in three lines....  Further,—­if I obtained a mere strict bald version of thing by thing, or at least word pregnant with thing, I should hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and sonority of the Greek; and this with the less regret, inasmuch as there is abundant musicality elsewhere, but nowhere else than in his poem the ideas of the poet.  And lastly, when presented with these ideas I should expect the result to prove very hard reading indeed if it were meant to resemble AEschylus.”

Every condition here laid down has been carried out with unflinching courage.  Browning has rendered word by word and line by line; with, indeed, some slight inevitable expansion in the rhymed choruses, very slight, infinitely slighter than every other translator has found needful.  Throughout, there are numberless instances of minute and happy accuracy of phrase, re-creations of the very thoughts of AEschylus.  An incomparable dexterity is shown in fitting phrase upon phrase, forcing line to bear the exact weight of line, rendering detail by detail.  But for this very reason, as a consequence of this very virtue, there is no denying that Browning’s version is certainly “very hard reading,” so hard reading that it is sometimes necessary to turn to the Greek in order to fully understand the English.  Browning has anticipated, but not altogether answered, this objection.  For, besides those passages which in their fidelity to every “minute particular,” simply reproduce the obscurity of the original, there is much that seems either obscure or harsh, and is so simply because it gives “the turn of each phrase,” not merely “in as Greek a fashion as English will bear,” but beyond it:  phrases which are native to Greek, foreign to English.  The choruses, which are attempted in metre as close as English can come to Greek metre, suggest the force, but not the dignity of the original; and seem often to be content to drop much of the poem by the way in getting at “the ideas of the poet.”  It is a Titan’s version of an Olympian, and it is thus no doubt the scholar rather than the general reader who will find most to please him in “this attempt to give our language the similitude of Greek by close and sustained grappling, word to word, with so sublime and difficult a masterpiece."[54]

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 54:  J.A.  Symonds, Academy, Nov. 10, 1877.]

26.  LA SAISIAZ:  THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC.

    [Published in May, 1878. La Saisiaz (written November,
    1877), pp. 1-82; The Two Poets of Croisic, pp. 83-201.
    (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol.  XIV. pp. 153-204, 205-279).]