Cromatografía Líquida de Alta Resolución (HPLC)

view could they do this, than for the sake of laying in materials to dress

her up in some strange shape or other? Whence otherwise could'they have

got their Centaurs, Cyclops, Giants &c&c&c? Whenever they attempt to

describe any natural object, what hideous disfiguring do they by this means

make of it? I would ask anyone who has seen the morning, (or indeed, who

has not) what idea of it a rosy-finger'd Lady, like Daphne sprouting into

a laurel, conveys to his imagination?

How differently does the person, who draws from nature, paint her

'Look what STREAKS

Do lace the SEVERING CLOUDS in yonder East!'

everyone who understands these words must acknowledge this to be a true

picture which brings at once the object full to his viewJ

So he was very conscious that words need to convey pictures and very

often quite fail to do this. His hero was Ossian. He seemed to have little

doubt that Ossian was a fake: 'if to make people relish this delicious repast,

it was necessary to persuade them, that it was prepared some hundred years

ago; what can they so properly blame for this, as their own absurd humour,

which requires thus to be cheated into pleasure? But this did not worry

him in the slightest because Ossian looked directly at nature and wrote about

it as it was:

'Over the green hill flies the inconstant sun', - A painter might

draw from hence - But what painting could represent that sudden

succession of light and shade which is conveyed to the mind in

the last period. Ossian sees real horses and uses real words to

convey them: 'The high maned, broad-breasted, proud, high leaping,

strong steed of the hill, loud and resounding in his hoof; the

spreading of his mane is like that stream of smoak on the heath'...

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Homer's two mares might pass for Venus's doves or two tame pigeons.

His literary stance was brusque, intelligent and very much of the early

1760s: 'I should like to see Homer translated in the same prosaic manner,

that is at least without the help of rhymes and other additions, and the

two contrasted together.'4 So he was plainly part of that aesthetic

movement which demanded Cowper's neo-Classical translation of The Iliad 1

1. Occasional Thoughts (London, 1762), p.76. 2. IbTdY'p.lll.

3. Ibid, w>. 96,97,98. 4. Ibid, p.109.

to correct Pope's version; his views, therefore, on free verse at this

particular time are of interest: 'the truth is that poetry was as

certainly prior to the art of versifying as reason was to the making

of syllogisms'. He compares poetry making by rule to men performing

tricks with their hands and feet tied up:

Who ever thought of complaining that the sublime passages we meet

with throughout the Bible were not in metre?.... as neither music nor

harmony is occasioned by bars or beats in music, which are only

assistances to the performers, so neither can it be in poetry....

what should hinder the poet from making a free and promiscuous use

of all the various feet and measures as they happened best to suit

his present purpose, provided only he was properly attentive to

please the ear and satisfy the judgement? By which means poetry

would be, what indeed it only naturally can be, a pleasing and

harmonious modulation of numbers of sounds, without any fixt or

regular returns... as to the writing or printing poetry in his

lines of a particular length, no one, but he who takes his ideas

of music from his eyes rather than from his ears, can think it at

all material.

Upon such a plan does the measure of Ossian's poems seem to be

regulated. There is the greatest attention paid in them to the

spirit of harmony, without confining it to certain bounds. Could

the genius of Handel desire a finer verse for his purpose than

this...

'Son of night retire: call thy winds and fly 1'^ 1

This obscure but eminently lively book has been quoted at length

to show that the translations from the German of this sharply limited

period in the early 1760s are by no means isolated in their deep involve­

ment with the problem of form and the stylistic efficiency of visual

writing. It is a period of real progress: revolution by eclecticism,

part bogus Celtic, part genuine German.

The next two translations of Gessner continued to refine this rather

bloodless simplicity of diction. Both were advances and deserve consideration

but they were several leaps of years ahead and were published after J.J.

Winckelmann's advocacy of Hellenism had been translated into English. The

next translation from the German in sequence was Robert Lloyd's version

of Klopstock's Death of Adam, published in 1763.

This is a play, though it was never performed. Its blank verse owes

much to Milton and it only achieved two editions.^ Stylistically it is

subdued after the prose-verse excitements of Gessner. The most interesting

feature of the book was its Preface.

Lloyd showed an acute, yet critical, awareness of things Grecian

and made it clear that he looked to Germany for the best modern versions

of the Greek theatre. After a slighting reference to an English version

of 'Medea' by 'the celebrated Mr Glover', whom he compared to Quinbus

Flestrin, the poet of Lilli put, he claimed that 'the sublime and pathetic'

Klopstock has actually improved on the Ancients, 'and has written....not

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according to the letter, but the spirit of those great originals.

Since the translation was never a popular success, too much significance

must not be laid upon it, but it is interesting to find such reverence

for a German at this period and important to have yet another witness to 12

1. There was a second publication (Chester, 1791) when interest in