_Grecian Taste_--"What is beautiful in it?"--asked a certain geometrician, after a performance of the _Iphigenia--_"there is nothing proved in it!" Could the Greeks have been so far from this taste? In Sophocles at least "everything is proved."
_Esprit Un-Grecian._--The Greeks were exceedingly logical and plain in all their thinking; they did not get tired of it, at least during their long flourishing period, as is so often the case with the French; who too willingly made a little excursion into the opposite, and in fact endure the spirit of logic only when it betrays its _sociable_ courtesy, its sociable self-renunciation, by a multitude of such little excursions into its opposite. Logic appears to them as necessary as bread and water, but also like these as a kind of prison-fare, as soon as it is to be taken pure and by itself. In good society one must never want to be in the right absolutely and solely, as all pure logic requires; hence the little dose of irrationality in all French _esprit_.--The social sense of the Greeks was far less developed than that of the French in the present and the past; hence, so little _esprit_ in their cleverest men, hence, so little wit, even in their wags, hence--alas! But people will not readily believe these tenets of mine, and how much of the kind I have still on my soul!--_Est res magna tacere_--says Martial, like all garrulous people.
_Translations._--One can estimate the amount of the historical sense which an age possesses by the way in which it makes _translations_ and seeks to embody in itself past periods and literatures. The French of Corneille, and even the French of the Revolution, appropriated Roman antiquity in a manner for which we would no longer have the courage--owing to our superior historical sense. And Roman antiquity itself: how violently, and at the same time how naïvely, did it lay its hand on everything excellent and elevated belonging to the older Grecian antiquity! How they translated these writings into the Roman present! How they wiped away intentionally and unconcernedly the wing-dust of the butterfly moment! It is thus that Horace now and then translated Alcæus or Archilochus, it is thus that Propertius translated Callimachus and Philetas (poets of equal rank with Theocritus, if we _be allowed_ to judge): of what consequence was it to them that the actual creator experienced this and that, and had inscribed the indication thereof in his poem!--as poets they were averse to the antiquarian, inquisitive spirit which precedes the historical sense; as poets they did not respect those essentially personal traits and names, nor anything peculiar to city, coast, or century, such as its costume and mask, but at once put the present and the Roman in its place. They seem to us to ask: "Should we not make the old new for ourselves, and adjust _ourselves_ to it? Should we not be allowed to inspire this dead body with our soul? for it is dead indeed: how loathsome is everything dead!"--They did not know the pleasure of the historical sense; the past and the alien was painful to them, and as Romans it was an incitement to a Roman conquest. In fact, they conquered when they translated,--not only in that they omitted the historical: they added also allusions to the present; above all, they struck out the name of the poet and put their own in its place--not with the feeling of theft, but with the very best conscience of the _Imperium Romanum_.