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ON TRANSLATING HOMER

by

MATTHEW ARNOLD

With F. W. Newman’s ‘Homeric Translation’
and Arnold’s ‘Last Words’

London
George Routledge & Sons Limited
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.

                                CONTENTS

ON TRANSLATING HOMER—

I. 1

II. 32

III. 68

HOMERIC TRANSLATION IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. A Reply to Matthew Arnold.
By Francis W. Newman 112

LAST WORDS ON TRANSLATING HOMER.

A Reply to Francis W. Newman. By Matthew Arnold 217

... Nunquamne reponam?

It has more than once been suggested to me that I should translate
Homer. That is a task for which I have neither the time nor the courage;
but the suggestion led me to regard yet more closely a poet whom I had
already long studied, and for one or two years the works of Homer were
seldom out of my hands. The study of classical literature is probably on
the decline; but, whatever may be the fate of this study in general, it
is certain that, as instruction spreads and the number of readers
increases, attention will be more and more directed to the poetry of
Homer, not indeed as part of a classical course, but as the most
important poetical monument existing. Even within the last ten years two
fresh translations of the _Iliad_ have appeared in England: one by a man
of great ability and genuine learning, Professor Newman; the other by Mr
Wright, the conscientious and painstaking translator of Dante. It may
safely be asserted that neither of these works will take rank as the
standard translation of Homer; that the task of rendering him will still
be attempted by other translators. It may perhaps be possible to render
to these some service, to save them some loss of labour, by pointing out
rocks on which their predecessors have split, and the right objects on
which a translator of Homer should fix his attention.

It is disputed what aim a translator should propose to himself in
dealing with his original. Even this preliminary is not yet settled. On
one side it is said that the translation ought to be such ‘that the
reader should, if possible, forget that it is a translation at all, and
be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original
work—something original’ (if the translation be English), ‘from an
English hand’. The real original is in this case, it is said, ‘taken as
a basis on which to rear a poem that shall affect our countrymen as the
original may be conceived to have affected its natural hearers’. On the
other hand, Mr Newman, who states the foregoing doctrine only to condemn
it, declares that he ‘aims at precisely the opposite: to retain every
peculiarity of the original, so far as he is able, _with the greater
care the more foreign it may happen to be_’; so that it may ‘never be
forgotten that he is imitating, and imitating in a different material’.
The translator’s ‘first duty’, says Mr Newman ‘is a historical one, to
be _faithful_’. Probably both sides would agree that the translator’s
‘first duty is to be faithful’; but the question at issue between them
is, in what faithfulness consists.

My one object is to give practical advice to a translator; and I shall
not the least concern myself with theories of translation as such. But I
advise the translator not to try ‘to rear on the basis of the _Iliad_, a
poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived
to have affected its natural hearers’; and for this simple reason, that
we cannot possibly tell _how_ the _Iliad_ ‘affected its natural
hearers’. It is probably meant merely that he should try to affect
Englishmen powerfully, as Homer affected Greeks powerfully; but this
direction is not enough, and can give no real guidance. For all great
poets affect their hearers powerfully, but the effect of one poet is one
thing, that of another poet another thing: it is our translator’s
business to reproduce the effect of Homer, and the most powerful emotion
of the unlearned English reader can never assure him whether he has
_re_produced this, or whether he has produced something else. So, again,
he may follow Mr Newman’s directions, he may try to be ‘faithful’, he
may ‘retain every peculiarity of his original’; but who is to assure
him, who is to assure Mr Newman himself, that, when he has done this, he
has done that for which Mr Newman enjoins this to be done, ‘adhered
closely to Homer’s manner and habit of thought’? Evidently the
translator needs some more practical directions than these. No one can
tell him how Homer affected the Greeks; but there are those who can tell
him how Homer affects _them_. These are scholars; who possess, at the
same time with knowledge of Greek, adequate poetical taste and feeling.
No translation will seem to them of much worth compared with the
original; but they alone can say whether the translation produces more
or less the same effect upon them as the original. They are the only
competent tribunal in this matter: the Greeks are dead; the unlearned
Englishman has not the data for judging; and no man can safely confide
in his own single judgment of his own work. Let not the translator,
then, trust to his notions of what the ancient Greeks would have thought
of him; he will lose himself in the vague. Let him not trust to what the
ordinary English reader thinks of him; he will be taking the blind for
his guide. Let him not trust to his own judgment of his own work; he may
be misled by individual caprices. Let him ask how his work affects those
who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry; whether to read it gives
the Provost of Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cambridge, or Professor
Jowett here in Oxford, at all the same feeling which to read the
original gives them. I consider that when Bentley said of Pope’s
translation, ‘It was a pretty poem, but must not be called Homer’, the
work, in spite of all its power and attractiveness, was judged.

Ὡς ἂν ὁ φρόνιμος ὁρίσειεν, ‘as the judicious would determine’, that is a
test to which everyone professes himself willing to submit his works.
Unhappily, in most cases, no two persons agree as to who ‘the judicious’
are. In the present case, the ambiguity is removed: I suppose the
translator at one with me as to the tribunal to which alone he should
look for judgment; and he has thus obtained a practical test by which to
estimate the real success of his work. How is he to proceed, in order
that his work, tried by this test, may be found most successful?

First of all, there are certain negative counsels which I will give him.
Homer has occupied men’s minds so much, such a literature has arisen
about him, that every one who approaches him should resolve strictly to
limit himself to that which may directly serve the object for which he
approaches him. I advise the translator to have nothing to do with the
questions, whether Homer ever existed; whether the poet of the _Iliad_
be one or many; whether the _Iliad_ be one poem or an _Achilleis_ and an
_Iliad_ stuck together; whether the Christian doctrine of the Atonement
is shadowed forth in the Homeric mythology; whether the Goddess Latona
in any way prefigures the Virgin Mary, and so on. These are questions
which have been discussed with learning, with ingenuity, nay, with
genius; but they have two inconveniences,—one general for all who
approach them, one particular for the translator. The general
inconvenience is that there really exist no data for determining them.
The particular inconvenience is that their solution by the translator,
even were it possible, could be of no benefit to his translation.

I advise him, again, not to trouble himself with constructing a special
vocabulary for his use in translation; with excluding a certain class of
English words, and with confining himself to another class, in obedience
to any theory about the peculiar qualities of Homer’s style. Mr Newman
says that ‘the entire dialect of Homer being essentially archaic, that
of a translator ought to be as much Saxo-Norman as possible, and owe as
little as possible to the elements thrown into our language by classical
learning’. Mr Newman is unfortunate in the observance of his own theory;
for I continually find in his translation words of Latin origin, which
seem to me quite alien to the simplicity of Homer,—‘responsive’, for
instance, which is a favourite word of Mr Newman, to represent the
Homeric ἀμειβόμενος:

      Great Hector of the motley helm thus spake to her _responsive_.
      But thus _responsively_ to him spake godlike Alexander.

And the word ‘celestial’ again, in the grand address of Zeus to the
horses of Achilles,

        You, who are born _celestial_, from Eld and Death exempted!

seems to me in that place exactly to jar upon the feeling as too
bookish. But, apart from the question of Mr Newman’s fidelity to his own
theory, such a theory seems to me both dangerous for a translator and
false in itself. Dangerous for a translator; because, wherever one finds
such a theory announced (and one finds it pretty often), it is generally
followed by an explosion of pedantry; and pedantry is of all things in
the world the most un-Homeric. False in itself; because, in fact, we owe
to the Latin element in our language most of that very rapidity and
clear decisiveness by which it is contradistinguished from the German,
and in sympathy with the languages of Greece and Rome: so that to limit
an English translator of Homer to words of Saxon origin is to deprive
him of one of his special advantages for translating Homer. In Voss’s
well-known translation of Homer, it is precisely the qualities of his
German language itself, something heavy and trailing both in the
structure of its sentences and in the words of which it is composed,
which prevent his translation, in spite of the hexameters, in spite of
the fidelity, from creating in us the impression created by the Greek.
Mr Newman’s prescription, if followed, would just strip the English
translator of the advantage which he has over Voss.

The frame of mind in which we approach an author influences our
correctness of appreciation of him; and Homer should be approached by a
translator in the simplest frame of mind possible. Modern sentiment
tries to make the ancient not less than the modern world its own; but
against modern sentiment in its applications to Homer the translator, if
he would feel Homer truly—and unless he feels him truly, how can he
render him truly?—cannot be too much on his guard. For example: the
writer of an interesting article on English translations of Homer, in
the last number of the _National Review_, quotes, I see, with
admiration, a criticism of Mr Ruskin on the use of the epithet φυσίζοος,
‘life-giving’, in that beautiful passage in the third book of the
_Iliad_, which follows Helen’s mention of her brothers Castor and Pollux
as alive, though they were in truth dead:

               ὣς φάτο· τοὺς δ’ ἤδη κατέχεν φυσίζοος αἶα
               ἐν Λακεδαίμονι αὖθι, φίλῃ ἐν πατρίδι γαίῃ.[1]

‘The poet’, says Mr Ruskin, ‘has to speak of the earth in sadness; but
he will not let that sadness affect or change his thought of it. No;
though Castor and Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our mother
still,—fruitful, life-giving’. This is a just specimen of that sort of
application of modern sentiment to the ancients, against which a
student, who wishes to feel the ancients truly, cannot too resolutely
defend himself. It reminds one, as, alas! so much of Mr Ruskin’s writing
reminds one, of those words of the most delicate of living critics:
“Comme tout genre de composition a son écueil particulier, _celui du
genre romanesque, c’est le faux_”. The reader may feel moved as he reads
it; but it is not the less an example of ‘le faux’ in criticism; it is
false. It is not true, as to that particular passage, that Homer called
the earth φυσίζοος because, ‘though he had to speak of the earth in
sadness, he would not let that sadness change or affect his thought of
it’, but consoled himself by considering that ‘the earth is our mother
still,—fruitful, life-giving’. It is not true, as a matter of general
criticism, that this kind of sentimentality, eminently modern, inspires
Homer at all. ‘From Homer and Polygnotus I every day learn more
clearly’, says Goethe, ‘that in our life here above ground we have,
properly speaking, to enact Hell’[2]:—if the student must absolutely
have a keynote to the _Iliad_, let him take this of Goethe, and see what
he can do with it; it will not, at any rate, like the tender pantheism
of Mr Ruskin, falsify for him the whole strain of Homer.

These are negative counsels; I come to the positive. When I say, the
translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four
qualities of his author;—that he is eminently rapid; that he is
eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in
the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that
he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that
is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally that he is eminently noble;—I
probably seem to be saying what is too general to be of much service to
anybody. Yet it is strictly true that, for want of duly penetrating
themselves with the first-named quality of Homer, his rapidity, Cowper
and Mr Wright have failed in rendering him; that, for want of duly
appreciating the second-named quality, his plainness and directness of
style and dictation, Pope and Mr Sotheby have failed in rendering him;
that for want of appreciating the third, his plainness and directness of
ideas, Chapman has failed in rendering him; while for want of
appreciating the fourth, his nobleness, Mr Newman, who has clearly seen
some of the faults of his predecessors, has yet failed more
conspicuously than any of them.

Coleridge says, in his strange language, speaking of the union of the
human soul with the divine essence, that this takes place

            Whene’er the mist, which stands ’twixt God and thee,
            Defecates to a pure transparency;

and so, too, it may be said of that union of the translator with his
original, which alone can produce a good translation, that it takes
place when the mist which stands between them—the mist of alien modes of
thinking, speaking, and feeling on the translator’s part—‘defecates to a
pure transparency’, and disappears. But between Cowper and Homer—(Mr
Wright repeats in the main Cowper’s manner, as Mr Sotheby repeats Pope’s
manner, and neither Mr Wright’s translation nor Mr Sotheby’s has, I must
be forgiven for saying, any proper reason for existing)—between Cowper
and Homer there is interposed the mist of Cowper’s elaborate Miltonic
manner, entirely alien to the flowing rapidity of Homer; between Pope
and Homer there is interposed the mist of Pope’s literary artificial
manner, entirely alien to the plain naturalness of Homer’s manner;
between Chapman and Homer there is interposed the mist of the
fancifulness of the Elizabethan age, entirely alien to the plain
directness of Homer’s thought and feeling; while between Mr Newman and
Homer is interposed a cloud of more than Egyptian thickness,—namely, a
manner, in Mr Newman’s version, eminently ignoble, while Homer’s manner
is eminently noble.

I do not despair of making all these propositions clear to a student who
approaches Homer with a free mind. First, Homer is eminently rapid, and
to this rapidity the elaborate movement of Miltonic blank verse is
alien. The reputation of Cowper, that most interesting man and excellent
poet, does not depend on his translation of Homer; and in his preface to
the second edition, he himself tells us that he felt,—he had too much
poetical taste not to feel,—on returning to his own version after six or
seven years, ‘more dissatisfied with it himself than the most difficult
to be pleased of all his judges’. And he was dissatisfied with it for
the right reason,—that ‘it seemed to him deficient _in the grace of
ease_’. Yet he seems to have originally misconceived the manner of Homer
so much, that it is no wonder he rendered him amiss. ‘The similitude of
Milton’s manner to that of Homer is such’, he says, ‘that no person
familiar with both can read either without being reminded of the other;
and it is in those breaks and pauses to which the numbers of the English
poet are so much indebted, both for their dignity and variety, that he
chiefly copies the Grecian’. It would be more true to say: ‘The
unlikeness of Milton’s manner to that of Homer is such, that no person
familiar with both can read either without being struck with his
difference from the other; and it is in his breaks and pauses that the
English poet is most unlike the Grecian’.

The inversion and pregnant conciseness of Milton or Dante are,
doubtless, most impressive qualities of style; but they are the very
opposites of the directness and flowingness of Homer, which he keeps
alike in passages of the simplest narrative, and in those of the deepest
emotion. Not only, for example, are these lines of Cowper un-Homeric:

              So numerous seemed those fires the banks between
              Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece
              In prospect all of Troy;

where the position of the word ‘blazing’ gives an entirely un-Homeric
movement to this simple passage, describing the fires of the Trojan camp
outside of Troy; but the following lines, in that very highly-wrought
passage where the horse of Achilles answers his master’s reproaches for
having left Patroclus on the field of battle, are equally un-Homeric:

              For not through sloth or tardiness on us
              Aught chargeable, have Ilium’s sons thine arms
              Stript from Patroclus’ shoulders; but a God
              Matchless in battle, offspring of bright-haired
              Latona, him contending in the van
              Slew, for the glory of the chief of Troy.

Here even the first inversion, ‘have Ilium’s sons thine arms Stript from
Patroclus’ shoulders’, gives the reader a sense of a movement not
Homeric; and the second inversion, ‘a God him contending in the van
Slew’, gives this sense ten times stronger. Instead of moving on without
check, as in reading the original, the reader twice finds himself, in
reading the translation, brought up and checked. Homer moves with the
same simplicity and rapidity in the highly-wrought as in the simple
passage.

It is in vain that Cowper insists on his fidelity: ‘my chief boast is
that I have adhered closely to my original’:—‘the matter found in me,
whether the reader like it or not, is found also in Homer; and the
matter not found in me, how much soever the reader may admire it, is
found only in Mr Pope’. To suppose that it is _fidelity_ to an original
to give its matter, unless you at the same time give its manner; or,
rather, to suppose that you can really give its matter at all, unless
you can give its manner, is just the mistake of our pre-Raphaelite
school of painters, who do not understand that the peculiar effect of
nature resides in the whole and not in the parts. So the peculiar effect
of a poet resides in his manner and movement, not in his words taken
separately. It is well known how conscientiously literal is Cowper in
his translation of Homer. It is well known how extravagantly free is
Pope.

                                   So let it be!
                   Portents and prodigies are lost on me;

that is Pope’s rendering of the words,

    Ξάνθε, τί μοι θάνατον μαντεύεαι; οὐδέ τί σε χρή·[3]

    Xanthus, why prophesiest thou my death to me? thou needest not at
       all:

yet, on the whole, Pope’s translation of the _Iliad_ is more Homeric
than Cowper’s, for it is more rapid.

Pope’s movement, however, though rapid, is not of the same kind as
Homer’s; and here I come to the real objection to rhyme in a translation
of Homer. It is commonly said that rhyme is to be abandoned in a
translation of Homer, because ‘the exigencies of rhyme’, to quote Mr
Newman, ‘positively forbid faithfulness’; because ‘a just translation of
any ancient poet in rhyme’, to quote Cowper, ‘is impossible’. This,
however, is merely an accidental objection to rhyme. If this were all,
it might be supposed, that if rhymes were more abundant Homer could be
adequately translated in rhyme. But this is not so; there is a deeper, a
substantial objection to rhyme in a translation of Homer. It is, that
rhyme inevitably tends to pair lines which in the original are
independent, and thus the movement of the poem is changed. In these
lines of Chapman, for instance, from Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus, in
the twelfth book of the _Iliad_:

                      O friend, if keeping back
    Would keep back age from us, and death, and that we might not wrack
    In this life’s human sea at all, but that deferring now
    We shunned death ever,—nor would I half this vain valor show,
    Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance;
    But since we _must_ go, though not here, and that besides the chance
    Proposed now, there are infinite fates, etc.

Here the necessity of making the line,

              Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance,

rhyme with the line which follows it, entirely changes and spoils the
movement of the passage.

                οὔτε κεν αὐτὸς ἐνὶ πρώτοισι μαχοίμην,
        οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν·[4]

        Neither would I myself go forth to fight with the foremost,
        Nor would I urge thee on to enter the glorious battle,

says Homer; there he stops, and begins an opposed movement:

        νῦν δ’—ἔμπης γὰρ Κῆρες ἐφεστᾶσιν θανάτοιο—

        But—for a thousand fates of death stand close to us always—

This line, in which Homer wishes to go away with the most marked
rapidity from the line before, Chapman is forced, by the necessity of
rhyming, intimately to connect with the line before.

    But since we _must_ go, though not here, and that besides the
       chance.

The moment the word _chance_ strikes our ear, we are irresistibly
carried back to _advance_ and to the whole previous line, which,
according to Homer’s own feeling, we ought to have left behind us
entirely, and to be moving farther and farther away from.

Rhyme certainly, by intensifying antithesis, can intensify separation,
and this is precisely what Pope does; but this balanced rhetorical
antithesis, though very effective, is entirely un-Homeric. And this is
what I mean by saying that Pope fails to render Homer, because he does
not render his plainness and directness of style and diction. Where
Homer marks separation by moving away, Pope marks it by antithesis. No
passage could show this better than the passage I have just quoted, on
which I will pause for a moment.

Robert Wood, whose _Essay on the Genius of Homer_ is mentioned by Goethe
as one of the books which fell into his hands when his powers were first
developing themselves, and strongly interested him, relates of this
passage a striking story. He says that in 1762, at the end of the Seven
Years’ War, being then Under-Secretary of State, he was directed to wait
upon the President of the Council, Lord Granville, a few days before he
died, with the preliminary articles of the Treaty of Paris. ‘I found
him’, he continues, ‘so languid, that I proposed postponing my business
for another time; but he insisted that I should stay, saying, it could
not prolong his life to neglect his duty; and repeating the following
passage out of Sarpedon’s speech, he dwelled with particular emphasis on
the third line, which recalled to his mind the distinguishing part he
had taken in public affairs:

             ὦ πέπον, εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε,
             αἰεὶ δὴ μέλλοιμεν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε
             ἔσσεσθ’, οὔτε κεν αὐτὸς ἐνὶ πρώτοισι μαχοίμην,[5]
             οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν·
             νῦν δ’—ἔμπης γὰρ Κῆρες ἐφεστᾶσιν θανάτοιο
             μυρίαι, ἃς οὐκ ἔστι φυγεῖν βρότον, οὐδ’ ὑπαλύξαι—
             ἴομεν.

His Lordship repeated the last word several times with a calm and
determinate resignation; and, after a serious pause of some minutes, he
desired to hear the Treaty read, to which he listened with great
attention, and recovered spirits enough to declare the approbation of a
dying statesman (I use his own words) “on the most glorious war, and
most honourable peace, this nation ever saw”’[6].

I quote this story, first, because it is interesting as exhibiting the
English aristocracy at its very height of culture, lofty spirit, and
greatness, towards the middle of the 18th century. I quote it, secondly,
because it seems to me to illustrate Goethe’s saying which I mentioned,
that our life, in Homer’s view of it, represents a conflict and a hell;
and it brings out, too, what there is tonic and fortifying in this
doctrine. I quote it, lastly, because it shows that the passage is just
one of those in translating which Pope will be at his best, a passage of
strong emotion and oratorical movement, not of simple narrative or
description.

Pope translates the passage thus:

              Could all our care elude the gloomy grave
              Which claims no less the fearful than the brave,
              For lust of fame I should not vainly dare
              In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war:
              But since, alas! ignoble age must come,
              Disease, and death’s inexorable doom;
              The life which others pay, let us bestow,
              And give to fame what we to nature owe.

Nothing could better exhibit Pope’s prodigious talent; and nothing, too,
could be better in its own way. But, as Bentley said, ‘You must not call
it Homer’. One feels that Homer’s thought has passed through a literary
and rhetorical crucible, and come out highly intellectualised; come out
in a form which strongly impresses us, indeed, but which no longer
impresses us in the same way as when it was uttered by Homer. The
antithesis of the last two lines—

                 The life which others pay, let us bestow,
                 And give to fame what we to nature owe

is excellent, and is just suited to Pope’s heroic couplet; but neither
the antithesis itself, nor the couplet which conveys it, is suited to
the feeling or to the movement of the Homeric ἴομεν.

A literary and intellectualised language is, however, in its own way
well suited to grand matters; and Pope, with a language of this kind and
his own admirable talent, comes off well enough as long as he has
passion, or oratory, or a great crisis to deal with. Even here, as I
have been pointing out, he does not render Homer; but he and his style
are in themselves strong. It is when he comes to level passages,
passages of narrative or description, that he and his style are sorely
tried, and prove themselves weak. A perfectly plain direct style can of
course convey the simplest matter as naturally as the grandest; indeed,
it must be harder for it, one would say, to convey a grand matter
worthily and nobly, than to convey a common matter, as alone such a
matter should be conveyed, plainly and simply. But the style of Rasselas
is incomparably better fitted to describe a sage philosophising than a
soldier lighting his camp-fire. The style of Pope is not the style of
Rasselas; but it is equally a literary style, equally unfitted to
describe a simple matter with the plain naturalness of Homer.

Everyone knows the passage at the end of the eighth book of the _Iliad_,
where the fires of the Trojan encampment are likened to the stars. It is
very far from my wish to hold Pope up to ridicule, so I shall not quote
the commencement of the passage, which in the original is of great and
celebrated beauty, and in translating which Pope has been singularly and
notoriously fortunate. But the latter part of the passage, where Homer
leaves the stars, and comes to the Trojan fires, treats of the plainest,
most matter-of-fact subject possible, and deals with this, as Homer
always deals with every subject, in the plainest and most
straightforward style. ‘So many in number, between the ships and the
streams of Xanthus, shone forth in front of Troy the fires kindled by
the Trojans. There were kindled a thousand fires in the plain; and by
each one there sat fifty men in the light of the blazing fire. And the
horses, munching white barley and rye, and standing by the chariots,
waited for the bright-throned Morning[7]’.

In Pope’s translation, this plain story becomes the following:

             So many flames before proud Ilion blaze,
             And brighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays;
             The long reflections of the distant fires
             Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires.
             A thousand piles the dusky horrors gild,
             And shoot a shady lustre o’er the field.
             Full fifty guards each flaming pile attend,
             Whose umbered arms, by fits, thick flashes send;
             Loud neigh the coursers o’er their heaps of corn,
             And ardent warriors wait the rising morn.

It is for passages of this sort, which, after all, form the bulk of a
narrative poem, that Pope’s style is so bad. In elevated passages he is
powerful, as Homer is powerful, though not in the same way; but in plain
narrative, where Homer is still powerful and delightful, Pope, by the
inherent fault of his style, is ineffective and out of taste. Wordsworth
says somewhere, that wherever Virgil seems to have composed ‘with his
eye on the object’, Dryden fails to render him. Homer invariably
composes ‘with his eye on the object’, whether the object be a moral or
a material one: Pope composes with his eye on his style, into which he
translates his object, whatever it is. That, therefore, which Homer
conveys to us immediately, Pope conveys to us through a medium. He aims
at turning Homer’s sentiments pointedly and rhetorically; at investing
Homer’s description with ornament and dignity. A sentiment may be
changed by being put into a pointed and oratorical form, yet may still
be very effective in that form; but a description, the moment it takes
its eyes off that which it is to describe, and begins to think of
ornamenting itself, is worthless.

Therefore, I say, the translator of Homer should penetrate himself with
a sense of the plainness and directness of Homer’s style; of the
simplicity with which Homer’s thought is evolved and expressed. He has
Pope’s fate before his eyes, to show him what a divorce may be created
even between the most gifted translator and Homer by an artificial
evolution of thought and a literary cast of style.

Chapman’s style is not artificial and literary like Pope’s nor his
movement elaborate and self-retarding like the Miltonic movement of
Cowper. He is plain-spoken, fresh, vigorous, and, to a certain degree,
rapid; and all these are Homeric qualities. I cannot say that I think
the movement of his fourteen-syllable line, which has been so much
commended, Homeric; but on this point I shall have more to say by and
by, when I come to speak of Mr Newman’s metrical exploits. But it is not
distinctly anti-Homeric, like the movement of Milton’s blank verse; and
it has a rapidity of its own. Chapman’s diction, too, is generally good,
that is, appropriate to Homer; above all, the syntactical character of
his style is appropriate. With these merits, what prevents his
translation from being a satisfactory version of Homer? Is it merely the
want of literal faithfulness to his original, imposed upon him, it is
said, by the exigencies of rhyme? Has this celebrated version, which has
so many advantages, no other and deeper defect than that? Its author is
a poet, and a poet, too, of the Elizabethan age; the golden age of
English literature as it is called, and on the whole truly called; for,
whatever be the defects of Elizabethan literature (and they are great),
we have no development of our literature to compare with it for vigour
and richness. This age, too, showed what it could do in translating, by
producing a master-piece, its version of the Bible.

Chapman’s translation has often been praised as eminently Homeric.
Keats’s fine sonnet in its honour everyone knows; but Keats could not
read the original, and therefore could not really judge the translation.
Coleridge, in praising Chapman’s version, says at the same time, ‘It
will give you small idea of Homer’. But the grave authority of Mr Hallum
pronounces this translation to be ‘often exceedingly Homeric’; and its
latest editor boldly declares that by what, with a deplorable style, he
calls ‘his own innative Homeric genius’, Chapman ‘has thoroughly
identified himself with Homer’; and that ‘we pardon him even for his
digressions, for they are such as we feel Homer himself would have
written’.

I confess that I can never read twenty lines of Chapman’s version
without recurring to Bentley’s cry, ‘This is not Homer!’ and that from a
deeper cause than any unfaithfulness occasioned by the fetters of rhyme.

I said that there were four things which eminently distinguished Homer,
and with a sense of which Homer’s translator should penetrate himself as
fully as possible. One of these four things was, the plainness and
directness of Homer’s ideas. I have just been speaking of the plainness
and directness of his style; but the plainness and directness of the
contents of his style, of his ideas themselves, is not less remarkable.
But as eminently as Homer is plain, so eminently is the Elizabethan
literature in general, and Chapman in particular, fanciful. Steeped in
humours and fantasticality up to its very lips, the Elizabethan age,
newly arrived at the free use of the human faculties after their long
term of bondage, and delighting to exercise them freely, suffers from
its own extravagance in this first exercise of them, can hardly bring
itself to see an object quietly or to describe it temperately. Happily,
in the translation of the Bible, the sacred character of their original
inspired the translators with such respect that they did not dare to
give the rein to their own fancies in dealing with it. But, in dealing
with works of profane literature, in dealing with poetical works above
all, which highly stimulated them, one may say that the minds of the
Elizabethan translators were _too_ active; that they could not forbear
importing so much of their own, and this of a most peculiar and
Elizabethan character, into their original, that they effaced the
character of the original itself.

Take merely the opening pages to Chapman’s translation, the introductory
verses, and the dedications. You will find:

                An Anagram of the name of our Dread Prince,
                My most gracious and sacred Mæcenas,
                Henry, Prince of Wales,
                Our Sunn, Heyr, Peace, Life,

Henry, son of James the First, to whom the work is dedicated. Then comes
an address,

               To the sacred Fountain of Princes,
               Sole Empress of Beauty and Virtue, Anne, Queen
                             Of England, etc.

All the Middle Age, with its grotesqueness, its conceits, its
irrationality, is still in these opening pages; they by themselves are
sufficient to indicate to us what a gulf divides Chapman from the
‘clearest-souled’ of poets, from Homer, almost as great a gulf as that
which divides him from Voltaire. Pope has been sneered at for saying
that Chapman writes ‘somewhat as one might imagine Homer himself to have
written before he arrived at years of discretion’. But the remark is
excellent: Homer expresses himself like a man of adult reason, Chapman
like a man whose reason has not yet cleared itself. For instance, if
Homer had had to say of a poet, that he hoped his merit was now about to
be fully established in the opinion of good judges, he was as incapable
of saying this as Chapman says it,—‘Though truth in her very nakedness
sits in so deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora, and Ganges, few eyes
can sound her, I hope yet those few here will so discover and confirm
that the date being out of her darkness in this morning of our poet, he
shall now gird his temples with the sun’,—I say, Homer was as incapable
of saying this in that manner, as Voltaire himself would have been.
Homer, indeed, has actually an affinity with Voltaire in the unrivalled
clearness and straightforwardness of his thinking; in the way in which
he keeps to one thought at a time, and puts that thought forth in its
complete natural plainness, instead of being led away from it by some
fancy striking him in connection with it, and being beguiled to wander
off with this fancy till his original thought, in its natural reality,
knows him no more. What could better show us how gifted a race was this
Greek race? The same member of it has not only the power of profoundly
touching that natural heart of humanity which it is Voltaire’s weakness
that he cannot reach, but can also address the understanding with all
Voltaire’s admirable simplicity and rationality.

My limits will not allow me to do more than shortly illustrate, from
Chapman’s version of the _Iliad_, what I mean when I speak of this vital
difference between Homer and an Elizabethan poet in the quality of their
thought; between the plain simplicity of the thought of the one, and the
curious complexity of the thought of the other. As in Pope’s case, I
carefully abstain from choosing passages for the express purpose of
making Chapman appear ridiculous; Chapman, like Pope, merits in himself
all respect, though he too, like Pope, fails to render Homer.

In that tonic speech of Sarpedon, of which I have said so much, Homer,
you may remember, has:

               εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε,
         αἰεὶ δὴ μέλλοιμεν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε
         ἔσσεσθ’—

                     if indeed, but once _this_ battle avoided,
         We were for ever to live without growing old and immortal—

Chapman cannot be satisfied with this, but must add a fancy to it:

                            if keeping back
    Would keep back age from us, and death, and _that we might not wrack
    In this life’s human sea at all_;

and so on. Again; in another passage which I have before quoted, where
Zeus says to the horses of Peleus,

                     τί σφῶϊ δόμεν Πηλῆϊ ἀνάκτι
               θνητῷ; ὑμεῖς δ’ ἐστὸν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε·[8]

               Why gave we you to royal Peleus, to a mortal?
               but ye are without old age, and immortal.

Chapman sophisticates this into:

             Why gave we you t’ a mortal king, when immortality
             And _incapacity of age so dignifies your states_?

Again; in the speech of Achilles to his horses, where Achilles,
according to Homer, says simply ‘Take heed that ye bring your master
safe back to the host of the Danaans, in some other sort than the last
time, when the battle is ended’, Chapman sophisticates this into:

    _When with blood, for this day’s fast observed, revenge shall yield
    Our heart satiety_, bring us off.

In Hector’s famous speech, again, at his parting from Andromache, Homer
makes him say: ‘Nor does my own heart so bid me’ (to keep safe behind
the walls), ‘since I have learned to be staunch always, and to fight
among the foremost of the Trojans, busy on behalf of my father’s great
glory, and my own[9]’. In Chapman’s hands this becomes:

                      The spirit I first did breathe
      Did never teach me that; much less, since the contempt of death
      Was settled in me, _and my mind knew what a worthy was,
      Whose office is to lead in fight, and give no danger pass
      Without improvement. In this fire must Hector’s trial shine:
      Here must his country, father, friends, be in him made divine._

You see how ingeniously Homer’s plain thought is _tormented_, as the
French would say, here. Homer goes on: ‘For well I know this in my mind
and in my heart, the day will be, when sacred Troy shall perish’—

                 ἔσσεται ἦμαρ, ὅτ’ ἄν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρή.

Chapman makes this:

     And such a _stormy_ day shall come, in mind and soul I know,
     When sacred Troy _shall shed her towers, for tears of overthrow_.

I might go on for ever, but I could not give you a better illustration
than this last, of what I mean by saying that the Elizabethan poet fails
to render Homer because he cannot forbear to interpose a play of thought
between his object and its expression. Chapman translates his object
into Elizabethan, as Pope translates it into the Augustan of Queen Anne;
both convey it to us through a medium. Homer, on the other hand, sees
his object and conveys it to us immediately.

And yet, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness of Homer’s
style, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness of his ideas,
he is eminently _noble_; he works as entirely in the grand style, he is
as grandiose, as Phidias, or Dante, or Michael Angelo. This is what
makes his translators despair. ‘To give relief’, says Cowper, ‘to
prosaic subjects’ (such as dressing, eating, drinking, harnessing,
travelling, going to bed), that is to treat such subjects nobly, in the
grand style, ‘without seeming unreasonably tumid, is extremely
difficult’. It _is_ difficult, but Homer has done it. Homer is precisely
the incomparable poet he is, because he has done it. His translator must
not be tumid, must not be artificial, must not be literary; true: but
then also he must not be commonplace, must not be ignoble. I have shown
you how translators of Homer fail by wanting rapidity, by wanting
simplicity of style, by wanting plainness of thought: in a second
lecture I will show you how a translator fails by wanting nobility.

Footnote 1:

  _Iliad_, iii. 243.

Footnote 2:

  _Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe_, vi. 230.

Footnote 3:

  _Iliad_, xix. 420.

Footnote 4:

  _Iliad_, xii. 324.

Footnote 5:

  These are the words on which Lord Granville ‘dwelled with particular
  emphasis’.

Footnote 6:

  Robert Wood, _Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_,
  London, 1775, p. vii.

Footnote 7:

  _Iliad_, viii. 560.

Footnote 8:

  _Iliad_, xvii. 443.

Footnote 9:

  _Iliad_, vi. 444.

                                   II

I must repeat what I said in beginning, that the translator of Homer
ought steadily to keep in mind where lies the real test of the success
of his translation, what judges he is to try to satisfy. He is to try to
satisfy _scholars_, because scholars alone have the means of really
judging him. A scholar may be a pedant, it is true, and then his
judgment will be worthless; but a scholar may also have poetical
feeling, and then he can judge him truly; whereas all the poetical
feeling in the world will not enable a man who is not a scholar to judge
him truly. For the translator is to reproduce Homer, and the scholar
alone has the means of knowing that Homer who is to be reproduced. He
knows him but imperfectly, for he is separated from him by time, race,
and language; but he alone knows him at all. Yet people speak as if
there were two real tribunals in this matter,—the scholar’s tribunal,
and that of the general public. They speak as if the scholar’s judgment
was one thing, and the general public’s judgment another; both with
their shortcomings, both with their liability to error; but both to be
regarded by the translator. The translator who makes verbal literalness
his chief care ‘will’, says a writer in the _National Review_ whom I
have already quoted, ‘be appreciated by the scholar accustomed to test a
translation rigidly by comparison with the original, to look perhaps
with excessive care to finish in detail rather than boldness and general
effect, and find pardon even for a version that seems bare and bold, so
it be scholastic and faithful’. But, if the scholar in judging a
translation looks to detail rather than to general effect, he judges it
pedantically and ill. The appeal, however, lies not from the pedantic
scholar to the general public, which can only like or dislike Chapman’s
version, or Pope’s, or Mr Newman’s, but cannot _judge_ them; it lies
from the pedantic scholar to the scholar who is not pedantic, who knows
that Homer is Homer by his general effect, and not by his single words,
and who demands but one thing in a translation,—that it shall, as nearly
as possible, reproduce for him the _general effect_ of Homer. This,
then, remains the one proper aim of the translator: to reproduce on the
intelligent scholar, as nearly as possible, the general effect of Homer.
Except so far as he reproduces this, he loses his labour, even though he
may make a spirited _Iliad_ of his own, like Pope, or translate Homer’s
_Iliad_ word for word, like Mr Newman. If his proper aim were to
stimulate in any manner possible the general public, he might be right
in following Pope’s example; if his proper aim were to help schoolboys
to construe Homer, he might be right in following Mr Newman’s. But it is
not: his proper aim is, I repeat it yet once more, to reproduce on the
intelligent scholar, as nearly as he can, the general effect of Homer.

When, therefore, Cowper says, ‘My chief boast is that I have adhered
closely to my original’; when Mr Newman says, ‘My aim is to retain every
peculiarity of the original, to be _faithful_, exactly as is the case
with the draughtsman of the Elgin marbles’; their real judge only
replies: ‘It may be so: reproduce then upon us, reproduce the effect of
Homer, as a good copy reproduces the effect of the Elgin marbles’.

When, again, Mr Newman tells us that ‘by an exhaustive process of
argument and experiment’ he has found a metre which is at once the metre
of ‘the modern Greek epic’, and a metre ‘like in moral genius’ to
Homer’s metre, his judge has still but the same answer for him: ‘It may
be so: reproduce then on our ear something of the effect produced by the
movement of Homer’.

But what is the general effect which Homer produces on Mr Newman
himself? because, when we know this, we shall know whether he and his
judges are agreed at the outset, whether we may expect him, if he can
reproduce the effect he feels, if his hand does not betray him in the
execution, to satisfy his judges and to succeed. If, however, Mr
Newman’s impression from Homer is something quite different from that of
his judges, then it can hardly be expected that any amount of labour or
talent will enable him to reproduce for them _their_ Homer.

Mr Newman does not leave us in doubt as to the general effect which
Homer makes upon him. As I have told you what is the general effect
which Homer makes upon me,—that of a most rapidly moving poet, that of a
poet most plain and direct in his style, that of a poet most plain and
direct in his ideas, that of a poet eminently noble,—so Mr Newman tells
us his general impression of Homer. ‘Homer’s style’, he says, ‘is
direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous’. Again: ‘Homer
rises and sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low
when it is mean’.

I lay my finger on four words in these two sentences of Mr Newman, and I
say that the man who could apply those words to Homer can never render
Homer truly. The four words are these: _quaint_, _garrulous_, _prosaic_,
_low_. Search the English language for a word which does not apply to
Homer, and you could not fix on a better than _quaint_, unless perhaps
you fixed on one of the other three.

Again; ‘to translate Homer suitably’, says Mr Newman, ‘we need a diction
sufficiently antiquated to obtain pardon of the reader for its frequent
homeliness’. ‘I am concerned’, he says again, ‘with the artistic problem
of attaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while remaining
easily intelligible’. And again, he speaks of ‘the more antiquated style
suited to this subject’. Quaint! antiquated!—but to whom? Sir Thomas
Browne is quaint, and the diction of Chaucer is antiquated: does Mr
Newman suppose that Homer seemed quaint to Sophocles, when he read him,
as Sir Thomas Browne seems quaint to us, when we read him? or that
Homer’s diction seemed antiquated to Sophocles, as Chaucer’s diction
seems antiquated to us? But we cannot really know, I confess, how Homer
seemed to Sophocles: well then, to those who can tell us how he seems to
them, to the living scholar, to our only present witness on this
matter,—does Homer make on the Provost of Eton, when he reads him, the
impression of a poet quaint and antiquated? does he make this impression
on Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett. When Shakspeare says, ‘The
princes _orgulous_’, meaning ‘the proud princes’, we say, ‘This is
antiquated’; when he says of the Trojan gates, that they

                                 With massy staples
                   And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts
                   _Sperr_ up the sons of Troy,

we say, ‘This is both quaint and antiquated’. But does Homer ever
compose in a language which produces on the scholar at all the same
impression as this language which I have quoted from Shakspeare? Never
once. Shakspeare is quaint and antiquated in the lines which I have just
quoted; but Shakspeare—need I say it?—can compose, when he likes, when
he is at his best, in a language perfectly simple, perfectly
intelligible; in a language which, in spite of the two centuries and a
half which part its author from us, stops us or surprises us as little
as the language of a contemporary. And Homer has not Shakspeare’s
variations: Homer always composes as Shakspeare composes at his best;
Homer is always simple and intelligible, as Shakspeare is often; Homer
is never quaint and antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes.

When Mr Newman says that Homer is garrulous, he seems, perhaps, to
depart less widely from the common opinion than when he calls him
quaint; for is there not Horace’s authority for asserting that ‘the good
Homer sometimes nods’, _bonus dormitat Homerus_? and a great many people
have come, from the currency of this well-known criticism, to represent
Homer to themselves as a diffuse old man, with the full-stocked mind,
but also with the occasional slips and weaknesses of old age. Horace has
said better things than his ‘bonus dormitat Homerus’; but he never meant
by this, as I need not remind anyone who knows the passage, that Homer
was garrulous, or anything of the kind. Instead, however, of either
discussing what Horace meant, or discussing Homer’s garrulity as a
general question, I prefer to bring to my mind some style which is
garrulous, and to ask myself, to ask you, whether anything at all of the
impression made by that style is ever made by the style of Homer. The
mediæval romancers, for instance, are garrulous; the following, to take
out of a thousand instances the first which comes to hand, is in a
garrulous manner. It is from the romance of Richard Cœur de Lion.

                    Of my tale be not a-wondered!
                    The French says he slew an hundred
                    (Whereof is made this English saw)
                    Or he rested him any thraw.
                    Him followed many an English knight
                    That eagerly holp him for to fight

and so on. Now the manner of that composition I call garrulous; everyone
will feel it to be garrulous; everyone will understand what is meant
when it is called garrulous. Then I ask the scholar,—does Homer’s manner
ever make upon you, I do not say, the same impression of its garrulity
as that passage, but does it make, ever for one moment, an impression in
the slightest way resembling, in the remotest degree akin to, the
impression made by that passage of the mediæval poet? I have no fear of
the answer.

I follow the same method with Mr Newman’s two other epithets, _prosaic_
and _low_. ‘Homer rises and sinks with his subject’, says Mr Newman; ‘is
prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is mean’. First I say, Homer is
never, in any sense, to be with truth called prosaic; he is never to be
called low. He does not rise and sink with his subject; on the contrary,
his manner invests his subject, whatever his subject be, with nobleness.
Then I look for an author of whom it may with truth be said, that he
‘rises and sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low
when it is mean’. Defoe is eminently such an author; of Defoe’s manner
it may with perfect precision be said, that it follows his matter; his
lifelike composition takes its character from the facts which it
conveys, not from the nobleness of the composer. In _Moll Flanders_ and
_Colonel Jack_, Defoe is undoubtedly prosaic when his subject is tame,
low when his subject is mean. Does Homer’s manner in the _Iliad_, I ask
the scholar, ever make upon him an impression at all like the impression
made by Defoe’s manner in _Moll Flanders_ and _Colonel Jack_? Does it
not, on the contrary, leave him with an impression of nobleness, even
when it deals with Thersites or with Irus?

Well then, Homer is neither quaint, nor garrulous, nor prosaic, nor
mean: and Mr Newman, in seeing him so, sees him differently from those
who are to judge Mr Newman’s rendering of him. By pointing out how a
wrong conception of Homer affects Mr Newman’s translation, I hope to
place in still clearer light those four cardinal truths which I
pronounce essential for him who would have a right conception of Homer:
that Homer is rapid, that he is plain and direct in word and style, that
he is plain and direct in his ideas, and that he is noble.

Mr Newman says that in fixing on a style for suitably rendering Homer,
as he conceives him, he ‘alights on the delicate line which separates
the _quaint_ from the _grotesque_’. ‘I ought to be quaint’, he says, ‘I
ought not to be grotesque’. This is a most unfortunate sentence. Mr
Newman is grotesque, which he himself says he ought not to be; and he
ought not to be quaint, which he himself says he ought to be.

‘No two persons will agree’, says Mr Newman, ‘as to where the quaint
ends and the grotesque begins’; and perhaps this is true. But, in order
to avoid all ambiguity in the use of the two words, it is enough to say,
that most persons would call an expression which produced on them a very
strong sense of its incongruity, and which violently surprised them,
_grotesque_; and an expression, which produced on them a slighter sense
of its incongruity, and which more gently surprised them, _quaint_.
Using the two words in this manner, I say, that when Mr Newman
translates Helen’s words to Hector in the sixth book,

          Δᾶερ ἐμεῖο, κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, ὀκρυοέσσης[10],

          O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief-working vixen,
          A numbing horror,

he is grotesque; that is, he expresses himself in a manner which
produces on us a very strong sense of its incongruity, and which
violently surprises us. I say, again, that when Mr Newman translates the
common line,

       Τὴν δ’ ἠμείβετ’ ἔπειτα μέγας κορυθαίολος Ἕκτωρ,

       Great Hector of the motley helm then spake to her responsive,

or the common expression, ἐϋκνήμιδες Ἀχαιοί, ‘dapper-greaved Achaians’,
he is quaint; that is, he expresses himself in a manner which produces
on us a slighter sense of incongruity, and which more gently surprises
us. But violent and gentle surprise are alike far from the scholar’s
spirit when he reads in Homer κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, or κορυθαίολος Ἕκτωρ,
or, ἐϋκνήμιδες Ἀχαιοί. These expressions no more seem odd to him than
the simplest expressions in English. He is not more checked by any
feeling of strangeness, strong or weak, when he reads them, than when he
reads in an English book ‘the painted savage’, or, ‘the phlegmatic
Dutchman’. Mr Newman’s renderings of them must, therefore, be wrong
expressions in a translation of Homer, because they excite in the
scholar, their only competent judge, a feeling quite alien to that
excited in him by what they profess to render.

Mr Newman, by expressions of this kind, is false to his original in two
ways. He is false to him inasmuch as he is ignoble; for a noble air, and
a grotesque air, the air of the address,

                 Δᾶερ ἐμεῖο, κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, ὀκρυοέσσης,

and the air of the address,

          O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief-working vixen,
          A numbing horror,

are just contrary the one to the other: and he is false to him inasmuch
as he is odd; for an odd diction like Mr Newman’s, and a perfectly plain
natural diction like Homer’s,—‘dapper-greaved Achaians’ and ἐϋκνήμιδες
Ἀχαιοί,—are also just contrary the one to the other. Where, indeed, Mr
Newman got his diction, with whom he can have lived, what can be his
test of antiquity and rarity for words, are questions which I ask myself
with bewilderment. He has prefixed to his translation a list of what he
calls ‘the more antiquated or rarer words’ which he has used. In this
list appear, on the one hand, such words as _doughty_, _grisly_,
_lusty_, _noisome_, _ravin_, which are familiar, one would think, to all
the world; on the other hand such words as _bragly_, meaning, Mr Newman
tells us, ‘proudly fine’; _bulkin_, ‘a calf’; _plump_, a ‘mass’; and so
on. ‘I am concerned’, says Mr Newman, ‘with the artistic problem of
attaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while remaining
easily intelligible’. But it seems to me that _lusty_ is not antiquated:
and that _bragly_ is not a word readily understood. That this word,
indeed, and _bulkin_, may have ‘a plausible aspect of moderate
antiquity’, I admit; but that they are ‘easily intelligible’, I deny.

Mr Newman’s syntax has, I say it with pleasure, a much more Homeric cast
than his vocabulary; his syntax, the mode in which his thought is
evolved, although not the actual words in which it is expressed, seems
to me right in its general character, and the best feature of his
version. It is not artificial or rhetorical like Cowper’s syntax or
Pope’s: it is simple, direct, and natural, and so far it is like
Homer’s. It fails, however, just where, from the inherent fault of Mr
Newman’s conception of Homer, one might expect it to fail,—it fails in
nobleness. It presents the thought in a way which is something more than
unconstrained,—over-familiar; something more than easy,—free and easy.
In this respect it is like the movement of Mr Newman’s version, like his
rhythm, for this, too, fails, in spite of some qualities, by not being
noble enough; this, while it avoids the faults of being slow and
elaborate, falls into a fault in the opposite direction, and is
slip-shod. Homer presents his thought naturally; but when Mr Newman has,

    A thousand fires along the plain, _I say_, that night were burning,

he presents his thought familiarly; in a style which may be the genuine
style of ballad-poetry, but which is not the style of Homer. Homer moves
freely; but when Mr Newman has,

          Infatuate! O that thou wert lord to some other army[11],

he gives himself too much freedom; he leaves us too much to do for his
rhythm ourselves, instead of giving to us a rhythm like Homer’s, easy
indeed, but mastering our ear with a fulness of power which is
irresistible.

I said that a certain style might be the genuine style of ballad-poetry,
but yet not the style of Homer. The analogy of the ballad is ever
present to Mr Newman’s thoughts in considering Homer; and perhaps
nothing has more caused his faults than this analogy,—this popular, but,
it is time to say, this erroneous analogy. ‘The moral qualities of
Homer’s style’, says Mr Newman, ‘being like to those of the English
ballad, we need a metre of the same genius. Only those metres, which by
the very possession of these qualities are liable to degenerate into
_doggerel_, are suitable to reproduce the ancient epic’. ‘The style of
Homer’, he says, in a passage which I have before quoted, ‘is direct,
popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous: in all these respects it
is similar to the old English ballad’. Mr Newman, I need not say, is by
no means alone in this opinion. ‘The most really and truly Homeric of
all the creations of the English muse is’, says Mr Newman’s critic in
the _National Review_, ‘the ballad-poetry of ancient times; and the
association between metre and subject is one that it would be true
wisdom to preserve’. ‘It is confessed’, says Chapman’s last editor, Mr
Hooper, ‘that the fourteen-syllable verse’ (that is, a ballad-verse) ‘is
peculiarly fitting for Homeric translation’. And the editor of Dr
Maginn’s clever and popular _Homeric Ballads_ assumes it as one of his
author’s greatest and most undisputable merits, that he was ‘the first
who consciously realised to himself the truth that Greek ballads can be
really represented in English only by a similar measure’.

This proposition that Homer’s poetry is _ballad-poetry_, analogous to
the well-known ballad-poetry of the English and other nations, has a
certain small portion of truth in it, and at one time probably served a
useful purpose, when it was employed to discredit the artificial and
literary manner in which Pope and his school rendered Homer. But it has
been so extravagantly over-used, the mistake which it was useful in
combating has so entirely lost the public favour, that it is now much
more important to insist on the large part of error contained in it,
than to extol its small part of truth. It is time to say plainly that,
whatever the admirers of our old ballads may think, the supreme form of
epic poetry, the genuine Homeric mould, is not the form of the Ballad of
Lord Bateman. I have myself shown the broad difference between Milton’s
manner and Homer’s; but, after a course of Mr Newman and Dr Maginn, I
turn round in desperation upon them and upon the balladists who have
misled them, and I exclaim: ‘Compared with you, Milton is Homer’s
double; there is, whatever you may think, ten thousand times more of the
real strain of Homer in

                  Blind Thamyris, and blind Mæonides,
                  And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old,

than in

                  Now Christ thee save, thou proud portèr,
                  Now Christ thee save and see[12],

or in

           While the tinker did dine, he had plenty of wine[13].

For Homer is not only rapid in movement, simple in style, plain in
language, natural in thought; he is also, and above all, _noble_. I have
advised the translator not to go into the vexed question of Homer’s
identity. Yet I will just remind him that the grand argument—or rather,
not argument, for the matter affords no data for arguing, but the grand
source from which conviction, as we read the _Iliad_, keeps pressing in
upon us, that there is one poet of the _Iliad_, one Homer—is precisely
this nobleness of the poet, this grand manner; we feel that the analogy
drawn from other joint compositions does not hold good here, because
those works do not bear, like the _Iliad_, the magic stamp of a master;
and the moment you have _anything_ less than a masterwork, the
co-operation or consolidation of several poets becomes possible, for
talent is not uncommon; the moment you have _much_ less than a
masterwork, they become easy, for mediocrity is everywhere. I can
imagine fifty Bradies joined with as many Tates to make the New Version
of the Psalms. I can imagine several poets having contributed to any one
of the old English ballads in Percy’s collection. I can imagine several
poets, possessing, like Chapman, the Elizabethan vigour and the
Elizabethan mannerism, united with Chapman to produce his version of the
_Iliad_. I can imagine several poets, with the literary knack of the
twelfth century, united to produce the _Nibelungen Lay_ in the form in
which we have it,—a work which the Germans, in their joy at discovering
a national epic of their own, have rated vastly higher than it deserves.
And lastly, though Mr Newman’s translation of Homer bears the strong
mark of his own idiosyncrasy, yet I can imagine Mr Newman and a school
of adepts trained by him in his art of poetry, jointly producing that
work, so that Aristarchus himself should have difficulty in pronouncing
which line was the master’s, and which a pupil’s. But I cannot imagine
several poets, or one poet, joined with Dante in the composition of his
_Inferno_, though many poets have taken for their subject a descent into
Hell. Many artists, again, have represented Moses; but there is only one
Moses of Michael Angelo. So the insurmountable obstacle to believing the
_Iliad_ a consolidated work of several poets is this: that the work of
great masters is unique; and the _Iliad_ has a great master’s genuine
stamp, and that stamp is _the grand style_.

Poets who cannot work in the grand style instinctively seek a style in
which their comparative inferiority may feel itself at ease, a manner
which may be, so to speak, indulgent to their inequalities. The
ballad-style offers to an epic poet, quite unable to fill the canvas of
Homer, or Dante, or Milton, a canvas which he is capable of filling. The
ballad-measure is quite able to give due effect to the vigour and spirit
which its employer, when at his very best, may be able to exhibit; and,
when he is not at his best, when he is a little trivial, or a little
dull, it will not betray him, it will not bring out his weakness into
broad relief. This is a convenience; but it is a convenience which the
ballad-style purchases by resigning all pretensions to the highest, to
the grand manner. It is true of its movement, as it is _not_ true of
Homer’s, that it is ‘liable to degenerate into doggerel’. It is true of
its ‘moral qualities’, as it is _not_ true of Homer’s, that ‘quaintness’
and ‘garrulity’ are among them. It is true of its employers, as it is
_not_ true of Homer, that they ‘rise and sink with their subject, are
prosaic when it is tame, are low when it is mean’. For this reason the
ballad-style and the ballad-measure are eminently _in_appropriate to
render Homer. Homer’s manner and movement are always both noble and
powerful: the ballad-manner and movement are often either jaunty and
smart, so not noble; or jog-trot and hum-drum, so not powerful.

The _Nibelungen Lay_ affords a good illustration of the qualities of the
ballad-manner. Based on grand traditions, which had found expression in
a grand lyric poetry, the German epic poem of the _Nibelungen Lay_,
though it is interesting, and though it has good passages, is itself
anything rather than a grand poem. It is a poem of which the composer
is, to speak the truth, a very ordinary mortal, and often, therefore,
like other ordinary mortals, very prosy. It is in a measure which
eminently adapts itself to this commonplace personality of its composer,
which has much the movement of the well-known measures of Tate and
Brady, and can jog on, for hundreds of lines at a time, with a level
ease which reminds one of Sheridan’s saying that easy writing may be
often such hard reading. But, instead of occupying myself with the
_Nibelungen Lay_, I prefer to look at the ballad-style as directly
applied to Homer, in Chapman’s version and Mr Newman’s, and in the
_Homeric Ballads_ of Dr. Maginn.

First I take Chapman. I have already shown that Chapman’s conceits are
un-Homeric, and that his rhyme is un-Homeric; I will now show how his
manner and movement are un-Homeric. Chapman’s diction, I have said, is
generally good; but it must be called good with this reserve, that,
though it has Homer’s plainness and directness, it often offends him who
knows Homer, by wanting Homer’s nobleness. In a passage which I have
already quoted, the address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles, where
Homer has,

              ἆ δειλώ, τι σφῶϊ δόμεν Πηλῆϊ ἄνακτι
              θνητῷ; ὑμεῖς δ’ ἐστὸν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε!
              ἦ ἵνα δυστήνοισι μετ’ ἀνδράσιν ἄλγε’ ἔχητον[14];

Chapman has,

                          _Poor wretched beasts_, said he,
        Why gave we you to a mortal king, when immortality
        And incapacity of age so dignifies your states?
        Was it to haste[15] the miseries poured out on human fates?

There are many faults in this rendering of Chapman’s, but what I
particularly wish to notice in it is the expression ‘Poor wretched
beasts’ for ἆ δειλώ. This expression just illustrates the difference
between the ballad-manner and Homer’s. The ballad-manner—Chapman’s
manner—is, I say, pitched sensibly lower than Homer’s. The ballad-manner
requires that an expression shall be plain and natural, and then it asks
no more. Homer’s manner requires that an expression shall be plain and
natural, but it also requires that it shall be noble. Ἆ δειλώ is as
plain, as simple as ‘Poor wretched beasts’; but it is also noble, which
‘Poor wretched beasts’ is not. ‘Poor wretched beasts’ is, in truth, a
little over-familiar, but this is no objection to it for the
ballad-manner; it is good enough for the old English ballad, good enough
for the _Nibelungen Lay_, good enough for Chapman’s _Iliad_, good enough
for Mr Newman’s _Iliad_, good enough for Dr Maginn’s _Homeric Ballads_;
but it is not good enough for Homer.

To feel that Chapman’s measure, though natural, is not Homeric; that,
though tolerably rapid, it has not Homer’s rapidity; that it has a
jogging rapidity rather than a flowing rapidity; and a movement familiar
rather than nobly easy, one has only, I think, to read half a dozen
lines in any part of his version. I prefer to keep as much as possible
to passages which I have already noticed, so I will quote the conclusion
of the nineteenth book, where Achilles answers his horse Xanthus, who
has prophesied his death to him[16].

                          Achilles, far in rage,
    Thus answered him:—It fits not thee thus proudly to presage
    My overthrow. I know myself it is my fate to fall
    Thus far from Phthia; yet that fate shall fail to vent her gall
    Till mine vent thousands.—These words said, he fell to horrid deeds,
    Gave dreadful signal, and forthright made fly his one-hoofed steeds.

For what regards the manner of this passage, the words ‘Achilles Thus
answered him’, and ‘I know myself it is my fate to fall Thus far from
Phthia’, are in Homer’s manner, and all the rest is out of it. But for
what regards its movement, who, after being jolted by Chapman through
such verse as this,

            These words said, he fell to horrid deeds,
    Gave dreadful signal, and forthright made fly his one-hoofed steeds,

who does not feel the vital difference of the movement of Homer,

              ἦ ῥα, καὶ ἐν πρώτοις ἰάχων ἔχε μώνυχας ἵππο υς?

To pass from Chapman to Dr Maginn. His _Homeric Ballads_ are vigorous
and genuine poems in their own way; they are not one continual falsetto,
like the pinch-beck _Roman Ballads_ of Lord Macaulay; but just because
they are ballads in their manner and movement, just because, to use the
words of his applauding editor, Dr Maginn has ‘consciously realised to
himself the truth that Greek ballads can be really represented in
English only by a similar manner’,—just for this very reason they are
not at all Homeric, they have not the least in the world the manner of
Homer. There is a celebrated incident in the nineteenth book of the
_Odyssey_, the recognition by the old nurse Eurycleia of a scar on the
leg of her master Ulysses, who has entered his own hall as an unknown
wanderer, and whose feet she has been set to wash. ‘Then she came near’,
says Homer, ‘and began to wash her master; and straightway she
recognised a scar which he had got in former days from the white tusk of
a wild boar, when he went to Parnassus unto Autolycus and the sons of
Autolycus, his mother’s father and brethren’[17]. This, ‘really
represented’ by Dr Maginn, in ‘a measure similar’ to Homer’s, becomes:

               And scarcely had she begun to wash
               Ere she was aware of the grisly gash
                   Above his knee that lay.
               It was a wound from a wild boar’s tooth,
               All on Parnassus’ slope,
               Where he went to hunt in the days of his youth
               With his mother’s sire,

and so on. That is the true ballad-manner, no one can deny; ‘all on
Parnassus’ slope’ is, I was going to say, the true ballad-slang; but
never again shall I be able to read

             νίζε δ’ ἄῤ ἆσσον ἴουσα ἄναχθ’ ἑόν· αὐτίκα δ’ ἔγνω
             οὐλήν,

without having the destestable dance of Dr Maginn’s

                   And scarcely had she begun to wash
                   Ere she was aware of the grisly gash,

jigging in my ears, to spoil the effect of Homer, and to torture me. To
apply that manner and that rhythm to Homer’s incidents, is not to
imitate Homer, but to travesty him.

Lastly I come to Mr Newman. His rhythm, like Chapman’s and Dr Maginn’s,
is a ballad-rhythm, but with a modification of his own. ‘Holding it’, he
tells us, ‘as an axiom, that rhyme must be abandoned’, he found, on
abandoning it, ‘an unpleasant void until he gave a double ending to the
verse’. In short, instead of saying

                      Good people all with one accord
                      Give ear unto my _tale_,

Mr Newman would say

                      Good people all with one accord
                      Give ear unto my _story_.

A recent American writer[18] gravely observes that for his countrymen
this rhythm has a disadvantage in being like the rhythm of the American
national air _Yankee Doodle_, and thus provoking ludicrous associations.
_Yankee Doodle_ is not our national air: for us Mr Newman’s rhythm has
not this disadvantage. He himself gives us several plausible reasons why
this rhythm of his really ought to be successful: let us examine how far
it _is_ successful.

Mr Newman joins to a bad rhythm so bad a diction that it is difficult to
distinguish exactly whether in any given passage it is his words or his
measure which produces a total impression of such an unpleasant kind.
But with a little attention we may analyse our total impression, and
find the share which each element has in producing it. To take the
passage which I have so often mentioned, Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus.
Mr Newman translates this as follows:

      O gentle friend! if thou and I, from this encounter ’scaping,
      Hereafter might for ever be from Eld and Death exempted
      As heavenly gods, not I in sooth would fight among the foremost,
      Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle.
      Now,—sith ten thousand shapes of Death do any-gait pursue us
      Which never mortal may evade, though sly of foot and nimble;—
      Onward! and glory let us earn, or glory yield to someone.

      Could all our care elude the gloomy grave
      Which claims no less the fearful than the brave.

I am not going to quote Pope’s version over again, but I must remark in
passing, how much more, with all Pope’s radical difference of manner
from Homer, it gives us of the real effect of

                   εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε

than Mr Newman’s lines. And now, why are Mr Newman’s lines faulty? They
are faulty, first, because, as a matter of diction, the expressions ‘O
gentle friend’, ‘eld’, ‘in sooth’, ‘liefly’, ‘advance’, ‘man-ennobling’,
‘sith’, ‘any-gait’, and ‘sly of foot’, are all bad; some of them worse
than others, but all bad: that is, they all of them as here used excite
in the scholar, their sole judge,—excite, I will boldly affirm, in
Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett,—a feeling totally different from
that excited in them by the words of Homer which these expressions
profess to render. The lines are faulty, secondly, because, as a matter
of rhythm, any and every line among them has to the ear of the same
judges (I affirm it with equal boldness) a movement as unlike Homer’s
movement in the corresponding line as the single words are unlike
Homer’s words. Οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμαι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειρν,—‘Nor liefly
thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle’;—for whose ears do those
two rhythms produce impressions of, to use Mr Newman’s own words,
‘similar moral genius’?

I will by no means make search in Mr Newman’s version for passages
likely to raise a laugh; that search, alas! would be far too easy. I
will quote but one other passage from him, and that a passage where the
diction is comparatively inoffensive, in order that disapproval of the
words may not unfairly heighten disapproval of the rhythm. The end of
the nineteenth book, the answer of Achilles to his horse Xanthus, Mr
Newman gives thus:

      Chestnut! why bodest death to me? from thee this was not needed.
      Myself right surely know alsó, that ’t is my doom to perish,
      From mother and from father dear apart, in Troy; but never
      Pause will I make of war, until the Trojans be glutted.
        He spake, and yelling, held afront the single-hoofed horses.

Here Mr Newman calls Xanthus _Chestnut_, indeed, as he calls Balius
_Spotted_, and Podarga _Spry-foot_; which is as if a Frenchman were to
call Miss Nightingale _Mdlle. Rossignol_, or Mr Bright _M. Clair_. And
several other expressions, too, ‘yelling’, ‘held afront’,
‘single-hoofed’,—leave, to say the very least, much to be desired.
Still, for Mr Newman, the diction of this passage is pure. All the more
clearly appears the profound vice of a rhythm, which, with comparatively
few faults of words, can leave a sense of such incurable alienation from
Homer’s manner as, ‘Myself right surely know also that ’tis my doom to
perish compared with the εὖ νύ τοι οἶδα καὶ αὐτὸς, ὅ μοι μόρος ἐνθάδ’
ὀλέσθαι of Homer.

But so deeply seated is the difference between the ballad-manner and
Homer’s, that even a man of the highest powers, even a man of the
greatest vigour of spirit and of true genius—the Coryphæus of
balladists, Sir Walter Scott—fails with a manner of this kind to produce
an effect at all like the effect of Homer. ‘I am not so rash’, declares
Mr Newman, ‘as to say that if _freedom_ be given to rhyme as in Walter
Scott’s poetry’,—‘Walter Scott, by far the most Homeric of our poets’,
as in another place he calls him,—‘a genius may not arise who will
translate Homer into the melodies of _Marmion_’. ‘The _truly_ classical
and _truly_ romantic’, says Dr Maginn, ‘are one; the moss-trooping
Nestor reappears in the moss-trooping heroes of Percy’s _Reliques_’; and
a description by Scott, which he quotes, he calls ‘graphic, and
therefore Homeric’. He forgets our fourth axiom,—that Homer is not
_only_ graphic; he is also noble, and has the grand style. Human nature
under like circumstances is probably in all stages much the same; and so
far it may be said that ‘the truly classical and the truly romantic are
one’; but it is of little use to tell us this, because we know the human
nature of other ages only through the representations of them which have
come down to us, and the classical and the romantic modes of
representation are so far from being ‘one’, that they remain eternally
distinct, and have created for us a separation between the two worlds
which they respectively represent. Therefore to call Nestor the
‘moss-trooping Nestor’ is absurd, because, though Nestor may possibly
have been much the same sort of man as many a moss-trooper, he has yet
come to us through a mode of representation so unlike that of Percy’s
_Reliques_, that instead of ‘reappearing in the moss-trooping heroes’ of
these poems, he exists in our imagination as something utterly unlike
them, and as belonging to another world. So the Greeks in Shakspeare’s
_Troilus and Cressida_ are no longer the Greeks whom we have known in
Homer, because they come to us through a mode of representation of the
romantic world. But I must not forget Scott.

I suppose that when Scott is in what may be called full ballad swing, no
one will hesitate to pronounce his manner neither Homeric nor the grand
manner. When he says, for instance,

                      I do not rhyme to that dull elf
                      Who cannot image to himself[19],

and so on, any scholar will feel that _this_ is not Homer’s manner. But
let us take Scott’s poetry at its best; and when it is at its best, it
is undoubtedly very good indeed:

                 Tunstall lies dead upon the field,
                 His life-blood stains the spotless shield;
                 Edmund is down,—my life is reft,—
                 The Admiral alone is left.
                 Let Stanley charge with spur of fire,—
                 With Chester charge, and Lancashire,
                 Full upon Scotland’s central host,
                 Or victory and England’s lost[20].

That is, no doubt, as vigorous as possible, as spirited as possible; it
is exceedingly fine poetry. And still I say, it is not in the grand
manner, and therefore it is not like Homer’s poetry. Now, how shall I
make him who doubts this feel that I say true; that these lines of Scott
are essentially neither in Homer’s style nor in the grand style? I may
point out to him that the movement of Scott’s lines, while it is rapid,
is also at the same time what the French call _saccadé_, its rapidity is
‘jerky’; whereas Homer’s rapidity is a flowing rapidity. But this is
something external and material; it is but the outward and visible sign
of an inward and spiritual diversity. I may discuss what, in the
abstract, constitutes the grand style; but that sort of general
discussion never much helps our judgment of particular instances. I may
say that the presence or absence of the grand style can only be
spiritually discerned; and this is true, but to plead this looks like
evading the difficulty. My best way is to take eminent specimens of the
grand style, and to put them side by side with this of Scott. For
example, when Homer says:

             άλλά, φίλος, θάνε καὶ σύ· τίη ὀλυφύρεαι οὕτως;
             κάθανε καὶ Πάτροκλος, ὅπερ σέο πολλὸν ἀμείνων[21],

that is in the grand style. When Virgil says:

               Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
               Fortunam ex aliis[22],

that is in the grand style. When Dante says:

              Lascio lo fele, et vo pei dolci pomi
              Promessi a me per lo verace Duca;
              Ma fino al centro pria convien ch’ io tomi[23],

that is in the grand style. When Milton says:

                               His form had yet not lost
                 All her original brightness, nor appeared
                 Less than archangel ruined, and the excess
                 Of glory obscured[24],

that, finally, is in the grand style. Now let anyone after repeating to
himself these four passages, repeat again the passage of Scott, and he
will perceive that there is something in style which the four first have
in common, and which the last is without; and this something is
precisely the grand manner. It is no disrespect to Scott to say that he
does not attain to this manner in his poetry; to say so, is merely to
say that he is not among the five or six supreme poets of the world.
Among these he is not; but, being a man of far greater powers than the
ballad-poets, he has tried to give to their instrument a compass and an
elevation which it does not naturally possess, in order to enable him to
come nearer to the effect of the instrument used by the great epic
poets—an instrument which he felt he could not truly use,—and in this
attempt he has but imperfectly succeeded. The poetic style of Scott
is—(it becomes necessary to say so when it is proposed to ‘translate
Homer into the melodies of _Marmion_’)—it is, tried by the highest
standard, a bastard epic style; and that is why, out of his own powerful
hands, it has had so little success. It is a less natural, and therefore
a less good style, than the original ballad-style; while it shares with
the ballad-style the inherent incapacity of rising into the grand style,
of adequately rendering Homer. Scott is certainly at his best in his
battles. Of Homer you could not say this; he is not better in his
battles than elsewhere; but even between the battle-pieces of the two
there exists all the difference which there is between an able work and
a masterpiece.

                 Tunstall lies dead upon the field,
                 His life-blood stains the spotless shield:
                 Edmund is down,—my life is reft—
                 The Admiral alone is left.

—‘For not in the hands of Diomede the son of Tydeus rages the spear, to
ward off destruction from the Danaans; neither as yet have I heard the
voice of the son of Atreus, shouting out of his hated mouth; but the
voice of Hector the slayer of men bursts round me, as he cheers on the
Trojans; and they with their yellings fill all the plain, overcoming the
Achaians in the battle’.—I protest that, to my feeling, Homer’s
performance, even through that pale and far-off shadow of a prose
translation, still has a hundred times more of the grand manner about
it, than the original poetry of Scott.

Well, then, the ballad-manner and the ballad-measure, whether in the
hands of the old ballad-poets, or arranged by Chapman, or arranged by Mr
Newman, or, even, arranged by Sir Walter Scott, cannot worthily render
Homer. And for one reason: Homer is plain, so are they; Homer is
natural, so are they; Homer is spirited, so are they; but Homer is
sustainedly noble, and they are not. Homer and they are both of them
natural, and therefore touching and stirring; but the grand style, which
is Homer’s, is something more than touching and stirring; it can form
the character, it is edifying. The old English balladist may stir Sir
Philip Sidney’s heart like a trumpet, and this is much: but Homer, but
the few artists in the grand style, can do more; they can refine the raw
natural man, they can transmute him. So it is not without cause that I
say, and say again, to the translator of Homer: ‘Never for a moment
suffer yourself to forget our fourth fundamental proposition, _Homer is
noble_’. For it is seen how large a share this nobleness has in
producing that general effect of his, which it is the main business of a
translator to _re_produce.

I shall have to try your patience yet once more upon this subject, and
then my task will be completed. I have shown what the four axioms
respecting Homer which I have laid down, exclude, what they bid a
translator not to do; I have still to show what they supply, what
positive help they can give to the translator in his work. I will even,
with their aid, myself try my fortune with some of those passages of
Homer which I have already noticed; not indeed with any confidence that
I more than others can succeed in adequately rendering Homer, but in the
hope of satisfying competent judges, in the hope of making it clear to
the future translator, that I at any rate follow a right method, and
that, in coming short, I come short from weakness of execution, not from
original vice of design. This is why I have so long occupied myself with
Mr Newman’s version; that, apart from all faults of execution, his
original design was wrong, and that he has done us the good service of
declaring that design in its naked wrongness. To bad practice he has
prefixed the bad theory which made the practice bad; he has given us a
false theory in his preface, and he has exemplified the bad effects of
that false theory in his translation. It is because his starting-point
is so bad that he runs so badly; and to save others from taking so false
a starting-point, may be to save them from running so futile a course.

Mr Newman, indeed, says in his preface, that if anyone dislikes his
translation, ‘he has his easy remedy; to keep aloof from it’. But Mr
Newman is a writer of considerable and deserved reputation; he is also a
Professor of the University of London, an institution which by its
position and by its merits acquires every year greater importance. It
would be a very grave thing if the authority of so eminent a Professor
led his students to misconceive entirely the chief work of the Greek
world; that work which, whatever the other works of classical antiquity
have to give us, gives it more abundantly than they all. The
eccentricity too, the arbitrariness, of which Mr Newman’s conception of
Homer offers so signal an example, are not a peculiar failing of Mr
Newman’s own; in varying degrees they are the great defect of English
intellect the great blemish of English literature. Our literature of the
eighteenth century, the literature of the school of Dryden, Addison,
Pope, Johnson, is a long reaction against this eccentricity, this
arbitrariness; that reaction perished by its own faults, and its enemies
are left once more masters of the field. It is much more likely that any
new English version of Homer will have Mr Newman’s faults than Pope’s.
Our present literature, which is very far, certainly, from having the
spirit and power of Elizabethan genius, yet has in its own way these
faults, eccentricity, and arbitrariness, quite as much as the
Elizabethan literature ever had. They are the cause that, while upon
none, perhaps, of the modern literatures has so great a sum of force
been expended as upon the English literature, at the present hour this
literature, regarded not as an object of mere literary interest but as a
living intellectual instrument, ranks only third in European effect and
importance among the literatures of Europe; it ranks after the
literatures of France and Germany. Of these two literatures, as of the
intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has
been a _critical_ effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge,
theology, philosophy, history, art, science,—to see the object as in
itself it really is. But, owing to the presence in English literature of
this eccentric and arbitrary spirit, owing to the strong tendency of
English writers to bring to the consideration of their object some
individual fancy, almost the last thing for which one would come to
English literature is just that very thing which now Europe most
desires—_criticism_. It is useful to notice any signal manifestation of
those faults, which thus limit and impair the action of our literature.
And therefore I have pointed out how widely, in translating Homer, a man
even of real ability and learning may go astray, unless he brings to the
study of this clearest of poets one quality in which our English
authors, with all their great gifts, are apt to be somewhat
wanting—simple lucidity of mind.

Footnote 10:

  _Iliad_, vi. 344.

Footnote 11:

  From the reproachful answer of Ulysses to Agamemnon, who had proposed
  an abandonment of their expedition. This is one of the ‘tonic’
  passages of the _Iliad_, so I quote it:

      Ah, unworthy king, some other inglorious army
      Should’st thou command, not rule over _us_, whose portion for ever
      Zeus hath made it, from youth right up to age, to be winding
      Skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of us perish.

  _Iliad_, xiv. 84.

Footnote 12:

  From the ballad of _King Estmere_, in Percy’s _Reliques of Ancient
  English Poetry_, i. 69 (edit. of 1767).

Footnote 13:

  _Reliques_, i. 241

Footnote 14:

  _Iliad_, xvii. 443.

Footnote 15:

  All the editions which I have seen have ‘haste’, but the right reading
  must certainly be ‘taste’.

Footnote 16:

  _Iliad_, xix. 419.

Footnote 17:

  _Odyssey_, xix. 392.

Footnote 18:

  Mr Marsh, in his _Lectures on the English Language_, New York, 1860,
  p. 520.

Footnote 19:

  _Marmion_, canto vi. 38.

Footnote 20:

  _Marmion_, canto vi. 29.

Footnote 21:

  ‘Be content, good friend, die also thou! why lamentest thou thyself on
  this wise? Patroclus, too, died, who was a far better than
  thou.’—_Iliad_, xxi. 106.

Footnote 22:

  ‘From me, young man, learn nobleness of soul and true effort: learn
  success from others.’—_Æneid_, xii. 435.

Footnote 23:

  ‘I leave the gall of bitterness, and I go for the apples of sweetness
  promised unto me by my faithful Guide; but far as the centre it
  behoves me first to fall.’—_Hell_, xvi. 61.

Footnote 24:

  _Paradise Lost_, i. 591.

Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in his words and style,
Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer is noble in his manner. Cowper
renders him ill because he is slow in his movement, and elaborate in his
style; Pope renders him ill because he is artificial both in his style
and in his words; Chapman renders him ill because he is fantastic in his
ideas; Mr Newman renders him ill because he is odd in his words and
ignoble in his manner. All four translators diverge from their original
at other points besides those named; but it is at the points thus named
that their divergence is greatest. For instance, Cowper’s diction is not
as Homer’s diction, nor his nobleness as Homer’s nobleness; but it is in
movement and grammatical style that he is most unlike Homer. Pope’s
rapidity is not of the same sort as Homer’s rapidity, nor are his
plainness of ideas and his nobleness as Homer’s plainness of ideas and
nobleness: but it is in the artificial character of his style and
diction that he is most unlike Homer. Chapman’s movement, words, style,
and manner, are often far enough from resembling Homer’s movement,
words, style, and manner; but it is the fantasticality of his ideas
which puts him farthest from resembling Homer. Mr Newman’s movement,
grammatical style, and ideas, are a thousand times in strong contrast
with Homer’s; still it is by the oddness of his diction and the
ignobleness of his manner that he contrasts with Homer the most
violently.

Therefore the translator must not say to himself: ‘Cowper is noble, Pope
is rapid, Chapman has a good diction, Mr Newman has a good cast of
sentence; I will avoid Cowper’s slowness, Pope’s artificiality,
Chapman’s conceits, Mr Newman’s oddity; I will take Cowper’s dignified
manner, Pope’s impetuous movement, Chapman’s vocabulary, Mr Newman’s
syntax, and so make a perfect translation of Homer’. Undoubtedly in
certain points the versions of Chapman, Cowper, Pope, and Mr Newman, all
of them have merit; some of them very high merit, others a lower merit;
but even in these points they have none of them precisely the same kind
of merit as Homer, and therefore the new translator, even if he can
imitate them in their good points, will still not satisfy his judge, the
scholar, who asks him for Homer and Homer’s kind of merit, or, at least,
for as much of them as it is possible to give.

So the translator really has no good model before him for any part of
his work, and has to invent everything for himself. He is to be rapid in
movement, plain in speech, simple in thought, and noble; and _how_ he is
to be either rapid, or plain, or simple, or noble, no one yet has shown
him. I shall try to-day to establish some practical suggestions which
may help the translator of Homer’s poetry to comply with the four grand
requirements which we make of him.

His version is to be rapid; and of course, to make a man’s poetry rapid,
as to make it noble, nothing can serve him so much as to have, in his
own nature, rapidity and nobleness. _It is the spirit that quickeneth_;
and no one will so well render Homer’s swift-flowing movement as he who
has himself something of the swift-moving spirit of Homer. Yet even this
is not quite enough. Pope certainly had a quick and darting spirit, as
he had, also, real nobleness; yet Pope does not render the movement of
Homer. To render this the translator must have, besides his natural
qualifications, an appropriate metre.

I have sufficiently shown why I think all forms of our ballad-metre
unsuited to Homer. It seems to me to be beyond question that, for epic
poetry, only three metres can seriously claim to be accounted capable of
the grand style. Two of these will at once occur to everyone,—the
ten-syllable, or so-called _heroic_, couplet, and blank verse. I do not
add to these the Spenserian stanza, although Dr Maginn, whose metrical
eccentricities I have already criticised, pronounces this stanza the one
right measure for a translation of Homer. It is enough to observe that
if Pope’s couplet, with the simple system of correspondences that its
rhymes introduce, changes the movement of Homer, in which no such
correspondences are found, and is therefore a bad measure for a
translator of Homer to employ, Spenser’s stanza, with its far more
intricate system of correspondences, must change Homer’s movement far
more profoundly, and must therefore be for the translator a far worse
measure than the couplet of Pope. Yet I will say, at the same time, that
the verse of Spenser is more fluid, slips more easily and quickly along,
than the verse of almost any other English poet.

              By this the northern wagoner had set
              His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star
              That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
              But firm is fixt, and sendeth light from far
              To all that in the wide deep wandering are[25].

One cannot but feel that English verse has not often moved with the
fluidity and sweet ease of these lines. It is possible that it may have
been this quality of Spenser’s poetry which made Dr Maginn think that
the stanza of _The Faery Queen_ must be a good measure for rendering
Homer. This it is not: Spenser’s verse is fluid and rapid, no doubt, but
there are more ways than one of being fluid and rapid, and Homer is
fluid and rapid in quite another way than Spenser. Spenser’s manner is
no more Homeric than is the manner of the one modern inheritor of
Spenser’s beautiful gift,—the poet, who evidently caught from Spenser
his sweet and easy-slipping movement, and who has exquisitely employed
it; a Spenserian genius, nay, a genius by natural endowment richer
probably than even Spenser; that light which shines so unexpectedly and
without fellow in our century, an Elizabethan born too late, the early
lost and admirably gifted Keats.

I say then that there are really but three metres,—the ten-syllable
couplet, blank verse, and a third metre which I will not yet name,
but which is neither the Spenserian stanza nor any form of
ballad-verse,—between which, as vehicles for Homer’s poetry, the
translator has to make his choice. Everyone will at once remember a
thousand passages in which both the ten-syllable couplet and blank
verse prove themselves to have nobleness. Undoubtedly the movement
and manner of this,

              Still raise for good the supplicating voice,
              But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice,

are noble. Undoubtedly, the movement and manner of this:

                 High on a throne of royal state, which far
                 Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,

are noble also. But the first is in a rhymed metre; and the unfitness of
a rhymed metre for rendering Homer I have already shown. I will observe
too, that the fine couplet which I have quoted comes out of a satire, a
didactic poem; and that it is in didactic poetry that the ten-syllable
couplet has most successfully essayed the grand style. In narrative
poetry this metre has succeeded best when it essayed a sensibly lower
style, the style of Chaucer, for instance; whose narrative manner,
though a very good and sound manner, is certainly neither the grand
manner nor the manner of Homer.

The rhymed ten-syllable couplet being thus excluded, blank verse offers
itself for the translator’s use. The first kind of blank verse which
naturally occurs to us is the blank verse of Milton, which has been
employed, with more or less modification, by Mr Cary in translating
Dante, by Cowper, and by Mr Wright in translating Homer. How noble this
metre is in Milton’s hands, how completely it shows itself capable of
the grand, nay, of the grandest, style, I need not say. To this metre,
as used in the _Paradise Lost_, our country owes the glory of having
produced one of the only two poetical works in the grand style which are
to be found in the modern languages; the _Divine Comedy_ of Dante is the
other. England and Italy here stand alone; Spain, France, and Germany,
have produced great poets, but neither Calderon, nor Corneille, nor
Schiller, nor even Goethe, has produced a body of poetry in the true
grand style, in the sense in which the style of the body of Homer’s
poetry, or Pindar’s, or Sophocles’s, is grand. But Dante has, and so has
Milton; and in this respect Milton possesses a distinction which even
Shakspeare, undoubtedly the supreme poetical power in our literature,
does not share with him. Not a tragedy of Shakspeare but contains
passages in the worst of all styles, the affected style; and the grand
style, although it may be harsh, or obscure, or cumbrous, or
over-laboured, is never affected. In spite, therefore, of objections
which may justly be urged against the plan and treatment of the
_Paradise Lost_, in spite of its possessing, certainly, a far less
enthralling force of interest to attract and to carry forward the reader
than the _Iliad_ or the _Divine Comedy_, it fully deserves, it can never
lose, its immense reputation; for, like the _Iliad_ and the _Divine
Comedy_, nay, in some respects to a higher degree than either of them,
it is in the grand style.

But the grandeur of Milton is one thing, and the grandeur of Homer is
another. Homer’s movement, I have said again and again, is a flowing, a
rapid movement; Milton’s, on the other hand, is a laboured, a
self-retarding movement. In each case, the movement, the metrical cast,
corresponds with the mode of evolution of the thought, with the
syntactical cast, and is indeed determined by it. Milton charges himself
so full with thought, imagination, knowledge, that his style will hardly
contain them. He is too full-stored to show us in much detail one
conception, one piece of knowledge; he just shows it to us in a pregnant
allusive way, and then he presses on to another; and all this fulness,
this pressure, this condensation, this self-constraint, enters into his
movement, and makes it what it is,—noble, but difficult and austere.
Homer is quite different; he says a thing, and says it to the end, and
then begins another, while Milton is trying to press a thousand things
into one. So that whereas, in reading Milton, you never lose the sense
of laborious and condensed fulness, in reading Homer you never lose the
sense of flowing and abounding ease. With Milton line runs into line,
and all is straitly bound together: with Homer line runs off from line,
and all hurries away onward. Homer begins, Μῆνιν ἄειδε, Θεά,—at the
second word announcing the proposed action: Milton begins:

               Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
               Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
               Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
               With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
               Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
               Sing, heavenly muse.

So chary of a sentence is he, so resolute not to let it escape him till
he has crowded into it all he can, that it is not till the thirty-ninth
word in the sentence that he will give us the key to it, the word of
action, the verb. Milton says:

                O for that warning voice, which he, who saw
                The Apocalypse, heard cry in heaven aloud.

He is not satisfied, unless he can tell us, all in one sentence, and
without permitting himself to actually mention the name, that the man
who had the warning voice was the same man who saw the Apocalypse. Homer
would have said, ‘O for that warning voice, which _John_ heard’—and if
it had suited him to say that John also saw the Apocalypse, he would
have given us that in another sentence. The effect of this allusive and
compressed manner of Milton is, I need not say, often very powerful; and
it is an effect which other great poets have often sought to obtain much
in the same way: Dante is full of it, Horace is full of it; but wherever
it exists, it is always an un-Homeric effect. ‘The losses of the
heavens’, says Horace, ‘fresh moons speedily repair; we, when we have
gone down where the pious Æneas, where the rich Tullus and Ancus
are,—_pulvis et umbra sumus_[26]’. He never actually says _where_ we go
to; he only indicates it by saying that it is that place where Æneas,
Tullus, and Ancus are. But Homer, when he has to speak of going down to
the grave, says, definitely, _ἐς Ἐλύσιοv πεδιον_—ἀθάνατοι
πέμψουσιν[27],—‘The immortals shall send thee _to the Elysian plain_’;
and it is not till after he has definitely said this, that he adds, that
it is there that the abode of departed worthies is placed: ὅθι ξανθὸς
Ῥαδάμανθυς—‘Where the yellow-haired Rhadamanthus is’. Again; Horace,
having to say that punishment sooner or later overtakes crime, says it
thus:

                       Raro antecedentem scelestum
                       Deseruit pede Pœna claudo[28].

The thought itself of these lines is familiar enough to Homer and
Hesiod; but neither Homer nor Hesiod, in expressing it, could possibly
have so complicated its expression as Horace complicates it, and
purposely complicates it, by his use of the word _deseruit_. I say that
this complicated evolution of the thought necessarily complicates the
movement and rhythm of a poet; and that the Miltonic blank verse, of
course the first model of blank verse which suggests itself to an
English translator of Homer, bears the strongest marks of such
complication, and is therefore entirely unfit to render Homer.

If blank verse is used in translating Homer, it must be a blank verse of
which English poetry, naturally swayed much by Milton’s treatment of
this metre, offers at present hardly any examples. It must not be
Cowper’s blank verse, who has studied Milton’s pregnant manner with such
effect, that, having to say of Mr Throckmorton that he spares his
avenue, although it is the fashion with other people to cut down theirs,
he says that Benevolus ‘reprieves the obsolete prolixity of shade’. It
must not be Mr Tennyson’s blank verse.

            For all experience is an arch, wherethrough
            Gleams that untravelled world, whose distance fades
            For ever and for ever, as we gaze.

It is no blame to the thought of those lines, which belongs to another
order of ideas than Homer’s, but it is true, that Homer would certainly
have said of them, ‘It is to consider too curiously to consider so’. It
is no blame to their rhythm, which belongs to another order of movement
than Homer’s, but it is true that these three lines by themselves take
up nearly as much time as a whole book of the _Iliad_. No; the blank
verse used in rendering Homer must be a blank verse of which perhaps the
best specimens are to be found in some of the most rapid passages of
Shakspeare’s plays,—a blank verse which does not dovetail its lines into
one another, and which habitually ends its lines with monosyllables.
Such a blank verse might no doubt be very rapid in its movement, and
might perfectly adapt itself to a thought plainly and directly evolved;
and it would be interesting to see it well applied to Homer. But the
translator who determines to use it, must not conceal from himself that
in order to pour Homer into the mould of this metre, he will have
entirely to break him up and melt him down, with the hope of then
successfully composing him afresh; and this is a process which is full
of risks. It may, no doubt, be the real Homer that issues new from it;
it is not certain beforehand that it cannot be the real Homer, as it is
certain that from the mould of Pope’s couplet or Cowper’s Miltonic verse
it cannot be the real Homer that will issue; still, the chances of
disappointment are great. The result of such an attempt to renovate the
old poet may be an Æson; but it may also, and more probably will be a
Pelias.

When I say this, I point to the metre which seems to me to give the
translator the best chance of preserving the general effect of
Homer,—that third metre which I have not yet expressly named, the
hexameter. I know all that is said against the use of hexameters in
English poetry; but it comes only to this, that, among us, they have not
yet been used on any considerable scale with success. _Solvitur
ambulando_: this is an objection which can best be met by _producing_
good English hexameters. And there is no reason in the nature of the
English language why it should not adapt itself to hexameters as well as
the German language does; nay, the English language, from its greater
rapidity, is in itself better suited than the German for them. The
hexameter, whether alone or with the pentameter, possesses a movement,
an expression, which no metre hitherto in common use amongst us
possesses, and which I am convinced English poetry, as our mental wants
multiply, will not always be content to forgo. Applied to Homer, this
metre affords to the translator the immense support of keeping him more
nearly than any other metre to Homer’s movement; and, since a poet’s
movement makes so large a part of his general effect, and to reproduce
this general effect is at once the translator’s indispensable business
and so difficult for him, it is a great thing to have this part of your
model’s general effect already given you in your metre, instead of
having to get it entirely for yourself.

These are general considerations; but there are also one or two
particular considerations which confirm me in the opinion that for
translating Homer into English verse the hexameter should be used. The
most successful attempt hitherto made at rendering Homer into English,
the attempt in which Homer’s general effect has been best retained, is
an attempt made in the hexameter measure. It is a version of the famous
lines in the third book of the _Iliad_, which end with that mention of
Castor and Pollux from which Mr Ruskin extracts the sentimental
consolation already noticed by me. The author is the accomplished
Provost of Eton, Dr Hawtrey; and this performance of his must be my
excuse for having taken the liberty to single him out for mention, as
one of the natural judges of a translation of Homer, along with
Professor Thompson and Professor Jowett, whose connection with Greek
literature is official. The passage is short[29]; and Dr Hawtrey’s
version of it is suffused with a pensive grace which is, perhaps, rather
more Virgilian than Homeric; still it is the one version of any part of
the _Iliad_ which in some degree reproduces for me the original effect
of Homer: it is the best, and it is in hexameters.

This is one of the particular considerations that incline me to prefer
the hexameter, for translating Homer, to our established metres. There
is another. Most of you, probably, have some knowledge of a poem by Mr
Clough, _The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich_, a long-vacation pastoral, in
hexameters. The general merits of that poem I am not going to discuss:
it is a serio-comic poem, and, therefore, of essentially different
nature from the _Iliad_. Still in two things it is, more than any other
English poem which I can call to mind, like the _Iliad_: in the rapidity
of its movement, and the plainness and directness of its style. The
thought of this poem is often curious and subtle, and that is not
Homeric; the diction is often grotesque, and that is not Homeric. Still
by its rapidity of movement, and plain and direct manner of presenting
the thought however curious in itself, this poem, which, being as I say
a serio-comic poem, has a right to be grotesque, is grotesque _truly_,
not, like Mr Newman’s version of the _Iliad_, _falsely_. Mr Clough’s odd
epithets, ‘The grave man nicknamed Adam’, ‘The hairy Aldrich’, and so
on, grow vitally and appear naturally in their place; while Mr Newman’s
‘dapper-greaved Achaians’, and ‘motley-helmed Hector’, have all the air
of being mechanically elaborated and artificially stuck in. Mr Clough’s
hexameters are excessively, needlessly rough; still owing to the native
rapidity of this measure, and to the directness of style which so well
allies itself with it, his composition produces a sense in the reader
which Homer’s composition also produces, and which Homer’s translator
ought to _re_-produce,—the sense of having, within short limits of time,
a large portion of human life presented to him, instead of a small
portion.

Mr Clough’s hexameters are, as I have just said, too rough and
irregular; and indeed a good model, on any considerable scale, of this
metre, the English translator will nowhere find. He must not follow the
model offered by Mr Longfellow in his pleasing and popular poem of
_Evangeline_; for the merit of the manner and movement of _Evangeline_,
when they are at their best, is to be tenderly elegant; and their fault,
when they are at their worst, is to be lumbering; but Homer’s defect is
not lumberingness, neither is tender elegance his excellence. The
lumbering effect of most English hexameters is caused by their being
much too dactylic[30]; the translator must learn to use spondees freely.
Mr Clough has done this, but he has not sufficiently observed another
rule which the translator cannot follow too strictly; and that is, to
have no lines which will not, as it is familiarly said, _read
themselves_. This is of the last importance for rhythms with which the
ear of the English public is not thoroughly acquainted. Lord Redesdale,
in two papers on the subject of Greek and Roman metres, has some good
remarks on the outrageous disregard of quantity in which English verse,
trusting to its force of accent, is apt to indulge itself. The
predominance of accent in our language is so great, that it would be
pedantic not to avail oneself of it; and Lord Redesdale suggests rules
which might easily be pushed too far. Still, it is undeniable that in
English hexameters we generally force the quantity far too much; we rely
on justification by accent with a security which is excessive. But not
only do we abuse accent by shortening long syllables and lengthening
short ones; we perpetually commit a far worse fault, by requiring the
removal of the accent from its natural place to an unnatural one, in
order to make our line scan. This is a fault, even when our metre is one
which every English reader knows, and when we can see what we want and
can correct the rhythm according to our wish; although it is a fault
which a great master may sometimes commit knowingly to produce a desired
effect, as Milton changes the natural accent on the word _Tiresias_ in
the line:

                  And Tíresias and Phineus, prophets old;

and then it ceases to be a fault, and becomes a beauty. But it is a real
fault, when Chapman has:

        By him the golden-throned Queen slept, the Queen of Deities;

for in this line, to make it scan, you have to take away the accent from
the word _Queen_, on which it naturally falls, and to place it on
_throned_, which would naturally be unaccented; and yet, after all, you
get no peculiar effect or beauty of cadence to reward you. It is a real
fault, when Mr Newman has:

            Infatuate! O that thou wert lord to some other army—

for here again the reader is required, not for any special advantage to
himself, but simply to save Mr Newman trouble, to place the accent on
the insignificant word _wert_, where it has no business whatever. But it
is still a greater fault, when Spenser has (to take a striking
instance):

          Wot ye why his mother with a veil hath covered his face?

for a hexameter; because here not only is the reader causelessly
required to make havoc with the natural accentuation of the line in
order to get it to run as a hexameter; but also he, in nine cases out of
ten, will be utterly at a loss how to perform the process required, and
the line will remain a mere monster for him. I repeat, it is advisable
to construct _all_ verses so that by reading them naturally—that is,
according to the sense and legitimate accent,—the reader gets the right
rhythm; but, for English hexameters, that they be so constructed is
indispensable.

If the hexameter best helps the translator to the Homeric rapidity, what
style may best help him to the Homeric plainness and directness? It is
the merit of a metre appropriate to your subject, that it in some degree
suggests and carries with itself a style appropriate to the subject; the
elaborate and self-retarding style, which comes so naturally when your
metre is the Miltonic blank verse, does not come naturally with the
hexameter; is, indeed, alien to it. On the other hand, the hexameter has
a natural dignity which repels both the jaunty style and the jog-trot
style, to both of which the ballad-measure so easily lends itself. These
are great advantages; and, perhaps, it is nearly enough to say to the
translator who uses the hexameter that he cannot too religiously follow,
in style, the inspiration of his metre. He will find that a loose and
idiomatic grammar—a grammar which follows the essential rather than the
formal logic of the thought—allies itself excellently with the
hexameter; and that, while this sort of grammar ensures plainness and
naturalness, it by no means comes short in nobleness. It is difficult to
pronounce, certainly, what is idiomatic in the ancient literature of a
language which, though still spoken, has long since entirely adopted, as
modern Greek has adopted, modern idioms. Still one may, I think, clearly
perceive that Homer’s grammatical style is idiomatic,—that it may even
be called, not improperly, a loose grammatical style[31]. Examples,
however, of what I mean by a loose grammatical style, will be of more
use to the translator if taken from English poetry than if taken from
Homer. I call it, then, a loose and idiomatic grammar which Shakspeare
uses in the last line of the following three:

                              He’s here in double trust:
                First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
                _Strong both against the deed_;

or in this:—

                            Wit, _whither wilt_?

What Shakspeare means is perfectly clear, clearer, probably, than if he
had said it in a more formal and regular manner; but his grammar is
loose and idiomatic, because he leaves out the subject of the verb
‘wilt’ in the second passage quoted, and because, in the first, a
prodigious addition to the sentence has to be, as we used to say in our
old Latin grammar days, _understood_, before the word ‘both’ can be
properly parsed. So, again, Chapman’s grammar is loose and idiomatic
where he says,

     Even share hath he that keeps his tent, and _he to field_ doth go,

because he leaves out, in the second clause, the relative which in
formal writing would be required. But Chapman here does not lose dignity
by this idiomatic way of expressing himself, any more than Shakspeare
loses it by neglecting to confer on ‘both’ the blessings of a regular
government: neither loses dignity, but each gives that impression of a
plain, direct, and natural mode of speaking, which Homer, too, gives,
and which it is so important, as I say, that Homer’s translator should
succeed in giving. Cowper calls blank verse ‘a style further removed
than rhyme from the vernacular idiom, both in the language itself and in
the arrangement of it’; and just in proportion as blank verse is removed
from the vernacular idiom, from that idiomatic style which is of all
styles the plainest and most natural, blank verse is unsuited to render
Homer.

Shakspeare is not only idiomatic in his grammar or style, he is also
idiomatic in his words or diction; and here too, his example is valuable
for the translator of Homer. The translator must not, indeed, allow
himself all the liberty that Shakspeare allows himself; for Shakspeare
sometimes uses expressions which pass perfectly well as he uses them,
because Shakspeare thinks so fast and so powerfully, that in reading him
we are borne over single words as by a mighty current; but, if our mind
were less excited,—and who may rely on exciting our mind like
Shakspeare?—they would check us. ‘To grunt and sweat under a weary
load’;—that does perfectly well where it comes in Shakspeare; but if the
translator of Homer, who will hardly have wound our minds up to the
pitch at which these words of Hamlet find them, were to employ, when he
has to speak of one of Homer’s heroes under the load of calamity, this
figure of ‘grunting’ and ‘sweating’ we should say, _He Newmanises_, and
his diction would offend us. For he is to be noble; and no plea of
wishing to be plain and natural can get him excused from being this:
only, as he is to be also, like Homer, perfectly simple and free from
artificiality, and as the use of idiomatic expressions undoubtedly gives
this effect[32], he should be as idiomatic as he can be without ceasing
to be noble. Therefore the idiomatic language of Shakspeare—such
language as, ‘prate of his _whereabout_’; ‘_jump_ the life to come’;
‘the damnation of his _taking-off_’; ‘his _quietus make_ with a bare
_bodkin_’—should be carefully observed by the translator of Homer,
although in every case he will have to decide for himself whether the
use, by him, of Shakspeare’s liberty, will or will not clash with his
indispensable duty of nobleness. He will find one English book and one
only, where, as in the _Iliad_ itself, perfect plainness of speech is
allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible. No one could
see this more clearly than Pope saw it: ‘This pure and noble
simplicity’, he says, ‘is nowhere in such perfection as in the Scripture
and Homer’: yet even with Pope a woman is a ‘fair’, a father is a ‘sire’
and an old man a ‘reverend sage’, and so on through all the phrases of
that pseudo-Augustan, and most unbiblical, vocabulary. The Bible,
however, is undoubtedly the grand mine of diction for the translator of
Homer; and, if he knows how to discriminate truly between what will suit
him and what will not, the Bible may afford him also invaluable lessons
of style.

I said that Homer, besides being plain in style and diction, was plain
in the quality of his thought. It is possible that a thought may be
expressed with idiomatic plainness, and yet not be in itself a plain
thought. For example, in Mr Clough’s poem, already mentioned, the style
and diction is almost always idiomatic and plain, but the thought itself
is often of a quality which is not plain; it is _curious_. But the grand
instance of the union of idiomatic expression with curious or difficult
thought is in Shakspeare’s poetry. Such, indeed, is the force and power
of Shakspeare’s idiomatic expression, that it gives an effect of
clearness and vividness even to a thought which is imperfect and
incoherent; for instance, when Hamlet says,

                  To take arms against a sea of troubles,

the figure there is undoubtedly most faulty, it by no means runs on four
legs; but the thing is said so freely and idiomatically, that it passes.
This, however, is not a point to which I now want to call your
attention; I want you to remark, in Shakspeare and others, only that
which we may directly apply to Homer. I say, then, that in Shakspeare
the thought is often, while most idiomatically uttered, nay, while good
and sound in itself, yet of a quality which is curious and difficult;
and that this quality of thought is something entirely un-Homeric. For
example, when Lady Macbeth says:

                     Memory, the warder of the brain,
                 Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
                 A limbeck only,

this figure is a perfectly sound and correct figure, no doubt; Mr Knight
even calls it a ‘happy’ figure; but it is a _difficult_ figure: Homer
would not have used it. Again, when Lady Macbeth says,

               When you durst do it, then you were a man;
               And, to be more than what you were, you would
               Be so much more the man,

the thought in the two last of these lines is, when you seize it, a
perfectly clear thought, and a fine thought; but it is a _curious_
thought: Homer would not have used it. These are favourable instances of
the union of plain style and words with a thought not plain in quality;
but take stronger instances of this union,—let the thought be not only
not plain in quality, but highly fanciful: and you have the Elizabethan
conceits; you have, in spite of idiomatic style and idiomatic diction,
everything which is most un-Homeric; you have such atrocities as this of
Chapman:

                         Fate shall fail to vent her gall
                   Till mine vent thousands.

I say, the poets of a nation which has produced such conceit as that,
must purify themselves seven times in the fire before they can hope to
render Homer. They must expel their nature with a fork, and keep crying
to one another night and day: ‘Homer not only moves rapidly, not only
speaks idiomatically; he is, also, _free from fancifulness_’.

So essentially characteristic of Homer is his plainness and naturalness
of thought, that to the preservation of this in his own version the
translator must without scruple sacrifice, where it is necessary, verbal
fidelity to his original, rather than run any risk of producing, by
literalness, an odd and unnatural effect. The double epithets so
constantly occurring in Homer must be dealt with according to this rule;
these epithets come quite naturally in Homer’s poetry; in English poetry
they, in nine cases out of ten, come, when literally rendered, quite
unnaturally. I will not now discuss why this is so, I assume it as an
indisputable fact that it is so; that Homer’s μερόπων ἀνθρώπων comes to
the reader as something perfectly natural, while Mr Newman’s
‘voice-dividing mortals’ comes to him as something perfectly unnatural.
Well then, as it is Homer’s general effect which we are to reproduce, it
is to be false to Homer to be so verbally faithful to him as that we
lose this effect: and by the English translator Homer’s double epithets
must be, in many places, renounced altogether; in all places where they
are rendered, rendered by equivalents which come naturally. Instead of
rendering θέτι τανύπεπλε by Mr Newman’s ‘Thetis trailing-robed’, which
brings to one’s mind long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement, the
translator must render the Greek by English words which come as
naturally to us as Milton’s words when he says, ‘Let gorgeous Tragedy
With sceptred pall come sweeping by’. Instead of rendering μώνυχας
ἵππους by Chapman’s ‘one-hoofed steeds’, or Mr Newman’s ‘single-hoofed
horses’, he must speak of horses in a way which surprises us as little
as Shakspeare surprises when he says, ‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed
steeds’. Instead of rendering μελιηδέα θυμόν by ‘life as honey
pleasant’, he must characterise life with the simple pathos of Gray’s
‘warm precincts of the cheerful day’. Instead of converting ποῖόν σε
ἔπoς φύγεν ἔρκος ὀδόντων; into the portentous remonstrance, ‘Betwixt the
outwork of thy teeth what word hath split’? he must remonstrate in
English as straightforward as this of St Peter, ‘Be it far from thee,
Lord: this shall not be unto thee’; or as this of the disciples, ‘What
is this that he saith, a little while? we cannot tell what he saith’.
Homer’s Greek, in each of the places quoted, reads as naturally as any
of those English passages: the expression no more calls away the
attention from the sense in the Greek than in the English. But when, in
order to render literally in English one of Homer’s double epithets, a
strange unfamiliar adjective is invented,—such as ‘voice-dividing’ for
μέρψς,—an improper share of the reader’s attention is necessarily
diverted to this ancillary word, to this word which Homer never intended
should receive so much notice; and a total effect quite different from