Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/414

406 into Lady Guest's version, one of the chief masterpieces of prose romantic narrative in the language, has disappeared utterly in M. Loth's French translation. We might set this down to the marked inferiority of modern French for purposes of romantic narrative but for the fact that M. de la Villemarqué has produced a most graceful and charming version of some of these tales. It will be said, I know, that he contented himself with putting Lady Guest's English into French. Perhaps he did. But compare his version of Geraint and Enid with that of M. Loth. Nine-tenths of the differences are simply stylistic; they in nowise affect our appreciation of the subject-matter, but they do make M. Loth's French bald and tedious to an intolerable degree. I most willingly admit the value of many of M. Loth's changes, I gladly concede that his version is indispensable to the non-Welsh student of the Mabinogion, but surely the positive mistakes made by Lady Guest might have been corrected; surely, where her freedom misrepresents the original, closeness might have been obtained without sacrificing every trait of the beauty which those who know the original declare it possesses, I trust M. Loth will pardon the vivacity of my censure, but to me the Mabinogion are one of the most precious heritages of beauty which the past has bequeathed to us, and I cannot bear to see this heritage sacrificed to a pedantic and, as I believe, mistaken idea of the translator's art.

I now come to Prof Zimmer's studies, a list of and brief reference to which will be found in my apologia, printed in the Revue Celtique, and reprinted, vol. ii. It is characteristic that the motive-power of these masterly investigations should be opposition to what the author evidently regards as a false and pestilent heresy, namely M. Gaston Paris's hypothesis as to the origin of the French Arthurian literature. This the great French scholar regarded as the outcome of contact between the Anglo-Norman poets and Celtic romance consequent upon the