Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. ¶ He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. ¶ Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
But passive renunciation is not the whole of wisdom; for not by renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs to whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.
A rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius than hit the mark with the crowd… This violent struggle for the perpetuation of our name extends backwards into the past, just as it aspires to conquer the future; we contend with the dead because we, the living, are obscured beneath their shadow. We are jealous of the geniuses of former times, whose names, standing out like the landmarks of history, rescue the ages from oblivion. The heaven of fame is not very large, and the more there are who enter it the less is the share of each. The great names of the past rob us of our place in it; the space which they fill in the popular memory they usurp from us who aspire to occupy it. And so we rise up in revolt against them, and hence the bitterness with which all those who seek after fame in the world of letters judge those who have already attained it and are in enjoyment of it.
Need is that I bring to a conclusion, for the present at any rate, these essays that threaten to become like a tale that has no ending. They have gone straight from my hands to the press in the form of a kind of improvization upon notes collected during a number of years, and in writing each essay I have not had before me any of those that preceded it. And thus they will go forth full of inward contradictions — apparent contradictions, at any rate — like life and like me myself.
Each day I go to my studio full of joy; in the evening when obliged to stop because of darkness I can scarcely wait for the morning to come… My work is not only a pleasure, it has become a necessity. No matter how many other things I have in my life, if I cannot give myself to my dear painting I am miserable.
Every one knows that strictly speaking most words are almost untranslatable. It is always hard to find an exact equivalent for any word which has much meaning. There are no exact synonyms for such words in their own language and nothing precisely corresponding to them in another. But this difficulty is immensely increased when these words have any subtle aroma any particular charm any delicate sentiment attached to them. Then they become absolutely untranslatable. The very quality which distinguishes them disappears when they are transferred into a different phrase. This makes the desperate nature of the attempt to translate poetry from one language into another for a large part of the charm of poetic language lies in the subtle associations connected with each word. We read Virgil or Horace in the best English translations and wonder how they can ever have been considered such great writers. Their peculiar aroma has evaporated while they were being poured from one receptacle into another. The reverse takes place which was suggested in the parable for the old wine has burst the new bottles and the wine has been spilled.
Hence it happens that foreign words are so often transported bodily from one language into another or left untranslated when quoted for any purpose. Words which cannot be translated from the Latin, Greek, French, German are adopted into English and naturalized. Thus every language is enriched by the best phrases of every other. This no doubt often leads to pedantry conscious or unconscious. Foreign words are used when English ones would do as well or better So we have introduced the German word hand book when we already had a word with precisely the same meaning manual and with a better sound But generally these immigrations from foreign parts enrich our own literature.
Sometimes words are left untranslated because they seem untranslatable. Shakspeare has done this as when the dying Cæsar reproaches Brutus with the words. “And thou, too, Brutus!” Shakspeare has left it in the Latin Et tu, Brute! Then die Cæsar.” There seems something incongruous in putting a Latin and an English clause together in the same line But Shakspeare no doubt found something in the Latin to which no English words not even his own could do justice The English and German Bibles as translations are as nearly perfect as anything can be. I mean as a whole and in their impression on the mind.
There are errors no doubt which ought to be corrected but the simplicity pathos sublimity of the language cannot be surpassed In these great Teutonic tongues strength and tenderness blend as in the original writings Unfortunately the language which was spoken by Jesus and his disciples in Galilee has disappeared There is no gospel extant in the words which were uttered on the lake shore or in Capernaum A few fragments however of that old speech remain in the New Testament certain words so full of tender and heavenly associations that they were left untranslated in the Greek gospels and still remain untranslated in our English Testament Of these I will mention five four of thein uttered by Jesus and one by Mary Magdalene Two of these were expressions of power one was a cry of anguish another was an utterance of ununspeakable tenderness the last of the most ardent faith We read that Jairus the ruler of the synagogue came to Jesus earnestly praying him to come and heal his little daughter who was at the point of death Jesus comes to the house goes into the room with only three of his disciples Peter James and John and the father and mother of the little girl who was twelve years old Having put out those whom he found in the room he called saying Maid arise This is what Luke says who of course was not present Matthew
It seems to me it’s a painter’s duty to try to put an idea into his work. In this print I have tried to express what seems to me one of the strongest proofs of the existence of the “quelque chose l’-haut” [something on high] in which Millet believed, namely the existence of God and eternity… ¶ [It is] certainly in the infinitely touching expression of a little old man, which he himself is unconscious of, when he is sitting quietly in the corner by the fire. At the same time, there is something noble, something great, which cannot be destined for the worms… This is far from all theology, simply the fact that the poorest little woodcutter or peasant on the hearth or miner can have moments of emotion and inspiration that give him a feeling of an eternal home, and of being close to it.