Prometheus Bound (Browning, 1833)/Preface
PREFACE.
Although, among the various versions which have appeared of various ancient writers, we may recognise the dead, together with much of the living letter; a literal version, together with a transfusion of poetical spirit;—why should we, on that account, consider ourselves charmed away from attempting another translation? A mirror may be held in different lights by different hands; and, according to the position of those hands, will the light fall. A picture may be imitated in different ways,—by steel engraving, or stone engraving; and, according to the vocation of the artist, will the copy be. According to Dr. Bentley, Pope's translation of Homer is not Homer; it is Spondanus: he might have said, it is not even Spondanus—it is Pope. Cowper's translation is a different Homer altogether; not Spondanus, nor Pope, nor the right Homer either. We do not blame Pope and Cowper for not having faithfully represented Homer: we do not blame Pope and Cowper for being Pope and Cowper. It is the nature of the human mind to communicate its own character to whatever substance it conveys, whether it convey metaphysical impressions from itself to another mind, or literary compositions from one to another language. It is therefore desirable that the same composition should be conveyed by different minds, that the character of the medium may not be necessarily associated with the thing conveyed. All men, since Æsop's time and before it, have worn various-coloured spectacles. They cannot part with their colour, which is their individuality; but they may correct the effects of that individuality by itself. If Potter show us Æschylus through green spectacles, and another translator, though in a very inferior manner, show us Æschylus through yellow ones, it will become clear to the English reader, that green and yellow are not inherent properties of the Greek poet: and in this respect, both the English reader and the Greek poet are benefited.
But the present age says, it has no need of translations from classic authors. It is, or it would be, an original age: it will not borrow thoughts with long genealogies, nor walk upon a pavé, nor wear a costume, like Queen Anne's authors and the French dramatists. Its poetry shall not be cold and polished and imitative poetry; but shall dream undreamt of dreams, and glow with an unearthly frenzy. If its dreams be noble dreams, may they be dreamt on; if its frenzy be the evidence of inspiration, "may I," as Prometheus says, "be mad." But let the age take heed.—There is one step from dreaming nobly to sleeping inertly; and one, from frenzy to imbecility.
I do not ask, I would not obtain, that our age should be servilely imitative of any former age. Surely it may think its own thoughts and speak its own words, yet turn not away from those who have thought and spoken well. The contemplation of excellence produces excellence, if not similar, yet parallel. We do not turn from green hills and waving forests, because we build and inhabit palaces; nor do we turn towards them, that we may model them in painted wax. We make them subjects of contemplation, in order to abstract from them those ideas of beauty, afterwards embodied in our own productions; and, above all, in order to consider their and our Creator under every manifestation of his goodness and his power. All beauties, whether in nature or art, whether in physics or morals, whether in composition or abstract reasoning, are multiplied reflections, visible in different distances and under different positions, of one archetypal beauty. If we owe gratitude to Him, who created and unveiled its form, should we refuse to gaze upon those reflections? Because they rest even upon heathen scrolls, should we turn away from those scrolls? Because thorns and briers are the product of the earth, should we avert our eyes from that earth? The mind of man and the earth of man are cursed alike.
But the age would not be "classical." "O, that profaned name!" What does it mean, and what is it made to mean? It does not mean what it is made to mean: it does not mean what is necessarily regular, and polished, and unimpassioned. The ancients, especially the ancient Greeks, felt, and thought, and wrote antecedently to rules: they felt passionately, and thought daringly; and wrote because they felt and thought. Shakspeare is a more classical writer than Racine.
Perhaps, of all the authors of antiquity, no one stands so forward to support this hypothesis, as Æschylus; and of all the works of Æschylus, no one stands more forward to support it, than his work of the Prometheus Bound. He is a fearless and impetuous, not a cautious and accomplished poet. His excellences could not be acquired by art, nor could his defects exist separately from genius. It would be nearly equally impossible for the mere imitator to compass either; for if we would stand in the mist, we must stand also on the mountain. His excellences consist chiefly in a vehement imaginativeness, a strong but repressed sensibility, a high tone of morality, a fervency of devotion, and a rolling energetic diction: and as sometimes his fancy rushes in, where his judgment fears to tread, and language, even the most copious and powerful of languages, writhes beneath its impetuosity; an occasional mixing of metaphor, and frequent obscurity of style, are named among his chief defects. He is pompous too, sometimes; but his pomposity has not any modern, any rigid, frigid effect. When he walks, like his actors, on cothurni, we do not say "how stiff he is!" but "how majestic!"
Whether the Prometheus be, or be not, the finest production of its author, it will not, I think, be contested, that Prometheus himself is the character, in the conception and development of which, its author has concentrated his powers in the most full and efficient manner. There is more gorgeousness of imagery in the Seven Chiefs; and more power in the Eumenides; and I should tremble to oppose any one scene in Prometheus, to the Cassandra scene in Agamemnon. The learned Mr. Boyd, who, in addition to many valuable and well-known translations,[1] has furnished the public with an able version of that obscure tragedy, considers the scene in question to be "unapproached and unapproachable by any rival." But I would rest the claims of the Prometheus upon one fulcrum, the conception of character. It is not in the usual manner of Æschylus to produce upon his canvass any very prominent figure, to which every other is made subordinate, and to which the interest of the spectator is very strongly and almost exclusively attached. Agamemnon's πληγὴν ἒχω we do not feel within our hearts. In the Seven Chiefs, there is a clear division of interest; and the reader willingly agrees with Antigone, that Polynices should be as honorably buried as Eteocles. In the Supplices, we are called upon to exercise universal charity towards fifty heroines. In the Persæ, we cannot weep with Atossa over the misfortunes of Xerxes; not even over what she most femininely considers to be his greatest misfortune—μάλιστα δ᾽ ἢδε συμφορὰ δάκνει-—his wearing a tattered garment. Perhaps we know more of Orestes than of any personage, always excepting Prometheus, introduced by Æschylus: and yet both in the Choëphorce and Eumenides, we are interested in his calamities, rather from their being calamities than from their being his. But Prometheus stands eminent and alone; one of the most original, and grand, and attaching characters ever conceived by the mind of man. That conception sank deeply into the soul of Milton, and, as has been observed, rose from thence in the likeness of his Satan. But the Satan of Milton and the Prometheus of Æschylus stand upon ground as unequal, as do the sublime of sin and the sublime of virtue. Satan suffered from his ambition; Prometheus from his humanity: Satan for himself; Prometheus for mankind: Satan dared perils which he had not weighed; Prometheus devoted himself to sorrows which he had foreknown. "Better to rule in hell," said Satan; "Better to serve this rock," said Prometheus. But in his hell, Satan yearned to associate man; while Prometheus preferred a solitary agony: nay, he even permitted his zeal and tenderness for the peace of others, to abstract him from that agony's intenseness.
Æschylus felt the force of his own portraiture: he never removes his Prometheus from the spectator's sight. The readers of Æschylus feel it: they are impatient at Io's long narrations; not because those narrations are otherwise than beautiful, but because they would hear Prometheus speak again: they are impatient even at Prometheus's prophetic replies to Io, because they would hear him speak only of Prometheus. From the moment of the first dawning of his character upon their minds, its effect is electrifying. He is silent: he disdains as much to answer the impotent and selfish compassion of Vulcan, as to murmur beneath the brutal cruelty of Strength. It was not thus that he pitied in his days of joy: it was not thus that he acted in his days of power: and his spirit is above them, and recks not of them; and when their pity and their scoffs pollute his ears no more, he pours out his impassioned sorrows to the air, and winds, and waters, and earth, and sun, whom he had never visited with benefits, and "taxed not with unkindness." The striking nature of these, our first ideas of Prometheus, is not enfeebled by any subsequent ones. We see him daring and unflinching beneath the torturing and dishonoring hand, yet keenly alive to the torture and dishonor; for himself fearless and rash, yet for others considerate and wary; himself unpitied, yet to others pitiful. And when, at the last, he calls no longer upon the sun, and earth, and waters, from whom the Avenger is secluding him; but demands of Æther, who is rolling light to all eyes excepting his, whether he beholds how he suffers by injustice;—our hearts rise up within us, and bear witness that the suffering is indeed unjust.
It is apparent with what bitter feeling the conceiver of this character must have regarded the transferred praise and love of Athens—of his country. "Are you not ashamed," said Menander to Philemon, "to conquer me in comedy?" Such a reproach might Æschylus have used to his dramatic rival, and extracted as deep a blush as ever stained Philemon's cheek. But he did not. Silent as his own Prometheus, he left for ever the Athens on whom he had conferred the immortality of his name and works; and went to Sicily, to die. In that place of exile he wrote his epitaph instead of tragedies, calling with his dying voice on the grove of Marathon[2] and the conquered Persians, as the only witnesses of his glory. "If thorns be in thy path," saith Marcus Antoninus,[3] "turn aside." But where should he turn, who would avoid the ingratitude and changefulness of man?
Among those who have passed judgment upon Æschylus, it is remarkable how many have passed a similar one to that of the Athenians, when, according to Suidas, they "broke down the benches" previous to his departure for Sicily;—a phrase interpreted by Scaliger to signify a final condemnation of his work. He is "damn'd by faint praise;" by an alternate acknowledgment of his genius, and censure of his taste; and by an invidious opposition to Sophocles and Euripides. Of the three great critics of antiquity,—Longinus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Quintilian,—Dionysius alone does not measure his criticism to twice the length of his commendation. Quintilian calls him "rudis in plerisque et incompositus," which my sense of justice almost gives me courage to call a false criticism. Longinus—Longinus!! uses similar language: —ἐνίοτε μέντοι ἀκατεργάστους καὶ οἱονεὶ ποκοειδεῖς τας ἐννοίας καὶ ἁμαλάκτους φέροντος. Now there are, undeniably, some things in Æschylus, which, like the expressions of Callisthenes, would properly fall under the censure of Longinus, as being οὐχ ὑψηλὰ, ὰλλὰ μετέωρα. But according to every principle by which he himself could urge his immortal claim upon posterity, the Homer of criticism should have named with less of coldness and more of rapture, the Homer of dramatic poetry.
With regard to the execution of this attempt, it is not necessary for me to say many words. 1 have rendered the iambics into blank verse, their nearest parallel; and the choral odes and other lyric intermixtures, into English lyrics, irregular and rhymed. Irregularity I imagined to be indispensable to the conveyance of any part of the effect of the original measure, of which little seems to be understood by modern critics, than that it is irregular. To the literal sense I have endeavoured to bend myself as closely as was poetically possible: but if, after all,—and it is too surely the case,—"quantum mutatus!" must be applied; may the reader say so rather sorrowfully than severely, and forgive my English for not being Greek, and myself for not being Æschylus.
And will Æschylus forgive, among my many other offences against him, the grave offence of profaning his Prometheus, by attaching to it some miscellaneous poems by its translator? Will he not rather retort upon me, his chorus's strongly expressed disapprobation of unequal unions? And how can I defend myself? ἀπόλεμος ὄδε γ᾽ ὁ πόλεμος.
- ↑ Author of, among other works, Select Passages from St. Chrysostom, St. Gregory Nazianzen, and St. Basil, translated from the Greek. To produce such eloquent translations, the "judicium subtile limatumque," the "teretes et religiosæ aures," attributed to Middleton in Dr. Parr's Preface to Bellendenus, were necessary. But what ears must those be, who deny their sensibility to the "most excellent music" of the writings of the Fathers? We can go to Phrygia for their similitude.
- ↑ See the epitaph which is attributed to him.
- ↑ Lib. viii. cap. 5.