Mr. Reed's career which makes it unfair to him to say that his courageous counting of a quorum was, as he regarded it, a party service. He considered it a party duty, and as a party duty it was done. He himself had, in fact, as most other members of Congress had, taken frequent advantage of the same absurd technicality to prevent the majority from acting. Indeed, he delivered a speech in the second session of the Forty-Sixth Congress in defense of the filibustering tactics of the Republicans during the first session, in which he said:

"It is a valuable privilege for the country that the minority shall have the right, by this extraordinary mode of proceeding, to call the attention of the country to measures which a party, in a moment of madness and of party feeling, is endeavoring to enforce upon the citizens of this land. And it works equally well with regard to all parties, for all parties have their times when they need to be checked, so that they may receive the opinions of the people who are their constituents and who are interested in the results of their legislation. I say that, as a practical matter, the results hitherto, throughout all our history, have justified the construction which those upon this side of the House have put upon the matter, and which has been put equally by members of the other side in times past."

Here, then, is the secret of his career. From the first it has been as a party servant or as a party leader that he has done his work. Not only is he a strong partisan; he is little more than a partisan. He has done nothing to show that he regards our present political duties as in any way different from the duties to which he first turned his hand twenty years ago, and the political party is yet the only instrument that he would use. So late, indeed, as the last session of Congress, and on so important a matter as the relief of the national treasury, he permitted his partisanship to override

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a broader duty. There was before the House a bill authorizing the sale of lowrate, short-term gold bonds, which had been introduced as an administration" measure. It was known to be the President's wish that it should pass. The only alternatives were, on the one hand a bond issue on far less advantageous terms, and on the other a confession of national bankruptcy. There were enough sound-money Democrats to pass the bill if all the sound-money Republicans would vote with them; but at the crucial moment Mr. Reed blocked the way merely for partisan advantage. He had a coinbond bill of his own, with which he was able, by virtue of his party leadership, to hold the great mass of the Republicans in check, and to keep them from going over to the support of the administration. As must have been foreseen, both bills failed, and the treasury was obliged to resort to such unsatisfactory means for relief as the existing laws afforded. Rather than permit Congress to do its plain duty when a President of the other party had asked it to do so, he preferred to force upon the President the necessity of saving the national credit' in a more costly and less popular way.

To civil service reform Mr. Reed has been tolerant, even somewhat actively tolerant when his friends have had its execution. But the morality of the merit system has never appealed to him strongly. He has never opposed it, for he is too frank to starve a law already on the books by withholding an appropriation to carry it into effect. He is a fair and open antagonist, but he has looked on the reform with good nature rather than with approval. He has always had the feeling that a Republican ought every time to draw a trump card. If he should become President, perhaps we should not have reason to fear that the reform would slip back, but it would hardly be set forward, unless he saw some partisan advantage or renown in extending it. So, too, as regards sound currency. He

It is always good news to hear that new champions are coming forward to translate Don Quixote into English. It is a bold deed, well worthy a knight-errant of the pen; and if many men make the attempt, we may be perhaps so fortunate as hereafter to have a true English translation. Don Quixote, it is said in the Encyclopædia Britannica, has been translated into every language in Europe, even including Turkish, but I cannot be lieve that any language is so fit as English to give the real counterfeit presentment of the book. One might guess that a Romance language would do better, but, on reflection, French prose lacks humor, and Italian has not sufficient subtlety to give the lights and shadows of Don Quixote; and as for German prose, in spite of Goethe it still is German prose. There is a scintilla of truth, so far as this translation is concerned, in the saying of Charles V., that French is the language for dancing-masters, Italian for singing birds, and German for horses. I should like to be able to read the Turkish translation. I imagine that there must be a dignity and self-respect in the language that would befit Don Quixote to a nicety; but for Sancho it would not do, even Candide's experience could not persuade me that it would be for him le meilleur monde possible:

he would be homesick talking Turkish. There are a number of English translations, one by Mr. Shelton long ago, one by Smollett, and others by Motteux, Jarvis, Duffield, Ormsby, and Watts,— all more or less inadequate, if I may judge from parts, for I have never been so willful-blame as to read them all. In truth, the translation is a very difficult matter. Don Quixote himself is one of the most delicately drawn characters in fiction; almost every Spanish word he speaks stands out in the reader's mind, separate and distinct, like a stroke in a Rembrandt etching. How can you measure out their English equivalents in the finely adjusted scales of language unless you have ten talents for weights? Epigrams are commonly of little use in finding the way to truth, but Coleridge has left a saying that, I think, helps us materially in this matter of translation. "Prose," he said, "is words in the best order; Poetry is the best words in the best order." Now, by what sleight of hand shall a man keep this best order of words in shifting thoughts from one language to another? In poetry we are waking up to this, and Homer and Dante are rendered into English prose. Now and again a man, if he have the luck to be a man of genius, may make English poetry when he professes to translate a

foreign poet. Such a one was Mr. Fitzgerald. But I know of no one who has made both poetry and a translation, with a few exceptions: such as Shelley in his translation of the angels' chorus in Faust, Dr. Hedge with Luther's hymn, and Wordsworth with Michelangelo's sonnet, "Ben può talor col mio ardente desio." Maybe the translators of the Old Testament were such.

for

Of all prose that I know, I should say that Don Quixote was the hardest to translate out of the original tongue; for Cervantes has used his words in the best order very often, and his Spanish tongue was of so fine a temper it had been framed among high-strung gentlemen, quick in quarrel, urbane in manner, and of a broad human courtesy such as gentlemen have in Utopia, and all men, I needs must think, in heaven -that the translator need be of a stout heart. Words are delicate works. Nature has nurtured them, art has toiled over them. For a thousand years those Spanish words have been shaped by Spanish mouths, and now some zealous translator, like a lean apothecary, expects to catch their fragrance and cork it up in English smelling-bottles. All a nation's sentiment has gone into its words. Great musicians, architects, painters, and sculptors put into their works the feelings of their country and of their age, but these works remain the works of individuals and bear their personal stamp, whereas all the nation, at all times, from generation to generation, has been putting its passions into its speech. The Spanish heart is not the English heart.

Moreover, the translator of Cervantes has another great difficulty. Don Quixote is the delineation of a man's character; he is as real as any hero in fiction from Achilles to Alan Breck, and much more so than the heroes who lie buried in Westminster Abbey.

"Er lebt und ist noch stärker

Als alle Todten sind."

VOL. LXXVII.

NO. 460.

17

This very reality lies in the arrangement of words, and slips through the translator's fingers. The hero was alive and then is done into English, a process that has much similarity to embalming. To draw the likeness of a living being in words is one of the most difficult tasks in art. We all, no doubt, can remember some figure coming, in the days of our childhood, into our Eden from the vague outer world, that impressed itself deeply in our memories. Such a one I can remember, a delicately bred gentleman, one of those in whom the gentle element was so predominant that perhaps the man was pushed too much aside. bearing spoke of training and discipline received in some place out of Eden that we knew not of, and there was a manner of habitual forbearance, almost shrinking, in his daily actions, as if he feared that whatever he touched might turn to sorrow, which still kept us behind the line across which his tenderness was ever inviting us. I think to describe his smile and to translate Don Quixote would be tasks of like quality.

His

But of all books in the world Don Quixote is the book for an English-speaking boy. There is a time in his boyhood while the sun of life throws a long shadow behind him, when, after he has read the Waverley Novels, Cooper, and Captain Marryat, he pauses hesitating between Thackeray and Dickens. Which shall he take? The course is long, for a boy is a most just and generous reader. He reads his novelist straight through from start to finish, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Old Curiosity Shop, and all, ending finally with a second reading of Pickwick. That is the way novels should be read. Reading the first novel of one of the ricos hombres of literature is like Aladdin going down into the magic cave: it summons a genie, who straightway spreads a wonderful prospect before you, but it is not till the second or third book that you understand all the power

of the master slave. It is at that moment of hesitation that Don Quixote should be put into the boy's hands; but that cannot be done now because there is no satisfactory English translation. Of course, Don Quixote is a man's book, also, the great human book, as Mr. Lowell following Sainte-Beuve calls it. Cervantes has breathed into its nostrils the breath of life, and, like the macrocosm, it has a different look for the boy and for the man of fifty. You can find in it the allegory that the ideal is out of place in this workaday world, that the light shineth in a darkness which comprehendeth it not. You can find the preaching of vanity, if such be your turn of mind, in Don Quixote as well as in the world. But the schoolboy does not look for that; there is no vain thing in life for him, and perhaps his is the clearer vision. And with this schoolboy, pausing as I have suggested on the brink of Thackeray or Dickens, a translation of Don Quixote has the best chance of success. Its defects will be of such a nature as will mar the man's enjoyment, but not his. It will give him the gallant gentleman pricked by a noble contempt for the ignoble triumphant and for the acquiescent many; he shall have there the lofty disregard of facts that hedge in housekeepers, barbers, and parsons; he shall find courage, endurance, knightliness, and reverence for woman. After a boy has once been squire to Sir Kenneth, to Ivanhoe, and to Claverhouse, what business has he in life but to right wrongs, to succor maidens, and to relieve widows and all who are desolate and oppressed? What if this gallant gentleman be a monomaniac, and be subjected to disasters at the hands of farmyard louts and tavern skinkers, by windmills and galley slaves: must not Ivanhoe's squire march through Vanity Fair and lodge in Bleak House, his long breeches unentangled in spurs, and his chief weapon of offense carried in his waistcoat pocket? Carducci says

that he read Don Quixote for the first time when a boy, and that then he "did not know the irony that God put into the world, and which the great poet had imitated in his little world of print and paper." Carducci is mistaken; there is no question of knowledge and ignorance. The boy has his world as heavy to an ounce, weighed in scales of avoirdupois, as that of a man of fifty, and there is no irony in it. The boy is not the subject of illusion; there is in fact no irony there. The man of fifty, le soi-disant désillusionné, is certainly on the border of presumption, to say that it is there, and then to call the boy an ignoramus. To be sure, he commonly couples his offensive epithet with some mitigating adjective, as "happy fool," or thus, "his pretty ignorance." But in place of the adjective there should be an apology. Every man is born into a house where there is a chamber full of veritable chronicles of Tristram and Launcelot, of Roland and Rinaldo di Mont' Albano; and if his housekeeper, his barber, and his parson wall up the door and tell him that Freston el gran encantador has swooped down on dragon back and carried it off by night, his acceptance of their assertions and his lofty compassion for his old illusions furnish but poor proof of wisdom. Such men, be sure, have followed too rashly in their youth some false adventurer into the world of thought, and their fifty years, like the monks of St. Cuthbert's Isle, have walled them up for punishment. There let them lie "like mutines in the bilboes." But however that may be, " mas vale buena esperanza que ruin possession."

It is for the boy that a good translation should be made, and that might be done; one in which Don Quixote shall talk like a scholarly gentleman, and in which there shall be no conscious grin of the translator spoiling the whole, as in that wretched version by Motteux. The boy wants two qualities in his books, enthusiasm and loyalty; and here he has

them jogging on side by side through four good volumes. Sainte-Beuve says that Joubert's notion of enthusiasm was une paix élevée; a boy's idea is la guerre élevée, and Cervantes was of that mind. He was a soldier of the best kind, fighting for Europe against Asia at Lepanto, and esteeming his lost arm the most honorable member of his body. Don Quixote is the incarnation of enthusiasm; and what loyalty was ever like Sancho's, even to the death-bed where he beseeches Don Quixote to live many years, “for it would be the utmost foolishness to die when no one had murdered him"! There are many who are loyal to a friend's deeds, and some to his faults, but to be loyal to another's dreams and visions is the privilege of very few. Besides, the boy demands incident, and here there is the greatest variety of adventure, of that delightful kind that happens in La Mancha without having to be sought in Trebisond or Cathay.

Another reason for a good translation is that Don Quixote is the first modern novel. It is the last of the romances of chivalry and the first novel; and as, on the whole, most of the great novels are English novels (for what other language can show a like richness to Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, Rob Roy, Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, Adam Bede, and The Scarlet Letter?), there should be an adequate English version of it. So many novels of much skill and force are written nowadays that we are too often swayed in our judgment of them by the pulse of the year or of the decade. Were it not well, after reading Mr. Meredith or Mr. Moore, to take our bearings by a mark that has withstood the changing sentiments of ten generations of mortal men? "You cannot fool all the people all the time." Men during three hundred years are of so many minds, and have such diverse dispositions and temperaments, and are placed in such different circumstances, with various passions and prejudices, that

any book that receives the suffrage of all is proved to be, to use Sainte-Beuve's phrase, un livre de l'humanité. By going back to these great human books we learn to keep our scales truly adjusted. Goethe said that every year he was wont to read over a play by Molière.

There have been a great many theories about the book, speculations as to what purpose Cervantes had in view when he wrote it. The chief two are that he intended a burlesque upon romances of knight-errantry, and that he intended an allegorical satire upon human enthusiasm. Doubtless he began with the purpose of ridiculing the old romances, but, as Carducci says, genius gallops ahead of its charioteer. By the seventh chapter he found himself with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza seeking adventures in La Mancha; and he had in his heart a deep and serious knowledge of life, and in his brain wit and fancy such that the world has but once had better, and he wrote. Men must express the deep feelings within them: the common man to one or two by words and acts and silence, the man of genius to the world by such means as nature has made easiest for him. In Spain, since the invention of printing, the one form of popular literature had been the romance of knighterrantry. The three great cycles of romantic fiction of King Arthur and the Round Table, of Charlemagne and his Paladins, and of the Greek empires founded by Alexander the Great — had spread all over western Europe, and had long before served their office. Their place in Spain was filled by the romances of knight-errantry. Of these, the first and best was Amadis of Gaul, which was probably written in Castile about the year 1350. The old version has been long lost, but Garci-Ordoñez de Montalvo wrote a new one some time after the conquest of Granada, which obtained wide popularity and still exists. The success of this was so brilliant that a great many books were written in imita