6 LITERATURE AND DRAMA 



original, and will readily admit that l the guests who fare 

 housemates with gods in air ' renders the true meaning of r&vSs 



/jUSTOLKCOV. 



We much wish that Mr. Browning had set a different aim 

 before him, for in truth we do not give the best idea of a foreign 

 author by using in English the very turn of each foreign phrase. 

 On the contrary, this practice is a cheap and common method 

 of raising a laugh. Thackeray began it or practised it with 

 French, making his Frenchmen speak a literal translation of 

 French phrases. The thing was droll, and is now copied in every 

 comic publication, but we should not get a good translation of 

 Racine by following this method. His graceful lines would 

 become grotesque, and the matter would not be much mended 

 if for each noun or adjective we substituted a periphrasis giving 

 the force of the word as indicated by its etymology. 



Perfect, or even nearly perfect, translation is of course 

 impossible, but good work has been done from time to time 

 when a poet has felt the beauty of some foreign poem strongly, 

 and has written in his own language another poem giving the 

 beauty which he saw. It almost seems as if Mr. Browning did 

 not very much admire the ' Agamemnon.' Now and then his 

 version suggests the almost incredible suspicion that he wished 

 to show his friends how inferior ^Eschylus was as a writer to 

 Euripides. Surely he must have had a sense of fun when he 

 made the chorus (of reputed sonority and magniloquence) speak 

 as follows : 



For there!s no bulwark in man's wealth to him 

 Who, through a surfeit,, kicks into the dim 

 And disappearing Bight's great altar. 



Could a more ludicrous image be presented to us than that of 

 a man who, in consequence of overeating, kicks a great altar 

 into the dim ? Hermann, who is followed by many scholars, 

 connects sis afydveiav with gVaXfts-, and so obtains the rational 

 meaning that wealth affords no bulwark behind which the guilty 

 man can hide. 



Our author has given us no setting to the play such as the 

 adventure of Balaustion, a story which enabled him by the 

 comments of the lyric girl to show us what he himself saw in 



