Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 by Various

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[Footnote A: For the sake of illustration of the care and labor given by
Mr. Clough to the revision, we open at random on the Life of Dion, Vol.
V., p. 291, and, comparing it with the original _Dryden_, we find, that
in ten pages, to the end of the Life, there are but three, and they
short sentences, in which changes of more or less consequence have not
been made. These changes amount sometimes to entire new translation,
sometimes consist merely in the correction of a few words. Throughout,
the hand of the thorough scholar is apparent. The earlier volumes of the
series would, probably, rarely exhibit such considerable alterations.]

But Mr. Clough's labors have not been merely those of reviser and
corrector. He has added greatly to the value of the work by occasional
concise foot-notes, as well as by notes contained in an appendix to each
volume. So excellent, indeed, are these notes, so full of learning and
information, conveyed in an agreeable way, that we cannot but feel a
regret (not often excited by commentators) that their number is not
greater. In addition to these, the fifth volume contains a very
carefully prepared and full Index of Proper Names, which is followed by
a list for reference as to their pronunciation.

When this version, to which Dryden gave his name, was made, there was no
other in English but that of Sir Thomas North, which had been made, not
from the Greek, but from the French of Amyot, and was first published in
1579. It was a good work for its time, and worthy of being dedicated to
Queen Elizabeth, although, as the knight declares, "she could better
understand it in Greek than any man can make it English." Its style is
rather robust than elegant, partaking of the manly vigor of the language
of its time, and now and then exhibiting something of that charm of
quaint simplicity which belongs to its original, Montaigne's favorite
Amyot. "Of all our French writers," says the incomparable essayist,
"I give, with justice, I think, the palm to Jacques Amyot";[B] and
thereupon he goes on to praise the purity of his style, as well as the
depth of his learning and judgment. But, although Amyot had "a true
imagination" of his author, he was not always exact in giving his
meaning. The learned Dr. Guy Patin says: "On dit que M. de Meziriac
avoit corrige dans son Amyot huit mille fautes, et qu'Amyot n'avoit
pas de bons exemplaires, ou qu'il n'avoit pas bien entendu le Grec de
Plutarque."[C]

[Footnote B: _Essays_, Book II. 4.]

[Footnote C: _Patiniana_.]

Amyot's eight thousand errors were not diminished in passing into Sir
Thomas North's English; but their number mattered little to the readers
of those days, who found in the thick folio enough of interest to spare
them from making inquiry as to the exactness of its rendering of the
meaning of Plutarch. From the time of its first publication, for more
than a hundred years, it was one of the most popular books of the
period, as was proved by the appearance of six successive editions in
folio.[D] Some of these clumsy volumes may, no doubt, have been put
to uses as ignoble as that which Chrysale, in "Les Femmes Savantes,"
suggests for his sister's similar copy of Amyot:--

"Vos livres eternels ne me contentent pas;
Et, hors un gros Plutarque a mettre mes rabats,
Vous devriez bruler tout ce meuble inutile";--

but duller books of the same size, of which there were many in those
days of patient readers, would have had an equal value for such
economical purposes as this, and "The Lives of the Noble Grecians and
Romans by that Grave Learned Philosopher & Historiographer Plutarch"
were too entertaining to young and old to be left for any length of time
quietly upon the shelf. They were the familiar reading of boys who
were to become the actors in the great drama of the Rebellion and the
Commonwealth, or who a little later were to frequent the dissolute court
of Charles, presenting in their own lives, whether in camp or court, as
patriots or as traitors, parallels to those which they had read in the
weighty pages of the old biographer.

[Footnote D: In 1579, 1595, 1602, 1631, 1657, 1676. Mr. Hooper, in his
Introduction to Chapman's Homer, London, 1857, says, that "the edition
of 1657 was published under the superintendence of the illustrious
Selden." We do not know his authority for this statement. The fact, if
it be one, is very remarkable, as Selden's death took place in 1654.]

Nor in more recent times has North's version failed of admirers. Godwin
declared, that, till this book fell into his hands, he had no genuine
feeling of Plutarch's merits, or knowledge of what sort of a writer he
was. But the chief interest of this translation at the present day,
except what it possesses as a storehouse of good mother-English, comes
from the fact that it was one of the books of Shakespeare's moderate
library, and one which he had thoroughly read, as is manifest from the
use that he made of it in his own works, especially in "Coriolanus,"
"Julius Caesar," and "Antony and Cleopatra." It was from the worthy
knight's folio that he got much of his little Latin and less Greek. He
helped himself freely to what was to his purpose; and a comparison of
the passages which he borrowed from with the scenes founded upon them is
interesting, as showing his use of the very words of the author before
him, and as exhibiting the new appearances which those words take on
under his plastic hand. We have no space for long extracts; but a short
illustration will serve to show that Shakespeare is the best translator
of Plutarch into English that we have had. Compare these two passages:--

"Therefore, when she [Cleopatra] was sent unto by divers letters, both
from Antonius himself and also from his friends, she made so light of
it, and mocked Antonius so much, that she disdained to set forward
otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus; the poop
whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which
kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the musick of flutes, bowboys,
citherns, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the
barge. And now for the person of herself, she was laid under a pavillion
of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess
Venus, commonly drawn in picture; and hard by her, on either hand of
her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid,
with little fans in their hands, with which they fanned wind upon her.
Her ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled
like the Nymphs Nereides (which are the Myrmaids of the waters) and like
the Graces; some steering the helm, others tending the tackle and ropes
of the barge, out of the which there came a wonderful passing sweet
savour of perfumes, that perfumed the wharf's side, pestered with
innumerable multitudes of people. Some of them followed the barge all
along the river side; others also ran out of the city to see her coming
in. So that in the end there ran such multitudes of people one
after another to see her, that Antonius was left post alone in the
market-place, in his imperial seat to give audience."--NORTH'S
_Plutarch, Life of Antonius_, p. 763. Ed. of 1676.

_Enobarbus._ When she first met Mark Antony, she pursed up his heart
upon the river of Cydnus.

_Agrippa._ There she appeared, indeed; or my reporter devised well for
her.

_Eno._ I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burnt on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick; with them the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water, which they beat, to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, (cloth of gold, of tissue,)
O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork Nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-color'd fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid, did.

_Agr._ Oh, rare for Antony!

_Eno._ Her gentlewomen, like the Nereids,
So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes,
And made their bends adornings: at the helm
A seeming mermaid steers; the silken tackle
Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands,
That yarely frame the office. From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her, and Antony,
Enthron'd i' th' market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air, which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in Nature.

_Antony and Cleopatra_. Act II. Sc. 2.

The operations of Shakespeare's creative imagination are rarely to be
observed more distinctly than in such instances as this, where we see
the precise source from which he drew, in all its original limitations
and native character. Books were to him like ingots of gold, which,
passing through the mint of his brain, came out thence stamped coin,
current for all time. Viewing some of his plays, it may be said, with no
real, though with apparent contradiction, that no man ever borrowed more
from books, and yet none ever owed less to them. For the Roman times
Plutarch served him, as Holinshed and Hall supplied him for his English
histories. Under Plutarch's guidance he walked through the streets of
ancient Rome, and became familiar with the conduct of her men. He is
more Roman than Plutarch himself, and by divine right of imagination he
makes himself a citizen of the Eternal City. While Shakespeare was using
Plutarch to such advantage, on the other hand, Ben Jonson seems to have
borrowed little or nothing from him in his Roman plays. He got what he
wanted out of the Latin authors, and he succeeded in Latinizing his
plays,--in giving to his characters the dress, but not the spirit of
Rome.

It was toward the end of the seventeenth century that Dryden's
translation appeared, and for about fifty years it held much the same
place with the reading public that North's had filled for previous
generations. It was, no doubt, in this version that Mrs. Fitzpatrick
amused herself during her seclusion in Ireland, as she tells Sophia
Western, with reading "a great deal in Plutarch's Lives." But this was
at length superseded by the translation of the brothers Langhorne,
which, spite of its want of vivacity, its labored periods, and formal
narrative, has retained its place as the popular version of Plutarch up
to the present day. One can hardly help wishing--so little of Plutarch's
spirit survives in their dull pages--that a similar fate had overtaken
these excellent men to that which carried off the gentle Abbe Ricard
with the _grippe_, when he had published but half of his translation of
the Philosopher of Cheronaea.

It is a proof of the intrinsic charm of Plutarch's Lives, that thus,
notwithstanding the imperfect manner in which they have been, up to this
time, presented to English readers, they should have been so constantly
and so generally read.[E] They have given equal delight to all ages and
to all classes. The heavy folio has been taken from its place on the
lower shelves in the quiet libraries of English country-houses, and been
read by old men at their firesides, by girls in trim gardens, by boys
who cared for no other classic. The cheap double-column octavo has
travelled in peddlers' carts to all the villages of New England, to
the backwoodsman's cabin in the West. It has taken its place on the
clock-shelf, with only the Bible, the "Pilgrim's Progress," and the
Almanac for its companions. No other classic author, with, perhaps, the
single exception of Aesop, has been so widely read in modern times; and
the popular knowledge of the men of Greece and Rome is derived more
from Plutarch than from all other ancient authors put together. The
often-repeated saying of Theodore Gaza, who, being once asked, if
learning should suffer a general shipwreck, and he had the choice of
saving one author, which he would select, is said to have replied,
"Plutarch,"--"and probably might give this reason," says Dryden, "that
in saving him he should secure the best collection of them all,"--this
saying is but a sort of prophecy of the decision of the common world,
who have chosen Plutarch from all the rest, and find, as Amyot says, "no
one else so profitable and so pleasant to read as he."[F]

[Footnote E: We have not spoken of Mr. Long's translations of Select
Lives from Plutarch, which were published in the series of Knight's
Weekly Volumes, under the title of _The Civil Wars of Rome_, because,
although executed in a manner deserving the highest praise, they
presented to English readers but a limited number of Plutarch's
biographies. Mr. Clough says, justly, in his Preface, that his own work
would not have been needed, had not Mr. Long confined his translations
within so narrow a compass.]

[Footnote F: "De tous les auteurs," says the Baron de Grimm, "qui nous
restent de l'antiquite, Plutarque est, sans contredit, celui qui a
recueilli le plus de verites de fait et de speculation. Ses oeuvres sont
une mine inepuisable de lumieres et de connaissance; c'est vraiment
l'encyclopedie des anciens." _Memoires Historiques_, etc., I., 312.]

Nor is it merely the common mass of readers who have chosen Plutarch as
their favorite ancient. The list of great and famous men who have made
him their companion is a long one. Men of action and men of thought have
taken equal satisfaction in his pages. Petrarch, the first scholar of
the Revival, held him in high esteem, and drew from him much of his
uncommon learning. Erasmus, the first scholar of the Reformation, made
his writings a special study, and translated from the Greek a large
portion of his Moral Works. Montaigne has taken pains to tell us of his
affection for him, and his Essays are full of the proofs of it. "I never
seriously settled myself," he says, "to the reading of any book of
solid learning but Plutarch and Seneca."[G] And in another essay he
adds,--"The familiarity I have had with these two authors, and the
assistance they have lent to my age, and to my book wholly built up of
what I have taken from them, oblige me to stand up for their honor."[H]
And again he declares,--"The hooks I chiefly use to form my opinions are
Plutarch, since he became French, and Seneca."[I] The genial humanity
and liberal wisdom of Plutarch claimed the sympathy of Montaigne, while
his discursive style and love of story-telling suited no less the taste
of his disciple. Montaigne, as it were, makes Plutarch a modern, and
uses his books to illustrate the passing times. He introduces him to new
characters, and reads his judgment upon them. He finds in him a hundred
things that others had not seen. It is a wide step from Montaigne
to Rousseau, and yet, spite of the naturalness of the one and the
artificiality of the other, there were some points of resemblance
between them, and they harmonize in their love for a common master,
Rousseau has written of Plutarch as Montaigne felt,--"Dans le petit
nombre de livres que je lis quelquefois encore, Plutarque est celui
qui m'attache et me profite le plus. Ce fut la premiere lecture de mon
enfance, et sera la derniere de ma vieillesse; c'est presque le seul
auteur que je n'ai jamais lu sans en tirer quelque fruit."[J] Plutarch's
Lives was one of the few books recommended to Catharine II. of Russia,
as she herself tells us, wherewith to solace and instruct herself during
the first wretched years of her miserable married life. It is, perhaps,
not impossible to trace in some passages of her later life the results
of what she then read.

[Footnote G: _Essays._ Book I., Chapter 25.]

[Footnote H: _Essays_, II. 23.]

[Footnote I: _Ibid._ II. 10.]

[Footnote J: _Les Reveries d'un Promeneur Solitaire._ Quatrieme
Promenade.]

And thus we might go on accumulating the names of men and women whom
all the world knows, who have confessed their obligations to the old
biographer,--philosophers like Bacon, warriors like Bussy d'Amboise,
poets like Wordsworth; while many a one has owed much to him who has
made no open acknowledgment of his debt. Montaigne somewhere complains
of the unlicensed stealings from his author; and Udall, in his Preface
to the Apophthegms of Erasmus, declares,--"It is a thing scarcely
believable, how much, and how boldly as well, the common writers that
from time to time have copied out his [Plutarch's] works, as also
certain that have thought themselves liable to control and amend all
men's doings, have taken upon them in this author, who ought with
all reverence to be handled of them, and with all fear to have been
preserved from altering, depraving, or corrupting."[K]

[Footnote K: The following passage presents a view of some of the uses
to which Plutarch's narratives were turned during the Middle Ages. "Or
personne n'ignore que les chroniqueurs du moyen age compilaient les
faits les plus remarquables de l'Ecriture Sainte ou des histoires
profanes pour les meler a leurs recits. C'est ainsi que ceux qui ont
ecrit la vie de Du Guesclin ont mis sur le compte de ce heros ce
que Plutarque rapporte de plus memorable des grands hommes de
l'antiquite."--SOUVESTRE. _Les Derniers Bretons._ I. 147.]

The question naturally arises, What are the qualities in Plutarch which
have made him so universal a favorite, which have attracted towards him
men of such opposite tempers and different lives? It is not enough
to say that all real biography is of interest,--that every man
has curiosity about the life of every other man, and finds in it
illustrations of his own. Other writers of lives have not had the same
fortune with Plutarch. For one reader of Suetonius or of Diogenes
Laertius, there are a thousand of Plutarch. Nor is it that the subjects
of his biographies are greater or more famous than all other men. Some
of the noblest and best known men of Greece and Rome are omitted from
Plutarch's list.[L] The true grounds of the general popularity of
Plutarch's Lives are not to be found in their subjects so much as in
his manner of treating them, and in the qualities of his own nature, as
exhibited in his book. At the tomb of Achilles, Alexander declared that
he esteemed him happy in having had so famous a poet to proclaim his
actions; and scarcely less fortunate were they who had such a biographer
as Plutarch to record their lives. He himself has given us his
conception of the true office of a biographer, and in this has explained
in great part the secret of his excellence. "It must be borne in mind,"
he says, "that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And
the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest
discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment,
an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and
inclinations than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the
bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore, as portrait-painters are more
exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is
seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give
my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls
of men; and, while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be
free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by
others."[M]

[Footnote L: In Rogers's _Recollections_, Grattan is reported as
saying,--"Of all men, if I could call up one, it should be Scipio
Africanus. Hannibal was perhaps a greater captain, but not so great and
good a man. Epaminondas did not do so much. Themistocles was a rogue."
It is curious that Themistocles is the only one of these men of whom we
have a biography by Plutarch. His Lives of Scipio and Epaminondas are
lost. Hannibal did not come within the scope of his design.]

[Footnote M: _Life of Alexander_, at the beginning.]

It is his fidelity to this principle, his dealing with events and
circumstances chiefly as they illustrate character, his delineation of
the features of the souls of men, that constitutes Plutarch's highest
merit as a biographer. He is no historian; he often neglects chronology,
and disregards the sequence of events; he omits many incidents, and he
avoids the details of national and political affairs. The progress of
the advance or decline of states is not to be learned from his pages.
But if his Lives be read in chronological order, much may be inferred
from them of the moral condition and changes of the communities in which
the men flourished whose characters and actions he describes. Biography
is thus made to cast an incidental light upon history. The successes
of Alexander give evidence of the lowering of the Greek spirit, and
illustrate the immemorial weakness of Oriental tyrannies. The victories
and the defeats of Pyrrhus alike display the vigor of Republican Rome.
The character and the fate of Mark Antony show that vigor at its ebb,
and foretell the near fall of the Roman liberties. Thus in his long
series of lives of noble Grecians and Romans, the motives and principles
which lay at the foundation of the characters of the men who moulded the
fate of Greece and Rome, the reciprocal influences of their times upon
these men and of these men upon their times, may all be traced with more
or less distinctness and certainty. It was not Plutarch's object to
exhibit them in sequent evolution, but, in attaining the object which he
had in view, he could not fail to make them manifest to the thoughtful
reader. His book, though not a history, is invaluable to historians.

But the character of Plutarch himself, not less than his method of
writing biography, explains his universal popularity, and gives its
special charm and value to his book. He was a man of large and generous
nature, of strong feeling, of refined tastes, of quick perceptions. His
mind had been cultivated in the acquisition of the best learning of his
times, and was disciplined by the study of books as well as of men. He
deserves the title of philosopher; but his philosophy was of a practical
rather than a speculative character,--though he was versed in the wisest
doctrines of the great masters of ancient thought, and in some of his
moral works shows himself their not unworthy follower. Above all, he was
a man of cheerful, genial, and receptive temper. A lover of justice and
of liberty, his sympathies are always on the side of what is right,
noble, and honorable. He believed in a divine ordering of the world,
and saw obscurely through the mists and shadows of heathenism the
indications of the wisdom and rectitude of an overruling Providence.
To him man did not appear as the sole arbiter of his own destiny, but
rather as an unconscious agent in working out the designs of a Higher
Power; and yet, as these designs were only dimly and imperfectly to
be recognized, the noblest man was he who was truest to the eternal
principles of right, who was most independent of the chances and
shiftings of fortune, who, "fortressed on conscience and impregnable
will," strove to live in the manliest and most self-supported relations
with the world, neither fearing nor hoping much in regard to the
uncertainties of the future, and who

"metus omnes et inexorabile fatum
Subjecit pedibus."

In his whole character, Plutarch shows himself one of the best examples
of the intelligent heathen of the later classic period. His Writings
contain the practical essence of the results of Greek and Roman life
and thought. His intellect, equally removed from superstition and
from skepticism, was open with a large receptiveness, which sometimes
approaches to credulity, to the traditions of early wonders, to the
reports of recent miracles, and to the stories of the deeds and sayings
of men.[N] The evidence upon which he reports is often insufficient to
establish the statements that he makes; but his readiness to tell the
current stories gives to his biographies a peculiar interest, adding
to their entertainment, and at the same time to their value as
representations of common beliefs and popular fancies. He is one of the
best story-tellers of antiquity, and from his works a series of "Percy
Anecdotes" of ancient men might easily be compiled. "Such anecdotes will
not," says he, in his Life of Timoleon, "be thought, I conceive, either
foreign to my purpose of writing lives, or unprofitable in themselves,
by such readers as are not in too much haste, or busied and taken up
with other concerns." It is this fulness of anecdote, which, perhaps,
more than any other quality of his writings, makes him the favorite
of boys as well as of men. He treasures up pithy sayings, and his own
reflections are often epigrammatic in expression, and always full of
good sense.

[Footnote N: There are two remarkable passages in the _Life of
Coriolanus_ which illustrate Plutarch's opinions upon these points. The
first (ii. 91) treats of the divine influence on the human will and
action; the second (ii. 97-98) relates to the mode of regarding events
seemingly incredible. This latter is peculiarly distinguished by its
good sense and clear statement. It closes with the memorable saying,
"Knowledge of divine things for the most part, as Heraclitus says, is
lost to us by incredulity."]

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