THE process of translation from one language to another is always a difficult one. History, narrative, scientific demonstration sustain least damage in the transfer; but even with these graver productions of literature, the special graces of style are apt to evaporate, leaving us with the facts or the argument, without those attractions of diction and manner which recommend them. And poetry of the loftier kind-epic or dramatical-poetry of the class which creates, enriching the world with new types of being as well as new strains of music, may survive, though seldom without loss, the dangerous operation. But who is so potent as to hand over to us out of one language into another the charm of melodious words-the sweetness of the lyric-the tender bloom of literary style, delicate as the down on the peach or the foam on the wave? There is nothing within the domain of Art which is so near the impossible, as there is nothing which is more commonly attempted or done by such unskilled hands. Is not any one able to translate? The literary hack who is good for nothing else the amateur-the poor lady or gentleman who has seen better days. It is easier than letting lodgings or going out governessing; it is the one thing which every body can undertake who has any knowledge, however fragmentary, of a foreign language. And this idea pervades even minds better qualified for the work. How many classical scholars have turned the Greek dramatists into nuisances! how many Germanists made Goethe an offence and stumbling-block to the unlearned! For, alas! even accuracy will not do it-even that fact which is to truth what flesh

often is to spirit, a bewildering semi-falsehood, more false than lies. Poetry is most frequently the victim, and poetry is precisely the kind of composition which most defies the process. From thence comes the startled scepticism, the doubting and servile applause, or rebellion alarmed at its own temerity, with which the uninstructed public, and especially women, regard the classics which they have no chance of knowing in the original: and nothing can be more prejudicial to all just canons of taste than this frightened subservience to a literary creed in the face of so huge a mass of testimony against its dogmas. The world is overawed by the authorities which impose upon it the doctrine, more absolute than St Athanasius, of classic perfection. "Whosoever would be saved" let him above all things believe that Greek literature is beyond all other, and that nothing approaching to it has ever been produced by mortal man. The faltering response which ignorance tries to make is choked in its very throat by the dead bones and dusty rags of verse, strophe and antistrophe, ode and lyric, dull, formal, and foolish, which are thrust upon us as evidences. this is Greek poetry!" the victim sobs aside underneath his alarmed Amens. But it is not, much tried and patient sufferer! no more than the poor composition into which it was once the fashion to make the youthful student turn a passage from Hamlet or Paradise Lost, was Shakespeare or Milton. Translation is folly, and translators (in most cases, barring such a fine example to the contrary, for instance, as Professor Jowett's 'Plato') incompetent; and

"If

fully to understand the excellence of a foreign author requires either the large gulp of robust faith or a knowledge of the language, one or the Even genius cannot always interpret genius, and the instances in which this sublime experiment can be tried are rare.

In the case of a writer like Molière the difficulties are lessened in one way, while increased in another. Even in his own country his poetry is not his charm; and the broad delight of those comic situations and complications in which he excels are quite within the reach of the translator. No failure in point of language can veil from us the ridiculous delightful figure of the 'Bourgeois Gentilhomme,' or make the fun of the Médecin Malgré Lui' incomprehensible. They are too clear, too real, too evident to be misconstrued. But, at the same time, the sparkle of fine wit, which is like the sparkle of champagne, incapable of being poured from one bottle into another, must necessarily evaporate in the process, not to say that the nuances of the French are often beyond the reach of the translator. M. Van Laun* does not bring to his task any special command of style or elegance of diction. The brilliant dialogue of Molière is apt to drop into somewhat vulgar .English in his hands; but, on the whole, his work is well done, and no deficiency in style can blunt the point of those comical embroilments, those odd encounters, the fun, the laughter, the enjouement with which each drama skims along in unbroken flight, rarely tedious, never flat, whimsical, natural, absurd, with a sustained animation and gaiety which is irresistible. The comedy of Shake

speare is entirely of a different kind. The fun is larger yet more individual and infinitely more profound. Take such a play as Twelfth Night' for example, which is pure comedy notwithstanding the charming fanciful romance with which its laughter is threaded through. The group which produces so much mirth is as individual in character as if each man was the special hero. The pompous, solemn steward-the riotous, tipsy old knight -- superannuated, fat school boy, primed for every mischief and frolic within reach-the quaint clown with his sentimental songs-and, last of all, the shrill, fantastic figure of Sir Andrew Aguecheek, delighted to produce his experiences à tout propos, and to verify his own character as one whom many do call fool. What lavish life, force, and variety is in them! And what a wonderful touch is that which opens all the sadder side of life in the very heart of the jest, by showing, within the pedantic gravity of Malvolio, a folly more intense than all the other folly combined, the half-tragic absurdity of self-importance and mad vanity, latent, and wanting only the stimulus of the simplest practical joke to call it forth Of all this splendid wealth of fooling there is nothing in Molière. His power lies not in exhibitions of human character, moved by genuine impulses of broad mirth like Sir Toby, or madness of folly like his victim, but rather in the concatenation of ludicrous or amusing circumstances around some semiabstract figure, type of a class or ruling passion, which we follow through one comic situation after another, ourselves the spectators of

the jest, which is played for our amusement solely, and to which we are parties throughout. The breadth of humanity is wanting, along with the elasticity and irregularity which belong more or less to all studies of character. But the abstract, if more rigid, is more manageable, and there are no bounds to the comic imagination which pursues a typical figure through all the embarrassments that can be heaped on his head, without sympathy or relenting. The plotters in Twelfth Night' have an enjoyment in their fun which nobody ever has in Molière; but, at the same time, they end by being somewhat ashamed of themselves for what they have done-a consequence which is equally far from the ideas of the French dramatist, whose bourgeois is deceived throughout, and excites no sympathy from any one, though his embarrassments and mistakes never lose their comic force or cease to amuse us. The same instinct guides Molière in his choice of subjects, which are never caviare to the general. The miser, the parvenu, the blue-stocking, the hypochondriac, these are the butts of his wit; and already half the fun is suggested to us by the position of the personage who stands as the central figure, and around whose devoted head the drollest misfortunes, the wittiest deceptions, the keenest arrows of satire are to fall. All is uncompromising, consistent, logical. There is no moral effect to be produced, no compassion excited. We We have nothing to do but look on, and laugh while our victim is baited, and enjoy the comical transformations he undergoes, the tricks that are played upon him, the developments of his vanity and ignorance, the cleverness with which he is made to do exactly the reverse of what he intends, and is tricked out of his money or his daughter, as the

case may be, to the general satisfaction. Or if it is the rogue, and not the victim, who holds the chief place, our entire attention is occupied by his laughable expedients, his clever trickery, the stupidity which sometimes balks his happiest efforts, but over which he triumphs in the end. Fourbe or sufferer, what does it matter? our dramatist has not the slightest intention of interesting us in the man. Moral disapproval of Scapin's naughty tricks, or compassion for the entire and complacent self-deception of Monsieur Jourdain, would be absolutely out of place. The most pedantic reader could scarcely be so far left to himself as to think such sentiments called for. We are equally indifferent to the personages of the drama, and delighted with their adventures. The element of sympathy is entirely left out.

Nor does Molière make up for the absence of character in his plays by any striking power of narrative or dramatic skill of construction. Nothing can be more simple than his plots. Some of them are taken direct from the classic models of Plautus or Terence; or, if not taken entire, are at least very closely copied, sometimes even with a want of intelligence which, if it did not happen to be conjoined with genius, would be remarkable enough. The favourite of ancient comedy, the well-known Davus or Tranio, the home-born slave whose interests were identical with those of the house, and who was as much the possessor as the property of his master, is a figure entirely belonging to the old world. Even the supernatural cleverness which belongs to this type of conventional character, is the cleverness of an inferior race, from which no scruples or higher sentiments are expected, and whose lying, stealing,

and chicanery of all kinds, are natural,-tricks to be laughed at rather than regarded with moral disapproval or judged by ordinary rules. The position of the classic slavetutor, to whom the charge of his young master is committed-who loves, and fights for, and robs him with equal satisfaction-who is sometimes his most favoured counsellor, and at another moment is roué de coups de baton-seems impossible as an actual reality even in the time of Molière, though it is quite in harmony with the sentiments of the period to which it originally belongs. This is one of the odd results of that lingering influence of the Renaissance, which made it the fashion to leap over the immediate past into the atmosphere of an age that came before all the principles which have shaped our own. Christianity was not very potent in society in the reign of Louis XIV.; but yet it is impossible, wherever that divine system has been, to get it so entirely out of the air, as to make a return possible into the light-hearted indifference to good and evil of which paganism was capable. This, however, it is evident, Molière never thought of, but adopted his classic model, as many a graver writer has done, in simple assurance of faith that a classic model must always be right. Fortunately, however, along with this clever rogue, with his characteristic and sanctioned sins against honesty and truth, the French comedian has adopted that curious temperance of the imagination which distinguishes Latin comedy, which it would be absurd to call purity or morality, but which yet keeps his works free from that licentiousness which has been the snare and destruction of his successors on the national stage. There is scarcely any immorality, in the ordinary sense of

the word, in these dramas. The complications of the story are produced by the innocent expedient of a virtuous though misplaced love, and the intentions of the hero and heroine throughout are entirely honourable. Through all his best-known works, Molière has little or nothing to say to the seventh commandment. It is the father who is tricked and laughed at, and deceived by all his Scapins and Mascarilles, not the husbandwhich, on the whole, is a much safer system. By times he may be gross, or even rudely indecent, after the fashion of his age; but his medical nastiness is clean and sweet in comparison with the "delicacy" of Dumas fils, and many a dramatist besides. In this respect he carries off the palm, even from the more restrained and sober art on this side of the Channel. The worst catastrophe in his ken is a runaway marriage; and even that is generally avoided by some ingenious shuffling of the cards, some secret of parentage discovered, or unthought of inheritance, which reconciles the angry parent; or, at the worst, some strong application of trickery which gets his consent under false pretences. Scapin himself has no worse conclusion in his thoughts. The "betrayed innocence" and rude libertinism of our own earlier dramatic literature, and even the equivocal expedients which Shakespeare does not hesitate to use, are unknown to the author of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme.' So consistent is he in this virtuous motif, that the plans of his dramas are distinctly monotonous; and nothing but the extreme fun of the situations, the fresh arrangement of the puzzle, the new tricks which every new emergency calls forth, can account for the persevering interest which

we take in the adroitness of the brilliant knave who operates, or the deceived parent who endures.

This is a very remarkable feature in the plays of Molière. Louis XIV. had not a model Court, nor is his age supposed to have been specially distinguished for purity, and there is nothing in Molière himself which points at any particular elevation of sentiment-yet, either by chance or intention, such is the fact. A little judicious cutting, involving merely the elision of a phrase here and there, would make most of his comedies perfectly safe for the severest drawingroom without touching the plot or impairing the fun in any material point, which is a very great deal to say. And yet there are no traces of restraint upon the dramatist, or regard for that "propriety" which is an English attribute, and only of recent invention so far as the stage is concerned. When he has anything offensive to say, he says it simply in so many words, not troubling himself about the modesty of his listeners; but no deeper immodesty of insinuation, no strained situation nor expedient of naughtiness, is in the straightforward tale. How those pretty young people, the son and daughter of the miser, managed respectively to marry the partners they themselves had chosen -how Monsieur Jourdain was tricked into consenting to the love-match of his daughter-how the Etourdi, notwithstanding all his follies, got himself mated according to his wish by means of the pleasant villanies of his Mascarille-how Scapin did all his fourberies in the same cause -how even the Malade Imaginaire was coaxed into consent by the lovers, and the Médecin malgré lui became the happy instrument of Hymen thus flows the tale. To be sure, the pretty young people are

of very inferior importance, in most cases; and it is the strictly comic figure of the injured father, the Avare or the Malade, who gives his name to the piece, or the knave who sustains all the machinery—the Scapin, Mascarille, or Sganarellewho is the centre figure of the whole. But this does not affect the fact that the framework of the story is always virtuous, and the youthful and natural love which ends in wedlock its pleasant object. Such traditions as these ought to have kept a higher standard on the French stage; and though they have not succeeded, unfortunately, in doing so, Molière stands out with all the greater distinctness for the faults of his successors. The modern dramatists of France can draw no arguments in their favour from the example of the greatest of French comedians. Wheresoever they have got their evil stories, their "delicate" studies of vice, and fine entanglements of nastiness, it certainly has not been from Molière.

There is one point, however, in which he bears a certain resemblance to Shakespeare, scarcely to be looked for in the more scientific work of a Frenchman, and that is the spontaneousness, almost the accidental character, of his work. There is no elaboration of longsettled purpose in it. As our Shakespeare, there seems little doubt, wrote to supply the necessities of the Globe, so Molière worked for his troupe and for his immediate audience, acquiring fame unawares, and prospering in the natural way, as most honest men do, who do their best for the purpose before them, without immediate reference to the reward. Genius, we believe, is always ingenuous, whether in the higher or the lower levels of art.

The

age was full of humours, as every