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 thus delivered 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 beholds

_himself_ naturally 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 his _Art of Poetry_ translated 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 be amplified, but not altered. Such is Mr

Waller's translation of Virgil's fourth AEneid. 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 the _Pastor

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's _Odyssey_, which he has contracted into two:--

'Dic mihi, musa, virum, captae post tempora Trojae

Qui 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--

[Greek: Hos mala polla

Plachthe.]

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 AEneid. '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 the _transfusion_, there will remain nothing

but a _caput 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 serve for both, that then they ought not to be

translated--

'Et qua

Desperes 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's _Orlando Furioso_, and _Jerusalem 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 all living 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 Nemaean)

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 hands

To vex the stubborn lands,

Nor beat the billowy sea

For 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 side

With firm endurance have been tried,

Keeping the soul exempted still

Through every change from taint of ill,

To the tower of Saturn they

Travel 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 braid

Armlets, and crowns their brows to shade.

Such bliss is their's, assured by just decree

Of Rhadamanth, who doth the judgment share

With father Saturn, spouse of Rhea, she

Who 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'erthrew

Hector, gigantic column of old Troy,

And valiant Cycnus slew,

And Morning's AEthiop boy."

CAREY.

"Whilst in the lands of unexhausted light

O'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 owe

For 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 state

Were they for sacred treasures placed--

The Muse-discovered world of Islands Fortunate.

Soft-footed winds with tuneful voyces there

Dance 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 gathered

For 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 fit

With sovereign Saturn on the bench to sit.

Peleus here, and Cadmus reign.

Here great Achilles, wrathful now no more,

Since his blest mother (who before

Had 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 coloured _con 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 with _a 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 old _mores_,

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 in sunshine? They had no hiding-holes. They

affronted the daylight. But the question must be answered more

comprehensively. The things told _are_--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.

"If he was not of the best age of Roman poetry, he was at least of

that which preceded it; and he himself refined it to that degree of

perfection, both in the language and the thoughts, that he left an

easy task to Virgil; who as he succeeded him in time, so he copied

his excellences; for the method of the Georgics is plainly derived

from him. Lucretius had chosen a subject naturally crabbed; he,

therefore, adorned it with poetical descriptions, and precepts of

morality, in the beginning and ending of his books, which you see

Virgil has imitated with great success in those four books, which, in

my opinion, are more perfect in their kind than even his divine

AEneid. The turn of his verses he has likewise followed in those

places where Lucretius has most laboured, and some of his very lines

he has transplanted into his own works, without much variation. If I

am not mistaken, the distinguishing character of Lucretius, (I mean

of his soul and genius,) is a certain kind of noble pride, and

positive assertion of his opinions. He is every where confident of

his own reason, and assuming an absolute command, not only over his

vulgar reader, but even his patron Memmius. For he is always bidding

him attend, as if he had the rod over him; and using a magisterial

authority while he instructs him. From his time to ours, I know none

so like him as our poet and philosopher of Malmesbury. This is that

perpetual dictatorship which is exercised by Lucretius, who, though

often in the wrong, yet seems to deal _bona fide_ with his reader and

tells him nothing but what he thinks; in which plain sincerity, I

believe, he differs from our Hobbes, who could not but be convinced,

or at least doubt of some eternal truths, which he has opposed. But

for Lucretius, he seems to disdain all manner of replies, and is so

confident of his cause, that he is beforehand with his antagonists;

urging for them whatever he imagined they could say, and leaving

them, as he supposes, without an objection for the future; all this

too, with so much scorn and indignation, as if he were assured of the

triumph before he entered into the lists. From this sublime and

daring genius of his, it must of necessity come to pass, that his

thoughts must be masculine, full of argumentation, and that

sufficiently warm. From the same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness

of his expressions, and the perpetual torrent of his verse, where the

barrenness of his subject does not too much constrain the quickness

of his fancy. For there is no doubt to be made, but that he could

have been every where as poetical as he is in his descriptions, and

in the moral part of his philosophy, if he had not aimed more to

instruct, in his system of nature, than to delight. But he was bent

on making Memmius a materialist, and teaching him to defy an

invisible power; in short, he was so much an atheist, that he forgot

sometimes to be a poet. These are the considerations which I had of

that author, before I attempted to translate some parts of him. And,

accordingly, I laid by my natural diffidence and scepticism for a

while, to take up that dogmatical way of his, which, as I said, is so

much his character as to make him that individual poet. As for his

opinions concerning the mortality of the soul, they are so absurd,

that I cannot if I would, believe them. I think a future state

demonstrable even by natural arguments; at least, to take away

rewards and punishments, is only a pleasing prospect to a man who

resolves before hand not to live morally. But, on the other side, the

thought of being nothing after death is a burden insupportable to a

virtuous man, even though a heathen. We naturally aim at happiness,

and cannot bear to have it confined to the shortness of our present

being; especially when we consider that virtue is generally unhappy

in this world, and vice fortunate; so that it is hope of futurity

alone, that makes this life tolerable in expectation of a better. Who

would not commit all the excesses to which he is prompted by his

natural inclinations, if he may do them with security while he is

alive, and be incapable of punishment after he is dead? If he be

cunning and secret enough to avoid the laws, there is no band of

morality to restrain him; for fame and reputation are weak ties; many

men have not the least sense of them. Powerful men are only awed by

them, as they conduce to their interest, and that not always, when a

passion is predominant; and no man will be contained within the

bounds of duty when he may safely transgress them. These are my

thoughts abstractedly, and without entering into the notions of our

Christian faith, which is the proper business of divines.

"But there are other arguments in this poem (which I have turned into

English) not belonging to the mortality of the soul, which are strong

enough to a reasonable man, to make him less in love with life, and

consequently in less apprehension of death. Such are the natural

satiety proceeding from a perpetual enjoyment of the same things; the

inconveniences of old age, which make him incapable of corporeal

pleasures, the decay of understanding and memory, which render him

contemptible, and useless to others. These, and many other reasons,

so pathetically urged, so beautifully expressed, so adorned with

examples, and so admirably raised by the _prosopopeia_ of nature, who

is brought in speaking to her children with so much authority and

vigour, deserve the pains I have taken with them, which, I hope, have

not been unsuccessful or unworthy of my author; at least, I must take

the liberty to own, that I was pleased with my own endeavours, which

but rarely happens to me; and that I am not dissatisfied upon the

review of any thing I have done in this author."

Lucretius is a poet of a sublimer order than Dryden. Yet have they

psychical affinities. The rush of poetical composition characterizes

both--a ready pomp and splendour--more prodigality than economy--bold

felicity rather than finish, though neither is that wanting--mastery of

language and measure--touches from the natural world, that fall in more as

a colouring of style, than the utterances of a heart imbued with a deep

love of nature. Indeed, if the genial belongs to the physiognomy of

Dryden's writing, the cordial is hardly a constituent in the character of

either poet, although at need both can find eloquent expression even for

the pathetic. In both, if in different measure, a sceptical vein is

inherent; but in Lucretius this arms itself in logic, and he appears in

his cosmogony as a philosophical atheist. In Dryden it might seem rather a

humour leaned to, because on that side lies the pleasure of mockery and

scoffing. Lucretius pleads his philosophy like a man who is incredulous in

earnest. But you can seldom say what it is that Dryden embraces with

seriousness, unless it be, in his better and happier undertakings, his

own part in executing the work. The subject-matter might seem almost

always rather accidentally brought to him, than affectionately sought by

him; once out of his hands, it is dismissed from his heart; he often seems

utterly to have forgotten opinions and persons in whom, not long before,

he had taken the liveliest interest--careless of inconsistencies even in

the same essay, assuredly one of the most self-contradicting of mortals.

No man, some say, has a right to question another's religious faith, but

all men have a right to judge of the professed principles on which it has

been adopted, when those principles have been triumphantly propounded to

the public in controversial treatises of elaborate verse. To reason

powerfully not only in verse but rhyme, is no common achievement, and such

fame is justly Dryden's; but how would the same reasoning have looked in

prose? His controversy with Stillingfleet shows--but so so. Does Lucretius

write from a strong heart and a seduced understanding? Or, is it now to be

quoted as a blameable unbelief that ridded itself of the Greek and Roman

Heaven and Hell? There is one great and essential difference on the side

of the Epicurean. An original poet, he seems to speak from a sweeping

contemplation of the universe. We grudge that the boundless exuberance of

painting should go to decorate the argumentation of an unfruitful system

of doctrine. We want the sympathy with the purpose of the poet, that

should for us harmonize the poem. He often strikes singularly high tones.

Witness, among many other great passages, his argument on death, and his

thunderstorm. And had the description of the heifer bemoaning and seeking

her lost calf been Virgil's, we should have thought it had sprung from the

heart of rural simplicity and love. Dryden and Lucretius agree in the

negligent indifference which they show, when mere argumentation is in

hand, to smoothness and ornament, and also in the wonderful facility with

which they compel logical forms to obey the measure. There they are indeed

truly great.

Lucretius's magnificent opening has invited Dryden to put forth his

happiest strength. The profuse eloquence and beauty of the original is

rendered. The passage, which may compete with any piece of translation in

the language, is, with Dryden, a fragment:--

"Delight of human kind, and gods above,

Parent of Rome, propitious Queen of Love;

Whose vital power, air, earth, and sea supplies,

And breeds whate'er is born beneath the rolling skies;

For every kind, by thy prolific might,

Springs, and beholds the regions of the light.

Thee, goddess, thee the clouds and tempests fear,

And at thy pleasing presence disappear;

For thee the land in fragrant flowers is drest;

For thee the ocean smiles, and smooths her wavy breast,

And heaven itself with more serene and purer light is blest.

For when the rising spring adorns the mead,

And a new scene of nature stands display'd,

When teeming buds, and cheerful greens appear,

And western gales unlock the lazy year;

The joyous birds thy welcome first express,

Whose native songs thy genial fire confess;

Then savage beasts bound o'er their slighted food,

Struck with thy darts, and tempt the raging flood.

All nature is thy gift; earth, air, and sea;

Of all that breathes; the various progeny,

Stung with delight, is goaded on by thee.

O'er barren mountains, o'er the flowery plain,

The leafy forest, and the liquid main,

Extends thy uncontroll'd and boundless reign;

Through all the living regions dost thou move,

And scatter'st, where thou goest, the kindly seeds of love.

Since, then, the race of every living thing

Obeys thy power; since nothing new can spring

Without thy warmth, without thy influence bear,

Or beautiful or lovesome can appear;

Be thou my aid, my tuneful song inspire,

And kindle with thy own productive fire;

While all thy province, Nature, I survey,

And sing to Memmius an immortal lay

Of heaven and earth, and every where thy wondrous power display:

To Memmius, under thy sweet influence born,

Whom thou with all thy gifts and graces dost adorn;

The rather then assist my muse and me,

Infusing verses worthy him and thee.

Meantime on land and sea let barbarous discord cease,

And lull the listening world in universal peace.

To thee mankind their soft repose must owe,

For thou alone that blessing canst bestow;

Because the brutal business of the war

Is managed by thy dreadful servant's care;

Who oft retires from fighting fields, to prove

The pleasing pains of thy eternal love;

And panting on thy breast, supinely lies,

While with thy heavenly form he feeds his eyes.

When, wishing all, he nothing can deny,

Thy charms in that auspicious moment try;

With winning eloquence our peace implore,

And quiet to the weary world restore."

Excellent English! and excellently representative of the Latin!

Dryden sometimes estranges his language from vulgar use by a Latinism;

(he, himself, insists upon this, as a deliberate act of enriching our poor

and barbarous tongue;) and in his highest writings, even where he has good

matter that will sustain itself at due poetical height, here and there he

has touches of an ornamental, imitative, and false poetical diction. But

that is not his own style--not the style which he uses where he is fully

himself. This is pure English, simple, masculine; turned into poetry by a

true life of expression, and by the inhering melody of the numbers. That

Lucretian Exordium he must have written in one of his happiest

veins--under the sting of the poetical oestrum. It is an instance where

he was called to his task by desire.

In his greatest undertaking--his Translation of Virgil--he often had to

write when the fervour was low and slack. The task was to be driven on;

and it was luck if the best places of his author fell to the uncertain

hour of his own inspiration. So possibly we may understand why sometimes,

when his original seems to challenge a full exertion of power, he comes

short of himself. The weariness of the long labour must often apologise

for languor, where the claims of the matter are less importunate. But it

is not easy--when culling for comparison some of the majestic or softer

strains into which Virgil has thrown his full soul, which he has wrought

with his most loving and exquisite skill--wholly to shut the door of

belief against the uncharitable suggestion,--that the Translator less

livelily apprehended, than you yourself do, some Virgilian charm, which

lay away from his own manner of thinking, and feeling, and of poetical

art.

The story, so marvellous and pathetic, of the Thracian harper-king, and

his bride stung by the serpent, is from of old the own tale of lovers and

poets. The heart of the Lover dares the terrific and unimaginable road;

and the voice and hand of the Minstrel subdue all impossibilities. Virgil

was fortunate in a link, which gave to his Italian Man of the Fields an

interest in the antique, strange, and touching Hellenic tradition; and he

has improved his opportunity worthily of his theme, of his work, and of

himself. The dexterous episode of Aristaeus, visited with a plague in his

bee-hives, for his fault in the death of Eurydice, ends, and by ending

consummates, the poem which took life in the soul of the Mincian

ploughboy, and to which the chief artist of Augustan Rome was content in

bequeathing the perpetual trust of his fame. Impassioned, profound

tenderness,--the creating high and pure spirit of beauty--the outwardly

watchful and sensitive eye and ear--with tones at will fetched by

listening imagination from the great deep of the wonderful, the solemn,

the sublime,--these, and crowning these, that sweet, and subtle, and rare

mastery, which avails, through translucent words, to reveal quick or slow

motions and varying hues of the now visible mind--which on the stream of

articulate sounds rolls along, self-evolving, and changing as the passion

changes, a power of music,--these all are surprisingly contained within

the SEVENTY-FIVE VERSES which unfold the anger of Orpheus, now a forlorn

and yet powerful ghost, and of the Nymphs, once her companions, for the

twice-lost Eurydice.

It is a hard but a fair trial to set the Translator against the best of

his author. It is to be presumed that Dryden, matched against the best of

Virgil, has done his best. We have not room for the whole diamond, but

shall display one or two of the brightest facets. Who has forgotten that

shrinking of the awed and tender imagination, which shuns the actual

telling that Eurydice died? Which announces her as doomed to

die--_Moritura!_ then says merely that she did not see in the deep grass

the huge water-snake before her feet guarding the river-bank along which

she fled! and then turns to pour on the ear the clamorous wail of her

companions.

"Illa quidem, dum te fugeret per flumina praeceps,

Immanem ante pedes hydrum _moritura_ puella

Servantem ripas alta non vidit in herba."

At this first losing of Eurydice, the impetuous, wild wail of the

Nymph-sisterhood may, in the verse of the Mantuan, be heard with one

burst, swelling and ringing over how many hills, champaigns, and rivers!

At chorus aequalis Dryadum clamore supremos

Implerunt montes; flerunt Rhodopeiae arces,

Altaque Pangaea, ac Rhesi Mavortia tellus,

Atque Getae, atque Hebrus, et Actias Orithyia.

That the vivid emphasis of a stormy sorrow--given to a picture of sound in

the foregoing verses, by that distinctiveness of the multitudinous

repetition--declines in the melodious four English representatives to a

greatly more generalized expression, must, one may think, be ascribed to

Dryden's despair of reconciling in his own rougher tongue the geography

and the music. Nevertheless, the version is evidently and successfully

studied, to mourn and complain.

But all her fellow nymphs the mountains tear

With loud lament, and break the yielding air:

The realms of Mars remurmur all around,

And echoes to the Athenian shores resound.

It is good, but hardly reaches the purpose of the original clamour, so

passionate, dirge-like, unearthly, and supernatural--at once telling the

death--as they say that in some countries the king's death is never told

in words, but with a clangour of shrieks only from the palace-top, which

is echoed by voices to voices on to the borders of his kingdom--at once,

we say, supplying this point of the relation, and impressing upon you the

superhuman character of the mourners, who are able not only to deplore,

but likewise mysteriously and mightily to avenge.

The next three lines are also, as might be presumed, at the height, for

they describe the paragon of lovers and harpers harping his affliction of

love--

Ipse cava solans aegrum testudine amorem,

Te dulcis conjux, te solo in litore secum,

Te veniente die, te decedente, canebat!

Musical, dolorous iteration, iteration! Musical, woe-begone iteration,

iteration! What have we in English?

"The unhappy husband, husband now no more,

Did, on his tuneful harp, his loss deplore,

And sought his mournful mind with music to restore.

On thee, dear wife, in desarts all alone,

He call'd, sigh'd, sang; his griefs with day begun,

Nor were they finish'd with the setting sun."

Studied verses undoubtedly--musical, and mournful, and iterative. The two

triplets of rhyme have unquestionably this meaning; and the bold choice of

the homely-affectionate, "_dear wife_," to render the more ornate "_dulcis

conjux_," is of a sincere simplicity, and as good English as may be. We

see here a poetical method of equivalents--for "on _thee_ he _call'd,

sigh'd, sang_," is intended to render the urgency and incessancy of _Te,

Te, Te, Te!_ But the singular and purely Virgilian artifice of

construction in the second and third line, is abandoned without hope of

imitation.

Orpheus goes down into hell.

"Taenarias etiam fauces, alta ostia Ditis,

Et caligantem nigra formidine lucum

Ingressus, Manesque adiit, Regemque tremendum,

Nesciaque humanis precibus mansuescere corda."

"Even to the dark dominions of the night

He took his way, thro' forests void of light,

And dared amidst the trembling ghosts to sing,

And stood before the inexorable king."

They are good verses, and might satisfy an English reader who knew not the

original: albeit they do not attain--how should they?--to the sullen

weight of dark dread that loads the Latin Hexameters. Look at

that--REGEMQUE TREMENDUM! And then, still, the insisting upon something

more! To what nameless Powers do they belong--those unassigned hearts,

that are without the experience and intelligence of complying with human

prayers?

The infatuation--_dementia_--which, on the verge of the rejoined light,

turns back too soon the head of Orpheus towards her who follows him, is by

Virgil said to be

"Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes!"

A verse awful by the measure which it preserves between the human of the

first half--_ignoscenda quidem_--and the infernal of the second

half--_scirent si ignoscere Manes_. It places before us, in comparison,

the Flexible, which lives in sunshine upon the earth--and the Inflexible,

which reigns in the gloom of Erebus underneath it.

What does Dryden? He takes down the still, severe majesty of Virgil by too

much of the Flexible--by a double dose of humanity.

"A fault _which easy pardon might receive,

Were lovers judges_, or could Hell forgive."

It is remarkable that he has himself quoted the line of Virgil with great

praise, as one that approaches, within measure, to an Ovidian "turn." He

has himself overstepped the measure, and made it quite Ovidian.

The four verses which describe the fault of Orpheus, and the perception of

it in hell, are unsurpassed:--

"Restitit; Eurydicenque suam jam luce sub ipsa,

Immemor, heu! victusque animi respexit. Ibi omnis

Effusus labor: atque immitis rupta tyranni

Foedera: terque fragor stagnis auditus Avernis."

Only note the growing pathos from the beloved name to the naming of the

dread act. EURYDICEN--_suam_--_jam luce sub ipsa_--_immemor_--_heu!_--

_victusque animi_--RESPEXIT. Five links! Look, too, what a long way on in

the verse that sin of backward-looking has brought you. There shall hardly

be found another verse in Virgil which has a pause of that magnitude at

that advance, in the measure. It is a great stretching on of the thought

against the law of music, which usually controls you to place the logical

in coincidence with the musical--stop; but here you are urged on into the

very midst, and beyond the midst, of the last dactyl--a musical sleight

which must needs heighten that feeling, impressed by the grammatical

structure, of a voluntary delay,--of unwillingness to utter the word

fraught with inevitable death--that mortal RESPEXIT! After this, there is

here no poured out toil--no clashing and rending--No! here is the deep

note of victory--the proclamation sounding out from the abyss that the

prize which was carried off is regained. Thrice down--down--as low as the

pools of Avernus breaks out a peal--

"Terque fragor stagnis auditus Avernis."

This is the master with whom--and this the language, and this the measure

with which--our translator competes--"_imparibus armis_."

"For, near the confines of ethereal light,

And longing for the glimmering of a sight,

The unwary lover cast his eyes behind,

Forgetful of the law, nor master of his mind.

Straight all his hopes exhaled in empty smoke,

And his long toils were forfeit for a look.

Three flashes of blue lightning gave the sign

Of covenants broke, three peals of thunder join."

The falling off--the failure at the end is deplorable indeed; yet Dryden

recovers himself, and much of what follows is very fine.

The outline of the Iliad interests man's everyday heart. A wife carried

off--the retaliation--an invasion or siege--a fair captive withheld from

ransom--a displeased God sending a plague--a high prince wronged,

offended, sullenly withdrawn to his tent--war prosperous and adverse--a

dear friend lost and wailed--a general by his death reconciled--that death

avenged--a dead son redeemed by his father, and mourned by his people,--To

receive all this sufferance into the heart's depths, wants no specific

association--no grounding historical knowledge. By virtue of those

anthropical elements--which are, by a change of accidents, one to him and

you, Homer, who happens to be a Greek, makes you one, and a Trojan too, or

rather you are with him in the human regions, and that fact sufficeth for

all your soul's desires. But, though no critic, and unversed in the laws

of Epos, which by the way are only discoverable in the poem which he

created in obedience to them, and that were first revealed to him from

heaven by its inspiring genius--nevertheless, you are affected throughout

all your being by those laws, and but by them could not have been made

"greater than you know," by the Iliad. For the main action, or Achilleid,

though you may not know it, has four great steps. From Achilles' wrong by

Agamemnon to the death of Patroclus, is a movement of one tenor. From the

death of Patroclus to the death of Hector, is an entirely new movement,

though causally bound in the closest manner to that antecedent. The Games

and Funeral of Patroclus is an independent action. The Restoration of

Hector's body is a dependent, and necessarily springing action, having a

certain subsistency within itself. To the whole the seat of moving power

is the bosom of Achilles. All the parts have perfect inter-obligation. Cut

away any one, and there would be not a perilous gash, but a detruncation

fatal to the living frame. There is vital integrity from the beginning to

the end. Nowhere can you stop till the great poet stops. Then you obtain

rest--not glad rest; for say not that the Iliad ends happily. The spirit

of war sits on the sepulchral mound of Hector expecting its prey, and the

topmost towers of Ilion, in the gloom of doom, lower with the ruining that

shall soon hide Mount Ida in a night of dust.

Forbid it, ye muses all! that we should whisper a word in dispraise of

Maro. But for what it is, not for what it is not, we love the AEneid. The

wafting over sea from an Asiatic to an Italian soil, and the setting there

of the acorn, which by the decree of the Destinies shall, in distant ages,

grow up into Rome, and the overshadowing Roman Empire--this majestic theme

appeals to the reason, and to the reason taught in the history of the

world. It is a deliberate, not an impassioning interest. And how

dominionless over our sympathy has the glowing and tender-hearted Virgil,

perhaps unavoidably, made the Hero, who impersonates his rational

interest! How unlike is this AEneas to that Achilles, round whose young

head, sacred to glory, Homer has gathered, as about one magnetic centre,

his tearful, fiery, turbulent, majestic, and magnanimous humanities!

Confess we must, reluctantly, that AEneas chills the AEneid. It was not that

Virgil had embraced a design greater than his poetical strength. But it

was in more than one respect unfortunately, unpoetically, conditioned.

That political foundation itself is to be made good by aggressive arms;

and by tearing a betrothed and enamoured beautiful bride from the youthful

and stately chivalrous prince, her lover, slain in fight against the

invaders; whilst the poor girl is to be made over to a widower, of whose

gallantry the most that we know is his ill-care of his wife, and his

running away from his mistress.

And thus, alas! it cannot be denied, the design of the _AEneis_ is carried

through without our great natural sympathies, as respects its end--against

them as respects its means. An insuperable difficulty! Did Virgil mistake,

then, in taking the subject? One hardly dares say so. The national

tradition offers to the national Epic poet the national Epic transaction;

and he accepts the offer. In doing so he allies by his theme his own to

the Homeric Epos. With all this, however, we do feel that fiery, and

all-powerful, and all-comprehensive genius projects the outline of the

_Iliad_ upon the canvass; whilst in this poetical history of the Trojan

plantation in Italy, we can ascribe to the general disposition and

invention hardly more than a prudent and skilful intelligence. But the

poetical soul, the creative fire then enters to possess the remainder of

the task. Was, after all, a pitched battle not exactly the thing in the

world the most kindly to the feelings and the best meted to the

understanding of the poet, commissioned to renown with verse the people

who fought more, and more successful, pitched battles than any other in

the world?

Were Virgil to write now, and you had to allot him his theme, what would

it be? A romance of knight-errantry? You would allot him none. You would

leave him free to the suggestions of his own delicious spirit. But he

thought himself bound to the Latin Epos. To speak in true critical

severity, the _AEneis_ has no Hero. It has a HEROINE. And who, pray, is

SHE? The seven-hilled Queen of the World. Like another Cybele, with her

turreted diadem, and gods for her children, in her arms and in her lap.

Herself heaven-descended--IMPERIAL ROME.

The two prophetical episodes--the Muster of the pre-existing ghosts before

the eyes of the great human ancestor, Anchises, in his Elysium--and those

anticipatory narrative Embossings of the Vulcanian shield, become in this

view integral and principal portions of the poem. That reviewing beside

that Elysian river, of the souls that are to animate Roman breasts, and to

figure in Roman chronicles, gave opportunity to Virgil of one Prophecy

that mingled mourning with triumph, and triumph with mourning. Victorious

over the Punic--victorious over the Gallic foe--carrying to the temple the

arms which he, a leader, stripped from a leader--the third consecrator of

such spoils--goes Marcellus. But who is He that moves at the side of the

hero? A youth, distinguished by his beauty and by his lustrous arms. The

Souls throng, with officious tumult, about him--and how much he resembles

his great companion! But on his destined brow sits no triumphal

lustre--mists and night cling about his head. Who is it? AEneas

enquires--and Anchises would fain withhold the reply. It is the descendant

of that elder Marcellus; and promises, were fatal decrees mutable, to

renew the prowess and praises of his famed progenitor. Fatal decrees might

not change, and the nephew of Augustus, the destined successor of his

reign, and the hopes of the Romans--OBIIT. You have often wept over

Virgil's verses--here are Dryden's:--

"AEneas here beheld, of form divine,

A godlike youth in glittering armour shine,

With great Marcellus keeping equal pace;

But gloomy were his eyes, dejected was his face.

He saw, and wond'ring, ask'd his airy guide,

What and of whence was he, who press'd the hero's side?

'His son, or one of his illustrious name

How like the former, and almost the same!

Observe the crowds that compass him around;

All gaze, and all admire, and raise shouting sound:

But hov'ring mists around his brows are spread,

And night, with sable shades, involve his head.'

'Seek not to know (the ghost replied with tears)

The sorrows of thy sons in future years.

This youth (the blissful vision of a day)

Shall just be shown on earth, then snatch'd away.

The gods too high had raised the Roman state,

Were but their gifts as permanent as great.

What groans of men shall fill the Martian field!

How fierce a blaze his flaming pile shall yield!

What funeral pomp shall floating Tyber see,

When, rising from his bed, he views the sad solemnity!

No youth shall equal hopes of glory give,

No youth afford so great a cause to grieve.

The Trojan honour, and the Roman boast,

Admired when living, and adored when lost!

Mirror of ancient faith in early youth!

Undaunted worth, inviolable truth!

No foe, unpunish'd, in the fighting-field

Shall dare thee, foot to foot, with sword and shield.

Much less in arms oppose thy matchless force,

When thy sharp spurs shall urge thy foaming horse.

Ah! couldst thou break through Fate's severe decree,

A new Marcellus shall arise in thee!

Full canisters of fragrant lilies bring,

Mix'd with the purple roses of the spring;

Let me with funeral flowers his body strow;

This gift which parents to their children owe,

This unavailing gift, at least, I may bestow!'"

Here is an excellent flow. The sorrow and the pride and the public love

which are the life of the original, are all taken to heart by the

translator, who succeeds in imparting to you the most touching of poetical

eulogies. You find, as usually every where, that the vigorous purpose of

the original is maintained, and well rendered, but that certain Virgilian

fascinations, which--whether they bewitch your heart or your fancy or our

ear, you do not know--are hardly given you back. Thus it might be very

hard to say what you have found that you cannot forget again, in such a

verse as that which introduces to your eye the subject of the more

effusive praise.

"Atque hic AEneas, una namque ire videbat

Egregium forma juvenem, et fulgentibus armis."

Yet you do not again forget that second line.

Dryden's rendering is equivalent for the meaning, and unblameable.

"AEneas here beheld of _form divine,

A godlike youth in glittering armour shine_."

The phrase is even heightened; but it does not loiter, like that other, in

your memory. The very heightening has injured the image--the shadow that

shone brighter in simple words.

The shadow then thrown across--

"Sed _frons_ laeta parum"--

is well given, with a variation, by--

"But gloomy were his _eyes_."

The lightlessness is feelingly placed where the chief light should be.

The unequalled

"Ostendent terris hunc tantum Fata,"

so fully signifying the magnitude of the gift offered and withdrawn--so

sadly the brief promise, and all so concisely, meets with a soft and

bright rendering in

"The _blissful vision_ of a day."

But Dryden's "shown _on_ earth," less positively affirms the loss fallen

upon the earth, than the Latin "shall show to the nations."

The praise involving the recollection of the manners which were--

"Heu pietas! heu prisca fides! invictaque bello

Dextera!"

is given with admirable fervour.

"Mirror of ancient faith, in early youth

Undaunted worth! inviolable truth!"

As for _those three words_ that smote, as the tradition goes, the heart of

the too deeply concerned auditress, the bereaved mother herself, to

swooning--

"_Tu Marcellus eris!_"--

they are no doubt, in their overwhelming simplicity, untransferable to our

uncouth idiom; and our ears may thank Dryden for the skill with which, by

a "New Marcellus," and an otherwise explanatory paraphrase, he has kept

the Virgilian music. Meantime the passionate vehemence of the breaking

away from that prophecy of intolerable grief--the call for the bestrewment

of flowers--

"Manibus date lilia plenis," &c.--

_must_ be weakened, if the moment of the transition is to fall, as we see

it in Dryden, at the interval between verse and verse, and not, as we have

just seen it with Virgil, at the juncture within the verse of hemistich

with hemistich.

"Tu Marcellus eris.--Manibus date lilia plenis," &c.

There is a pause in that line, during which the mother, had she not

swooned, might have calmed her heart!

It is usual to discover that Virgil wants originality--that he transcribes

his battles from Homer. In truth, it was not easy, with fights of the

Homeric ages, to do otherwise. However, Virgil has done otherwise, if any

one will be at the pains to look.

For instance, an incident, not in the battles by the Xanthus, is the

following:--

A powerful Tuscan warrior, infuriated by the ill fighting of his men,

distinguishes himself by an extraordinary feat. Clasping round the body,

and so unhorsing a lighter antagonist, he rides off with him; snaps the

javelin, which his captive still grasps, near the head, and with its point

probes and aims for a vulnerable place. The unfortunate Latine, as he lies

across the horse's neck, struggles, and will baffle the deathly blow.

Landseer could suggest no more vivid comparison, than one which leaps into

your own imagination--a snake soused upon by an eagle.

"So stoops the yellow eagle from on high,

And bears a speckled serpent through the sky,

Fastening his crooked talons on the prey:

The prisoner hisses through the liquid way;

Resists the royal hawk, and though oppresst,

She fights in columns and erects her crest:

Turn'd to her foe, she stiffens every scale,

And shoots her forky tongue, and whisks her threat'ning tail.

Against the victor all defence is weak;

The imperial bird still plies her with his beak,

He tears her bowels, and her heart he gores,

Then clasps his pinions and securely soars."

A glorious paraphrase!

This is an incident more like a knight of Ariosto's, the terrible Sarazin

Rhodomont, or Orlando himself, than Homer's, who did not, indeed, combat

on horseback.

But speaking of the moderns, we will venture to say, that if Virgil has

copied, he is also an original who has been copied. And we will ask, who

is the prototype of the ladies, turned knights, who flourish in favour

with our poets of romance?--with Ariosto, with Tasso, with our own

Spenser? Who but the heroic virgin ally of the Rutulian prince--who but

CAMILLA?

We name her, however, neither for her own sake, nor for Virgil's, but for

Dryden's, who seems also to have taken her into favour, and to have

written, with a peculiar spirit and feeling, the parts of the poem which

represent her in action.

She leads her Amazons into Italian fields, warring against the fate-driven

fugitives of overthrown Troy. Whence were her Amazon followers? Whence is

She? Her history her divine patroness, Diana, relates. Her father, the

strong-limbed, rude-souled Metabus, a wild and intractable Volscian king,

fled from the face and from the pursuit of his people. He bore, in his

arms, one dear treasure; a companion of his flight; yet an infant--this

daughter. He flies. The Amasenus, in flood, bars his way. More doubtful

for his charge than for himself, hastily, with love-prompted art, he

swathes the babe in stripped bark--binds her to the shaft of his huge

oaken spear--dedicates her with a prayer to the virgin goddess of woods,

and of the woodland chase--hurls, from a gigantic hand, the weapon across

the tempestuous flood--and, ere his pursuers have reached him, plunges in,

breasts the waters, and, saving and saved, swims across. In the forest

depths, amongst imbosoming hills, the rugged sire fosters the vowed

follower of Diana. The nursling of the wild grows up a bold and skilled

huntress; and now that war storms in the land, she, with her huntress

companions, joins the war. Some unexplained reconciliation, or perhaps

restoration, has taken effect; for, along with her armed maidens, she

leads the troops of the Volscians. In the field she fights like a virago;

but her entrance thither was against the desire of the goddess, for it

dooms her to die. Her eager following of a gorgeously armed warrior

exposes her to a treacherous aim, and she falls. The provident goddess had

put her own bow, and an arrow from her own quiver, into the hands of a

nymph chosen to execute the vengeance of the impending death, and that

arrow flies to its mark.

"Nor, after that, in towns which walls enclose,

Would trust his hunted life amidst his foes;

But, rough, in open air he chose to lie;

Earth was his couch, his covering was the sky.

On hills unshorn, or in a desert den,

He shunn'd the dire society of men.

A shepherd's solitary life he led;

His daughter with the milk of mares he fed.

The dugs of bears, and every savage beast,

He drew, and through her lips the liquor press'd.

The little amazon could scarcely go,

He loads her with a quiver and a bow;

And, that she might her staggering steps command,

He with a slender javelin fills her hand.

Her flowing hair no golden fillet bound;

Nor swept her trailing robe the dusty ground.

Instead of these, a tiger's hide o'erspread

Her back and shoulders, fasten'd to her head.

The flying dart she first attempts to fling,

And round her tender temples toss'd the sling;

Then as her strength with years increased, began }

To pierce aloft in air the soaring swan, }

And from the clouds to fetch the heron and the crane. }

The Tuscan matrons with each other vied,

To bless their rival sons with such a bride;

But she disdains their love, to share with me

The sylvan shades, and vow'd virginity.

And oh! I wish, contented with my cares

Of savage spoils, she had not sought the wars.

Then had she been of my celestial train,

And shunn'd the fate that dooms her to be slain.

But since, opposing heaven's decree, she goes

To find her death among forbidden foes,

Haste with these arms, and take thy steepy flight,

Where, with the gods adverse, the Latins fight.

This bow to thee, this quiver, I bequeath,

This chosen arrow, to avenge her death:

By whate'er hand Camilla shall be slain,

Or of the Trojan or Italian train,

Let him not pass unpunish'd from the plain.

Then, in a hollow cloud, myself will aid

To bear the breathless body of my maid:

Unspoil'd shall be her arms, and unprofaned

Her holy limbs with any human hand,

And in a marble tomb laid in her native land."

What is Virgil's in this fair and romantically cast fiction? What hints

did the traditionary fable give him? You are not concerned to make an

enquiry which you have no means of satisfying. You must hold Camilla to be

as much Virgil's as any thing is Homer's in the Iliad. The painting

throughout is to the life, and perfectly graceful. The subject was one

likely to attach the imagination of a modern poet, and you feel all along,

that pleasure inspirits the happy translation of Dryden.

The Destruction of Troy, the Love of Dido, the Descent into Hell, entire

Cantos of the poem, take deep and lasting possession of every reader; and,

like the first and second books of the Paradise Lost, too much seduce

admiration from the remainder of the work. You pick out from the whole

Italian war, Lausus, Pallas, Nisus, and Euryalus, and think that you have

done with Virgil.

We beg to propose a literary experiment. Homer has left us two poems--a

War, and a Wandering. Virgil has bequeathed us one, representing those

two, and that proportionally; although in the Latin the Odyssey comes

first, and the Iliad follows. For the first six AEneids relate the

wandering; whilst the latter six display the war. Let us, therefore,

fairly cut the great outrolling, unfolding picture in two, and have two

poems, distinct, although closely allied; twins, moulded in one womb,

nourished from the same blood. We dare to predict that the poem of "AEneas

in Italy," now considered with its own independent interests, and after

its own art and management, will duly compete with its rival, "AEneas

Fugitive."

How the whole movement, and march, and original conduct of the Italian war

will come out! The peaceful entertainment of the Trojans by Latinus, moved

with old and new prophecies, and his ready offer of his daughter, Lavinia,

to AEneas in marriage--the adverse interposition of Juno--her summoning of

Alecto from hell--the glad Fury's fine discharge of her part--her

maddening of the Queen Amata, who loves Turnus, hates the strangers, and

catches in her own madness all the Latian mothers--the INFURIATING of the

young, gallant, ardent, defrauded, princely lover himself--a splendid

scene, where the hot warrior's jeers of the fiend in her beldam disguise,

sting her Tartarean heart as if it had been a woman's, and for the very

wrath she reveals her terrible self--then that exquisite incident, won

from the new matter of the poet, from the PASTORAL manners with which he

is historically obliged to deal in Italy--the Fury's third and last

feat--her drawing-on of Ascanius's hounds to hunt the beautiful favourite

stag, which the daughter of the King's chief herdsman petted--and, thence,

a quarrel, a skirmish, slaughter begun, and the whole population of the

plains aroused. And so with bacchanal women, with Rutulians, and with his

own rude liegemen in tumult, the old King overborne--shutting himself up

in his palace; and war inflamed in Hesperia, to the full heart's-wish of

Jove's imperial wife, who has nothing left her to do more than, descending

again from the sky, to push open with her own hands the brazen-gated

temple of Janus.

All this is very poetical--is very different from the _Iliad_, and is

perfectly measured to the scale of a war, moved, not by confederated

Greece for the overthrow of an Asiatic empire, but by the tribes of the

coast for beating back the crews of a few straggling ships from planting a

colony, who have nothing on their side but their valour, their fame, and

their fates.

Analyze this war; make out for yourself, distinctly, the story, of which

in a poem one always too easily loses the sequence, delight and emotion

making one less observant; then understand the poetical workings out, in

their places and after their bearings; and you will satisfy yourself, that

although the cleaving of heads, and the transpiercing of trunks, and the

hewing off of limbs, are processes that must always keep up a certain

general resemblance to themselves, you have not a campaign imitated from

the Iliad; but an original one--proper to person and place.

_Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work._

Footnotes:

[1] Raphael was born in 1483, Michael Angelo in 1474.

[2]

[Greek: "Me man aspoudei ge kai akleios apoloimen

Alla mega rhexas ti kai essomenoisi pythesthai."]

_Iliad_, XXII. 304.

[3] We were about to make some remarks on the alleged production of

_animated globules in albumen by electricity_; but we find that, in a note

to the third edition, the author virtually relinquishes this ground. We

had made enquiries amongst scientific men; but no such experiment had been

received or accredited amongst them.

[4] "In tracing the series of fossiliferous formations, from the most

ancient to the more modern, the first deposits in which we meet with

assemblages of organic remains having a near analogy to the _Fauna_ of

certain parts of the globe in our own time, are those commonly called

tertiary. Even in the Eocene, or oldest subdivision of these tertiary

formations, some few of the testacea belong to existing species, although

almost all of them, and apparently all the associated vertebrata, are now

extinct. These Eocene strata are succeeded by a great number of modern

deposits, which depart gradually in the character of their fossils from

the Eocene type, and approach more and more to that of the living

creation. In the present state of science, it is chiefly by the aid of

shells that we are enabled to arrive at the results; for, of all classes,

the testacea are the most generally diffused in a fossil state, and may be

called the medals principally employed by nature in recording the

chronology of past events. In the Miocene deposits, which succeed next to

the Eocene, we begin to find a considerable number, although still a

minority, of recent species intermixed with some fossils common to the

preceding epoch. We then arrive at the Pliocene strata, in which species

now contemporary with man begin to preponderate, and in the newest of

which nine-tenths of the fossils agree with species still inhabiting the

neighbouring sea.

"In thus passing from the older to the newer members of the tertiary

system, we meet with many chasms; but none which separate entirely, and by

a broad line of demarcation, one state of the organic world from another.

There are no signs of an abrupt termination of one _Fauna_ and _Flora_,

and the starting into life of new and wholly distinct forms. Although we

are far from being able to demonstrate geologically an insensible

transition from the Eocene to the recent _Fauna_, yet we may affirm that

the more we enlarge and perfect our survey of Europe, the more nearly do

we approximate to such a continuous series, and the more gradually are we

conducted from times when many of the genera and nearly all the species

were extinct, to those in which scarcely a single species flourished which

we do not know to exist at present."--LYELL'S _Principles of Geology_.

Vol. i. p. 283.

[5] This lower jaw is described in another part of the work as showing in

the human embryo the last trace of the monkey.

[6] Printed at Dublin for Philip Dixon Hardy & Sons, 1842.

[7] A place in Ireland?

[8] We subjoin the original Etruscan text as read by our author, with its

alleged Irish equivalents.

BUCUCUM : IUBIU : PUNE : UBEF : FURFATH : TREF : BITLUF : TURUF : | MARTE

: THURIE : FETU : PUPLEEPER : TUTAS : HUBINAS : TUTAPER : ICUBINA : |

BATUBA : FERINE : FETU : PUNI : FETU : ARBIC : USTENTU : CUTEP : PES-

NIMU.

_Bu co com iudh be in Pune u be fa for fath tre fa be at lu fa tur u fa |

mer ta tur i e fad u prob lu bar to ta is i iudh be i na is to ta bar i co

be i na | ba do ba fa ain e fad u Puni fad u ar be iudh us tan do co taib

be sni mo._

[9] It appears that the Royal Irish Academy had refused to publish these

speculations in its Transactions. We are surprised they should have

admitted some others of the same stamp, to which reference is made further

on.

[10] "Now, as Serapio was about to have added something of the same

nature, the stranger, taking the words out of his mouth--I am wonderfully

pleased, said he, to hear discourses upon such subjects as these; but am

constrained to claim your first promise, to tell the reason wherefore now

the Pythian prophetess no longer delivers her oracles in poetic numbers

and measures. Upon which Theo interposing--It cannot be denied, said he,

but that there have been great changes and innovations in reference to

poetry and the sciences, yet it is as certain that from all antiquity

oracles have been delivered in prose. For we find in Thucydides that the

Lacedaemonians, desirous to know the issue of the war then entered into

against the Athenians, were answered in prose." * * * "And so of Dinomenes

the Sicilian, Procles, tyrant of Epidaurus and Timarchus; and, which is

more, the oracular answers, according to which Lycurgus conferred the form

of the Lacedaemonian commonwealth, were also so given."--_Plutarch. Moral._

[11] _Death of Wallenstein_, Act v. Scene 1, (Coleridge's Translation,)

relating to his remembrances of the younger Piccolomini.

[12] "_Like the dry corpse which stood upright._"--See the _Second_ Book

of Kings, chap. xiii. v. 20 and 21. Thirty years ago this impressive

incident was made the subject of a large altar-piece by Mr Alston, an

interesting American artist, then resident in London.

[13] "_African Obeah._"--Thirty-years ago it would not have been necessary

to say one word of the Obi or Obeah magic; because at that time several

distinguished writers (Miss Edgeworth, for instance, in her Belinda) had

made use of this superstition in fictions, and because the remarkable

history of Three-finger'd Jack, a story brought upon the stage, had made

the superstition notorious as a fact. Now, however, so long after the case

has probably passed out of the public mind, it may be proper to

mention--that when an Obeah man, _i. e._, a professor of this dark

collusion with human fears and human credulity, had once woven his

dreadful net of ghostly terrors, and had thrown it over his selected

victim, vainly did that victim flutter, struggle, languish in the meshes;

unless the spells were reversed, he generally perished; and without a

wound except from his own too domineering fancy.

[14] What follows, I think, (for book I have none of any kind where this

paper is proceeding,) viz. _et sera sub nocte rudentum_, is probably a

mistake of Virgil's; the lions did not roar because night was approaching,

but because night brought with it their principal meal, and consequently

the impatience of hunger.

[15] "_Kilcrops._"--See, amongst Southey's early poems, one upon this

superstition. Southey argues _contra_; but for my part, I should have been

more disposed to hold a brief on the other side.

[16] In this place I derive my feeling partly from a lovely sketch of the

appearance, in verse, by Mr Wordsworth; partly from my own experience of

the case; and, not having the poems here, I know not how to proportion my

acknowledgments.

[17] "And so, then," the Cynic objects, "you rank your own mind (and you

tell us so frankly) amongst the primary formations?" As I love to annoy

him, it would give me pleasure to reply--"Perhaps I do." But as I never

answer more questions than are necessary, I confine myself to saying, that

this is not a necessary construction of the words. Some minds stand nearer

to the type of the original nature in man, are truer than others to the

great magnet in our dark planet. Minds that are impassioned on a more

colossal scale than ordinary, deeper in their vibrations, and more

extensive in the scale of their vibrations--whether, in other parts of

their intellectual system, they had or had not a corresponding

compass--will tremble to greater depths from a fearful convulsion, and

will come round by a longer curve of undulations.

[18] _i. e._ (As on account of English readers is added,) the recognition

of his true identity, which in one moment, and by a horrid flash of

revelation, connects him with acts incestuous, murderous, parricidal, in

the past, and with a mysterious fatality of woe lurking in the future.

[19] Euripides.

Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.

The original text includes Greek characters. For this text version these

letters have been replaced with transliterations.

The following misprints have been corrected:

"inexorbably" corrected to "inexorably" (page 466)

"daugher" corrected to "daughter" (page 489)

"expresssion" corrected to "expression" (page 492)

Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in

spelling and hyphenation usage have been retained.