Mr Arnold has in some respects attacked me discreetly; I mean, where he has said that which damages me with his readers, and yet leaves me no possible reply. What is easier than for one to call another ignoble? what more damaging? what harder to refute? Then when he speaks of my ‘metrical exploits’ how can I be offended? to what have I to reply? His words are expressive either of compliment or of contempt; but in either case are untangible. Again: when he would show how tender he has been of my honour, and how unwilling to expose my enormities, he says: p. 57: ‘I will by no means search in Mr Newman’s version for passages likely to raise a laugh: that search, alas! would be far too easy’; I find the pity which the word alas! expresses, to be very clever, and very effective against me. But, I think, he was not discreet, but very unwise, in making dogmatic statements on the ground of erudition, many of which I have exposed; and about which much more remains to be said than space will allow me.
In his denial that Homer is ‘garrulous’, he complains that so many think him to be ‘diffuse’. Mr Arnold, it seems, is unaware of that very prominent peculiarity; which suits ill even to Mr Gladstone’s style. Thus, where Homer said (and I said) in a passage quoted above, ‘people that have a voice in their bosom’, Mr Gladstone has only ‘speaking men’. I have noticed the epithet shaggy as quaint, in ‘His heart in his shaggy bosom was divided’, where, in a moral thought, a physical epithet is obtruded. But even if ‘shaggy’ be dropped, it remains diffuse (and characteristically so) to say ‘my heart in my bosom is divided’, for ‘I doubt’. So—‘I will speak what my heart in my bosom bids me’. So, Homer makes men think κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμὸν, ‘in their heart and mind’; and deprives them of ‘mind and soul’. Also: ‘this appeared to him in his mind to be the best counsel’. Mr Arnold assumes tones of great superiority; but every school-boy knows that diffuseness is a distinguishing characteristic of Homer. Again, the poet’s epithets are often selected by their convenience for his metre; sometimes perhaps even appropriated for no other cause. No one has ever given any better reason why Diomedes and Menelaus are almost exclusively called βοὴν ἀγαθὸς, except that it suits the metre. This belongs to the improvisatore, the negligent, the ballad style. The word ἐϋμμελίης, which I with others render ‘ashen-speared’, is said of Priam, of Panthus, and of sons of Panthus. Mr Arnold rebukes me, p. 106, for violating my own principles. ‘I say, on the other hand, that εὐμμελίω has not the effect[[51]] of a peculiarity in the original, while “ashen-speared” has the effect of a peculiarity in the English: and “warlike” is as marking an equivalent as I dare give for ἐϋμμελίω, for fear of disturbing the balance of expression in Homer’s sentence’. Mr Arnold cannot write a sentence on Greek, without showing an ignorance hard to excuse in one who thus comes forward as a vituperating censor. Warlike is a word current in the lips and books of all Englishmen: ἐϋμμελίης is a word never used, never, I believe, in all Greek literature, by anyone but Homer. If he does but turn to Liddell and Scott, he will see their statement, that the Attic form εὐμελίας is only to be found in grammars. He is here, as always, wrong in his facts. The word is most singular in Greek; more singular by far than ‘ashen-spear’d’ in English, because it is more obscure, as is its special application to one or two persons: and in truth I have doubted whether we any better understand Eumelian Priam than Gerenian Nestor.—Mr Arnold presently imputes to me the opinion that χιτὼν means ‘a cloak’, which he does not dispute; but if I had thought it necessary to be literal, I must have rendered χαλκοχίτωνες brazen-shirted. He suggests to me the rendering ‘brazen-coated’, which I have used in Il. 4, 285 and elsewhere. I have also used ‘brazen-clad’, and I now prefer ‘brazen-mail’d’. I here wish only to press that Mr Arnold’s criticism proceeds on a false fact. Homer’s epithet was not a familiar word at Athens (in any other sense than as Burns or Virgil may be familiar to Mr Arnold), but was strange, unknown even to their poets; hence his demand that I shall use a word already familiar in English poetry is doubly baseless. The later poets of Greece have plenty of words beginning with χαλκο-; but this one word is exclusively Homer’s.—Everything that I have now said, may be repeated still more pointedly concerning ἐϋκνημῖδες, inasmuch as directing attention to leg-armour is peculiarly quaint. No one in all Greek literature (as far as I know) names the word but Homer; and yet Mr Arnold turns on me with his ever reiterated, ever unsupported, assertions and censures, of course assuming that ‘the scholar’ is with him. (I have no theory at hand, to explain why he regards his own word to suffice without attempt at proof.) The epithet is intensely peculiar; and I observe that Mr Arnold has not dared to suggest a translation. It is clear to me that he is ashamed of my poet’s oddities; and has no mode of escaping from them but by bluntly denying facts. Equally peculiar to Homer are the words κυδιάνειρα, τανύπεπλος and twenty others, equally unknown to Attic the peculiar compound μελιήδης (adopted from Homer by Pindar), about all which he carps at me on false grounds. But I pass these, and speak a little more at length about μέροπες.
Will the reader allow me to vary these tedious details, by imagining a conversation between the Aristophanic Socrates and his clownish pupil Strepsiades. I suppose the philosopher to be instructing him in the higher Greek, Homer being the text.
Soc. Now Streppy, tell me what μέροπες ἄνθρωποι means?
Strep. Let me see: μέροπες? that must mean ‘half-faced’.
Soc. Nonsense, silly fellow: think again.
Strep. Well then: μέροπες, half-eyed, squinting.
Soc. No; you are playing the fool: it is not our ὀπ in ὄψις, ὄψομαι, κάτοπτρον, but another sort of ὀπ.
Strep. Why, you yesterday told me that οἴνοπα was ‘wine-faced’, and αἴθοπα ‘blazing-faced’, something like our αἰθίοψ.
Soc. Ah! well: it is not so wonderful that you go wrong. It is true, there is also νῶροψ, στέροψ, ἦνοψ. Those might mislead you: μέροψ is rather peculiar. Now cannot you think of any characteristic of mankind, which μέροπες will express. How do men differ from other animals?