I certainly do not recommend this style to a translator, yet it would have its advantage. Even with a smaller change of dialect it would aid us over Helen’s self-piercing denunciation, ‘approaching to Christian penitence’, as some have judged it.
Quoth she, I am a gramsome bitch,
If woman bitch may bee.
But in behalf of the poet I must avow: when one considers how dramatic he is, it is marvellous how little in him can offend. For this very reason he is above needing tender treatment from a translator, but can bear faithful rendering, not only better than Shakspeare but better than Pindar or Sophocles.
When Mr Arnold denies that Homer is ever prosaic or homely, his own specimens of translation put me into despair of convincing him; for they seem to me a very anthology of prosaic flatness. Phrases, which are not in themselves bad, if they were elevated by something in the syntax or rhythm distinguishing them from prose, become in him prose out-and-out. ‘To Peleus why did we give you, to a mortal’? ‘In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires; by each one there sate fifty men’. [At least he might have left out the expletive.] ‘By their chariots stood the steeds, and champed the white barley; while their masters sate by the fire and waited for morning’. ‘Us, whose portion for ever Zeus has made it, from youth right up to age, to be winding skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of us perish’. The words which I here italicize, seem to me below noble ballad. What shall I say of ‘I bethink me what the Trojan men and Trojan women might murmur’. ‘Sacred Troy shall go to destruction’. ‘Or bear pails to the well of Messeϊs’. ‘See, the wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain of the horsemen of Troy, in the day they fought for their city’, for, ‘who was captain in the day on which——’. ‘Let me be dead and the earth be mounded (?) above me, ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity[[49]] told of’. ‘By no slow pace or want of swiftness of ours[[50]] did the Trojans obtain to strip the arms of Patroclus’. ‘Here I am destined to perish, far from my father and mother dear; for all that, I will not’, etc. ‘Dare they not enter the fight, or stand in the council of heroes, all for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?’ One who regards all this to be high poetry,—emphatically ‘noble’,—may well think τὸν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος or ‘with him there came forty black galleys’, or the broiling of the beef collops, to be such. When Mr Arnold regards ‘no want of swiftness of ours’; ‘for all that’, in the sense of nevertheless; ‘all for fear’, i.e. because of the fear; not to be prosaic: my readers, however ignorant of Greek, will dispense with further argument from me. Mr Arnold’s inability to discern prose in Greek is not to be trusted.
But I see something more in this phenomenon. Mr Arnold is an original poet; and, as such, certainly uses a diction far more elevated than he here puts forward to represent Homer. He calls his Homeric diction plain and simple. Interpreting these words from the contrast of Mr Arnold’s own poems, I claim his suffrage as on my side, that Homer is often in a style much lower than what the moderns esteem to be poetical. But I protest, that he carries it very much too far, and levels the noblest down to the most negligent style of Homer. The poet is not always so ‘ignoble’, as the unlearned might infer from my critic’s specimens. He never drops so low as Shakspeare; yet if he were as sustained as Virgil or Milton, he would with it lose his vast superiority over these, his rich variety. That the whole first book of the Iliad is pitched lower than the rest, though it has vigorous descriptions, is denoted by the total absence of simile in it: for Homer’s kindling is always indicated by simile. The second book rises on the first, until the catalogue of ships, which (as if to atone for its flatness) is ushered in by five consecutive similes. In the third and fourth books the poet continues to rise, and almost culminates in the fifth; but then seems to restrain himself, lest nothing grander be left for Achilles. Although I do not believe in a unity of authorship between the Odyssey and the Iliad, yet in the Iliad itself I see such unity, that I cannot doubt its negligences to be from art. (The monstrous speech of Nestor in the 11th book is a case by itself. About 100 lines have perhaps been added later, for reasons other than literary.) I observe that just before the poet is about to bring out Achilles in his utmost splendour, he has three-quarters of a book comparatively tame, with a ridiculous legend told by Agamemnon in order to cast his own sins upon Fate. If Shakspeare introduces coarse wrangling, buffoonery, or mean superstition, no one claims or wishes this to be in a high diction or tragic rhythm; and why should anyone wish such a thing from Homer or Homer’s translator? I find nothing here in the poet to apologize for; but much cause for indignation, when the unlearned public is misled by translators or by critics to expect delicacy and elegance out of place. But I beg the unlearned to judge for himself whether Homer can have intended such lines as the following for poetry, and whether I am bound to make them any better than I do.
Then visiting he urged each man with words,
Mesthles and Glaucus and Medon and Thersilochus
And Asteropæus and Deisenor and Hippothoüs
And Phorkys and Chromius and Ennomus the augur.