"Into what depth thou see'st,From what height fallen."
For ever I searched the abysses with some wandering thoughts unintelligible to myself. For ever I dallied with some obscure notion, how my sister's love might be made in some dim way available for delivering me from misery; or else how the misery I had suffered and was suffering might be made, in some way equally dim, the ransom for winning back her love.
Here pause, reader! Imagine yourself seated in some cloud-scaling swing, oscillating under the impulse of lunatic hands; for the strength of lunacy may belong to human dreams, the fearful caprice of lunacy, and the malice of lunacy, whilst thevictimof those dreams may be all the more certainly removed from lunacy; even as a bridge gathers cohesion and strength from the increasing resistance into which it is forced by increasing pressure. Seated in such a swing, fast as you reach the lowest point of depression, may you rely on racing up to a starry altitude of corresponding ascent. Ups and downs you will see, heights and depths, in our fiery course together, such as will sometimes tempt you to look shyly and suspiciously at me, your guide, and the ruler of the oscillations. Here, at the point where I have called a halt, the reader has reached the lowest depth in my nursery afflictions. From that point, according to the principles ofartwhich govern the movement of these Confessions, I had meant to launch him upwards through the whole arch of ascending visionswhich seemed requisite to balance the sweep downwards, so recently described in his course. But accidents of the press have made it impossible to accomplish this purpose in the present month's journal. There is reason to regret that the advantages of position, which were essential to the full effect of passages planned for equipoise and mutual resistance, have thus been lost. Meantime, upon the principle of the mariner who rigs ajury-mast in default of his regular spars, I find my resource in a sort of "jury" peroration—not sufficient in the way of a balance by itsproportions, but sufficient to indicate thequalityof the balance which I had contemplated. He who hasreallyread the preceding parts of these present Confessions, will be aware that a stricter scrutiny of the past, such as was natural after the whole economy of the dreaming faculty had been convulsed beyond all precedents on record, led me to the conviction that not one agency, but two agencies, had co-operated to the tremendous result. The nursery experience had been the ally and the natural co-efficient of the opium. For that reason it was that the nursery experience has been narrated. Logically, it bears the very same relation to the convulsions of the dreaming faculty as the opium. The idealizing tendency existed in the dream-theatre of my childhood; but the preternatural strength of its action and colouring was first developed after the confluence of thetwocauses. The reader must suppose me at Oxford: twelve years and a half are gone by; I am in the glory of youthful happiness; but I have now first tampered with opium; and now first the agitations of my childhood reopened in strength, now first they swept in upon the brain with power and the grandeur of recovered life, under the separate and the concurring inspirations of opium.
Once again, after twelve years' interval, the nursery of my childhood expanded before me—my sister was moaning in bed—I was beginning to be restless with fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the nurse, but now dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon some Grecian stage with her uplifted hand, and like the superb Medea standing alone with her children in the nursery at Corinth,[19]smote me senseless to the ground. Again, I was in the chamber with my sister's corpse—again the pomps of life rose up in silence, the glory of summer, the frost of death. Dream formed itself mysteriously within dream; within these Oxford dreams remoulded itself continually the trance in my sister's chamber,—the blue heavens, the everlasting vault, the soaring billows, the throne steeped in the thought (but not the sight) of "Him that sate thereon;" the flight, the pursuit, the irrecoverable steps of my return to earth. Once more the funeral procession gathered; the priest in his white surplice stood waiting with a book in his hand by the side of an open grave, the sacristan with his shovel; the coffin sank; thedust to dustdescended. Again I was in the church on a heavenly Sunday morning. The golden sunlight of God slept amongst the heads of his apostles, his martyrs, his saints; the fragment from the litany—the fragment from the clouds—awoke again the lawny beds that went up to scale the heavens—awoke again the shadowy arms that moved downwards to meet them. Once again, arose the swell of the anthem—the burst of the Hallelujah chorus—the storm—the trampling movement of the choral passion—the agitation of my own trembling sympathy—the tumult of the choir—the wrath of the organ. Once more I, that wallowed, became he that rose up to the clouds. And now in Oxford, all was bound up into unity; the first state and the last were melted into each other as in some sunny glorifying haze. For high above my own station, hovered a gleaming host of heavenly beings, surrounding the pillows of the dying children. And such beings sympathize equally with sorrow that grovels and with sorrow that soars. Such beings pity alike the children that are languishing in death, and the children that live only to languish in tears.
Dryden.
Sir Walter Scott's admirable Life of Dryden concludes with this passage:—"I have thus detailed the life, and offered some remarks on the literary character, ofJohn Dryden; who, educated in a pedantic taste and a fanatical religion, was destined, if not to give laws to the stage of England, at least to defend its liberties; to improve burlesque into satire; to free translation from the fetters of verbal metaphrase, and exclude from it the license of paraphrase; to teach posterity the powerful and varied poetical harmony of which their language was capable; to give an example of the lyric ode of unapproached excellence; and to leave a namesecond only to those of Milton and of Shakspeare." Two names we miss, and muse where the immortal author of Waverley would have placed them; not surely below Dryden's—those ofChaucerandSpenser.
Let those Four names form a constellation—and the star Dryden, large and bright though it be, must not be looked for in the same region of the heavens. First in the second order of English poets—let glorious John keep the place assigned him by the greatest of Scotsmen. We desire not that he shall vacate the throne. But between the first order and the second, let that be remembered which seems here to have been forgotten, that immeasurable spaces intervene. "Second only to Shakspeare and Milton," implies near approach to them of another greatness inferior but in degree, and Dryden is thus lifted up in our imagination into the sphere of the Creators. On such mention of Milton, let us converse about him for a short half hour, and then venture to descend on Dryden, not with precipitation, but as in a balloon.
To an Englishman recollecting the poetical glories of his country, the Seventeenth Century often appears as the mother of one great name—Milton. Original and mighty poets express, at its highest, the mind of their time as it is localized on their own soil. With Elizabeth the splendour of the feudal and chivalrous ages for England finally sets. A world expires, and erelong a new world rises. The Wars which signalize the new period, contrast deeply with those which heretofore tore the land. Those were the factions of high lineages. Now, thought seizes the weapons of earthly warfare. The rights vesting in an English subject by the statutes of the country—the rights vesting in man, as the subject of civil government, by the laws of God and nature, are scanned by awakened reason, and put arms into men's hands. The highest of all the interests of the human being—higher than all others, as eternity excels time—Religion—is equally debated. The Protestant church is beleaguered by hostile sects—the Reformation subjected to the demand for a more searching and effective reform. Creed, worship, ecclesiastical discipline and government, all come into debate. A thraldom of opinion—a bondage of authority, that held for many centuries the nation bound together in no powerless union, is, upon the sudden, broken up. Men will know why they obey and why they believe; and human laws and divine truths are searched, as far as the wit of man is capable, to the roots. It is the spirit of the new time that has broken forth, and begins ambitiously, and riotously, to try its powers, but nobly, magnanimously, and heroically too.Miltonowned and showed himself a son of the time. Gifted with powers eminently fitted for severe investigation—apt for learning, and learned beyond most men—of a temper adverse and rebellious to an assumed and ungrounded control—large-hearted and large-minded to comprehend the diverse interests of men—personally fearless—devout in the highest andboldest sense of the word; namely, as acknowledging no supreme law but from heaven, and as confiding in the immediate communication of divine assistance to the faithful servants of heaven—possessing, moreover, in amplest measure, that peculiar endowment of sovereign poets which enables them to stand up as the teachers of a lofty and tender wisdom, as moral prophets to the species, the clear faculty of profound self-inspection—he was prepared to share in the intellectual strife and change of that day, even had some interposing, pacific angel charmed away from the bosom of the land all other warfare and revolution—and to shine in that age's work, even had the muse never smiled upon his cradled forehead, never laid the magical murmurs of song on his chosen lips. He was a politician, a theologian of his age—amidst the demolition of established things, the clang of arms, and the streaming of blood, whether in the field or upon the scaffold, a thinker and a writer.
There are times that naturally produce real, others that naturally produce imitative poetry. Tranquil, stagnating times, produce the imitative; times that rouse in man self-consciousnesses, produce the real. All great poetry has a moral foundation. It is imagination building upon the great, deep, universal, eternal human will. Therefore profound sympathy with man, and profound intelligence of man, aided by, or growing out of, that profound sympathy, is vital to the true poet. But in stagnating times both sympathy with man sleeps, and the disclosure of man sleeps. Troubled times bring out humanity—show its terrible depths—also its might and grandeur—both ways its truth. A great poet seems to require his birth in an age when there are about him great self-revelations of man, for his vaticination. Moreover, his own particular being is more deeply and strongly stirred and shown to him in such a time. But the moral tempest may be too violent for poetry—as the Civil War of the Roses appeared to blast it and all letters—that of the Parliament contrariwise. The intellect of Milton, in theParadise Lost, shows that it had seen "the giant-world enraged."
Happily for the literary fame of his country—for the solid exaltation in these latter ages of the sublime art which he cultivated—for the lovers of poetry who by inheritance or by acquisition speak the masculine and expressive language which he still ennobled—for the serene fame of the august poet himself—the political repose which a new change (the restoration of detruded and exiled royalty to its ancestral throne) spread over the land, by shutting up the public hopes of the civil and ecclesiastical republican in despair, and by crushing his faction in the dust, gave him back, in the visionary blindness of undecaying age, to "the still air of delightful studies," in order that, in seclusion from all "barbarous dissonance," he might achieve the work destined to him from the beginning—not less than the greatest ever achieved by man.
Educated by such a strife to power—and not more sublimely gifted than strenuously exercised—Milton had constantly carried in his soul the twofold consciousness of the highest destination. He knew himself born a great poet; and the names of great poets sounding through all time, rang in his ears. What Homer was to his people and to his language, he would be to his; and this was the lower vocation—glorious as earthly things may be glorious—and self-respecting while he thought of his own head as of one that shall be laurel-bound; yet magnanimous and public-spirited, while he trusted to shed upon his language and upon his country the beams of his own fame. This, we say, was his lower vocation, taken among thoughts and feelings high but merely human. But a higher one accompanied it. The sense of a sanctity native to the human soul, and indestructible—the assiduous hallowing of himself, and of all his powers, by religious offices that seek nothing lower than communion with the fountain-head of all holiness and of all good. And Milton, labouring "in the eye of his great taskmaster"—trained by all recluse and silent studies—trained by the turmoil raging around him of the times, and by his own share in the general contention—according to the self-dedication of his mind trained within the temple—he, stricken with darkness,and amidst the gloom of extinguished earthly hopes, assumed the singing robes of the poet.
The purpose of the Paradise Lost is wholly religious. He strikes the loudest, and, at the same time, the sweetest-toned harp of the Muse with the hand of a Christian theologian. He girds up all the highest powers of the human mind to wrestling with the most arduous question with which the human faculties can engage—the all-involving question—How is the world governed? Do we live under chance, or fate, or Providence? Is there a God? And is he holy, loving, wise, and just? He will
"Assert eternal providence,And justify the ways of God to man."
The justifying answer he reads in the Scriptures. Man fell, tempted from without by another, but by the act of his own free-will, and by his own choice. Thus, according to the theology of Milton, is the divine Rule of the universe completely justified in the sin into which man has fallen—in the punishment which has fallen upon man. The Justice of God is cleared. And his Love? That shines out, when man has perversely fallen, by the Covenant of Mercy, by finding out for him a Redeemer. And thus the two events in the history of mankind, which the Scriptures present as infinitely surpassing all others in importance, which are cardinal to the destinies of the human race, upon which all our woe, and, in the highest sense, all our weal are hung, become the subject of the work—the Fall of man consoled by the promise and undertaking of his Redemption.
The narrative of the Fall, delivered with an awful and a pathetic simplicity to us in a few words in the first chapter of Genesis, becomes accordingly the groundwork of the Poem; and these few words, with a few more scattered through the Scriptures, and barely hinting Celestial transactions, the War and Fall of the Angels, are by a genius, as daringly as powerfully creative, expanded into the mighty dimensions of an Epic. That unspeakable hope, foreshown to Adam as to be accomplished in distant generations, pouring an exhilarating beam upon the darkness of man's self-wrought destruction, which saves the catastrophe of the poem from utter despair, and which tranquillizes the sadness, has to be interwoven in the poet's narrative of the Fall. How stupendous the art that has disposed and ordered the immensity!—comprehended the complexity of the subject into a clearly harmonized, musically proportionate Whole!
Unless the Paradise Lost had risen from the soul of Milton as a hymn—unless he had begun to sing as a worshipper with his hands uplifted before the altar of incense, the choice of the subject would have been more than bold—it would have been the daring of presumption—an act of impiety. For he will put in dialogue God the Father and God the Son—disclosing their supreme counsels. He has prayed to the Third Person of the Godhead for light and succour. If this were a fetch of human wit, it was in the austere zealot and puritan a mockery. To a devout Roman Catholic poet, we could forgive every thing. For nursed among legends and visual representations of the invisible—panoplied in a childlike imposed faith from the access of impiety—his paternoster and his ave-marie more familiar to his lips than his bread, almost so as their breath—the most audacious representations may come to him vividly and naturally, without a scruple and without a thought. But Milton, the purged, the chastened, a spiritual iconoclast, drinking his faith by his own thirst on the waters of Zion, a champion whose weapons from the armoury of God "are given him tempered"—he to holy things cannot lay other than an awful hand. We know that he believed himself under a peculiar guidance. Surely, he had had visions of glory which, when he designed the poem that would include scenes in heaven, offered themselves again almost like very revelations. If we hesitate in believing this of him, it is because we conceive in him a stern intellectual pride and strength, which could not easily kneel to adore. But there we should greatly err. For he recognized in himself—
"Self-knowing, and from thenceMagnanimous to correspond with heaven"—
that capacity of song which nothingbut sacred Epos could satisfy. Diodati asks him—"Quid studes?" and he answers—"Mehercle, immortalitatem!" This might persuade us that he finally chose the Fall of Man as he at first had chosen King Arthur. But not so. When Arthur dropped away from his purposes, naturally displaced by the after-choice, the will toward an Epic underwent an answerable revolution. The first subject was called by the "longing after immortality." But another longing, or the longing after another immortality, carried the will and the man to the second. The learning and the learned art of theParadise Lost, concur in inclining us to look upon Milton as an artist rather than a worshipper. On closer consideration of its spirit, we cannot think of his putting his hand to such a work without the inwardly felt conviction thatGod was with him in it.
And, what is the feeling with which a youthful mind first regards theParadise Lost? A holy awe—something as if it were a second Bible. So, too, have felt towards it our great poets. Elwood, the Quaker, has told us, but we cannot believe him, thathesuggested to Milton theParadise Regained! Hardly credible that, being the natural sequel and complement of theParadise Lost, it should not have occurred to Milton. Pray, did the Quakersuggest the treatment? To conceive that man was virtually redeemed when Jesus had avouched, by proof, his perfect obedience, was a view, we think, proper to spring in a religious mind. It is remarkable, however, certainly, that the Atoning Sacrifice, which in theParadise Lostis brought into the front of the Divine rule and of the poem, in theParadise Regainedhardly appears—if at all. In both you see the holy awe with which Milton shuns describing the scenes of the Passion. Between Adam and Michael, on that "top of speculation" the Visions end at the Deluge. The Crucifixion falls amongst the recorded events, and is told with few and sparing words. Youmustthink that the removal of the dread Crucifixion from the action of theParadise Regainedrecommended that action to the poet—contradicting Warburton, who blames him, as a poet, for not having chosen the more stupendous action. Milton thus obtained further a perfect Greek simplicity of plan. The Crucifixion has always seemed profaned when any modern poet has dared to describe it.
TheSamson Agonisteswas, you know, Milton's last work. How suitable, above all other subjects, to the Hebrew soul within him! Their common blindness—the simplicity of character that is proper to a strong man—"the plain heroic magnitude of mind"—the absolute dependence on God, that is to say, trustful dependence brought out by blindness—the submission under the visiting hand of heaven provoked by Samson's own disobedience—God's especial selection of himas his own, a dedicated Nazarite—his call to be a national deliverer—All these combined to affect his devout imagination; while one might almost think, that in the youthful Milton the same fancy had delighted in the prowess and exploits of Samson which rejoiced in the heroes of chivalrous fable.
What are Dryden's works to these? How shall we compare Poet with Poet—Man with Man?
Let us then turn to the other clauses in Sir Walter's eulogium, and we shall be able to go along with him in much—not all—of what he affirms of his darling Dryden. He was verilyA GREAT TRANSLATOR. But before speaking of his performances, or of his principles, in that Fine Art, Translation, let us say a few words on its range and power.
It is indeed most desirable to have the gift of tongues, though the "myriad-minded" man had but that of his own. There are people who can parley all the European languages, even like so many natives, and read you off-hand any strange-looking page, be it even MS., you can submit to their eyes. Yet, we believe, they always most feelingly understand the "old familiar faces" of the words they got by heart in lisping them, and that became a part of their being, not by process of study, but by that seeming inspiration, through which childhood is ever joyfully acquiring multifarious lore in the spirit of love. In waking and sleeping dreams we speak our mother tongue. In it we makelove—in it we say our prayers. Had he lived till he was fourscore, John Leyden, in the dotage of genius, would have maundered by the banks of the Ganges in the Doric that charmed his ears among the murmurs of the Teviot. Heaven bless the man who invented Translation! Heaven bless Translators all—especially those who give us in English all thoughts, rich and rare, that took life in foreign attire, and continue to charm human hearts, and souls, and minds, in a change of light that shows them sometimes even more beautiful than when first they had a place among airy creatures!
But methinks we hear some wiseacre, who is no wizard, exclaim:—"Oh! to be enjoyed, it must be read in the original!" What! the Bible? You have no Hebrew, and little Greek, but surely you sometimes dip into the Old and into the New Testament.
To treat the question more argumentatively, let Prose Composition be divided into History, Philosophy, Oratory. In History, Translation—say into English—is easiest, and in all cases practicable. The information transferred is the chief thing asked, even if Style be lost—with some writers a small, with others no doubt a considerable, with a few a great loss. But the facts, that is, the events, and all the characters too, can be turned over, although one finer historical fact—the spirit of the country and time, as breathing in the very Style of the artist, may, yet need not, evaporate. The Translator, however, should be himself an historian or antiquary, and should confine himself—as, indeed, if left to himself he will do—to the nation in whose fate he happens to have had awakened in him—by influences hard to tell, and perhaps to himself unknown—the perpetual interest of a sympathy that endears to him, above all others, that especial region, and the ages that like shadows have passed over it.
In Philosophy, the Translator's task is harder, and it is higher; but its accomplishment is open to the zealous lover of truth. The whole philosophy must be thoroughly possessed by him, or meanings will be lost from, or imposed on, the author—cases fatal both. Besides, of all writers, a philosopher most collects extensive and penetrating theories into chosen words. No dictionary—the soul only of the philosopher interprets these words. In the new language, you must have great power and mastery to seize equivalents if there; if not, to create them, or to extricate yourself with circumlocutions that do not bewilder or mislead—precise and exquisite. Have we, in our language, many, any such Translations? Not Taylor's or Sydenham's Plato—not Gillies's Aristotle. Coleridge is dead—but De Quincey is alive.
In Oratory, the Style is all in all. It is theipsissimus homo. He who "wielded at will that fierce democratic," does not appear unless the thunder growl and the lightning dazzle. From what hand shall it fulmine over England as over Greece? Yet the matter, the facts, the order, the logic, are all easily enough to be transferred—not the passion and the splendour, except by an orator, and even hardly by him; but Brougham has grappled manfully with Demosthenes, though he hath somewhat diminished the power of the Crown.
But in Poetry. Ay, there the difficulties grow—there all are collected—and one equal to all, or nearly so, is added—Verse! Of all writers, the poet is the most exquisite in his words. His creations revolve in them—live in them—breathe and burn. Shakspeare expresses this—"the poet'spenturns them to shape." Ariel, and Lear, and Hamlet, are not except in the very words—their very own words. For the poet, of all men, feels most susceptibly, sensitively, perceptively, acutely, accurately, clearly, tenderly, kindly—the contact of his mind with yours; and the words are themedium of contact! Yet, most of theIliadmay be transferred—for it is a history. The manners are easily depicted in a Translation—so is the wonderful thinking that remains to us therein from that remote lost world—and makes the substratum of the poem. In short, that old world which Homer preserves, can be shown in a Translation, butnot Homer himself. The simplicity, and sweetness, and majesty, and the musical soul and art, require Greek, and old Greek. Atranslation into Attic Greek by Sophocles, would not be Homer. Into modern English? Alas, and alack-a-day! An English translator might better undertake Euripides than Sophocles, and Sophocles than Æschylus. Æschylus, Pindar, Homer—these are the three terrors of Translation. Why? They are doubly so remote! Distant so far, and distant so high! We should not, ourselves, much care for undertaking Apollonius Rhodius, and Callimachus, although the Alexandrian schoolmaster abounds in the poetical riches of the Greek tongue, and the Cyrenaic hymnist has an unattainable spirit of grace and elastic step. Yet we could, with a safe conscience, try; because if less glory be attempted by the translator, less can be lost for his original. Whereas, if we let down Homer, Pindar, Æschylus, we are lowering the heights of the human spirit—crimen læsœ majestatis. In poetry the absolutely creative power of the human spirit—that immense endowment and privilege of the human being—is at its height. Many view this endowment and privilege with scepticism—renouncing their own glory—denying themselves. Therefore, it is always important, in civilized times, that the majesty and might of poetry be sustained—surrounded by a body-guard of opinion. In rude times it can take good care of itself. Then the king walks among the people safe in their faith and love. Now you tremble to diminish the reverence of that creation. But courage! All cannot read Greek, and they are, as fellow men of Homer, entitled to as much of him as they can get. Chapman, Pope, Cowper, Sotheby, all taken together, impress an Englishman (Scotsman included) who is no Grecian, with a belief in greatness. And then for the perpetual feeding of his faith he has his own Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton.
Translation, you see then, O gracious perusers! has divers motives. One is ambitious. It is to help in giving the poet his due fame, and that is a motive honourably sprung, since it comes of the belief that the poet belongs to the species at large; and that accordingly his praise has not had its full reverberation, until it has rebounded from all hearts. Of the same impulse, but dealing justice in another direction, is the wish that the less learned shall not, from that accident, forfeit their share of the common patrimony; and that surely is among the best of all reasons. A peculiar sort of zeal is to cultivate the vernacular literature by transplanting the great works of other more happily cultivated languages, as we naturalize fair and useful exotics. This is an early thought, and goes off as the country advances. Probably the different reasons of Translation would affect, even materially, the characters of Translation; or at least, if they coexist, the predominance of one over the other moving causes. The different purposes will even give different orders of Translators. To undertake to aid in diffusing the version of Homer to the ends of the West, would ask an Englishman tolerably confident in his own powers. It breathed in the fiery spirit of George Chapman, who having rolled out the Iliad in our stateliest numbers, the Odyssey in more moderate strain, and finally dispatched the HomericMinora, begins his own Epilogue of three consecutive labours, with
"The work that IWAS BORN TO DO IS DONE!"
A little reflection will suggest to many a wishing Translator, thatHEis in danger of rather doing injustice to the celebrity of an admired original. Incapables! refrain, desist, be dumb.
The use of Translations to the literature that has received them has been questioned. The native genius and energies of a country may, it has been feared, be oppressed by the importation of wealth and luxuries. The Hygeian maxim to remain poor for the sake of health and strength, is hard to act upon. In another sense, we might rather look upon the introduced strangers as dangerous rivals, who rouse us to woo with better devotion, and so are useful. Besides, it looks like a timid policy to refuse to know what our fellows have done. Milton was not subdued, but inflamed, by conversing withallthe great originals. Burns did not the less Dorically tune his reed, because Pope had sounded in his ear echoes of the Scamandrian trumpet-blast. The truer and more encouraging doctrinerather seems to be, that if the land has in its mould the right nurture of genius, genius will strike its roots, and lift its flowers. In the mean time, it is to be considered, against such a policy of jealous protection, thatnotthe influence on the vernacular literature is the first legitimate claim, but the gain of enlightenment for the human mind, intent upon enlarging itself by bringing under kenevery wherethat which itself has been, and that which itself has doneevery where.
The great distinction which we have observed in these remarks on Translation, between compositions in Prose and Verse, seems here to demand from us some remarks. A question of the very highest importance in literature arises—can the Fictitious which the poet relates in Verse be as well related in Prose? The voice of all ages, countries, languages, answers—NO! The literature of every civilized nation presents this phenomenon—a division broad and deep, running through it, and marked by that distinction in the musical structure of discourse, which we habitually designate by the names, Prose and Verse. The distinction, as we all know, is as decided in the substance itself of the composition, as it is in the musical putting together of the words. Homer, Pindar, Alcæus, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, or Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, upon the one side; and upon the other, Herodotus and Thucydides, Demosthenes, Plato, and the Stagyrite—or under another still fortunate sky, Livy, Cæsar, Tacitus, Cicero and Seneca—here bare names of the poets on the one side, of the writers of prose on the other, express alike to our soberest judgment, and to our most awakened enthusiasm, nothing less than two distinctWorlds of Thinking.
How so commanding, so permeating, so vivifying, and so transfusing a power should reside in a fact of human speech, seemingly so slight and slender as that ruled and mechanical adjustment of a few syllables which we call a verse, is perhaps not explicable by our philosophy; but of the power itself, the uniform history of mankind leaves us no liberty to doubt. Yet may we understand something of this wonderful agency; and conceive how the new and strange wealth of music brought out from words, of which the speaker in verse finds himself the privileged master, may lift up, as on wings, his courage to think and utter. We may suppose that the sweet and melting, or the solemn, the prolonged, the proud swell, or flow, or fall of his own numbers, may surprise his own ear, and seize his own soul with unexpected emotions; and that off his guard and unawares, and, as grave ancient writers have said, in a sort of sacred madness, he may be hurried into inventions of greatness, of wonder, and beauty, which would have remained for ever locked up and forbidden to the colder and more reserved temper, which seems fittingly to accompany prose, the accustomed language of Reason. Versification is Measure, and it is Harmony. If you hear the measure you listen expectantly, and there is a recurring pleasure in the fulfilment of that expectation. But the pleasure thus afforded would soon be exhausted, did not the power of Harmony tell. That is a musical pleasure which cannot be exhausted. Here, then, is a reason why the natural music of speech shall be elaborated to its height in verse. You assume that the mind of the orator, the historian, the philosopher, is given up wholly to the truth of his matter. Therefore in him the palpable study of harmonious periods (as in Isocrates) impairs your confidence in his earnestness and sincerity. Not so, we venture to say, in the case of the poet. In his composition the very law of the verse instals the sound in a sort of mysterious sovereignty over the sense. He hurries or he protracts—he swells notes as of an organ, he attenuates them as of a flute. He seeks in the sound of words their power—and their power is great—to paint notions and things—to imitate the twanging of a bow, the hissing of an arrow, the roaring of the winds, the weltering of the waves. His verse laughs with merriment, and wails with sorrow; and that, which would in a grave writer of prose be frivolous, be sonorous trifles, crowns his muse with praise. Consequences follow, deeply penetrating into the substance of the whole composition, which is thusdelivered up, in a manner unknown to prose, to the wonder-working power of a delighted inspiration.
We know if any one begins to recite a passage of Milton, that we expect to hear a charm of sound which we never for a moment dream of hearing in prose—a new and a more beautiful speech. For having made one mode of speech more musical than another, we have placed it more immediately under the dominion of the faculty by which we are cognizant of beauty. Accordingly we feel, and know, and universally admit, although Eloquence is musical, that Poetry far excels Eloquence in its alliance with the beautiful. Music is beauty, addressing itself to the sense of hearing, and therefore the beautiful is showered upon poetry, and therein everlastingly enshrined. Verse, then, is a language seized upon by the soul gratifying itself in the indulgence of its own emotions, under a law of beauty. Thus we have seen a power introduced into human discourse, by a cause that hardly promised such wonderful effects. A modulation of sounds, a musical rising, and falling, and flowing, fitted for expressing a fervour, a boldness, an enthusiasm in the thinking, suddenly transforms the whole character of composition, creates or infuses a new spirit of thought. A kind of literature is produced, of a peculiar, and that the highest order—Poetry. We have seen this take many beautiful, august, and imposing forms—the majesty of the Epopeia—the pathetic energy of the Tragic Drama—the rapturous exaltation and prodigal splendour of the Lyrical Ode. The names of the species recal the names of the great works belonging to each, and of the great masters whose memory the works have made immortal. Those masters of the divine art thus breathing delight, are numbered among the loftiest and most powerful spirits. Nations, illustrious in peace and war, heroic in character and action, founders of stable and flourishing republics and empires, have set on the front of their renown the fame of having produced this or that other glorious poem. What wonder, since the poet, in forms given by imagination, embodies the profoundest, the loftiest, the tenderest, the innermost acts and movements of that soul which lives in every human bosom? What wonder if each of us loves the poet, when in his work, as in a celestial mirror, each of us beholdshimselfnaturally and truly pictured, and yet ennobled? What wonder if the nation, proud of itself, of its position, and of its memories, exalts its own darling son of song, who may have fixed, in a precious throng of imperishable words, the peculiar spirit of thinking, of loving, of daring, which has made the nation what it has been, is, and hopes long to be? What wonder if humankind, when mighty ages have departed, and languages once cultivated in their beauty, have ceased from being spoken, should bring across lands and seas crowns of undying laurels to cast at the feet of some awful poet who cannot die? In whose true, capacious, and prophetic mind, the coming civilization of his own people was long beforehand anticipated and predisposed? And in whose antique verse we, the offspring of other ages, and tongues, and races, drink still the freshly-flowing and ever-living waters of original and unexhausted humanity?
Oh! how shall such strains as these, in which each single word and syllable has in itself a spell, more potent by its position, survive, in undiminished force and beauty, the art that would fain spirit them away out of one language, which they have breathed all life long, into another which they have to learn to love? Lived there ever such a magician? Never.
There is reason for sadness in the above little paragraph. But after due rumination, let us forget it, and proceed. Hear Dryden prosing away upon paraphrase, and metaphrase, and imitation, in his very best style.
"All translation, I suppose, may be reduced to these three heads—First, that of metaphrase, or turning an author, word by word, and line by line, from one language into another. Thus, or near this manner, was Horace hisArt of Poetrytranslated by Ben Jonson. The second way is that of paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense; and that, too, is admitted to beamplified, but not altered. Such is Mr Waller's translation of Virgil's fourth Æneid. The third way is that of imitation, where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion, and taking only some general hints from the original, to run divisions on the ground-work as he pleases. Such is Mr Cowley's practice in turning two odes of Pindar, and one of Horace, into English."Concerning the first of these methods, our master, Horace, has given us this caution—'Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus Interpres'———'Nor word for word too faithfully translate,'as the Earl of Roscommon has excellently rendered it. 'Too faithfully is, indeed, pedantically.' It is a faith like that which proceeds from superstition, blind and zealous. Take it in the expression of Sir John Denham to Sir Richard Fanshaw, on his version of thePastor Fido—'That servile path thou nobly dost decline,Of tracing word by word, and line by line:A new and nobler way thou dost pursue,To make translations, and translators too;They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame,True to his sense, but truer to his fame.'"It is almost impossible to translate verbally, and well, at the same time; for the Latin (a most severe and compendious language) often expresses that in one word, which either the barbarity or the narrowness of modern tongues cannot supply in more. It is frequent, also, that the conceit is couched in some expression which will be lost in English—'Aque iidem venti vela fidemque ferent.'What poet of our nation is so happy as to express this thought literally in English, and to strike wit, or almost sense, out of it?"In short, the verbal copier is encumbered with so many difficulties at once, that he can never disentangle himself from them all. He is to consider, at the same time, the thought of his author, and his words, and to find out the counterpart to each in another language; and besides this, he is to confine himself to the compass of numbers, and the slavery of rhyme. It is much like dancing on ropes with fettered legs; a man may shun a fall by using caution, but the gracefulness of motion is not to be expected; and when we have said the best of it, it is but a foolish task, for no sober man would put himself into a danger for the applause of escaping without breaking his neck. We see Ben Jonson could not avoid obscurity in his literal translation of Horace, attempted in the same compass of lines; nay, Horace himself could scarce have done it to a Greek poet,'Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio:'either perspicuity or gracefulness will frequently be wanting. Horace has, indeed, avoided both these rocks in his translation of the three first lines of Homer'sOdyssey, which he has contracted into two:—'Dic mihi, musa, virum, captæ post tempora TrojæQui mores hominum multorum vidit, et urbes.'Muse, speak the man, who, since the siege of Troy,So many towns, such change of manners saw.'But then the sufferings of Ulysses, which are a considerable part of that sentence, are omitted—Ὃς μάλα πολλὰΠλὰγχθη.The consideration of these difficulties, in a servile, literal translation, not long since made two of our famous wits, Sir John Denham and Mr Cowley, to contrive another way of turning authors into our tongue, called, by the latter of them, imitation. As they were friends, I suppose they communicated their thoughts on this subject to each other; and, therefore, their reasons for it are little different, though the practice of one is much more moderate. I take imitation of an author, in their sense, to be an endeavour of a later poet to write like one who has written before him on the same subject; that is, not to translate his words, or to be confined to his sense, but only to set him as a pattern, and to write as he supposes that author would have done, had he lived in our age and in our country. Yet I dare not say that either of them have carried this libertine way of rendering authors (as Mr Cowley calls it) so far as my definition reaches, for, in the Pindaric Odes, the customs and ceremonies of ancient Greece are still preserved. But I know not what mischief may arise hereafter from the example of such an innovation, when writers of unequal parts to him shall imitate so bold an undertaking. To add and to diminish what we please, in the way avowed by him, ought only to be granted to Mr Cowley, and that, too,only in his translation of Pindar; because he alone was able to make him amends, by giving him better of his own, whenever he refused his author's thoughts. Pindar is generally known to be a dark writer, to want connexion, (I mean as to our understanding,) to soar out of sight, and to leave his reader at a gaze. So wild and ungovernable a poet cannot be translated literally; his genius is too strong to bear a chain, and, Samson-like, he shakes it off. A genius so elevated and unconfixed as Mr Cowley's was but necessary to make Pindar speak English, and that was to be performed by no other way than imitation. But if Virgil, or Ovid, or any regular intelligible authors, be thus used, it is no longer to be called their work, when neither the thoughts nor words are drawn from the original; but instead of them there is something new produced, which is almost the creation of another hand. By this way, it is true, somewhat that is excellent may be invented, perhaps more excellent than the first design; though Virgil must be still excepted, when that perhaps takes place. Yet he who is inquisitive to know an author's thoughts, will be disappointed in his expectation; and it is not always that a man will be contented to have a present made him when he expects the payment of a debt. To state it fairly; imitation of an author is the most advantageous way for a translator to show himself, but the greatest wrong which can be done to the memory and reputation of the dead. Sir John Denham (who advised more liberty than he took himself) gives his reason for his innovation in his admirable preface before the translation of the second Æneid. 'Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in pouring out of one language into another, it will all evaporate; and, if a new spirit be not added in thetransfusion, there will remain nothing but acaput mortuum.' I confess this argument holds good against a literal translation; but who defends it? Imitation and verbal version are, in my opinion, the two extremes which ought to be avoided; and therefore, when I have proposed the mean betwixt them, it will be seen how far this argument will reach."No man is capable of translating poetry, who, besides a genius to that art, is not a master both of his author's language and of his own; nor must we understand the language only of the poet, but his particular turn of thoughts and expression, which are the characters that distinguish, and, as it were, individuate him from all other writers. When we are come thus far it is time to look into ourselves, to conform our genius to his, to give his thought either the same turn, if our tongue will bear it, or, if not, to vary but the dress, not to alter or destroy the substance. The like care must be taken of the more outward ornaments—the words. When they appear (which is but seldom) literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But, since every language is so full of its own proprieties, that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words; it is enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense. I suppose he may stretch his chain to such a latitude, but, by innovation of thoughts, methinks he breaks it. By this means the spirit of an author may be transfused, and yet not lost; and thus it is plain that the reason alleged by Sir John Denham has no further force than the expression; for thought, if it be translated truly, cannot be lost in another language; but the words that convey it to our apprehension (which are the image and ornament of that thought) may be so ill chosen, as to make it appear in an unhandsome dress, and rob it of its native lustre. There is, therefore, a liberty to be allowed for the expression; neither is it necessary that words and lines should be confined to the measure of the original. The sense of an author, generally speaking, is to be sacred and inviolable. If the fancy of Ovid be luxuriant it is his character to be so; and if I retrench it he is no longer Ovid. It will be replied, that he receives advantage by this lopping of his superfluous branches, but I rejoin that a translator has no such right. When a painter copies from the life, I suppose he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments, under pretence that his picture will look better: perhaps the face which he has drawn would be more exact if the eyes and nose were altered; but it is his business to make it resemble the original. In two cases only there may a seeming difficulty arise; that is, if the thought be notoriously trivial or dishonest; but the same answer will servefor both, that then they ought not to be translated—'Et quaDesperes tractata nitescere posse, relinquas.'"Thus I have ventured to give my opinion on this subject against the authority of two great men, but, I hope, without offence to either of their memories; for I both loved them living, and reverence them now they are dead. But if, after what I have urged, it be thought by better judges that the praise of a translation consists in adding new beauties to the piece, thereby to recompense the loss which it sustains by change of language, I shall be willing to be taught better, and recant. In the meantime, it seems to me that the true reason why we have so few versions which are tolerable, is not from the too close pursuing of the author's sense, but because that there are so few who have all the talents which are requisite for translation, and that there is so little praise, and so small encouragement, for so considerable a part of learning."
"All translation, I suppose, may be reduced to these three heads—First, that of metaphrase, or turning an author, word by word, and line by line, from one language into another. Thus, or near this manner, was Horace hisArt of Poetrytranslated by Ben Jonson. The second way is that of paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense; and that, too, is admitted to beamplified, but not altered. Such is Mr Waller's translation of Virgil's fourth Æneid. The third way is that of imitation, where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion, and taking only some general hints from the original, to run divisions on the ground-work as he pleases. Such is Mr Cowley's practice in turning two odes of Pindar, and one of Horace, into English.
"Concerning the first of these methods, our master, Horace, has given us this caution—
'Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus Interpres'———'Nor word for word too faithfully translate,'
as the Earl of Roscommon has excellently rendered it. 'Too faithfully is, indeed, pedantically.' It is a faith like that which proceeds from superstition, blind and zealous. Take it in the expression of Sir John Denham to Sir Richard Fanshaw, on his version of thePastor Fido—
'That servile path thou nobly dost decline,Of tracing word by word, and line by line:A new and nobler way thou dost pursue,To make translations, and translators too;They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame,True to his sense, but truer to his fame.'
"It is almost impossible to translate verbally, and well, at the same time; for the Latin (a most severe and compendious language) often expresses that in one word, which either the barbarity or the narrowness of modern tongues cannot supply in more. It is frequent, also, that the conceit is couched in some expression which will be lost in English—
'Aque iidem venti vela fidemque ferent.'
What poet of our nation is so happy as to express this thought literally in English, and to strike wit, or almost sense, out of it?
"In short, the verbal copier is encumbered with so many difficulties at once, that he can never disentangle himself from them all. He is to consider, at the same time, the thought of his author, and his words, and to find out the counterpart to each in another language; and besides this, he is to confine himself to the compass of numbers, and the slavery of rhyme. It is much like dancing on ropes with fettered legs; a man may shun a fall by using caution, but the gracefulness of motion is not to be expected; and when we have said the best of it, it is but a foolish task, for no sober man would put himself into a danger for the applause of escaping without breaking his neck. We see Ben Jonson could not avoid obscurity in his literal translation of Horace, attempted in the same compass of lines; nay, Horace himself could scarce have done it to a Greek poet,
'Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio:'
either perspicuity or gracefulness will frequently be wanting. Horace has, indeed, avoided both these rocks in his translation of the three first lines of Homer'sOdyssey, which he has contracted into two:—
'Dic mihi, musa, virum, captæ post tempora TrojæQui mores hominum multorum vidit, et urbes.'Muse, speak the man, who, since the siege of Troy,So many towns, such change of manners saw.'
But then the sufferings of Ulysses, which are a considerable part of that sentence, are omitted—
Ὃς μάλα πολλὰΠλὰγχθη.
The consideration of these difficulties, in a servile, literal translation, not long since made two of our famous wits, Sir John Denham and Mr Cowley, to contrive another way of turning authors into our tongue, called, by the latter of them, imitation. As they were friends, I suppose they communicated their thoughts on this subject to each other; and, therefore, their reasons for it are little different, though the practice of one is much more moderate. I take imitation of an author, in their sense, to be an endeavour of a later poet to write like one who has written before him on the same subject; that is, not to translate his words, or to be confined to his sense, but only to set him as a pattern, and to write as he supposes that author would have done, had he lived in our age and in our country. Yet I dare not say that either of them have carried this libertine way of rendering authors (as Mr Cowley calls it) so far as my definition reaches, for, in the Pindaric Odes, the customs and ceremonies of ancient Greece are still preserved. But I know not what mischief may arise hereafter from the example of such an innovation, when writers of unequal parts to him shall imitate so bold an undertaking. To add and to diminish what we please, in the way avowed by him, ought only to be granted to Mr Cowley, and that, too,only in his translation of Pindar; because he alone was able to make him amends, by giving him better of his own, whenever he refused his author's thoughts. Pindar is generally known to be a dark writer, to want connexion, (I mean as to our understanding,) to soar out of sight, and to leave his reader at a gaze. So wild and ungovernable a poet cannot be translated literally; his genius is too strong to bear a chain, and, Samson-like, he shakes it off. A genius so elevated and unconfixed as Mr Cowley's was but necessary to make Pindar speak English, and that was to be performed by no other way than imitation. But if Virgil, or Ovid, or any regular intelligible authors, be thus used, it is no longer to be called their work, when neither the thoughts nor words are drawn from the original; but instead of them there is something new produced, which is almost the creation of another hand. By this way, it is true, somewhat that is excellent may be invented, perhaps more excellent than the first design; though Virgil must be still excepted, when that perhaps takes place. Yet he who is inquisitive to know an author's thoughts, will be disappointed in his expectation; and it is not always that a man will be contented to have a present made him when he expects the payment of a debt. To state it fairly; imitation of an author is the most advantageous way for a translator to show himself, but the greatest wrong which can be done to the memory and reputation of the dead. Sir John Denham (who advised more liberty than he took himself) gives his reason for his innovation in his admirable preface before the translation of the second Æneid. 'Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in pouring out of one language into another, it will all evaporate; and, if a new spirit be not added in thetransfusion, there will remain nothing but acaput mortuum.' I confess this argument holds good against a literal translation; but who defends it? Imitation and verbal version are, in my opinion, the two extremes which ought to be avoided; and therefore, when I have proposed the mean betwixt them, it will be seen how far this argument will reach.
"No man is capable of translating poetry, who, besides a genius to that art, is not a master both of his author's language and of his own; nor must we understand the language only of the poet, but his particular turn of thoughts and expression, which are the characters that distinguish, and, as it were, individuate him from all other writers. When we are come thus far it is time to look into ourselves, to conform our genius to his, to give his thought either the same turn, if our tongue will bear it, or, if not, to vary but the dress, not to alter or destroy the substance. The like care must be taken of the more outward ornaments—the words. When they appear (which is but seldom) literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But, since every language is so full of its own proprieties, that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words; it is enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense. I suppose he may stretch his chain to such a latitude, but, by innovation of thoughts, methinks he breaks it. By this means the spirit of an author may be transfused, and yet not lost; and thus it is plain that the reason alleged by Sir John Denham has no further force than the expression; for thought, if it be translated truly, cannot be lost in another language; but the words that convey it to our apprehension (which are the image and ornament of that thought) may be so ill chosen, as to make it appear in an unhandsome dress, and rob it of its native lustre. There is, therefore, a liberty to be allowed for the expression; neither is it necessary that words and lines should be confined to the measure of the original. The sense of an author, generally speaking, is to be sacred and inviolable. If the fancy of Ovid be luxuriant it is his character to be so; and if I retrench it he is no longer Ovid. It will be replied, that he receives advantage by this lopping of his superfluous branches, but I rejoin that a translator has no such right. When a painter copies from the life, I suppose he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments, under pretence that his picture will look better: perhaps the face which he has drawn would be more exact if the eyes and nose were altered; but it is his business to make it resemble the original. In two cases only there may a seeming difficulty arise; that is, if the thought be notoriously trivial or dishonest; but the same answer will servefor both, that then they ought not to be translated—
'Et quaDesperes tractata nitescere posse, relinquas.'
"Thus I have ventured to give my opinion on this subject against the authority of two great men, but, I hope, without offence to either of their memories; for I both loved them living, and reverence them now they are dead. But if, after what I have urged, it be thought by better judges that the praise of a translation consists in adding new beauties to the piece, thereby to recompense the loss which it sustains by change of language, I shall be willing to be taught better, and recant. In the meantime, it seems to me that the true reason why we have so few versions which are tolerable, is not from the too close pursuing of the author's sense, but because that there are so few who have all the talents which are requisite for translation, and that there is so little praise, and so small encouragement, for so considerable a part of learning."
We could write a useful commentary on each paragraph of that lively dissertation. The positions laid down are not, in all their extent, tenable; and Dryden himself, in other places, advocates principles of Translation altogether different from these, and violates them in his practice by a thousand beauties as well as faults. We confine ourselves to one or two remarks.
Dryden, in assigning the qualifications of a poetical Translator, seems to speak with due caution—"He must have a genius to the art." How much, then, of the powers are asked in him which go to making the original poet? Not the great creative genius. In order effectively to translating the Song of Achilles, he need not have been able to invent the character of Achilles, or to delineate it, if he found it, as Homer might largely, invented in tradition to his hands. But he must be the adequate critic of the Song full and whole. He must feel the Achilles whom Homer has given him, through chilling blood, and thrilling nerve, and almost through shivering, shuddering bone. Neither need he be, inverse and word possibly, the creator for thoughts of his own. That Homer is. He is not called upon to be, in his own strength, an audacious, impetuous, majestic, and magnanimous thinker. It is enough if he have the sensibility, the simplicity, the sincerity, the sympathy, and the intellectual capacity, to become all this, on the strength of another. But if he could not create the thoughts, neither could he, upon his own behalf, create the verbal and metrical expression of the thoughts; for in these last is the inspiration that brings into the light of existence both words and music. Yet nothing seems to hinder, but that if endowed for perfectly accepting and appropriating the thoughts, he may then become in secondary place inspired, and a creator for the "new utterance." In all our observation of the various constitutions bestowed, in different men, upon the common human mind, nothing appears to forbid that an exquisite and mastering faculty of language, such as shall place the wealth of a mother-tongue at command, and an exquisite ear and talent for melodious and significant numbers, may be lodged in a spirit that is not gifted with original invention. Much rather, the recognition of the compensating and separable way in which faculties are dealt, would lead us to look from time to time, for children of the Muse gifted for supereminent Translators. Do we not see engravers, not themselves exalted and accomplished masters, who yet absorb into their transcript the soul of the master? Dryden's phrase, "have a genius," seems to express this qualified gifting—the enthusiasm, and the narrower creative faculty excellently given, and kept alive and active by cultivation and exercise.
Hoole'sOrlando Furioso, andJerusalem Delivered, are among the world's duller achievements in the art of Translation. They have obtained some favour of public opinion by the interest which will break through them, and which they in their unambitious way singularly attest—the interest of the matter. What is the native deficiency which extinguishes in them every glimmer of the original Style? The clerk at the India-House, or some other house, had not, in the moulding of heart or brain, any touch of the romantic. And Ariosto and Tasso are the two poets of Romance. Take a translator of no higher intellectual endowment than Mr Hoole—perform some unknown adjuration to the goddess Nature, which shall move her to infuse into him the species of sensibility which grounds the two poems, and which we have said that we desiderate in the bold Accountant,—read the poems through with him, taking care that he understands them—as far as a matter of the sort may be seen to, teach him, which is all fair, a trick or two of our English verse to relieve the terrible couplet monotony—run an eye over the MS. on its way to the printer, and he shall have enriched the literature of his country with, if not two rightly representative, yet too justifiable Translations.
Dryden's defence of the manner in which Pindar has been made to speak English by Cowley, cannot be sustained. A translator must give the meaning of his author so as that they who are scholars in the vernacular only—for to the unread and uncultivated he does not address himself—may be as nearly as possible so impressed and affected as scholars in the original tongue are by the author; or, soaring a little more ambitiously, as nearly as may be as they were affected to whom the original work was native. To Anglicize Pindar is not the adventure. It is to Hellenize an English reader. Homer is not dyed in Grecism as Pindar is. The profound, universal, overpowering humanity of Homer makes him of the soil everywhere. The boundaries of nations, and of races, fade out and vanish. He and we are of the family—of the brotherhood—Man. That is all that we feel and know. The manners are a little gone by. That is all the difference. We read an ancestral chronicle, rather than the diary of to-day. But Pindar is all Greek—Greek to the backbone. There the stately and splendid mythology stands in its own power—not allied to us by infused human blood—but estranged from us in a dazling, divine glory. The great theological poet of Greece, the hymnist of her deities, remembers, in celebrating athlete and charioteer, his grave and superior function. To hear Pindar in English, you must open your wings, and away to the field of Elis, or the Isthmian strand. Under the canopying smoke of London or Edinburgh, even amongst the beautiful fields of England or Scotland, there is nothing to be made of him. You must be a Greek among Greeks.
Therefore, in the Translator, no condescension to our ignorance at least. And no ignoble dread of our ignorant prejudices. The difficult connexion of the thoughts which Dryden duly allows to the foreign and ancient poet, a commentary might clear, where it does as much for the reader of the Greek; or sometimes, possibly, a word interpolated might help. But the difficulty of translating Pindar is quite distinct from his obscurity. For it is his light. It is the super-terrestrial splendour of the lyrical phraseology which satisfied the Greek imagination, lifted into transport by the ardour, joy, and triumph, of those Panhellenic Games. It is the simple, yet dignified strength of the short, pithy, sage Sentences. It is the rendering of the now bold and abrupt, now enchained sequences of expressive sound, in those measures which we hardly yet know how to scan. It is not the track but the wing of the Theban eagle that is the desperation.
It is always delightful to hear Dryden speaking of Cowley. He was indeed a man made to be loved. But to students in the divine art, his poetry will for ever remain the great puzzle. His "Pindarque Odes, written in imitation of the style and manner of the Odes of Pindar," are unique. Cowley was a scholar. In Latin verse he is one of the greatest among the modern masters; and he had much Greek. There can be no doubt that he could construe Pindar—none that he could have understood him—had he tried to do so. "If a man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one madman had translated another." Instead, therefore, of translating him word for word, "the ingenious Cowley" set about imitating his style and manner, and that he thought might best be effected by changing his measures, and discarding almost all his words, except the proper names, to which he added many others of person or place, illustrious at the time, or in tradition. Events and exploits brought vividly back by Pindar to the memory of listeners, to whom a word sufficed, are descanted on by Cowley in explanatory strains, often unintelligible to allliving men. The two opening lies of his first Imitation characterize his muse.
"Queen of all harmonious things,Dancing words, and speaking things."
The words do dance indeed; and "Cowley's Medley" combines the Polka and the Gallopade.
Yet throughout these Two Odes (the Second Olympic and the First Nemæan) may be detected flowing the poetry of Pindar. Compare Cowley with him—book in hand—and ever and anon you behold Pindar. Cowley all along had him in his mind—but Cowley's mind played him queer tricks—his heart never; yet had he a soul capable of taking flight with the Theban eagle. There are many fine lines, sentimental and descriptive, in these extraordinary performances. There is sometimes "a golden ferment" on the page, which, for the moment, pleases more than the cold correctness of Carey. For example—The Isle of the Blest.
"Far other lot befalls the good;A life from trouble free;Nor with laborious handsTo vex the stubborn lands,Nor beat the billowy seaFor a scanty livelihood.But with the honour'd of the gods,Who love the faithful, their abodes;By day or night the sun quits not their sphere,Living a dateless age without a tear.The others urge meanwhile,Loathsome to light their endless toil.But whoso thrice on either sideWith firm endurance have been tried,Keeping the soul exempted stillThrough every change from taint of ill,To the tower of Saturn theyTravel Jove's eternal way.On that blest Isle's enchanted ground,Airs from ocean breathe around;Burn the bright immortal flowers,Some on beds, and some on bowers,From the branches hanging high;Some fed by waters where they lie;Of whose blossoms these do braidArmlets, and crowns their brows to shade.Such bliss is their's, assured by just decreeOf Rhadamanth, who doth the judgment shareWith father Saturn, spouse of Rhea, sheWho hath o'er all in heav'n the highest chair.With them are Peleus, Cadmus number'd,And he, whom as in trance he slumber'd,His mother Thetis wafted there,Softening the heart of Jove with prayer,Her own Achilles, that o'erthrewHector, gigantic column of old Troy,And valiant Cycnus slew,And Morning's Æthiop boy."Carey.
"Whilst in the lands of unexhausted lightO'er which the godlike sun's unwearied light,Ne'er winks in clouds, nor sleeps in night,An endless spring of age the good enjoy,Where neither want does pinch, nor plenty cloy.There neither earth nor sea they plow,Nor ought to labour oweFor food, that whilst it nourishes does decay,And in the lamp of life consumes away.Thrice had these men through mortal bodies past,Did thrice the tryal undergo,Till all their little dross was purged at last,The furnace had no more to do.There in rich Saturn's peaceful stateWere they for sacred treasures placed—The Muse-discovered world of Islands Fortunate.Soft-footed winds with tuneful voyces thereDance through the perfumed air.There silver rivers through enamell'd meadows glide,And golden trees enrich their side.Th' illustrious leaves no dropping autumn fear,And jewels for their fruit they bear,Which by the blest are gatheredFor bracelets to the arm, and garlands to the head.Here all the heroes and their poets live,Wise Radamanthus did the sentence give,Who for his justice was thought fitWith sovereign Saturn on the bench to sit.Peleus here, and Cadmus reign.Here great Achilles, wrathful now no more,Since his blest mother (who beforeHad try'd it on his body in vain)Dipt now his soul in Stygian lake,Which did from thence a divine hardness take,That does from passion and from vice invulnerable make."
Carey's commencement is dull—his close is good—but the whole will never, on this earth, be gotten by heart. Cowley's conceits are cruel in Pindar's case—yet, in spite of them, there is a strange sublimity in the strain—at the end moral grandeur. Reginald Heber and Abraham Moore—especially Reginald—excel Carey; but Pindar in English is reserved for another age.
Dryden dashed at every poet—Theocritus, Lucretius, Persius, Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Virgil, Homer—each in his turn unhesitatingly doth he take into his translating hands. In his Essay on Satire, he compares with one another the three Roman Satirists; but though he draws their characters with his usual force and freedom of touch, they are not finely distinctive—if colouredcon amore, yet without due consideration. In the Preface to the Second Miscellany, he says of Horace's Satires, that they "are incomparably beyond Juvenal's, if to laugh and rally is to be preferred to raillery and declaiming." In his Essay, he says, "In my particular opinion, Juvenal is the more delightful writer." And again—"Juvenal is of a more vigorous and masculine wit; he gives me as much pleasure as I can bear; he fully satisfies my expectation; he treats his subject home; his spleen is raised, and he raises mine. I have the pleasure of concernment in all he says; he drives his reader along with him. * * * His thoughts are sharper; his indignation against vice more vehement; his spirit has more of the commonwealth genius; he treats tyranny and all the vices attending it, as they deserve, with the utmost rigour; and consequently a noble soul is better pleased with a zealous vindicator of Roman liberty, than witha temporizing poet, a well-manner'd court-slave, and a man who is often afraid of laughing in the right place, who is ever decent because he is naturally servile." Is this Quintus Horatius Flaccus!
In Dryden and Juvenal are met peer and peer. Indignant scorn and moral disgust instigated the nervous hand of Juvenal, moulded to wield the scourge of satire. He is an orator in verse, speaking with power and command, skilled in the strength of the Roman speech, and practised in the weapons of rhetoric. But he is nevertheless a poet. Seized with impressions, you see his sail caught with driving gusts, if his eye be on the card. He snatches images right and left on his impetuous way, and flings them forth suddenly and vividly, so that they always tell. Perhaps he is more apt at binding a weighty thought in fewer words than his Translator, who felt himself as this disadvantage when he expressively portrayed the Latin as "a severe and compendious language." The Roman satirist has more care of himself; he maintains a prouder step; and the justifying incentive to this kind of poetry, hate with disdain of the vices and miseries to be lashed, more possesses his bosom. And what a wild insurrection of crimes and vices! What a challenge to hate and disdain in the minds in which the tradition of the antique virtues, the oldmores, those edifiers of the sublime Republic, had yet life! Rome under Nero and Domitian! Pedants have presumed to question the sincerity of his indignation, and have more than hinted that his power of picturing those enormous profligacies was inspired by the pleasure of a depraved imagination. Never was there falser charge. The times and the topics were not for delicate handling,—they were to be looked at boldly in the face,—and if spoken of at all, at full, and with unmistakable words.
There is no gloating in his eyes when fixed in fire on guilt. Antipathy and abhorrence load with more revolting colours the hideous visage, from which, but for that moral purpose, they would recoil. But what, it may be asked, is the worth and use of a satire that drags out vices from their hiding-holes to flay them insunshine? They had no hiding-holes. They affronted the daylight. But the question must be answered more comprehensively. The things toldare—the corruption of our own spirit has engendered them—and every great city, in one age or another, is a Rome. Consult Cowper. To know such things is one bitter and offending lesson in the knowledge of our nature. For the pure and simple such records are not written. It is a galling disclosure, a frightful warning for the anomalous race of the proud-impure. Gifford finely said of this greatest of satirists, that, "disregarding the claims of a vain urbanity, and fixing all his soul on the eternal distinctions of moral good and evil, he laboured with a magnificence of language peculiar to himself to set forth the loveliness of virtue, and the deformity and horror of vice, in full and perfect display." The loveliness of virtue! Ay, in many a picture of the innocence and simplicity of the olden time—unelaborate but truthful—ever and anon presented for a few moments to show how happy humanity is in its goodness, and how its wickedness is degradation and misery. And there are many prolonged lofty strains sounding the praise of victorious virtue. They are for all time—and they, too, that magnify and glorify the spirit of liberty, then exiled from the city it had built, and never more to have dominion there, but regnant now in nations that know how to prize the genius it still continued to inspire when public virtue was dead.
Yet Dryden has not been altogether successful with Juvenal. In many places he is most slovenly—in many elaborately coarse beyond the coarseness ready-made to his hand—in some of the great passages, he leaves out what he feared to equal, and, in the face of all the principles in his own creed on Translation, he often paraphrases with all possible effrontery, and lets himself loose to what is called imitation, till the original evanishes, to return, however, on a sudden, apparition-like, and with a voice of power, giving assurance of the real Juvenal.
His criticism on Lucretius is characteristic of them both. See how rashly, we had almost said foolishly, he rates the Epicurean for his belief in the mortality of the soul. Were there no better reason afforded by the light of nature, for a belief in its immortality than what Dryden throws out, human nature would not so earnestly have embraced, and so profoundly felt, and so clearly seen, the truth of the Christian dispensation.