oices of
a few recalcitrants, voices which become louder and more numerous as the
century advances; in the nineteenth century the most casual survey
discovers conflicting views on matters of fundamental importance to the
translator. Who are to be the readers, who the judges, of a translation
are obviously questions of primary significance to both translator and
critic, but they are questions which have never been authoritatively
settled. When, for example, Caxton in the fifteenth century uses the
"curious" terms which he thinks will appeal to a clerk or a noble
gentleman, his critics complain because the common people cannot
understand his words. A similar situation appears in modern times when
Arnold lays down the law that the judges of an English version of Homer
must be "scholars, because scholars alone have the means of really
judging him," and Newman replies that "scholars are the tribunal of
Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public must be the
only rightful judge."

Again, critics have been hesitant in defining the all-important term
"faithfulness." To one writer fidelity may imply a reproduction of his
original as nearly as possible word for word and line for line; to
another it may mean an attempt to carry over into English the spirit of
the original, at the sacrifice, where necessary, not only of the exact
words but of the exact substance of his source. The one extreme is
likely to result in an awkward, more or less unintelligible version; the
other, as illustrated, for example, by Pope's _Homer_, may give us a
work so modified by the personality of the translator or by the
prevailing taste of his time as to be almost a new creation. But while
it is easy to point out the defects of the two methods, few critics have
had the courage to give fair consideration to both possibilities; to
treat the two aims, not as mutually exclusive, but as complementary; to
realize that the spirit and the letter may be not two but one. In the
sixteenth century Sir Thomas North translated from the French Amyot's
wise observation: "The office of a fit translator consisteth not only in
the faithful expressing of his author's meaning, but also in a certain
resembling and shadowing forth of the form of his style and manner of
his speaking"; but few English critics, in the period under our
consideration, grasped thus firmly the essential connection between
thought and style and the consequent responsibility of the transl