Chapter III (6)

It is not for me to interpose between two such combatants; and indeed my way lies, not up the highroad where they are contending, but along a bypath. With the absolute truth of their general propositions respecting accent and quantity, I have nothing to do; it is most interesting and instructive to me to hear such propositions discussed, when it is Mr Munro or Mr Spedding who discusses them; but I have strictly limited myself in these Lectures to the humble function of giving practical advice to the translator of Homer. He, I still think, must not follow so confidently, as makers of English hexameters have hitherto followed, Mr Munro’s maxim, _quantity may be utterly discarded_. He must not, like Mr Longfellow, make _seventeen_ a dactyl in spite of all the length of its last syllable, even though he can plead that in counting we lay the accent on the first syllable of this word. He may be far from attaining Mr Spedding’s nicety of ear; may be unable to feel that ‘while _quantity_ is a dactyl, _quiddity_ is a tribrach’, and that ‘_rapidly_ is a word to which we find no parallel in Latin’; but I think he must bring himself to distinguish, with Mr Spedding, between ‘_th’ o’er_-wearied eyelid’, and ‘_the_ wearied eyelid’, as being, the one a correct ending for a hexameter, the other an ending with a false quantity in it; instead of finding, with Mr Munro, that this distinction ‘conveys to his mind no intelligible idea’. He must temper his belief in Mr Munro’s dictum, _quantity must be utterly discarded_, by mixing with it a belief in this other dictum of the same author, _two or more consonants take longer time in enunciating than one_[63].

Criticism is so apt in general to be vague and impalpable, that when it gives us a solid and definite possession, such as is Mr Spedding’s parallel of the Virgilian and the English hexameter with their difference of accentuation distinctly marked, we cannot be too grateful to it. It is in the way in which Mr Spedding proceeds to press his conclusions from the parallel which he has drawn out, that his criticism seems to me to come a little short. Here even he, I think, shows (if he will allow me to say so) a little of that want of pliancy and suppleness so common among critics, but so dangerous to their criticism; he is a little too absolute in imposing his metrical laws; he too much forgets the excellent maxim of Menander, so applicable to literary criticism:—

Καλὸν οἱ νόμοι σφόδρ’ εἰσίν· ὁ δ’ ὁρῶν τοὺς νόμους
λίαν ἀκριβῶς, συκοφάντης φαίνεται·

‘Laws are admirable things; but he who keeps his eye too closely fixed upon them, runs the risk of becoming’, let us say, a purist. Mr Spedding is probably mistaken in supposing that Virgil pronounced his hexameters as Mr Spedding pronounces them. He is almost certainly mistaken in supposing that Homer pronounced his hexameters as Mr Spedding pronounces Virgil’s. But this, as I have said, is not a question for us to treat; all we are here concerned with is the imitation, by the English hexameter, of the ancient hexameter _in its effect upon us moderns_. Suppose we concede to Mr Spedding that his parallel proves our accentuation of the English and of the Virgilian hexameter to be different: what are we to conclude from that; how will a criticism, not a formal, but a substantial criticism, deal with such a fact as that? Will it infer, as Mr Spedding infers, that the English hexameter, therefore, must not pretend to reproduce better than other rhythms the movement of Homer’s hexameter for us, that there can be no correspondence at all between the movement of these two hexameters, that if we want to have such a correspondence, we must abandon the current English hexameter altogether, and adopt in its place a new hexameter of Mr Spedding’s Anglo-Latin type, substitute for lines like the

Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia ...

of Dr Hawtrey, lines like the

Procession, complex melodies, pause, quantity, accent,
After Virgilian precedent and practice, in order ...

of Mr Spedding? To infer this, is to go, as I have complained of Mr Newman for sometimes going, a great deal too fast. I think prudent criticism must certainly recognise, in the current English hexameter, a fact which cannot so lightly be set aside; it must acknowledge that by this hexameter the English ear, the genius of the English language, have, in their own way, adopted, have _translated_ for themselves the Homeric hexameter; and that a rhythm which has thus grown up, which is thus, in a manner, the production of nature, has in its general type something necessary and inevitable, something which admits change only within narrow limits, which precludes change that is sweeping and essential. I think, therefore, the prudent critic will regard Mr Spedding’s proposed revolution as simply impracticable. He will feel that in English poetry the hexameter, if used at all, must be, in the main, the English hexameter now current. He will perceive that its having come into existence as the representative of the Homeric hexameter, proves it to have, for the English ear, a certain correspondence with the Homeric hexameter, although this correspondence may be, from the difference of the Greek and English languages, necessarily incomplete. This incompleteness he will endeavour[64], as he may find or fancy himself able, gradually somewhat to lessen through minor changes, suggested by the ancient hexameter, but respecting the general constitution of the modern: the notion of making it disappear altogether by the critic’s inventing in his closet a new constitution of his own for the English hexameter, he will judge to be a chimerical dream.

When, therefore, Mr Spedding objects to the English hexameter, that it imperfectly represents the movement of the ancient hexameters, I answer: We must work with the tools we have. The received English type, in its general outlines, is, for England, the necessary given type of this metre; it is by rendering the metrical beat of its pattern, not by rendering the accentual beat of it, that the English language has adapted the Greek hexameter. To render the metrical beat of its pattern is something; by effecting so much as this the English hexameter puts itself in closer relations with its original, it comes nearer to its movement than any other metre which does not even effect so much as this; but Mr Spedding is dissatisfied with it for not effecting more still, for not rendering the accentual beat too. If he asks me _why_ the English hexameter has not tried to render this too, _why_ it has confined itself to rendering the metrical beat, _why_, in short, it is itself, and not Mr Spedding’s new hexameter, that is a question which I, whose only business is to give practical advice to a translator, am not bound to answer; but I will not decline to answer it nevertheless. I will suggest to Mr Spedding that, as I have already said, the modern hexameter is merely an attempt to imitate the effect of the ancient hexameter, as read by us moderns; that the great object of its imitation has been the hexameter of Homer; that of this hexameter such lines as those which Mr Spedding declares to be so rare, even in Homer, but which are in truth so common, lines in which the quantity and the reader’s accent coincide, are, for the English reader, just from that simplicity (for him) of rhythm which they owe to this very coincidence, the master-type; that so much is this the case that one may again and again notice an English reader of Homer, in reading lines where his Virgilian accent would not coincide with the quantity, abandoning this accent, and reading the lines (as we say) _by quantity_, reading them as if he were scanning them; while foreigners neglect our Virgilian accent even in reading Virgil, read even Virgil by quantity, making the accents coincide with the long syllables. And no doubt the hexameter of a kindred language, the German, based on this mode of reading the ancient hexameter, has had a powerful influence upon the type of its English fellow. But all this shows how extremely powerful accent is for us moderns, since we find not even Greek and Latin quantity perceptible enough without it. Yet in these languages, where we have been accustomed always to look for it, it is far more perceptible to us Englishmen than in our own language, where we have not been accustomed to look for it. And here is the true reason why Mr Spedding’s hexameter is not and cannot be the current English hexameter, even though it is based on the accentuation which Englishmen give to all Virgil’s lines, and to many of Homer’s,—that the quantity which in Greek or Latin words we feel, or imagine we feel, even though it be unsupported by accent, we do not feel or imagine we feel in English words when it is thus unsupported. For example, in repeating the Latin line

Ipsa tibi blandos _fundent_ cunabula flores,

an Englishman feels the length of the second syllable of _fundent_, although he lays the accent on the first; but in repeating Mr Spedding’s line,

Softly cometh slumber _closing_ th’ o’erwearied eyelid,

the English ear, full of the accent on the first syllable of _closing_, has really no sense at all of any length in its second. The metrical beat of the line is thus quite destroyed.

So when Mr Spedding proposes a new Anglo-Virgilian hexameter he proposes an impossibility; when he ‘denies altogether that the metrical movement of the English hexameter has _any_ resemblance to that of the Greek’, he denies too much; when he declares that, ‘were every other metre impossible, an attempt to translate Homer into English hexameters might be permitted, _but that such an attempt he himself would never read_’, he exhibits, it seems to me, a little of that obduracy and over-vehemence in liking and disliking,—a remnant, I suppose, of our insular ferocity,—to which English criticism is so prone. He ought to be enchanted to meet with a good attempt in any metre, even though he would never have advised it, even though its success be contrary to all his expectations; for it is the critic’s first duty—prior even to his duty of stigmatizing what is bad—_to welcome everything that is good_. In welcoming this, he must at all times be ready, like the Christian convert, even to burn what he used to worship, and to worship what he used to burn. Nay, but he need not be thus inconsistent in welcoming it; he may retain all his principles: principles endure, circumstances change; absolute success is one thing, relative success another. Relative success may take place under the most diverse conditions; and it is in appreciating the good in even relative success, it is in taking into account the change of circumstances, that the critic’s judgment is tested, that his versatility must display itself. He is to keep his idea of the best, of perfection, and at the same time to be willingly accessible to every second best which offers itself. So I enjoy the ease and beauty of Mr Spedding’s stanza,

Therewith to all the gods in order due ...

I welcome it, in the absence of equally good poetry in another metre[65], although I still think the stanza unfit to render Homer thoroughly well, although I still think other metres fit to render him better. So I concede to Mr Spedding that every form of translation, prose or verse, must more or less break up Homer in order to reproduce him; but then I urge that that form which needs to break him up least is to be preferred. So I concede to him that the test proposed by me for the translator—a competent scholar’s judgment whether the translation more or less reproduces for him the effect of the original—is not perfectly satisfactory; but I adopt it as the best we can get, as the only test capable of being really applied; for Mr Spedding’s proposed substitute, the translations making the same effect, more or less, upon the unlearned which the original makes upon the scholar, is a test which can never really be applied at all. These two impressions, that of the scholar, and that of the unlearned reader, can, practically, never be accurately compared; they are, and must remain, like those lines we read of in Euclid, which, though produced ever so far, can never meet. So, again, I concede that a good verse-translation of Homer, or, indeed, of any poet, is very difficult, and that a good prose-translation is much easier; but then I urge that a verse-translation, while giving the pleasure which Pope’s has given, might at the same time render Homer more faithfully than Pope’s; and that this being possible, we ought not to cease wishing for a source of pleasure which no prose-translation can ever hope to rival.

Wishing for such a verse-translation of Homer, believing that rhythms have natural tendencies which, within certain limits, inevitably govern them; having little faith, therefore, that rhythms which have manifested tendencies utterly un-Homeric can so change themselves as to become well adapted for rendering Homer, I have looked about for the rhythm which seems to depart least from the tendencies of Homer’s rhythm. Such a rhythm I think may be found in the English hexameter, somewhat modified. I look with hope towards continued attempts at perfecting and employing this rhythm; but my belief in the immediate success of such attempts is far less confident than has been supposed. Between the recognition of this rhythm as ideally the best, and the recommendation of it to the translator for instant practical use, there must come all that consideration of circumstances, all that pliancy in foregoing, under the pressure of certain difficulties, the absolute best, which I have said is so indispensable to the critic. The hexameter is, comparatively, still unfamiliar in England; many people have a great dislike to it. A certain degree of unfamiliarity, a certain degree of dislike, are obstacles with which it is not wise to contend. It is difficult to say at present whether the dislike to this rhythm is so strong and so wide-spread that it will prevent its ever becoming thoroughly familiar. I think not, but it is too soon to decide. I am inclined to think that the dislike of it is rather among the professional critics than among the general public; I think the reception which Mr Longfellow’s _Evangeline_ has met with indicates this. I think that even now, if a version of the _Iliad_ in English hexameters were made by a poet who, like Mr Longfellow, has that indefinable quality which renders him popular, something _attractive_ in his talent, which communicates itself to his verses, it would have a great success among the general public. Yet a version of Homer in hexameters of the _Evangeline_ type would not satisfy the judicious, nor is the definite establishment of this type to be desired; and one would regret that Mr Longfellow should, even to popularise the hexameter, give the immense labour required for a translation of Homer when one could not wish his work to stand. Rather it is to be wished that by the efforts of poets like Mr Longfellow in original poetry, and the efforts of less distinguished poets in the task of translation, the hexameter may gradually be made familiar to the ear of the English public; at the same time that there gradually arises, out of all these efforts, an improved type of this rhythm; a type which some man of genius may sign with the final stamp, and employ in rendering Homer; a hexameter which may be as superior to Vosse’s as Shakspeare’s blank verse is superior to Schiller’s. I am inclined to believe that all this travail will actually take place, because I believe that modern poetry is actually in want of such an instrument as the hexameter.

In the meantime, whether this rhythm be destined to success or not, let us steadily keep in mind what originally made us turn to it. We turned to it because we required certain Homeric characteristics in a translation of Homer, and because all other rhythms seemed to find, from different causes, great difficulties in satisfying this our requirement. If the hexameter is impossible, if one of these other rhythms must be used, let us keep this rhythm always in mind of our requirements and of its own faults, let us compel it to get rid of these latter as much as possible. It may be necessary to have recourse to blank verse; but then blank verse must _de-Cowperize_ itself, must get rid of the habits of stiff self-retardation which make it say ‘_Not fewer_ shone’, for ‘_So many shone_’. Homer moves swiftly: blank verse _can_ move swiftly if it likes, but it must remember that the movement of such lines as

A thousand fires were burning, and by each ...

is just the slow movement which makes us despair of it. Homer moves with noble ease: blank verse must not be suffered to forget that the movement of

Came they not over from sweet Lacedæmon ...

is ungainly. Homer’s expression of his thought is simple as light: we know how blank verse affects such locutions as

While the steeds _mouthed their corn aloof_ ...

and such models of expressing one’s thought are sophisticated and artificial.

One sees how needful it is to direct incessantly the English translator’s attention to the essential characteristics of Homer’s poetry, when so accomplished a person as Mr Spedding, recognising these characteristics as indeed Homer’s, admitting them to be essential, is led by the ingrained habits and tendencies of English blank verse thus repeatedly to lose sight of them in translating even a few lines. One sees this yet more clearly, when Mr Spedding, taking me to task for saying that the blank verse used for rendering Homer ‘must not be Mr Tennyson’s blank verse’, declares that in most of Mr Tennyson’s blank verse all Homer’s essential characteristics, ‘rapidity of movement, _plainness of words and style_, _simplicity and directness of ideas_, and, above all, nobleness of manner, are as conspicuous as in Homer himself’. This shows, it seems to me, how hard it is for English readers of poetry, even the most accomplished, to feel deeply and permanently what Greek plainness of thought and Greek simplicity of expression really are: they admit the importance of these qualities in a general way, but they have no ever-present sense of them; and they easily attribute them to any poetry which has other excellent qualities, and which they very much admire. No doubt there are plainer things in Mr Tennyson’s poetry than the three lines I quoted; in choosing them, as in choosing a specimen of ballad-poetry, I wished to bring out clearly, by a strong instance, the qualities of thought and style to which I was calling attention; but when Mr Spedding talks of a plainness of thought _like Homer’s_, of a plainness of speech _like Homer’s_, and says that he finds these constantly in Mr Tennyson’s poetry, I answer that these I do not find there at all. Mr Tennyson is a most distinguished and charming poet; but the very essential characteristic of his poetry is, it seems to me, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness of thought, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness of expression. In the best and most characteristic productions of his genius, these characteristics are most prominent. They are marked characteristics, as we have seen, of the Elizabethan poets; they are marked, though not the essential, characteristics of Shakspeare himself. Under the influences of the nineteenth century, under wholly new conditions of thought and culture, they manifest themselves in Mr Tennyson’s poetry in a wholly new way. But they are still there. The essential bent of his poetry is towards such expressions as

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars;

O’er the sun’s bright eye
Drew the vast eyelid of an inky cloud;

When the cairned mountain was a shadow, sunned
The world to peace again;

The fresh young captains flashed their glittering teeth,
The huge bush-bearded barons heaved and blew;

He bared the knotted column of his throat,
The massive square of his heroic breast,
And arms on which the standing muscle sloped
As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,
Running too vehemently to break upon it.

And this way of speaking is the least _plain_, the most _un-Homeric_, which can possibly be conceived. Homer presents his thought to you just as it wells from the source of his mind: Mr Tennyson carefully distils his thought before he will part with it. Hence comes, in the expression of the thought, a heightened and elaborate air. In Homer’s poetry it is all natural thoughts in natural words; in Mr Tennyson’s poetry it is all distilled thoughts in distilled words. Exactly this heightening and elaboration may be observed in Mr Spedding’s

While the steeds _mouthed their corn aloof_

(an expression which might have been Mr Tennyson’s), on which I have already commented; and to one who is penetrated with a sense of the real simplicity of Homer, this subtle sophistication of the thought is, I think, very perceptible even in such lines as these,

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy,

which I have seen quoted as perfectly Homeric. Perfect simplicity can be obtained only by a genius of which perfect simplicity is an essential characteristic.

So true is this, that when a genius essentially subtle, or a genius which, from whatever cause, is in its essence not truly and broadly simple, determines to be perfectly plain, determines not to admit a shade of subtlety or curiosity into its expression, it cannot ever then attain real simplicity; it can only attain a semblance of simplicity[66]. French criticism, richer in its vocabulary than ours, has invented a useful word to distinguish this semblance (often very beautiful and valuable) from the real quality. The real quality it calls _simplicité_, the semblance _simplesse_. The one is natural simplicity, the other is artificial simplicity. What is called simplicity in the productions of a genius essentially not simple, is, in truth, _simplesse_. The two are distinguishable from one another the moment they appear in company. For instance, let us take the opening of the narrative in Wordsworth’s _Michael_:

Upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale
There dwelt a shepherd, Michael was his name;
An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength; his mind was keen,
Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs;
And in his shepherd’s calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men.

Now let us take the opening of the narrative in Mr Tennyson’s _Dora_:

With Farmer Allan at the farm abode
William and Dora. William was his son,
And she his niece. He often looked at them,
And often thought, ‘I’ll make them man and wife’.

The simplicity of the first of these passages is _simplicité_; that of the second, _simplesse_. Let us take the end of the same two poems: first, of _Michael_:

The cottage which was named the Evening Star
Is gone, the ploughshare has been through the ground
On which it stood; great changes have been wrought
In all the neighbourhood: yet the oak is left
That grew beside their door: and the remains
Of the unfinished sheepfold may be seen
Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head Ghyll.

And now, of _Dora_:

So those four abode
Within one house together; and as years
Went forward, Mary took another mate:
But Dora lived unmarried till her death.

A heedless critic may call both of these passages simple if he will. Simple, in a certain sense, they both are; but between the simplicity of the two there is all the difference that there is between the simplicity of Homer and the simplicity of Moschus.

But, whether the hexameter establish itself or not, whether a truly simple and rapid blank verse be obtained or not, as the vehicle for a standard English translation of Homer, I feel sure that this vehicle will not be furnished by the ballad-form. On this question about the ballad-character of Homer’s poetry, I see that Professor Blackie proposes a compromise: he suggests that those who say Homer’s poetry is pure ballad-poetry, and those who deny that it is ballad-poetry at all, should split the difference between them; that it should be agreed that Homer’s poems are ballads _a little_, but not so much as some have said. I am very sensible to the courtesy of the terms in which Mr Blackie invites me to this compromise; but I cannot, I am sorry to say, accept it; I cannot allow that Homer’s poetry is ballad-poetry at all. A want of capacity for sustained nobleness seems to me inherent in the ballad-form when employed for epic poetry. The more we examine this proposition, the more certain, I think, will it become to us. Let us but observe how a great poet, having to deliver a narrative very weighty and serious, instinctively shrinks from the ballad-form as from a form not commensurate with his subject-matter, a form too narrow and shallow for it, and seeks for a form which has more amplitude and impressiveness. Everyone knows the _Lucy Gray_ and the _Ruth_ of Wordsworth. Both poems are excellent; but the subject-matter of the narrative of _Ruth_ is much more weighty and impressive to the poet’s own feeling than that of the narrative of _Lucy Gray_, for which latter, in its unpretending simplicity, the ballad-form is quite adequate. Wordsworth, at the time he composed _Ruth_, his great time, his _annus mirabilis_, about 1800, strove to be simple; it was his mission to be simple; he loved the ballad-form, he clung to it, because it was simple. Even in _Ruth_ he tried, one may say, to use it; he would have used it if he could: but the gravity of his matter is too much for this somewhat slight form; he is obliged to give to his form more amplitude, more augustness, to shake out its folds.

The wretched parents all that night
Went shouting far and wide;
But there was neither sound nor sight
To serve them for a guide.

That is beautiful, no doubt, and the form is adequate to the subject-matter. But take this, on the other hand:

I, too, have passed her on the hills,
Setting her little water-mills
By spouts and fountains wild;
Such small machinery as she turned,
Ere she had wept, ere she had mourned,
A young and happy child.

Who does not perceive how the greater fulness and weight of his matter has here compelled the true and feeling poet to adopt a form of more _volume_ than the simple ballad-form?

It is of narrative poetry that I am speaking; the question is about the use of the ballad-form for _this_. I say that for this poetry (when in the grand style, as Homer’s is) the ballad-form is entirely inadequate; and that Homer’s translator must not adopt it, because it even leads him, by its own weakness, away from the grand style rather than towards it. We must remember that the matter of narrative poetry stands in a different relation to the vehicle which conveys it, is not so independent of this vehicle, so absorbing and powerful in itself, as the matter of purely emotional poetry. When there comes in poetry what I may call the _lyrical cry_, this transfigures everything, makes everything grand; the simplest form may be here even an advantage, because the flame of the emotion glows through and through it more easily. To go again for an illustration to Wordsworth; our great poet, since Milton, by his performance, as Keats, I think, is our great poet by his gift and promise; in one of his stanzas to the Cuckoo, we have:

And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.

Here the lyrical cry, though taking the simple ballad-form, is as grand as the lyrical cry coming in poetry of an ampler form, as grand as the

An innocent life, yet far astray!

of _Ruth_; as the

There is a comfort in the strength of love

of _Michael_. In this way, by the occurrence of this lyrical cry, the ballad-poets themselves rise sometimes, though not so often as one might perhaps have hoped, to the grand style.

O lang, lang may their ladies sit,
Wi’ their fans into their hand,
Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spence
Come sailing to the land.

O lang, lang may the ladies stand,
Wi’ their gold combs in their hair,
Waiting for their ain dear lords,
For they’ll see them nae mair.

But from this impressiveness of the ballad-form, when its subject-matter fills it over and over again, is, indeed, in itself, all in all, one must not infer its effectiveness when its subject-matter is not thus overpowering, in the great body of a narrative.

But, after all, Homer is not a better poet than the balladists, because he has taken in the hexameter a better instrument; he took this instrument because he was a _different_ poet from them; so different, not only so much better, but so essentially different, that he has not to be classed with them at all. Poets receive their distinctive character, not from their subject, but from their application to that subject of the ideas (to quote the _Excursion_)

On God, on Nature, and on human life,

which they have acquired for themselves. In the ballad-poets in general, as in men of a rude and early stage of the world, in whom their humanity is not yet variously and fully developed, the stock of these ideas is scanty, and the ideas themselves not very effective or profound. From them the narrative itself is the great matter, not the spirit and significance which underlies the narrative. Even in later times of richly developed life and thought, poets appear who have what may be called a _balladist’s mind_; in whom a fresh and lively curiosity for the outward spectacle of the world is much more strong than their sense of the inward significance of that spectacle. When they apply ideas to their narrative of human events, you feel that they are, so to speak, travelling out of their own province: in the best of them you feel this perceptibly, but in those of a lower order you feel it very strongly. Even Sir Walter Scott’s efforts of this kind, even, for instance, the

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,

or the

O woman! in our hours of ease,

even these leave, I think, as high poetry, much to be desired; far more than the same poet’s descriptions of a hunt or a battle. But Lord Macaulay’s

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The captain of the gate:
‘To all the men upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late’.

(and here, since I have been reproached with undervaluing Lord Macaulay’s _Lays of Ancient Rome_, let me frankly say that, to my mind, a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all), I say, Lord Macaulay’s

To all the men upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late,

it is hard to read without a cry of pain. But with Homer it is very different. This ‘noble barbarian’, this ‘savage with the lively eye’, whose verse, Mr Newman thinks, would affect us, if we could hear the living Homer, ‘like an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast’, is never more at home, never more nobly himself, than in applying profound ideas to his narrative. As a poet he belongs, narrative as is his poetry, and early as is his date, to an incomparably more developed spiritual and intellectual order than the balladists, or than Scott and Macaulay; he is here as much to be distinguished from them, and in the same way, as Milton is to be distinguished from them. He is, indeed, rather to be classed with Milton than with the balladists and Scott; for what he has in common with Milton, the noble and profound application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic greatness. The most essentially grand and characteristic things of Homer are such things as

ἔτλην δ’, οἷ’ οὔπω τις ἐπιχθόνιος βροτὸς ἂλλος,
ἀνδρὸς παιδοφόνοιο ποτὶ στόμα χεῖρ’ ὀρέγεσθαι[67],

or as

καὶ σὲ, γέρον, τὸ πρὶν μὲν ἀκούομεν ὄλβιον εἶναι[68],

or as

ὥς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσιν,
ζώειν ἀχνυμένους· αὐτοὶ δὲ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσίν[69],

and of these the tone is given, far better than by anything of the balladists, by such things as the

Io no piangeva: sì dentro impietrai:
Piangevan elli ...[70]

of Dante; or the

Fall’n Cherub! to be weak is miserable

of Milton.

I suppose I must, before I conclude, say a word or two about my own hexameters; and yet really, on such a topic, I am almost ashamed to trouble you. From those perishable objects I feel, I can truly say, a most Oriental detachment. You yourselves are witnesses how little importance, when I offered them to you, I claimed for them, how humble a function I designed them to fill. I offered them, not as specimens of a competing translation of Homer, but as illustrations of certain canons which I had been trying to establish for Homer’s poetry. I said that these canons they might very well illustrate by failing as well as by succeeding: if they illustrate them in any manner, I am satisfied. I was thinking of the future translator of Homer, and trying to let him see as clearly as possible what I meant by the combination of characteristics which I assigned to Homer’s poetry, by saying that this poetry was at once rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct in its ideas, and noble in manner. I do not suppose that my own hexameters are rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct in their ideas, and noble in manner; but I am in hopes that a translator, reading them with a genuine interest in his subject, and without the slightest grain of personal feeling, may see more clearly, as he reads them, what I meant by saying that Homer’s poetry is all these. I am in hopes that he may be able to seize more distinctly, when he has before him my

So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of the Xanthus,

or my

Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you?

or my

So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle,

the exact points which I wish him to avoid in Cowper’s

So numerous seemed those fires the banks between,

or in Pope’s

Unhappy coursers of immortal strain,

or in Mr Newman’s

He spake, and, yelling, held a-front his single-hoofed horses.

At the same time there may be innumerable points in mine which he ought to avoid also. Of the merit of his own compositions no composer can be admitted the judge.

But thus humbly useful to the future translator I still hope my hexameters may prove; and he it is, above all, whom one has to regard. The general public carries away little from discussions of this kind, except some vague notion that one advocates English hexameters, or that one has attacked Mr Newman. On the mind of an adversary one never makes the faintest impression. Mr Newman reads all one can say about diction, and his last word on the subject is, that he ‘regards it as a question about to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic _landis_, _houndis_, _hartis_’ (for lands, hounds, harts), and also ‘the final _en_ of the plural of verbs (we _dancen_, they _singen_, etc.), which still subsists in Lancashire’. A certain critic reads all one can say about style, and at the end of it arrives at the inference that, ‘after all, there is some style grander than the grand style itself, since Shakspeare has not the grand manner, and yet has the supremacy over Milton’; another critic reads all one can say about rhythm, and the result is, that he thinks Scott’s rhythm, in the description of the death of Marmion, all the better for being _saccadé_, because the dying ejaculations of Marmion were likely to be ‘jerky’. How vain to rise up early, and to take rest late, from any zeal for proving to Mr Newman that he must not, in translating Homer, say _houndis_ and _dancen_; or to the first of the two critics above quoted, that one poet may be a greater poetical force than another, and yet have a more unequal style; or to the second, that the best art, having to represent the death of a hero, does not set about imitating his dying noises! Such critics, however, provide for an opponent’s vivacity the charming excuse offered by Rivarol for his, when he was reproached with giving offence by it: ‘Ah’! he exclaimed, ‘no one considers how much pain every man of taste has had to _suffer_, before he ever inflicts any’.

It is for the future translator that one must work. The successful translator of Homer will have (or he cannot succeed) that true sense for his subject, and that disinterested love for it, which are, both of them, so rare in literature, and so precious; he will not be led off by any false scent; he will have an eye for the real matter, and where he thinks he may find any indication of this, no hint will be too slight for him, no shade will be too fine, no imperfections will turn him aside, he will go before his adviser’s thought, and help it out with his own. This is the sort of student that a critic of Homer should always have in his thoughts; but students of this sort are indeed rare.

And how, then, can I help being reminded what a student of this sort we have just lost in Mr Clough, whose name I have already mentioned in these lectures? He, too, was busy with Homer; but it is not on that account that I now speak of him. Nor do I speak of him in order to call attention to his qualities and powers in general, admirable as these were. I mention him because, in so eminent a degree, he possessed these two invaluable literary qualities, a true sense for his object of study, and a single-hearted care for it. He had both; but he had the second even more eminently than the first. He greatly developed the first through means of the second. In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the most undivided and disinterested love for his object in itself, the greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal. His interest was in literature itself; and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from all taint of littleness. In the saturnalia of ignoble personal passions, of which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled. He had not yet traduced his friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised what he despised. Those who knew him well had the conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his. His poem, of which I before spoke, has some admirable Homeric qualities;—out-of-doors freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity. Some of the expressions in that poem, ‘_Dangerous Corrievreckan ... Where roads are unknown to Loch Nevish_’, come back now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. But that in him of which I think oftenest is the Homeric simplicity of his literary life.

Footnote 56:

‘It is the fact, that scholars of fastidious refinement, but of a
judgment which I think far more masculine than Mr Arnold’s, have
passed a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of my
translation. I at present count eight such names’.—‘Before venturing
to print, I sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would
accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women
have extolled them, how greedily a working man has inquired for them,
without knowing who was the translator’.—MR NEWMAN’S Reply, pp. 113,
124, _supra_.

Footnote 57:

‘O for the fields of Thessaly and the streams of Spercheios! O for the
hills alive with the dances of the Laconian maidens, the hills of
Taygetus’!—_Georgics_, ii. 486.

Footnote 58:

_Iliad_, xvii, 216.

Footnote 59:

_Purgatory_, xxiii, 124.

Footnote 60:

_Purgatory_, xxiii, 127.

Footnote 61:

‘A secure time fell to the lot neither of Peleus the son of Æacus, nor
of the godlike Cadmus; howbeit these are said to have had, of all
mortals, the supreme of happiness, who heard the golden-snooded Muses
sing, one of them on the mountain (Pelion), the other in seven-gated
Thebus’.

Footnote 62:

Lines such as the first of the _Odyssey_

Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὅς μάλα πολλὰ....

Footnote 63:

Substantially, however, in the question at issue between Mr Munro and
Mr Spedding, I agree with Mr Munro. By the italicized words in the
following sentence, ‘The rhythm of the Virgilian hexameter depends
entirely on _cæsura_, _pause_, and a due arrangement of words’, he has
touched, it seems to me, in the constitution of this hexameter, the
central point which Mr Spedding misses. The accent, or _heightened
tone_, of Virgil in reading his own hexameters, was probably far from
being the same thing as the accent or _stress_ with which we read
them. The general effect of each line, in Virgil’s mouth, was probably
therefore something widely different from what Mr Spedding assumes it
to have been: an ancient’s accentual reading was something which
allowed the metrical beat of the Latin line to be far more perceptible
than our accentual reading allows it to be.

On the question as to the _real_ rhythm of the ancient hexameter, Mr
Newman has in his _Reply_ a page quite admirable for force and
precision. Here he is in his element, and his ability and acuteness
have their proper scope. But it is true that the _modern_ reading of
the ancient hexameter is what the modern hexameter has to imitate, and
that the English reading of the Virgilian hexameter is as Mr Spedding
describes it. Why this reading has not been imitated by the English
hexameter, I have tried to point out in the text.

Footnote 64:

Such a minor change I have attempted by occasionally shifting, in the
first foot of the hexameter, the accent from the first syllable to the
second. In the current English hexameter, it is on the first. Mr
Spedding, who proposes radically to subvert the constitution of this
hexameter, seems not to understand that anyone can propose to modify
it partially; he can comprehend revolution in this metre, but not
reform. Accordingly he asks me how I can bring myself to say,
‘_Bé_tween that and the ships’, or ‘_Thére_ sat fifty men’; or how I
can reconcile such forcing of the accent with my own rule, that
‘hexameters must _read themselves_’. Presently he says that he cannot
believe I do pronounce these words so, but that he thinks I leave out
the accent in the first foot altogether, and thus get a hexameter with
only five accents. He will pardon me: I pronounce, as I suppose he
himself does, if he reads the words naturally, ‘Be_tween_ that and the
ships’, and ‘There _sát_ fifty men’. Mr Spedding is familiar enough
with this accent on the second syllable in Virgil’s hexameters; in ‘et
_té_ montosæ’, or ‘Ve_ló_ces jaculo’. Such a change is an attempt to
relieve the monotony of the current English hexameter by occasionally
altering the position of one of its accents; it is not an attempt to
make a wholly new English hexameter by habitually altering the
position of four of them. Very likely it is an unsuccessful attempt;
but at any-rate it does not violate what I think is the fundamental
rule for English hexameters, that may be such as to _read themselves_
without necessitating, on the reader’s part, any non-natural
putting-on or taking-off accent. Hexameters like these of Mr
Longfellow,

‘In that delightful land which is washed by the Delaware’s
waters’,

and,

‘As if they fain would appease the Dryads, whose haunts they
molested’,

violate this rule; and they are very common. I think the blemish of Mr
Dart’s recent meritorious version of the _Iliad_ is that it contains
too many of them.

Footnote 65:

As I welcome another more recent attempt in stanza,—Mr Worsley’s
version of the _Odyssey_ in Spenser’s measure. Mr Worsley does me the
honour to notice some remarks of mine on this measure: I had said that
its greater intricacy made it a worse measure than even the
ten-syllable couplet to employ for rendering Homer. He points out, in
answer, that ‘the more complicated the correspondences in a poetical
measure, the less obtrusive and absolute are the rhymes’. This is
true, and subtly remarked; but I never denied that the single shocks
of rhyme in the couplet were more _strongly felt_ than those in the
stanza; I said that the more frequent recurrence of the same rhyme, in
the stanza, necessarily made this measure more _intricate_. The stanza
repacks Homer’s matter yet more arbitrarily, and therefore changes his
movement yet more radically, than the couplet. Accordingly, I imagine
a nearer approach to a perfect translation of Homer is possible in the
couplet, well managed, than in the stanza, however well managed. But
meanwhile Mr Worsley, applying the Spenserian stanza, that beautiful
romantic measure, to the most romantic poem of the ancient world;
making this stanza yield him, too (what it never yielded to Byron),
its treasures of fluidity and sweet ease; above all, bringing to his
task a truly poetical sense and skill, has produced a version of the
_Odyssey_ much the most pleasing of those hitherto produced, and which
is delightful to read.

For the public this may well be enough, nay, more than enough; but for
the critic even this is not yet quite enough.

Footnote 66:

I speak of poetic genius as employing itself upon narrative or
dramatic poetry,—poetry in which the poet has to go out of himself and
to create. In lyrical poetry, in the direct expression of personal
feeling, the most subtle genius may, under the momentary pressure of
passion, express itself simply. Even here, however, the native
tendency will generally be discernible.

Footnote 67:

‘And I have endured—the like whereof no soul upon the earth hath yet
endured—to carry to my lips the hand of him who slew my
child’.—_Iliad_, xxiv. 505.

Footnote 68:

‘Nay and thou too, old man, in times past wert, as we hear,
happy’.—_Iliad_, xxiv. 543. In the original this line, for mingled
pathos and dignity, is perhaps without a rival even in Homer.

Footnote 69:

’For so have the gods spun our destiny to us wretched mortals,—that we
should live in sorrow; but they themselves are without
trouble’.—_Iliad_, xxiv. 525.

Footnote 70:

‘_I_ wept not: so of stone grew I within:—_they_ wept’.—_Hell_,
xxxiii. 49 (Carlyle’s Translation, slightly altered).

THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH

* * * * * *

Transcriber’s note:

○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the chapters in which they are
referenced.