But thus responsively to him spake godlike Alexander.
And the word ‘celestial’ again, in the grand address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles,
You, who are born celestial, from Eld and Death exempted!
seems to me in that place exactly to jar upon the feeling as too bookish. But, apart from the question of Mr Newman’s fidelity to his own theory, such a theory seems to me both dangerous for a translator and false in itself. Dangerous for a translator; because, wherever one finds such a theory announced (and one finds it pretty often), it is generally followed by an explosion of pedantry; and pedantry is of all things in the world the most un-Homeric. False in itself; because, in fact, we owe to the Latin element in our language most of that very rapidity and clear decisiveness by which it is contradistinguished from the German, and in sympathy with the languages of Greece and Rome: so that to limit an English translator of Homer to words of Saxon origin is to deprive him of one of his special advantages for translating Homer. In Voss’s well-known translation of Homer, it is precisely the qualities of his German language itself, something heavy and trailing both in the structure of its sentences and in the words of which it is composed, which prevent his translation, in spite of the hexameters, in spite of the fidelity, from creating in us the impression created by the Greek. Mr Newman’s prescription, if followed, would just strip the English translator of the advantage which he has over Voss.
The frame of mind in which we approach an author influences our correctness of appreciation of him; and Homer should be approached by a translator in the simplest frame of mind possible. Modern sentiment tries to make the ancient not less than the modern world its own; but against modern sentiment in its applications to Homer the translator, if he would feel Homer truly—and unless he feels him truly, how can he render him truly?—cannot be too much on his guard. For example: the writer of an interesting article on English translations of Homer, in the last number of the National Review, quotes, I see, with admiration, a criticism of Mr Ruskin on the use of the epithet φυσίζοος, ‘life-giving’, in that beautiful passage in the third book of the Iliad, which follows Helen’s mention of her brothers Castor and Pollux as alive, though they were in truth dead:
ὣς φάτο· τοὺς δ’ ἤδη κατέχεν φυσίζοος αἶα
ἐν Λακεδαίμονι αὖθι, φίλῃ ἐν πατρίδι γαίῃ.[[1]]
‘The poet’, says Mr Ruskin, ‘has to speak of the earth in sadness; but he will not let that sadness affect or change his thought of it. No; though Castor and Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our mother still,—fruitful, life-giving’. This is a just specimen of that sort of application of modern sentiment to the ancients, against which a student, who wishes to feel the ancients truly, cannot too resolutely defend himself. It reminds one, as, alas! so much of Mr Ruskin’s writing reminds one, of those words of the most delicate of living critics: “Comme tout genre de composition a son écueil particulier, celui du genre romanesque, c’est le faux”. The reader may feel moved as he reads it; but it is not the less an example of ‘le faux’ in criticism; it is false. It is not true, as to that particular passage, that Homer called the earth φυσίζοος because, ‘though he had to speak of the earth in sadness, he would not let that sadness change or affect his thought of it’, but consoled himself by considering that ‘the earth is our mother still,—fruitful, life-giving’. It is not true, as a matter of general criticism, that this kind of sentimentality, eminently modern, inspires Homer at all. ‘From Homer and Polygnotus I every day learn more clearly’, says Goethe, ‘that in our life here above ground we have, properly speaking, to enact Hell’[[2]]:—if the student must absolutely have a keynote to the Iliad, let him take this of Goethe, and see what he can do with it; it will not, at any rate, like the tender pantheism of Mr Ruskin, falsify for him the whole strain of Homer.
These are negative counsels; I come to the positive. When I say, the translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author;—that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally that he is eminently noble;—I probably seem to be saying what is too general to be of much service to anybody. Yet it is strictly true that, for want of duly penetrating themselves with the first-named quality of Homer, his rapidity, Cowper and Mr Wright have failed in rendering him; that, for want of duly appreciating the second-named quality, his plainness and directness of style and dictation, Pope and Mr Sotheby have failed in rendering him; that for want of appreciating the third, his plainness and directness of ideas, Chapman has failed in rendering him; while for want of appreciating the fourth, his nobleness, Mr Newman, who has clearly seen some of the faults of his predecessors, has yet failed more conspicuously than any of them.
Coleridge says, in his strange language, speaking of the union of the human soul with the divine essence, that this takes place