Beautiful and full of poetic spirit and suggestion as this phraseology is, a reader may be forgiven if it recalls the reply of Hamlet when asked by Polonius what it is he reads. Compared with the swift dramatic method employed by Wagner to make the heroes and heroines of this same saga live for our time, it must be admitted that the latter drives home with the greater energy and conviction. Morris himself, however, was “not much interested” in anything Wagner did, looking upon it “as nothing short of desecration to bring such a tremendous and world-wide subject under the gaslights of an opera, the most rococo and degraded of all forms of art.”
To the group of translations and adaptations already described must be added one other ambitious effort which belongs to it, properly speaking, although separated from it in time by more than ten years. In 1887 Morris published a translation of the Odyssey, written in anapæstic couplets, and rendered as literally as by the prose crib of which he made frank use. Mr. Watts-Dunton finds in this translation the Homeric eagerness, although the Homeric dignity is lacking. The majority of competent critics were against it, however, nor is a high degree of classical training necessary to perceive in it an incoherence and clumsiness of diction impossible to associate with the lucid images of the Greeks. Compare, for example, Morris’s account of the recognition of Ulysses by Argus with Bryant’s limpid rendering of the same episode, and the tortured style of the former is obvious at once. Bryant’s translation reads:
There lay
Argus, devoured with vermin. As he saw
Ulysses drawing near, he wagged his tail
And dropped his ears, but found that he could come
No nearer to his master. Seeing this
Ulysses wiped away a tear unmark’d
By the good swineherd whom he questioned thus:
“Eumæus, this I marvel at,—this dog
That lies upon the dunghill, beautiful
In form, but whether in the chase as fleet
As he is fairly shaped I cannot tell.
Worthless, perchance, as house-dogs often are
Whose masters keep them for the sake of show.”
And thus, Eumæus, thou didst make reply:
“The dog belongs to one who died afar.
Had he the power of limb which once he had
For feats of hunting when Ulysses sailed
For Troy and left him, thou wouldst be amazed
Both at his swiftness and his strength. No beast
In the thick forest depths which once he saw,
Or even tracked by footprints, could escape.
And now he is a sufferer, since his lord
Has perished far from his own land. No more
The careless women heed the creature’s wants;
For, when the master is no longer near,
The servants cease from their appointed tasks,
And on the day that one becomes a slave
The Thunderer, Jove takes half his worth away.”
He spake, and, entering that fair dwelling-place,
Passed through to where the illustrious suitors sat,
While over Argus the black night of death
Came suddenly as soon as he had seen
Ulysses, absent now for twenty years.
And here is the description by Morris of the infinitely touching scene:
There then did the woodhound Argus all full of ticks abide;
But now so soon as he noted Odysseus drawing anear
He wagged his tail, and fawning he laid down either ear,
But had no might to drag him nigher from where he lay
To his master, who beheld him and wiped a tear away
That he lightly hid from Eumæus, unto whom he spake and said:
“Eumæus, much I marvel at the dog on the dung-heap laid;
Fair-shapen is his body, but nought I know indeed
If unto this his fairness he hath good running speed,
Or is but like unto some—men’s table-dogs I mean,
Which but because of their fairness lords cherish to be seen.”
Then thou, O swineherd Eumæus, didst speak and answer thus:
“Yea, this is the hound of the man that hath died aloof from us;
And if yet to do and to look on he were even such an one
As Odysseus left behind him when to Troy he gat him gone
Then wouldest thou wonder beholding his speed and hardihood,
For no monster that he followed through the depths of the tangled wood
Would he blench from, and well he wotted of their trail and where it led.
But now ill he hath, since his master in an alien land is dead,
And no care of him have the women, that are heedless here and light;
Since thralls whenso they are missing their masters’ rule and might.
No longer are they willing to do the thing that should be;
For Zeus, the loud-voiced, taketh half a man’s valiancy
Whenso the day of thralldom hath hold of him at last.”
So saying into the homestead of the happy place he passed
And straight to the hall he wended ’mid the Wooers overbold.
But the murky doom of the death-day of Argus now took hold
When he had looked on Odysseus in this the twentieth year.
The decade between the publication of The Earthly Paradise and Sigurd the Volsung had been one of sustained literary effort varied, as we have seen, but hardly interrupted by the work in decoration. The latter Morris called his “bread-and-cheese work,” the former his “pleasure work of books.” The time had not yet come for a complete union between the two, although it was foreshadowed by the illuminated manuscripts made for friends during these years. A selection from his own poems, a translation of the Eyrbyggja Saga, a copy of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the Æneid of Virgil were among the works that Morris undertook to transcribe with his own hand on vellum, with decorative margins with results of great beauty. He had now long been happy in work calling out all this enthusiasm, but the world was going on without, to use his own words, “beautiful and strange and dreadful and worshipful.” He was approaching the time when his conscience would no longer let him rest in the thought that he was “not born to set the crooked straight.”
