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Updated: May 17, 2025
"The great Athene, Apollo, and all his nine Pierides, have sent their envoys," said the older actor pathetically, "for there, too, are the sculptors Euphranor and Chares, and the godlike builder of the lighthouse, Sostratus in person." "A handsome man," cried the girl flute-player, "but vain, I tell you, vain " "Self-conscious, you ought to say," corrected her companion.
The kind-hearted man's patience, however, was not tested too long; for when Helena entered the summer-house Didymus had already been informed of the disaster which threatened him and his family. The philosopher Euphranor, an elderly member of the Museum, had reached him through the garden gate, and, spite of Philotas's warning sign, told him what was occurring.
Besides his Trinity contemporaries, from Tennyson and Thackeray downwards, he had Carlyle for an intimate friend, and he married the daughter of Bernard Barton, the poet-Quaker and friend of Lamb. He published nothing till the second half of the century had opened, when Euphranor, written long before at Cambridge, or with reference to it, appeared.
Then, suddenly raising it, he rushed to the door, and without heeding the upper garment which Helena still held in her hand, tore it open, shouting, "But things must and shall be changed!" Euphranor and his granddaughter followed.
Similar remarks were made on other cushions; but when the philosopher Hegesias asked the famous sculptor Euphranor what he thought of Hermon's Demeter, the kindly old man answered, "I should laud this noble work as a memorable event, even if it did not mark the end, as well as the beginning, of its highly gifted creator's new career." Nothing of this kind was uttered near Hermon.
When he closed, deep silence reigned for a brief interval, and one man looked at another irresolutely until the hero of the day, gray-haired Euphranor, rose and, leaning on the arm of his favourite pupil, walked through the centre of the arena to the stage, mounted it, embraced Hermon with paternal warmth, and made him happy by the words: "The deception that has fallen to your lot, my poor young friend, is a lamentable one; but honour to every one who honestly means to uphold the truth.
Of such idiosyncrasy, both in letters and in other work, few men have had more than the author of Euphranor and (as we have had to say before) the "translator or paraphrast" not merely of Persian but of Spanish and Greek masterpieces. It is indeed notorious that it was in this latter capacity that he showed the individuality of his genius most strongly. It is a frequently but perhaps idly disputed question how much is Omar and how much FitzGerald, while the problem might certainly be extended by asking how much is Aeschylus and how much Calderon in his versions of those masters: but it does not concern us here. What does concern us is the fact that he has contrived to make his most famous exercise in translation signally, and the others to some extent, not dead "versions," but as it were reincarnations of the original, the spirit or the flesh (whichever anyone pleases) being his own, or both being blended of his and the author's. To do this requires a "strong nativity" though not in the equivocal sense in which another great translator of FitzGerald's own type used that term. It shows in his scanty "original" work: but it shows also and perhaps more strongly in his letters. Everyone who has studied the history of the English Universities in connection with that of English literature knows, even if he has not been fortunate enough to experience it, the remarkable fashion in which, at certain times, colleges and coteries at Oxford and Cambridge have seemed to throw a strange and almost magical influence over a generation (hardly more) of undergraduates. There was unmistakably such an aura or atmosphere about in Trinity College, Cambridge, during the last of the twenties and the first of the thirties of the nineteenth century a spirit of literature and humour, of seriousness and jest, of prose sense and half mystical poetry which produced things as diverse as The Dying Swan and Clarke's Library of Useless Knowledge, Vanity Fair and the English Rubaiy
Now the sculptor began to speak, and noisy applause thundered around him as he concluded the well-chosen words of homage with which he offered cordial congratulations to the estimable Euphranor, to whom the festival was given; but the shouts soon ceased, for the audience had heard his modest entreaty to be permitted to say a few words, concerning a personal matter, to those who were his professional colleagues, as well as to the others who had honoured him with their interest and, only too loudly, with undeserved applause.
"The great Athene, Apollo, and all his nine Pierides, have sent their envoys," said the older actor pathetically, "for there, too, are the sculptors Euphranor and Chares, and the godlike builder of the lighthouse, Sostratus in person." "A handsome man," cried the girl flute-player, "but vain, I tell you, vain " "Self-conscious, you ought to say," corrected her companion.
But Hermon was not in the mood to share a joyous revel, and he frankly said so, although immediately after his return he had accepted the invitation to the festival which the whole fellowship of artists would give the following day in honour of the seventieth birthday of the old sculptor Euphranor.
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