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.

‘_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.

But I must proceed to remark: Homer might have been as unintelligible to

Pericles, as was the court poet of king Crœsus, and yet it might be

highly improper to translate him into an old English dialect; namely, if

he had been the typical poet of a logical and refined age. _Here is the

real question_;—is he absolutely antique, or only antiquated relatively,

as Euripides is now antiquated? A modern Greek statesman, accomplished

for every purpose of modern business, might find himself quite perplexed

by the infinitives, the numerous participles, the optatives, the

datives, by the particle ἂν, and by the whole syntax of Euripides, as

also by many special words; but this would never justify us in

translating Euripides into any but a most refined style. Was Homer of

this class? I say, that he _not only was_ antiquated, relatively to

Pericles, but _is also_ absolutely antique, being the poet of a

barbarian age. Antiquity in poets is not (as Horace stupidly imagines in

the argument of the horse’s tail) a question of years, but of intrinsic

qualities. Homer sang to a wholly unfastidious audience, very

susceptible to the marvellous, very unalive to the ridiculous, capable

of swallowing with reverence the most grotesque conceptions. Hence

nothing is easier than to turn Homer to ridicule. The fun which Lucian

made of his mythology, a rhetorical critic like Mr Arnold could make of

his diction, if he understood it as he understands mine. He takes credit

to himself for _not_ ridiculing me; and is not aware, that I could not

be like Homer without being easy to ridicule. An intelligent child is

the second-best reader of Homer. The best of all is a scholar of highly

masculine taste; the worst of all is a fastidious and refined man, to

whom everything quaint seems ignoble and contemptible.

I might have supposed that Mr Arnold thinks Homer to be a polished

drawing-room poet, like Pope, when I read in him this astonishing

sentence, p. 35. ‘Search the English language for a word which does

_not_ apply to Homer, and you could not fix on a better word than

_quaint_’. But I am taken aback at finding him praise the diction of

Chapman’s translation in contrast to mine. Now I never open Chapman,

without being offended at his pushing Homer’s quaintness most

unnecessarily into the grotesque. Thus in Mr Gladstone’s first passage

above, where Homer says that the sea ‘sputters out the foam’, Chapman

makes it, ‘_all her back in bristles set, spits_ every way _her_ foam’,

obtruding what may remind one of a cat or a stoat. I hold _sputter_ to

be epical[44], because it is strong; but _spit_ is feeble and mean. In

passing, I observe that the universal praise given to Chapman as

‘Homeric’ (a praise which I have too absolutely repeated, perhaps

through false shame of depreciating my only rival) is a testimony to me

that I rightly appreciate Homeric style; for my style is Chapman’s

softened, purged of conceits and made far more melodious. Mr Arnold

leaves me to wonder, how, with his disgust at me, he can avoid feeling

tenfold disgust at Chapman; and to wonder also what he _means_, by so

blankly contradicting my statement that Homer is quaint; and why he so

vehemently resents it. He does not vouchsafe to me or to his readers one

particle of disproof or of explanation.

I regard it as quaint in Homer to call Juno _white-arm’d goddess_ and

_large-ey’d_. (I have not rendered βοῶπις _ox-ey’d_, because in a case

of doubt I shrank to obtrude anything so grotesque to us.) It is quaint

to say, ‘the lord of bright-haired Juno lightens’ for ‘it lightens’; or

‘my heart in my _shaggy_ bosom is divided’, for ‘I doubt’: quaint to

call waves _wet_, milk _white_, blood _dusky_, horses _singlehoofed_, a

hero’s hand _broad_, words _winged_, Vulcan _Lobfoot_ (Κυλλοποδίων), a

maiden _fair-ankled_, the Greeks _wellgreav’d_, a spear _longshadowy_,

battle and council _man-ennobling_, one’s knees _dear_, and many other

epithets. Mr Arnold most gratuitously asserts that the sense of these

had evaporated to the Athenians. If that were true, it would not signify

to this argument. Δαιμόνιος (possessed by an elf or dæmon) so lost its

sense in Attic talk, that although Æschylus has it in its true meaning,

some college tutors (I am told) render ὦ δαιμόνιε in Plato, ‘my very

good sir!’ This is surely no good reason for mistranslating the word in

Homer. If Mr Arnold could prove (what he certainly cannot) that

Sophocles had forgotten the derivation of ἐϋκνημῖδες and ἐϋμμελίης, and

understood by the former nothing but ‘full armed’ and by the latter (as

he says) nothing but ‘war-like’, this would not justify his blame of me

for rendering the words correctly. If the whole Greek nation by long

familiarity had become inobservant of Homer’s ‘oddities’ (conceding this

for the moment), that also would be no fault of mine. That Homer _is_

extremely peculiar, even if the Greeks had become deadened to the sense

of it, the proof on all sides is overpowering.

It is very quaint to say, ‘the outwork (or rampart) of the teeth’

instead of ‘the lips’. If Mr Arnold will call it ‘portentous’ in my

English, let him produce some shadow of reason for denying it to be

portentous in Greek. Many phrases are so quaint as to be almost

untranslatable, as μήστωρ φόβοιο (deviser of fear?) μήστωρ ἀϋτῆς

(deviser of outcry?): others are quaint to the verge of being comical,

as to call a man an _equipoise_ (ἀτάλαντος) to a god, and to praise eyes

for having a _curl_ in them[45]. It is quaint to make Juno call Jupiter

αἰνότατε (grimmest? direst?), whether she is in good or bad humour with

him, and to call a Vision _ghastly_, when it is sent with a pleasant

message. It is astonishingly quaint to tell how many oxen every fringe

of Athene’s ægis was worth.—It is quaint to call Patroclus ‘a great

simpleton’, for not foreseeing that he would lose his life in rushing to

the rescue of his countrymen. (I cannot receive Mr Arnold’s suggested

Biblical correction ‘Thou fool’! which he thinks grander: first, because

grave moral rebuke is utterly out of place; secondly, because the Greek

cannot mean this;—it means infantine simplicity, and has precisely the

colour of the word which I have used.)—It is quaint to say: ‘Patroclus

kindled a great fire, _godlike man_’! or, ‘Automedon held up the meat,

_divine_ Achilles slic’d it’: quaint to address a young friend as

‘Oh[46] pippin’! or ‘Oh softheart’! or ‘Oh pet’! whichever is the true

translation. It is quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are

belabouring, Ulysses to a pet ram, Agamemnon in two lines to three gods,

and in the third line to a bull; the Myrmidons to wasps, Achilles to a

grampus chasing little fishes, Antilochus to a wolf which kills a dog

and runs away. Menelaus striding over Patroclus’s body to a heifer

defending her first-born. It is quaint to say that Menelaus was as brave

as a bloodsucking fly, that Agamemnon’s sobs came thick as flashes of

lightning; and that the Trojan mares, while running, groaned like

overflowing rivers. All such similes come from a mind quick to discern

similarities, but _very dull to feel incongruities_; unaware therefore

that it is on a verge where the sublime easily turns into the ludicrous;

a mind and heart inevitably quaint to the very core. What is it in

Vulcan, when he would comfort his mother under Jupiter’s threat, to make

jokes about the severe mauling which he himself formerly received, and

his terror lest she should be now beaten? Still more quaint (if

_rollicking_ is not the word), is the address by which Jupiter tries to

ingratiate himself with Juno: viz. he recounts to her all his unlawful

amours, declaring that in none of them was he so smitten as now. I have

not enough of the γενναῖος εὐηθεία, the barbarian simple-heartedness,

needed by a reader of Homer, to get through this speech with gravity.

What shall I call it, certainly much worse than quaint, that the poet

adds: Jupiter was more enamoured than at his _stolen_ embrace in their

first bed ‘secretly from their dear parents’? But to develop Homer’s

inexhaustible quaintnesses, of which Mr Arnold denies the existence,

seems to me to need a long treatise. It is not to be expected, that one

who is blind to superficial facts so very prominent as those which I

have recounted, should retain any delicate perception of the highly

coloured, intense, and very eccentric diction of Homer, even if he has

ever understood it, which he forces me to doubt. He sees nothing ‘odd’

in κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, or in κυνόμυια, ‘thou dogfly’! He replaces to his

imagination the flesh and blood of the noble barbarian by a dim feeble

spiritless outline.

I have not adduced, in proof of Homer’s quaintness, the monstrous simile

given to us in Iliad 13, 754; viz. Hector ‘darted forward screaming like

a snowy mountain, and flew through the Trojans and allies’: for I cannot

believe that the poet wrote anything so absurd. Rather than admit this,

I have suggested that the text is corrupt, and that for ὄρεϊ νιφόεντι we

should read ὀρνέῳ θύοντι, ‘darted forth screaming _like a raging bird_’.

Yet, as far as I know, I am the first man that has here impugned the

text. Mr Brandreth is faithful in his rendering, except that he says

_shouting_ for _screaming_:

‘He said; and like a snowy mountain, rush’d

Shouting; and flew through Trojans and allies.’

Chapman, Cowper, and Pope strain and twist the words to an impossible

sense, putting in something about _white plume_, which they fancy

suggested a snowy mountain; but they evidently accept the Greek as it

stands, unhesitatingly. I claim this phenomenon in proof that to all

commentators and interpreters hitherto Homer’s quaintness has been such

an _axiom_, that they have even acquiesced unsuspiciously in an

extravagance which goes far beyond oddity. Moreover the reader may augur

by my opposite treatment of the passage, with what discernment Mr Arnold

condemns me of obtruding upon Homer gratuitous oddities which equal the

conceits of Chapman.

But, while thus vindicating _Quaintness_ as an essential quality of

Homer, do I regard it as a weakness to be apologized for? Certainly not;

for it is a condition of his cardinal excellences. He could not

otherwise be _Picturesque_ as he is. So volatile is his mind, that what

would be a Metaphor in a more logical and cultivated age, with him riots

in Simile which overflows its banks. His similes not merely go

beyond[47] the mark of likeness; in extreme cases they even turn into

contrariety. If he were not so carried away by his illustration, as to

forget what he is illustrating (which belongs to a quaint mind), he

would never paint for us such full and splendid pictures. Where a

logical later poet would have said that Menelaus

With _eagle-eye_ survey’d the field,

the mere metaphor contenting him; Homer says:

Gazing around on every side, in fashion of an eagle,

Which, of all heaven’s fowl, they say, to scan the earth is

keenest:

Whose eye, when loftiest he hangs, not the swift hare escapeth,

Lurking amid a leaf-clad bush: but straight at it he souseth,

Unerring; and with crooked gripe doth quickly rieve its spirit.

I feel this long simile to be a disturbance of the logical balance, such

as belongs to the lively eye of the savage, whose observation is

intense, his concentration of reasoning powers feeble. Without this, we

should never have got anything so picturesque.

Homer never sees things _in the same proportions_ as we see them. To

omit his digressions, and what I may call his ‘impertinences’, in order

to give to his argument that which Mr Arnold is pleased to call the

proper ‘balance’, is to value our own logical minds, more than his

picturesque[48] but illogical mind.

Mr Arnold says that I am not quaint, but grotesque, in my rendering of

κυνὸς κακομηχάνου. I do not hold the phrase to be quaint: to me it is

excessively coarse. When Jupiter calls Juno ‘a bitch’, of course he

means a snarling cur; hence my rendering, ‘vixen’ (or she-fox), is there

perfect, since we say _vixen_ of an irascible woman. But Helen had no

such evil tempers, and beyond a doubt she meant to ascribe impurity to

herself. I have twice committed a pious fraud by making her call herself

‘a vixen’, where ‘bitch’ is the only faithful rendering; and Mr Arnold,

instead of thanking me for throwing a thin veil over Homer’s deformity,

assails me for my phrase as intolerably grotesque.

He further forbids me to invent new compound adjectives, as

fair-thron’d, rill-bestream’d; because they strike us as new, though

Homer’s epithets (he says) did not so strike the Greeks: hence they

derange attention from the main question. I hold this doctrine of his

(conceding his fact for a moment) to be destructive of all translation

whatever, into prose or poetry. When Homer tells us that Achilles’

horses were munching lotus and parsley, Pope renders it by ‘the horses

grazed’, and does not say on what. Using Mr Arnold’s principles, he

might defend himself by arguing: ‘The Greeks, being familiar with such

horsefood, were not struck by it as new, as my reader would be. I was

afraid of telling him _what_ the horses were eating, lest it should

derange the balance of his mind, and injuriously divert him from the

main idea of the sentence’. But, I find, readers are indignant on

learning Pope’s suppression: they feel that he has defrauded them of a

piece of interesting information.—In short, how _can_ an Englishman read

any Greek composition and be affected by it as Greeks were? In a piece

of Euripides my imagination is caught by many things, which he never

intended or calculated for the prominence which they actually get in my

mind. This or that absurdity in mythology, which passed with him as

matter of course, may monopolize my main attention. Our minds are not

passive recipients of this or that poet’s influence; but the poet is the

material on which our minds actively work. If an unlearned reader thinks

it very ‘odd’ of Homer (the first time he hears it) to call Aurora

‘fair-thron’d’, so does a boy learning Greek think it odd to call her

εὔθρονος. Mr Arnold ought to blot every odd Homeric epithet out of his

_Greek_ Homer (or never lend the copy to a youthful learner) if he

desires me to expunge ‘fair-thron’d’ from the translation. Nay, I think

he should conceal that the Morning was esteemed as a goddess, though she

had no altars or sacrifice. It is _all_ odd. But that is just why people

want to read an English Homer,—to know all his oddities, exactly as

learned men do. He is the phenomenon to be studied. His peculiarities,

pleasant or unpleasant, are to be made known, precisely because of his

great eminence and his substantial deeply seated worth. Mr Arnold writes

like a timid biographer, fearful to let too much of his friend come out.

So much as to the substance. As to mere words, here also I hold the very

reverse of Mr Arnold’s doctrine. I do not feel free to translate

οὐρανομήκης by ‘heaven-kissing’, precisely _because_ Shakspeare has used

the last word. It is his property, as ἐϋκνημῖδες, ἐϋμμελίης, κυδιάνειρα,

etc., are Homer’s property. I could not use it without being felt to

_quote_ Shakspeare, which would be highly inappropriate in a Homeric

translation. But _if_ nobody had ever yet used the phrase

‘heaven-kissing’ (or if it were current without any proprietor) _then_ I

should be quite free to use it as a rendering of οὐρανομήκης. I cannot

assent to a critic killing the vital powers of our tongue. If Shakspeare

might invent the compound ‘heaven-kissing’, or ‘man-ennobling’, so might

William Wordsworth or Matthew Arnold; and so might I. Inspiration is not

dead, nor yet is the English language.

Mr Arnold is slow to understand what I think very obvious. Let me then

put a case. What if I were to scold a missionary for rendering in Feejee

the phrase ‘kingdom of heaven’ and ‘Lamb of God’ accurately; also

‘saints’ and other words _characteristic of the New Testament_? I might

urge against him: ‘This and that sounds very _odd_ to the Feejees: that

cannot be right, for it did _not_ seem odd to the Nicene bishops. The

latter had forgotten that βασιλεία meant “kingdom”; they took the phrase

“kingdom of God” collectively to mean “the Church”. The phrase did not

surprise them. As to “Lambs”, the Feejees are not accustomed to

sacrifice, and cannot be expected to know of themselves what “Lamb of

God” means, as Hebrews did. The courtiers of Constantine thought it very

natural to be called ἅγιοι, for they were accustomed to think every

baptised person ἅγιος; but to the baptised courtiers of Feejee it really

seems very _odd_ to be called _saints_. You disturb the balance of their

judgment’.

The missionary might reply: ‘You seemed to be ashamed of the oddities of

the Gospel. I am not. They grow out of its excellences and cannot be

separated. By avoiding a few eccentric phrases you will do little to

remove the deep-seated eccentricity of its very essence. Odd and

eccentric it will remain, unless you despoil it of its heart, and reduce

it to a fashionable philosophy’. And just so do I reply to Mr Arnold.

The Homeric style (whether it be that of an individual or of an age) is

peculiar, is ‘odd’, if Mr Arnold like the word, to the very core. Its

eccentricities in epithet are mere efflorescences of its essential

eccentricity. If Homer could cry out to us, I doubt not he would say, as

Oliver Cromwell to the painter, ‘Paint me just I am, _wart and all_’:

but if the true Homer could reappear, I am sure Mr Arnold would start

from him just as a bishop of Rome from a fisherman apostle. If a

translator of the Bible honours the book by his close rendering of its

characteristics, however ‘odd’, so do I honour Homer by the same. Those

characteristics, the moment I produce them, Mr Arnold calls _ignoble_.

Well: be it so; but I am not to blame for them. They exist whether Mr

Arnold likes them or not.

I will here observe that he bids me paraphrase τανύπεπλος

(trailing-robed) into something like, ‘Let gorgeous Tragedy With

sceptred pall come sweeping by’. I deliberately judge, that to

paraphrase an otiose epithet is the very worst thing that can be done:

to omit it entirely would be better. I object even to Mr Gladstone’s

... whom Leto bare,

Leto with the flowing hair.

For the repetition overdoes the prominence of the epithet. Still more

extravagant is Mr Arnold in wishing me to turn ‘single-hoofed horses’ in

to ‘something which _as little surprises us_ as “Gallop apace, you

fiery-footed steeds”’: p. 96. To reproduce Shakspeare would be in any

case a ‘surprising’ mode of translating Homer: but the principle which

changes ‘single-hoofed’ into a different epithet which the translator

thinks _better_, is precisely that which for more than two centuries has

made nearly all English translation worthless. To throw the poet into

your crucible, and bring out old Pelias young, is not a hopeful process.

I had thought, the manly taste of this day had outgrown the idea that a

translator’s business is to melt up the old coin and stamp it with a

modern image. I am wondering that I should have to write against such

notions: I would not take the trouble, only that they come against me

from an Oxford Professor of Poetry.

At the same time, his doctrine, as I have said, goes far beyond compound

epithets. Whether I say ‘motley-helmèd Hector’ or ‘Hector of the motley

helm’, ‘silver-footed Thetis’ or ‘Thetis of the silver foot’,

‘man-ennobling combat’ or ‘combat which ennobles man’, the novelty is so

nearly on a par, that he cannot condemn one and justify the other on

this score. Even Pope falls far short of the false taste which would

plane down every Homeric prominence: for he prizes an elegant epithet

like ‘silver-footed’, however new and odd.

From such a Homer as Mr Arnold’s specimens and principles would give us,

no one could _learn_ anything; no one could have any motive for reading

the translation. He smooths down the stamp of Homer’s coin, till nothing

is left even for microscopic examination. When he forbids me (p. 96) to

let my reader know that Homer calls horses ‘single-hoofed’, of course he

would suppress also the epithets ‘white milk’, ‘dusky blood’, ‘dear

knees’, ‘dear life’, etc. His process obliterates everything

characteristic, great or small.

Mr Arnold condemns my translating certain names of horses. He says (p.

58): ‘Mr Newman calls Xanthus _Chesnut_; as he calls Balius _Spotted_

and Podarga _Spry-foot_: which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss

Nightingale _Mdelle. Rossignol_, or Mr Bright _M. Clair_’. He is very

wanting in discrimination. If I had translated Hector into _Possessor_

or Agamemnon into _Highmind_, his censure would be just. A Miss White

may be a brunette, a Miss Brown may be a blonde: we utter the proper

names of men and women without any remembrance of their intrinsic

meaning. But it is different with many names of domestic animals. We

never call a dog _Spot_, unless he is spotted; nor without consciousness

that the name expresses his peculiarity. No one would give to a black

horse the name Chesnut; nor, if he had called a chesnut horse by the

name Chesnut, would he ever forget the meaning of the name while he used

it. The Greeks called a chesnut horse _xanthos_ and a spotted horse

_balios_; therefore, until Mr Arnold proves the contrary, I believe that

they never read the names of Achilles’ two horses without a sense of

their meaning. Hence the names ought to be translated; while Hector and

Laomedon ought not. The same reasoning applies to Podarga, though I do

not certainly understand ἀργός. I have taken it to mean _sprightly_.

Mr Arnold further asserts, that Homer is never ‘garrulous’. Allowing

that too many others agree with me, he attributes our error to giving

too much weight to a sentence in Horace! I admire Horace as an

ode-writer, but I do not revere him as a critic, any more than as a

moral philosopher. I say that Homer is garrulous, because I see and feel

it. Mr Arnold puts me into a most unwelcome position. I have a right to

say, I have some enthusiasm for Homer. In the midst of numerous urgent

calls of duty and taste, I devoted every possible quarter of an hour for

two years and a half to translate the Iliad, toiling unremittingly in my

vacations and in my walks, and going to large expenses of money, in

order to put the book before the unlearned; and this, though I am not a

Professor of Poetry nor even of Greek. Yet now I am forced to appear as

Homer’s disparager and accuser! But if Homer were always a poet, he

could not be, what he is, so many other things beside poet. As the

Egyptians paint in their tombs processes of art, not because they are

beautiful or grand, but from a mere love of imitating; so Homer narrates

perpetually from a mere love of chatting. In how thoroughly Egyptian a

way does he tell the process of cutting up an ox and making _kebâb_; the

process of bringing a boat to anchor and carefully putting by the

tackle; the process of taking out a shawl from a chest, where it lies at

the very bottom! With what glee he repeats the secret talk of the gods;

and can tell all about the toilet of Juno. Every particular of trifling

actions comes out with him, as, the opening of a door or box with a key.

He tells who made Juno’s earrings or veil or the shield of Ajax, the

history of Agamemnon’s breast-plate, and in what detail a hero puts on

his pieces of armour. I would not press the chattiness of Pandarus,

Glaucus, Nestor, Æneas, in the midst of battle; I might press his

description of wounds. Indeed I have said enough, and more than enough,

against Mr Arnold’s novel, unsupported, paradoxical assertion.—But this

is connected with another subject. I called Homer’s manner ‘direct’: Mr

Arnold (if I understand) would supersede this by his own epithet

‘rapid’. But I cannot admit the exchange: Homer is often the opposite of

rapid. Amplification is his characteristic, as it must be of every

improvisatore, every popular orator: condensation indeed is improper for

anything but written style; written to be read privately. But I regard

as Homer’s worst defect, his lingering over scenes of endless carnage

and painful wounds. He knows to half an inch where one hero hits another

and how deep. They arm: they approach: they encounter: we have to listen

to stereotype details again and again. Such a style is anything but

‘rapid’. Homer’s garrulity often leads him into it; yet he can do far

better, as in a part of the fight over Patroclus’s body, and other

splendid passages.

Garrulity often vents itself in expletives. Mr Arnold selects for

animadversion this line of mine (p. 41),

‘A thousand fires along the plain, _I say_, that night were

gleaming’.

He says: ‘This may be the genuine style of ballad poetry, but it is

_not_ the style of Homer’. I reply; my use of expletives is moderate

indeed compared to Homer’s. Mr Arnold writes, as if quite unaware that

such words as the intensely prosaic ἄρα, and its abbreviations ἂρ, ῥα,

with τοι, τε, δὴ, μάλα, ἦ, ἦ ῥα νυ, περ, overflow in epic style; and

that a pupil who has mastered the very copious stock of Attic particles,

is taken quite aback by the extravagant number in Homer. Our expletives

are generally more offensive, because longer. My principle is, to admit

only such expletives as _add energy_, and savour of antiquity. To the

feeble expletives of mean ditties I am not prone. I once heard from an

eminent counsellor the first lesson of young lawyers, in the following

doggerel:

He who holds his lands in fee,

Need neither quake nor quiver:

For I humbly conceive, look ye, do ye see?

He holds his lands for ever.

The ‘humbly conceiving’ certainly outdoes Homer. Yet if the poet had

chosen (as he _might_ have chosen) to make Polydamas or Glaucus say:

Ὅστις ἐπετράφθη τέμενος πίστει βασιλῆος,

φημί τοι, οὗτος ἀνὴρ οὔτ’ ἂρ τρέμει οὔτε φοβεῖται·

δὴ μάλα γάρ ῥα ἑὰς κρατέοι κεν ἐσαιὲν ἀρούρας:

I rather think the following would be a fair prose rendering: ‘Whoso

hath been entrusted with a demesne under pledge with the king (I tell

you); this man neither trembleth (you see) nor feareth: for (look ye!)

he (verily) may hold (you see) his lands for ever’.

Since Mr Arnold momentarily appeals to me on the chasm between Attic and

Homeric Greek, I turn the last piece into a style _far less_ widely

separated from modern English than Homer from Thucydides.

Dat mon, quhich hauldeth Kyngis-af

Londis yn féo, niver

(I tell ’e) feereth aught; sith hee

Doth hauld hys londis yver.

I certainly do _not_ recommend this style to a translator, yet it would

have its advantage. Even with a smaller change of dialect it would aid

us over Helen’s self-piercing denunciation, ‘approaching to Christian

penitence’, as some have judged it.

Quoth she, I am a gramsome bitch,

If woman bitch may bee.

But in behalf of the poet I must avow: when one considers how dramatic

he is, it is marvellous how little in him can offend. For this very

reason he is above needing tender treatment from a translator, but can

bear faithful rendering, not only better than Shakspeare but better than

Pindar or Sophocles.

When Mr Arnold denies that Homer is ever prosaic or homely, his own

specimens of translation put me into despair of convincing him; for they

seem to me a very anthology of prosaic flatness. Phrases, which are not

in themselves bad, if they were elevated by something in the syntax or

rhythm distinguishing them from prose, become in him prose out-and-out.

‘To Peleus why did we give you, to a mortal’? ‘In the plain _there_ were

kindled a thousand fires; by each one _there_ sate fifty men’. [At least

he might have left out the expletive.] ‘By their chariots stood the

steeds, and champed the white barley; while their masters sate by the

fire and waited for morning’. ‘Us, whose portion for ever Zeus has made

it, from youth _right up_ to age, to be winding skeins of grievous wars,

till _every soul of us_ perish’. The words which I here italicize, seem

to me below noble ballad. What shall I say of ‘I bethink me what the

Trojan men and Trojan women might murmur’. ‘Sacred Troy shall _go to

destruction_’. ‘Or bear pails to the well of Messeϊs’. ‘See, the wife of

Hector, that great pre-eminent captain of the horsemen of Troy, _in the

day they fought_ for their city’, for, ‘_who was_ captain in the day _on

which_——’. ‘Let me be dead and the earth be mounded (?) above me, ere I

hear thy cries, and thy captivity[49] _told of_’. ‘By no slow pace or

want of swiftness _of ours_[50] did the Trojans _obtain to strip_ the

arms of Patroclus’. ‘Here I am destined to perish, far from my father

and mother dear; _for all that_, I will not’, etc. ‘Dare they not enter

the fight, or stand in the council of heroes, _all_ for fear of the

shame and the _taunts my crime_ has awakened?’ One who regards all this

to be high poetry,—emphatically ‘noble’,—may well think τὸν δ’

ἀπαμειβόμενος or ‘with him there came forty black galleys’, or the

broiling of the beef collops, to be such. When Mr Arnold regards ‘no

want of swiftness of _ours_’; ‘for all that’, in the sense of

nevertheless; ‘_all_ for fear’, _i.e._ because of the fear; _not_ to be

prosaic: my readers, however ignorant of Greek, will dispense with

further argument from me. Mr Arnold’s inability to discern prose in

Greek is not to be trusted.

But I see something more in this phenomenon. Mr Arnold is an original

poet; and, as such, certainly uses a diction far more elevated than he

here puts forward to represent Homer. He calls his Homeric diction

_plain_ and _simple_. Interpreting these words from the contrast of Mr

Arnold’s own poems, I claim his suffrage as on my side, that Homer is

often in a style much lower than what the moderns esteem to be poetical.

But I protest, that he carries it _very much_ too far, and levels the

noblest down to the most negligent style of Homer. The poet is _not_

always so ‘ignoble’, as the unlearned might infer from my critic’s

specimens. He never drops so low as Shakspeare; yet if he were as

sustained as Virgil or Milton, he would with it lose his vast

superiority over these, his rich variety. That the whole first book of

the Iliad is pitched lower than the rest, though it has vigorous

descriptions, is denoted by the total absence of simile in it: for

Homer’s kindling is always indicated by simile. The second book rises on

the first, until the catalogue of ships, which (as if to atone for its

flatness) is ushered in by five consecutive similes. In the third and

fourth books the poet continues to rise, and almost culminates in the

fifth; but then seems to restrain himself, lest nothing grander be left

for Achilles. Although I do not believe in a unity of authorship between

the Odyssey and the Iliad, yet in the Iliad itself I see such unity,

that I cannot doubt its negligences to be from art. (The monstrous

speech of Nestor in the 11th book is a case by itself. About 100 lines

have perhaps been added later, for reasons other than literary.) I

observe that just before the poet is about to bring out Achilles in his

utmost splendour, he has three-quarters of a book comparatively tame,

with a ridiculous legend told by Agamemnon in order to cast his own sins

upon Fate. If Shakspeare introduces coarse wrangling, buffoonery, or

mean superstition, no one claims or wishes this to be in a high diction

or tragic rhythm; and why should anyone wish such a thing from Homer or

Homer’s translator? I find nothing here in the poet to apologize for;

but much cause for indignation, when the unlearned public is misled by

translators or by critics to expect delicacy and elegance out of place.

But I beg the unlearned to judge for himself whether Homer _can_ have

intended such lines as the following for poetry, and whether I am bound

to make them any better than I do.

Then visiting he urged each man with words,

Mesthles and Glaucus and Medon and Thersilochus

And Asteropæus and Deisenor and Hippothoüs

And Phorkys and Chromius and Ennomus the augur.

He has lines in plenty as little elevated. If they came often in masses,

it would be best to translate them into avowed prose: but since gleams

of poetry break out amid what is flattest, I have no choice but to

imitate Homer in retaining a uniform, but easy and unpretending metre.

Mr Arnold calls my metre ‘slip-shod’: if it can rise into grandeur when

needful, the epithet is a praise.

Of course I hold the Iliad to be _generally_ noble and grand. Very many

of the poet’s conceptions were grand to him, mean to us: especially is

he mean and absurd in scenes of conflict between the gods. Besides, he

is disgusting and horrible occasionally in word and thought; as when

Hecuba wishes to ‘cling on Achilles and eat up his liver’; when (as

Jupiter says) Juno would gladly eat Priam’s children raw; when Jupiter

hanged Juno up and fastened a pair of anvils to her feet; also in the

description of dreadful wounds, and the treatment which (Priam says)

dogs give to an old man’s corpse. The descriptions of Vulcan and

Thersites are ignoble; so is the mode of mourning for Hector adopted by

Priam; so is the treatment of the populace by Ulysses, which does but

reflect the manners of the day. I am not now blaming Homer for these

things; but I say no treatment can elevate the subject; the translator

must not be expected to make noble what is not so intrinsically.

If anyone think that I am disparaging Homer, let me remind him of the

horrid grossnesses of Shakspeare, which yet are not allowed to lessen

our admiration of Shakspeare’s grandeur. The Homer of the Iliad is

morally pure and often very tender; but to expect refinement and

universal delicacy of expression in that stage of civilization is quite

anachronistic and unreasonable. As in earlier England, so in Homeric

Greece, even high poetry partook of the coarseness of society. This was

probably inevitable, precisely because Greek epic poetry was so

_natural_.

Mr Arnold says that I make Homer’s nobleness _eminently ignoble_. This

suggests to me to quote a passage, not because I think myself

particularly successful in it, but because the poet is evidently aiming

to be grand, when his mightiest hero puts forth mighty boastings,

offensive to some of the gods. It is the speech of Achilles over the

dead body of Asteropæus (Iliad 21, 184). Whether I make it ignoble, by

my diction or my metre, the reader must judge.

Lie as thou art. ’Tis hard for thee to strive against the

children

Of overmatching Saturn’s son, tho’ offspring of a River.

Thou boastest, that thy origin is from a Stream broad-flówing;

I boast, from mighty Jupiter to trace my first beginning.

A man who o’er the Myrmidons holdeth wide rule, begat me,

Peleus; whose father Æacus by Jupiter was gotten.

Rivers, that trickle to the sea, than Jupiter are weaker;

So, than the progeny of Jove, weaker a River’s offspring.

Yea, if he aught avail’d to help, behold! a mighty River

Beside thee here: but none can fight with Jove, the child of

Saturn.

Not royal Acheloïus with him may play the equal.

Nor e’en the amplebosom’d strength of deeply-flowing Ocean:

Tho’ from his fulness every Sea and every River welleth,

And all the ever-bubbling springs and eke their vasty sources.

Yet at the lightning-bolt of Jove doth even Ocean shudder,

And at the direful thunder-clap, when from the sky it crasheth.

Mr Arnold has in some respects attacked me discreetly; I mean, where he

has said that which damages me with his readers, and yet leaves me no

possible reply. What is easier than for one to call another ignoble?

what more damaging? what harder to refute? Then when he speaks of my

‘metrical exploits’ how can I be offended? to what have I to reply? His

words are expressive either of compliment or of contempt; but in either

case are untangible. Again: when he would show how tender he has been of

my honour, and how unwilling to expose my enormities, he says: p. 57: ‘I

will by no means search in Mr Newman’s version for passages likely to

raise a laugh: that search, _alas!_ would be far too easy’; I find the

pity which the word _alas!_ expresses, to be very clever, and very

effective against me. But, I think, he was not discreet, but very

unwise, in making dogmatic statements on the ground of erudition, many

of which I have exposed; and about which much more remains to be said

than space will allow me.

In his denial that Homer is ‘garrulous’, he complains that so many think

him to be ‘diffuse’. Mr Arnold, it seems, is unaware of that very

prominent peculiarity; which suits ill even to Mr Gladstone’s style.

Thus, where Homer said (and I said) in a passage quoted above, ‘people

that have _a voice in their bosom_’, Mr Gladstone has only ‘_speaking_

men’. I have noticed the epithet _shaggy_ as quaint, in ‘His heart in

his shaggy bosom was divided’, where, in a moral thought, a physical

epithet is obtruded. But even if ‘shaggy’ be dropped, it remains diffuse

(and characteristically so) to say ‘my _heart in my bosom_ is divided’,

for ‘I doubt’. So—‘I will speak what _my heart in my bosom_ bids me’.

So, Homer makes men think κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμὸν, ‘in their heart

_and mind_’; and deprives them of ‘mind and soul’. Also: ‘this appeared

to him _in his mind_ to be the best counsel’. Mr Arnold assumes tones of

great superiority; but every school-boy knows that diffuseness is a

distinguishing characteristic of Homer. Again, the poet’s epithets are

often selected by their convenience for his metre; sometimes perhaps

even appropriated for no other cause. No one has ever given any better

reason why Diomedes and Menelaus are almost exclusively called βοὴν

ἀγαθὸς, except that it suits the metre. This belongs to the

improvisatore, the negligent, the ballad style. The word ἐϋμμελίης,

which I with others render ‘ashen-speared’, is said of Priam, of

Panthus, and of sons of Panthus. Mr Arnold rebukes me, p. 106, for

violating my own principles. ‘I say, on the other hand, that εὐμμελίω

has _not_ the effect[51] of a peculiarity in the original, while

“ashen-speared” _has_ the effect of a peculiarity in the English: and

“warlike” is as marking an equivalent as I dare give for ἐϋμμελίω, _for

fear of disturbing the balance of expression_ in Homer’s sentence’. Mr

Arnold cannot write a sentence on Greek, without showing an ignorance

hard to excuse in one who thus comes forward as a vituperating censor.

_Warlike_ is a word current in the lips and books of all Englishmen:

ἐϋμμελίης is a word _never_ used, never, I believe, in all Greek

literature, by anyone but Homer. If he does but turn to Liddell and

Scott, he will see their statement, that the Attic form εὐμελίας is only

to be found in grammars. He is here, as always, wrong in his facts. The

word is most singular in Greek; more singular by far than

‘ashen-spear’d’ in English, because it is more obscure, as is its

special application to one or two persons: and in truth I have doubted

whether we any better understand Eumelian Priam than Gerenian Nestor.—Mr

Arnold presently imputes to me the opinion that χιτὼν means ‘a cloak’,

_which he does not dispute_; but if I had thought it necessary to be

literal, I must have rendered χαλκοχίτωνες brazen-shirted. He suggests

to me the rendering ‘brazen-coated’, which I have used in Il. 4, 285 and

elsewhere. I have also used ‘brazen-clad’, and I now prefer

‘brazen-mail’d’. I here wish only to press that Mr Arnold’s criticism

proceeds on a false fact. Homer’s epithet was _not_ a familiar word at

Athens (in any other sense than as Burns or Virgil may be familiar to Mr

Arnold), but was strange, unknown even to their poets; hence his demand

that I shall use a word already familiar in English poetry is doubly

baseless. The later poets of Greece have plenty of words beginning with

χαλκο-; but this one word is exclusively Homer’s.—Everything that I have

now said, may be repeated still more pointedly concerning ἐϋκνημῖδες,

inasmuch as directing attention to leg-armour is peculiarly quaint. No

one in all Greek literature (as far as I know) names the word but Homer;

and yet Mr Arnold turns on me with his ever reiterated, ever

unsupported, assertions and censures, of course assuming that ‘the

scholar’ is with him. (I have no theory at hand, to explain why he

regards his own word to suffice without attempt at proof.) The epithet

is intensely peculiar; and I observe that Mr Arnold has not dared to

suggest a translation. It is clear to me that he is ashamed of my poet’s

oddities; and has no mode of escaping from them but by bluntly denying

facts. Equally peculiar to Homer are the words κυδιάνειρα, τανύπεπλος

and twenty others, equally unknown to Attic the peculiar compound

μελιήδης (adopted from Homer by Pindar), about all which he carps at me

on false grounds. But I pass these, and speak a little more at length

about μέροπες.

Will the reader allow me to vary these tedious details, by imagining a

conversation between the Aristophanic Socrates and his clownish pupil

Strepsiades. I suppose the philosopher to be instructing him in the

higher Greek, Homer being the text.

_Soc._ Now Streppy, tell me what μέροπες ἄνθρωποι means?

_Strep._ Let me see: μέροπες? that must mean ‘half-faced’.

_Soc._ Nonsense, silly fellow: think again.

_Strep._ Well then: μέροπες, half-eyed, squinting.

_Soc._ No; you are playing the fool: it is not our ὀπ in ὄψις, ὄψομαι,

κάτοπτρον, but another sort of ὀπ.

_Strep._ Why, you yesterday told me that οἴνοπα was ‘wine-faced’, and

αἴθοπα ‘blazing-faced’, something like our αἰθίοψ.

_Soc._ Ah! well: it is not so wonderful that you go wrong. It is true,

there is also νῶροψ, στέροψ, ἦνοψ. Those might mislead you: μέροψ is

rather peculiar. Now cannot you think of any characteristic of mankind,

which μέροπες will express. How do men differ from other animals?

_Strep._ I have it! I heard it from your young friend Euclid. Μέροψ

ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος, ‘man is a cooking animal’.

_Soc._ You stupid lout! what are you at? what do you mean?

_Strep._ Why, μέροψ, from μείρω, I distribute, ὄψον sauce.

_Soc._ No, no: ὄψον has the ὀψ, with radical immovable ς in it; but here

ὀπ is the root, and ς is movable.

_Strep._ Now I have got it; μείρω, I distribute, ὀπὸν, juice, rennet.

_Soc._ Wretched man! you must forget your larder and your dairy, if ever

you are to learn grammar.—Come Streppy: leave rustic words, and think of

the language of the gods. Did you ever hear of the brilliant goddess

Circe and of her ὄπα καλὴν?

_Strep._ Oh yes; Circe and her beautiful face.

_Soc._ I told you, _no_! you forgetful fellow. It is ANOTHER ὀπ. Now I

will ask you in a different way. Do you know why we call fishes ἔλλοπες?

_Strep._ I suppose, because they are cased in scales.

_Soc._ That is not it. (And yet I am not sure. Perhaps the fellow is

right, after all.) Well, we will not speak any more of ἔλλοπες. But did

you never hear in Euripides, οὐκ ἔχω γεγωνεῖν ὄπα? What does that mean?

_Strep._ ‘I am not able to shout out, ὦ πόποι’.

_Soc._ No, no, Streppy: but Euripides often uses ὄπα. He takes it from

Homer, and it is akin to ἐπ, not to _our_ ὀπ and much less to πόποι.

What does ἔπη mean?

_Strep._ It means such lines as the diviners sing.

_Soc._ So it does in Attic, but Homer uses it for ῥήματα, words; indeed

we also sometimes.

_Strep._ Yes, yes, I do know it. All is right.

_Soc._ I think you do: well, and ὂψ means a voice, φωνὴ.

_Strep._ How you learned men like to puzzle us! I often have heard ὀπι,

ὄπα in the Tragedies, but never quite understood it. What a pity they do

not say φωνὴ when they mean φωνή.

_Soc._ We have at last made one step. Now what is μέροψ? μέροπες

ἄνθρωποι.

_Strep._ Μείρω, I divide, ὄπα, φωνὴν, voice; ‘voice-dividing’: what

_can_ that mean?

_Soc._ You have heard a wild dog howl, and a tame dog bark: tell me how

they differ.

_Strep._ The wild dog gives a long long _oo-oo_, which changes like a

trumpet if you push your hand up and down it; and the tame dog says

_bow, wow, wow_, like two or three panpipes blown one after another.

_Soc._ Exactly; you see the tame dog is humanized: he _divides his

voice_ into syllables, as men do. ‘Voice-dividing’ means ‘speaking in

syllables’.

_Strep._ Oh, how clever you are!

_Soc._ Well then, you understand; ‘Voice-dividing’ means _articulating_.

Mr Arnold will see in the Scholiast on Iliad 1, 250, precisely this

order of analysis for μέροπες. It seems to me to give not a traditional

but a grammatical explanation. Be that as it may, it indicates that a

Greek had to pass through _exactly the same process_ in order to expound

μέροπες, as an Englishman to get sense out of ‘voice-dividing’. The word

is twice used by Æschylus, who affects Homeric words, and once by

Euripides (Iph. T.) in the connection πολέσιν μερόπων, where the very

unusual Ionism πολέσιν shows in how Homeric a region is the poet’s

fancy. No other word ending in οψ except μέροψ can be confidently

assigned to the root ὂψ, a voice. Ἦνοψ in Homer (itself of most

uncertain sense and derivation) is generally referred to the other ὄψ.

The sense of ἔλλοψ again[52] is very uncertain. Every way therefore

μέροψ is ‘odd’ and obscure. The phrase ‘articulating’ is utterly prosaic

and inadmissible. _Vocal_ is rather too Latinized for my style, and

besides, is apt to mean _melodious_. The phrase ‘voice-dividing’ is

indeed easier to us than μέροπες can have been to the Athenians, because

we all know what _voice_ means, but they had to be taught scholastically

what ὄπα meant; nor would easily guess that ὂψ in μέροψ had a sense,

differing from ὂψ in (ἀ)στέροψ οἶνοψ, αἶθοψ, αἶθίοψ, νῶροψ (ἦνοψ),

χάροψ. Finally, since μέροπες is only found in the plural, it remains an

open question, whether it does not mean ‘speaking various languages’. Mr

Arnold will find that Stephanus and Scapula treat it as doubtful, though

Liddell and Scott do not name the second interpretation. I desired to

leave in the English all the uncertainty of the Greek: but my critic is

unencumbered with such cares.

Hitherto I have been unwillingly thrown into nothing but antagonism to

Mr Arnold, who thereby at least adds tenfold value to his praise, and

makes me proud when he declares that the _structure_ of my sentences is

good and Homeric. For this I give the credit to my metre, which alone

confers on me this cardinal advantage. But in turn I will compliment Mr

Arnold at the expense of some other critics. He does know, and they do

not, the difference of _flowing_ and _smooth_. A mountain torrent is

flowing, but often very rough; such is Homer. The ‘staircases of

Neptune’ on the canal of Languedoc are smooth, but do not flow: you have

to descend abruptly from each level to the next. It would be unjust to

say absolutely, that such is Pope’s smoothness; yet often, I feel, this

censure would not be too severe. The rhyme forces him to so frequent a

change of the nominative, that he becomes painfully discontinuous, where

Homer is what Aristotle calls ‘long-linked’. At the same time, in our

language, in order to impart a flowing style, good structure does not

suffice. A principle is needed, unknown to the Greeks; viz. the natural

divisions of the sentence oratorically, must coincide with the divisions

of the verse musically. To attain this _always_ in a long poem, is very

difficult to a translator who is scrupulous as to tampering with the

sense. I have not always been successful in this. But before any critic

passes on me the general sentence that I am ‘deficient in flow’, let him

count up the proportion of instances in which he can justly make the

complaint, and mark whether they occur in elevated passages.

I shall now speak of the peculiarities of my diction, under three heads:

1. old or antiquated words; 2. coarse words expressive of outward

actions, but having no moral colour; 3. words of which the sense has

degenerated in modern days.

1. Mr Arnold appears to regard what is _antiquated_ as _ignoble_. I

think him, as usual, in fundamental error. In general the nobler words

come from ancient style, and in no case can it be said that old words

(as such) are ignoble. To introduce such terms as _whereat_,

_therefrom_, _quoth_, _beholden_, _steed_, _erst_, _anon_, _anent_, into

the midst of style which in all other respects is modern and prosaic,

would be like to that which we often hear from half-educated people. The

want of harmony makes us regard it as low-minded and uncouth. From this

cause (as I suspect) has stolen into Mr Arnold’s mind the fallacy, that

the words themselves are uncouth[53]. But the words are excellent, if

only they are in proper keeping with the general style.—Now it is very

possible, that in some passages, few or many, I am open to the charge of

having mixed old and new style unskilfully; but I cannot admit that the

old words (as such) are ignoble. No one speaks of Spenser’s dialect,

nay, nor of Thomson’s; although with Thomson it was assumed, exactly as

by me, but to a far greater extent, and without any such necessity as

urges me. As I have stated in my preface, a broad tinge of antiquity in

the style is essential, to make Homer’s barbaric puerilities and

eccentricities less offensive. (Even Mr Arnold would admit this, if he

admitted my _facts_: but he denies that there is anything eccentric,

antique, quaint, barbaric in Homer: that is his _only_ way of resisting

my conclusion.) If Mr Gladstone were able to give his valuable time to

work out an entire Iliad in his refined modern style, I feel confident

that he would find it impossible to deal faithfully with the eccentric

phraseology and with the negligent parts of the poem. I have the

testimony of an unfriendly reviewer, that I am the first and _only_

translator that has dared to give Homer’s constant epithets and not

conceal his forms of thought: of course I could not have done this in

modern style. The lisping of a child is well enough from a child, but is

disgusting in a full-grown man. Cowper and Pope systematically cut out

from Homer whatever they cannot make _stately_, and harmonize with

modern style: even Mr Brandreth often shrinks, though he is brave enough

to say _ox-eyed Juno_. Who then can doubt the extreme unfitness of their

metre and of their modern diction? My opposers never fairly meet the

argument. Mr Arnold, when most gratuitously censuring my mild rendering

of κυνὸς κακομηχάνου ὀκρυοέσσης, _does not dare to suggest any English

for it himself_. Even Mr Brandreth skips it. It is not merely offensive

words; but the purest and simplest phrases, as a man’s ‘dear life’,

‘dear knees’, or his ‘tightly-built house’, are a stumbling-block to

translators. No stronger proof is necessary, or perhaps is possible,

than these phenomena give, that to shed an antique hue over Homer is of

first necessity to a translator: without it, _injustice_ is done both to

the reader and to the poet. Whether I have managed the style well, is a

separate question, and is matter of detail. I may have sometimes done

well, sometimes ill; but I claim that my critics shall judge me from a

broader ground, and shall not pertinaciously go on comparing my version

with modern style, and condemning me as (what they are pleased to call)

_inelegant_ because it is not like refined modern poetry, when it

specially avoids to be such. They never deal thus with Thomson or

Chatterton, any more than with Shakspeare or Spenser.

There is no sharp distinction possible between the foreign and the

antiquated in language. What is obsolete with us, may still live

somewhere: as, what in Greek is called Poetic or Homeric, may at the

same time be living Æolic. So, whether I take a word from Spenser or

from Scotland, is generally unimportant. I do not remember more than

four Scotch words, which I have occasionally adopted for convenience;

viz. Callant, young man; Canny, right-minded; Bonny, handsome; to Skirl,

to cry shrilly. A trochaic word, which I cannot get in English, is

sometimes urgently needed. It is astonishing to me that those who ought

to know both what a large mass of antique and foreign-sounding words an

Athenian found in Homer, and how many Doric or Sicilian forms as well as

Homeric words the Greek tragedians _on principle_ brought into their

songs, should make the outcry that they do against my very limited use

of that which has an antique or Scotch sound. Classical scholars ought

to set their faces against the double heresy, of trying to enforce, that

foreign poetry, however various, shall be all rendered into one English

dialect, and that this shall, in order of words and in diction, closely

approximate to polished prose. From an Oxford Professor I should have

expected the very opposite spirit to that which Mr Arnold shows. He

ought to know and feel that one glory of Greek poetry is its great

internal variety. He admits the principle that old words are a source of

ennoblement for diction, when he extols the Bible as his standard: for

surely he claims no rhetorical inspiration for the translators. Words

which have come to us in a sacred connection, no doubt, gain a sacred

hue, but they must not be allowed to desecrate other old and excellent

words. Mr Arnold informs his Oxford hearers that ‘his Bibliolatry is

perhaps excessive’. So the public will judge, if he say that _wench_,

_whore_, _pate_, _pot_, _gin_, _damn_, _busybody_, _audience_,

_principality_, _generation_, are epical noble words because they are in

the Bible, and that _lief_, _ken_, _in sooth_, _grim_, _stalwart_,

_gait_, _guise_, _eld_, _hie_, _erst_, are bad, because they are not

there. Nine times out of ten, what are called ‘poetical’ words, are

nothing but antique words, and are made ignoble by Mr Arnold’s doctrine.

His very arbitrary condemnation of _eld_, _lief_, _in sooth_, _gait_,

_gentle friend_ in one passage of mine as ‘bad words’, is probably due

to his monomaniac fancy that there is nothing quaint and nothing antique

in Homer. Excellent and noble as are these words which he rebukes,

excellent even for Æschylus, I should doubt the propriety of using them

in the dialogue of Euripides; on the level of which he seems to think

Homer to be.

2. Our language, especially the Saxon part of it, abounds with vigorous

monosyllabic verbs, and dissyllabic frequentatives derived from them,

indicative of strong physical action. For these words (which, I make no

doubt, Mr Arnold regards as ignoble plebeians), I claim Quiritarian

rights: but I do not wish them to displace patricians from high service.

Such verbs as _sweat_, _haul_, _plump_, _maul_, _yell_, _bang_,

_splash_, _smash_, _thump_, _tug_, _scud_, _sprawl_, _spank_, etc., I

hold (in their purely physical sense) to be eminently epical: for the

epic revels in descriptions of violent action to which they are suited.

Intense muscular exertion in every form, intense physical action of the

surrounding elements, with intense ascription or description of size or

colour;—together make up an immense fraction of the poem. To cut out

these words is to emasculate the epic. Even Pope admits such words. My

eye in turning his pages was just now caught by: ‘They tug, they sweat’.

Who will say that ‘tug’, ‘sweat’ are admissible, but ‘bang’, ‘smash’,

‘sputter’ are inadmissible? Mr Arnold resents my saying that Homer is

often homely. He is homely expressly because he is natural. The epical

diction admits both the gigantesque and the homely: it inexorably

refuses the conventional, under which is comprised a vast mass of what

some wrongly call elegant. But while I justify the use of homely words

in a primary physical, I depreciate them in a secondary moral sense. Mr

Arnold clearly is dull to this distinction, or he would not utter

against me the following taunt, p. 91:

‘_To grunt and sweat under a weary load_ does perfectly well where it

comes in Shakspeare: but if the translator of Homer, who will hardly

have wound up our minds to the pitch at which these words of Hamlet find

them, were to employ, when he has to speak of Homer’s heroes under the

load of calamity, this figure of “grunting” and “sweating”, we should

say, _He Newmanizes_’.

Mr Arnold here not only makes a mistake, he propagates a slander; as if

I had ever used such words as _grunt_ and _sweat_ morally. If Homer in

the Iliad spoke of grunting swine, as he does of sweating steeds, so

should I. As the coarse metaphors here quoted from Shakspeare are

utterly opposed to Homer’s style, to obtrude them on him would be a

gross offence. Mr Arnold sends his readers away with the belief that

this is my practice, though he has not dared to assert it. I _bear_ such

coarseness in Shakspeare, not because I am ‘wound up to a high pitch’ by

him, ‘borne away by a mighty current’ (which Mr Arnold, with ingenious

unfairness to me, assumes to be certain in a reader of Shakspeare and

all but impossible in a reader of Homer), but because I know, that in

Shakspeare’s time all literature was coarse, as was the speech of

courtiers and of the queen herself. Mr Arnold imputes to me Shakspeare’s

coarseness, from which I instinctively shrink; and when his logic leads

to the conclusion, ‘he Shakspearizes’, he with gratuitous rancour turns

it into ‘he Newmanizes’.

Some words which with the Biblical translators seem to have been noble,

I should not now dare to use in the primitive sense. For instance, ‘His

iniquity shall fall upon his own _pate_’. Yet I think _pate_ a good

metaphorical word and have used it of the sea-waves, in a bold passage,

Il. 13, 795:

Then ón rush’d théy, with weight and mass like to a troublous

whirlwind,

Which from the thundercloud of Jove down on the campaign

plumpeth,

And doth the briny flood bestir with an unearthly uproar:

Then in the everbrawling sea full many a billow splasheth,

Hollow, and bald with hoary _pate_, one racing after other.

Is there really no ‘mighty current’ here, to sweep off petty criticism?

I have a remark on the strong physical word ‘plumpeth’ here used. It is

fundamentally Milton’s, ‘plump down he drops ten thousand fathom deep’;

_plumb_ and _plump_ in this sense are clearly the same root. I confess I

have not been able to find the _verb_ in an old writer, though it is so

common now. Old writers do not say ‘to plumb down’, but ‘to _drop_ plumb

down’. Perhaps in a second edition (if I reach to it), I may alter the

words to ‘plumb ... droppeth’, on this ground; but I do turn sick at the

mawkishness of critics, one of whom, who ought to know better, tells me

that the word _plump_ reminds him ‘of the crinolined hoyden of a

boarding-school’!! If he had said, ‘It is too like the phrase of a

sailor, of a peasant, of a schoolboy’, this objection would be at least

intelligible. However: the word is intended to express the _violent

impact of a body descending from aloft_, and it _does_ express it.

Mr Arnold censures me for representing Achilles as _yelling_. He is

depicted by the poet as in the most violent physical rage, boiling over

with passion and wholly uncontrouled. He smacks his two thighs at once;

he rolls on the ground, μέγας μεγαλωστὶ; he defiles his hair with dust;

he rends it; he grinds his teeth; fire flashes from his eyes; but—he may

not ‘yell’, that would not be _comme il faut_! We shall agree, that in

peace nothing so becomes a hero as modest stillness; but that ‘Peleus’

son, insatiate of combat’, full of the fiercest pent-up passion, should

vent a little of it in a _yell_, seems to me quite in place. That the

Greek ἰάχων is not necessarily to be so rendered, I am aware; but it is

a very vigorous word, like _peal_ and _shriek_; neither of which would

here suit. I sometimes render it _skirl_: but ‘battle-yell’ is a

received rightful phrase. Achilles is not a stately Virgilian _pius

Æneas_, but is a far wilder barbarian.

After Mr Arnold has laid upon me the sins of Shakspeare, he amazes me by

adding, p. 92: ‘The idiomatic language of Shakspeare, such language as

“prate of his _whereabout_”, “_jump_ the life to come”, “the damnation

of his _taking-off_”, “_quietus make_ with a bare bodkin”, should be

carefully observed by the translator of Homer; although in every case he

will have to decide for himself, whether the use, by him, of

Shakspeare’s liberty, will or will not clash with his indispensable duty

of nobleness’.

Of the Shakspearianisms here italicized by Mr Arnold, there is not one

which I could endure to adopt. ‘His whereabout’, I regard as the

flattest prose. (The word _prate_ is a plebeian which I admit in its own

low places; but how Mr Arnold can approve of it, consistently with his

attacks on me, I do not understand.) Damnation and Taking-off (for Guilt

and Murder), and Jump, I absolutely reject; and ‘quietus make’ would be

nothing but an utterly inadmissible _quotation_ from Shakspeare. _Jump_

as an active verb is to me monstrous, but _Jump_ is just the sort of

modern prose word which is not noble. _Leap_, _Bound_, for great action,

_Skip_, _Frisk_, _Gambol_ for smaller, are all good.

I have shown against Mr Arnold—(1) that Homer was out-and-out antiquated

to the Athenians, even when perfectly understood by them; (2) that his

conceptions, similes, phraseology and epithets are habitually quaint,

strange, unparalleled in Greek literature; and pardonable only to

semibarbarism; (3) that they are intimately related to his noblest

excellences; (4) that many words are so peculiar as to be still doubtful

to us; (5) I have indicated that some of his descriptions and

conceptions are horrible to us, though they are not so to his barbaric

auditors; (6) that considerable portions of the poem are not poetry, but

rhythmical prose like Horace’s Satires, and are interesting to us not as

poetry but as portraying the manners or sentiments of the day. I now add

(7) what is inevitable in all high and barbaric poetry, perhaps in all

high poetry, many of his energetic descriptions are expressed in _coarse

physical words_. I do not here attempt proof, for it might need a

treatise: but I give one illustration; Il. 13, 136, Τρῶες προὒτυψαν

ἀολλέες. Cowper, misled by the _ignis fatuus_ of ‘stateliness’, renders

it absurdly

_The pow’rs of Ilium_ gave the first assault,

_Embattled_ close;

but it is strictly, ‘The Trojans _knocked-forward_ (or, thumped,

_butted_, forward) in close pack’. The verb is too coarse for later

polished prose, and even the adjective is very strong (_packed

together_). I believe, that ‘Forward in _pack_ the Troians _pitch’d_’,

would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour; and I maintain

that ‘Forward in mass the Troians pitch’d’, would be an irreprovable

rendering.

Dryden in this respect is in entire harmony with Homeric style. No

critic deals fairly with me in isolating any of these strong words, and

then appealing to his readers whether I am not ignoble. Hereby he

deprives me of the ἀγὼν, the ‘mighty current’ of Mr Arnold, and he

misstates the problem; which is, whether the word is suitable, _then_

and _there_, for the work required of it, as the coalman at the pit, the

clown in the furrow, the huntsman in the open field.

3. There is a small number of words not natural plebeians, but

patricians on which a most unjust bill of attainder has been passed,

which I seek to reverse. On the first which I name, Mr Arnold will side

with me, because it is a Biblical word, _wench_. In Lancashire I believe

that at the age of about sixteen a ‘girl’ turns into ‘a wench’, or as we

say ‘a young woman’. In Homer, ‘girl’ and ‘young woman’ are alike

inadmissible; ‘maid’ or ‘maiden’ will not always suit, and ‘wench’ is

the natural word. I do not know that I have used it three times, but I

claim a right of using it, and protest against allowing the heroes of

slang to deprive us of excellent words by their perverse misuse. If the

imaginations of some men are always in satire and in low slang, so much

the worse for them: but the more we yield to such demands, the more will

be exacted. I expect, before long, to be told that _brick_ is an ignoble

word, meaning a jolly fellow, and that _sell_, _cut_ are out of place in

Homer. My metre, it seems, is inadmissible with some, because it is the

metre of Yankee Doodle! as if Homer’s metre were not that of the

Margites. Every noble poem is liable to be travestied, as the Iliad and

Æschylus and Shakspeare have been. Every burlesque writer uses the noble

metre, and caricatures the noble style. Mr Arnold says, I must not

render τανύπεπλος ‘trailing-rob’d’, because it reminds him of ‘long

petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement’. What a confession as to the state

of his imagination! Why not, of ‘a queen’s robe trailing on a marble

pavement’? Did he never read

πέπλον μὲν κατέχευεν ἑανὸν πατρὸς ἐτ’ οὔδει?

I have digressed: I return to words which have been misunderstood. A

second word is of more importance, _Imp_; which properly means a Graft.

The best translation of ὦ Λήδας ἔρνος to my mind, is, ‘O Imp of Leda’!

for neither ‘bud of Leda’, nor ‘scion of Leda’ satisfy me: much less

‘sprig’ or ‘shoot of Leda’. The theological writers so often used the

phrase ‘imp of Satan’ for ‘child of the devil’, that (since Bunyan?) the

vulgar no longer understand that _imp_ means _scion_, _child_, and

suppose it to mean ‘little devil’. A Reviewer has omitted to give his

unlearned readers any explanation of the word (though I carefully

explained it) and calls down their indignation upon me by his censures,

which I hope proceeded from carelessness and ignorance.

Even in Spenser’s Fairy Queen the word retains its rightful and noble

sense:

Well worthy _imp_! then said the lady, etc.,

and in North’s Plutarch,

‘He took upon him to protect him from them all, and not to suffer so

goodly an _imp_ [Alcibiades] to lose the good fruit of his youth’.

Dryden uses the verb, To imp; to graft, insert.

I was quite aware that I claimed of my readers a certain strength of

mind, when I bid them to forget the defilements which vulgarity has shed

over the noble word Imp, and carry their imaginations back two or three

centuries: but I did not calculate that any critic would call Dainty

grotesque. This word is equivalent in meaning to Delicate and Nice, but

has precisely the epical character in which both those words are

deficient. For instance, I say, that after the death of Patroclus, the

coursers ‘stood motionless’,

Drooping tōwārd the ground their heads, and down their plaintive

eyelids

Did warm tears trickle to the ground, their charioteer

bewailing.

Defilèd were their _dainty_ manes, over the yoke-strap dropping.