have been considering-not excepting the styles of Gibbon or Macaulay. It is the necessarily limited range of their power. You can not appeal to the largest possible audience with a scholarly style. And what is worse, every such style, being artificial more than natural, contains within itself certain elements of corruption and dissolution. We have to read Sir Thomas Browne with a glossary to-day-that is, if we wish to be very exact in our renderings of his thoughts; you will find an extensive glossary attached to his work. This you will not find in Gibbon or Macaulay, but this is only because they are still near to us in time. For all that, the language of the former is now found to be decidedly old-fashioned, notwithstanding its beauty; and the study of the latter will probably become old-fashioned during the present century. It is quite otherwise in the case of that simple northern style, of which I gave you specimens in a former lecture. That never can become old-fashioned, even though the language die in which it was originally written. Containing nothing artificial, it also contains no element of decay. It can impress equally well the most learned and the most ignorant minds, and if we have to make a choice at all between their perfectly plain style and the gorgeous music and colours of Sir Thomas Browne, I should not hesitate for a moment to tell you that the simple style is much the better. However, that is not a reason for refusing to give to the classic writers the praise and admiration which they have so justly earned.

III
BJÖRNSON

BEFORE studying some further wonderful prose I want to speak to you about what I believe to be a wide-spread and very harmful delusion in Japan. I mean the delusion that students of English literature ought to study in English only the books originally written in English,-not English translations from other languages. Of course, in these times, I acknowledge that there is some reason for distrust of translations. Translations are made very quickly and very badly, only for the purpose of gaining money, and a vast amount of modern translation is absolute trash, but it is very different in the case of foreign works which have been long adopted into the English language, and which have become practically a common possession of Englishmen,such as the translation of the "Arabian Nights," the grand prose translation of Goethe's "Faust," the translation of "Wilhelm Meister" by Carlyle, the translation of “Undine” which every boy reads, to mention only a few things at random. So with the translations of the great Italian and Spanish and Russian writers,—not to speak of French writers. In fact, if Englishmen had studied only English literature, English literature would never have become developed as it is now. And if Englishmen had studied foreign literature only in the original tongue, English literature would still have made very little progress. It has been through thousands of translations, not through scholarly study, that the best of our poetry, the best of our fiction, the best of our prose has been modified and improved by foreign influence. As I once before told you, the development of literature is only in a very limited degree the work of the scholars. The great scholars are seldom producers

This grewsome joke shows that the young man would have preferred the father to die fighting. But the old folks were busy enough in preparing the little boy for death. It is a terrible story,—an atrociously cruel one; but it shows great nobility of character in the victims, and the reader is moved in spite of himself by this most simple relation of fact.

Now perhaps you will think that this simple style can only produce such effects when the subject matter of the narrative is itself of a terrible or startling or extraordinary character. I am quite sure that this is not true, because I find exactly the same style in such a modern novel as "Synnövé Solbakken" by Björnson, and I find it in such fairy tales of Andersen as "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Little Mermaid." These simplest subjects are full of wonder and beauty for the eyes that can see and the mind that can think; and with such an eye and such a mind, the simple style is quite enough. How trifling at times are the subjects of Andersen's stories—a child's toy, a plant growing in the field, a snow image, made by children somewhat as we make a snow daruma in the farmyard, a rose-bush under the window. It would be nonsense to say that here the interest depends upon the subject matter! In such a story as "The Little Tin Soldier" we are really affected almost as much as by the story of Eyjolf in the old saga-simply because the old saga-teller and the modern story-teller wrote and thought very much in the same way. Or take another subject, of a more complicated character, the story of the "Nightingale of the Emperor of China and the Nightingale of the Emperor of Japan." There is a great deal more meaning here than the pretty narrative itself shows upon the surface. The whole idea is the history of our human life, the life of the artist, and his inability to obtain just recognition, and the power of the humbug to ignore him. It is a very profound story indeed; and there are pages in it which one can scarcely read with dry eyes. It affects us both intellectually and emotionally to an extraordinary de

gree; but the style is still the style of the old sagas. Of course I must acknowledge that Andersen uses a few more adjectives than the Icelandic writers did, but you will find, on examining him closely, that he does not use them when he can help it. Now the other style that I was telling you about, the modern artistic style, uses adjectives almost as profusely as in poetry. I do not wish to speak badly of it; but scarcely any writer who uses it has been able to give so powerful an impression as the Norse writers who never used it at all.

In the simple style there is something of the genius of the race. After all, any great literary manner must have its foundation in race character. The manner that I have been describing is an evidence of northern race character at its very best. Quite incidentally I may observe here that another northern race, which has produced a literature only in very recent times, shows something of the same simple force of plain style,-I mean Russian literature. The great modern Russian writers, most of all, resemble the old Norse writers in their management of effects with few words. But my purpose in this lecture has been especially to suggest to you a possible resemblance between old Japanese literary methods and these old northern literary methods. I imagine that the northern simple art accords better with Japanese genius than ever could the more elaborate forms of literature, based upon the old classic studies.

mixed with Italian and Spanish. In the Elizabethan Age, education was not so widely diffused, but we know that the young people of those times used to read Spanish novels and stories, and that no less than one hundred and seventy Spanish books were then translated.

I think you will see from all this that English literature actually depends for its vitality upon translations, and that the minds of English youth are by no means formed through purely English influences. Observe that I have not said anything about the study of Greek and Latin, which are more than foreign influences; they are actually influences from another vanished world. Nor have I said anything about the influence of religious literature, vast as it is-Hebrew literature, literature of the Bible, on which are based the prayers that children learn at their mother's knee. Really, instead of being the principal factor in English education, English literature occupies quite a small place. If an Englishman only knew English literature, he would know very little indeed. The best of his literature may be in English; he has Shakespeare, for example; but the greater part of it is certainly not English, and even to-day its yearly production is being more and more affected by the ideas of France and Italy and Russia and Sweden and Norway-without mentioning the new influences from many Oriental countries.

No: you should think of any foreign language that you are able to acquire, not as the medium for expressing only the thoughts of one people, but as a medium through which you can obtain the best thought of the world. If you can not read Russian, why not read the Russian novelists in English or French? Perhaps you can not read Italian or Spanish; but that is no reason why you should not know the poems of Petrarch and Ariosto, or the dramas of Calderon. If you do not know Portuguese, there is a good English translation of Camoens. I suppose that in Tokyo very few persons know Finnish; but the wonderful epic of