Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 2.djvu/26

 NOTES AND QUERIES. (12 s. n. JULY i, 1916.

Bohemia drawn from ' The Winter's Tale.' No sort of attempt is made to eliminate the personal factor, to distinguish between commonplaces of French thought, and the individual whims, opinions, or designs or the different dramatists. In fact, as & piece of rather extended literary work, it is so sketchy, so uncritical, so lacking in grip, that it makes a sad impression of triviality. We venture to think that the more solid and better equipped of American men of letters should turn their minds to criticizing and castigating the increasing output of studies of the kind before us in which a sound idea, a good subject, ia lighted on, but brought to tnotbing by the lackiof genuine work upon it, by the triviality of the treatment.

We are beginning to think that some constitu- tional difference of ear, of taste for style in diction, -renders an English lover of letters incapable of guessing the effect of American writing on American ears, and therefore it may be hardly a trust- worthy judge of it. But the same disability does not exist in regard to cliches not of phrase, but of thought, or to outworn generalizations and mixed metaphors, and these both in the book before us, and in some others we have recently looked into which came to us from America we also venture .to deprecate.

Sappho and the Sapphic Metre in English. With Bibliographical Notes by Edwin Marion Cox. (Chiswick Press, Is. net.)

THE history of translations of Sappho into English does not offer any particulars of a specially excit- ing nature. The first attempt was that of John Hall, who in his translation of Longinus ' On the Sublime,' published in 1652, did into English the Ode embedded therein. Dr. Cox cites this in full, as he does the version of the same poem made by Pulteney in his rendering of Longimis from a French translation. There is obviously little to be said in favour of either ; nor need we dissent from the slight measure of praise allotted to Ambrose Philips and those who immediately followed him. Yet some account must be taken of the value of -words as words. A writer in The Atlantic Monthly for 1894 is quoted as making enthusiastic, but cer- tainly well - justified observations on the Greek language from this point of view ; but neither he nor our author mentions a circumstance which must continually be borne in mind in estimating old translations and that is the continuous change in the poetical value of words, and still more of phrases. It is probable that the seventeenth-century lines which affect us with chill carried to seven- teenth-century ears something of the force of restrained passion which we associate more readily with brief homely words. We are, it seems clear, much nearer the peculiar Greek sense for the value of words than our forefathers were ; and, like the Greeks, we tend in poetry to interpose layers of rich and subtle imagery, forming a language within a language, between the actual words and the centre of the thought. Bearing this in mind, and noting how strongly poetic tradition descends observing, too, what excellence in translation has here and there recently been attained we hope that there will yet be a twentieth-century English version of the Hymn to Aphrodite, more excellent than any hitherto, and even worthy to stand beside the original.

Dr. Cox gives us two interesting examples of his own achievements in this line : we like both.

We wondered why so sensitive and exact a reader as he shows himself chose to add "silver" a word that counts a good deal usually to

A^SuAce fiiv a <re\\<iva,

and also to ignore in this line the force of the idea of "setting" contained in the first word.

The information put together in this brochure should prove welcome to students, for some of it, if wanted, might have to be sought with trouble. A tabular conspectus of the works referred to would not have taken up much space and would have been useful : and some of the paragraphs might with advantage have been divided up, in order to be easier of reference.

The Influence of Ancient Egyptian Civilization in the East and in America. By G. Elliot Smith, P.R.S. (Manchester, University Press.) THE reader must not expect too much from the alluring title of this tractate of 32 pp. Dr. Elliot Smith, in a concise lecture, presents us with the merest outline of the conclusions at which he has arrived elsewhere. But the arguments and proofs which led to these conclusions must be sought in the larger works to which he makes reference. Our curiosity consequently is stimu- lated rather than gratified.

The thesis which he seeks to establish is that the essential elements of the ancient civilization of America, as well as those of India, Northern Asia, the Malay Archipelago, and Oceania, were brought to them about the eighth century B.C. by migra- tions of mariners from the Eastern Mediterranean, and that these early wanderers were Phoenicians in search of gold and pearls. There is, of course, nothing new in this suggestion. He refers, indeed, to the more recent researches of the late Terrien de la Couperie into the connexion between the Sumerian and ancient Chinese scripts, but he seems to have missed the valuable investigations of our Oxford scholar, Dr. C. J. Ball, on the same subject, with which he would do well to make himself acquainted.

HIDDEN RELATIONSHIPS CONTAINED IN WILLS. MR. GERALD FOTHERGILL (11 Brussels Road, New Wandsworth, S.W.) writes :

"All genealogists know that wills are at present only indexed under the testator's surname. In the hope of throwing open these vast mines of informa- tion relating to families not of the testator's sur- name, I am indexing the legatees in the P.C.C. A start has been made with the years 1650, 1700, and 1770, and some seven thousand names have been extracted. It is intended after the war to print these lists."

The Athenaeum now appearing monthly, arrange- ments have been made whereby advertisements of posts vacant and wanted, which it is desired to publish weekly, may appear in the intervening weeks in ' N. & Q.'

MR. T. JESSON. Forwarded.

MR. R. VAUGHAN GOWER (' R. Brereton, Artist '). MR. ARCHIBALD SPARKE writes to say that Brereton exhibited twice at the Suffolk Street Galleries, the dates being 1835 and 1847.