impossible in youth to have appreciated half its merit. I certainly got pleasure from reading it when I was young, but I got more pleasure on reading it again years afterwards.

The great books have stood the test of time because they possess in an unusual degree the power of satisfying human needs, and giving sustained human pleasure; and it is a great mistake to let new literature divert us from reading the old. Isaac Disraeli says somewhere that great books lead us to a proper perspective and sense of the values of life. The sentence is something to this effect: "he who is not familiarized with the finest passages of the finest writers will one day be mortified to observe that his best thoughts are their indifferent ones.'

This last word I would say on the pleasure of reading: It was Tennyson who said, "I like these large still books." It is the large still books that give the most abiding pleasure, but if we are to read them and appreciate them we must sometimes be still ourselves; we must reach that calm and contemplative mood which makes us receptive of the best things in literature. Bacon, in his 'Essay on Study,' says, "Study is for delight, for ornament, and for ability. For delight its chief use is in privateness and retirement"; and Walton, at the end of his most famous and beautiful book, puts simply this quotation

ON TRANSLATING PLAYS.

BY HARLEY GRANVILLE-BARKER, F.R.S.L.

[Read October 22nd, 1924.]

EVERY sort of translation has its problems. We read, "Sonnez 3 fois s.v.p. pour le sommelier." But when he comes he is still not what we should call a butler, as the dictionary bids us. A word-for-word translation of a novel would be an outrage upon its author. It is even hard to make sure of the exactitudes of a treaty. And a play presents difficulties all its own. I speak of plays written for the theatre and translated for use in the theatre, not of academic exercises.

To begin with, the written text is not a play's final and complete manifestation. This it will owe to its

actors and their interpreting. sound and movement.

They render it into If we nowadays forget to

think of its text as something in the nature of an orchestral score, it is only because the notation is so familiar. For the written word-though how recently!—has come to be the commonest currency of mental exchange. Do we think of it any longer in terms of the speech it represents? But drama is an ancient art, and the traditional method of its reduction to a written record is, truly, for the adept only. Modern dramatists may try, for the benefit

of the more casual reader, to enlarge this tradition, but they can hardly absolve him from the need for some technical knowledge of the art. In fact the further they go with their stage directions that seem to ignore the stage, the easier the play's understanding is to be made for those who have no understanding of plays, the greater the danger of bastardizing the whole affair. The reader of a play should read it as a musician will the score of a symphony. He has, indeed, to imagine both sight and sound-the action of the scene as well as the spoken word. Even so, he can hardly predicate that collaboration so peculiar to the theatre the quickening of the dramatist's work not only by the actors' interpretation, but by their very personalities. A play's performance which was a mere intelligent repetition of the author's words accompanied by the necessary action, its object merely to let the audience understand what was going forward, no more, would be a very lifeless business. But what do we find in the theatre at its liveliest? ("Best" will suggest high ambitions, with achievement ever lagging behind.) We find actors and audience in a concord which certainly no mere verbal, no mere intellectual give and take of the author's meaning will set up. The play is being interpreted, and its meaning enriched in a dozen other ways. There is the emotional value in the very sound of words, the allusive value of familiar phrases, there is a whole vocabulary of demeanour and gesture, more or less developed in different nations and differing for each. Not words, then, alone, in the significance the dictionary allows them, but all this in addition must

be made translatable if a play in its completeness is to be carried from one language to another.

Then there are dramatic conventions to be counted with, and again each country will have its own. In modern drama the so-called realistic drama-these do not differ much as between one European country and another, though within two generations they have appreciably changed in them all. But in most countries, at some time of efflorescence for the theatre, a convention for poetic drama was formed, fixed, and this has been handed down. The modern audience accepts it all but unconsciously. In England blank verse is the medium, and by long use and wont, it is a medium of sufficient clarity. We do not, that is to say, find Hamlet's emotions the less credible for their conveyance in ten-syllable lines. Now I cannot pretend to hear with a Frenchman's ears, but I must suppose that Racine's rhymed alexandrines are equally no bar to his spontaneous appreciation of Andromaque's emotions or Phèdre's. They are to mine. Nor do I think that the longest and closest devotion to Racine would render me as uncalculatingly responsive to his verse as I am-by birthright it would seem-to Shakespeare's. We need look for no such devotion in the average playgoer. How, then, are we to give the full value of Shakespeare to a Frenchman, to an Englishman the full value of Racine?

The French have been accustomed to render our blank verse into alexandrines. Other ways have been tried. I heard, while this lecture was preparing, of a "Hamlet" put from blank verse into blank verse; though unstressed blank verse must, one would

suppose, prove a dull affair in delivery. Here, of course, lies the prosodical difficulty, in the change from a stressed to an unstressed language. The alexandrine may be the simplest solution of this, but the traditions of its dramatic use, its theatrical associations if you like, seem only to raise others. Turn to the Alexandre Dumas-Paul Meurice version of "Hamlet." It is now out of date, but it held the field for many years. Mounet-Sully played it, I believe. Dumas' name is writ very large on the title-page, Paul Meurice's very small, though this possibly belies their respective responsibility. Shakespeare's name might well be writ there smaller still, for it is a very free version indeed. But whenever they think they will they try for translation gallantly enough.*

Hamlet: Save me and hover o'er me with your wings

You heavenly guards!—What would your gracious figure? Queen Alas! he's mad.

Hamlet: Do you not come your tardy son to chide

That, laps'd in time and passion, lets go by

The important acting of your dread command?
Oh, say.

This becomes

Hamlet: Sauvez-moi! cachez moi! célestes légions

* Mr. William Archer told me, to the best of my recollection, that it. contained the famous rendering of the everlasting canon fixed 'gainst self-slaughter into "artillerie du ciel," and that he had heard MounetSully speak the line. This is not in the printed text, and my recollection can now, alas, never be verified.