Part 13

Another word which has been ill-understood and ill-used, is _dapper_. Of the epithet dappergreav’d for ἐϋκνημὶς I certainly am not enamoured, but I have not yet found a better rendering. It is easier to carp at my phrase, than to suggest a better. The word _dapper_ in Dutch = German _tapfer_; and like the Scotch _braw_ or _brave_ means with us _fine_, _gallant_, _elegant_. I have read the line of an old poet,

The dapper words which lovers use,

for _elegant_, I suppose; and so ‘the dapper does’ and ‘dapper elves’ of Milton must refer to elegance or refined beauty. What is there[54] ignoble in such a word? ‘Elegant’ and ‘pretty’ are inadmissible in epic poetry: ‘dapper’ is logically equivalent, and _has the epic colour_. Neither ‘fair’ nor ‘comely’ here suit. As to the school translation of ‘wellgreav’d’, every common Englishman on hearing the sound receives it as ‘wellgrieved’, and to me it is very unpleasing. A part of the mischief, a large part of it, is in the word _greave_; for _dapper-girdled_ is on the whole well-received. But what else can we say for _greave_? leggings? gambados?

Much perhaps remains to be learnt concerning Homer’s perpetual epithets. My very learned colleague Goldstücke, Professor of Sanscrit, is convinced that the epithet _cow-eyed_ of the Homeric Juno is an echo of the notion of Hindoo poets, that (if I remember his statement) ‘the sun-beams are the _cows_ of heaven’. The sacred qualities of the Hindoo cow are perhaps not to be forgotten. I have myself been struck by the phrase διϊπετέος ποτάμοιο as akin to the idea that the Ganges falls from Mount Meru, the Hindoo Olympus. Also the meaning of two other epithets has been revealed to me from the pictures of Hindoo ladies. First, _curl-eyed_, to which I have referred above; secondly, _rosy-fingered Aurora_. For Aurora is an ‘Eastern lady’; and, as such, has the tips of her fingers dyed rosy-red, whether by henna or by some more brilliant drug. Who shall say that the kings and warriors of Homer do not derive from the East their epithet ‘Jove-nurtured’? or that this or that goddess is not called ‘golden-throned’ or ‘fair-throned’ in allusion to Assyrian sculptures or painting, as Rivers probably drew their later poetical attribute ‘bull-headed’ from the sculpture of fountains? It is a familiar remark, that Homer’s poetry presupposes a vast pre-existing art and material. Much in him was traditional. Many of his wild legends came from Asia. He is to us much beside a poet; and that a translator should assume to cut him down to the standard of modern taste, is a thought which all the higher minds of this age have outgrown. How much better is that reverential Docility, which with simple and innocent wonder, receives the oddest notions of antiquity as material of instruction yet to be revealed, than the self-complacent Criticism, which pronouncing everything against modern taste to be grotesque[55] and contemptible, squares the facts to its own ‘Axioms’! _Homer is noble: but this or that epithet is not noble: therefore we must explode it from Homer!_ I value, I maintain, I struggle for the ‘high a priori road’ in its own place; but certainly not in historical literature. To read Homer’s own thoughts is to wander in a world abounding with freshness: but if we insist on treading round and round in our own footsteps, we shall never ascend those heights whence the strange region is to be seen. Surely an intelligent learned critic ought to inculcate on the unlearned, that if they would get instruction from Homer, they must not expect to have their ears tickled by a musical sound as of a namby-pamby poetaster; but must look on a metre as doing its duty, when it ‘strings the mind up to the necessary pitch’ in elevated passages; and that instead of demanding of a translator everywhere a rhythmical perfection which perhaps can only be attained by a great sacrifice of higher qualities, they should be willing to submit to a small part of that ruggedness, which Mr Arnold cheerfully bears in Homer himself through the loss of the Digamma. And now, for a final protest. To be _stately_ is not to be _grand_. Nicolas of Russia may have been stately like Cowper, Garibaldi is grand like the true Homer. A diplomatic address is stately; it is not grand, nor often noble. To expect a translation of Homer to be _pervadingly elegant_, is absurd; Homer is not such, any more than is the side of an Alpine mountain. The elegant and the picturesque are seldom identical, however much of delicate beauty may be interstudded in the picturesque; but this has always got plenty of what is shaggy and uncouth, without which contrast the full delight of beauty would not be attained. I think Moore in his characteristic way tells of a beauty

Shining on, shining on, by no shadow made tender, Till love falls asleep in the sameness of splendour.

Such certainly is not Homer’s. His beauty, when at its height, is _wild_ beauty: it smells of the mountain and of the sea. If he be compared to a noble animal, it is not to such a spruce rubbed-down Newmarket racer as our smooth translators would pretend, but to a wild horse of the Don Cossacks: and if I, instead of this, present to the reader nothing but a Dandie Dinmont’s pony, this, as a first approximation, is a valuable step towards the true solution.

Before the best translation of the Iliad of which our language is capable can be produced, the English public has to unlearn the false notion of Homer which his _deliberately faithless_ versifiers have infused. Chapman’s conceits unfit his translation for instructing the public, even if his rhythm ‘jolted’ less, if his structure were simpler, and his dialect more intelligible. My version, if allowed to be read, will prepare the public to receive a version better than mine. I regard it as a question about to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic _landis_, _houndis_, _hartis_, etc., instead of our modern unmelodious _lands_, _hounds_, _harts_; whether the _ye_ or _y_ before the past participle may not be restored; the want of which confounds that participle with the past tense. Even the final -en of the plural of verbs (we dancen, they singen, etc.) still subsists in Lancashire. It deserves consideration whether by a _few_ such slight grammatical retrogressions into antiquity a translator of Homer might not add much melody to his poem and do good service to the language.

Footnote 35:

He attacks the same line also in p. 44; but I do not claim this as a mark, how free I am from the fault.

Footnote 36:

If I had used such a double dative, as ‘to Peleus to a mortal’, what would he have said of my syntax?

Footnote 37:

Ballad-_manner_! The prevalent ballad-_metre_ is the Common Metre of our Psalm tunes: and yet he assumes that whatever is in this metre must be on the same level. I have professed (Pref. p. x) that our _existing_ old ballads are ‘poor and mean’, and are not my pattern.

Footnote 38:

He has also overlooked the misprint _Trojans_, where I wrote _Troïans_ (in three syllables), and has thus spoiled one verse out of the five.

Footnote 39:

As a literary curiosity I append the sentence of a learned reviewer concerning this metre of Campbell. ‘It is a metre fit for introducing anything or translating anything; a metre that _nothing can elevate, or degrade, or improve, or spoil_; in which all subjects will sound alike. A theorem of Euclid, a leading article from the _Times_, a dialogue from the last new novel, could all be reduced to it with the slightest possible verbal alteration’. [Quite true of Greek hexameter or Shakspeare’s line. It is a _virtue_ in the metres]. ‘To such a mill all would be grist that came near it, and _in no grain that had once passed through it would human ingenuity ever detect again a characteristic quality_’. This writer is a stout maintainer that English ballad metre is the right one for translating Homer: only, somehow, he shuts his eyes to the fact that Campbell’s _is_ ballad metre! Sad to say, extravagant and absurd assertions, like these, though anonymous, can, by a parade of learning, do much damage to the sale of a book in verse.

Footnote 40:

I think he has mistaken the _summit_ of the wave for a _headland_, and has made a single description into two, by the word _Or_: but I now confine my regard to the metre and general effect of the style.

Footnote 41:

_Companion_, in four syllables, is in Shakspeare’s style; with whom habitually the termination _-tion_ is two.

Footnote 42:

By corrupting the past tenses of _welisso_ into a false similarity to the past tenses of _elelizo_, the old editors superimposed a new and false sense on the latter verb; which still holds its place in our dictionaries, as it deceived the Greeks themselves.

Footnote 43:

That λλ _in Attic_ was sounded like French _l mouillée_, is judged probable by the learned writer of the article L (Penny Cyclop.), who urges that μᾶλλον is for μάλιον, and compares φυλλο with _folio_, αλλο with _alio_, ἁλλ with _sali_.

Footnote 44:

Men who can bear ‘belch’ in poetry, nowadays pretend that ‘sputter’ is indelicate. They find Homer’s ἀποπτύει to be ‘elegant’, but _sputter_—not! ‘No one would guess from Mr Newman’s coarse phrases how _elegant_ is Homer’!!

Footnote 45:

In a Note to my translation (overlooked by more than one critic) I have explained _curl-ey’d_, carefully, but not very accurately perhaps; as I had not before me the picture of the Hindoo lady to which I referred. The whole _upper eyelid_, when _open_, may be called the curl; for it is shaped like a buffalo’s horns. This accounts for ἑλικοβλέφαρος, ‘having a curly eye_lid_’.

Footnote 46:

I thought I had toned it down pretty well, in rendering it ‘O gentle friend’! Mr Arnold rebukes me for this, without telling me what I ought to say, or what is my fault. One thing is certain, that the Greek is most _odd_ and peculiar.

Footnote 47:

In the noble simile of the sea-tide, quoted p. 138 above, only the two first of its five lines are to the purpose. Mr Gladstone, seduced by rhyme, has so tapered off the point of the similitude, that only a microscopic reader will see it.

Footnote 48:

It is very singular that Mr Gladstone should imagine such a poet to have no eye for colour. I totally protest against his turning Homer’s paintings into leadpencil drawings. I believe that γλαυκὸς is grey (silvergreen), χάροψ blue; and that πρασινὸς, ‘leek-colour’, was too mean a word for any poets, early or late, to use for ‘green’, therefore χλωρὸς does duty for it. Κῦμα πορφύρεον is surely ‘the purple wave’, and ἰοειδέα πόντον ‘the violet sea’.

Footnote 49:

He pares down ἑλκηθμοῖο (the dragging away of a woman by the hair) into ‘captivity’! Better surely is my ‘ignoble’ version: ‘Ere-that I see thee _dragg’d away_, and hear thy shriek of anguish’.

Footnote 50:

He means _ours_ for two syllables. ‘Swiftness of ours’ is surely ungrammatical. ‘A galley of my own’ = one of my own galleys; but ‘a father of mine’, is absurd, since each has but one father. I confess I have myself been seduced into writing ‘those two eyes of his’, to avoid ‘_those his_ two eyes’: but I have since condemned and altered it.

Footnote 51:

Of course no peculiarity of phrase has _the effect_ of peculiarity on a man who has imperfect acquaintance with the delicacies of a language; who, for instance, thinks that ἑλκηθμὸς means δουλεία.

Footnote 52:

Ἐλλὸς needs light and gives none. Benfey suggests that it is for ἐνεὸς, as ἄλλος, _alius_, for Sanscrit _anya_. He with me refers ἔλλοψ to λέπω. Cf. _squamigeri_ in Lucretius.

Footnote 53:

I do not see that Mr Arnold has any right to reproach _me_, because _he_ does not know Spenser’s word ‘bragly’ (which I may have used twice in the Iliad), or Dryden’s word ‘plump’, for a mass. The former is so near in sound to _brag_ and _braw_, that an Englishman who is once told that it means ‘proudly fine’, ought thenceforward to find it very intelligible: the latter is a noble modification of the vulgar _lump_. That he can carp as he does against these words and against _bulkin_ (= young bullock) as unintelligible, is a testimony how little I have imposed of difficulty on my readers. Those who know _lambkin_ cannot find _bulkin_ very hard. Since writing the above, I see a learned writer in the Philological Museum illustrates ἴλη by the old English phrase ‘a plump of spears’.

Footnote 54:

I observe that Lord Lyttelton renders Milton’s _dapper elf_ by ῥαδινὰ, ‘softly moving’.

Footnote 55:

Mr Arnold calls it an unfortunate sentence of mine: ‘I ought to be quaint; I ought not to be grotesque’. I am disposed to think him right, but for reasons very opposite to those which he assigns. I have ‘unfortunately’ given to querulous critics a cue for attacking me unjustly. I should rather have said: ‘We ought to be _quaint_, and not to shrink from that which the fastidious modern will be sure to call _grotesque_ in English, when he is too blunted by habit, or too poor a scholar to discern it in the Greek’.

Last Words on Translating Homer A Reply to Francis W. Newman By Matthew Arnold

‘Multi, qui persequuntur me, et tribulant me: a testimoniis non declinavi.’

Buffon, the great French naturalist, imposed on himself the rule of steadily abstaining from all answer to attacks made upon him. ‘Je n’ai jamais répondu à aucune critique’, he said to one of his friends who, on the occasion of a certain criticism, was eager to take up arms in his behalf; ‘je n’ai jamais répondu à aucune critique, et je garderai le même silence sur celle-ci’. On another occasion, when accused of plagiarism, and pressed by his friends to answer, ‘Il vaut mieux’, he said, ‘laisser ces mauvaises gens dans l’incertitude’. Even when reply to an attack was made successfully, he disapproved of it, he regretted that those he esteemed should make it. Montesquieu, more sensitive to criticism than Buffon, had answered, and successfully answered, an attack made upon his great work, the _Esprit des Lois_, by the _Gazetier Janséniste_. This Jansenist Gazetteer was a periodical of those times, a periodical such as other times, also, have occasionally seen, very pretentious, very aggressive, and, when the point to be seized was at all a delicate one, very apt to miss it. ‘Notwithstanding this example’, said Buffon, who, as well as Montesquieu, had been attacked by the Jansenist Gazetteer, ‘notwithstanding this example, I think I may promise my course will be different. I shall not answer a single word’.

And to anyone who has noticed the baneful effects of the controversy, with all its train of personal rivalries and hatreds, on men of letters or men of science; to anyone who has observed how it tends to impair, not only their dignity and repose, but their productive force, their genuine activity; how it always checks the free play of the spirit, and often ends by stopping it altogether; it can hardly seem doubtful that the rule thus imposed on himself by Buffon was a wise one. His own career, indeed, admirably shows the wisdom of it. That career was as glorious as it was serene; but it owed to its serenity no small part of its glory. The regularity and completeness with which he gradually built up the great work which he had designed, the air of equable majesty which he shed over it, struck powerfully the imagination of his contemporaries, and surrounded Buffon’s fame with a peculiar respect and dignity. ‘He is’, said Frederick the Great of him, ‘the man who has best deserved the great celebrity which he has acquired’. And this regularity of production, this equableness of temper, he maintained by his resolute disdain of personal controversy.

Buffon’s example seems to me worthy of all imitation, and in my humble way I mean always to follow it. I never have replied, I never will reply, to any literary assailant; in such encounters tempers are lost, the world laughs, and truth is not served. Least of all should I think of using this Chair as a place from which to carry on such a conflict. But when a learned and estimable man thinks he has reason to complain of language used by me in this Chair, when he attributes to me intentions and feelings towards him which are far from my heart, I owe him some explanation, and I am bound, too, to make the explanation as public as the words which gave offence. This is the reason why I revert once more to the subject of translating Homer. But being thus brought back to that subject, and not wishing to occupy you solely with an explanation which, after all, is Mr Newman’s affair and mine, not the public’s, I shall take the opportunity, not certainly to enter into any conflict with anyone, but to try to establish our old friend, the coming translator of Homer, yet a little firmer in the positions which I hope we have now secured for him; to protect him against the danger of relaxing, in the confusion of dispute, his attention to those matters which alone I consider important for him; to save him from losing sight, in the dust of the attacks delivered over it, of the real body of Patroclus. He will, probably, when he arrives, requite my solicitude very ill, and be in haste to disown his benefactor: but my interest in him is so sincere that I can disregard his probable ingratitude.

First, however, for the explanation. Mr Newman has published a reply to the remarks which I made on his translation of the _Iliad_. He seems to think that the respect which at the outset of those remarks I professed for him must have been professed ironically; he says that I use ‘forms of attack against him which he does not know how to characterize’; that I ‘speak scornfully’ of him, treat him with ‘gratuitous insult, gratuitous rancour’; that I ‘propagate slanders’ against him, that I wish to ‘damage him with my readers’, to ‘stimulate my readers to despise’ him. He is entirely mistaken. I respect Mr Newman sincerely; I respect him as one of the few learned men we have, one of the few who love learning for its own sake; this respect for him I had before I read his translation of the _Iliad_, I retained it while I was commenting on that translation, I have not lost it after reading his reply. Any vivacities of expression which may have given him pain I sincerely regret, and can only assure him that I used them without a thought of insult or rancour. When I took the liberty of creating the verb _to Newmanize_, my intentions were no more rancorous than if I had said to _Miltonize_; when I exclaimed, in my astonishment at his vocabulary, ‘With whom can Mr Newman have lived’? I meant merely to convey, in a familiar form of speech, the sense of bewilderment one has at finding a person to whom words one thought all the world knew seem strange, and words one thought entirely strange, intelligible. Yet this simple expression of my bewilderment Mr Newman construes into an accusation that he is ‘often guilty of keeping low company’, and says that I shall ‘never want a stone to throw at him’. And what is stranger still, one of his friends gravely tells me that Mr Newman ‘lived with the fellows of Balliol’. As if that made Mr Newman’s glossary less inexplicable to me! As if he could have got his glossary from the fellows of Balliol! As if I could believe that the members of that distinguished society, of whose discourse, not so many years afterwards, I myself was an unworthy hearer, were in Mr Newman’s time so far removed from the Attic purity of speech which we all of us admired, that when one of them called a calf a _bulkin_, the rest ‘easily understood’ him; or, when he wanted to say that a newspaper-article was ‘proudly fine’, it mattered little whether he said it was that or _bragly_! No; his having lived with the fellows of Balliol does not explain Mr Newman’s glossary to me. I will no longer ask ‘with whom he can have lived’, since that gives him offence; but I must still declare that where he got his test of rarity or intelligibility for words is a mystery to me.

That, however, does not prevent me from entertaining a very sincere respect for Mr Newman, and since he doubts it, I am glad to reiterate my expression of it. But the truth of the matter is this: I unfeignedly admire Mr Newman’s ability and learning; but I think in his translation of Homer he has employed that ability and learning quite amiss. I think he has chosen quite the wrong field for turning his ability and learning to account. I think that in England, partly from the want of an Academy, partly from a national habit of intellect to which that want of an Academy is itself due, there exists too little of what I may call a public force of correct literary opinion, possessing within certain limits a clear sense of what is right and wrong, sound and unsound, and sharply recalling men of ability and learning from any flagrant misdirection of these their advantages. I think, even, that in our country a powerful misdirection of this kind is often more likely to subjugate and pervert opinion than to be checked and corrected by it[56]. Hence a chaos of false tendencies, wasted efforts, impotent conclusions, works which ought never to have been undertaken. Anyone who can introduce a little order into this chaos by establishing in any quarter a single sound rule of criticism, a single rule which clearly marks what is right as right, and what is wrong as wrong, does a good deed; and his deed is so much the better the greater force he counteracts of learning and ability applied to thicken the chaos. Of course no one can be sure that he has fixed any such rules; he can only do his best to fix them; but somewhere or other, in the literary opinion of Europe, if not in the literary opinion of one nation, in fifty years, if not in five, there is a final judgment on these matters, and the critic’s work will at last stand or fall by its true merits.

Meanwhile, the charge of having in one instance misapplied his powers, of having once followed a false tendency, is no such grievous charge to bring against a man; it does not exclude a great respect for himself personally, or for his powers in the happiest manifestations of them. False tendency is, I have said, an evil to which the artist or the man of letters in England is peculiarly prone; but everywhere in our time he is liable to it,—the greatest as well as the humblest. ‘The first beginnings of my _Wilhelm Meister_’, says Goethe, ‘arose out of an obscure sense of the great truth that man will often attempt something of which nature has denied him the proper powers, will undertake and practise something in which he cannot become skilled. An inward feeling warns him to desist’ (yes, but there are, unhappily, cases of absolute judicial blindness!), ‘nevertheless he cannot get clear in himself about it, and is driven along a false road to a false goal, without knowing how it is with him. To this we may refer everything which goes by the name of false tendency, dilettanteism, and so on. A great many men waste in this way the fairest portion of their lives, and fall at last into wonderful delusion’. Yet after all, Goethe adds, it sometimes happens that even on this false road a man finds, not indeed that which he sought, but something which is good and useful for him; ‘like Saul, the son of Kish, who went forth to look for his father’s asses, and found a kingdom’. And thus false tendency as well as true, vain effort as well as fruitful, go together to produce that great movement of life, to present that immense and magic spectacle of human affairs, which from boyhood to old age fascinates the gaze of every man of imagination, and which would be his terror, if it were not at the same time his delight.