The Oxford Book of American Essays

In fact, man, unless he is consciously and admittedly fit, revolts against the implication of the doctrine of evolution, and objects both to being considered unfit to survive and succeed, and to being forced to accept the only fate which nature offers to those who are unfit for survival and success. Indeed, he manifests with amazing pertinacity what Schopenhauer used to call "the will to live," and considerations and arguments based on adaptability to environment have no weight with him. So much the worse for environment, he cries; and straightway sets out to prove it.

On the other hand, those humans who are classed by the doctrine of evolution as fit, exhibit a most disconcerting satisfaction with things as they are. The fit make no conscious struggle for existence. They do not have to. Being fit, they survive ipso facto. Thus does the doctrine of evolution, like a playful kitten, merrily pursue its tail with rapturous delight. The fit survive; those survive who are fit. Nothing could be more simple.

Those who are not adapted to the conditions that surround them, however, rebel against the fate of the earthworm and the climbing-plant and the brightly colored bird, and engage in a conscious struggle for existence and for success in that existence despite their inappropriate environment. Statutes can be repealed or amended; why not laws of nature as well? Those human beings who are unfit have, it must be admitted, one great, though perhaps temporary, advantage over the laws of nature; for the laws of nature have not yet been granted suffrage, and the organized unfit can always lead a large majority to the polls. So soon as knowledge of this fact becomes common property, the laws of nature will have a bad quarter of an hour in more countries than one.

The revolt of the unfit primarily takes the form of attempts to lessen and to limit competition, which is instinctively felt, and with reason, to be part of the struggle for existence and for success. The inequalities which nature makes, and without which the process of evolution could not go on, the unfit propose to smooth away and to wipe out by that magic fiat of collective human will called legislation. The great struggle between the gods of Olympus and the Titans, which the ancient sculptors so loved to picture, was child’s play compared with the struggle between the laws of nature and the laws of man which the civilized world is apparently soon to be invited to witness. This struggle will bear a little examination, and it may be that the laws of nature, as the doctrine of evolution conceives and states them, will not have everything their own way.

Professor Huxley, whose orthodoxy as an evolutionist will hardly be questioned, made a suggestion of this kind in his Romanes lecture as long ago as 1893. He called attention then to the fact that there is a fallacy in the notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent survival of the fittest, therefore, men as social and ethical beings must depend upon the same process to help them to perfection. As Professor Huxley suggests, this fallacy doubtless has its origin in the ambiguity of the phrase "survival of the fittest." One jumps to the conclusion that fittest means best; whereas, of course, it has in it no moral element whatever. The doctrine of evolution uses the term fitness in a hard and stern sense. Nothing more is meant by it than a measure of adaptation to surrounding conditions. Into this conception of fitness there enters no element of beauty, no element of morality, no element of progress toward an ideal. Fitness is a cold fact ascertainable with almost mathematical certainty.

We now begin to catch sight of the real significance of this struggle between the laws of nature and the laws of man. From one point of view the struggle is hopeless from the start; from another it is full of promise. If it be true that man really proposes to halt the laws of nature by his legislation, then the struggle is hopeless. It is only a question of time when the laws of nature will have their way. If, on the other hand, the struggle between the laws of nature and the laws of man is in reality a mock struggle, and the supposed combat merely an exhibition of evolutionary boxing, then we may find a clew to what is really going on.

It might be worth while, for example, to follow up the suggestion that in looking back over the whole series of products of organic evolution, the real successes and permanences of life are to be found among those species that have been able to institute something like what we call a social system. Wherever an individual insists upon treating himself as an end in himself, and all other individuals as his actual or potential competitors or enemies, then the fate of the earthworm, the climbing-plant, and the brightly colored bird is sure to be his; for he has brought himself under the jurisdiction of one of nature’s laws, and sooner or later he must succumb to that law of nature, and in the struggle for existence his place will be marked out for him by it with unerring precision. If, however, he has developed so far as to have risen to the lofty height of human sympathy, and thereby has learned to transcend his individuality and to make himself a member of a larger whole, he may then save himself from the extinction which follows inevitably upon proved unfitness in the individual struggle for existence.

So soon as the individual has something to give, there will be those who have something to give to him, and he elevates himself above this relentless law with its inexorable punishments for the unfit. At that point, when individuals begin to give each to the other, then their mutual co-operation and interdependence build human society, and participation in that society changes the whole character of the human struggle. Nevertheless, large numbers of human beings carry with them into social and political relations the traditions and instincts of the old individualistic struggle for existence, with the laws of organic evolution pointing grimly to their several destinies. These are not able to realize that moral elements, and what we call progress toward an end or ideal, are not found under the operation of the law of natural selection, but have to be discovered elsewhere and added to it. Beauty, morality, progress have other lurking-places than in the struggle for existence, and they have for their sponsors other laws than that of natural selection. You will read the pages of Darwin and of Herbert Spencer in vain for any indication of how the Parthenon was produced, how the Sistine Madonna, how the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, how the Divine Comedy, or Hamlet or Faust. There are many mysteries left in the world, thank God, and these are some of them.

The escape of genius from the cloud-covered mountain-tops of the unknown into human society has not yet been accounted for. Even Rousseau made a mistake. When he was writing the Contrat social it is recorded that his attention was favorably attracted by the island of Corsica. He, being engaged in the process of finding out how to repeal the laws of man by the laws of nature, spoke of Corsica as the one country in Europe that seemed to him capable of legislation. This led him to add: "I have a presentiment that some day this little island will astonish Europe." It was not long before Corsica did astonish Europe, but not by any capacity for legislation. As some clever person has said, it let loose Napoleon. We know nothing more of the origin and advent of genius than that.

Perhaps we should comprehend these things better were it not for the persistence of the superstition that human beings habitually think. There is no more persistent superstition than this. Linnæus helped it on to an undeserved permanence when he devised the name Homo sapiens for the highest species of the order primates. That was the quintessence of complimentary nomenclature. Of course human beings as such do not think. A real thinker is one of the rarest things in nature. He comes only at long intervals in human history, and when he does come, he is often astonishingly unwelcome. Indeed, he is sometimes speedily sent the way of the unfit and unprotesting earthworm. Emerson understood this, as he understood so many other of the deep things of life. For he wrote: "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk."

The plain fact is that man is not ruled by thinking. When man thinks he thinks, he usually merely feels; and his instincts and feelings are powerful precisely in proportion as they are irrational. Reason reveals the other side, and a knowledge of the other side is fatal to the driving power of a prejudice. Prejudices have their important uses, but it is well to try not to mix them up with principles.

The underlying principle in the widespread and ominous revolt of the unfit is that moral considerations must outweigh the mere blind struggle for existence in human affairs.

It is to this fact that we must hold fast if we would understand the world of to-day, and still more the world of to-morrow. The purpose of the revolt of the unfit is to substitute interdependence on a higher plane for the struggle for existence on a lower one. Who dares attempt to picture what will happen if this revolt shall not succeed?

These are problems full of fascination. In one form or another they will persist as long as humanity itself. There is only one way of getting rid of them, and that is so charmingly and wittily pointed out by Robert Louis Stevenson in his fable, "The Four Reformers," that I wish to quote it:

"Four reformers met under a bramble-bush. They were all agreed the world must be changed. 'We must abolish property,' said one.

"'We must abolish marriage,' said the second.

"'We must abolish God,' said the third.

"'I wish we could abolish work,' said the fourth.

"'Do not let us get beyond practical politics,' said the first. 'The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.'

"'The first thing,' said the second, 'is to give freedom to the sexes.'

"'The first thing,' said the third, 'is to find out how to do it.'

"'The first step,' said the first, 'is to abolish the Bible.'

"'The first thing,' said the second, 'is to abolish the laws.'

'"The first thing,' said the third, 'is to abolish mankind.'"

[From Why Should We Change Our Form of Government, by Nicholas Murray Butler. Copyright, 1912, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]

ON TRANSLATING THE ODES OF HORACE

W. P. TRENT

IN a letter written on August 21, 1703, to Robert Harley, afterward Earl of Oxford and Prime Minister, by Dr. George Hickes, the famous scholar and non-juror, there is a reference to "old Dr. Biram Eaton who has read Horace over, as they tell me, many hundred times, oftener, I fear, than he has read the Gospels." Dr. Biram Eaton has escaped an article in the Dictionary of National Biography, and, so far as I know, he has never been reckoned by Horatians among their patron saints. In view of the slur cast upon him by Dr. Hickes I should like to propose his canonization, but I should much prefer to lay a wager that he found time between his readings to try to turn some of the odes of his favorite writer into English verses, probably into couplets resembling those of Dryden. And I should also be willing to wager that before and after making each of his versions, he gave expression, in some form or other, to the proverbial statement that to attempt to translate Horace is to attempt the impossible.

Perhaps we owe to this proverbial impossibility the fact that the translator of Horace is always with us. A living antinomy, he writes a modest preface; then exclaiming in the words of his master, "Nil mortalibus ardui est," he tries to scale very heaven in his folly, to rush blindly per vetitum nefas. But because he has loved much, therefore is much forgiven him. To love Horace and not attempt to translate him would be to flout that principle of altruism in which some modern thinkers have discovered, more poetically perhaps than philosophically, the motive force of civilization. "We love Horace, and hence we must try to set him forth in a way to make others love him," is what all translators, it would seem, say to themselves, consciously or unconsciously, when they decide to publish their respective renditions. And who shall blame them? Where is the critic competent to judge their work, who has not himself listened to the Siren’s song, if but for a moment in his youth, who has not a version of some ode of Horace hid away among his papers, the memory of which will doubtless forever prevent him from flinging a stone at any fellow-offender?

It is not only impossible to translate Horace adequately, but it is impossible to explain satisfactorily the causes of his unbounded popularity – a popularity illustrated by the fact that when that well-known group of American book-lovers, the Bibliophile Society, were seeking to determine what great man of letters they would first honor by issuing one or more of his works in sumptuous form, they chose – not an author of their own day or nation or language – but a writer dead nearly two thousand years, of alien race and tongue, spokesman of a civilization remote and strange, the Horace of the immortal Odes. Yet admirers of Lucretius and of Catullus tell us very plainly and insistently that this Horace of the Odes is not a great poet. We listen respectfully to the charge and somehow we do not seem greatly to resent it; we merely read the Odes, if possible, more diligently and affectionately – not, it is true, in the splendid Bibliophile volumes, but in some well-worn pocket edition that has accompanied us on our journeys, or, like one I own, has helped us to while away the hours on a deer stand, through which the deer, as shy as the fawn with which the poet compared Chloë, simply would not run. If we own such a pocket volume, we leave our critical faculties in abeyance when Dante, in the Inferno, introduces Horace to us along with Homer and Ovid and Lucan; for do not our hearts tell us that in the truest sense of the phrase, he is worthy to walk with the greatest of this mediævally assorted company? We feel sure that Virgil must have loved him as a man; we have proof that Milton admired him as a poet. We deny to him "the grand manner," but we attribute to him every charm. When we seek to analyze this charm, we are left with the suspicion that, after we have pointed out many of its elements, such as humor, vivacity, kindliness, sententiousness, and the like, there are as many others, equally potent but more subtle, that escape us altogether. So we turn the hackneyed saying into "the charm is the man," and contentedly exchange analysis for enjoyment. And yet we are persuaded that no author is more worthy of the painstaking, detailed study characteristic of modern scholarship than is this same Epicurean poet, who so utterly defies analysis and would be the first, were he not but "dust and a shade," to smile at our ponderous erudition. We feel that the scholar who shall devote the best years of his life to studying the influence of Horace upon subsequent writers in the chief literatures and to collecting the tributes that have been paid to his genius by the great and worthy of all lands and ages, will deserve sincere benedictions. We conclude, in short, that that exquisite epithet, "the well-beloved," so inappropriately bestowed upon the worthless and flippant French King, belongs to Horace, and to Horace alone, jure divino.

But this praise of Horace and this defense of his translators fails to justify or explain the writing of this paper. An honest confession being good for the soul, I will confess that the remarks that follow were first employed to introduce some versions of selected Odes I was once rash enough to publish. It is not a good sportsman that shuts his eyes and bangs away with both barrels at a flock of birds, and I now doubt whether I was wise in trying to bring down readers, if not with my verse-barrel, at least with my prose-barrel. Being older, I use at present only one barrel at a time and, perhaps for the same reason, I am wont to try the prose-barrel. And fortunately I can apply to the comments I intend to make on Horatian translators the quotation I used in order to mollify irate readers of my own verse renderings. It came from a once popular, now forgotten poet, the Rev. John Pomfret, and it ran as follows: – "It will be to little purpose, the Author presumes, to offer any reasons why the following POEMS appear in public; for it is ten to one whether he gives the true, and if he does, it is much greater odds whether the gentle reader is so courteous as to believe him."

So much has been written on the methods of Horace’s translators, and so much remains to be written, that it is hard to determine where to begin; but perhaps the preface of the late Professor Conington to his well-known translation of the Odes will furnish a proper point of departure. Few persons, whether translators or readers, are likely to object to Conington’s first premise that the translator ought to aim at "some kind of metrical conformity to his original." To reproduce an original Sapphic or Alcaic stanza in blank verse, or in the couplets of Pope, is at once to repel the reader who knows Horace well, and to give the reader who is unacquainted with Latin lyric poetry a totally erroneous conception of the metrical and rhythmical methods of the poet. To render a compressed Latin verse by a diffuse English one is to do injustice, as Conington observes, to the sententiousness for which Horace is justly celebrated, although the English scholar, had he written after the appearance of Mr. Gladstone’s attempt to render the Odes, might with propriety have added that the translator should not, in his avoidance of diffuseness, be seduced by the facility of the octosyllabic couplet. To translate Horace’s odes into anything but quatrains, except on occasions, is also to offend the meticulous Horatian and to mislead any reader who seeks to know the poet through an English rendering. It would seem, however, that when Professor Conington insisted that an English measure once adopted for the Alcaic must be used for every ode in which Horace employed the stanza just named, he went far toward hampering the translator, who, despite his proneness to offend, has his rights. That such uniformity ought to be aimed at, and that it will, as a rule, be aimed at, is doubtless true; but there is an element of the problem with which Conington does not seem sufficiently to have reckoned.

This is rhyme, which he assumed to be necessary to a successful rendition of an ode of Horace. A particular stanza not employing rhyme may probably be used without resulting loss in translating every ode written in a special form. Yet this may not be the case with a stanza employing rhymes, if the translator aim, as he should, at a fairly, though not an awkwardly literal rendering of the language of his original. There will necessarily be coincidences of sound in a literal prose version of a Latin stanza that will suggest a definite and advantageous arrangement of rhymes for a poetical version. To adopt a certain English stanza in which to render a certain Latin stanza wherever it occurs, is to do away with this natural advantage, which presents itself oftener than might at first be supposed.

Concrete examples will serve to make my meaning clear. The third ode of the first book, the admirable "Sic te diva potens Cypri," is written in what is called the Second Asclepiad meter; so is the delightful ninth ode of the third book, the "Donec gratus eram." We will assume that for the first of these odes the translator has chosen a quatrain with alternating rhymes (a, b, a, b). Following Professor Conington’s rule of uniformity, he must employ the same stanza for the second of the two odes, which, by the way, Conington himself did not do, for reasons which he gave at length. Now the fifth stanza of the "Donec gratus eram" runs as follows: —

"Quid si prisca redit VenusDiductosque jugo cogit aëneo,Si flava excutitur ChloëRejectaeque patet janua Lydiae?"

This may be rendered in prose: —

"What if the former Love return and join with brazen yoke the parted ones, if yellow-haired Chloë be shaken off, and the door stand open for rejected Lydia?"

If my memory does not deceive me, it was this stanza, and especially one word in its last verse, that determined the arrangement of rhymes in a version I attempted years ago, "Consule Planco." This verse seemed to run inevitably into

"And open stand for Lydia the door."

It needed but a moment to detect in the first verse of the stanza a possible rhyme-word. The syllable re of redit furnished more, not the most apt of rhymes with door, but still sufficient, as things go with amateur translators, and with a perhaps pardonable tautology I wrote

"What if the former Love once more

Return – "

Two other rhymes were found with little difficulty in the di of diductos and in excutitur, which suggested wide and cast aside, and the whole stanza, omitting strictly metrical considerations, appeared, or rather might have appeared, for I have changed it slightly, as follows: —

"What if the former Love once moreReturn and yoke the sweethearts parted wide,If fair-haired Chloë be cast aside,And open stand for Lydia the door?"

This stanza seemed to have the merit of almost complete literalness, since it omitted only two epithets, and I thought it had no unpardonable defects of rhythm and diction. So I took it as a model, and with little difficulty translated the entire ode – with what success I should not say and others need not inquire.

That rhymes and their position in the stanza are often determined for the translator by his original or else by a prose rendering of that original seems also to be shown by the following version of the closing ode of the first book (Carm. xxxviii) – the graceful "Persicos odi": —

"I hate your Persian trappings, boy,Your linden-woven crowns annoy,Cease searching for the spot where blowsThe lingering rose."To simple myrtle nothing add;The myrtle misbecomes, my lad,Nor thee nor me drinking my wine’Neath close-grown vine."

Here "puer," boy, and "Displicent," displease or annoy, seem to determine, not merely the first rhyme, but the rhyme arrangement (a, a), and it needs but a glance at the close of the first stanza of the original to show that another word rhyming with "boy" would be hard to obtain. It follows that, if we are to have a quatrain, the third and fourth verses should probably be made to rhyme (b, b), and it is not difficult to comply with this requirement, or to cast the second stanza in the mold of the first. It is, alas! too true that no equivalent to "blows" will be found in Horace, that "Sedulus curo" has been unceremoniously thrown aside, that the poet does not specifically mention "wine" as the beverage he liked to drink in his rustic arbor. But a "rose," which Horace does mention, certainly "blows" or blooms very often in English verse; it is not too far-fetched to get "nothing add" and "lad" out of "nihil allabores" and "ministrum"; and "vine" ("vite") has suggested "wine" to many generations of poets. But it is rhyme suggestions and their influence upon the choice of stanzaic form that have occasioned this mild protest against Professor Conington’s precepts of rigid stanzaic conformity. I am convinced, from the above examples and from many more, not only that uniformity of stanza is not to be strictly insisted upon when one is employing rhymes, but also that translators should search more diligently than they appear to do for the rhyme suggestions implicit in so many Horatian stanzas.

Upon other points it is easier to agree with Conington. For most of the odes the iambic movement natural to English is preferable, as Milton may be held to have perceived. He abandoned rhyme in his celebrated version of the "Quis multa gracilis" (i., v.), and hence he had an excellent opportunity to indulge in experiments in so-called logaœdic verse. But he clung to the iambic movement, and the fact is significant, although not to be pressed, since he gave us no other rendering of an entire ode. Here too, however, I must plead for a careful study of each ode by the would-be translator, for there seem to be cases in which it would be almost disastrous to attempt a version in iambics. Such a case is presented by the beautiful "Diffugere nives" (iv., vii.). The iambic renderings of Professor Conington and Sir Theodore Martin seem to stray far from the original movement – as far as the former’s "'No 'scaping death' proclaims the year" does from the diction of Horace or of any other good poet. It is true that English dactyls are dangerous things, especially in translations, where the padding or packing which is natural to the measure when employed in English, is increased by the padding inevitably introduced into a translation from a synthetic into an analytic language. Yet the dactylic movement of the First Archilochian, in which the "Diffugere nives" is written, is hardly without great loss to be represented by any use of English iambics. It presents more difficulty than the introduction of something resembling the movement of dactylic hexameters proper into our blank verse.