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By Root 992 0

timeless, absolute value, and that this value is accessible to the lay reader without expository aids if he will but apply himself diligently. Because science is clearly part of our culture, they have therefore included these six useless volumes without asking themselves what benefit the reader will get from a hundred and sixty double-column pages of Hippocrates (“We must avoid wetting all sorts of ulcers except with wine, unless the ulcer be situated in a joint.” “In women, blood collected in the breasts indicates madness.” “You should put persons on a course of hellebore who are troubled with a defluction from the head.” “Acute disease come [sic] to a crisis in fourteen days”) or how he can profit from or even understand Fourier’s Analytical Theory of Heat and Huygens’ Treatise on Light without a special knowledge of earlier and later work in these fields.

Another drawback is the fetish for Great Writers and complete texts, which results in a lot of the same thing by a few hands instead of a more representative collection. Minor works by major writers are consistently preferred to major works by minor writers. Thus nearly all Shakespeare is here, including even The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but not Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus or Webster’s Duchess of Malfi or Jonson’s Volpone. Nearly all Milton’s poetry is here, but no Donne, no Herrick, no Marvell, or, for that matter, any other English poetry except Chaucer and Shakespeare. We get Gibbon in two huge volumes but no Vico, Michelet, or Burckhardt; six hundred pages of Kant but no Nietzsche or Kierkegaard; two volumes of Aquinas but no Calvin or Luther; three hundred pages of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, but no Voltaire or Diderot. Even if in every case the one right author had been elected to the Great Writers’ Club, which is not the situation, this principle of selection would give a distorted view of our culture, since it omits so much of the context in which each great writer existed.

So much for the selection, which, for all its scholastic whimsicality, is the most successful aspect of the enterprise.[1] Having caught your goose, you must cook it. But the editors are indifferent cooks. They have failed to overcome the two greatest barriers to a modern reader’s understanding and enjoyment of the Great Books—that their authors were largely foreigners in both place and time.

Only a third of them wrote in English; almost all of them were citizens of strange countries fifty to three thousand years away. Except for a few scientific works, apparently no translations were commissioned for this undertaking. The existing translations of prose writers are probably adequate, and some are classic. But just two of the verse translations seem good to me: Rogers’ Aristophanes and Priest’s Faust. (I speak of reading pleasure, not of their fidelity. But I assume, first, that a work of art is intended to give pleasure, and that if it does not, the fault lies either with the writer, a thought too unsettling to be entertained in the case of the Great Books, or with the translator; and, second, that if any writer, Great or not, wrote verse he must have had in mind the effect of verse, in which the unit of form is the rhythmical line rather than the sentence or the paragraph, and that a prose rendering which runs the lines together produces something that is to poetry as marmalade is to oranges.) Rhoades’ Virgil and Cookson’s Aeschylus are in verse, but they are dull and mediocre, the former smoothly so and the latter clumsily so. Charles Eliot Norton’s prose Dante is unbelievably graceless (“In my imagination appeared the vestige of the pitilessness of her who...” “While I was going on, my eyes were encountered by one, and I said straightway thus...”). Jebb’s Sophocles and E.P. Coleridge’s Euripides are in that fantastic nineteenth-century translator’s prose (“Yon man...” “Ay me! And once again, Ay me!” “Why weepest thou?” “Thus stands the matter, be well assured.” “In fear of what woe foreshown?”). Homer is in Samuel Butler’s translation, the best prose version extant, except for T.E. Lawrence