A Friend of Walter Pater's

A Note on a Strange ana Attractive Literary Figure

ARTHUR SYMONS

I RECENTLY read of the death of Charles Lancelot Shadwell at Oxford at the age of seventy-nine. He was one of the most intimate friends of Pater; and it was to him that he dedicated Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) under the initials of C. L. S. This hook, filled with creative criticism, and the finest book Pater ever wrote, reveals a rare and special temperament, and the most carefully and curiously beautiful of all English styles. As artist's prose it may be compared with the poetry of Rossetti; as fine, as careful, as new a thing as that, and with something of the same exotic odour about it: a savour in this case of French soil, a Watteau grace and delicacy. He was, as Maliarm6 called him "Le prosaleur ouvragé par excellence de ce temps."

For strangeness and subtlety of temperament, for rarity and delicacy of form, for something incredibly attractive to those who knew him, he was as unique in our age as Botticelli—whom he first interpreted to the modern world—in the great age of Raphael. Of Raphael two things may be said, which are really the right side and the wrong side of a single quality: that he is Greek and that he is commonplace. What was invisible did not exist for him, and it is not likely that he conceived the divine persons of his pictures to be much otherwise in themselves than as he painted them; only higher in the scale of perfection; and he applied himself to the task of painting the Farnesina better and better, as a veiled lady or as the Virgin.

His Translation of Dante

SHADWELL'S translation of the Purgatory of Dante (1892) is in a way, marvellous; his reproduction of a poem certainly full of "the rare patience of genius," is itself a work of rare patience and scholarship, conspicuously free from

the haste By which all action is disgraced.

He has chosen the metre invented in English verse by Andrew Marvell in a "Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland," which has to me a more than Iloratian splendour, as in these lines:

But with his keener eye

The axe's edge did try;

Nor called the gods with vulgar spite

To vindicate his helpless right,

But bowed his comely head

Down, as upon a bed.

You actually hear the axe's descent. It is almost as if, as I have written on Hood, a stone is flung angrily in the air and may strike the canopy before it falls back on the earth; and the pity of the thing is like that of a great line of Dante.

I certainly cannot agree with what Pater says in regard to the metre. "The translator has explained in detail his reasons for adopting it; its essential equivalence to Dante's terza rima. With a writer whose vocabulary is so significant and searched through as that of Dante, whose words withal are so sensitive and picturesque, there can be no lidelity which does not exclude a certain literal exactness." The one absolute certainty as to every translation, from whatever language, is that the metre must always be kept, the exact rhymes where the rhymes in the original are exact; and that, as Rossetti says finally: "The life-blood of rhymed translation is this—that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one. Poetry not being an exact science, litcrality of rendering is altogether secondary to this chief aim." As for litcrality that must be left to the choice of every translator. Nor must any one strive, as Pater supposes, to give the value "of the very syllables of the original," as such a thing does not exist in the art of translating.

Take the case of Browning's "perversion " of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, in which he has tried to render line by line and word by word; and, in doing this and in giving double endings and inversions to every line of his version, as well as •mutilating the magnificent choruses, he has signally failed. To require a translation "to be literal at ever> cost save that of absolute violence to our language", which Browning demanded of himself, is to show that he has no sense of what a translation ought to be; besides that it is generally necessary to refer to the Greek for the explanation of the English. To read beside this Swinburne's amazing and marvellous translation of 42 lines from the Grand Chorus of The Birds of Aristophanes—in which he has added double rhymes, but has kept the characteristic rhythm of the original—makes one wonder why Browning ever ventured to translate a Greek Tragedy and why Swinburne never translated more of Aristophanes.

Fitzgerald and Rossetti

IN the two greatest verse translations in English, Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam and Rosetti's Early Italian Poets, each translator had the particular good fortune to discover for himself, apparently through sheer absorption of the original into the very substance of his own mind, a new form, which, as it brought a new thing into English, seemed to be born with it. Fitzgerald, of course, treated his original very freely, weaving a consecutive poem out of stanzas brought together from different parts of that original. But such stanzas as he translated he generally translated very faithfully, and, if he built a new structure of his own, every brick was Omar Khayyam's and the general pattern was preserved. The form of the stanza, which was new in English, follows the Persian arrangement of rhymes, and gets as near as it well could, without disturbing English metre, to the Persian rhyme. Here, then, along with this presentment of a foreign poet, was a new creation in English verse, modelled closely upon the actual form of the foreign poet, and then giving us at once the two things necessary in a perfect translation.

In Rossetti's translation we see a poet, of partly Italian birth, bringing into English literature, and assimilating with English speech, a new element, which is afterwards to give birth, in his own verse, to a new kind of English literature. Unlike Fitzgerald, Rossetti was a poet of creative genius, and in these translations we see him forming his own style, in the effort to reproduce livingly the effect of these mediaeval poets of his own country. Thus, in his translations, as in Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam, we receive "one more possession of beauty," and in each case, it is not only a possession but a seed-plot, and it has been fruitful. No writer of English verse of to-day writes quite the same as if these two consummate translations had not brought new qualities into English.

Dryden on Translation

IN several of his prefaces Dryden has written with his usual brilliant sense on the question of translation, and, if we may differ from his main contention, that " it is almost impossible to translate verbally and well, at the same time, we cannot be told too often that the translator must perfectly understand his author's tongue, and absolutely command his own: so that to be a thorough translator, he must be a thorough poet." What follows, in the preface to the Second Miscellany, is now less important, and no more generally remembered. "Neither is it enough," says Dryden, "to give his author's sense, in good English, in poetical expression, and in numerical numbers; for, though all these are exceedingly difficult to perform, there yet remains an harder task; and it is a secret of which few translators have sufficiently thought. I have already hinted a word or two concerning it; that is, the maintaining the character of an author, which distinguishes him from all others and makes him appear that individual poet whom you would interpret."

(Continued on page 102)

(Continued from page 100)

It is in Botticelli's later mystical period that he does his drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy, begun in 1481 and ended after he finishes his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. His Hell is mere or less that of the Campo Santo and of the mediaeval illuminators, whose convention was not consecrated by tradition. The beauty which comes into his designs comes by a skill of hand which draws lovely lines for the articulations of the bat's wing, and gorgeous decoration in the grouping of the tormented figures and their tormentors, and in coiled snakes that voyage across certain designs in intricate arabesques, and in the crowd and trampling of horsemen. Some arc rapturous as when winged infants plunge into biossoms and whirl, drunken with odours, into the river out of the swirling of the grasses.

The Magic of Dante

BUT, as the breadth of Dante's theological heaven connects itself with the generous eclecticism which finds in "the house of many mansions" due places for Virgil and other sublime spirits of the pagan world amid the infants unbaptised of the dispensation of Christ, so Botticelli in the circle of the sun does but shield his eyes against overpowering light, not seeing any of the doctors of the Church; so even the birds who make D and T and L with their flight, and the M of wings twined with lilies, do not tempt him out of his reticence. But every motion of Dante's soul and of Beatrice's spirit is rendered with absolute subtlety—even in the lifting of the eyelids, even in the parting of the lips— with a restraint like Dante's, and like no other gesture in Italian painting or poetry, Only Wordsworth, occasionally, among poets, gets the inevitable magic of a statement which is at once completely truthful and completely beautiful. Dante gets it into almost every statement. One thing is certain, that Dante is a great poet, one of the greatest poets, but more like Sophocles than Shakespeare, by a certain universality in his appeal to men's minds; and that he represents, at its best and highest, the upper classes of the Dark Ages not less than he represents their Italy. " Hut Dante," writes Swinburne, "would seem to be as jealous a God as he of the Jews in his most exacting and exclusive mood of anarchy." That may be so, for he was a great rebel,

Eat and wash hands, Can Grander— scarce We know their deeds now; hands which fed Our Dante with that bitter bread; And thou, the watch-dog of those stairs Which, of all paths his feet knew well, Were steeper found than Heaven or Hell.

Is Dante really sublime in the Miltonic sense or in the sense in which some o.r Blake s drawings are sublime? I do not feel that he is. His imagination is precise, severe, definite, he sees in hard outline, by flashes, certainly, but without any of the heightening of atmosphere. Yet think poets have said about night, and then hear Dante:

La nolte che le cose ci nasconde.

"Night that hides things from us." While both Shakespeare and Milton are constantly saying things for effect, and letting them dazzle us, Dante's style requires no heightening, no matter what he has to say; even in his "deductions" which are apt to turn heaven into a wrangling hell of the schoolmen.

"So far as I know," wrote Pater on Shadwell's translation, "nothing quite like this has been yet done for presenting Dante to English readers, in union with the attractiveness of metrical form, and a scholarly care for English style." This is certainly true; for Cary's version in blank verse, printed in 1805, is not adequate in regard to the form he had chosen. To translate Dante may be presumed to be an impossible thing, for to do it would require, as the first and final requirement, a luminous and concise style equal to Wordsworth at his best, as when he said (it should have been said of Dante):—

My soul was like a star, and dwell apart.

The cadence and style of Dante were beyond the best style of Cary; but what he did was to turn the Italian poem into an English one, to a certain degree Miltonic, but faithful to the simplicity of the words and turns of speech in the original. Only the complete version of Cary, and the daring experiment of Shadwell, who, as I have said, has rendered the Purgatorio into the metre of Marvell's great ode, have succeeded in the one thing most necessary: that a poem should not cease to be a poem on being rendered into another language.