Chapman, Cowper, and Pope strain and twist the words to an impossible sense, putting in something about white plume, which they fancy suggested a snowy mountain; but they evidently accept the Greek as it stands, unhesitatingly. I claim this phenomenon in proof that to all commentators and interpreters hitherto Homer’s quaintness has been such an axiom, that they have even acquiesced unsuspiciously in an extravagance which goes far beyond oddity. Moreover the reader may augur by my opposite treatment of the passage, with what discernment Mr Arnold condemns me of obtruding upon Homer gratuitous oddities which equal the conceits of Chapman.
But, while thus vindicating Quaintness as an essential quality of Homer, do I regard it as a weakness to be apologized for? Certainly not; for it is a condition of his cardinal excellences. He could not otherwise be Picturesque as he is. So volatile is his mind, that what would be a Metaphor in a more logical and cultivated age, with him riots in Simile which overflows its banks. His similes not merely go beyond[[47]] the mark of likeness; in extreme cases they even turn into contrariety. If he were not so carried away by his illustration, as to forget what he is illustrating (which belongs to a quaint mind), he would never paint for us such full and splendid pictures. Where a logical later poet would have said that Menelaus
With eagle-eye survey’d the field,
the mere metaphor contenting him; Homer says:
Gazing around on every side, in fashion of an eagle,
Which, of all heaven’s fowl, they say, to scan the earth is keenest:
Whose eye, when loftiest he hangs, not the swift hare escapeth,
Lurking amid a leaf-clad bush: but straight at it he souseth,
Unerring; and with crooked gripe doth quickly rieve its spirit.
I feel this long simile to be a disturbance of the logical balance, such as belongs to the lively eye of the savage, whose observation is intense, his concentration of reasoning powers feeble. Without this, we should never have got anything so picturesque.