The Nineteenth Century and After

'the whole of the day,' are quite alien from the distinguished and refined diction of the Odes, which even avoid diminutives. Nor can we patiently endure 'poetic licences' redolent of Sternhold and Hopkins, like the omission of the article in ‘Myrtoan wave' (compare ‘Like pelican in wilderness' in the famous perversion of the Psalms), and inverted order of words, as in II. xiii. :

On evil day thou planted wast.

The version as a whole takes its place beside our English metrical version of the Psalms. The undeniable eminence of Gladstone as a speaker would lead a reader who recognises a certain kinship between political oratory and literary faculty to surmise that he might have been more successful, or certainly would not have failed so completely, if he had not disabled himself by his ill-judged attempt to 'abridge the syllabic length of the Latin text, and to carry compression to the furthest practicable point.' Yet sometimes we find thoughts and phrases introduced without any warrant in the text, either to achieve a supposed beauty of expression, as in 'The flood of thy Licymnia's hair' for 'crine Licymniae,' or to eke out the rhyme, as in III. xxviii., where the italicised words are due only to the translator :

Up, Lyde, that fine juice

Old Caecuban, produce; and ibid. 16 :

Then, when the hours grow dim,

Old Night shall have her hymn; and in I. ii. 10 :

The elm-tree top to fishy kind

Gave harbour.

Now Horace never thought of a harbour for fishes, which indeed would seem superfluous.

In III. i. 33 in the Latin

Contracta pisces aequora sentiunt

there is no 'think' or 'spy,' as in

Their realm is less, the fishes think,

When buildings in the sea they spy.

Are we captious in seeing a ludicrous image, and recalling an occasion on which the fishes are said to have become profane under 'the sun's perpendicular heat'? Again, we are offended in III. xxiv. 54 :

Nescit equo rudis
Haerere ingenuus puer,

Venarique timet.

We are aware that in old-fashioned English to clip' means to surround, encompass,' hence (perhaps) 'bestride,' but in

Our highborn youth nor hunts nor rides,
He cannot clip his horse's sides,

we cannot but think of the accomplishment rather of a groom than of a highborn youth ; while in the same ode 'filthy stuff is solely metri gratia, like 'affront the skies' in IV. xi. 12, 'begun and ended’ in IV. vi. 40, and 'till their blood runs icy cold ' for ' exanimari’ in III. xii. 2. On the other hand, ‘splendide mendax ' (III. xi. 35) is untranslated, like 'Troiae prope victor altae' (IV. vi. 3), and 'renidet,' almost a keynote of the ode (III. vi. 12). A strange phrase in the poem on the abduction of Europa is not so much a piece of padding as a mistranslation. Europa (III. xxvii. 38) asks herself is she 'awake or dreaming':

vigilansne ploro

Turpe commissum? This appears as

Ah, the awakened sense

Of sin ! a sentiment which will appeal (perhaps) to the nonconformist conscience, as 'engender heat' for 'torrere jecur' will recommend itself to 'scientists.'

The choice of metres is a most essential matter in the rendering of the Odes. It is obviously incumbent on the translator to render in one and the same metre all odes which Horace has written in this or that metre, Alcaic or Sapphic or Choriambic. Gladstone repudiates this obligation on the quite insufficient ground that Horace has in many cases employed the same metre for odes the most widely divergent in subject and character. In other words, the translator is a better judge than the poet on the delicate question of the auspicious marriage of metre with matter. Gladstone's favourite rhythm is the octosyllabic, which is used effectively by Swift and Butler, and which (with variations) achieves some dignity in the oriental love-tales of Byron and the Border minstrelsy of Scott; but it is quite unsuitable to reproduce the effect of Horace's higher flights in Alcaics and Sapphics. Let us observe how mean is the

. octosyllabic metre of Gladstone in the fine Alcaic ode (I. xxxvii.) on the death of Cleopatra, and how the better-chosen measures of other translators have raised the tone of the poem. We give the final and loftiest stanzas :

Ausa et iacentem visere regiam
Voltu sereno, fortis et asperas
Tractare serpentes, ut atrum

Corpore combiberet venenum.

F. L. Latham. She dared upon her palace lying low

To look with face serene; nor did she shrink
Grim snakes from fondling, that her body so

Might in its life-blood their black poison drink.

Conington.

Amid her ruin'd halls she stood

Unblench'd, and fearless to the end
Grasp'd the fell snakes, that all her blood

Might with the cold black venom blend.

Conington's version of the next verse

Deliberata morte ferocioris singularly fine :

Death's purpose flushing in her face. Martin rises to the height of the subject in the last stanza :

Embracing death with desperate calm, that she

Might rob Rome's galleys of the royal prize,

Queen to the last, and ne'er in humbled guise

To swell a triumph's haughty pageantry. This is surely the loftiest of the Odes. Many would crown that on Regulus (III. v.), but it is disfigured by a lamentable bathos in its last stanza.

De Vere and Conington, it will be seen, have used the same metre-a stately one. Latham has chosen one longer by a foot in each line, while Martin employs a modification of the In Memoriam stanza. Gladstone alone sinks to a rhythm redolent of the nursery moral lyre :

Bill Davis was a dunce and fool,
He would not go to Sunday-school.

The famous Amoebean ode, III. ix., so much admired by a great scholar that he said he would rather be its author than be King of Spain, is better turned by Gladstone, but we have again his favourite creeping octosyllabics. The last two stanzas are his best, though 'resign' in the third line should be resigned,

‘' and we have never met a fickle cork. We will compare his version with others :

Horace.
Gladstone. What if our ancient love awoke,

And bound us with its golden yoke ?
If auburn Chloë I resign,
And Lydia once again be mine?

All the above versions, except the first, seem to have something of poetry and something of Horace. Lord Derby, it will be observed, omits levior cortice.'

We have inveighed against octosyllabics, and we must protest against one other metre used (so far as we know) only by Sir Theodore Martin, who in his other metric effects is, perhaps, the happiest of the translators. It is the tinkling cymbal of Moore. Unless the subject is weighty and serious, anapaests degenerate into doggerel, as in

I myself, wooed by one that was truly a jewel,

In thraldom was held which I cheerfully bore,
By that vulgar thing, Myrtale, though she was cruel

As waves that indent the Calabrian shore. The same rhythm has utterly vulgarised the pretty ode to Xanthias Phoceus (II. iv.). Surely hardly anything could be more alien than this from the distinguished manner of the Horstian Odes. Yet Martin is one of the best translators, disputing (in our opinion) the primacy with De Vere and Conington. As examples of the art of these three, we would offer, in addition to extracts already made, the following characteristic specimens. De Vere and Martin are champions of freedom, and never bald. Conington is wonderfully successful in steering clear of the reefs of baldness while hugging the shore of the text :

Martin.

· Felices ter et amplius' (1. xiii. 17).
Oh, trebly blest, and blest for ever,

Are they whom true affection binds,
No cold distrusts nor janglings sever

The union of their constant minds,
But life in blended current flows
Serene and quiet to the close.