Part 19

to translate “fragiles” as “frail” is to miss the whole point of the epithet. What Virgil means is, “I could just reach the branches from the ground and _break them off_”; if it is to be translated by one epithet, it must be “brittle.” Again in the Ninth Eclogue the words

“quâ se subducere colles _Incipiunt_, mollique jugum demittere clivo,”

do not mean “where the hills with gentle depression steal away into the plain,” but the very opposite: _i.e._ “Where the hills begin to draw themselves up from the plain,” the ascent being contemplated from below. In Eclogue IX., in turning the couplet

“Nam neque adhuc Vario videor, nec dicere Cinnâ Digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores,”

the translator has no authority for turning the last verse into “a cackling goose in a chorus of cygnets,” for there is no tradition that cygnets sang, and goose should have been printed with a capital letter to preserve the pun, the allusion being to a poetaster named Anser. Unfortunately for the English translator, our literature can boast no counterpart to “Anser” _totidem literis_, but Goose printed with a capital is near enough to preserve, or suggest the sarcasm. There is another slip in Eclogue X.: “Ferulas” is not “wands of willow” but “fennel.”

Occasionally a touch is introduced which is neither authorized by the original, nor true to nature. There is nothing, for instance to warrant, in Eclogue I. 56, the epithet “odorous” as applied to the willow, nor does “salictum” mean a “willow” but a “willow-bed or plantation.” To translate “ubi tempus erit” by “when the hour shall have struck” reminds us of Shakespeare’s famous anachronism in _Julius Cæsar_ and is as surprising in the work of a scholar as the lengthening of the penultimate in arbutus, “Sweet is the shower to the blade, To the newly weaned kid the arbutus.” As a rule, the translator turns difficult passages very skilfully, but this is not the case with the couplet which concludes the “Pollio”:--

“Incipe, parve puer: cui non risere parentes Nec deus hunc mensâ, dea nec dignata cubili est”;

that is, the “babe on whom the parent never smiled, no god ever deemed worthy of his board, no goddess of her bed”--in other words, he can never enjoy the rewards of a hero like Hercules; but there is neither sense nor skill, and something very like a serious grammatical error, in

“Who knows not the smile of a parent, Neither the board of a god nor the bed of a goddess is worthy.”

But to turn from comparative trifles. No one who reads this version of the _Eclogues_ can doubt that Sir Osborne Morgan has proved his point, that the English hexameter, when skilfully used, is the measure best adapted for reproducing Virgil’s music in English. The following passage (_Ec._ VII. 45-48) is happily turned; let us place the original beside the translation:--

“Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba, Et quæ vos rarâ viridis tegit arbutus umbrâ, Solstitium pecori defendite: jam venit æstas Torrida, jam læto turgent in palmite gemmæ.”

“Moss-grown fountains and sward more soft than the softest of slumbers, Arbutus tree that flings over both its flickering shadows, Shelter my flock from the sun. Already the summer is on us, Summer that scorches up all! See the bud on the glad vine is swelling.”

Again (_Ec._ X. 41-48):--

“Serta mihi Phyllis legeret, cantaret Amyntas: Hic gelidi fontes, hic mollia prata, Lycori, Hic nemus: hic ipso tecum consumerer ævo. Nunc insanus amor duri me Martis in armis Tela inter media atque adversos detinet hostes: Tu procul a patriâ--nec sit mihi credere tantum!-- Alpinas, ah dura, nives et frigora Rheni Me sine sola vides.”

“Phyllis would gather me flowers and Amyntas a melody chant me; Cool is the fountain’s wave and soft is the meadow, Lycoris; Shady the grove! Here with thee I would die of old age in the greenwood. Mad is the lust of war, that now in the heart of the battle Chains me where darts fall fast, and the charge of the foemen is fiercest, Far, far away from your home--Oh, would that I might not believe it-- Lost amid Alpine snows or the frozen desolate Rhineland, Lonely without me you wander.”

Many other felicitous passages might be quoted; indeed, there is no Eclogue without them; but the translator is not sure-footed, and, if he occasionally illustrates the hexameter in its excellence, he illustrates, unhappily too often, some of its worst defects. Two qualities are indispensable to the success of this measure in English. Our language, unlike the classical languages, being accentual and not quantitative, if the long syllable is not represented where the stress naturally falls, and the short syllables where it does not fall, the effect is sometimes grotesque, sometimes distressing, and always unsatisfactory. Nothing, for example, could be worse in their various ways than the following:--

“Wept when you saw they were given the lad, and had you not managed.” “Let not the frozen air harm you.” “Scatter the sand with his hind hoofs.” “The pliant growth of the osier.” “Worthy of Sophocles’ sock, trumpet-tongued through the Universe echo.” “Own’d it himself, and yet he would not deliver it to me.”

A very nice ear, too, is required to adjust the collocation of words in which either vowels or consonants predominate, and the relative position of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words, the predominance of the former in our language increasing enormously the difficulty. No measure, moreover, so easily runs into intolerable monotony--a monotony which Clough sought to avoid by overweighting his verses with spondees, and which Longfellow illustrates by the cloying predominance of the dactylic movement. Sir Osborne Morgan tells us that he took Kingsley as his model. Kingsley’s hexameters are respectable, but they have no distinction, and he had certainly not a good ear. Longfellow’s are far better, and are sometimes exquisitely felicitous, as in a couplet like the following, which, with the exception of one word, is flawless:--

“Men whose lives glided on like the rivers that water the woodlands, Darken’d by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of Heaven.”

Probably the best hexameters which have been composed in English are those in William Watson’s _Hymn to the Sea_ and those in which Hawtry translated Iliad III. 234-244, and the parting of Hector and Andromache in the Sixth Iliad, models--these versions--not merely of translation, but of hexametrical structure. There are, however, certain magical effects, particularly in the Virgilian hexameter, produced by an exquisite but audacious tact in the employment of licences, which can never be reproduced in English.

Such would be--

“Nam neque Parnassi vobis juga, nam neque Pindi Ulla moram fecere, neque Aonie Aganippe. Illum etiam lauri, etiam flevere myricæ; Pinifer illum etiam solâ sub rupe jacentem Mænalus et gelidi fleverunt saxa Lycæi.”

Milton, and Milton alone among Englishmen, had the secret of this music, but he elicited it from another instrument.

THE LATEST EDITION OF THOMSON[46]

[Footnote 46: _The Poetical Works of James Thomson._ A New Edition, with Memoir and Critical Appendices, by the Rev. D. C. Tovey. 2 vols. London.]

“Jacob Thomson, ein vergessener Dichter des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts”--a forgotten poet of the eighteenth century--such is the title of a recent monograph on the author of _The Seasons_ by Dr. G. Schmeding. Dr. G. Schmeding is, however, so obliging as to pronounce that, in his opinion, this ought not to be Thomson’s fate; that there remains in his work, especially in _The Seasons_ merit enough to entitle him to be “enrolled among poets,” and to find appreciation, at all events in schools and reading societies. Dr. Schmeding may rest assured that Thomson’s fame is quite safe. It has no doubt suffered, as that of all the poets of the eighteenth century has suffered, by the great revolution which has, in the course of the last ninety years, passed over literary tastes and fashions. But during the present century there have been no less than twenty editions of his poems, to say nothing of separate editions of _The Seasons_; while his works, or portions of them, have been translated into German, Italian, modern Greek, and Russian. Only two years ago M. Léon Morel, in his _J. Thomson, sa vie et ses œuvres_, published an elaborate and admirable monograph on this “forgotten poet.” And now Mr. Tovey, who, we are glad to see, has been appointed Clarke Lecturer at Cambridge, has given us a new biography of him and a new edition of his works, making, if we are not mistaken, the thirty-second memoir of him and the twenty-first edition of his works which have appeared since the beginning of the century. This is pretty well for a forgotten poet!

Mr. Tovey’s name is a sufficient guarantee for accurate and scholarly work. But it might naturally be asked, what is there to justify another edition of this poet, when so many editions are already in the field and so easily accessible? We have little difficulty in answering this question. The special features of Mr. Tovey’s edition are as important as they are interesting. In the first place, he has given us a much fuller biography than has hitherto appeared in English; in the second place, he has thrown much interesting light on the political bearing of Thomson’s dramas; and, in the third place, he has given, what no other editor of Thomson has given, a full collation of Thomson’s own MS. corrections, preserved in Mitford’s copy, now deposited in the British Museum. The critical notes have cost him, he says, and we can quite believe it, much time and labour, and in his preface he half apologizes for what may seem “a ridiculous travesty of more important labours.” There was no necessity for such an apology: he observes justly that he has “not spent more pains on Thomson’s text than so many of our scholars bestow upon some Greek and Latin poets whose intrinsic merit is no greater than Thomson’s.”

To serious readers these critical notes will constitute the most valuable part of Mr. Tovey’s labours; they are, in truth, the speciality of this particular edition, and will make it indispensable to all students of this most interesting poet. And now Mr. Tovey will, we trust, forgive us if, with due deference, we point out what seem to us to be defects in his work. The first thing that might have been expected from so learned and careful an editor of Thomson was an adequate discussion of the great problem of the authorship of _Rule Britannia_, and the second an exposure of one of the most extraordinary “mare’s-nests” to be found in English literature. But nothing, we regret to say, can be more perfunctory and inadequate than the two notes in which the first question is hurried over with references to _Notes and Queries_, and nothing more irritating than the confusion worse confounded in which Mr. Tovey leaves the second. We shall therefore make no apology for entering somewhat at length into both these questions.

And first for the authorship of _Rule Britannia_. The facts are these. In 1740 Thomson and Mallet wrote, in conjunction, a masque entitled _Alfred_, which, on 1st August in that year, was represented before the Prince and Princess of Wales at Clifden. It was in two acts, and it contained six lyrics, the last being _Rule Britannia_, which is entitled an “Ode,” the music being by Dr. Arne. In 1745 Arne turned the piece into an opera, and also into “a musical drama.” By this time the lyric had become very popular, but there is no evidence to show that it had been definitely attributed to either of the coadjutors. In 1748 Thomson died. In 1751 Mallet re-issued _Alfred_, but in another form. It was entirely remodelled, and almost entirely re-written, and, in an advertisement prefixed to the work, he says: “According to the present arrangement of the fable I was obliged to reject a great deal of what I had written in the other: neither could I retain, of my friend’s part, more than three or four speeches, and a part of one song.” Now, of the parts retained from the former work, there were the first three stanzas of _Rule Britannia_, the three others being excised, and their place supplied by three stanzas written by Lord Bolingbroke. If Mallet is to be believed, then, “part of one song” must refer, either to a song in the third scene of the second act, beginning “From those eternal regions bright,” or to _Rule Britannia_, for these are the only lyrics in which portions of the lyrics in the former edition are retained. _Rule Britannia_ is, it is true, entitled “An Ode” in the former edition, and the other lyric “A Song,” so that Mallet would certainly seem to imply that what he had retained of his friend’s work was the portion of the song referred to, and not _Rule Britannia_. But, as Mallet was notoriously a man who could not be believed on oath, and was an adept in all those bad arts by which little men filch honours which do not belong to them, if he is to be allowed to have any title to the honour of composing this lyric, it ought to rest on something better than the ambiguity between the word “Ode” and the word “Song.”

There is no evidence that, while both were alive, either Thomson or Mallet claimed the authorship; but this is certain, it was printed at Edinburgh, during Mallet’s lifetime, in the second edition of a well-known song book, entitled _The Charmer_, with Thomson’s initials appended to it. It is certain that Mallet had friends in Edinburgh, and it is equally certain that neither he nor any of his friends raised any objection to its ascription to Thomson. In 1743, in 1759, and in 1762 Mallet published collections of poems, but in none of these collections does he lay claim to _Rule Britannia_, and, though it was printed in song-books in 1749, 1750, and 1761, it is in no case assigned to Mallet. None of his contemporaries, so far as we know, attributed it to him, and it is remarkable that, in a brief obituary notice of him which appeared in the _Scots Magazine_ in 1765, he is spoken of as the author of the famous ballad _William and Margaret_, but not a word is said about _Rule Britannia_. A further presumption in Thomson’s favour is this: in all probability Dr. Arne, who set it to music, knew the authorship, and he survived both Thomson and Mallet, dying in 1778. The song had become very popular and celebrated, so that if Mallet had desired to have the credit of its composition, it is strange that he should not have laid claim to it, had his claim been a good one. But if his claim was not good, he could hardly have ventured to claim the authorship, as Dr. Arne would have been in his way. It is quite possible that the ambiguity in the advertisement to the recension of 1751 was designed; it certainly left the question open, and we cannot but think there is something very suspicious in what follows the sentence in Mallet’s advertisement, where he speaks of his having used so little of his friend’s work. “I mention this expressly,” he adds, “that, whatever faults are found in the present performance, they may be charged, as they ought to be, entirely to my account.” A vainer and more unscrupulous man than Mallet never existed; and, while it is simply incredible that he should not have claimed what would have constituted his chief title to popularity as a poet, had he been able to do so, it is in exact accordance with his established character that he should, as he did in the advertisement of 1751, have left himself an opportunity of asserting that claim, should those who were privy to the secret have predeceased him, and thus enabled him to do so with impunity.

The internal evidence--and on this alone the question must now be argued--seems to us conclusive in Thomson’s favour. The Ode is simply a translation into lyrics of what finds embodiment in Thomson’s _Britannia_, in the fourth and fifth parts of _Liberty_, and in his Verses to the Prince of Wales. Coming to details, there can be no doubt that the third stanza--

“Still more majestic shalt thou rise, More dreadful from each foreign stroke; As the loud blast that tears the skies Serves but to root thy native oak”--

was suggested by Horace’s

“Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus Nigræ feraci frondis in Algido, Per damna, per cædes, ab ipso Ducit opes animumque ferro.”

Now, not only was Horace, as innumerable imitations and reminiscences prove, one of Thomson’s favourite poets, but Thomson has, in the third part of _Liberty_ translated this very passage:--

“Like an oak, Nurs’d on feracious Algidum, whose boughs Still stronger shoot beneath the rigid axe By loss, by slaughter, from the steel itself E’en force and spirit drew.”

He has, elsewhere, two other reminiscences of the same passage, once in the third part of _Liberty_--

“Every tempest sung Innoxious by, or bade it firmer stand”--

and once in _Sophonisba_ (Act V. sc. ii.):--

“Thy rooted worth Has stood these wintry blasts, grown stronger by them.”

The epithet “azure” employed in the first stanza is, with “cerulean” and “aerial,” one of the three commonest epithets in Thomson, the three occurring at least twenty times in his poetry. A somewhat cursory examination of his works has enabled us to find that “azure” or “azured” alone occurs ten times. “Generous,” too, in the Latin sense of the term, is another of his favourite words, it being used no less than sixteen times in _Britannia_ and _Liberty_ alone. Another of his favourite allusions is to England’s “native oaks.” Thus in _Britannia_ he speaks of--

“Your oaks, peculiar harden’d, shoot Strong into sturdy growth;”

in the last part of _Liberty_ we find “Let her own naval oak be basely torn,” and in the same part of the poem he speaks of the “venerable oaks” and “kindred floods.” The epithet “manly” and the phrase “the fair”--“manly hearts to guard the fair”--are also peculiarly Thomsonian, being repeatedly employed by him, the phrase “the fair” occurring in his poetry at least six times, if not oftener. “Flame,” too, is another of his favourite words.

“All their attempts to bend thee down Will but arouse,” etc.,

is exactly the sentiment in _Britannia_.

“Your hearts Swell with a sudden courage, growing still As danger grows.”

The stanza beginning “To thee belongs,” etc., is simply a lyrical paraphrase of the passage in _Britannia_ commencing “Oh first of human blessings,” and of a couplet in the last part of _Liberty_:--

“The winds and seas are Britain’s wide domain; And not a sail but by permission spreads.”

The couplet

“All thine shall be the subject main, And every shore it circles thine”

is simply the echo of a couplet in the fifth part of _Liberty_--

“All ocean is her own, and every land To whom her ruling thunder ocean bears.”

The phrase “blessed isle,” as applied to England, he employs three times in _Liberty_. Again, the stanza in which _Rule Britannia_ is written is the stanza in which the majority of Thomson’s minor lyrics are written, and the rhythm and cadence, not less than the tone, colour and sentiment, are exactly his.

Mallet was undoubtedly an accomplished man and a respectable poet, as his ballad _William and Margaret_, his _Edwin and Emma_, and his _Birks of Invermay_ sufficiently prove, but he has written nothing tolerable in the vein of _Rule Britannia_. Neatness, and tenderness bordering on effeminacy, mark his characteristic lyrics, and, if we except a few lines in his _Tyburn_ and the eight concluding lines in a poem entitled _A Fragment_, there is no virility in his poetry at all. Of the patriotism and ardent love of liberty which pervade Thomson’s poems, and which glow so intensely in _Rule Britannia_, he has absolutely nothing. Nor are there any analogues or parallels in his poems to this lyric either in form--for if we are not mistaken, he has never employed the stanza in which it is written--or in imagery, or phraseology. Like Thomson, whom, in his narrative blank-verse poems, he servilely imitates, he is fond of the words “azure” and “aerial”; and the word “azure” is the only verbal coincidence linking the phraseology of his acknowledged poems with the lyric in question. It may be added, too, that a man who was capable of the jingling rubbish of such a masque as _Britannia_, and who had the execrable taste to substitute Bolingbroke’s stanzas for the stanzas which they supersede, could hardly have been equal to the production of this lyric. We believe, then, that there can be no reasonable doubt that the honour of composing _Rule Britannia_ belongs to Thomson the bard, and not to Mallet the fribble.

But to return to Mr. Tovey and the “mare’s-nest” to which we have referred. This mare’s-nest is the assumption that Pope assisted Thomson in revising _The Seasons_. Since Robert Bell’s edition this has come to be received as an established fact, but we propose to show that it rests on a hypothesis demonstrably baseless.

There is, in the British Museum, an interleaved copy of the first volume of the London edition of Thomson’s works, dated 1738, and the part of the volume which contains _The Seasons_ is full of manuscript deletions, corrections, and additions. These are in two handwritings, the one being unmistakably the handwriting of Thomson, the other beyond all question the handwriting of some one else. Almost all these corrections were inserted in the edition prepared for the press in 1744, and now, consequently, form part of the present text. The corrections in the hand which is not the hand of Thomson are, in many cases, of extraordinary merit, showing a fineness of ear and delicacy of touch quite above the reach of Thomson himself. We will give two or three samples. Thomson had written in _Autumn_ 290 seqq.:--

“With harvest shining all these fields are thine, And if my rustics may presume so far, Their master, too, who then indeed were blest To make the daughter of Acasto so.”

The unknown corrector substitutes the present reading:--

“The fields, the master, all, my fair, are thine; If to the various blessings which thy house Has lavished on me thou wilt add that bliss, That dearest bliss, the power of blessing thee!”

The other is famous. Thomson had written:--

“Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty’s self, Recluse among the woods, if City-dames Will deign their faith. And thus she went compell’d By strong necessity, with as serene And pleased a look as patience can put on, To glean Palemon’s fields.”

For these vapid and dissonant verses is substituted by the corrector, who very properly retains the first verse, what is now the text:--

“Recluse amid the close embow’ring woods, As in the hollow breast of Apennine, Beneath the shelter of encircling hills, A myrtle rises, far from human eyes, And breathes its balmy fragrance o’er the wild. So flourished blooming, and unseen by all, The sweet Lavinia,” etc.

The transformation of a single line is often most felicitous: thus in _Winter_ the flat line

“Through the lone night that bids the waves arise”

is grandly altered into

“Through the black night that sits immense around.”

Thus, in _Spring_, Thomson had merely written

“Whose aged oaks and venerable gloom Invite the noisy rooks;”

but his corrector alters and extends the passage into

“Whose aged elms and venerable oaks Invite the rooks, who high amid the boughs In early spring their airy city build, And caw with ceaseless clamour.”