CALVERLEY'S COMPLETE WORKS.* NOTHING eludes analysis SO completely as charm ;

and charm masculine charm, the indefinable attraction of a man for other men, is the secret of Calverley's extraordinary popowity

with men of all kinds and ages. There may be women who know his writings by heart : there are very few men of either University who do not. The limitation is perhaps inevitable; he caught once and for all the peculiar and distinctive humour of the English Universities, and those to whom the academic temperament is distasteful have little love for this mature and scholarly jesting, which, in spite of its maturity, is so bounded in its outlook and interests. In some cases the type may occasion a positive antipathy, as we saw when Mr.

Swinburne launched into a surprising tirade against the author of Verses and Translations. It is not perhaps a very courageous type ; it maintains the poet who " chez lee trois quarts des hommes " dies young in a sort of surreptitious existence, and only lets him peep out shamefacedly under cover of a jest. Byron and plenty of other poets mingle jest with poetry, but they have the courage of both, and give the jest and the poetry full rein. Reticence pushed to the point of hesitancy is the characteristic of Calverley and his school. Verses like these from "The Poet and the Fly" show more than just a knack of verse :—

" Flee to some loved haunt of thine, To the valleys where the line Udder-deep in grasses cool,

Or the rushy-margined pool, Strive to lash thy murmurous kin (Vainly) from their dappled skin."

-Yet Calverley does not, as Lowell does in his "Familiar Epistle to a Friend," keep for the poetic passage its full poetic value; rather, he makes you feel that poetry is being

treated with disrespect, and that feeling is not agreeable. But within his own province, as the scholarly jester of a society that has scholarship enough to pick up allusions, to catch the fugitive hint of parody, be is unsurpassable. He knows how to give the incongruous word its discreet and irresistible emphasis :—

" 0 my earliest love, still unforgotten,

With your downcast eyes of dreamy blue, Never, somehow, could I seem to cotton To another as I did to you."

For, of course, the art of the parodist is paradoxical, and consists in selecting the wrong word at the right moment. But the vogue of Calverley does not depend upon his technical mastery. The verses " Hic air, hic est," with their summary of undergraduate life or the study of the "worn-out city clerk"

called " Peace " (tnerunt sal, if ever verses deserved the name), owe their charm not so much to style as to temperament,— to the delightful vein of humorous and kindly contemplation.

However, about these things it is superfluous to write; and Calverley in the greater part of this volume is presented to IN in the less familiar aspect of a translator. The man was and

is so much beloved both by those who knew him and by those who know his writings that to disparage anything from his pen is heresy. Yet Calverley's translations convince us that the charm of "Fly-Leaves" and the rest resides in the man's personality rather than in his accomplishment or in his command of style. The talent for allusive quotation, or mis- quotation, which makes his "Carmen Saeculare " such a marvel of in gmuity, haunted him through all his serious work ; and whether he is rendering Latin into English or English into Latin we are dogged by continual echoes. Of his serious Latin compositions we speak with diffidence, but in our judgment he does not compose in the language as if it had become native to his mind. Landor in his epigrams writes Latin poetry that is stamped everywhere with Landor's own personality. Mr. Swinburne in his threnody on Lander pre- fixed to the 'Atalanta" wrote a Greek poem as musical and spontaneous as his English. Calverley seems always to be putting together from a well-stored mind an admirable cent°

• The Complete Works of C. B. Calverley. With a Biographical Notice by Sir Walter J. Sendai]. G.C.Y.G. London : G. Bell and Sons. Pal

of phrases that have already been used by some classic. The English of his translations seems to us characterised by the same lack of character. The Calverley of the "Ply-Leaves" is unmistakeable in every line ; but who is this ?— " Winless, meet it is that I obey Mine elder. Lead, or into shade—that shifts At the wind's fancy—or mayhap (the best) Into some cave. See, here's a cave o'er which A wild vine flings her flimsy foliage."

There is only one word in that with character and colour,— eilase."—and that word seems to us conspicuously wrong.

Otherwise the passage is destitute of the individuality with- out which there cannot be style. Broadly speaking, when Calverley writes blank verse and you come upon a passage that has a style, it is the style of Tennyson. Theocritus in his rendering will scarcely interest the English reader, except ossibly the passages of comedy. The Syracusan ladies on p their way to the festival of Adonis have a certain amount of expression, but the Greek is so lively that it takes a deal of killing. And when it should leap into poetry, with the recital of the song, in plain truth, we fall into flatness and worse. Here is a specimen :— " Soft as a dream, such tapestry gleams o'erhead As the Milesian's self would gaze on, charmed. But sweet Adonis bath his own sweet bed; Next Aphrodite sleeps the roseate-armed, A bridegroom of eighteen or nineteen years. Kiss the smooth boyish lip—there's no sting there ! "

The last but one of these lines if read with anything like its true accent is simply intolerable. There is the more reason to dispute over Calverley's translations because he was a theorist on the subject, and also perhaps because Sir Walter Sendall rates his achievement in this respect so highly. The theory upon which he proceeded, and desired that others should proceed, was that a translator should attempt to repro- duce not only the sense, but the rhythm of the original. By rhythm, as he explains in an essay on metrical translation here reprinted, we must understand, not the metre, but the movement of the original. We can only say that the blank verse by which he represents the hexameters of Theocrat's and Virgil seems to us destitute of all the suppleness and' natural spring and play which make rhythm. It is, indeed, almost impossible to secure that freedom if any attempt be made to adhere closely to the Original. A man who fixed in his mind the general meaning of a passage and the general flow of the rhythmic arrangement might, so to say, rewrite it in another language, reproducing that rise and fall of the sentences. On the other hand, it is possible in English blank verse—so loose are the shackles—to give a rendering almost as literal as in prose. And that is what Calverley did, but not in that way can the pleasure of verse be secured. He secures only the benefit of the convention, which makes many turns of phrase seem natural that in prose would be affected or strained.

Sir Walter Sendall praises highly the version of "Audivere, Lyee," the ninth ode of Horace's fourth book. We can only say that it lacks, to our judgment, all the dignity and re- strained passion of the original. We prefer the ingenuity of the ode on Archytas. But in one part of this book the translator is seen to the greatest advantage,—in his render- ing of the noble Latin hymns. A real accent of passion breathes through the verses ; and in one translation especially that of the Venerable Bede's hymn on St. John the Baptist, Calverley has caught up a strain of Milton's Lo, to prepare Thy way,' Did God the Father say, ` Before thy face my messenger I send Thy coming to forerun ; As on the Orient sun Doth the bright daystar morn by morn attend." What could be better than this again, from Adam of St. Victor's "Lux jucunda, lux insignia" ?— " Day all jubilant, all splendid. When from heaven the fire descended On the chosen of the Lord ! Heart is full and tongue rejoices : Yea, our hearts invite our voices To sing praise with one accord."

Altogether, there is a glow and a freedom in these renderings wholly absent from the versions of the classics ; and it is probable that the man's nature found a real outlet in these ITrical outbursts of devotion.