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in the scheme of providence was to go with Delia while he himself went with Francie, and nothing would have induced George Flack to disfigure that equation.

The young man was professionally so occupied with other people's affairs that it should doubtless be mentioned to his praise that he still managed to have affairs- -or at least an affair of his own. That affair was Francie Dosson, and he was pleased to perceive how little she cared what had become of Mr. and Mrs. Rosenheim, and Master Samuel and Miss Cora. He counted all the things she didn't care about-her soft inadvertent eyes helped him to do that; and they footed up so, as he would have said, that they gave him a pleasant sense of a free field. If she had so few interests, there was the greater possibility that a young man of bold conceptions and cheerful manners might become

one.

She had usually the air of waiting for something with a sort of amused resignation, while tender, shy, indefinite little fancies hummed in her brain; so that she would perhaps recognize in him the reward of patience. George Flack was aware that he exposed his friends to considerable fatigue: he brought them back pale and taciturn from suburban excursions, and from wanderings often rather aimless and casual among the boulevards and avenues of the town. He regarded them at such moments with compla. cency, however, for these were hours of diminished resistance: he had an idea that he should be able eventually to circumvent Delia if he could only watch for some time when she was tired. He liked to make them all feel helpless and dependent, and this was not difficult with people who were so modest and artless, so unconscious of the boundless power of wealth. Sentiment, in our young man, was not a scruple nor a source of weakness; but he thought it really touching, the little these good people knew of what they could do with their money. They had in their hands a weapon of infinite No. 340.-VOL. LVII.

range, and yet they were incapable of firing a shot for themselves. They had a kind of social humility: it appeared never to have occurred to them that, added to their amiability, their money gave them a value. This used to strike George Flack on certain occasions when he came back to find them in the places where he had dropped them while he rushed off to give a turn to one of his screws. They never played him false, never wearied of waiting; always sat patient and submissive, usually at a café to which he had introduced them, or in a row of chairs on the boulevard, or in the Tuileries or the Champs Elysées.

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He introduced them to many cafés, in different parts of 'Paris, being careful to choose those which (in his view) young ladies might frequent with propriety, and there were two or three in the neighbourhood of their hotel where they became frequent and familiar figures. As the late spring days grew warmer and brighter they usually sat outside on the "terrace' -the little expanse of small tables at the door of the establishment, where Mr. Flack, on the return, could descry them from afar at their post in exactly the same position to which he had committed them. They complained of no satiety in watching the many-coloured movement of the Parisian streets; and if some of the features in the panorama were base they were only so in a version which the imagination of our friends was incapable of supplying. George Flack considered that he was rendering a positive service to Mr. Dosson: wouldn't the old gentleman have sat all day in the court anyway? And wasn't the boulevard better than the court? It was his theory, too, that he flattered and caressed Mis Francie's father, for there was no one to whom he had furnished more copious details about the affairs, the projects and prospects, of the Reverberator. He had left no doubt in the old gentleman's mind as to the race he himself intended to run, and Mr. Dosson used to say to him every day, the first

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thing, "Well, where have you got to now?" as if he took a real interest. George Flack narrated his interviews, to which Delia and Francie gave attention only in case they knew something of the persons on whom the young emissary of the Reverberator had conferred this distinction ; whereas Mr. Dosson listened, with his tolerant interposition of, "Is that so?" and "Well, that's good," just as submissively when he heard of the celebrity in question for the first time.

In conversation with his daughters Mr. Flack was frequently the theme, though introduced much more by the young ladies than by himself, and especially by Delia, who announced at an early period that she knew what he wanted and that it wasn't in the least what she wanted. She amplified this statement very soon-at least as regards her interpretation of Mr. Flack's designs: a certain mystery still hung about her own, which, as she intimated, had much more to recommend them. Delia's vision of the danger as well as the advantage of being a pretty girl was closely connected (and this was natural) with the idea of "engagement": this idea was in a manner complete in itself, and her imagination failed, in the oddest way, to carry it into the next stage. She wanted her sister to be engaged, but she didn't at all wish her to be married, and she had not clearly made up her mind as to how Francie was to enjoy both the promotion and the arrest. It was a secret source of humiliation to her that there had as yet, to her knowledge, been no one with whom her sister had exchanged vows: if her conviction on this subject could have expressed itself intelligibly it would have given you a glimpse of a droll state of mind-a dim theory that a bright girl ought to be able to try successive aspirants. Ie'ia's conception of what such a trial might consist of was strangely innocent it was made up of calls and walks and buggy-drives, and above all of being spoken of as engaged;

and it never occurred to her that a repetition of lovers rubs off a young lady's delicacy. She felt herself a born old maid, and never dreamed of a lover of her own-he would have been dreadfully in her way; but she dreamed of love as something in its nature very delicate. All the same she discriminated: it did lead to something after all, and she desired that for Francie it should not lead to a union with Mr. Flack. She looked at such a union in the light of that other view which she kept as yet to herself, but which she was ready to produce so soon as the right occasion should come up; and she told her sister that she would never speak to her again if she should let this young man supposeAnd here she always paused, plunging again into impressive reticence.

"Suppose what?" Francie asked, as if she were totally unacquainted (which indeed she really was) with the suppositions of young men.

"Well, you'll see, when he begins to say things you won't like." This sounded ominous on Delia's part, but she had in reality very little apprehension; otherwise she would have risen against the custom adopted by Mr. Flack of perpetually coming round: she would have given her attention (though it struggled in general unsuccessfully with all this side of their life) to some prompt means of getting away from Paris. She told her father what in her view the correspondent of the Reverberator was "after"; but it must be added that she did not make him feel very strongly on the matter. This, however, was not of importance, with her inner sense that Francie would never really do anything—that is, wouldn't really like anything-they didn't like.

Her sister's docility was a great comfort to her, especially as it was addressed in the first instance to herself. She liked and disliked certain things much more than the girl herself did either; and Francie was glad to take advantage of her reasons, having so few of her own. They served

Delia's reasons-for Mr. Dosson as well, so that Francie was not guilty of any particular irreverence in regarding her sister, rather than her father, as the controller of her fate. A fate was rather a cumbersome and formidable possession, which it relieved her that some kind person should undertake the keeping of. Delia had somehow got hold of hers first-before even her father, and ever so much before Mr. Flack; and it lay with Delia to make any change. She couldn't have accepted any gentleman as a husband without reference to Delia, any more than she could have done up her hair without a glass. The only action taken by Mr. Dosson in consequence of his elder daughter's revelations was to embrace the idea as a subject of daily pleasantry. He was fond, in his intercourse with his children, of some small usual joke, some humorous refrain; and what could have been more in the line of true domestic sport than a little gentle but unintermitted raillery upon Francie's conquest? Mr. Flack's attributive intentions became a theme of indulgent parental chaff, and the girl was neither dazzled nor annoyed by such familiar references to them. "Well, he has told us about half we know," she used often to reply.

Among the things he told them was that this was the very best time in the young lady's life to have her portrait painted, and the best place in the world to have it done well: also that he knew a "lovely artist," a young American of extraordinary talent, who would be delighted to undertake the work. He conducted them to this gentleman's studio, where they saw several pictures by which they were considerably mystified. Francie protested that she didn't want to be done that way, and Delia declared that she would as soon have her sister shown up in a magic lantern. They had had the fortune not to find Mr.

Waterlow at home, so that they were free to express themselves, and the pictures were shown them by his servant. They looked at them as they looked at bonnets and confections when they went to expensive shops: as if it were a question, among so many specimens, of the style and colour they would choose. Mr. Waterlow's productions struck them for the most part in the same manner as those garments which ladies classify as frights, and they went away with a very low opinion of the young Ameri can master. George Flack told them, however, that they couldn't get out of it, inasmuch as he had already written home to the Reverberator that Francie was to sit. They accepted this somehow as a kind of supernatural sign that she would have to; for they believed everything that they heard quoted from a newspaper. Moreover Mr. Flack explained to them that it would be idiotic to miss such an opportunity to get something at once precious and cheap; for it was well known that Impressionism was going to be the art of the future, and Charles Waterlow was a rising Impressionist. It was a new system altogether, and the latest improvement in art. They didn't want to go back, they wanted to go forward, and he would give them an article that would fetch five times the money in a couple of years. They were not in search of a bargain, but they allowed themselves to be inoculated with any reason which they thought would be characteristic of earnest people; and he even convinced them, after a little, that when once they had got used to impressionism they would never look at anything else. Mr. Waterlow was the man, among the young, and he had no interest in praising him, because he was not a personal friend: his reputa tion was advancing with strides, and any one with any sense would want to secure something before the rush.

(To be continued.)

HENRY JAMES.

276

VIRGIL IN ENGLISH VERSE.

THAT Virgil should be the most translated and the most untranslatable of poets is not wonderful it is only another way of saying that more than any other poet he kindles in his readers the thirst after expression, the desire of repayment. And yet

his supreme magic is, like all supreme qualities, essentially inimitable: inceptus clamor frustratur hiantes: they perish, and he remains.

But it is in human nature that translations should continue to be made, since in no other way can the desire come so near being satisfied of saying what we think about Virgil. For a translation is in a sense the sum of the translator's criticism and appreciation of his author: he says in it, in his own words, what effect the original has produced on him. For the perfect translation two qualities would be required perfect apprehension of the thing translated, and perfect power of putting this apprehension into words; and beyond these two qualities nothing else. Whether a scholar and poet great enough to appreciate Virgil fully would often have time or inclination to translate him, when so many other matters call on him for utterance, were too curious a question. By doing so he would to a certain degree abandon the function of a poet for that of a critic, and poets cannot well be spared for other work. The chances are that a modern poet would only care to translate Virgil in the way in which Virgil himself translated Theocritus or Homer: though Mr. Morris's Eneid (which is not only a remarkable poem, but one of the most important criticisms ever made on Virgil) is such an exception as disproves the rule. Conington, in 1861, concluded his review of the English translators of Virgil by pronouncing

it unlikely that the attempt to translate him into verse would be often made in the future, and hinting that sweet were the uses of prose. His judgment that scholars would prefer prose has been signally falsified: it is a small, though possibly a deserved, compliment to scholars to think that they would naturally prefer the inferior to the superior form of language. Conington proceeded forthwith to translate Virgil into verse himself. And since then there have been more partial or complete verse-translations than ever-in blank verse, in heroic couplets, in ballad-couplets, in stanzas ; and now by Sir Charles Bowen in a metre which, if not precisely of his own invention, has never been reduced to the same rules and employed on the same scale before.

This metre Sir Charles Bowen considers to be a modification of the English hexameter. It is (if technical language may be allowed for the sake of precision) a rhyming line, in triple measure, containing six stresses, and beginning and ending on a stressed syllable. It corresponds, as exactly as an English can correspond to a Latin metre, to the dactylic pentameter if the first half of the line were full as if, for example, we were to alter the couplet of Ovid into,

"Et tamen ille tuæ felix Eneidos auctor Contulit in Tyrios simul arma virumque toros."

It is obvious that a pentameter thus altered would still remain essentially different from a hexameter in rhythmical effect; and if Sir Charles Bowen's verse be spoken of as a hexameter, this must be carefully kept in mind. kept in mind. As an English form of verse it is the same, with one exception (that the line is begun on a

stressed syllable), as that of the earlier sections of Maud. But this exception is of capital importance. To understand it, we must consider what may be called the natural quality of English rhythm.

In early English poetry we find the systems of falling and rising rhythm —that is to say, of rhythms in which the stressed syllables precede the unstressed, and rhythms in which the unstressed syllables precede the stressed -both in use and fighting for predominance. The first was combined with an initial, the second with a final assonance. But with Langland the former system said its last word. Whether from the effect of the personal genius of Chaucer, from the overpowering authority of French and Italian poetry, or from some inherent quality of the English language, the rising rhythm alone has been since then used for continuous poetical composition with few exceptions, and these chiefly lyrical, iambic and anapæstic verse have driven out trochaic and dactylic. Partly this is due to the prevalence of rhymed verse: trochaic or dactylic metres imply double or triple rhymes, and to these the English language does not lend itself; while the use of rhyme at all, means that the line rises towards the end and culminates on the last stressed syllable. But even if rhyme be put out of account, the normal, and by this time we may say the necessary, form of blank verse is iambic. Mr. Browning's One Word More is singular instance of the falling trochaic rhythm being chosen, for special reasons, and with the explicit purpose of making a poem different from all other poems; while of dactylic verse ("dactylics, call'st thou 'em?") except for the attempts made to write English hexameters after the Latin model, there is hardly a specimen in our poetry.

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Again, there are two forms of sixstressed triple metre natural to English, differing from each other in that one divides the line midway and the

other does not. Casura properly speaking does not exist in English, and cannot exist in any poetry which is not quantitative. 1 But the effect of a cæsura may be obtained by beginning the rhythm anew from a fresh unaccented base in the middle of the line; and this is the only method in English of giving that double movement of fall and rise which is given by the cæsura to the Greek and Latin hexameters. The undivided line has no quality in common with the classical hexameter except that of having six stresses; and its movement is so extremely rapid that it can hardly be used except for lyrical poetry. To make the difference more clear, a passage in each metre is added; the one from Maud, the other from Mr. Morris's translation of the Volo-spá, the creation of Ask and Embla.

"A million emeralds break from the rubybudded lime

In the little grove where I sit-ah, wherefore cannot I be

Like things of the season gay, like the bountiful season bland,

When the far-off sail is blown by the breeze of a softer clime,

Half-lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea,

The silent sapphire-spangled marriage ring of the land?"

"There were twain, and they went upon earth, and were speechless, unmighty and wan;

They were hopeless, deathless, lifeless, and the Mighty named them Man:

Then they gave them speech and power, and they gave them colour and breath; And deeds and the hope they gave them, and they gave them Life and Death: Yea hope, as the hope of the Framers; yea might, as the Fashioners had,

Till they wrought, and rejoiced in their bodies, and saw their sons and were glad:

1 The word cæsura is here used in its strict sense of a break at the end of a half-foot, or, to speak metrically, a division in the line from which the rhythm starts again with reversed stress thus in a senarius the rhythm goes on from the cæsural pause as trochaic, and in a hexameter as anapæstic. In a line of English blank verse there may be a break, but there is no change of rhythm.

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