Part 14

Buffon, the great French naturalist, imposed on himself the rule of steadily abstaining from all answer to attacks made upon him. ‘Je n’ai jamais répondu à aucune critique’, he said to one of his friends who, on the occasion of a certain criticism, was eager to take up arms in his behalf; ‘je n’ai jamais répondu à aucune critique, et je garderai le même silence sur celle-ci’. On another occasion, when accused of plagiarism, and pressed by his friends to answer, ‘Il vaut mieux’, he said, ‘laisser ces mauvaises gens dans l’incertitude’. Even when reply to an attack was made successfully, he disapproved of it, he regretted that those he esteemed should make it. Montesquieu, more sensitive to criticism than Buffon, had answered, and successfully answered, an attack made upon his great work, the _Esprit des Lois_, by the _Gazetier Janséniste_. This Jansenist Gazetteer was a periodical of those times, a periodical such as other times, also, have occasionally seen, very pretentious, very aggressive, and, when the point to be seized was at all a delicate one, very apt to miss it. ‘Notwithstanding this example’, said Buffon, who, as well as Montesquieu, had been attacked by the Jansenist Gazetteer, ‘notwithstanding this example, I think I may promise my course will be different. I shall not answer a single word’.

And to anyone who has noticed the baneful effects of the controversy, with all its train of personal rivalries and hatreds, on men of letters or men of science; to anyone who has observed how it tends to impair, not only their dignity and repose, but their productive force, their genuine activity; how it always checks the free play of the spirit, and often ends by stopping it altogether; it can hardly seem doubtful that the rule thus imposed on himself by Buffon was a wise one. His own career, indeed, admirably shows the wisdom of it. That career was as glorious as it was serene; but it owed to its serenity no small part of its glory. The regularity and completeness with which he gradually built up the great work which he had designed, the air of equable majesty which he shed over it, struck powerfully the imagination of his contemporaries, and surrounded Buffon’s fame with a peculiar respect and dignity. ‘He is’, said Frederick the Great of him, ‘the man who has best deserved the great celebrity which he has acquired’. And this regularity of production, this equableness of temper, he maintained by his resolute disdain of personal controversy.

Buffon’s example seems to me worthy of all imitation, and in my humble way I mean always to follow it. I never have replied, I never will reply, to any literary assailant; in such encounters tempers are lost, the world laughs, and truth is not served. Least of all should I think of using this Chair as a place from which to carry on such a conflict. But when a learned and estimable man thinks he has reason to complain of language used by me in this Chair, when he attributes to me intentions and feelings towards him which are far from my heart, I owe him some explanation, and I am bound, too, to make the explanation as public as the words which gave offence. This is the reason why I revert once more to the subject of translating Homer. But being thus brought back to that subject, and not wishing to occupy you solely with an explanation which, after all, is Mr Newman’s affair and mine, not the public’s, I shall take the opportunity, not certainly to enter into any conflict with anyone, but to try to establish our old friend, the coming translator of Homer, yet a little firmer in the positions which I hope we have now secured for him; to protect him against the danger of relaxing, in the confusion of dispute, his attention to those matters which alone I consider important for him; to save him from losing sight, in the dust of the attacks delivered over it, of the real body of Patroclus. He will, probably, when he arrives, requite my solicitude very ill, and be in haste to disown his benefactor: but my interest in him is so sincere that I can disregard his probable ingratitude.

First, however, for the explanation. Mr Newman has published a reply to the remarks which I made on his translation of the _Iliad_. He seems to think that the respect which at the outset of those remarks I professed for him must have been professed ironically; he says that I use ‘forms of attack against him which he does not know how to characterize’; that I ‘speak scornfully’ of him, treat him with ‘gratuitous insult, gratuitous rancour’; that I ‘propagate slanders’ against him, that I wish to ‘damage him with my readers’, to ‘stimulate my readers to despise’ him. He is entirely mistaken. I respect Mr Newman sincerely; I respect him as one of the few learned men we have, one of the few who love learning for its own sake; this respect for him I had before I read his translation of the _Iliad_, I retained it while I was commenting on that translation, I have not lost it after reading his reply. Any vivacities of expression which may have given him pain I sincerely regret, and can only assure him that I used them without a thought of insult or rancour. When I took the liberty of creating the verb _to Newmanize_, my intentions were no more rancorous than if I had said to _Miltonize_; when I exclaimed, in my astonishment at his vocabulary, ‘With whom can Mr Newman have lived’? I meant merely to convey, in a familiar form of speech, the sense of bewilderment one has at finding a person to whom words one thought all the world knew seem strange, and words one thought entirely strange, intelligible. Yet this simple expression of my bewilderment Mr Newman construes into an accusation that he is ‘often guilty of keeping low company’, and says that I shall ‘never want a stone to throw at him’. And what is stranger still, one of his friends gravely tells me that Mr Newman ‘lived with the fellows of Balliol’. As if that made Mr Newman’s glossary less inexplicable to me! As if he could have got his glossary from the fellows of Balliol! As if I could believe that the members of that distinguished society, of whose discourse, not so many years afterwards, I myself was an unworthy hearer, were in Mr Newman’s time so far removed from the Attic purity of speech which we all of us admired, that when one of them called a calf a _bulkin_, the rest ‘easily understood’ him; or, when he wanted to say that a newspaper-article was ‘proudly fine’, it mattered little whether he said it was that or _bragly_! No; his having lived with the fellows of Balliol does not explain Mr Newman’s glossary to me. I will no longer ask ‘with whom he can have lived’, since that gives him offence; but I must still declare that where he got his test of rarity or intelligibility for words is a mystery to me.

That, however, does not prevent me from entertaining a very sincere respect for Mr Newman, and since he doubts it, I am glad to reiterate my expression of it. But the truth of the matter is this: I unfeignedly admire Mr Newman’s ability and learning; but I think in his translation of Homer he has employed that ability and learning quite amiss. I think he has chosen quite the wrong field for turning his ability and learning to account. I think that in England, partly from the want of an Academy,

## partly from a national habit of intellect to which that want of an

Academy is itself due, there exists too little of what I may call a public force of correct literary opinion, possessing within certain limits a clear sense of what is right and wrong, sound and unsound, and sharply recalling men of ability and learning from any flagrant misdirection of these their advantages. I think, even, that in our country a powerful misdirection of this kind is often more likely to subjugate and pervert opinion than to be checked and corrected by it[56]. Hence a chaos of false tendencies, wasted efforts, impotent conclusions, works which ought never to have been undertaken. Anyone who can introduce a little order into this chaos by establishing in any quarter a single sound rule of criticism, a single rule which clearly marks what is right as right, and what is wrong as wrong, does a good deed; and his deed is so much the better the greater force he counteracts of learning and ability applied to thicken the chaos. Of course no one can be sure that he has fixed any such rules; he can only do his best to fix them; but somewhere or other, in the literary opinion of Europe, if not in the literary opinion of one nation, in fifty years, if not in five, there is a final judgment on these matters, and the critic’s work will at last stand or fall by its true merits.

Meanwhile, the charge of having in one instance misapplied his powers, of having once followed a false tendency, is no such grievous charge to bring against a man; it does not exclude a great respect for himself personally, or for his powers in the happiest manifestations of them. False tendency is, I have said, an evil to which the artist or the man of letters in England is peculiarly prone; but everywhere in our time he is liable to it,—the greatest as well as the humblest. ‘The first beginnings of my _Wilhelm Meister_’, says Goethe, ‘arose out of an obscure sense of the great truth that man will often attempt something of which nature has denied him the proper powers, will undertake and practise something in which he cannot become skilled. An inward feeling warns him to desist’ (yes, but there are, unhappily, cases of absolute judicial blindness!), ‘nevertheless he cannot get clear in himself about it, and is driven along a false road to a false goal, without knowing how it is with him. To this we may refer everything which goes by the name of false tendency, dilettanteism, and so on. A great many men waste in this way the fairest portion of their lives, and fall at last into wonderful delusion’. Yet after all, Goethe adds, it sometimes happens that even on this false road a man finds, not indeed that which he sought, but something which is good and useful for him; ‘like Saul, the son of Kish, who went forth to look for his father’s asses, and found a kingdom’. And thus false tendency as well as true, vain effort as well as fruitful, go together to produce that great movement of life, to present that immense and magic spectacle of human affairs, which from boyhood to old age fascinates the gaze of every man of imagination, and which would be his terror, if it were not at the same time his delight.

So Mr Newman may see how wide-spread a danger it is, to which he has, as I think, in setting himself to translate Homer, fallen a prey. He may be well satisfied if he can escape from it by paying it the tribute of a single work only. He may judge how unlikely it is that I should ‘despise’ him for once falling a prey to it. I know far too well how exposed to it we all are; how exposed to it I myself am. At this very moment, for example, I am fresh from reading Mr Newman’s Reply to my Lectures, a reply full of that erudition in which (as I am so often and so good-naturedly reminded, but indeed I know it without being reminded) Mr Newman is immeasurably my superior. Well, the demon that pushes us all to our ruin is even now prompting me to follow Mr Newman into a discussion about the digamma, and I know not what providence holds me back. And some day, I have no doubt, I shall lecture on the language of the Berbers, and give him his entire revenge.

But Mr Newman does not confine himself to complaints on his own behalf, he complains on Homer’s behalf too. He says that my ‘statements about Greek literature are against the most notorious and elementary fact’; that I ‘do a public wrong to literature by publishing them’; and that the Professors to whom I appealed in my three Lectures, ‘would only lose credit if they sanctioned the use I make of their names’. He does these eminent men the kindness of adding, however, that ‘whether they are pleased with this parading of their names in behalf of paradoxical error, he may well doubt’, and that ‘until they endorse it themselves, he shall treat my process as a piece of forgery’. He proceeds to discuss my statements at great length, and with an erudition and ingenuity which nobody can admire more than I do. And he ends by saying that my ignorance is great.

Alas! that is very true. Much as Mr Newman was mistaken when he talked of my rancour, he is entirely right when he talks of my ignorance. And yet, perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes find myself wishing, when dealing with these matters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance were even greater than it is. To handle these matters properly there is needed a poise so perfect that the least overweight in any direction tends to destroy the balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys it, even erudition may destroy it. To press to the sense of the thing itself with which one is dealing, not to go off on some collateral issue about the thing, is the hardest matter in the world. The ‘thing itself’ with which one is here dealing, the critical perception of poetic truth, is of all things the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent; by even pressing too impetuously after it, one runs the risk of losing it. The critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable; he should be indeed the ‘ondoyant et divers’, the _undulating and diverse_ being of Montaigne. The less he can deal with his object simply and freely, the more things he has to take into account in dealing with it, the more, in short, he has to encumber himself, so much the greater force of spirit he needs to retain his elasticity. But one cannot exactly have this greater force by wishing for it; so, for the force of spirit one has, the load put upon it is often heavier than it will well bear. The late Duke of Wellington said of a certain peer that ‘it was a great pity his education had been so far too much for his abilities’. In like manner, one often sees erudition out of all proportion to its owner’s critical faculty. Little as I know, therefore, I am always apprehensive, in dealing with poetry, lest even that little should prove ‘too much for my abilities’.

With this consciousness of my own lack of learning, nay, with this sort of acquiescence in it, with this belief that for the labourer in the field of poetical criticism learning has its disadvantages, I am not likely to dispute with Mr Newman about matters of erudition. All that he says on these matters in his Reply I read with great interest; in general I agree with him; but only, I am sorry to say, up to a certain point. Like all learned men, accustomed to desire definite rules, he draws his conclusions too absolutely; he wants to include too much under his rules; he does not quite perceive that in poetical criticism the shade, the fine distinction, is everything; and that, when he has once missed this, in all he says he is in truth but beating the air. For instance: because I think Homer noble, he imagines I must think him elegant; and in fact he says in plain words that I do think him so, that to me Homer seems ‘pervadingly elegant’. But he does not. Virgil is elegant, ‘pervadingly elegant’, even in passages of the highest emotion:

O, ubi campi, Spercheosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacænis Taygeta[57]!

Even there Virgil, though of a divine elegance, is still elegant, but Homer is not elegant; the word is quite a wrong one to apply to him, and Mr Newman is quite right in blaming anyone he finds so applying it. Again; arguing against my assertion that Homer is not quaint, he says: ‘It is quaint to call waves _wet_, milk _white_, blood _dusky_, horses _single-hoofed_, words winged, Vulcan _Lobfoot_ (Κυλλοποδίων), a spear _longshadowy_‘, and so on. I find I know not how many distinctions to draw here. I do not think it quaint to call waves _wet_, or milk _white_, or words _winged_; but I do think it quaint to call horses _single-hoofed_, or Vulcan _Lobfoot_, or a spear _longshadowy_. As to calling blood _dusky_, I do not feel quite sure; I will tell Mr Newman my opinion when I see the passage in which he calls it so. But then, again, because it is quaint to call Vulcan _Lobfoot_, I cannot admit that it was quaint to call him Κυλλοποδίων; nor that, because it is quaint to call a spear _longshadowy_, it was quaint to call it δολιχόσκιον. Here Mr Newman’s erudition misleads him: he knows the literal value of the Greek so well, that he thinks his literal rendering identical with the Greek, and that the Greek must stand or fall along with his rendering. But the real question is, not whether he has given us, so to speak, full change for the Greek, but _how_ he gives us our change: we want it in gold, and he gives it us in copper. Again: ‘It is quaint’, says Mr Newman, ‘to address a young friend as “O Pippin”! it is quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring’. Here, too, Mr Newman goes much too fast, and his category of quaintness is too comprehensive. To address a young friend as ‘O Pippin’! is, I cordially agree with him, very quaint; although I do not think it was quaint in Sarpedon to address Glaucus as ὦ πέπον: but in comparing, whether in Greek or in English, Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring, I do not see that there is of necessity anything quaint at all. Again; because I said that _eld_, _lief_, _in sooth_, and other words, are, as Mr Newman uses them in certain places, bad words, he imagines that I must mean to stamp these words with an absolute reprobation; and because I said that ‘my Bibliolatry is excessive’, he imagines that I brand all words as ignoble which are not in the Bible. Nothing of the kind: there are no such absolute rules to be laid down in these matters. The Bible vocabulary is to be used as an assistance, not as an authority. Of the words which, placed where Mr Newman places them, I have called bad words, everyone may be excellent in some other place. Take _eld_, for instance: when Shakspeare, reproaching man with the dependence in which his youth is passed, says:

all thy blessed youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms Of palsied _eld_, ...

it seems to me that _eld_ comes in excellently there, in a passage of curious meditation; but when Mr Newman renders ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε by ‘from _Eld_ and Death exempted’, it seems to me he infuses a tinge of quaintness into the transparent simplicity of Homer’s expression, and so I call _eld_ a bad word in that place.

Once more. Mr Newman lays it down as a general rule that ‘many of Homer’s energetic descriptions are expressed in coarse physical words’. He goes on: ‘I give one illustration,—Τρῶες προὔτυψαν ἀολλέες. Cowper, misled by the _ignis fatuus_ of “stateliness” renders it absurdly:

The powers 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 Trojans pitched”, would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour; and I maintain that “forward in mass the Trojans pitched”, would be an irreprovable rendering’. He actually gives us all that as if it were a piece of scientific deduction; and as if, at the end, he had arrived at an incontrovertible conclusion. But, in truth, one cannot settle these matters quite in this way. Mr Newman’s general rule may be true or false (I dislike to meddle with general rules), but every part in what follows must stand or fall by itself, and its soundness or unsoundness has nothing at all to do with the truth or falsehood of Mr Newman’s general rule. He first gives, as a strict rendering of the Greek, ‘The Trojans knocked forward (or, thumped, butted forward), in close pack’. I need not say that, as a ‘strict rendering of the Greek’, this is good; all Mr Newman’s ‘strict renderings of the Greek’ are sure to be, as such, good; but ‘in close pack’, for ἀολλέες, seems to me to be what Mr Newman’s renderings are not always,—an excellent _poetical rendering_ of the Greek; a thousand times better, certainly, than Cowper’s ‘embattled close’. Well, but Mr Newman goes on: ‘I believe that, “forward in pack the Trojans pitched”, would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour’. Here, I say, the Homeric colour is half washed out of Mr Newman’s happy rendering of ἀολλέες; while in ‘pitched’ for προὔτυψαν, the literal fidelity of the first rendering is gone, while certainly no Homeric colour has come in its place. Finally, Mr Newman concludes: ‘I maintain that “forward in mass the Trojans pitched”, would be an irreprovable rendering’. Here, in what Mr Newman fancies his final moment of triumph, Homeric colour and literal fidelity have alike abandoned him altogether; the last stage of his translation is much worse than the second, and immeasurably worse than the first.

All this to show that a looser, easier method than Mr Newman’s must be taken, if we are to arrive at any good result in these questions. I now go on to follow Mr Newman a little further, not at all as wishing to dispute with him, but as seeking (and this is the true fruit we may gather from criticisms upon us) to gain hints from him for the establishment of some useful truth about our subject, even when I think him wrong. I still retain, I confess, my conviction that Homer’s characteristic qualities are rapidity of movement, plainness of words and style, simplicity and directness of ideas, and, above all, nobleness, the grand manner. Whenever Mr Newman drops a word, awakens a train of thought, which leads me to see any of these characteristics more clearly, I am grateful to him; and one or two suggestions of this kind which he affords, are all that now, having expressed my sorrow that he should have misconceived my feelings towards him, and pointed out what I think the vice of his method of criticism, I have to notice in his Reply.