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,
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,
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,
or in
While the tinker did dine, he had plenty of wine.
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;
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 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.
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’. 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 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,
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.
Let Stanley charge with spur of fire,—
With Chester charge, and Lancashire,
Full upon Scotland’s central host,
Or victory and England’s lost.
That is, no doubt, as vigorous as possible, as spirited as possible; it is exceedingly fine poetry. And still I say, it is not in the grand manner, and therefore it is not like Homer’s poetry. Now, how shall I make him who doubts this feel that I say true; that these lines of Scott are essentially neither in Homer’s style nor in the grand style? I may point out to him that the movement of Scott’s lines, while it is rapid, is also at the same time what the French call saccadé, its rapidity is ‘jerky’; whereas Homer’s rapidity is a flowing rapidity. But this is something external and material; it is but the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual diversity. I may discuss what, in the abstract, constitutes the grand style; but that sort of general discussion never much helps our judgment of particular instances. I may say that the presence or absence of the grand style can only be spiritually discerned; and this is true, but to plead this looks like evading the difficulty. My best way is to take eminent specimens of the grand style, and to put them side by side with this of Scott. For example, when Homer says:
άλλά, φίλος, θάνε καὶ σύ· τίη ὀλυφύρεαι οὕτως;
κάθανε καὶ Πάτροκλος, ὅπερ σέο πολλὸν ἀμείνων,
that is in the grand style. When Virgil says:
Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis,
that is in the grand style. When Dante says:
Lascio lo fele, et vo pei dolci pomi
Promessi a me per lo verace Duca;
Ma fino al centro pria convien ch’ io tomi,
that is in the grand style. When Milton says:
His form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured,
that, finally, is in the grand style. Now let anyone after repeating to himself these four passages, repeat again the passage of Scott, and he will perceive that there is something in style which the four first have in common, and which the last is without; and this something is precisely the grand manner. It is no disrespect to Scott to say that he does not attain to this manner in his poetry; to say so, is merely to say that he is not among the five or six supreme poets of the world. Among these he is not; but, being a man of far greater powers than the ballad-poets, he has tried to give to their instrument a compass and an elevation which it does not naturally possess, in order to enable him to come nearer to the effect of the instrument used by the great epic poets—an instrument which he felt he could not truly use,—and in this attempt he has but imperfectly succeeded. The poetic style of Scott is—(it becomes necessary to say so when it is proposed to ‘translate Homer into the melodies of Marmion’)—it is, tried by the highest standard, a bastard epic style; and that is why, out of his own powerful hands, it has had so little success. It is a less natural, and therefore a less good style, than the original ballad-style; while it shares with the ballad-style the inherent incapacity of rising into the grand style, of adequately rendering Homer. Scott is certainly at his best in his battles. Of Homer you could not say this; he is not better in his battles than elsewhere; but even between the battle-pieces of the two there exists all the difference which there is between an able work and a masterpiece.
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.
—‘For not in the hands of Diomede the son of Tydeus rages the spear, to ward off destruction from the Danaans; neither as yet have I heard the voice of the son of Atreus, shouting out of his hated mouth; but the voice of Hector the slayer of men bursts round me, as he cheers on the Trojans; and they with their yellings fill all the plain, overcoming the Achaians in the battle’.—I protest that, to my feeling, Homer’s performance, even through that pale and far-off shadow of a prose translation, still has a hundred times more of the grand manner about it, than the original poetry of Scott.
Well, then, the ballad-manner and the ballad-measure, whether in the hands of the old ballad-poets, or arranged by Chapman, or arranged by Mr Newman, or, even, arranged by Sir Walter Scott, cannot worthily render Homer. And for one reason: Homer is plain, so are they; Homer is natural, so are they; Homer is spirited, so are they; but Homer is sustainedly noble, and they are not. Homer and they are both of them natural, and therefore touching and stirring; but the grand style, which is Homer’s, is something more than touching and stirring; it can form the character, it is edifying. The old English balladist may stir Sir Philip Sidney’s heart like a trumpet, and this is much: but Homer, but the few artists in the grand style, can do more; they can refine the raw natural man, they can transmute him. So it is not without cause that I say, and say again, to the translator of Homer: ‘Never for a moment suffer yourself to forget our fourth fundamental proposition, Homer is noble’. For it is seen how large a share this nobleness has in producing that general effect of his, which it is the main business of a translator to reproduce.
I shall have to try your patience yet once more upon this subject, and then my task will be completed. I have shown what the four axioms respecting Homer which I have laid down, exclude, what they bid a translator not to do; I have still to show what they supply, what positive help they can give to the translator in his work. I will even, with their aid, myself try my fortune with some of those passages of Homer which I have already noticed; not indeed with any confidence that I more than others can succeed in adequately rendering Homer, but in the hope of satisfying competent judges, in the hope of making it clear to the future translator, that I at any rate follow a right method, and that, in coming short, I come short from weakness of execution, not from original vice of design. This is why I have so long occupied myself with Mr Newman’s version; that, apart from all faults of execution, his original design was wrong, and that he has done us the good service of declaring that design in its naked wrongness. To bad practice he has prefixed the bad theory which made the practice bad; he has given us a false theory in his preface, and he has exemplified the bad effects of that false theory in his translation. It is because his starting-point is so bad that he runs so badly; and to save others from taking so false a starting-point, may be to save them from running so futile a course.
Mr Newman, indeed, says in his preface, that if anyone dislikes his translation, ‘he has his easy remedy; to keep aloof from it’. But Mr Newman is a writer of considerable and deserved reputation; he is also a Professor of the University of London, an institution which by its position and by its merits acquires every year greater importance. It would be a very grave thing if the authority of so eminent a Professor led his students to misconceive entirely the chief work of the Greek world; that work which, whatever the other works of classical antiquity have to give us, gives it more abundantly than they all. The eccentricity too, the arbitrariness, of which Mr Newman’s conception of Homer offers so signal an example, are not a peculiar failing of Mr Newman’s own; in varying degrees they are the great defect of English intellect the great blemish of English literature. Our literature of the eighteenth century, the literature of the school of Dryden, Addison, Pope, Johnson, is a long reaction against this eccentricity, this arbitrariness; that reaction perished by its own faults, and its enemies are left once more masters of the field. It is much more likely that any new English version of Homer will have Mr Newman’s faults than Pope’s. Our present literature, which is very far, certainly, from having the spirit and power of Elizabethan genius, yet has in its own way these faults, eccentricity, and arbitrariness, quite as much as the Elizabethan literature ever had. They are the cause that, while upon none, perhaps, of the modern literatures has so great a sum of force been expended as upon the English literature, at the present hour this literature, regarded not as an object of mere literary interest but as a living intellectual instrument, ranks only third in European effect and importance among the literatures of Europe; it ranks after the literatures of France and Germany. Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science,—to see the object as in itself it really is. But, owing to the presence in English literature of this eccentric and arbitrary spirit, owing to the strong tendency of English writers to bring to the consideration of their object some individual fancy, almost the last thing for which one would come to English literature is just that very thing which now Europe most desires—criticism. It is useful to notice any signal manifestation of those faults, which thus limit and impair the action of our literature. And therefore I have pointed out how widely, in translating Homer, a man even of real ability and learning may go astray, unless he brings to the study of this clearest of poets one quality in which our English authors, with all their great gifts, are apt to be somewhat wanting—simple lucidity of mind.
Next: Part III