My dear Cowell,
Your Letter to day was a real pleasure—nay, a comfort—to me. For I had begun to think that, for whatever reason, you had dropt me; and I know not one of all my friends whom I could less afford to lose.
You anticipate rightly all I think of the new Idylls. [111] I had bought the Book at Lowestoft: and when I returned here for Christmas found that A. T.’s Publisher had sent me a Copy. As I suppose this was done by A. T.’s order, I have written to acknowledge the Gift, and to tell him something, if not all, of what I think of them. I do not tell him that I think his hand weakened; but I tell him (what is very true) that, though the main Myth of King Arthur’s Dynasty in Britain has a certain Grandeur in my Eyes, the several legendary fragments of it never did much interest me; excepting the Morte, which I suppose most interested him also, as he took it up first of all. I am not sure if such a Romance as Arthur’s is not best told in the artless old English in which it was told to Arthur’s artless successors four hundred years ago; or dished up anew in something of a Ballad Style like his own Lady of Shalott, rather than elaborated into a modern
Epic form. I never cared, however, for any chivalric Epic; neither Tasso, nor Spenser, nor even Ariosto, whose Epic has a sort of Ballad-humour in it; Don Quixote is the only one of all this sort I have ever cared for.
I certainly wish that Alfred had devoted his diminished powers to translating Sophocles, or Æschylus, as I fancy a Poet should do—one work, at any rate—of his great Predecessors. But Pegasus won’t be harnessed.
From which I descend to my own humble feet. I will send you some copies of Calderon when I have uncloseted and corrected them. As to Agamemnon, I bound up a Copy of him in the other Translations I sent to Trinity Library—not very wisely, I doubt; but I thought the Book would just be put up on its shelf, and I had given all I was asked for, or ever could be asked for. The Master, however, wrote me that it came to his Eyes, and I dare say he thought I had best have let Æschylus alone. My Version was not intended for those who know the Original; but, by hook or by crook, to interest some who do not. The Shape I have wrought the Play into is good, I think: the Dialogue good also: but the Choruses (though well contrived for the progress of the Story) are very false to Æschylus; and anyhow want the hand of a Poet. Mine, as I said, are only a sort of ‘Entr’ acte’ Music, which would be better supplied by Music itself.
I will send you in a day or two my Christmas
Gossip for the East Anglian, where I am more at home. But you have heard me tell it all before.
It is too late to wish you a good Christmas—(I wonder how you passed it, mine was solitary and dull enough) but you know I wish you all the Good the New Year can bring. Love to Elizabeth; do not be so long without writing again, if only half a dozen lines, to yours and hers sincerely,
E. F. G.