English experiments; and my confident belief is that, in the most conspicuous cases of failure both here and on the Continent, the causes which led to the break-down can be distinctly shown to have been extraneous to the principle of participation.

A more satisfactory mode of investigating the adaptability of the system to English circumstances lies in ascertaining, first, what are the conditions under which it promises an economic success, and next, whether those conditions hold to any important extent in this country.

The fund on which participation draws is the surplus profit realised in consequence of the enhanced efficiency of the work done under its stimulating influence. Such extra profit is, therefore, obtainable wherever workmen have it in their power to increase the quantity, improve the quality, or diminish the cost price of their staple of production by more effective exertion, by increased economy in the use of tools and materials, or by a reduction in the costs of superintendence. In other words, the surplus profit realisable will depend on the influence which manual labour is capable of exerting upon production. Evidently, therefore, this influence will be greatest in branches of industry where the skill of the labourer plays the leading part, where the outlay on tools and materials bears a small ratio to the cost of production, and where individual superintendence is difficult and expensive. It will, on the contrary, be least effective in industries where mechanism is the principal agency, where the interest on capital fixed in machinery is the chief element of cost price, and where the workmen, assembled in large factories, can be easily and effectively superintended.

Participation would, therefore, be applied with the best prospects of success to such industries as agriculture, mining, building, carpentering, decorating, &c., where wages form a leading element of cost; while the least promising field would be supplied by cotton-spinning, weaving, and other machine-dominated branches of production. That agriculture offers a peculiarly valuable opening will not be doubted by those who are acquainted with the extraordinary results attained during Mr. John Scott Vandeleur's Irish experiment at Ralahine in the years 1831-3, where an intelligently planned system of profitsharing secured a complete local triumph over an acute crisis of agrarian discontent and outrage.9

In coal-mining I am assured on excellent authority that a great amount of preventible waste is occasioned by timber, plates, &c., being carelessly buried under débris and thus finally lost. That

See Pare's Co-operative Agriculture, Longmans, 1870, and a series of papers commenced in the Co-operative News of April 16, 1881, by Mr. E. T. Craig, who was the Secretary, and to a great extent the practical organiser, of the Ralahine Association.' The attention of persons interested in the future of Irish agricultural labourers cannot, at the present conjuncture, be too urgently invited to the details of this startlingly successful and suggestive experiment.

much time is frittered away, and much material and gear wastefully dealt with, by workmen employed in the house-industries to which I have referred, will not be disputed. It is clear, then, that English workmen have it largely in their power to enhance profits by contributing better and more economical labour. That they will be ready to make the more assiduous efforts involved in such labour, as soon as they have thoroughly grasped the motives for increased zeal which participation holds out, appears to me equally certain. If, however, the experiment is to be tried, it is obviously from the employers that the initiative must come. They will, of course, make no trial of the system without a preliminary study of the methods adopted on the Continent, with regard to which so much trustworthy information has now been accumulated by French and German research. In view, however, of the great results which participation seems to promise in raising masses of the labouring population out of the prolétaire or hand-to-mouth class, and thereby drying up a main source of our national pauperism, it is to be hoped that employers of labour, productive or distributive, whether on a large or on a small scale, will consider that a complete examination of the whole subject treated in this article, undertaken with a direct view to practical action, is urgently called for.

SEDLEY TAYLOR.

POSTSCRIPT.

A special Society is now (April) being formed to disseminate in this country translations from the best foreign sources, and other trustworthy information, on Participation in Profits. Persons inclined to join this Society are invited to write to me at Trinity College, Cambridge.

S. T.

FRENCH VERSE IN ENGLISH.

TRANSLATION from so flexible and tender a language as French into our more brutal' English-prose or verse-will always have somewhat the effect of a thing looked at through a magnifying glass. Nor is this an effect to be quite deprecated, inasmuch as it should be better to see too clearly anything that is worth seeing than not to see it at all, provided that one see it in some sort of proportion. Which forms, in the main, my excuse for the verses which I purpose setting forth in this paper; and if they run a chance of offending a critical eye and jarring on a sensitive ear by their directness and the rather cumbersome rules with which I trammel them, I shall try at least to save them from baldness and coarseness, extremes into which practice shows one that such work, so trammelled, is most likely to run. I would add that these renderings are to be regarded as experimental, and were, many of them, written for music.

We have become familiarised of late, to an unprecedented degree, with French originals of all kinds in English dress, and we are always being reminded by the stage and by our lighter reading how little that which charms us most is native here. In the work, for instance, of our young poets, we hear something louder than an echo from French singing of a bygone age, and perhaps the best turn this can serve is the sending us to the originals to find out with how much more grace these very things were first said or sung. Mere translation of such originals need not be an unthankful task. Hard indeed it is to pour the wine from the gold into the silver cup without spilling a drop,' as has once and again been done, but there is a sincere pleasure in handling them so far as to register, however inadequately, each turn of their expression and their thought to enrich another language. I speak only of translation into verse, recognising indeed no other mode of rendering poetry which allows of showing how intimately the small and the great' are there commingled, how much the worth of the whole depends on the arrangement of the parts; and I cannot help thinking that the closer and harder one makes one's rules, the nearer will the likeness of one's translations be to the originals, such at least as are rather fine' than 'broad,' and from these my examples will be mostly taken.

To be brief, then, while in no haste to disparage other ways of work, should this be proved untenable, I want rhythmical and not

seldom syllabic equality, and a variation of rhyme to correspond to the intermixture of the rimes masculines et féminines,' which I see no means of gaining in English but through rhymes in single and double syllables.

Anticipating, although not accepting, the objection that French poetry is not rhythmical, while English verse must be, to suit our taste at all, I propose (in doubtful cases) the test of usual reading for decision of accent in the graver measures, and the test of music in the lyrical.'

There is nothing more painful by way of preface than destructive criticism, and the task were endless did one dare to face it, and always open to the retort of failure; there is risk, moreover, of losing heart and temper over the positive and negative faults of most translators, their selfishness and their want of care. It will be better to begin my examples as early in French literature as I possibly can, and, where I touch upon some poem which has suffered from such treatment, to try and make it illustrate what I say. After all, it is in one's examples that the merits of one's own fashion of translating must be shown; it is by them that it must stand or fall. But there are sundry little books before me highly praised by many courteous readers, which I too would gladly praise for a certain delicacy of touch, were not their demerits of too glaring and detrimental a nature to be lightly passed over. Their tone is misleading and their measures inaccurate, and faults which in less graceful and scholarly volumes would be swamped by coarser faults are here forced into their due prominence. It is bad to give no distinctiveness to the poets of the sixteenth century, to deaden their colour into a uniform grey of regret and spoil their singing; but it is worse for any French student to do this to de Musset and rob him of his satire and his wit as well as his 'intention' and his metrical charm, inasmuch as de Musset, of whom I shall want to give several specimens after my manner, is more definitely French than any other poet of his land. He is modern, direct, Parisian.

What I have to say upon technique, too, will find its place with such of my examples as may call severally for technical explanation, tiresome in the gross unless to some half-dozen readers: but I premise generally that, in the matter of rhymes, I shall count such words as flower' dissyllabic at the end of a line, unless where I may spell them as monosyllables and rhyme them with 'our.' They are in sufficiently marked contrast to the masculine monosyllable (although our rhythmic English will not allow them dissyllabic value), and our double rhymes are too few for us to spare them. He would be overdaring, however I do not say he would be wrong-who should use 'our'

With the musician it rests first to decide the accent in lyrics; but there is also a further responsibility that rests with him, on which there is much to be said, which my subject gives me inclination but not leave to say; disregard of rhyme, of rhythm, and of elision being the fault of nearly all musical settings of French words, saving those by French composers, and sometimes of those too.

and the like spellings of the same sound as dissyllabic, and I shall not venture to do this, though Mr. Rossetti's Song of the Bower proves that no less an artist than he can do so. But then he has not bound himself to dissyllables, and might object that he never meant the other rhymes as such, and that the halves of each stanza are of diverse form. Mr. Rossetti is one of the translators whose perfect work disheartens me, because, while raised above carping by a certain original and poetic touch, it is not amenable to what I cannot but consider as the first rules and tests of translation.

Villon's ballade Of Dead Ladies, for instance, contains but three rhymes, as such a ballade must in French, and should in English, but Mr. Rossetti's version contains no less than eight. His first verse is faultless, but his second does not belong to it as Villon's second does. One could wish it might; only that this can never be!' The companion ballade to this, The Lords of Old Time, has been rendered, with some words of preface too diffident in tone, by Mr. Swinburne in a manner wholly accurate and praiseworthy. This translation, if inferior in interest to the ballade Of Dead Ladies, is far its superior in point of conscience. Indeed Mr. Swinburne's translations from Villon, given us together only lately in his second series of Poems and Ballads, are just as good as they can be, and it is instructive to compare his Ballad of the Gibbet (in its wholesome iambie verse) with Mr. Lang's, as fainthearted and metrically inaccurate a piece of work as may be.' Henceforward must be left to Mr. Swinburne Villon, our sad, bad, glad, mad brother's name,

as, with an echo of Mr. Browning's incisive verse, he calls him. Excellent as is Mr. Payne's translation, Mr. Swinburne's verse alone is Beauty making beautiful old rhyme

In praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights.

Again, while Mr. Rossetti's John of Tours will suit the traditional music very well, his rendering of The Three Princesses will in nowise fit the beautiful old song from which the French words are inseparable. The colour indeed is kept, but the form is gone. It is the work of a painter, not of a musician. One is surprised to see among poet-critics Mr. Swinburne marvelling at Mr. Rossetti's consummate accuracy in translating a song into a poem that will not sing to the song's tune at all, and is not even, rhythmically speaking, its fellow, and Mr. Gosse in a most thoughtful essay praising Mr. Lang's 'careful translation' of a rondel, which he has just said consists necessarily of fourteen lines, into a little English poem of twelve! One pities the student of French poetry who is to learn from these samples of work what is this ballade, or this rondel, or this song.

2 In his Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, to which I must make further reference by-and-by. Mr. Lang's translation of the Arbor amoris, by the way, is correct in its order of rhymes.