Part 13

Mr Arnold censures me for representing Achilles as _yelling_. He is depicted by the poet as in the most violent physical rage, boiling over with passion and wholly uncontrouled. He smacks his two thighs at once; he rolls on the ground, μέγας μεγαλωστὶ; he defiles his hair with dust; he rends it; he grinds his teeth; fire flashes from his eyes; but—he may not ‘yell’, that would not be _comme il faut_! We shall agree, that in peace nothing so becomes a hero as modest stillness; but that ‘Peleus’ son, insatiate of combat’, full of the fiercest pent-up passion, should vent a little of it in a _yell_, seems to me quite in place. That the Greek ἰάχων is not necessarily to be so rendered, I am aware; but it is a very vigorous word, like _peal_ and _shriek_; neither of which would here suit. I sometimes render it _skirl_: but ‘battle-yell’ is a received rightful phrase. Achilles is not a stately Virgilian _pius Æneas_, but is a far wilder barbarian.

After Mr Arnold has laid upon me the sins of Shakspeare, he amazes me by adding, p. 92: ‘The idiomatic language of Shakspeare, such language as “prate of his _whereabout_”, “_jump_ the life to come”, “the damnation of his _taking-off_”, “_quietus make_ with a bare bodkin”, should be carefully observed by the translator of Homer; although in every case he will have to decide for himself, whether the use, by him, of Shakspeare’s liberty, will or will not clash with his indispensable duty of nobleness’.

Of the Shakspearianisms here italicized by Mr Arnold, there is not one which I could endure to adopt. ‘His whereabout’, I regard as the flattest prose. (The word _prate_ is a plebeian which I admit in its own low places; but how Mr Arnold can approve of it, consistently with his attacks on me, I do not understand.) Damnation and Taking-off (for Guilt and Murder), and Jump, I absolutely reject; and ‘quietus make’ would be nothing but an utterly inadmissible _quotation_ from Shakspeare. _Jump_ as an active verb is to me monstrous, but _Jump_ is just the sort of modern prose word which is not noble. _Leap_, _Bound_, for great action, _Skip_, _Frisk_, _Gambol_ for smaller, are all good.

I have shown against Mr Arnold—(1) that Homer was out-and-out antiquated to the Athenians, even when perfectly understood by them; (2) that his conceptions, similes, phraseology and epithets are habitually quaint, strange, unparalleled in Greek literature; and pardonable only to semibarbarism; (3) that they are intimately related to his noblest excellences; (4) that many words are so peculiar as to be still doubtful to us; (5) I have indicated that some of his descriptions and conceptions are horrible to us, though they are not so to his barbaric auditors; (6) that considerable portions of the poem are not poetry, but rhythmical prose like Horace’s Satires, and are interesting to us not as poetry but as portraying the manners or sentiments of the day. I now add (7) what is inevitable in all high and barbaric poetry, perhaps in all high poetry, many of his energetic descriptions are expressed in _coarse physical words_. I do not here attempt proof, for it might need a treatise: but I give one illustration; Il. 13, 136, Τρῶες προὒτυψαν ἀολλέες. Cowper, misled by the _ignis fatuus_ of ‘stateliness’, renders it absurdly

_The pow’rs of Ilium_ gave the first assault, _Embattled_ close;

but it is strictly, ‘The Trojans _knocked-forward_ (or, thumped, _butted_, forward) in close pack’. The verb is too coarse for later polished prose, and even the adjective is very strong (_packed together_). I believe, that ‘Forward in _pack_ the Troians _pitch’d_’, would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour; and I maintain that ‘Forward in mass the Troians pitch’d’, would be an irreprovable rendering.

Dryden in this respect is in entire harmony with Homeric style. No critic deals fairly with me in isolating any of these strong words, and then appealing to his readers whether I am not ignoble. Hereby he deprives me of the ἀγὼν, the ‘mighty current’ of Mr Arnold, and he misstates the problem; which is, whether the word is suitable, _then_ and _there_, for the work required of it, as the coalman at the pit, the clown in the furrow, the huntsman in the open field.

3. There is a small number of words not natural plebeians, but patricians on which a most unjust bill of attainder has been passed, which I seek to reverse. On the first which I name, Mr Arnold will side with me, because it is a Biblical word, _wench_. In Lancashire I believe that at the age of about sixteen a ‘girl’ turns into ‘a wench’, or as we say ‘a young woman’. In Homer, ‘girl’ and ‘young woman’ are alike inadmissible; ‘maid’ or ‘maiden’ will not always suit, and ‘wench’ is the natural word. I do not know that I have used it three times, but I claim a right of using it, and protest against allowing the heroes of slang to deprive us of excellent words by their perverse misuse. If the imaginations of some men are always in satire and in low slang, so much the worse for them: but the more we yield to such demands, the more will be exacted. I expect, before long, to be told that _brick_ is an ignoble word, meaning a jolly fellow, and that _sell_, _cut_ are out of place in Homer. My metre, it seems, is inadmissible with some, because it is the metre of Yankee Doodle! as if Homer’s metre were not that of the Margites. Every noble poem is liable to be travestied, as the Iliad and Æschylus and Shakspeare have been. Every burlesque writer uses the noble metre, and caricatures the noble style. Mr Arnold says, I must not render τανύπεπλος ‘trailing-rob’d’, because it reminds him of ‘long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement’. What a confession as to the state of his imagination! Why not, of ‘a queen’s robe trailing on a marble pavement’? Did he never read

πέπλον μὲν κατέχευεν ἑανὸν πατρὸς ἐτ’ οὔδει?

I have digressed: I return to words which have been misunderstood. A second word is of more importance, _Imp_; which properly means a Graft. The best translation of ὦ Λήδας ἔρνος to my mind, is, ‘O Imp of Leda’! for neither ‘bud of Leda’, nor ‘scion of Leda’ satisfy me: much less ‘sprig’ or ‘shoot of Leda’. The theological writers so often used the phrase ‘imp of Satan’ for ‘child of the devil’, that (since Bunyan?) the vulgar no longer understand that _imp_ means _scion_, _child_, and suppose it to mean ‘little devil’. A Reviewer has omitted to give his unlearned readers any explanation of the word (though I carefully explained it) and calls down their indignation upon me by his censures, which I hope proceeded from carelessness and ignorance.

Even in Spenser’s Fairy Queen the word retains its rightful and noble sense:

Well worthy _imp_! then said the lady, etc.,

and in North’s Plutarch,

‘He took upon him to protect him from them all, and not to suffer so goodly an _imp_ [Alcibiades] to lose the good fruit of his youth’.

Dryden uses the verb, To imp; to graft, insert.

I was quite aware that I claimed of my readers a certain strength of mind, when I bid them to forget the defilements which vulgarity has shed over the noble word Imp, and carry their imaginations back two or three centuries: but I did not calculate that any critic would call Dainty grotesque. This word is equivalent in meaning to Delicate and Nice, but has precisely the epical character in which both those words are deficient. For instance, I say, that after the death of Patroclus, the coursers ‘stood motionless’,

Drooping tōwārd the ground their heads, and down their plaintive eyelids Did warm tears trickle to the ground, their charioteer bewailing. Defilèd were their _dainty_ manes, over the yoke-strap dropping.

A critic who objects to this, has to learn English from my translation. Does he imagine that Dainty can mean nothing but ‘over-particular as to food’?

In the compound Dainty-cheek’d, Homer shows his own epic peculiarity. It is imitated in the similar word εὐπάρᾳος applied to the Gorgon Medusa by Pindar: but not in the Attics. I have somewhere read, that the rudest conception of female beauty is that of a brilliant red _plump_ cheek; such as an English clown admires (was this what Pindar meant?); the second stage looks to the delicacy of tint in the cheek (this is Homer’s καλλιπάρῃος:) the third looks to shape (this is the εὒμορφος of the Attics, the _formosus_ of the Latins, and is seen in the Greek sculpture); the fourth and highest looks to moral expression: this is the idea of Christian Europe. That Homer rests exclusively in the second or semibarbaric stage, it is not for me to say, but, as far as I am able, to give to the readers of my translation materials for their own judgment. From the vague word εἶδος, _species_, _appearance_, it cannot be positively inferred whether the poet had an eye for Shape. The epithets curl-eyed and fine-ankled decidedly suggest that he had; except that his application of the former to the entire nation of the Greeks makes it seem to be of foreign tradition, and as unreal as brazen-_mailed_.

Another word which has been ill-understood and ill-used, is _dapper_. Of the epithet dappergreav’d for ἐϋκνημὶς I certainly am not enamoured, but I have not yet found a better rendering. It is easier to carp at my phrase, than to suggest a better. The word _dapper_ in Dutch = German _tapfer_; and like the Scotch _braw_ or _brave_ means with us _fine_, _gallant_, _elegant_. I have read the line of an old poet,

The dapper words which lovers use,

for _elegant_, I suppose; and so ‘the dapper does’ and ‘dapper elves’ of Milton must refer to elegance or refined beauty. What is there[54] ignoble in such a word? ‘Elegant’ and ‘pretty’ are inadmissible in epic poetry: ‘dapper’ is logically equivalent, and _has the epic colour_. Neither ‘fair’ nor ‘comely’ here suit. As to the school translation of ‘wellgreav’d’, every common Englishman on hearing the sound receives it as ‘wellgrieved’, and to me it is very unpleasing. A part of the mischief, a large part of it, is in the word _greave_; for _dapper-girdled_ is on the whole well-received. But what else can we say for _greave_? leggings? gambados?

Much perhaps remains to be learnt concerning Homer’s perpetual epithets. My very learned colleague Goldstücke, Professor of Sanscrit, is convinced that the epithet _cow-eyed_ of the Homeric Juno is an echo of the notion of Hindoo poets, that (if I remember his statement) ‘the sun-beams are the _cows_ of heaven’. The sacred qualities of the Hindoo cow are perhaps not to be forgotten. I have myself been struck by the phrase διϊπετέος ποτάμοιο as akin to the idea that the Ganges falls from Mount Meru, the Hindoo Olympus. Also the meaning of two other epithets has been revealed to me from the pictures of Hindoo ladies. First, _curl-eyed_, to which I have referred above; secondly, _rosy-fingered Aurora_. For Aurora is an ‘Eastern lady’; and, as such, has the tips of her fingers dyed rosy-red, whether by henna or by some more brilliant drug. Who shall say that the kings and warriors of Homer do not derive from the East their epithet ‘Jove-nurtured’? or that this or that goddess is not called ‘golden-throned’ or ‘fair-throned’ in allusion to Assyrian sculptures or painting, as Rivers probably drew their later poetical attribute ‘bull-headed’ from the sculpture of fountains? It is a familiar remark, that Homer’s poetry presupposes a vast pre-existing art and material. Much in him was traditional. Many of his wild legends came from Asia. He is to us much beside a poet; and that a translator should assume to cut him down to the standard of modern taste, is a thought which all the higher minds of this age have outgrown. How much better is that reverential Docility, which with simple and innocent wonder, receives the oddest notions of antiquity as material of instruction yet to be revealed, than the self-complacent Criticism, which pronouncing everything against modern taste to be grotesque[55] and contemptible, squares the facts to its own ‘Axioms’! _Homer is noble: but this or that epithet is not noble: therefore we must explode it from Homer!_ I value, I maintain, I struggle for the ‘high a priori road’ in its own place; but certainly not in historical literature. To read Homer’s own thoughts is to wander in a world abounding with freshness: but if we insist on treading round and round in our own footsteps, we shall never ascend those heights whence the strange region is to be seen. Surely an intelligent learned critic ought to inculcate on the unlearned, that if they would get instruction from Homer, they must not expect to have their ears tickled by a musical sound as of a namby-pamby poetaster; but must look on a metre as doing its duty, when it ‘strings the mind up to the necessary pitch’ in elevated passages; and that instead of demanding of a translator everywhere a rhythmical perfection which perhaps can only be attained by a great sacrifice of higher qualities, they should be willing to submit to a small part of that ruggedness, which Mr Arnold cheerfully bears in Homer himself through the loss of the Digamma. And now, for a final protest. To be _stately_ is not to be _grand_. Nicolas of Russia may have been stately like Cowper, Garibaldi is grand like the true Homer. A diplomatic address is stately; it is not grand, nor often noble. To expect a translation of Homer to be _pervadingly elegant_, is absurd; Homer is not such, any more than is the side of an Alpine mountain. The elegant and the picturesque are seldom identical, however much of delicate beauty may be interstudded in the picturesque; but this has always got plenty of what is shaggy and uncouth, without which contrast the full delight of beauty would not be attained. I think Moore in his characteristic way tells of a beauty

Shining on, shining on, by no shadow made tender, Till love falls asleep in the sameness of splendour.

Such certainly is not Homer’s. His beauty, when at its height, is _wild_ beauty: it smells of the mountain and of the sea. If he be compared to a noble animal, it is not to such a spruce rubbed-down Newmarket racer as our smooth translators would pretend, but to a wild horse of the Don Cossacks: and if I, instead of this, present to the reader nothing but a Dandie Dinmont’s pony, this, as a first approximation, is a valuable step towards the true solution.

Before the best translation of the Iliad of which our language is capable can be produced, the English public has to unlearn the false notion of Homer which his _deliberately faithless_ versifiers have infused. Chapman’s conceits unfit his translation for instructing the public, even if his rhythm ‘jolted’ less, if his structure were simpler, and his dialect more intelligible. My version, if allowed to be read, will prepare the public to receive a version better than mine. I regard it as a question about to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic _landis_, _houndis_, _hartis_, etc., instead of our modern unmelodious _lands_, _hounds_, _harts_; whether the _ye_ or _y_ before the past participle may not be restored; the want of which confounds that participle with the past tense. Even the final -en of the plural of verbs (we dancen, they singen, etc.) still subsists in Lancashire. It deserves consideration whether by a _few_ such slight grammatical retrogressions into antiquity a translator of Homer might not add much melody to his poem and do good service to the language.

Footnote 35:

He attacks the same line also in p. 44; but I do not claim this as a mark, how free I am from the fault.

Footnote 36:

If I had used such a double dative, as ‘to Peleus to a mortal’, what would he have said of my syntax?

Footnote 37:

Ballad-_manner_! The prevalent ballad-_metre_ is the Common Metre of our Psalm tunes: and yet he assumes that whatever is in this metre must be on the same level. I have professed (Pref. p. x) that our _existing_ old ballads are ‘poor and mean’, and are not my pattern.

Footnote 38:

He has also overlooked the misprint _Trojans_, where I wrote _Troïans_ (in three syllables), and has thus spoiled one verse out of the five.

Footnote 39:

As a literary curiosity I append the sentence of a learned reviewer concerning this metre of Campbell. ‘It is a metre fit for introducing anything or translating anything; a metre that _nothing can elevate, or degrade, or improve, or spoil_; in which all subjects will sound alike. A theorem of Euclid, a leading article from the _Times_, a dialogue from the last new novel, could all be reduced to it with the slightest possible verbal alteration’. [Quite true of Greek hexameter or Shakspeare’s line. It is a _virtue_ in the metres]. ‘To such a mill all would be grist that came near it, and _in no grain that had once passed through it would human ingenuity ever detect again a characteristic quality_’. This writer is a stout maintainer that English ballad metre is the right one for translating Homer: only, somehow, he shuts his eyes to the fact that Campbell’s _is_ ballad metre! Sad to say, extravagant and absurd assertions, like these, though anonymous, can, by a parade of learning, do much damage to the sale of a book in verse.

Footnote 40:

I think he has mistaken the _summit_ of the wave for a _headland_, and has made a single description into two, by the word _Or_: but I now confine my regard to the metre and general effect of the style.

Footnote 41:

_Companion_, in four syllables, is in Shakspeare’s style; with whom habitually the termination _-tion_ is two.

Footnote 42:

By corrupting the past tenses of _welisso_ into a false similarity to the past tenses of _elelizo_, the old editors superimposed a new and false sense on the latter verb; which still holds its place in our dictionaries, as it deceived the Greeks themselves.

Footnote 43:

That λλ _in Attic_ was sounded like French _l mouillée_, is judged probable by the learned writer of the article L (Penny Cyclop.), who urges that μᾶλλον is for μάλιον, and compares φυλλο with _folio_, αλλο with _alio_, ἁλλ with _sali_.

Footnote 44:

Men who can bear ‘belch’ in poetry, nowadays pretend that ‘sputter’ is indelicate. They find Homer’s ἀποπτύει to be ‘elegant’, but _sputter_—not! ‘No one would guess from Mr Newman’s coarse phrases how _elegant_ is Homer’!!

Footnote 45:

In a Note to my translation (overlooked by more than one critic) I have explained _curl-ey’d_, carefully, but not very accurately perhaps; as I had not before me the picture of the Hindoo lady to which I referred. The whole _upper eyelid_, when _open_, may be called the curl; for it is shaped like a buffalo’s horns. This accounts for ἑλικοβλέφαρος, ‘having a curly eye_lid_’.

Footnote 46:

I thought I had toned it down pretty well, in rendering it ‘O gentle friend’! Mr Arnold rebukes me for this, without telling me what I ought to say, or what is my fault. One thing is certain, that the Greek is most _odd_ and peculiar.

Footnote 47:

In the noble simile of the sea-tide, quoted p. 138 above, only the two first of its five lines are to the purpose. Mr Gladstone, seduced by rhyme, has so tapered off the point of the similitude, that only a microscopic reader will see it.

Footnote 48:

It is very singular that Mr Gladstone should imagine such a poet to have no eye for colour. I totally protest against his turning Homer’s paintings into leadpencil drawings. I believe that γλαυκὸς is grey (silvergreen), χάροψ blue; and that πρασινὸς, ‘leek-colour’, was too mean a word for any poets, early or late, to use for ‘green’, therefore χλωρὸς does duty for it. Κῦμα πορφύρεον is surely ‘the purple wave’, and ἰοειδέα πόντον ‘the violet sea’.

Footnote 49:

He pares down ἑλκηθμοῖο (the dragging away of a woman by the hair) into ‘captivity’! Better surely is my ‘ignoble’ version: ‘Ere-that I see thee _dragg’d away_, and hear thy shriek of anguish’.

Footnote 50:

He means _ours_ for two syllables. ‘Swiftness of ours’ is surely ungrammatical. ‘A galley of my own’ = one of my own galleys; but ‘a father of mine’, is absurd, since each has but one father. I confess I have myself been seduced into writing ‘those two eyes of his’, to avoid ‘_those his_ two eyes’: but I have since condemned and altered it.

Footnote 51:

Of course no peculiarity of phrase has _the effect_ of peculiarity on a man who has imperfect acquaintance with the delicacies of a language; who, for instance, thinks that ἑλκηθμὸς means δουλεία.

Footnote 52:

Ἐλλὸς needs light and gives none. Benfey suggests that it is for ἐνεὸς, as ἄλλος, _alius_, for Sanscrit _anya_. He with me refers ἔλλοψ to λέπω. Cf. _squamigeri_ in Lucretius.

Footnote 53:

I do not see that Mr Arnold has any right to reproach _me_, because _he_ does not know Spenser’s word ‘bragly’ (which I may have used twice in the Iliad), or Dryden’s word ‘plump’, for a mass. The former is so near in sound to _brag_ and _braw_, that an Englishman who is once told that it means ‘proudly fine’, ought thenceforward to find it very intelligible: the latter is a noble modification of the vulgar _lump_. That he can carp as he does against these words and against _bulkin_ (= young bullock) as unintelligible, is a testimony how little I have imposed of difficulty on my readers. Those who know _lambkin_ cannot find _bulkin_ very hard. Since writing the above, I see a learned writer in the Philological Museum illustrates ἴλη by the old English phrase ‘a plump of spears’.

Footnote 54:

I observe that Lord Lyttelton renders Milton’s _dapper elf_ by ῥαδινὰ, ‘softly moving’.

Footnote 55:

Mr Arnold calls it an unfortunate sentence of mine: ‘I ought to be quaint; I ought not to be grotesque’. I am disposed to think him right, but for reasons very opposite to those which he assigns. I have ‘unfortunately’ given to querulous critics a cue for attacking me unjustly. I should rather have said: ‘We ought to be _quaint_, and not to shrink from that which the fastidious modern will be sure to call _grotesque_ in English, when he is too blunted by habit, or too poor a scholar to discern it in the Greek’.

Last Words on Translating Homer A Reply to Francis W. Newman By Matthew Arnold

‘Multi, qui persequuntur me, et tribulant me: a testimoniis non declinavi.’