XXV.
EPILOGUE.
How much author’s anguish of self-tasking and of self-denial, in exploration, study, selection, rejection, condensation, retrenchment, to say nothing of the anxiety to be clear in expression, to be true, to be proportionate, to be just, finally, too, to be entertaining as well as instructive—this little book has cost the producer of it, no one is likely ever to guess that has not tried a similar task with similar application of conscience himself.
For instance, to name Ronsard, the brilliant, the once sovereign Ronsard—lately, after so long occultation of his orb, come, through the romanticists of to-day, or shall we write “of yesterday”? almost to brightness again—to name this poet, without at least giving in specimen the following celebrated sonnet from his hand, which, for the sake of making our present point the clearer, we may now show in a neat version by Mr. Andrew Lang (but why should Mr. Lang, in his fourth line, change Ronsard’s “fair” to “young”?):
| When you are very old, at evening You’ll sit and spin beside the fire, and say, Humming my songs, “Ah well, ah well-a-day! When I was young, of me did Ronsard sing.” None of your maidens that doth hear the thing, Albeit with her weary task foredone, But wakens at my name, and calls you one Blest, to be held in long remembering. I shall be low beneath the earth, and laid On sleep, a phantom in the myrtle shade, While you beside the fire, a grandame gray, My love, your pride, remember and regret; Ah, love me, love! we may be happy yet, And gather roses while ’tis called to-day: |
—then, for another instance, to pass over Boileau and not bring forward from him even so much as the following characteristic epigram, wherein this wit and satirist pays his sarcastic respects to that same poet Cotin whom (pp. 81 ff.) we showed Molière mocking under the name of “Trissotin” (here we must do our own translating):
| In vain, with thousandfold abuse, My foes, through all their works diffuse, Have thought to make me shocking to mankind; Cotin, to bring my style to shame, Has played a much more easy game, He has his verses to my pen assigned— |
to achieve, we say, these abstinences, and abstinences such as these, was a problem hard indeed to solve.
The result of all is before the reader; and, good or bad, it is, we are bound to confess, the very best that, within the given limits, we could do. Such students of our subject as we may fortunately have succeeded in making hungry for still more knowledge than we ourselves supply, we can conscientiously send, for further partial satisfaction of their desire, to that series of books, already once named by us, which has lately been published at Chicago, under the title, “The Great French Writers.” Messrs. A. C. McClurg & Co. have done a true service to the cause of letters in general, and in particular to the cause of what may be called international letters, in reproducing this series of books. They are good books, they are well translated, and they appear in handsome form. Madame de Sévigné, Montesquieu, Bernardin de St. Pierre, and three names that, together with all of their several kinds, economists, philosophers, historians, we here have been obliged to omit, Turgot, Victor Cousin, Thiers, are in the list of authors treated in the volumes thus far issued.