Part 6

If the hexameter best helps the translator to the Homeric rapidity, what style may best help him to the Homeric plainness and directness? It is the merit of a metre appropriate to your subject, that it in some degree suggests and carries with itself a style appropriate to the subject; the elaborate and self-retarding style, which comes so naturally when your metre is the Miltonic blank verse, does not come naturally with the hexameter; is, indeed, alien to it. On the other hand, the hexameter has a natural dignity which repels both the jaunty style and the jog-trot style, to both of which the ballad-measure so easily lends itself. These are great advantages; and, perhaps, it is nearly enough to say to the translator who uses the hexameter that he cannot too religiously follow, in style, the inspiration of his metre. He will find that a loose and idiomatic grammar—a grammar which follows the essential rather than the formal logic of the thought—allies itself excellently with the hexameter; and that, while this sort of grammar ensures plainness and naturalness, it by no means comes short in nobleness. It is difficult to pronounce, certainly, what is idiomatic in the ancient literature of a language which, though still spoken, has long since entirely adopted, as modern Greek has adopted, modern idioms. Still one may, I think, clearly perceive that Homer’s grammatical style is idiomatic,—that it may even be called, not improperly, a loose grammatical style[31]. Examples, however, of what I mean by a loose grammatical style, will be of more use to the translator if taken from English poetry than if taken from Homer. I call it, then, a loose and idiomatic grammar which Shakspeare uses in the last line of the following three:

He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, _Strong both against the deed_;

or in this:—

Wit, _whither wilt_?

What Shakspeare means is perfectly clear, clearer, probably, than if he had said it in a more formal and regular manner; but his grammar is loose and idiomatic, because he leaves out the subject of the verb ‘wilt’ in the second passage quoted, and because, in the first, a prodigious addition to the sentence has to be, as we used to say in our old Latin grammar days, _understood_, before the word ‘both’ can be properly parsed. So, again, Chapman’s grammar is loose and idiomatic where he says,

Even share hath he that keeps his tent, and _he to field_ doth go,

because he leaves out, in the second clause, the relative which in formal writing would be required. But Chapman here does not lose dignity by this idiomatic way of expressing himself, any more than Shakspeare loses it by neglecting to confer on ‘both’ the blessings of a regular government: neither loses dignity, but each gives that impression of a plain, direct, and natural mode of speaking, which Homer, too, gives, and which it is so important, as I say, that Homer’s translator should succeed in giving. Cowper calls blank verse ‘a style further removed than rhyme from the vernacular idiom, both in the language itself and in the arrangement of it’; and just in proportion as blank verse is removed from the vernacular idiom, from that idiomatic style which is of all styles the plainest and most natural, blank verse is unsuited to render Homer.

Shakspeare is not only idiomatic in his grammar or style, he is also idiomatic in his words or diction; and here too, his example is valuable for the translator of Homer. The translator must not, indeed, allow himself all the liberty that Shakspeare allows himself; for Shakspeare sometimes uses expressions which pass perfectly well as he uses them, because Shakspeare thinks so fast and so powerfully, that in reading him we are borne over single words as by a mighty current; but, if our mind were less excited,—and who may rely on exciting our mind like Shakspeare?—they would check us. ‘To grunt and sweat under a weary load’;—that does perfectly well where it comes in Shakspeare; but if the translator of Homer, who will hardly have wound our minds up to the pitch at which these words of Hamlet find them, were to employ, when he has to speak of one of Homer’s heroes under the load of calamity, this figure of ‘grunting’ and ‘sweating’ we should say, _He Newmanises_, and his diction would offend us. For he is to be noble; and no plea of wishing to be plain and natural can get him excused from being this: only, as he is to be also, like Homer, perfectly simple and free from artificiality, and as the use of idiomatic expressions undoubtedly gives this effect[32], he should be as idiomatic as he can be without ceasing to be noble. Therefore the idiomatic language of Shakspeare—such language as, ‘prate of his _whereabout_’; ‘_jump_ the life to come’; ‘the damnation of his _taking-off_’; ‘his _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. He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the _Iliad_ itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible. No one could see this more clearly than Pope saw it: ‘This pure and noble simplicity’, he says, ‘is nowhere in such perfection as in the Scripture and Homer’: yet even with Pope a woman is a ‘fair’, a father is a ‘sire’ and an old man a ‘reverend sage’, and so on through all the phrases of that pseudo-Augustan, and most unbiblical, vocabulary. The Bible, however, is undoubtedly the grand mine of diction for the translator of Homer; and, if he knows how to discriminate truly between what will suit him and what will not, the Bible may afford him also invaluable lessons of style.

I said that Homer, besides being plain in style and diction, was plain in the quality of his thought. It is possible that a thought may be expressed with idiomatic plainness, and yet not be in itself a plain thought. For example, in Mr Clough’s poem, already mentioned, the style and diction is almost always idiomatic and plain, but the thought itself is often of a quality which is not plain; it is _curious_. But the grand instance of the union of idiomatic expression with curious or difficult thought is in Shakspeare’s poetry. Such, indeed, is the force and power of Shakspeare’s idiomatic expression, that it gives an effect of clearness and vividness even to a thought which is imperfect and incoherent; for instance, when Hamlet says,

To take arms against a sea of troubles,

the figure there is undoubtedly most faulty, it by no means runs on four legs; but the thing is said so freely and idiomatically, that it passes. This, however, is not a point to which I now want to call your attention; I want you to remark, in Shakspeare and others, only that which we may directly apply to Homer. I say, then, that in Shakspeare the thought is often, while most idiomatically uttered, nay, while good and sound in itself, yet of a quality which is curious and difficult; and that this quality of thought is something entirely un-Homeric. For example, when Lady Macbeth says:

Memory, the warder of the brain, Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason A limbeck only,

this figure is a perfectly sound and correct figure, no doubt; Mr Knight even calls it a ‘happy’ figure; but it is a _difficult_ figure: Homer would not have used it. Again, when Lady Macbeth says,

When you durst do it, then you were a man; And, to be more than what you were, you would Be so much more the man,

the thought in the two last of these lines is, when you seize it, a perfectly clear thought, and a fine thought; but it is a _curious_ thought: Homer would not have used it. These are favourable instances of the union of plain style and words with a thought not plain in quality; but take stronger instances of this union,—let the thought be not only not plain in quality, but highly fanciful: and you have the Elizabethan conceits; you have, in spite of idiomatic style and idiomatic diction, everything which is most un-Homeric; you have such atrocities as this of Chapman:

Fate shall fail to vent her gall Till mine vent thousands.

I say, the poets of a nation which has produced such conceit as that, must purify themselves seven times in the fire before they can hope to render Homer. They must expel their nature with a fork, and keep crying to one another night and day: ‘Homer not only moves rapidly, not only speaks idiomatically; he is, also, _free from fancifulness_’.

So essentially characteristic of Homer is his plainness and naturalness of thought, that to the preservation of this in his own version the translator must without scruple sacrifice, where it is necessary, verbal fidelity to his original, rather than run any risk of producing, by literalness, an odd and unnatural effect. The double epithets so constantly occurring in Homer must be dealt with according to this rule; these epithets come quite naturally in Homer’s poetry; in English poetry they, in nine cases out of ten, come, when literally rendered, quite unnaturally. I will not now discuss why this is so, I assume it as an indisputable fact that it is so; that Homer’s μερόπων ἀνθρώπων comes to the reader as something perfectly natural, while Mr Newman’s ‘voice-dividing mortals’ comes to him as something perfectly unnatural. Well then, as it is Homer’s general effect which we are to reproduce, it is to be false to Homer to be so verbally faithful to him as that we lose this effect: and by the English translator Homer’s double epithets must be, in many places, renounced altogether; in all places where they are rendered, rendered by equivalents which come naturally. Instead of rendering θέτι τανύπεπλε by Mr Newman’s ‘Thetis trailing-robed’, which brings to one’s mind long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement, the translator must render the Greek by English words which come as naturally to us as Milton’s words when he says, ‘Let gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping by’. Instead of rendering μώνυχας ἵππους by Chapman’s ‘one-hoofed steeds’, or Mr Newman’s ‘single-hoofed horses’, he must speak of horses in a way which surprises us as little as Shakspeare surprises when he says, ‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds’. Instead of rendering μελιηδέα θυμόν by ‘life as honey pleasant’, he must characterise life with the simple pathos of Gray’s ‘warm precincts of the cheerful day’. Instead of converting ποῖόν σε ἔπoς φύγεν ἔρκος ὀδόντων; into the portentous remonstrance, ‘Betwixt the outwork of thy teeth what word hath split’? he must remonstrate in English as straightforward as this of St Peter, ‘Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee’; or as this of the disciples, ‘What is this that he saith, a little while? we cannot tell what he saith’. Homer’s Greek, in each of the places quoted, reads as naturally as any of those English passages: the expression no more calls away the attention from the sense in the Greek than in the English. But when, in order to render literally in English one of Homer’s double epithets, a strange unfamiliar adjective is invented,—such as ‘voice-dividing’ for μέρψς,—an improper share of the reader’s attention is necessarily diverted to this ancillary word, to this word which Homer never intended should receive so much notice; and a total effect quite different from Homer’s is thus produced. Therefore Mr Newman, though he does not purposely import, like Chapman, conceits of his own into the _Iliad_, does actually import them; for the result of his singular diction is to raise ideas, and odd ideas, not raised by the corresponding diction in Homer; and Chapman himself does no more. Cowper says: ‘I have cautiously avoided all terms of new invention, with an abundance of which persons of more ingenuity than judgment have not enriched our language but encumbered it’; and this criticism so exactly hits the diction of Mr Newman that one is irresistibly led to imagine his present appearance in the flesh to be at least his second.

A translator cannot well have a Homeric rapidity, style, diction, and quality of thought, without at the same time having what is the result of these in Homer,—nobleness. Therefore I do not attempt to lay down any rules for obtaining this effect of nobleness,—the effect, too, of all others the most impalpable, the most irreducible to rule, and which most depends on the individual personality of the artist. So I proceed at once to give you, in conclusion, one or two passages in which I have tried to follow those principles of Homeric translation which I have laid down. I give them, it must be remembered, not as specimens of perfect translation, but as specimens of an attempt to translate Homer on certain principles; specimens which may very aptly illustrate those principles by falling short as well as by succeeding.

I take first a passage of which I have already spoken, the comparison of the Trojan fires to the stars. The first part of that passage is, I have said, of splendid beauty; and to begin with a lame version of that would be the height of imprudence in me. It is the last and more level part with which I shall concern myself. I have already quoted Cowper’s version of this part in order to show you how unlike his stiff and Miltonic manner of telling a plain story is to Homer’s easy and rapid manner:

So numerous seemed those fires the bank between Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece, In prospect all of Troy—

I need not continue to the end. I have also quoted Pope’s version of it, to show you how unlike his ornate and artificial manner is to Homer’s plain and natural manner:

So many flames before proud Ilion blaze, And brighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays; The long reflections of the distant fires Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires,

and much more of the same kind. I want to show you that it is possible, in a plain passage of this sort, to keep Homer’s simplicity without being heavy and dull; and to keep his dignity without bringing in pomp and ornament. ‘As numerous as are the stars on a clear night’, says Homer,

So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus, Between that and the ships, the Trojans’ numerous fires. In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires: by each one There sat fifty men, in the ruddy light of the fire: By their chariots stood the steeds, and champed the white barley While their masters sat by the fire, and waited for Morning.

Here, in order to keep Homer’s effect of perfect plainness and directness, I repeat the word ‘fires’ as he repeats πυρά without scruple; although in a more elaborate and literary style of poetry this recurrence of the same word would be a fault to be avoided. I omit the epithet of Morning, and whereas Homer says that the steeds ‘waited for Morning’, I prefer to attribute this expectation of Morning to the master and not to the horse. Very likely in this particular, as in any other single particular, I may be wrong: what I wish you to remark is my endeavour after absolute plainness of speech, my care to avoid anything which may the least check or surprise the reader, whom Homer does not check or surprise. Homer’s lively personal familiarity with war, and with the war-horse as his master’s companion, is such that, as it seems to me, his attributing to the one the other’s feelings comes to us quite naturally; but, from a poet without this familiarity, the attribution strikes as a little unnatural; and therefore, as everything the least unnatural is un-Homeric, I avoid it.

Again, in the address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles, Cowper has:

Jove saw their grief with pity, and his brows Shaking, within himself thus, pensive, said. ‘Ah hapless pair! wherefore by gift divine Were ye to Peleus given, a mortal king, Yourselves immortal and from age exempt?’

There is no want of dignity here, as in the versions of Chapman and Mr Newman, which I have already quoted: but the whole effect is much too slow. Take Pope:

Nor Jove disdained to cast a pitying look While thus relenting to the steeds he spoke. ‘Unhappy coursers of immortal strain! Exempt from age and deathless now in vain; Did we your race on mortal man bestow Only, alas! to share in mortal woe?’

Here there is no want either of dignity or rapidity, but all is too artificial. ‘Nor Jove disdained’, for instance, is a very artificial and literary way of rendering Homer’s words and so is, ‘coursers of immortal strain’.

Μυρομένω δ’ ἄρα τώ γε ἰδὼν, ἐλέησε Κρονίων.

And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bewailing, And he shook his head, and thus addressed his own bosom. ‘Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you, To a mortal? but ye are without old age and immortal. Was it that ye, with man, might have your thousands of sorrows? For than man, indeed, there breathes no wretcheder creature, Of all living things, that on earth are breathing and moving’.

Here I will observe that the use of ‘own’, in the second line for the last syllable of a dactyl, and the use of ‘To a’, in the fourth, for a complete spondee, though they do not, I think, actually spoil the run of the hexameter, are yet undoubtedly instances of that over-reliance on accent, and too free disregard of quantity, which Lord Redesdale visits with just reprehension[33].

I now take two longer passages in order to try my method more fully; but I still keep to passages which have already come under our notice. I quoted Chapman’s version of some passages in the speech of Hector at his

## parting with Andromache. One astounding conceit will probably still be

in your remembrance,

When sacred Troy shall _shed her tow’rs for tears of overthrow_,

as a translation of ὅτ’ ἄν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἰρή. I will quote a few lines which will give you, also, the key-note to the Anglo-Augustan manner of rendering this passage and to the Miltonic manner of rendering it. What Mr Newman’s manner of rendering it would be, you can by this time sufficiently imagine for yourselves. Mr Wright,—to quote for once from his meritorious version instead of Cowper’s, whose strong and weak points are those of Mr Wright also,—Mr Wright begins his version of this passage thus:

All these thy anxious cares are also mine, Partner beloved; but how could I endure The scorn of Trojans and their long-robed wives, Should they behold their Hector shrink from war, And act the coward’s part! Nor doth my soul Prompt the base thought.

_Ex pede Herculem_: you see just what the manner is. Mr Sotheby, on the other hand (to take a disciple of Pope instead of Pope himself), begins thus:

‘What moves thee, moves my mind,’ brave Hector said, ‘Yet Troy’s upbraiding scorn I deeply dread, If, like a slave, where chiefs with chiefs engage, The warrior Hector fears the war to wage. Not thus my heart inclines.’

From that specimen, too, you can easily divine what, with such a manner, will become of the whole passage. But Homer has neither

What moves thee, moves my mind,

nor has he

All these thy anxious cares are also mine.

Ἦ καὶ ἐμοὶ τάδε πάντα μέλει, γύναι· ἀλλὰ μάλ’ αἰνῶς,

that is what Homer has, that is his style and movement, if one could but catch it. Andromache, as you know, has been entreating Hector to defend Troy from within the walls, instead of exposing his life, and, with his own life, the safety of all those dearest to him, by fighting in the open plain. Hector replies:

Woman, I too take thought for this; but then I bethink me What the Trojan men and Trojan women might murmur, If like a coward I skulked behind, apart from the battle. Nor would my own heart let me; my heart, which has bid me be valiant Always, and always fighting among the first of the Trojans, Busy for Priam’s fame and my own, in spite of the future. For that day will come, my soul is assured of its coming, It will come, when sacred Troy shall go to destruction, Troy, and warlike Priam too, and the people of Priam. And yet not that grief, which then will be, of the Trojans, Moves me so much—not Hecuba’s grief, nor Priam my father’s, Nor my brethren’s, many and brave, who then will be lying In the bloody dust, beneath the feet of their foemen— As thy grief, when, in tears, some brazen-coated Achaian Shall transport thee away, and the day of thy freedom be ended. Then, perhaps, thou shalt work at the loom of another, in Argos, Or bear pails to the well of Messeïs, or Hypereia, Sorely against thy will, by strong Necessity’s order. And some man may say, as he looks and sees thy tears falling: _See, the wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain Of the horsemen of Troy, in the day they fought for their city_. So some man will say; and then thy grief will redouble At thy want of a man like me, to save thee from bondage. But let me be dead, and the earth be mounded above me, Ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity told of.

The main question, whether or no this version reproduces for him the movement and general effect of Homer better than other versions[34] of the same passage, I leave for the judgment of the scholar. But the

## particular points, in which the operation of my own rules is manifested,