Part 11

Mr Arnold further asserts, that Homer is never ‘garrulous’. Allowing that too many others agree with me, he attributes our error to giving too much weight to a sentence in Horace! I admire Horace as an ode-writer, but I do not revere him as a critic, any more than as a moral philosopher. I say that Homer is garrulous, because I see and feel it. Mr Arnold puts me into a most unwelcome position. I have a right to say, I have some enthusiasm for Homer. In the midst of numerous urgent calls of duty and taste, I devoted every possible quarter of an hour for two years and a half to translate the Iliad, toiling unremittingly in my vacations and in my walks, and going to large expenses of money, in order to put the book before the unlearned; and this, though I am not a Professor of Poetry nor even of Greek. Yet now I am forced to appear as Homer’s disparager and accuser! But if Homer were always a poet, he could not be, what he is, so many other things beside poet. As the Egyptians paint in their tombs processes of art, not because they are beautiful or grand, but from a mere love of imitating; so Homer narrates perpetually from a mere love of chatting. In how thoroughly Egyptian a way does he tell the process of cutting up an ox and making _kebâb_; the process of bringing a boat to anchor and carefully putting by the tackle; the process of taking out a shawl from a chest, where it lies at the very bottom! With what glee he repeats the secret talk of the gods; and can tell all about the toilet of Juno. Every particular of trifling actions comes out with him, as, the opening of a door or box with a key. He tells who made Juno’s earrings or veil or the shield of Ajax, the history of Agamemnon’s breast-plate, and in what detail a hero puts on his pieces of armour. I would not press the chattiness of Pandarus, Glaucus, Nestor, Æneas, in the midst of battle; I might press his description of wounds. Indeed I have said enough, and more than enough, against Mr Arnold’s novel, unsupported, paradoxical assertion.—But this is connected with another subject. I called Homer’s manner ‘direct’: Mr Arnold (if I understand) would supersede this by his own epithet ‘rapid’. But I cannot admit the exchange: Homer is often the opposite of rapid. Amplification is his characteristic, as it must be of every improvisatore, every popular orator: condensation indeed is improper for anything but written style; written to be read privately. But I regard as Homer’s worst defect, his lingering over scenes of endless carnage and painful wounds. He knows to half an inch where one hero hits another and how deep. They arm: they approach: they encounter: we have to listen to stereotype details again and again. Such a style is anything but ‘rapid’. Homer’s garrulity often leads him into it; yet he can do far better, as in a part of the fight over Patroclus’s body, and other splendid passages.

Garrulity often vents itself in expletives. Mr Arnold selects for animadversion this line of mine (p. 41),

‘A thousand fires along the plain, _I say_, that night were gleaming’.

He says: ‘This may be the genuine style of ballad poetry, but it is _not_ the style of Homer’. I reply; my use of expletives is moderate indeed compared to Homer’s. Mr Arnold writes, as if quite unaware that such words as the intensely prosaic ἄρα, and its abbreviations ἂρ, ῥα, with τοι, τε, δὴ, μάλα, ἦ, ἦ ῥα νυ, περ, overflow in epic style; and that a pupil who has mastered the very copious stock of Attic particles, is taken quite aback by the extravagant number in Homer. Our expletives are generally more offensive, because longer. My principle is, to admit only such expletives as _add energy_, and savour of antiquity. To the feeble expletives of mean ditties I am not prone. I once heard from an eminent counsellor the first lesson of young lawyers, in the following doggerel:

He who holds his lands in fee, Need neither quake nor quiver: For I humbly conceive, look ye, do ye see? He holds his lands for ever.

The ‘humbly conceiving’ certainly outdoes Homer. Yet if the poet had chosen (as he _might_ have chosen) to make Polydamas or Glaucus say:

Ὅστις ἐπετράφθη τέμενος πίστει βασιλῆος, φημί τοι, οὗτος ἀνὴρ οὔτ’ ἂρ τρέμει οὔτε φοβεῖται· δὴ μάλα γάρ ῥα ἑὰς κρατέοι κεν ἐσαιὲν ἀρούρας:

I rather think the following would be a fair prose rendering: ‘Whoso hath been entrusted with a demesne under pledge with the king (I tell you); this man neither trembleth (you see) nor feareth: for (look ye!) he (verily) may hold (you see) his lands for ever’.

Since Mr Arnold momentarily appeals to me on the chasm between Attic and Homeric Greek, I turn the last piece into a style _far less_ widely separated from modern English than Homer from Thucydides.

Dat mon, quhich hauldeth Kyngis-af Londis yn féo, niver (I tell ’e) feereth aught; sith hee Doth hauld hys londis yver.

I certainly do _not_ recommend this style to a translator, yet it would have its advantage. Even with a smaller change of dialect it would aid us over Helen’s self-piercing denunciation, ‘approaching to Christian penitence’, as some have judged it.

Quoth she, I am a gramsome bitch, If woman bitch may bee.

But in behalf of the poet I must avow: when one considers how dramatic he is, it is marvellous how little in him can offend. For this very reason he is above needing tender treatment from a translator, but can bear faithful rendering, not only better than Shakspeare but better than Pindar or Sophocles.

When Mr Arnold denies that Homer is ever prosaic or homely, his own specimens of translation put me into despair of convincing him; for they seem to me a very anthology of prosaic flatness. Phrases, which are not in themselves bad, if they were elevated by something in the syntax or rhythm distinguishing them from prose, become in him prose out-and-out. ‘To Peleus why did we give you, to a mortal’? ‘In the plain _there_ were kindled a thousand fires; by each one _there_ sate fifty men’. [At least he might have left out the expletive.] ‘By their chariots stood the steeds, and champed the white barley; while their masters sate by the fire and waited for morning’. ‘Us, whose portion for ever Zeus has made it, from youth _right up_ to age, to be winding skeins of grievous wars, till _every soul of us_ perish’. The words which I here italicize, seem to me below noble ballad. What shall I say of ‘I bethink me what the Trojan men and Trojan women might murmur’. ‘Sacred Troy shall _go to destruction_’. ‘Or bear pails to the well of Messeϊs’. ‘See, the wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain of the horsemen of Troy, _in the day they fought_ for their city’, for, ‘_who was_ captain in the day _on which_——’. ‘Let me be dead and the earth be mounded (?) above me, ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity[49] _told of_’. ‘By no slow pace or want of swiftness _of ours_[50] did the Trojans _obtain to strip_ the arms of Patroclus’. ‘Here I am destined to perish, far from my father and mother dear; _for all that_, I will not’, etc. ‘Dare they not enter the fight, or stand in the council of heroes, _all_ for fear of the shame and the _taunts my crime_ has awakened?’ One who regards all this to be high poetry,—emphatically ‘noble’,—may well think τὸν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος or ‘with him there came forty black galleys’, or the broiling of the beef collops, to be such. When Mr Arnold regards ‘no want of swiftness of _ours_’; ‘for all that’, in the sense of nevertheless; ‘_all_ for fear’, _i.e._ because of the fear; _not_ to be prosaic: my readers, however ignorant of Greek, will dispense with further argument from me. Mr Arnold’s inability to discern prose in Greek is not to be trusted.

But I see something more in this phenomenon. Mr Arnold is an original poet; and, as such, certainly uses a diction far more elevated than he here puts forward to represent Homer. He calls his Homeric diction _plain_ and _simple_. Interpreting these words from the contrast of Mr Arnold’s own poems, I claim his suffrage as on my side, that Homer is often in a style much lower than what the moderns esteem to be poetical. But I protest, that he carries it _very much_ too far, and levels the noblest down to the most negligent style of Homer. The poet is _not_ always so ‘ignoble’, as the unlearned might infer from my critic’s specimens. He never drops so low as Shakspeare; yet if he were as sustained as Virgil or Milton, he would with it lose his vast superiority over these, his rich variety. That the whole first book of the Iliad is pitched lower than the rest, though it has vigorous descriptions, is denoted by the total absence of simile in it: for Homer’s kindling is always indicated by simile. The second book rises on the first, until the catalogue of ships, which (as if to atone for its flatness) is ushered in by five consecutive similes. In the third and fourth books the poet continues to rise, and almost culminates in the fifth; but then seems to restrain himself, lest nothing grander be left for Achilles. Although I do not believe in a unity of authorship between the Odyssey and the Iliad, yet in the Iliad itself I see such unity, that I cannot doubt its negligences to be from art. (The monstrous speech of Nestor in the 11th book is a case by itself. About 100 lines have perhaps been added later, for reasons other than literary.) I observe that just before the poet is about to bring out Achilles in his utmost splendour, he has three-quarters of a book comparatively tame, with a ridiculous legend told by Agamemnon in order to cast his own sins upon Fate. If Shakspeare introduces coarse wrangling, buffoonery, or mean superstition, no one claims or wishes this to be in a high diction or tragic rhythm; and why should anyone wish such a thing from Homer or Homer’s translator? I find nothing here in the poet to apologize for; but much cause for indignation, when the unlearned public is misled by translators or by critics to expect delicacy and elegance out of place. But I beg the unlearned to judge for himself whether Homer _can_ have intended such lines as the following for poetry, and whether I am bound to make them any better than I do.

Then visiting he urged each man with words, Mesthles and Glaucus and Medon and Thersilochus And Asteropæus and Deisenor and Hippothoüs And Phorkys and Chromius and Ennomus the augur.

He has lines in plenty as little elevated. If they came often in masses, it would be best to translate them into avowed prose: but since gleams of poetry break out amid what is flattest, I have no choice but to imitate Homer in retaining a uniform, but easy and unpretending metre. Mr Arnold calls my metre ‘slip-shod’: if it can rise into grandeur when needful, the epithet is a praise.

Of course I hold the Iliad to be _generally_ noble and grand. Very many of the poet’s conceptions were grand to him, mean to us: especially is he mean and absurd in scenes of conflict between the gods. Besides, he is disgusting and horrible occasionally in word and thought; as when Hecuba wishes to ‘cling on Achilles and eat up his liver’; when (as Jupiter says) Juno would gladly eat Priam’s children raw; when Jupiter hanged Juno up and fastened a pair of anvils to her feet; also in the description of dreadful wounds, and the treatment which (Priam says) dogs give to an old man’s corpse. The descriptions of Vulcan and Thersites are ignoble; so is the mode of mourning for Hector adopted by Priam; so is the treatment of the populace by Ulysses, which does but reflect the manners of the day. I am not now blaming Homer for these things; but I say no treatment can elevate the subject; the translator must not be expected to make noble what is not so intrinsically.

If anyone think that I am disparaging Homer, let me remind him of the horrid grossnesses of Shakspeare, which yet are not allowed to lessen our admiration of Shakspeare’s grandeur. The Homer of the Iliad is morally pure and often very tender; but to expect refinement and universal delicacy of expression in that stage of civilization is quite anachronistic and unreasonable. As in earlier England, so in Homeric Greece, even high poetry partook of the coarseness of society. This was probably inevitable, precisely because Greek epic poetry was so _natural_.

Mr Arnold says that I make Homer’s nobleness _eminently ignoble_. This suggests to me to quote a passage, not because I think myself particularly successful in it, but because the poet is evidently aiming to be grand, when his mightiest hero puts forth mighty boastings, offensive to some of the gods. It is the speech of Achilles over the dead body of Asteropæus (Iliad 21, 184). Whether I make it ignoble, by my diction or my metre, the reader must judge.

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_.