Homer never sees things in the same proportions as we see them. To omit his digressions, and what I may call his ‘impertinences’, in order to give to his argument that which Mr Arnold is pleased to call the proper ‘balance’, is to value our own logical minds, more than his picturesque[[48]] but illogical mind.
Mr Arnold says that I am not quaint, but grotesque, in my rendering of κυνὸς κακομηχάνου. I do not hold the phrase to be quaint: to me it is excessively coarse. When Jupiter calls Juno ‘a bitch’, of course he means a snarling cur; hence my rendering, ‘vixen’ (or she-fox), is there perfect, since we say vixen of an irascible woman. But Helen had no such evil tempers, and beyond a doubt she meant to ascribe impurity to herself. I have twice committed a pious fraud by making her call herself ‘a vixen’, where ‘bitch’ is the only faithful rendering; and Mr Arnold, instead of thanking me for throwing a thin veil over Homer’s deformity, assails me for my phrase as intolerably grotesque.
He further forbids me to invent new compound adjectives, as fair-thron’d, rill-bestream’d; because they strike us as new, though Homer’s epithets (he says) did not so strike the Greeks: hence they derange attention from the main question. I hold this doctrine of his (conceding his fact for a moment) to be destructive of all translation whatever, into prose or poetry. When Homer tells us that Achilles’ horses were munching lotus and parsley, Pope renders it by ‘the horses grazed’, and does not say on what. Using Mr Arnold’s principles, he might defend himself by arguing: ‘The Greeks, being familiar with such horsefood, were not struck by it as new, as my reader would be. I was afraid of telling him what the horses were eating, lest it should derange the balance of his mind, and injuriously divert him from the main idea of the sentence’. But, I find, readers are indignant on learning Pope’s suppression: they feel that he has defrauded them of a piece of interesting information.—In short, how can an Englishman read any Greek composition and be affected by it as Greeks were? In a piece of Euripides my imagination is caught by many things, which he never intended or calculated for the prominence which they actually get in my mind. This or that absurdity in mythology, which passed with him as matter of course, may monopolize my main attention. Our minds are not passive recipients of this or that poet’s influence; but the poet is the material on which our minds actively work. If an unlearned reader thinks it very ‘odd’ of Homer (the first time he hears it) to call Aurora ‘fair-thron’d’, so does a boy learning Greek think it odd to call her εὔθρονος. Mr Arnold ought to blot every odd Homeric epithet out of his Greek Homer (or never lend the copy to a youthful learner) if he desires me to expunge ‘fair-thron’d’ from the translation. Nay, I think he should conceal that the Morning was esteemed as a goddess, though she had no altars or sacrifice. It is all odd. But that is just why people want to read an English Homer,—to know all his oddities, exactly as learned men do. He is the phenomenon to be studied. His peculiarities, pleasant or unpleasant, are to be made known, precisely because of his great eminence and his substantial deeply seated worth. Mr Arnold writes like a timid biographer, fearful to let too much of his friend come out. So much as to the substance. As to mere words, here also I hold the very reverse of Mr Arnold’s doctrine. I do not feel free to translate οὐρανομήκης by ‘heaven-kissing’, precisely because Shakspeare has used the last word. It is his property, as ἐϋκνημῖδες, ἐϋμμελίης, κυδιάνειρα, etc., are Homer’s property. I could not use it without being felt to quote Shakspeare, which would be highly inappropriate in a Homeric translation. But if nobody had ever yet used the phrase ‘heaven-kissing’ (or if it were current without any proprietor) then I should be quite free to use it as a rendering of οὐρανομήκης. I cannot assent to a critic killing the vital powers of our tongue. If Shakspeare might invent the compound ‘heaven-kissing’, or ‘man-ennobling’, so might William Wordsworth or Matthew Arnold; and so might I. Inspiration is not dead, nor yet is the English language.
Mr Arnold is slow to understand what I think very obvious. Let me then put a case. What if I were to scold a missionary for rendering in Feejee the phrase ‘kingdom of heaven’ and ‘Lamb of God’ accurately; also ‘saints’ and other words characteristic of the New Testament? I might urge against him: ‘This and that sounds very odd to the Feejees: that cannot be right, for it did not seem odd to the Nicene bishops. The latter had forgotten that βασιλεία meant “kingdom”; they took the phrase “kingdom of God” collectively to mean “the Church”. The phrase did not surprise them. As to “Lambs”, the Feejees are not accustomed to sacrifice, and cannot be expected to know of themselves what “Lamb of God” means, as Hebrews did. The courtiers of Constantine thought it very natural to be called ἅγιοι, for they were accustomed to think every baptised person ἅγιος; but to the baptised courtiers of Feejee it really seems very odd to be called saints. You disturb the balance of their judgment’.
The missionary might reply: ‘You seemed to be ashamed of the oddities of the Gospel. I am not. They grow out of its excellences and cannot be separated. By avoiding a few eccentric phrases you will do little to remove the deep-seated eccentricity of its very essence. Odd and eccentric it will remain, unless you despoil it of its heart, and reduce it to a fashionable philosophy’. And just so do I reply to Mr Arnold. The Homeric style (whether it be that of an individual or of an age) is peculiar, is ‘odd’, if Mr Arnold like the word, to the very core. Its eccentricities in epithet are mere efflorescences of its essential eccentricity. If Homer could cry out to us, I doubt not he would say, as Oliver Cromwell to the painter, ‘Paint me just I am, wart and all’: but if the true Homer could reappear, I am sure Mr Arnold would start from him just as a bishop of Rome from a fisherman apostle. If a translator of the Bible honours the book by his close rendering of its characteristics, however ‘odd’, so do I honour Homer by the same. Those characteristics, the moment I produce them, Mr Arnold calls ignoble. Well: be it so; but I am not to blame for them. They exist whether Mr Arnold likes them or not.
I will here observe that he bids me paraphrase τανύπεπλος (trailing-robed) into something like, ‘Let gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping by’. I deliberately judge, that to paraphrase an otiose epithet is the very worst thing that can be done: to omit it entirely would be better. I object even to Mr Gladstone’s
... whom Leto bare,
Leto with the flowing hair.
For the repetition overdoes the prominence of the epithet. Still more extravagant is Mr Arnold in wishing me to turn ‘single-hoofed horses’ in to ‘something which as little surprises us as “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds”’: p. 96. To reproduce Shakspeare would be in any case a ‘surprising’ mode of translating Homer: but the principle which changes ‘single-hoofed’ into a different epithet which the translator thinks better, is precisely that which for more than two centuries has made nearly all English translation worthless. To throw the poet into your crucible, and bring out old Pelias young, is not a hopeful process. I had thought, the manly taste of this day had outgrown the idea that a translator’s business is to melt up the old coin and stamp it with a modern image. I am wondering that I should have to write against such notions: I would not take the trouble, only that they come against me from an Oxford Professor of Poetry.
At the same time, his doctrine, as I have said, goes far beyond compound epithets. Whether I say ‘motley-helmèd Hector’ or ‘Hector of the motley helm’, ‘silver-footed Thetis’ or ‘Thetis of the silver foot’, ‘man-ennobling combat’ or ‘combat which ennobles man’, the novelty is so nearly on a par, that he cannot condemn one and justify the other on this score. Even Pope falls far short of the false taste which would plane down every Homeric prominence: for he prizes an elegant epithet like ‘silver-footed’, however new and odd.