introductory dialogue, with much interspersed literary criticism, including an unequivocal and perhaps precocious rejection of Wilamowitz's translations from the Greek on the ground of their lifelessness, short work is made of those translators whose productions are even clearer' than the originals. I am so priggish,' Borchardt makes Arnold say, as to want Æschylus just no clearer than he himself wished to be, nor Pindar, nor Swinburne, nor George,' which, for the rest, may perhaps account for some of the considerable deviations on minor points from Jowett's version of the Lysis.

More recently (1924) Borchardt has issued in the beautiful editions of the Bremer Presse the Altionische Götterlieder a selection consisting of four of the apocryphal', and partly Orphic, hymns which circulated under the name of Homer. These translations in the hexameter verse of the original Demeter, Apollo, Hermes, and Aphrodite hymns are accompanied as usual by a lengthy and scholarly appendix.

During the war Borchardt served as a Prussian officer. His published speech, dealing with The War and German Responsibility, while constituting no more in the main than the then customary repetition of German selfrighteousness and Chauvinistic optimism, is nevertheless characterised by a choice of language not usually met with in this field of discussion, and also by a still more remarkable moderation in his views as compared with his contemporaries not downright opponents of the war, particularly with regard to the then proposed annexations. Since the war Borchardt has retured to North Italy, rarely emerging with an occasional lecture or two, which invariably attract large select audiences, and for which his oratorical attainment is considered almost unique.

A volume of reprinted prose essays (1920) contains, besides the two diatribes against George and Gundolf already mentioned, a fascinating study of Italian social

and historical atmosphere', entitled Villa; a lengthy essay dealing with Hofmannsthal's Alkestis and with the origins of that archaic legend; also a dissertation on Dante and his German translators, in which the latter are given severe chastisement. This volume also contains a striking piece entitled Veltheim, in which a chance meeting with that notorious character provides the material for some rugged classical comparisons.

Among Borchardt's original creative works are the Poetische Erzählungen, the Vermischte Gedichte, Der Durant, Die Halbgerettete Seele, Die Schöpfung aus Liebe, Verkündigung—the last a fragment of a projected dramatic poem, 'Die Päpstin Jutta'. There is also an Epilegomena to Dante, of which the first instalment consists of an introduction to the Vita Nuova, which Borchardt has also translated, together with a new translation of the Divina Commedia and some shorter works, into German. The Germania of Tacitus lies also before us in an entirely new translation, which, in spite of its dismal monotony, rivets the attention from beginning to end; there is also Das Buch foram (1907), a vigorous piece in the biblical, Lutheran style (Insel-Bücherei, No. 93).

Borchardt is also closely associated with the stream of English literature ushered in by the Rosetti School, and in touching verses he has acknowledged his own debt to Swinburne, exclaiming Segne mir den Mut, den ich dir danke. He has, moreover, translated a selection of Swinburne's poetry, and examples of his imitations could have been written by Swinburne himself had that bard employed German as his medium, so hauntingly Swinburnian are they in theme, rhythm and diction, specially noteworthy in the Ballade vom Wind, Schlaf und Gesang. A selection of twelve of W. S. Landor's Conversations has also appeared, among which Borchardt was unable to resist the Louis XIV and Father La Chaise.

The foregoing enumeration by no means completes

the mountain of Borchardt's works, which becomes ever more formidable by accretion '. It seems paradoxical enough that a writer who sets out rejecting translations on principle (He who wishes to read a Greek book and has no Greek should learn Greek': Arnold, Gespräch über Formen), should continue to produce translations interminable, for quite the largest part thus consists of translation, in rendering the masterpieces of antiquity accessible to the modern German reader, and preserving the continuity of the antique, or at least his own interpretation of it, for which his poetic skill and philological knowledge, as well as his archæological scholarship, pre-eminently adapt him. For Borchardt each word, each syllable even, is a monument of antiquity, and one feels the one-sided display of philology and learning bristling at every point. A further aim, which he shares with George and his circle, is perhaps more or less patriotic -to contribute to the development of the German language as a vehicle of poetic tradition and thought, and to restore to it its original flexibility. How far he is impelled by his antagonism to the George circle, and their undoubted tendency to a literary papacy, and exactly to what extent his activity results from, or is coloured by, a political, antiFrench bias, must here be left undetermined. In the appendix to Die Grossen Trobadors, for instance, Borchardt regards the Provençal literature as the direct mediator between the Antique and the Renaissance and modern German and English tradition, to the almost total exclusion of the French-a thesis which he admittedly owes to the research of Karl Vossler and others. Thus another justification for national prejudice in literature has now been discovered and added in the name of 'science' to those already existing, for which procedure the reply of competent French historians of literature will assuredly not be wanting. Stefan George, on the other hand, owes much of his inspiration to modern French literature,

and the influence has been to some extent reciprocal.1 It would almost appear as if these two chief figures represent in the higher literature of the Germany of to-day the two antagonistic tendencies visible there in the international relations.

Borchardt's prose clearly does not belong to all ', for no style could be so extremely difficult and involved, even for cultured Germans. A beginner in the language, however, would be ill-advised in attempting to unravel his lengthy periods, which spring with brilliant and undeniable 'cleverness,' like forked lightning with academic versatility from one learned and often obscure allusion to another. German lends itself with great facility to word-coining, but this daring faculty was surely never in stronger evidence than in Borchardt.2

1 See the appreciative monograph on Stefan George and his circle by Johannes Nohl in Weltliteratur der Gegenwart, Vol. I, 1924. (Franz Schneider Verlag, Berlin.)

2 A selection, in which the poetical and prose works are almost equally represented, has been published since the above was written. It includes some of the best parts of nearly thirty compositions. (Rudolf Borchardt, Ausgewählte Werke, 1900-1918, Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, Berlin, 1925.) More recently the Bremer Press, of which Borchardt was co-founder, have published Gartenphantasie, and the following editions which Borchardt has prepared: Deutsche Denkreden, Hartman von Aue's Der Arme Heinrich, and a new anthology of German poetry selected according to definite principles, entitled: Ewiger Vorrat Deutscher Poesie, a selection that will demand careful study. Still recenter is a lengthy contemplative and critical essay on the garden (No. 77 of 'Einkehr '-which is the literary supplement to the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten).

THE ADVENTURE OF MODERN MUSIC

T

HE object of philosophy, a modern writer has said, is the logical clarification of thought. Music as a rule has resisted that process, so that a book on music which is philosophical and at the same time the work of a musician is something out of the ordinary. Not that everyone will agree with it; indeed some have strongly disagreed with it already. They suspect that the author is getting at them', that he means more than he says and that there are implications between the lines which are aimed deliberately at themselves. It has made them decidedly uncomfortable to find that a man with a severe classical training in music is after all not quite sound' on some of their most cherished beliefs, and that he even appears to sympathize with those 'wild men who do not treat music as a thing to be taken seriously. Perhaps they are right; yet to a dispassionate reader, it will seem rather that the author of Terpander, or Music and the Future (Kegan Paul, 2s. 6d. net) takes music not less but more seriously than most other writers, that in the past music has provided his most passionate experiences, and that in the future other and newer music may do so again.

Terpander is a book entirely about music; it is not about composers or even, necessarily, about compositions. The author is a historian, and he proves that the detached, historical method is no less serviceable with the music of the present than it is with the music of the past. An eighteenth-century historian describing a sixteenth-century theorist said that he manifested a disposition the farthest removed that can possibly be from credulity'. This disposition, he added, led him to inquire into the doctrines