Part 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

πέπλον μὲν κατέχευεν ἑανὸν πατρὸς ἐτ’ οὔδει?

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

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

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

and in North’s Plutarch,

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

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

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

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

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

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