‘To grunt and sweat under a weary load does perfectly well where it comes in Shakspeare: but if the translator of Homer, who will hardly have wound up our minds to the pitch at which these words of Hamlet find them, were to employ, when he has to speak of Homer’s heroes under the load of calamity, this figure of “grunting” and “sweating”, we should say, He Newmanizes’.
Mr Arnold here not only makes a mistake, he propagates a slander; as if I had ever used such words as grunt and sweat morally. If Homer in the Iliad spoke of grunting swine, as he does of sweating steeds, so should I. As the coarse metaphors here quoted from Shakspeare are utterly opposed to Homer’s style, to obtrude them on him would be a gross offence. Mr Arnold sends his readers away with the belief that this is my practice, though he has not dared to assert it. I bear such coarseness in Shakspeare, not because I am ‘wound up to a high pitch’ by him, ‘borne away by a mighty current’ (which Mr Arnold, with ingenious unfairness to me, assumes to be certain in a reader of Shakspeare and all but impossible in a reader of Homer), but because I know, that in Shakspeare’s time all literature was coarse, as was the speech of courtiers and of the queen herself. Mr Arnold imputes to me Shakspeare’s coarseness, from which I instinctively shrink; and when his logic leads to the conclusion, ‘he Shakspearizes’, he with gratuitous rancour turns it into ‘he Newmanizes’.
Some words which with the Biblical translators seem to have been noble, I should not now dare to use in the primitive sense. For instance, ‘His iniquity shall fall upon his own pate’. Yet I think pate a good metaphorical word and have used it of the sea-waves, in a bold passage, Il. 13, 795:
Then ón rush’d théy, with weight and mass like to a troublous whirlwind,
Which from the thundercloud of Jove down on the campaign plumpeth,
And doth the briny flood bestir with an unearthly uproar:
Then in the everbrawling sea full many a billow splasheth,
Hollow, and bald with hoary pate, one racing after other.
Is there really no ‘mighty current’ here, to sweep off petty criticism?
I have a remark on the strong physical word ‘plumpeth’ here used. It is fundamentally Milton’s, ‘plump down he drops ten thousand fathom deep’; plumb and plump in this sense are clearly the same root. I confess I have not been able to find the verb in an old writer, though it is so common now. Old writers do not say ‘to plumb down’, but ‘to drop plumb down’. Perhaps in a second edition (if I reach to it), I may alter the words to ‘plumb ... droppeth’, on this ground; but I do turn sick at the mawkishness of critics, one of whom, who ought to know better, tells me that the word plump reminds him ‘of the crinolined hoyden of a boarding-school’!! If he had said, ‘It is too like the phrase of a sailor, of a peasant, of a schoolboy’, this objection would be at least intelligible. However: the word is intended to express the violent impact of a body descending from aloft, and it does express it.