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Page 4
From this enumeration, which I fear has been somewhat tedious, it will
be seen that I have been guided throughout not by any systematic
principles, but by a multitude of minor considerations, some operating
more strongly in one case, and some in another. I trust, however, that
in all this diversity I shall be found to have kept in view the object
on which I have been insisting, a metrical correspondence with the
original. Even where I have been most inconsistent, I have still
adhered to the rule of comprising the English within the same number of
lines as the Latin. I believe tills to be almost essential to the
preservation of the character of the Horatian lyric, which always
retains a certain severity, and never loses itself in modern
exuberance; and though I am well aware that the result in my case has
frequently, perhaps generally, been a most un-Horatian stiffness, I am
convinced from my own experience that a really accomplished artist
would find the task of composing under these conditions far more
hopeful than he had previously imagined it to be. Yet it is a restraint
to which scarcely any of the previous translators of the Odes have been
willing to submit. Perhaps Professor Newman is the only one who has
carried it through the whole of the Four Books; most of my predecessors
have ignored it altogether. It is this which, in my judgment, is the
chief drawback to the success of the most distinguished of them, Mr.
Theodore Martin. He has brought to his work a grace and delicacy of
expression and a happy flow of musical verse which are beyond my
praise, and which render many of his Odes most pleasing to read as
poems. I wish he had combined with these qualities that terseness and
condensation which remind us that a Roman, even when writing "songs of
love and wine," was a Roman still.
Some may consider it extraordinary that in discussing the different
ways of representing Horatian metres I have said nothing of
transplanting those metres themselves into English. I think, however,
that an apology for my silence may he found in the present state of the
controversy about the English hexameter. Whatever may be the ultimate
fate of that struggling alien--and I confess myself to be one of those
who doubt whether he can ever be naturalized--most judges will, I
believe, agree that for the present at any rate his case is sufficient
to occupy the literary tribunals, and that to raise any discussion on
the rights of others of his class would be premature. Practice, after
all, is more powerful in such matters than theory; and hardly at any
time in the three hundred years during which we have had a formed
literature has the introduction of classical lyric measures into
English been a practical question. Stanihurst has had many successors
in the hexameter; probably he has not had more than one or two in the
Asclepiad. The Sapphic, indeed, has been tried repeatedly; but it is an
exception which is no exception, the metre thus intruded into our
language not being really the Latin Sapphic, but a metre of a different
kind, founded on a mistake in the manner of reading the Latin, into
which Englishmen naturally fall, and in which, for convenience'
sake, they as naturally persist. The late Mr. Clough, whose efforts in
literature were essentially tentative, in form as well as in spirit,
and whose loss for that very reason is perhaps of more serious import
to English poetry than if, with equal genius, he had possessed a more
conservative habit of mind, once attempted reproductions of nearly all
the different varieties of Horatian metres. They may he found in a
paper which he contributed to the fourth volume of the "Classical
Museum;" and a perusal of them will, I think, be likely to convince the
reader that the task is one in which even great rhythmical power and
mastery of language would be far from certain of succeeding. Even the
Alcaic fragment which he has inserted in his "Amours de Voyage"--
"Eager for battle here
Stood Vulcan, here matronal Juno,
And with the bow to his shoulder faithful
He who with pure dew laveth of Castaly
His flowing locks, who holdeth of Lycia
The oak forest and the wood that bore him,
Delos' and Patara's own Apollo,"--
admirably finished as it is, and highly pleasing as a fragment,
scarcely persuades us that twenty stanzas of the same workmanship would
be read with adequate pleasure, still less that the same satisfaction
would be felt through six-and-thirty Odes. After all, however, a sober
critic will be disposed rather to pass judgment on the past than to
predict the future, knowing, as he must, how easily the "solvitur
ambulando" of an artist like Mr. Tennyson may disturb a whole chain
of ingenious reasoning on the possibilities of things.
The question of the language into which Horace should be translated is
not less important than that of the metre; but it involves far less
discussion of points of detail, and may, in fact, be very soon
dismissed. I believe that the chief danger which a translator has to
avoid is that of subjection to the influences of his own period.
Whether or no Mr. Merivale is right in supposing that an analogy exists
between the literature of the present day and that of post-Augustan
Rome, it will not, I think, be disputed that between our period and the
Augustan period the resemblances are very few, perhaps not more than
must necessarily exist between two periods of high cultivation. It is
the fashion to say that the characteristic of the literature of the
last century was shallow clearness, the expression of obvious thoughts
in obvious, though highly finished language; it is the fashion to
retort upon our own generation that its tendency is to over-thinking
and over-expression, a constant search for thoughts which shall not he
obvious and words which shall be above the level of received
conventionality. Accepting these as descriptions, however imperfect, of
two different types of literature, we can have no doubt to which
division to refer the literary remains of Augustan Rome. The Odes of
Horace, in particular, will, I think, strike a reader who comes back to
them after reading other books, as distinguished by a simplicity,
monotony, and almost poverty of sentiment, and as depending for the
charm of their external form not so much on novel and ingenious images
as on musical words aptly chosen and aptly combined. We are always
hearing of wine-jars and Thracian convivialities, of parsley wreaths
and Syrian nard; the graver topics, which it is the poet's wisdom to
forget, are constantly typified by the terrors of quivered Medes and
painted Gelonians; there is the perpetual antithesis between youth and
age, there is the ever-recurring image of green and withered trees, and
it is only the attractiveness of the Latin, half real, half perhaps
arising from association and the romance of a language not one's own,
that makes us feel this "lyrical commonplace" more supportable than
common-place is usually found to be. It is this, indeed, which
constitutes the grand difficulty of the translator, who may well despair
when he undertakes to reproduce beauties depending on expression by a
process in which expression is sure to be sacrificed. But it would, I
think, be a mistake to attempt to get rid of this monotony by calling
in the aid of that variety of images and forms of language which modern
poetry presents. Here, as in the case of metres, it seems to me that to
exceed the bounds of what may be called classical parsimony would be to
abandon the one chance, faint as it may be, of producing on the
reader's mind something like the impression produced by Horace. I do
not say that I have always been as abstinent as I think a translator
ought to be; here, as in all matters connected with this most difficult
work, weakness may claim a licence of which strength would disdain to
avail itself; I only say that I have not surrendered myself to the
temptation habitually and without a struggle. As a general rule, while
not unfrequently compelled to vary the precise image Horace has chosen,
I have substituted one which he has used elsewhere; where he has talked
of triumphs, meaning no more than victories, I have talked of bays;
where he gives the picture of the luxuriant harvests of Sardinia, I
have spoken of the wheat on the threshing-floors. On the whole I have
tried, so far as my powers would allow me, to give my translation
something of the colour of our eighteenth-century poetry, believing the
poetry of that time to be the nearest analogue of the poetry of
Augustus' court that England has produced, and feeling quite sure that
a writer will bear traces enough of the language and manner of his own
time to redeem him from the charge of having forgotten what is after
all his native tongue. As one instance out of many, I may mention the
use of compound epithets as a temptation to which the translator of
Horace is sure to be exposed, and which, in my judgment, he ought in
general to resist. Their power of condensation naturally recommends
them to a writer who has to deal with inconvenient clauses, threatening
to swallow up the greater part of a line; but there is no doubt that in
the Augustan poets, as compared with the poets of the republic, they
are chiefly conspicuous for their absence, and it is equally certain, I
think, that a translator of an Augustan poet ought not to suffer them
to be a prominent feature of his style. I have, perhaps, indulged in
them too often myself to note them as a defect in others; but it seems
to me that they contribute, along with the Tennysonian metre, to
diminish the pleasure with which we read such a version as that of
which I have already spoken by "C. S. C." of "Justum et tenacem." I may
add, too, that I have occasionally allowed the desire of brevity to
lead me into an omission of the definite article, which, though perhaps
in keeping with the style of Milton, is certainly out of keeping with
that of the eighteenth century. It is one of a translator's many
refuges, and has been conceded so long that it can hardly he denied him
with justice, however it may remind the reader of a bald verbal
rendering.
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