A good example of recent translation that for racy flavor and grace reads "like an original," is Catherine A. Janvier's translation of Felix Gras's The Reds of the Midi, passages from which are quoted above, pp. 17 and 495.

III. EXPOSITION IN LITERATURE.

As description and narration cover broadly the work of arousing and satisfying the imagination, so exposition, which in some form is their chief rival in literary prevalence, covers broadly the work of informing the intellect. The great body of literature that imparts knowledge, opinion, and counsel may be included under the comprehensive term exposition.

It would serve no practical purpose to catalogue the various forms and aspects that exposition may take in literature. Some of its more prominent phases only will here be mentioned.

I.

Criticism. This represents the broad popular use of exposition, as it is adapted to the interests and capacities of readers in general. Its aim is to find the principles that

The translator, fully possessed with the sense of the passage, makes no mistakes, but adopting another metre, we will suppose, paraphrases it thus:

A time there was when wood, and stream, and field,

The earth, and every common sight, did yield

To me a pure and heavenly delight,

Such as is seen in dream and vision bright.

That time is past; no longer can I see

The things which charmed my youthful reverie.

"These are specimens of translating from English into English, and show what effects are produced by a change of music and a change of suggestion. It is clear that in a foreign language the music must incessantly be changed, and as no complex words are precisely equivalent in two languages, the suggestions must also be different. Idioms are of course untranslatable. Felicities of expression are the idioms of the poet; but as on the one hand these felicities are essential to the poem, and on the other hand untranslatable, the vanity of translation becomes apparent. I do not say that a translator cannot produce a fine poem in imitation of an original poem; but I utterly disbelieve in the possibility of his giving us a work which can be to us what the original is to those who read it."- LEWES, Life of Goethe, pp. 466-468.

should determine a work of literature or art or polity, and pass judgment on such work, or on tendencies that influence it, according as it fulfils or transgresses those principles.

Criticism, at bottom, is neither eulogy nor fault-finding; it is intelligent analysis of a work according to some standard which critic and reader alike recognize as just. According as it is of this character criticism is one of the great educational agencies of an age.

Its Prevailing Ways of Publication. In two ways, which may be called the ephemeral and the permanent, criticism meets the ordinary reader.

1. The first comprises the accounts of literary, artistic, musical, and dramatic works which are prepared every day for newspapers and magazines. Such criticisms are a kind of news announcement, their object being primarily to describe, and then by some rapid strokes of judgment to help the reader decide whether the work under review is worthy of his further attention. While this work is ordinarily only a rough and broad analysis, it should be deep and vital, and made without fear or favor; beyond this, that is, as puffery or invective, it is not criticism; it is merely business or prejudice.

2. The second and higher kind is one of the younger departments of literature, having come in and been developed alongside the increased general culture of men. It appears often in reviews, and then, according to its permanent interest is republished in book form. It is the product of good scholarship, imagination, sound and clear thinking, broad comparative and penetrative study. The body of literature thus produced belongs to the most valuable reading of an age.1

1 "At its best, this is one of the most exquisite of intellectual products, and only a little below the creative work of the novelist or poet. It has come into existence much later than the other forms of belles-lettres; it is hardly two hundred years

NOTE. - Macaulay and Carlyle did much of their earlier work in the form of critical articles for reviews; which work was afterward reissued in their collected writings. Some of the earlier critics of note are Francis Jeffrey, William Hazlitt, Sydney Smith, Lord Brougham, and Thomas De Quincey. Some of the men whose work has contributed to make criticism a highly valued department of literature are Saint-Beuve, Matthew Arnold, Walter Bagehot, Edward Dowden, Leslie Stephen, Richard Holt Hutton; in art criticism, John Ruskin, who has almost created the sphere in which his artistic knowledge expresses itself, and Walter Pater.

Its Requisites. The requisites of good criticism, which are really qualifications of the critic, may be summarized in three leading traits.

1. Intelligence. The critic must have a large and proportioned knowledge not only of what he criticises, but of its whole sphere of ideas and technicalities; this because the critique itself must judge the work under review by both intrinsic and comparative standards.

2. Sympathy. The critic must have the ability to enter, without disturbing prepossessions, into the thought and feeling of others, so as to see through their eyes, and judge from their point of view; this because the critique, even though it deals with an erroneous or detested work, must show some insight as to how it reached its position.

3. Individuality. The critic must with all his sympathy have a fixed standard of his own, which, while it does not preclude fair judgment, gives all his utterances conviction and consistency; this because the critique itself should be as vital and personal as the work it criticises.1

old. Yet it takes every day a greater prominence, and it becomes more and more desirable to insist on its importance and to ensure its welfare." - EDMUND Gosse in The New Review, Vol. iv, p. 409.

1 For the processes involved in criticism, see above, pp. 578-582. See also WILKINSON, A Free Lance in the Field of Life and Letters, pp. 108–111.

II.

Forms of Expository Work. The work of exposition in literature takes two principal forms, the treatise and the essay. The Treatise. This, which generally takes the compass of a volume or more, aims to present its subject in all parts, and with a thorough and finished treatment. This leads generally to an exhaustive setting-forth not only of the results of thought, but of all the processes by which those results are obtained. The treatise, then, is the great means of getting the deepest investigation of the age, in all questions scientific, philosophical, political, so before the minds of men that it may be preserved and further promoted.

In such work the thought or theory is first, and literary embellishment, if added, is incidental and secondary. Το literature in the narrower sense, therefore, the treatise belongs only indirectly, and according as the writer has or has not a trained literary method; and at its best the literary virtues it displays are clearness of statement and lucidity of ordering,the fundamental qualities that subserve practical use.

NOTE. — The various text-books in science and all departments of learning are familiar representatives of the treatise. The part that treatises play in the progress of investigation may be judged from such massive and standard works as Darwin's Origin of Species, Herbert Spencer's philosophical works, Bacon's Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum, Newton's Principia, Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, Hobbes's Leviathan, Butler's Analogy, Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, and many others.

The Essay. — Of all literary forms the most opportune and practical, on the whole, is the essay; and this for two reasons: it is the most convenient for the prevailing custom of periodical publication; and it is the form best adapted to the use of those who write only occasionally and not as a profession. In general esteem it stands next to the novel; while often it may attain a literary grace and elegance denied to the novel.

The modest name originally given to this form of composition-essay, trial or attempt—still retains something of its significance in both types of essay presently to be distinguished. The significance relates especially to what is promised in the paper: not an exhaustive treatment, but suggestive, giving rather results than processes, and expressed in a style adapted to popular apprehension. The office of the essay, as John Morley defines it, is "merely to open questions, to indicate points, to suggest cases, to sketch outlines." If in any case an essay does more than this, it does what any one has the right to do, namely, more than it promises.

The modern facility of publication in periodical form and the tendency to exploit all kinds of knowledge and research in this popular way have developed the essay in a new direction, so that now it exists in two distinct types.

1. The prevailing modern type, found in reviews, magazines, and volumes of miscellaneous writings, may be called the didactic. It is virtually a short treatise. It aims at careful and ordered working-up of a subject, centres about a definite proposition to be maintained by exposition and reasoning, and addresses itself prevailingly to the intellect. In such a work the interest is directed to the subject-matter, and the writer's own personality is kept in the background.

NOTE. Various names, more or less non-committal, are given to essays of this type; of which perhaps the most popular nowadays is the simple name paper. Articles, reviews, monographs, appreciations, studies are other designations for the same general thing. The names of men who have achieved distinction in this kind of writing have been given in the note on p. 593, above.

2. The original type of essay, which still survives in some of the most exquisite literary work, may be called the personal. In it the writer is as it were conversing with his reader; he freely reveals, and ordinarily in familiar language, his own fancies and feelings, whims, and idiosyncrasies. Studied plan