CHAPTER IX TRANSLATIONS OF THE CLASSICS IN THE CREECH'S TRANSLATIONS; ROWE'S LUCAN; POPE'S ILIAD; POPE'S, FENTON'S, AND BROOME'S ODYSSEY; PITT'S VIRGIL AND VIDA'S ART OF POETRY; GILBERT WEST'S PINDAR. Now that I have completed my survey of the effects of the Classical Renaissance on the original English Poetry that followed the Revolution of 1688, it will be convenient to illustrate briefly the strength of the movement in the chief translations by Englishmen of the Greek and Roman poets. The period between the Restoration and the end of George II.'s reign is the great age of English poetical translation. Beginning with Creech and Dryden, it may be said to close with Gilbert West, and within these limits are included such brilliant performances as Dryden's translation of Virgil, of which I have already spoken, Pope's Homer, Rowe's Lucan, and Gilbert West's Pindar. Some of these translations seem to have been inspired, like those of Creech, mainly by an admiration for the Classics in themselves; others, among which are Rowe's Pharsalia and Pitt's Vida's Art of Poetry, by a native sympathy between the original author and the translator; while others again, such as Dryden's Virgil, were tasks undertaken, with an eye to profit, by great poets, at the instance of booksellers seeking to satisfy the literary curiosity of the public. Thomas Creech is the most characteristic representative of the first class. His translations cover Lucretius (1682); The Odes, Satyrs, and Epistles of Horace (1684); Elega from Ovid, and the Second and Third Eclogues of Virgil (1684); The Idylliums of Theocritus (1684); The Thirteenth Satire of Juvenal (1693); Five Books of M. Manilius (1697). Some of these undertakings were no doubt the fruits of an arrangement with booksellers, but the translation of Lucretius was evidently a labour of love and scholarship; and learned enthusiasm alone can have prompted the rendering into English of so dull a writer as Manilius. Creech was born at Blandford, in Dorsetshire, in 1659, and was educated by Thomas Curgenven, Rector of Folke, and headmaster of Sherborne School. He was admitted as a commoner into Wadham College in 1675; became scholar of the college in 1676; took his B.A. degree in 1680, and his M.A. in 1683, in which latter year he was also elected a Fellow. In 1696 he took the degree of B.D. Between 1694 and 1696 he was headmaster of Sherborne, and towards the end of his time there he began to exhibit symptoms of mental derangement. His malady increased in violence after he had resigned his mastership. In 1699 he was appointed by his college Rector of Welwyn, but he never resided there, and, becoming quite insane, he committed suicide in 1700. Though this act has been sometimes imputed to his study of Lucretius, it appears to have been in reality the result partly of a disappointment in love, and partly of money difficulties. Creech belongs to the literal school of translators, approved of by Ben Jonson, of which, before his day, Thomas May is the chief representative. His most important translations are those of Horace and Lucretius. As a poetical translator of Horace, whose merit depends so much on felicity of form, he had not many qualifications. He says of himself in his preface: I cannot choose but smile now and then to think that I who have not music enough to understand one note, and too little illnature (for that is commonly thought a necessary ingredient) to be a satirist, should venture upon Horace : 'tis certain our language is not capable of the numbers of the poet, and therefore, if the sense of the author is delivered, the variety of expression kept (which I must despair of after Quintilian hath assured us that he is most happily bold in his words), and his fancy not debased (for I cannot think myself able to improve Horace), 'tis all that can be expected from a version. And again, after citing Cowley's remarks on the change of manners since Pindar's time, Creech says: : 'Tis true he improves this consideration, and urges it as concluding against all strict and faithful versions in which I must beg leave to dissent, thinking it better to convey down the learning of the Ancients, than their empty sound suited to the present times, and show the age their whole substance, rather than their ghost embodied with some light air of my own. Pope cites the two first lines of Creech's translation of Horace Epistles i. vi. in his own Epistle to Murray; but few of Creech's renderings of Horace's Odes will bear quoting. The sense is generally accurately conveyed in them, but they have no beauty of form, and the translator sometimes permits himself, in the middle of an ode, to depart from the measure he has chosen. The translation of the Ode to Torquatus is a favourable specimen of his work; it will be observed, however, that though Creech uses a ten-syllable and eight-syllable metre, he cannot compress his version into so few lines as Horace :— 1 The snows are gone, and grass returns again; The unswoln streams their narrow banks contain, The decent nymphs, with smiling graces joined, They dread no blasts, nor fear the wind, The nimble Hour, that turns the circling year, 1 Horace, Odes, iv. vii. The Spring the Winter, Summer wastes the Spring, When drunken Autumn spreads her drooping wing, The moon, 'tis true, her monthly loss repairs, She straight renews her borrowed light; But when black Death hath turned our shining years, When we shall view the gloomy Stygian shore, And walk amongst the mighty dead, Who knows if stubborn fate will prove so kind, Whate'er is for thy greedy heir designed Will slip his hands and fly away. When thou art gone, and Minos' sentence read, Thy fame, nor all thy learned tongue can plead, For chaste Hippolytus Diana strives; She strives, but ah! she strives in vain : Lucretius was a poet more likely than Horace to call forth such powers as Creech possessed. A large part of the Latin poet's subject is fitter for expression in prose than in verse; and, on the other hand, the numerous passages of dialectic and satire in the De Rerum Natura were capable of being rendered in the English heroic couplet, which, as treated by Dryden, had acquired a high degree of polish and flexibility. Lucretius' thought also was so grand in itself that, except in the translation of a stupid man-and Creech was no fool-it could not sink to a low level. Creech had indeed none of the poetic fire of his original, but he was a good scholar, and had a fair command of metre, so that his translation is always readable. If the following passage had not to stand comparison with Dryden's rendering,' it would be allowed to possess considerable merit : 1 See Dryden's Translation of the Latter Part of the Third Book of Lucretius, 121-146. But now if Nature should begin to speak, Was pleasant, if with joy thou saw'st the sun; My pleasures always in a circle run, The same returning with the yearly sun. And thus, though thou shalt still enjoy thy prime, The same dull joys must vex the appetite; Although thou couldst prolong thy wretched breath We must confess that her reproofs are just. It will be found, on comparison, that Dryden takes greater liberties with the text than Creech allows himself. Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) to whom I shall have to refer again in another connection, was a translator of a very different order. Taking up the same task as Thomas May, who, in the reign of Charles I., had rendered Lucan's Pharsalia into English on Ben Jonson's principle of literal exactness, Rowe followed Dryden's paraphrastic method, and it is interesting to compare the different results of the two versions. Rowe made his translation in his last years; it was not published till after his death. He seems to have been inspired mainly by a certain literary sympathy of taste with Lucan, as May was by Lucan's political tendencies; but what he admired in his author was not so much the laboured affectation of his diction (that |