BOOKS.

MR. MORRIS'S " ODYSSEY."'

Mn. MORRIS'S Odyssey is completed in this volume, and corn; plated, we need hardly say, in the same fashion in which the task was commenced. It is definitely an attempt to make the Odyssey read as quaintly and as little in keeping with modern conceptions, whether as regards thought or language, as it is possible to make it consistently with a tolerably intelligible style. For this purpose, all kinds of odd-sounding composite words are coined even where the original does not give as any equally grotesque phrase, but in place of it either a very ordinary word, or two ordinary words not in any way interlocked as Mr. Morris loves to interlock them. Thus, isireev, which merely means, we suppose, "assented," and is in no respects an odder word in Greek than " assented" is in English, Mr. Morris

translates in Book 1. 47, by " yea-said :"—

" go be apake; and all yea-said him, and bade the thing to be," where Mr. Morris deliberately makes, to English ears, his trans- cot"' "W"h7y 'tall:din:" William MoTtfliet Author

at

lotion much more quaint and grotesque than the Greek word would be to Greek ears. And so, again, in the same book, where Athene addresses Ulysses, as "insatiate of deceits" (Unws sir% Mr. Morris invents as the equivalent the very unjustified quaint- ness "guile-greedy," though "greedy of guile" would have been far nearer to the mechanism of Homer's phrase. So, again, he translates cairn, which surely is not at worst at all quainter than " vagrant," by "gangrel," a word entirely foreign to any classical English, though cairn; is not at all foreign to classical Greek. The same thirst for archaisms,—jarring and misleading archaisms, as we maintain,—pursues Mr. Morris throughout his Odyssey. A04apLEvo; IzIreavicov becomes "all thy horse-lore heed gone by ;" Agipau, "be of good cheer," becomes "heart-up;" vgq9eAnwpira ZEI%g becomes "Zeus the Cloud-pack's Herder ;" xEipt xzerazpirii," with a stroke from the palm of his hand," becomes "with the stroke of his hand laid flatting" (where there is no conceivable excuse for the " ling," except the malice prepense of a theory that Homer should be made grotesquely quaint). When Euryclea anoints Ulysses with oil, Mr. Morris gives it " with oil she sleeked his skin ;" and when Ulysses comes out from his bath " with a form like to the immortals," Mr. Morris says,— " And as be went up from the bath-vat, like the deathless his body did show."

When Athens spreads a mist round Ulysses so that he does not recognise the localities of his own Ithacan home, since it is the natural effect of a concealing and magnifying mist which shuts out all that is not close under the eye, and magnifies what is close under it, that the roads appear to have no turning, and to be quite continuous, the harbours to be all that one could wish, the rocks steep, and the trees luxuriant,—Mr. Morris gives us the following,— "Therefore all things about him the King as strange did see, The microoked ways far-reaching, the all-safe havens there, The steep, high rocks, and the trees, well.growing, leafy-fair."

"Uncrooked " is a vile phrase for" without turnings," and hardly suggests the true meaning ; it was not that the roads looked " nncrooked," bat that they did not look crooked, as they would have done if Ulysses could have seen further. Then ipyrKci. wapri Nye, zaupoicri3oto Acarigans COme8 Out,— "As along the shore of the wallow of the washing seas he crept," where " wallow " ie, we think, a pure superfluity of grotesque. nese for which there is no excuse; nor do we think " washing " at all a good translation for a word which is used to express the roar of a great multitude of men, as well as the roar of the ocean. It is not the washing sound that the word must indicate, not the gurgle of the breakers on the beach, but the indistinct tumult of the distant waters.

On the whole, we like Mr. Morris's translation less in this second volume than we did in his first, because there are fewer passages of the idyllic sort such as rather beguiled the poet from his theory. In his picture of Circe and Calypso in their different island homes, Mr. Morris to a certain extent forgot his theory, and painted, with the genuine zest of a poet, a beautiful idyllic subject. But here there are fewer passages of that description, nor is his style at all suited to the grander bits of this portion of the Odyssey, like the bending of Ulysses' bow and the slaughter of the suitors. Unlike Homer as Pope cannot help being, we infinitely prefer Pope's rendering of the bending of Ulysses' bow to Mr. Morris's. There is far more fire is it, more motion, more menace, more triumph. Here is Mr. Morris's :— " And silently forth from the house meanwhile had Fhilcotins sped, And therewith he bolted the gate of the well-walled forecourt there ;

But there lay beneath the cloister a curved ship's mooring-gear, A flag.wronght rope, and therewith he bound o'er the gate of the close, And then gat him aback and sat down on the bench whence he erewhile arose, And set his eyes on Odysseus, who as now the great bow bare,

And was turning it over on all sides, and trying it here and there, Lest the worms its horn should have eaten while long was its master away,

And one would be eyeing his neighbour, and thuswise would he say : Lo here, a lover of bows, one canning in archery !

Or belike in his house at home e'en such-like gear doth lie; Or e'en such an one is be minded to fashion, since handling it still, He turneth it o'er, this gangrel, this crafty one of ill!' And than would another be saying of those younglings haughty and high : 'E'en so soon and so great a measure of gain may he come by

As he may now accomplish the bending of the bow.'

So the Wooers spoke ; hat Odysseus, that many a retie did know, When the great bow he had handled, and eyed it about and along, Then straight, as a man well learnfid in the lyre and the song, On a new pin lightly stretcheth the cord, and maketh fast From side to side the sheep.gut well-twined and overcast ; So the mighty bow he beaded with no whit of labouring, And caught it op in his right hand, and fell to try the string, That 'neath his hand sang lovely as a swallow's voice is fair.

But great grief fell on the Wooers, and their skin changed colour there, And mightily Zeus thundered, and made manifest a sign ;

And thereat rejoiced Odysseus, the toil stout man divine,

At that sign of the Son of Croons, the orookbd-counselled Lord ; And he caught up a swift arrow that lay bare upon the board, Since is that hollow quiver as yet the others lay,

Which those men of the Achresos should taste ere long that day,

And he laid it on the bow-bridge, and the sock and the string he drew, And thence from his seat on the settle he shot a shaft that flew Straight-aimed, and of all the axes missed not a single head, From the first ring through and through them, and out at the last it sped, The brass-shod shaft ; and therewith to Telemachus spoke he:

' The guest in thine halls a.sittiog in nowise shameth thee,

Telemachus. I missed not thy mark, nor overlong Toiled I the bow a-bending; stark yet am I and strong.

Forsooth, the Wooers that shamed me no more may make me scorn !

But now for these Lehman. is the hour and the season born

To dight the feast in the daylight, and otherwise to be fain With the song and the harp thereafter that crown the banquet's So he spoke; and with bent brow nodded, and Telemachus the lord, Dear son of the godlike Odysseus, girt on his whetted sword ; His dear hand gripped the spear-shaft, and hie father's side sneer, He stood by the bigh-seat created with the gleaming brazen gear."

One sees here how Mr. Morris's effort to be quaint spoils the directness and rapidity of Homer,—" with no whit of labouring" is the equivalent of the simple Amp avrotAiu, "without effort;" "fell to try the string" is the equivalent of wiiptiactro Inv*, " tried the string." 'II tirS sonic dim xeXiativi [tan", " But it sang beautifully under his hand, like in voice to a swallow," is weakened both by the introduction of the epithet " fair " for the swallow's voice, and the substitution of the quaint adverb " lovely " for " beautifully," for it surely is not meant that the note was intrinsically beautiful (indeed, the swallow's cry is somewhat shrill), but that the bow sang beautifully to the ear of the grim warrior who knew what he was about to do with it. That the sound was not beautiful to the suitors, the next lines tell us. Again, the cold irony of the invitation to the suitors to begin feasting, and feasting to the sound of music, while such a fate was preparing for them, is lost in the dreadful archaism of the couplet:— "To dight the feast in the daylight, and otherwise to be fain

With the song and the harp thereafter that crown the banquet's

gain."

Pope's version,—

" Ill I deserved these haughty peers' disdain, Now let them comfort their dejected train, In sweet repast the present hour employ, Nor wait till evening for the genial joy ; Then to the lute's soft voice prolong the night, Music the banquet's most refined delight,"— is three times as nervous and disdainful.

Mr. Morris seems to us to make a great mistake when he treats the extremely germinal character of Homer's conceptions of such matters as geography, history, natural laws, and domestic civilisation, as suggesting that the language in which these matters are treated should also be of that half-developed kind proper to a society which is groping for utterance. Homer was master of one of the most splendid forms of speech which have ever been at the command of man. Look carefully at Mr. Morris's selected phraseology for the rendering of Homer, and we find that it abounds in each words as " gangrel," " eleeked," heartnp," "bath-vat," " toil-stout," "Cloud-packs Herder," " flatling," " uncrooked," " guile-greedy," &c.,—that is, in clumsy compound words which have either been devised for the particular occasion and jar on the ear, or which must be sup- posed to have dropped out of use because they produced an effect in excess of that which they were intended to produce, and so diverted the attention of the reader from more important points. Now, this we may safely say,—that Homer's expressions never produce this effect of clumsy tentativeness or of spotty impres- siveness There never was a form of speech more full of har- mony, less marked by disagreeable singularities, than Homer's. If he is antique in his knowledge of the universe, as, of course, he is, he is up to the highest mark we can conceive in the fine tone of his phraseology, the perfect blending of his tints, the general harmony of his effects. Mr. Morris's Odyssey makes one shrink at every page from the oddity of the combinations which he invents, of the patches of effect which he grafts upon his author. To translate stoe/arripiva Zinc, "Cloud-pack's Herder ;" to translate Bdcsmpor apyriceOmw (epithets of Hermes), " the flitter, the Argue-bane," instead of " the Messenger, the slayer of Argue," produces much the same sort of grotesque effect as would any sixteenth-century historian who should have called Henry VIII. " the wife-ridder, the Pope-bane." In a word, Mr. Morris makes us stare, where Homer makes us quite at home. We do not think that Mr. Woraley's Odyssey is at all like the original, for, with all its beauty, it has lost Homer's simplicity, and we are sure that Cowper 's Odyssey is as much too dull and flat as Mr. Worsley's is too rich and complex. Bat either the one or the other seems to us to be a less misleading rendering of Homer's Odyssey than Mr. Morris's, which, in spite of some beautiful passages, is limping, grotesque, and destitute of the mellow beauty of Homer.