Pièce 157 - Letter from R. C. Trevelyan to William Everett

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The Shiffolds, Holmbury St. Mary, Dorking. - Apologises for not replying sooner to Everett's letter; is very pleased that Everett is generally pleased with "Cecilia [Gonzaga]", and tends to agree with most of his criticisms: he too thinks Antonio's character could have been more effective and that Everett's suggested treatment would have made this possible, also that 'the transitions from verse to prose are not really successful'. Will not admit that what he has tried to do is 'artistically wrong', and could cite the scene between Iago and Cassio in Othello Act II - but that would prove only that 'a very great artist can solve... an apparently impossible problem', not that Trevelyan was right to try. 'A little more of [Count Vittorio] Alfieri's "fierceness" would indeed have done' the play good, but it was Trevelyan's first, rather timid, experiment in drama. May have weakened his verse too much by using tribrachs; they are 'quite legitimate' according to his theory of verse, but tend to 'reduce the dignity and solidity of blank verse' as in Ternnyson and in Euripides' iambics. Uses them less in his 'Parsival play' ["The Birth of Parsival"]; when his verse becomes irregular it is 'usually to produce some lyrical or quasi-lyrical effect' and even there is increasingly inclined 'to leave out unaccented syllables'. 'Doubtless' Polyphemus, in Trevelyan's poem, 'is very much sophisticated and sentimentalized' as is 'his friend the fawn', but he feels 'sophistication and modernization is legitimate, if it is done frankly'; 'the lost lines of Horace' which Everett 'quoted no doubt from a recently discovered papyrus' were however to the point and 'excellent for their own sakes'. His father has sent him Everett's translation of "Phaselus" [Catullus 4]; liked it very much, though still prefers his own as his 'unrhymed iambics' allowed him to 'preserve the movement of the original' more closely than Everett's couplets. Will try "Sabinus ille" ["Appendix Vergiliana", "Catalepton" 10] but does not think he will make much of it; will be very interested to see how Everett tackles. Encloses 'another very doubtful experiment made long ago from Catullus'; found the rhymes 'very hampering' [now not present].