Part 27

Mr. Hazlitt’s General Introduction supplies us with no new information, but this was hardly to be expected where Mr. Dyce had already gone over the field. We wish that he had been able to give us better means of distinguishing the three almost contemporary John Websters one from the other, for we think the internal evidence is enough to show that all the plays attributed to the author of the “Duchess” and “Vittoria” could not have been written by the same person. On the whole, he has given us a very respectable, and certainly a very pretty, edition of an eminent poet.

* * * * *

We could almost forgive all other shortcomings of Mr. Smith’s _library_ for the great gift it brings us in the five volumes of Chapman’s translations. Coleridge, sending Chapman’s Homer to Wordsworth, writes, “What is stupidly said of Shakespeare is really true and appropriate of Chapman; mighty faults counterpoised by mighty beauties.... It is as truly an original poem as the Faery Queene;--it will give you small idea of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope’s epigrams, or Cowper’s cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. For Chapman writes and feels as a poet,--as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In short, it is an exquisite poem, in spite of its frequent and perverse quaintnesses and harshnesses, which are, however, amply repaid by almost unexampled sweetness and beauty of language, all over spirit and feeling.”[28] From a passage of his Preface it would appear that Chapman had been criticised pretty sharply in his own day for amplifying his author. “And this one example I thought necessary to insert here to show my detractors that they have no reason to vilify my circumlocution sometimes, when their most approved Grecians, Homer’s interpreters generally, hold him fit to be so converted. Yet how much I differ, and with what authority, let my impartial and judicial reader judge. Always conceiving how pedantical and absurd an affectation it is in the interpretation of any author (much more of Homer) to turn him word for word, when (according to Horace and other best lawgivers to translators) it is the part of every knowing and judicial interpreter not to follow the number and order of words, but the material things themselves, and sentences to weigh diligently, and to clothe and adorn them with words and such a style and form of oration as are most apt for the language in which they are converted.” Again in his verses _To the Reader_, he speaks of

“The _ample transmigration_ to be shown By nature-loving Poesy,”

and defends his own use of “needful periphrases,” and says that “word for word” translation is to

“Make fish with fowl, camels with whales, engender.”

“For even as different a production Ask Greek and English: since, as they in sounds And letters shun one form and unison, So have their sense and elegancy bounds In their distinguished natures, and require Only a judgment to make both consent In sense and elocution.”

There are two theories of translation,--literal paraphrase and free reproduction. At best, the translation of poetry is but an imitation of natural flowers in cambric or wax; and however much of likeness there may be, the aroma, whose charm of indefinable suggestion in the association of ideas is so powerful, is precisely what is lost irretrievably. From where it lurked in the immortal verse, a presence divined rather than ascertained, baffling the ear which it enchanted, escaping the grasp which yet it thrilled, airy, evanescent, imperishable, beckoning the imagination with promises better than any fulfilment,

“The parting _genius_ is with sighing sent.”

The paraphrase is a plaster-cast of the Grecian urn; the reproduction, if by a man of genius, is like Keats’s ode, which makes the figures move and the leaves tremble again, if not with the old life, with a sorcery which deceives the fancy. Of all English poets, Keats was the one to have translated Homer.

In any other than a mere prose version of a great poem, we have a right to demand that it give us at least an adequate impression of force and originality. We have a right to ask, If this poem were published now for the first time, as the work of a contemporary, should we read it, not with the same, but with anything like the same conviction of its freshness, vigor, and originality, its high level of style and its witchery of verse, that Homer, if now for the first time discovered, would infallibly beget in us? Perhaps this looks like asking for a new Homer to translate the old one; but if this be too much, it is certainly not unfair to insist that the feeling given us should be that of life, and not artifice.

The Homer of Chapman, whatever its defects, alone of all English versions has this crowning merit of being, where it is most successful, thoroughly alive. He has made for us the best poem that has yet been Englished out of Homer, and in so far gives us a truer idea of him. Of all translators he is farthest removed from the fault with which he charges others, when he says that “our divine master’s most ingenious imitating the life of things (which is the soul of a poem) is never respected nor perceived by his interpreters only standing pedantically on the grammar and words, utterly ignorant of the sense and grace of him.” His mastery of English is something wonderful even in an age of masters, when the language was still a mother-tongue, and not a contrivance of pedants and grammarians. He had a reverential sense of “our divine Homer’s depth and gravity, which will not open itself to the curious austerity of belaboring art, but only to the natural and most ingenious soul of our thrice-sacred Poesy.” His task was as holy to him as a version of Scripture; he justifies the tears of Achilles by those of Jesus, and the eloquence of his horse by that of Balaam’s less noble animal. He does not always keep close to his original, but he sins no more, even in this, than any of his rivals. He is especially great in the similes. Here he rouses himself always, and if his enthusiasm sometimes lead him to heighten a little, or even to add outright, he gives us a picture full of life and action, or of the grandeur and beauty of nature, as stirring to the fancy as his original. Of all who have attempted Homer, he has the topping merit of being inspired by him.

In the recent discussions of Homeric translation in England, it has always been taken for granted that we had or could have some adequate conception of Homer’s metre. Lord Derby, in his Preface, plainly assumes this. But there can be no greater fallacy. No human ears, much less Greek ones, could have endured what, with our mechanical knowledge of the verse, ignorance of the accent, and English pronunciation, we blandly accept for such music as Homer chanted. We have utterly lost the tune and cannot reproduce it. Mr. Newman conjectures it to have been something like Yankee Doodle; Mr. Arnold is sure it was the English hexameter; and they are both partly right so far as we may trust our reasonable impressions; for, after all, an impression is all that we have. Cowper attempts to give the ring of the ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο by

“Dread-sounding, bounding on the silver bow,”

which only too fatally recalls the old Scottish dancing-tune,--

“Amaisit I gaisit To see, led at command, A strampant and rampant Ferss lyon in his hand.”

The attempt was in the right direction, however, for Homer, like Dante and Shakespeare, like all who really command language, seems fond of playing with assonances. No doubt the Homeric verse consented at will to an eager rapidity, and no doubt also its general character is that of prolonged but unmonotonous roll. Everybody says it is like the long ridges of the sea, some overtopping their neighbors a little, each with an independent undulation of its crest, yet all driven by a common impulse, and breaking, not with the sudden snap of an unyielding material, but one after the other, with a stately curve, to slide back and mingle with those that follow. Chapman’s measure has the disadvantage of an association with Sternhold and Hopkins, but it has the merit of length, and, where he is in the right mood, is free, spirited, and sonorous. Above all, there is everywhere the movement of life and passion in it. Chapman was a master of verse, making it hurry, linger, or stop short, to suit the meaning. Like all great versifiers he must be read with study, for the slightest change of accent loses the expression of an entire passage. His great fault as a translator is that he takes fire too easily and runs beyond his author. Perhaps he _intensifies_ too much, though this be a fault on the right side; he certainly sometimes weakens the force of passages by crowding in particulars which Homer had wisely omitted, for Homer’s simplicity is by no means mere simplicity of thought, nor, as it is often foolishly called, of nature. It is the simplicity of consummate art, the last achievement of poets and the invariable characteristic of the greatest among them. To Chapman’s mind once warmed to its work, the words are only a mist, suggesting, while it hides, the divine form of the original image or thought; and his imagination strives to body forth that, as he conceives it, in all its celestial proportions. Let us compare with Lord Derby’s version, as the latest, a passage where Chapman merely intensities (Book XIII., beginning at the 86th verse in Lord Derby, the 73d of Chapman, and the 76th of Homer):--

“Whom answered thus the son of Telamon: ‘My hands, too, grasp with firmer hold the spear, My spirit, like thine, is stirred; I feel my feet Instinct with fiery life; nor should I fear With Hector, son of Priam, in his might Alone to meet, and grapple to the death.’”

Thus Lord Derby. Chapman renders:--

“This Telamonius thus received: ‘So, to my thoughts, my hands Burn with desire to toss my lance; _each foot beneath me stands Bare on bright fire to use his speed_; my heart is raised so high, That to encounter Hector’s self I long insatiately.’”

There is no question which version is the more energetic. Is Lord Derby’s nearer the original in being tamer? He has taken the “instinct with fiery life” from Chapman’s hint. The original has simply “restless,” or more familiarly “in a fidget.” There is nothing about “grappling to the death,” and “nor should I fear” is feeble where Chapman with his “long insatiately” is literal. We will give an example where Chapman has amplified his original (Book XVI. v. 426; Derby, 494; Chapman, 405):--

“Down jumped he from his chariot; down leapt his foe as light; And as, on some far-looking rock, a cast of vultures fight, Fly on each other, strike and truss, part, meet, and then stick by, Tug both with crooked beaks and seres, cry, fight, and fight and cry, So fiercely fought these angry kings.”[29]

Lord Derby’s version is nearer:--

“He said, and from his car, accoutred, sprang; Patroclus saw and he too leaped to earth. As on a lofty rock, with angry screams, Hook-beaked, with talons curved, two vultures fight, So with loud shouts these two to battle rushed.”

Chapman has made his first line out of two in Homer, but, granting the license, how rapid and springy is the verse! Lord Derby’s “withs” are not agreeable, his “shouts” is an ill-chosen word for a comparison with vultures, “talons curved” is feeble, and his verse is, as usual, mainly built up of little blocks of four syllables each. “To battle” also is vague. With whom? Homer says that they rushed each at other. We shall not discuss how much license is loyal in a translator, but, as we think his chief aim should be to give a feeling of that life and spirit which makes the immortality of his original, and is the very breath in the nostrils of all poetry, he has a right to adapt himself to the genius of his own language. If he would do justice to his author, he must make up in one passage for his unavoidable shortcomings in another. He may here and there take for granted certain exigencies of verse in his original which he feels in his own case. Even Dante, who boasted that no word had ever made him say what he did not wish, should have made an exception of rhyming ones, for these sometimes, even in so abundant a language as the Italian, have driven the most straightforward of poets into an awkward _détour_.

We give one more passage from Chapman:--

“And all in golden weeds He clothed himself; the golden scourge most elegantly done He took and mounted to his seat; and then the god begun To drive his chariot through the waves. From whirl-pits every way The whales exulted under him, and knew their king; the sea For joy did open, and his horse so swift and lightly flew The under axle-tree of brass no drop of water drew.”

Here the first half is sluggish and inadequate, but what surging vigor, what tumult of the sea, what swiftness, in the last! Here is Lord Derby’s attempt:--

“All clad in gold, the golden lash he grasped Of curious work, and, mounting on his car, Skimmed o’er the waves; from all the depths below Gambolled around the monsters of the deep, Acknowledging their king: the joyous sea Parted her waves; swift flew the bounding steeds, Nor was the brazen axle wet with spray.”

Chapman here is truer to his master, and the motion is in the verse itself. Lord Derby’s is description, and not picture. “Monsters of the deep” is an example of the hackneyed periphrases in which he abounds, like all men to whom language is a literary tradition, and not a living gift of the Muses. “_Lash_” is precisely the wrong word. Chapman is always great at sea. Here is another example from the Fourteenth Book:--

“And as, when with unwieldy waves _the great sea forefeels winds_ That both ways murmur, and no way her certain current finds, But pants and swells confusedly, here goes, and there will stay, Till on it air casts one firm wind, and then it rolls away.”

Observe how the somewhat ponderous movement of the first verse assists the meaning of the words.

He is great, too, in single phrases and lines:--

“And as, from top of some steep hill, the Lightener strips a cloud _And lets a great sky out of Heaven_, in whose delightsome light All prominent foreheads, forests, towers, and temples cheer the sight.’ (Book XVI. v. 286.)

The lion “lets his rough brows down so low they hide his eyes”; the flames “wrastle” in the woods; “rude feet dim the day with a fog of dust;” and so in a hundred other instances.

For an example of his more restrained vigor, take the speech of Sarpedon in the Twelfth Book of the Iliad, and for poetic beauty, the whole story of Ulysses and Nausikaa in the Odyssey. It was here that Keats made himself Grecian and learned to versify.

Mr. Hooper has done his work of editing well. But he has sometimes misapprehended his author, and distorted his meaning by faulty punctuation. In one of the passages already cited, Mr. Hooper’s text stands thus: “Lest I be prejudiced with opinion, to dissent of ignorance, or singularity.” All the commas which darken the sense should be removed. Chapman meant to say, “Lest I be condemned beforehand by people thinking I dissent out of ignorance or singularity.” (Iliad Vol. I. p. 23.) So on the next page the want of a hyphen makes nonsense: “And saw the round coming [round-coming] of this silver bow of our Phoebus,” that is, the crescent coming to the full circle. In the translations, too, the pointing needs reformation now and then, but shows, on the whole, a praiseworthy fidelity. We will give a few examples of what we believe to be errors on the part of Mr. Hooper, who, by the way, is weakest on points which concern the language of Chapman’s day. We follow the order of the text as most convenient.

“Bid” (Il. i.) is explained to mean “threaten, challenge,” where “offer” would be the right word.

“And cast The offal of all to the deep.” (Il. i. 309.)

Surely a slip of Chapman’s pen. He must have intended to write “Of all the offal,” a transversion common with him and needed here to avoid a punning jingle.

“So much I must affirm our power exceeds th’ inhabitant.” (Il. ii. 110.)

Mr. Hooper’s note is “inhabiters, viz. of Troy.” “Inhabitant” is an adjective agreeing with “power.” Our power without exceeds that within.

“Yet all this time to stay, Out of our judgments, for our end, and now to take our way Without it were absurd and vile.” (Il. ii, 257.)

A note on this passage tells us that “out of judgments” means “against our inclinations.” It means simply “in accordance with our good judgment,” just as we still say “out of his wisdom.” Compare Il. iii. 63,

“Hector, because thy sharp reproof is _out of justice_ given, I take it well.”

“And as Jove, brandishing a star which men a comet call, Hurls out his curled hair abroad, that from his brand exhals A thousand sparks.” (Il. iv. 85.)

Mr. Hooper’s note is “‘_Which men a comet call_’--so both the folios. Dr. Taylor has printed ‘_which man a comet calls_.’ This certainly suits the rhyme, but I adhere to Chapman’s text.” Both editors have misunderstood the passage. The fault is not in “call” but in “exhals,” a clear misprint for “exhall,” the spelling, as was common, being conformed to the visible rhyme. “That” means “so that” (a frequent Elizabethan construction) and “exhall” is governed by “sparks.” The meaning is, “As when Jove, brandishing a comet, hurls out its curled hair so that a thousand sparks exhale from its burning.”

“The _evicke_ skipping from the rock.”

Mr. Hooper tells us, “It is doubtful what this word really is. Dr. Taylor suggests that it may probably mean the _evict_, or doomed one--but? It is possible Chapman meant to Anglicize the Greek αἴξ; or should we read Ibex, as the αἴξ ἴξαλος was such?” The word means the _chamois_, and is merely the English form of the French _ibiche_. Dr. Taylor’s reading would amaze us were we not familiar with the commentators on Shakespeare.

“And now they _out-ray_ to your fleet.” (Il. v. 793.)

“_Out-ray_--spread out in array; abbreviated from array. Dr. Taylor says ‘rush out,’ from the Anglo-Saxon ‘_rean_,’ to flow; but there seems no necessity for such an etymology.” We should think not! Chapman, like Pope, made his first sketch from the French, and corrected it by the Greek. Those who would understand Chapman’s English must allow for traces of his French guide here and there. This is one of them, perhaps. The word is etymologically unrelated to _array_. It is merely the old French _oultréer_, a derivative of _ultra_. It means “they pass beyond their gates even to your fleet.” He had said just before that formerly “your foes durst not a foot address _without their ports_.” The word occurs again Il. xxiii. 413.

“When none, though many kings put on, could make his vaunt, he led Tydides to renewed assault or issued first the dike.” (Il. viii. 217.)

“_Tydides_.--He led Tydides, i. e. Tydides he led. An unusual construction.” Not in the least. The old printers or authors sometimes put a comma where some connecting particle was left out. We had just now an instance where one took the place of _so_. Here it supplies _that_. “None could make his vaunt that he led (that is, was before) Tydides.” We still use the word in the same sense, as the “leading” horse in a race.

“And all did wilfully expect the silver-throned morn.” (Il. viii. 497.)

“_Wilfully_--willingly, anxiously.” _Wishfully_, as elsewhere in Chapman.

“And as, upon a rich man’s crop of barley or of wheat, Opposed for swiftness at their work, a sort of reapers sweat.”

“_Opposed_--standing opposite to one another for expedition’s sake.” We hope Mr. Hooper understood his own note, for it baffles us utterly. The meaning is simply “pitted against each other to see which will reap most swiftly.” In a note (Il. xi. 417.) we are told that “the etymology [of _lucern_] seems uncertain.” It is nothing more than a corruption of the old French _leucerve_ (_loup-cervier_).

“I would then make-in in deed and steep My income in their bloods.” (Il. xvii. 481.)

“_Income_--communication, or infusion, of courage from the Gods. The word in this sense Todd says was a favorite in Cromwell’s time.” A surprising note! _Income_ here means nothing more than “onfall,” as the context shows.

“To put the best in _ure_.” (Il. xvii. 545.)

“_Ure_--use. Skinner thinks it a contraction of _usura_. It is frequent in Chaucer. Todd gives examples from Hooker and L’Estrange.” The word is common enough, but how Mr. Hooper could seriously quote good old Skinner for such an etymology we cannot conceive. It does not mean “in use,” but “to work,” being merely the English form of _en œuvre_, as “manure” is of _manœuvrer_.

“So troop-meal Troy pursued a while.” (Il. xvii. 634.)

“_Troop-meal_--in troops, troop by troop. So piecemeal. To _meal_ was to mingle, mix together; from the French _mêler_.... The reader would do well to consult Dr. Jamieson’s excellent ‘Dictionary of the Scottish Language’ in voce ‘_mell_.’” No doubt the reader might profit by consulting it under any other word beginning with M, and any of them would be as much to the purpose as _mell_. _Troop-meal_, like _inch-meal_, _piece-meal_, implies separation, not mingling, and is from a Teutonic root. Mr. Hooper is always weak in his linguistic. In a note on Il. xviii. 144, he informs us that “To _sterve_ is to _die_; and the sense of _starve_, with cold or hunger originated in the 17th century.” We would it had! But we suspect that men had died of both these diseases earlier. What he should have said was that the restriction of meaning to dying with hunger was modern.

Il. xx. 239 we have “the God’s” for “the Gods’” and a few lines below “Anchisiades’” for “Anchisiades’s”; Il. xxi. 407, “press’d” for “prest.”

We had noted a considerable number of other slips, but we will mention only two more. “Treen broches” is explained to mean “branches of trees.” (Hymn to Hermes, 227.) It means “wooden spits.” In the Bacchus (28, 29) Mr. Hooper restores a corrupt reading which Mr. Singer (for a wonder) had set right. He prints,--

“Nay, which of all the Pow’r fully-divined Esteem ye him?”

Of course it should be powerfully-divined, for otherwise we must read “Pow’rs.” The five volumes need a very careful revision in their punctuation, and in another edition we should advise Mr. Hooper to strike out every note in which he has been tempted into etymology.

* * * * *