Part 10

But I must proceed to remark: Homer might have been as unintelligible to Pericles, as was the court poet of king Crœsus, and yet it might be highly improper to translate him into an old English dialect; namely, if he had been the typical poet of a logical and refined age. _Here is the real question_;—is he absolutely antique, or only antiquated relatively, as Euripides is now antiquated? A modern Greek statesman, accomplished for every purpose of modern business, might find himself quite perplexed by the infinitives, the numerous participles, the optatives, the datives, by the particle ἂν, and by the whole syntax of Euripides, as also by many special words; but this would never justify us in translating Euripides into any but a most refined style. Was Homer of this class? I say, that he _not only was_ antiquated, relatively to Pericles, but _is also_ absolutely antique, being the poet of a barbarian age. Antiquity in poets is not (as Horace stupidly imagines in the argument of the horse’s tail) a question of years, but of intrinsic qualities. Homer sang to a wholly unfastidious audience, very susceptible to the marvellous, very unalive to the ridiculous, capable of swallowing with reverence the most grotesque conceptions. Hence nothing is easier than to turn Homer to ridicule. The fun which Lucian made of his mythology, a rhetorical critic like Mr Arnold could make of his diction, if he understood it as he understands mine. He takes credit to himself for _not_ ridiculing me; and is not aware, that I could not be like Homer without being easy to ridicule. An intelligent child is the second-best reader of Homer. The best of all is a scholar of highly masculine taste; the worst of all is a fastidious and refined man, to whom everything quaint seems ignoble and contemptible.

I might have supposed that Mr Arnold thinks Homer to be a polished drawing-room poet, like Pope, when I read in him this astonishing sentence, p. 35. ‘Search the English language for a word which does _not_ apply to Homer, and you could not fix on a better word than _quaint_’. But I am taken aback at finding him praise the diction of Chapman’s translation in contrast to mine. Now I never open Chapman, without being offended at his pushing Homer’s quaintness most unnecessarily into the grotesque. Thus in Mr Gladstone’s first passage above, where Homer says that the sea ‘sputters out the foam’, Chapman makes it, ‘_all her back in bristles set, spits_ every way _her_ foam’, obtruding what may remind one of a cat or a stoat. I hold _sputter_ to be epical[44], because it is strong; but _spit_ is feeble and mean. In passing, I observe that the universal praise given to Chapman as ‘Homeric’ (a praise which I have too absolutely repeated, perhaps through false shame of depreciating my only rival) is a testimony to me that I rightly appreciate Homeric style; for my style is Chapman’s softened, purged of conceits and made far more melodious. Mr Arnold leaves me to wonder, how, with his disgust at me, he can avoid feeling tenfold disgust at Chapman; and to wonder also what he _means_, by so blankly contradicting my statement that Homer is quaint; and why he so vehemently resents it. He does not vouchsafe to me or to his readers one particle of disproof or of explanation.

I regard it as quaint in Homer to call Juno _white-arm’d goddess_ and _large-ey’d_. (I have not rendered βοῶπις _ox-ey’d_, because in a case of doubt I shrank to obtrude anything so grotesque to us.) It is quaint to say, ‘the lord of bright-haired Juno lightens’ for ‘it lightens’; or ‘my heart in my _shaggy_ bosom is divided’, for ‘I doubt’: quaint to call waves _wet_, milk _white_, blood _dusky_, horses _singlehoofed_, a hero’s hand _broad_, words _winged_, Vulcan _Lobfoot_ (Κυλλοποδίων), a maiden _fair-ankled_, the Greeks _wellgreav’d_, a spear _longshadowy_, battle and council _man-ennobling_, one’s knees _dear_, and many other epithets. Mr Arnold most gratuitously asserts that the sense of these had evaporated to the Athenians. If that were true, it would not signify to this argument. Δαιμόνιος (possessed by an elf or dæmon) so lost its sense in Attic talk, that although Æschylus has it in its true meaning, some college tutors (I am told) render ὦ δαιμόνιε in Plato, ‘my very good sir!’ This is surely no good reason for mistranslating the word in Homer. If Mr Arnold could prove (what he certainly cannot) that Sophocles had forgotten the derivation of ἐϋκνημῖδες and ἐϋμμελίης, and understood by the former nothing but ‘full armed’ and by the latter (as he says) nothing but ‘war-like’, this would not justify his blame of me for rendering the words correctly. If the whole Greek nation by long familiarity had become inobservant of Homer’s ‘oddities’ (conceding this for the moment), that also would be no fault of mine. That Homer _is_ extremely peculiar, even if the Greeks had become deadened to the sense of it, the proof on all sides is overpowering.

It is very quaint to say, ‘the outwork (or rampart) of the teeth’ instead of ‘the lips’. If Mr Arnold will call it ‘portentous’ in my English, let him produce some shadow of reason for denying it to be portentous in Greek. Many phrases are so quaint as to be almost untranslatable, as μήστωρ φόβοιο (deviser of fear?) μήστωρ ἀϋτῆς (deviser of outcry?): others are quaint to the verge of being comical, as to call a man an _equipoise_ (ἀτάλαντος) to a god, and to praise eyes for having a _curl_ in them[45]. It is quaint to make Juno call Jupiter αἰνότατε (grimmest? direst?), whether she is in good or bad humour with him, and to call a Vision _ghastly_, when it is sent with a pleasant message. It is astonishingly quaint to tell how many oxen every fringe of Athene’s ægis was worth.—It is quaint to call Patroclus ‘a great simpleton’, for not foreseeing that he would lose his life in rushing to the rescue of his countrymen. (I cannot receive Mr Arnold’s suggested Biblical correction ‘Thou fool’! which he thinks grander: first, because grave moral rebuke is utterly out of place; secondly, because the Greek cannot mean this;—it means infantine simplicity, and has precisely the colour of the word which I have used.)—It is quaint to say: ‘Patroclus kindled a great fire, _godlike man_’! or, ‘Automedon held up the meat, _divine_ Achilles slic’d it’: quaint to address a young friend as ‘Oh[46] pippin’! or ‘Oh softheart’! or ‘Oh pet’! whichever is the true translation. It is quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring, Ulysses to a pet ram, Agamemnon in two lines to three gods, and in the third line to a bull; the Myrmidons to wasps, Achilles to a grampus chasing little fishes, Antilochus to a wolf which kills a dog and runs away. Menelaus striding over Patroclus’s body to a heifer defending her first-born. It is quaint to say that Menelaus was as brave as a bloodsucking fly, that Agamemnon’s sobs came thick as flashes of lightning; and that the Trojan mares, while running, groaned like overflowing rivers. All such similes come from a mind quick to discern similarities, but _very dull to feel incongruities_; unaware therefore that it is on a verge where the sublime easily turns into the ludicrous; a mind and heart inevitably quaint to the very core. What is it in Vulcan, when he would comfort his mother under Jupiter’s threat, to make jokes about the severe mauling which he himself formerly received, and his terror lest she should be now beaten? Still more quaint (if _rollicking_ is not the word), is the address by which Jupiter tries to ingratiate himself with Juno: viz. he recounts to her all his unlawful amours, declaring that in none of them was he so smitten as now. I have not enough of the γενναῖος εὐηθεία, the barbarian simple-heartedness, needed by a reader of Homer, to get through this speech with gravity. What shall I call it, certainly much worse than quaint, that the poet adds: Jupiter was more enamoured than at his _stolen_ embrace in their first bed ‘secretly from their dear parents’? But to develop Homer’s inexhaustible quaintnesses, of which Mr Arnold denies the existence, seems to me to need a long treatise. It is not to be expected, that one who is blind to superficial facts so very prominent as those which I have recounted, should retain any delicate perception of the highly coloured, intense, and very eccentric diction of Homer, even if he has ever understood it, which he forces me to doubt. He sees nothing ‘odd’ in κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, or in κυνόμυια, ‘thou dogfly’! He replaces to his imagination the flesh and blood of the noble barbarian by a dim feeble spiritless outline.

I have not adduced, in proof of Homer’s quaintness, the monstrous simile given to us in Iliad 13, 754; viz. Hector ‘darted forward screaming like a snowy mountain, and flew through the Trojans and allies’: for I cannot believe that the poet wrote anything so absurd. Rather than admit this, I have suggested that the text is corrupt, and that for ὄρεϊ νιφόεντι we should read ὀρνέῳ θύοντι, ‘darted forth screaming _like a raging bird_’. Yet, as far as I know, I am the first man that has here impugned the text. Mr Brandreth is faithful in his rendering, except that he says _shouting_ for _screaming_:

‘He said; and like a snowy mountain, rush’d Shouting; and flew through Trojans and allies.’

Chapman, Cowper, and Pope strain and twist the words to an impossible sense, putting in something about _white plume_, which they fancy suggested a snowy mountain; but they evidently accept the Greek as it stands, unhesitatingly. I claim this phenomenon in proof that to all commentators and interpreters hitherto Homer’s quaintness has been such an _axiom_, that they have even acquiesced unsuspiciously in an extravagance which goes far beyond oddity. Moreover the reader may augur by my opposite treatment of the passage, with what discernment Mr Arnold condemns me of obtruding upon Homer gratuitous oddities which equal the conceits of Chapman.

But, while thus vindicating _Quaintness_ as an essential quality of Homer, do I regard it as a weakness to be apologized for? Certainly not; for it is a condition of his cardinal excellences. He could not otherwise be _Picturesque_ as he is. So volatile is his mind, that what would be a Metaphor in a more logical and cultivated age, with him riots in Simile which overflows its banks. His similes not merely go beyond[47] the mark of likeness; in extreme cases they even turn into contrariety. If he were not so carried away by his illustration, as to forget what he is illustrating (which belongs to a quaint mind), he would never paint for us such full and splendid pictures. Where a logical later poet would have said that Menelaus

With _eagle-eye_ survey’d the field,

the mere metaphor contenting him; Homer says:

Gazing around on every side, in fashion of an eagle, Which, of all heaven’s fowl, they say, to scan the earth is keenest: Whose eye, when loftiest he hangs, not the swift hare escapeth, Lurking amid a leaf-clad bush: but straight at it he souseth, Unerring; and with crooked gripe doth quickly rieve its spirit.

I feel this long simile to be a disturbance of the logical balance, such as belongs to the lively eye of the savage, whose observation is intense, his concentration of reasoning powers feeble. Without this, we should never have got anything so picturesque.

Homer never sees things _in the same proportions_ as we see them. To omit his digressions, and what I may call his ‘impertinences’, in order to give to his argument that which Mr Arnold is pleased to call the proper ‘balance’, is to value our own logical minds, more than his picturesque[48] but illogical mind.

Mr Arnold says that I am not quaint, but grotesque, in my rendering of κυνὸς κακομηχάνου. I do not hold the phrase to be quaint: to me it is excessively coarse. When Jupiter calls Juno ‘a bitch’, of course he means a snarling cur; hence my rendering, ‘vixen’ (or she-fox), is there perfect, since we say _vixen_ of an irascible woman. But Helen had no such evil tempers, and beyond a doubt she meant to ascribe impurity to herself. I have twice committed a pious fraud by making her call herself ‘a vixen’, where ‘bitch’ is the only faithful rendering; and Mr Arnold, instead of thanking me for throwing a thin veil over Homer’s deformity, assails me for my phrase as intolerably grotesque.

He further forbids me to invent new compound adjectives, as fair-thron’d, rill-bestream’d; because they strike us as new, though Homer’s epithets (he says) did not so strike the Greeks: hence they derange attention from the main question. I hold this doctrine of his (conceding his fact for a moment) to be destructive of all translation whatever, into prose or poetry. When Homer tells us that Achilles’ horses were munching lotus and parsley, Pope renders it by ‘the horses grazed’, and does not say on what. Using Mr Arnold’s principles, he might defend himself by arguing: ‘The Greeks, being familiar with such horsefood, were not struck by it as new, as my reader would be. I was afraid of telling him _what_ the horses were eating, lest it should derange the balance of his mind, and injuriously divert him from the main idea of the sentence’. But, I find, readers are indignant on learning Pope’s suppression: they feel that he has defrauded them of a piece of interesting information.—In short, how _can_ an Englishman read any Greek composition and be affected by it as Greeks were? In a piece of Euripides my imagination is caught by many things, which he never intended or calculated for the prominence which they actually get in my mind. This or that absurdity in mythology, which passed with him as matter of course, may monopolize my main attention. Our minds are not passive recipients of this or that poet’s influence; but the poet is the material on which our minds actively work. If an unlearned reader thinks it very ‘odd’ of Homer (the first time he hears it) to call Aurora ‘fair-thron’d’, so does a boy learning Greek think it odd to call her εὔθρονος. Mr Arnold ought to blot every odd Homeric epithet out of his _Greek_ Homer (or never lend the copy to a youthful learner) if he desires me to expunge ‘fair-thron’d’ from the translation. Nay, I think he should conceal that the Morning was esteemed as a goddess, though she had no altars or sacrifice. It is _all_ odd. But that is just why people want to read an English Homer,—to know all his oddities, exactly as learned men do. He is the phenomenon to be studied. His peculiarities, pleasant or unpleasant, are to be made known, precisely because of his great eminence and his substantial deeply seated worth. Mr Arnold writes like a timid biographer, fearful to let too much of his friend come out. So much as to the substance. As to mere words, here also I hold the very reverse of Mr Arnold’s doctrine. I do not feel free to translate οὐρανομήκης by ‘heaven-kissing’, precisely _because_ Shakspeare has used the last word. It is his property, as ἐϋκνημῖδες, ἐϋμμελίης, κυδιάνειρα, etc., are Homer’s property. I could not use it without being felt to _quote_ Shakspeare, which would be highly inappropriate in a Homeric translation. But _if_ nobody had ever yet used the phrase ‘heaven-kissing’ (or if it were current without any proprietor) _then_ I should be quite free to use it as a rendering of οὐρανομήκης. I cannot assent to a critic killing the vital powers of our tongue. If Shakspeare might invent the compound ‘heaven-kissing’, or ‘man-ennobling’, so might William Wordsworth or Matthew Arnold; and so might I. Inspiration is not dead, nor yet is the English language.

Mr Arnold is slow to understand what I think very obvious. Let me then put a case. What if I were to scold a missionary for rendering in Feejee the phrase ‘kingdom of heaven’ and ‘Lamb of God’ accurately; also ‘saints’ and other words _characteristic of the New Testament_? I might urge against him: ‘This and that sounds very _odd_ to the Feejees: that cannot be right, for it did _not_ seem odd to the Nicene bishops. The latter had forgotten that βασιλεία meant “kingdom”; they took the phrase “kingdom of God” collectively to mean “the Church”. The phrase did not surprise them. As to “Lambs”, the Feejees are not accustomed to sacrifice, and cannot be expected to know of themselves what “Lamb of God” means, as Hebrews did. The courtiers of Constantine thought it very natural to be called ἅγιοι, for they were accustomed to think every baptised person ἅγιος; but to the baptised courtiers of Feejee it really seems very _odd_ to be called _saints_. You disturb the balance of their judgment’.

The missionary might reply: ‘You seemed to be ashamed of the oddities of the Gospel. I am not. They grow out of its excellences and cannot be separated. By avoiding a few eccentric phrases you will do little to remove the deep-seated eccentricity of its very essence. Odd and eccentric it will remain, unless you despoil it of its heart, and reduce it to a fashionable philosophy’. And just so do I reply to Mr Arnold. The Homeric style (whether it be that of an individual or of an age) is peculiar, is ‘odd’, if Mr Arnold like the word, to the very core. Its eccentricities in epithet are mere efflorescences of its essential eccentricity. If Homer could cry out to us, I doubt not he would say, as Oliver Cromwell to the painter, ‘Paint me just I am, _wart and all_’: but if the true Homer could reappear, I am sure Mr Arnold would start from him just as a bishop of Rome from a fisherman apostle. If a translator of the Bible honours the book by his close rendering of its characteristics, however ‘odd’, so do I honour Homer by the same. Those characteristics, the moment I produce them, Mr Arnold calls _ignoble_. Well: be it so; but I am not to blame for them. They exist whether Mr Arnold likes them or not.

I will here observe that he bids me paraphrase τανύπεπλος (trailing-robed) into something like, ‘Let gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping by’. I deliberately judge, that to paraphrase an otiose epithet is the very worst thing that can be done: to omit it entirely would be better. I object even to Mr Gladstone’s

... whom Leto bare, Leto with the flowing hair.

For the repetition overdoes the prominence of the epithet. Still more extravagant is Mr Arnold in wishing me to turn ‘single-hoofed horses’ in to ‘something which _as little surprises us_ as “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds”’: p. 96. To reproduce Shakspeare would be in any case a ‘surprising’ mode of translating Homer: but the principle which changes ‘single-hoofed’ into a different epithet which the translator thinks _better_, is precisely that which for more than two centuries has made nearly all English translation worthless. To throw the poet into your crucible, and bring out old Pelias young, is not a hopeful process. I had thought, the manly taste of this day had outgrown the idea that a translator’s business is to melt up the old coin and stamp it with a modern image. I am wondering that I should have to write against such notions: I would not take the trouble, only that they come against me from an Oxford Professor of Poetry.

At the same time, his doctrine, as I have said, goes far beyond compound epithets. Whether I say ‘motley-helmèd Hector’ or ‘Hector of the motley helm’, ‘silver-footed Thetis’ or ‘Thetis of the silver foot’, ‘man-ennobling combat’ or ‘combat which ennobles man’, the novelty is so nearly on a par, that he cannot condemn one and justify the other on this score. Even Pope falls far short of the false taste which would plane down every Homeric prominence: for he prizes an elegant epithet like ‘silver-footed’, however new and odd.

From such a Homer as Mr Arnold’s specimens and principles would give us, no one could _learn_ anything; no one could have any motive for reading the translation. He smooths down the stamp of Homer’s coin, till nothing is left even for microscopic examination. When he forbids me (p. 96) to let my reader know that Homer calls horses ‘single-hoofed’, of course he would suppress also the epithets ‘white milk’, ‘dusky blood’, ‘dear knees’, ‘dear life’, etc. His process obliterates everything characteristic, great or small.

Mr Arnold condemns my translating certain names of horses. He says (p. 58): ‘Mr Newman calls Xanthus _Chesnut_; as he calls Balius _Spotted_ and Podarga _Spry-foot_: which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale _Mdelle. Rossignol_, or Mr Bright _M. Clair_’. He is very wanting in discrimination. If I had translated Hector into _Possessor_ or Agamemnon into _Highmind_, his censure would be just. A Miss White may be a brunette, a Miss Brown may be a blonde: we utter the proper names of men and women without any remembrance of their intrinsic meaning. But it is different with many names of domestic animals. We never call a dog _Spot_, unless he is spotted; nor without consciousness that the name expresses his peculiarity. No one would give to a black horse the name Chesnut; nor, if he had called a chesnut horse by the name Chesnut, would he ever forget the meaning of the name while he used it. The Greeks called a chesnut horse _xanthos_ and a spotted horse _balios_; therefore, until Mr Arnold proves the contrary, I believe that they never read the names of Achilles’ two horses without a sense of their meaning. Hence the names ought to be translated; while Hector and Laomedon ought not. The same reasoning applies to Podarga, though I do not certainly understand ἀργός. I have taken it to mean _sprightly_.