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.