ON

ENGLISH LITERATURE

BY

EDMOND SCHERER

TRANSLATED BY

GEORGE SAINTSBURY

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1891

[All rights reserved]

PREFACE

WHEN I was asked by Mr. Stuart Reid-to whom M. Scherer himself had some years ago indicated the essays in which he would like to be presented to the English public-whether I would undertake the present book, I was pleased with the commission for three reasons, two private and one public. In the first place, translation, though there has been some dispute as to its effect on the reader, is most undoubtedly good for the soul of the translator, especially if he be a critic by profession. Nothing creates, and nothing maintains, that sense of difference as between language and language, which is one of the most important points in criticism, so well as the effort to transfer the effect of one into the other. In the second place it had so happened that M. Scherer, not very long before his own death, had written at some length a criticism of a work of my own, which I think I may describe at once naturally and sufficiently by saying that it did not strike my perhaps prej

udiced eyes as the happiest instance of his critical powers. Now I should certainly have preferred that M. Scherer should praise me. "Every fellow," as we know, "likes a hand." And I do not know that I can plead guilty to the charge of being pigeon-livered and lacking gall. But I had understood, years before, the differences in point of view, in taste, and so forth, which not only made it impossible for M. Scherer to sympathize with my criticism of the literature of his own language, but made it even possible for him, a most accurate and conscientious critic, to some extent to misrepresent it. Tout comprendre (as we also know) c'est tout pardonner. And consequently I was very glad to have an opportunity of raising a little pile of coals of fire on M. Scherer's defunct head; an occupation as interesting to the man of humor as it is creditable in the eyes of the philosopher and the divine.

But neither of these reasons would have induced me to undertake a task which, however useful it may be as an exercise and agreeable as a revanche, is much more troublesome than original composition, if I had not also thought that such wellnourished and robust criticism as M. Scherer's is