DIALOGUES OF PLATO, Jowett's Translation of. The worst and the best of Benjamin Jowett's translation of Plato's Dia logues is expressed in two contemporary epigrams. Ingram Bywater, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and Jowett's successor as Regius professor of Greek, used to say, half in jest, "I do not suppose he ever looked at any text of Plato beyond Parker's little Oxford and it was the opinion of Sir Richard Jebb, of Cambridge, that "Jowett made Plato an English The master of Balliol was, in fact, notoriously deficient in the so called science of philology. The first edition of his Plato was replete with manifest errors, and the correctness of the third edition is owing in some measure to his docility in follow ing the strictures of his critics. But even the third (standard) edition is not always a safe guide in details. But Jowett was not writing a crib, nor was his concern much with the nice ties of Greek grammar. He was a theologian and a student of statescraft as well as a pro fessor of Greek, and he was interested more in the character and practical career of his pupils than in their scholarship. Plato was to Jowett a depository of the wisdom of the ancient world, which, with the parallel wisdom of Christian theology, formed the basis of sound tradition. In such a spirit the Dialogues were offered to Englishmen, and it is in large measure owing to this spirit that the translation of the Dialogues has the manner of an English classic. More specifically, Jowett's success is attributable to his sensitiveness to the peculiari ties of the Platonic style. The characteristic virtue of this style is its power of conducting a philosophical argument in the natural give and-take of cultivated gentlemen seeking the truth together, or in the no less natural thrust and-parry of a genuine seeker disputing with sophistical babblers and baiting them with irony and sarcasm. There never has been any other language, not even Greek in the hands of any other writer, so finely adapted as Plato's at its best forjust this sort of conversation, shift ing as it does with incomparable ease from light to grave and from bantering personali ties to the solemn intuitions of eternity. And
it is just this note of refined and free-ranging conversation that Jowett, by some gift of sym pathy, has caught and transferred to his Eng lish. We seem not to be listeners among strange men in a remote age, but among men of modern London or Oxford discussing the ever old and ever new themes of justice and temperance and bravery and wisdom and the ways of God's high providence. If Jowett fails anywhere, it is in his rendering of some of the more poetical passages of the original, where for the moment the speaker is rapt out of the ordinary tone of conversation. At times Jowett is too little but the fault is on the right side. Readers who have no Greek often ask how much of Plato can be got out of Jowett. They can get much, but not all. The chief obstacle in their way is the imperfect corre spondence between the Greek ethical terms and their inevitable equivalents in any modern speech. Thus, sophrosuni is commonly ren dered by the English and, indeed, no nearer equivalent is available. Yet "temper ance) is very far from covering the full sense of the original, which conveys the notion of moderation, but embraces also the wider notion of the mens sana in corpore sano and is deeply colored by the peculiar graces of Hellenic life. There is no possible way to acquire the right feeling for such a word—and a vast amount of Plato's philosophy revolves about just such terms— except by long familiarity with it in its native setting. What can be done to trans fer that settine to a new medium, Jowett, per haps, has done; but he is not Plato, and English is not Greek.