Page:Prometheus Bound (Bevan 1902).djvu/21

 To hand down translations may seem too poor a mark for the ambition of the age. And yet the Book, which has been the most powerful force in English literature, is a translation. In the case of the Greek poets, how much of our intellectual heritage comes from them, even though all the while a strange tongue has had to be mastered in order to know them, no one needs to be reminded. Such mastery was possible to the few, and literature was mainly the concern of the few. But this is so less and less, and if democracy is destined to lay hold of literature, as of everything else, that generation will have made no mean contribution, which delivers to the people a standard rendering of the great works upon which our own literature has been nourished. If a new creative age supervenes, it would in such a rendering possess inestimable material.

The Bible has just been referred to, as the great example of the literary influence of a translation. But that translation was the work of no individual, it came stamped with no personal peculiarity. And if our age is to bring forth a translation of the Greek poets of permanent and universal authority,