The value of translating as a help toward literary facility is a thing which should not be overlooked by the student. Whatever increases ease in the handling of language is of worth, and especially valuable is whatever forces the writer to greater exactness in the use of words and phrases. Reading aloud in English from a book in another language is excellent practice in the line of training the mind to quickness in the use of words; and this is especially good for one going into newspaper work.
It is going a little out of our way to comment here on the translation which comes into school work, but a word may not be amiss. It is always to be remembered, both by teacher and by pupil, that translation involves two languages, and one as fully as the other. Too often work of this sort is done as if the foreign language was the one to be considered exclusively. Students are allowed to give an approximate meaning of the Latin or the French which they are reading, putting their so-called translation into a verbal jargon which uses the English vocabulary, but which is no more English than the dictionary becomes a poem from having in it the words used in poetry. This is unfair to the student in several ways. It makes him hate what he is doing; it prevents his ever having anything like a proper or true idea of the value of the literature which he is mangling out of a foreign tongue into mongrel English. It destroys his feeling for his own language, and it makes it all but impossible for him to be taught English composition. More than one teacher who agonizes in spirit over the themes of his or her pupils, wondering why it is seemingly so impossible to teach them to write even reasonably well, might find an answer to the perplexing question by considering the English into which they are allowed to render their work in the languages. If pupils are let to translate from French and German and Latin into a sort of schoolroom dialect, inexact, unidiomatic, and lifeless, it is gross stupidity to expect that they will fail to be influenced by this. A pupil’s education is a unit. As long as it is assumed that his training in the languages is one thing, in mathematics another, and in geography or history a third, there is a constant loss of energy in counteracting the effects of this mistake. Every branch must be taught with a view to every other, and learned with a view to every other; and especially evident is it that in all teaching the matter of the proper use of the language of the learner should be kept always in sight. The translation which injures the pupil’s use of his own tongue does him a harm which cannot be atoned for by any knowledge it gives him of another.
It must by this time be apparent that translation in the best sense is really so closely allied to original work as hardly to be distinguished from it. In fact no writer can hope to produce successful versions of works of imagination who has not himself a genuine literary gift, carefully trained. The pathetic idea of so many young women that because they have taken lessons in French and German they can make their living by translating from those languages is quickly and painfully crushed by any attempt to carry it into practice; but there is far from being any adequate conception even among general writers of how difficult an art really good translation is. Yet so rapidly is public taste being educated in this matter that poor versions from other tongues become every day more and more futile and ineffective.
[XXI]
CRITICISM
Criticism is the estimation of work by defined standards. In its application to literature it is the trying of whatever is written. It is, so to say, the balance-sheet of composition.
Criticism is a sort of Exposition, yet it is well to consider it by itself because it has so much the nature of a general survey of the whole field of composition. Indeed, since literary training depends so largely upon self-criticism, it is essential to understand its methods and principles before one can hope to progress fast or far.
There has never before been a time when there has been so much talk about the art as in the latter half of this century, and seldom a time when there has been less of the genuine article. Matthew Arnold preached the gospel of criticism, and the world went on its uncritical way very much as before. There have even been doubts expressed whether there was after all any such thing save in theory. That entertaining Philistine, Mr. Andrew Lang, has declared that criticism is nothing but the expression of personal opinion, and has strengthened his position by pretty consistently living up to the assertion. The definition has been somewhat widely accepted; and it is certainly true that much which in common speech is called criticism is nothing more or less than an expression of prejudice or opinion. Indeed, in common speech the word is pretty generally used to signify mere fault-finding. There is, however, no more propriety in using the verb “to criticise” in the sense of “to censure” than in the sense of “to praise.” It means neither. Its nearest synonym is “to estimate,” or “to measure.”