I MM mJkm WW Aa, et\ey/jLcu for XeXrjcpa, etc., point to a time when the initial \ of the roots was a double letter. A root Waft would explain Homer's h'Wafte. If W* ap- proached to its Welsh sound, that is, to %X, it is not wonderful that such a pronunciation as o(f>pd Wafta* /jl6v was possible : but it is singular that the vBari XXiapa) of Attic is written XiapS in our Homeric text, though the metre needs a double consonant. Such phenomena as x\iapb$ and Xiapbs, ellftco and * That XX in Attic was sounded like French I mouillee, is judged probable by the learned writer of the article L (Penny Cyclop.), who urges that /xaXXoi/ is for pakiov, and compares cfrvWo with folio, aXXo with alio, aXX with sail. LOST CONSONANTS. 41 \eif3co, Ha and fiia, et/xapfiai and e/Jb/jbope, ata and ryala, yivro for eXeTo, loner) and X ff ( as i n English and German is obvious,) it is easy to confound them all under the compendious word " digamma." I should be glad to know that Homer's forms were as well understood by modern scholars as Mr. Arnold lays down. On his quotation from Shakspeare, I remark, 1. "Orgulous," from French ' ' orgueilleux," is intel- ligible to all who know French, and is comparable to SHAKSPEARE AND HOMER. 45 Sicilian words in iEschylus. 2. It is contrary to fact to say, that Homer has not words, and words in great plenty, as unintelligible to later Greeks, as " orgulous" to us. 3. Sperr, for Bar, as Splash for Plash, is much less than the diversity which separates Homer from the spoken Attic. What is afxiKpo^ for fxacpbs to compare with rjficuos for /xi/cpos ? 4. Mr. Arnold (as I understand him) blames Shakspeare for being sometimes antiquated : I do not blame him, nor yet Homer for the same ; but neither can I admit the contrast which he asserts. He says : <{ Shakspeare " can compose, when he is at his best, in a language " perfectly intelligible, in spite of the two centuries " and a half which part him from us. Homer has not " Shakspeare's variations : he is never antiquated, as " Shakspeare is sometimes." I certainly find the very same variations in Homer, as Mr. Arnold finds in Shakspeare. My reader unlearned in Greek might hastily infer from the facts just laid before him, that Homer is always equally strange to a purely Attic ear : but is not so. The dialects of Greece did indeed differ strongly, as broad Scotch from English ; yet as we know, Burns is sometimes perfectly intelligible to an Englishman, sometimes quite unintelligible. In spite of Homer's occasional wide receding from Attic speech, he as often comes close to it. For instance, in the first piece quoted above from Gladstone, the 46 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. simile occuping five (Homeric) lines would almost go down in Sophocles, if the Tragedian had chosen to use the metre. There is but one out-and-out Homeric word in it (eTraaavTepos) : and even that is used once in an iEschylean chorus. There are no strange in- flections, and not a single digamma is sensibly lost. Its peculiarities are only -el for ei, ebv for bv, and Be re for Be, which could not embarrass the hearer as to the sense. I myself reproduce much the same result. Thus in my translation of these five lines I have the antiquated words blore for blast, harry for harass (harrow, worry), and the antiquated participle hoven from heave, as cloven, woven from cleave, weave. The whole has thus just a tinge of antiquity, as had the Homeric passage to the Attics, without any need of aid from a Glossary. But at other times the aid is occasionally convenient, just as in Homer or Shak- speare. Mr. Arnold plays fallaciously on the words familiar and unfamiliar. Homer's words may have been fami- liar to the Athenians (i.e. often heard), even when they were not understood, but, at most, were guessed at ; or when, being understood, they were still felt and known to be utterly foreign. Of course, when thus " familiar," they could not " surprise " the Athenians, as Mr. Arnold complains that my renderings surprise the English. Let mine be heard as Pope or even HOMER ABSOLUTELY ANTIQUE. 47 Cowper has been heard, and no one will be "sur- " prised." Antiquated words are understood well by some, ill by others, not at all by a third class \ hence it is diffi- cult to decide the limits of a glossary. Mr. Arnold speaks scornfully of me, (he wonders with whom Mr. Newman can have lived,) that I use the words which I use, and explain those which I explain. He cen- sures my little Glossary, for containing three words which he did not know, and some others, which, he says, are " familiar to all the world." It is clear, he will never want a stone to throw at me. I suppose I am often guilty of keeping low company. I have found ladies — whom no one would guess to be so ill- educated, — who yet do not distinctly know what lusty means ; but have an uncomfortable feeling that it is very near to lustful ; and understand grisly only in the sense of grizzled, grey. Great numbers mistake the sense of Buxom, Imp, Dapper, deplorably. I no more wrote my Glossary than my translation for per- sons so highly educated as Mr. Arnold. But I must proceed to remark : Homer might have been as unintelligible to Pericles, as was the court poet of king Croesus, and yet it might be highly im- proper to translate him into an old English dialect ; namely, if he had been the typical poet of a logical and refined age. Here is the real question; — is he 48 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. absolutely antique, or only antiquated relatively, as Euripides is now antiquated? A modern Greek statesman, accomplished for every purpose of modern business, might find himself quite perplexed by the infinitives, the numerous participles, the optatives, the datives, — by the particle av, — and by the whole syntax of Euripides, as also by many special words ; but this would never justify us in translating Euri- pides into any but a most refined style. Was Homer of this class ? I say, that he not only was antiquated, relatively to Pericles, but is also absolutely antique, being the poet of a barbarian age. Antiquity in poets is not (as Horace stupidly imagines in the argu- ment of the horse's tail) a question of years, but of intrinsic qualities. Homer sang to a wholly unfas- tidious audience, very susceptible to the marvellous, very unalive to the ridiculous, capable of swallow- ing with reverence the most grotesque conceptions. Hence nothing is easier than to turn Homer to ridi- cule. The fun which Lucian made of his mythology, a rhetorical critic like Mr. Arnold could make of his diction, if he understood it as he understands mine. He takes credit to himself for not ridiculing me ; and is not aware, that I could not be like Homer without being easy to ridicule. An intelligent child is the second-best reader of Homer. The best of all is a scholar of highly masculine taste; the worst of all QUAINTNESS OF CHAPMAN. 49 is a fastidious and refined man, to whom everything quaint seems ignoble and contemptible. I might have supposed that Mr. Arnold thinks Homer to be a polished drawing-room poet, like Pope, when I read in him this astonishing sentence, p. 33. "Search the English language for a word " which does not apply to Homer, and you could not " fix on a better word than quaint." But I am taken aback at finding him praise the diction of Chapman's translation in contrast to mine. Now I never open Chapman, without being offended at his pushing Homer's quaintness most unnecessarily into the gro- tesque. Thus in Mr. Gladstone's first passage above, where Homer says that the sea "sputters out the u foam," Chapman makes it, " all her back in bristles set, spits every way her foam," obtruding what may remind one of a cat or stoat. I hold sputter to be epical,* because it is strong; but spit is feeble and mean. In passing, I observe that the universal praise given to Chapman as " Homeric " (a praise which I have too absolutely repeated, perhaps through false shame of depreciating my only rival) is a testimony to me that I rightly appreciate Homeric style; for * Men who can bear " belch " in poetry, nowadays pretend that " spntter " is indelicate. They find Homer's a-noirrvei to be " elegant," but sputter — not ! " No one would guess from " Mr. Newman's coarse phrases how elegant is Homer " ! ! E 50 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. my style is Chapman's softened, purged of conceits and made far more melodious. Mr. Arnold leaves me to wonder, how, with his disgust at me, he can avoid feeling tenfold disgust at Chapman; and to wonder also what he means, by so blankly contradict- ing my statement that Homer is quaint ; and why he so vehemently resents it. He does not vouchsafe to me or to his readers one particle of disproof or of ex- planation. I regard it as quaint in Homer to call Juno white- arm 'd goddess and large-ey'd. (I have not rendered /3oa>7Tfc9 ox-ey'd, because in a case of doubt I shrank to obtrude anything so grotesque to us.) It is quaint to say, " the lord of bright-haired Juno lightens," for " it lightens;" or "my heart in my shaggy bosom is " divided," for, " I doubt :" quaint to call waves wet, milk white, blood dusky, horses singlehoofed, a hero's hand broad, words winged, Vulcan Lobfoot (KuXXo- 7toBlcov), a maiden fair-ankled, the Greeks wellgreav'd, a spear longshadowy , battle and council man-ennobling, one's knees dear, and many other epithets. Mr. Arnold most gratuitously asserts that the sense of these had evaporated to the Athenians. If that were true, it would not signify to this argument. Aai- povios (possessed by an elf or daemon) so lost its sense in Attic talk, that although iEschylus has it in its true meaning, some college tutors (I am told) QUAINTNESS OF HOMER. 51 render w Saifiovie in Plato, " my very good sir ! ' This is surely no good reason for mistranslating the word in Homer. If Mr. Arnold could prove (what he certainly cannot) that Sophocles had forgotten the derivation of ii>/cvr)/j,2$es and iv/jL/jLeXLrjs, and under- stood by the former nothing but " full armed " and by the latter (as he says) nothing but " warlike," this would not justify his blame of me for rendering the words correctly. If the whole Greek nation by long familiarity had become inobservant of Homer's " odd- ities/' (conceding this for the moment,) that also would be no fault of mine. That Homer is extremely peculiar, even if the Greeks had become deadened to the sense of it, the proof on all sides is overpowering. It is very quaint to say, " the outwork (or rampart) " of the teeth" instead of " the lips." If Mr. Arnold will call it " portentous" in my English, let him pro- duce some shadow of reason for denying it to be por- tentous in Greek. Many phrases are so quaint as to be almost untranslatable, as fArjarcop ,r\yavov. I do not hold the phrase to be quaint : to me it is excessively coarse. When Jupiter calls Juno " a bitch/' of course he means a snarling cur ; hence my rendering, "vixen" (or she-fox), is there perfect, since we say vixen of an irascible woman. But Helen had no such evil tem- pers, and beyond a doubt she meant to ascribe im- purity to herself. I have twice committed a pious fraud by making her call herself "a vixen," where " bitch " is the only faithful rendering; and Mr. Ar- nold, instead of thanking me for throwing a thin veil over Homer's deformity, assails me for my phrase as intolerably grotesque. He further forbids me to invent new compound ad- jectives, as fair-thron'd, rill-bestream'd ; because they strike us as new, though Homer's epithets (he says) did not so strike the Greeks : hence they derange at- tention from the main question. I hold this doctrine of his (conceding his fact for a moment) to be de- structive of all translation whatever, into prose or poetry. When Homer tells us that Achilles's horses were munching lotus and parsley, Pope renders it by and that irpaaivos, " leek-colour," was too mean a word for any poets, early or late, to use for " green ;" therefore x^pos does dutj? for it. Kdfia iropcpvpeov is surely " the purple wave," and loeidea tvovtov ''the violet sea." 58 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. " the horses grazed," and does not say on what. Using Mr. Arnold's principles, he might defend him- self by arguing : " The Greeks, being familiar with " such horsefood, were not struck by it as new, as my " reader would be. I was afraid of telling him what " the horses were eating, lest it should derange the " balance of his mind, and injuriously divert him from " the main idea of the sentence." But, I find, rea- ders are indignant on learning Pope's suppression : they feel that he has defrauded them of a piece of in- teresting information. — In short, how can an English- man read any Greek composition and be affected by it as Greeks were? In a piece of Euripides my imagination is caught by many things, which he never intended or calculated for the prominence which they actually get in my mind. This or that absurdity in mythology, which passed with him as matter of course, may monopolize my main attention. Our minds are not passive recipients of this or that poet's influence ; but the poet is the material on which our minds actively work. If an unlearned reader thinks it very " odd" of Homer (the first time he hears it) to call Aurora " fair-thron'd," so does a boy learning Greek think it odd to call her evOpovos. Mr. Arnold ought to blot every odd Homeric epithet out of his Greek Homer (or never lend the copy to a youthful learner) if he desire me to expunge " fair-thron'd" from the NOVELTY OF THOUGHT. 59 translation. Nay, I think he should conceal that the Morning was esteemed as a goddess, though she had no altars or sacrifice. It is all odd. But that is just why people want to read an English Homer, — to know all his oddities, exactly as learned men do. He is the phenomenon to be studied. His peculiarities, pleasant or unpleasant, are to be made known, pre- cisely because of his great eminence and his substan- tial deeply seated worth. Mr. Arnold writes like a timid biographer, fearful to let too much of his friend come out. So much as to the substance. As to mere words, here also I hold the very reverse of Mr. Arnold's doctrine. I do not feel free to translate ovpavofirjfcr]^ by "heaven-kissing," precisely because Shakspeare has used the last word. It is his pro- perty, as ivKvrjfjblSe^, ivfifjueXir}?, Kvhidveipa, etc., are Homer's property. I could not use it without being felt to quote Shakspeare, which would be highly in- appropriate in a Homeric translation. But if nobody had ever yet used the phrase "heaven-kissing" (or if it were current without any proprietor) then I should be quite free to use it as a rendering of ovpavo/j,rj/cr}$. I cannot assent to a critic killing the vital powers of our tongue. If Shakspeare might invent the com- pound " heaven-kissing," or " man-ennobling," so might Willi am "Wordsworth or Matthew Arnold; and so might I. Inspiration is not dead, nor yet is the English language. 60 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. Mr. Arnold is slow to understand what I think very obvious. Let me then put a case. What if I were to scold a missionary for rendering in Feejee the phrase "kingdom of heaven" and "Lamb of God" accurately ; also " saints " and other words charac- teristic of the New Testament ? I might urge against him : " This and that sounds very odd to the Fee- "jees: that cannot be right, for it did not seem odd " to the Nicene bishops. The latter had forgotten "that ftaortkela meant ' kingdom ;' they took the "phrase ' kingdom of God* collectively to mean ' the " Church/ The phrase did not surprise them. As " to ' Lambs/ the Feejees are not accustomed to " sacrifice, and cannot be expected to know of them- " selves what c Lamb of God' means, as Hebrews " did. The courtiers of Constantine thought it very " natural to be called ayioi, for they were accustomed " to think every baptized person ayio? ; but to the " baptized courtiers of Feejee it really seems very odd " to be called saints. You disturb the balance of "their judgment." The missionary might reply : " You seem to be " ashamed of the oddities of the Gospel. I am not. " They grow out of its excellences and cannot be " separated. By avoiding a few eccentric phrases you " will do little to remove the deep-seated eccentricity " of its very essence. Odd and eccentric it will re- 61 " main, unless you despoil it of its heart, and reduce "it to a fashionable philosophy." And just so do I reply to Mr. Arnold. The Homeric style (whether it be that of an individual or of an age) is peculiar, is " odd," if Mr. Arnold like the word, to the very core. Its eccentricities in epithet are mere efflores- cences of its essential eccentricity, If Homer could cry out to us, I doubt not he would say, as Oliver Cromwell to the painter, " Paint me just I am, wart " and all :" but if the true Homer could reappear, I am sure Mr. Arnold would start from him just as a bishop of Rome from a fisherman apostle. If a trans- lator of the Bible honours the book by his close ren- dering of its characteristics, however " odd," so do I honour Homer by the same. Those characteristics, the moment I produce them, Mr. Arnold calls ignoble. Well : be it so ; but I am not to blame for them. They exist, whether Mr. Arnold likes them or not. I will here observe that he bids me paraphrase TavinreirXos (trailing-robed) into something like, " Let "gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping by." I deliberately judge, that to paraphrase an otiose epithet is the very worst thing that can be done : to omit it entirely would be better. I object even to Mr. Gladstone's . . . . whom Leto bare, Leto with the flowing hair. 62 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. For the repetition overdoes the prominence of the epithet. Still more extravagant is Mr. Arnold in wishing me to turn "single-hoofed horses" into " something which as little surprises us as ' Gallop " l apace, you fiery-footed steeds : ; "p. 90. To repro- duce Shakspeare would be in any case a " surprising " mode of translating Homer : but the principle which changes " single-hoofed " into a different epithet which the translator thinks better, is precisely that which for more than two centuries has made nearly all English translation worthless. To throw the poet into your crucible, and bring out old Pelias young, is not a hopeful process. I had thought, the manly taste of this day had outgrown the idea that a trans- lator's business is to melt up the old coin and stamp it with a modern image. I am wondering that I should have to write against such notions : I would not take the trouble, only that they come against me from an Oxford Professor of Poetry. At the same time, his doctrine, as I have said, goes far beyond compound epithets. Whether I say " motley-helmed Hector" or " Hector of the motley "helm," "silver-footed Thetis" or "Thetis of the "silver foot," "man-ennobling combat" or "combat " which ennobles man," the novelty is so nearly on a par, that he cannot condemn one and justify the other on this score. Even Pope falls far short of the false CHESNUT AND SPOTTED. 63 taste which would plane down every Homeric promi- nence : for he prizes an elegant epithet like " silver- " footed/' however new and odd. From such a Homer as Mr. Arnold's specimens and principles would give us, no one could learn any- thing ; no one could have any motive for reading the translation. He smooths down the stamp of Homer's coin, till nothing is left even for microscopic exami- nation. When he forbids me (p. 90) to let my reader know that Homer calls horses " single-hoofed/' of course he would suppress also the epithets " white " milk/' ".dusky blood/' " dear knees/' ' c dear life/' etc. His process obliterates everything characteristic, great or small. Mr. Arnold condemns my translating certain names of horses. He says (p.. 55): "Mr. Newman calls Xan- " thus Chesnut ; as he calls Balius Spotted and Pod- " arga Spryfoot : which is as if a Frenchman were " to call Miss Nightingale Madlle. Rossignol, or Mr. " Bright M . Clair" He is very wanting in discrimi- nation. If I had translated Hector into Possessor or Agamemnon into Highmind, his censure would be just. A Miss White may be a brunette, a Miss Brown may be a blonde : we utter the proper names of men and women without any remembrance of their intrinsic meaning. But it is different with many names of domestic animals. We never call a dog 61< HOMERIC TRANSLATION. Spot, unless he is spotted ; nor without consciousness that the name expresses his peculiarity. No one would give to a black horse the name Chesnut; nor, if he had called a chesnut horse by the name Chesnut, would he ever forget the meaning of the name while he used it. The Greeks called a chesnut horse xanthos and a spotted horse balios ; therefore, until Mr. Arnold proves the contrary, I believe that they never read the names of Achilles' s two horses without a sense of their meaning. Hence the names ought to be trans- lated ; while Hector and Laomedon ought not. The same reasoning applies to Podarga, though I do not certainly understand a/370?. I have taken it to mean sprightly. Mr. Arnold further asserts, that Homer is never "garrulous." Allowing that too many others agree with me, he attributes our error to giving too much weight to a sentence in Horace ! I admire Horace as an ode- writer, but I do not revere him as a critic, any more than as a moral philosopher. I say that Ho- mer is garrulous., because I see and feel it. — Mr. Ar- nold puts me into a most unwelcome position. I have a right to say, I have some enthusiasm for Homer. In the midst of numerous urgent calls of duty and taste, I devoted every possible quarter of an hour for two years and a half to translate the Iliad, toiling un- remittingly in my vacations and in my walks, and GARRULITY OF HOMER. 65 going to large expenses of money, in order to put the book before the unlearned; and this, though I am not a Professor of Poetry nor even of Greek. Yet now I am forced to appear as Homer's disparager and accuser ! But if Homer were always a poet, he could not be, what he is, so many other things be- side poet. As the Egyptians paint in their tombs processes of art, not because they are beautiful or grand, but from a mere love of imitating ; so Homer narrates perpetually from a mere love of chatting. In how thoroughly Egyptian a way does he tell the pro- cess of cutting up an ox and making kebab ; the pro- cess of bringing a boat to anchor and carefully put- ting by the tackle ; the process of taking out a shawl from a chest, where it lies at the very bottom ! With what glee he repeats the secret talk of the gods ; and can tell all about the toilet of Juno. Every particular of trifling actions comes out with him, as, the opening of a door or box with a key. — He tells who made Juno's earrings or veil or the shield of Ajax — the his- tory of Agamemnon's breastplate — and in what detail a hero puts on his pieces of armour. I would not press the chattiness of Pandarus, Glaucus, Nestor, iEneas, in the midst of battle ; I might press his de- scription of wounds. Indeed I have said enough, and more than enough, against Mr. Arnold's novel, un- supported paradoxical assertion. — But this is con- 66 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. nected with another subject. I called Homer's man- ner " direct i" Mr. Arnold (if I understand) would supersede this by his own epithet "rapid." But I cannot admit the exchange : Homer is often the oppo- site of rapid. Amplification is his characteristic, as it must be of every improvisatore, every popular ora- tor : condensation indeed is improper for anything but written style, — written to be read privately. But I regard as Homer's worst defect, his lingering over scenes of endless carnage and painful wounds. He knows to half an inch where one hero hits another and how deep. They arm : they approach : they en- counter : we have to listen to stereotype details again and again. Such a style is anything but " rapid." Homer's garrulity often leads him into it ; yet he can do far better, as in a part of the fight over Patroclus's body, and other splendid passages. Garrulity often vents itself in expletives. Mr. Arnold selects for animadversion this line of mine (P- 41) - "A thousand fires along the plain, I say, that night were gleaming." He says : " This may be the genuine style of ballad " poetry, but it is not the style of Homer." I reply ; my use of expletives is moderate indeed compared to Homer's. Mr. Arnold writes, as if quite unaware homer's expletives. 67 that such words as the intensely prosaic dp a, and its abbreviations ap, pa, with toc, t€, 8rj, fidXa, 97, 77 pa vv, nrep, overflow in epic style ; and that a pupil who has mastered the very copious stock of Attic particles, is taken quite aback by the extravagant number in Homer. Our expletives are generally more offensive, because longer. My principle is, to admit only such expletives as add energy, and savour of antiquity. To the feeble expletives of mean ditties I am not prone. I once heard from an eminent counsellor the first lesson of young lawyers, in the following doggrel : He who holds his lands in fee, Need neither quake nor quiver : For I humbly conceive, look ye, do ye see ? He holds his lands for ever. The " humbly conceiving " certainly outdoes Homer. Yet if the poet had chosen (as he might have chosen) to make Polydamas or Glaucus say : "Octtls enerpdcpdr] refievos rricrTei fiaaiXrjos, Cprjfii tol, ovtos dvrjp ovt ap rpepei ovre (poftelrai' drj /xaXa yap pa eas Kparioi kcv eaaiev dpovpas : I rather think the following would be a fair prose rendering: "Whoso hath been entrusted with a de- " mesne under pledge with the king ; (I tell you,) this " man neither trembleth (you see) nor feareth : for " (look ye !) he (verily) may hold (you see) his lands " for ever." f 2 68 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. Since Mr. Arnold momentarily appeals to me on the chasm between Attic and Homeric Greek, I turn the last piece into a style far less widely separated from modern English than Homer from Thucydides. Dat mon, quhich kauldeth Kyngis-af Londis yn feo, niver (I tell 'e) feereth aught ; sith hee Doth hauld hys londis yver. I certainly do not recommend this style to a trans- lator, yet it would have its advantage. Even with a smaller change of dialect it would aid us over Helen's self piercing denunciation, — " approaching to Chris- " tian penitence," as some have judged it. Quoth she, I am a gramsome bitch, If woman bitch may bee. But in behalf of the poet I must avow : when one considers how dramatic he is, it is marvellous how little in him can offend. For this very reason he is above needing tender treatment from a translator, but can bear faithful rendering, not only better than Shakspeare but better than Pindar or Sophocles. When Mr. Arnold denies that Homer is ever pro- saic or homely, his own specimens of translation put me into despair of convincing him ; for they seem to me a very anthology of prosaic flatness. Phrases, which are not in themselves bad, if they were elevated MR. ARNOLD PROSAIC. 69 by something in the syntax or rhythm distinguishing them from prose, become in him prose out-and-out. " To Peleus why did we give you, to a mortal ?" " In " the plain there were kindled a thousand fires j by " each one there sate fifty men." [At least he might have left out the expletive.] "By their chariots "stood the steeds, and champed the white barley; " while their masters sate by the fire and waited for " morning." " Us, whose portion for ever Zeus has " made it, from youth right up to age, to be winding " skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of us perish." The words which I here italicize, seem to me below noble ballad. What shall I say of "I bethink me " what the Trojan men and Trojan women might " murmur." " Sacred Troy shall go to destruction." " Or bear pails to the well of Messeis." " See, the " wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain of the " horsemen of Troy, in the day they fought for their " city :" for, " who was captain in the day on which — ." " Let me be dead and the earth be mounded (?) above " me, ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity* told of" " By no slow pace or want of swiftness of oursf did * He pares down eAK^fyioio, (the dragging away of a woman by the hair,) into " captivity !" Better surely is my "ignoble" version : " Ere-that I see thee dragg'd away, and hear thy shriek of anguish." t He means ours for two syllables. " Swiftness of ours" is surely ungrammatical. " A galley of my own'— one of my 70 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. " the Trojans obtain to strip the arms of Patroclus." " Here I am destined to perish, far from my father " and mother dear ; for all that, I will not/' etc. " Dare they not enter the fight, or stand in the coun- " cil of heroes, all for fear of the shame and the taunts "my crime has awakened?" One who regards all this to be high poetry, — emphatically " noble," — may well think rbv 8' aTrafieifio/jLevos or " with him there " came forty black galleys," or the broiling of the beef collops, to be such. When Mr. Arnold regards u no want of swiftness of ours ;" " for all that," in the sense of nevertheless ; " all for fear," i.e. because of the fear ; — not to be prosaic : — my readers, however ig- norant of Greek, will dispense with further argument from me. Mr. Arnold's inability to discern prose in Greek is not to be trusted. But I see something more in this phenomenon. Mr. Arnold is an original poet ; and, as such, cer- tainly uses a diction far more elevated than he here puts forward to represent Homer. He calls his Ho- meric diction plain and simple. Interpreting these words from the contrast of Mr. Arnold's own poems, I claim his suffrage as on my side, that Homer is own galleys ; but " a father of mine," is absurd, since each has but one father. I confess I have myself been seduced into writing " those two eyes of his," to avoid " those his two " eyes" : but I have since condemned and altered it. 71 often in a style much lower than what the moderns esteem to be poetical. But I protest, that he carries it very much too far, and levels the noblest down to the most negligent style of Homer. The poet is not always so "ignoble," as the unlearned might infer from my critic's specimens. He never drops so low as Shakspeare ; yet if he were as sustained as Virgil , or Milton, he would with it lose his vast superiority over these, his rich variety. That the whole first book of the Iliad is pitched lower than the rest, though it has vigorous descriptions, is denoted by the total ab- sence of simile in it : for Homer's kindling is always indicated by simile. The second book rises on the first, until the catalogue of ships, which (as if to atone for its flatness) is ushered in by five consecutive similes. In the third and fourth books the poet continues to rise, and almost culminates in the fifth ; but then seems to restrain himself, lest nothing grander be left for Achilles. Although I do not be- lieve in a unity of authorship between the Odyssey and the Iliad, yet in the Iliad itself I see such unity, that I cannot doubt its negligences to be from art. (The monstrous speech of Nestor in the 11th book is a case by itself. About 100 lines have perhaps been added later, for reasons other than literary.) I ob- serve that just before the poet is about to bring out Achilles in his utmost splendour, he has three-quarters 72 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. of a book comparatively tame, with a ridiculous legend told by Agamemnon in order to cast his own sins upon Pate. If Shakspeare introduces coarse wrangling, buffoonery, or mean superstition, no one claims or wishes this to be in a high diction or tragic rhythm ; and why should any one wish such a thing from Homer or Homer's translator ? I find nothing here in the poet to apologize for ; but much cause for in- dignation, when the unlearned public is misled by translators or by critics to expect delicacy and ele- gance out of place. But I beg the unlearned to judge for himself whether Homer can have intended such lines as the following for poetry, and whether I am bound to make them any better than I do. Then visiting he urged each man with words, Mesthles and Glaucus and Medon and Thereilochus And Asteropseus and Deisenor and Hippothoiis And Phorkys and Chromius and Ennomus the augur. He has lines in plenty as little elevated. If they came often in masses, it would be best to translate them into avowed prose : but since gleams of poetry break out amid what is flattest, I have no choice but to imi- tate Homer in retaining a uniform, but easy and un- pretending metre. Mr. Arnold calls my metre " slip- " shod :" if it can rise into grandeur when needful, the epithet is a praise. Of course I hold the Iliad to be generally noble and 73 grand. Very many of the poet's conceptions were grand to him, mean to us : especially is he mean and absurd in scenes of conflict between the gods. Be- sides, he is disgusting and horrible occasionally in word and thought ; as when Hecuba wishes to " cling " on Achilles and eat up his liver ;" when (as Jupiter says) Juno would gladly eat Priam's children raw ; when Jupiter hanged Juno up and fastened a pair of anvils to her feet ; also in the description of dreadful wounds, and the treatment which (Priam says) dogs give to an old man's corpse. The descriptions of Vul- can and Thersites are ignoble; so is the mode of mourning for Hector adopted by Priam; so is the treatment of the populace by Ulysses, which does but reflect the manners of the day. I am not now blaming Homer for these things ; but I say no treatment can elevate the subject; the translator must not be ex- pected to make noble what is not so intrinsically. If any one think that I am disparaging Homer, let me remind him of the horrid grossnesses of Shak- speare, which yet are not allowed to lessen our admi- ration of Shakspeare's grandeur. The Homer of the Iliad is morally pure and often very tender ; but to expect refinement and universal delicacy of expression in that stage of civilization is quite anachronistic and unreasonable. As in earlier England, so in Homeric Greece, even high poetry partook of the coarseness 74 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. of society. This was probably inevitable, precisely because Greek epic poetry was so natural. Mr. Arnold says that I make Homer's nobleness eminently ignoble. This suggests to me to quote a passage, not because I think myself particularly suc- cessful in it, but because the poet is evidently aiming to be grand, when his mightiest hero puts forth mighty boastings, offensive to some of the gods. It is the speech of Achilles over the dead body of Asteropseus (Iliad 21, 184). Whether I make it ignoble, by my diction or my metre, the reader must judge. Lie as thou art. 'Tis hard for thee to strive against the children Of overmatching Saturn's son, tho' offspring of a Hiver, Thou boastest, that thy origin is from a Stream broad-flowing ; I boast," from mighty Jupiter to trace my first beginning. A man who o'er the Myrmidons holdeth wide rule, begat me, Peleus ; whose father iEacus by Jupiter was gotten. Elvers, that trickle to the sea, than Jupiter are weaker ; So, than the progeny of Jove, weaker a River's offspring. Yea, if he aught avail'd to help, behold ! a mighty Hiver Beside thee here : but none can fight with Jove, the child of Saturn. Not royal Acheloius with him may play the equal, Nor e'en the amplebosom'd strength of deeply-flowing Ocean : Tho' from his fulness every Sea and every Hiver welleth, And all the ever-bubbling springs and eke their vasty sources. Yet at the lightning-bolt of Jove doth even Ocean shudder, And at the direful thunder-clap, when from the sky it crasheth. Mr. Arnold has in some respects attacked me dis- creetly; I mean, where he has said that which da- 75 mages me with his readers, and yet leaves me no possible reply. What is easier than for one to call another ignoble ? what more damaging ? what harder to refute ? Then when he speaks of my " metrical exploits " how can I be offended ? to what have I to reply? His words are expressive either of compli- ment or of contempt ; but in either case are untan- gible. Again : when he would show how tender he has been of my honour, and how unwilling to expose my enormities, he says : p. 54 : "I will by no means " search in Mr. Newman's version for passages likely " to raise a laugh : that search, alas ! would be far " too easy ;" I find the pity which the word alas ! expresses, to be very clever, and very effective against me. But, I think, he was not discreet, but very un- wise, in making dogmatic statements on the ground of erudition, many of which I have exposed ; and about which much more remains to be said than space will allow me. In his denial that Homer is " garrulous," he com- plains that so many think him to be "diffuse." Mr. Arnold, it seems, is unaware of that very prominent peculiarity ; which suits ill even to Mr. Gladstone's style. Thus, where Homer said (and I said) in a pas- sage quoted above, " people that have a voice in their bosom," Mr. Gladstone has only " speaking men." I have noticed the epithet shaggy as quaint, in " His 76 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. heart in his shaggy bosom was divided;" where, in a moral thought, a physical epithet is obtruded. But even if "shaggy" be dropped, it remains diffuse (and characteristically so) to say " my heart in my bosom is divided," for, "I doubt." So — "I will speak what my heart in my bosom bids me." So, Homer makes men think Kara (fypiva teal Kara, 0v/jlov, " in their heart and mind;" and deprives them of "mind and " soul." Also : " this appeared to him in his mind to " be the best counsel." Mr. Arnold assumes tones of great superiority; but every schoolboy knows that diffuseness is a distinguishing characteristic of Homer. Again, the poet's epithets are often selected by their convenience for his metre ; sometimes perhaps even appropriated for no other cause. No one has ever given any better reason why Diomedes and Menelaus are almost exclusively called ftorjv ayaObs, except that it suits the metre. This belongs to the improvisatore, the negligent, the ballad style. The word ivfifieXiT)?, which I with others render " ashen-speared," is said of Priam, of Panthus, and of sons of Panthus. Mr. Arnold rebukes me, p. 99, for violating my own prin- ciples. " I say, on the other hand, that €v/a/jl€\lq) " has not the effect* of a peculiarity in the original, " while e ashen- speared' has the effect of a peculia- * Of course no peculiarity of phrase has the effect of pecu- liarity on a man who has imperfect acquaintance with the PECULIAR EPITHETS. 77 "rity in the English: and 'warlike' is as marking " an equivalent as I dare give for ivfjLfieXico, for fear " of disturbing the balance of expression in Homer's " sentence." Mr. Arnold cannot write a sentence on Greek, without showing an ignorance hard to excuse in one who thus comes forward as a vituperating censor. Warlike is a word current in the lips and books of all Englishmen : ei^/zeXt^? is a word never used, never, I believe, in all Greek literature, by any one but Homer. If he does but turn to Liddell and Scott, he will see their statement, that the Attic form evfAeXlas is only to be found in grammars. He is here, as always, wrong in his facts. The word is most singular in Greek; more singular by far than " ashen-spear' d" in English, because it is more ob- scure, as is its special application to one or two per- sons : and in truth I have doubted whether we any bet- ter understand Eumelian Priam than Gerenian Nestor. — Mr. Arnold presently imputes to me the opinion that xLTcov means " a cloak/' which he does not dis- pute ; but if I had thought it necessary to be literal, I must have rendered ^aX/co^lrcove^ brazen-shirted. He suggests to me the rendering "brazen-coated," which T have used in II. 4, 285 and elsewhere. I have also used ' ' brazen-clad/' and I now prefer " brazen- delicacies of a language ; who, for instance, thinks that €Kkt]6ix6s means SouAeia. 78 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. mail'd." I here wish only to press that Mr. Arnold's criticism proceeds on a false fact. Homer's epithet was not a familiar word at Athens (in any other sense than as Burns or Virgil may be familiar to Mr. Ar- nold,) but was strange, unknown even to their poets ; hence his demand that I shall use a word already familiar in English poetry is doubly baseless. The later poets of Greece have plenty of words beginning with xaX/co-; but this one word is exclusively Homer's. — Everything that I have now said, may be repeated still more pointedly concerning iv/cvrjfjLiBes, inasmuch as directing attention to leg-armour is peculiarly quaint. No one in all Greek literature (as far as I know) names the word but Homer ; and yet Mr. Ar- nold turns on me with his ever reiterated, ever un- supported, assertions and censures, of course assuming that ee the scholar" is with him. (I have no theory at hand, to explain why he regards his own word to suffice without attempt at proof.) The epithet is intensely peculiar; and I observe that Mr. Arnold has not dared to suggest a translation. It is clear to me that he is ashamed of my poet's oddities ; and has no mode of escaping from them but by bluntly denying facts. Equally peculiar to Homer are the words Kv&idveLpa, Tavu7re7rXo? and twenty others, — equally unknown to Attic the peculiar compound juLe\ir)ST)$ (adopted from Homer by Pindar), — about Mepo7re9. 79 all which he carps at me on false grounds. But I pass these, and speak a little more at length about jjLepoire?. Will the reader allow me to vary these tedious de- tails, by imagining a conversation between the Aris- tophanic Socrates and his clownish pupil Strepsiades. I suppose the philosopher to be instructing him in the higher Greek, Homer being the text. Soc. Now Streppy, tell me what iiepoires avOpcoiroi means ? Strep. Let me see: fiepoire^? that must mean "half-faced." Soc. Nonsense, silly fellow : think again. Strep. Well then : fjuepoTres, half-eyed, squinting. Soc. No; you are playing the fool: it is not our 07r in oSja?, oyfro/jLai, KaroTTTpov, but another sort of 07T. Strep. Why, you yesterday told me that oivoira was "wine-faced," and aWoira "blazing-faced," something like our aWloyfr. Soc. Ah ! well : it is not so wonderful that you go wrong. It is true, there is also vwpoyfr, o-ripo-^r, rjvoty. Those might mislead you : /juepoyfr is rather peculiar. Now cannot you think of any characteristic of man- kind, which jjbepOTTes will express. How do men dif- fer from other animals ? Strep. I have it ! I heard it from your young friend 80 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. Euclid. Mepoty earlv avQpwrros, " man is a cooking " animal." Soc. You stupid lout ! what are you at ? what do you mean ? Strep. Why, fiipo-dr, from fxeipw, I distribute, o^rov sauce. Soc. No, no : otyov has the 6-ty, with radical im- moveable ? in it ; but here bir is the root, and 5 is moveable. Strep. Now I have got it; fieipco, I distribute, qttov, juice, rennet. Soc. Wretched man ! you must forget your larder and your dairy, if ever you are to learn grammar. — Come Streppy : leave rustic words, and think of the language of the gods. Did you ever hear of the bril- liant goddess Circe and of her oira fcaXrjv ? Strep. Oh yes ; Circe and her beautiful face. -Soc. I told you, no ! you forgetful fellow. It is another o7r. Now I will ask you in a different way. Do you know why we call fishes e'WoTre? ? Strep. I suppose, because they are cased in scales. Soc. That is not it. — (And yet I am not sure. Perhaps the fellow is right, after all.) — Well, we will not speak any more of e\Xo7re?. But did you never hear in Euripides, ov/c eyus yeycovelv oira? What does that mean ? Strep. " I am not able to shout out, o)vr] when they mean (fxDvrj. Soc. We have at last made one step. Now what is pepo-^r ? /jLepo7T6<; avOpcoiTOL. Strep. M.€ip(o } I divide, oira, (j)covr]v, voice ; " voice- " dividing : " what can that mean ? Soc. You have heard a wild dog howl, and a tame dog bark : tell me how they differ. Strep. The wild dog gives a long long oo-oo, which changes like a trumpet if you push your hand up and down it ; and the tame dog says bow, wow, wow, like two or three panpipes blown one after another. Soc. Exactly ; you see the tame dog is humanized : he divides his voice into syllables, as men do. " Voice- " dividing" means " speaking in syllables." G 82 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. Strep. Oh, how clever you are ! Soc. Well then, you understand ; " Voice-dividing" means articulating. Mr. Arnold will see in the Scholiast on Iliad 1, 250, precisely this order of analysis for /juipoTre^. It seems to me to give not a traditional but a gramma- tical explanation. Be that as it may, it indicates that a Greek had to pass through exactly the same process in order to expound ixepoire^, as an English- man to get sense out of " voice-dividing." The word is twice used by ^Eschylus, who affects Homeric words, and once by Euripides (Iph. T.) in the con- nection TToXiaiv /Jbepoircovj where the very unusual Ionism TroXeaiv shows in how Homeric a region is the poet's fancy. No other word ending in oty except pepoyfr can be confidently assigned to the root 6-v/r, a voice. ^Hvoifr in Homer (itself of most uncertain sense and derivation) is generally referred to the other 6\Jr. The sense of eWo-yjr again* is very uncertain. Every way therefore pepo-ty is e ' odd " and obscure. The phrase " articulating" is utterly prosaic and inad- missible. Vocal is rather too Latinized for my style, and besides, is apt to mean melodious. The phrase "voice-dividing" is indeed easier to us than fiepoTres * 'EAAos- needs light and gives none. Benfey suggests that it is for iveos, as SXkos, alius, for Sanscrit anya. He with me refers eXkoyjr to AeVw. Cf. squamigeri in Lucretius. HOMERIC STRUCTURE. 83 can have been to the Athenians, because we all know what voice means, but they had to be taught scholasti- cally what oira meant ; nor would easily guess that 6-^r in /xepoi/r had a sense, differing from oi/r in (a)o-Tepo-v|r olvoyfr, aWoTJr, aWioyfr, v&poty [rjvo^), ^dpo-^r. Fi- nally, since ^epoire^ is only found in the plural, it remains an open question, whether it does not mean " speaking various languages." Mr. Arnold will find that Stephanus and Scapula treat it as doubtful, though Liddell and Scott do not name the second in- terpretation. I desired to leave in the English all the uncertainty of the Greek : but my critic is un- encumbered with such cares. Hitherto I have been unwillingly thrown into no- thing but antagonism to Mr. Arnold, who thereby at least adds tenfold value to his praise, and makes me proud when he declares that the structure of my sen- tences is good and Homeric. For this I give the credit to my metre, which alone confers on me this cardinal advantage. But in turn I will compliment Mr. Arnold at the expense of some other critics. He does know, and they do not, the difference of flowing and smooth. A mountain torrent is flowing, but often very rough ; such is Homer. The " stair- cases of Neptune" on the canal of Languedoc are smooth, but do not flow : you have to descend abruptly from each level to the next. It would be unjust to g 2 84 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. say absolutely, that such is Pope's smoothness ; yet often, I feel, this censure would not be too severe. The rhyme forces him to so frequent a change of the nominative, that he becomes painfully discontinuous, where Homer is what Aristotle calls " long-linked." At the same time, in our language, in order to im- part a flowing style, good structure does not suffice. A principle is needed, unknown to the Greeks ; viz. the natural divisions of the sentence oratorically, must coincide with the divisions of the verse musically. To attain this always in a long poem, is very difficult to a translator who is scrupulous as to tampering with the sense. I have not always been successful in this. But before any critic passes on me the general sen- tence that I am " deficient in flow," let him count up the proportion of instances in which he can justly make the complaint, and mark whether they occur in elevated passages. I shall now speak of the peculiarities of my diction, under three heads: 1. old or antiquated words; 2. coarse words expressive of outward actions, but having no moral colour ; 3. words of which the sense has de- generated in modern days. 1. Mr. Arnold appears to regard what is antiquated as ignoble. I think him, as usual, in fundamental error. In general the nobler words come from an- cient style, and in no case can it be said that old ANTIQUE ENGLISH. 85 words (as such) are ignoble. To introduce such terms as whereat, therefrom, quoth, beholden, steed, erst, anon, anent, into the midst of style which in all other respects is modern and prosaic, would be like to that which we often hear from half-educated people. The want of harmony makes us regard it as lowminded and uncouth. From this cause (as I suspect) has stolen into Mr. Arnold's mind the fallacy, that the words themselves are uncouth.* But the words are excellent, if only they are in proper keeping with the general style. — Now it is very possible, that in some passages, few or many, I am open to the charge of having mixed old and new style unskilfully; but I cannot admit that the old words (as such) are ignoble. No one so speaks of Spenser's dialect, nay, nor of Thomson's ; although with Thomson it was assumed, * I do not see that Mr. Arnold has any right to reproach. me, because he does not know Spenser's word "bragly," (which I may have used twice in the Iliad,) or Dryden's word " plump," for a mass. The former is so near in sound to brag and braw, that an Englishman who is once told that it means "proudly fine," ought thenceforward to find it very intelli- gible : the latter is a noble modification of the vulgar lump. That he can carp as he does against these words and against bullcin (= young bullock) as unintelligible, is a testimony how little I have imposed of difficulty on my readers. Those who know lambkin cannot find bulkin very hard. Since writing the above, I see a learned writer in the Philological Museum illustrates 'lXij by the old English phrase " a plump of spears." 86 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. exactly as by me, but to a far greater extent, and without any such necessity as urges me. As I bave stated in my preface, a broad tinge of antiquity in the style is essential, to make Homer's barbaric puerili- ties and eccentricities less offensive. (Even Mr. Ar- nold would admit this, if he admitted my facts : but he denies that there is anything eccentric, antique, quaint, barbaric in Homer : that is his only way of resisting my conclusion.) If Mr. Gladstone were able to give his valuable time to woi»k out an entire Iliad in his refined modern style, I feel confident that he would find it impossible to deal faithfully with the eccentric phraseology and with the negligent parts of the poem. I have the testimony of an unfriendly re- viewer, that I am the first and only translator that has dared to give Homer's constant epithets and not conceal his forms of thought : of course I could not have done this in modern style. The lisping of a child is well enough from a child, but is disgusting in a full-grown man. Cowper and Pope systemati- cally cut out from Homer whatever they cannot make stately, and harmonize with modern style : even Mr. Brandreth often shrinks, though he is brave enough to say ox-eyed Juno. Who then can doubt the ex- treme unfitness of their metre and of their modern diction? My opposers never fairly meet the argu- ment. Mr. Arnold, when most gratuitously censuring ANTIQUE ENGLISH. 87 my mild rendering of «wo? KaKOfirj-^dvov otcpvoiaar]?, does not dare to suggest any English for it himself. Even Mr. Brandreth skips it. Tt is not merely offensive words ; but the purest and simplest phrases, as a man's "dear life/' "dear knees/' or his "tightly-built house/' are a stumbling-block to translators. No stronger proof is necessary, or perhaps is possible, than these phenomena give, that to shed an antique hue over Homer is of first necessity to a translator : without it, injustice is done both to the reader and to the poet. Whether I have managed the style well, is a separate question, and is matter of detail. I may have some- times done well, sometimes ill; but I claim that my critics shall judge me from a broader ground, and shall not pertinaciously go on comparing my version with modern style, and condemning me as (what they are pleased to call) inelegant, because it is not like refined modern poetry, when it specially avoids to be such. They never deal thus with Thomson or Chat- terton, any more than with Shakspeare or Spenser. There is no sharp distinction possible between the foreign and the antiquated in language. What is obsolete with us, may still live somewhere : as, what in Greek is called Poetic or Homeric, may at the same time be living iEolic. So, whether I take a word from Spenser or from Scotland, is generally unimportant. I do not remember more than four 88 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. Scotch words, which I have occasionally adopted for convenience ; viz. Callant, young man ; Canny, right- minded ; Bonny, handsome ; to Skirl, to cry shrilly. A trochaic word, which I cannot get in English, is sometimes urgently needed. It is astonishing to me that those who ought to know both what a large mass of antique and foreign- sounding words an Athe- nian found in Homer, and how many Doric or Sici- lian forms as well as Homeric words the Greek tra- gedians on principle brought into their songs, should make the outcry that they do against my very limited use of that which has an antique or Scotch sound. Classical scholars ought to set their faces against the double heresy, of trying to enforce, that foreign poe- try, however various, shall be all rendered into one English dialect, and that this shall, in order of words and in diction, closely approximate to polished prose. From an Oxford Professor I should have expected the very opposite spirit to that which Mr. Arnold shows. He ought to know and feel that one glory of Greek poetry is its great internal variety. He admits the principle that old words are a source of ennoblement for diction, when he extols the Bible as his standard : for surely he claims no rhetorical inspiration for the translators. Words which have come to us in a sacred connection, no doubt, gain a sacred hue, but they must not be allowed to desecrate other old and excel- STRONG PHYSICAL WORDS. 89 lent words. Mr. Arnold informs his Oxford hearers that " his Bibliolatry is perhaps excessive." So the public will judge, if he say that wench, whore, pate, pot, gin, damn, busybody, audience, principality, gene- ration, are epical noble words because they are in the Bible, and that lief, ken, in sooth, grim, stalwart, gait, guise, eld, hie, erst, are bad, because they are not there. Nine times out of ten, what are called "poe- tical" words, are nothing but antique words, and are made ignoble by Mr. Arnold's doctrine. His very arbitrary condemnation of eld, lief, in sooth, gait, gentle friend in one passage of mine as " bad words," is probably due to his monomaniac fancy that there is nothing quaint and nothing antique in Homer. Excellent and noble as are these words which he re- bukes, excellent even for iEschylus, I should doubt the propriety of using them in the dialogue of Euri- pides ; on the level of which he seems to think Ho- mer to be. 2. Our language, especially the Saxon part of it, abounds with vigorous monosyllabic verbs, and dis- syllabic frequentatives derived from them, indicative of strong physical action. For these words, (which, I make no doubt, Mr. Arnold regards as ignoble ple- beians,) I claim Quiritarian rights : but I do not wish them to displace patricians from high service. Such verbs as sweat, haul, plump, maul, yell, bang, splash, 90 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. smash, thump, tug, scud, sprawl, spank, etc., I hold (in their purely physical sense) to be eminently epical : for the epic revels in descriptions of violent action to which they are suited. Intense muscular exertion in every form, intense physical action of the surrounding elements, with intense ascription or description of size or colour; — together make up an immense fraction of the poem. To cut out these words is to emasculate the epic. Even Pope admits such words. My eye in turning his pages was just now caught by : "They " tug, they sweat." Who will say that " tug," " sweat " are admissible, but " bang," " smash," " sputter " are inadmissible? Mr. Arnold resents my saying that Homer is often homely. He is homely expressly be- cause he is natural. The epical diction admits both the gigantesque and the homely : it inexorably refuses the conventional, under which is comprised a vast mass of what some wrongly call elegant. But while I justify the use of homely words in a primary phy- sical, I deprecate them in a secondary moral sense. Mr. Arnold clearly is dull to this distinction, or he would not utter against me the following taunt, p. 85 : " To grunt and sweat under a weary load does perfectly well where it comes in Shakspeare : but if the translator of Homer, who will hardly have wound up our minds to the pitch at which these words of Hamlet find them, were to employ, when he has to COARSE METAPHOR. 91 speak of Homer's heroes under the load of calamity, this figure of ' grunting' and 'sweating/ we should say, He Newmanizes." Mr. Arnold here not only makes a mistake, he pro- pagates a slander ; as if I had ever used such words as grunt and siveat morally. If Homer in the Iliad spoke of grunting swine, as he does of sweating steeds, so should I. As the coarse metaphors here quoted from Shakspeare are utterly opposed to Homer's style, to obtrude them on him would be a gross offence. Mr. Arnold sends his readers away with the belief that this is my practice, though he has not dared to assert it. I bear such coarseness in Shakspeare, not because I am " wound up to a high pitch " by him, "borne away by a mighty current," — (which Mr. Arnold, with ingenious unfairness to me, assumes to be certain in a reader of Shakspeare and all but impossible in a reader of Homer,) — but because I know, that in Shakspeare's time all literature was coarse, as was the speech of courtiers and of the queen herself. Mr. Arnold imputes to me Shakspeare's coarseness, from which I instinctively shrink; and when his logic leads to the conclusion, "he Shak- " spearizes," he with gratuitous rancour turns it into " he Newmanizes." Some words which with the Biblical translators seem to have been noble, I should not now dare to 92 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. use in the primitive sense. For instance, " His ini- quity shall fall upon his own pate" Yet I think pate a good metaphorical word and have used it of the sea -waves, in a bold passage, II. 13, 795 : Then on rush'd they, with weight and mass like to a troublous whirlwind, Which from the thundercloud of Jove down on the champaign plumpeth, And doth the briny flood bestir with an unearthly uproar : Then in the everbrawling sea full many a billow splasheth, Hollow, and bald with hoary pate, one racing after other. Is there really no " mighty current " here, to sweep off petty criticism ? I have a remark on the strong physical word "plumpeth" here used. It is fundamentally Mil- ton's, " plumb down he drops ten thousand fathom " deep ;" plumb and plump in this sense are clearly the same root. I confess I have not been able to find the verb in an old writer, though it is so common now. Old writers do not say " to plumb down," but " to drop plumb down." Perhaps in a second edition, (if I reach to it,) I may alter the words to "plumb.. . . " droppeth," on this ground ; but I do turn sick at the mawkishness of critics, one of whom, who ought to know better, tells me that the word plump re- minds him " of the crinolined hoyden of a boarding- " school " ! ! If he had said, " It is too like the phrase HOMERIC VEHEMENCE. 93 " of a sailor, — of a peasant, — of a schoolboy/' this objection would be at least intelligible. However : the word is intended to express the violent impact of a body descending from aloft, — and it does express it. Mr. Arnold censures me for representing Achilles as yelling. He is depicted by the poet as in the most violent physical rage, boiling over with passion and wholly uncontrouled. He smacks his two thighs at once; he rolls on the ground, /jLeyas fjueyaXcoarl ; he denies his hair with dust ; he rends it ; he grinds his teeth; fire flashes from his eyes; but — he may not " yell," that would not be comme il faut ! We shall agree, that in peace nothing so becomes a hero as modest stillness; but that ^'Peleus' son, insatiate of " combat," full of the fiercest pent-up passion, should vent a little of it in a yell, seems to me quite in place. That the Greek Id^wv is not necessarily to be so ren- dered, I am aware; but it is a very vigorous word, like peal and shriek ; neither of which would here suit. I sometimes render it skirl : but " battle-yell " is a received rightful phrase. Achilles is not a stately Virgilian plus JEneas, but is a far wilder barbarian. After Mr. Arnold has laid upon me the sins of Shakspeare, he amazes me by adding, p. 86 : " The idiomatic language of Shakspeare, — such language as ' prate of his whereabout? 'jump the life to come/ — ' the damnation of his taking-off,' — ' quietus make with 94 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. ' a bare bodkin/ should be carefully observed by the translator of Homer ; although in every case he will have to decide for himself, whether the use, by him, of Shakspeare's liberty, will or will not clash with his indispensable duty of nobleness." Of the Shakspearianisms here italicized by Mr. Arnold, there is not one which I could endure to adopt. " His whereabout," I regard as the flattest prose. (The word prate is a plebeian which I admit in its own low places ; but how Mr. Arnold can approve of it, consistently with his attacks on me, I do not understand.) Damnation and Taking-off, (for Guilt and Murder,) and Jump, I absolutely reject; and " quietus make" would be nothing but an utterly in- admissible quotation from Shakspeare. Jump as an active verb is to me monstrous, but Jump is just the sort of modern prose word which is not noble. Leap, Bound, for great action, Skip, Frisk, Gambol for smaller, are all good. I have shown against Mr. Arnold, (1) that Homer was out-and-out antiquated to the Athenians, even when perfectly understood by them ; (2) that his con- ceptions, similes, phraseology and epithets are habi- tually quaint, strange, unparalleled in Greek litera- ture ; and pardonable only to semibarbarism ; (3) that they are intimately related to his noblest excellencies ; (4) that many words are so peculiar as to be still COARSE PHYSICAL WORDS. 95 doubtful to us j (5) I have indicated that some of his descriptions and conceptions are horrible to us, though they were not so to his barbaric auditors j (6) that considerable portions of the poem are not poetry, but rhythmical prose like Horace's Satires, and are in- teresting to us not as poetry but as portraying the manners or sentiments of the day. I now add (7) what is inevitable in all high and barbaric poetry, — perhaps in all high poetry, — many of his energetic descriptions are expressed in coarse physical words. I do not here attempt proof, for it might need a trea- tise : but I give one illustration ; II. 13, 136, T/xwe? irpovrvy^av aoWees. Cowper, misled by the ignis fatuus of " stateliness," renders it absurdly TliepowWs of Ilium gave the first assault, Embattled close ; but it is strictly, "The Trojans knocked-forward (or, " thumped, butted, forward) in close pack." The verb is too coarse for later polished prose, and even the adjective is very strong [packed together) . I believe, that " Forward in pack the Troians pitch' d" would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour ; and I maintain that " Forward in mass the Troians pitched," would be an irreprovable rendering. Dryden in this respect is in entire harmony with Homeric style. No critic deals fairly with me in 96 HOMERIC TRANSLATION. isolating any of these strong words, and then appeal- ing to his readers whether I am not ignoble. Hereby he deprives me of the aycov, the " mighty current" of Mr. Arnold, and he misstates the problem ; which is, whether the word is suitable, then and there, for the work required of it, as the coalman at the pit, the clown in the furrow, the huntsman in the open field. 3. There is a small number of words, not natural plebeians, but patricians on which a most unjust bill of attainder has been passed, which I seek to reverse. On the first which I name, Mr. Arnold will side with me, because it is a Biblical word, — wench. In Lan- cashire I believe that at the age of about sixteen a ct gi r i" turns into " a wench," or as we say " a young " woman." In Homer, " girl" and " young woman" are alike inadmissible ; " maid" or " maiden" will not always suit, and u wench" is the natural word. I do not know that I have used it three times, but I claim a right of using it, and protest against allowing the heroes of slang to deprive us of excellent words by their perverse misuse. If the imaginations of some men are always in satire and in low slang, so much the worse for them : but the more we yield to such demands, the more will be exacted. I expect, before long, to be told that brick is an ignoble word, mean- ing a jolly fellow, and that sell, cut are out of place in Homer. My metre, it seems, is inadmissible with MISUSED WORDS. 97 some, because it is the metre of Yankee Doodle ! as if Homer's metre were not that of the Margites. Every noble poem is liable to be travestied, as the Iliad and iEschylus and Shakspeare have been. Every burlesque writer uses the noble metre, and caricatures the noble style. Mr. Arnold says, I must not render Tavv7re7r\o<; " trailing-rob'd," because it reminds him of " long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement." "What a confession as to the state of his imagination ! Why not, of "a queen's robe trailing on a marble " pavement" ? Did he never read iveiikov /xiv KaTe^evev eavbv narpos in ovdei ? I have digressed: I return to words which have been misunderstood. A second word is of more im- portance, Imp ; which properly means a Graft. The best translation of Lt- m Mm.,, rJhi£Mi