MR. WHITELAW'S SOPHOCLES.*

WE have willingly given to Mr. Whitelaw's volume the careful

attention which is the due of a conscientious and reverent effort to render worthily into English a great classic. The leisure which a schoolmaster's life affords might indeed—so small is the public to which such books appeal—be more lucratively employed, but scarcely more honourably or usefully. There is no such effective way of becoming thoroughly acquainted with

any great masterpiece of language as by editing or translating it. The reader may be content if he comprehends his author, -bat the editor or translator must put this comprehension into a practical shape. We do not doubt that any class which may have the advantage of reading Sophocles with Mr. Whitelaw will reap the greatest benefit from his labours as a translator.

We find little or nothing to criticise, so far as scholarship is concerned, in Mr. Whitelaw's renderings. This is not the occasion to discuss passages of disputed meaning. We may find ourselves differing now and then from the translator, but he is perfectly competent to form and to defend his own opinions. The only positive mistake that we have found is evidently due, not to any defect in the Greek, but to his ignorance of the prac- tice of horsemanship (an imputation, by the way, which most Englishmen will judge far the more serious of the two). It

occurs in the account of the imaginary chariot race in which Orestes is said to have been killed. The original runs thus :— "KE1YOS ine cchliv ?(TX(IIMV (71"0,1p, grdY el ''EXplpire a6ptyya, ScEoh, 1? ?WEIS ZetpalOP TITVOY crirye Tbv wpoeictiAtevov."

This Mr. Whitelaw translates :—

"And ever, against the pillar where they tarried, Orestes grazed his axle, and his traces

Loosed on the right and tightened on the left."

The turning was evidently from right to left. To effect this,

the charioteer, says the teller of the tale, slackened the pull on the right horse, and tightened it on the left or near horse. But -the effect of this action would be to curve the near horse's body, and with it to curve, that is, to slacken, the trace, while the out- side trace would be simultaneously tightened. The translator has, in fact, wrongly substituted "trace " for "rein."

Of the blank verse into which Mr. Whitelaw has rendered the dialogue of the plays, we have to complain that it is un- necessarily rugged and harsh. Here is a specimen, from the Electra (766-787). Clytaemnestra has just heard the false tidings of her son's death, and cries,—

" Zeus, what shall I say,-this is glad news to me,

Or dire news, and yet good news ? Oh, 'tis bitter That by my own calamities I live. Pedagogue. Lady, why does thy heart fail for this hearing ?

C/yt. 'Tis dire to be a mother. Howe'er unkind

The child of one's womb, one cannot learn to hate.

Ped. Then all in vain it seems that we have come.

Clyt. Nay, not in vain. How shoiildst thou say in vain ?

If hither you bring to me proof of his death,—

His death, whose life from my life sprang, but he Would none of my milk, and from my nursing fled, And lived an alien, and since he went from hence Saw me no more; but called me murderess Of his father, and with dire reckoning menaced me, So that the kind sleep neither by night nor day Covered my eyes, but still the tyrannous time Seemed ever to drag me onward to my doom.

But now, for on this day I am rid of fear From him and from this maiden, who, worse plague, Dwelt with me, sucking from me day by day My sheer heart's blood,—now, now, methinks, in peace, Untroubled by his threats, my days shall pass."

Here are twenty-two lines, and nine of them have eleven syllables (not reckoning those that have a superfluous syllable at the end), and one has twelve. Of course, some of the syllables it would be possible to shorten or elide. An occa- sional licence of this kind may be granted even to verse that is meant for reading, not for recitation. In genuine dramatic poetry, the poetry of the actual stage, it is still more common. But Mr. Whitelaw has exceeded all bounds, and has conse- quently made his verse exceedingly unmelodions. It is evident, too, that this has been done, sometimes at least, of set purpose. Why the wholly superfluous article, not at all required by the sense, and a positive offence to the sound, in the line,—

" So that the kind sleep neither by night nor day" ?

* Sophaclos. Translated into English Verse. By Robert Whitelaw. London : Rivingtons. 18E3.

What kind of affectation is this, to spoil a verse by introducing a word which no one would think of using in prose P Must we seek for an explanation in the dedication of the volume, which expresses the writer's obligations to Mr. Browning ? No student of the Greek drama, certainly no one who seeks to pre- sent it in English form, can afford to neglect Mr. Browning's admirable studies from Euripides. But much as may be learnt from him, he is of all masters the most dangerous for a disciple to imitate, as dangerous as Carlyle would be to a young writer of English prose. Again, even if we allow the dramatic licence to verse never intended for the stage, is this speech of Clytaem- nestra's a fit occasion for its use ? Can we suppose it to have been broken by passion Not so. It is a long-meditated defence, for she must have often contemplated the possibility of her eon's death, and was prepared to justify the unnatural calm with which she heard it.

We have said "unnecessarily harsh," for Mr. Whitelaw can give as melody in verse, when he pleases. There is no fault to be found with this, from the opening scene of the Philoctetes :—

" Deeds now, not words ; thine, to perform the rest, And seek, not far from hence, a cave that looks This way and that, whereof at either mouth A man may sit, to feel the winter's sun ; And breezes cool in summer, fraught with sleep, Course through the tunnelled chamber of the rock. And lower down, a little on the left,

A springing fountain mark, if still it flows."

Or this, later on in the same play :— " 0 two-mouthed aspect of the cave I know, Robbed, and without the means to live, to thee I must return, and there beneath thy shade My lonely life shall waste itself away ! And no winged bird, no mountain-roaming beast, These shafts shall slay, but I myself shall die Unhappy, and make a feast for these, whereby I once was fed ; they whom I hunted then Shall make their prey of me, and I shall render My life a forfeit for the lives of them,— Slain by this all so guileless-seeming man."

This is smooth enough ; and yet it is a passionate utterance, to which a rougher rhythm might have been appropriate.

The choral odes and recitations have been rendered into unrhymed verse, which follows the strophe and antistrophe of the original. There is much very meritorious work in this part of the translation. The language is often adequate to the beauty of the Greek, and is never quite unworthy of it. Mr. Whitelaw does not reach, indeed—who could hope to reach ?— the exquisite music of Mr. Matthew Arnold's unrhymed verse, in his drama of 3ferope, but he has acquitted himself well ; and he is here, as indeed he is everywhere, admirably faithful.

Here is part of the joyous song into which, most unreasonably, but to the reader's gain, the chorus breaks forth, when the dark secret of Oedipus' birth is just about to be revealed :—

"Thy mother, 0 fair son,—

Some mountain nymph was she, In fadeless beauty clad, Whom Pan upon the mountain saw and loved ?

Or her to his embraces Did Lycias woo and win ?

For well our pastoral lawns he loves !

Or else Kyllene's lord, Or Bacchus, who delights The mountain-heights to haunt, Did some fair nymph of the Heliconian train (His playmates best-beloved) Leave on the hills his babe for him to find ?"