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XIV.

HORACE AND HIS TRANSLATORS.

HE lyrical part of Horace can never be properly translated. This was the opinion of Johnson, and among his correct opinions. As

a whole the Odes present insuperable obstacles to any one translator; and ages may pass, as they have passed, without each separate Ode finding its proper man, and so in the aggregate a fit version grow up to the delectation of some future generation.

About the importance of the task, there may be difference of opinion, but its difficulty, nay its impossibility, has been pretty generally admitted by all save the several doughty knights that have attempted it. I am not aware, however, that the difficulty has been ever referred to the true cause, which lies much deeper than the specialties that have been ordinarily assigned. These, indeed, are strong, but not insuperable, and lie partly in what directly regards the translator, as the curiosa felicitas of his author, which will tax his ingenuity in finding equivalents in his own tongue; and partly in the minds of his readers, as the different state of manners or allusions to customs and the like, which but a small number of readers will now be qualified to understand or sympathize with. But this last class rather narrows the number of readers than touches the quality of the book. Translation is good or bad quite irrespectively of whether it be generally relished or not. Some portion of the preparation required to understand the original, is always necessary to full enjoyment of the best translation. Some portion of the original, great or small, according to its breadth or large human reach, would

interest without previous preparation; that portion will, according to the intrinsic interest of the subject itself, yield the exact measure of the popularity a good translation may expect. To augment that portion at the expense of the original, may popularize the translation, but will vitiate its quality. The book that requires much of this treatment ought not to be translated at all. This, however, by the way: revenons à nos moutons."

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The grand cause of the Lyrics of Horace, as a whole, never having been well translated, though separate Odes have been, is in my opinion roundly this, that the prime requisite for a translator, viz., to be in the author's own mood for the matter, in the very key in which he saw and sang about the thing is, in this case, all but impossible. To translate an Ode well you must work yourself into the state of mind and feeling with regard to it in which the author wrote it. This will often be hard with any one Ode; what then are the chances with them all? The translator must catch the mantle of inspiration from his original, if he would speak in the same vein. But, alas! who is to be there when the mantle falls? Time and occasion are to be patiently watched, and are hard to catch. And though by licence of Parnass, we suppose the shade of the ancient singer to be helpfully hovering over the honest translator that means him well, yet no translator can be better circumstanced than Horace himself; and what was his posture to these Odes? Did he sit down and say, "I will now write me four Books of Odes upon every possible subject in my way, expecting to fall into the mood for each as I go along, from the first ode of the first book to the last of the fourth." Yet this, or something like it, the wholesale translator undertakes to do; and this is precisely what Horace did not; and would have joyously laughed at the very notion of doing. No; but it was thus. Occasion here, occasion there, possessed the impressionable mind of

the poet for the time, and, under its influence, an ode was thrown off, which under other influences, or at another time he would not, or could not have done. Horace himself could not have reproduced his odes, any more than he could have reproduced the occasions under which they were written. A transposition of the epochs of any of the odes, could that have been possible, might have found him in no mood for the substituted ode. How cumulative then are the impediments in the way of a translator's dealing with them as a whole. The more intimately such translator shall have wrought himself into rapport with one ode, the worse his mood probably for the next, which is totally different, and has no connection with it.

A long consecutive poem, as a drama or an epic, is for the same reason, on a very different footing. There, once in the mood, once in harmony with the original, you grow more and more so, and your facility of translating increases as you go, till you get almost a faculty of supplying a gap in the original, or at least what shall not contradict it in feeling and drift, however short in actual power. You will have acquired an impetus which will speed you of itself, while with a book of odes, on the contrary, it is continually a drawing up and starting afresh.

Another difficulty that Horace offers to a translator of the Odes, is that so much has been borrowed from a Greek original; a circumstance that strips it of its suggestiveness. And this is too much a feature with Latin authors, and especially of the Augustan age. Like our Queen Anne writers, that which they wrote is written out, and nothing suggested. What I mean is, that in reading, you take what is given, but it does not breed in your mind, as with the more original Greek writers. I am speaking of poets. Virgil in this way marvellously contrasts with Homer. With Homer you get to know as much about the thing as he does himself, so graphically, so suggestively, is it

brought before you. You could go on and write more about it, and in the same vein-I do not say with the same ability—and be sure you were right. But with Virgil you could not. A step from where he puts you, may land you in limbo, for aught you know; so bald and indefinite is his overlauded copy from the affluent original of Homer.

XV.

FALSE GROUNDS FOR OBVIOUS DUTIES.

MAN was standing on the high bank of a pleasant river, the ground firm, and no fear of its slipping from under him to the risk of his toppling into the stream. After standing some time, and viewing the whereabouts, he was minded to lean with his arms on a wooden bar that was supported by upright wooden rests, and promised pleasantly to one who should so use it as a window-sill, and look down on the swift-gliding river, of which the bank was rather steep and high at this spot. The bar, however, had a defect not uncommon with wooden, as well as other structures, with process of time. That terrible sly old edax rerum had applied his tooth to the supports of this bar at the bottom, and next the river especially. Our contemplator, what with the weight of his reflections and the avoirdupois of his person, was too much for what he leant on. It gave way, and into the river he fell, beyond all possibility of saving himself. We have only to hope he could swim, and so ultimately floundered to dry land. With his fate, however, we have nothing to do, but only with the moral of his disaster, viz. that he damaged his safe upright position by

choosing to lean upon something that courted his lazy reliance.

Those who give false grounds for truth, however plausible, risk a moral catastrophe for their pupils, as fatal and as needless as the accident we have recorded. There is too much tendency to catch up the first truth that comes to hand, and use it for the nonce, with a want of care or candour very ill-becoming in one erring mortal to another. But it is always mischievous to urge the right thing upon wrong grounds. Inter alia, for instance, it were unwise to dissuade from suicide, and ground the reason on the commandment which says, "Thou shalt not kill." That, indeed, is a plain, direct, easy thing to lean on if it would support you. You may call it self-murder, and triumphantly claim the prohibition of murder as including it. But the murder the lawgiver contemplated was not the murder you think of; and, in proof, your pupil will only have to read on, and see what punishment is awarded to the murderer, and the result will not heighten his opinion of the sagacity or candour of his instructor. He will there and no mention of burial in the cross-roads, and other Christian methods of punishing the crime, by afflicting the unoffending and distressed relatives of the deceased, but life for life the ultimate punishment, and cities of refuge, with composition with the relatives of the deceased, in case of accidental unpremeditated homicide.

The reasons against suicide are inferential from the general scope of the Christian scheme as regulating this life of probation, which such crime hath tendency to abridge and interfere with, &c. &c. Nor is it the only ill thing that is not expressly prohibited by that scheme, though alien to it. Slavery is nowhere forbidden, but, on the contrary, assumed as part of the social state at its promulgation, and yet who doubts that one of the inevitable and sweet consequences of a pure vital Christian influence