IX

But, although a student of English Literature be ignorant of Greek and Latin as languages, may he not have Greek and Latin literature widely opened to him by intelligent translations? The question has often been asked, but I ask it again. May not some translations open a door to him by which he can see them through an atmosphere, and in that atmosphere the authentic ancient gods walking: so that returning upon English literature he may recognise them there, too, walking and talking in a garden of values? The highest poetical speech of any one language defies, in my belief, translation into any other. But Herodotus loses little, and North is every whit as good as Plutarch.

  Sigh no more, ladies; ladies, sigh no more!
     Men were deceivers ever;
  One foot in sea and one on shore,
     To one thing constant never

Suppose that rendered thus:

I enjoin upon the adult female population ([Greek: gynaikes]), not once but twice, that there be from this time forward, a total cessation of sighing. The male is, and has been, constantly addicted to inconstancy, treading the ocean and the mainland respectively with alternate feet.

That, more or less, is what Paley did upon Euripides, and how would you like it if a modern Greek did it upon Shakespeare? None the less I remember that my own first awed surmise of what Greek might mean came from a translated story of Herodotus—the story of Cleobis and Biton—at the tail of an old grammar-book, before I had learnt the Greek alphabet; and I am sure that the instinct of the old translators was sound; that somehow (as Wordsworth says somewhere) the present must be balanced on the wings of the past and the future, and that as you stretch out the one you stretch out the other to strength.