PREFACE.
Although, among the various versions which have
appeared of various ancient writers, we may recognise
the dead, together with much of the living letter; a
literal version, together with a transfusion of poetical
spirit;—why should we, on that account, consider ourselves
charmed away from attempting another translation?
A mirror may he held in different lights by
different hands; and, according to the position of
those hands, will the light fall. A picture may be
imitated in different ways,—by steel engraving, or stone
engraving; and, according to the vocation of the
artist, will the copy be. According to Dr. Bentley,
Pope's translation of Homer is not Homer; it is
Spondanus: he might have said, it is not even
Spondanus—it is Pope. Cowper's translation is a
different Homer altogether; not Spondanus, nor
Pope, nor the right Homer either. We do not
blame Pope and Cowper for not having faithfully
represented Homer: we do not blame Pope and
Cowper for being Pope and Cowper. It is the nature
of the human mind to communicate its own character
to whatever substance it conveys, whether it
convey metaphysical impressions from itself to another
mind, or literary compositions from one to
another language. It is therefore desirable that the
same composition should be conveyed by different
minds, that the character of the medium may not be
necessarily associated with the thing conveyed. All
men, since Æsop's time and before it, have worn various-coloured
spectacles. They cannot part with
their colour, which is their individuality; but they
may correct the effects of that individuality by itself.
If Potter show us Æschylus through green spectacles,
and another translator, though in a very inferior manner,
show us Æschylus through yellow ones, it will
become clear to the English reader, that green and
yellow are not inherent properties of the Greek poet:
and in this respect, both the English reader and the
Greek poet are benefited.
But the present age says, it has no need of translations
from classic authors. It is, or it would be, an original
age: it will not borrow thoughts with long genealogies,
nor walk upon a pavé, nor wear a costume, like Queen
Anne's authors and the French dramatists. Its
poetry shall not be cold and polished and imitative
poetry; but shall dream undreamt of dreams, and
glow with an unearthly frenzy. If its dreams be
noble dreams, may they be dreamt on; if its frenzy
be the evidence of inspiration, “may I,” as Prometheus
says, “be mad.” But let the age take heed.—
There is one step from dreaming nobly to sleeping
inertly; and one, from frenzy to imbecility.
I do not ask, I would not obtain, that our age
should be servilely imitative of any former age.
Surely it may think its own thoughts and speak its
own words, yet turn not away from those who have
thought and spoken well. The contemplation of excellence
produces excellence, if not similar, yet parallel.
We do not turn from green hills and waving
forests, because we build and inhabit palaces; nor do
we turn towards them, that we may model them in
painted wax. We make them subjects of contemplation,
in order to abstract from them those ideas of
beauty, afterwards embodied in our own productions;
and, above all, in order to consider their and our
Creator under every manifestation of his goodness
and his power. All beauties, whether in nature or
art, whether in physics or morals, whether in composition
or abstract reasoning, are multiplied reflections,
visible in different distances and under different positions,
of one archetypal beauty. If we owe gratitude to
Him, who created and unveiled its form, should we refuse
to gaze upon those reflections? Because they rest
even upon heathen scrolls, should we turn away from
those scrolls? Because thorns and briers are the product
of the earth, should we avert our eyes from that
earth? The mind of man and the earth of man are
cursed alike.
But the age would not be “classical.” “O, that
profaned name!” What does it mean, and what is
it made to mean? It does not mean what it is made
to mean: it does not mean what is necessarily regular,
and polished, and unimpassioned. The ancients,
especially the ancient Greeks, felt, and thought, and
wrote antecedently to rules: they felt passionately,
and thought daringly; and wrote because they felt
and thought. Shakspeare is a more classical writer
than Racine.
Perhaps, of all the authors of antiquity, no one
stands so forward to support this hypothesis, as Æschylus;
and of all the works of Æschylus, no one
stands more forward to support it, than his work of
the Prometheus Bound. He is a fearless and impetuous,
not a cautious and accomplished poet. His
excellences could not be acquired by art, nor could
his defects exist separately from genius. It would be
nearly equally impossible for the mere imitator to
compass either; for if we would stand in the mist, we
must stand also on the mountain. His excellences
consist chiefly in a vehement imaginativeness, a strong
but repressed sensibility, a high tone of morality, a
fervency of devotion, and a rolling energetic diction:
and as sometimes his fancy rushes in, where his judgment
fears to tread, and language, even the most copious
and powerful of languages, writhes beneath its
impetuosity; an occasional mixing of metaphor, and
frequent obscurity of style, are named among his chief
defects. He is pompous too, sometimes; but his
pomposity has not any modern, any rigid, frigid effect.
When he walks, like his actors, on cothurni, we do
not say “how stiff he is!” but “how majestic!”
Whether the Prometheus be, or be not, the finest
production of its author, it will not, I think, be contested,
that Prometheus himself is the character, in
the conception and development of which, its author
has concentrated his powers in the most full and efficient
manner. There is more gorgeousness of imagery
in the Seven Chiefs; and more power in the Eumenides;
and I should tremble to oppose any one scene
in Prometheus, to the Cassandra scene in Agamemnon.
The learned Mr. Boyd, who, in addition to
many valuable and well-known translations,
has furnished
the public with an able version of that obscure
tragedy, considers the scene in question to be “unapproached
and unapproachable by any rival.” But
I would rest the claims of the Prometheus upon
one fulcrum, THE CONCEPTION OF CHARACTER. It
is not in the usual manner of Æschylus to produce
upon his canvass any very prominent figure, to which
every other is made subordinate, and to which the
interest of the spectator is very strongly and almost
exclusively attached. Agamemnon's
πληγην εχω we
do not feel within our hearts. In the Seven Chiefs, there
is a clear division of interest; and the reader willingly
agrees with Antigone, that Polynices should be as
honorably buried as Eteocles. In the Supplices, we
are called upon to exercise universal charity towards
fifty heroines. In the Persæ, we cannot weep with
Atossa over the misfortunes of Xerxes; not even over
what she most femininely considers to be his greatest
misfortune—
μαλιστα δ' ηδε συμφορα δακνει—his wearing
a tattered garment. Perhaps we know more of
Orestes than of any personage, always excepting
Prometheus, introduced by Æschylus: and yet both
in the Choëphorœ and Eumenides, we are interested in
his calamities, rather from their being calamities than
from their being his. But Prometheus stands eminent
and alone; one of the most original, and grand,
and attaching characters ever conceived by the mind
of man. That conception sank deeply into the soul
of Milton, and, as has been observed, rose from thence
in the likeness of his Satan. But the Satan of Milton
and the Prometheus of Æschylus stand upon ground
as unequal, as do the sublime of sin and the sublime of
virtue. Satan suffered from his ambition; Prometheus
from his humanity: Satan for himself; Prometheus
for mankind: Satan dared perils which he
had not weighed; Prometheus devoted himself to
sorrows which he had foreknown. “Better to rule
in hell,” said Satan; “Better to serve this rock,”
said Prometheus. But in his hell, Satan yearned to
associate man; while Prometheus preferred a solitary
agony: nay, he even permitted his zeal and tenderness
for the peace of others, to abstract him from that
agony's intenseness.
Æschylus felt the force of his own portraiture: he
never removes his Prometheus from the spectator's
sight. The readers of Æschylus feel it: they are impatient
at Io's long narrations; not because those narrations
are otherwise than beautiful, but because they
would hear Prometheus speak again: they are impatient
even at Prometheus's prophetic replies to Io,
because they would hear him speak only of Prometheus.
From the moment of the first dawning of his
character upon their minds, its effect is electrifying.
He is silent: he disdains as much to answer the impotent
and selfish compassion of Vulcan, as to murmur
beneath the brutal cruelty of Strength. It was not
thus that
he pitied in his days of joy: it was not thus
that
he acted in his days of power: and his spirit is
above them, and recks not of them; and when their
pity and their scoffs pollute his ears no more, he pours
out his impassioned sorrows to the air, and winds, and
waters, and earth, and sun, whom he had never visited
with benefits, and “taxed not with unkindness.” The
striking nature of these, our first ideas of Prometheus,
is not enfeebled by any subsequent ones. We see
him daring and unflinching beneath the torturing and
dishonoring hand, yet keenly alive to the torture and
dishonor; for himself fearless and rash, yet for others
considerate and wary; himself unpitied, yet to others
pitiful. And when, at the last, he calls no longer
upon the sun, and earth, and waters, from whom the
Avenger is secluding him; but demands of Æther,
who is rolling light to all eyes excepting his, whether
he beholds how he suffers by injustice;—our hearts rise
up within us, and bear witness that the suffering is
indeed unjust.
It is apparent with what bitter feeling the conceiver
of this character must have regarded the transferred
praise and love of Athens—of his country.
“Are you not ashamed,” said Menander to Philemon,
“to conquer me in comedy?” Such a reproach
might Æschylus have used to his dramatic rival, and
extracted as deep a blush as ever stained Philemon's
cheek. But he did not. Silent as his own Prometheus,
he left for ever the Athens on whom he had
conferred the immortality of his name and works; and
went to Sicily, to die. In that place of exile he
wrote his epitaph instead of tragedies, calling with
his dying voice on the grove of Marathon
and the
conquered Persians, as the only witnesses of his
glory. “If thorns be in thy path,” saith Marcus
Antoninus,
“turn aside.” But where should
he turn,
who would avoid the ingratitude and changefulness
of man?
Among those who have passed judgment upon Æschylus,
it is remarkable how many have passed a similar
one to that of the Athenians, when, according
to Suidas, they “broke down the benches” previous
to his departure for Sicily;—a phrase interpreted by
Scaliger to signify a final condemnation of his work. He
is “damn'd by faint praise;” by an alternate acknowledgment
of his genius, and censure of his taste; and
by an invidious opposition to Sophocles and Euripides.
Of the three great critics of antiquity,—Longinus,
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Quintilian,—Dionysius
alone does not measure his criticism to twice the
length of his commendation. Quintilian calls him
“rudis in plerisque et incompositus,” which my sense
of justice almost gives me courage to call a false criticism.
Longinus—Longinus!! uses similar language:
—
ενιοτε μεντοι ακατεργαστους και οιονει ποκοειδεις τας
εννοιας και αμαλακτους φεροντος.
Now there are, undeniably,
some things in Æschylus, which, like the
expressions of Callisthenes, would properly fall under
the censure of Longinus, as being
ουχ υψηλα, αλλα
μετεωρα. But according to every principle by which
he himself could urge his immortal claim upon posterity,
the Homer of criticism should have named
with less of coldness and more of rapture, the Homer
of dramatic poetry.
With regard to the execution of this attempt, it is
not necessary for me to say many words. I have
rendered the iambics into blank verse, their nearest
parallel; and the choral odes and other lyric intermixtures,
into English lyrics, irregular and rhymed.
Irregularity I imagined to be indispensable to the
conveyance of any part of the effect of the original
measure, of which little seems to be understood by
modern critics, than that it is irregular. To the literal
sense I have endeavoured to bend myself as closely as
was poetically possible: but if, after all,—and it is
too surely the case,—“quantum mutatus!” must be
applied; may the reader say so rather sorrowfully
than severely, and forgive my English for not being
Greek, and myself for not being Æschylus.
And will Æschylus forgive, among my many other
offences against him, the grave offence of profaning
his Prometheus, by attaching to it some miscellaneous
poems by its translator? Will he not rather retort
upon me, his chorus's strongly expressed disapprobation
of unequal unions? And how can I defend
myself? απολεμος οδε γ' ο πολεμος.
