THE attention of English readers has been, within the last year or two, recalled to the subject of continental literature; and as the sources of highest literary enjoyment are, after all, derived to every one of us from our own language, we are dependent on translators and compilers from foreign works to a greater extent than would at first appear. Admitting fully the inadequacy of translation ever to produce the same effect by precisely the same means as the original writer makes use of,-and therefore being prepared to allow that, even in the most accurate translation, there must be something of what has, happily enough, been called compensation,-admitting that in the modernizations of Chaucer, by Dryden, by Wordsworth, and by the author of the story of Rimini, a writer whose felicity of language is often such as to produce effects in translation which we scarcely think have been equalled by any other man of our days who has ventured in this perilous walk of literature, there is always something lost of the capricious quaintnesses and of the costume, while the modern artist is not so wholly hidden by his mask as to prevent us from seeing the eyes smiling with something of a boy's exultation at the kind of fantastic illusion which he creates; while, in short, we know that it is not Chaucer or Boccacio whom

we are reading,-yet they who love the original most, are the same who are most likely to receive pleasure from such translators and imitators as we have described. So far is verbal accuracy from satisfying the kind of taste to which we allude, that we think there can be no doubt whatever of its altogether defeating its purpose; and so opposed may be the genius of the language, from which we translate, to that which supplies the new moulds into which the thought must be made to flow, that we do not know any where two volumes which produce an effect so wholly dissimilar as Beckford's English translation of his own French Vathek and the volume from which he translates. Every characteristic feature of the original is lost; and the English book, far from representing any thing of the liveliness, of the archness, of the orientalism, put forth with mock seriousness and satiric gravity, gives us something scarcely differing in kind or degree from Dr. Hawkesworth's bloated extravaganzas of Almoran and Hamet, and the rest of our western orientalists. "The Paradise of the Senses" is described with as much solemnity as if it was the Hall of Eblis. The desolate and heartless mirth-"there is a laughing devil in the sneer"-is wholly absent from the English book. In the sort of dependence in which we are

VOL VII.

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placed upon translators, we are disinclined to any criticism on trifling faults of detail; and we indeed now and then are forced, against our will, into the conviction that a writer whose general competence we admit, may be right, even though such fact prove that we, his critics, are wrong in the very details which he is, after all, more likely than we are to have fully considered. If the feeling and spirit are preserved, we care little for the arrangement of phrases, or the collocation of commas. When we are told that a translator has succeeded in accurately exhibiting to an English reader the same number of lines as the author from whom he translates, we are, like Dryden, too polite to count after him, but before we join in applauding this curious felicity, we sometimes feel the misgiving fear that such praise may possibly arise from a total misconception of the power of one or other of the languages to be compared. The translator of Hudibras may feel it necessary, now and then, to express an idiom which the English reader at once understands, by some circuitous phrase or other, where, if he had translated literally, he would have translated not feebly,-which may be the fault of paraphrase,-but falsely suggesting no one thought which it was his author's purpose to communicateobscuring, by the preservation of some conventional form of language, the communication, which the very form was chosen, because it was supposed well adapted to convey with freedom and force. We say all this, because we believe the difficulties of translation, especially poetical translation, are but little estimated.

We have in a former number said that Schiller was fortunate above all other writers in his translators; and yet, we do not think him popular, or likely ever to be very popular, in England. We enter not into the controversy which Memzel has recommenced in Germany, after it had pretty well subsided, as to the respective merits of Goethe and Schiller; on such a subject the opinion of any one not a German, is but of little value, and among Germans the matter is one of the things to be determined rather by individual

feeling than by any appeal that can be made to any recognised principles of taste. We ourselves feel that Goethe gives to every object which he describes its own peculiar life, its own nature, its own thoughts. In Goethe, whether he describes human life, or scenery, or, as in the unique poem of Reinard the Fox," the satiric chatter of birds and beasts, we have every where what we may call the commonplace of nature, shewn through an unexaggerating and undistorting medium; no where is the common-place of poetry, either of its sentiments or its decorations, to be found in his works. Birds and flowers are animated, not as by our English poets, with a sentimental and poetic life, but with a bird-like vivacity, and a flower-like spirit; every image has a statuesque and peculiar beauty, but none of them seem "made out of the carver's brain"-all seems as if, though Goethe had never lived, they must have yet been discovered, not created, by some future observer. His art seems that of observing all-of representing all that he observes, and we feel as if we had no moral right to complain of such a writer not representing, for the purpose of his art, life better or worse, or other than it is. In Schiller's works, on the contrary, every where is his own spirit exhibited. Schiller it is-the high and holy Schiller-that breathes himself into every one of the characters which he represents. The humblest of his ballads, instinct as they are with life, are all animated with his life, with his feelings. The fantastic, capricious, and wilful life of their own which Goethe gives his Mignons and his Ariels-for he too has an Ariel-as if the beings which he had created existed with a will independent of his, and moved in a sphere of their own, with thoughts which were not always wholly revealed to him whose creation they were-have no existence in the works of Schiller. The life which he himself lived, or would have lived, was that which Schiller gave his heroes: his very ballads are every one of them dramatic. The Message to the Iron Foundry, and the Song of the Bell, are all of them a succession of scenes of as perfect stage effect as his most elaborate drama, and they are free from the one

fault of his dramas, which is, that the succession of scenes in the latter, while each is skilfully executed, seem to have little or no bearing on the common purpose which all should have. In "Alfieri" the close of his story is before his own mind in every step of his progress, in every line given to any one of his characters--and this it is which gives to all his creations the severe and thoughtful beauty, which more than rivals the most perfect art of the ancient dramatists. If all be the poet's creation and grouping, yet nothing seems the indulgence of his caprice-all is as could not but be-nothing is accidental or arbitrary, and the Italian language, in which his sculpture is executed, is not, if we may use a phrase of Bacon's on a different subject," immersed in matter," as the German is. The style of the German poets is in nothing evidenced more than in their triumph over some great disadvantages of their language, which is so far from being in any thing of a forward state, that their prose writers are absolutely unreadable. We must not, however, allow ourselves to be betrayed into discussion, that would lead us wide from our present purpose, which is, in a paper or two, to direct our readers' attention to some of the English translations from Schiller, and to glean for them some of the smaller pieces which are scattered over our literature. In some cases we shall, perhaps, present our readers with more than one translation of the same poem, and while we can imagine no reason which should prevent our stating in such instances to which we give the preference, our readers must feel that we are writing in a spirit which renders it unlikely that we should regard any thing of rivalry as existing between the respective translations which we may quote, or indeed that we should ourselves feel always able or disposed to determine which is best. Should such cases arise in the course of our article, let it at once be understood that the very act of our quoting from more than one translation of any piece, is evidence that each has given us pleasure as a poem, and that on this account alone do we seek to preserve it.

The total dissimilarity of the genius of Goethe and Schiller-Goethe at all times distrusting sentiment of all kinds, feeling as if no idea had any secure

existence till it had been translated into outward form, and yet contemning the idolatries of those to whom form was all in all, and who did not see manifested by the outward world an invisible and harmonious spirit that was the life of all, and the separation of any individual member from which was alienation, and a forfeiture of its proper being-Goethe, who in politics sought to preserve all and to improve all that he found established, even because it was established, and because the violence of change was in no case to be contemplated, and chiefly because thus alone did he see any chance for leisure to the elect of mankind to pursue ennobling studiescounselling mankind to risque nothing of present happiness for theoretic dreams of good, yet never at any one moment using his great genius and his powerful influence otherwise than in the effort to increase for all and for each the fullest opportunities for the development of their peculiar talentsimproving all by educating all; such was Goethe. But this is not the place to insist on his individual character and excellencies. Schiller, from a boy, seeking to learn from the external world the spirit of the world within the mind, reading history in a superstitious spirit, but determined, at any sacrifice to himself or others, to seek for man in new forms of society the realization of the good which he believed to be possible. That society might be in all things better ordered, and that most of its institutions are unfavourable to happiness and virtue, was his belief, and this belief was one that he fancied himself to have derived by a fair induction from a sufficiently extensive observation of facts.

The contrast between man's unlimited capacity for happiness and good, and the interruptions which seem to impede the growth of the human mind in every form of society in which man has yet existed, does not, as Schiller thought, point so much to the probability of earth's becoming a paradise againthongh such hope should not be shut out from our view-as to the fact, without reference to which the riddle of life is inexplicable, that there is a world in which the growth, which is here interrupted, will be perfected and matured. Of revolutions, which the wiser mind of Goethe regarded with