or two hundred, or two million times? There is no reason in Nature or in Art why I should: unless, indeed, I am a mere Work-Machine, for whom the divine gift of Thought were no other than the terrestrial gift of Steam is to the Steam-engine; a power whereby Cotton might be spun, and money and money's worth realised. "Notable enough too, here as elsewhere, wilt thou find the potency of Names; which indeed are but one kind of such Custom-woven, wonder-hiding garments. Witchcraft, and all manner of Spectre-work, and Demonolgy, we have now named Madness, and Diseases of the Nerves. Seldom reflecting that still the new question comes upon us: What is Madness, what are Nerves? Ever, as before, does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific, altogether infernal boiling up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through this fair-painted Vision of Creation, which swims thereon, which we name the Real. Was Luther's Picture of the Devil less a Reality, whether it were formed within the In every bodily eye, or without it? the wisest Soul, lies a whole world of internal Madness, an authentic DemonEmpire; out of which, indeed, his world of Wisdom has been creatively built together, and now rests there, as on its dark foundations does a habitable flowery Earth-rind. "But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial Me for dwelling here, and yet to blind it, lie allembracing, as the universal canvass, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavour to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through. "Fortunatus had a wishing Hat, which when he put on, and wished himself Anywhere, behold he was There. By this means had Fortunatus triumphed over Space, he had annihilated Space; for him there was no Where, but all was Here. Were a Hatter to establish himself, in the Wahngasse of Weissnichtwo, and make felts of this sort for all mankind, what a world we should have of it! Still stranger, should, on the opposite side of the street, another Hatter establish himself; and, as his fellow-craftsman made Space-annihilating Hats, make Time-annihilating! Of both would I purchase, were it with my last groschen; but chiefly of this latter. To clap on your felt, and, simply by wishing that you were Anywhere, straightway to be There! Next to clap on your other felt, and, simply by wishing that you were Anywhen, straightway to be Then! This were indeed the grander: shooting at will from the Fire-Creation of the World to its Fire-Consummation; here historically present in the First Century, conversing face to face with Paul and Seneca; there prophetically in the Thirty-first, conversing also face to face with other Pauls and Senecas, who as yet stand hidden in the depth of that late Time! "Or thinkest thou, it were impossible, unimaginable? Is the Past annihilated, then, or only past; is the Future non-extant, or only future? Those mystic faculties of thine, Memory and Hope, already answer: already through those mystic avenues, thou the Earthblinded summonest both Past and Future, and communest with them, though as yet darkly, and with mute beckonings. The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of To-morrow roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both are. Pierce through the TimeElement, glance into the Eternal. Believe what thou findest written in the sanctuaries of Man's Soul, even as all Thinkers, in all ages, have devoutly read it there: that Time and Space are not God, but creations of God; that with God as it is a universal HERE, so is it an Everlasting Now. "And seest thou therein any glimpse of IMMORTALITY? - O Heaven! Is the white Tomb ofour Loved One, who died from our arms, and must be left behind us there, which rises in the distance, like a pale, mournfully receding Milestone, to tell how many toilsome uncheered miles we have journeyed on alone, but a pale spectral Illusion! Is the lost Friend still mysteriously Here, even as we are Here mysteriously, with God! - Know of a truth that only the Time-shadows have perished, or are perishable; that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and for ever. This, should it unhappily seem new, thou mayst ponder, at thy leisure; for the next twenty years, or the next twenty centuries: believe it thou must; understand it thou canst not. "That the Thought-forms, Space and Time, wherein, once for all, we are sent into this Earth to live, should condition and determine our whole Practical reasonings, conceptions, and imagings (not imaginings),--seems altogether fit, just, and unavoidable. But that they should, farthermore, usurp such sway over pure spiritual Meditation, and blind us to the wonder everywhere lying close on us, seems nowise so. Admit Space and Time to their due rank as Forms of Thought; nay, even, if thou wilt, to their quite undue rank of Realities: and consider, then, with thyself how their thin disguises hide from us the brightest God-effulgences! Thus, were it not miraculous, could I stretch forth my hand, and clutch the Sun? Yet thou seest me daily stretch forth my hand, and therewith clutch many a thing, and swing it hither and thither. Art thou a grown Baby, then, to fancy that the Miracle lies in miles of distance, or in pounds avoirdupois of weight; and not to see that the true inexplicable God-revealing Miracle lies in this, s, that I can stretch forth my hand at all; that I have free Force to clutch aught therewith? Innumerable other of this sort are the deceptions, and wonder-hiding stupefactions, which Space practises on us. "Still worse is it with regard to Time. Your grand anti-magician, and universal wonder-hider, is this same lying Time. Had we but the Timeannihilating Hat, to put on for once only, we should see ourselves in a World of Miracles, wherein all fabled or authentic Thaumaturgy, and feats of Magic, were outdone. But unhappily we have not such a Hat; and man, poor fool that he is, can seldom and scantily help himself without one. "Were it not wonderful, for instance, had Orpheus built the walls of Thebes by the mere sound of his Lyre? Yet tell me, who built these walls of Weissnichtwo; summoning out all the sandstone rocks, to dance along from the Steinbruch (now a huge Troglodyte Chasm, with frightful green-mantled pools); and shape themselves into Doric and Ionic pillars, squared ashlar houses, and noble streets? Was it not the still higher Orpheus, or Orpheuses, who, in past centuries, by the divine Music of Wisdom, succeeded in civilising Man? Our highest Orpheus walked in Judea, eighteen hundred years ago: his sphere-melody, flowing in wild native tones, took captive the ravished souls of men; and, being of a truth sphere-melody, still flows and sounds, though now with thousandfold Accompaniments, and rich symphonies, through all our hearts; and modulates, and divinely leads them. Is that a wonder, which happens in two hours; and does it cease to be wonderful if happening in two million? Not only was Thebes built by the Music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done. "Sweep away the Illusion of Time : glance, if thou have eyes, from the near moving-cause to its far distant Mover: The stroke that came transmitted through a whole galaxy of elastic balls, was it less a stroke than if the last ball only had been struck, and sent flying? Oh, could I (with the Time-annihilating Hat) transport thee direct from the Beginnings to the Endings, how were thy eyesight unsealed, and thy heart set flaming in the Light-sea of celestial wonder! Then sawest thou that this fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God; that through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams. But Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish. "Again, could any thing be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost? The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind's eye as well as with the body's, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the three-score years into three minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air, and Invisibility ? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years and æons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of beatified Souls? And again, do we not squeak and gibber (in our discordant, screech-owlish debatings and recriminatings); and glide bodeful, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar (poltern), and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead, till the scent of the morningair summons us to our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon: does the steel Host, that yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-Hunt; which has now, with its howling tumult that made Night hideous, flitted away?-Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the earth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once. "O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our ME; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes through his eyes; Force dwells in his arm and heart: but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, as if it were a firm substance: fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet's sounding. Plummet's? Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while ago they were not; a little while and they are not, their very ashes are not. "So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission, APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow: - and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in longdrawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some foot-print of us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence? -O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God. BLACKIE'S AND SYME'S TRANSLATIONS OF FAUST.* ONE of the most injurious consequences of bad translations is the check they form upon the production of good. They not merely, so far as their circulation extends, give currency to the most erroneous impressions of the originals, but, by taking off the grace of novelty and anticipating some portion of the limited patronage vouchsafed to undertakings of the sort, they often preoccupy the field to the entire exclusion of rivalry. Perhaps no foreign author has had more reason for complaint on this score than Goethe; so far, at least, as concerns his Faust. For many years the English public, on seemingly good authority, believed that Lord Francis Egerton (Gower) had effected every thing that a consummate master of both languages could effect; and that his work reflected all the fire, fancy and feeling, of the great German, as in a glass. The hour of retribution came, and his lordship has been tumbled down from his pinnacle; but hardly have we had time to congratulate ourselves, when, lo and behold! an impudent attempt is already making to elevate two (or one of two) equally shallow, equally undeserving pretenders in his place; which attempt, and all attempts like it, we hereby avow our firm determination to defeat. The pretenders in question are Messrs. Blackie and Syme, and we undertake to shew, in the course of a very few pages, that neither of them has so much as approximated to what can be termed an adequate metrical translation of Faust. Before coming to specimens, which is the only fair way of deciding on such matters, we have a word or two to preface as to the style and versification of the original. The language, then, be it remembered, of this wonderful poem, is as easy, natural, and idiomatic as it is possible for language to be: the most varied rhythm, the most delicious harmony, have been attained, without undue inversion or transposition of any sort; no roundabout modes of expression are employed in order to hitch in the rhymes, but the words are uniformly those very words, and no other, which are exactly adapted to the sense. The author is also strictly logical, in the better and philosophical sense of the term; and he is never guilty of bathos or absurdity. Mr. Blackie, whom we shall take first, is diametrically the reverse, the very antipodes, of Goethe in these respects. His language is hardly ever natural or idiomatic, hardly ever such as any human being but a nambypamby rhymster would employ; the adjectives follow and precede the substantives, and the nominatives and accusatives the verbs, not according to any rules of grammar or idiom, but according as may be found necessary to complete the scanning or final jingle of the lines; and when, as often happens, the most forced inversion proves insufficient to supply the required quantity or accentuation of syllables, it is Mr. Blackie's wont to add or substitute some wretched nonsense of his He is, moreover, extremely inaccurate; and, to crown all, his ear is so singularly defective, that the worst descriptions (or, rather, make-believes) of rhymes, with lines which have no pretension to be called verses, are abundantly discoverable throughout. own. All that is here stated shall be proved to the letter-proved by such a host of instances, as to place the matter beyond the possibility of a doubt; though, as regards Mr. Blackie's taste in rhymes, we should conceive it quite sufficient to quote such a specimen as the following: Mephistopheles. "What! know'st me not? thou hag! thou skeleton! Thy sov'reign, who can smash thee when he pleases, * Faust, a Tragedy. By J. W. Goethe. Translated into English Verse, with Notes and Preliminary Remarks, by John S. Blackie, Fellow of the Society for Archæological Correspondence, Rome. Blackwood, Edinburgh, and T. Cadell, London. 1834. Faust, a Tragedy. Translated from the German of Goethe, by David Syme. Black, Edinburgh. 1834. Know'st not the scarlet doublet, mole-eyed mother? The Witch. O my liege lord! forgive the rough salute, And where, too, have you left your pair of ravens? Mephistopheles. For this time you may thank the heavens All things are now so smooth, the famous northern devil A stuffing to fill up my boots and shoes." P. 106. Now here are twenty consecutive lines without one legitimate rhyme: Skeleton, own-pleases, pieces-mother, feather-buried, forehead-salute, foot -ravens, heavens-off, enough-mother, together-cultivation, fashiondevil, uncivil. Such are the attempts at jingle in which Mr. Blackie exults: nor must we omit to call attention to the felicitous conclusion of the paragraph. What Mephistopheles really says is, "Therefore, like many a gallant, I have worn false calves these many years." This Mr. Blackie judiciously renders "And I, as modern dandies do, must use A stuffing to fill up my boots and shoes;" being the very opposite course to that which modern dandies, who pride themselves on the smallness of their feet, would pursue. The atrocity of this instance has led us to anticipate a little; we will now begin with the beginning, and cull Mr. Blackie's beauties as they occur. The dedication, compared with the rest of the version, is good; compared with the original, exceedingly poor. How weakly, for example, are the last two lines of the first stanza rendered by "The magic breath that wafteth on your How unlike Goethe is it, as in the second stanza of the translation, to say: "The echo like of half-forgotten lays !" In the third, again: "They hear no more the sequel of my song, The souls to whom I sung my early lay." As if the souls in question ever had heard the sequel at all. The original is, "They hear not the following lays, the souls to whom I sang my first." In the fourth and last stanza, too, the simple words Ein Schauer fasst mich -" a trembling comes over me," are tortured into My heart is moved with youth's returning fire;" which operates as a complete disturbance of the sentiment. Mr. Blackie blunders in the very first sentence of the Prologue in the Theatre, or, as he phrases it, Prelude on the Stage: "Ye twain in weal and woe to me, making, In German lands our hopeful under- Without the multitude we cannot thrive, The manager merely asks what hopes they entertain of an undertaking which he is on the point of engaging in. On the poet's remarking that, "What glitters is born for the moment; what is genuine, remains unlost to posterity," the clown or merryman breaks out: "If I could but hear no more about posterity! Suppose I chose to talk |