[In the following essay, initially given as a lecture on November 20, 1952, Gibbon lauds Marsh's abilities as a translator, in particular his subtle and skillful translation of Eugene Fromentin's Dominique.]

1

The aim of every art is perfection, and the problem of every art is the means whereby that perfection can become possible. One can appreciate achievement with only a very slight knowledge of technicalities, or with no knowledge at all; but in spite of everything that artists may have told us about how they surrender to their intuitions, no great practitioner of any art has ever been in a position to boast that he had a soul above technique. If a man is not interested in the means, then that is a sign that his interest in the end is insufficient.

I have taken as my theme for this lecture the art of translation, linked presently to a particular practitioner, and, still more, to one particular work of that practitioner. I should like to discuss both the art and its exponent with the objectivity and detachment, as well as the intense interest, of an allied craftsman. The exponent is with us here this afternoon, but let me assure him straight away that I propose to treat this as a complete irrelevance. I shall not spare his blushes.

The problems of the translator are to a very large extent the same as those of the creative writer. It is true that he escapes the problem of invention, although there have been translators who seemed reluctant to avail themselves of this indulgence. But if the translator is spared—and of course he is spared—having to ask himself, ‘What shall I write about?’—its corollary, ‘And how shall I write about it?’ is made doubly formidable for him by the fact that half the answer to it exists already. The answer is, ‘You must write about it as Longus wrote about it, or as Montaigne wrote about it; or as Marcel Proust wrote about it. Nothing easier imaginable, my dear fellow. Just get out your fountain pen and start writing in the style of Proust.’ The translator in fact must make a new brick with an entirely different kind of clay, English clay, French clay, German clay, whatever his language may be; but it must look as like the old brick as no matter.

Alas, it is not so easy. There must be at least one modest corner of Hell which is paved not so much with good intentions as with bad translations. The experts themselves can be caught on the wrong foot. Dr. Page, editor of the Loeb Library, once wrote to Sir Ernest Debenham, Stephen MacKenna's generous patron, ‘You could possibly find half a dozen scholars who could translate Plotinus accurately; but to reproduce him, to make him live again, to catch something of that unearthly beauty which attaches to his words—this needs something more than accuracy and scholarship and Mr. MacKenna possesses it.’ But even MacKenna could nod. When with the help of an assistant he retranslated a passage at the end of the Sixth Ennead which he had already translated once before as part of a conspectus in his first volume, he ruined it. The earlier version which I will read you is an example of inspired translation. (I remind you that Plotinus is not the easiest of authors.)

The Soul restored to Likeness goes to its Like and holds of the Supreme all that Soul can hold … that which is before all things that are, over and apart from all the universe of Existence. This is not to say that in this plunging into the Divine the Soul reaches nothingness: it is when it is evil that it sinks towards nothingness: by this way, this that leads to the Good, it finds itself; when it is in the Divine it is truly itself, no longer a thing among things. It abandons Being to become a Beyond-Being when its converse is in the Supreme. He who knows himself to have become such, knows himself now an image of the Supreme; and when the phantasm has returned to the Original, the journey is achieved. Suppose him to fall again from the Vision, he will call up the virtue within him and, seeing himself all glorious again, he will take his upward flight once more, through virtue to the Divine Mind, through the Wisdom There to the Supreme. And this is the life of the Gods, and of Godlike men, a life without love of the world, a flight of the Alone to the Alone.

But when thirteen years later he came to render it the second time, with the assistance of that coadjutor who, we are told, subjected these last tractates to ‘minute revision’, MacKenna changed it completely so that it is almost unrecognizable. Even the lovely conclusion is altered to

This is the life of gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth, the passing of solitary to solitary.

The burden of responsibility carried by a translator is a heavy one. He is a liaison officer of culture between one nation and another. He can make or mar. Let me confess to what may seem a strange heresy. I suspect that some translations are better than their originals. Better in what way? Better in the force, or the fervour, or the lucidity, or the grace, or the economy, or even the conviction with which they express the creative writer's original intention. Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that—thanks to the marvellous language-sense of the Elizabethans—Isaiah is more sonorous, more stirring in the English of the authorized version than in his original Hebrew? I don't know, but I think it could be. All through the Bible are phrases in which the artistry of its translators seems almost incomparable. ‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.’ ‘Who going through the vale of misery use it for a well and the springs are filled with water.’ ‘And a man shall be as a hiding place from the wind and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.’

2

Let me turn now from this consideration of the Muse of translation to the practitioner, to the servant of the Muse in question. Leaving aside altogether his distinguished public services, Sir Edward Marsh has a double claim on the attention of posterity. It was George Russell or, as he chose to be known, A. E., who, writing his valediction to the readers of the literary journal which he had edited for a number of years, said that he would like to be remembered for one thing, that ‘I was the friend of the Irish poets, those who make the soul of a nation’. People who think like this about poets and poetry are a minority. Sir Edward Marsh is one of them. He placed a whole generation of poets in his debt by his solicitude for their work. The best of the so-called Georgian poets, over whom he clucked so assiduously, picking up and dropping from his beak that one kind of seed which is absolutely invaluable to a young poet, namely, a piece of paper on which to print his poem and a publisher willing to send it forth into the world, are as safe as the best of the Jacobeans, and the name of their champion will go down in company with their own. Flecker, De la Mare, Davies—one need not continue to enumerate—as long as English poetry survives these will survive, vindicating the faith which their editor had in them.

But, as well as this claim upon the affection of all those who love literature, Sir Edward Marsh will have his own personal claim to remembrance as one of the great English translators. It is unnecessary for me to lay laurels either on his Horace or on his La Fontaine for they have been vindicated in several ways that are peculiarly flattering to a writer's self-esteem. The translated Odes have been going into a succession of editions ever since their first appearance in 1941. The translated Fables which came to us, originally, with those delightful engravings of Stephen Gooden, have now popped up—if one can use such an irreverent term—in Everyman's Library, a very suitable setting for a classic of translation. Both the reading public and the experts therefore have set their seal upon each of these achievements and no toot upon my penny whistle is needed by way of anticlimax.

I am reluctant in any case to discuss verse translation. It is the most difficult of all literary crafts. In poetry sound is from the beginning an almost integral part of sense. They are Siamese twins and if you attempt to separate them the operation may be attended with the very gravest consequences. And whereas the prose cadences in different languages can often be made to approximate quite closely to one another, their poetic cadences can only with extreme difficulty be reproduced. The whole structure of a poem may be implicit in the language in which it is written and it is only a happy accident if a closely-corresponding structure is feasible in another language. It is Sir Edward Marsh himself who has said in his Translator's Preface to the Fables, ‘La Fontaine seems to me less impossible to translate than most French poets’. Less impossible. Note that phrase. Professor Bodkin has told us how it took him five years to find twenty-seven French poems that he could reproduce in English rather than translate—poems, he says, that would ‘read as though they were spontaneously planned in English’, that would ‘convey the exact significance of the originals’ and that would ‘reproduce as far as possible the metre, the verse form, the rhyme scheme and the assonance of their models’. By a standard as severe as this not one poem in ten thousand is translatable. It is a piece of sheer good fortune when the poet Hérold writes

La flûte amère de l'automne
Pleure dans le soir anxieux

and one can parallel it with

The bitter flute of autumn
Weeps in the anxious eve.

But this absolute standard which the translator of poetry knows to be almost impossible is the standard which one expects, and I think justifiably expects, from great prose translation. Great prose translation always leaves us unconscious of the fact that it is translation. The masterpiece provokes the masterpiece. Sir Edmund Gosse speaks of North as ‘having bestowed a classic upon English literature’, and it is Gosse also who points out that it was the prose translators of the Elizabethan period who were largely responsible in the first instance for stimulating its creative writers. The interesting part about North's translation is that it is a translation of a translation. It was not made from Plutarch direct but from the French of Amyot. Gosse excuses this fact by saying ‘Amyot is one of the few translators in whose hands an author gains more than he loses’. Therein, from the mouth of a great critic, we get an inkling of the status of the translator, an individual in whose hands an author may gain.

Although George Moore translated Daphnis and Chloe without knowing a word of Greek, and although I am living for the day when Sir Edward Marsh, who says he knows no German, will translate Gottfried Keller for us, I am not suggesting of course that the best method for translators is to start as far as possible from the original work. But is it a little more than a coincidence that the intermediary language, both in the case of North and of Moore and also of the indefatigable Powys Mathers with his many translations from Syrian, Chinese, and other sources, was always French? And is it not a fact that some of the best, I was nearly going to say all the best, translations in our language are of French authors, Montaigne, Maupassant, Anatole France, Marcel Proust, to mention only four, as though the French language with its classic standards of excellence, its lucidity, and its economy, simply asked for translation and by a stylist with a delight in clarity and an ear for the sound of words. Proust, you may say, is neither lucid nor economical. But his intention, nevertheless, is always clarity, the maximum degree of clarity on behalf of the most fugitive impression, or the most subtle and elaborate analysis of psychological process.

3

Eugène Fromentin's Dominique has long been a classic in its own country, but it had to wait more than eighty-six years for an English translator who should be worthy of it. To me it seems an incomparably finer book than the much better known Adolphe of Benjamin Constant. In Constant's book the whole situation is rather artificial and the endless emotional transports have not even a telling background to lend them interest. It is a matter of indifference to most of us whether the young man finally deserts his mistress or not, and the fact that his sensibility seems to luxuriate in giving us the same exchange of reproaches over and over again, the same situation accompanied by the same lamentations, very soon callouses any sympathy we could possibly have felt for either party. We are at first irritated and finally bored. Fromentin never prolongs his anguishes and never bores us. Although he was a painter by profession he nevertheless won a considerable reputation during his lifetime as a writer. As John Hayward has said, ‘he has long been accepted as one of the masters of French romantic literature. Although there are faults in the construction of Dominique, Fromentin's analysis of the human heart in love, his power of evoking, with a painter's sensibility, a mood from Nature, and the exquisite refinement of his style, have seldom been surpassed in any literature, and then only by the few supreme creators of fiction.’

This is high praise for a book which its author described in his dedicatory preface to George Sand as a first attempt, full of imperfections. It was published in January 1863, after being serialized in April and May the previous year in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The French edition in our own National Library in Dublin found its way there about 1911. It is the twenty-seventh. This is not spectacular, but it is significant, and there must have been numerous editions since then, including one enormously expensive de luxe one shown me a year or two ago in Lausanne. George Sand, incidentally, was to repay the compliment of dedication, for in 1866 we find her writing to Flaubert, ‘I have formed the habit of putting my novels under the patronage of a beloved name. I dedicated the last to Fromentin.’ Dominique begins quietly in a rural setting. It does very much the kind of thing that Francis Jammes and René Bazin were, later, to do so successfully. Indeed the book proceeds so modestly that one should suspend judgement on it during its early pages. But though it demands from its reader patience and that degree of surrender which only a masterpiece is entitled to ask, it rewards him proportionately. It is nonsense to say, as one English critic has done, that it is impossible to imagine anyone reading this book without skipping. It is far harder, to my mind, to imagine anyone, once fairly launched on its pages, wishing to miss a single word of it, or setting it down at the close without all that sense of nostalgic loneliness which overtakes us when we are expelled from a world in which we have lived happily for hours, or perhaps for days.

What strikes us at once is the sheer honesty of the writing and the evocative power of the descriptions.

Evening was at hand. It was only a few minutes before the sun would reach the cutting edge of the horizon, and its long rays were lighting up with streaks of shine and shadow a wide, dreary woodless plain, chequered by vineyards, fallows, and marshland, with scarcely an undulation, and here and there a vista opening on the distant sea. Only a whitish village or two, with flat-roofed church and saxon belfry rising from a bulge of the plain and a few small lonely farms, each with a thin clump of trees and a huge stack of fodder by its side, gave life to this vast and monotonous landscape, whose picturesque poverty would have seemed complete but for the singular beauty conferred on it by the weather, the hour, and the season.

If we know France at all we see again mentally the whole scene, carried back to that country by these simple and straight-forward sentences. Although it is written with great beauty, one is quite unconscious of any deliberate artistry when reading Dominique. Such is its grave, calm sincerity that a strange thing happened when I once came direct from it to some of the later tales of Turgenev. It seemed to me that I had temporarily lost a little of my immense admiration for the Russian writer. His accomplishment was too evident. It was too obvious that he knew all the tricks of the trade. Despite his great skill one could detect that Turgenev was arranging his material, was presenting it. In the case of the French book, the flow of the narrative is easy and artless so that we have the feeling not of reading fiction at all, but of overhearing a genuine soliloquy. Its form grows naturally, shaped by some sense of inner compulsion. At his best, Turgenev can do the same—for example in Torrents of Spring and in First Love.

Fromentin's novel is patently sincere. Indeed its main structural defect may perhaps arise out of its author's anxiety to be honest with us. He wants us to know the end of his story before we know the beginning, he wants us to read the one in the light of the other. He employs the not very satisfactory literary device of the Chinese box—the story within the story—passing from one narrator in the first person to another, Dominique himself, who tells his own life story. It is a rather clumsy device, but it ensures that we shall see the hero's character in the right perspective. Having met the middle-aged Dominique, we are in a better position to understand him as a youth.

The plot is straightforward enough. Three young men face life and exchange their views on it, while they attempt to learn, or are forced to learn, some of its lessons. We are given a penetrating study of the introvert, the libertine, and the man of character. Equally sympathetically, Fromentin delineates the two sisters, the one suffering all the despair of love ignored, the other of a love ruled out by circumstance. His plot has a denouement and it is dramatic, but it is only psychologically dramatic. Indeed, psychological interest outweighs action throughout. Fromentin from the start hints to his reader that he is not going to be offered the spectacle of either seduction, adultery, or desertion. Dominique loses his heart mildly at sixteen to a girl a year his senior who is just back from her convent school. Soon after this she marries a man a good deal older than she and the rest of the book is largely concerned with the efforts of these two people to maintain their friendship in defiance of the impulse to love. One does not need to be an authority on platonics to realize that out of such a situation and the tension which it engenders may come a keen degree of suffering and self-awareness.

The tale develops with the slow surety of a poem, rather than the nervous haste and intensity of a novel. And it is in his respect for its pace, its whole structural plan, and its underlying conception that Sir Edward Marsh shows himself so admirably fitted for his task. His cadenced prose does for Fromentin what Scott Moncrieff did for Proust, and he is bound to his author by an inherent sympathy. There is no sense of effort, every word seems natural and inevitable and direct as in that translation which Ralph Wright gave us twenty years ago of Lamartine's Graziella.

Dominique, as we have seen, begins quietly and ends almost equally quietly, although its temperature in the interval has risen very considerably at more than one point. Fromentin never elaborates unduly. His effects are always achieved with the utmost economy of means.

We left Les Trembles in mid-November on a hoar-frosty morning. The carriages followed the avenue and drove through Villeneuve as I had done the time before. Madeleine was opposite me, and I looked alternately at the country disappearing behind us, and at her candid face.

It is all as simple as that, but in its context it is extremely telling: and, though a large proportion of his book takes place in Paris, Fromentin is a master of rural description:

Only the winepresses had been left to ventilate the floor under the screws, and from one end of the village to the other the moisture of crushed grapes and the hot exhalations of fermenting wine mingled with the smell of henhouses and stables. In the country beyond, no sound was to be heard but the crowing of the cocks, waking from their first sleep to announce that the night would be damp. Flocks of thrushes, carried on the east wind, birds of passage migrating from north to south, flew over the village, calling continually to one another like travellers on a road at night. Between eight and nine o'clock there was a sudden burst of festive sound which set all the farm-dogs barking. It was the shrill, rhythmical music of a bagpipe playing the tune of a country dance.

In the subsequent description of the dance, in the description of the deserted lighthouse at the end of the shingly peninsula, and in many other places Fromentin, as John Hayward rightly says, evokes Nature with a painter's sensibility. All the descriptions are admirable. I shall revert to that shortly when I consider the translation as such. But the characterization, although we are dealing with characters which might almost be called types—in the same way that Shakespeare's young girl, or Turgenev's young girl can be said to be types—is as vivid as the description, and can be extremely subtle. We are not aware for a long time of Madeleine's own feelings or of whether she loves at all. It is doubtful if she does. When we meet her first she makes almost as little impact on our consciousness as on that of Dominique. He can say of her:

Her face was white, and her complexion had the chill which comes of living within doors with never any motion of any kind. Her eyes were only half-opened, as if she had just woken up. Neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, her figure was formless, waiting for time to define and mould it. She was already spoken of as ‘very pretty’ and I repeated the remark by rote, without consideration and without conviction.

He was not the first lover, nor will he be the last to record such an apathetic reaction to the person and personality of the beloved. For many, love must have had just such an inauspicious beginning. In Madeleine's case, as in the case of nearly every individual in this quite short book, character transpires almost as slowly and gradually as in real life. For a long time she seems the very type of self-control and self-restraint, and her aspiration to play the part of elder sister to a promising young man, talented but ill-equipped with the quality of ambition, seems to us intelligible and absolutely genuine. It is genuine, and Fromentin's skill both as psychologist and storyteller emerges in the sudden, and yet extraordinarily simple and direct, incidental proof furnished to indicate her own surrender to a force from which she has been trying for so long to free another. For, as Dominique observes, ‘of all maladies the one she had undertaken to cure me of was the most contagious’. Nothing could be more effective as a means of conveying pent-up emotion and a whole revolution in the attitude of one person to another than the episode of the torn bouquet as they return from the theatre and Madeleine's single anguished phrase, ‘You're torturing me and breaking my heart.’ This is all the more so if we have given due consideration to the relatively trivial circumstance which had held such significance for her and occasioned her distress earlier in the evening.

4

Fromentin's style, so far from seeming to exploit its material, gives the impression rather of having behind it a vast untapped emotional reserve, exercising a sort of tidal pull but never exhibiting its full force. He can risk simplicity which is just what a writer too conscious of his audience dares not risk, being rather like a jerry-builder who feels unhappy about his scaffolding until his wallpaper is safely up.

Under this restrained treatment—the emphasis almost of understatement—Madeleine may for a time seem a stick to us, but when she does, eventually and for an instant, show her feelings, the effect is tremendous. Again it is a matter of a single phrase.

‘Help me to fold my shawl,’ she said.

They fold the shawl, the fringe slips out of her hands, and suddenly she is in his arms,

her head thrown back, her eyes shut, her lips cold, half-dead, and faint from my kisses. Then she shuddered with a violent spasm; she opened her eyes, stood on tiptoe to reach my height and threw herself on my neck with all her strength. And now it was she who kissed me.

That is all. An instant later they have separated. But we shall never think of her as a stick again. Or put beside this episode of the folded shawl her farewell to him next day, amazingly restrained until its final words, ‘If you only knew how I love you! I couldn't have told you yesterday, but now I can admit it, because it is just the one forbidden word which is parting us.’

If all this seems great nonsense, then one can only say that it is from such nonsense that life in large measure derives its significance for us and that even a great poet like Shakespeare makes it again and again the pivot of his work. Even in a writer like Flaubert we get an admission of the significance of moral tension and a bare hint of the intrinsic significance of love. After that, the scientific heresy begins to creep into literature, man sees himself as an ape, and instead of love we get externalities like the frock coat, the brothel, and the libidinous kiss. Great as my admiration for Maupassant is, the fact remains that though he could write about the landscape as a poet he found it hard to write about humanity other than in their aspect of lumps of unattractive clay. Hardly ever does he seem to concede the real validity of the emotions about which he writes. Tchekov does show us the human heart, but a little as one might show it on the dissecting-table of a hospital, under the surgeon's knife.

It would be completely wrong to think that Dominique is mere imaginative romance. It has the sharp outlines, the clarity of background, and the vital detail of Flaubert's L'Éducation Sentimentale. Flaubert, we know, read Fromentin's book when it appeared, with approval and at a single sitting. L'Éducation Sentimentale was not published till seven years later in 1869. I cannot help wondering whether Flaubert's reading of the earlier book may not have influenced him in his own, and to me Madame Arnoux is a rather top-heavy elaboration of the more tenuous, but in some ways much more successful and sympathique Madeleine. As for the scene when Madeleine gallops through the forest with Dominique it suggests so strongly another scene in Turgenev's Torrents of Spring that I was not happy till I had verified the date of the latter and assured myself that it was not published till years later. If there is any talk of indebtedness therefore, it is the Russian's.

Fromentin is a moralist but he never allows the note of the moralist to overshadow that of the penetrating psychologist. Even his portrait of the impeccable Augustin, the tutor who has his own fortune to carve out, we recognize that such men have existed and have battled heroically against disadvantageous circumstance. The reply to those who would see Augustin as a nincompoop, bolstered up with high principles, is that the real life of Pierre and Marie Curie furnishes an almost exact parallel and that nobody has thought of calling them nincompoops. Augustin's gospel is exactly the opposite of that of Dominique's other friend Olivier, the bored libertine, and he is not afraid to state it explicitly in his letters to his young friend Dominique. He believes that life is fundamentally just and that it must yield ultimately to courage and to the steady and patient direction of will. So he can recommend to Dominique what he says is ‘a remedy which applies to everything, even the diseases of the imagination of which I know so little’. It is ‘the daily practice of sound ideas, of logical feelings, and of attainable affections; in a word, the judicious use of the forces and activities of life’. He summarizes his creed in three watch-words: ‘believe in life, be sensible and don't cry for the moon’.

And yet, despite his lofty sentiments, Augustin is not a prig any more than Madeleine has proved to be a stick. We see him hard-pressed by circumstance and almost discouraged—‘something showed on him like the red stains that soak through the clothes of a wounded soldier’. Later we meet him after he has made a bolder bet than ever on the justice of life and we hear Olivier sneer, ‘A man like that was bound to begin by getting married. Have you ever noticed that there are two classes of men who have a mania for early marriage, however certain it may be that they can neither live with their wives nor support them? Sailors and paupers.’

In a sense, the book is a study of the warfare against boredom. Augustin is never subject to it. He cannot afford to be. He has not the time. Olivier succumbs to it completely, even to the point of attempting his own life in middle age. Dominique triumphs finally, but more by good luck than good management. Even as a schoolboy he loves red-letter occasions, he has a craze for dates, ciphers, and commemorative hieroglyphics whenever he feels ‘the urge to recall an instant of fulfillment or of rapture’.

The rest of my life, the part which wasted itself in lukewarm feelings or dull indifference, reminded me of the dried-up shallows on the beach where all movement dies when the ebbing tide leaves them bare. The alternation of bright and dark was like the intermittent beams of a revolving lighthouse, and I was perpetually on the look-out for a moment of reawakening as I might have watched for the reappearance of the signal flash.

He realizes that his experience is very far from being unique, but when, later in life, he re-encounters it in some book, it seems to him that his was only ‘a derogatory parody of what great spirits had undergone before me’.

Their example taught me nothing: their conclusions, if they drew any, had no moral for me. The harm was done, if that word can be applied to the cruel gift of the power to look at one's own life as if it were a play staged by someone else; and I entered on life without hating it, much though it had made me suffer, chained to an inseparable, most intimate, and absolutely mortal enemy; myself.

This is good, and the very great integrity of Fromentin's own writing is matched by the integrity of the translation. The one calls forth the other, since, for a good translator, the whole zest of the game lies precisely where it lies for an original writer, in adequacy of expression while avoiding the superfluous word.

I ask myself what were the qualifications necessary for the translation of this little classic. The pre-requisite for any translation is a deep and perceptive sympathy for the work in question. The translator must feel himself saturated in its mood and spirit before ever he begins. He must have realized the least intention of its creator with a sharpness of apprehension far beyond that of the average reader. He must be alive to what might be called the emotional wavelength of the book as a whole, so that when its tension is heightened his own sense of fitness will, almost instinctively, heighten the tension of his words. If he were a person of crude susceptibilities it would be almost impossible for him to register these barometrical changes in atmosphere, much less transfer them into his own language. If his sensitivity is inadequate it is absolutely inevitable that his actual performance will reveal the grossest shortcomings.

But one may be sensitive to the merits of prose and yet quite incapable of reproducing them. It is precisely at this point that the translator becomes, and must become, truly creative. It is on his ear, on his feeling for prose that all now depends, whether he shall write ‘the flight of the Alone to the Alone’ or shall substitute for it something as colourless, as meaningless as ‘the passing of solitary to solitary’. I said earlier in this lecture that it was possible to reproduce the prose cadences of another language in a way that was almost impossible in the case of verse. Cadences in prose are largely dependent on two things, pace and pause. Prose can be abrupt and staccato for its own purposes, but, in general, it achieves its effects partly by the vividness and directness of its imagery, and by the suitability of the epithets chosen, and then by its accumulative rhythm and the variety given to it by its periodic pauses. To appreciate prose one must have an ear for its pace. On page after page of this English version of Dominique language is handled with a subtlety that makes it difficult for us to realize that this is a translation and not an original work. It flows with an inspired case, which nevertheless must in the nature of things be deliberate. Original work, of course, has often been worked over quite as intensely as any translation, and owes its virtues to precisely the same passionate and insistent search after perfection.

Let me now read you certain passages from Dominique which will make abundantly plain what I mean when I say that we have here a masterpiece in our own language. More than thirty years ago George Moore was in a state of acute mental distress about the prospects of the English language which he maintained was being rubbed threadbare and would soon be unfit for use by any serious prose stylist. If he were alive today I think I would give Moore this translation to prove that English prose can still be grave, forcible, penetrating, poetic, and beautifully cadenced. Here are two passages which should give some idea of the ease and skill with which Sir Edward Marsh has performed his task and of that matchless inevitability of the words he has chosen.

Take the description of the visit to the lighthouse, which for the sake of brevity I shall have to cut a little.

At the land's end, on a sort of shingly peninsula with three of its sides exposed to the waves, there was a lighthouse which has been since pulled down, in the middle of a tiny garden hedged with tamarisks planted so near the shore that whenever the tide was a little higher than usual they were drowned in foam. This was the place where the ladies mostly came to meet the guns on shooting days. It was a very lonely spot: the cliffs were higher than elsewhere and the sea vaster, coming up for once to one's idea of it as a blue illimitable desert, a never-resting solitude. It was the highest point on the coast, and even from the base of the tower the eye could take in the whole of the circular horizon. This was an impressive surprise, in a country so poor in design that it hardly ever presented a contour or a prospect.

I remember that one day Madeleine and M. de Nièvres wanted to go to the top of the lighthouse. There was a strong wind, and the noise of the air, not heard at the base, grew louder as we mounted, growling like thunder in the spiral staircase, and shaking the glass panes of the lantern over our heads. When we emerged, a hundred feet from the ground, our faces were buffeted by a regular storm, and there rose from all round the horizon a strange angry murmur, inconceivable by anyone who hasn't listened to the sea from a great height. The sky was overclouded, and between the foamy border of the waves and the bottom of the cliffs the low tide had laid bare the desolate ocean-bed, paved with rocks and carpeted with black vegetation. In the distance sheets of water gleamed among the wrack, and two or three hunters of crab, so small that you could have taken them for fishing-birds, were wandering by the side of the mud-banks, which were hardly distinguishable in the immense expanse of the lagoons. Beyond this dreary tract the open sea began, grey and tumultuous, fading far off into the mist. … We distinctly felt the huge tower rocking under our feet at every impact of the wind. Fascinated by the overwhelming sense of danger, and allured as it were by the roar of the mounting tide below, we stood for a long time in utter stupefaction, like people who with their feet still planted in the frail life of man might one day suddenly and miraculously find themselves confronted with the incredible adventure of gazing into the beyond. It was indeed a place set apart. I knew instinctively that the tension was too great: sooner or later a string would snap. One of us would break down—perhaps not the one who was most deeply moved, but the one with the least power of resistance. It was Julie.

Or to take Olivier's diagnosis of his own complaint. Again I must cut slightly.

‘I've finished,’ he said without a trace of emotion in his voice. … ‘Happiness—real happiness—is a myth. The gates of the earthly paradise were shut behind our first parents, and for the last forty-five years mankind has had to do as best it could with makeshift approximations to perfection and happiness. I have no illusions about the appetites or the pleasures of my fellow-creatures. I put my claims low: I'm deeply humiliated by my status as a human being, but I'm resigned to it. Do you know my chief object in life? It's to kill boredom. The man who could do his fellows this service would be the real dragon-killer. The commonplace and the boring.’ Not all the mythology of the uncouth Pagans ever conceived two such insidious and deadly pests. They are very much alike, in that for all their infinite diversity they are both invariably ugly, dull and colourless, and show life in such an aspect that the first day you enter on it you are sick on the threshold. … Woe to them who have the vision too young! As for me, I have always known them. When I went to school, there they were; and I daresay you noticed them too! There wasn't a day of the three years of monotonous pettiness I spent there when they failed to put in an appearance. … I had almost forgotten that they also resided in Paris, and I go on seeking refuge from them in the noisy world, in extravagance, in new experiences, in the forlorn hope that the two wretched timid, stingy middle-class, custom-ridden demons won't be able to dog me. They have more victims to their name than many of the so-called mortal passions. I know their murderous ways, and I dread them.

It may seem a strange confession to make to one's audience, but there would not be a great deal of exaggeration in the statement if I were to say that I had brought you here this afternoon mainly to give myself the personal pleasure of reading those passages aloud to you. Don't cry out, ‘Exhibitionist! Obviously you think you do them full justice. Has it not occurred to you that we can read them for ourselves any time we like?’ My motive, I hope, has a deeper validity than the one which your protests would suggest. The standards of the best writing do not change so radically from age to age. And it is these standards that we need—more than ever today—to acclaim. I said to a successful Irish author recently, ‘Well, at its best, George Moore's narrative prose delights me as much as ever.’ His reply was that anyone who wrote like Moore today would be committing literary hari-kari. Apparently the public will take it from Moore who is dead but they would not take it from anyone who was living. Readers today, my friend implied, require from a writer a new line of attack. But newness is nothing in its own right, any more than oldness. What matters is vitality, which is a different matter altogether.

So much for the view that the first duty of the writer is to break the existent moulds. The first duty of the writer is, and has always been, not to break the existent moulds but to break his heart. He must give us of his very best. The writer today is threatened not only by the cult of novelty for its own sake but by the fact that a rival industry is competing with him and looks as though it might end by engulfing him. Men have never had better journalism than they have today. It is vivid, witty, readable, informed, and I can enjoy it as much as anyone. But our Society exists, I imagine, with—as one of its main purposes—the determination to prevent people from confusing the values of journalism and the values of literature.

The inspired translation is rare, as rare as the inspired creative work, perhaps more rare. This is not surprising. The qualities demanded from the writer in the one case and in the other are not so different, and his success can be traced back to factors that are very similar. The creative writer must have integrity and he must have artistry, conscious or unconscious. The translator must have integrity and he must have artistry, largely conscious artistry. His themes are already decided for him, but he is there to orchestrate them, and bad orchestration can ruin everything. A writer like Synge revised repeatedly. I remember being very much impressed as a schoolboy when Lily Yeats, the sister of the poet, told me that Synge used to make successive revisions of each of his plays, lettering the typescripts A, B, C, D, and so on. When he had reached the letter L, she said, Synge began to feel that the play might be getting into shape. A translator's labours are rather like these later labours of the creative writer. He starts from something but there is still, one might say, almost everything to be done. He may win the campaign or he may yet lose it utterly.

Sir Edward's is not the first English translation of Dominique. Nearly twenty years ago there appeared another, whose preface reveals the fact that the translator possessed the most sensitive understanding of the merits of Fromentin's work. But good intentions are not enough. This earlier translation failed even with the best intentions. Was it Reynolds or Gainsborough who, standing in front of a picture at some exhibition remarked to a companion, ‘H'm. It lacks—it lacks—well it lacks just that.' In the same way this earlier translation lacks ‘just that'. It is cultured, sensitive, conscientious, but it is not impelling, it has little vitality. There is hardly a sentence, hardly a phrase that one feels was imperative and inevitable. Now we seem to be getting near the secret of the mystery. Is the secret just the secret of words? Of course it is the secret of words, what else could it be? But of words in an almost mystical sense. Flaubert said, ‘A phrase can only live when it corresponds to all the necessities of respiration. I know it to be good when it can be read aloud. … Badly written sentences do not stand this test; they weigh on your chest, hinder the beating of your heart, and thus find themselves outside the conditions of life.' In other words language is a part of truth. Sound is a part of essential sense. I have heard that a fervent young woman, praising the English Dominique to Sir Edward, remarked, ‘What I want to know is where did you get your beautiful style?' He replied in a modest whisper, ‘From Fromentin, my dear.' That reply was too modest. If it was to be found in Fromentin, his predecessor had just the same chance. No, some of it, without a doubt, must have been found somewhere in the man whom his friends call ‘Eddie Marsh'.

Throughout his translation words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs have a sort of magical quality, an inner radiance, a sweep, a rhythm, as though it were all a labour of love, a labour launched under the auspices of a most friendly star. The tension of each situation is reflected in the tension of the words themselves; the serenity of a landscape is suggested in words equally serene. Writing eight years before this translation was made Edward Sackville-West calls Dominique ‘This civilized masterpiece'. After outlining the plot he sums up, ‘Such is the main structure of an astoundingly faultless novel. The setting, style and tempo decorate and exhibit that structure with admirable propriety. … The habit of looking intently at objects and the wholes they compose, gives to Fromentin's prose the unified fluency of a successful painting, in which line and colour and texture all contribute to an effect of delightful vividness, and easy mastery of the exactly right touch.'

But in the earlier translation which I have criticized there is all too little to suggest that Fromentin has orchestrated his themes with supreme skill. The pace of the book is uniform, which is perhaps true of the original, but the translation lacks most of those heightenings of interest which give the story its real tempo for a reader. These could only be conveyed by someone with a deep feeling for language, and this is missing. What should be moving becomes rather commonplace. Whereas in Marsh's translation every page, every passage is not only effective in itself but is built into the general structure and affects us emotionally as though we were listening to a sonata rather than reading a book. The opening words of Dominique are, ‘Certainement je n'ai pas à me plaindre—me disait celui dont je rapporterai les confidences dans le recit très-simple et trop peu romanesque qu'on lira tout à l'heure.’ But who is going to prick up his ears or focus his attention when he reads, ‘“So it is clear that I have no reason to complain”, said the man whose plain unvarnished story I am about to relate just as he confided it to me’? Compare this with the simplicity and naturalness, and yet the inevitability, of ‘“No, I have nothing to complain of,” he said, as he finished telling me the simple and none too romantic story which you are about to read.’

It is the phrase which counts—‘le soir venait’ ‘evening was at hand’; ‘c'était un homme d'apparence encore jeune’ ‘at this time he still had the look of a young man’.

Occasionally Fromentin might seem to have made it impossible to go wrong. Take the original of a passage that I have quoted to you already earlier in my lecture. ‘Nous quittâmes Les Trembles au milieu de novembre, par une froide matinée de gelée blanche. Les voitures suivirent l'avenue, traversèrent Ville-Neuve, comme autrefois je l'avais fait. Et je regardais alternativement et la campagne qui disparaissait derrière nous, et l'honnête visage de Madeleine assise en face de moi.’ In the earlier translation this reads: ‘We left Les Trembles in the middle of November, on a cold morning of white frost. The carriages went down the avenue, and through Villeneuve, as I had done long ago. And now I looked at the country disappearing behind us, and now at the guileless face of Madeleine who was sitting opposite me.’ Well, it is perhaps adequate in this instance, but the final ‘who was sitting opposite me’ ruins the balance of the whole sentence. It lacks just that cadence that Flaubert would have approved in ‘Madeleine was opposite me and I looked alternately at the country disappearing behind us, and at her candid face’. In 1878 Xavier Doudan wrote to Mademoiselle de Sainte Aulaire of Dominique, ‘Il y a dans tout le roman un parfum léger et doux comme l'iris, qui nous rappelle tout et rien.’ Everything and nothing. C'est assez facile de rappeler rien, mais de rappeler tout et rien c'est une autre chose!

Fromentin's style is restrained, without affectation. It is almost anonymous. And yet at the same time it is instantly recognizable because of its integrity. Listen to this, which is not out of Dominique at all, but from a letter which Fromentin wrote to Paul Bataillard in February 1848, nearly twenty years before the book appeared, ‘Depuis trente heures la pluie n'a pas cessé; les routes, effondrées par les torrents de tout l'hiver, n'avaient pas eu le temps de sécher tout à fait et les voilà redevenues impraticables.’ There you have the authentic Fromentin cadences long before he made use of them in his novel.

It is chastening to think that as long ago as 1901 Yeats wrote what is truer than ever today—

The arts have failed; fewer people are interested in them every generation. The mere business of living, of making money, of amusing oneself occupies people more and more and makes them less and less capable of the difficult art of appreciating. … We who care deeply about the arts find ourselves the priesthood of an almost forgotten faith, and we must, I think, if we would win the people again, take upon ourselves the method and the fervour of a priesthood. We must be half humble and half proud.

I suppose it is Sir Edward Marsh's role this afternoon to be humble, and mine to be proud; proud that it should be my privilege to pay this tribute, however imperfectly, to an achievement that I so much admire, and proud that we should have here with us the man who was responsible for it.