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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."

The above remarks will serve to exhibit the subtle relations and delicacies of literature, and what they depend on; and the effect will be enhanced if the student is induced thereby to seek those relations for himself. The effort to make the best translation possible, stern as are the limitations of such work, is an invaluable means of acquiring power over the fine resources of his native tongue.

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NOTE. For other suggestive remarks on translation, see Newman, “Idea of a University," pages 285-290. The classic treatise on translating poetry, alike valuable in matter and attractive in style, is Matthew Arnold's course of lectures delivered before the University of Oxford, “On Translating Homer."

Having in the foregoing three chapters traced the laws and processes that belong to invention in general, we are now to discuss, in the rest of Part II., the particular forms that inven

tion adopts, as it has to deal with material of various kinds, and the extension and combination of these forms in the leading types of literature. This discussion will be comprised under the following heads :

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Chapter IV.

Invention dealing with Objects; - Description. Chapter V. Invention dealing with Events; - Narration. Chapter VI. Invention dealing with Generalizations; — Expo

sition.

Chapter VII. Invention dealing with Truths;-Argumentation. Chapter VIII. Invention dealing with Issues; — Persuasion.

CHAPTER IV.

INVENTION DEALING WITH OBSERVED OBJECTS: DESCRIPTION.

As revealed in the early literatures of all nations, the most primitive and natural impulse to literary utterance manifests itself in men's efforts to report what they observe in the world around them, either as simply perceived or as vivified and embellished by imagination. This impulse is equally spontaneous whether the objects observed be at rest or in action, whether things or events; and thus this simplest inventive effort results in two forms of discourse, description and narration; forms generally found in some proportion together, but distinct in principle, and therefore needing for purposes of study to be examined separately. The first of these will be discussed in the present chapter.

I. DESCRIPTION IN ITS PRINCIPLES.

In common with the procedure adopted for the other specific forms of invention, we are first to consider description in its principles, as it exists unmixed, and afterward to notice the greater literary types in which description constitutes the predominating element.

I.

Definition of Description. - Description is the portrayal of concrete objects, material or spiritual, by means of language.

1. Observe in this definition, first, that description is portrayal. It is much more, therefore, than the mere enumeration of the parts and qualities of an object. Such enumeration has indeed. its frequent occasion: the bare demand for information requires

often only a catalogue of details; but this is only the unsifted material for description, not the description itself. Description is such a treatment of an object, as a whole and in its parts, as produces a unified and consistent picture of it, aiding the reader to reproduce it in imagination with something of the vividness with which the writer originally perceived it. In this respect description is analogous to painting; it seeks to accomplish by language what painting seeks to accomplish by pencil and pigments.// Like painting, therefore, it must arrange the details of its picture into a composition; there must be a balance and relation of parts, a background and foreground, a predominating unity that gives meaning and character to all its diverse elements.

2. Observe, secondly, that the objects with which description deals are concrete; that is, not generalized classes of objects, but particular individuals of a class. In this respect description is the contrast to exposition. The aim of the latter is to generalize and classify; to give therefore, by definition, example, and the like, only such qualities as belong to a whole group of objects. The aim of description, on the other hand, is to give the qualities wherein one object is individualized, unlike other objects; and has nothing to do with the class except in so far as referring it to a class may serve to localize it.

3. Observe, thirdly, that the range of description includes not only the kinds of objects best adapted to portrayal, namely, material objects, such as are seen and heard and handled, but also spiritual objects, that is, mental states and qualities, character, and such like. This range necessitates different procedures in the structure of description, according as the plan is suggested by the natural arrangement of parts, or has to be shaped by the writer's logical sense. It makes an essential difference whether he has to find his plan or make it.

These main characteristics of description suggest to what points attention must be especially directed: namely, to the structure of description in general, to special means of making it concrete and vivid, and to the exactions imposed upon it by the object.

Mechanism of Description.

II.

The aim of description, namely, to produce in the reader's imagination the same vivid conception of the object described that the writer himself has; and the material with which description has to work, namely, individual details associated in space or in thought; give rise to two main problems of structure, the problem of selection, and the problem of grouping.

1. The problem of selection, - how to estimate and choose particulars. A difficult problem: for on the one hand, the number of individual details belonging to an object of any complexity is very great; and on the other, to enumerate more than a very limited number crowds and confuses, not vivifies, the portrayal. To clear description it is imperative, therefore, that the details selected be only such as are the most characteristic, and that they be in the smallest number consistent with adequate presentation. And of course in proportion to the smallness of the number should be their vividness in arousing the reader's imagination to reproduce the described object for himself.

2. The problem of grouping, - how to make unity of effect out of diversity of material. The nature of this problem is thus explained by Lessing: "The details, which the eye takes in at a glance, he (the describer) enumerates slowly one by one, and it often happens that, by the time he has brought us to the last, we have forgotten the first. Yet from these details we are to form a picture. When we look at an object the various parts are always present to the eye. It can run over them again and again. The ear, however, loses the details it has heard, unless memory retain them. And if they be so retained, what pains and effort it costs to recall their impressions in the proper order and with even the moderate degree of rapidity necessary to the obtaining of a tolerable idea of the whole." It is necessary, therefore, to have the description modelled on strongly marked and definite lines of

1 Lessing, "Laocoon" (Ellen Frothingham's translation), p. 102.

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