Part 4

And scarcely had she begun to wash Ere she was aware of the grisly gash Above his knee that lay. It was a wound from a wild boar’s tooth, All on Parnassus’ slope, Where he went to hunt in the days of his youth With his mother’s sire,

and so on. That is the true ballad-manner, no one can deny; ‘all on Parnassus’ slope’ is, I was going to say, the true ballad-slang; but never again shall I be able to read

νίζε δ’ ἄῤ ἆσσον ἴουσα ἄναχθ’ ἑόν· αὐτίκα δ’ ἔγνω οὐλήν,

without having the destestable dance of Dr Maginn’s

And scarcely had she begun to wash Ere she was aware of the grisly gash,

jigging in my ears, to spoil the effect of Homer, and to torture me. To apply that manner and that rhythm to Homer’s incidents, is not to imitate Homer, but to travesty him.

Lastly I come to Mr Newman. His rhythm, like Chapman’s and Dr Maginn’s, is a ballad-rhythm, but with a modification of his own. ‘Holding it’, he tells us, ‘as an axiom, that rhyme must be abandoned’, he found, on abandoning it, ‘an unpleasant void until he gave a double ending to the verse’. In short, instead of saying

Good people all with one accord Give ear unto my _tale_,

Mr Newman would say

Good people all with one accord Give ear unto my _story_.

A recent American writer[18] gravely observes that for his countrymen this rhythm has a disadvantage in being like the rhythm of the American national air _Yankee Doodle_, and thus provoking ludicrous associations. _Yankee Doodle_ is not our national air: for us Mr Newman’s rhythm has not this disadvantage. He himself gives us several plausible reasons why this rhythm of his really ought to be successful: let us examine how far it _is_ successful.

Mr Newman joins to a bad rhythm so bad a diction that it is difficult to distinguish exactly whether in any given passage it is his words or his measure which produces a total impression of such an unpleasant kind. But with a little attention we may analyse our total impression, and find the share which each element has in producing it. To take the passage which I have so often mentioned, Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus. Mr Newman translates this as follows:

O gentle friend! if thou and I, from this encounter ’scaping, Hereafter might for ever be from Eld and Death exempted As heavenly gods, not I in sooth would fight among the foremost, Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle. Now,—sith ten thousand shapes of Death do any-gait pursue us Which never mortal may evade, though sly of foot and nimble;— Onward! and glory let us earn, or glory yield to someone.

Could all our care elude the gloomy grave Which claims no less the fearful than the brave.

I am not going to quote Pope’s version over again, but I must remark in passing, how much more, with all Pope’s radical difference of manner from Homer, it gives us of the real effect of

εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε

than Mr Newman’s lines. And now, why are Mr Newman’s lines faulty? They are faulty, first, because, as a matter of diction, the expressions ‘O gentle friend’, ‘eld’, ‘in sooth’, ‘liefly’, ‘advance’, ‘man-ennobling’, ‘sith’, ‘any-gait’, and ‘sly of foot’, are all bad; some of them worse than others, but all bad: that is, they all of them as here used excite in the scholar, their sole judge,—excite, I will boldly affirm, in Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett,—a feeling totally different from that excited in them by the words of Homer which these expressions profess to render. The lines are faulty, secondly, because, as a matter of rhythm, any and every line among them has to the ear of the same judges (I affirm it with equal boldness) a movement as unlike Homer’s movement in the corresponding line as the single words are unlike Homer’s words. Οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμαι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειρν,—‘Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle’;—for whose ears do those two rhythms produce impressions of, to use Mr Newman’s own words, ‘similar moral genius’?

I will by no means make search in Mr Newman’s version for passages likely to raise a laugh; that search, alas! would be far too easy. I will quote but one other passage from him, and that a passage where the diction is comparatively inoffensive, in order that disapproval of the words may not unfairly heighten disapproval of the rhythm. The end of the nineteenth book, the answer of Achilles to his horse Xanthus, Mr Newman gives thus:

Chestnut! why bodest death to me? from thee this was not needed. Myself right surely know alsó, that ’t is my doom to perish, From mother and from father dear apart, in Troy; but never Pause will I make of war, until the Trojans be glutted. He spake, and yelling, held afront the single-hoofed horses.

Here Mr Newman calls Xanthus _Chestnut_, indeed, as he calls Balius _Spotted_, and Podarga _Spry-foot_; which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale _Mdlle. Rossignol_, or Mr Bright _M. Clair_. And several other expressions, too, ‘yelling’, ‘held afront’, ‘single-hoofed’,—leave, to say the very least, much to be desired. Still, for Mr Newman, the diction of this passage is pure. All the more clearly appears the profound vice of a rhythm, which, with comparatively few faults of words, can leave a sense of such incurable alienation from Homer’s manner as, ‘Myself right surely know also that ’tis my doom to perish compared with the εὖ νύ τοι οἶδα καὶ αὐτὸς, ὅ μοι μόρος ἐνθάδ’ ὀλέσθαι of Homer.

But so deeply seated is the difference between the ballad-manner and Homer’s, that even a man of the highest powers, even a man of the greatest vigour of spirit and of true genius—the Coryphæus of balladists, Sir Walter Scott—fails with a manner of this kind to produce an effect at all like the effect of Homer. ‘I am not so rash’, declares Mr Newman, ‘as to say that if _freedom_ be given to rhyme as in Walter Scott’s poetry’,—‘Walter Scott, by far the most Homeric of our poets’, as in another place he calls him,—‘a genius may not arise who will translate Homer into the melodies of _Marmion_’. ‘The _truly_ classical and _truly_ romantic’, says Dr Maginn, ‘are one; the moss-trooping Nestor reappears in the moss-trooping heroes of Percy’s _Reliques_’; and a description by Scott, which he quotes, he calls ‘graphic, and therefore Homeric’. He forgets our fourth axiom,—that Homer is not _only_ graphic; he is also noble, and has the grand style. Human nature under like circumstances is probably in all stages much the same; and so far it may be said that ‘the truly classical and the truly romantic are one’; but it is of little use to tell us this, because we know the human nature of other ages only through the representations of them which have come down to us, and the classical and the romantic modes of representation are so far from being ‘one’, that they remain eternally distinct, and have created for us a separation between the two worlds which they respectively represent. Therefore to call Nestor the ‘moss-trooping Nestor’ is absurd, because, though Nestor may possibly have been much the same sort of man as many a moss-trooper, he has yet come to us through a mode of representation so unlike that of Percy’s _Reliques_, that instead of ‘reappearing in the moss-trooping heroes’ of these poems, he exists in our imagination as something utterly unlike them, and as belonging to another world. So the Greeks in Shakspeare’s _Troilus and Cressida_ are no longer the Greeks whom we have known in Homer, because they come to us through a mode of representation of the romantic world. But I must not forget Scott.

I suppose that when Scott is in what may be called full ballad swing, no one will hesitate to pronounce his manner neither Homeric nor the grand manner. When he says, for instance,

I do not rhyme to that dull elf Who cannot image to himself[19],

and so on, any scholar will feel that _this_ is not Homer’s manner. But let us take Scott’s poetry at its best; and when it is at its best, it is undoubtedly very good indeed:

Tunstall lies dead upon the field, His life-blood stains the spotless shield; Edmund is down,—my life is reft,— The Admiral alone is left. Let Stanley charge with spur of fire,— With Chester charge, and Lancashire, Full upon Scotland’s central host, Or victory and England’s lost[20].

That is, no doubt, as vigorous as possible, as spirited as possible; it is exceedingly fine poetry. And still I say, it is not in the grand manner, and therefore it is not like Homer’s poetry. Now, how shall I make him who doubts this feel that I say true; that these lines of Scott are essentially neither in Homer’s style nor in the grand style? I may point out to him that the movement of Scott’s lines, while it is rapid, is also at the same time what the French call _saccadé_, its rapidity is ‘jerky’; whereas Homer’s rapidity is a flowing rapidity. But this is something external and material; it is but the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual diversity. I may discuss what, in the abstract, constitutes the grand style; but that sort of general discussion never much helps our judgment of particular instances. I may say that the presence or absence of the grand style can only be spiritually discerned; and this is true, but to plead this looks like evading the difficulty. My best way is to take eminent specimens of the grand style, and to put them side by side with this of Scott. For example, when Homer says:

άλλά, φίλος, θάνε καὶ σύ· τίη ὀλυφύρεαι οὕτως; κάθανε καὶ Πάτροκλος, ὅπερ σέο πολλὸν ἀμείνων[21],

that is in the grand style. When Virgil says:

Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem, Fortunam ex aliis[22],

that is in the grand style. When Dante says:

Lascio lo fele, et vo pei dolci pomi Promessi a me per lo verace Duca; Ma fino al centro pria convien ch’ io tomi[23],

that is in the grand style. When Milton says:

His form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruined, and the excess Of glory obscured[24],

that, finally, is in the grand style. Now let anyone after repeating to himself these four passages, repeat again the passage of Scott, and he will perceive that there is something in style which the four first have in common, and which the last is without; and this something is precisely the grand manner. It is no disrespect to Scott to say that he does not attain to this manner in his poetry; to say so, is merely to say that he is not among the five or six supreme poets of the world. Among these he is not; but, being a man of far greater powers than the ballad-poets, he has tried to give to their instrument a compass and an elevation which it does not naturally possess, in order to enable him to come nearer to the effect of the instrument used by the great epic poets—an instrument which he felt he could not truly use,—and in this attempt he has but imperfectly succeeded. The poetic style of Scott is—(it becomes necessary to say so when it is proposed to ‘translate Homer into the melodies of _Marmion_’)—it is, tried by the highest standard, a bastard epic style; and that is why, out of his own powerful hands, it has had so little success. It is a less natural, and therefore a less good style, than the original ballad-style; while it shares with the ballad-style the inherent incapacity of rising into the grand style, of adequately rendering Homer. Scott is certainly at his best in his battles. Of Homer you could not say this; he is not better in his battles than elsewhere; but even between the battle-pieces of the two there exists all the difference which there is between an able work and a masterpiece.

Tunstall lies dead upon the field, His life-blood stains the spotless shield: Edmund is down,—my life is reft— The Admiral alone is left.

—‘For not in the hands of Diomede the son of Tydeus rages the spear, to ward off destruction from the Danaans; neither as yet have I heard the voice of the son of Atreus, shouting out of his hated mouth; but the voice of Hector the slayer of men bursts round me, as he cheers on the Trojans; and they with their yellings fill all the plain, overcoming the Achaians in the battle’.—I protest that, to my feeling, Homer’s performance, even through that pale and far-off shadow of a prose translation, still has a hundred times more of the grand manner about it, than the original poetry of Scott.

Well, then, the ballad-manner and the ballad-measure, whether in the hands of the old ballad-poets, or arranged by Chapman, or arranged by Mr Newman, or, even, arranged by Sir Walter Scott, cannot worthily render Homer. And for one reason: Homer is plain, so are they; Homer is natural, so are they; Homer is spirited, so are they; but Homer is sustainedly noble, and they are not. Homer and they are both of them natural, and therefore touching and stirring; but the grand style, which is Homer’s, is something more than touching and stirring; it can form the character, it is edifying. The old English balladist may stir Sir Philip Sidney’s heart like a trumpet, and this is much: but Homer, but the few artists in the grand style, can do more; they can refine the raw natural man, they can transmute him. So it is not without cause that I say, and say again, to the translator of Homer: ‘Never for a moment suffer yourself to forget our fourth fundamental proposition, _Homer is noble_’. For it is seen how large a share this nobleness has in producing that general effect of his, which it is the main business of a translator to _re_produce.

I shall have to try your patience yet once more upon this subject, and then my task will be completed. I have shown what the four axioms respecting Homer which I have laid down, exclude, what they bid a translator not to do; I have still to show what they supply, what positive help they can give to the translator in his work. I will even, with their aid, myself try my fortune with some of those passages of Homer which I have already noticed; not indeed with any confidence that I more than others can succeed in adequately rendering Homer, but in the hope of satisfying competent judges, in the hope of making it clear to the future translator, that I at any rate follow a right method, and that, in coming short, I come short from weakness of execution, not from original vice of design. This is why I have so long occupied myself with Mr Newman’s version; that, apart from all faults of execution, his original design was wrong, and that he has done us the good service of declaring that design in its naked wrongness. To bad practice he has prefixed the bad theory which made the practice bad; he has given us a false theory in his preface, and he has exemplified the bad effects of that false theory in his translation. It is because his starting-point is so bad that he runs so badly; and to save others from taking so false a starting-point, may be to save them from running so futile a course.

Mr Newman, indeed, says in his preface, that if anyone dislikes his translation, ‘he has his easy remedy; to keep aloof from it’. But Mr Newman is a writer of considerable and deserved reputation; he is also a Professor of the University of London, an institution which by its position and by its merits acquires every year greater importance. It would be a very grave thing if the authority of so eminent a Professor led his students to misconceive entirely the chief work of the Greek world; that work which, whatever the other works of classical antiquity have to give us, gives it more abundantly than they all. The eccentricity too, the arbitrariness, of which Mr Newman’s conception of Homer offers so signal an example, are not a peculiar failing of Mr Newman’s own; in varying degrees they are the great defect of English intellect the great blemish of English literature. Our literature of the eighteenth century, the literature of the school of Dryden, Addison, Pope, Johnson, is a long reaction against this eccentricity, this arbitrariness; that reaction perished by its own faults, and its enemies are left once more masters of the field. It is much more likely that any new English version of Homer will have Mr Newman’s faults than Pope’s. Our present literature, which is very far, certainly, from having the spirit and power of Elizabethan genius, yet has in its own way these faults, eccentricity, and arbitrariness, quite as much as the Elizabethan literature ever had. They are the cause that, while upon none, perhaps, of the modern literatures has so great a sum of force been expended as upon the English literature, at the present hour this literature, regarded not as an object of mere literary interest but as a living intellectual instrument, ranks only third in European effect and importance among the literatures of Europe; it ranks after the literatures of France and Germany. Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a _critical_ effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science,—to see the object as in itself it really is. But, owing to the presence in English literature of this eccentric and arbitrary spirit, owing to the strong tendency of English writers to bring to the consideration of their object some individual fancy, almost the last thing for which one would come to English literature is just that very thing which now Europe most desires—_criticism_. It is useful to notice any signal manifestation of those faults, which thus limit and impair the action of our literature. And therefore I have pointed out how widely, in translating Homer, a man even of real ability and learning may go astray, unless he brings to the study of this clearest of poets one quality in which our English authors, with all their great gifts, are apt to be somewhat wanting—simple lucidity of mind.

Footnote 10:

_Iliad_, vi. 344.

Footnote 11:

From the reproachful answer of Ulysses to Agamemnon, who had proposed an abandonment of their expedition. This is one of the ‘tonic’ passages of the _Iliad_, so I quote it:

Ah, unworthy king, some other inglorious army Should’st thou command, not rule over _us_, whose portion for ever Zeus hath made it, from youth right up to age, to be winding Skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of us perish.

_Iliad_, xiv. 84.

Footnote 12:

From the ballad of _King Estmere_, in Percy’s _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_, i. 69 (edit. of 1767).

Footnote 13:

_Reliques_, i. 241

Footnote 14:

_Iliad_, xvii. 443.

Footnote 15:

All the editions which I have seen have ‘haste’, but the right reading must certainly be ‘taste’.

Footnote 16:

_Iliad_, xix. 419.

Footnote 17:

_Odyssey_, xix. 392.

Footnote 18:

Mr Marsh, in his _Lectures on the English Language_, New York, 1860, p. 520.

Footnote 19:

_Marmion_, canto vi. 38.

Footnote 20:

_Marmion_, canto vi. 29.

Footnote 21:

‘Be content, good friend, die also thou! why lamentest thou thyself on this wise? Patroclus, too, died, who was a far better than thou.’—_Iliad_, xxi. 106.

Footnote 22:

‘From me, young man, learn nobleness of soul and true effort: learn success from others.’—_Æneid_, xii. 435.

Footnote 23:

‘I leave the gall of bitterness, and I go for the apples of sweetness promised unto me by my faithful Guide; but far as the centre it behoves me first to fall.’—_Hell_, xvi. 61.

Footnote 24:

_Paradise Lost_, i. 591.

III

Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in his words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer is noble in his manner. Cowper renders him ill because he is slow in his movement, and elaborate in his style; Pope renders him ill because he is artificial both in his style and in his words; Chapman renders him ill because he is fantastic in his ideas; Mr Newman renders him ill because he is odd in his words and ignoble in his manner. All four translators diverge from their original at other points besides those named; but it is at the points thus named that their divergence is greatest. For instance, Cowper’s diction is not as Homer’s diction, nor his nobleness as Homer’s nobleness; but it is in movement and grammatical style that he is most unlike Homer. Pope’s rapidity is not of the same sort as Homer’s rapidity, nor are his plainness of ideas and his nobleness as Homer’s plainness of ideas and nobleness: but it is in the artificial character of his style and diction that he is most unlike Homer. Chapman’s movement, words, style, and manner, are often far enough from resembling Homer’s movement, words, style, and manner; but it is the fantasticality of his ideas which puts him farthest from resembling Homer. Mr Newman’s movement, grammatical style, and ideas, are a thousand times in strong contrast with Homer’s; still it is by the oddness of his diction and the ignobleness of his manner that he contrasts with Homer the most violently.

Therefore the translator must not say to himself: ‘Cowper is noble, Pope is rapid, Chapman has a good diction, Mr Newman has a good cast of sentence; I will avoid Cowper’s slowness, Pope’s artificiality, Chapman’s conceits, Mr Newman’s oddity; I will take Cowper’s dignified manner, Pope’s impetuous movement, Chapman’s vocabulary, Mr Newman’s syntax, and so make a perfect translation of Homer’. Undoubtedly in certain points the versions of Chapman, Cowper, Pope, and Mr Newman, all of them have merit; some of them very high merit, others a lower merit; but even in these points they have none of them precisely the same kind of merit as Homer, and therefore the new translator, even if he can imitate them in their good points, will still not satisfy his judge, the scholar, who asks him for Homer and Homer’s kind of merit, or, at least, for as much of them as it is possible to give.

So the translator really has no good model before him for any part of his work, and has to invent everything for himself. He is to be rapid in movement, plain in speech, simple in thought, and noble; and _how_ he is to be either rapid, or plain, or simple, or noble, no one yet has shown him. I shall try to-day to establish some practical suggestions which may help the translator of Homer’s poetry to comply with the four grand requirements which we make of him.

His version is to be rapid; and of course, to make a man’s poetry rapid, as to make it noble, nothing can serve him so much as to have, in his own nature, rapidity and nobleness. _It is the spirit that quickeneth_; and no one will so well render Homer’s swift-flowing movement as he who has himself something of the swift-moving spirit of Homer. Yet even this is not quite enough. Pope certainly had a quick and darting spirit, as he had, also, real nobleness; yet Pope does not render the movement of Homer. To render this the translator must have, besides his natural qualifications, an appropriate metre.