Part 2
His Lordship repeated the last word several times with a calm and determinate resignation; and, after a serious pause of some minutes, he desired to hear the Treaty read, to which he listened with great attention, and recovered spirits enough to declare the approbation of a dying statesman (I use his own words) “on the most glorious war, and most honourable peace, this nation ever saw”’[6].
I quote this story, first, because it is interesting as exhibiting the English aristocracy at its very height of culture, lofty spirit, and greatness, towards the middle of the 18th century. I quote it, secondly, because it seems to me to illustrate Goethe’s saying which I mentioned, that our life, in Homer’s view of it, represents a conflict and a hell; and it brings out, too, what there is tonic and fortifying in this doctrine. I quote it, lastly, because it shows that the passage is just one of those in translating which Pope will be at his best, a passage of strong emotion and oratorical movement, not of simple narrative or description.
Pope translates the passage thus:
Could all our care elude the gloomy grave Which claims no less the fearful than the brave, For lust of fame I should not vainly dare In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war: But since, alas! ignoble age must come, Disease, and death’s inexorable doom; The life which others pay, let us bestow, And give to fame what we to nature owe.
Nothing could better exhibit Pope’s prodigious talent; and nothing, too, could be better in its own way. But, as Bentley said, ‘You must not call it Homer’. One feels that Homer’s thought has passed through a literary and rhetorical crucible, and come out highly intellectualised; come out in a form which strongly impresses us, indeed, but which no longer impresses us in the same way as when it was uttered by Homer. The antithesis of the last two lines—
The life which others pay, let us bestow, And give to fame what we to nature owe
is excellent, and is just suited to Pope’s heroic couplet; but neither the antithesis itself, nor the couplet which conveys it, is suited to the feeling or to the movement of the Homeric ἴομεν.
A literary and intellectualised language is, however, in its own way well suited to grand matters; and Pope, with a language of this kind and his own admirable talent, comes off well enough as long as he has passion, or oratory, or a great crisis to deal with. Even here, as I have been pointing out, he does not render Homer; but he and his style are in themselves strong. It is when he comes to level passages, passages of narrative or description, that he and his style are sorely tried, and prove themselves weak. A perfectly plain direct style can of course convey the simplest matter as naturally as the grandest; indeed, it must be harder for it, one would say, to convey a grand matter worthily and nobly, than to convey a common matter, as alone such a matter should be conveyed, plainly and simply. But the style of Rasselas is incomparably better fitted to describe a sage philosophising than a soldier lighting his camp-fire. The style of Pope is not the style of Rasselas; but it is equally a literary style, equally unfitted to describe a simple matter with the plain naturalness of Homer.
Everyone knows the passage at the end of the eighth book of the _Iliad_, where the fires of the Trojan encampment are likened to the stars. It is very far from my wish to hold Pope up to ridicule, so I shall not quote the commencement of the passage, which in the original is of great and celebrated beauty, and in translating which Pope has been singularly and notoriously fortunate. But the latter part of the passage, where Homer leaves the stars, and comes to the Trojan fires, treats of the plainest, most matter-of-fact subject possible, and deals with this, as Homer always deals with every subject, in the plainest and most straightforward style. ‘So many in number, between the ships and the streams of Xanthus, shone forth in front of Troy the fires kindled by the Trojans. There were kindled a thousand fires in the plain; and by each one there sat fifty men in the light of the blazing fire. And the horses, munching white barley and rye, and standing by the chariots, waited for the bright-throned Morning[7]’.
In Pope’s translation, this plain story becomes the following:
So many flames before proud Ilion blaze, And brighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays; The long reflections of the distant fires Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires. A thousand piles the dusky horrors gild, And shoot a shady lustre o’er the field. Full fifty guards each flaming pile attend, Whose umbered arms, by fits, thick flashes send; Loud neigh the coursers o’er their heaps of corn, And ardent warriors wait the rising morn.
It is for passages of this sort, which, after all, form the bulk of a narrative poem, that Pope’s style is so bad. In elevated passages he is powerful, as Homer is powerful, though not in the same way; but in plain narrative, where Homer is still powerful and delightful, Pope, by the inherent fault of his style, is ineffective and out of taste. Wordsworth says somewhere, that wherever Virgil seems to have composed ‘with his eye on the object’, Dryden fails to render him. Homer invariably composes ‘with his eye on the object’, whether the object be a moral or a material one: Pope composes with his eye on his style, into which he translates his object, whatever it is. That, therefore, which Homer conveys to us immediately, Pope conveys to us through a medium. He aims at turning Homer’s sentiments pointedly and rhetorically; at investing Homer’s description with ornament and dignity. A sentiment may be changed by being put into a pointed and oratorical form, yet may still be very effective in that form; but a description, the moment it takes its eyes off that which it is to describe, and begins to think of ornamenting itself, is worthless.
Therefore, I say, the translator of Homer should penetrate himself with a sense of the plainness and directness of Homer’s style; of the simplicity with which Homer’s thought is evolved and expressed. He has Pope’s fate before his eyes, to show him what a divorce may be created even between the most gifted translator and Homer by an artificial evolution of thought and a literary cast of style.
Chapman’s style is not artificial and literary like Pope’s nor his movement elaborate and self-retarding like the Miltonic movement of Cowper. He is plain-spoken, fresh, vigorous, and, to a certain degree, rapid; and all these are Homeric qualities. I cannot say that I think the movement of his fourteen-syllable line, which has been so much commended, Homeric; but on this point I shall have more to say by and by, when I come to speak of Mr Newman’s metrical exploits. But it is not distinctly anti-Homeric, like the movement of Milton’s blank verse; and it has a rapidity of its own. Chapman’s diction, too, is generally good, that is, appropriate to Homer; above all, the syntactical character of his style is appropriate. With these merits, what prevents his translation from being a satisfactory version of Homer? Is it merely the want of literal faithfulness to his original, imposed upon him, it is said, by the exigencies of rhyme? Has this celebrated version, which has so many advantages, no other and deeper defect than that? Its author is a poet, and a poet, too, of the Elizabethan age; the golden age of English literature as it is called, and on the whole truly called; for, whatever be the defects of Elizabethan literature (and they are great), we have no development of our literature to compare with it for vigour and richness. This age, too, showed what it could do in translating, by producing a master-piece, its version of the Bible.
Chapman’s translation has often been praised as eminently Homeric. Keats’s fine sonnet in its honour everyone knows; but Keats could not read the original, and therefore could not really judge the translation. Coleridge, in praising Chapman’s version, says at the same time, ‘It will give you small idea of Homer’. But the grave authority of Mr Hallum pronounces this translation to be ‘often exceedingly Homeric’; and its latest editor boldly declares that by what, with a deplorable style, he calls ‘his own innative Homeric genius’, Chapman ‘has thoroughly identified himself with Homer’; and that ‘we pardon him even for his digressions, for they are such as we feel Homer himself would have written’.
I confess that I can never read twenty lines of Chapman’s version without recurring to Bentley’s cry, ‘This is not Homer!’ and that from a deeper cause than any unfaithfulness occasioned by the fetters of rhyme.
I said that there were four things which eminently distinguished Homer, and with a sense of which Homer’s translator should penetrate himself as fully as possible. One of these four things was, the plainness and directness of Homer’s ideas. I have just been speaking of the plainness and directness of his style; but the plainness and directness of the contents of his style, of his ideas themselves, is not less remarkable. But as eminently as Homer is plain, so eminently is the Elizabethan literature in general, and Chapman in particular, fanciful. Steeped in humours and fantasticality up to its very lips, the Elizabethan age, newly arrived at the free use of the human faculties after their long term of bondage, and delighting to exercise them freely, suffers from its own extravagance in this first exercise of them, can hardly bring itself to see an object quietly or to describe it temperately. Happily, in the translation of the Bible, the sacred character of their original inspired the translators with such respect that they did not dare to give the rein to their own fancies in dealing with it. But, in dealing with works of profane literature, in dealing with poetical works above all, which highly stimulated them, one may say that the minds of the Elizabethan translators were _too_ active; that they could not forbear importing so much of their own, and this of a most peculiar and Elizabethan character, into their original, that they effaced the character of the original itself.
Take merely the opening pages to Chapman’s translation, the introductory verses, and the dedications. You will find:
An Anagram of the name of our Dread Prince, My most gracious and sacred Mæcenas, Henry, Prince of Wales, Our Sunn, Heyr, Peace, Life,
Henry, son of James the First, to whom the work is dedicated. Then comes an address,
To the sacred Fountain of Princes, Sole Empress of Beauty and Virtue, Anne, Queen Of England, etc.
All the Middle Age, with its grotesqueness, its conceits, its irrationality, is still in these opening pages; they by themselves are sufficient to indicate to us what a gulf divides Chapman from the ‘clearest-souled’ of poets, from Homer, almost as great a gulf as that which divides him from Voltaire. Pope has been sneered at for saying that Chapman writes ‘somewhat as one might imagine Homer himself to have written before he arrived at years of discretion’. But the remark is excellent: Homer expresses himself like a man of adult reason, Chapman like a man whose reason has not yet cleared itself. For instance, if Homer had had to say of a poet, that he hoped his merit was now about to be fully established in the opinion of good judges, he was as incapable of saying this as Chapman says it,—‘Though truth in her very nakedness sits in so deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora, and Ganges, few eyes can sound her, I hope yet those few here will so discover and confirm that the date being out of her darkness in this morning of our poet, he shall now gird his temples with the sun’,—I say, Homer was as incapable of saying this in that manner, as Voltaire himself would have been. Homer, indeed, has actually an affinity with Voltaire in the unrivalled clearness and straightforwardness of his thinking; in the way in which he keeps to one thought at a time, and puts that thought forth in its complete natural plainness, instead of being led away from it by some fancy striking him in connection with it, and being beguiled to wander off with this fancy till his original thought, in its natural reality, knows him no more. What could better show us how gifted a race was this Greek race? The same member of it has not only the power of profoundly touching that natural heart of humanity which it is Voltaire’s weakness that he cannot reach, but can also address the understanding with all Voltaire’s admirable simplicity and rationality.
My limits will not allow me to do more than shortly illustrate, from Chapman’s version of the _Iliad_, what I mean when I speak of this vital difference between Homer and an Elizabethan poet in the quality of their thought; between the plain simplicity of the thought of the one, and the curious complexity of the thought of the other. As in Pope’s case, I carefully abstain from choosing passages for the express purpose of making Chapman appear ridiculous; Chapman, like Pope, merits in himself all respect, though he too, like Pope, fails to render Homer.
In that tonic speech of Sarpedon, of which I have said so much, Homer, you may remember, has:
εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε, αἰεὶ δὴ μέλλοιμεν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε ἔσσεσθ’—
if indeed, but once _this_ battle avoided, We were for ever to live without growing old and immortal—
Chapman cannot be satisfied with this, but must add a fancy to it:
if keeping back Would keep back age from us, and death, and _that we might not wrack In this life’s human sea at all_;
and so on. Again; in another passage which I have before quoted, where Zeus says to the horses of Peleus,
τί σφῶϊ δόμεν Πηλῆϊ ἀνάκτι θνητῷ; ὑμεῖς δ’ ἐστὸν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε·[8]
Why gave we you to royal Peleus, to a mortal? but ye are without old age, and immortal.
Chapman sophisticates this into:
Why gave we you t’ a mortal king, when immortality And _incapacity of age so dignifies your states_?
Again; in the speech of Achilles to his horses, where Achilles, according to Homer, says simply ‘Take heed that ye bring your master safe back to the host of the Danaans, in some other sort than the last time, when the battle is ended’, Chapman sophisticates this into:
_When with blood, for this day’s fast observed, revenge shall yield Our heart satiety_, bring us off.
In Hector’s famous speech, again, at his parting from Andromache, Homer makes him say: ‘Nor does my own heart so bid me’ (to keep safe behind the walls), ‘since I have learned to be staunch always, and to fight among the foremost of the Trojans, busy on behalf of my father’s great glory, and my own[9]’. In Chapman’s hands this becomes:
The spirit I first did breathe Did never teach me that; much less, since the contempt of death Was settled in me, _and my mind knew what a worthy was, Whose office is to lead in fight, and give no danger pass Without improvement. In this fire must Hector’s trial shine: Here must his country, father, friends, be in him made divine._
You see how ingeniously Homer’s plain thought is _tormented_, as the French would say, here. Homer goes on: ‘For well I know this in my mind and in my heart, the day will be, when sacred Troy shall perish’—
ἔσσεται ἦμαρ, ὅτ’ ἄν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρή.
Chapman makes this:
And such a _stormy_ day shall come, in mind and soul I know, When sacred Troy _shall shed her towers, for tears of overthrow_.
I might go on for ever, but I could not give you a better illustration than this last, of what I mean by saying that the Elizabethan poet fails to render Homer because he cannot forbear to interpose a play of thought between his object and its expression. Chapman translates his object into Elizabethan, as Pope translates it into the Augustan of Queen Anne; both convey it to us through a medium. Homer, on the other hand, sees his object and conveys it to us immediately.
And yet, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness of Homer’s style, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness of his ideas, he is eminently _noble_; he works as entirely in the grand style, he is as grandiose, as Phidias, or Dante, or Michael Angelo. This is what makes his translators despair. ‘To give relief’, says Cowper, ‘to prosaic subjects’ (such as dressing, eating, drinking, harnessing, travelling, going to bed), that is to treat such subjects nobly, in the grand style, ‘without seeming unreasonably tumid, is extremely difficult’. It _is_ difficult, but Homer has done it. Homer is precisely the incomparable poet he is, because he has done it. His translator must not be tumid, must not be artificial, must not be literary; true: but then also he must not be commonplace, must not be ignoble. I have shown you how translators of Homer fail by wanting rapidity, by wanting simplicity of style, by wanting plainness of thought: in a second lecture I will show you how a translator fails by wanting nobility.
Footnote 1:
_Iliad_, iii. 243.
Footnote 2:
_Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe_, vi. 230.
Footnote 3:
_Iliad_, xix. 420.
Footnote 4:
_Iliad_, xii. 324.
Footnote 5:
These are the words on which Lord Granville ‘dwelled with particular emphasis’.
Footnote 6:
Robert Wood, _Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_, London, 1775, p. vii.
Footnote 7:
_Iliad_, viii. 560.
Footnote 8:
_Iliad_, xvii. 443.
Footnote 9:
_Iliad_, vi. 444.
II
I must repeat what I said in beginning, that the translator of Homer ought steadily to keep in mind where lies the real test of the success of his translation, what judges he is to try to satisfy. He is to try to satisfy _scholars_, because scholars alone have the means of really judging him. A scholar may be a pedant, it is true, and then his judgment will be worthless; but a scholar may also have poetical feeling, and then he can judge him truly; whereas all the poetical feeling in the world will not enable a man who is not a scholar to judge him truly. For the translator is to reproduce Homer, and the scholar alone has the means of knowing that Homer who is to be reproduced. He knows him but imperfectly, for he is separated from him by time, race, and language; but he alone knows him at all. Yet people speak as if there were two real tribunals in this matter,—the scholar’s tribunal, and that of the general public. They speak as if the scholar’s judgment was one thing, and the general public’s judgment another; both with their shortcomings, both with their liability to error; but both to be regarded by the translator. The translator who makes verbal literalness his chief care ‘will’, says a writer in the _National Review_ whom I have already quoted, ‘be appreciated by the scholar accustomed to test a translation rigidly by comparison with the original, to look perhaps with excessive care to finish in detail rather than boldness and general effect, and find pardon even for a version that seems bare and bold, so it be scholastic and faithful’. But, if the scholar in judging a translation looks to detail rather than to general effect, he judges it pedantically and ill. The appeal, however, lies not from the pedantic scholar to the general public, which can only like or dislike Chapman’s version, or Pope’s, or Mr Newman’s, but cannot _judge_ them; it lies from the pedantic scholar to the scholar who is not pedantic, who knows that Homer is Homer by his general effect, and not by his single words, and who demands but one thing in a translation,—that it shall, as nearly as possible, reproduce for him the _general effect_ of Homer. This, then, remains the one proper aim of the translator: to reproduce on the intelligent scholar, as nearly as possible, the general effect of Homer. Except so far as he reproduces this, he loses his labour, even though he may make a spirited _Iliad_ of his own, like Pope, or translate Homer’s _Iliad_ word for word, like Mr Newman. If his proper aim were to stimulate in any manner possible the general public, he might be right in following Pope’s example; if his proper aim were to help schoolboys to construe Homer, he might be right in following Mr Newman’s. But it is not: his proper aim is, I repeat it yet once more, to reproduce on the intelligent scholar, as nearly as he can, the general effect of Homer.
When, therefore, Cowper says, ‘My chief boast is that I have adhered closely to my original’; when Mr Newman says, ‘My aim is to retain every peculiarity of the original, to be _faithful_, exactly as is the case with the draughtsman of the Elgin marbles’; their real judge only replies: ‘It may be so: reproduce then upon us, reproduce the effect of Homer, as a good copy reproduces the effect of the Elgin marbles’.
When, again, Mr Newman tells us that ‘by an exhaustive process of argument and experiment’ he has found a metre which is at once the metre of ‘the modern Greek epic’, and a metre ‘like in moral genius’ to Homer’s metre, his judge has still but the same answer for him: ‘It may be so: reproduce then on our ear something of the effect produced by the movement of Homer’.
But what is the general effect which Homer produces on Mr Newman himself? because, when we know this, we shall know whether he and his judges are agreed at the outset, whether we may expect him, if he can reproduce the effect he feels, if his hand does not betray him in the execution, to satisfy his judges and to succeed. If, however, Mr Newman’s impression from Homer is something quite different from that of his judges, then it can hardly be expected that any amount of labour or talent will enable him to reproduce for them _their_ Homer.
Mr Newman does not leave us in doubt as to the general effect which Homer makes upon him. As I have told you what is the general effect which Homer makes upon me,—that of a most rapidly moving poet, that of a poet most plain and direct in his style, that of a poet most plain and direct in his ideas, that of a poet eminently noble,—so Mr Newman tells us his general impression of Homer. ‘Homer’s style’, he says, ‘is direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous’. Again: ‘Homer rises and sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is mean’.
I lay my finger on four words in these two sentences of Mr Newman, and I say that the man who could apply those words to Homer can never render Homer truly. The four words are these: _quaint_, _garrulous_, _prosaic_, _low_. Search the English language for a word which does not apply to Homer, and you could not fix on a better than _quaint_, unless perhaps you fixed on one of the other three.