All this is very well as an anecdote; but we cannot understand the extraordinary penetration required in the matter. The phrase “Le gouvernement provisoire” is French, and the note in cypher was addressed to Frenchmen. The difficulty of decyphering may well be supposed much greater had the key been in a foreign tongue; yet any one who will take the trouble may address us a note, in the same manner as here proposed, and the key-phrase may be either in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Latin or Greek, (or in any of the dialects of these languages), and we pledge ourselves for the solution of the riddle. The experiment may afford our readers some amusement—let them try it.
But we are rambling from our theme. The genius of Arago is finely painted, and the character of his quackery put in a true light. The straight-forward, plainly-written critical comments upon this philosopher, as well as upon George Sand, and that absurd antithesis-hunter, Victor Hugo, please us far more than that mere cant and rhapsody in which the biographer involves himself when speaking of Châteaubriand and Lamartine. We have observed that all great authors who fall occasionally into the sins of ranting and raving, meet with critics who think the only way to elucidate, is to out-rant and out-rave them. A beautiful confusion of thought of course ensues, which it is truly refreshing to contemplate.
The account of George Sand (Madame Dudevant) is full of piquancy and spirit. The writer, by dint of a little chicanery, obtained access, it seems, to her boudoir, with an opportunity of sketching her in dishabille. He found her in a gentleman’s frock coat, smoking a cigar.
Speaking of the equivocal costume affected by this lady, Mr. Walsh, in a foot-note, comments upon a nice distinction made once by a soldier on duty at the Chamber of Deputies. Madame D., habited in male attire, was making her way into the gallery, when the man, presenting his musket before her, cried out “Monsieur, les dames ne passent pas par ici!”
But we regret that our space will not allow us to cull even a few of the good things with which the book abounds. The whole volume is exceedingly piquant, and replete with that racy wit which is so peculiarly French as to make us believe it a consequence of the tournure of the language itself. But if a Frenchman is invariably witty, he is not the less everlastingly bombastic; and these memoirs are decidedly French. What can we do but smile when we hear any one talk about Châteaubriand’s Essay upon English Poetry, with his Translation of Milton! as a task which he alone was qualified to execute!—or when we read page after page in which Lamartine is discoursed of as “a noble child, with flaxen locks,” “disporting upon the banks of the Seine,” “picking up Grecian lyres dropped by the mild Chenier,” “enriching them with Christian chords,” and “ravishing the world with new melodies!” What can we do but laugh outright at such phrases as the “sympathetic swan-like cries,” and the “singular lyric precocity of the crystal soul”—of such an ass as the author of Bug-Jargal?
So far as mere translation goes, the volume now before us is, in some respects, not very well done. Too little care has been taken in rendering the French idioms by English equivalents; and, because a French writer, through the impulses of his vivacity, cannot avoid telling, in the present tense, a story of the past, it does not follow that such a misusage of language is consonant with the graver genius of the Saxon. Mr. Walsh is always too literal, although sufficiently correct. He should not employ, however, even in translation, such queer words as “to legitimate,” meaning “to legitimatize,” or “to fulmine,” meaning “to fulminate.”
At page 211, the force of the compound “l’homme-calembourg” is not conveyed by the words “the punster,” even when we italicize the. The walking-pun, perhaps, is an analogous phrase which might be more properly employed.
There is some odd mistake at page 274, where the translator speaks of measuring the diameter of the earth by measuring its rays. We presume the word in the original is rayons; if so we can only translate it by the Latin radii. No doubt a radius, literally, is a ray; but science has its own terms, and will employ them. We should like to see either Mr. Walsh or Monsieur Arago (or both together) trying to measure a ray of the earth.
The mechanical execution of the book is good, saving a thousand outrageous typographical blunders, and that lithograph of Thiers. We have no doubt in the world that this gentleman (who ran away during the three days and hid himself in the woods of Montmorency), is a somewhat dirty, insignificant little fellow, and so be it; but we will never be brought to believe that any individual in Christendom ever did or could look half as saucy, or as greasy, as does “Monsieur Mirabeau-mouche” in that picture.