Note 55 — Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice A Reply to Matthew Arnold By Francis W. Newman (continued 2)

Mr Arnold calls it an unfortunate sentence of mine: ‘I ought to be quaint; I ought not to be grotesque’. I am disposed to think him right, but for reasons very opposite to those which he assigns. I have ‘unfortunately’ given to querulous critics a cue for attacking me unjustly. I should rather have said: ‘We ought to be quaint, and not to shrink from that which the fastidious modern will be sure to call grotesque in English, when he is too blunted by habit, or too poor a scholar to discern it in the Greek’.