CHAPTER X
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.