thological phenomena precisely similar to those of the nuns of Loudun. Insensibility and invulnerability,—not complete, it is true, and often far less than was alleged,-and that kind of double consciousness which led the subjects of it to refer their thoughts and impressions to a higher power, mysteriously in contact with and enfolding their own nature, are common to them and to the unhappy sisters of Loudun. The Convulsionnaires and the Prophets were, like the demoniacs, chiefly women, and facts are quite conclusive as to the cause of their religious frenzy. To use the technical phraseology of medical psychology, erotomania, complicated with theomania and demonomania, is the explanation of their condition, which, on evidence which seems to us most abundant and conclusive, M. Figuier considers established. If we had room, much would require to be added, by way of illustration and qualification, to this general statement. But we must conclude, recommending the reader who is interested in the matter to consult M. Figuier's excellent chapters, and the authorities he cites. We shall look forward with curiosity to the treatment by the same author, in future volumes, of the phenomena of animal magnetism, table-turning, and spirit-rapping. ART. V.-HORACE. Horace's Odes, translated into English Verse, with a Life and Notes, by Theodore Martin. London: J. W. Parker and Son, 1860. WHEN, in our early school-days, we first begin to realise the meaning of the term "Latin lyrics" in the varieties of Alcaic, Asclepiad, Sapphic, and the other forms of metrical rhythm which are approached through the portal of Maecenas atavis edite regibus, few, if any, among us can form an adequate conception of the rich reward which is to be the result of the enterprise we are then undertaking. The Odes of Horace will always be found a popular lesson among intelligent schoolboys, from the comparative ease with which their general meaning can be understood and approximately rendered in construing, from their shortness, and from their variety of subject and treatment, and especially from the marked facility of retention in the youthful memory which they gain from the strong ictus of lyrical measure, in comparison with the uniform hexameters or elegiacs of Ovid and Virgil. But it is not until this first easily-gained acquaintance has been insensibly converted into a familiar intimacy, that we can appreciate fairly, either in kind or degree, the permanent gain and pleasure we derive from a knowledge of Horace. It is only at a maturer age that we begin to translate him, except in the way of an obligatory school-exercise, or to quote him for the sake of the actual point of his lines, and not from the mere vanity of quotation. Most of us are satisfied to abandon as vain the attempt to represent him appropriately in English before we have gone very far; but the habit of quoting him does not decline, but rather strengthens, with our years. The country gentleman, the clergyman, sometimes even the lawyer and the doctor, the political or social writer, the orator and the conversationalist, all draw from the same well instances and illustrations, with the same unlimited confidence in the sympathetic understanding and approbation of whatever moderately cultivated audience they may happen to be addressing. Horace is the classical author whose words are most constantly quoted, and received with the most invariable toleration or acceptance, in the House of Commons, an assembly which, with all its varieties of individual character, literary taste, and education, does as a whole most curiously represent and reflect the intuitively critical fastidiousness of our national common sense and humour. What is the main reason, or is there any single main reason, for Horace's enduring popularity as a victim of translation and repetition in modern days? How is it that his works, written for a small and select circle of scholarly minds in imperial Rome, should continue to fascinate one poetical aspirant after another, to serve as a perennial garden-bed of ornament to one prosewriter or declaimer after another, beyond an interval of nearly two thousand years? He might say of himself, more truly perhaps than any other Latin poet, not only non omnis moriar, but omnis non moriar. What is it that makes him at once so universal and domestic a favourite, and so recognisedly inimitable and untranslatable? Mr. Theodore Martin, the latest, one of the most enthusiastic, and perhaps the most genial and successful, of his English lyrical translators, gives us in the motto which stands at the head of his volume no fresh clue to the secret, while he judiciously admits the fact of the preeminent difficulty of the task he has undértaken. The words of Mr. Tennyson, "What practice, howsoe'er expert In fitting aptest words to things, Or voice, the richest toned that sings, although the narrowing of their sense from the spirit of regret for the loss of such a friend as the subject of In Memoriam to the admiration which a student feels for the work of the master he is copying may seem to savour of the genius of parody,-are perhaps as apposite an acknowledgment of the peculiarity of Horace's poetry as could have been chosen. That subtle, volatile essence is so difficult to reproduce, just because it is so difficult to define; and it is the same quality which renders it so universally charming. It has preserved through perpetuity its character of freshness and originality, because among many followers Horace has found no school, no imitator or adapter who has caught the tone of his mind as well as the outer marks of his style. To be another Horace, it is not enough to be able to write fluent, graceful, and suggestive lyrics on occasional topics. Nor is it enough of itself to be endowed with the same genial laughing turn of mind, the same equilibrium of spirit, the same content, or power of assuming content, in a summary acceptance of the problems of life, the same strict adherence to rule in living and writing, the same mixture of critical severity and charitable toleration which went to make up Horace's character as a man. The perfection of lyrical form is not sufficient without the calm, broad, Epicurean sunniness of temper; nor does this, again, suffice without the persevering and intuitive power which secures a studied perfection of form. That conscientious accuracy of expression, which never conveys more or less than the exact amount which is intended to be conveyed, is never more desirable, never more valuable, and rarely more difficult of attainment, than when it is busied upon topics professedly reflecting the personality of the writer. The golden rule for a poet "His worst he kept, his best he gave❞— is one which the tendencies of our modern poetry have done. much to overlay. A yearning zeal to rush into the public and irreticent exposition of vague life-dramas and other subjective mysteries is perhaps a natural consequence of the wider prevalence among ourselves of unquiet speculation as to the meaning of this little life, which Horace was satisfied to believe rounded with a sleep. Inevitable as this tendency may be, it is not desirable that its gratification should be so paramount an object in poetry as to render us as writers or readers indifferent to the careful self-scrutiny and patient study of his own work, which enabled the Roman lyrist justly to qualify his poems with the hard-earned title of operosa carmina. Had Horace been a more ambitious and professed philosopher, he would not have been so favourite and so immortal a singer. Having once chosen the medium through which he could best express his own mind for the benefit of others, he took care never to use that medium for the unlicensed conveyance of any thing which could not properly be brought within the range of its capabilities. The moral, where there is one, in Horace's songs is so carefully harmonised with both subject and expression as to be inseparable in the appreciation and the memory of every reader; and in many cases the real meaning of a song is best expressed in its leading to no perceptible moral at all. The true work of art, the operosum carmen of Horace, is that which has the art to conceal its own artifice altogether, and bursts out on us like the spontaneous growth of imagination or nature. It is this natural but highly cultivated growth of Latin soil which it is so difficult to reproduce upon English ground. An exotic plant always requires time and care before it will acclimatise itself thoroughly; and when it does so, it is always through some gradual and slight, but perceptible, modification of its indigenous habits and character. The principles of natural selection exact recognition at the hands of literary transplanters as forcibly as in experiments of physical culture. In translating an epic poem or a drama into a foreign language, the path is more clearly defined than it can ever be for the writer who attempts to transfuse into a new form occasional pieces like the odes or satires of Horace. The style of the heroic translation falls, in proportion to the power of its author, and always aims to fall, into a sustained gravity and simplicity analogous to that of the original. The whole duty of an English Iliad or Odyssey is to place before its readers as faithfully and forcibly as possible what the epic would have been if Homer's language had been English, while Homer's mind and age remained Greek. A similar subordination to the mould of his original is required from a translator of Eschylus or Aristophanes. But whoever undertakes to translate in this style a satire not dramatic in form, will discover sooner or later that he has been exercising a superfluous and ineffective degree and order of fidelity. Satire should always address itself personally and directly to those for whom it is intended, as the eyes of a portrait set on the wall follow steadily round the room the eyes of whoever looks at it, when he moves from one position to another. The aim of translating satire from Latin into English is not to show its English readers merely how it was used to lash, and for what vices, the Romans of the times of Augustus and Domitian; but to apply the same rules and the same tests as closely as may be to the country and the ages which will read it in its new form. The follies and pursuits of man, the quidquid agunt homines,-the true food of the satirist,-are in their intrinsic character independent of place and time, but vary from day to day in their outward fashion. To produce a full and vivid effect in their representation and condemnation, the painter must catch the actual folly that at the moment of his painting is on the wing. He may build the modern group on the lines of the antique composition, but the dress and the faces must be those of his own day. This was the sense in which Pope and Johnson understood (and rightly) the duties and the powers of a translator of satiric poems. The same principles apply, but with a lesser degree of simplicity and strictness, and therefore with a greater difficulty of right application, to occasional lyric poems. They must fall in their new language into some form which shall be to the apprehension of their new cycle of readers as natural and as original as their old form was to those to whom they were in the first instance addressed. They must put on not only a modern dress, but a modern face and expression, to be palatable either to those who do know the old forms, or to those who do not; and yet the new dress and face must unmistakably recall and involve the old. Those who read them as part of the literature of the present day must be able to feel in them the modern touches which redeem antiquarian imitations from the charge of nothingness. Those who know the originals by heart should be enabled to enjoy them still more on comparison with the translations, through the opportunity so given of appreciating the delicacy and the importance of the slight touches of alteration, which show at once the difference, and the likeness in difference, of the age of Horace and our own. Without wishing definitely to adjudge to Mr. Martin the palm of an uniform superiority over the other recent translators of Horace's lyrical poems, we hold that he has in general so emphatically caught the tone in which the Odes are to be translated rightly, if at all, that we shall use his version whenever quotation is necessary, in illustration of our remarks on Horace as a poet and a man. Few poets could be named whose lives and characters may be more fairly and fully illustrated out of their own works than Horace. The overflow of a man's heart into song has rarely been combined with a more genuine openness and sincerity of heart. No desire to wear a mask or to speak with a feigned voice, to display himself morally or as an artist greater or completer than he felt himself to be,-is traceable in any of his writings. If the sunny cheerfulness of his mind only beamed out here or there, it might be possible to suspect that the serenity of his philosophy was, if not put on or exaggerated, at any rate now and then brought forward for show. But when the expression of this content escapes as it were unconsciously through ode after ode, and epistle after epistle,-when chords of the most different tone lead up to the same close,-it is impossible not to believe it unaffected, enduring, and true. What is the sum of the philosophy to which this frame of temper is due? It is narrow, but complete. Its main rule is a para H |
