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; everyone will feel it to be garrulous; everyone 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 mediæval poet? I have no fear of the answer.
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 Moll 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 violently surprised them, grotesque; and an expression, which produced on them a slighter sense of its incongruity, and which more gently surprised them, quaint. Using the two words in this manner, I say, that when Mr Newman translates Helen’s words to Hector in the sixth book,
Δᾶερ ἐμεῖο, κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, ὀκρυοέσσης[[10]],
O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief-working vixen,
A numbing horror,