My Compliments to Mrs. Mure and all your Family; not forgetting the two young Gentlemen whom you have withdrawn from us. I am with great Sincerity, Dear Baron, Your affectionate Friend and Servant PARK PLACE, 30 of March, 1769. DAVID HUME. Again we have Mure's answer to this letter in the Caldwell Papers, with a note to tell us that the letter itself is not preserved. The Baron accepts the Lords' decision with resignation, but joins with Hume in commiserating 'poor Andrew,' who was perhaps not so much to be pitied after all. His rich friend, Pulteney, to whom allusion is here made, gave him 400l. a year, and, what is perhaps more to the point, his reputation for good faith does not appear to have been seriously shaken. Even Boswell, who warmly espoused the Douglas side in his absurd' Spanish tale' of Dorando, represents Don Pedro Stivalbo as a man of principle' imposed upon by interested witnesses, whose language he little understood! Stuart's crushd heart' recovered sufficiently two years later for him to write the extraordinary Letters to Lord Mansfieldletters' unique in history,' says Burton, ' as being a systematic and serious arraignment of the conduct of a judge in the highest court of the realm by the law agent of a litigant.' Mansfield ignored the attack, and Stuart's subsequent career was very successful. His portrait by Reynolds, which hangs in the Public Gallery at Bath, is that of a handsome, dignified and prosperous gentleman. In view of the coldly furious letters and the account of the trial given to us by Hume and others, it is curious that, while Hansard reports the Chancellor (Camden's) condemnation of Stuart, his version of Mansfield's speech contains no seriously adverse reflections upon him. It has been suggested in explanation that Mansfield's notorious timidity caused him to have some of his own remarks suppressed. This may throw light on Hume's ' despair of seeing so compleat a Copy of them' (the speeches) 'as will not be disowned by the Speakers.' What we know that the great lawyer did say may well have provoked Hume's sardonic contempt, for his speech, as recorded in the Parliamentary History, is a mawkish production, largely devoted to assuring his audience that such a nice, well-bred woman as Lady Jane would never have stolen babies, combined with a dissertation on the signs and symptoms of true maternal feeling. Men are a trifle prone to let themselves go on the latter subject, perhaps sub-consciously secure in the knowledge that they cannot be called upon to put their own theories to the test of experience. Whether his theme be indignant, practical, or reflective, VOL. XCVIII-No. 582 X Hume never forgets his literary style, and several corrections in these letters (written in a beautiful hand) bear witness to the fact that even in his most intimate correspondence he does not care to allow a clumsy phrase to lurk. The sentence beginning' The Question, tho' not in the least intricate,' etc., must have particularly pleased him, for it is almost exactly reproduced in a letter to Dr. Blair, written two days later, but wherein lies the sharp distinction between intricate and complicated I confess I cannot discover. No further litigation impugned the rights of Archibald Douglas, and the decision of the House of Lords is now generally believed to have been in accordance with the facts. As said before, these long-forgotten letters may form no very remarkable addition to what the world already knows of David Hume. But it is enough if they retouch the colours of the old picture the very pleasing picture of the 'sceptic philosopher,' who was far indeed from living the life of gloom and dying the death of horror that some of his acquaintances feared (I had almost said desired) might be his lot. If this much be accomplished, the resurrection of the letters and my attempt to set them in an intelligible context will not have been in vain. B. G. MURE. 1925 THE TRANSLATION OF WORDS FOR MUSIC THE art of translation of verse into verse has fascinated many scholars and attracted some poets. To the art of adaptation Goethe turned his talent in the Westöstlicher Diwan and Fitzgerald his genius in Omar Khaiyyam. The world wavers in its taste between a translation and an adaptation, and the art of translation for music stands in the debatable ground between them, and constitutes a 'version' which can at any moment be either. Its final allegiance is due not to the poem, but to the music, and the best way of giving that allegiance is to think what it was that the composer found in the poem and what it is that the singer can put there; and these will not necessarily be the same things as moved the poet to write it, or to write it in that way. Working on the same picture as the poet, but in a different medium, the composer cannot parallel the detail of the poet's workmanship, but must go on a path of his own which may even to some degree ignore it. The singer is the interpreter between them, the pоýτns, or teller-forth; he gives bodily form to the poet's voiceless thought, and intensity of purpose to the composer's unthought emotion. The translator works in the poet's medium and uses his technique, but not necessarily the same kind of technique as he did in that particular poem or line. When there is a failure to reach some peculiar felicity of thought or expression here, he tries to balance it by another which his imagination supplies there. He can help the composer when the metrical variety of the poem clashes with the unity which the music demands, and he can help the singer when the composer has been unable wholly to do so in his melody without sacrificing something of his musical scheme. That would be the ideal version, but we seldom see it in practice, even in our own practice. Without wasting time over lamenting or pillorying the failures, it is proposed here to explain what the difficulties of a version are, to show how they may be avoided or overcome, to detail the arguments for or against having translations at all, and to suggest a way in which the art of translating a text of a song might be fostered by being provided with a definite purpose. For an art does not come into being or maintain itself by straining in an abstract way after beauty, but by applying imagination to some piece of work that needs to be done; and we shall never make a good version until the purpose of making it is clear and desirable to us, until we can put our hearts as well as our brains into the making. The untranslatableness of the original comes across us chiefly in two places: in intensely prosaic statements which need the glamour of a foreign language to carry them off-' Apri la finistra ' (Traviata), 'Je vais poster ma lettre' (Manon), 'La soupe est prête?' (Louise), Milk-punch ou wisky?' (Butterfly); and in endearing language, such as the recurrent ' petit père' in Pelléas and the famous 'Elsa, ich liebe dich,' in Lohengrin, both of which can be translated literally, but then sound ludicrously inadequate. In the second category come also short isolated sentences where everything depends on getting the right tone into the words— Parsifal's reiterated 'Das weiss ich nicht' (blank helplessness) and Magdalena's 'Komm, Ev'chen, komm; wir müssen fort' (a casual remark). The answer to all such difficulties broadly is that if that particular thing cannot be said we must say something else. These instances are all operatic, for it is in opera that these broken sentences chiefly occur and are important. One can say at once that Open the window' is a good deal better than Fling wide the casement' or any other poetical' words. The 'soup is not a real difficulty; anything that means 'Is dinner ready?' will do. 'Milk-punch' is to us an absurd thing to find on a summer afternoon in a garden for two people only; but Pinkerton need only point to the two stage liquors provided and say, ' Which can I offer you?' altering the vocal line if necessary. For petit père' Yniold need merely say what an English girl would say, not necessarily at the same place in the (prose) sentence, and half a dozen times instead of twenty-seven times. The Lohengrin problem is more serious: It all turns on that quaver. We may omit it and have what Gounod makes Margarita say ('Il m'aime') and Faust reply ('Il t'aime'), a sentiment we need not hesitate to translate literally. But the quaver is essential to the German word, and therefore to the music, and we must think twice before altering it in this particular place. Or we may keep the quaver. In that case we must find a perfectly natural-sounding phrase of which the second syllable only is accented and the last two are pendants to it: - 'So dear to me' would do, but 'so' is weak; in 'my very own' we find it difficult to prolong the 've-'; in my love! my own!' the 'own' is a more, not less, important word than 'love,' whereas the melody drops, not rises; 'I worship thee' suggests the marriage service; in 'I love but thee' the 'but' is a base subterfuge; 'my dearest love' is rather a mouthful ('-st 1-'), and 'my dearest one' is a form of address we might find in a correspondence between two people happily married. Still among these a singer might find, or modify, one so as to sing it with conviction, though two singers might choose differently. And there we will leave it. That the singer should sing with conviction, not that the audience should satisfy intelligent curiosity, is the main reason for a version. You will say that there are few who will not be able to sing 'ich liebe dich' with quite as much conviction as they could any English substitute. But what about the words Elsa has just sung? They are crabbed enough in the German : Wie gäb' es Zweifels Schuld, die grösser, Als die an dich den Glauben raubt, and the English of Lady Macfarren does not help us much. How many non-German prima donnas will guess that this means: How could there be a greater sin of doubt than that which should rob me of my belief in you? which even in English is not immediately intelligible? We shall find the double rhyme almost impossible; let us drop it, then, and simply say: My shield, my champion, my defender, There are indeed a few places where we absolutely must rhyme; one has just occurred in this passage, in two lines where the music is identical: Nie sollst du mich befragen, Never to ask or doubt me, But, with these infrequent exceptions, why not follow the rule, not of Racine, but of Shakespeare, and rhyme only at periodic or emotional moments? Wagner abandoned rhyme in The Ring; we may guess why: it both hampered him and bored him. Rhyme, like every other device, alliteration, antithesis, chiasmus, |