A BOOK OF THE MOMENT.

THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY.

Tim books of the moment just now are as often as not Classics rendered into English. That this is a good sign I have no doubt. Whenever our. literature has been most alive a Id most vigorous, it has been marked by translation.' The Elizabethans were as great in translations as they were

in original prose. and verse. Dryden, though so .virile and original, a writer, was the translator not only of Virgil, and Lucretius, and Ovid, but also of French and even early English verse witness his fables from Chaucer. The earlier part of the eighteenth century was also an epoch of translation. Pope's Iliad and Gordon's inimitable Tacitus are capital examples. The Victorians had their Bohn and found excellent refreshment therein, and to that series we are still all beholden. But it is the rule that each epoch—almost each 'generation —requires a translation which will lit its own needs. We are finding our translations partly by new versions and part4, by the revival of the seventeenth-century translations. But of these on another occasion.

To-day I must pay homage to. the Loeb Series. There the editors, ,Mr. Capps, Mr. T. E. Page and Mr. Rouse, have determined, very properly from their point of view,' to let their versions be as correct as modern scholarship knows how to reiakelhem. For example, they did not adopt the translation even of Gordon, but insisted on more exact renderings. The fact that the Greek and Latin are printed on the opposite page to the translation made this the more necessary. The blunders of the earlier translators, owing very often to a corrupt text, could hardly have stood opposite a better text supplied by modern scholarship'.

But the proof of the Loeb translations is in the reading. Though I am no scholar, and have forgotten all the little Greek I ever had and most of the Latin, I know nothing more delightful than to run one's hand over a bookshelf full of the Loeb translations and feast thereon at leisure. Whether it is. the recent volumes of Hippocrates—a perfect mine of delightful reading, though they sound so technical—or Cicero's letters and speeches, or even the miscellaneous writings of that rather dull dog, Julian the Apostate, or the Greek Anthology, or the Lyra Graces, one is absolutely certain to come upon delightful things. And then there are " finds " and new discoveries in plenty in these volumes. Take, for example, the Scriptores Historia,e Augustae, or Anec- dotal Memoirs of the Roman Emperors. I had always heard the book damned as badly written, untrustworthy, and gener- ally a hodgepodge of inexactitudes, worthy of neither credit nor attention. When, then, Vol. I. of the three in prepara- tion reached me in the Imeb library, I had no intention of reading it. I.turned up ,my nose at it as " unworthy the consideration of the scholar and the gentleman." Happily a wet day, - ii-cold in the head and a whimsical impulse induced me 1:o read it. I was transported. It is one of the most delightful, curious and amusing collections of anecdotes about great. men and great things that have ever been written. Gossip it may be, but it is gossip of the kind that makes the great people of antiquity live. They come down from their marble pedestals and take you by the hand. Here is, the key to unlock the pompous mysteries of the Caesars, their Augustas, their Senators, Consuls and Praetors. You get, for, example, in touch with the real Marcus Aurelius, and by no means to his discredit. Hadrian, with his love of going to the tops of mountains and seeing sunrises—an excellent gift in an Emperor—grows human. Pertinax and Commodus cease to be names. In fact, this whole crowd of half-Emperors and quarter-Emperors become, not shadows and phantoms, but people very much alive.

Scattered up and down are admirable epigrams and pregnant sayings. I will take only two examples : that of the Emperor who instituted small dinner parties and formulated the proposition : " Seven make a dinner ; nine make a din." The Latin is quite'as neat to the ear as the English. Take, too, the desperate saying of Hadrian, who remarked (doubtless

with an imperial sigh) that precautions against usurpers were of little avail. " No roan can kill his successor." Then the intimate pictures, like that of Septimus Severus,

the shrewd lights 'on Faustina, the delicate problem 'of the bringing up of Princes, and the awful paradox that great men are almost alWayi Succeeded by duds or scoundrels.. I have absolutely covered two pages at the end of my copy. of the Scriptores with the numbers of pages' on which theie is something specially good, and there is hardly room for another entry. On the next re-reading I shall have to take refuge on the title-page.

Before I leave this amazingly delightful book I feel I must qUote a passage on the two eternal questions which haunt alike the palace, the house in Westbourne Terrace, the eight- roomed villa and the cottage. Those . are : (1) the best education for the children, and (2) the hot water system and- the baths. The description of the teaching of Cciminodus Antoninus under the directions of Marcus Aurelius and what it led to is one of the bitterest pieces of. Satire, though not so intended, that have ever been written. After the death of Antoninus, Marcus Aureliiis tried to educate Commodus, not only by his own teaching—poor scholar, poor teacher—. but also by employing the greatest and best 'of men and. experts alive in the Empire. In Greek literature, as in Latin, Commodus had the noblest and the ablest of masters: ' Those are the facts. Here is the comment of Aelius Lampridius • " However, teachers in 'all these studies profited him not in the least—such is the power, either of ,natural character; or Of the' i tutors maintained in a-palace. For even from his earliest years he. was base and dishonourable, and cruel arid lewd, defiled of mouth; moreover, and debauched.' Even then he was an adept•in certain arts which are not becoming in an Eniperor, for he could mould' goblets,. and dance and sing and whistle, and he could play the. buffoon and the gladiator to perfection. In the twelfth year of his life, at Centumcellae, he gave a forecast of his cruelty. For when it happened that his bath was drawn too cool, he ordered the bathkeeper to be cast into the furnace ; whereupon the slave who had been ordered to do this burned a sheep-skin in the furnace, in order to make him believe by the stench of the vapour that the punishment had been carried out."• Another wonderful description is that of Pertinax, of whom we are told that he was so mean that " before he was made Emperor he used to serve at his banquets lettuce and the edible thistle in' half portions." We seem here to reach the very abysm of dietary squalor. Foreign hotels please do not copy ! Another of his peculiarities is worth recording. Even after he was made Emperor, " he never ate pheasants at his own banquets or sent them to others." What he did with them does not appear ! Perhaps nobody ever gave him any, arid' lie was too little of a sportsman to shoot his own, coverts. But then he was not one of the Emperors who lived in the grand style. Quite the contrary. As the writer of his anecdotal history says, " he did not wish to seem other than he really was," which was a rather punctilious, fussy, close-

. fisted little business man _

" On the other hand, he was so stingy and eager for money that even after he became Emperor he carried on a business at Vada , Sabatia through agents, just as he had done as a private citizen. And despite his efforts, he was not greatly beloved ; certainly, all who talked freely together spoke ill of Pertinax, calling him the smooth-tongued, that is, a man who speaks affably and acts meanly. In truth, has fellow-townsmen, who had flocked to him after his accession, and had obtained nothing from him, gave him this name. In his lust for gain, he accepted presents with eagerness."

It seems wrong to deal with the subject of translations from the Classics without touching on the mechanism of translation. The two poles in translation are the paraphrase, and mere construing or the verbal substitution of the English word for the foreign word. Which method should be employed is a difficult question and largely depends upon the reader's taste. The best thing ever said on the question to my mind is the passage in Selden's " Table Talk." Though it is, no doubt, known to most readers, it is so short that one may as well put it on recqrd here :-

"There is no book so translated as the Bible. For the purpose, if I translate a French book into English, I turn it into English phrase, not into Trench English. II fait livid; T say,' it Is •cold, not it makes cold ; but the Bible is translated into English words rather than into English .phrase. The Hebraisms are kept, and the phrase of that language is kept : as, for example (he uncovered her shame), which is well enough, so long as scholars have to do with it ; but when it comes among the common people, lord, what gear do they make of it 1 "

I have no doubt myself that the _translation by verbal substitution is the one which gives us much the most loCal

ciiloui and puts us most en rapport with the writer. When the Bible was first translated, no doubt it seemed perfectly strange and unintelligible to many readers owing to the Hebraic idioms and methods of literary presentation ; but the book had so great a spiritual and intellectual impact upon our language, our prose style, and our habits of thought that it to some extent Hebraicized our language, our phraseo- logy, the shape of our sentences and the • contour of our thoughts. We could not now go back to paraphrase transla- tion without serious injury to our literature. For 'myself, I would much rather see the Classics treated in the same way than adopt the most elegant paraphrase, unless the pare- pluaser is a poet like Pope or Dryden, who builds what is really a new poem on the old foundations. In spite of their crudity, I have always felt a great deal nearer Virgil, Horace and Caesar, in Dr. Giles's cribs than in much more smooth, scholarly and elegant translations where the object is to try to get an exact reflection of the thought in faultless English. Take, for example, the following passage from the Sixth Book :- "The Cumaean Sibyl sings her dreadful mysteries from her inmost shrine, in such words, enveloping true things in obscure ones, and bellows in the cavern : Apollo shakes those reins over her raving, and directs excitements under her breast.

As soon as her fury ceased, and her raging mouth was at rest,

the hero Aeneas begins : ' No form of troubles, 0 virgin, arises new or unexpected to me ' • I have anticipated- and have gone through all things beforehand with myself in my mind. I pray one thing, the gate of the infernal king is said (to be) here, and the darksome lake (farmed) by overflowing Acheron, that it may happen (to me) to go to the sight and the presence of my dear father ; that thou teach the way and open the sacred doors. I snatched away him on these shoulders through flames and a thousand pursuing weapons, and rescued him from the midst of the enemy. He having accom- panied my path (though) infirm bore with me all seas, and all the threats both of the sea and of the sky, beyond the strength and the lot of old age."

So rises the Virgilian fountain from the turbid reservoir

of what Dr. Giles himself calls : " Construed, with the text, into English, literally and word for word." The passage I have " recovered " from the crib of childhood's unhappy hours may seem " impossible " to the mind of elegance, but I do not see why it should not be enormously improved by some person with real knowledge and a feeling for the English language. Perhaps some of our more learned readers would oblige by applying the system of substitution to the first twenty lines of the Aenid and give us the result. Persons working on these principles might give versions of the Classics which, though they might seem uncouth at first, would after a certain time educate readers into the Latin attitude of mind. In the case of Greek writers, there would be comparatively little difficulty. Greek is a reasonable tongue, and there is no standing on one's head and painting with one's toes as in the best Latin prose.

In Eastern languages the system . of word substitution

answers admirably. I remember a translation of the Boston of Sadi, i.e., " The Rose Garden," made in English in Calcutta in the year 1809, which, though odd in places, brings you infinitely nearer to the poet than do the regular Persian scholars. I think it possible, though I admit it does not seem likely, that one would be able to read Jami if he were treated by substitution. Hafiz, again, is a good field for the substitutor. It is also conceivable that if Welsh and Gaelic poetry were firmly treated in this way that their attractions might be increased. What an autumnal rose for the later phases of Mr. Lloyd George's career would be a new version of the Mabinogion I Could there be a fitter task for the Cincinnatus of Churt and Criceieth ? Lord Haldane might follow suit with a new Ossian in vers Libre—unless Mr. Ian Macpherson should regard that as poaching.

J. ST. LOS STRACHEY.