Amyot's book,
which was Montaigne's breviary, came to Thomas North, who
embellished Amyot, as Amyot had embellished Plutarch.
which was Montaigne's breviary, came to Thomas North, who
embellished Amyot, as Amyot had embellished Plutarch.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v04
Holland justly describes his
enterprise as a conquest. He'would wish rather and endeavour,'
says he in the preface to his translation of Pliny, 'by all means to
triumph now over the Romans in subduing their literature under the
dent of the English pen, in requitall of the conquest some time over
this Island, atchieved by the edge of their sword. ' And, harbouring
this sentiment of conquest, the translators were strongly impelled
also by the desire to benefit their native land and its rulers.
They had learned from the classics deep lessons of policy and
statecraft, which they would impart to their queen and her magis-
trates. Their achievement was, indeed, the real renascence of
England, the authentic recovery of the ancient spirit. That they
were keenly conscious of what they were doing is clear from their
dedications and their prefaces. The choice of the great personages
to whom they presented their works was made with a deliberate
purpose. When North and Holland asked the queen’s protection
for their masterpieces, it was in the full hope and knowledge that
Plutarch and Livy would prove wise guides unto her footsteps.
Nor was it with the mere intent of flattery or applause that
other translators offered the fruits of their toil to Cecil,
Leicester and Christopher Hatton. They wished to give counsel
where they deemed it useful. Thomas Wilson, for instance,
the translator of Demosthenes, thought that every good subject
should compare the present and the past; that, when he heard
of Athens and the Athenians, he should remember England and
Englishmen; that, in brief, he should learn from the doings of his
E. L. IV.
1
CH, I.
## p. 2 (#24) ###############################################
2
Translators
3
elders how to deal with his own affairs. John Brende, who
Englished Quintus Curtius, in presenting his book to the duke
of Northumberland, thus explained his purpose:
* There is required in all Magistrates,' says he, 'both a faith and feare in
God, and also an outward pollicie in worldly thinges 1: whereof, as the one is
to be learned by the Scriptures, so the other must chiefly be gathered by
reading of histories. '
Wherever you turn, you find the same admirable excuse; and, as
the translators gave to England well nigh the whole wisdom of the
ancients, they provided not merely grave instruction for kings
and statesmen, but plots for the dramatists, and entertainment for
lettered ease.
As their interest lay chiefly in the matter of their originals,
they professed little desire to illustrate a theory of translation.
They had neither the knowledge nor the sense of criticism, which
should measure accurately the niceties of their craft. They set
about their work in a spirit of sublime unconsciousness. In their
many prefaces, and they delighted in prefaces, there is scarce a
hint that they are pursuing a delicate art. The most of them
were indifferent to, or ignorant of, Horace's maxim :
Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus
Interpres,
though, for the best of reasons, they followed the poet's liberal
counsel. They would not have understood the scientific care with
which Dryden presently distinguished metaphrase and paraphrase.
Chapman, it is true, knew the end at which he aimed, and, in the
preface to his Homer, lucidly describes what should be the ambition
of the translator:
“The work of a skilfull and worthy translator,' says he, “is to observe the
sentences, figures and formes of speech proposed in his author, his true sence
and height, and to adorn them with figures and formes of oration fitted to the
originall in the same tongue to which they are translated. '
And one W. R. , in an eloquent epistle, addressed to the translator,
wittily defends Lodge against the charge that he had not parrot-like
spoken Seneca's own words and lost himself in a Latin echo. But
both Chapman and Lodge's defender wrote when the art of trans-
lation had been pursued for two generations and was falling, not
unnaturally, into a habit of self-criticism. In general, the trans-
lators of the heyday were accurate neither in word nor in shape.
1
i Geffraie Fenton showed his approval of this sentiment by borrowing it word for
word in his preface to the Tragicall Discourses.
## p. 3 (#25) ###############################################
The Craft of Translation
3
They followed the text as remotely as they imitated the style of
their originals.
I have said that North and his colleagues were inspired by a
love of adventure. They resembled the pioneers of our empire also
in a splendid lack of scruple. As the early travellers cheerfully
seized
upon the treasure of others, painfully acquired, and turned
to their own profit the discoveries of Spaniard and Portuguese, so
the translators cared not by what intermediary they approached
the Greek and Latin texts. Very few were scholars in the sense
that Philemon Holland was a scholar. Like Shakespeare, the
most had little Latin and less Greek. When Thomas Nicolls,
citizen and goldsmith of London, set out to translate Thucydides,
he went no further than the French of Claude de Seyssel, and
Claude de Seyssel made his version not from the Greek but from
the Latin of Laurentius Valla. Between Thomas North and Plutarch
stands the gracious figure of Jacques Amyot. Thomas Underdowne
derived his Aethiopian Historie from the Latin of Stanislaus
Warschewiczki, a Polish country gentleman, who translated the
Greek of Heliodorus, rure paterno, in 1551. Thus Adlington, in
interpreting The Golden Ass, was misled by Lasne Dore of
Guillaume Michel. Thus Aristotle came into our speech through the
French of Leroy, and even Bandello crossed from Italy to England
by the courtly bridge of Belleforest.
The result of this careless method is that the translations of
Elizabeth's age (in prose, at any rate) are unsoiled by pedantry.
They do not smell of the lamp; they suggest nowhere the laborious
use of the pedestrian dictionary. They call up a vision of
space and courage and the open air. That they are inappropriate
seems no fault in them. If they replace the restraint of the classics
with the colour and sentiment of romance, it is because the trans-
lators have done their work thoroughly. They have turned the
authors of Greece and Rome not merely into a new language but
into the feeling of another age and clime. In other words, their
books carry with them the lively air of brave originals. And this
natural impress is the deeper, because translation was not an
exclusive craft, pursued in the narrow spirit of mere scholarship.
Many of the most ingenious craftsmen were men of the world,
who made their versions to beguile a leisure snatched from the
conduct of affairs. Sir Thomas Hoby, who gave us The Courtier,
was an ambassador; Danett, who put Commines in an English
dress, practised the art of diplomacy loftily exemplified in
his original; with a fine sense of propriety, Peter Whitehorne
1-2
## p. 4 (#26) ###############################################
4
Translators
>
>
translated Machiavelli's Arte of Warre when he was in Barbary
with the emperor, 'at the siege and winning of Calibbia’; Thomas
North himself played his part as a magistrate in the policies of the
larger world. Even those who, like Holland and Golding, adopted
translating as a profession practised a style all untrammelled by
the schools. The reproach of Dryden, that “there are many who
understand Greek and Latin, and yet are ignorant of their mother-
tongue,' might not be brought with justice against them. Few
men of the century knew Greek and Latin. Many were masters
of English, which they wrote with an eloquence and elaboration
rarely surpassed.
The translators’ range of discovery was wide. They brought
into the ken of Englishmen the vast continent of classical literature.
Only a few provinces escaped their search, and, of the few, one was
the province which should have had the quickest attraction for them.
It is not a little strange that the golden age of our drama should
have seen the translation of but one Greek play. Of Aeschylus and
Sophocles there is nothing. A free paraphrase of the Phoenissae,
presented at Gray's Inn under the name of Jocasta in 1566 by
George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh, and made not from
the Greek but from the Italian of Ludovico Dolce, is the Eliza-
bethans' only and fragile link with Euripides. Plautus fared not
much better: we have no more than the Menaechmi of William
Warner (1595), which may have given Shakespeare a hint for The
Comedy of Errors. More popular were Seneca and Terence-
Seneca, no doubt, for his ingenious maxims, and Terence because he
was appointed to be read in schools. Of the historians, both Greek
and Latin, there is a long list. An unknown translator, who
hides his name under the initials B. R. , and who may be Barnabe
Rich, published two books of Herodotus in 1584, and Thomas
Nicolls, already mentioned, gave to England a complete Thucydides
in 1550. Of Livy, we have a fragment by Antony Cope (1544),
and a version of all that remains by the incomparable Philemon
Holland (1600), to whose industry also are due Suetonius
(1606), Ammianus Marcellinus (1609) and Xenophon's Cyro-
paedia (1632). Sallust, as might be expected, was a favourite of
Tudor England. His Catiline was translated by Thomas Paynell
(1541), his Jugurtha by Alexander Barclay (1557), and both
histories by Thomas Heywood, the dramatist (1608). Golding's
Caesar (1565), Brende's Quintus Curtius (1553), and Stocker's
Diodorus Siculus (1569), by no means complete the tale. What
Sir Henry Savile did for the Histories and the Agricola of Tacitus
## p. 5 (#27) ###############################################
of Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca
5
(1591), Richard Greenwey did for the Annals and the Description
of Germany (1598), and there is no author Englished for us in
fuller and worthier shape than the wisest of Roman historians.
Xenophon found other translators besides Holland, and Plutarch's
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans fell happily into the
hands of Sir Thomas North, whose skill gave them a second and a
larger immortality.
The philosophers and moralists of the ancient world chimed
with the humour of Tudor England. Their simple disputations
possess the charm of freshness and curiosity. The problems of
conduct posed by Cicero and Plutarch are of a kind that found
an eager solution in the minds of men, still simple enough to love
casuistry for its own sake. Such questions as how a man may
praise himself without incurring envy or blame, or whether
philosophers ought to converse with princes and rulers, were met,
it is certain, with many arguments and various answers. And the
translators supplied those ignorant of the dead languages with a
mighty armoury of intellectual weapons. Of Plato, to be sure,
there is little enough. Besides Sir Thomas Elyot's Of the Know-
ledge which maketh a wise man (1533), distantly inspired by the
philosopher, immediately suggested by Diogenes Laertius, there is
but a version of the Axiochus, a doubtful dialogue. Aristotle
received more generous treatment. His Ethics were translated
from the Italian by John Wylkinson (1547), and, as has been said,
one J. D. made a version of the Politics from the French of Loys
Leroy, dit Regius (1598) Far more popular were Cicero and
Seneca, the chief instructors of the age. Tully's Offices, translated
by Robert Whittington, laureate in grammar (1533), and by Nicholas
Grimald (1555), were confidently commended to rulers, schoolmen,
orators and rhetoricians:
'At few words," says the ingenious Grimalde, 'al men, that of wisdome be
studious, may gette sommewhat herein to sharpe the wyt, to store the intelli-
gence, to fede the minde, to quicke the sprite, to augment the reason, to direct
the appetite, to frame the tounge, to fashion the maners. '
Nor were the two treatises on Friendship and Old Age overlooked.
The one was translated by John Harington (1550), the other by
Thomas Newton (1569), and both have as handsome an appearance
in their English dress as any books of the time; and, in 1561, John
Dolman 'englysshed these fyve Questions, which Marke Tullye
Cicero disputed in his Manor of Tusculanum. Upon Seneca, also,
Whittington tried his hand, to whom we owe The Fame and
Rule of Honest lyvynge (1546) and The Remedyes against all
casual Chances. For the rest, Arthur Golding translated The
## p. 6 (#28) ###############################################
6
Translators
1
1
Woorke concerning Benefyting (1558), and, in 1614, Thomas Lodge
published his monumental version of Seneca's prose, a work un-
dimmed by comparison even with Holland's translation of Plutarch's
Morals (1603).
The modern world yielded as rich a spoil as the ancient. The
Italianate Englishman, bitterly reproached by his contemporaries,
brought back from Italy, with his fantastic costume and new-
fangled manners, a love of Italian literature and of Italian romance.
From across the Alps came our knowledge of the court, of arms
and of the arts. In a famous passage, Ascham deplored the
encroaching influence. Evil as he thought the Morte Arthure,
'the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two speciall
poyntes, in open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye,' he declared
that 'ten Morte Arthures do not the tenth part so much harme as
one of these bookes, made in Italie, and translated in England. '
Yet their growing popularity could not be gainsaid:
“That which is most to be lamented'-again Ascham speaks-'and therefore
more nedefull to be looked to, there be mo of these ungratious bookes set out
in Printe within these fewe monethes, than have been sene in England many
score yeare before. '
Ascham wrote in 1567, and there is no doubt that he had in his
mind William Painter's Palace of Pleasure, of which the first
volume was published in 1566, the second in 1567, and Geffraie
Fenton's Certaine Tragicall Discourses (1567). Few books of the
time had a more immediate and profound influence than these.
They entertained the court and were an inspiration to the poets.
Had it not been for Painter, the English drama would have taken
another path. The stories of blood and desire, appropriate to
the ferocity of the Italian republics, were eagerly retold by our
dramatists, avid of the fierce emotions which Elizabeth's peaceful
England did not encourage in act. The tale of borrowings from
Painter's Palace is a long one. Shakespeare and Webster, Marston
and Massinger, all owe a debt to the ingenious writer whom Ascham
savagely condemned. And they could not have gone for their plots
to a better source. For Painter was a true child of his age. 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.
enterprise as a conquest. He'would wish rather and endeavour,'
says he in the preface to his translation of Pliny, 'by all means to
triumph now over the Romans in subduing their literature under the
dent of the English pen, in requitall of the conquest some time over
this Island, atchieved by the edge of their sword. ' And, harbouring
this sentiment of conquest, the translators were strongly impelled
also by the desire to benefit their native land and its rulers.
They had learned from the classics deep lessons of policy and
statecraft, which they would impart to their queen and her magis-
trates. Their achievement was, indeed, the real renascence of
England, the authentic recovery of the ancient spirit. That they
were keenly conscious of what they were doing is clear from their
dedications and their prefaces. The choice of the great personages
to whom they presented their works was made with a deliberate
purpose. When North and Holland asked the queen’s protection
for their masterpieces, it was in the full hope and knowledge that
Plutarch and Livy would prove wise guides unto her footsteps.
Nor was it with the mere intent of flattery or applause that
other translators offered the fruits of their toil to Cecil,
Leicester and Christopher Hatton. They wished to give counsel
where they deemed it useful. Thomas Wilson, for instance,
the translator of Demosthenes, thought that every good subject
should compare the present and the past; that, when he heard
of Athens and the Athenians, he should remember England and
Englishmen; that, in brief, he should learn from the doings of his
E. L. IV.
1
CH, I.
## p. 2 (#24) ###############################################
2
Translators
3
elders how to deal with his own affairs. John Brende, who
Englished Quintus Curtius, in presenting his book to the duke
of Northumberland, thus explained his purpose:
* There is required in all Magistrates,' says he, 'both a faith and feare in
God, and also an outward pollicie in worldly thinges 1: whereof, as the one is
to be learned by the Scriptures, so the other must chiefly be gathered by
reading of histories. '
Wherever you turn, you find the same admirable excuse; and, as
the translators gave to England well nigh the whole wisdom of the
ancients, they provided not merely grave instruction for kings
and statesmen, but plots for the dramatists, and entertainment for
lettered ease.
As their interest lay chiefly in the matter of their originals,
they professed little desire to illustrate a theory of translation.
They had neither the knowledge nor the sense of criticism, which
should measure accurately the niceties of their craft. They set
about their work in a spirit of sublime unconsciousness. In their
many prefaces, and they delighted in prefaces, there is scarce a
hint that they are pursuing a delicate art. The most of them
were indifferent to, or ignorant of, Horace's maxim :
Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus
Interpres,
though, for the best of reasons, they followed the poet's liberal
counsel. They would not have understood the scientific care with
which Dryden presently distinguished metaphrase and paraphrase.
Chapman, it is true, knew the end at which he aimed, and, in the
preface to his Homer, lucidly describes what should be the ambition
of the translator:
“The work of a skilfull and worthy translator,' says he, “is to observe the
sentences, figures and formes of speech proposed in his author, his true sence
and height, and to adorn them with figures and formes of oration fitted to the
originall in the same tongue to which they are translated. '
And one W. R. , in an eloquent epistle, addressed to the translator,
wittily defends Lodge against the charge that he had not parrot-like
spoken Seneca's own words and lost himself in a Latin echo. But
both Chapman and Lodge's defender wrote when the art of trans-
lation had been pursued for two generations and was falling, not
unnaturally, into a habit of self-criticism. In general, the trans-
lators of the heyday were accurate neither in word nor in shape.
1
i Geffraie Fenton showed his approval of this sentiment by borrowing it word for
word in his preface to the Tragicall Discourses.
## p. 3 (#25) ###############################################
The Craft of Translation
3
They followed the text as remotely as they imitated the style of
their originals.
I have said that North and his colleagues were inspired by a
love of adventure. They resembled the pioneers of our empire also
in a splendid lack of scruple. As the early travellers cheerfully
seized
upon the treasure of others, painfully acquired, and turned
to their own profit the discoveries of Spaniard and Portuguese, so
the translators cared not by what intermediary they approached
the Greek and Latin texts. Very few were scholars in the sense
that Philemon Holland was a scholar. Like Shakespeare, the
most had little Latin and less Greek. When Thomas Nicolls,
citizen and goldsmith of London, set out to translate Thucydides,
he went no further than the French of Claude de Seyssel, and
Claude de Seyssel made his version not from the Greek but from
the Latin of Laurentius Valla. Between Thomas North and Plutarch
stands the gracious figure of Jacques Amyot. Thomas Underdowne
derived his Aethiopian Historie from the Latin of Stanislaus
Warschewiczki, a Polish country gentleman, who translated the
Greek of Heliodorus, rure paterno, in 1551. Thus Adlington, in
interpreting The Golden Ass, was misled by Lasne Dore of
Guillaume Michel. Thus Aristotle came into our speech through the
French of Leroy, and even Bandello crossed from Italy to England
by the courtly bridge of Belleforest.
The result of this careless method is that the translations of
Elizabeth's age (in prose, at any rate) are unsoiled by pedantry.
They do not smell of the lamp; they suggest nowhere the laborious
use of the pedestrian dictionary. They call up a vision of
space and courage and the open air. That they are inappropriate
seems no fault in them. If they replace the restraint of the classics
with the colour and sentiment of romance, it is because the trans-
lators have done their work thoroughly. They have turned the
authors of Greece and Rome not merely into a new language but
into the feeling of another age and clime. In other words, their
books carry with them the lively air of brave originals. And this
natural impress is the deeper, because translation was not an
exclusive craft, pursued in the narrow spirit of mere scholarship.
Many of the most ingenious craftsmen were men of the world,
who made their versions to beguile a leisure snatched from the
conduct of affairs. Sir Thomas Hoby, who gave us The Courtier,
was an ambassador; Danett, who put Commines in an English
dress, practised the art of diplomacy loftily exemplified in
his original; with a fine sense of propriety, Peter Whitehorne
1-2
## p. 4 (#26) ###############################################
4
Translators
>
>
translated Machiavelli's Arte of Warre when he was in Barbary
with the emperor, 'at the siege and winning of Calibbia’; Thomas
North himself played his part as a magistrate in the policies of the
larger world. Even those who, like Holland and Golding, adopted
translating as a profession practised a style all untrammelled by
the schools. The reproach of Dryden, that “there are many who
understand Greek and Latin, and yet are ignorant of their mother-
tongue,' might not be brought with justice against them. Few
men of the century knew Greek and Latin. Many were masters
of English, which they wrote with an eloquence and elaboration
rarely surpassed.
The translators’ range of discovery was wide. They brought
into the ken of Englishmen the vast continent of classical literature.
Only a few provinces escaped their search, and, of the few, one was
the province which should have had the quickest attraction for them.
It is not a little strange that the golden age of our drama should
have seen the translation of but one Greek play. Of Aeschylus and
Sophocles there is nothing. A free paraphrase of the Phoenissae,
presented at Gray's Inn under the name of Jocasta in 1566 by
George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh, and made not from
the Greek but from the Italian of Ludovico Dolce, is the Eliza-
bethans' only and fragile link with Euripides. Plautus fared not
much better: we have no more than the Menaechmi of William
Warner (1595), which may have given Shakespeare a hint for The
Comedy of Errors. More popular were Seneca and Terence-
Seneca, no doubt, for his ingenious maxims, and Terence because he
was appointed to be read in schools. Of the historians, both Greek
and Latin, there is a long list. An unknown translator, who
hides his name under the initials B. R. , and who may be Barnabe
Rich, published two books of Herodotus in 1584, and Thomas
Nicolls, already mentioned, gave to England a complete Thucydides
in 1550. Of Livy, we have a fragment by Antony Cope (1544),
and a version of all that remains by the incomparable Philemon
Holland (1600), to whose industry also are due Suetonius
(1606), Ammianus Marcellinus (1609) and Xenophon's Cyro-
paedia (1632). Sallust, as might be expected, was a favourite of
Tudor England. His Catiline was translated by Thomas Paynell
(1541), his Jugurtha by Alexander Barclay (1557), and both
histories by Thomas Heywood, the dramatist (1608). Golding's
Caesar (1565), Brende's Quintus Curtius (1553), and Stocker's
Diodorus Siculus (1569), by no means complete the tale. What
Sir Henry Savile did for the Histories and the Agricola of Tacitus
## p. 5 (#27) ###############################################
of Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca
5
(1591), Richard Greenwey did for the Annals and the Description
of Germany (1598), and there is no author Englished for us in
fuller and worthier shape than the wisest of Roman historians.
Xenophon found other translators besides Holland, and Plutarch's
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans fell happily into the
hands of Sir Thomas North, whose skill gave them a second and a
larger immortality.
The philosophers and moralists of the ancient world chimed
with the humour of Tudor England. Their simple disputations
possess the charm of freshness and curiosity. The problems of
conduct posed by Cicero and Plutarch are of a kind that found
an eager solution in the minds of men, still simple enough to love
casuistry for its own sake. Such questions as how a man may
praise himself without incurring envy or blame, or whether
philosophers ought to converse with princes and rulers, were met,
it is certain, with many arguments and various answers. And the
translators supplied those ignorant of the dead languages with a
mighty armoury of intellectual weapons. Of Plato, to be sure,
there is little enough. Besides Sir Thomas Elyot's Of the Know-
ledge which maketh a wise man (1533), distantly inspired by the
philosopher, immediately suggested by Diogenes Laertius, there is
but a version of the Axiochus, a doubtful dialogue. Aristotle
received more generous treatment. His Ethics were translated
from the Italian by John Wylkinson (1547), and, as has been said,
one J. D. made a version of the Politics from the French of Loys
Leroy, dit Regius (1598) Far more popular were Cicero and
Seneca, the chief instructors of the age. Tully's Offices, translated
by Robert Whittington, laureate in grammar (1533), and by Nicholas
Grimald (1555), were confidently commended to rulers, schoolmen,
orators and rhetoricians:
'At few words," says the ingenious Grimalde, 'al men, that of wisdome be
studious, may gette sommewhat herein to sharpe the wyt, to store the intelli-
gence, to fede the minde, to quicke the sprite, to augment the reason, to direct
the appetite, to frame the tounge, to fashion the maners. '
Nor were the two treatises on Friendship and Old Age overlooked.
The one was translated by John Harington (1550), the other by
Thomas Newton (1569), and both have as handsome an appearance
in their English dress as any books of the time; and, in 1561, John
Dolman 'englysshed these fyve Questions, which Marke Tullye
Cicero disputed in his Manor of Tusculanum. Upon Seneca, also,
Whittington tried his hand, to whom we owe The Fame and
Rule of Honest lyvynge (1546) and The Remedyes against all
casual Chances. For the rest, Arthur Golding translated The
## p. 6 (#28) ###############################################
6
Translators
1
1
Woorke concerning Benefyting (1558), and, in 1614, Thomas Lodge
published his monumental version of Seneca's prose, a work un-
dimmed by comparison even with Holland's translation of Plutarch's
Morals (1603).
The modern world yielded as rich a spoil as the ancient. The
Italianate Englishman, bitterly reproached by his contemporaries,
brought back from Italy, with his fantastic costume and new-
fangled manners, a love of Italian literature and of Italian romance.
From across the Alps came our knowledge of the court, of arms
and of the arts. In a famous passage, Ascham deplored the
encroaching influence. Evil as he thought the Morte Arthure,
'the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two speciall
poyntes, in open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye,' he declared
that 'ten Morte Arthures do not the tenth part so much harme as
one of these bookes, made in Italie, and translated in England. '
Yet their growing popularity could not be gainsaid:
“That which is most to be lamented'-again Ascham speaks-'and therefore
more nedefull to be looked to, there be mo of these ungratious bookes set out
in Printe within these fewe monethes, than have been sene in England many
score yeare before. '
Ascham wrote in 1567, and there is no doubt that he had in his
mind William Painter's Palace of Pleasure, of which the first
volume was published in 1566, the second in 1567, and Geffraie
Fenton's Certaine Tragicall Discourses (1567). Few books of the
time had a more immediate and profound influence than these.
They entertained the court and were an inspiration to the poets.
Had it not been for Painter, the English drama would have taken
another path. The stories of blood and desire, appropriate to
the ferocity of the Italian republics, were eagerly retold by our
dramatists, avid of the fierce emotions which Elizabeth's peaceful
England did not encourage in act. The tale of borrowings from
Painter's Palace is a long one. Shakespeare and Webster, Marston
and Massinger, all owe a debt to the ingenious writer whom Ascham
savagely condemned. And they could not have gone for their plots
to a better source. For Painter was a true child of his age. 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.
