On his quotation from Shakspeare, I remark, 1. ‘Orgulous’, from French ‘orgueilleux’, is intelligible to all who know French, and is comparable to Sicilian words in Æschylus. 2. It is contrary to fact to say, that Homer has not words, and words in great plenty, as unintelligible to later Greeks, as ‘orgulous’ to us. 3. Sperr, for Bar, as Splash for Plash, is much less than the diversity which separates Homer from the spoken Attic. What is σμικρὸς for μικρὸς to compare with ἠβαιὸς for μικρός? 4. Mr Arnold (as I understand him) blames Shakspeare for being sometimes antiquated: I do not blame him, nor yet Homer for the same; but neither can I admit the contrast which he asserts. He says: ‘Shakspeare can compose, when he is at his best, in a language perfectly intelligible, in spite of the two centuries and a half which part him from us. Homer has not Shakspeare’s variations: he is never antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes’. I certainly find the very same variations in Homer, as Mr Arnold finds in Shakspeare. My reader unlearned in Greek might hastily infer from the facts just laid before him, that Homer is always equally strange to a purely Attic ear: but is not so. The dialects of Greece did indeed differ strongly, as broad Scotch from English; yet as we know, Burns is sometimes perfectly intelligible to an Englishman, sometimes quite unintelligible. In spite of Homer’s occasional wide receding from Attic speech, he as often comes close to it. For instance, in the first piece quoted above from Gladstone, the simile occupying five (Homeric) lines would almost go down in Sophocles, if the Tragedian had chosen to use the metre. There is but one out-and-out Homeric word in it (ἐπασσύτερος): and even that is used once in an Æschylean chorus. There are no strange inflections, and not a single digamma is sensibly lost. Its peculiarities are only -εϊ for ει, ἐὸν for ὂν, and δέ τε for δέ, which could not embarrass the hearer as to the sense. I myself reproduce much the same result. Thus in my translation of these five lines I have the antiquated words blore for blast, harry for harass (harrow, worry), and the antiquated participle hoven from heave, as cloven, woven from cleave, weave. The whole has thus just a tinge of antiquity, as had the Homeric passage to the Attics, without any need of aid from a Glossary. But at other times the aid is occasionally convenient, just as in Homer or Shakspeare.
Mr Arnold plays fallaciously on the words familiar and unfamiliar. Homer’s words may have been familiar to the Athenians (i.e. often heard), even when they were not understood, but, at most, were guessed at; or when, being understood, they were still felt and known to be utterly foreign. Of course, when thus ‘familiar’, they could not ‘surprise’ the Athenians, as Mr Arnold complains that my renderings surprise the English. Let mine be heard as Pope or even Cowper has been heard, and no one will be ‘surprised’.
Antiquated words are understood well by some, ill by others, not at all by a third class; hence it is difficult to decide the limits of a glossary. Mr Arnold speaks scornfully of me (he wonders with whom Mr Newman can have lived), that I use the words which I use, and explain those which I explain. He censures my little Glossary, for containing three words which he did not know, and some others, which, he says, are ‘familiar to all the world’. It is clear, he will never want a stone to throw at me. I suppose I am often guilty of keeping low company. I have found ladies whom no one would guess to be so ill-educated, who yet do not distinctly know what lusty means; but have an uncomfortable feeling that it is very near to lustful; and understand grisly only in the sense of grizzled, grey. Great numbers mistake the sense of Buxom, Imp, Dapper, deplorably. I no more wrote my Glossary than my translation for persons so highly educated as Mr Arnold.
But I must proceed to remark: Homer might have been as unintelligible to Pericles, as was the court poet of king Crœsus, and yet it might be highly improper to translate him into an old English dialect; namely, if he had been the typical poet of a logical and refined age. Here is the real question;—is he absolutely antique, or only antiquated relatively, as Euripides is now antiquated? A modern Greek statesman, accomplished for every purpose of modern business, might find himself quite perplexed by the infinitives, the numerous participles, the optatives, the datives, by the particle ἂν, and by the whole syntax of Euripides, as also by many special words; but this would never justify us in translating Euripides into any but a most refined style. Was Homer of this class? I say, that he not only was antiquated, relatively to Pericles, but is also absolutely antique, being the poet of a barbarian age. Antiquity in poets is not (as Horace stupidly imagines in the argument of the horse’s tail) a question of years, but of intrinsic qualities. Homer sang to a wholly unfastidious audience, very susceptible to the marvellous, very unalive to the ridiculous, capable of swallowing with reverence the most grotesque conceptions. Hence nothing is easier than to turn Homer to ridicule. The fun which Lucian made of his mythology, a rhetorical critic like Mr Arnold could make of his diction, if he understood it as he understands mine. He takes credit to himself for not ridiculing me; and is not aware, that I could not be like Homer without being easy to ridicule. An intelligent child is the second-best reader of Homer. The best of all is a scholar of highly masculine taste; the worst of all is a fastidious and refined man, to whom everything quaint seems ignoble and contemptible.
I might have supposed that Mr Arnold thinks Homer to be a polished drawing-room poet, like Pope, when I read in him this astonishing sentence, p. 35. ‘Search the English language for a word which does not apply to Homer, and you could not fix on a better word than quaint’. But I am taken aback at finding him praise the diction of Chapman’s translation in contrast to mine. Now I never open Chapman, without being offended at his pushing Homer’s quaintness most unnecessarily into the grotesque. Thus in Mr Gladstone’s first passage above, where Homer says that the sea ‘sputters out the foam’, Chapman makes it, ‘all her back in bristles set, spits every way her foam’, obtruding what may remind one of a cat or a stoat. I hold sputter to be epical[[44]], because it is strong; but spit is feeble and mean. In passing, I observe that the universal praise given to Chapman as ‘Homeric’ (a praise which I have too absolutely repeated, perhaps through false shame of depreciating my only rival) is a testimony to me that I rightly appreciate Homeric style; for my style is Chapman’s softened, purged of conceits and made far more melodious. Mr Arnold leaves me to wonder, how, with his disgust at me, he can avoid feeling tenfold disgust at Chapman; and to wonder also what he means, by so blankly contradicting my statement that Homer is quaint; and why he so vehemently resents it. He does not vouchsafe to me or to his readers one particle of disproof or of explanation.
I regard it as quaint in Homer to call Juno white-arm’d goddess and large-ey’d. (I have not rendered βοῶπις ox-ey’d, because in a case of doubt I shrank to obtrude anything so grotesque to us.) It is quaint to say, ‘the lord of bright-haired Juno lightens’ for ‘it lightens’; or ‘my heart in my shaggy bosom is divided’, for ‘I doubt’: quaint to call waves wet, milk white, blood dusky, horses singlehoofed, a hero’s hand broad, words winged, Vulcan Lobfoot (Κυλλοποδίων), a maiden fair-ankled, the Greeks wellgreav’d, a spear longshadowy, battle and council man-ennobling, one’s knees dear, and many other epithets. Mr Arnold most gratuitously asserts that the sense of these had evaporated to the Athenians. If that were true, it would not signify to this argument. Δαιμόνιος (possessed by an elf or dæmon) so lost its sense in Attic talk, that although Æschylus has it in its true meaning, some college tutors (I am told) render ὦ δαιμόνιε in Plato, ‘my very good sir!’ This is surely no good reason for mistranslating the word in Homer. If Mr Arnold could prove (what he certainly cannot) that Sophocles had forgotten the derivation of ἐϋκνημῖδες and ἐϋμμελίης, and understood by the former nothing but ‘full armed’ and by the latter (as he says) nothing but ‘war-like’, this would not justify his blame of me for rendering the words correctly. If the whole Greek nation by long familiarity had become inobservant of Homer’s ‘oddities’ (conceding this for the moment), that also would be no fault of mine. That Homer is extremely peculiar, even if the Greeks had become deadened to the sense of it, the proof on all sides is overpowering.
It is very quaint to say, ‘the outwork (or rampart) of the teeth’ instead of ‘the lips’. If Mr Arnold will call it ‘portentous’ in my English, let him produce some shadow of reason for denying it to be portentous in Greek. Many phrases are so quaint as to be almost untranslatable, as μήστωρ φόβοιο (deviser of fear?) μήστωρ ἀϋτῆς (deviser of outcry?): others are quaint to the verge of being comical, as to call a man an equipoise (ἀτάλαντος) to a god, and to praise eyes for having a curl in them[[45]]. It is quaint to make Juno call Jupiter αἰνότατε (grimmest? direst?), whether she is in good or bad humour with him, and to call a Vision ghastly, when it is sent with a pleasant message. It is astonishingly quaint to tell how many oxen every fringe of Athene’s ægis was worth.—It is quaint to call Patroclus ‘a great simpleton’, for not foreseeing that he would lose his life in rushing to the rescue of his countrymen. (I cannot receive Mr Arnold’s suggested Biblical correction ‘Thou fool’! which he thinks grander: first, because grave moral rebuke is utterly out of place; secondly, because the Greek cannot mean this;—it means infantine simplicity, and has precisely the colour of the word which I have used.)—It is quaint to say: ‘Patroclus kindled a great fire, godlike man’! or, ‘Automedon held up the meat, divine Achilles slic’d it’: quaint to address a young friend as ‘Oh[[46]] pippin’! or ‘Oh softheart’! or ‘Oh pet’! whichever is the true translation. It is quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring, Ulysses to a pet ram, Agamemnon in two lines to three gods, and in the third line to a bull; the Myrmidons to wasps, Achilles to a grampus chasing little fishes, Antilochus to a wolf which kills a dog and runs away. Menelaus striding over Patroclus’s body to a heifer defending her first-born. It is quaint to say that Menelaus was as brave as a bloodsucking fly, that Agamemnon’s sobs came thick as flashes of lightning; and that the Trojan mares, while running, groaned like overflowing rivers. All such similes come from a mind quick to discern similarities, but very dull to feel incongruities; unaware therefore that it is on a verge where the sublime easily turns into the ludicrous; a mind and heart inevitably quaint to the very core. What is it in Vulcan, when he would comfort his mother under Jupiter’s threat, to make jokes about the severe mauling which he himself formerly received, and his terror lest she should be now beaten? Still more quaint (if rollicking is not the word), is the address by which Jupiter tries to ingratiate himself with Juno: viz. he recounts to her all his unlawful amours, declaring that in none of them was he so smitten as now. I have not enough of the γενναῖος εὐηθεία, the barbarian simple-heartedness, needed by a reader of Homer, to get through this speech with gravity. What shall I call it, certainly much worse than quaint, that the poet adds: Jupiter was more enamoured than at his stolen embrace in their first bed ‘secretly from their dear parents’? But to develop Homer’s inexhaustible quaintnesses, of which Mr Arnold denies the existence, seems to me to need a long treatise. It is not to be expected, that one who is blind to superficial facts so very prominent as those which I have recounted, should retain any delicate perception of the highly coloured, intense, and very eccentric diction of Homer, even if he has ever understood it, which he forces me to doubt. He sees nothing ‘odd’ in κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, or in κυνόμυια, ‘thou dogfly’! He replaces to his imagination the flesh and blood of the noble barbarian by a dim feeble spiritless outline.
I have not adduced, in proof of Homer’s quaintness, the monstrous simile given to us in Iliad 13, 754; viz. Hector ‘darted forward screaming like a snowy mountain, and flew through the Trojans and allies’: for I cannot believe that the poet wrote anything so absurd. Rather than admit this, I have suggested that the text is corrupt, and that for ὄρεϊ νιφόεντι we should read ὀρνέῳ θύοντι, ‘darted forth screaming like a raging bird’. Yet, as far as I know, I am the first man that has here impugned the text. Mr Brandreth is faithful in his rendering, except that he says shouting for screaming:
‘He said; and like a snowy mountain, rush’d
Shouting; and flew through Trojans and allies.’