there is a psychological peculiarity in Mr. Newman's habit of mind—an exaggerated development of what Wordsworth alludes to when he says,
And less
Than other intellects had mine been used
To lean upon extrinsic circumstance
Of record or tradition,[1]
which very characteristic goes to prove the spiritual, or if you will the ideal, the transcendental, the unpractical warp, crossing the woof of his logical intellect; the whole web presenting a strangely involved, intertwisted, tangled appearance, which may make wise men marvel, and good men lament, and rash men rail.
As a scholar, on the other hand, there is nothing surprising in Mr. Newman's selection of Horace[2] for translation and elucidation. The Professor of Latin at University College has a classical repute, in itself an ample warranty for this enterprise. Qualified for the labour the professor is allowed to be: the only curiosity is, that the man should have fixed on Horace, as if it were a labour of love. Insomuch that were we called upon to select a whole septuagint of translators, to render Horatian lyrics in becoming English, we should probably complete the tale of threescore and ten (beginning with names such as Boo Gualtier and Father Prout), without once thinking to include this ripe scholar but miso-epicurean.
For how uncongenial this unresting, careworn, serious spirit, with the carpe diem votary of pleasure as it passes, of folly as it flies! Admirable as the Horatian poems are in refinement and in beauty of expression, they are rather, as Müller says, a pleasant pastime, or exercise of skill, than an outpouring (as in Alcaeus and the Æolic lyrics) of the inmost feelings of the soul, or an expression of deep and vehement passion. Mr. de Quincey somewhere observes, that what was in fact a disease of the mind, Horace (like an English poet of similar calibre) mistook for a feature of preternatural strength, this disease being the incapacity of self-determination towards any paramount or abiding principles: so that while others are chained and coerced by certain fixed aspects of truth, and their efforts overruled accordingly in one uniform line of direction, he, the brilliant poet, fluttered on butterfly wings to the right and to the left, obeying no guidance but that of some instant and fugitive sensibility to some momentary phasis of beauty. Hence, indeed, those discrepancies in the writings of Horace which have occasioned so much critical labour to commentator and scholiast; for we are to consider his occasional effusions (and such they almost all are)—so a contributor to "Guesses at Truth" remarks[3]—as
- ↑ Prelude. Book VIII.
- ↑ Is the same selection by two other recent translators (Professor Sewell and Mr. Whyte Melville) a sign of the times?
- ↑ "The heart has often been compared to the needle for its constancy: has it ever been so for its variations? Yet were any man to keep minutes of his feelings from youth to age, what a table of variations would they present—how numerous, how diverse, haw strange! This is just what we find in the writings of Horace. … Their very contradictions prove their truth."—Guesses at Truth. First Series.
