Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES ON TRANSLATING HOMER ON TRANSLATING HOMER BY MATTHEW ARNOLD POPULAR EDITION LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1896 [All rights reserved} College Library . . . Nunquanme reponam ? I. 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 impor- tant 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 10925C 1 2 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 in 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 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 3 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 faithful- ness 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 1 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 rquoduced 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, B 2 4 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 English- man 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 judg- ment 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 Cam- bridge, or Professor Jowett here in Oxford, at all the same ON TRANSLATING HOMER 5 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. 'fis av 6 </)oVi/*os optWev, 'as the judicious would determine,' that is a test to which every one professes himself willing to submit his works. Unhappily, in most cases, no two persons agree as to who ' the judicious ' arc. 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 ap- proaches 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 Achillcis 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 learn- ing, 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 con- structing 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 d/ Great Hector of the motley helm thus spake to her responsive. But thus responsive ly to him spake god-like Alexander. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 7 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. New- man's fidelity to his own theory, such a theory seems to me both dangerous for a translator and false in itself. Dan- gerous 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 decisive- ness 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 8 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 </>uo-toos, ' 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 : (as <pd.ro ' TOVS 5" ^STJ Kar^x fl> <pv<fioos ola <V AaKfSai'/icivi aS0i, <f>iAj) eV irarpiSi -yai'jj. ' ' 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 1 Iliad, iii. 243. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 9 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 de- fend 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 composi- tion a son ecueil particulier, celui du genre romancsque, c*est Ic 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 <iWoos 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. 1 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:' 1 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. 1 Bricfivechscl i-uischcn Schiller nnd Goctlu, vi. 230. io ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 ; ON TRANSLATING HOMER n and so, too, it may be said of that union of the translator with his original, which alone can produce a good transla- tion, 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 trans- parency,' 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 12 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 /;/ the grace of ease.' Yet he seems to have originally miscon- ceived 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 un- likeness 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 ; ON TRANSLATING HOMER 13 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 in- version, 'a God him contending in the van Slew,' gives this sense ten times stronger. Instead of moving on with- out check, as in reading the original, the reader twice finds 14 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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, s.di'0f, T( not Qiiva-Tov ftavrtufat ; ovSf ri erf xp'h ' ' Xanthus, why prophesies! thou my death to me ? thou needcst not at all :- 1 Iliad, xix. 420. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 15 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 trans- lation of Homer, because 'the exigences 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 in- evitably 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 hack Would keep back age from us, and death, and that \ve 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. 1 6 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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. vfce Ktt> aurbj fi>l irpiarotfft ^LO.XU'I^I]V, 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 move- vvv 5' t/j.iri)s -yap Kypes tyfffTaffiv Qa.va.roio 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 imist go, though not here, and that besides the chance The moment the word chance strikes our ear, we are ir- resistibly 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 1 Iliad, xii. 324. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 17 separation, and this is precisely what Pope does ; but this balanced rhetorical antithesis, though very effective, is <\ n 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 : c 1 8 ON TRANSLATING HOMER Si irtirov, tl nff yap, ir6\ffj.ov irtpl r6vS( (pvydvrt altl 8r; fjL(\\ot/j.fv ayrfpcii T' aOavdrca Tf tfffffcrO', o ST e KSV avrbs (fl irpdroiffi oftre Kt ere (TreAXoi/xi judx'? / e's Kv$iavfipai> ' v.vi> 8' 6/UTnjs yap Krjpes t<f>(ffTa(nv davaroio HVptcu, as OVK ICTTJ (pvyflv Pp6roi>, ouS' vira\vai 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 states- man (I use his own words) "on the most glorious war, and most honourable peace, this nation ever saw." ' 2 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 last 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 fortify- ing in this doctrine. I quote it, lastly, because it shows that the passage is just one of those in translating which 1 These arc the words on which Lord Granvillc ' dwelled with particular emphasis.' 2 Robert Wood, Essay on the Original Genius ami Writings of Hoincr> London, 1775, p. vii. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 19 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 io//,v. A literary and intellectualised language is, however, in 20 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 sim- plest 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 Ras- selas ; but it is equally a literary style, equally unfitted to de- scribe a simple matter with the plain naturalness of Homer. Every one 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 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 21 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 straight- forward 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.' ' In Pope's translation, this plain story becomes the following : So many flames l>efore 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 ; Ixnid 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 1 Iliad, viii. 560. 22 ON TRANSLATING HOMER in the same way ; but in plain narrative, where Homer is still power 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 pene- trate 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 ON TRANSLATING HOZfER 23 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 move- ment 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 exigences 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 Eli/.abethan 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 24 ON TRANSLATING HOMER Chapman's translation has often been praised as eminently Homeric. Keats's fine sonnet in its honour every one 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. Hallam 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 Chap- man's version without recurring to Bentlcy'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 plain- ness and directness of his style ; but the plainness and directness of the contents of his style, of his ideas them- selves, is not less remarkable. But as_eminently as Homer ON TRANSLATING HOMER 25 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 transla- tion, the introductory verses, and the dedications. You will find : An Anagram of the name of our Dread Prince, My most gracious and sacred Maecenas, Henry, Prince of Wales, Our Sunn, Heyr, Peace, Life, 26 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 ex- presses 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 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 27 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 J/iad, 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. 28 ON TRANSLATING HOMER In that tonic speech of Sarpedon, of which I have said so much, Homer, you may remember, has : fl f*V yap, Tt6\t[JLOV TTfpl T&V alfl STJ /j.f\hoi/J.fv a.yf) fffffecrd ', 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 ~vc might not ivrack In this lifers human sea at all : and so on. Again ; in another passage which I have before quoted, where Zeus says to the horses of Peleus, ' O.VO.KTI 0jT)T< ; v/j.f'is 8' tffriif aylipu T' a.6avdru Tt ' Why gave we you to royal Felons, to a mortal ? but yc 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, 1 Iliad, xvii. 443. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 29 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.' 1 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, ll'hosc office is to lead in fight, and give no danger pass Without improvement. In this fire must Het tor'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 : '- fWtrcu ijfap, 3r' 6.v ITOT' oAa-Ap 'lAios j'ptj. Chapman makes this : And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I know, When sacred Troy shall shed her to">vcrs, for tears of ovcrlhrcnv. 1 Iliad, vi. 444. 30 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 trans- lators 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 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 31 of thought : in a second lecture I will show you how a translator fails by wanting nobility. II. I must repeat what I said in beginning, that the trans- lator 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 32 , ON TRANSLATING HOMER verbal literalness his chief care ' will,' says a writer in the National Review whom I have already quoted, ' be appre- ciated 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 cannnot 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 genera/ 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 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 33 example ; if his proper aim were to help schoolboys to construe Homer, he might be right in following Mr. New- man'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 befaitfyu/, 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 exhaus- tive process of argument and experiment ' he has found a metre which is at once the metre of ' the modern Greek epic,' and a metre Mike 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 D 34 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 docs 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 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 35 of the reader for its frequent homeliness.' ' I am con- cerned,' he says again, 'with the artistic problem of attain- ing a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while remain- ing easily intelligible.' And again, he speaks of ' the more antiquated style suited to this subject.' Quaint ! anti- quated ! but to whom ? Sir Thomas Browne is quaint, and the diction of Chaucer is antiquated : does Mr. New- man 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 anti- quated 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 Shak- spearc says, ' The princes orgulous,' meaning ' the proud princes,' we say, ' This is antiquated ; ' when he says of the Trojan gates, that they \Vilh massy staples And corrcsponsivc and fulfilling 1x>lts Spcrr 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 D 2 36 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 Shak- speare 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 Ilomcrus ? 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 any one who knows the passage, that Homer was garrulous, or OX TRANSLATING HOMER 37 anything of the kind. Instead, however, of either discuss- ing 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 mediaeval 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 Cceur de Lion. Of my tale be not a-womlerecl ! 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 ; every one will feel it to be garrulous ; every one 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 mediaeval poet ? I have no fear of the answer. 38 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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. Docs Homer's manner in the Itiad, I ask the scholar, ever make upon him an impression at all like the impression made by Defoe's manner in Aloll 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. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 39 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 in- congruity, and which more gently surprised them, quaint. Using the two words in this manner, I say, that when Mr. 40 ON TRANSLATING HOMER Newman translates Helen's words to Hector in the sixth book, Attfp ffj.(7ll, KlH'bs KaKOjUTJXayul/, OKpUOfVoTJ?,' - 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, TV 8' T)/ueij8<T' ciretra /Atyas Kopv0a.io\o "E/craip, Great Hector of the motley helm then spake to her responsive, or the common expression tv/cv^/uSes 'A\aioi, ' 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 KVI-OS Ka/co/x^avov, or Kopv6aioXo<; "EKray), or, ivKn'/fti&ts 'A^atoi'. These expressions no more seem odd to him than the simplest expressions in English. lie 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 1 //tad, vi. 344. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 41 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, Aasp ^fJ-f^o, Kwbs KaKourixdvov, oxpvofffaris, - 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-grcaved Achaians' and e'r/ci-j///^*? 'AX<UOI, are also just contrary the one to the other. AYhere, 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 42 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 lusiy 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 ex- pect 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 good qualities, by not being noble enough ; this, while it avoids the faults of being slow and elaborate, falls into a ON TRANSLATING HOMER 43 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 wcrt lord to some other army, ' 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 finalities 1 From the reproachful answer of Ulysses to Agamemnon, who had proposed an abandonment of their expedition. This is one <>( the ' tonic' passages of the Iliad, so I quote it : Ah, unworthy king, some other inglorious army Should'st thou command, not rule over its, whose |>rlion for ever Zeus hath made it, from youth right up to age, to be winding Skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of us jKrish. Iliad, xiv. 84. 44 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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. New- man, 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 Chap- man'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, ON TRANSLATING HOMER 45 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, lllind Thamyris, and blind M.vonides, And Tiresias, and 1'hincus, prophets old, than in, Now Christ thee save, thou proud jx>rkr, Now Christ thee save and see, 1 - - or in, While the tinker did dine, he had plenty of \\inc. '' 1 From the ballad o{ King EslmcrC) in Percy's A'<//.///o <y ,-///,/.;//' English /W/j, i. 69 (edit, of 1767). 2 Kf!fijitfs t i. 241. 46 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 Tales to make the New Version of the Psalms. lean imagine several poets having con- tributed 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 Eli/abethan mannerism, united with Chapman to produce his version uf the Iliad. I can imagine several poets, with the literary knack of the twelfth century, united to produce the Nibelungen ON TRANSLATING HOMER 47 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 composi- tion 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, indul- gent 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 48 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 weaknesses into broad relief. This is a con- venience ; 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 notlruc. 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 ///appropriate to render Homer. Homer's manner and movement are always both noble and powerful : the ballad-manner and move- ment are often either jaunty and smart, so not noble ; or jog-trot and humdrum, so not powerful. The Nibclungcn 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 Nibclungcn Lay, though it is in- teresting, and though it has good passages, is itself anything rather than a grand poem. It is a poem of which the com- poser 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 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 49 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 Chap- man'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 gen- erally good ; but it must be called good with this reserve, that, though it has Homer's plainness and directness, it often ofTends him who knows Homer, by wanting Homer's noble- ness. In a passage which I have already quoted, the address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles, where Homer has StiAci), TI (Ti/xI'i 5<I,u(i' Tl7)Af)i tfraKTt tytt?f 5' iariv ay>)j)u> T' aOavdrw T* / ij tva. StxTT^yoKTi /ACT' CLvSpdaiv &\yt' l\rfrov ; ' Chapman has Poor wretthed foasff, said lie, \Vliy gave we you to a mortal king, when immortality ///</</, xvii. 443. 50 ON TRANSLATING HOMER And incapacity of age so dignifies your states ? Was it to haste ' 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 a 8tXw. 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. *A SctAw 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 ob- jection to it for the ballad-manner; it is good enough for the old English ballad, good enough for the Nibelitngcn Lay, good enough for Chapman's Iliad, good enough for Mr. Newman's Iliad, good enough for Dr. Maginn's Homeric Jlallads ; 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 1 All the editions which I have seen have ' haste,' but the right reading must certainly be 'taste.' ON TRANSLATING HOMER 51 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. 1 Achilles, far in rage, Thus answered him : It fits not thec 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 move- ment, who, after being jolted by Chapman through such verse as this, These words said, he fell to horrid deeds, (lave dreadful signal, and forthright made fly his one-hoofed steeds, - who docs not feel the vital difference of the movement of Homer, r} fia, Kal Iv irpaiTois \a.\<av \\t iui>vv\a.^ lirtr, us ? 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 pinchbeck 1 ///a</, xix. 419. E 2 52 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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." 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 Al>ovc 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, 1 Odyssey, xix. 392. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 53 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, vif 8* &p' afftrov loi/tro &vaxO' tov ainina 5' tyvw OVATJI', without having the detestable 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 tolls 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 car unto my story. A recent American writer 1 gravely observes that for his 1 Mr. Marsh, in his Lectures on the English Language, New York, 1860, p. 520. 54 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 forever be from Eld and Death exempted As heavenly gods, not I in sooth would fight among the foremost, Nor liefiy 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 some one. 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 . ON TRANSLATING HOMER 55 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 el i*.tv yap, than Mr. Newman's lines. And now, why are Mr. New- man'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 move- ment as unlike Homer's movement in the corresponding line as the single words arc unlike Homer's words. OiW KC o-f oWAAoi/xi iifi\rjv 5 KvSuivfipav,' Nor lie fly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle;' for whose ears do those two rhythms produce impressions of, to use Mr. New- man'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, 56 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 also, 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 com- paratively 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 (.v vi> TOI otSa KUI UUTOS, o p.ui /xopos V#u8' oXr0ui of Homer. But so deeply seated is the difference between the ON TRANSLATING HOMER 57 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 Coryphrcus 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 \t 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 Afarmion? ' 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. 58 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, ' 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 ; Mannion, canto vi. 38. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 59 Edmund is down, my life is reft, The Admiral alone is left. Let Stanley charge with spur of fire, \Vith Chester charge, and Lancashire, Full upon Scotland's central host, Or victory and England's lost. ' 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 Homers 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 sacctide, 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 1 Marmion, canto vi. 29. 60 ON TRANSLATING HOMER style, and to put them side by side with this of Scott. For example, when Homer says : a\\d, tf)i\os, Qave Kal ffv TIT; o\v^)vpfat OVTWS ; K&r9ave Kal TldrpOK\os, '6irfp ere'o TroAA&y o/ieii/aii', 1 that is in the grand style. When Virgil says : Disco, pucr, virtutcm ex me verumquc laborem, Fortunam ex aliis, 2 that is in the grand style. When Dante says : Lascio lo fele, et vo pei dolci pomi Proniessi a me per lo verace Duca ; Ma fino al centre pria convien ch' io tomi, * 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, 1 that, finally, is in the grand style. Now let any one after repeating to himself these four passages, repeat again the 1 'Be content, good friend, die also thou ! why lamcntest thou thyself on this wise? 1'atroclus, too, died, who was a far better than thou.' Iliad, xxi. 106. 4 ' From me, young man, learn nobleness of soul and true effort : learn success from others.' slLncid, xii. 435. 3 ' I leave the gall of bitterness, and I go for the apples of sweet- ness promised unto me by my faithful Guide ; but far as the centre it behoves me first lo fall.' Hell, xvi. 61. 4 Paradise Lost, \. 591. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 61 passage of Scott, and he will perceive that there is some- thing 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 ; hut, 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' 1 } 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 difler- 62 ON TRANSLATING HOMER ence which there is between an able work and a master- piece. 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 arc 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 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 63 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 pro- position, 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 reproduce. 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 64 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 any one 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, arc not a peculiar failing of Mr. Newman's own ; in varying degrees they arc the great defect ON TRANSLATING HOMER 65 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 reac- tion 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 66 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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. III. 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 fan- tastic 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, Cowpcr's diction is ON TRANSLATING HOMER 67 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 ignoblcness of his manner that he contrasts with Homer the most violently. Therefore the translator must not say to himself : 'Cowpcr 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 digni- fied 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 F 2 68 ON TRANSLATING HOMER a lower merit ; but even in these points they have none of them precisely the same kind of merit as Homer, and there- fore 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. // is (he 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 docs not render the movement of Homer. To render this the translator must have, besides his natural qualifications, an appropriate metre. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 69 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 every one, 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, pro- nounces this stan/a 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 1'ope. Vet 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 tliis 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 li^ht from far To all that in the wide deep wandering are. 1 1 The Faery Queen, Canto ii. stanza I. 70 ON TRANSLATING HOMER One cannot but feel that English verse has not often moved with the fluidity and sweet ease of these lines. It is possi- ble 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 endow- ment richer probably than even Spenser ; that light which shines so unexpected 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 I Tomer's poetry, the translator has to make his choice. Every one will at once remember a thousand passages in which both the ten-syllable couplet and blank verse prove ON TRANSLATING HOMER 71 themselves to have nobleness. Undoubtedly the movement and manner of this, Still raise fur 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. Gary in translating Dante, by Cowper, and by Mr. Wright in translating Homer. How noble this 72 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 pos- sesses 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 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 73 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, 74 ON TRANSLATING HOMER ueiSe, 0eu, 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 ; ON TRANSLATING HOMER 75 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 /Kneas, where the rich Tullus and Ancus are, pul-vis ct umbra sumtts. n He never actually says ivhcre we go to ; he only indicates it by saying that it is that place where .Kneas, Tullus, and Ancus are. But Homer, when he has to speak of going down to the grave, says, definitely, es 'HAvonov TreSiov - aOdvaroi Tre'/zi/'omru', 2 '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 : u6i nvOi><: 'PaSa/MU'fli's-' Where the yellow-haired Rhadamanthus is.' Again; Horace, having to say that punishment sooner or later overtakes crime, says it thus : K;m> antecedcntcm scclcstum Dfscruit i>c<lc I'cuna claudu. 3 The thought itself of these lines is familiar enough to Homer and Ilesiod; but neither Homer nor llesiod, in expressing it, could possibly have so complicated its ex- pression as Horace complicates it, and purposely com- plicates it, by his use of the word descruit. I say that this complicated evolution of the thought necessarily complicates 1 OJcs, IV. vii. 13. 2 O.tytsey iv. 563. J OJ.-s, III. ii. 31. 76 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 fur ever, as we ga/e. 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. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 77 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 linos with mono- syllables. 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 trans- lator who determines to use it, must not conceal from him- self 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 Cowpcr's Miltonic verse it cannot be the real Homer that will issue ; still, the chances of disappointment arc great. The result of such an attempt to renovate the old poet may be an .'Kson ; 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 78 ON TRANSLATING HOMER not yet expressly named, the hexameter. I know all that is said against the use of hexameters in English poetry ; but it conies only to this, that, among us, they have not yet been used on any considerable scale with success. Solvifur 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 con- vinced English poetry, as our mental wants multiply, will not always be content to forego. 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 arc also one or two particular considerations which confirm me in ON TRANSLATING HOMER 79 the opinion that for translating Homer into English verse the hexameter should be used. The most successful at- tempt 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 Jowctt, whose connection with Greek literature is official. The passage is short ; ' and Dr. Hawtrcy's version of it is suffused with a pensive grace which is, perhaps, rather more Virgilian than Homeric ; still it is the one 1 So short, that I quote it entire : - Clearly the rest I behold of the dark -eyed sons of Achaia ; Known to me well are the faces of all ; their names I rememl>er ; Two, two only remain, whom I sec not among the commanders, Castor fleet in the car, Polydeukes brave with the cestus, Own dear brethren of mine, -one parent loved us as infants. Are they not here in the host, from the shores of loved Ixaced.vmon, Or, though they came with the rest in ships that Ixnind through the waters, Dare they not enter the fight or stand in the council of Heroes, 8o version of any part of the Iliad which in some degree re- produces 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, All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened ? So said she ; -they long since in Earth's soft arms were reposing, There, in their own clear land, their Fatherland, Lacedremon. English Hexameter Translations; London, 1847; p. 242. I have changed Dr. Ilawtrey's ' Kastor,' ' Lakcdaimon,' back to the familiar ' Castor,' ' Lacedrcmon,' in obedience to my own rule that everything odd is to be avoided in rendering Homer, the most natural and least odd of poets. I see Mr. Newman's critic in the National Review urges our generation to bear with the unnatural effect of these rewritten Greek names, in the hope that by this means the effect of them may have to the next generation become natural. For my part, I feel no disposition to pass all my own life in the wilderness of pedantry, in order that a posterity which I shall never see may one day enter an orthographical Canaan ; and, after all, the real question is this : whether our living apprehension of the Greek world is more checked by meeting in an English book about the Greeks, names not spelt letter for letter as in the original Greek, or by meeting names which make us rub our eyes and call out, ' How exceedingly odd !' The Latin names of the Greek deities raise in most cases the idea of quite distinct personages from the personages whose idea is raised by the Greek names. Hera and Juno are actually, to every scholar's imagination, two different people. So in all these cases the Latin names must, at any inconvenience, be abandoned when we arc dealing with the Greek world. 1'ut I think it can be in the sensitive imagina- tion of Mr. Grote only, that ' Thuoydidcs ' raises the idea of a different man from ON TRANSLATING HOMER 81 probably, have some knowledge of a poem by Mr. dough, 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 pcem, 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 in 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. (Hough'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-greavcd Achaians,' and 'motley-helmed Hector,' have all the air of being mechanically elaborated and artificially stuck in. Mr. dough'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 com- position produces a sense in the reader which Homer's com- position also produces, and which Homer's translator ought G 82 to reproduce, 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 con- siderable scale, of this metre, the English translator will no- where 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 JLvangeline, 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 ;' the translator must learn to use spondees freely. Mr. Clough has done this, but he has not sufficiently ob- served another rule which the translator cannot follow too strictly ; and that is, to have no lines which will not, as it is familiarly said, rend themselves. This is of the last impor- tance for rhythms with which the ear of the English public 1 For instance ; in a version (I believe, by the late Mr. I.ockhart) of Homer's description of the parting of Hector and Andromache, there occurs, in the first five lines, but one spondee besides the necessary spondees in the sixth place ; in the corresponding five lines of Homer there occur ten. See Knglhh Hexameter Translations, 244. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 83 is not thoroughly acquainted. Lord Redcsdalc, 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 one's self 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 he 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 Tircsins in the line : And Tiresins and I'hineus, 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 Deitie> : c; 2 84 ON TRANSLATING HOMER foi 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 wcrt, 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 cause- lessly 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 nil verses so that by reading them naturally that is, accord- ing to the sense and legitimate accent, the reader gets the right rhythm ; but, for English hexameters, that they be so constructed is indispensable. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 85 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 appro- priate 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 86 ON TRANSLATING HOMER style. 1 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 Shak- speare 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 unit ? ' What Shakspcare 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, -- 1 Sec, for inslancc, in the Iliad, the loose construction of Zarrf, xvii. 658; that of ftoiro, xvii. 681 ; that of o'lrf, xviii. 209; and the elliptical construction at xix. 42, 43; also the idiomatic construction of iyuiv 85f irapairx"'', xix. 140. These instances are all taken within a ranye of a thousand lines ; any one may easily multiply them for himself. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 87 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 Shakspearc 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 88 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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, 1 he should be as idiomatic as he can be without ceas- ing 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 iaking-off ; ' ' his quietus make with a bare bodkin ' should be carefully observed by the translator of Homer, although in every case 1 Our knowledge of Homer's Greek is hardly such as to enable us to pronounce cjuite confidently what is idiomatic in his diction, and what is not, any more than in his grammar ; but I seem to mysel clearly to recognise an idiomatic stamp in such expressions as ro\virtv(iv -ito\(/j.i)vs, xiv. 86 ; <j>dos tv v^iairiv Ofyjs, xvi. 94 ; riv' titu) aairaalta^ avriav y/'v Ka/xiff"', xix. 71 ; K\OTOTrtvtiv, xix. 149 ; and many others. The first-quoted expression, Tn\virtwiv 6.pyct\tovt iro\t/j.ov<;, seems to me to have just about the same degree of freedom as the ' /rt//> the life to come,' or the ' shuffle off \\\\* mortal coil,' of Shakspeare. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 89 he will have to decide for himself whether the use, by him, of Shakspcarc'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 cleaily 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. dough'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 90 ON TRANSLATING HOMER poetry. Such, indeed, is the force and power of Shak- speare'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 lie so much more the man, ON TRANSLATING HOMER 91 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 con- ceit 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 fiincifuhiess? 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 sacri- fice, 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 92 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 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 //.epoTrtov ur^poWwv comes to the reader as something perfectly natural, while Mr. Newman's ' voice- dividing mortals ' comes to him as something perfectly un- natural. 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 en TavvvcTrXe by Mr. Newman's 'Thetis trailing-robed,' which brings to one's mind long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement, the trans- lator 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 //oii'i^u? ITTTTOUS 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 fjLfXirjSca Ovfiw Ijy ' life as honey pleasant,' he must characterise life with ON TRANSLATING HOMER 93 the simple pathos of Gray's 'warm precincts of the cheerful day.' Instead of converting TTOLOV o-e ITTOS <vyev C/JKOS oSon-wv ; 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 /At'poi/^, 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 Homer's is thus produced. Therefore Mr. Newman, though he docs not purposely import, like Chapman, con- ceits of his own into the Iliad, does actually import them ; for the result of his singular diction is to raise ideas, and odd ideas, not raised by the corresponding diction in Homer; and Chapman himself does no more. Cowpcr says : ' I have cautiously avoided all terms of new invention, with an abundance of which persons of more ingenuity than 94 ON TRANSLATING HOMER judgment have not enriched our language but encumbered it ; ' and this criticism so exactly hits the diction of Mr. Newman that one is irresistibly led to imagine his present appearance in the flesh to be at least his second. A translator cannot well have a Homeric rapidity, style, diction, and quality of thought, without at the same time having what is the result of these in Homer, nobleness. Therefore I do not attempt to lay down any rules for obtaining this effect of nobleness, the effect, too, of all others the most impalpable, the most irreducible to rule, and which most depends on the individual personality of the artist. So I proceed at once to give you, in conclusion, one or two passages in which I have tried to follow those principles of Homeric translation which I have laid down. I give them, it must be remembered, not as specimens of perfect translation, but as specimens of an attempt to translate Homer on certain principles ; specimens which may very aptly illustrate those principles by falling short as well as by succeeding. I take first a passage of which I have already spoken, the comparison of the Trojan fires to the stars. The first part of that passage is, I have said, of splendid beauty ; and to begin with a lame version of that would be the height of imprudence in me. It is the last and more level part with which I shall concern myself. I have already ON TRANSLATING HOMER 95 quoted Cowper's version of this part in order to show you how unlike his stiff and Miltonic manner of telling a plain story is to Homer's easy and rapid manner : So numerous seemed those fires the bank between Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece, In prospect all of Troy I need not continue to the end. I have also quoted Pope's version of it, to show you how unlike his ornate and artificial manner is to Homer's plain and natural manner : So many flames before proud Ilion bla/.e, And brighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays ; The long reflections of the distant tires (ileam on the walls, and tremble on the spires, - and much more of the same kind. I want to show you that it is possible, in a plain passage of this sort, to keep Homer's simplicity without being heavy and dull ; and to keep his dignity without bringing in pomp and ornament. 'As numerous as are the stars on a clear night,' says Homer, So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus, Between that and the ships, the Trujan.-,' numerous fires. In the plain there were kindled a thousand tires : by each one There sat fifty men, in the ruddy light of the fire : Ky their chariots stood the steeds, and champed the while liarley \Yhile their masters sat by the tire, and waited for Morning. 96 ON TRANSLATING HOMER Here, in order to keep Homer's effect of perfect plainness and directness, I repeat the word ' fires ' as he repeats irvpd. without scruple ; although in a more elaborate and literary style of poetry this recurrence of the same word would be a fault to be avoided. I omit the epithet of Morning, and whereas Homer says that the steeds ' waited for Morning,' I prefer to attribute this expectation of Morning to the master and not to the horse. Very likely in this particular, as in any other single particular, I may be wrong : what I wish you to remark is my endeavour after absolute plain- ness of speech, my care to avoid anything which may the least check or surprise the reader, whom Homer does not check or surprise. Homer's lively personal familiarity with war, and with the war-horse as his master's companion, is such that, as it seems to me, his attributing to the one the other's feelings comes to us quite naturally ; but, from a poet without this familiarity, the attribution strikes as a little unnatural ; and therefore, as everything the least un- natural is un-Homeric, I avoid it. Again, in the address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles, Cowper has : |ove saw their grief with pity, and his brows Shaking, within himself thus, pensive, said. ' Ah hapless pair ! wherefore by gift divine Were ye to Peleus given, a mortal king, Yourselves immortal and from age exempt ? ' ON TRANSLATING HOMER 97 There is no want of dignity here, as in the versions of Chapman and Mr. Newman, which I have already quoted : but the whole effect is much too slow. Take Pope : Nor Jove disdained to cast a pitying look While thus relenting to the steeds he spoke. ' Unhappy coursers of immortal strain ! Exempt from age and deathless now in vain ; Did we your race on mortal man bestow Only, alas ! to share in mortal woe ? ' Here there is no want either of dignity or rapidity, hut all is too artificial. 'Nor Jove disdained,' for instance, is a very artificial and literary way of rendering Homer's words and so is, 'coursers of immortal strain.' Mupo^fV&j 5' &pa r<a yt IKiar, f\('ijfff Kfoviwt'. And with pity the son of Saturn saw them licwailing, And he shook his head, and thus addressed his own bosom ; 1 Ah, unhappy pair, to Pelcus why did we give you, To a mortal ? but ye are without old a^e and immortal. Was it that ye, with man, might have yuur thousands of sorrows ? For than man, indeed, there breathes no wretcheder creature, Of all living things, that on earth arc breathing and moving.' Here I will observe that the use of ' own,' in the second line, for the last syllabic of a dactyl, and the use of 'To a,' in the fourth, for a complete spondee, though they do not, I think, actually spoil the run of the hexameter, arc yet undoubtedly instances of that over-reliance on accent, and H 9 8 too free disregard of quantity, which Lord Redesdale visits with just reprehension. 1 I now take two longer passages in order to try my method more fully ; but I still keep to passages which have already come under our notice. I quoted Chapman's version of some passages in the speech of Hector at his parting with Andromache. One astounding conceit will probably still be in your remembrance, When sacred Troy shall shed her tcnv'rs for tears of overthrow, 1 It must be remembered, however, that, if we disregard quantity too much in constructing English hexameters, we also disregard accent too much in reading Greek hexameters. We read every Greek dactyl so as to make a pure dactyl of it ; but, to a Greek, the accent must have hindered many dactyls from sounding as pure dactyls. When we read aid \ o s 'liriros, for instance, or alyt6 x oio, the dactyl in each of these cases is made by us as pure a dactyl as ' Tityrc,' or ' dignity ; ' but to a Greek it was not so. To him al6\os must have been nearly as impure a dactyl as ' death-destined ' is to us ; and alyi6x nearly as impure as the ' dressed his own ' of my text. Nor, I think, does this right mode of pronouncing the two words at all spoil the run of the line as a hexameter. The effect of al6\\os IWTTOS (or something like that), though not our effect, is not a disagreeable one. On the other hand, Kopv6at6\os as a paroxylonon, although it has the respectable authority of Liddell and Scott's Lexicon (following Ileyne), is certainly wrong ; for then the word cannot be pronounced without throwing an accent on the first syllable as well as the third, and ptyas nop'pvOai6\\os"EKT<ap would have been to a Greek as intolerable an ending for a hexameter line as 'accurst orphanhood-destined houses' would be to us. The best authorities, accordingly, accent KopvOato\os as a proparoxytonon. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 99 as a translation of oV S.v TTOT' oXoiXjj ''IXtos Iprj. I will quote a few lines which may give you, also, the key-note to the Anglo-Augustan manner of rendering this passage and to the Miltonic manner of rendering it. What Mr. Newman's manner of rendering it would be, you can by this time sufficiently imagine for yourselves. Mr. Wright, to quote for once from his meritorious version instead of Cowper's, whose strong and weak points are those of Mr. Wright also, Mr. Wright begins his version of this passage thus : All these thy anxious cares are also mine, Partner beloved ; but how could I endure The scorn of Trojans and their long-robed wives, Should they behold their I lector shrink from war, And act the coward's part ? Nor doth my soul Prompt the base thought. Ex pcde Henulcm: you see just what the manner is. Mr. Sotheby, on the other hand (to take a disciple of Pope instead of Pope himself), begins thus : ' What moves thee, moves my mind,' brave Hector said, ' Yet Troy's upbraiding scorn I deeply dread, If, like a slave, where chiefs with chiefs engage, The warrior Hector fears the war to wage. Not thus my heart inclines.' From that specimen, too, you can easily divine what, with such a manner, will become of the whole passage. But Homer has neither What moves thce, moves my mind, II 2 ioo ON TRANSLATING HOMER nor has he All these thy anxious cares are also mine. T H Kal fftol raSe iravTo. /j.t\fi, yvvai a\\a fj.d\' alvus,. that is what Homer has, that is his style and movement, if one could but catch it. Andromache, as you know, has been entreating Hector to defend Troy from within the walls, instead of exposing his life, and, with his own life, the safety of all those dearest to him, by fighting in the open plain. Hector replies : Woman, I too take thought for this ; but then I bethink me What the Trojan men and Trojan women might murmur, If like a coward I skulked behind, apart from the battle. Nor would my own heart let me ; my heart, which has bid me be valiant Always, and always fighting among the first of the Trojans, Busy for Priam's fame and my own, in spite of the future. For that day will come, my soul is assured of its coming, It will come, when sacred Troy shall go to destruction, Troy, and warlike Priam too, and the people of Priam. And yet not that grief, which then will be, of the Trojans, Moves me so much not Hecuba's grief, nor Priam my father's, Nor my brethren's, many and brave, who then will be lying In the bloody dust, beneath the feet of their focmen As thy grief, when, in tears, some brazen-coaled Achaian Shall transport thee away, and the day of thy freedom be ended. Then, perhaps, thou shall work at the loom of another, in Argos, Or Ix-ar pails to the well of Messeis, or Hypereia, Sorely against thy will, by strong Necessity's order. And some man may say, as he looks and sees thy tears falling : Sec, (he wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent cajtain Oj the horsemen of Troy, in the day they fought for their city. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 101 So some man will say ; and then tliy grief will redouble At thy want of a man like me, to save thee from bondage. But let me be dead, and the earth be mounded above me, Ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity told of. The main question, whether or no this version reproduces for him the movement and general effect of Homer better than other versions ' of the same passage, I leave for the judgment of the scholar. But the particular points, in which the operation of my own rules is manifested, are as follows. In the second line I leave out the epithet of the Trojan women IXxecrtTren-Xow, altogether. In the sixth line I put in five words ' in spite of the future,' which arc in the original by implication only, and are not there actually expressed. This I do, because Homer, as I have before said, is so remote from one who reads him in English, that the English translator must be even plainer, if possible, and more unambiguous than Homer himself; the connection of meaning must be even more distinctly marked in the trans- lation than in the original. For in the Greek language itself there is something which brings one nearer to Homer, which gives one a clue to his thought, which makes a hint enough ; but in the English language this sense of nearness, this clue, is gone ; hints are insufficient, everything must be stated with full distinctness. In the ninth line Homer's epithet 1 Dr. Hawtrcy also has translated this passage; but here, he has not, I think, been so successful as in his ' Helen on the walls of Troy. ' 102 ON TRANSLATING HOMER for Priam is ev/x/AtXto), ' armed with good ashen spear,' say the dictionaries ; ' ashen-speared,' translates Mr. Newman, following his own rule to 'retain every peculiarity of his original,' I say, on the other hand, that ev/x/AtXt'w has not the effect of a 'peculiarity' in the original, while 'ashen- t speared ' has the effect of a ' peculiarity ' in English ; and ' warlike ' is as marking an equivalent as I dare give for eu/i/AcAiw, for fear of disturbing the balance of expression in Homer's sentence. In the fourteenth line, again, I translate XoA/coxiTwi/wv by 'brazen-coated.' Mr. Newman, meaning to be perfectly literal, translates it by ' brazen-cloaked,' an expression which comes to the reader oddly and unnaturally, while Homer's word comes to him quite naturally ; but I venture to go as near to a literal rendering as ' brazen-coated,' because a ' coat of brass ' is familiar to us all from the Bible, and familiar, too, as distinctly specified in connection with the wearer. Finally, let me further illustrate from the twentieth line the value which I attach, in a question of diction, to the authority of the Bible. The word 'pre- eminent' occurs in that line ; I was a little in doubt whether that was not too bookish an expression to be used in rendering Homer, as I can imagine Mr. Newman to have been a little in doubt whether his ' responsively accosted ' for a/j.tifl<'>fj.evo<; Trpoo-ttfrrj, was not too bookish an expression. Let us both, I say, consult our Bibles : Mr. Newman will ON TRANSLATING HOMER 103 nowhere find it in his Bible that David, for instance, ' re- sponsively accosted Goliath ; ' but I do find in mine that ' the right hand of the Lord hath the pre-eminence ; ' and forth- with I use ' pre-eminent,' without scruple. My Bibliolatry is perhaps excessive ; and no doubt a true poetic feeling is the Homeric translator's best guide in the use of words ; but where this feeling does not exist, or is at fault, I think he cannot do better than take for a mechanical guide Cruden's Concordance. To be sure, here as elsewhere, the consulter must know how to consult, must know how very- slight a variation of word or circumstance makes the difference between an authority in his favour, and an authority which gives him no countenance at all ; for instance, the ' Great simpleton ! ' (for ^y a >' 7 / 7rtos ) of Mr- Newman, and the 'Thou fool ! ' of the Bible, are something alike ; but ' Thou fool ! ' is very grand, and ' Great simple- ton ! ' is an atrocity. So, too, Chapman's ' Poor wretched beasts ' is pitched many degrees too low ; but Shakspeare's 1 Poor venomous fool, Be angry and despatch ! ' is in the grand style. One more piece of translation and I have done. I will take the passage in which both Chapman and Mr. Newman have already so much excited our astonishment, the passage at the end of the nineteenth book of the Iliad, the dialogue 104 between Achilles and his horse Xanthus, after the death of Patroclus. Achilles begins : ' Xanthus and Balius both, ye far-famed seed of Podarga ! See that ye bring your master home to the host of the Argives In some other sort than your last, when the battle is ended ; And not leave him behind, a corpse on the plain, like Patroclus.' Then, from beneath the yoke, the fleet horse Xanthus addressed him : Sudden he bowed his head, and all his mane, as he bowed it, Streamed to the ground by the yoke, escaping from under the collar ; And he was given a voice by the white-armed Goddess Hera. ' Truly, yet this time will we save thee, mighty Achilles ! But thy day of death is at hand ; nor shall we be the reason No, but the will of heaven, and Fate's invincible power. For by no slow pace or want of swiftness of ours Did the Trojans obtain to strip the arms from Patroclus ; But that prince among Gods, the son of the lovely-haired Lcto, Slew him fighting in front of the fray, and glorified Hector. But, for us, we vie in speed with the breath of the West-Wind, Which, men say, is the fleetest of winds ; 't is thou who art fated To lie low in death, by the hand of a God and a Mortal.' Thus far he ; and here his voice was stopped by the Furies. Then, with a troubled heart, the swift Achilles addressed him : 1 Why dost thou prophesy so my death to me, Xanthus ? It needs not. I of myself know well, that here I am destined to perish, Far from my father and mother dear : for all that I will not Stay this hand from fight, till the Trojans are utterly routed.' So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle. Here the only particular remark which I will make is, that in the fourth and eighth line the grammar is what I call a loose and idiomatic grammar. In writing a regular and literary style, one would in the fourth line have to repeat ON TRANSLATING HOMER 105 before ' leave ' the words ' that ye ' from the second line, and to insert the word ' do ; ' and in the eighth line one would not use such an expression as 'he was given a voice.' But I will make one general remark on the character of my own translations, as I have made so many on that of the transla- tions of others. It is, that over the graver passages there is shed an air somewhat too strenuous and severe, by com- parison with that lovely ease and sweetness which Homer, for all his noble and masculine way of thinking, never loses. Here I stop. I have said so much, because I think that the task of translating Homer into English verse both will ba re-attempted, and may be re attempted successfully. There are great works composed of parts so disparate that one translator is not likely to have the requisite gifts for poetically rendering all of them. Such are the works of Shakspeare, and Goethe's Faust ; and these it is best to attempt to render in prose only. People praise Tieck and Schlegel's version of Shakspeare : I, for my part, would sooner read Shakspeare in the French prose translation, and that is saying a great deal ; but in the German poets' hands Shakspeare so often gets, especially where he is humorous, an air of what the French call niaiseric ! and can anything be more un-Shakspearian than that ? Again ; Mr. Hayward's prose translation of the first part of Faust so good that it makes one regret Mr. Hayward should have abandoned the 106 ON TRANSLATING HOMER line of translation for a kind of literature which is, to say the least, somewhat slight is not likely to be surpassed by any translation in verse. But poems like the Iliad, which, in the main, are in one manner, may hope to find a poetical translator so gifted and so trained as to be able to learn that one manner, and to reproduce it. Only, the poet who would reproduce this must cultivate in himself a Greek virtue by no means common among the moderns in general, and the English in particular, moderation. For Homer has not only the English vigour, he has the Greek grace ; and when one observes the boistering, rollicking way in which his English admirers even men of genius, like the late Professor Wilson love to talk of Homer and his poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no very deep com- munity of nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm. ' It is very well, my good friends,' I always imagine Homer saying to them : if he could hear them : ' you do me a great deal of honour, but somehow or other you praise me too like barbarians.' For Homer's grandeur is not the mixed and turbid grandeur of the great poets of the north, of the authors of Otliello and Faust ; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur. Certainly his poetry has all the energy and power of the poetry of our ruder climates ; but it has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 107 LAST WORDS 1 Multi, qui persequuntur me, ct tribuhinl me : a testimonies non dcclinavi.' BUKFON, the great French naturalist, imposed on himself the rule of steadily abstaining from all answer to attacks made upon him. 'Je n'ai jamais repondu a aucune critique,' he said to one of his friends who, on the occasion of a certain criticism, was eager to take up arms in his behalf; 'je n'ai jamais repondu a aucune critique, ct je gardcrai le meme silence sur celle-ci.' On another occasion, when accused of plagiarism, and pressed by his friends to answer, 'II vaut mieux,' he said, 'laisser ces mauvaiscs gens dans I'incertitude.' Even when reply to an attack was made successfully, he disapproved of it, he regretted that those he esteemed should make it. Montesquieu, more sensitive to criticism than Btiffon, had answered, and successfully answered, an attack made upon his great work, the Esprit dcs Lois, by the Gazcticr Janscnislc. This Jansenist Ga/etteer was a periodical of those times, a periodical such as other times, also, have occasionally seen, very pretentious, very aggressive, and, when the point to be seized was at all a delicate one, very apt to miss it. 'Notwithstanding this example,' said BufTon, who, as well as Montesquieu, had been attacked by the Jansenist io8 ON TRANSLATING HOMER Gazetteer, ' notwithstanding this example, I think I may promise my course will be different. I shall not answer a single word.' And to any one who has noticed the baneful effects of controversy, with all its train of personal rivalries and hatreds, on men of letters or men of science ; to any one who has observed how it tends to impair, not only their dignity and repose, but their productive force, their genuine activity ; how it always checks the free play of the spirit, and often ends by stopping it altogether ; it can hardly seem doubtful, that the rule thus imposed on himself by Buffon was a wise one. His own career, indeed, admirably shows the wisdom of it. That career was as glorious as it was serene ; but it owed to its serenity no small part of its glory. The regularity and completeness with which he gradually built up the great work which he had designed, the air of equable majesty which he shed over it, struck powerfully the imagination of his contemporaries, and surrounded Buffon's fame with a peculiar respect and dignity. 'He is,' said Frederick the Great of him, 'the man who has best deserved the great celebrity which he has acquired.' And this regularity of production, this equableness of temper, he maintained by his resolute disdain of personal controversy. Buffon's example seems to me worthy of all imitation, ON TRANSLATING HOMER 109 and in my humble way I mean always to follow it. I never have replied, I never will reply, to any literary assailant ; in such encounters tempers are lost, the world laughs, and truth is not served. Least of all should I think of using this Chair as a place from which to carry on such a conflict. But when a learned and estimable man thinks he has reason to complain of language used by me in this Chair, when he attributes to me intentions and feelings towards him which are far from my heart, I owe him some explanation, and I am bound, too, to make the explanation as public as the words which gave offence. This is the reason why I revert once more to the subject of translating Homer. But being thus brought back to that subject, and not wishing to occupy you solely with an explanation which, after all, is Mr. Newman's affair and mine, not the public's, I shall take the opportunity, not certainly to enter into any conflict with any one, but to try to establish our old friend, the coming translator of Homer, yet a little firmer in the positions which I hope we have now secured for him ; to protect him against the danger of relaxing, in the confusion of dispute, his attention to those matters which alone I consider important for him ; to save him from losing sight, in the dust of the attacks delivered over it, of the real body of Patroclus. He will, probably, when he arrives, requite my solicitude very ill, no ON TRANSLATING HOMER and be in haste to disown his benefactor : but my interest in him is so sincere that I can disregard his probable in- gratitude. First, however, for the explanation. Mr. Newman has published a reply to the remarks which I made on his translation of the Iliad. He seems to think that the respect which at the outset of those remarks I professed for him must have been professed ironically ; he says that I use 'forms of attack against him which he does not know how to characterise ; ' that I ' speak scornfully ' of him, treat him with 'gratuitous insult, gratuitous rancour;' that I 'propagate slanders' against him, that I wish to 'damage him with my readers,' to 'stimulate my readers to despise' him. He is entirely mistaken. I respect Mr. Newman sincerely ; I respect him as one of the few learned men we have, one of the few who love learning for its own sake ; this respect for him I had before I read his translation of the Iliad, I retained it while I was commenting on that translation, I have not lost it after reading his reply. Any vivacities of expression which may have given him pain I sincerely regret, and can only assure him that I used them without a thought of insult or rancour. When I took the liberty of creating the verb to Newmanise, my intentions were no more rancorous than if I had said to Miltonise ; when I exclaimed, in my astonishment at his vocabulary, 'With ON TRANSLATING HOMER in whom can Mr. Newman have lived ? ' I meant merely to convey, in a familiar form of speech, the sense of bewilder- ment one has at finding a person to whom words one thought all the world knew seem strange, and words one thought entirely strange, intelligible. Yet this simple ex- pression of my bewilderment Mr. Newman construes into an accusation that he is 'often guilty of keeping low company,' and says that I shall 'never want a stone to throw at him.' And what is stranger still; one of his friends gravely tells me that Mr. Newman ' lived with the fellows of Balliol.' As if that made Mr. Newman's glossary less inexplicable to me ! As if he could have got his glossary from the fellows of Balliol ! As if I could believe that the members of that distinguished society of whose discourse, not so many years afterwards, I myself was an unworthy hearer were in Mr. Newman's time so far re- moved from the Attic purity of speech which we all of us admired, that when one of them called a calf a l>nlkin, the rest ' easily understood ' him ; or, when he wanted to say that a newspaper-article was 'proudly fine,' it mattered little whether he said it was that or brag/y ! No ; his having lived with the fellows of Balliol docs not explain Mr. Newman's glossary to me. I will no longer ask 'with whom he can have lived,' since that gives him offence ; but I must still declare that where he got his 112 ON TRANSLATING HOMER test of rarity or intelligibility for words is a mystery to me. That, however, does not prevent me from entertaining a very sincere respect for Mr. Newman, and since he doubts it, I am glad to reiterate my expression of it. But the truth of the matter is this : I unfeignedly admire Mr. Newman's ability and learning ; but I think in his translation of Homer he has employed that ability and learning quite amiss. I think he has chosen quite the wrong field for turning his ability and learning to account. I think that in England, partly from the want of an Academy, partly from a national habit of intellect to which that want of an Academy is itself due, there exists too little of what I may call a public force of correct literary opinion, possessing within certain limits a clear sense of what is right and wrong, sound and unsound, and sharply recalling men of ability and learning from any flagrant misdirection of these their advantages. I think, even, that in our country a powerful misdirection of this kind is often more likely to subjugate and pervert opinion than to be checked and corrected by it. 1 Hence a chaos of false tendencies, wasted 1 ' It is the fact, that scholars of fastidious refinement, but ofajudg- mcnt which I think far more masculine than Mr. Arnold's, have passed a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of my transla- tion. I at present count eight such names.' ' Before venturing to print, I sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would ON TRANSLATING HOMER 113 efforts, impotent conclusions, works which ought never to have been undertaken. Any one who can introduce a little order into this chaos by establishing in any quarter a single sound rule of criticism, a single rule which clearly marks what is right as right, and what is wrong as wrong, does a good deed ; and his deed is so much the better the greater force he counteracts of learning and ability applied to thicken the chaos. Of course no one can be sure that he has fixed any such rules ; he can only do his best to fix them ; but somewhere or other, in the literary opinion of Europe, if not in the literary opinion of one nation, in fifty years, if not in five, there is a final judgment on these matters, and the critic's work will at last stand or fall by its true merits. Meanwhile, the charge of having in one instance mis- applied his powers, of having once followed a false ten- dency, is no such grievous charge to bring against a man ; it docs not exclude a great respect for himself personally, or for his powers in the happiest manifestations of them. False tendency is, I have said, an evil to which the artist or the man of letters in England is peculiarly prone ; but everywhere in our time he is liable to it, -the greatest as accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women have extolled them, how greedily a working man has inquired for them, without knowing who was the translator.' - Mr. NEWMAN'S Reply, pp. 2, 12, 13. I H4 ON TRANSLATING HOMER well as the humblest. ' The first beginnings of my Wilheltn MeisferJ says Goethe, 'arose out of an obscure sense of the great truth that man will often attempt something for which nature has denied him the proper powers, will undertake and practise something in which he cannot become skilled. An inward feeling warns him to desist ' (yes, but there are, unhappily, cases of absolute judicial blindness !), ' neverthe- less he cannot get clear in himself about it, and is driven along a false road to a false goal, without knowing how it is with him. To this we may refer everything which goes by the name of false tendency, dilettanteism, and so on. A great many men waste in this way the fairest portion of their lives, and fall at last into wonderful delusion.' Yet after all, Goethe adds, it sometimes happens that even on this false road a man finds, not indeed that which he sought, but something which is good and useful for him ; ' like Saul, the son of Kish, who went forth to look for his father's asses, and found a kingdom.' And thus false tendency as well as true, vain effort as well as fruitful, go together to produce that great movement of life, to present that im- mense and magic spectacle of human affairs, which from boyhood to old age fascinates the gaze of every man of imagination, and which would be his terror, if it were not at the same time his delight. So Mr. Newman may see how wide-spread a danger it ON TRANSLATING HOMER 115 is, to which he has, as I think, in setting himself to translate Homer, fallen a prey. He may be well satisfied if he can escape from it by paying it the tribute of a single work only. He may judge how unlikely it is that I should ' despise ' him for once falling a prey to it. I know far too well how exposed to it we all are ; how exposed to it I myself am. At this very moment, for example, I am fresh from reading Mr. Newman's Reply to my Lectures, a reply full of that erudi- tion in which (as I am so often and so good-naturedly reminded, but indeed I know it without being reminded) Mr. Newman is immeasurably my superior. Well, the demon that pushes us all to our ruin is even now prompting me to follow Mr. Newman into a discussion about the digamma, and I know not what providence holds me back. And some day, I have no doubt, I shall lecture on the language of the Berbers, and give him his entire revenge. But Mr. Newman does not confine himself to com- plaints on his own behalf, he complains on Homer's behalf too. He says that my ' statements about Greek literature are against the most notorious and elementary fact ; ' that I ' do a public wrong to literature by publishing them ; ' and that the Professors to whom I appealed in my three Lectures, ' would only lose credit if they sanctioned the use I make of their names.' He does these eminent men the I 2 ii6 ON TRANSLATING HOMER kindness of adding, however, that ' whether they are pleased with this parading of their names in behalf of paradoxical error, he may well doubt,' and that ' until they endorse it themselves, he shall treat my process as a piece of forgery.' He proceeds to discuss my statements at great length, and with an erudition and ingenuity which nobody can admire more than I do. And he ends by saying that my ignorance is great. Alas ! that is very true. Much as Mr. Newman was mistaken when he talked of my rancour, he is entirely right when he talks of my ignorance. And yet, perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes find myself wishing, when dealing with these matters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance were even greater than it is. To handle these matters properly there is needed a poise so perfect that the least overweight in any direction tends to destroy the balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys it, even erudition may destroy it. To press to the sense of the thing itself with which one is dealing, not to go off on some collateral issue about the thing, is the hardest matter in the world. The 'thing itself with which one is here dealing, - -the critical perception of poetic truth,--- is of all things the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent ; by even pressing too impetuously after it, one runs the risk of losing it. The critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the nicest ON TRANSLATING HOMER 117 moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imagin- able ; he should be indeed the ' ondoyant et divers,' the undulating and diverse being of Montaigne. The less he can deal with his object simply and freely, the more things he has to take into account in dealing with it, the more, in short, he has to encumber himself, so much the greater force of spirit he needs to retain his elasticity. But one cannot exactly have this greater force by wishing for it ; so, for the force of spirit one has, the load put upon it is often heavier than it will well bear. The late Duke of Wellington said of a certain peer that ' it was a great pity his education had been so far too much for his abilities.' In like manner, one often sees erudition out of all proportion to its owner's critical faculty. Little as I know, therefore, I am always apprehensive, in dealing with poetry, lest even that little should prove ' too much for my abilities.' With this consciousness of my own lack of learning, nay, with this sort of acquiescence in it, with this belief that for the labourer in the field of poetical criticism learning has its disadvantages, I am not likely to dispute with Mr. Newman about matters of erudition. All that he says on these matters in his Reply I read with great interest ; in general I agree with him ; but only, I am sorry to say, up to a certain point. Like all learned men, accustomed to desire definite rules, he draws his conclusions too absolutely: ii8 ON TRANSLATING HOMER he wants to include too much under his rules ; he does not quite perceive that in poetical criticism the shade, the fine distinction, is everything ; and that, when he has once missed this, in all he says he is in truth but beating the air. For instance : because I think Homer noble, he imagines I must think him elegant ; and in fact he says in plain words that I do think him so, that to me Homer seems ' pervadingly elegant.' But he does not. Virgil is elegant, 'pervadingly elegant,' even in passages of the highest emotion : O, ubi campi, Spcrcheosque, ct virginibus bacchata Lacrcnis Taygeta ! ' Even there Virgil, though of a divine elegance, is still elegant, but Homer is not elegant; the word is quite a wrong one to apply to him, and Mr. Newman is quite right in blaming any one he finds so applying it. Again ; argu- ing against my assertion that Homer is not quaint, he says : ' It is quaint to call waves wet, milk white, blood dusky, horses single-hoofed, words winged, Vulcan Lobfoot (KuAXo7ToS<W), a spear longshadowyj and so on. I find I know not how many distinctions to draw here. I do not think it quaint to call waves wet, or milk white, or words 1 O for the fields of Thcssaly and the streams of Spcrcheios ! O for the hills alive with the dances of the Laconian maidens, the hills of Taygetus ! ' Georgics, ii. 486. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 119 winged ; but I do think it quaint to call horses single-hoofed, or Vulcan Lobfoot, or a spear longshadowy. As to calling blood dusky, I do not feel quite sure ; I will tell Mr. New- man my opinion when I see the passage in which he calls it so. But then, again, because it is quaint to call Vulcan Lobfoot, I cannot admit that it was quaint to call him KvAAoTToSiW ; nor that, because it is quaint to call a spear longshadowy, it was quaint to call it SoXi^o'o-Ktov. Here Mr. Newman's erudition misleads him : he knows the literal value of the Greek so well, that he thinks his literal render- ing identical with the Greek, and that the Greek must stand or fall along with his rendering. But the real question is, not whether he has given us, so to speak, full change for the Greek, but how he gives us our change : we want it in gold, and he g'ivcs it us in copper. Again : ' It is quaint,' says Mr. Newman, ' to address a young friend as " O Pippin ! " it is quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring.' Here, too, Mr. Newman goes much too fast, and his category of quaintness is too comprehen- sive. To address a young friend as ' O Pippin ! ' is, I cordially agree with him, very quaint ; although I do not think it was quaint in Sarpedon to address Glaucus as o iri-rrov : but in comparing, whether in Greek or in English, Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring, I do not see that there is of necessity anything quaint at all. Again ; 120 ON TRANSLATING HOMER because 1 said that eld, lief, in sooth, and other words, are, as Mr. Newman uses them in certain places, bad words, he imagines that I must mean to stamp these words with an absolute reprobation ; and because I said that ' my Biblio- latry is excessive,' he imagines that I brand all words as ignoble which are not in the Bible. Nothing of the kind : there are no such absolute rules to be laid down in these matters. The Bible vocabulary is to be used as an assist- ance, not as an authority. Of the words which, placed where Mr. Newman places them, I have called bad words, every one may be excellent in some other place. Take eld, for instance : when Shakspeare, reproaching man with the dependence in which his youth is passed, says : all thy Messed youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms Of palsied eld, . . . it seems to me that eld comes in excellently there, in a passage of curious meditation ; but when Mr. Newman renders uy///ju> T' U$UI'UTOJ re by ' from Eld and Death exempted,' it seems to me he infuses a tinge of quaintness into the transparent simplicity of Homer's expression, and so I call eld a bad word in that place. Once more. Mr. Newman lays it down as a general rule that ' many of Homer's energetic descriptions are ex- pressed in coarse physical words.' He goes on : 'I give ON TRANSLATING HOMER 121 one illustration, Tpwts irpovrv\j/av doA\9. Cowper, misled by the ignis fafuus of " stateliness " renders it absurdly : The powers of Ilium gave the first assault Embattled close ; but it is, strictly, "The Trojans knocked fonvard (or, thumped, butted forward) in close pack." The verb is too coarse for later polished prose, and even the adjective is very strong (packed together^. I believe, that "fonvard in pack the Trojans pitched," would not be really unfaithful to the I lomcric colour ; and I maintain, " that forward in mass the Trojans pitched," would be an irreprovable rendering.' He actually gives us all that as if it were a piece of scientific deduction ; and as if, at the end, he had arrived at an incontrovertible conclusion. But, in truth, one cannot settle these matters quite in this way. Mr. Newman's general rule may be true or false (I dislike to meddle with general rules), but every part in what follows must stand or fall by itself, and its soundness or unsoundness has nothing at all to do with the truth or falsehood of Mr. Newman's general rule. He first gives, as a strict rendering of the Greek, 'The Trojans knocked forward (or, thumped, butted forward), in close pack.' I need not say that, as a ' strict rendering of the Greek,' this is good, all Mr. Newman's ' strict renderings of the Greek ' are sure to be, as such, good ; but ' in close pack,' for JoXAe'ts, seems to me to be what 122 ON TRANSLATING HOMER Mr. Newman's renderings are not always, an excellent poetical rendering of the Greek ; a thousand times better, certainly, than Cowper's 'embattled close.' Well, but Mr. Newman goes on : 'I believe that, " forward in pack the Trojans pitched," would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour.' Here, I say, the Homeric colour is half washed out of Mr. Newman's happy rendering of doAAe'f9 ; while in ' pitched ' for Trpovrv^av, the literal fidelity of the first rendering is gone, while certainly no Homeric colour has come in its place. Finally, Mr. Newman con- cludes : ' I maintain that " forward in mass the Trojans pitched," would be an irreprovable rendering.' Here, in what Mr. Newman fancies his final moment of triumph, Homeric colour and literal fidelity have alike abandoned him altogether ; the last stage of his translation is much worse than the second, and immeasurably worse than the first. All this to show that a looser, easier method than Mr. Newman's must be taken, if we are to arrive at any good result in these questions. I now go on to follow Mr. Newman a little further, not at all as wishing to dispute with him, but as seeking (and this is the true fruit we may gather from criticisms upon us) to gain hints from him for the establishment of some useful truth about our subject, even when I think him wrong. I still retain, I confess, my conviction that Homer's characteristic qualities are rapidity ON TRANSLATING HOMER 123 of movement, plainness of words and style, simplicity and directness of ideas, and, above all, nobleness, the grand manner. Whenever Mr. Newman drops a word, awakens a train of thought, which leads me to see any of these charac- teristics more clearly, I am grateful to him ; and one or two suggestions of this kind which he affords, are all that now, having expressed my sorrow that he should have miscon- ceived my feelings towards him, and pointed out what I think the vice of his method of criticism, I have to notice in his Reply. Such a suggestion I find in Mr. Newman's remarks on my assertion that the translator of Homer must not adopt a quaint and antiquated style in rendering him, because the impression which Homer makes upon the living scholar is not that of a poet quaint and antiquated, but that of a poet perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible. I added that we can- not, I confess, really know how Homer seemed to Sophocles, but that it is impossible to me to believe that he seemed to him quaint and antiquated. Mr. Newman asserts, on the other hand, that I am absurdly wrong here ; that Homer seemed 'out and out' quaint and antiquated to the Athe- nians ; that ' every sentence of him was more or less anti- quated to Sophocles, who could no more help feeling at every instant the foreign and antiquated character of the poetry than an Englishman can help feeling the same in 124 ON TRANSLATING HOMER reading Burns's poems.' And not only does Mr. Newman say this, but he has managed thoroughly to convince some of his readers of it. ' Homer's Greek,' says one of them, 'certainly seemed antiquated to the historical times of Greece. Mr. Newman, taking a far broader historical and philological view than Mr. Arnold, stoutly maintains that it did seem so. And another says : ' Doubtless Homer's dialect and diction were as hard and obscure to a later Attic Greek as Chaucer to an Englishman of our day.' Mr. Newman goes on to say, that not only was Homer antiquated relatively to Pericles, but he is antiquated to the living scholar ; and, indeed, is in himself ' absolutely antique, being the poet of a barbarian age.' He tells us of his ' inexhaustible quaintnesses,' of his ' very eccentric dic- tion ; ' and he infers, of course, that he is perfectly right in rendering him in a quaint and antiquated style. Now this question, whether or no Homer seemed quaint and antiquated to Sophocles, I call a delightful question to raise. It is not a barren verbal dispute ; it is a question 'drenched in matter,' to use an expression of Bacon ; a question full of flesh and blood, and of which the scrutiny, though I still think we cannot settle it absolutely, may yet give us a directly useful result. To scrutinise it may lead us to see more clearly what sort of a style a modern trans- lator of Homer ought to adopt. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 125 Homer's verses were some of the first words which a young Athenian heard. He heard them from his mother or his nurse before he went to school ; and at school, when he went there, he was constantly occupied with them. So much did he hear of them that Socrates proposes, in the interests of morality, to have selections from Homer made, and placed in the hands of mothers and nurses, in his model republic ; in order that, of an author with whom they were sure to be so perpetually conversant, the young might learn only those parts which might do them good. His language was as familiar to Sophocles, we may be quite sure, as the language of the Bible is to us. Nay, more. Homer's language was not, of course, in the time of Sophocles, the spoken or written language of ordinary life, any more than the language of the llible, any more than the language of poetry, is with us ; but for one great species of composition epic poetry it was still the current language ; it was the language in which every one who made that sort of poetry composed. Every one at Athens who dabbled in epic poetry, not only understood Homer's language, he possessed it. He possessed it as every one who dabbles in poetry with us, possesses what may be called the poetical vocabulary, as distinguished from the vocabulary of common speech and of modern prose : I mean, such expressions as perchance for perhaps, 126 ON TRANSLATING HOMER spake for spoke, aye for ever, don for put on, charmed for charm' d, and thousands of others. I might go to Burns and Chaucer, and, taking words and passages from them, ask if they afforded any parallel to a language so familiar and so possessed. But this I will not do, for Mr. Newman himself supplies me with what he thinks a fair parallel, in its effect upon us, to the language of Homer in its effect upon Sophocles. He says that such words as man, londis, libbard, withouten, muchel, give us a tolerable but incomplete notion of this parallel ; and he finally exhibits the parallel in all its clearness, by this poetical specimen : Dat mon, quhich hauldcth Kyngis af Londis yn feo, nivcr (I tell 'c) fecrcth aught ; sith hcc Doth hauld hys londis yver. Now, docs Mr. Newman really think that Sophocles could, as he says, ' no more help feeling at every instant the foreign and antiquated character of Homer, than an Englishman can help feeling the same in hearing ' these lines? Is he quite sure of it? He says he is ; he will not allow of any doubt or hesitation in the matter. Iliad confessed we could not really know how Homer seemed to Sophocles; 'Let Mr. Arnold confess for himself,' cries Mr. Newman, ' and not for me, who know perfectly well.' And this is what he knows ! ON TRANSLATING HOMER 127 Mr. Newman says, however, that I ' play fallaciously on the words familiar and unfamiliar ; ' that ' Homer's words may have been familiar to the Athenians (i.e. often heard) even when they were either not understood by them or else, being understood, were yet felt and known to be utterly foreign. Let my renderings,' he continues, ' be heard, as Pope or even Cowper has been heard, and no one will be " surprised." ' But the whole question is here. The translator must not assume that to have taken place which has not taken place, although, perhaps, he may wish it to have taken place, namely, that his diction is become an established possession of the minds of men, and therefore is, in its proper place, familiar to them, will not ' surprise ' them. If Homer's language was familiar, that is, often heard, then to this language words like londis and libbard, which are not familiar, offer, for the translator's purpose, no parallel. For some purpose of the philologer they may offer a parallel to it ; for the translator's purpose they offer none. The question is not, whether a diction is antiquated for current speech, but whether it is antiquated for that particular pur- pose for which it is employed. A diction that is antiquated for common speech and common prose, may very well not be antiquated for poetry or certain special kinds of prose. ' Per- adventure there shall be ten found there,' is not antiquated 128 for Biblical prose, though for conversation or for a news- paper it is antiquated. 'The trumpet spake not to the armed throng,' is not antiquated for poetry, although we should not write in a letter, ' he spake to me,' or say, ' the British soldier is armed with the Enfield rifle.' But when language is antiquated for that particular purpose for which it is employed, as numbers of Chaucer's words, for in- stance, are antiquated for poetry, such language is a bad representative of language which, like Homer's, was never antiquated for that particular purpose for which it was employed. I imagine that HyX-ifidBeu for n^Xei'Sov, in Homer, no more sounded antiquated to Sophocles, than armed for arntd, in Milton, sounds antiquated to us ; but Mr. Newman's withoutcn and muchel do sound to us anti- quated, even for poetry, and therefore they do not corre- spond in their effect upon us with Homer's words in their effect upon Sophocles. When Chaucer, who uses such words, is to pass current amongst us, to be familiar to us, as Homer was familiar to the Athenians, he has to be modernised, as Wordsworth and others set to work to modernise him ; but an Athenian no more needed to have Homer modernised, than we need to have the Bible modernised, or Wordsworth himself. Therefore, when Mr. Newman's words bragly, Intlkin, and the rest, are an established possession of our minds, as Homer's words were an established possession of an ON TRANSLATING HOMER 129 Athenian's mind, he may use them ; but not till then. Chaucer's words, the words of Burns, great poets as these were, are yet not thus an established possession of an Englishman's mind, and therefore they must not be used in rendering Homer into English. Mr. Newman has been misled just by doing that which his admirer praises him for doing, by taking a ' far broader historical and philological view than ' mine. Precisely because he has done this, and has applied the ' philological view ' where it was not applicable, but where the ' poetical view ' alone was rightly applicable, he has fallen into error. It is the same with him in his remarks on the difficulty and obscurity of Homer. Homer, I say, is perfectly plain in speech, simple, and intelligible. And I infer from this that his translator, too, ought to be perfectly plain in speech, simple, and intelligible ; ought not to say, for instance, in rendering O>r K( at fffi\\otfu /J-dxriv ^j xu'Sidvdpav . . . ' Nor lieHy thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle,' and things of that kind. Mr. Newman hands me a list of some twenty hard words, invokes Buttmann, Mr. Maiden, and M. Benfey, and asks me if I think myself wiser than all the world of Greek scholars, and if I am ready to supply the deficiencies of I.idclell and Scott's Lexicon \ But here, again, Mr. Newman errs by not perceiving that the question K 1 3 o ON TRANSLATING HOMER is one not of scholarship, but of a poetical translation of Homer. This, I say, should be perfectly simple and intelli- gible. He replies by telling me that d8u/os, tiAiVoSes, and o-tyoAoets are hard words. Well, but what does he infer from that ? That the poetical translation, in his rendering of them, is to give us a sense of the difficulties of the scholar, and so is to make his translation obscure? If he does not mean that, how, by bringing forward these hard words, does he touch the question whether an English version of Homer should be plain or not plain ? If Homer's poetry, as poetry, is in its general effect on the poetical reader perfectly simple and intelligible, the uncertainty of the scholar about the true meaning of certain words can never change this general effect. Rather will the poetry of Homer make us forget his philology, than his philology make us forget his poetry. It may even be affirmed that every one who reads Homer perpetually for the sake of enjoying his poetry (and no one who does not so read him will ever translate him well), comes at last to form a perfectly clear sense in his own mind for every important word in Homer, such as uStros, or rj\iftaTo<;, whatever the scholar's doubts about the word may be. And this sense is present to his mind with perfect clearness and fulness, whenever the word recurs, although as a scholar he may know that he cannot be sure whether this sense is the right one or not. But poetically he feels clearly about the word, although philologically he may not. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 131 The scholar in him may hesitate, like the father in Sheridan's play ; but the reader of poetry in him is, like the governor, fixed. The same thing happens to us with our own lan- guage. How many words occur in the Bible, for instance, to which thousands of hearers do not feel sure they attach the precise real meaning ; but they make out a meaning for them out of what materials they have at hand ; and the words, heard over and over again, come to convey this meaning with a certainty which poetically is adequate, though not philologically. How many have attached a clear and poetically adequate sense to ' the beam ' and ' the mote? though not precisely the right one ! How clearly, again, have readers got a sense from Milton's words, 'grate on their scrannel pipes,' who yet might have been puzzled to write a commentary on the word scrannel for the dictionary ! So we get a clear sense from uSivos as an epithet for grief, after often meeting with it and finding out all we can about it, even though that all be philologically insufficient ; so we get a clear sense from clXtVoScs as an epithet for cows. And this his clear poetical sense about the words, not his philo- logical uncertainties about them, is what the translator has to convey. Words like bragly and bulkin offer no parallel to these words ; because the reader, from his entire want of familiarity with the words bragly and bulkin, has no clear sense of them poetically. 132 ON TRANSLATING HOMER Perplexed by his knowledge of the philological aspect of Homer's language, encumbered by his own learning, Mr. Newman, I say, misses the poetical aspect, misses that with which alone we are here concerned. ' Homer is odd,' he persists, fixing his eyes on his own philological analysis of fiwru^, and fjiepoil/\, and KvAAoTroSiW, and not on these words in their synthetic character ; just as Professor Max Miiller, going a little farther back, and fixing his attention on the elementary value of the word Ovydnjp, might say Homer was ' odd ' for using that word ; ' if the whole Greek nation, by long familiarity, had become inobservant of Homer's oddities,' of the oddities of this ' noble barbarian,' as Mr. Newman elsewhere calls him, this ' noble barbarian ' with the ' lively eye of the savage,' ' that would be no fault of mine. That would not justify Mr. Arnold's blame of me for rendering the words correctly.' Correctly, ah, but what is correctness in this case ? This correctness of his is the very rock on which Mr. Newman has split. He is so correct that at last he finds peculiarity everywhere. The true knowledge of Homer becomes at last, in his eyes, a knowledge of Homer's ' peculiarities, pleasant and unplea- sant.' Learned men know these ' peculiarities,' and Homer is to be translated because the unlearned are impatient to know them too. 'That,' he exclaims, ' is just why people want to read an English Homer, to know all his oddities, just as 0.V TRANSLATING HOMER 133 learned men do.' Here I am obliged to shake my head, and to declare that, in spite of all my respect for Mr. Newman, I cannot go these lengths with him. He talks of my ' mono maniac fancy that there is nothing quaint or antique in Homer.' Terrible learning, I cannot help in my turn exclaiming, terrible learning, which discovers so much ! Here, then, I take my leave of Mr. Newman, retaining my opinion that his version of Homer is spoiled by his making Homer odd and ignoble ; but having, I hope, sufficient love for literature to be able to canvass works without thinking of persons, and to hold this or that pro- duction cheap, while retaining a sincere respect, on other grounds, for its author. In fulfilment of my promise to take this opportunity for giving the translator of Homer a little further advice, I proceed to notice one or two other criticisms which I find, in like manner, suggestive ; which give us an opportunity, that is, of seeing more clearly, as we look into them, the true principles on which translation of Homer should rest. This is all I seek in criticisms ; and, perhaps (as I have already said) it is only as one seeks a positive result of this kind, that one can get any fruit from them. Seeking a negative result from them, personal altercation and wrangling, one gets no fruit ; seeking a positive result, the elucidation and establishment of one's ideas, one may get much. Even i 3 4 ON TRANSLATING HOMER bad criticisms may thus be made suggestive and fruitful. I declared, in a former lecture on this subject, my conviction that criticism is not the strong point of our national literature. Well, even the bad criticisms on our present topic which I meet with, serve to illustrate this conviction for me. And thus one is enabled, even in reading remarks which for Homeric criticism, for their immediate subject, have no value, which are far too personal in spirit, far too immoderate in temper, and far too heavy-handed in style, for the delicate matter they have to treat, still to gain light and confirma- tion for a serious idea, and to follow the Baconian injunc- tion, semper aliquid addiscere, always to be adding to one's stock of observation and knowledge. Yes, even when we have to do with writers who, to quote the words of an ex- quisite critic, the master of us all in criticism, M. Sainte- Beuve, remind us, when they handle such subjects as our present, of ' Romans of the fourth or fifth century, coming to hold forth, all at random, in African style, on papers found in the desk of Augustus, Maecenas, or Pollio,' even then we may instruct ourselves if we may regard ideas and not persons ; even then we may enable ourselves to say, with the same critic describing the effect made upon him by D'Argenson's Monoirs : ' My taste is revolted, but I learn something ; -Jc si/is choquc mais je suis tnstruif. 1 But let us pass to criticisms which are suggestive directly ON TRANSLATING HOMER 135 and not thus indirectly only, criticisms by examining which we may be brought nearer to what immediately interests us, the right way of translating Homer. I said that Homer did not rise and sink with his subject, was never to be called prosaic and low. This gives surprise to many persons, who object that parts of the Iliad are cer- tainly pitched lower than others, and who remind me of a number of absolutely level passages in Homer. But I never denied that a subject must rise and sink, that it must have its elevated and its level regions ; all I deny is, that a poet can be said to rise and sink when all that he, as a poet, can do, is perfectly well done ; when he is perfectly sound and good, that is, perfect as a poet, in the level regions of his subject as well as in its elevated regions. Indeed, what distinguishes the greatest masters of poetry from all others is, that they are perfectly sound and poetical in these level regions of their subject, in these regions which are the great difficulty of all poets but the very greatest, which they never quite know what to do with. A poet may sink in these regions by being falsely grand as well as by being low j he sinks, in short, whenever he does not treat his matter, whatever it is, in a perfectly good and poetic way. But, so long as he treats it in this way, he can- not be said to sink, whatever his matter may do. A passage of the simplest narrative is quoted to me from Homer : 136 ON TRANSLATING HOMER and I am asked, whether Homer does not sink there ; whether he ' can have intended such lines as those for poetry ? ' My answer is : Those lines are very good poetry indeed, poetry of the best class, in that place. But when Wordsworth, having to narrate a very plain matter, tries not to sink in narrating it, tries, in short, to be what is falsely called poetical, he does sink, although he sinks by being pompous, not by being low. Onward we drove beneath the Castle ; caught, While crossing Magdalen Bridge, a glimpse of Cam, And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn. That last line shows excellently how a poet may sink with his subject by resolving not to sink with it. A page or two farther on, the subject rises to grandeur, and then Words- worth is nobly worthy of it : The antechapel, where the statue stood Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. But the supreme poet is he who is thoroughly sound and poetical, alike when his subject is grand, and when it is plain : with him the subject may sink, but never the poet. 1 ///<?(/, xvii. 216. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 137 But a Dutch painter does not rise and sink with his subject, Defoe, in Moll Flanders, does not rise and sink with his subject, in so far as an artist cannot be said to sink who is sound in his treatment of his subject, however plain it is : yet Defoe, yet a Dutch painter, may in one sense be said to sink with their subject, because though sound in their treatment of it, they are not poetical, poetical in the true, not the false sense of the word ; because, in fact, they are not in the grand style. Homer can in no sense be said to sink with his subject, because his soundness has something more than literal naturalness about it ; because his soundness is the soundness of Homer, of a great epic poet ; because, in fact, he is in the grand style. So he sheds over the simplest matter he touches the charm of his grand manner ; he makes everything noble. Nothing has raised more question- ing among my critics than these words, noble, the grand style. People complain that I do not define these words sufficiently, that I do not tell them enough about them. ' The grand style, but what is the grand style ? ' they cry ; some with an inclination to believe in it, but puzzled ; others mockingly and with incredulity. Alas ! the grand style is the last matter in the world for verbal definition to deal with adequately. One may say of it as is said of faith : 'One must feel it in order to know what it is.' But, as of faith, so too one may say of nobleness, of the grand style : 138 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 1 Woe to those who know it not ! ' Yet this expression, though indefinable, has a charm ; one is the better for con- sidering it ; bonum est, nos hie esse ; nay, one loves to try to explain it, though one knows that one must speak imper- fectly. For those, then, who ask the question, What is the grand style ? with sincerity, I will try to make some answer, inadequate as it must be. For those who ask it mockingly I have no answer, except to repeat to them, with compassionate sorrow, the Gospel words : Moriemini in peccatis vestris, Ye shall die in your sins. But let me, at any rate, have the pleasure of again giving, before I begin to try and define the grand style, a specimen of what it is. Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole, More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days, On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues. . . . There is the grand style in perfection ; and any one who has a sense for it, will feel it a thousand times better from repeating those lines than from hearing anything I can say about it. Let us try, however, what can be' said, controlling what we say by examples. I think it will be found that the grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted^ treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 139 I think this definition will be found to cover all instances of the grand style in poetry which present themselves. I think it will be found to exclude all poetry which is not in the grand style. And I think it contains no terms which are obscure, which themselves need defining. Even those who do not understand what is meant by calling poetry noble, will understand, I imagine, what is meant by speaking of a noble nature in a man. But the noble or powerful nature the bedeutendcs Indiridiium of Goethe -is not enough. For instance, Mr. Newman has zeal for learning, zeal for think- ing, zeal for liberty, and all these things are noble, they ennoble a man ; but he has not the poetical gift : there must be the poetical gift, the ' divine faculty,' also. And, besides all this, the subject must be a serious one (for it is only by a kind of license that we can speak of the grand style in comedy) : and it must be treated with simplicity or severity. Here is the great difficulty : the poets of the world have been many ; there has been wanting neither abundance of poetical gift nor abundance of noble natures ; but a poetical gift so happy, in a noble nature so circum- stanced and trained, that the result is a continuous style, perfect in simplicity or perfect in severity, has been extremely rare. One poet has had the gifts of nature and faculty in unequalled fulness, without the circumstances and training which make this sustained perfection of style possible. Of 140 ON TRANSLATING HOMER other poets, some have caught this perfect strain now and then, in short pieces or single lines, but have not been able to maintain it through considerable works ; others have composed all their productions in a style which, by com- parison with the best, one must call secondary. The best model of the grand style simple is Homer ; perhaps the best model of the grand style severe is Milton. But Dante is remarkable for affording admirable examples of both styles ; he has the grand style which arises from simplicity, and he has the grand style which arises from severity ; and from him I will illustrate them both. In a former lecture I pointed out what that severity of poetical style is, which comes from saying a thing with a kind of intense compression, or in an allusive, brief, almost haughty way, as if the poet's mind were charged with so many and such grave matters, that he would not deign to treat any one of them explicitly. Of this severity the last line of the following stanza of the Purgatory is a good example. Dante has been telling Forese that Virgil had guided him through Hell, and he goes on : Indi m' ban tratto su gli suoi conforti, Salendo e rigiramlo la Montagna Che tlrizza voi che il inondo fcce torli,^ 1 Thence hath his comforting aid led me up, climbing and 1 J'itrgij/ory, xxiii. 124. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 141 circling the Mountain, which straightens you whom the world made crooked? These last words, 'la Montagna che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti? ' the Mountain which straightens you whom the world made crooked] for the Mountain of Purgatory, I call an excellent specimen of the grand style in severity, where the poet's mind is too full charged to suffer him to speak more explicitly. But the very next stanza is a beautiful specimen of the grand style in simplicity, where a noble nature and a poetical gift unite to utter a thing with the most limpid plainness and clearness : Tanto dice di farini sua compagna Ch' io saro la dove fia Beatrice ; Ouivi convien che senza lui rimagna. ' ' So long,' Dante continues, ' so long he (Virgil) saith he will bear me company, until I shall be there where Beatrice is ; there it behoves that without him I remain.' But the noble simplicity of that in the Italian no words of mine can render. Both these styles, the simple and the severe, are truly grand ; the severe seems, perhaps, the grandest, so long as we attend most to the great personality, to the noble nature, in the poet its author ; the simple seems the grandest when we attend most to the exquisite faculty, to the poetical gift. But the simple is no doubt to be preferred. It is the more 1 Purgatory , xxiii. 127. 142 ON TRANSLATING HOMER magical : in the other there is something intellectual, some- thing which gives scope for a play of thought which may exist where the poetical gift is either wanting or present in only inferior degree : the severe is much more imitable, and this a little spoils its charm. A kind of semblance of this style keeps Young going, one may say, through all the nine parts of that most indifferent production, the Night Thoughts. But the grand style in simplicity is inimitable : cav OVK eyevT* oiir' AlaKiSa irapa Hr]\f7, oijTe Trap' av-nQtcp Kd5fj.w XtyovraL p.av fiporiav u\^ov vireprarov ol ax^f, o'l re /cat xpuaainrvKM /j.e\TTOu.fvuv ev ijpfi Moicraj', Kal tv tmairvKois &'iov QT)&O.LS . . .' There is a limpidness in that, a want of salient points to seize and transfer, which makes imitation impossible, except by a genius akin to the genius which produced it. Greek simplicity and Greek grace are inimitable ; but it is said that the Iliad may still be ballad-poetry while in- finitely superior to all other ballads, and that, in my speci- mens of English ballad-poetry, I have been unfair. Well, 1 ' A secure time fell to the lot neither of Pelcus the son of /Eacus, nor of the godlike Cadmus ; howbeit these are said to have had, of all mortals, the supreme of happiness, who heard the golden-snooded Muses sing, one of them on the mountain (Pelion), the other in seven- gated Thebes.' ON TRANSLATING HOMER 143 no doubt there are better things in English ballad-poetry than Now Christ thce save, thou proud porter, . . . but the real strength of a chain, they say, is the strength of its weakest link ; and what I was trying to show you was, that the English ballad-style is not an instrument of enough compass and force to correspond to the Greek hexameter ; that, owing to an inherent weakness in it as an epic style, it easily runs into one of two faults, either it is prosaic and humdrum, or, trying to avoid that fault, and to make itself lively (se fairc vi/), it becomes pert and jaunty. To show that, the passage about King Adland's porter serves very well. But these degradations are not proper to a true epic instrument, such as the Greek hexameter. You may say, if you like, when you find Homer's verse, even in describing the plainest matter, neither humdrum nor jaunty, that this is because he is so incomparably better a poet than other balladists, because he is Homer. But take the whole range of Greek epic poetry, take the later poets, the poets of the last ages of this poetry, many of them most indifferent, Coluthus, Tryphiodorus, Quintus of Smyrna, Nonnus. Never will you find in this instrument of the hexameter, even in their hands, the vices of the ballad-style in the weak moments of this last : everywhere the hexameter a noble, a truly epical instrument rather 144 ON TRANSLATING HOMER resists the weakness of its employer than lends itself to it. Quintus of Smyrna is a poet of merit, but certainly not a poet of a high order ; with him, too, epic poetry, whether in the character of its prosody or in that of its diction, is no longer the epic poetry of earlier and better times, nor epic poetry as again restored by Nonnus : but even in Quintus of Smyrna, I say, the hexameter is still the hexameter ; it is a style which the ballad-style, even in the hands of better poets, cannot rival. And in the hands of inferior poets, the ballad-style sinks to vices of which the hexameter, even in the hands of a Tryphiodorus, never can become guilty. But a critic, whom it is impossible to read without pleasure, and the disguise of whose initials I am sure I may be allowed to penetrate, Mr. Spedding, says that he ' denies altogether that the metrical movement of the English hexameter has any resemblance to that of the Greek.' Of course, in that case, if the two metres in no respect correspond, praise accorded to the Greek hexameter as an epical instrument will not extend to the English. Mr. Spedding seeks to establish his proposition by pointing out that the system of accentuation differs in the English and in the Virgilian hexameter ; that in the first, the accent and the long syllable (or what has to do duty as such) coincide, in the second they do not. He says that we cannot be so ON TRANSLATING HOMER 145 sure of the accent with which Greek verse should be read as of that with which Latin should ; but that the lines of Homer in which the accent and the long syllable coincide, as in the English hexameter, are certainly very rare. He suggests a type of English hexameter in agreement with the Virgilian model, and formed on the supposition that 'quantity is as distinguishable in English as in I,atin or Greek by any car that will attend to it.' Of the truth of this supposition he entertains no doubt. The new hexameter will, Mr. Spcdding thinks, at least have the merit of resembling, in its metrical movement, the classical hexameter, which merit the ordinary English hexameter has not. But even with this improved hexameter he is not satisfied ; and he goes on, first to suggest other metres for rendering Homer, and finally to suggest that rendering Homer is impossible. A scholar to whom all who admire Lucretius owe a large debt of gratitude, Mr. Munro, has replied to Mr. Spedding. Mr. Munro declares that 'the accent of the old Greeks and Romans resembled our accent only in name, in reality was essentially different ; ' that 'our English reading of Homer and Virgil has in itself no meaning ;' and that 'accent has nothing to do with the Yirgilian hexameter.' If this be so, of course the merit which Mr. Spedding attributes to his own hexameter, of really corresponding with the Virgilian hexameter, has no existence. Again ; in contra- L 146 ON TRANSLATING HOMER diction to Mr. Spedding's assertion that lines in which (in our reading of them) the accent and the long syllable co- incide, 1 as in the ordinary English hexameter, are 'rare even in Homer,' Mr. Munro declares that such lines, ' instead of being rare, are among the very commonest types of Homeric rhythm.' Mr. Spedding asserts that 'quantity is as distin- guishable in English as in Latin or Greek by any car that will attend to it ; ' but Mr. Munro replies, that in English ' neither his ear nor his reason recognises any real distinc- tion of quantity except that which is produced by accen- tuated and unaccentuated syllables.' He therefore arrives at the conclusion that in constructing English hexameters, ' quantity must be utterly discarded ; and longer or shorter unaccentuated syllables can have no meaning, except so far as they may be made to produce sweeter or harsher sounds in the hands of a master.' It is not for me to interpose between two such com- batants ; and indeed my way lies, not up the highroad where they are contending, but along a bypath. With the absolute truth of their general propositions respecting accent and quantity, I have nothing to do ; it is most interesting and instructive to me to hear such propositions discussed, when it is Mr. Munro or Mr. Spedding who discusses them ; 1 Lines such as the first of the Odyssey: J Av$pa fj.oi ti/vfwe, MyCiro, iroKvTpoirov, >j /xaAa 7roA\i . . . ON TRANSLATING HOMER 147 but I have strictly limited myself in these Lectures to the humble function of giving practical advice to the translator of Homer. He, I still think, must not follow so confidently, as makers of English hexameters have hitherto followed, Mr. Munro's maxim, quantity may be utterly discarded. He must not, like Mr. Longfellow, make seventeen a dactyl in spite of all the length of its last syllable, even though he can plead that in counting we lay the accent on the first syllable of this word. He may be far from attaining Mr. Spedding's nicety of ear ; may be unable to feel that ' while quantity is a dactyl, quiddity is a tribrach,' and that 'rapidly is a word to which we lind no parallel in Latin ; 'but I think he must bring himself to distinguish, with Mr. Sped- ding, between '//*' o'er- wearied eyelid,' and ' the wearied eyelid,' as being, the one a correct ending for a hexameter, the other an ending with a false quantity in it ; instead of finding, with Mr. Munro, that this distinction 'conveys to his mind no intelligible idea.' He must temper his belief in Mr. Munro's dictum, (juantity must l>e utterly discarded, by mixing with it a belief in this other dictum of the same author, -two or more consonants take longer time in enuncia- ting than one. ' 1 Substantially, however, in the question at issue between .Mr. Munro and Mr. S^ddin^, I agree with Mr. Munro. Hy the italicised words in the following sentence, ' The rhythm uf the Yirgilian 148 ON TRANSLATING HOMER Criticism is so apt in general to be vague and impalpable, that when it gives us a solid and definite possession, such as is Mr. Spedding's parallel of the Virgilian and the English hexameter with their difference of accentuation distinctly marked, we cannot be too grateful to it. It is in the way in which Mr. Spedding proceeds to press his conclusions from the parallel which he has drawn out, that his criticism seems to rne to come a little short. Here even he, I think, shows (if he will allow me to say so) a little of that want of pliancy and suppleness so common among critics, but so dangerous to their criticism ; he is a little too absolute in imposing his metrical laws ; he too much forgets the excel- hexameter depends entirely on ctesiira, pause, and a due arrangement of words,' he has touched, it seems to me, in the constitution of this hexameter, the central point, which Mr. Spedding misses. The accent, or heightened tone, of Virgil in reading his own hexameters, was probably far from being the same tiling as the accent or stress with which we read them. The general effect of each line, in Virgil's mouth, was probably therefore something widely different from what Mr. Spedding assumes it to have been : an ancient's accentual reading was something which allowed the metrical beat of the Latin line to be far more perceptible than our accentual reading allows it to be. On the question as to the real rhythm of the ancient hexameter, Mr. Newman has in his Reply a page quite admirable for force and precision. Here he is in his element, and his ability and acuteness have their proper scope, lint it is true that the inoa'ent reading of the ancient hexameter is what the modern hexameter has to imitate, and that the Knglish reading of the Virgilian hexameter is as Mr. Spedding describes it. Why this reading has not been imitated by the tnglish hexameter, I have tried to point out in the text. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 149 lent maxim of Menander, so applicable to literary criti- cism : ol i6/j.ut ff<(>6$p' flffiv ' & 5' opiav rovs v6fi.ovs 'Laws are admirable things; but he who keeps his eye too closely fixed upon them, runs the risk of becoming ' let us say, a purist. Mr. Spedding is probably mistaken in sup- posing that Virgil pronounced his hexameters as Mr. Sped- ding pronounces them. He is almost certainly mistaken in supposing that Homer pronounced his hexameters as Mr. Spedding pronounces Virgil's. Hut this, as I have said, is not a question for us to treat ; all we are here concerned with is the imitation, by the English hexameter, of the ancient hexameter in Us effect upon us moderns. Suppose we concede to Mr. Spedding that his parallel proves our accentuation of the English and of the Virgilian hexameter to be different : what are we to conclude from that ; how will a criticism not a formal, but a substantial criticism deal with such a fact as that ? Will it infer, as Mr. Spedding infers, that the English hexameter, therefore, must not pretend to reproduce better than other rhythms the move- ment of Homer's hexameter for us, that there can be no correspondence at all between the movement of these two hexameters,- that if we want to have such a correspondence, we must abandon the current English hexameter altogether, 150 ON TRANSLATING HOMER and adopt in its place a new hexameter of Mr. Spedding's Anglo-Latin type, substitute for lines like the Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia . . . of Dr. Hawtrey, lines like the Procession, complex melodies, pause, quantity, accent, After Virgilian precedent and practice, in order . . . of Mr. Spedding? To infer this, is to go, as I have com- plained of Mr. Newman for sometimes going, a great deal too fast. I think prudent criticism must certainly recognise, in the current English hexameter, a fact which cannot so lightly be set aside ; it must acknowledge that by this hexameter the English ear, the genius of the English lan- guage, have, in their own way, adopted, have translated for themselves the Homeric hexameter ; and that a rhythm which has thus grown up, which is thus, in a manner, the production of nature, has in its general type something necessary and inevitable, something which admits change only within narrow limits, which precludes change that is sweeping and essential. I think, therefore, the prudent critic will regard Mr. Spedding's proposed revolution as simply impracticable. He will feel that in English poetry the hexameter, if used at all, must be, in the main, the English hexameter now current. He will perceive that its having come into existence as the representative of the ON TRANSLATING HOMER 151 Homeric hexameter, proves it to have, for the English ear, a certain correspondence with the Homeric hexameter, although this correspondence may be, from the difference of the Greek and English languages, necessarily incomplete. This incompleteness he will endeavour, 1 as he may find or fancy himself able, gradually somewhat to lessen through minor changes, suggested by the ancient hexameter, but respecting the general constitution of the modern : the 1 Such a minor change I have attempted by occasionally shifting, in the first foot of the hexameter, the accent from the first syllable to the second. In the current English hexameter, it is on the first. Mr. Sledding, who proposes radically to subvert the constitution of this hexameter, seems not to understand that any one can projxjse to modify it partially; he can comprehend revolution in this metre, but not reform. Accordingly he asks me how I can bring myself to say, ' /Wwccn that and the ships,' or There sat fifty men ;' or how I can reconcile such forcing of the accent with my own rule, that ' hexameters must read themselves.' I'resently he says that he cannot l>clieve I do pronounce these words so, but that he thinks I leave out the accent in the first foot altogether, and thus get a hexameter with only five accents. He will pardon me : I pronounce, as I sup|K>sc he himself does, if he reads the words naturally, ' He/r.vc;/ that and the ships,' and ' There sat fifty men.' Mr. Spedding is familiar enough with this accent on the second syllable in Virgil's hexameters; in ' et tf montosay or ' Vc/( ; ccs jaculo.' Such a change is an attempt to relieve the monotony of the current English hexameter by occasionally altering the position of one of its accents ; it is not an attempt to make a wholly new English hexameter by habitually altering the |K>sition of four of them. Very likely it is an unsuccessful attempt ; but at any rate it does not violate what I think is the fundamental rule for English hexameters, that may be such as to nW themselves without necessitating, on the 152 ON TRANSLATING HOMER notion of making it disappear altogether by the critic's inventing in his closet a new constitution of his own for the English hexameter, he will judge to be a chimerical dream. When, therefore, Mr. Spedding objects to the English hexameter, that it imperfectly represents the movement of the ancient hexameters, I answer : We must work with the tools we have. The received English type, in its general outlines, is, for England, the necessary given type of this metre ; it is by rendering the metrical beat of its pattern, not by rendering the accentual beat of it, that the English language has adapted the Greek hexameter. To render the metrical beat of its pattern is something ; by effecting so much as this the English hexameter puts itself in closer relations with its original, it comes nearer to its movement than any other metre which does not even effect so much as this ; but Mr. Spedding is dissatisfied with it for not effecting more still, for not rendering the accentual beat reader's part, any non-natural putting-on or taking-off accent. Hexameters like these of Mr. Longfellow, ' In that delightful land which is washed by the Delaware's waters,' and, ' As if they fain would appease the Dryads, whose haunts they molested,' violate this rule ; and they are very common. I think the blemish of Mr. Dart's recent meritorious version of the Iliad is that it contains too many of them. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 153 too. If he asks me why the English hexameter has not tried to render this too, why it has confined itself to ren- dering the metrical beat, why, in short, it is itself, and not Mr. Spedding's new hexameter, that is a question which I, whose only business is to give practical advice to a trans- lator, am not bound to answer ; but I will not decline to answer it nevertheless. I will suggest to Mr. Spcdding that, as I have already said, the modern hexameter is merely an attempt to imitate the effect of the ancient hexameter, as read by us moderns ; that the great object of its imitation has been the hexameter of Homer ; that of this hexameter such lines as those which Mr. Spedding declares to be so rare, even in Homer, but which are in truth so common, lines in which the quantity and the reader's accent coincide, are, for the English reader, just from that simplicity (for him) of rhythm which they owe to this very coincidence, the master-type ; that so much is this the case, that one may again and again notice an English reader of Homer, in reading lines where his Virgilian accent would not coincide with the quantity, abandoning this accent, and reading the lines (as we say) fy quantity, reading them as if he were scanning them ; while foreigners neglect our Virgilian accent even in reading Virgil, read even Virgil by quantity, making the accents coincide with the long syllables. And no doubt the hexameter of a kindred language, the German, 154 ON TRANSLATING HOMER based on this mode of reading the ancient hexameter, has had a powerful influence upon the type of its English fellow. But all this shows how extremely powerful accent is for us moderns, since we find not even Greek and Latin quantity perceptible enough without it. Yet in these languages, where we have been accustomed always to look for it, it is far more perceptible to us Englishmen than in our own language, where we have not been accustomed to look for it. And here is the true reason why Mr. Spedding's hexameter is not and cannot be the current English hexa- meter, even though it is based on the accentuation which Englishmen give to all Virgil's lines, and to many of Homer's, that the quantity which in Greek or Latin words we feel, or imagine we feel, even though it be unsupported by accent, we do not feel or imagine we feel in English words when it is thus unsupported. For example, in re- peating the Latin line Ipsa tibi blandos /;///<?;// cunabula florcs, an Englishman feels the length of the second syllable of /undent, although he lays the accent on the first ; but in repeating Mr. Spedding's line, Softly cometh slumber dosing th' o'erwcaried eyelid, the English ear, full of the accent on the first syllable of closing, has really no sense at all of any length in its ON TRANSLATING HOMER 155 second. The metrical beat of the line is thus quite de- stroyed. So when Mr. Spedding proposes a new Anglo-Virgilian hexameter he proposes an impossibility ; when he ' denies altogether that the metrical movement of the English hexameter has any resemblance to that of the Greek,' he denies too much ; when he declares that, ' were every other metre impossible, an attempt to translate Homer into English hexameters might be permitted, l>ut that such an attempt he himself would never read, 1 he exhibits, it seems to me, a little of that obduracy and over-vehemence in liking and disliking, a remnant, I suppose, of our insular ferocity, to which English criticism is so prone. He ought to be enchanted to meet with a good attempt in any metre, even though he would never have advised it, even though its success be contrary to all his expectations ; for it is the critic's first duty prior even to his duty of stigmatising what is bad to welcome evcr\thing that is good. In welcom- ing this, he must at all times be ready, like the Christian convert, even to burn what he used to worship, and to worship what he used to burn. Nay, but he need not be thus inconsistent in welcoming it ; he may retain all his prin- ciples : principles endure, circumstances change ; absolute success is one thing, relative success another. Relative success may take place under the most diverse conditions ; 156 ON TRANSLATING HOMER and it is in appreciating the good in even relative success, it is in taking into account the change of circumstances, that the critic's judgment is tested, that his versatility must display itself. He is to keep his idea of the best, of per- fection, and at the same time to be willingly accessible to every second best which offers itself. So I enjoy the ease and beauty of Mr. Spedding's stanza, Therewith to all the gods in order due . . . I welcome it, in the absence of equally good poetry in another metre, 1 although I still think the stanza unfit to 1 As I welcome another more recent attempt in stanza, Mr. Worsley's version of the Odyssey in Spenser's measure, Mr. Worsley does me the honour to notice some remarks of mine on this measure : I had said that its greater intricacy made it a worse measure than even the ten-syllable couplet to employ for rendering Homer. He points out, in answer, that ' the more complicated the correspondences in a poetical measure, the less obtrusive and absolute are the rhymes.' This is true, and subtly remarked ; but I never denied that the single shocks of rhyme in the couplet were more strongly fell than those in the stanza ; I said that the more frequent recurrence of the same rhyme, in the stanza, necessarily made this measure more intricate. The stanza repacks Homer's matter yet more arbitrarily, and therefore changes his movement yet more radically, than the couplet. Ac- cordingly, I imagine a nearer approach to a perfect translation of Homer is possible in the couplet, well managed, than in the stanza, however well managed. Hut meanwhile Mr. Worsley, applying the Spenserian stanza, that beautiful romantic measure, to the most romantic poem of the ancient world ; making this stanza yield him, too (what it never yielded to I'.yron), its treasures of fluidity and sweet ease ; above all, bringing to his task a truly poetical sense and skill, OX TRANSLATING HOMER 157 render Homer thoroughly well, although I still think other metres fit to render him better. So I concede to Mr. Spedding that every form of translation, prose or verse, must more or less break up Homer in order to reproduce him ; but then I urge that that form which needs to break him up least is to be preferred. So I concede to him that the test proposed by me for the translator a competent scholar's judgment whether the translation more or less reproduces for him the effect of the original is not per- feqtly satisfactory ; but I adopt it as the best we can get, as the only test capable of being really applied ; for Mr. Spedding's proposed substitute the translations making the same effect, more or less, upon the unlearned which the original makes upon the scholar is a test which can never really be applied at all. These two impressions that of the scholar, and that of the unlearned reader can, practically, never be accurately compared ; they are, and must remain, like those lines we read of in Kuclid, which, though produced ever so far, can never meet. So, again, 1 concede that a good verse-translation of Homer, or, indeed, of any poet, is very difficult, and that a good prose-translation has produced a version of (lie O<fys*i-y much the most pleasing of those hitherto produced, and which is delightful to read. Kor the public this may well IK- enough, nay, more than enough ; but for the critic even this is not yet quite enough. 158 ON TRANSLATING HOMER is much easier ; but then I urge that a verse-translation, while giving the pleasure which Pope's has given, might at the same time render Homer more faithfully than Pope's ; and that this being possible, we ought not to cease wishing for a source of pleasure which no prose-translation can ever hope to rival. Wishing for such a verse-translation of Homer, believing that rhythms have natural tendencies which, within certain limits, inevitably govern them ; having little faith, therefore, that rhythms which have manifested tendencies utterly un- Homeric can so change themselves as to become well adapted for rendering Homer, I have looked about for the rhythm which seems to depart least from the tendencies of Homer's rhythm. Such a rhythm I think may be found in the English hexameter, somewhat modified. I look with hope towards continued attempts at perfecting and employ- ing this rhythm ; but my belief in the immediate success of such attempts is far less confident than has been supposed. 15etween the recognition of this rhythm as ideally the best, and the recommendation of it to the translator for instant practical use, there must come all that consideration of circumstances, all that pliancy in foregoing, under the pres- sure of certain difficulties, the absolute best, which I have said is so indispensable to the critic. The hexameter is, comparatively, still unfamiliar in England ; many people 159 have a great dislike to it. A certain degree of unfamiliarity, a certain degree of dislike, are obstacles with which it is not wise to contend. It is difficult to say at present whether the dislike to this rhythm is so strong and so wide-spread that it will prevent its ever becoming thoroughly familiar. I think not, but it is too soon to decide. I am inclined to think that the dislike of it is rather among the profes- sional critics than among the general public ; I think the reception which Mr. Longfellow's Evangcline has met with indicates this. I think that even now, if a version of the Iliad in English hexameters were made by a poet who, like Mr. Longfellow, has that indefinable quality which renders him popular, -something attractive in his talent, which communicates itself to his verses, it would have a great success among the general public. Yet a version of Homer in hexameters of the Evangeline type would not satisfy the judicious, nor is the definite establishment of this type to be desired ; and one would regret that Mr. Longfellow should, even to popularise the hexameter, give the immense labour required for a translation of Homer, when one could not wish his work to stand. Rather it is to be wished that by the efforts of poets like Mr. Longfellow in original poetry, and the efforts of less distinguished poets in the task of translation, the hexameter may gradually be made familiar to the ear of the English public ; at the same time 160 ON TRANSLATING HOMER that there gradually arises, out of all these efforts, an improved type of this rhythm ; a type which some man of genius may sign with the final stamp, and employ in render- ing Homer ; a hexameter which may be as superior to Vosse's as Shakspeare's blank verse is superior to Schiller's. I am inclined to believe that all this travail will actually take place, because I believe that modern poetry is actually in want of such an instrument as the hexameter. In the meantime, whether this rhythm be destined to success or not, let us steadily keep in mind what originally made us turn to it. We turned to it because we required certain Homeric characteristics in a translation of Homer, and because all other rhythms seemed to find, from different causes, great difficulties in satisfying this our requirement. If the hexameter is impossible, if one of these other rhythms must be used, let us keep this rhythm always in mind of our requirements and of its own faults, let us compel it to get rid of these latter as much as possible. It may be necessary to have recourse to blank verse ; but then blank verse must de-Coivpcrisc itself, must get rid of the habits of stiff self- retardation which make it say ' Not fewer shone,' for 'So many sho/tc? Homer moves swiftly: blank verse uin move swiftly if it likes, but it must remember that the movement of such lines as A thousand fires were burning, and l>y e.ich . . . ON TRANSLATING HOMER 161 is just the slow movement which makes us despair of it. Homer moves with noble ease : blank verse must not be suffered to forget that the movement of Came they not over from sweet Lacedremon . . . is ungainly. Homer's expression of his thought is simple as light : we know how blank verse affects such locutions as While the steeds mouthed their corn aloof . . . and such modes of expressing one's thought are sophisticated and artificial. One sees how needful it is to direct incessantly the English translator's attention to the essential characteristics of Homer's poetry, when so accomplished a person as Mr. Spedding, recognising these characteristics as indeed Homer's, admitting them to be essential, is led by the in- grained habits and tendencies of English blank verse thus repeatedly to lose sight of them in translating even a few lines. One sees this yet more clearly, when Mr. Spedding, taking me to task for saying that the blank verse used for rendering Homer ' must not be Mr. Tennyson's blank verse,' declares that in most of Mr. Tennyson's blank verse all Homer's essential characteristics 'rapidity of movement, plainness of words and style, simplicity and directness of ideas, and, above all, nobleness of manner arc as conspicuous as in Homer himself.' This shows, it seems to me, how hard it 1 62 ON TRANSLATING HOMER is for English readers of poetry, even the most accomplished, to feel deeply and permanently what Greek plainness of thought and Greek simplicity of expression really are : they admit the importance of these qualities in a general way, but they have no ever-present sense of them ; and they easily attribute them to any poetry which has other excellent qualities, and which they very much admire. No doubt there are plainer things in Mr. Tennyson's poetry than the three lines I quoted ; in choosing them, as in choosing a specimen of ballad-poetry, I wished to bring out clearly, by a strong instance, the qualities of thought and style to which I was calling attention ; but when Mr. Spedding talks of a plainness of thought like Homers, of a plainness of speech like Homer's, and says that he finds these constantly in Mr. Tennyson's poetry, I answer that these I do not find there at all. Mr. Tennyson is a most distinguished and charming poet ; but the very essential characteristic of his poetry is, it seems to me, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborate- ness of thought, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborate- ness of expression. In the best and most characteristic productions of his genius, these characteristics are most prominent. They arc marked characteristics, as we have seen, of the Rlixabethan poets ; they arc marked, though not the essential, characteristics of Shakspeare himself. Under the influences of the nineteenth century, under wholly new conditions of thought and culture, they manifest ON TRANSLATING HOMER 163 themselves in Mr. Tennyson's poetry in a wholly new way. But they are still there. The essential bent of his poetry is towards such expressions as Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars ; O'er the sun's bright eye Drew the vast eyelid of an inky cloud ; When the caimed mountain was a shadow, sunned The world to peace again ; The fresh young captains flashed their glittering teeth, The huge lnish-lx.-arded barons heaved and blew ; He bared the knotted column of his throat, The massive square of his heroic breast, And arms on which the standing muscle sloped As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, Running too vehemently to break upon it. And this way of speaking is the least //<*///, the most un- Honieric, which can possibly be conceived. Homer presents his thought to you just as it wells from the source of his mind : Mr. Tennyson carefully distils his thought before he will part with it. Hence comes, in the expression of the thought, a heightened and elaborate air. In Homer's poetry it is all natural thoughts in natural words ; in Mr. Tenny- son's poetry it is all distilled thoughts in distilled words. Exactly this heightening and elaboration may be observed in Mr. Spedding's While the steeds mouthed their corn aloof, (an expression which might have been Mr. Tennyson's) on M 2 1 64 ON TRANSLATING HOMER which I have already commented ; and to one who is pene- trated with a sense of the real simplicity of Homer, this subtle sophistication of the thought is, I think, very per- ceptible even in such lines as these, And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy, which I have seen quoted as perfectly Homeric. Perfect simplicity can be obtained only by a genius of which perfect simplicity is an essential characteristic. So true is this, that when a genius essentially subtle, or a genius which, from whatever cause, is in its essence not truly and broadly simple, determines to be perfectly plain, determines not to admit a shade of subtlety or curiosity into its expression, it cannot ever then attain real simplicity ; it can only attain a semblance of simplicity. 1 French criticism, richer in its vocabulary than ours, has invented a useful word to distinguish this semblance (often very beautiful and valuable) from the real quality. The real quality it calls simplicity the semblance simplcsse. The one is natural simplicity, the other is artificial simplicity. What 1 I speak of poetic genius as employing itself upon narrative or dramatic poetry, poetry in which the poet has to go out of himself and to create. In lyrical poetry, in the direct expression of personal feeling, the most subtle genius may, under the momentary pressure of passion, express itself simply. Even here, however, the nati% - c tendency will generally be discernible. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 165 is called simplicity in the productions of a genius essentially not simple, is, in truth, simplesse. The two are distinguish- able from one another the moment they appear in company. For instance, let us take the opening of the narrative in Wordsworth's Michael ': Upon the forest-side in Grnsmcre Yale There dwelt a shepherd, Michael was his name ; An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb. lli> Ixxlily frame had been from youth to age ( )f an unusual strength ; his mind was keen, Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs ; And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt And watchful more than ordinary men. Now let us take the opening of the narrative in Mr. Tenny- son's Dora : \Vith Farmer Allan at the farm al.de William and Dora. William was his son, And she his niece. lie often looked at them. And often thought, ' I'll make them man and wife.' The simplicity of the first of these passages is simplicitc ; that of the second, si/ti/>/t-ssi: I.ct us take the end of the same two poems : first, of Michael : The cottnge which was named the Fvcning Star Is gone, the ploughshare has been through the ground On which it stood ; great changes have been wrought In all the neighbourhood : yet the oak is left That grew beside their door : and the remains Of the unfinished sheepfold may be seen Boide the boisterous brook of Green-head C.hyll. 1 66 ON TRANSLATING HOMER And now, of Dora : So those four abode Within one house together ; and as years Went forward, Mary took another mate : But Dora lived unmarried till her death. A heedless critic may call both of these passages simple if he will. Simple, in a certain sense, they both are ; but between the simplicity of the two there is all the difference that there is between the simplicity of Homer and the simplicity of Moschus. But whether the hexameter establish itself or not, whether a truly simple and rapid blank verse be obtained or not, as the vehicle for a standard English translation of Homer I feel sure that this vehicle will not be furnished by the ballad form. On this question about the ballad- character of Homer's poetry, I see that Professor Blackie proposes a compromise : he suggests that those who say Homer's poetry is pure ballad-poetry, and those who deny that it is ballad-poetry at all, should split the difference between them ; that it should be agreed that Homer's poems are ballads a /////<, but not so much as some have said. 1 am very sensible to the courtesy of the terms in which Mr. Blackie invites me to this compromise ; but I cannot, I am sorry to say, accept it ; I cannot allow that Homer's poetry is ballad-poetry at all. A want of capacity for sustained nobleness seems to me inherent in the ballad- ON TRANSLATING HOMER 167 form when employed for epic poetry. The more we examine this proposition, the more certain, I think, will it become to us. Let us but observe how a great poet, having to deliver a narrative very weighty and serious, instinctively shrinks from the ballad-form as from a form not commensurate with his subject-matter, a form too narrow and shallow for it, and seeks for a form which has more amplitude and impressiveness. Every one knows the Lucy Gray and the Ruth of Wordsworth. Both poems are excellent ; but the subject-matter of the narrative of Ruth is much more weighty and impressive to the poet's own feeling than that of the narrative of Lucy Gray, for which latter, in its unpretending simplicity, the ballad-form is quite adequate. Wordsworth, at the time he composed Ruth, his great time, his annus tniralnlis, about 1800, strove to be simple ; it was his mission to be simple ; he loved the ballad-form, he clung to it, because it was simple. Even in Ruth he tried, one may say, to use it ; he would have used it if he could : but the gravity of his matter is too much for this somewhat slight form ; he is obliged to give to his form more amplitude, more augustness, to shake out its folds. The wretched parents all that night Went shouting far and wide ; 15ut there was neither sound nor sight To serve them for a guide. 1 68 ON TRANSLATING HOMER That is beautiful, no doubt, and the form is adequate to the subject-matter. But take this, on the other hand : I, too, have passed her on the hills, Setting her little water-mills By spouts and fountains wild ; Such small machinery as she turned, Ere she had wept, ere she had mourned, A young and happy child. Who does not perceive how the greater fulness and weight of his matter has here compelled the true and feeling poet to adopt a form of more volume than the simple ballad- form ? It is of narrative poetry that I am speaking ; the ques- tion is about the use of the ballad-form for this. I say that for this poetry (when in the grand style, as Homer's is) the ballad-form is entirely inadequate ; and that Homer's trans- lator must not adopt it, because it even leads him, by its own weakness, away from the grand style rather than towards it. We must remember that the matter of narrative poetry stands in a different relation to the vehicle which conveys it, is not so independent of this vehicle, so ab- sorbing and powerful in itself, - as the matter of purely emo- tional poetry. When there comes in poetry what I may call the lyrical cry, this transfigures everything, makes everything grand ; the simplest form may be here even an advantage, because the flame of the emotion glows through and through ON TRANSLATING HOMER 169 it more easily. To go again for an illustration to Words- worth ; our great poet, since Milton, by his performance, as Keats, I think, is our great poet by his gift and promise ; in one of his stanzas to the Cuckoo, we have : And I can listen to thec yet ; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do 1>eget That golden time again. Here the lyrical cry, though taking the simple ballad-form, is as grand as the lyrical cry coming in poetry of an ampler form, as grand as the An innocent life, yet far astray ! of Ruth ; as the There is a comfort in the strength of love of Michncl. In this way, by the occurrence of this lyrical cry, the ballad- poets themselves rise sometimes, though not so often as one might perhaps have hoped, to the grand style. () l.uig, lang may their ladies sit, \Vi' their fans into I heir hand, Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spence Come sxiling to the land. O lang, lang may the ladies stand, \\Y their gold Comhs in their hair, Waiting for their ain dear lords, Kor they'll sec them nae mair. i;o ON TRANSLATING HOMER But from this impressiveness of the ballad-form, when its subject-matter fills it over and over again, is, indeed, in itself, all in all, one must not infer its effectiveness when its subject-matter is not thus overpowering, in the great body of a narrative. But, after all, Homer is not a better poet than the balladists, because he has taken in the hexameter a better instrument ; he took this instrument because he was a different poet from them ; so different, nut only so much better, but so essentially different, that he is not to be classed with them at all. Poets receive their distinctive character, not from their subject, but from their application to that subject of the ideas (to quote the Excursion) On God, on Nature, and on human life, which they have acquired for themselves. In the ballad- poets in general, as in men of a rude and early stage of the world, in whom their humanity is not yet variously and fully developed, the stock of these ideas is scanty, and the ideas themselves not very effective or profound. From them the narrative itself is the great matter, not the spirit and signifi- cance which underlies the narrative. Even in later times of richly developed life and thought, poets appear who have what may be called a balladisfs mind in whom a fresh and lively curiosity for the outward spectacle of the world is ON TRANSLATING HOMER 171 much more strong than their sense of the inward significance of that spectacle. When they apply ideas to their narrative of human events, you feel that they are, so to speak, travel- ling out of their own province : in the best of them you feel this perceptibly, but in those of a lower order you feel it very strongly. Even Sir Walter Scott's efforts of this kind, even, for instance, the Breathes there the man with soul so dead, or the O woman ! in our hours of case, even these leave, I think, as high pot-try, much to be desired ; far more than the same poet's descriptions of a hunt or a battle. 15ut Lord Macaulay's Then out spake brave Horalius, The captain of the gate : ' To all the men upon this earth Death cometh soon or late,' (and here, since I have been reproached with undervaluing Lord Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, let me frankly say that, to my mind, a man's power to detect the ring of false metal in those I~iys is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all), I say, Lord Macaulay's To all the men upon this earth Death cometh soon or late, it is hard to read without a cry of pain. But with Homer it 1/2 is very different. This 'noble barbarian,' this 'savage with the lively eye,' whose verse, Mr. Newman thinks, would affect us, if we could hear the living Homer, ' like an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast,' is never more at home, never more nobly himself, than in applying profound ideas to his narrative. As a poet he belongs narrative as is his poetry, and early as is his date to an incomparably more developed spiritual and intellectual order than the balladists, or than Scott and Macaulay ; he is here as much to be distinguished from them, and in the same way, as Milton is to be distinguished from them. He is, indeed, rather to be classed with Milton than with the balladists and Scott ; for what he has in common with Milton the noble and profound application of ideas to life - is the most essential part of poetic greatness. The most essentially grand and characteristic things of Homer are such things as crA?)!/ 5', ol ' UUTTW TIV tfnx.Oomo'i /fyoros aAAos, avSpbs iraiOu<l>6i'mo TTHTI OTII/J.U. x*^p' opiytaOm, 1 or as Kal IT*, ")fpov t T<> nplv /j.<v dxoi'o/ntf oA/Sioi' t(ai,-' 1 ' Ami I have endured the like whereof no soul upon the earth hath yet endured to carry to my lips the hand of him who slew my child.' Iliad, xxiv. 505. '-' ' Nay and thou too, old man, in limes past wert, as we hear, happy.'-- Iliad, xxiv. 543. In the original this line, for mingled pathos and dignity, is perhaps without a rival even in Homer. ON TRANSLATING HOMER 173 or as >s yap littK\u(Ta.vTi> 6to\ 8ciXo?<r< ^poroiffiv, (wttv ixwutrovi avroi 8< T' acr)56j tlffiv,* and of these the tone is given, far better than by anything of the balladists, by such things as the Io no piangeva : si dcntro impictrai : I'iangcvan elli . . .'' of Dante ; or the Fall'n Cherub ! to IK; weak is miserable of Milton. I suppose I must, before I conclude, say a word or two about my own hexameters ; and yet really, on such a topic, I am almost ashamed to trouble you. From those perish- able objects I feel, I can truly say, a most Oriental detach- ment. You yourselves are witnesses how little importance, when I offered them to you, I claimed for them, how humble a function I designed them to fill. I offered them, not as specimens of a competing translation of Homer, but as illustrations of certain canons which I had been trying to establish for Homer's poetry. I said that these canons they might very well illustrate by failing as well as by 1 ' Tor so have the gods spun our destiny to us wretched mortals, - that we should live in sorrow ; hut they themselves arc without trouble.' -- Iliiiit, xxiv. 525. '/wept not : so of stone grew I within : ///^ywcpt.' Iff II, xxxiii. 49 (Carlyle's Translation, slightly altered). 174 ON TRANSLATING HOMER succeeding : if they illustrate them in any manner, I am satisfied. I was thinking of the future translator of Homer, and trying to let him see as clearly as possible what I meant by the combination of characteristics which I assigned to Homer's poetry, by saying that this poetry was at once rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct in its ideas, and noble in manner. I do not suppose that my own hexameters are rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct in their ideas, and noble in manner ; but I am in hopes that a translator, reading them with a genuine interest in his subject, and without the slightest grain of personal feeling, may see more clearly, as he reads them, what I mean by saying that Homer's poetry is all these. I am in hopes that he may be able to seize more distinctly, when he has before him my So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of the Xanthus, or my Ah, unhappy pair, to I'elcus why did we give you ? or my So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle, the exact points which I wish him to avoid in Cowper's So numerous seemed those fires the banks between, or in Pope's Unhappy coursers of immortal strain, ON TRANSLATING HOMER 175 or in Mr. Newman's He spake, and, yelling, held a-front his single hoofed horses. At the same time there may be innumerable points in mine which he ought to avoid also. Of the merit of his own compositions no composer can be admitted the judge. But thus humbly useful to the future translator I still hope my hexameters may prove ; and he it is, above all, whom one has to regard. The general public carries away little from discussions of this kind, except some vague notion that one advocates English hexameters, or that one has attacked Mr. Newman. On the mind of an adversary one never makes the faintest impression. Mr. Newman reads all one can say about diction, and his last word on the subject is, that he ' regards it as a question about to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic landis, /tount/is, /tar/is' (for lands, hounds, harts), and also 'the final en of the plural of verbs (we ddticcn, they sirtgen, etc.), which 'still subsists in I ,ancashire.' A certain critic reads all one can say about style, and at the end of it arrives at the inference that, 'after all, there is some style grander than the grand style itself, since Shakspeare has not the grand manner, and yet has the supremacy over Milton ; ' another critic reads all one can say about rhythm, and the result is, that he thinks 176 ON TRANSLATING HOMER Scott's rhythm, in the description of the death of Marmion, all the better for being saccadc, because the dying ejacula- tions of Marmion were likely to be 'jerky.' How vain to rise up early, and to take rest late, from any zeal for proving to Mr. Newman that he must not, in translating Homer, say h.ntndis and dancen ; or to the first of the two critics above quoted, that one poet may be a greater poetical force than another, and yet have a more unequal style ; or to the second, that the best art, having to represent the death of a hero, does not set about imitating his dying noises ! Such critics, however, provide for an opponent's vivacity the charming excuse offered by Rivarol for his, when he was reproached with giving offence by it : 'Ah ! ' he exclaimed, ' no one considers how much pain every man of taste has had to suffer, before he ever inflicts any.' It is for the future translator that one must work. The successful translator of Homer will have (or he cannot succeed) that true sense for his subject, and that dis- interested love of it, which are, botli of them, so rare in literature, and so precious ; he will not be led off by any false scent ; he will have an eye for the real matter, and where he thinks he may find any indication of this, no hint will be too slight for him, no shade will be too fine, no imperfections will turn him aside, he will go before his adviser's thought, and help it out with his own. This is the ON TRANSLATING HOlfER 177 sort of student that a critic of Homer should always have in his thoughts ; but students of this sort are indeed rare. And how, then, can I help being reminded what a student of this sort we have just lost in Mr. Clough, whose name I have already mentioned in these lectures? He, too, was busy with Homer ; but it is not on that account that I now speak of him. Nor do I speak of him in order to call attention to his qualities and powers in general, admirable as these were. I mention him because, in so eminent a degree, he possessed these two invaluable literary qualities, a true sense for his object of study, and a single- hearted care for it. He had both ; but he had the second even more eminently than the first. He greatly developed the first through means of the second. In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the most undivided and disinterested love for his object in itself, the greatest aver- sion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal. His interest was in literature itself; and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from all taint of littleness. In the saturnalia of ignoble personal passions, of which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled. He had not yet traduced his friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised what he despised. Those who knew him well N I ;8 ON TRANSLATING HOMER had the conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his. His poem, of which I before spoke, has some admirable Homeric qualities ; out-of-doors fresh- ness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity. Some of the ex- pressions in that poem, ' .Dangerous Corrievreckan . . . Where roads are unknown to Loch A T evishJ come back now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. But that in him of which I think oftenest is the Homeric simplicity of his literary life. THE END PKINTKD UV K AND Hi., NfcU -STKEET blJUAHE LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. WORKS BY THE LATE MATTHEW ARNOLD. PASSAGES FROM THE PROSE WRITINGS OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. Crown 8vo. 7*. 6</. CONTENTS: i. Literature. a. Politics and Society. 3. Philosophy and Religion. LAST ESSAYS ON CHURCH AND RELIGION. With a Preface. Crown 8vo. js. 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