And they changed their lives and departed, and came back as the leaves of the trees Come back and increase in the summer :-and I, I, I am of these;

And I know of them that have fashioned,
and the deeds that have blossomed and
grow;

But nought of the Gods' repentance, or the
Gods' undoing I know."

The former of these is the verse which Sir Charles Bowen has chosen for his translation; but with a view of making it like the Latin hexameter he has forbidden himself the use of unaccented opening syllables, and (except when Nature has been too strong for him) makes the line begin uniformly on a stressed syllable so as to give the apparent effect of a falling rhythm.

Against this treatment the English language revolts. The simplest measure of the disastrous difficulties in which it involves the writer is that it makes it impossible to begin a line with an unstressed monosyllable, with any word like "the," "of," or "and." Sir Charles Bowen has employed extreme dexterity in avoiding them. But in spite of all imaginable dexterity it becomes every now and then necessary either to let the metre break down, or to keep it up at the expense of awkward ellipses and asyndeta. Lines like,

"Or when silver or marble is set in the yellow of gold

"May our children for ever preserve its memory bright

"Till our way to the hillock and ancient shrine we had wrought'

is better to have such lines than to write English like,

"Lioness chases the wolf, wolf follows the goat in her flight,

Frolicking she-goat roves to the cytisus flower to be fed."

"Enough I suffer of wrong

Home who have once seen plundered, survived Troy, foes in her heart."

"Tyrians too this festival night to the palace repair,

Places found them on couches with bright embroidery fair,

Gaze on the Trojan gifts, on the boy Iulus' eyes."

This is a grammatical extravagance which may seem slight in a single instance; but the way in which it recurs on every page jars on the reader's nerves at last, as does the perpetual and wearisome enjambement

which makes one line end with a weak epithet in order to get the substantive at the beginning of the

next.

66

Facing the porch, on the threshold itself, stands Pyrrhus in bright

Triumph, with glittering weapons, a flashing mirror of light."

Tramples on law divine, Polydorus slays, and with bold

Hand on the treasure seizes."

Ibi omnis effusus labor : against such inherent vice of metre the brilliant merits of this translation contend fruitlessly.

It is hardly possible to determine theoretically what form of English verse is most suited for translating Virgil: the best will no doubt be that in which the best translation is made. But it is possible to state certain

"When I beheld their serried ranks, their martial fire"

"Thine own shade, my sire, thine own disconsolate shade

"Lest thy bark, of her rudder bereft, and her helmsman lost,

Might be unequal to combat the wild seas round her that tossed

have no definite rhythm at all; yet it

which is not of the first rank, which has not been carried by skill and practice somewhere near perfection, can ever hope to convey anything of Virgil's great distinction of mastery, of the perfect smoothness, the jewel-finish of his workmanship. And (dactylic verse in English being out of the question) no metre but an iambic one can hope to reproduce his stateliness and equability of move

Now

ment. These long smooth anapastics are before all things rapid. Virgil can be rapid when he chooses; but rapidity is the last word that one would think of applying to the typical Virgilian line. Aristotle calls the Homeric hexameter, "the stateliest of verses." In Latin hands it acquired a still greater stateliness, a more weighty and majestic movement; and with Virgil it is beyond all rivalry, "the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man." It is worth observing that, in the poem where these words occur, Lord Tennyson has seized its quality with extraordinary art, by using an immensely long line where the insertion of a full foot in place of a cæsura makes the verse fall apart in a surge and recoil like that of the hexameter itself. Against the English hexameter properly so called the case has long ago gone by default. The fact that an English sentence may naturally fall into hexameter-rhythm (as in "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!") proves nothing, "for it is also likely that many unlikely things should happen." Nor does it prove much more that there are a few Elizabethan hexameters of great beauty, or that in the hands of an eminent master of language it is even now possible, as Mr. Arnold has proved in his Lectures on Translating Homer, to render a short passage into lines which shall have something of the force and dignity of the original. It remains true, after all is said, that a metre depending on quantity and cæsura for its very essence is not natural in a language which possesses neither. Sir Richard Fanshawe's noble translation of the fourth Æneid into Spenserian verse

1.Perhaps the most graceful ever written are those of Greene.

"Days in grief and nights consumed to think on a goddess,

Broken sleeps, sweet dreams but short from the night to the morning."

Nothing could be better than this; but it is only a tour de force after all.

A verse that can be so handled, that can keep balance and dignity while following with extraordinary closeness the structure and diction of the Latin, cannot be dismissed lightly. But any stanza-verse is under heavy disadvantages as compared with a verse which is continuous. It is in blank verse, and in it only, that the greatest rhythmical effects in English have been attained; but who can write blank verse?-hardly three men in a century. A long passage from the eighth Æneid rendered into admirable blank verse by Cowper stands as yet almost alone. Next to it, in the technical perfection to which it has been carried, comes the decasyllabic couplet; and in this it is possible that the last word will be said. Stateliness and sweetness, Virgil's two great qualities, it is capable of to any degree; nor is there any other metre which admits such variety of treatment. From the pastoral couplet of Browne to the

heroic couplet of Dryden it covers as great a range as the Latin hexameter. In the hands of Keats it reached a subtlety and complexity of harmony comparable to that of Virgil in his earlier work. "Lamia leaves on my ear," says Mr. F. T. Palgrave, "an echo like the delicate richness of Virgil's hexameter in the Eclogues: the note of his magical inner sweetness is, in some degree, reached upon a different instrument"; and Mr. Frederic Myers, whose fragments of Virgilian translation are only disappointing from their scantiness, has shown how it may be adapted to a periodic structure with something approaching the fluidity of blank verse itself. There is some advantage, in dealing with Virgil, of getting a line which shall more or less correspond in length to his; and with the heroic couplet it is true that one line of the English is, as a rule, too little for one line of the Latin, and two are too much. But the disadvantage is more apparent than real. It is not on his single lines that Virgil depends: it is on his single phrases, his "lonely words." Vobis parta quies-absens absentem auditque videtque-nihil o tibi amice relictum-dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos: it is in such phrases as these, full of strange depths of music, of half-tones and melancholy cadences, rather than in the great rhetorical single lines, that the peculiar charm of Virgil lies.

Nor is that translation necessarily the best which keeps most to the outward form of the original. If the office of a poetical translation be to reproduce that effect on the reader which the original has produced on the translator, a hundred influences must intervene, and the effect come through strange channels of association. Take the great line twice spoken in the Iliad, once by Glaucus in the sixth book, once by Nestor in the eleventh, αἰέν ἀριστεύειν καὶ ὑπείροχον ἔμμεναι ἄλλων-how does Pope deal with it? Here are the two passages from his translation,

"Hippolochus survived; from him I came The honoured author of my birth and

name;

By his decree I sought the Trojan town, By his instructions learn to win renown, To stand the first in worth as in command, To add new honours to my native land, Before my eyes my mighty sires to place, And emulate the glories of our race." "We then explained the cause on which we

came,

Urged you to arms, and found you fierce for fame.

Your ancient fathers generous precepts gave,

Peleus said only this-'My son, be brave.'"

It is not necessary to determine which of these is the better translation, the two couplets or the two words. The important point is, that both the gorgeous rhetorical amplification of the one and the concentrated brevity of the other give just that lifting of the heart which the single line of Homer gives with the incomparable Homeric simplicity. Or, to return to Virgil: stateliness and sweetness are his unfailing qualities, the qualities in which he excels all other poets: a translation which should keep these qualities need not trouble itself much about lesser matters. The standard of accuracy required has risen, of its own accord as it were, to such a point that it can take care of itself. Conington's translation in this respect set a standard for all the future. No one would tolerate now, for the sake of any vigour or dignity, such swinging carelessness, such schoolboy scholarship as Dryden's; but just for that reason, we are safe against any one making the attempt on so slender a base of knowledge, or with such contempt for the outward form of Virgil, as Dryden did. Mr. Morris, who alone has given the Virgilian sweetness, as Dryden alone has given the Virgilian stateliness, keeps as closely to the original as Conington himself; and now Sir Charles Bowen has shown that even greater accuracy in this respect is possible. But to produce a translation which should hold the field, not only the standard of accuracy set by modern scholarship,

but also the standard of stateliness set by Dryden and the standard of sweetness set by Mr. Morris, have become essential for all the future. Two examples will illustrate this. The first is Dryden's, the second Mr. Morris's translation of Æneid vi. 450-466,

"Not far from these, Phoenician Dido stood, Fresh from her wound, her bosom bathed in blood;

Whom when the Trojan hero hardly knew, Obscure in shades, and with a doubtful view,

Doubtful as he who sees, through dusky night,

Or thinks he sees, the moon's uncertain light,

With tears he first approached the sullen shade;

And, as his love inspired him, thus he said:

"Unhappy queen! then is the common breath

Of rumour true, in your reported death, And I, alas! the cause?-By heaven I Vow,

And all the powers that rule the realms below,

Unwilling I forsook your friendly state, Commanded by the gods, and forced by Fate,

Those gods, that Fate, whose unresisted might

Has sent me to these regions void of light, Through the vast empire of eternal night. Nor dared I to presume that, pressed with grief,

My flight should urge you through this dire relief.

Stay, stay your steps, and listen to my

Vows!

"Tis the last interview that Fate allows!'" "Midst whom Phoenician Dido now, fresh from the iron bane,

Went wandering in that mighty wood: and when the Trojan man

First dimly knew her standing by amid the glimmer wan

E'en as in earliest of the month one sees the moon arise,

Or seems to see her at the least in cloudy drift of skies

He spake, and let the tears fall down by all love's sweetness stirred :

Unhappy Dido, was it true, that bitter following word,

That thou wert dead, by sword hadst sought the utter end of all?

Was it thy very death I wrought? Ah! on the stars I call,

I call the Gods and whatso faith the nether earth may hold,

To witness that against my will I left thy field and fold!

Dimly discerned her face, as a man, when the month is but young,

Sees, or believes he has seen, amid cloudlets shining, the moon.

Tears in his eyes, he addressed her with tender love as of old :

True then, sorrowful Dido, the messenger fires that told

Thy sad death, and the doom thou soughtest
of choice by thy hand!

Was it, alas! to a grave that I did thee!
Now by the bright

Stars, by the Gods, and the faith that abides
in realms of the Night,

'Twas unwillingly, lady, I bade farewell to thy land.

Yet, the behest of Immortals, -the same which bids me to go

Through these shadows, the wilderness mire and the darkness below,

Drove me imperiously thence, nor possessed I power to believe

I at departing had left thee in grief thus bitter to grieve.

Tarry, and turn not away from a face that on thine would dwell;

'Tis thy lover thou fliest, and this is our last farewell!'"

Certainly one cannot borrow the famous formula and say that Sir Charles Bowen's translation would be better if he had taken more pains. The more one studies it, the more is one impressed by the delicate and unwearying labour that has been spent upon it, by his fine and conscientious scholarship, by the persistency with which he has striven to give Virgil's very turns of expression. In one matter indeed he has allowed himself an unfortunate laxity. For Virgil, more than for most poetry, the metre, whichever be chosen, should be adhered to with rigorous accuracy.

Sir Charles Bowen has started on a basis of rhymed couplets, but in his arrangement of rhymes he uses extreme licence. Triplets, quatrains, various combinations of five, of six, and even of seven-lined stanzas, break into the couplet-system so freely that one is never sure what rhyme is to come next. Systems of irregularly grouped rhymes may be employed with exquisite effect in lyrical poetry; and indeed in the Eclogues, where (as in the songs of Theocritus) there is always something of a lyrical note, he often uses them with great beauty. But in an epic it is another matter. Thus in Eneid vi. 637-665, the thirty lines of his translation are made up as follows: a stanza of five lines, a couplet, a quatrain, a couplet, a quatrain, a stanza of seven lines, a couplet, a quatrain. Mr. Swinburne's recent freak of writing a whole scene of a tragedy in sonnets is hardly more violent than this. Yet if any adverse criticism be allowable, it is rather over-elaboration, never carelessness, that must be laid to his charge; as though he had occasionally forgot ten, in his minute study of the language, that Virgil is in the first place a poet, and that "the facility and golden cadence of poesy" are the first qualities at which a translator must aim. Virgil's security of workmanship was so great that he could say anything: by a strange magic the commonest words, the most prosaic expressions, became poetical from the mere fact that he used them. But it does not follow that a translator may say anything.

"Anon each mariner brave

Bakes in the fire, then crushes, his barley snatched from the wave."

Virgil, hordea qui dixit, might speak (though he does not) of snatching barley: a translator does so at his own peril.

"Second in order of honour the brave who sundered her chains,

He who spitted the pole with his feathered reed is the last."

1 Locrine, Act i. sc. 2.

This is grotesque, and Virgil is never grotesque. And alongside of this is the other fact, which must always be the despair of a translator, that Virgil had a greater power than any other poet ever has had of saturating his language with second meanings, as some precious stones are full of under-lights. A translator has often to make his choice between leaving these out altogether or dragging them to the surface; in either case the magic is gone. "All but the grieving queen; how much too little for the splendid and sombre cadence of the At non infelix animi Phoenissa! "Such is the bees' sweet fever in summer's earliest prime;" how much too much for the two simple words, fervet opus, of the Latin! Yet Sir Charles Bowen has often caught the golden mean, nay even the golden cadence :