The Golden Ass
By Apuleius.
Translated by William Adlington.
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To
Stéphane Mallarmé
This Metamorphosis of
an Ancient Decadent
Introduction
Apuleius—His style—His debt to Lucian—The Sermo Milesius—The book’s touch with life—The dramatis personae—The witches of Thessaly—Cupid and Psyche—The macabre element—Apuleius the man—Autobiography—His Apology—Modern parallels—Adlington—His purism—His simple diction—Coined words—The imagery shirked—His rare ornament—His ignorance of Latin—The ideal translation—Adlington’s English—His mastery of phrase—His sustained rhythm—A model of prose—Two French versions—Guillaume Michel—His misleading of Adlington—Adlington the man—His morality—His love of allegory.
The Golden Ass of Apuleius is, so to say, a beginning of modern literature. From this brilliant medley of reality and romance, of wit and pathos, of fantasy and observation, was born that new art, complex in thought, various in expression, which gives a semblance of frigidity to perfection itself. An indefatigable youthfulness is its distinction. As it was fresh when Adlington translated it “out of Latin” three centuries since, so it is familiar today, and is like to prove an influence tomorrow. Indeed, it is among the marvels of history that an alien of twenty-five and Apuleius was no more when he wrote his Metamorphoses should have revolutionised a language not his own, and bequeathed us a freedom which, a thousand times abused, has never since been taken away.
A barbarian born, a Greek by education, Apuleius only acquired the Latin tongue by painful effort. Now, a foreigner, not prejudiced by an inveterate habit of speech, seldom escapes a curiosity of phrase. Where the language is the same, whether written or spoken, art is wont to lapse into nature. But there was no reason why Apuleius, who could not but be conscious of his diction, should ever deviate from artifice. His style, in truth, he put on as a garment, and it fitted the matter without a crease. His exotic vocabulary was the fruit of the widest research. He ransacked the ancient plays for long-forgotten words. He cared not where he picked up his neologisms, so they were dazzling and bizarre. Greece, his own Carthage, the gutters of Rome, contribute to the wealth of his diction, for he knew naught of that pedantry which would cramp expression for authority’s sake. The literary use of slang was almost his own invention. He would twist the vulgar words of every day into quaint, unheard-of meanings, nor did he ever deny shelter to those loafers and footpads of speech which inspire the grammarian with horror. On every page you encounter a proverb, a catchword, a literary allusion, a flagrant redundancy. One quality only was distasteful to him: the commonplace. He is ever the literary fop, conscious of his trappings and assured of a handsome effect. In brief, he belonged to the African School, for which elaboration was the first and last law of taste. He may even have been a pupil of Fronto, the prime champion of the elocutio novella, the rhetorician who condemned Cicero in that he was not scrupulous in his search for effect, and urged upon his pupils the use of insperata atque inopinata verba. No wonder poor Adlington, whose equipment of Latin was of the lightest, hesitated for a while! No wonder he complained that “the Author had written his work in so dark and high a style, in so strange and absurd words, and in such new invented phrases, as he seemed rather to set it forth to show his magnificence of prose, than to participate his doings to others!” But the difficulty is not invincible; and the adventurous have their reward. The prose sparkles with light and colour. Not a page but is rich inlaid with jewels of fantastic speech. For Apuleius realised centuries before Baudelaire that a vocabulary is a palette, and he employed his own with
