Chapter III (4)

Lie as thou art. ’Tis hard for thee to strive against the
children
Of overmatching Saturn’s son, tho’ offspring of a River.
Thou boastest, that thy origin is from a Stream broad-flówing;
I boast, from mighty Jupiter to trace my first beginning.
A man who o’er the Myrmidons holdeth wide rule, begat me,
Peleus; whose father Æacus by Jupiter was gotten.
Rivers, that trickle to the sea, than Jupiter are weaker;
So, than the progeny of Jove, weaker a River’s offspring.
Yea, if he aught avail’d to help, behold! a mighty River
Beside thee here: but none can fight with Jove, the child of
Saturn.
Not royal Acheloïus with him may play the equal.
Nor e’en the amplebosom’d strength of deeply-flowing Ocean:
Tho’ from his fulness every Sea and every River welleth,
And all the ever-bubbling springs and eke their vasty sources.
Yet at the lightning-bolt of Jove doth even Ocean shudder,
And at the direful thunder-clap, when from the sky it crasheth.

Mr Arnold has in some respects attacked me discreetly; I mean, where he has said that which damages me with his readers, and yet leaves me no possible reply. What is easier than for one to call another ignoble? what more damaging? what harder to refute? Then when he speaks of my ‘metrical exploits’ how can I be offended? to what have I to reply? His words are expressive either of compliment or of contempt; but in either case are untangible. Again: when he would show how tender he has been of my honour, and how unwilling to expose my enormities, he says: p. 57: ‘I will by no means search in Mr Newman’s version for passages likely to raise a laugh: that search, _alas!_ would be far too easy’; I find the pity which the word _alas!_ expresses, to be very clever, and very effective against me. But, I think, he was not discreet, but very unwise, in making dogmatic statements on the ground of erudition, many of which I have exposed; and about which much more remains to be said than space will allow me.

In his denial that Homer is ‘garrulous’, he complains that so many think him to be ‘diffuse’. Mr Arnold, it seems, is unaware of that very prominent peculiarity; which suits ill even to Mr Gladstone’s style. Thus, where Homer said (and I said) in a passage quoted above, ‘people that have _a voice in their bosom_’, Mr Gladstone has only ‘_speaking_ men’. I have noticed the epithet _shaggy_ as quaint, in ‘His heart in his shaggy bosom was divided’, where, in a moral thought, a physical epithet is obtruded. But even if ‘shaggy’ be dropped, it remains diffuse (and characteristically so) to say ‘my _heart in my bosom_ is divided’, for ‘I doubt’. So—‘I will speak what _my heart in my bosom_ bids me’. So, Homer makes men think κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμὸν, ‘in their heart _and mind_’; and deprives them of ‘mind and soul’. Also: ‘this appeared to him _in his mind_ to be the best counsel’. Mr Arnold assumes tones of great superiority; but every school-boy knows that diffuseness is a distinguishing characteristic of Homer. Again, the poet’s epithets are often selected by their convenience for his metre; sometimes perhaps even appropriated for no other cause. No one has ever given any better reason why Diomedes and Menelaus are almost exclusively called βοὴν ἀγαθὸς, except that it suits the metre. This belongs to the improvisatore, the negligent, the ballad style. The word ἐϋμμελίης, which I with others render ‘ashen-speared’, is said of Priam, of Panthus, and of sons of Panthus. Mr Arnold rebukes me, p. 106, for violating my own principles. ‘I say, on the other hand, that εὐμμελίω has _not_ the effect[51] of a peculiarity in the original, while “ashen-speared” _has_ the effect of a peculiarity in the English: and “warlike” is as marking an equivalent as I dare give for ἐϋμμελίω, _for fear of disturbing the balance of expression_ in Homer’s sentence’. Mr Arnold cannot write a sentence on Greek, without showing an ignorance hard to excuse in one who thus comes forward as a vituperating censor. _Warlike_ is a word current in the lips and books of all Englishmen: ἐϋμμελίης is a word _never_ used, never, I believe, in all Greek literature, by anyone but Homer. If he does but turn to Liddell and Scott, he will see their statement, that the Attic form εὐμελίας is only to be found in grammars. He is here, as always, wrong in his facts. The word is most singular in Greek; more singular by far than ‘ashen-spear’d’ in English, because it is more obscure, as is its special application to one or two persons: and in truth I have doubted whether we any better understand Eumelian Priam than Gerenian Nestor.—Mr Arnold presently imputes to me the opinion that χιτὼν means ‘a cloak’, _which he does not dispute_; but if I had thought it necessary to be literal, I must have rendered χαλκοχίτωνες brazen-shirted. He suggests to me the rendering ‘brazen-coated’, which I have used in Il. 4, 285 and elsewhere. I have also used ‘brazen-clad’, and I now prefer ‘brazen-mail’d’. I here wish only to press that Mr Arnold’s criticism proceeds on a false fact. Homer’s epithet was _not_ a familiar word at Athens (in any other sense than as Burns or Virgil may be familiar to Mr Arnold), but was strange, unknown even to their poets; hence his demand that I shall use a word already familiar in English poetry is doubly baseless. The later poets of Greece have plenty of words beginning with χαλκο-; but this one word is exclusively Homer’s.—Everything that I have now said, may be repeated still more pointedly concerning ἐϋκνημῖδες, inasmuch as directing attention to leg-armour is peculiarly quaint. No one in all Greek literature (as far as I know) names the word but Homer; and yet Mr Arnold turns on me with his ever reiterated, ever unsupported, assertions and censures, of course assuming that ‘the scholar’ is with him. (I have no theory at hand, to explain why he regards his own word to suffice without attempt at proof.) The epithet is intensely peculiar; and I observe that Mr Arnold has not dared to suggest a translation. It is clear to me that he is ashamed of my poet’s oddities; and has no mode of escaping from them but by bluntly denying facts. Equally peculiar to Homer are the words κυδιάνειρα, τανύπεπλος and twenty others, equally unknown to Attic the peculiar compound μελιήδης (adopted from Homer by Pindar), about all which he carps at me on false grounds. But I pass these, and speak a little more at length about μέροπες.

Will the reader allow me to vary these tedious details, by imagining a conversation between the Aristophanic Socrates and his clownish pupil Strepsiades. I suppose the philosopher to be instructing him in the higher Greek, Homer being the text.

_Soc._ Now Streppy, tell me what μέροπες ἄνθρωποι means?

_Strep._ Let me see: μέροπες? that must mean ‘half-faced’.

_Soc._ Nonsense, silly fellow: think again.

_Strep._ Well then: μέροπες, half-eyed, squinting.

_Soc._ No; you are playing the fool: it is not our ὀπ in ὄψις, ὄψομαι, κάτοπτρον, but another sort of ὀπ.

_Strep._ Why, you yesterday told me that οἴνοπα was ‘wine-faced’, and αἴθοπα ‘blazing-faced’, something like our αἰθίοψ.

_Soc._ Ah! well: it is not so wonderful that you go wrong. It is true, there is also νῶροψ, στέροψ, ἦνοψ. Those might mislead you: μέροψ is rather peculiar. Now cannot you think of any characteristic of mankind, which μέροπες will express. How do men differ from other animals?

_Strep._ I have it! I heard it from your young friend Euclid. Μέροψ ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος, ‘man is a cooking animal’.

_Soc._ You stupid lout! what are you at? what do you mean?

_Strep._ Why, μέροψ, from μείρω, I distribute, ὄψον sauce.

_Soc._ No, no: ὄψον has the ὀψ, with radical immovable ς in it; but here ὀπ is the root, and ς is movable.

_Strep._ Now I have got it; μείρω, I distribute, ὀπὸν, juice, rennet.

_Soc._ Wretched man! you must forget your larder and your dairy, if ever you are to learn grammar.—Come Streppy: leave rustic words, and think of the language of the gods. Did you ever hear of the brilliant goddess Circe and of her ὄπα καλὴν?

_Strep._ Oh yes; Circe and her beautiful face.

_Soc._ I told you, _no_! you forgetful fellow. It is ANOTHER ὀπ. Now I will ask you in a different way. Do you know why we call fishes ἔλλοπες?

_Strep._ I suppose, because they are cased in scales.

_Soc._ That is not it. (And yet I am not sure. Perhaps the fellow is right, after all.) Well, we will not speak any more of ἔλλοπες. But did you never hear in Euripides, οὐκ ἔχω γεγωνεῖν ὄπα? What does that mean?

_Strep._ ‘I am not able to shout out, ὦ πόποι’.

_Soc._ No, no, Streppy: but Euripides often uses ὄπα. He takes it from Homer, and it is akin to ἐπ, not to _our_ ὀπ and much less to πόποι. What does ἔπη mean?

_Strep._ It means such lines as the diviners sing.

_Soc._ So it does in Attic, but Homer uses it for ῥήματα, words; indeed we also sometimes.

_Strep._ Yes, yes, I do know it. All is right.

_Soc._ I think you do: well, and ὂψ means a voice, φωνὴ.

_Strep._ How you learned men like to puzzle us! I often have heard ὀπι, ὄπα in the Tragedies, but never quite understood it. What a pity they do not say φωνὴ when they mean φωνή.

_Soc._ We have at last made one step. Now what is μέροψ? μέροπες ἄνθρωποι.

_Strep._ Μείρω, I divide, ὄπα, φωνὴν, voice; ‘voice-dividing’: what _can_ that mean?

_Soc._ You have heard a wild dog howl, and a tame dog bark: tell me how they differ.

_Strep._ The wild dog gives a long long _oo-oo_, which changes like a trumpet if you push your hand up and down it; and the tame dog says _bow, wow, wow_, like two or three panpipes blown one after another.

_Soc._ Exactly; you see the tame dog is humanized: he _divides his voice_ into syllables, as men do. ‘Voice-dividing’ means ‘speaking in syllables’.

_Strep._ Oh, how clever you are!

_Soc._ Well then, you understand; ‘Voice-dividing’ means _articulating_.

Mr Arnold will see in the Scholiast on Iliad 1, 250, precisely this order of analysis for μέροπες. It seems to me to give not a traditional but a grammatical explanation. Be that as it may, it indicates that a Greek had to pass through _exactly the same process_ in order to expound μέροπες, as an Englishman to get sense out of ‘voice-dividing’. The word is twice used by Æschylus, who affects Homeric words, and once by Euripides (Iph. T.) in the connection πολέσιν μερόπων, where the very unusual Ionism πολέσιν shows in how Homeric a region is the poet’s fancy. No other word ending in οψ except μέροψ can be confidently assigned to the root ὂψ, a voice. Ἦνοψ in Homer (itself of most uncertain sense and derivation) is generally referred to the other ὄψ. The sense of ἔλλοψ again[52] is very uncertain. Every way therefore μέροψ is ‘odd’ and obscure. The phrase ‘articulating’ is utterly prosaic and inadmissible. _Vocal_ is rather too Latinized for my style, and besides, is apt to mean _melodious_. The phrase ‘voice-dividing’ is indeed easier to us than μέροπες can have been to the Athenians, because we all know what _voice_ means, but they had to be taught scholastically what ὄπα meant; nor would easily guess that ὂψ in μέροψ had a sense, differing from ὂψ in (ἀ)στέροψ οἶνοψ, αἶθοψ, αἶθίοψ, νῶροψ (ἦνοψ), χάροψ. Finally, since μέροπες is only found in the plural, it remains an open question, whether it does not mean ‘speaking various languages’. Mr Arnold will find that Stephanus and Scapula treat it as doubtful, though Liddell and Scott do not name the second interpretation. I desired to leave in the English all the uncertainty of the Greek: but my critic is unencumbered with such cares.

Hitherto I have been unwillingly thrown into nothing but antagonism to Mr Arnold, who thereby at least adds tenfold value to his praise, and makes me proud when he declares that the _structure_ of my sentences is good and Homeric. For this I give the credit to my metre, which alone confers on me this cardinal advantage. But in turn I will compliment Mr Arnold at the expense of some other critics. He does know, and they do not, the difference of _flowing_ and _smooth_. A mountain torrent is flowing, but often very rough; such is Homer. The ‘staircases of Neptune’ on the canal of Languedoc are smooth, but do not flow: you have to descend abruptly from each level to the next. It would be unjust to say absolutely, that such is Pope’s smoothness; yet often, I feel, this censure would not be too severe. The rhyme forces him to so frequent a change of the nominative, that he becomes painfully discontinuous, where Homer is what Aristotle calls ‘long-linked’. At the same time, in our language, in order to impart a flowing style, good structure does not suffice. A principle is needed, unknown to the Greeks; viz. the natural divisions of the sentence oratorically, must coincide with the divisions of the verse musically. To attain this _always_ in a long poem, is very difficult to a translator who is scrupulous as to tampering with the sense. I have not always been successful in this. But before any critic passes on me the general sentence that I am ‘deficient in flow’, let him count up the proportion of instances in which he can justly make the complaint, and mark whether they occur in elevated passages.

I shall now speak of the peculiarities of my diction, under three heads: 1. old or antiquated words; 2. coarse words expressive of outward actions, but having no moral colour; 3. words of which the sense has degenerated in modern days.

1. Mr Arnold appears to regard what is _antiquated_ as _ignoble_. I think him, as usual, in fundamental error. In general the nobler words come from ancient style, and in no case can it be said that old words (as such) are ignoble. To introduce such terms as _whereat_, _therefrom_, _quoth_, _beholden_, _steed_, _erst_, _anon_, _anent_, into the midst of style which in all other respects is modern and prosaic, would be like to that which we often hear from half-educated people. The want of harmony makes us regard it as low-minded and uncouth. From this cause (as I suspect) has stolen into Mr Arnold’s mind the fallacy, that the words themselves are uncouth[53]. But the words are excellent, if only they are in proper keeping with the general style.—Now it is very possible, that in some passages, few or many, I am open to the charge of having mixed old and new style unskilfully; but I cannot admit that the old words (as such) are ignoble. No one speaks of Spenser’s dialect, nay, nor of Thomson’s; although with Thomson it was assumed, exactly as by me, but to a far greater extent, and without any such necessity as urges me. As I have stated in my preface, a broad tinge of antiquity in the style is essential, to make Homer’s barbaric puerilities and eccentricities less offensive. (Even Mr Arnold would admit this, if he admitted my _facts_: but he denies that there is anything eccentric, antique, quaint, barbaric in Homer: that is his _only_ way of resisting my conclusion.) If Mr Gladstone were able to give his valuable time to work out an entire Iliad in his refined modern style, I feel confident that he would find it impossible to deal faithfully with the eccentric phraseology and with the negligent parts of the poem. I have the testimony of an unfriendly reviewer, that I am the first and _only_ translator that has dared to give Homer’s constant epithets and not conceal his forms of thought: of course I could not have done this in modern style. The lisping of a child is well enough from a child, but is disgusting in a full-grown man. Cowper and Pope systematically cut out from Homer whatever they cannot make _stately_, and harmonize with modern style: even Mr Brandreth often shrinks, though he is brave enough to say _ox-eyed Juno_. Who then can doubt the extreme unfitness of their metre and of their modern diction? My opposers never fairly meet the argument. Mr Arnold, when most gratuitously censuring my mild rendering of κυνὸς κακομηχάνου ὀκρυοέσσης, _does not dare to suggest any English for it himself_. Even Mr Brandreth skips it. It is not merely offensive words; but the purest and simplest phrases, as a man’s ‘dear life’, ‘dear knees’, or his ‘tightly-built house’, are a stumbling-block to translators. No stronger proof is necessary, or perhaps is possible, than these phenomena give, that to shed an antique hue over Homer is of first necessity to a translator: without it, _injustice_ is done both to the reader and to the poet. Whether I have managed the style well, is a separate question, and is matter of detail. I may have sometimes done well, sometimes ill; but I claim that my critics shall judge me from a broader ground, and shall not pertinaciously go on comparing my version with modern style, and condemning me as (what they are pleased to call) _inelegant_ because it is not like refined modern poetry, when it specially avoids to be such. They never deal thus with Thomson or Chatterton, any more than with Shakspeare or Spenser.

There is no sharp distinction possible between the foreign and the antiquated in language. What is obsolete with us, may still live somewhere: as, what in Greek is called Poetic or Homeric, may at the same time be living Æolic. So, whether I take a word from Spenser or from Scotland, is generally unimportant. I do not remember more than four Scotch words, which I have occasionally adopted for convenience; viz. Callant, young man; Canny, right-minded; Bonny, handsome; to Skirl, to cry shrilly. A trochaic word, which I cannot get in English, is sometimes urgently needed. It is astonishing to me that those who ought to know both what a large mass of antique and foreign-sounding words an Athenian found in Homer, and how many Doric or Sicilian forms as well as Homeric words the Greek tragedians _on principle_ brought into their songs, should make the outcry that they do against my very limited use of that which has an antique or Scotch sound. Classical scholars ought to set their faces against the double heresy, of trying to enforce, that foreign poetry, however various, shall be all rendered into one English dialect, and that this shall, in order of words and in diction, closely approximate to polished prose. From an Oxford Professor I should have expected the very opposite spirit to that which Mr Arnold shows. He ought to know and feel that one glory of Greek poetry is its great internal variety. He admits the principle that old words are a source of ennoblement for diction, when he extols the Bible as his standard: for surely he claims no rhetorical inspiration for the translators. Words which have come to us in a sacred connection, no doubt, gain a sacred hue, but they must not be allowed to desecrate other old and excellent words. Mr Arnold informs his Oxford hearers that ‘his Bibliolatry is perhaps excessive’. So the public will judge, if he say that _wench_, _whore_, _pate_, _pot_, _gin_, _damn_, _busybody_, _audience_, _principality_, _generation_, are epical noble words because they are in the Bible, and that _lief_, _ken_, _in sooth_, _grim_, _stalwart_, _gait_, _guise_, _eld_, _hie_, _erst_, are bad, because they are not there. Nine times out of ten, what are called ‘poetical’ words, are nothing but antique words, and are made ignoble by Mr Arnold’s doctrine. His very arbitrary condemnation of _eld_, _lief_, _in sooth_, _gait_, _gentle friend_ in one passage of mine as ‘bad words’, is probably due to his monomaniac fancy that there is nothing quaint and nothing antique in Homer. Excellent and noble as are these words which he rebukes, excellent even for Æschylus, I should doubt the propriety of using them in the dialogue of Euripides; on the level of which he seems to think Homer to be.

2. Our language, especially the Saxon part of it, abounds with vigorous monosyllabic verbs, and dissyllabic frequentatives derived from them, indicative of strong physical action. For these words (which, I make no doubt, Mr Arnold regards as ignoble plebeians), I claim Quiritarian rights: but I do not wish them to displace patricians from high service. Such verbs as _sweat_, _haul_, _plump_, _maul_, _yell_, _bang_, _splash_, _smash_, _thump_, _tug_, _scud_, _sprawl_, _spank_, etc., I hold (in their purely physical sense) to be eminently epical: for the epic revels in descriptions of violent action to which they are suited. Intense muscular exertion in every form, intense physical action of the surrounding elements, with intense ascription or description of size or colour;—together make up an immense fraction of the poem. To cut out these words is to emasculate the epic. Even Pope admits such words. My eye in turning his pages was just now caught by: ‘They tug, they sweat’. Who will say that ‘tug’, ‘sweat’ are admissible, but ‘bang’, ‘smash’, ‘sputter’ are inadmissible? Mr Arnold resents my saying that Homer is often homely. He is homely expressly because he is natural. The epical diction admits both the gigantesque and the homely: it inexorably refuses the conventional, under which is comprised a vast mass of what some wrongly call elegant. But while I justify the use of homely words in a primary physical, I depreciate them in a secondary moral sense. Mr Arnold clearly is dull to this distinction, or he would not utter against me the following taunt, p. 91:

‘_To grunt and sweat under a weary load_ does perfectly well where it comes in Shakspeare: but if the translator of Homer, who will hardly have wound up our minds to the pitch at which these words of Hamlet find them, were to employ, when he has to speak of Homer’s heroes under the load of calamity, this figure of “grunting” and “sweating”, we should say, _He Newmanizes_’.

Mr Arnold here not only makes a mistake, he propagates a slander; as if I had ever used such words as _grunt_ and _sweat_ morally. If Homer in the Iliad spoke of grunting swine, as he does of sweating steeds, so should I. As the coarse metaphors here quoted from Shakspeare are utterly opposed to Homer’s style, to obtrude them on him would be a gross offence. Mr Arnold sends his readers away with the belief that this is my practice, though he has not dared to assert it. I _bear_ such coarseness in Shakspeare, not because I am ‘wound up to a high pitch’ by him, ‘borne away by a mighty current’ (which Mr Arnold, with ingenious unfairness to me, assumes to be certain in a reader of Shakspeare and all but impossible in a reader of Homer), but because I know, that in Shakspeare’s time all literature was coarse, as was the speech of courtiers and of the queen herself. Mr Arnold imputes to me Shakspeare’s coarseness, from which I instinctively shrink; and when his logic leads to the conclusion, ‘he Shakspearizes’, he with gratuitous rancour turns it into ‘he Newmanizes’.

Some words which with the Biblical translators seem to have been noble, I should not now dare to use in the primitive sense. For instance, ‘His iniquity shall fall upon his own _pate_’. Yet I think _pate_ a good metaphorical word and have used it of the sea-waves, in a bold passage, Il. 13, 795:

Then ón rush’d théy, with weight and mass like to a troublous
whirlwind,
Which from the thundercloud of Jove down on the campaign
plumpeth,
And doth the briny flood bestir with an unearthly uproar:
Then in the everbrawling sea full many a billow splasheth,
Hollow, and bald with hoary _pate_, one racing after other.

Is there really no ‘mighty current’ here, to sweep off petty criticism?

I have a remark on the strong physical word ‘plumpeth’ here used. It is fundamentally Milton’s, ‘plump down he drops ten thousand fathom deep’; _plumb_ and _plump_ in this sense are clearly the same root. I confess I have not been able to find the _verb_ in an old writer, though it is so common now. Old writers do not say ‘to plumb down’, but ‘to _drop_ plumb down’. Perhaps in a second edition (if I reach to it), I may alter the words to ‘plumb ... droppeth’, on this ground; but I do turn sick at the mawkishness of critics, one of whom, who ought to know better, tells me that the word _plump_ reminds him ‘of the crinolined hoyden of a boarding-school’!! If he had said, ‘It is too like the phrase of a sailor, of a peasant, of a schoolboy’, this objection would be at least intelligible. However: the word is intended to express the _violent impact of a body descending from aloft_, and it _does_ express it.

Mr Arnold censures me for representing Achilles as _yelling_. He is depicted by the poet as in the most violent physical rage, boiling over with passion and wholly uncontrouled. He smacks his two thighs at once; he rolls on the ground, μέγας μεγαλωστὶ; he defiles his hair with dust; he rends it; he grinds his teeth; fire flashes from his eyes; but—he may not ‘yell’, that would not be _comme il faut_! We shall agree, that in peace nothing so becomes a hero as modest stillness; but that ‘Peleus’ son, insatiate of combat’, full of the fiercest pent-up passion, should vent a little of it in a _yell_, seems to me quite in place. That the Greek ἰάχων is not necessarily to be so rendered, I am aware; but it is a very vigorous word, like _peal_ and _shriek_; neither of which would here suit. I sometimes render it _skirl_: but ‘battle-yell’ is a received rightful phrase. Achilles is not a stately Virgilian _pius Æneas_, but is a far wilder barbarian.

After Mr Arnold has laid upon me the sins of Shakspeare, he amazes me by adding, p. 92: ‘The idiomatic language of Shakspeare, such language as “prate of his _whereabout_”, “_jump_ the life to come”, “the damnation of his _taking-off_”, “_quietus make_ with a bare bodkin”, should be carefully observed by the translator of Homer; although in every case he will have to decide for himself, whether the use, by him, of Shakspeare’s liberty, will or will not clash with his indispensable duty of nobleness’.

Of the Shakspearianisms here italicized by Mr Arnold, there is not one which I could endure to adopt. ‘His whereabout’, I regard as the flattest prose. (The word _prate_ is a plebeian which I admit in its own low places; but how Mr Arnold can approve of it, consistently with his attacks on me, I do not understand.) Damnation and Taking-off (for Guilt and Murder), and Jump, I absolutely reject; and ‘quietus make’ would be nothing but an utterly inadmissible _quotation_ from Shakspeare. _Jump_ as an active verb is to me monstrous, but _Jump_ is just the sort of modern prose word which is not noble. _Leap_, _Bound_, for great action, _Skip_, _Frisk_, _Gambol_ for smaller, are all good.

I have shown against Mr Arnold—(1) that Homer was out-and-out antiquated to the Athenians, even when perfectly understood by them; (2) that his conceptions, similes, phraseology and epithets are habitually quaint, strange, unparalleled in Greek literature; and pardonable only to semibarbarism; (3) that they are intimately related to his noblest excellences; (4) that many words are so peculiar as to be still doubtful to us; (5) I have indicated that some of his descriptions and conceptions are horrible to us, though they are not so to his barbaric auditors; (6) that considerable portions of the poem are not poetry, but rhythmical prose like Horace’s Satires, and are interesting to us not as poetry but as portraying the manners or sentiments of the day. I now add (7) what is inevitable in all high and barbaric poetry, perhaps in all high poetry, many of his energetic descriptions are expressed in _coarse physical words_. I do not here attempt proof, for it might need a treatise: but I give one illustration; Il. 13, 136, Τρῶες προὒτυψαν ἀολλέες. Cowper, misled by the _ignis fatuus_ of ‘stateliness’, renders it absurdly

_The pow’rs of Ilium_ gave the first assault,
_Embattled_ close;

but it is strictly, ‘The Trojans _knocked-forward_ (or, thumped, _butted_, forward) in close pack’. The verb is too coarse for later polished prose, and even the adjective is very strong (_packed together_). I believe, that ‘Forward in _pack_ the Troians _pitch’d_’, would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour; and I maintain that ‘Forward in mass the Troians pitch’d’, would be an irreprovable rendering.

Dryden in this respect is in entire harmony with Homeric style. No critic deals fairly with me in isolating any of these strong words, and then appealing to his readers whether I am not ignoble. Hereby he deprives me of the ἀγὼν, the ‘mighty current’ of Mr Arnold, and he misstates the problem; which is, whether the word is suitable, _then_ and _there_, for the work required of it, as the coalman at the pit, the clown in the furrow, the huntsman in the open field.

3. There is a small number of words not natural plebeians, but patricians on which a most unjust bill of attainder has been passed, which I seek to reverse. On the first which I name, Mr Arnold will side with me, because it is a Biblical word, _wench_. In Lancashire I believe that at the age of about sixteen a ‘girl’ turns into ‘a wench’, or as we say ‘a young woman’. In Homer, ‘girl’ and ‘young woman’ are alike inadmissible; ‘maid’ or ‘maiden’ will not always suit, and ‘wench’ is the natural word. I do not know that I have used it three times, but I claim a right of using it, and protest against allowing the heroes of slang to deprive us of excellent words by their perverse misuse. If the imaginations of some men are always in satire and in low slang, so much the worse for them: but the more we yield to such demands, the more will be exacted. I expect, before long, to be told that _brick_ is an ignoble word, meaning a jolly fellow, and that _sell_, _cut_ are out of place in Homer. My metre, it seems, is inadmissible with some, because it is the metre of Yankee Doodle! as if Homer’s metre were not that of the Margites. Every noble poem is liable to be travestied, as the Iliad and Æschylus and Shakspeare have been. Every burlesque writer uses the noble metre, and caricatures the noble style. Mr Arnold says, I must not render τανύπεπλος ‘trailing-rob’d’, because it reminds him of ‘long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement’. What a confession as to the state of his imagination! Why not, of ‘a queen’s robe trailing on a marble pavement’? Did he never read

πέπλον μὲν κατέχευεν ἑανὸν πατρὸς ἐτ’ οὔδει?

I have digressed: I return to words which have been misunderstood. A second word is of more importance, _Imp_; which properly means a Graft. The best translation of ὦ Λήδας ἔρνος to my mind, is, ‘O Imp of Leda’! for neither ‘bud of Leda’, nor ‘scion of Leda’ satisfy me: much less ‘sprig’ or ‘shoot of Leda’. The theological writers so often used the phrase ‘imp of Satan’ for ‘child of the devil’, that (since Bunyan?) the vulgar no longer understand that _imp_ means _scion_, _child_, and suppose it to mean ‘little devil’. A Reviewer has omitted to give his unlearned readers any explanation of the word (though I carefully explained it) and calls down their indignation upon me by his censures, which I hope proceeded from carelessness and ignorance.

Even in Spenser’s Fairy Queen the word retains its rightful and noble sense:

Well worthy _imp_! then said the lady, etc.,

and in North’s Plutarch,

‘He took upon him to protect him from them all, and not to suffer so goodly an _imp_ [Alcibiades] to lose the good fruit of his youth’.

Dryden uses the verb, To imp; to graft, insert.

I was quite aware that I claimed of my readers a certain strength of mind, when I bid them to forget the defilements which vulgarity has shed over the noble word Imp, and carry their imaginations back two or three centuries: but I did not calculate that any critic would call Dainty grotesque. This word is equivalent in meaning to Delicate and Nice, but has precisely the epical character in which both those words are deficient. For instance, I say, that after the death of Patroclus, the coursers ‘stood motionless’,

Drooping tōwārd the ground their heads, and down their plaintive
eyelids
Did warm tears trickle to the ground, their charioteer
bewailing.
Defilèd were their _dainty_ manes, over the yoke-strap dropping.

A critic who objects to this, has to learn English from my translation. Does he imagine that Dainty can mean nothing but ‘over-particular as to food’?

In the compound Dainty-cheek’d, Homer shows his own epic peculiarity. It is imitated in the similar word εὐπάρᾳος applied to the Gorgon Medusa by Pindar: but not in the Attics. I have somewhere read, that the rudest conception of female beauty is that of a brilliant red _plump_ cheek; such as an English clown admires (was this what Pindar meant?); the second stage looks to the delicacy of tint in the cheek (this is Homer’s καλλιπάρῃος:) the third looks to shape (this is the εὒμορφος of the Attics, the _formosus_ of the Latins, and is seen in the Greek sculpture); the fourth and highest looks to moral expression: this is the idea of Christian Europe. That Homer rests exclusively in the second or semibarbaric stage, it is not for me to say, but, as far as I am able, to give to the readers of my translation materials for their own judgment. From the vague word εἶδος, _species_, _appearance_, it cannot be positively inferred whether the poet had an eye for Shape. The epithets curl-eyed and fine-ankled decidedly suggest that he had; except that his application of the former to the entire nation of the Greeks makes it seem to be of foreign tradition, and as unreal as brazen-_mailed_.

Another word which has been ill-understood and ill-used, is _dapper_. Of the epithet dappergreav’d for ἐϋκνημὶς I certainly am not enamoured, but I have not yet found a better rendering. It is easier to carp at my phrase, than to suggest a better. The word _dapper_ in Dutch = German _tapfer_; and like the Scotch _braw_ or _brave_ means with us _fine_, _gallant_, _elegant_. I have read the line of an old poet,

The dapper words which lovers use,

for _elegant_, I suppose; and so ‘the dapper does’ and ‘dapper elves’ of Milton must refer to elegance or refined beauty. What is there[54] ignoble in such a word? ‘Elegant’ and ‘pretty’ are inadmissible in epic poetry: ‘dapper’ is logically equivalent, and _has the epic colour_. Neither ‘fair’ nor ‘comely’ here suit. As to the school translation of ‘wellgreav’d’, every common Englishman on hearing the sound receives it as ‘wellgrieved’, and to me it is very unpleasing. A part of the mischief, a large part of it, is in the word _greave_; for _dapper-girdled_ is on the whole well-received. But what else can we say for _greave_? leggings? gambados?

Much perhaps remains to be learnt concerning Homer’s perpetual epithets. My very learned colleague Goldstücke, Professor of Sanscrit, is convinced that the epithet _cow-eyed_ of the Homeric Juno is an echo of the notion of Hindoo poets, that (if I remember his statement) ‘the sun-beams are the _cows_ of heaven’. The sacred qualities of the Hindoo cow are perhaps not to be forgotten. I have myself been struck by the phrase διϊπετέος ποτάμοιο as akin to the idea that the Ganges falls from Mount Meru, the Hindoo Olympus. Also the meaning of two other epithets has been revealed to me from the pictures of Hindoo ladies. First, _curl-eyed_, to which I have referred above; secondly, _rosy-fingered Aurora_. For Aurora is an ‘Eastern lady’; and, as such, has the tips of her fingers dyed rosy-red, whether by henna or by some more brilliant drug. Who shall say that the kings and warriors of Homer do not derive from the East their epithet ‘Jove-nurtured’? or that this or that goddess is not called ‘golden-throned’ or ‘fair-throned’ in allusion to Assyrian sculptures or painting, as Rivers probably drew their later poetical attribute ‘bull-headed’ from the sculpture of fountains? It is a familiar remark, that Homer’s poetry presupposes a vast pre-existing art and material. Much in him was traditional. Many of his wild legends came from Asia. He is to us much beside a poet; and that a translator should assume to cut him down to the standard of modern taste, is a thought which all the higher minds of this age have outgrown. How much better is that reverential Docility, which with simple and innocent wonder, receives the oddest notions of antiquity as material of instruction yet to be revealed, than the self-complacent Criticism, which pronouncing everything against modern taste to be grotesque[55] and contemptible, squares the facts to its own ‘Axioms’! _Homer is noble: but this or that epithet is not noble: therefore we must explode it from Homer!_ I value, I maintain, I struggle for the ‘high a priori road’ in its own place; but certainly not in historical literature. To read Homer’s own thoughts is to wander in a world abounding with freshness: but if we insist on treading round and round in our own footsteps, we shall never ascend those heights whence the strange region is to be seen. Surely an intelligent learned critic ought to inculcate on the unlearned, that if they would get instruction from Homer, they must not expect to have their ears tickled by a musical sound as of a namby-pamby poetaster; but must look on a metre as doing its duty, when it ‘strings the mind up to the necessary pitch’ in elevated passages; and that instead of demanding of a translator everywhere a rhythmical perfection which perhaps can only be attained by a great sacrifice of higher qualities, they should be willing to submit to a small part of that ruggedness, which Mr Arnold cheerfully bears in Homer himself through the loss of the Digamma. And now, for a final protest. To be _stately_ is not to be _grand_. Nicolas of Russia may have been stately like Cowper, Garibaldi is grand like the true Homer. A diplomatic address is stately; it is not grand, nor often noble. To expect a translation of Homer to be _pervadingly elegant_, is absurd; Homer is not such, any more than is the side of an Alpine mountain. The elegant and the picturesque are seldom identical, however much of delicate beauty may be interstudded in the picturesque; but this has always got plenty of what is shaggy and uncouth, without which contrast the full delight of beauty would not be attained. I think Moore in his characteristic way tells of a beauty

Shining on, shining on, by no shadow made tender,
Till love falls asleep in the sameness of splendour.

Such certainly is not Homer’s. His beauty, when at its height, is _wild_ beauty: it smells of the mountain and of the sea. If he be compared to a noble animal, it is not to such a spruce rubbed-down Newmarket racer as our smooth translators would pretend, but to a wild horse of the Don Cossacks: and if I, instead of this, present to the reader nothing but a Dandie Dinmont’s pony, this, as a first approximation, is a valuable step towards the true solution.

Before the best translation of the Iliad of which our language is capable can be produced, the English public has to unlearn the false notion of Homer which his _deliberately faithless_ versifiers have infused. Chapman’s conceits unfit his translation for instructing the public, even if his rhythm ‘jolted’ less, if his structure were simpler, and his dialect more intelligible. My version, if allowed to be read, will prepare the public to receive a version better than mine. I regard it as a question about to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic _landis_, _houndis_, _hartis_, etc., instead of our modern unmelodious _lands_, _hounds_, _harts_; whether the _ye_ or _y_ before the past participle may not be restored; the want of which confounds that participle with the past tense. Even the final -en of the plural of verbs (we dancen, they singen, etc.) still subsists in Lancashire. It deserves consideration whether by a _few_ such slight grammatical retrogressions into antiquity a translator of Homer might not add much melody to his poem and do good service to the language.

Footnote 35:

He attacks the same line also in p. 44; but I do not claim this as a
mark, how free I am from the fault.

Footnote 36:

If I had used such a double dative, as ‘to Peleus to a mortal’, what
would he have said of my syntax?

Footnote 37:

Ballad-_manner_! The prevalent ballad-_metre_ is the Common Metre of
our Psalm tunes: and yet he assumes that whatever is in this metre
must be on the same level. I have professed (Pref. p. x) that our
_existing_ old ballads are ‘poor and mean’, and are not my pattern.

Footnote 38:

He has also overlooked the misprint _Trojans_, where I wrote _Troïans_
(in three syllables), and has thus spoiled one verse out of the five.

Footnote 39:

As a literary curiosity I append the sentence of a learned reviewer
concerning this metre of Campbell. ‘It is a metre fit for introducing
anything or translating anything; a metre that _nothing can elevate,
or degrade, or improve, or spoil_; in which all subjects will sound
alike. A theorem of Euclid, a leading article from the _Times_, a
dialogue from the last new novel, could all be reduced to it with the
slightest possible verbal alteration’. [Quite true of Greek hexameter
or Shakspeare’s line. It is a _virtue_ in the metres]. ‘To such a mill
all would be grist that came near it, and _in no grain that had once
passed through it would human ingenuity ever detect again a
characteristic quality_’. This writer is a stout maintainer that
English ballad metre is the right one for translating Homer: only,
somehow, he shuts his eyes to the fact that Campbell’s _is_ ballad
metre! Sad to say, extravagant and absurd assertions, like these,
though anonymous, can, by a parade of learning, do much damage to the
sale of a book in verse.

Footnote 40:

I think he has mistaken the _summit_ of the wave for a _headland_, and
has made a single description into two, by the word _Or_: but I now
confine my regard to the metre and general effect of the style.

Footnote 41:

_Companion_, in four syllables, is in Shakspeare’s style; with whom
habitually the termination _-tion_ is two.

Footnote 42:

By corrupting the past tenses of _welisso_ into a false similarity to
the past tenses of _elelizo_, the old editors superimposed a new and
false sense on the latter verb; which still holds its place in our
dictionaries, as it deceived the Greeks themselves.

Footnote 43:

That λλ _in Attic_ was sounded like French _l mouillée_, is judged
probable by the learned writer of the article L (Penny Cyclop.), who
urges that μᾶλλον is for μάλιον, and compares φυλλο with _folio_, αλλο
with _alio_, ἁλλ with _sali_.

Footnote 44:

Men who can bear ‘belch’ in poetry, nowadays pretend that ‘sputter’ is
indelicate. They find Homer’s ἀποπτύει to be ‘elegant’, but
_sputter_—not! ‘No one would guess from Mr Newman’s coarse phrases how
_elegant_ is Homer’!!

Footnote 45:

In a Note to my translation (overlooked by more than one critic) I
have explained _curl-ey’d_, carefully, but not very accurately
perhaps; as I had not before me the picture of the Hindoo lady to
which I referred. The whole _upper eyelid_, when _open_, may be called
the curl; for it is shaped like a buffalo’s horns. This accounts for
ἑλικοβλέφαρος, ‘having a curly eye_lid_’.

Footnote 46:

I thought I had toned it down pretty well, in rendering it ‘O gentle
friend’! Mr Arnold rebukes me for this, without telling me what I
ought to say, or what is my fault. One thing is certain, that the
Greek is most _odd_ and peculiar.

Footnote 47:

In the noble simile of the sea-tide, quoted p. 138 above, only the two
first of its five lines are to the purpose. Mr Gladstone, seduced by
rhyme, has so tapered off the point of the similitude, that only a
microscopic reader will see it.

Footnote 48:

It is very singular that Mr Gladstone should imagine such a poet to
have no eye for colour. I totally protest against his turning Homer’s
paintings into leadpencil drawings. I believe that γλαυκὸς is grey
(silvergreen), χάροψ blue; and that πρασινὸς, ‘leek-colour’, was too
mean a word for any poets, early or late, to use for ‘green’,
therefore χλωρὸς does duty for it. Κῦμα πορφύρεον is surely ‘the
purple wave’, and ἰοειδέα πόντον ‘the violet sea’.

Footnote 49:

He pares down ἑλκηθμοῖο (the dragging away of a woman by the hair)
into ‘captivity’! Better surely is my ‘ignoble’ version: ‘Ere-that I
see thee _dragg’d away_, and hear thy shriek of anguish’.

Footnote 50:

He means _ours_ for two syllables. ‘Swiftness of ours’ is surely
ungrammatical. ‘A galley of my own’ = one of my own galleys; but ‘a
father of mine’, is absurd, since each has but one father. I confess I
have myself been seduced into writing ‘those two eyes of his’, to
avoid ‘_those his_ two eyes’: but I have since condemned and altered
it.

Footnote 51:

Of course no peculiarity of phrase has _the effect_ of peculiarity on
a man who has imperfect acquaintance with the delicacies of a
language; who, for instance, thinks that ἑλκηθμὸς means δουλεία.

Footnote 52:

Ἐλλὸς needs light and gives none. Benfey suggests that it is for
ἐνεὸς, as ἄλλος, _alius_, for Sanscrit _anya_. He with me refers ἔλλοψ
to λέπω. Cf. _squamigeri_ in Lucretius.

Footnote 53:

I do not see that Mr Arnold has any right to reproach _me_, because
_he_ does not know Spenser’s word ‘bragly’ (which I may have used
twice in the Iliad), or Dryden’s word ‘plump’, for a mass. The former
is so near in sound to _brag_ and _braw_, that an Englishman who is
once told that it means ‘proudly fine’, ought thenceforward to find it
very intelligible: the latter is a noble modification of the vulgar
_lump_. That he can carp as he does against these words and against
_bulkin_ (= young bullock) as unintelligible, is a testimony how
little I have imposed of difficulty on my readers. Those who know
_lambkin_ cannot find _bulkin_ very hard. Since writing the above, I
see a learned writer in the Philological Museum illustrates ἴλη by the
old English phrase ‘a plump of spears’.

Footnote 54:

I observe that Lord Lyttelton renders Milton’s _dapper elf_ by ῥαδινὰ,
‘softly moving’.

Footnote 55:

Mr Arnold calls it an unfortunate sentence of mine: ‘I ought to be
quaint; I ought not to be grotesque’. I am disposed to think him
right, but for reasons very opposite to those which he assigns. I have
‘unfortunately’ given to querulous critics a cue for attacking me
unjustly. I should rather have said: ‘We ought to be _quaint_, and not
to shrink from that which the fastidious modern will be sure to call
_grotesque_ in English, when he is too blunted by habit, or too poor a
scholar to discern it in the Greek’.

Last Words on Translating Homer
A Reply to Francis W. Newman
By Matthew Arnold

‘Multi, qui persequuntur me, et tribulant me: a testimoniis non
declinavi.’

Buffon, the great French naturalist, imposed on himself the rule of steadily abstaining from all answer to attacks made upon him. ‘Je n’ai jamais répondu à aucune critique’, he said to one of his friends who, on the occasion of a certain criticism, was eager to take up arms in his behalf; ‘je n’ai jamais répondu à aucune critique, et je garderai le même silence sur celle-ci’. On another occasion, when accused of plagiarism, and pressed by his friends to answer, ‘Il vaut mieux’, he said, ‘laisser ces mauvaises gens dans l’incertitude’. Even when reply to an attack was made successfully, he disapproved of it, he regretted that those he esteemed should make it. Montesquieu, more sensitive to criticism than Buffon, had answered, and successfully answered, an attack made upon his great work, the _Esprit des Lois_, by the _Gazetier Janséniste_. This Jansenist Gazetteer was a periodical of those times, a periodical such as other times, also, have occasionally seen, very pretentious, very aggressive, and, when the point to be seized was at all a delicate one, very apt to miss it. ‘Notwithstanding this example’, said Buffon, who, as well as Montesquieu, had been attacked by the Jansenist Gazetteer, ‘notwithstanding this example, I think I may promise my course will be different. I shall not answer a single word’.

And to anyone who has noticed the baneful effects of the controversy, with all its train of personal rivalries and hatreds, on men of letters or men of science; to anyone who has observed how it tends to impair, not only their dignity and repose, but their productive force, their genuine activity; how it always checks the free play of the spirit, and often ends by stopping it altogether; it can hardly seem doubtful that the rule thus imposed on himself by Buffon was a wise one. His own career, indeed, admirably shows the wisdom of it. That career was as glorious as it was serene; but it owed to its serenity no small part of its glory. The regularity and completeness with which he gradually built up the great work which he had designed, the air of equable majesty which he shed over it, struck powerfully the imagination of his contemporaries, and surrounded Buffon’s fame with a peculiar respect and dignity. ‘He is’, said Frederick the Great of him, ‘the man who has best deserved the great celebrity which he has acquired’. And this regularity of production, this equableness of temper, he maintained by his resolute disdain of personal controversy.

Buffon’s example seems to me worthy of all imitation, and in my humble way I mean always to follow it. I never have replied, I never will reply, to any literary assailant; in such encounters tempers are lost, the world laughs, and truth is not served. Least of all should I think of using this Chair as a place from which to carry on such a conflict. But when a learned and estimable man thinks he has reason to complain of language used by me in this Chair, when he attributes to me intentions and feelings towards him which are far from my heart, I owe him some explanation, and I am bound, too, to make the explanation as public as the words which gave offence. This is the reason why I revert once more to the subject of translating Homer. But being thus brought back to that subject, and not wishing to occupy you solely with an explanation which, after all, is Mr Newman’s affair and mine, not the public’s, I shall take the opportunity, not certainly to enter into any conflict with anyone, but to try to establish our old friend, the coming translator of Homer, yet a little firmer in the positions which I hope we have now secured for him; to protect him against the danger of relaxing, in the confusion of dispute, his attention to those matters which alone I consider important for him; to save him from losing sight, in the dust of the attacks delivered over it, of the real body of Patroclus. He will, probably, when he arrives, requite my solicitude very ill, and be in haste to disown his benefactor: but my interest in him is so sincere that I can disregard his probable ingratitude.