From such a Homer as Mr Arnold’s specimens and principles would give us, no one could learn anything; no one could have any motive for reading the translation. He smooths down the stamp of Homer’s coin, till nothing is left even for microscopic examination. When he forbids me (p. [96]) to let my reader know that Homer calls horses ‘single-hoofed’, of course he would suppress also the epithets ‘white milk’, ‘dusky blood’, ‘dear knees’, ‘dear life’, etc. His process obliterates everything characteristic, great or small.
Mr Arnold condemns my translating certain names of horses. He says (p. [5]8): ‘Mr Newman calls Xanthus Chesnut; as he calls Balius Spotted and Podarga Spry-foot: which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale Mdelle. Rossignol, or Mr Bright M. Clair’. He is very wanting in discrimination. If I had translated Hector into Possessor or Agamemnon into Highmind, his censure would be just. A Miss White may be a brunette, a Miss Brown may be a blonde: we utter the proper names of men and women without any remembrance of their intrinsic meaning. But it is different with many names of domestic animals. We never call a dog Spot, unless he is spotted; nor without consciousness that the name expresses his peculiarity. No one would give to a black horse the name Chesnut; nor, if he had called a chesnut horse by the name Chesnut, would he ever forget the meaning of the name while he used it. The Greeks called a chesnut horse xanthos and a spotted horse balios; therefore, until Mr Arnold proves the contrary, I believe that they never read the names of Achilles’ two horses without a sense of their meaning. Hence the names ought to be translated; while Hector and Laomedon ought not. The same reasoning applies to Podarga, though I do not certainly understand ἀργός. I have taken it to mean sprightly.
Mr Arnold further asserts, that Homer is never ‘garrulous’. Allowing that too many others agree with me, he attributes our error to giving too much weight to a sentence in Horace! I admire Horace as an ode-writer, but I do not revere him as a critic, any more than as a moral philosopher. I say that Homer is garrulous, because I see and feel it. Mr Arnold puts me into a most unwelcome position. I have a right to say, I have some enthusiasm for Homer. In the midst of numerous urgent calls of duty and taste, I devoted every possible quarter of an hour for two years and a half to translate the Iliad, toiling unremittingly in my vacations and in my walks, and going to large expenses of money, in order to put the book before the unlearned; and this, though I am not a Professor of Poetry nor even of Greek. Yet now I am forced to appear as Homer’s disparager and accuser! But if Homer were always a poet, he could not be, what he is, so many other things beside poet. As the Egyptians paint in their tombs processes of art, not because they are beautiful or grand, but from a mere love of imitating; so Homer narrates perpetually from a mere love of chatting. In how thoroughly Egyptian a way does he tell the process of cutting up an ox and making kebâb; the process of bringing a boat to anchor and carefully putting by the tackle; the process of taking out a shawl from a chest, where it lies at the very bottom! With what glee he repeats the secret talk of the gods; and can tell all about the toilet of Juno. Every particular of trifling actions comes out with him, as, the opening of a door or box with a key. He tells who made Juno’s earrings or veil or the shield of Ajax, the history of Agamemnon’s breast-plate, and in what detail a hero puts on his pieces of armour. I would not press the chattiness of Pandarus, Glaucus, Nestor, Æneas, in the midst of battle; I might press his description of wounds. Indeed I have said enough, and more than enough, against Mr Arnold’s novel, unsupported, paradoxical assertion.—But this is connected with another subject. I called Homer’s manner ‘direct’: Mr Arnold (if I understand) would supersede this by his own epithet ‘rapid’. But I cannot admit the exchange: Homer is often the opposite of rapid. Amplification is his characteristic, as it must be of every improvisatore, every popular orator: condensation indeed is improper for anything but written style; written to be read privately. But I regard as Homer’s worst defect, his lingering over scenes of endless carnage and painful wounds. He knows to half an inch where one hero hits another and how deep. They arm: they approach: they encounter: we have to listen to stereotype details again and again. Such a style is anything but ‘rapid’. Homer’s garrulity often leads him into it; yet he can do far better, as in a part of the fight over Patroclus’s body, and other splendid passages.
Garrulity often vents itself in expletives. Mr Arnold selects for animadversion this line of mine (p. 41),
‘A thousand fires along the plain, I say, that night were gleaming’.
He says: ‘This may be the genuine style of ballad poetry, but it is not the style of Homer’. I reply; my use of expletives is moderate indeed compared to Homer’s. Mr Arnold writes, as if quite unaware that such words as the intensely prosaic ἄρα, and its abbreviations ἂρ, ῥα, with τοι, τε, δὴ, μάλα, ἦ, ἦ ῥα νυ, περ, overflow in epic style; and that a pupil who has mastered the very copious stock of Attic particles, is taken quite aback by the extravagant number in Homer. Our expletives are generally more offensive, because longer. My principle is, to admit only such expletives as add energy, and savour of antiquity. To the feeble expletives of mean ditties I am not prone. I once heard from an eminent counsellor the first lesson of young lawyers, in the following doggerel:
He who holds his lands in fee,
Need neither quake nor quiver:
For I humbly conceive, look ye, do ye see?
He holds his lands for ever.