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remained a part of the scholar's furniture; the greater British public has its Shakespeare, and will none of them. The brave array of Caroline poets, Herrick and his company, long bore a

not Shakespeare, and they were not of his age. Only recently have they been securely reprinted.

Backwards the shadow lies deeper. Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and the rest,

part, too young and inexperienced to | mighty contemporary, and him alone, lead their countrymen with any safety that their plays, for all the wit and along the path of political reform. No romance that enlivens them, have doubt the spread of knowledge is progressing rapidly throughout the land; but many years must necessarily elapse before the evils of mental slavery can be said to be non-existent, or before the free exercise of individual judg-twofold burden of neglect; they were ment is, in any sense, a reality; and until such time arrives it is clearly the duty of government to protect, as far as possible, the uneducated masses from the false and seditious doctrines of men who, whether from lack of in- as dramatists and predecessors of telligence to grasp the true character Shakespeare, have had their full share of England's work in this country, or of attention; but the whole mass of from self-interested and spiteful mo- literature that went to the making of tives, spare no pains to throw odium on Shakespeare, the output especially of the government which has fostered the earlier half of Elizabeth's reign, them and which in return they are now has, with this exception, been scarcely doing their utmost to embarrass. "If reprinted in modern days. So innocent the Indian government," as Sir Lepel and plenary has been the confidence of Griffin very justly remarks in his ar- his countrymen in Shakespeare's thievticle" India in 1895," "be too timid toery, that they have trusted him to steal protect itself from open sedition and for them all that was good in English too ungenerous to defend its servants literature during the years of his upagainst false and malicious misrepre- bringing. It was an age of prose; sentation, it has surrendered one of Elizabethan prose, by a commonplace the elementary principles of a civilized of criticism, is found wanting in the government, popular or autocratic, and qualities of lucidity, balance, and predeserves the fate which attends on all cision; the most enthusiastic of the rulers who do not know how to gov- foragers among these forgotten works ern." have been sworn to the service of poetry and bent on elucidating poetic origins; and hence it has come about that a noble tradition of English prose and a long line of works that glorified it have been left to the book-fancier and the British Museum. An adventurer here and there, intent on some ONE of the best and most curious special interest, has earned gratitude proofs of the supremacy of Shake- by recovering some single book, Holinsspeare among English writers is to be hed's "Chronicles," Scot's "Discovfound in the length and depth of the ery of Witchcraft," Painter's "Palace shadow that has been cast by his fame. of Pleasure," and the Shakespeare There is hardly a writer in the century societies have trawled and dredged not of his apparition but has suffered from in vain; but the larger task of raising the brightness of that neighborhood. a monument to the age has been left The works of great Elizabethan and untouched. It is, therefore, with a Jacobean dramatists were ransacked new sense of hope and in a spirit of for a hundred years to illustrate Shakespeare's poorest jests, before they were edited for their proper merits. Beaumont and Fletcher may thank their

Simla, April 22, 1895.

From The Fortnightly Review.
TUDOR TRANSLATIONS.

BY PROFESSOR RALEIGH.

the deepest thankfulness, that readers and lovers of English literature have seen volume follow volume in Messrs. Nutt's series of "The Tudor Transla

tions," edited by Mr. W. E. Henley." Plutarch" from the French. Yet of It may be accepted as a happy omen him it might be said, as was said of that the series makes its appeal directly Shakespeare by "the friendly admirer to the public through the medium of of his endowments," that he doth no academy or body of subscribers. retrieve the fates, A nation must be very careless, as well as very rich, if it can dare to neglect such of its own masterpieces as have now once more seen the light.

Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron:
gates

Of death and Lethe, where confused lie
Great heaps of ruinous mortality.

A word dies every moment beneathr the translator's pen, and another is born; the happiest translators are perchance those in whom the sense of guilt is least and the joy of creation greatest, who betray their victims into a new immortality without apologies.. Of this kind were the great English translators who flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Lord Berners onwards. They made mistakes, some of them, on every page; it is an act of justice to record a few of the mistakes they did not make. They did not, like their successors of the eighteenth century, avoid personal feeling and modern color by foregoing all feeling and color whatever, making Greek and Roman worthies talk the desiccated language of a philosophical drawing-room. They did not, like so many nineteenth-century translators, seek to retain ancient feeling and color by foregoing their own vocabulary and serving up a hodge-podge of archaisms. They wrote the language they talked, and let their own emotion and fancy color the tale they transcribed. In the vigor and versatility of the prose of Berners and of North there lay the promise, and something more than the promise, of the great poetry that was to come.

That these works are merely inaccurate translations of the classics of other tongues has been pleaded in excuse for the dust that lies upon them. Mr. Henley does well in proclaiming from the first that they are to be considered and judged as original works. For this is the only enduring test; fulfilling it, the translation of a bad book will live; failing to meet it, the translation of the Iliad will wither as it drops from the press. The ambition of English scholarship for an absolute translation, at once correct and elegant, preserving, as the saying is, the beauties of the original while avoiding locutions that are foreign to what is so often called, in this sad context, the genius of the English language; this will-o'-the wisp has kept generations of wise men dancing, gravely and fantastically, in its train, only to plunge them at last into the despondent absurdity of translating verse by prose. Yet all the while it has been known to the artist that there is no such thing as an absolute translation; that if, as a modern French critic has observed, all reading and understanding involves a fresh translation from the symbols of one mind into the symbols of another, no less does all translation involve a fresh reading and appropriation. A translator should know two languages-the proposition The professional student of literature is easily granted; but it is hardly an is prone, perhaps too prone, to treat extravagance to say that he may know books relatively to some wide scheme one of them too well, so that his labor of his own, to trace in them origins shall appear to himself a doleful vio- and influences, and to be concerned lence and no transfiguration. Fitzger- with them for something that is not ald can hardly have preferred the themselves. He enters a book as the Persian verses he found to the English bailiffs enter a house, to assess values, verses he left; Shelley, who was no and to claim property in the name of German scholar, produced the only ver- others. This relative, historical insion of the opening chorus of "Faust" terest, which often attaches especially that is indubitably English poetry; and to books that have been deservedly Sir Thomas North translated his superseded, would hardly warrant the

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sumptuous reprints that Mr. Henley | that he heightened and much that he has given to Florio's Montaigne," left unchanged, Shakespeare found Mabbe's "Celestina," and North's also some passages in North that he "Plutarch." In truth, these books rendered with a paler glory. deserve reprint for a much stronger The three books which were richest reason: they have been forgotten in suggestion for Shakespeare made without being superseded. They are their first appearance in English durmasterpieces clean dropped out of ing the years of his boyhood. They mind in the hustle of changing fash- are typical of a threefold interest, ious. And yet a very great historical | awakened in this country at the time interest centres - how should it not? of the Renaissance: an interest in the —in the prose, good, bad, or indiffer- Greek and Roman classics, in the origient, of the age of Shakespeare, inde-nal achievements of the Renaissance pendently of its artistic value. Take spirit abroad, especially in Italy and away from Shakespeare the three books | France, and in the earlier history of to which he owed the largest of his England herself, now newly conscious debts, the works respectively of of her greatness and rousing herself to Painter, Holinshed, and Sir Thomas her destiny. Of these three educators North, and the Shakespearean canon, the first was of the deepest import, and in its threefold division of comedies, has left the most voluminous evihistories, and tragedies, would have to dences. The early translations of the be recast in imagination - he must classics, Ovid, Virgil, and Homer, perforce have found some other world Livy, Sallust, and Thucydides, deto conquer. The last-mentioned and lighted a people hungry for story and greatest of the three not only furnished indifferent for the most part to style. Shakespeare with subjects, it possessed But here an all-important distinction is his imagination in and out of season. to be made between verse and prose. He read it, the critics have inferred, Verse-making in the days before Spenwhile he was writing "Macbeth." ser was almost a lost art, the trans"There is none but he," says Mac-lators of the poets were content to take beth of Banquo,

There is none but he Whose being I do fear, and under him My genius is rebuked, as, it is said, Mark Antony's was by Cæsar.

The corresponding passage in North's "Plutarch" is reproduced later, in its due place, in the words of the soothsayer of "Antony and Cleopatra :

Thy dæmon, that's thy spirit which keeps thee, is

Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable, Where Cæsar's is not; but near him thy angel

Becomes a feard, as being o'erpowered.

their cue from Protestant psalmody, and Virgil and Homer were furnished, the one by Phaer and Twyne, the other by Arthur Hall, M.P., the predecessor of Chapman, with similar pairs of bagpipes, wherethrough they droned the measure that has been quaintly named "the Alexandrine of Master Sternhold." A prolonged study of these works, or of Arthur Golding's immensely popular Ovid, serves to chasten the reader's intolerance for the wild experiments in metre of Drant and Stanihurst, and the excesses of the Areopagus." The outlandish metrical disguises that had so short a vogue were donned by men who were fearful

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It is no matter for wonder if a book that thus intruded itself on the white-lest a worse thing should befall them. heat of the workshop where "Macbeth" When the new prosody arrived with was wrought, should have defied the Spenser, the day of the psalm-singers creator of "Macbeth" to better all of and of the "Dranters " alike was over, it that he touched; and Mr. George and there followed the noble metrical Wyndham, in his admirable introduc- translations of Harington, Fairfax, and tion to the new edition, has no diffi- Sylvester, of Marlowe, Chapman, and culty in showing that, amidst much Sandys. But this was later; the fact

mother's son." A contrast like this is only to be matched by the two versions of the Psalms contained in a Scottish Bible.

remains that Shakespeare and his gen- | necke, even for greedines to take eration, all but the scholars, made these women; but not a man of them their acquaintance with Greek and escaped, for they were slayne, every Latin poets through the carlier translators; Hall, not Chapmau, was the new planet that swam into their ken. So that while the prose of his immediate predecessors lent Shakespeare some The passing affectations of a people of his most dazzling tragic splendors, and an age sensitive to all foreign fashtheir verse, which he was loth to waste, ions, have been allowed unjustly to furnished him with the grave-digger's overshadow the pure stream of English hobbling chant in "Hamlet," and the prose that ran through the sixteenth "tedious brief scene of young Pyra- and seventeenth centuries. The picmus in the "Midsummer Night's turesque loose Saxon syntax and the Dream." Indeed, when Bottom ap- wealth of homely diction that are to be pears with an ass's head on his shoul- found in North fought hard and long ders and Quince blesses him for that against the invasion of the more perhe is "translated," the dramatist was fect mechanism of the Latin sentence probably thinking, not without grati-and the tyranny of the Latin vocabtude, of Master Arthur Golding and his ulary. All the great artists of this Ovid "a work very pleasant and de- period, however profound and wide lectable."

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their scholarship, knew the saving value of the Saxon blend. Milton himself, at whose hands English poetry became classic, knew where to go for the best wealth of his prose invective.

But the prose of the same age, imaginative and flexible, strong and rich, shows that Malory, Caxtou, and Berners, More, and Tyndal, had not written in vain. Any one who would fain see "The superstitious man,' ," he says in the contrast at its most striking need one passage, " by his good will is an only turn to North's "Plutarch," and atheist, but being scared from thence note the odd patches of early Eliza- by the pangs and gripes of a boiling bethan doggerel that interrupt that conscience, all in a pudder shuffles up wonderful texture of prose. Sophocles, to himself such a God and such a worAristophanes, and the rest of the Greek ship as is most agreeable to remedy his poets, speak their sense with a gener- fear." When he speaks of the minaous expansion in the interests of rhym-tory visit of the king to the House of ing. Solon mounts upon the herald's Commons, he alludes to the gentlestone in the market-place, and sings the elegy that his friends praised beyond measure, in this fashion :

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men of the royal train as "the spawn
and shipwreck of taverns and dicing-
houses." ""
And he works some of his
most surprising effects by raising him-
self on the slow gyrations of the Latin
sentence, to swoop with the greater
impetus upon a blunt Saxon phrase.
Nevertheless, the English sentence, in
the prose works of Milton, is already
well on its way to the technique of Gib-
bon; for Milton respects the laws of
formal syntax as North and Shake-
speare never did, and seeks finality of
expression where the earlier romantics
were fearless of breach or expansion
and the tags of emotion and after-
thought. But the question is, whether
the prose of Shakespeare's age or of
Gibbon's age, the two chief periods of

English translation, is better fitted for | yot, whereby North also breaks the the rendering of masterpieces.

It is a question that admits of but one answer. The eighteenth century has made comparison easy by rehaudling almost all the books that had been translated in the earlier time. It is a lesson in English prose to read North's version of "Plutarch" by the side of Langhorne's. And if, on the one hand, North is no ordinary Elizabethau, on the other it may be pleaded for the fairness of the comparison, that the Langhornes were good scholars and well above the average of the translators of their day. All their decayed metaphors and their foolish conventional expressions, neither good talk nor good script, may be easily matched and beaten by the verbose futilities of their contemporaries.

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continuity of the Greek sentence, to end it on some cadence of feeling or note of color, is well seen in that phrase - "they looke so pittiefully." The barest circumstances of war act themselves over again in his imagination and vivify his style. Timoleon sent help to the Corinthians, says Langhorne, " in small fishing-boats and little skiffs, which watched the opportunity to make their way through the enemy's fleet, when it happened to be separated by a storm." But North sees the situation in detail, and elaborates the key of it, speaking of "the litle fisher boats and crayers, which got into the castell many times, but specially in storme and fowle weather, passing by the gallyes of the barbarous people, that laye scatteringly one from "Some there be," says North, "that another, dispersed abroad by tempest, for the death of a dogge, or their horse, and great billowes of the sea." And are so out of harte, and take such when he is dealing with the vicissitudes thought, that they are ready to go into of human life and of human conduct, the grounde, they looke so pittiefully. his words take an almost unconscious Other some are cleane contrarie, who hue of sympathy and contempt. Perthough they have lost their children, seus, king of Macedonia, was comforgone their friendes, or some gentle-pelled, says Langhorne, "to escape man deare unto them, yet no sorrow-through a narrow window, and to let full worde hath commen from them, himself down by the wall with his wife neither have they done any unseemely and children, who had little experithing; but have passed the rest of their life like wise, constant, and vertuous men. For it is not love but weakness, which breedeth these extreme sorowes, and exceeding feare, in men that are not exercised, nor acquainted to fight against fortune with reason."

enced such fatigue and hardship." North's version is: "He came down in the night by ropes, out of a litle straight windowe upon the walles, and not only him self, but his wife and litle babes, who never knewe before what flying and hardnes ment." The pusillanimity of Perseus, says Langhorne, Langhorne renders the passage in "deprived him even of pity, the only the strain of one who has insured his consolation of which fortune does not child's life. "Some have expressed a rob the distressed." It is like the very great regret upon the death of close of a charity sermon, and almost dogs and horses; whilst others have conceals the obligation that lay on borne the loss of valuable children, Perseus to kill himself, rather than be without any affliction, or at least with-led in a Roman triumph. North does out any indecent sorrow, and have not stitch his words by the side of the passed the rest of their days with calm- Greek, inch for inch, but he feels the ness and composure. It is, certainly, disgrace of the king. By his faint weakness, not affection, which brings heart and fear to die, he says, Perseus infinite troubles and fears upon men, deprived him self of others' pittie who are not fortified by reason against and compassion towards him, being the power of fortune." that only thing which fortune cannot

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The beautiful trick, common in Am-denie and take from the afflicted, and

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