In any other than a mere prose version of a great poem, we have a right to demand that it give us at least an adequate impression of force and originality. We have a right to ask, If this poem were published now for the first time, as the work of a contemporary, should we read it, not with the same, but with anything like the same conviction of its freshness, vigor, and originality, its high level of style and its witchery of verse, that Homer, if now for the first time discovered, would infallibly beget in us? Perhaps this looks like asking for a new Homer to translate the old one; but if this be too much, it is certainly not unfair to insist that the feeling given us should be that of life, and not artifice.
The Homer of Chapman, whatever its defects, alone of all English versions has this crowning merit of being, where it is most successful, thoroughly alive. He has made for us the best poem that has yet been Englished out of Homer, and in so far gives us a truer idea of him. Of all translators he is farthest removed from the fault with which he charges others, when he says that “our divine master’s most ingenious imitating the life of things (which is the soul of a poem) is never respected nor perceived by his interpreters only standing pedantically on the grammar and words, utterly ignorant of the sense and grace of him.” His mastery of English is something wonderful even in an age of masters, when the language was still a mother-tongue, and not a contrivance of pedants and grammarians. He had a reverential sense of “our divine Homer’s depth and gravity, which will not open itself to the curious austerity of belaboring art, but only to the natural and most ingenious soul of our thrice-sacred Poesy.” His task was as holy to him as a version of Scripture; he justifies the tears of Achilles by those of Jesus, and the eloquence of his horse by that of Balaam’s less noble animal. He does not always keep close to his original, but he sins no more, even in this, than any of his rivals. He is especially great in the similes. Here he rouses himself always, and if his enthusiasm sometimes lead him to heighten a little, or even to add outright, he gives us a picture full of life and action, or of the grandeur and beauty of nature, as stirring to the fancy as his original. Of all who have attempted Homer, he has the topping merit of being inspired by him.
In the recent discussions of Homeric translation in England, it has always been taken for granted that we had or could have some adequate conception of Homer’s metre. Lord Derby, in his Preface, plainly assumes this. But there can be no greater fallacy. No human ears, much less Greek ones, could have endured what, with our mechanical knowledge of the verse, ignorance of the accent, and English pronunciation, we blandly accept for such music as Homer chanted. We have utterly lost the tune and cannot reproduce it. Mr. Newman conjectures it to have been something like Yankee Doodle; Mr. Arnold is sure it was the English hexameter; and they are both partly right so far as we may trust our reasonable impressions; for, after all, an impression is all that we have. Cowper attempts to give the ring of the ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο by
“Dread-sounding, bounding on the silver bow,”
which only too fatally recalls the old Scottish dancing-tune,—
“Amaisit I gaisit
To see, led at command,
A strampant and rampant
Ferss lyon in his hand.”
The attempt was in the right direction, however, for Homer, like Dante and Shakespeare, like all who really command language, seems fond of playing with assonances. No doubt the Homeric verse consented at will to an eager rapidity, and no doubt also its general character is that of prolonged but unmonotonous roll. Everybody says it is like the long ridges of the sea, some overtopping their neighbors a little, each with an independent undulation of its crest, yet all driven by a common impulse, and breaking, not with the sudden snap of an unyielding material, but one after the other, with a stately curve, to slide back and mingle with those that follow. Chapman’s measure has the disadvantage of an association with Sternhold and Hopkins, but it has the merit of length, and, where he is in the right mood, is free, spirited, and sonorous. Above all, there is everywhere the movement of life and passion in it. Chapman was a master of verse, making it hurry, linger, or stop short, to suit the meaning. Like all great versifiers he must be read with study, for the slightest change of accent loses the expression of an entire passage. His great fault as a translator is that he takes fire too easily and runs beyond his author. Perhaps he intensifies too much, though this be a fault on the right side; he certainly sometimes weakens the force of passages by crowding in particulars which Homer had wisely omitted, for Homer’s simplicity is by no means mere simplicity of thought, nor, as it is often foolishly called, of nature. It is the simplicity of consummate art, the last achievement of poets and the invariable characteristic of the greatest among them. To Chapman’s mind once warmed to its work, the words are only a mist, suggesting, while it hides, the divine form of the original image or thought; and his imagination strives to body forth that, as he conceives it, in all its celestial proportions. Let us compare with Lord Derby’s version, as the latest, a passage where Chapman merely intensities (Book XIII., beginning at the 86th verse in Lord Derby, the 73d of Chapman, and the 76th of Homer):—
“Whom answered thus the son of Telamon:
‘My hands, too, grasp with firmer hold the spear,
My spirit, like thine, is stirred; I feel my feet
Instinct with fiery life; nor should I fear
With Hector, son of Priam, in his might
Alone to meet, and grapple to the death.’”
Thus Lord Derby. Chapman renders:—
“This Telamonius thus received: ‘So, to my thoughts, my hands
Burn with desire to toss my lance; each foot beneath me stands
Bare on bright fire to use his speed; my heart is raised so high,
That to encounter Hector’s self I long insatiately.’”