Stories from the Greek Tragedians
Book Description
Alfred J. Church has written a bold attempt to give us a genuinely classical version of the masterpieces of the great classics. In relation to these, he has given some effective equivalents for the passage that would have been held by the great devotees of Homer and Virgil to be one of the most striking passages in the poems.
Again, it is hardly possible to give with anything like fullness...
MoreAlfred J. Church has written a bold attempt to give us a genuinely classical version of the masterpieces of the great classics. In relation to these, he has given some effective equivalents for the passage that would have been held by the great devotees of Homer and Virgil to be one of the most striking passages in the poems.
Again, it is hardly possible to give with anything like fullness even the effect of the sharply-ringing dialogue of the Greek plays, in which mind is made to encounter mind with even less than the usual result of such verbal conflict, though with very much more than the usual concentration of character in speech. It would have destroyed the character of the book to render for us this dialogue in more than the briefest outline; and here again, therefore, the student of Greek tragedy will feel that this volume is to him not quite so much when compared with its classical original, as the Stories from Homer and from Virgil were in comparison with their originals.
But if from the very nature of the case, Church has given us in this volume what seems less to represent his original than he did in the Stories from Homer and from Virgil, something indeed that could not have been spoken of as "Stories" at all, if it had been in any degree more like the sources from which he derived it than it is, he only makes us wonder the more on that account at the beauty of the effect, and the wonderful success he has achieved in taking just so much from his original as gives dignity and depth to the tragic tale, without in any way interfering with the flow of the narrative and the freedom of the style.
If readers of the tragedies miss that depth of gloom, that overhanging cloud of destiny, which gives so grand a background to the development of the Greek drama, those who have not yet read them, those for whom these Stories are written, will yet find sufficient trace of that gloom to confess themselves spell-bound by these beautiful narratives, and impelled to such study as will enable them to go to the originals themselves.
Nothing could show greater art than the mixture of boldness and reserve with which Church has embodied the reflections of the tragic chorus in the texture of his story, so as to give it something of the grand moral outline of the original, without too much detail of misgiving or dismay. Take the story of "The Death of Agamemnon". Perhaps the most difficult, certainly the grandest, and we should say also the most successful in its rendering of the tragic background of thought.
Church manages, too, to give his readers the pith of the great characters painted by the tragic poets. In the Story of Philoctetes, a story singularly difficult to vivify with anything like a mere narrative interest, as there is hardly any incident in it, he boldly throws himself on the play of character which it contains, and makes so striking a sketch of the high-minded though faltering Neoptolemus, and of the crafty Odysseus, that even his youngest readers,, will find its interest almost as great as if it contained more moving incidents.
How finely Church has given the contrast between the honorable remorse of Neoptolemus, and the cold, utilitarian self-possession of Odysseus! And so, too, how finely Church renders the remorseful love of Medea, when about to destroy her children, and yet possessed with the utmost passion for the offspring that in her deadly revenge she was resolved to sacrifice.
It is hardly possible to say too much of the style of these stories. Mr. Church has a rare command of pure and liquid English, and hardly ever offends the ear with a too familiar expression, and never with a pedantic one. Never before, so difficult a task as this has been performed with greater vigor and a sincerer touch.
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