of the translator
is over them all. Messrs. Payne and Lang and Swinburne have turned poor
Villon into a citizen of Bedford Park, Fitzgerald and Florence Macarthy
have Englished Calderon, Messrs. Pope, Gladstone and others have done
their worst with Homer. If Rossetti had not succeeded with _la Vita
Nuova_, if Fitzgerald had not ennobled Omar, if Mr. Lang had not bettered
upon Banville and Gerard de Nerval, the word 'translator' would be odious
as the word 'occupy.' And 'occupy' on the authority of Mrs. Dorothy
Tearsheet is an odious word indeed.

The Proof of It.

The fact is, the translator too often forgets the difference between his
subject and himself; he is too often a common graveyard mason that would
play the sculptor. And it is not nearly enough for him to be a decent
craftsman. To give an adequate idea of an artist's work a man must be
himself an artist of equal force and versatility with his original. The
typical translator makes clever enough verses, but Heine's accomplishment
is remote from him as Heine's genius. He perverts his author as rhyme
and rhythm will. No charge of verbal inaccuracy need therefore be made,
for we do not expect a literal fidelity in our workman. Let him convey
the spirit of his original, and that, so far as meaning goes, is enough.
But we do expect of him a something that shall recall his author's form,
his author's personality, his author's charm of diction and of style; and
here it is that such an interpreter as Sir Theodore Martin (say) fails
with such assurance and ill-fortune. The movement of Heine's rhythms,
simple as they seem, is not spontaneous; it is an effect of art: the poet
laboured at his cadences as at his meanings. Artificial he is, but he
has the wonderful quality of never seeming artificial. His verses dance
and sway like the nixies he loved. Their every motion seems informed
with the perfect suavity and spontaneity of pure nature. They tinkle
down the air like sunset bells, they float like clouds, they wave like
flowers, they twitter like skylarks, they have in them something of the
swiftness and the certainty of exquisite physical sensations. In such a
transcript as Sir Theodore's all this is lost: Heine becomes a mere
prentice-metrist; he sets the teeth on edge as surely as Browning
himself; the verse that recalled a dance of naiads suggests a springless
cart on a Highland road; Terpsichore is made to prance a hobnailed
breakdown. The poem