BOOKS.

LORD DERBY'S HON1ER.*

LORD DERBY'S appearance among the crowd of scholars who are contending for the body of Homer will scarcely be less startling or impressive than the effect produced upon the contending Greeks and Trojans, so well rendered by Lord Derby, when Achilles appears unarmed to claim the body of Patroclus :— " There he stood

And shouted loudly ; Pallas joined her voice, And filled with terror all the Trojan host. Clear as the trumpet's sound which calls to arms Some town encompassed round with hostile bands Rang out the voice of great /Eacides,

But when Achilles' voice of brass they heard They quailed in spirit."

And thus no doubt will the scholars quail, especially those who, like Professor Arnold, are fighting for the views upon which Lord Derby frowns, when the "Rupert of debate" denounces in brief, emphatic words, without argument, "that pestilent heresy the • so-called English Hexameter," and scares away the advocates of trochaic metre, Spenserian stanzas, and all the metres competing with his own, by the positive announcement that if "justice is ever to be done to the easy flow and majestic simplicity of the grand old poet, it can only. be in the heroic blank verse.' Holding, as we do, with Lord Derby on the whole, we conceive, however, that in his dogmatic way be has tossed aside too recklessly the considera- tions which have induced critics like Pro fessorArnold to yearn after the hexameter, and strive to naturalize it in English verse ;' and

• that if he had considered them more deeply, his own version, the best, we think, on the whole,—though scarcely so scholarly as Mr. Wright's, or so poetical in some passages as Cowper's,—which we have yet had in blank verse, would have gained greatly in effect. The great characteristic of the Greek hexameter is a special flexibility or elasticity, which makes it a sort of artistic connecting link between the diffuseness of ordinary narrative and the passion of the highest poetry,—knitting together the former into a closer texture, and stretching beneath the strain of the latter so as to give a sort of epic deliberateness and dilation of form to the inten- sity of the stronger emotions. The Homeric hexameter binds its conceptions together something like a hair chain, contracting the lighter details, expanding beneath the weightier feelings, so that neither lose the peculiar tone proper to epic art, the story-telling never relaxing into prose, and the passion never bursting the bounds of narrative poetry. Dramatic as Homer is, he is never so dramatic as to render us impatient of the mould of narrative poetry. Tender as he is, lie never so far loses the sense of the outer world as to lift us into the atmosphere of lyric poetry. Diffuse, —or even prolix if any one will have it so,—as he sometimes is, the diffuseness never passes the bounds of a sweet and musical simplicity which renders it worthy of the epic mould. And no one with any sense of rhythm can doubt that much of this peculiar harmony of effect in poetry, which stretches over the whole range of art,—from childlike fidelity to the minutia) of a feast up to the deepest pathos of human love and the silent rapture of all but lyric feeling,—is due to the singular flexibility and beauty of the Homeric hexameter. It may confidently be said that there never has been any other medium of epic poetry that can compare with it. Certainly there has never been any that, starting properly from the narrative key, rises so easily into all the beauties not in- consistent with that key.

Now this characteristic, which we have called the peculiar. elasticity of the Homeric hexameter, Lord Derby in his absolute scorn for the English hexameter lias too much overlooked. Had he appreciated better what it is that the English friends of the hexameter are asking for, he might, we think, have greatly improved his own rhythm without abandoning the form of blank verse. There is nothing in which different forms of English blank verse differ so much as this characteristic of elasticity, —contracting the diffuse into measure, dilating the intense into the freer and more spacious imaginative form in which minstrels would most delight to recount it. It is, we fancy, the feeling that blank verse is usually deficient in this elasticity, and apt to give at once a certain tone of dulness and tameness to the lower narrative, and too terse and rugged a form, inconsistent with the recounting style of the whole, to the speeches which the narra- tive contains, that has driven many of the finer critics into the generally hopeless attempt to invent an English metro of the same character as the Greek hexameter. For special passages no doubt the attempt has succeeded fairly,—and where it h

• The Iliad of Homer. Rendered lato English Blank Verse by Edward, Ear of Derby. 2 vols. London: Murray,

done so, any one may see at a glance the quality in n hich Lord Derby's blank verse is specially defective. Let us take the pas- sage so successfully rendered into English hexameters by Dr. Hawtrey,—the passage in which Helen wonders at the absence of her brothers Castor and Pollux from the Grecian host, and Homer tells us, with his own peculiar pathos, the true cause,— and compare it with Lord Derby's version. Here is Dr. Hawtrey's translation :— " Clearly the rest I beheld of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia ; Known to me well are the faces of all ; their names I remember ; Two, two only remain, whom I see not among the commanders, Castor fleet in the car—Polydeuces brave with the cactus — Own dear brethren of mine—one parent loved us as infants. Are they not here in the host, from the shores of lov'd Lacedtemon ? Or tho' they came with the rest, in ships that bound thro' the waters, Dare they not enter the fight or stand in the council of Heroes, All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened? So said she ;—they long since in Earth's soft arms were reposing, There in their own dear land, their Father-land, Lacedtemon." ' This strikes us as the only successful attempt we have ever seen to render Homer into English hexameter, and we do not be- lieve that even by Dr. Hawtrey,—indeed he himself is now of the same mind,—the experiment could have been successfully extended. The English hexameter has a peculiar monotony which suits a passage like this of tender narrative sentiment, but is quite unecpIal to the range and variety of the Greek metre. But now compare this with the blank verse of Lord Derby, and we feel at once the change from the motion of "ships that bound through the waters," to that of horses tramping on roadways :— Now all the other keen-eyed Greeks I see. Whom once I know and now could call by name ; But two I miss, two captains of the host, My own two brethren and my mother's sons, Castor and Pollux ; Castor horseman bold, Pollux unmatched in pugilistic skill In Laced.semon have they stayed behind? Or can it be in ocean-going ships That they have come indeed, but shun to join The fight of warriors, fearful of the shame And deep disgrace that on my name attend? Thus she; unconscious that in Sparta they Their native land, beneath the sod were laid."

Who does not feel a sort of wooden dulness of effect in the rhythm of this passage, apart from its faults of mere translation? The line we have italicized is peculiarly leaden, and we cannot help thinking that the faulty and very prosaic rendering of the Irg etyafiy IIoXudeiosEa, literally, "Polydeuces good with the fist," is almost a result of the sodden blank verse in which Lord Derby was at the time writing, a species of verse which leads the thought into stupid abstractions like "pugilistic skill." To the same benumbing effect we partly attribute it that 1.4:,rd Derby has lost all the pathetic beauty of Homer's correction of Helen, in which he contrasts so finely her speculation as to the motive of her brothers' absence with its true cause, and has instead clumsily intruded the word "uncon- scious," which spoils the simplicity of that contrast. Indeed " unconscious" is an abstract term which seems almost to be suggested by the dull tramp of the metre. It would be im- puting too much evil to it to saddle it also with the crime of completely_ omitting to render the exquisite touch contained in

the epithet 9u

sage shows perfectly the difficulty of which Lord Derby has been unconscious, in rendering so lively and elastic a metre as the Greek hexameter into one so liable at least to woodenness as the English blank verse. Homer's hexameter and the dull blank verse of this extract strike us as a perfect literary illustration of the contrast between "the quick" and "the dead."

We say the dull blank verse of "this extract," because Lord Derby's blank verse is often very much more living, and because we see no reason why in the hands of a master the English blank verso might not be almost as full of elasticity and motion as the Greek hexameter itself. No one can deny such elasticity and motion to such lines as these of the Poet Laureate's :- "The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks : The long day wanes : the slow moon climbs : the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding farrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars until I die."

In such blank verse as that, it might be possible to reproduce Homer in English. But even Lord Derby's blank verse is often a ything but leaden. Take him at the angry parts, where #c Mee is abusing Agamemnon, or Ulysses rating Thersites, and

If

though we inay still complain of a want of elasticity,—of a style far too much like the stroke of an axe for the Greek,—we cannot complain of duluess. There is as much life in this passage as if Agamemnon were a political opponent — "Thou sot, with eye of dog, and heart of deer ! Who never dar'st to lead in armed fight Th' assembled hosts, nor with a chosen few To man the secret ambush,—for thou fear'st To look on death—no doubt 'tie easier far Girt with thy troops to plunder of his right Whoe'er may venture to oppose thy will ! A tyrant king because thou rul'st o'er slaves !

Were it not so, this insult were thy last. But this I say, and with an oath confirm, By this my royal staff which never more Shall put forth leaf nor spray, since first it left Upon the mountain side its parent stem, Nor blossom more; since all around the axe Hath lopped both leaf and bark, and now 'tis borne Emblem of justice, by the sons of Greece Who guard the sacred ministry of law Before the face of Jove ! a mighty oath!

The time shall come when all the sons of Greece Shall mourn Achilles' loss, and thou, the while, Heart-rent, shall be all-impotent to aid When by the warrior slayer Hector's band Many shall fall, and then thy soul shall mourn The.slight on Grecia's bravest warrior cast."

This is good invective, and our only objection to it is, not that it is too strong or too good, but that it is not tempered by the rhythm into the epic beauty of the memorial manner, so that one is startled by the long episode concerning the staff, which seems harshly inter- posed between passages of invective not merely so strong as these,

but so blank and void of nuances in the expression. Such episodes never startle us in Homer, because the long musical wave of his metre tells us at once that it is not the very passion of the speaker, but the minstrel's rendering of it which we hear,—and we expect, therefore, or at least never wonder at, the epic amplification of the illustrative hints such speeches may contain. But the sharp

blank verse of Lord Derby scarcely reminds us of the artistic mould in which the passion has been re-cast, and we come therefore on the long parenthetical account of Achilles' staff with even more surprise than we should feel if Lord Brougham had turned aside from the adjuration which he addressed to the House of Lords in the excitement of the great Reform debate, to recount all the historical associations connected with appeals made to public bodies by kneeling men of genius, before falling down upon his own knees to entreat their Lordships to pass the Bill. The difference in both metrical and literary qualities,—.-in. all those qualities which suit a recounted speech, part of a long history, rather than the scream of immediate passion,—between Ohogapis, mobs icar' apeuVily b' iXdpoto and Lord Derby's "Thou sot, with eye of dog and heart of door," seems to us very wide. "Heavy with wine," though not com-

plimentary, is a literary and reflective expression compared with "sot ;"—and the Greek circumlocution" having the eyes of a dog,"

has a deliberateness of manner about it that rather reminds us of Mr. Disraeli's carefully moulded expressions of invective than the strong harsh jar of naked passion. We do not mean that Homer gives any flavour of artificiality to the passion of Achilles, but that he does make us feel that it has been re-cast by an epic poet, and that you see the rage through the medium of art. Lord Derby's version is rage itself which almost rends the artistic veil ; while in Homer the rage of Achilles is traditional, and saturated with the imagination of recounting bards,—not the agony of the threatening breaker, but the long swell with which it breaks in the imagination, after that agony has been long past. Lord Derby's most stirring passages are scarcely ever epic in their tone. A slight but characteristic illustration of the same tendency of his to drop the epic touches for the effect of a more forcible and immediate emotion, is his translation of the line by which Agamemnon (and others) conclude their anticipation of the triumph of their foes over their defeat :—" Thus some one will some day say ; and then may the broad earth yawn for me." Lord Derby gives it :—" Thus when men speak, gape, earth, and hide my shame," which is vigorous, but too abrupt, and has lost the mellow tempering touch of the epic poetry. The dreamy epithet of earth, "broad," picturing its desolateness, which has here slipped out, and the adjuration "hide my shame ! ' which has slipped in, make all the difference between the dramatic and the epic colouring. It is this comparative indifference to artistic lights and shadows in his love of popular force and movement which has led Lord Derby into what we must think the great blunder of sacrificing

the names and associations of the Greek .gods and goddesses for the sake of using the (now) scarcely much more familiar Roman equivalents. We doubt "very much whether there are any who will read Lord Derby's Homer with real interest who would be more puzzled by the mention of Zeus, or Pallas Athene, or Aphro- dite, or even Poseidon, than by the mention of Jove, Minerva, Venus, or Neptune. But to those, even schoolboys, who do know the difference, the substitution of the latter for the former will be

a perpetual irritation. The permanent epithets so characteristic of Homer are simply absurd when coupled with the Latin names.

Minerva suggests a dry didactic divinity, the goddess of old maids, with no more right to the cold blue eyes and martial terrors of Pallas Athene than Lord Malmesbuty wool.' have to the title of the "Rupert of debate." What business would Minerva have had ta take hold of Achilles by his yellr hair ?—why it would have been a gross impropriety in her, compromising to her reputation. What a fiasco it sounds for Minerva to direct a spear against More and send him howling with the noise of ten thousand men away to Heaven. Ares, the bloodthirsty bully, who is the he'te noire of Olympus and hateful for his truculence and whining cowardice even to the Father of gods and men, is as much beneath the Boman Mars as Pallas Athene. is above Minerva.

All the grandest Homeric passages concerning the gods are dis- figured by this excessive dread of pedantry in Lord Derby, or rather by this deficiency in his value for a crowd of delicate associations, which has induced him to use indifferently names almost as wide as the poles asunder. It may be a fancy that Lord Derby has, in consequence of this conscious confusion (which may have been necessary in deference to the usages of the last century, but has quite ceased to be so in this), slurred over the translation of those passages most characteristic of the Greek divinities and made them the least effective of all his trans- lations. Take, for instance, the passage we have already referred to, in which Pallas Athene descends to hold back Achilles from open violence to Agamemnon,—one of the finest of those subordinate episodes which are not exactly famous.

Lord Derby translates it thus :—

" She stood behind, and by the yellow hair

She held the son of Peleus, visible To him alone, by all the rest unseen.

Achilles wondering turned and straight he knew The blue-eyed Pallas ; awful was her glance Whom thus the chief with winged words addressed."

This strikes us as careless and ineffective. Homer does not say she "held," but "took hold of" ()O which makes all the differ-

ence in the movement of the passage, as it is this taking him by the hair which startles Achilles and makes him turn in wonder. Then in substituting "visible" for the middle voice "appearing"

or "manifesting herself"(yscusopirs)" to him alone," another slight touch of life is lost, and the difference between a visible object and a vision disappears. Then for Homer's "knew" or "recognized" (irar) Lord Derby reads "saw," which misses the reference to Achilles' personal familiarity, so to say, with the martial goddess. But the touch which strikes us as the most important which Lord Derby has missed is the Berk: he of tool otianley, "but awful to him appeared her eyes," the poetry of which is very inadeq tiately rendered

by "awful was her glance"—the point here being that Achilles, in his mood of passion, felt her cold blue eyes strike chill upon him, not that her glance was in fact intended to be reproachful, which does not appear. It was that slight curdling which contact with the cold self-restraint of the goddess produced on the fermentation of Achilles' passion, which the poet wished to mark, not any reproach in her glance, in which she did not apparently indulge. Lord Derby does not feel Homer's conception of Pallas Athene, or he could never call her Minerva ; and it is his failure to feel this which makes hint miss the true shade of meaning here, and refer the terror to the intentional expression of the goddess, instead of to the natural revulsion of feeling which her cold Olympian wisdom just then produced on the boiling wrath of human passion. In like manner Lord Derby seems to us to slur over that classical passage describing the nod of Zeus which shakes Olympus from which Phidias is said to have caught his great conception of the god. Lord Derby translates : —

"He said, and nodded with his shadowy brows :

Waved on th' immortal head th' ambrosial locks, And all Olympus trembled at his nod."

zoavEn is not shadowy, but blue-black,—precisely sable,"—and has no reference to the shadow cast by the eyebrows, but only to their colour; nor can any one, to our mind, nod with his brows.

Homer says he nodded over his sable brows (xuavi4ety OcopLet), which catches the expression of a nod,—the eyebrows retreating and the upper part of the head taking the place they occupied ; and this is the motion which explains the next line, and sends the immortal locks overflowing from the eternal bead, a picture which Lord Derby's second line quite fails to render. Mr.

Wright's translation is better, though he, too, translates (?) Zeus into Jove, and "bowing assent" might be more appropriate to a conversation in a drawing-room than to the solemn sanction of a divine power.

"He spoke; and bending low his sable brows

Jove bowed assent. Around the immortal head Of Heaven's high King flowed down the ambrosial locks, And all Olympus trembled."

Lord Derby is never less fortunate than in the little touches con- cerning the gods. He misses often both the quaint human frailties and the physical majesty in Homer's pictures of them. When Thetis tells Achilles that "Zeus went yesterday to Oceanus to feast with the good Ethiopians, and all the gods went in his train, but on- the twelfth day he will come back to Olympus, and then I will go to the braes-floored house of Zeus and kneel to him and I think that I shall persuade hitn,"-Lord Derby, besides being.

inaccurate, misses half the simplicity of the quaint picture, and yet makes it less "noble," as Mr. Arnold would say, by inserting the prosaic word "purposed to return,"—a verb scarcely English, and certainly vulgarizing as well as interpolated.

"For Jove is to a solemn banquet gone Beyond the sea to /Ethiopia's shore Since yester' night : and with him all the gods ;— On the twelfth day be purposed to return To high Olympus : thither then will I, And at his feet my supplication make ; And he, I think, will not deny my suit."

This is singularly colourless. It misses the train of gods ; it misses the feasting with the "good Ethiopians "and substitutes the mere place ; it puts in the ugly idea and verb "purposed," for

which there is no pretence ; it misses the "brass-floored house of Zeus ;" it translates kneeling' by the dull phrase of making a supplication at his feet; and it renders the quaint poetry of "And I think that I shall persuade him," by " I think he will not deny my suit." Need we take further trouble to prove that Lord Derby slurs over the Homeric gods, their characters, and

their habits ?

But we should be very sorry to give the impression that Lord

Derby's Iliad is a poor performance. There are many passages in it of very great vigour, and some of very great beauty. Com- pared with other translators, his version is simple and powerful. There is far more current in the narrative than in Cowper's, and more general strength, though less scholarship and accuracy, than in Mr. Wright's. There is no finer translation.th an his of the finest descriptive passage in all Homer—the close of the eighth book. It will even compare favourably with the translation of Mr. Tennyson, except in brevity and in the last two lines, in which the Poet Laureate wins a decisive victory :—

" As when in heav'n, around the glitt'ring moon The stars shine bright amid the breathless air; And ev'ry crag, and ev'ry jutting peak Stands boldly forth, and ev'ry forest glade ; Ev'n to the gates of heav'n is open 'd wide The boundless sky ; shines each particular star Distinct ; joy fills the gazing shep- herd's heart.

So bright, so thickly scatter'd o'er the plain, Before the walls of Troy, between the ships And Xanthus' stream, the Trojan watchfires blaz'd.

A thousand fires burnt brightly ; and round each Sat fifty warriors in the ruddy glare ; With store of provender before them laid, Barley and rye, the tether'd horses stood Beside the cars, and waited for the morn."

Neither translator seems to us to have caught the force of the Ovpdvoky, which must surely mean that the lower and greyer strata of the atmosphere were broken through " fttom Heaven downwards, as if by some revealing power on high which pierced or a moment through that cold and superficial film which is t us the sky. Dean Alford alone has so translated it :— "Mn. TENNYSON.

"As when in heaven the stars about the moon

Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,

And every height comes out, and jutting peak

And valley, and the immeasurable heavens

Break open to their highest, and all the stars

Shine, and the hind rejoices in his heart : So many a fire between the ships and stream Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy, A thousand on the plain ; and close by each Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire ; And champing golden grain their horses stood, Hard by the chariots, waiting for the dawn." "And from above The glory of the boundless firmament Bursts downwards."

But in all essential respects Lord Derby's version seems to us as fine as any yet given of the finest passage of its kind in Hombr, except in its last two lines, where he inserts "tethered" and misses the "champing." Nothing, again, can be better than Ulysses' rebuke to the mob. The aristocratic feeling of the translator comes out in it, and he makes Ulysses bid the mob not to "meddle and muddle" in affairs that are not for them to settle, with true Tory scorn:—

" Good friend, keep still ; and hear what others say, Thy betters far ; for thou art good for naught, Of small account in council or in fight.

All are not sovereigns here ; ill fares the State Where many masters rule ; let one be lord One Ring supreme; to whom wise Saturn's son In token of his sovereign power hath given The sceptre's sway and ministry of law."

That is admirably rendered. And, on the whole, we believe Lord Derby's translation, though it does not equal Pope's in

verve, and is often inferior even to Cowper's, to be the most effective as an English rendering of Homer now in existence. It

is not a great poem ; but it is a vigorous and occasionally a delicate rendering of a great poem, without mannerism and not without spirit. We cannot look to any but a great poet for a faithful rendering of Homer's royal but simple manner and various mood.