Part 17
I, too, have passed her on the hills, Setting her little water-mills By spouts and fountains wild; Such small machinery as she turned, Ere she had wept, ere she had mourned, A young and happy child.
Who does not perceive how the greater fulness and weight of his matter has here compelled the true and feeling poet to adopt a form of more _volume_ than the simple ballad-form?
It is of narrative poetry that I am speaking; the question is about the use of the ballad-form for _this_. I say that for this poetry (when in the grand style, as Homer’s is) the ballad-form is entirely inadequate; and that Homer’s translator must not adopt it, because it even leads him, by its own weakness, away from the grand style rather than towards it. We must remember that the matter of narrative poetry stands in a different relation to the vehicle which conveys it, is not so independent of this vehicle, so absorbing and powerful in itself, as the matter of purely emotional poetry. When there comes in poetry what I may call the _lyrical cry_, this transfigures everything, makes everything grand; the simplest form may be here even an advantage, because the flame of the emotion glows through and through it more easily. To go again for an illustration to Wordsworth; our great poet, since Milton, by his performance, as Keats, I think, is our great poet by his gift and promise; in one of his stanzas to the Cuckoo, we have:
And I can listen to thee yet; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget That golden time again.
Here the lyrical cry, though taking the simple ballad-form, is as grand as the lyrical cry coming in poetry of an ampler form, as grand as the
An innocent life, yet far astray!
of _Ruth_; as the
There is a comfort in the strength of love
of _Michael_. In this way, by the occurrence of this lyrical cry, the ballad-poets themselves rise sometimes, though not so often as one might perhaps have hoped, to the grand style.
O lang, lang may their ladies sit, Wi’ their fans into their hand, Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spence Come sailing to the land.
O lang, lang may the ladies stand, Wi’ their gold combs in their hair, Waiting for their ain dear lords, For they’ll see them nae mair.
But from this impressiveness of the ballad-form, when its subject-matter fills it over and over again, is, indeed, in itself, all in all, one must not infer its effectiveness when its subject-matter is not thus overpowering, in the great body of a narrative.
But, after all, Homer is not a better poet than the balladists, because he has taken in the hexameter a better instrument; he took this instrument because he was a _different_ poet from them; so different, not only so much better, but so essentially different, that he has not to be classed with them at all. Poets receive their distinctive character, not from their subject, but from their application to that subject of the ideas (to quote the _Excursion_)
On God, on Nature, and on human life,
which they have acquired for themselves. In the ballad-poets in general, as in men of a rude and early stage of the world, in whom their humanity is not yet variously and fully developed, the stock of these ideas is scanty, and the ideas themselves not very effective or profound. From them the narrative itself is the great matter, not the spirit and significance which underlies the narrative. Even in later times of richly developed life and thought, poets appear who have what may be called a _balladist’s mind_; in whom a fresh and lively curiosity for the outward spectacle of the world is much more strong than their sense of the inward significance of that spectacle. When they apply ideas to their narrative of human events, you feel that they are, so to speak, travelling out of their own province: in the best of them you feel this perceptibly, but in those of a lower order you feel it very strongly. Even Sir Walter Scott’s efforts of this kind, even, for instance, the
Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
or the
O woman! in our hours of ease,
even these leave, I think, as high poetry, much to be desired; far more than the same poet’s descriptions of a hunt or a battle. But Lord Macaulay’s
Then out spake brave Horatius, The captain of the gate: ‘To all the men upon this earth Death cometh soon or late’.
(and here, since I have been reproached with undervaluing Lord Macaulay’s _Lays of Ancient Rome_, let me frankly say that, to my mind, a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all), I say, Lord Macaulay’s
To all the men upon this earth Death cometh soon or late,
it is hard to read without a cry of pain. But with Homer it is very different. This ‘noble barbarian’, this ‘savage with the lively eye’, whose verse, Mr Newman thinks, would affect us, if we could hear the living Homer, ‘like an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast’, is never more at home, never more nobly himself, than in applying profound ideas to his narrative. As a poet he belongs, narrative as is his poetry, and early as is his date, to an incomparably more developed spiritual and intellectual order than the balladists, or than Scott and Macaulay; he is here as much to be distinguished from them, and in the same way, as Milton is to be distinguished from them. He is, indeed, rather to be classed with Milton than with the balladists and Scott; for what he has in common with Milton, the noble and profound application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic greatness. The most essentially grand and characteristic things of Homer are such things as
ἔτλην δ’, οἷ’ οὔπω τις ἐπιχθόνιος βροτὸς ἂλλος, ἀνδρὸς παιδοφόνοιο ποτὶ στόμα χεῖρ’ ὀρέγεσθαι[67],
or as
καὶ σὲ, γέρον, τὸ πρὶν μὲν ἀκούομεν ὄλβιον εἶναι[68],
or as
ὥς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσιν, ζώειν ἀχνυμένους· αὐτοὶ δὲ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσίν[69],
and of these the tone is given, far better than by anything of the balladists, by such things as the
Io no piangeva: sì dentro impietrai: Piangevan elli ...[70]
of Dante; or the
Fall’n Cherub! to be weak is miserable
of Milton.
I suppose I must, before I conclude, say a word or two about my own hexameters; and yet really, on such a topic, I am almost ashamed to trouble you. From those perishable objects I feel, I can truly say, a most Oriental detachment. You yourselves are witnesses how little importance, when I offered them to you, I claimed for them, how humble a function I designed them to fill. I offered them, not as specimens of a competing translation of Homer, but as illustrations of certain canons which I had been trying to establish for Homer’s poetry. I said that these canons they might very well illustrate by failing as well as by succeeding: if they illustrate them in any manner, I am satisfied. I was thinking of the future translator of Homer, and trying to let him see as clearly as possible what I meant by the combination of characteristics which I assigned to Homer’s poetry, by saying that this poetry was at once rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct in its ideas, and noble in manner. I do not suppose that my own hexameters are rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct in their ideas, and noble in manner; but I am in hopes that a translator, reading them with a genuine interest in his subject, and without the slightest grain of personal feeling, may see more clearly, as he reads them, what I meant by saying that Homer’s poetry is all these. I am in hopes that he may be able to seize more distinctly, when he has before him my
So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of the Xanthus,
or my
Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you?
or my
So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle,
the exact points which I wish him to avoid in Cowper’s
So numerous seemed those fires the banks between,
or in Pope’s
Unhappy coursers of immortal strain,
or in Mr Newman’s
He spake, and, yelling, held a-front his single-hoofed horses.
At the same time there may be innumerable points in mine which he ought to avoid also. Of the merit of his own compositions no composer can be admitted the judge.
But thus humbly useful to the future translator I still hope my hexameters may prove; and he it is, above all, whom one has to regard. The general public carries away little from discussions of this kind, except some vague notion that one advocates English hexameters, or that one has attacked Mr Newman. On the mind of an adversary one never makes the faintest impression. Mr Newman reads all one can say about diction, and his last word on the subject is, that he ‘regards it as a question about to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic _landis_, _houndis_, _hartis_’ (for lands, hounds, harts), and also ‘the final _en_ of the plural of verbs (we _dancen_, they _singen_, etc.), which still subsists in Lancashire’. A certain critic reads all one can say about style, and at the end of it arrives at the inference that, ‘after all, there is some style grander than the grand style itself, since Shakspeare has not the grand manner, and yet has the supremacy over Milton’; another critic reads all one can say about rhythm, and the result is, that he thinks Scott’s rhythm, in the description of the death of Marmion, all the better for being _saccadé_, because the dying ejaculations of Marmion were likely to be ‘jerky’. How vain to rise up early, and to take rest late, from any zeal for proving to Mr Newman that he must not, in translating Homer, say _houndis_ and _dancen_; or to the first of the two critics above quoted, that one poet may be a greater poetical force than another, and yet have a more unequal style; or to the second, that the best art, having to represent the death of a hero, does not set about imitating his dying noises! Such critics, however, provide for an opponent’s vivacity the charming excuse offered by Rivarol for his, when he was reproached with giving offence by it: ‘Ah’! he exclaimed, ‘no one considers how much pain every man of taste has had to _suffer_, before he ever inflicts any’.
It is for the future translator that one must work. The successful translator of Homer will have (or he cannot succeed) that true sense for his subject, and that disinterested love for it, which are, both of them, so rare in literature, and so precious; he will not be led off by any false scent; he will have an eye for the real matter, and where he thinks he may find any indication of this, no hint will be too slight for him, no shade will be too fine, no imperfections will turn him aside, he will go before his adviser’s thought, and help it out with his own. This is the sort of student that a critic of Homer should always have in his thoughts; but students of this sort are indeed rare.
And how, then, can I help being reminded what a student of this sort we have just lost in Mr Clough, whose name I have already mentioned in these lectures? He, too, was busy with Homer; but it is not on that account that I now speak of him. Nor do I speak of him in order to call attention to his qualities and powers in general, admirable as these were. I mention him because, in so eminent a degree, he possessed these two invaluable literary qualities, a true sense for his object of study, and a single-hearted care for it. He had both; but he had the second even more eminently than the first. He greatly developed the first through means of the second. In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the most undivided and disinterested love for his object in itself, the greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal. His interest was in literature itself; and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from all taint of littleness. In the saturnalia of ignoble personal passions, of which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled. He had not yet traduced his friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised what he despised. Those who knew him well had the conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his. His poem, of which I before spoke, has some admirable Homeric qualities;—out-of-doors freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity. Some of the expressions in that poem, ‘_Dangerous Corrievreckan ... Where roads are unknown to Loch Nevish_’, come back now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. But that in him of which I think oftenest is the Homeric simplicity of his literary life.
Footnote 56:
‘It is the fact, that scholars of fastidious refinement, but of a judgment which I think far more masculine than Mr Arnold’s, have passed a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of my translation. I at present count eight such names’.—‘Before venturing to print, I sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women have extolled them, how greedily a working man has inquired for them, without knowing who was the translator’.—MR NEWMAN’S Reply, pp. 113, 124, _supra_.
Footnote 57:
‘O for the fields of Thessaly and the streams of Spercheios! O for the hills alive with the dances of the Laconian maidens, the hills of Taygetus’!—_Georgics_, ii. 486.
Footnote 58:
_Iliad_, xvii, 216.
Footnote 59:
_Purgatory_, xxiii, 124.
Footnote 60:
_Purgatory_, xxiii, 127.
Footnote 61:
‘A secure time fell to the lot neither of Peleus the son of Æacus, nor of the godlike Cadmus; howbeit these are said to have had, of all mortals, the supreme of happiness, who heard the golden-snooded Muses sing, one of them on the mountain (Pelion), the other in seven-gated Thebus’.
Footnote 62:
Lines such as the first of the _Odyssey_
Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὅς μάλα πολλὰ....
Footnote 63:
Substantially, however, in the question at issue between Mr Munro and Mr Spedding, I agree with Mr Munro. By the italicized words in the following sentence, ‘The rhythm of the Virgilian hexameter depends entirely on _cæsura_, _pause_, and a due arrangement of words’, he has touched, it seems to me, in the constitution of this hexameter, the central point which Mr Spedding misses. The accent, or _heightened tone_, of Virgil in reading his own hexameters, was probably far from being the same thing as the accent or _stress_ with which we read them. The general effect of each line, in Virgil’s mouth, was probably therefore something widely different from what Mr Spedding assumes it to have been: an ancient’s accentual reading was something which allowed the metrical beat of the Latin line to be far more perceptible than our accentual reading allows it to be.
On the question as to the _real_ rhythm of the ancient hexameter, Mr Newman has in his _Reply_ a page quite admirable for force and precision. Here he is in his element, and his ability and acuteness have their proper scope. But it is true that the _modern_ reading of the ancient hexameter is what the modern hexameter has to imitate, and that the English reading of the Virgilian hexameter is as Mr Spedding describes it. Why this reading has not been imitated by the English hexameter, I have tried to point out in the text.
Footnote 64:
Such a minor change I have attempted by occasionally shifting, in the first foot of the hexameter, the accent from the first syllable to the second. In the current English hexameter, it is on the first. Mr Spedding, who proposes radically to subvert the constitution of this hexameter, seems not to understand that anyone can propose to modify it partially; he can comprehend revolution in this metre, but not reform. Accordingly he asks me how I can bring myself to say, ‘_Bé_tween that and the ships’, or ‘_Thére_ sat fifty men’; or how I can reconcile such forcing of the accent with my own rule, that ‘hexameters must _read themselves_’. Presently he says that he cannot believe I do pronounce these words so, but that he thinks I leave out the accent in the first foot altogether, and thus get a hexameter with only five accents. He will pardon me: I pronounce, as I suppose he himself does, if he reads the words naturally, ‘Be_tween_ that and the ships’, and ‘There _sát_ fifty men’. Mr Spedding is familiar enough with this accent on the second syllable in Virgil’s hexameters; in ‘et _té_ montosæ’, or ‘Ve_ló_ces jaculo’. Such a change is an attempt to relieve the monotony of the current English hexameter by occasionally altering the position of one of its accents; it is not an attempt to make a wholly new English hexameter by habitually altering the position of four of them. Very likely it is an unsuccessful attempt; but at any-rate it does not violate what I think is the fundamental rule for English hexameters, that may be such as to _read themselves_ without necessitating, on the reader’s part, any non-natural putting-on or taking-off accent. Hexameters like these of Mr Longfellow,
‘In that delightful land which is washed by the Delaware’s waters’,
and,
‘As if they fain would appease the Dryads, whose haunts they molested’,
violate this rule; and they are very common. I think the blemish of Mr Dart’s recent meritorious version of the _Iliad_ is that it contains too many of them.
Footnote 65:
As I welcome another more recent attempt in stanza,—Mr Worsley’s version of the _Odyssey_ in Spenser’s measure. Mr Worsley does me the honour to notice some remarks of mine on this measure: I had said that its greater intricacy made it a worse measure than even the ten-syllable couplet to employ for rendering Homer. He points out, in answer, that ‘the more complicated the correspondences in a poetical measure, the less obtrusive and absolute are the rhymes’. This is true, and subtly remarked; but I never denied that the single shocks of rhyme in the couplet were more _strongly felt_ than those in the stanza; I said that the more frequent recurrence of the same rhyme, in the stanza, necessarily made this measure more _intricate_. The stanza repacks Homer’s matter yet more arbitrarily, and therefore changes his movement yet more radically, than the couplet. Accordingly, I imagine a nearer approach to a perfect translation of Homer is possible in the couplet, well managed, than in the stanza, however well managed. But meanwhile Mr Worsley, applying the Spenserian stanza, that beautiful romantic measure, to the most romantic poem of the ancient world; making this stanza yield him, too (what it never yielded to Byron), its treasures of fluidity and sweet ease; above all, bringing to his task a truly poetical sense and skill, has produced a version of the _Odyssey_ much the most pleasing of those hitherto produced, and which is delightful to read.
For the public this may well be enough, nay, more than enough; but for the critic even this is not yet quite enough.
Footnote 66:
I speak of poetic genius as employing itself upon narrative or dramatic poetry,—poetry in which the poet has to go out of himself and to create. In lyrical poetry, in the direct expression of personal feeling, the most subtle genius may, under the momentary pressure of passion, express itself simply. Even here, however, the native tendency will generally be discernible.
Footnote 67:
‘And I have endured—the like whereof no soul upon the earth hath yet endured—to carry to my lips the hand of him who slew my child’.—_Iliad_, xxiv. 505.
Footnote 68:
‘Nay and thou too, old man, in times past wert, as we hear, happy’.—_Iliad_, xxiv. 543. In the original this line, for mingled pathos and dignity, is perhaps without a rival even in Homer.
Footnote 69:
’For so have the gods spun our destiny to us wretched mortals,—that we should live in sorrow; but they themselves are without trouble’.—_Iliad_, xxiv. 525.
Footnote 70:
‘_I_ wept not: so of stone grew I within:—_they_ wept’.—_Hell_, xxxiii. 49 (Carlyle’s Translation, slightly altered).
THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH
* * * * * *
Transcriber’s note:
○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the chapters in which they are referenced.