than from within, and hence there is apt to be a dryness of surface, a
lack of that sheen, that spontaneous warm emanation, which, in good
original work, comes from free inward impulsion. To counteract, in so
far as may be, this proneness to a mechanical inflexibility, the
translator should keep himself free to wield boldly and with full
swing his own native speech. By his line-for-line allegiance, Mr.
Longfellow forfeits much of this freedom. He is too intent on the
words; he sacrifices the spirit to the letter; he overlays the poetry
with a verbal literalness; he deprives himself of scope to give a
billowy motion, a heightened color, a girded vigor, to choice
passages. The rhythmical languor consequent on this verbal conformity,
this lineal servility, is increased by a frequent looseness in
the endings of lines, some of which on every page, and many on some
pages, have--contrary to all good usage--the superfluous eleventh
syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson
in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King." Nor do
good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his
Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book
of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in
dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected by the best artists as a
weakness. Can it be that Mr. Longfellow hereby aims to be more close
to the form of Dante? Whatever the cause of its use, the effect is
still farther to weaken his translation. These loose poetic
endings--and on most pages one third of the lines have eleven
syllables and on some pages more than a third--do a part in causing
Mr. Longfellow's Dante to lack the clean outline, the tonic ring, the
chiseled edge of the original, and in making his cantos read as would
sound a high passionate tune played on a harp whose strings are
relaxed.
Looking at the printed Italian Dante beside the English, in a volume
where opposite each English page is the corresponding page of
the original, as in Mr. Dayman's, one cannot fail to be struck with
the comparative narrowness of the Italian column. This comes of the
comparative shortness of Italian syllables. For instance, as the
strongest exemplification, the ever-recurring _and_, and the
often-repeated _is_, are both expressed in Italian by a single letter,
_e_. And this shortness comes of the numerousness of vowels. In lines
of thirty letters Dante will have on an average sixteen consonants to
fourteen vowels, nearly half and half; while his translators have
about twenty consonants to ten vowels, or two to one. From this
comparative rejection of consonants, Italian cannot, as English can,
bind into one syllable words of seven or eight letters, like _friends_
and _straight_, nor even words of six letters, like _chimed_,
_shoots_, _thwart_, _spring_; nor does Italian abound as English does
in monosyllables, and the few it has are mostly of but two or three
letters. In combination its syllables sometimes get to four letters,
as in _fronte_ and _braccia_. As a consequence hereof, Dante's lines,
although always of eleven syllables, average about twenty-nine
letters, while those of the three translators about thirty-three.
Hence, the poem in their versions carries more weight than the
original; its soul is more cumbered with body.
In order to the faithful reproduction of Dante, to the giving the best
transcript, possible in English, of his thought and feeling, should
not regard be had to the essential difference between the syllabic
constitutions of the two languages, what may be called the physical
basis of the two mediums of utterance? Here is the Francesca story,
translated in the spirit of this suggestion:--
I turned to them, and then I spake:
"Francesca! tears o'erfill mine eyes,
Such pity thy keen pangs awake.
But say: in th' hour of sweetest sighs,
By what and how found Love relief
And broke thy doubtful longing's spell?"
And she: "There is no greater grief
Than joy in sorrow to retell.
But if so urgently one seeks
To know our Love's first root, I will
Do as he does who weeps and speaks.
One day of Lancelot we still
Read o'er, how love held him enchained.
Without mistrust we were alone.
Our cheeks oft were of color drained:
One passage vanquished us, but one.
When we read of lips longed for pressed
By such a lover with a kiss,
This one whom naught from me shall wrest,
All trembling kissed my mouth. To this
That book and writer brought us. We
No farther read that day." While she
Thus spake, the other spirit wept
So bitterly, with pity I
Fell motionless, my senses swept
By swoon, as one about to die.
In the very first line two Italian trisyllables, _rivolsi_ and
_parlai_, are given in English with literal fidelity by two
monosyllables, _turned_ and _spake_. In the fourth observe how, in a
word-for-word rendering, the eleven Italian syllables become, without
any forcing, eight English:
"Ma dimmi: al tempo de' dolci sospiri:"
"But tell me: in th' hour of sweet sighs."
For the sake of a more musical cadence, this line is slightly
modified. Again, in the line,--
"Than joy in sorrow to retell,"
_joy_ represents, and represents faithfully, three words containing
six syllables, _del tempo felice_: _retell_ stands for _ricordarsi_,
and _in sorrow_ for _nella miseria_, or, three syllables for six; so
that, by means of eight syllables, is given a full and complete
translation of what in Italian takes up seventeen. English the most
simple, direct, idiomatic, is needed in order that a translation of
Dante be faithful to his simplicity and naturalness; and this is the
first fidelity his translator should feel himself bound to. Owing to
the fundamental difference between the syllabic structures of
the two languages, we are enabled to put into English lines of eight
syllables the whole meaning of Dante's lines of eleven. In the above
experiment even more has been done. The twenty-eight lines of Dante
are given in twenty-six lines of eight syllables each, and this
without any sacrifice of the thought or feeling; for the "this thy
teacher knows," which is omitted, besides that the commentators cannot
agree on its meaning, is parenthetical in sense, and with reverence be
it said, in so far a defect in such a relation. As to the form of
Dante, what is essential in that has been preserved, namely, the
iambic measure and the rhyme.
Let us try if this curtailment of syllables will be successful when
applied to the terrible words, written in blackest color, over the
gate of Hell, at the beginning of the third canto of the "Inferno":--
Through me the path to place of wail:
Through me the path to endless sigh:
Through me the path to souls in bale.
'Twas Justice moved my Maker high:
Wisdom supreme, and Might divine,
And primal Love established me.
Created birth was none ere mine,
And I endure eternally:
Ye who pass in, all hope resign.
Has anything been lost in the transit from Italian words to English?
English speech being organically more concentrated than Italian, does
not the reduction of eleven syllables to eight especially subserve
what ought to be the twofold aim of all poetic translation, namely,
along with fidelity to the thought and spirit of the original,
fidelity to the idiom, and cast and play of the translator's own
tongue?
Here is another short passage in a different key,--the opening of the
last canto of the "Paradiso":--
Maid-mother, daughter of thy Son,
Meek, yet above all things create,
Fair aim of the Eternal one,
'Tis thou who so our human state
Ennobledst, that its Maker deigned
Himself his creature's son to be.
This flower, in th' endless peace, was gained
Through kindling of God's love in thee.
In this passage nine Italian lines of eleven syllables are converted
into eight lines of eight syllables each. We submit it to the candid
reader of Italian to say, whether aught of the original has been
sacrificed to brevity.
The rejection of all superfluity, the conciseness and simplicity to
which the translator is obliged by octosyllabic verse, compensate for
the partial loss of that breadth of sweep for which decasyllabic
verse gives more room, but of which the translator of Dante does
not feel the want.
One more short passage of four lines,--the famous figure of the lark
in the twentieth Canto of the "Paradiso":--
Like lark that through the air careers,
First singing, then, silent his heart,
Feeds on the sweetness in his ears,
Such joy to th' image did impart
Th' eternal will.
This paper has exceeded the length we designed to give it; but,
nevertheless, we beg the reader's indulgence for a few moments longer,
while we conclude with an octosyllabic version of the last thirty
lines of the celebrated Ugolino story. It is unrhymed; for that
terrible tale can dispense, in English, with soft echoes at the end of
lines.
When locked I heard the nether door
Of the dread tower, I without speech
Into my children's faces looked:
Nor wept, so inly turned to stone.
They wept: and my dear Anselm said,
"Thou look'st so, father, what hast thou?"
Still I nor wept nor answer made
That whole day through, nor the next night,
Till a new sun rose on the world.
As in our doleful prison came
A little glimmer, and I saw
On faces four my own pale stare,
Both of my hands for grief I bit;
And they, thinking it was from wish
To eat, rose suddenly and said:
"Father, less shall we feel of pain
If them wilt eat of us: from thee
Came this poor flesh: take it again."
I calmed me then, not to grieve them.
The next two days we spake no word.
Oh! obdurate earth, why didst not ope?
When we had come to the fourth day
Gaddo threw him stretched at my feet,
Saying, "Father, why dost not help me?"
There died he; and, as thou seest me,
I saw the three fall one by one
The fifth and sixth day; then I groped,
Now blind, o'er each; and two whole days
I called them after they were dead:
Then hunger did what grief could not.
V.
SAINTE-BEUVE, THE CRITIC.
A literary critic, a genuine one, should carry in his brain an arsenal
of opposites. He should combine common sense with tact, integrity with
indulgence, breadth with keenness, vigor with delicacy, largeness with
subtlety, knowledge with geniality, inflexibility with sinuousness,
severity with suavity; and, that all these counter qualities be
effective, he will need constant culture and vigilance, besides the
union of reason with warmth, of enthusiasm with self-control, of wit
with philosophy,--but hold: at this rate, in order to fit out the
critic, human nature will have to set apart its highest and best. Dr.
Johnson declared, the poet ought to know everything and to have seen
everything, and the ancients required the like of an orator. Truly,
the supreme poet should have manifold gifts, be humanly indued as
generously and completely as is the bust of Homer, ideally shaped by
the light of the infallible artistic instinct and insight of the
Greeks. The poet, it is true, must be born a poet, and the
critic is the child of culture. But as the poet, to perfect his
birthright, has need of culture, so the man whom culture can shape and
sharpen to the good critic, must be born with many gifts, to be
susceptible of such shaping. And when we reflect that the task of the
critic is to see clearly into the subtlest and deepest mind, to
measure its hollows and its elevations, to weigh all its individual
and its composite powers, and, that from every one of the throbbing
aggregates, whom it is his office to analyze and portray, issue lines
that run on all sides into the infinite, we must conclude that he who
is to be the accomplished interpreter, the trusted judge, should be
able swiftly to follow these lines.
Long and exacting as is our roll of what is wanted to equip a
veritable sure critic, we have yet to add two cardinal qualifications,
which by the subject of our present paper are possessed in liberal
allotment. The first is, joy in life, from which the pages of M.
Sainte-Beuve derive, not a superficial sprightliness merely, but a
mellow, radiant geniality. The other, which is of still deeper
account, is the capacity of admiration; a virtue--for so it deserves
to be called--born directly of the nobler sensibilities, those
in whose presence only can be recognized and enjoyed the lofty and the
profound, the beautiful and the true. He who is not well endowed with
these higher senses is not a bad critic; he is no critic at all. Not
only can he not discern the good there is in a man or a work, he can
as little discover and expose the bad; for, deficiencies implying
failures to reach a certain fullness, implying a falling short of the
complete, to say where and what are deficiencies, involves the having
in the mind an idea of the full and complete. The man so meagrely
furnished as to hold no such idea is but a carper, not a critic. To
know the bad denotes knowledge of the good; in criticism as in morals,
a righteous indignation can only flash from a shock to pure feelings.
In a notice of M. Thiers' chapter on St. Helena, M. Sainte-Beuve,
after expressing his admiration of the commentaries of Napoleon on the
campaigns of Turenne, Frederic, and Caesar, adds: "A man of letters
smiles at first involuntarily to see Napoleon apply to each of these
famous campaigns a methodical criticism, just as we would proceed with
a work of the mind, with an epic or tragic poem. But is not a
campaign of a great captain equally a work of genius? Napoleon is here
the high sovereign critic, the Goethe in this department, as the
Feuquières, the Jominis, the St. Cyrs are the La Harpes or the
Fontanes, the Lessings or the Schlegels, all good and expert critics;
but he is the first of all, nor, if you reflect on it, could it have
been otherwise. And who then would say better things of Homer than
Milton?"--Goethe supreme in literary criticism, Milton on Homer; this
touches the root of the matter; sympathy with the writer and his work
the critic must have,--sympathy as one of the sources of good
judgment, and even of knowledge. You cannot know, and therefore not
judge of a man or book or thing, unless you have some fellow-feeling
with him or it; and to judge well you must have much fellow-feeling.
The critic must, moreover, be a thinker; reason is the critic's sun.
Scott and Byron could say just and fresh things about poets and
poetry; but neither could command the whole field, nor dig deep into
the soil. Witness Byron's deliberate exaltation of Pope. Whereas
Wordsworth and Coleridge were among the soundest of critics, because,
besides being poets, they were both profound thinkers.
For the perfecting of the literary critic the especial
sympathy needed is that with excellence; for high literature is the
outcome of the best there is in humanity, the finished expression of
healthiest aspirations, of choicest thoughts, the ripened fruit of
noble, of refined growths, the perfected fruit, with all the perfume
and beauty of the flower upon it. Of this sympathy M. Sainte-Beuve,
throughout his many volumes, gives overflowing evidence, in addition
to that primary proof of having himself written good poems. Besides
the love, he has the instinct, of literature, and this instinct draws
him to what is its bloom and fullest manifestation, and his love is
the more warm and constant for being discriminative and refined.
Through variety of knowledge, with intellectual keenness, he enjoys
excellence in the diversified forms that literature assumes. His pages
abound in illustrations of his versatility, which is nowhere more
strikingly exhibited than in the contrast between two successive
papers (both equally admirable) in the very first volume of the
"Causeries du Lundi," the one on Madame Récamier, the other on
Napoleon. Read especially the series of paragraphs beginning, "Some
natures are born pure, and have received _quand même_ the gift
of innocence," to see how gracefully, subtly, delicately, with what a
feminine tenderness, he draws the portrait of this most fascinating of
women, this beautiful creature, for whom grace and sweetness did even
still more than beauty, this fairy-queen of France, this refined
coquette, who drew to her hundreds of hearts, this kindly magician,
who turned all her lovers into friends. Then pass directly to the next
paper, on the terrible Corsican, "who weakened his greatness by the
gigantic--who loved to astonish--who delighted too much in what was
his forte, war,--who was too much a bold adventurer." And further on,
the account of Napoleon's conversation with Goethe at Weimar, in which
account M. Sainte-Beuve shows how fully he values the largeness and
truthfulness and penetration of the great German. The impression thus
made on the reader as to the variousness of M. Sainte-Beuve's power is
deepened by another paper in the same volume, that on M. Guizot and
his historic school, a masterly paper, which reasons convincingly
against those historians "who strain humanity, who make the lesson that
history teaches too direct and stiff, who put themselves in the place
of Providence," which, as is said in another place (vol. v. p.
150), "is often but a deification of our own thought."
In a paper published in 1862, M. Sainte-Beuve--who had then, for more
than thirty years, been plying zealously and continuously the function
of critic--describes what is a fundamental feature of his method in
arriving at a judgment on books and authors. "Literature, literary
production, is in my eyes not distinct, or at least not separable,
from the rest of the man and his organization. I can enjoy a work, but
it is difficult for me to form a judgment on it independently of the
man himself; and I readily say, _as is the tree so is the fruit_.
Literary study thus leads me quite naturally to moral study." This, of
course, he can apply but partially to the ancients; but with the
moderns the first thing to do in order to know the work is to know the
man who did it, to get at his primary organization, his interior
beginnings and proclivities; and to learn this, one of the best means
is, to make yourself acquainted with his race, his family, his
predecessors. "You are sure to recognize the superior man, in part at
least, in his parents, especially in his mother, the most direct and
certain of his parents; also in his sisters and his brothers,
even in his children. In these one discovers important features which,
from being too condensed, too closely joined in the eminent
individual, are masked; but whereof the basis, the _fond_, is found in
others of his blood in a more naked, a more simple state."
Hereby is shown with what thoroughness and professional
conscientiousness M. Sainte-Beuve sets himself to his work of critic.
Partially applying to himself his method, we discover in part the
cause of his sympathy for feminine nature, and of his tact in
delineating it. His father died before he was born; and thence all
living parental influence on him was maternal. None of his volumes is
more captivating than his "Portraits de Femmes," a translation of
which we are glad to see announced.
Of Sainte-Beuve's love for excellence there is, in the third volume of
the "Nouveaux Lundis," an illustration, eloquently disclosing how deep
is his sympathy with the most excellent that human kind has known. For
the London Exposition of 1862 a magnificent folio of the New Testament
was prepared at the Imperial Press of Paris. The critic takes the
occasion to write a paper on "Les saints Evangiles," especially the
Sermon on the Mount. After quoting and commenting on the Beatitudes,
he continues: "Had there ever before been heard in the world such
accents, such a love of poverty, of self-divestment, such a hunger and
thirst for justice, such eagerness to suffer for it, to be cursed of
men in behalf of it, such an intrepid confidence in celestial
recompense, such a forgiveness of injuries, and not simply forgiveness
but a livelier feeling of charity for those who have injured you, who
persecute and calumniate you, such a form of prayer and of familiar
address to the Father who is in heaven? Was there ever before anything
like to that, so encouraging, so consoling, in the teaching and the
precepts of the sages? Was that not truly a revelation in the midst of
human morals; and if there be joined to it, what cannot be separated
from it, the totality of such a life, spent in doing good, and that
predication of about three years, crowned by the crucifixion, have we
not a right to say that here was a 'new ideal of a soul perfectly
heroic,' which, under this half Jewish, Galilean form was set before
all coming generations?
"Who talks to us of _myth_, of the realization, more or less
instinctive or philosophical, of the human conscience reflecting
itself in a being who only supplied the pretext and who hardly
existed. What! do you not feel the reality, the living, vibrating,
bleeding, compassionate personality, which, independently of
what belief and enthusiasm may have added, exists and throbs behind
such words? What more convincing demonstration of the beauty and truth
of the entirely historic personage, Jesus, than the Sermon on the
Mount?"
Alluding, then, to the denial of originality in the moral doctrines of
Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, after citing from Socrates, Marcus
Aurelius, and others, passages wherein is recommended "charity toward
the human race," declares that all these examples and precepts, all
that makes a fine body of social and philosophical morality, is not
Christianity itself as beheld at its source and in its spirit. "What
characterizes," he proceeds, "the discourse on the mount and the other
sayings and parables of Jesus, is not the charity that relates to
equity and strict justice, to which, with a sound heart and upright
spirit, one attains; it is something unknown to flesh and blood and to
simple reason, it is a kind of innocent and pure exaltation, freed
from rule and superior to law, holily improvident, a stranger
to all calculation, to all positive prevision, unreservedly reliant on
Him who sees and knows all things, and as a last reward counting on
the coming of that kingdom of God, the promise of which cannot fail:--
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever
shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
also.
And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy
coat, let him have thy cloak also....
Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow
of thee turn not thou away....
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one,
and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and
despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what
ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body,
what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the
body than raiment?...
"Nothing of this is to be found in the ancient sages and moralists,
not in Hesiod, nor in the maxims of Greece any more than in Confucius.
It is not in Cicero, nor in Aristotle, nor even in Socrates any more
than in the modern Franklin. The principle of inspiration is
different, if indeed it be not opposite: the paths may come together
for a moment, but they cross one another. And it is this delicate
ideal of devotedness, of moral purification, of continual renouncement
and self-sacrifice, breathing in the words and embodied in the person
and life of Christ, which constitutes the entire novelty as well as
the sublimity of Christianity taken at its source."