The Heroic Couplet.
The Spenserian Stanza.
Jurien de la Gravière.
This kind of success is of importance only so far as it affects the wealth or the independence of a nation. Otherwise, success abroad is merely a subject of national vanity of a very empty kind. It is not the same with nations as with individuals. Personal celebrity is really a legitimate object of ambition for a wise man, because it makes life pleasanter to him in various very practical ways, and especially by bringing him into contact with people interested in his own pursuits. There is no national reward of that kind. It matters nothing to the English people whether their authors and artists have a continental celebrity or not. We shall understand the subject better by considering, at first, the case of England separately, and her celebrity in France, for different achievements of genius and industry. Certainly, if English genius is visible in anything it is in poetry, yet no Englishman who knew the French would attach the slightest weight to their opinion on the English poets. They often know the language well enough to read prose of a clear and simple kind; I quite believe that some Frenchmen of cultivated taste may appreciate Addison’s prose, or Goldsmith’s prose, and a few, a very few, may perhaps enjoy some verses of Byron or Pope; but English blank verse is usually quite beyond French appreciation as to its technical qualities, and so indeed are the more delicate and subtle cadences of English rhymed metres such as those which occur, for example, in the “Lotos-Eaters.” I should think it highly improbable that there are ten Frenchmen with ear enough to seize upon the very different qualities that artists so different as Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson can give to a metre, blank verse, which appears to be identical in the three cases, or who would know the difference between the heroic couplet as employed by Pope and the same measure in the hands of William Morris. There is the Spenserian stanza, too, as its inventor used it, and as it has been used by Thomson and Byron. Try to explain these differences, which in reality are enormous, to a Frenchman. Try to explain to him anything about the musical qualities of the English language. He will laugh at you for your “patriotism”; it being a received opinion in France that English never is and never can be musical. There is Vice-Admiral Jurien de la Gravière, for example, probably the most cultivated officer in the French navy, an Academician, a scholar, a charming and very instructive writer, altogether a man who would do honour to any nation. Of course he knows English, and he certainly has no narrow prejudice against Englishmen, yet in his touching reminiscence of Lieutenant Gore, in the last Figaro Illustré, I find the following passage. He is telling about an evening on board a French ship of war near Rhodes, spent in Gore’s society after a separation.
Anecdote of Lieutenant Gore.
“La soirée passa comme un songe. Un seul orage faillit la troubler. Je soutenais que la langue anglaise était rude, complètement dépourvue d’harmonie. ‘Elle est rude pour vous, qui ne savez pas la prononcer,’ ripostait l’insulaire avec véhémence.”
Here we have first the impression of the uneducated French ear, then the truth about the matter from the Englishman. Another Frenchman (whose name is not worth mentioning in connection with that of M. Jurien de la Gravière) says that the English language is scarcely intelligible when spoken, even for the English themselves, and that is why they are so taciturn. Another calls English “cet idiome sourd.” How are these Frenchmen to appreciate the “mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies”?—how are their ears to hear the “God-gifted organ-voice of England”?
French Opinion on different English Writers.
The Philosophers.
What really happens is this. English authors are known in France by translations, and as neither the music of verse nor the style of prose can be reproduced in a translation, the author is judged by a criterion outside of his literary workmanship. His reputation is constructed over again, without reference to his mastery of language, on the grounds of thought or invention only. Herbert Spencer has a great reputation in France as a thinker, Dickens as an inventor. Thackeray is very little appreciated, because the French can never know how superior he was in style to Dickens. Of English writers on art, Sir Joshua Reynolds is appreciated in France because his doctrine contained nothing particularly English, and his style was simple and clear; Ruskin has no French readers because his views on art are English and his style complex, elaborate, ornate. The name of Byron is known to every educated Frenchman, that of Tennyson is known to students of English literature only. All the chief English and Scotch philosophers are familiar to French students of philosophy, and in fact accepted by them as their great teachers and guides, but they are utterly unknown to the French public.