THE DIGNITY 01' HOMER.

WE cannot join in the admiration which seems to be felt for Mr. W. Morris's version of the first twelve books of the Odyssey! Mr. W. Morris is a poet, and a poet in whom much of the various pathos of human life has found for itself a tender and a musical voice. He has a fine sense, too, of what is beautiful, though his sense of the beautiful is a little too much confined to that which satisfies the longing for peace and rest. Bat Mr. Morris does not, except in fragments here and there, give a good impression of his own finer qualities in this version of the Odyssey. Now and then, as in the beautiful though much too artificial description of the abode of Calypso, and again in the expedition of Nausicaa, he is at his best; but even then his best is utterly different in effect from Homer's best. We had never thought it possible that Mr. Arnold's lectures on "Translating Homer " would have been so utterly fruit- less of result on a nature so susceptible of fine literary feeling as Mr. Morris's. Yet, in spite of these lectures, which we can hardly suppose that he failed to read, he has embarked on an enterprise the very structure and design of which seem to us to have been condemned by anticipation, —and more than condemned, shown to be ill-conceived,—in Mr. Arnold's lectures. In those lectures, Mr. Arnold insists that any adequate translation of Homer must be rapid in movement, plain and direct both in the manner and in the substance of the thought, and, finally, noble in its character. We have often ques- tioned whether " noble " is precisely the word for the whole of Homer. Doubtless Homer's style is the most perfect of all styles for dealing even with the commonest matters; but it is not grand in dealing with plain matters, and would not be the best if it were. Its perfection consists rather, we should say, in uniform dignity than in uniform nobility,— which, indeed, hardly seems to us to apply to any conceivable mode of treating the details of a banquet or the construction of a raft. But though "noble" seems to us hardly to apply to all the elastic movements of Homer's style, we should certainly have said that "dignity," that constant characteristic of the better life of the ancient world, where there was no complexity and intricacy of affairs sufficient to upset the poise of the higher minds, does apply to Homer throughout, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and both to the substance of the narrative and to its style. Indeed, one of the reasons why, in our opinion, the greater classical writers are so well worthy of even years of study by the hurrying men of our generation, is that to read them is a lesson in dignity such as it is hardly possible otherwise to gain,—a lesson in the study of the due proportion between the outward and the inward world, between the urgency of human needs and the worth of human nature. But open Mr. Morris's Odyssey, and at the very first glance one drops it astonished at the want of dignity :— " Tell me, 0 Muse, of the Shifty, the man who wandered afar, After the Holy Burg, Troy.town, be had wasted with war; He saw the towns of menfolk, and the mind of men did he learn ; As he warded his life in the world, and his fellow-farers' return, Many a grief of heart on the deep-sea flood he bore, Nor yet might he save his fellows, for all that be longed for it sore. They died of their own souls' folly, for witless as they were They ate up the beasts of the Sun, the Rider of the Air, And he took away from them all their dear returning day ; 0 Ch3ddess! 0 daughter of Zeus ! from whencesoever ye may, Gather the tale, and tell it, yea even to us at the last !"

Now, whatever may be said in praise of that, no one can say it is • Published by Messrs. Reeves and Tamer. dignified verse, or verse that even suggests a dignified hero. Just conceive introducing Ulysses as "the Shifty,"—which suggests at once the title given by the young thieves in Fagiu's household to their greakhero," the Artful,"—instead of the man of much experience, or, if that be the true meaning of it, the man of many wiles. It is, to our minds, impossible to conceive a greater blow to the imagination than the invocation to the Muse to inspire the poet with a true vision of "the Shifty." Again, " holy " is as much too reverential a word for dpo,,, which conveyed only the ceremonial sacredness of Troy, as " Shifty " is too lowering a word for Ulysses. And to tell us that Ulysses "saw the towns of menfolk,"is deliberately to introduoe grotesque- ness of phraseology where there is not a trace of it in the original. Nothing can be simpler and more direct in speech than the line in which the poet tells us that Ulysses "saw the cities and made acquaintance with the mind of many men," and nothing more unlike it than Mr. Morris's paraphrase ; and what can be more ingeniously obscure than the wording of the line P— "As he warded his life in the world, and his fellow-farers' return."

How do you ward your " fellow-farers' return P" Can any expression be less like the dignity, simplicity, and directness of Homer P Whatever may be said of Homer, it can never be said truly of him that he favours conceits or oddities of expression. From the first description of the disorderly household in Ithaca which was the result of the prolonged absence of Ulysses,—of Penelope's stately grief and maternal fidelity,—of the sedate de- spondency of Telemachus,—of the impressions made on the young man by hearing his father's friends at Pylos and Sparta speak of their lost comrade,—of the melancholy of Ulysses, yearning after his old home, in the island of the goddess Calypso,—of his arrival in Amuck, and the impression he makes there upon the King and Queen and all their subjects,—of the narrative he gives of his wanderings, and especially of his visit to the world below, —from the picture of these things, to the steps taken after his return home to recover his authority, and his final slaughter of the suitors, the one pervading impression is that of the dignity of the Greek chieftain who had incurred the enmity of some of the gods, and gained the friendship of others of them, but who had the fiat of destiny on his side through all his misfortunes. Self-possession, self-reverence, self-confidence through all the turns of fate, through all his Grecian wiles and diplomacies, through all the bends and turns of his constant will, are the features which Homer is always trying to bring out. The nature of the man is exempli- fied in the nature of the bow which, in the moment of destiny, he finds so flexible to his hand, and to his hand alone. Pliant as to occasions, but inflexible as to his ultimate purpose, the whole story of the Odyssey is the story of a character of the old Greek type of dignity, and of the impression made by that character on gods and men.

But this is the last impression one could derive from such a version of the Odyssey as Mr. Morris's, which hides the statuesque simplicity of the Homeric story in all sorts of quips and cranks and eccentricities of expression, transforming Homer into a sort of Renaissance writer who is so pleased with having recovered a new literary medium, that he cannot restrain him- self from taking a multitude of liberties with that medium. Take, again, another random specimen of this disguising of the dignity and simplicity of Homer in the conceits of a half. inarticulateliterature. The passage we open at is that in which Ulysses shrinks from the lonely voyage on the raft which Calypso enjoins upon him :—

"Bet thereat the goodly Odysseus, toil-stout, fell shuddering, And his voice withal he lifted and set these words on the wing ' Far other things than my going, 0 Goddess, thou wiliest for me When thou bledest me fare in a raft o'er the mighty gulf of the sea, The perilous place and dreadful, where a way is scarce to be had With a shapely ship swift-sailing, with the wind of Zeus made glad Against thy will, 0 Goddess, on the raft will I nowise fare, But and if thou bast the heart with a mighty oath to swear That no other baleful trouble thou wiliest on me to fall.' He :make, and the Godhead's glory, Calypso, smiled withal, And she stroked him down with her hand, and named him, and

epake for her part • Yea, verily art thou conning, and no scant-of-wit then art.'"

What can be a goodlier assortment of quaintly disguising and disfiguring epithets than " toil-stout " (as bad a coinage as we can imagine for gom:rxgc, a word which " toil-worn " would at least express fairly enough, without that ostentatious air of being a shred of gipsy finery which the new-coined word gives), "set on the wing," "gulf of the sea" (a combination which attenuates the force of the original, instead of expressing it), " baleful trouble," "stroked him down" (which might be applied to a horse), "no scant-of- wit,"—all expressions which bewilder the imagination, and make us feel as if Homer were a storehouse of conceits, instead of a world fall of the clear and stately outlines of grand and simple life. Again, let us pass to Ulysses' visit to the under-world, and his interview there with his mother, one of the finest passages in the first twelve books of the Odyssey

"‘ What doom of Death o'ercarne thee that layeth men along ?

Was it the lingering sickness, or did Artemis shaft-strong Fall on thee for thy slaying with her gentle bolts and kind ?

Yea, tell me too of my father, and the son I left behind.

Bides my lordship yet amongst them, or bath some man taken it o'er, Some alien ? Are they saying that I return no more ?

And I bid thee tell me the counsel and the mind of my wife

bewooed ;

Bides she still with my child, and steadfast yet guardeth all my good ?

Or her doth some Aohman, the best of the people, wed ?'

So I spake, and thereto my mother beworshipped answered and said

Yea, surely she abideth, and a hardy heart cloth bear

Within the halls of thine homestead ; but all nights cloth she wear In grief and in lamentation, and through all days doth pine. Nay, no man holdeth thine honour, but on those fields of thine In peace Telemachus dwelleth, and meted feasts doth he share, Whereof it is due that a man, a dealer of dooms, should have care, For thereto do all men bid him. But afield cloth thy father abide Nor ever wendeth him townward, nor bath he any tide Bedstead and bedding and blankets or rugs wrought fine and sleek, But a-winter he sleeps in the feast-hall whereto the thrall-folk seek, Adown in the ash by the fire, and in sorry raiment is clad ; But when the summer cometh with harvest rich and glad, Then about his vineyard's fatness where the mother of wine cloth

abound, And down on the leaves new-fallen, are his beds spread out on the ground.

And there in sorrow he lieth and eketh his heart-grief sore, In his longings for thy homefare, and eld bath him more and more. And in each wise I too perished, and e'en solo mine end I came. For neither on me in the homestead fell the Shaft.glad Eager.of-aim, Nor with her kindly arrows my body did she slay ; Net came the sickness upon me to drive the soul away From the limbs that met it quickened, with woeful waste and pine ; But the longing for thee, Odysseus, and those glorious redea of thine,

And the longing for thy kindness raft the sweet life from me.'" Mr. Morris does not quite lose all the pathos there, but he spoils it by arbitrary and antiquated tags of expression. What can be less Homeric than to translate the word which describes death as laying ne low by the nn-English and almost vulgar literalism, "laying men along P" Then, again, what can be more perverse in its elaborate clumsiness and oddity -than "shaft-strong," for a word which in the Greek is neither clumsy nor odd ? " Bewooed " and " beworshipped," too, are vile words, for which we see no excuse in the Greek ; indeed, the latter probably misrepresents a word which is in- tended to imply reverence, but by no means worship. "Meted feasts," again, and "dealer of dooms" are ostentatiously archaic ; while "rugs wrought fine and sleek," " eketh his heart-grief sore," " eld bath him more and more," and "the Shaft-glad Eager-of-aim" (where the same word is translated "shaft-glad" which was before translated "shaft-strong," and we cannot say which we dislike the more), are all terms apparently intended to impress upon the reader what a quaint curiosity-shop of oddities the language of Homer is. We deny it altogether. Homer, of course, used words which became rare or obsolete in the later language, but all his words seem to us intellectual tools of a refined simplicity, employed by a perfect master of style. There is nothing of that quality of uncertainty, of fumbling with thoughts and words, which characterises quaint writers, writers who are striving with difficulties to bring out their meaning, and who only do so by fits and starts of effort. Professor Newman's Iliad was condemned by Mr. Arnold pre- cisely for its jerky and grotesque style. And though Mr. Morris manages to put a good deal of music, beauty, and pathos here and there into his rhymed version, he makes exactly the same blunder. He gives an undignified effect to Homer's simplicity, instead of giving it the brightness and sureness of serene and happy vision. We read Mr. Morris with the sense that, with all his talent, he is giving us not Homer, but Homer lamed and hobbled through the translator's totally false conception of Homer's childishness and inarticulateness. We should have thought that never was a poet so perfectly articulate as Homer, so strong in his sense of the dignity and simplicity of life and home, of war and peace, of love and hate, of truth and craft, of Nature and Art, of gods and men. Mr. Morris has dressed up the most vivid and masterly of poets in a quaint garb, borrowed from

a number of different and inconsistent costumes, and the effect to us is very undignified. In Homer himself, dignity is never lost.