Litchfield enquirer., 1879-02-13

aware that there existed any obstacle to the accuracy of his decisions, but gave his opinion with a good deal of authority, which might have surprised me had not so frequently heard Latin scholars do exactly the same thing. My French friend read 'Claribel" in a ridiculous manner; but English scholars all read Latin poetry In manner not less ridicu- lous. You laugh to hear ''Ciaribel" read with a foreign pronunciation, and you see at once the absurdty of affecting to judge of it as poe try before the reader has learned to pronounce the sounds but you dc not laugh to hear Lat in poetry read with foreign pronunciation, and you no not perceive that we are all of us disqualified, by our profound ignorance of the pronunciation of the ancient Romans, for any competent criticism of their verse; In all poetry in all oratory, in much of the best and most artistic prose-writing also, sound has great influence upon sense great deal is conveyed by it: especially in the way of feeling. If we do not thoroughly know and practice the right pronunciation (and by the right pronunciation I mean that which the au thor himself thought iaa whilst he wrote) we miss those delicate tones and cadences which are in literature like the modulations of the voice in speech. Nor can we properly appre- ciate the artistic choice of beautiful names for persons and places unless we knew the sounds of them quite accurately, and have already in our minds the association belonging to the sounds. Names which are selected with the greatest care by our English poets, and which hold their place like jewels on the finely wrought texture of the verse; lose all their val ue when they are read with a vicious foreign pronunciation. So it must be with Latin poe try when read by an Englishman, and it is probable that we are really quite insensible to the delicate art of verbal selection as it was nraPtinad nj antiquity.
 l know that scholars think that they hear the Roman music still but this is one of the illusions of scholarship. In each country Lat in scholars have adopted conventional style of reading, and the sounds which are in con- formity with that style seem to be musical, whilst other than the accepted sounds seem ri- diculous, and grate harshly on the unaccustom- ed ear. The music which the Englishman hears, or imagines that he hears, in the lan- guage of ancient Rome, is certainly not the mu- sic which the Roman authors intended to note in words. It is as if my Frenchman, having read ''Claribel'' in his own way, had affirmed that he heard the music of the verse. If he heard music at all it was not Tennyson's
 Permit me to add few observations about sense. My French friend certainly under stood English in very remarkable manner for student who had never visited our coun- try he knew the dictionary meaning of every word he encountered, and yet there ever ra- mained between him and our English tongue a barrier or wall of separation. hard to define, but easy to perceive. In the true deep sense he never understood the language. He stud jed it, laid regular siege to It, mastered it to all appearance, yet remained, to the end out side of it. His observations, and especially his unfavorable criticisms, proved this quite exclusively. Expressions often appeared to him faulty, in which no English reader would see anything to remark upon; it may be added that(by way of compensation)he was unable to appreciate the oddity of those intentionally quaint forms of expression which are invented by the craft of humorists. It may even be doubted whether his English was of any ascer- tainable use to him. He might probably have come as near to an understanding of our au- thors by the help of translations, and he could not converse in English, for the spoken language was entirely unintelligible to him. An acquisition of this kind seems scarcely an adequate reward for the labor that it costs Compared with living Englishmen my French friend was nowhere, but if English had been a dead language, he would have been looked 6ssvat t4 aasa as very eminent scholar, and would ," ,,eas: occupied prUfossor's chair in the uni