A thousand fires were burning, and by each ...
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 Lacedæmon ...
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 models 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 ingrained 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, simplicity 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 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 Homer’s, of a plainness of speech like Homer’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; but the very essential characteristic of his poetry is, it seems to me, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness of thought, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness 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 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 Danaë to the stars;
O’er the sun’s bright eye
Drew the vast eyelid of an inky cloud;