The Iliad Of Homer.
Rendered Into English Blank Verse
By Edward, Earl Of Derby.
It is our custom, or that of our time, to decry classical education. We have a right to do so, no doubt, if our unfavorable judgment regarding it is based upon a correct and intelligent estimate of its value, as a method of training the youthful mind and of disciplining the intellect by the exercise of its nascent power upon works of model taste and unrivalled elegance. Submitting classical education to this test, we cannot glibly join in the outcry against it of those who see in it only a process for acquiring a knowledge of Greek and Latin words, of no earthly use to the possessor or to anybody else. Neither, on the other hand, would we, upon such test, accept it as the only canon of liberal education, to the exclusion of others that may serve the purpose of instruction with more practical advantage.
We would fain offer Earl Derby's translation of the Iliad as an example, according to our notion, of the practical process to be followed in studying the classic authors in order to profit by their beauty, and of the gifts the mind receives from the cultivation of classic literature. Not a poet himself, the noble lord has imbibed into his own plastic mind the conceptions of the "sovereign poet" in all their poetic beauty and serene grandeur, and reproduces them for the English reader, shapely moulded, not distorted nor disfigured. We shall not enter into a comparison of his translation with that of Pope or Cowper, neither shall we discuss the fitness of the metre he has adopted. His own translation, if argument were wanted, would compel us to agree with him that he has selected that metre best suited for rendering the Homeric poem into English verse, and we give him our hearty accord in his condemnation of the English hexameter— a lumbering rhythm, not inaptly compared, by some author, to the noise of pumpkins rolling on a barn-floor. We shall merely show, by a few extracts, how he has succeeded in reproducing the conceptions of the poem, and how happily he has caught, without imparting any admixture of modern sentiment, the flowing style in which the poet pours forth, as it were, without drawing breath, his grand melodious strain. His translation is not a dead cast, but a copy, and a copy instinct with life. His task was not an easy one; and when we reflect upon his life and eminent station, we cannot help thinking that to ordinary men the difficulty would be much enhanced thereby. Still, it redounds the more to the honor of English scholarship and English statesmanship, that the foremost among its orators and statesmen, who, for more than a quarter of a century, has borne a large share of the weighty affairs of a vast empire; who by his talents has helped to solve the thousand vexed questions of modern politics and reform, could, during leisure, withdraw his mind from the absorbing interests of the political arena, and allow it to repose on the sublime naturalness of the Iliad, and float in placid unison with the serene grandeur of Homer's song. Though the translation is truly Homeric, yet, wrought as it is with spirit and genius, it bears in it something of the mind it springs from. The reader will not fail to discover in the echo of the Iliad, so faithfully reflected in its purity, natural freshness, and vigor, something of that splendid eloquence heard amid strife as angry and as fierce as raged between Agamemnon and Achilles.
In giving quotations, we shall omit those finer passages that are familiar to most readers, such as those well-known passages of the Third Book, with their beautiful similes, that describe the Greeks assembling and passing in review before their leaders. On these many a youthful and full-grown bard has tried his skill; but never have we seen them so beautifully rendered as in the translation before us. We select for our readers, first, that picture in the Fourth Book, in which all the raging elements of battle are thronged together—the maddening vengeance, the wrath, the fury of hostile ranks in the horror of collision—and which commences with the description of
"Discord unappeased, 504
Of blood-stained Mars the sister and the friend;
With humble crest at first, anon her head,
While yet she treads the earth, affronts the skies.
The gage of battle in the midst she threw,
Strode through the crowd and woe to mortals wrought,
When to their midst they came, together rushed 510
Bucklers and lances, and the furious might
Of mail-clad warriors; bossy shield on shield
Clattered in conflict; loud the clamor rose.
Then rose two mingled shouts and groans of men
Slaying and slain; the earth ran red with blood, 513
As when descending from the mountain's brow,
Two wintry torrents from their copious source
Pour downward to the narrow pass, where meet
Their mingled waters in some deep ravine,
Their weight of flood; on the far mountain side 520
The shepherd hears the roar; so loud arose
The shouts and yells of those commingling hosts."
Nothing can give a better idea of the power of the translator than the manner in which he has compressed this passage, with its bewildering throng of elements, into the same number of lines as the original. We miss none of the simple grandeur, none of the directness, none of the even, rapid movement so characteristic of Homer. There is no importation of what belongs not to Homer into it, no amplification, no turning aside from the object, or indirectness in introducing and depicting every incident in the picture. It is Homer's strain; grand, rapid, and simple.
A few lines further on we have one of those beautiful images by which the poet has a fondness for describing the fall of his young heroes. Depicting the death of the stripling Simoisius, he sings:
"Prone in the dust he fell; 552
As some tall poplar, grown in marshy mead,
Smooth-stemmed, with boughs up-springing toward the head."
Again of young Gorgythion, in the Eighth Book:
"Down sank his head, as in a garden sinks
A ripened poppy charged with vernal rains; 350
So sank his head beneath his helmet's weight."
And of Asius, in the Thirteenth Book:
"He fell as falls an oak, or poplar tall,
Or lofty pine."
These passages are placed together as containing some of the poet's favorite and beautiful images, and as showing how happy the translator has been in rendering them with truthfulness to their natural grace.
Earl Derby is not less successful in reproducing the deep tenderness and moving pathos that form a conspicuous feature of the Iliad. We quote from the Sixth Book, from the affecting scene between Hector and Andromache; but, instead of Andromache's words, so well known through Pope's translation, we give the answer of the noble Hector, the hero of the Iliad, in which, with soul-felt tenderness, he seeks to console his desponding wife: [Footnote 280]
[Footnote 280: To illustrate what we mean by the directness, simplicity, and even rapid movement of Homer's verse, we cite here from a popular English poet an extract which, though not a parallel to the above, is somewhat kindred; it is the first at hand, and will serve our purpose.
"Trust me, whatever fate my soul may gall,
Thou at thy woman's choice shall ne'er repine.
Trust me, whatever storm on me may fall,
This man's true heart shall ward the bolt from thine.
Hark, where the bird from yon dark ilex breathes
Soul into night so be thy love to me;
Look, when around the bird the ilex wreathes
Still sheltering boughs, so be my love to thee!
O dweller in my heart! the music thine;
And the deep shelter—wilt thou scorn it? mine."
It will be observed, in reading these exquisite lines, how complex is the web of thought; how the artist, as it were, lingers to work into it embroidery of words and images borrowed from foreign objects. In Homer there is nothing but the natural artless flow of feeling; the even movement, as it springs from the soul, is not crossed by shadow or image from any other object, nor does it diverge this way or that to borrow of other sources in metaphor or comparison, tone, color, or pathos. The movement in Homer is natural, direct, even, rapid; and yet this natural, simple, deep gush of feeling presents to us a most truthful, touching, and expressive picture of a soul overwhelmed with tender love and sorrow commingled, but facing the stern task of duty.]
"Think not, dear wife, that by such thoughts as these 512
My heart has ne'er been wrung; but I should blush
To face the men and long-robed dames of Troy,
If, like a coward, I could shun the fight.
Nor could my soul the lessons of my youth
So far forget, whose boast it still has been
In the forefront of battle to be found,
Charged with my father's glory and mine own.
Yet in my inmost soul too well I know 520
The day must come when this our sacred Troy,
And Priam's race, and Priam's royal self,
Shall in one common ruin be o'erthrown.
But not the thoughts of Troy's impending fate,
Nor Hecuba's, nor royal Priam's woes, 525
Nor loss of brethren, numerous and brave,
By hostile hands laid prostrate in the dust,
So deeply wring my heart as thoughts of thee,
Thy days of freedom lost, and led away
A weeping captive by some brass-clad Greek. 530
Haply in Argos, at a mistress' beck,
Condemned to ply the loom, or water draw
From Hypereia's or Messais' fount.
Heart wrung, by stern necessity constrained,
Then they who see thy tears perchance may say, 535
'Lo! this was Hector's wife, who, when they fought
On plains of Troy, was Ilium's bravest chief!'
Thus may they speak, and thus thy grief renew
For loss of him who might have been thy shield
To rescue thee from slavery's bitter hour. 540
Oh! may I sleep in dust ere be condemned
To hear thy cries and see thee dragged away."
The opinion of Lord Derby's oratory, entertained on this side of the Atlantic, may tempt those who admire it to think that in this translation his splendid eloquence and vigorous language would have their fitting scope in depicting the scenes of camp and field, in transmitting, lifelike, those angry encounters in the councils of gods and men; but, that the most tender and delicate tones of human feeling are not alien to his speech, is amply proved by the lines we have quoted. The same deep chord of feeling is struck by the words and modulations of this beautiful passage that vibrates in the pathetic language and melody of the Ionian bard.
We add another of those magnificent incidents of the Iliad, where the struggle of warriors on the very brink of battle is so grandly described by the poet. In the Thirteenth Book, the Greeks, closely massed under the Ajaces,
Waited the Trojan charge, by Hector led
Spear close to spear, and shield by shield o'erlaid,
Buckler to buckler pressed, and helm to helm,
And man to man, the horse-hair plumes above,
That nodded on the warriors' glittering crests,
Each other touched, so closely matched they stood.
Backward, by many a stalwart hand, were drawn
The spears, in act to hurl; their eyes and minds
Turned to the front and eager for the fray.
On poured the Trojan masses; in the van
Hector straight forward urged his furious course:
As some huge boulder, from its rocky bed
Detached, and by the wintry torrent's force
Hurled down the cliff's steep face, when constant rains
The massive rock's firm hold have undermined,
With giant bounds it flies; the crashing wood
Resounds beneath it, still it hurries on,
Until, arriving at the level plain,
Its headlong impulse checked, it rolls no more;
So Hector, threatening now through ships and tents
Even to the sea to force his murderous way,
Anon, confronted by that phalanx firm,
Halts close before it."
This truly fine passage is the perfection of Homeric poetry. We doubt if pen or brush has ever produced a picture abounding so much in life and action. The marvellous combination of objects presented to view in these lines, each heightening the effect of the other, and all blending into one tumultuous action, stirred by the fiery spirit of war, gives us a grand and terrific picture. In reading it, with almost the noise and din and the fray of warring men ringing in the words employed in the translation, we feel as if we had never before been enabled, by any English version, to enter into the full spirit of Homer himself.
We give a last quotation from the closing scene of the poem, where the cry of mourning Troy is raised over the lifeless body of its brave defender. The wail of his wife and of his mother has been heard; but there remains one other, the beauteous Helen, whose fatal charms had deluged the plains of Troy with blood, had inflicted on the lifeless hero on whom she now gazes in sadness many a day of toil and many an hour of pain, and now had crowned the heap of Ilium's sorrows with this last scene of woe. Her words of love commingled with self-reproach, are the highest tribute the poet could pay, in his closing verse, to the hero whom, throughout his song, he endows with all the noblest traits of son, of patriot, of brother, and of husband.
"Hector, of all my brethren dearest thou!
True, godlike Paris claims me as his wife,
Who bore me hither—would I then had died!
But twenty years have passed since here I came
And left my native land; yet ne'er from thee 895
I heard one scornful, one degrading word.
And when from others I have borne reproach,
Thy brothers, sisters, or thy brothers' wives
Or mother, (for thy sire was ever kind
Even as a father,) thou hast checked them still
With kindly feeling and with gentle words:
For thee I weep, and for myself no less;
For through the breadth of Troy, none love me now,
None kindly look on me, but all abhor."
In the portions of Lord Derby's translation we have here given, we have not selected what are universally regarded as the most beautiful passages of the poem. We have selected such passages as from their crowded incidents, their bewildering throng of objects, their rapid succession of scenes or deep and tender pathos, appeared to us the most difficult for the translator to reproduce. We doubt if there be a student of Homer who will fail to find them a transcript of the poet's meaning, with almost literal exactness, as well as a copy of the genius and spirit of the poem. We had purposed selecting some passages which would give our readers a sample of his manner of rendering the Homeric epithets. The beauty of the few occurring in the above extracts will not escape them. Students of Homer are aware how constantly he appends distinctive epithets to persons, things, and places. To translate these wherever they occur would give a strange, unnatural cast to the poem. The English language, not like the plastic Greek, could not bear along the burden of them; besides, many of them would require an awkward paraphrase, which would only add words, not vividness or distinctness, to the thought of the poet. Lord Derby has wisely and discriminately dealt with these; when he renders them, he does so with so much exactitude and expressive force, that we feel rise within us, at this late hour, a sigh of regret that we had not at our hand his version of them, when we were students of Homer. In reading the translation through, we cannot say where we would have an epithet added that has been omitted, or where we would have stricken it out where it has been preserved. We said that the translation is a copy of the Iliad—a copy produced with genius and spirit. It will be read with pleasure by the classical scholar, to whom it will recall in their freshness and grandeur the scenes of that poem which charmed him in years long past. It will be welcomed by the general reader, who has not before tasted the charms of Homer's song, and who will gratefully acknowledge it as a new treasure to the storehouse of English literature. In it—and in the life of the noble author, whose devotedness to classical literature could not have lived through his busy political life, did he not in his own inward consciousness ever find the great benefit and elegant pleasure he had gained from it—is furnished for the public at large the strongest argument we know against banishing classical education from our schools and colleges.