HELEN OF TROY.*

MR. LANG, as was to be expected of him, has written a refined, scholarly, and agreeable poem, which cannot be better described than in his own words :—" In this story in rhyme of the for- tunes of Helen, the theory that she was an unwilling victim of the Gods has been preferred. Many of the descriptions of manners are versified from the Iliad and the Odyssey. The description of the events after the death of Hector, and the account of the sack of Troy, is chiefly borrowed from Quintus Smyrnmus." Mr. Lang abounds in pleasant, if not very original qualities, through three hundred and five rhymed stanzas of eight lines, and his Helen is a lady who would not be out of place at school-room tea in the best-guarded English family, particularly if the family were sufficiently trained in the art of the day, and in that curious renascence of the renascence paganism to which cling shreds of mediaeval style. That man is indeed brave, however well equipped with scholarship, who approaches the mystery of Helen, and lays hands on the ark wherein the Greek conception of incarnate Beauty is enshrined. Every literary epoch has had its prophet of Helen, and though Mr. Lang disclaims any purpose but that of versifying the Homeric account of her, and though he is modest and wise in his simple expression of the more ancient legends of her, he still remains, to our mind, like a man who takes the horn of Roland to play an air from Patience, or the sword of Achilles to cut a posy of meadow flowers. For the story of Helen is of large and of increasing significance ; and there is a certain incongruity in the romantic and mediaeval treatment of it in our time when men ask,—What is Beauty P with as much anxious, despondency as they do,—What is Truth ?

Mr. Lang gives us a masque in which figures of the fifteenth century copy the attitudes and assume the parts hallowed to the imagination by the frieze of the Parthenon and the Homeric poems. If we can condone this, and it is no new presumption in literature, we may allow that Mr. Lang has done well, accord- ing to the standard of the day. He does not sin against taste in pretended worship of humanity, or disfigure the Greek legend by modern additions of vice. Nor has he cambered the smooth flow of his verse by moral or immoral speculations, or psychological questioning of the motives of Paris or Menelaus. Perhaps the divinities who shape Helen's life and the events of the Trojan war are insufficiently divine, and come and go in too pastoral and idyllic a fashion, but there is a charm in mere suavity for readers sated with verbal tricks and pseudo- originality. Mr. Lang's effects and stage properties are as accurately arranged as they could be at the Lyceum. It is curious how he reflects the manner of one or two of our very refined painters, who even when most sincerely and learnedly classical, in fact cannot get rid of mediaeval feeling, ignoring this deep-lying difference between the classical and the mediaeval styles, that the sentiment of the middle ages presupposed the harmonies of creation and a beneficent Ruler, while the Homeric

• Holes of Troy. By A. Lang. London George Bell and Bons. 1882.

mortal was the isolated victim of superhuman antagonisms, never free of land or sea, and never master of Nature. How- ever well Mr. Lang describes the home of Menelaus, however true he is to the Greek conception of Aphrodite's cruelty, when Aphrodite tells Helen,—

" Thou art the toy of Gods, an instrument Wherewith all mortals shall be plagued or blest, Even at my pleasure; yea, thou shalt be bent This way and that, bowe'er it like me best,"

the attitude of the Argive Queen is as little Greek as a pre- Raphaelite picture, when she awaits the coming of Paris :—

" And Helen sat her down upon the grass, And plucked the little daisies, white and red,

And toss'd them where the running waters pass, To watch them racing from the fountain-head, And whirled about where little streams dispersed ; And still with many birds the garden rang, And marry, marry, in their song they said,—. Or so do maids interpret that they sang."

'The flight of Paris and Helen,

"Across the great green plain unharvested," is full of Odyssean feeling ; and here Mr. Lang's scholarship is seen in its best aspect, and we are not bewildered as where he

More particularly describes the daughter of Zeus, the Greek Eve, the goal of men's desire, but the gate of death to many heroes. In the story of CE none and the death of her son Corythus, mur- dered by his father, Paris, Mr. Lang is not hampered by the thoughts and longings of three thousand years which have gathered round Helen, and he succeeds better than when he .affects to follow the literal simplicity of the myth of Helen's • empire, assured as it was by her betrayal of her husband. For it is not given to Mr. Lang's genius to make us feel towards her as did the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and we remain dissatis- fied when he makes her speak the words which Homer puts into her month ; and yet he admires and quotes Marlowe's passionate echo of renascence worship, and cannot ignore Goethe's claim for her of aesthetic sovereignty and of a high altar in the temple of sociology. CEnone, the mountain nymph, is a more practic- able subject for minor artists. Her passion ebbs and flows

within the skirts of Ida, and is not the motive of the Achaean storm that raged round the god-built walls of Bios. Only the sculptor of the Louvre Venus, or perhaps Leonardo da -Vinci, could set Helen before us, example as she is both of

Aphrodite's power and of the power of the human con- science, which conflicting, make beauty tragic. The betrayal .and grief of CEnone are purely human, compared with the tragedy of Helen, who fails under the weight of divine gifts,— the mortal crushed by the immortal. We can quite understand

the shrewish rage of the river-nymph when she wrote on her -birchen scroll to her great rival, much as Peg Woffington might

have written to Kitty Clive,-

" Oh, thou that on those hidden runes doth look, Hest thou forgotten quite thine ancient sin, Thy Lord, thy lofty palace, and thy kin,

Even as thy Love forgets the words he spoke, The strong oath broken one weak heart to win,

The lips that kissed him, and the heart that broke ?

Nay, but methinks thou shalt not quite forget The curse wherewith I curse thee till I die ; The tears that on the wood-nymph's cheeks are wet Shall burn thy hateful beauty deathlessly.

Nor shall God raise up seed to thee; but I Have borne thy love this messenger : my son, Who yet shall make him glad, for Time goes by, And soon shall thine enchantments all be done."

Our readers will remark the discord of the Biblical note struck by CEnone, but it is difficult to avoid incongruity and at the

same time use archaisms as freely as does Mr. Lang, whose 4' archer wights " "hurl" into . the night, who writes of a bear 4' that in these rocks did wonn," whose Trojans " fell on slumber zn the night." - There is, in truth, no ground for any severe

criticism, or any enthusiastic praise, as we pass from stanza to stanza of what is, to any real presentment of the personages -concerned, as a charmingly mellowed medimval tapestry is to actual men and women of any age. There is a good deal to Tease a curious taste, there are small literary excitements when fir. Lang comes in direct competition with Mr. Tennyson, as in his account of the vision of Paris on Mount Ida, or when the prompting of Chaucer becomes very audible. The conception of the three Goddesses is mediaeval throughout, and while the moral element and the " composition of place" and description of person are made the most of, the action of Fate and of the half-vengeful, half-sportive Powers who willed the woes that were to follow, is not felt. Aphrodite inspires no awe, and therefore, take what view Mr. Lang likes, his Helen remains unexcused, and her remorse is the remorse of a modern sinner, who blames a vague Providence for her misfortunes, even while she repents. In vain does Mr. Lang use his scholarship in ingenious adaptation of Homeric incidents, and descriptions,

and epithets ; in vain does he, so to speak, make a stepping- stone across the centuries by use of early English idioms ; his effort to perfect his inise-en-scene impairs the deeper-lying

dramatic appeal to our human sympathy with the men and women of the immortal story. We prefer Mr. Lang's notes wherein he discusses the materials he has used, and translates in simple language the passages of the Iliad and Odyssey in which Helen appears, to his poetical presentment of her. Compare, for instance, the Helen embroidering on tapestry the adventures of the siege, the battles of horse-taming Trojans, and bronze-clad Achasans, and the Helen—nearly related to Mr. Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott "—who,--

fared before a mighty loom, And sang, and cast her shuttle wrought of gold, And forth unto the utmost secret room The wave of her wild melody was roll'd ; And still she fashion'd marvels manifold, Strange shapes of fish and serpent, bear and swan, The loves of the immortal Gods of old, Wherefrom the peoples of the world began."

Here and there occur vigorous stanzas and excellent lines, which, however, too often dissatisfy the ear for want of an expected pause. The death of Corythus is dramatic, as is the sudden appearance of the Greek Fleet, even as -Enone spoke her curse, and ended :— 06, ye foolish people, deaf and blind,

What death is coming on you from the sea ?' Then all men turned, and lo, upon the lee Of Tenedos, beneath the driving rain, The countless Argive ships were racing free, The wind and oarsmen speeding them amain."

But continually we are checked in admiration by some warp of taste, perhaps most so near the end, when, to use Mr. Lang's words, he writes how" Menelaus would have let stone Helen, but

Aphrodite saved her, and made them at one again ; and how they came home to Lacedsamon, and of their translation to Elysium," where Helen became "a saint in Heathendom." Mr. Lang gets over the difficulty of explaining, what the stern Greeks left unexplained, the escape of Helen when Troy was sacked, by a reference to the escape of the sinner brought before our Lord, and His words are put into the mouth of Menelaus, who, indeed, does not forgive, but exclaims, with Old-Testament adjuration,—

" Nay, as mine own soul liveth, there is one That will not set thy barren beauty free,"— yet is stayed in his vengeance by the spell of Aphrodite; a situation not managed with much dignity by the English poet, who fails when he would paint the transition of passion from

hate to desire.

We have chiefly tried in these remarks to justify our dis- appointment that so finished a scholar and so pleasant a poet as Mr. Lang dallies with the prevalent fashion, which uses the most fruitful and profound legends of the Aryan past as subject

for verse that is hardly poetry. If dilettantism is to level down all intellectualheights to pleake the demand for neat cloth-covers and-

easy reading, no doubt there will be soon abundant " ghosts "to " squeeze" the Helens and give " artistic finish " to the manu- factured reproductions of our great forefathers' work. We do not liken Mr. Lang to such as these, but he paves the way for them, and is but one of several who seem in a conapiracy to simplify what can and should never be simple, and to blind us to the revelations of the starry night of the past by the veil of ingenious but very local light.