Part 17

I welcome it, in the absence of equally good poetry in another metre[65], although I still think the stanza unfit to render Homer thoroughly well, although I still think other metres fit to render him better. So I concede to Mr Spedding that every form of translation, prose or verse, must more or less break up Homer in order to reproduce him; but then I urge that that form which needs to break him up least is to be preferred. So I concede to him that the test proposed by me for the translator—a competent scholar’s judgment whether the translation more or less reproduces for him the effect of the original—is not perfectly satisfactory; but I adopt it as the best we can get, as the only test capable of being really applied; for Mr Spedding’s proposed substitute, the translations making the same effect, more or less, upon the unlearned which the original makes upon the scholar, is a test which can never really be applied at all. These two impressions, that of the scholar, and that of the unlearned reader, can, practically, never be accurately compared; they are, and must remain, like those lines we read of in Euclid, which, though produced ever so far, can never meet. So, again, I concede that a good verse-translation of Homer, or, indeed, of any poet, is very difficult, and that a good prose-translation is much easier; but then I urge that a verse-translation, while giving the pleasure which Pope’s has given, might at the same time render Homer more faithfully than Pope’s; and that this being possible, we ought not to cease wishing for a source of pleasure which no prose-translation can ever hope to rival.

Wishing for such a verse-translation of Homer, believing that rhythms have natural tendencies which, within certain limits, inevitably govern them; having little faith, therefore, that rhythms which have manifested tendencies utterly un-Homeric can so change themselves as to become well adapted for rendering Homer, I have looked about for the rhythm which seems to depart least from the tendencies of Homer’s rhythm. Such a rhythm I think may be found in the English hexameter, somewhat modified. I look with hope towards continued attempts at perfecting and employing this rhythm; but my belief in the immediate success of such attempts is far less confident than has been supposed. Between the recognition of this rhythm as ideally the best, and the recommendation of it to the translator for instant practical use, there must come all that consideration of circumstances, all that pliancy in foregoing, under the pressure of certain difficulties, the absolute best, which I have said is so indispensable to the critic. The hexameter is, comparatively, still unfamiliar in England; many people have a great dislike to it. A certain degree of unfamiliarity, a certain degree of dislike, are obstacles with which it is not wise to contend. It is difficult to say at present whether the dislike to this rhythm is so strong and so wide-spread that it will prevent its ever becoming thoroughly familiar. I think not, but it is too soon to decide. I am inclined to think that the dislike of it is rather among the professional critics than among the general public; I think the reception which Mr Longfellow’s _Evangeline_ has met with indicates this. I think that even now, if a version of the _Iliad_ in English hexameters were made by a poet who, like Mr Longfellow, has that indefinable quality which renders him popular, something _attractive_ in his talent, which communicates itself to his verses, it would have a great success among the general public. Yet a version of Homer in hexameters of the _Evangeline_ type would not satisfy the judicious, nor is the definite establishment of this type to be desired; and one would regret that Mr Longfellow should, even to popularise the hexameter, give the immense labour required for a translation of Homer when one could not wish his work to stand. Rather it is to be wished that by the efforts of poets like Mr Longfellow in original poetry, and the efforts of less distinguished poets in the task of translation, the hexameter may gradually be made familiar to the ear of the English public; at the same time that there gradually arises, out of all these efforts, an improved type of this rhythm; a type which some man of genius may sign with the final stamp, and employ in rendering Homer; a hexameter which may be as superior to Vosse’s as Shakspeare’s blank verse is superior to Schiller’s. I am inclined to believe that all this travail will actually take place, because I believe that modern poetry is actually in want of such an instrument as the hexameter.

In the meantime, whether this rhythm be destined to success or not, let us steadily keep in mind what originally made us turn to it. We turned to it because we required certain Homeric characteristics in a translation of Homer, and because all other rhythms seemed to find, from different causes, great difficulties in satisfying this our requirement. If the hexameter is impossible, if one of these other rhythms must be used, let us keep this rhythm always in mind of our requirements and of its own faults, let us compel it to get rid of these latter as much as possible. It may be necessary to have recourse to blank verse; but then blank verse must _de-Cowperize_ itself, must get rid of the habits of stiff self-retardation which make it say ‘_Not fewer_ shone’, for ‘_So many shone_’. Homer moves swiftly: blank verse _can_ move swiftly if it likes, but it must remember that the movement of such lines as

A thousand fires were burning, and by each ...

is just the slow movement which makes us despair of it. Homer moves with noble ease: blank verse must not be suffered to forget that the movement of

Came they not over from sweet Lacedæmon ...

is ungainly. Homer’s expression of his thought is simple as light: we know how blank verse affects such locutions as

While the steeds _mouthed their corn aloof_ ...

and such models of expressing one’s thought are sophisticated and artificial.

One sees how needful it is to direct incessantly the English translator’s attention to the essential characteristics of Homer’s poetry, when so accomplished a person as Mr Spedding, recognising these characteristics as indeed Homer’s, admitting them to be essential, is led by the ingrained habits and tendencies of English blank verse thus repeatedly to lose sight of them in translating even a few lines. One sees this yet more clearly, when Mr Spedding, taking me to task for saying that the blank verse used for rendering Homer ‘must not be Mr Tennyson’s blank verse’, declares that in most of Mr Tennyson’s blank verse all Homer’s essential characteristics, ‘rapidity of movement, _plainness of words and style_, _simplicity and directness of ideas_, and, above all, nobleness of manner, are as conspicuous as in Homer himself’. This shows, it seems to me, how hard it is for English readers of poetry, even the most accomplished, to feel deeply and permanently what Greek plainness of thought and Greek simplicity of expression really are: they admit the importance of these qualities in a general way, but they have no ever-present sense of them; and they easily attribute them to any poetry which has other excellent qualities, and which they very much admire. No doubt there are plainer things in Mr Tennyson’s poetry than the three lines I quoted; in choosing them, as in choosing a specimen of ballad-poetry, I wished to bring out clearly, by a strong instance, the qualities of thought and style to which I was calling attention; but when Mr Spedding talks of a plainness of thought _like Homer’s_, of a plainness of speech _like Homer’s_, and says that he finds these constantly in Mr Tennyson’s poetry, I answer that these I do not find there at all. Mr Tennyson is a most distinguished and charming poet; but the very essential characteristic of his poetry is, it seems to me, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness of thought, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness of expression. In the best and most characteristic productions of his genius, these characteristics are most prominent. They are marked characteristics, as we have seen, of the Elizabethan poets; they are marked, though not the essential, characteristics of Shakspeare himself. Under the influences of the nineteenth century, under wholly new conditions of thought and culture, they manifest themselves in Mr Tennyson’s poetry in a wholly new way. But they are still there. The essential bent of his poetry is towards such expressions as

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars;

O’er the sun’s bright eye Drew the vast eyelid of an inky cloud;

When the cairned mountain was a shadow, sunned The world to peace again;

The fresh young captains flashed their glittering teeth, The huge bush-bearded barons heaved and blew;

He bared the knotted column of his throat, The massive square of his heroic breast, And arms on which the standing muscle sloped As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone, Running too vehemently to break upon it.

And this way of speaking is the least _plain_, the most _un-Homeric_, which can possibly be conceived. Homer presents his thought to you just as it wells from the source of his mind: Mr Tennyson carefully distils his thought before he will part with it. Hence comes, in the expression of the thought, a heightened and elaborate air. In Homer’s poetry it is all natural thoughts in natural words; in Mr Tennyson’s poetry it is all distilled thoughts in distilled words. Exactly this heightening and elaboration may be observed in Mr Spedding’s

While the steeds _mouthed their corn aloof_

(an expression which might have been Mr Tennyson’s), on which I have already commented; and to one who is penetrated with a sense of the real simplicity of Homer, this subtle sophistication of the thought is, I think, very perceptible even in such lines as these,

And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy,

which I have seen quoted as perfectly Homeric. Perfect simplicity can be obtained only by a genius of which perfect simplicity is an essential characteristic.

So true is this, that when a genius essentially subtle, or a genius which, from whatever cause, is in its essence not truly and broadly simple, determines to be perfectly plain, determines not to admit a shade of subtlety or curiosity into its expression, it cannot ever then attain real simplicity; it can only attain a semblance of simplicity[66]. French criticism, richer in its vocabulary than ours, has invented a useful word to distinguish this semblance (often very beautiful and valuable) from the real quality. The real quality it calls _simplicité_, the semblance _simplesse_. The one is natural simplicity, the other is artificial simplicity. What is called simplicity in the productions of a genius essentially not simple, is, in truth, _simplesse_. The two are distinguishable from one another the moment they appear in company. For instance, let us take the opening of the narrative in Wordsworth’s _Michael_:

Upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale There dwelt a shepherd, Michael was his name; An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb. His bodily frame had been from youth to age Of an unusual strength; his mind was keen, Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs; And in his shepherd’s calling he was prompt And watchful more than ordinary men.

Now let us take the opening of the narrative in Mr Tennyson’s _Dora_:

With Farmer Allan at the farm abode William and Dora. William was his son, And she his niece. He often looked at them, And often thought, ‘I’ll make them man and wife’.

The simplicity of the first of these passages is _simplicité_; that of the second, _simplesse_. Let us take the end of the same two poems: first, of _Michael_:

The cottage which was named the Evening Star Is gone, the ploughshare has been through the ground On which it stood; great changes have been wrought In all the neighbourhood: yet the oak is left That grew beside their door: and the remains Of the unfinished sheepfold may be seen Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head Ghyll.

And now, of _Dora_:

So those four abode Within one house together; and as years Went forward, Mary took another mate: But Dora lived unmarried till her death.

A heedless critic may call both of these passages simple if he will. Simple, in a certain sense, they both are; but between the simplicity of the two there is all the difference that there is between the simplicity of Homer and the simplicity of Moschus.

But, whether the hexameter establish itself or not, whether a truly simple and rapid blank verse be obtained or not, as the vehicle for a standard English translation of Homer, I feel sure that this vehicle will not be furnished by the ballad-form. On this question about the ballad-character of Homer’s poetry, I see that Professor Blackie proposes a compromise: he suggests that those who say Homer’s poetry is pure ballad-poetry, and those who deny that it is ballad-poetry at all, should split the difference between them; that it should be agreed that Homer’s poems are ballads _a little_, but not so much as some have said. I am very sensible to the courtesy of the terms in which Mr Blackie invites me to this compromise; but I cannot, I am sorry to say, accept it; I cannot allow that Homer’s poetry is ballad-poetry at all. A want of capacity for sustained nobleness seems to me inherent in the ballad-form when employed for epic poetry. The more we examine this proposition, the more certain, I think, will it become to us. Let us but observe how a great poet, having to deliver a narrative very weighty and serious, instinctively shrinks from the ballad-form as from a form not commensurate with his subject-matter, a form too narrow and shallow for it, and seeks for a form which has more amplitude and impressiveness. Everyone knows the _Lucy Gray_ and the _Ruth_ of Wordsworth. Both poems are excellent; but the subject-matter of the narrative of _Ruth_ is much more weighty and impressive to the poet’s own feeling than that of the narrative of _Lucy Gray_, for which latter, in its unpretending simplicity, the ballad-form is quite adequate. Wordsworth, at the time he composed _Ruth_, his great time, his _annus mirabilis_, about 1800, strove to be simple; it was his mission to be simple; he loved the ballad-form, he clung to it, because it was simple. Even in _Ruth_ he tried, one may say, to use it; he would have used it if he could: but the gravity of his matter is too much for this somewhat slight form; he is obliged to give to his form more amplitude, more augustness, to shake out its folds.

The wretched parents all that night Went shouting far and wide; But there was neither sound nor sight To serve them for a guide.

That is beautiful, no doubt, and the form is adequate to the subject-matter. But take this, on the other hand:

I, too, have passed her on the hills, Setting her little water-mills By spouts and fountains wild; Such small machinery as she turned, Ere she had wept, ere she had mourned, A young and happy child.

Who does not perceive how the greater fulness and weight of his matter has here compelled the true and feeling poet to adopt a form of more _volume_ than the simple ballad-form?

It is of narrative poetry that I am speaking; the question is about the use of the ballad-form for _this_. I say that for this poetry (when in the grand style, as Homer’s is) the ballad-form is entirely inadequate; and that Homer’s translator must not adopt it, because it even leads him, by its own weakness, away from the grand style rather than towards it. We must remember that the matter of narrative poetry stands in a different relation to the vehicle which conveys it, is not so independent of this vehicle, so absorbing and powerful in itself, as the matter of purely emotional poetry. When there comes in poetry what I may call the _lyrical cry_, this transfigures everything, makes everything grand; the simplest form may be here even an advantage, because the flame of the emotion glows through and through it more easily. To go again for an illustration to Wordsworth; our great poet, since Milton, by his performance, as Keats, I think, is our great poet by his gift and promise; in one of his stanzas to the Cuckoo, we have:

And I can listen to thee yet; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget That golden time again.

Here the lyrical cry, though taking the simple ballad-form, is as grand as the lyrical cry coming in poetry of an ampler form, as grand as the

An innocent life, yet far astray!

of _Ruth_; as the

There is a comfort in the strength of love

of _Michael_. In this way, by the occurrence of this lyrical cry, the ballad-poets themselves rise sometimes, though not so often as one might perhaps have hoped, to the grand style.

O lang, lang may their ladies sit, Wi’ their fans into their hand, Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spence Come sailing to the land.

O lang, lang may the ladies stand, Wi’ their gold combs in their hair, Waiting for their ain dear lords, For they’ll see them nae mair.

But from this impressiveness of the ballad-form, when its subject-matter fills it over and over again, is, indeed, in itself, all in all, one must not infer its effectiveness when its subject-matter is not thus overpowering, in the great body of a narrative.

But, after all, Homer is not a better poet than the balladists, because he has taken in the hexameter a better instrument; he took this instrument because he was a _different_ poet from them; so different, not only so much better, but so essentially different, that he has not to be classed with them at all. Poets receive their distinctive character, not from their subject, but from their application to that subject of the ideas (to quote the _Excursion_)

On God, on Nature, and on human life,

which they have acquired for themselves. In the ballad-poets in general, as in men of a rude and early stage of the world, in whom their humanity is not yet variously and fully developed, the stock of these ideas is scanty, and the ideas themselves not very effective or profound. From them the narrative itself is the great matter, not the spirit and significance which underlies the narrative. Even in later times of richly developed life and thought, poets appear who have what may be called a _balladist’s mind_; in whom a fresh and lively curiosity for the outward spectacle of the world is much more strong than their sense of the inward significance of that spectacle. When they apply ideas to their narrative of human events, you feel that they are, so to speak, travelling out of their own province: in the best of them you feel this perceptibly, but in those of a lower order you feel it very strongly. Even Sir Walter Scott’s efforts of this kind, even, for instance, the

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,

or the

O woman! in our hours of ease,

even these leave, I think, as high poetry, much to be desired; far more than the same poet’s descriptions of a hunt or a battle. But Lord Macaulay’s

Then out spake brave Horatius, The captain of the gate: ‘To all the men upon this earth Death cometh soon or late’.

(and here, since I have been reproached with undervaluing Lord Macaulay’s _Lays of Ancient Rome_, let me frankly say that, to my mind, a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all), I say, Lord Macaulay’s

To all the men upon this earth Death cometh soon or late,

it is hard to read without a cry of pain. But with Homer it is very different. This ‘noble barbarian’, this ‘savage with the lively eye’, whose verse, Mr Newman thinks, would affect us, if we could hear the living Homer, ‘like an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast’, is never more at home, never more nobly himself, than in applying profound ideas to his narrative. As a poet he belongs, narrative as is his poetry, and early as is his date, to an incomparably more developed spiritual and intellectual order than the balladists, or than Scott and Macaulay; he is here as much to be distinguished from them, and in the same way, as Milton is to be distinguished from them. He is, indeed, rather to be classed with Milton than with the balladists and Scott; for what he has in common with Milton, the noble and profound application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic greatness. The most essentially grand and characteristic things of Homer are such things as

ἔτλην δ’, οἷ’ οὔπω τις ἐπιχθόνιος βροτὸς ἂλλος, ἀνδρὸς παιδοφόνοιο ποτὶ στόμα χεῖρ’ ὀρέγεσθαι[67],

or as

καὶ σὲ, γέρον, τὸ πρὶν μὲν ἀκούομεν ὄλβιον εἶναι[68],

or as

ὥς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσιν, ζώειν ἀχνυμένους· αὐτοὶ δὲ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσίν[69],

and of these the tone is given, far better than by anything of the balladists, by such things as the

Io no piangeva: sì dentro impietrai: Piangevan elli ...[70]

of Dante; or the

Fall’n Cherub! to be weak is miserable

of Milton.

I suppose I must, before I conclude, say a word or two about my own hexameters; and yet really, on such a topic, I am almost ashamed to trouble you. From those perishable objects I feel, I can truly say, a most Oriental detachment. You yourselves are witnesses how little importance, when I offered them to you, I claimed for them, how humble a function I designed them to fill. I offered them, not as specimens of a competing translation of Homer, but as illustrations of certain canons which I had been trying to establish for Homer’s poetry. I said that these canons they might very well illustrate by failing as well as by succeeding: if they illustrate them in any manner, I am satisfied. I was thinking of the future translator of Homer, and trying to let him see as clearly as possible what I meant by the combination of characteristics which I assigned to Homer’s poetry, by saying that this poetry was at once rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct in its ideas, and noble in manner. I do not suppose that my own hexameters are rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct in their ideas, and noble in manner; but I am in hopes that a translator, reading them with a genuine interest in his subject, and without the slightest grain of personal feeling, may see more clearly, as he reads them, what I meant by saying that Homer’s poetry is all these. I am in hopes that he may be able to seize more distinctly, when he has before him my

So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of the Xanthus,

or my

Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you?

or my

So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle,

the exact points which I wish him to avoid in Cowper’s

So numerous seemed those fires the banks between,

or in Pope’s

Unhappy coursers of immortal strain,