THE LATE PROFESSOR CONING-TON.
nXFORD had a much greater loss last Saturday than that of her brilliant Chancellor,—translator, and spirited translator, of Homer though he was. The Professor of Latin was one who gave up to the studies of the University his whole life, and we may truly say genius,—for his great abilities became genius through the ample and laborious culture with which his incessant industry and fine taste enriched them ;—and even one such man is an influence and a power in the University very difficult to be replaced. Of refined scholars, scholars whose tastes incline them to enter into the deli- cacies of criticism and of literary and philological distinctions, there are sure to be plenty in every English university ; but of men who not only enjoy the life of scholarship, but who live it with the zeal and enthusiasm of Professor Conington, there are always but few, for the temperament which is ardent enough to live his life, rarely indeed chooses that kind of life to live. We expect and find ardour like his in the Church, in politics, in the walks of science, even in law. We are not surprised at the gigan- tic reading even of metaphysicians like the late Sir William Hamil- ton, or philologists like Bopp, or the inexhaustible industry of discoverers like Faraday. In all enterprises where there is imme- diate hope of fresh discovery, there is a loadstone to draw men on ; in all where there is the pleasure of building up a system and founding a school, the attraction, such as it is, is obvious enough to all minds ; in all where there is a great moral campaign to wage, there is a " delight of battle " which few Englishmen fail to appreciate. But classical scholarship presents none of these incentives to unremitting industry. It is the favourite pursuit of a class of minds which have many of the temptations of the artistic temperament without the stimulus of the direct service of beauty ;—the delicacy of insight without the imperious demands on strenuous devotion, the quick and dreamy sympathies of the poet without the intenser moods of creative fervour, the somewhat desultory tastes of the lover of miscel- laneous letters without the aggressive ambition which the hope of great popularity is apt to inspire. The mere lin- guist or the mere philologist may be as much of a drudge as a hodman, though of a higher kind. For him there is no more special temptation to an indolent and superficial life, than there is for the banker's clerk or the working journalist, perhaps not so much. But the classical scholar, if he is worthy of the name, has learnt to feed his mind on nice discriminations of shades of feel- ing and thought, half the delight of which lies in the subtlety and finesse of the intellectual operations which they demand, that is, in the artistic pleasure involved in entering heartily into the fine work of a fine hand using a fine tool ; and yet by the very choice which he makes of his profession, he avows that he is rather com- petent to restore and interpret the works of others, than to create for himself. It is rare, indeed, to find such a temperament com- bined with the ardour and enterprise of a direct discoverer or creator ; to find great learning, fine tastes, and delicate sympathies devoted to elucidating the genius and labours of others, yet so devoted with a vigour and tenacity worthy either of an inde- fatigable intellectual operative with no rare fancies, or of a great original genius working out for himself his own ideas. The ideal classical scholar is generally more or less of a dilettante. He is apt to wrap his talent in a napkin and bury it in the earth, and rather pique himself than otherwise on doing so, as the hero in the parable himself did. Professor Conington had all the highest qualifications of the ideal classical scholar, without a spark of the dilettante in him ;—having received.ten talents, he went and made them ten talents more.
The record of his mere college achievements at Oxford is some- thing enormous. He gained a Magdalen demyship in days when it was at least said that only the President of Magdalen awarded the scholarship which fell to his gift by merit, and that almost all the other fellows awarded usually by favour. He gained the Ireland and the Hertford scholarships, the Latin verse prize, the English essay, the Latin essay, and the Eldon scholarship which is usually the reward of the man who has gained the greatest number of previous distinctions of this kind, in other words, the final distinction which marks distinctions already won. He took a first-class degree, and no sooner was the Professorship of Latin created by the Oxford Commission than Mr. Conington, then barely twenty-nine, was pointed out on all hands as the fit man to fill it. But this kind of early distinction is but a very uncertain promise for the actual achievements of the life of scholarship. The University competi- tions cut out for young men once passed through, the more difficult tasks proper to be self-imposed in maturer years are constantly neglected ; the ripe scholar indulges at once his fastidiousness and his indolence, persuading himself that his indolence is fasti- diousness and his fastidiousness a high standard of taste,—and nothing comes of him. It was not so with Professor Conington. He was not only one of the most diligent of Professors, but one of the most diligent of editors and translators. Though dying at the early age of forty-four, he has left us works that will probably ever associate his name with the greatest of Latin poets,—an edition of Virgil of marvellous erudition and critical power ; a translation of the ./Eneid which is probably the happiest effort at translation in the English language ; and translations of Horace of inferior but still considerable merit—one section of which was only just com- pleted before his death, and the value of which is estimated by a far better critic and finer judge of classical literature than the present writer can pretend to be in another column,—and, again, twelve books of the Iliad in Spenserian verse, written with a rare disinter- estedness to complete his friend Mr. Worsley's translation of Homer in that metre, which had been cut short by a death still more prema- ture than that which has now deprived us of Mr. Conington. But the great work by which he will be known as long as Virgil is loved by Englishmen is his 2Eneid. For that he had rare qualifications, —tenderness, sweetness, laboriousness, a serious pathos full of culture, a reflective heart, and a sincere piety of the domestic and political affections no less than of the spirit. It was not to be expected that the same man would be equally qualified to enter into the neat and bright vivacity of Horace and into the melodious and gentle earnestness of Virgil. Valuable as some of Professor Conington's work in relation to Horace is, it is the work of fine scholarship rather than of personal sympathy. In regard to Virgil it is both. The piety,—pietas in the old sense,—which helped Professor Conington to love Virgil so heartily, and render him with such spiritual delicacy of touch, was not less remarkable than the delicacy of his sympathy with Virgilian emotion. The latter, indeed, is most remarkable. There is hardly in English literature any rendering of a classic so perfect as the exquisite lines in which he translates Dido's lament before her suicide :— " Sweet relics of a time of love,
When fate and Heaven were kind, Receive my life-blood and remove These tortures of the mind.
My life is lived and I have played The part that fortune gave, And now I pass a queenly shade Majestic to the grave."
How perfect at once is the tenderness in this rendering of " dulces exuviie, dum fata deusque sinebant," and the majesty of "et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago" ! There must have been a vast reserve of brooding feeling in the man who could translate as Professor Conington has done the dying lament of Dido. And yet more striking even than Mr. Conington's Virgilian tenderness, was his sympathy with the Virgilian piety, in the Latin sense,— the piety, that is, including the State and the family in the same network of reverent sentiment,—so different from our modern individualism. We remember a somewhat striking instance of this published in our own columns. It was in a letter which Mr. Conington addressed to this journal two years and a half ago, during the discussion as to the propriety of a humiliation-day for the cattle plague, and of which it can now be no breach of confidence to disclose the authorship. "My own belief," he writes, " is that in personal matters whatever is worth serious anxiety is worth making a subject of prayer,—that praying is a better attitude towards the future than fretting. Such a feeling seems to me to suit the relation in which we should naturally desire to stand to the God who made us and who cares for us ; I incline also to think that it may lead us conversely to wish for nothing for which we should not like to pray. I would apply the same rule to things of national concern. A visitation which . obliges the Government to appoint a Commission when Parlia- ment is not sitting, and which takes precedence of other questions as soon as Parliament meets, appears to me to be quite serious enough to be made a matter of national prayer." We understood better than ever, after reading that letter, the deep vein of sympathy with the political piety of the Roman poet which fitted Mr. Conington to be so great a translator of Virgil.
As a scholar, Mr. Couington was full of what Mr. Arnold calls the modern spirit.' Nothing is more characteristic in his Vir- gilian criticism than the careful discrimination of those various tendencies' of meaning,—rays of suggestion, as it were,—thrown out by words and phrases in different directions, which make translation at once so difficult and so fascinating an art. Mr. Jowett familiarized us first with this kind of criticism in his com- mentaries on St. Paul's epistles. Mr. Conington adopted it as a classical teacher, and taught his students to see in Latin words, not a number of mathematically defined figures of significance, but, as it were, a number of radiant centres of force sending forth their attractions or repulsions, now on this side, now on that. The won- derful patience and subtlety with which Mr. Conington worked out this conception of his subject, constitutes, we believe, one of his greatest claims to respect as a scholar.
A scholar who knew Mr. Conington well, and who criticizes his last translation from Horace in another column, has justly remarked, what our own knowledge of him fully confirms, that never did a refined culture more visibly enter into and mould a man's face than in his case. The countenance of the accomplished scholar, whose sickly and yet hungry weight of visage obtained him a well-known fanciful nickname when he was an under- graduate, had been so far transfigured by the depth and studiousness of a careful and fastidious intellect long before his death, that the nickname had lost half its force,—the prevailing expressions of his face being all associated with the delicate discriminations and fine cares of a gentle and conscientious artist. The sickliness, indeed, never left his countenance, but the subtleties and niceties of feel- ing proper to a mind that " broods and sleeps on its own heart " multiplied from year to year.
Though it was of Mr. Conington's essence to be moderate, there was no Liberal at Oxford who will be more grievously missed in the debates of the University. He was not a man with any warm love of life, or any ardour of blood in him,—which makes, by the way, the wonderful physical animation of many of his translations, the translation of the fifth book of the Eneid, for instance, containing the games in memory of Anchises, a translation which has almost more life than the original, the more remarkable. But all he did he did with a deliberate and delicate precision of touch that could not but give it weight with even the least considerate opponents, and at Oxford especially an earnest Liberal like Mr. Conington, with a spirit anxiously conservative of all that was noblest in the place, would often have more weight than Liberals of a more em- phatic and less anxious type. The most industrious of scholars and the most conscientious of teachers, the most faithful and loyal of friends, the most cautious of reformers, and of all men whose earthly life is in books the most fascinating and human,—he was a more perfect representative of the true scholastic genius of Oxford than perhaps any teacher now left there. Certainly, no man ever illus- trated better Mr. Aruold's notion that the genius of Oxford is bound to generate ' sweetness and light.' In Mr. Conington, Oxford found both graces inborn, but enhanced them by her happiest art. Oxford may well now say of Mr. Conington, in the words of his own flue translation from Virgil,— " No purer son
Troy ever bred; more jealous none Of sacred right ; God's will be done."
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