275. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 2, 83–85.
Hope End.
Saturday. Novr 3. 1827.
Sir,
When I consider the date & contents of your last letter, I feel very deeply that my delay in replying to it has been considerably longer than it should have been,—tho’, I do hope, not too long for you to pardon. I was unwilling to write without sending back your book, or to send back your book without giving it that strict attention due to its excellencies; & thus the delay has been a necessary consequence of my having been absent from home,—& of my thoughts having been harrassed by illness in my family,—with other engrossing circumstances. [1]
You have extremely obliged me by lending me your Select Translations,—passages of which, I have repeatedly read with increasing delight & admiration: particularly the Oration on Eutropius, which is a picture in motion,—& that Homeric description of a battle, contained in your extract from the 6th book of St Chrysostom “On the Priesthood”. [2] Translation has been sometimes called the body weighing down the soul of original composition; but certainly in your case,
“One might almost say the body thought” [3] —
Your language has so much animation, &,—may I use the expression?,—so much transparency. If I may venture upon one objection, it shall regard the frequency of your inverted sentences. The objection is mentioned with diffidence, for I am thoroughly aware that language recieves its “ribs of steel” [4] from inversion,—that Milton’s prose is very energetic because very inverted,—& that, in Addison’s melodious compositions, the absence of inversion has proved the absence of nerve. With all this, I am only too convinced that the genius of our language will not admit a great latitude & frequency in inverting sentences, without putting on a constrained & artificial character; & I venture to observe to you,—under your correction,—that something of this constraint & artifice is visible here & there in your translation—ex. gr. in Page 120. “Perhaps thou art offended, because to Philosophy I have resigned myself”,—where while you were writing English, you must have been thinking Greek. Forgive me my great freedom,—which you permitted me to take on other occasions, & which, on the present one, I dare to take, unpermitted. [5]
You notice several plagiarisms committed on your saints & by your saints, on & by profane writers; but you do not notice one very striking imitation of Lucretius by St Basil:– I will write down the corresponding passages.
“So have I seen an experienced physician, who, giving to his patient an unpalatable draught, anointed the cup with honey.” Page 244
“Nam veluti pueris absinthia tætra medentes
Quom dare conantur, prius oras pocula circum
Contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore;
Ut puerorum œtas [sic, for ætas] improvida ludificetur
Labrorum tenus; interea perpotet amarum
Absinthi laticem, deceptaque non capiatur,
Sed potius, tali a tactu recreata, valescat.”
De Rerum Natura. lib 4.11. [6]
Tasso in the first canto (I think) of his Gerusalemme liberata, has followed Lucretius. [7] Your notes have great learning & acuteness,—besides the still more valuable characteristic of “zeal according to knowledge” [8] which they everywhere discover.
And now I have spoken about your book, it remains to me to speak about your letter: it remains to me to say that I was at once gratified & pained by that letter,—gratified by the expression of your kind & flattering opinion—and pained by finding that you could, for a moment, suppose me prejudiced against you. Let me prove at once the utter impossibility of such a circumstance,—& assure you, that, if a prejudice on my side had prevented our personal intercourse, the same prejudice must have operated on our continued correspondence,—for where I objected to visit I should hardly be willing to write. When I told you of the difficulties under which I laboured respecting my mode of conveyance to Malvern, I spoke very truly; & at the time I wrote my first letter,—& for some time afterwards, I did not know but that those difficulties might be the only ones likely to interfere with our immediate personal intercourse. I have been, however, disappointed,—& my Father has represented to me, that, whatever gratification & improvement I might recieve from a personal intercourse with you, yet, as a female, & a young female, I could not pay such a first visit as the one you proposed to me, without overstepping the established observances of society. I never could persuade myself to tell you this, until now,—and have evaded the subject as long as I could, & perhaps longer than I ought. You have now forced the whole truth from me; for I cannot allow you to think either that I wished to decieve you respecting myself, or that I myself was decieved respecting you. And now will you allow me to repeat,—& will you believe in my sincerity while I do so,—that I still “hope for some opportunity by which I may have the pleasure & advantage of Mr Boyd’s conversation”?
I must always remain
his obliged & sincere
E B Barrett.
You were kind enough to promise to lend me the oration on Eutropius in the original Greek. At present I am reading quite in a different direction,—but, when I am more at liberty, perhaps you will allow me to claim your promise,—if I should not in the meantime,—as I am thinking of doing—purchase the book.
Address, on integral page: Hugh Stuart Boyd Esqr / Ruby Cottage / Malvern Wells.
Publication: EBB-HSB, pp. 9–12.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. The illnesses of EBB’s grandmother, Arabella Graham-Clarke, and Mary Moulton-Barrett. The “engrossing circumstances” were probably related to the impending departure of EBB’s uncle Sam and his wife Mary for Jamaica.
2. Select Passages of the Writings of St. Chrysostom, St. Gregory Nazianzen, and St. Basil (1806). Boyd’s translation of St. Chrysostom’s oration on Eutropius appeared on pp. 89–112; the passage from “On the Priesthood” on pp. 70–74. St. John Chrysostom (ca. 345–407), Archbishop of Constantinople, one of the Fathers of the Christian Church, was one of the principal theological writers studied by EBB with Boyd. In his teachings, he stressed asceticism and personal study of the Scriptures.
3. Cf. John Donne’s The Second Anniversarie (1612), line 246.
4. Pope’s translation of The Odyssey, XIX, 578.
5. One suspects that EBB was being diplomatic to avoid hurting Boyd’s feelings. The Edinburgh Review was much blunter, saying “from the evident tendencies of this gentleman’s taste, we should pronounce him a most dangerous person to be entrusted with a version of the Fathers; for, the fault of these writers being a superabundance of metaphors, and Mr Boyd being quite as metaphorically given as themselves, the consequence is, that, wherever there is a flourish of this kind in the original, he is sure to add another of his own to it in translation; which is really ‘too much of a good thing:’ … these double and triple flowers of rhetoric [must] be accounted monstrosities in the system of taste.” The reviewer quotes an example taken from p. 121 of Boyd’s book. St. Gregory speaks of the tears of Cæsarius’s mother being “subdued by philosophy,” a phrase inflated by Boyd to “her tears are dried by the sweet breezes of philosophy.” (No. XLVII, November 1814, pp. 63 and 69.)
6. “But as with children, when physicians try to administer rank wormwood, they first touch the rim of the cups all about with the sweet yellow fluid of honey, that unthinking childhood may be deluded as far as the lips, and meanwhile that they may drink up the bitter juice of wormwood, and though beguiled be not betrayed, but rather by such means he restored and regain health” (translation by W.H.D. Rouse, 1924).
“Thus to a sickly child we hand a glass
its rim besprinkled with a potion sweet:
deceived, the bitter medicine he drinks,
and such deception a new vigor brings.”
(Canto I, v. 3, translated by Joseph Tusiani, 1970.)
8. Cf. Romans, 10:2.
___________________
