MR. ROBINSON ELLIS'S " CATULLUS.".

THE author of this translation is already well known by his labours in editing the text of Catullus ; and when we took up this volume, it was with the conviction that nothing would be wanting to it that zeal and knowledge could supply, and with the hope that Mr. Robinson Ellis might prove no leas successful as a translator than as an editor, and that his version might be worthy to take its place as a work not only of scholarship, but of English literature. The result, however, is disappointing. Mr. Ellis has proceeded on what we cannot but think a wrong principle ; he has been hampered throughout by the unreasonable conditions he has imposed on himself, and he has produced something which will neither seem like English verse to an unclassical reader, nor be accepted by a classical reader as adequately representing Latin verse. We sympathize with the spirit of the translator's attempt, and we are not un- moved by his appeal to the " too limited number of readers who can really hear with their ears ;" but at the risk of being ex- -eluded from that number, we must pronounce the work a failure. It is elaborate, and sometimes splendid, but on the whole it fails. It has made shipwreck, as so many other well-designed plans of all kinds have done, on a plausible compromise. This view must be justified somewhat in detail.

There are two courses open to a translator of classical poetry.

• The l'orms and Fragments of Catullus, translated in tAe iletree 'of the Original, By Robinson Ellis. Loudon: Murray. 1571, He may give .up as impracticable the attempt to represent the outward form of the original, and aim at replacing the ancient poem by such a poem as the author might have written if his instrument, instead of Greek or Latin, with its involved con- structions and quantitative prosody, had been the modern lan- guage of the translator, with its explicit constructions and prosody to which quantity is unknown. This is the plan which Mr. Theodore Martin followed in his version of Catullus, published ten years ago. We do not say this is faultless ; it errs by a cer- tain tendency to levity and diffuseness, and the copy falls short of the clear outline and firm solidity, the inimitable union of grace and compactness, which fascinate us in the model. But It is pleasant to read as English poetry, and calculated to give, on the whole, a very fair impression of Catullus' thought and manner to English readers. We shall presently compare some of Mr. Theodore Martin's work with its newer rival now before us.

On the other hand the translator may aspire to reproduce the exact structure of the original even at the risk of making his work strange and repulsive at first sight to the modern reader. He may strive to find exact equivalents for the metrical form, to follow minutely every turn of the language, to produce not English poems, but Anglicized Latin poems. This is what Mr. Robinson Ellis has aimed at, and we do not say it is a less legitimate ambi- tion than the other ; but the mechanical difficulties of the task are infinitely greater, and it may well be questioned whether they can ever be surmounted except by a writer of such poetic power as refuses to give itself up to translation. Mr. Ellis is justly dissatisfied with the attempts that have been made to represent the classical quantitative metres by corresponding accentual metres. The English hexameter, as it has hitherto been written, is clumsy and shapeless at best. If it were adopted by our leading poets, as has been the good fortune of its kindred in Germany, it might, no doubt, become really harmonious, and develop its own laws of construction ; but those laws would not be the same as the laws of the Homeric hexameter, nor even analogous to them. The classical metres are founded on quantity and varied by accent ; the modern metres are founded on accent and varied by quantity ; in the ono, that is, the quantity or relative weight of the syllables making up a verse is distributed in a definite manner, the accent or relative stress in an indefinite manner ; in the other, the arrangement of the accented and unaccented syllables is definite, the arrangement of heavy and light syllables indefinite. An English hexameter is no true copy of a Greek or Latin hexameter, but a reversed impression. Our Homeric translators make believe to walk about in the garment of Hoiner, but it is turned inside out. It remains to be seen whether it is not possible to express the real image of the classical prosody iu existing lan- guages. The experiment was tried in the Elizabethian period of English, but very little came of it. Perhaps this was chiefly for the want of some compelling master-hand to guide the movement, rather than for any of the reasons suggested by Mr. Robinson Ellis in his preface. Partly the experimenters were misled by the eye to make syllables long or short in defiance of the ear (for instance, re- sound what Ilisted stands at the end of a hexameter, / being really a diphthong) ; partly they were so intent upon the quantity that they left the accent entirely to take care of itself. To establish how this was in Greek would require a more minute discussion than there is room here for, but the Roman poets certainly did not leave the distribution of accented syllables to chance. Some years ago a critic of Homeric translators in Fraser's Mizgazine renewed the attempt with a few quantitative English hexameters which in metrical effect left hardly anything to be desired ; they might well claim (we quote from memory) to be "stately, sonorous, Rolling ever forward, tidoliko, with thunder, in endless Procession, complex melodies, pause, quantity, accent, After Virgilian precedent and practice, in order Distributed ;"

and Mr. Tennyson's more recent " Experiments " will be fresh in our readers' recollection. The hendecasyllables are to our mind the most successful of all these ; and it seems strange that with such an encouraging example before him Mr. Robinson Ellis did not determine to write true quantitative verse, neither refusing to give quantity its due weight where accent does not coin- cide with it, nor letting accent do duty at a pinch for quantity. No doubt it would require no small faith, ingenuity, and daring to do this consistently through a long work, -But we regret that Mr. Ellis has not tried it. What he has done is to rest in a sort of middle course. He adopts two principles, which seem to us inconsistent and mutually destructive, namely that accented syllables, as a general rule, are long," and that 'the laws of position are to be observed according to the general rules of classical prosody." His first principle is incompatible with the rules of quantitative verse. It means, not that as a matter of fact the accent in the English language generally

falls on a long syllable, but that an accented short syllable may be treated as long ; and accordingly he so applies it throughout his translation. Any, body, mother, from us, stand for trochees ; canopy, memory, for dactyls ; melodies ever- lasting for the close of a spondaic hexameter. The second princi-

ple is, on the other hand, hardly more compatible with the rules of accentual verse. If quantity is to be only the secondary element of the metre, the distribution of it which prevents the accentual rhythm from being monotonous must be left to a larger discretion than this rule allows. The way in which Mr. Ellis treats words in which the relation of accent and quantity is not quite obvious

:shows how ill the two rules go together. He makes tenantless a dactyl. So it may be accentually. But if there is quantity in Eng- iish at all, this word is in quantity clearly analogous to such a Greek word as xiogcarni, the accented syllable being short and the suc- ceeding unaccented one long. As for the a being " more short than long," we confess that if the combination n t 1 is not enough

to make a short syllable long by position, we cannot tell what is. Such laxity as this gives a manifest advantage to those who maintain that the sense of quantity as the ancients understood it is extinct, and cannot be now revived with any prospect of success ; and their opinion, though we do not share it, is far from being un- tenable or unworthy of serious discussion. Mr. Ellis distinguishes "legitimate quantity (in which accent and position are alike observed)" from " illegitimate (in which position is observed, but accent disregarded)." To attempt such a distinction is to utter a fatal doubt in the same breath with a confession of faith. It .shows more plainly than any comment of ours can do the halting between quantity and accent wherein lies the radical defect of the work.

This want of consistency in principle gives an air of uneasy vacillation to the translator's verse. 'He seems never to have quite made up his mind whether the rhythm is quantitative or accentual. These lines, for instance, are not distinguishable in effect from the 'familiar jingle of the accentual pseudo-hexameter :—

" When the delectable hour those days did fully determine, Straightway then in crowds all Thossaly flocked to the palace,— Thronging hosts uncounted, a company joyous approaching, Many a gift they carry, delight their faces illumines."

'On the other hand we find here and there verses which are true in quantity throughout, and have a real quantitative rhythm, such as :—

" Hosper his orb long-look'd for aloft 'gins slowly to kindle."

And this,-

01

Hespor, movebh in heaven a light more tyrannous ever,"

is a good verse but for the last two feet, where it breaks loose from the even flow of quantity into mere accentual clatter ; and these others are faultless :-

"Straight to the ground, dash'd forth ungently, the gift shoots head- long."

"Comes not night's bright bearer a fire o'er Oeta revealing." " They must open anon; 'twore better anon be replying." But there are not many such to be found together.

It was surely not worth while to make any great sacrifice to the exigencies of such a metrical experiment as this ; but ele- gance has been constantly sacrificed, spirit not seldom, and occa- sionally even sense. Catullus is capable of being abrupt, im- petuous, condensed : he is not, as a rule, odd, uncouth, or archaic, yet Mr. Ellis's version is all this, and so much so that in some places it can hardly pass for Engliih. Violent inversions, strange usages of words, and obsolete or all but unknown words are freely resorted to. It is difficult to see what "torches oozily swinging" can mean, and a '"jeacinorous house" sounds amiss in an epigram. One is never free from a sense of constraint and difficulty, which in the shorter poems is almost ludicrous, as if one watched an artist trying to cut gems with a chisel. Let us compare the end of the elegy on Labia's sparrow in Mr. Robinson Ellis's and in Mr. Theodore

Martin's version. This is the older one, which aims at turning Catullus into English :—

" Out upon you, and your pow'r, Which all fairest things devour, Orme' gloomy shades, that e'er Ye should take my bird so fair ! Oh, poor bird ! Oh, dismal shades ! Yours the blame is, that my maid's Eyes, dear eyes I are ewol'n and red, Weeping for her darling dead."

And here is the newer, which will be content with nothing less than forcing English into the mould of Catullus

:- "Evil on ye, the shades of evil Crone,

Shades all beauteous happy things devouring, Such a beauteous happy bird ye took him.

Ah for pity ; but ah 1 for him the sparrow, Our poor sparrow, on whom to think my lady's Eyes do angrily redden all a-weeping."

Few readers can doubt that Mr. Theodore Martin's verses are the more readable and the better English. As to the Latin, they

represent it quite as correctly as Mr. Robinson Ellis has done, and in one point more BO ; for they mark the tenderness given by the

diminutives in the last two lines, which be has lost. The next piece iu order, the well-known dedication of Catullus' boat, fares still worse. The exquisiteness of

"Phasolus illo quoin vidotis hospites Ait fuisso navium oolerrimue,"

is hard to recognize in

"The puny pinnace yonder you, my friends, discern, Of every ship professes agilost to be."

It is not reasonable that because Catullus wrote Latin in pure iambics Englishmen should be expected to read something which is neither pure iambic nor pure English. However, this is an extreme instance, and it will be fairer to seek comparisons in the poems which give the translator a larger scope. In the Allis, Mr. Robinson Ellis has perhaps been more successful in metrical effect than elsewhere ; but his fancy has still cost him too dear. Three of the finest lines in the poem are these :— "Sod ubi oris aurei Sol radiantibus ooulis Lustravit aethera album, seta dura, mare forum, Pepulitquo nootis umbras vegetis sonipodibue," —which Mr. Ellis renders thus, " When awoke the sun, the golden, that his eyes heaven-orient Seann'd lustrous air, the redo seas, earth's massy solidity, When he smote the shadowy twilight with his healthy team sublime."

There is a certain force in this, but it is cramped and disfigured by the devices the translator has had recourse to in order to find short syllables for the end of the line. How much more life and motion there is in Mr. Theodore Martin's couplet :—

" But whop the sun's fresh steeds had chased the dark, and with his radiant eyes

He gazed along the solid earth, the cruel seas, and golden skies."

This version, or something like it, we feel that Catullus might have written, if he had written in English ; he could not by any possi- bility have written the other. We take one more passage for com- parison, this time from an elegiac poem ; it is Catullus' well-known burst of sorrow on the mention of Troy, where his brother died. Mr. Ellis gives it thus:— "Troy, dark death universal, of Asia grave and of Europe, Altar of heroes Troy, Troy of heroical acts, Now to my own dear brother abhorred worker of ancient Death. Ah! woeful soul, brother, unhappily lost, Al, I fair light anblest, in darkness sadly receding,

All our house lies low, brother, inearthed in you, Quenclid untimely with you, joy waits not ever a morrow, Joy which alive your love's bounty fed hour upon hour."

Mr. Theodore Martin

;-

"Troy accurst, Of Asia and of Europe both the tomb!

Grave of the bravo and noble I Troy that durst My own dear brother whelm in hapless doom!

"Woe's me, my brother! Comfort of mine eyes! Entomb'd with thee is all out• house ; and dead

With thee the pleasures all, I once did prize, Which, living, by thy love were fann'd and fed1"

Further comment is hardly needful to point out the Contrast between these two pieces of work.

There is a serious fault of another kind to be found with Mr. Robinson Ellis's translation, if it is intended to be anything more than a plaything for scholars. There is notoriously much matter in Catullus of a kind which modern readers have a right to expect to be suppressed. The desire to preserve as much of the original as possible is no doubt laudable in principle. But in this case the translator's zeal for his author has gone beyond what is possible, and he has allowed to appear in this volume many things that had better have been left alone.