17 JULY 1897, Page 17

BOOKS.

A NEW TRANSLATION OF BOETHIUS4

IT is, we believe, rather more than a century since a new English version has appeared of that once popular manual, the Consolation of Philosophy, which Dante, it will be remem- bered, fled to for solace after the death of Beatrice, and so widely different a temperament and so irreverent a critic as Gibbon eulogised as a "golden book." The reason of the neglect, if it be neglect, is doubtless that our age prefers to seek its philosophy nearer the fountain-head. To us who are privileged to read Plato and Aristotle for ourselves, if not in the original yet in competent versions, the day of Boethias may seem to have gone by, for it was his peculiar merit to be the interpreter of their philosophy to a barbarous age. But be is more than an epitomises. Whatever the source of his ideas, and he borrows over a wide field, from the Porch no less than from the Academy, he makes them his own by comprehension and sympathy ; the voice that speaks in his pages is a real, individual voice; and even if the philosophy were less con- soling than many generations have found it, the form of the book, the happy alternation of prose and verse, its fine imagination and rhetoric, would alone suffice to secure it a permanent place in literature.

The controversy as to whether Boethins was a Christian

• Copyright in Atom ice. by John Lane.

f The Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius. Translate] int, English Prom and Verse by H. B. James. M.A. London: Elliot Stock.

will possibly never be settled to the entire satisfaction of everybody. The document discovered twenty years ago which refers to his book on the Trinity has convinced so sound a scholar as Mr. Hodgkin that the dogmatic treatises bearing his name are indeed from his hand, and the Roman Church has decided the question in its own infallible fashion by making him a saint. And the fact may be so. Boethius, in that case, will be the earliest known specimen of a type not uncommon at the Renaissance, and revived with a difference to-day, the Christian theologian who draws his real consolation from non-Christian philosophy. The book was written during its author's imprisonment at Pavia under sentence of death on a false charge of conspiracy against Theodoric. Until the moment of his fall he bad led a life of remarkable felicity, at first as a scholar, translating for his countrymen the great works of the Greek men of science,—Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Archimedes, and many of the writings of Aristotle; after- wards, feeling drawn to realise Plato's dream of the philosopher

statesman, as Consul and magister officiorum. He was happy,

too, in his home-life, having married the daughter of Symmachus, a daughter worthy of her famous sire in whom the old Roman virtue seemed to breathe again, and having lived to see both his sons Consul in one year. And then came the end by the ordinary method of informers.

The subject of the Consolation is a colloquy between

Boethius and Philosophy, who visits him in prison and makes him tell his story, and then endeavours to raise him out of his dejection, at first by simple, and then by stronger, medicines. She reminds him that true happiness cannot lie in the gifts of fortune, that fortune is by nature fickle, and cannot be blamed for " doing her kind ; " and then shows that the pursuit of these elusive pleasures is really a blind pursuit of some sovereign good, which cannot be found except in God.

Boethius then propounds the problem of evil, and is answered with the paradox that evil has no real existence ; that the wicked are always impotent, and the good alone powerful; nay, that the wicked are, in various ways, always being punished, in- their wicked will itself, in their power of doing evil, and in the accomplishment of their will, which only heaps up misery for themselves. Then follow discussions on the difference between fate and Providence, and the reconciliation of free-wilt with foreknowledge, which latter controversy is thus decided : God being eternal, his foreseeing is simple seeing, and so no more necessitates action on our part than we necessitate any action that we watch.

In this last conclusion we may recognise the germ of a passage in the "In Memoriam ":—

" Or if indeed that eye foresee— Or see, in Mm is no before—"

and that leads to the remark that not the least interesting thing about Boethius is the influence he has exercised upon. our English poets. To Chaucer, as to the Middle Ages generally, he was a great sage, and accordingly Chaucer translated him into prose ; but to Chaucer he was also a

great man of letters, and so he paid him the compliment he paid to Per rarch and others, of extensive translation into his. own verse. There is a well-known passage in Book IV. of Troylus and Cryseyde, some fourteen stanzas long, where Troylus debates about free-will and foreknowledge, which is merely transcribed from Boethius; so, too, the lEtas Prima is nothing but a paraphrase of Metrum ii. 5. But large borrow- ings of this sort by no means exhaust Chaucer's debt.. Most of his moralisiugs came out of Boethins, especially those about fortune's wheel, the brittleness of human happiness, &c.; and so do some of his most admired images, such as that. introduced into both the Squire's and Manciple's tales, of the caged bird who will fly to the woods if she can for all her dainty feeding. From Boethins, too, comes the thought to be found not only in Chaucer, but in Dante and most poets since, that the worst sting of misery is to have been happy.

Another English poet much influenced by Boethius is Henry Vaughan, who translated some eighteen of his metres. It is a compliment that Mr. James deserves to compare his versions with Vaughan's. Sometimes the verdict must be that the

old is better, but sometimes Mr. James carries it, for example in the passage about the caged bird already referred to (Metre iii. 2) :— " And the woodland songster, pent In forlorn imprisonment, Though a mistress lavish care, Store of honesed sweets prepare- Yet, if in his narrow cage, As he hops from bar to bar, He should spy the woods afar Cool with sheltering foliage. All these dainties he will spurn, To the woods his heart will turn ; Only for the woods he longs, Pipes the woods in all his songs."

As a specimen of Mr. James's prose, which is smooth and easy, as well as close to the Latin, we will quote his version of the concluding passage :—Qua cum ita sint, manet intemerata mortalibus arbitrii libertas, ttc. :— " And all this being so, the freedom of man's will stands un- shaken, and laws are not unrighteous, since their rewards and punishments are held forth to wills unbound by any necessity. -God, who foreknoweth all things, still looks down from above, and the ever-present eternity of His vision concurs with the future character of all our acts, and dispenseth to the good rewards, to the bad punishments. Our hopes and prayers also are not fixed on God in vain, and when they are rightly directed cannot fail of effect. Therefore, withstand vice, practise virtue, lift up your souls to right hopes, offer humble prayers to Heaven. Great is the necessity of righteousness laid upon you if ye will not hide it from your- selves, seeing that all your actions are done before the eyes of a Judge who seeth all things."