A critic who objects to this, has to learn English from my translation.

Does he imagine that Dainty can mean nothing but ‘over-particular as to

food’?

In the compound Dainty-cheek’d, Homer shows his own epic peculiarity. It

is imitated in the similar word εὐπάρᾳος applied to the Gorgon Medusa by

Pindar: but not in the Attics. I have somewhere read, that the rudest

conception of female beauty is that of a brilliant red _plump_ cheek;

such as an English clown admires (was this what Pindar meant?); the

second stage looks to the delicacy of tint in the cheek (this is Homer’s

καλλιπάρῃος:) the third looks to shape (this is the εὒμορφος of the

Attics, the _formosus_ of the Latins, and is seen in the Greek

sculpture); the fourth and highest looks to moral expression: this is

the idea of Christian Europe. That Homer rests exclusively in the second

or semibarbaric stage, it is not for me to say, but, as far as I am

able, to give to the readers of my translation materials for their own

judgment. From the vague word εἶδος, _species_, _appearance_, it cannot

be positively inferred whether the poet had an eye for Shape. The

epithets curl-eyed and fine-ankled decidedly suggest that he had; except

that his application of the former to the entire nation of the Greeks

makes it seem to be of foreign tradition, and as unreal as

brazen-_mailed_.

Another word which has been ill-understood and ill-used, is _dapper_. Of

the epithet dappergreav’d for ἐϋκνημὶς I certainly am not enamoured, but

I have not yet found a better rendering. It is easier to carp at my

phrase, than to suggest a better. The word _dapper_ in Dutch = German

_tapfer_; and like the Scotch _braw_ or _brave_ means with us _fine_,

_gallant_, _elegant_. I have read the line of an old poet,

The dapper words which lovers use,

for _elegant_, I suppose; and so ‘the dapper does’ and ‘dapper elves’ of

Milton must refer to elegance or refined beauty. What is there[54]

ignoble in such a word? ‘Elegant’ and ‘pretty’ are inadmissible in epic

poetry: ‘dapper’ is logically equivalent, and _has the epic colour_.

Neither ‘fair’ nor ‘comely’ here suit. As to the school translation of

‘wellgreav’d’, every common Englishman on hearing the sound receives it

as ‘wellgrieved’, and to me it is very unpleasing. A part of the

mischief, a large part of it, is in the word _greave_; for

_dapper-girdled_ is on the whole well-received. But what else can we say

for _greave_? leggings? gambados?

Much perhaps remains to be learnt concerning Homer’s perpetual epithets.

My very learned colleague Goldstücke, Professor of Sanscrit, is

convinced that the epithet _cow-eyed_ of the Homeric Juno is an echo of

the notion of Hindoo poets, that (if I remember his statement) ‘the

sun-beams are the _cows_ of heaven’. The sacred qualities of the Hindoo

cow are perhaps not to be forgotten. I have myself been struck by the

phrase διϊπετέος ποτάμοιο as akin to the idea that the Ganges falls from

Mount Meru, the Hindoo Olympus. Also the meaning of two other epithets

has been revealed to me from the pictures of Hindoo ladies. First,

_curl-eyed_, to which I have referred above; secondly, _rosy-fingered

Aurora_. For Aurora is an ‘Eastern lady’; and, as such, has the tips of

her fingers dyed rosy-red, whether by henna or by some more brilliant

drug. Who shall say that the kings and warriors of Homer do not derive

from the East their epithet ‘Jove-nurtured’? or that this or that

goddess is not called ‘golden-throned’ or ‘fair-throned’ in allusion to

Assyrian sculptures or painting, as Rivers probably drew their later

poetical attribute ‘bull-headed’ from the sculpture of fountains? It is

a familiar remark, that Homer’s poetry presupposes a vast pre-existing

art and material. Much in him was traditional. Many of his wild legends

came from Asia. He is to us much beside a poet; and that a translator

should assume to cut him down to the standard of modern taste, is a

thought which all the higher minds of this age have outgrown. How much

better is that reverential Docility, which with simple and innocent

wonder, receives the oddest notions of antiquity as material of

instruction yet to be revealed, than the self-complacent Criticism,

which pronouncing everything against modern taste to be grotesque[55]

and contemptible, squares the facts to its own ‘Axioms’! _Homer is

noble: but this or that epithet is not noble: therefore we must explode

it from Homer!_ I value, I maintain, I struggle for the ‘high a priori

road’ in its own place; but certainly not in historical literature. To

read Homer’s own thoughts is to wander in a world abounding with

freshness: but if we insist on treading round and round in our own

footsteps, we shall never ascend those heights whence the strange region

is to be seen. Surely an intelligent learned critic ought to inculcate

on the unlearned, that if they would get instruction from Homer, they

must not expect to have their ears tickled by a musical sound as of a

namby-pamby poetaster; but must look on a metre as doing its duty, when

it ‘strings the mind up to the necessary pitch’ in elevated passages;

and that instead of demanding of a translator everywhere a rhythmical

perfection which perhaps can only be attained by a great sacrifice of

higher qualities, they should be willing to submit to a small part of

that ruggedness, which Mr Arnold cheerfully bears in Homer himself

through the loss of the Digamma. And now, for a final protest. To be

_stately_ is not to be _grand_. Nicolas of Russia may have been stately

like Cowper, Garibaldi is grand like the true Homer. A diplomatic

address is stately; it is not grand, nor often noble. To expect a

translation of Homer to be _pervadingly elegant_, is absurd; Homer is

not such, any more than is the side of an Alpine mountain. The elegant

and the picturesque are seldom identical, however much of delicate

beauty may be interstudded in the picturesque; but this has always got

plenty of what is shaggy and uncouth, without which contrast the full

delight of beauty would not be attained. I think Moore in his

characteristic way tells of a beauty

Shining on, shining on, by no shadow made tender,

Till love falls asleep in the sameness of splendour.

Such certainly is not Homer’s. His beauty, when at its height, is _wild_

beauty: it smells of the mountain and of the sea. If he be compared to a

noble animal, it is not to such a spruce rubbed-down Newmarket racer as

our smooth translators would pretend, but to a wild horse of the Don

Cossacks: and if I, instead of this, present to the reader nothing but a

Dandie Dinmont’s pony, this, as a first approximation, is a valuable

step towards the true solution.

Before the best translation of the Iliad of which our language is

capable can be produced, the English public has to unlearn the false

notion of Homer which his _deliberately faithless_ versifiers have

infused. Chapman’s conceits unfit his translation for instructing the

public, even if his rhythm ‘jolted’ less, if his structure were simpler,

and his dialect more intelligible. My version, if allowed to be read,

will prepare the public to receive a version better than mine. I regard

it as a question about to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer

ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic _landis_, _houndis_, _hartis_,

etc., instead of our modern unmelodious _lands_, _hounds_, _harts_;

whether the _ye_ or _y_ before the past participle may not be restored;

the want of which confounds that participle with the past tense. Even

the final -en of the plural of verbs (we dancen, they singen, etc.)

still subsists in Lancashire. It deserves consideration whether by a

_few_ such slight grammatical retrogressions into antiquity a translator

of Homer might not add much melody to his poem and do good service to

the language.

Footnote 35:

He attacks the same line also in p. 44; but I do not claim this as a

mark, how free I am from the fault.

Footnote 36:

If I had used such a double dative, as ‘to Peleus to a mortal’, what

would he have said of my syntax?

Footnote 37:

Ballad-_manner_! The prevalent ballad-_metre_ is the Common Metre of

our Psalm tunes: and yet he assumes that whatever is in this metre

must be on the same level. I have professed (Pref. p. x) that our

_existing_ old ballads are ‘poor and mean’, and are not my pattern.

Footnote 38:

He has also overlooked the misprint _Trojans_, where I wrote _Troïans_

(in three syllables), and has thus spoiled one verse out of the five.

Footnote 39:

As a literary curiosity I append the sentence of a learned reviewer

concerning this metre of Campbell. ‘It is a metre fit for introducing

anything or translating anything; a metre that _nothing can elevate,

or degrade, or improve, or spoil_; in which all subjects will sound

alike. A theorem of Euclid, a leading article from the _Times_, a

dialogue from the last new novel, could all be reduced to it with the

slightest possible verbal alteration’. [Quite true of Greek hexameter

or Shakspeare’s line. It is a _virtue_ in the metres]. ‘To such a mill

all would be grist that came near it, and _in no grain that had once

passed through it would human ingenuity ever detect again a

characteristic quality_’. This writer is a stout maintainer that

English ballad metre is the right one for translating Homer: only,

somehow, he shuts his eyes to the fact that Campbell’s _is_ ballad

metre! Sad to say, extravagant and absurd assertions, like these,

though anonymous, can, by a parade of learning, do much damage to the

sale of a book in verse.

Footnote 40:

I think he has mistaken the _summit_ of the wave for a _headland_, and

has made a single description into two, by the word _Or_: but I now

confine my regard to the metre and general effect of the style.

Footnote 41:

_Companion_, in four syllables, is in Shakspeare’s style; with whom

habitually the termination _-tion_ is two.

Footnote 42:

By corrupting the past tenses of _welisso_ into a false similarity to

the past tenses of _elelizo_, the old editors superimposed a new and

false sense on the latter verb; which still holds its place in our

dictionaries, as it deceived the Greeks themselves.

Footnote 43:

That λλ _in Attic_ was sounded like French _l mouillée_, is judged

probable by the learned writer of the article L (Penny Cyclop.), who

urges that μᾶλλον is for μάλιον, and compares φυλλο with _folio_, αλλο

with _alio_, ἁλλ with _sali_.

Footnote 44:

Men who can bear ‘belch’ in poetry, nowadays pretend that ‘sputter’ is

indelicate. They find Homer’s ἀποπτύει to be ‘elegant’, but

_sputter_—not! ‘No one would guess from Mr Newman’s coarse phrases how

_elegant_ is Homer’!!

Footnote 45:

In a Note to my translation (overlooked by more than one critic) I

have explained _curl-ey’d_, carefully, but not very accurately

perhaps; as I had not before me the picture of the Hindoo lady to

which I referred. The whole _upper eyelid_, when _open_, may be called

the curl; for it is shaped like a buffalo’s horns. This accounts for

ἑλικοβλέφαρος, ‘having a curly eye_lid_’.

Footnote 46:

I thought I had toned it down pretty well, in rendering it ‘O gentle

friend’! Mr Arnold rebukes me for this, without telling me what I

ought to say, or what is my fault. One thing is certain, that the

Greek is most _odd_ and peculiar.

Footnote 47:

In the noble simile of the sea-tide, quoted p. 138 above, only the two

first of its five lines are to the purpose. Mr Gladstone, seduced by

rhyme, has so tapered off the point of the similitude, that only a

microscopic reader will see it.

Footnote 48:

It is very singular that Mr Gladstone should imagine such a poet to

have no eye for colour. I totally protest against his turning Homer’s

paintings into leadpencil drawings. I believe that γλαυκὸς is grey

(silvergreen), χάροψ blue; and that πρασινὸς, ‘leek-colour’, was too

mean a word for any poets, early or late, to use for ‘green’,

therefore χλωρὸς does duty for it. Κῦμα πορφύρεον is surely ‘the

purple wave’, and ἰοειδέα πόντον ‘the violet sea’.

Footnote 49:

He pares down ἑλκηθμοῖο (the dragging away of a woman by the hair)

into ‘captivity’! Better surely is my ‘ignoble’ version: ‘Ere-that I

see thee _dragg’d away_, and hear thy shriek of anguish’.

Footnote 50:

He means _ours_ for two syllables. ‘Swiftness of ours’ is surely

ungrammatical. ‘A galley of my own’ = one of my own galleys; but ‘a

father of mine’, is absurd, since each has but one father. I confess I

have myself been seduced into writing ‘those two eyes of his’, to

avoid ‘_those his_ two eyes’: but I have since condemned and altered

it.

Footnote 51:

Of course no peculiarity of phrase has _the effect_ of peculiarity on

a man who has imperfect acquaintance with the delicacies of a

language; who, for instance, thinks that ἑλκηθμὸς means δουλεία.

Footnote 52:

Ἐλλὸς needs light and gives none. Benfey suggests that it is for

ἐνεὸς, as ἄλλος, _alius_, for Sanscrit _anya_. He with me refers ἔλλοψ

to λέπω. Cf. _squamigeri_ in Lucretius.

Footnote 53:

I do not see that Mr Arnold has any right to reproach _me_, because

_he_ does not know Spenser’s word ‘bragly’ (which I may have used

twice in the Iliad), or Dryden’s word ‘plump’, for a mass. The former

is so near in sound to _brag_ and _braw_, that an Englishman who is

once told that it means ‘proudly fine’, ought thenceforward to find it

very intelligible: the latter is a noble modification of the vulgar

_lump_. That he can carp as he does against these words and against

_bulkin_ (= young bullock) as unintelligible, is a testimony how

little I have imposed of difficulty on my readers. Those who know

_lambkin_ cannot find _bulkin_ very hard. Since writing the above, I

see a learned writer in the Philological Museum illustrates ἴλη by the

old English phrase ‘a plump of spears’.

Footnote 54:

I observe that Lord Lyttelton renders Milton’s _dapper elf_ by ῥαδινὰ,

‘softly moving’.

Footnote 55:

Mr Arnold calls it an unfortunate sentence of mine: ‘I ought to be

quaint; I ought not to be grotesque’. I am disposed to think him

right, but for reasons very opposite to those which he assigns. I have

‘unfortunately’ given to querulous critics a cue for attacking me

unjustly. I should rather have said: ‘We ought to be _quaint_, and not

to shrink from that which the fastidious modern will be sure to call

_grotesque_ in English, when he is too blunted by habit, or too poor a

scholar to discern it in the Greek’.

Last Words on Translating Homer

A Reply to Francis W. Newman

By Matthew Arnold

‘Multi, qui persequuntur me, et tribulant me: a testimoniis non

declinavi.’

Buffon, the great French naturalist, imposed on himself the rule of

steadily abstaining from all answer to attacks made upon him. ‘Je n’ai

jamais répondu à aucune critique’, he said to one of his friends who, on

the occasion of a certain criticism, was eager to take up arms in his

behalf; ‘je n’ai jamais répondu à aucune critique, et je garderai le

même silence sur celle-ci’. On another occasion, when accused of

plagiarism, and pressed by his friends to answer, ‘Il vaut mieux’, he

said, ‘laisser ces mauvaises gens dans l’incertitude’. Even when reply

to an attack was made successfully, he disapproved of it, he regretted

that those he esteemed should make it. Montesquieu, more sensitive to

criticism than Buffon, had answered, and successfully answered, an

attack made upon his great work, the _Esprit des Lois_, by the _Gazetier

Janséniste_. This Jansenist Gazetteer was a periodical of those times, a

periodical such as other times, also, have occasionally seen, very

pretentious, very aggressive, and, when the point to be seized was at

all a delicate one, very apt to miss it. ‘Notwithstanding this example’,

said Buffon, who, as well as Montesquieu, had been attacked by the

Jansenist Gazetteer, ‘notwithstanding this example, I think I may

promise my course will be different. I shall not answer a single word’.

And to anyone who has noticed the baneful effects of the controversy,

with all its train of personal rivalries and hatreds, on men of letters

or men of science; to anyone who has observed how it tends to impair,

not only their dignity and repose, but their productive force, their

genuine activity; how it always checks the free play of the spirit, and

often ends by stopping it altogether; it can hardly seem doubtful that

the rule thus imposed on himself by Buffon was a wise one. His own

career, indeed, admirably shows the wisdom of it. That career was as

glorious as it was serene; but it owed to its serenity no small part of

its glory. The regularity and completeness with which he gradually built

up the great work which he had designed, the air of equable majesty

which he shed over it, struck powerfully the imagination of his

contemporaries, and surrounded Buffon’s fame with a peculiar respect and

dignity. ‘He is’, said Frederick the Great of him, ‘the man who has best

deserved the great celebrity which he has acquired’. And this regularity

of production, this equableness of temper, he maintained by his resolute

disdain of personal controversy.

Buffon’s example seems to me worthy of all imitation, and in my humble

way I mean always to follow it. I never have replied, I never will

reply, to any literary assailant; in such encounters tempers are lost,

the world laughs, and truth is not served. Least of all should I think

of using this Chair as a place from which to carry on such a conflict.

But when a learned and estimable man thinks he has reason to complain of

language used by me in this Chair, when he attributes to me intentions

and feelings towards him which are far from my heart, I owe him some

explanation, and I am bound, too, to make the explanation as public as

the words which gave offence. This is the reason why I revert once more

to the subject of translating Homer. But being thus brought back to that

subject, and not wishing to occupy you solely with an explanation which,

after all, is Mr Newman’s affair and mine, not the public’s, I shall

take the opportunity, not certainly to enter into any conflict with

anyone, but to try to establish our old friend, the coming translator of

Homer, yet a little firmer in the positions which I hope we have now

secured for him; to protect him against the danger of relaxing, in the

confusion of dispute, his attention to those matters which alone I

consider important for him; to save him from losing sight, in the dust

of the attacks delivered over it, of the real body of Patroclus. He

will, probably, when he arrives, requite my solicitude very ill, and be

in haste to disown his benefactor: but my interest in him is so sincere

that I can disregard his probable ingratitude.

First, however, for the explanation. Mr Newman has published a reply to

the remarks which I made on his translation of the _Iliad_. He seems to

think that the respect which at the outset of those remarks I professed

for him must have been professed ironically; he says that I use ‘forms

of attack against him which he does not know how to characterize’; that

I ‘speak scornfully’ of him, treat him with ‘gratuitous insult,

gratuitous rancour’; that I ‘propagate slanders’ against him, that I

wish to ‘damage him with my readers’, to ‘stimulate my readers to

despise’ him. He is entirely mistaken. I respect Mr Newman sincerely; I

respect him as one of the few learned men we have, one of the few who

love learning for its own sake; this respect for him I had before I read

his translation of the _Iliad_, I retained it while I was commenting on

that translation, I have not lost it after reading his reply. Any

vivacities of expression which may have given him pain I sincerely

regret, and can only assure him that I used them without a thought of

insult or rancour. When I took the liberty of creating the verb _to

Newmanize_, my intentions were no more rancorous than if I had said to

_Miltonize_; when I exclaimed, in my astonishment at his vocabulary,

‘With whom can Mr Newman have lived’? I meant merely to convey, in a

familiar form of speech, the sense of bewilderment one has at finding a

person to whom words one thought all the world knew seem strange, and

words one thought entirely strange, intelligible. Yet this simple

expression of my bewilderment Mr Newman construes into an accusation

that he is ‘often guilty of keeping low company’, and says that I shall

‘never want a stone to throw at him’. And what is stranger still, one of

his friends gravely tells me that Mr Newman ‘lived with the fellows of

Balliol’. As if that made Mr Newman’s glossary less inexplicable to me!

As if he could have got his glossary from the fellows of Balliol! As if

I could believe that the members of that distinguished society, of whose

discourse, not so many years afterwards, I myself was an unworthy

hearer, were in Mr Newman’s time so far removed from the Attic purity of

speech which we all of us admired, that when one of them called a calf a

_bulkin_, the rest ‘easily understood’ him; or, when he wanted to say

that a newspaper-article was ‘proudly fine’, it mattered little whether

he said it was that or _bragly_! No; his having lived with the fellows

of Balliol does not explain Mr Newman’s glossary to me. I will no longer

ask ‘with whom he can have lived’, since that gives him offence; but I

must still declare that where he got his test of rarity or

intelligibility for words is a mystery to me.

That, however, does not prevent me from entertaining a very sincere

respect for Mr Newman, and since he doubts it, I am glad to reiterate my

expression of it. But the truth of the matter is this: I unfeignedly

admire Mr Newman’s ability and learning; but I think in his translation

of Homer he has employed that ability and learning quite amiss. I think

he has chosen quite the wrong field for turning his ability and learning

to account. I think that in England, partly from the want of an Academy,

partly from a national habit of intellect to which that want of an

Academy is itself due, there exists too little of what I may call a

public force of correct literary opinion, possessing within certain

limits a clear sense of what is right and wrong, sound and unsound, and

sharply recalling men of ability and learning from any flagrant

misdirection of these their advantages. I think, even, that in our

country a powerful misdirection of this kind is often more likely to

subjugate and pervert opinion than to be checked and corrected by

it[56]. Hence a chaos of false tendencies, wasted efforts, impotent

conclusions, works which ought never to have been undertaken. Anyone who

can introduce a little order into this chaos by establishing in any

quarter a single sound rule of criticism, a single rule which clearly

marks what is right as right, and what is wrong as wrong, does a good

deed; and his deed is so much the better the greater force he

counteracts of learning and ability applied to thicken the chaos. Of

course no one can be sure that he has fixed any such rules; he can only

do his best to fix them; but somewhere or other, in the literary opinion

of Europe, if not in the literary opinion of one nation, in fifty years,

if not in five, there is a final judgment on these matters, and the

critic’s work will at last stand or fall by its true merits.

Meanwhile, the charge of having in one instance misapplied his powers,

of having once followed a false tendency, is no such grievous charge to

bring against a man; it does not exclude a great respect for himself

personally, or for his powers in the happiest manifestations of them.

False tendency is, I have said, an evil to which the artist or the man

of letters in England is peculiarly prone; but everywhere in our time he

is liable to it,—the greatest as well as the humblest. ‘The first

beginnings of my _Wilhelm Meister_’, says Goethe, ‘arose out of an

obscure sense of the great truth that man will often attempt something

of which nature has denied him the proper powers, will undertake and

practise something in which he cannot become skilled. An inward feeling

warns him to desist’ (yes, but there are, unhappily, cases of absolute

judicial blindness!), ‘nevertheless he cannot get clear in himself about

it, and is driven along a false road to a false goal, without knowing

how it is with him. To this we may refer everything which goes by the

name of false tendency, dilettanteism, and so on. A great many men waste

in this way the fairest portion of their lives, and fall at last into

wonderful delusion’. Yet after all, Goethe adds, it sometimes happens

that even on this false road a man finds, not indeed that which he

sought, but something which is good and useful for him; ‘like Saul, the

son of Kish, who went forth to look for his father’s asses, and found a

kingdom’. And thus false tendency as well as true, vain effort as well

as fruitful, go together to produce that great movement of life, to

present that immense and magic spectacle of human affairs, which from

boyhood to old age fascinates the gaze of every man of imagination, and

which would be his terror, if it were not at the same time his delight.

So Mr Newman may see how wide-spread a danger it is, to which he has, as

I think, in setting himself to translate Homer, fallen a prey. He may be

well satisfied if he can escape from it by paying it the tribute of a

single work only. He may judge how unlikely it is that I should

‘despise’ him for once falling a prey to it. I know far too well how

exposed to it we all are; how exposed to it I myself am. At this very

moment, for example, I am fresh from reading Mr Newman’s Reply to my

Lectures, a reply full of that erudition in which (as I am so often and

so good-naturedly reminded, but indeed I know it without being reminded)

Mr Newman is immeasurably my superior. Well, the demon that pushes us

all to our ruin is even now prompting me to follow Mr Newman into a

discussion about the digamma, and I know not what providence holds me

back. And some day, I have no doubt, I shall lecture on the language of

the Berbers, and give him his entire revenge.

But Mr Newman does not confine himself to complaints on his own behalf,

he complains on Homer’s behalf too. He says that my ‘statements about

Greek literature are against the most notorious and elementary fact’;

that I ‘do a public wrong to literature by publishing them’; and that

the Professors to whom I appealed in my three Lectures, ‘would only lose

credit if they sanctioned the use I make of their names’. He does these

eminent men the kindness of adding, however, that ‘whether they are

pleased with this parading of their names in behalf of paradoxical

error, he may well doubt’, and that ‘until they endorse it themselves,

he shall treat my process as a piece of forgery’. He proceeds to discuss

my statements at great length, and with an erudition and ingenuity which

nobody can admire more than I do. And he ends by saying that my

ignorance is great.

Alas! that is very true. Much as Mr Newman was mistaken when he talked

of my rancour, he is entirely right when he talks of my ignorance. And

yet, perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes find myself wishing,

when dealing with these matters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance

were even greater than it is. To handle these matters properly there is

needed a poise so perfect that the least overweight in any direction

tends to destroy the balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys

it, even erudition may destroy it. To press to the sense of the thing

itself with which one is dealing, not to go off on some collateral issue

about the thing, is the hardest matter in the world. The ‘thing itself’

with which one is here dealing, the critical perception of poetic truth,

is of all things the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent; by even

pressing too impetuously after it, one runs the risk of losing it. The

critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, the

most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable; he should be indeed

the ‘ondoyant et divers’, the _undulating and diverse_ being of

Montaigne. The less he can deal with his object simply and freely, the

more things he has to take into account in dealing with it, the more, in

short, he has to encumber himself, so much the greater force of spirit

he needs to retain his elasticity. But one cannot exactly have this

greater force by wishing for it; so, for the force of spirit one has,

the load put upon it is often heavier than it will well bear. The late

Duke of Wellington said of a certain peer that ‘it was a great pity his

education had been so far too much for his abilities’. In like manner,

one often sees erudition out of all proportion to its owner’s critical

faculty. Little as I know, therefore, I am always apprehensive, in

dealing with poetry, lest even that little should prove ‘too much for my

abilities’.

With this consciousness of my own lack of learning, nay, with this sort

of acquiescence in it, with this belief that for the labourer in the

field of poetical criticism learning has its disadvantages, I am not

likely to dispute with Mr Newman about matters of erudition. All that he

says on these matters in his Reply I read with great interest; in

general I agree with him; but only, I am sorry to say, up to a certain

point. Like all learned men, accustomed to desire definite rules, he

draws his conclusions too absolutely; he wants to include too much under

his rules; he does not quite perceive that in poetical criticism the

shade, the fine distinction, is everything; and that, when he has once

missed this, in all he says he is in truth but beating the air. For

instance: because I think Homer noble, he imagines I must think him

elegant; and in fact he says in plain words that I do think him so, that

to me Homer seems ‘pervadingly elegant’. But he does not. Virgil is

elegant, ‘pervadingly elegant’, even in passages of the highest emotion:

O, ubi campi,

Spercheosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacænis

Taygeta[57]!

Even there Virgil, though of a divine elegance, is still elegant, but

Homer is not elegant; the word is quite a wrong one to apply to him, and

Mr Newman is quite right in blaming anyone he finds so applying it.

Again; arguing against my assertion that Homer is not quaint, he says:

‘It is quaint to call waves _wet_, milk _white_, blood _dusky_, horses

_single-hoofed_, words winged, Vulcan _Lobfoot_ (Κυλλοποδίων), a spear

_longshadowy_‘, and so on. I find I know not how many distinctions to

draw here. I do not think it quaint to call waves _wet_, or milk

_white_, or words _winged_; but I do think it quaint to call horses

_single-hoofed_, or Vulcan _Lobfoot_, or a spear _longshadowy_. As to

calling blood _dusky_, I do not feel quite sure; I will tell Mr Newman

my opinion when I see the passage in which he calls it so. But then,

again, because it is quaint to call Vulcan _Lobfoot_, I cannot admit

that it was quaint to call him Κυλλοποδίων; nor that, because it is

quaint to call a spear _longshadowy_, it was quaint to call it

δολιχόσκιον. Here Mr Newman’s erudition misleads him: he knows the

literal value of the Greek so well, that he thinks his literal rendering

identical with the Greek, and that the Greek must stand or fall along

with his rendering. But the real question is, not whether he has given

us, so to speak, full change for the Greek, but _how_ he gives us our

change: we want it in gold, and he gives it us in copper. Again: ‘It is

quaint’, says Mr Newman, ‘to address a young friend as “O Pippin”! it is

quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring’. Here, too,

Mr Newman goes much too fast, and his category of quaintness is too

comprehensive. To address a young friend as ‘O Pippin’! is, I cordially

agree with him, very quaint; although I do not think it was quaint in

Sarpedon to address Glaucus as ὦ πέπον: but in comparing, whether in

Greek or in English, Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring, I do not

see that there is of necessity anything quaint at all. Again; because I

said that _eld_, _lief_, _in sooth_, and other words, are, as Mr Newman

uses them in certain places, bad words, he imagines that I must mean to

stamp these words with an absolute reprobation; and because I said that

‘my Bibliolatry is excessive’, he imagines that I brand all words as

ignoble which are not in the Bible. Nothing of the kind: there are no

such absolute rules to be laid down in these matters. The Bible

vocabulary is to be used as an assistance, not as an authority. Of the

words which, placed where Mr Newman places them, I have called bad

words, everyone may be excellent in some other place. Take _eld_, for

instance: when Shakspeare, reproaching man with the dependence in which

his youth is passed, says:

all thy blessed youth

Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms

Of palsied _eld_, ...

it seems to me that _eld_ comes in excellently there, in a passage of

curious meditation; but when Mr Newman renders ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε by

‘from _Eld_ and Death exempted’, it seems to me he infuses a tinge of

quaintness into the transparent simplicity of Homer’s expression, and so

I call _eld_ a bad word in that place.

Once more. Mr Newman lays it down as a general rule that ‘many of

Homer’s energetic descriptions are expressed in coarse physical words’.

He goes on: ‘I give one illustration,—Τρῶες προὔτυψαν ἀολλέες. Cowper,

misled by the _ignis fatuus_ of “stateliness” renders it absurdly:

The powers 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 Trojans pitched”, would not be really

unfaithful to the Homeric colour; and I maintain that “forward in mass

the Trojans pitched”, would be an irreprovable rendering’. He actually

gives us all that as if it were a piece of scientific deduction; and as

if, at the end, he had arrived at an incontrovertible conclusion. But,

in truth, one cannot settle these matters quite in this way. Mr Newman’s

general rule may be true or false (I dislike to meddle with general

rules), but every part in what follows must stand or fall by itself, and

its soundness or unsoundness has nothing at all to do with the truth or

falsehood of Mr Newman’s general rule. He first gives, as a strict

rendering of the Greek, ‘The Trojans knocked forward (or, thumped,

butted forward), in close pack’. I need not say that, as a ‘strict

rendering of the Greek’, this is good; all Mr Newman’s ‘strict

renderings of the Greek’ are sure to be, as such, good; but ‘in close

pack’, for ἀολλέες, seems to me to be what Mr Newman’s renderings are

not always,—an excellent _poetical rendering_ of the Greek; a thousand

times better, certainly, than Cowper’s ‘embattled close’. Well, but Mr

Newman goes on: ‘I believe that, “forward in pack the Trojans pitched”,

would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour’. Here, I say, the

Homeric colour is half washed out of Mr Newman’s happy rendering of

ἀολλέες; while in ‘pitched’ for προὔτυψαν, the literal fidelity of the

first rendering is gone, while certainly no Homeric colour has come in

its place. Finally, Mr Newman concludes: ‘I maintain that “forward in

mass the Trojans pitched”, would be an irreprovable rendering’. Here, in

what Mr Newman fancies his final moment of triumph, Homeric colour and

literal fidelity have alike abandoned him altogether; the last stage of

his translation is much worse than the second, and immeasurably worse

than the first.

All this to show that a looser, easier method than Mr Newman’s must be

taken, if we are to arrive at any good result in these questions. I now

go on to follow Mr Newman a little further, not at all as wishing to

dispute with him, but as seeking (and this is the true fruit we may

gather from criticisms upon us) to gain hints from him for the

establishment of some useful truth about our subject, even when I think

him wrong. I still retain, I confess, my conviction that Homer’s

characteristic qualities are rapidity of movement, plainness of words

and style, simplicity and directness of ideas, and, above all,

nobleness, the grand manner. Whenever Mr Newman drops a word, awakens a

train of thought, which leads me to see any of these characteristics

more clearly, I am grateful to him; and one or two suggestions of this

kind which he affords, are all that now, having expressed my sorrow that

he should have misconceived my feelings towards him, and pointed out

what I think the vice of his method of criticism, I have to notice in

his Reply.

Such a suggestion I find in Mr Newman’s remarks on my assertion that the

translator of Homer must not adopt a quaint and antiquated style in

rendering him, because the impression which Homer makes upon the living

scholar is not that of a poet quaint and antiquated, but that of a poet

perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible. I added that we cannot, I

confess, really know how Homer seemed to Sophocles, but that it is

impossible to me to believe that he seemed to him quaint and antiquated.

Mr Newman asserts, on the other hand, that I am absurdly wrong here;

that Homer seemed ‘out and out’ quaint and antiquated to the Athenians;

that ‘every sentence of him 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’. And not only does Mr Newman say this,

but he has managed thoroughly to convince some of his readers of it.

‘Homer’s Greek’, says one of them, ‘certainly seemed antiquated to the

historical times of Greece. Mr Newman, taking a far broader historical

and philological view than Mr Arnold, stoutly maintains that it did seem

so.’ And another says: ‘Doubtless Homer’s dialect and diction were as

hard and obscure to a later Attic Greek as Chaucer to an Englishman of

our day.’

Mr Newman goes on to say, that not only was Homer antiquated relatively

to Pericles, but he is antiquated to the living scholar; and, indeed, is

in himself ‘absolutely antique, being the poet of a barbarian age’. He

tells us of his ‘inexhaustible quaintnesses’, of his ‘very eccentric

diction’; and he infers, of course, that he is perfectly right in

rendering him in a quaint and antiquated style.

Now this question, whether or no Homer seemed quaint and antiquated to

Sophocles, I call a delightful question to raise. It is not a barren

verbal dispute; it is a question ‘drenched in matter’, to use an

expression of Bacon; a question full of flesh and blood, and of which

the scrutiny, though I still think we cannot settle absolutely, may yet

give us a directly useful result. To scrutinize it may lead us to see

more clearly what sort of a style a modern translator of Homer ought to

adopt.

Homer’s verses were some of the first words which a young Athenian

heard. He heard them from his mother or his nurse before he went to

school; and at school, when he went there, he was constantly occupied

with them. So much did he hear of them that Socrates proposes, in the

interests of morality, to have selections from Homer made, and placed in

the hands of mothers and nurses, in his model republic; in order that,

of an author with whom they were sure to be so perpetually conversant,

the young might learn only those parts which might do them good. His

language was as familiar to Sophocles, we may be quite sure, as the

language of the Bible is to us.

Nay, more. Homer’s language was not, of course, in the time of

Sophocles, the spoken or written language of ordinary life, any more

than the language of the Bible, any more than the language of poetry, is

with us; but for one great species of composition, epic poetry, it was

still the current language; it was the language in which everyone who

made that sort of poetry composed. Everyone at Athens who dabbled in

epic poetry, not only understood Homer’s language, he possessed it. He

possessed it as everyone who dabbles in poetry with us, possesses what

may be called the poetical vocabulary, as distinguished from the

vocabulary of common speech and of modern prose: I mean, such

expressions as _perchance_ for _perhaps_, _spake_ for _spoke_, _aye_ for

_ever_, _don_ for _put on_, _charméd_ for _charm’d_, and thousands of

others.

I might go to Burns and Chaucer, and, taking words and passages from

them, ask if they afforded any parallel to a language so familiar and so

possessed. But this I will not do, for Mr Newman himself supplies me

with what he thinks a fair parallel, in its effect upon us, to the

language of Homer in its effect upon Sophocles. He says that such words

as _mon_, _londis_, _libbard_, _withouten_, _muchel_, give us a

tolerable but incomplete notion of this parallel; and he finally

exhibits the parallel in all its clearness, by this poetical specimen:

Dat mon, quhich hauldeth Kyngis af

Londis yn féo, niver

(I tell ’e) feereth aught; sith hee

Doth hauld hys londis yver.

Now, does Mr Newman really think that Sophocles could, as he says, ‘no

more help feeling at every instant the foreign and antiquated character

of Homer, than an Englishman can help feeling the same in hearing these

lines’? Is he quite sure of it? He says he is; he will not allow of any

doubt or hesitation in the matter. I had confessed we could not really

know how Homer seemed to Sophocles; ‘Let Mr Arnold confess for himself’,

cries Mr Newman, ‘and not for me, who know perfectly well’. And this is

what he knows!

Mr Newman says, however, that I ‘play fallaciously on the words familiar

and unfamiliar’; that ‘Homer’s words may have been familiar to the

Athenians (_i.e._ often heard) even when they were either not understood

by them or else, being understood, were yet felt and known to be utterly

foreign. Let my renderings’, he continues, ‘be heard, as Pope or even

Cowper has been heard, and no one will be “surprised”’.

But the whole question is here. The translator must not assume that to

have taken place which has not taken place, although, perhaps, he may

wish it to have taken place, namely, that his diction is become an

established possession of the minds of men, and therefore is, in its

proper place, familiar to them, will not ‘surprise’ them. If Homer’s

language was familiar, that is, often heard, then to his language words

like _londis_ and _libbard_, which are not familiar, offer, for the

translator’s purpose, no parallel. For some purpose of the philologer

they may offer a parallel to it; for the translator’s purpose they offer

none. The question is not, whether a diction is antiquated for current

speech, but whether it is antiquated for that particular purpose for

which it is employed. A diction that is antiquated for common speech and

common prose, may very well not be antiquated for poetry or certain

special kinds of prose. ‘Peradventure there shall be ten found there’,

is not antiquated for Biblical prose, though for conversation or for a

newspaper it is antiquated. ‘The trumpet spake not to the arméd throng’,

is not antiquated for poetry, although we should not write in a letter,

‘he _spake_ to me’, or say, ‘the British soldier is _arméd_ with the

Enfield rifle’. But when language is antiquated for that particular

purpose for which it is employed, as numbers of Chaucer’s words, for

instance, are antiquated for poetry, such language is a bad

representative of language which, like Homer’s, was never antiquated for

that particular purpose for which it was employed. I imagine that

Πηληϊάδεω for Πηλείδου, in Homer, no more sounded antiquated to

Sophocles, than _arméd_ for _arm’d_, in Milton, sounds antiquated to us;

but Mr Newman’s _withouten_ and _muchel_ do sound to us antiquated, even

for poetry, and therefore they do not correspond in their effect upon us

with Homer’s words in their effect upon Sophocles. When Chaucer, who

uses such words, is to pass current amongst us, to be familiar to us, as

Homer was familiar to the Athenians, he has to be modernized, as

Wordsworth and others set to work to modernize him; but an Athenian no

more needed to have Homer modernized, than we need to have the Bible

modernized, or Wordsworth himself.

Therefore, when Mr Newman’s words _bragly_, _bulkin_, and the rest, are

an established possession of our minds, as Homer’s words were an

established possession of an Athenian’s mind, he may use them; but not

till then. Chaucer’s words, the words of Burns, great poets as these

were, are yet not thus an established possession of an Englishman’s

mind, and therefore they must not be used in rendering Homer into

English.

Mr Newman has been misled just by doing that which his admirer praises

him for doing, by taking a ‘far broader historical and philological view

than mine’. Precisely because he has done this, and has applied the

‘philological view’ where it was not applicable, but where the ‘poetical

view’ alone was rightly applicable, he has fallen into error.

It is the same with him in his remarks on the difficulty and obscurity

of Homer. Homer, I say, is perfectly plain in speech, simple, and

intelligible. And I infer from this that his translator, too, ought to

be perfectly plain in speech, simple, and intelligible; ought not to

say, for instance, in rendering

Οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν ...

‘Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle’,—and things of

that kind. Mr Newman hands me a list of some twenty hard words, invokes

Buttmann, Mr Malden, and M. Benfey, and asks me if I think myself wiser

than all the world of Greek scholars, and if I am ready to supply the

deficiencies of Liddell and Scott’s _Lexicon_! But here, again, Mr

Newman errs by not perceiving that the question is not one of

scholarship, but of a poetical translation of Homer. This, I say, should

be perfectly simple and intelligible. He replies by telling me that

ἀδινὸς, εἰλίποδες, and σιγαλόεις are hard words. Well, but what does he

infer from that? That the poetical translation, in his rendering of

them, is to give us a sense of the difficulties of the scholar, and so

is to make his translation obscure? If he does not mean that, how, by

bringing forward these hard words, does he touch the question whether an

English version of Homer should be plain or not plain? If Homer’s

poetry, as poetry, is in its general effect on the poetical reader

perfectly simple and intelligible, the uncertainty of the scholar about

the true meaning of certain words can never change this general effect.

Rather will the poetry of Homer make us forget his philology, than his

philology make us forget his poetry. It may even be affirmed that

everyone who reads Homer perpetually for the sake of enjoying his poetry

(and no one who does not so read him will ever translate him well),

comes at last to form a perfectly clear sense in his own mind for every

important word in Homer, such as ἀδινὸς, or ἠλίβατος, whatever the

scholar’s doubts about the word may be. And this sense is present to his

mind with perfect clearness and fulness, whenever the word recurs,

although as a scholar he may know that he cannot be sure whether this

sense is the right one or not. But poetically he feels clearly about the

word, although philologically he may not. The scholar in him may

hesitate, like the father in Sheridan’s play; but the reader of poetry

in him is, like the governor, fixed. The same thing happens to us with

our own language. How many words occur in the Bible, for instance, to

which thousands of hearers do not feel sure they attach the precise real

meaning; but they make out _a_ meaning for them out of what materials

they have at hand; and the words, heard over and over again, come to

convey this meaning with a certainty which poetically is adequate,

though not philologically. How many have attached a clear and poetically

adequate sense to ‘_the beam_’ and ‘_the mote_’, though not precisely

the right one! How clearly, again, have readers got a sense from

Milton’s words, ‘grate on their _scrannel_ pipes’, who yet might have

been puzzled to write a commentary on the word _scrannel_ for the

dictionary! So we get a clear sense from ἀδινὸs as an epithet for grief,

after often meeting with it and finding out all we can about it, even

though that all be philologically insufficient; so we get a clear sense

from εἰλίποδες as an epithet for cows. And this his clear poetical sense

about the words, not his philological uncertainties about them, is what

the translator has to convey. Words like _bragly_ and _bulkin_ offer no

parallel to these words; because the reader, from his entire want of

familiarity with the words bragly and bulkin, has no clear sense of them

poetically.

Perplexed by his knowledge of the philological aspect of Homer’s

language, encumbered by his own learning, Mr Newman, I say, misses the

poetical aspect, misses that with which alone we are here concerned.

‘Homer _is_ odd’, he persists, fixing his eyes on his own philological

analysis of μώνυξ, and μέροψς, and Κυλλοποδίων, and not on these words

in their synthetic character;—just as Professor Max Müller, going a

little farther back, and fixing his attention on the elementary value of

the word θυγάτηρ, might say Homer was ‘odd’ for using _that_ word;—‘if

the whole Greek nation, by long familiarity, had become inobservant of

Homer’s oddities’, of the oddities of this ‘noble barbarian’, as Mr

Newman elsewhere calls him, this ‘noble barbarian’ with the ‘lively eye

of the savage’, ‘that would be no fault of mine. That would not justify

Mr Arnold’s blame of me for rendering the words correctly’.

_Correctly_,—ah, but what _is_ correctness in this case? This

correctness of his is the very rock on which Mr Newman has split. He is

so correct that at last he finds peculiarity everywhere. The true

knowledge of Homer becomes at last, in his eyes, a knowledge of Homer’s

‘peculiarities, pleasant and unpleasant’. Learned men know these

‘peculiarities’, and Homer is to be translated because the unlearned are

impatient to know them too. ‘That’, he exclaims, ‘is just why people

want to read an English Homer, _to know all his oddities, just as

learned men do_’. Here I am obliged to shake my head, and to declare

that, in spite of all my respect for Mr Newman, I cannot go these

lengths with him. He talks of my ‘monomaniac fancy that there is nothing

quaint or antique in Homer’. Terrible learning, I cannot help in my turn

exclaiming, terrible learning, which discovers so much!

Here, then, I take my leave of Mr Newman, retaining my opinion that his

version of Homer is spoiled by his making Homer odd and ignoble; but

having, I hope, sufficient love for literature to be able to canvass

works without thinking of persons, and to hold this or that production

cheap, while retaining a sincere respect, on other grounds, for its

author.

In fulfilment of my promise to take this opportunity for giving the

translator of Homer a little further advice, I proceed to notice one or

two other criticisms which I find, in like manner, _suggestive_; which

give us an opportunity, that is, of seeing more clearly, as we look into

them, the true principles on which translation of Homer should rest.

This is all I seek in criticisms; and, perhaps (as I have already said)

it is only as one seeks a positive result of this kind, that one can get

any fruit from them. Seeking a negative result from them, personal

altercation and wrangling, one gets no fruit; seeking a positive result,

the elucidation and establishment of one’s ideas, one may get much. Even

bad criticisms may thus be made suggestive and fruitful. I declared, in

a former lecture on this subject, my conviction that criticism is not

the strong point of our national literature. Well, even the bad

criticisms on our present topic which I meet with, serve to illustrate

this conviction for me. And thus one is enabled, even in reading remarks

which for Homeric criticism, for their immediate subject, have no value,

which are far too personal in spirit, far too immoderate in temper, and

far too heavy-handed in style, for the delicate matter they have to

treat, still to gain light and confirmation for a serious idea, and to

follow the Baconian injunction, _semper aliquid addiscere_, always to be

adding to one’s stock of observation and knowledge. Yes, even when we

have to do with writers who, to quote the words of an exquisite critic,

the master of us all in criticism, M. Sainte-Beuve, remind us, when they

handle such subjects as our present, of ‘Romans of the fourth or fifth

century, coming to hold forth, all at random, in African style, on

papers found in the desk of Augustus, Mæcenas, or Pollio’, even then we

may instruct ourselves if we may regard ideas and not persons; even then

we may enable ourselves to say, with the same critic describing the

effect made upon him by D’Argenson’s _Memoirs_: ‘My taste is revolted,

but I learn something; _Je suis choqué mais je suis instruit_’.

But let us pass to criticisms which are suggestive directly and not thus

indirectly only, criticisms by examining which we may be brought nearer

to what immediately interests us, the right way of translating Homer.

I said that Homer did not rise and sink with his subject, was never to

be called prosaic and low. This gives surprise to many persons, who

object that parts of the _Iliad_ are certainly pitched lower than

others, and who remind me of a number of absolutely level passages in

Homer. But I never denied that a _subject_ must rise and sink, that it

must have its elevated and its level regions; all I deny is, that a poet

can be said to rise and sink when all that he, as a poet, can do, is

perfectly well done; when he is perfectly sound and good, that is,

perfect as a poet, in the level regions of his subject as well as in its

elevated regions. Indeed, what distinguishes the greatest masters of

poetry from all others is, that they are perfectly sound and poetical in

these level regions of their subject, in these regions which are the

great difficulty of all poets but the very greatest, which they never

quite know what to do with. A poet may sink in these regions by being

falsely grand as well as by being low; he sinks, in short, whenever he

does not treat his matter, whatever it is, in a perfectly good and

poetic way. But, so long as he treats it in this way, he cannot be said

to _sink_, whatever his matter may do. A passage of the simplest

narrative is quoted to me from Homer:—

ὤτρυνεν δὲ ἕκαστον ἐποιχόμενος ἐπέεσσιν,

Μέσθλην τε, Γλαῦκόν τε, Μέδοντά τε, θερσιλοχόν τε ...[58]

and I am asked, whether Homer does not sink _there_; whether he ‘_can_

have intended such lines as those for poetry’? My answer is: Those lines

are very good poetry indeed, poetry of the best class, _in that place_.

But when Wordsworth, having to narrate a very plain matter, tries _not_

to sink in narrating it, tries, in short, to be what is falsely called

poetical, he does sink, although he sinks by being pompous, not by being

low.

Onward we drove beneath the Castle; caught,

While crossing Magdalen Bridge, a glimpse of Cam,

And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn.

That last line shows excellently how a poet may sink with his subject by

resolving not to sink with it. A page or two farther on, the subject

rises to grandeur, and then Wordsworth is nobly worthy of it:

The antechapel, where the statue stood

Of Newton with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

But the supreme poet is he who is thoroughly sound and poetical, alike

when his subject is grand, and when it is plain: with him the subject

may sink, but never the poet. But a Dutch painter does not rise and sink

with his subject; Defoe, in _Moll Flanders_, does not rise and sink with

his subject, in so far as an artist cannot be said to sink who is sound

in his treatment of his subject, however plain it is: yet Defoe, yet a

Dutch painter, may in one sense be said to sink with their subject,

because though sound in their treatment of it, they are not _poetical_,

poetical in the true, not the false sense of the word; because, in fact,

they are not in the grand style. Homer can in no sense be said to sink

with his subject, because his soundness has something more than literal

naturalness about it; because his soundness is the soundness of Homer,

of a great epic poet; because, in fact, he is in the grand style. So he

sheds over the simplest matter he touches the charm of his grand manner;

he makes everything noble. Nothing has raised more questioning among my

critics than these words, _noble_, _the grand style_. People complain

that I do not define these words sufficiently, that I do not tell them

enough about them. ‘The grand style, but what _is_ the grand style’?

they cry; some with an inclination to believe in it, but puzzled; others

mockingly and with incredulity. Alas! the grand style is the last matter

in the world for verbal definition to deal with adequately. One may say

of it as is said of faith: ‘One must feel it in order to know what it

is’. But, as of faith, so too one may say of nobleness, of the grand

style: ‘Woe to those who know it not’! Yet this expression, though

indefinable, has a charm; one is the better for considering it; _bonum

est, nos hic esse_; nay, one loves to try to explain it, though one

knows that one must speak imperfectly. For those, then, who ask the

question, What is the grand style? with sincerity, I will try to make

some answer, inadequate as it must be. For those who ask it mockingly I

have no answer, except to repeat to them, with compassionate sorrow, the

Gospel words: _Moriemini in peccatis vestris_, Ye shall die in your

sins.

But let me, at any rate, have the pleasure of again giving, before I

begin to try and define the grand style, a specimen of what it _is_.

Standing on earth, not wrapt above the pole,

More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged

To hoarse or mute, though fall’n on evil days,

On evil days though fall’n, and evil tongues....

There is the grand style in perfection; and anyone who has a sense for

it, will feel it a thousand times better from repeating those lines than

from hearing anything I can say about it.

Let us try, however, what _can_ be said, controlling what we say by

examples. I think it will be found that the grand style arises in

poetry, _when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity

or with severity a serious subject_. I think this definition will be

found to cover all instances of the grand style in poetry which present

themselves. I think it will be found to exclude all poetry which is not

in the grand style. And I think it contains no terms which are obscure,

which themselves need defining. Even those who do not understand what is

meant by calling poetry noble, will understand, I imagine, what is meant

by speaking of a noble nature in a man. But the noble or powerful

nature—the _bedeutendes Individuum_ of Goethe—is not enough. For

instance, Mr Newman has zeal for learning, zeal for thinking, zeal for

liberty, and all these things are noble, they ennoble a man; but he has

not the poetical gift: there must be the poetical gift, the ‘divine

faculty’, also. And, besides all this, the subject must be a serious one

(for it is only by a kind of licence that we can speak of the grand

style in comedy); and it must be treated _with simplicity or severity_.

Here is the great difficulty: the poets of the world have been many;

there has been wanting neither abundance of poetical gift nor abundance

of noble natures; but a poetical gift so happy, in a noble nature so

circumstanced and trained, that the result is a continuous style,

perfect in simplicity or perfect in severity, has been extremely rare.

One poet has had the gifts of nature and faculty in unequalled fulness,

without the circumstances and training which make this sustained

perfection of style possible. Of other poets, some have caught this

perfect strain now and then, in short pieces or single lines, but have

not been able to maintain it through considerable works; others have

composed all their productions in a style which, by comparison with the

best, one must call secondary.

The best model of the grand style simple is Homer; perhaps the best

model of the grand style severe is Milton. But Dante is remarkable for

affording admirable examples of both styles; he has the grand style

which arises from simplicity, and he has the grand style which arises

from severity; and from him I will illustrate them both. In a former

lecture I pointed out what that severity of poetical style is, which

comes from saying a thing with a kind of intense compression, or in an

illusive, brief, almost haughty way, as if the poet’s mind were charged

with so many and such grave matters, that he would not deign to treat

any one of them explicitly. Of this severity the last line of the

following stanza of the _Purgatory_ is a good example. Dante has been

telling Forese that Virgil had guided him through Hell, and he goes on:

Indi m’ han tratto su gli suoi conforti,

Salendo e rigirando la Montagna

_Che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti_[59].

‘Thence hath his comforting aid led me up, climbing and circling the

Mountain, _which straightens you whom the world made crooked_’. These

last words, ‘la Montagna _che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti_’, ‘the

Mountain _which straightens you whom the world made crooked_’, for the

Mountain of Purgatory, I call an excellent specimen of the grand style

in severity, where the poet’s mind is too full charged to suffer him to

speak more explicitly. But the very next stanza is a beautiful specimen

of the grand style in simplicity, where a noble nature and a poetical

gift unite to utter a thing with the most limpid plainness and

clearness:

Tanto dice di farmi sua compagna

Ch’ io sarὸ là dove fia Beatrice;

Quivi convien che senza lui rimagna[60].

‘So long’, Dante continues, ‘so long he (Virgil) saith he will bear me

company, until I shall be there where Beatrice is; there it behoves that

without him I remain’. But the noble simplicity of that in the Italian

no words of mine can render.

Both these styles, the simple and the severe, are truly grand; the

severe seems, perhaps, the grandest, so long as we attend most to the

great personality, to the noble nature, in the poet its author; the

simple seems the grandest when we attend most to the exquisite faculty,

to the poetical gift. But the simple is no doubt to be preferred. It is

the more _magical_: in the other there is something intellectual,

something which gives scope for a play of thought which may exist where

the poetical gift is either wanting or present in only inferior degree:

the severe is much more imitable, and this a little spoils its charm. A

kind of semblance of this style keeps Young going, one may say, through

all the nine parts of that most indifferent production, the _Night

Thoughts_. But the grand style in simplicity is inimitable:

αἰὼν ἀσφαλὴς

οὐκ ἔγεντ’ οὔτ’ Αἰακίδᾳ παρὰ Πηλεῖ,

οὔτε παρ’ ἀντιθέῳ Κάδμῳ· λέγονται μὰν βροτῶν

ὄλβον ὑπέρτατον οἱ σχεῖν, οἵ τε καὶ χρυσαμπύκων

μελπομενᾶν ἐν ὄρει Μοισᾶν, καὶ ἐν ἑπταπύλοις

ἄϊον Θήβαις ..[61]..

There is a limpidness in that, a want of salient points to seize and

transfer, which makes imitation impossible, except by a genius akin to

the genius which produced it.

Greek simplicity and Greek grace are inimitable; but it is said that the

_Iliad_ may still be ballad-poetry while infinitely superior to all

other ballads, and that, in my specimens of English ballad-poetry, I

have been unfair. Well, no doubt there are better things in English

ballad-poetry than

Now Christ thee save, thou proud portér, ...

but the real strength of a chain, they say, is the strength of its

weakest link; and what I was trying to show you was, that the English

ballad-style is not an instrument of enough compass and force to

correspond to the Greek hexameter; that, owing to an inherent weakness

in it as an epic style, it easily runs into one or two faults, either it

is prosaic and humdrum, or, trying to avoid that fault, and to make

itself lively (_se faire vif_), it becomes pert and jaunty. To show

that, the passage about King Adland’s porter serves very well. But these

degradations are not proper to a true epic instrument, such as the Greek

hexameter.

You may say, if you like, when you find Homer’s verse, even in

describing the plainest matter, neither humdrum nor jaunty, that this is

because he is so incomparably better a poet than other balladists,

because he is Homer. But take the whole range of Greek epic poetry, take

the later poets, the poets of the last ages of this poetry, many of them

most indifferent, Coluthus, Tryphiodorus, Quintus of Smyrna, Nonnus.

Never will you find in this instrument of the hexameter, even in their

hands, the vices of the ballad-style in the weak moments of this last:

everywhere the hexameter, a noble, a truly epical instrument, rather

resists the weakness of its employer than lends itself to it. Quintus of

Smyrna is a poet of merit, but certainly not a poet of a high order:

with him, too, epic poetry, whether in the character of its prosody or

in that of its diction, is no longer the epic poetry of earlier and

better times, nor epic poetry as again restored by Nonnus: but even in

Quintus of Smyrna, I say, the hexameter is still the hexameter; it is a

style which the ballad-style, even in the hands of better poets, cannot

rival. And in the hands of inferior poets, the ballad-style sinks to

vices of which the hexameter, even in the hands of a Tryphiodorus, never

can become guilty.

But a critic, whom it is impossible to read without pleasure, and the

disguise of whose initials I am sure I may be allowed to penetrate, Mr

Spedding says that he ‘denies altogether that the metrical movement of

the English hexameter has any resemblance to that of the Greek’. Of

course, in that case, if the two metres in no respect correspond, praise

accorded to the Greek hexameter as an epical instrument will not extend

to the English. Mr Spedding seeks to establish his proposition by

pointing out that the system of accentuation differs in the English and

in the Virgilian hexameter; that in the first, the accent and the long

syllable (or what has to do duty as such) coincide, in the second they

do not. He says that we cannot be so sure of the accent with which Greek

verse should be read as of that with which Latin should; but that the

lines of Homer in which the accent and the long syllable coincide, as in

the English hexameter, are certainly very rare. He suggests a type of

English hexameter in agreement with the Virgilian model, and formed on

the supposition that ‘quantity is as distinguishable in English as in

Latin or Greek by any ear that will attend to it’. Of the truth of this

supposition he entertains no doubt. The new hexameter will, Mr Spedding

thinks, at least have the merit of resembling, in its metrical movement,

the classical hexameter, which merit the ordinary English hexameter has

not. But even with this improved hexameter he is not satisfied; and he

goes on, first to suggest other metres for rendering Homer, and finally

to suggest that rendering Homer is impossible.

A scholar to whom all who admire Lucretius owe a large debt of

gratitude, Mr Munro, has replied to Mr Spedding. Mr Munro declares that

‘the accent of the old Greeks and Romans resembled our accent only in

name, in reality was essentially different’; that ‘our English reading

of Homer and Virgil has in itself no meaning’; and that ‘accent has

nothing to do with the Virgilian hexameter’. If this be so, of course

the merit which Mr Spedding attributes to his own hexameter, of really

corresponding with the Virgilian hexameter, has no existence. Again; in

contradiction to Mr Spedding’s assertion that lines in which (in our

reading of them) the accent and the long syllable coincide[62], as in

the ordinary English hexameter, are ‘rare even in Homer’, Mr Munro

declares that such lines, ‘instead of being rare, are among the very

commonest types of Homeric rhythm’. Mr Spedding asserts that ‘quantity

is as distinguishable in English as in Latin or Greek by any ear that

will attend to it’; but Mr Munro replies, that in English ‘neither his

ear nor his reason recognises any real distinction of quantity except

that which is produced by accentuated and unaccentuated syllables’. He

therefore arrives at the conclusion that in constructing English

hexameters, ‘quantity must be utterly discarded; and longer or shorter

unaccentuated syllables can have no meaning, except so far as they may

be made to produce sweeter or harsher sounds in the hands of a master’.

It is not for me to interpose between two such combatants; and indeed my

way lies, not up the highroad where they are contending, but along a

bypath. With the absolute truth of their general propositions respecting

accent and quantity, I have nothing to do; it is most interesting and

instructive to me to hear such propositions discussed, when it is Mr

Munro or Mr Spedding who discusses them; but I have strictly limited

myself in these Lectures to the humble function of giving practical

advice to the translator of Homer. He, I still think, must not follow so

confidently, as makers of English hexameters have hitherto followed, Mr

Munro’s maxim, _quantity may be utterly discarded_. He must not, like Mr

Longfellow, make _seventeen_ a dactyl in spite of all the length of its

last syllable, even though he can plead that in counting we lay the

accent on the first syllable of this word. He may be far from attaining

Mr Spedding’s nicety of ear; may be unable to feel that ‘while

_quantity_ is a dactyl, _quiddity_ is a tribrach’, and that ‘_rapidly_

is a word to which we find no parallel in Latin’; but I think he must

bring himself to distinguish, with Mr Spedding, between ‘_th’

o’er_-wearied eyelid’, and ‘_the_ wearied eyelid’, as being, the one a

correct ending for a hexameter, the other an ending with a false

quantity in it; instead of finding, with Mr Munro, that this distinction

‘conveys to his mind no intelligible idea’. He must temper his belief in

Mr Munro’s dictum, _quantity must be utterly discarded_, by mixing with

it a belief in this other dictum of the same author, _two or more

consonants take longer time in enunciating than one_[63].

Criticism is so apt in general to be vague and impalpable, that when it

gives us a solid and definite possession, such as is Mr Spedding’s

parallel of the Virgilian and the English hexameter with their

difference of accentuation distinctly marked, we cannot be too grateful

to it. It is in the way in which Mr Spedding proceeds to press his

conclusions from the parallel which he has drawn out, that his criticism

seems to me to come a little short. Here even he, I think, shows (if he

will allow me to say so) a little of that want of pliancy and suppleness

so common among critics, but so dangerous to their criticism; he is a

little too absolute in imposing his metrical laws; he too much forgets

the excellent maxim of Menander, so applicable to literary criticism:—

Καλὸν οἱ νόμοι σφόδρ’ εἰσίν· ὁ δ’ ὁρῶν τοὺς νόμους

λίαν ἀκριβῶς, συκοφάντης φαίνεται·

‘Laws are admirable things; but he who keeps his eye too closely fixed

upon them, runs the risk of becoming’, let us say, a purist. Mr Spedding

is probably mistaken in supposing that Virgil pronounced his hexameters

as Mr Spedding pronounces them. He is almost certainly mistaken in

supposing that Homer pronounced his hexameters as Mr Spedding pronounces

Virgil’s. But this, as I have said, is not a question for us to treat;

all we are here concerned with is the imitation, by the English

hexameter, of the ancient hexameter _in its effect upon us moderns_.

Suppose we concede to Mr Spedding that his parallel proves our

accentuation of the English and of the Virgilian hexameter to be

different: what are we to conclude from that; how will a criticism, not

a formal, but a substantial criticism, deal with such a fact as that?

Will it infer, as Mr Spedding infers, that the English hexameter,

therefore, must not pretend to reproduce better than other rhythms the

movement of Homer’s hexameter for us, that there can be no

correspondence at all between the movement of these two hexameters, that

if we want to have such a correspondence, we must abandon the current

English hexameter altogether, and adopt in its place a new hexameter of

Mr Spedding’s Anglo-Latin type, substitute for lines like the

Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia ...

of Dr Hawtrey, lines like the

Procession, complex melodies, pause, quantity, accent,

After Virgilian precedent and practice, in order ...

of Mr Spedding? To infer this, is to go, as I have complained of Mr

Newman for sometimes going, a great deal too fast. I think prudent

criticism must certainly recognise, in the current English hexameter, a

fact which cannot so lightly be set aside; it must acknowledge that by

this hexameter the English ear, the genius of the English language,

have, in their own way, adopted, have _translated_ for themselves the

Homeric hexameter; and that a rhythm which has thus grown up, which is

thus, in a manner, the production of nature, has in its general type

something necessary and inevitable, something which admits change only

within narrow limits, which precludes change that is sweeping and

essential. I think, therefore, the prudent critic will regard Mr

Spedding’s proposed revolution as simply impracticable. He will feel

that in English poetry the hexameter, if used at all, must be, in the

main, the English hexameter now current. He will perceive that its

having come into existence as the representative of the Homeric

hexameter, proves it to have, for the English ear, a certain

correspondence with the Homeric hexameter, although this correspondence

may be, from the difference of the Greek and English languages,

necessarily incomplete. This incompleteness he will endeavour[64], as he

may find or fancy himself able, gradually somewhat to lessen through

minor changes, suggested by the ancient hexameter, but respecting the

general constitution of the modern: the notion of making it disappear

altogether by the critic’s inventing in his closet a new constitution of

his own for the English hexameter, he will judge to be a chimerical

dream.

When, therefore, Mr Spedding objects to the English hexameter, that it

imperfectly represents the movement of the ancient hexameters, I answer:

We must work with the tools we have. The received English type, in its

general outlines, is, for England, the necessary given type of this

metre; it is by rendering the metrical beat of its pattern, not by

rendering the accentual beat of it, that the English language has

adapted the Greek hexameter. To render the metrical beat of its pattern

is something; by effecting so much as this the English hexameter puts

itself in closer relations with its original, it comes nearer to its

movement than any other metre which does not even effect so much as

this; but Mr Spedding is dissatisfied with it for not effecting more

still, for not rendering the accentual beat too. If he asks me _why_ the

English hexameter has not tried to render this too, _why_ it has

confined itself to rendering the metrical beat, _why_, in short, it is

itself, and not Mr Spedding’s new hexameter, that is a question which I,

whose only business is to give practical advice to a translator, am not

bound to answer; but I will not decline to answer it nevertheless. I

will suggest to Mr Spedding that, as I have already said, the modern

hexameter is merely an attempt to imitate the effect of the ancient

hexameter, as read by us moderns; that the great object of its imitation

has been the hexameter of Homer; that of this hexameter such lines as

those which Mr Spedding declares to be so rare, even in Homer, but which

are in truth so common, lines in which the quantity and the reader’s

accent coincide, are, for the English reader, just from that simplicity

(for him) of rhythm which they owe to this very coincidence, the

master-type; that so much is this the case that one may again and again

notice an English reader of Homer, in reading lines where his Virgilian

accent would not coincide with the quantity, abandoning this accent, and

reading the lines (as we say) _by quantity_, reading them as if he were

scanning them; while foreigners neglect our Virgilian accent even in

reading Virgil, read even Virgil by quantity, making the accents

coincide with the long syllables. And no doubt the hexameter of a

kindred language, the German, based on this mode of reading the ancient

hexameter, has had a powerful influence upon the type of its English

fellow. But all this shows how extremely powerful accent is for us

moderns, since we find not even Greek and Latin quantity perceptible

enough without it. Yet in these languages, where we have been accustomed

always to look for it, it is far more perceptible to us Englishmen than

in our own language, where we have not been accustomed to look for it.

And here is the true reason why Mr Spedding’s hexameter is not and

cannot be the current English hexameter, even though it is based on the

accentuation which Englishmen give to all Virgil’s lines, and to many of

Homer’s,—that the quantity which in Greek or Latin words we feel, or

imagine we feel, even though it be unsupported by accent, we do not feel

or imagine we feel in English words when it is thus unsupported. For

example, in repeating the Latin line

Ipsa tibi blandos _fundent_ cunabula flores,

an Englishman feels the length of the second syllable of _fundent_,

although he lays the accent on the first; but in repeating Mr Spedding’s

line,

Softly cometh slumber _closing_ th’ o’erwearied eyelid,

the English ear, full of the accent on the first syllable of _closing_,

has really no sense at all of any length in its second. The metrical

beat of the line is thus quite destroyed.

So when Mr Spedding proposes a new Anglo-Virgilian hexameter he proposes

an impossibility; when he ‘denies altogether that the metrical movement

of the English hexameter has _any_ resemblance to that of the Greek’, he

denies too much; when he declares that, ‘were every other metre

impossible, an attempt to translate Homer into English hexameters might

be permitted, _but that such an attempt he himself would never read_’,

he exhibits, it seems to me, a little of that obduracy and

over-vehemence in liking and disliking,—a remnant, I suppose, of our

insular ferocity,—to which English criticism is so prone. He ought to be

enchanted to meet with a good attempt in any metre, even though he would

never have advised it, even though its success be contrary to all his

expectations; for it is the critic’s first duty—prior even to his duty

of stigmatizing what is bad—_to welcome everything that is good_. In

welcoming this, he must at all times be ready, like the Christian

convert, even to burn what he used to worship, and to worship what he

used to burn. Nay, but he need not be thus inconsistent in welcoming it;

he may retain all his principles: principles endure, circumstances

change; absolute success is one thing, relative success another.

Relative success may take place under the most diverse conditions; and

it is in appreciating the good in even relative success, it is in taking

into account the change of circumstances, that the critic’s judgment is

tested, that his versatility must display itself. He is to keep his idea

of the best, of perfection, and at the same time to be willingly

accessible to every second best which offers itself. So I enjoy the ease

and beauty of Mr Spedding’s stanza,

Therewith to all the gods in order due ...

I welcome it, in the absence of equally good poetry in another

metre[65], although I still think the stanza unfit to render Homer

thoroughly well, although I still think other metres fit to render him

better. So I concede to Mr Spedding that every form of translation,

prose or verse, must more or less break up Homer in order to reproduce

him; but then I urge that that form which needs to break him up least is

to be preferred. So I concede to him that the test proposed by me for

the translator—a competent scholar’s judgment whether the translation

more or less reproduces for him the effect of the original—is not

perfectly satisfactory; but I adopt it as the best we can get, as the

only test capable of being really applied; for Mr Spedding’s proposed

substitute, the translations making the same effect, more or less, upon

the unlearned which the original makes upon the scholar, is a test which

can never really be applied at all. These two impressions, that of the

scholar, and that of the unlearned reader, can, practically, never be

accurately compared; they are, and must remain, like those lines we read

of in Euclid, which, though produced ever so far, can never meet. So,

again, I concede that a good verse-translation of Homer, or, indeed, of

any poet, is very difficult, and that a good prose-translation is much

easier; but then I urge that a verse-translation, while giving the

pleasure which Pope’s has given, might at the same time render Homer

more faithfully than Pope’s; and that this being possible, we ought not

to cease wishing for a source of pleasure which no prose-translation can

ever hope to rival.

Wishing for such a verse-translation of Homer, believing that rhythms

have natural tendencies which, within certain limits, inevitably govern

them; having little faith, therefore, that rhythms which have manifested

tendencies utterly un-Homeric can so change themselves as to become well

adapted for rendering Homer, I have looked about for the rhythm which

seems to depart least from the tendencies of Homer’s rhythm. Such a

rhythm I think may be found in the English hexameter, somewhat modified.

I look with hope towards continued attempts at perfecting and employing

this rhythm; but my belief in the immediate success of such attempts is

far less confident than has been supposed. Between the recognition of

this rhythm as ideally the best, and the recommendation of it to the

translator for instant practical use, there must come all that

consideration of circumstances, all that pliancy in foregoing, under the

pressure of certain difficulties, the absolute best, which I have said

is so indispensable to the critic. The hexameter is, comparatively,

still unfamiliar in England; many people have a great dislike to it. A

certain degree of unfamiliarity, a certain degree of dislike, are

obstacles with which it is not wise to contend. It is difficult to say

at present whether the dislike to this rhythm is so strong and so

wide-spread that it will prevent its ever becoming thoroughly familiar.

I think not, but it is too soon to decide. I am inclined to think that

the dislike of it is rather among the professional critics than among

the general public; I think the reception which Mr Longfellow’s

_Evangeline_ has met with indicates this. I think that even now, if a

version of the _Iliad_ in English hexameters were made by a poet who,

like Mr Longfellow, has that indefinable quality which renders him

popular, something _attractive_ in his talent, which communicates itself

to his verses, it would have a great success among the general public.

Yet a version of Homer in hexameters of the _Evangeline_ type would not

satisfy the judicious, nor is the definite establishment of this type to

be desired; and one would regret that Mr Longfellow should, even to

popularise the hexameter, give the immense labour required for a

translation of Homer when one could not wish his work to stand. Rather

it is to be wished that by the efforts of poets like Mr Longfellow in

original poetry, and the efforts of less distinguished poets in the task

of translation, the hexameter may gradually be made familiar to the ear

of the English public; at the same time that there gradually arises, out

of all these efforts, an improved type of this rhythm; a type which some

man of genius may sign with the final stamp, and employ in rendering

Homer; a hexameter which may be as superior to Vosse’s as Shakspeare’s

blank verse is superior to Schiller’s. I am inclined to believe that all

this travail will actually take place, because I believe that modern

poetry is actually in want of such an instrument as the hexameter.

In the meantime, whether this rhythm be destined to success or not, let

us steadily keep in mind what originally made us turn to it. We turned

to it because we required certain Homeric characteristics in a

translation of Homer, and because all other rhythms seemed to find, from

different causes, great difficulties in satisfying this our requirement.

If the hexameter is impossible, if one of these other rhythms must be

used, let us keep this rhythm always in mind of our requirements and of

its own faults, let us compel it to get rid of these latter as much as

possible. It may be necessary to have recourse to blank verse; but then

blank verse must _de-Cowperize_ itself, must get rid of the habits of

stiff self-retardation which make it say ‘_Not fewer_ shone’, for ‘_So

many shone_’. Homer moves swiftly: blank verse _can_ move swiftly if it

likes, but it must remember that the movement of such lines as

A thousand fires were burning, and by each ...

is just the slow movement which makes us despair of it. Homer moves with

noble ease: blank verse must not be suffered to forget that the movement

of

Came they not over from sweet Lacedæmon ...

is ungainly. Homer’s expression of his thought is simple as light: we

know how blank verse affects such locutions as

While the steeds _mouthed their corn aloof_ ...

and such models of expressing one’s thought are sophisticated and

artificial.

One sees how needful it is to direct incessantly the English

translator’s attention to the essential characteristics of Homer’s

poetry, when so accomplished a person as Mr Spedding, recognising these

characteristics as indeed Homer’s, admitting them to be essential, is

led by the ingrained habits and tendencies of English blank verse thus

repeatedly to lose sight of them in translating even a few lines. One

sees this yet more clearly, when Mr Spedding, taking me to task for

saying that the blank verse used for rendering Homer ‘must not be Mr

Tennyson’s blank verse’, declares that in most of Mr Tennyson’s blank

verse all Homer’s essential characteristics, ‘rapidity of movement,

_plainness of words and style_, _simplicity and directness of ideas_,

and, above all, nobleness of manner, are as conspicuous as in Homer

himself’. This shows, it seems to me, how hard it is for English readers

of poetry, even the most accomplished, to feel deeply and permanently

what Greek plainness of thought and Greek simplicity of expression

really are: they admit the importance of these qualities in a general

way, but they have no ever-present sense of them; and they easily

attribute them to any poetry which has other excellent qualities, and

which they very much admire. No doubt there are plainer things in Mr

Tennyson’s poetry than the three lines I quoted; in choosing them, as in

choosing a specimen of ballad-poetry, I wished to bring out clearly, by

a strong instance, the qualities of thought and style to which I was

calling attention; but when Mr Spedding talks of a plainness of thought

_like Homer’s_, of a plainness of speech _like Homer’s_, and says that

he finds these constantly in Mr Tennyson’s poetry, I answer that these I

do not find there at all. Mr Tennyson is a most distinguished and

charming poet; but the very essential characteristic of his poetry is,

it seems to me, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness of

thought, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness of expression. In

the best and most characteristic productions of his genius, these

characteristics are most prominent. They are marked characteristics, as

we have seen, of the Elizabethan poets; they are marked, though not the

essential, characteristics of Shakspeare himself. Under the influences

of the nineteenth century, under wholly new conditions of thought and

culture, they manifest themselves in Mr Tennyson’s poetry in a wholly

new way. But they are still there. The essential bent of his poetry is

towards such expressions as

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars;

O’er the sun’s bright eye

Drew the vast eyelid of an inky cloud;

When the cairned mountain was a shadow, sunned

The world to peace again;

The fresh young captains flashed their glittering teeth,

The huge bush-bearded barons heaved and blew;

He bared the knotted column of his throat,

The massive square of his heroic breast,

And arms on which the standing muscle sloped

As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,

Running too vehemently to break upon it.

And this way of speaking is the least _plain_, the most _un-Homeric_,

which can possibly be conceived. Homer presents his thought to you just

as it wells from the source of his mind: Mr Tennyson carefully distils

his thought before he will part with it. Hence comes, in the expression

of the thought, a heightened and elaborate air. In Homer’s poetry it is

all natural thoughts in natural words; in Mr Tennyson’s poetry it is all

distilled thoughts in distilled words. Exactly this heightening and

elaboration may be observed in Mr Spedding’s