short of living himself for awhile into the personality of another. Supposing him at the same time to be possessed of any discernment, he will be able afterwards to speak of the man whose spirit he has attempted to convey, with the authority of one who has learned to know him intus et in cute—bones, marrow, flesh, and superficies. Nor is the translator exposed to the biographer's weakness for overvaluing his subject. He pretends to no discoveries, has taken no brief for or against the character it is his duty to reproduce, has set up no full-length portrait on the literary easel, to be painted by the aid of documents, and with a certain preconceived conception of pictorial harmony. In so far as it is possible to enter into personal intercourse with any one whose voice we have not heard, whose physical influences we have not been affected by, in whose living presence we have not thought, and felt, and acted, in so far the translator of a book like Cellini's Memoirs or Rousseau's Confessions can claim to be familiar and intimate with its author.
II
I have recently put myself into these very confidential relations with Cellini, having made the completely new English version of his autobiography to which the following pages serve as introduction. I think that I am therefore justified in once more handling a somewhat hackneyed subject, and in rectifying what I have previously published concerning it.[1]
A book which the great Goethe thought worthy
[ 4 ]
- ↑ Renaissance in Italy, vol. iii. ch. viii.
