NOTES ON ELIZABETHAN CLASSICISTS^[1]
LE 227-248.

The reactions and ‘movements’ of literature are scarcely, if ever, movements against good work or good custom. Dryden and the precursors of Dryden did not react against Hamlet. If the eighteenth-century movement toward regularity is among those least sympathetic to the public of our moment, it is ‘historically justifiable’, even though the katachrestical vigours of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander may not be enough to ‘explain’ the existence of Pope. A single faulty work showing great powers would hardly be enough to start a ‘reaction’; only the mediocrity of a given time can drive the more intelligent men of that time to ‘break with tradition’.

I take it that the phrase ‘break with tradition’ is currently used to mean ‘desert the more obvious imbecilities of one’s immediate elders’; at least, it has had that meaning in the periodical mouth for some years. Only the careful and critical mind will seek to know how much tradition inhered in the immediate elders.

Vaguely in some course of literature we heard of ‘the old fourteeners’, vulgariter, the metre of the Battle of Ivry. Hamlet could not have been written in this pleasing and popular measure. The ‘classics’, however, appeared in it. For Court ladies and cosmopolitan heroes it is perhaps a little bewildering, but in the mouth of Oenone:

The Heroycal Epistles of the learned Poet Publius Ovidius Naso. In English verse: set out and translated by George Tuberuile. 1567. London: Henry Denham.

The pastoral note is at least not unpleasing, and the story more real than in the mouths of the later poets, who enliven us with the couplet to the tune:

The old versions of Ovid are worth more than a week’s random reading. Turning from the Heroides I find this in a little booklet said to have been ‘printed abroad’. It is undated, and bears ‘C. Marlow’ on the title-page.

Any fault is more pleasing than the current fault of the many. One should read a few bad poets of every era, as one should read a little trash of every contemporary nation, if one would know the worth of the good in either.

Turning from translation, for a moment, to The Shepherdes Starre (1591), for the abandonment of syntax and sense, for an interesting experiment in metric, for beautiful lines astray in a maze of unsense, I find the incoherent conclusion of much incoherence, where Amaryllis says: ‘In the meane while let this my Roundilay end my follie’; and tilts at the age-old bogie of ‘Sapphics’, Aeolium Carmen, which perhaps Catullus aloneof imitators has imitated with success.

Amaryllis. In the mean while let this my Roundilay end my follie:

Surely among poems containing a considerable amount of beauty, this is one of the worst ever written. Patient endeavour will reveal to the reader a little more coherence and syntax than is at first glance apparent, but from this I draw no moral conclusion.

For all half forgotten writing there is, to my mind, little criticism save selection. ‘Those greene Driades’; Oenone, ‘offspring of a floud’; the music of the Elegy must make their own argument.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations; or follows it. The Victorians in lesser degree had FitzGerald, and Swinburne’s Villon, and Rossetti. One is at first a little surprised at the importance which historians of Spanish poetry give to Boscan, but our histories give our own translators too little. And worse, we have long since fallen under the blight of the Miltonic or noise tradition, to a stilted dialect in translating the classics, a dialect which imitates the idiom of the ancients rather than seeking their meaning, a state of mind which aims at ‘teaching the boy his Latin’ or Greek or whatever it may be, but has long since ceased to care for the beauty of the original; or which perhaps thinks ‘appreciation’ obligatory, and the meaning and content mere accessories.

Golding was no inconsiderable poet, and the Marlow of the translations has beauties no whit inferior to the Marlow of original composition. In fact, the skill of the translations forbids one to balk at the terminal e. We conclude the identity without seeking through works of reference.

Compare (pardon the professional tone whereof I seem unable to divest myself in discussing these matters), compare the anonymous rather unskilled work in the translation of Sixe Idillia, with Marlow’s version of Amorum, lib. III, 13.

THE XVIII JDILLION
HELLENS EPITHALAMION[3]

THE IX JDILLION
CYCLOPS TO GALATEA THE WATER-NYMPH

The ‘shuffling of their feete’ is pleasing, but the Cyclops speaks perhaps too much in his own vein. Marlow is much more dexterous.

The reader, if he can divert his thought from matter to manner, may well wonder how much the eighteenth-century authors have added, or if they added anything save a sort of faculty for systematization of product, a power to repeat certain effects regularly and at will.

But Golding’s book published before all these others will give us more matter for reverie. One wonders, in reading it, how much more of the Middle Ages was Ovid. We know well enough that they read him and loved him more than the more Tennysonian Virgil.

Yet how great was Chaucer’s debt to the Doctor Amoris? That we will never know. Was Chaucer’s delectable style simply the first Ovid in English? Or, as likely, is Golding’s Ovid a mirror of Chaucer? Or is a fine poet ever translated until another his equal invents a new style in a later language? Can we, for our part, know our Ovid until we find him in Golding? Is there one of us so good at his Latin, and so ready in imagination that Golding will not throw upon his mind shades and glamours inherent in the original text which had for all that escaped him? Is any foreign speech ever our own, ever so full of beauty as our lingua materna (whatever lingua materna that may be)? Or is not a new beauty created, an old beauty doubled when the overchange is well done?

Will

quite give us the ‘scarlet curtain’ of the simile in the Flight from Hippomenes? Perhaps all these things are personal matters, and not matter for criticism or discussion. But it is certain that ‘we’ have forgotten our Ovid, ‘we’ being the reading public, the readers of English poetry, have forgotten our Ovid since Golding went out of print.

Reality and particularization! The Elizabethans themselves began the long series of sins against them. In Ovid at least they are not divorced from sweeping imagination as in the Fasti (v. 222):

or in the opening of the Metamorphoses, as by Golding:

‘Which Chaos hight, a huge rude heape and nothing else but even
A heavie lump and clottred clod of seedes.

I throw in the last line for the quality of one adjective, and close this section of excerpts with a bit of fun anent Bacchus.

————————————Thou into Sea didst send
The Tyrrhene shipmen. Thou with bittes the sturdy neckes dost bend
Of spotted Lynxes: throngs of Fownes and Satyres on thee tend,
And that old Hag that with a staff his staggering limmes doth stay
Scarce able on his Asse to sit for reeling every way.
Thou comest not in any place but that is hearde the noyse
Of gagling womens tatling tongues and showting out of boyes.
With sound of Timbrels, Tabors, Pipes, and Brazen pannes and pots
Confusedly among the rout that in thine Orgies trots.

The sin or error of Milton – let me leave of vague expressions of a personal active dislike, and make my yearlong diatribes more coherent. Honour where it is due! Milton undoubtedly built up the sonority of the blank verse paragraph in our language. But he did this at the cost of his idiom. He tried to turn English into Latin; to use an uninflected language as if it were an inflected one, neglecting the genius of English, distorting its fibrous manner, making schoolboy translations of Latin phrases: ‘Him who disobeys me disobeys’.

I am leaving apart all my disgust with what he has to say, his asinine bigotry, his beastly hebraism, the coarseness of his mentality, I am dealing with a technical matter. All this clause structure modelled on Latin rhetoric, borrowed and thrust into sonorities which are sometimes most enviable.

The sin of vague pompous words is neither his own sin nor original. Euphues and Gongora were before him. The Elizabethan audience was interested in large speech. ‘Multitudinous seas incarnadine’ caused as much thrill as any epigram in Lady Windermere’s Fan or The Importance of Being Earnest. The dramatists had started this manner, Milton but continued in their wake, adding to their highsoundingness his passion for latinization, the latinization of a language peculiarly unfitted for his sort of latinization. Golding in the ninth year of Elizabeth can talk of ‘Charles his wane’ in translating Ovid, but Milton’s fields are ‘irriguous’, and worse, and much more notably displeasing, his clause structure is a matter of ‘quem’s’, ‘cui’s’, and ‘quomodo’s’.

Another point in defence of Golding: his constant use of ‘did go’, ‘did say’, etc., is not fustian and mannerism; it was contemporary speech, though in a present-day poet it is impotent affectation and definite lack of technique. I am not saying ‘Golding is a greater poet than Milton’; these quantitative comparisons are in odium.^[7] Milton is the most unpleasant of English poets, and he has certain definite and analysable defects. His unpleasantness is a matter of personal taste. His faults of language are subject to argument just as are the faults of any other poet’s language. His popularity has been largely due to his bigotry, but there is no reason why that popular quality should be for ever a shield against criticism. His real place is nearer to Drummond of Hawthornden than to ‘Shakespear and Dante’ whereto the stupidity of our forebears tried to exalt him.

His short poems are his defenders’ best stronghold, and it will take some effort to show that they are better than Drummond’s Phoebus Arise. In all this I am not insisting on ‘Charles his wane’ as the sole mode of translation. I point out that Golding was endeavouring to convey the sense of the original to his readers. He names the thing of his original author, by the name most germane, familiar, homely, to his hearers. He is intent on conveying a meaning, and not on bemusing them with a rumble. And I hold that the real poet is sufficiently absorbed in his content to care more for the content than the rumble; and also that Chaucer and Golding are more likely to find the mot juste (whether or no they held any theories there-anent) than were for some centuries their successors, saving the author of Hamlet.

Beside the fustian tradition, the tradition of cliché phrases, copies of Greek and Latin clause structure and phrase structure, two causes have removed the classics from us. On one hand we have ceased to read Greek with the aid of Latin cribs, and Latin is the only language into which any great amount of Greek can be in a lively fashion set over; secondly, there is no discrimination in classical studies. The student is told that all the classics are excellent and that it is a crime to think about what he reads. There is no use pretending that these literatures are read as literature. An apostolic succession of school teachers has become the medium of distribution.

The critical faculty is discouraged, the poets are made an exercise, a means of teaching the language. Even in this there is a great deal of buncome. It is much better that a man should use a crib, and know the content of his authors than that he should be able to recite all the rules in Allen and Greenough’s Grammar. Even the teaching by rules is largely a hoax. The Latin had certain case feelings. For the genitive he felt source, for the dative indirect action upon, for the accusative direct action upon, for the ablative all other peripheric sensation, i.e. it is less definitely or directly the source than the genitive, it is contributory circumstance; lump the locative with it, and one might call it the ‘circumstantial’. Where it and the dative have the same form, we may conclude that there was simply a general indirect case.

The humanizing influence of the classics depends more on a wide knowledge, a reading knowledge, than on an ability to write exer cises in Latin; it is ridiculous to pretend that a reading knowledge need imply more than a general intelligence of the minutiae of grammar. I am not assuming the position of those who objected to Erasmus’s ‘tittle-tattles’,^[8] but there is a sane order of importance.

When the classics were a new beauty and ecstasy people cared a damn sight more about the meaning of the authors, and a damn sight less about their grammar and philology.

We await, vei jauzen lo jorn, the time when the student will be encouraged to say which poems bore him to tears, and which he thinks rubbish, and whether there is any beauty in ‘Maecenas sprung from a line of kings’. It is bad enough that so much of the finest poetry in the world should be distributed almost wholly through class-rooms, but if the first question to be asked were: ‘Gentlemen, are these verses worth reading?’ instead of ‘What is the mood of ‘manet’?’ if, in short, the professor were put on his mettle to find poems worth reading instead of given the facilem descensum, the shoot, the supine shoot, of grammatical discussion, he might more dig out the vital spots in his authors, and meet from his class a less persistent undercurrent of conviction that all Latin authors are a trial.

The uncritical scholarly attitude has so spread, that hardly a living man can tell you at what points the Latin authors surpass the Greek, yet the comparison of their differences is full of all fascinations. Because Homer is better than Virgil, and Aeschylus, presumably, than Seneca, there has spread a superstition that the mere fact of a text being in Greek makes it of necessity better than a text written in Latin – which is buncombe.

Ovid indubitably added and invented much that is not in Greek, and the Greeks might be hard put to it to find a better poet among themselves than is their disciple Catullus. Is not Sappho, in comparison, a little, just a little Swinburnian?

I do not state this as dogma, but one should be open to such speculation.

I know that all classic authors have been authoritatively edited and printed by Teubner, and their wording ultimately settled at Leipzig, but all questions concerning ‘the classics’ are not definitely settled, cold-storaged, and shelved.

I may have been an ensanguined fool to spend so much time on medieval literature, or the time so ‘wasted’ may help me to read Ovid with greater insight. I may have been right or wrong to read ‘renaissance latinists, instead of following the professional caution that ‘after all if one confined oneself to the accepted authors one was of reading good stuff, whereas there was a risk in hunting about the unknown’.

I am much more grateful for the five minutes during which a certain lecturer emphasized young Icarus begorming himself with Daedalus’ wax than for all the dead hours he spent in trying to make me a scholar.

‘Getting in both of their ways.’ My plagiarism was from the life and not from Ovid, the difference is perhaps unimportant.

Yet if after sixteen years a professor’s words came back to one, it is perhaps important that the classics should be humanly, rather than philologically taught, even in class-rooms. A barbaric age given over to education agitates for their exclusion and desuetude. Education is an onanism of the soul. Philology will be ascribed to De la Sade.

And there is perhaps more hope for the débutante who drawls in the last fashionable and outwearied die-away cadence ‘Ayh ! Trois Contes? THAT’S a good buk’, than for the connoisseur stuffed full of catalogues; able to date any author and enumerate all the ranges of ‘influences’.

Meditation after further reading during which I found nothing of interest:

Beauty is a brief gasp between one cliché and another. In this case, between the ‘fourteeners’ and the rhymed couplet of ‘pentameter’.

‘C. M.’ was a poet, likewise Golding, both facts already known to all ‘students of the period’. Turbeyville or Turberuile is not a discovery.

Horace would seem to confer no boons upon his translators. With the exception of Chapman, the early translators of Homer seem less happy than the translators of Ovid: Horace’s Satires are, we believe, the basis of much’ eighteenth-century satire. The earliest English version of any Horace that I have found is headed:

'A Medicinable Morall, that is 2 bookes of Horace. his Satyres, Englyshed according to the prescription of saint Hierome (Episto.-ad Ruffin.) Quod malum est, muta, Quod bonum est; prode. The Wailyngs of the Prophet Hieremiah done into Englyshe verse also Epigrammes, by T. Drant. Perused and allowed according to the Queen Madiesties Iniunctions, London 1566.’

The mutation of the satire is not inviting. The Ars Poetica opens as follows:

By 1625 the Miltonic cliché is already formed. It is perhaps not particularly Milton’s. Sir T. Hawkins is greeted by John Beaumont, but I do not find his translations very readable. I turn back, indeed, gratefully to Corinna (Amores 1, 5 ) in a long loose gown

‘C. M.’ gets quality even in the hackneyed topic:

As late .as 1633 Saltonstall keeps some trace of good cadence; though it is manifestly departing.

Tuberuile in the 1567 edition of the Heroides does not confine himself to one measure, nor to rhyme. I think I have seen a misstatement about the date of the earliest blank verse in English. These eight lines should prevent its being set too late. The movement is, to me at least, of interest, apart from any question of scholastic preciosity.

His Phaedra has the ‘fourteener’ measure.

But there is an infinite monotony of fourteeners, and there is subsequently an infinite plethora of rhymed ten-syllable couplets. And they are all ‘exactly alike’. Whether they translate Horace or Homer they are all exactly alike. Beauty is a grasp between clichés.

For every ‘great age’ a few poets have written a few beautiful lines, or found a few exquisite melodies, and ten thousand people have copied them, until each strand of music is planed down to a dullness. The Sapphic stanza appears an exception, and yet, ... Greece and Alexandria may have been embedded knee-deep in bad Sapphics, and it is easy to turn it to ridicule, comical, thumping.

There is a certain resonance in Certain Bokes of Virgiles Aenaeis by Henry Earl of Surrey (apud Ricardum Tottel 1557).

Still there is hardly enough here to persuade one to re-read or to read the Aeneid. Besides it is ‘so Miltonic’. ‘Tho. Phaer, Docteur of Phisike’ in 1562, published a version in older mould, whereof this tenebrous sample:

He uses inner rhyme, and alliteration apparently without any design, merely because they happen. Such lines as ‘For as at sterne I stood, and steering strongly held my helme’ do not compare favourably with the relatively free Saxon fragments. But when we come to

‘The XIII BUKES OF ENEADOS of the famose. Poete Virgill, traslatet out of Latyne verses into Scottish metir by the Reverend Father in God Mayster Gawin Douglas Bishop of Dunkel, unkil to the Erle of Angus, every book having hys particular’ prologue (printed in 1553)’^[9]

we have to deal with a highly different matter.

His commas are not punctuation, but indicate his caesurae.

Approaching the passage concerning the ‘hundryd headed Bugges’ of Dr Phaer, Douglas translates as follows:

I am inclined to think that he gets more poetry out of Virgil than any other translator. At least he gives one a clue to Dante’s respect for the Mantuan. In the first book Aeneas with the ‘traist Achates’ is walking by the sea-board:

This is not spoiled by one’s memory of Chaucer’s allusion.

Douglas continues:

From Aeneas answer, these lines:

And after her prophecy:

Gawine Douglas was a great poet, and Golding has never had due praise since his own contemporaries bestowed it upon him. Caxton’s Virgil (1490) is a prose redaction of a French version. The eclogue beginning

is too familiar to quote here.

The celebrated distych:

is quoted by Wm. Webbe, in 1586, as a perfect example of English quantity and ascribed to ‘Master Watson, fellow of S. John’s’, forty years earlier. If Master Watson continued his Odyssey there is alas no further trace of it.

Conclusions after this reading:

1. The quality of translations declined in measure as the translators ceased to be absorbed in the subject matter of their original. They ended in the ‘Miltonian’ cliché; in the stock and stilted phraseology of the usual English verse as it has come down to us.
2. This ‘Miltonian’ cliché is much less Milton’s invention than is usually supposed.
3. His visualization is probably better than I had thought. The credit due him for developing the resonance of the English blank verse paragraph is probably much less than most other people have until now supposed.
4. Gawine Douglas his works, should be made accessible by reprinting.
5. This will probably be done by some dull dog, who will thereby receive cash and great scholastic distinction. I, however; shall die in the gutter because I have not observed that, commandment which says ‘Thou shalt respect the imbecilities of thine elders in order that thy belly shall be made fat from the jobs which lie in their charge’.
6. That editors, publishers, and universities loathe the inquisitive spirit.

(1916 circa)

[1] Originally appeared as "Elizabethan Classicists" in The Egoist: IV, 8 (Sept. 1917) 120-22; 9 (Oct. 1917) 135-36; 10 (Nov. 1917) 154-56; 11 (Dec. 1917) 168-69; and V, 1 (Jan. 1918) 8-9.

[2] Amorum, lib. 1, elegia 13.

[3] Sixe Idillia, published by Joseph Barnes, Oxford, 1588; one hundred copies reprinted by H. Daniel, Oxford, 1883.

[4] Amorum, lib. III, elegia 13. These translations are reprinted in the Clarendon Press edition of Marlowe’s Works, 1910.

[5] Metamorphoses, by Arthur Golding, 1567. The Fyft booke. Reprint of 300 copies by De la More Press, in folio.

[6] Atalanta. The Eight booke.

[7] 1929. His Metamorphoses form possibly the most beautiful book in our language.

[8] Greek accents.

[9] Written about 1512, i.e. early in the reign of Henry VIII, and by no means ’Elizabethan’.