yet nil admirari. But we must not assume that this easy reading was altogether easy writing, as though it cost the writer little or nothing, or consists of the first ebullient and unexamined sallies of an indolent genius. Pope may say,
Horace still charms with graceful negligence,
And without method talks us into sense;[1]
but Pope conveys a wrong impression if he implies that we are not to look in Horace for elaborate, cautious, time-taking art. Such diction as the polished lyrist employs, is not penny-a-liner's work. There are single odes of his, Mr. de Quincey[2] has observed, that "must have cost him a good six weeks' seclusion from the wickedness of Rome." If he sang sweetly in numbers, it was not because the numbers came as a matter of course; nor were the numbers accepted on the shopping principle of first come first served.
To transfer into English the thoughts and style of this elaborate ease, but not easy elaboration, demands much toil as well as skill. Mr. Newman's version of the gentleman farmer's poetry does not bid fair for popularity. Nor does he look for it, but expressly avows himself to despair of finding readers among those who seek solely for amusement, and bespeaks for himself a thoughtful and serious reader, anxious for instruction. He had been assured, he tells us, that it is impossible to induce Englishmen to read poems in new metres. "It may be so," he resignedly admits, as he ushers in his new metres—"but if so, I think it is equally impossible to induce them to read ancient poetry at all—in any metres, or in prose translations. Dickens and Thackeray are, I suppose, more amusing than Tennyson or Wordsworth, and leave to many men of business no time to read Milton, or Thomson, or Virgil, or Æschylus." At the same time, he contends that every educated man who, now that modern European literature has eclipsed the ancient, shrinks from attempting to learn two difficult languages, and to explore their literature, must yet desire to know whatever may be known in English concerning those master-minds of the ancients, who have so affected the European intellect. Hence the value of select translations. Undoubtedly—so allows the present translator—a great poet can never be fully translated from a more powerful into a less powerful language; it is as impossible as to execute in soft wood the copy of a marble statue. "Yet some approximation may be attained, which gives to the reader not only a knowledge of the substance, but a feeling of the form of thought, and a right
- ↑ Essay on Criticism.
- ↑ In confuting a Scottish critic's assumption, that Horace was "notoriously indolent," but "not so Lucretius," the Opium-eater contends, that between the sublime atheist and the graceful man of ton, the difference in amount of labour (without speaking of final merit) would appear to be as between the weaving of a blanket and the weaving of an exquisite cambric. "The curiosa felicitas of Horace in his lyric compositions, the elaborate delicacy of workmanship in his thoughts and in his style, argue a scale of labour that, as against any equal number of lines in Lucretius, would measure itself by months against days." Indeed, he shows that, between the two, the proportions of labour are absolutely incommensurable: in Horace the labour being directly as the power; in Lucretius inversely as the power—Horace's best being obtained by most labour, and the best of Lucretius by least.
