It is to Dryden, however, that the credit must be given of having first drawn this out with careful analysis and examples. Dryden is sometimes called the first great writer, the "father" of modern English prose. He is more certainly the father of English criticism. An excellent prose writer he certainly is, nervous, clear, free yet firm, and a shrewd critic, and his critical pieces are excellent reading. But unfortunately Dryden in his prose as in his verse was hasty and somewhat reckless. The torrent of his genius hurried him on and extricated him only too easily from difficulty. We may not take seriously the gibe of Swift:

every

Read all the prefaces of Dryden, For those our critics much confide in, Though writ at first only for filling To raise the volume's price a shilling. But Dryden confesses himself that he wrote them, as he confesses that he wrote many things, "in haste." Yet, hasty as they are in composition, they are full of sound sense and discriminating judgment.

The fullest analysis of the art of translation will be found in the preface to his rendering of the Epistles of Ovid.

All translations (he there says) I suppose may be reduced to three heads. First, that of Metaphrase, or turning an author word by word and line by line from one language into another.

The second way is that of Paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense, and that too is admitted to be amplified but not altered. An example of this style is Waller's Fourth Aeneid.

The third way is that of Imitation, where the translator (if now we have not lost that name) assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion, and taking only some general hints from the original to run division on the groundwork as he pleases.

The examples given of this method are Cowley's "Odes of Pindar" and the same author's rendering of Horace.

Having distinguished these three modes, Dryden proceeds to discuss their relative advantages and disadvantages. The whole discussion is too long to quote, but the main points may well be given.

Concerning the first of these methods, our master Horace has given us this caution:

Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus
Interpres.

Too faithfully is indeed pedantically. It is almost impossible to translate verbally and well at the same time. Such translation (in the case of poetry) is like dancing on ropes with fettered legs; a man may shun a fall by using caution, but the gracefulness of motion is not to be expected.

Imitation is the other extreme. It is the endeavor of a later poet to write like one who has written before him on the same subject, not to translate his words or be confined to his sense, but only to set him as a pattern and to write as he supposes that author would have done had he lived in our age and in our country.

It may be justified, says Dryden, in the case of Cowley's Pindar-for Dryden, be it noted, seems like Horace to have had the idea that Pindar was a most irregular poet, above or without law, one who

Per audaces nova dithyrambos

Verba devolvit numerisque fertur
Lege solutis;

but not in the case of a regular and intelligible poet like Virgil or Ovid.

To state it fairly, he concludes: "Imitation is the most advantageous way for a translator to show himself, but the greatest wrong which can be done to the memory and reputation of the dead." He then proceeds to advocate the middle course of "Paraphrase" or "translation with latitude."

Like Dryden, we may perhaps dismiss "Imitation" as not really translation at all. At the same time he seems to admit that it is a process which may produce very fair poetry, and it should be noted that Dryden all along is really thinking and writing of poetical translation. Certainly a process tending very much towards "Imi

tation," in which the "latitude," at any rate which the translator has allowed himself, is very large, has given us one of the most remarkable and individual poems of our time, the "Omar yam" of Edward Fitzgerald:

Your golden Eastern lay,
Than which I know no version done
In English more divinely well;
A planet equal to the sun
That cast it, that large infidel
Your Omar.

Mr. Fitzgerald's method avowedly contained a good deal of "Imitation." Chapman's Homer again is really, as Mr. Swinburne's discriminating eulogy on it shows, rather an imitation than a translation. "By the standard," says Mr. Swinburne, "of original work they may be more fairly and more worthily judged than by the standard of translation." We may compare, too, Coleridge and Lamb, who say the same thing. And some of the best reputed and certainly happiest modern versions of the classics into English undoubtedly err on the side of "Imitation," such as Frere's Aristophanes or Morshead's Agamemnon. Indeed a moderate use of "Imitation" is hardly distinguishable from Dryden's Own "Paraphrase;" and it may be noted that this very word "Paraphrase," which Dryden uses to denote the middle course, is ordinarily used to imply something certainly much nearer to imitation than to literal translation, and, indeed, that Dryden himself, as will be seen both by practice and precept, supports such an application.

There can be little doubt that this middle course is the true "golden mean," the true course for the translator to pursue, whether we call it "Paraphrase," which, as we have indicated, may be to modern ears misleading, or “translation with latitude," or, as we have suggested, "liberal" as opposed to literal translation. The question will be as to the amount of latitude permissible. One main consideration which should determine this will, if what was said at the outset be correct, at once appear. The latitude

But another consideration affects this latitude, -a consideration the enforcement of which is perhaps Dryden's chief merit, a consideration which many even of the very best translators have overlooked. It is the preservation of the individual differentiating character of the original. The language of Dryden should here be quoted in extenso:

No man (he says) is capable of translating poetry who, besides a genius to that art, is not a master both of the author's language and of his own; nor must we understand the language only of the poet, but his peculiar turn of thought and expression, which are the characters that distinguish, and as it were individuate,

him from all other writers.

When we are come thus far, it is time to look into ourselves, to conform our genius to his, to give his thoughts either the same turn if our tongue will bear it, or if not to vary but the dress, not to alter or destroy the substance. The like care must be taken of the mere outward ornaments, the words. Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another. There is therefore a liberty to be allowed for the expression, neither is it necessary that words and lines should be confined to the measure of the original. The sense of an author, generally speaking, is to be sacred and inviolable. If the fancy of Ovid be luxuriant, it is his character to be so; and if I retrench it, he is no longer Ovid. It will be replied that he receives advantage by this lopping of is superfluous branches, but I rejoin that a translator has

no such right. When a painter copies from the life, I suppose he has no

privilege to alter his features and lineaments under pretence that his picture will look better, perhaps the face which he has drawn would be more exact if the eye or the nose were altered, but it is his business to make it resemble the original.

What Dryden says well but briefly

here, he has enforced and somewhat amplified in another piece, the preface to what is called the "Second Miscellany," including translations from Theocritus, Lucretius, and Horace. This preface is exceedingly characteristic of Dryden, and contains some criticisms thrown out by the way which are of interest and instruction, beyond the province of translation.

There are many (he says) then, who understand Greek and Latin, and yet are ignorant of their mother tongue. The proprieties and delicacies of the English tongue are known to few. To know them (he adds) requires not only learning but experience of life and good society. Most of our ingenious young men take some cried-up English poet for their model and imitate him.

It appears necessary that a man should be a nice critic in his mother tongue before he attempts to translate a foreign language. Neither is it sufficient that he be able to judge of words and style, but he must be a master of them too; he must perfectly understand his author's tongue and absolutely command his own.

So that to be a thorough translator he must be a thorough poet.1

Neither is it enough to give his author's sense in good English in poetical expressions and in musical numbers; there remains a yet harder task, and it is a secret or which few translators have sufficiently thought. It is the maintaining the character of an author, which distinguishes him from all others and makes him appear that individual poet whom you would interpret.

He then complains that the translators have not preserved the difference between Virgil and Ovid, but have confounded their several talents, and compares them to Sir Peter Lely, who "drew many graceful pictures, but few that were like, because he always studied himself more than those who sat to him." "In such translations," he says, "I can easily distinguish the hand which performed the work, but I cannot distinguish one poet from another."

The sum and substance of Dryden's remarks then is, that the best translation is translation with reasonable 1 Compare Chapman's preface to his translation of the Iliad.

latitude, not mechanically or servilely reproductive, but loyal and faithful both to sense and style, not literal but liberal. And this is the view of all the best translators. It is true that an eminent poet and translator of our time, Mr. Robert Browning, in the preface to his version of the "Agamemnon," holds a brief for literal as against liberal rendering. He maintains that a word-for-word translation gives the best notion of the original, and that if the reader wants embellishment he can put it in for himself. Mr. Browning was a genius, a poet of originality, and a masculine thinker, and anything he advances seriously should be seriously considered. But in this case he put himself out of court. His love, his passion for the great writers of Greece, does credit to his heart rather than his head. His biographer tells us that he refused to admit the pretensions of even the best of them to be masters of style, and wrote his "Agamemnon" partly to expose the folly of those pretensions. In other words, he does not appreciate in them that of which as a poet he was most in need, and which they could have given him; namely, artistic form. The result is an "Agamemnon" reflected in the distorting mirror of Mr. Browning's manner. That there is vigor and fire in his version is of course true, as there must be in everything he touched. But if he says that Aeschylus is obscure, he has given us obscurum per obscuriorem, and the scholar who said that he could just make it out with the aid of the original had reason as well as wit on his side. It is true that a perfectly literal translation may be best for two persons,for him who knows the original, and for him who, without knowing the original, is himself a man of great creative imagination, and can reclothe the dry bones with flesh and blood and beauty. But a translation is not meant only or mainly for such readers, and Mr. Browning is not consistent. He does not give us a really literal version. He throws it into a certain form,

1 Life and Letters of Robert Browning, by Mrs. Sutherland Orr, p. 308.

but it is the form not of Aeschylus or anything resembling Aeschylus, but of Mr. Browning.

Further, against the great authority of Mr. Browning may be quoted the authority, far greater in this matter, of the master to whom he owed so much, Mr. D. G. Rossetti. Mr. Rossetti

was

one of the most practised and unfailing translators of his own or any time. No one probably was ever more highly sensitive to the impression he wished to convey, more passionate in the desire to convey it. Arbitrary, wilful, he, if any ever did, formed his opinions for himself, and they may be trusted to be sincere. What does he say then on this point? In the preface to the first edition of "Dante and his Circle," he writes:

The life-blood of rhythmical translation is this commandment, that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one.

The only true motive for putting poetry into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh nation as far as possible with one more possession of beauty. Poetry not being an exact science, literality of rendering is altogether secondary to this chief law. I say literality, not fidelity, which is by no means the same thing. When literality can be combined with what is this primary condition of success, the translator is fortunate, and must strive his utmost to unite them. When such object can only be attained by paraphrase, that is the only path.

Such is the canon of the translator

of the "Ballad of Dead Ladies." And what Rossetti says of rhythmical translation is of course equally good in principle of all translation of artistic style, whether in poetry or prose.

It is indispensable then in translating, whether from poetry or prose, that the translator should preserve the essentials of the style and character of the original. And to do this it is obvious that he must be careful first of all to consider what in each case these are. The critic, as Dryden saw, must precede and underlie the trans1 And also that of the translator of "Omar Khayyam;" see Edward Fitzgerald's preface to his version of the "Agamemnon."

lator. This is what Mr. Matthew Arnold, a consummate critic, saw so clearly, and brought out so forcibly in those delightful lectures on translating Homer, alluded to already, lectures which every one who aspires to translate should, to use Horace's phrase, "thumb night and day." He begins by laying down four main characteristics of Homer, all four of which are so essential that the translator can neglect no single one; and he then points out how, by neglecting one or more, the various translators of Homer have failed so far in various ways.

Gray felt and

But, as appears in the course of Mr. Matthew Arnold's disquisition, in translating poetry it is not enough to preserve the style; there is yet another consideration of the highest importance, the consideration of the form. This is the point on which, as we saw, time was weak in form, partly because Dryden is weakest, partly because his it was limited. From the large freedom in spirit and expression of the Elizabethans, from their spacious time and its melodious bursts, English poetry gradually declined, nor did it expand again until the dawn of the Romantic movement in the early years of our own century. struggled against the restrictions with the feeling he has well expressed in the "Stanzas to Mr. Bentley." Dryden perhaps did not feel it, for Dryden was Titanic not Olympian, a giant not a god; but he was limited by it. For those who feel it, and in proportion as they feel it, form must always be one of the great problems and difficulties of the translator. It is the superadded difficulty which makes any translation of poetry often so hopeless. It is a barrier set between language and language, between literature and literature. All forms are not congenial or even possible to all languages. Even when the same forms are common to two or more languages, they are common, but with differences. The Latin Hexameter, the Latin Pentameter, the Latin Alcaic and Lyric, even when a great Latin artist attempts to minimize

un

Now form is of the essence of much, nay of most, poetry. Die Kunst ist nur Gestaltung, says Goethe. Art is only the giving of form. Although for certain reasons it is a common and in some ways commendable practice to translate poetry into prose, no one doubts that an enormous loss is at once involved by that process. What then is to be done with form by the translator? The perfect translation doubtedly requires that the form, as well as the style and sense, should be transferred. This is the first and best method. And there are some languages as between which and cases in which this transference can be effected fairly adequately. Form can often be transferred from German into English, and English into German, though the absence of terminations in English and the consequently more monosyllabic character and deficiency in double rhymes of English constitutes difficulty with which every translator is familiar. Again the heroic couplet, with a difference, is common to French and English. Boileau can be translated into the style of Dryden or Pope and vice versa. So again the sonnet borrowed from Italian has been naturalized in England, and Italian sonnets can, allowing for differences of ending and rhyme, be sufficiently rendered into English.

a

But the cases in which the same form and mould are naturally common to two countries and languages are very limited. The next question is, can exotic forms be naturalized? To some extent this can perhaps be done. In the first place many, perhaps most of the forms which seem native and indigenous have originally been imported. It is an experiment always worth trying. The result will often be beautiful, even if it is not absolutely what is aimed at. Tennyson's Alcaics and Hendecasyllabics and Galliambics -be they, as is disputed, syllabically and prosodically exact or not-cannot be said to produce just the same effect and impression as the similar metres

a charm of their own. The exquisite metrification, too little appreciated, of the Jubilee Ode does not even suggest to many ears the rhythm of "Collis o Heliconii," on which it is based, but it is a beautiful addition to English metres. The same may be said of many of Mr. Swinburne's marvellous and brilliant experiments. There is then always much to be said for attempts to translate into the "metre of the original." Such a careful and conscientious volume as Professor Robinson Ellis's renderings of Catullus, done in this manner, not only aids the English reader to form an idea of Catullus, but discovers new possibilities in the English language. But for perfect translation, it is necessary not only that a form be possible, but that it be natural, and, if not familiar, at least so congenial that it may hereafter become familiar. Here again the first canon of translation has its force: "A translation must read like an original." That being so, then it is almost imperative for the translator to adopt a form which is already familiar, and perhaps this rule might be laid down, that no form or metre can be happily used in translaton in which a master in the language of the translation could or would not naturally write an original poem. Translation metres are no more permissible than translation English.

A crucial instance of the question of transference of metres is the Hexameter. Is the Hexameter an English metre, and can it be used to translate the Greek and the Latin Hexameter? The history of the attempts to acclimatize the Hexameter in England is very interesting, but too long to be recited here. A pleasing though not great poem has been written by Longfellow in English Hexameter, and some beautiful, though not quite commandingly or convincingly beautiful, effects have been there attained. Clough used the metre with more strength and better result. But neither Longfellow's nor Clough's' Hexameters, nor again 1 Cp. Clough's "Letters of Parepidemus," No. II.