'It seemed that he leaned very
lightly on the Neb thereof,' says Fuller, 'though weightily enough
in another sense, performing not slightly but solidly what he
undertook.
lightly on the Neb thereof,' says Fuller, 'though weightily enough
in another sense, performing not slightly but solidly what he
undertook.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v04
His
ambition, like the ambition of the chroniclers, was encyclopaedic.
He aimed, not at telling one story, but at telling all stories. He
began at the beginning and carried his work to the very end. It
would be difficult to find a plot that has not its origin, or its
counterpart, in Painter's treasure-house. His earliest stories are
taken from Livy, Herodotus and Aulus Gellius; and, presently, he
seeks his originals in the works of queen Margaret and Boccaccio,
of Bandello and Straparola. Whatever were the origin and substance
## p. 7 (#29) ###############################################
Painter and Fenton
7.
of his tales, be reduced them all to a certain plainness. He had a
ready talent for story-telling; he cultivated a straightforward style;
and, unlike the most of his fellows, he avoided embroidery. His
popularity, therefore, is easily explained: his work was quickly
intelligible to simple folk, and the dramatists had no difficulty in
clothing his dry bones with their romantic imagery. But they
acknowledged their debt with a difference. Shakespeare did not
scruple to borrow the very words of North and Holinshed. He
took no more than the plot from Painter's version of Rhomeo and
Julietta.
Ascham's judgment of Painter and Fenton, foolish and unjust
as it is, seems to have been anticipated by the translator of the
Tragicall Discourses of Bandello. Fenton, indeed, securely defends
himself against the detraction of the puritan. In an epistle
dedicatory, addressed to the lady Mary Sidney, he professes that
his choice of stories was made with the best motive. He had no
other desire than to improve the occasion.
'Albeit, at the firste sighte,' says he, theis discourses maye importe certeine
vanytyes or fonde practises in love, yet I doubte not to bee absolved . . . , seinge
I have rather noted diversitie of examples in sondrye younge men and women,
approvynge sufficientlye the inconvenience happenynge by the pursute of
lycenceous desyer, then affected in anye sorte suche uncerteyne follyes. '
If Bandello incurred censure, what sentence would have been
passed upon Boccaccio? Though his Decameron was involved in
the harsh judgment passed upon Painter's Palace, though some
stories found a place in Turbervile's Tragical Tales, it was not
known to England, save in fragments, until 1620. His Philocopo
was translated in 1567 by H. G. , and, twenty years later, Bartholomew
Young did into English the Amorous Fiammetta, wherein is sette
doune a catalogue of all and singular passions of love and jealosie
incident to an enamoured yong gentleman. Of the other Italian
books, thus early done into English, the most famous was
Castiglione's Il Cortegiano, of which Hoby's version won the
difficult approval of Ascham himself. This book, he said, 'advisedlie
read, and diligentlie folowed, but one yeare at home in England,
would do a yong gentleman more good, I wisse, then three yeares
travell abrode spent in Italie. ' And then came Machiavelli, whose
Arte of Warre, as has been said, was Englished by Peter White-
horne (1560), and of whose Florentine Historie we owe an excellent
version to Thomas Bedingfield (1598). But there is no Prince in
English until 1640, and thus we are confronted by a literary puzzle.
No work had a profounder influence upon the thought and
## p. 8 (#30) ###############################################
8
Translators
policy of Tudor England than Machiavelli's Prince. It was a text-
book to Thomas Cromwell; its precepts were obediently followed
by Cecil and Leicester. The mingled fear and respect in which its
author was held converted him into a monstrous legend. No
writer is more frequently cited, generally with disapproval, than
Machiavelli, and it is always the Prince, which was not translated,
and not the Arte of Warre and the Florentine Historie, which
were, that arouses the ire of Englishmen. A German scholar has
counted more than three hundred references to the Prince in the
works of the dramatists alone, and has traced them to the celebrated
treatise of Gentillet: Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner
et maintenir en bonne paix un royaume. . . contre N. Machiavel
le Florentin (1576), a work translated into English by Simon
Patericke (1602). Thus the hostility of the Elizabethans against
the Florentine was inspired not by the study of the original but by
the violent partisanship of a Huguenot. However, if the accident
which took the Arte of Warre and left the Prince remains unex-
plained, the preference of French to Italian is natural enough.
The truth is, French was the language best understood by the
English of the sixteenth century. Not merely was it the avenue
through which many of the classics passed into our language and
our literature; its familiar use tempted the translators to make
known in England the learning and philosophy of France. The
French books which we find in English are many and of many
kinds. First in importance is Florio's Montaigne (1603), after
which may be placed Danett's Commines (1596), a finished portrait
of the politician, which partly atones for the absence of the Prince'.
The indefatigable Arthur Golding translated the Politicke, Moral
and Martiall Discourses, written in French by Jacques Hurault
(1595), while Henri Estienne, La Noue and La Primaudaye all
found their way into our English speech. And France, also, like
Italy, has her paradox. As we have no Prince before Dacres,
80 we have no Rabelais before Sir Thomas Urquhart. The in-
fluence of Gargantua, now the legendary giant, now Rabelais's own
creation, and of Pantagruel, is plain for all to see. They are among
the commonplaces of our dramatists, and, but for the example of
Rabelais, at least two masters of prose, Nashe and Harvey, would
have written far other than they did. But, though a version of
1 That masterpiece of satiric observation, de la Sale’s Les Quinze Joyes de Mariage,
should surely have found a tranelator in the sixteenth century. And, though the
earliest version noted bears the date 1694, it is a fourth edition, and earlier in style
than the year of its publication. See volume nu of the present work, pp. 89, 90.
## p. 9 (#31) ###############################################
Spanish Works
9
>
Gargantua his Prophecie is entered in the Stationers' registers
(1592), either it was never published or it has disappeared, and
those who studied the style and gospel of Messer Alcofribas must
have studied them in the original.
There remains Spain, united to England in the bonds of enmity,
and then, as now, the land of curiosity and romance. Her influence,
widely felt, was deepest in the realms of discovery and mysticism,
of manners and chivalry. The great masterpieces, Cervantes's Don
Quixote and Exemplary Novels and the Celestina of Fernando de
Rojas, came to England, when the Stewarts sat upon the throne.
But the sixteenth century knew no more popular book, no more
potent influence than The Diall of Princes, translated from Guevara
by Thomas North (1557), in which may be detected the first seeds
of euphuism. Vives taught philosophy, rhetoric and civil law
orally at Oxford, and, by his translated works, to England. The
'spiritual and heavenly exercises ’of Granada brought comfort and
inspiration to the devout; it was through Spain that Amadis and
Palmerin came to England; and many of the bravest adventures
chronicled in Hakluyt's treasury of voyages were sought and found
in the peninsula. The earliest example of the picaresque novel,
Lazarillo de Tormes, was 'drawen out of Spanish' by David Rowland
(1576), and, among many others, Bartholomew Young, already men-
tioned as a scholar in Italian, translated from its native Spanish
the Diana of George Montemayor.
Thus it will be seen that the translators into prose of Elizabeth's
reign were impartial, as they were courageous, in their choice.
They were appalled neither by the difficulty of strange tongues
nor by the freedom of foreign tales. And, various as was their
excuse, their style is uniform. As I have said, they made no
attempt to represent the niceties of the original in their own
tongue. They cut and clipped French and Roman, Spanish and
Greek, to the same form and shape. Some were simpler than
others; some were less cunning in the search after strange words.
William Adlington, for instance, who might have found in Apuleius
an opportunity for all the resources of Elizabethan vigour and
Elizabethan slang, treated his author with a certain reserve. But,
for the most part, the colour of the translations is the colour of
the translator's time and country, and if we study the method
of one or two chosen examples, we shall get an insight into the
method of them all.
The most famous, and, perhaps, the best, of Elizabethan trans-
lations is Sir Thomas North's Lives of the Noble Grecians and
## p. 10 (#32) ##############################################
ΙΟ
Translators
T
Romans (1579). That Shakespeare used it in patient obedience,
borrowing words as well as plots, is its unique distinction. But if
Shakespeare had never laid upon it that hand of Midas, which
transmuted whatever it touched into pure gold, the version had
yet been memorable. It is not Plutarch. In many respects it is
Plutarch's antithesis. North composed a new masterpiece upon
Plutarch's theme. As I have said, he saw Plutarch through
Amyot's eye. And the result is neither Amyot nor Plutarch.
No book, in truth, ever had a stranger history. There came out
of Chaeronea in the first century after Christ a scholar and a
writer who was destined to exert a powerful, if indirect, influence
upon the greatest of our poets. Thus was Boeotia avenged of her
slanderers; thus did a star of intelligence shine over despised
Thebes. The Boeotian wrote a book, which, in due time, fell into
the hands of Jacques Amyot. What Amyot did with the book,
Montaigne, himself a humble debtor, shall proclaim:
‘Je donne avec raison,' he writes,ʻce me semble, la palme d Jacques Amyot,
sur touts nos escrivains françois. . . . Nous, aultres ignorants estions perdus,
si ce livre ne nous eust relevé du bourbier; sa mercy, nous osons à cett'heure
et parler et escrire: les dames en regentent les maistres d'eschole : c'est nostre
breviaire.
E
HE
And Plutarch's good fortune did not rest here. Amyot's book,
which was Montaigne's breviary, came to Thomas North, who
embellished Amyot, as Amyot had embellished Plutarch. North's
Plutarch is as far from Amyot's as Amyot's is from its original.
Not merely the words, but the very spirit is transformed. Change
the names, and you might be reading in North's page of Philip
Sidney and Richard Grenville, of Leicester and of the great lord
Burghley. For North, though he knew little of the classics, was a
master of noble English. He was neither schoolman nor euphuist.
As he freed his language from the fetters which immature scholars
had cast upon it, so he did not lay upon its bones the awkward
chains of a purposed ingenuity. He held a central place in the
history of our speech. He played upon English prose as upon an organ
whose every stop he controlled with an easy confidence. He had
a perfect sense of the weight and colour of words; pathos and
gaiety, familiarity and grandeur resound in his magnificently
cadenced periods. It was his good fortune to handle a language
still fired with the various energy of youth, and he could contrive
the effects of sound and sense which had neither been condemned
nor worn out by the thoughtful pedant. Above all, his style had
a dramatic quality which suggests to the reader a constant move-
$
## p. 11 (#33) ##############################################
Sir Thomas North
II
ment, and the value of which, no doubt, was candidly recognised by
Shakespeare. An example will best illustrate this peculiar skill
of the translator. Here is the prelude to the immortal discourse
of Coriolanus:
:
It was even twy light when he entred the cittie of Antinm, and many
people met him in the streetes, but no man knewe him. So he went directly
to Tullus Aufidius house, and when he came thither, he got him up straight
to the chimney harthe, and sat him downe, and spake not a worde to any man,
his face all muffled over. They of the house spying him, wondered what he
should be, and yet they durst not byd him rise. For, ill-favoredly muffled up
and disguised as he was, yet there appeared a certaine majestie in his coun-
tenance, and in his silence: whereupon they went to Tullus who was at supper,
to tell him of the straunge disguising of this man.
The beauty of this passage is incontestable, and yet it is hard to
explain. There is no striving after effect. There'are no strange
words. If it has a modern air, it is because the words used are of
universal significance, and belong neither to this age nor to that.
And, simple as they are, they breathe the very spirit of romance.
They move and throb with life, as if they were not mere symbols,
but were the very essence of drama and of action. Now turn to
the French of Amyot, and you will discern the same quality sternly
subdued to the finer classicism of the language:
Ainsy s'en alla droict à la maison de Tullus, là où de primsault il entra
jusqu'au fouyer, et illec s'assit sans dire mot à personne, ayant le visage
couvert et la teste affublée : de quoy ceulx de la maison feurent bien esbahis,
et neantmoins ne l'oserent faire leiver: car encores qu'il se cachast, si
recognoissoit on ne sçay quoy de dignité en sa contenance et en son silence,
et s'en allerent dire à Tullus, qui souppoit, ceste estrange façon de faire.
At first sight the economy of the French is apparent. The words
are fewer and are held together by a firmer thread than in the
English version. But North has contrived by a touch here and
there to give a picturesqueness to the scene which neither the
French nor the Greek warrants. For instance, 'they of the house
spying him'introduces a new image. Ceulx de la maison is in
Amyot's version, and corresponds to oi kard thy oixiav. But the
spying is North's own legitimate invention. And again, the words
‘ill-favoredly muffled up and disguised as he was,' which give an
accent to the whole passage, represent no more than a particle in
the Greek (ήν γάρ τι και περί αυτόν κ. τ. λ. ), and are far more
finely dramatic than the French: encores qu'il se cachast. More-
over, the last words of the English passage, the straunge disguising
of this man,' find their excuse neither in French nor in Greek.
There is a commonness of phrase in την ατοπίαν του πράγματος as
## p. 12 (#34) ##############################################
I 2
Translators
1
1
in ceste estrange façon de faire, which finds no echo in North's
splendidly inaccurate rendering. He instantly calls your attention
from the thing to the man, and asks you to look once again at the
strange muffled figure sitting by the hearth. And this, perhaps, is
one of his secrets: an intent always to flatter the eye as well as
the ear, and to reveal in pictures the meaning of his author. At
any rate, there are few who, were the choice given them, would not
rather read Plutarch in the noble English of North than in the re-
strained and sometimes inexpressive Greek of Plutarch. North,
it is true, turned Plutarch's men into heroes of English blood and
bone, but, in separating them thus ruthlessly from their origin, he
endowed them with a warm, pulsing humanity, of which their
author dreamed not.
Philemon Holland was a translator of another kind. His
legendary pen was apt for any enterprise. He was a finished
master utriusque linguae, and so great was his industry that be is
not the hero of one but of half a dozen books. It was not for him
to ask the aid of French or Italian. He went straight to the
ancient texts—Greek or Latin-and brought back with him to his
native English spoils which were legitimately his own. His whole
career was a proper training for the work of his mature years.
Born in 1552, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and,
having studied medicine, settled at Coventry in the practice of his
profession. But humane letters had laid a stern hand upon him, and,
while he cured the poor in charity, he became usher in the Coventry
Grammar School, and gave his life to scholarship and the muses.
Fuller, who had a genius for devising names, called him 'the
Translator Generall in his age,' and it is thus that he will be re-
membered unto the end of time. As I have said, his knowledge of
Greek and Latin was accurate and profound. Still rarer was his
knowledge of English. True, he did not possess the tact and
simplicity of North. He could not produce wonderful effects by
the use of a few plain words. His was the romance not of feeling,
but of decoration. He loved ornament with the ardour of an
ornamental age, and he tricked out his authors with all the re-
sources of Elizabethan English. The concision and reticence of
the classics were as nothing to him. He was ambitious always to
clothe them in the garb which they might have worn had they
been not mere Englishmen, but fantastics of his own age. Like all
his contemporaries, he was eager to excuse his own shortcomings.
'According to this purpose and intent of mine,' he wrote, “I frame
my pen, not to any affected phrase, but to a meane and popular stile.
a
## p. 13 (#35) ##############################################
Philemon Holland
13
Wherein, if I have called againe into use some old words, let it be
attributed to the love of my countrey language: if the sentence be not so
concise, couched and knit togither as the originall, loth I was to be obscure
and darke: have I not Englished every word aptly? ech nation hath
several maners, yea, and tearmes appropriate by themselves. '
His phrase is never affected; his style is neither mean
nor popular; and thus far he speaks the language of conven-
tion. The rest of the passage is the soundest criticism.
Holland had a natural love of the old words and proverbs which
distinguished his country language. His sentences are seldom
concise or knit together, and his translations, though not apt to
their originals, are apt enough to the language of their adoption.
If he seldom echoed the sound of Greek and Latin, he never missed
the sense, nor did he fear a comparison of his own work with the
classical texts. When it was said that his versions were not in
accord with the French or Italian, he knew that he was in the
right of it. 'Like as Alcibiades said to one'-thus he wrote-
'Tráračov oův kaì ăkovoov, i. e. strike hardly (Euribiades) 80 you
heare me speake: even so I say; Find fault and spare not; but
withal, read the original better before you give sentence. ' Let his
own test be applied to him, and he will not fail. Take, for instance,
a famous passage in the fifth book of Livy, which describes the
salvation of the Capitol from the Gauls. Here is the Latin, simple
and straightforward:
Anseres non fefellere, quibus sacris Junonis in summa inopia cibi tamen
abstinebatur. Quae res saluti fuit; namque clangore eorum alarumque
crepitu excitus M. Manlius, qui triennio ante consul fuerat, vir bello egregius,
armis arreptis simul ad arma ceteros ciens vadit.
Holland's English, close as it keeps to the text of Livy, has its own
colour and quality :
*But they could not so escape the geese'-thus it runs—'which were
consecrated unto Juno, and for all the scarcitie of victuals were spared and not
killed up. And this it was that saved them all. For with their gagling and
fluttering of their wings, M. Manlius,who three yeares before had been Consul,
a right hardie and noble warrionr, was awaked. Who taking weapon in hand,
speedily went forth and raised the rest withall to take armes. '
The English has a plainness to which Holland very rarely attains ;
but it is not its plainness nor its perfect harmony that gives it
a character of its own. In the first place,'gagling'arrests the ear so
sharply, that the reader is as wide awake as M. Manlius himself.
And then how admirable in sound and sense is the equivalent of
vir bello egregius'a right hardie and noble warriour! ' It is by
such touches as this and by a feeling of what is musical in prose,
which never deserted him, that Holland produced his effects. His
## p. 14 (#36) ##############################################
14
Translators
3
failing from a pedantic point of view is an excess of ornament.
He was not always content to say what he had to say once. He
delighted to turn a statement about—to put it now in this light,
now in that. 'Jacta est alea,' writes Suetonius. "The dice be thrown,'
says Holland; 'I have set up my rest; come what will of it' His
'
variety and resource are endless. In a single passage he makes
a
Vitellius his own contemporary.
‘Being given most of all to excessive bellie cheere and crueltie,' he writes,
'he devided his repast into three meales every day at least, and sometime into
foure, to wit, Breakefast, Dinner, Supper, and rere-bankets. '
From this, the last drop of Latin austerity is squeezed. And you
can hear Vespasian rioting with his friends when Holland writes :
given exceedingly hee was to skoffs, and those so skurrile and filthy, that he
could not so much as forbeare words of ribaudrie. And yet there be many
right pleasant conceited jests of his extant.
In such terms as these might Rabelais have composed the
lives of the Roman Emperors. Excellent in tone and movement
as is the Suetonius, in some respects his Pliny is Holland's
masterpiece. The difficulty of this enterprise was far greater. If
the obstacle in the way of a familiar rendering might have seemed
insuperable, Holland has easily surmounted it. He has thawed the
frigid original at the fire of his romantic temper. 'Sirrah (quoth
he) remember you are but a shoemaker, and therefore meddle no
higher I advise you than with shoes. ' The mere Sirrah carries
you leagues away from Apelles and the shoemaker whom he bade
look to bis last, and reminds you of the truth that Holland, like
the old painters, put the noblest of his Greeks and Romans into
doublet and hose.
His industry was universally applauded. He composed folios
with as little toil as other men give to the writing of pamphlets.
The two largest of his works are separated by a bare year It was
said that he wrote the whole of Plutarch's Morals with one pen-
a pen which became mythical.
'It seemed that he leaned very
lightly on the Neb thereof,' says Fuller, 'though weightily enough
in another sense, performing not slightly but solidly what he
undertook. ' Fuller, with his usual good sense, puts his finger upon
the truth. It was the solidity of Holland's achievement, not its
extent, which was remarkable. His industry was always well
directed. Few writers have ever kept so consistently at a high
level of excellence. He was no master in the art of sinking. His
narrative never flags; his argument knows no failure. His style
was apt alike for history or reflection. And if he did not accurately
3
## p. 15 (#37) ##############################################
15
Florio's Montaigne
represent in English the prose of Livy and Plutarch, of Suetonius
and Pliny, he left us a set of variations upon ancient motives,
to which we may listen with an independent and unalloyed
pleasure.
John Florio's Montaigne holds a place apart. This translator
had neither the sentiment of North nor the scholarship of
Holland. He brought to his task that which neither the one
nor the other of these masters possessed-a curious fantasy, which
was all his own. He was of the stuff whereof pedants are made.
He delighted in eccentricity and extravagance. His prefaces are
masterpieces of pomp and decoration. Asking, in a breathless
refrain, ‘Madame, now do I flatter you? ' he exhausts the language
of adulation, until at last he falls back upon ecstatic repetitions.
He dedicates the first book of his Montaigne 'to the Right
Honourable my best-best Benefactors, and most-most honored
Ladies, Lucie Countesse of Bedford ; and hir best-most loved-
loving mother Lady Anne Harrington' He plays upon words; he
.
lets sound take the place of sense; he cultivates alliteration, and
pleads guilty to‘a jirke of the French jargon. ' A plain simplicity
is beyond his reach; he fetches his frequent images from afar. He
declares that in his translation he serves but as Vulcan, to hatchet
this Minerva from that Jupiter's bigge braine. ' When he con-
templates his finished work, he strikes an attitude of valiance.
'I sweat, I wept, and I went-on, til now I stand at bay. ' He is
modest only when he thinks of his original. “Him have I set
before you,' says he, 'perhaps without his trappings, and his
'meate without sauce. ' But he keeps a stern face even in the
presence of his 'peerlesse, and in all good gifts unparagonised
Ladies'; he tells his reader that he is still resolute John Florio';
and there is always more of Bobadil in his bearing than of Holo-
fernes.
Upon his version of Montaigne's Essays he exhausted his gifts
and lavished his temperament. He loved words for their own
sakes with a love which Montaigne would not have appreciated, and
which will be easily intelligible to all who know Florio's famous
Worlde of Wordes. Turn where you will in his translation, and you
will find flowers of speech, which grow not in the garden of the
original. 'Je n'y vauls rien,' says Montaigne, and Florio interprets:
'I am nothing worth, and I can never fadge well. ' For souflet Florio
can find nothing simpler than 'a whirret in the car'; for finesses
verbales he gives us 'verbal wily-beguilies,' surely a coinage of his
own. Fade becomes 'wallowish,' and crestez is admirably rendered
6
## p. 16 (#38) ##############################################
16
Translators
6
>
by 'pert and cocket. ' The ‘jirke of the French jargon,' already
mentioned, is evident in such borrowed words as 'tintamare,'
'entrecuidance,' 'friandize' and 'mignardize. ' He is as fond as
Montaigne himself of proverbial phrases. 'I will have them to
give Plutarch a bob upon mine own lips' has precisely the same
sense and sound as the French 'Je veux qu'ils donnent une nazarde
à Plutarque sur mon nez. And, though the metaphor is changed,
‘he hath had the canvas' (as who should say ‘he hath had the
sack') is an excellent match for 'cettuy-cy aura donné du nez à
terre. It will be seen that Florio's method was neither just nor
accurate. He made no attempt to suppress himself as we are told
a good translator should. The reader never forgets that resolute
John Florio' is looking out from the page as well as Montaigne.
He is often inaccurate, and not seldom he misses the point. But
compare his version with Cotton's, and you will not hesitate to
give the palm to Florio. Cotton's translation is a sound and
scholarly piece of work; Florio's is a living book.
The translations in verse made in the age of Elizabeth may not
be compared with the translations in prose. For their inferiority
there are many plain reasons. Only a poet can render in another
tongue the works of a poet, and even a poet cannot ensure a just
interpretation. Between one language and another there are
obstacles of metre and style, of temper and music, which are most
often insuperable. Moreover, in the sixteenth century, the trans-
lating of prose was governed by so wise a convention, that mere
journeymen could attempt a delicate task without risking con-
spicuous failure.
The secret of verse could not be thus easily
imparted, and much that won the approval of its own time appears
to us the saddest of doggerel. The enterprise was yet further
hampered by a vain love of experiment. An age which desired to
leave nothing untried did its best to introduce the hexameter into
English verse, and, as Vergil and Ovid composed their poems in
hexameters, it seemed proper to some translators to follow an
alien example. Ascham began the controversy both by practice
and precept. In his Toxophilus, he gave the world some poor
specimens of the kind. The exercise of some ingenuity may scan
the lines which follow:
>
:
What thing wants quiet and meri rest endures but a smal while.
Both merie songs and good shoting deliteth Apollo.
His precept was better than his practice. He condemned the
English hexameter far more effectively than he wrote it. Carmen
## p. 17 (#39) ##############################################
6
Stanyhurst's Vergil
17
erametrum, said he, doth rather holte and hoble than run
smothly in an English tong. The question, once posed, was hotly
debated. Gabriel Harvey wished no other epitaph than this : 'the
inventor of the English hexameter. Spenser gave Harvey a ready
approval, and Nashe, of course, took the other side. "The Hexa-
meter verse,' says he, with excellent sense, 'I grant to be a gentle-
man of an auncient house (so is many an English begger); yet this
clyme of ours hee cannot thrive in. Time has proved the justice
of Nashe's opinion. The experiments of Spenser and Harvey were
long since forgotten, and those who turned Vergil and Ovid into
their own measures are remembered only as curiosities.
By far the bravest of them was Richard Stanyhurst, who, in
1582, published the First Foure Bookes of Virgil his Aeneis
translated intoo English heroical verse. ' Whether he wrote in
prose or verse, he surpassed in a fantastic eccentricity the vainest
of his contemporaries. Never was there a stranger mixture of
pedantry and slang than is to be found in his work. His criticism
is his own and expressed in his own terms. The verses of Ennius,
he says, 'savoure soomwhat nappy of thee spigget,' and he classes
him with Horace, Juvenal and Persius among a 'rablement of
cheate Poëtes. ' Vergil, on the other hand, for his peerelesse style,
and matchlesse stuffe doth beare thee prick and price among al
thee Roman Poëts. ' He declares that, if any hold that Phaer's
version lightened his enterprise, they are altogeather in a wrong
box. ' He offers to go over these books again and give them a new
livery, which shall neither ‘jet with Mr Phaer his badges, ne yeet
bee clad with this apparaile wherewith at this present they coom
furth atyred. ' Indeed, he makes light of his labour. Phaer took
fifteen days to translate the fourth book. He ‘huddled up' his in
ten. And for this he asks no praise but pardon, adding, character-
istically, that 'forelittring bitches whelp blynd puppies. ' But,
though he wasted not his time, he did nothing at haphazard. He
expounds his theory of the hexameter with great care, and gives
every syllable its proper quantity, varying its length according to
its terinination and to the consonant or vowel which follows it.
His labour is lost. Even if his theory were admissible, it would
not save his version from ridicule.
Yet, absurd as it is, Stanyhurst's Vergil is worth examination.
It is a work which owes no debt to anything save to its author's
perverted ingenuity. Orthography, metre, vocabulary are each
unique. Stanyhurst aimed, not merely at a new prosody, but at
a new language. He invented a set of onomatopoeic symbols,
2
E. L. IV.
CH. 1.
## p. 18 (#40) ##############################################
18
Translators
which you cannot match elsewhere in literature. What can we
make of such lines as these :
Theese flaws theyre cabbans wyth stur snar jarrye doe ransack.
Now doe they rayse gastly lyghtnings, now grislye reboundings
Of ruffe raffe roaring, mens harts with terror agrysing,
With peale meale ramping, with thwick thwack sturdelye thundring?
Not content with these mimicries of sound, he invented what-
ever new words seemed useful for his purpose. 'Mutterus humming,'
'gredelye bibled,''smacklye bebasse thee,' 'boucherous hatchet-
these are a few of his false coins. And he used the slang which
was modern in his day for the interpretation of Vergil without
scruple or shame. Imagine Dido, queen of Carthage, asking in
,
fury: shall a stranger give me the slampam'! With an equal
contempt of fitness he renders pollutum hospitium by 'Paltock's
Inn,' and so pleased is he with 'Scarboro warning,' for the blow
before the word, that he uses it with no better excuse than
incautam, and, in another place, he is guilty of Scarboro scrabbling'
without any excuse at all. As little did he hesitate to mar the
epic dignity of Vergil with the popular proverbs of every day,
such as 'in straw there lurketh some pad,' or 'as wild as a March
hare. ' And, being bound in the chains of the hexameter, he
distorts the order of the words out of all semblance to English,
until his version is wholly unintelligible without the friendly
aid of the Latin. Yet his monstrous incongruities pleased the
taste of his time. Harvey is proud to have been imitated by
' learned Mr Stanyhurst'; and Phaer fell, that this thrasonicall
huffe snuffe' might rise. Richard Carew mentions him in the
same breath with Sir Philip Sidney, and Francis Meres cites him
without disapproval. But critics there were who saw through his
pretence. Nashe, above all, rated him at a proper value; and
Barnabe Rich did him ample justice in few words : 'Among other
Fictions,' says Rich, ‘be tooke upon him to translate Virgill, aud
stript him out of a Velvet gowne into a Fooles coate, out of a Latin
Heroicall verse into an English riffe raffe. ' The question of the
English hexameter has received a final answer, and, for us, Stany-
hurst is but an episode in the history of literature. And what an
episode! His very gravity makes him the more ludicrous, and his
only pupils are Charles Cotton, Thomas Bridges, captain Alexander
Radcliffe and the other writers of burlesque.
To Stanyhurst, Thomas Phaer was an insignificant competitor.
But he had enjoyed twenty years of fame before Stanyhurst's
44
a
a
a
## p. 19 (#41) ##############################################
>
Phaer's Vergil
19
version was printed, and, though momentarily depressed, he
survived the absurd fashion of the hexameter in the esteem of his
contemporaries. Webbe praises his 'most gallant verse,' and
chooses him as an example to prove the meetnesse of our speeche
to receive the best forme of poetry. ' The proof is deficient.
Phaer was no poet, and very ill-skilled to present the beauty of
Vergil in English verse. As Anthony à Wood says, he was 'a
person of a mutable mind,' who addicted his muse to many studies.
Educated at Oxford, he studied law, wrote a work Of the Nature
of Writts and presently adopted medicine as his profession. In
brief, translation was his pastime, and, doubtless, his knowledge
of the healing art was profounder than his knowledge of English
or Latin. His Vergil, composed in lines of fourteen syllables, like
Golding's Ovid and Chapman's Homer, never rises above a facile
mediocrity. The translator constantly sacrifices taste and sense to
the demands of rime, and mixes in a kind of familiar jingle the
easy stateliness of the original. Even in the rare passages which
display some movement and energy, he descends suddenly upon
the wrong word, and sets the reader on his guard. Here, for
instance, is his rendering of the celebrated lines, Monstrum
horrendum ingens, etc. , in the fourth book:
A monster gastly great, for every plume her carkas beares
Lyke number leering eies she hath, like number harckning eares,
Lyke number tounges and mouthes she waggs, a wondrous thing to speake;
At midnight fourth she flies, and under shade her sounde doth squeake.
If the first two lines might pass muster, no word can be said in
defence of the others. With the word 'squeake,' Phaer descends
into bathos, and the best that can be said for him is that, while
Stanyhurst always lets his reason go, Phaer is sometimes sane.
The best loved of all the ancient poets was Ovid, whose popu-
larity is attested by many translations of varying worth. The first
version in point of date is The Fable of Ovid treting of Narcissus,
translated oute of Latin into Englysh Mytre, with a moral therein
to, very pleasante to rede. This was followed, five years later, by
the first edition of Arthur Golding's work (1565), of which more
will be said presently. In 1567, George Turbervile printed The
Heroycall Epistles of the learned Poet Publius Ovidius Naso,
and, in 1577, there came from the press two versions of Ovid his
Invective against Ibis, one of which is the work of Thomas Under-
downe, to whom, also, we owe the Aethiopian Historie of Heliodorus.
Marlowe turned the Elegies into rimed couplets, and George
Chapman, in 1595, published Ovids Banquet of Sauce, a coronet
a
2-2
## p. 20 (#42) ##############################################
20
Translators
4
for his Mistress Philosophy, and his amorous Zodiac. De
Tristibus was Englished by Churchyard, and Francis Beaumont
gave proof of his skill in a lively version of Salmacis and Herma-
phroditus. The cause of Ovid's popularity is not far to seek.
He was an efficient guide to the Greek and Roman mythologies,
and he furnished the poets with theme, sentiment and allusion. Of
all the translations, by far the most famous was Arthur Golding's
rendering of the Metamorphoses. The first edition (1565) contained
but four books. In 1567, the work was complete. It is described
on the title-page as 'a worke very pleasaunt and delectable,' and
a stern couplet warns the reader against frivolity:
With skill, heede, and judgement, thys work must be red,
For els to the reader it stands in small stead.
Golding's motive, in truth, was above suspicion. His work was
'pleasaunt and delectable' by accident. He wished to improve the
occasion before all things. In a long epistle, addressed to Robert
earl of Leicester, he clearly sets forth his purpose. There is no
fable of Ovid which does not make for edification. For instance :
In Phaeton's fable untoo syght the Poet dooth expresse
The natures of ambition blynd, and youthful wilfulnesse.
And a little ingenuity will interpret every book in a sense most
profitable to the reader. That Ovid and his heroes were paynims
he confesses with regret, and takes heart in the reflection that they
may all be reduced too ryght of Christian law. ' In the same spirit,
he hopes that the simple sort of reader will not be offended when
he sees the heathen names of feigned gods in the book, and assures
him that every living wight, high and low, rich and poor, master and
slave, maid and wife, simple and brave, young and old, good and bad,
wise and foolish, lout and learned man, shall see his whole estate,
words, thoughts and deeds in this mirror. It is a bold claim of
universality, which Ovid himself would not have made. But it
was in tune with the temper of the age, and, doubtless, added to
the popularity of the work.
The chief characteristic of the translation is its evenness. It
never falls below or rises above a certain level. The craftsman-
ship is neither slovenly nor distinguished. The narrative flows
through its easy channel without the smallest shock of interruption.
In other words, the style is rapid, fluent and monotonous. The
author is never a poet and never a shirk. You may read his
mellifluous lines with something of the same simple pleasure which
the original gives you. Strength and energy are beyond Golding's
## p. 21 (#43) ##############################################
Golding and Chapman
21
compass, and he wisely chose a poet to translate who made no
demand upon the qualities he did not possess. He chose a metre,
too, very apt for continuous narrative—the long line of fourteen
syllables, and it is not strange that his contemporaries bestowed
upon him their high approval. Puttenham paid him no more than
his due when he described him as 'in translation very cleare and
very faithfully answering his author's intent. He won the rare
and difficult praise of Thomas Nashe, and he was honoured by
Shakespeare, who did not disdain to borrow of his verses. The
lines which follow will recall to everyone a celebrated passage in
The Tempest:
Ye Ayres and windes: ye Elves of Hills, of Brookes, of Woods alone,
Of standing Lakes, and of the Night approche ye everychone.
And Golding was by no means a man of one book. He turned
Latin and French into English with equal facility. Had it not been
for Holland, he might justly have been called the ‘Translator
Generall in his age. ' A friend of Sir Philip Sidney, he completed
that poet's translation of De Mornay's Woorke concerning the
trewnesse of the Christian Religion. To him we owe our earliest
and best version of Caesar's Gallic War (1565), besides The
abridgemente of the Histories of Trogus Pompeius, gathered
and written in the Latin tung by the famous Historiographer
Justin (1570), several works translated from Calvin and the
Politicke, Moral and Martial Discourses written in French by
M. Jacques Hurault (1595). In brief, he tried his hand at many
enterprises and failed in none, and Webbe's panegyric might still
stand for his epitaph :
For which Gentleman surely our Country hath greatly to gyve God
thankes: as for him which hath taken infinite paynes without ceasing, travelling
as yet indefatigably, and is addicted without society by his continuall laboure
to profit this nation and speeche in all kind of good learning.
Though Ovid and Vergil were the favourites, the other poets
were by no means neglected. Another reign saw the completion
of Chapman's vigorous and faithful Homer, which Pope should
never have displaced, but he published a translation of seven
books of the Iliad in 1598, and a word must be said here of his
splendid achievement. To do full justice to Chapman's work a
continuous reading is necessary. It shines less brightly in isolated
passages than in its whole surface, various and burnished, like the
shield of Achilles. It is a poet's echo of a poet-loud and bold.
Justly may the same indulgence be granted Chapman which he
would claim for Homer : he 'must not bee read for a few lynes
## p. 22 (#44) ##############################################
22
Translators
2
with leaves turned over caprichiously in dismembred fractions, but
throughout, the whole drift, weight, and height of his workes set
before the apprensive eyes of his judge. ' Then shall we perceive
the true merit of Chapman's masterpiece. From end to end it
gives proof of an abounding life, a quenchless energy. There is a
grandeur and spirit in Chapman’s rendering, not unworthy the
original, ‘of all bookes extant in all kinds the first and best. ' The
long, swinging line of fourteen syllables, chosen for the Niad, is
the fairest representative of Homer's majestic hexameters, and it
is matter for regret that Chapman preferred the heroical distich
in his rendering of the Odyssey. Moreover, Chapman claimed an
advantage over his fellows in that he translated his author without
a French or Latin intermediary. His knowledge of Greek was not
impeccable. Errors due to ignorance or haste are not infrequent,
nor need they cause us surprise, if it be true, as he asserts, that he
translated the last twelve books in fifteen weeks. As little need
they incur our censure. If Chapman, the scholar, sometimes
nodded, Chapman, the poet, was ever awake, and his version of
Homer will ever remain one among the masterpieces of his age
and country.
In his prefaces, he vindicates both Homer and himself from the
detraction of enemies. Admitting proudly that his manner of
writing is ‘farre fecht, and, as it were, beyond sea,' he defends, as
well he may, his varietie of new wordes. ' Ifómy countrey language
were an usurer,' says he, ‘hee would thanke me for enriching him. '
Chaucer had more new words than any man since him need devise,
and therefore for currant wits to crie from standing braines, like a broode of
Frogs from a ditch, to have the ceaseless flowing river of our tongue turnde
into their Frogpoole, is a song farre from their arrogation of sweetnes.
And, ready as he was, in his ‘harmlesse and pious studie,'
to esteem the policies and wisdoms of his enemies at no more
value than a musty nut, he was readier still to champion the fame
of Homer, especially against the ‘soule-blind Scaliger' and his
'palsied diminuation. ' He did not belittle the beauty of the
Aeneid, but, with perfect truth, declared that Homer's poems
were 'writ from a free furie,' Vergil's out of a 'courtly, laborious,
and altogether imitatorie spirit. ' In brief, he was loyal alike in
commentary and interpretation, and, as he hailed Homer "the
Prince of Poets,' so he himself may justly be styled the prince
of poetical translators. But even he had his forerunners. In
1579 Thomas Purfoote gave to English what he calls The Crounc of
Homer's Works, or The Battel of the Frogges and Myce, and, in
8
## p. 23 (#45) ##############################################
23
a
Sylvester and Harington
1581, Arthur Hall, M. P. for Grantham, translated ten books of the
Iliad from the French. Of Horace, Thomas Drant Englished both
Satires and Epistles; Marlowe turned a book of Lucan into blank
verse; and Timothy Kendall's Flowres of Epigrammes (1575 and
1577) were gathered out of sundry authors and particularly from
Martial. The deficiency in Greek drama, as has been said, was made
up for by many versions of Seneca, and there was no reason why
an Englishman of the sixteenth century, who had not the ancient
tongues, should have been deprived of a fair knowledge of the
Greek and Latin poets.
Of modern poets there is not so long a tale to tell.
ambition, like the ambition of the chroniclers, was encyclopaedic.
He aimed, not at telling one story, but at telling all stories. He
began at the beginning and carried his work to the very end. It
would be difficult to find a plot that has not its origin, or its
counterpart, in Painter's treasure-house. His earliest stories are
taken from Livy, Herodotus and Aulus Gellius; and, presently, he
seeks his originals in the works of queen Margaret and Boccaccio,
of Bandello and Straparola. Whatever were the origin and substance
## p. 7 (#29) ###############################################
Painter and Fenton
7.
of his tales, be reduced them all to a certain plainness. He had a
ready talent for story-telling; he cultivated a straightforward style;
and, unlike the most of his fellows, he avoided embroidery. His
popularity, therefore, is easily explained: his work was quickly
intelligible to simple folk, and the dramatists had no difficulty in
clothing his dry bones with their romantic imagery. But they
acknowledged their debt with a difference. Shakespeare did not
scruple to borrow the very words of North and Holinshed. He
took no more than the plot from Painter's version of Rhomeo and
Julietta.
Ascham's judgment of Painter and Fenton, foolish and unjust
as it is, seems to have been anticipated by the translator of the
Tragicall Discourses of Bandello. Fenton, indeed, securely defends
himself against the detraction of the puritan. In an epistle
dedicatory, addressed to the lady Mary Sidney, he professes that
his choice of stories was made with the best motive. He had no
other desire than to improve the occasion.
'Albeit, at the firste sighte,' says he, theis discourses maye importe certeine
vanytyes or fonde practises in love, yet I doubte not to bee absolved . . . , seinge
I have rather noted diversitie of examples in sondrye younge men and women,
approvynge sufficientlye the inconvenience happenynge by the pursute of
lycenceous desyer, then affected in anye sorte suche uncerteyne follyes. '
If Bandello incurred censure, what sentence would have been
passed upon Boccaccio? Though his Decameron was involved in
the harsh judgment passed upon Painter's Palace, though some
stories found a place in Turbervile's Tragical Tales, it was not
known to England, save in fragments, until 1620. His Philocopo
was translated in 1567 by H. G. , and, twenty years later, Bartholomew
Young did into English the Amorous Fiammetta, wherein is sette
doune a catalogue of all and singular passions of love and jealosie
incident to an enamoured yong gentleman. Of the other Italian
books, thus early done into English, the most famous was
Castiglione's Il Cortegiano, of which Hoby's version won the
difficult approval of Ascham himself. This book, he said, 'advisedlie
read, and diligentlie folowed, but one yeare at home in England,
would do a yong gentleman more good, I wisse, then three yeares
travell abrode spent in Italie. ' And then came Machiavelli, whose
Arte of Warre, as has been said, was Englished by Peter White-
horne (1560), and of whose Florentine Historie we owe an excellent
version to Thomas Bedingfield (1598). But there is no Prince in
English until 1640, and thus we are confronted by a literary puzzle.
No work had a profounder influence upon the thought and
## p. 8 (#30) ###############################################
8
Translators
policy of Tudor England than Machiavelli's Prince. It was a text-
book to Thomas Cromwell; its precepts were obediently followed
by Cecil and Leicester. The mingled fear and respect in which its
author was held converted him into a monstrous legend. No
writer is more frequently cited, generally with disapproval, than
Machiavelli, and it is always the Prince, which was not translated,
and not the Arte of Warre and the Florentine Historie, which
were, that arouses the ire of Englishmen. A German scholar has
counted more than three hundred references to the Prince in the
works of the dramatists alone, and has traced them to the celebrated
treatise of Gentillet: Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner
et maintenir en bonne paix un royaume. . . contre N. Machiavel
le Florentin (1576), a work translated into English by Simon
Patericke (1602). Thus the hostility of the Elizabethans against
the Florentine was inspired not by the study of the original but by
the violent partisanship of a Huguenot. However, if the accident
which took the Arte of Warre and left the Prince remains unex-
plained, the preference of French to Italian is natural enough.
The truth is, French was the language best understood by the
English of the sixteenth century. Not merely was it the avenue
through which many of the classics passed into our language and
our literature; its familiar use tempted the translators to make
known in England the learning and philosophy of France. The
French books which we find in English are many and of many
kinds. First in importance is Florio's Montaigne (1603), after
which may be placed Danett's Commines (1596), a finished portrait
of the politician, which partly atones for the absence of the Prince'.
The indefatigable Arthur Golding translated the Politicke, Moral
and Martiall Discourses, written in French by Jacques Hurault
(1595), while Henri Estienne, La Noue and La Primaudaye all
found their way into our English speech. And France, also, like
Italy, has her paradox. As we have no Prince before Dacres,
80 we have no Rabelais before Sir Thomas Urquhart. The in-
fluence of Gargantua, now the legendary giant, now Rabelais's own
creation, and of Pantagruel, is plain for all to see. They are among
the commonplaces of our dramatists, and, but for the example of
Rabelais, at least two masters of prose, Nashe and Harvey, would
have written far other than they did. But, though a version of
1 That masterpiece of satiric observation, de la Sale’s Les Quinze Joyes de Mariage,
should surely have found a tranelator in the sixteenth century. And, though the
earliest version noted bears the date 1694, it is a fourth edition, and earlier in style
than the year of its publication. See volume nu of the present work, pp. 89, 90.
## p. 9 (#31) ###############################################
Spanish Works
9
>
Gargantua his Prophecie is entered in the Stationers' registers
(1592), either it was never published or it has disappeared, and
those who studied the style and gospel of Messer Alcofribas must
have studied them in the original.
There remains Spain, united to England in the bonds of enmity,
and then, as now, the land of curiosity and romance. Her influence,
widely felt, was deepest in the realms of discovery and mysticism,
of manners and chivalry. The great masterpieces, Cervantes's Don
Quixote and Exemplary Novels and the Celestina of Fernando de
Rojas, came to England, when the Stewarts sat upon the throne.
But the sixteenth century knew no more popular book, no more
potent influence than The Diall of Princes, translated from Guevara
by Thomas North (1557), in which may be detected the first seeds
of euphuism. Vives taught philosophy, rhetoric and civil law
orally at Oxford, and, by his translated works, to England. The
'spiritual and heavenly exercises ’of Granada brought comfort and
inspiration to the devout; it was through Spain that Amadis and
Palmerin came to England; and many of the bravest adventures
chronicled in Hakluyt's treasury of voyages were sought and found
in the peninsula. The earliest example of the picaresque novel,
Lazarillo de Tormes, was 'drawen out of Spanish' by David Rowland
(1576), and, among many others, Bartholomew Young, already men-
tioned as a scholar in Italian, translated from its native Spanish
the Diana of George Montemayor.
Thus it will be seen that the translators into prose of Elizabeth's
reign were impartial, as they were courageous, in their choice.
They were appalled neither by the difficulty of strange tongues
nor by the freedom of foreign tales. And, various as was their
excuse, their style is uniform. As I have said, they made no
attempt to represent the niceties of the original in their own
tongue. They cut and clipped French and Roman, Spanish and
Greek, to the same form and shape. Some were simpler than
others; some were less cunning in the search after strange words.
William Adlington, for instance, who might have found in Apuleius
an opportunity for all the resources of Elizabethan vigour and
Elizabethan slang, treated his author with a certain reserve. But,
for the most part, the colour of the translations is the colour of
the translator's time and country, and if we study the method
of one or two chosen examples, we shall get an insight into the
method of them all.
The most famous, and, perhaps, the best, of Elizabethan trans-
lations is Sir Thomas North's Lives of the Noble Grecians and
## p. 10 (#32) ##############################################
ΙΟ
Translators
T
Romans (1579). That Shakespeare used it in patient obedience,
borrowing words as well as plots, is its unique distinction. But if
Shakespeare had never laid upon it that hand of Midas, which
transmuted whatever it touched into pure gold, the version had
yet been memorable. It is not Plutarch. In many respects it is
Plutarch's antithesis. North composed a new masterpiece upon
Plutarch's theme. As I have said, he saw Plutarch through
Amyot's eye. And the result is neither Amyot nor Plutarch.
No book, in truth, ever had a stranger history. There came out
of Chaeronea in the first century after Christ a scholar and a
writer who was destined to exert a powerful, if indirect, influence
upon the greatest of our poets. Thus was Boeotia avenged of her
slanderers; thus did a star of intelligence shine over despised
Thebes. The Boeotian wrote a book, which, in due time, fell into
the hands of Jacques Amyot. What Amyot did with the book,
Montaigne, himself a humble debtor, shall proclaim:
‘Je donne avec raison,' he writes,ʻce me semble, la palme d Jacques Amyot,
sur touts nos escrivains françois. . . . Nous, aultres ignorants estions perdus,
si ce livre ne nous eust relevé du bourbier; sa mercy, nous osons à cett'heure
et parler et escrire: les dames en regentent les maistres d'eschole : c'est nostre
breviaire.
E
HE
And Plutarch's good fortune did not rest here. Amyot's book,
which was Montaigne's breviary, came to Thomas North, who
embellished Amyot, as Amyot had embellished Plutarch. North's
Plutarch is as far from Amyot's as Amyot's is from its original.
Not merely the words, but the very spirit is transformed. Change
the names, and you might be reading in North's page of Philip
Sidney and Richard Grenville, of Leicester and of the great lord
Burghley. For North, though he knew little of the classics, was a
master of noble English. He was neither schoolman nor euphuist.
As he freed his language from the fetters which immature scholars
had cast upon it, so he did not lay upon its bones the awkward
chains of a purposed ingenuity. He held a central place in the
history of our speech. He played upon English prose as upon an organ
whose every stop he controlled with an easy confidence. He had
a perfect sense of the weight and colour of words; pathos and
gaiety, familiarity and grandeur resound in his magnificently
cadenced periods. It was his good fortune to handle a language
still fired with the various energy of youth, and he could contrive
the effects of sound and sense which had neither been condemned
nor worn out by the thoughtful pedant. Above all, his style had
a dramatic quality which suggests to the reader a constant move-
$
## p. 11 (#33) ##############################################
Sir Thomas North
II
ment, and the value of which, no doubt, was candidly recognised by
Shakespeare. An example will best illustrate this peculiar skill
of the translator. Here is the prelude to the immortal discourse
of Coriolanus:
:
It was even twy light when he entred the cittie of Antinm, and many
people met him in the streetes, but no man knewe him. So he went directly
to Tullus Aufidius house, and when he came thither, he got him up straight
to the chimney harthe, and sat him downe, and spake not a worde to any man,
his face all muffled over. They of the house spying him, wondered what he
should be, and yet they durst not byd him rise. For, ill-favoredly muffled up
and disguised as he was, yet there appeared a certaine majestie in his coun-
tenance, and in his silence: whereupon they went to Tullus who was at supper,
to tell him of the straunge disguising of this man.
The beauty of this passage is incontestable, and yet it is hard to
explain. There is no striving after effect. There'are no strange
words. If it has a modern air, it is because the words used are of
universal significance, and belong neither to this age nor to that.
And, simple as they are, they breathe the very spirit of romance.
They move and throb with life, as if they were not mere symbols,
but were the very essence of drama and of action. Now turn to
the French of Amyot, and you will discern the same quality sternly
subdued to the finer classicism of the language:
Ainsy s'en alla droict à la maison de Tullus, là où de primsault il entra
jusqu'au fouyer, et illec s'assit sans dire mot à personne, ayant le visage
couvert et la teste affublée : de quoy ceulx de la maison feurent bien esbahis,
et neantmoins ne l'oserent faire leiver: car encores qu'il se cachast, si
recognoissoit on ne sçay quoy de dignité en sa contenance et en son silence,
et s'en allerent dire à Tullus, qui souppoit, ceste estrange façon de faire.
At first sight the economy of the French is apparent. The words
are fewer and are held together by a firmer thread than in the
English version. But North has contrived by a touch here and
there to give a picturesqueness to the scene which neither the
French nor the Greek warrants. For instance, 'they of the house
spying him'introduces a new image. Ceulx de la maison is in
Amyot's version, and corresponds to oi kard thy oixiav. But the
spying is North's own legitimate invention. And again, the words
‘ill-favoredly muffled up and disguised as he was,' which give an
accent to the whole passage, represent no more than a particle in
the Greek (ήν γάρ τι και περί αυτόν κ. τ. λ. ), and are far more
finely dramatic than the French: encores qu'il se cachast. More-
over, the last words of the English passage, the straunge disguising
of this man,' find their excuse neither in French nor in Greek.
There is a commonness of phrase in την ατοπίαν του πράγματος as
## p. 12 (#34) ##############################################
I 2
Translators
1
1
in ceste estrange façon de faire, which finds no echo in North's
splendidly inaccurate rendering. He instantly calls your attention
from the thing to the man, and asks you to look once again at the
strange muffled figure sitting by the hearth. And this, perhaps, is
one of his secrets: an intent always to flatter the eye as well as
the ear, and to reveal in pictures the meaning of his author. At
any rate, there are few who, were the choice given them, would not
rather read Plutarch in the noble English of North than in the re-
strained and sometimes inexpressive Greek of Plutarch. North,
it is true, turned Plutarch's men into heroes of English blood and
bone, but, in separating them thus ruthlessly from their origin, he
endowed them with a warm, pulsing humanity, of which their
author dreamed not.
Philemon Holland was a translator of another kind. His
legendary pen was apt for any enterprise. He was a finished
master utriusque linguae, and so great was his industry that be is
not the hero of one but of half a dozen books. It was not for him
to ask the aid of French or Italian. He went straight to the
ancient texts—Greek or Latin-and brought back with him to his
native English spoils which were legitimately his own. His whole
career was a proper training for the work of his mature years.
Born in 1552, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and,
having studied medicine, settled at Coventry in the practice of his
profession. But humane letters had laid a stern hand upon him, and,
while he cured the poor in charity, he became usher in the Coventry
Grammar School, and gave his life to scholarship and the muses.
Fuller, who had a genius for devising names, called him 'the
Translator Generall in his age,' and it is thus that he will be re-
membered unto the end of time. As I have said, his knowledge of
Greek and Latin was accurate and profound. Still rarer was his
knowledge of English. True, he did not possess the tact and
simplicity of North. He could not produce wonderful effects by
the use of a few plain words. His was the romance not of feeling,
but of decoration. He loved ornament with the ardour of an
ornamental age, and he tricked out his authors with all the re-
sources of Elizabethan English. The concision and reticence of
the classics were as nothing to him. He was ambitious always to
clothe them in the garb which they might have worn had they
been not mere Englishmen, but fantastics of his own age. Like all
his contemporaries, he was eager to excuse his own shortcomings.
'According to this purpose and intent of mine,' he wrote, “I frame
my pen, not to any affected phrase, but to a meane and popular stile.
a
## p. 13 (#35) ##############################################
Philemon Holland
13
Wherein, if I have called againe into use some old words, let it be
attributed to the love of my countrey language: if the sentence be not so
concise, couched and knit togither as the originall, loth I was to be obscure
and darke: have I not Englished every word aptly? ech nation hath
several maners, yea, and tearmes appropriate by themselves. '
His phrase is never affected; his style is neither mean
nor popular; and thus far he speaks the language of conven-
tion. The rest of the passage is the soundest criticism.
Holland had a natural love of the old words and proverbs which
distinguished his country language. His sentences are seldom
concise or knit together, and his translations, though not apt to
their originals, are apt enough to the language of their adoption.
If he seldom echoed the sound of Greek and Latin, he never missed
the sense, nor did he fear a comparison of his own work with the
classical texts. When it was said that his versions were not in
accord with the French or Italian, he knew that he was in the
right of it. 'Like as Alcibiades said to one'-thus he wrote-
'Tráračov oův kaì ăkovoov, i. e. strike hardly (Euribiades) 80 you
heare me speake: even so I say; Find fault and spare not; but
withal, read the original better before you give sentence. ' Let his
own test be applied to him, and he will not fail. Take, for instance,
a famous passage in the fifth book of Livy, which describes the
salvation of the Capitol from the Gauls. Here is the Latin, simple
and straightforward:
Anseres non fefellere, quibus sacris Junonis in summa inopia cibi tamen
abstinebatur. Quae res saluti fuit; namque clangore eorum alarumque
crepitu excitus M. Manlius, qui triennio ante consul fuerat, vir bello egregius,
armis arreptis simul ad arma ceteros ciens vadit.
Holland's English, close as it keeps to the text of Livy, has its own
colour and quality :
*But they could not so escape the geese'-thus it runs—'which were
consecrated unto Juno, and for all the scarcitie of victuals were spared and not
killed up. And this it was that saved them all. For with their gagling and
fluttering of their wings, M. Manlius,who three yeares before had been Consul,
a right hardie and noble warrionr, was awaked. Who taking weapon in hand,
speedily went forth and raised the rest withall to take armes. '
The English has a plainness to which Holland very rarely attains ;
but it is not its plainness nor its perfect harmony that gives it
a character of its own. In the first place,'gagling'arrests the ear so
sharply, that the reader is as wide awake as M. Manlius himself.
And then how admirable in sound and sense is the equivalent of
vir bello egregius'a right hardie and noble warriour! ' It is by
such touches as this and by a feeling of what is musical in prose,
which never deserted him, that Holland produced his effects. His
## p. 14 (#36) ##############################################
14
Translators
3
failing from a pedantic point of view is an excess of ornament.
He was not always content to say what he had to say once. He
delighted to turn a statement about—to put it now in this light,
now in that. 'Jacta est alea,' writes Suetonius. "The dice be thrown,'
says Holland; 'I have set up my rest; come what will of it' His
'
variety and resource are endless. In a single passage he makes
a
Vitellius his own contemporary.
‘Being given most of all to excessive bellie cheere and crueltie,' he writes,
'he devided his repast into three meales every day at least, and sometime into
foure, to wit, Breakefast, Dinner, Supper, and rere-bankets. '
From this, the last drop of Latin austerity is squeezed. And you
can hear Vespasian rioting with his friends when Holland writes :
given exceedingly hee was to skoffs, and those so skurrile and filthy, that he
could not so much as forbeare words of ribaudrie. And yet there be many
right pleasant conceited jests of his extant.
In such terms as these might Rabelais have composed the
lives of the Roman Emperors. Excellent in tone and movement
as is the Suetonius, in some respects his Pliny is Holland's
masterpiece. The difficulty of this enterprise was far greater. If
the obstacle in the way of a familiar rendering might have seemed
insuperable, Holland has easily surmounted it. He has thawed the
frigid original at the fire of his romantic temper. 'Sirrah (quoth
he) remember you are but a shoemaker, and therefore meddle no
higher I advise you than with shoes. ' The mere Sirrah carries
you leagues away from Apelles and the shoemaker whom he bade
look to bis last, and reminds you of the truth that Holland, like
the old painters, put the noblest of his Greeks and Romans into
doublet and hose.
His industry was universally applauded. He composed folios
with as little toil as other men give to the writing of pamphlets.
The two largest of his works are separated by a bare year It was
said that he wrote the whole of Plutarch's Morals with one pen-
a pen which became mythical.
'It seemed that he leaned very
lightly on the Neb thereof,' says Fuller, 'though weightily enough
in another sense, performing not slightly but solidly what he
undertook. ' Fuller, with his usual good sense, puts his finger upon
the truth. It was the solidity of Holland's achievement, not its
extent, which was remarkable. His industry was always well
directed. Few writers have ever kept so consistently at a high
level of excellence. He was no master in the art of sinking. His
narrative never flags; his argument knows no failure. His style
was apt alike for history or reflection. And if he did not accurately
3
## p. 15 (#37) ##############################################
15
Florio's Montaigne
represent in English the prose of Livy and Plutarch, of Suetonius
and Pliny, he left us a set of variations upon ancient motives,
to which we may listen with an independent and unalloyed
pleasure.
John Florio's Montaigne holds a place apart. This translator
had neither the sentiment of North nor the scholarship of
Holland. He brought to his task that which neither the one
nor the other of these masters possessed-a curious fantasy, which
was all his own. He was of the stuff whereof pedants are made.
He delighted in eccentricity and extravagance. His prefaces are
masterpieces of pomp and decoration. Asking, in a breathless
refrain, ‘Madame, now do I flatter you? ' he exhausts the language
of adulation, until at last he falls back upon ecstatic repetitions.
He dedicates the first book of his Montaigne 'to the Right
Honourable my best-best Benefactors, and most-most honored
Ladies, Lucie Countesse of Bedford ; and hir best-most loved-
loving mother Lady Anne Harrington' He plays upon words; he
.
lets sound take the place of sense; he cultivates alliteration, and
pleads guilty to‘a jirke of the French jargon. ' A plain simplicity
is beyond his reach; he fetches his frequent images from afar. He
declares that in his translation he serves but as Vulcan, to hatchet
this Minerva from that Jupiter's bigge braine. ' When he con-
templates his finished work, he strikes an attitude of valiance.
'I sweat, I wept, and I went-on, til now I stand at bay. ' He is
modest only when he thinks of his original. “Him have I set
before you,' says he, 'perhaps without his trappings, and his
'meate without sauce. ' But he keeps a stern face even in the
presence of his 'peerlesse, and in all good gifts unparagonised
Ladies'; he tells his reader that he is still resolute John Florio';
and there is always more of Bobadil in his bearing than of Holo-
fernes.
Upon his version of Montaigne's Essays he exhausted his gifts
and lavished his temperament. He loved words for their own
sakes with a love which Montaigne would not have appreciated, and
which will be easily intelligible to all who know Florio's famous
Worlde of Wordes. Turn where you will in his translation, and you
will find flowers of speech, which grow not in the garden of the
original. 'Je n'y vauls rien,' says Montaigne, and Florio interprets:
'I am nothing worth, and I can never fadge well. ' For souflet Florio
can find nothing simpler than 'a whirret in the car'; for finesses
verbales he gives us 'verbal wily-beguilies,' surely a coinage of his
own. Fade becomes 'wallowish,' and crestez is admirably rendered
6
## p. 16 (#38) ##############################################
16
Translators
6
>
by 'pert and cocket. ' The ‘jirke of the French jargon,' already
mentioned, is evident in such borrowed words as 'tintamare,'
'entrecuidance,' 'friandize' and 'mignardize. ' He is as fond as
Montaigne himself of proverbial phrases. 'I will have them to
give Plutarch a bob upon mine own lips' has precisely the same
sense and sound as the French 'Je veux qu'ils donnent une nazarde
à Plutarque sur mon nez. And, though the metaphor is changed,
‘he hath had the canvas' (as who should say ‘he hath had the
sack') is an excellent match for 'cettuy-cy aura donné du nez à
terre. It will be seen that Florio's method was neither just nor
accurate. He made no attempt to suppress himself as we are told
a good translator should. The reader never forgets that resolute
John Florio' is looking out from the page as well as Montaigne.
He is often inaccurate, and not seldom he misses the point. But
compare his version with Cotton's, and you will not hesitate to
give the palm to Florio. Cotton's translation is a sound and
scholarly piece of work; Florio's is a living book.
The translations in verse made in the age of Elizabeth may not
be compared with the translations in prose. For their inferiority
there are many plain reasons. Only a poet can render in another
tongue the works of a poet, and even a poet cannot ensure a just
interpretation. Between one language and another there are
obstacles of metre and style, of temper and music, which are most
often insuperable. Moreover, in the sixteenth century, the trans-
lating of prose was governed by so wise a convention, that mere
journeymen could attempt a delicate task without risking con-
spicuous failure.
The secret of verse could not be thus easily
imparted, and much that won the approval of its own time appears
to us the saddest of doggerel. The enterprise was yet further
hampered by a vain love of experiment. An age which desired to
leave nothing untried did its best to introduce the hexameter into
English verse, and, as Vergil and Ovid composed their poems in
hexameters, it seemed proper to some translators to follow an
alien example. Ascham began the controversy both by practice
and precept. In his Toxophilus, he gave the world some poor
specimens of the kind. The exercise of some ingenuity may scan
the lines which follow:
>
:
What thing wants quiet and meri rest endures but a smal while.
Both merie songs and good shoting deliteth Apollo.
His precept was better than his practice. He condemned the
English hexameter far more effectively than he wrote it. Carmen
## p. 17 (#39) ##############################################
6
Stanyhurst's Vergil
17
erametrum, said he, doth rather holte and hoble than run
smothly in an English tong. The question, once posed, was hotly
debated. Gabriel Harvey wished no other epitaph than this : 'the
inventor of the English hexameter. Spenser gave Harvey a ready
approval, and Nashe, of course, took the other side. "The Hexa-
meter verse,' says he, with excellent sense, 'I grant to be a gentle-
man of an auncient house (so is many an English begger); yet this
clyme of ours hee cannot thrive in. Time has proved the justice
of Nashe's opinion. The experiments of Spenser and Harvey were
long since forgotten, and those who turned Vergil and Ovid into
their own measures are remembered only as curiosities.
By far the bravest of them was Richard Stanyhurst, who, in
1582, published the First Foure Bookes of Virgil his Aeneis
translated intoo English heroical verse. ' Whether he wrote in
prose or verse, he surpassed in a fantastic eccentricity the vainest
of his contemporaries. Never was there a stranger mixture of
pedantry and slang than is to be found in his work. His criticism
is his own and expressed in his own terms. The verses of Ennius,
he says, 'savoure soomwhat nappy of thee spigget,' and he classes
him with Horace, Juvenal and Persius among a 'rablement of
cheate Poëtes. ' Vergil, on the other hand, for his peerelesse style,
and matchlesse stuffe doth beare thee prick and price among al
thee Roman Poëts. ' He declares that, if any hold that Phaer's
version lightened his enterprise, they are altogeather in a wrong
box. ' He offers to go over these books again and give them a new
livery, which shall neither ‘jet with Mr Phaer his badges, ne yeet
bee clad with this apparaile wherewith at this present they coom
furth atyred. ' Indeed, he makes light of his labour. Phaer took
fifteen days to translate the fourth book. He ‘huddled up' his in
ten. And for this he asks no praise but pardon, adding, character-
istically, that 'forelittring bitches whelp blynd puppies. ' But,
though he wasted not his time, he did nothing at haphazard. He
expounds his theory of the hexameter with great care, and gives
every syllable its proper quantity, varying its length according to
its terinination and to the consonant or vowel which follows it.
His labour is lost. Even if his theory were admissible, it would
not save his version from ridicule.
Yet, absurd as it is, Stanyhurst's Vergil is worth examination.
It is a work which owes no debt to anything save to its author's
perverted ingenuity. Orthography, metre, vocabulary are each
unique. Stanyhurst aimed, not merely at a new prosody, but at
a new language. He invented a set of onomatopoeic symbols,
2
E. L. IV.
CH. 1.
## p. 18 (#40) ##############################################
18
Translators
which you cannot match elsewhere in literature. What can we
make of such lines as these :
Theese flaws theyre cabbans wyth stur snar jarrye doe ransack.
Now doe they rayse gastly lyghtnings, now grislye reboundings
Of ruffe raffe roaring, mens harts with terror agrysing,
With peale meale ramping, with thwick thwack sturdelye thundring?
Not content with these mimicries of sound, he invented what-
ever new words seemed useful for his purpose. 'Mutterus humming,'
'gredelye bibled,''smacklye bebasse thee,' 'boucherous hatchet-
these are a few of his false coins. And he used the slang which
was modern in his day for the interpretation of Vergil without
scruple or shame. Imagine Dido, queen of Carthage, asking in
,
fury: shall a stranger give me the slampam'! With an equal
contempt of fitness he renders pollutum hospitium by 'Paltock's
Inn,' and so pleased is he with 'Scarboro warning,' for the blow
before the word, that he uses it with no better excuse than
incautam, and, in another place, he is guilty of Scarboro scrabbling'
without any excuse at all. As little did he hesitate to mar the
epic dignity of Vergil with the popular proverbs of every day,
such as 'in straw there lurketh some pad,' or 'as wild as a March
hare. ' And, being bound in the chains of the hexameter, he
distorts the order of the words out of all semblance to English,
until his version is wholly unintelligible without the friendly
aid of the Latin. Yet his monstrous incongruities pleased the
taste of his time. Harvey is proud to have been imitated by
' learned Mr Stanyhurst'; and Phaer fell, that this thrasonicall
huffe snuffe' might rise. Richard Carew mentions him in the
same breath with Sir Philip Sidney, and Francis Meres cites him
without disapproval. But critics there were who saw through his
pretence. Nashe, above all, rated him at a proper value; and
Barnabe Rich did him ample justice in few words : 'Among other
Fictions,' says Rich, ‘be tooke upon him to translate Virgill, aud
stript him out of a Velvet gowne into a Fooles coate, out of a Latin
Heroicall verse into an English riffe raffe. ' The question of the
English hexameter has received a final answer, and, for us, Stany-
hurst is but an episode in the history of literature. And what an
episode! His very gravity makes him the more ludicrous, and his
only pupils are Charles Cotton, Thomas Bridges, captain Alexander
Radcliffe and the other writers of burlesque.
To Stanyhurst, Thomas Phaer was an insignificant competitor.
But he had enjoyed twenty years of fame before Stanyhurst's
44
a
a
a
## p. 19 (#41) ##############################################
>
Phaer's Vergil
19
version was printed, and, though momentarily depressed, he
survived the absurd fashion of the hexameter in the esteem of his
contemporaries. Webbe praises his 'most gallant verse,' and
chooses him as an example to prove the meetnesse of our speeche
to receive the best forme of poetry. ' The proof is deficient.
Phaer was no poet, and very ill-skilled to present the beauty of
Vergil in English verse. As Anthony à Wood says, he was 'a
person of a mutable mind,' who addicted his muse to many studies.
Educated at Oxford, he studied law, wrote a work Of the Nature
of Writts and presently adopted medicine as his profession. In
brief, translation was his pastime, and, doubtless, his knowledge
of the healing art was profounder than his knowledge of English
or Latin. His Vergil, composed in lines of fourteen syllables, like
Golding's Ovid and Chapman's Homer, never rises above a facile
mediocrity. The translator constantly sacrifices taste and sense to
the demands of rime, and mixes in a kind of familiar jingle the
easy stateliness of the original. Even in the rare passages which
display some movement and energy, he descends suddenly upon
the wrong word, and sets the reader on his guard. Here, for
instance, is his rendering of the celebrated lines, Monstrum
horrendum ingens, etc. , in the fourth book:
A monster gastly great, for every plume her carkas beares
Lyke number leering eies she hath, like number harckning eares,
Lyke number tounges and mouthes she waggs, a wondrous thing to speake;
At midnight fourth she flies, and under shade her sounde doth squeake.
If the first two lines might pass muster, no word can be said in
defence of the others. With the word 'squeake,' Phaer descends
into bathos, and the best that can be said for him is that, while
Stanyhurst always lets his reason go, Phaer is sometimes sane.
The best loved of all the ancient poets was Ovid, whose popu-
larity is attested by many translations of varying worth. The first
version in point of date is The Fable of Ovid treting of Narcissus,
translated oute of Latin into Englysh Mytre, with a moral therein
to, very pleasante to rede. This was followed, five years later, by
the first edition of Arthur Golding's work (1565), of which more
will be said presently. In 1567, George Turbervile printed The
Heroycall Epistles of the learned Poet Publius Ovidius Naso,
and, in 1577, there came from the press two versions of Ovid his
Invective against Ibis, one of which is the work of Thomas Under-
downe, to whom, also, we owe the Aethiopian Historie of Heliodorus.
Marlowe turned the Elegies into rimed couplets, and George
Chapman, in 1595, published Ovids Banquet of Sauce, a coronet
a
2-2
## p. 20 (#42) ##############################################
20
Translators
4
for his Mistress Philosophy, and his amorous Zodiac. De
Tristibus was Englished by Churchyard, and Francis Beaumont
gave proof of his skill in a lively version of Salmacis and Herma-
phroditus. The cause of Ovid's popularity is not far to seek.
He was an efficient guide to the Greek and Roman mythologies,
and he furnished the poets with theme, sentiment and allusion. Of
all the translations, by far the most famous was Arthur Golding's
rendering of the Metamorphoses. The first edition (1565) contained
but four books. In 1567, the work was complete. It is described
on the title-page as 'a worke very pleasaunt and delectable,' and
a stern couplet warns the reader against frivolity:
With skill, heede, and judgement, thys work must be red,
For els to the reader it stands in small stead.
Golding's motive, in truth, was above suspicion. His work was
'pleasaunt and delectable' by accident. He wished to improve the
occasion before all things. In a long epistle, addressed to Robert
earl of Leicester, he clearly sets forth his purpose. There is no
fable of Ovid which does not make for edification. For instance :
In Phaeton's fable untoo syght the Poet dooth expresse
The natures of ambition blynd, and youthful wilfulnesse.
And a little ingenuity will interpret every book in a sense most
profitable to the reader. That Ovid and his heroes were paynims
he confesses with regret, and takes heart in the reflection that they
may all be reduced too ryght of Christian law. ' In the same spirit,
he hopes that the simple sort of reader will not be offended when
he sees the heathen names of feigned gods in the book, and assures
him that every living wight, high and low, rich and poor, master and
slave, maid and wife, simple and brave, young and old, good and bad,
wise and foolish, lout and learned man, shall see his whole estate,
words, thoughts and deeds in this mirror. It is a bold claim of
universality, which Ovid himself would not have made. But it
was in tune with the temper of the age, and, doubtless, added to
the popularity of the work.
The chief characteristic of the translation is its evenness. It
never falls below or rises above a certain level. The craftsman-
ship is neither slovenly nor distinguished. The narrative flows
through its easy channel without the smallest shock of interruption.
In other words, the style is rapid, fluent and monotonous. The
author is never a poet and never a shirk. You may read his
mellifluous lines with something of the same simple pleasure which
the original gives you. Strength and energy are beyond Golding's
## p. 21 (#43) ##############################################
Golding and Chapman
21
compass, and he wisely chose a poet to translate who made no
demand upon the qualities he did not possess. He chose a metre,
too, very apt for continuous narrative—the long line of fourteen
syllables, and it is not strange that his contemporaries bestowed
upon him their high approval. Puttenham paid him no more than
his due when he described him as 'in translation very cleare and
very faithfully answering his author's intent. He won the rare
and difficult praise of Thomas Nashe, and he was honoured by
Shakespeare, who did not disdain to borrow of his verses. The
lines which follow will recall to everyone a celebrated passage in
The Tempest:
Ye Ayres and windes: ye Elves of Hills, of Brookes, of Woods alone,
Of standing Lakes, and of the Night approche ye everychone.
And Golding was by no means a man of one book. He turned
Latin and French into English with equal facility. Had it not been
for Holland, he might justly have been called the ‘Translator
Generall in his age. ' A friend of Sir Philip Sidney, he completed
that poet's translation of De Mornay's Woorke concerning the
trewnesse of the Christian Religion. To him we owe our earliest
and best version of Caesar's Gallic War (1565), besides The
abridgemente of the Histories of Trogus Pompeius, gathered
and written in the Latin tung by the famous Historiographer
Justin (1570), several works translated from Calvin and the
Politicke, Moral and Martial Discourses written in French by
M. Jacques Hurault (1595). In brief, he tried his hand at many
enterprises and failed in none, and Webbe's panegyric might still
stand for his epitaph :
For which Gentleman surely our Country hath greatly to gyve God
thankes: as for him which hath taken infinite paynes without ceasing, travelling
as yet indefatigably, and is addicted without society by his continuall laboure
to profit this nation and speeche in all kind of good learning.
Though Ovid and Vergil were the favourites, the other poets
were by no means neglected. Another reign saw the completion
of Chapman's vigorous and faithful Homer, which Pope should
never have displaced, but he published a translation of seven
books of the Iliad in 1598, and a word must be said here of his
splendid achievement. To do full justice to Chapman's work a
continuous reading is necessary. It shines less brightly in isolated
passages than in its whole surface, various and burnished, like the
shield of Achilles. It is a poet's echo of a poet-loud and bold.
Justly may the same indulgence be granted Chapman which he
would claim for Homer : he 'must not bee read for a few lynes
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Translators
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with leaves turned over caprichiously in dismembred fractions, but
throughout, the whole drift, weight, and height of his workes set
before the apprensive eyes of his judge. ' Then shall we perceive
the true merit of Chapman's masterpiece. From end to end it
gives proof of an abounding life, a quenchless energy. There is a
grandeur and spirit in Chapman’s rendering, not unworthy the
original, ‘of all bookes extant in all kinds the first and best. ' The
long, swinging line of fourteen syllables, chosen for the Niad, is
the fairest representative of Homer's majestic hexameters, and it
is matter for regret that Chapman preferred the heroical distich
in his rendering of the Odyssey. Moreover, Chapman claimed an
advantage over his fellows in that he translated his author without
a French or Latin intermediary. His knowledge of Greek was not
impeccable. Errors due to ignorance or haste are not infrequent,
nor need they cause us surprise, if it be true, as he asserts, that he
translated the last twelve books in fifteen weeks. As little need
they incur our censure. If Chapman, the scholar, sometimes
nodded, Chapman, the poet, was ever awake, and his version of
Homer will ever remain one among the masterpieces of his age
and country.
In his prefaces, he vindicates both Homer and himself from the
detraction of enemies. Admitting proudly that his manner of
writing is ‘farre fecht, and, as it were, beyond sea,' he defends, as
well he may, his varietie of new wordes. ' Ifómy countrey language
were an usurer,' says he, ‘hee would thanke me for enriching him. '
Chaucer had more new words than any man since him need devise,
and therefore for currant wits to crie from standing braines, like a broode of
Frogs from a ditch, to have the ceaseless flowing river of our tongue turnde
into their Frogpoole, is a song farre from their arrogation of sweetnes.
And, ready as he was, in his ‘harmlesse and pious studie,'
to esteem the policies and wisdoms of his enemies at no more
value than a musty nut, he was readier still to champion the fame
of Homer, especially against the ‘soule-blind Scaliger' and his
'palsied diminuation. ' He did not belittle the beauty of the
Aeneid, but, with perfect truth, declared that Homer's poems
were 'writ from a free furie,' Vergil's out of a 'courtly, laborious,
and altogether imitatorie spirit. ' In brief, he was loyal alike in
commentary and interpretation, and, as he hailed Homer "the
Prince of Poets,' so he himself may justly be styled the prince
of poetical translators. But even he had his forerunners. In
1579 Thomas Purfoote gave to English what he calls The Crounc of
Homer's Works, or The Battel of the Frogges and Myce, and, in
8
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23
a
Sylvester and Harington
1581, Arthur Hall, M. P. for Grantham, translated ten books of the
Iliad from the French. Of Horace, Thomas Drant Englished both
Satires and Epistles; Marlowe turned a book of Lucan into blank
verse; and Timothy Kendall's Flowres of Epigrammes (1575 and
1577) were gathered out of sundry authors and particularly from
Martial. The deficiency in Greek drama, as has been said, was made
up for by many versions of Seneca, and there was no reason why
an Englishman of the sixteenth century, who had not the ancient
tongues, should have been deprived of a fair knowledge of the
Greek and Latin poets.
Of modern poets there is not so long a tale to tell.
