Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/19

Rh quotations in his original shows extraordinary information and mental alertness. It would be remarkable if a twelfth-century writer, using French, had woven into his discourse a literal translation of a piece of English verse, and if his English translator had been able from memory to reinsert the English original.

But what Mr. Macaulay supposes to have happened is something much more complicated than this, for which I do not think any precedent can be found. For these verses are not given, either in the French or the English, as the current quotation which Mr. Macaulay assumes them to be. What is given as a current quotation is a Latin distich enumerating the subjects of holy meditation:

Then follow in the English the words “That is,” and then the six lines of English verse: this six-line English poem is a paraphrase of the Latin distich, expanding it metri gratia and putting the subjects of meditation in a different order, to facilitate the rhyme. The French gives the Latin distich: then follow the words “c’est,” and then follows a translation, not of the Latin verses, but of the English ones.

Mr. Macaulay’s explanation compels us to assume (1) that the six English lines were not the work of the writer of the Ancren Riwle, but were already current and generally known—an assumption for which there is no support. We must then further assume (2) that the author of the original French Ancren Riwle not only knew these English lines, but was so bemused by them that, having quoted a Latin distich and wishing to translate it into French, he translated these six English lines instead, and offered them to his readers as being what they are not, viz. a French prose translation of the Latin; (3) that then the English translator, adroitly seeing what had happened, substituted the English verse in place of the French prose translation, and thus gave us for the first time an intelligible sequence: the Latin distich followed by a free paraphrase into English verse.

I think it must be agreed that this involves quite illegitimate assumptions. We must assert with confidence that at this point it is the French text which is translated from the English, and not the reverse, unless, like the undergraduate in Punch, we are prepared to scorn Virgil as being nothing but a literal translation of the crib.