Mr Arnold censures me for representing Achilles as yelling. He is depicted by the poet as in the most violent physical rage, boiling over with passion and wholly uncontrouled. He smacks his two thighs at once; he rolls on the ground, μέγας μεγαλωστὶ; he defiles his hair with dust; he rends it; he grinds his teeth; fire flashes from his eyes; but—he may not ‘yell’, that would not be comme il faut! We shall agree, that in peace nothing so becomes a hero as modest stillness; but that ‘Peleus’ son, insatiate of combat’, full of the fiercest pent-up passion, should vent a little of it in a yell, seems to me quite in place. That the Greek ἰάχων is not necessarily to be so rendered, I am aware; but it is a very vigorous word, like peal and shriek; neither of which would here suit. I sometimes render it skirl: but ‘battle-yell’ is a received rightful phrase. Achilles is not a stately Virgilian pius Æneas, but is a far wilder barbarian.
After Mr Arnold has laid upon me the sins of Shakspeare, he amazes me by adding, p. 92: ‘The idiomatic language of Shakspeare, such language as “prate of his whereabout”, “jump the life to come”, “the damnation of his taking-off”, “quietus make with a bare bodkin”, should be carefully observed by the translator of Homer; although in every case he will have to decide for himself, whether the use, by him, of Shakspeare’s liberty, will or will not clash with his indispensable duty of nobleness’.
Of the Shakspearianisms here italicized by Mr Arnold, there is not one which I could endure to adopt. ‘His whereabout’, I regard as the flattest prose. (The word prate is a plebeian which I admit in its own low places; but how Mr Arnold can approve of it, consistently with his attacks on me, I do not understand.) Damnation and Taking-off (for Guilt and Murder), and Jump, I absolutely reject; and ‘quietus make’ would be nothing but an utterly inadmissible quotation from Shakspeare. Jump as an active verb is to me monstrous, but Jump is just the sort of modern prose word which is not noble. Leap, Bound, for great action, Skip, Frisk, Gambol for smaller, are all good.
I have shown against Mr Arnold—(1) that Homer was out-and-out antiquated to the Athenians, even when perfectly understood by them; (2) that his conceptions, similes, phraseology and epithets are habitually quaint, strange, unparalleled in Greek literature; and pardonable only to semibarbarism; (3) that they are intimately related to his noblest excellences; (4) that many words are so peculiar as to be still doubtful to us; (5) I have indicated that some of his descriptions and conceptions are horrible to us, though they are not so to his barbaric auditors; (6) that considerable portions of the poem are not poetry, but rhythmical prose like Horace’s Satires, and are interesting to us not as poetry but as portraying the manners or sentiments of the day. I now add (7) what is inevitable in all high and barbaric poetry, perhaps in all high poetry, many of his energetic descriptions are expressed in coarse physical words. I do not here attempt proof, for it might need a treatise: but I give one illustration; Il. 13, 136, Τρῶες προὒτυψαν ἀολλέες. Cowper, misled by the ignis fatuus of ‘stateliness’, renders it absurdly
The pow’rs of Ilium gave the first assault,
Embattled close;
but it is strictly, ‘The Trojans knocked-forward (or, thumped, butted, forward) in close pack’. The verb is too coarse for later polished prose, and even the adjective is very strong (packed together). I believe, that ‘Forward in pack the Troians pitch’d’, would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour; and I maintain that ‘Forward in mass the Troians pitch’d’, would be an irreprovable rendering.
Dryden in this respect is in entire harmony with Homeric style. No critic deals fairly with me in isolating any of these strong words, and then appealing to his readers whether I am not ignoble. Hereby he deprives me of the ἀγὼν, the ‘mighty current’ of Mr Arnold, and he misstates the problem; which is, whether the word is suitable, then and there, for the work required of it, as the coalman at the pit, the clown in the furrow, the huntsman in the open field.
3. There is a small number of words not natural plebeians, but patricians on which a most unjust bill of attainder has been passed, which I seek to reverse. On the first which I name, Mr Arnold will side with me, because it is a Biblical word, wench. In Lancashire I believe that at the age of about sixteen a ‘girl’ turns into ‘a wench’, or as we say ‘a young woman’. In Homer, ‘girl’ and ‘young woman’ are alike inadmissible; ‘maid’ or ‘maiden’ will not always suit, and ‘wench’ is the natural word. I do not know that I have used it three times, but I claim a right of using it, and protest against allowing the heroes of slang to deprive us of excellent words by their perverse misuse. If the imaginations of some men are always in satire and in low slang, so much the worse for them: but the more we yield to such demands, the more will be exacted. I expect, before long, to be told that brick is an ignoble word, meaning a jolly fellow, and that sell, cut are out of place in Homer. My metre, it seems, is inadmissible with some, because it is the metre of Yankee Doodle! as if Homer’s metre were not that of the Margites. Every noble poem is liable to be travestied, as the Iliad and Æschylus and Shakspeare have been. Every burlesque writer uses the noble metre, and caricatures the noble style. Mr Arnold says, I must not render τανύπεπλος ‘trailing-rob’d’, because it reminds him of ‘long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement’. What a confession as to the state of his imagination! Why not, of ‘a queen’s robe trailing on a marble pavement’? Did he never read
πέπλον μὲν κατέχευεν ἑανὸν πατρὸς ἐτ’ οὔδει?