“And then rest, gentle bones; yet pray
That when by the precise you are view’d,
A supersedeas be not sued
To remove you to a place more airy,
That in your stead they may keep chary
Stockfish or seacoal, for the abuses
Of sacrilege have turned graves to viler uses.”
To the last verse Mr. Hazlitt appends this note, “Than that of burning
men’s bones for fuel.” There is no allusion here to burning men’s bones,
but simply to the desecration of graveyards by building warehouses upon
them, in digging the foundations for which the bones would be thrown
out. The allusion is, perhaps, to the “Churchyard of the Holy
Trinity”;--see Stow’s _Survey_, ed. 1603, p. 126. Elsewhere, in the same
play, Webster alludes bitterly to “begging church-land.”
Vol. I. p. 73, “And if he walk through the street, he ducks at the
penthouses, like an ancient that dares not nourish at the oathtaking of
the prætor for fear of the signposts.” Mr. Hazlitt’s note is, “_Ancient_
was a standard or flag; also an _ensign_, of which Skinner says it is a
corruption. What the meaning of the simile is the present editor cannot
suggest.” We confess we find no difficulty. The meaning plainly is, that
he ducks for fear of hitting the penthouses, as an ensign on the Lord
Mayor’s day dares not flourish his standard for fear of hitting the
signposts. We suggest the query, whether _ancient_, in this sense, be
not a corruption of the Italian word _anziano_.
Want of space compels us to leave many other passages, which we had
marked for comment, unnoticed. We are surprised that Mr. Hazlitt, (see
his Introduction to “Vittoria Corombona,”) in undertaking to give us
some information concerning the Dukedom and Castle of Bracciano, should
uniformly spell it _Brachiano_. Shakespeare’s _Petruchio_ might have put
him on his guard. We should be glad also to know in what part of Italy
he places _Malfi_.
Mr. Hazlitt’s General Introduction supplies us with no new information,
but this was hardly to be expected where Mr. Dyce had already gone over
the field. We wish that he had been able to give us better means of
distinguishing the three almost contemporary John Websters one from the
other, for we think the internal evidence is enough to show that all the
plays attributed to the author of the “Duchess” and “Vittoria” could not
have been written by the same person. On the whole, he has given us a
very respectable, and certainly a very pretty, edition of an eminent
poet.
* * * * *
We could almost forgive all other shortcomings of Mr. Smith’s _library_
for the great gift it brings us in the five volumes of Chapman’s
translations. Coleridge, sending Chapman’s Homer to Wordsworth, writes,
“What is stupidly said of Shakespeare is really true and appropriate of
Chapman; mighty faults counterpoised by mighty beauties.... It is as
truly an original poem as the Faery Queene;--it will give you small idea
of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope’s epigrams, or Cowper’s
cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. For Chapman writes and feels as
a poet,--as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the
reign of Queen Elizabeth. In short, it is an exquisite poem, in spite of
its frequent and perverse quaintnesses and harshnesses, which are,
however, amply repaid by almost unexampled sweetness and beauty of
language, all over spirit and feeling.”[28] From a passage of his
Preface it would appear that Chapman had been criticised pretty sharply
in his own day for amplifying his author. “And this one example I
thought necessary to insert here to show my detractors that they have
no reason to vilify my circumlocution sometimes, when their most
approved Grecians, Homer’s interpreters generally, hold him fit to be so
converted. Yet how much I differ, and with what authority, let my
impartial and judicial reader judge. Always conceiving how pedantical
and absurd an affectation it is in the interpretation of any author
(much more of Homer) to turn him word for word, when (according to
Horace and other best lawgivers to translators) it is the part of every
knowing and judicial interpreter not to follow the number and order of
words, but the material things themselves, and sentences to weigh
diligently, and to clothe and adorn them with words and such a style and
form of oration as are most apt for the language in which they are
converted.” Again in his verses _To the Reader_, he speaks of
“The _ample transmigration_ to be shown
By nature-loving Poesy,”
and defends his own use of “needful periphrases,” and says that “word
for word” translation is to
“Make fish with fowl, camels with whales, engender.”
“For even as different a production
Ask Greek and English: since, as they in sounds
And letters shun one form and unison,
So have their sense and elegancy bounds
In their distinguished natures, and require
Only a judgment to make both consent
In sense and elocution.”
There are two theories of translation,--literal paraphrase and free
reproduction. At best, the translation of poetry is but an imitation of
natural flowers in cambric or wax; and however much of likeness there
may be, the aroma, whose charm of indefinable suggestion in the
association of ideas is so powerful, is precisely what is lost
irretrievably. From where it lurked in the immortal verse, a presence
divined rather than ascertained, baffling the ear which it enchanted,
escaping the grasp which yet it thrilled, airy, evanescent,
imperishable, beckoning the imagination with promises better than any
fulfilment,
“The parting _genius_ is with sighing sent.”
The paraphrase is a plaster-cast of the Grecian urn; the reproduction,
if by a man of genius, is like Keats’s ode, which makes the figures move
and the leaves tremble again, if not with the old life, with a sorcery
which deceives the fancy. Of all English poets, Keats was the one to
have translated Homer.
In any other than a mere prose version of a great poem, we have a right
to demand that it give us at least an adequate impression of force and
originality. We have a right to ask, If this poem were published now for
the first time, as the work of a contemporary, should we read it, not
with the same, but with anything like the same conviction of its
freshness, vigor, and originality, its high level of style and its
witchery of verse, that Homer, if now for the first time discovered,
would infallibly beget in us? Perhaps this looks like asking for a new
Homer to translate the old one; but if this be too much, it is certainly
not unfair to insist that the feeling given us should be that of life,
and not artifice.
The Homer of Chapman, whatever its defects, alone of all English
versions has this crowning merit of being, where it is most successful,
thoroughly alive. He has made for us the best poem that has yet been
Englished out of Homer, and in so far gives us a truer idea of him. Of
all translators he is farthest removed from the fault with which he
charges others, when he says that “our divine master’s most ingenious
imitating the life of things (which is the soul of a poem) is never
respected nor perceived by his interpreters only standing pedantically
on the grammar and words, utterly ignorant of the sense and grace of
him.” His mastery of English is something wonderful even in an age of
masters, when the language was still a mother-tongue, and not a
contrivance of pedants and grammarians. He had a reverential sense of
“our divine Homer’s depth and gravity, which will not open itself to the
curious austerity of belaboring art, but only to the natural and most
ingenious soul of our thrice-sacred Poesy.” His task was as holy to him
as a version of Scripture; he justifies the tears of Achilles by those
of Jesus, and the eloquence of his horse by that of Balaam’s less noble
animal. He does not always keep close to his original, but he sins no
more, even in this, than any of his rivals. He is especially great in
the similes. Here he rouses himself always, and if his enthusiasm
sometimes lead him to heighten a little, or even to add outright, he
gives us a picture full of life and action, or of the grandeur and
beauty of nature, as stirring to the fancy as his original. Of all who
have attempted Homer, he has the topping merit of being inspired by him.
In the recent discussions of Homeric translation in England, it has
always been taken for granted that we had or could have some adequate
conception of Homer’s metre. Lord Derby, in his Preface, plainly assumes
this. But there can be no greater fallacy. No human ears, much less
Greek ones, could have endured what, with our mechanical knowledge of
the verse, ignorance of the accent, and English pronunciation, we
blandly accept for such music as Homer chanted. We have utterly lost the
tune and cannot reproduce it. Mr. Newman conjectures it to have been
something like Yankee Doodle; Mr. Arnold is sure it was the English
hexameter; and they are both partly right so far as we may trust our
reasonable impressions; for, after all, an impression is all that we
have. Cowper attempts to give the ring of the ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο by
“Dread-sounding, bounding on the silver bow,”
which only too fatally recalls the old Scottish dancing-tune,--
“Amaisit I gaisit
To see, led at command,
A strampant and rampant
Ferss lyon in his hand.”
The attempt was in the right direction, however, for Homer, like Dante
and Shakespeare, like all who really command language, seems fond of
playing with assonances. No doubt the Homeric verse consented at will to
an eager rapidity, and no doubt also its general character is that of
prolonged but unmonotonous roll. Everybody says it is like the long
ridges of the sea, some overtopping their neighbors a little, each with
an independent undulation of its crest, yet all driven by a common
impulse, and breaking, not with the sudden snap of an unyielding
material, but one after the other, with a stately curve, to slide back
and mingle with those that follow. Chapman’s measure has the
disadvantage of an association with Sternhold and Hopkins, but it has
the merit of length, and, where he is in the right mood, is free,
spirited, and sonorous. Above all, there is everywhere the movement of
life and passion in it. Chapman was a master of verse, making it hurry,
linger, or stop short, to suit the meaning. Like all great versifiers he
must be read with study, for the slightest change of accent loses the
expression of an entire passage. His great fault as a translator is that
he takes fire too easily and runs beyond his author. Perhaps he
_intensifies_ too much, though this be a fault on the right side; he
certainly sometimes weakens the force of passages by crowding in
particulars which Homer had wisely omitted, for Homer’s simplicity is
by no means mere simplicity of thought, nor, as it is often foolishly
called, of nature. It is the simplicity of consummate art, the last
achievement of poets and the invariable characteristic of the greatest
among them. To Chapman’s mind once warmed to its work, the words are
only a mist, suggesting, while it hides, the divine form of the original
image or thought; and his imagination strives to body forth that, as he
conceives it, in all its celestial proportions. Let us compare with Lord
Derby’s version, as the latest, a passage where Chapman merely
intensities (Book XIII., beginning at the 86th verse in Lord Derby, the
73d of Chapman, and the 76th of Homer):--
“Whom answered thus the son of Telamon:
‘My hands, too, grasp with firmer hold the spear,
My spirit, like thine, is stirred; I feel my feet
Instinct with fiery life; nor should I fear
With Hector, son of Priam, in his might
Alone to meet, and grapple to the death.’”