Page:Prometheus Bound (Bevan 1902).djvu/16

 It is to be observed that, taken by themselves, none of these models can be altogether followed. In the Elizabethan drama there is much that is deficient in universality, that calls up ruffled collars and pointed beards—verbal conceits, ephemeral mannerisms. The Hebraic language of the Bible is too primitive, to say nothing of its dearth of adjectives, to render the more complex and various language of Greek poetry. The classical constructions of Milton have never become part of English, and would be intolerable at second-hand: they would give exactly that cast of cold and conventional unreality, which vitiates what one may call the Eighteenth Century view of Greek antiquity, and which it is one of the main pre-occupations of a translator to avoid.

It follows that the style which best reproduces the effect of the Greek drama in English, would be one whose basis was that of the Elizabethan dramatists, but which was purged of Elizabethan eccentricities, with more of elemental breadth and simplicity by approximation to the language of the Bible, and in the specially sonorous and elaborate passages sounding of Milton. Sometimes one of