The Practical Difficulty.
The results of the improved teaching of modern languages have not yet had time to become visible in France. Teachers tell me that amongst their pupils a certain proportion show a natural taste and aptitude, and take heartily to their work.[9] The rest count for nothing, and will retain only a limited vocabulary. In England some knowledge of modern languages is, as yet, much more general, but it seldom reaches the degree of what can be seriously called “learning.” The practical difficulty is that the unripe minds of young students, especially of young ladies, are not ready for the strongest books, and they take no interest in the history and development of a language, so they soon fall back upon the easy and amusing literature of the present, to the neglect of the great authors. That is the misfortune of modern languages as an intellectual pursuit.
Rare Appreciation of Foreign Poetry.
Blank Verse.
Rhyme.
Expletive Phrases.
Difficulties in English Poetry for Frenchmen.
English Difficulties with French Verse.
Technical Workmanship.
It very rarely happens that a reader of either nationality has any appreciation of the poetry of the other. We may begin by setting aside that immense majority of prosaic minds which exist in all countries, and for whom all poetry must be for ever unintelligible. After them come those lovers of poetry who enjoy rhyme but cannot hear the music of blank verse. The French are in that position with regard to English poetry, though they claim an appreciation of blank verse in Horace and Virgil. Then, even in rhymed poetry, there remains the prodigious difficulty of pronunciation. Sound and feeling must go together in poetry, but the foreigner rarely has the sound. And even if he could imitate sounds exactly there would still remain the lack of those early associations to which poets are constantly appealing, both by subtle allusion and by the affectionate choice of words. The foreigner, too, has a difficulty in gliding over the unimportant expletive phrases; they acquire too much consequence in his eyes. The conventionalisms of the art strike the foreigner too forcibly. When an Englishman, in reading his own language, follows poetic ideas, a Frenchman is embarrassed by what seems to him the lawlessness of the versification, and he seeks for rules. On the other hand, the elaborate rules of French versification seem pedantic to an English mind, which perceives no necessary connection between such artificial restraints and the agile spirit of poetry. Was ever yet English scholar so learned that he could feel properly shocked by what shocks a French critic in verse? How is the foreigner to disengage the poetic from the conventional element? Since both English and French scholars believe that they have mastered all the secrets of Greek and Latin versification, it might be inferred that there is no insuperable difficulty in that of a modern tongue; yet where is the Englishman, except Swinburne, who in reading a French poem knows good technical workmanship when he sees it?