It is our custom, or that of our time, to decry classical education. We have a right to do so, no doubt, if our unfavorable judgment regarding it is based upon a correct and intelligent estimate of its value, as a method of training the youthful mind and of disciplining the intellect by the exercise of its nascent power upon works of model taste and unrivalled elegance. Submitting classical education to this test, we cannot glibly join in the outcry against it of those who see in it only a process for acquiring a knowledge of Greek and Latin words, of no earthly use to the possessor or to anybody else. Neither, on the other hand, would we, upon such test, accept it as the only canon of liberal education, to the exclusion of others that may serve the purpose of instruction with more practical advantage.
We would fain offer Earl Derby's translation of the Iliad as an example, according to our notion, of the practical process to be followed in studying the classic authors in order to profit by their beauty, and of the gifts the mind receives from the cultivation of classic literature. Not a poet himself, the noble lord has imbibed into his own plastic mind the conceptions of the "sovereign poet" in all their poetic beauty and serene grandeur, and reproduces them for the English reader, shapely moulded, not distorted nor disfigured. We shall not enter into a comparison of his translation with that of Pope or Cowper, neither shall we discuss the fitness of the metre he has adopted. His own translation, if argument were wanted, would compel us to agree with him that he has selected that metre best suited for rendering the Homeric poem into English verse, and we give him our hearty accord in his condemnation of the English hexameter— a lumbering rhythm, not inaptly compared, by some author, to the noise of pumpkins rolling on a barn-floor. We shall merely show, by a few extracts, how he has succeeded in reproducing the conceptions of the poem, and how happily he has caught, without imparting any admixture of modern sentiment, the flowing style in which the poet pours forth, as it were, without drawing breath, his grand melodious strain. His translation is not a dead cast, but a copy, and a copy instinct with life. His task was not an easy one; and when we reflect upon his life and eminent station, we cannot help thinking that to ordinary men the difficulty would be much enhanced thereby. Still, it redounds the more to the honor of English scholarship and English statesmanship, that the foremost among its orators and statesmen, who, for more than a quarter of a century, has borne a large share of the weighty affairs of a vast empire; who by his talents has helped to solve the thousand vexed questions of modern politics and reform, could, during leisure, withdraw his mind from the absorbing interests of the political arena, and allow it to repose on the sublime naturalness of the Iliad, and float in placid unison with the serene grandeur of Homer's song. Though the translation is truly Homeric, yet, wrought as it is with spirit and genius, it bears in it something of the mind it springs from. The reader will not fail to discover in the echo of the Iliad, so faithfully reflected in its purity, natural freshness, and vigor, something of that splendid eloquence heard amid strife as angry and as fierce as raged between Agamemnon and Achilles.
In giving quotations, we shall omit those finer passages that are familiar to most readers, such as those well-known passages of the Third Book, with their beautiful similes, that describe the Greeks assembling and passing in review before their leaders. On these many a youthful and full-grown bard has tried his skill; but never have we seen them so beautifully rendered as in the translation before us. We select for our readers, first, that picture in the Fourth Book, in which all the raging elements of battle are thronged together—the maddening vengeance, the wrath, the fury of hostile ranks in the horror of collision—and which commences with the description of
"Discord unappeased, 504
Of blood-stained Mars the sister and the friend;
With humble crest at first, anon her head,
While yet she treads the earth, affronts the skies.
The gage of battle in the midst she threw,
Strode through the crowd and woe to mortals wrought,
When to their midst they came, together rushed 510
Bucklers and lances, and the furious might
Of mail-clad warriors; bossy shield on shield
Clattered in conflict; loud the clamor rose.
Then rose two mingled shouts and groans of men
Slaying and slain; the earth ran red with blood, 513
As when descending from the mountain's brow,
Two wintry torrents from their copious source
Pour downward to the narrow pass, where meet
Their mingled waters in some deep ravine,
Their weight of flood; on the far mountain side 520
The shepherd hears the roar; so loud arose
The shouts and yells of those commingling hosts."
Nothing can give a better idea of the power of the translator than the manner in which he has compressed this passage, with its bewildering throng of elements, into the same number of lines as the original. We miss none of the simple grandeur, none of the directness, none of the even, rapid movement so characteristic of Homer. There is no importation of what belongs not to Homer into it, no amplification, no turning aside from the object, or indirectness in introducing and depicting every incident in the picture. It is Homer's strain; grand, rapid, and simple.
A few lines further on we have one of those beautiful images by which the poet has a fondness for describing the fall of his young heroes. Depicting the death of the stripling Simoisius, he sings:
"Prone in the dust he fell; 552
As some tall poplar, grown in marshy mead,
Smooth-stemmed, with boughs up-springing toward the head."
Again of young Gorgythion, in the Eighth Book:
"Down sank his head, as in a garden sinks
A ripened poppy charged with vernal rains; 350
So sank his head beneath his helmet's weight."