Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice A Reply to Matthew Arnold By Francis W. Newman

It is so difficult, amid the press of literature, for a mere versifier and translator to gain notice at all, that an assailant may even do one a service, if he so conduct his assault as to enable the reader to sit in intelligent judgment on the merits of the book assailed. But when the critic deals out to the readers only so much knowledge as may propagate his own contempt of the book, he has undoubtedly immense power to dissuade them from wishing to open it. Mr Arnold writes as openly aiming at this end. He begins by complimenting me, as ‘a man of great ability and genuine learning’; but on questions of learning, as well as of taste, he puts me down as bluntly, as if he had meant, ‘a man totally void both of learning and of sagacity’. He again and again takes for granted that he has ‘the scholar’ on his side, ‘the living scholar’, the man 113who has learning and taste without pedantry. He bids me please ‘the scholars’, and go to ‘the scholars’ tribunal’; and does not know that I did this, to the extent of my opportunity, before committing myself to a laborious, expensive and perhaps thankless task. Of course he cannot guess, what is the fact, that scholars of fastidious refinement, but of a judgment which I think far more masculine than Mr Arnold’s, have passed a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of my translations. I at this moment count eight such names, though of course I must not here adduce them: nor will I further allude to it, than to say, that I have no such sense either of pride or of despondency, as those are liable to, who are consciously isolated in their taste.

Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public is the only rightful judge; and to it I wish to appeal. Even scholars collectively have no right, and much less have single scholars, to pronounce a final sentence on questions of taste in their court. Where I differ in Taste from Mr Arnold, it is very difficult to find ‘the scholars’ tribunal even if I acknowledged its absolute jurisdiction: but as regards Erudition, this difficulty does not occur, and I shall fully reply to the numerous dogmatisms by which he settles the case against me.

114But I must first avow to the reader my own moderate pretensions. Mr Arnold begins by instilling two errors which he does not commit himself to assert. He says that my work will not take rank as the standard translation of Homer, but other translations will be made: as if I thought otherwise! If I have set the example of the right direction in which translators ought to aim, of course those who follow me will improve upon me and supersede me. A man would be rash indeed to withhold his version of a poem of fifteen thousand lines, until he had, to his best ability, imparted to them all their final perfection. He might spend the leisure of his life upon it. He would possibly be in his grave before it could see the light. If it then were published, and it was founded on any new principle, there would be no one to defend it from the attacks of ignorance and prejudice. In the nature of the case, his wisdom is to elaborate in the first instance all the high and noble parts carefully, and get through the inferior parts somehow; leaving of necessity very much to be done in successive editions, if possibly it please general taste sufficiently to reach them. A generous and intelligent critic will test such a work mainly or solely by the most noble parts, and as to the rest, will consider whether the metre and style adapts itself naturally to them also.

Next, Mr Arnold asks, ‘Who is to assure 115Mr Newman, that when he has tried to retain every peculiarity of his original, 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 more practical directions than these’. The tendency of this is, to suggest to the reader that I am not aware of the difficulty of rightly applying good principles; whereas I have in this very connection said expressly, that even when a translator has got right principles, he is liable to go wrong in the detail of their application. This is as true of all the principles which Mr Arnold can possibly give, as of those which I have given; nor do I for a moment assume, that in writing fifteen thousand lines of verse I have not made hundreds of blots.

At the same time Mr Arnold has overlooked the point of my remark. Nearly every translator before me has knowingly, purposely, habitually shrunk from Homer’s thoughts and Homer’s manner. The reader will afterwards see whether Mr Arnold does not justify them in their course. It is not for those who are purposely unfaithful to taunt me with the difficulty of being truly faithful.

I have alleged, and, against Mr Arnold’s flat denial, I deliberately repeat, that Homer rises and sinks with his subject, and is often homely or prosaic. I have professed as my 116principle, to follow my original in this matter. It is unfair to expect of me grandeur in trivial passages. If in any place where Homer is confessedly grand and noble, I have marred and ruined his greatness, let me be reproved. But I shall have occasion to protest, that Stateliness is not Grandeur, Picturesqueness is not Stately, Wild Beauty is not to be confounded with Elegance: a Forest has its swamps and brushwood, as well as its tall trees.

The duty of one who publishes his censures on me is, to select noble, greatly admired passages, and confront me both with a prose translation of the original (for the public cannot go to the Greek) and also with that which he judges to be a more successful version than mine. Translation being matter of compromise, and being certain to fall below the original, when this is of the highest type of grandeur; the question is not, What translator is perfect? but, Who is least imperfect? Hence the only fair test is by comparison, when comparison is possible. But Mr Arnold has not put me to this test. He has quoted two very short passages, and various single lines, half lines and single words, from me; and chooses to tell his readers that I ruin Homer’s nobleness, when (if his censure is just) he might make them feel it by quoting me upon the most admired pieces. 117Now with the warmest sincerity I say: If any English reader, after perusing my version of four or five eminently noble passages of sufficient length, side by side with those of other translators, and (better still) with a prose version also, finds in them high qualities which I have destroyed; I am foremost to advise him to shut my book, or to consult it only (as Mr Arnold suggests) as a schoolboy’s ‘help to construe’, if such it can be. My sole object is, to bring Homer before the unlearned public: I seek no self-glorification: the sooner I am superseded by a really better translation, the greater will be my pleasure.

It was not until I more closely read Mr Arnold’s own versions, that I understood how necessary is his repugnance to mine. I am unwilling to speak of his metrical efforts. I shall not say more than my argument strictly demands. It here suffices to state the simple fact, that for awhile I seriously doubted whether he meant his first specimen for metre at all. He seems distinctly to say, he is going to give us English Hexameters; but it was long before I could believe that he had written the following for that metre:

So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus,

Between that and the ships, the Trojans’ numerous fires.

In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires: by each one

118There sate fifty men, in the ruddy light of the fire.

By their chariots stood the steeds, and champ’d the white barley,

While their masters sate by the fire, and waited for Morning.

I sincerely thought, this was meant for prose; at length the two last lines opened my eyes. He does mean them for Hexameters! ‘Fire’ ( = feuer) with him is a spondee or trochee. The first line, I now see, begins with three (quantitative) spondees, and is meant to be spondaic in the fifth foot. ‘Bed of, Between, In the’,—are meant for spondees! So are ‘There sate’, ‘By their’; though ‘Troy by the’ was a dactyl. ‘Champ’d the white’ is a dactyl. My ‘metrical exploits’ amaze Mr Arnold (p. 23); but my courage is timidity itself compared to his.

His second specimen stands thus:

And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bewailing,

And he shook his head, and thus address’d his own bosom:

Ah, unhappy pair! to Peleus why did we give you,

To a mortal? but ye are without old age and immortal.

Was it that ye with man, might have your thousands of sorrows?

For than man indeed there breathes no wretcheder creature,

Of all living things, that on earth are breathing and moving.

119Upon this he apologises for ‘To a’, intended as a spondee in the fourth line, and ‘-dress’d his own’ for a dactyl in the second; liberties which, he admits, go rather far, but ‘do not actually spoil the run of the hexameter’. In a note, he attempts to palliate his deeds by recriminating on Homer, though he will not allow to me the same excuse. The accent (it seems) on the second syllable of αἰόλος makes it as impure a dactyl to a Greek as ‘death-destin’d’ is to us! Mr Arnold’s erudition in Greek metres is very curious, if he can establish that they take any cognisance at all of the prose accent, or that αἰολος is quantitatively more or less of a dactyl, according as the prose accent is on one or other syllable. His ear also must be of a very unusual kind, if it makes out that ‘death-destin’d’ is anything but a downright Molossus. Write it dethdestind, as it is pronounced, and the eye, equally with the ear, decides it to be of the same type as the word persistunt. In the lines just quoted, most readers will be slow to believe, that they have to place an impetus of the voice (an ictus metricus at least) on Bétween, In´ the, Thére sate, By´ their, A´nd with, A´nd he, Tó a, Fór than, O´f all. Here, in the course of thirteen lines, composed as a specimen of style, is found the same offence nine times repeated, to say nothing here of other deformities. Now contrast Mr Arnold’s 120severity against me^[35], p. 87: ‘It is a real fault when Mr Newman has:

Infátuáte! óh that thou wért | lord to some other army—

for here the reader is required, not for any special advantage to himself, but simply to save Mr Newman trouble, to place the accent on the insignificant word wert, where it has no business whatever’. Thus to the flaw which Mr Arnold admits nine times in thirteen pattern lines, he shows no mercy in me, who have toiled through fifteen thousand. Besides, on wert we are free at pleasure to place or not to place the accent; but in Mr Arnold’s Bétween, Tó a, etc., it is impossible or offensive.

To avoid a needlessly personal argument, I enlarge on the general question of hexameters. Others, scholars of repute, have given example and authority to English hexameters. As matter of curiosity, as erudite sport, such experiments may have their value. I do not mean to express indiscriminate disapproval, much less contempt. I have myself privately tried the same in Alcaics; and find the chief objection to be, not that the task is impossible, but that to execute it well is too difficult for a language like ours, overladen with consonants, and abounding with syllables 121neither distinctly long nor distinctly short, but of every intermediate length. Singing to a tune was essential to keep even Greek or Roman poetry to true time; to the English language it is of tenfold necessity. But if time is abandoned (as in fact it always is), and the prose accent has to do duty for the ictus metricus, the moral genius of the metre is fundamentally subverted. What previously was steady duplicate time (‘march-time’, as Professor Blackie calls it) vacillates between duplicate and triplicate. With Homer, a dactyl had nothing in it more tripping than a spondee: a crotchet followed by two quavers belongs to as grave an anthem as two crotchets. But Mr Arnold himself (p. 55) calls the introduction of anapæsts by Dr Maginn into our ballad measure, ‘a detestable dance’: as in:

And scarcely hád shĕ bĕgún to wash,

Ere shé wăs ăwáre ŏf thĕ grisly gash.

I will not assert that this is everywhere improper in the Odyssey; but no part of the Iliad occurs to me in which it is proper, and I have totally excluded it in my own practice. I notice it but once in Mr Gladstone’s specimens, and it certainly offends my taste as out of harmony with the gravity of the rest, viz.

My ships shall bound ĭn thĕ morning’s light.

In Shakspeare we have i’th’ and o’th’ for 122monosyllables, but (so scrupulous am I in the midst of my ‘atrocities’) I never dream of such a liberty myself, much less of avowed ‘anapæsts’. So far do I go in the opposite direction, as to prefer to make such words as Danai, victory three syllables, which even Mr Gladstone and Pope accept as dissyllabic. Some reviewers have called my metre lege solutum; which is as ridiculous a mistake as Horace made concerning Pindar. That, in passing. But surely Mr Arnold’s severe blow at Dr Maginn rebounds with double force upon himself.

To Péleus whý dĭd wĕ gíve you?—

Hécŭbă’s griéf nor Príăm my fáther’s—

Thoúsănds ŏf sórrows—

cannot be a less detestable jig than that of Dr Maginn. And this objection holds against every accentual hexameter, even to those of Longfellow or Lockhart, if applied to grand poetry. For bombast, in a wild whimsical poem, Mr Clough has proved it to be highly appropriate; and I think, the more ‘rollicking’ is Mr Clough (if only I understand the word) the more successful his metre. Mr Arnold himself feels what I say against ‘dactyls’, for on this very ground he advises largely superseding them by spondees; and since what he calls a spondee is any pair of syllables of which the former is accentuable, his precept amounts to this, that the hexameter be converted into a line of six accentual trochees, with 123free liberty left of diversifying it, in any foot except the last, by Dr Maginn’s ‘detestable dance’. What more severe condemnation of the metre is imaginable than this mere description gives? ‘Six trochees’ seems to me the worst possible foundation for an English metre. I cannot imagine that Mr Arnold will give the slightest weight to this, as a judgment from me; but I do advise him to search in Samson Agonistes, Thalaba, Kehama, and Shelley’s works, for the phenomenon.

I have elsewhere insisted, but I here repeat, that for a long poem a trochaic beginning of the verse is most unnatural and vexatious in English, because so large a number of our sentences begin with unaccented syllables, and the vigour of a trochaic line eminently depends on the purity of its initial trochee. Mr Arnold’s feeble trochees already quoted (from Bétween to Tó a) are all the fatal result of defying the tendencies of our language.

If by a happy combination any scholar could compose fifty such English hexameters, as would convey a living likeness of the Virgilian metre, I should applaud it as valuable for initiating schoolboys into that metre: but there its utility would end. The method could not be profitably used for translating Homer or Virgil, plainly because it is impossible to say for whose service such a translation would be executed. Those 124who can read the original will never care to read through any translation; and the unlearned look on all, even the best hexameters, whether from Southey, Lockhart or Longfellow, as odd and disagreeable prose. Mr Arnold deprecates appeal to popular taste: well he may! yet if the unlearned are to be our audience, we cannot defy them. I myself, before venturing to print, sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would 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; but I well know that this is quite insufficient to establish the merits of a translation. It is nevertheless one point. ‘Homer is popular’, is one of the very few matters of fact in this controversy on which Mr Arnold and I are agreed. ‘English hexameters are not popular’, is a truth so obvious, that I do not yet believe he will deny it. Therefore, ‘Hexameters are not the metre for translating Homer’. Q. E. D.

I cannot but think that the very respectable scholars who pertinaciously adhere to the notion that English hexameters have something ‘epical’ in them, have no vivid feeling of the difference between Accent and Quantity: and this is the less wonderful, since so very few persons have ever actually heard quantitative verse. I have; by 125listening to Hungarian poems, read to me by my friend Mr Francis Pulszky, a native Magyar. He had not finished a single page, before I complained gravely of the monotony. He replied: ‘So do we complain of it’: and then showed me, by turning the pages, that the poet cut the knot which he could not untie, by frequent changes of his metre. Whether it was a change of mere length, as from Iambic senarian to Iambic dimeter; or implied a fundamental change of time, as in music from common to minuet time; I cannot say. But, to my ear, nothing but a tune can ever save a quantitative metre from hideous monotony. It is like strumming a piece of very simple music on a single note. Nor only so; but the most beautiful of anthems, after it has been repeated a hundred times on a hundred successive verses, begins to pall on the ear. How much more would an entire book of Homer, if chanted at one sitting! I have the conviction, though I will not undertake to impart it to another, that if the living Homer could sing his lines to us, they would at first move in us the same pleasing interest as an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast; but that, after hearing twenty lines, we should complain of meagreness, sameness, and loss of moral expression; and should judge the style to be as inferior to our own oratorical metres, as the music of Pindar to our third-rate 126modern music. But if the poet, at our request, instead of singing the verses, read or spoke them, then from the loss of well-marked time and the ascendency reassumed by the prose-accent, we should be as helplessly unable to hear any metre in them, as are the modern Greeks.

I expect that Mr Arnold will reply to this, that he reads and does not sing Homer, and yet he finds his verses to be melodious and not monotonous. To this, I retort, that he begins by wilfully pronouncing Greek falsely, according to the laws of Latin accent, and artificially assimilating the Homeric to the Virgilian line. Virgil has compromised between the ictus metricus and the prose accent, by exacting that the two coincide in the two last feet and generally forbidding it in the second and third foot. What is called the ‘feminine cæsura’ gives (in the Latin language) coincidence on the third foot. Our extreme familiarity with these laws of compromise enables us to anticipate recurring sounds and satisfies our ear. But the Greek prose accent, by reason of oxytons and paroxytons, and accent on the ante-penultima in spite of a long penultima, totally resists all such compromise; and proves that particular form of melody, which our scholars enjoy in Homer, to be an unhistoric imitation of Virgil.

I am aware, there is a bold theory, whispered if not published, that,—so out-and-out 127Æolian was Homer,—his laws of accent must have been almost Latin. According to this, Erasmus, following the track of Virgil blindly, has taught us to pronounce Euripides and Plato ridiculously ill, but Homer, with an accuracy of accent which puts Aristarchus to shame. This is no place for discussing so difficult a question. Suffice it to say, first, that Mr Arnold cannot take refuge in such a theory, since he does not admit that Homer was antiquated to Euripides; next, that admitting the theory to him, still the loss of the Digamma destroys to him the true rhythm of Homer. I shall recur to both questions below. I here add, that our English pronunciation even of Virgil often so ruins Virgil’s own quantities, that there is something either of delusion or of pedantry in our scholars’ self-complacency in the rhythm which they elicit.

I think it fortunate for Mr Arnold, that he had not ‘courage to translate Homer’; for he must have failed to make it acceptable to the unlearned. But if the public ear prefers ballad metres, still (Mr Arnold assumes) ‘the scholar’ is with him in this whole controversy. Nevertheless it gradually comes out that neither is this the case, but he himself is in the minority. P. 110, he writes: ‘When one observes the boistering, rollicking way in which Homer’s English admirers—even men of genius, like the late Professor Wilson—love to talk of 128Homer and his poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no very deep community of nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm.’ It does not occur to Mr Arnold that the defect of perception lies with himself, and that Homer has more sides than he has discovered. He deplores that Dr Maginn, and others whom he names, err with me, in believing that our ballad-style is the nearest approximation to that of Homer; and avows that ‘it is time to say plainly’ (p. 46) that Homer is not of the ballad-type. So in p. 45, ‘—this popular, but, it is time to say, this erroneous analogy’ between the ballad and Homer. Since it is reserved for Mr Arnold to turn the tide of opinion; since it is a task not yet achieved, but remains to be achieved by his authoritative enunciation; he confesses that hitherto I have with me the suffrage of scholars. With this confession, a little more diffidence would be becoming, if diffidence were possible to the fanaticism with which he idolises hexameters. P. 88, he says: ‘The hexameter has a natural dignity, which repels both the jaunty style and the jog-trot style, etc.... The translator who uses it cannot too religiously follow the INSPIRATION OF HIS METRE’ etc. Inspiration from a metre which has no recognised type? from a metre which the heart and soul of the nation ignores? I believe, if the metre can inspire anything, it is to frolic and gambol 129with Mr Clough. Mr Arnold’s English hexameter cannot be a higher inspiration to him, than the true hexameter was to a Greek: yet that metre inspired strains of totally different essential genius and merit.

But I claim Mr Arnold himself as confessing that our ballad metre is epical, when he says that Scott is ‘bastard-epic’. I do not admit that his quotations from Scott are all Scott’s best, nor anything like it; but if they were, it would only prove something against Scott’s genius or talent, nothing about his metre. The Κύπρια ἔπη or Ἰλίου πέρσις were probably very inferior to the Iliad; but no one would on that account call them or the Frogs and Mice bastard-epic. No one would call a bad tale of Dryden or of Crabbe bastard-epic. The application of the word to Scott virtually concedes what I assert. Mr Arnold also calls Macaulay’s ballads ‘pinchbeck’; but a man needs to produce something very noble himself, before he can afford thus to sneer at Macaulay’s ‘Lars Porsena’.

Before I enter on my own ‘metrical exploits’, I must get rid of a disagreeable topic. Mr Arnold’s repugnance to them has led him into forms of attack, which I do not know how to characterize. I shall state my complaints as concisely as I can, and so leave them.

1. I do not seek for any similarity of sound in an English accentual metre to that 130of a Greek quantitative metre; besides that Homer writes in a highly vocalized tongue, while ours is overfilled with consonants. I have disowned this notion of similar rhythm in the strongest terms (p. xvii of my Preface), expressly because some critics had imputed this aim to me in the case of Horace. I summed up: ‘It is not audible sameness of metre, but a likeness of moral genius which is to be aimed at’. I contrast the audible to the moral. Mr Arnold suppresses this contrast, and writes as follows, p. 34. Mr Newman tells us that he has found a metre like in moral genius to Homer’s. His judge has still the same answer: reproduce THEN on our ear something of ‘the effect produced by the movement of Homer’. He recurs to the same fallacy in p. 57. ‘For whose EAR do those two rhythms produce impressions of (to use Mr Newman’s own words) “similar moral genius”’? His reader will naturally suppose that ‘like in moral genius’ is with me an eccentric phrase for ‘like in musical cadence’. The only likeness to the ear which I have admitted, is, that the one and the other are primitively made for music. That, Mr Arnold knows, is a matter of fact, whether a ballad be well or ill written. If he pleases, he may hold the rhythm of our metre to be necessarily inferior to Homer’s and to his own; but when I fully explained in my preface what were my tests of ‘like 131moral genius’, I cannot understand his suppressing them, and perverting the sense of my words.

2. In p. 52, Mr Arnold quotes Chapman’s translation of ἆ δείλω, ‘Poor wretched beasts’ (of Achilles’ horses), on which he comments severely. He does not quote me. Yet in p. 100, after exhibiting Cowper’s translation of the same passage, he adds: ‘There is no want of dignity here, as in the versions of Chapman and of Mr Newman, which I have already quoted’. Thus he leads the reader to believe that I have the same phrase as Chapman! In fact, my translation is:

Ha! why on Peleus, mortal prince,

Bestowed we you, unhappy!

If he had done me the justice of quoting, it is possible that some readers would not have thought my rendering intrinsically ‘wanting in dignity’, or less noble than Mr Arnold’s own, which is:

Ah! unhappy pair! to Peleus^[36] why did we give you,

To a mortal?

In p. 52, he with very gratuitous insult remarks, that ‘Poor wretched beasts’ is a little over-familiar; but this is no objection to it for the ballad-manner^[37]: it is good 132enough ... for Mr Newman’s Iliad, ... etc.’ Yet I myself have not thought it good enough for my Iliad.

3. In p. 107, Mr Arnold gives his own translation of the discourse between Achilles and his horse; and prefaces it with the words, ‘I will take the passage in which both Chapman and Mr Newman have already so much excited our astonishment’. But he did not quote my translation of the noble part of the passage, consisting of 19 lines; he has merely quoted^[38] the tail of it, 5 lines; which are altogether inferior. Of this a sufficient indication is, that Mr Gladstone has translated the 19 and omitted the 5. I shall below give my translation parallel to Mr Gladstone’s. The curious reader may compare it with Mr Arnold’s, if he choose.

4. In p. 102, Mr Arnold quotes from Chapman as a translation of ὅταν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ιλιος ἱρὴ,

‘When sacred Troy shall shed her tow’rs for tears of overthrow’;

and adds: ‘What Mr Newman’s manner of rendering would be, you can by this time sufficiently imagine for yourselves’. 133Would be! Why does he set his readers to ‘imagine’, when in fewer words he could tell them what my version is? It stands thus:

A day, when sacred Ilium | for overthrow is destin’d,—

which may have faults unperceived by me, but is in my opinion far better than Mr Arnold’s, and certainly did not deserve to be censured side by side with Chapman’s absurdity. I must say plainly; a critic has no right to hide what I have written, and stimulate his readers to despise me by these indirect methods.

I proceed to my own metre. It is exhibited in this stanza of Campbell:

By this the storm grew loud apace:

The waterwraith was shrieking,

And in the scowl of heav’n each face

Grew dark as they were speaking.

Whether I use this metre well or ill, I maintain that it is essentially a noble metre, a popular metre, a metre of great capacity. It is essentially the national ballad metre, for the double rhyme is an accident. Of course it can be applied to low, as well as to high subjects; else it would not be popular: it would not be ‘of a like moral genius’ to the Homeric metre, which was available equally for the comic poem Margites, for the precepts of Pythagoras, for the pious prosaic hymn of Cleanthes, 134for the driest prose of a naval catalogue^[39], in short, for all early thought. Mr Arnold appears to forget, though he cannot be ignorant, that prose-composition is later than Homer, and that in the epical days every initial effort at prose history was carried on in Homeric doggerel by the Cyclic poets, who traced the history of Troy ab ovo in consecutive chronology. I say, he is merely inadvertent, he cannot be ignorant, that the Homeric metre, like my metre, subserves prosaic thought with the utmost facility; but I hold it to be, not indavertence, but blindness, when he does not see that Homer’s τὸν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος is a line of as thoroughly unaffected oratio pedestris as any verse of Pythagoras or Horace’s Satires. 135But on diction I defer to speak, till I have finished the topic of metre.

I do not say that any measure is faultless. Every measure has its foible: mine has that fault which every uniform line must have; it is liable to monotony. This is evaded of course, as in the hexameter or rather as in Milton’s line, first, by varying the cæsura, secondly, by varying certain feet, within narrow and well understood limits, thirdly, by irregularity in the strength of accents, fourthly, by varying the weight of the unaccented syllables also. All these things are needed, for the mere sake of breaking uniformity. I will not here assert that Homer’s many marvellous freedoms, such as ἑκηβόλου Ἀπόλλωνος, were dictated by this aim, like those in the Paradise Lost; but I do say, that it is most unjust, most unintelligent, in critics, to produce single lines from me, and criticize them as rough or weak, instead of examining them and presenting them as part of a mass. How would Shakspeare stand this sort of test? nay, or Milton? The metrical laws of a long poem cannot be the same as of a sonnet: single verses are organic elements of a great whole. A crag must not be cut like a gem. Mr Arnold should remember Aristotle’s maxim, that popular eloquence (and such is Homer’s) should be broad, rough and highly coloured, like scene painting, not polished into delicacy like miniature. 136But I speak now of metre, not yet of diction. In any long and popular poem it is a mistake to wish every line to conform severely to a few types; but to claim this of a translator of Homer is a doubly unintelligent exaction, when Homer’s own liberties transgress all bounds; many of them being feebly disguised by later double spellings, as εἵως, εἷος, invented for his special accommodation.

The Homeric verse has a rhythmical advantage over mine in less rigidity of cæsura. Though the Hexameter was made out of two Doric lines, yet no division of sense, no pause of the voice or thought, is exacted between them. The chasm between two English verses is deeper. Perhaps, on the side of syntax, a four + three English metre drives harder towards monotony than Homer’s own verse. For other reasons, it lies under a like disadvantage, compared with Milton’s metre. The secondary cæsuras possible in the four feet are of course less numerous than those in the five feet, and the three-foot verse has still less variety. To my taste, it is far more pleasing that the short line recur less regularly; just as the parœmiac of Greek anapæsts is less pleasant in the Aristophanic tetrameter, than when it comes frequent but not expected. This is a main reason why I prefer Scott’s free metre to my own; yet, without rhyme, I have not found how to use his freedom. 137Mr Arnold wrongly supposes me to have overlooked his main and just objections to rhyming Homer; viz. that so many Homeric lines are intrinsically made for isolation. In p. ix of my Preface I called it a fatal embarrassment. But the objection applies in its full strength only against Pope’s rhymes, not against Walter Scott’s.

Mr Gladstone has now laid before the public his own specimens of Homeric translation. Their dates range from 1836 to 1859. It is possible that he has as strong a distaste as Mr Arnold for my version; for he totally ignores the archaic, the rugged, the boisterous element in Homer. But as to metre, he gives me his full suffrage. He has lines with four accents, with three, and a few with two; not one with five. On the whole, his metre, his cadences, his varying rhymes, are those of Scott. He has more trochaic lines than I approve. He is truthful to Homer on many sides; and (such is the delicate grace and variety admitted by the rhyme) his verses are more pleasing than mine. I do not hesitate to say, that if all Homer could be put before the public in the same style equally well with his best pieces, a translation executed on my principles could not live in the market at its side; and certainly I should spare my labour. I add, that I myself prefer the former piece which I quote to my own, even while I see his defects: for I hold that his graces, at 138which I cannot afford to aim, more than make up for his losses. After this confession, I frankly contrast his rendering of the two noblest passages with mine, that the reader may see, what Mr Arnold does not show, my weak and strong sides.

Gladstone, Iliad 4, 422

As when the billow gathers fast

With slow and sullen roar

Beneath the keen northwestern blast

Against the sounding shore:

First far at sea it rears its crest,

Then bursts upon the beach,

Or^[40] with proud arch and swelling breast,

Where headlands outward reach,

It smites their strength, and bellowing flings

Its silver foam afar;

So, stern and thick, the Danaan kings

And soldiers marched to war.

Each leader gave his men the word;

Each warrior deep in silence heard.

So mute they march’d, thou could’st not ken

They were a mass of speaking men:

And as they strode in martial might,

Their flickering arms shot back the light.

But as at even the folded sheep

Of some rich master stand,

Ten thousand thick their place they keep,

And bide the milkman’s hand,

And more and more they bleat, the more

They hear their lamblings cry;

So, from the Trojan host, uproar

And din rose loud and high.

139They were a many-voicèd throng:

Discordant accents there,

That sound from many a differing tongue,

Their differing race declare.

These, Mars had kindled for the fight;

Those, starry-ey’d Athenè’s might,

And savage Terror and Affright,

And Strife, insatiate of wars,

The sister and the mate of Mars:

Strife, that, a pigmy at her birth,

By gathering rumour fed,

Soon plants her feet upon the earth,

And in the heav’n her head.

I add my own rendering of the same; somewhat corrected, but only in the direction of my own principles and against Arnold’s.

As when the surges of the deep, by Western blore uphoven,

Against the ever-booming strand dash up in roll successive;

A head of waters swelleth first aloof; then under harried

By the rough bottom, roars aloud; till, hollow at the summit,

Sputtering the briny foam abroad, the huge crest tumbleth over:

So then the lines of Danaï, successive and unceasing,

In battle’s close array mov’d on. To his own troops each leader

Gave order: dumbly went the rest (nor mightèst thou discover,

So vast a train of people held a voice within their bosom),

In silence their commanders fearing: all the ranks wellmarshall’d

Were clad in crafty panoply, which glitter’d on their bodies.

140Meantime, as sheep within the yard of some great cattle-master,

While the white milk is drain’d from them, stand round in number countless,

And, grievèd by their lambs’ complaint, respond with bleat incessant;

So then along their ample host arose the Troian hurly.

For neither common words spake théy, nor kindred accent utter’d;

But mingled was the tongue of men from divers places summon’d.

By Arès these were urgèd on, those by grey-ey’d Athenè,

By Fear, by Panic, and by Strife immeasurably eager,

The sister and companion^[41] of hero-slaying Arès,

Who truly doth at first her crest but humble rear; thereafter,

Planting upon the ground her feet, her head in heaven fixeth.

Gladstone, Iliad 19, 403

Hanging low his auburn head,

Sweeping with his mane the ground,

From beneath his collar shed,

Xanthus, hark! a voice hath found,

Xanthus of the flashing feet:

Whitearm’d Herè gave the sound.

‘Lord Achilles, strong and fleet!

Trust us, we will bear thee home;

Yet cometh nigh thy day of doom:

No doom of ours, but doom that stands

By God and mighty Fate’s commands.

’Twas not that we were slow or slack

Patroclus lay a corpse, his back

All stript of arms by Trojan hands.

141The prince of gods, whom Leto bare,

Leto with the flowing hair,

He forward fighting did the deed,

And gave to Hector glory’s meed.

In toil for thee, we will not shun

Against e’en Zephyr’s breath to run,

Swiftest of winds: but all in vain:

By God and man shalt thou be slain.’

He spake: and here, his words among,

Erinnys bound his faltering tongue.

Beginning with Achilles’ speech, I render the passage parallel to Gladstone thus.

‘Chestnut and Spotted! noble pair! farfamous brood of Spry-foot!

In other guise now ponder ye your charioteer to rescue

Back to the troop of Danaï, when we have done with battle:

Nor leave him dead upon the field, as late ye left Patroclus’.

But him the dapplefooted steed under the yoke accosted;

(And droop’d his auburn head aside straightway; and through the collar,

His full mane, streaming to the ground, over the yoke was scatter’d:

Him Juno, whitearm’d goddess, then with voice Of man endowèd):

‘Now and again we verily will save and more than save thee,

Dreadful Achilles! yet for thee the deadly day approacheth.

Not ours the guilt; but mighty God and stubborn Fate are guilty.

Not by the slowness of our feet or dulness of our spirit

The Troians did thy armour strip from shoulders of Patroclus;

But the exalted god, for whom brighthair’d Latona travail’d,

142Slew him amid the foremost rank and glory gave to Hector.

Now we, in coursing, pace would keep even with breeze of Zephyr,

Which speediest they say to be: but for thyself ’tis fated

By hand of hero and of God in mighty strife to perish

So much he spake: thereat his voice the Furies stopp’d for ever.

Now if any fool ask, Why does not Mr Gladstone translate all Homer? any fool can reply with me, Because he is Chancellor of the Exchequer. A man who has talents and acquirements adequate to translate Homer well into rhyme, is almost certain to have other far more urgent calls for the exercise of such talents.

So much of metre. At length I come to the topic of Diction, where Mr Arnold and I are at variance not only as to taste, but as to the main facts of Greek literature. I had called Homer’s style quaint and garrulous; and said that he rises and falls with his subject, being prosaic when it is tame, and low when it is mean. I added no proof; for I did not dream that it was needed. Mr Arnold not only absolutely denies all this, and denies it without proof; but adds, that these assertions prove my incompetence, and account for my total and conspicuous failure. His whole attack upon my diction is grounded on a passage which I must quote at length; for it is so 143confused in logic, that I may otherwise be thought to garble it, pp. 36, 37.

‘Mr Newman speaks of the more antiquated style suited to this subject. Quaint! Antiquated! but to whom? Sir Thomas Browne is quaint, and the diction of Chaucer is antiquated: does Mr Newman suppose that Homer seemed quaint to Sophocles, as Chaucer’s diction seems antiquated to us? But we cannot really know, I confess (!!), how Homer seemed to Sophocles. Well then, to those who can tell us how he seems to them, to the living scholar, to our only present witness on this matter—does Homer make on the Provost of Eton, when he reads him, the impression of a poet quaint and antiquated! does he make this impression on Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett? When Shakspeare says, “The Princes orgulous”, meaning “the proud princes”, we say, “This is antiquated”. When he says of the Trojan gates, that they,

With massy staples

And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts

Sperr up the sons of Troy,

we say, “This is both quaint and antiquated”. But does Homer ever compose in a language, which produces on the scholar at all the same impression as this language which I have quoted from Shakspeare? Never once. Shakspeare is quaint and antiquated in the lines I have just quoted; but Shakspeare, 144need 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 or surprises us as little as the language of a contemporary. And Homer has not Shakspeare’s variations. Homer always composes, as Shakspeare composes at his best. Homer is always simple and intelligible, as Shakspeare is often; Homer is never quaint and antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes’.

If Mr Arnold were to lay before none but Oxford students assertions concerning Greek literature so startlingly erroneous as are here contained, it would not concern me to refute or protest against them. The young men who read Homer and Sophocles and Thucydides, nay, the boys who read Homer and Xenophon, would know his statements to be against the most notorious and elementary fact: and the Professors, whom he quotes, would only lose credit, if they sanctioned the use he makes of their names. But when he publishes the book for the unlearned in Greek, among whom I must include a great number of editors of magazines, I find Mr Arnold to do a public wrong to literature, and a private wrong to my book. If I am silent, such editors may easily believe that I have made an enormous blunder in treating the dialect of Homer as antiquated. If 145those who are ostensibly scholars, thus assail my version, and the great majority of magazines and reviews ignore it, its existence can never become known to the public; or it will exist not to be read, but to be despised without being opened; and it must perish as many meritorious books perish. I but lately picked up, new, and for a fraction of its price, at a second-hand stall, a translation of the Iliad by T. S. Brandreth, Esq. (Pickering, London), into Cowper’s metre, which is, as I judge, immensely superior to Cowper. Its date is 1846: I had never heard of it. It seems to have perished uncriticized, unreproved, unwept, unknown. I do not wish my progeny to die of neglect, though I am willing that it should be slain in battle. However, just because I address myself to the public unlearned in Greek, and because Mr Arnold lays before them a new, paradoxical, monstrously erroneous representation of facts, with the avowed object of staying the plague of my Homer; I am forced to reply to him.

Knowingly or unknowingly, he leads his readers to confuse four different questions: 1. whether Homer is thoroughly intelligible to modern scholars; 2. whether Homer was antiquated to the Athenians of Themistocles and Pericles; 3. whether he was thoroughly understood by them; 4. whether he is, absolutely, an antique poet.

146I feel it rather odd, that Mr Arnold begins by complimenting me with ‘genuine learning’, and proceeds to appeal from me to the ‘living scholar’. (What if I were bluntly to reply: ‘Well! I am the living scholar’?) After starting the question, how Homer’s style appeared to Sophocles, he suddenly enters a plea, under form of a concession [‘I confess’!], as a pretence for carrying the cause into a new court, that of the Provost of Eton and two Professors, into which court I have no admission; and then, of his own will, pronounces a sentence in the name of these learned men. Whether they are pleased with this parading of their name in behalf of paradoxical error, I may well doubt: and until they indorse it themselves, I shall treat Mr Arnold’s process as a piece of forgery. But, be this as it may, I cannot allow him to ‘confess’ for me against me: let him confess for himself that he does not know, and not for me, who know perfectly well, whether Homer seemed quaint or antiquated to Sophocles. Of course he did, as every beginner must know. Why, if I were to write mon for man, londis for lands, nesties for nests, libbard for leopard, muchel for much, nap for snap, green-wood shaw for greenwood shade, Mr Arnold would call me antiquated, although every word would be intelligible. Can he possibly be ignorant, that this exhibits but the smallest part of the chasm which separates the 147Homeric dialect not merely from the Attic prose, but from Æschylus when he borrows most from Homer? Every sentence of Homer was more or less antiquated 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 reading Burns’ poems. Would mon, londis, libbard, withouten, muchel be antiquated or foreign, and are Πηληϊάδαο for Πηλείδου, ὁσσάτιος for ὅσος, ἤϋτε for ὡς, στήῃ for στῇ, τεκέεσσι for τέκνοις, τοῖσδεσσι for τοῖσδε, πολέες for πολλοὶ, μεσοηγὺς for μεταξὺ, αἶα for γῆ, εἴβω for λείβω, and five hundred others, less antiquated or less foreign? Homer has archaisms in every variety; some rather recent to the Athenians, and carrying their minds back only to Solon, as βασιλῆος for βασίλεως; others harsher, yet varying as dialect still, as ξεῖνος for ξένος, τίε for ἐτίμα, ἀνθεμόεις for ἀνθηρὸς, κέκλυθι for κλύε or ἄκουσον, θαμὺς for θαμινὸς or συχνὸς, ναιετάοντες for ναίοντες or οἰκοῦντες: others varying in the root, like a new language, as ἄφενος for πλοῦτος, ἰότης for βούλημα, τῆ for δέξαι, under which head are heaps of strange words, as ἀκὴν, χώομαι, βιὸς, κῆλα, μέμβλωκε, γέντο, πέπον, etc. etc. Finally comes a goodly lot of words which to this day are most uncertain in sense. My learned colleague Mr Malden has printed a paper on Homeric words, misunderstood 148by the later poets. Buttmann has written an octavo volume (I have the English translation, containing 548 pages) to discuss 106 ill-explained Homeric words. Some of these Sophocles may have understood, though we do not; but even if so, they were not the less antiquated to him. If there has been any perfect traditional understanding of Homer, we should not need to deal with so many words by elaborate argument. On the face of the Iliad alone every learner must know how many difficult adjectives occur: I write down on the spur of the moment and without reference, κρήγυον, ἀργὸς, ἀδινὸς, ἄητος, αἴητος, νώροψ, ἦνοψ, εἰλίποδες, ἕλιξ, ἑλικῶπες, ἔλλοπες, μέροπες, ἠλίβατος, ἠλέκτωρ, αἰγίλιψ, σιγαλόεις, ἰόμωρος, ἐγχεσίμωρος, πέπονες, ἠθεῖος. If Mr Arnold thought himself wiser than all the world of Greek scholars, he would not appeal to them, but would surely enlighten us all: he would tell me, for instance, what ἔλλοπες means, which Liddell and Scott do not pretend to understand; or ἠθεῖος, of which they give three different explanations. But he does not write as claiming an independent opinion, when he flatly opposes me and sets me down; he does but use surreptitiously the name of the ‘living scholar’ against me.

But I have only begun to describe the marked chasm often separating Homer’s dialect from everything Attic. It has a 149wide diversity of grammatical inflections, far beyond such vowel changes of dialect as answer to our provincial pronunciations. This begins with new case-endings to the nouns; in -θι, -θεν, -δε, -φι, proceeds to very peculiar pronominal forms, and then to strange or irregular verbal inflections, infinitives in -μεν, -μεναι, imperfects in -εσκε, presents in -αθω, and an immensity of strange adverbs and conjunctions. In Thiersch’s Greek Grammar, after the Accidence of common Greek is added as supplement an Homeric Grammar: and in it the Homeric Noun and Verb occupy (in the English Translation) 206 octavo pages. Who ever heard of a Spenserian Grammar? How many pages could be needed to explain Chaucer’s grammatical deviations from modern English? The bare fact of Thiersch having written so copious a grammar will enable even the unlearned to understand the monstrous misrepresentation of Homer’s dialect, on which Mr Arnold has based his condemnation of my Homeric diction. Not wishing to face the plain and undeniable facts which I have here recounted, Mr Arnold makes a ‘confession’ that we know nothing about them! and then appeals to three learned men whether Homer is antiquated to them; and expounds this to mean, intelligible to them! Well: if they have learned modern Greek, of course they may understand it; but Attic Greek 150alone will not teach it to them. Neither will it teach them Homer’s Greek. The difference of the two is in some directions so vast, that they may deserve to be called two languages as much as Portuguese and Spanish.

Much as I have written, a large side of the argument remains still untouched. The orthography of Homer was revolutionized in adapting it to Hellenic use, and in the process not only were the grammatical forms tampered with, but at least one consonant was suppressed. I am sure Mr Arnold has heard of the Digamma, though he does not see it in the current Homeric text. By the re-establishment of this letter, no small addition would be made to the ‘oddity’ of the sound to the ears of Sophocles. That the unlearned in Greek may understand this, I add, that what with us is written eoika, oikon, oinos, hekas, eorga, eeipe, eleliχθη, were with the poet wewoika, wīkon, wīnos, wekas (or swekas?), weworga, eweipe, eweliχθη^[42]; and so with very many other words, in which either the metre or the grammatical formation helps us to detect a lost consonant, and the analogy of other dialects or languages assures us that it is 151w which has been lost. Nor is this all; but in certain words sw seems to have vanished. What in our text is hoi, heos, hekuros, were probably woi and swoi, weos and sweos, swekuros. Moreover the received spelling of many other words is corrupt: for instance, deos, deidoika, eddeisen, periddeisas, addees. The true root must have had the form dwe or dre or dhe. That the consonant lost was really w, is asserted by Benfey from the Sanscrit dvish. Hence the true forms are dweos, dedwoika, edweisen, etc.... Next, the initial l of Homer had in some words a stronger pronunciation, whether λλ or χλ, as in λλιταὶ, λλίσσομαι, λλωτὸς, λλιτανεύω. I have met with the opinion that the consonant lost in anax is not w but k; and that Homer’s kanax is connected with English king. The relations of wergon, weworga, wrexai, to English work and wrought must strike everyone; but I do not here press the phenomena of the Homeric r (although it became br in strong Æolism), because they do not differ from those in Attic. The Attic forms εἴληφα, εἴλεγμαι for λέληφα, etc., point to a time when the initial λ of the roots was a double letter. A root λλαβ would explain Homer’s ἔλλαβε. If λλ^[43] approached 152to its Welsh sound, that is, to χλ, it is not wonderful that such a pronunciation as οφρᾰ λλαβωμεν was possible: but it is singular that the ὕδατι χλιαρῷ of Attic is written λιαρῷ in our Homeric text, though the metre needs a double consonant. Such phenomena as χλιαρὸς and λιαρὸς, εἴβω and λειβω, ἴα and μία, εἴμαρμαι and ἔμμορε, αἶα and γαῖα, γέντο for ἕλετο, ἰωκὴ and ἴωξις with διώκω, need to be reconsidered in connection. The εἰς ἅλα ἇλτο of our Homer was perhaps εἰς ἅλα σάλλτο: when λλ was changed into λ, they compensated by circumflexing the vowel. I might add the query, Is it so certain that his θεαων was θeāwōn, and not θeārōn, analogous to Latin dearum? But dropping here everything that has the slightest uncertainty, the mere restoration of the w where it is most necessary, makes a startling addition to the antiquated sound of the Homeric text. The reciters of Homer in Athens must have dropped the w, since it is never written. Nor indeed would Sophocles have introduced in his Trachiniæ, ἁ δέ οἱ φίλα δάμαρ ... leaving a hiatus most offensive to the Attics, in mere imitation of Homer, if he had been accustomed to hear from the reciters, de woi or de swoi. In other words also, as in οὐλόμενος for ὀλόμενος, 153later poets have slavishly followed Homer into irregularities suggested by his peculiar metre. Whether Homer’s ᾱθανατος, αμμορος ... rose out of ανθάνατος, ἄνμορος ... is wholly unimportant when we remember his Ᾱπόλλωνος.

But this leads to remark on the acuteness of Mr Arnold’s ear. I need not ask whether he recites the Α differently in Ἆρες, Ἄρες, and in, Ᾰπόλλων Ᾱπολλωνος. He will not allow anything antiquated in Homer; and therefore it is certain that he recites,

αιδοιος τε μοι εσσι, φιλε εκυρε, δεινος τε

and—ουδε εοικε—

as they are printed, and admires the rhythm. When he endures with exemplary patience such hiatuses, such dactyls as ἑεκυ, ουδεε, such a spondee as ρε δει, I can hardly wonder at his complacency in his own spondees “Between,” “To a.” He finds nothing wrong in και πεδια λωτευντα or πολλα λισσομενη. But Homer sang,

φιλε swεκυρε δwεινος τε—ουδε wεwοικε—

και πεδια λλωτευντα ... πολλα λλισσομενη.

Mr Arnold is not satisfied with destroying Quantity alone. After theoretically substituting Accent for it in his hexameters, he robs us of Accent also; and presents to us the syllables “to a,” both short and both necessarily unaccented, for a Spondee, in a 154pattern piece seven lines long, and with an express and gratuitous remark, that in using ‘to a’ for a Spondee, he has perhaps relied too much on accent. I hold up these phenomena in Mr Arnold as a warning to all scholars, of the pit of delusion into which they will fall, if they allow themselves to talk fine about the ‘Homeric rhythm’ as now heard, and the duty of a translator to reproduce something of it.

It is not merely the sound and the metre of Homer, which are impaired by the loss of his radical w; in extreme cases the sense also is confused. Thus if a scholar be asked, what is the meaning of ἐείσατο in the Iliad? he will have to reply: If it stands for eweisato, it means, ‘he was like’, and is related to the English root wis and wit, Germ. wiss, Lat. vid; but it may also mean ‘he went’—a very eccentric Homerism,—in which case we should perhaps write it eyeisato, as in old English we have he yode or yede instead of he goed, gaed, since too the current root in Greek and Latin i (go) may be accepted as ye, answering to German geh, English go. Thus two words, eweisato, ‘he was like’, eyeisato, ‘he went’, are confounded in our text. I will add, that in the Homeric

—ἤϋτε wέθνεα (y)εῖσι—(Il. 2, 87)

—διὰ πρὸ δὲ (y)είσατο καὶ τῆς (Il. 4, 138)

my ear misses the consonant, though Mr 155Arnold’s (it seems) does not. If we were ordered to read dat ting in Chaucer for that thing, it would at first ‘surprise’ us as ‘grotesque’, but after this objection had vanished, we should still feel it ‘antiquated’. The confusion of thick and tick, thread and tread, may illustrate the possible effect of dropping the w in Homer. I observe that Benfey’s Greek Root Lexicon has a list of 454 digammated words, most of which are Homeric. But it is quite needless to press the argument to its full.

If as much learning had been spent on the double λ and on the y and h of Homer, as on the digamma, it might perhaps now be conceded that we have lost, not one, but three or four consonants from his text. That λ in λύω or λούω was ever a complex sound in Greek, I see nothing to indicate; hence that λ, and the λ of λιταὶ, λιαρὸς, seem to have been different consonants in Homer, as l and ll in Welsh. As to h and y I assert nothing, except that critics appear too hastily to infer, that if a consonant has disappeared, it must needs be w. It is credible that the Greek h was once strong enough to stop hiatus or elision, as the English, and much more the Asiatic h. The later Greeks, after turning the character H into a vowel, seem to have had no idea of a consonant h in the middle of a word, nor any means of writing the consonant y. Since G passes through gh into the sounds 156h, w, y, f (as in English and German is obvious), it is easy to confound them all under the compendious word ‘digamma’. I should be glad to know that Homer’s forms were as well understood by modern scholars as Mr Arnold lays down.

On his quotation from Shakspeare, I remark, 1. ‘Orgulous’, from French ‘orgueilleux’, is intelligible to all who know French, and is comparable to Sicilian words in Æschylus. 2. It is contrary to fact to say, that Homer has not words, and words in great plenty, as unintelligible to later Greeks, as ‘orgulous’ to us. 3. Sperr, for Bar, as Splash for Plash, is much less than the diversity which separates Homer from the spoken Attic. What is σμικρὸς for μικρὸς to compare with ἠβαιὸς for μικρός? 4. Mr Arnold (as I understand him) blames Shakspeare for being sometimes antiquated: I do not blame him, nor yet Homer for the same; but neither can I admit the contrast which he asserts. He says: ‘Shakspeare can compose, when he is at his best, in a language perfectly intelligible, in spite of the two centuries and a half which part him from us. Homer has not Shakspeare’s variations: he is never antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes’. I certainly find the very same variations in Homer, as Mr Arnold finds in Shakspeare. My reader unlearned in Greek might hastily infer from the facts just laid before him, that Homer 157is always equally strange to a purely Attic ear: but is not so. The dialects of Greece did indeed differ strongly, as broad Scotch from English; yet as we know, Burns is sometimes perfectly intelligible to an Englishman, sometimes quite unintelligible. In spite of Homer’s occasional wide receding from Attic speech, he as often comes close to it. For instance, in the first piece quoted above from Gladstone, the simile occupying five (Homeric) lines would almost go down in Sophocles, if the Tragedian had chosen to use the metre. There is but one out-and-out Homeric word in it (ἐπασσύτερος): and even that is used once in an Æschylean chorus. There are no strange inflections, and not a single digamma is sensibly lost. Its peculiarities are only -εϊ for ει, ἐὸν for ὂν, and δέ τε for δέ, which could not embarrass the hearer as to the sense. I myself reproduce much the same result. Thus in my translation of these five lines I have the antiquated words blore for blast, harry for harass (harrow, worry), and the antiquated participle hoven from heave, as cloven, woven from cleave, weave. The whole has thus just a tinge of antiquity, as had the Homeric passage to the Attics, without any need of aid from a Glossary. But at other times the aid is occasionally convenient, just as in Homer or Shakspeare.

Mr Arnold plays fallaciously on the words 158familiar and unfamiliar. Homer’s words may have been familiar to the Athenians (i.e. often heard), even when they were not understood, but, at most, were guessed at; or when, being understood, they were still felt and known to be utterly foreign. Of course, when thus ‘familiar’, they could not ‘surprise’ the Athenians, as Mr Arnold complains that my renderings surprise the English. Let mine be heard as Pope or even Cowper has been heard, and no one will be ‘surprised’.

Antiquated words are understood well by some, ill by others, not at all by a third class; hence it is difficult to decide the limits of a glossary. Mr Arnold speaks scornfully of me (he wonders with whom Mr Newman can have lived), that I use the words which I use, and explain those which I explain. He censures my little Glossary, for containing three words which he did not know, and some others, which, he says, are ‘familiar to all the world’. It is clear, he will never want a stone to throw at me. I suppose I am often guilty of keeping low company. I have found ladies whom no one would guess to be so ill-educated, who yet do not distinctly know what lusty means; but have an uncomfortable feeling that it is very near to lustful; and understand grisly only in the sense of grizzled, grey. Great numbers mistake the sense of Buxom, Imp, Dapper, deplorably. I no more wrote 159my Glossary than my translation for persons so highly educated as Mr Arnold.

But I must proceed to remark: Homer might have been as unintelligible to Pericles, as was the court poet of king Crœsus, and yet it might be highly improper to translate him into an old English dialect; namely, if he had been the typical poet of a logical and refined age. Here is the real question;—is he absolutely antique, or only antiquated relatively, as Euripides is now antiquated? A modern Greek statesman, accomplished for every purpose of modern business, might find himself quite perplexed by the infinitives, the numerous participles, the optatives, the datives, by the particle ἂν, and by the whole syntax of Euripides, as also by many special words; but this would never justify us in translating Euripides into any but a most refined style. Was Homer of this class? I say, that he not only was antiquated, relatively to Pericles, but is also absolutely antique, being the poet of a barbarian age. Antiquity in poets is not (as Horace stupidly imagines in the argument of the horse’s tail) a question of years, but of intrinsic qualities. Homer sang to a wholly unfastidious audience, very susceptible to the marvellous, very unalive to the ridiculous, capable of swallowing with reverence the most grotesque conceptions. Hence nothing is easier than to turn Homer to ridicule. 160The fun which Lucian made of his mythology, a rhetorical critic like Mr Arnold could make of his diction, if he understood it as he understands mine. He takes credit to himself for not ridiculing me; and is not aware, that I could not be like Homer without being easy to ridicule. An intelligent child is the second-best reader of Homer. The best of all is a scholar of highly masculine taste; the worst of all is a fastidious and refined man, to whom everything quaint seems ignoble and contemptible.

I might have supposed that Mr Arnold thinks Homer to be a polished drawing-room poet, like Pope, when I read in him this astonishing sentence, p. 35. ‘Search the English language for a word which does not apply to Homer, and you could not fix on a better word than quaint’. But I am taken aback at finding him praise the diction of Chapman’s translation in contrast to mine. Now I never open Chapman, without being offended at his pushing Homer’s quaintness most unnecessarily into the grotesque. Thus in Mr Gladstone’s first passage above, where Homer says that the sea ‘sputters out the foam’, Chapman makes it, ‘all her back in bristles set, spits every way her foam’, obtruding what may remind one of a cat or a stoat. I hold sputter to be epical^[44], because it is strong; 161but spit is feeble and mean. In passing, I observe that the universal praise given to Chapman as ‘Homeric’ (a praise which I have too absolutely repeated, perhaps through false shame of depreciating my only rival) is a testimony to me that I rightly appreciate Homeric style; for my style is Chapman’s softened, purged of conceits and made far more melodious. Mr Arnold leaves me to wonder, how, with his disgust at me, he can avoid feeling tenfold disgust at Chapman; and to wonder also what he means, by so blankly contradicting my statement that Homer is quaint; and why he so vehemently resents it. He does not vouchsafe to me or to his readers one particle of disproof or of explanation.

I regard it as quaint in Homer to call Juno white-arm’d goddess and large-ey’d. (I have not rendered βοῶπις ox-ey’d, because in a case of doubt I shrank to obtrude anything so grotesque to us.) It is quaint to say, ‘the lord of bright-haired Juno lightens’ for ‘it lightens’; or ‘my heart in my shaggy bosom is divided’, for ‘I doubt’: quaint to call waves wet, milk white, blood dusky, horses singlehoofed, a hero’s hand broad, words winged, Vulcan Lobfoot (Κυλλοποδίων), a maiden fair-ankled, the Greeks 162wellgreav’d, a spear longshadowy, battle and council man-ennobling, one’s knees dear, and many other epithets. Mr Arnold most gratuitously asserts that the sense of these had evaporated to the Athenians. If that were true, it would not signify to this argument. Δαιμόνιος (possessed by an elf or dæmon) so lost its sense in Attic talk, that although Æschylus has it in its true meaning, some college tutors (I am told) render ὦ δαιμόνιε in Plato, ‘my very good sir!’ This is surely no good reason for mistranslating the word in Homer. If Mr Arnold could prove (what he certainly cannot) that Sophocles had forgotten the derivation of ἐϋκνημῖδες and ἐϋμμελίης, and understood by the former nothing but ‘full armed’ and by the latter (as he says) nothing but ‘war-like’, this would not justify his blame of me for rendering the words correctly. If the whole Greek nation by long familiarity had become inobservant of Homer’s ‘oddities’ (conceding this for the moment), that also would be no fault of mine. That Homer is extremely peculiar, even if the Greeks had become deadened to the sense of it, the proof on all sides is overpowering.

It is very quaint to say, ‘the outwork (or rampart) of the teeth’ instead of ‘the lips’. If Mr Arnold will call it ‘portentous’ in my English, let him produce some shadow of reason for denying it to be portentous in Greek. Many phrases are so quaint as 163to be almost untranslatable, as μήστωρ φόβοιο (deviser of fear?) μήστωρ ἀϋτῆς (deviser of outcry?): others are quaint to the verge of being comical, as to call a man an equipoise (ἀτάλαντος) to a god, and to praise eyes for having a curl in them^[45]. It is quaint to make Juno call Jupiter αἰνότατε (grimmest? direst?), whether she is in good or bad humour with him, and to call a Vision ghastly, when it is sent with a pleasant message. It is astonishingly quaint to tell how many oxen every fringe of Athene’s ægis was worth.—It is quaint to call Patroclus ‘a great simpleton’, for not foreseeing that he would lose his life in rushing to the rescue of his countrymen. (I cannot receive Mr Arnold’s suggested Biblical correction ‘Thou fool’! which he thinks grander: first, because grave moral rebuke is utterly out of place; secondly, because the Greek cannot mean this;—it means infantine simplicity, and has precisely the colour of the word which I have used.)—It is quaint to say: ‘Patroclus kindled a great fire, godlike man’! or, ‘Automedon held up the meat, divine Achilles slic’d it’: quaint to address a 164young friend as ‘Oh^[46] pippin’! or ‘Oh softheart’! or ‘Oh pet’! whichever is the true translation. It is quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring, Ulysses to a pet ram, Agamemnon in two lines to three gods, and in the third line to a bull; the Myrmidons to wasps, Achilles to a grampus chasing little fishes, Antilochus to a wolf which kills a dog and runs away. Menelaus striding over Patroclus’s body to a heifer defending her first-born. It is quaint to say that Menelaus was as brave as a bloodsucking fly, that Agamemnon’s sobs came thick as flashes of lightning; and that the Trojan mares, while running, groaned like overflowing rivers. All such similes come from a mind quick to discern similarities, but very dull to feel incongruities; unaware therefore that it is on a verge where the sublime easily turns into the ludicrous; a mind and heart inevitably quaint to the very core. What is it in Vulcan, when he would comfort his mother under Jupiter’s threat, to make jokes about the severe mauling which he himself formerly received, and his terror lest she should be now beaten? Still more quaint (if rollicking is not the word), is the 165address by which Jupiter tries to ingratiate himself with Juno: viz. he recounts to her all his unlawful amours, declaring that in none of them was he so smitten as now. I have not enough of the γενναῖος εὐηθεία, the barbarian simple-heartedness, needed by a reader of Homer, to get through this speech with gravity. What shall I call it, certainly much worse than quaint, that the poet adds: Jupiter was more enamoured than at his stolen embrace in their first bed ‘secretly from their dear parents’? But to develop Homer’s inexhaustible quaintnesses, of which Mr Arnold denies the existence, seems to me to need a long treatise. It is not to be expected, that one who is blind to superficial facts so very prominent as those which I have recounted, should retain any delicate perception of the highly coloured, intense, and very eccentric diction of Homer, even if he has ever understood it, which he forces me to doubt. He sees nothing ‘odd’ in κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, or in κυνόμυια, ‘thou dogfly’! He replaces to his imagination the flesh and blood of the noble barbarian by a dim feeble spiritless outline.

I have not adduced, in proof of Homer’s quaintness, the monstrous simile given to us in Iliad 13, 754; viz. Hector ‘darted forward screaming like a snowy mountain, and flew through the Trojans and allies’: for I cannot believe that the poet wrote anything so absurd. Rather than admit 166this, I have suggested that the text is corrupt, and that for ὄρεϊ νιφόεντι we should read ὀρνέῳ θύοντι, ‘darted forth screaming like a raging bird’. Yet, as far as I know, I am the first man that has here impugned the text. Mr Brandreth is faithful in his rendering, except that he says shouting for screaming:

‘He said; and like a snowy mountain, rush’d

Shouting; and flew through Trojans and allies.’

Chapman, Cowper, and Pope strain and twist the words to an impossible sense, putting in something about white plume, which they fancy suggested a snowy mountain; but they evidently accept the Greek as it stands, unhesitatingly. I claim this phenomenon in proof that to all commentators and interpreters hitherto Homer’s quaintness has been such an axiom, that they have even acquiesced unsuspiciously in an extravagance which goes far beyond oddity. Moreover the reader may augur by my opposite treatment of the passage, with what discernment Mr Arnold condemns me of obtruding upon Homer gratuitous oddities which equal the conceits of Chapman.

But, while thus vindicating Quaintness as an essential quality of Homer, do I regard it as a weakness to be apologized for? Certainly not; for it is a condition of his cardinal excellences. He could not otherwise be Picturesque as he is. So volatile is his 167mind, that what would be a Metaphor in a more logical and cultivated age, with him riots in Simile which overflows its banks. His similes not merely go beyond^[47] the mark of likeness; in extreme cases they even turn into contrariety. If he were not so carried away by his illustration, as to forget what he is illustrating (which belongs to a quaint mind), he would never paint for us such full and splendid pictures. Where a logical later poet would have said that Menelaus

With eagle-eye survey’d the field,

the mere metaphor contenting him; Homer says:

Gazing around on every side, in fashion of an eagle,

Which, of all heaven’s fowl, they say, to scan the earth is keenest:

Whose eye, when loftiest he hangs, not the swift hare escapeth,

Lurking amid a leaf-clad bush: but straight at it he souseth,

Unerring; and with crooked gripe doth quickly rieve its spirit.

I feel this long simile to be a disturbance of the logical balance, such as belongs to the lively eye of the savage, whose observation is intense, his concentration of reasoning 168powers feeble. Without this, we should never have got anything so picturesque.

Homer never sees things in the same proportions as we see them. To omit his digressions, and what I may call his ‘impertinences’, in order to give to his argument that which Mr Arnold is pleased to call the proper ‘balance’, is to value our own logical minds, more than his picturesque^[48] but illogical mind.

Mr Arnold says that I am not quaint, but grotesque, in my rendering of κυνὸς κακομηχάνου. I do not hold the phrase to be quaint: to me it is excessively coarse. When Jupiter calls Juno ‘a bitch’, of course he means a snarling cur; hence my rendering, ‘vixen’ (or she-fox), is there perfect, since we say vixen of an irascible woman. But Helen had no such evil tempers, and beyond a doubt she meant to ascribe impurity to herself. I have twice committed a pious fraud by making her call herself ‘a vixen’, where ‘bitch’ is the only faithful rendering; and Mr Arnold, instead of thanking me for throwing a thin veil over 169Homer’s deformity, assails me for my phrase as intolerably grotesque.

He further forbids me to invent new compound adjectives, as fair-thron’d, rill-bestream’d; because they strike us as new, though Homer’s epithets (he says) did not so strike the Greeks: hence they derange attention from the main question. I hold this doctrine of his (conceding his fact for a moment) to be destructive of all translation whatever, into prose or poetry. When Homer tells us that Achilles’ horses were munching lotus and parsley, Pope renders it by ‘the horses grazed’, and does not say on what. Using Mr Arnold’s principles, he might defend himself by arguing: ‘The Greeks, being familiar with such horsefood, were not struck by it as new, as my reader would be. I was afraid of telling him what the horses were eating, lest it should derange the balance of his mind, and injuriously divert him from the main idea of the sentence’. But, I find, readers are indignant on learning Pope’s suppression: they feel that he has defrauded them of a piece of interesting information.—In short, how can an Englishman read any Greek composition and be affected by it as Greeks were? In a piece of Euripides my imagination is caught by many things, which he never intended or calculated for the prominence which they actually get in my mind. This or that absurdity in mythology, 170which passed with him as matter of course, may monopolize my main attention. Our minds are not passive recipients of this or that poet’s influence; but the poet is the material on which our minds actively work. If an unlearned reader thinks it very ‘odd’ of Homer (the first time he hears it) to call Aurora ‘fair-thron’d’, so does a boy learning Greek think it odd to call her εὔθρονος. Mr Arnold ought to blot every odd Homeric epithet out of his Greek Homer (or never lend the copy to a youthful learner) if he desires me to expunge ‘fair-thron’d’ from the translation. Nay, I think he should conceal that the Morning was esteemed as a goddess, though she had no altars or sacrifice. It is all odd. But that is just why people want to read an English Homer,—to know all his oddities, exactly as learned men do. He is the phenomenon to be studied. His peculiarities, pleasant or unpleasant, are to be made known, precisely because of his great eminence and his substantial deeply seated worth. Mr Arnold writes like a timid biographer, fearful to let too much of his friend come out. So much as to the substance. As to mere words, here also I hold the very reverse of Mr Arnold’s doctrine. I do not feel free to translate οὐρανομήκης by ‘heaven-kissing’, precisely because Shakspeare has used the last word. It is his property, as ἐϋκνημῖδες, ἐϋμμελίης, 171κυδιάνειρα, etc., are Homer’s property. I could not use it without being felt to quote Shakspeare, which would be highly inappropriate in a Homeric translation. But if nobody had ever yet used the phrase ‘heaven-kissing’ (or if it were current without any proprietor) then I should be quite free to use it as a rendering of οὐρανομήκης. I cannot assent to a critic killing the vital powers of our tongue. If Shakspeare might invent the compound ‘heaven-kissing’, or ‘man-ennobling’, so might William Wordsworth or Matthew Arnold; and so might I. Inspiration is not dead, nor yet is the English language.

Mr Arnold is slow to understand what I think very obvious. Let me then put a case. What if I were to scold a missionary for rendering in Feejee the phrase ‘kingdom of heaven’ and ‘Lamb of God’ accurately; also ‘saints’ and other words characteristic of the New Testament? I might urge against him: ‘This and that sounds very odd to the Feejees: that cannot be right, for it did not seem odd to the Nicene bishops. The latter had forgotten that βασιλεία meant “kingdom”; they took the phrase “kingdom of God” collectively to mean “the Church”. The phrase did not surprise them. As to “Lambs”, the Feejees are not accustomed to sacrifice, and cannot be expected to know of themselves what “Lamb of God” means, as Hebrews did. The 172courtiers of Constantine thought it very natural to be called ἅγιοι, for they were accustomed to think every baptised person ἅγιος; but to the baptised courtiers of Feejee it really seems very odd to be called saints. You disturb the balance of their judgment’.

The missionary might reply: ‘You seemed to be ashamed of the oddities of the Gospel. I am not. They grow out of its excellences and cannot be separated. By avoiding a few eccentric phrases you will do little to remove the deep-seated eccentricity of its very essence. Odd and eccentric it will remain, unless you despoil it of its heart, and reduce it to a fashionable philosophy’. And just so do I reply to Mr Arnold. The Homeric style (whether it be that of an individual or of an age) is peculiar, is ‘odd’, if Mr Arnold like the word, to the very core. Its eccentricities in epithet are mere efflorescences of its essential eccentricity. If Homer could cry out to us, I doubt not he would say, as Oliver Cromwell to the painter, ‘Paint me just I am, wart and all’: but if the true Homer could reappear, I am sure Mr Arnold would start from him just as a bishop of Rome from a fisherman apostle. If a translator of the Bible honours the book by his close rendering of its characteristics, however ‘odd’, so do I honour Homer by the same. Those characteristics, the moment I produce them, Mr 173Arnold calls ignoble. Well: be it so; but I am not to blame for them. They exist whether Mr Arnold likes them or not.

I will here observe that he bids me paraphrase τανύπεπλος (trailing-robed) into something like, ‘Let gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping by’. I deliberately judge, that to paraphrase an otiose epithet is the very worst thing that can be done: to omit it entirely would be better. I object even to Mr Gladstone’s

... whom Leto bare,

Leto with the flowing hair.

For the repetition overdoes the prominence of the epithet. Still more extravagant is Mr Arnold in wishing me to turn ‘single-hoofed horses’ in to ‘something which as little surprises us as “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds”’: p. 96. To reproduce Shakspeare would be in any case a ‘surprising’ mode of translating Homer: but the principle which changes ‘single-hoofed’ into a different epithet which the translator thinks better, is precisely that which for more than two centuries has made nearly all English translation worthless. To throw the poet into your crucible, and bring out old Pelias young, is not a hopeful process. I had thought, the manly taste of this day had outgrown the idea that a translator’s business is to melt up the old coin and stamp it with a modern image. I am 174wondering that I should have to write against such notions: I would not take the trouble, only that they come against me from an Oxford Professor of Poetry.

At the same time, his doctrine, as I have said, goes far beyond compound epithets. Whether I say ‘motley-helmèd Hector’ or ‘Hector of the motley helm’, ‘silver-footed Thetis’ or ‘Thetis of the silver foot’, ‘man-ennobling combat’ or ‘combat which ennobles man’, the novelty is so nearly on a par, that he cannot condemn one and justify the other on this score. Even Pope falls far short of the false taste which would plane down every Homeric prominence: for he prizes an elegant epithet like ‘silver-footed’, however new and odd.

From such a Homer as Mr Arnold’s specimens and principles would give us, no one could learn anything; no one could have any motive for reading the translation. He smooths down the stamp of Homer’s coin, till nothing is left even for microscopic examination. When he forbids me (p. 96) to let my reader know that Homer calls horses ‘single-hoofed’, of course he would suppress also the epithets ‘white milk’, ‘dusky blood’, ‘dear knees’, ‘dear life’, etc. His process obliterates everything characteristic, great or small.

Mr Arnold condemns my translating certain names of horses. He says (p. 58): ‘Mr Newman calls Xanthus Chesnut; as 175he calls Balius Spotted and Podarga Spry-foot: which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale Mdelle. Rossignol, or Mr Bright M. Clair’. He is very wanting in discrimination. If I had translated Hector into Possessor or Agamemnon into Highmind, his censure would be just. A Miss White may be a brunette, a Miss Brown may be a blonde: we utter the proper names of men and women without any remembrance of their intrinsic meaning. But it is different with many names of domestic animals. We never call a dog Spot, unless he is spotted; nor without consciousness that the name expresses his peculiarity. No one would give to a black horse the name Chesnut; nor, if he had called a chesnut horse by the name Chesnut, would he ever forget the meaning of the name while he used it. The Greeks called a chesnut horse xanthos and a spotted horse balios; therefore, until Mr Arnold proves the contrary, I believe that they never read the names of Achilles’ two horses without a sense of their meaning. Hence the names ought to be translated; while Hector and Laomedon ought not. The same reasoning applies to Podarga, though I do not certainly understand ἀργός. I have taken it to mean sprightly.

Mr Arnold further asserts, that Homer is never ‘garrulous’. Allowing that too many others agree with me, he attributes our error to giving too much weight to a sentence in 176Horace! I admire Horace as an ode-writer, but I do not revere him as a critic, any more than as a moral philosopher. I say that Homer is garrulous, because I see and feel it. Mr Arnold puts me into a most unwelcome position. I have a right to say, I have some enthusiasm for Homer. In the midst of numerous urgent calls of duty and taste, I devoted every possible quarter of an hour for two years and a half to translate the Iliad, toiling unremittingly in my vacations and in my walks, and going to large expenses of money, in order to put the book before the unlearned; and this, though I am not a Professor of Poetry nor even of Greek. Yet now I am forced to appear as Homer’s disparager and accuser! But if Homer were always a poet, he could not be, what he is, so many other things beside poet. As the Egyptians paint in their tombs processes of art, not because they are beautiful or grand, but from a mere love of imitating; so Homer narrates perpetually from a mere love of chatting. In how thoroughly Egyptian a way does he tell the process of cutting up an ox and making kebâb; the process of bringing a boat to anchor and carefully putting by the tackle; the process of taking out a shawl from a chest, where it lies at the very bottom! With what glee he repeats the secret talk of the gods; and can tell all about the toilet of Juno. Every particular of trifling 177actions comes out with him, as, the opening of a door or box with a key. He tells who made Juno’s earrings or veil or the shield of Ajax, the history of Agamemnon’s breast-plate, and in what detail a hero puts on his pieces of armour. I would not press the chattiness of Pandarus, Glaucus, Nestor, Æneas, in the midst of battle; I might press his description of wounds. Indeed I have said enough, and more than enough, against Mr Arnold’s novel, unsupported, paradoxical assertion.—But this is connected with another subject. I called Homer’s manner ‘direct’: Mr Arnold (if I understand) would supersede this by his own epithet ‘rapid’. But I cannot admit the exchange: Homer is often the opposite of rapid. Amplification is his characteristic, as it must be of every improvisatore, every popular orator: condensation indeed is improper for anything but written style; written to be read privately. But I regard as Homer’s worst defect, his lingering over scenes of endless carnage and painful wounds. He knows to half an inch where one hero hits another and how deep. They arm: they approach: they encounter: we have to listen to stereotype details again and again. Such a style is anything but ‘rapid’. Homer’s garrulity often leads him into it; yet he can do far better, as in a part of the fight over Patroclus’s body, and other splendid passages.

178Garrulity often vents itself in expletives. Mr Arnold selects for animadversion this line of mine (p. 41),

‘A thousand fires along the plain, I say, that night were gleaming’.

He says: ‘This may be the genuine style of ballad poetry, but it is not the style of Homer’. I reply; my use of expletives is moderate indeed compared to Homer’s. Mr Arnold writes, as if quite unaware that such words as the intensely prosaic ἄρα, and its abbreviations ἂρ, ῥα, with τοι, τε, δὴ, μάλα, ἦ, ἦ ῥα νυ, περ, overflow in epic style; and that a pupil who has mastered the very copious stock of Attic particles, is taken quite aback by the extravagant number in Homer. Our expletives are generally more offensive, because longer. My principle is, to admit only such expletives as add energy, and savour of antiquity. To the feeble expletives of mean ditties I am not prone. I once heard from an eminent counsellor the first lesson of young lawyers, in the following doggerel:

He who holds his lands in fee,

Need neither quake nor quiver:

For I humbly conceive, look ye, do ye see?

He holds his lands for ever.

The ‘humbly conceiving’ certainly outdoes Homer. Yet if the poet had chosen (as he might have chosen) to make Polydamas or Glaucus say:

179Ὅστις ἐπετράφθη τέμενος πίστει βασιλῆος,

φημί τοι, οὗτος ἀνὴρ οὔτ’ ἂρ τρέμει οὔτε φοβεῖται·

δὴ μάλα γάρ ῥα ἑὰς κρατέοι κεν ἐσαιὲν ἀρούρας:

I rather think the following would be a fair prose rendering: ‘Whoso hath been entrusted with a demesne under pledge with the king (I tell you); this man neither trembleth (you see) nor feareth: for (look ye!) he (verily) may hold (you see) his lands for ever’.

Since Mr Arnold momentarily appeals to me on the chasm between Attic and Homeric Greek, I turn the last piece into a style far less widely separated from modern English than Homer from Thucydides.

Dat mon, quhich hauldeth Kyngis-af

Londis yn féo, niver

(I tell ’e) feereth aught; sith hee

Doth hauld hys londis yver.

I certainly do not recommend this style to a translator, yet it would have its advantage. Even with a smaller change of dialect it would aid us over Helen’s self-piercing denunciation, ‘approaching to Christian penitence’, as some have judged it.

Quoth she, I am a gramsome bitch,

If woman bitch may bee.

But in behalf of the poet I must avow: when one considers how dramatic he is, it is marvellous how little in him can offend. 180For this very reason he is above needing tender treatment from a translator, but can bear faithful rendering, not only better than Shakspeare but better than Pindar or Sophocles.

When Mr Arnold denies that Homer is ever prosaic or homely, his own specimens of translation put me into despair of convincing him; for they seem to me a very anthology of prosaic flatness. Phrases, which are not in themselves bad, if they were elevated by something in the syntax or rhythm distinguishing them from prose, become in him prose out-and-out. ‘To Peleus why did we give you, to a mortal’? ‘In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires; by each one there sate fifty men’. [At least he might have left out the expletive.] ‘By their chariots stood the steeds, and champed the white barley; while their masters sate by the fire and waited for morning’. ‘Us, whose portion for ever Zeus has made it, from youth right up to age, to be winding skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of us perish’. The words which I here italicize, seem to me below noble ballad. What shall I say of ‘I bethink me what the Trojan men and Trojan women might murmur’. ‘Sacred Troy shall go to destruction’. ‘Or bear pails to the well of Messeϊs’. ‘See, the wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain of the horsemen of Troy, in the day they fought 181for their city’, for, ‘who was captain in the day on which——’. ‘Let me be dead and the earth be mounded (?) above me, ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity^[49] told of’. ‘By no slow pace or want of swiftness of ours^[50] did the Trojans obtain to strip the arms of Patroclus’. ‘Here I am destined to perish, far from my father and mother dear; for all that, I will not’, etc. ‘Dare they not enter the fight, or stand in the council of heroes, all for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?’ One who regards all this to be high poetry,—emphatically ‘noble’,—may well think τὸν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος or ‘with him there came forty black galleys’, or the broiling of the beef collops, to be such. When Mr Arnold regards ‘no want of swiftness of ours’; ‘for all that’, in the sense of nevertheless; ‘all for fear’, i.e. because of the fear; not to be prosaic: my readers, however ignorant of Greek, will dispense with further argument from me. Mr Arnold’s inability to discern prose in Greek is not to be trusted.

182But I see something more in this phenomenon. Mr Arnold is an original poet; and, as such, certainly uses a diction far more elevated than he here puts forward to represent Homer. He calls his Homeric diction plain and simple. Interpreting these words from the contrast of Mr Arnold’s own poems, I claim his suffrage as on my side, that Homer is often in a style much lower than what the moderns esteem to be poetical. But I protest, that he carries it very much too far, and levels the noblest down to the most negligent style of Homer. The poet is not always so ‘ignoble’, as the unlearned might infer from my critic’s specimens. He never drops so low as Shakspeare; yet if he were as sustained as Virgil or Milton, he would with it lose his vast superiority over these, his rich variety. That the whole first book of the Iliad is pitched lower than the rest, though it has vigorous descriptions, is denoted by the total absence of simile in it: for Homer’s kindling is always indicated by simile. The second book rises on the first, until the catalogue of ships, which (as if to atone for its flatness) is ushered in by five consecutive similes. In the third and fourth books the poet continues to rise, and almost culminates in the fifth; but then seems to restrain himself, lest nothing grander be left for Achilles. Although I do not believe in a unity of authorship between the Odyssey and the Iliad, yet in the Iliad itself 183I see such unity, that I cannot doubt its negligences to be from art. (The monstrous speech of Nestor in the 11th book is a case by itself. About 100 lines have perhaps been added later, for reasons other than literary.) I observe that just before the poet is about to bring out Achilles in his utmost splendour, he has three-quarters of a book comparatively tame, with a ridiculous legend told by Agamemnon in order to cast his own sins upon Fate. If Shakspeare introduces coarse wrangling, buffoonery, or mean superstition, no one claims or wishes this to be in a high diction or tragic rhythm; and why should anyone wish such a thing from Homer or Homer’s translator? I find nothing here in the poet to apologize for; but much cause for indignation, when the unlearned public is misled by translators or by critics to expect delicacy and elegance out of place. But I beg the unlearned to judge for himself whether Homer can have intended such lines as the following for poetry, and whether I am bound to make them any better than I do.