Strep. The wild dog gives a long long oo-oo, which changes like a trumpet if you push your hand up and down it; and the tame dog says bow, wow, wow, like two or three panpipes blown one after another.
Soc. Exactly; you see the tame dog is humanized: he divides his voice into syllables, as men do. ‘Voice-dividing’ means ‘speaking in syllables’.
Strep. Oh, how clever you are!
Soc. Well then, you understand; ‘Voice-dividing’ means articulating.
Mr Arnold will see in the Scholiast on Iliad 1, 250, precisely this order of analysis for μέροπες. It seems to me to give not a traditional but a grammatical explanation. Be that as it may, it indicates that a Greek had to pass through exactly the same process in order to expound μέροπες, as an Englishman to get sense out of ‘voice-dividing’. The word is twice used by Æschylus, who affects Homeric words, and once by Euripides (Iph. T.) in the connection πολέσιν μερόπων, where the very unusual Ionism πολέσιν shows in how Homeric a region is the poet’s fancy. No other word ending in οψ except μέροψ can be confidently assigned to the root ὂψ, a voice. Ἦνοψ in Homer (itself of most uncertain sense and derivation) is generally referred to the other ὄψ. The sense of ἔλλοψ again[[52]] is very uncertain. Every way therefore μέροψ is ‘odd’ and obscure. The phrase ‘articulating’ is utterly prosaic and inadmissible. Vocal is rather too Latinized for my style, and besides, is apt to mean melodious. The phrase ‘voice-dividing’ is indeed easier to us than μέροπες can have been to the Athenians, because we all know what voice means, but they had to be taught scholastically what ὄπα meant; nor would easily guess that ὂψ in μέροψ had a sense, differing from ὂψ in (ἀ)στέροψ οἶνοψ, αἶθοψ, αἶθίοψ, νῶροψ (ἦνοψ), χάροψ. Finally, since μέροπες is only found in the plural, it remains an open question, whether it does not mean ‘speaking various languages’. Mr Arnold will find that Stephanus and Scapula treat it as doubtful, though Liddell and Scott do not name the second interpretation. I desired to leave in the English all the uncertainty of the Greek: but my critic is unencumbered with such cares.
Hitherto I have been unwillingly thrown into nothing but antagonism to Mr Arnold, who thereby at least adds tenfold value to his praise, and makes me proud when he declares that the structure of my sentences is good and Homeric. For this I give the credit to my metre, which alone confers on me this cardinal advantage. But in turn I will compliment Mr Arnold at the expense of some other critics. He does know, and they do not, the difference of flowing and smooth. A mountain torrent is flowing, but often very rough; such is Homer. The ‘staircases of Neptune’ on the canal of Languedoc are smooth, but do not flow: you have to descend abruptly from each level to the next. It would be unjust to say absolutely, that such is Pope’s smoothness; yet often, I feel, this censure would not be too severe. The rhyme forces him to so frequent a change of the nominative, that he becomes painfully discontinuous, where Homer is what Aristotle calls ‘long-linked’. At the same time, in our language, in order to impart a flowing style, good structure does not suffice. A principle is needed, unknown to the Greeks; viz. the natural divisions of the sentence oratorically, must coincide with the divisions of the verse musically. To attain this always in a long poem, is very difficult to a translator who is scrupulous as to tampering with the sense. I have not always been successful in this. But before any critic passes on me the general sentence that I am ‘deficient in flow’, let him count up the proportion of instances in which he can justly make the complaint, and mark whether they occur in elevated passages.
I shall now speak of the peculiarities of my diction, under three heads: 1. old or antiquated words; 2. coarse words expressive of outward actions, but having no moral colour; 3. words of which the sense has degenerated in modern days.
1. Mr Arnold appears to regard what is antiquated as ignoble. I think him, as usual, in fundamental error. In general the nobler words come from ancient style, and in no case can it be said that old words (as such) are ignoble. To introduce such terms as whereat, therefrom, quoth, beholden, steed, erst, anon, anent, into the midst of style which in all other respects is modern and prosaic, would be like to that which we often hear from half-educated people. The want of harmony makes us regard it as low-minded and uncouth. From this cause (as I suspect) has stolen into Mr Arnold’s mind the fallacy, that the words themselves are uncouth[[53]]. But the words are excellent, if only they are in proper keeping with the general style.—Now it is very possible, that in some passages, few or many, I am open to the charge of having mixed old and new style unskilfully; but I cannot admit that the old words (as such) are ignoble. No one speaks of Spenser’s dialect, nay, nor of Thomson’s; although with Thomson it was assumed, exactly as by me, but to a far greater extent, and without any such necessity as urges me. As I have stated in my preface, a broad tinge of antiquity in the style is essential, to make Homer’s barbaric puerilities and eccentricities less offensive. (Even Mr Arnold would admit this, if he admitted my facts: but he denies that there is anything eccentric, antique, quaint, barbaric in Homer: that is his only way of resisting my conclusion.) If Mr Gladstone were able to give his valuable time to work out an entire Iliad in his refined modern style, I feel confident that he would find it impossible to deal faithfully with the eccentric phraseology and with the negligent parts of the poem. I have the testimony of an unfriendly reviewer, that I am the first and only translator that has dared to give Homer’s constant epithets and not conceal his forms of thought: of course I could not have done this in modern style. The lisping of a child is well enough from a child, but is disgusting in a full-grown man. Cowper and Pope systematically cut out from Homer whatever they cannot make stately, and harmonize with modern style: even Mr Brandreth often shrinks, though he is brave enough to say ox-eyed Juno. Who then can doubt the extreme unfitness of their metre and of their modern diction? My opposers never fairly meet the argument. Mr Arnold, when most gratuitously censuring my mild rendering of κυνὸς κακομηχάνου ὀκρυοέσσης, does not dare to suggest any English for it himself. Even Mr Brandreth skips it. It is not merely offensive words; but the purest and simplest phrases, as a man’s ‘dear life’, ‘dear knees’, or his ‘tightly-built house’, are a stumbling-block to translators. No stronger proof is necessary, or perhaps is possible, than these phenomena give, that to shed an antique hue over Homer is of first necessity to a translator: without it, injustice is done both to the reader and to the poet. Whether I have managed the style well, is a separate question, and is matter of detail. I may have sometimes done well, sometimes ill; but I claim that my critics shall judge me from a broader ground, and shall not pertinaciously go on comparing my version with modern style, and condemning me as (what they are pleased to call) inelegant because it is not like refined modern poetry, when it specially avoids to be such. They never deal thus with Thomson or Chatterton, any more than with Shakspeare or Spenser.
There is no sharp distinction possible between the foreign and the antiquated in language. What is obsolete with us, may still live somewhere: as, what in Greek is called Poetic or Homeric, may at the same time be living Æolic. So, whether I take a word from Spenser or from Scotland, is generally unimportant. I do not remember more than four Scotch words, which I have occasionally adopted for convenience; viz. Callant, young man; Canny, right-minded; Bonny, handsome; to Skirl, to cry shrilly. A trochaic word, which I cannot get in English, is sometimes urgently needed. It is astonishing to me that those who ought to know both what a large mass of antique and foreign-sounding words an Athenian found in Homer, and how many Doric or Sicilian forms as well as Homeric words the Greek tragedians on principle brought into their songs, should make the outcry that they do against my very limited use of that which has an antique or Scotch sound. Classical scholars ought to set their faces against the double heresy, of trying to enforce, that foreign poetry, however various, shall be all rendered into one English dialect, and that this shall, in order of words and in diction, closely approximate to polished prose. From an Oxford Professor I should have expected the very opposite spirit to that which Mr Arnold shows. He ought to know and feel that one glory of Greek poetry is its great internal variety. He admits the principle that old words are a source of ennoblement for diction, when he extols the Bible as his standard: for surely he claims no rhetorical inspiration for the translators. Words which have come to us in a sacred connection, no doubt, gain a sacred hue, but they must not be allowed to desecrate other old and excellent words. Mr Arnold informs his Oxford hearers that ‘his Bibliolatry is perhaps excessive’. So the public will judge, if he say that wench, whore, pate, pot, gin, damn, busybody, audience, principality, generation, are epical noble words because they are in the Bible, and that lief, ken, in sooth, grim, stalwart, gait, guise, eld, hie, erst, are bad, because they are not there. Nine times out of ten, what are called ‘poetical’ words, are nothing but antique words, and are made ignoble by Mr Arnold’s doctrine. His very arbitrary condemnation of eld, lief, in sooth, gait, gentle friend in one passage of mine as ‘bad words’, is probably due to his monomaniac fancy that there is nothing quaint and nothing antique in Homer. Excellent and noble as are these words which he rebukes, excellent even for Æschylus, I should doubt the propriety of using them in the dialogue of Euripides; on the level of which he seems to think Homer to be.
2. Our language, especially the Saxon part of it, abounds with vigorous monosyllabic verbs, and dissyllabic frequentatives derived from them, indicative of strong physical action. For these words (which, I make no doubt, Mr Arnold regards as ignoble plebeians), I claim Quiritarian rights: but I do not wish them to displace patricians from high service. Such verbs as sweat, haul, plump, maul, yell, bang, splash, smash, thump, tug, scud, sprawl, spank, etc., I hold (in their purely physical sense) to be eminently epical: for the epic revels in descriptions of violent action to which they are suited. Intense muscular exertion in every form, intense physical action of the surrounding elements, with intense ascription or description of size or colour;—together make up an immense fraction of the poem. To cut out these words is to emasculate the epic. Even Pope admits such words. My eye in turning his pages was just now caught by: ‘They tug, they sweat’. Who will say that ‘tug’, ‘sweat’ are admissible, but ‘bang’, ‘smash’, ‘sputter’ are inadmissible? Mr Arnold resents my saying that Homer is often homely. He is homely expressly because he is natural. The epical diction admits both the gigantesque and the homely: it inexorably refuses the conventional, under which is comprised a vast mass of what some wrongly call elegant. But while I justify the use of homely words in a primary physical, I depreciate them in a secondary moral sense. Mr Arnold clearly is dull to this distinction, or he would not utter against me the following taunt, p. 91: