Odes and Carmen Saeculare | Page 6

greater Sapphic, the "Lydia, die
per omnes" I have made another iambic combination, the six-syllable
with the fourteen-syllable, arranged as a couplet. The choriambic I
thought might be exchanged for a heroic stanza, in which the first line
should rhyme with the fourth, the second with the third, a kind of "In
Memoriam" elongated. Lastly, I have chosen the heroic quatrain proper,
the metre of Gray's "Elegy," for the two Odes in the First Book written
in what is called the Metrum Alcmanium, "Laudabunt alii," and "Te
maris et terrae," rather from a vague notion of the dignity of the
measure than from any distinct sense of special appropriateness.
From this enumeration, which I fear has been somewhat tedious, it will
be seen that I have been guided throughout not by any systematic
principles, but by a multitude of minor considerations, some operating
more strongly in one case, and some in another. I trust, however, that in
all this diversity I shall be found to have kept in view the object on
which I have been insisting, a metrical correspondence with the original.
Even where I have been most inconsistent, I have still adhered to the
rule of comprising the English within the same number of lines as the
Latin. I believe tills to be almost essential to the pieservation of the
character of the Horatian lyric, which always retains a certain severity,
and never loses itself in modern exuberance; and though I am well
aware that the result in my case has frequently, perhaps generally, been
a most un-Horatian stiffness, I am convinced from my own experience
that a really accomplished artist would find the task of composing
under these conditions far more hopeful than he had previously
imagined it to be. Yet it is a restraint to which scarcely any of the
previous translators of the Odes have been willing to submit. Perhaps
Professor Newman is the only one who has carried it through the whole
of the Four Books; most of my predecessors have ignored it altogether.
It is this which, in my judgment, is the chief drawback to the success of
the most distinguished of them, Mr. Theodore Martin. He has brought
to his work a grace and delicacy of expression and a happy flow of
musical verse which are beyond my praise, and which render many of
his Odes most pleasing to read as poems. I wish he had combined with
these qualities that terseness and condensation which remind us that a

Roman, even when writing "songs of love and wine," was a Roman
still.
Some may consider it extraordinary that in discussing the different
ways of representing Horatian metres I have said nothing of
transplanting those metres themselves into English. I think, however,
that an apology for my silence may he found in the present state of the
controversy about the English hexameter. Whatever may be the
ultimate fate of that struggling alien--and I confess myself to be one of
those who doubt whether he can ever be naturalized--most judges will,
I believe, agree that for the present at any rate his case is sufficient to
occupy the literary tribunals, and that to raise any discussion on the
rights of others of his class would be premature. Practice, after all, is
more powerful in such matters than theory; and hardly at any time in
the three hundred years during which we have had a formed literature
has the introduction of classical lyric measures into English been a
practical question. Stanihurst has had many successors in the hexameter;
probably he has not had more than one or two in the Asclepiad. The
Sapphic, indeed, has been tried repeatedly; but it is an exception which
is no exception, the metre thus intruded into our language not being
really the Latin Sapphic, but a metre of a different kind, founded on a
mistake in the manner of reading the Latin, into which Englishmen
naturally fall, and in which, for convenience' sake, they as naturally
persist. The late Mr. Clough, whose efforts in literature were essentially
tentative, in form as well as in spirit, and whose loss for that very
reason is perhaps of more serious import to English poetry than if, with
equal genius, he had possessed a more conservative habit of mind, once
attempted reproductions of nearly all the different varieties of Horatian
metres. They may he found in a paper which he contributed to the
fourth volume of the "Classical Museum;" and a perusal of them will, I
think, be likely to convince the reader that the task is one in which even
great rhythmical power and mastery of language would be far from
certain of succeeding. Even the Alcaic fragment which he has inserted
in his "Amours de Voyage"--
"Eager for battle here
Stood Vulcan, here