Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/120

 not likely to have the requisite gifts for poetically rendering all of them. Such are the works of Shakspeare, and Goethe's Faust; and these it is best to attempt to render in prose only. People praise Tieck and Schlegel's version of Shakspeare. I, for my part, would sooner read Shakspeare in the French prose translation, and that is saying a great deal; but in the German poets' hands Shakspeare so often gets, especially where he is humorous, an air of what the French call niaiserie! and can anything be more un-Shakspearian than that? Again; Mr Hayward's prose translation of the first part of Faust—so good that it makes one regret Mr Hayward should have abandoned the line of translation for a kind of literature which is, to say the least, somewhat slight—is not likely to be surpassed by any translation in verse. But poems like the Iliad, which, in the main, are in one manner, may hope to find a poetical translator so gifted and so trained as to be able to learn that one manner, and to reproduce it. Only, the poet who would reproduce this must cultivate in himself a Greek virtue by no means common among the moderns in general, and the English in particular,—moderation. For Homer has not only the English vigour, he has the Greek grace; and when one observes the bolstering, rollicking way in which his English admirers—even men of genius like