I am not preaching red Radicalism in this: I am not telling you
that Jack is as good as his master: if he were, he would be a
great deal better; for he would understand Homer (say) as well as
his master, the child of parents who could afford to have him
taught Greek. As Greek is commonly taught, I regret to say,
whether they have learnt it or not makes a distressingly small
difference to most boys' appreciation of Homer. Still it does
make a vast difference to some, and should make a vast difference
to all. And yet, if you will read the passage in Kinglake's
"Eöthen" in which he tells--in words that find their echo in many
a reader's memory--of his boyish passion for Homer--and if you
will note that the boy imbibed his passion, after all, through
the conduit of Pope's translation--you will acknowledge that, for
the human boy, admission to much of the glory of Homer's realm
does not depend upon such mastery as a boy of fifteen or sixteen
possesses over the original. But let me quote you a few
sentences:
I, too, loved Homer, but not with a scholar's love. The most
humble and pious among women was yet so proud a mother that she
could teach her first-born son no Watts's hymns, no collects
for the day; she could teach him in earliest childhood no less
than this--to find a home in his saddle, and to love old Homer,
and all that old Homer sung. True it is, that the Greek was
ingeniously rendered into English, the English of Pope even,
but not even a mesh like that can screen an earnest child from
the fire of Homer's battles.
I pored over the "Odyssey" as over a story-book, hoping and
fearing for the hero whom yet I partly scorned. But the
"Iliad"--line by line I clasped it to my brain with reverence
as well as with love....
The impatient child is not grubbing for beauties, but
pushing the siege; the women vex him with their delays,
and their talking ... but all the while that he thus chafes at
the pausing of the action, the strong vertical light of
Homer's poetry is blazing so full upon the people and
things of the "Iliad," that soon to the eyes of the child they
grow familiar as his mother's shawl....
It was not the recollection of school nor college learning,
but the rapturous and earnest reading of my childhood,
which made me bend forward so longingly to the plains of Troy.