles, and will baffle the deathly blow. Landseer could suggest no more vivid comparison, than one which leaps into your own imagination—a snake soused upon by an eagle.
"So stoops the yellow eagle from on high,And bears a speckled serpent through the sky,Fastening his crooked talons on the prey:The prisoner hisses through the liquid way;Resists the royal hawk, and though oppresst,She fights in columns and erects her crest:Turn'd to her foe, she stiffens every scale,And shoots her forky tongue, and whisks her threat'ning tail.Against the victor all defence is weak;The imperial bird still plies her with his beak,He tears her bowels, and her heart he gores,Then clasps his pinions and securely soars."
A glorious paraphrase!
This is an incident more like a knight of Ariosto's, the terrible Sarazin Rhodomont, or Orlando himself, than Homer's, who did not, indeed, combat on horseback.
But speaking of the moderns, we will venture to say, that if Virgil has copied, he is also an original who has been copied. And we will ask, who is the prototype of the ladies, turned knights, who flourish in favour with our poets of romance?—with Ariosto, with Tasso, with our own Spenser? Who but the heroic virgin ally of the Rutulian prince—who butCamilla?
We name her, however, neither for her own sake, nor for Virgil's, but for Dryden's, who seems also to have taken her into favour, and to have written, with a peculiar spirit and feeling, the parts of the poem which represent her in action.
She leads her Amazons into Italian fields, warring against the fate-driven fugitives of overthrown Troy. Whence were her Amazon followers? Whence is She? Her history her divine patroness, Diana, relates. Her father, the strong-limbed, rude-souled Metabus, a wild and intractable Volscian king, fled from the face and from the pursuit of his people. He bore, in his arms, one dear treasure; a companion of his flight; yet an infant—this daughter. He flies. The Amasenus, in flood, bars his way. More doubtful for his charge than for himself, hastily, with love-prompted art, he swathes the babe in stripped bark—binds her to the shaft of his huge oaken spear—dedicates her with a prayer to the virgingoddess of woods, and of the woodland chase—hurls, from a gigantic hand, the weapon across the tempestuous flood—and, ere his pursuers have reached him, plunges in, breasts the waters, and, saving and saved, swims across. In the forest depths, amongst imbosoming hills, the rugged sire fosters the vowed follower of Diana. The nursling of the wild grows up a bold and skilled huntress; and now that war storms in the land, she, with her huntress companions, joins the war. Some unexplained reconciliation, or perhaps restoration, has taken effect; for, along with her armed maidens, she leads the troops of the Volscians. In the field she fights like a virago; but her entrance thither was against the desire of the goddess, for it dooms her to die. Her eager following of a gorgeously armed warrior exposes her to a treacherous aim, and she falls. The provident goddess had put her own bow, and an arrow from her own quiver, into the hands of a nymph chosen to execute the vengeance of the impending death, and that arrow flies to its mark.
"Nor, after that, in towns which walls enclose,Would trust his hunted life amidst his foes;But, rough, in open air he chose to lie;Earth was his couch, his covering was the sky.On hills unshorn, or in a desert den,He shunn'd the dire society of men.A shepherd's solitary life he led;His daughter with the milk of mares he fed.The dugs of bears, and every savage beast,He drew, and through her lips the liquor press'd.The little amazon could scarcely go,He loads her with a quiver and a bow;And, that she might her staggering steps command,He with a slender javelin fills her hand.Her flowing hair no golden fillet bound;Nor swept her trailing robe the dusty ground.Instead of these, a tiger's hide o'erspreadHer back and shoulders, fasten'd to her head.The flying dart she first attempts to fling,And round her tender temples toss'd the sling;Then as her strength with years increased, beganTo pierce aloft in air the soaring swan,And from the clouds to fetch the heron and the crane.The Tuscan matrons with each other vied,To bless their rival sons with such a bride;But she disdains their love, to share with meThe sylvan shades, and vow'd virginity.And oh! I wish, contented with my caresOf savage spoils, she had not sought the wars.Then had she been of my celestial train,And shunn'd the fate that dooms her to be slain.But since, opposing heaven's decree, she goesTo find her death among forbidden foes,Haste with these arms, and take thy steepy flight,Where, with the gods adverse, the Latins fight.This bow to thee, this quiver, I bequeath,This chosen arrow, to avenge her death:By whate'er hand Camilla shall be slain,Or of the Trojan or Italian train,Let him not pass unpunish'd from the plain.Then, in a hollow cloud, myself will aidTo bear the breathless body of my maid:Unspoil'd shall be her arms, and unprofanedHer holy limbs with any human hand,And in a marble tomb laid in her native land."
What is Virgil's in this fair and romantically cast fiction? What hints did the traditionary fable give him? You are not concerned to make anenquiry which you have no means of satisfying. You must hold Camilla to be as much Virgil's as any thing is Homer's in the Iliad. The painting throughout is to the life, and perfectly graceful. The subject was one likely to attach the imagination of a modern poet, and you feel all along, that pleasure inspirits the happy translation of Dryden.
The Destruction of Troy, the Love of Dido, the Descent into Hell, entire Cantos of the poem, take deep and lasting possession of every reader; and, like the first and second books of the Paradise Lost, too much seduce admiration from the remainder of the work. You pick out from the whole Italian war, Lausus, Pallas, Nisus, and Euryalus, and think that you have done with Virgil.
We beg to propose a literary experiment. Homer has left us two poems—a War, and a Wandering. Virgil has bequeathed us one, representing those two, and that proportionally; although in the Latin the Odyssey comes first, and the Iliad follows. For the first six Æneids relate the wandering; whilst the latter six display the war. Let us, therefore, fairly cut the great outrolling, unfolding picture in two, and have two poems, distinct, although closely allied; twins, moulded in one womb, nourished from the same blood. We dare to predict that the poem of "Æneas in Italy," now considered with its own independent interests, and after its own art and management, will duly compete with its rival, "Æneas Fugitive."
How the whole movement, and march, and original conduct of the Italian war will come out! The peaceful entertainment of the Trojans by Latinus, moved with old and new prophecies, and his ready offer of his daughter, Lavinia, to Æneas in marriage—the adverse interposition of Juno—her summoning of Alecto from hell—the glad Fury's fine discharge of her part—her maddening of the Queen Amata, who loves Turnus, hates the strangers, and catches in her own madness all the Latian mothers—theINFURIATINGof the young, gallant, ardent, defrauded, princely lover himself—a splendid scene, where the hot warrior's jeers of the fiend in her beldam disguise, sting her Tartarean heart as if it had been a woman's, and for the very wrath she reveals her terrible self—then that exquisite incident, won from the new matter of the poet, from thePASTORALmanners with which he is historically obliged to deal in Italy—the Fury's third and last feat—her drawing-on of Ascanius's hounds to hunt the beautiful favourite stag, which the daughter of the King's chief herdsman petted—and, thence, a quarrel, a skirmish, slaughter begun, and the whole population of the plains aroused. And so with bacchanal women, with Rutulians, and with his own rude liegemen in tumult, the old King overborne—shutting himself up in his palace; and war inflamed in Hesperia, to the full heart's-wish of Jove's imperial wife, who has nothing left her to do more than, descending again from the sky, to push open with her own hands the brazen-gated temple of Janus.
All this is very poetical—is very different from theIliad, and is perfectly measured to the scale of a war, moved, not by confederated Greece for the overthrow of an Asiatic empire, but by the tribes of the coast for beating back the crews of a few straggling ships from planting a colony, who have nothing on their side but their valour, their fame, and their fates.
Analyze this war; make out for yourself, distinctly, the story, of which in a poem one always too easily loses the sequence, delight and emotion making one less observant; then understand the poetical workings out, in their places and after their bearings; and you will satisfy yourself, that although the cleaving of heads, and the transpiercing of trunks, and the hewing off of limbs, are processes that must always keep up a certain general resemblance to themselves, you have not a campaign imitated from the Iliad; but an original one—proper to person and place.
Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work.
Footnotes:
[1]Raphael was born in 1483, Michael Angelo in 1474.
[2]
"Μὴ μὰν ἀσπουδει γε καὶ ἀκλειῶς ἀπολοίμην᾽Αλλὰ μέγα ῥέξας τι καὶ ἐσσομενοιοι πυθέσθαι."Iliad, XXII. 304.
[3]We were about to make some remarks on the alleged production ofanimated globules in albumen by electricity; but we find that, in a note to the third edition, the author virtually relinquishes this ground. We had made enquiries amongst scientific men; but no such experiment had been received or accredited amongst them.
[4]"In tracing the series of fossiliferous formations, from the most ancient to the more modern, the first deposits in which we meet with assemblages of organic remains having a near analogy to theFaunaof certain parts of the globe in our own time, are those commonly called tertiary. Even in the Eocene, or oldest subdivision of these tertiary formations, some few of the testacea belong to existing species, although almost all of them, and apparently all the associated vertebrata, are now extinct. These Eocene strata are succeeded by a great number of modern deposits, which depart gradually in the character of their fossils from the Eocene type, and approach more and more to that of the living creation. In the present state of science, it is chiefly by the aid of shells that we are enabled to arrive at the results; for, of all classes, the testacea are the most generally diffused in a fossil state, and may be called the medals principally employed by nature in recording the chronology of past events. In the Miocene deposits, which succeed next to the Eocene, we begin to find a considerable number, although still a minority, of recent species intermixed with some fossils common to the preceding epoch. We then arrive at the Pliocene strata, in which species now contemporary with man begin to preponderate, and in the newest of which nine-tenths of the fossils agree with species still inhabiting the neighbouring sea.
"In thus passing from the older to the newer members of the tertiary system, we meet with many chasms; but none which separate entirely, and by a broad line of demarcation, one state of the organic world from another. There are no signs of an abrupt termination of oneFaunaandFlora, and the starting into life of new and wholly distinct forms. Although we are far from being able to demonstrate geologically an insensible transition from the Eocene to the recentFauna, yet we may affirm that the more we enlarge and perfect our survey of Europe, the more nearly do we approximate to such a continuous series, and the more gradually are we conducted from times when many of the genera and nearly all the species were extinct, to those in which scarcely a single species flourished which we do not know to exist at present."—Lyell'sPrinciples of Geology. Vol. i. p. 283.
[5]This lower jaw is described in another part of the work as showing in the human embryo the last trace of the monkey.
[6]Printed at Dublin for Philip Dixon Hardy & Sons, 1842.
[7]A place in Ireland?
[8]We subjoin the original Etruscan text as read by our author, with its alleged Irish equivalents.
Bucucum : iubiu : pune : ubef : furfath : tref : bitluf : turuf : | marte : thurie : fetu : pupleeper : tutas : hubinas : tutaper : icubina : | batuba : ferine : fetu : puni : fetu : arbic : ustentu : cutep : pes- nimu.
Bu co com iudh be in Pune u be fa for fath tre fa be at lu fa tur u fa | mer ta tur i e fad u prob lu bar to ta is i iudh be i na is to ta bar i co be i na | ba do ba fa ain e fad u Puni fad u ar be iudh us tan do co taib be sni mo.
[9]It appears that the Royal Irish Academy had refused to publish these speculations in its Transactions. We are surprised they should have admitted some others of the same stamp, to which reference is made further on.
[10]"Now, as Serapio was about to have added something of the same nature, the stranger, taking the words out of his mouth—I am wonderfully pleased, said he, to hear discourses upon such subjects as these; but am constrained to claim your first promise, to tell the reason wherefore now the Pythian prophetess no longer delivers her oracles in poetic numbers and measures. Upon which Theo interposing—It cannot be denied, said he, but that there have been great changes and innovations in reference to poetry and the sciences, yet it is as certain that from all antiquity oracles have been delivered in prose. For we find in Thucydides that the Lacedæmonians, desirous to know the issue of the war then entered into against the Athenians, were answered in prose." * * * "And so of Dinomenes the Sicilian, Procles, tyrant of Epidaurus and Timarchus; and, which is more, the oracular answers, according to which Lycurgus conferred the form of the Lacedæmonian commonwealth, were also so given."—Plutarch. Moral.
[11]Death of Wallenstein, Act v. Scene 1, (Coleridge's Translation,) relating to his remembrances of the younger Piccolomini.
[12]"Like the dry corpse which stood upright."—See theSecondBook of Kings, chap. xiii. v. 20 and 21. Thirty years ago this impressive incident was made the subject of a large altar-piece by Mr Alston, an interesting American artist, then resident in London.
[13]"African Obeah."—Thirty-years ago it would not have been necessary to say one word of the Obi or Obeah magic; because at that time several distinguished writers (Miss Edgeworth, for instance, in her Belinda) had made use of this superstition in fictions, and because the remarkable history of Three-finger'd Jack, a story brought upon the stage, had made the superstition notorious as a fact. Now, however, so long after the case has probably passed out of the public mind, it may be proper to mention—that when an Obeah man,i. e., a professor of this dark collusion with human fears and human credulity, had once woven his dreadful net of ghostly terrors, and had thrown it over his selected victim, vainly did that victim flutter, struggle, languish in the meshes; unless the spells were reversed, he generally perished; and without a wound except from his own too domineering fancy.
[14]What follows, I think, (for book I have none of any kind where this paper is proceeding,) viz.et serâ sub nocte rudentum, is probably a mistake of Virgil's; the lions did not roar because night was approaching, but because night brought with it their principal meal, and consequently the impatience of hunger.
[15]"Kilcrops."—See, amongst Southey's early poems, one upon this superstition. Southey arguescontra; but for my part, I should have been more disposed to hold a brief on the other side.
[16]In this place I derive my feeling partly from a lovely sketch of the appearance, in verse, by Mr Wordsworth; partly from my own experience of the case; and, not having the poems here, I know not how to proportion my acknowledgments.
[17]"And so, then," the Cynic objects, "you rank your own mind (and you tell us so frankly) amongst the primary formations?" As I love to annoy him, it would give me pleasure to reply—"Perhaps I do." But as I never answer more questions than are necessary, I confine myself to saying, that this is not a necessary construction of the words. Some minds stand nearer to the type of the original nature in man, are truer than others to the great magnet in our dark planet. Minds that are impassioned on a more colossal scale than ordinary, deeper in their vibrations, and more extensive in the scale of their vibrations—whether, in other parts of their intellectual system, they had or had not a corresponding compass—will tremble to greater depths from a fearful convulsion, and will come round by a longer curve of undulations.
[18]i. e.(As on account of English readers is added,) the recognition of his true identity, which in one moment, and by a horrid flash of revelation, connects him with acts incestuous, murderous, parricidal, in the past, and with a mysterious fatality of woe lurking in the future.
[19]Euripides.