Part 15

Such a suggestion I find in Mr Newman’s remarks on my assertion that the translator of Homer must not adopt a quaint and antiquated style in rendering him, because the impression which Homer makes upon the living scholar is not that of a poet quaint and antiquated, but that of a poet perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible. I added that we cannot, I confess, really know how Homer seemed to Sophocles, but that it is impossible to me to believe that he seemed to him quaint and antiquated. Mr Newman asserts, on the other hand, that I am absurdly wrong here; that Homer seemed ‘out and out’ quaint and antiquated to the Athenians; that ‘every sentence of him was more or less antiquated to Sophocles, who could no more help feeling at every instant the foreign and antiquated character of the poetry than an Englishman can help feeling the same in reading Burns’ poems’. And not only does Mr Newman say this, but he has managed thoroughly to convince some of his readers of it. ‘Homer’s Greek’, says one of them, ‘certainly seemed antiquated to the historical times of Greece. Mr Newman, taking a far broader historical and philological view than Mr Arnold, stoutly maintains that it did seem so.’ And another says: ‘Doubtless Homer’s dialect and diction were as hard and obscure to a later Attic Greek as Chaucer to an Englishman of our day.’

Mr Newman goes on to say, that not only was Homer antiquated relatively to Pericles, but he is antiquated to the living scholar; and, indeed, is in himself ‘absolutely antique, being the poet of a barbarian age’. He tells us of his ‘inexhaustible quaintnesses’, of his ‘very eccentric diction’; and he infers, of course, that he is perfectly right in rendering him in a quaint and antiquated style.

Now this question, whether or no Homer seemed quaint and antiquated to Sophocles, I call a delightful question to raise. It is not a barren verbal dispute; it is a question ‘drenched in matter’, to use an expression of Bacon; a question full of flesh and blood, and of which the scrutiny, though I still think we cannot settle absolutely, may yet give us a directly useful result. To scrutinize it may lead us to see more clearly what sort of a style a modern translator of Homer ought to adopt.

Homer’s verses were some of the first words which a young Athenian heard. He heard them from his mother or his nurse before he went to school; and at school, when he went there, he was constantly occupied with them. So much did he hear of them that Socrates proposes, in the interests of morality, to have selections from Homer made, and placed in the hands of mothers and nurses, in his model republic; in order that, of an author with whom they were sure to be so perpetually conversant, the young might learn only those parts which might do them good. His language was as familiar to Sophocles, we may be quite sure, as the language of the Bible is to us.

Nay, more. Homer’s language was not, of course, in the time of Sophocles, the spoken or written language of ordinary life, any more than the language of the Bible, any more than the language of poetry, is with us; but for one great species of composition, epic poetry, it was still the current language; it was the language in which everyone who made that sort of poetry composed. Everyone at Athens who dabbled in epic poetry, not only understood Homer’s language, he possessed it. He possessed it as everyone who dabbles in poetry with us, possesses what may be called the poetical vocabulary, as distinguished from the vocabulary of common speech and of modern prose: I mean, such expressions as _perchance_ for _perhaps_, _spake_ for _spoke_, _aye_ for _ever_, _don_ for _put on_, _charméd_ for _charm’d_, and thousands of others.

I might go to Burns and Chaucer, and, taking words and passages from them, ask if they afforded any parallel to a language so familiar and so possessed. But this I will not do, for Mr Newman himself supplies me with what he thinks a fair parallel, in its effect upon us, to the language of Homer in its effect upon Sophocles. He says that such words as _mon_, _londis_, _libbard_, _withouten_, _muchel_, give us a tolerable but incomplete notion of this parallel; and he finally exhibits the parallel in all its clearness, by this poetical specimen:

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

Now, does Mr Newman really think that Sophocles could, as he says, ‘no more help feeling at every instant the foreign and antiquated character of Homer, than an Englishman can help feeling the same in hearing these lines’? Is he quite sure of it? He says he is; he will not allow of any doubt or hesitation in the matter. I had confessed we could not really know how Homer seemed to Sophocles; ‘Let Mr Arnold confess for himself’, cries Mr Newman, ‘and not for me, who know perfectly well’. And this is what he knows!

Mr Newman says, however, that I ‘play fallaciously on the words familiar and unfamiliar’; that ‘Homer’s words may have been familiar to the Athenians (_i.e._ often heard) even when they were either not understood by them or else, being understood, were yet felt and known to be utterly foreign. Let my renderings’, he continues, ‘be heard, as Pope or even Cowper has been heard, and no one will be “surprised”’.

But the whole question is here. The translator must not assume that to have taken place which has not taken place, although, perhaps, he may wish it to have taken place, namely, that his diction is become an established possession of the minds of men, and therefore is, in its proper place, familiar to them, will not ‘surprise’ them. If Homer’s language was familiar, that is, often heard, then to his language words like _londis_ and _libbard_, which are not familiar, offer, for the translator’s purpose, no parallel. For some purpose of the philologer they may offer a parallel to it; for the translator’s purpose they offer none. The question is not, whether a diction is antiquated for current speech, but whether it is antiquated for that particular purpose for which it is employed. A diction that is antiquated for common speech and common prose, may very well not be antiquated for poetry or certain special kinds of prose. ‘Peradventure there shall be ten found there’, is not antiquated for Biblical prose, though for conversation or for a newspaper it is antiquated. ‘The trumpet spake not to the arméd throng’, is not antiquated for poetry, although we should not write in a letter, ‘he _spake_ to me’, or say, ‘the British soldier is _arméd_ with the Enfield rifle’. But when language is antiquated for that particular purpose for which it is employed, as numbers of Chaucer’s words, for instance, are antiquated for poetry, such language is a bad representative of language which, like Homer’s, was never antiquated for that particular purpose for which it was employed. I imagine that Πηληϊάδεω for Πηλείδου, in Homer, no more sounded antiquated to Sophocles, than _arméd_ for _arm’d_, in Milton, sounds antiquated to us; but Mr Newman’s _withouten_ and _muchel_ do sound to us antiquated, even for poetry, and therefore they do not correspond in their effect upon us with Homer’s words in their effect upon Sophocles. When Chaucer, who uses such words, is to pass current amongst us, to be familiar to us, as Homer was familiar to the Athenians, he has to be modernized, as Wordsworth and others set to work to modernize him; but an Athenian no more needed to have Homer modernized, than we need to have the Bible modernized, or Wordsworth himself.

Therefore, when Mr Newman’s words _bragly_, _bulkin_, and the rest, are an established possession of our minds, as Homer’s words were an established possession of an Athenian’s mind, he may use them; but not till then. Chaucer’s words, the words of Burns, great poets as these were, are yet not thus an established possession of an Englishman’s mind, and therefore they must not be used in rendering Homer into English.

Mr Newman has been misled just by doing that which his admirer praises him for doing, by taking a ‘far broader historical and philological view than mine’. Precisely because he has done this, and has applied the ‘philological view’ where it was not applicable, but where the ‘poetical view’ alone was rightly applicable, he has fallen into error.

It is the same with him in his remarks on the difficulty and obscurity of Homer. Homer, I say, is perfectly plain in speech, simple, and intelligible. And I infer from this that his translator, too, ought to be perfectly plain in speech, simple, and intelligible; ought not to say, for instance, in rendering

Οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν ...

‘Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle’,—and things of that kind. Mr Newman hands me a list of some twenty hard words, invokes Buttmann, Mr Malden, and M. Benfey, and asks me if I think myself wiser than all the world of Greek scholars, and if I am ready to supply the deficiencies of Liddell and Scott’s _Lexicon_! But here, again, Mr Newman errs by not perceiving that the question is not one of scholarship, but of a poetical translation of Homer. This, I say, should be perfectly simple and intelligible. He replies by telling me that ἀδινὸς, εἰλίποδες, and σιγαλόεις are hard words. Well, but what does he infer from that? That the poetical translation, in his rendering of them, is to give us a sense of the difficulties of the scholar, and so is to make his translation obscure? If he does not mean that, how, by bringing forward these hard words, does he touch the question whether an English version of Homer should be plain or not plain? If Homer’s poetry, as poetry, is in its general effect on the poetical reader perfectly simple and intelligible, the uncertainty of the scholar about the true meaning of certain words can never change this general effect. Rather will the poetry of Homer make us forget his philology, than his philology make us forget his poetry. It may even be affirmed that everyone who reads Homer perpetually for the sake of enjoying his poetry (and no one who does not so read him will ever translate him well), comes at last to form a perfectly clear sense in his own mind for every important word in Homer, such as ἀδινὸς, or ἠλίβατος, whatever the scholar’s doubts about the word may be. And this sense is present to his mind with perfect clearness and fulness, whenever the word recurs, although as a scholar he may know that he cannot be sure whether this sense is the right one or not. But poetically he feels clearly about the word, although philologically he may not. The scholar in him may hesitate, like the father in Sheridan’s play; but the reader of poetry in him is, like the governor, fixed. The same thing happens to us with our own language. How many words occur in the Bible, for instance, to which thousands of hearers do not feel sure they attach the precise real meaning; but they make out _a_ meaning for them out of what materials they have at hand; and the words, heard over and over again, come to convey this meaning with a certainty which poetically is adequate, though not philologically. How many have attached a clear and poetically adequate sense to ‘_the beam_’ and ‘_the mote_’, though not precisely the right one! How clearly, again, have readers got a sense from Milton’s words, ‘grate on their _scrannel_ pipes’, who yet might have been puzzled to write a commentary on the word _scrannel_ for the dictionary! So we get a clear sense from ἀδινὸs as an epithet for grief, after often meeting with it and finding out all we can about it, even though that all be philologically insufficient; so we get a clear sense from εἰλίποδες as an epithet for cows. And this his clear poetical sense about the words, not his philological uncertainties about them, is what the translator has to convey. Words like _bragly_ and _bulkin_ offer no parallel to these words; because the reader, from his entire want of familiarity with the words bragly and bulkin, has no clear sense of them poetically.

Perplexed by his knowledge of the philological aspect of Homer’s language, encumbered by his own learning, Mr Newman, I say, misses the poetical aspect, misses that with which alone we are here concerned. ‘Homer _is_ odd’, he persists, fixing his eyes on his own philological analysis of μώνυξ, and μέροψς, and Κυλλοποδίων, and not on these words in their synthetic character;—just as Professor Max Müller, going a little farther back, and fixing his attention on the elementary value of the word θυγάτηρ, might say Homer was ‘odd’ for using _that_ word;—‘if the whole Greek nation, by long familiarity, had become inobservant of Homer’s oddities’, of the oddities of this ‘noble barbarian’, as Mr Newman elsewhere calls him, this ‘noble barbarian’ with the ‘lively eye of the savage’, ‘that would be no fault of mine. That would not justify Mr Arnold’s blame of me for rendering the words correctly’. _Correctly_,—ah, but what _is_ correctness in this case? This correctness of his is the very rock on which Mr Newman has split. He is so correct that at last he finds peculiarity everywhere. The true knowledge of Homer becomes at last, in his eyes, a knowledge of Homer’s ‘peculiarities, pleasant and unpleasant’. Learned men know these ‘peculiarities’, and Homer is to be translated because the unlearned are impatient to know them too. ‘That’, he exclaims, ‘is just why people want to read an English Homer, _to know all his oddities, just as learned men do_’. Here I am obliged to shake my head, and to declare that, in spite of all my respect for Mr Newman, I cannot go these lengths with him. He talks of my ‘monomaniac fancy that there is nothing quaint or antique in Homer’. Terrible learning, I cannot help in my turn exclaiming, terrible learning, which discovers so much!

Here, then, I take my leave of Mr Newman, retaining my opinion that his version of Homer is spoiled by his making Homer odd and ignoble; but having, I hope, sufficient love for literature to be able to canvass works without thinking of persons, and to hold this or that production cheap, while retaining a sincere respect, on other grounds, for its author.

In fulfilment of my promise to take this opportunity for giving the translator of Homer a little further advice, I proceed to notice one or two other criticisms which I find, in like manner, _suggestive_; which give us an opportunity, that is, of seeing more clearly, as we look into them, the true principles on which translation of Homer should rest. This is all I seek in criticisms; and, perhaps (as I have already said) it is only as one seeks a positive result of this kind, that one can get any fruit from them. Seeking a negative result from them, personal altercation and wrangling, one gets no fruit; seeking a positive result, the elucidation and establishment of one’s ideas, one may get much. Even bad criticisms may thus be made suggestive and fruitful. I declared, in a former lecture on this subject, my conviction that criticism is not the strong point of our national literature. Well, even the bad criticisms on our present topic which I meet with, serve to illustrate this conviction for me. And thus one is enabled, even in reading remarks which for Homeric criticism, for their immediate subject, have no value, which are far too personal in spirit, far too immoderate in temper, and far too heavy-handed in style, for the delicate matter they have to treat, still to gain light and confirmation for a serious idea, and to follow the Baconian injunction, _semper aliquid addiscere_, always to be adding to one’s stock of observation and knowledge. Yes, even when we have to do with writers who, to quote the words of an exquisite critic, the master of us all in criticism, M. Sainte-Beuve, remind us, when they handle such subjects as our present, of ‘Romans of the fourth or fifth century, coming to hold forth, all at random, in African style, on papers found in the desk of Augustus, Mæcenas, or Pollio’, even then we may instruct ourselves if we may regard ideas and not persons; even then we may enable ourselves to say, with the same critic describing the effect made upon him by D’Argenson’s _Memoirs_: ‘My taste is revolted, but I learn something; _Je suis choqué mais je suis instruit_’.

But let us pass to criticisms which are suggestive directly and not thus indirectly only, criticisms by examining which we may be brought nearer to what immediately interests us, the right way of translating Homer.

I said that Homer did not rise and sink with his subject, was never to be called prosaic and low. This gives surprise to many persons, who object that parts of the _Iliad_ are certainly pitched lower than others, and who remind me of a number of absolutely level passages in Homer. But I never denied that a _subject_ must rise and sink, that it must have its elevated and its level regions; all I deny is, that a poet can be said to rise and sink when all that he, as a poet, can do, is perfectly well done; when he is perfectly sound and good, that is, perfect as a poet, in the level regions of his subject as well as in its elevated regions. Indeed, what distinguishes the greatest masters of poetry from all others is, that they are perfectly sound and poetical in these level regions of their subject, in these regions which are the great difficulty of all poets but the very greatest, which they never quite know what to do with. A poet may sink in these regions by being falsely grand as well as by being low; he sinks, in short, whenever he does not treat his matter, whatever it is, in a perfectly good and poetic way. But, so long as he treats it in this way, he cannot be said to _sink_, whatever his matter may do. A passage of the simplest narrative is quoted to me from Homer:—

ὤτρυνεν δὲ ἕκαστον ἐποιχόμενος ἐπέεσσιν, Μέσθλην τε, Γλαῦκόν τε, Μέδοντά τε, θερσιλοχόν τε ...[58]

and I am asked, whether Homer does not sink _there_; whether he ‘_can_ have intended such lines as those for poetry’? My answer is: Those lines are very good poetry indeed, poetry of the best class, _in that place_. But when Wordsworth, having to narrate a very plain matter, tries _not_ to sink in narrating it, tries, in short, to be what is falsely called poetical, he does sink, although he sinks by being pompous, not by being low.

Onward we drove beneath the Castle; caught, While crossing Magdalen Bridge, a glimpse of Cam, And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn.

That last line shows excellently how a poet may sink with his subject by resolving not to sink with it. A page or two farther on, the subject rises to grandeur, and then Wordsworth is nobly worthy of it:

The antechapel, where the statue stood Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

But the supreme poet is he who is thoroughly sound and poetical, alike when his subject is grand, and when it is plain: with him the subject may sink, but never the poet. But a Dutch painter does not rise and sink with his subject; Defoe, in _Moll Flanders_, does not rise and sink with his subject, in so far as an artist cannot be said to sink who is sound in his treatment of his subject, however plain it is: yet Defoe, yet a Dutch painter, may in one sense be said to sink with their subject, because though sound in their treatment of it, they are not _poetical_, poetical in the true, not the false sense of the word; because, in fact, they are not in the grand style. Homer can in no sense be said to sink with his subject, because his soundness has something more than literal naturalness about it; because his soundness is the soundness of Homer, of a great epic poet; because, in fact, he is in the grand style. So he sheds over the simplest matter he touches the charm of his grand manner; he makes everything noble. Nothing has raised more questioning among my critics than these words, _noble_, _the grand style_. People complain that I do not define these words sufficiently, that I do not tell them enough about them. ‘The grand style, but what _is_ the grand style’? they cry; some with an inclination to believe in it, but puzzled; others mockingly and with incredulity. Alas! the grand style is the last matter in the world for verbal definition to deal with adequately. One may say of it as is said of faith: ‘One must feel it in order to know what it is’. But, as of faith, so too one may say of nobleness, of the grand style: ‘Woe to those who know it not’! Yet this expression, though indefinable, has a charm; one is the better for considering it; _bonum est, nos hic esse_; nay, one loves to try to explain it, though one knows that one must speak imperfectly. For those, then, who ask the question, What is the grand style? with sincerity, I will try to make some answer, inadequate as it must be. For those who ask it mockingly I have no answer, except to repeat to them, with compassionate sorrow, the Gospel words: _Moriemini in peccatis vestris_, Ye shall die in your sins.

But let me, at any rate, have the pleasure of again giving, before I begin to try and define the grand style, a specimen of what it _is_.

Standing on earth, not wrapt above the pole, More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged To hoarse or mute, though fall’n on evil days, On evil days though fall’n, and evil tongues....

There is the grand style in perfection; and anyone who has a sense for it, will feel it a thousand times better from repeating those lines than from hearing anything I can say about it.