He’s here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed;
or in this:—
Wit, whither wilt?
What Shakspeare means is perfectly clear, clearer, probably, than if he had said it in a more formal and regular manner; but his grammar is loose and idiomatic, because he leaves out the subject of the verb ‘wilt’ in the second passage quoted, and because, in the first, a prodigious addition to the sentence has to be, as we used to say in our old Latin grammar days, understood, before the word ‘both’ can be properly parsed. So, again, Chapman’s grammar is loose and idiomatic where he says,
Even share hath he that keeps his tent, and he to field doth go,
because he leaves out, in the second clause, the relative which in formal writing would be required. But Chapman here does not lose dignity by this idiomatic way of expressing himself, any more than Shakspeare loses it by neglecting to confer on ‘both’ the blessings of a regular government: neither loses dignity, but each gives that impression of a plain, direct, and natural mode of speaking, which Homer, too, gives, and which it is so important, as I say, that Homer’s translator should succeed in giving. Cowper calls blank verse ‘a style further removed than rhyme from the vernacular idiom, both in the language itself and in the arrangement of it’; and just in proportion as blank verse is removed from the vernacular idiom, from that idiomatic style which is of all styles the plainest and most natural, blank verse is unsuited to render Homer.
Shakspeare is not only idiomatic in his grammar or style, he is also idiomatic in his words or diction; and here too, his example is valuable for the translator of Homer. The translator must not, indeed, allow himself all the liberty that Shakspeare allows himself; for Shakspeare sometimes uses expressions which pass perfectly well as he uses them, because Shakspeare thinks so fast and so powerfully, that in reading him we are borne over single words as by a mighty current; but, if our mind were less excited,—and who may rely on exciting our mind like Shakspeare?—they would check us. ‘To grunt and sweat under a weary load’;—that does perfectly well where it comes in Shakspeare; but if the translator of Homer, who will hardly have wound our minds up to the pitch at which these words of Hamlet find them, were to employ, when he has to speak of one of Homer’s heroes under the load of calamity, this figure of ‘grunting’ and ‘sweating’ we should say, He Newmanises, and his diction would offend us. For he is to be noble; and no plea of wishing to be plain and natural can get him excused from being this: only, as he is to be also, like Homer, perfectly simple and free from artificiality, and as the use of idiomatic expressions undoubtedly gives this effect[[32]], he should be as idiomatic as he can be without ceasing to be noble. Therefore the idiomatic language of Shakspeare—such language as, ‘prate of his whereabout’; ‘jump the life to come’; ‘the damnation of his taking-off’; ‘his quietus make with a bare bodkin’—should be carefully observed by the translator of Homer, although in every case he will have to decide for himself whether the use, by him, of Shakspeare’s liberty, will or will not clash with his indispensable duty of nobleness. He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible. No one could see this more clearly than Pope saw it: ‘This pure and noble simplicity’, he says, ‘is nowhere in such perfection as in the Scripture and Homer’: yet even with Pope a woman is a ‘fair’, a father is a ‘sire’ and an old man a ‘reverend sage’, and so on through all the phrases of that pseudo-Augustan, and most unbiblical, vocabulary. The Bible, however, is undoubtedly the grand mine of diction for the translator of Homer; and, if he knows how to discriminate truly between what will suit him and what will not, the Bible may afford him also invaluable lessons of style.
I said that Homer, besides being plain in style and diction, was plain in the quality of his thought. It is possible that a thought may be expressed with idiomatic plainness, and yet not be in itself a plain thought. For example, in Mr Clough’s poem, already mentioned, the style and diction is almost always idiomatic and plain, but the thought itself is often of a quality which is not plain; it is curious. But the grand instance of the union of idiomatic expression with curious or difficult thought is in Shakspeare’s poetry. Such, indeed, is the force and power of Shakspeare’s idiomatic expression, that it gives an effect of clearness and vividness even to a thought which is imperfect and incoherent; for instance, when Hamlet says,