Chapter III (2)

Here I stop. I have said so much, because I think that the task of translating Homer into English verse both will be reattempted, and may be reattempted successfully. There are great works composed of parts so disparate that one translator is not likely to have the requisite gifts for poetically rendering all of them. Such are the works of Shakspeare, and Goethe’s _Faust_; and these it is best to attempt to render in prose only. People praise Tieck and Schlegel’s version of Shakspeare. I, for my part, would sooner read Shakspeare in the French prose translation, and that is saying a great deal; but in the German poets’ hands Shakspeare so often gets, especially where he is humorous, an air of what the French call _niaiserie_! and can anything be more un-Shakspearian than that? Again; Mr Hayward’s prose translation of the first part of _Faust_—so good that it makes one regret Mr Hayward should have abandoned the line of translation for a kind of literature which is, to say the least, somewhat slight—is not likely to be surpassed by any translation in verse. But poems like the _Iliad_, which, in the main, are in one manner, may hope to find a poetical translator so gifted and so trained as to be able to learn that one manner, and to reproduce it. Only, the poet who would reproduce this must cultivate in himself a Greek virtue by no means common among the moderns in general, and the English in particular,—_moderation_. For Homer has not only the English vigour, he has the Greek grace; and when one observes the bolstering, rollicking way in which his English admirers—even men of genius like the late Professor Wilson—love to talk of Homer and his poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no very deep community of nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm. ‘It is very well, my good friends’, I always imagine Homer saying to them: if he could hear them: ‘you do me a great deal of honour, but somehow or other you praise me too like barbarians’. For Homer’s grandeur is not the mixed and turbid grandeur of the great poets of the north, of the authors of _Othello_ and _Faust_; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur. Certainly his poetry has all the energy and power of the poetry of our ruder climates; but it has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky.

Footnote 25:

_The Faery Queen_, Canto ii. stanza I.

Footnote 26:

_Odes_, IV. vii. 13.

Footnote 27:

_Odyssey_ iv. 563.

Footnote 28:

_Odes_, III. ii. 31.

Footnote 29:

So short, that I quote it entire:

Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia;
Known to me well are the faces of all; their names I remember;
Two, two only remain, whom I see not among the commanders,
Castor fleet in the car,—Polydeukes brave with the cestus,—
Own dear brethren of mine,—one parent loved us as infants.
Are they not here in the host, from the shores of loved Lacedæmon,
Or, though they came with the rest in ships that bound through the
waters,
Dare they not enter the fight or stand in the council of Heroes,
All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?
So said she;—they long since in Earth’s soft arms were reposing,
There, in their own dear land, their Fatherland, Lacedæmon.

_English Hexameter Translations_, London,
1847, p. 242.

I have changed Dr Hawtrey’s ‘Kastor’, ‘Lakedaimon’, back to the
familiar ‘Castor’, ‘Lacedæmon’, in obedience to my own rule that
everything _odd_ is to be avoided in rendering Homer, the most natural
and least odd of poets. I see Mr Newman’s critic in the _National
Review_ urges our generation to bear with the unnatural effect of
these rewritten Greek names, in the hope that by this means the effect
of them may have to the next generation become natural. For my part, I
feel no disposition to pass all my own life in the wilderness of
pedantry, in order that a posterity which I shall never see may one
day enter an orthographical Canaan; and, after all, the real question
is this: whether our living apprehension of the Greek world is more
checked by meeting in an English book about the Greeks, names not
spelt letter for letter as in the original Greek, or by meeting names
which make us rub our eyes and call out, ‘How exceedingly odd!’

The Latin names of the Greek deities raise in most cases the idea of
quite distinct personages from the personages whose idea is raised by
the Greek names. Hera and Juno are actually, to every scholar’s
imagination, two different people. So in all these cases the Latin
names must, at any inconvenience, be abandoned when we are dealing
with the Greek world. But I think it can be in the sensitive
imagination of Mr Grote only, that ‘Thucydides’ raises the idea of a
different man from =Θουκυδίδης=.

Footnote 30:

For instance; in a version (I believe, by the late Mr Lockhart) of
Homer’s description of the parting of Hector and Andromache, there
occurs, in the first five lines, but one spondee besides the necessary
spondees in the sixth place; in the corresponding five lines of Homer
there occur ten. See _English Hexameter Translations_, 244.

Footnote 31:

See for instance, in the _Iliad_, the loose construction of =ὅστε=,
xvii. 658; that of =ἴδοιτο=, xvii. 681; that of =οἵτε=, xviii. 209;
and the elliptical construction at xix. 42, 43; also the idiomatic
construction of =ἐγὼν ὅδε παρασχεῖν=, xix. 140. These instances are
all taken within a range of a thousand lines; anyone may easily
multiply them for himself.

Footnote 32:

Our knowledge of Homer’s Greek is hardly such as to enable us to
pronounce quite confidently what is idiomatic in his diction, and what
is not, any more than in his grammar; but I seem to myself clearly to
recognise an idiomatic stamp in such expressions as =τολυπεύειν
πολέμους=, xiv. 86; =φάος ἐν νήεσσιν θήῃς=, xvi. 94; =τιν’ οἴω
ἀσπασίως αὐτῶν γόνυ κάμψειν=, xix. 71; =κλοτοπεύειν=, xix. 149; and
many others. The first-quoted expression, =τολυπεύειν ἀργαλέους
πολέμους=, seems to me to have just about the same degree of freedom
as the ‘_jump_ the life to come’, or the ‘_shuffle off_ this mortal
coil’, of Shakspeare.

Footnote 33:

It must be remembered, however, that, if we disregard quantity too
much in constructing English hexameters, we also disregard accent too
much in reading Greek hexameters. We read every Greek dactyl so as to
make a pure dactyl of it; but, to a Greek, the accent must have
hindered many dactyls from sounding as pure dactyls. When we read
=αἰόλος= ἵππος, for instance, or =αἰγιόχοιο=, the dactyl in each of
these cases is made by us as pure a dactyl as ‘Tityre’, or ‘dignity’;
but to a Greek it was not so. To him αἰόλος must have been nearly as
impure a dactyl as ‘death-destined’ is to us; and αἰγιόχ nearly as
impure as the ‘dressed his own’ of my text. Nor, I think, does this
right mode of pronouncing the two words at all spoil the run of the
line as a hexameter. The effect of =αἰόλλος= ἵππος (or something like
that), though not _our_ effect, is not a disagreeable one. On the
other hand, κορυθαιόλος as a paroxytonon, although it has the
respectable authority of Liddell and Scott’s _Lexicon_ (following
Heyne), is certainly wrong; for then the word cannot be pronounced
without throwing an accent on the first syllable as well as the third,
and μέγας =κοῤῥυθαιόλλος= Ἕκτωρ would have been to a Greek as
intolerable an ending for a hexameter line as ‘accurst
_orphanhood-destined_ houses’ would be to us. The best authorities,
accordingly, accent κορυθαίολος as a proparoxytonon.

Footnote 34:

Dr Hawtrey also has translated this passage; but here, he has not, I
think, been so successful as in his ‘Helen on the walls of Troy’.

Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice
A Reply to Matthew Arnold
By Francis W. Newman

It is so difficult, amid the press of literature, for a mere versifier and translator to gain notice at all, that an assailant may even do one a service, if he so conduct his assault as to enable the reader to sit in intelligent judgment on the merits of the book assailed. But when the critic deals out to the readers only so much knowledge as may propagate his own contempt of the book, he has undoubtedly immense power to dissuade them from wishing to open it. Mr Arnold writes as openly aiming at this end. He begins by complimenting me, as ‘a man of great ability and genuine learning’; but on questions of learning, as well as of taste, he puts me down as bluntly, as if he had meant, ‘a man totally void both of learning and of sagacity’. He again and again takes for granted that he has ‘the scholar’ on his side, ‘the living scholar’, the man who has learning and taste without pedantry. He bids me please ‘the scholars’, and go to ‘the scholars’ tribunal’; and does not know that I did this, to the extent of my opportunity, before committing myself to a laborious, expensive and perhaps thankless task. Of course he cannot guess, what 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 translations. I at this moment count eight such names, though of course I must not here adduce them: nor will I further allude to it, than to say, that I have no such sense either of pride or of despondency, as those are liable to, who are consciously isolated in their taste.

Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public is the only rightful judge; and to it I wish to appeal. Even scholars collectively have no right, and much less have single scholars, to pronounce a final sentence on questions of taste in their court. Where I differ in Taste from Mr Arnold, it is very difficult to find ‘the scholars’ tribunal even if I acknowledged its absolute jurisdiction: but as regards Erudition, this difficulty does not occur, and I shall fully reply to the numerous dogmatisms by which he settles the case against me.

But I must first avow to the reader my own moderate pretensions. Mr Arnold begins by instilling two errors which he does not commit himself to assert. He says that my work will _not_ take rank as _the_ standard translation of Homer, but _other translations will be made_: as if I thought otherwise! If I have set the example of the right direction in which translators ought to aim, of course those who follow me will improve upon me and supersede me. A man would be rash indeed to withhold his version of a poem of fifteen thousand lines, until he had, to his best ability, imparted to them all their final perfection. He might spend the leisure of his life upon it. He would possibly be in his grave before it could see the light. If it then were published, and it was founded on any new principle, there would be no one to defend it from the attacks of ignorance and prejudice. In the nature of the case, his wisdom is to elaborate in the first instance all the high and noble parts _carefully_, and get through the inferior parts _somehow_; leaving of necessity very much to be done in successive editions, if possibly it please general taste sufficiently to reach them. A generous and intelligent critic will test such a work mainly or solely by the most noble parts, and as to the rest, will consider whether the metre and style adapts itself naturally to them also.

Next, Mr Arnold asks, ‘Who is to assure Mr Newman, that when he has tried to retain every peculiarity of his original, he has done that for which Mr Newman enjoins this to be done—adhered closely to Homer’s manner and habit of thought? Evidently the translator needs more practical directions than these’. The tendency of this is, to suggest to the reader that I am not aware of the difficulty of rightly applying good principles; whereas I have in this very connection said expressly, that even when a translator has got right principles, he is liable to go wrong in the detail of their application. This is as true of all the principles which Mr Arnold can possibly give, as of those which I have given; nor do I for a moment assume, that in writing fifteen thousand lines of verse I have not made hundreds of blots.

At the same time Mr Arnold has overlooked the point of my remark. Nearly every translator before me has _knowingly_, _purposely_, _habitually_ shrunk from Homer’s thoughts and Homer’s manner. The reader will afterwards see whether Mr Arnold does not justify them in their course. It is not for those who are purposely unfaithful to taunt me with the difficulty of being truly faithful.

I have alleged, and, against Mr Arnold’s flat denial, I deliberately repeat, that Homer rises and sinks with his subject, and is often homely or prosaic. I have professed as my principle, to follow my original in this matter. It is unfair to expect of me grandeur in trivial passages. If in any place where Homer is _confessedly_ grand and noble, I have marred and ruined his greatness, let me be reproved. But I shall have occasion to protest, that Stateliness is not Grandeur, Picturesqueness is not Stately, Wild Beauty is not to be confounded with Elegance: a Forest has its swamps and brushwood, as well as its tall trees.

The duty of one who _publishes_ his censures on me is, to select noble, greatly admired passages, and confront me both with a prose translation of the original (for the public cannot go to the Greek) and also with that which he judges to be a more successful version than mine. Translation being matter of compromise, and being certain to fall below the original, when this is of the highest type of grandeur; the question is not, What translator is perfect? but, Who is least imperfect? Hence the only fair test is by comparison, when comparison is possible. But Mr Arnold has not put me to this test. He has quoted two very short passages, and various single lines, half lines and single words, from me; and chooses to _tell_ his readers that I ruin Homer’s nobleness, when (if his censure is just) he might make them _feel_ it by quoting me upon the most admired pieces. Now with the warmest sincerity I say: If any English reader, after perusing my version of four or five eminently noble passages of sufficient length, side by side with those of other translators, and (better still) with a prose version also, finds in them high qualities which I have destroyed; I am foremost to advise him to shut my book, or to consult it only (as Mr Arnold suggests) as a schoolboy’s ‘help to construe’, if such it can be. My sole object is, to bring Homer before the unlearned public: I seek no self-glorification: the sooner I am superseded by a really better translation, the greater will be my pleasure.

It was not until I more closely read Mr Arnold’s own versions, that I understood how necessary is his repugnance to mine. I am unwilling to speak of his metrical efforts. I shall not say more than my argument strictly demands. It here suffices to state the simple fact, that for awhile I seriously doubted whether he meant his first specimen for metre at all. He seems distinctly to say, he is going to give us English Hexameters; but it was long before I could believe that he had written the following for that metre:

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 sate fifty men, in the ruddy light of the fire.
By their chariots stood the steeds, and champ’d the white barley,
While their masters sate by the fire, and waited for Morning.

I sincerely thought, this was meant for prose; at length the two last lines opened my eyes. He _does_ mean them for Hexameters! ‘Fire’ ( = feuer) with him is a spondee or trochee. The first line, I now see, begins with three (quantitative) spondees, and is meant to be spondaic in the fifth foot. ‘Bed of, Between, In the’,—are meant for spondees! So are ‘There sate’, ‘_By_ their’; though ‘Troy _by_ the’ was a dactyl. ‘Champ’d the white’ is a dactyl. My ‘metrical exploits’ amaze Mr Arnold (p. 23); but my courage is timidity itself compared to his.

His second specimen stands thus:

And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bewailing,
And he shook his head, and thus address’d 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.

Upon this he apologises for ‘To a’, intended as a spondee in the fourth line, and ‘-dress’d his own’ for a dactyl in the second; liberties which, he admits, go rather far, but ‘do not actually spoil the run of the hexameter’. In a note, he attempts to palliate his deeds by recriminating on Homer, though he will not allow to me the same excuse. The accent (it seems) on the second syllable of αἰόλος makes it as impure a dactyl to a Greek as ‘death-destin’d’ is to us! Mr Arnold’s erudition in Greek metres is very curious, if he can establish that they take any cognisance _at all_ of the prose accent, or that αἰολος is quantitatively more or less of a dactyl, according as the prose accent is on one or other syllable. His ear also must be of a very unusual kind, if it makes out that ‘death-destin’d’ is anything but a downright Molossus. Write it _dethdestind_, as it is pronounced, and the eye, equally with the ear, decides it to be of the same type as the word _persistunt_. In the lines just quoted, most readers will be slow to believe, that they have to place an impetus of the voice (an ictus metricus at least) on Bétween, In´ the, Thére sate, By´ their, A´nd with, A´nd he, Tó a, Fór than, O´f all. Here, in the course of thirteen lines, _composed as a specimen of style_, is found the same offence nine times repeated, to say nothing here of other deformities. Now contrast Mr Arnold’s severity against me[35], p. 87: ‘It is a real fault when Mr Newman has:

Infátuáte! óh that thou wért | lord to some other army—

for here the reader is required, not for any special advantage to himself, but _simply to save Mr Newman trouble_, to place the accent on the insignificant word _wert_, where it has _no business whatever_’. Thus to the flaw which Mr Arnold admits nine times in thirteen pattern lines, he shows no mercy in me, who have toiled through fifteen thousand. Besides, on _wert_ we are free at pleasure to place or not to place the accent; but in Mr Arnold’s _Bétween_, _Tó a_, etc., it is impossible or offensive.

To avoid a needlessly personal argument, I enlarge on the general question of hexameters. Others, scholars of repute, have given example and authority to English hexameters. As matter of curiosity, as erudite sport, such experiments may have their value. I do not mean to express indiscriminate disapproval, much less contempt. I have myself privately tried the same in Alcaics; and find the chief objection to be, not that the task is impossible, but that to execute it _well_ is too difficult for a language like ours, overladen with consonants, and abounding with syllables neither distinctly long nor distinctly short, but of every intermediate length. Singing to a tune was essential to keep even Greek or Roman poetry to true _time_; to the English language it is of tenfold necessity. But if _time_ is abandoned (as in fact it always is), and the prose accent has to do duty for the ictus metricus, the moral genius of the metre is fundamentally subverted. What previously was steady duplicate time (‘march-time’, as Professor Blackie calls it) vacillates between duplicate and triplicate. With Homer, a dactyl had nothing in it _more tripping_ than a spondee: a crotchet followed by two quavers belongs to as grave an anthem as two crotchets. But Mr Arnold himself (p. 55) calls the introduction of anapæsts by Dr Maginn into our ballad measure, ‘a detestable dance’: as in:

And scarcely hád shĕ bĕgún to wash,
Ere shé wăs ăwáre ŏf thĕ grisly gash.

I will not assert that this is everywhere improper in the Odyssey; but no part of the Iliad occurs to me in which it is proper, and I have totally excluded it in my own practice. I notice it but once in Mr Gladstone’s specimens, and it certainly offends my taste as out of harmony with the gravity of the rest, viz.

My ships shall bound ĭn thĕ morning’s light.

In Shakspeare we have _i’th’_ and _o’th’_ for monosyllables, but (so scrupulous am I in the midst of my ‘atrocities’) I never dream of such a liberty myself, much less of avowed ‘anapæsts’. So far do I go in the opposite direction, as to prefer to make such words as _Danai_, _victory_ three syllables, which even Mr Gladstone and Pope accept as dissyllabic. Some reviewers have called my metre _lege solutum_; which is as ridiculous a mistake as Horace made concerning Pindar. That, in passing. But surely Mr Arnold’s severe blow at Dr Maginn rebounds with double force upon himself.

To Péleus whý dĭd wĕ gíve you?—
Hécŭbă’s griéf nor Príăm my fáther’s—
Thoúsănds ŏf sórrows—

cannot be a _less_ detestable jig than that of Dr Maginn. And this objection holds against every accentual hexameter, even to those of Longfellow or Lockhart, if applied to grand poetry. For bombast, in a wild whimsical poem, Mr Clough has proved it to be highly appropriate; and I think, the more ‘rollicking’ is Mr Clough (if only I understand the word) the more successful his metre. Mr Arnold himself _feels_ what I say against ‘dactyls’, for on this very ground he advises largely superseding them by spondees; and since what he calls a spondee is any pair of syllables of which the former is accentuable, his precept amounts to this, that the hexameter be converted into a line of six accentual trochees, with free liberty left of diversifying it, in any foot except the last, by Dr Maginn’s ‘detestable dance’. What more severe condemnation of the metre is imaginable than this mere description gives? ‘Six trochees’ seems to me the worst possible foundation for an English metre. I cannot imagine that Mr Arnold will give the slightest weight to this, as a judgment from me; but I do advise him to search in Samson Agonistes, Thalaba, Kehama, and Shelley’s works, for the phenomenon.

I have elsewhere insisted, but I here repeat, that for a long poem a trochaic beginning of the verse is most unnatural and vexatious in English, because so large a number of our sentences begin with unaccented syllables, and the vigour of a trochaic line eminently depends on the purity of its initial trochee. Mr Arnold’s feeble trochees already quoted (from _Bétween_ to _Tó a_) are all the fatal result of defying the tendencies of our language.

If by a happy combination any scholar could compose fifty _such_ English hexameters, as would convey a living likeness of the Virgilian metre, I should applaud it as valuable for initiating schoolboys into that metre: but there its utility would end. The method could not be profitably used for translating Homer or Virgil, plainly because it is impossible to say for whose service such a translation would be executed. Those who can read the original will never care to read _through_ any translation; and the unlearned look on all, even the best hexameters, whether from Southey, Lockhart or Longfellow, as odd and disagreeable prose. Mr Arnold deprecates appeal to popular taste: well he may! yet if the unlearned are to be our audience, we cannot defy them. I myself, before venturing to print, 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; but I well know that this is quite insufficient to establish the merits of a translation. It is nevertheless _one_ point. ‘Homer is popular’, is one of the very few matters of fact in this controversy on which Mr Arnold and I are agreed. ‘English hexameters are not popular’, is a truth so obvious, that I do not yet believe he will deny it. Therefore, ‘Hexameters are not the metre for translating Homer’. Q. E. D.

I cannot but think that the very respectable scholars who pertinaciously adhere to the notion that English hexameters have something ‘epical’ in them, have no vivid _feeling_ of the difference between Accent and Quantity: and this is the less wonderful, since so very few persons have ever actually _heard_ quantitative verse. I have; by listening to Hungarian poems, read to me by my friend Mr Francis Pulszky, a native Magyar. He had not finished a single page, before I complained gravely of the monotony. He replied: ‘So do _we_ complain of it’: and then showed me, by turning the pages, that the poet cut the knot which he could not untie, by frequent changes of his metre. Whether it was a change of mere length, as from Iambic senarian to Iambic dimeter; or implied a fundamental change of time, as in music from _common_ to _minuet_ time; I cannot say. But, to my ear, nothing but a tune can ever save a quantitative metre from hideous monotony. It is like strumming a piece of very simple music on a single note. Nor only so; but the most beautiful of anthems, after it has been repeated a hundred times on a hundred successive verses, begins to pall on the ear. How much more would an entire book of Homer, if chanted at one sitting! I have the conviction, though I will not undertake to impart it to another, that if the living Homer could sing his lines to us, they would at first move in us the same pleasing interest as an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast; but that, after hearing twenty lines, we should complain of meagreness, sameness, and _loss of moral expression_; and should judge the style to be _as_ inferior to our own oratorical metres, as the music of Pindar to our third-rate modern music. But if the poet, at our request, instead of singing the verses, read or spoke them, then from the loss of well-marked time and the ascendency reassumed by the prose-accent, we should be as helplessly unable to _hear_ any metre in them, as are the modern Greeks.

I expect that Mr Arnold will reply to this, that he _reads_ and does not _sing_ Homer, and yet he finds his verses to be melodious and not monotonous. To this, I retort, that he begins by wilfully pronouncing Greek falsely, according to the laws of _Latin_ accent, and artificially assimilating the Homeric to the Virgilian line. Virgil has compromised between the ictus metricus and the prose accent, by exacting that the two coincide in the two last feet and generally forbidding it in the second and third foot. What is called the ‘feminine cæsura’ gives (in the Latin language) coincidence on the third foot. Our extreme familiarity with these laws of compromise enables us to anticipate recurring sounds and satisfies our ear. But the Greek prose accent, by reason of oxytons and paroxytons, and accent on the ante-penultima in spite of a long penultima, totally resists all such compromise; and proves that particular form of melody, which our scholars enjoy in Homer, to be an unhistoric imitation of Virgil.

I am aware, there is a bold theory, whispered if not published, that,—so out-and-out _Æolian_ was Homer,—his laws of accent must have been almost Latin. According to this, Erasmus, following the track of Virgil blindly, has taught us to pronounce Euripides and Plato ridiculously ill, but Homer, with an accuracy of accent which puts Aristarchus to shame. This is no place for discussing so difficult a question. Suffice it to say, _first_, that Mr Arnold cannot take refuge in such a theory, since he does not admit that Homer was antiquated to Euripides; _next_, that admitting the theory to him, still the loss of the Digamma destroys to him the true rhythm of Homer. I shall recur to both questions below. I here add, that our English pronunciation even of Virgil often so ruins Virgil’s own _quantities_, that there is something either of delusion or of pedantry in our scholars’ self-complacency in the rhythm which they elicit.

I think it fortunate for Mr Arnold, that he had _not_ ‘courage to translate Homer’; for he must have failed to make it acceptable to the unlearned. But if the public ear prefers ballad metres, still (Mr Arnold assumes) ‘the scholar’ is with him in this whole controversy. Nevertheless it gradually comes out that neither is this the case, but he himself is in the minority. P. 110, he writes: ‘When one observes the boistering, rollicking way in which Homer’s English admirers—even men of genius, like the late Professor Wilson—love to talk of Homer and his poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no very deep community of nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm.’ It does not occur to Mr Arnold that the defect of perception lies with himself, and that Homer has more sides than he has discovered. He deplores that Dr Maginn, and others whom he names, err with me, in believing that our ballad-style is the nearest approximation to that of Homer; and avows that ‘_it is time to say plainly_’ (p. 46) that Homer is not of the ballad-type. So in p. 45, ‘—this _popular_, but, _it is time to say_, this erroneous analogy’ between the ballad and Homer. Since it is reserved for Mr Arnold to turn the tide of opinion; since it is a task not yet achieved, but remains to be achieved by his authoritative enunciation; he confesses that hitherto I have with me the suffrage of scholars. With this confession, a little more diffidence would be becoming, if diffidence were possible to the fanaticism with which he idolises hexameters. P. 88, he says: ‘The hexameter has a natural dignity, which repels both the jaunty style and the jog-trot style, etc.... _The translator who uses it cannot too religiously follow the_ INSPIRATION OF HIS METRE’ etc. Inspiration from a metre which has no recognised type? from a metre which the _heart_ and _soul_ of the nation ignores? I believe, if the metre can inspire anything, it is to frolic and gambol with Mr Clough. Mr Arnold’s English hexameter cannot be a higher inspiration to him, than the true hexameter was to a Greek: yet that metre inspired strains of totally different essential genius and merit.

But I claim Mr Arnold himself as confessing that our ballad _metre_ is epical, when he says that Scott is ‘_bastard_-epic’. I do not admit that his quotations from Scott are all Scott’s best, nor anything like it; but if they were, it would only prove something against Scott’s genius or talent, nothing about his metre. The Κύπρια ἔπη or Ἰλίου πέρσις were probably very inferior to the Iliad; but no one would on that account call them or the Frogs and Mice bastard-epic. No one would call a bad tale of Dryden or of Crabbe bastard-epic. The application of the word to Scott virtually concedes what I assert. Mr Arnold also calls Macaulay’s ballads ‘pinchbeck’; but a man needs to produce something very noble himself, before he can afford thus to sneer at Macaulay’s ‘Lars Porsena’.

Before I enter on my own ‘metrical exploits’, I must get rid of a disagreeable topic. Mr Arnold’s repugnance to them has led him into forms of attack, which I do not know how to characterize. I shall state my complaints as concisely as I can, and so leave them.

1. I do not seek for any similarity of _sound_ in an English accentual metre to that of a Greek quantitative metre; besides that Homer writes in a highly vocalized tongue, while ours is overfilled with consonants. I have disowned this notion of similar rhythm in the strongest terms (p. xvii of my Preface), expressly because some critics had imputed this aim to me in the case of Horace. I summed up: ‘It is not audible sameness of metre, but a likeness of moral genius which is to be aimed at’. I contrast the audible to the moral. Mr Arnold suppresses this contrast, and writes as follows, p. 34. Mr Newman tells us that he has found a metre like in moral genius to Homer’s. His judge has still the same answer: reproduce THEN _on our ear_ something of ‘the effect produced by the _movement_ of Homer’. He recurs to the same fallacy in p. 57. ‘For whose EAR do those two _rhythms_ produce impressions of (_to use Mr Newman’s own words_) “similar moral genius”’? His reader will naturally suppose that ‘like in moral genius’ is with me an eccentric phrase for ‘like in musical cadence’. The only likeness to the ear which I have admitted, is, that the one and the other are primitively made _for music_. That, Mr Arnold knows, is a matter of fact, whether a ballad be well or ill written. If he pleases, he may hold the rhythm of our metre to be necessarily inferior to Homer’s and to his own; but when I fully explained in my preface what were my tests of ‘like moral genius’, I cannot understand his suppressing them, and perverting the sense of my words.

2. In p. 52, Mr Arnold quotes Chapman’s translation of ἆ δείλω, ‘Poor wretched _beasts_’ (of Achilles’ horses), on which he comments severely. He does _not_ quote me. Yet in p. 100, after exhibiting Cowper’s translation of the same passage, he adds: ‘There is no want of dignity here, as in the versions of Chapman and of _Mr Newman, which I have already quoted_’. Thus he leads the reader to believe that I have the same phrase as Chapman! In fact, my translation is:

Ha! why on Peleus, mortal prince,
Bestowed we _you_, unhappy!

If he had done me the justice of quoting, it is possible that some readers would not have thought my rendering intrinsically ‘wanting in dignity’, or less noble than Mr Arnold’s own, which is:

Ah! unhappy pair! to Peleus[36] why did we give you,
To a mortal?

In p. 52, he with very gratuitous insult remarks, that ‘Poor wretched beasts’ is a little over-familiar; but this is no objection to it for the ballad-manner[37]: _it is good enough_ ... _for Mr Newman’s Iliad_, ... etc.’ Yet I myself have _not_ thought it good enough for my Iliad.

3. In p. 107, Mr Arnold gives his own translation of the discourse between Achilles and his horse; and prefaces it with the words, ‘I will take the passage in which both Chapman and Mr Newman _have already so much excited our astonishment_’. But he did not quote my translation of the noble part of the passage, consisting of 19 lines; he has merely quoted[38] the tail of it, 5 lines; which are altogether inferior. Of this a sufficient indication is, that Mr Gladstone has translated the 19 and omitted the 5. I shall below give my translation parallel to Mr Gladstone’s. The curious reader may compare it with Mr Arnold’s, if he choose.

4. In p. 102, Mr Arnold quotes from Chapman as a translation of ὅταν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ιλιος ἱρὴ,

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

and adds: ‘What Mr Newman’s manner of rendering would be, you can by this time sufficiently imagine for yourselves’. _Would be!_ Why does he set his readers to ‘imagine’, when in fewer words he could tell them what my version _is_? It stands thus:

A day, when sacred Ilium | for overthrow is destin’d,—

which may have faults unperceived by me, but is in my opinion far better than Mr Arnold’s, and certainly did not deserve to be censured side by side with Chapman’s absurdity. I must say plainly; a critic has no right to hide what I have written, and stimulate his readers to despise me by these _indirect_ methods.

I proceed to my own metre. It is exhibited in this stanza of Campbell:

By this the storm grew loud apace:
The waterwraith was shrieking,
And in the scowl of heav’n each face
Grew dark as they were speaking.

Whether I use this metre well or ill, I maintain that it is essentially a noble metre, a popular metre, a metre of great capacity. _It is essentially the national ballad metre_, for the double rhyme is an accident. Of _course_ it can be applied to low, as well as to high subjects; else it would _not_ be popular: it would _not_ be ‘of a like moral genius’ to the Homeric metre, which was available equally for the comic poem _Margites_, for the precepts of Pythagoras, for the pious prosaic hymn of Cleanthes, for the driest prose of a naval catalogue[39], in short, _for all early thought_. Mr Arnold appears to forget, though he cannot be ignorant, that prose-composition is later than Homer, and that in the epical days every initial effort at prose history was carried on in _Homeric doggerel_ by the Cyclic poets, who traced the history of Troy _ab ovo_ in consecutive chronology. I say, he is merely inadvertent, he cannot be ignorant, that the Homeric _metre_, like my metre, subserves prosaic thought with the utmost facility; but I hold it to be, not indavertence, but blindness, when he does not see that Homer’s τὸν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος is a line of as thoroughly unaffected _oratio pedestris_ as any verse of Pythagoras or Horace’s Satires. But on diction I defer to speak, till I have finished the topic of metre.

I do not say that any measure is faultless. Every measure has its foible: mine has that fault which every uniform line must have; it is liable to monotony. This is evaded of course, as in the hexameter or rather as in Milton’s line, first, by varying the cæsura, secondly, by varying certain feet, within narrow and well understood limits, thirdly, by irregularity in the strength of accents, fourthly, by varying the weight of the unaccented syllables also. All these things are needed, _for the mere sake of breaking uniformity_. I will not here assert that Homer’s many marvellous freedoms, such as ἑκηβόλου Ἀπόλλωνος, were dictated by this aim, like those in the _Paradise Lost_; but I do say, that it is most unjust, most unintelligent, in critics, to produce _single_ lines from me, and criticize them as rough or weak, instead of examining them and presenting them as part of _a mass_. How would Shakspeare stand this sort of test? nay, or Milton? The metrical laws of a long poem cannot be the same as of a sonnet: single verses are organic elements of a great whole. A crag must not be cut like a gem. Mr Arnold should remember Aristotle’s maxim, that popular eloquence (and such is Homer’s) should be broad, rough and highly coloured, like scene painting, not polished into delicacy like miniature. But I speak now of metre, not yet of diction. In _any_ long and popular poem it is a mistake to wish every line to conform severely to a few types; but to claim this of a translator of _Homer_ is a doubly unintelligent exaction, when Homer’s own liberties transgress all bounds; many of them being feebly disguised by later double spellings, as εἵως, εἷος, invented for his special accommodation.

The Homeric verse has a rhythmical advantage over mine in less rigidity of cæsura. Though the Hexameter was made out of two Doric lines, yet no division of sense, no pause of the voice or thought, is exacted between them. The chasm between two English verses is deeper. Perhaps, on the side of syntax, a _four + three_ English metre drives harder towards monotony than Homer’s own verse. For other reasons, it lies under a like disadvantage, compared with Milton’s metre. The secondary cæsuras possible in the four feet are of course less numerous than those in the five feet, and the three-foot verse has still less variety. To my taste, it is far more pleasing that the short line recur less regularly; just as the parœmiac of Greek anapæsts is less pleasant in the Aristophanic tetrameter, than when it comes frequent but not expected. This is a main reason why I prefer Scott’s free metre to my own; yet, without rhyme, I have not found how to use his freedom. Mr Arnold wrongly supposes me to have overlooked his main and just objections to rhyming Homer; viz. that so many Homeric lines are intrinsically made for isolation. In p. ix of my Preface I called it a fatal embarrassment. But the objection applies in its full strength only against Pope’s rhymes, not against Walter Scott’s.

Mr Gladstone has now laid before the public his own specimens of Homeric translation. Their dates range from 1836 to 1859. It is possible that he has as strong a distaste as Mr Arnold for my version; for he totally ignores the archaic, the rugged, the boisterous element in Homer. But as to metre, he gives me his full suffrage. He has lines with four accents, with three, and a few with two; not one with five. On the whole, his metre, his cadences, his varying rhymes, are those of Scott. He has more trochaic lines than I approve. He is truthful to Homer on many sides; and (such is the delicate grace and variety admitted by the rhyme) his verses are more pleasing than mine. I do not hesitate to say, that if _all_ Homer could be put before the public in the same style equally well with his best pieces, a translation executed on my principles could not live in the market at its side; and certainly I should spare my labour. I add, that I myself prefer the former piece which I quote to my own, even while I see his defects: for I hold that his graces, at which I cannot afford to aim, more than make up for his losses. After this confession, I frankly contrast his rendering of the two noblest passages with mine, that the reader may see, what Mr Arnold does not show, my weak and strong sides.

GLADSTONE, Iliad 4, 422

As when the billow gathers fast
With slow and sullen roar
Beneath the keen northwestern blast
Against the sounding shore:
First far at sea it rears its crest,
Then bursts upon the beach,
Or[40] with proud arch and swelling breast,
Where headlands outward reach,
It smites their strength, and bellowing flings
Its silver foam afar;
So, stern and thick, the Danaan kings
And soldiers marched to war.
Each leader gave his men the word;
Each warrior deep in silence heard.
So mute they march’d, thou could’st not ken
They were a mass of speaking men:
And as they strode in martial might,
Their flickering arms shot back the light.
But as at even the folded sheep
Of some rich master stand,
Ten thousand thick their place they keep,
And bide the milkman’s hand,
And more and more they bleat, the more
They hear their lamblings cry;
So, from the Trojan host, uproar
And din rose loud and high.
They were a many-voicèd throng:
Discordant accents there,
That sound from many a differing tongue,
Their differing race declare.
These, Mars had kindled for the fight;
Those, starry-ey’d Athenè’s might,
And savage Terror and Affright,
And Strife, insatiate of wars,
The sister and the mate of Mars:
Strife, that, a pigmy at her birth,
By gathering rumour fed,
Soon plants her feet upon the earth,
And in the heav’n her head.

I add my own rendering of the same; somewhat corrected, but only in the direction of my own principles and against Arnold’s.

As when the surges of the deep, by Western blore uphoven,
Against the ever-booming strand dash up in roll successive;
A head of waters swelleth first aloof; then under harried
By the rough bottom, roars aloud; till, hollow at the summit,
Sputtering the briny foam abroad, the huge crest tumbleth over:
So then the lines of Danaï, successive and unceasing,
In battle’s close array mov’d on. To his own troops each leader
Gave order: dumbly went the rest (nor mightèst thou discover,
So vast a train of people held a voice within their bosom),
In silence their commanders fearing: all the ranks
wellmarshall’d
Were clad in crafty panoply, which glitter’d on their bodies.
Meantime, as sheep within the yard of some great cattle-master,
While the white milk is drain’d from them, stand round in number
countless,
And, grievèd by their lambs’ complaint, respond with bleat
incessant;
So then along their ample host arose the Troian hurly.
For neither common words spake théy, nor kindred accent utter’d;
But mingled was the tongue of men from divers places summon’d.
By Arès these were urgèd on, those by grey-ey’d Athenè,
By Fear, by Panic, and by Strife immeasurably eager,
The sister and companion[41] of hero-slaying Arès,
Who truly doth at first her crest but humble rear; thereafter,
Planting upon the ground her feet, her head in heaven fixeth.

GLADSTONE, Iliad 19, 403

Hanging low his auburn head,
Sweeping with his mane the ground,
From beneath his collar shed,
Xanthus, hark! a voice hath found,
Xanthus of the flashing feet:
Whitearm’d Herè gave the sound.
‘Lord Achilles, strong and fleet!
Trust us, we will bear thee home;
Yet cometh nigh thy day of doom:
No doom of ours, but doom that stands
By God and mighty Fate’s commands.
’Twas not that we were slow or slack
Patroclus lay a corpse, his back
All stript of arms by Trojan hands.
The prince of gods, whom Leto bare,
Leto with the flowing hair,
He forward fighting did the deed,
And gave to Hector glory’s meed.
In toil for thee, we will not shun
Against e’en Zephyr’s breath to run,
Swiftest of winds: but all in vain:
By God and man shalt thou be slain.’
He spake: and here, his words among,
Erinnys bound his faltering tongue.

Beginning with Achilles’ speech, I render the passage parallel to Gladstone thus.

‘_Chestnut_ and _Spotted_! noble pair! farfamous brood of
_Spry-foot_!
In other guise now ponder ye your charioteer to rescue
Back to the troop of Danaï, when we have done with battle:
Nor leave him dead upon the field, as late ye left Patroclus’.
But him the dapplefooted steed under the yoke accosted;
(And droop’d his auburn head aside straightway; and through the
collar,
His full mane, streaming to the ground, over the yoke was
scatter’d:
Him Juno, whitearm’d goddess, then with voice Of man endowèd):
‘Now and again we verily will save and more than save thee,
Dreadful Achilles! yet for thee the deadly day approacheth.
Not ours the guilt; but mighty God and stubborn Fate are guilty.
Not by the slowness of our feet or dulness of our spirit
The Troians did thy armour strip from shoulders of Patroclus;
But the exalted god, for whom brighthair’d Latona travail’d,
Slew him amid the foremost rank and glory gave to Hector.
Now we, in coursing, pace would keep even with breeze of Zephyr,
Which speediest they say to be: but for thyself ’tis fated
By hand of hero and of God in mighty strife to perish
So much he spake: thereat his voice the Furies stopp’d for ever.

Now if any fool ask, Why does not Mr Gladstone translate _all_ Homer? any fool can reply with me, Because he is Chancellor of the Exchequer. A man who has talents and acquirements adequate to translate Homer _well_ into _rhyme_, is almost certain to have other far more urgent calls for the exercise of such talents.

So much of metre. At length I come to the topic of Diction, where Mr Arnold and I are at variance not only as to taste, but as to the main facts of Greek literature. I had called Homer’s style quaint and garrulous; and said that he rises and falls with his subject, being prosaic when it is tame, and low when it is mean. I added no proof; for I did not dream that it was needed. Mr Arnold not only absolutely denies all this, and denies it without proof; but adds, that these assertions prove my incompetence, and account for my total and conspicuous failure. His whole attack upon my diction is grounded on a passage which I must quote at length; for it is so confused in logic, that I may otherwise be thought to garble it, pp. 36, 37.

‘Mr Newman speaks of the more antiquated style suited to this subject. Quaint! Antiquated! but to whom? Sir Thomas Browne is quaint, and the diction of Chaucer is antiquated: does Mr Newman suppose that Homer seemed quaint to Sophocles, as Chaucer’s diction seems antiquated to us? But we cannot really know, I confess (!!), how Homer seemed to Sophocles. Well then, to those who can tell us how he seems to them, to the living scholar, to our only present witness on this matter—does Homer make on the Provost of Eton, when he reads him, the impression of a poet quaint and antiquated! does he make this impression on Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett? When Shakspeare says, “The Princes orgulous”, meaning “the proud princes”, we say, “This is antiquated”. When he says of the Trojan gates, that they,

With massy staples
And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts
_Sperr_ up 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. If those 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 by T. 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 public _unlearned_ in Greek, and because Mr Arnold lays before _them_ a 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.