The safest course--Consideration of the relative value and
interest of books in libraries--The intrinsic and extrinsic
aspects--Consolation for the less wealthy buyer--The best books
among the cheapest--A few examples--Abundance of printed matter
in book-form--Schedule of Books which are Books--Remarks on
English translations of foreign literature.
WHEN we inspect a great library, filling three or four apartments
lined with cases, the first impression is that the possession of such
an assemblage of literary monuments is a privilege reserved for the
very wealthy; and to some extent so it is. But certain elements enter
into the constitution of all extensive accumulations of property of
any kind, whether it be books, prints, medals, or coins, which
inevitably swell the bulk and the cost without augmenting in anything
approaching an equal ratio the solid value. Not to wander from our
immediate field of inquiry and argument, the literary connoisseur,
starting perhaps with a fairly modest programme, acquires almost
insensibly an inclination to expand and diverge, until he becomes,
instead of the owner of a taste, the victim of an insatiable passion.
He not merely admits innumerable authors and works of whom or which he
originally knew nothing, but there are variant impressions, copies
with special readings or an unique _provenance_, bindings curious or
splendid; and nothing at last comes amiss, the means of purchase
presumed.
Yet, at the same time, he does not substantially possess, perhaps,
much more than the master of a _petite bibliotheque_, on which the
outlay has not been a hundredth part of his own. A considerable
proportion of his shelf-furniture are distant acquaintances, as it
were, and those acquisitions with which he is intimate are not
unlikely to prove less numerous than the belongings of his humbler and
less voracious contemporary.
Even where the object and ruling law are strict practical selections
of what pleases the buyer, the range of difference is very wide. One
man prefers the modern novelists, prose essayists, or verse writers; a
second, collections of caricatures and prints in book-form; a third,
topography; a fourth, the occult sciences, and so forth. I offer no
objection to these partialities; but I entertain an individual
preference for volumes chosen from nearly all branches of the _belles
lettres_, each for its own sake. I do not vote of necessity in all
cases for a book because it is rare, or because it is old, or because
it is the best edition; but I do not think that I should like any
scholar my friend to have the opportunity of pointing out to me (as he
would, wouldn't he?) that I lacked any real essential, as the child
tried to satisfy Longfellow that his shelves were not complete without
a copy of the undying romance of Jack the Giant-killer.
It cannot fail to strike any one opening such books as Bacon's _Sylva
Sylvarum_ or Markham's _Way to Get Wealth_, for how comparatively,
indeed absolutely, small a consideration it is possible to obtain two
works so brimful of interest and curiosity on all subjects connected
with gardening, agriculture, and rural pursuits or amusements. But
both these works long remained--the Bacon yet does so--outside the
collector's pale and cognisance, and the real cause was that they were
alike common; they had been the favourites of successive generations;
edition upon edition had been demanded; and the survival of copies was
too great to suit the book-hunter, who aims at shyer quarry.
Take again, as a sample, a noble old work like the English Bayle, five
substantial folios; it was a question of more than a five-pound note
to become the master of a good, well-bound copy; one in morocco or
russia by Roger Payne twice that amount could once scarcely have
brought down; and now it is _articulo mortis_. The connoisseur finds
it too bulky, and he hears that its matter has been superseded. At any
rate, it is no longer the _mode_, and the mill begins to acquire
familiarity with it. Let the taste return for such big game, and
copies will be as Caxtons are. Most part of the editions will ere then
have been served up again in the form of cheap book-drapery.
The _ne plus ultra_ of interest and respect seems to us to centre in
such collections of books as those of Samuel Pepys, Narcissus
Luttrell, the Rev. Henry White of Lichfield, and Charles Lamb, where
the volumes reflect the personal tastes of their owners, and are, or
have been, objects to them of personal regard. What is to be thought
or said of the man who simply buys works which happen to be in the
fashion for the moment, and for which he competes with others as wise
as himself, till the prices become ridiculous? English and American
millionaires acquire specimens of early typography, poetry, binding,
or what not, because they hear that it is the thing to do. One
gentleman will give L100 more for a copy, because he is credibly
informed that it is three-eighths of an inch taller than any other
known; and a second will take something from the vendor on the
assurance that no library of any pretensions is complete without it.
This sort of child's-play is not Book-Collecting. The true book-closet
and its master have to be kinsfolk, not acquaintances introduced by
some bookseller in waiting. Humanly speaking, the poor little
catalogue made by Hearne of his own books and MSS. comes nearer home
to our affections than those of Grenville and Huth.
In speaking and thinking of real books, it is necessary again to
distinguish between articulate productions of two classes--between
such a work, for example, as Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ and such an one
as Thoreau's _Walden_, or between Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire_ and Sir Thomas Browne's _Urn-Burial_. The present is an
enterprise directed toward the indication to collectors of different
views and tastes of the volumes which they should respectively select
for study or purchase. There are millions who have passed through
life unconsciously without having read a book, although they may have
seen, nay, possessed thousands. Those which might have been
recommended to them with advantage, and perused with advantage, were
too obscure, too dull, too cheap, too unfashionable. It is of no use
to read publications with which your acquaintances have no
familiarity, and to the merits of which it might be a hard task to
convert them. But, as we have said, we want space to enter into these
details, and we can only generalise bibliographically, repeating that
literature is broadly classifiable into Books and Things in
Book-Form--Specimens of Paper, Typography and Binding, or counterfeit
illusory distributions of printer's letter into words and sentences
and volumes by the passing favourites of each succeeding age--what
Thoreau call its "tit-men."
We might readily instance masterpieces of erudition or industry which
leave nothing to be desired in the way of information and safe
guidance, and which, at the same time, do not distantly realise our
conception of Books--real _bona fide_ Books. They may be the best
editions by the best binders, or they may be antiquarian periodicals
or sets of Learned Transactions, reducing much of the elder lore
cherished and credited by our ancestors to waste-paper; we feel that
it is a sort of superstition which influences us in regarding them;
but we fail to shake off the prejudice, or whatever it may be, and we
hold up, on the contrary, to the gaze of some sceptical acquaintance
a humble little volume in plain mellow sheep--say, a first Walton, or
Bunyan, or Carew, nay, by possibility a Caxton or Wynkyn de
Worde--which a roomful of perfectly gentlemanly books should not buy
from us. It may strike the reader as a heresy in taste and judgment to
pronounce the four Shakespeare folios of secondary interest from the
highest point of view, as being posthumous and edited productions. But
so it is; yet Caxton's first impression of Chaucer's _Canterbury
Tales_, if we were to happen upon it by accident, is a possession
which we should not be easily persuaded to coin into sovereigns, and
such a prize as the Evelyn copy of Spenser's _Faery Queen_, 1590, with
the Diarist's cypher down the back and his note of ownership inside
the old calf cover, is worth a library of inarticulate printed matter.
So, again, Aubrey, in his _Miscellanies_, _Remains of Gentilism and
Judaism_, _History of Surrey_, and _Natural History of Wiltshire_,
presents us with works very imperfect and empirical in their
character--even foolish and irritating here and there; but between
those undertakings and such as Manning and Bray's or Brayley and
Britton's _Surrey_ there is the difference that the latter are
literary compilations, and the former personal relics inalienably
identified with an individual and an epoch.
It is the same with certain others, ancient as well as modern writers.
Take Herodotus, Athenaeus, and Aulus Gellius on the one hand, and
Bishop Kennett's _Parochial Antiquities_, White's _Selborne_, Knox's
_Ornithological Rambles in Sussex_, or Lucas's _Studies in
Nidderdale_ on the other. All these equally tell you, not what some
one else saw or thought, but what they saw or thought themselves, and
in a manner which will never cease to charm.
There are works, again, which, without professing to entertain for the
authors any strong personal regard, we read and re-peruse, as we admire a
fine piece of sculpture or porcelain, an antique bronze or cameo, as
masterpieces of art or models of style. We are perfectly conscious, as we
proceed, that they are not to be trusted as authorities, and perhaps it
is so on the very account which renders them irresistibly attractive.
Some of the most celebrated literary compositions in our language are
more or less strongly imbued with the spirit of partisanship or a leaven
of constitutional bias; yet we like to have them by us to steal
half-an-hour's delight, just as we resort sometimes to alluring but
dangerous stimulants. We have in our mind, not volumes of fiction, not
even the historical novel, but serious narratives purporting to describe
the annals of our country and the lives of our countrymen and
countrywomen. We take them up and we lay them down with pleasure, and it
is agreeable to feel that they are not far away; and they will not do us
greater harm, if we combine an acquaintance with their deficiencies and
faults as well as with their beauties, than the fascinating associates
with whom we exchange civilities in the drawing-room or at the club, and
with whose haunts and opinions we are alike unconcerned. Of the romances
under the soberer names of history, biography, and criticism, which
abound in all the literatures of nearly all times, we are at liberty to
credit as much or as little as we choose; but in how many instances we
should regret to lose, or not to have inherited, these; and the personal
partiality which constitutes the blemish here and there equally
constitutes the merit.
What makes us return again and again to certain books in all
literatures, forgetful of chronology and biographical dictionaries?
What draws us irresistibly for the twentieth time to works of such
different origin and character as Herodotus, Caesar, Aulus Gellius,
Browne's _Urn-Burial_ and _Religio Medici_, Pepys's _Diary_, Defoe's
_Robinson Crusoe_, Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, and a handful of
authors nearer to our own day? Is it not their breadth, catholicism,
and sincerity? Is it not precisely those qualities which no sublunar
systems of computing time can affect or delimit? If we take
successively in hand the _Odyssey_, the _Arabian Nights_, the
_Canterbury Tales_, _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas de Santillane_, and
_Robinson Crusoe_, do we without some reflection realise that between
the first and the last in order of production thousands of years
intervened? Most of the romances of chivalry and the _Faery Queen_
strike us as more antiquated than Homer, assuredly more so than
Chaucer. The secret and the charm seems to lie in the fact that all
great books are pictures of human nature, which is and has been
always the same; and we are able to account in a similar manner for
the stupendous popularity of such works as the _Imitatio Christi_ and
the _Pilgrim's Progress_. Above all things, they are strictly _bona
fide_. They are no catch-pennies.
We find ourselves with hundreds, nay, thousands of other books at our
elbow or at our command, living in communion with half-a-dozen minds.
We read our favourite books, and when we have reached the end of our
tether, we recommence as if we were in the Scilly Islands, and there
were no more obtainable or permissible. We never wax tired of conning
over Bayle St. John's _Montaigne the Essayist_, Thoreau's _Walden_,
Howell's _Venetian Life_ and _Italian Journeys_. _Cuique suum._ We
have known those who never let the sun set without dipping into
Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, or who have some pet volume with
which they renew their intimacy every year, as Francis Douce did with
_Reynard the Fox_. There must usually be an unconscious sympathy in
these cases, a pleasing revelation of extended identity, as if these
other productions were what we should have liked to claim as our own,
and as if we felt we should have said the same things and thought the
same thoughts, if they had been ours.
It is the same with some parts of some writers' labours, to be had
separately, as _Hamlet_, _As You Like It_, _A Midsummer Night's
Dream_, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, _Macbeth_, and the _Merchant of
Venice_; and with a few detached or select compositions to which one
has to thread one's way in a larger volume: a few songs scattered
through the early dramatists and lyrists; Gray's _Elegy_; Tennyson's
_May Queen_ (without the sequel), and _Locksley Hall_ and _In
Memoriam_ (missing the tags).
In the present aspect of our inquiry, _Famous Books_ and the _Best_
are by no means convertible terms. There are such, it is true, as fall
under both categories: the Hebrew Scriptures, Homer, Herodotus,
_Arabian Nights_, _Canterbury Tales_, Montaigne's _Essays_,
Shakespeare, Gibbon. Famous literary compositions at different levels
or in their various classes are Boccaccio's _Decameron_, Ariosto's
_Orlando Furioso_, Aretino, Spenser's _Faery Queen_, Rabelais,
_Pilgrim's Progress_, La Fontaine's _Tales_, Rousseau's _Confessions_,
_Tristram Shandy_, _Candide_, _Don Juan_; and even among these how
fair a proportion depends for its value and fruitfulness on the
student? And, again, on his training. For we are aware of readers who
prefer Bunyan to Spenser, others who place Sterne, Voltaire, and Byron
before both, and not a few who have emerged with profit and without
pollution from the perusal of the labours of Rabelais and Aretino.
There is a literal deluge of moral and colourless works, on the
contrary, from which even the average modern reader comes away only
with an uncomfortable sense of waste of time and eyesight.
Of printed matter in book-shape there is no end. The mass grows day
by day, almost hour by hour. Yet the successful candidates for
admission to our inner circle of publications of all ages and
countries, which so far meet on common ground in being provided with a
passport to succeeding times requiring and recognising no critical
_vise_, increase in numbers slowly, O so slowly! It would be
presumptuous and unsafe to attempt to discount the ultimate verdict on
many now popular names; but it is to be apprehended that, looking at
the much more numerous body of writers, the calls to immortality will
hereafter be in a relatively diminishing ratio. The influences and
agencies by which certain schools of thought and work are artificially
forced to the front are too often temporary, and their life is apt to
be, Hamadryad-like, conterminous with that of their foster-parents. It
has been my lot to witness the rise, decline, and evanescence of
groups of authors and artists, whom it was almost sacrilegious to
mention even with qualification. Adverse criticism was out of the
question for any one valuing his own repute.
How various all the afore-mentioned standard or permanent books are,
and still in one respect how similar! Similar, inasmuch as they or
their subject-matter are surrounded by an atmosphere which preserves
them as in embalmed cerements. In strict truth, there may be some
among the number which are far indeed from being individually
important or costly, while others in a critical sense have long been
entirely obsolete, or perhaps never possessed any critical rank. It
does not signify. Their testimonials are independent of such
considerations. Many, most of them, are on ever-living topics; many,
again, in their essence and material properties are sanctified and
odorous.
I find myself possessed by a theory, possibly a weak and erroneous
one, in favour of such a book, for instance, as Johnson's _Lives of
the Poets_, as Johnson published it, with all its imperfections, with
the full consciousness that improved editions exist. For the original
output represents a genuine aspect of the author's mind, prejudices
inclusive; and I am not sure that, had he lived to bring out a revised
and enlarged impression, I should have looked upon it as so
characteristic and spontaneous; and the same criticism applies to a
number of other productions, dependent for their appreciation by us
not upon their substantial, so much as on their sentimental, value.
What is not unapt to strike an average mind is that, with such a
caseful of volumes as my cursory and incomplete inventory represents
and enumerates, how much, or perhaps rather how little, remains behind
of solid, intrinsic worth, and what a preponderance of the unnamed
printed matter resolves itself into _bric-a-brac_, unless it amounts
to such publications, past and present, as one is content to procure
on loan from the circulating library or inspect in the show-cases of
our museums.
Happy the men who lived before literary societies, book-clubs, and
cheap editions, which have between them so multiplied the aggregate
stock or material from which the collector has to make his choice!
There are occasional instances where co-operation is useful, and even
necessary; but the movement has perhaps been carried too far, as such
movements usually are. Our forefathers could not have divined what an
unknown future was to yield to us in the form of printed matter of all
sorts and degrees. But they already had their great authors, their
favourite books, their rarities, in sufficient abundance. It was a
narrower field, but a less perplexing one; and from the seeing-point
of the amateur, pure and simple, our gain is not unequivocal.
I shall now proceed to draw up an experimental catalogue of works
which appear to possess a solid and permanent claim to respect and
attention for their own sakes, apart from any critical, textual, or
other secondary elements. Others without number might be added as
examples of learning, utility, and curiosity; but they do not fall
within this exceedingly select category:--
AEsop's _Fables_.
# In a form as near as may be
to the original work.
Antoninus, _Itinerary_.
_Arabian Nights._
_Arthur of Little Britain._
Ashmole's _Theatrum Chemicum_.
Athenaeus.
Aulus Gellius.
Bacon's _Sylva Sylvarum_.
Bacon's _Essays_.
Bayle's _Dictionary_, in English.
Bidpai or Pilpay [so called], _Fables_ of.
# A genuine English text.
Boccaccio's _Decameron_.
Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ and _Tour in the Hebrides_.
Bradbury's _Nature-printed Ferns and Seaweeds_.
Brand's _Popular Antiquities_.
# Latest recension, _not_ Ellis's.
Browne's _Religio Medici_.
Browne's _Urn-Burial_.
# The latter reminds us of
Lamb's style, allowing for difference
of time.
Browne's _Vulgar Errors_.
Browning's _Early Poems_.
# A moderate volume would
hold all worth perpetuation.
Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_.
Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_.
# A book of academical cast,
abounding in quaint conceits and
curious extracts; full of false
philosophy and morality.
Butler's _Hudibras_.
Byron's _Scotish Bards_.
Byron's _Childe Harold_.
Byron's _Don Juan_.
Caesaris _Commentarii_.
Carew, Thomas, _Poems_.
Cervantes' _Don Quixote_, by Jervis, 2 vols. 4to.
Chappell's _Popular Music_.
Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_.
Chronicles (English) Series of.
# Including Froissart and
Monstrelet, with the original illuminated
illustrations to former.
Cicero, _De Senectute et De Amicitia_.
# In the original Latin.
Cobbett's _Rural Rides_.
Coleridge's _Table-Talk_.
Cotgrave's _French Dictionary_.
Couch's _British Fishes_.
Coventry, Chester, Towneley, and York Mysteries.
Cunningham's _London_, by H. B. Wheatley.
Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_.
Delany, _Diary and Correspondence_.
Diogenes Laertius.
Dodsley's _Old Plays_.
Douce's _Illustrations of Shakespeare_, 2 vols.
Dunlop's _History of Fiction_.
Sir H. Ellis's _Original Letters_, three series.
George Ellis's _Specimens of Early English Romances_.
Elton's _Specimens of the Classic Poets_, 3 vols. 1814.
# Elton's versions of portions
of Homer appear to be superior to
Chapman, and to make it regrettable
that he did not complete the work.
_Epinal Glossary_, by Sweet.
# For the earliest English extant.
Evelyn's _Diary_.
Evelyn's _Sylva_.
Fairholt's _Costume_, 1860.
Fielding's _Tom Jones_.
Fox's _Book of Martyrs_.
Fournier's _Vieux-Neuf_, 1877.
Gayton's _Festivous Notes on Don Quixote_.
_Gesta Romanorum_, in English.
Gilchrist's _Blake_.
Gilpin's _Forest Scenery_.
_Golden Legend_, in English.
Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_.
Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_.
Grimm's _Popular Stories_.
Hakluyt's _Voyages_.
Harleian Miscellany.
Hearne's _Diary_, 2nd edition.
Rawlinson's _Herodotus_.
Herrick's _Hesperides_.
Holland's _Heroeologia_, 1620.
Homer, by Chapman.
# But better in the original.
Hone's Popular Works.
# An original copy.
Horace, _Satires and Epistles_, by Keightley.
_Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis._
# A printed edition for the engravings.
James Howell's _Letters_.
Howells' _Italian Journeys_.
Howells' _Venetian Life_.
_Hundred Merry Tales_, 1526.
Hunter's _New Illustrations of Shakespeare_.
Hunter's _Historical Tracts_.
Hunter's _Account of New Plymouth_, 2nd edition.
Irving's _Scotish Poetry_.
Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_.
Johnson's _Rasselas_.
# For the sake of its story, not of the book.
_Junius, Letters of._
Keightley's _Mythology of Greece and Italy_.
# Some of the matter anticipated
by Sir T. Browne in his _Vulgar Errors_.
Keightley's Histories of Greece, Rome, and England (last editions).
Knox's _Ornithological Rambles in Sussex_.
Lamb's _Elia_.
Lamb's _Letters_.
Lamb's _Adventures of Ulysses_.
Lamb's _Rosamund Gray_.
Langland's _Piers Ploughman_.
Latimer's _Sermons_.
_Lazarillo de Tormes_, in English.
Le Houx, _Vaux de Vire_, in French.
Leland's _Itinerary_ and _Collectanea_, 1770.
Le Sage's _Gil Blas_, IN FRENCH.
Lord Lindsay's _Lives of the Lindsays_.
# See that passage where the
opinion of James, Earl of Balcarres,
is quoted in regard to the
duty of men to leave behind them
some trace or record of their
mind. Edit. 1849.
Lockhart's _Life of Scott_.
Lodge's _Portraits_.
# An early edition.
Lovelace's _Poems_.
Lucas, _Studies in Nidderdale_.
Lysons, _Magna Britannia_, 6 vols.
Lysons, _Environs of London_, 2nd edition.
Malory's _Morte Arthur_.
Montaigne's _Essays_, IN FRENCH.
Morris's Works on Birds, Birds' Eggs, &c.
Nuernberg Chronicle, 1493.
# The Latin text. As a very early picture-book.
Olaus Magnus.
# Original Latin, with the woodcuts.
Ovid.
# Partly as in all appearance
a favourite in some shape with our Shakespeare.
_Paston Letters._
Pennant's _Tours in Wales and Scotland_, and _Journey to London_.
# On account of their personality. You know that much is
obsolete, and other men have improved
on them; but there is somehow the same charm.
Pepys's _Diary_, by Wheatley.
Percy's _Reliques_.
Phillips's _English Dictionary_.
Photii _Bibliotheca_.
Plato's _Dialogues_.
# Perhaps the French version by Cousin is preferable.
Plinii _Epistolae_.
Plutarch's _Lives_.
_Popular (Early) Poetry of England_, 4 vols.
_Popular (Early) Poetry of Scotland and the Border_, 2 vols.
Poets. _Select British Poets_, 1824.
# Includes ample selections from writers hardly worth possessing
in a separate shape, including many even great and
distinguished names.
Poets. _Corpus Poetarum Latinorum et Graecorum._
# The same remark applies.
Rabelais.
Randolph's _Plays and Poems_.
_Retrospective Review._
_Reynard the Fox_, in English.
Richardson's _Clarissa_.
_Robin Hood Ballads._
Scot's _Discovery of Witchcraft_.
Selden's _Table-Talk_.
Shakespeare's _Works_.
Shakespeare's _Library_, 6 vols.
_Songs of the Dramatists._
Southey's _Commonplace Book_.
Southey's _Select Letters_.
# More especially for his delightful letters to children.
Spence's _Anecdotes_.
Spenser's _Works_.
Sterne's _Tristram Shandy_.
St. John's (J. A.) _Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece_, 1842.
# A lifelong labour, and most delightful and instructive work.
St. John's (Bayle) _Montaigne the Essayist_.
St. John's English version of Saint Simon.
Stow's _Annals_.
Stow's _Survey of London_, 1720.
Strutt's _Costume_, by Planche.
Suckling's Works.
Swift's _Gulliver_.
Sydney's _Arcadia_.
Tennyson's _Lyrical Poems_.
# A judicious one-volume selection preferable.
Thoreau's _Walden_, 1854.
Thorne's _Environs of London_.
Tottell's _Miscellany_.
Virgil, _Bucolics_ and _Georgics_, by Keightley.
Voltaire's _Candide_, in French.
Voltaire's _Philosophical Dictionary_.
Walton's _Angler_.
Warton's _English Poetry_, 1871.
Walpole's _Letters_.
Wise's _New Forest_.
# Best edition for engravings.
White's _Selborne_, 1st edition.
Wodroephe's _Spare Hours of a Soldier_, 1623.
Yarrell's _British Birds_.
How passing rich one would be with all these, and no more--rich beyond
the greatest bibliomaniacs, and beyond the possessors of the rarest
and costliest treasures in book-form! Turn over the pages of the most
splendid catalogues, and how few one would find to add! Nor would all
the before-recited productions appeal to all book-lovers. There are
many who would excuse themselves from admitting Rabelais. Some might
not particularly care for the works of foreign origin. Some might be
courageous enough to avow an indifference to Milton and Spenser, and
even a dislike to Bunyan. Still the rule holds good, we think, that
all our chosen authors or books have more or less powerful
credentials. There remain to be added Books of Reference, as we have
pointed out, curiosities, and this or that person's specialisms.
From a strictly practical point of view, the language and sense of any
great writer, ancient or modern, may be as well, nay, better,
appreciated in a volume bought for a trifle than in a rare and
luxurious edition, where the place and time of origin, the type, the
paper, and the binding are adventitious accessories--almost
_impedimenta_--and the book itself a work of art like a picture or a
coin. But with either of the latter it is different, for there the
canvas or the metal is an integral portion of the object. For
instance, take the better parts of Tennyson. Is it not sufficient to
read them in a modest foolscap octavo? Do we require external aids?
The poet is his own best illustrator, and if we purchase a pictorial
edition, we are apt to find that the author and the artist are at
variance in their interpretations.
Translations are always to be carefully avoided by all who can more or
less confidently read the author in the original language. We have yet
to meet with a version, whether of an ancient or of a modern classic,
which is thoroughly appreciative and satisfactory. The majority are
utterly disappointing and deceptive. It is in the transfer of the
idiom and costume that the difficulty and consequent failure lie. No
one who merely knows at second hand Homer, Herodotus, Plautus,
Terence, Horace, Virgil, Montaigne, Le Sage (a metonym for _Gil
Blas_), Cervantes, La Fontaine, Dumas, Maupassant, Balzac, can have
had an opportunity of forming an adequate and just estimate of those
authors. You might nearly as soon expect a Frenchman to relish Butler
or Dickens in their Parisian habiliments.
Such a fact--for a fact it undoubtedly is--opens to our consideration
a very large and a very grave problem, since the very limited extent
to which the English public is conversant with Greek and Latin, and
with even the Latin family of modern languages, makes the admission
that so many works of the highest importance and interest are only
properly and truly readable in their own tongues tantamount to one
that they are not properly and truly readable at all.
Of all forms of translation, the paraphrase is perhaps the worst, so
far as an interpretation of the original sense goes, but not the most
dangerous if we know it to be what it is, and do not look for more
than a general idea of the meaning and plan of the author. To be
practically serviceable, an English version of any classical or
foreign work should be literal, and with the literalness as idiomatic
as may be; and if the text to be rendered is in verse, the English
equivalent should preferably be in verse without rhyme or in prose.
The object to be attained in these cases is a transfer of the
conceptions, notions, or theories of writers from languages which we
do not understand to one which we do; and therefore the best
translator is he who has absolutely no higher aim than this, and does
not aspire to make his task a stalking-horse for his own literary
ambition.
There is scarcely an end of the various schemes adopted to convey to
us intelligibly and successfully the sentiments and conceits of
ancient authors as well as of those of other countries, and, all
things considered, a _literal_ version in prose appears to present the
fewest disadvantages, for it disarms the translator of the temptation
to poetical flights and metrical ingenuity, and brings us nearer to
the man and the age to be immediately and primarily studied.
At best, a translation is an indifferent substitute for the book
itself, as it was delivered to the world by some renowned hand, or
even by some personage whose individuality is stamped, as in the case
of the _Imitatio Christi_ or the _Essays_ of Montaigne, on every
sentence indelibly and untransferably, and seems part of the very
Latin or French type. An amusing instance occurred in which a
gentleman, having heard of the fine style of A Kempis, bought as a
present to a friend a copy of the latest English translation! And it
is equally futile to look for the essence and spirit of the great
Gascon writer in the pages of Florio or Cotton, both of whom, though
in unequal measure, to the exigencies of diction or an imperfect
conversance with the dialect in which Montaigne wrote sacrificed
precious personal idiosyncrasies.
The majority of the popular and current versions of the classics are
unsatisfying and treacherous, because they have been executed either
by under-paid scholars, like Bohn's Series, or by persons who have had
a tendency to put themselves in the place of their author.
We may not be very willing to part with our old favourites, such as
Chapman's _Homer_, Florio's _Montaigne_, North's _Plutarch_, Shelton's
_Don Quixote_, Urquhart's _Rabelais_, and Smollett's _Gil Blas_; but
it is to be feared that they must be prized as curiosities and
rarities rather than as interpreters and guides. If a thoroughly
reliable library of classical translations, on as literal a plan as
possible, could be formed, it would be a real boon to the public--it
would be what Bohn's Series ought to have been. Of course, in the
department of translation there are two leading divisions--the ancient
and the modern classics; and for much the same reason that a story or
a _jeu d'esprit_ seldom bears transplanting from one soil to another,
both these branches of literature are apt to suffer when they change
their garb. Almost every man who writes is influenced by dominant
environments, whether he be Greek or Roman, or Oriental, or modern
European of whatever nationality; and his mere expressions or sense
rendered into a foreign tongue are usually like a painting without a
background or an atmosphere. We may range over the whole field from
the most ancient times to the most modern, and the same thing
manifests itself. Open before me is an illustration which will answer
the purpose as well as any other, in the shape of Muirhead's version
of the _Vaux de Vire_ of Jean le Houx. At page 105 we have the
following stanza:--
"Lorsque me presse l'heure,
Je retourne au logis;
Ma femme est la qui pleure,
Ainsi qu'il m'est aduis,
Et me dict en cholere:
'Que fay ie seule au lict?
Est il seant de boire
Ainsi jusqu'a minuict?'"
Mr. Muirhead translates thus--
"When late the hour appears,
Returning to my home,
My wife is there in tears,
As I hear when I come.
She greets me testily:
'I lie a-bed alone:
Do you thus shamelessly
Carouse till midnight's gone?'"
The same kind of paraphrastic dilution runs through the volume; nor is
Mr. Muirhead wholly to blame. The original is idiomatic and terse, and
he could not find exact equivalents in numerous cases. _Ab uno disce
omnes._ But what a privilege it becomes to be able to dispense with
interpreters! My admiration of these festive _chansons_ arises from my
appreciation of them in their native costume and diction. The Knight
of La Mancha was of my opinion herein, for he likened a translation to
a piece of Flemish tapestry seen on the wrong side.
A corollary which naturally suggests itself to my mind is that if a
familiarity--say, even with Latin and French alone--is expedient on no
other account, it is eminently so on this one; and the mastery of the
inner sense of a great and famous writer constitutes an ample reward
for any expenditure of labour and time in acquiring the language in
which he wrote, in making yourself as nearly his countryman as you
can. I remember a saying, which may have been a wicked epigram, that
the only book in Bohn's Classical Library worthy of purchase or
perusal was a version of one of Aristotle's works which a gentleman
had executed _con amore_ and presented to the publisher.
A voluminous and not very well known body of literary material
consists of foreign translations of contemporary English pamphlets of
a historical or religious character, from the time of Henry VIII. to
the Revolution of 1688, covering the entire Stuart period. They cannot
be said to be of primary consequence beyond the proof which they
furnish of the interest felt abroad in passing transactions in this
country, even in such incidents of minor moment as the trial of
Elizabeth Cellier in 1680 for an obscure political libel, and the
occasional value which they have acquired through the apparent loss of
the English originals. We have, for example, a French account of a
London ferryman, who, under pretence of conveying passengers across
the river, strangled them (1586); a second, of the misdoings of a
minister at Malden in Essex (1588); and a third, of the execution of
two priests and two laymen at Oxford in 1590, the last existing also
in Italian, but none of them known in English.