From Cowper's Lines on his Mother's Picture. O UTINAM eloquium labris accederet istis! Vita mihi, extincta te, satis atra fuit; Hæc tibi sunt labia, et, quem novi infantulus, idem Verba silent vocem tamen ipsa silentia præstant, Et sonat insolitum rursus in aure melos "Desine, care puer, vano indulgere dolori; Quid tibi cum lachrymis? quæ tibi causa metûs ?” Hi dulces oculi, referentes intima sensûs, Lugentem recreant lumine ut ante, suo, Grata, licet sero veneris, hospes, ave! Captivos teneat sensus gratissimus error, F. O. Our Library Table. * 1. CONINGTON'S Æneid. 2. The Saturday Review on Excommunication. 4. Dr. Austin's Guests. 5. Myths of the Middle Ages. 6. Legends of the Irish Celts. 7. Bertrand du Guesclin, and Joan of Arc. 1. Mr. Conington, the Professor of Latin at Oxford, has already won for himself the gratitude of scholars by his labours as a commentator on Virgil. He has devoted himself especially to this poet, and it cannot be doubted that Virgil is far better understood and appreciated now than twenty years ago in consequence. As far as love for his author and the most conscientious and industrious study of his works are concerned, Mr. Conington has unusual qualifications for the task of a translator of Virgil. We gain, in his present work, the full advantage of the progress in scholarship made since the days of Dryden, and particularly of Mr. Conington's own critical studies. We are passing now into a period when nothing slipshod or imperfect in this respect will be tolerated in the translators of the classics. Mr. Conington has himself remarked that "a translation may have as a piece of embodied criticism a value which it would not possess in virtue of its intrinsic merit." His own work most amply illustrates these words. It will most materially as well as most pleasantly assist the Virgilian student in many a difficult passage; and—which is a still higher praise to give it-it will help the same student in many a passage which he has thought easy and of no great depth or refinement of beauty, to discover the less obtrusive treasures which the tender and delicate hand of Virgil "Veils, half untold, that we the more may muse." The true test of a translation, however, is the answer to the question, whether it conveys to those who have never seen the original as fair an idea of that original as is possible in another language? There are perhaps very few translations of poetry which rise to the full height of this standard. Some languages are less rich and less flexible than others, and their genius, even when strained to the utmost, makes them unequal to the task imposed upon them in the translation of a masterpiece. English is perhaps not copious enough as a representative of Greek, and it has nothing that answers to the latter in its beautiful inflexions and ease of composition. It *The Eneid of Virgil, translated into English verse. By John Conington, M.A., Corpus Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. London, 1866. may be as rich as Latin, but it is less terse and less elegant. But some authors are far more translateable than others; Homer than Pindar or schylus, Juvenal than Virgil. Virgil is, in reality, one of the most difficult of authors. We may tell a first-rate from a second-rate scholar as well by setting both to construe twenty lines of a well-known passage in the neid or the Georgics, as by choosing a speech in Thucydides, or a chorus in Eschylus as the test in an examination. Virgil is one of the commonest of all school-books, yet few men even in the class examinations at Oxford will render him perfectly. His charm lies not only in his sweetness, his pathos, his tenderness, but in the fact that these are wedded to so much strength and dignity, and in the half playful, half melancholy irony -in the old sense of the word-with which his deeper thoughts are hinted at rather than expressed. He was a perfect master of expression the beauty of his style is unapproachable. What is a translator to do with such a poet? He must console himself with the thought that he may do very well without quite succeeding, and that it is a great thing to have given even half an idea of Virgil to English readers. Setting aside the great superiority of Mr. Conington's present translation on the score of accurate and discerning fidelity, it may also be justly said to read very fairly as an English poem. We think an unclassical reader will here and there have to pause to make out the meaning. Even the opening lines are liable to this criticism, -strangely enough, for there is no difficulty in the original. Mr. Conington begins thus: "Arms and the man I sing, who first And landed on Lavinium's shore." This is inauspicious: but it is fair to say, that such blemishes are not very common in his pages. Our readers will see by this short quotation that he has chosen the metre of Marmion for his translation. He gives us the reasons for this in his preface, and they are not insignificant. He is afraid of trying the heroic couplet, because there Dryden has been before him: blank verse, he thinks, is only well written by one or two men in a generation: there are other reasons against the Spenserian stanza. He does not condescend to mention English hexameters: which may perhaps find hereafter what they have not yet found-a poet who can use them well. He has been led to the metre of Scott partly by an exhaustive process, which left it his only alternative, partly from its ease, partly from the rapidity which it allows. We fear that this metre has only been proved by Mr. Conington's attempt to be no true representative of the Virgilian verse. It appears to us incurably deficient in dignity. It may sometimes, for a short time, in the hands of a master, be the vehicle of a grand poetic passage: but its ordinary flow is that of a rivulet rather than of a river. The true English metre for Virgil is that which Milton has used to embody so much sweetness as well as so much grandeur, the metre of Cowper, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, mer. in which Lord Derby has been so successful as a translator of HoIf the English language can render Virgil, it must be in blank verse, or in its rhyming sister, the heroic couplet which Dryden has used so well. Let us, however, give Mr. Conington the chance of winning our readers' verdict against our own decision by letting them see how he has rendered some well-known passage. There is a part of the prophecy of Anchises in the Sixth Book, ending with some of the finest and most thoroughly Virgilian lines in the whole Æneid: "Say, shall I show you face to face The monarchs of Tarquinian race, And vengeful Brutus, proud to wring The people's fasces from a king? He first in consul's pomp shall lift The axe and rods, the freeman's gift, And call his own rebellious seed For menac'd liberty to bleed. Unhappy Father! howsoe'er VOL. V. The deed be judg'd by after days, And unextinguish'd thirst of praise. And great Canillus: mark him show Now twined in bonds of amity While yet they dwell in night, And thou, do thou the first refrain, In whom my life-blood runs. One, victor in Corinthian war, And one Mycena shall o'erthrow, Who, mighty Cato, Cossus, who Would keep your names concealed? Serranus o'er his furrow bowed UU Our greatest thou, whose wise delay Be this your genius-to impose And crush the sons of pride." These last lines are surely but inadequate substitutes for the grand verses with which all lovers of Virgil are so familiar. 2. "To any one who has really studied the history of the constitution and jurisprudence of the Papal system nothing is more amusing," we are told by a writer in the Saturday Review*-who expends two columns on the illustration of the assertion-" than the ignorance on these subjects which is constantly displayed by those who pride themselves on being the most devoted disciples of that system." To us it seems that there is something still more amusing in the ignorance displayed by those who come forward to give instruction to the disciples of that system, and to reprove them for venturing to express an opinion about it, when their own qualifications for the task are limited to a fair stock of prejudice, a somewhat flippant pen, and a momentary glance at some document which they do not understand. Nothing, we suppose, will ever teach this class of writers that they had better not meddle with Catholic theology, or keep them from discharging their missiles with the same sort of alacrity, and the same sort of results, as those which signalised Mr. Winkle's attempts at athletic exercises. We should not have gone out of our usual path to notice this particular Article, which is not much more absurd than the generality of similar effusions, but for two reasons. First, it starts with a monstrous misrepresentation of an Article of our own; and, secondly, as the bull of Martin V., which it quotes to misinterpret, is not often to be met with except in a theological library, it may be worth while for the sake of any who, not being familiar with it themselves, may have been perplexed by this writer's confident language about it, to correct his mis-statements. It is not also, perhaps, wholly useless to illustrate now then by a particular instance, what it would be a fatiguing process and an almost impossible feat ever adequately to represent, the untrustworthiness of that criticism which, because it is in print, and suits itself to their prejudices, and is glibly and magisterially spoken, is so readily received by many of our countrymen as indisputable truth, and becomes firmly imbedded in the huge mass of anti-Catholic tradition. In our October notice of a volume of Unionist Essays we were giving an account of the grounds on which the writers of the most advanced school in the Anglican Establishment profess to build their * October 20, 1866: "Is Victor Emmanuel excommunicated ?" |