No More Learning

Botticelli is not a botanist, nor is Shakespeare a geographer. It is
this fault which leads critics to call Tacitus 'a stilted pleader at a
decadent bar', and to complain that his narrative of the war with
Civilis is 'made dull and unreal by speeches'--because they have not
found in Tacitus what they had no right to look for. Tacitus inserts
speeches for the same reason that he excludes tactical details. They
add to the human interest of his work. They give scope to his great
dramatic powers, to that passionate sympathy with character which
finds expression in a style as nervous as itself. They enable him to
display motives, to appraise actions, to reveal moral forces. It is
interest in human nature rather than pride of rhetoric which makes him
love a good debate.

The supreme distinction of Tacitus is, of course, his style. That is
lost in a translation. 'Hard' though his Latin is, it is not obscure.
Careful attention can always detect his exact thought. Like Meredith
he is 'hard' because he does so much with words. Neither writer leaves
any doubt about his meaning. It is therefore a translator's first duty
to be lucid, and not until that duty is done may he try by faint
flushes of epigram to reflect something of the brilliance of Tacitus'
Latin. Very faint indeed that reflection must always be: probably no
audience could be found to listen to a translation of Tacitus, yet one
feels that his Latin would challenge and hold the attention of any
audience that was not stone-deaf.
But it is because Tacitus is never a
mere stylist that some of us continue in the failure to translate him.
His historical deductions and his revelations of character have their
value for every age. 'This form of history,' says Montaigne, 'is by
much the most useful . . . there are in it more precepts than stories:
it is not a book to read, 'tis a book to study and learn: 'tis full of
sententious opinions, right or wrong: 'tis a nursery of ethic and
politic discourses, for the use and ornament of those who have any
place in the government of the world. . . . His pen seems most proper for
a troubled and sick state, as ours at present is; you would often say
it is us he paints and pinches. ' Sir Henry Savile, Warden of Merton
and Provost of Eton, who translated the _Histories_ into racy
Elizabethan English at a time when the state was neither 'troubled'
nor 'sick' is as convinced as Montaigne or the theorists of the French
Revolution that Tacitus had lessons for his age. 'In Galba thou maiest
learne, that a Good Prince gouerned by evill ministers is as dangerous
as if he were evill himselfe. By Otho, that the fortune of a rash man
is _Torrenti similis_, which rises at an instant, and falles in a
moment. By Vitellius, that he that hath no vertue can neuer be happie:
for by his own baseness he will loose all, which either fortune, or
other mens labours have cast upon him. By Vespasian, that in civill
tumults an advised patience, and opportunitie well taken are the onely
weapons of advantage. In them all, and in the state of Rome under them
thou maiest see the calamities that follow civill warres, where lawes
lie asleepe, and all things are iudged by the sword.