Essays Aesthetical Part 7

But say: in th' hour of sweetest sighs, By what and how found Love relief And broke thy doubtful longing's spell?"

And she: "There is no greater grief Than joy in sorrow to retell.

But if so urgently one seeks To know our Love's first root, I will Do as he does who weeps and speaks.

One day of Lancelot we still Read o'er, how love held him enchained.

Without mistrust we were alone.

Our cheeks oft were of color drained: One pa.s.sage vanquished us, but one.

When we read of lips longed for pressed By such a lover with a kiss, This one whom naught from me shall wrest, All trembling kissed my mouth. To this That book and writer brought us. We No farther read that day." While she Thus spake, the other spirit wept So bitterly, with pity I Fell motionless, my senses swept By swoon, as one about to die.

In the very first line two Italian trisyllables, _rivolsi_ and _parlai_, are given in English with literal fidelity by two monosyllables, _turned_ and _spake_. In the fourth observe how, in a word-for-word rendering, the eleven Italian syllables become, without any forcing, eight English:

"Ma dimmi: al tempo de' dolci sospiri:"

"But tell me: in th' hour of sweet sighs."

For the sake of a more musical cadence, this line is slightly modified. Again, in the line,--

"Than joy in sorrow to retell,"

_joy_ represents, and represents faithfully, three words containing six syllables, _del tempo felice_: _retell_ stands for _ricordarsi_, and _in sorrow_ for _nella miseria_, or, three syllables for six; so that, by means of eight syllables, is given a full and complete translation of what in Italian takes up seventeen. English the most simple, direct, idiomatic, is needed in order that a translation of Dante be faithful to his simplicity and naturalness; and this is the first fidelity his translator should feel himself bound to. Owing to the fundamental difference between the syllabic structures of the two languages, we are enabled to put into English lines of eight syllables the whole meaning of Dante's lines of eleven. In the above experiment even more has been done. The twenty-eight lines of Dante are given in twenty-six lines of eight syllables each, and this without any sacrifice of the thought or feeling; for the "this thy teacher knows," which is omitted, besides that the commentators cannot agree on its meaning, is parenthetical in sense, and with reverence be it said, in so far a defect in such a relation. As to the form of Dante, what is essential in that has been preserved, namely, the iambic measure and the rhyme.

Let us try if this curtailment of syllables will be successful when applied to the terrible words, written in blackest color, over the gate of h.e.l.l, at the beginning of the third canto of the "Inferno":--

Through me the path to place of wail: Through me the path to endless sigh: Through me the path to souls in bale.

'Twas Justice moved my Maker high: Wisdom supreme, and Might divine, And primal Love established me.

Created birth was none ere mine, And I endure eternally: Ye who pa.s.s in, all hope resign.

Has anything been lost in the transit from Italian words to English?

English speech being organically more concentrated than Italian, does not the reduction of eleven syllables to eight especially subserve what ought to be the twofold aim of all poetic translation, namely, along with fidelity to the thought and spirit of the original, fidelity to the idiom, and cast and play of the translator's own tongue?

Here is another short pa.s.sage in a different key,--the opening of the last canto of the "Paradiso":--

Maid-mother, daughter of thy Son, Meek, yet above all things create, Fair aim of the Eternal one, 'Tis thou who so our human state Enn.o.bledst, that its Maker deigned Himself his creature's son to be.

This flower, in th' endless peace, was gained Through kindling of G.o.d's love in thee.

In this pa.s.sage nine Italian lines of eleven syllables are converted into eight lines of eight syllables each. We submit it to the candid reader of Italian to say, whether aught of the original has been sacrificed to brevity.

The rejection of all superfluity, the conciseness and simplicity to which the translator is obliged by octosyllabic verse, compensate for the partial loss of that breadth of sweep for which decasyllabic verse gives more room, but of which the translator of Dante does not feel the want.

One more short pa.s.sage of four lines,--the famous figure of the lark in the twentieth Canto of the "Paradiso":--

Like lark that through the air careers, First singing, then, silent his heart, Feeds on the sweetness in his ears, Such joy to th' image did impart Th' eternal will.

This paper has exceeded the length we designed to give it; but, nevertheless, we beg the reader's indulgence for a few moments longer, while we conclude with an octosyllabic version of the last thirty lines of the celebrated Ugolino story. It is unrhymed; for that terrible tale can dispense, in English, with soft echoes at the end of lines.

When locked I heard the nether door Of the dread tower, I without speech Into my children's faces looked: Nor wept, so inly turned to stone.

They wept: and my dear Anselm said, "Thou look'st so, father, what hast thou?"

Still I nor wept nor answer made That whole day through, nor the next night, Till a new sun rose on the world.

As in our doleful prison came A little glimmer, and I saw On faces four my own pale stare, Both of my hands for grief I bit; And they, thinking it was from wish To eat, rose suddenly and said: "Father, less shall we feel of pain If them wilt eat of us: from thee Came this poor flesh: take it again."

I calmed me then, not to grieve them.

The next two days we spake no word.

Oh! obdurate earth, why didst not ope?

When we had come to the fourth day Gaddo threw him stretched at my feet, Saying, "Father, why dost not help me?"

There died he; and, as thou seest me, I saw the three fall one by one The fifth and sixth day; then I groped, Now blind, o'er each; and two whole days I called them after they were dead: Then hunger did what grief could not.

V.

SAINTE-BEUVE, THE CRITIC.

A literary critic, a genuine one, should carry in his brain an a.r.s.enal of opposites. He should combine common sense with tact, integrity with indulgence, breadth with keenness, vigor with delicacy, largeness with subtlety, knowledge with geniality, inflexibility with sinuousness, severity with suavity; and, that all these counter qualities be effective, he will need constant culture and vigilance, besides the union of reason with warmth, of enthusiasm with self-control, of wit with philosophy,--but hold: at this rate, in order to fit out the critic, human nature will have to set apart its highest and best. Dr.

Johnson declared, the poet ought to know everything and to have seen everything, and the ancients required the like of an orator. Truly, the supreme poet should have manifold gifts, be humanly indued as generously and completely as is the bust of Homer, ideally shaped by the light of the infallible artistic instinct and insight of the Greeks. The poet, it is true, must be born a poet, and the critic is the child of culture. But as the poet, to perfect his birthright, has need of culture, so the man whom culture can shape and sharpen to the good critic, must be born with many gifts, to be susceptible of such shaping. And when we reflect that the task of the critic is to see clearly into the subtlest and deepest mind, to measure its hollows and its elevations, to weigh all its individual and its composite powers, and, that from every one of the throbbing aggregates, whom it is his office to a.n.a.lyze and portray, issue lines that run on all sides into the infinite, we must conclude that he who is to be the accomplished interpreter, the trusted judge, should be able swiftly to follow these lines.

Long and exacting as is our roll of what is wanted to equip a veritable sure critic, we have yet to add two cardinal qualifications, which by the subject of our present paper are possessed in liberal allotment. The first is, joy in life, from which the pages of M.

Sainte-Beuve derive, not a superficial sprightliness merely, but a mellow, radiant geniality. The other, which is of still deeper account, is the capacity of admiration; a virtue--for so it deserves to be called--born directly of the n.o.bler sensibilities, those in whose presence only can be recognized and enjoyed the lofty and the profound, the beautiful and the true. He who is not well endowed with these higher senses is not a bad critic; he is no critic at all. Not only can he not discern the good there is in a man or a work, he can as little discover and expose the bad; for, deficiencies implying failures to reach a certain fullness, implying a falling short of the complete, to say where and what are deficiencies, involves the having in the mind an idea of the full and complete. The man so meagrely furnished as to hold no such idea is but a carper, not a critic. To know the bad denotes knowledge of the good; in criticism as in morals, a righteous indignation can only flash from a shock to pure feelings.

In a notice of M. Thiers' chapter on St. Helena, M. Sainte-Beuve, after expressing his admiration of the commentaries of Napoleon on the campaigns of Turenne, Frederic, and Caesar, adds: "A man of letters smiles at first involuntarily to see Napoleon apply to each of these famous campaigns a methodical criticism, just as we would proceed with a work of the mind, with an epic or tragic poem. But is not a campaign of a great captain equally a work of genius? Napoleon is here the high sovereign critic, the Goethe in this department, as the Feuquieres, the Jominis, the St. Cyrs are the La Harpes or the Fontanes, the Lessings or the Schlegels, all good and expert critics; but he is the first of all, nor, if you reflect on it, could it have been otherwise. And who then would say better things of Homer than Milton?"--Goethe supreme in literary criticism, Milton on Homer; this touches the root of the matter; sympathy with the writer and his work the critic must have,--sympathy as one of the sources of good judgment, and even of knowledge. You cannot know, and therefore not judge of a man or book or thing, unless you have some fellow-feeling with him or it; and to judge well you must have much fellow-feeling.

The critic must, moreover, be a thinker; reason is the critic's sun.

Scott and Byron could say just and fresh things about poets and poetry; but neither could command the whole field, nor dig deep into the soil. Witness Byron's deliberate exaltation of Pope. Whereas Wordsworth and Coleridge were among the soundest of critics, because, besides being poets, they were both profound thinkers.

For the perfecting of the literary critic the especial sympathy needed is that with excellence; for high literature is the outcome of the best there is in humanity, the finished expression of healthiest aspirations, of choicest thoughts, the ripened fruit of n.o.ble, of refined growths, the perfected fruit, with all the perfume and beauty of the flower upon it. Of this sympathy M. Sainte-Beuve, throughout his many volumes, gives overflowing evidence, in addition to that primary proof of having himself written good poems. Besides the love, he has the instinct, of literature, and this instinct draws him to what is its bloom and fullest manifestation, and his love is the more warm and constant for being discriminative and refined.

Through variety of knowledge, with intellectual keenness, he enjoys excellence in the diversified forms that literature a.s.sumes. His pages abound in ill.u.s.trations of his versatility, which is nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in the contrast between two successive papers (both equally admirable) in the very first volume of the "Causeries du Lundi," the one on Madame Recamier, the other on Napoleon. Read especially the series of paragraphs beginning, "Some natures are born pure, and have received _quand meme_ the gift of innocence," to see how gracefully, subtly, delicately, with what a feminine tenderness, he draws the portrait of this most fascinating of women, this beautiful creature, for whom grace and sweetness did even still more than beauty, this fairy-queen of France, this refined coquette, who drew to her hundreds of hearts, this kindly magician, who turned all her lovers into friends. Then pa.s.s directly to the next paper, on the terrible Corsican, "who weakened his greatness by the gigantic--who loved to astonish--who delighted too much in what was his forte, war,--who was too much a bold adventurer." And further on, the account of Napoleon's conversation with Goethe at Weimar, in which account M. Sainte-Beuve shows how fully he values the largeness and truthfulness and penetration of the great German. The impression thus made on the reader as to the variousness of M. Sainte-Beuve's power is deepened by another paper in the same volume, that on M. Guizot and his historic school, a masterly paper, which reasons convincingly against those historians "who strain humanity, who make the lesson that history teaches too direct and stiff, who put themselves in the place of Providence," which, as is said in another place (vol. v. p.

150), "is often but a deification of our own thought."

In a paper published in 1862, M. Sainte-Beuve--who had then, for more than thirty years, been plying zealously and continuously the function of critic--describes what is a fundamental feature of his method in arriving at a judgment on books and authors. "Literature, literary production, is in my eyes not distinct, or at least not separable, from the rest of the man and his organization. I can enjoy a work, but it is difficult for me to form a judgment on it independently of the man himself; and I readily say, _as is the tree so is the fruit_.

Literary study thus leads me quite naturally to moral study." This, of course, he can apply but partially to the ancients; but with the moderns the first thing to do in order to know the work is to know the man who did it, to get at his primary organization, his interior beginnings and proclivities; and to learn this, one of the best means is, to make yourself acquainted with his race, his family, his predecessors. "You are sure to recognize the superior man, in part at least, in his parents, especially in his mother, the most direct and certain of his parents; also in his sisters and his brothers, even in his children. In these one discovers important features which, from being too condensed, too closely joined in the eminent individual, are masked; but whereof the basis, the _fond_, is found in others of his blood in a more naked, a more simple state."

Hereby is shown with what thoroughness and professional conscientiousness M. Sainte-Beuve sets himself to his work of critic.

Partially applying to himself his method, we discover in part the cause of his sympathy for feminine nature, and of his tact in delineating it. His father died before he was born; and thence all living parental influence on him was maternal. None of his volumes is more captivating than his "Portraits de Femmes," a translation of which we are glad to see announced.

Of Sainte-Beuve's love for excellence there is, in the third volume of the "Nouveaux Lundis," an ill.u.s.tration, eloquently disclosing how deep is his sympathy with the most excellent that human kind has known. For the London Exposition of 1862 a magnificent folio of the New Testament was prepared at the Imperial Press of Paris. The critic takes the occasion to write a paper on "Les saints Evangiles," especially the Sermon on the Mount. After quoting and commenting on the Beat.i.tudes, he continues: "Had there ever before been heard in the world such accents, such a love of poverty, of self-divestment, such a hunger and thirst for justice, such eagerness to suffer for it, to be cursed of men in behalf of it, such an intrepid confidence in celestial recompense, such a forgiveness of injuries, and not simply forgiveness but a livelier feeling of charity for those who have injured you, who persecute and calumniate you, such a form of prayer and of familiar address to the Father who is in heaven? Was there ever before anything like to that, so encouraging, so consoling, in the teaching and the precepts of the sages? Was that not truly a revelation in the midst of human morals; and if there be joined to it, what cannot be separated from it, the totality of such a life, spent in doing good, and that predication of about three years, crowned by the crucifixion, have we not a right to say that here was a 'new ideal of a soul perfectly heroic,' which, under this half Jewish, Galilean form was set before all coming generations?

"Who talks to us of _myth_, of the realization, more or less instinctive or philosophical, of the human conscience reflecting itself in a being who only supplied the pretext and who hardly existed. What! do you not feel the reality, the living, vibrating, bleeding, compa.s.sionate personality, which, independently of what belief and enthusiasm may have added, exists and throbs behind such words? What more convincing demonstration of the beauty and truth of the entirely historic personage, Jesus, than the Sermon on the Mount?"

Alluding, then, to the denial of originality in the moral doctrines of Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, after citing from Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and others, pa.s.sages wherein is recommended "charity toward the human race," declares that all these examples and precepts, all that makes a fine body of social and philosophical morality, is not Christianity itself as beheld at its source and in its spirit. "What characterizes," he proceeds, "the discourse on the mount and the other sayings and parables of Jesus, is not the charity that relates to equity and strict justice, to which, with a sound heart and upright spirit, one attains; it is something unknown to flesh and blood and to simple reason, it is a kind of innocent and pure exaltation, freed from rule and superior to law, holily improvident, a stranger to all calculation, to all positive prevision, unreservedly reliant on Him who sees and knows all things, and as a last reward counting on the coming of that kingdom of G.o.d, the promise of which cannot fail:--

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also....

Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away....

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve G.o.d and mammon.

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?...

"Nothing of this is to be found in the ancient sages and moralists, not in Hesiod, nor in the maxims of Greece any more than in Confucius.