Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/802

782, but it is far from being perfect. Let him read a chapter of French or German, learned in this way, and then read the same amount of English—on the same subject, and, as nearly as may be, in the same style and he will find a great difference in the time required. Let him read a plain narrative in the foreign tongue, and he will find that weariness importunes him to stop much sooner than it would if he were reading a good English translation.

Nor is this all. The meaning has been more or less misty throughout, as can readily be proved by taking the individual words out of connection and finding that many fail to call up any definite idea. And, although the ideas have appeared during the reading, they have been faint instead of vivid, because the association impulses have been sluggish and uncertain instead of prompt and true. Moreover, the subtile correspondences between sense and sound, which are allied to the unexplained power of music, together with almost all that constitutes the charm and effectiveness of style, have been lost in a struggle to get the bare meaning no, not even the bare meaning, but a bare skeleton of the meaning. If this is a serious loss in reading plain narrative or scientific exposition, how fatal is it to the full enjoyment of poetical or rhetorical writings, where every word has been chosen with some reference to its sound! The readers of Hamerton's wise and charming essays on The Intellectual Life will remember how Tennyson's Claribel was read by a thoroughly cultivated Frenchman, who had long studied English and read abundantly of the literature, but had never become really familiar with English sounds:

 At ev ze bittle bommess Azvart ze zeeket lon At none ze veeld be ommess Aboot ze most edston At meedneeg ze mon commess An lokez doon alon Ere songg ze lintveet svelless Ze clirvoiced mavi dvelless Ze fledgling srost lispess Ze slombroos vav ootvelless Ze babblang ronnel creespess Ze ollov grot replee-ess Vere Claribel lovlee-ess."

Ought we to be content to read the French and German or the Greek and Latin poets in any such fashion?

But even such absurdly incorrect sounds serve some purpose, for they keep the association currents in their natural course through the auditory center. They are like a debased and mutilated currency, whose low and uncertain value discourages and