Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 Part 2

Neither, unfortunately, is there any sure guarantee that the mistakes, which it is now almost universally admitted were made, will not recur.

Where, indeed, are we to look for any effective check? The rulers of India, whether they sit in Calcutta or London, may again be carried away by the partial views of an influential cla.s.s, or of a few masterful individuals. It is absurd to speak of creating free inst.i.tutions in India to control the Indian Government. Experience has shown that parliamentary action in England not infrequently degenerates into acrimonious discussion and recrimination dictated by party pa.s.sion; in any case, it is generally too late to change the course of events. Still less reliance can be placed on the action of the British Press, which falls a ready victim to the specious arguments advanced by some strategical pseudo-Imperialist in high position, or by some fervent acolyte who has learnt at the feet of his master the fatal and facile lesson of how an Empire, built up by statesmen, may be wrecked by the well-intentioned but mistaken measures recommended by specialists to ensure Imperial salvation. The managers of the London newspapers afford, indeed, be it said to their credit, every facility for the publication of views adverse to those which they themselves advocate. But it is none the less true that, during the years when the unwise frontier policy of a few years ago was being planned and executed, the voices of the opposition, although they were those of Indian statesmen and officials who could speak with the highest authority, failed to obtain an adequate hearing until the evil was irremediable. On the other hand, the views of the strategical specialists went abroad over the land, with the result that ill-informed and careless public opinion followed their advice without having any very precise idea of whither it was being led.

It would appear, therefore, that there is need for great care and watchfulness in the management of Indian affairs. That same inconsistency of character and absence of definite aim, which are such notable Anglo-Saxon qualities and which adapt themselves so admirably to the requirements of Imperial rule, may in some respects const.i.tute an additional danger. If we are not to adopt a policy based on securing the contentment of the subject race by ministering to their material interests, we must of necessity make a distinct approach to the counter-policy of governing by the sword alone. In that case, it would be as well not to allow a free native Press, or to encourage high education. Any repressive or retrograde measures in either of these directions would, without doubt, meet with strong and, to a great extent, reasonable opposition in England. A large section of the public, forgetful of the fact that they had stood pa.s.sively by whilst measures, such as the imposition of increased taxes, which the natives of India really resent, were adopted, would protest loudly against the adoption of other measures which are, indeed, open to objection, but which nevertheless touch Oriental in a far less degree than they affect Western public feeling. The result of this inconsistency is that our present system rather tends to turn out demagogues from our colleges, to give them every facility for sowing their subversive views broadcast over the land, and at the same time to prepare the ground for the reception of the seed which they sow. Now this is the very reverse of a sound Imperial policy. We cannot, it is true, effectually prevent the manufacture of demagogues without adopting measures which would render us false to our acknowledged principles of government and to our civilising mission. But we may govern in such a manner as to give the demagogue no fulcrum with which to move his credulous and ill-informed countrymen and co-religionists. The leading principle of a government of this nature should be that low taxation is the most potent instrument with which to conjure discontent. This is the policy which will tend more than any other to the stability of Imperial rule. If it is to be adopted, two elements of British society will have to be kept in check at the hands of the statesman acting in concert with the moralist. These are Militarism and Commercial Egotism. The Empire depends in a great degree on the strength and efficiency of its army. It thrives on its commerce. But if the soldier and the trader are not kept under some degree of statesmanlike control, they are capable of becoming the most formidable, though unconscious, enemies of the British Empire.

It will be seen, therefore, that though there are some disquieting circ.u.mstances attendant on our Imperial rule, the general result of an examination into the causes which led to the collapse of Roman power, and a comparison of those causes with the principles on which the British Empire is governed, are, on the whole, encouraging. To every danger which threatens there is a safeguard. To every portion of the body politic in which symptoms of disease may occur, it is possible to apply a remedy.

Christianity is our most powerful ally. We are the sworn enemies of the slave-dealer and the slave-owner. The dangers arising from the possible pauperisation of the proletariat may, it is to be hoped, be averted by our national character and by the natural play of our time-honoured inst.i.tutions. If we adhere steadily to the principle that local revenues are to be expended locally, and if, at the same time, we give all reasonable encouragement to local self-government and shun any tendency towards over-centralisation, we shall steer clear of one of the rocks on which the Roman ship of state was wrecked. Unskilful or unwise finance is our greatest danger, but here again the remedy lies ready to hand if we are wise enough to avail ourselves of it. It consists in adapting our fiscal methods to the requirements of our subject races, and still more in the steadfast rejection of any proposals which, by rendering high taxation inevitable, will infringe the cardinal principle on which a sound Imperial policy should be based. That principle is that, whilst the sword should be always ready for use, it should be kept in reserve for great emergencies, and that we should endeavour to find, in the contentment of the subject race, a more worthy and, it may be hoped, a stronger bond of union between the rulers and the ruled.

If any more sweeping generalisation than this is required, it may be said that the whole, or nearly the whole, of the essential points of a sound Imperial policy admit of being embodied in this one statement, that, whilst steadily avoiding any movement in the direction of official proselytism, our relations with the various races who are subjects of the King of England should be founded on the granite rock of the Christian moral code.

Humanity, as it pa.s.ses through phase after phase of the historical movement, may advance indefinitely in excellence; but its advance will be an indefinite approximation to the Christian type. A divergence from that type, to whatever extent it may take place, will not be progress, but debas.e.m.e.nt and corruption. In a moral point of view, in short, the world may abandon Christianity, but can never advance beyond it. This is not a matter of authority, or even of revelation. If it is true, it is a matter of reason as much as anything in the world.[23]

[Footnote 1: _Italy and Her Invaders_. Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892.]

[Footnote 2: Male imperando summum imperium amitt.i.tur.--PUBLIUS SYRUS.]

[Footnote 3: _Decline and Fall_, chap. xx.]

[Footnote 4: Any one who wishes to gain an insight into the fundamental principles which governed those relations cannot do better than read the opening chapters of Sorel's _L'Europe et la Revolution Francaise_.]

[Footnote 5: Ecclesiastes i. 9.]

[Footnote 6: _Life and Letters of Sir James Graham_, vol. ii. p. 328.]

[Footnote 7: Lord Farrer says: "It is the privilege of honourable trade that, like mercy, it is twice blessed; it blesseth him that gives and him that takes; each of its dealings is of necessity a benefit to both parties. But traders and speculators are not always the most scrupulous of mankind. Their dealings with savage and half-civilised nations too often betray sharp practice, sometimes violence and wrong. The persons who carry on our trade on the outskirts of civilisation are not distinguished by a special appreciation of the rights of others, nor are the speculators, who are attracted by the enormous profits to be made by precarious investments in half-civilised countries, people in whose hands we should desire to place the fortunes or reputation of our country. When a difficulty arises between ourselves and one of the weaker nations, these are the persons whose voice is most loudly raised for acts of violence, of aggression, or of revenge."--_The State in its Relation to Trade_, p. 177.]

[Footnote 8: It should never be forgotten that, in Oriental countries, whatever good is done to the ma.s.ses is necessarily purchased at the expense of incurring the resentment of the ruling cla.s.ses, who abused the power they formerly possessed. Seeley (_Expansion of England_, p.

320) says with great truth: "It would be very rash to a.s.sume that any grat.i.tude, which may have been aroused here and there by our administration, can be more than sufficient to counterbalance the discontent which we have excited among those whom we have ousted from authority and influence."]

[Footnote 9: Juvenal, xiv. 176-8.]

[Footnote 10: "La superiorite des Anglo-Saxons! Si on ne la proclame pas, on la subit et on la redoute; les craintes, les mefiances et parfois les haines que souleve l'Anglais l'attestent a.s.sez haut....

"Nous ne pouvons faire un pas a travers le monde, sans rencontrer l'Anglais. Nous ne pouvons jeter les yeux sur nos anciennes possessions, sans y voir flotter le pavilion anglais." _A Quoi tient la Superiorite des Anglo-Saxons?_--Demolins. This work, as well as another on much the same subject (_L'Europa giovane_, by Guglielmo Ferrero), were reviewed in the _Edinburgh Review_ for January 1898.]

[Footnote 11: _Vie de Turgot_, i. 47. In the debate on the India Act in 1858, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, whose views were generally distinguished for their moderation, said: "I do most confidently maintain that no civilised Government ever existed on the face of this earth which was more corrupt, more perfidious, and more capricious than the East India Company was from 1758 to 1784, when it was placed under Parliamentary control."]

[Footnote 12: "It still remains true that there is a large body of public opinion in England which carries into all politics a sound moral sense, and which places a just and righteous policy higher than any mere party interest. It is on the power and pressure of this opinion that the high character of English government must ultimately depend."--_Map of Life_, Lecky, p. 184. It will be a matter for surprise if the ultra-bureaucratic spirit, coupled with a somewhat p.r.o.nounced degree of commercial egotism, do not prove the two rocks on which German colonial enterprise will be eventually shipwrecked.]

[Footnote 13: Butcher, _Some Aspects of the Greek Genius_, p. 27.]

[Footnote 14: _Essays_. "Of Honour and Reputation."]

[Footnote 15: _Sir Charles Wood's Administration of Indian Affairs, 1859-66._ West. 1867. Sir Algernon West was Private Secretary to Sir Charles Wood, afterwards Lord Halifax, who was the first Secretary of State for India appointed after the pa.s.sing of the India Act of 1858, and, therefore, inaugurated the new system.]

[Footnote 16: See, _inter alia_, Chesney's _Indian Polity_, p. 136.]

[Footnote 17: Perhaps the best-known example is "Salus populi suprema lex esto," a maxim which, as Selden has pointed out (_Table Talk_, ciii.), is very frequently misapplied. See also the advice given by the Emperor Claudius to the Parthian Mithridates (Tacitus, _Ann._ xii. 11).]

[Footnote 18: "The idea of forcing everything to an artificial equality has something, at first view, very captivating in it. It has all the appearance imaginable of justice and good order; and very many persons, without any sort of partial purposes, have been led to adopt such schemes, and to pursue them with great earnestness and warmth. Though I have no doubt that the minute, laborious, and very expensive _cadastre_, which was made by the King of Sardinia, has done no sort of good, and that after all his pains a few years will restore all things to their first inequality, yet it has been the admiration of half the reforming financiers of Europe; I mean the official financiers, as well as the speculative."--_Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis_, ii. 126.]

[Footnote 19: Mill, _History of British India_, vi. 433.]

[Footnote 20: Elphinstone, _History of India_, p. 77.]

[Footnote 21: Lord Lawrence said: "Light taxation is, in my mind, the panacea for foreign rule in India." Bosworth Smith, _Life of Lord Lawrence_, vol. ii. p. 497.]

[Footnote 22: The essential portions of this despatch, in so far as the purposes of the present argument are concerned, are given in Sir Richard Temple's work (p. 185), and in Bosworth Smith's _Life of Lord Lawrence_, vol. ii. p. 186.]

[Footnote 23: Goldwin Smith, _Lectures on the Study of History_, p.

154.]

II

TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE

_"The Edinburgh Review," July 1913_

When Emerson said "We like everything to do its office, whether it be a milch-cow or a rattlesnake," he a.s.sumed, perhaps somewhat too hastily in the latter case, that all the world understands the functions which a milch-cow or a rattlesnake is called upon to perform. No one can doubt that the office of a translator is to translate, but a wide difference of opinion may exist, and, in fact, has always existed, as to the lat.i.tude which he may allow himself in translating. Is he to adhere rigidly to a literal rendering of the original text, or is paraphrase permissible, and, if permissible, within what limits may it be adopted?

In deciding which of these courses to pursue, the translator stands between Scylla and Charybdis. If he departs too widely from the precise words of the text, he incurs the blame of the purist, who will accuse him of foisting language on the original author which the latter never employed, with the possible result that even the ideas or sentiments which it had been intended to convey have been disfigured. If, on the other hand, he renders word for word, he will often find, more especially if his translation be in verse, that in a cacophonous attempt to force the genius of one language into an unnatural channel, the whole of the beauty and even, possibly, some of the real meaning of the original have been allowed to evaporate. Dr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, in an instructive article on Translation contributed to the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ quotes the high authority of Dryden as to the course which should be followed in the execution of an ideal translation.

A translator (Dryden writes) that would write with any force or spirit of an original must never dwell on the words of his author.

He ought to possess himself entirely, and perfectly comprehend the genius and sense of his author, the nature of the subject, and the terms of the art or subject treated of; and then he will express himself as justly, and with as much life, as if he wrote an original; whereas he who copies word for word loses all the spirit in the tedious transfusion.

In the application of Dryden's canon a distinction has to be made between prose and verse. The composition of good prose, which Coleridge described as "words in the right order," is, indeed, of the utmost importance for all the purposes of the historian, the writer on philosophy, or the orator. An example of the manner in which fine prose can bring to the mind a vivid conception of a striking event is Jeremy Collier's description of Cranmer's death, which excited the enthusiastic admiration of Mr. Gladstone.[24] He seemed [Collier wrote] "to repel the force of the fire and to overlook the torture, by strength of thought."

Nevertheless, the main object of the prose writer, and still more of the orator, should be to state his facts or to prove his case. Cato laid down the very sound principle "rem tene, verba sequentur," and Quintilian held that "no speaker, when important interests are involved, should be very solicitous about his words." It is true that this principle is one that has been more often honoured in the breach than the observance. Lucian, in his _Lexiphanes_,[25] directs the shafts of his keen satire against the meticulous attention to phraseology practised by his contemporaries. Cardinal Bembo sacrificed substance to form to the extent of advising young men not to read St. Paul for fear that their style should be injured, and Professor Saintsbury[26]

mentions the case of a French author, Paul de Saint-Victor, who "used, when sitting down to write, to put words that had struck his fancy at intervals over the sheet, and write his matter in and up to them." These are instances of that word-worship run mad which has not infrequently led to dire results, inasmuch as it has tended to engender the belief that statesmanship is synonymous with fine writing or perfervid oratory.

The oratory in which Demosthenes excelled, Professor Bury says,[27] "was one of the curses of Greek politics."

The attention paid by the ancients to what may be termed tricks of style has probably in some degree enhanced the difficulties of prose translation. It may not always be easy in a foreign language to reproduce the subtle linguistic shades of Demosthenic oratory--the Anaphora (repet.i.tion of the same word at the beginning of co-ordinate sentences following one another), the Anastrophe (the final word of a sentence repeated at the beginning of one immediately following), the Polysyndeton (the same conjunction repeated), or the Epidiorthosis (the correction of an expression). Nevertheless, in dealing with a prose composition, the weight of the arguments, the lucidity with which the facts are set forth, and the force with which the conclusions are driven home, rank, or should rank, in the mind of the reader higher than any feelings which are derived from the music of the words or the skilful order in which they are arranged. Moreover, in prose more frequently than in verse, it is the beauty of the idea expressed which attracts rather than the language in which it is clothed. Thus, for instance, there can be no difficulty in translating the celebrated metaphor of Pericles[28] that "the loss of the youth of the city was as if the spring was taken out of the year," because the beauty of the idea can in no way suffer by presenting it in English, French, or German rather than in the original Greek. Again, to quote another instance from Latin, the fine epitaph to St. Ovinus in Ely Cathedral: "Lucem tuam Ovino da, Deus, et requiem," loses nothing of its terse pathos by being rendered into English. Occasionally, indeed, the truth is forced upon us that even in prose "a thing may be well said once but cannot be well said twice" (t?

?a??? e?pe?? ?pa? pe??????eta?, d?? d? ??? ??d??eta?), but this is generally because the genius of one language lends itself with special ease to some singularly felicitous and often epigrammatic form of expression which is almost or sometimes even quite untranslatable. Who, for instance, would dare to translate into English the following description which the d.u.c.h.esse de Dino[29] gave of a lady of her acquaintance: "Elle n'a jamais ete jolie, mais elle etait blanche et fraiche, _avec quelques jolis details"_? On the whole, however, it may be said that if the prose translator is thoroughly well acquainted with both of the languages which he has to handle, he ought to be able to pay adequate homage to the genius of the one without offering undue violence to that of the other.

The case of the translator of poetry, which Coleridge defined as "the best words in the best order," is manifestly very different. A phrase which is harmonious or pregnant with fire in one language may become discordant, flat, and vapid when translated into another. Sh.e.l.ley spoke of "the vanity of translation." "It were as wise (he said) to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet."

Longinus has told us[30] that "beautiful words are the very light of thought" (f?? ??? t? ??t? ?d??? t?? ??? t? ?a?? ???ata), but it will often happen, in reading a fine pa.s.sage, that on a.n.a.lysing the sentiments evoked, it is difficult to decide whether they are due to the thought or to the beauty of the words. A mere word, as in the case of Edgar Poe's "Nevermore," has at times inspired a poet. When Keats, speaking of Melancholy, says:

She lives with Beauty--Beauty that must die-- And Joy, whose hand is ever on his lips, Bidding adieu,

or when Mrs. Browning writes:

... Young As Eve with Nature's daybreak on her face,

the pleasure, both of sense and sentiment, is in each case derived alike from the music of the language and the beauty of the ideas. But in such lines as

Arethusa arose from her couch of snows, etc.,