Part 18
or in Mr Newman’s
He spake, and, yelling, held a-front his single-hoofed horses.
At the same time there may be innumerable points in mine which he ought to avoid also. Of the merit of his own compositions no composer can be admitted the judge.
But thus humbly useful to the future translator I still hope my hexameters may prove; and he it is, above all, whom one has to regard. The general public carries away little from discussions of this kind, except some vague notion that one advocates English hexameters, or that one has attacked Mr Newman. On the mind of an adversary one never makes the faintest impression. Mr Newman reads all one can say about diction, and his last word on the subject is, that he ‘regards it as a question about to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic _landis_, _houndis_, _hartis_’ (for lands, hounds, harts), and also ‘the final _en_ of the plural of verbs (we _dancen_, they _singen_, etc.), which still subsists in Lancashire’. A certain critic reads all one can say about style, and at the end of it arrives at the inference that, ‘after all, there is some style grander than the grand style itself, since Shakspeare has not the grand manner, and yet has the supremacy over Milton’; another critic reads all one can say about rhythm, and the result is, that he thinks Scott’s rhythm, in the description of the death of Marmion, all the better for being _saccadé_, because the dying ejaculations of Marmion were likely to be ‘jerky’. How vain to rise up early, and to take rest late, from any zeal for proving to Mr Newman that he must not, in translating Homer, say _houndis_ and _dancen_; or to the first of the two critics above quoted, that one poet may be a greater poetical force than another, and yet have a more unequal style; or to the second, that the best art, having to represent the death of a hero, does not set about imitating his dying noises! Such critics, however, provide for an opponent’s vivacity the charming excuse offered by Rivarol for his, when he was reproached with giving offence by it: ‘Ah’! he exclaimed, ‘no one considers how much pain every man of taste has had to _suffer_, before he ever inflicts any’.
It is for the future translator that one must work. The successful translator of Homer will have (or he cannot succeed) that true sense for his subject, and that disinterested love for it, which are, both of them, so rare in literature, and so precious; he will not be led off by any false scent; he will have an eye for the real matter, and where he thinks he may find any indication of this, no hint will be too slight for him, no shade will be too fine, no imperfections will turn him aside, he will go before his adviser’s thought, and help it out with his own. This is the sort of student that a critic of Homer should always have in his thoughts; but students of this sort are indeed rare.
And how, then, can I help being reminded what a student of this sort we have just lost in Mr Clough, whose name I have already mentioned in these lectures? He, too, was busy with Homer; but it is not on that account that I now speak of him. Nor do I speak of him in order to call attention to his qualities and powers in general, admirable as these were. I mention him because, in so eminent a degree, he possessed these two invaluable literary qualities, a true sense for his object of study, and a single-hearted care for it. He had both; but he had the second even more eminently than the first. He greatly developed the first through means of the second. In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the most undivided and disinterested love for his object in itself, the greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal. His interest was in literature itself; and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from all taint of littleness. In the saturnalia of ignoble personal passions, of which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled. He had not yet traduced his friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised what he despised. Those who knew him well had the conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his. His poem, of which I before spoke, has some admirable Homeric qualities;—out-of-doors freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity. Some of the expressions in that poem, ‘_Dangerous Corrievreckan ... Where roads are unknown to Loch Nevish_’, come back now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. But that in him of which I think oftenest is the Homeric simplicity of his literary life.
Footnote 56:
‘It is the fact, that scholars of fastidious refinement, but of a judgment which I think far more masculine than Mr Arnold’s, have passed a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of my translation. I at present count eight such names’.—‘Before venturing to print, I sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women have extolled them, how greedily a working man has inquired for them, without knowing who was the translator’.—MR NEWMAN’S Reply, pp. 113, 124, _supra_.
Footnote 57:
‘O for the fields of Thessaly and the streams of Spercheios! O for the hills alive with the dances of the Laconian maidens, the hills of Taygetus’!—_Georgics_, ii. 486.
Footnote 58:
_Iliad_, xvii, 216.
Footnote 59:
_Purgatory_, xxiii, 124.
Footnote 60:
_Purgatory_, xxiii, 127.
Footnote 61:
‘A secure time fell to the lot neither of Peleus the son of Æacus, nor of the godlike Cadmus; howbeit these are said to have had, of all mortals, the supreme of happiness, who heard the golden-snooded Muses sing, one of them on the mountain (Pelion), the other in seven-gated Thebus’.
Footnote 62:
Lines such as the first of the _Odyssey_
Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὅς μάλα πολλὰ....
Footnote 63:
Substantially, however, in the question at issue between Mr Munro and Mr Spedding, I agree with Mr Munro. By the italicized words in the following sentence, ‘The rhythm of the Virgilian hexameter depends entirely on _cæsura_, _pause_, and a due arrangement of words’, he has touched, it seems to me, in the constitution of this hexameter, the central point which Mr Spedding misses. The accent, or _heightened tone_, of Virgil in reading his own hexameters, was probably far from being the same thing as the accent or _stress_ with which we read them. The general effect of each line, in Virgil’s mouth, was probably therefore something widely different from what Mr Spedding assumes it to have been: an ancient’s accentual reading was something which allowed the metrical beat of the Latin line to be far more perceptible than our accentual reading allows it to be.
On the question as to the _real_ rhythm of the ancient hexameter, Mr Newman has in his _Reply_ a page quite admirable for force and precision. Here he is in his element, and his ability and acuteness have their proper scope. But it is true that the _modern_ reading of the ancient hexameter is what the modern hexameter has to imitate, and that the English reading of the Virgilian hexameter is as Mr Spedding describes it. Why this reading has not been imitated by the English hexameter, I have tried to point out in the text.
Footnote 64:
Such a minor change I have attempted by occasionally shifting, in the first foot of the hexameter, the accent from the first syllable to the second. In the current English hexameter, it is on the first. Mr Spedding, who proposes radically to subvert the constitution of this hexameter, seems not to understand that anyone can propose to modify it partially; he can comprehend revolution in this metre, but not reform. Accordingly he asks me how I can bring myself to say, ‘_Bé_tween that and the ships’, or ‘_Thére_ sat fifty men’; or how I can reconcile such forcing of the accent with my own rule, that ‘hexameters must _read themselves_’. Presently he says that he cannot believe I do pronounce these words so, but that he thinks I leave out the accent in the first foot altogether, and thus get a hexameter with only five accents. He will pardon me: I pronounce, as I suppose he himself does, if he reads the words naturally, ‘Be_tween_ that and the ships’, and ‘There _sát_ fifty men’. Mr Spedding is familiar enough with this accent on the second syllable in Virgil’s hexameters; in ‘et _té_ montosæ’, or ‘Ve_ló_ces jaculo’. Such a change is an attempt to relieve the monotony of the current English hexameter by occasionally altering the position of one of its accents; it is not an attempt to make a wholly new English hexameter by habitually altering the position of four of them. Very likely it is an unsuccessful attempt; but at any-rate it does not violate what I think is the fundamental rule for English hexameters, that may be such as to _read themselves_ without necessitating, on the reader’s part, any non-natural putting-on or taking-off accent. Hexameters like these of Mr Longfellow,
‘In that delightful land which is washed by the Delaware’s waters’,
and,
‘As if they fain would appease the Dryads, whose haunts they molested’,
violate this rule; and they are very common. I think the blemish of Mr Dart’s recent meritorious version of the _Iliad_ is that it contains too many of them.
Footnote 65:
As I welcome another more recent attempt in stanza,—Mr Worsley’s version of the _Odyssey_ in Spenser’s measure. Mr Worsley does me the honour to notice some remarks of mine on this measure: I had said that its greater intricacy made it a worse measure than even the ten-syllable couplet to employ for rendering Homer. He points out, in answer, that ‘the more complicated the correspondences in a poetical measure, the less obtrusive and absolute are the rhymes’. This is true, and subtly remarked; but I never denied that the single shocks of rhyme in the couplet were more _strongly felt_ than those in the stanza; I said that the more frequent recurrence of the same rhyme, in the stanza, necessarily made this measure more _intricate_. The stanza repacks Homer’s matter yet more arbitrarily, and therefore changes his movement yet more radically, than the couplet. Accordingly, I imagine a nearer approach to a perfect translation of Homer is possible in the couplet, well managed, than in the stanza, however well managed. But meanwhile Mr Worsley, applying the Spenserian stanza, that beautiful romantic measure, to the most romantic poem of the ancient world; making this stanza yield him, too (what it never yielded to Byron), its treasures of fluidity and sweet ease; above all, bringing to his task a truly poetical sense and skill, has produced a version of the _Odyssey_ much the most pleasing of those hitherto produced, and which is delightful to read.
For the public this may well be enough, nay, more than enough; but for the critic even this is not yet quite enough.
Footnote 66:
I speak of poetic genius as employing itself upon narrative or dramatic poetry,—poetry in which the poet has to go out of himself and to create. In lyrical poetry, in the direct expression of personal feeling, the most subtle genius may, under the momentary pressure of passion, express itself simply. Even here, however, the native tendency will generally be discernible.
Footnote 67:
‘And I have endured—the like whereof no soul upon the earth hath yet endured—to carry to my lips the hand of him who slew my child’.—_Iliad_, xxiv. 505.
Footnote 68:
‘Nay and thou too, old man, in times past wert, as we hear, happy’.—_Iliad_, xxiv. 543. In the original this line, for mingled pathos and dignity, is perhaps without a rival even in Homer.
Footnote 69:
’For so have the gods spun our destiny to us wretched mortals,—that we should live in sorrow; but they themselves are without trouble’.—_Iliad_, xxiv. 525.
Footnote 70:
‘_I_ wept not: so of stone grew I within:—_they_ wept’.—_Hell_, xxxiii. 49 (Carlyle’s Translation, slightly altered).
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Transcriber’s note:
○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the chapters in which they are referenced.