Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1894) v1.djvu/13

Rh "moral reflections." It does seem strange that the singers who during the present century have enriched English poetry with wealth of metrical variety lavish beyond all precedent, should have lived in vain for the translator of the Greek drama, especially since those magnificent notes of chorus-music were struck by the author of Atalanta in Calydon and Erechtheus, after which the good old Pindaric-ode pattern, with its guilelessly capricious alternations of longs and shorts, seems curiously out of date.

In spite of the examples of Shelley and Swinburne, the employment of rhyme in choral lyrics appears in some quarters to be still regarded as an open question, certain translators going so far as to pronounce the unrhymed structure intrinsically superior. It is perhaps unsafe to dogmatize: solvitur ambulando. The form of verse in which a translator finds that he can—not, perform his task most quickly, but—do his best work, the mould into which, for him, the great thoughts of the ancient master most felicitously run, so that his task becomes a labour of love, that is for him the best, and he will not wisely let preconceived theories bar his choice, or the authority of imposing names turn him out of his own path. I incline to think that the translator who, not from his experience in the management of it, but in compliance with a theory, rejects rhyme in lyrical passages, is in danger of making the task of worthily presenting his author more rather than less arduous. He is apt to think that he thereby secures closer correspondence with the original; yet I am not sure that this is not more apparent than real: rhymed and unrhymed choruses by the same hand (as in Plumptre's and Campbell's Sophocles) differ little, if at all, in fidelity (properly understood) to the original. On the other hand, he who, for the sake of faithfulness, discards rhyme, may find himself drifting into a new danger, that of making a fetish of this faithfulness, the result of which will be to