of Milton.
I suppose I must, before I conclude, say a word or two about my own
hexameters; and yet really, on such a topic, I am almost ashamed to
trouble you. From those perishable objects I feel, I can truly say, a
most Oriental detachment. You yourselves are witnesses how little
importance, when I offered them to you, I claimed for them, how humble a
function I designed them to fill. I offered them, not as specimens of a
competing translation of Homer, but as illustrations of certain canons
which I had been trying to establish for Homer’s poetry. I said that
these canons they might very well illustrate by failing as well as by
succeeding: if they illustrate them in any manner, I am satisfied. I was
thinking of the future translator of Homer, and trying to let him see as
clearly as possible what I meant by the combination of characteristics
which I assigned to Homer’s poetry, by saying that this poetry was at
once rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct in
its ideas, and noble in manner. I do not suppose that my own hexameters
are rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct in
their ideas, and noble in manner; but I am in hopes that a translator,
reading them with a genuine interest in his subject, and without the
slightest grain of personal feeling, may see more clearly, as he reads
them, what I meant by saying that Homer’s poetry is all these. I am in
hopes that he may be able to seize more distinctly, when he has before
him my
So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of the Xanthus,
or my
Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you?
or my
So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle,
the exact points which I wish him to avoid in Cowper’s
So numerous seemed those fires the banks between,
or in Pope’s
Unhappy coursers of immortal strain,
or in Mr Newman’s
He spake, and, yelling, held a-front his single-hoofed horses.
At the same time there may be innumerable points in mine which he ought
to avoid also. Of the merit of his own compositions no composer can be
admitted the judge.
But thus humbly useful to the future translator I still hope my
hexameters may prove; and he it is, above all, whom one has to regard.
The general public carries away little from discussions of this kind,
except some vague notion that one advocates English hexameters, or that
one has attacked Mr Newman. On the mind of an adversary one never makes
the faintest impression. Mr Newman reads all one can say about diction,
and his last word on the subject is, that he ‘regards it as a question
about to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not to
adopt the old dissyllabic _landis_, _houndis_, _hartis_’ (for lands,
hounds, harts), and also ‘the final _en_ of the plural of verbs (we
_dancen_, they _singen_, etc.), which still subsists in Lancashire’. A
certain critic reads all one can say about style, and at the end of it
arrives at the inference that, ‘after all, there is some style grander
than the grand style itself, since Shakspeare has not the grand manner,
and yet has the supremacy over Milton’; another critic reads all one can
say about rhythm, and the result is, that he thinks Scott’s rhythm, in
the description of the death of Marmion, all the better for being
_saccadé_, because the dying ejaculations of Marmion were likely to be
‘jerky’. How vain to rise up early, and to take rest late, from any zeal
for proving to Mr Newman that he must not, in translating Homer, say
_houndis_ and _dancen_; or to the first of the two critics above quoted,
that one poet may be a greater poetical force than another, and yet have
a more unequal style; or to the second, that the best art, having to
represent the death of a hero, does not set about imitating his dying
noises! Such critics, however, provide for an opponent’s vivacity the
charming excuse offered by Rivarol for his, when he was reproached with
giving offence by it: ‘Ah’! he exclaimed, ‘no one considers how much
pain every man of taste has had to _suffer_, before he ever inflicts
any’.
It is for the future translator that one must work. The successful
translator of Homer will have (or he cannot succeed) that true sense for
his subject, and that disinterested love for it, which are, both of
them, so rare in literature, and so precious; he will not be led off by
any false scent; he will have an eye for the real matter, and where he
thinks he may find any indication of this, no hint will be too slight
for him, no shade will be too fine, no imperfections will turn him
aside, he will go before his adviser’s thought, and help it out with his
own. This is the sort of student that a critic of Homer should always
have in his thoughts; but students of this sort are indeed rare.
And how, then, can I help being reminded what a student of this sort we
have just lost in Mr Clough, whose name I have already mentioned in
these lectures? He, too, was busy with Homer; but it is not on that
account that I now speak of him. Nor do I speak of him in order to call
attention to his qualities and powers in general, admirable as these
were. I mention him because, in so eminent a degree, he possessed these
two invaluable literary qualities, a true sense for his object of study,
and a single-hearted care for it. He had both; but he had the second
even more eminently than the first. He greatly developed the first
through means of the second. In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy,
he had the most undivided and disinterested love for his object in
itself, the greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything accidental
or personal. His interest was in literature itself; and it was this
which gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from
all taint of littleness. In the saturnalia of ignoble personal passions,
of which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded
communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled. He had not yet
traduced his friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he
admired, nor praised what he despised. Those who knew him well had the
conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his.
His poem, of which I before spoke, has some admirable Homeric
qualities;—out-of-doors freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity.
Some of the expressions in that poem, ‘_Dangerous Corrievreckan ...
Where roads are unknown to Loch Nevish_’, come back now to my ear with
the true Homeric ring. But that in him of which I think oftenest is the
Homeric simplicity of his literary life.
Footnote 56:
‘It is the fact, that scholars of fastidious refinement, but of a
judgment which I think far more masculine than Mr Arnold’s, have
passed a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of my
translation. I at present count eight such names’.—‘Before venturing
to print, I sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would
accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women
have extolled them, how greedily a working man has inquired for them,
without knowing who was the translator’.—MR NEWMAN’S Reply, pp. 113,
124, _supra_.
Footnote 57:
‘O for the fields of Thessaly and the streams of Spercheios! O for the
hills alive with the dances of the Laconian maidens, the hills of
Taygetus’!—_Georgics_, ii. 486.
Footnote 58:
_Iliad_, xvii, 216.
Footnote 59:
_Purgatory_, xxiii, 124.
Footnote 60:
_Purgatory_, xxiii, 127.
Footnote 61:
‘A secure time fell to the lot neither of Peleus the son of Æacus, nor
of the godlike Cadmus; howbeit these are said to have had, of all
mortals, the supreme of happiness, who heard the golden-snooded Muses
sing, one of them on the mountain (Pelion), the other in seven-gated
Thebus’.
Footnote 62: