Part 9

‘_Chestnut_ and _Spotted_! noble pair! farfamous brood of _Spry-foot_! In other guise now ponder ye your charioteer to rescue Back to the troop of Danaï, when we have done with battle: Nor leave him dead upon the field, as late ye left Patroclus’. But him the dapplefooted steed under the yoke accosted; (And droop’d his auburn head aside straightway; and through the collar, His full mane, streaming to the ground, over the yoke was scatter’d: Him Juno, whitearm’d goddess, then with voice Of man endowèd): ‘Now and again we verily will save and more than save thee, Dreadful Achilles! yet for thee the deadly day approacheth. Not ours the guilt; but mighty God and stubborn Fate are guilty. Not by the slowness of our feet or dulness of our spirit The Troians did thy armour strip from shoulders of Patroclus; But the exalted god, for whom brighthair’d Latona travail’d, Slew him amid the foremost rank and glory gave to Hector. Now we, in coursing, pace would keep even with breeze of Zephyr, Which speediest they say to be: but for thyself ’tis fated By hand of hero and of God in mighty strife to perish So much he spake: thereat his voice the Furies stopp’d for ever.

Now if any fool ask, Why does not Mr Gladstone translate _all_ Homer? any fool can reply with me, Because he is Chancellor of the Exchequer. A man who has talents and acquirements adequate to translate Homer _well_ into _rhyme_, is almost certain to have other far more urgent calls for the exercise of such talents.

So much of metre. At length I come to the topic of Diction, where Mr Arnold and I are at variance not only as to taste, but as to the main facts of Greek literature. I had called Homer’s style quaint and garrulous; and said that he rises and falls with his subject, being prosaic when it is tame, and low when it is mean. I added no proof; for I did not dream that it was needed. Mr Arnold not only absolutely denies all this, and denies it without proof; but adds, that these assertions prove my incompetence, and account for my total and conspicuous failure. His whole attack upon my diction is grounded on a passage which I must quote at length; for it is so confused in logic, that I may otherwise be thought to garble it, pp. 36, 37.

‘Mr Newman speaks of the more antiquated style suited to this subject. Quaint! Antiquated! but to whom? Sir Thomas Browne is quaint, and the diction of Chaucer is antiquated: does Mr Newman suppose that Homer seemed quaint to Sophocles, as Chaucer’s diction seems antiquated to us? But we cannot really know, I confess (!!), how Homer seemed to Sophocles. Well then, to those who can tell us how he seems to them, to the living scholar, to our only present witness on this matter—does Homer make on the Provost of Eton, when he reads him, the impression of a poet quaint and antiquated! does he make this impression on Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett? When Shakspeare says, “The Princes orgulous”, meaning “the proud princes”, we say, “This is antiquated”. When he says of the Trojan gates, that they,

With massy staples And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts _Sperr_ up the sons of Troy,

we say, “This is both quaint and antiquated”. But does Homer ever compose in a language, which produces on the scholar at all the same impression as this language which I have quoted from Shakspeare? Never once. Shakspeare is quaint and antiquated in the lines I have just quoted; but Shakspeare, need I say it? can compose, when he likes, when he is at his best, in a language perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible; in a language, which, in spite of the two centuries and a half which part its author from us, stops or surprises us as little as the language of a contemporary. And Homer has not Shakspeare’s variations. Homer always composes, as Shakspeare composes at his best. Homer is always simple and intelligible, as Shakspeare is often; Homer is never quaint and antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes’.

If Mr Arnold were to lay before none but Oxford students assertions concerning Greek literature so startlingly erroneous as are here contained, it would not concern me to refute or protest against them. The young men who read Homer and Sophocles and Thucydides, nay, the boys who read Homer and Xenophon, would know his statements to be against the most notorious and elementary fact: and the Professors, whom he quotes, would only lose credit, if they sanctioned the use he makes of their names. But when he publishes the book for the unlearned in Greek, among whom I must include a great number of editors of magazines, I find Mr Arnold to do a public wrong to literature, and a private wrong to my book. If I am silent, such editors may easily believe that I have made an enormous blunder in treating the dialect of Homer as antiquated. If those who are ostensibly scholars, thus assail my version, and the great majority of magazines and reviews ignore it, its existence can never become known to the public; or it will exist not to be read, but to be despised without being opened; and it must perish as many meritorious books perish. I but lately picked up, new, and for a fraction of its price, at a second-hand stall, a translation of the Iliad by T. S. Brandreth, Esq. (Pickering, London), into Cowper’s metre, which is, as I judge, immensely superior to Cowper. Its date is 1846: I had never heard of it. It seems to have perished uncriticized, unreproved, unwept, unknown. I do not wish my progeny to die of neglect, though I am willing that it should be slain in battle. However, just because I address myself to the public _unlearned_ in Greek, and because Mr Arnold lays before _them_ a new, paradoxical, monstrously erroneous representation of facts, with the avowed object of staying the plague of my Homer; I am forced to reply to him.

Knowingly or unknowingly, he leads his readers to confuse four different questions: 1. whether Homer is thoroughly intelligible to modern scholars; 2. whether Homer was antiquated to the Athenians of Themistocles and Pericles; 3. whether he was thoroughly understood by them; 4. whether he is, absolutely, an antique poet.

I feel it rather odd, that Mr Arnold begins by complimenting me with ‘genuine learning’, and proceeds to appeal from me to the ‘living scholar’. (What if I were bluntly to reply: ‘Well! I am the living scholar’?) After starting the question, how Homer’s style appeared to Sophocles, he suddenly enters a plea, under form of a concession [‘I confess’!], as a pretence for carrying the cause into a new court, that of the Provost of Eton and two Professors, into which court I have no admission; and then, of his own will, pronounces a sentence in the name of these learned men. Whether they are pleased with this parading of their name in behalf of paradoxical error, I may well doubt: and until they indorse it themselves, I shall treat Mr Arnold’s process as a piece of forgery. But, be this as it may, I cannot allow him to ‘confess’ for me against me: let him confess for himself that he does not know, and not for me, who know perfectly well, whether Homer seemed quaint or antiquated to Sophocles. Of course he did, as every beginner must know. Why, if I were to write _mon_ for _man_, _londis_ for _lands_, _nesties_ for _nests_, _libbard_ for _leopard_, _muchel_ for _much_, _nap_ for _snap_, _green-wood shaw_ for _greenwood shade_, Mr Arnold would call me antiquated, although every word would be intelligible. Can he possibly be ignorant, that this exhibits but the smallest part of the chasm which separates the Homeric dialect not merely from the Attic prose, but from Æschylus when he borrows most from Homer? Every sentence of Homer was more or less antiquated to Sophocles, who could no more help feeling at every instant the foreign and antiquated character of the poetry, than an Englishman can help feeling the same in reading Burns’ poems. Would _mon_, _londis_, _libbard_, _withouten_, _muchel_ be antiquated or foreign, and are Πηληϊάδαο for Πηλείδου, ὁσσάτιος for ὅσος, ἤϋτε for ὡς, στήῃ for στῇ, τεκέεσσι for τέκνοις, τοῖσδεσσι for τοῖσδε, πολέες for πολλοὶ, μεσοηγὺς for μεταξὺ, αἶα for γῆ, εἴβω for λείβω, and five hundred others, less antiquated or less foreign? Homer has archaisms in every variety; some rather recent to the Athenians, and carrying their minds back only to Solon, as βασιλῆος for βασίλεως; others harsher, yet varying as dialect still, as ξεῖνος for ξένος, τίε for ἐτίμα, ἀνθεμόεις for ἀνθηρὸς, κέκλυθι for κλύε or ἄκουσον, θαμὺς for θαμινὸς or συχνὸς, ναιετάοντες for ναίοντες or οἰκοῦντες: others varying in the root, like a new language, as ἄφενος for πλοῦτος, ἰότης for βούλημα, τῆ for δέξαι, under which head are heaps of strange words, as ἀκὴν, χώομαι, βιὸς, κῆλα, μέμβλωκε, γέντο, πέπον, etc. etc. Finally comes a goodly lot of words which to this day are most uncertain in sense. My learned colleague Mr Malden has printed a paper on Homeric words, misunderstood by the later poets. Buttmann has written an octavo volume (I have the English translation, _containing 548 pages_) to discuss 106 ill-explained Homeric words. Some of these Sophocles may have understood, though we do not; but even if so, they were not the less antiquated to him. If there has been any perfect traditional understanding of Homer, we should not need to deal with so many words by elaborate argument. On the face of the Iliad alone every learner must know how many difficult adjectives occur: I write down on the spur of the moment and without reference, κρήγυον, ἀργὸς, ἀδινὸς, ἄητος, αἴητος, νώροψ, ἦνοψ, εἰλίποδες, ἕλιξ, ἑλικῶπες, ἔλλοπες, μέροπες, ἠλίβατος, ἠλέκτωρ, αἰγίλιψ, σιγαλόεις, ἰόμωρος, ἐγχεσίμωρος, πέπονες, ἠθεῖος. If Mr Arnold thought himself wiser than all the world of Greek scholars, he would not appeal to them, but would surely enlighten us all: he would tell me, for instance, what ἔλλοπες means, which Liddell and Scott do not pretend to understand; or ἠθεῖος, of which they give three different explanations. But he does not write as claiming an independent opinion, when he flatly opposes me and sets me down; he does but use surreptitiously the name of the ‘living scholar’ against me.

But I have only begun to describe the marked chasm often separating Homer’s dialect from everything Attic. It has a wide diversity of grammatical inflections, far beyond such vowel changes of dialect as answer to our provincial pronunciations. This begins with new case-endings to the nouns; in -θι, -θεν, -δε, -φι, proceeds to very peculiar pronominal forms, and then to strange or irregular verbal inflections, infinitives in -μεν, -μεναι, imperfects in -εσκε, presents in -αθω, and an immensity of strange adverbs and conjunctions. In Thiersch’s Greek Grammar, after the Accidence of common Greek is added as supplement an Homeric Grammar: and in it the Homeric Noun and Verb occupy (in the English Translation) 206 octavo pages. Who ever heard of a Spenserian Grammar? How many pages could be needed to explain Chaucer’s grammatical deviations from modern English? The bare fact of Thiersch having written so copious a grammar will enable even the unlearned to understand the monstrous misrepresentation of Homer’s dialect, on which Mr Arnold has based his condemnation of my Homeric diction. Not wishing to face the plain and undeniable facts which I have here recounted, Mr Arnold makes a ‘confession’ that we know nothing about them! and then appeals to three learned men whether Homer is antiquated to _them_; and expounds this to mean, _intelligible to them_! Well: if they have learned _modern_ Greek, of course they may understand it; but Attic Greek alone will not teach it to them. Neither will it teach them _Homer’s_ Greek. The difference of the two is in some directions so vast, that they may deserve to be called two languages as much as Portuguese and Spanish.

Much as I have written, a large side of the argument remains still untouched. The orthography of Homer was revolutionized in adapting it to Hellenic use, and in the process not only were the grammatical forms tampered with, but at least one consonant was suppressed. I am sure Mr Arnold has heard of the Digamma, though he does not see it in the current Homeric text. By the re-establishment of this letter, no small addition would be made to the ‘oddity’ of the sound to the ears of Sophocles. That the unlearned in Greek may understand this, I add, that what with us is written _eoika_, _oikon_, _oinos_, _hekas_, _eorga_, _eeipe_, _eleli_χθη, were with the poet _wewoika_, _wīkon_, _wīnos_, _wekas_ (or _swekas_?), _weworga_, _eweipe_, _eweli_χθη[42]; and so with very many other words, in which either the metre or the grammatical formation helps us to detect a lost consonant, and the analogy of other dialects or languages assures us that it is _w_ which has been lost. Nor is this all; but in certain words _sw_ seems to have vanished. What in our text is _hoi_, _heos_, _hekuros_, were probably _woi_ and _swoi_, _weos_ and _sweos_, _swekuros_. Moreover the received spelling of many other words is corrupt: for instance, _deos_, _deidoika_, _eddeisen_, _periddeisas_, _addees_. The true root must have had the form _dwe_ or _dre_ or _dhe_. That the consonant lost was really _w_, is asserted by Benfey from the Sanscrit _dvish_. Hence the true forms are _dweos_, _dedwoika_, _edweisen_, etc.... Next, the initial _l_ of Homer had in some words a stronger pronunciation, whether λλ or χλ, as in λλιταὶ, λλίσσομαι, λλωτὸς, λλιτανεύω. I have met with the opinion that the consonant lost in _anax_ is not _w_ but _k_; and that Homer’s _kanax_ is connected with English _king_. The relations of _wergon_, _weworga_, _wrexai_, to English _work_ and _wrought_ must strike everyone; but I do not here press the phenomena of the Homeric _r_ (although it became _br_ in strong Æolism), because they do not differ from those in Attic. The Attic forms εἴληφα, εἴλεγμαι for λέληφα, etc., point to a time when the initial λ of the roots was a double letter. A root λλαβ would explain Homer’s ἔλλαβε. If λλ[43] approached to its Welsh sound, that is, to χλ, it is not wonderful that such a pronunciation as οφρᾰ λλαβωμεν was possible: but it is singular that the ὕδατι χλιαρῷ of Attic is written λιαρῷ in our Homeric text, though the metre needs a double consonant. Such phenomena as χλιαρὸς and λιαρὸς, εἴβω and λειβω, ἴα and μία, εἴμαρμαι and ἔμμορε, αἶα and γαῖα, γέντο for ἕλετο, ἰωκὴ and ἴωξις with διώκω, need to be reconsidered in connection. The εἰς ἅλα ἇλτο of our Homer was perhaps εἰς ἅλα σάλλτο: when λλ was changed into λ, they compensated by circumflexing the vowel. I might add the query, Is it so certain that his θεαων was θ_eāwōn_, and not θ_eārōn_, analogous to Latin _dearum_? But dropping here everything that has the slightest uncertainty, the mere restoration of the _w_ where it is most necessary, makes a startling addition to the antiquated sound of the Homeric text. The reciters of Homer in Athens must have dropped the _w_, since it is never written. Nor indeed would Sophocles have introduced in his _Trachiniæ_, ἁ δέ οἱ φίλα δάμαρ ... leaving a hiatus most offensive to the Attics, in mere imitation of Homer, if he had been accustomed to hear from the reciters, _de woi_ or _de swoi_. In other words also, as in οὐλόμενος for ὀλόμενος, later poets have slavishly followed Homer into irregularities suggested by his peculiar metre. Whether Homer’s ᾱθανατος, αμμορος ... rose out of ανθάνατος, ἄνμορος ... is wholly unimportant when we remember his Ᾱπόλλωνος.

But this leads to remark on the acuteness of Mr Arnold’s ear. I need not ask whether he recites the Α differently in Ἆρες, Ἄρες, and in, Ᾰπόλλων Ᾱπολλωνος. He will not allow anything antiquated in Homer; and therefore it is certain that he recites,

αιδοιος τε μοι εσσι, φιλε εκυρε, δεινος τε and—ουδε εοικε—

as they are printed, and admires the rhythm. When he endures with exemplary patience such hiatuses, such dactyls as ἑεκυ, ουδεε, such a spondee as ρε δει, I can hardly wonder at his complacency in his own spondees “Between,” “To a.” He finds nothing wrong in και πεδια λωτευντα or πολλα λισσομενη. But Homer sang,

φιλε swεκυρε δwεινος τε—ουδε wεwοικε— και πεδια λλωτευντα ... πολλα λλισσομενη.

Mr Arnold is not satisfied with destroying Quantity alone. After theoretically substituting Accent for it in his hexameters, he robs us of Accent also; and presents to us the syllables “to a,” _both short_ and _both necessarily unaccented_, for a Spondee, in a pattern piece seven lines long, and with an express and gratuitous remark, that in using ‘to a’ for a Spondee, he has perhaps relied too much on accent. I hold up these phenomena in Mr Arnold as a warning to all scholars, of the pit of delusion into which they will fall, if they allow themselves to talk fine about the ‘Homeric rhythm’ _as now heard_, and the duty of a translator to reproduce something of it.

It is not merely the sound and the metre of Homer, which are impaired by the loss of his radical _w_; in extreme cases the sense also is confused. Thus if a scholar be asked, what is the meaning of ἐείσατο in the Iliad? he will have to reply: If it stands for _eweisato_, it means, ‘he was like’, and is related to the English root _wis_ and _wit_, Germ. _wiss_, Lat. _vid_; but it may also mean ‘he went’—a very eccentric Homerism,—in which case we should perhaps write it _eyeisato_, as in old English we have _he yode_ or _yede_ instead of _he goed_, _gaed_, since too the current root in Greek and Latin _i_ (go) may be accepted as _ye_, answering to German _geh_, English _go_. Thus two words, _eweisato_, ‘he was like’, _eyeisato_, ‘he went’, are confounded in our text. I will add, that in the Homeric

—ἤϋτε wέθνεα (_y_)εῖσι—(_Il._ 2, 87)

—διὰ πρὸ δὲ (_y_)είσατο καὶ τῆς (_Il._ 4, 138)

_my_ ear misses the consonant, though Mr Arnold’s (it seems) does not. If we were ordered to read _dat ting_ in Chaucer for _that thing_, it would at first ‘surprise’ us as ‘grotesque’, but after this objection had vanished, we should still feel it ‘antiquated’. The confusion of _thick_ and _tick_, _thread_ and _tread_, may illustrate the possible effect of dropping the _w_ in Homer. I observe that Benfey’s Greek Root Lexicon has a list of 454 digammated words, most of which are Homeric. But it is quite needless to press the argument to its full.

If as much learning had been spent on the double λ and on the _y_ and _h_ of Homer, as on the digamma, it might perhaps now be conceded that we have lost, not one, but three or four consonants from his text. That λ in λύω or λούω was ever a complex sound in Greek, I see nothing to indicate; hence _that_ λ, and the λ of λιταὶ, λιαρὸς, seem to have been different consonants in Homer, as _l_ and _ll_ in Welsh. As to _h_ and _y_ I assert nothing, except that critics appear too hastily to infer, that if a consonant has disappeared, it must needs be _w_. It is credible that the Greek _h_ was once strong enough to stop hiatus or elision, as the English, and much more the Asiatic _h_. The later Greeks, after turning the character H into a vowel, seem to have had no idea of a consonant _h_ in the middle of a word, nor any means of writing the consonant _y_. Since G passes through _gh_ into the sounds _h_, _w_, _y_, _f_ (as in English and German is obvious), it is easy to confound them all under the compendious word ‘digamma’. I should be glad to know that Homer’s forms were as well understood by modern scholars as Mr Arnold lays down.

On his quotation from Shakspeare, I remark, 1. ‘Orgulous’, from French ‘orgueilleux’, is intelligible to all who know French, and is comparable to Sicilian words in Æschylus. 2. It is contrary to fact to say, that Homer has not words, and words in great plenty, as unintelligible to later Greeks, as ‘orgulous’ to us. 3. _Sperr_, for _Bar_, as _Splash_ for _Plash_, is much less than the diversity which separates Homer from the spoken Attic. What is σμικρὸς for μικρὸς to compare with ἠβαιὸς for μικρός? 4. Mr Arnold (as I understand him) blames Shakspeare for being sometimes antiquated: I do not blame him, nor yet Homer for the same; but neither can I admit the contrast which he asserts. He says: ‘Shakspeare can compose, when he is at his best, in a language perfectly intelligible, in spite of the two centuries and a half which part him from us. _Homer has not Shakspeare’s variations_: he is never antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes’. I certainly find the very same variations in Homer, as Mr Arnold finds in Shakspeare. My reader unlearned in Greek might hastily infer from the facts just laid before him, that Homer is always equally strange to a purely Attic ear: but is not so. The dialects of Greece did indeed differ strongly, as broad Scotch from English; yet as we know, Burns is sometimes perfectly intelligible to an Englishman, sometimes quite unintelligible. In spite of Homer’s occasional wide receding from Attic speech, he as often comes close to it. For instance, in the first piece quoted above from Gladstone, the simile occupying five (Homeric) lines would _almost_ go down in Sophocles, if the Tragedian had chosen to use the metre. There is but one out-and-out Homeric word in it (ἐπασσύτερος): and even that is used once in an Æschylean chorus. There are no strange inflections, and not a single digamma is sensibly lost. Its peculiarities are only -εϊ for ει, ἐὸν for ὂν, and δέ τε for δέ, which could not embarrass the hearer as to the sense. I myself reproduce much the same result. Thus in my translation of these five lines I have the antiquated words _blore_ for _blast_, _harry_ for _harass_ (_harrow_, _worry_), and the antiquated participle _hoven_ from _heave_, as _cloven_, _woven_ from _cleave_, _weave_. The whole has thus just a tinge of antiquity, as had the Homeric passage to the Attics, without any need of aid from a Glossary. But at other times the aid is occasionally convenient, just as in Homer or Shakspeare.

Mr Arnold plays fallaciously on the words familiar and unfamiliar. Homer’s words may have been _familiar_ to the Athenians (_i.e._ often heard), even when they were _not_ understood, but, at most, were guessed at; or when, being understood, they were still felt and known to be utterly foreign. Of course, when thus ‘familiar’, they could not ‘surprise’ the Athenians, as Mr Arnold complains that my renderings surprise the English. Let mine be heard as Pope or even Cowper has been heard, and no one will be ‘surprised’.

Antiquated words are understood well by some, ill by others, not at all by a third class; hence it is difficult to decide the limits of a glossary. Mr Arnold speaks scornfully of me (he wonders _with whom Mr Newman can have lived_), that I use the words which I use, and explain those which I explain. He censures my little Glossary, for containing three words which he did not know, and some others, which, he says, are ‘familiar to all the world’. It is clear, he will never want a stone to throw at me. I suppose I am often guilty of keeping low company. I have found ladies whom no one would guess to be so ill-educated, who yet do not distinctly know what _lusty_ means; but have an uncomfortable feeling that it is very near to _lustful_; and understand _grisly_ only in the sense of _grizzled_, _grey_. Great numbers mistake the sense of Buxom, Imp, Dapper, deplorably. I no more wrote my Glossary than my translation for persons so highly educated as Mr Arnold.