With massy staplesAnd corresponsive and fulfilling boltsSperrup the sons of Troy,
With massy staplesAnd corresponsive and fulfilling boltsSperrup the sons of Troy,
With massy staplesAnd corresponsive and fulfilling boltsSperrup the sons of Troy,
With massy staples
And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts
Sperrup the sons of Troy,
we say, “This is both quaint and antiquated”. But does Homer ever compose in a language, which produces on the scholar at all the same impression as this language which I have quoted from Shakspeare? Never once. Shakspeare is quaint and antiquated in the lines I have just quoted; but Shakspeare,need I say it? can compose, when he likes, when he is at his best, in a language perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible; in a language, which, in spite of the two centuries and a half which part its author from us, stops or surprises us as little as the language of a contemporary. And Homer has not Shakspeare’s variations. Homer always composes, as Shakspeare composes at his best. Homer is always simple and intelligible, as Shakspeare is often; Homer is never quaint and antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes’.
If Mr Arnold were to lay before none but Oxford students assertions concerning Greek literature so startlingly erroneous as are here contained, it would not concern me to refute or protest against them. The young men who read Homer and Sophocles and Thucydides, nay, the boys who read Homer and Xenophon, would know his statements to be against the most notorious and elementary fact: and the Professors, whom he quotes, would only lose credit, if they sanctioned the use he makes of their names. But when he publishes the book for the unlearned in Greek, among whom I must include a great number of editors of magazines, I find Mr Arnold to do a public wrong to literature, and a private wrong to my book. If I am silent, such editors may easily believe that I have made an enormous blunder in treating the dialect of Homer as antiquated. Ifthose who are ostensibly scholars, thus assail my version, and the great majority of magazines and reviews ignore it, its existence can never become known to the public; or it will exist not to be read, but to be despised without being opened; and it must perish as many meritorious books perish. I but lately picked up, new, and for a fraction of its price, at a second-hand stall, a translation of the Iliad byT. S.Brandreth, Esq. (Pickering, London), into Cowper’s metre, which is, as I judge, immensely superior to Cowper. Its date is 1846: I had never heard of it. It seems to have perished uncriticized, unreproved, unwept, unknown. I do not wish my progeny to die of neglect, though I am willing that it should be slain in battle. However, just because I address myself to the publicunlearnedin Greek, and because Mr Arnold lays beforethema new, paradoxical, monstrously erroneous representation of facts, with the avowed object of staying the plague of my Homer; I am forced to reply to him.
Knowingly or unknowingly, he leads his readers to confuse four different questions: 1. whether Homer is thoroughly intelligible to modern scholars; 2. whether Homer was antiquated to the Athenians of Themistocles and Pericles; 3. whether he was thoroughly understood by them; 4. whether he is, absolutely, an antique poet.
I feel it rather odd, that Mr Arnold begins by complimenting me with ‘genuine learning’, and proceeds to appeal from me to the ‘living scholar’. (What if I were bluntly to reply: ‘Well! I am the living scholar’?) After starting the question, how Homer’s style appeared to Sophocles, he suddenly enters a plea, under form of a concession [‘I confess’!], as a pretence for carrying the cause into a new court, that of the Provost of Eton and two Professors, into which court I have no admission; and then, of his own will, pronounces a sentence in the name of these learned men. Whether they are pleased with this parading of their name in behalf of paradoxical error, I may well doubt: and until they indorse it themselves, I shall treat Mr Arnold’s process as a piece of forgery. But, be this as it may, I cannot allow him to ‘confess’ for me against me: let him confess for himself that he does not know, and not for me, who know perfectly well, whether Homer seemed quaint or antiquated to Sophocles. Of course he did, as every beginner must know. Why, if I were to writemonforman,londisforlands,nestiesfornests,libbardforleopard,muchelformuch,napforsnap,green-wood shawforgreenwood shade, Mr Arnold would call me antiquated, although every word would be intelligible. Can he possibly be ignorant, that this exhibits but the smallest part of the chasm which separates theHomeric dialect not merely from the Attic prose, but from Æschylus when he borrows most from Homer? Every sentence of Homer 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. Wouldmon,londis,libbard,withouten,muchelbe antiquated or foreign, and areΠηληϊάδαοforΠηλείδου, ὁσσάτιοςforὅσος, ἤϋτεforὡς, στήῃforστῇ, τεκέεσσιforτέκνοις, τοῖσδεσσιforτοῖσδε, πολέεςforπολλοὶ, μεσοηγὺςforμεταξὺ, αἶαforγῆ, εἴβωforλείβω, and five hundred others, less antiquated or less foreign? Homer has archaisms in every variety; some rather recent to the Athenians, and carrying their minds back only to Solon, asβασιλῆοςforβασίλεως; others harsher, yet varying as dialect still, asξεῖνοςforξένος, τίεforἐτίμα, ἀνθεμόειςforἀνθηρὸς, κέκλυθιforκλύεorἄκουσον, θαμὺςforθαμινὸςorσυχνὸς, ναιετάοντεςforναίοντεςorοἰκοῦντες: others varying in the root, like a new language, asἄφενοςforπλοῦτος, ἰότηςforβούλημα, τῆforδέξαι, under which head are heaps of strange words, asἀκὴν, χώομαι, βιὸς, κῆλα, μέμβλωκε, γέντο, πέπον, etc. etc. Finally comes a goodly lot of words which to this day are most uncertain in sense. My learned colleague Mr Malden has printed a paper on Homeric words, misunderstoodby the later poets. Buttmann has written an octavo volume (I have the English translation,containing 548 pages) to discuss 106 ill-explained Homeric words. Some of these Sophocles may have understood, though we do not; but even if so, they were not the less antiquated to him. If there has been any perfect traditional understanding of Homer, we should not need to deal with so many words by elaborate argument. On the face of the Iliad alone every learner must know how many difficult adjectives occur: I write down on the spur of the moment and without reference,κρήγυον, ἀργὸς, ἀδινὸς, ἄητος, αἴητος, νώροψ, ἦνοψ, εἰλίποδες, ἕλιξ, ἑλικῶπες, ἔλλοπες, μέροπες, ἠλίβατος, ἠλέκτωρ, αἰγίλιψ, σιγαλόεις, ἰόμωρος, ἐγχεσίμωρος, πέπονες, ἠθεῖος. If Mr Arnold thought himself wiser than all the world of Greek scholars, he would not appeal to them, but would surely enlighten us all: he would tell me, for instance, whatἔλλοπεςmeans, which Liddell and Scott do not pretend to understand; orἠθεῖος, of which they give three different explanations. But he does not write as claiming an independent opinion, when he flatly opposes me and sets me down; he does but use surreptitiously the name of the ‘living scholar’ against me.
But I have only begun to describe the marked chasm often separating Homer’s dialect from everything Attic. It has awide diversity of grammatical inflections, far beyond such vowel changes of dialect as answer to our provincial pronunciations. This begins with new case-endings to the nouns; in -θι, -θεν, -δε, -φι, proceeds to very peculiar pronominal forms, and then to strange or irregular verbal inflections, infinitives in -μεν, -μεναι, imperfects in -εσκε, presents in -αθω, and an immensity of strange adverbs and conjunctions. In Thiersch’s Greek Grammar, after the Accidence of common Greek is added as supplement an Homeric Grammar: and in it the Homeric Noun and Verb occupy (in the English Translation) 206 octavo pages. Who ever heard of a Spenserian Grammar? How many pages could be needed to explain Chaucer’s grammatical deviations from modern English? The bare fact of Thiersch having written so copious a grammar will enable even the unlearned to understand the monstrous misrepresentation of Homer’s dialect, on which Mr Arnold has based his condemnation of my Homeric diction. Not wishing to face the plain and undeniable facts which I have here recounted, Mr Arnold makes a ‘confession’ that we know nothing about them! and then appeals to three learned men whether Homer is antiquated tothem; and expounds this to mean,intelligible to them! Well: if they have learnedmodernGreek, of course they may understand it; but Attic Greekalone will not teach it to them. Neither will it teach themHomer’sGreek. The difference of the two is in some directions so vast, that they may deserve to be called two languages as much as Portuguese and Spanish.
Much as I have written, a large side of the argument remains still untouched. The orthography of Homer was revolutionized in adapting it to Hellenic use, and in the process not only were the grammatical forms tampered with, but at least one consonant was suppressed. I am sure Mr Arnold has heard of the Digamma, though he does not see it in the current Homeric text. By the re-establishment of this letter, no small addition would be made to the ‘oddity’ of the sound to the ears of Sophocles. That the unlearned in Greek may understand this, I add, that what with us is writteneoika,oikon,oinos,hekas,eorga,eeipe,eleliχθη, were with the poetwewoika,wīkon,wīnos,wekas(orswekas?),weworga,eweipe,eweliχθη[42]; and so with very many other words, in which either the metre or the grammatical formation helps us to detect a lost consonant, and the analogy of other dialects or languages assures us that it iswwhich has been lost. Nor is this all; but in certain wordsswseems to have vanished. What in our text ishoi,heos,hekuros, were probablywoiandswoi,weosandsweos,swekuros. Moreover the received spelling of many other words is corrupt: for instance,deos,deidoika,eddeisen,periddeisas,addees. The true root must have had the formdweordreordhe. That the consonant lost was reallyw, is asserted by Benfey from the Sanscritdvish. Hence the true forms aredweos,dedwoika,edweisen, etc.... Next, the initiallof Homer had in some words a stronger pronunciation, whether λλ or χλ, as inλλιταὶ, λλίσσομαι, λλωτὸς, λλιτανεύω. I have met with the opinion that the consonant lost inanaxis notwbutk; and that Homer’skanaxis connected with Englishking. The relations ofwergon,weworga,wrexai, to Englishworkandwroughtmust strike everyone; but I do not here press the phenomena of the Homericr(although it becamebrin strong Æolism), because they do not differ from those in Attic. The Attic formsεἴληφα, εἴλεγμαιforλέληφα, etc., point to a time when the initial λ of the roots was a double letter. A root λλαβ would explain Homer’s ἔλλαβε. If λλ[43]approachedto its Welsh sound, that is, to χλ, it is not wonderful that such a pronunciation asοφρᾰ λλαβωμενwas possible: but it is singular that theὕδατι χλιαρῷof Attic is writtenλιαρῷin our Homeric text, though the metre needs a double consonant. Such phenomena asχλιαρὸςandλιαρὸς, εἴβωandλειβω, ἴαandμία, εἴμαρμαιandἔμμορε, αἶαandγαῖα, γέντοforἕλετο, ἰωκὴandἴωξιςwithδιώκω, need to be reconsidered in connection. Theεἰς ἅλα ἇλτοof our Homer was perhapsεἰς ἅλα σάλλτο: when λλ was changed into λ, they compensated by circumflexing the vowel. I might add the query, Is it so certain that hisθεαωνwas θeāwōn, and not θeārōn, analogous to Latindearum? But dropping here everything that has the slightest uncertainty, the mere restoration of thewwhere it is most necessary, makes a startling addition to the antiquated sound of the Homeric text. The reciters of Homer in Athens must have dropped thew, since it is never written. Nor indeed would Sophocles have introduced in hisTrachiniæ,ἁ δέ οἱ φίλα δάμαρ... leaving a hiatus most offensive to the Attics, in mere imitation of Homer, if he had been accustomed to hear from the reciters,de woiorde swoi. In other words also, as inοὐλόμενοςforὀλόμενος,later poets have slavishly followed Homer into irregularities suggested by his peculiar metre. Whether Homer’sᾱθανατος, αμμορος... rose out ofανθάνατος, ἄνμορος... is wholly unimportant when we remember hisᾹπόλλωνος.
But this leads to remark on the acuteness of Mr Arnold’s ear. I need not ask whether he recites the Α differently inἎρες, Ἄρες,and in,Ᾰπόλλων Ᾱπολλωνος. He will not allow anything antiquated in Homer; and therefore it is certain that he recites,
αιδοιος τε μοι εσσι, φιλε εκυρε, δεινος τεand—ουδε εοικε—
αιδοιος τε μοι εσσι, φιλε εκυρε, δεινος τεand—ουδε εοικε—
αιδοιος τε μοι εσσι, φιλε εκυρε, δεινος τεand—ουδε εοικε—
αιδοιος τε μοι εσσι, φιλε εκυρε, δεινος τε
and—ουδε εοικε—
as they are printed, and admires the rhythm. When he endures with exemplary patience such hiatuses, such dactyls asἑεκυ, ουδεε, such a spondee asρε δει, I can hardly wonder at his complacency in his own spondees “Between,” “To a.” He finds nothing wrong inκαι πεδια λωτευνταorπολλα λισσομενη. But Homer sang,
φιλε swεκυρε δwεινος τε—ουδε wεwοικε—και πεδια λλωτευντα ... πολλα λλισσομενη.
φιλε swεκυρε δwεινος τε—ουδε wεwοικε—και πεδια λλωτευντα ... πολλα λλισσομενη.
φιλε swεκυρε δwεινος τε—ουδε wεwοικε—και πεδια λλωτευντα ... πολλα λλισσομενη.
φιλε swεκυρε δwεινος τε—ουδε wεwοικε—
και πεδια λλωτευντα ... πολλα λλισσομενη.
Mr Arnold is not satisfied with destroying Quantity alone. After theoretically substituting Accent for it in his hexameters, he robs us of Accent also; and presents to us the syllables “to a,”both shortandboth necessarily unaccented, for a Spondee, in apattern piece seven lines long, and with an express and gratuitous remark, that in using ‘to a’ for a Spondee, he has perhaps relied too much on accent. I hold up these phenomena in Mr Arnold as a warning to all scholars, of the pit of delusion into which they will fall, if they allow themselves to talk fine about the ‘Homeric rhythm’as now heard, and the duty of a translator to reproduce something of it.
It is not merely the sound and the metre of Homer, which are impaired by the loss of his radicalw; in extreme cases the sense also is confused. Thus if a scholar be asked, what is the meaning ofἐείσατοin the Iliad? he will have to reply: If it stands foreweisato, it means, ‘he was like’, and is related to the English rootwisandwit,Germ.wiss,Lat.vid; but it may also mean ‘he went’—a very eccentric Homerism,—in which case we should perhaps write iteyeisato, as in old English we havehe yodeoryedeinstead ofhe goed,gaed, since too the current root in Greek and Latini(go) may be accepted asye, answering to Germangeh, Englishgo. Thus two words,eweisato, ‘he was like’,eyeisato, ‘he went’, are confounded in our text. I will add, that in the Homeric
—ἤϋτε wέθνεα (y)εῖσι—(Il.2, 87)
—διὰ πρὸ δὲ (y)είσατο καὶ τῆς(Il.4, 138)
myear misses the consonant, though MrArnold’s (it seems) does not. If we were ordered to readdat tingin Chaucer forthat thing, it would at first ‘surprise’ us as ‘grotesque’, but after this objection had vanished, we should still feel it ‘antiquated’. The confusion ofthickandtick,threadandtread, may illustrate the possible effect of dropping thewin Homer. I observe that Benfey’s Greek Root Lexicon has a list of 454 digammated words, most of which are Homeric. But it is quite needless to press the argument to its full.
If as much learning had been spent on the double λ and on theyandhof Homer, as on the digamma, it might perhaps now be conceded that we have lost, not one, but three or four consonants from his text. That λ inλύωorλούωwas ever a complex sound in Greek, I see nothing to indicate; hencethatλ, and the λ ofλιταὶ, λιαρὸς,seem to have been different consonants in Homer, aslandllin Welsh. As tohandyI assert nothing, except that critics appear too hastily to infer, that if a consonant has disappeared, it must needs bew. It is credible that the Greekhwas once strong enough to stop hiatus or elision, as the English, and much more the Asiatich. The later Greeks, after turning the character H into a vowel, seem to have had no idea of a consonanthin the middle of a word, nor any means of writing the consonanty. Since G passes throughghinto the soundsh,w,y,f(as in English and German is obvious), it is easy to confound them all under the compendious word ‘digamma’. I should be glad to know that Homer’s forms were as well understood by modern scholars as Mr Arnold lays down.
On his quotation from Shakspeare, I remark, 1. ‘Orgulous’, from French‘orgueilleux’, is intelligible to all who know French, and is comparable to Sicilian words in Æschylus. 2. It is contrary to fact to say, that Homer has not words, and words in great plenty, as unintelligible to later Greeks, as ‘orgulous’ to us. 3.Sperr, forBar, asSplashforPlash, is much less than the diversity which separates Homer from the spoken Attic. What isσμικρὸςforμικρὸςto compare withἠβαιὸςforμικρός? 4. Mr Arnold (as I understand him) blames Shakspeare for being sometimes antiquated: I do not blame him, nor yet Homer for the same; but neither can I admit the contrast which he asserts. He says: ‘Shakspeare can compose, when he is at his best, in a language perfectly intelligible, in spite of the two centuries and a half which part him from us.Homer has not Shakspeare’s variations: he is never antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes’. I certainly find the very same variations in Homer, as Mr Arnold finds in Shakspeare. My reader unlearned in Greek might hastily infer from the facts just laid before him, that Homeris always equally strange to a purely Attic ear: but is not so. The dialects of Greece did indeed differ strongly, as broad Scotch from English; yet as we know, Burns is sometimes perfectly intelligible to an Englishman, sometimes quite unintelligible. In spite of Homer’s occasional wide receding from Attic speech, he as often comes close to it. For instance, in the first piece quoted above from Gladstone, the simile occupying five (Homeric) lines wouldalmostgo down in Sophocles, if the Tragedian had chosen to use the metre. There is but one out-and-out Homeric word in it (ἐπασσύτερος): and even that is used once in an Æschylean chorus. There are no strange inflections, and not a single digamma is sensibly lost. Its peculiarities are only -εϊ for ει, ἐὸν for ὂν, and δέ τε for δέ, which could not embarrass the hearer as to the sense. I myself reproduce much the same result. Thus in my translation of these five lines I have the antiquated wordsbloreforblast,harryforharass(harrow,worry), and the antiquated participlehovenfromheave, ascloven,wovenfromcleave,weave. The whole has thus just a tinge of antiquity, as had the Homeric passage to the Attics, without any need of aid from a Glossary. But at other times the aid is occasionally convenient, just as in Homer or Shakspeare.
Mr Arnold plays fallaciously on the wordsfamiliar and unfamiliar. Homer’s words may have beenfamiliarto the Athenians (i.e.often heard), even when they werenotunderstood, but, at most, were guessed at; or when, being understood, they were still felt and known to be utterly foreign. Of course, when thus ‘familiar’, they could not ‘surprise’ the Athenians, as Mr Arnold complains that my renderings surprise the English. Let mine be heard as Pope or even Cowper has been heard, and no one will be ‘surprised’.
Antiquated words are understood well by some, ill by others, not at all by a third class; hence it is difficult to decide the limits of a glossary. Mr Arnold speaks scornfully of me (he wonderswith whom Mr Newman can have lived), that I use the words which I use, and explain those which I explain. He censures my little Glossary, for containing three words which he did not know, and some others, which, he says, are ‘familiar to all the world’. It is clear, he will never want a stone to throw at me. I suppose I am often guilty of keeping low company. I have found ladies whom no one would guess to be so ill-educated, who yet do not distinctly know whatlustymeans; but have an uncomfortable feeling that it is very near tolustful; and understandgrislyonly in the sense ofgrizzled,grey. Great numbers mistake the sense of Buxom, Imp, Dapper, deplorably. I no more wrotemy Glossary than my translation for persons so highly educated as Mr Arnold.
But I must proceed to remark: Homer might have been as unintelligible to Pericles, as was the court poet of king Crœsus, and yet it might be highly improper to translate him into an old English dialect; namely, if he had been the typical poet of a logical and refined age.Here is the real question;—is he absolutely antique, or only antiquated relatively, as Euripides is now antiquated? A modern Greek statesman, accomplished for every purpose of modern business, might find himself quite perplexed by the infinitives, the numerous participles, the optatives, the datives, by the particle ἂν, and by the whole syntax of Euripides, as also by many special words; but this would never justify us in translating Euripides into any but a most refined style. Was Homer of this class? I say, that henot only wasantiquated, relatively to Pericles, butis alsoabsolutely antique, being the poet of a barbarian age. Antiquity in poets is not (as Horace stupidly imagines in the argument of the horse’s tail) a question of years, but of intrinsic qualities. Homer sang to a wholly unfastidious audience, very susceptible to the marvellous, very unalive to the ridiculous, capable of swallowing with reverence the most grotesque conceptions. Hence nothing is easier than to turn Homer to ridicule.The fun which Lucian made of his mythology, a rhetorical critic like Mr Arnold could make of his diction, if he understood it as he understands mine. He takes credit to himself fornotridiculing me; and is not aware, that I could not be like Homer without being easy to ridicule. An intelligent child is the second-best reader of Homer. The best of all is a scholar of highly masculine taste; the worst of all is a fastidious and refined man, to whom everything quaint seems ignoble and contemptible.
I might have supposed that Mr Arnold thinks Homer to be a polished drawing-room poet, like Pope, when I read in him this astonishing sentence,p.35. ‘Search the English language for a word which doesnotapply to Homer, and you could not fix on a better word thanquaint’. But I am taken aback at finding him praise the diction of Chapman’s translation in contrast to mine. Now I never open Chapman, without being offended at his pushing Homer’s quaintness most unnecessarily into the grotesque. Thus in Mr Gladstone’s first passage above, where Homer says that the sea ‘sputters out the foam’, Chapman makes it, ‘all her back in bristles set, spitsevery wayherfoam’, obtruding what may remind one of a cat or a stoat. I holdsputterto be epical[44], because it is strong;butspitis feeble and mean. In passing, I observe that the universal praise given to Chapman as ‘Homeric’ (a praise which I have too absolutely repeated, perhaps through false shame of depreciating my only rival) is a testimony to me that I rightly appreciate Homeric style; for my style is Chapman’s softened, purged of conceits and made far more melodious. Mr Arnold leaves me to wonder, how, with his disgust at me, he can avoid feeling tenfold disgust at Chapman; and to wonder also what hemeans, by so blankly contradicting my statement that Homer is quaint; and why he so vehemently resents it. He does not vouchsafe to me or to his readers one particle of disproof or of explanation.
I regard it as quaint in Homer to call Junowhite-arm’d goddessandlarge-ey’d. (I have not renderedβοῶπιςox-ey’d, because in a case of doubt I shrank to obtrude anything so grotesque to us.) It is quaint to say, ‘the lord of bright-haired Juno lightens’ for ‘it lightens’; or ‘my heart in myshaggybosom is divided’, for ‘I doubt’: quaint to call waveswet, milkwhite, blooddusky, horsessinglehoofed, a hero’s handbroad, wordswinged, VulcanLobfoot(Κυλλοποδίων), a maidenfair-ankled, the Greekswellgreav’d, a spearlongshadowy, battle and councilman-ennobling, one’s kneesdear, and many other epithets. Mr Arnold most gratuitously asserts that the sense of these had evaporated to the Athenians. If that were true, it would not signify to this argument.Δαιμόνιος(possessed by an elf or dæmon) so lost its sense in Attic talk, that although Æschylus has it in its true meaning, some college tutors (I am told) renderὦ δαιμόνιεin Plato, ‘my very good sir!’ This is surely no good reason for mistranslating the word in Homer. If Mr Arnold could prove (what he certainly cannot) that Sophocles had forgotten the derivation ofἐϋκνημῖδεςandἐϋμμελίης, and understood by the former nothing but ‘full armed’ and by the latter (as he says) nothing but ‘war-like’, this would not justify his blame of me for rendering the words correctly. If the whole Greek nation by long familiarity had become inobservant of Homer’s ‘oddities’ (conceding this for the moment), that also would be no fault of mine. That Homerisextremely peculiar, even if the Greeks had become deadened to the sense of it, the proof on all sides is overpowering.
It is very quaint to say, ‘the outwork (or rampart) of the teeth’ instead of ‘the lips’. If Mr Arnold will call it ‘portentous’ in my English, let him produce some shadow of reason for denying it to be portentous in Greek. Many phrases are so quaint asto be almost untranslatable, asμήστωρ φόβοιο(deviser of fear?)μήστωρ ἀϋτῆς(deviser of outcry?): others are quaint to the verge of being comical, as to call a man anequipoise(ἀτάλαντος) to a god, and to praise eyes for having acurlin them[45]. It is quaint to make Juno call Jupiterαἰνότατε(grimmest? direst?), whether she is in good or bad humour with him, and to call a Visionghastly, when it is sent with a pleasant message. It is astonishingly quaint to tell how many oxen every fringe of Athene’s ægis was worth.—It is quaint to call Patroclus ‘a great simpleton’, for not foreseeing that he would lose his life in rushing to the rescue of his countrymen. (I cannot receive Mr Arnold’s suggested Biblical correction ‘Thou fool’! which he thinks grander: first, because grave moral rebuke is utterly out of place; secondly, because the Greek cannot mean this;—it means infantine simplicity, and has precisely the colour of the word which I have used.)—It is quaint to say: ‘Patroclus kindled a great fire,godlike man’! or, ‘Automedon held up the meat,divineAchilles slic’d it’: quaint to address ayoung friend as ‘Oh[46]pippin’! or ‘Oh softheart’! or ‘Oh pet’! whichever is the true translation. It is quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring, Ulysses to a pet ram, Agamemnon in two lines to three gods, and in the third line to a bull; the Myrmidons to wasps, Achilles to a grampus chasing little fishes, Antilochus to a wolf which kills a dog and runs away. Menelaus striding over Patroclus’s body to a heifer defending her first-born. It is quaint to say that Menelaus was as brave as a bloodsucking fly, that Agamemnon’s sobs came thick as flashes of lightning; and that the Trojan mares, while running, groaned like overflowing rivers. All such similes come from a mind quick to discern similarities, butvery dull to feel incongruities; unaware therefore that it is on a verge where the sublime easily turns into the ludicrous; a mind and heart inevitably quaint to the very core. What is it in Vulcan, when he would comfort his mother under Jupiter’s threat, to make jokes about the severe mauling which he himself formerly received, and his terror lest she should be now beaten? Still more quaint (ifrollickingis not the word), is theaddress by which Jupiter tries to ingratiate himself with Juno: viz. he recounts to her all his unlawful amours, declaring that in none of them was he so smitten as now. I have not enough of the γενναῖος εὐηθεία, the barbarian simple-heartedness, needed by a reader of Homer, to get through this speech with gravity. What shall I call it, certainly much worse than quaint, that the poet adds: Jupiter was more enamoured than at hisstolenembrace in their first bed ‘secretly from their dear parents’? But to develop Homer’s inexhaustible quaintnesses, of which Mr Arnold denies the existence, seems to me to need a long treatise. It is not to be expected, that one who is blind to superficial facts so very prominent as those which I have recounted, should retain any delicate perception of the highly coloured, intense, and very eccentric diction of Homer, even if he has ever understood it, which he forces me to doubt. He sees nothing ‘odd’ inκυνὸς κακομηχάνου, or inκυνόμυια, ‘thou dogfly’! He replaces to his imagination the flesh and blood of the noble barbarian by a dim feeble spiritless outline.
I have not adduced, in proof of Homer’s quaintness, the monstrous simile given to us in Iliad 13, 754; viz. Hector ‘darted forward screaming like a snowy mountain, and flew through the Trojans and allies’: for I cannot believe that the poet wrote anything so absurd. Rather than admitthis, I have suggested that the text is corrupt, and that forὄρεϊ νιφόεντιwe should readὀρνέῳ θύοντι, ‘darted forth screaminglike a raging bird’. Yet, as far as I know, I am the first man that has here impugned the text. Mr Brandreth is faithful in his rendering, except that he saysshoutingforscreaming:
‘He said; and like a snowy mountain, rush’dShouting; and flew through Trojans and allies.’
‘He said; and like a snowy mountain, rush’dShouting; and flew through Trojans and allies.’
‘He said; and like a snowy mountain, rush’dShouting; and flew through Trojans and allies.’
‘He said; and like a snowy mountain, rush’d
Shouting; and flew through Trojans and allies.’
Chapman, Cowper, and Pope strain and twist the words to an impossible sense, putting in something aboutwhite plume, which they fancy suggested a snowy mountain; but they evidently accept the Greek as it stands, unhesitatingly. I claim this phenomenon in proof that to all commentators and interpreters hitherto Homer’s quaintness has been such anaxiom, that they have even acquiesced unsuspiciously in an extravagance which goes far beyond oddity. Moreover the reader may augur by my opposite treatment of the passage, with what discernment Mr Arnold condemns me of obtruding upon Homer gratuitous oddities which equal the conceits of Chapman.
But, while thus vindicatingQuaintnessas an essential quality of Homer, do I regard it as a weakness to be apologized for? Certainly not; for it is a condition of his cardinal excellences. He could not otherwise bePicturesqueas he is. So volatile is hismind, that what would be a Metaphor in a more logical and cultivated age, with him riots in Simile which overflows its banks. His similes not merely go beyond[47]the mark of likeness; in extreme cases they even turn into contrariety. If he were not so carried away by his illustration, as to forget what he is illustrating (which belongs to a quaint mind), he would never paint for us such full and splendid pictures. Where a logical later poet would have said that Menelaus
Witheagle-eyesurvey’d the field,
Witheagle-eyesurvey’d the field,
Witheagle-eyesurvey’d the field,
Witheagle-eyesurvey’d the field,
the mere metaphor contenting him; Homer says:
Gazing around on every side, in fashion of an eagle,Which, of all heaven’s fowl, they say, to scan the earth is keenest:Whose eye, when loftiest he hangs, not the swift hare escapeth,Lurking amid a leaf-clad bush: but straight at it he souseth,Unerring; and with crooked gripe doth quickly rieve its spirit.
Gazing around on every side, in fashion of an eagle,Which, of all heaven’s fowl, they say, to scan the earth is keenest:Whose eye, when loftiest he hangs, not the swift hare escapeth,Lurking amid a leaf-clad bush: but straight at it he souseth,Unerring; and with crooked gripe doth quickly rieve its spirit.
Gazing around on every side, in fashion of an eagle,Which, of all heaven’s fowl, they say, to scan the earth is keenest:Whose eye, when loftiest he hangs, not the swift hare escapeth,Lurking amid a leaf-clad bush: but straight at it he souseth,Unerring; and with crooked gripe doth quickly rieve its spirit.
Gazing around on every side, in fashion of an eagle,
Which, of all heaven’s fowl, they say, to scan the earth is keenest:
Whose eye, when loftiest he hangs, not the swift hare escapeth,
Lurking amid a leaf-clad bush: but straight at it he souseth,
Unerring; and with crooked gripe doth quickly rieve its spirit.
I feel this long simile to be a disturbance of the logical balance, such as belongs to the lively eye of the savage, whose observation is intense, his concentration of reasoningpowers feeble. Without this, we should never have got anything so picturesque.
Homer never sees thingsin the same proportionsas we see them. To omit his digressions, and what I may call his ‘impertinences’, in order to give to his argument that which Mr Arnold is pleased to call the proper ‘balance’, is to value our own logical minds, more than his picturesque[48]but illogical mind.
Mr Arnold says that I am not quaint, but grotesque, in my rendering ofκυνὸς κακομηχάνου. I do not hold the phrase to be quaint: to me it is excessively coarse. When Jupiter calls Juno ‘a bitch’, of course he means a snarling cur; hence my rendering, ‘vixen’ (or she-fox), is there perfect, since we sayvixenof an irascible woman. But Helen had no such evil tempers, and beyond a doubt she meant to ascribe impurity to herself. I have twice committed a pious fraud by making her call herself ‘a vixen’, where ‘bitch’ is the only faithful rendering; and Mr Arnold, instead of thanking me for throwing a thin veil overHomer’s deformity, assails me for my phrase as intolerably grotesque.
He further forbids me to invent new compound adjectives, as fair-thron’d, rill-bestream’d; because they strike us as new, though Homer’s epithets (he says) did not so strike the Greeks: hence they derange attention from the main question. I hold this doctrine of his (conceding his fact for a moment) to be destructive of all translation whatever, into prose or poetry. When Homer tells us that Achilles’ horses were munching lotus and parsley, Pope renders it by ‘the horses grazed’, and does not say on what. Using Mr Arnold’s principles, he might defend himself by arguing: ‘The Greeks, being familiar with such horsefood, were not struck by it as new, as my reader would be. I was afraid of telling himwhatthe horses were eating, lest it should derange the balance of his mind, and injuriously divert him from the main idea of the sentence’. But, I find, readers are indignant on learning Pope’s suppression: they feel that he has defrauded them of a piece of interesting information.—In short, howcanan Englishman read any Greek composition and be affected by it as Greeks were? In a piece of Euripides my imagination is caught by many things, which he never intended or calculated for the prominence which they actually get in my mind. This or that absurdity in mythology,which passed with him as matter of course, may monopolize my main attention. Our minds are not passive recipients of this or that poet’s influence; but the poet is the material on which our minds actively work. If an unlearned reader thinks it very ‘odd’ of Homer (the first time he hears it) to call Aurora ‘fair-thron’d’, so does a boy learning Greek think it odd to call herεὔθρονος. Mr Arnold ought to blot every odd Homeric epithet out of hisGreekHomer (or never lend the copy to a youthful learner) if he desires me to expunge ‘fair-thron’d’ from the translation. Nay, I think he should conceal that the Morning was esteemed as a goddess, though she had no altars or sacrifice. It isallodd. But that is just why people want to read an English Homer,—to know all his oddities, exactly as learned men do. He is the phenomenon to be studied. His peculiarities, pleasant or unpleasant, are to be made known, precisely because of his great eminence and his substantial deeply seated worth. Mr Arnold writes like a timid biographer, fearful to let too much of his friend come out. So much as to the substance. As to mere words, here also I hold the very reverse of Mr Arnold’s doctrine. I do not feel free to translate οὐρανομήκης by ‘heaven-kissing’, preciselybecauseShakspeare has used the last word. It is his property, asἐϋκνημῖδες, ἐϋμμελίης,κυδιάνειρα, etc., are Homer’s property. I could not use it without being felt toquoteShakspeare, which would be highly inappropriate in a Homeric translation. Butifnobody had ever yet used the phrase ‘heaven-kissing’ (or if it were current without any proprietor)thenI should be quite free to use it as a rendering ofοὐρανομήκης. I cannot assent to a critic killing the vital powers of our tongue. If Shakspeare might invent the compound ‘heaven-kissing’, or ‘man-ennobling’, so might William Wordsworth or Matthew Arnold; and so might I. Inspiration is not dead, nor yet is the English language.
Mr Arnold is slow to understand what I think very obvious. Let me then put a case. What if I were to scold a missionary for rendering in Feejee the phrase ‘kingdom of heaven’ and ‘Lamb of God’ accurately; also ‘saints’ and other wordscharacteristic of the New Testament? I might urge against him: ‘This and that sounds veryoddto the Feejees: that cannot be right, for it didnotseem odd to the Nicene bishops. The latter had forgotten thatβασιλείαmeant “kingdom”; they took the phrase “kingdom of God” collectively to mean “the Church”. The phrase did not surprise them. As to “Lambs”, the Feejees are not accustomed to sacrifice, and cannot be expected to know of themselves what “Lamb of God” means, as Hebrews did. Thecourtiers of Constantine thought it very natural to be calledἅγιοι, for they were accustomed to think every baptised personἅγιος; but to the baptised courtiers of Feejee it really seems veryoddto be calledsaints. You disturb the balance of their judgment’.
The missionary might reply: ‘You seemed to be ashamed of the oddities of the Gospel. I am not. They grow out of its excellences and cannot be separated. By avoiding a few eccentric phrases you will do little to remove the deep-seated eccentricity of its very essence. Odd and eccentric it will remain, unless you despoil it of its heart, and reduce it to a fashionable philosophy’. And just so do I reply to Mr Arnold. The Homeric style (whether it be that of an individual or of an age) is peculiar, is ‘odd’, if Mr Arnold like the word, to the very core. Its eccentricities in epithet are mere efflorescences of its essential eccentricity. If Homer could cry out to us, I doubt not he would say, as Oliver Cromwell to the painter, ‘Paint me just I am,wart and all’: but if the true Homer could reappear, I am sure Mr Arnold would start from him just as a bishop of Rome from a fisherman apostle. If a translator of the Bible honours the book by his close rendering of its characteristics, however ‘odd’, so do I honour Homer by the same. Those characteristics, the moment I produce them, MrArnold callsignoble. Well: be it so; but I am not to blame for them. They exist whether Mr Arnold likes them or not.
I will here observe that he bids me paraphraseτανύπεπλος(trailing-robed) into something like, ‘Let gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping by’. I deliberately judge, that to paraphrase an otiose epithet is the very worst thing that can be done: to omit it entirely would be better. I object even to Mr Gladstone’s
... whom Leto bare,Leto with the flowing hair.
... whom Leto bare,Leto with the flowing hair.
... whom Leto bare,Leto with the flowing hair.
... whom Leto bare,
Leto with the flowing hair.
For the repetition overdoes the prominence of the epithet. Still more extravagant is Mr Arnold in wishing me to turn ‘single-hoofed horses’ in to ‘something whichas little surprises usas “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds”’:p.96. To reproduce Shakspeare would be in any case a ‘surprising’ mode of translating Homer: but the principle which changes ‘single-hoofed’ into a different epithet which the translator thinksbetter, is precisely that which for more than two centuries has made nearly all English translation worthless. To throw the poet into your crucible, and bring out old Pelias young, is not a hopeful process. I had thought, the manly taste of this day had outgrown the idea that a translator’s business is to melt up the old coin and stamp it with a modern image. I amwondering that I should have to write against such notions: I would not take the trouble, only that they come against me from an Oxford Professor of Poetry.
At the same time, his doctrine, as I have said, goes far beyond compound epithets. Whether I say ‘motley-helmèd Hector’ or ‘Hector of the motley helm’, ‘silver-footed Thetis’ or ‘Thetis of the silver foot’, ‘man-ennobling combat’ or ‘combat which ennobles man’, the novelty is so nearly on a par, that he cannot condemn one and justify the other on this score. Even Pope falls far short of the false taste which would plane down every Homeric prominence: for he prizes an elegant epithet like ‘silver-footed’, however new and odd.
From such a Homer as Mr Arnold’s specimens and principles would give us, no one couldlearnanything; no one could have any motive for reading the translation. He smooths down the stamp of Homer’s coin, till nothing is left even for microscopic examination. When he forbids me (p.96) to let my reader know that Homer calls horses ‘single-hoofed’, of course he would suppress also the epithets ‘white milk’, ‘dusky blood’, ‘dear knees’, ‘dear life’, etc. His process obliterates everything characteristic, great or small.
Mr Arnold condemns my translating certain names of horses. He says (p.58): ‘Mr Newman calls XanthusChesnut; ashe calls BaliusSpottedand PodargaSpry-foot: which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss NightingaleMdelle. Rossignol, or Mr BrightM. Clair’. He is very wanting in discrimination. If I had translated Hector intoPossessoror Agamemnon intoHighmind, his censure would be just. A Miss White may be a brunette, a Miss Brown may be a blonde: we utter the proper names of men and women without any remembrance of their intrinsic meaning. But it is different with many names of domestic animals. We never call a dogSpot, unless he is spotted; nor without consciousness that the name expresses his peculiarity. No one would give to a black horse the name Chesnut; nor, if he had called a chesnut horse by the name Chesnut, would he ever forget the meaning of the name while he used it. The Greeks called a chesnut horsexanthosand a spotted horsebalios; therefore, until Mr Arnold proves the contrary, I believe that they never read the names of Achilles’ two horses without a sense of their meaning. Hence the names ought to be translated; while Hector and Laomedon ought not. The same reasoning applies to Podarga, though I do not certainly understandἀργός. I have taken it to meansprightly.
Mr Arnold further asserts, that Homer is never ‘garrulous’. Allowing that too many others agree with me, he attributes our error to giving too much weight to a sentence inHorace! I admire Horace as an ode-writer, but I do not revere him as a critic, any more than as a moral philosopher. I say that Homer is garrulous, because I see and feel it. Mr Arnold puts me into a most unwelcome position. I have a right to say, I have some enthusiasm for Homer. In the midst of numerous urgent calls of duty and taste, I devoted every possible quarter of an hour for two years and a half to translate the Iliad, toiling unremittingly in my vacations and in my walks, and going to large expenses of money, in order to put the book before the unlearned; and this, though I am not a Professor of Poetry nor even of Greek. Yet now I am forced to appear as Homer’s disparager and accuser! But if Homer were always a poet, he could not be, what he is, so many other things beside poet. As the Egyptians paint in their tombs processes of art, not because they are beautiful or grand, but from a mere love of imitating; so Homer narrates perpetually from a mere love of chatting. In how thoroughly Egyptian a way does he tell the process of cutting up an ox and makingkebâb; the process of bringing a boat to anchor and carefully putting by the tackle; the process of taking out a shawl from a chest, where it lies at the very bottom! With what glee he repeats the secret talk of the gods; and can tell all about the toilet of Juno. Every particular of triflingactions comes out with him, as, the opening of a door or box with a key. He tells who made Juno’s earrings or veil or the shield of Ajax, the history of Agamemnon’s breast-plate, and in what detail a hero puts on his pieces of armour. I would not press the chattiness of Pandarus, Glaucus, Nestor, Æneas, in the midst of battle; I might press his description of wounds. Indeed I have said enough, and more than enough, against Mr Arnold’s novel, unsupported, paradoxical assertion.—But this is connected with another subject. I called Homer’s manner ‘direct’: Mr Arnold (if I understand) would supersede this by his own epithet ‘rapid’. But I cannot admit the exchange: Homer is often the opposite of rapid. Amplification is his characteristic, as it must be of every improvisatore, every popular orator: condensation indeed is improper for anything but written style; written to be read privately. But I regard as Homer’s worst defect, his lingering over scenes of endless carnage and painful wounds. He knows to half an inch where one hero hits another and how deep. They arm: they approach: they encounter: we have to listen to stereotype details again and again. Such a style is anything but ‘rapid’. Homer’s garrulity often leads him into it; yet he can do far better, as in a part of the fight over Patroclus’s body, and other splendid passages.
Garrulity often vents itself in expletives. Mr Arnold selects for animadversion this line of mine (p.41),