8 LITERATURE AND DRAMA 



And they groan praising much, the while, 

 Now this man as experienced in the strife, 

 Now that, fallen nobly on a slaughtered pile 

 Because of not his own another's wife. 



The absence of tawdry additions to the original is certainly 

 a great comfort, going far to counterbalance the oddity of some 

 expressions. One cannot help regretting, however, that a 

 natural reaction against smooth commonplace should lately in 

 all branches of art have led to affected harshness. After all, to 

 be quaint is a small merit, while to be queer is, sooner or later, 

 to be damned. We will not quarrel with the new style of 

 spelling. There is really no right or wrong in the matter ; the 

 effect of a word as seen or pronounced is a matter of asso- 

 ciation ; to those for whom more and nobler associations gather 

 round Klutaimnestra and Kikero than round Clytemnestra and 

 Cicero, the modern antiques are best. Heracles shall at once 

 displace Hercules, since even now he is the stronger. When we 

 turn to other translators, we see well enough why Mr. Browning 

 was tempted to sacrifice everything to fidelity. Mr. Morshead, 

 the latest adventurer, gives us a flowing version made with 

 care, but, not being a poet, he worries his reader by a frequent 

 use of stock expressions, such as 'rapine fell' and 'presage 

 fair,' often reducing ^Eschylus to the level of Scott's lays. We 

 think he has been most successful in rendering the difficult 

 scene with Cassandra, and he shows everywhere a keen and just 

 appreciation of the beauty of the original work. Mr. Fitz- 

 gerald has more poetical verve than Mr. Morshead, and here and 

 there rises to a high level, but he misses out all that does not 

 come home to him, and it is not a little amusing to find the 

 translator or writer of the ' Rubaiyat ' omitting all the simple 

 straightforward religion preached by the chorus. A plain man 

 reading the 'Agamemnon' of ^Eschylus would come to the 

 conclusion that the old men of the chorus believed in a supreme 

 God, Zeus, by no means unlike Jehovah, that they regarded 

 moral conduct as pleasing to God and the punishment of crime 

 as inflicted by God soon or late. The reader of Mr. Fitz- 

 gerald's chorus would imagine that ^Eschylus had forestalled the 

 nineteenth century in mild pessimistic mooning, and that Mene- 

 laus was a Scandinavian sentimentalist such as Mr. Morris loves 



