history of all nations, I perceive, do gradually desert
them, when they have passed the consummation of
S
$e 60. LOOKER-ON. 99
their fortunes, and begin to measure back their steps
through that returning scale, by which all human
greatness is humbled.
It is with nations, as it is with individuals : in the
florid stages of youth, when the spring of the mind is
unworn, and the spirits and health are sound, the
resources of real life are hardly enough for the
exercise of its powers ; the bounds of truth and exist-
ence are broken, and the stores of fiction are called in
to supply the deficiency. As age advances, the
mind narrows itself to the range of actual objects,
and finds a sufficient exertion in the common topics
and occurrences of life. At length the season of
decay arrives, and the date of a more limited
activity ; what remains of force and vigour is ex-
pended on the means of preservation ; and existence
itself is object sufficient for the efforts of extreme de-
crepitude. While the works, therefore, of imagina-
tion preserve their esteem in this country, and the
higher Poetry has still a train of votaries sufficient to
maintain her dignity, I consider that ominous mo-
ment at some distance, whence the period of our na-
tional decay is to be dated.
The close of the eighteenth century will have pro-
duced English translations of two of the most cele-
brated poems in the world, which, if we refuse to.
admit them as testimonies to the genius of the age,
we must at least accept as proofs of a yet-prevailing
taste for the sublimer kinds of poetry. If there be
genius, however, in catching the spirit of a great
original writer, in transfusing that spirit into a new
language ; in sustaining a correspondent dignity of
expression, and elevation of manner, through so dif-
ferent a medium ; in taking to pieces the whole
structure of his language, and building it up again
with new materials, which materials we have also to
jc 2
100 LOOKER-ON. N 60.
shape and adjust to the purposes of our new edifice ;
if there be genius in all this, there is genius in the
work of an accomplished translator. It has been
sensibly observed, that to comprehend perfectly the
extent and value of another's abilities, a portion of
those abilities was necessary in the judge. " Ut enim
de pictore, sculptore, fictore, nisi artifex judicare, ita
nisi sapiens non potest perspicere sapientem." If,
therefore, simply to qualify us to taste and appreciate
them in others, such a participation be necessary, a
much larger share, surely, must be required to repre-
sent them with fidelity and justice. Were it asked,
therefore, what qualifications were requisite for a
translator of Homer, nothing less could be demanded,
than a perfect knowledge of the two languages with
which he is concerned, and a sympathy of feeling
and conception with the great original.
An Englishman has a stronger interest in asserting
the dignity and difficulty of translation, than the
native of any other country, inasmuch as his own
language contains the most arduous attempts and
most successful specimens. The French, it is true,
have not been insensible to the advantages to be de-
rived from this direction of literary industry : they
understood that the deficiencies of a language were
only to be ascertained by comparing its strength with
that of others : but together with what profit they
derived from the labours of translation, they made
also this unwelcome discovery, that there was some-
thing of constraint and formality in the genius of
their language ; something court-bred and precise in
its character and complexion, which rendered it of a
cast unfit for the great representations of general
nature, and the sublime simplicity of the higher
poetry. We have nothing of the Greek and Roman
labour in this kind, of any importance, unless we can
N< 60. LOOKER-ON. 101
agree that some of the plays of Terence are versions
of those of Menander ; a notion taken up too much
upon trust, like a thousand others of a similar nature.
The Iliad of Salvini is without the first pretension of
poetry, its power of giving pleasure ; I shall there-
fore say nothing upon it, for where there is nothing
to invite a reader, there can be nothing to provoke a
critic.
In England, the spirit of translation has extended
itself over the whole province of ancient literature ;
an effect attributable to two causes a genuine and
prevailing relish of these precious models, and the
pliancy, vigour, and abundance of our language. la
that spirit of commerce, which is our national cha-
racteristic, we have extended our traffic in words to
every corner of the globe ; and have carried on this
trade with the dead and the living, to a greater de-
gree than any other country : we have not only
drawn immediately from the Greeks and the Ro-
mans, but, in the circulations of commerce, we have
made other countries our carriers, and have imported,
in foreign bottoms, a variety of ancient idioms, and
classical derivations. Out of such a fund of mate-?
rials, and such a choice of combinations, a style is
furnished us for every occasion, and for objects the
most opposite in their nature and demands. We
have an arsenal replete with all kinds of stores ; and
whether we are to depend upon our artillery or our
muskets, whether we fight on horseback or on foot,
we may be armed for either contest.
There is something, however, in the nature of
translation, which discourages genius, by throwing a
veil before that perfection which it loves to contem-
plate. We can propose nothing to ourselves but
second praise, and for this we have to struggle with a
band of difficulties which it is not even in the power
k 3
102 LOOKER-ON. N 60.
of genius to remove. While language is of so local
and complexional a nature-; while words are not
merely representative of things, but represent also
the feelings which accompany them, which feelings
vary with the manners and customs of different na-
tions and ages, more or less disappointment will al-
ways attend upon the labour of translation. It is a
task with which the world is never satisfied. To
content us, it must suit our present tastes and com-
plexions, while it is required to be true and faithful
to its original. These merits are rarely consistent
with each other ; the hero of one country is the
savage of another ; and what in one age is sim-
plicity, in another is vulgarity.
The heroes of the Iliad, to modern conceptions of
courage, are a group of bullies and bravadoes : if it
be nature, it is nature stripped of its humanities ;
and a mind must be lost to feeling, or blinded by its
partialities, to draw pleasure from such a contempla-
tion. Veiled in the obscurity of a language but half
understood, and surrounded by a cohort of sonorous
words, and noble images ; viewed through so recon-
ciling a medium, the descriptions and characters of
Homer in a great measure lose their natural effect,
are carried to a distance that levels their obliquities,
or regarded behind a skreen that throws an advan-
tageous shade upon their deformities. It may be re-
marked too, that, in the perusal of a strange lan-
guage, the mind insensibly drops a portion of its
native habits and sentiments, and in some degree ac-
commodates itself to the spirit of those new objects
which are presented before it : but when customs
and manners, the most abhorrent from our nature
and feelings, are exhibited in all the familiarity of
translation in the dress of our fathers and brothers ;
when they set foot, as it were, on our very hearths
N 60. LOOKER-ON. 105
and thresholds it is impossible we can make- those
same allowances ; it is impossible, with our present
principles and feelings, to delight in such a contem-
plation. It is, as if a savage from Otaheite were to
appear in the dress of an English gentleman, eating
his raw meat, or dressing his food in a hollow stone.
The latest translation of Homer exhibits an attempt
to render, in our language, the real spirit of the
original, and to present a faithful transcript of its
simplicity ; it has certainly succeeded in departing
much less than former endeavours, from the spirit of
its model. To this ambition however it has sacri-
ficed what is of the first importance to a writer, the
power of attracting readers ; and its general charac-
ter is so coarse and rugged, as not to be redeemed by
those features of true poetry, by which it is here and
there adorned. Very opposite to this was the design
and principle of Mr. Pope's translation : he wrote for
the English reader, under a conviction that, to pro-
duce entertainment was the first object of poetry,
and that in this end he must necessarily fail, unless
he consulted the genius of his own language and his
own times. This is what Homer did before him ;
and had Homer written under his circumstances,
there is little doubt but that his immortal poem
would have breathed a similar elegance. The na-
ture, however, of our minds is such, that we can en-
tertain no principle with moderation ; and Pope has
carried a little farther than was expedient, that of ac-
commodation to the taste of the times. He seems t<?
have had the same stomach for Homer, as had the
superstitious old slave, in the Sultan's seraglio, for
the Alcoran, who devoured a versicle every night, at
going to bed, written on a piece of China satin.
The English reader will certainly derive from
Pope's translation no accurate acquaintance with thj
104- LOOKER-ON. N 60.
Iliad ; but the scholar can never cease to wonder at
those talents which have been able to compose any
thing so different from it, and yet so like it : he can
never cease to wonder at that admirable art by
which the same story is told, with so different a co-
louring, and that mighty genius by which so much
of its sublimity has been saved in the wreck of its
simplicity. We have in this translation an inex-
haustible store of poetical language, and the richest
treasure of poetical combinations that any produc-
tion affords. There is no instance of so much ele-
gance with so much energy, in the whole compass
of English literature ; and perhaps we are to date
the highest polish of our language, from the ap-
pearance of this wonderful work.
There must necessarily be a strong affinity in the
constitution of all truly poetical minds : their chief
difference is derived from the bias of education and
the influence of external circumstances. I speak
here with reference to those princes in poetry, who
extend their sovereignty to ages ; that is, to such
men as Homef and Virgil. I conceive that Virgil
might have written like Homer, had he written in
barbarous times ; and that the polish of the age
would have decorated the genius of Homer, had he
composed his Iliad in the court of Augustus. While
the bewitching arrangement and the consummate
choice of words in the iiineid ; while its inimitable
variety of phrase, and captivating harmony of rhythm,
imposes a trying task upon the translator he is en-
couraged and supported by the consideration, that
the affinity of character between the age in which
the original was produced, and the translation un-
dertaken, must eminently contribute to reconcile
the spirit of the former with the interests of the
latter, and, by blending truth with entertainment.
N 60. LOOKER-ON. 105
and exactness with elegance, require none of those
mortifying sacrifices by which a translator, to attract
readers, must expose himself to critics must die a
martyr to fidelity, or live a scandal to scholarship.
With these advantages, Dryden is less excusable for
the faults of his English Virgil. Had he put his
genius to the stretch, he might surely have main-
tained that constant magnificence, that unbending
majesty, which is the characteristic of the Roman
poet. His irregularities, and his meannesses, merit
a double reproach ; they are not only blemishes in
themselves, but are sins against that uniform dignity
which runs through and distinguishes the whole of
his mighty original. The best manner of Dryden is
always stately and magnificent ; and there is a bound
and elasticity in the march of his verses, which, had
it prevailed throughout his translation, would have
very successfully represented the character of the
original ; but his constitutional carelessness broke in
upon this system, and betrayed him into such un-
pardonable negligences, that it seems as if he had
designed to exhibit the two extremes of good and bad
translation, in the course of his volumes. The gen-
tleman by whom the task is at present undertaken
has submitted the five first books to my perusal ; and
as far as I can judge, if the rest are in the same
spirit, it will be the most complete translation in the
English language. He has adhered to the sense of
his author with a remarkable scrupulosity, to which,
however, he has made no sacrifice of ease or perspi-
cuity. If you read it with an eye to the original,
you are delighted with his precision ; if you read it
for itself, you forget it is a translation. It is a mo-
dern structure built with Roman brick and Roman
cement, and such as gave such unperishing strength
to their ancient castles. I shall close my paper of
106 LOOKElW>N. N* GO.
to-day, with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice,
which he has sent me for a specimen, beginning
with the 454th line of the Fourth Georgic.
Now, wild in woe, the miserable bard
Mourns his rapt bride ! she, while along the stream,
From Aristaeus' hot pursuit she fled
In headlong haste, saw not before her feet
A Hydra huge, beneath the spiring blade,
Guarding the banks ; saw not' to death devote !
'Twas then the Dryad Choir, her sister train,
Rais'd piercing plaints, that loftiest mountains rang ;
In tears the Rhodopean rocks dissolv'd,
And tall Pangeus wept, and (nurse of Mars)
Thrace, and the Getae, and swift Hebrus' stream,
And Orithyra fair, Athenian maid.
He, soothing his sad love, thee, consort sweet,
Thee sole along the solitary shore,
Thee at advancing, thee at parting day,
Sang to his hollow shell. Th' infernal jaws
Of Taenarus, and gates of Dis profound,
And forests that with blackest terror gloom 'd,
He piere'd : and dar'd to face the shades of hell,
And the tremendous king, and ruthless souls,
Unknowing how to melt at mortal pray'rs.
But, at his strain arous'd came flitting fast
Thin shadows from the bottomless abyss
Of Erebus, and empty shades of men
Now banish'd from the light of upper day,
In number countless as the birds that fly
By myriads to the woods, and hide them there,
Driv'n from the mountain tops by closing eve,
Or wint'ry show'rs. Here matrons, husbands, throng,
And spirits, now of life disburthen'd, once
Heroes magnanimous ; unwedded maids,
And boys, and youths, erst on funereal piles
Laid 'fore their parents' eyes ; whom circling bind
Cocytus' mire obscene, and squalid reeds,
And, with her sluggard wave, th' abhorred lake,
And Styx, with streams thrice three times circumfus'd ;
Nor less the damned domes astounded stood,
And Death's Tartarean deeps ; and Furies three,
With tangled locks of twisting adders blue ;
No 60. LOOKER-ON. 107
And Cerberus, to silence charm'd, fast held
His yawning mouths threefold ; and sudden paus'd
Ixion's indefatigable wheel.
And now, all perils with reverted step
Safe had he pass'd, and, on the verge of light,
Ransom'd Eurydice was now arriv'd,
Following behind (such law Proserpine gave)
When here infatuate phrensy sudden seiz'd
Th' unwary lover ; pardonable, I deem,
To pardon could the gods infernal know.
He stood ; and now, on the last bounds of day,
All mem'ry lost, alas ! and soul-subdu'd,
On his Eurydice back-turning gaz'd !
There lost was all his toil, and there infring'd
Th' ungentle tyrant's law ! Thrice sounds were heard
To bellow through Avernus' floodless pool.
Then she : And who me, miserable me !
And who, my Orpheus, thee, hath thus undone ?
What madness seiz'd thy soul ? See ! once again,
Where me the iron destinies recall,
And death-like slumbers seize my swimming eyes !
And now farewell ! By deepest night clos'd round.
Far am I borne away, and stretch to thee
My powr'less hands ! ah me ! now thine no more !
She said ; and sudden melted from his view
Inflight dispers'd, as smoke dissolving blends
Into thin air ; no longer him discerns
Clasping the shades in vain, and eager still
To speak innumerable things ; nor more
Hell's boatman grants th' opposing lake to pass.
What should he do ? or whither (twice by Fate
His bride now wrested) bend his wandering way ?
How shall he weep, what magic tones employ,
To mitigate the manes ? She the while,
Chill'd by the hand of death, sails far away.
While sev'n sad months in tedious order roll'd
(So fame records), beneath a sky-clad rock,
Beside forsaken Strymon's pensive stream,
Ceaseless he wept, his woes revolving sad
In gelid caverns, soothing tigers fierce,
And luring with his song the list'ning oaks.
Under a poplar tree, thus Philomel,
Moaning, bewails all lost her tender young,
Whom, callow in her nest, th' obdurate clown
108 LOOKER-ON. N 60.
Observing, thence in secret drew ; but she
Sorrows all night, and, drooping on the bough,
Renews and still renews her doleful strain,
And fills with piteous plaints the regions round.
From that sad hour, no joys of Venus born,
No Hymeneal rites his constant soul
Could bend ; but ice-bound Hyperborean climes,
And snowy Tanai's, and Riphaean wastes,
To frost for ever married, wild he roam'd
In solitude forlorn ; lamenting still
Eurydice for ever, ever, lost,
And Pluto's frustrate boon. The Thracian dames
(Their love despis'd), amid the rites divine,
And Bacchanalian orgies of the night,
Wide o'er the fields the lacerated youth
Scatter'd. Nor less ev'n then, when Hebrus' stream
The head rude-torn from off the marble neck,
Amidst his eddying tide roll'd buoyant on ;
Ev'n then, Eurydice ! the voice itself
And torpid tongue, ah ! sad Eurydice !
While linger'd still the parting spirit, call'd ;
Eurydice ! along the river's length,
The winding banks in dying echoes bear.
N61. LOOKER-ON. 10$
N61. SATURDAY, JULY 13.
Non missura culem, nisi plena cruoris hirudo.
Nor will he leave his skin, until he drains,
Through every pore, the liquor of his veins.
There is no better proof of the difficulty that attends
any species of composition, than the scarcity of sue*
cessful specimens it affords, among a more than com-
mon multitude of trials. It is hard to point out an
indisputably good translation in the language; whence
it follows, that no mind of ordinary mould is equal to
the performance, and that, to accomplish for the task,
some certain qualities must conspire, which do rarely
operate in conjunction. Why men should think
humbly of an object which great geniuses have
thought not unworthy to employ them, and on which
original talents have been tried in vain which, in
the literary warfare, has proved too strong for the
mighty, and which, circumscribed as its limits may
seem, has held out against those conquerers by
whom greater provinces have been subdued, it is not
easy to conceive, unless it arise from the envy in-,
spired by failures in original attempts, which derive
some consolation from under-rating the glory ac-
quired in less arduous undertakings. They are best
answered, however, by a fact which contains in it
something a little problematical : there never was
a capital translator that, was destitute of original
VOL. XLIII. L
110 LOOKER-ON. N 61.
powers, while many an original genius is without the
qualifications of a translator.
If translation were nothing more than a verbal
exercise of the memory, and a mechanical accommo-
dation of one part to another ; if the letter alone,
and not the spirit, were concerned : if the force of a
man's mind existed separately in the words, and not
in their combination ; and if the sum of his meaning
were always to be produced from the same denomi-
nations ; the translator might stand in the middle,
between the maker of an index, and the compiler of
a vocabulary : but, if there be any intellectual che-
mistry employed in the transfusion of thoughts and
images from one language into another ; if, to repre-
sent, in all their vivacity, the pictures wrought in
another's imagination, we must possess all the cor-
responding colours in our own ; if it be necessary to
feel nicely, to describe justly ; if we must conceive
fully, to copy faithfully ; then there is a dignity in
translation above the reach of common men ; a
merit that belongs to it beyond what the original
reflects ; a merit peculiarly and eminently its own ;
and a mode of excellence not always within the
grasp of original ability.
But what is that circumstance in which consists
the superior difficulty of translation ; a difficulty
which great wits and accomplished writers have
rarely, if ever, surmounted ; and before which ge-
nius itself falls often prostrate, and avows its imbeci-
lity ? A greater felicity of invention, or power of
imagination ; a greater skill in combining, or force
in colouring ; a greater expansion of thought, or
affluence of materials, it cannot require than works
of original genius : to these belong whatever hold
the highest place and character in the order of in-
tellectual endowments ; whatever is paramount and
JP'61. LOOKER-OS. Ill
princely in the mind. In what then consists this
peculiar difficulty of translation ? Not in its con-
cerns with the genius or the judgement separately ;
not in its claims upon the imagination, or its exer-
cise of the memory ; but in that equal tribute it
exacts from all the powers of the intellect, in that
poise and equilibrium of the faculties it requires,
which holds them all in reciprocal dependence ; in
its calls for genius, but genius yoked to discretion ;
in its calls for prudence, but prudence informed
with vivacity ; in that rigour of its demands, which
requires an assemblage of qualities, that rarely con-
spire, which requires ambition with moderate pre-
tensions, emulation without the wish to surpass,
freedom tempered with reserve, and spirit exercised
to forbearance.
This speculative difficulty of translation has pro-
duced those defects in practice which might have
reasonably been expected. In its earlier efforts, we
behold a tameness and servility which disappoint us
of all the genius of the original ; by its idolatrous
adherence to forms and symbols, it lost sight of the
true objects of its adoration the spirit and divinity
itself. Of this character are the attempts of Ben
Johnson, Hobbes, Holiday, and others. Then fol-
lowed a crowd of slovenly translators, whose pride
seemed to consist in familiarising their originals, by
coarse and ordinary expressions, content with a loose
display of their meaning, without caring about the
quality of the medium through which their sense was
conveyed. Such are the versions of Echard and Es-
trange, whose productions may be studied with ad-
vantage by those whose business is with the vulgar
combinations of the language, with sordid witticisms
and proverbial buffoonery. In the cohort of licen-
tious translators who followed, and who may justly
l2
112 LOOKKR-ON. N61.
be said to be above their profession, Dryden appears
at their head,
by merit rais'd
To that bad eminence.
Franchised by nature, and endued with that grace
of manner by which some men are privileged above
rules, he felt that he could adventure in poetry be-
yond any other writer of his age. Unhappily he
carried this habitual carelessness into the province of
translation, where it could not but work considerable
mischief, and overthrow the very principle and pur-
pose of his labours ; where it was a breach of literary
trust, and a violation of that faith to which he pledged
himself by the undertaking. He complains, indeed,
of the insufficiency of our language, which was un-
able to supply what the original exacted in the
grace and splendour of diction; and repines at the
difficulty which grew upon him, of making new
words and phrases, to correspond with the unwea-
ried variety of his author's language : but this plea,
which is doubtful as far as it goes, can never excuse
his violations of that first and fundamental law of
his original, which enjoined a chaste severity, and
an uniform elevation of style.
I do not know how a man can reasonably com-
plain, with the Paradise Lost in his hands, of the
want of strength, or variety, or majesty, in our lan-