BOOKS.
RYDBERG'S "ROMAN DAYS."* APART from its intrinsic merits, this volume is interesting as affording a gauge, to some extent, of the present state of Swedish literature. The author, Viktor Rydberg, received, in 1877, the highest honour that can fall to a writer in Sweden, a chair in the Swedish Academy. This Academy provides only eighteen of these coveted seats, as against the forty which her elder and more famous sister dangles before the eyes of incepting " immortals " in France. But it would be easier to find forty duly qualified candidates for " immortality " in France than eighteen in Sweden, just as it would be easier to find forty really good cricketers in York- shire than eighteen in Norfolk. Small blame, of course, in either case, to the smaller country or to the smaller county. We are forced, however, to make this remark by the exaggerated praise which Dr. Lindehn has bestowed upon his countrymen in the "biographical sketch" of Rydberg prefixed to this volume. We are there told implicitly that in Roman Days the writer "has revealed qualities which prove that his authorship is not confined within the limits of a single land or nation, and which place him in the foremost rank of writers for the world." This
is going a great deal too far, and the reader who puts his trust in such tall-talk is doomed to be disappointed. It is with Bceotia rather than with Attica that Sweden may challenge comparison, and if Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII. together outweigh Epaminondas, Pindar and Plutarch do more, perhaps, than redress the balance, as against the world- honoured name of Linnaeus. It is only just, however, to Viktor Rydberg to observe that he owes his fame and elevation in a great measure to merits which can only be duly appreciated by those who are thoroughly acquainted with the language in which he writes. Holding, and rightly holding, that language is an essential form of national life, "he has," says Dr. Lin- dehn, "given an almost devout care to the Swedish language, in purifying it from foreign words and phrases, and in zealously gathering up neglected or half-forgotten words, appreciating every single word of pure idiomatic origin as too precious a grain of gold to be wasted, or even alloyed with those of foreign extraction. Hence the peculiar charm of his style to Swedish readers, but also the difficulty in translating the beauty of his creations into a foreign language." Style, indeed, is precisely the one quality which is sure to evaporate, more or less, in all translations. Subtract style, and how few there are in every fresh batch of the French " immortals " who have any valid claims to immortality. Still, all deductions made, we may say with confidence that Roman Days is a book that was well worth translating, and one, we may add, that has, on the whole, been well translated. If space permits us, we may point out some errors, or what seem to us to be errors, into which Mr. Clark has fallen ; but they are neither so numerous nor so grave as to affect the general excellence of his work, which deserves to be reckoned as a very creditable addition to the literature of America.
Roman Days, a title apparently of Mr. Clark's own choosing, is composed of four distinct parts,—a series of studies, of unequal length, on the first six Caesars; two essays on a pair of "Antique Statues ;" a collection of "Roman Tradi- tions about St. Peter and St. Paul ;" and lastly, some half- dozen "Pencil Sketches in Rome." The studies are called "The Roman Emperors in Marble," and are decidedly the pick of the basket. We cannot go along with Rydberg in a great deal of his phrenological and physiognomical speculations, for two reasons. First, that when a man's general character is known beforehand, it is impossible not to interpolate when we try to read his mind's construction in his face. Second, that we more than doubt if these statues are such exact presentments of their originals as to warrant us in drawing more confident conclusions from them than we might, e.g., from the effigy of the present Empress of India on a florin. Be this as it may, the characters of the questionable quintet who inherited the world which Julius Cwsar conquered is still a theme of exhaustless interest. Rydberg's studies will suggest a comparison with Be Quincey's Essays on The Cesar, and so far as they go, we give the preference to the former. In both, the note of the novelist is more perceptible than that
• Roman Days. From the Swedish of Viktor Rydberg. By A. C. Clark. London : Sampson Low and Co. 1879. of the historian. In both, we are bored by what the French call longueurs, though the Englishman is a greater offender in thie respect than the Swede. But De Quincey committed, it will be. remembered, the almost incredible blunder of omitting Tiberius from his list, and although we occasionally meet with stumbling- blocks in Rydberg, we have noticed none so great as the non- sense in De Quincey about the first Csesar's contempt for Sulla'e literary acquirements and capacity. By far the longest of Rydberg's studies is the one in which he discusses Nero. it is not, to our thinking, the best. The stage-struck rascal who
closes the list engrosses as many pages as are given to the whole of his predecessors together. But there are obvious marks of padding in these pages, redeemed though it may be, and not infrequently, by passages like the following :—
" Nero's cruelty has become a by-word. But to the cruelty that enjoys the pain of others, the cruelty of voluptuaries and hysterical women whose nerves are tickled at the sight of torture and blood, Nero was a stranger; • he died too young, and with health too un- broken, to fall into that. Nor can he be charged with the villainous nature of a Caligula, who killed because he had the power to do so. Just as little can the kind of cruelty most usual bo attributed to him, which has its rise in the impulse of retaliation or the feeling of revenge. He was, on the contrary, whenever he could without danger or sacrifice be so, inclined to overlook and forgive. But an amiable nature, without the support of moral principle, is altogether untrustworthy in the trials of life. One sees it best in the so-called natural people, in whom cruelty can of a sudden break out in the very midst of simple expressions of beautiful qualities of the human soul. And with all his surfeiting on the forms of an over-refined culture, Nero was and remained a 'primitive man.' When the instinct of self-preservation was aroused, when he saw his life menaced, or that be was threatened in the conditions of en- joying life, he lost the power of reason. Imagination, which can make ills in prospect worse than those that have happened, over- powered him ; and if those who surrounded him were such as urged him on, instead of restraining him, he struck, and spared not. The watchword of the time' besides, was by every means to seek enjoy- ment and avoid pain. To an Epicurean savage, in whose hands had been placed the destiny of the world, the desire to remove causes of suffering lay in very close proximity to that of avoiding them. If he hesitated to take the step from one to the other, there were frighten- ing, encouraging, and flattering voices that conjured him to do so, and seemed to be right, too, for when he had crossed the Rubicon of crime, everything came on rejoicing to meet him. And the dignified repose with which the Stoic went forth to die, the defiant frivolity with which the Epicurean left the feast of life, were equally apt to persuade the tyrant that everything—life and death, and the judg- ment of life and death—is play."
We may here notice one of the minor stumbling-blocks to which we have alluded. Rydberg is much exercised by the pre- ference which Juvenal gives to the matricide Orestes over the matricide Nero, because, as he says,— " Nunquam in scena cantavit Orestes, Troica non scripsit."
He (Rydberg) searches for a key to what he calls this riddle, missing the obvious explanation that the last three words are an anti-climax in Juvenal's regular style, and merely express the satirist's contempt for the Emperor's poetry gad poetry, without any reference to the moral delicacy and indeli- cacy of his unquestionably worthless epic. The paper on Claudius strikes us as about the best. It is clever and amusing, if not convincing. But, in point of fact, what Ryd- berg says of Tiberius may be said with still more truth of that gloomy emperor's predecessors and successors. They all await the master-hand that shall be able to draw them. Tacitus, it seems, is prejudiced, Suetonius is a scandalmonger, while Ampere is little more than Tacitus-and-water, and Merivale, though a good, is not a great historian. Mommsen is the man, and, if report speaks true, we may look for his summing-up before many years are over. When it comes, if we may rashly venture, in a rough and ready way, to anticipate the great scholar's judgment, it will, we imagine, knock a little of the gilt off the gingerbread of Augustus, and scrape away several coats of Stahr's and of 13eesley's whitewash from Tiberius. It will also, if we mistake not, give Caligula and Claudius certificates for Colney Hatch and Earlswood respectively ; and if it shows any mercy to Nero at all, that aesthetic rapscallion, the odious son of a still more odious mother, will owe his escape from the deepest of deep damnation to some application or other of the doctrine of heredity.
As to the rest of the contents of this book, we must hastily and briefly say that the "Pencil Sketches in Rome" are lively and graphic, and not unpleasantly tinged with the stalwart Protestantism of a man whose ancestors may have fought under the banner of the Lion of the North. The "Roman Traditions of Peter and Paul" are full of quaint in- terest, and if we select the "Ascension of Simon the Sorcerer" for especial praise, we do so because we think that the narrator has unduly depreciated his own description. As to the "Antique Statues" the "Aphrodite of Melos " may be said to be after Lessing,—but after Leasing in more senses than one : and we may remind Mr. Clark, in passing, that whatever our spelling- reformadoea may have in store for us, at present " maelon" cannot be written as an equivalent for the Greek word piXoy. The " Antinous " strikes us as wire-drawn, and we are not sorry that space forbids us to waste words on that very unimportant personage. " Antinoism," pace that very able and eloquent writer, Mr. J. A. Symonds has no charms for us. And to the question why divine honours were paid, and paid for so many years, to Hadrian's pampered popinjay, we cheerfully answer that we neither know nor care. Probably, to borrow Mr. Carlyle's sneer, the vast majority of his worshippers were fools.
One word, before we finish, about the errors which we fancy that we have discovered in Mr. Clark's translation. We have only room to mention two. In p. 3, we find "Moon-shine pate" as an equivalent for the "bald libertine," as Ccesar was called by his delighted soldiery. This seems no less ludicrous than in- correct, but Rydberg is probably as much in fault here as his translator. The second and still more ludicrous slip lurks in the following sentence, where the author is still speaking of Ca3sar's baldness,—" He tried to help himself by ' discount ;' the crown borrowed from the back of the head, to cover the deficiency ; but at last the lender, too, was bank- rupt." Now, we have little doubt that the Swedish word here rendered by " crown " is quite free from ambiguity, and means a coronet. But the English word suggests not only the crown, as opposed to the back of the head, but also, by its proximity to " discount " and "borrowing," recalls to a British, if not to an American, ear the notion of a dollar, and the farce of Lend Me Five Shillings. We must not, however, conclude without repeating our conviction that Mr. Clark has given us a very worthy translation of a very worthy book.
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