It has more than once been suggested to me that I should translate Homer. That is a task for which I have neither the time nor the courage; but the suggestion led me to regard yet more closely a poet whom I had already long studied, and for one or two years the works of Homer were seldom out of my hands. The study of classical literature is probably on the decline; but, whatever may be the fate of this study in general, it is certain that, as instruction spreads and the number of readers increases, attention will be more and more directed to the poetry of Homer, not indeed as part of a classical course, but as the most important poetical monument existing. Even within the last ten years two fresh translations of the Iliad have appeared in England: one by a man of great ability and genuine learning, Professor Newman; the other by Mr Wright, the conscientious and painstaking translator of Dante. It may safely be asserted that neither of these works will take rank as the standard translation of Homer; that the task of rendering him will still be attempted by other translators. It may perhaps be possible to render to these some service, to save them some loss of labour, by pointing out rocks on which their predecessors have split, and the right objects on which a translator of Homer should fix his attention.

It is disputed what aim a translator should propose to himself in dealing with his original. Even this preliminary is not yet settled. On one side it is said that the translation ought to be such ‘that the reader should, if possible, forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work—something original’ (if the translation be English), ‘from an English hand’. The real original is in this case, it is said, ‘taken as a basis on which to rear a poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have affected its natural hearers’. On the other hand, Mr Newman, who states the foregoing doctrine only to condemn it, declares that he ‘aims at precisely the opposite: to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as he is able, with the greater care the more foreign it may happen to be’; so that it may ‘never be forgotten that he is imitating, and imitating in a different material’. The translator’s ‘first duty’, says Mr Newman ‘is a historical one, to be faithful’. Probably both sides would agree that the translator’s ‘first duty is to be faithful’; but the question at issue between them is, in what faithfulness consists.

My one object is to give practical advice to a translator; and I shall not the least concern myself with theories of translation as such. But I advise the translator not to try ‘to rear on the basis of the Iliad, a poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have affected its natural hearers’; and for this simple reason, that we cannot possibly tell how the Iliad ‘affected its natural hearers’. It is probably meant merely that he should try to affect Englishmen powerfully, as Homer affected Greeks powerfully; but this direction is not enough, and can give no real guidance. For all great poets affect their hearers powerfully, but the effect of one poet is one thing, that of another poet another thing: it is our translator’s business to reproduce the effect of Homer, and the most powerful emotion of the unlearned English reader can never assure him whether he has reproduced this, or whether he has produced something else. So, again, he may follow Mr Newman’s directions, he may try to be ‘faithful’, he may ‘retain every peculiarity of his original’; but who is to assure him, who is to assure Mr Newman himself, that, when he has done this, he has done that for which Mr Newman enjoins this to be done, ‘adhered closely to Homer’s manner and habit of thought’? Evidently the translator needs some more practical directions than these. No one can tell him how Homer affected the Greeks; but there are those who can tell him how Homer affects them. These are scholars; who possess, at the same time with knowledge of Greek, adequate poetical taste and feeling. No translation will seem to them of much worth compared with the original; but they alone can say whether the translation produces more or less the same effect upon them as the original. They are the only competent tribunal in this matter: the Greeks are dead; the unlearned Englishman has not the data for judging; and no man can safely confide in his own single judgment of his own work. Let not the translator, then, trust to his notions of what the ancient Greeks would have thought of him; he will lose himself in the vague. Let him not trust to what the ordinary English reader thinks of him; he will be taking the blind for his guide. Let him not trust to his own judgment of his own work; he may be misled by individual caprices. Let him ask how his work affects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry; whether to read it gives the Provost of Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cambridge, or Professor Jowett here in Oxford, at all the same feeling which to read the original gives them. I consider that when Bentley said of Pope’s translation, ‘It was a pretty poem, but must not be called Homer’, the work, in spite of all its power and attractiveness, was judged.

Ὡς ἂν ὁ φρόνιμος ὁρίσειεν, ‘as the judicious would determine’, that is a test to which everyone professes himself willing to submit his works. Unhappily, in most cases, no two persons agree as to who ‘the judicious’ are. In the present case, the ambiguity is removed: I suppose the translator at one with me as to the tribunal to which alone he should look for judgment; and he has thus obtained a practical test by which to estimate the real success of his work. How is he to proceed, in order that his work, tried by this test, may be found most successful?

First of all, there are certain negative counsels which I will give him. Homer has occupied men’s minds so much, such a literature has arisen about him, that every one who approaches him should resolve strictly to limit himself to that which may directly serve the object for which he approaches him. I advise the translator to have nothing to do with the questions, whether Homer ever existed; whether the poet of the Iliad be one or many; whether the Iliad be one poem or an Achilleis and an Iliad stuck together; whether the Christian doctrine of the Atonement is shadowed forth in the Homeric mythology; whether the Goddess Latona in any way prefigures the Virgin Mary, and so on. These are questions which have been discussed with learning, with ingenuity, nay, with genius; but they have two inconveniences,—one general for all who approach them, one particular for the translator. The general inconvenience is that there really exist no data for determining them. The particular inconvenience is that their solution by the translator, even were it possible, could be of no benefit to his translation.

I advise him, again, not to trouble himself with constructing a special vocabulary for his use in translation; with excluding a certain class of English words, and with confining himself to another class, in obedience to any theory about the peculiar qualities of Homer’s style. Mr Newman says that ‘the entire dialect of Homer being essentially archaic, that of a translator ought to be as much Saxo-Norman as possible, and owe as little as possible to the elements thrown into our language by classical learning’. Mr Newman is unfortunate in the observance of his own theory; for I continually find in his translation words of Latin origin, which seem to me quite alien to the simplicity of Homer,—‘responsive’, for instance, which is a favourite word of Mr Newman, to represent the Homeric ἀμειβόμενος:

Great Hector of the motley helm thus spake to her responsive.

But thus responsively to him spake godlike Alexander.

And the word ‘celestial’ again, in the grand address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles,

You, who are born celestial, from Eld and Death exempted!

seems to me in that place exactly to jar upon the feeling as too bookish. But, apart from the question of Mr Newman’s fidelity to his own theory, such a theory seems to me both dangerous for a translator and false in itself. Dangerous for a translator; because, wherever one finds such a theory announced (and one finds it pretty often), it is generally followed by an explosion of pedantry; and pedantry is of all things in the world the most un-Homeric. False in itself; because, in fact, we owe to the Latin element in our language most of that very rapidity and clear decisiveness by which it is contradistinguished from the German, and in sympathy with the languages of Greece and Rome: so that to limit an English translator of Homer to words of Saxon origin is to deprive him of one of his special advantages for translating Homer. In Voss’s well-known translation of Homer, it is precisely the qualities of his German language itself, something heavy and trailing both in the structure of its sentences and in the words of which it is composed, which prevent his translation, in spite of the hexameters, in spite of the fidelity, from creating in us the impression created by the Greek. Mr Newman’s prescription, if followed, would just strip the English translator of the advantage which he has over Voss.

The frame of mind in which we approach an author influences our correctness of appreciation of him; and Homer should be approached by a translator in the simplest frame of mind possible. Modern sentiment tries to make the ancient not less than the modern world its own; but against modern sentiment in its applications to Homer the translator, if he would feel Homer truly—and unless he feels him truly, how can he render him truly?—cannot be too much on his guard. For example: the writer of an interesting article on English translations of Homer, in the last number of the National Review, quotes, I see, with admiration, a criticism of Mr Ruskin on the use of the epithet φυσίζοος, ‘life-giving’, in that beautiful passage in the third book of the Iliad, which follows Helen’s mention of her brothers Castor and Pollux as alive, though they were in truth dead:

ὣς φάτο· τοὺς δ’ ἤδη κατέχεν φυσίζοος αἶα

ἐν Λακεδαίμονι αὖθι, φίλῃ ἐν πατρίδι γαίῃ.[^[1]]

‘The poet’, says Mr Ruskin, ‘has to speak of the earth in sadness; but he will not let that sadness affect or change his thought of it. No; though Castor and Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our mother still,—fruitful, life-giving’. This is a just specimen of that sort of application of modern sentiment to the ancients, against which a student, who wishes to feel the ancients truly, cannot too resolutely defend himself. It reminds one, as, alas! so much of Mr Ruskin’s writing reminds one, of those words of the most delicate of living critics: “Comme tout genre de composition a son écueil particulier, celui du genre romanesque, c’est le faux”. The reader may feel moved as he reads it; but it is not the less an example of ‘le faux’ in criticism; it is false. It is not true, as to that particular passage, that Homer called the earth φυσίζοος because, ‘though he had to speak of the earth in sadness, he would not let that sadness change or affect his thought of it’, but consoled himself by considering that ‘the earth is our mother still,—fruitful, life-giving’. It is not true, as a matter of general criticism, that this kind of sentimentality, eminently modern, inspires Homer at all. ‘From Homer and Polygnotus I every day learn more clearly’, says Goethe, ‘that in our life here above ground we have, properly speaking, to enact Hell’[^[2]]:—if the student must absolutely have a keynote to the Iliad, let him take this of Goethe, and see what he can do with it; it will not, at any rate, like the tender pantheism of Mr Ruskin, falsify for him the whole strain of Homer.

These are negative counsels; I come to the positive. When I say, the translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author;—that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally that he is eminently noble;—I probably seem to be saying what is too general to be of much service to anybody. Yet it is strictly true that, for want of duly penetrating themselves with the first-named quality of Homer, his rapidity, Cowper and Mr Wright have failed in rendering him; that, for want of duly appreciating the second-named quality, his plainness and directness of style and dictation, Pope and Mr Sotheby have failed in rendering him; that for want of appreciating the third, his plainness and directness of ideas, Chapman has failed in rendering him; while for want of appreciating the fourth, his nobleness, Mr Newman, who has clearly seen some of the faults of his predecessors, has yet failed more conspicuously than any of them.

Coleridge says, in his strange language, speaking of the union of the human soul with the divine essence, that this takes place

Whene’er the mist, which stands ’twixt God and thee,

Defecates to a pure transparency;

and so, too, it may be said of that union of the translator with his original, which alone can produce a good translation, that it takes place when the mist which stands between them—the mist of alien modes of thinking, speaking, and feeling on the translator’s part—‘defecates to a pure transparency’, and disappears. But between Cowper and Homer—(Mr Wright repeats in the main Cowper’s manner, as Mr Sotheby repeats Pope’s manner, and neither Mr Wright’s translation nor Mr Sotheby’s has, I must be forgiven for saying, any proper reason for existing)—between Cowper and Homer there is interposed the mist of Cowper’s elaborate Miltonic manner, entirely alien to the flowing rapidity of Homer; between Pope and Homer there is interposed the mist of Pope’s literary artificial manner, entirely alien to the plain naturalness of Homer’s manner; between Chapman and Homer there is interposed the mist of the fancifulness of the Elizabethan age, entirely alien to the plain directness of Homer’s thought and feeling; while between Mr Newman and Homer is interposed a cloud of more than Egyptian thickness,—namely, a manner, in Mr Newman’s version, eminently ignoble, while Homer’s manner is eminently noble.

I do not despair of making all these propositions clear to a student who approaches Homer with a free mind. First, Homer is eminently rapid, and to this rapidity the elaborate movement of Miltonic blank verse is alien. The reputation of Cowper, that most interesting man and excellent poet, does not depend on his translation of Homer; and in his preface to the second edition, he himself tells us that he felt,—he had too much poetical taste not to feel,—on returning to his own version after six or seven years, ‘more dissatisfied with it himself than the most difficult to be pleased of all his judges’. And he was dissatisfied with it for the right reason,—that ‘it seemed to him deficient in the grace of ease’. Yet he seems to have originally misconceived the manner of Homer so much, that it is no wonder he rendered him amiss. ‘The similitude of Milton’s manner to that of Homer is such’, he says, ‘that no person familiar with both can read either without being reminded of the other; and it is in those breaks and pauses to which the numbers of the English poet are so much indebted, both for their dignity and variety, that he chiefly copies the Grecian’. It would be more true to say: ‘The unlikeness of Milton’s manner to that of Homer is such, that no person familiar with both can read either without being struck with his difference from the other; and it is in his breaks and pauses that the English poet is most unlike the Grecian’.

The inversion and pregnant conciseness of Milton or Dante are, doubtless, most impressive qualities of style; but they are the very opposites of the directness and flowingness of Homer, which he keeps alike in passages of the simplest narrative, and in those of the deepest emotion. Not only, for example, are these lines of Cowper un-Homeric:

So numerous seemed those fires the banks between

Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece

In prospect all of Troy;

where the position of the word ‘blazing’ gives an entirely un-Homeric movement to this simple passage, describing the fires of the Trojan camp outside of Troy; but the following lines, in that very highly-wrought passage where the horse of Achilles answers his master’s reproaches for having left Patroclus on the field of battle, are equally un-Homeric:

For not through sloth or tardiness on us

Aught chargeable, have Ilium’s sons thine arms

Stript from Patroclus’ shoulders; but a God

Matchless in battle, offspring of bright-haired

Latona, him contending in the van

Slew, for the glory of the chief of Troy.

Here even the first inversion, ‘have Ilium’s sons thine arms Stript from Patroclus’ shoulders’, gives the reader a sense of a movement not Homeric; and the second inversion, ‘a God him contending in the van Slew’, gives this sense ten times stronger. Instead of moving on without check, as in reading the original, the reader twice finds himself, in reading the translation, brought up and checked. Homer moves with the same simplicity and rapidity in the highly-wrought as in the simple passage.

It is in vain that Cowper insists on his fidelity: ‘my chief boast is that I have adhered closely to my original’:—‘the matter found in me, whether the reader like it or not, is found also in Homer; and the matter not found in me, how much soever the reader may admire it, is found only in Mr Pope’. To suppose that it is fidelity to an original to give its matter, unless you at the same time give its manner; or, rather, to suppose that you can really give its matter at all, unless you can give its manner, is just the mistake of our pre-Raphaelite school of painters, who do not understand that the peculiar effect of nature resides in the whole and not in the parts. So the peculiar effect of a poet resides in his manner and movement, not in his words taken separately. It is well known how conscientiously literal is Cowper in his translation of Homer. It is well known how extravagantly free is Pope.

So let it be!

Portents and prodigies are lost on me;

that is Pope’s rendering of the words,

Ξάνθε, τί μοι θάνατον μαντεύεαι; οὐδέ τί σε χρή·[^[3]]

Xanthus, why prophesiest thou my death to me? thou needest not at all:

yet, on the whole, Pope’s translation of the Iliad is more Homeric than Cowper’s, for it is more rapid.

Pope’s movement, however, though rapid, is not of the same kind as Homer’s; and here I come to the real objection to rhyme in a translation of Homer. It is commonly said that rhyme is to be abandoned in a translation of Homer, because ‘the exigencies of rhyme’, to quote Mr Newman, ‘positively forbid faithfulness’; because ‘a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme’, to quote Cowper, ‘is impossible’. This, however, is merely an accidental objection to rhyme. If this were all, it might be supposed, that if rhymes were more abundant Homer could be adequately translated in rhyme. But this is not so; there is a deeper, a substantial objection to rhyme in a translation of Homer. It is, that rhyme inevitably tends to pair lines which in the original are independent, and thus the movement of the poem is changed. In these lines of Chapman, for instance, from Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus, in the twelfth book of the Iliad:

O friend, if keeping back

Would keep back age from us, and death, and that we might not wrack

In this life’s human sea at all, but that deferring now

We shunned death ever,—nor would I half this vain valor show,

Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance;

But since we must go, though not here, and that besides the chance

Proposed now, there are infinite fates, etc.

Here the necessity of making the line,

Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance,

rhyme with the line which follows it, entirely changes and spoils the movement of the passage.

οὔτε κεν αὐτὸς ἐνὶ πρώτοισι μαχοίμην,

οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν·[^[4]]

Neither would I myself go forth to fight with the foremost,

Nor would I urge thee on to enter the glorious battle,

says Homer; there he stops, and begins an opposed movement:

νῦν δ’—ἔμπης γὰρ Κῆρες ἐφεστᾶσιν θανάτοιο—

But—for a thousand fates of death stand close to us always—

This line, in which Homer wishes to go away with the most marked rapidity from the line before, Chapman is forced, by the necessity of rhyming, intimately to connect with the line before.

But since we must go, though not here, and that besides the chance.

The moment the word chance strikes our ear, we are irresistibly carried back to advance and to the whole previous line, which, according to Homer’s own feeling, we ought to have left behind us entirely, and to be moving farther and farther away from.

Rhyme certainly, by intensifying antithesis, can intensify separation, and this is precisely what Pope does; but this balanced rhetorical antithesis, though very effective, is entirely un-Homeric. And this is what I mean by saying that Pope fails to render Homer, because he does not render his plainness and directness of style and diction. Where Homer marks separation by moving away, Pope marks it by antithesis. No passage could show this better than the passage I have just quoted, on which I will pause for a moment.

Robert Wood, whose Essay on the Genius of Homer is mentioned by Goethe as one of the books which fell into his hands when his powers were first developing themselves, and strongly interested him, relates of this passage a striking story. He says that in 1762, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, being then Under-Secretary of State, he was directed to wait upon the President of the Council, Lord Granville, a few days before he died, with the preliminary articles of the Treaty of Paris. ‘I found him’, he continues, ‘so languid, that I proposed postponing my business for another time; but he insisted that I should stay, saying, it could not prolong his life to neglect his duty; and repeating the following passage out of Sarpedon’s speech, he dwelled with particular emphasis on the third line, which recalled to his mind the distinguishing part he had taken in public affairs:

ὦ πέπον, εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε,

αἰεὶ δὴ μέλλοιμεν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε

ἔσσεσθ’, οὔτε κεν αὐτὸς ἐνὶ πρώτοισι μαχοίμην,[^[5]]

οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν·

νῦν δ’—ἔμπης γὰρ Κῆρες ἐφεστᾶσιν θανάτοιο

μυρίαι, ἃς οὐκ ἔστι φυγεῖν βρότον, οὐδ’ ὑπαλύξαι—

ἴομεν.

His Lordship repeated the last word several times with a calm and determinate resignation; and, after a serious pause of some minutes, he desired to hear the Treaty read, to which he listened with great attention, and recovered spirits enough to declare the approbation of a dying statesman (I use his own words) “on the most glorious war, and most honourable peace, this nation ever saw”’[^[6]].

I quote this story, first, because it is interesting as exhibiting the English aristocracy at its very height of culture, lofty spirit, and greatness, towards the middle of the 18th century. I quote it, secondly, because it seems to me to illustrate Goethe’s saying which I mentioned, that our life, in Homer’s view of it, represents a conflict and a hell; and it brings out, too, what there is tonic and fortifying in this doctrine. I quote it, lastly, because it shows that the passage is just one of those in translating which Pope will be at his best, a passage of strong emotion and oratorical movement, not of simple narrative or description.

Pope translates the passage thus:

Could all our care elude the gloomy grave

Which claims no less the fearful than the brave,

For lust of fame I should not vainly dare

In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war:

But since, alas! ignoble age must come,

Disease, and death’s inexorable doom;

The life which others pay, let us bestow,

And give to fame what we to nature owe.

Nothing could better exhibit Pope’s prodigious talent; and nothing, too, could be better in its own way. But, as Bentley said, ‘You must not call it Homer’. One feels that Homer’s thought has passed through a literary and rhetorical crucible, and come out highly intellectualised; come out in a form which strongly impresses us, indeed, but which no longer impresses us in the same way as when it was uttered by Homer. The antithesis of the last two lines—

The life which others pay, let us bestow,

And give to fame what we to nature owe

is excellent, and is just suited to Pope’s heroic couplet; but neither the antithesis itself, nor the couplet which conveys it, is suited to the feeling or to the movement of the Homeric ἴομεν.

A literary and intellectualised language is, however, in its own way well suited to grand matters; and Pope, with a language of this kind and his own admirable talent, comes off well enough as long as he has passion, or oratory, or a great crisis to deal with. Even here, as I have been pointing out, he does not render Homer; but he and his style are in themselves strong. It is when he comes to level passages, passages of narrative or description, that he and his style are sorely tried, and prove themselves weak. A perfectly plain direct style can of course convey the simplest matter as naturally as the grandest; indeed, it must be harder for it, one would say, to convey a grand matter worthily and nobly, than to convey a common matter, as alone such a matter should be conveyed, plainly and simply. But the style of Rasselas is incomparably better fitted to describe a sage philosophising than a soldier lighting his camp-fire. The style of Pope is not the style of Rasselas; but it is equally a literary style, equally unfitted to describe a simple matter with the plain naturalness of Homer.

Everyone knows the passage at the end of the eighth book of the Iliad, where the fires of the Trojan encampment are likened to the stars. It is very far from my wish to hold Pope up to ridicule, so I shall not quote the commencement of the passage, which in the original is of great and celebrated beauty, and in translating which Pope has been singularly and notoriously fortunate. But the latter part of the passage, where Homer leaves the stars, and comes to the Trojan fires, treats of the plainest, most matter-of-fact subject possible, and deals with this, as Homer always deals with every subject, in the plainest and most straightforward style. ‘So many in number, between the ships and the streams of Xanthus, shone forth in front of Troy the fires kindled by the Trojans. There were kindled a thousand fires in the plain; and by each one there sat fifty men in the light of the blazing fire. And the horses, munching white barley and rye, and standing by the chariots, waited for the bright-throned Morning [^[7]]’.

In Pope’s translation, this plain story becomes the following:

So many flames before proud Ilion blaze,

And brighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays;

The long reflections of the distant fires

Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires.

A thousand piles the dusky horrors gild,

And shoot a shady lustre o’er the field.

Full fifty guards each flaming pile attend,

Whose umbered arms, by fits, thick flashes send;

Loud neigh the coursers o’er their heaps of corn,

And ardent warriors wait the rising morn.

It is for passages of this sort, which, after all, form the bulk of a narrative poem, that Pope’s style is so bad. In elevated passages he is powerful, as Homer is powerful, though not in the same way; but in plain narrative, where Homer is still powerful and delightful, Pope, by the inherent fault of his style, is ineffective and out of taste. Wordsworth says somewhere, that wherever Virgil seems to have composed ‘with his eye on the object’, Dryden fails to render him. Homer invariably composes ‘with his eye on the object’, whether the object be a moral or a material one: Pope composes with his eye on his style, into which he translates his object, whatever it is. That, therefore, which Homer conveys to us immediately, Pope conveys to us through a medium. He aims at turning Homer’s sentiments pointedly and rhetorically; at investing Homer’s description with ornament and dignity. A sentiment may be changed by being put into a pointed and oratorical form, yet may still be very effective in that form; but a description, the moment it takes its eyes off that which it is to describe, and begins to think of ornamenting itself, is worthless.

Therefore, I say, the translator of Homer should penetrate himself with a sense of the plainness and directness of Homer’s style; of the simplicity with which Homer’s thought is evolved and expressed. He has Pope’s fate before his eyes, to show him what a divorce may be created even between the most gifted translator and Homer by an artificial evolution of thought and a literary cast of style.

Chapman’s style is not artificial and literary like Pope’s nor his movement elaborate and self-retarding like the Miltonic movement of Cowper. He is plain-spoken, fresh, vigorous, and, to a certain degree, rapid; and all these are Homeric qualities. I cannot say that I think the movement of his fourteen-syllable line, which has been so much commended, Homeric; but on this point I shall have more to say by and by, when I come to speak of Mr Newman’s metrical exploits. But it is not distinctly anti-Homeric, like the movement of Milton’s blank verse; and it has a rapidity of its own. Chapman’s diction, too, is generally good, that is, appropriate to Homer; above all, the syntactical character of his style is appropriate. With these merits, what prevents his translation from being a satisfactory version of Homer? Is it merely the want of literal faithfulness to his original, imposed upon him, it is said, by the exigencies of rhyme? Has this celebrated version, which has so many advantages, no other and deeper defect than that? Its author is a poet, and a poet, too, of the Elizabethan age; the golden age of English literature as it is called, and on the whole truly called; for, whatever be the defects of Elizabethan literature (and they are great), we have no development of our literature to compare with it for vigour and richness. This age, too, showed what it could do in translating, by producing a master-piece, its version of the Bible.

Chapman’s translation has often been praised as eminently Homeric. Keats’s fine sonnet in its honour everyone knows; but Keats could not read the original, and therefore could not really judge the translation. Coleridge, in praising Chapman’s version, says at the same time, ‘It will give you small idea of Homer’. But the grave authority of Mr Hallum pronounces this translation to be ‘often exceedingly Homeric’; and its latest editor boldly declares that by what, with a deplorable style, he calls ‘his own innative Homeric genius’, Chapman ‘has thoroughly identified himself with Homer’; and that ‘we pardon him even for his digressions, for they are such as we feel Homer himself would have written’.

I confess that I can never read twenty lines of Chapman’s version without recurring to Bentley’s cry, ‘This is not Homer!’ and that from a deeper cause than any unfaithfulness occasioned by the fetters of rhyme.

I said that there were four things which eminently distinguished Homer, and with a sense of which Homer’s translator should penetrate himself as fully as possible. One of these four things was, the plainness and directness of Homer’s ideas. I have just been speaking of the plainness and directness of his style; but the plainness and directness of the contents of his style, of his ideas themselves, is not less remarkable. But as eminently as Homer is plain, so eminently is the Elizabethan literature in general, and Chapman in particular, fanciful. Steeped in humours and fantasticality up to its very lips, the Elizabethan age, newly arrived at the free use of the human faculties after their long term of bondage, and delighting to exercise them freely, suffers from its own extravagance in this first exercise of them, can hardly bring itself to see an object quietly or to describe it temperately. Happily, in the translation of the Bible, the sacred character of their original inspired the translators with such respect that they did not dare to give the rein to their own fancies in dealing with it. But, in dealing with works of profane literature, in dealing with poetical works above all, which highly stimulated them, one may say that the minds of the Elizabethan translators were too active; that they could not forbear importing so much of their own, and this of a most peculiar and Elizabethan character, into their original, that they effaced the character of the original itself.

Take merely the opening pages to Chapman’s translation, the introductory verses, and the dedications. You will find:

An Anagram of the name of our Dread Prince,

My most gracious and sacred Mæcenas,

Henry, Prince of Wales,

Our Sunn, Heyr, Peace, Life,

Henry, son of James the First, to whom the work is dedicated. Then comes an address,

To the sacred Fountain of Princes,

Sole Empress of Beauty and Virtue, Anne, Queen

Of England, etc.

All the Middle Age, with its grotesqueness, its conceits, its irrationality, is still in these opening pages; they by themselves are sufficient to indicate to us what a gulf divides Chapman from the ‘clearest-souled’ of poets, from Homer, almost as great a gulf as that which divides him from Voltaire. Pope has been sneered at for saying that Chapman writes ‘somewhat as one might imagine Homer himself to have written before he arrived at years of discretion’. But the remark is excellent: Homer expresses himself like a man of adult reason, Chapman like a man whose reason has not yet cleared itself. For instance, if Homer had had to say of a poet, that he hoped his merit was now about to be fully established in the opinion of good judges, he was as incapable of saying this as Chapman says it,—‘Though truth in her very nakedness sits in so deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora, and Ganges, few eyes can sound her, I hope yet those few here will so discover and confirm that the date being out of her darkness in this morning of our poet, he shall now gird his temples with the sun’,—I say, Homer was as incapable of saying this in that manner, as Voltaire himself would have been. Homer, indeed, has actually an affinity with Voltaire in the unrivalled clearness and straightforwardness of his thinking; in the way in which he keeps to one thought at a time, and puts that thought forth in its complete natural plainness, instead of being led away from it by some fancy striking him in connection with it, and being beguiled to wander off with this fancy till his original thought, in its natural reality, knows him no more. What could better show us how gifted a race was this Greek race? The same member of it has not only the power of profoundly touching that natural heart of humanity which it is Voltaire’s weakness that he cannot reach, but can also address the understanding with all Voltaire’s admirable simplicity and rationality.

My limits will not allow me to do more than shortly illustrate, from Chapman’s version of the Iliad, what I mean when I speak of this vital difference between Homer and an Elizabethan poet in the quality of their thought; between the plain simplicity of the thought of the one, and the curious complexity of the thought of the other. As in Pope’s case, I carefully abstain from choosing passages for the express purpose of making Chapman appear ridiculous; Chapman, like Pope, merits in himself all respect, though he too, like Pope, fails to render Homer.

In that tonic speech of Sarpedon, of which I have said so much, Homer, you may remember, has:

εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε,

αἰεὶ δὴ μέλλοιμεν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε

ἔσσεσθ’—

if indeed, but once this battle avoided,

We were for ever to live without growing old and immortal—

Chapman cannot be satisfied with this, but must add a fancy to it:

if keeping back

Would keep back age from us, and death, and that we might not wrack

In this life’s human sea at all;

and so on. Again; in another passage which I have before quoted, where Zeus says to the horses of Peleus,

τί σφῶϊ δόμεν Πηλῆϊ ἀνάκτι

θνητῷ; ὑμεῖς δ’ ἐστὸν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε·[^[8]]

Why gave we you to royal Peleus, to a mortal?

but ye are without old age, and immortal.

Chapman sophisticates this into:

Why gave we you t’ a mortal king, when immortality

And incapacity of age so dignifies your states?

Again; in the speech of Achilles to his horses, where Achilles, according to Homer, says simply ‘Take heed that ye bring your master safe back to the host of the Danaans, in some other sort than the last time, when the battle is ended’, Chapman sophisticates this into:

When with blood, for this day’s fast observed, revenge shall yield

Our heart satiety, bring us off.

In Hector’s famous speech, again, at his parting from Andromache, Homer makes him say: ‘Nor does my own heart so bid me’ (to keep safe behind the walls), ‘since I have learned to be staunch always, and to fight among the foremost of the Trojans, busy on behalf of my father’s great glory, and my own [^[9]]’. In Chapman’s hands this becomes:

The spirit I first did breathe

Did never teach me that; much less, since the contempt of death

Was settled in me, and my mind knew what a worthy was,

Whose office is to lead in fight, and give no danger pass

Without improvement. In this fire must Hector’s trial shine:

Here must his country, father, friends, be in him made divine.

You see how ingeniously Homer’s plain thought is tormented, as the French would say, here. Homer goes on: ‘For well I know this in my mind and in my heart, the day will be, when sacred Troy shall perish’—

ἔσσεται ἦμαρ, ὅτ’ ἄν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρή.

Chapman makes this:

And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I know,

When sacred Troy shall shed her towers, for tears of overthrow.

I might go on for ever, but I could not give you a better illustration than this last, of what I mean by saying that the Elizabethan poet fails to render Homer because he cannot forbear to interpose a play of thought between his object and its expression. Chapman translates his object into Elizabethan, as Pope translates it into the Augustan of Queen Anne; both convey it to us through a medium. Homer, on the other hand, sees his object and conveys it to us immediately.

And yet, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness of Homer’s style, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness of his ideas, he is eminently noble; he works as entirely in the grand style, he is as grandiose, as Phidias, or Dante, or Michael Angelo. This is what makes his translators despair. ‘To give relief’, says Cowper, ‘to prosaic subjects’ (such as dressing, eating, drinking, harnessing, travelling, going to bed), that is to treat such subjects nobly, in the grand style, ‘without seeming unreasonably tumid, is extremely difficult’. It is difficult, but Homer has done it. Homer is precisely the incomparable poet he is, because he has done it. His translator must not be tumid, must not be artificial, must not be literary; true: but then also he must not be commonplace, must not be ignoble. I have shown you how translators of Homer fail by wanting rapidity, by wanting simplicity of style, by wanting plainness of thought: in a second lecture I will show you how a translator fails by wanting nobility.

II

I must repeat what I said in beginning, that the translator of Homer ought steadily to keep in mind where lies the real test of the success of his translation, what judges he is to try to satisfy. He is to try to satisfy scholars, because scholars alone have the means of really judging him. A scholar may be a pedant, it is true, and then his judgment will be worthless; but a scholar may also have poetical feeling, and then he can judge him truly; whereas all the poetical feeling in the world will not enable a man who is not a scholar to judge him truly. For the translator is to reproduce Homer, and the scholar alone has the means of knowing that Homer who is to be reproduced. He knows him but imperfectly, for he is separated from him by time, race, and language; but he alone knows him at all. Yet people speak as if there were two real tribunals in this matter,—the scholar’s tribunal, and that of the general public. They speak as if the scholar’s judgment was one thing, and the general public’s judgment another; both with their shortcomings, both with their liability to error; but both to be regarded by the translator. The translator who makes verbal literalness his chief care ‘will’, says a writer in the National Review whom I have already quoted, ‘be appreciated by the scholar accustomed to test a translation rigidly by comparison with the original, to look perhaps with excessive care to finish in detail rather than boldness and general effect, and find pardon even for a version that seems bare and bold, so it be scholastic and faithful’. But, if the scholar in judging a translation looks to detail rather than to general effect, he judges it pedantically and ill. The appeal, however, lies not from the pedantic scholar to the general public, which can only like or dislike Chapman’s version, or Pope’s, or Mr Newman’s, but cannot judge them; it lies from the pedantic scholar to the scholar who is not pedantic, who knows that Homer is Homer by his general effect, and not by his single words, and who demands but one thing in a translation,—that it shall, as nearly as possible, reproduce for him the general effect of Homer. This, then, remains the one proper aim of the translator: to reproduce on the intelligent scholar, as nearly as possible, the general effect of Homer. Except so far as he reproduces this, he loses his labour, even though he may make a spirited Iliad of his own, like Pope, or translate Homer’s Iliad word for word, like Mr Newman. If his proper aim were to stimulate in any manner possible the general public, he might be right in following Pope’s example; if his proper aim were to help schoolboys to construe Homer, he might be right in following Mr Newman’s. But it is not: his proper aim is, I repeat it yet once more, to reproduce on the intelligent scholar, as nearly as he can, the general effect of Homer.

When, therefore, Cowper says, ‘My chief boast is that I have adhered closely to my original’; when Mr Newman says, ‘My aim is to retain every peculiarity of the original, to be faithful, exactly as is the case with the draughtsman of the Elgin marbles’; their real judge only replies: ‘It may be so: reproduce then upon us, reproduce the effect of Homer, as a good copy reproduces the effect of the Elgin marbles’.

When, again, Mr Newman tells us that ‘by an exhaustive process of argument and experiment’ he has found a metre which is at once the metre of ‘the modern Greek epic’, and a metre ‘like in moral genius’ to Homer’s metre, his judge has still but the same answer for him: ‘It may be so: reproduce then on our ear something of the effect produced by the movement of Homer’.

But what is the general effect which Homer produces on Mr Newman himself? because, when we know this, we shall know whether he and his judges are agreed at the outset, whether we may expect him, if he can reproduce the effect he feels, if his hand does not betray him in the execution, to satisfy his judges and to succeed. If, however, Mr Newman’s impression from Homer is something quite different from that of his judges, then it can hardly be expected that any amount of labour or talent will enable him to reproduce for them their Homer.

Mr Newman does not leave us in doubt as to the general effect which Homer makes upon him. As I have told you what is the general effect which Homer makes upon me,—that of a most rapidly moving poet, that of a poet most plain and direct in his style, that of a poet most plain and direct in his ideas, that of a poet eminently noble,—so Mr Newman tells us his general impression of Homer. ‘Homer’s style’, he says, ‘is direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous’. Again: ‘Homer rises and sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is mean’.

I lay my finger on four words in these two sentences of Mr Newman, and I say that the man who could apply those words to Homer can never render Homer truly. The four words are these: quaint, garrulous, prosaic, low. Search the English language for a word which does not apply to Homer, and you could not fix on a better than quaint, unless perhaps you fixed on one of the other three.

Again; ‘to translate Homer suitably’, says Mr Newman, ‘we need a diction sufficiently antiquated to obtain pardon of the reader for its frequent homeliness’. ‘I am concerned’, he says again, ‘with the artistic problem of attaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while remaining easily intelligible’. And again, he speaks of ‘the more antiquated style suited to this subject’. Quaint! antiquated!—but to whom? Sir Thomas Browne is quaint, and the diction of Chaucer is antiquated: does Mr Newman suppose that Homer seemed quaint to Sophocles, when he read him, as Sir Thomas Browne seems quaint to us, when we read him? or that Homer’s diction seemed antiquated to Sophocles, as Chaucer’s diction seems antiquated to us? But we cannot really know, I confess, how Homer seemed to Sophocles: well then, to those who can tell us how he seems to them, to the living scholar, to our only present witness on this matter,—does Homer make on the Provost of Eton, when he reads him, the impression of a poet quaint and antiquated? does he make this impression on Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett. When Shakspeare says, ‘The princes orgulous’, meaning ‘the proud princes’, we say, ‘This is antiquated’; when he says of the Trojan gates, that they

With massy staples

And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts

Sperr up the sons of Troy,

we say, ‘This is both quaint and antiquated’. But does Homer ever compose in a language which produces on the scholar at all the same impression as this language which I have quoted from Shakspeare? Never once. Shakspeare is quaint and antiquated in the lines which I have just quoted; but Shakspeare—need I say it?—can compose, when he likes, when he is at his best, in a language perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible; in a language which, in spite of the two centuries and a half which part its author from us, stops us or surprises us as little as the language of a contemporary. And Homer has not Shakspeare’s variations: Homer always composes as Shakspeare composes at his best; Homer is always simple and intelligible, as Shakspeare is often; Homer is never quaint and antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes.

When Mr Newman says that Homer is garrulous, he seems, perhaps, to depart less widely from the common opinion than when he calls him quaint; for is there not Horace’s authority for asserting that ‘the good Homer sometimes nods’, bonus dormitat Homerus? and a great many people have come, from the currency of this well-known criticism, to represent Homer to themselves as a diffuse old man, with the full-stocked mind, but also with the occasional slips and weaknesses of old age. Horace has said better things than his ‘bonus dormitat Homerus’; but he never meant by this, as I need not remind anyone who knows the passage, that Homer was garrulous, or anything of the kind. Instead, however, of either discussing what Horace meant, or discussing Homer’s garrulity as a general question, I prefer to bring to my mind some style which is garrulous, and to ask myself, to ask you, whether anything at all of the impression made by that style is ever made by the style of Homer. The mediæval romancers, for instance, are garrulous; the following, to take out of a thousand instances the first which comes to hand, is in a garrulous manner. It is from the romance of Richard Cœur de Lion.

Of my tale be not a-wondered!

The French says he slew an hundred

(Whereof is made this English saw)

Or he rested him any thraw.

Him followed many an English knight

That eagerly holp him for to fight

and so on. Now the manner of that composition I call garrulous; everyone will feel it to be garrulous; everyone will understand what is meant when it is called garrulous. Then I ask the scholar,—does Homer’s manner ever make upon you, I do not say, the same impression of its garrulity as that passage, but does it make, ever for one moment, an impression in the slightest way resembling, in the remotest degree akin to, the impression made by that passage of the mediæval poet? I have no fear of the answer.

I follow the same method with Mr Newman’s two other epithets, prosaic and low. ‘Homer rises and sinks with his subject’, says Mr Newman; ‘is prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is mean’. First I say, Homer is never, in any sense, to be with truth called prosaic; he is never to be called low. He does not rise and sink with his subject; on the contrary, his manner invests his subject, whatever his subject be, with nobleness. Then I look for an author of whom it may with truth be said, that he ‘rises and sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is mean’. Defoe is eminently such an author; of Defoe’s manner it may with perfect precision be said, that it follows his matter; his lifelike composition takes its character from the facts which it conveys, not from the nobleness of the composer. In Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack, Defoe is undoubtedly prosaic when his subject is tame, low when his subject is mean. Does Homer’s manner in the Iliad, I ask the scholar, ever make upon him an impression at all like the impression made by Defoe’s manner in Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack? Does it not, on the contrary, leave him with an impression of nobleness, even when it deals with Thersites or with Irus?

Well then, Homer is neither quaint, nor garrulous, nor prosaic, nor mean: and Mr Newman, in seeing him so, sees him differently from those who are to judge Mr Newman’s rendering of him. By pointing out how a wrong conception of Homer affects Mr Newman’s translation, I hope to place in still clearer light those four cardinal truths which I pronounce essential for him who would have a right conception of Homer: that Homer is rapid, that he is plain and direct in word and style, that he is plain and direct in his ideas, and that he is noble.

Mr Newman says that in fixing on a style for suitably rendering Homer, as he conceives him, he ‘alights on the delicate line which separates the quaint from the grotesque’. ‘I ought to be quaint’, he says, ‘I ought not to be grotesque’. This is a most unfortunate sentence. Mr Newman is grotesque, which he himself says he ought not to be; and he ought not to be quaint, which he himself says he ought to be.

‘No two persons will agree’, says Mr Newman, ‘as to where the quaint ends and the grotesque begins’; and perhaps this is true. But, in order to avoid all ambiguity in the use of the two words, it is enough to say, that most persons would call an expression which produced on them a very strong sense of its incongruity, and which violently surprised them, grotesque; and an expression, which produced on them a slighter sense of its incongruity, and which more gently surprised them, quaint. Using the two words in this manner, I say, that when Mr Newman translates Helen’s words to Hector in the sixth book,

Δᾶερ ἐμεῖο, κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, ὀκρυοέσσης [^[10]],

O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief-working vixen,

A numbing horror,

he is grotesque; that is, he expresses himself in a manner which produces on us a very strong sense of its incongruity, and which violently surprises us. I say, again, that when Mr Newman translates the common line,

Τὴν δ’ ἠμείβετ’ ἔπειτα μέγας κορυθαίολος Ἕκτωρ,

Great Hector of the motley helm then spake to her responsive,

or the common expression, ἐϋκνήμιδες Ἀχαιοί, ‘dapper-greaved Achaians’, he is quaint; that is, he expresses himself in a manner which produces on us a slighter sense of incongruity, and which more gently surprises us. But violent and gentle surprise are alike far from the scholar’s spirit when he reads in Homer κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, or κορυθαίολος Ἕκτωρ, or, ἐϋκνήμιδες Ἀχαιοί. These expressions no more seem odd to him than the simplest expressions in English. He is not more checked by any feeling of strangeness, strong or weak, when he reads them, than when he reads in an English book ‘the painted savage’, or, ‘the phlegmatic Dutchman’. Mr Newman’s renderings of them must, therefore, be wrong expressions in a translation of Homer, because they excite in the scholar, their only competent judge, a feeling quite alien to that excited in him by what they profess to render.

Mr Newman, by expressions of this kind, is false to his original in two ways. He is false to him inasmuch as he is ignoble; for a noble air, and a grotesque air, the air of the address,

Δᾶερ ἐμεῖο, κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, ὀκρυοέσσης,

and the air of the address,

O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief-working vixen,

A numbing horror,

are just contrary the one to the other: and he is false to him inasmuch as he is odd; for an odd diction like Mr Newman’s, and a perfectly plain natural diction like Homer’s,—‘dapper-greaved Achaians’ and ἐϋκνήμιδες Ἀχαιοί,—are also just contrary the one to the other. Where, indeed, Mr Newman got his diction, with whom he can have lived, what can be his test of antiquity and rarity for words, are questions which I ask myself with bewilderment. He has prefixed to his translation a list of what he calls ‘the more antiquated or rarer words’ which he has used. In this list appear, on the one hand, such words as doughty, grisly, lusty, noisome, ravin, which are familiar, one would think, to all the world; on the other hand such words as bragly, meaning, Mr Newman tells us, ‘proudly fine’; bulkin, ‘a calf’; plump, a ‘mass’; and so on. ‘I am concerned’, says Mr Newman, ‘with the artistic problem of attaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while remaining easily intelligible’. But it seems to me that lusty is not antiquated: and that bragly is not a word readily understood. That this word, indeed, and bulkin, may have ‘a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity’, I admit; but that they are ‘easily intelligible’, I deny.

Mr Newman’s syntax has, I say it with pleasure, a much more Homeric cast than his vocabulary; his syntax, the mode in which his thought is evolved, although not the actual words in which it is expressed, seems to me right in its general character, and the best feature of his version. It is not artificial or rhetorical like Cowper’s syntax or Pope’s: it is simple, direct, and natural, and so far it is like Homer’s. It fails, however, just where, from the inherent fault of Mr Newman’s conception of Homer, one might expect it to fail,—it fails in nobleness. It presents the thought in a way which is something more than unconstrained,—over-familiar; something more than easy,—free and easy. In this respect it is like the movement of Mr Newman’s version, like his rhythm, for this, too, fails, in spite of some qualities, by not being noble enough; this, while it avoids the faults of being slow and elaborate, falls into a fault in the opposite direction, and is slip-shod. Homer presents his thought naturally; but when Mr Newman has,

A thousand fires along the plain, I say, that night were burning,

he presents his thought familiarly; in a style which may be the genuine style of ballad-poetry, but which is not the style of Homer. Homer moves freely; but when Mr Newman has,

Infatuate! O that thou wert lord to some other army [^[11]],

he gives himself too much freedom; he leaves us too much to do for his rhythm ourselves, instead of giving to us a rhythm like Homer’s, easy indeed, but mastering our ear with a fulness of power which is irresistible.

I said that a certain style might be the genuine style of ballad-poetry, but yet not the style of Homer. The analogy of the ballad is ever present to Mr Newman’s thoughts in considering Homer; and perhaps nothing has more caused his faults than this analogy,—this popular, but, it is time to say, this erroneous analogy. ‘The moral qualities of Homer’s style’, says Mr Newman, ‘being like to those of the English ballad, we need a metre of the same genius. Only those metres, which by the very possession of these qualities are liable to degenerate into doggerel, are suitable to reproduce the ancient epic’. ‘The style of Homer’, he says, in a passage which I have before quoted, ‘is direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous: in all these respects it is similar to the old English ballad’. Mr Newman, I need not say, is by no means alone in this opinion. ‘The most really and truly Homeric of all the creations of the English muse is’, says Mr Newman’s critic in the National Review, ‘the ballad-poetry of ancient times; and the association between metre and subject is one that it would be true wisdom to preserve’. ‘It is confessed’, says Chapman’s last editor, Mr Hooper, ‘that the fourteen-syllable verse’ (that is, a ballad-verse) ‘is peculiarly fitting for Homeric translation’. And the editor of Dr Maginn’s clever and popular Homeric Ballads assumes it as one of his author’s greatest and most undisputable merits, that he was ‘the first who consciously realised to himself the truth that Greek ballads can be really represented in English only by a similar measure’.

This proposition that Homer’s poetry is ballad-poetry, analogous to the well-known ballad-poetry of the English and other nations, has a certain small portion of truth in it, and at one time probably served a useful purpose, when it was employed to discredit the artificial and literary manner in which Pope and his school rendered Homer. But it has been so extravagantly over-used, the mistake which it was useful in combating has so entirely lost the public favour, that it is now much more important to insist on the large part of error contained in it, than to extol its small part of truth. It is time to say plainly that, whatever the admirers of our old ballads may think, the supreme form of epic poetry, the genuine Homeric mould, is not the form of the Ballad of Lord Bateman. I have myself shown the broad difference between Milton’s manner and Homer’s; but, after a course of Mr Newman and Dr Maginn, I turn round in desperation upon them and upon the balladists who have misled them, and I exclaim: ‘Compared with you, Milton is Homer’s double; there is, whatever you may think, ten thousand times more of the real strain of Homer in

Blind Thamyris, and blind Mæonides,

And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old,

than in

Now Christ thee save, thou proud portèr,

Now Christ thee save and see [^[12]],

or in

While the tinker did dine, he had plenty of wine [^[13]].

For Homer is not only rapid in movement, simple in style, plain in language, natural in thought; he is also, and above all, noble. I have advised the translator not to go into the vexed question of Homer’s identity. Yet I will just remind him that the grand argument—or rather, not argument, for the matter affords no data for arguing, but the grand source from which conviction, as we read the Iliad, keeps pressing in upon us, that there is one poet of the Iliad, one Homer—is precisely this nobleness of the poet, this grand manner; we feel that the analogy drawn from other joint compositions does not hold good here, because those works do not bear, like the Iliad, the magic stamp of a master; and the moment you have anything less than a masterwork, the co-operation or consolidation of several poets becomes possible, for talent is not uncommon; the moment you have much less than a masterwork, they become easy, for mediocrity is everywhere. I can imagine fifty Bradies joined with as many Tates to make the New Version of the Psalms. I can imagine several poets having contributed to any one of the old English ballads in Percy’s collection. I can imagine several poets, possessing, like Chapman, the Elizabethan vigour and the Elizabethan mannerism, united with Chapman to produce his version of the Iliad. I can imagine several poets, with the literary knack of the twelfth century, united to produce the Nibelungen Lay in the form in which we have it,—a work which the Germans, in their joy at discovering a national epic of their own, have rated vastly higher than it deserves. And lastly, though Mr Newman’s translation of Homer bears the strong mark of his own idiosyncrasy, yet I can imagine Mr Newman and a school of adepts trained by him in his art of poetry, jointly producing that work, so that Aristarchus himself should have difficulty in pronouncing which line was the master’s, and which a pupil’s. But I cannot imagine several poets, or one poet, joined with Dante in the composition of his Inferno, though many poets have taken for their subject a descent into Hell. Many artists, again, have represented Moses; but there is only one Moses of Michael Angelo. So the insurmountable obstacle to believing the Iliad a consolidated work of several poets is this: that the work of great masters is unique; and the Iliad has a great master’s genuine stamp, and that stamp is the grand style.

Poets who cannot work in the grand style instinctively seek a style in which their comparative inferiority may feel itself at ease, a manner which may be, so to speak, indulgent to their inequalities. The ballad-style offers to an epic poet, quite unable to fill the canvas of Homer, or Dante, or Milton, a canvas which he is capable of filling. The ballad-measure is quite able to give due effect to the vigour and spirit which its employer, when at his very best, may be able to exhibit; and, when he is not at his best, when he is a little trivial, or a little dull, it will not betray him, it will not bring out his weakness into broad relief. This is a convenience; but it is a convenience which the ballad-style purchases by resigning all pretensions to the highest, to the grand manner. It is true of its movement, as it is not true of Homer’s, that it is ‘liable to degenerate into doggerel’. It is true of its ‘moral qualities’, as it is not true of Homer’s, that ‘quaintness’ and ‘garrulity’ are among them. It is true of its employers, as it is not true of Homer, that they ‘rise and sink with their subject, are prosaic when it is tame, are low when it is mean’. For this reason the ballad-style and the ballad-measure are eminently inappropriate to render Homer. Homer’s manner and movement are always both noble and powerful: the ballad-manner and movement are often either jaunty and smart, so not noble; or jog-trot and hum-drum, so not powerful.

The Nibelungen Lay affords a good illustration of the qualities of the ballad-manner. Based on grand traditions, which had found expression in a grand lyric poetry, the German epic poem of the Nibelungen Lay, though it is interesting, and though it has good passages, is itself anything rather than a grand poem. It is a poem of which the composer is, to speak the truth, a very ordinary mortal, and often, therefore, like other ordinary mortals, very prosy. It is in a measure which eminently adapts itself to this commonplace personality of its composer, which has much the movement of the well-known measures of Tate and Brady, and can jog on, for hundreds of lines at a time, with a level ease which reminds one of Sheridan’s saying that easy writing may be often such hard reading. But, instead of occupying myself with the Nibelungen Lay, I prefer to look at the ballad-style as directly applied to Homer, in Chapman’s version and Mr Newman’s, and in the Homeric Ballads of Dr. Maginn.

First I take Chapman. I have already shown that Chapman’s conceits are un-Homeric, and that his rhyme is un-Homeric; I will now show how his manner and movement are un-Homeric. Chapman’s diction, I have said, is generally good; but it must be called good with this reserve, that, though it has Homer’s plainness and directness, it often offends him who knows Homer, by wanting Homer’s nobleness. In a passage which I have already quoted, the address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles, where Homer has,

ἆ δειλώ, τι σφῶϊ δόμεν Πηλῆϊ ἄνακτι

θνητῷ; ὑμεῖς δ’ ἐστὸν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε!

ἦ ἵνα δυστήνοισι μετ’ ἀνδράσιν ἄλγε’ ἔχητον [^[14]];

Chapman has,

Poor wretched beasts, said he,

Why gave we you to a mortal king, when immortality

And incapacity of age so dignifies your states?

Was it to haste [^[15]] the miseries poured out on human fates?

There are many faults in this rendering of Chapman’s, but what I particularly wish to notice in it is the expression ‘Poor wretched beasts’ for ἆ δειλώ. This expression just illustrates the difference between the ballad-manner and Homer’s. The ballad-manner—Chapman’s manner—is, I say, pitched sensibly lower than Homer’s. The ballad-manner requires that an expression shall be plain and natural, and then it asks no more. Homer’s manner requires that an expression shall be plain and natural, but it also requires that it shall be noble. Ἆ δειλώ is as plain, as simple as ‘Poor wretched beasts’; but it is also noble, which ‘Poor wretched beasts’ is not. ‘Poor wretched beasts’ is, in truth, a little over-familiar, but this is no objection to it for the ballad-manner; it is good enough for the old English ballad, good enough for the Nibelungen Lay, good enough for Chapman’s Iliad, good enough for Mr Newman’s Iliad, good enough for Dr Maginn’s Homeric Ballads; but it is not good enough for Homer.

To feel that Chapman’s measure, though natural, is not Homeric; that, though tolerably rapid, it has not Homer’s rapidity; that it has a jogging rapidity rather than a flowing rapidity; and a movement familiar rather than nobly easy, one has only, I think, to read half a dozen lines in any part of his version. I prefer to keep as much as possible to passages which I have already noticed, so I will quote the conclusion of the nineteenth book, where Achilles answers his horse Xanthus, who has prophesied his death to him [^[16]].

Achilles, far in rage,

Thus answered him:—It fits not thee thus proudly to presage

My overthrow. I know myself it is my fate to fall

Thus far from Phthia; yet that fate shall fail to vent her gall

Till mine vent thousands.—These words said, he fell to horrid deeds,

Gave dreadful signal, and forthright made fly his one-hoofed steeds.

For what regards the manner of this passage, the words ‘Achilles Thus answered him’, and ‘I know myself it is my fate to fall Thus far from Phthia’, are in Homer’s manner, and all the rest is out of it. But for what regards its movement, who, after being jolted by Chapman through such verse as this,

These words said, he fell to horrid deeds,

Gave dreadful signal, and forthright made fly his one-hoofed steeds,

who does not feel the vital difference of the movement of Homer,

ἦ ῥα, καὶ ἐν πρώτοις ἰάχων ἔχε μώνυχας ἵππο υς?

To pass from Chapman to Dr Maginn. His Homeric Ballads are vigorous and genuine poems in their own way; they are not one continual falsetto, like the pinch-beck Roman Ballads of Lord Macaulay; but just because they are ballads in their manner and movement, just because, to use the words of his applauding editor, Dr Maginn has ‘consciously realised to himself the truth that Greek ballads can be really represented in English only by a similar manner’,—just for this very reason they are not at all Homeric, they have not the least in the world the manner of Homer. There is a celebrated incident in the nineteenth book of the Odyssey, the recognition by the old nurse Eurycleia of a scar on the leg of her master Ulysses, who has entered his own hall as an unknown wanderer, and whose feet she has been set to wash. ‘Then she came near’, says Homer, ‘and began to wash her master; and straightway she recognised a scar which he had got in former days from the white tusk of a wild boar, when he went to Parnassus unto Autolycus and the sons of Autolycus, his mother’s father and brethren’[^[17]]. This, ‘really represented’ by Dr Maginn, in ‘a measure similar’ to Homer’s, becomes:

And scarcely had she begun to wash

Ere she was aware of the grisly gash

Above his knee that lay.

It was a wound from a wild boar’s tooth,

All on Parnassus’ slope,

Where he went to hunt in the days of his youth

With his mother’s sire,

and so on. That is the true ballad-manner, no one can deny; ‘all on Parnassus’ slope’ is, I was going to say, the true ballad-slang; but never again shall I be able to read

νίζε δ’ ἄῤ ἆσσον ἴουσα ἄναχθ’ ἑόν· αὐτίκα δ’ ἔγνω

οὐλήν,

without having the destestable dance of Dr Maginn’s

And scarcely had she begun to wash

Ere she was aware of the grisly gash,

jigging in my ears, to spoil the effect of Homer, and to torture me. To apply that manner and that rhythm to Homer’s incidents, is not to imitate Homer, but to travesty him.

Lastly I come to Mr Newman. His rhythm, like Chapman’s and Dr Maginn’s, is a ballad-rhythm, but with a modification of his own. ‘Holding it’, he tells us, ‘as an axiom, that rhyme must be abandoned’, he found, on abandoning it, ‘an unpleasant void until he gave a double ending to the verse’. In short, instead of saying

Good people all with one accord

Give ear unto my tale,

Mr Newman would say

Good people all with one accord

Give ear unto my story.

A recent American writer [^[18]] gravely observes that for his countrymen this rhythm has a disadvantage in being like the rhythm of the American national air Yankee Doodle, and thus provoking ludicrous associations. Yankee Doodle is not our national air: for us Mr Newman’s rhythm has not this disadvantage. He himself gives us several plausible reasons why this rhythm of his really ought to be successful: let us examine how far it is successful.

Mr Newman joins to a bad rhythm so bad a diction that it is difficult to distinguish exactly whether in any given passage it is his words or his measure which produces a total impression of such an unpleasant kind. But with a little attention we may analyse our total impression, and find the share which each element has in producing it. To take the passage which I have so often mentioned, Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus. Mr Newman translates this as follows:

O gentle friend! if thou and I, from this encounter ’scaping,

Hereafter might for ever be from Eld and Death exempted

As heavenly gods, not I in sooth would fight among the foremost,

Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle.

Now,—sith ten thousand shapes of Death do any-gait pursue us

Which never mortal may evade, though sly of foot and nimble;—

Onward! and glory let us earn, or glory yield to someone.

Could all our care elude the gloomy grave

Which claims no less the fearful than the brave.

I am not going to quote Pope’s version over again, but I must remark in passing, how much more, with all Pope’s radical difference of manner from Homer, it gives us of the real effect of

εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε

than Mr Newman’s lines. And now, why are Mr Newman’s lines faulty? They are faulty, first, because, as a matter of diction, the expressions ‘O gentle friend’, ‘eld’, ‘in sooth’, ‘liefly’, ‘advance’, ‘man-ennobling’, ‘sith’, ‘any-gait’, and ‘sly of foot’, are all bad; some of them worse than others, but all bad: that is, they all of them as here used excite in the scholar, their sole judge,—excite, I will boldly affirm, in Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett,—a feeling totally different from that excited in them by the words of Homer which these expressions profess to render. The lines are faulty, secondly, because, as a matter of rhythm, any and every line among them has to the ear of the same judges (I affirm it with equal boldness) a movement as unlike Homer’s movement in the corresponding line as the single words are unlike Homer’s words. Οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμαι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειρν,—‘Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle’;—for whose ears do those two rhythms produce impressions of, to use Mr Newman’s own words, ‘similar moral genius’?

I will by no means make search in Mr Newman’s version for passages likely to raise a laugh; that search, alas! would be far too easy. I will quote but one other passage from him, and that a passage where the diction is comparatively inoffensive, in order that disapproval of the words may not unfairly heighten disapproval of the rhythm. The end of the nineteenth book, the answer of Achilles to his horse Xanthus, Mr Newman gives thus:

Chestnut! why bodest death to me? from thee this was not needed.

Myself right surely know alsó, that ’t is my doom to perish,

From mother and from father dear apart, in Troy; but never

Pause will I make of war, until the Trojans be glutted.

He spake, and yelling, held afront the single-hoofed horses.

Here Mr Newman calls Xanthus Chestnut, indeed, as he calls Balius Spotted, and Podarga Spry-foot; which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale Mdlle. Rossignol, or Mr Bright M. Clair. And several other expressions, too, ‘yelling’, ‘held afront’, ‘single-hoofed’,—leave, to say the very least, much to be desired. Still, for Mr Newman, the diction of this passage is pure. All the more clearly appears the profound vice of a rhythm, which, with comparatively few faults of words, can leave a sense of such incurable alienation from Homer’s manner as, ‘Myself right surely know also that ’tis my doom to perish compared with the εὖ νύ τοι οἶδα καὶ αὐτὸς, ὅ μοι μόρος ἐνθάδ’ ὀλέσθαι of Homer.

But so deeply seated is the difference between the ballad-manner and Homer’s, that even a man of the highest powers, even a man of the greatest vigour of spirit and of true genius—the Coryphæus of balladists, Sir Walter Scott—fails with a manner of this kind to produce an effect at all like the effect of Homer. ‘I am not so rash’, declares Mr Newman, ‘as to say that if freedom be given to rhyme as in Walter Scott’s poetry’,—‘Walter Scott, by far the most Homeric of our poets’, as in another place he calls him,—‘a genius may not arise who will translate Homer into the melodies of Marmion’. ‘The truly classical and truly romantic’, says Dr Maginn, ‘are one; the moss-trooping Nestor reappears in the moss-trooping heroes of Percy’s Reliques’; and a description by Scott, which he quotes, he calls ‘graphic, and therefore Homeric’. He forgets our fourth axiom,—that Homer is not only graphic; he is also noble, and has the grand style. Human nature under like circumstances is probably in all stages much the same; and so far it may be said that ‘the truly classical and the truly romantic are one’; but it is of little use to tell us this, because we know the human nature of other ages only through the representations of them which have come down to us, and the classical and the romantic modes of representation are so far from being ‘one’, that they remain eternally distinct, and have created for us a separation between the two worlds which they respectively represent. Therefore to call Nestor the ‘moss-trooping Nestor’ is absurd, because, though Nestor may possibly have been much the same sort of man as many a moss-trooper, he has yet come to us through a mode of representation so unlike that of Percy’s Reliques, that instead of ‘reappearing in the moss-trooping heroes’ of these poems, he exists in our imagination as something utterly unlike them, and as belonging to another world. So the Greeks in Shakspeare’s Troilus and Cressida are no longer the Greeks whom we have known in Homer, because they come to us through a mode of representation of the romantic world. But I must not forget Scott.

I suppose that when Scott is in what may be called full ballad swing, no one will hesitate to pronounce his manner neither Homeric nor the grand manner. When he says, for instance,

I do not rhyme to that dull elf

Who cannot image to himself [^[19]],

and so on, any scholar will feel that this is not Homer’s manner. But let us take Scott’s poetry at its best; and when it is at its best, it is undoubtedly very good indeed:

Tunstall lies dead upon the field,

His life-blood stains the spotless shield;

Edmund is down,—my life is reft,—

The Admiral alone is left.

ON TRANSLATING HOMER

CONTENTS

I

II