Part 11

Mr Arnold is slow to understand what I think very obvious. Let me then put a case. What if I were to scold a missionary for rendering in Feejee the phrase ‘kingdom of heaven’ and ‘Lamb of God’ accurately; also ‘saints’ and other words _characteristic of the New Testament_? I might urge against him: ‘This and that sounds very _odd_ to the Feejees: that cannot be right, for it did _not_ seem odd to the Nicene bishops. The latter had forgotten that βασιλεία meant “kingdom”; they took the phrase “kingdom of God” collectively to mean “the Church”. The phrase did not surprise them. As to “Lambs”, the Feejees are not accustomed to sacrifice, and cannot be expected to know of themselves what “Lamb of God” means, as Hebrews did. The courtiers of Constantine thought it very natural to be called ἅγιοι, for they were accustomed to think every baptised person ἅγιος; but to the baptised courtiers of Feejee it really seems very _odd_ to be called _saints_. You disturb the balance of their judgment’.

The missionary might reply: ‘You seemed to be ashamed of the oddities of the Gospel. I am not. They grow out of its excellences and cannot be separated. By avoiding a few eccentric phrases you will do little to remove the deep-seated eccentricity of its very essence. Odd and eccentric it will remain, unless you despoil it of its heart, and reduce it to a fashionable philosophy’. And just so do I reply to Mr Arnold. The Homeric style (whether it be that of an individual or of an age) is peculiar, is ‘odd’, if Mr Arnold like the word, to the very core. Its eccentricities in epithet are mere efflorescences of its essential eccentricity. If Homer could cry out to us, I doubt not he would say, as Oliver Cromwell to the painter, ‘Paint me just I am, _wart and all_’: but if the true Homer could reappear, I am sure Mr Arnold would start from him just as a bishop of Rome from a fisherman apostle. If a translator of the Bible honours the book by his close rendering of its characteristics, however ‘odd’, so do I honour Homer by the same. Those characteristics, the moment I produce them, Mr Arnold calls _ignoble_. Well: be it so; but I am not to blame for them. They exist whether Mr Arnold likes them or not.

I will here observe that he bids me paraphrase τανύπεπλος (trailing-robed) into something like, ‘Let gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping by’. I deliberately judge, that to paraphrase an otiose epithet is the very worst thing that can be done: to omit it entirely would be better. I object even to Mr Gladstone’s

... whom Leto bare, Leto with the flowing hair.

For the repetition overdoes the prominence of the epithet. Still more extravagant is Mr Arnold in wishing me to turn ‘single-hoofed horses’ in to ‘something which _as little surprises us_ as “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds”’: p. 96. To reproduce Shakspeare would be in any case a ‘surprising’ mode of translating Homer: but the principle which changes ‘single-hoofed’ into a different epithet which the translator thinks _better_, is precisely that which for more than two centuries has made nearly all English translation worthless. To throw the poet into your crucible, and bring out old Pelias young, is not a hopeful process. I had thought, the manly taste of this day had outgrown the idea that a translator’s business is to melt up the old coin and stamp it with a modern image. I am wondering that I should have to write against such notions: I would not take the trouble, only that they come against me from an Oxford Professor of Poetry.

At the same time, his doctrine, as I have said, goes far beyond compound epithets. Whether I say ‘motley-helmèd Hector’ or ‘Hector of the motley helm’, ‘silver-footed Thetis’ or ‘Thetis of the silver foot’, ‘man-ennobling combat’ or ‘combat which ennobles man’, the novelty is so nearly on a par, that he cannot condemn one and justify the other on this score. Even Pope falls far short of the false taste which would plane down every Homeric prominence: for he prizes an elegant epithet like ‘silver-footed’, however new and odd.

From such a Homer as Mr Arnold’s specimens and principles would give us, no one could _learn_ anything; no one could have any motive for reading the translation. He smooths down the stamp of Homer’s coin, till nothing is left even for microscopic examination. When he forbids me (p. 96) to let my reader know that Homer calls horses ‘single-hoofed’, of course he would suppress also the epithets ‘white milk’, ‘dusky blood’, ‘dear knees’, ‘dear life’, etc. His process obliterates everything characteristic, great or small.

Mr Arnold condemns my translating certain names of horses. He says (p. 58): ‘Mr Newman calls Xanthus _Chesnut_; as he calls Balius _Spotted_ and Podarga _Spry-foot_: which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale _Mdelle. Rossignol_, or Mr Bright _M. Clair_’. He is very wanting in discrimination. If I had translated Hector into _Possessor_ or Agamemnon into _Highmind_, his censure would be just. A Miss White may be a brunette, a Miss Brown may be a blonde: we utter the proper names of men and women without any remembrance of their intrinsic meaning. But it is different with many names of domestic animals. We never call a dog _Spot_, unless he is spotted; nor without consciousness that the name expresses his peculiarity. No one would give to a black horse the name Chesnut; nor, if he had called a chesnut horse by the name Chesnut, would he ever forget the meaning of the name while he used it. The Greeks called a chesnut horse _xanthos_ and a spotted horse _balios_; therefore, until Mr Arnold proves the contrary, I believe that they never read the names of Achilles’ two horses without a sense of their meaning. Hence the names ought to be translated; while Hector and Laomedon ought not. The same reasoning applies to Podarga, though I do not certainly understand ἀργός. I have taken it to mean _sprightly_.

Mr Arnold further asserts, that Homer is never ‘garrulous’. Allowing that too many others agree with me, he attributes our error to giving too much weight to a sentence in Horace! I admire Horace as an ode-writer, but I do not revere him as a critic, any more than as a moral philosopher. I say that Homer is garrulous, because I see and feel it. Mr Arnold puts me into a most unwelcome position. I have a right to say, I have some enthusiasm for Homer. In the midst of numerous urgent calls of duty and taste, I devoted every possible quarter of an hour for two years and a half to translate the Iliad, toiling unremittingly in my vacations and in my walks, and going to large expenses of money, in order to put the book before the unlearned; and this, though I am not a Professor of Poetry nor even of Greek. Yet now I am forced to appear as Homer’s disparager and accuser! But if Homer were always a poet, he could not be, what he is, so many other things beside poet. As the Egyptians paint in their tombs processes of art, not because they are beautiful or grand, but from a mere love of imitating; so Homer narrates perpetually from a mere love of chatting. In how thoroughly Egyptian a way does he tell the process of cutting up an ox and making _kebâb_; the process of bringing a boat to anchor and carefully putting by the tackle; the process of taking out a shawl from a chest, where it lies at the very bottom! With what glee he repeats the secret talk of the gods; and can tell all about the toilet of Juno. Every particular of trifling

## actions comes out with him, as, the opening of a door or box with a key.

He tells who made Juno’s earrings or veil or the shield of Ajax, the history of Agamemnon’s breast-plate, and in what detail a hero puts on his pieces of armour. I would not press the chattiness of Pandarus, Glaucus, Nestor, Æneas, in the midst of battle; I might press his description of wounds. Indeed I have said enough, and more than enough, against Mr Arnold’s novel, unsupported, paradoxical assertion.—But this is connected with another subject. I called Homer’s manner ‘direct’: Mr Arnold (if I understand) would supersede this by his own epithet ‘rapid’. But I cannot admit the exchange: Homer is often the opposite of rapid. Amplification is his characteristic, as it must be of every improvisatore, every popular orator: condensation indeed is improper for anything but written style; written to be read privately. But I regard as Homer’s worst defect, his lingering over scenes of endless carnage and painful wounds. He knows to half an inch where one hero hits another and how deep. They arm: they approach: they encounter: we have to listen to stereotype details again and again. Such a style is anything but ‘rapid’. Homer’s garrulity often leads him into it; yet he can do far better, as in a part of the fight over Patroclus’s body, and other splendid passages.

Garrulity often vents itself in expletives. Mr Arnold selects for animadversion this line of mine (p. 41),

‘A thousand fires along the plain, _I say_, that night were gleaming’.

He says: ‘This may be the genuine style of ballad poetry, but it is _not_ the style of Homer’. I reply; my use of expletives is moderate indeed compared to Homer’s. Mr Arnold writes, as if quite unaware that such words as the intensely prosaic ἄρα, and its abbreviations ἂρ, ῥα, with τοι, τε, δὴ, μάλα, ἦ, ἦ ῥα νυ, περ, overflow in epic style; and that a pupil who has mastered the very copious stock of Attic particles, is taken quite aback by the extravagant number in Homer. Our expletives are generally more offensive, because longer. My principle is, to admit only such expletives as _add energy_, and savour of antiquity. To the feeble expletives of mean ditties I am not prone. I once heard from an eminent counsellor the first lesson of young lawyers, in the following doggerel:

He who holds his lands in fee, Need neither quake nor quiver: For I humbly conceive, look ye, do ye see? He holds his lands for ever.

The ‘humbly conceiving’ certainly outdoes Homer. Yet if the poet had chosen (as he _might_ have chosen) to make Polydamas or Glaucus say:

Ὅστις ἐπετράφθη τέμενος πίστει βασιλῆος, φημί τοι, οὗτος ἀνὴρ οὔτ’ ἂρ τρέμει οὔτε φοβεῖται· δὴ μάλα γάρ ῥα ἑὰς κρατέοι κεν ἐσαιὲν ἀρούρας:

I rather think the following would be a fair prose rendering: ‘Whoso hath been entrusted with a demesne under pledge with the king (I tell you); this man neither trembleth (you see) nor feareth: for (look ye!) he (verily) may hold (you see) his lands for ever’.

Since Mr Arnold momentarily appeals to me on the chasm between Attic and Homeric Greek, I turn the last piece into a style _far less_ widely separated from modern English than Homer from Thucydides.

Dat mon, quhich hauldeth Kyngis-af Londis yn féo, niver (I tell ’e) feereth aught; sith hee Doth hauld hys londis yver.

I certainly do _not_ recommend this style to a translator, yet it would have its advantage. Even with a smaller change of dialect it would aid us over Helen’s self-piercing denunciation, ‘approaching to Christian penitence’, as some have judged it.

Quoth she, I am a gramsome bitch, If woman bitch may bee.

But in behalf of the poet I must avow: when one considers how dramatic he is, it is marvellous how little in him can offend. For this very reason he is above needing tender treatment from a translator, but can bear faithful rendering, not only better than Shakspeare but better than Pindar or Sophocles.

When Mr Arnold denies that Homer is ever prosaic or homely, his own specimens of translation put me into despair of convincing him; for they seem to me a very anthology of prosaic flatness. Phrases, which are not in themselves bad, if they were elevated by something in the syntax or rhythm distinguishing them from prose, become in him prose out-and-out. ‘To Peleus why did we give you, to a mortal’? ‘In the plain _there_ were kindled a thousand fires; by each one _there_ sate fifty men’. [At least he might have left out the expletive.] ‘By their chariots stood the steeds, and champed the white barley; while their masters sate by the fire and waited for morning’. ‘Us, whose portion for ever Zeus has made it, from youth _right up_ to age, to be winding skeins of grievous wars, till _every soul of us_ perish’. The words which I here italicize, seem to me below noble ballad. What shall I say of ‘I bethink me what the Trojan men and Trojan women might murmur’. ‘Sacred Troy shall _go to destruction_’. ‘Or bear pails to the well of Messeϊs’. ‘See, the wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain of the horsemen of Troy, _in the day they fought_ for their city’, for, ‘_who was_ captain in the day _on which_——’. ‘Let me be dead and the earth be mounded (?) above me, ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity[49] _told of_’. ‘By no slow pace or want of swiftness _of ours_[50] did the Trojans _obtain to strip_ the arms of Patroclus’. ‘Here I am destined to perish, far from my father and mother dear; _for all that_, I will not’, etc. ‘Dare they not enter the fight, or stand in the council of heroes, _all_ for fear of the shame and the _taunts my crime_ has awakened?’ One who regards all this to be high poetry,—emphatically ‘noble’,—may well think τὸν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος or ‘with him there came forty black galleys’, or the broiling of the beef collops, to be such. When Mr Arnold regards ‘no want of swiftness of _ours_’; ‘for all that’, in the sense of nevertheless; ‘_all_ for fear’, _i.e._ because of the fear; _not_ to be prosaic: my readers, however ignorant of Greek, will dispense with further argument from me. Mr Arnold’s inability to discern prose in Greek is not to be trusted.

But I see something more in this phenomenon. Mr Arnold is an original poet; and, as such, certainly uses a diction far more elevated than he here puts forward to represent Homer. He calls his Homeric diction _plain_ and _simple_. Interpreting these words from the contrast of Mr Arnold’s own poems, I claim his suffrage as on my side, that Homer is often in a style much lower than what the moderns esteem to be poetical. But I protest, that he carries it _very much_ too far, and levels the noblest down to the most negligent style of Homer. The poet is _not_ always so ‘ignoble’, as the unlearned might infer from my critic’s specimens. He never drops so low as Shakspeare; yet if he were as sustained as Virgil or Milton, he would with it lose his vast superiority over these, his rich variety. That the whole first book of the Iliad is pitched lower than the rest, though it has vigorous descriptions, is denoted by the total absence of simile in it: for Homer’s kindling is always indicated by simile. The second book rises on the first, until the catalogue of ships, which (as if to atone for its flatness) is ushered in by five consecutive similes. In the third and fourth books the poet continues to rise, and almost culminates in the fifth; but then seems to restrain himself, lest nothing grander be left for Achilles. Although I do not believe in a unity of authorship between the Odyssey and the Iliad, yet in the Iliad itself I see such unity, that I cannot doubt its negligences to be from art. (The monstrous speech of Nestor in the 11th book is a case by itself. About 100 lines have perhaps been added later, for reasons other than literary.) I observe that just before the poet is about to bring out Achilles in his utmost splendour, he has three-quarters of a book comparatively tame, with a ridiculous legend told by Agamemnon in order to cast his own sins upon Fate. If Shakspeare introduces coarse wrangling, buffoonery, or mean superstition, no one claims or wishes this to be in a high diction or tragic rhythm; and why should anyone wish such a thing from Homer or Homer’s translator? I find nothing here in the poet to apologize for; but much cause for indignation, when the unlearned public is misled by translators or by critics to expect delicacy and elegance out of place. But I beg the unlearned to judge for himself whether Homer _can_ have intended such lines as the following for poetry, and whether I am bound to make them any better than I do.

Then visiting he urged each man with words, Mesthles and Glaucus and Medon and Thersilochus And Asteropæus and Deisenor and Hippothoüs And Phorkys and Chromius and Ennomus the augur.

He has lines in plenty as little elevated. If they came often in masses, it would be best to translate them into avowed prose: but since gleams of poetry break out amid what is flattest, I have no choice but to imitate Homer in retaining a uniform, but easy and unpretending metre. Mr Arnold calls my metre ‘slip-shod’: if it can rise into grandeur when needful, the epithet is a praise.

Of course I hold the Iliad to be _generally_ noble and grand. Very many of the poet’s conceptions were grand to him, mean to us: especially is he mean and absurd in scenes of conflict between the gods. Besides, he is disgusting and horrible occasionally in word and thought; as when Hecuba wishes to ‘cling on Achilles and eat up his liver’; when (as Jupiter says) Juno would gladly eat Priam’s children raw; when Jupiter hanged Juno up and fastened a pair of anvils to her feet; also in the description of dreadful wounds, and the treatment which (Priam says) dogs give to an old man’s corpse. The descriptions of Vulcan and Thersites are ignoble; so is the mode of mourning for Hector adopted by Priam; so is the treatment of the populace by Ulysses, which does but reflect the manners of the day. I am not now blaming Homer for these things; but I say no treatment can elevate the subject; the translator must not be expected to make noble what is not so intrinsically.

If anyone think that I am disparaging Homer, let me remind him of the horrid grossnesses of Shakspeare, which yet are not allowed to lessen our admiration of Shakspeare’s grandeur. The Homer of the Iliad is morally pure and often very tender; but to expect refinement and universal delicacy of expression in that stage of civilization is quite anachronistic and unreasonable. As in earlier England, so in Homeric Greece, even high poetry partook of the coarseness of society. This was probably inevitable, precisely because Greek epic poetry was so _natural_.

Mr Arnold says that I make Homer’s nobleness _eminently ignoble_. This suggests to me to quote a passage, not because I think myself

## particularly successful in it, but because the poet is evidently aiming

to be grand, when his mightiest hero puts forth mighty boastings, offensive to some of the gods. It is the speech of Achilles over the dead body of Asteropæus (Iliad 21, 184). Whether I make it ignoble, by my diction or my metre, the reader must judge.

Lie as thou art. ’Tis hard for thee to strive against the children Of overmatching Saturn’s son, tho’ offspring of a River. Thou boastest, that thy origin is from a Stream broad-flówing; I boast, from mighty Jupiter to trace my first beginning. A man who o’er the Myrmidons holdeth wide rule, begat me, Peleus; whose father Æacus by Jupiter was gotten. Rivers, that trickle to the sea, than Jupiter are weaker; So, than the progeny of Jove, weaker a River’s offspring. Yea, if he aught avail’d to help, behold! a mighty River Beside thee here: but none can fight with Jove, the child of Saturn. Not royal Acheloïus with him may play the equal. Nor e’en the amplebosom’d strength of deeply-flowing Ocean: Tho’ from his fulness every Sea and every River welleth, And all the ever-bubbling springs and eke their vasty sources. Yet at the lightning-bolt of Jove doth even Ocean shudder, And at the direful thunder-clap, when from the sky it crasheth.

Mr Arnold has in some respects attacked me discreetly; I mean, where he has said that which damages me with his readers, and yet leaves me no possible reply. What is easier than for one to call another ignoble? what more damaging? what harder to refute? Then when he speaks of my ‘metrical exploits’ how can I be offended? to what have I to reply? His words are expressive either of compliment or of contempt; but in either case are untangible. Again: when he would show how tender he has been of my honour, and how unwilling to expose my enormities, he says: p. 57: ‘I will by no means search in Mr Newman’s version for passages likely to raise a laugh: that search, _alas!_ would be far too easy’; I find the pity which the word _alas!_ expresses, to be very clever, and very effective against me. But, I think, he was not discreet, but very unwise, in making dogmatic statements on the ground of erudition, many of which I have exposed; and about which much more remains to be said than space will allow me.