Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

The value of the practice of translation from Latin or Greek into English, in getting command of good English style, in my judgment, can hardly be stated too strongly. The explanation is not hard to find. You have in these two languages and especially in Latin, the best instrument for the most precise and most perfect expression of thought. The Latin prose of Tacitus and Cicero, the verse of Virgil and Horace, are like a Greek statue, or an Italian cameo—you have not only exquisite beauty, but also exquisite precision. You get the thought into your mind with the accuracy and precision of the words that express numbers in the multiplication table. Ten times one are ten—not ten and one one-millionth. Having got the idea into your mind with the precision, accuracy, and beauty of the Latin expression, you are to get its equivalent in English. Suppose you have knowledge of no language but your own. The thought comes to you in the mysterious way in which thoughts are born, and struggles for expression in apt words. If the phrase that occurs to you does not exactly fit the thought, you are almost certain, especially in speaking or rapid composition, to modify the thought to fit the phrase. Your sentence commands you, not you the sentence. The extemporary speaker never gets, or easily loses, the power of precise and accurate thinking or statement, and rarely attains a literary excellence which gives him immortality. But the conscientious translator has no such refuge. He is confronted by the inexorable original. He cannot evade or shirk. He must try and try and try again until he has got the exact thought expressed in its English equivalent. This is not enough. He must get an English expression if the resources of the language will furnish it, which will equal as near as may be the dignity and beauty of the original. He must not give you pewter for silver, or pinchbeck for gold, or mica for diamond. This practice will soon give him ready command of the great riches of his own noble English tongue. It will give a habitual nobility and beauty to his own style. The best word and phrase will come to him spontaneously when he speaks and thinks. The processes of thought itself will grow easier. The orator will get the affluence and abundance which characterize the great Italian artists of the Middle Ages, who astonish us as much by the amount and variety of their work as by its excellence.

The value of translation is very different from that of original written composition. Cicero says:

"Stilus optimus et praestantissimus dicendi effector ac magister."

Of this I am by no means sure. If you write rapidly you get the habit of careless composition. If you write slowly you get the habit of slow composition. Each of these is an injury to the style of the speaker. He cannot stop to correct or scratch out. Cicero himself in a later passage states his preference for translation. He says that at first he used to take a Latin author, Ennius or Gracchus, and get the meaning into his head, and then write it again. But he soon found that in that way if he used again the very words of his author he got no advantage, and if he used other language of his own, the author had already occupied the ground with the best expression, and he was left with the second best. So he gave up the practice and adopted instead that of translating from the Greek.

But to go back to what makes an orator. As I have said, his object is to excite the emotions which, being excited, will be most likely to impel his audience to think or act as he desires. He must never disgust them, he must never excite their contempt. He can use to great advantage the most varied learning, the profoundest philosophy, the most compelling logic. He must master the subject with which he has to deal, and he must have knowledge adequate to illustrate and adorn it. When every other faculty of the orator is acquired, it sometimes almost seems as if the voice were nine-tenths, and everything else but one-tenth, of the consummate orator. It is impossible to overrate the importance to his purpose of that matchless instrument, the human voice.

The most fastidious critic is by no means the best judge, seldom even a fairly good judge, of the public speaker. He is likely to be a stranger to the emotion which the orator inspires and excites. He is likely to fall into mistakes like that which Goldwin Smith makes about Patrick Henry. Mr. Smith ridicules Henry's speech and action and voice. The emotion which the great Virginian stirred in the breasts of his backwoodsmen seems very absurd to this cultured Englishman. The bowing and changes of countenance and gesticulating of the orator seem to him like the cheapest acting. Yet to us who understand it, it does not seem that Patrick Henry in the old church at Richmond need yield the palm to Chatham in St. Stephen's Chapel, either for the grandeur of his theme or of his stage, or the sublimity of his eloquence.

Matthew Arnold had the best pair of intellectual eyes of our time. But he sometimes made a like mistake as a critic of poetry. He speaks slightingly of Emerson's Fourth of July Ode—

Oh tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven,
And one in our desire.

What did the Englishman know of the Fourth of July emotion which stirred all Americans in the days when the country had just escaped destruction, and was entering upon its new career of freedom and of glory? What could he understand of that feeling, full of the morning and of the springtime, which heard the cannon boom and the bells ring, with stirring and quickened pulse, in those exultant days? Surely there never was a loftier stroke than that with which the New England poet interpreted to his countrymen the feeling of that joyous time—the feeling which is to waken again when the Fourth of July comes round on many anniversaries:

Oh tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven,
And one in our desire.