THE READING OF FOREIGN CLASSICS
Since there is not time in the short life of man to read all the good
books written in one language, the young reader, or even the person
who has formed the habit of reading, may feel that he need never go
beyond the books of his own race. In a sense this is true. Perhaps
it is especially true for us who are born to the English language.
For the English people, however insular they may be in some respects,
have always been great explorers of the lands and the thoughts of
other races. They have plundered the literature of their neighbors and
loaded the borrowed riches into their own books. In the Elizabethan age
some writers seem to have regarded it as a patriotic duty to render
for their countrymen the choicest literature of France and Italy and
Spain. While they were robbing their neighbors across the channel, they
were also building English classics out of the literary monuments of
“insolent Greece and haughty Rome.” And for many generations English
writers, like those of other modern countries, have been brought up on
the classics.
So we find incorporated in English literature the culture of the
entire ancient and modern world, and one who should read only English
books could still have a full mind and a cultivated spirit. We cannot
say, therefore, that it is necessary, in order to realize the true
purpose of reading, to make excursions into the literature of foreign
countries. But we can point out the advantage of such excursions, and
I would insist on the ease with which the ordinary person, who has
enjoyed only a limited formal education, can make himself acquainted
with foreign languages and literatures if he will.
In our time we have schools to teach everything known to man from
advertising to zoölogy. It is well that our schools are broadening in
interest and that every kind of knowledge is being organized so that
it can be imparted. But there is a danger that we may get into the
habit of leaving too much for the schools, that we may come to think
that the schools monopolize all knowledge, or at least all the methods
of teaching. This would be a great pity in a nation that is proud of
self-made men. We, of all peoples, must remember what Walter Scott
said, that the best part of a man’s education is that which he gives
himself. Schools and universities only start us in a methodical way, on
a short well-surveyed path, into the world of knowledge. Most of the
learning of educated men and women is acquired after they have left the
college gates, and anyone may set out on the road to knowledge with
little direct assistance from the schools. The better, the easier for
us, if we can go to college; but if we cannot have the advantage of
formal education we need not resign ourselves to ignorance.[4]
Most young people, however, will think of Greek, Latin, French, and
German as difficult and “learned” mysteries accessible only to the
fortunate who can go to the higher schools, and of use only to those
who intend to enter scientific and literary professions. If I say
that with no knowledge of any language but English you can teach
yourself any other language well enough to read it, I hope you will
not shake your head and say that such self-teaching is possible only
to extraordinary intellects. Many commonplace persons have learned
languages by reading them, with no equipment but a lexicon, a short
grammar, and an interesting text. Perhaps it is not fair on top of that
statement to cite the case of Elihu Burritt, for he was an exceptional
man. But as readers will learn from his excellent “Autobiography,” he
began his studies under very difficult circumstances; so that, taking
all things together, talent and conditions, many a young man can start
where he began and under no greater disadvantages. Burritt would have
gone some way on the road to learning even if his endowments had been
small. And with no genius but the genius of industry we can follow for
a little distance his democratic course.
Burritt was a blacksmith by trade. He had only such education as he
could get in a country academy, where his brother was the master. In
his leisure he studied mathematics and languages, and before he died
he had acquired a reading knowledge of fifty tongues and dialects,
ancient and modern. Yet he was not a self-absorbed man who shut himself
up in profitless culture. He became a world-wide apostle of peace.
The study of languages taught him that all men are brothers. If he
could learn fifty foreign languages, any of us can learn one, and
through that one we too shall understand that we are not an isolated
people, not the only people in the world. We shall meet in their native
tongue some great group of our brothers, the Germans, the French, the
Italians, learn their ideals and broaden our own. It is impossible to
learn Greek and Latin and not to feel how close we are to the peoples
of two thousand years ago. It is impossible to learn French or German
and keep in our hearts any of that contempt for “foreigners” which
ignorant and provincial people so stupidly cherish.
We shall arrive, too, through knowledge of another language at a
finer appreciation of our own language, its shades and distinctions,
its variety and power. We shall understand better the great English
writers, many of whom have known something of foreign literature and
refer in a familiar way to French and German and ancient classics, as
if they took for granted in their readers an acquaintance with the
literature of other nations.
How shall we go to work to learn foreign languages? The answer is as
simple as the prescription for reading English. Open a book written
in the foreign language and take each word in order through a whole
sentence. Then read that same sentence in a good translation. Then
write down all the words that seem to be nouns and all the words that
seem to be verbs. After that read the sections in the grammar about
verbs and nouns. The other parts of speech will take care of themselves
for a while. Then try another sentence. I know one young person who
read through a French book and got at its meaning by guessing at the
words and then returning over those which appeared oftenest and which,
of course, were the commonest. It is possible by a comparison of the
many uses of the same word to squeeze some meaning out of it. The
dictionary and the grammar will give the rest.
The foreign book stores, the publishers of text books, and the
purveyors of home teaching methods that are advertised in the more
reputable journals offer language books that are of real assistance.
The scope of this Guide does not admit any detailed instruction in
the methods of learning foreign languages. I can only insist that
with a few books and perseverance anyone can learn, not to speak,
perhaps not to write, but to read a strange tongue. And I say to the
boy or the girl who is going to the high school that not to take the
courses in Greek, Latin, French and German is to throw away a precious
opportunity. Upon the grounding of those few years in school, the
young receptive years, what a knowledge of languages one can build!
The notion, all too prevalent, that foreign languages, especially
Greek and Latin, are of no use to the boy or the girl who is going
“right into business,” is one of the dullest fallacies with which a
hard-working practical people ever blinded its soul. Playing the piano
and learning to sing, nay, even going to church, are of no use in
business. But who will be so foolish as to devote his whole life to
business? Burritt, the blacksmith boy, taught himself languages. The
high-school boy who is going to be a blacksmith can begin to study
languages before he picks up the tools of his bread-winning labor. If
this seems like the vain idealism of a bookish person, let me make an
appeal to your patriotism. Do you know that this land of opportunity
and prosperity is not developing so many fundamentally educated
men and women as we should expect from our vast system of public
schools and our many universities? One reason is that we have so many
bread-and-butter Americans who allow their boys and girls to stay away
from those classes in Greek and Latin and French and German which our
high schools provide at such great cost to the generous taxpayer. All
we lack in America is the will to use the good things we have provided
for us.
Well, we who are interested in the reading of good books will
make up our minds to get by hook or crook a little taste of some
language besides English. If we truly care for poetry we shall try
to read Vergil and Homer and Dante and Goethe. To become gradually
familiar with one great foreign poet, so that we know him as we know
Shakespeare, is to conquer a whole new world.
The easiest books to read in a foreign tongue are prose fictions, in
which the interest of the story spurs the reader on and makes him eager
for the meanings of the words. Text-book publishers issue inexpensive
editions of modern French and German fictions, which are, of course,
selected by the editors with a view to their fitness for young readers.
The French or German book which has become a recognized classic in
its native land and is considered by editors of school books to be a
good classroom text is likely to have universal literary qualities,
simplicity, purity of style, and right-mindedness. I find in admirable
inexpensive texts representative stories by Dumas, Zola, George Sand,
Halévy, Daudet, Pierre Loti, Balzac, Hugo, About, and other French
masters, and by Freytag, Baumbach, Sudermann, and Heyse among modern
German writers. French and German drama and history lie but a step
beyond. I, for one, have read more of these school editions of foreign
classics since I left school than when they were part of school-day
duty, and I am still grateful for the convenient notes and lists of
hard words. As one with only an imperfect reading knowledge of foreign
languages, I can testify with the right degree of authority to the
pleasure of the ordinary person in reading unfamiliar tongues. If one
has a fair grounding of Latin, the exploration of Italian and Spanish
is a tour through a cleared and easy country. With Professor Norton’s
wonderful prose translation and with the text of Dante in the _Temple
Classics_, where the English version faces the Italian, page for page,
one can read Dante as one would read Chaucer. And there could be no
better way to learn the difference between prose and poetry than to
turn now and again to Longfellow’s truly poetic translation and feel
how his verse lifts in places to something that the prose cannot quite
attain.
If we are not persuaded that our soul’s good depends on a knowledge
of foreign languages, we can make the acquaintance of the classics of
other nations in the best English renderings. Our greatest book, the
King James Bible, is a translation, so great a translation that in
point of style it is said by some critical scholars to be better than
its Greek and Hebrew originals. In general it is true that translation
falls below the original or radically changes its character. Until
the nineteenth century, when the scholars of our race began to give
us literal translations of the classics, which although “literal”
are still idiomatic English, translators in our tongue have been, as
a rule, willful conquerors who dominated the native spirit of their
originals with the overwhelming power of the English language and
spirit. They anglicized the foreign masterpiece so that its own father
would not recognize it. The result was often, as in Pope’s “Iliad,” a
new English classic but not a good pathway to the house of the foreign
poet.
Pope’s “Iliad” is a “classic” but it is poor Homer and not the best of
Pope. His genius is much better expressed in “The Rape of the Lock.”
And Homer’s genius is much better preserved for us in the simple prose
of Leaf, Myers, Butcher, and Lang. Professor G. H. Palmer’s “Odyssey”
is so good that no translator hereafter has a right to plead as excuse
for the failure of his version of any classic that “the English
language will not do it.” Matthew Arnold’s essay “On Translating Homer”
will stimulate the reader’s interest in the art of translation and help
bring him near to the Greek spirit. But this essay goes into subtleties
which may baffle the beginner. Any beginner, old enough to read at all,
can read Professor Palmer’s “Odyssey.” Many books of Greek stories and
legends of the heroes have been prepared for young readers. “Old Greek
Stories” by C. H. Hanson, or A. J. Church’s books of Greek life and
story, together with Bulfinch’s “Age of Fable,” will initiate one into
the Homeric mysteries.[5]
After the reader has advanced far enough to be interested in
philosophy, he will wish to read Epictetus and Plato. Jowett’s “Plato”
is one of the great translations of the nineteenth century. The reader
of Browning will not omit his noble, if somewhat difficult translation
of the “Agamemnon” of Æschylus. From the early Elizabethans to the
late Victorians the works of the English poets are starred with bits
from the Latin and Greek poets. One of the finest of translations from
the Greek is the “Theocritus” of Charles Stuart Calverley, the English
poet, who loved all things beautiful and enjoyed all things absurd.
Calverley’s translations from the classics and his delicious burlesques
and parodies will give one a new sense of how close together the
different moods of literature may lie in the same heart, both the heart
of the poet and the heart of the reader.
If an artistic translation of a foreign work has not been made or is
not easily accessible, a literal translation is of great service to the
casual reader. Even in the preparation of lessons in Latin and Greek
a literal translation, honestly used, helps one to learn the original
language and extends one’s English vocabulary. The reason there is a
ban upon the “pony” in school is that people ride it too hard and do
not learn to walk on their own feet. Out of school we can get much from
literal renderings of the classics, such as are to be found in the
cheap series of _Handy Literal Translations_, published by Hinds & Co.
Their fault is that they are printed in tryingly small type, but this
is a defect due to their merits of compactness and low cost.
The best translation of Vergil is Conington’s prose version, which has
become an English classic. The introduction is one of the best essays
on translating. There are several renderings of Vergil into English
verse. Dryden’s is the best known, and is of interest to the reader
of English principally because Dryden did it. He brought to Vergil
somewhat the same ideals of translation and the same kind of skill that
Pope brought to the “Iliad.” William Morris’s version is probably the
most fluent and poetic of modern translations of Vergil into English
verse.
The Latin poet who has been most often translated, and by the greatest
variety of talent, is Horace, whom our forefathers thought that every
gentleman should be able to quote. The accomplished translator likes
to match his skill against the clever Roman, to render his light
philosophy, his keen phrase, his beautiful brevity. The American will
like the free and joyous “Echoes from the Sabine Farm,” by the late
Eugene Field and his brother, Mr. Roswell Field, a book that must have
made the shade of Horace inquire appreciatively in what part of the
world Chicago is “located.”
Modern literature in all countries has attracted the readers of other
countries, and the work of translation is going on continuously. Not
only the great foreign classics of the last three hundred years, but a
host of lesser writers on the continent of Europe have made their way
into English. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a
new interest in German literature and philosophy--indeed, there was a
new German literature. Goethe was translated by Sir Walter Scott and
others. Coleridge translated Schiller’s “Wallenstein.” Carlyle made
a number of translations from German romance, among them a glowing
version of Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister,” which, in part, suggested his
own strange masterpiece, “Sartor Resartus.” Bayard Taylor’s poetic
version of “Faust” is of interest to the American reader and is no mean
representation of the original.
Hugo and Dumas are as well known to us as Scott and Dickens. Who
has not read “Les Miserables” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and
“The Toilers of the Sea”; “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three
Musketeers”? “The Devil’s Pool,” “Mauprat” and “The Little Fadette” by
George Sand have been English literature these many years. So, too,
have “Eugénie Grandet” and “Le Père Goriot” by Balzac, the first of the
great French realists whose work has come to us directly in translation
and indirectly through the English and American writers whom they have
influenced.
As for later French fiction we can trust to the taste of English
translators, as we can to the judgment of the editors of the school
texts, to give us the best, that is, the best for us. The finest of
Maupassant comes to us politely introduced by Mr. Henry James in “The
Odd Number.” Bourget, Daudet, Pierre Loti, Mérimée, Halévy, the great
Belgian poet, Maeterlinck, who belongs to French literature, Anatole
France in his beautiful story, “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard,” the
poet Rostand--these and others we have naturalized in English. It is
to France that we turn for the best criticism, and the reader who gets
far enough to be interested in that branch of literature will find that
many of the critics of our race have been pupils of the French critics
from Sainte-Beuve to Brunetière and Hennequin.
Other countries besides France, Germany, and England have produced
literature which has crossed the boundaries of the nations and become
the possession of the world. The Russian novel is, perhaps, the most
powerful that the nineteenth century has seen, but the American reader
may as well leave it until he has read a great deal of English
fiction. Then he will find that Turgenieff, Tolstoi, Dostoevski are
giants in a giant nation. Poland has one writer who is known to English
readers, Sienkiewicz, whose “Quo Vadis” and “With Fire and Sword” are
among the great novels of our age. I should recommend that admirers
of “Ben Hur” read “Quo Vadis” and get a lesson in the difference
between a masterpiece and a pleasant book that is very much less than a
masterpiece. Readers who think there is some special virtue in American
humor--and no doubt there is--ought to know at least one of the great
books of Spain, “Don Quixote.” Spanish has become an important language
to us who are learning about our neighbors, “the other Americans,”
and are trying to wake up our lagging trade relations with them and
our backward sympathies. The young man going into business will find
some good chances open to him if he knows Spanish, and, what is
perhaps quite as important, he will find that Spain, too, has a modern
literature.
We cannot know all foreign literatures, but we can know at least one.
Whether we visit in spirit Italy or Norway or Spain or Russia, we shall
be learning the great lesson of literature, that our brothers the world
over are doing and thinking and hoping the same things that we are.
Reading foreign books[6] is the cheapest and perhaps the wisest kind of
travel, for the body rests while the mind goes abroad.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] See also page 241.
[5] See also the discussion of Chapman, pp. 245-8 of this Guide.
[6] Books in foreign languages and English translations will be found
in their proper place in the lists of fiction, poetry, etc.