■^1. '■';^- --Sy 1M- '- ■., 
 
 f^»-j-*^^^^ '^ISIPfT^'j 
 
 MASTER 
 NEGA TIVE 
 NO. 91-80382 
 
!'«i;-«<-'-* 
 
 MICROFILMED 1 99 1 
 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW 
 
 /■ 
 
 I %.^- % 
 
 as part of the 
 Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project" 
 
 Funded by the 
 NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 
 
 Reproductions may not be made without permission from 
 
 Columbia Universitv Library 
 
COPYRIGHT STATEMENT 
 
 The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United 
 States Code - concerns the making of photocopies or other 
 reproductions of copyrighted material... 
 
 Coiumbia University Library reserves the right to refuse to 
 
 accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fuifillrn !!i if the order 
 w oiild if V • violation of the copyright law. 
 
AUTHOR: 
 
 LD, MATT 
 
 TITLE: 
 
 ON 
 
 Hr\ 
 
 PLA CE: 
 
 •^ 
 
 « 
 
 .f«W^ '-5^ 
 
 18 
 
 S L AT I M 
 
 J 
 
Master Negative # 
 
 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES 
 PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT 
 
 -Jl-2olZP.-2c ._ 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARCFT 
 
 Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record 
 
 Restrictions on Use: 
 
 88EF 
 SArSl 
 
 NNC 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 1822-1888. 
 
 On translating Homer. Popixlar ed. 
 Smith, Elder, 1896. 
 
 178 p. 
 
 London, 
 
 u 
 
 TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA 
 
 FILM SlZE:___<y:p_Jnni__ REDUCTION RATIO: 
 
 IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA IIA IB IIB 
 
 DATE FILMED: /^/jsjjt INITIALS M.^ O 
 
 HLMEDBY: RESEARCH FUBLICATIONS, INC WOODBRIDGE. CT ~~ 
 
 ^JIK 
 
 t 
 
 * > 
 
c 
 
 Association for information and Image IManagement 
 
 1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1100 
 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 
 
 301/587-8202 
 
 II 
 
 Centimeter 
 
 iijj 
 
 iiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiiii 
 
 rTT 
 
 liiiiliiiil 
 
 4 
 
 iiiiliiii 
 
 T 
 
 5 6 7 8 
 
 iliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiilii 
 
 rrrrj 
 
 ITT 
 
 9 
 
 iiiliii 
 
 T 
 
 10 11 
 
 iiiliiiiliiiiliiiiiiiiiiiniii 
 
 12 13 14 15 mm 
 
 TTT 
 
 T 
 
 iiiiiiinuiiiiiiiiiii 
 
 T 
 
 T 
 
 
 tii 
 
 Inches 
 
 1.0 
 
 I.I 
 
 1.25 
 
 i^ 2.8 
 
 Ik 
 
 2.5 
 
 1^ 3.2 
 
 [r iiiiiM 
 
 2.2 
 
 •A u 
 UUU 
 
 2.0 
 
 
 1.8 
 
 
 
 1.4 
 
 1.6 
 
 *pi 
 
 MflNUFfiCTURED TO flllM STRNDfiRDS 
 BY APPLIED IMAGE, INC. 
 
N 
 
 ON 
 
 TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
ON 
 
 TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 BY 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 Popular Edition 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 
 
 1896 
 
 I 
 
 [An rights reserved] 
 

 Gift -r' 
 
 DEC 4- 1957 
 
 
 \ 
 
 
 « 
 
 CO 
 
 in 
 
 CD 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 >4 
 
 Nunquamne reponam ? 
 
 I. 
 
 It has more than once been suggested to me that I should 
 
 . translate Homer. That is a task" for which I have neither 
 
 ^— the time nor the courage ; but the suggestion led me to 
 
 ^ regard yet more closely a poet whom I had already long 
 
 ^ studied, and for one or two years the works of Homer were 
 
 1 X seldom out of my hands. The study of classical literature 
 
 is probably on the decline ; but, whatever may be the fate 
 
 of this study in general, it is certain that, as instruction 
 spreads and the number of readers increases, attention will 
 be more and more directed to the poetry of Homer, not 
 indeed as part of a classical course, but as the most impor- 
 \^ tant poetical monument existing. Even within the last ten 
 ^ years two fresh translations of the I/iad have appeared in 
 England : one by a man of great ability and genuine 
 
 B 
 
2 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 learning, Professor Newman ; the other by Mr. Wright, the 
 conscientious and painstaking translator of Dante. It may 
 safely be asserted that neither of these works will take 
 rank as the standard translation of Homer ; that the task of 
 rendering him will still be attempted by other translators. 
 It may perhaps be possible to render to these some service, 
 to save them some loss of labour, by pointing out rocks on 
 which their predecessors have split, and the right objects on 
 which a translator of Homer should fix his attention. 
 
 It is disputed what aim a translator should propose to 
 himself in dealing with his original. Even this preliminary 
 is not yet settled. On one side it is said that the translation 
 ought to be such ' that the reader should, if possible, forget 
 that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion 
 that he is reading an original work,— something original ' (if 
 the translation be in English), 'from an English hand.' 
 The real original is in this case, it is said, ' taken as a basis 
 on which to rear a poem that shall affect our countrymen 
 as the original may be conceived to have affected its natural 
 hearers.' On the other hand, Mr. Newman, who states the 
 foregoing doctrine only to condemn it, declares that he 
 * aims at precisely the opposite : to retain every peculiarity 
 of the original, so far as he is able, with the greater care the 
 more foreign it may happen to be ; ' so that it may * never be 
 forgotten that he is imitating, and imitating in a different 
 
 ' 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 3 
 
 material' The translator's * first duty,' says Mr. Newman 
 *is a historical one, to he faithful: Probably both sides 
 would agree that the translator's ' first duty is to be faithful ; ' 
 but the question at issue between them is, in what faithful- 
 ness consists. 
 
 My one object is to give practical advice to a translator ; 
 and I shall not the least concern myself with theories of 
 translation as such. But I advise the translator not to try 
 ' to rear on the basis of the Iliad, a poem that shall affect 
 our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have 
 affected its natural hearers ; ' and for this simple reason, 
 that we cannot possibly tell how the I/iad * affected its 
 natural hearers.' It is probably meant merely that he should 
 try to affect Englishmen powerfully, as Homer affected 
 Greeks powerfully ; but this direction is not enough, and 
 can give no real guidance. For all great poets affect their 
 hearers powerfully, but the effect of one poet is one thing, 
 that of another poet another thing : it is our translator's 
 business to reproduce the effect of Homer, and the most 
 powerful emotion of the unlearned English reader can never 
 assure him whether he has /-produced this, or whether he 
 has produced something else. So, again, he may follow 
 Mr. Newman's directions, he may try to be 'faithful,' he 
 may 'retain every peculiarity of his original ; ' but who is to 
 assure him, who is to assure Mr. Newman himself, that, 
 
 B 2 
 
4 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 when he has done this, he has done that for which Mr. 
 Newman enjoins this to be done, 'adhered closely to 
 Homer's manner and habit of J.hought'? Evidently the 
 translator needs some more practical directions than these. 
 No one can tell him how Homer affected the Greeks ; but 
 there are those who can tell him how Homer affects theuu 
 These are scholars ; who possess, at the same time with 
 knowledge of Greek, adequate poetical taste and feeling. 
 No translation will seem to them of much worth compared 
 with the original ; but they alone can say whether the 
 translation produces more or less the same effect upon them 
 as the original. They are the only competent tribunal in 
 this matter : the Greeks are dead ; the unlearned English- 
 man has not the data for judging ; and no man can safely 
 confide in his own single judgment of his own work. Let 
 not the translator, then, trust to his notions of what the 
 ancient Greeks would have thought of him ; he will lose 
 himself in the vague. Let him not trust to what the 
 ordinary English reader thinks of him ; he will be taking 
 the blind for his guide. Let him not trust to his own judg- 
 ment of his own work ; he may be misled by individual 
 caprices. Let him ask how his work affects those who both 
 know Greek and can appreciate poetry ; whether to read it 
 gives the Provost of Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cam- 
 bridge, or Professor Jowett here in Oxford, at all the same 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 5 
 
 feeling which to read the original gives them. I consider 
 that when Bentley said of Pope's translation, 'It was a 
 pretty poem, but must not be called Homer,' the work, in 
 spite of all its power and attractiveness, was judged. 
 
 'fi? av 6 <l>p6yLfios 6/3tWcv,— 'as the judicious would 
 determine,' that is a test to which every one professes 
 himself willing to submit his works. Unhappily, in most 
 cases, no two persons agree as to who ' the judicious ' are. 
 In the present case, the ambiguity is removed : I suppose 
 the translator at one with me as to the tribunal to which 
 alone he should look for judgment; and he has thus 
 obtained a practical test by which to estimate the real 
 success of his work. How is he to proceed, in order that 
 his work, tried by this test, may be found most successful ? 
 First of all, there are certain negative counsels which I 
 will give him. Homer has occupied men's minds so much, 
 such a literature has arisen about him, that every one who 
 approaches him should resolve strictly to limit himself to 
 that which may directly serve the object for which he ap- 
 proaches him. I advise the translator to have nothing to 
 do with the questions, whether Homer ever existed ; whether 
 the poet of the ///W be one or many ; whether the I/iad 
 be one poem or an Achilleis and an Iliad stuck together ; 
 whether the Christian doctrine of the Atonement is shadowed 
 forth in the Homeric mythology; whether the Goddess 
 
 I 
 
ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 Latona in any way prefigures the Virgin Mary, and so on. 
 These are questions which have been discussed with learn- 
 ing, with ingenuity, nay, with genius ; but they have two 
 inconveniences,— one general for all who approach them, 
 one particular for the translator. The general inconvenience 
 is that there really exist no data for determining them. 
 The particular inconvenience is that their solution by the 
 translator, even were it possible, could be of no benefit to 
 his translation. 
 
 I advise him, again, not to trouble himself with con- 
 structing a special vocabulary for his use in translation ; 
 with excluding a certain class of English words, and with 
 confining himself to another class, in obedience to any 
 theory about the peculiar qualities of Homer's style. Mr. 
 Newman says that 'the entire dialect of Homer being 
 essentially archaic, that of a translator ought to be as much 
 Saxo-Norman as possible, and owe as little as possible to 
 the elements thiown into our language by classical learning.' 
 Mr. Newman is unfortunate in the observance of his own 
 theory ; for I continually find in his translation words of 
 Latin origin, which seem to me quite alien to the simplicity 
 of Homer, — ' responsive,' for instance, which is a favourite 
 word of Mr. Newman, to represent the Homeric d/xct^o/xcvos : 
 
 Great Hector of the motley helm thus spake to her responsive. 
 But thus responsively to him spake god-like Alexander. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 7 
 
 And the word * celestial,' again, in the grand address of 
 Zeus to the horses of Achilles, 
 
 You, who are born celestial, from Eld and Death exempted ! 
 
 seems to me in that place exactly to jar upon the feeling as 
 too bookish. But, apart from the question of Mr. New- 
 man's fidelity to his own theory, such a theory seems to me 
 both dangerous for a translator and false in itself. Dan- 
 gerous for a translator ; because, wherever one finds such a 
 theory announced (and one finds it pretty often), it is 
 generally followed by an explosion of pedantry ; and pedantry 
 is of all things in the world the most un-Homeric. False 
 in itself; because, in fact, we owe to the Latin element in 
 our language most of that very rapidity and clear decisive- 
 ness by which it is contradistinguished from the German, 
 and in sympathy with the languages of Greece and Rome : so 
 that to limit an English translator of Homer to words of Saxon 
 origin is to deprive him of one of his special advantages for 
 translating Homer. In Voss's well-known translation of 
 Homer, it is precisely the qualities of his German language 
 itself, something heavy and trailing both in the structure of 
 its sentences and in the words of which it is composed, 
 which prevent his translation, in spite of the hexameters, in 
 spite of the fidelity, from creating in us the impression 
 created by the Greek. Mr. Newman's prescription, if 
 
8 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 followed, would just strip the English translator of the 
 advantage which he has over Voss. 
 
 The frame of mind in which we approach an author 
 influences our correctness of appreciation of him ; and 
 Homer should be approached by a translator in the simplest 
 frame of mind possible. Modern sentiment tries to make 
 the ancient not less than the modern world its own ; but 
 against modern sentiment in its applications to Homer the 
 translator, if he would feel Homer truly — and unless he 
 feels him truly, how can he render him truly ? — cannot be 
 too much on his guard. For example : the writer of an 
 interesting article on English translations of Homer, in the 
 last number of the National Revieiv, quotes, I see, with 
 admiration, a criticism of Mr. Ruskin on the use of the 
 epithet (t^va-L^oos, 'life-giving,' in that beautiful passage in 
 the third book of the I/iad, which follows Helen's mention 
 of her brothers Castor and Pollux as alive, though they 
 were in truth dead : 
 
 ws (pdro • Tovs 5' fjSrj Kar^x^v <pvai^oos ala 
 iv AaKfdalfxoyi aZdi, (piXri iv irarpihi yair], ' 
 
 ' The poet,' says Mr. Ruskin, ' has to speak of the earth in 
 sadness ; but he will not let that sadness affect or change 
 his thought of it. No ; though Castor and Pollux be dead, 
 yet the earth is our mother still,— fruitful, life-giving.' This 
 
 ' I/iad, iii. 243. 
 
 
 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 9 
 
 is a just specimen of that sort of application of modern 
 sentiment to the ancients, against which a student, who 
 wishes to feel the ancients truly, cannot too resolutely de- 
 fend himself. It reminds one, as, alas ! so much of Mr. 
 Ruskin's writing reminds one, of those words of the most 
 delicate of living critics : * Comme tout genre de composi- 
 tion a son ecueil particulier, ce/ui du genre romanesque, (^est 
 lefaux' The reader may feel moved as he reads it ; but it 
 is not the less an example of ' le faux ' in criticism ; it is false. 
 It is not true, as to that particular passage, that Homer called 
 the earth <^vcrt^oos because, ' though he had to speak of the 
 earth in sadness, he would not let that sadness change or 
 affect his thought of it,' but consoled himself by considering 
 that 'the earth is our mother still, — fruitful, life-giving.' It 
 is not true, as a matter of general criticism, that this kind 
 of sentimentality, eminently modern, inspires Homer at all. 
 *From Homer and Polygnotus I every day learn more 
 clearly,' says Goethe, ' that in our life here above ground 
 we have, properly speaking, to enact Hell : ' ' — if the 
 student must absolutely have a keynote to the Iliad, let 
 him take this of Goethe, and see what he can do with it ; 
 it will not, at any rate, like the tender pantheism of Mr. 
 Ruskin, falsify for him the whole strain of Homer. 
 
 These are negative counsels ; I come to the positive. 
 
 ' Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe^ vi. 230. 
 
10 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 When I say, the translator of Homer should above all be 
 penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author ;— that 
 he is eminently rapid ; that he is eminently plain and direct, 
 both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression 
 of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words ; that he 
 is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, 
 that is, in his matter and ideas ; and, finally that he is 
 eminently noble ;— I probably seem to be saying what is 
 too general to be of much service to anybody. Yet it is 
 strictly true that, for want of duly penetrating themselves 
 with the first-named quality of Homer, his rapidity, Cowper 
 and Mr. Wright have failed in rendering him ; that, for 
 want of duly appreciating the second-named quality, his 
 plainness and directness of style and dictation, Pope and 
 Mr. Sotheby have failed in rendering him ; that for want ot 
 appreciating the third, his plainness and directness of ideas. 
 Chapman has failed in rendering him ; while for want of 
 appreciating the fourth, his nobleness, Mr. Newman, who 
 has clearly seen some of the faults of his predecessors, has 
 yet failed more conspicuously than any of them. 
 
 Coleridge says, in his strange language, speaking of the 
 union of the human soul with the divine essence, that this 
 takes place 
 
 Whene'er the mist, which stands 'twixt God and thee, 
 Defecates to a pure transparency ; 
 
 1 
 
 < 
 
 $\ 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 II 
 
 and so, too, it may be said of that union of the translator 
 with his original, which alone can produce a good transla- 
 tion, that it takes place when the mist which stands between 
 them — the mist of alien modes of thinking, speaking, and 
 feeling on the translator's part — * defecates to a pure trans- 
 parency,' and disappears. But between Cowper and Homer 
 — (Mr. Wright repeats in the main Cowper's manner, as 
 Mr. Sotheby repeats Pope's manner, and neither Mr. 
 Wright's translation nor Mr Sotheby's has, I must be 
 forgiven for saying, any proper reason for existing) — between 
 Cowper and Homer there is interposed the mist of Cowper's 
 elaborate Miltonic manner, entirely alien to the flowing 
 rapidity of Homer ; between Pope and Homer there is 
 interposed the mist of Pope's literary artificial manner, 
 entirely alien to the plain naturalness of Homer's manner ; 
 between Chapman and Homer there is interposed the mist 
 of the fancifulness of the Elizabethan age, entirely alien to 
 the plain directness of Homer's thought and feeling ; while 
 between Mr. Newman and Homer is interposed a cloud 
 of more than Egyptian thickness, — namely, a manner, in 
 Mr. Newman's version, eminently ignoble, while Homer's 
 manner is eminendy noble. 
 
 I do not despair of making all these propositions clear 
 to a student who approaches Homer with a free mind. 
 First, Homer is eminently rapid, and to this rapidity the 
 
12 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 13 
 
 I 
 
 fl 
 
 elaborate movement of Miltonic blank verse is alien. The 
 reputation of Cowper, that most interesting man and 
 excellent poet, does not depend on his translation of Homer ; 
 and in his preface to the second edition, he himself tells us 
 that he felt, — he had too much poetical taste not to feel, — 
 on returning to his own version after six or seven years, 
 * more dissatisfied with it himself than the most difficult to 
 be pleased of all his judges.' And he was dissatisfied with 
 it for the right reason, — that ' it seemed to him deficient in 
 the grace of ease.'' Yet he seems to have originally miscon- 
 ceived the manner of Homer so much, that it is no wonder 
 he rendered him amiss. *The similitude of Milton's 
 manner to that of Homer is such,' he says, * that no person 
 familiar with both can read either without being reminded 
 of the other ; and it is in those breaks and pauses to which 
 the numbers of the English poet are so much indebted, 
 both for their dignity and variety, that he chiefly copies 
 the Grecian.' It would be more true to say : * The un- 
 likeness of Milton's manner to that of Homer is such, that 
 no person familiar with both can read either without being 
 struck with his difference from the other ; and it is in his 
 breaks and pauses that the English poet is most unlike the 
 Grecian.* 
 
 The inversion and pregnant conciseness of Milton or 
 Dante are, doubtless, most impressive qualities of style ; 
 
 but they are the very opposites of the directness and 
 flowingness of Homer, which he keeps alike in passages of 
 the simplest narrative, and in those of the deepest emotion. 
 Not only, for example, are these lines of Cowper un- 
 
 Homeric : — 
 
 So numerous seemed those fires the banks between 
 Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece 
 In prospect all of Troy ; 
 
 where the position of the word ' blazing ' gives an entirely 
 un-Homeric movement to this simple passage, describing 
 the fires of the Trojan camp outside of Troy ; but the 
 following lines, in that very highly-wrought passage where 
 the horse of Achilles answers his master's reproaches for 
 having left Patroclus on the field of battle, are equally 
 
 un-Homeric : — 
 
 For not through sloth or tardiness on us 
 Aught chargeable, have Ilium's sons thine arms 
 Stript from Patroclus' shoulders ; but a God 
 Matchless in battle, offspring of bright-haired 
 Latona, him contending in the van 
 Slew, for the glory of the chief of Troy. 
 
 Here even the first inversion, 'have Ilium's sons thine 
 arms Stript from Patroclus' shoulders,' gives the reader a 
 sense of a movement not Homeric ; and the second in- 
 version, *a God him contending in the van Slew,' gives 
 this sense ten times stronger. Instead of moving on with- 
 out check, as in reading the original, the reader twice finds 
 
I 
 
 14 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 15 
 
 himself, in reading the translation, brought up and checked. 
 Homer moves with the same simplicity and rapidity in the 
 highly-wrought as in the simple passage. 
 
 It is in vain that Cowper insists on his fidelity : * my 
 chief boast is that I have adhered closely to my original : ' 
 — 'the matter found in me, whether the reader like it or 
 not, is found also in Homer ; and the matter not found in 
 me, how much soever the reader may admire it, is found 
 only in Mr. Pope.' To suppose that it is fidelity to an 
 original to give its matter, unless you at the same time give 
 its manner ; or, rather, to suppose that you can really give 
 its matter at all, unless you can give its manner, is just the 
 mistake of our pre-Raphaelite school of painters, who do 
 not understand that the peculiar effect of nature resides in 
 the whole and not in the parts. So the peculiar effect of a 
 poet resides in his manner and movement, not in his words 
 taken separately. It is well known how conscientiously 
 literal is Cowper in his translation of Homer. It is well 
 known how extravagantly free is Pope. 
 
 So let it be ! 
 Portents and prodigies are lost on me : 
 
 that is Pope's rendering of the words, 
 
 Hdi^Oe, Ti iioi Q6.va.rov fxavrfinai ; ovhi rl <T€ xp'h ' * 
 Xanthus, why prophesiest thou my death to me ? thou needest not at 
 
 all:- 
 
 Iliad, xix. 420. 
 
 ■ 
 
 yet, on the whole. Pope's translation of the Iliad is more 
 Homeric than Cowper's, for it is more rapid. 
 
 Pope's movement, however, though rapid, is not of the 
 same kind as Homer's ; and here I come to the real 
 objection to rhyme in a translation of Homer. It is 
 commonly said that rhyme is to be abandoned in a trans- 
 lation of Homer, because Uhe exigences of rhyme,' to 
 quote Mr. Newman, ' positively forbid faithfulness ; ' 
 because *a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme,' 
 to quote Cowper, 'is impossible.' This, however, is 
 merely an accidental objection to rhyme. If this were all, 
 it might be supposed, that if rhymes were more abundant 
 Homer could be adequately translated in rhyme. But this 
 is not so ; there is a deeper, a substantial objection to 
 rhyme in a translation of Homer. It is, that rhyme in- 
 evitably tends to pair lines which in the original are 
 independent, and thus the movement of the poem is changed. 
 In these lines of Chapman, for instance, from Sarpedon's 
 speech to Glaucus, in the twelfth book of the Iliad : — 
 
 O friend, if keeping back 
 Would keep back age from us, and death, and that we might not 
 
 wrack 
 In this life's human sea at all, but that deferring now 
 We shunned death ever, — nor would I half this vain valor show, 
 Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance ; 
 But since we mtest go, though not here, and that besides the chance 
 Proposed now, there are infinite fates, etc. 
 
i6 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 Here the necessity of making the line, 
 
 Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance, 
 
 rhyme with the line which follows it, entirely changes and 
 spoils the movement of the passage. 
 
 oijT€ Ke <re ffTfWoifii tiaxw is KvBidvcipav • • 
 
 Neither would I myself go forth to fight with the foremost, 
 Nor would I urge thee on to enter the glorious battle, 
 
 says Homer ; there he stops, and begins an opposed move- 
 ment : - „, V > ^ , « 
 
 pvv 6 — 6/u»i7s yap K-rjpes icfxaTucriv davdroio — 
 But— for a thousand fates of death stand close to us always— 
 
 This line, in which Homer wishes to go away with the 
 most marked rapidity from the line before, Chapman is 
 forced, by the necessity of rhyming, intimately to connect 
 with the line before. 
 
 But since we mus^ go, though not here, and that besides the chance — 
 
 The moment the word chance strikes our ear, we are ir- 
 resistibly carried back to advance and to the whole previous 
 line, which, according to Homer's own feeling, we ought to 
 have left behind us entirely, and to be moving farther and 
 farther away from. 
 
 Rhyme certainly, by intensifying antithesis, can intensify 
 
 ^ Iliady xii. 324. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 17 
 
 (1 
 
 \ 
 
 
 separation, and this is precisely what Pope does ; but this 
 balanced rhetorical antithesis, though very effective, is 
 entirely un-Homeric. And this is what I mean by saying 
 that Pope fails to render Homer, because he does not 
 render his plainness and directness of style and diction. 
 Where Homer marks separation by moving away, Pope 
 marks it by antithesis. No passage could show this better 
 than the passage I have just quoted, on which I will pause 
 for a moment. 
 
 Robert Wood, whose Essay on the Genius of Homer is 
 mentioned by Goethe as one of the books which fell into 
 his hands when his powers were first developing themselves, 
 and strongly interested him, relates of this passage a striking 
 story. He says that in 1762, at the end of the Seven Years' 
 War, being then Under-Secretary of State, he was directed 
 lo wait upon the President of the Council, Lord Granville, 
 a few days before he died, with the preliminary articles of 
 the Treaty of Paris. ' I found him,' he continues, * so 
 languid, that I proposed postponing my business for 
 another time ; but he insisted that I should stay, saying, it 
 could not prolong his life to neglect his duty ; and repeating 
 the following passage out of Sarpedon's speech, he dwelled 
 with particular emphasis on the third line, which recalled 
 to his mind the distinguishing part he had taken in public 
 affairs : — 
 
1 8 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 S) ireVov, 6t fxfv yitp, TrSAffiov nepl rSvbe <pvy6vT€j 
 
 aid 8^ fieWoiixev ayi^pw t' aOavdro} re 
 
 ((r<T€ard\ ij T € Kfv avrhs iyl Trp (aroKTi fiaxolfxriy,^ 
 
 oin € k4 at (rrdWoifii fidx'fl*' ^s Kv^idveipau ' 
 
 vvv 5' — eixirr]5 yap Krjpes i<p«rTa(Tiv davdroio 
 
 ixvpiaty &s oifK tern <p\ryuv fip6Toy, ou5' viraXv^at — 
 
 tofl€V. 
 
 His Lordship repeated the last word several times with a 
 calm and determinate resignation ; and, after a serious 
 pause of some minutes, he desired to hear the Treaty read, 
 to which he listened with great attention, and recovered 
 spirits enough to declare the approbation of a dying states- 
 man (I use his own words) *' on the most glorious war, and 
 most honourable peace, this nation ever saw." ' ^ 
 
 I quote this story, first, because it is interesting as 
 exhibiting the English aristocracy at its very height of 
 culture, lofty spirit, and greatness, towards the middle of 
 the last century. I quote it, secondly, because it seems to 
 me to illustrate Goethe's saying which I mentioned, that 
 our life, in Homer's view of it, represents a conflict and a 
 hell ; and it brings out, too, what there is tonic and fortify- 
 ing in this doctrine. I quote it, lastly, because it shows 
 that the passage is just one of those in translating which 
 
 • These are the words on which Lord Granville * dwelled with 
 particular emphasis.' 
 
 - Robert Wood, Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of 
 Horner^ London, 1775, P- ^ii. 
 
 J 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 19 
 
 Pope will be at his best, a passage of strong emotion and 
 oratorical movement, not of simple narrative or description. 
 Pope translates the passage thus : — 
 
 Could all our care elude the gloomy grave 
 Which claims no less the fearful than the brave, 
 For lust of fame I should not vainly dare 
 In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war : 
 But since, alas ! ignoble age must come, 
 Disease, and death's inexorable doom ; 
 The life which others pay, let us bestow, 
 And give to fame what we to nature owe. 
 
 Nothing could better exhibit Pope's prodigious talent ; and 
 
 nothing, too, could be better in its own way. But, as 
 
 Bentley said, ' You must not call it Homer.' One feels 
 
 that Homer's thought has passed through a literary and 
 
 rhetorical crucible, and come out highly intellectualised ; 
 
 come out in a form which strongly impresses us, indeed, 
 
 but which no longer impresses us in the same way as when 
 
 it was uttered by Homer. The antithesis of the last two 
 
 lines — 
 
 The life which others i)ay, let us bestow, 
 
 And give to fame what we to nature owe — 
 
 is excellent, and is just suited to Pope's heroic couplet ; 
 but neither the antithesis itself, nor the couplet which 
 conveys it, is suited to the feeling or to the movement of 
 the Homeric io/xcf. 
 
 A literary and intellectualised language is, however, in 
 
 c 2 
 
 / 
 
20 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 its own way well suited to grand matters ; and Pope, with 
 a language of this kind and his own admirable talent, 
 comes off well enough as long as he has passion, or oratory, 
 or a great crisis to deal with. Even here, as I have been 
 pointing out, he does not render Homer ; but he and his 
 style are in themselves strong. It is when he comes to 
 level passages, passages of narrative or description, that he 
 and his style are sorely tried, and prove themselves weak. 
 A perfectly plain direct style can of course convey the sim- 
 plest matter as naturally as the grandest ; indeed, it must 
 be harder for it, one would say, to convey a grand matter 
 worthily and nobly, than to convey a common matter, 
 as alone such a matter should be conveyed, plainly and 
 simply. But the style of Rasselas is incomparably better 
 fitted to describe a sage philosophising than a soldier lighting 
 his camp-fire. The style of Pope is not the style of Ras- 
 selas ; but it is equally a literary style, equally unfitted to de- 
 scribe a simple matter with the plain naturalness of Homer. 
 Every one knows the passage at the end of the eighth book 
 of the Iliad, where the fires of the Trojan encampment are 
 likened to the stars. It is very far from my wish to hold Pope 
 up to ridicule, so I shall not quote the commencement of 
 the passage, which in the original is of great and celebrated 
 beauty, and in translating which Pope l^is been singularly 
 and notoriously fortunate. Biy the latter part of the 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 21 
 
 passage, where Homer leaves the stars, and comes to the 
 Trojan fires, treats of the plainest, most matter-of-fact 
 subject possible, and deals with this, as Homer always 
 deals with every subject, in the plainest and most straight- 
 forward style. *So many in number, between the ships 
 and the streams of Xanthus, shone forth in front of Troy 
 the fires kindled by the Trojans. There were kindled a 
 thousand fires in the plain ; and by each one there sat fifty 
 men in the light of the blazing fire. And the horses, 
 munching white barley and rye, and standing by the 
 chariots, waited for the bright-throned Morning.' ^ 
 
 In Pope's translation, this plain story becomes the 
 
 following : — 
 
 So many flames before proud Ilion blaze, 
 
 And brighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays ; 
 
 The long reflections of the distant fires 
 
 Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires. 
 
 A thousand piles the dusky horrors gild, 
 
 And shoot a shady lustre o'er the field. 
 
 Full fifty guards each flaming pile attend, 
 
 Whose umbered arms, by fits, thick flashes send ; 
 
 Loud neigh the coursers o'er their heaps of corn, 
 
 And ardent warriors wait the rising morn. 
 
 It is for passages of this sort, which, after all, form the bulk 
 of a narrative poem, that Pope's style is so bad. In elevated 
 passages he is powerful, as Homer is powerful, though not 
 
 ' Iliad, viii. 560. 
 
 f 
 
 i 
 
22 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 23 
 
 in the same way ; but in plain narrative, where Homer is 
 still power and delightful, Pope, by the inherent fault of his 
 style, is ineffective and out of taste. Wordsworth says 
 somewhere, that wherever Virgil seems to have composed 
 « with his eye on the object,' Dryden fails to render him. 
 Homer invariably composes ' with his eye on the object,' 
 whether the object be a moral or a material one : Pope 
 composes with his eye on his style, into which he translates 
 his object, whatever it is. That, therefore, which Homer 
 conveys to us immediately. Pope conveys to us through a 
 medium. He aims at turning Homer's sentiments pointedly 
 and rhetorically; at investing Homer's description with 
 ornament and dignity. A sentiment may be changed by 
 being put into a pointed and oratorical form, yet may still 
 be very effective in that form ; but a description, the 
 moment it takes its eyes off that which it is to describe, 
 and begins to think of ornamenting itself, is worthless. 
 
 Therefore, I say, the translator of Homer should pene- 
 trate himself with a sense of the plainness and directness of 
 Homer's style ; of the simplicity with which Homer's 
 thought is evolved and expressed. He has Pope's fate 
 before his eyes, to show him what a divorce may be created 
 even between the most gifted translator and Homer by an 
 artificial evolution of thought and a literary cast of style. 
 Chapman's style is not artificial and literary like Pope's 
 
 nor his movement elaborate and self-retarding like the 
 Miltonic movement of Cowper. He is plain-spoken, fresh, 
 vigorous, and, to a certain degree, rapid ; and all these are 
 Homeric qualities. I cannot say that I think the move- 
 ment of his fourteen-syllable line, which has been so much 
 commended, Homeric; but on this point I shall have 
 more to say by and by, when I come to speak of Mr. 
 Newman's metrical exploits. But it is not distinctly anti- 
 Hotneric, like the movement of Milton's blank verse ; and 
 it has a rapidity of its own. Chapman's diction, too, is 
 generally good, that is, appropriate to Homer ; above all, 
 the syntactical character of his style is appropriate. With 
 these merits, what prevents his translation from being a 
 satisfactory version of Homer ? Is it merely the want of 
 literal faithfulness to his original, imposed upon him, it is 
 said, by the exigences of rhyme? Has this celebrated 
 version, which has so many advantages, no other and 
 deeper defect than that ? Its author is a poet, and a poet, 
 too, of the Elizabethan age ; the golden age of English 
 literature as it is called, and on the whole truly called ; for, 
 whatever be the defects of Elizabethan literature (and they 
 are great), we have no development of our literature to 
 compare with it for vigour and richness. This age, too, 
 showed what it could do in translating, by producing a 
 master-piece, its version of the Bible 
 
 *♦,.. 
 
24 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 Chapman's translation has often been praised as 
 eminently Homeric. Keats's fine sonnet in its honour 
 every one knows ; but Keats could not read the original, 
 and therefore could not really judge the translation. 
 Coleridge, in praising Chapman's version, says at the same 
 time, 'It will give you small idea of Homer.' But the 
 grave authority of Mr. Hallam pronounces this translation 
 to be ' often exceedingly Homeric ; ' and its latest editor 
 boldly declares that by what, with a deplorable style, he 
 calls ' his own innative Homeric genius,' Chapman * has 
 thoroughly identified himself with Homer ; ' and that ' we 
 pardon him even for his digressions, for they are such as 
 we feel Homer himself w^ould have written.' 
 
 I confess that I can never read twenty lines of Chap- 
 man's version without recurring to Bentley's cry, 'This is 
 not Homer ! ' and that from a deeper cause than any 
 unfaithfulness occasioned by the fetters of rhyme. 
 
 I said that there were four things which eminently 
 distinguished Homer, and with a sense of which Homer's 
 translator should penetrate himself as fully as possible. 
 One of these four things was, the plainness and directness 
 of Homer's ideas. I have just been speaking of the plain- 
 ness and directness of his style ; but- the plainness and 
 directness of the contents of his style, of his ideas them- 
 selves, is not less remarkable. But as^eminently as Homer 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 25 
 
 'i 
 
 I 
 
 k 
 
 \ 
 
 is plain, so eminently is the Elizabethan literature in 
 general, and Chapman in particular, fanciful. Steeped in 
 humours and fantasticality up to its very lips, the Elizabethan 
 age, newly arrived at the free use of the human faculties 
 after their long term of bondage, and delighting to exercise 
 them freely, suffers from its own extravagance in this first 
 exercise of them, can hardly bring itself to see an object 
 quietly or to describe it temperately. Happily, in the 
 translation of the Bible, the sacred character of their 
 original inspired the translators with such respect that they 
 did not dare to give the rein to their own fancies in dealing 
 with it. But, in dealing with works of profane literature, 
 in dealing with poetical works above all, which highly 
 stimulated them, ) one may say that the minds of the 
 Elizabethan translators were too active ; that they could 
 not forbear importing so much of their own, and this 
 of a most peculiar and Elizabethan character, into their 
 original, that they effaced the character of the original 
 
 itself. 
 
 Take merely the opening pages to Chapman's transla- 
 tion, the introductory verses, and the dedications. You 
 
 will find : — 
 
 An Anagram of the name of our Dread Prince, 
 My most gracious and sacred MiEcenas, 
 Henry, Prince of Wales, 
 Our Sunn, Heyr, Peace, Life,— 
 
26 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 Henry, son of James the First, to whom the work is 
 dedicated. Then comes an address, 
 
 To the sacred Fountain of Princes, 
 Sole Empress of Beauty and Virtue, Anne, Queen 
 Of England, etc. 
 
 All the Middle Age, with its grotesqueness, its conceits, 
 its irrationality, is still in these opening pages ; they by 
 themselves are sufficient to indicate to us what a gulf 
 divides Chapman from the ' clearest-souled ' of poets, from 
 Homer ; almost as great a gulf as that which divides him 
 from Voltaire. Pope has been sneered at for saying that 
 Chapman writes * somewhat as one might imagine Homer 
 himself to have written before he arrived at years of 
 discretion.' But the remark is excellent : Homer ex- 
 presses himself like a man of adult reason. Chapman like a 
 man whose reason has not yet cleared itself. For instance, 
 if Homer had had to say of a poet, that he hoped his 
 merit was now about to be fully established in the opinion 
 of good judges, he was as incapable of saying this as 
 Chapman says it,— 'Though truth in her very nakedness 
 sits in so deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora, and 
 Ganges, few eyes can sound her, I hope yet those few here 
 will so discover and confirm that the date being out of her 
 darkness in this morning of our poet, he shall now gird his 
 temples with the sun,'— I say, Homer was as incapable of 
 
 ) 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 27 
 
 / 
 
 ■ly 
 
 i 
 
 saying this in that manner, as Voltaire himself would have 
 been. Homer, indeed, has actually an affinity with 
 Voltaire in the unrivalled clearness and straightforwardness 
 of his thinking ; in the way in which he keeps to one 
 thought at a time, and puts that thought forth in its 
 complete natural plainness, instead of being led away from 
 it by some fancy striking him in connection with it, and 
 being beguiled to wander off with this fancy till his original 
 thought, in its natural reality, knows him no more. What 
 could better show us how gifted a race was this Greek 
 race ? The same member of it has not only the power of 
 profoundly touching that natural heart of humanity which 
 it is Voltaire's weakness that he cannot reach, but can also 
 address the understanding with all Voltaire's admirable 
 simplicity and rationality. 
 
 My limits will not allow me to do more than shortly 
 illustrate, from Chapman's version of the Iliad, what I 
 mean when 1 speak of this vital difference between Homer 
 and an Elizabethan poet in the quality of their thought ; 
 between the plain simplicity of the thought of the one, and 
 the curious complexity of the thought of the other. As in 
 Pope's case, I carefully abstain from choosing passages for 
 the express purpose of making Chapman appear ridiculous ; 
 Chapman, like Pope, merits in himself all respect, though 
 he too, like Pope, fails to render Homer. 
 
 \ 
 
 \ 
 
 
 
ii 
 
 28 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 In that tonic speech of Sarpedon, of which I have said 
 so much, Homer, you may remember, has : — 
 
 ci fjikv yap^ irdAefiov vepl t6v^€ <pvy6vTfy 
 aU\ S^ fifWoifiev ayiipo} t' adavaTu re 
 iffffead ', — 
 
 if indeed, but once this battle avoided, 
 We were for ever to live without growing old and immortal. 
 
 Chapman cannot be satisfied with this, but must add a 
 
 fancy to it : — 
 
 if keeping back 
 Would keep Ijack age from us, and death, and that we might not 
 
 wrack 
 In this life's human sea at all : 
 
 and so on. Again ; in another passage which I have before 
 quoted, where Zeus says to the horses of Peleus, 
 
 t\, ff<pa>'i Zdfxiv Tli]\r\'i avcLKTi 
 Birfi7(f ; vfif7s 5' iffrhu ayiipu t' aOavdrw t€ ' ' 
 
 Why gave we you to royal Peleus, to a mortal ? but ye are without 
 old age, and immortal. 
 
 Chapman sophisticates this into : — 
 
 Why gave we you t' a mortal king, when immortality 
 And incapacity of age so dignifies your states 1 
 
 Again ; in the speech of Achilles to his horses, where 
 Achilles, according to Homer, says simply, * Take heed that 
 ye bring your master safe back to the host of the Danaans, 
 
 * Iliady xvii. 443. 
 
 J 
 
 
 i 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 29 
 
 in some other sort than the last time, when the battle is 
 ended,' Chapman sophisticates this into : — 
 
 When with bloody for this day's fast obso-ved^ revenge shall yield 
 Our heart satiety^ bring us off. 
 
 In Hector's famous speech, again, at his parting from 
 Andromache, Homer makes him say : ' Nor does my own 
 heart so bid me ' (to keep safe behind the walls), * since I 
 have learned to be staunch always, and to fight among the 
 foremost of the Trojans, busy on behalf of my father's great 
 glory, and my own.'^ In Chapman's hands this becomes : — 
 
 The spirit I first did breathe 
 Did never teach me that ; much less, since the contempt of death 
 Was settled in me, ami my mind huw what a worthy was^ 
 Whose office is to lead in fight, and give no danger pass 
 Without improvement. In this fire must Hector's trial shitu : 
 Here must his country, father, fricfuis, be in him made divine. 
 
 You see how ingeniously Homer's plain thought is tormented, 
 as the French would say, here. Homer goes on : • For well 
 I know this in my mind and in my heart, the day will be, 
 when sacred Troy shall perish : ' — 
 
 taatrai ^fiap, 8t' 6.v itot' 6\u\ri ''iXios Ipv. 
 
 Chapman makes this : — 
 
 And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I know, 
 When sacred Troy shall shed her towers, for tears of overthrow. 
 
 * Iliad^ vi. 444. 
 
 ^^^»*%ij^_' 
 
 •■-^^ 
 
30 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 !l 
 
 I might go on for ever, but I could not give you a better 
 illustration than this last, of what I mean by saying that the 
 Elizabethan poet fails to render Homer because he cannot 
 forbear to interpose a play of thought between his object 
 and its expression. Chapman translates his object into 
 Elizabethan, as Pope translates it into the Augustan of 
 Queen Anne; both convey it to us through a medium. 
 Homer, on the other hand, sees his object and conveys it 
 to us immediately. 
 
 And yet, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness 
 of Homer's style, in spite of this perfect plainness and 
 directness of his ideas, he is eminently noble ; he works as 
 entirely in the grand style, he is as grandiose, as Phidias, or 
 Dante, or Michael Angelo. This is what makes his trans- 
 lators despair. 'To give relief,' says Cowper, *to prosaic 
 subjects' (such as dressing, eating, drinking, harnessing, 
 travelling, going to bed), that is to treat such subjects nobly, 
 in the grand style, 'without seeming unreasonably tumid, 
 is extremely difficult.' It is difficult, but Homer has done 
 it. Homer is precisely the incomparable poet he is, because 
 he has done it. His translator must not be tumid, must 
 not be artificial, must not be literary ; true : but then also 
 "he must not be commonplace, must not be ignoble. I 
 have shown you how translators of Homer fail by wanting 
 rapidity, by wanting simplicity of style, by wanting plainness 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 31 
 
 of thought : in a second lecture I will show you how a 
 translator fails by wanting nobility. 
 
 II. 
 
 I must repeat what I said in beginning, that the trans- 
 lator of Homer ought steadily to keep in mind where lies 
 the real test of the success of his translation, what judges 
 he is to try to satisfy. He is to try to satisfy scholars, 
 because scholars alone have the means of really judging 
 him. A scholar may be a pedant, it is true, and then his 
 judgment will be worthless ; but a scholar may also have 
 poetical feeling, and then he can judge him truly ; whereas 
 all the poetical feeling in the world will not enable a man 
 who is not a scholar to judge him truly. For the translator 
 is to reproduce Homer, and the scholar alone has the 
 means of knowing that Homer who is to be reproduced. He 
 knows him but imperfectly, for he is separated from him by 
 time, race, and language ; but he alone knows him at all. 
 Yet people speak as if there were two real tribunals in this 
 matter,— the scholar's tribunal, and that of the general 
 public. They speak as if the scholar's judgment was one 
 thing, and the general public's judgment another; both with 
 their shortcomings, both with their liability to error ; but both 
 to be regarded by the translator. The translator who makes 
 
 I* 
 
 
32 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 33 
 
 I 
 
 verbal literalness his chief care * will,' says a writer in the 
 National Review whom I have already quoted, ' be appre- 
 ciated by the scholar accustomed to test a translation 
 rigidly by comparison with the original, to look perhaps 
 with excessive care to finish in detail rather than boldness 
 and general effect, and find pardon even for a version that 
 seems bare and bold, so it be scholastic and faithful.' But, 
 if the scholar in judging a translation looks to detail rather 
 than to general effect, he judges it pedantically and ill. 
 The appeal, however, lies not from the pedantic scholar to 
 the general public, which can only like or dislike Chapman's 
 version, or Pope's, or Mr. Newman's, but cannnot judge 
 them j it lies from the pedantic scholar to the scholar who 
 is not pedantic, who knows that Homer is Homer by his 
 general effect, and not by his single words, and who 
 demands but one thing in a translation, — that it shall, as 
 nearly as possible, reproduce for him the general effect of 
 Homer. This, then, remains the one proper aim of the 
 translator : to reproduce on the intelligent scholar, as nearly 
 as possible, the general effect of Homer. Except so far as 
 he reproduces this, he loses his labour, even though he may 
 make a spirited Iliad of his own, like Pope, or translate 
 Homer's Iliad word for word, like Mr. Newman. If his 
 proper aim were to stimulate in any manner possible the 
 general public, he might be right in following Pope's 
 
 J 
 
 Al 
 
 example ; if his proper aim were to help schoolboys to 
 construe Homer, he might be right in following Mr. New- 
 man's. But it is not : his proper aim is, I repeat it yet 
 once more, to reproduce on the intelligent scholar, as nearly 
 as he can, the general effect of Homer. 
 
 When, therefore, Cowper says, ' My chief boast is that I 
 have adhered closely to my original ; ' when Mr. Newman 
 says, * My aim is to retain every peculiarity of the original, 
 to h^ faithful, exactly as is the case with the draughtsman of 
 the Elgin marbles j ' their real judge only replies : ' It may 
 be so : reproduce then upon us, reproduce the effect of 
 Homer, as a good copy reproduces the effect of the Elgin 
 
 marbles.' 
 
 When, again, Mr. Newman tells us that ' by an exhaus- 
 tive process of argument and experiment ' he has found a 
 metre which is at once the metre of 'the modern Greek 
 epic,' and a metre ' like in moral genius ' to Homer's metre, 
 his judge has still but the same answer for him : ' It may 
 be so : reproduce then on our ear something of the effect 
 produced by the movement of Homer.' 
 
 But what is the general effect which Homer produces 
 on Mr. Newman himself? because, when we know this, we 
 shall know whether he and his judges are agreed at the 
 outset, whether we may expect him, if he can reproduce 
 the effect he feels, if his hand does not betray him in the 
 
 D 
 
 il 
 
 i^-^ 
 
34 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 i 
 
 execution, to satisfy his judges and to succeed. If, however, 
 Mr. Newman's impression from Homer is something quite 
 different from that of his judges, then it can hardly be 
 expected that any amount of labour or talent will enable 
 him to reproduce for them their Homer. 
 
 Mr. Newman does not leave us in doubt as to the 
 general effect which Homer makes upon him. As I have 
 told you what is the general effect which Homer makes 
 upon me, — that of a most rapidly moving poet, that of a 
 poet most plain and direct in his style, that of a poet most 
 plain and direct in his ideas, that of a poet eminently 
 noble, — so Mr. Newman tells us his general impression of 
 Homer, * Homer's style,' he says, * is direct, popular, 
 forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous.' Again : * Homer rises 
 and sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low 
 when it is mean.' 
 
 I lay my finger on four words in these two sentences of 
 Mr. Newman, and I say that the man who could apply 
 those words to Homer can never render Homer truly. 
 The four words are these : quaint, garrulous^ prosaic, loiv. 
 Search the English language for a w^ord which does not 
 apply to Homer, and you could not fix on a better than 
 quaint, unless perhaps you fixed on one of the other three. 
 
 Again; *to translate Homer suitably,' says Mr. Newman, 
 * we need a diction sufficiently antiquated to obtain pardon 
 
 ^ 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 35 
 
 • 
 
 of the reader for its frequent homeliness.' ' I am con- 
 cerned,' he says again, ' with the artistic problem of attain- 
 ing a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while remain- 
 ing easily intelligible.' And again, he speaks of ' the more 
 antiquated style suited to this subject.' Quaint ! anti- 
 quated ! — but to whom ? Sir Thomas Browne is quaint, 
 and the diction of Chaucer is antiquated : does Mr. New- 
 man suppose that Homer seemed quaint to Sophocles, 
 when he read him, as Sir Thomas Browne seems quaint to 
 us, when we read him? or that Homer's diction seemed 
 antiquated to Sophocles, as Chaucer's diction seems anti- 
 quated to us ? But we cannot really know, I confess, how 
 Homer seemed to Sophocles ; well then, to those who can 
 tell us how he seems to them, to the living scholar, to our 
 only present witness on this matter,— does Homer make on 
 the Provost of Eton, when he reads him, the impression of 
 a poet quaint and antiquated? does he make this impression 
 on Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett. When Shak- 
 speare 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 
 
 D 2 
 
 '''T**«»w*ft*M^^:.'i , , 
 
36 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 scholar at all the same impression as this language which I 
 have quoted from Shakspeare ? Never once. Shakspeare 
 is quaint and antiquated in the lines which I have just 
 quoted; but Shakspeare -need I say it?— can compose, 
 when he likes, when he is at his best, in a language perfectly 
 simple, perfectly intelligible ; in a language which, in spite 
 of the two centuries and a half which part its author from 
 us, stops us or surprises us as little as the language of a 
 contemporary. And Homer has not Shakspeare's variations : 
 Homer always composes as Shakspeare composes at his 
 best ; Homer is always simple and intelligible, as Shak- 
 speare is often ; Homer is never quaint and antiquated, as 
 Shakspeare is sometimes. 
 
 When Mr. Newman says that Homer is garrulous, he 
 seems, perhaps, to depart less widely from the common 
 opinion than when he calls him quaint ; for is there not 
 Horace's authority for asserting that 'the good Homer 
 sometimes nods,' bonus dermitat Homerus ? and a great 
 many people have come, from the currency of this well- 
 known criticism, to represent Homer to themselves as a 
 diffuse old man, with the full-stocked mind, but also with 
 the occasional slips and weaknesses of old age. Horace 
 has said better things than his ' bonus dormitat Homerus ; ' 
 but he never meant by this, as I need not remind any one 
 who knows the passage, that Homer was garrulous, or 
 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 37 
 
 anything of the kind. Instead, however, of either discuss- 
 ing what Horace meant, or discussing Homer's garrulity as 
 a general question, I prefer to bring to my mind some style 
 which is garrulous, and to ask myself, to ask you, whether 
 anything at all of the impression made by that style is ever 
 made by the style of Homer. The mediaeval romancers, 
 for instance, are garrulous ; the following, to take out of a 
 thousand instances the first which comes to hand, is in a 
 garrulous manner. It is from the romance of Richard 
 
 Coeur de Lion. 
 
 Of my tale be not a-wondered ! 
 The French says he slew an hundred 
 (Whereof is made this English saw) 
 Or he rested him any thraw. 
 Him followed many an English knight 
 That eagerly holp him for to fight,— 
 
 and so on. Now the manner of that composition I call 
 garrulous ; every one will feel it to be garrulous ; every one 
 will understand what is meant when it is called garrulous. 
 Then I ask the scholar,~does Homer's manner ever make 
 upon you, I do not say, the same impression of its garrulity 
 as that passage, but does it make, ever for one moment, 
 an impression in the slightest way resembling, in the 
 remotest degree akin to, the impression made by that 
 passage of the mediaeval poet? I have no fear of the 
 answer, 
 
38 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 39 
 
 I follow the same method with Mr. Newman's two other 
 epithets, prosaic and low. ' Homer rises and sinks with his 
 subject,' says Mr. Newman ; ' is prosaic when it is tame, is 
 low when it is mean.' First I say, Homer is never, in any 
 sense, to be with truth called prosaic ; he is never to be 
 called low. He does not rise and sink with his subject ; on 
 the contrary, his manner invests his subject, whatever his 
 subject be, with nobleness. Then I look for an author of 
 whom it may with truth be said, that he * rises and sinks 
 with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is 
 mean.' Defoe is eminently such an author ; of Defoe's 
 manner it may with perfect precision be said, that it follows 
 his matter ; his lifelike composition takes its character from 
 the facts which it conveys, not from the nobleness of the 
 composer. In AIoll Flanders and Colonel Jack^ Defoe is 
 undoubtedly prosaic when his subject is tame, low when his 
 subject is mean. Does Homer's manner in the Iliad^ I ask 
 the scholar, ever make upon him an impression at all like 
 the impression made by Defoe's manner in Moll Flanders 
 and Colonel Jack ? Does it not, on the contrary, leave him 
 with an impression of nobleness, even when it deals with 
 Thersites or with Irus ? 
 
 Well then. Homer is neither quaint, nor garrulous, nor 
 prosaic, nor mean : and Mr. Newman, in seeing him so, 
 sees him differently from those who are to judge Mr. 
 
 Newman's rendering of him. By pointing out how a wrong 
 conception of Homer affects Mr. Newman's translation, I 
 hope to place in still clearer light those four cardinal truths 
 which I pronounce essential for him who would have a 
 right conception of Homer : that Homer is rapid, that he 
 is plain and direct in word and style, that he is plain and 
 direct in his ideas, and that he is noble. 
 
 Mr. Newman says that in fixing on a style for suitably 
 rendering Homer, as he conceives him, he ' alights on the 
 delicate line which separates the quaint from the grotesque: 
 *I ought to be quaint,' he says, *I ought not to be 
 grotesque.' This is a most unfortunate sentence. Mr. 
 Newman is grotesque, which he himself says he ought not 
 to be ; and he ought not to be quaint, which he himself 
 
 says he ought to be. 
 
 ' No two persons will agree,' says Mr. Newman, ' as to 
 where the quaint ends and the grotesque begins ; ' and 
 perhaps this is true. But, in order to avoid all ambiguity 
 in the use of the two words, it is enough to say, that 
 most persons would call an expression which produced on 
 them a very strong sense of its incongruity, and which 
 violendy surprised them, grotesque; and an expression, 
 which produced on them a slighter sense of its in- 
 congruity, and which more gently surprised them, quaint. 
 Using the two words in this manner, I say, that when Mr. 
 
 i 
 

 t it iL,i' i ift l W." ■ 
 
 f 
 
 40 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 Newman translates Helen's words to Hector in the sixth 
 book, 
 
 Aa€p ijxiioy Kvvhs KaKoyLi]X'i-voVy oKpuofCaris,^ — 
 
 O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief- working vixen, 
 A numbing horror, — 
 
 he is grotesque ; that is, he expresses himself in a manner 
 which produces on us a very str< ng sense of its incongruity, 
 and which violently surprises us. I say, again, that when 
 Mr. Newman translates the common line, 
 
 TV 8' Tj^et'jScT' ^ireira fiiyas KopvdaioKos "EKTup, — 
 Great Hector of the motley helm then spake to her responsive, — 
 
 or the common expression eiJKVTj/xtScs 'Axatot, ' dapper- 
 greaved Achaians,' he is quaint ; that is, he expresses 
 himself in a manner which produces on us a slighter sense 
 of incongruity, and which more gently surprises us. But 
 violent and gentle surprise are alike far- from the scholar's 
 spirit when he reads in Homer kwo^ KaKOfirj^avovj or 
 KopvBaioXo^ "E/cT(op, or, IvKvrjixihe^; ^A^atoL. These expressions 
 no more seem odd to him than the simplest expressions in 
 English. He is not more checked by any feeling of 
 strangeness, strong or weak, when he reads them, than 
 when he reads in an English book 'the painted savage,' or, 
 * the phlegmatic Dutchman.' Mr. Newman's renderings of 
 
 » I/i'adf vi. 344. 
 
 viV 
 
 ] 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 41 
 
 them must, therefore, be wrong expressions in a translation 
 of Homer, because they excite in the scholar, their only 
 competent judge, a feeling quite alien to that excited in 
 him by what they profess to render. 
 
 Mr. Newman, by expressions of this kind, is false to his 
 original in two ways. He is false to him inasmuch as he is 
 ignoble ; for a noble air, and a grotesque air, the air of the 
 address, 
 
 Aaep ffiflo, KVfhs KaKoptrixo-vov, oKpvodffa-yfSy — 
 
 and the air of the address, 
 
 O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief-working vixen, 
 A numbing horror, — 
 
 are just contrary the one to the other : and he is false to 
 him inasmuch as he is odd ; for an odd diction like Mr. 
 Newman's, and a perfectly plain natural diction like 
 Homer's, — * dapper-greaved Achaians' and ivKvrjixi^e^ 
 *Axatot, — are also just contrary the one to the other. Where, 
 indeed, Mr. Newman got his diction, with whom he can 
 have lived, what can be his test of antiquity and rarity for 
 words, are questions which I ask myself with bewilderment. 
 He has prefixed to his translation a list of what he calls 
 * the more antiquated or rarer words ' which he has used. 
 In this list appear, on the one hand, such words as doughty^ 
 grisly^ lusty^ noisome^ ravin, which are familiar, one would 
 think, to all the world ; on the other hand such words as 
 
i**« 
 
 w"i^«»«r<>i^ 
 
 u 
 
 I I 
 
 42 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 bragly, meaning, Mr. Newman tells us, 'proudly fine; 
 bulkin, 'a cdM)' plump, a 'mass;' and so on. 'I am 
 concerned,' says Mr. Newman, ' with the artistic problem of 
 attaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while 
 remaining easily intelligible.' But it seems to me that lusty 
 is not antiquated : and that bragly is not a word readily 
 understood. That this word, indeed, and bulkin, may have 
 ' a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity,' I admit ; but 
 that they are * easily intelligible,' I deny. 
 
 Mr. Newman's syntax has, I say it with pleasure, a 
 much more Homeric cast than his vocabulary ; his syntax, 
 the mode in which his thought is evolved, although not the 
 actual words in which it is expressed, seems to me right in 
 its general character, and the best feature of his version. 
 It is not artificial or rhetorical like Cowper's syntax or 
 Pope's : it is simple, direct, and natural, and so far it is like 
 Homer's. It fails, however, just where, from the inherent 
 fault of Mr. Newman's conception of Homer, one might ex- 
 pect it to fail,— it fails in nobleness. It presents the thought 
 in a way which is something more than unconstrained,— 
 over-familiar ; something more than easy,— free and easy. 
 In this respect it is like the movement of Mr. Newman's 
 version, like his rhythm, for this, too, fails, in spite of some 
 good qualities, by not being noble enough ; this, while it 
 avoids the faults of being slow and elaborate, falls into a 
 
 \ 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 43 
 
 fault in the opposite direction, and is slip-shod. Homer 
 
 presents his thought naturally ; but when Mr. Newman has, 
 
 A thousand fires along the plain, I say, that night were burning,— 
 
 he presents his thought familiarly ; in a style which may be 
 the genuine style of ballad-poetry, but which is not the 
 style of Homer. Homer moves freely; but when Mr. 
 Newman has, 
 
 Infatuate ! O that thou wert lord to some other army,— ' 
 
 he gives himself too much freedom ; he leaves us too much 
 to do for his rhythm ourselves, instead of giving to us a 
 rhythm like Homer's, easy indeed, but mastering our ear 
 with a fulness of power which is irresistible. 
 
 I said that a certain style might be the genuine style of 
 ballad-poetry, but yet not the style of Homer. The analogy 
 of the ballad is ever present to Mr. Newman's thoughts 
 in considering Homer; ajid perhaps nothing has more 
 caused his faults than this analogy,— this popular, but, it is 
 time to say, this erroneous analogy. ' The moral qualities 
 
 » From the reproachful answer of Ulysses to Agamemnon, who had 
 proposed an abandonment of their expedition. This is one of the 
 ' tonic ' passages of the Iltady so I quote it :— 
 
 Ah, unworthy king, some other inglorious army 
 Should'st thou command, not rule over its, whose portion for ever 
 Zeus hath made it, from youth right up to age, to be winding 
 Skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of us perish. 
 
 Iliad, xiv. 84. 
 
 "5^ 
 
 il 
 
'lyrwuT^K" I • mw 
 
 •lt m t^mgm^'^ j l g i _ MM. . i ir -^f - 
 
 r^mmf^mr'V^pm 
 
 ■■L . 
 
 m0»m 
 
 'W 
 
 ! 
 
 ■ft 
 
 fe « 
 
 44 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 of Homer's style,' says Mr. Newman, ' being like to those of 
 the English ballad, we need a metre of the same genius. 
 Only those metres, which by the very possession of these 
 qualities are liable to degenerate into doggerel^ are suitable 
 to reproduce the ancient epic' ' The style of Homer,' he 
 says, in a passage which I have before quoted, * is direct, 
 popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous : in all these 
 respects it is similar to the old English ballad.' Mr. New- 
 man, I need not say, is by no means alone in this opinion. 
 * The most really and truly Homeric of all the creations of 
 the English muse is,' says Mr. Newman's critic in the 
 National Review^ 'the ballad-poetry of ancient times \ and the 
 association between metre and subject is one that it would 
 be true wisdom to preserve.' ' It is confessed,' says Chap- 
 man's last editor, Mr. Hooper, ' that the fourteen-syllable 
 verse ' (that is, a ballad-verse) ' is peculiarly fitting for 
 Homeric translation.' And the editor of Dr. Maginn's 
 clever and popular Ho7neric Ballads assumes it as one of 
 his author's greatest and most undisputable merits, that he 
 was 'the first who consciously realised to himself the truth 
 that Greek ballads can be really represented in English only 
 by a similar measure.' 
 
 This proposition that Homer's poetry is ballad-poetry^ 
 analogous to the well-known ballad-poetry of the English 
 and other nations, has a certain small portion of truth in it, 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 45 
 
 and at one time probably served a useful purpose, when it 
 was employed to discredit the artificial and literary manner 
 in which Pope and his school rendered Homer. But it has 
 been so extravagantly over-used, the mistake which it was 
 useful in combating has so entirely lost the public favour, 
 that it is now much more important to insist on the large 
 part of error contained in it, than to extol its small part 
 of truth. It is time to say plainly that, whatever the 
 admirers of our old ballads may think, the supreme form of 
 epic poetry, the genuine Homeric mould, is not the form of 
 the Ballad of Lord Bateman. I have myself shown the 
 broad difference between Milton's manner and Homer's ; 
 but, after a course of Mr. Newman and Dr. Maginn, I turn 
 round in desperation upon them and upon the balladists 
 who have misled them, and I exclaim : ' Compared with 
 you, Milton is Homer's double ; there is, whatever you may 
 think, ten thousand times more of the real strain of Homer 
 in, 
 
 than in. 
 
 or m. 
 
 Blind Thamyris, and blind Mseonides, 
 And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old, — 
 
 Now Christ thee save, thou proud porter, 
 Now Christ thee save and see,' — 
 
 While the tinker did dine, he had plenty of wine.' 
 
 ' From the ballad of King Esimercy in Percy's Rcliques of Ancient 
 English Poetry^ i. 69 (edit, of 1767). 
 2 Reliques, i. 241. 
 

 J ' 
 
 46 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 47 
 
 For Homer is not only rapid in movement, simple in 
 style, plain in language, natural in thought ; he is also, and 
 above all, noble. I have advised the translator not to go 
 into the vexed question of Homer's identity. Yet I will 
 just remind him that the grand argument— or rather, not 
 argument, for the matter affords no data for arguing, but the 
 grand source from which conviction, as we read the Hiad^ 
 keeps pressing in upon us, that there is one poet of the Iliad^ 
 one Homer — is precisely this nobleness of the poet, this 
 grand manner ; we feel that the analogy drawn from other 
 joint compositions does not hold good here, because those 
 works do not bear, like the Iliad^ the magic stamp of a 
 master ; and the moment you have anything less than a 
 masterwork, the co-operation or consolidation of several 
 poets becomes possible, for talent is not uncommon ; the 
 moment you have much less than a masterwork, they become 
 
 Ik 
 
 easy, for mediocrity is everywhere. I can imagine fifty 
 Bradies joined with as many Tates to make the New Version 
 of the Psalms. I can imagine several poets having con- 
 tributed to any one of the old English ballads in Percy's 
 collection. I can imagine several poets, possessing, like 
 Chapman, the Elizabethan vigour and the Elizabethan 
 mannerism, united with Chapman to produce his version of 
 the Iliad. I can imagine several poets, with the literary knack 
 of the twelfth century, united to produce the Nibelungen 
 
 \ 
 
 Lay in the form in which we have it,— a work which the 
 Germans, in their joy at discovering a national epic of their 
 own, have rated vastly higher than it deserves. And lastly, 
 though Mr. Newman's translation of Homer bears the strong 
 mark of his own idiosyncrasy, yet I can imagine Mr. 
 Newman and a school of adepts trained by him in his art 
 of poetry, jointly producing that work, so that Aristarchus 
 himself should have difficulty in pronouncing which line was 
 the master's, and which a pupil's. But I cannot imagine 
 several poets, or one poet, joined with Dante in the composi- 
 tion of his Inferno, though many poets have taken for their 
 subject a descent into Hell. Many artists, again, have 
 represented Moses ; but there is only one Moses of Michael 
 Angelo. So the insurmountable obstacle to believing the 
 Iliad a consolidated work of several poets is this : that the 
 work of great masters is unique ; and the Iliad has a great 
 master's genuine stamp, and that stamp is the grand style. 
 
 Poets who cannot work in the grand style instinctively 
 seek a style in which their comparative inferiority may feel 
 itself at ease, a manner which may be, so to speak, indul- 
 gent to their inequalities. The ballad-style offers to an epic 
 poet, quite unable to fill the canvas of Homer, or Dante, or 
 Milton, a canvas which he is capable of filling. The ballad- 
 measure is quite able to give due effect to the vigour and 
 spirit which its employer, when at his very best, may be able 
 
 f 
 
 s 
 
 i 
 
11 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 49 
 
 t y 
 
 \ i.» 
 
 ir 
 
 ii 
 
 48 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 to exhibit ; and, when he is not at his best, when he is a 
 httle trivial, or a Httle dull, it will not betray him, it will not 
 bring out his weaknesses into broad relief. This -is a con- 
 venience ; but it is a convenience which the ballad-style 
 purchases by resigning all pretensions to the highest, to the 
 grand manner. It is true of its movement, as it is not true 
 of Homer's, that it is * liable to degenerate into doggerel' 
 It is true of its ' moral qualities,' as it is not true of Homer's, 
 that 'quaintness' and ' garrulity ' are among them. It is 
 true of its employers, as it is not true of Homer, that they 
 ^ rise and sink with their subject, are prosaic when it is tame, 
 are low when it is mean.' For this reason the ballad-style 
 and the ballad-measure are eminently //^appropriate to 
 render Homer. Homer's manner and movement are always 
 both noble and powerful : the ballad-manner and move- 
 ment are often either jaunty and smart, so not noble ; or 
 jog-trot and humdrum, so not powerful. 
 
 The Nibelungen Lay affords a good illustration of the 
 qualities of the ballad-manner. Based on grand traditions, 
 which had found expression in a grand lyric poetry, the 
 German epic poem of the Nibelungen Lay^ though it is in- 
 teresting, and though it has good passages, is itself anything 
 rather than a grand poem. It is a poem of which the com- 
 poser is, to speak the truth, a very ordinary mortal, and 
 often, therefore, like other ordinary mortals, very prosy. It 
 is in a measure which eminently adapts itself to this 
 
 commonplace personality of its composer, which has much 
 the movement of the well-known measures of Tate and 
 Brady, and can jog on, for hundreds of lines at a time, with 
 a level ease which reminds one of Sheridan's saying that 
 easy writing may be often such hard reading. But, instead 
 of occupying myself with the Nibelungen Lay, I prefer to 
 look at the ballad-style as directly applied to Homer, in 
 Chapman's version and Mr. Newman's, and in the Homeric 
 Ballads of Dr. Maginn. 
 
 First I take Chapman. I have already shown that Chap- 
 man's conceits are un-Homeric, and that his rhyme is un- 
 Homeric • I will now show how his manner and movement 
 are un-Homeric. Chapman's diction, I have said, is gen- 
 erally good ; but it must be called good with this reserve, 
 that, though it has Homer's plainness and directness, it often 
 offends him who knows Homer, by wanting Homer's noble- 
 ness. In a passage which I have already quoted, the 
 address of Zeus ^o the horses of Achilles, where Homer 
 
 has — 
 
 a hiCKd>^ ri (T<poo'i ^S/xev nTj\T)t HvaKTi 
 evrtrcf; vH'e7s 5' iffrhv aynpo t' adavaTW Tf ! 
 
 Chapman has— , , z . mi. 
 
 Poo}' wretched beasts , said he, 
 
 Why gave we you to a mortal king, when immortality 
 
 Iliadj xvii. 443. 
 
50 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 51 
 
 And incapacity of age so dignifies your states ? 
 
 Was it to haste ' the miseries poured out on human fates ? 
 
 There are many faults in this rendering of Chapman's, but 
 what I particularly wish to notice in it is the expression 
 ' Poor wretched beasts ' for 5 SctXw. This expression just 
 illustrates the difference between the ballad-manner and 
 Homer's. The ballad- manner— Chapman's manner— is, I 
 say, pitched sensibly lower than Homer's. The ballad- 
 manner requires that an expression shall be plain and 
 natural, and then it asks no more. Homer's manner 
 requires that an expression shall be plain and natural, but 
 it also requires that it shall be noble. 'A SctXw is as plain, 
 as simple as ' Poor wretched beasts ; ' but it is also noble, 
 which *Poor wretched beasts' is not. 'Poor wretched 
 beasts' is, in truth, a little over- familiar, but this is no ob- 
 jection to it for the ballad-manner ; it is good enough for 
 the old English ballad, good enough for the Nibelungen Lay, 
 good enough for Chapman's Iliad, good enough for Mr. 
 Newman's Iliad, good enough for Dr. Maginn's Homeric 
 Ballads ; but it is not good enough for Homer. 
 
 To feel that Chapman's measure, though natural, is not 
 Homeric ; that, though tolerably rapid, it has not Homer's 
 rapidity \ that it has a jogging rapidity rather than a flowing 
 
 > All the editions which I have seen have * haste,' but the right 
 reading must certainly be * taste.' 
 
 rapidity ; and a movement familiar rather than nobly easy, 
 
 one has only, I think, to read half a dozen lines in any part 
 
 of his version. I prefer to keep as much as possible to 
 
 passages which I have already noticed, so I will quote the 
 
 conclusion of the nineteenth book, where Achilles answers 
 
 his horse Xanthus, who has prophesied his death to him.^ 
 
 Achilles, far in rage, 
 Thus answered him : — It fits not thee thus proudly to presage 
 My overthrow. I know myself it is my fate to fall 
 Thus far from Phthia ; yet that fate shall fail to vent her gall 
 Till mine vent thousands. —These words said, he fell to horrid deeds, 
 Gave dreadful signal, and forthright made fly his one-hoofed steeds. 
 
 For what regards the manner of this passage, the words 
 * Achilles Thus answered him,' and ' I know myself it is my 
 fate to fall Thus far from Phthia,' are in Homer's manner, 
 and all the rest is out of it. But for what regards its move- 
 ment, who, after being jolted by Chapman through such 
 
 verse as this, — 
 
 These words said, he fell to horrid deeds, 
 
 Gave dreadful signal, and forthright made fly his one-hoofed steeds, — 
 
 who does not feel the vital difference of the movement of 
 Homer, — 
 
 To pass from Chapman to Dr. Maginn. His Homeric 
 Ballads are vigorous and genuine poems in their own way ; 
 they are not one continual falsetto, like the pinchbeck 
 
 ' I/iadf xix. 419. 
 
 E2 
 
.( 
 
 52 
 
 OlSi TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 Roman Ballads of Lord Macaulay ; but just because they 
 are ballads in their manner and movement, just because, to 
 use the words of his applauding editor, Dr. Maginn has 
 ' consciously realised to himself the truth that Greek ballads 
 can be really represented in English only by a similar 
 manner,'— just for this very reason they are not at all 
 Homeric, they have not the least in the world the manner 
 of Homer. There is a celebrated incident in the nineteenth 
 book of the Odyssey, the recognition by the old nurse 
 Eurycleia of a scar on the leg of her master Ulysses, who 
 has entered his own hall as an unknown wanderer, and 
 whose feet she has been set to wash. 'Then she came 
 near,' says Homer, ' and began to wash her master ; and 
 straightway she recognised a scar which he had got in 
 former days from the white tusk of a wild boar, when he 
 went to Parnassus unto Autolycus and the sons of 
 Autolycus, his mother's father and brethren.'^ This, * really 
 represented ' by Dr. Maginn, in ' a measure similar ' to 
 Homer's, becomes : — 
 
 And scarcely had she begun to wash 
 Ere she was aware of the grisly gash 
 
 Above his knee that lay. 
 It was a wound from a wild boar's tooth, 
 All on Parnassus' slope, 
 
 Where he went to hunt in the days of his youth 
 With his mother's sire, — 
 
 * Odyssey^ xix. 392, 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 53 
 
 
 and so on. That is the true ballad-manner, no one can 
 deny ; ' all on Parnassus slope ' is, I was going to say, the 
 true ballad-slang ; but never again shall I be able to read, 
 
 vi^i V 6.p dtaaov iovao. ivaxG' tov avrina 5' iyvot 
 
 ov 
 
 )\-i\v. 
 
 without having the detestable dance of Dr. Maginn's,— 
 And scarcely had she begun to wash 
 Ere she was aware of the grisly gash,— 
 
 jigging in my ears, to spoil the effect of Homer, and to 
 torture me. To apply that manner and that rhythm to 
 Homer's incidents, is not to imitate Homer, but to travesty 
 
 him. 
 
 Lastly I come to Mr. Newman. His rhythm, like 
 Chapman's and Dr. Maginn's, is a ballad-rhythm, but with 
 a modification of his own. * Holding it,' he tells us, ' as an 
 axiom, that rhyme must be abandoned,' he found, on 
 abandoning it, ' an unpleasant void until he gave a double 
 ending to the verse.' In short, instead of saying, 
 
 Good people all with one accord 
 Give ear unto my taky— 
 
 Mr. Newman would say. 
 
 Good people all with one accord 
 Give ear unto my story. 
 
 A recent American writer^ gravely observes that for his 
 
 > Mr. Marsh, in his Lectures on the English Language, New York, 
 i860, p. 520. 
 
54 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 countrymen this rhythm has a disadvantage in being Hke 
 the rhythm of the American national air Yankee Doodle^ and 
 thus provoking ludicrous associations. Yankee Doodle is 
 not our national air : for us Mr. Newman's rhythm has not 
 this disadvantage. He himself gives us several plausible 
 reasons why this rhythm of his really ought to be successful : 
 let us examine how far it is successful. 
 
 Mr. Newman joins to a bad rhythm so bad a diction 
 that it is difficult to distinguish exactly whether in any 
 given passage it is his words or his measure which produces 
 a total impression of such an unpleasant kind. But with a 
 little attention we may analyse our total impression, and 
 find the share which each element has in producing it. 
 To take the passage which I have so often mentioned, 
 Sarpedon's speech to Glaucus. Mr. Newman translates this 
 as follows : — 
 
 O gentle friend ! if thou and I, from this encounter 'scaping, 
 Hereafter might forever be from Eld and Death exempted 
 As heavenly gods, not I in sooth would fight among the foremost, 
 Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle. 
 Now,— sith ten thousand shapes of Death do any-gait pursue us 
 . Which never mortal may evade, though sly of foot and nimble ; — 
 Onward ! and glory let us earn, or glory yield to some one. — 
 
 Could all our care elude the gloomy grave 
 Which claims no less the fearful than the brave — 
 
 I am not going to quote Pope's version over again, but I 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 55 
 
 1 
 
 must remark in passing, how much more, with all Pope's 
 radical difference of manner from Homer, it gives us of the 
 real effect of 
 
 €1 \x.\v yapf ToXefiov irfpl r6vhf <pvy6vT€ — 
 
 than Mr. Newman's lines. And now, why are Mr. New- 
 man's lines faulty? They are faulty, first, because, as a 
 matter of diction, the expressions ' O gentle friend,' ' eld, 
 ' in sooth,' * liefly,' * advance,' ' man-ennobling,' ' sith,' * any- 
 gait,' and ' sly of foot,' are all bad ; some of them worse 
 than others, but all bad : that is, they all of them as here 
 used excite in the scholar, their sole judge,— excite, I will 
 boldly affirm, in Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett,— 
 a feeling totally different from that excited in them by the 
 words of Homer which these expressions profess to render. 
 The lines are faulty, secondly, because, as a matter of 
 rhythm, any and every line among them has to the ear of 
 the same judges (I affirm it with equal boldness) a move- 
 ment as unlike Homer's movement in the corresponding 
 line as the single words are unlike Homer's words. Ovr€ 
 Ki o-e o-Tc'Uot/xi i^axnv €9 KvStavctpav,— ' Nor liefly thee would 
 I advance to man-ennobling battle ; '—for whose ears do 
 those two rhythms produce impressions of, to use Mr. New- 
 man's own words, ' similar moral genius ' ? 
 
 I will by no means make search in Mr. Newman's 
 version for passages likely to raise a laugh ; that search. 
 
 ! 
 
56 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 57 
 
 II ••■ 
 
 : 1 
 
 alas ! would be far too easy. I will quote but one other 
 passage from him, and that a passage where the diction is 
 comparatively inoffensive, in order that disapproval of the 
 words may not unfairly heighten disapproval of the rhythm. 
 The end of the nineteenth book, the answer of Achilles to 
 his horse Xanthus, Mr. Newman gives thus : — 
 
 Chestnut ! why bodest death to me ? from thee this was not needed. 
 Myself right surely know also, that 't is my doom to perish, 
 From mother and from father dear apart, in Troy ; but never 
 Pause will I make of war, until the Trojans be glutted. 
 
 He spake, and yelling, held afront the single-hoofed horses. 
 
 Here Mr. Newman calls Xanthus Chestnut^ indeed, as he 
 calls Balius Spotted^ and Podarga Spry-foot \ which is as if 
 a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale Mdlle, Rossignol^ 
 or Mr. Bright M. Clair. And several other expressions, 
 too, * yelling,' 'held afront,' 'single-hoofed,' — leave, to say 
 the very least, much to be desired. Still, for Mr. Newman, 
 the diction of this passage is pure. All the more clearly 
 appears the profound vice of a rhythm, which, with com- 
 paratively few faults of words, can leave a sense of such 
 incurable alienation from Homer's manner as, ' Myself right 
 surely know also that 'tis my doom to perish,' compared 
 with the cv vv Tot otSa kox aurog, o /xot ix6po<s ivOdS' oXia-Qai 
 of Homer. 
 
 But so deeply seated is the difference between the 
 
 
 ballad-manner and Homer's, that even a man of the highest 
 powers, even a man of the greatest vigour of spirit and of 
 true genius,— the Coryphoeus of balladists, Sir Walter Scott, 
 —fails with a manner of this kind to produce an effect at 
 all like the effect of Homer. ' I am not so rash,' declares 
 Mr. Newman, 'as to say that {{freedom be given to rhyme 
 as in Walter Scott's poetry,'-Walter Scott, ' by far the most 
 Homeric of our poets,' as in another place he calls him,— 
 ' a genius may not arise who will translate Homer into the 
 melodies of Marmion: 'The truly classical and truly 
 romantic,' says Dr. Maginn, 'are one; the moss-trooping 
 Nestor reappears in the moss-trooping heroes of Percy's 
 Reliquesr and a description by Scott, which he quotes, he 
 calls ' graphic, and therefore Homeric' He forgets our 
 fourth axiom,— that Homer is not only graphic ; he is also 
 noble, and has the grand style. Human nature under like 
 circumstances is probably in all stages much the same ; and 
 so far it may be said that ' the truly classical and the truly 
 romantic are one ;' but it is of little use to tell us this, 
 because we know the human nature of other ages only 
 through the representations of them which have come 
 down to us, and the classical and the romantic modes of 
 representation are so far from being 'one,' that they remain 
 eternally distinct, and have created for us a separation 
 between the two worlds which they respectively represent. 
 
 I 
 
58 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 
 Therefore to call Nestor the * moss-trooping Nestor' is 
 
 absurd, because, though Nestor may possibly have been 
 
 much the same sort of man as many a moss-trooper, he has 
 
 yet come to us through a mode of representation so unlike 
 
 that of Percy's Reliques, that instead of 'reappearing in 
 
 the moss-trooping heroes ' of these poems, he exists in our 
 
 imagination as something utterly unlike them, and as 
 
 belonging to another world. So the Greeks in Shakspeare's 
 
 Troilus and Cressida are no longer the Greeks whom we 
 
 have known in Homer, because they come to us through a 
 
 mode of representation of the romantic world. But I must 
 
 not forget Scott. 
 
 I suppose that when Scott is in what may be called full 
 
 ballad swing, no one will hesitate to pronounce his manner 
 
 neither Homeric nor the grand manner. When he says, 
 
 for instance, 
 
 I do not rhyme to that dull elf 
 
 Who cannot image to himself, ' 
 
 and so on, any scholar will feel that this is not Homer's 
 manner. But let us take Scott's poetry at its best ; and 
 when it is at its best, it is undoubtedly very good 
 indeed : — 
 
 Tunstall lies dead upon the field, 
 
 His life-blood stains the spotless shield ; 
 
 ' Marmion, canto vi. 38. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 59 
 
 Edmund is down,— my life is reft,— 
 The Admiral alone is left. 
 Let Stanley charge with spur of fire,— 
 With Chester charge, and Lancashire, 
 Full upon Scotland's central host, 
 Or victory and England's lost.^ 
 
 That is, no doubt, as vigorous as possible, as spirited as 
 possible ; it is exceedingly fine poetry. And still I say, it 
 is not in the grand manner, and therefore it is not like 
 Homer's poetry. Now, how shall I make him who doubts 
 this feel that I say true ; that these lines of Scott are 
 essentially neither in Homer's style nor in the grand style ? 
 I may point out to him that the movement of Scott's lines, 
 while it is rapid, is also at the same time what the French 
 call saccade, its rapidity is 'jerky;' whereas Homer's 
 rapidity is a flowing rapidity. But this is something external 
 and material ; it is but the outward and visible sign of an 
 inward and spiritual diversity. I may discuss what, in the 
 abstract, constitutes the grand style ; butthat sort of general 
 discussion never much helps our judgment of particular 
 instances. I may say that the presence or absence of the 
 grand style can only be spiritually discerned ; and this is 
 true, but to plead this looks like evading the difficulty. 
 My best way is to take eminent specimens of the grand 
 
 » Marmion, canto vi. 29. 
 
6o 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 style, and to put them side by side with this of Scott. For 
 example, when Homer says : — 
 
 aAAct, <f>i\05, ddv€ Koi av' rln] 6\v<pvpeai ovtus; 
 ni-rQavi koX UdrpoKKos, oirep a4o Tro\\})V a/u.eiVwi',* 
 
 that is in the grand style. When Virgil says : — 
 
 Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem, 
 Fortunam ex aliis, ^ 
 
 that is in the grand style. When Dante says : — 
 
 Lascio lo fele, et vo pei dolci pomi 
 Promessi a me per lo verace Duca ; 
 Ma fino al centro pria convien ch' io tomi, ^ 
 
 that is in the grand style. When Milton says : — 
 
 His form had yet not lost 
 All her original brightness, nor appeared 
 Less than archangel ruined, and the excess 
 Of glory obscured,' 
 
 that, finally, is in the grand style. Now let any one after 
 repeating to himself these four passages, repeat again the 
 
 ^ * Be content, good friend, die also thou ! why lamentest thou 
 thyself on this wise? Patroclus, too, died, who was a far better than 
 thou.' — Iliad y xxi. lo6. 
 
 2 ' From me, young man, learn nobleness of soul and true effort : 
 learn success from others.' — yEneid, xii. 435. 
 
 3 ' I leave the gall of bitterness, and I go for the apples of sweet- 
 ness promised unto me by my faithful Guide ; but far as the centre it 
 behoves me first to fall.' — Hell^ xvi. 61. 
 
 ^ Paradise Losty i. 591. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 61 
 
 passage of Scott, and he will perceive that there is some- 
 thing in style which the four first have in common, and 
 which the last is without ; and this something is precisely 
 the grand manner. It is no disrespect to Scott to say that 
 he does not attain to this manner in his poetry ; to say so, 
 is merely to say that he is not among the five or six supreme 
 poets of the world. Among these he is not ; but, being a 
 man of far greater powers than the ballad-poets, he has 
 tried to give to their instrument a compass and an elevation 
 which it does not naturally possess, in order to enable him 
 to come nearer to the effect of the instrument used by the 
 great epic poets-an instrument which he felt he could not 
 truly use,-and in this attempt he has but imperfectly 
 succeeded. The poetic style of Scott is-(it becomes 
 necessary to say so when it is proposed to 'translate 
 Homer into the melodies oi Marmion')-i\. is, tried by the 
 highest standard, a bastard epic style ; and that is why, out 
 of his own powerful hands, it has had so little success. It 
 is a less natural, and therefore a less good style, than the 
 original ballad-style ; while it shares with the ballad-style 
 the inherent incapacity of rising into the grand style, of 
 adequately rendering Homer. Scott is certainly at his best 
 in his battles. Of Homer you could not say this ; he is 
 not better in his battles than elsewhere ; but even between 
 the battle-pieces of the two there exists all the differ- 
 
 i % 
 
 ^ I 
 
! 
 
 i 'i 
 
 m 
 
 II 
 
 62 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ence which there is between an able work and a master- 
 piece. 
 
 Tunstall lies dead upon the field, 
 
 His life-blood stains the spotless shield : 
 Edmund is down, — my life is reft, — 
 The Admiral alone is left. 
 
 — ' For not in the hands of Diomede the son of Tydeus 
 rages the spear, to ward off destruction from the Danaans ; 
 neither as yet have I heard the voice of the son of Atreus, 
 shouting out of his hated mouth ; but the voice of Hector 
 the slayer of men bursts round me, as he cheers on the 
 Trojans; and they with their yellings fill all the plain, 
 overcoming the Achaians in the battle.' — I protest that, to 
 my feeling, Homer's performance, even through that pale 
 and far-off shadow of a prose translation, still has a hundred 
 times more of the grand manner about it, than the original 
 poetry of Scott. 
 
 Well, then, the ballad-manner and the ballad-measure, 
 whether in the hands of the old ballad poets, or arranged 
 by Chapman, or arranged by Mr. Newman, or, even, 
 arranged by Sir Walter Scott, cannot worthily render Homer. 
 And for one reason : Homer is plain, so are they ; Hcmer 
 is natural, so are they ; Homer is spirited, so are they ; 
 but Homer is sustainedly noble, and they are not. Homer 
 and they are both of them natural, and therefore touching 
 and stirring ; but the grand style, which is Homer's, is 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 63 
 
 something more than touching and stirring; it can form 
 the character, it is edifying. The old English balladist 
 may stir Sir Philip Sidney's heart like a trumpet, and this 
 is much : but Homer, but the few artists in the grand style, 
 can do more ; they can refine the raw natural man, they 
 can transmute him. So it is not without cause that I say, 
 and say again, to the translator of Homer : * Never for a 
 moment suffer yourself to forget our fourth fundamental pro- 
 position, Ho7ner is noble: For it is seen how large a share 
 this nobleness has in producing that general effect of his, 
 which it is the main business of a translator to ;rproduce. 
 
 I shall have to try your patience yet once more upon 
 this subject, and then my task will be completed. I have 
 shown what the four axioms respecting Homer which I have 
 laid down, exclude, what they bid a translator not to do ; I 
 have still to show what they supply, what positive help they 
 can give to the translator in his work. I will even, with 
 their aid, myself try my fortune with some of those passages 
 of Homer which I have already noticed ; not indeed with 
 any confidence that I more than others can succeed in 
 adequately rendering Homer, but in the hope of satisfying 
 competent judges, in the hope of making it clear to the 
 future translator, that I at any rate follow a right method, 
 and that, in coming short, I come short from weakness of 
 execution, not from original vice of design. This is why I 
 
 «i 
 
 1^ 
 
 I 
 
-■fi^fr -*■■ •»■ 
 
 1^1 
 
 64 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 have so long occupied myself with Mr. Newman's version ; 
 that, apart from all faults of execution, his original design 
 was wrong, and that he has done us the good service of 
 declaring that design in its naked wrongness. To bad 
 practice he has prefixed the bad theory which made the 
 practice bad ; he has given us a fiilse theory in his preface, 
 and he has exemplified the bad effects of that false theory 
 in his translation. It is because his starting-point is so bad 
 that he runs so badly ; and to save others from taking so 
 false a starting-point, may be to save them from running so 
 futile a course. 
 
 Mr. Newman, indeed, says in his preface, that if any one 
 dislikes his translation, * he has his easy remedy ; to keep 
 aloof from it.' But Mr. Newman is a writer of considerable 
 and deserved reputation ; he is also a Professor of the 
 University of London, an institution which by its position 
 and by its merits acquires every year greater importance. It 
 would be a very grave thing if the authority of so eminent a 
 Professor led his students to misconceive entirely the chief 
 work of the Greek world \ that work which, whatever the 
 other works of classical antiquity have to give us, gives it 
 more abundantly than they all. The eccentricity too, the 
 arbitrariness, of which Mr. Newman's conception of Homer 
 offers so signal an example, are not a peculiar failing of Mr. 
 Newman's own ; in varying degrees they are the great defect 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 65 
 
 
 of English intellect, the great blemish of English literature. 
 Our literature of the eighteenth century, the literature of the 
 school of Dryden, Addison, Pope, Johnson, is a long reac- 
 tion against this eccentricity, this arbitrariness ; that reaction 
 perished by its own faults, and its enemies are left once more 
 masters of the field. It is much more likely that any new 
 English version of Homer will have Mr. Newman's faults 
 than Pope's. Our present literature, which is very far, 
 certainly, from having the spirit and power of Elizabethan 
 genius, yet has in its own way these faults, eccentricity and 
 arbitrariness, quite as much as the Elizabethan literature 
 ever had. They are the cause that, while upon none, 
 perhaps, of the modern literatures has so great a sum of 
 force been expended as upon the English literature, at the 
 present hour this literature, regarded not as an object of 
 mere literary interest but as a living intellectual instrument 
 ranks only third in European effect and importance among 
 the literatures of Europe ; it ranks after the literatures of 
 France and Germany. Of these two literatures, as of the 
 intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many 
 years, has been a critical effort ; the endeavour, in all 
 branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, 
 science, — to see the object as in itself it really is. But 
 owing to the presence in English literature of this eccentric 
 and arbitrary spirit, owing to the strong tendency of English 
 
 F 
 
 w 
 
 1 
 

 66 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 67 
 
 writers to bring to the consideration of their object some 
 individual fancy, almost the last thing for which one would 
 come to English literature is just that very thing which now 
 Europe most desires -rr/V/V/Vw. It is useful to notice any 
 signal manifestation of those faults, which thus limit and 
 impair the action of our literature. And therefore I have 
 pointed out how widely, in translating Homer, a man even 
 of real ability and learning may go astray, unless he brings 
 to the study of this clearest of poets one quality in which 
 our English authors, with all their great gifts, are apt to be 
 somewhat wanting— simple lucidity of mind. 
 
 III. 
 
 Homer is rapid in his movement. Homer is plain in his 
 words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas. Homer is 
 noble in his manner. Cowper renders him ill because he is 
 slow in his movement, and elaborate in his style ; Pope 
 renders him ill because he is artificial both in his style and 
 in his words ; Chapman renders him ill because he is fan- 
 tastic in his ideas ; Mr. Newman renders him ill because he 
 is odd in his words and ignoble in his manner. All four 
 translators diverge from their original at other points besides 
 those named ; but it is at the points thus named that their 
 divergence is greatest. For instance, Cowper's diction is 
 
 not as Homer's diction, nor his nobleness as Homer's 
 nobleness ; but it is in movement and grammatical style 
 that he is most unlike Homer. Pope's rapidity is not of 
 the same sort as Homer's rapidity, nor are his plainness of 
 ideas and his nobleness as Homer's plainness of ideas and 
 nobleness : but it is in the artificial character of his style 
 and diction that he is most unlike Homer. Chapman's 
 movement, words, style, and manner, are often far enough 
 from resembling Homer's movement, words, style, and 
 manner ; but it is the fantasticality of his ideas which puts 
 him farthest from resembling Homer. Mr. Newman's 
 movement, grammatical style, and ideas, are a thousand 
 times in strong contrast with Homer's ; still it is by the 
 oddness of his diction and the ignobleness of his manner 
 that he contrasts with Homer the most violently. 
 
 Therefore the translator must not say to himself: 
 ' Cowper is noble, Pope is rapid, Chapman has a good 
 diction, Mr. Newman has a good cast of sentence ; I will 
 avoid Cowper's slowness. Pope's artificiality, Chapman's 
 conceits, Mr. Newman's oddity ; I will take Cowper's digni- 
 fied manner. Pope's impetuous movement, Chapman's 
 vocabulary, Mr. Newman's syntax, and so make a perfect 
 translation of Homer.' Undoubtedly in certain points the 
 versions of Chapman, Cowper, Pope, and Mr. Newman, all 
 of them have merit ; some of them very high merit, others 
 
 \ 
 
 F 2 
 
V 
 
 i: 
 
 68 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 a lower merit ; but even in these points they have none of 
 them precisely the same kind of merit as Homer, and there- 
 fore the new translator, even if he can imitate them in their 
 good points, will still not satisfy his judge, the scholar, who 
 asks him for Homer and Homer's kind of merit, or, at least, 
 for as much of them as it is possible to give. 
 
 So the translator really has no good model before him 
 for any part of his work, and has to invent everything for 
 himself. He is to be rapid in movement, plain in speech, 
 simple in thought, and noble ; and hoiv he is to be either 
 rapid, or plain, or simple, or noble, no one yet has shown him. 
 I shall try to-day to establish some practical suggestions 
 which may help the translator of Homer's poetry to comply 
 with the four grand requirements which we make of him. 
 
 His version is to be rapid ; and of course, to make a 
 man's poetry rapid, as to make it noble, nothing can serve 
 him so much as to have, in his own nature, rapidity and 
 nobleness. // is the spirit that quickeneth ; and no one will 
 so well render Homer's swift-flowing movement as he who 
 has himself something of the swift-moving spirit of Homer. 
 Yet even this is not quite enough. Pope certainly had a 
 quick and darting spirit, as he had, also, real nobleness ; 
 yet Pope does not render the movement of Homer. To 
 render this the translator must have, besides his natural 
 qualifications, an appropriate metre. 
 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 69 
 
 I have sufficiently shown why I think all forms of our 
 ballad-metre unsuited to Homer. It seems to me to be 
 beyond question that, for epic poetry, only three metres can 
 seriously claim to be accounted capable of the grand style. 
 Two of these will at once occur to every one,— the ten- 
 syllable, or so-called heroic, couplet, and blank verse. I do 
 not add to these the Spenserian stanza, although Dr. Maginn, 
 whose metrical eccentricities I have already criticised, pro- 
 nounces this stanza the one right measure for a translation 
 of Homer. It is enough to observe that if Pope's couplet, 
 with the simple system of correspondences that its rhymes 
 introduce, changes the movement of Homer, in which no 
 such correspondences are found, and is therefore a bad 
 measure for a translator of Homer to employ, Spenser's 
 stanza, with its far more intricate system of correspondences, 
 must change Homer's movement far more profoundly, and 
 must therefore be for the translator a far worse measure than 
 the couplet of Pope. Yet I will say, at the same time, that the 
 verse of Spenser is more fluid, slips more easily and quickly 
 along, than the verse of almost any other English poet. 
 
 By this the northern wagoner had set 
 His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star 
 That was in ocean waves yet never wet, 
 But firm is fixt, and sendeth light from far 
 To all that in the wide deep wandering are. ' 
 
 * The Faery Queen, Canto ii. stanza I. 
 
 • \ 
 
:( 
 
 7o 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 One cannot but feel that English verse has not often moved 
 with the fluidity and sweet ease of these lines. It is possi- 
 ble that it may have been this quality of Spenser's poetry 
 which made Dr. Maginn think that the stanza of The Faery 
 Queen must be a good measure for rendering Homer. This 
 it is not : Spenser's verse is fluid and rapid, no doubt, but 
 there are more ways than one of being fluid and rapid, and 
 Homer is fluid and rapid in quite another way than Spenser. 
 Spenser's manner is no more Homeric than is the manner 
 of the one modern inheritor of Spenser's beautiful gift, — the 
 poet, who evidently caught from Spenser his sweet and 
 easy-slipping movement, and who has exquisitely employed 
 it ; a Spenserian genius, nay, a genius by natural endow- 
 ment richer probably than even Spenser ; that light which 
 shines so unexpected and without fellow in our century, an 
 Elizabethan born too late, the early lost and admirably 
 gifted Keats. 
 
 I say then that there are really but three metres, — the 
 ten-syllable couplet, blank verse, and a third metre which I 
 will not yet name, but which is neither the Spenserian stanza 
 nor any form of ballad-verse, —between which, as vehicles 
 for Homer's poetry, the translator has to make his choice. 
 Every one will at once remember a thousand passages in 
 which both the ten-syllable couplet and blank verse prove 
 
 1 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 71 
 
 themselves to have nobleness. Undoubtedly the movement 
 and manner of this, — 
 
 Still raise for good the supplicating voice, 
 
 But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice,— 
 
 are noble. Undoubtedly, the movement and manner of 
 
 this : — t^. V r 
 
 High on a throne of royal state, which far 
 
 Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,— 
 
 are noble also. But the first is in a rhymed metre ; and 
 the unfitness of a rhymed metre for rendering Homer I 
 have already shown. I will observe too, that the fine 
 couplet which I have quoted comes out of a satire, a 
 didactic poem ; and that it is in didactic poetry that the 
 ten-syllable couplet has most successfully essayed the grand 
 style. In narrative poetry this metre has succeeded best 
 when it essayed a sensibly lower style, the style of Chaucer, 
 for instance ; whose narrative manner, though a very good 
 and sound manner, is certainly neither the grand manner 
 nor the manner of Homer. 
 
 The rhymed ten-syllable couplet being thus excluded, 
 blank verse off"ers itself for the translator's use. The first kind 
 of blank verse which naturally occurs to us is the blank verse 
 of Milton, which has been employed, with more or less 
 modification, by Mr. Gary in translating Dante, by Cowper, 
 and by Mr. Wright in translating Homer. How noble this 
 
 : f 
 
 !/ 
 
72 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 73 
 
 metre is in Milton's hands, how completely it shows itself 
 capable of the grand, nay, of the grandest, style, I need not 
 say. To this metre, as used in the Paradise Lost, our 
 country owes the glory of having produced one of the only 
 two poetical works in the grand style which are to be found 
 in the modern languages ; the Divine Comedy of Dante is 
 the other. England and Italy here stand alone ; Spain, 
 France, and Germany, have produced great poets, but 
 neither Calderon, nor Corneille, nor Schiller, nor even 
 Goethe, has produced a body of poetry in the true grand 
 style, in the sense in which the style of the body of Homer's 
 poetry, or Pindar's, or Sophocles's, is grand. But Dante 
 has, and so has Milton ; and in this respect Milton pos- 
 sesses *a distinction which even Shakspeare, undoubtedly 
 the supreme poetical power in our literature, does not 
 share with him. Not a tragedy of Shakspeare but contains 
 passages in the worst of all styles, the affected style ; and 
 the grand style, although it may be harsh, or obscure, or 
 cumbrous, or over-laboured, is never affected. In spite, 
 therefore, of objections which may justly be urged against 
 the plan and treatment of the Paradise Lost, in spite of its 
 possessing, certainly, a far less enthralling force of interest 
 to attract and to carry forward the reader than the Liiad or 
 the Divine Cofnedy, it fully deserves, it can never lose, its 
 immense reputation ; for, like the Liiad and the Divi?ie 
 
 
 Comedy, nay, in some respects to a higher degree than 
 either of them, it is in the grand style. 
 
 But the grandeur of Milton is one thing, and the 
 grandeur of Homer is another. Homer's movement, I 
 have said again and again, is a flowing, a rapid movement ; 
 Milton's, on the other hand, is a laboured, a self-retarding 
 movement. In each case, the movement, the metrical 
 cast, corresponds with the mode of evolution of the thought, 
 with the syntactical cast, and is indeed determined by it. 
 Milton charges himself so full with thought, imagination, 
 knowledge, that his style will hardly contain them. He is 
 too full-stored to show us in much detail one conception, 
 one piece of knowledge ; he just shows it to us in a pregnant 
 allusive way, and then he presses on to another ; and all 
 this fulness, this pressure, this condensation, this self- 
 constraint, enters into his movement, and makes it what it 
 is,— noble, but difficult and austere. Homer is quite 
 different ; he says a thing, and says it to the end, and then 
 begins another, while Milton is trying to press a thousand 
 things into one. So that whereas, in reading Milton, you 
 never lose the sense of laborious and condensed fulness, m 
 reading Homer you never lose the sense of flowing and 
 abounding ease. With Milton line runs into line, and all 
 is straitly bound together : with Homer line runs off from 
 line, and all hurries away onward. Homer begins, Mr^nv 
 
 I 
 
 i 
 
 ( 
 
 Ill 
 

 74 
 
 (9A^ TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 7S 
 
 
 .] 
 
 detSe, ©ctt,— at the second word announcing the proposed 
 action : Milton begins : 
 
 Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
 Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
 Brought death into the world, and all our woe, 
 With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
 Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, 
 Sing, heavenly muse. 
 
 So chary of a sentence is he, so resolute not to let it escape 
 him till he has crowded into it all he can, that it is not till 
 the thirty-ninth word in the sentence that he will give us 
 the key to it, the word of action, the verb. Milton says : 
 
 O for that warning voice, which he, who saw 
 The Apocalypse, heard cry in heaven aloud. 
 
 He is not satisfied, unless he can tell us, all in one sentence, 
 and without permitting himself to actually mention the 
 name, that the man who had the warning voice was the 
 same man who saw the Apocalypse. Homer would have 
 said, 'O for that warning voice, which /^/^;/ heard '—and \i 
 it had suited him to say that John also saw the Apocalypse, 
 he would have given us that in another sentence. The 
 effect of this allusive and compressed manner of Milton is, 
 I need not say, often very powerful ; and it is an effect 
 which other great poets have often sought to obtain much 
 in the same way : Dante is full of it, Horace is full of it ; 
 
 
 but wherever it exists, it is always an un-Homeric effect. 
 'The losses of the heavens,' says Horace, afresh moons 
 speedily repair ; we, when we have gone down where the 
 pious i^neas, where the rich TuUus and Ancus are, -///^/V 
 et umbra sumus:^ He never actually says where we go to ; 
 he only indicates it by saying that it is that place where 
 ^.neas, Tullus, and Ancus are. But Homer, when he has 
 to speak of going down to the grave, says, definitely, cs 
 'HXuVtov TTcStov— d6ldmTot 7re>i/^ov(nv,2—' The immortals 
 shall send thee to the Elysian plain ; ' and it is not till after 
 he has definitely said this, that he adds, that it is there 
 that the abode of departed worthies is placed : oOi fui/6'os 
 'PaStt/xav^vs- ' Where the yellow-haired Rhadamanthus is.' 
 Again ; Horace, having to say that punishment sooner or 
 later overtakes crime, says it thus : 
 
 Raro antecedentem scelestuni 
 * Deseruit pede Poena claudo.^ 
 
 The thought itself of these lines is familiar enough to 
 Homer and Hesiod ; but neither Homer nor Hesiod, in 
 expressing it, could possibly have so complicated its ex- 
 pression as Horace complicates it, and purposely com- 
 plicates it, by his use of the word deseruit. I say that this 
 complicated evolution of the thought necessarily complicates 
 
 > Odes, IV. vii. 13. "^ Odyssey iv. 563. 
 
 3 Odes, III. ii. 31. 
 
 / 
 
76 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 77 
 
 I 
 
 the movement and rhythm of a poet ; and that the Miltonic 
 blank verse, of course the first model of blank verse which 
 suggests itself to an English translator of Homer, bears the 
 strongest marks of such complication, and is therefore 
 entirely unfit to render Homer. 
 
 If blank verse is used in translating Homer, it must be 
 a blank verse of which English poetry, naturally swayed 
 much by Milton's treatment of this metre, offers at present 
 hardly any examples. It must not be Cowper's blank 
 verse, who has studied Milton's pregnant manner with such 
 effect, that, having to say of Mr. Throckmorton that he 
 spares his avenue, although it is the fashion with other 
 people to cut down theirs, he says that Benevolus ' reprieves 
 The obsolete prolixity of shade.' It must not be Mr. 
 Tennyson's blank verse. 
 
 For all experience is an arch, wherethrough 
 Gleams that unt ravelled world, whose distance fades 
 For ever and for ever, as we gaze. 
 
 It is no blame to the thought of those lines, which belongs 
 to another order of ideas than Homer's, but it is true, that 
 Homer would certainly have said of them, ' It is to consider 
 too curiously to consider so.' It is no blame to their 
 rhythm, which belongs to another order of movement than 
 Homer's, but it is true that these three lines by themselves 
 take up nearly as much time as a whole book of the Iliad. 
 
 No ; the blank verse used in rendering Homer must be a 
 blank verse of which perhaps the best specimens are to be 
 found in some of the most rapid passages of Shakspeare's 
 plays, —a blank verse which does not dovetail its lines into 
 one another, and which habitually ends its lines with mono- 
 syllables. Such a blank verse might no doubt be very rapid 
 in its movement, and might perfectly adapt itself to a 
 thought plainly and directly evolved ; and it would be 
 interesting to see it well applied to Homer. But the trans- 
 lator who determines to use it, must not conceal from him- 
 self that in order to pour Homer into the mould of this 
 metre, he will have entirely to break him up and melt him 
 down, with the hope of then successfully composing him 
 afresh ; and this is a process which is full of risks. It may, 
 no doubt, be the real Homer that issues new from it ; it is 
 not certain beforehand that it cannot be the real Homer, 
 as it is certain that from the mould of Pope's couplet or 
 Cowper's Miltonic verse it cannot be the real Homer that 
 will issue ; still, the chances of disappointment are great. 
 The result of such an attempt to renovate the old poet 
 may be an ^son ; but it may also, and more probably will 
 be a Pelias. 
 
 When I say this, I point to the metre which seems to 
 me to give the translator the best chance of preserving the 
 general effect of Homer, — that third metre which I have 
 
 > 
 
78 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 79 
 
 not yet expressly named, the hexameter. I know all that is 
 said against the use of hexameters in English poetry ; but 
 it comes only to this, that, among us, they have not yet 
 been used on any considerable scale with success. Solvitur 
 ambulando : this is an objection which can best be met by 
 producing good English hexameters. And there is no reason 
 in the nature of the English language why it should not 
 adapt itself to hexameters as well as the German language 
 does ; nay, the English language, from its greater rapidity, 
 is in itself better suited than the German for them. The 
 hexameter, whether alone or with the pentameter, possesses 
 a movement, an expression, which no metre hitherto in 
 common use amongst us possesses, and which I am con- 
 vinced English poetry, as our mental wants multiply, will 
 not always be content to forego. Applied to Homer, this 
 metre affords to the translator the immense support of 
 keeping him more nearly than any other metre to Homer's 
 movement j and, since a poet's movement makes so large a 
 part of his general effect, and to reproduce this general 
 effect is at once the translator's indispensable business and 
 so difficult for him, it is a great thing to have this part of 
 your model's general effect already given you in your metre, 
 instead of having to get it entirely for yourself. 
 
 These are general considerations ; but there are also 
 one or two particular considerations which confirm me in 
 
 the opinion that for translating Homer into English verse 
 the hexameter should be used. The most successful at- 
 tempt hitherto made at rendering Homer into English, the 
 attempt in which Homer's general effect has been best 
 retained, is an attempt made in the hexameter measure. It 
 is a version of the famous lines in the third book of the 
 I/iad^ which end with that mention of Castor and Pollux 
 from which Mr. Ruskin extracts the sentimental consolation 
 already noticed by me. The author is the accomplished 
 Provost of Eton, Dr. Hawtrey ; and this performance of his 
 must be my excuse for having taken the liberty to single 
 him out for mention, as one of the natural judges of a 
 translation of Homer, along with Professor Thompson and 
 Professor Jowett, whose connection with Greek literature is 
 official. The passage is short ; ' and Dr. Hawtrey's version 
 of it is suffused with a pensive grace which is, perhaps, 
 rather more Virgilian than Homeric ; still it is the one 
 
 ' So short, that I quote it entire : — 
 
 Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia ; 
 Known to me well are the faces of all ; their names I remember ; 
 Two, two only remain, whom I see not among tlie commanders, 
 Castor fleet in the car, — Polydeukes brave with the cestus, — 
 Own dear brethren of mine, — one parent loved us as infants. 
 Are they not here in the host, from the shores of loved Lacedxmon, 
 Or, though they came with the rest in ships that bound through the 
 
 waters, 
 Dare they not enter the fight or stand in the council of Heroes, 
 
1 
 
 8o 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 version of any part of the Iliad which in some degree re- 
 produces for me the original effect of Homer : it is the best, - 
 and it is in hexameters. 
 
 This is one of the particular considerations that incHne 
 me to prefer the hexameter, for translating Homer, to our 
 established metres. There is another. Most of you, 
 
 All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened ? 
 
 So said she ;-they long since in Earth's soft arms were reposing, 
 There, in their own.dear land, their Fatherland, Lacedajmon. 
 
 English Hexameter Translations; London, 1847; p. 242. 
 
 I have changed Dr. Hawtrey's ' Kastor,' ' Lakedaimon,' back to 
 the familiar ' Castor,' ' Lacedaemon,' in obedience to my own rule that 
 everything odd is to be avoided in rendering Homer, the most natural 
 and least odd of poets. I see Mr. Newman's critic in" the Natioftal 
 Review urges our generation to bear with the unnatural effect of these 
 rewritten Greek names, in the hope that by this means the effect of them 
 ' may have to the next generation become natural. For my part, I feel 
 no disposition to pass all my own life in the wilderness of pedantry, in 
 order that a posterity which I shall never see may one day enter an 
 orthographical Canaan; and, after all, the real question is this; 
 whether our living apprehension of the Greek world is more checked 
 by meeting in an English book about the Greeks, names not spelt 
 letter for letter as in the original Greek, or by meeting names which 
 make us rub our eyes and call out, ' How exceedingly odd ! ' 
 
 The Latin names of the Greek deities raise in most cases the idea 
 of quite distinct personages from the personages whose idea is raised by 
 the Greek names. Hera and Juno are actually, to every scholar's 
 imagination, two different people. So in all these cases the Latin 
 names must, at any inconvenience, be abandoned when we are dealing 
 with the Greek world. But I think it can be in the sensitive imagina- 
 tion of Mr. Grote only, that ' Thucydides ' raises the idea of a different 
 man from OjukuS/St]?. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 81 
 
 probably, have some knowledge of a poem by Mr. Clough^ 
 The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich, a long-vacation pastoral, in 
 hexameters. The general merits of that poem I am not 
 going to discuss : it is a serio-comic pcem, and, therefore, 
 of essentially different nature from the Iliad. Still in two 
 things it is, more than any other English poem which I can 
 call to mind, like the Iliad : in the rapidity of its movement, 
 and the plainness and directness of its style. The thought 
 in this poem is often curious and subtle, and that is not 
 Homeric ; the diction is often grotesque, and that is not 
 Homeric. Still by its rapidity of movement, and plain and 
 direct manner of presenting the thought however curious 
 in itself, this poem, which, being as I say a serio-comic poem, 
 has a right to be grotesque, is grotesque /ruh\ not, like Mr. 
 Newman's version of the Iliad, falsely. Mr. C lough's odd 
 epithets, ' The grave man nicknamed Adam,' ' The hairy 
 Aldrich,' and so on, grow vitally and appear naturally in their 
 place ; while Mr. Newman's ' dapper-greaved Achaians,' 
 and ' motley-helmed Hector,' have all the air of being 
 mechanically elaborated and artificially stuck in. Mr. 
 Clough's hexameters are excessively, needlessly rough ; still 
 owing to the native rapidity of this measure, and to the 
 directness of style which so well allies itself with it, his com- 
 position produces a sense in the reader which Homer's com- 
 position also produces, and which Homer's translator ought 
 
 G 
 
n 
 
 * 
 
 i 
 
 4 
 
 I 
 
 82 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 to rq)roduce,— the sense of having, within short Hmits of 
 time, a large portion of human Hfe presented to him, instead 
 of a small portion. 
 
 Mr. Clough's hexameters are, as I have just said, too 
 rough and irregular ; and indeed a good model, on any con- 
 siderable scale, of this metre, the English translator will no- 
 where find. He must not follow the model offered by Mr. 
 Longfellow in his pleasing and popular poem of Evangeline ; 
 for the merit of the manner and movement of Evangeline, 
 when they are at their best, is to be tenderly elegant ; and 
 their fault, when they are at their worst, is to be lumbering ; 
 but Homer's defect is not lumberingness, neither is tender 
 elegance his excellence. The lumbering effect of most 
 English hexameters is caused by their being much too 
 dactylic ;^ the translator must learn to use spondees freely. 
 Mr. Clough has done this, but he has not sufficiently ob- 
 served another rule which the translator cannot follow too 
 strictly ; and that is, to have no lines which will not, as it is 
 familiarly said, read themselves. This is of the last impor- 
 tance for rhythms with which the ear of the English public 
 
 ' For instance ; in a version (I believe, by the late Mr. Lockhart) 
 of Homer's description of the parting of Hector and Andromache, 
 there occurs, in the first five lines, \a\\. one spondee besides the 
 necessary spondees in the sixth place ; in the corresponding five lines 
 of Homer there occur ten. See English Hexameter Translations, 
 244. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 83 
 
 is not thoroughly acquainted. Lord Redesdale, in two 
 papers on the subject of Greek and Roman metres, has 
 some good remarks on the outrageous disregard of quantity 
 in which English verse, trusting to its force of accent, is apt 
 to indulge itself. The predominance of accent in our 
 language is so great, that it would be pedantic not to avail 
 one's self of it ; and Lord Redesdale suggests rules which 
 might easily be pushed too far. Still, it is undeniable that 
 in English hexameters we generally force the quantity far 
 too much ; we rely on justification by accent with a security 
 which is excessive. But not only do we abuse accent by 
 ■ shortening long syllables and lengthening short ones ; we 
 perpetually commit a far worse fault, by requiring the removal 
 of the accent from its natural place to an unnatural one, in 
 order to make our fine scan. This is a fault, even when our 
 n.etre is one which every English reader knows, and when 
 he can see what we want and can correct the rhythm 
 according to our wish ; although it is a fault which a great 
 n.aster may sometimes commit knowingly to produce a 
 desired effect, as Milton changes the natural accent on the 
 
 word Tiresias in the line :- 
 
 And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old ; 
 
 and then it ceases to be a fault, and becomes a beauty. But 
 it is a real fault, when Chapman has :- 
 
 By him the golden-throned Queen slept, the Queen of Deities ; 
 
 -' G 2 
 
 ( 
 
f* 
 
 I 
 
 84 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 for in this line, to make it scan, you have to take away the 
 
 accent from the word Queen, on which it naturally falls, and 
 
 to place it on throned, which would naturally be unaccented ; 
 
 and yet, after all, you get no peculiar effect or beauty of 
 
 cadence to reward you. It is a real fault, when Mr. Newman 
 
 has : — 
 
 Infatuate ! O that thou wert lord to some other army — 
 
 for here again the reader is required, not for any special 
 advantage to himself, but simply to save Mr. Newman 
 trouble, to place the accent on the insignificant word wert, 
 where it has no business whatever. But it is still a greater 
 fault, when Spenser has (to take a striking instance) : — 
 
 Wot ye why his mother with a veil hath covered his face ? ' 
 
 for a hexameter ; because here not only is the reader cause- 
 lessly required to make havoc with the natural accentuation 
 of the line in order to get it to run as a hexameter ; but also 
 he, in nine cases out of ten, will be utterly at a loss how to 
 perform the process required, and the line will remain a 
 mere monster for him. I repeat, it is advisable to construct 
 fl// verses so that by reading them naturally— that is, accord- 
 ing to the sense and legitimate accent, — the reader gets the 
 right rhythm ; but, for English hexameters, that they be so 
 constructed is indispensable. 
 
 I 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 85 
 
 If the hexameter best helps the translator to the Homenc 
 rapidity, what style may best help him to the Homer.c 
 plainness and directness ? It is the merit of a metre appro- 
 priate to your subject, that it in some degree suggests and 
 carries with itself a style appropriate to the subject ; the 
 elaborate and self-retarding style, which comes so naturally 
 when your metre is the Miltonic blank verse, does not come 
 naturally with the hexameter ; is, indeed, alien to it. On the 
 other hand, the hexameter has a natural dignity which repels 
 both the jaunty style and the jog-trot style, to both of wh.ch 
 the ballad-measure so easily lends itself. These are great 
 advantages ; and, perhaps, it is nearly enough to say to the 
 translator who uses the hexameter that he cannot too 
 religiously follow, in style, the inspiration of his metre. He 
 will find that a loose and idiomatic grammar-a grammar 
 which follows the essential rather than the formal log.c of 
 the thought-allies itself excellently with the hexameter ; and 
 nhat, while this sort of grammar ensures plainness and 
 naturalness, it by no means comes short in nobleness. It 
 is difficult to pronounce, certainly, what is idiomafc m the 
 ancient literature of a language which, though still spoken, 
 has long since entirely adopted, as modern Greek has 
 adopted, modern idioms. Still one may, I think, clearly 
 perceive that Homer's grammatical style is idiomat.c,-tha 
 it may even be called, not improperly, a loose grammatical 
 
 I 
 
1/ 
 
 I 
 
 86 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 style. ^ Examples, however, of what I mean by a loose 
 grammatical style, will be of more use to the translator if 
 taken from English poetry than if taken from Homer. I 
 call it, then, a loose and idiomatic grammar which Shak- 
 speare uses in the last line of the following three :— 
 
 He's here in double trust : 
 First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, 
 Strong both against the deed ; — 
 
 or in this :- 
 
 Wit, luhither ivilt ? ' 
 
 What Shakspeare means is perfectly clear, clearer, probably, 
 than if he had said it in a more formal and regular manner ; 
 but his grammar is loose and idiomatic, because he leaves 
 out the subject of the verb 'wilt' in the second passage 
 quoted, and because, in the first, a prodigious addition to 
 the sentence has to be, as we used to say in our old Latin 
 grammar days, understood, before the word ' both ' can be 
 properly parsed. So, again. Chapman's grammar is loose 
 and idiomatic where he says, 
 
 Even share hath he that keeps his tent, and he to field doth go, — 
 
 > See, for instance, in the Iliad, the loose construction of oo-rt, xvii. 
 658; that of ^oiTo, xvii. 681; that of oIt^, xviii. 209; and the 
 elliptical construction at xix. 42, 43 ; also the idiomatic construction of 
 ^7a!j/ 85e irapaax^^^'j xix. 140. These instances are all taken within 
 a range of a thousand lines ; any one may easily multiply them for 
 himself. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 87 
 
 because he leaves out, in the second clause, the relatwe 
 which in formal writing would be required. But Chapman 
 here does not lose dignity by this idiomatic way of expressmg 
 himself, any more than Shakspeare loses it by neglectmg to 
 confer on 'both' the blessings of a regular government : 
 neither loses dignity, but each gives that impression of a 
 plain, direct, and natural mode of speaking, which Homer, 
 too gives, and which it is so important, as I say, that 
 Homer's translator should succeed in giving. Cowper calls 
 blank verse 'a style further removed than rhyme from the 
 vernacular idiom, both in the language itself and m the 
 arrangement of it ; ' and just in proportion as blank verse ,s 
 removed from the vernacular idiom, from that idiomat.c 
 style which is of all styles the plainest and most natural, 
 blank verse is unsuited to render Homer. 
 
 Shakspeare is not only idiomatic in his grammar or 
 style, he is also idiomatic in his words or diction ; and here 
 \oo, his example is valuable for the translator of Homer. 
 The translator must not, indeed, allow himself all the liberty 
 that Shakspeare allows himself; for Shakspeare somefmes 
 uses expressions which pass perfectly well as he uses them, 
 because Shakspeare thinks so fast and so powerfully, that 
 in reading him we are borne over single words as by a 
 mighty current ; but, if our mind were less excited,-and 
 who may rely on exciting our mind like Shakspeare?- they 
 
88 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 would check us. * To grunt and sweat under a weary load ; 
 —that does perfectly well where it comes in Shakspeare ; 
 but if the translator of Homer, who will hardly have wound 
 our minds up to the pitch at which these words of Hamlet 
 find them, were to employ, when he has to speak of one of 
 Homer's heroes under the load of calamity, this figure of 
 
 * grunting' and * sweating ' we should say, He Neivmanises, 
 and his diction would offend us. For he is to be noble ; 
 and no plea of wishing to be plain and natural can get him 
 excused from being this : only, as he is to be also, like 
 Homer, perfectly simple and free from artificiality, and as 
 the use of idiomatic expressions undoubtedly gives this 
 effect,' he should be as idiomatic as he can be without ceas- 
 ing to be noble. Therefore the idiomatic language of 
 Shakspeare— such language as, 'prate of his whereabout)' 
 'pimp the life to come ; ' 'the damnation of his faking- off ; ' 
 
 * his quietus ?fiake with a bare bodkin '— should be carefully 
 observed by the translator of Homer, although in every case 
 
 ' Our knowledge of Homer's Greek is hardly such as to enable us 
 to pronounce quite confidently what is idiomatic in his diction, and 
 what is not, any more than in his grammar ; but I seem to mysel 
 clearly to recognise an idiomatic stamp in such expressions as roAuTrevet./ 
 ToK^fxovs, xiv. 86 ; (pdos eV vi],a<nv d-f^jis, xvi. 94 ; riu' 0^00 hawaaicos 
 avrwv y6tv Kd^^f^ui', xix. 71 ; HXoron.ieii^, xix. 149 ; and many others. 
 The first-quoted expression, roXvTTfduv apyaXiovs iroXfuovs, seems to 
 me to have just about the same degree of freedom as the 'jump the 
 life to come,' or the ' s/iiiffe ^/"this mortal coil,' of Shakspeare. 
 
 
 \ 
 
 ^^ 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 89 
 
 he will have to decide for himself whether the use, by him, 
 of Shakspeare's liberty, will or will not clash with his 
 indispensable duty of nobleness. He will find one English 
 book and one only, where, as in the I/iad itself, perfect 
 plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness ; and that 
 book is the Bible. No one could see this more cleaily than 
 Pope saw it : ' This pure and noble simplicity,' he says, ' is 
 nowhere in such perfection as in the Scripture and Homer : ' 
 yet even with Pope a woman is a * fair,' a father is a ' sire,' 
 and an old man a 'reverend sage,' and so on through all 
 the phrases of that pseudo- Augustan, and most unbiblical, 
 vocabulary. The Bible, however, is undoubtedly the grand 
 mine of diction for the translator of Homer ; and, if he 
 knows how to discriminate truly between what will suit him 
 and what will not, the Bible may afford him also invaluable 
 lessons of style. 
 
 I said that Homer, besides being plain in style and 
 diction, was plain in the quality of his thought. It is 
 possible that a thought may be expressed with idiomatic 
 plainness, and yet not be in itself a plain thought. For 
 example, in Mr. Clough's poem, already mentioned, the style 
 and diction is almost always idiomatic and plain, but the 
 thought itself is often of a quality which is not plain ; it is 
 curious. But the grand instance of the union of idiomatic 
 expression with curious or difficult thought is in Shakspeare's 
 
 
^w 
 
 90 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 t 
 
 poetry. Such, indeed, is the force and power of Shak- 
 speare's idiomatic expression, that it gives an effect of 
 clearness and vividness even to a thought which is imperfect 
 and incoherent ; for instance, when Hamlet says, — 
 To take arms against a sea of troubles, — 
 
 the figure there is undoubtedly most faulty, it by no means 
 
 runs on four legs ; but the thing is said so freely and 
 
 idiomatically, that it passes. This, however, is not a point 
 
 to which I now want to call your attention ; I want you to 
 
 remark, in Shakspeare and others, only that which we may 
 
 directly apply to Homer. I say, then, that in Shakspeare 
 
 the thought is often, while most idiomatically uttered, 
 
 nay, while good and sound in itself, yet of a quality 
 
 which is curious and difficult ; and that this quality of 
 
 thought is something entirely un-Homeric. For example, 
 
 when Lady Macbeth says. — 
 
 Memory, the warder of the brain, 
 Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason 
 A limbeck only, — 
 
 this figure is a perfectly sound and correct figure, no doubt ; 
 
 Mr. Knight even calls it a * happy ' figure ; but it is a 
 
 difficult figure : Homer would not have used it. Again, 
 
 when Lady Macbeth says, — 
 
 When you durst do it, then you were a man ; 
 And, to be more than what you were, you would 
 Be so much more the man, — 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 91 
 
 « 
 
 the thought in the two last of these lines is, when you seize 
 
 it, a perfectly clear thought, and a fine thought ; but it is a 
 
 curious thought : Homer would not have used it. These 
 
 are favourable instances of the union of plain style and 
 
 words with a thought not plain in quality ; but take stronger 
 
 instances of this union,— let the thought be not only not 
 
 plain in quality, but highly fanciful : and you have the 
 
 Elizabethan conceits ; you have, in spite of idiomatic style 
 
 and idiomatic diction, everything which is most un-Homeric ; 
 
 you have such atrocities as this of Chapman : — 
 
 Fate shall fail to vent her gall 
 Till mine vent thousands. 
 
 I say, the poets of a nation which has produced such con- 
 ceit as that, must purify themselves seven times in the fire 
 before they can hope to render Horner. They must expel 
 their nature with a fork, and keep crying to one another 
 night and day : ' Homer not only moves rapidly, not only 
 speaks idiomatically ; he is, 2\%o, free from fancifulness: 
 
 So essentially characteristic of Homer is his plainness 
 and naturalness of thought, that to the preservation of this 
 in his own version the translator must without scruple sacri- 
 fice, where it is necessary, verbal fidelity to his original, 
 rather than run any risk of producing, by literalness, an odd 
 and unnatural effect. The double epithets so constantly 
 occurring in Homer must be dealt with according to this 
 
 -*i< 
 
92 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 rule ; these epithets come quite naturally in Homer's poetry ; 
 in English poetry they, in nine cases out of ten, come, when 
 literally rendered, quite unnaturally. I will not now discuss 
 why this is so, I assume it as an indisputable fact that it is 
 so ; that Homer's fiepoTruiv dvOpwiroiv comes to the reader as 
 something perfectly natural, while Mr. Newman's 'voice- 
 dividing mortals ' comes to him as something perfectly un- 
 natural. Well then, as it is Homer's general effect which 
 we are to reproduce, it is to be false to Homer to be so 
 verbally faithful to him as that we lose this effect : and by 
 the English translator Homer's double epithets must be, 
 in many places, renounced altogether ; in all places where 
 they are rendered, rendered by equivalents which come 
 naturally. Instead of rendering ©eVt TavvTrcn-Xe by Mr. 
 Newman's 'Thetis trailing-robed,' which brings to one's 
 mind long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement, the trans- 
 lator must render the Greek by English words which come 
 as naturally to us as Milton's words when he says, 'Let 
 gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping by.' 
 Instead of rendering fiu)vvxa<; linrovq by Chapman's 'one- 
 hoofed steeds,' or Mr. Newman's 'single-hoofed horses,' he 
 must speak of horses in a way which surprises us as little as 
 Shakspeare surprises when he says, 'Gallop apace, you 
 fiery-footed steeds.' Instead of rendering /xcAtT/Sea Bvfxov 
 by 'life as honey pleasant,' he must characterise life with 
 
 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 93 
 
 the simple pathos of Gray's ' warm precincts of the cheerful 
 day.' Instead of converting ttoIov o-e ctto? c^vyci/ cpKos oSovtiov ; 
 into the portentous remonstrance, ' Betwixt the outwork of 
 thy teeth what word hath split?' he must remonstrate in 
 English as straightforward as this of St. Peter, ' Be it far 
 from thee, Lord : this shall not be unto thee ; ' or as this of 
 the disciples, 'What is this that he saith, a little while? we 
 cannot tell what he saith.' Homer's Greek, in each of the 
 places quoted, reads as naturally as any of those English 
 passages : the expression no more calls away the attention 
 from the sense in the Greek than in the English. But when, 
 in order to render literally in English one of Homer's 
 double epithets, a strange unfamiliar adjective is invented, — 
 such as ' voice-dividing ' for /xepoi/A?, — an improper share of 
 the reader's attention is necessarily diverted to this ancillary 
 word, to this word which Homer never intended should 
 receive so much notice ; and a total effect quite different 
 from Homer's is thus produced. Therefore Mr. Newman, 
 though he does not purposely import, like Chapman, con- 
 ceits of his own into the I/iad, does actually import them ; 
 for the result of his singular diction is to raise ideas, and 
 odd ideas, not raised by the corresponding diction in 
 Homer ; and Chapman himself does no more. Cowper 
 says : ' I have cautiously avoided all terms of new invention, 
 with an abundance. of which persons of more ingenuity than 
 
 ■A*. 
 
«r-?- 
 
 is 
 
 i 
 
 94 
 
 OJV TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 judgment have not enriched our language but encumbered 
 it ; ' and this criticism so exactly hits the diction of Mr. 
 Newman that one is irresistibly led to imagine his present 
 appearance in the flesh to be at least his second. 
 
 A translator cannot well have a Homeric rapidity, style, 
 diction, and quality of thought, without at the same timi 
 having what is the result of these in Homer,-nobleness. 
 Therefore I do not attempt to lay down any rules for 
 obtaining this effect of nobleness,-the effect, too, of all 
 others the most impalpable, the most irreducible to rule, 
 and which most depends on the individual personality of 
 the artist. So I proceed at once to give you, in conclusion, 
 one or two passages in which I have tried to follow those 
 principles of Homeric translation which I have laid down. 
 I give them, it must be remembered, not as specimens of 
 perfect translation, but as specimens of an attempt to 
 translate Homer on certain principles ; specimens which 
 may very aptly illustrate those principles by falling short as 
 well as by succeeding. 
 
 I take first a passage of which I have already spoken, 
 the comparison of the Trojan fires to the stars. The first 
 part of that passage is, I have said, of splendid beauty ; 
 and to begin with a lame version of that would be the' 
 height of imprudence in me. It is the last and more level 
 part with which I shall concern myself. I have already 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 95 
 
 quoted Cowper's version of this part in order to show you 
 how unlike his stiff and Miltonic manner of telling a plain 
 story is to Homer's easy and rapid manner :— 
 
 So numerous seemed those fires the bank between 
 Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece, 
 In prospect all of Troy— 
 
 I need not continue to the end. I have also quoted 
 Pope's version of it, to show you how unlike his ornate 
 and artificial manner is to Homer's plain and natural 
 manner : 
 
 So many flames before proud Uion blaze. 
 
 And brighten glimmering Xanthus with Iheir rays ; 
 
 The long reflections of the distant fires 
 
 Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires,— 
 
 and much more of the same kind. I want to show you 
 that it is possible, in a plain passage of this sort, to keep 
 Homer's simplicity without being heavy and dull ; and to 
 keep his dignity without bringing in pomp and ornament. 
 'As numerous as are the stars on a clear night,' says 
 Homer, 
 
 So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus 
 
 Between that and the ships, the Trojans' numerous fires'. 
 
 In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires : by eacl, one 
 
 1 here sat fifty men, in the ruddy liglu of the fire • 
 
 % their chariots stood the steeds, and chan.ped the white barley 
 
 While their masters sat by the fire, and waited for Morning 
 
96 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 97 
 
 ill 
 
 Here, in order to keep Homer's effect of perfect plainness 
 and directness, I repeat the word ' fires ' as he repeats irvpa 
 without scruple ; although in a more elaborate and literary 
 style of poetry this recurrence of the same word would be a 
 fault to be avoided. I omit the epithet of Morning, and 
 whereas Homer says that the steeds ' waited for Morning,' 
 I prefer to attribute this expectation of Morning to the 
 master and not to the horse. Very likely in this particular, 
 as in any other single particular, I may be wrong : what I 
 wish you to remark is my endeavour after absolute plain- 
 ness of speech, my care to avoid anything which may the 
 least check or surprise the reader, whom Homer does not 
 check or surprise. Homer's lively personal familiarity with 
 war, and with the war-horse as his master's companion, is 
 such that, as it seems to me, his attributing to the one the 
 other's feelings comes to us quite naturally ; but, from a 
 poet without this familiarity, the attribution strikes as a 
 little unnatural ; and therefore, as everything the least un- 
 natural is un-Homeric, I avoid it. 
 
 Again, in the address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles, 
 Covvper has : 
 
 Jove saw their grief with pity, and his brows 
 Shaking, within himself thus, pensive, said. 
 
 ' Ah hapless pair ! wherefore by gift divine 
 Were ye to Peleus given, a mortal king, 
 Yourselves immortal and from age exempt ? ' 
 
 I 
 
 There is no want of dignity here, as in the versions of 
 Chapman and Mr. Newman, which I have already quoted : 
 but the whole effect is much too slow. Take Pope :— 
 
 Nor Jove disdained to cast a pitying look 
 While thus relenting to the steeds he spoke. 
 * Unhappy coursers of immortal strain ! 
 Exempt from age and deathless now in vain ; 
 Did we your race on mortal man bestow 
 Only, alas ! to share in mortal woe ? ' 
 
 Here there is no want either of dignity or rapidity, but all 
 is too artificial. *Nor Jove disdained,' for instance, is a 
 very artificial and literary way of rendering Homer's words 
 and so is, * coursers of immortal strain.' 
 
 Mvpofxfvu 5' &pa ro) ye l^wv, eXeTjo-e Kfoviwi'. — 
 
 And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bew^ailing, 
 
 And he shook his head, and thus addressed 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.' 
 
 Here I will observe that the use of * own,' in the second 
 line, for the last syllable of a dactyl, and the use of 'To a,' 
 in the fourth, for a complete spondee, though they do not, 
 I think, actually spoil the run of the hexameter, are yet 
 undoubtedly instances of that over-reliance on accent, and 
 
 ri-; 
 
■»tt- **■* 1 -1 ^«drcgiv;e— 
 
 98 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 99 
 
 «l! 
 
 too free disregard of quantity, which Lord Redesdale visits 
 with just reprehension.^ 
 
 I now take two longer passages in order to try my method 
 more fully ; but I still keep to passages which have already 
 come under our notice. I quoted Chapman's version of 
 some passages in the speech of Hector at his parting with 
 Andromache. One astounding conceit will probably still 
 be in your remembrance, — 
 
 Wlien sacred Troy shall shed her tozv'rs for tears of overt hrotv, — 
 
 * It must be remembered, however, that, if we disregard quantity 
 too much in constructing English hexameters, we also disregard accent 
 too much in reading Greek hexameters. We read every Greek dactyl 
 so as to make a pure dactyl of it ; but, to a Greek, the accent must 
 have hindered many dactyls from sounding as pure dactyls. When we 
 read a\6 X s 1.TriroSf for instance, or alyi6 xoio^ the dactyl in each of 
 these cases is made by us as pure a dactyl as ' Tityre,' or * dignity ; ' 
 but to a Greek it was not so. To him aiSXos must have been nearly as 
 impure a dactyl as * death-destined ' is to us ; and alyi6x nearly as 
 impure as the * dressed his own ' of my text. Nor, I think, does this 
 right mode of pronouncing the two words at all spoil the run of the 
 line as a hexameter. The effect oi ai6\\os tmros (or something like 
 that), though not 07tr effect, is not a disagreeable one. On the other 
 hand, Kopvdai6\os as a paroxytonon, although it has the respectable 
 authority of Liddell and Scott's Lexicon (following Heyne), is certainly 
 wrong ; for then the word cannot be pronounced without throwing 
 an accent on the first syllable as well as the third, and yiiya^ 
 Ko^l>v6ai6\\os''ZKT(ji}p would have been to a Greek as intolerable an 
 ending for a hexameter line as ' accurst orphanhood-destined houses ' 
 would be to us. The best authorities, accordingly, accent KopvdaioXos 
 as a proparoxytonon. 
 
 as a translation of ot av iror 6X(D\ri 'iXto? Iprj. I will quote 
 a few lines which may give you, also, the key-note to the 
 Anglo-Augustan manner of rendering this passage and to 
 the Miltonic manner of rendering it. What Mr. Newman's 
 manner of rendering it would be, you can by this time 
 sufficiently imagine for yourselves. Mr. Wright, — to quote 
 for once from his meritorious version instead of Cowper's, 
 whose strong and weak points are those of Mr. Wright also, 
 — Mr. Wright begins his version of this passage thus : 
 
 All these thy anxious cares are also mine, 
 Partner beloved ; but how could I endure 
 The scorn of Trojans and their long-robed wives. 
 Should they behold their Hector shrink from war, 
 And act the coward's part ? Nor doth my soul 
 Prompt the base thought. 
 
 Ex pede Herculejn : you see just what the manner is. Mr. 
 Sotheby, on the other hand (to take a disciple of Pope 
 instead of Pope himself), begins thus : 
 
 * What moves thee, moves my mind,' brave Hector said, 
 
 * Yet Troy's upbraiding scorn I deeply dread. 
 If, like a slave, where chiefs with chiefs engage, 
 The warrior Hector fears the war to wage. 
 Not thus my heart inclines.' 
 
 From that specimen, too, you can easily divine what, with 
 such a manner, will become of the whole passage. But 
 Homer has neither 
 
 What moves thee, moves my mind, — 
 
 H 2 
 
n. r^. 
 
 I 
 
 lOO 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 nor has he 
 
 All these thy anxious cares are also mine. 
 
 'H Koi ifio\ TciSe irdvTa /xe'Xe/, yvvai ' aA\a /ia\' alvus,— 
 
 that is what Homer has, that is his style and movement, if 
 one could but catch it. Andromache, as you know, has 
 been entreating Hector to defend Troy from within the 
 walls, instead of exposing his life, and, with his own life, 
 the safety of all those dearest to him, by fighting in the 
 open plain. Hector replies : — 
 
 Woman, I too take thought for this ; but then I bethink me 
 
 What the Trojan men and Trojan women might murmur, 
 
 If like a coward I skulked behind, apart from the battle. 
 
 Nor would my own heart let me ; my heart, which has bid me be 
 
 valiant 
 Always, and always fighting among the first of the Trojans, 
 Busy for Priam's fame and my own, in spite of the future. 
 For that day will come, my soul is assured of its coming, 
 It will come, when sacred Troy shall go to destruction, 
 Troy, and warlike Priam too, and the people of Priam. 
 And yet not that grief, which then will be, of the Trojans, 
 Moves me so much— not Hecuba's grief, nor Priam my father's, 
 Nor my brethren's, many and brave, who then will be lying 
 In the bloody dust, beneath the feet of their foemen- 
 As thy grief, when, in tears, some brazen-coated Achaian 
 Shall transport thee away, and the day of thy freedom be ended. 
 Then, perhaps, thou shalt work at the loom of another, in Argos, 
 Or bear pails to the well of Messeis, or Hypereia, 
 Sorely against thy will, by strong Necessity's order. 
 And some man may say, as he looks and sees thy tears falling : 
 See, the wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain 
 Of the horsemen of Troy, in the day they fought for their city. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER loi 
 
 So some man will say ; and then thy grief will redouble 
 At thy want of a man like me, to save thee from bondage. 
 But let me be dead, and the earth be mounded above mc, 
 Ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity told of. 
 
 The main question, whether or no this version reproduces 
 for him the movement and general effect of Homer better 
 than other versions ^ of the same passage, I leave for the 
 judgment of the scholar. But the particular points, in which 
 the operation of my own rules is manifested, are as follows. 
 In the second line I leave out the epithet of the Trojan 
 women cXKco-iTreVXovg, altogether. In the sixth line I put 
 in five words 'in spite of the future,' which are in the 
 original by implication only, and are not there actually 
 expressed. This I do, because Homer, as I have before 
 said, is so remote from one who reads him in English, that 
 the English translator must be even plainer, if possible, and 
 more unambiguous than Homer himself ; the connection of 
 meaning must be even more distinctly marked in the trans- 
 lation than in the original. For in the Greek language itself 
 there is something which brings one nearer to Homer, which 
 gives one a clue to his thought, which makes a hint enough ; 
 but in the English language this sense of nearness, this clue, 
 is gone ; hints are insufficient, everything must be stated 
 with full distinctness. In the ninth line Homer's epithet 
 
 ' Dr. Ilawtrey also has translated this passage ; but here, he has 
 not, I think, been so successful as in his * Helen on the walls of Troy.' 
 
. '^ " f "%. 1^" — , r-.K*'^ .*•' ^Qi i-afTfVw' V *4j^ 
 
 -. ji-^wS^rfW-W 
 
 ifesseiteiL 
 
 t| 
 
 I 
 
 1 02 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 for Priam is cv/^/xcXto), — * armed with good ashen spear,' say 
 the dictionaries ; * ashen-speared,' translates Mr. Newman, 
 following his own rule to 'retain every peculiarity of his 
 original,' — I say, on the other hand, that ivfifxeXtiii has not 
 the effect of a * peculiarity ' in the original, while 'ashen- 
 speared ' has the effect of a ' peculiarity ' in English ; and 
 'warlike' is as marking an equivalent as I dare give for 
 cr/x/xeXto), for fear of disturbing the balance of expression in 
 Homer's sentence. In the fourteenth line, again, I translate 
 XaXKoxiTQ)V(x)v by 'brazen-coated.' Mr. Newman, meaning 
 to be perfectly literal, translates it by ' brazen-cloaked,' an 
 expression which comes to the reader oddly and unnaturally, 
 while Homer's word comes to him quite naturally ; but I 
 venture to go as near to a literal rendering as ' brazen-coated, 
 because a ' coat of brass ' is familiar to us all from the Bible, 
 and familiar, too, as distinctly specified in connection with 
 the wearer. Finally, let me further illustrate from the 
 twentieth line the value which I attach, in a question of 
 diction, to the authority of the Bible. The word 'pre- 
 eminent ' occurs in that line ; I was a little in doubt whether 
 that was not too bookish an expression to be used in 
 rendering Homer, as I can imagine Mr. Newman to have 
 been a little in doubt whether his ' responsively accosted ' 
 for d/x€t/3o/xcvos 7rpoo-€</>r7, was not too bookish an expression. 
 Let us both, I say, consult our Bibles : Mr. Newman will 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 103 
 
 nowhere find it in his Bible that David, for instance, ' re- 
 sponsively accosted Goliath ; ' but I do find in mine that * the 
 right hand of the Lord hath i\\Q pre-eminence ',' and forth- 
 with I use ' pre-eminent,' without scruple. My Bibliolatry 
 is perhaps excessive ; and no doubt a true poetic feeling is 
 the Homeric translator's best guide in the use of words ; 
 but where this feeling does not exist, or is at fault, I think 
 he cannot do better than take for a mechanical guide 
 Cruden's Concordance. To be sure, here as elsewhere, the 
 consulter must know how to consult,— must know how very 
 slight a variation of word or circumstance makes the 
 difference between an authority in his favour, and an 
 authority which gives him no countenance at all; for 
 instance, the ' Great simpleton ! ' (for /xcya vr/Trtos) of Mr. 
 Newman, and the * Thou fool ! ' of the Bible, are something 
 alike ; but ' Thou fool ! ' is very grand, and ' Great simple- 
 ton ! ' is an atrocity. So, too. Chapman's * Poor wretched 
 beasts ' is pitched many degrees too low ; but Shakspeare's 
 ' Poor venomous fool, Be angry and despatch ! ' is in the 
 
 grand style. 
 
 One more piece of translation and I have done. I will 
 take the passage in which both Chapman and Mr. Newman 
 have already so much excited our astonishment, the passage 
 at the end of the nineteenth book of the Iliad, the dialogue 
 
 A .-. m 
 
^esfm^'mmmr-'im^i^mm 
 
 104 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 between Achilles and his horse Xanthus, after the death of 
 Patroclus. Achilles begins : — 
 
 ' Xanthus and Balius both, ye far-famed seed of Podarga ! 
 See that ye bring your master home to the host of the Argives 
 In some other sort than your last, when the battle is ended ; 
 And not leave him behind, a corpse on the plain, like Patroclus.' 
 
 Then, from beneath the yoke, the fleet horse Xanthus addressed 
 him : 
 Sudden he bowed his head, and all his mane, as he bowed it. 
 Streamed to the ground by the yoke, escaping from under the collar ; 
 And he was given a voice by the white-armed Goddess Hera. 
 
 ' Truly, yet this time will we save thee, mighty Achilles ! 
 But thy day of death is at hand ; nor shall zue be the reason — 
 No, but the will of heaven, and Fate's invincible power. 
 For by no slow pace or want of swiftness of ours 
 Did the Trojans obtain to strip the arms from Patroclus ; 
 But that prince among Gods, the son of the lovely-haired Leto, 
 Slew him fighting in front of the fray, and glorified Hector. 
 But, for us, we vie in speed with the breath of the West-Wind, 
 Which, men say, is the fleetest of winds ; 't is thou who art fated 
 To lie low in death, by the hand of a God and a Mortal.' 
 
 Thus far he ; and here his voice was stopped by the Furies. 
 Then, with a troubled heart, the swift Achilles addressed him : 
 
 • Why dost thou prophesy so my death to me, Xanthus ? It needs 
 not. 
 I of myself know well, that here I am destined to perish. 
 Far from my father and mother dear : for all that I will not 
 Stay this hand from fight, till the Trojans are utterly routed.* 
 
 So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle. 
 
 Here the only particular remark which I will make is, 
 that in the fourth and eighth line the grammar is what I call 
 a loose and idiomatic grammar. In writing a regular and 
 literary style, one would in the fourth line have to repeat 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 105 
 
 before ' leave ' the words ' that ye ' from the second line, and 
 to insert the word * do ; ' and in the eighth line one would 
 not use such an expression as ' he was given a voice.' But 
 I will make one general remark on the character of my own 
 translations, as I have made so many on that of the transla- 
 tions of others. It is, that over the graver passages there is 
 shed an air somewhat too strenuous and severe, by com- 
 parison with that lovely ease and sweetness which Homer, 
 for all his noble and masculine way of thinking, never 
 loses. 
 
 Here I stop. I have said so much, because I think that 
 the task of translating Homer into English verse both will 
 be re-attempted, and may be re -attempted successfully. 
 There are great works composed of parts so disparate that 
 one translator is not likely to have the requisite gifts for 
 poetically rendering all of them. Such are the works of 
 Shakspeare, and Goethe's Faust ; and these it is best to 
 attempt to render in prose only. People praise Tieck and 
 Schlegel's version of Shakspeare: I, for my part, would 
 sooner read Shakspeare in the French prose translation, and 
 that is saying a great deal ; but in the German poets' hands 
 Shakspeare so often gets, especially where he is humorous, 
 an air of what the French call niaiserie ! and can anything 
 be more un-Shakspearian than that ? Again ; Mr. Hayward's 
 prose translation of the first part oi Faust— ^o good that it 
 makes one regret Mr. Hayward should have abandoned the 
 
'•^p^ 
 
 d»M>-VAa11tl^— nia, ■ 
 
 io6 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 line of translation for a kind of literature which is, to say 
 the least, somewhat slight-is not likely to be surpassed by 
 any translation in verse. But poems like the I/iad, which, 
 in the main, are in one manner, may hope to find a poetical 
 translator so gifted and so trained as to be able to learn 
 that one manner, and to reproduce it. Only, the poet who 
 would reproduce this must cultivate in himself a Greek 
 virtue by no means common among the moderns in general, 
 and the English in particular,- /;^^^^^«//^/^. For Homer 
 has not only the English vigour, he has the Greek grace ; 
 and when one observes the boistering, rollicking way in 
 which his English admirers-even men of genius, like the 
 late Professor Wilson-love to talk of Homer and his poetry, 
 one cannot help feeling that there is no very deep com- 
 munity of nature between them and the object of their 
 enthusiasm. ' It is very well, my good friends,' I always 
 imagine Homer saying to them : if he could hear them : 
 ' you do me a great deal of honour, but somehow or other 
 you praise me too like barbarians.' For Homer's grandeur 
 is not the mixed and turbid grandeur of the great poets of 
 the north, of the authors of OM/o and Fausr, it is a 
 perfect, a lovely grandeur. Certainly his poetry has all the 
 energy and power of the poetry of our ruder climates ; but 
 it has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the 
 liquid clearness of an Ionian sky. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 107 
 
 LAST WORDS 
 
 *Multi, qui persequuntur me, et tribulant me: a testimoniis non 
 declinavi.* 
 
 BuFFON, the great French naturalist, imposed on himself 
 the rule of steadily abstaining from all answer to attacks 
 made upon him. *Je n'ai jamais repondu k aucune 
 critique,' he said to one of his friends who, on the occasion 
 of a certain criticism, was eager to take up arms in his 
 behalf; *je n'ai jamais repondu a aucune critique, et je 
 garderai le meme silence sur celle- ci.' On another occasion, 
 when accused of plagiarism, and pressed by his friends to 
 answer, *I1 vaut mieux,' he said, Maisser ces mauvaises 
 gens dans I'incertitude.' Even when reply to an attack 
 was made successfully, he disapproved of it, he regretted 
 that those he esteemed should make it. Montesquieu, 
 more sensitive to criticism than Buffon, had answered, and 
 successfully answered, an attack made upon his great work, 
 the Esprit des Lois, by the Gazetier Jatiseniste, This 
 Jansenist Gazetteer was a periodical of those times, —a 
 periodical such as other times, also, have occasionally seen, 
 —very pretentious, very aggressive, and, when the point to 
 be seized was at all a delicate one, very apt to miss it. 
 * Notwithstanding this example,' said Buffon,— who, as well 
 as Montesquieu, had been attacked by the Jansenist 
 
 t I 
 
 \ 
 
 
•r'l^ 
 
 y ,.. 
 
 io8 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 Gazetteer,—^ notwithstanding this example, I think I may 
 promise my course will be different. I shall not answer a 
 
 single word.' 
 
 And to any one who has noticed the baneful effects of 
 controversy, with all its train of personal rivalries and 
 hatreds, on men of letters or men of science ; to any one 
 who has observed how it tends to impair, not only their 
 dignity and repose, but their productive force, their genuine 
 activity ; how it always checks the free play of the spirit, 
 and often ends by stopping it altogether ; it can hardly 
 seem doubtful, that the rule thus imposed on himself by 
 Buffon was a wise one. His own career, indeed, admirably 
 shows the wisdom of it. That career was as glorious as it 
 was serene ; but it owed to its serenity no small part of its 
 glory. The regularity and completeness with which he 
 gradually built up the great work which he had designed, 
 the air of equable majesty which he shed over it, struck 
 powerfully the imagination of his contemporaries, and 
 surrounded Buffon's fame with a peculiar respect and 
 dignity. *He is,' said Frederick the Great of him, 'the 
 man who has best deserved the great celebrity which he 
 has acquired.' And this regularity of production, this 
 equableness of temper, he maintained by his resolute 
 disdain of personal controversy. 
 
 Buffon's example seems to me worthy of all imitation, 
 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 109 
 
 and in my humble way I mean always to follow it. I 
 never have replied, I never will reply, to any literary 
 assailant ; in such encounters tempers are lost, the world 
 laughs, and truth is not served. Least of all should I 
 think of using this Chair as a place from which to carry on 
 such a conflict. But when a learned and estimable man 
 thinks he has reason to complain of language used by me 
 in this Chair,— when he attributes to me intentions and 
 feelings towards him which are far from my heart, I owe 
 him some explanation— and I am bound, too, to make the 
 explanation as public as the words which gave offence. 
 This is the reason why I revert once more to the subject of 
 translating Homer. But being thus brought back to that 
 subject, and not wishing to occupy you solely with an 
 explanation which, after all, is Mr. Newman's affair and 
 mine, not the public's, I shall take the opportunity,~not 
 certainly to enter into any conflict with any one,— but to 
 try to establish our old friend, the coming translator of 
 Homer, yet a little firmer in the positions which I hope 
 we have now secured for him ; to protect him against the 
 danger of relaxing, in the confusion of dispute, his attention 
 to those matters which alone I consider important for him ; 
 to save him from losing sight, in the dust of the attacks 
 delivered over it, of the real body of Patroclus. He will, 
 probably, when he arrives, requite my solicitude very ill, 
 
I 
 
 no 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 and be in haste to disown his benefactor : but my interest 
 in him is so sincere that I can disregard his probable in- 
 gratitude. 
 
 First, however, for the explanation. Mr. Newman has 
 published a reply to the remarks which I made on his 
 translation of the Iliad. He seems to think that the 
 respect which at the outset of those remarks I professed 
 for him must have been professed ironically ; he says that 
 I use 'forms of attack against him which he does not know 
 how to characterise ; ' that I ' speak scornfully ' of him, . 
 treat him with ' gratuitous insult, gratuitous rancour ; ' that 
 I * propagate slanders ' against him, that I wish to ' damage 
 him with my readers,' to * stimulate my readers to despise ' 
 him. He is entirely mistaken. I respect Mr. Newman 
 sincerely ; I respect him as one of the few learned men we 
 have, one of the few who love learning for its own sake ; 
 this respect for him I had before I read his translation of 
 the Iliad, I retained it while I w^as commenting on that 
 translation, I have not lost it after reading his reply. Any 
 vivacities of expression which may have given him pain I 
 sincerely regret, and can only assure him that I used them 
 without a thought of insult or rancour. When I took the 
 liberty of creating the verb to Newmanise, my intentions were 
 no more rancorous than if I had said to Miltonise \ when I 
 exclaimed, in my astonishment at his vocabulary, 'With 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 III 
 
 whom can Mr. Newman have lived .? ' I meant merely to 
 convey, in a familiar form of speech, the sense of bewilder- 
 ment one has at finding a person to whom words one 
 thought all the world knew seem strange, and words one 
 thought entirely strange, intelligible. Yet this simple ex- 
 pression of my bewilderment Mr. Newman construes into 
 an accusation that he is 'often guilty of keeping low 
 company,' and says that I shall 'never want a stone to 
 throw at him.' And what is stranger still, one of his friends 
 gravely tells me that Mr. Newman ' lived with the fellows 
 of BallioL' As if that made Mr. Newman's glossary 
 less inexplicable to me ! As if he could have got his 
 glossary from the fellows of Balliol ! As if I could believe 
 that the members of that distinguished society— of whose 
 discourse, not so many years afterwards, I myself was an 
 unworthy hearer— were in Mr. Newman's time so far re- 
 moved from the Attic purity of speech which we all of us 
 admired, that when one of them called a calf a bulkin, the 
 rest ' easily understood ' him ; or, when he wanted to say 
 that a newspaper-article was 'proudly fine,' it mattered 
 little whether he said it was that or bragly ! No • 
 his having lived with the fellows of Balliol does not 
 explain Mr. Newman's glossary to me. I will no longer 
 ask 'with whom he can have lived,' since that gives him 
 offence; but I must still declare that where he got his 
 
112 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 test of rarity or intelligibility for words is a mystery to 
 me. 
 
 That, however, does not prevent me from entertaining 
 a very sincere respect for Mr. Newman, and since he 
 doubts it, I am glad to reiterate my expression of it. But 
 the truth of the matter is this : I unfeignedly admire 
 Mr. Newman's ability and learning ; but I think in his 
 translation of Homer he has employed that ability and 
 learning quite amiss. I think he has chosen quite the 
 wrong field for turning his ability and learning to account. 
 I think that in England, partly from the want of an 
 Academy, partly from a national habit of intellect to which 
 that want of an Academy is itself due, there exists too little 
 of what I may call a public force of correct literary opinion, 
 possessing within certain limits a clear sense of what is right 
 and wrong, sound and unsound, and sharply recalling men 
 of ability and learning from any flagrant misdirection of 
 these their advantages. I think, even, that in our country 
 a powerful misdirection of this kind is often more likely to 
 subjugate and pervert opinion than to be checked and 
 corrected by it.^ Hence a chaos of false tendencies, wasted 
 
 ' ' It is the fact, that scholars of fastidious refinement, but of a judg- 
 ment which I think far more masculine than Mr. Arnold's, have 
 passed a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of my transla- 
 tion. I at present count eight such names.' — ' Before venturing to 
 print, I sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would 
 
 »* yST' f^"v*t''iii 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 113 
 
 efforts, impotent conclusions, works which ought never to 
 have been undertaken. Any one who can introduce a little 
 order into this chaos by establishing in any quarter a single 
 sound rule of criticism, a single rule which clearly marks 
 what is right as right, and what is wrong as wrong, does a 
 good deed ; and his deed is so much the better the greater 
 force he counteracts of learning and ability applied to 
 thicken the chaos. Of course no one can be sure that he 
 has fixed any such rules ; he can only do his best to fix 
 them ; but somewhere or other, in the literary opinion of 
 Europe, if not in the literary opinion of one nation, in fifty 
 years, if not in five, there is a final judgment on these 
 matters, and the critic's work will at last stand or fall by its 
 true merits. 
 
 Meanwhile, the charge of having in one instance mis- 
 applied his powers, of having once followed a false ten- 
 dency, is no such grievous charge to bring against a man ; 
 it does not exclude a great respect for himself personally, 
 or for his powers in the happiest manifestations of them. 
 False tendency is, I have said, an evil to which the artist or 
 the man of letters in England is peculiarly prone ; but 
 everywhere in our time he is liable to it,— the greatest as 
 
 accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated 
 women have extolled them, how greedily a working man has inquired 
 for them, without knowing who was the translator.' -Mr. Newman's 
 Reply, pp. 2, 12, 13. 
 
114 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 well as the humblest. * The first beginnings of my Wilhelm 
 Meister,' says Goethe, 'arose out of an obscure sense of the 
 great truth that man will often attempt something for which 
 nature has denied him the proper powers, will undertake 
 and practise something in which he cannot become skilled. 
 An inward feeling warns him to desist ' (yes, but there are, 
 unhappily, cases of absolute judicial blindness !), * neverthe- 
 less he cannot get clear in himself about it, and is driven along 
 a false road to a false goal, without knowing how it is with 
 him. To this we may refer everything which goes by the 
 name of false tendency, dilettanteism, and so on. A great 
 many men waste in this way the fairest portion of their 
 lives, and fall at last into wonderful delusion.' Yet after 
 all, — Goethe adds, — it sometimes happens that even on this 
 false road a man finds, not indeed that which he sought, 
 but something which is good and useful for him ; ' like 
 Saul, the son of Kish, who went forth to look for his father's 
 asses, and found a kingdom.' And thus false tendency as 
 well as true, vain effort as well as fruitful, go together to 
 produce that great movement of life, to present that im- 
 mense and magic spectacle of human affairs, which from 
 boyhood to old age fascinates the gaze of every man of 
 imagination, and which would be his terror, if it were not at 
 the same time his delight. 
 
 So Mr. Newman may see how wide-spread a danger it 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 115 
 
 is, to which he has, as I think, in setting himself to translate 
 Homer, fallen a prey. He may be well satisfied if he can 
 escape from it by paying it the tribute of a single work only. 
 He may judge how unlikely it is that I should ' despise ' 
 him for once falling a prey to it. I know far too well how 
 exposed to it we all are ; how exposed to it I myself am. At 
 this very moment, for example, I am fresh from reading Mr. 
 Newman's Reply to my Lectures, a reply full of that erudi- 
 tion in which (as I am so often and so good-naturedly 
 reminded, but indeed I know it without being reminded) 
 Mr. Newman is immeasurably my superior. Well, the 
 demon that pushes us all to our ruin is even now prompting 
 me to follow Mr. Newman into a discussion about the 
 digamma, and I know not what providence holds me 
 back. And some day, I have no doubt, I shall lecture 
 on the language of the Berbers, and give him his entire 
 revenge. 
 
 But Mr. Newman does not confine himself to com- 
 plaints on his own behalf, he complains on Homer's behalf 
 too. He says that my ' statements about Greek literature 
 are against the most notorious and elementary fact ; ' that 
 I * do a public wrong to literature by publishing them ; ' 
 and that the Professors to whom I appealed in my three 
 Lectures, ' would only lose credit if they sanctioned the use 
 I make of their names.' He does these eminent men the 
 
 I 2 
 
ii6 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 kindness of adding, however, that ' whether they are pleased 
 with this parading of their names in behalf of paradoxical 
 error, he may well doubt,' and that ' until they endorse it 
 themselves, he shall treat my process as a piece of forgery.' 
 He proceeds to discuss my statements at great length, and 
 with an erudition and ingenuity which nobody can admire 
 more than I do. And he ends by saying that my ignorance 
 is great. 
 
 Alas ! that is very true. Much as Mr. Newman was 
 mistaken when he talked of my rancour, he is entirely right 
 when he talks of my ignorance. And yet, perverse as it 
 seems to say so, I sometimes find myself wishing, when 
 deahng with these matters of poetical criticism, that my 
 ignorance were even greater than it is. To handle these 
 matters properly there is needed a poise so perfect that the 
 least overweight in any direction tends to destroy the 
 balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys it, even 
 erudition may destroy it. To press to the sense of the 
 thing itself with which one is dealing, not to go off on some 
 collateral issue about the thing, is the hardest matter in the 
 world. The ' thing itself ' with which one is here dealing, 
 - -the critical perception of poetic truth, — is of all things 
 the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent ; by even pressing 
 too impetuously after it, one runs the risk of losing it. The 
 critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the nicest 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 "7 
 
 moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imagin- 
 able ; he should be indeed the ' ondoyant et divers,' the 
 undulating and diverse being of Montaigne. The less he 
 can deal with his object simply and freely, the more things 
 he has to take into account in dealing with it,— the more, 
 in short, he has to encumber himself,— so much the greater 
 force of spirit he needs to retain his elasticity. But one 
 cannot exactly have this greater force by wishing for it ; so, 
 for the force of spirit one has, the load put upon it is often 
 heavier than it will well bear. The late Duke of Wellington 
 said of a certain peer that * it was a great pity his education 
 had been so far too much for his abilities.' In like manner, 
 one often sees erudition out of all proportion to its owner's 
 critical faculty. Little as I know, therefore, I am always 
 apprehensive, in dealing with poetry, lest even that little 
 should prove ' too much for my abilities.' 
 
 With this consciousness of my own lack of learning, — 
 nay, with this sort of acquiescence in it, with this belief that 
 for the labourer in the field of poetical criticism learning 
 has its disadvantages,— I am not likely to dispute with 
 Mr. Newman about matters of erudition. All that he says 
 on these matters in his Reply I read with great interest ; in 
 general I agree with him ; but only, I am sorry to say, up 
 to a certain point. Like all learned men, accustomed to 
 desire definite rules, he draws his conclusions too absolutely; 
 
 \ 
 
ii8 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 he wants to include too much under his rules ; he does not 
 quite perceive that in poetical criticism the shade, the fine 
 distinction, is everything; and that, when he has once 
 missed this, in all he says he is in truth but beating the air. 
 For instance : because I think Homer noble, he imagines 
 I must think him elegant ; and in fact he says in plain 
 words that I do think him so,— that to me Homer seems 
 ' pervadingly elegant.' But he does not. Virgil is elegant, 
 —'pervadingly elegant,'— even in passages of the highest 
 
 emotion :" 
 
 O, ubi campi, 
 Spercheosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacoenis 
 Taygeta ! ' 
 
 Even there Virgil, though of a divine elegance, is still 
 elegant, but Homer is not elegant; the word is quite a 
 wrong one to apply to him, and Mr. Newman is quite right 
 in blaming any one he finds so applying it. Again ; argu- 
 ing against my assertion that Homer is not quaint, he 
 says : * It is quaint to call waves wet, milk white, blood 
 dusky, horses single-hoofed, words winged, Vulcan Lobfoot 
 (KvAAoTToSttov), a spear longshadowy,' and so on. I find I 
 know not how many distinctions to draw here. I do not 
 think it quaint to call waves wet, or milk white, or words 
 
 * * O for the fields of Thessaly and the streams of Spercheios ! O 
 for the hills alive with the dances of the Laconian maidens, the hills of 
 Taygetus ! '—Georgics, ii. 486. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 119 
 
 winged ; but I do think it quaint to call horses single-hoofed, 
 or Vulcan Lobfoot, or a spear longshadowy. As to calling 
 blood dusky, I do not feel quite sure ; I will tell Mr. New- 
 man my opinion when I see the passage in which he calls 
 it so. But then, again, because it is quaint to call Vulcan 
 Lobfoot, I cannot admit that it was quaint to call him 
 KvXXoTToStW ; nor that, because it is quaint to call a spear 
 longshadowy, it was quaint to call it ^oXixoctkiov. Here Mr. 
 Newman's erudition misleads him : he knows the literal 
 value of the Greek so well, that he thinks his literal render- 
 ing identical with the Greek, and that the Greek must stand 
 or fall along with his rendering. But the real question is, 
 not whether he has given us, so to speak, full change for 
 the Greek, but how he gives us our change : we want it in 
 gold, and he gives it us in copper. Again : * It is quaint,' 
 says Mr. Newman, * to address a young friend as " O 
 Pippin ! " — it is quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom 
 boys are belabouring.' Here, too, Mr. Newman goes much 
 too fast, and his category of quaintness is too comprehen- 
 sive. To address a young friend as ' O Pippin ! ' is, I 
 cordially agree with him, very quaint ; although I do not 
 think it was quaint in Sarpedon to address Glaucus as 
 iriirov : but in comparing, whether in Greek or in English, 
 Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring, I do not see 
 that there is of necessity anything quaint at all. Again ; 
 
 
 li 
 
I 
 
 1 20 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 121 
 
 because 1 said that eld, lief, in sooth, and other words, are, 
 as Mr. Newman uses them in certain places, bad words, he 
 imagines that I must mean to stamp these words with an 
 absolute reprobation ; and because I said that 'my Biblio- 
 latry is excessive,' he imagines that I brand all words as 
 ignoble which are not in the Bible. Nothing of the kind : 
 there are no such absolute rules to be laid down in these 
 matters. The Bible vocabulary is to be used as an assist- 
 ance, not as an authority. Of the words which, placed 
 where Mr. Newman places them, I have called bad words, 
 every one may be excellent in some other place. Take eld, 
 for instance : when Shakspeare, reproaching man with the 
 dependence in which his youth is passed, says : 
 
 all thy blessed youth 
 Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms 
 Of palsied eld, . . . 
 
 it seems to me that eld comes in excellently there, in a 
 passage of curious meditation; but when Mr. Newman 
 renders dy>ypa) t' d^avarw Tc by 'from Eld and Death 
 exempted,' it seems to me he infuses a tinge of quaintness 
 into the transparent simplicity of Homer's expression, and 
 so I call eld a bad word in that place. 
 
 Once more. Mr. Newman lays it down as a general 
 rule that ' many of Homer's energetic descriptions are ex- 
 pressed in coarse physical words.' He goes on: 'I give 
 
 s 
 
 one illustration, — Tpoics TrpovTVij/av aoXX€€<;. Cowper, misled 
 by the igtiis fatuus of " stateliness " renders it absurdly : 
 
 The powers of Ilium gave the first assault 
 Embattled close ; 
 
 but it is, strictly, "The Trojans knocked fonvard (or, 
 thumped, butted forward) in close pack:' The verb is too 
 coarse for later polished prose, and even the adjective is 
 very strong {packed together^. I believe, that " forward in 
 pack the Trojans pitched," would not be really unfaithful to 
 the Homeric colour ; and I maintain, " that forward in mass 
 the Trojans pitched," would be an irreprovable rendering.' 
 He actually gives us all that as if it were a piece of scientific 
 deduction ; and as if, at the end, he had arrived at an 
 incontrovertible conclusion. But, in truth, one cannot settle 
 these matters quite in this way. Mr. Newman's general 
 rule may be true or false (I dislike to meddle with general 
 rules), but every part in what follows must stand or fall 
 by itself, and its soundness or unsoundness has nothing at 
 all to do with the truth or falsehood of Mr. Newman's 
 general rule. He first gives, as a strict rendering of the 
 Greek, ' The Trojans knocked forward (or, thumped, butted 
 forward), in close pack.' I need not say that, as a ' strict 
 rendering of the Greek,' this is good,— all Mr. Newman's 
 ' strict renderings of the Greek ' are sure to be, as such, good ; 
 but ' in close pack/ for doAAec?, seems to me to be what 
 
 I f 
 
i 
 
 122 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 Mr. Newman's renderings are not always,— an excellent 
 poetical rendering of the Greek ; a thousand times better, 
 certainly, than Cowper's 'embattled close.' Well, but 
 Mr. Newman goes on : * I believe that, *' forward in pack 
 the Trojans pitched," would not be really unfaithful to 
 the Homeric colour.' Here, I say, the Homeric colour is 
 half washed out of Mr. Newman's happy rendering of 
 doAAee? ; while in * pitched ' for Trpovrvil/avj the literal fidelity 
 of the first rendering is gone, while certainly no Homeric 
 colour has come in its place. Finally, Mr. Newman con- 
 cludes : 'I maintain that "forward in mass the 7>ojans 
 pitched," would be an irreprovable rendering.' Here, in 
 what Mr. Newman fancies his final moment of triumph, 
 Homeric colour and literal fidelity have alike abandoned 
 him altogether ; the last stage of his translation is much worse 
 than the second, and immeasurably worse than the first. 
 
 All this to show that a looser, easier method than Mr. 
 Newman's must be taken, if we are to arrive at any good 
 result in these questions. I now go on to follow Mr. 
 Newman a little further, not at all as wishing to dispute 
 with him, but as seeking (and this is the true fruit we may 
 gather from criticisms upon us) to gain hints from him for 
 the establishment of some useful truth about our subject, 
 even when I think him wrong. I still retain, I confess, my 
 conviction that Homer's characteristic qualities are rapidity 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 123 
 
 of movement, plainness of words and style, simplicity and 
 directness of ideas, and, above all, nobleness, the grand 
 manner. Whenever Mr. Newman drops a word, awakens a 
 train of thought, which leads me to see any of these charac- 
 teristics more clearly, I am grateful to him ; and one or two 
 suggestions of this kind which he affords, are all that now, 
 —having expressed my sorrow that he should have miscon- 
 ceived my feelings towards him, and pointed out what I 
 think the vice of his method of criticism, — I have to notice 
 in his Reply. 
 
 Such a suggestion I find in Mr. Newman's remarks on 
 my assertion that the translator of Homer must not adopt a 
 quaint and antiquated style in rendering him, because the 
 impression which Homer makes upon the living scholar is 
 not that of a poet quaint and antiquated, but that of a poet 
 perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible. I added that we can- 
 not, I confess, really know how Homer seemed to Sophocles, 
 but that it is impossible to me to believe that he seemed to 
 him quaint and antiquated. Mr. Newman asserts, on the 
 other hand, that I am absurdly wrong here; that Homer 
 seemed * out and out ' quaint and antiquated to the Athe- 
 nians ; that ' every sentence of him was more or less anti- 
 quated to Sophocles, who could no more help feeling at 
 every instant the foreign and antiquated character of the 
 poetry than an Englishman can help feeling the same in 
 
 S ' 
 
 ff 
 
 I 
 
 13 I 
 
 t i^^Hl^ 
 
 
124 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 reading Burns's poems.' And not only does Mr. Newman 
 say this, but he has managed thoroughly to convince some 
 of his readers of it. * Homer's Greek/ says one of them, 
 'certainly seemed antiquated to the historical times of 
 Greece. Mr. Newman, taking a far broader historical and 
 philological view than Mr. Arnold, stoutly maintains that it 
 did seem so. And another says : * Doubtless Homer's 
 dialect and diction were as hard and obscure to a later 
 Attic Greek as Chaucer to an Englishman of our day.' 
 
 Mr. Newman goes on to say, that not only was Homer 
 antiquated relatively to Pericles, but he is antiquated to 
 the living scholar ; and, indeed, is in himself ' absolutely 
 antique, being the poet of a barbarian age.' He tells us of 
 his * inexhaustible quaintnesses,' of his * very eccentric dic- 
 tion ; ' and he infers, of course, that he is perfectly right in 
 rendering him in a quaint and antiquated style. 
 
 Now this question, — whether or no Homer seemed 
 quaint and antiquated to Sophocles, — I call a delightful 
 question to raise. It is not a barren verbal dispute ; it is a 
 question 'drenched in matter,' to use an expression of Bacon ; 
 a question full of flesh and blood, and of which the scrutiny, 
 though I still think we cannot settle it absolutely, may yet 
 give us a directly useful result. To scrutinise it may lead 
 us to see more clearly what sort of a style a modern trans- 
 lator of Homer ought to adopt. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 125 
 
 Homer's verses were some of the first words which a 
 young Athenian heard. He heard them from his mother 
 or his nurse before he went to school ; and at school, when 
 he went there, he was constantly occupied with them. So 
 much did he hear of them that Socrates proposes, in the 
 interests of morality, to have selections from Homer made, 
 and placed in the hands of mothers and nurses, in his 
 model republic ; in order that, of an author with whom they 
 were sure to be so perpetually conversant, the young might 
 learn only those parts which might do them good. His 
 language was as familiar to Sophocles, we may be quite 
 sure, as the language of the Bible is to us. 
 
 Nay, more. Homer's language was not, of course, in 
 the time of Sophocles, the spoken or written language of 
 ordinary life, any more than the language of the Bible, any 
 more than the language of poetry, is with us ; but for one 
 great species of composition— epic poetry— it was still the 
 current language ; it was the language in which every one 
 who made that sort of poetry composed. Every one at 
 Athens who dabbled in epic poetry, not only understood 
 Homer's language,— he possessed it. He possessed it as 
 every one who dabbles in poetry with us, possesses what 
 may be called the poetical vocabulary, as distinguished 
 from the vocabulary of common speech and of modern 
 prose: I mean, such expressions d.s perchance iox perhaps, 
 
126 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 spake for spoke, aye for ever, don for put on, charmed for 
 charmed, and thousands of others. 
 
 I might go to Burns and Chaucer, and, taking words and 
 passages from them, ask if they afforded any parallel to a 
 language so familiar and so possessed. But this I will not 
 do, for Mr. Newman himself supplies me with what he 
 thinks a fair parallel, in its effect upon us, to the language 
 of Homer in its effect upon Sophocles. He says that such 
 words as mon, londis, libbard, withouten, muchel, give us a 
 tolerable but incomplete notion of this parallel ; and he 
 finally exhibits the parallel in all its clearness, by this 
 poetical specimen : — 
 
 Dat mon, quhich hauldeth Kyngis af 
 
 Londis yn feo, niver 
 (I tell 'e) feereth aught ; sith hee 
 
 Doth hauld hys londis yver. 
 
 Now, does Mr. Newman really think that Sophocles could, 
 as he says, * no more help feeling at every instant the 
 foreign and antiquated character of Homer, than an 
 Englishman can help feeling the same in hearing ' these 
 lines ? Is he quite sure of it ? He says he is ; he will 
 not allow of any doubt or hesitation in the matter. I had 
 confessed we could not really know how Homer seemed to 
 Sophocles ; — * Let Mr. Arnold confess for himself,' cries 
 Mr. Newman, ' and not for me, who know perfectly well' 
 And this is what he knows ! 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 127 
 
 
 Mr. Newman says, however, that I ' play fallaciously on 
 the words familiar and unfamiliar ; ' that * Homer's words 
 may have been familiar to the Athenians {i.e. often heard) 
 even when they were either not understood by them or else, 
 being understood, were yet felt and known to be utterly 
 foreign. Let my renderings,' he continues, * be heard, as 
 Pope or even Cowper has been heard, and no one will be 
 
 •' surprised." ' 
 
 But the whole question is here. The translator must 
 not assume that to have taken place which has not taken 
 place, although, perhaps, he may wish it to have taken 
 place,— namely, that his diction is become an established 
 possession of the minds of men, and therefore is, in its 
 proper place, familiar to them, will not ' surprise ' them. If 
 Homer's language was familiar,— that is, often heard,— then 
 to this language words Hke londis and libbard, which are not 
 familiar, offer, for the translator's purpose, no parallel. For 
 some purpose of the philologer they may offer a parallel to 
 it ; for the translator's purpose they offer none. The 
 question is not, whether a diction is antiquated for current 
 speech, but whether it is antiquated for that particular pur- 
 pose for which it is employed. A diction that is antiquated 
 for common speech and common prose, may very well not be 
 antiquated for poetry or certain special kinds of prose. * Per- 
 adventure there shall be ten found there,' is not antiquated 
 
 ti 
 
128 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 129 
 
 for Biblical prose, though for conversation or for a news- 
 paper it is antiquated. 'The trumpet spake not to the 
 arme'd throng,' is not antiquated for poetry, although we 
 should not write in a letter, ' he spake to me,' or say, ' the 
 British soldier is arfned with the Enfield rifle.' But when 
 language is antiquated for that particular purpose for which 
 it is employed, — as numbers of Chaucer's words, for in- 
 stance, are antiquated for poetry,— such language is a bad 
 representative of language which, like Homer's, was never 
 antiquated for that particular purpose for which it was 
 employed. I imagine that IlryXryVaSea) for Ht/XciSov, in 
 Homer, no more sounded antiquated to Sophocles, than 
 armed for ar7ii'd, in Milton, sounds antiquated to us ; but 
 Mr. Newman's withouten and niuchel do sound to us anti- 
 quated, even for poetry, and therefore they do not corre- 
 spond in their effect upon us with Homer's words in their 
 effect upon Sophocles. When Chaucer, who uses such 
 words, is to pass current amongst us, to be familiar to 
 us, as Homer was familiar to the Athenians, he has 
 to be modernised, as Wordsworth and others set to work 
 to modernise him ; but an Athenian no more needed 
 to have Homer modernised, than we need to have the Bible 
 modernised, or Wordsworth himself. 
 
 Therefore, when Mr. Newman's words bragly, bulkin, 
 and the rest, are an established possession of our minds, 
 as Homer's words were an established possession of an 
 
 Athenian's mind, he may use them; but not till then. 
 Chaucer's words, the words of Burns, great poets as these 
 were, are yet not thus an established possession of an 
 Englishman's mind, and therefore they must not be used 
 in rendering Homer into English. 
 
 Mr. Newman has been misled just by doing that which 
 his admirer praises him for doing, by taking a * far broader 
 historical and philological view than ' mine. Precisely 
 because he has done this, and has applied the ' philological 
 view ' where it was not applicable, but w^here the * poetical 
 view ' alone was rightly applicable, he has fallen into error. 
 
 It is the same with him in his remarks on the difficulty 
 and obscurity of Homer. Homer, I say, is perfectly plain 
 in speech, simple, and intelligible. And I infer from this 
 that his translator, too, ought to be perfectly plain in speech, 
 simple, and intelligible ; ought not to say, for instance, in 
 rendering 
 
 * Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle,' 
 — and things of that kind. Mr. Newman hands me a list 
 of some twenty hard words, invokes Buttmann, Mr. Maiden, 
 and M. Benfey, and asks me if I think myself wiser than 
 all the world of Greek scholars, and if I am ready to supply 
 the deficiencies of Liddell and Scott's Lexicon ! But here, 
 again, Mr. Newman errs by not perceiving that the question 
 
 K 
 
I30 
 
 ON TRANSLATING H'OMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 131 
 
 is one not of scholarship, but of a poetical translation of 
 Homer. This, I say, should be perfectly simple and intelli- 
 gible. He rephes by telling me that d8ti/6s, ctXtVoScs, and 
 aiyaXo€ts are hard words. Well, but what does he infer 
 from that? That the poetical translation, in his rendering of 
 them, is to give us a sense of the difficulties of the scholar, 
 and so is to make his translation obscure ? If he does not 
 mean that, how, by bringing forward these hard words, does 
 he touch the question whether an English version of Homer 
 should be plain or not plain ? If Homer's poetry, as poetry, 
 is in its general effect on the poetical reader perfectly simple 
 and intelligible, the uncertainty of the scholar about the 
 true meaning of certain words can never change this general 
 effect. Rather will the poetry of Homer make us forget his 
 philology, than his philology make us forget his poetry. It 
 may even be affirmed that every one who reads Homer 
 perpetually for the sake of enjoying his poetry (and no one 
 who does not so read him will ever translate him well), 
 comes at last to form a perfectly clear sense in his own mind 
 for every important word in Homer, such as dStvos, or 
 ^XtySaros, whatever the scholar's doubts about the word may 
 be. And this sense is present to his mind with perfect 
 clearness and fulness, whenever the word recurs, although 
 as a scholar he may know that he cannot be sure whether 
 this sense is the right one or not. But poetically he feels 
 clearly about the word, although philologically he may not. 
 
 The scholar in him may hesitate, like the father in Sheridan's 
 play ; but the reader of poetry in him is, like the governor, 
 fixed. The same thing happens to us with our own lan- 
 guage. How many words occur in the Bible, for instance, 
 to which thousands of hearers do not feel sure they attach 
 the precise real meaning ; but they make out a meaning for 
 them out of what materials they have at hand ; and the 
 words, heard over and over again, come to convey this 
 meaning with a certainty which poetically is adequate, 
 though not philologically. How many have attached a clear 
 and poetically adequate sense to 'the/^^«;;/' and 'the niote^ 
 though not precisely the right one ! How clearly, again, have 
 readers got a sense from Milton's words, 'grate on their 
 scrannel pipes,' who yet might have been puzzled to write a 
 commentary on the word scrannel for the dictionary ! So 
 w^e get a clear sense from dStvos as an epithet for grief, after 
 often meeting with it and finding out all we can about it, 
 even though that all be philologically insufficient ; so we 
 get a clear sense from ctAtVoScs as an epithet for cows. And 
 this his clear poetical sense about the w^ords, not his philo- 
 logical uncertainties about them, is what the translator has 
 to convey. Words like bragly and bulkin offer no parallel 
 to these words ; because the reader, from his entire want of 
 familiarity with the words bragly and bulkin^ has no clear 
 sense of them poetically. 
 
 K 2 
 
132 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 Perplexed by his knowledge of the philological aspect 
 of Homer's language, encumbered by his own learning, Mr. 
 Newman, I say, misses the poetical aspect, misses that with 
 which alone we are here concerned. ' Homer is odd,' he 
 persists, fixing his eyes on his own philological analysis of 
 i^^M, and /x€>i/.s, and Ki;XXo7ro8tW, and not on these words 
 in their synthetic character ;- just as Professor Max Muller, 
 going a Uttle farther back, and fixing his attention on the 
 elementary value of the word Ovyaryip, might say Homer 
 was ' odd ' for using that word ;— ' if the whole Greek nation, 
 by long familiarity, had become inobservant of Homer's 
 oddities,'— of the oddities of this ' noble barbarian,' as Mr. 
 Newman elsewhere calls him, this ' noble barbarian ' with 
 the ' lively eye of the savage,'—' that would be no fault of 
 mine. That would not justify Mr. Arnold's blame of me 
 for rendering the words correctly.' Correctly —^h, but wha t 
 is correctness in this case ? This correctness of his is the 
 very rock on which Mr. Newman has split. He is so 
 correct that at last he finds peculiarity everywhere. The 
 true knowledge of Homer becomes at last, in his eyes, a 
 knowledge of Homer's ' peculiarities, pleasant and unplea- 
 sant.' Learned men know these 'peculiarities,' and Homer is 
 to be translated because the unlearned are impatient to know 
 them too. ' That,' he exclaims, * is just why people want to 
 read an English Homer,— /^ know all his oddities, just as 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 133 
 
 learned men do.' Here I am obliged to shake my head, and 
 to declare that, in spite of all my respect for Mr. Newman, 
 I cannot go these lengths with him. He talks of my * mono- 
 maniac fancy that there is nothing quaint or antique in 
 Homer.' Terrible learning,— I cannot help in my turn 
 exclaiming,— terrible learning, which discovers so much ! 
 
 Here, then, I take my leave of Mr. Newman, retaining 
 my opinion that his version of Homer is spoiled by his 
 making Homer odd and ignoble ; but having, I hope, 
 sufficient love for literature to be able to canvass works 
 without thinking of persons, and to hold this or that pro- 
 duction cheap, while retaining a sincere respect, on other 
 grounds, for its author. 
 
 In fulfilment of my promise to take this opportunity for 
 giving the translator of Homer a little further advice, I 
 proceed to notice one or two other criticisms which I find, 
 in like manner, suggestive ; which give us an opportunity, 
 that is, of seeing more clearly, as we look into them, the true 
 principles on which translation of Homer should rest. This 
 is all I seek in criticisms ; and, perhaps (as I have already 
 said) it is only as one seeks a positive result of this kind, 
 that one can get any fruit from them. Seeking a negative 
 result from them,— personal altercation and wrangling,— one 
 gets no fruit ; seeking a positive result,— the elucidation and 
 establishment of one's ideas, — one may get much. Even 
 
134 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 bad criticisms may thus be made suggestive and fruitful. I 
 declared, in a former lecture on this subject, my conviction 
 that criticism is not the strong point of our national literature. 
 Well, even the bad criticisms on our present topic which I 
 meet with, serve to illustrate this conviction for me. And 
 thus one is enabled, even in reading remarks which for 
 Homeric criticism, for their immediate subject, have no value, 
 — w^hich are far too personal in spirit, far too immoderate in 
 temper, and far too heavy-handed in style, for the delicate 
 matter they have to treat, — still to gain light and confirma- 
 tion for a serious idea, and to follow the Baconian injunc- 
 tion, semper aliquid addiscere, always to be adding to one's 
 stock of observation and knowledge. Yes, even when we 
 have to do with writers who, — to quote the words of an ex- 
 quisite critic, the master of us all in criticism, M. Sainte- 
 Beuve, — remind us, when they handle such subjects as our 
 present, of ' Romans of the fourth or fifth century, coming 
 to hold forth, all at random, in African style, on papers 
 found in the desk of Augustus, Maecenas, or Pollio,' — even 
 then we may instruct ourselves if we may regard ideas and 
 not persons ; even then we may enable ourselves to say, 
 with the same critic describing the effect made upon him by 
 D'Argenson's Memoirs : * My taste is revolted, but I learn 
 something ',—/e suis choque 7?iais je siiis instruit.^ 
 
 But let us pass to criticisms which are suggestive directly 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 135 
 
 and not thus indirectly only,— criticisms by examining which 
 we may be brought nearer to what immediately interests 
 us, — the right way of translating Homer. 
 
 I said that Homer did not rise and sink with his subject, 
 was never to be called prosaic and low. This gives surprise 
 to many persons, who object that parts of the Iliad are cer- 
 tainly pitched lower than others, and who remind me of a 
 number of absolutely level passages in Homer. But I 
 never denied that a subject must rise and sink, that it must 
 have its elevated and its level regions ; all I deny is, that a 
 poet can be said to rise and sink when all that he, as a 
 poet, can do, is perfectly well done ; when he is perfectly 
 sound and good, that is, perfect as a poet, in the level 
 regions of his subject as well as in its elevated regions. 
 Indeed, what distinguishes the greatest masters of poetry 
 from all others is, that they are perfectly sound and poetical 
 in these level regions of their subject,-in these regions 
 which are the great difficulty of all poets but the very 
 greatest, which they never quite know what to do with. A 
 poet may sink in these regions by being falsely grand as well 
 as by being low ; he sinks, in short, whenever he does not 
 treat his matter, whatever it is, in a perfectly good and 
 poetic way. But, so long as he treats it in this way, he can- 
 not be said to sink, whatever his matter may do. A passage 
 of the simplest narrative is quoted to me from Homer :— 
 
"L:.fi-*»*"":^S^*-'ffiE!S.*^^~'-?(^®wr:^'' -"i*" 
 
 136 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 &Tpvv€v 5e iKaffrov ivoix^fievos iireecrffiVf 
 
 Me(r0\rjr re, TXavKSv re, Midovrd re, @ip<ri\ox^v t€ . . .' 
 
 and I am asked, whether Homer does not sink there ; 
 whether he ^can have intended such hnes as those for 
 poetry ? ' My answer is : Those hnes are very good poetry 
 indeed, poetry of the best class, m that place. But when 
 Wordsworth, having to narrate a very plain matter, tries not 
 to sink in narrating it, tries, in short, to be what is falsely 
 called poetical, he does sink, although he sinks by being 
 pompous, not by being low. 
 
 Onward we drove beneath the Castle ; caught, 
 While crossing Magdalen Bridge, a glimpse of Cam, 
 And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn. 
 
 That last line shows excellently how a poet may sink with 
 his subject by resolving not to sink with it. A page or two 
 farther on, the subject rises to grandeur, and then Words- 
 worth is nobly worthy of it : — 
 
 The antechapel, where the statue stood 
 Of Newton with his prism and silent face, 
 The marble index of a mind for ever 
 Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. 
 
 But the supreme poet is he who is thoroughly sound and 
 poetical, alike when his subject is grand, and when it is 
 plain : with him the subject may sink, but never the poet. 
 
 * Iliad, xvii. 2 1 6, 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ^37 
 
 But a Dutch painter does not rise and sink with his subject, 
 — Defoe, in Mo/l Flanders, does not rise and sink with his 
 subject, — in so far as an artist cannot be said to sink who is 
 sound in his treatment of his subject, however plain it is : 
 yet Defoe, yet a Dutch painter, may in one sense be said 
 to sink with their subject, because though sound in their 
 treatment of it, they are not poetical, — poetical in the true, 
 not the false sense of the word ; because, in fact, they are 
 not in the grand style. Homer can in no sense be said to 
 sink with his subject, because his soundness has something 
 more than literal naturalness about it ; because his soundness 
 is the soundness of Homer, of a great epic poet ; because, in 
 fact, he is in the grand style. So he sheds over the simplest 
 matter he touches the charm of his grand manner ; he 
 makes everything noble. Nothing has raised more question- 
 ing among my critics than these words, — noble, the grand 
 style. People complain that I do not define these words 
 sufficiently, that I do not tell them enough about them. 
 
 * The grand style, — but what is the grand style ? ' — they cry ; 
 some with an inclination to believe in it, but puzzled ; 
 others mockingly and with incredulity. Alas ! the grand 
 style is the last matter in the world for verbal definition to 
 deal with adequately. One may say of it as is said of faith : 
 
 * One must feel it in order to know what it is.' But, as of 
 faith, so too one may say of nobleness, of the grand style : 
 
 f| 
 
138 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 *Woe to those who know it not T Yet this expression, 
 though indefinable, has a charm ; one is the better for con- 
 sidering it ; bonum est, nos hie esse ; nay, one loves to try to 
 explain it, though one knows that one must speak imper- 
 fectly. For those, then, who ask the question,— What is 
 the grand style ?-with sincerity, I will try to make some 
 answer, inadequate as it must be. For those who ask it 
 mockingly I have no answer, except to repeat to them, with 
 compassionate sorrow, the Gospel words : Moriemini in 
 feccatis vestris—YQ shall die in your sins. 
 
 But let me, at any rate, have the pleasure of again giving, 
 
 before I begin to try and define the grand style, a specimen 
 
 of what it is. 
 
 Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole, 
 More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged 
 To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days, 
 On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues. . . . 
 
 There is the grand style in perfection ; and any one who 
 has a sense for it, will feel it a thousand times better from 
 repeating those lines than from hearing anything I can say 
 
 about it. 
 
 Let us try, however, what can be said, controlling what 
 we say by examples. I think it will be found that the 
 grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically 
 gifted, treats ivith simplicity or with severity a serious subject. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 139 
 
 I think this definition will be found to cover all instances of 
 the grand style in poetry which present themselves. I 
 think it will be found to exclude all poetry which is not in 
 the grand style. And I think it contains no terms which are 
 obscure, which themselves need defining. Even those who 
 do not understand what is meant by calling poetry noble, 
 will understand, I imagine, what is meant by speaking of a 
 noble nature in a man. But the noble or powerful nature — 
 the bedeutendes Individuuvi of Goethe— is not enough. For 
 instance, Mr. Newman has zeal for learning, zeal for think- 
 ing, zeal for liberty, and all these things are noble, they 
 ennoble a man ; but he has not the poetical gift : there 
 must be the poetical gift, the ' divine faculty,' also. And, 
 besides all this, the subject must be a serious one (for it is 
 only by a kind of license that we can speak of the grand 
 style in comedy) ; and it must be treated with simplicity or 
 severity. Here is the great difficulty : the poets of the 
 world have been many ; there has been wanting neither 
 abundance of poetical gift nor abundance of noble natures ; 
 but a poetical gift so happy, in a noble nature so circum- 
 stanced and trained, that the result is a continuous style, 
 perfect in simplicity or perfect in severity, has been extremely 
 rare. One poet has had the gifts of nature and faculty in 
 unequalled fulness, without the circumstances and training 
 which make this sustained perfection of style possible. Of 
 
I40 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 other poets, some have caught this perfect strain now and 
 then, in short pieces or single hnes, but have not been able 
 to maintain it through considerable works ; others have 
 composed all their productions in a style which, by com- 
 parison with the best, one must call secondary. 
 
 The best model of the grand style simple is Homer ; 
 perhaps the best model of the grand style severe is Milton. 
 But Dante is remarkable for affording admirable examples 
 of both styles ; he has the grand style which arises from 
 simplicity, and he has the grand style which arises from 
 severity ; and from him I will illustrate them both. In a 
 former lecture I pointed out what that severity of poetical 
 style is, which comes from saying a thing with a kind of 
 intense compression, or in an allusive, brief, almost haughty 
 way, as if the poet's mind were charged with so many and 
 such grave matters, that he would not deign to treat any one 
 of them explicitly. Of this severity the last line of the 
 following stanza of the Purgatory is a good example. Dante 
 has been telling Forese that Virgil had guided him through 
 Hell, and he goes on : — 
 
 Indi m' han tratto su gli suoi conforti, 
 Salendo e rigirando la Montagna 
 Che drizza voi che il inondo fece torti.^ 
 
 * Thence hath his comforting aid led me up, climbing and 
 
 ' Purgatory i xxiii. 124. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 141 
 
 circling the Mountain, which straightens you whom the world 
 made crooked' These last words, * la Montagna che drizza 
 voi che il mondo fece torti' — ' the Mountain which straightens 
 you whom the world made crooked^ — for the Mountain of 
 Purgatory, I call an excellent specimen of the grand style in 
 severity, where the poet's mind is too full charged to suffer 
 him to speak more explicitly. But the very next stanza ^'s a 
 beautiful specimen of the grand style in simplicity, where a 
 noble nature and a poetical gift unite to utter a thing with 
 the most limpid plainness and clearness : — 
 
 Tanto dice di farmi sua compagna 
 Ch' io saro la dove fia Beatrice ; 
 Quivi convien che senza lui rimagna. ' 
 
 * So long,' Dante continues, * so long he (Virgil) saith he will 
 bear me company, until I shall be there where Beatrice is ; 
 there it behoves that without him I remain.' But the noble 
 simplicity of that in the Italian no words of mine can 
 render. 
 
 Both these styles, the simple and the severe, are truly 
 grand ; the severe seems, perhaps, the grandest, so long as 
 we attend most to the great personality, to the noble nature, 
 in the poet its author ; the simple seems the grandest when 
 we attend most to the exquisite faculty, to the poetical gift. 
 But the simple is no doubt to be preferred. It is the more 
 
 ' Purgatory, xxiii. 127. 
 
142 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 magical : in the other there is something intellectual, some- 
 thing which gives scope for a play of thought which may 
 exist where the poetical gift is either wanting or present 
 in only inferior degree : the severe is much more imitable, 
 and this a little spoils its charm. A kind of semblance 
 of this style keeps Young going, one may say, through all the 
 nine parts of that most indifferent production, the Night 
 Thoughts. But the grand style in simplicity is inimitable : 
 
 oXinv a(r(pa\^s 
 ovK €7ej/T oiir' AtaKiSa irapa nrjXct, 
 oijT€ Trap' avTidi(t> Kd^H-V ' ^^ovrai fiau ^poroiv 
 '6\fiov virfprarov ol ax^tv, oi re Kal xP^'f^-l^^^^^^ 
 fif\iroa€vav eV opei MoktSi/, Kal iu eirraTTuAois 
 &'Cov 0^/3ais . . .' 
 
 There is a hmpidness in that, a want of salient points to 
 seize and transfer, which makes imitation impossible, except 
 by a genius akin to the genius which produced it. 
 
 Greek simplicity and Greek grace are inimitable ; but it 
 is said that the Iliad may still be ballad-poetry while in- 
 finitely superior to all other ballads, and that, in my speci- 
 mens of English ballad-poetry, I have been unfair. Well, 
 
 » ' A secure time fell to the lot neither of Peleus the son of iEacus, 
 nor of the godhke Cadmus ; howbeit these are said to have had, of all 
 mortals, the supreme of happiness, who heard the golden-snooded 
 Muses sing, one of them on the mountain (Pelion), the other in seven- 
 gated Thebes.' 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 143 
 
 no doubt there are better things in English ballad-poetry 
 
 than 
 
 Now Christ thee save, thou proud porter, . . . 
 
 but the real strength of a chain, they say, is the strength 
 of its weakest link ; and what I was trying to show you was, 
 that the English ballad-style is not an instrument of enough 
 compass and force to correspond to the Greek hexameter ; 
 that, owing to an inherent weakness in it as an epic style, it 
 easily runs into one of tw^o faults, — either it is prosaic and 
 humdrum, or, trying to avoid that fault, and to make itself 
 lively (se /aire vif\ it becomes pert and jaunty. To show 
 that, the passage about King Adland's porter serves very 
 well. But these degradations are not proper to a true epic 
 instrument, such as the Greek hexameter. 
 
 You may say, if you like, when you find Homer's verse, 
 even in describing the plainest matter, neither humdrum 
 nor jaunty, that this is because he is so incomparably better 
 a poet than other balladists, because he is Homer. But 
 take the whole range of Greek epic poetry, — take the later 
 poets, the poets of the last ages of this poetry, many of them 
 most indifferent, — Coluthus, Tryphiodorus, Quintus of 
 Smyrna, Nonnus. Never will you find in this instrument 
 of the hexameter, even in their hands, the vices of the 
 ballad-style in the weak moments of this last : everywhere 
 the hexameter — a noble, a truly epical instrument— rather 
 
 ^P 
 
I 
 
 t 
 
 144 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 resists the weakness of its employer than lends itself to it. 
 Quintus of Smyrna is a poet of merit, but certainly not a poet 
 of a high order ; with him, too, epic poetry, whether in the 
 character of its prosody or in that of its diction, is no longer 
 the epic poetry of earlier and better times, nor epic poetry 
 as again restored by Nonnus : but even in Quintus of 
 Smyrna, I say, the hexameter is still the hexameter ; it is a 
 style which the ballad-style, even in the hands of better 
 poets, cannot rival. And in the hands of inferior poets, 
 the ballad-style sinks to vices of which the hexameter, 
 even in the hands of a Tryphiodorus, never can become 
 
 guilty. 
 
 But a critic, whom it is impossible to read without 
 pleasure, and the disguise of whose initials I am sure I may 
 be allowed to penetrate,— Mr. Spedding,— says that he 
 * denies altogether that the metrical movement of the 
 English hexameter has any resemblance to that of the 
 Greek.' Of course, in that case, if the two metres in no 
 respect correspond, praise accorded to the Greek hexameter 
 as an epical instrument will not extend to the English. Mr. 
 Spedding seeks to establish his proposition by pointing out 
 that the system of accentuation differs in the English and 
 in the Virgilian hexameter ; that in the first, the accent and 
 the long syllable (or what has to do duty as such) coincide, 
 in the second they do not. He says that we cannot be so 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 145 
 
 sure of the accent with which Greek verse should be read 
 as of that with which Latin should ; but that the lines of 
 Homer in which the accent and the long syllable coincide, 
 as in the English hexameter, are certainly very rare. He 
 suggests a type of English hexameter in agreement with the 
 Virgilian model, and formed on the supposition that 'quantity 
 is as distinguishable in EngHsh as in I^tin or Greek by any 
 ear that will attend to it.' Of the truth of this supposition 
 he entertains no doubt. The new hexameter will, Mr. 
 Spedding thinks, at least have the merit of resembling, in 
 its metrical movement, the classical hexameter, which merit 
 the ordinary English hexameter has not. But even with 
 this improved hexameter he is not satisfied ; and he goes 
 on, first to suggest other metres for rendering Homer, and 
 finally to suggest that rendering Homer is impossible. 
 
 A scholar to whom all who admire Lucretius owe a 
 large debt of gratitude, — Mr. Munro, — has replied to Mr. 
 Spedding. Mr. Munro declares that 'the accent of the old 
 Greeks and Romans resembled our accent only in name, in 
 reality was essentially different ; ' that * our English reading 
 of Homer and Virgil has in itself no meaning ; ' and that 
 'accent has nothing to do with the Virgilian hexameter.' If 
 this be so, of course the merit which Mr. Spedding attributes 
 to his own hexameter, of really corresponding with the 
 Virgilian hexameter, has no existence. Again ; in contra- 
 
 L 
 
146 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 diction to Mr. Spedding's assertion that lines in which (in 
 our reading of them) the accent and the long syllable co- 
 incide,' as in the ordinary English hexameter, are *rare even 
 in Homer,' Mr. Munro declares that such lines, ' instead of 
 being rare, are among the very commonest types of Homeric 
 rhythm.' Mr. Spedding asserts that * quantity is as distin- 
 guishable in English as in Latin or Greek by any ear that 
 will attend to it ; ' but Mr. Munro replies, that in English 
 
 * neither his ear nor his reason recognises any real distinc- 
 tion of quantity except that which is produced by accen- 
 tuated and unaccentuated syllables.' He therefore arrives 
 at the conclusion that in constructing English hexameters, 
 
 * quantity must be utterly discarded ; and longer or shorter 
 unaccentuated syllables can have no meaning, except so far 
 as they may be made to produce sweeter or harsher sounds 
 in the hands of a master.' 
 
 It is not for me to interpose between two such com- 
 batants ; and indeed my way lies, not up the highroad 
 where they are contending, but along a bypath. With the 
 absolute truth of their general propositions respecting accent 
 and quantity, I have nothing to do ; it is most interesting 
 and instructive to me to hear such propositions discussed, 
 when it is Mr. Munro or Mr. Spedding who discusses them ; 
 
 ' Lines such as the first of the Odyssey: 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 147 
 
 but I have strictly limited myself in these Lectures to the 
 humble function of giving practical advice to the translator 
 of Homer. He, I still think, must not follow so confidently, 
 as makers of English hexameters have hitherto followed, 
 Mr. Munro's maxim,— pia^i/i/y maybe utterly discarded. He 
 must not, like Mr. Longfellow, make sevetiteen a dactyl in 
 spite of all the length of its last syllable, even though he 
 can plead that in counting we lay the accent on the first 
 syllable of this word. He may be far from attaining Mr. 
 Spedding's nicety of ear ;— may be unable to feel that ' while 
 quantity is a dactyl, quiddity is a tribrach,' and that 'rapidly 
 is a word to which we find no parallel in Latin ; '—but I 
 think he must bring himself to distinguish, with Mr. Sped- 
 ding, between ' th' ^'^z-- wearied eyelid,' and 'the wearied 
 eyehd,' as being, the one a correct ending for a hexameter, 
 the other an ending with a false quantity in it ; instead of 
 finding, with Mr. Munro, that this distinction 'conveys to 
 his mind no intelligible idea.' He must temper his belief 
 in Mr. Munro's ^xcXwrn,^ quantity must be utterly discarded, 
 — by mixing with it a belief in this other dictum of the same 
 author, —/z£/(? or more consonants take longer time in enuncia- 
 ting than one. ^ 
 
 * Substantially, however, in the question at issue between Mr. 
 Munro and Mr. Spedding, I agree with Mr. Munro. By the italicised 
 words in the following sentence, ' The rhythm of the Virgilian 
 
 L 2 
 
148 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 Criticism is so apt in general to be vague and impalpable, 
 
 that when it gives us a solid and definite possession, such 
 
 as is Mr. Spedding's parallel of the Virgilian and the English 
 
 hexameter with their difference of accentuation distinctly 
 
 marked, we cannot be too grateful to it. It is in the way 
 
 in which Mr. Spedding proceeds to press his conclusions 
 
 from the parallel which he has drawn out, that his criticism 
 
 seems to me to come a little short. Here even he, I think, 
 
 shows (if he will allow me to say so) a little of that want of 
 
 pliancy and suppleness so common among critics, but so 
 
 dangerous to their criticism ; he is a little too absolute in 
 
 imposing his metrical laws ; he too much forgets the excel- 
 
 hexameter depends entirely on ccBsiira^ pause^ and a due arrangement 
 of words,' he has touched, it seems to me, in the constitution of this 
 hexameter, the central point, which Mr. Spedding misses. The 
 accent, or heightened tone^ of Virgil in reading his own hexameters, 
 was probably far from being the same thing as the accent or stress with 
 which we read them. The general effect of each line, in Virgil's 
 mouth, was probably therefore something widely different from what 
 Mr. Spedding assumes it to have been : an ancient's accentual reading 
 was something which allowed the metrical beat of the Latin line to be 
 far more perceptible than our accentual reading allows it to be. 
 
 On the question as to the real rhythm of the ancient hexameter, 
 Mr. Newman has in his Reply a page quite admirable for force and 
 precision. Here he is in his element, and his ability and acuteness 
 have their proper scope. But it is true that the modern reading of 
 the ancient hexameter is what the modern hexameter has to imitate, 
 and that the English reading of the Virgilian hexameter is as Mr. 
 Spedding describes it. Why this reading has not been imitated by the 
 English hexameter, I have tried to point out in the text. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 149 
 
 lent maxim of Menander, so applicable to literary criti- 
 cism : — 
 
 KaXhv ol vSfioi ff(p6^p^ fla-lv ' 6 5' opuu rovs ifSfxavs 
 \iav OLKpi^us, avKocpdvrris (paiicTui ' 
 
 * Laws are admirable things ; but he who keeps his eye 
 too closely fixed upon them, runs the risk of becoming '—let 
 us say, a purist. Mr. Spedding is probably mistaken in sup- 
 posing that Virgil pronounced his hexameters as Mr. Sped- 
 ding pronounces them. He is almost certainly mistaken 
 in supposing that Homer pronounced his hexameters as 
 Mr. Spedding pronounces Virgil's. But this, as I have said, 
 is not a question for us to treat ; all we are here concerned 
 with is the imitation, by the English hexameter, of the 
 ancient hexameter in its effect upon us moderns. Suppose 
 we concede to Mr. Spedding that his parallel proves our 
 accentuation of the English and of the Virgilian hexameter 
 to be different : what are we to conclude from that ; how 
 will a criticism— not a formal, but a substantial criticism- 
 deal with such a fact as that ? Will it infer, as Mr. Spedding 
 infers, that the English hexameter, therefore, must not 
 pretend to reproduce better than other rhythms the move- 
 ment of Homer's hexameter for us,— that there can be no 
 correspondence at all between the movement of these two 
 hexameters, — that if we want to have such a correspondence, 
 we must abandon the current English hexameter altogether, 
 
ISO 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 and adopt in its place a new hexameter of Mr. Spedding's 
 Anglo-Latin type,— substitute for lines like the 
 
 Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia . . . 
 of Dr. Hawtrey, lines like the 
 
 Procession, complex melodies, pause, quantity, accent. 
 After Virgilian precedent and practice, in order . . . 
 
 of Mr. Spedding? To infer this, is to go, as I have com- 
 plained of Mr. Newman for sometimes going, a great deal 
 too fast. I think prudent criticism must certainly recognise, 
 in the current English hexameter, a fact which cannot so 
 lightly be set aside ; it must acknowledge that by this 
 hexameter the English ear, the genius of the English lan- 
 guage, have, in their own way, adopted, have translated for 
 themselves the Homeric hexameter ; and that a rhythm 
 which has thus grown up, which is thus, in a manner, the 
 production of nature, has in its general type something 
 necessary and inevitable, something which admits change 
 only within narrow limits, which precludes change that is 
 sweeping and essential. I think, therefore, the prudent 
 critic will regard Mr. Spedding's proposed revolution as 
 simply impracticable. He will feel that in English poetry 
 the hexameter, if used at all, must be, in the main, the 
 English hexameter now current. He will perceive that its 
 having come into existence as the representative pf the 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 151 
 
 Homeric hexameter, proves it to have, for the English ear, 
 a certain correspondence with the Homeric hexameter, 
 although this correspondence may be, from the difference 
 of the Greek and English languages, necessarily incomplete. 
 This incompleteness he will endeavour,^ as he may find or 
 fancy himself able, gradually somewhat to lessen through 
 minor changes, suggested by the ancient hexameter, but 
 respecting the general constitution of the modern : the 
 
 • Such a minor change I have attempted by occasionally shifting, in 
 the first foot of the hexameter, the accent from the first syllable to the 
 second. In the current English hexameter, it is on the first. Mr. 
 Spedding, who proposes radically to subvert the constitution of this 
 hexameter, seems not to understand that any one can propose to modify 
 it partially; he can comprehend revolution in this metre, but not 
 reform. Accordingly he asks me how I can bring myself to say, 
 ' ^Aween that and the ships,' or * Thhe sat fifty men ;' or how I can 
 reconcile such forcing of the accent with my own rule, that ' hexameters 
 must read themselves: Presently he says that he cannot believe I do 
 pronounce these words so, but that he thinks I leave out the accent in 
 the first foot altogether, and thus get a hexameter with only five accents. 
 He will pardon me : I pronounce, as rsupix)se he himself does, if he 
 reads the words naturally, * "between that and the ships,' and * There 
 sdt fifty men.' Mr. Spedding is familiar enough with this accent on 
 the second syllable in Virgil's hexameters; in *et te montosae,' or 
 < Ve/Jces jaculo. ' Such a change is an attempt to relieve the monotony 
 of the current English hexameter by occasionally altering the position 
 of one of its accents ; it is not an attempt to make a wholly new 
 English hexameter by habitually altering the position of four of them. 
 Very likely it is an unsuccessful attempt ; but at any rate it does not 
 violate what I think is the fundamental rule for English hexameters,— 
 that may be such as to read themselves without necessitating, on the 
 
 li 
 
152 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 notion of making it disappear altogether by the critic's 
 inventing in his closet a new constitution of his own for the 
 English hexameter, he will judge to be a chimerical dream. 
 When, therefore, Mr. Spedding objects to the English 
 hexameter, that it imperfectly represents the movement of 
 the ancient hexameters, I answer : We must work with the 
 tools we have. The received English type, in its general 
 outlines, is, for England, the necessary given type of this 
 metre ; it is by rendering the metrical beat of its pattern, 
 riot by rendering the accentual beat of it, that the English 
 language has adapted the Greek hexameter. To render 
 the metrical beat of its pattern is something ; by effecting 
 so much as this the English hexameter puts itself in closer 
 relations with its original, it comes nearer to its movement 
 than any other metre which does not even effect so much 
 as this ; but Mr. Spedding is dissatisfied with it for not 
 effecting more still, for not rendering the accentual beat 
 
 reader's part, any non-natural putting-on or taking-off accent. 
 Hexameters like these of Mr. Longfellow, 
 
 ' In that delightful land which is washed by the Delaware's waters,' 
 and, 
 
 • As if they fain would appease the Dryads, whose haunts they 
 molested,' 
 
 violate this rule ; and they are very common. I think the blemish of 
 Mr. Dart's recent meritorious version of the Iliad is that it contains too 
 many of them. 
 
 M. ff I iTC^T&ii 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 153 
 
 too. If he asks me why the English hexameter has not 
 tried to render this too, why it has confined itself to ren- 
 dering the metrical beat, why, in short, it is itself, and not 
 Mr. Spedding's new hexameter,— that is a question which 
 I, whose only business is to give practical advice to a trans- 
 lator, am not bound to answer ; but I will not decline to 
 answer it nevertheless. I will suggest to Mr. Spedding that, 
 as I have already said, the modern hexameter is merely an 
 attempt to imitate the effect of the ancient hexameter, as 
 read by us moderns ; that the great object of its imitation 
 has been the hexameter of Homer ; that of this hexameter 
 such lines as those which Mr. Spedding declares to be so 
 rare, even in Homer, but which are in truth so common, — 
 lines in which the quantity and the reader's accent coincide, 
 —are, for the English reader, just from that simplicity (for 
 him) of rhythm which they owe to this very coincidence, 
 the master-type ; that so much is this the case, that one may 
 again and again notice an English reader of Homer, in 
 reading lines where his Virgilian accent would not coincide 
 with the quantity, abandoning this accent, and reading the 
 lines (as we say) by quantity, reading them as if he were 
 scanning them ; while foreigners neglect our Virgilian 
 accent even in reading Virgil, read even Virgil by quantity, 
 making the accents coincide with the long syllables. And 
 no doubt the hexameter of a kindred language, the German, 
 
154 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 based on this mode of reading the ancient hexameter, has 
 had a powerful influence upon the type of its EngHsh fellow. 
 But all this shows how extremely powerful accent is for us 
 moderns, since we find not even Greek and Latin quantity 
 perceptible enough without it. Yet in these languages, 
 where we have been accustomed always to look for it, it is 
 far more perceptible to us Englishmen than in our own 
 language, where we have not been accustomed to look for 
 it. And here is the true reason why Mr. Spedding's 
 hexameter is not and cannot be the current English hexa- 
 meter, even though it is based on the accentuation which 
 Englishmen give to all Virgil's lines, and to many of 
 Homer's,— that the quantity which in Greek or Latin words 
 we feel, or imagine we feel, even though it be unsupported 
 by accent, we do not feel or imagine we feel in English 
 words when it is thus unsupported. For example, in re- 
 peating the Latin line 
 
 Ipsa tibi \A2,XidiO% /undent cunabula flores, 
 
 an Englishman feels the length of the second syllable of 
 /undent, although he lays the accent on the first ; but in 
 repeating Mr. Spedding's line. 
 
 Softly Cometh slumber rlosittg th' o'erwearied eyelid, 
 
 the English ear, full of the accent on the first syllable 
 of closing, has really no sense at all of any length in its 
 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 155 
 
 second. The metrical beat of the line is thus quite de- 
 stroyed. 
 
 So when Mr. Spedding proposes a new Anglo -Virgilian 
 hexameter he proposes an impossibility ; when he ' denies 
 altogether that the metrical movement of the English 
 hexameter has any resemblance to that of the Greek,' he 
 denies too much ; when he declares that, ' were every other 
 metre impossible, an attempt to translate Homer into 
 English hexameters might be permitted, but that such an 
 attempt he himsel/ ivould never read,' he exhibits, it seems 
 to me, a little of that obduracy and over-vehemence in 
 liking and disliking,— a remnant, I suppose, of our insular 
 ferocity, — to which English criticism is so prone. He ought 
 to be enchanted to meet with a good attempt in any metre, 
 even though he would never have advised it, even though 
 its success be contrary to all his expectations ; for it is the 
 critic's first duty — prior even to his duty of stigmatising 
 what is bad — to welcome everything that is good. In welcom- 
 ing this, he must at all times be ready, like the Christian 
 convert, even to burn what he used to worship, and to 
 worship what he used to burn. Nay, but he need not be 
 thus inconsistent in welcoming it ; he may retain all his prin- 
 ciples : principles endure, circumstances change ; absolute 
 success is one thing, relativ^e success another. Relative 
 success may take place under the most diverse conditions ; 
 
156 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 and it is in appreciating the good in even relative success 
 it is in taking into account the change of circumstances 
 that the critic's judgment is tested, that his versatih'ty must 
 display itself. He is to keep his idea of the best, of per- 
 fection, and at the same time to be willingly accessible to 
 every second best which offers itself So I enjoy the ease 
 and beauty of Mr. Spedding's stanza, 
 
 Therewith to all the gods in order due . . . 
 
 I welcome it, in the absence of equally good poetry in 
 another metre,' although I still think the stanza unfit to 
 
 ' As I welcome another more recent attempt in stanza,— Mr. 
 Worsley's version of the Odyssey in Spenser's measure. Mr. Worsley 
 does me the honour to notice some remarks of mine on this measure : 
 I had said that its greater intricacy made it a worse measure than even 
 the ten-syllable couplet to employ for rendering Homer. He points 
 out, in answer, that ' the more complicated the correspondences in a 
 poetical measure, the less obtrusive and absolute are the rhymes.' 
 This is true, and subtly remarked ; but I never denied that the single 
 shocks of rhyme in the couplet were more strongly felt than those in 
 the stanza ; I said that the more frequent recurrence of the same rhyme, 
 in the stanza, necessarily made this measure more intricate. The 
 stanza repacks Homer's matter yet more arbitrarily, and therefore 
 changes his movement yet more radically, than the couplet. Ac- 
 cordingly, I imagine a nearer approach to a perfect translation of 
 Homer is possible in the couplet, well managed, than in the stanza, 
 however well managed. But meanwhile Mr. Worsley,— applying the 
 Spenserian stanza, that beautiful romantic measure, to the most 
 romantic poem of the ancient world ; making this stanza yield him, too 
 (what it never yielded to Byron), its treasures of fluidity and sweet 
 ease ; above all, bringing to his task a truly poetical sense and skill,— 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 157 
 
 render Homer thoroughly well,— although I still think other 
 metres fit to render him better. So I concede to Mr. 
 Spedding that every form of translation, prose or verse, 
 must more or less break up Homer in order to reproduce 
 him j but then I urge that that form which needs to break 
 him up least is to be preferred. So I concede to him that 
 the test proposed by me for the translator— a competent 
 scholar's judgment whether the translation more or less 
 reproduces for him the effect of the original — is not per- 
 fectly satisfactory ; but I adopt it as the best we can get, 
 as the only test capable of being really applied ; for Mr. 
 Spedding's proposed substitute— the translations making 
 the same effect, more or less, upon the unlearned which 
 the original makes upon the scholar — is a test which can 
 never really be applied at all. These two impressions— 
 that of the scholar, and that of the unlearned reader— can, 
 practically, never be accurately compared ; they are, and 
 must remain, like those lines we read of in Euclid, which, 
 though produced ever so far, can never meet. So, again, I 
 concede that a good verse-translation of Homer, or, indeed, 
 of any poet, is very difficult, and that a good prose-translation 
 
 has produced a version of the Odyssey much the most pleasing of those 
 hitherto produced, and which is delightful to read. 
 
 For the public this may well be enough, nay, more than enough ; 
 but for the critic even this is not yet quite enough. 
 
 :1 
 
158 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 is much easier ; but then I urge that a verse-translation, 
 while giving the pleasure which Pope's has given, might 
 at the same time render Homer more faithfully than 
 Pope's j and that this being possible, we ought not to cease 
 wishing for a source of pleasure which no prose-translation 
 can ever hope to rival. 
 
 Wishing for such a verse-translation of Homer, believing 
 that rhythms have natural tendencies which, within certain 
 limits, inevitably govern them ; having little faith, therefore, 
 that rhythms which have manifested tendencies utterly un- 
 Homeric can so change themselves as to become well 
 adapted for rendering Homer, — I have looked about for the 
 rhythm which seems to depart least from the tendencies of 
 Homer's rhythm. Such a rhythm I think may be found in 
 the English hexameter, somewhat modified. I look with 
 hope towards continued attempts at perfecting and employ- 
 ing this rhythm ; but my belief in the immediate success of 
 such attempts is far less confident than has been supposed. 
 ' Between the recognition of this rhythm as ideally the best, 
 and the recommendation of it to the translator for instant 
 practical use, there must come all that consideration of 
 circumstances, all that pliancy in foregoing, under the pres- 
 sure of certain difficulties, the absolute best, which I have 
 said is so indispensable to the critic. The hexameter is, 
 comparatively, still unfamiliar in England ; many people 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 159 
 
 have a great dislike to it. A certain degree of unfamiliarity, 
 a certain degree of dislike, are obstacles with which it is not 
 wise to contend. It is difficult to say at present whether 
 the dislike to this rhythm is so strong and so wide-spread 
 that it will prevent its ever becoming thoroughly familiar. 
 I think not, but it is too soon to decide. I am inclined 
 to think that the dislike of it is rather among the profes- 
 sional critics than among the general public ; I think the 
 reception which Mr. Longfellow's Evangeline has met with 
 indicates this. I think that even now, if a version of the 
 Iliad in Enghsh hexameters were made by a poet who, like 
 Mr. Longfellow, has that indefinable quality which renders 
 him popular, — something attractive in his talent, which 
 communicates itself to his verses, — it would have a great 
 success among the general public. Yet a version of Homer 
 in hexameters of the Evangeline type would not satisfy the 
 judicious, nor is the definite establishment of this type to 
 be desired ; and one would regret that Mr. Longfellow 
 should, even to popularise the hexameter, give the immense 
 labour required for a translation of Homer, when one could 
 not wish his work to stand. Rather it is to be wished that 
 by the efforts of poets like Mr. Longfellow in original 
 poetry, and the efforts of less distinguished poets in the 
 task of translation, the hexameter may gradually be made 
 familiar to the ear of the English pubHc ; at the same time 
 
 ■W?=r^pK^SJ^ 
 
i6o 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 that there gradually arises, out of all these efforts, an 
 improved type of this rhythm ; a type which some man of 
 genius may sign with the final stamp, and employ in render- 
 ing Homer ; a hexameter which may be as superior to 
 Vosse's as Shakspeare's blank verse is superior to Schiller's. 
 I am inclined to believe that all this travail will actually 
 take place, because I believe that modern poetry is actually 
 in want of such an instrument as the hexameter. 
 
 In the meantime, whether this rhythm be destined to 
 success or not, let us steadily keep in mind what originally 
 made us turn to it. We turned to it because we required 
 certain Homeric characteristics in a translation of Homer, 
 and because all other rhythms seemed to find, from different 
 causes, great difficulties in satisfying this our requirement. 
 If the hexameter is impossible, if one of these other rhythms 
 must be used, let us keep this rhythm always in mind of 
 our requirements and of its own faults, let us compel it to 
 get rid of these latter as much as possible. It may be 
 necessary to have recourse to blank verse ; but then blank 
 verse must de-Coivperise itself, must get rid of the habits of 
 stiff self-retardation which make it say * Not fewer shone,' 
 for ' So many shone.^ Homer moves swiftly : blank verse 
 can move swiftly if it likes, but it must remember that the 
 movement of such lines as 
 
 A thousand fires were burning, and by each . . . 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 i6i 
 
 is just the slow movement which makes us despair of it. 
 Homer moves with noble ease : blank verse must not be 
 suffered to forget that the movement of 
 
 Came they not over from sweet Lacedoemon . . . 
 
 is ungainly. Homer's expression of his thought is simple 
 
 as light : we know how blank verse affects such locutions as 
 
 While the steeds mouthed their corn aloof . . . 
 
 and such modes of expressing one's thought are sophisticated 
 and artificial. 
 
 One sees how needful it is to direct incessantly the 
 English translator's attention to the essential characteristics 
 of Homer's poetry, when so accomplished a person as 
 Mr. Spedding, recognising these characteristics as indeed 
 Homer's, admitting them to be essential, is led by the in- 
 grained habits and tendencies of English blank verse thus 
 repeatedly to lose sight of them in translating even a few 
 lines. One sees this yet more clearly, when Mr. Spedding, 
 taking me to task for saying that the blank verse used for 
 rendering Homer ' must not be Mr. Tennyson's blank verse,' 
 declares that in most of Mr. Tennyson's blank verse all 
 Homer's essential characteristics— * rapidity of movement, 
 plainness of words and style, sitnplicity and directness of ideas, 
 and, above all, nobleness of manner— are as conspicuous as in 
 Homer himself.' This shows, it seems to me, how hard it 
 
1 62 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 is for English readers of poetry, even the most accomplished, 
 to feel deeply and permanently what Greek plainness of 
 thought and Greek simplicity of expression really are : they 
 admit the importance of these qualities in a general way, 
 but they have no ever-present sense of them ; and they 
 easily attribute them to any poetry which has other excellent 
 qualities, and which they very much admire. No doubt 
 there are plainer things in Mr. Tennyson's poetry than the 
 three lines I quoted ; in choosing them, as in choosing a 
 specimen of ballad-poetry, I wished to bring out clearly, by 
 a strong instance, the qualities of thought and style to which 
 I was calling attention ; but when Mr. Spedding talks of a 
 plainness of thought like Hofner's, of a plainness of speech 
 like Horner's, and says that he finds these constantly in Mr. 
 Tennyson's poetry, I answer that these I do not find there 
 at all. Mr. Tennyson is a most distinguished and charming 
 poet j but the very essential characteristic of his poetry is, 
 it seems to me, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborate- 
 ness of thought, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborate- 
 ness of expression. In the best and most characteristic 
 productions of his genius, these characteristics are most 
 prominent. They are marked characteristics, as we have 
 seen, of the Elizabethan poets ; they are marked, though 
 not the essential, characteristics of Shakspeare himself. 
 Under the influences of the nineteenth century, under 
 wholly new conditions of thought and culture, they manifest 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 163 
 
 themselves in Mr. Tennyson's poetry in a wholly new^ way. 
 
 But they are still there. The essential bent of his poetry is 
 
 towards such expressions as — 
 
 Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars ; 
 
 O'er the sun's bright eye 
 Drew the vast eyelid of an inky cloud ; 
 
 When the cairned mountain was a shadow, sunned 
 The world to peace again ; 
 
 The fresh young captains flashed their glittering teeth, 
 The huge bush-bearded barons heaved and blew ; 
 
 He bared the knotted column of his throat, 
 The massive square of his heroic breast, 
 And arms on which the standing muscle sloped 
 As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, 
 Running too vehemently to break upon it. 
 
 And this way of speaking is the least plain, the most un- 
 Homeric, which can possibly be conceived. Homer presents 
 his thought to you just as it wells from the source of his 
 mind : Mr. Tennyson carefully distils his thought before he 
 will part with it. Hence comes, in the expression of the 
 thought, a heightened and elaborate air. In Homer's poetry 
 it is all natural thoughts in natural words ; in Mr. Tenny- 
 son's poetry it is all distilled thoughts in distilled words. 
 Exactly this heightening and elaboration may be observed 
 in Mr. Spedding's 
 
 While the steeds mouthed their corn aloof ^ 
 
 (an expression which might have been Mr. Tennyson's) on 
 
 M 2 
 
1 64 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 which I have already commented ; and to one who is pene- 
 trated with a sense of the real simplicity of Homer, this 
 subtle sophistication of the thought is, I think, very per- 
 ceptible even in such lines as these, — 
 
 And drunk delight of battle with my peers, 
 Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy, — 
 
 which I have seen quoted as perfectly Homeric. Perfect 
 simplicity can be obtained only by a genius of which perfect 
 simplicity is an essential characteristic. 
 
 So true is this, that when a genius essentially subtle, or 
 a genius which, from whatever cause, is in its essence not 
 truly and broadly simple, determines to be perfectly plain, 
 determines not to admit a shade of subtlety or curiosity 
 into its expression, it cannot ever then attain real simplicity ; 
 it can only attain a semblance of simplicity.^ French 
 criticism, richer in its vocabulary than ours, has invented 
 a useful word to distinguish this semblance (often very 
 beautiful and valuable) from the real quality. The real 
 quality it calls simplicite^ the semblance simplesse. The one 
 is natural simplicity, the other is artificial simplicity. What 
 
 ' I speak of poetic genius as employing itself upon narrative or 
 dramatic poetry, — poetry in which the poet has to go out of himself 
 and to create. In lyrical poetry, in the direct expression of personal 
 feeling, the most subtle genius may, under the momentary pressure 
 of passion, express itself simply. Even here, however, the native 
 tendency will generally be discernible. 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 165 
 
 is called simplicity in the productions of a genius essentially 
 not simple, is, in truth, simplesse. The two are distinguish- 
 able from one another the moment they appear in company. 
 For instance, let us take the opening of the narrative in 
 Wordsworth's MichaeL — 
 
 Upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale 
 There dwelt a shepherd, Michael was his name ; 
 An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb. 
 His bodily frame had been from youth to age 
 Of an unusual strength ; his mind was keen, 
 Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs ; 
 And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt 
 And watchful more than ordinary men. 
 
 Now let us take the opening of the narrative in Mr. Tenny- 
 son's Dora : — 
 
 With Farmer Allan at the farm abode 
 William and Dora. William was his son, 
 And she his niece. He often looked at them, 
 And often thought, ' I'll make them man and wife.' 
 
 The simplicity of the first of these passages is simplicite ; 
 
 that of the second, simplesse. Let us take the end of the 
 
 same two poems : first, of Michael: — 
 
 The cottage which was named the Evening Star 
 
 Is gone,— the ploughshare has been through the ground 
 
 On which it stood ; great changes have been wrought 
 
 In all the neighbourhood : yet the oak is left 
 
 That grew beside their door : and the remains 
 
 Of the unfinished sheepfold may be seen 
 
 Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head Ghyll. 
 
1 66 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 And now, of Dora : — 
 
 So those four abode 
 Within one house together ; and as years 
 Went forward, Mary took another mate : 
 But Dora lived unmarried till her death. 
 
 A heedless critic may call both of these passages simple 
 if he will. Simple, in a certain sense, they both are ; but 
 between the simplicity of the two there is all the difference 
 that there is between the simplicity of Homer and the 
 simplicity of Moschus. 
 
 But — whether the hexameter establish itself or not, 
 whether a truly simple and rapid blank verse be obtained 
 or not, as the vehicle for a standard English translation of 
 Homer— I feel sure that this vehicle will not be furnished 
 by the ballad form. On this question about the ballad- 
 character of Homer's poetry, I see that Professor Blackie 
 proposes a compromise : he suggests that those who say 
 Homer's poetry is pure ballad-poetry, and those who deny 
 that it is ballad-poetry at all, should split the difference 
 between them ; that it should be agreed that Homer's 
 poems are ballads a little, but not so much as some have 
 said. I am very sensible to the courtesy of the terms in 
 which Mr. Blackie invites me to this compromise ; but I 
 cannot, I am sorry to say, accept it ; I cannot allow that 
 Homer's poetry is ballad-poetry at all. A want of capacity 
 for sustained nobleness seems to me inherent in the ballad- 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 167 
 
 form when employed for epic poetry. The more we 
 examine this proposition, the more certain, I think, will it 
 become to us. Let us but observe how a great poet, 
 having to deliver a narrative very weighty and serious, 
 instinctively shrinks from the ballad-form as from a form 
 not commensurate with his subject-matter, a form too 
 narrow and shallow for it, and seeks for a form which has 
 more amplitude and impressiveness. Every one knows the 
 Lucy Gray and the Ruth of Wordsworth. Both poems are 
 excellent ; but the subject-matter of the narrative of Ruth 
 is much more weighty and impressive to the poet's own 
 feeling than that of the narrative of Lucy Gray, for which 
 latter, in its unpretending simplicity, the ballad-form is quite 
 adequate. Wordsworth, at the time he composed Ruth,— 
 his great time, his annus mirabilis, about 1800, — strove to 
 be simple ; it was his mission to be simple ; he loved the 
 ballad-form, he clung to it, because it was simple. Even 
 in Ruth he tried, one may say, to use it ; he would have 
 used it if he could : but the gravity of his matter is too 
 much for this somewhat slight form ; he is obliged to give 
 to his form more amplitude, more augustness, to shake out 
 
 its folds. 
 
 The wretched parents all that night 
 
 Went shouting far and wide ; 
 But there was neither sound nor sight 
 
 To serve them for a guide. 
 
1 68 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 169 
 
 That is beautiful, no doubt, and the form is adequate to the 
 subject-matter. But take this, on the other hand :— 
 
 I, too, have passed her on the hills, 
 Setting her little water-mills 
 
 By spouts and fountains wild ; 
 Such small machinery as she turned, 
 Ere she had wept, ere she had mourned, 
 
 A young and happy child. 
 
 Who does not perceive how the greater fulness and weight 
 of his matter has here compelled the true and feeling poet 
 to adopt a form of more volume than the simple ballad- 
 form ? 
 
 It is of narrative poetry that I am speaking ; the ques- 
 tion is about the use of the ballad-form for this. I say that 
 for this poetry (when in the grand style, as Homer's is) the 
 ballad-form is entirely inadequate ; and that Homer's trans- 
 lator must not adopt it, because it even leads him, by its 
 own weakness, away from the grand style rather than 
 towards it. We must remember that the matter of narrative 
 poetry stands in a different relation to the vehicle which 
 conveys it,— is not so independent of this vehicle, so ab- 
 sorbing and powerful in itself,— as the matter of purely emo- 
 tional poetry. When there comes in poetry what I may call 
 the lyrical cry, this transfigures everything, makes everything 
 grand ; the simplest form may be here even an advantage, 
 because the flame of the emotion glows through and through 
 
 I 
 
 it more easily. To go again for an illustration to Words- 
 worth ; — our great poet, since Milton, by his performance, 
 as Keats, I think, is our great poet by his gift and promise ; 
 — in one of his stanzas to the Cuckoo, we have : — 
 
 And I can listen to thee yet ; 
 
 Can lie upon the plain 
 And listen, till I do beget 
 
 That golden time again. 
 
 Here the lyrical cry, though taking the simple ballad-form, 
 is as grand as the lyrical cry coming in poetry of an ampler 
 form, as grand as the 
 
 An innocent life, yet far astray ! 
 
 of Ruth ; as the 
 
 There is a comfort in the strength of love 
 
 of Michael. In this way, by the occurrence of this lyrical 
 cry, the ballad- poets themselves rise sometimes, though not 
 so often as one might perhaps have hoped, to the grand 
 style. 
 
 O lang, lang may their ladies sit, 
 Wi' their fans into their hand, 
 Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spence 
 Come sailing to the land. 
 
 O lang, lang may the ladies stand, 
 Wi' their gold combs in their hair, 
 Waiting for their ain dear lords, 
 For they'll see them nae mair. 
 
 1 
 
 « f 
 
I70 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 But from this impressiveness of the ballad-form, when its 
 subject-matter fills it over and over again, — is, indeed, in 
 itself, all in all,— one must not infer its effectiveness when 
 its subject-matter is not thus overpowering, in the great 
 body of a narrative. 
 
 But, after all, Homer is not a better poet than the 
 balladists, because he has taken in the hexameter a better 
 instrument ; he took this instrument because he was a 
 different poet from them ; so different,— not only so much 
 better, but. so essentially different,— that he is not to be 
 classed with them at all. Poets receive their distinctive 
 character, not from their subject, but from their application 
 to that subject of the ideas (to quote the Excursion) 
 
 On God, on Nature, and on human life, 
 
 which they have acquired for themselves. In the ballad- 
 poets in general, as in men of a rude and early stage of the 
 world, in whom their humanity is not yet variously and fully 
 developed, the stock of these ideas is scanty, and the ideas 
 themselves not very effective or profound. From them the 
 narrative itself is the great matter, not the spirit and signifi- 
 cance which underlies the narrative. Even in later times 
 of richly developed life and thought, poets appear who have 
 what may be called a balladisfs mind ; in whom a fresh and 
 lively curiosity for the outward spectacle of the world is 
 
 m 
 
 \ 
 
 i 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 171 
 
 much more strong than their sense of the inward significance 
 of that spectacle. When they apply ideas to their narrative 
 of human events, you feel that they are, so to speak, travel- 
 ling out of their own province : in the best of them you feel 
 this perceptibly, but in those of a lower order you feel it 
 very strongly. Even Sir Walter Scott's efforts of this kind, 
 — even, for instance, the 
 
 Breathes there the man with soul so dead, 
 
 or the 
 
 O woman ! in our hours of ease, — 
 
 even these leave, I think, as high poetry, much to be desired ; 
 far more than the same poet's descriptions of a hunt or a 
 battle. But Lord Macaulay's 
 
 Then out spake brave Horatius, 
 
 The captain of the gate : 
 ' To all the men upon this earth 
 
 Death cometh soon or late,' 
 
 (and here, since I have been reproached with undervaluing 
 
 Lord Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, let me frankly say 
 
 that, to my mind, a man's power to detect the ring of false 
 
 metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give 
 
 an opinion about poetical matters at all), — I say, Lord 
 
 Macaulay's 
 
 To all the men upon this earth 
 
 Death cometh soon or late, 
 it is hard to read without a cry of pain. But with Homer it 
 
172 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 173 
 
 4"i 
 
 is very different. This 'noble barbarian,' this 'savage with 
 the lively eye,' — whose verse, Mr. Newman thinks, would 
 affect us, if we could hear the living Homer, * hke an elegant 
 and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast,' — 
 is never more at home, never more nobly himself, than in 
 applying profound ideas to his narrative. As a poet he 
 belongs — narrative as is his poetry, and early as is his date — 
 to an incomparably more developed spiritual and intellectual 
 order than the balladists, or than Scott and Macaulay ; he 
 is here as much to be distinguished from them, and in the 
 same way, as Milton is to be distinguished from them. He 
 is, indeed, rather to be classed with Milton than with the 
 balladists and Scott ; for what he has in common with 
 Milton — the noble and profound application of ideas to life 
 — is the most essential part of poetic greatness. The most 
 essentially grand and characteristic things of Homer are 
 such things as — 
 
 ctA.tji' 5', 01' oi/TTw T»$ iTnx^6viOS ^porhs dWos, 
 avSpbs iraibo(l>6uoio ttotI ardixa X^'p' op4yeadai,^ 
 
 or as — 
 
 Kal ai, fipov, rh nplu fxiv anovofiiu oK^iov ^Ivai,"^ 
 
 • * And I have endured - the like whereof no soul upon the earth 
 hath yet endured— to carry to my lips the hand of him who slew my 
 child.' — Iliady xxiv. 505. 
 
 ■^ ' Nay and thou too, old man, in times past wert, as we hear, 
 happy.' — Iliad, xxiv. 543. In the original this line, for mingled 
 pathos and dignity, is perhaps without a rival even in Homer. 
 
 Ls yap iTT^KXwffavro 0€oi ^eiXolffi ^poToTcni/, 
 Ciifiv hxv^piivovi ■ ahro\ U t' aKri^^€S tiV.V,' 
 
 and of these the tone is given, far better than by anything 
 of the balladists, by such things as the 
 
 Id no piangeva : s\ dentro impietrai : 
 Piangevan elli . . -"^ 
 
 of Dante ; or the 
 
 Fall'n Cherub ! to be weak is miserable 
 
 of Milton. 
 
 I suppose I must, before I conclude, say a word or two 
 about my own hexameters ; and yet really, on such a topic, 
 I am almost ashamed to trouble you. From those perish- 
 able objects I feel, I can truly say, a most Oriental detach- 
 ment. You yourselves are witnesses how little importance, 
 when I offered them to you, I claimed for them,-how 
 humble a function I designed them to fill. I offered them, 
 not as specimens of a competing translation of Homer, but 
 as illustrations of certain canons which I had been trying 
 to establish for Homer's poetry. I said that these canons 
 they might very well illustrate by failing as well as by 
 
 « « For so have the gods spun our destiny to us wretched mortals, 
 -that we should live in sorrow ; but they themselves are without 
 
 trouble.'— //^W, xxiv. 525. 
 
 ^ '/wept not : soof stone grew I within :-M.>'wept.'-i7<?//, xxxm. 
 
 49 (Carlyle's Translation, slightly altered). 
 
 "I 
 
 / 
 
174 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 succeeding : if they illustrate them in any manner, I am 
 satisfied. I was thinking of the future translator of Homer, 
 and trying to let him see as clearly as possible what I meant 
 by the combination of characteristics which I assigned to 
 Homer's poetry,— by saying that this poetry was at once 
 rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and 
 direct in its ideas, and noble in manner. I do not suppose 
 that my own hexameters are rapid in movement, plain in 
 words and style, simple and direct in their ideas, and noble 
 in manner; but I am in hopes that a translator, reading 
 them with a genuine interest in his subject, and without the 
 slightest grain of personal feeling, may see more clearly, as 
 he reads them, what I mean by saying that Homer's poetry 
 is all these. I am in hopes that he may be able to seize 
 more distinctly, when he has before him my 
 
 So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of the Xanthus, 
 
 or my 
 
 or my 
 
 Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you ? 
 
 So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle, 
 the exact points which I wish him to avoid in Cowper's 
 
 So numerous seemed those fires the banks between, 
 or in Pope's 
 
 Unhappy coursers of immortal strain, 
 
 \ 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER i75 
 
 or in Mr. Newman's 
 
 He spake, and, yelling, held a-front his single hoofed horses. 
 
 At the same time there may be innumerable points in mine 
 which he ought to avoid also. Of the merit of his own 
 compositions no composer can be admitted the judge. 
 
 But thus humbly useful to the future translator I still 
 hope my hexameters may prove ; and he it is, above all, 
 whom one has to regard. The general public carries away 
 little from discussions of this kind, except some vague 
 notion that one advocates English hexameters, or that one 
 has attacked Mr. Newman. On the mind of an adversary 
 one never makes the faintest impression. Mr. Newman 
 reads all one can say about diction, and his last word on 
 the subject is, that he ' regards it as a question about to 
 open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not to 
 adopt the old dissyllabic landis, houndis, hartis' (for lands, 
 hounds, harts), and also 'the final en of the plural of verbs 
 (we dancen, they singen, etc.), which 'still subsists in 
 Lancashire.' A certain critic reads all one can say about 
 style, and at the end of it arrives at the inference that, 'after 
 all, there is some style grander than the grand style itself, 
 since Shakspeare has not the grand manner, and yet has 
 the supremacy over Milton;' another critic reads all one 
 can say about rhythm, and the result is, that he thinks 
 
 .1-. 
 
 
176 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 Scott's rhythm, in the description of the death of Marmion, 
 all the better for being saccade, because the dying ejacula- 
 tions of Marmion were likely to be 'jerky.' How vain to 
 rise up early, and to take rest late, from any zeal for proving 
 to Mr. Newman that he must not, in translating Homer, 
 say houndis and da7icen ; or to the first of the two critics 
 above quoted, that one poet may be a greater poetical force 
 than another, and yet have a more unequal style ; or to the 
 second, that the best art, having to represent the death of a 
 hero, does not set about imitating his dying noises ! Such 
 critics, however, provide for an opponent's vivacity the 
 charming excuse offered by Rivarol for his, when he was 
 reproached with giving offence by it :— ' Ah ! ' he exclaimed, 
 * no one considers how much pain every man of taste has 
 had to suffer, before he ever inflicts any.' 
 
 It is for the future translator that one must work. The 
 successful translator of Homer will have (or he cannot 
 succeed) that true sense for his subject, and that dis- 
 interested love of it, which are, both of them, so rare in 
 literature, and so precious ; he will not be led off by any 
 false scent ; he will have an eye for the real matter and 
 where he thinks he may find any indication of this, no hint 
 will be too slight for him, no shade will be too fine, no 
 imperfections will turn him aside,— he will go before his 
 adviser's thought, and help it out with his own. This is the 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 177 
 
 sort of student that a critic of Homer should always have 
 in his thoughts ; but students of this sort are indeed rare. 
 
 And how, then, can I help being reminded what a 
 student of this sort we have just lost in Mr. Clough, whose 
 name I have already mentioned in these lectures? He, 
 too, was busy with Homer ; but it is not on that account 
 that I now speak of him. Nor do I speak of him in order 
 to call attention to his qualities and powers in general, 
 admirable as these were. I mention him because, in so 
 eminent a degree, he possessed these two invaluable literary 
 qualities, — a true sense for his object of study, and a single- 
 hearted care for it. He had both ; but he had the second 
 even more eminently than the first. He greatly developed 
 the first through means of the second. In the study of art, 
 poetry, or philosophy, he had the most undivided and 
 disinterested love for his object in itself, the greatest aver- 
 sion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal. 
 His interest was in literature itself ; and it was this which 
 gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so 
 free from all taint of littleness. In the saturnalia of ignoble 
 personal passions, of which the struggle for literary success, 
 in old and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, 
 he never mingled. He had not yet traduced his friends, 
 nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, 
 nor praised what he despised. Those who knew him well 
 
 N 
 
178 
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 
 
 had the conviction that, even with time, these literary arts 
 would never be his. His poem, of which I before spoke, 
 has some admirable Homeric qualities ;— out-of-doors fresh- 
 ness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity. Some of the ex- 
 pressions in that poem, — 'Dangerous Corrievreckan . . . 
 Where roads are unknown to Loch Nevish^ — come back 
 now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. But that in 
 him of which I think oftenest is the Homeric simplicity 
 of his literary life. 
 
 THE END 
 
 
 PRINTED BV 
 
 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SMITH, ELDER, & CO/S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 WORKS BY THE LATE MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 PASSAGES FROM THE PROSE WRITINGS OF MATTHEW 
 
 ARNOLD. Crown 8vo. 7^. td. j r> i- • 
 
 Contents:-!. Literature.-2. Politics and Society.-3. Philosophy and Religion. 
 
 LAST ESSAYS ON CHURCH AND RELIGION. With a Preface. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 7^. 
 
 MIXED ESSAYS. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 9^. 
 
 Contents :-Democracy-Equality-Irish Catholicism and British Liberahsm- 
 Porro Unnm est Necessarium-K Guide to English Literature-B alkland-A French 
 Critic on Milton— A French Critic on Goethe- George Sand. 
 
 LITERATURE AND DOGMA : an Essay towards a Better Apprehen- 
 sion of the Bible. Popular Edition, with a new Preface. Crown 8vo. 2^. td. 
 GOD AND THE BIBLE: a Sequel to * Literature and Dogma.' 
 
 Popular Edition, with a new Preface. Crown 8vo. zs. 6d. 
 
 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM ; with Other Essays. Popular 
 
 Edition with a new Preface. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 Contents:— St. Paul and Protestantism— Puritanism and the Church of England- 
 Modem Dissent— A Comment on Christmas. 
 
 CULTURE AND ANARCHY : an Essay in Political and Social 
 
 Criticism. Popular Edition. Crown Bvo. 2^. 6d. 
 
 IRISH ESSAYS, AND OTHERS. Popular Edition. Cr. 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 ON THE STUDY OF CELTIC LITERATURE. Popular Edition. 
 
 Crown Bvo. "zs. td. 
 
 WORKS BY LESLIE STEPHEN. 
 HOURS IN A LIBRARY. Revised, Rearranged, and Cheaper Edition. 
 
 With additional Chapters. In 3 vols. Crown 8vo. 6j. each. 
 
 Contents of the Volumes. 
 
 Volume I. -De Foe's Novels-Richardson— Pope as a Moralist— Sir Walter Scott- 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne — Balzac -De Quincey-Sir Thomas Browne— Jonathan 
 Edwards— Horace Walpole. 
 
 Volume II.-Dr. Johnson's Writings-Crabbe-Williani Hazlitt-Disraelis Novels- 
 Massinger-Fielding-Cowper and Rousseau-First Edinburgh Reviewers-Words- 
 worth's Ethics— Lander's Conversations— Macaulay. 
 
 Volume 1 1 1. -Charlotte Bronte -Charles Kingsley -Godwin and Shelley -Gray and 
 his School - Sterne-Country Books - George Eliot - Autobiography - Carlylc s 
 Ethics— State Trials— S. T. Coleridge. 
 
 THE LIFE OF SIR JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN, BART., 
 
 KCS.I., a Tudge of the High Court of Justice. By his Brother, Leslie 
 SiEi'HEN. With 2 Portraits. Second Edition. Demy 8vo. 16^. 
 
 AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY ; and other Essays. Large crown 8vo. 
 
 lay. dd. 
 
 LIFE OF HENRY FAWCETT. With 2 Steel Portraits. Fifth 
 
 Edition. Large crown 8vo. 12^. 6^. 
 
 THE SCIENCE OF ETHICS : an Essay upon Ethical Theory, as 
 
 Modified by the Doctrine of Evolution. Demy 8vo. i6f. 
 
 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH 
 
 CENTURY. Second Edition. 2 vols. Demy 8vo. 28^. 
 
 London : SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place. 
 
SMITH, ELDER, & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 OUR SQUARE AND CIRCLE ; or, The Annals of a Little London 
 House. By ' Jack Easel,' sometime Punch s Roving Correspondent. With a 
 Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. 5^. 
 
 GERALD EVERSLEY'S FRIENDSHIP : a Study in Real Life. By 
 
 the Rev. J. E. C. Wellpon, Head Master of Harrow School. Fourth Edition. 
 Crown 8vo. ds. 
 
 OFF THE MILL. By the Right Rev. G. F. Browne, D.C.L., Bishop 
 
 of Stepney. With 2 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. dj. 
 
 FIFTY YEARS ; or, Dead Leaves and Living Seeds. By the Rev. 
 
 Hakry Jones, Prebendary of St. Paul's ;A.uthorof ' Holiday Papers,' ' East and 
 West London,' &c. Second'Edition. Crown 8vo. i,s. 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF A MILITARY LIFE. By General Sir John 
 
 Adve, G.C. B., R.A., late Governor of Gibraltar. With Illustrations by the 
 Author. Demy 8vo. 14J. net. 
 
 HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. By E. Benjamin Andrevvs. 
 
 D.D., LL.D., President of the Brown University. 2 vols., crown 8vo. with 
 Maps, i6j. 
 
 IN STEVENSON'S SAMOA. By Marie Fraser. Second Edition. 
 
 With Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. "zs. td. 
 
 THE HAWARDEN HORACE. By Charles L. Graves, Author of 
 
 • The Blarney Ballads,' ' The Green above the Red,' &c. Third Edition. Small 
 post 8vo. 3^^. (id. 
 
 THE MARTYRED FOOL. By D. Christie Murray, Author of 
 
 * Rainbow Gold,' 'Aunt Rachel,' 'Joseph's Coat,' &c. Crown 8vo. ds. 
 
 A FATAL RESERVATION. By R. O. Prowse, Author of 'The 
 
 Poison of Asps ' &c. Crown 8vo. ts. 
 
 GLEAMS OF MEMORY; with some Reflections. By James Payn. 
 
 Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 3^. td. 
 
 AN ARTIST'S REMINISCENCES. By Rudolf Lehmann. With 
 
 Portrait. Demy 8vo. 12J. dd. net. 
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. Taken 
 
 from the work of John Addington Svmonds. By Lieut. -Col. Alfred Pearson. 
 With a Steel Engraving of a recent Portrait of Mr. Symonds. Demy 8vo. i2f. td. 
 
 VOLTAIRE'S VISIT TO ENGLAND, 1726-1729. By Archibald 
 
 Ballantvne. Crown 8vo. Zs. 6d. 
 
 THE JOCKEY CLUB AND ITS FOUNDERS. By Robert Black, 
 
 M.A., Author of 'Horse Racing in France,' &c. Crown 8vo. loy. 6d. 
 
 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF ROBERT BROWNING. By Mrs. 
 
 Sutherland Ork. With Portrait, and Steel Engraving of Mr. Browning's 
 Study in De Vere Gardens. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 12s. 6d. 
 
 London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place. 
 
»*- 
 
 
 prT 
 
 .r61 
 
 ^OLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES *" 
 
 0021098140 
 
 L'k. 
 
 
 o 
 
 
 --5 
 
 mm4 
 
 X o 
 
 CO <