Mr Newman’s syntax has, I say it with pleasure, a much more Homeric cast than his vocabulary; his syntax, the mode in which his thought is evolved, although not the actual words in which it is expressed, seems to me right in its general character, and the best feature of his version. It is not artificial or rhetorical like Cowper’s syntax or Pope’s: it is simple, direct, and natural, and so far it is like Homer’s. It fails, however, just where, from the inherent fault of Mr Newman’s conception of Homer, one might expect it to fail,—it fails in nobleness. It presents the thought in a way which is something more than unconstrained,—over-familiar; something more than easy,—free and easy. In this respect it is like the movement of Mr Newman’s version, like his rhythm, for this, too, fails, in spite of some qualities, by not being noble enough; this, while it avoids the faults of being slow and elaborate, falls into a fault in the opposite direction, and is slip-shod. Homer presents his thought naturally; but when Mr Newman has,
A thousand fires along the plain, I say, that night were burning,
he presents his thought familiarly; in a style which may be the genuine style of ballad-poetry, but which is not the style of Homer. Homer moves freely; but when Mr Newman has,
Infatuate! O that thou wert lord to some other army[[11]],
he gives himself too much freedom; he leaves us too much to do for his rhythm ourselves, instead of giving to us a rhythm like Homer’s, easy indeed, but mastering our ear with a fulness of power which is irresistible.
I said that a certain style might be the genuine style of ballad-poetry, but yet not the style of Homer. The analogy of the ballad is ever present to Mr Newman’s thoughts in considering Homer; and perhaps nothing has more caused his faults than this analogy,—this popular, but, it is time to say, this erroneous analogy. ‘The moral qualities of Homer’s style’, says Mr Newman, ‘being like to those of the English ballad, we need a metre of the same genius. Only those metres, which by the very possession of these qualities are liable to degenerate into doggerel, are suitable to reproduce the ancient epic’. ‘The style of Homer’, he says, in a passage which I have before quoted, ‘is direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous: in all these respects it is similar to the old English ballad’. Mr Newman, I need not say, is by no means alone in this opinion. ‘The most really and truly Homeric of all the creations of the English muse is’, says Mr Newman’s critic in the National Review, ‘the ballad-poetry of ancient times; and the association between metre and subject is one that it would be true wisdom to preserve’. ‘It is confessed’, says Chapman’s last editor, Mr Hooper, ‘that the fourteen-syllable verse’ (that is, a ballad-verse) ‘is peculiarly fitting for Homeric translation’. And the editor of Dr Maginn’s clever and popular Homeric Ballads assumes it as one of his author’s greatest and most undisputable merits, that he was ‘the first who consciously realised to himself the truth that Greek ballads can be really represented in English only by a similar measure’.
This proposition that Homer’s poetry is ballad-poetry, analogous to the well-known ballad-poetry of the English and other nations, has a certain small portion of truth in it, and at one time probably served a useful purpose, when it was employed to discredit the artificial and literary manner in which Pope and his school rendered Homer. But it has been so extravagantly over-used, the mistake which it was useful in combating has so entirely lost the public favour, that it is now much more important to insist on the large part of error contained in it, than to extol its small part of truth. It is time to say plainly that, whatever the admirers of our old ballads may think, the supreme form of epic poetry, the genuine Homeric mould, is not the form of the Ballad of Lord Bateman. I have myself shown the broad difference between Milton’s manner and Homer’s; but, after a course of Mr Newman and Dr Maginn, I turn round in desperation upon them and upon the balladists who have misled them, and I exclaim: ‘Compared with you, Milton is Homer’s double; there is, whatever you may think, ten thousand times more of the real strain of Homer in
Blind Thamyris, and blind Mæonides,
And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old,
than in