he cannot be a colorless medium of expression,

at least, in so far as he is, he leaves the result colorless. Every problem of the force and tone of words, of the bearing of particles, of the comparative effects of order between the two languages is a pure problem of choosing an exactly interpretative equivalent of the original. An interpreter the translator must be at every turn; his literary ideal is to produce a work which, through his perfect assimilation of two languages, shall have the same effect on its newer readers that the original had on its day and public.

Three requisites, in the main, are necessary to translation. First, of course, to choose exact and literal equivalents for all that can be literally transferred. This applies to all the denotative elements of language: concrete and everyday words, matter-of-fact description, recounting of plain events. Secondly, to reproduce in some equivalent form the spirit and feeling of the original; a task increasingly difficult according to the original writer's individuality and the prevalence of the emotional or imaginative element in the production. This requisite applies to all that is conveyed by connotation, whether in implied idea or in animus of word and figure; also to the irregularities of speech, roughness, ellipses, and the like, so far as an intended impression is made by them. It is lack of skill in these fine powers of language that produces the prevailing flat effect of which we are conscious in ordinary translation.1 Thirdly, and growing out of this last requisite, to translate the idioms of one language not literally

1 "The two constituent elements of every thought thus expressed are the idea and the emotion. Both must be transferred, the one neither enlarged nor diminished, the other neither strengthened nor weakened. They are addressed to two departments of the soul, the one to the intellect as something to be known, the other to the affections as something to be felt. They are logically separable, though indivisible in fact. The idea can never be clearly given without the emotion; the emotion can never be felt in its spiritual heartiness without accuracy in the accompanying idea." - TAYLER LEWIS, On the Emotional Element in Hebrew Translation, Methodist Quarterly Review, 1862, p. 85.

but into what is correspondingly idiomatic of the other. Not always can this be done, for different languages do not often have parallel idioms; but when a just impression of the racy native flavor of the original can be conveyed the translator achieves his highest triumph in the mastery of his art.1

1 The following passage, though long, will abundantly justify insertion for the light it throws on an important aspect of this subject, the untranslatable :

"Several times in these pages I have felt called upon to protest against the adequacy of all translation of poetry. In its happiest efforts, translation is but approximation; and its efforts are not often happy. A translation may be good as translation, but it cannot be an adequate reproduction of the original. It may be a good poem; it may be a good imitation of another poem; it may be better than the original; but it cannot be an adequate reproduction; it cannot be the same thing in another language, producing the same effect on the mind. And the cause lies deep in the nature of poetry. 'Melody,' as Beethoven said to Bettina, 'gives a sensuous existence to poetry; for does not the meaning of a poem become embodied in melody? The meanings of a poem and the meanings of the individual words may be reproduced; but in a poem meaning and form are as indissoluble as soul and body; and the form cannot be reproduced. The effect of poetry is a compound of music and suggestion; this music and this suggestion are intermingled in words, to alter which is to alter the effect. For words in poetry are not, as in prose, simple representatives of objects and ideas: they are parts of an organic whole- they are tones in the harmony; substitute other parts, and the result is a monstrosity, as if an arm were substituted for a wing; substitute other tones or semitones, and you produce a discord. Words have their music and their shades of meaning too delicate for accurate reproduction in any other form; the suggestiveness of one word cannot be conveyed by another. Now all translation is of necessity a substitution of one word for another: the substitute may express the meaning, but it cannot accurately reproduce the music, nor those precise shades of suggestiveness on which the delicacy and beauty of the original depend.

"Words are not only symbols of objects, but centres of associations; and their suggestiveness depends partly on their sound. Thus there is not the slightest difference in the meaning expressed when I say

or

The dews of night began to fall,

The nightly dews commenced to fall.

Meaning and metre are the same; but one is poetry, the other prose. Wordsworth paints a landscape in this line:

The river wanders at its own sweet will.

Let us translate it into other words:

The river runneth free from all restraint.

We preserve the meaning, but where is the landscape? Or we may turn it thus:

The river flows, now here, now there, at will,

NOTE.

The difficulties of translation are still greater, not to say insuperable, in the translation of poetry, which cannot well produce an effect like the original without a corresponding metrical form, and yet which cannot be at once metrical and literal.

which is a very close translation, much closer than any usually found in a foreign language, where indeed it would in all probability assume some such form as this:

The river self-impelled pursues its course.

In these examples we have what is seldom found in translations, accuracy of meaning expressed in similar metre; yet the music and the poetry are gone; because the music and the poetry are organically dependent on certain peculiar arrangements of sound and suggestion. Walter Scott speaks of the verse of a ballad by Mickle which haunted his boyhood; it is this:

The dews of summer night did fall;
The moon, sweet regent of the sky,
Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall,

And many an oak that grew thereby.

This verse we will rearrange as a translator would rearrange it:

The nightly dews commenced to fall;

The moon, whose empire is the sky,
Shone on the sides of Cumnor Hall,

And all the oaks that stood thereby.

Here is a verse which certainly would never have haunted any one; and yet upon what apparently slight variations the difference of effect depends! The meaning, metre, rhymes, and most of the words, are the same; yet the difference in the result is infinite. Let us translate it a little more freely :

Sweetly did fall the dews of night;

The moon, of heaven the lovely queen,

On Cumnor Hall shone silver bright,

And glanced the oaks' broad boughs between.

I appeal to the reader's experience whether this is not a translation which in another language would pass for excellent; and nevertheless it is not more like the original than a wax rose is like a garden rose.

"To conclude these illustrations, I will give one which may serve to bring into relief the havoc made by translators who adopt a different metre from that of the original. Wordsworth begins his famous Ode:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,

A good example of recent translation that for racy flavor a reads "like an original," is Catherine A. Janvier's translation o Gras's The Reds of the Midi, passages from which are quoted 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