Part 8

If by a happy combination any scholar could compose fifty _such_ English hexameters, as would convey a living likeness of the Virgilian metre, I should applaud it as valuable for initiating schoolboys into that metre: but there its utility would end. The method could not be profitably used for translating Homer or Virgil, plainly because it is impossible to say for whose service such a translation would be executed. Those who can read the original will never care to read _through_ any translation; and the unlearned look on all, even the best hexameters, whether from Southey, Lockhart or Longfellow, as odd and disagreeable prose. Mr Arnold deprecates appeal to popular taste: well he may! yet if the unlearned are to be our audience, we cannot defy them. I myself, before venturing to print, 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; but I well know that this is quite insufficient to establish the merits of a translation. It is nevertheless _one_ point. ‘Homer is popular’, is one of the very few matters of fact in this controversy on which Mr Arnold and I are agreed. ‘English hexameters are not popular’, is a truth so obvious, that I do not yet believe he will deny it. Therefore, ‘Hexameters are not the metre for translating Homer’. Q. E. D.

I cannot but think that the very respectable scholars who pertinaciously adhere to the notion that English hexameters have something ‘epical’ in them, have no vivid _feeling_ of the difference between Accent and Quantity: and this is the less wonderful, since so very few persons have ever actually _heard_ quantitative verse. I have; by listening to Hungarian poems, read to me by my friend Mr Francis Pulszky, a native Magyar. He had not finished a single page, before I complained gravely of the monotony. He replied: ‘So do _we_ complain of it’: and then showed me, by turning the pages, that the poet cut the knot which he could not untie, by frequent changes of his metre. Whether it was a change of mere length, as from Iambic senarian to Iambic dimeter; or implied a fundamental change of time, as in music from _common_ to _minuet_ time; I cannot say. But, to my ear, nothing but a tune can ever save a quantitative metre from hideous monotony. It is like strumming a piece of very simple music on a single note. Nor only so; but the most beautiful of anthems, after it has been repeated a hundred times on a hundred successive verses, begins to pall on the ear. How much more would an entire book of Homer, if chanted at one sitting! I have the conviction, though I will not undertake to impart it to another, that if the living Homer could sing his lines to us, they would at first move in us the same pleasing interest as an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast; but that, after hearing twenty lines, we should complain of meagreness, sameness, and _loss of moral expression_; and should judge the style to be _as_ inferior to our own oratorical metres, as the music of Pindar to our third-rate modern music. But if the poet, at our request, instead of singing the verses, read or spoke them, then from the loss of well-marked time and the ascendency reassumed by the prose-accent, we should be as helplessly unable to _hear_ any metre in them, as are the modern Greeks.

I expect that Mr Arnold will reply to this, that he _reads_ and does not _sing_ Homer, and yet he finds his verses to be melodious and not monotonous. To this, I retort, that he begins by wilfully pronouncing Greek falsely, according to the laws of _Latin_ accent, and artificially assimilating the Homeric to the Virgilian line. Virgil has compromised between the ictus metricus and the prose accent, by exacting that the two coincide in the two last feet and generally forbidding it in the second and third foot. What is called the ‘feminine cæsura’ gives (in the Latin language) coincidence on the third foot. Our extreme familiarity with these laws of compromise enables us to anticipate recurring sounds and satisfies our ear. But the Greek prose accent, by reason of oxytons and paroxytons, and accent on the ante-penultima in spite of a long penultima, totally resists all such compromise; and proves that particular form of melody, which our scholars enjoy in Homer, to be an unhistoric imitation of Virgil.

I am aware, there is a bold theory, whispered if not published, that,—so out-and-out _Æolian_ was Homer,—his laws of accent must have been almost Latin. According to this, Erasmus, following the track of Virgil blindly, has taught us to pronounce Euripides and Plato ridiculously ill, but Homer, with an accuracy of accent which puts Aristarchus to shame. This is no place for discussing so difficult a question. Suffice it to say, _first_, that Mr Arnold cannot take refuge in such a theory, since he does not admit that Homer was antiquated to Euripides; _next_, that admitting the theory to him, still the loss of the Digamma destroys to him the true rhythm of Homer. I shall recur to both questions below. I here add, that our English pronunciation even of Virgil often so ruins Virgil’s own _quantities_, that there is something either of delusion or of pedantry in our scholars’ self-complacency in the rhythm which they elicit.

I think it fortunate for Mr Arnold, that he had _not_ ‘courage to translate Homer’; for he must have failed to make it acceptable to the unlearned. But if the public ear prefers ballad metres, still (Mr Arnold assumes) ‘the scholar’ is with him in this whole controversy. Nevertheless it gradually comes out that neither is this the case, but he himself is in the minority. P. 110, he writes: ‘When one observes the boistering, rollicking way in which Homer’s English admirers—even men of genius, like the late Professor Wilson—love to talk of Homer and his poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no very deep community of nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm.’ It does not occur to Mr Arnold that the defect of perception lies with himself, and that Homer has more sides than he has discovered. He deplores that Dr Maginn, and others whom he names, err with me, in believing that our ballad-style is the nearest approximation to that of Homer; and avows that ‘_it is time to say plainly_’ (p. 46) that Homer is not of the ballad-type. So in p. 45, ‘—this _popular_, but, _it is time to say_, this erroneous analogy’ between the ballad and Homer. Since it is reserved for Mr Arnold to turn the tide of opinion; since it is a task not yet achieved, but remains to be achieved by his authoritative enunciation; he confesses that hitherto I have with me the suffrage of scholars. With this confession, a little more diffidence would be becoming, if diffidence were possible to the fanaticism with which he idolises hexameters. P. 88, he says: ‘The hexameter has a natural dignity, which repels both the jaunty style and the jog-trot style, etc.... _The translator who uses it cannot too religiously follow the_ INSPIRATION OF HIS METRE’ etc. Inspiration from a metre which has no recognised type? from a metre which the _heart_ and _soul_ of the nation ignores? I believe, if the metre can inspire anything, it is to frolic and gambol with Mr Clough. Mr Arnold’s English hexameter cannot be a higher inspiration to him, than the true hexameter was to a Greek: yet that metre inspired strains of totally different essential genius and merit.

But I claim Mr Arnold himself as confessing that our ballad _metre_ is epical, when he says that Scott is ‘_bastard_-epic’. I do not admit that his quotations from Scott are all Scott’s best, nor anything like it; but if they were, it would only prove something against Scott’s genius or talent, nothing about his metre. The Κύπρια ἔπη or Ἰλίου πέρσις were probably very inferior to the Iliad; but no one would on that account call them or the Frogs and Mice bastard-epic. No one would call a bad tale of Dryden or of Crabbe bastard-epic. The application of the word to Scott virtually concedes what I assert. Mr Arnold also calls Macaulay’s ballads ‘pinchbeck’; but a man needs to produce something very noble himself, before he can afford thus to sneer at Macaulay’s ‘Lars Porsena’.

Before I enter on my own ‘metrical exploits’, I must get rid of a disagreeable topic. Mr Arnold’s repugnance to them has led him into forms of attack, which I do not know how to characterize. I shall state my complaints as concisely as I can, and so leave them.

1. I do not seek for any similarity of _sound_ in an English accentual metre to that of a Greek quantitative metre; besides that Homer writes in a highly vocalized tongue, while ours is overfilled with consonants. I have disowned this notion of similar rhythm in the strongest terms (p. xvii of my Preface), expressly because some critics had imputed this aim to me in the case of Horace. I summed up: ‘It is not audible sameness of metre, but a likeness of moral genius which is to be aimed at’. I contrast the audible to the moral. Mr Arnold suppresses this contrast, and writes as follows, p. 34. Mr Newman tells us that he has found a metre like in moral genius to Homer’s. His judge has still the same answer: reproduce THEN _on our ear_ something of ‘the effect produced by the _movement_ of Homer’. He recurs to the same fallacy in p. 57. ‘For whose EAR do those two _rhythms_ produce impressions of (_to use Mr Newman’s own words_) “similar moral genius”’? His reader will naturally suppose that ‘like in moral genius’ is with me an eccentric phrase for ‘like in musical cadence’. The only likeness to the ear which I have admitted, is, that the one and the other are primitively made _for music_. That, Mr Arnold knows, is a matter of fact, whether a ballad be well or ill written. If he pleases, he may hold the rhythm of our metre to be necessarily inferior to Homer’s and to his own; but when I fully explained in my preface what were my tests of ‘like moral genius’, I cannot understand his suppressing them, and perverting the sense of my words.

2. In p. 52, Mr Arnold quotes Chapman’s translation of ἆ δείλω, ‘Poor wretched _beasts_’ (of Achilles’ horses), on which he comments severely. He does _not_ quote me. Yet in p. 100, after exhibiting Cowper’s translation of the same passage, he adds: ‘There is no want of dignity here, as in the versions of Chapman and of _Mr Newman, which I have already quoted_’. Thus he leads the reader to believe that I have the same phrase as Chapman! In fact, my translation is:

Ha! why on Peleus, mortal prince, Bestowed we _you_, unhappy!

If he had done me the justice of quoting, it is possible that some readers would not have thought my rendering intrinsically ‘wanting in dignity’, or less noble than Mr Arnold’s own, which is:

Ah! unhappy pair! to Peleus[36] why did we give you, To a mortal?

In p. 52, he with very gratuitous insult remarks, that ‘Poor wretched beasts’ is a little over-familiar; but this is no objection to it for the ballad-manner[37]: _it is good enough_ ... _for Mr Newman’s Iliad_, ... etc.’ Yet I myself have _not_ thought it good enough for my Iliad.

3. In p. 107, Mr Arnold gives his own translation of the discourse between Achilles and his horse; and prefaces it with the words, ‘I will take the passage in which both Chapman and Mr Newman _have already so much excited our astonishment_’. But he did not quote my translation of the noble part of the passage, consisting of 19 lines; he has merely quoted[38] the tail of it, 5 lines; which are altogether inferior. Of this a sufficient indication is, that Mr Gladstone has translated the 19 and omitted the 5. I shall below give my translation parallel to Mr Gladstone’s. The curious reader may compare it with Mr Arnold’s, if he choose.

4. In p. 102, Mr Arnold quotes from Chapman as a translation of ὅταν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ιλιος ἱρὴ,

‘When sacred Troy shall _shed her tow’rs for tears of overthrow_’;

and adds: ‘What Mr Newman’s manner of rendering would be, you can by this time sufficiently imagine for yourselves’. _Would be!_ Why does he set his readers to ‘imagine’, when in fewer words he could tell them what my version _is_? It stands thus:

A day, when sacred Ilium | for overthrow is destin’d,—

which may have faults unperceived by me, but is in my opinion far better than Mr Arnold’s, and certainly did not deserve to be censured side by side with Chapman’s absurdity. I must say plainly; a critic has no right to hide what I have written, and stimulate his readers to despise me by these _indirect_ methods.

I proceed to my own metre. It is exhibited in this stanza of Campbell:

By this the storm grew loud apace: The waterwraith was shrieking, And in the scowl of heav’n each face Grew dark as they were speaking.

Whether I use this metre well or ill, I maintain that it is essentially a noble metre, a popular metre, a metre of great capacity. _It is essentially the national ballad metre_, for the double rhyme is an accident. Of _course_ it can be applied to low, as well as to high subjects; else it would _not_ be popular: it would _not_ be ‘of a like moral genius’ to the Homeric metre, which was available equally for the comic poem _Margites_, for the precepts of Pythagoras, for the pious prosaic hymn of Cleanthes, for the driest prose of a naval catalogue[39], in short, _for all early thought_. Mr Arnold appears to forget, though he cannot be ignorant, that prose-composition is later than Homer, and that in the epical days every initial effort at prose history was carried on in _Homeric doggerel_ by the Cyclic poets, who traced the history of Troy _ab ovo_ in consecutive chronology. I say, he is merely inadvertent, he cannot be ignorant, that the Homeric _metre_, like my metre, subserves prosaic thought with the utmost facility; but I hold it to be, not indavertence, but blindness, when he does not see that Homer’s τὸν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος is a line of as thoroughly unaffected _oratio pedestris_ as any verse of Pythagoras or Horace’s Satires. But on diction I defer to speak, till I have finished the topic of metre.

I do not say that any measure is faultless. Every measure has its foible: mine has that fault which every uniform line must have; it is liable to monotony. This is evaded of course, as in the hexameter or rather as in Milton’s line, first, by varying the cæsura, secondly, by varying certain feet, within narrow and well understood limits, thirdly, by irregularity in the strength of accents, fourthly, by varying the weight of the unaccented syllables also. All these things are needed, _for the mere sake of breaking uniformity_. I will not here assert that Homer’s many marvellous freedoms, such as ἑκηβόλου Ἀπόλλωνος, were dictated by this aim, like those in the _Paradise Lost_; but I do say, that it is most unjust, most unintelligent, in critics, to produce _single_ lines from me, and criticize them as rough or weak, instead of examining them and presenting them as part of _a mass_. How would Shakspeare stand this sort of test? nay, or Milton? The metrical laws of a long poem cannot be the same as of a sonnet: single verses are organic elements of a great whole. A crag must not be cut like a gem. Mr Arnold should remember Aristotle’s maxim, that popular eloquence (and such is Homer’s) should be broad, rough and highly coloured, like scene painting, not polished into delicacy like miniature. But I speak now of metre, not yet of diction. In _any_ long and popular poem it is a mistake to wish every line to conform severely to a few types; but to claim this of a translator of _Homer_ is a doubly unintelligent exaction, when Homer’s own liberties transgress all bounds; many of them being feebly disguised by later double spellings, as εἵως, εἷος, invented for his special accommodation.

The Homeric verse has a rhythmical advantage over mine in less rigidity of cæsura. Though the Hexameter was made out of two Doric lines, yet no division of sense, no pause of the voice or thought, is exacted between them. The chasm between two English verses is deeper. Perhaps, on the side of syntax, a _four + three_ English metre drives harder towards monotony than Homer’s own verse. For other reasons, it lies under a like disadvantage, compared with Milton’s metre. The secondary cæsuras possible in the four feet are of course less numerous than those in the five feet, and the three-foot verse has still less variety. To my taste, it is far more pleasing that the short line recur less regularly; just as the parœmiac of Greek anapæsts is less pleasant in the Aristophanic tetrameter, than when it comes frequent but not expected. This is a main reason why I prefer Scott’s free metre to my own; yet, without rhyme, I have not found how to use his freedom. Mr Arnold wrongly supposes me to have overlooked his main and just objections to rhyming Homer; viz. that so many Homeric lines are intrinsically made for isolation. In p. ix of my Preface I called it a fatal embarrassment. But the objection applies in its full strength only against Pope’s rhymes, not against Walter Scott’s.

Mr Gladstone has now laid before the public his own specimens of Homeric translation. Their dates range from 1836 to 1859. It is possible that he has as strong a distaste as Mr Arnold for my version; for he totally ignores the archaic, the rugged, the boisterous element in Homer. But as to metre, he gives me his full suffrage. He has lines with four accents, with three, and a few with two; not one with five. On the whole, his metre, his cadences, his varying rhymes, are those of Scott. He has more trochaic lines than I approve. He is truthful to Homer on many sides; and (such is the delicate grace and variety admitted by the rhyme) his verses are more pleasing than mine. I do not hesitate to say, that if _all_ Homer could be put before the public in the same style equally well with his best pieces, a translation executed on my principles could not live in the market at its side; and certainly I should spare my labour. I add, that I myself prefer the former piece which I quote to my own, even while I see his defects: for I hold that his graces, at which I cannot afford to aim, more than make up for his losses. After this confession, I frankly contrast his rendering of the two noblest passages with mine, that the reader may see, what Mr Arnold does not show, my weak and strong sides.

GLADSTONE, Iliad 4, 422

As when the billow gathers fast With slow and sullen roar Beneath the keen northwestern blast Against the sounding shore: First far at sea it rears its crest, Then bursts upon the beach, Or[40] with proud arch and swelling breast, Where headlands outward reach, It smites their strength, and bellowing flings Its silver foam afar; So, stern and thick, the Danaan kings And soldiers marched to war. Each leader gave his men the word; Each warrior deep in silence heard. So mute they march’d, thou could’st not ken They were a mass of speaking men: And as they strode in martial might, Their flickering arms shot back the light. But as at even the folded sheep Of some rich master stand, Ten thousand thick their place they keep, And bide the milkman’s hand, And more and more they bleat, the more They hear their lamblings cry; So, from the Trojan host, uproar And din rose loud and high. They were a many-voicèd throng: Discordant accents there, That sound from many a differing tongue, Their differing race declare. These, Mars had kindled for the fight; Those, starry-ey’d Athenè’s might, And savage Terror and Affright, And Strife, insatiate of wars, The sister and the mate of Mars: Strife, that, a pigmy at her birth, By gathering rumour fed, Soon plants her feet upon the earth, And in the heav’n her head.

I add my own rendering of the same; somewhat corrected, but only in the direction of my own principles and against Arnold’s.

As when the surges of the deep, by Western blore uphoven, Against the ever-booming strand dash up in roll successive; A head of waters swelleth first aloof; then under harried By the rough bottom, roars aloud; till, hollow at the summit, Sputtering the briny foam abroad, the huge crest tumbleth over: So then the lines of Danaï, successive and unceasing, In battle’s close array mov’d on. To his own troops each leader Gave order: dumbly went the rest (nor mightèst thou discover, So vast a train of people held a voice within their bosom), In silence their commanders fearing: all the ranks wellmarshall’d Were clad in crafty panoply, which glitter’d on their bodies. Meantime, as sheep within the yard of some great cattle-master, While the white milk is drain’d from them, stand round in number countless, And, grievèd by their lambs’ complaint, respond with bleat incessant; So then along their ample host arose the Troian hurly. For neither common words spake théy, nor kindred accent utter’d; But mingled was the tongue of men from divers places summon’d. By Arès these were urgèd on, those by grey-ey’d Athenè, By Fear, by Panic, and by Strife immeasurably eager, The sister and companion[41] of hero-slaying Arès, Who truly doth at first her crest but humble rear; thereafter, Planting upon the ground her feet, her head in heaven fixeth.

GLADSTONE, Iliad 19, 403

Hanging low his auburn head, Sweeping with his mane the ground, From beneath his collar shed, Xanthus, hark! a voice hath found, Xanthus of the flashing feet: Whitearm’d Herè gave the sound. ‘Lord Achilles, strong and fleet! Trust us, we will bear thee home; Yet cometh nigh thy day of doom: No doom of ours, but doom that stands By God and mighty Fate’s commands. ’Twas not that we were slow or slack Patroclus lay a corpse, his back All stript of arms by Trojan hands. The prince of gods, whom Leto bare, Leto with the flowing hair, He forward fighting did the deed, And gave to Hector glory’s meed. In toil for thee, we will not shun Against e’en Zephyr’s breath to run, Swiftest of winds: but all in vain: By God and man shalt thou be slain.’ He spake: and here, his words among, Erinnys bound his faltering tongue.

Beginning with Achilles’ speech, I render the passage parallel to Gladstone thus.