As to his style, his manner or movement: to summarize what Mathew Arnold says of it (the best I can do): it is as direct and rapid as Scott's; as lucid as Wordsworth's could be; but noble like Shakespeare's or Milton's. There is no Dantesque periphrasis, nor Miltonian agnostic struggle and inversion; but he calls spades, spades, and moves on to the next thing swiftly, clearly, and yet with exultation. (Yet there is retardation often by long similes.) And he either made a language for himself, or found one ready to his hand, as resonant and sonorous as the loll and slap of billows in the hollow caverns of the sea. As his lines swing in and roll and crash, they swell the soul in you, and you hear and grow great on the rhythm of the eternal. This though we really, I suppose, are quite uncertain as to the pronunciation. But give the vowels merely a plain English value, certain to be wrong, and you still have grand music. Perhaps some of you have read Mathew Arnold's great essay On Translating Homer, and know the arguments wherewith wise Matthew exalts him. A Mr. Newman had translated him so as considerably to out-Bottom Bottom; and Arnold took up the cudgels—to some effect. Newman had treated him as a barbarian, a primitive; Arnold argued that it was Homer, on the contrary, who might have so looked on us. There is, however, perhaps something to be said on Mr. Newman's side. Homer's huge and age-long fame, and his extraordinary virtues, were quite capable of blinding even a great critic to certain things about him which I shall, with great timidity, designate imperfections: therein following De Quincey, who read Greek from early childhood as easily as English, and who, as a critic, saw things sometimes. Bonus dormitat Homerus, says Horace; like the elder Gobbo, he "something smacked." He was the product of a great creative force; which did not however work in a great literary age: and all I am going to say is merely a bearing out of this.
First there is his poverty of epithets. He repeats the same ones over and over again. He can hardly mention Hector without calling him megas koruthaiolos Hector,—"great glittering- helmeted Hector"; or (in the genitive) Hectoros hippodamoio— "of Hector the tamer of war-steeds." Over and over again we have anax andron Agamemnon; or "swift-footed Achilles." Over and over again is the sea poluphloisbois-terous, as if he could say nothing new about it. Having discovered one resounding phrase that fits nicely into the hexameter, he seems to have been just content with the splendor of sound, and unwilling so to stir his imagination as to flash some new revelation on it. As if Hamlet should never be mentioned in the play, without some such epithet as "the hesitating Dane."…… But think how the Myriad-minded One positively tumbles over himself in hurling and fountaining up new revelatory figures and epithets about everything: how he could not afford to repeat himself, because there were not enough hours in the day, days in the year, nor years in one human lifetime, in which to ease his imagination of its tremendous burden. He had Golconda at the root of his tongue: let him but pass you the time of day, and it shall go hard but he will pour you out the wealth of Ormus or of Ind. A plethora, some have said: never mind; wealth was nothing to him, because he had it all. Or note how severe Milton, almost every time he alludes to Satan, throws some new light of majestic gloom, inner or outer, with a new epithet or synonym, upon his figure or his mind.
Even of mere ancillaries and colorless lines, Homer will make you a resounding glory. What means this most familiar one, think you:
Ten d'apameibomenos prosephe koruthaiolos Hector?
—Surely here some weighty splendid thing is being revealed? But no; it means: "Answering spake unto her great glittering-helmeted Hector;" or tout simplement, 'Hector answered.' And hardly can anyone open his lips, but it must be brought in with some variation of that sea-riding billow, or roll of drums:
Ton d'emeibet epeita anax andron Agamemnon. Hos phato. Ten d'outi prosephe nephelegereta Zeus
—whereafter at seven lines down we get again:
Ten de meg' ochthesas prosephe nephelegereta Zeus;
—in all of which I think we do get something of primitivism and unskill. It is a preoccupation with sound where there is no adequate excuse for the sound; after the fashion of some orators, whom, to speak plainly, it is a weariness to hear. But you will remember how Shakespeare rises to his grandest music when he has fatefullest words to utter; and how Milton rolls in his supreme thunders each in its recurring cycle; leads you to wave-crest over wave-trough, and then recedes; and how the crest is always some tremendous thing in vision, or thought as well as sound. So he has everlasting variation; manages his storms and billows; and so I think his music is greater in effect than Homer's—would still be greater, could we be sure of Homer's tones and vowel- values; as I think his vision goes deeper into the realm of the Soul and the Eternal.
Yet is Homer majestic and beautiful abundantly. If it is true that his reputation gains on the principle of Omne ignotum pro magnifico—because he is unknown to most that praise him—let none imagine him less than a wonderful reservoir of poetry. His faults—to call them that—are such as you would expect from his age, race, and peculiar historic position; his virtues are drawn out of the grandeur of his own soul, and the current from the Unfathomable that flowed through him. He had the high serious attitude towards the great things, and treated them highly, deeply and seriously. We may compare him to Dante: who also wrote, in an age and land not yet literary or cultured, with a huge racial inspiration. But Dante had something more: a purpose to reveal in symbol the tremendous world of the Soul. Matthew Arnold speaks of the Homeric poems as "the most important poetical monument existing." Well; cultured Tom, Dick and Harry would say much the same thing; it is the orthodox thing to say. But with great deference to Matthew, I believe they are really a less important monument than the poems of Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, or Milton, or I suppose Goethe—to name only poets of the Western World; because each of these created a Soul- symbol; which I think the Iliad at any rate does not.