attempt to illustrate the present position of the Irish people. In the
most acute throes of the famine, July 22, 1847, an act was passed for
the punishment of vagrants and persons offending against the laws in
force for the relief of the poor in Ireland—an act worthy of the worst
days of Nero or Diocletian. Let us inquire what was the condition of
the country when this act was passed. At the end of February that year
there were 116,321 inmates in receipt of relief in the workhouses, and
in July there were 10,000 cases of fever, apart from other terrible
diseases, in those institutions, the mortality being enormous. Under
the Temporary Relief Act there were issued, July 3, rations equal to
the support of 3,020,712 persons. Yet the Vagrant Act inflicted
imprisonment in a common jail and hard labor for a month upon any
person “placing himself in any public place, street, highway, court, or
passage to beg or gather alms,” with the same punishment for removing
from one poor-law union, or even one electoral division, to another for
the purpose of relief. More than half the population were then in
receipt of relief, a vast portion of them being engaged upon relief
works, which necessitated the migration to considerable distances of
the male heads of families. Yet a clause in this act imposed
imprisonment for three months, with hard labor, for desertion or wilful
neglect of a family by its head—desertion that might have arisen from
removal for some miles to another union or electoral division, in order
to provide food for them.
Ireland was one uncovered lazar-house in 1847. We write from vivid and
painful remembrance of personal travel of 5,000 to 10,000 miles yearly,
in an official capacity, over the most afflicted of the famine-stricken
districts, from Waterford round to Sligo, during that and subsequent
years up to 1858. We visited every workhouse, every auxiliary, every
fever hospital, every relief depot, every soup-kitchen, every centre of
public works, by way of relief, every missionary station for
proselytizing purposes, every ragged-school, every jail, and made a
minute personal survey of the most distressed localities in the south
and west of Ireland in 1847 and throughout the famine. Holding an
important commission from the government, we had access to and command
of sources of reliable information open to few, while we had personal
communication with the chief officers of several public departments
that enabled us to understand thoroughly the precise condition of the
suffering classes throughout the whole period of acute distress in
Ireland. Charged, unsolicited, by the government with a special inquiry
connected with the condition of the destitute and criminal classes
which embraced the whole kingdom, owing to experience acquired during
the famine period, we visited officially every county, every diocese,
every poor-law union, every parish in Ireland, and willingly place the
results of that experience before the readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
The history of the famine is yet to be written, and, if not soon
prepared, the records of personal experience will be lost, and a
reliable account of it rendered impossible. When political factions in
the United States traduce the Irish race, and when factions in the
several British colonies do likewise, as regards Irish immigrants, they
do so ignorant, it is to be hoped, of the precise circumstances under
which these immigrants reached those countries during pressure of the
famine. We have treated the amount of decline of population in Ireland,
and the social quality of that decline, in this article. The decrease
of population directly through the famine is, as we have said,
exaggerated. The census commissioners of 1851 set down the deaths from
_extraordinary_ causes, between 1841 and 1851, or rather from 1845, as
follows:
Deaths from fever 222,029
Deaths from dissentery 134,355
and diarrhœa
Deaths from cholera 35,989
Deaths from starvation 21,770
———
Total 414,143
These figures, sad and enormous as they are, we are prepared to show
are an entire understatement of the true facts of the case. The whole
condition of society below the middle classes was disorganized and
demoralized. Panic and paralysis seized the entire population. The
dependent perished at home or in the workhouses, while those with means
to emigrate fled the country. Flying from famine, fever, and
pestilence, these reluctant emigrants, numbers of whom perished before
settlement, have helped to lay the foundation of the prosperity of the
United States and of the British colonies. The author of the _Record of
the O’Connell Centenary_, describing the character of the early Irish
emigrants, says, with great truth and force:
“Snatched from rough rural labor, little skilled in handicraft,
a very large number wholly illiterate, and many unable to speak
any tongue save the native Gaelic; nearly half of them females,
without that cultured training in domestic service required by
other countries; a heavy, helpless juvenile element hanging on
them; intensely clannish, yet removed from those tribal and
religious standards of morality and social life which
powerfully influence the Irish at home; memory saddened with
the recollection of the roofless cabin and the loved little
ancestral farm lost for ever, the dead who had been starved at
home or fell in fever, the dear relatives who sought the
shelter of the workhouse, but through whose trap-coffin they
were precipitated into the famine fosse without shroud or
requiem; and the uncertainty of despair as to the living
remnant of the family left behind—agonized by such feelings,
the millions were hastily deported on the shores of America,
Australia, and New Zealand, objects of sympathy and affection
to the generous, of pity to the benevolent, of alarm and horror
to the timid, of contempt to the misanthropic, and of scorn and
hatred to the enemies of the race and faith of the Irish
nation. Never before was spectacle so sad, so gigantic, so
appalling submitted to the contemplation of humanity; the
history of Ireland was dramatized throughout Christendom, and
its tragic story personated on every hospitable shore on both
hemispheres, when Moore’s prediction was literally and amply
fulfilled:
“‘The stranger shall hear thy lament on his plain;
The sigh of thy harp shall be sent o’er the deep.’”
We have given an outline sketch of the condition of Ireland just before
and in the early stages of the famine; in our next we shall endeavor to
trace what progress she has made from that sad period to her present
improved position in 1878.
Copyright: Rev. I. T. HECKER. 1878.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE BLESSED VIRGIN.
Like chants which fade yet linger still to bless,
While float their formless notes of joy or dole,
So thought doth grieve for words beyond control,
That to itself it may thy charms confess,
And tell each grace with joyous eagerness,
As did the morning stars their anthems roll,
Or as the angels greet a ransom’d soul.
Such tongues alone could paint the loveliness
Which o’er thy face in sad, sweet beauty smiled;
As though in unseen wingings, ever near,
The Dove had coo’d a legend in thine ear
Of some rare tenderness to grief beguiled—
Perchance of love which bought redemption dear,
With all its cost of sorrow to thy Child.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.
VIRGIL AND HORACE—III.
The work of translation seems in an odd way to enlist that mimetic
impulse which is so strong an element of human nature, and which is
really at the bottom of so much of human rivalry. To wish to do as much
as others in any given line of effort is but an after-thought, a
secondary motion of the mind; the initial instinct is to do _the same_
as they. That men do not rest at this; that they are not content with
merely duplicating what they see done about them, like the late
lamented Mr. Pongo; that they are for ever seeking “to better their
instruction,” is due to that further instinctive yearning for
perfection which helps to differentiate them from Mr. Pongo, and
interferes so sadly with many most ingenious and scientific schemes for
recreating the universe without a Creator. All literatures, it may be
said, all poets, begin with translation—that is, with imitation of some
other literature or poet. Alcæus and Sophron, no doubt, are but Horace
and Theocritus to the unknown who went before them; Homer is first,
doubtless, only because we know not the greater than Homer—rapt from us
by the irrevocable years—whom Homer may have copied, as Virgil copied
Homer.
This, however, is a law of literature which was known as long ago as
the days of Solomon, at least. What is not so obvious, and even more
curious as well as more to the present point, is why translators under
certain conditions should be so fond of repeating one another in regard
to any particular bit of work.
For a generation or so some one of the poets who are the favorite
objects of the translator’s zeal will be neglected and seemingly
forgotten. Then some day appears a version which attracts attention and
gets talked of, and, _presto_! a dozen pens are in eager chase to rival
or surpass it. Now it is Homer which is thus brought into notice, and
we have Professor Newman, Lord Derby, Mr. Wright, Mr. Worsley, Mr.
Dart, Professor Blackie, Mr. Bryant—what muse shall catalogue the
host?—giving us in quick succession and in every kind of metre their
versions of the _Iliad_ or _Odyssey_, or both? Again it is Virgil, and
within a brief interval Professor Conington, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Cranch
have done the _Æneid_ into English. Or once more Horace sways the hour,
and in a twinkling or thereabouts a dozen translations of the _Odes_
are smoking hot from the press on the critic’s table, and bewildering
him to choose among their various merits. Within the last half-century,
nay, within the last twenty-five years, we have seen just this
revolution. Is it because our own is so peculiarly one of those
transitional periods in the history of a literature which are most
favorable to translation—indeed, most provocative of it; one of those
intervals when the national imagination is, as it were, lying fallow
after the exhaustion of some great creative epoch, and intellectual
effort takes chiefly the form of criticism, which in one sense
translation is? Well, such generalizations are as perilous as they are
fascinating and we must not yield to them too rashly. In this case, if
we did yield, we should be told, no doubt, that translation was no more
a peculiarity of a transitional period than of a creative one; that the
notion of such divisions in the history of a literature is preposterous
and but another invention of the arch-enemy, like comparative philology
and the Eastern question, to set the mildest and wisest of sages—even
ourselves, beloved reader—thirsting for each other’s blood; or that,
finally, an epoch which has produced Tennyson and Browning, De Vere and
Arnold, Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, and—let nothing tempt us back
to our own side of the Atlantic, where poets grow like pumpkins, big
and little, in every garden patch; yet surely, if originality goes for
anything, we may add—Tupper—that a time so prolific of poetic genius is
not to be counted a transitional period at all.
This, or something like it, we should no doubt hear, if we ventured
upon putting forth as our own the enticing proposition we have but
modestly thrown out as a suggestion to the reader. And if we were not
withheld by that providential want of time and opportunity which so
often saves us from our rasher selves, we should no doubt go on to make
the venture even now: to assert that, in spite of Tennyson and
Browning, in spite even of Matthew Arnold—in one sense a truer voice of
his time than either of them—in spite of the pagan and mediæval
renaissance piloted by that wonderfully clever coterie of the
Rossettis, the present can in no sense be called a creative epoch in
our literature, as we call creative the two epochs of which Shakspeare
and Wordsworth are, broadly speaking, the representative
names—representative, however, in different ways and in widely
different degrees; that it is, on the contrary, a true transitional
period, as the period of Pope and Dryden was transitional, and for
analogous reasons; and that, because it is so, the art of translation
flourishes now as then. Nor should we forget, in saying this, the
numerous translations which marked the Elizabethan era. But it is to be
noted that while all, or nearly all, the then extant classics were
turned into English before the close of the Elizabethan era,
translations of any one of them were not repeated, and precisely for
this reason: that the age, being a creative epoch, made its main effort
in the direction of knowledge, and not of criticism—sought to acquire
ideas, and not to arrange them, as was the case with the translating
periods which came after it. Then, too, it was the virtual beginning of
our literature, when translation, as we have said, came natural to it.
Chaucer two hundred years before was a creative poet, if the term may
be used, in a time that was not creative, a time that was not his, a
time whose sluggishness not even his pregnant genius could inform;
Chaucer was the glad premature swallow of a lingering, long-delaying
spring, whose settled sunshine came to us only with Spenser’s later
bird-song,
“Preluding those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still.”
Milton may be said to have concluded, as Spenser preluded, that mighty
time, without fairly belonging to it. They belonged rather to each
other. “Milton has owned to me,” says Dryden, “that his original was
Spenser.” They were the epilogue and the prologue of that mighty
opening chorus of our literature, in which the translators, too, had
their parts, but only as prompters to the great singers, to help them
to add to their native melody here and there some sweetness of a
foreign note.
The time of critical translation, of translation for its own sake, as
an art, came in only with Dryden—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest of
the transition poets. Then, too, translators began first to repeat each
other’s work. Before the year 1580 most of the classic poets had been
translated into English verse. They were not duplicated, because, as we
have said, the time wanted first of all the knowledge of them, and it
was not fastidious as to the shape in which it came. For a hundred
years after its appearance Phaer’s version of the _Æneid_ had no rival.
Then came Vicars’, only to disappear almost as quickly. Doubly lapped
in lead, it sank at once in that Stygian pool where Dulness tries the
weight of her favorites, and there it has since remained, like
Prospero’s book and staff, drowned
“Deeper than did ever plummet sound.”
Undeterred by this untoward fate, John Ogilby brought out his
translation soon after, first at Cambridge and again in London,
“adorned with sculptures and illustrated with annotations”—“the fairest
edition,” grave Anthony à Wood assures us, “that till then the English
press ever produced.” This gorgeous work, pronounced by Pope to be
below criticism, nevertheless went through four editions before
descending to the congenial fellowship of Vicars under the forgetful
wave—a proof how much a good English version of the _Æneid_ was
desired. Ogilby had been a dancing-master, and perhaps learned in his
profession to rival Lucilius, who
“In hora sæpe ducentos
Ut magnum versus dictabat stans pede in uno.”[172]
At all events, although he took to literature late in life—he was past
forty before he learned Latin or Greek—he was a prodigious author, as
we learn from the _Dunciad_:
“Here groans the shelf with Ogilby the great.”
Besides translating remorselessly everything he could lay hands on,
from Homer to Æsop, he found time to write various heroic poems, and
had even completed an epic in twelve books on Charles I., when fate
took pity on his fellows and sent the great fire of London to the
rescue. Phillips, in the _Theatrum Poetarum_, styles Ogilby a prodigy,
and avers that his “Paraphrase on Æsop’s Fables” “is generally
confessed to have exceeded whatever hath been done before in that
kind.”[173] As Milton’s nephew can scarcely be suspected of a joke, we
must conclude that this is not one of the critical judgments which
Milton inspired. Nevertheless, Ogilby’s translations and paraphrases
procured him a “genteel livelihood” which many better poems have failed
to do for their authors.
Neither Vicars nor Ogilby, however, was of sufficient note, nor had
their labors sufficient vitality, to set the current of translation
fairly going. That was reserved for Dryden, whose famous work came out
in 1697. Dryden had all the qualifications necessary to ensure him a
full harvest of imitation and rivalry at once. He was the most famous
poet and critic of his day, and in either capacity had found means to
excite abundance of jealousies and resentments. Moreover, his change of
religion, and the vigor with which he had espoused the Catholic cause
in his _Hind and Panther_, made him many additional enemies. So it is
not to be wondered at that when, as Pope puts it,
“Pride, malice, folly, against Dryden rose
In various shapes of parsons, critics, beaux,”
the parsons led the onslaught. First came Parson Milbourn, “the fairest
of critics,” who printed his own version side by side with the one he
found fault with, and whom Dulness also promptly claimed for her own.
Then Dr. Brady, giving over to his worthy coadjutor, Tate, for the
nonce the herculean task of promoting Sternhold and Hopkins to be next
to the worst poets in the world, devoted himself to the equally
gigantic labor of proving that there was a work he could translate more
abominably than the Psalms. His version in blank-verse, “when dragged
into the light,” says Dr. Johnson, “did not live long enough to cry.”
Then Dr. Trapp, the Oxford professor of poetry—_majora viribus
audens_—rushed to the attack and did the _Æneid_ into, if possible,
still blanker verse than his predecessor’s. It was he who said of
Dryden’s version “that where Dryden shines most we often see the least
of Virgil.” This was true enough; and it was, no doubt, to avoid the
like reproach that the good doctor forbore to shine at all. On him was
made the well-known epigram apropos of a certain poem said to be better
than Virgil:
“Better than Virgil? Yes, perhaps;
But then, by Jove, ’tis Dr. Trapp’s!”
This is only another form of Bentley’s famous judgment: “A very pretty
poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” The doctor has had no
better luck than his fellows.
“Olli dura quies oculos et ferreus urguet
Somnus; in æternam clauduntur lumina noctem.”[174]
These efforts of the parsons, however, were no doubt inspired at least
as much by _odium theologicum_ as by the genuine impulse of emulation.
The first true exemplification of this came about 1729 with the version
of Pitt,[175] whose choice of Dryden’s couplet was a direct challenge.
Johnson’s estimate of the success of this rivalry is not, on the whole,
unfair—or, at least, as fair as such comparisons often are. “Dryden,”
he says, “leads the reader forward by his general vigor and
sprightliness, and Pitt often stops him to contemplate the excellence
of a single couplet; Dryden’s faults are forgotten in the hurry of
delight, and Pitt’s beauties neglected in the languor of a cold and
listless perusal; Pitt pleases the critics and Dryden the people; Pitt
is quoted and Dryden read.” Dryden, however, is probably oftener read
nowadays than Pitt is quoted. It is something to be a poet after all,
and in the exchange of translation we allow for the purity of his metal
and the beauty of his coinage. Most of us would rather have the gold of
Dryden, though it fall a piece or two short in the reckoning, than the
small change of Pitt, though every silver sixpence and copper farthing
be accounted for.
Other translations of the _Æneid_ there were during the eighteenth
century, among them one by another Oxford professor of poetry, Hawkins,
but none have survived. Pope’s translation of Homer, which was
published soon after Pitt’s _Æneid_, diverted attention to the Greek
poet, and gave him with translators a pre-eminence over his Latin rival
which only within a few years he can be said to have lost. Pope had no
imitators, however, till long after. Even more absolutely than Dryden
he swayed the sceptre of poetry in his time; and the presumptuous wight
who had ventured to challenge his sovereignty or to measure strength
with “that poetical wonder, the translation of the _Iliad_, a
performance which no age or nation can pretend to rival,” gods—critical
gods—and men and booksellers would have laughed to scorn. It is true,
Addison, that most uneasy “brother near the throne,” was shrewdly
suspected of meditating such a design under the cloak of his friend and
follower, Tickell, and even went so far as to publish—so ran the
current gossip of the coffee-houses—a version of the first book of the
_Iliad_ in Tickell’s name. But the scheme stopped there; Pope’s triumph
was too splendid and overwhelming, and his great work calmly defied
competition, until the spell of his honeyed couplet was broken, and
Cowper could find a hearing for his ponderous Miltonic periods, a full
half-century after Pope’s death. The battle which soon thereafter came
to be joined between the partisans of the Popian and Cowperian
methods—both of them, as Mr. Arnold assures us, really on a complete
equality of error—had the effect of keeping Homer in the foreground and
Virgil in the shade, despite the praiseworthy versions of the latter by
Simmons in rhymed couplets about 1817, and Kennedy in blank-verse some
thirty years later, until the critical _furore_ created by the
appearance of Prof. Conington’s _Æneid_ about ten years since once more
turned the tide and brought our Mantuan to the front.
Conington’s translation, by the novelty of its metre, the freshness of
its treatment, the spirit of its movement, its union of fidelity and
grace, took the public ear and at once won a popularity which, if we
may judge from the fact that a new edition has been lately advertised,
it has not yet lost nor is destined speedily to lose. Moreover, its
peculiar metre gave rise to a discussion among the critics, which has
no doubt had its share in bringing out the two additional versions by
Mr. Cranch and Mr. Morris at brief intervals after Professor
Conington’s, the former at Boston, the latter in England and reprinted
here. Each of these three versions has that “proper reason for
existing” in novelty of method and manner which Mr. Arnold demands, and
without which, indeed, multiplied translations are but cumberers of the
book-stall and a weariness to the flesh. Of Mr. Cranch this assertion
may sound a trifle odd, since his work upon its face presents little
that is new. In place of the galloping octosyllabics of Prof. Conington
or the resurrected Alexandrines of Mr. Morris, he offers us only the
familiar blank-verse which Kennedy and Trapp and Brady used, or
misused, before him; he has no theories to illustrate, but translates
his author as faithfully as he knows how, and his rendering is neither
so exceedingly good nor so excessively bad as to give it any claim to
originality upon that score. But then it is the first American
translation of Virgil, and that is surely novelty enough.