Page images
PDF
EPUB

6

A foamy river, when the opposing dams
Are broken down, rolls rushing o'er the plain,
And sweeping whirls the cattle with their
folds.

These eyes saw Pyrrhus raging, smeared with gore,

And both the Atridæ in the entrance storm,
Amidst a hundred daughters saw the queen,
And Priam on the altars with his blood
Pollute those hallowed fires, which he himself
Had consecrated. Fifty bridal rooms,
So great their hopes of numerous future heirs,
The posts, with trophies and barbaric gold
Magnificent, lay smoking on the ground:
Where the flames fail, the Greeks supply
their place.'

KENNEDY.

'An ingress made by force, The Greeks admitted slay the first they meet, And crowd the places all around with troops. Not with such rage a river pours o'er lands A swollen flood, and herds with stalls bears down

Through all the plains when it has burst away
From broken banks, and with a foamy whirl
O'ercome opposing mounds. These eyes beheld
Pyrrhus with slaughter rage, and at the gates
The two Atrida. Hecuba I saw,
Wives of her sons a hundred, and at shrines
Priam the king, defiling with his blood
The fires which he himself had sacred made.
The fifty bridal chambers, which had raised
Hopes of a long posterity, their posts,
Proud with barbaric gold and spoils, fall
down.

Greeks plant their footsteps where the flames relent,'

SINGLETON.

A way is made by force: the Greeks poured in,

Burst passage, and the foremost massacre,
And wide with soldiery the places fill.
Not so [resistless] when from bursten dams
The foamy river hath escaped away,
And mastered in its eddy barrier mounds,
"Tis carried in a pile upon the tilths

In frenzy, and throughout the champaigns all
The cattle with their cotes it sweepeth off.
I Neoptolemus beheld myself
Raving with butchery, and in the gate
Atreus' twain sons; I Hecuba beheld

And her one hundred daughters; Priam too

Among the altars staining with his blood;
The fires which he himself had sanctified.
Those fifty nuptial couches, hope so great
Of children's children, doors with foreign gold
And trophies haught, down tumbled to the
earth.

Possess the Danai where fails the flame.'

OWGAN.

A path is cleared by force: the thronging Greeks force their way and massacre the foremost, and fill the open space with soldiers. Not so resistless the foaming torrent, when it o'erflows its broken banks and washes down with its flood the obstructing dams, rushes upon the fields in a mass, and from every plain sweeps herds and stalls. I saw myself Neoptolemus revelling in slaughter, and the two Atride in the gate: I saw Hecuba and her hundred daughters-in-law, and Priam amid the altars staining with blood the fires his hands had consecrated. Those fifty chambers, so rich a promise of descendants, the doorways rich with barbaric gold, lay prostrate. The Greeks are masters where the fire dies out.'

HENRY.

'Main strength bursts a passage,
The entrance is forced,
In rush the Danai,
Slaughter the foremost,

And the whole place with soldiery
Fill far and wide.

Less furiously the foaming river,
Whose gushing flood has overcome
And burst the dam's opposing mass
And left its channel, on the fields
Rushes aheap, and drags along
Cattle and stall o'er all the plain.

Myself have seen upon the threshold
Neoptolemus and the twain Atridæ,
Furious and reeking slaughter:
Hecuba and her hundred daughters
Myself have seen, and midst the altars
Priam defiling with his blood
The fires himself had consecrated.
Low lie those fifty spousal chambers,
So rich hope of a teeming offspring,
Low lie those fifty doors superb.
With conquered spoils and gold barbaric:
The Danai or the fire have all.'

Of the three blank versions of this passage we incline to put Mr. Singleton's first. It does not pretend to Miltonic grandeur, but it is not worse versified than its rivals, and its language gains strength from its closeness to the original. Tilths,' a word by

6

which

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

which he pregnantly renders 'arva,' is quaint; but it is important here that we should conceive of the fields as tilled, so we prefer it to Mr. Kennedy's 'lands,' or the simple 'fields' of other translators. I Neoptolemus beheld myself' is ambiguous, and therefore awkward. 'Couches' is of course a mistranslation for chambers.' 6 'Possess the Danai where fails the flame' is needlessly harsh, though it preserves something [of the epigrammatic character of the Latin. Trapp perhaps comes next, as he has more rapidity than Mr. Kennedy; and in a passage like this rapidity is indispensable. But he has various shortcomings, and not a few blemishes. 'Fit via vi,' which he tells us in his note is no pun, but a likeness of sound, which sounds prettily, he practically slurs over altogether. The rich apartments' is a poor substitute for loca,' and 'late' is left out. The simile is shortened by being stripped of two pieces of Virgilian iteration, aggeribus ruptis' being fused with oppositas evicit gurgite moles,' and campos per omnes' dropped after in arva." Nepotum,' which is meant especially to fix our thoughts on Priam and Hecuba, is lost in the generality of numerous future heirs,' and the precise meaning of 'spes tanta' apparently misunderstood. Raging, smeared with gore,' is very far from 'furentem cæde,' which is best rendered by Mr. Singleton's 'raving with butchery.' Mr. Kennedy seems to us to fail in strength throughout. He is injudicious in his management of the simile, reversing the order of the clauses, so as to put the triumph of the torrent in the foreground, and its struggle with obstacles afterwards; whereas Virgil evidently intended us to pause awhile on the struggle, like the torrent itself, and then hurry along-like the torrent itself, stronger for the delay. These eyes beheld' should not have been exchanged for 'I saw,' thus ignoring Virgil's emphatic repetition of vidi.' 'Which had raised hopes of a long posterity' is not poetry, but prose. Fall down' does not give the force of the perfect procubuere.' 'Greeks plant their footsteps where the flames relent' is pointless where point is wanted: 'plant their footsteps' does not answer to 'tenent,' nor relent' to 'deficit.'

6

6

[ocr errors]

Dr. Owgan's translation is respectable, but there is nothing in it which can be called striking; and the exact force of the Latin is not always given any more than in the metrical versions. 'Open space' is poor for 'late loca,' which is doubtless meant to give us a vague, illimitable notion of the royal palace. 'O'erflows' and 'washes down' miss the tense, which Virgil evidently meant to discriminate from that of 'fertur' and 'trahit.' Nor does 'washes down' represent evicit.' 'Herds and stalls' hardly gives the sense of cum stabulis armenta,' not indicating

[ocr errors]

6

the

[ocr errors]

6

the close connexion between the two, the herds and their stalls,' or herd, stall, and all.' 'From every plain' seems to us an unhappy use of the distributive; and we see no reason for changing 'per' into 'from.' 'Descendants' is not nepotum ;' and whether 'postes' are the doorposts or the doors, they are certainly not the doorways, which could not have been 'rich with spoils.' 'Lay prostrate' turns the perfect into an aorist. The best part of the version is the last sentence, where 'tenent' and deficit' are both well rendered.

6

Putting aside the question of the propriety of its Pindaric rhythm, we must allow that Dr. Henry's version has its merits. The first strophe (so to call it) is well done; the second not so well; the third worst of all. 'Myself have seen' is, we think, a mistake, as the sense seems to require the past, not the perfect; at any rate we may say that the former is the predominant notion. "Furious and reeking slaughter' is a most unfortunate dilution. So rich hope of a teeming offspring' is another instance of blindness to the real force of 'nepotum.' The Danai or the

fire have all' gives the epigram, but we are not told, what Virgil certainly intended us to understand, that of the two enemies the Greeks were the more indefatigable.

Were it not for fear of tiring our readers, we would gladly continue our examination of these competing translations, feeling as we do that to produce a single passage from each is a little like the uncritical procedure of the man who brought a brick as a specimen of his house. Perhaps, however, we have quoted enough, if not to determine the rank of the translators, at any rate to justify our opinion of the various styles which they have attempted. Not wishing to prejudge the success of any coming poet, who may reclaim for Virgil the rhythm for which Milton it seems is indebted to him, we cannot think blank verse well chosen as a vehicle for close rendering. It has, perhaps, its advantages as an exercise for boys, who may be supposed to be unacquainted with the possible harmonies of poetical prose, and to be incapable of recognizing anything as poetry which does not run to the eye in measured lines. But one who can really wield prose will, we think, find it beyond comparison the better instrument. We do not of course deny that English verse per se is a better representative of Latin verse than English prose. Mr. Singleton may be right in saying, that if Virgil and Cicero could be got to translate Homer closely into Latin, Virgil's translation would be the one we should prefer. But we are dealing with those who are neither Virgils nor Ciceros, but simply men of culture, with a good command over their own language, and a good eye for the beauties of their author; and such men, we conceive, will do

wisely to try the yet unexhausted resources of prose. Only a great master can handle blank verse so as to give real pleasure to his readers. A versifier of very moderate pretensions may write it with ease, but no one will thank him for it. Blank verse, like other verse, presupposes and promises a certain sustained pitch of poetical elevation, and any descent from it is felt and resented at once. Prose, on the other hand, promises far less; and anything which it gives beyond its promise is accepted with pleasure and surprise. The indeterminate character of its rhythm, which does not require that emphasis should be placed on this or that word, much less on this or that syllable, allows to admit unhesitatingly words which, if introduced into blank verse at all, would be felt to be feeble and burdensome. The passage which we have just been examining supplies an instance in point. Virgil talks of Hecubam centumque nurus.' A prose translation need not shrink from the word daughters-in-law,' nor from the use of many words which embarrass the writers of verse, and which, though essential to a lucid representation of the sense, add nothing to the poetical dignity of the passage. Thus a vigorous Latin line is turned by Mr. Singleton into two feeble lines of English :

becomes

[ocr errors]

6

'Si qua est cælo pietas quæ talia curet'

'If any righteousness exist in heaven

Which may concern itself about the like.'

If the writer of rhythmical prose cannot be said to be free either from the temptation or from the compulsion to expand himself, he does himself and his author far less harm by yielding to them. No doubt, as Sydney Smith said, a prose style may often be greatly improved in vigour by striking out every other word from each sentence when written; but there are occasions where diffuseness is graceful, and a certain amount of surplusage may sometimes be admitted into harmonious prose for no better reason than to sustain the balance of clause against clause, and to bring out the general rhythmical effect. Brevity is of course the preferable extreme; but redundancy has its charms if a writer knows when to be redundant, as the readers of Mr. De Quincey and Mr. Ruskin are well aware. On the other hand, such rhythmical writing as Dr. Henry's, or Mr. Singleton's, where he is not actually metrical, has no real advantage that we can see over more recognised modes of composition. It gives up the benefits of association, no one in reading it being reminded of anything already existing in English, while the uniformity of its structure Vol. 110.-No. 219. imposes

I

imposes virtually as great a restraint on a writer as actual metre. Johnson advised poets who did not think themselves capable of astonishing, and hoped only to please, to condescend to rhyme. Translators who despair of imitating Virgil's diction, and are ambitious only of giving his meaning in a pleasing form, may reasonably be content with prose.

ART. IV.-1. Ancient Law: its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas. By Henry Sumner Maine. London, 1861.

2. The Province of Jurisprudence determined. (Second Edition.) By the late John Austin, Esq. London, 1861.

HE Letters of Camus,' written in 1775, prescribe the course

Tofreading which was formerly thought necessary for a young

French advocate. He was to begin with a series of works on the Law of Nature; he was then to devote four years to the study of Roman Law; next he was to gain a general acquaintance with the coutumes, ordonnances, and arrêts of his own country-a subject which need not, in the opinion of M. Camus, take him much more time than that which had preceded it; lastly, he would dip into Canon Law; and, thus prepared, might begin to think of entering into practice. So extensive a curriculum was never deemed requisite for an English lawyer, though Blackstone's opening lecture informs us that it had in his time become the fashion to seek at the Universities of Germany, Switzerland, and Holland some wider knowledge of the science of jurisprudence than could be obtained at home. Lord Colchester, according to his biographer, went for that purpose to Geneva, and there took his degree as a civilian. To come nearer to our own time, ViceChancellor Wood congratulates himself, we believe, on having pursued the same study at the same place, under the celebrated and unfortunate Rossi. So changed, however, for a quarter of a century at least, has been the general course of professional education, that a young and even a middle-aged barrister of the present day finds it hard to realise the fact that attendance on lectures at Geneva and a Swiss degree should have been thought advisable by an English lawyer less than sixty years since.'

6

The progressive tendency of law and legal study in England to become thoroughly special and insular, can hardly be regarded, by any man whom it has not quite spoiled, without some regret. The vast monotonous labyrinth of technical learning surrounds him like a great city, whose confined and stony thoroughfares he

« PreviousContinue »