neutr1 signs, but that they possess an intense national life; that they are "national" in the same way as the Devonshire, or the Yorkshire, or the Lancashire dialect is "local"; and that to translate a masterpiece from one language into another is almost like attempting to express a sonata in the medium of marble, or a poem in the form of a picture.

Having thus examined words in their individual essence, I pass to a consideration of them in combination.

Not the words alone, but even the rhythm, the metre, the verse, will be the contemporaneous offspring of the emotion or imagination which possesses him. Poeta nascitur non fit, says the proverb; and this is, in numerous instances, true of his poems as well as of himself. They are born, not framed; they are a strain rather than a composition; and their perfection is the monument, not so much of his skill as of his power. And this is true of prose as well as of verse in its degree...

Thus wrote Cardinal Newman, and the same conception of the function of language is enunciated by F. W. Myers. He is speaking about Virgil :—

The range of human thoughts and emotions greatly transcends the range of such symbols as man has invented to express them, and it becomes therefore the business of Art to use these symbols in a double way. They must be used for the direct representation of thought and feeling; but they must also be combined by so subtle an imagination as to suggest much which there is no means of directly expressing. And this can be done; for experience shows that it is possible so to arrange forms, colours, and sounds as to stimulate the imagination in a new and inexplicable way. This power makes the painter's art an imaginative as well as an imitative one, and gives birth to the art of the musician, whose symbols are hardly imitative at all, but express emotions which, till music suggests them, have been not only unknown but unimaginable. Poetry is both an imitative and an imaginative Art. As a choice and condensed form of emotional speech, it possesses the reality which depends on its directly recalling our previous thoughts and feelings. But as a system of rhythmical and melodious effectsnot indebted for their potency to their associated ideas alone-it appeals also to that mysterious power by which mere arrangements of sound can convey an emotion which no one could have predicted beforehand, and which no known laws can explain.

And he goes on to refer to "the effect which is produced mainly by relations and sequences of vowels and consonants too varying and delicate to be reproducible by rule." And, summing up, he

VOL. 245. NO.499.

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says: "The poet thrills us with delight by a collocation of consonants, much as the etcher suggests infinity by the scratch of the needle."

There have been many translations of Virgil, and it would be rash to prognosticate that we shall ever see the end of them. Yet it seems incredible that any lover of Virgil, anyone who had come under the spell of his melancholy and stately charm, should imagine it possible to convey that charm through the medium of another tongue. What is it that gives to a famous line, like "Tendebantque manus ripæ ulterioris amore," its haunting beauty, its mysterious and abiding power? Assuredly it is not the mere grammatical or logical meaning? I do not know how Dryden, or Wordsworth, or Conington, or Lord Justice Bowen rendered this line; but I am quite sure that none of them will be found to have given an equivalent for which one would predict any notable degree of longevity. No, the value, the enduring loveliness of the line resides in what-to borrow a word from the terminology of music-may be called its. overtones." This power of suggestion it is, this richness in " overtones," which imparts to the work of the great masters, whether in poetry or prose, its permanence and its power.

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But, though we all may be agreed as to the beauty of a given line of Virgil, nothing is less probable than that any two people will have a precisely similar impression of it. Our appreciation of a writer will depend on a whole host of factors, of circumstances at once too numerous and too elusive ever to be seized and catalogued-upon our heredity, our education, our environment, our tastes, our traditions, our individual temperament, upon those seemingly insignificant incidents and experiences which, trivial as they may appear, exert so powerful and lasting an influence on our lives, becoming in Pater's phrase, “ parts of the great chain wherewith we are bound." Moreover, all writers are inevitably affected in a greater or lesser degree by the prevailing literary fashions of their day. Take, for example, three translations of Homer, separated from each other by long intervals of time; the versions of Chapman, Pope and Andrew Lang. So greatly do they differ one from another in tone and style; so divergent are the impressions they make upon us, that we might be excused for questioning whether they could have been based on the same original. Chapman displays all the exuberant fancy, and freely

indulges in the riotous conceits of the Elizabethans. Troy must needs "shed her towers for tears of overthrow." Ulysses is tossed about by the waves and the process is called the "horrid tennis." Pope is stately, resonant, rich in brilliant antitheses. Andrew Lang and his coadjutor yield the whole position when they confess, as they do in the preface to the Odyssey, that "there can be no final English translation of Homer" since, as they themselves add, " in each there must be, in addition to what is Greek and eternal, the element of what is modern, personal and fleeting."

In his "Grammar of Assent," Newman, who has been explaining the difference between notional and real assent, pauses to give an illustration of his meaning. In a passage of exquisite beauty, he invites the reader to consider how differently old and young are affected by the reading of the classics. It is only after long years have passed and he has had experience of life that they come home to him and pierce him as if he had never before known them with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness." It is then that he comes to understand how it is that lines," the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival." That is a familiar passage, and since, as I daresay, most people know it by heart, there was little need to quote it, but who, by any stretch of imagination, however unwilling he may be to subscribe to the theory of words that I have attempted to set forth-the power of words, in subtle combination, to suggest more than "the logical step in the argument," to suggest the infinite and eternal-who could hold that these passages, to which Newman alludes, would live for generation after generation, for thousands of years, and exercise their perennial charm in the translations of Chapman, Dryden, Pope, Cowper?

Among the many reasons (wrote George Gissing) which make one glad to have been born in England, one of the first is that I read Shakespeare in my mother tongue. If I try to imagine myself as one who cannot know him face to face, who hears him only speaking from afar, and that in accents which only through the labouring intelligence can touch the living soul, there comes upon me a sense of chill deprivation. I am wont to think that I can read Homer, and, assuredly, if any man

enjoys him, it is I; but can I, for a moment, dream that Homer yields me all his music; that his word is to me as to him who walked by the Hellenic shore when Hellas lived? I know that there reaches me across the vast of time no more than a faint and broken echo; I know that it would be fainter still, but for its blending with those memories of youth which are as a glimmer of the world's primeval glory.

I have italicised those words because they prompt me to anticipate one objection which cannot fail to have suggested itself. "You speak," some reader may say, "of the effect upon your mind of the words of some great classical writer such as Homer, or Virgil, or Horace; but you forget that those words are in a tongue that is not your own, and that if you admit their effect upon your mind, upon the foreign mind, part, at least, of your argument is blown to the winds." To this I would reply that, for those who have learned them in their youth, the Greek and Latin classics are interwoven, so to speak, with the very fibre of their being : they have inspired the vast majority of our great writers in poetry and prose; they are, in very truth, part and parcel of our language. "My old Liddell and Scott," says Gissing again,“ still serves me, and if in opening it, I bend close enough to catch the scent of the leaves, I am back again at that day of boyhood (noted on the flyleaf by the hand of one long dead) when the book was new and I used it for the first time. It was a day of summer, and perhaps there fell upon the unfamiliar page, viewed with childish tremor, half apprehension and half delight, a mellow sunshine, which was to linger for ever in my mind." All who have had the classics drummed into them at school, whatever the fates have had in store for them since-from Anatole France to the down-and-out beach-comber in Stevenson's "Ebb-Tide "-will not fail to understand that passage.

It may be urged that, whether or not there is any substance in the arguments here advanced, there do exist translations which are universally admitted to rank among the great literature of the world translations exhibiting a merit equal, and perhaps superior, to the originals from which they purport to be rendered. This, of course, I do not attempt to deny. Fitzgerald's “ Omar,” for example, may quite possibly be equal or superior in beauty to its Persian original. But in reality that is beside the question. The point is that whatever beauties the translation may exhibit, those beauties are not, and cannot be, the same as those of the original.

Among the present-day practitioners of the translator's art, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, in his translations from Stendhal and Marcel Proust, has won for himself a well-deserved distinction. And it must be confessed that he, if anyone, is calculated to supply the exception necessary to prove the rule which it has been my aim to lay down. Yet, here again, I am not quite sure, but I do not think that even Mr. Scott-Moncrieff is, after all, to be excluded from my general statement that traduttori are they cannot help it-traditori. But in this case, the treason is so charming that we are all supremely happy in our betrayal. This, however, involves a question which I must leave to a higher tribunal to decide; to Professor Saintsbury, for example, or, if he ever deigns to read a translation, to Sir Edmund Gosse. Mr. Scott-Moncrieff has, in full measure, all the gifts which a translator should possess. He has erudition, an acute perception of the delicate nuances, the finer shades of meaning and, most important of all, a great gift of style. With these advantages, he has produced a translation which resembles the original as closely as Chambertin, shall we say, resembles Château Margaux, though which is which I do not presume to decide.

Perhaps it will be asked how it comes about that, if there is any real substance in the difficulties I have adumbrated as besetting the path of the translator, there are so many people willing, nay anxious, to undertake so hopeless a task. I am afraid it is only too true that the vast majority have little or no notion either of the dignity or the difficulties of their calling. It is currently held that translators are people who, having some knowledge of a foreign language, but no ideas of their own, are compelled, in order to gain a living, to fall back upon the task of dishing up the ideas of some foreign author for the benefit of their less cultivated compatriots. In point of fact, translation, if one of the most poorly retributed, is certainly one of the most difficult of all branches of literary art. Or, perhaps, I should say, rather that it is either easy or impossible. That so many people look upon it as easy is the reason why so many bad translations are produced in this country. I remember saying to Anatole France what I laid down as the text of this essay, namely, that translation was an impossible thing. Putting his hand encouragingly on my shoulder, he replied: "Precisely, my friend; the recognition of that truth is a necessary preliminary to success in the art."