Page:Prometheus Bound (Bevan 1902).djvu/14

 they translated the Greek, as it came, into any form which gave the logical sense with a certain euphony of syllables. It is as if one should attempt to scale a mountain by making a rush at it, without looking for the path. By observing the path, a less powerful climber may perhaps arrive higher.

The effect of a foreign original can only be given by a style which suggests that which most nearly corresponds to it in our own literature. Now we have in English literature, as well as in Greek, a great age of poetic drama, the time of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts, and the best of this drama is by theory part of the furniture of every educated Englishman's mind. Its vocabulary, characteristic phrases, turns of expression, come to him charged with the associations of poetic drama. Here, then, we have a model to guide us, a language to draw upon, in translating the plays of the Greeks. But we must also take account of the fact that, with all their analogies, Greek and Elizabethan tragedy do not absolutely correspond in spirit. The Greek tragedians, and especially Aeschylus, stood to their people in some