BOOKS.

PROFESSOR CONINGTON'S COMPLETION OF MR. WORSLEY'S ILIAD.*

PROFESSOR CONINGTON has in this volume done what is very rare in literary labour,—devoted a very great amount of time and work to complete the task of a friend, by whose name, rather than by Professor Conington's, the whole translation will neces- sarily be chiefly known. By this he has no doubt added immensely * The Iliad qf Romer, transhaed into English Verse in the Sponserian Stanza. By Philip Stanhope Worsley, M.A. Vol. II., Books 11-24. Translated by John Conington, MA. London ; Blackwood. to the value of the late Mr. Worsley's labour. A fragment, how- ever large, can never take its proper rank among the complete translations of any author, and though Mr. Worsley's Odyssey was complete, and his Iliad half-finished, so that three-quarters of Homer had been rendered by Mr. Worsley himself into his own elegant Spenserian verse, without the disinterested labour of Mr. Conington Mr. Worsley's translation could never have been popular, and would have been known probably only to scholars. The difference between the value of a com- plete translation, and of one wanting the last quarter is far more than one-fourth, according to the very natural stand- ards of popular estimation. To know that you will be unable to finish the great story in the style and rhythm in which you have begun it will always be, with the majority of mankind, a very sufficient reason for not beginning it at all. We believe, therefore, that a greater and more disinterested literary service was never rendered to a lost friend's work than Professor Coning- ton has rendered to Mr. Worsley's, by adding the wanting twelve books, and rendering them with a care and polish not unworthy to stand beside Mr. Worsley's. Original literary work of this kind is a region in which,—why, we scarcely know,—disinterestedness like Professor Conington's is exceedingly rare. No man likes to merge his original work in another's, and that Mr. Conington's is in every sense original work, except so far as he has adopted the rhythm and the manner of Mr. Worsley, is obvious enough. Yet Mr. Conington's name will never be connected with the Iliad by reason of this volume, as it will very long, we believe, be con- nected with the iEneid. So much the more should we admire this noble and laborious tribute of friendship, and give Mr. Conington,—before this last instalment of Mr. Worsley's Homer is allowed to coalesce in the popular imagination with that larger portion which is really Mr. Worsley's work,—the in- dependent literary estimation which it fairly deserves. Of the volume now published, concluding the Iliad, only the first twelve stanzas of the thirteenth book (about four pages out of 322) were completed by Mr. Worsley before his death.

We have always held that the movement of the Spenserian stanza is not very suitable to Homer, and specially unsuitable to the rapid and often dramatic movement of the Iliad. In the Odyssey there are numerous descriptive passages which are more complete and rounded off in themselves than almost any in the Iliad, which last always seem to lead up to action. Now Mr. Worsley manages his Spenserian stanza so as to reflect very pleasantly these comparatively clear still reaches of pure descrip- tion, and even the action in the Odyssey is usually so much more tranquil and idyllic than in the lliad, that though we perceive the incommensurability between the rich Speuserian stanza (properly adapted to an idealistic allegorical vision, where the movement is the movement of the poet's fancy rather than of the narrative itself), and the regular march of the Homeric hexameters, we do not resent the dreaminess of the verse,—the inward melody produced by the quick-revolving wheels of the Spenserian rhyme,—as we do when we hear the muster of great forces in the Iliad. In many parts of the Iliad the Spenserian stanza gives the effect of an attempt to paint rapid motion by a series of pictures of different phases of rest,—an attempt to paint a cataract by picturing a number of eddies each completely centred in itself. But this is a criticism not on Mr. Conington's, but on Mr. Worsley's design, and we are now only concerned with the way in which Professor Conington has executed the unfinished part of it.

Let us try Mr. Coningtou's translation by the most characteris- tically Homeric tests,—some of them exceptionally favourable to the Spenserian rhythm, with its cyclical return of the rhyme into itself, —some of them exceptionally unfavourable. Perhaps the most favourable passages for the Spenserian stanza are those in which a long Homeric simile stretches over the surface of about a single stanza, while another is occupied in applying the simile to the human action which is to be illustrated. We have a very good instance of this in the early part of Mr. Conington's work,—near the opening of the fifteenth book, where Hector's onset is described, and its sudden check when he reaches the serried ranks of the Greeks :—

"Quivered the javelins in their stalwart hands : Straight on they looked, and yearned for the death-lock.

On plunged the Trojans: Hector led their bands Right forward ; as a boulder from a rock, Which wintry torrent down the steep doth knock, Loosening the stiff rock-joints with infinite rain ; High bounding it flies onward; with the shock

The wood rings; still it travels, till the plain Receives it; then no more it plunges, although fain.

"So Hector: whiles he vaunted ho would reach The A.chaian camp and navy without let, Slaying and harrying e'en to the sea-beach ; But when at last their serried ranks he met, Steadfast he stood, with foot 'gainst foot firm sot: They with sharp swords and javelins doubly steeled Still thrusting, pricking, off the assailant beat, Achaia's sons: he, staggering backward, reeled,

While in his followers' ears his voice like trumpet pealed."

That is on the whole wonderfully faithful and sufficiently spirited, —but the line "which wintry torrent down the steep doth knock" is, it cannot be denied, more than quaint, grotesque,—both by the elision of the article before "wintry torrent," and the use of the

word " knock " instead of " sweep " or " push " for the impulse given by a torrent. And these faults,—the grotesque compression of phraseology necessary sometimes to get sufficient into a line,— and the use of old-fashioned rather grotesque expressions for the sake of the rhyme, like " knock " here, and elsewhere odd preterite tenses (as " strook " for the preterite of strike),—seem to us Mr. Conington's principal defects, and if we are not mistaken, defects rather more frequent than we find in Mr. Worsley's part of the version. The defect of the $penseriau verse itself is probably here at its minimum, and yet to our ears the re- curring rhymes in the course of the two stanzas, while the poet is tracing the continuous downward rush of the boulder, and where the mind does not want any pauses, nay, almost deprecates • ledges to linger upon till it gets to the point where the onward course is arrested, are a little grating and superfluous. It seems to us that Lord Derby's blank verse, though really much less close a translation, gives much more of the movement of Homer :— " As some huge boulder, from its rocky bed

Detached, and by the wintry torrent's force Hurled down the cliff's steep face, when constant rains The massive rock's firm hold have undermined ; With giant bounds it flies, the crashing wood Resounds beneath it, still it hurries on, Until, arriving at the level plain, Its headlong impulse checked, it rolls no more ; So Hector," itc.

There seems to be a real need in the mind to stretch itself, without the returning rests and pauses of rhyme, over the downward flight of the boulder. Yet Lord Derby both leaves out and adds more than Professor Conington. Certainly in Homer the wood does

not both crash and resound, and probably only the resonance, not the sound of cracking timber, is conveyed by xrucriu. And Pro- fessor Conington has given admirably the concluding words of the simile which express the permanent pressure of the boulder after it is arrested, the pressure which is needful to image Hector's

living force when his onset is stopped by the spears of the Greeks.

Mr. Conington's "though fain" (Ecre.61.6€1,6; ,,,rEp) is essential to the living spirit of the simile, and concludes his spirited verse with its finest touch, the touch which expresses time moving force

of the boulder even when the motion is come to an end.

Let us take another test, the translation of the noble passage describing Hera, when, after being silenced and terrified by Zeus, but still as bitter as ever against his sympathy for the Trojan cause, she reaches the council-room of the gods on Olympus, and brings the message of his auger :—

"Then ceased imperial Hera and sat down :

Troubled were all the gods: a faint smile wrought Around her lips, but softened not the frown 'Twist her dark brows, while thus she spoke her thought : Mere infants we, right senseless and untaught, Who rage at Zeus, and would his power arrest By word or blow : he reeks nor heeds us aught, Sitting apart, and Baal' that of the blest In lustibood and strength he past compare is best.'"

Mr. Conington's expression here, that a smile " wrought " round Hera's lips,—(why "a faint smile," by the way ? there is no hint of this in Homer, aud it weakens the force of the contrast between the stormy brow and the smiling lips),—is fine, because it so com- pletely localizes the smile, and distinguishes it from anything which would express inward pleasure. But the necessity of find- ing a rhyme to " wrought " obliges Mr. Conington to put " thought " where we really want "wrath." Hera does not speak her thought, but her passion, in what follows, and Homer expressly says so, cream ôi Ep.goirdhisu ,u,gr4(iiia. The rhyme there- fore weakens the verse, and the feeble quaintness of " lustihood " seems to us to dilute still further this savage growl of Hera at her lord. The translation is fine and faithful on the whole, but both the exigencies of the rhyme and the infection of quaint- ness which the Spenserian stanza seems to cause, appear to us to weaken it. The worst effect produced by this metre is, how- ever, where the close of one verse interrupts a highly dramatic situation, as at the moment of Hector's death. Mr. Conington

has, we think, needlessly allowed the close of the stanza to break the flow of Achilles' vindictive passion, and so completely spoiled the effect :—

" And Hector, faint and gasping, did entreat :

'Now by thy knees, thy parents, I implore, Let not dogs tear me lying at the fleet, But take thou presents, brass and gold good store, In ransom from my sire and mother hoar, For my poor corpse, that Troy may honour me With mead of funeral flame when all is o'er.'

To whom Achilleus, frowning angrily: Dog that thou art, have done : let knees and parents be.

" 'Would that as surely heart and will were mine To carve and eat thy flesh, my maw to stay, As none shall ward off dogs from head of thine. Though treasures ton and twentyfold they weigh Here on the place, and promise more to pay, Nay, though with gold King Priam on his throne Should match thy weight, not then thy dam should lay Thy body on the couch, and wail her own, But dogs and ravening birds shall pick thee to the bone.'"

The lengthening of the last line of the first stanza seems to us to rob it of all nerve. Beside Lord Derby's admirable

"Knee me no knees, vile hound, nor prate to me of parents !"

it is very weak, and the pause itself is radically bad.

But, on the whole, the translation seems to us wonderfully good, and near to Mr. Worsley's own mark. What jars us most are the manifold antiquenesses,--such as "The Achaians wight," "ere they joined in stour," for instance, which occur in a single stanza, —expressions which seem to us, embodied as they are in the most fanciful and subjective of modern forms of verse,—to convey a false effect, what Mr. Arnold calls simplesse, rather than simpli- city. On the whole, as a work of art, Professor Couington's completion of Mr. Won3ley's graceful poem, cannot rank by any means with his own spirited and rapid iEneid. But it is wonder- fully faithful, more faithful than we should have thought possible, often very spirited, sometimes poetical. And the defects seem to us to be rather natural consequences of the form of verse selected than due to any negligence of Professor Conington's. As the com- pletion of another man's conception and design, it is probably almost unequalled in literary history.