The translation of Agamemnon, the preface to which is dated “October 1st, 1877,” was undertaken at the request or command of Carlyle.  The argument of the preface fails to justify Browning’s method.  A translation “literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language” may be highly desirable; it is commonly called a “crib”; and a crib contrived by one who is not only a scholar but a man of genius will now and again yield a word or a phrase of felicitous precision.  But that a translation “literal at every cost” should be put into verse is a wrong both to the original and to the poetry of the language to which the original is transferred; it assumes a poetic garb which in assuming it rends to tatters.  A translation into verse implies that a certain beauty of form is part of the writer’s aim; it implies that a poem is to be reproduced as a poem, and not as that bastard product of learned ill judgment—­a glorified crib; and a glorified crib is necessarily a bad crib.  Mrs Orr, who tells us that Browning refused to regard even the first of Greek writers as models of literary style, had no doubt that the translation of the Agamemnon was partly made for the pleasure of exposing the false claims made on their behalf.  Such a supposition does not agree well with Browning’s own Preface; but if he had desired to prove that the Agamemnon can be so rendered as to be barely readable, he has been singularly successful.  From first to last in the genius of Browning there was an element, showing itself from time to time, of strange perversity.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 103:  Was this a “baffled visit,” as described by Mr Henry James in his “Life of Story” (ii. 197), when the hostess was absent, and the guests housed in an inn?]

[Footnote 104:  Letter quoted by Mrs Orr, p. 288.]

[Footnote 105:  The attitude is reproduced in a photograph from which a woodcut is given in Mme. Blanc’s article “A French Friend of Browning.”]

[Footnote 106:  “Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning,” by Annie Ritchie, pp. 291, 292.]

[Footnote 107:  “A Bibliography of the Writings of Robert Browning,” by T.J.  Wise, pp. 157, 158.]

[Footnote 108:  Aristophanes’ Apology is connected with these poems by its character as a casuistical self-defence of the chief speaker.]

[Footnote 109:  North’s “Plutarch,” 1579, p. 599.]

[Footnote 110:  “Les Deux Masques,” ii. 281.]

[Footnote 111:  A comment of Paul de Saint-Victor on the silence of the recovered Alkestis deserves to be quoted:  “Hercule apprend a Admete qu’il lui est interdit d’entendre sa voix avant qu’elle soit purifiee de sa consecration aux Divinites infernales.  J’aime mieux voir dans cette reserve un scrupule religieux du poete laissant a la morte sa dignite d’Ombre.  Alceste a ete nitiee aux profonds mysteres de la mort; elle a vu l’invisible, elle a entendu l’ineffable; toute parole sortie de ses levres serait une divulgation sacrilege.  Ce silence mysterieux la spiritualise et la rattache par un dernier lien au monde eternel.”]