ON TRANSLATING

HOMER
BY

MATTHEW ARNOLD

I
It has more than once been suggested to me that I should translate Homer. That is a task for
which I have neither the time nor the courage; but the suggestion led me to regard yet more
closely a poet whom I had already long studied, and for one or two years the works of Homer
were seldom out of my hands. The study of classical literature is probably on the decline; but,
whatever may be the fate of this study in general, it is certain that, as instruction spreads and the
number of readers increases, attention will be more and more directed to the poetry of Homer,
not indeed as part of a classical course, but as the most important poetical monument existing.
Even within the last ten years two fresh translations of the Iliad have appeared in England: one
by a man of great ability and genuine learning, Professor Newman; the other by Mr Wright, the
conscientious and painstaking translator of Dante. It may safely be asserted 2that neither of these
works will take rank as the standard translation of Homer; that the task of rendering him will still
be attempted by other translators. It may perhaps be possible to render to these some service, to
save them some loss of labour, by pointing out rocks on which their predecessors have split, and
the right objects on which a translator of Homer should fix his attention.
It is disputed what aim a translator should propose to himself in dealing with his original. Even
this preliminary is not yet settled. On one side it is said that the translation ought to be such ‘that
the reader should, if possible, forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion
that he is reading an original work—something original’ (if the translation be English), ‘from an
English hand’. The real original is in this case, it is said, ‘taken as a basis on which to rear a
poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have affected its
natural hearers’. On the other hand, Mr Newman, who states the foregoing doctrine only to
condemn it, declares that he ‘aims at precisely the opposite: to retain every peculiarity of the
original, so far as he is able, with the greater care the more foreign it may happen to be’; so that
it may ‘never be forgotten that he is imitating, and imitating in a different material’.
The 3translator’s ‘first duty’, says Mr Newman ‘is a historical one, to be faithful’. Probably both
sides would agree that the translator’s ‘first duty is to be faithful’; but the question at issue
between them is, in what faithfulness consists.
My one object is to give practical advice to a translator; and I shall not the least concern myself
with theories of translation as such. But I advise the translator not to try ‘to rear on the basis of
the Iliad, a poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have
affected its natural hearers’; and for this simple reason, that we cannot possibly
tell how the Iliad ‘affected its natural hearers’. It is probably meant merely that he should try to
affect Englishmen powerfully, as Homer affected Greeks powerfully; but this direction is not
enough, and can give no real guidance. For all great poets affect their hearers powerfully, but the
effect of one poet is one thing, that of another poet another thing: it is our translator’s business to
reproduce the effect of Homer, and the most powerful emotion of the unlearned English reader
can never assure him whether he has reproduced this, or whether he has produced something
else. So, again, he may follow Mr Newman’s directions, he may try to be ‘faithful’, he may
‘retain every peculiarity of his original’; but who is to assure him, who is to assure Mr
Newman 4himself, that, when he has done this, he has done that for which Mr Newman enjoins
this to be done, ‘adhered closely to Homer’s manner and habit of thought’? Evidently the
translator needs some more practical directions than these. No one can tell him how Homer
affected the Greeks; but there are those who can tell him how Homer affects them. These are
scholars; who possess, at the same time with knowledge of Greek, adequate poetical taste and
feeling. No translation will seem to them of much worth compared with the original; but they
alone can say whether the translation produces more or less the same effect upon them as the
original. They are the only competent tribunal in this matter: the Greeks are dead; the unlearned
Englishman has not the data for judging; and no man can safely confide in his own single
judgment of his own work. Let not the translator, then, trust to his notions of what the ancient
Greeks would have thought of him; he will lose himself in the vague. Let him not trust to what
the ordinary English reader thinks of him; he will be taking the blind for his guide. Let him not
trust to his own judgment of his own work; he may be misled by individual caprices. Let him ask
how his work affects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry; whether to read it
gives the Provost of Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cambridge, 5or Professor Jowett here in
Oxford, at all the same feeling which to read the original gives them. I consider that when
Bentley said of Pope’s translation, ‘It was a pretty poem, but must not be called Homer’, the
work, in spite of all its power and attractiveness, was judged.
Ὡς ἂν ὁ φρόνιμος ὁρίσειεν, ‘as the judicious would determine’, that is a test to which everyone
professes himself willing to submit his works. Unhappily, in most cases, no two persons agree as
to who ‘the judicious’ are. In the present case, the ambiguity is removed: I suppose the translator
at one with me as to the tribunal to which alone he should look for judgment; and he has thus
obtained a practical test by which to estimate the real success of his work. How is he to proceed,
in order that his work, tried by this test, may be found most successful?
First of all, there are certain negative counsels which I will give him. Homer has occupied men’s
minds so much, such a literature has arisen about him, that every one who approaches him
should resolve strictly to limit himself to that which may directly serve the object for which he
approaches him. I advise the translator to have nothing to do with the questions, whether Homer
ever existed; whether the poet of the Iliad be one or many; whether the Iliad be one poem or
an Achilleis and an 6Iliad stuck together; whether the Christian doctrine of the Atonement is
shadowed forth in the Homeric mythology; whether the Goddess Latona in any way prefigures
the Virgin Mary, and so on. These are questions which have been discussed with learning, with
ingenuity, nay, with genius; but they have two inconveniences,—one general for all who
approach them, one particular for the translator. The general inconvenience is that there really
exist no data for determining them. The particular inconvenience is that their solution by the
translator, even were it possible, could be of no benefit to his translation.
I advise him, again, not to trouble himself with constructing a special vocabulary for his use in
translation; with excluding a certain class of English words, and with confining himself to
another class, in obedience to any theory about the peculiar qualities of Homer’s style. Mr
Newman says that ‘the entire dialect of Homer being essentially archaic, that of a translator
ought to be as much Saxo-Norman as possible, and owe as little as possible to the elements
thrown into our language by classical learning’. Mr Newman is unfortunate in the observance of
his own theory; for I continually find in his translation words of Latin origin, which seem to me
quite alien to the simplicity of Homer,—‘responsive’, for instance, which is a favourite word
of 7Mr Newman, to represent the Homeric ἀμειβόμενος:
Great Hector of the motley helm thus spake to her responsive.
But thus responsively to him spake godlike Alexander.
And the word ‘celestial’ again, in the grand address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles,
You, who are born celestial, from Eld and Death exempted!
seems to me in that place exactly to jar upon the feeling as too bookish. But, apart from the
question of Mr Newman’s fidelity to his own theory, such a theory seems to me both dangerous
for a translator and false in itself. Dangerous for a translator; because, wherever one finds such a
theory announced (and one finds it pretty often), it is generally followed by an explosion of
pedantry; and pedantry is of all things in the world the most un-Homeric. False in itself; because,
in fact, we owe to the Latin element in our language most of that very rapidity and clear
decisiveness by which it is contradistinguished from the German, and in sympathy with the
languages of Greece and Rome: so that to limit an English translator of Homer to words of
Saxon origin is to deprive him of one of his special advantages for translating Homer. In Voss’s
well-known translation of Homer, it is precisely the qualities of his German language itself,
something heavy and trailing both 8in the structure of its sentences and in the words of which it
is composed, which prevent his translation, in spite of the hexameters, in spite of the fidelity,
from creating in us the impression created by the Greek. Mr Newman’s prescription, if followed,
would just strip the English translator of the advantage which he has over Voss.
The frame of mind in which we approach an author influences our correctness of appreciation of
him; and Homer should be approached by a translator in the simplest frame of mind possible.
Modern sentiment tries to make the ancient not less than the modern world its own; but against
modern sentiment in its applications to Homer the translator, if he would feel Homer truly—and
unless he feels him truly, how can he render him truly?—cannot be too much on his guard. For
example: the writer of an interesting article on English translations of Homer, in the last number
of the National Review, quotes, I see, with admiration, a criticism of Mr Ruskin on the use of the
epithet φυσίζοος, ‘life-giving’, in that beautiful passage in the third book of the Iliad, which
follows Helen’s mention of her brothers Castor and Pollux as alive, though they were in truth
dead:
ὣς φάτο· τοὺς δ’ ἤδη κατέχεν φυσίζοος αἶα
ἐν Λακεδαίμονι αὖθι, φίλῃ ἐν πατρίδι γαίῃ.[1]
9‘The poet’, says Mr Ruskin, ‘has to speak of the earth in sadness; but he will not let that sadness
affect or change his thought of it. No; though Castor and Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our
mother still,—fruitful, life-giving’. This is a just specimen of that sort of application of modern
sentiment to the ancients, against which a student, who wishes to feel the ancients truly, cannot
too resolutely defend himself. It reminds one, as, alas! so much of Mr Ruskin’s writing reminds
one, of those words of the most delicate of living critics: “Comme tout genre de composition a
son écueil particulier, celui du genre romanesque, c’est le faux”. The reader may feel moved as
he reads it; but it is not the less an example of ‘le faux’ in criticism; it is false. It is not true, as to
that particular passage, that Homer called the earth φυσίζοος because, ‘though he had to speak of
the earth in sadness, he would not let that sadness change or affect his thought of it’, but
consoled himself by considering that ‘the earth is our mother still,—fruitful, life-giving’. It is not
true, as a matter of general criticism, that this kind of sentimentality, eminently modern, inspires
Homer at all. ‘From Homer and Polygnotus I every day learn more clearly’, says Goethe, ‘that in
our life here above ground we have, properly speaking, to enact Hell’[2]:—if the student must
absolutely 10have a keynote to the Iliad, let him take this of Goethe, and see what he can do with
it; it will not, at any rate, like the tender pantheism of Mr Ruskin, falsify for him the whole strain
of Homer.
These are negative counsels; I come to the positive. When I say, the translator of Homer should
above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author;—that he is eminently rapid;
that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of
it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the
substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally that he is eminently
noble;—I probably seem to be saying what is too general to be of much service to anybody. Yet it
is strictly true that, for want of duly penetrating themselves with the first-named quality of
Homer, his rapidity, Cowper and Mr Wright have failed in rendering him; that, for want of duly
appreciating the second-named quality, his plainness and directness of style and dictation, Pope
and Mr Sotheby have failed in rendering him; that for want of appreciating the third, his
plainness and directness of ideas, Chapman has failed in rendering him; while for want of
appreciating the fourth, his nobleness, Mr Newman, who has clearly seen some of the faults of
his predecessors, 11has yet failed more conspicuously than any of them.
Coleridge says, in his strange language, speaking of the union of the human soul with the divine
essence, that this takes place
Whene’er the mist, which stands ’twixt God and thee,
Defecates to a pure transparency;
and so, too, it may be said of that union of the translator with his original, which alone can
produce a good translation, that it takes place when the mist which stands between them—the
mist of alien modes of thinking, speaking, and feeling on the translator’s part—‘defecates to a
pure transparency’, and disappears. But between Cowper and Homer—(Mr Wright repeats in the
main Cowper’s manner, as Mr Sotheby repeats Pope’s manner, and neither Mr Wright’s
translation nor Mr Sotheby’s has, I must be forgiven for saying, any proper reason for
existing)—between Cowper and Homer there is interposed the mist of Cowper’s elaborate
Miltonic manner, entirely alien to the flowing rapidity of Homer; between Pope and Homer there
is interposed the mist of Pope’s literary artificial manner, entirely alien to the plain naturalness of
Homer’s manner; between Chapman and Homer there is interposed the mist of the fancifulness
of the Elizabethan age, entirely alien to the plain directness of Homer’s thought and feeling;
while between 12Mr Newman and Homer is interposed a cloud of more than Egyptian
thickness,—namely, a manner, in Mr Newman’s version, eminently ignoble, while Homer’s
manner is eminently noble.
I do not despair of making all these propositions clear to a student who approaches Homer with a
free mind. First, Homer is eminently rapid, and to this rapidity the elaborate movement of
Miltonic blank verse is alien. The reputation of Cowper, that most interesting man and excellent
poet, does not depend on his translation of Homer; and in his preface to the second edition, he
himself tells us that he felt,—he had too much poetical taste not to feel,—on returning to his own
version after six or seven years, ‘more dissatisfied with it himself than the most difficult to be
pleased of all his judges’. And he was dissatisfied with it for the right reason,—that ‘it seemed to
him deficient in the grace of ease’. Yet he seems to have originally misconceived the manner of
Homer so much, that it is no wonder he rendered him amiss. ‘The similitude of Milton’s manner
to that of Homer is such’, he says, ‘that no person familiar with both can read either without
being reminded of the other; and it is in those breaks and pauses to which the numbers of the
English poet are so much indebted, both for their dignity and variety, that he chiefly copies the
Grecian’. It 13would be more true to say: ‘The unlikeness of Milton’s manner to that of Homer is
such, that no person familiar with both can read either without being struck with his difference
from the other; and it is in his breaks and pauses that the English poet is most unlike the
Grecian’.
The inversion and pregnant conciseness of Milton or Dante are, doubtless, most impressive
qualities of style; but they are the very opposites of the directness and flowingness of Homer,
which he keeps alike in passages of the simplest narrative, and in those of the deepest emotion.
Not only, for example, are these lines of Cowper un-Homeric:
So numerous seemed those fires the banks between
Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece
In prospect all of Troy;
where the position of the word ‘blazing’ gives an entirely un-Homeric movement to this simple
passage, describing the fires of the Trojan camp outside of Troy; but the following lines, in that
very highly-wrought passage where the horse of Achilles answers his master’s reproaches for
having left Patroclus on the field of battle, are equally un-Homeric:
For not through sloth or tardiness on us
Aught chargeable, have Ilium’s sons thine arms
Stript from Patroclus’ shoulders; but a God
Matchless in battle, offspring of bright-haired
Latona, him contending in the van
Slew, for the glory of the chief of Troy.
14Here even the first inversion, ‘have Ilium’s sons thine arms Stript from Patroclus’ shoulders’,
gives the reader a sense of a movement not Homeric; and the second inversion, ‘a God him
contending in the van Slew’, gives this sense ten times stronger. Instead of moving on without
check, as in reading the original, the reader twice finds himself, in reading the translation,
brought up and checked. Homer moves with the same simplicity and rapidity in the highly-
wrought as in the simple passage.
It is in vain that Cowper insists on his fidelity: ‘my chief boast is that I have adhered closely to
my original’:—‘the matter found in me, whether the reader like it or not, is found also in Homer;
and the matter not found in me, how much soever the reader may admire it, is found only in Mr
Pope’. To suppose that it is fidelity to an original to give its matter, unless you at the same time
give its manner; or, rather, to suppose that you can really give its matter at all, unless you can
give its manner, is just the mistake of our pre-Raphaelite school of painters, who do not
understand that the peculiar effect of nature resides in the whole and not in the parts. So the
peculiar effect of a poet resides in his manner and movement, not in his words taken separately.
It is well known how conscientiously literal is Cowper in his translation 15of Homer. It is well
known how extravagantly free is Pope.
So let it be!
Portents and prodigies are lost on me;
that is Pope’s rendering of the words,
Ξάνθε, τί μοι θάνατον μαντεύεαι; οὐδέ τί σε χρή·[3]
Xanthus, why prophesiest thou my death to me? thou needest not at all:
yet, on the whole, Pope’s translation of the Iliad is more Homeric than Cowper’s, for it is more
rapid.
Pope’s movement, however, though rapid, is not of the same kind as Homer’s; and here I come to
the real objection to rhyme in a translation of Homer. It is commonly said that rhyme is to be
abandoned in a translation of Homer, because ‘the exigencies of rhyme’, to quote Mr Newman,
‘positively forbid faithfulness’; because ‘a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme’, to quote
Cowper, ‘is impossible’. This, however, is merely an accidental objection to rhyme. If this were
all, it might be supposed, that if rhymes were more abundant Homer could be adequately
translated in rhyme. But this is not so; there is a deeper, a substantial objection to rhyme in a
translation of Homer. It is, that rhyme inevitably tends to pair lines which in the original are
independent, and thus the movement 16of the poem is changed. In these lines of Chapman, for
instance, from Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus, in the twelfth book of the Iliad:
O friend, if keeping back
Would keep back age from us, and death, and that we might not wrack
In this life’s human sea at all, but that deferring now
We shunned death ever,—nor would I half this vain valor show,
Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance;
But since we must go, though not here, and that besides the chance
Proposed now, there are infinite fates, etc.
Here the necessity of making the line,
Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance,
rhyme with the line which follows it, entirely changes and spoils the movement of the passage.
οὔτε κεν αὐτὸς ἐνὶ πρώτοισι μαχοίμην,
οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν·[4]
Neither would I myself go forth to fight with the foremost,
Nor would I urge thee on to enter the glorious battle,
says Homer; there he stops, and begins an opposed movement:
νῦν δ’—ἔμπης γὰρ Κῆρες ἐφεστᾶσιν θανάτοιο—
But—for a thousand fates of death stand close to us always—
This line, in which Homer wishes to go away 17with the most marked rapidity from the line
before, Chapman is forced, by the necessity of rhyming, intimately to connect with the line
before.
But since we must go, though not here, and that besides the chance.
The moment the word chance strikes our ear, we are irresistibly carried back to advance and to
the whole previous line, which, according to Homer’s own feeling, we ought to have left behind
us entirely, and to be moving farther and farther away from.
Rhyme certainly, by intensifying antithesis, can intensify separation, and this is precisely what
Pope does; but this balanced rhetorical antithesis, though very effective, is entirely un-Homeric.
And this is what I mean by saying that Pope fails to render Homer, because he does not render
his plainness and directness of style and diction. Where Homer marks separation by moving
away, Pope marks it by antithesis. No passage could show this better than the passage I have just
quoted, on which I will pause for a moment.
Robert Wood, whose Essay on the Genius of Homer is mentioned by Goethe as one of the books
which fell into his hands when his powers were first developing themselves, and strongly
interested him, relates of this passage a striking story. He says that in 1762, at the end of the
Seven Years’ War, 18being then Under-Secretary of State, he was directed to wait upon the
President of the Council, Lord Granville, a few days before he died, with the preliminary articles
of the Treaty of Paris. ‘I found him’, he continues, ‘so languid, that I proposed postponing my
business for another time; but he insisted that I should stay, saying, it could not prolong his life to
neglect his duty; and repeating the following passage out of Sarpedon’s speech, he dwelled with
particular emphasis on the third line, which recalled to his mind the distinguishing part he had
taken in public affairs:
ὦ πέπον, εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε,
αἰεὶ δὴ μέλλοιμεν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε
ἔσσεσθ’, οὔτε κεν αὐτὸς ἐνὶ πρώτοισι μαχοίμην,[5]
οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν·
νῦν δ’—ἔμπης γὰρ Κῆρες ἐφεστᾶσιν θανάτοιο
μυρίαι, ἃς οὐκ ἔστι φυγεῖν βρότον, οὐδ’ ὑπαλύξαι—
ἴομεν.
His Lordship repeated the last word several times with a calm and determinate resignation; and,
after a serious pause of some minutes, he desired to hear the Treaty read, to which he listened
with great attention, 19and recovered spirits enough to declare the approbation of a dying
statesman (I use his own words) “on the most glorious war, and most honourable peace, this
nation ever saw”’[6].
I quote this story, first, because it is interesting as exhibiting the English aristocracy at its very
height of culture, lofty spirit, and greatness, towards the middle of the 18th century. I quote it,
secondly, because it seems to me to illustrate Goethe’s saying which I mentioned, that our life, in
Homer’s view of it, represents a conflict and a hell; and it brings out, too, what there is tonic and
fortifying in this doctrine. I quote it, lastly, because it shows that the passage is just one of those
in translating which Pope will be at his best, a passage of strong emotion and oratorical
movement, not of simple narrative or description.
Pope translates the passage thus:
Could all our care elude the gloomy grave
Which claims no less the fearful than the brave,
For lust of fame I should not vainly dare
In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war:
But since, alas! ignoble age must come,
Disease, and death’s inexorable doom;
The life which others pay, let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe.
Nothing could better exhibit Pope’s prodigious talent; and nothing, too, could be 20better in its
own way. But, as Bentley said, ‘You must not call it Homer’. One feels that Homer’s thought has
passed through a literary and rhetorical crucible, and come out highly intellectualised; come out
in a form which strongly impresses us, indeed, but which no longer impresses us in the same way
as when it was uttered by Homer. The antithesis of the last two lines—
The life which others pay, let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe
is excellent, and is just suited to Pope’s heroic couplet; but neither the antithesis itself, nor the
couplet which conveys it, is suited to the feeling or to the movement of the Homeric ἴομεν.
A literary and intellectualised language is, however, in its own way well suited to grand matters;
and Pope, with a language of this kind and his own admirable talent, comes off well enough as
long as he has passion, or oratory, or a great crisis to deal with. Even here, as I have been
pointing out, he does not render Homer; but he and his style are in themselves strong. It is when
he comes to level passages, passages of narrative or description, that he and his style are sorely
tried, and prove themselves weak. A perfectly plain direct style can of course convey the simplest
matter as naturally as the grandest; indeed, it must be harder for it, one would say, to convey 21a
grand matter worthily and nobly, than to convey a common matter, as alone such a matter should
be conveyed, plainly and simply. But the style of Rasselas is incomparably better fitted to
describe a sage philosophising than a soldier lighting his camp-fire. The style of Pope is not the
style of Rasselas; but it is equally a literary style, equally unfitted to describe a simple matter
with the plain naturalness of Homer.
Everyone knows the passage at the end of the eighth book of the Iliad, where the fires of the
Trojan encampment are likened to the stars. It is very far from my wish to hold Pope up to
ridicule, so I shall not quote the commencement of the passage, which in the original is of great
and celebrated beauty, and in translating which Pope has been singularly and notoriously
fortunate. But the latter part of the passage, where Homer leaves the stars, and comes to the
Trojan fires, treats of the plainest, most matter-of-fact subject possible, and deals with this, as
Homer always deals with every subject, in the plainest and most straightforward style. ‘So many
in number, between the ships and the streams of Xanthus, shone forth in front of Troy the fires
kindled by the Trojans. There were kindled a thousand fires in the plain; and by each one there
sat fifty men in the light of the blazing fire. And the horses, munching white barley and rye, and
standing 22by the chariots, waited for the bright-throned Morning[7]’.
In Pope’s translation, this plain story becomes the following:
So many flames before proud Ilion blaze,
And brighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays;
The long reflections of the distant fires
Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires.
A thousand piles the dusky horrors gild,
And shoot a shady lustre o’er the field.
Full fifty guards each flaming pile attend,
Whose umbered arms, by fits, thick flashes send;
Loud neigh the coursers o’er their heaps of corn,
And ardent warriors wait the rising morn.
It is for passages of this sort, which, after all, form the bulk of a narrative poem, that Pope’s style
is so bad. In elevated passages he is powerful, as Homer is powerful, though not in the same
way; but in plain narrative, where Homer is still powerful and delightful, Pope, by the inherent
fault of his style, is ineffective and out of taste. Wordsworth says somewhere, that wherever
Virgil seems to have composed ‘with his eye on the object’, Dryden fails to render him. Homer
invariably composes ‘with his eye on the object’, whether the object be a moral or a material
one: Pope composes with his eye on his style, into which he translates his object, whatever it is.
That, therefore, which Homer conveys to us immediately, Pope conveys to us through a medium.
He aims at turning Homer’s sentiments 23pointedly and rhetorically; at investing Homer’s
description with ornament and dignity. A sentiment may be changed by being put into a pointed
and oratorical form, yet may still be very effective in that form; but a description, the moment it
takes its eyes off that which it is to describe, and begins to think of ornamenting itself, is
worthless.
Therefore, I say, the translator of Homer should penetrate himself with a sense of the plainness
and directness of Homer’s style; of the simplicity with which Homer’s thought is evolved and
expressed. He has Pope’s fate before his eyes, to show him what a divorce may be created even
between the most gifted translator and Homer by an artificial evolution of thought and a literary
cast of style.
Chapman’s style is not artificial and literary like Pope’s nor his movement elaborate and self-
retarding like the Miltonic movement of Cowper. He is plain-spoken, fresh, vigorous, and, to a
certain degree, rapid; and all these are Homeric qualities. I cannot say that I think the movement
of his fourteen-syllable line, which has been so much commended, Homeric; but on this point I
shall have more to say by and by, when I come to speak of Mr Newman’s metrical exploits. But
it is not distinctly anti-Homeric, like the movement of Milton’s blank verse; and it has a rapidity
of its 24own. Chapman’s diction, too, is generally good, that is, appropriate to Homer; above all,
the syntactical character of his style is appropriate. With these merits, what prevents his
translation from being a satisfactory version of Homer? Is it merely the want of literal
faithfulness to his original, imposed upon him, it is said, by the exigencies of rhyme? Has this
celebrated version, which has so many advantages, no other and deeper defect than that? Its
author is a poet, and a poet, too, of the Elizabethan age; the golden age of English literature as it
is called, and on the whole truly called; for, whatever be the defects of Elizabethan literature (and
they are great), we have no development of our literature to compare with it for vigour and
richness. This age, too, showed what it could do in translating, by producing a master-piece, its
version of the Bible.
Chapman’s translation has often been praised as eminently Homeric. Keats’s fine sonnet in its
honour everyone knows; but Keats could not read the original, and therefore could not really
judge the translation. Coleridge, in praising Chapman’s version, says at the same time, ‘It will
give you small idea of Homer’. But the grave authority of Mr Hallum pronounces this translation
to be ‘often exceedingly Homeric’; and its latest editor boldly declares that by what, with a
deplorable 25style, he calls ‘his own innative Homeric genius’, Chapman ‘has thoroughly
identified himself with Homer’; and that ‘we pardon him even for his digressions, for they are
such as we feel Homer himself would have written’.
I confess that I can never read twenty lines of Chapman’s version without recurring to Bentley’s
cry, ‘This is not Homer!’ and that from a deeper cause than any unfaithfulness occasioned by the
fetters of rhyme.
I said that there were four things which eminently distinguished Homer, and with a sense of
which Homer’s translator should penetrate himself as fully as possible. One of these four things
was, the plainness and directness of Homer’s ideas. I have just been speaking of the plainness
and directness of his style; but the plainness and directness of the contents of his style, of his
ideas themselves, is not less remarkable. But as eminently as Homer is plain, so eminently is the
Elizabethan literature in general, and Chapman in particular, fanciful. Steeped in humours and
fantasticality up to its very lips, the Elizabethan age, newly arrived at the free use of the human
faculties after their long term of bondage, and delighting to exercise them freely, suffers from its
own extravagance in this first exercise of them, can hardly bring itself to see an object quietly or
to describe it temperately. 26Happily, in the translation of the Bible, the sacred character of their
original inspired the translators with such respect that they did not dare to give the rein to their
own fancies in dealing with it. But, in dealing with works of profane literature, in dealing with
poetical works above all, which highly stimulated them, one may say that the minds of the
Elizabethan translators were too active; that they could not forbear importing so much of their
own, and this of a most peculiar and Elizabethan character, into their original, that they effaced
the character of the original itself.
Take merely the opening pages to Chapman’s translation, the introductory verses, and the
dedications. You will find:
An Anagram of the name of our Dread Prince,
My most gracious and sacred Mæcenas,
Henry, Prince of Wales,
Our Sunn, Heyr, Peace, Life,
Henry, son of James the First, to whom the work is dedicated. Then comes an address,
To the sacred Fountain of Princes,
Sole Empress of Beauty and Virtue, Anne, Queen
Of England, etc.
All the Middle Age, with its grotesqueness, its conceits, its irrationality, is still in these opening
pages; they by themselves are sufficient to indicate to us what a gulf divides Chapman from the
‘clearest-souled’ of poets, from Homer, almost as great a gulf 27as that which divides him from
Voltaire. Pope has been sneered at for saying that Chapman writes ‘somewhat as one might
imagine Homer himself to have written before he arrived at years of discretion’. But the remark
is excellent: Homer expresses himself like a man of adult reason, Chapman like a man whose
reason has not yet cleared itself. For instance, if Homer had had to say of a poet, that he hoped
his merit was now about to be fully established in the opinion of good judges, he was as
incapable of saying this as Chapman says it,—‘Though truth in her very nakedness sits in so
deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora, and Ganges, few eyes can sound her, I hope yet those few
here will so discover and confirm that the date being out of her darkness in this morning of our
poet, he shall now gird his temples with the sun’,—I say, Homer was as incapable of saying this
in that manner, as Voltaire himself would have been. Homer, indeed, has actually an affinity with
Voltaire in the unrivalled clearness and straightforwardness of his thinking; in the way in which
he keeps to one thought at a time, and puts that thought forth in its complete natural plainness,
instead of being led away from it by some fancy striking him in connection with it, and being
beguiled to wander off with this fancy till his original thought, in its natural reality, knows him
no more. 28What could better show us how gifted a race was this Greek race? The same member
of it has not only the power of profoundly touching that natural heart of humanity which it is
Voltaire’s weakness that he cannot reach, but can also address the understanding with all
Voltaire’s admirable simplicity and rationality.
My limits will not allow me to do more than shortly illustrate, from Chapman’s version of
the Iliad, what I mean when I speak of this vital difference between Homer and an Elizabethan
poet in the quality of their thought; between the plain simplicity of the thought of the one, and
the curious complexity of the thought of the other. As in Pope’s case, I carefully abstain from
choosing passages for the express purpose of making Chapman appear ridiculous; Chapman, like
Pope, merits in himself all respect, though he too, like Pope, fails to render Homer.
In that tonic speech of Sarpedon, of which I have said so much, Homer, you may remember, has:
εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε,
αἰεὶ δὴ μέλλοιμεν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε
ἔσσεσθ’—
if indeed, but once this battle avoided,
We were for ever to live without growing old and immortal—
Chapman cannot be satisfied with this, but must add a fancy to it:
29if keeping back
Would keep back age from us, and death, and that we might not wrack
In this life’s human sea at all;
and so on. Again; in another passage which I have before quoted, where Zeus says to the horses
of Peleus,
τί σφῶϊ δόμεν Πηλῆϊ ἀνάκτι
θνητῷ; ὑμεῖς δ’ ἐστὸν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε·[8]
Why gave we you to royal Peleus, to a mortal?
but ye are without old age, and immortal.
Chapman sophisticates this into:
Why gave we you t’ a mortal king, when immortality
And incapacity of age so dignifies your states?
Again; in the speech of Achilles to his horses, where Achilles, according to Homer, says simply
‘Take heed that ye bring your master safe back to the host of the Danaans, in some other sort
than the last time, when the battle is ended’, Chapman sophisticates this into:
When with blood, for this day’s fast observed, revenge shall yield
Our heart satiety, bring us off.
In Hector’s famous speech, again, at his parting from Andromache, Homer makes him say: ‘Nor
does my own heart so bid me’ (to keep safe behind the walls), ‘since I have learned to be staunch
always, and to fight among the foremost of the Trojans, 30busy on behalf of my father’s great
glory, and my own[9]’. In Chapman’s hands this becomes:
The spirit I first did breathe
Did never teach me that; much less, since the contempt of death
Was settled in me, and my mind knew what a worthy was,
Whose office is to lead in fight, and give no danger pass
Without improvement. In this fire must Hector’s trial shine:
Here must his country, father, friends, be in him made divine.
You see how ingeniously Homer’s plain thought is tormented, as the French would say, here.
Homer goes on: ‘For well I know this in my mind and in my heart, the day will be, when sacred
Troy shall perish’—
ἔσσεται ἦμαρ, ὅτ’ ἄν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρή.
Chapman makes this:
And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I know,
When sacred Troy shall shed her towers, for tears of overthrow.
I might go on for ever, but I could not give you a better illustration than this last, of what I mean
by saying that the Elizabethan poet fails to render Homer because he cannot forbear to interpose
a play of thought between his object and its expression. Chapman translates his object into
Elizabethan, 31as Pope translates it into the Augustan of Queen Anne; both convey it to us
through a medium. Homer, on the other hand, sees his object and conveys it to us immediately.
And yet, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness of Homer’s style, in spite of this perfect
plainness and directness of his ideas, he is eminently noble; he works as entirely in the grand
style, he is as grandiose, as Phidias, or Dante, or Michael Angelo. This is what makes his
translators despair. ‘To give relief’, says Cowper, ‘to prosaic subjects’ (such as dressing, eating,
drinking, harnessing, travelling, going to bed), that is to treat such subjects nobly, in the grand
style, ‘without seeming unreasonably tumid, is extremely difficult’. It is difficult, but Homer has
done it. Homer is precisely the incomparable poet he is, because he has done it. His translator
must not be tumid, must not be artificial, must not be literary; true: but then also he must not be
commonplace, must not be ignoble. I have shown you how translators of Homer fail by wanting
rapidity, by wanting simplicity of style, by wanting plainness of thought: in a second lecture I
will show you how a translator fails by wanting nobility.
32
II
I must repeat what I said in beginning, that the translator of Homer ought steadily to keep in
mind where lies the real test of the success of his translation, what judges he is to try to satisfy.
He is to try to satisfy scholars, because scholars alone have the means of really judging him. A
scholar may be a pedant, it is true, and then his judgment will be worthless; but a scholar may
also have poetical feeling, and then he can judge him truly; whereas all the poetical feeling in the
world will not enable a man who is not a scholar to judge him truly. For the translator is to
reproduce Homer, and the scholar alone has the means of knowing that Homer who is to be
reproduced. He knows him but imperfectly, for he is separated from him by time, race, and
language; but he alone knows him at all. Yet people speak as if there were two real tribunals in
this matter,—the scholar’s tribunal, and that of the general public. They speak as if the scholar’s
judgment was one thing, and the general public’s judgment another; both with their
shortcomings, both with their liability to error; but both to be regarded by the translator. The
translator who makes verbal literalness his chief care ‘will’, says a writer in the National
Review whom 33I have already quoted, ‘be appreciated by the scholar accustomed to test a
translation rigidly by comparison with the original, to look perhaps with excessive care to finish
in detail rather than boldness and general effect, and find pardon even for a version that seems
bare and bold, so it be scholastic and faithful’. But, if the scholar in judging a translation looks to
detail rather than to general effect, he judges it pedantically and ill. The appeal, however, lies not
from the pedantic scholar to the general public, which can only like or dislike Chapman’s
version, or Pope’s, or Mr Newman’s, but cannot judge them; it lies from the pedantic scholar to
the scholar who is not pedantic, who knows that Homer is Homer by his general effect, and not
by his single words, and who demands but one thing in a translation,—that it shall, as nearly as
possible, reproduce for him the general effect of Homer. This, then, remains the one proper aim
of the translator: to reproduce on the intelligent scholar, as nearly as possible, the general effect
of Homer. Except so far as he reproduces this, he loses his labour, even though he may make a
spirited Iliad of his own, like Pope, or translate Homer’s Iliad word for word, like Mr Newman.
If his proper aim were to stimulate in any manner possible the general public, he might be right
in following Pope’s example; if his proper aim were to help 34schoolboys to construe Homer, he
might be right in following Mr Newman’s. But it is not: his proper aim is, I repeat it yet once
more, to reproduce on the intelligent scholar, as nearly as he can, the general effect of Homer.
When, therefore, Cowper says, ‘My chief boast is that I have adhered closely to my original’;
when Mr Newman says, ‘My aim is to retain every peculiarity of the original, to be faithful,
exactly as is the case with the draughtsman of the Elgin marbles’; their real judge only replies: ‘It
may be so: reproduce then upon us, reproduce the effect of Homer, as a good copy reproduces
the effect of the Elgin marbles’.
When, again, Mr Newman tells us that ‘by an exhaustive process of argument and experiment’ he
has found a metre which is at once the metre of ‘the modern Greek epic’, and a metre ‘like in
moral genius’ to Homer’s metre, his judge has still but the same answer for him: ‘It may be so:
reproduce then on our ear something of the effect produced by the movement of Homer’.
But what is the general effect which Homer produces on Mr Newman himself? because, when
we know this, we shall know whether he and his judges are agreed at the outset, whether we may
expect him, if he can reproduce the effect he feels, if his hand does not betray him in the
execution, 35to satisfy his judges and to succeed. If, however, Mr Newman’s impression from
Homer is something quite different from that of his judges, then it can hardly be expected that
any amount of labour or talent will enable him to reproduce for them their Homer.
Mr Newman does not leave us in doubt as to the general effect which Homer makes upon him.
As I have told you what is the general effect which Homer makes upon me,—that of a most
rapidly moving poet, that of a poet most plain and direct in his style, that of a poet most plain and
direct in his ideas, that of a poet eminently noble,—so Mr Newman tells us his general
impression of Homer. ‘Homer’s style’, he says, ‘is direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing,
garrulous’. Again: ‘Homer rises and sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low
when it is mean’.
I lay my finger on four words in these two sentences of Mr Newman, and I say that the man who
could apply those words to Homer can never render Homer truly. The four words are
these: quaint, garrulous, prosaic, low. Search the English language for a word which does not
apply to Homer, and you could not fix on a better than quaint, unless perhaps you fixed on one of
the other three.
Again; ‘to translate Homer suitably’, says Mr Newman, ‘we need a diction
sufficiently 36antiquated to obtain pardon of the reader for its frequent homeliness’. ‘I am
concerned’, he says again, ‘with the artistic problem of attaining a plausible aspect of moderate
antiquity, while remaining easily intelligible’. And again, he speaks of ‘the more antiquated style
suited to this subject’. Quaint! antiquated!—but to whom? Sir Thomas Browne is quaint, and the
diction of Chaucer is antiquated: does Mr Newman suppose that Homer seemed quaint to
Sophocles, when he read him, as Sir Thomas Browne seems quaint to us, when we read him? or
that Homer’s diction seemed antiquated to Sophocles, as Chaucer’s diction seems antiquated to
us? But we cannot really know, I confess, how Homer seemed to Sophocles: well then, to those
who can tell us how he seems to them, to the living scholar, to our only present witness on this
matter,—does Homer make on the Provost of Eton, when he reads him, the impression of a poet
quaint and antiquated? does he make this impression on Professor Thompson or Professor
Jowett. When Shakspeare says, ‘The princes orgulous’, meaning ‘the proud princes’, we say,
‘This is antiquated’; when he says of the Trojan gates, that they
With massy staples
And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts
Sperr up the sons of Troy,
we say, ‘This is both quaint and antiquated’. 37But does Homer ever compose in a language
which produces on the scholar at all the same impression as this language which I have quoted
from Shakspeare? Never once. Shakspeare is quaint and antiquated in the lines which I have just
quoted; but Shakspeare—need I say it?—can compose, when he likes, when he is at his best, in a
language perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible; in a language which, in spite of the two
centuries and a half which part its author from us, stops us or surprises us as little as the language
of a contemporary. And Homer has not Shakspeare’s variations: Homer always composes as
Shakspeare composes at his best; Homer is always simple and intelligible, as Shakspeare is
often; Homer is never quaint and antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes.
When Mr Newman says that Homer is garrulous, he seems, perhaps, to depart less widely from
the common opinion than when he calls him quaint; for is there not Horace’s authority for
asserting that ‘the good Homer sometimes nods’, bonus dormitat Homerus? and a great many
people have come, from the currency of this well-known criticism, to represent Homer to
themselves as a diffuse old man, with the full-stocked mind, but also with the occasional slips
and weaknesses of old age. Horace has said better things than his ‘bonus dormitat Homerus’; but
he never meant by this, 38as I need not remind anyone who knows the passage, that Homer was
garrulous, or anything of the kind. Instead, however, of either discussing what Horace meant, or
discussing Homer’s garrulity as a general question, I prefer to bring to my mind some style
which is garrulous, and to ask myself, to ask you, whether anything at all of the impression made
by that style is ever made by the style of Homer. The mediæval romancers, for instance, are
garrulous; the following, to take out of a thousand instances the first which comes to hand, is in a
garrulous manner. It is from the romance of Richard Cœur de Lion.
Of my tale be not a-wondered!
The French says he slew an hundred
(Whereof is made this English saw)
Or he rested him any thraw.
Him followed many an English knight
That eagerly holp him for to fight
and so on. Now the manner of that composition I call garrulous; everyone will feel it to be
garrulous; everyone will understand what is meant when it is called garrulous. Then I ask the
scholar,—does Homer’s manner ever make upon you, I do not say, the same impression of its
garrulity as that passage, but does it make, ever for one moment, an impression in the slightest
way resembling, in the remotest degree akin to, the impression made by that passage of the
mediæval poet? I have no fear of the answer.
39I follow the same method with Mr Newman’s two other epithets, prosaic and low. ‘Homer
rises and sinks with his subject’, says Mr Newman; ‘is prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is
mean’. First I say, Homer is never, in any sense, to be with truth called prosaic; he is never to be
called low. He does not rise and sink with his subject; on the contrary, his manner invests his
subject, whatever his subject be, with nobleness. Then I look for an author of whom it may with
truth be said, that he ‘rises and sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is
mean’. Defoe is eminently such an author; of Defoe’s manner it may with perfect precision be
said, that it follows his matter; his lifelike composition takes its character from the facts which it
conveys, not from the nobleness of the composer. In Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack, Defoe is
undoubtedly prosaic when his subject is tame, low when his subject is mean. Does Homer’s
manner in the Iliad, I ask the scholar, ever make upon him an impression at all like the
impression made by Defoe’s manner in Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack? Does it not, on the
contrary, leave him with an impression of nobleness, even when it deals with Thersites or with
Irus?
Well then, Homer is neither quaint, nor garrulous, nor prosaic, nor mean: and Mr Newman, in
seeing him so, sees him differently 40from those who are to judge Mr Newman’s rendering of
him. By pointing out how a wrong conception of Homer affects Mr Newman’s translation, I hope
to place in still clearer light those four cardinal truths which I pronounce essential for him who
would have a right conception of Homer: that Homer is rapid, that he is plain and direct in word
and style, that he is plain and direct in his ideas, and that he is noble.
Mr Newman says that in fixing on a style for suitably rendering Homer, as he conceives him, he
‘alights on the delicate line which separates the quaint from the grotesque’. ‘I ought to be
quaint’, he says, ‘I ought not to be grotesque’. This is a most unfortunate sentence. Mr Newman
is grotesque, which he himself says he ought not to be; and he ought not to be quaint, which he
himself says he ought to be.
‘No two persons will agree’, says Mr Newman, ‘as to where the quaint ends and the grotesque
begins’; and perhaps this is true. But, in order to avoid all ambiguity in the use of the two words,
it is enough to say, that most persons would call an expression which produced on them a very
strong sense of its incongruity, and which violently surprised them, grotesque; and an expression,
which produced on them a slighter sense of its incongruity, and which 41more gently surprised
them, quaint. Using the two words in this manner, I say, that when Mr Newman translates
Helen’s words to Hector in the sixth book,
Δᾶερ ἐμεῖο, κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, ὀκρυοέσσης[10],
O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief-working vixen,
A numbing horror,
he is grotesque; that is, he expresses himself in a manner which produces on us a very strong
sense of its incongruity, and which violently surprises us. I say, again, that when Mr Newman
translates the common line,
Τὴν δ’ ἠμείβετ’ ἔπειτα μέγας κορυθαίολος Ἕκτωρ,
Great Hector of the motley helm then spake to her responsive,
or the common expression, ἐϋκνήμιδες Ἀχαιοί, ‘dapper-greaved Achaians’, he is quaint; that is,
he expresses himself in a manner which produces on us a slighter sense of incongruity, and
which more gently surprises us. But violent and gentle surprise are alike far from the scholar’s
spirit when he reads in Homer κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, or κορυθαίολος Ἕκτωρ, or, ἐϋκνήμιδες
Ἀχαιοί. These expressions no more seem odd to him than the simplest expressions in English. He
is not more checked by any feeling 42of strangeness, strong or weak, when he reads them, than
when he reads in an English book ‘the painted savage’, or, ‘the phlegmatic Dutchman’. Mr
Newman’s renderings of them must, therefore, be wrong expressions in a translation of Homer,
because they excite in the scholar, their only competent judge, a feeling quite alien to that excited
in him by what they profess to render.
Mr Newman, by expressions of this kind, is false to his original in two ways. He is false to him
inasmuch as he is ignoble; for a noble air, and a grotesque air, the air of the address,
Δᾶερ ἐμεῖο, κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, ὀκρυοέσσης,
and the air of the address,
O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief-working vixen,
A numbing horror,
are just contrary the one to the other: and he is false to him inasmuch as he is odd; for an odd
diction like Mr Newman’s, and a perfectly plain natural diction like Homer’s,—‘dapper-greaved
Achaians’ and ἐϋκνήμιδες Ἀχαιοί,—are also just contrary the one to the other. Where, indeed, Mr
Newman got his diction, with whom he can have lived, what can be his test of antiquity and
rarity for words, are questions which I ask myself with bewilderment. He has prefixed to his
translation a list of what 43he calls ‘the more antiquated or rarer words’ which he has used. In
this list appear, on the one hand, such words as doughty, grisly, lusty, noisome, ravin, which are
familiar, one would think, to all the world; on the other hand such words as bragly, meaning, Mr
Newman tells us, ‘proudly fine’; bulkin, ‘a calf’; plump, a ‘mass’; and so on. ‘I am concerned’,
says Mr Newman, ‘with the artistic problem of attaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity,
while remaining easily intelligible’. But it seems to me that lusty is not antiquated: and
that bragly is not a word readily understood. That this word, indeed, and bulkin, may have ‘a
plausible aspect of moderate antiquity’, I admit; but that they are ‘easily intelligible’, I deny.
Mr Newman’s syntax has, I say it with pleasure, a much more Homeric cast than his vocabulary;
his syntax, the mode in which his thought is evolved, although not the actual words in which it is
expressed, seems to me right in its general character, and the best feature of his version. It is not
artificial or rhetorical like Cowper’s syntax or Pope’s: it is simple, direct, and natural, and so far
it is like Homer’s. It fails, however, just where, from the inherent fault of Mr Newman’s
conception of Homer, one might expect it to fail,—it fails in nobleness. It presents the thought in
a way 44which is something more than unconstrained,—over-familiar; something more than
easy,—free and easy. In this respect it is like the movement of Mr Newman’s version, like his
rhythm, for this, too, fails, in spite of some qualities, by not being noble enough; this, while it
avoids the faults of being slow and elaborate, falls into a fault in the opposite direction, and is
slip-shod. Homer presents his thought naturally; but when Mr Newman has,
A thousand fires along the plain, I say, that night were burning,
he presents his thought familiarly; in a style which may be the genuine style of ballad-poetry, but
which is not the style of Homer. Homer moves freely; but when Mr Newman has,
Infatuate! O that thou wert lord to some other army[11],
he gives himself too much freedom; he leaves us too much to do for his rhythm ourselves,
instead of giving to us a rhythm 45like Homer’s, easy indeed, but mastering our ear with a
fulness of power which is irresistible.
I said that a certain style might be the genuine style of ballad-poetry, but yet not the style of
Homer. The analogy of the ballad is ever present to Mr Newman’s thoughts in considering
Homer; and perhaps nothing has more caused his faults than this analogy,—this popular, but, it is
time to say, this erroneous analogy. ‘The moral qualities of Homer’s style’, says Mr Newman,
‘being like to those of the English ballad, we need a metre of the same genius. Only those
metres, which by the very possession of these qualities are liable to degenerate into doggerel, are
suitable to reproduce the ancient epic’. ‘The style of Homer’, he says, in a passage which I have
before quoted, ‘is direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous: in all these respects it is
similar to the old English ballad’. Mr Newman, I need not say, is by no means alone in this
opinion. ‘The most really and truly Homeric of all the creations of the English muse is’, says Mr
Newman’s critic in the National Review, ‘the ballad-poetry of ancient times; and the association
between metre and subject is one that it would be true wisdom to preserve’. ‘It is confessed’,
says Chapman’s last editor, Mr Hooper, ‘that the fourteen-syllable verse’ (that is, a ballad-verse)
‘is peculiarly 46fitting for Homeric translation’. And the editor of Dr Maginn’s clever and
popular Homeric Ballads assumes it as one of his author’s greatest and most undisputable merits,
that he was ‘the first who consciously realised to himself the truth that Greek ballads can be
really represented in English only by a similar measure’.
This proposition that Homer’s poetry is ballad-poetry, analogous to the well-known ballad-
poetry of the English and other nations, has a certain small portion of truth in it, and at one time
probably served a useful purpose, when it was employed to discredit the artificial and literary
manner in which Pope and his school rendered Homer. But it has been so extravagantly over-
used, the mistake which it was useful in combating has so entirely lost the public favour, that it is
now much more important to insist on the large part of error contained in it, than to extol its
small part of truth. It is time to say plainly that, whatever the admirers of our old ballads may
think, the supreme form of epic poetry, the genuine Homeric mould, is not the form of the Ballad
of Lord Bateman. I have myself shown the broad difference between Milton’s manner and
Homer’s; but, after a course of Mr Newman and Dr Maginn, I turn round in desperation upon
them and upon the balladists who have misled them, and I exclaim: ‘Compared with you,
Milton 47is Homer’s double; there is, whatever you may think, ten thousand times more of the
real strain of Homer in
Blind Thamyris, and blind Mæonides,
And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old,
than in
Now Christ thee save, thou proud portèr,
Now Christ thee save and see[12],
or in
While the tinker did dine, he had plenty of wine[13].
For Homer is not only rapid in movement, simple in style, plain in language, natural in thought;
he is also, and above all, noble. I have advised the translator not to go into the vexed question of
Homer’s identity. Yet I will just remind him that the grand argument—or rather, not argument,
for the matter affords no data for arguing, but the grand source from which conviction, as we
read the Iliad, keeps pressing in upon us, that there is one poet of the Iliad, one Homer—is
precisely this nobleness of the poet, this grand manner; we feel that the analogy drawn from
other joint compositions does not hold good here, because those works do not bear, like the Iliad,
the magic stamp of a master; and the moment you have anything less than a masterwork, the co-
operation or consolidation of several poets 48becomes possible, for talent is not uncommon; the
moment you have much less than a masterwork, they become easy, for mediocrity is everywhere.
I can imagine fifty Bradies joined with as many Tates to make the New Version of the Psalms. I
can imagine several poets having contributed to any one of the old English ballads in Percy’s
collection. I can imagine several poets, possessing, like Chapman, the Elizabethan vigour and the
Elizabethan mannerism, united with Chapman to produce his version of the Iliad. I can imagine
several poets, with the literary knack of the twelfth century, united to produce the Nibelungen
Lay in the form in which we have it,—a work which the Germans, in their joy at discovering a
national epic of their own, have rated vastly higher than it deserves. And lastly, though Mr
Newman’s translation of Homer bears the strong mark of his own idiosyncrasy, yet I can imagine
Mr Newman and a school of adepts trained by him in his art of poetry, jointly producing that
work, so that Aristarchus himself should have difficulty in pronouncing which line was the
master’s, and which a pupil’s. But I cannot imagine several poets, or one poet, joined with Dante
in the composition of his Inferno, though many poets have taken for their subject a descent into
Hell. Many artists, again, have represented Moses; but there is only one Moses 49of Michael
Angelo. So the insurmountable obstacle to believing the Iliad a consolidated work of several
poets is this: that the work of great masters is unique; and the Iliad has a great master’s genuine
stamp, and that stamp is the grand style.
Poets who cannot work in the grand style instinctively seek a style in which their comparative
inferiority may feel itself at ease, a manner which may be, so to speak, indulgent to their
inequalities. The ballad-style offers to an epic poet, quite unable to fill the canvas of Homer, or
Dante, or Milton, a canvas which he is capable of filling. The ballad-measure is quite able to give
due effect to the vigour and spirit which its employer, when at his very best, may be able to
exhibit; and, when he is not at his best, when he is a little trivial, or a little dull, it will not betray
him, it will not bring out his weakness into broad relief. This is a convenience; but it is a
convenience which the ballad-style purchases by resigning all pretensions to the highest, to the
grand manner. It is true of its movement, as it is not true of Homer’s, that it is ‘liable to
degenerate into doggerel’. It is true of its ‘moral qualities’, as it is not true of Homer’s, that
‘quaintness’ and ‘garrulity’ are among them. It is true of its employers, as it is not true of Homer,
that they ‘rise and sink with their subject, are prosaic when it is tame, are low when it 50is
mean’. For this reason the ballad-style and the ballad-measure are eminently inappropriate to
render Homer. Homer’s manner and movement are always both noble and powerful: the ballad-
manner and movement are often either jaunty and smart, so not noble; or jog-trot and hum-drum,
so not powerful.
The Nibelungen Lay affords a good illustration of the qualities of the ballad-manner. Based on
grand traditions, which had found expression in a grand lyric poetry, the German epic poem of
the Nibelungen Lay, though it is interesting, and though it has good passages, is itself anything
rather than a grand poem. It is a poem of which the composer is, to speak the truth, a very
ordinary mortal, and often, therefore, like other ordinary mortals, very prosy. It is in a measure
which eminently adapts itself to this commonplace personality of its composer, which has much
the movement of the well-known measures of Tate and Brady, and can jog on, for hundreds of
lines at a time, with a level ease which reminds one of Sheridan’s saying that easy writing may
be often such hard reading. But, instead of occupying myself with the Nibelungen Lay, I prefer to
look at the ballad-style as directly applied to Homer, in Chapman’s version and Mr Newman’s,
and in the Homeric Ballads of Dr. Maginn.
First I take Chapman. I have already 51shown that Chapman’s conceits are un-Homeric, and that
his rhyme is un-Homeric; I will now show how his manner and movement are un-Homeric.
Chapman’s diction, I have said, is generally good; but it must be called good with this reserve,
that, though it has Homer’s plainness and directness, it often offends him who knows Homer, by
wanting Homer’s nobleness. In a passage which I have already quoted, the address of Zeus to the
horses of Achilles, where Homer has,
ἆ δειλώ, τι σφῶϊ δόμεν Πηλῆϊ ἄνακτι
θνητῷ; ὑμεῖς δ’ ἐστὸν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε!
ἦ ἵνα δυστήνοισι μετ’ ἀνδράσιν ἄλγε’ ἔχητον[14];
Chapman has,
Poor wretched beasts, said he,
Why gave we you to a mortal king, when immortality
And incapacity of age so dignifies your states?
Was it to haste[15] the miseries poured out on human fates?
There are many faults in this rendering of Chapman’s, but what I particularly wish to notice in it
is the expression ‘Poor wretched beasts’ for ἆ δειλώ. This expression just illustrates the
difference between the ballad-manner and Homer’s. The ballad-manner—Chapman’s manner—
is, I say, pitched sensibly lower than Homer’s. The ballad-manner requires that 52an expression
shall be plain and natural, and then it asks no more. Homer’s manner requires that an expression
shall be plain and natural, but it also requires that it shall be noble. Ἆ δειλώ is as plain, as simple
as ‘Poor wretched beasts’; but it is also noble, which ‘Poor wretched beasts’ is not. ‘Poor
wretched beasts’ is, in truth, a little over-familiar, but this is no objection to it for the ballad-
manner; it is good enough for the old English ballad, good enough for the Nibelungen Lay, good
enough for Chapman’s Iliad, good enough for Mr Newman’s Iliad, good enough for Dr
Maginn’s Homeric Ballads; but it is not good enough for Homer.
To feel that Chapman’s measure, though natural, is not Homeric; that, though tolerably rapid, it
has not Homer’s rapidity; that it has a jogging rapidity rather than a flowing rapidity; and a
movement familiar rather than nobly easy, one has only, I think, to read half a dozen lines in any
part of his version. I prefer to keep as much as possible to passages which I have already noticed,
so I will quote the conclusion of the nineteenth book, where Achilles answers his horse Xanthus,
who has prophesied his death to him[16].
Achilles, far in rage,
Thus answered him:—It fits not thee thus proudly to presage
53My overthrow. I know myself it is my fate to fall
Thus far from Phthia; yet that fate shall fail to vent her gall
Till mine vent thousands.—These words said, he fell to horrid deeds,
Gave dreadful signal, and forthright made fly his one-hoofed steeds.
For what regards the manner of this passage, the words ‘Achilles Thus answered him’, and ‘I
know myself it is my fate to fall Thus far from Phthia’, are in Homer’s manner, and all the rest is
out of it. But for what regards its movement, who, after being jolted by Chapman through such
verse as this,
These words said, he fell to horrid deeds,
Gave dreadful signal, and forthright made fly his one-hoofed steeds,
who does not feel the vital difference of the movement of Homer,
ἦ ῥα, καὶ ἐν πρώτοις ἰάχων ἔχε μώνυχας ἵππο υς?
To pass from Chapman to Dr Maginn. His Homeric Ballads are vigorous and genuine poems in
their own way; they are not one continual falsetto, like the pinch-beck Roman Ballads of Lord
Macaulay; but just because they are ballads in their manner and movement, just because, to use
the words of his applauding editor, Dr Maginn has ‘consciously realised to himself the truth that
Greek ballads can be really represented in English only by a similar manner’,—just for this very
reason they 54are not at all Homeric, they have not the least in the world the manner of Homer.
There is a celebrated incident in the nineteenth book of the Odyssey, the recognition by the old
nurse Eurycleia of a scar on the leg of her master Ulysses, who has entered his own hall as an
unknown wanderer, and whose feet she has been set to wash. ‘Then she came near’, says Homer,
‘and began to wash her master; and straightway she recognised a scar which he had got in former
days from the white tusk of a wild boar, when he went to Parnassus unto Autolycus and the sons
of Autolycus, his mother’s father and brethren’[17]. This, ‘really represented’ by Dr Maginn, in ‘a
measure similar’ to Homer’s, becomes:
And scarcely had she begun to wash
Ere she was aware of the grisly gash
Above his knee that lay.
It was a wound from a wild boar’s tooth,
All on Parnassus’ slope,
Where he went to hunt in the days of his youth
With his mother’s sire,
and so on. That is the true ballad-manner, no one can deny; ‘all on Parnassus’ slope’ is, I was
going to say, the true ballad-slang; but never again shall I be able to read
νίζε δ’ ἄῤ ἆσσον ἴουσα ἄναχθ’ ἑόν· αὐτίκα δ’ ἔγνω
οὐλήν,
55without having the destestable dance of Dr Maginn’s
And scarcely had she begun to wash
Ere she was aware of the grisly gash,
jigging in my ears, to spoil the effect of Homer, and to torture me. To apply that manner and that
rhythm to Homer’s incidents, is not to imitate Homer, but to travesty him.
Lastly I come to Mr Newman. His rhythm, like Chapman’s and Dr Maginn’s, is a ballad-rhythm,
but with a modification of his own. ‘Holding it’, he tells us, ‘as an axiom, that rhyme must be
abandoned’, he found, on abandoning it, ‘an unpleasant void until he gave a double ending to the
verse’. In short, instead of saying
Good people all with one accord
Give ear unto my tale,
Mr Newman would say
Good people all with one accord
Give ear unto my story.
A recent American writer[18] gravely observes that for his countrymen this rhythm has a
disadvantage in being like the rhythm of the American national air Yankee Doodle, and thus
provoking ludicrous associations. Yankee Doodle is not our national air: for us Mr Newman’s
rhythm has not this disadvantage. 56He himself gives us several plausible reasons why this
rhythm of his really ought to be successful: let us examine how far it is successful.
Mr Newman joins to a bad rhythm so bad a diction that it is difficult to distinguish exactly
whether in any given passage it is his words or his measure which produces a total impression of
such an unpleasant kind. But with a little attention we may analyse our total impression, and find
the share which each element has in producing it. To take the passage which I have so often
mentioned, Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus. Mr Newman translates this as follows:
O gentle friend! if thou and I, from this encounter ’scaping,
Hereafter might for ever be from Eld and Death exempted
As heavenly gods, not I in sooth would fight among the foremost,
Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle.
Now,—sith ten thousand shapes of Death do any-gait pursue us
Which never mortal may evade, though sly of foot and nimble;—
Onward! and glory let us earn, or glory yield to someone.
Could all our care elude the gloomy grave
Which claims no less the fearful than the brave.
I am not going to quote Pope’s version over again, but I must remark in passing, how much
more, with all Pope’s radical difference 57of manner from Homer, it gives us of the real effect of
εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε
than Mr Newman’s lines. And now, why are Mr Newman’s lines faulty? They are faulty, first,
because, as a matter of diction, the expressions ‘O gentle friend’, ‘eld’, ‘in sooth’, ‘liefly’,
‘advance’, ‘man-ennobling’, ‘sith’, ‘any-gait’, and ‘sly of foot’, are all bad; some of them worse
than others, but all bad: that is, they all of them as here used excite in the scholar, their sole
judge,—excite, I will boldly affirm, in Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett,—a feeling
totally different from that excited in them by the words of Homer which these expressions
profess to render. The lines are faulty, secondly, because, as a matter of rhythm, any and every
line among them has to the ear of the same judges (I affirm it with equal boldness) a movement
as unlike Homer’s movement in the corresponding line as the single words are unlike Homer’s
words. Οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμαι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειρν,—‘Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-
ennobling battle’;—for whose ears do those two rhythms produce impressions of, to use Mr
Newman’s own words, ‘similar moral genius’?
I will by no means make search in Mr Newman’s version for passages likely to raise a laugh; that
search, alas! would 58be far too easy. I will quote but one other passage from him, and that a
passage where the diction is comparatively inoffensive, in order that disapproval of the words
may not unfairly heighten disapproval of the rhythm. The end of the nineteenth book, the answer
of Achilles to his horse Xanthus, Mr Newman gives thus:
Chestnut! why bodest death to me? from thee this was not needed.
Myself right surely know alsó, that ’t is my doom to perish,
From mother and from father dear apart, in Troy; but never
Pause will I make of war, until the Trojans be glutted.
He spake, and yelling, held afront the single-hoofed horses.
Here Mr Newman calls Xanthus Chestnut, indeed, as he calls Balius Spotted, and Podarga Spry-
foot; which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale Mdlle. Rossignol, or Mr Bright M.
Clair. And several other expressions, too, ‘yelling’, ‘held afront’, ‘single-hoofed’,—leave, to say
the very least, much to be desired. Still, for Mr Newman, the diction of this passage is pure. All
the more clearly appears the profound vice of a rhythm, which, with comparatively few faults of
words, can leave a sense of such incurable alienation from Homer’s manner as, ‘Myself right
surely know also that ’tis my doom to perish compared with the εὖ νύ τοι οἶδα καὶ αὐτὸς, ὅ μοι
μόρος ἐνθάδ’ ὀλέσθαι of Homer.
59But so deeply seated is the difference between the ballad-manner and Homer’s, that even a
man of the highest powers, even a man of the greatest vigour of spirit and of true genius—the
Coryphæus of balladists, Sir Walter Scott—fails with a manner of this kind to produce an effect
at all like the effect of Homer. ‘I am not so rash’, declares Mr Newman, ‘as to say that
if freedom be given to rhyme as in Walter Scott’s poetry’,—‘Walter Scott, by far the most
Homeric of our poets’, as in another place he calls him,—‘a genius may not arise who will
translate Homer into the melodies of Marmion’. ‘The truly classical and truly romantic’, says Dr
Maginn, ‘are one; the moss-trooping Nestor reappears in the moss-trooping heroes of
Percy’s Reliques’; and a description by Scott, which he quotes, he calls ‘graphic, and therefore
Homeric’. He forgets our fourth axiom,—that Homer is not only graphic; he is also noble, and
has the grand style. Human nature under like circumstances is probably in all stages much the
same; and so far it may be said that ‘the truly classical and the truly romantic are one’; but it is of
little use to tell us this, because we know the human nature of other ages only through the
representations of them which have come down to us, and the classical and the romantic modes
of representation are so far from being ‘one’, that they remain eternally 60distinct, and have
created for us a separation between the two worlds which they respectively represent. Therefore
to call Nestor the ‘moss-trooping Nestor’ is absurd, because, though Nestor may possibly have
been much the same sort of man as many a moss-trooper, he has yet come to us through a mode
of representation so unlike that of Percy’s Reliques, that instead of ‘reappearing in the moss-
trooping heroes’ of these poems, he exists in our imagination as something utterly unlike them,
and as belonging to another world. So the Greeks in Shakspeare’s Troilus and Cressida are no
longer the Greeks whom we have known in Homer, because they come to us through a mode of
representation of the romantic world. But I must not forget Scott.
I suppose that when Scott is in what may be called full ballad swing, no one will hesitate to
pronounce his manner neither Homeric nor the grand manner. When he says, for instance,
I do not rhyme to that dull elf
Who cannot image to himself[19],
and so on, any scholar will feel that this is not Homer’s manner. But let us take Scott’s poetry at
its best; and when it is at its best, it is undoubtedly very good indeed:
Tunstall lies dead upon the field,
His life-blood stains the spotless shield;
61Edmund is down,—my life is reft,—
The Admiral alone is left.
Let Stanley charge with spur of fire,—
With Chester charge, and Lancashire,
Full upon Scotland’s central host,
Or victory and England’s lost[20].
That is, no doubt, as vigorous as possible, as spirited as possible; it is exceedingly fine poetry.
And still I say, it is not in the grand manner, and therefore it is not like Homer’s poetry. Now,
how shall I make him who doubts this feel that I say true; that these lines of Scott are essentially
neither in Homer’s style nor in the grand style? I may point out to him that the movement of
Scott’s lines, while it is rapid, is also at the same time what the French call saccadé, its rapidity is
‘jerky’; whereas Homer’s rapidity is a flowing rapidity. But this is something external and
material; it is but the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual diversity. I may discuss
what, in the abstract, constitutes the grand style; but that sort of general discussion never much
helps our judgment of particular instances. I may say that the presence or absence of the grand
style can only be spiritually discerned; and this is true, but to plead this looks like evading the
difficulty. My best way is to take eminent specimens of the grand style, and 62to put them side
by side with this of Scott. For example, when Homer says:
άλλά, φίλος, θάνε καὶ σύ· τίη ὀλυφύρεαι οὕτως;
κάθανε καὶ Πάτροκλος, ὅπερ σέο πολλὸν ἀμείνων[21],
that is in the grand style. When Virgil says:
Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis[22],
that is in the grand style. When Dante says:
Lascio lo fele, et vo pei dolci pomi
Promessi a me per lo verace Duca;
Ma fino al centro pria convien ch’ io tomi[23],
that is in the grand style. When Milton says:
His form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured[24],
that, finally, is in the grand style. Now 63let anyone after repeating to himself these four
passages, repeat again the passage of Scott, and he will perceive that there is something in style
which the four first have in common, and which the last is without; and this something is
precisely the grand manner. It is no disrespect to Scott to say that he does not attain to this
manner in his poetry; to say so, is merely to say that he is not among the five or six supreme
poets of the world. Among these he is not; but, being a man of far greater powers than the ballad-
poets, he has tried to give to their instrument a compass and an elevation which it does not
naturally possess, in order to enable him to come nearer to the effect of the instrument used by
the great epic poets—an instrument which he felt he could not truly use,—and in this attempt he
has but imperfectly succeeded. The poetic style of Scott is—(it becomes necessary to say so
when it is proposed to ‘translate Homer into the melodies of Marmion’)—it is, tried by the
highest standard, a bastard epic style; and that is why, out of his own powerful hands, it has had
so little success. It is a less natural, and therefore a less good style, than the original ballad-style;
while it shares with the ballad-style the inherent incapacity of rising into the grand style, of
adequately rendering Homer. Scott is certainly at his best in his battles. Of Homer you
could 64not say this; he is not better in his battles than elsewhere; but even between the battle-
pieces of the two there exists all the difference which there is between an able work and a
masterpiece.
Tunstall lies dead upon the field,
His life-blood stains the spotless shield:
Edmund is down,—my life is reft—
The Admiral alone is left.
—‘For not in the hands of Diomede the son of Tydeus rages the spear, to ward off destruction
from the Danaans; neither as yet have I heard the voice of the son of Atreus, shouting out of his
hated mouth; but the voice of Hector the slayer of men bursts round me, as he cheers on the
Trojans; and they with their yellings fill all the plain, overcoming the Achaians in the battle’.—I
protest that, to my feeling, Homer’s performance, even through that pale and far-off shadow of a
prose translation, still has a hundred times more of the grand manner about it, than the original
poetry of Scott.
Well, then, the ballad-manner and the ballad-measure, whether in the hands of the old ballad-
poets, or arranged by Chapman, or arranged by Mr Newman, or, even, arranged by Sir Walter
Scott, cannot worthily render Homer. And for one reason: Homer is plain, so are they; Homer is
natural, so are they; Homer is spirited, so are they; but Homer is sustainedly noble, and they are
not. Homer 65and they are both of them natural, and therefore touching and stirring; but the
grand style, which is Homer’s, is something more than touching and stirring; it can form the
character, it is edifying. The old English balladist may stir Sir Philip Sidney’s heart like a
trumpet, and this is much: but Homer, but the few artists in the grand style, can do more; they
can refine the raw natural man, they can transmute him. So it is not without cause that I say, and
say again, to the translator of Homer: ‘Never for a moment suffer yourself to forget our fourth
fundamental proposition, Homer is noble’. For it is seen how large a share this nobleness has in
producing that general effect of his, which it is the main business of a translator to reproduce.
I shall have to try your patience yet once more upon this subject, and then my task will be
completed. I have shown what the four axioms respecting Homer which I have laid down,
exclude, what they bid a translator not to do; I have still to show what they supply, what positive
help they can give to the translator in his work. I will even, with their aid, myself try my fortune
with some of those passages of Homer which I have already noticed; not indeed with any
confidence that I more than others can succeed in adequately rendering Homer, but in the hope of
satisfying competent judges, in the hope of making it clear to the future 66translator, that I at any
rate follow a right method, and that, in coming short, I come short from weakness of execution,
not from original vice of design. This is why I have so long occupied myself with Mr Newman’s
version; that, apart from all faults of execution, his original design was wrong, and that he has
done us the good service of declaring that design in its naked wrongness. To bad practice he has
prefixed the bad theory which made the practice bad; he has given us a false theory in his
preface, and he has exemplified the bad effects of that false theory in his translation. It is because
his starting-point is so bad that he runs so badly; and to save others from taking so false a
starting-point, may be to save them from running so futile a course.
Mr Newman, indeed, says in his preface, that if anyone dislikes his translation, ‘he has his easy
remedy; to keep aloof from it’. But Mr Newman is a writer of considerable and deserved
reputation; he is also a Professor of the University of London, an institution which by its position
and by its merits acquires every year greater importance. It would be a very grave thing if the
authority of so eminent a Professor led his students to misconceive entirely the chief work of the
Greek world; that work which, whatever the other works of classical antiquity have to give us,
gives it more abundantly than they all. The eccentricity 67too, the arbitrariness, of which Mr
Newman’s conception of Homer offers so signal an example, are not a peculiar failing of Mr
Newman’s own; in varying degrees they are the great defect of English intellect the great
blemish of English literature. Our literature of the eighteenth century, the literature of the school
of Dryden, Addison, Pope, Johnson, is a long reaction against this eccentricity, this arbitrariness;
that reaction perished by its own faults, and its enemies are left once more masters of the field. It
is much more likely that any new English version of Homer will have Mr Newman’s faults than
Pope’s. Our present literature, which is very far, certainly, from having the spirit and power of
Elizabethan genius, yet has in its own way these faults, eccentricity, and arbitrariness, quite as
much as the Elizabethan literature ever had. They are the cause that, while upon none, perhaps,
of the modern literatures has so great a sum of force been expended as upon the English
literature, at the present hour this literature, regarded not as an object of mere literary interest but
as a living intellectual instrument, ranks only third in European effect and importance among the
literatures of Europe; it ranks after the literatures of France and Germany. Of these two
literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been
a 68critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history,
art, science,—to see the object as in itself it really is. But, owing to the presence in English
literature of this eccentric and arbitrary spirit, owing to the strong tendency of English writers to
bring to the consideration of their object some individual fancy, almost the last thing for which
one would come to English literature is just that very thing which now Europe most desires—
criticism. It is useful to notice any signal manifestation of those faults, which thus limit and
impair the action of our literature. And therefore I have pointed out how widely, in translating
Homer, a man even of real ability and learning may go astray, unless he brings to the study of
this clearest of poets one quality in which our English authors, with all their great gifts, are apt to
be somewhat wanting—simple lucidity of mind.
III
Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in his words and style, Homer is simple in his
ideas, Homer is noble in his manner. Cowper renders him ill because he is slow in his movement,
and elaborate in his style; Pope renders him ill because he is artificial both in his style and in his
words; Chapman renders him ill because 69he is fantastic in his ideas; Mr Newman renders him
ill because he is odd in his words and ignoble in his manner. All four translators diverge from
their original at other points besides those named; but it is at the points thus named that their
divergence is greatest. For instance, Cowper’s diction is not as Homer’s diction, nor his
nobleness as Homer’s nobleness; but it is in movement and grammatical style that he is most
unlike Homer. Pope’s rapidity is not of the same sort as Homer’s rapidity, nor are his plainness of
ideas and his nobleness as Homer’s plainness of ideas and nobleness: but it is in the artificial
character of his style and diction that he is most unlike Homer. Chapman’s movement, words,
style, and manner, are often far enough from resembling Homer’s movement, words, style, and
manner; but it is the fantasticality of his ideas which puts him farthest from resembling Homer.
Mr Newman’s movement, grammatical style, and ideas, are a thousand times in strong contrast
with Homer’s; still it is by the oddness of his diction and the ignobleness of his manner that he
contrasts with Homer the most violently.
Therefore the translator must not say to himself: ‘Cowper is noble, Pope is rapid, Chapman has a
good diction, Mr Newman has a good cast of sentence; I will avoid Cowper’s slowness, Pope’s
artificiality, Chapman’s 70conceits, Mr Newman’s oddity; I will take Cowper’s dignified manner,
Pope’s impetuous movement, Chapman’s vocabulary, Mr Newman’s syntax, and so make a
perfect translation of Homer’. Undoubtedly in certain points the versions of Chapman, Cowper,
Pope, and Mr Newman, all of them have merit; some of them very high merit, others a lower
merit; but even in these points they have none of them precisely the same kind of merit as
Homer, and therefore the new translator, even if he can imitate them in their good points, will
still not satisfy his judge, the scholar, who asks him for Homer and Homer’s kind of merit, or, at
least, for as much of them as it is possible to give.
So the translator really has no good model before him for any part of his work, and has to invent
everything for himself. He is to be rapid in movement, plain in speech, simple in thought, and
noble; and how he is to be either rapid, or plain, or simple, or noble, no one yet has shown him. I
shall try to-day to establish some practical suggestions which may help the translator of Homer’s
poetry to comply with the four grand requirements which we make of him.
His version is to be rapid; and of course, to make a man’s poetry rapid, as to make it noble,
nothing can serve him so much as to have, in his own nature, rapidity and nobleness. It is the
spirit that quickeneth; 71and no one will so well render Homer’s swift-flowing movement as he
who has himself something of the swift-moving spirit of Homer. Yet even this is not quite
enough. Pope certainly had a quick and darting spirit, as he had, also, real nobleness; yet Pope
does not render the movement of Homer. To render this the translator must have, besides his
natural qualifications, an appropriate metre.
I have sufficiently shown why I think all forms of our ballad-metre unsuited to Homer. It seems
to me to be beyond question that, for epic poetry, only three metres can seriously claim to be
accounted capable of the grand style. Two of these will at once occur to everyone,—the ten-
syllable, or so-called heroic, couplet, and blank verse. I do not add to these the Spenserian
stanza, although Dr Maginn, whose metrical eccentricities I have already criticised, pronounces
this stanza the one right measure for a translation of Homer. It is enough to observe that if Pope’s
couplet, with the simple system of correspondences that its rhymes introduce, changes the
movement of Homer, in which no such correspondences are found, and is therefore a bad
measure for a translator of Homer to employ, Spenser’s stanza, with its far more intricate system
of correspondences, must change Homer’s movement far more profoundly, and must therefore be
for the translator 72a far worse measure than the couplet of Pope. Yet I will say, at the same time,
that the verse of Spenser is more fluid, slips more easily and quickly along, than the verse of
almost any other English poet.
By this the northern wagoner had set
His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star
That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
But firm is fixt, and sendeth light from far
To all that in the wide deep wandering are[25].
One cannot but feel that English verse has not often moved with the fluidity and sweet ease of
these lines. It is possible that it may have been this quality of Spenser’s poetry which made Dr
Maginn think that the stanza of The Faery Queen must be a good measure for rendering Homer.
This it is not: Spenser’s verse is fluid and rapid, no doubt, but there are more ways than one of
being fluid and rapid, and Homer is fluid and rapid in quite another way than Spenser. Spenser’s
manner is no more Homeric than is the manner of the one modern inheritor of Spenser’s
beautiful gift,—the poet, who evidently caught from Spenser his sweet and easy-slipping
movement, and who has exquisitely employed it; a Spenserian genius, nay, a genius by natural
endowment richer probably than even Spenser; that light which shines so unexpectedly and
without fellow in our century, an Elizabethan born too 73late, the early lost and admirably gifted
Keats.
I say then that there are really but three metres,—the ten-syllable couplet, blank verse, and a
third metre which I will not yet name, but which is neither the Spenserian stanza nor any form of
ballad-verse,—between which, as vehicles for Homer’s poetry, the translator has to make his
choice. Everyone will at once remember a thousand passages in which both the ten-syllable
couplet and blank verse prove themselves to have nobleness. Undoubtedly the movement and
manner of this,
Still raise for good the supplicating voice,
But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice,
are noble. Undoubtedly, the movement and manner of this:
High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
are noble also. But the first is in a rhymed metre; and the unfitness of a rhymed metre for
rendering Homer I have already shown. I will observe too, that the fine couplet which I have
quoted comes out of a satire, a didactic poem; and that it is in didactic poetry that the ten-syllable
couplet has most successfully essayed the grand style. In narrative poetry this metre has
succeeded best when it essayed a sensibly lower style, the style of Chaucer, for instance; whose
narrative manner, though a very good and 74sound manner, is certainly neither the grand manner
nor the manner of Homer.
The rhymed ten-syllable couplet being thus excluded, blank verse offers itself for the translator’s
use. The first kind of blank verse which naturally occurs to us is the blank verse of Milton, which
has been employed, with more or less modification, by Mr Cary in translating Dante, by Cowper,
and by Mr Wright in translating Homer. How noble this metre is in Milton’s hands, how
completely it shows itself capable of the grand, nay, of the grandest, style, I need not say. To this
metre, as used in the Paradise Lost, our country owes the glory of having produced one of the
only two poetical works in the grand style which are to be found in the modern languages;
the Divine Comedy of Dante is the other. England and Italy here stand alone; Spain, France, and
Germany, have produced great poets, but neither Calderon, nor Corneille, nor Schiller, nor even
Goethe, has produced a body of poetry in the true grand style, in the sense in which the style of
the body of Homer’s poetry, or Pindar’s, or Sophocles’s, is grand. But Dante has, and so has
Milton; and in this respect Milton possesses a distinction which even Shakspeare, undoubtedly
the supreme poetical power in our literature, does not share with him. Not a tragedy of
Shakspeare but contains passages in the worst of all styles, the 75affected style; and the grand
style, although it may be harsh, or obscure, or cumbrous, or over-laboured, is never affected. In
spite, therefore, of objections which may justly be urged against the plan and treatment of
the Paradise Lost, in spite of its possessing, certainly, a far less enthralling force of interest to
attract and to carry forward the reader than the Iliad or the Divine Comedy, it fully deserves, it
can never lose, its immense reputation; for, like the Iliad and the Divine Comedy, nay, in some
respects to a higher degree than either of them, it is in the grand style.
But the grandeur of Milton is one thing, and the grandeur of Homer is another. Homer’s
movement, I have said again and again, is a flowing, a rapid movement; Milton’s, on the other
hand, is a laboured, a self-retarding movement. In each case, the movement, the metrical cast,
corresponds with the mode of evolution of the thought, with the syntactical cast, and is indeed
determined by it. Milton charges himself so full with thought, imagination, knowledge, that his
style will hardly contain them. He is too full-stored to show us in much detail one conception,
one piece of knowledge; he just shows it to us in a pregnant allusive way, and then he presses on
to another; and all this fulness, this pressure, this condensation, this self-constraint, enters into
his movement, and 76makes it what it is,—noble, but difficult and austere. Homer is quite
different; he says a thing, and says it to the end, and then begins another, while Milton is trying
to press a thousand things into one. So that whereas, in reading Milton, you never lose the sense
of laborious and condensed fulness, in reading Homer you never lose the sense of flowing and
abounding ease. With Milton line runs into line, and all is straitly bound together: with Homer
line runs off from line, and all hurries away onward. Homer begins, Μῆνιν ἄειδε, Θεά,—at the
second word announcing the proposed action: Milton begins:
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, heavenly muse.
So chary of a sentence is he, so resolute not to let it escape him till he has crowded into it all he
can, that it is not till the thirty-ninth word in the sentence that he will give us the key to it, the
word of action, the verb. Milton says:
O for that warning voice, which he, who saw
The Apocalypse, heard cry in heaven aloud.
He is not satisfied, unless he can tell us, all in one sentence, and without permitting himself to
actually mention the name, that 77the man who had the warning voice was the same man who
saw the Apocalypse. Homer would have said, ‘O for that warning voice, which John heard’—
and if it had suited him to say that John also saw the Apocalypse, he would have given us that in
another sentence. The effect of this allusive and compressed manner of Milton is, I need not say,
often very powerful; and it is an effect which other great poets have often sought to obtain much
in the same way: Dante is full of it, Horace is full of it; but wherever it exists, it is always an un-
Homeric effect. ‘The losses of the heavens’, says Horace, ‘fresh moons speedily repair; we,
when we have gone down where the pious Æneas, where the rich Tullus and Ancus are,—pulvis
et umbra sumus[26]’. He never actually says where we go to; he only indicates it by saying that it
is that place where Æneas, Tullus, and Ancus are. But Homer, when he has to speak of going
down to the grave, says, definitely, ἐς Ἐλύσιοv πεδιον—ἀθάνατοι πέμψουσιν[27],—‘The
immortals shall send thee to the Elysian plain’; and it is not till after he has definitely said this,
that he adds, that it is there that the abode of departed worthies is placed: ὅθι ξανθὸς
Ῥαδάμανθυς—‘Where the yellow-haired Rhadamanthus is’. Again; Horace, 78having to say that
punishment sooner or later overtakes crime, says it thus:
Raro antecedentem scelestum
Deseruit pede Pœna claudo[28].
The thought itself of these lines is familiar enough to Homer and Hesiod; but neither Homer nor
Hesiod, in expressing it, could possibly have so complicated its expression as Horace
complicates it, and purposely complicates it, by his use of the word deseruit. I say that this
complicated evolution of the thought necessarily complicates the movement and rhythm of a
poet; and that the Miltonic blank verse, of course the first model of blank verse which suggests
itself to an English translator of Homer, bears the strongest marks of such complication, and is
therefore entirely unfit to render Homer.
If blank verse is used in translating Homer, it must be a blank verse of which English poetry,
naturally swayed much by Milton’s treatment of this metre, offers at present hardly any
examples. It must not be Cowper’s blank verse, who has studied Milton’s pregnant manner with
such effect, that, having to say of Mr Throckmorton that he spares his avenue, although it is the
fashion with other people to cut down theirs, he says that Benevolus ‘reprieves 79the obsolete
prolixity of shade’. It must not be Mr Tennyson’s blank verse.
For all experience is an arch, wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose distance fades
For ever and for ever, as we gaze.
It is no blame to the thought of those lines, which belongs to another order of ideas than
Homer’s, but it is true, that Homer would certainly have said of them, ‘It is to consider too
curiously to consider so’. It is no blame to their rhythm, which belongs to another order of
movement than Homer’s, but it is true that these three lines by themselves take up nearly as
much time as a whole book of the Iliad. No; the blank verse used in rendering Homer must be a
blank verse of which perhaps the best specimens are to be found in some of the most rapid
passages of Shakspeare’s plays,—a blank verse which does not dovetail its lines into one
another, and which habitually ends its lines with monosyllables. Such a blank verse might no
doubt be very rapid in its movement, and might perfectly adapt itself to a thought plainly and
directly evolved; and it would be interesting to see it well applied to Homer. But the translator
who determines to use it, must not conceal from himself that in order to pour Homer into the
mould of this metre, he will have entirely to break him up and melt him down, with the hope of
then successfully composing 80him afresh; and this is a process which is full of risks. It may, no
doubt, be the real Homer that issues new from it; it is not certain beforehand that it cannot be the
real Homer, as it is certain that from the mould of Pope’s couplet or Cowper’s Miltonic verse it
cannot be the real Homer that will issue; still, the chances of disappointment are great. The result
of such an attempt to renovate the old poet may be an Æson; but it may also, and more probably
will be a Pelias.
When I say this, I point to the metre which seems to me to give the translator the best chance of
preserving the general effect of Homer,—that third metre which I have not yet expressly named,
the hexameter. I know all that is said against the use of hexameters in English poetry; but it
comes only to this, that, among us, they have not yet been used on any considerable scale with
success. Solvitur ambulando: this is an objection which can best be met by producing good
English hexameters. And there is no reason in the nature of the English language why it should
not adapt itself to hexameters as well as the German language does; nay, the English language,
from its greater rapidity, is in itself better suited than the German for them. The hexameter,
whether alone or with the pentameter, possesses a movement, an expression, which 81no metre
hitherto in common use amongst us possesses, and which I am convinced English poetry, as our
mental wants multiply, will not always be content to forgo. Applied to Homer, this metre affords
to the translator the immense support of keeping him more nearly than any other metre to
Homer’s movement; and, since a poet’s movement makes so large a part of his general effect,
and to reproduce this general effect is at once the translator’s indispensable business and so
difficult for him, it is a great thing to have this part of your model’s general effect already given
you in your metre, instead of having to get it entirely for yourself.
These are general considerations; but there are also one or two particular considerations which
confirm me in the opinion that for translating Homer into English verse the hexameter should be
used. The most successful attempt hitherto made at rendering Homer into English, the attempt in
which Homer’s general effect has been best retained, is an attempt made in the hexameter
measure. It is a version of the famous lines in the third book of the Iliad, which end with that
mention of Castor and Pollux from which Mr Ruskin extracts the sentimental consolation already
noticed by me. The author is the accomplished Provost of Eton, Dr Hawtrey; and this
performance of his must be my excuse for 82having taken the liberty to single him out for
mention, as one of the natural judges of a translation of Homer, along with Professor Thompson
and Professor Jowett, whose connection with Greek literature is official. The passage is short[29];
and Dr 83Hawtrey’s version of it is suffused with a pensive grace which is, perhaps, rather more
Virgilian than Homeric; still it is the one version of any part of the Iliad which in some degree
reproduces for me the original effect of Homer: it is the best, and it is in hexameters.
This is one of the particular considerations that incline me to prefer the hexameter, for translating
Homer, to our established metres. There is another. Most of you, probably, have some knowledge
of a poem by Mr Clough, The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich, a long-vacation pastoral, in
hexameters. The general merits of that poem I am not going to discuss: it is a serio-
comic 84poem, and, therefore, of essentially different nature from the Iliad. Still in two things it
is, more than any other English poem which I can call to mind, like the Iliad: in the rapidity of its
movement, and the plainness and directness of its style. The thought of this poem is often curious
and subtle, and that is not Homeric; the diction is often grotesque, and that is not Homeric. Still
by its rapidity of movement, and plain and direct manner of presenting the thought however
curious in itself, this poem, which, being as I say a serio-comic poem, has a right to be grotesque,
is grotesque truly, not, like Mr Newman’s version of the Iliad, falsely. Mr Clough’s odd epithets,
‘The grave man nicknamed Adam’, ‘The hairy Aldrich’, and so on, grow vitally and appear
naturally in their place; while Mr Newman’s ‘dapper-greaved Achaians’, and ‘motley-helmed
Hector’, have all the air of being mechanically elaborated and artificially stuck in. Mr Clough’s
hexameters are excessively, needlessly rough; still owing to the native rapidity of this measure,
and to the directness of style which so well allies itself with it, his composition produces a sense
in the reader which Homer’s composition also produces, and which Homer’s translator ought
to re-produce,—the sense of having, within short limits of time, a large portion of human life
presented to him, instead of a small portion.
85Mr Clough’s hexameters are, as I have just said, too rough and irregular; and indeed a good
model, on any considerable scale, of this metre, the English translator will nowhere find. He
must not follow the model offered by Mr Longfellow in his pleasing and popular poem
of Evangeline; for the merit of the manner and movement of Evangeline, when they are at their
best, is to be tenderly elegant; and their fault, when they are at their worst, is to be lumbering; but
Homer’s defect is not lumberingness, neither is tender elegance his excellence. The lumbering
effect of most English hexameters is caused by their being much too dactylic[30]; the translator
must learn to use spondees freely. Mr Clough has done this, but he has not sufficiently observed
another rule which the translator cannot follow too strictly; and that is, to have no lines which
will not, as it is familiarly said, read themselves. This is of the last importance for rhythms with
which the ear of the English public is not thoroughly acquainted. Lord Redesdale, in two papers
on the subject of Greek and Roman metres, has some good remarks on 86the outrageous
disregard of quantity in which English verse, trusting to its force of accent, is apt to indulge
itself. The predominance of accent in our language is so great, that it would be pedantic not to
avail oneself of it; and Lord Redesdale suggests rules which might easily be pushed too far. Still,
it is undeniable that in English hexameters we generally force the quantity far too much; we rely
on justification by accent with a security which is excessive. But not only do we abuse accent by
shortening long syllables and lengthening short ones; we perpetually commit a far worse fault,
by requiring the removal of the accent from its natural place to an unnatural one, in order to
make our line scan. This is a fault, even when our metre is one which every English reader
knows, and when we can see what we want and can correct the rhythm according to our wish;
although it is a fault which a great master may sometimes commit knowingly to produce a
desired effect, as Milton changes the natural accent on the word Tiresias in the line:
And Tíresias and Phineus, prophets old;
and then it ceases to be a fault, and becomes a beauty. But it is a real fault, when Chapman has:
By him the golden-throned Queen slept, the Queen of Deities;
87for in this line, to make it scan, you have to take away the accent from the word Queen, on
which it naturally falls, and to place it on throned, which would naturally be unaccented; and yet,
after all, you get no peculiar effect or beauty of cadence to reward you. It is a real fault, when Mr
Newman has:
Infatuate! O that thou wert lord to some other army—
for here again the reader is required, not for any special advantage to himself, but simply to save
Mr Newman trouble, to place the accent on the insignificant word wert, where it has no business
whatever. But it is still a greater fault, when Spenser has (to take a striking instance):
Wot ye why his mother with a veil hath covered his face?
for a hexameter; because here not only is the reader causelessly required to make havoc with the
natural accentuation of the line in order to get it to run as a hexameter; but also he, in nine cases
out of ten, will be utterly at a loss how to perform the process required, and the line will remain a
mere monster for him. I repeat, it is advisable to construct all verses so that by reading them
naturally—that is, according to the sense and legitimate accent,—the reader gets the right
rhythm; but, for English hexameters, 88that they be so constructed is indispensable.
If the hexameter best helps the translator to the Homeric rapidity, what style may best help him
to the Homeric plainness and directness? It is the merit of a metre appropriate to your subject,
that it in some degree suggests and carries with itself a style appropriate to the subject; the
elaborate and self-retarding style, which comes so naturally when your metre is the Miltonic
blank verse, does not come naturally with the hexameter; is, indeed, alien to it. On the other
hand, the hexameter has a natural dignity which repels both the jaunty style and the jog-trot style,
to both of which the ballad-measure so easily lends itself. These are great advantages; and,
perhaps, it is nearly enough to say to the translator who uses the hexameter that he cannot too
religiously follow, in style, the inspiration of his metre. He will find that a loose and idiomatic
grammar—a grammar which follows the essential rather than the formal logic of the thought—
allies itself excellently with the hexameter; and that, while this sort of grammar ensures plainness
and naturalness, it by no means comes short in nobleness. It is difficult to pronounce, certainly,
what is idiomatic in the ancient literature of a language which, though still spoken, has long since
entirely adopted, as modern Greek has adopted, 89modern idioms. Still one may, I think, clearly
perceive that Homer’s grammatical style is idiomatic,—that it may even be called, not
improperly, a loose grammatical style[31]. Examples, however, of what I mean by a loose
grammatical style, will be of more use to the translator if taken from English poetry than if taken
from Homer. I call it, then, a loose and idiomatic grammar which Shakspeare uses in the last line
of the following three:
He’s here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed;
or in this:—
Wit, whither wilt?
What Shakspeare means is perfectly clear, clearer, probably, than if he had said it in a more
formal and regular manner; but his grammar is loose and idiomatic, because he leaves out the
subject of the verb ‘wilt’ in the second passage quoted, and because, in the first, a prodigious
addition to the sentence has to be, as we used to say in our old Latin grammar days, understood,
before the word ‘both’ can be properly 90parsed. So, again, Chapman’s grammar is loose and
idiomatic where he says,
Even share hath he that keeps his tent, and he to field doth go,
because he leaves out, in the second clause, the relative which in formal writing would be
required. But Chapman here does not lose dignity by this idiomatic way of expressing himself,
any more than Shakspeare loses it by neglecting to confer on ‘both’ the blessings of a regular
government: neither loses dignity, but each gives that impression of a plain, direct, and natural
mode of speaking, which Homer, too, gives, and which it is so important, as I say, that Homer’s
translator should succeed in giving. Cowper calls blank verse ‘a style further removed than
rhyme from the vernacular idiom, both in the language itself and in the arrangement of it’; and
just in proportion as blank verse is removed from the vernacular idiom, from that idiomatic style
which is of all styles the plainest and most natural, blank verse is unsuited to render Homer.
Shakspeare is not only idiomatic in his grammar or style, he is also idiomatic in his words or
diction; and here too, his example is valuable for the translator of Homer. The translator must
not, indeed, allow himself all the liberty that Shakspeare allows himself; for Shakspeare
sometimes uses expressions which pass perfectly well 91as he uses them, because Shakspeare
thinks so fast and so powerfully, that in reading him we are borne over single words as by a
mighty current; but, if our mind were less excited,—and who may rely on exciting our mind like
Shakspeare?—they would check us. ‘To grunt and sweat under a weary load’;—that does
perfectly well where it comes in Shakspeare; but if the translator of Homer, who will hardly have
wound our minds up to the pitch at which these words of Hamlet find them, were to employ,
when he has to speak of one of Homer’s heroes under the load of calamity, this figure of
‘grunting’ and ‘sweating’ we should say, He Newmanises, and his diction would offend us. For
he is to be noble; and no plea of wishing to be plain and natural can get him excused from being
this: only, as he is to be also, like Homer, perfectly simple and free from artificiality, and as the
use of idiomatic expressions undoubtedly gives this effect[32], he should be as idiomatic as he
can 92be without ceasing to be noble. Therefore the idiomatic language of Shakspeare—such
language as, ‘prate of his whereabout’; ‘jump the life to come’; ‘the damnation of his taking-off’;
‘his quietus make with a bare bodkin’—should be carefully observed by the translator of Homer,
although in every case he will have to decide for himself whether the use, by him, of
Shakspeare’s liberty, will or will not clash with his indispensable duty of nobleness. He will find
one English book and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied
with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible. No one could see this more clearly than Pope
saw it: ‘This pure and noble simplicity’, he says, ‘is nowhere in such perfection as in the
Scripture and Homer’: yet even with Pope a woman is a ‘fair’, a father is a ‘sire’ and an old man
a ‘reverend sage’, and so on through all the phrases of that pseudo-Augustan, and most
unbiblical, vocabulary. The Bible, however, is undoubtedly the grand mine of diction for the
translator of Homer; and, if he knows how to discriminate truly between what will suit him and
what will not, the Bible may afford him also invaluable lessons of style.
I said that Homer, besides being plain in style and diction, was plain in the quality of his thought.
It is possible that a thought may be expressed with idiomatic plainness, 93and yet not be in itself
a plain thought. For example, in Mr Clough’s poem, already mentioned, the style and diction is
almost always idiomatic and plain, but the thought itself is often of a quality which is not plain; it
is curious. But the grand instance of the union of idiomatic expression with curious or difficult
thought is in Shakspeare’s poetry. Such, indeed, is the force and power of Shakspeare’s idiomatic
expression, that it gives an effect of clearness and vividness even to a thought which is imperfect
and incoherent; for instance, when Hamlet says,
To take arms against a sea of troubles,
the figure there is undoubtedly most faulty, it by no means runs on four legs; but the thing is said
so freely and idiomatically, that it passes. This, however, is not a point to which I now want to
call your attention; I want you to remark, in Shakspeare and others, only that which we may
directly apply to Homer. I say, then, that in Shakspeare the thought is often, while most
idiomatically uttered, nay, while good and sound in itself, yet of a quality which is curious and
difficult; and that this quality of thought is something entirely un-Homeric. For example, when
Lady Macbeth says:
Memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only,
94this figure is a perfectly sound and correct figure, no doubt; Mr Knight even calls it a ‘happy’
figure; but it is a difficult figure: Homer would not have used it. Again, when Lady Macbeth
says,
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man,
the thought in the two last of these lines is, when you seize it, a perfectly clear thought, and a
fine thought; but it is a curious thought: Homer would not have used it. These are favourable
instances of the union of plain style and words with a thought not plain in quality; but take
stronger instances of this union,—let the thought be not only not plain in quality, but highly
fanciful: and you have the Elizabethan conceits; you have, in spite of idiomatic style and
idiomatic diction, everything which is most un-Homeric; you have such atrocities as this of
Chapman:
Fate shall fail to vent her gall
Till mine vent thousands.
I say, the poets of a nation which has produced such conceit as that, must purify themselves
seven times in the fire before they can hope to render Homer. They must expel their nature with a
fork, and keep crying to one another night and day: ‘Homer not only moves rapidly, not only
speaks idiomatically; he is, also, free from fancifulness’.
95So essentially characteristic of Homer is his plainness and naturalness of thought, that to the
preservation of this in his own version the translator must without scruple sacrifice, where it is
necessary, verbal fidelity to his original, rather than run any risk of producing, by literalness, an
odd and unnatural effect. The double epithets so constantly occurring in Homer must be dealt
with according to this rule; these epithets come quite naturally in Homer’s poetry; in English
poetry they, in nine cases out of ten, come, when literally rendered, quite unnaturally. I will not
now discuss why this is so, I assume it as an indisputable fact that it is so; that Homer’s μερόπων
ἀνθρώπων comes to the reader as something perfectly natural, while Mr Newman’s ‘voice-
dividing mortals’ comes to him as something perfectly unnatural. Well then, as it is Homer’s
general effect which we are to reproduce, it is to be false to Homer to be so verbally faithful to
him as that we lose this effect: and by the English translator Homer’s double epithets must be, in
many places, renounced altogether; in all places where they are rendered, rendered by
equivalents which come naturally. Instead of rendering θέτι τανύπεπλε by Mr Newman’s ‘Thetis
trailing-robed’, which brings to one’s mind long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement, the
translator must render the Greek by English words which come as naturally 96to us as Milton’s
words when he says, ‘Let gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping by’. Instead of
rendering μώνυχας ἵππους by Chapman’s ‘one-hoofed steeds’, or Mr Newman’s ‘single-hoofed
horses’, he must speak of horses in a way which surprises us as little as Shakspeare surprises
when he says, ‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds’. Instead of rendering μελιηδέα θυμόν by
‘life as honey pleasant’, he must characterise life with the simple pathos of Gray’s ‘warm
precincts of the cheerful day’. Instead of converting ποῖόν σε ἔπoς φύγεν ἔρκος ὀδόντων; into the
portentous remonstrance, ‘Betwixt the outwork of thy teeth what word hath split’? he must
remonstrate in English as straightforward as this of St Peter, ‘Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall
not be unto thee’; or as this of the disciples, ‘What is this that he saith, a little while? we cannot
tell what he saith’. Homer’s Greek, in each of the places quoted, reads as naturally as any of
those English passages: the expression no more calls away the attention from the sense in the
Greek than in the English. But when, in order to render literally in English one of Homer’s
double epithets, a strange unfamiliar adjective is invented,—such as ‘voice-dividing’
for μέρψς,—an improper share of the reader’s attention is necessarily diverted to this ancillary
word, to this word which Homer never intended 97should receive so much notice; and a total
effect quite different from Homer’s is thus produced. Therefore Mr Newman, though he does not
purposely import, like Chapman, conceits of his own into the Iliad, does actually import them;
for the result of his singular diction is to raise ideas, and odd ideas, not raised by the
corresponding diction in Homer; and Chapman himself does no more. Cowper says: ‘I have
cautiously avoided all terms of new invention, with an abundance of which persons of more
ingenuity than judgment have not enriched our language but encumbered it’; and this criticism so
exactly hits the diction of Mr Newman that one is irresistibly led to imagine his present
appearance in the flesh to be at least his second.
A translator cannot well have a Homeric rapidity, style, diction, and quality of thought, without
at the same time having what is the result of these in Homer,—nobleness. Therefore I do not
attempt to lay down any rules for obtaining this effect of nobleness,—the effect, too, of all others
the most impalpable, the most irreducible to rule, and which most depends on the individual
personality of the artist. So I proceed at once to give you, in conclusion, one or two passages in
which I have tried to follow those principles of Homeric translation which I have laid down. I
give them, it must be remembered, not as specimens of 98perfect translation, but as specimens of
an attempt to translate Homer on certain principles; specimens which may very aptly illustrate
those principles by falling short as well as by succeeding.
I take first a passage of which I have already spoken, the comparison of the Trojan fires to the
stars. The first part of that passage is, I have said, of splendid beauty; and to begin with a lame
version of that would be the height of imprudence in me. It is the last and more level part with
which I shall concern myself. I have already quoted Cowper’s version of this part in order to
show you how unlike his stiff and Miltonic manner of telling a plain story is to Homer’s easy and
rapid manner:
So numerous seemed those fires the bank between
Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece,
In prospect all of Troy—
I need not continue to the end. I have also quoted Pope’s version of it, to show you how unlike
his ornate and artificial manner is to Homer’s plain and natural manner:
So many flames before proud Ilion blaze,
And brighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays;
The long reflections of the distant fires
Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires,
and much more of the same kind. I want to show you that it is possible, in a plain passage of this
sort, to keep Homer’s simplicity without being heavy and dull; and to keep his dignity without
bringing in pomp 99and ornament. ‘As numerous as are the stars on a clear night’, says Homer,
So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus,
Between that and the ships, the Trojans’ numerous fires.
In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires: by each one
There sat fifty men, in the ruddy light of the fire:
By their chariots stood the steeds, and champed the white barley
While their masters sat by the fire, and waited for Morning.
Here, in order to keep Homer’s effect of perfect plainness and directness, I repeat the word ‘fires’
as he repeats πυρά without scruple; although in a more elaborate and literary style of poetry this
recurrence of the same word would be a fault to be avoided. I omit the epithet of Morning, and
whereas Homer says that the steeds ‘waited for Morning’, I prefer to attribute this expectation of
Morning to the master and not to the horse. Very likely in this particular, as in any other single
particular, I may be wrong: what I wish you to remark is my endeavour after absolute plainness
of speech, my care to avoid anything which may the least check or surprise the reader, whom
Homer does not check or surprise. Homer’s lively personal familiarity with war, and with the
war-horse as his master’s companion, is such that, as it seems to me, his attributing to the one the
other’s feelings 100comes to us quite naturally; but, from a poet without this familiarity, the
attribution strikes as a little unnatural; and therefore, as everything the least unnatural is un-
Homeric, I avoid it.
Again, in the address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles, Cowper has:
Jove saw their grief with pity, and his brows
Shaking, within himself thus, pensive, said.
‘Ah hapless pair! wherefore by gift divine
Were ye to Peleus given, a mortal king,
Yourselves immortal and from age exempt?’
There is no want of dignity here, as in the versions of Chapman and Mr Newman, which I have
already quoted: but the whole effect is much too slow. Take Pope:
Nor Jove disdained to cast a pitying look
While thus relenting to the steeds he spoke.
‘Unhappy coursers of immortal strain!
Exempt from age and deathless now in vain;
Did we your race on mortal man bestow
Only, alas! to share in mortal woe?’
Here there is no want either of dignity or rapidity, but all is too artificial. ‘Nor Jove disdained’,
for instance, is a very artificial and literary way of rendering Homer’s words and so is, ‘coursers
of immortal strain’.
Μυρομένω δ’ ἄρα τώ γε ἰδὼν, ἐλέησε Κρονίων.
And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bewailing,
And he shook his head, and thus addressed his own bosom.
101‘Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you,
To a mortal? but ye are without old age and immortal.
Was it that ye, with man, might have your thousands of sorrows?
For than man, indeed, there breathes no wretcheder creature,
Of all living things, that on earth are breathing and moving’.
Here I will observe that the use of ‘own’, in the second line for the last syllable of a dactyl, and
the use of ‘To a’, in the fourth, for a complete spondee, though they do not, I think, actually spoil
the run of the hexameter, are yet undoubtedly instances of that over-reliance on accent, and too
free disregard of quantity, which Lord Redesdale visits with just reprehension[33].
102I now take two longer passages in order to try my method more fully; but I still keep to
passages which have already come under our notice. I quoted Chapman’s version of some
passages in the speech of Hector at his parting with Andromache. One astounding conceit will
probably still be in your remembrance,
When sacred Troy shall shed her tow’rs for tears of overthrow,
as a translation of ὅτ’ ἄν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἰρή. I will quote a few lines which will give you, also,
the key-note to the Anglo-Augustan manner of rendering this passage and to the Miltonic manner
of rendering it. What Mr Newman’s manner of rendering it would be, you can by this time
sufficiently imagine for yourselves. Mr Wright,—to quote for once from his meritorious version
instead of Cowper’s, whose strong and weak points are those of Mr Wright also,—Mr Wright
begins his version of this passage thus:
All these thy anxious cares are also mine,
Partner beloved; but how could I endure
The scorn of Trojans and their long-robed wives,
103Should they behold their Hector shrink from war,
And act the coward’s part! Nor doth my soul
Prompt the base thought.
Ex pede Herculem: you see just what the manner is. Mr Sotheby, on the other hand (to take a
disciple of Pope instead of Pope himself), begins thus:
‘What moves thee, moves my mind,’ brave Hector said,
‘Yet Troy’s upbraiding scorn I deeply dread,
If, like a slave, where chiefs with chiefs engage,
The warrior Hector fears the war to wage.
Not thus my heart inclines.’
From that specimen, too, you can easily divine what, with such a manner, will become of the
whole passage. But Homer has neither
What moves thee, moves my mind,
nor has he
All these thy anxious cares are also mine.
Ἦ καὶ ἐμοὶ τάδε πάντα μέλει, γύναι· ἀλλὰ μάλ’ αἰνῶς,
that is what Homer has, that is his style and movement, if one could but catch it. Andromache, as
you know, has been entreating Hector to defend Troy from within the walls, instead of exposing
his life, and, with his own life, the safety of all those dearest to him, by fighting in the open
plain. Hector replies:
Woman, I too take thought for this; but then I bethink me
What the Trojan men and Trojan women might murmur,
104If like a coward I skulked behind, apart from the battle.
Nor would my own heart let me; my heart, which has bid me be valiant
Always, and always fighting among the first of the Trojans,
Busy for Priam’s fame and my own, in spite of the future.
For that day will come, my soul is assured of its coming,
It will come, when sacred Troy shall go to destruction,
Troy, and warlike Priam too, and the people of Priam.
And yet not that grief, which then will be, of the Trojans,
Moves me so much—not Hecuba’s grief, nor Priam my father’s,
Nor my brethren’s, many and brave, who then will be lying
In the bloody dust, beneath the feet of their foemen—
As thy grief, when, in tears, some brazen-coated Achaian
Shall transport thee away, and the day of thy freedom be ended.
Then, perhaps, thou shalt work at the loom of another, in Argos,
Or bear pails to the well of Messeïs, or Hypereia,
Sorely against thy will, by strong Necessity’s order.
And some man may say, as he looks and sees thy tears falling:
See, the wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain
Of the horsemen of Troy, in the day they fought for their city.
So some man will say; and then thy grief will redouble
At thy want of a man like me, to save thee from bondage.
But let me be dead, and the earth be mounded above me,
Ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity told of.
105The main question, whether or no this version reproduces for him the movement and general
effect of Homer better than other versions[34] of the same passage, I leave for the judgment of the
scholar. But the particular points, in which the operation of my own rules is manifested, are as
follows. In the second line I leave out the epithet of the Trojan women ἑλκεσιπέπλους, altogether.
In the sixth line I put in five words ‘in spite of the future’, which are in the original by
implication only, and are not there actually expressed. This I do, because Homer, as I have before
said, is so remote from one who reads him in English, that the English translator must be even
plainer, if possible, and more unambiguous than Homer himself; the connection of meaning must
be even more distinctly marked in the translation than in the original. For in the Greek language
itself there is something which brings one nearer to Homer, which gives one a clue to his
thought, which makes a hint enough; but in the English language this sense of nearness, this clue,
is gone; hints are insufficient, everything must be stated with full distinctness. In the ninth line
Homer’s epithet for Priam is ἐυμμελίω,—‘armed with good ashen spear’, 106say the
dictionaries; ‘ashen-speared’, translates Mr Newman, following his own rule to ‘retain every
peculiarity of his original’,—I say, on the other hand, that ἐυμμελίω has not the effect of a
‘peculiarity’ in the original, while ‘ashen-speared’ has the effect of a ‘peculiarity’ in English; and
‘warlike’ is as marking an equivalent as I dare give for ἐυμμελίω, for fear of disturbing the
balance of expression in Homer’s sentence. In the fourteenth line, again, I
translate χαλκοχιτώνων by ‘brazen-coated’. Mr Newman, meaning to be perfectly literal,
translates it by ‘brazen-cloaked’, an expression which comes to the reader oddly and unnaturally,
while Homer’s word comes to him quite naturally; but I venture to go as near to a literal
rendering as ‘brazen-coated’, because a ‘coat of brass’ is familiar to us all from the Bible, and
familiar, too, as distinctly specified in connection with the wearer. Finally, let me further
illustrate from the twentieth line the value which I attach, in a question of diction, to the
authority of the Bible. The word ‘pre-eminent’ occurs in that line; I was a little in doubt whether
that was not too bookish an expression to be used in rendering Homer, as I can imagine Mr
Newman to have been a little in doubt whether his ‘responsively accosted’ for ἀμειβόμενος
προσέφη, was not too bookish an expression. Let us both, I say, consult our Bibles: Mr Newman
will 107nowhere find it in his Bible that David, for instance, ‘responsively accosted Goliath’; but
I do find in mine that ‘the right hand of the Lord hath the pre-eminence’; and forthwith I use
‘pre-eminent’, without scruple. My Bibliolatry is perhaps excessive; and no doubt a true poetic
feeling is the Homeric translator’s best guide in the use of words; but where this feeling does not
exist, or is at fault, I think he cannot do better than take for a mechanical guide
Cruden’s Concordance. To be sure, here as elsewhere, the consulter must know how to
consult,—must know how very slight a variation of word or circumstance makes the difference
between an authority in his favour, and an authority which gives him no countenance at all; for
instance, the ‘Great simpleton!’ (for μέγα νήπιος) of Mr Newman, and the ‘Thou fool!’ of the
Bible, are something alike; but ‘Thou fool!’ is very grand, and ‘Great simpleton!’ is an atrocity.
So, too, Chapman’s ‘Poor wretched beasts’ is pitched many degrees too low; but Shakspeare’s
‘Poor venomous fool, Be angry and despatch!’ is in the grand style.
One more piece of translation and I have done. I will take the passage in which both Chapman
and Mr Newman have already so much excited our astonishment, the passage at the end of the
nineteenth book of the Iliad, the dialogue between 108Achilles and his horse Xanthus, after the
death of Patroclus. Achilles begins:
‘Xanthus and Balius both, ye far-famed seed of Podarga!
See that ye bring your master home to the host of the Argives
In some other sort than your last, when the battle is ended;
And not leave him behind, a corpse on the plain, like Patroclus’.
Then, from beneath the yoke, the fleet horse Xanthus addressed him:
Sudden he bowed his head, and all his mane, as he bowed it,
Streamed to the ground by the yoke, escaping from under the collar;
And he was given a voice by the white-armed Goddess Hera.
‘Truly, yet this time will we save thee, mighty Achilles!
But thy day of death is at hand; nor shall we be the reason—
No, but the will of heaven, and Fate’s invincible power.
For by no slow pace or want of swiftness of ours
Did the Trojans obtain to strip the arms from Patroclus;
But that prince among Gods, the son of the lovely-haired Leto,
Slew him fighting in front of the fray, and glorified Hector.
But, for us, we vie in speed with the breath of the West-Wind,
Which, men say, is the fleetest of winds; ’tis thou who art fated
To lie low in death, by the hand of a God and a Mortal’.
Thus far he; and here his voice was stopped by the Furies.
Then, with a troubled heart, the swift Achilles addressed him:
109‘Why dost thou prophesy so my death to me, Xanthus? It needs not.
I of myself know well, that here I am destined to perish,
Far from my father and mother dear: for all that I will not
Stay this hand from fight, till the Trojans are utterly routed
So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle.
Here the only particular remark which I will make is, that in the fourth and eighth line the
grammar is what I call a loose and idiomatic grammar. In writing a regular and literary style, one
would in the fourth line have to repeat before ‘leave’ the words ‘that ye’ from the second line,
and to insert the word ‘do’; and in the eighth line one would not use such an expression as ‘he
was given a voice’. But I will make one general remark on the character of my own translations,
as I have made so many on that of the translations of others. It is, that over the graver passages
there is shed an air somewhat too strenuous and severe, by comparison with that lovely ease and
sweetness which Homer, for all his noble and masculine way of thinking, never loses.
Here I stop. I have said so much, because I think that the task of translating Homer into English
verse both will be reattempted, and may be reattempted successfully. There are great works
composed of parts so disparate that one translator is 110not likely to have the requisite gifts for
poetically rendering all of them. Such are the works of Shakspeare, and Goethe’s Faust; and
these it is best to attempt to render in prose only. People praise Tieck and Schlegel’s version of
Shakspeare. I, for my part, would sooner read Shakspeare in the French prose translation, and
that is saying a great deal; but in the German poets’ hands Shakspeare so often gets, especially
where he is humorous, an air of what the French call niaiserie! and can anything be more un-
Shakspearian than that? Again; Mr Hayward’s prose translation of the first part of Faust—so
good that it makes one regret Mr Hayward should have abandoned the line of translation for a
kind of literature which is, to say the least, somewhat slight—is not likely to be surpassed by any
translation in verse. But poems like the Iliad, which, in the main, are in one manner, may hope to
find a poetical translator so gifted and so trained as to be able to learn that one manner, and to
reproduce it. Only, the poet who would reproduce this must cultivate in himself a Greek virtue by
no means common among the moderns in general, and the English in particular,—moderation.
For Homer has not only the English vigour, he has the Greek grace; and when one observes the
bolstering, rollicking way in which his English admirers—even men of genius like 111the late
Professor Wilson—love to talk of Homer and his poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no
very deep community of nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm. ‘It is very well,
my good friends’, I always imagine Homer saying to them: if he could hear them: ‘you do me a
great deal of honour, but somehow or other you praise me too like barbarians’. For Homer’s
grandeur is not the mixed and turbid grandeur of the great poets of the north, of the authors
of Othello and Faust; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur. Certainly his poetry has all the energy and
power of the poetry of our ruder climates; but it has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon,
the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky.