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.
I have sufficiently shown why I think all forms of our ballad-metre
unsuited to Homer. It seems to me to be beyond question that, for epic
poetry, only three metres can seriously claim to be accounted capable of
the grand style. Two of these will at once occur to everyone,—the
ten-syllable, or so-called _heroic_, couplet, and blank verse. I do not
add to these the Spenserian stanza, although Dr Maginn, whose metrical
eccentricities I have already criticised, pronounces this stanza the one
right measure for a translation of Homer. It is enough to observe that
if Pope’s couplet, with the simple system of correspondences that its
rhymes introduce, changes the movement of Homer, in which no such
correspondences are found, and is therefore a bad measure for a
translator of Homer to employ, Spenser’s stanza, with its far more
intricate system of correspondences, must change Homer’s movement far
more profoundly, and must therefore be for the translator a far worse
measure than the couplet of Pope. Yet I will say, at the same time, that
the verse of Spenser is more fluid, slips more easily and quickly along,
than the verse of almost any other English poet.
By this the northern wagoner had set
His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star
That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
But firm is fixt, and sendeth light from far
To all that in the wide deep wandering are[25].
One cannot but feel that English verse has not often moved with the
fluidity and sweet ease of these lines. It is possible that it may have
been this quality of Spenser’s poetry which made Dr Maginn think that
the stanza of _The Faery Queen_ must be a good measure for rendering
Homer. This it is not: Spenser’s verse is fluid and rapid, no doubt, but
there are more ways than one of being fluid and rapid, and Homer is
fluid and rapid in quite another way than Spenser. Spenser’s manner is
no more Homeric than is the manner of the one modern inheritor of
Spenser’s beautiful gift,—the poet, who evidently caught from Spenser
his sweet and easy-slipping movement, and who has exquisitely employed
it; a Spenserian genius, nay, a genius by natural endowment richer
probably than even Spenser; that light which shines so unexpectedly and
without fellow in our century, an Elizabethan born too late, the early
lost and admirably gifted Keats.
I say then that there are really but three metres,—the ten-syllable
couplet, blank verse, and a third metre which I will not yet name,
but which is neither the Spenserian stanza nor any form of
ballad-verse,—between which, as vehicles for Homer’s poetry, the
translator has to make his choice. Everyone will at once remember a
thousand passages in which both the ten-syllable couplet and blank
verse prove themselves to have nobleness. Undoubtedly the movement
and manner of this,
Still raise for good the supplicating voice,
But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice,
are noble. Undoubtedly, the movement and manner of this:
High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
are noble also. But the first is in a rhymed metre; and the unfitness of
a rhymed metre for rendering Homer I have already shown. I will observe
too, that the fine couplet which I have quoted comes out of a satire, a
didactic poem; and that it is in didactic poetry that the ten-syllable
couplet has most successfully essayed the grand style. In narrative
poetry this metre has succeeded best when it essayed a sensibly lower
style, the style of Chaucer, for instance; whose narrative manner,
though a very good and sound manner, is certainly neither the grand
manner nor the manner of Homer.
The rhymed ten-syllable couplet being thus excluded, blank verse offers
itself for the translator’s use. The first kind of blank verse which
naturally occurs to us is the blank verse of Milton, which has been
employed, with more or less modification, by Mr Cary in translating
Dante, by Cowper, and by Mr Wright in translating Homer. How noble this
metre is in Milton’s hands, how completely it shows itself capable of
the grand, nay, of the grandest, style, I need not say. To this metre,
as used in the _Paradise Lost_, our country owes the glory of having
produced one of the only two poetical works in the grand style which are
to be found in the modern languages; the _Divine Comedy_ of Dante is the
other. England and Italy here stand alone; Spain, France, and Germany,
have produced great poets, but neither Calderon, nor Corneille, nor
Schiller, nor even Goethe, has produced a body of poetry in the true
grand style, in the sense in which the style of the body of Homer’s
poetry, or Pindar’s, or Sophocles’s, is grand. But Dante has, and so has
Milton; and in this respect Milton possesses a distinction which even
Shakspeare, undoubtedly the supreme poetical power in our literature,
does not share with him. Not a tragedy of Shakspeare but contains
passages in the worst of all styles, the affected style; and the grand
style, although it may be harsh, or obscure, or cumbrous, or
over-laboured, is never affected. In spite, therefore, of objections
which may justly be urged against the plan and treatment of the
_Paradise Lost_, in spite of its possessing, certainly, a far less
enthralling force of interest to attract and to carry forward the reader
than the _Iliad_ or the _Divine Comedy_, it fully deserves, it can never
lose, its immense reputation; for, like the _Iliad_ and the _Divine
Comedy_, nay, in some respects to a higher degree than either of them,
it is in the grand style.
But the grandeur of Milton is one thing, and the grandeur of Homer is
another. Homer’s movement, I have said again and again, is a flowing, a
rapid movement; Milton’s, on the other hand, is a laboured, a
self-retarding movement. In each case, the movement, the metrical cast,
corresponds with the mode of evolution of the thought, with the
syntactical cast, and is indeed determined by it. Milton charges himself
so full with thought, imagination, knowledge, that his style will hardly
contain them. He is too full-stored to show us in much detail one
conception, one piece of knowledge; he just shows it to us in a pregnant
allusive way, and then he presses on to another; and all this fulness,
this pressure, this condensation, this self-constraint, enters into his
movement, and makes it what it is,—noble, but difficult and austere.
Homer is quite different; he says a thing, and says it to the end, and
then begins another, while Milton is trying to press a thousand things
into one. So that whereas, in reading Milton, you never lose the sense
of laborious and condensed fulness, in reading Homer you never lose the
sense of flowing and abounding ease. With Milton line runs into line,
and all is straitly bound together: with Homer line runs off from line,
and all hurries away onward. Homer begins, Μῆνιν ἄειδε, Θεά,—at the
second word announcing the proposed action: Milton begins:
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, heavenly muse.
So chary of a sentence is he, so resolute not to let it escape him till
he has crowded into it all he can, that it is not till the thirty-ninth
word in the sentence that he will give us the key to it, the word of
action, the verb. Milton says:
O for that warning voice, which he, who saw
The Apocalypse, heard cry in heaven aloud.
He is not satisfied, unless he can tell us, all in one sentence, and
without permitting himself to actually mention the name, that the man
who had the warning voice was the same man who saw the Apocalypse. Homer
would have said, ‘O for that warning voice, which _John_ heard’—and if
it had suited him to say that John also saw the Apocalypse, he would
have given us that in another sentence. The effect of this allusive and
compressed manner of Milton is, I need not say, often very powerful; and
it is an effect which other great poets have often sought to obtain much
in the same way: Dante is full of it, Horace is full of it; but wherever
it exists, it is always an un-Homeric effect. ‘The losses of the
heavens’, says Horace, ‘fresh moons speedily repair; we, when we have
gone down where the pious Æneas, where the rich Tullus and Ancus
are,—_pulvis et umbra sumus_[26]’. He never actually says _where_ we go
to; he only indicates it by saying that it is that place where Æneas,
Tullus, and Ancus are. But Homer, when he has to speak of going down to
the grave, says, definitely, _ἐς Ἐλύσιοv πεδιον_—ἀθάνατοι
πέμψουσιν[27],—‘The immortals shall send thee _to the Elysian plain_’;
and it is not till after he has definitely said this, that he adds, that
it is there that the abode of departed worthies is placed: ὅθι ξανθὸς
Ῥαδάμανθυς—‘Where the yellow-haired Rhadamanthus is’. Again; Horace,
having to say that punishment sooner or later overtakes crime, says it
thus:
Raro antecedentem scelestum
Deseruit pede Pœna claudo[28].
The thought itself of these lines is familiar enough to Homer and
Hesiod; but neither Homer nor Hesiod, in expressing it, could possibly
have so complicated its expression as Horace complicates it, and
purposely complicates it, by his use of the word _deseruit_. I say that
this complicated evolution of the thought necessarily complicates the
movement and rhythm of a poet; and that the Miltonic blank verse, of
course the first model of blank verse which suggests itself to an
English translator of Homer, bears the strongest marks of such
complication, and is therefore entirely unfit to render Homer.
If blank verse is used in translating Homer, it must be a blank verse of
which English poetry, naturally swayed much by Milton’s treatment of
this metre, offers at present hardly any examples. It must not be
Cowper’s blank verse, who has studied Milton’s pregnant manner with such
effect, that, having to say of Mr Throckmorton that he spares his
avenue, although it is the fashion with other people to cut down theirs,
he says that Benevolus ‘reprieves the obsolete prolixity of shade’. It
must not be Mr Tennyson’s blank verse.
For all experience is an arch, wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose distance fades
For ever and for ever, as we gaze.
It is no blame to the thought of those lines, which belongs to another
order of ideas than Homer’s, but it is true, that Homer would certainly
have said of them, ‘It is to consider too curiously to consider so’. It
is no blame to their rhythm, which belongs to another order of movement
than Homer’s, but it is true that these three lines by themselves take
up nearly as much time as a whole book of the _Iliad_. No; the blank
verse used in rendering Homer must be a blank verse of which perhaps the
best specimens are to be found in some of the most rapid passages of
Shakspeare’s plays,—a blank verse which does not dovetail its lines into
one another, and which habitually ends its lines with monosyllables.
Such a blank verse might no doubt be very rapid in its movement, and
might perfectly adapt itself to a thought plainly and directly evolved;
and it would be interesting to see it well applied to Homer. But the
translator who determines to use it, must not conceal from himself that
in order to pour Homer into the mould of this metre, he will have
entirely to break him up and melt him down, with the hope of then
successfully composing him afresh; and this is a process which is full
of risks. It may, no doubt, be the real Homer that issues new from it;
it is not certain beforehand that it cannot be the real Homer, as it is
certain that from the mould of Pope’s couplet or Cowper’s Miltonic verse
it cannot be the real Homer that will issue; still, the chances of
disappointment are great. The result of such an attempt to renovate the
old poet may be an Æson; but it may also, and more probably will be a
Pelias.
When I say this, I point to the metre which seems to me to give the
translator the best chance of preserving the general effect of
Homer,—that third metre which I have not yet expressly named, the
hexameter. I know all that is said against the use of hexameters in
English poetry; but it comes only to this, that, among us, they have not
yet been used on any considerable scale with success. _Solvitur
ambulando_: this is an objection which can best be met by _producing_
good English hexameters. And there is no reason in the nature of the
English language why it should not adapt itself to hexameters as well as
the German language does; nay, the English language, from its greater
rapidity, is in itself better suited than the German for them. The
hexameter, whether alone or with the pentameter, possesses a movement,
an expression, which no metre hitherto in common use amongst us
possesses, and which I am convinced English poetry, as our mental wants
multiply, will not always be content to forgo. Applied to Homer, this
metre affords to the translator the immense support of keeping him more
nearly than any other metre to Homer’s movement; and, since a poet’s
movement makes so large a part of his general effect, and to reproduce
this general effect is at once the translator’s indispensable business
and so difficult for him, it is a great thing to have this part of your
model’s general effect already given you in your metre, instead of
having to get it entirely for yourself.
These are general considerations; but there are also one or two
particular considerations which confirm me in the opinion that for
translating Homer into English verse the hexameter should be used. The
most successful attempt hitherto made at rendering Homer into English,
the attempt in which Homer’s general effect has been best retained, is
an attempt made in the hexameter measure. It is a version of the famous
lines in the third book of the _Iliad_, which end with that mention of
Castor and Pollux from which Mr Ruskin extracts the sentimental
consolation already noticed by me. The author is the accomplished
Provost of Eton, Dr Hawtrey; and this performance of his must be my
excuse for having taken the liberty to single him out for mention, as
one of the natural judges of a translation of Homer, along with
Professor Thompson and Professor Jowett, whose connection with Greek
literature is official. The passage is short[29]; and Dr Hawtrey’s
version of it is suffused with a pensive grace which is, perhaps, rather
more Virgilian than Homeric; still it is the one version of any part of
the _Iliad_ which in some degree reproduces for me the original effect
of Homer: it is the best, and it is in hexameters.
This is one of the particular considerations that incline me to prefer
the hexameter, for translating Homer, to our established metres. There
is another. Most of you, probably, have some knowledge of a poem by Mr
Clough, _The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich_, a long-vacation pastoral, in
hexameters. The general merits of that poem I am not going to discuss:
it is a serio-comic poem, and, therefore, of essentially different
nature from the _Iliad_. Still in two things it is, more than any other
English poem which I can call to mind, like the _Iliad_: in the rapidity
of its movement, and the plainness and directness of its style. The
thought of this poem is often curious and subtle, and that is not
Homeric; the diction is often grotesque, and that is not Homeric. Still
by its rapidity of movement, and plain and direct manner of presenting
the thought however curious in itself, this poem, which, being as I say
a serio-comic poem, has a right to be grotesque, is grotesque _truly_,
not, like Mr Newman’s version of the _Iliad_, _falsely_. Mr Clough’s odd
epithets, ‘The grave man nicknamed Adam’, ‘The hairy Aldrich’, and so
on, grow vitally and appear naturally in their place; while Mr Newman’s
‘dapper-greaved Achaians’, and ‘motley-helmed Hector’, have all the air
of being mechanically elaborated and artificially stuck in. Mr Clough’s
hexameters are excessively, needlessly rough; still owing to the native
rapidity of this measure, and to the directness of style which so well
allies itself with it, his composition produces a sense in the reader
which Homer’s composition also produces, and which Homer’s translator
ought to _re_-produce,—the sense of having, within short limits of time,
a large portion of human life presented to him, instead of a small
portion.
Mr Clough’s hexameters are, as I have just said, too rough and
irregular; and indeed a good model, on any considerable scale, of this
metre, the English translator will nowhere find. He must not follow the
model offered by Mr Longfellow in his pleasing and popular poem of
_Evangeline_; for the merit of the manner and movement of _Evangeline_,
when they are at their best, is to be tenderly elegant; and their fault,
when they are at their worst, is to be lumbering; but Homer’s defect is
not lumberingness, neither is tender elegance his excellence. The
lumbering effect of most English hexameters is caused by their being
much too dactylic[30]; the translator must learn to use spondees freely.
Mr Clough has done this, but he has not sufficiently observed another
rule which the translator cannot follow too strictly; and that is, to
have no lines which will not, as it is familiarly said, _read
themselves_. This is of the last importance for rhythms with which the
ear of the English public is not thoroughly acquainted. Lord Redesdale,
in two papers on the subject of Greek and Roman metres, has some good
remarks on the outrageous disregard of quantity in which English verse,
trusting to its force of accent, is apt to indulge itself. The
predominance of accent in our language is so great, that it would be
pedantic not to avail oneself of it; and Lord Redesdale suggests rules
which might easily be pushed too far. Still, it is undeniable that in
English hexameters we generally force the quantity far too much; we rely
on justification by accent with a security which is excessive. But not
only do we abuse accent by shortening long syllables and lengthening
short ones; we perpetually commit a far worse fault, by requiring the
removal of the accent from its natural place to an unnatural one, in
order to make our line scan. This is a fault, even when our metre is one
which every English reader knows, and when we can see what we want and
can correct the rhythm according to our wish; although it is a fault
which a great master may sometimes commit knowingly to produce a desired
effect, as Milton changes the natural accent on the word _Tiresias_ in
the line:
And Tíresias and Phineus, prophets old;
and then it ceases to be a fault, and becomes a beauty. But it is a real
fault, when Chapman has:
By him the golden-throned Queen slept, the Queen of Deities;
for in this line, to make it scan, you have to take away the accent from
the word _Queen_, on which it naturally falls, and to place it on
_throned_, which would naturally be unaccented; and yet, after all, you
get no peculiar effect or beauty of cadence to reward you. It is a real
fault, when Mr Newman has: