This line, in which Homer wishes to go away with the most marked
rapidity from the line before, Chapman is forced, by the necessity of
rhyming, intimately to connect with the line before.
But since we _must_ go, though not here, and that besides the
chance.
The moment the word _chance_ strikes our ear, we are irresistibly
carried back to _advance_ and to the whole previous line, which,
according to Homer’s own feeling, we ought to have left behind us
entirely, and to be moving farther and farther away from.
Rhyme certainly, by intensifying antithesis, can intensify separation,
and this is precisely what Pope does; but this balanced rhetorical
antithesis, though very effective, is entirely un-Homeric. And this is
what I mean by saying that Pope fails to render Homer, because he does
not render his plainness and directness of style and diction. Where
Homer marks separation by moving away, Pope marks it by antithesis. No
passage could show this better than the passage I have just quoted, on
which I will pause for a moment.
Robert Wood, whose _Essay on the Genius of Homer_ is mentioned by Goethe
as one of the books which fell into his hands when his powers were first
developing themselves, and strongly interested him, relates of this
passage a striking story. He says that in 1762, at the end of the Seven
Years’ War, being then Under-Secretary of State, he was directed to wait
upon the President of the Council, Lord Granville, a few days before he
died, with the preliminary articles of the Treaty of Paris. ‘I found
him’, he continues, ‘so languid, that I proposed postponing my business
for another time; but he insisted that I should stay, saying, it could
not prolong his life to neglect his duty; and repeating the following
passage out of Sarpedon’s speech, he dwelled with particular emphasis on
the third line, which recalled to his mind the distinguishing part he
had taken in public affairs:
ὦ πέπον, εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε,
αἰεὶ δὴ μέλλοιμεν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε
ἔσσεσθ’, οὔτε κεν αὐτὸς ἐνὶ πρώτοισι μαχοίμην,[5]
οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν·
νῦν δ’—ἔμπης γὰρ Κῆρες ἐφεστᾶσιν θανάτοιο
μυρίαι, ἃς οὐκ ἔστι φυγεῖν βρότον, οὐδ’ ὑπαλύξαι—
ἴομεν.
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.