■■ 

 
 BRARY ^ 
 
 /^GITY OF 
 
 L.FOI3NIA 
 
 RVINE 
 
 J
 
 IS- 1 

 
 ON THE 
 
 STUDY OF CELTIC LITERATURE 
 
 AND ON 
 
 TRANSLATING HOMER
 
 ON THE STUDY 
 
 OF 
 
 CELTIC LITEBATUBE 
 
 AND ON 
 
 TRANSLATING HOMES 
 
 BY 
 
 MATTHEW AKNOLD 
 
 £efo gorfe 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1898 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.
 
 ON THE 
 
 STUDY OF CELTIC LITEEATUKE 
 
 VOL II.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The following remarks on the study of Celtic Litera- 
 ture formed the substance of four lectures given by 
 me last year and the year before in the chair of 
 poetry at Oxford. They were first published in the 
 Cornhill Magazine, and are now reprinted from thence. 
 Again and again, in the course of them, I have marked 
 the very humble scope intended ; which is, not to 
 treat any special branch of scientific Celtic studies (a 
 task for which I am quite incompetent), but to point 
 out the many directions in which the results of those 
 studies offer matter of general interest, and to insist 
 on the benefit we may all derive from knowing the 
 Celt and things Celtic more thoroughly. It was im- 
 possible, however, to avoid touching on certain points 
 of ethnology and philology, which can be securely 
 handled only by those who have made these sciences 
 the object of special study. Here the mere literary 
 critic must owe his whole safety to his tact in choos- 
 ing authorities to follow, and whatever he advances 
 must be understood as advanced with a sense of the 
 insecurity which, after all, attaches to such a mode of
 
 Vlll INTRODUCTION. 
 
 proceeding, and as put forward provisionally, by way 
 of hypothesis rather than of confident assertion. 
 
 To mark clearly to the reader both this provisional 
 character of much which I advance, and my own 
 sense of it, I have inserted, as a check upon some of 
 the positions adopted in the text, notes and comments 
 with which Lord Strangford has kindly furnished me. 
 Lord Strangford is hardly less distinguished for know- 
 ing ethnology and languages so scientifically than for 
 knowing so much of them ; and his interest, even 
 from the vantage-ground of his scientific knowledge, 
 and after making all due reserves on points of scien- 
 tific detail, in my treatment, — with merely the re- 
 sources and point of view of a literary critic at my 
 command, — of such a subject as the study of Celtic 
 Literature, is the most encouraging assurance I could 
 have received that my attempt is not altogether a 
 vain one. 
 
 Both Lord Strangford and others whose opinion I 
 respect have said that I am unjust in calling Mr. 
 Nash, the acute and learned author of Taliesin, or the 
 Bards and Druids of Britain, a "Celt-hater." "He is 
 a denouncer," says Lord Strangford in a note on this 
 expression, " of Celtic extravagance, that is all ; he is 
 an anti-Philocelt, a very different thing from an anti- 
 Celt, and quite indispensable in scientific inquiry. 
 As Philoceltism has hitherto,— hitherto, remember, — 
 meant nothing but uncritical acceptance and irrational 
 admiration of the beloved object's sayings and doings, 
 without reference to truth one way or the other, it is 
 surely in the interest of science to support him in the
 
 INTRODUCTION. IX 
 
 main. In tracing the workings of old Celtic leaven 
 in poems which embody the Celtic soul of all time in a 
 mediaeval form, I do not see that you come into any 
 necessary opposition with him, for your concern is with 
 the spirit, his with the substance only." I entirely agree 
 with almost all which Lord Strangford here urges, 
 and indeed, so sincere is my respect for Mr. Nash's 
 critical discernment and learning, and so unhesitating 
 my recognition of the usefulness, in many respects, 
 of the work of demolition performed by him, that in 
 originally designating him as a Celt-hater, I hastened 
 to add, as the reader will see by referring to the pass- 
 age, 1 words of explanation and apology for so calling 
 him. But I thought then, and I think still, that Mr. 
 Nash, in pursuing his work of demolition, too much 
 puts out of sight the positive and constructive per- 
 formance for which this work of demolition is to clear 
 the ground. I thought then, and I think still, that 
 in this Celtic controversy, as in other controversies, 
 it is most desirable both to believe and to profess 
 that the work of construction is the fruitful and im- 
 portant work, and that we are demolishing only to 
 prepare for it. Mr. Nash's scepticism seems to me, — 
 in the aspect in which his work, on the whole, shows 
 it, — too absolute, too stationary, too much without a 
 future ; and this tends to make it, for the non-Celtic 
 part of his readers, less fruitful than it otherwise 
 would be, and for his Celtic readers, harsh and repel- 
 lent. I have therefore suffered my remarks on Mr. 
 Nash still to stand, though with a little modification ; 
 
 1 See p. 2G of the following essay.
 
 X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 but I hope he will read them by the light of these 
 explanations, and that he will believe my sense of 
 esteem for his work to be a thousand times stronger 
 than my sense of difference from it. 
 
 To lead towards solid ground, where the Celt may 
 with legitimate satisfaction point to traces of the 
 gifts and workings of his race, and where the English- 
 man may find himself induced to sympathise with 
 that satisfaction and to feel an interest in it, is the 
 design of all the considerations urged in the following 
 essay. Kindly taking the will for the deed, a Welsh- 
 man and an old acquaintance of mine, Mr. Hugh 
 Owen, received my remarks with so much cordiality, 
 that he asked me to come to the Eisteddfod last 
 summer at Chester, and there to read a paper on 
 some topic of Celtic literature or antiquities. In an- 
 swer to this flattering proposal of Mr. Owen's, I wrote 
 him a letter which appeared at the time in several 
 newspapers, and of which the following extract pre- 
 serves all that is of any importance : — 
 
 " My knowledge of Welsh matters is so utterly in- 
 significant that it would be impertinence in me, under 
 any circumstances, to talk about those matters to an 
 assemblage of persons, many of whom have passed 
 their lives in studying them. 
 
 " Your gathering acquires more interest every year. 
 Let me venture to say that you have to avoid two 
 dangers in order to work all the good which your 
 friends could desire. You have to avoid the danger 
 of giving offence to practical men by retarding the 
 spread of the English language in the principality.
 
 INTRODUCTION. xi 
 
 I believe that to preserve and honour the Welsh lan- 
 guage and literature is quite compatible with not 
 thwarting or delaying for a single hour the introduc- 
 tion, so undeniably useful, of a knowledge of English 
 among all classes in Wales. 5Tou have to avoid, again, 
 the danger of alienating men of science by a blind, 
 partial, and uncritical treatment of your national 
 antiquities. Mr. Stephens's excellent book, The Litera- 
 ture of the Cymry, shows how perfectly Welshmen can 
 avoid this danger if they will. 
 
 " When I see the enthusiasm these Eisteddfods 
 can awaken in your whole people, and then think of 
 the tastes, the literature, the amusements, of our 
 own lower and middle class, I am filled with admira- 
 tion for you. It is a consoling thought, and one 
 which history allows us to entertain, that nations 
 disinherited of political success may yet leave their 
 mark on the world's progress, and contribute power- 
 fully to the civilisation of mankind. We in England 
 have come to that point when the continued advance 
 and greatness of our nation is threatened by one 
 cause, and one cause above all. Far more than by 
 the helplessness of an aristocracy whose day is fast 
 coming to an end, far more than by the rawness of 
 a lower class whose day is only just beginning, we 
 are imperilled by what I call the 'Philistinism' of 
 our middle class. On the side of beauty and taste, 
 vulgarity ; on the side of morals and feeling, coarse- 
 ness ; on the side of mind and spirit, unintelligence, 
 — this is Philistinism. Now, then, is the moment 
 for the greater delicacy and spirituality of the Celtic
 
 Xll INTRODUCTION. 
 
 peoples who are blended with us, if it be but wisely- 
 directed, to make itself prized and honoured. In a 
 certain measure the children of Taliesin and Ossian 
 have now an opportunity for renewing the famous 
 feat of the Greeks, and conquering their conquerors. 
 No service England can render the Celts by giving 
 you a share in her many good qualities, can surpass 
 that which the Celts can at this moment render 
 England, by communicating to us some of theirs." 
 
 Now certainly, in that letter, written to a Welsh- 
 man and on the occasion of a Welsh festival, I 
 enlarged on the merits of the Celtic spirit and of its 
 works, rather than on their demerits. It would have 
 been offensive and inhuman to do otherwise. When 
 an acquaintance asks you to write his father's epitaph, 
 you do not generally seize that opportunity for saying 
 that his father was blind of one eye, and had an un- 
 fortunate habit of not paying his tradesmen's bills. 
 But the weak side of Celtism and of its Celtic glori- 
 fiers, the danger against which they have to guard, 
 is clearly indicated in that letter ; and in the remarks 
 reprinted in this volume, — remarks which were the 
 original cause of Mr. Owen's writinsr to me, and 
 must have been fully present to his mind when he 
 read my letter, — the shortcomings both of the Celtic 
 race, and of the Celtic students of its literature and 
 antiquities, are unreservedly marked, and, so far as 
 is necessary, blamed. 1 It was, indeed, not my 
 purpose to make blame the chief part of what I 
 said; for the Celts, like other people, are to be 
 
 1 See particularly pp. 9, 10, 11, of the following essay.
 
 INTRODUCTION. Xlll 
 
 meliorated rather by developing their gifts than 
 by chastising their defects. The wise man, says 
 Spinoza admirably, "de humana impotentia non 
 nisi parce loqui curabit, at largiter de humana virtute 
 seu potentia." But so far as condemnation of Celtic 
 failure was needful towards preparing the way for 
 the growth of Celtic virtue, I used condemnation. 
 
 The Times, however, prefers a shorter and sharper 
 method of dealing with the Celts, and in a couple of 
 leading articles, having the Chester Eisteddfod and 
 my letter to Mr. Hugh Owen for their text, it de- 
 veloped with great frankness, and in its usual 
 forcible style, its own views for the amelioration of 
 Wales and its people. Cease to do evil, learn to do 
 good, was the upshot of its exhortations to the 
 Welsh; by evil, the Times understanding all things 
 Celtic, and by good, all things English. " The Welsh 
 language is the curse of Wales. Its prevalence, and 
 the ignorance of English have excluded, and even 
 now exclude the Welsh people from the civilisation 
 of their English neighbours. An Eisteddfod is one 
 of the most mischievous and selfish pieces of senti- 
 mentalism which could possibly be perpetrated. It 
 is simply a foolish interference with the natural 
 progress of civilisation and prosperity. If it is 
 desirable that the Welsh should talk English, it is 
 monstrous folly to encourage them in a loving 
 fondness for their old language. Not only the 
 energy and power, but the intelligence and music 
 of Europe have come mainly from Teutonic sources, 
 and this glorification of everything Celtic, if it were
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION. 
 
 not pedantry, would be sheer ignorance. The sooner 
 all Welsh specialities disappear from the face of the 
 earth the better." 
 
 And I need hardly say that I myself, as so often 
 happens to me at the hands of my own countrymen, 
 was cruelly judged by the Times, and most severely 
 treated. What I said to Mr. Owen about the spread 
 of the English language in Wales being quite com- 
 patible with preserving and honouring the Welsh 
 language and literature, was tersely set down as 
 "arrant nonsense," and I was characterised as "a 
 sentimentalist who talks nonsense about the children 
 of Taliesin and Ossian, and whose dainty taste re- 
 quires something more flimsy than the strong sense 
 and sturdy morality of his fellow Englishmen." 
 
 As I said before, I am unhappily inured to having 
 these harsh interpretations put by my fellow English- 
 men upon what I write, and I no longer cry out about 
 it. And then, too, I have made a study of the 
 Corinthian or leading article style, and know its exi- 
 gences, and that they are no more to be quarrelled 
 with than the law of gravitation. So, for my part, 
 when I read these asperities of the Times, my mind 
 did not dwell very much on my own concern in them ; 
 but what I said to myself, as I put the newspaper 
 down, was this : " Behold England's difficulty in govern- 
 ing Ireland ! " 
 
 I pass by the dauntless assumption that the 
 agricultural peasant whom we in England, without 
 Eisteddfods, succeed in developing, is so much finer 
 a product of civilisation than the Welsh peasant, re-
 
 INTRODUCTION. XV 
 
 tarded by these "pieces of sentimentalism." I will 
 be content to suppose that our "strong sense and 
 sturdy morality " are as admirable and as universal as 
 the Times pleases. But even supposing this, I will 
 ask : Did any one ever hear of strong sense and sturdy 
 morality being thrust down other people's throats in 
 this fashion 1 Might not these divine English gifts, 
 and the English language in which they are preached, 
 have a better chance of making their way among the 
 poor Celtic heathen, if the English apostle delivered 
 his message a little more agreeably 1 There is nothing 
 like love and admiration for bringing people to a like- 
 ness with what they love and admire ; but the 
 Englishman seems never to dream of employing these 
 influences upon a race he wants to fuse with himself. 
 He employs simply material interests for his work of 
 fusion ; and, beyond these, nothing except scorn and 
 rebuke. Accordingly there is no vital union between 
 him and the races he has annexed ; and while France 
 can truly boast of her " magnificent unity," a unity of 
 spirit no less than of name between all the people 
 who compose her, in England the Englishman proper 
 is in union of spirit with no one except other English- 
 men proper like himself. His Welsh and Irish fellow- 
 citizens are hardly more amalgamated with him now 
 than they were when Wales and Ireland were first 
 conquered, and the true unity of even these small 
 islands has yet to be achieved. When these papers 
 of mine on the Celtic genius and literature first 
 appeared in the Comhitt Magazine, they brought me, 
 as was natural, many communications from Welsh-
 
 XVI INTKODUCTION. 
 
 men and Irishmen having an interest in the subject : 
 and one could not but be painfully struck, in reading 
 these communications, to see how profound a feeling 
 of aversion and severance from the English they in 
 general manifested. Who can be surprised at it, 
 when he observes the strain of the Times in the 
 articles just quoted, and remembers that this is the 
 characteristic strain of the Englishman in commenting 
 on whatsoever is not himself? And then, with our 
 boundless faith in machinery, we English expect the 
 Welshman as a matter of course to grow attached 
 to us, because we invite him to do business with 
 us, and let him hold any number of public meet- 
 ings and publish all the newspapers he likes ! 
 When shall we learn that what attaches people to 
 us is the spirit we are of, and not the machinery we 
 employ 1 
 
 Last year there was a project of holding a Breton 
 Eisteddfod at Quimper in Brittany, and the French 
 Home Secretary, whether wishing to protect the 
 magnificent unity of France from inroads of Bre- 
 tonism, or fearing lest the design should be used in 
 furtherance of Legitimist intrigues, or from whatever 
 motive, issued an order which prohibited the meeting. 
 If Mr. Walpole had issued an order prohibiting the 
 Chester Eisteddfod, all the Englishmen from Corn- 
 wall to John 0' Groat's House would have rushed to 
 the rescue ; and our strong sense and sturdy morality 
 would never have stopped gnashing their teeth and 
 rending their garments till the prohibition was 
 rescinded. What a pity our strong sense and sturdy
 
 INTRODUCTION. XVll 
 
 morality fail to perceive that words like those of 
 the Times create a far keener sense of estrangement 
 and dislike than acts like those of the French 
 Minister ! Acts like those of the French Minister 
 are attributed to reasons of State, and the Govern- 
 ment is held blamable for them, not the French 
 people. Articles like those of the Times are attri- 
 buted to the want of sympathy and of sweetness of 
 disposition in the English nature, and the whole 
 English people gets the blame of them. And deser- 
 vedly ; for from some such ground of want of 
 sympathy and sweetness in the English nature, do 
 articles like those of the Times come, and to some 
 such ground do they make appeal. The sympathetic 
 and social virtues of the French nature, on the other 
 hand, actually repair the breaches made by oppressive 
 deeds of the Government, and create, among popula- 
 tions joined with France as the Welsh and Irish are 
 joined with England, a sense of liking and attachment 
 towards the French people. The French Government 
 may discourage the German language in Alsace 
 and prohibit Eisteddfods in Brittany ; but the 
 Journal des Debats never treats German music and 
 poetry as mischievous lumber, nor tells the Bretons 
 that the sooner all Breton specialities disappear from 
 the face of the earth the better. Accordingly, the 
 Bretons and Alsatians have come to feel themselves a 
 part of France, and to feel pride in bearing the French 
 name ; while the Welsh and Irish obstinately refuse 
 to amalgamate with us, and will not admire the 
 Englishman as he admires himself, however much
 
 XVlll INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the Times may scold them and rate them, and assure 
 them there is nobody on earth so admirable. 
 
 And at what a moment does it assure them of 
 this, good heavens ! At a moment when the ice is 
 breaking up in England, and we are all beginning at 
 last to see how much real confusion and insufficiency 
 it covered ; when, whatever may be the merits, — and 
 they are great,— of the Englishman and of his strong 
 sense and sturdy moralitj^, it is growing more and 
 more evident that, if he is to endure and advance, he 
 must transform himself, must add something to his 
 strong sense and sturdy morality, or at least must 
 give to these excellent gifts of his a new development. 
 My friend, Mr. Goldwin Smith, says, in his eloquent 
 way, that England is the favourite of Heaven. Far 
 be it from me to say that England is not the favourite 
 of Heaven ; but at this moment she reminds me 
 more of what the prophet Isaiah calls, " a bull in a 
 net." She has satisfied herself in all departments 
 with clap- trap and routine so long, and she is now so 
 astounded at finding they will not serve her turn any 
 longer ! And this is the moment, when Englishism 
 pure and simple, which with all its fine qualities 
 managed always to make itself singularly unattrac- 
 tive, is losing that imperturbable faith in its untrans- 
 formed self which at any rate made it imposing, — this 
 is the moment when our great organ tells the Celts 
 that everything of theirs not English is " simply 
 a foolish interference with the natural progress of 
 civilisation and prosperity ; " and poor Talhaiarn, 
 venturing to remonstrate, is commanded "to drop
 
 INTRODUCTION. XIX 
 
 his outlandish title, and to refuse even to talk Welsh 
 in Wales ! " 
 
 But let us leave the dead to bury their dead, and 
 let us who are alive go on unto perfection. Let the 
 Celtic members of this empire consider that they too 
 have to transform themselves ; and though the sum- 
 mons to transform themselves be often conveyed 
 harshly and brutally, and with the cry to root up 
 their Avheat as well as their tares, yet that is no 
 reason why the summons should not be followed so 
 far as their tares are concerned. Let them consider 
 that they are inextricably bound up with us, and 
 that, if the suggestions in the following pages have 
 any truth, we English, alien and uncongenial to our 
 Celtic partners as we may have hitherto shown our- 
 selves, have notwithstanding, beyond perhaps any 
 other nation, a thousand latent springs of possible 
 sympathy with them. Let them consider that new 
 ideas and forces are stirring in England, that day by 
 day these new ideas and forces gain in power, and 
 that almost every one of them is the friend of the 
 Celt and not his enemy. And, whether our Celtic 
 partners will consider this or no, at any rate let us 
 ourselves, all of us who are proud of being the 
 ministers of these new ideas, work incessantly to 
 procure for them a wider and more fruitful applica- 
 tion ; and to remove the main ground of the Celt's 
 alienation from the Englishman, by substituting, in 
 place of that type of Englishman with whom alone 
 the Celt has too long been familiar, a new type, more 
 intelligent, more gracious, and more humane.
 
 ON THE STUDY 
 
 OF 
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 
 
 " They went forth to the war, but they always fell." 
 
 Ossian. 
 
 The summer before last I spent some weeks at Llan- 
 dudno, on the Welsh coast. The best lodging-houses 
 at Llandudno look eastward, towards Liverpool ; and 
 from that Saxon hive swarms are incessantly issuing, 
 crossing the bay, and taking possession of the beach 
 and the lodging-houses. Guarded by the Great and 
 Little Orme's Head, and alive with the Saxon invaders 
 from Liverpool, the eastern bay is an attractive point 
 of interest, and many visitors to Llandudno never 
 contemplate anything else. But, putting aside the 
 charm of the Liverpool steamboats, perhaps the view, 
 on this side, a little dissatisfies one after a while ; the 
 horizon wants mystery, the sea wants beauty, the 
 coast wants verdure, and has a too bare austereness 
 and aridity. At last one turns round and looks west- 
 ward. Everything is changed. Over the mouth of 
 the Conway and its sands is the eternal softness and 
 mild light of the west; the low line of the mystic 
 
 VOL. II. & B
 
 2 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 Anglesey, and the precipitous Penmaenmawr, and 
 the great group of Carnedd Llewelyn and Carnedd 
 David and their brethren fading away, hill behind 
 hill, in an aerial haze, make the horizon ; between 
 the foot of Penmaenmawr and the bending coast of 
 Anglesey, the sea, a silver stream, disappears one 
 knows not whither. On this side, Wales, — Wales, 
 where the past still lives, where every place has its 
 tradition, every name its poetry, and where the 
 people, the genuine people, still knows this past, this 
 tradition, this poetry, and lives with it, and clings to 
 it; while, alas, the prosperous Saxon on the other 
 side, the invader from Liverpool and Birkenhead, has 
 long ago forgotten his. And the promontory where 
 Llandudno stands is the very centre of this tradition ; 
 it is Creuddyn, the bloody city, where every stone has 
 its story ; there, opposite its decaying rival, Conway 
 Castle, is Diganwy, not decaying but long since 
 utterly decayed, some crumbling foundations on a 
 crag-top and nothing more ; — Diganwy, where Mael- 
 gwyn shut up Elphin, and where Taliesin came to 
 free him. Below, in a fold of the hill, is Llan-rhos, 
 the church of the marsh, where the same Mael-gwyn, 
 a British prince of real history, a bold and licentious 
 chief, the original, it is said, of Arthur's Lancelot, 
 shut himself up in the church to avoid the Yellow 
 Plague, and peeped out through a hole in the door, 
 and saw the monster and died. Behind among the 
 woods, is Glod-daeth, the place of feasting, where the 
 bards were entertained ; and farther away, up the 
 valley of the Conway towards Llanrwst, is the Lake
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 3 
 
 of Ceirionydd and Taliesin's grave. Or, again, look- 
 ing seawards and Anglesey- wards, you have Pen-mon, 
 Seiriol's isle and priory, where Mael-gwyn lies buried ; 
 you have the Sands of Lamentation and Llys Helig, 
 Heilig's Mansion, a mansion under the waves, a sea- 
 buried palace and realm. Hac ibat Simois ; hie est 
 Sigeia tellus. 
 
 As I walked up and down, last August year, look- 
 ing at the waves as they washed this Sigeian land 
 which has never had its Homer, and listening with 
 curiosity to the strange, unfamiliar speech of its old pos- 
 sessors' obscure descendants, — bathing people, vege- 
 table-sellers, and donkey boys, — who were all about 
 me, suddenly I heard, through the stream of unknown 
 Welsh, words, not English, indeed, but still familiar. 
 They came from a French nursery-maid with some 
 children. Profoundly ignorant of her relationship, 
 this Gaulish Celt moved among her British cousins, 
 speaking her polite neo-Latin tongue, and full of 
 compassionate contempt, probably, for the Welsh 
 barbarians and their jargon. What a revolution was 
 here ! How had the star of this daughter of Gomer 
 waxed, while the star of these Cymry, his sons, had 
 waned ! What a difference of fortune in the two, 
 since the days when, speaking the same language, 
 they left their common dwelling-place in the heart of 
 Asia; since the Cimmerians of the Euxine came in 
 upon their western kinsmen, the sons of the giant 
 Galates ; since the sisters, Gaul and Britain, cut the 
 mistletoe in their forests, and saw the coming of 
 Csesar ! Blanc, rouge, rocher, champ, e'glise, seigneur, —
 
 4 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 these words, by which the Gallo-Eoman Celt now 
 names white, and red, and rock, and field, and church, 
 and lord, are no part of the speech of his true ances- 
 tors, they are words he has" learnt ; but since he 
 learned them they have had a world-wide success, and 
 we all teach them to our children, and armies speak- 
 ing them have domineered in every city of that Ger- 
 many by which the British Celt was broken, and in 
 the train of these armies, Saxon auxiliaries, a humbled 
 contingent, have been fain to follow; — the poor Welsh- 
 man still says, in the genuine tongue of his ancestors, 1 
 
 1 Lord Strangford remarks on this passage : — "Your Gomer 
 and your Cimmerians are of course only lay figures, to be ac- 
 cepted in the rhetorical and subjective sense. As such I accept 
 them, but I enter a protest against the ' genuine tongue of his 
 ancestors. ' Modern Celtic tongues are to the old Celtic heard 
 by Julius CiBsar, broadly speaking, what the modern Romanic 
 tongues are to Caesar's own Latin. "Welsh, in fact, is a detritus; 
 a language in the category of modern French, or, to speak less 
 roughly and with a closer approximation, of old Provencal, 
 not in the category of Lithuanian, much less in the category of 
 Basque. By true inductive research, based on an accurate 
 comparison of such forms of Celtic speech, oral and recorded, as 
 we now possess, modern philology has, in so far as was possible, 
 succeeded in restoring certain forms of the parent speech, and 
 in so doing has achieved not the least striking of its many 
 triumphs ; for those very forms thus restored have since been 
 verified past all cavil by their actual discovery in the old Gaulish 
 inscriptions recently come to light. The phoncsis of Welsh as 
 it stands is modern, not xnimitive ; its grammar, — the verbs 
 excepted, — is constructed out of the fragments of its earlier 
 forms, and its vocabulary is strongly Bomanised, two out of 
 the six words here given being Latin of the Empire. Rightly 
 understood, this enhances the value of modern Celtic instead 
 of depreciating it, because it serves to rectify it. To me it is a 
 wonder that Welsh should have retained so much of its in-
 
 CELTIC LITEEATUEE. 5 
 
 givyn, goch, aravj, maes, llan, arglivydd ; but his land is 
 a province, and his history petty, and his Saxon sub- 
 duers scout his speech as an obstacle to civilisation ; 
 and the echo of all its kindred in other lands is grow- 
 ing every day fainter and more feeble ; gone in 
 Cornwall, going in Brittany and the Scotch High- 
 lands, going, too, in Ireland; — and there, above all, 
 the badge of the beaten race, the property of the 
 vanquished. 
 
 But the Celtic genius was just then preparing, in 
 Llandudno, to have its hour of revival. Workmen 
 were busy in putting up a large tent-like wooden 
 building, which attracted the eye of every new- 
 comer, and which my little boys believed (their 
 wish, no doubt, being father to their belief) to be a 
 circus. It turned out, however, to be no circus for 
 Castor and Pollux, but a temple for Apollo and the 
 Muses. It was the place where the Eisteddfod, or 
 Bardic Congress of Wales, was about to be held ; a 
 meeting which has for its object (I quote the words 
 of its promoters) " the diffusion of useful knowledge, 
 the eliciting of native talent, and the cherishing of 
 love of home and honourable fame by the cultivation 
 of poetry, music, and art." My little boys were dis- 
 appointed ; but I, whose circus days are over, I, who 
 have a professional interest in poetry, and who, also, 
 hating all one-sidedness and oppression, wish nothing 
 
 tegrity under the iron pressure of four hundred years of Koman 
 dominion. Modern Welsh tenacity and cohesive power under 
 English pressure is nothing compared with what that must have 
 heen."
 
 6 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 better than that the Celtic genius should be able to 
 show itself to the world and to make its voice heard, 
 was delighted. I took my ticket, and waited im- 
 patiently for the day of opening. The day came, an 
 unfortunate one ; storms of wind, clouds of dust, an 
 angry, dirty sea. The Saxons who arrived by the 
 Liverpool steamers looked miserable ; even the Welsh 
 who arrived by land, — whether they were discom- 
 posed by the bad morning, or by the monstrous and 
 crashing tax which the London and North- Western 
 Eailway Company levies on all whom it transports 
 across those four miles of marshy peninsula between 
 Conway and Llandudno, — did not look happy. First 
 we went to the Gorsedd, or preliminary congress for 
 conferring the degree of bard. The Gorsedd was 
 held in the open air, at the windy corner of a street, 
 and the morning was not favourable to open-air 
 solemnities. The Welsh, too, share, it seems to me, 
 with their Saxon invaders, an inaptitude for show and 
 spectacle. Show and spectacle are better managed 
 by the Latin race, and those whom it has moulded ; 
 the Welsh, like us, are a little awkward and resource- 
 less in the organisation of a festival. The presiding 
 genius of the mystic circle, in our hideous nineteenth 
 century costume relieved only by a green scarf, the 
 wind drowning his voice and the dust powdering 
 his whiskers, looked thoroughly wretched : so did 
 the aspirants for bardic honours ; and I believe, 
 after about an hour of it, we all of us, as we 
 stood shivering round the sacred stones, began half 
 to wish for the Druid's sacrificial knife to end our
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 7 
 
 sufferings. But the Druid's knife is gone from his 
 hands ; so we sought the shelter of the Eisteddfod 
 building. 
 
 The sight inside was not lively. The president 
 and his supporters mustered strong on the platform. 
 On the floor the one or two front benches were pretty 
 well filled, but their occupants were for the most part 
 Saxons, who came there from curiosity, not from en- 
 thusiasm ; and all the middle and back benches, 
 where should have been the true enthusiasts, — the 
 Welsh people, — were nearly empty. The president, 
 I am sure, showed a national spirit which was admir- 
 able. He addressed us Saxons in our own language, 
 and called us " the English branch of the descendants 
 of the ancient Britons." We received the compli- 
 ment with the impassive dulness which is the charac- 
 teristic of our nature ; and the lively Celtic nature, 
 which should have made up for the dulness of ours, 
 was absent. A lady who sat by me, and who was 
 the wife, I found, of a distinguished bard on the 
 platform, told me, with emotion in her look and 
 voice, how dear were these solemnities to the heart 
 of her people, how deep was the interest which is 
 aroused by them. I believe her, but still the whole 
 performance, on that particular morning, was incur- 
 ably lifeless. The recitation of the prize composi- 
 tions began : pieces of verse and prose in the Welsh 
 language, an essay on punctuality being, if I remem- 
 ber right, one of them ; a poem on the march of 
 Havelock, another. This went on for some time. 
 Then Dr. Vaughan, — the well-known Nonconformist
 
 8 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 minister, a Welshman, and a good patriot, — ad 
 dressed us in English. His speech was a powerful 
 one, and he succeeded, I confess, in sending a faint 
 thrill through our front benches ; but it was the old 
 familiar thrill which we have all of us felt a thousand 
 times in Saxon chapels and meeting-halls, and had 
 nothing bardic about it. I stepped out, and in the 
 street I came across an acquaintance fresh from Lon- 
 don and the parliamentary session. In a moment 
 the spell of the Celtic genius was forgotten, the 
 Philistinism of our Saxon nature made itself felt; 
 and my friend and I walked up and down by the 
 roaring waves, talking not of ovates and bards, and 
 triads and englyns, but of the sewage question, and 
 the glories of our local self-government, and the 
 mysterious perfections of the Metropolitan Board of 
 Works. 
 
 I believe it is admitted, even by the admirers of 
 Eisteddfods in general, that this particular Eistedd- 
 fod was not a success. Llandudno, it is said, was not 
 the right place for it. Held in Conway Castle, as a 
 few years ago it was, and its spectators, — an enthu- 
 siastic multitude, — filling the grand old ruin, I can 
 imagine it a most impressive and interesting sight, 
 even to a stranger labouring under the terrible dis- 
 advantage of being ignorant of the Welsh language. 
 But even seen as I saw it at Llandudno, it had the 
 power to set one thinking. An Eisteddfod is, no 
 doubt, a kind of Olympic meeting; and that the 
 common people of Wales should care for such a 
 thing, shows something Greek in them, something
 
 CELTIC LITERATUEE. \) 
 
 spiritual, something humane, something (I am afraid 
 one must add) which in the English common people 
 is not to be found. This line of reflection has been 
 followed by the accomplished Bishop of St. David's, 
 and by the Saturday Review ; it is just, it is fruitful, 
 and those who pursued it merit our best thanks. 
 But, from peculiar circumstances, the Llandudno 
 meeting was, as I have said, such as not at all to 
 suggest ideas of Olympia, and of a multitude touched 
 liy the divine flame, and hanging on the lips of 
 Pindar. It rather suggested the triumph of the 
 prosaic, practical Saxon, and the approaching extinc- 
 tion of an enthusiasm which he derides as factitious, 
 a literature which he disdains as trash, a language 
 which he detests as a nuisance. 
 
 I must say I quite share the opinion of my brother 
 Saxons as to the practical inconvenience of perpe- 
 tuating the speaking of Welsh. It may cause a 
 moment's distress to one's imagination when one 
 hears that the last Cornwall peasant who spoke the 
 old tongue of Cornwall is dead ; but, no doubt, Corn- 
 wall is the better for adopting English, for becoming- 
 more thoroughly one with the rest of the country. 
 The fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into 
 one homogeneous, English-speaking whole, the break- 
 ing down of barriers between us, the swallowing up 
 of separate provincial nationalities, is a consummation 
 to which the natural course of things irresistibly 
 tends ; it is a necessity of what is called modern 
 civilisation, and modern civilisation is a real, legiti- 
 mate force ; the change must come, and its accomplish-
 
 10 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 ment is a mere affair of time. The sooner the Welsh 
 language disappears as an instrument of the practical, 
 political, social life of Wales, the better; the better 
 for England, the better for Wales itself. Traders 
 and tourists do excellent service by pushing the Eng- 
 lish wedge farther and farther into the heart of the 
 principality ; Ministers of Education, by hammering 
 it harder and harder into the elementary schools. 
 Nor, perhaps, can one have much sympathy with the 
 literary cultivation of Welsh as an instrument of 
 living literature ; and in this respect Eisteddfods en- 
 courage, I think, a fantastic and mischief-working 
 delusion. For all serious purposes in modern litera- 
 ture (and trifling purposes in it who would care to 
 encourage ?) the language of a Welshman is and must 
 be English ; if an Eisteddfod author has anything to 
 say about punctuality or about the march of Have- 
 lock, he had much better say it in English ; or 
 rather, perhaps, what he has to say on these subjects 
 may as well be said in Welsh, but the moment he 
 has anything of real importance to say, anything the 
 world will the least care to hear, he must speak Eng- 
 lish. Dilettanteism might possibly do much harm 
 here, might mislead and waste and bring to nought 
 a genuine talent. For all modern purposes, I repeat, 
 let us all as soon as possible be one people ; let the 
 Welshman speak English, and, if he is an author, let 
 him write English. 
 
 So far, I go along with the stream of my brother 
 Saxons ; but here, I imagine, I part company with 
 them. They will have nothing to do with the Welsh
 
 CELTIC LITEEATURE. 11 
 
 language and literature on any terms ; they would 
 gladly make a clean sweep of it from the face of 
 the earth. I, on certain terms, wish to make a great 
 deal more of it than is made now ; and I regard the 
 Welsh literature, — or rather, dropping the distinc- 
 tion between Welsh and Irish, Gaels and Cymris, 
 let me say Celtic literature, — as an object of very 
 great interest. My brother Saxons have, as is well 
 known, a terrible way with them of wanting to im- 
 prove everything but themselves off the face of the 
 earth ; I have no such passion for finding nothing but 
 myself everywhere ; I like variety to exist and to 
 show itself to me, and I would not for the world have 
 the lineaments of the Celtic genius lost. But I know 
 my brother Saxons, I know their strength, and I 
 know that the Celtic genius will make nothing of 
 trying to set up barriers against them in the world 
 of fact and brute force, of trying to hold its own 
 against them as a political and social counter-power, 
 as the soul of a hostile nationality. To me there is 
 something mournful (and at this moment, when one 
 sees what is going on in Ireland, how well may one 
 say so !) in hearing a Welshman or an Irishman make 
 pretensions, — natural pretensions, I admit, but how 
 hopelessly vain ! — to such a rival self-establishment ; 
 there is something mournful in hearing an English- 
 man scout them. Strength ! alas it is not strength, 
 strength in the material world, which is wanting to 
 us Saxons ; we have plenty of strength for swallow- 
 ing up and absorbing as much as we choose ; there is 
 nothing to hinder us from effacing the last poor
 
 12 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 material remains of that Celtic power which once was 
 everywhere, but has long since, in the race of civilisa- 
 tion, fallen out of sight. We may threaten them 
 with extinction if we will, and may almost say in so 
 threatening them, like Csesar in threatening with 
 death the tribune Metellus who closed the treasury 
 doors against him : "And when I threaten this, young 
 man, to threaten it is more trouble to me than to do 
 it." It is not in the outward and visible world of 
 material life that the Celtic genius of Wales or 
 Ireland can at this day hope to count for much ; it is 
 in the inward world of thought and science. What 
 it has been, what it has done, let it ask us to attend 
 to that, as a matter of science and history ; not to 
 what it will be or will do, as a matter of modern 
 politics. It cannot count appreciably now as a 
 material power; but, perhaps, if it can get itself 
 thoroughly known as an object of science, it may 
 count for a good deal,— far more than we Saxons, 
 most of us, imagine, — as a spiritual power. 
 
 The bent of our time is towards science, towards 
 knowing things as they are; so the Celt's claims 
 towards having his genius and its works fairly treated, 
 as objects of scientific investigation, the Saxon can 
 hardly reject, when these claims are urged simply on 
 their own merits, and are not mixed up with extrane- 
 ous pretensions which jeopardise them. What the 
 French call the sciencd des origines, the science of 
 origins, — a science which is at the bottom of all real 
 knowledge of the actual world, and which is every 
 day growing in interest and importance, — is very in-
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 13 
 
 complete without a thorough critical account of the 
 Celts, and their genius, language, and literature. This 
 science has still great progress to make, hut its pro- 
 gress, made even within the recollection of those of 
 us who are in middle life, has already affected our 
 common notions ahout the Celtic race ; and this 
 change, too, shows how science, the knowing things 
 as they are, may even have salutary practical conse- 
 quences. I remember, when I was young, I was 
 taught to think of Celt as separated by an impass- 
 able gulf from Teuton ; l my father, in particular, 
 
 1 Here again let me have the pleasure of quoting Lord 
 Strangford : — "When the Celtic tongues were first taken in 
 hand at the dawn of comparative philological inquiry, the 
 tendency was, for all practical results, to separate them from 
 the Indo-European aggregate, rather than to unite them with 
 it. The great gulf once fixed between them was narrowed on 
 the surface, but it was greatly and indefinitely deepened. Then 
 vocabulary and some of their grammar was seen at once to be 
 perfectly Indo-European, but they had no case-endings to their 
 nouns, — none at all in "Welsh, none that could be understood 
 in Gaelic ; their phonesis seemed primeval and inexplicable, and 
 nothing could be made out of their pronouns which could not 
 be equally made out of many wholly on-Aryan languages. They 
 were therefore co-ordinated, not with each single Aryan tongue 
 but with the general complex of Aryan tongues, and were con- 
 ceived to be anterior to them and apart from them, as it wen 
 the strayed vanguard of European colonisation or conquest from 
 the East. The reason of this misconception was, that their 
 records lay wholly uninvestigated as far as all historical study 
 of the language was concerned, and that nobody troubled him- 
 self about the relative age and the development of forms, so 
 that the philologists were fain to take them as they were put 
 into their hands by uncritical or perverse native commentators 
 and writers, whose grammars and dictionaries teemed with 
 blunders and downright forgeries. One thing, and one thing
 
 14 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 was never weary of contrasting them ; he insisted 
 much oftener on the separation between us and 
 them than on the separation between us and any 
 other race in the world ; in the same way Lord 
 Lyndhurst, in words long famous, called the Irish, 
 " aliens in speech, in religion, in blood." This natu- 
 rally created a profound sense of estrangement; it 
 doubled the estrangement which political and reli- 
 gious differences already made between us and the 
 Irish : it seemed to make this estrangement immense, 
 incurable, fatal. It begot a strange reluctance, as any 
 one may see by reading the preface to the great text- 
 book for Welsh poetry, the Myvyrian Archceology, 
 published at the beginning of this century, to fur- 
 ther, nay, allow, — even among quiet, peaceable people 
 
 alone, led to the truth : the sheer drudgery of thirteen long 
 years spent by Zeuss in the patient investigation of the most 
 ancient Celtic records, in their actual condition, line by line 
 and letter by letter. Then for the first time the foundation of 
 Celtic research was laid ; but the great philologist did not live 
 to see the superstructure which never could have been raised 
 but for him. Prichard was first to indicate the right path, 
 and Bopp, in his monograph of 1839, displayed his incompar- 
 able and masterly sagacity as usual, but for want of any trust- 
 worthy record of Celtic words and forms to work upon, the 
 truth remained concealed or obscured until the publication of 
 the Grammatica Ccltica. Dr. Arnold, a man of the past genera- 
 tion, who made more use of the then uncertain and unfixed 
 doctrines of comparative philology in his historical writings 
 than is done by the present generation in the fullest noonday 
 light of the Vcrgleichendc Grammatik, was thus justified in his 
 view by the philology of the period, to which he merely gave 
 an enlarged historical expression. The prime fallacy then as 
 now, however, was that of antedating the distinction between 
 Gaelic and Cymric Celts."
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 15 
 
 like the Welsh, the publication of the documents of 
 their ancient literature, the monuments of the Cymric 
 genius ; such was the sense of repulsion, the sense of 
 incompatibility, of radical antagonism, making it 
 seem dangerous to us to let such opposites to our- 
 selves have speech and utterance. Certainly the 
 Jew, — the Jew of ancient times, at least, — then 
 seemed a thousand degrees nearer than the Celt 
 to us. Puritanism had so assimilated Bible ideas 
 and phraseology ; names like Ebenezer, and notions 
 like that of hewing Agag in pieces, came so natural 
 to us, that the sense of affinity between the Teutonic 
 and the Hebrew nature was quite strong ; a steady, 
 middle-class Anglo-Saxon much more imagined him- 
 self Ehud's cousin than Ossian's. But meanwhile, 
 the pregnant and striking ideas of the ethnologists 
 about the true natural grouping of the human race, 
 the doctrine of a great Indo-European unity, com- 
 prising Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Latins, Celts, 
 Teutons, Slavonians, on the one hand, and, on the 
 other hand, of a Semitic unity and of a Mongolian 
 unity, separated by profound distinguishing marks 
 from the Indo-European unity and from one another, 
 was slowly acquiring consistency and popularising 
 itself. So strong and real could the sense of sym- 
 pathy or antipathy, grounded upon real identity 01 
 diversity in race, grow in men of culture, that we 
 read of a genuine Teuton, — Wilhelm von Humboldt, 
 finding, even in the sphere of religion, that sphere 
 where the might of Semitism has been so over- 
 powering, the food which most truly suited his
 
 16 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 spirit in the productions not of the alien Semitic 
 genius, but of the genius of Greece or India, the 
 Teuton's born kinsfolk of the common Indo-Euro- 
 pean family. "Towards Semitism he felt himself," 
 we read, "far less drawn;" he had the conscious- 
 ness of a certain antipathy in the depths of his 
 nature to this, and to its "absorbing, tyrannous, 
 terrorist religion," as to the opener, more flexible 
 Indo-European genius, this religion appeared. " The 
 mere workings of the old man in him!" Semitism 
 will readily reply ; and though one can hardly admit 
 this short and easy method of settling the matter, it 
 must be owned that Humboldt's is an extreme case 
 of Indo-Europeanism, useful as letting us see what 
 may be the power of race and primitive constitution, 
 but not likely, in the spiritual sphere, to have many 
 companion cases equalling it. Still, even in this 
 sphere, the tendency is in Humboldt's direction ; 
 the modern spirit tends more and more to estab- 
 lish a sense of native diversity between our Euro- 
 pean bent and the Semitic bent, and to eliminate, 
 even in our religion, certain elements as purely and 
 excessively Semitic, and therefore, in right, not 
 combinable with our European nature, not assimil- 
 able by it. This tendency is now quite visible even 
 among ourselves, and even, as I have said, within 
 the great sphere of the Semitic genius, the sphere 
 of religion ; and for its justification this tendency 
 appeals to science, the science of origins ; it appeals 
 to this science as teaching us which way our natural 
 affinities and repulsions lie. It appeals to this
 
 CELTIC LITERATUEE. 17 
 
 science, and in part it conies from it; it is, in con- 
 siderable part, an indirect practical result from it. 
 
 In the sphere of politics, too, there has, in the 
 same way, appeared an indirect practical result from 
 this science; the sense of antipathy to the Irish people, 
 of radical estrangement from them, has visibly abated 
 amongst all the better part of us ; the remorse for 
 past ill-treatment of them, the wish to make amends, 
 to do them justice, to fairly unite, if possible, in one 
 people with them, has visibly increased ; hardly a 
 book on Ireland is now published, hardly a debate 
 on Ireland now passes in Parliament, without this 
 appearing. Fanciful as the notion may at first seem, 
 I am inclined to think that the march of science, — 
 science insisting that there is no such original chasm 
 between the Celt and the Saxon as we once popularly 
 imagined, that they are not truly, what Lord Lynd- 
 hurst called them, aliens in blood from us, that they 
 are our brothers in the great Indo-European family, 
 has had a share, an appreciable share, in producing 
 this changed state of feeling. No doubt, the release 
 from alarm and struggle, the sense of firm possession, 
 solid security, and overwhelming power ; no doubt 
 these, allowing and encouraging humane feelings to 
 spring up in us, have done much ; no doubt a state 
 of fear and danger, Ireland in hostile conflict with us, 
 our union violently disturbed, might, while it drove 
 back all humane feelings, make also the old sense of, 
 utter estrangement revive. Nevertheless, so long as 
 such a malignant revolution of events does not actually 
 come about, so long the new sense of kinship and 
 VOL. II. C
 
 18 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 kindliness lives, works, and gathers strength ; and 
 the longer it so lives and works, the more it makes 
 any such malignant revolution improbable. And 
 this new, reconciling sense has, I say, its roots in 
 science. 
 
 However, on these indirect benefits of science we 
 must not lay too much stress. Only this must be 
 allowed ; it is clear that there are now in operation 
 two influences, both favourable to a more attentive 
 and impartial study of Celtism than it has yet ever 
 received from us. One is the strengthening in us of 
 the feeling of Indo-Europeanism ; the other, the 
 strengthening in us of the scientific sense generally. 
 The first breaks down barriers between us and the 
 Celt, relaxes the estrangement between us ; the 
 second begets the desire to know his case thoroughly, 
 and to be just to it. This is a very different matter 
 from the political and social Celtisation of which cer- 
 tain enthusiasts dream ; but it is not to be despised 
 by any one to whom the Celtic genius is dear ; and 
 it is possible, while the other is not. 
 
 I. 
 
 To know the Celtic case thoroughly, one must 
 know the Celtic people ; and to know them one must 
 know that by which a people best express themselves, 
 . — their literature. Few of us have any notion what 
 a mass of Celtic literature is really yet extant and 
 accessible. One constantly finds even very accom- 
 plished people, who fancy that the remains of Welsh
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 19 
 
 and Irish literature are as inconsiderable by their 
 volume, as, in their opinion, they are by their intrin- 
 sic merit ; that these remains consist of a few prose 
 stories, in great part borrowed from the literature of 
 nations more civilised than the Welsh or Irish nation, 
 and of some unintelligible poetry. As to Welsh 
 literature, they have heard, perhaps, of the Black 
 Book of Caermarthen, or of the Bed Book of Hergest, and 
 they imagine that one or two famous manuscript 
 books like these contain the whole matter. They 
 have no notion that, in real truth, to quote the words 
 of one who is no friend to the high pretensions of 
 Welsh literature, but their most formidable impugner, 
 Mr. Nash : — " The Myvyrian manuscripts alone, now 
 deposited in the British Museum, amount to 47 
 volumes of poetry, of various sizes, containing about 
 4700 pieces of poetry, in 16,000 pages, besides about 
 2000 englynion or epigrammatic stanzas. There are 
 also, in the same collection, 53 volumes of prose, in 
 about 15,300 pages, containing a great many curious 
 documents on various subjects. Besides these, which 
 were purchased of the Avidow of the celebrated Owen 
 Jones, the editor of the Myvyrian Archaeology, there 
 are a vast number of collections of Welsh manu- 
 scripts in London, and in the libraries of the gentry 
 of the principality." The Myvyrian Archaeology, 
 here spoken of by Mr. Nash, I have already men- 
 tioned ; he calls its editor, Owen Jones, celebrated ; 
 he is not so celebrated but that he claims a word, in 
 passing, from a professor of poetry. He was a Den- 
 bighshire statesman, as we say in the north, born be-
 
 20 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 fore the middle of last century, in that vale of Myvyr, 
 which has given its name to his archaeology. From his 
 childhood he had that passion for the old treasures of 
 his country's literature, which to this day, as I have 
 said, in the common people of Wales is so remark- 
 able ; these treasures were unprinted, scattered, dim- 
 cult of access, jealously guarded. " More than once," 
 says Edward Lhuyd, who in his Archmlogia Britan- 
 nica, brought out by him in 1707, would gladly have 
 given them to the world, " more than once I had a 
 promise from the owner, and the promise was after- 
 wards retracted at the instigation of certain persons, 
 pseudo-politicians, as I think, rather than men of 
 letters." So Owen Jones went up, a young man of 
 nineteen, to London, and got employment in a fur- 
 rier's shop in Thames Street ; for forty years, with a 
 single object in view, he worked at his business ; and 
 at the end of that time his object was won. He had 
 risen in his employment till the business had become 
 his own, and he was now a man of considerable 
 means ; but those means had been sought by him for 
 one purpose only, the purpose of his life, the dream 
 of his youth, — the giving permanence and publicity 
 to the treasures of his national literature. Gradually 
 he got manuscript after manuscript transcribed, and 
 at last, in 1801, he jointly with two friends brought 
 out in three large volumes, printed in double columns, 
 his Myvyrian Archceology of Wales. The book is full 
 of imperfections ; it presented itself to a public which 
 could not judge of its importance, and it brought upon 
 its author in his lifetime more attack than honour.
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 21 
 
 He died not long afterwards, and now he lies buried 
 in All-hallows Church, in London, with his tomb 
 turned towards the east, away from the green vale of 
 Clwyd and the mountains of his native Wales ; but 
 his book is the great repertory of the literature of his 
 nation, the comparative study of languages and 
 literatures gains every day more followers, and no 
 one of these followers, at home or abroad, touches 
 Welsh literature without paying homage to the Den- 
 bighshire peasant's name ; if the bard's glory and his 
 own are still matter of moment to him, — si quid men- 
 tern mortalia tangunt, — he may be satisfied. 
 
 Even the printed stock of early Welsh literature 
 is, therefore, considerable, and the manuscript stock 
 of it is very great indeed. Of Irish literature, the 
 stock, printed and manuscript, is truly vast ; the work 
 of cataloguing and describing this has been admirably 
 performed by another remarkable man, who died only 
 the other day, Mr. Eugene O'Curry. Obscure Scaliger 
 of a despised literature, he deserves some weightier 
 voice to praise him than the voice of an unlearned 
 bellettristic trifler like me ; he belongs to the race of 
 the giants in literary research and industry, — a race 
 now almost extinct. Without a literary education, 
 and impeded too, it appears, by much trouble of mind 
 and infirmity of body, he has accomplished such a 
 thorough work of classification and description for the 
 chaotic mass of Irish literature, that the student has 
 now half his labour saved, and needs only to use his 
 materials as Eugene O'Curry hands them to him. It 
 was as a professor in the Catholic University in Dublin
 
 22 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 that O'Curry gave the lectures in which he has done 
 the student this service ; it is touching to find that 
 these lectures, a splendid tribute of devotion to the 
 Celtic cause, had no hearer more attentive, more 
 sympathising, than a man, himself, too, the champion 
 of a cause more interesting than prosperous, — one of 
 those causes which please noble spirits, but do not 
 please destiny, which have Cato's adherence, but not 
 Heaven's, — Dr. Newman. Eugene O'Curry, in these 
 lectures of his, taking as his standard the quarto page 
 of Dr. O'Donovan's edition of the Annals of the Four 
 Masters (and this printed monument of one branch of 
 Irish literature occupies by itself, let me say in passing, 
 seven large quarto volumes, containing 4215 pages of 
 closely printed matter), Eugene O'Curry says, that 
 the great vellum manuscript books belonging to 
 Trinity College, Dublin, and to the Eoyal Irish Aca- 
 demy, — books with fascinating titles, the Book of the 
 Dun Cow, the Booh of Leinster, the Book of Ballymote, 
 the Speckled Book, the Book of Lecain, the Yellow Book of 
 Lecain, — have, between them, matter enough to fill 
 11,400 of these pages; the other vellum manuscripts 
 in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, have matter 
 enough to fill 8200 pages more ; and the paper manu- 
 scripts of Trinity College, and the Eoyal Irish Academy 
 together, would fill, he says, 30,000 such pages more. 
 The ancient laws of Ireland, the so-called Brehon laws, 
 which a commission is now publishing, were not as 
 yet completely transcribed when O'Curry wrote ; but 
 what had even then been transcribed was sufficient, 
 he says, to fill nearly 8000 of Dr. O'Donovan's pages.
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 23 
 
 Here are, at any rate, materials enough with a ven- 
 geance. These materials fall, of course, into several 
 divisions. The most literary of these divisions, the 
 Tales, consisting of Historic Tales and Imaginative Tales, 
 distributes the contents of its Historic Tales as follows : 
 — Battles, voyages, sieges, tragedies, cow-spoils, court- 
 ships, adventures, land -expeditions, sea-expeditions, 
 banquets, elopements, loves, lake-irruptions, colonisa- 
 tions, visions. Of what a treasure-house of resources 
 for the history of Celtic life and the Celtic genius does 
 that bare list, even by itself, call up the image ! The 
 Annals of the Four Masters give " the years of founda- 
 tions and destructions of churches and castles, the 
 obituaries of remarkable persons, the inaugurations of 
 kings, the battles of chiefs, the contests of clans, the 
 ages of bards, abbots, bishops, etc." 1 Through other 
 divisions of this mass of materials, — the books of 
 pedigrees and genealogies, the martyrologies and festo- 
 logies, such as the Felire of Angus the Culdee, the topo- 
 graphical tracts, such as the Dinnsenchas, — we touch 
 " the most ancient traditions of the Irish, traditions 
 which were committed to writing at a period when 
 the ancient customs of the people were unbroken." 
 We touch "the early history of Ireland, civil and 
 ecclesiastical." We get " the origin and history of the 
 countless monuments of Ireland, of the ruined church 
 and tower, the sculptured cross, the holy well, and 
 the commemorative name of almost every townland 
 and parish in the whole island." We get, in short, 
 
 1 Dr. O'Conor in liis Catalogue of the Siowe MSS. (quoted by 
 O'Curry).
 
 24 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 "the most detailed information upon almost every 
 part of ancient Gaelic life, a vast quantity of valuable 
 details of life and manners." 1 
 
 And then, besides, to our knowledge of the Celtic 
 genius, Mr. Norris has brought us from Cornwall, M. 
 de la Villemarque" from Brittany, contributions, in- 
 significant indeed in quantity, if one compares them 
 with the mass of the Irish materials extant, but far from 
 insignificant in value. 
 
 We want to know what all this mass of docu- 
 ments really tells us about the Celt. But the mode 
 of dealing with these documents, and with the whole 
 question of Celtic antiquity, has hitherto been most 
 unsatisfactory. Those who have dealt with them, 
 have gone to work, in general, either as warm Celt- 
 lovers or as warm Celt-haters, and not as disin- 
 terested students of an important matter of science. 
 One party seems to set out with the determina- 
 tion to find everything in Celtism and its remains ; 
 the other, with the determination to find nothing in 
 them. A simple seeker for truth has a hard time 
 between the two. An illustration or so will make 
 clear what I mean. First let us take the Celt-lovers, 
 who, though they engage one's sympathies more than 
 the Celt-haters, yet, inasmuch as assertion is more 
 dangerous than denial, show their weaknesses in a 
 more signal way. A very learned man, the Rev. 
 Edward Davies, published in the early part of this 
 century two important books on Celtic antiquity. 
 The second of these books, The Mythology and Bites oj 
 
 1 O'Curry.
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 25 
 
 the British Druids, contains, with much other interest- 
 ing matter, the charming story of Taliesin. Bryant's 
 book on mythology was then in vogue, and Bryant, 
 in the fantastical manner so common in those days, 
 found in Greek mythology what he called an arkite 
 idolatry, pointing to Noah's deluge and the ark. 
 Davies wishing to give dignity to his Celtic mytho- 
 logy, determines to find the arkite idolatry there 
 too, and the style in which he proceeds to do this 
 affords a good specimen of the extravagance which 
 has caused Celtic antiquity to be looked upon with so 
 much suspicion. The story of Taliesin begins thus : — 
 
 " In former times there was a man of noble descent 
 in Penllyn. His name was Tegid Voel, and his 
 paternal estate was in the midd.le of the Lake of 
 Tegid, and his wife was called Ceridwen." 
 
 Nothing could well be simpler ; but what Davies 
 finds in this simple opening of Taliesin's story, is 
 prodigious : — 
 
 " Let us take a brief view of the proprietor of this 
 estate. Tegid Voel — bald serenity — presents itself 
 at once to our fancy. The painter would find no 
 embarrassment in sketching the portrait of this sedate 
 venerable personage, whose crown is partly stripped 
 of its hoary honours. But of all the gods of antiquity, 
 none could with propriety sit for this picture except- 
 ing Saturn, the acknowledged representative of Noah, 
 and the husband of Rhea, which was but another 
 name for Ceres, the genius of the ark." 
 
 And Ceres, the genius of the ark, is of course 
 found in Ceridwen. "the British Ceres, the arkite
 
 2G ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 goddess who initiates us into the deepest mysteries of 
 the arkite superstition." 
 
 Now the story of Taliesin, as it proceeds, exhibits 
 Ceridwen as a sorceress ; and a sorceress, like a 
 goddess, belongs to the world of the supernatural ; 
 but, beyond this, the story itself does not suggest one 
 particle of relationship between Ceridwen and Ceres. 
 All the rest conies out of Davies's fancy, and is 
 established by reasoning of the force of that about 
 "bald serenity." 
 
 It is not difficult for the other side, the Celt-haters, 
 to get a triumph over such adversaries as these. 
 Perhaps I ought to ask pardon of Mr. Nash, whose 
 Taliesin it is impossible to read without profit and 
 instruction, for classing him among the Celt-haters : 
 his determined scepticism about "Welsh antiquity 
 seems to me, however, to betray a preconceived 
 hostility, a bias taken beforehand, as unmistakable as 
 Mr. Davies's prepossessions. But Mr. Nash is often 
 very happy in demolishing, for really the Celt-lovers 
 seem often to try to lay themselves open, and to 
 invite demolition. Full of his notions about an arkite 
 idolatry and a Helio-da3monic worship, Edward Davies 
 gives this translation of an old Welsh poem, entitled 
 The Panegyric of Lludd the Great : — 
 
 "A song of dark import was composed by the 
 distinguished Ogdoad, who assembled on the day of 
 the moon, and went in open procession. On the day 
 of Mars they allotted wrath to their adversaries ; on 
 the day of Mercury they enjoyed their full pomp ; on 
 the day of Jove they were delivered from the detested
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 27 
 
 usurpers ; on the day of Venus, the day of the great 
 influx, they swam in the blood of men; 1 on the day 
 of the Sun there truly assemble five ships and five 
 hundred of those who make supplication : Brithi, 
 Brithoi ! son of the compacted wood, the shock 
 overtakes me ; we all attend on Adonai, on the area 
 of Pwmpai." 
 
 That looks Helio-damionic enough, undoubtedly ; 
 especially when Davies prints Brithi, Brithoi / in 
 Hebrew characters, as being "vestiges of sacred 
 hymns in the Phoenician language." But then comes 
 Mr. Nash, and says that the poem is a Middle-Age 
 composition, with nothing Helio-dsemonic about it; 
 that it is meant to ridicule the monks; and that 
 Brithi, Brithoi/ is a mere piece of unintelligible 
 jargon in mockery of the chants used by the monks 
 at prayers ; and he gives this counter-translation of 
 the poem : — 
 
 " They make harsh songs ; they note eight num- 
 bers. On Monday they will be prying about. On 
 Tuesday they separate, angry with their adversaries. 
 On Wednesday they drink, enjoying themselves 
 ostentatiously. On Thursday they are in the choir ; 
 their poverty is disagreeable. Friday is a day of 
 abundance, the men are swimming in pleasures. On 
 Sunday, certainly, five legions and five hundreds of 
 them, they pray, they make exclamations : Brithi, 
 Brithoi ! Like wood-cuckoos in noise they will be, 
 every one of the idiots banging on the ground." 
 
 1 Here, where Saturday should come, something is wanting 
 in the manuscript.
 
 28 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 As one reads Mr. Nash's explanation and trans- 
 lation after Edward Davies's, one feels that a flood of 
 the hroad daylight of common-sense has been suddenly 
 shed over the Panegyric on Lhidd the Great, and one 
 is very grateful to Mr. Nash. 
 
 Or, again, when another Celt-lover, Mr. Herbert, 
 has bewildered us with his fancies, as uncritical as 
 Edward Davies's; with his neo-Druidism, his Mith- 
 riac heresy, his Crist -celi, or man -god of the mys- 
 teries ; and, above all, his ape of the sanctuary, 
 "signifying the mercurial principle, that strange and 
 unexplained disgrace of paganism," Mr. Nash comes 
 to our assistance, and is most refreshingly rational. 
 To confine ourselves to the ape of the sanctuary only. 
 Mr. Herbert constructs his monster, — to whom, he 
 says, " great sanctity, together with foul crime, decep- 
 tion, and treachery," is ascribed, — out of four lines of 
 old Welsh poetry, of which he adopts the following 
 translation : — 
 
 "Without the ape, without the stall of the cow, 
 without the mundane rampart, the world will become 
 desolate, not requiring the cuckoos to convene the 
 appointed dance over the green." 
 
 One is not very clear what all this means, but it 
 has, at any rate, a solemn air about it, which prepares 
 one for the development of its first-named personage, 
 the ape, into the mystical ape of the sanctuary. The 
 cow, too, — says another famous Celt-lover, Dr. Owen, 
 the learned author of the Welsh Dictionary, — the cow 
 (henfon) is the cow of transmigration ; and this also 
 sounds natural enough. But Mr. Nash, who has a
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 29 
 
 keen eye for the piecing which frequently happens 
 in these old fragments, has observed that just here, 
 where the ape of the sanctuary and the cow of trans- 
 migration make their appearance, there seems to 
 come a cluster of adages, popular sayings ; and he at 
 once remembers an adage preserved with the word 
 henfon in it, where, as he justly says, " the cow of 
 transmigration cannot very well have place." This 
 adage, rendered literally in English, is : " Whoso 
 owns the old cow, let him go at her tail ; " and the 
 meaning of it, as a popular saying, is clear and 
 simple enough. With this clue, Mr. Nash examines 
 the whole passage, suggests that heb eppa, " without 
 the ape," with which Mr. Herbert begins, in truth 
 belongs to something going before and is to be trans- 
 lated somewhat differently ; and, in short, that what 
 we really have here is simply these three adages one 
 after another : " The first share is the full one. 
 Politeness is natural, says the ape. Without the cow- 
 stall there would be no dung-heap" And one can 
 hardly doubt that Mr. Nash is quite right. 
 
 Even friends of the Celt, who are perfectly incap- 
 able of extravagances of this sort, fall too often into 
 a loose mode of criticism concerning him and the 
 documents of his history, which is unsatisfactory in 
 itself, and also gives an advantage to his many 
 enemies. One of the best and most delightful friends 
 he has ever had, — M. de la Villemarque, — has seen 
 clearly enough that often the alleged antiquity of his 
 documents cannot be proved, that it can be even dis- 
 proved, and that he must rely on other supports thai)
 
 30 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 this to establish what he wants ; yet one finds him 
 saying : "I open the collection of Welsh bards from 
 the sixth to the tenth century. Taliesin, one of the 
 oldest of them," . . . and so on. But his adversaries 
 deny that we have really any such thing as a " collec- 
 tion of Welsh bards from the sixth to the tenth 
 century," or that a "Taliesin, one of the oldest of 
 them," exists to be quoted in defence of any thesis. 
 Sharon Turner, again, whose Vindication of the Ancient 
 British Poems was prompted, it seems to me, by a critical 
 instinct at bottom sound, is weak and uncritical in 
 details like this : " The strange poem of Taliesin, 
 called the Spoils of Annum, implies the existence (in 
 the sixth century, he means) of mythological tales 
 about Arthur ; and the frequent allusion of the old 
 Welsh bards to the persons and incidents which we 
 find in the Mabinogion, are further proofs that there 
 must have been such stories in circulation amongst 
 the Welsh." But the critic has to show, against his 
 adversaries, that the Spoils of Annwn is a real poem 
 of the sixth century, with a real sixth-century poet 
 called Taliesin for its author, before he can use it to 
 prove what Sharon Turner there wishes to prove; 
 and, in like manner, the high antiquity of persons 
 and incidents that are found in the manuscripts of the 
 Mabinogion, — manuscripts written, like the famous 
 Red Book of Hergest, in the library of Jesus College at 
 Oxford, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, — 
 is not proved by allusions of the old Welsh bards, 
 until (which is just the question at issue) the pieces 
 containing these allusions are proved themselves to
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 31 
 
 possess a very high antiquity. In the present state 
 of the question as to the early Welsh literature, this 
 sort of reasoning is inconclusive and bewildering, and 
 merely carries us round in a circle. Again, it is 
 worse than inconclusive reasoning, it shows so un- 
 critical a spirit that it begets grave mistrust, when 
 Mr. Williams ab Ithel, employed by the Master of the 
 Rolls to edit the Brut y Tywysogion, the "Chronicle of 
 the Princes," says in his introduction, in many re- 
 spects so useful and interesting : " We may add, on 
 the authority of a scrupulously faithful antiquary, 
 and one that was deeply versed in the traditions of 
 his order — the late Iolo Morganwg — that King Arthur 
 in his Institutes of the Round Table introduced the 
 age of the world for events which occurred before 
 Christ, and the year of Christ's nativity for all subse- 
 quent events." Now, putting out of the question 
 Iolo Morganwg's character as an antiquary, it is 
 obvious that no one, not Grimm himself, can stand in 
 that way as "authority" for King Arthur's having 
 thus regulated chronology by his Institutes of the 
 Round Table, or even for there ever having been any 
 such institutes at all. And finally, greatly as I re- 
 spect and admire Mr. Eugene O'Curry, unquestionable 
 as is the sagacity, the moderation, which he in general 
 unites with his immense learning, I must say that he, 
 too, like his brother Celt-lovers, sometimes lays him- 
 self dangerously open. For instance, the Royal Irish 
 Academy possesses in its Museum a relic of the 
 greatest value, the Domhnach Airgid, a Latin manu- 
 script of the four gospels. The outer box containing
 
 32 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 this manuscript is of the fourteenth century, but the 
 manuscript itself, says O'Curry (and no man is better 
 able to judge), is certainly of the sixth. This is all 
 very well. "But," O'Curry then goes on, "I believe 
 no reasonable doubt can exist that the Domhnach 
 Airgid was actually sanctified by the hand of our 
 great Apostle." One has a thrill of excitement at 
 receiving this assurance from such a man as Eugene 
 O'Curry; one believes that he is really going to make 
 it clear that St. Patrick did actually sanctify the 
 Domhnach Airgid with his own hands ; and one reads 
 on : — 
 
 "As St. Patrick, says an ancient life of St. Mac 
 Carthainn preserved by Colgan in his Acta Sanctorum 
 Hibernian, was on his way from the north, and coming 
 to the place now called Clogher, he was carried over 
 a stream by his strong man, Bishop Mac Carthainn, 
 who, while bearing the Saint, groaned aloud, exclaim- 
 ing : 'Ugh! Ugh!' 
 
 " ' Upon my good word,' said the Saint, ' it was 
 not usual with you to make that noise.' 
 
 " ' I am now old and infirm,' said Bishop Mac 
 Carthainn, ' and all my early companions in mission- 
 Avork you have settled down in their respective 
 churches, while I am still on my travels.' 
 
 " ' Found a church then,' said the Saint, ' that 
 shall not be too near us (that is to his own Church 
 of Armagh) for familiarity, nor too far from us for 
 intercourse.' 
 
 " And the Saint then left Bishop Mac Carthainn 
 there, at Clogher, and bestowed the Domhnach Airgid
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 33 
 
 upon him, which had heen given to Patrick from 
 heaven, when he was on the sea, coming to Erin." 
 
 The legend is full of poetry, full of humour ; and 
 one can quite appreciate, after reading it, the tact 
 which gave St. Patrick such a prodigious success in 
 organising the primitive church in Ireland ; the new 
 bishop, "not too near us for familiarity, nor too far 
 from us for intercourse," is a masterpiece. But how 
 can Eugene O'Curry have imagined that it takes no 
 more than a legend like that, to prove that the parti- 
 cular manuscript now in the Museum of the Eoyal 
 Irish Academy was once in St. Patrick's pocket 1 
 
 I insist upon extravagances like these, not in order 
 to throw ridicule upon the Celt-lovers, — on the con- 
 trary, I feel a great deal of sympathy with them, — 
 but rather, to make it clear what an immense advan 
 tage the Celt-haters, the negative side, have in the 
 controversy about Celtic antiquity ; how much a clear- 
 headed sceptic, like Mr. Nash, may utterly demolish, 
 and, in demolishing, give himself the appearance of 
 having won an entire victory. But an entire victory 
 he has, as I will next proceed to show, by no means 
 won. 
 
 II. 
 
 I said that a sceptic like Mr. Nash, by demolishing 
 the rubbish of the Celtic antiquaries, might often 
 give himself the appearance of having won a complete 
 victory, but that a complete victory he had, in truth, 
 by no means won. He has cleared much rubbish 
 away, but this is no such very difficult feat, and 
 
 VOL. II. D
 
 34 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 requires mainly common-sense ; to be sure, Welsh 
 archaeologists are apt to lose their common-sense, but 
 at moments when they are in possession of it they 
 can do the indispensable, negative part of criticism, 
 not, indeed, so briskly or cleverly as Mr. Nash, but 
 still well enough. Edward Davies, for instance, has 
 quite clearly seen that the alleged remains of old 
 Welsh literature are not to be taken for genuine 
 just as they stand : " Some petty and mendicant 
 minstrel, who only chaunted it as an old song, has 
 tacked on" (he says of a poem he is discussing) 
 " these lines, in a style and measure totally different 
 from the preceding verses : ' May the Trinity grant 
 us mercy in the day of judgment : a liberal donation, 
 good gentlemen ! ' There, fifty years before Mr. 
 Nash, is a clearance very like one of Mr. Nash's. 
 But the difficult feat in this matter is the feat of 
 construction ; to determine when one has cleared 
 away all that is to be cleared away, what is the 
 significance of that which is left ; and here, I confess, 
 I think Mr. Nash and his fellow-sceptics, who say 
 that next to nothing is left, and that the significance 
 of whatever is left is next to nothing, dissatisfy the 
 genuine critic even more than Edward Davies and his 
 brother enthusiasts, who have a sense that something 
 primitive, august, and interesting is there, though 
 they fail to extract it, dissatisfy him. There is a very 
 edifying story told by O'Curry of the effect produced 
 on Moore, the poet, who had undertaken to write the 
 history of Ireland (a task for which he was quite 
 unfit), by the contemplation of an old Irish manu-
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 35 
 
 script. Moore had, without knowing anything about 
 them, spoken slightingly of the value to the historian 
 of Ireland of the materials afforded by such manu- 
 scripts ; but, says O'Curry : — 
 
 " In the year 1839, during one of his last visits to 
 the land of his birth, he, in company with his old 
 and attached friend Dr. Petrie, favoured me with an 
 unexpected visit at the Eoyal Irish Academy. I was 
 at that period employed on the Ordnance Survey of 
 Ireland, and at the time of his visit happened to have 
 before me on my desk the Boohs of Ballymote and 
 Lecain, The Speckled Book, The Annals of the Four 
 Masters, and many other ancient books, for historical 
 research and reference. I had never before seen 
 Moore, and after a brief introduction and explanation 
 of the nature of my occupation by Dr. Petrie, and 
 seeing the formidable array of so many dark and 
 time-worn volumes by which I was surrounded, he 
 looked a little disconcerted, but after a while plucked 
 up courage to open the Book of Ballymote and ask 
 what it was. Dr. Petrie and myself then entered into 
 a short explanation of the history and character of 
 the books then present as well as of ancient Gaedhelic 
 documents in general. Moore listened with great 
 attention, alternately scanning the books and myself, 
 and then asked me, in a serious tone, if I understood 
 them, and how I had learned to do so. Having 
 satisfied him upon these points, he turned to Dr. 
 Petrie and said : ' Petrie, these huge tomes could 
 not have been written by fools or for any foolish pur- 
 pose. I never knew anything about them before, and
 
 36 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 I had no right to have undertaken the History of 
 Ireland? " 
 
 And from that day Moore, it is said, lost all heart 
 for going on with his History of Ireland, and it was 
 only the importunity of the publishers which induced 
 him to bring out the remaining volume. 
 
 Could not have been written by fools, or for any foolish 
 purpose. That is, I am convinced, a true presenti- 
 ment to have in one's mind when one looks at Irish 
 documents like the Book of Ballymote, or Welsh docu- 
 ments like the Red Booh of Hergest. In some respects, 
 at any rate, these documents are what they claim to 
 be, they hold what they pretend to hold, they touch 
 that primitive world of which they profess to be the 
 voice. The true critic is he who can detect this 
 precious and genuine part in them, and employ it for 
 the elucidation of the Celt's genius and history, and 
 for any other fruitful purposes to which it can be 
 applied. Merely to point out the mixture of what is 
 late and spurious in them, is to touch but the fringes 
 of the matter. In reliance upon the discovery of this 
 mixture of what is late and spurious in them, to 
 pooh-pooh them altogether, to treat them as a heap of 
 rubbish, a mass of Middle- Age forgeries, is to fall into 
 the greatest possible error. Granted that all the 
 manuscripts of Welsh poetry (to take that branch of 
 Celtic literature which has had, in Mr. Nash, the 
 ablest disparager), granted that all such manuscripts 
 that we possess are, with the most insignificant excep- 
 tion, not older than the twelfth century ; granted 
 that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a time
 
 CELTIC L1TERATUKE. 37 
 
 of great poetical activity in Wales, a time when the 
 mediaeval literature flourished there, as it flourished 
 in England, France, and other countries ; granted 
 that a great deal of what Welsh enthusiasts have 
 attributed to their great traditional poets of the sixth 
 century belongs to this later epoch, — what then 1 
 Does that get rid of the great traditional poets, the 
 Cynveirdd or old bards, Aneurin, Taliesin, Llywarch 
 Hen, and their compeers, — does that get rid of the 
 great poetical tradition of the sixth century alto- 
 gether ; does it merge the whole literary antiquity of 
 Wales in her mediaeval literary antiquity, or, at least, 
 reduce all other than this to insignificance ? Mr. 
 Nash says it does ; all his efforts are directed to show 
 how much of the so-called sixth-century pieces may 
 be resolved into mediaeval, twelfth-century work ; his 
 grand thesis is that there is nothing primitive and 
 pre-Christian in the extant Welsh literature, no traces 
 of the Druidism and Paganism every one associates 
 with Celtic antiquity ; all this, he says, was extin- 
 guished by Paulinus in A.D. 59, and never resuscitated. 
 " At the time the Mabinogion and the Taliesin ballads 
 were composed, no tradition or popular recollection 
 of the Druids or the Druidical mythology existed in 
 Wales. The Welsh bards knew of no older mystery, 
 nor of any mystic creed, unknown to the rest of the 
 Christian world." And Mr. Nash complains that 
 " the old opinion that the Welsh poems contain 
 notices of Druid or Pagan superstitions of a remote 
 origin " should still find promulgators ; what we find 
 in them is only, he says, what was circulating in
 
 38 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 Wales in the twelfth century, and " one great mistake 
 in these investigations has been the supposing that 
 the Welsh of the twelfth, or even of the sixth century, 
 were wiser as well as more Pagan than their neigh- 
 bours." 
 
 Why, what a wonderful thing is this ! We have, 
 in the first place, the most weighty and explicit tes- 
 timony, — Strabo's, Caesar's, Lucan's, — that this race 
 once possessed a special, profound, spiritual discipline, 
 that they were, to use Mr. Nash's words, " wiser than 
 their neighbours." Lucan's words are singular! y 
 clear and strong, and serve well to stand as a land- 
 mark in this controversy, in which one is sometimes 
 embarrassed by hearing authorities quoted on this 
 side or that, when one does not feel sure precisely 
 what they say, how much or how little; Lucan, 
 addressing those hitherto under the pressure of Eome, 
 but now left by the Roman civil war to their own 
 devices, says : — 
 
 " Ye too, ye bards, who by your praises perpetuate 
 the memory of the fallen brave, without hindrance 
 poured forth your strains. And ye, ye Druids, now 
 that the sword was removed, began once more your 
 barbaric rites and weird solemnities. To you only is 
 given knowledge or ignorance (whichever it be) of the 
 gods and the powers of heaven ; your dwelling is in 
 the lone heart of the forest. From you we learn, 
 that the bourne of man's ghost is not the senseless 
 grave, not the pale realm of the monarch below ; in 
 another world his spirit survives still ; — death, if your 
 lore be true, is but the passage to enduring life."
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 39 
 
 There is the testimony of an educated Roman, 
 fifty years after Christ, to the Celtic race being then 
 "wiser than their neighbours ; " testimony all the 
 more remarkable because civilised nations, though 
 very prone to ascribe to barbarous people an ideal 
 purity and simplicity of life and manners are by no 
 means naturally inclined to ascribe to them high 
 attainment in intellectual and spiritual things. And 
 now, along with this testimony of Lucan's, one has 
 to carry in mind Csesar's remark, that the Druids, 
 partly from a religious scruple, partly from a desire 
 to discipline the memory of their pupils, committed 
 nothing to writins;. Well, then come the crashing 
 defeat of the Celtic race in Britain and the Eoman 
 conquest ; but the Celtic race subsisted here still, and 
 any one can see that, while the race subsisted, the 
 traditions of a discipline such as that of which Lucan 
 has drawn the picture Avere not likely to be so very 
 speedily "extinguished." The withdrawal of the 
 Romans, the recovered independence of the native 
 race here, the Saxon invasion, the struggle with the 
 Saxons, were just the ground for one of those bursts 
 of energetic national life and self-consciousness which 
 find a voice in a burst of poets and poetry. Accord- 
 ingly, to this time, to the sixth century, the universal 
 Welsh tradition attaches the great group of British 
 poets, Taliesin and his fellows. In the twelfth cen- 
 tury there began for Wales, along with another burst 
 of national life, another burst of poetry ; and this 
 burst literary in the stricter sense of the word, — a 
 burst which left, for the first time, written records.
 
 40 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 It wrote the records of its predecessors, as Avell as of 
 itself, and therefore Mr. Nash wants to make it the 
 real author of the whole poetry, one may say, of the 
 sixth century as well as its own. No doubt one 
 cannot produce the texts of the poetry of the sixth 
 century ; no doubt we have this only as the twelfth 
 and succeeding centuries wrote it down ; no doubt 
 they mixed and changed it a great deal in writing it 
 down. But, since a continuous stream of testimony 
 shows the enduring existence and influence among 
 the kindred Celts of Wales and Brittany, from the 
 sixth century to the twelfth, of an old national litera- 
 ture, it seems certain that much of this must be 
 traceable in the documents of the twelfth century, 
 and the interesting thing is to trace it. It cannot be 
 denied that there is such a continuous stream of 
 testimony; there is Gildas in the sixth century, 
 Nennius in the eighth, the laws of Howel in the 
 tenth ; in the eleventh, twenty or thirty years before 
 the new literary epoch began, we hear of Rhys ap 
 Tudor having " brought with him from Brittany the 
 system of the Round Table, which at home had 
 become quite forgotten, and he restored it as it is, 
 with regard to minstrels and bards, as it had been at 
 Caerleon-upon-Usk, under the Emperor Arthur, in 
 the time of the sovereignty of the race of the Cymry 
 over the island of Britain and its adjacent islands." 
 Mr. Nash's own comment on this is : " We here see 
 the introduction of the Arthurian romance from 
 Brittany, preceding by nearly one generation the 
 revival of music and poetry in North Wales ; " and
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 41 
 
 yet he does not seem to perceive what a testimony 
 is here to the reality, fulness, and subsistence of that 
 primitive literature about which he is so sceptical. 
 Then in the twelfth century testimony to this primi- 
 tive literature absolutely abounds ; one can quote 
 none better than that of Giraldus de Barri, or Giraldus 
 Cambrensis, as he is usually called. Giraldus is an 
 excellent authority, who knew well what he was 
 writing about, and he speaks of the "Welsh bards and 
 rhapsodists of his time as having in their possession 
 " ancient and authentic books " in the Welsh lan- 
 guage. The apparatus of technical terms of poetry, 
 again, and the elaborate poetical organisation which 
 we find both in Wales and Ireland, existing from 
 the very commencement of the mediaeval literary 
 period in each, and to which no other mediaeval 
 literature, so far as I know, shows at its first begin- 
 nings anything similar, indicates surely, in these 
 Celtic peoples, the clear and persistent tradition of 
 an older poetical period of great development, and 
 almost irresistibly connects itself in one's mind 
 with the elaborate Druidic discipline which Caesar 
 mentions. 
 
 But perhaps the best way to get a full sense of 
 the storied antiquity, forming as it were the back- 
 ground to those mediaeval documents which in Mr. 
 Nash's eyes pretty much begin and end with them- 
 selves, is to take, almost at random, a passage from 
 such a tale as Kilhwch and Olwen, in the MaHnogUm, 
 — that charming collection, for which we owe such 
 a debt of gratitude to Lady Charlotte Guest (to call
 
 42 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 her still by the name she bore when she made her 
 happy entry into the world of letters), and which she 
 so unkindly suffers to remain out of print. Almost 
 every page of this tale points to traditions and per- 
 sonages of the most remote antiquity, and is instinct 
 with the very breath of the primitive world. Search 
 is made for Mabon, the son of Modron, who was 
 taken when three nights old from between his mother 
 and the wall. The seekers go first to the Ousel of 
 Cilgwri ; the Ousel had lived long enough to peck a 
 smith's anvil down to the size of a nut, but he had 
 never heard of Mabon. " But there is a race of ani- 
 mals who were formed before me, and I will be your 
 guide to them." So the Ousel guides them to the 
 Stag of Kedynvre. The Stag has seen an oak sapling, 
 in the wood where he lived, grow up to be an oak 
 with a hundred branches, and then slowly decay 
 down to a withered stump, yet he had never heard of 
 Mabon. " But I will be your guide to the place 
 where there is an animal which was formed before I 
 was ; " and he guides them to the Owl of Cwm Caw- 
 lwyd. " When first I came hither," says the Owl, 
 " the wide valley you see was a wooded glen. And 
 a race of men came and rooted it up. And there 
 grew a second wood ; and this wood is the third. 
 My wings, are they not withered stumps?" Yet 
 the Owl, in spite of his great age, had never heard 
 of Mabon ; but he offered to be guide " to where is 
 the oldest animal in the world, and the one that has 
 travelled most, the Eagle of Gwern Abwy." The 
 Eagle was so old, that a rock, from the top of which
 
 CELTIC LITER ATUKE. 43 
 
 he pecked at the stars every evening, was now not so 
 much as a span high. He knew nothing of Mabon ; 
 but there was a monster Salmon, into whom he once 
 struck his claws in Llyn Llyw, who might, perhaps, 
 tell them something of him. And at last the Salmon 
 of Llyn Llyw told them of Mabon. "With every 
 tide I go along the river upwards, until I come near 
 to the walls of Gloucester, and there have I found 
 such wrong as I never found elsewhere." And the 
 Salmon took Arthur's messengers on his shoulders up 
 to the wall of the prison in Gloucester, and they 
 delivered Mabon. 
 
 Nothing could better give that sense of primitive 
 and pre -mediaeval antiquity which to the observer 
 with any tact for these things is, I think, clearly 
 perceptible in these remains, at whatever time they 
 may have been written ; or better serve to check too 
 absolute an acceptance of Mr. Nash's doctrine, — in 
 some respects very salutary, — "that the common 
 assumption of such remains of the date of the sixth 
 century, has been made upon very unsatisfactory 
 grounds." It is true, it has ; it is true, too, that, as 
 he goes on to say, "writers who claim for produc- 
 tions actually existing only in manuscripts of the 
 twelfth, an origin in the sixth century, are called 
 upon to demonstrate the links of evidence, either 
 internal or external, which bridge over this great 
 intervening period of at least five hundred years." 
 Then Mr. Nash continues : " This external evidence 
 is altogether wanting." Not altogether, as we have 
 seen ; that assertion is a little too strong. But I am
 
 44 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 content to let it pass, because it is true, that without 
 internal evidence in this matter the external evidence 
 would be of no moment. But when Mr. Nash con- 
 tinues further : "And the internal evidence even of 
 the so-called historic poems themselves, is, in some 
 instances at least, opposed to their claims to an origin 
 in the sixth century," and leaves the matter there, 
 and finishes his chapter, I say that is an unsatisfactory 
 turn to give to the matter, and a lame and impotent 
 conclusion to his chapter ; because the one interesting, 
 fruitful question here is, not in what instances the 
 internal evidence opposes the claims of these poems 
 to a sixth -century origin, but in what instances it 
 supports them, and what these sixth-century remains, 
 thus established, signify. 
 
 So again with the question as to the mythological 
 import of these poems. Mr. Nash seems to me to 
 have dealt with this, too, rather in the spirit of a 
 sturdy enemy of the Celts and their pretensions, — 
 often enough chimerical, — than in the spirit of a dis- 
 interested man of science. " We find in the oldest 
 compositions in the Welsh language no traces," he 
 says, "of the Druids, or of a pagan mythology." He 
 will not hear of there being, for instance, in these 
 compositions, traces of the doctrine of the transmigra- 
 tion of souls, attributed to the Druids in such clear 
 words by Caesar. He is very severe upon a German 
 scholar, long and favourably known in this country, 
 who has already furnished several contributions to 
 our knowledge of the Celtic race, and of whose labours 
 the main fruit has, I believe, not yet been given us, —
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 45 
 
 Mr. Meyer. He is very severe upon Mr. Meyer, for 
 finding in one of the poems ascribed to Taliesin, " a 
 sacrificial hymn addressed to the god Pryd, in his 
 character of god of the Sun." It is not for me to 
 pronounce for or against this notion of Mr. Meyer's. 
 I have not the knowledge which is needed in order 
 to make one's suffrage in these matters of any value ; 
 speaking merely as one of the unlearned public, I will 
 confess that allegory seems to me to play, in Mr. 
 Mej'er's theories, a somewhat excessive part ; Arthur 
 and his Twelve (?) Knights of the Round Table signi- 
 fying solely the year with its twelve months ; Percival 
 and the Miller signifying solely steel and the grind- 
 stone ; Stonehenge and the Gododin put to purely calen- 
 darial purposes ; the Nibelungen, the Mahabharata, and 
 the Iliad, finally following the fate of the Gododin; 
 all this appears to me, I will confess, a little prema- 
 turely grasped, a little unsubstantial. But that any 
 one who knows the set of modern mythological science 
 towards astronomical and solar myths, a set which 
 has already justified itself in many respects so victori- 
 ously, and which is so irresistible that one can hardly 
 now look up at the sun without having the sensations 
 of a moth ; — that any one who knows this should find 
 in the Welsh remains no traces of mythology is quite 
 astounding. Why, the heroes and heroines of the old 
 Cymric world are all in the sky as well as in Welsh 
 story ; Arthur is the Great Bear, his harp is the con- 
 stellation Lyra ; Cassiopeia's chair is Llys Don, Don's 
 Court ; the daughter of Don was Arianrod, and the 
 Northern Crown is Caer Arianrod ; Gwydion was
 
 46 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 Don's son, and the Milky Way is Caer Gwydion. 
 With Gwydion is Math, the son of Mathonwy, tho 
 "man of illusion and phantasy;" and the moment 
 one goes below the surface, — almost before one goes 
 below the surface, — all is illusion and phantasy, 
 double-meaning, and far-reaching mythological im- 
 port, in the world which all these personages inhabit. 
 What are the three hundred ravens of Owen, and the 
 nine sorceresses of Peredur, and the dogs of Annwn 
 the Welsh Hades, and the birds of Ehiannon, whose 
 song was so sweet that warriors remained spell-bound 
 for eighty years together listening to them ? What 
 is the Avanc, the water-monster, of whom every lake- 
 side in Wales, and her proverbial speech, and her 
 music, to this day preserve the tradition ? What is 
 Gwyn the son of Nudd, king of fairie, the ruler of 
 the Tylwyth Teg, or family of beauty, who till the 
 day of doom fights on every first day of May,— the 
 great feast of the sun among the Celtic peoples, — 
 with Gwythyr, for the fair Cordelia, the daughter of 
 Lear? What is the wonderful mare of Teirnyon, 
 which on the night of every first of May foaled, and 
 no one ever knew what became of the colt ? Who is 
 the mystic Arawn, the king of Annwn, who changed 
 semblance for a year with Pwyll, prince of Dyved, 
 and reigned in his place? These are no mediaeval 
 personages ; they belong to an older, pagan, mytho- 
 logical world. The very first thing that strikes one, 
 in reading the Mabinogion, is how evidently the mediae- 
 val story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he 
 does not fully possess the secret ; he is like a peasant
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 47 
 
 building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or 
 Ephesus; he builds, hut what he builds is full of 
 materials of which he knows not the history, or 
 knows by a glimmering tradition merely; — stones 
 "not of this building," but of an older architecture, 
 greater, cunninger, more majestical. In the mediaeval 
 stories of no Latin or Teutonic people does this strike 
 one as in those of the Welsh. Kilhwch, in the story, 
 already quoted, of Kilhwch and Ohven, asks help at the 
 hand of Arthur's warriors ; a list of these warriors is 
 given, which fills I know not how many pages of 
 Lady Charlotte Guest's book; this list is a perfect 
 treasure-house of mysterious ruins : — 
 
 " Teithi Hen, the son of Gwynham — (his domains 
 were swallowed up by the sea, and he himself hardly 
 escaped, and he came to Arthur, and his knife had 
 this peculiarity, that from the time that he came 
 there no haft would ever remain upon it, and owing 
 to this a sickness came over him, and he pined away 
 during the remainder of his life, and of this he died). 
 
 "Drem, the son of Dreinidyd — (when the gnat 
 arose in the morning with the sun, Drem could see it 
 from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as Pen Blathaon 
 in North Britain). 
 
 " Kynyr Keinvarvawc — (when he was told he had 
 a son born, he said to his wife : Damsel, if thy son 
 be mine, his heart will be always cold, and there will 
 be no warmth in his hands)." 
 
 How evident, again, is the slightness of the narra- 
 tor's hold upon the Twrch-Trwyth and his strange 
 story ! How manifest the mixture of known and
 
 48 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 unknown, shadowy and clear, of different layers and 
 orders of tradition jumbled together, in the story of 
 Bran the Blessed, a story whose personages touch a 
 comparatively late and historic time. Bran invades 
 Ireland, to avenge one of " the three unhappy blows 
 of this island," the daily striking of Bran wen by 
 her husband Matholwch, King of Ireland. Bran is 
 mortally wounded by a poisoned dart, and only seven 
 men of Britain, " the Island of the Mighty," escape, 
 among them Taliesin : — ■ 
 
 "And Bran commanded them that they should 
 cut off his head. And take you my head, said he, 
 and bear it even unto the White Mount in London, 
 and bury it there with the face towards France. 
 And a long time will you be upon the road. In 
 Harlech you will be feasting seven years, the birds of 
 Rhiannon singing unto you the while. And all that 
 time the head will be to you as pleasant company as 
 it ever was when on my body. And at Gwales in 
 Penvro you will be fourscore years, and you may re- 
 main there, and the head with you uncorrupted, until 
 you open the door that looks towards Aber Henvelen 
 and towards Cornwall. And after you have opened 
 that door, there you may no longer tarry ; set forth 
 then to London to bury the head, and go straight 
 forward. 
 
 " So they cut off his head, and those seven went 
 forward therewith. And Branwen Avas the eighth 
 with them, and they came to land at Aber Alaw in 
 Anglesey, and they sate down to rest. And Branwen 
 looked towards Ireland and towards the Island of the
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 49 
 
 Mighty, to see if she could descry them. ' Alas,' said 
 she, ' woe is me that I was ever born ; two islands 
 have been destroyed because of me.' Then she 
 uttered a loud groan, and there broke her heart. 
 And they made her a four-sided grave, and buried 
 her upon the banks of the Alaw. 
 
 " Then they went to Harlech, and sate down to 
 feast and to drink there ; and there came three birds 
 and began singing, and all the songs they had ever 
 heard were harsh compared thereto ; and at this feast 
 they continued seven years. Then they went to 
 Gwales in Penvro, and there they found a fair and 
 regal spot overlooking the ocean, and a spacious hall 
 was therein. And they went into the hall, and two 
 of its doors were open, but the third door was closed, 
 that which looked towards Cornwall. ' See yonder,' 
 said Manawyddan, ' is the door that we may not 
 open.' And that night they regaled themselves, and 
 were joyful. And there they remained fourscore 
 years, nor did they think they had ever spent a time 
 more joyous and mirthful. And they were not more 
 weary than when first they came, neither did they, 
 any of them, know the time they had been there. 
 And it was as pleasant to them having the head with 
 them as if Bran had been with them himself. 
 
 " But one day said Heilyn, the son of Gwyn : 
 ' Evil betide me if I do not open the door to know 
 if that is true which is said concerning it.' So he 
 opened the door and looked towards Cornwall and 
 Aber Henvelen. And when they had looked, they 
 were as conscious of all the evils they had ever sus- 
 
 VOL. II. E
 
 50 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 tamed, and of all the friends and companions they 
 had lost, and of all the misery that had befallen 
 them, as if all had happened in that very spot ; and 
 especially of the fate of their lord. And because of 
 their perturbation they could not rest, but journeyed 
 forth with the head towards London. And they 
 buried the head in the White Mount." 
 
 Arthur afterwards, in his pride and self-confidence, 
 disinterred the head, and this was one of " the three 
 unhappy disclosures of the island of Britain." 
 
 There is evidently mixed here, with the newer 
 legend, a detritus, as the geologists would say, of 
 something far older ; and the secret of Wales and its 
 genius is not truly reached until this detritus, instead 
 of being called recent because it is found in contact 
 with what is recent, is disengaged, and is made to 
 tell its own story. 
 
 But when we show him things of this kind in the 
 Welsh remains, Mr. Nash has an answer for us. 
 " Oh," he says, " all this is merely a machinery of 
 necromancers and magic, such as has probably been 
 possessed by all people in all ages, more or less 
 abundantly. How similar are the creations of the 
 human mind in times and places the most remote ! 
 We see in this similarity only an evidence of the 
 existence of a common stock of ideas, variously 
 developed according to the formative pressure of 
 external circumstances. The materials of these tales 
 are not peculiar to the Welsh." And then Mr. Nash 
 points out, with much learning and ingenuity, how 
 certain incidents of these tales have their counterparts
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 51 
 
 in Irish, in Scandinavian, in Oriental romance. He 
 says, fairly enough, that the assertions of Taliesin, in 
 the famous Hanes Taliesin, or History of Taliesin, that 
 he was present with Noah in the Ark, at the Tower 
 of Battel, and with Alexander of Macedon, " we may 
 ascribe to the poetic fancy of the Christian priest of 
 the thirteenth century, who brought this romance 
 into its present form. We may compare these state- 
 ments of the universal presence of the wonder-working 
 magician with those of the gleeman who recites the 
 Anglo-Saxon metrical tale called the Traveller's Song." 
 No doubt lands the most distant can be shown to 
 have a common property in many marvellous stories. 
 This is one of the most interesting discoveries of 
 modern science ; but modern science is equally in- 
 terested in knowing how the genius of each people 
 has differentiated, so to speak, this common property 
 of theirs ; in tracking out, in each case, that special 
 " variety of development " which, to use Mr. Nash's 
 own words, " the formative pressure of external cir- 
 cumstances " has occasioned ; and not the formative 
 pressure from without only, but also the formative 
 pressure from within. It is this which he who deals 
 with the Welsh remains in a philosophic spirit wants 
 to know. Where is the force, for scientific purposes, 
 of telling us that certain incidents by which Welsh 
 poetry has been supposed to indicate a surviving 
 tradition of the doctrine of transmigration, are found 
 in Irish poetry also, when Irish poetry has, like 
 Welsh, its roots in that Celtism which is said to 
 have held this doctrine of transmigration so strongly 1
 
 52 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 Where is even the great force, for scientific purposes, 
 of proving, if it were possible to prove, that the 
 extant remains of Welsh poetry contain not one plain 
 declaration of Druiclical, Pagan, pre-Christian doc- 
 trine, if one has in the extant remains of Breton 
 poetry such texts as this from the prophecy of 
 Gwenchlan : " Three times must we all die, before 
 we come to our final repose 1 " or as the cry of the 
 eagles, in the same poem, of fierce thirst for Christian 
 blood, a cry in which the poet evidently gives vent 
 to his own hatred 1 since the solidarity, to use that 
 convenient French word, of Breton and Welsh poetry 
 is so complete, that the ideas of the one may be 
 almost certainly assumed not to have been wanting 
 to those of the other. The question is, when Taliesin 
 says, in the Battle of the Trees: " I have been in many 
 shapes before I attained a congenial form. I have 
 been a narrow blade of a sword, I have been a drop 
 in the air, I have been a shining star, I have been a 
 word in a book, I have been a book in the beginning, 
 I have been a light in a lantern a year and a half, I 
 have been a bridge for passing over three-score rivers ; 
 I have journeyed as an eagle, I have been a boat on 
 the sea, I have been a director in battle, I have been 
 a sword in the hand, I have been a shield in fight, I 
 have been the string of a harp, I have been enchanted 
 for a year in the foam of water. There is nothing in 
 which I have not been," — the question is, have these 
 " statements of the universal presence of the wonder- 
 working magician " nothing which distinguishes them 
 from " similar creations of the human mind in times
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 53 
 
 and places the most remote ; " have they not an in- 
 wardness, a severity of form, a solemnity of tone, 
 which indicates the still reverberating echo of a pro- 
 found doctrine and discipline, such as was Druidism 1 
 Suppose we compare Taliesin, as Mr. Nash invites us, 
 with the gleeman of the Anglo-Saxon Traveller's Song. 
 Take the specimen of this song which Mr. Nash him- 
 self quotes: "I have been with the Israelites and 
 with the Essyringi, with the Hebrews and with the 
 Indians and with the Egyptians ; I have been with 
 the Medes and with the Persians and with the 
 Myrgings." It is very well to parallel with this 
 extract Taliesin's : "I carried the banner before 
 Alexander ; I was in Canaan when Absalom was 
 slain ; I was on the horse's crupper of Elias and 
 Enoch ; I was on the high cross of the merciful son 
 of God ; I was the chief overseer at the building of 
 the tower of Nimrod ; I was with my King in the 
 manger of the ass ; I supported Moses through the 
 waters of Jordan ; I have been in the buttery in the 
 land of the Trinity ; it is not known what is the 
 nature of its meat and its fish." It is very well to 
 say that these assertions "we may fairly ascribe 
 to the poetic fancy of a Christian priest of the thir- 
 teenth century." Certainly we may; the last of 
 Taliesin's assertions more especially ; though one 
 must remark at the same time that the Welshman 
 shows much more fire and imagination than the 
 An'do-Saxon. But Taliesin adds, after his : "I was 
 in Canaan when Absalom was slain," " / was in the 
 hall of Don before G-wydion was born ; " he adds, after :
 
 54 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 " I was chief overseer at the building of the tower of 
 Nimrod," " i" have been three times resident in the castle 
 of Arianrod /" he adds, after: "I was at the cross 
 with Mary Magdalene," " i" obtained my inspiration 
 from the cauldron of Ceridwen." And finally, after the 
 mediseval touch of the visit to the buttery in the land 
 of the Trinity, he goes off at score : "I have been 
 instructed in the whole system of the universe; I 
 shall be till the day of judgment on the face of the 
 earth. I have been in an uneasy chair above Caer 
 Sidin, and the whirling round without motion between 
 three elements. Is it not the wonder of the world 
 that cannot be discovered 1 " And so he ends the 
 poem. But here is the Celtic, the essential part of 
 the poem : it is here that the " formative pressure " 
 has been really in operation ; and here surely is 
 paganism and mythology enough, which the Christian 
 priest of the thirteenth century can have had nothing 
 to do with. It is unscientific, no doubt, to interpret 
 this part as Edward Davies and Mr. Herbert do ; but 
 it is unscientific also to get rid of it as Mr. Nash does. 
 Wales and the Welsh genius are not to be known 
 without this part ; and the true critic is he who can 
 best disengage its real significance. 
 
 I say, then, what we want is to know the Celt and 
 his genius ; not to exalt him or to abase him, but to 
 know him. And for this a disinterested, positive, and 
 constructive criticism is needed. Neither his friends 
 nor his enemies have yet given us much of this. His 
 friends have given us materials for criticism, and for 
 these we ought to be grateful; his enemies have given
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 55 
 
 us negative criticism, and for this, too, up to a certain 
 point, we may be grateful ; but the criticism we really 
 want neither of them has yet given us. 
 
 Philology, however, that science which in our time 
 has had so many successes, has not been abandoned 
 by her good fortune in touching the Celt ; philology 
 has brought, almost for the first time in their lives, 
 the Celt and sound criticism together. The Celtic 
 grammar of Zeuss, whose death is so grievous a loss 
 to science, offers a splendid specimen of that patient, 
 disinterested way of treating objects of knowledge, 
 which is the best and most attractive characteristic 
 of Germany. Zeuss proceeds neither as a Celt-lover 
 nor as a Celt-hater ; not the slightest trace of a wish 
 to glorify Teutonism or to abase Celtism, appears in 
 his book. The only desire apparent there, is the 
 desire to know his object, the language of the Celtic 
 peoples, as it really is. In this he stands as a model 
 to Celtic students ; and it has been given to him, as 
 a reward for his sound method, to establish certain 
 points which are henceforth cardinal points, land- 
 marks, in all the discussion of Celtic matters, and 
 which no one had so established before. People 
 talked at random of Celtic writings of this or that 
 age ; Zeuss has definitely fixed the age of what we 
 actually have of these writings. To take the Cymric 
 group of languages : our earliest Cornish document is 
 a vocabulary of the thirteenth century ; our earliest 
 Breton document is a short description of an estate 
 in a deed of the ninth century ; our earliest Welsh 
 documents are Welsh glosses of the eighth century to
 
 56 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 Eutychus, the grammarian, and Ovid's Art of Love, 
 and the verses found by Edward Lhuyd in the 
 Juvencus manuscript at Cambridge. The mention of 
 this Juvencus fragment, by the bye, suggests the differ- 
 ence there is between an interested and a disinterested 
 critical habit. Mr. Nash deals with this fragment ; 
 but, in spite of all his great acuteness and learning, 
 because he has a bias, because he does not bring to 
 these matters the disinterested spirit they need, he is 
 capable of getting rid, cpuite unwarrantably, of a par- 
 ticular word in the fragment which does not suit him; 
 his dealing with the verses is an advocate's dealing, not 
 a critic's. Of this sort of thing Zeuss is incapable. 
 
 The test which Zeuss used for establishing the 
 age of these documents is a scientific test, the test of 
 orthography and of declensional and syntactical forms. 
 These matters are far out of my province, but what 
 is clear, sound, and simple, has a natural attraction 
 for us all, and one feels a pleasure in repeating it. 
 It is the grand sign of age, Zeuss says, in Welsh and 
 Irish words, when what the grammarians call the 
 " destitutio tenuium " has not yet taken place ; when 
 the sharp consonants have not yet been changed into 
 flat, p or t into b or d ; when, for instance, map, a 
 son, has not yet become mob ; coet, a wood, coed ; ocet, 
 a harrow, oged. This is a clear, scientific test to apply, 
 and a test of which the accuracy can be verified ; I 
 do not say that Zeuss was the first person who knew 
 this test or applied it, but I say that he is the first 
 person who in dealing with Celtic matters has invari- 
 ably proceeded by means of this and similar scientific
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 57 
 
 tests ; the first person, therefore, the body of whose 
 work has a scientific, stable character ; and so he 
 stands as a model to all Celtic inquirers. 
 
 His influence has already been most happy ; and 
 as I have enlarged on a certain failure in criticism of 
 Eugene O'Curry's, — whose business, after all, was the 
 description and classification of materials rather than 
 criticism, — let me show, by another example from 
 Eugene O'Curry, this good influence of Zeuss upon 
 Celtic studies. Eugene O'Curry wants to establish 
 that compositions of an older date than the twelfth 
 century existed in Ireland in the twelfth century, and 
 thus he proceeds. He takes one of the great extant 
 Irish manuscripts, the Leabhar na h' Uidhre ; or Book 
 of the Dun Coiv. The compiler of this book was, he 
 says, a certain Maelmuiri, a member of the religious 
 house of Cluainmacnois. This he establishes from a 
 passage in the manuscript itself : " This is a trial of 
 his pen here, by Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn 
 na m'Bocht." The date of Maelmuiri he establishes 
 from a passage in the Annals of the Four Masters, under 
 the year 1106 : " Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn 
 na m'Bocht, was killed in the middle of the great 
 stone church of Cluainmacnois, by a party of robbers." 
 Thus he gets the date of the Book of the Dun Cow. 
 This book contains an elegy on the death of St. 
 Columb. Now, even before 1106, the language of 
 this elegy was so old as to require a gloss to make it 
 intelligible, for it is accompanied by a gloss written 
 between the lines. This gloss quotes, for the expla- 
 nation of obsolete words, a number of more ancient
 
 58 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 compositions ; and these compositions, therefore must, 
 at the beginning of the twelfth century, have been 
 still in existence. Nothing can be sounder; every 
 step is proved, and fairly proved, as one goes along. 
 O'Curry thus affords a good specimen of the sane 
 mode of proceeding so much wanted in Celtic re- 
 searches, and so little practised by Edward Davies 
 and his brethren ; and to found this sane method, 
 Zeuss, by the example he sets in his own department 
 of philology, has mainly contributed. 
 
 Science's reconciling power, too, on which I have 
 already touched, philology, in her Celtic researches, 
 again and again illustrates. Races and languages 
 have been absurdly joined, and unity has been often 
 rashly assumed at stages where one was far, very far, 
 from having yet really reached unity. Science has 
 and will long have to be a divider and a separatist, 
 breaking arbitrary and fanciful connections, and dis- 
 sipating dreams of a premature and impossible unity. 
 Still, science, — true science, — recognises in the bottom 
 of her soul a law of ultimate fusion, of conciliation. 
 To reach this, but to reach it legitimately, she tends. 
 She draws, for instance, towards the same idea which 
 fills her elder and diviner sister, poetry, — the idea of 
 the substantial unity of man ; though she draws to- 
 wards it by roads of her own. But continually she 
 is showing us affinity where Ave imagined there was 
 isolation. What schoolboy of us has not rummaged 
 his Greek dictionary in vain for a satisfactory account 
 of that old name for the Peloponnese, the Apian 
 Land ? and within the limits of Greek itself there is
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 59 
 
 none. But the Scythian name for earth, " apia," 
 watery, water-issued, meaning first isle and then land — 
 this name, which we find in " avia," Scandinavia, and 
 in " ey " for Alderne?/, not only explains the Apian 
 Land of Sophocles for us, but points the way to a 
 whole world of relationships of which we knew 
 nothing. The Scythians themselves again, — obscure, 
 far-separated Mongolian people as they used to ap- 
 pear to us, — when we find that they are essentially 
 Teutonic and Indo-European, their very name the 
 same word as the common Latin word " scutum," the 
 shielded people, what a surprise they give us ! And 
 then, before we have recovered from this surprise we 
 learn that the name of their father and god, Targi- 
 tavus, carries us I know not how much further into 
 familiar company. This divinity, Shining with the 
 targe, the Greek Hercules, the Sun, contains in the 
 second half of his name, tavus, " shining," a won- 
 derful cement to hold times and nations together. 
 Tavus, "shining," from " tava " — in Sanscrit, as well 
 as Scythian, "to burn" or "shine," — is Divus, dies, 
 Zeus, 0eos, Diva, and I know not how much more ; 
 and Taviti, the bright and burnt, fire, the place of 
 fire, the hearth, the centre of the family, becomes the 
 family itself, just as our word family, the Latin 
 familia, is from thymeU, the sacred centre of fire. 
 The hearth comes to mean home. Then from home 
 it comes to mean the group of homes, the tribe ; 
 from the tribe the entire nation ; and in this sense of 
 nation or people, the Avord appears in Gothic, Norse, 
 Celtic, and Persian, as well as in Scythian ; the
 
 60 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 Theuthisks, Deutschen, Tudesques, are the men of one 
 theuth, nation, or people ; and of this our name Ger- 
 mans, itself is, perhaps, only the Roman translation, 
 meaning the men of one germ or stock. The Celtic 
 divinity, Teutates, has his name from the Celtic teuta, 
 people ; taviti, fire, appearing here in its secondary 
 and derived sense of people, just as it does in its own 
 Scythian language in Targitavus's second name, Tavit- 
 varus, Teutaros, the protector of the people. Another 
 Celtic divinity, the Hesus of Lucan, finds his brother 
 in the Gaisos, the sword, symbolising the god of 
 battles of the Teutonic Scythians. 1 And after philo- 
 
 1 See Les Scythes les Ancitres des Peuplcs Germaniqucs el 
 Slaves, par F. G. Bergmann, professeur a la faculte des Lettres 
 de Strasbourg : Colmar, 1858. But Professor Bergmann's ety- 
 mologies are often, says Lord Strangford, " false lights, held by 
 an uncertain hand." And Lord Strangford continues : — "The 
 Apian land certainly meant the watery land, Meer-icmschlungen, 
 among the pre-Hellenic Greeks, just as the same land is called 
 Morea by the modern post-Hellenic or Romaic Greeks from 
 more, the name for the sea in the Slavonic vernacular of its 
 inhabitants during the heart of the Middle Ages. But it is only 
 connected by a remote and secondary affinity, if connected at all, 
 with the avia of Scandinavia, assuming that to be the true 
 German word for water, which, if it had come down to us in 
 Gothic, would have been avi, genitive aujds, and not a mere 
 Latinised termination. Scythian is surely a negative rather 
 than a positive term, much like our Indian, or the Turanian 
 of modern ethnologists, used to comprehend nomads and bar- 
 barians of all sorts and faces north and east of the Black and 
 Caspian seas. It is unsafe to connect their name with anything 
 as yet ; it is quite as likely that it refers to the bow and 
 arrow as to the shield, and is connected with our word to shoot, 
 seeotan, skiwtan, Lithuanian szau-ti. Some of the Scythian 
 peoples may have been Anarian, Allophylic, Mongolian ; some 
 were demonstrably Aryan, and not only that, but Iranian as
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 61 
 
 logy has thus related to each other the Celt and the 
 Teuton, she takes another branch of the Indo-Euro- 
 pean family, the Sclaves, and shows us them as 
 having the same name with the German Suevi, the 
 solar people ; the common ground here, too, being 
 that grand point of union, the sun, fire. So, also, we 
 find Mr. Meyer, whose Celtic studies I just now men- 
 well, as is Lest shown in a memoir read before the Berlin 
 Academy this last year ; the evidence having been first indicated 
 in the rough by Schaffarik the Slavonic antiquary. Coins, 
 glosses, proper names, and inscriptions prove it. Targitaos (not 
 -tavus) and the rest is guess-work or wrong. Herodotus's Ta/3n-J 
 for the goddess Vesta is not connected with tbe root div whence 
 Devas, Deus, etc. , but the root tap, in Latin tep (of tepere, tepe- 
 facere), Slavonic tepl, topi (for Up or top), in modern Persian 
 tab. Thymcle refers to the hearth as the place of smoke (dvw, 
 thus, fumus), but familia denotes household from famulus for 
 fagmulus, the root fag being equated with the Sansk. bhaj, 
 servira. Lucan's Hesus or Esus may fairly be compared with 
 the Welsh Hu Gadarn by legitimate process, but no letter- 
 change can justify his connection with Gaisos, the spear, not 
 the sword, Virgil's gcesicm, A.S. gdr, our verb to gore, retained 
 in its outer form in gar-fish. For Theuthisks, lege Thiudisks, 
 from thiuda, pqpulus ; in old high German Diutisk, Diotisk, 
 popularis, vulgaris, the country vernacular as distinguished from 
 the cultivated Latin ; hence the word Dutch, Bcutsch. With 
 our ancestors tliedd stood for nation generally and gethedde for 
 any speech. Our diet in the political sense is the same word, 
 but borrowed from our German cousins, not inherited from our 
 fathers. The modern Celtic form is the Irish tuath, in ancient 
 Celtic it must have been teuta, touta. of which we actually have 
 the adjective toutius in the Gaulish inscription of Nismes. In 
 Oscan we have it as turta, tuta, its adjective being handed 
 down in Livy's meddix tuticus, the mayor or chief magistrate of 
 the tuta. In the Umbrian inscriptions it is tola. In Lithuanian 
 tauta, the country opposed to the town, and in old Prussian 
 tauta, the country generally, en Prusislcan tautan, im Land zu 
 Preusseri.'"
 
 62 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 tioned, harping again and again on the connection 
 even in Europe, if you go hack far enough, hetween 
 Celt and German. So, after all we have heard, and 
 truly heard of the diversity hetween all things 
 Semitic and all things Indo-European, there is now 
 an Italian philologist at work upon the relationship 
 between Sanscrit and Hebrew. 
 
 Both in small and great things, philology, dealing 
 with Celtic matters, has exemplified this tending of 
 science towards unity. Who has not been puzzled 
 by the relation of the Scots with Ireland — that vetus 
 et major Scotia, as Colgan calls it 1 Who does not feel 
 what pleasure Zeuss brings us when he suggests that 
 Gael, the name for the Irish Celt, and Scot, are at 
 bottom the same word, both having their origin in a 
 word meaning wind, and both signifying the violent 
 stormy people 2 1 Who does not feel his mind agreeably 
 cleared about our friends the Fenians, when he learns 
 that the root of their name, fen, " white," appears in 
 the hero Fingal ; in Gwynned, the Welsh name for 
 North Wales ; in the Roman Venedotia ; in Vannes 
 in Brittany ; in Venice 1 The very name of Ireland, 
 some say, comes from the famous Sanscrit word Arya, 
 the land of the Aryans, or noble men ; although the 
 weight of opinion seems to be in favour of connecting 
 
 1 Lord Strangford observes here: — "The original forms of 
 Gael should be mentioned — Gaedil, Goidil : in modern Gaelic 
 orthography Gaoidheal where the dh is not realised in pronuncia- 
 tion. There is nothing impossible in the connection of the root 
 of this with that of Scot, if the s of the latter be merely pros- 
 thetic. But the whole thing is in nubibus, and given as a guess 
 only."
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 63 
 
 it rather with another Sanscrit word, avara, occidental, 
 the western land or isle of the west. 1 But, at any 
 rate, who that has been brought up to think the Celts 
 utter aliens from us and our culture, can come without 
 a start of sympathy upon such words as heol (sol), or 
 buaist (fuisti) 1 ? or upon such a sentence as this, "Peris 
 Duw duifunnaun" ("God prepared two fountains")? 
 Or when Mr. "Whitley Stokes, one of the very ablest 
 scholars formed in Zeuss's school, a born philologist, — 
 he now occupies, alas ! a post under the Government 
 of India, instead of a chair of philology at home, and 
 makes one think mournfully of Montesquieu's saying, 
 that had he been an Englishman he should never have 
 produced his great work, but have caught the con- 
 tagion of practical life, and devoted himself to what 
 is called "rising in the world," — when Mr. Whitley 
 Stokes, in his edition of Cormac's Glossary, holds up 
 the Irish word traitli, the sea, and makes us remark 
 that, though the names Triton, Amphitrite, and those 
 of corresponding Indian and Zend divinities, point to 
 the meaning sea, yet it is only Irish which actually 
 supplies the vocable, how delightfully that brings 
 Ireland into the Indo-European concert ! What a 
 wholesome buffet it gives to Lord Lyndhurst's aliena- 
 tion doctrines ! 
 
 To go a little farther. Of the two great Celtic 
 divisions of language, the Gaelic and the Cymric, the 
 
 1 " The name of Erin," says Lord Strangford, "is treated at 
 length in a masterly note by Whitley Stokes in the first series 
 of Max Midler's lectures (4th ed.) p. 255, where its earliest 
 tangible form is shown to have been Iverio. Pictet's connection 
 with Arya is quite baseless."
 
 64 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 Gaelic, say the philologists, is more related to the 
 younger, more synthetic, group of languages, Sanscrit, 
 Greek, Zend, Latin, and Teutonic ; the Cymric to the 
 older, more analytic Turanian group. Of the more 
 synthetic Aryan group, again, Zend and Teutonic are, 
 in their turn, looser and more analytic than Sanscrit 
 and Greek, more in sympathy with the Turanian group 
 and with Celtic. What possibilities of affinity and 
 influence are here hinted at ; what lines of inquiry, 
 worth exploring, at any rate, suggest themselves to 
 one's mind. By the forms of its language a nation 
 expresses its very self. Our language is the loosest, 
 the most analytic, of all European languages. And 
 we, then, what are we 1 what is England. I will not 
 answer, A vast obscure Cymric basis with a vast visible 
 Teutonic superstructure ; but I will say that that 
 answer sometimes suggests itself, at any rate, — some- 
 times knocks at our mind's door for admission ; and 
 we begin to cast about and see whether it is to be let 
 in. 
 
 But the forms of its language are not our only key 
 to a people ; what it says in its language, its literature, 
 is the great key, and we must get back to literature. 
 The literature of the Celtic peoples has not yet had 
 its Zeuss, and greatly it wants him. We need a Zeuss 
 to apply to Celtic literature, to all its vexed questions 
 of dates, authenticity, and significance, the criticism, 
 the sane method, the disinterested endeavour to get 
 at the real facts, which Zeuss has shown in dealing 
 with Celtic language. Science is good in itself, and 
 therefore Celtic literature, — the Celt-haters having
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 65 
 
 failed to prove it a bubble, — Celtic literature is interest- 
 ing, merely as an object of knowledge. But it rein- 
 forces and redoubles our interest in Celtic literature 
 if we find that here, too, science exercises the recon- 
 ciling, the uniting influence of which I have said so 
 much ; if we find here, more than anywhere else, 
 traces of kinship, and the most essential sort of kin- 
 ship, spiritual kinship, between us and the Celt, of 
 which we had never dreamed. I settle nothing, and 
 can settle nothing ; I have not the special knowledge 
 needed for that. I have no pretension to do more 
 than to try and awaken interest ; to seize on hints, 
 to point out indications, which, to any one with a 
 feeling for literature, suggest themselves; to stimulate 
 other inquirers. I must surely be without the bias 
 which has so often rendered Welsh and Irish students 
 extravagant; why, my very name expresses that 
 peculiar Semitico- Saxon mixture which makes the 
 typical Englishman ; I can have no ends to serve in 
 finding in Celtic literature more than is there. What 
 is there, is for me the only question. 
 
 III. 
 
 We have seen how philology carries us towards 
 ideas of affinity of race which are new to us. But 
 it is evident that this affinity, even if proved, can be 
 no very potent affair, unless it goes beyond the 
 stage at which we have hitherto observed it. 
 Affinity between races still, so to speak, in their 
 mother's womb, counts for something, indeed, but 
 
 VOL. IL F
 
 66 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 cannot count for very much. So long as Celt and 
 Teuton are in their embryo rudimentary state, or, 
 at least, no such great while out of their cradle, 
 still engaged in their wanderings, changes of place 
 and struggle for development, so long as they have 
 not yet crystallised into solid nations, they may 
 touch and mix in passing, and yet very little come 
 of it. It is when the embryo has grown and solidi- 
 fied into a distinct nation, into the Gaul or German 
 of history, when it has finally acquired the char- 
 acters which make the Gaul of history what he is, 
 the German of history what he is, that contact and 
 mixture are important, and may leave a long train 
 of effects; for Celt and Teuton by this time have 
 their formed, marked, national, ineffaceable qualities 
 to oppose or to communicate. The contact of the 
 German of the Continent with the Celt was in the 
 prehistoric times, and the definite German type, as 
 we know it, was fixed later, and from the time when 
 it became fixed was not influenced by the Celtic type. 
 But here in our country, in historic times, long after 
 the Celtic embryo had crystallised into the Celt 
 proper, long after the Germanic embryo had crystal- 
 lised into the German proper, there was an important 
 contact between the two peoples ; the Saxons invaded 
 the Britons and settled themselves in the Britons' 
 country. Well, then, here was a contact which one 
 might expect would leave its traces ; if the Saxons 
 got the upper hand, as we all know they did, and 
 made our country be England and us be English, 
 there must yet, one would think, be some trace of
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 67 
 
 the Saxon having met the Briton ; there must be 
 some Celtic vein or other running through us. 
 Many people say there is nothing at all of the 
 kind, absolutely nothing ; the Saturday Review treats 
 these matters of ethnology with great power and 
 learning, and the Saturday Review says we are "a 
 nation into which a Norman element, like a much 
 smaller Celtic element, was so completely absorbed 
 that it is vain to seek after Norman or Celtic ele- 
 ments in any modern Englishman." And the other 
 day at Zurich I read a long essay on English litera- 
 ture by one of the professors there, in which the 
 writer observed, as a remarkable thing, that while 
 other countries conquered by the Germans, — France, 
 for instance, and Italy, — had ousted all German in- 
 fluence from their genius and literature, there were 
 two countries, not originally Germanic, but conquered 
 by the Germans, England and German Switzerland, 
 of which the genius and the literature were purely 
 and unmixedly German ; and this he laid down as a 
 position which nobody would dream of challenging. 
 
 I say it is strange that this should be so, and we 
 in particular have reason for inquiring whether it 
 really is so ; because though, as I have said, even as 
 a matter of science the Celt has a claim to be known, 
 and we have an interest in knowing him, yet this 
 interest is wonderfully enhanced if we find him to 
 have actually a part in us. The question is to be 
 tried by external and by internal evidence; the 
 language and the physical type of our race afford 
 certain data for trying it, and other data are afforded
 
 68 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 by our literature, genius, and spiritual production 
 generally. Data of this second kind belong to the 
 province of the literary critic ; data of the first kind 
 to the province of the philologist and of the phy- 
 siologist. 
 
 The province of the philologist and of the phy- 
 siologist is not mine ; but this whole question as to 
 the mixture of Celt with Saxon in us has been so 
 little explored, people have been so prone to settle 
 it off-hand according to their prepossessions, that 
 even on the philological and physiological side of it 
 I must say a few words in passing. Surely it must 
 strike with surprise any one who thinks of it, to 
 find that without any immense inpouring of a whole 
 people, that by mere expeditions of invaders having 
 to come over the sea, and in no greater numbers 
 than the Saxons, so far as we can make out, actually 
 came, the old occupants of this island, the Celtic 
 Britons, should have been completely annihilated, 
 or even so completely absorbed that it is vain to 
 seek after Celtic elements in the existing English 
 race. Of deliberate wholesale extermination of the 
 Celtic race, all of them who could not fly to Wales 
 or Scotland, we hear nothing ; and without some 
 such extermination one would suppose that a great 
 mass of them must have remained in the country, 
 their lot the obscure and, so to speak, underground 
 lot of a subject race, but yet insensibly getting mixed 
 with their conquerors, and their blood entering into 
 the composition of a new people, in which the stock 
 of the conquerors counts for most, but the stock of
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 69 
 
 the conquered, too, counts for something. How 
 little the triumph of the conqueror's laws, manners, 
 and language, proves the extinction of the old race 
 we may see by looking at France ; Gaul was Latin- 
 ised in language, manners, and laws, and yet her 
 people remained essentially Celtic. The Germanisa- 
 tion of Britain went far deeper than the Latinisation 
 of France, and not only laws, manners, and language, 
 but the main current of the blood, became Germanic ; 
 but how, without some process of radical extirpation, 
 of which, as I say, there is no evidence, can there 
 have failed to subsist in Britain, as in Gaul, a Celtic 
 current too 1 The indications of this in our language 
 have never yet been thoroughly searched out ; the 
 Celtic names of places prove nothing, of course, as 
 to the point here in question ; they come from the 
 prehistoric times, the times before the nations, Ger- 
 manic or Celtic, had crystallised, and they are every- 
 where, as the impetuous Celt was formerly every- 
 where, — in the Alps, the Apennines, the Cevennes, 
 the Rhine, the Po, as well as in the Thames, the 
 Humber, Cumberland, London. But it is said that 
 the words of Celtic origin for things having to do 
 with every-day peaceful life, — the life of a settled 
 nation, — words like basket (to take an instance which 
 all the world knows) form a much larger body in our 
 language than is commonly supposed ; it is said that 
 a number of our raciest, most idiomatic, popular words 
 — for example, bam, kick, whop, twaddle, fudge, hitch, 
 muggy, — are Celtic. These assertions require to be 
 carefully examined, and it by no means follows that
 
 70 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 because an English word is found in Celtic, therefore 
 we get it from thence ; but they have not yet had 
 the attention which, as illustrating through language 
 this matter of the subsistence and intermingling in 
 our nation of a Celtic part, they merit. 
 
 Nor have the physiological data which illustrate 
 this matter had much more attention from us in Eng- 
 land. But in France, a physician, half English by 
 blood though a Frenchman by home and language, 
 Monsieur W. F. Edwards, brother to Monsieur Milne- 
 Edwards, the well-known zoologist, published in 1839 
 a letter to Monsieur Amed6e Thierry with this title : 
 Des Caraderes Physiologiques des Races Humaines con- 
 sid&ris dans lews Rapports avec VHistoire. The letter 
 attracted great attention on the Continent; it fills 
 not much more than a hundred pages, and they are 
 a hundred pages which well deserve reading and re- 
 reading. Monsieur Thierry in his Histoire des Gaidois 
 had divided the population of Gaul into certain 
 groups, and the object of Monsieur Edwards was to 
 try this division by physiology. Groups of men 
 have, he says, their physical type which distinguishes 
 them, as well as their language ; the traces of this 
 physical type endure as the traces of language endure, 
 and physiology is enabled to verify history by them. 
 Accordingly, he determines the physical type of each 
 of the two great Celtic families, the Gaels and the 
 Cymris, who are said to have been distributed in a 
 certain order through Gaul, and then he tracks these 
 types in the population of France at the present day, 
 and so verifies the alleged original order of distribu-
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 71 
 
 tion. In doing this, he makes excursions into neigh- 
 bouring countries where the Gaels and the Cymris 
 have been, and he declares that in England he finds 
 abundant traces of the physical type which he has 
 established as the Cymric, still subsisting in our popu- 
 lation, and having descended from the old British 
 possessors of our soil before the Saxon conquest. 
 But if we are to believe the current English opinion, 
 says Monsieur Edwards, the stock of these old British 
 possessors is clean gone. On this opinion he makes 
 the following comment : — 
 
 " In the territory occupied by the Saxons, the 
 Britons were no longer an independent nation, nor 
 even a people with any civil existence at all. For 
 history, therefore, they were dead, above all for 
 history as it was then written; but they had not 
 perished; they still lived on, and undoubtedly in 
 such numbers as the remains of a great nation, in 
 spite of its disasters, might still be expected to keep. 
 That the Britons were destroyed or expelled from 
 England, properly so called, is, as I have said, a 
 popular opinion in that country. It is founded on 
 the exaggeration of the writers of history; but in 
 these very writers, when we come to look closely at 
 what they say, we find the confession that the remains 
 of this people were reduced to a state of strict servi- 
 tude. Attached to the soil, they will have shared in 
 that emancipation which during the course of the 
 Middle Ages gradually restored to political life the 
 mass of the population in the countries of Western 
 Europe ; recovering by slow degrees their rights with-
 
 72 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 out resuming their name, and rising gradually with 
 the rise of industry, they will have got spread through 
 all ranks of society. The gradualness of this move- 
 ment, and the ohscurity which enwrapped its begin- 
 nings, allowed the contempt of the conqueror and the 
 shame of the conquered to become fixed feelings ; 
 and so it turns out, that an Englishman who now 
 thinks himself sprung from the Saxons or the Nor- 
 mans, is often in reality the descendant of the 
 Britons." 
 
 So physiology, as well as language, incomplete 
 though the application of their tests to this matter 
 has hitherto been, may lead us to hesitate before 
 accepting the round assertion that it is vain to search 
 for Celtic elements in any modern Englishman. But 
 it is not only by the tests of physiology and language 
 that we can try this matter. As there are for physi- 
 ology physical marks, such as the square heads of the 
 German, the round head of the Gael, the oval head 
 of the Cymri, which determine the type of a people, 
 so for criticism there are spiritual marks which deter- 
 mine the type, and make us speak of the Greek 
 genius, the Teutonic genius, the Celtic genius, and so 
 on. Here is another test at our service ; and this 
 test, too, has never yet been thoroughly employed. 
 Foreign critics have indeed occasionally hazarded the 
 idea that in English poetry there is a Celtic element 
 traceable; and Mr. Morley, in his very readable as 
 Avell as very useful book on the English writers before 
 Chaucer, has a sentence which struck my attention 
 when I read it, because it expresses an opinion which
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 73 
 
 I, too, have long held. Mr. Morley says : — " The 
 main current of English literature cannot be discon- 
 nected from the lively Celtic wit in which it has one 
 of its sources. The Celts do not form an utterly 
 distinct part of our mixed population. But for early, 
 frequent, and various contact with the race that in its 
 half-barbarous days invented Ossian's dialogues with 
 St. Patrick, and that quickened afterwards the North- 
 men's blood in France, Germanic England would not 
 have produced a Shakspeare." But there Mr. Morley 
 leaves the matter. He indicates this Celtic element 
 and influence, but he does not show us, — it did not 
 come within the scope of his work to show us, — how 
 this influence has declared itself. Unlike the physio- 
 logical test, or the linguistic test, this literary, 
 spiritual test is one which I may perhaps be allowed 
 to try my hand at applying. I say that there is a 
 Celtic element in the English nature, as well as a 
 Germanic element, and that this element manifests 
 itself in our spirit and literature. But before I try 
 to point out how it manifests itself, it may be as well 
 to get a clear notion of what we mean by a Celtic 
 element, a Germanic element; what characters, that 
 is, determine for us the Celtic genius, the Germanic 
 genius, as we commonly conceive the two. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Let me repeat what I have often said of the char- 
 acteristics which mark the English spirit, the English 
 genius. This spirit, this genius, judged, to be sure,
 
 74 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 rather from a friend's than an enemy's point of view, 
 yet judged on the whole fairly, is characterised, I 
 have repeatedly said, by energy with honesty. Take 
 away some of the energy which comes to us, as I 
 believe, in part from Celtic and Roman sources ; in- 
 stead of energy, say rather steadiness ; and you have 
 the Germanic genius : steadiness with honesty. It is 
 evident how nearly the two characterisations approach 
 one another ; and yet they leave, as we shall see, a 
 great deal of room for difference. Steadiness with 
 honesty ; the danger for a national spirit thus com- 
 posed is the humdrum, the plain and ugly, the 
 ignoble : in a word, das Gemeine, die Gemeinheit, that 
 curse of Germany, against which Goethe was all his 
 life fighting. The excellence of a national spirit thus 
 composed is freedom from whim, flightiness, perverse- 
 ness ; patient fidelity to Nature, — in a word, science, 
 — leading it at last, though slowly, and not by the 
 most brilliant road, out of the bondage of the hum- 
 drum and common, into the better life. The uni- 
 versal dead-level of plainness and homeliness, the 
 lack of all beauty and distinction in form and feature, 
 the slowness and clumsiness of the language, the 
 eternal beer, sausages, and bad tobacco, the blank 
 commonness everywhere, pressing at last like a 
 weight on the spirits of the traveller in Northern 
 Germany, and making him impatient to be gone, — 
 this is the weak side ; the industry, the well-doing, 
 the patient steady elaboration of things, the idea of 
 science governing all departments of human activity, 
 —this is the strong side ; and through this side of
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 75 
 
 her genius, Germany has already obtained excellent 
 results, and is destined, we may depend upon it, how- 
 ever her pedantry, her slowness, her fumbling, her 
 ineffectiveness, her bad government, may at times 
 make us cry out, to an immense development. 1 
 
 For dulness, the creeping Saxons, — says an old Irish 
 poem, assigning the characteristics for which different 
 nations are celebrated : — 
 
 For acuteness and valour, the Greeks, 
 
 For excessive pride, the Romans, 
 
 For dulness, the creeping Saxons ; 
 
 For beauty and amorousness, the Gacdhils. 
 
 We have seen in what sense, and with what explana- 
 tion, this characterisation of the German may be 
 allowed to stand ; now let us come to the beautiful 
 and amorous Gaedhil. Or rather, let us find a defini- 
 tion which may suit both branches of the Celtic 
 family, the Cymri as well as the Gael. It is clear 
 that special circumstances may have developed some 
 one side in the national character of Cymri or Gael, 
 Welshman or Irishman, so that the observer's notice 
 shall be readily caught by this side, and yet it may 
 be impossible to adopt it as characteristic of the 
 Celtic nature generally. For instance, in his beau- 
 tiful essay on the poetry of the Celtic races, M. 
 Renan, with his eyes fixed on the Bretons and the 
 Welsh, is struck with the timidity, the shyness, the 
 delicacy of the Celtic nature, its preference for a re- 
 tired life, its embarrassment at having to deal with 
 
 1 It is to be remembered that the above was written before 
 the recent war between Prussia and Austria.
 
 76 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 the great world. He talks of the douce petite race 
 naturellement chrttienne, his race jiere et timide, a 
 TexUrieur gauche et embarrasse'e. But it is evident 
 that this description, however well it may do for the 
 Cymri, will never do for the Gael, never do for the 
 typical Irishman of Donnybrook fair. Again, M. 
 Renan's infinie dSlicatesse de sentiment qui caractirise la 
 race Celtique, how little that accords with the popular 
 conception of an Irishman who wants to borrow 
 money ! Sentiment is, however, the word which 
 marks where the Celtic races really touch and are 
 one ; sentimental, if the Celtic nature is to be charac- 
 terised by a single term, is the best term to take. 
 An organisation quick to feel impressions, and feeling 
 them very strongly ; a lively personality therefore, 
 keenly sensitive to joy and to sorrow ; this is the 
 main point. If the downs of life too much outnumber 
 the ups, this temperament, just because it is so 
 quickly and nearly conscious of all impressions, may 
 no doubt be seen shy and wounded ; it may be seen 
 in wistful regret, it may be seen in passionate, pene- 
 trating melancholy; but its essence is to aspire 
 ardently after life, light, and emotion, to be expan- 
 sive, adventurous, and gay. Our word gay, it is said, 
 is itself Celtic. It is not from gaudium, but from the 
 Celtic gair, to laugh ; l and the impressionable Celt, 
 
 1 The etymology is Monsieur Henri Martin's, but Lord 
 Strangford says : — "Whatever gai may be, it is assuredly not 
 Celtic. Is there any authority for this word gair, to laugh, or 
 rather ' laughter, ' beyond O'Reilly? O'Reilly is no authority 
 at all except in so far as tested and passed by the new school. It 
 is hard to give up gavisus. But Diez, chief authority in
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 77 
 
 soon up and soon down, is the more down because it 
 is so his nature to he up — to be sociable, hospitable, 
 eloquent, admired, figuring away brilliantly. He 
 loves bright colours, he easily becomes audacious, 
 overcrowing, full of fanfaronade. The German, 
 say the physiologists, has the larger volume of in- 
 testines (and who that has ever seen a German at a 
 table-d'hote will not readily believe this 1), the French- 
 man has the more developed organs of respiration. 
 That is just the expansive, eager Celtic nature ; the 
 head in the air, snuffing and snorting ; a proud look 
 and a high stomach, as the Psalmist says, but without 
 any such settled savage temper as the Psalmist seems 
 to impute by those words. For good and for bad, the 
 Celtic genius is more airy and unsubstantial, goes less 
 near the ground, than the German. The Celt is often 
 called sensual ; but it is not so much the vulgar satis- 
 factions of sense that attract him as emotion and 
 excitement ; he is truly, as I began by saying, senti- 
 mental. 
 
 Sentimental, — always ready to react against the des- 
 potism of fact ; that is the description a great friend l 
 of the Celt gives of him ; and it is not a bad descrip- 
 tion of the sentimental temperament ; it lets us into 
 the secret of its dangers and of its habitual want of 
 success. Balance, measure, and patience, these are 
 the eternal conditions, even supposing the happiest 
 
 Romanic matters, is content to accept Muratori's reference to an 
 old High-German gdhi, modern jcihe, sharp, quick, sudden, 
 brisk, and so to the sense of lively, animated, high in spirits. " 
 1 Monsieur Henri Martin, whose chapters on the Celts, in 
 his Hidoire de France, are full of information and interest.
 
 78 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 temperament to start with, of high success; and 
 balance, measure, and patience are just what the Celt 
 has never had. Even in the world of spiritual crea- 
 tion, he has never, in spite of his admirable gifts of 
 quick perception and warm emotion, succeeded per- 
 fectly, because he never has had steadiness, patience, 
 sanity enough to comply with the conditions under 
 which alone can expression be perfectly given to the 
 finest perceptions and emotions. The Greek has the 
 same perceptive, emotional temperament as the Celt ; 
 but he adds to this temperament the sense of measure; 
 hence his admirable success in the plastic arts, in 
 which the Celtic genius, with its chafing against the 
 despotism of fact, its perpetual straining after mere 
 emotion, has accomplished nothing. In the compara- 
 tively petty art of ornamentation, in rings, brooches, 
 crosiers, relic-cases, and so on, he has done just enough 
 to show his delicacy of taste, his happy temperament ; 
 but the grand difficulties of painting and sculpture, 
 the prolonged dealings of spirit with matter, he has 
 never had patience for. Take the more spiritual arts 
 of music and poetry. All that emotion alone can do 
 in music the Celt has done ; the very soul of emotion 
 breathes in the Scotch and Irish airs ; but with all 
 this power of musical feeling, what has the Celt, so 
 eager for emotion that he has not patience for science, 
 effected in music, to be compared with what the less 
 emotional German, steadily developing his musical 
 feeling with the science of a Sebastian Bach or a 
 Beethoven, has effected? In poetry, again, — poetry 
 which the Celt has so passionately, so nobly loved ;
 
 CELTIC LITERATUKE. 79 
 
 poetry where emotion counts for so much, but where 
 reason, too, reason, measure, sanity, also count for so 
 much, — the Celt has shown genius, indeed, splendid 
 genius ; but even here his faults have clung to him, 
 and hindered him from producing great works, such 
 as other nations with a genius for poetry,— the Greeks, 
 say, or the Italians, — have produced. The Celt has 
 not produced great poetical works, he has only pro- 
 duced poetry with an air of greatness investing it 
 all, and sometimes giving, moreover, to short pieces, 
 or to passages, lines, and snatches of long pieces, 
 singular beauty and power. And yet he loved poetry 
 so much that he grudged no pains to it ; but the true 
 art, the architectonic^ which shapes great works, such 
 as the Agamemnon or the Divine Comedy, comes only 
 after a steady, deep-searching survey, a firm concep- 
 tion of the facts of human life, which the Celt has 
 not patience for. So he runs off into technic, where 
 he employs the utmost elaboration, and attains as- 
 tonishing skill ; but in the contents of his poetry you 
 have only so much interpretation of the world as the 
 first dash of a quick, strong perception, and then sen- 
 timent, infinite sentiment, can bring you. Here, too, 
 his want of sanity and steadfastness has kept the Celt 
 back from the highest success. 
 
 If his rebellion against fact has thus lamed the 
 Celt even in spiritual work, how much more must it 
 have lamed him in the world of business and politics ! 
 The skilful and resolute appliance of means to ends 
 which is needed both to make progress in material 
 civilisation, and also to form powerful states, is just
 
 80 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 what the Celt has least turn for. He is sensual, as I 
 have said, or at least sensuous ; loves bright colours, 
 company, and pleasure ; and here he is like the Greek 
 and Latin races ; but compare the talent the Greek 
 and Latin (or Latinised) races have shown for gratify- 
 ing their senses, for procuring an outward life, rich, 
 luxurious, splendid, with the Celt's failure to reach 
 any material civilisation sound and satisfying, and 
 not out at elbows, poor, slovenly, and half-barbarous. 
 The sensuousness of the Greek made Sybaris and 
 Corinth, the sensuousness of the Latin made Rome 
 and Baise, the sensuousness of the Latinised French- 
 man makes Paris ; the sensuousness of the Celt 
 proper has made Ireland. Even in his ideal heroic 
 times, his gay and sensuous nature cannot carry him, 
 in the appliances of his favourite life of sociability 
 and pleasure, beyond the gross and creeping Saxon 
 whom he despises ; the regent Breas, we are told in 
 the Battle of Moytura of the Fomorians, became un- 
 popular because " the knives of his people were not 
 greased at his table, nor did their breath smell of ale 
 at the banquet." In its grossness and barbarousness 
 is not that Saxon, as Saxon as it can be 1 just what 
 the Latinised Norman, sensuous and sociable like the 
 Celt, but with the talent to make this bent of his 
 serve to a practical embellishment of his mode of 
 living, found so disgusting in the Saxon. 
 
 And as in material civilisation he has been in- 
 effectual, so has the Celt been ineffectual in politics. 
 This colossal, impetuous, adventurous wanderer, the 
 Titan of the early world, who in primitive times fills
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 81 
 
 so large a place on earth's scene, dwindles and dwindles 
 as history goes on, and at last is shrunk to what we 
 now see him. For ages and ages the world has been 
 constantly slipping, ever more and more, out of the 
 Celt's grasp. " They went forth to the war," Ossian 
 says most truly, "but they always fell." 
 
 And yet, if one sets about constituting an ideal 
 genius, what a great deal of the Celt does one find 
 oneself drawn to put into it ! Of an ideal genius 
 one does not want the elements, any of them, to be 
 in a state of weakness ; on the contrary, one wants 
 all of them to be in the highest state of power ; but 
 with a law of measure, of harmony, presiding over 
 the whole. So the sensibility of the Celt, if every- 
 thing else were not sacrificed to it, is a beautiful and 
 admirable force. For sensibility, the power of quick 
 and strong perception and emotion, is one of the 
 very prime constituents of genius, perhaps its most 
 positive constituent ; it is to the soul what good 
 senses are to the body, the grand natural condition 
 of successful activity. Sensibility gives genius its 
 materials ; one cannot have too much of it, if one can 
 but keep its master and not be its slave. Do not let 
 us wish that the Celt had had less sensibility, but 
 that he had been more master of it. Even as it is, 
 if his sensibility has been a source of weakness to 
 him, it has been a source of power too, and a source 
 of happiness. Some people have found in the Celtic 
 nature and its sensibility the main root out of which 
 chivalry and romance and the glorification of a femi- 
 nine ideal spring ; this is a great question, with 
 
 VOL. II. G
 
 82 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 which I cannot deal here. Let me notice in passing, 
 however, that there is, in truth, a Celtic air about the 
 extravagance of chivalry, its reaction against the 
 despotism of fact, its straining human nature further 
 than it will stand. But putting all this question of 
 chivalry and its origin on one side, no doubt the 
 sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, 
 have something feminine in them, and the Celt is 
 thus peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the femi- 
 nine idiosyncrasy ; he has an affinity to it ; he is not 
 far from its secret. Again, his sensibility gives him 
 a peculiarly near and intimate feeling of nature and 
 the life of nature ; here, too, he seems in a special 
 Avay attracted by the secret before him, the secret of 
 natural beauty and natural magic, and to be close to 
 it, to half-divine it. In the productions of the Celtic 
 genius, nothing, perhaps, is so interesting as the evi- 
 dences of this power : I shall have occasion to give 
 specimens of them by and by. The same sensibility 
 made the Celts full of reverence and enthusiasm for 
 genius, learning, and the things of the mind ; to be a 
 bard, freed a man, — that is a characteristic stroke of 
 this generous and ennobling ardour of theirs, which 
 no race has ever shown more strongly. Even the 
 extravagance and exaggeration of the sentimental 
 Celtic nature has often something romantic and attrac- 
 tive about it, something which has a sort of smack of 
 misdirected good. The Celt, undisciplinable, anarchi- 
 cal, and turbulent by nature, but out of affection 
 and admiration giving himself body and soul to some 
 leader, that is not a promising political temperament.
 
 CELTIC LITEEATUKE. 83 
 
 it is just the opposite of the Anglo-Saxon tempera- 
 ment, disciplinable and steadily obedient within cer- 
 tain limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom 
 and self-dependence; but it is a temperament for 
 which one has a kind of sympathy notwithstanding. 
 And very often, for the gay defiant reaction against 
 fact of the lively Celtic nature one has more than 
 sympathy ; one feels, in spite of the extravagance, in 
 spite of good sense disapproving, magnetised and ex- 
 hilarated by it. The Gauls had a rule inflicting a 
 fine on every warrior who, when he appeared on 
 parade, was found to stick out too much in front, — to 
 be corpulent, in short. Such a rule is surely the 
 maddest article of war ever framed, and to people to 
 whom nature has assigned a large volume of intes- 
 tines, must appear, no doubt, horrible ; but yet has 
 it not an audacious, sparkling, immaterial manner 
 with it, which lifts one out of routine, and sets one's 
 spirits in a glow 1 
 
 All tendencies of human nature are in themselves 
 vital and profitable ; when they are blamed, they are 
 only to be blamed relatively, not absolutely. This 
 holds true of the Saxon's phlegm as well as of the 
 Celt's sentiment. Out of the steady humdrum habit 
 of the creeping Saxon, as the Celt calls him, — out of 
 his way of going near the ground, — has come, no 
 doubt, Philistinism, that plant of essentially Germanic 
 growth, flourishing with its genuine marks only in the 
 German fatherland, Great Britain and her colonies, 
 and the United States of America ; but what a soul 
 of goodness there is in Philistinism itself ! and this
 
 84 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 soul of goodness I, who am often supposed to be 
 Philistinism's mortal enemy merely because I do not 
 wish it to have things all its own way, cherish as 
 much as anybody. This steady-going habit leads at 
 last, as I have said, up to science, up to the compre- 
 hension and interpretation of the world. With us in 
 Great Britain, it is true, it does not seem to lead so 
 far as that; it is in Germany, where the habit is 
 more unmixed, that it can lead to science. Here with 
 us it seems at a certain point to meet with a conflict- 
 ing force, which checks it and prevents its pushing on 
 to science ; but before reaching this point what con- 
 quests has it not won ! and all the more, perhaps, for 
 stopping short at this point, for spending its exertions 
 within a bounded field, the field of plain sense, of 
 direct practical utility. How it has augmented the 
 comforts and conveniences of life for us ! Doors that 
 open, windows that shut, locks that turn, razors that 
 shave, coats that wear, watches that go, and a thou- 
 sand more such good things, are the invention of the 
 Philistines. 
 
 Here, then, if commingling there is in our race, 
 are two very unlike elements to commingle ; the 
 steady-going Saxon temperament and the sentimental 
 Celtic temperament. But before we go on to try and 
 verify, in our life and literature, the alleged fact of 
 this commingling, we have yet another element to 
 take into account, the Norman element. The critic 
 in the Saturday Review, whom I have already quoted, 
 says that in looking for traces of Normanism in our 
 national genius, as in looking for traces of Celtism in
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 85 
 
 it, we do but lose our labour ; he says, indeed, that 
 there went to the original making of our nation a 
 very great deal more of a Norman element than of 
 a Celtic element, but he asserts that both elements 
 have now so completely disappeared, that it is vain 
 to look for any trace of either of them in the modern 
 Englishman. But this sort of assertion I do not like 
 to admit without trying it a little. I want, therefore, 
 to get some plain notion of the Norman habit and 
 genius, as I have sought to get some plain notion of 
 the Saxon and Celtic. Some people will say that the 
 Normans are Teutonic, and that therefore the dis- 
 tinguishing characters of the German genius must be 
 those of their genius also ; but the matter cannot be 
 settled in this speedy fashion. No doubt the basis of 
 the Norman race is Teutonic ; but the governing point 
 in the history of the Norman race, — so far, at least, 
 as we English have to do with it, — is not its Teutonic 
 origin, but its Latin civilisation. The French people 
 have, as I have already remarked, an undoubtedly 
 Celtic basis, yet so decisive in its effect upon a nation's 
 habit and character can be the contact with a stronger 
 civilisation, that Gaul, without changing the basis of 
 her blood, became, for all practical intents and pur- 
 poses, a Latin country, France and not Ireland, through 
 the Eoman conquest. Latinism conquered Celtism in 
 her, as it also conquered the Germanism imported by 
 the Frankish and other invasions; Celtism is, how- 
 ever, I need not say, everywhere manifest still in the 
 French nation ; even Germanism is distinctly trace- 
 able in it, as any one who attentively compares the
 
 86 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 French with other Latin races will see. No one can 
 look carefully at the French troops in Eome, amongst 
 the Italian population, and not perceive this trace of 
 Germanism ; I do not mean in the Alsatian soldiers 
 only, hut in the soldiers of genuine France. But the 
 governing character of France, as a power in the 
 world, is Latin; such was the force of Greek and 
 Roman civilisation upon a race whose whole mass 
 remained Celtic, and where the Celtic language still 
 lingered on, they say, among the common people, for 
 some five or six centuries after the Roman conquest. 
 But the Normans in Neustria lost their old Teutonic 
 language in a wonderfully short time ; when they 
 conquered England they were already Latinised; with 
 them were a number of Frenchmen by race, men from 
 Anjou and Poitou, so they brought into England more, 
 non-Teutonic blood, besides what they had themselves 
 got by intermarriage, than is commonly supposed ; the 
 great point, however, is, that by civilisation this vigorous 
 race, when it took possession of England, was Latin. 
 
 These Normans, who in Neustria had lost their 
 old Teutonic tongue so rapidly, kept in England their 
 new Latin tongue for some three centuries. It was 
 Edward the Third's reign before English came to be 
 used in law -pleadings and spoken at court. Why 
 this difference 1 ? Both in Neustria and in England 
 the Normans were a handful; but in Neustria, as 
 Teutons, they were in contact with a more advanced 
 civilisation than their own ; in England, as Latins, 
 with a less advanced. The Latinised Normans in 
 England had the sense for fact, which the Celts had
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 87 
 
 not; and the love of strenuousness, clearness, and 
 rapidity, the high Latin spirit, which the Saxons had 
 not. They hated the slowness and didness of the 
 creeping Saxon ; it offended their clear, strenuous 
 talent for affairs, as it offended the Celt's quick and 
 delicate perception. The Normans had the Roman 
 talent for affairs, the Eoman decisiveness in emer- 
 gencies. They have been called prosaic, but this is 
 not a right word for them ; they were neither senti- 
 mental, nor, strictly speaking, poetical. They had 
 more sense for rhetoric than for poetry, like the 
 Romans ; but, like the Romans, they had too high a 
 spirit not to like a noble intellectual stimulus of some 
 kind, and thus they were carried out of the region of 
 the merely prosaic. Their foible, — the bad excess of 
 their characterising quality of strenuousness, — was not 
 a prosaic flatness, it was hardness and insolence. 
 
 I have been obliged to fetch a very wide circuit, 
 but at last I have got what I went to seek. I have 
 got a rough, but, I hope, clear notion of these three 
 forces, the Germanic genius, the Celtic genius, the 
 Norman genius. The Germanic genius has steadi- 
 ness as its main basis, with commonness and humdrum 
 for its defect, fidelity to nature for its excellence. The 
 Celtic genius, sentiment as its main basis, with love of 
 beauty, charm, and spirituality for its excellence, in- 
 effectualness and self-will for its defect. The Norman 
 genius, talent for affairs as its main basis, with strenu- 
 ousness and clear rapidity for its excellence, hardness 
 and insolence for its defect. And now to try and 
 trace these in the composite English genius.
 
 88 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 V. 
 
 To begin with what is more external. If we are 
 so wholly Anglo-Saxon and Germanic as people say, 
 how comes it that the habits and gait of the German 
 language are so exceedingly unlike ours ? Why while 
 the Times talks in this fashion : " At noon a long line 
 of carriages extended from Pall Mall to the Peers' 
 entrance of the Palace of Westminster," does the 
 Cologne Gazette talk in this other fashion : " Nachdem 
 die Vorbereitungen zu dem auf dem Giirzenich-Saale 
 zu Ehren der Abgeordneten Statt finden sollenden 
 Bankette bereits vollstandig getroffen worden waren, 
 fand heute vormittag auf polizeiliche Anordnung die 
 Schliessung sammtlicher Zugange zum Giirzenich 
 Statt?" 1 Surely the mental habit of people who 
 express their thoughts in so very different a manner, 
 
 1 The above is really a sentence taken from the Cologne 
 Gazette. Lord Strangford's comment here is as follows : — 
 " Modern Germanism, in a general estimate of Germanism, 
 should not be taken, absolutely and necessarily, as the constant, 
 whereof we are the variant. The Low Dutch of Holland, any- 
 how, are indisputably as genuine Dutch as the High Dutch of 
 Germany Proper. But do they write sentences like this one, — 
 informe, ingens, cui lumen adcmptum ? If not, the question 
 must be asked, not how we have come to deviate, but how the 
 Germans have come to deviate. Our modern English prose in 
 plain matters is often all just the same as the prose of King 
 Alfred and the Chronicle. Ohthere's North Sea Voyage and 
 Wulfstan's Baltic Voyage is the sort of thing which is sent in 
 every day, one may say, to the Geographical or Ethnological 
 Society, in the whole style and turn of phrase and thought." 
 
 The mass of a stock must supply our data for judging the 
 stock. But see, moreover, what I have said at p. 91.
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 89 
 
 the one rapid, the other slow, the one plain, the other 
 embarrassed, the one trailing, the other striding, can- 
 not be essentially the same. The English language, 
 strange compound as it is, with its want of inflections, 
 and with all the difficulties which this want of inflec- 
 tions brings upon it, has yet made itself capable of 
 being, in good hands, a business instrument as ready, 
 direct, and clear, as French or Latin. Again : per- 
 haps no nation, after the Greeks and Romans, has so 
 clearly felt in what true rhetoric, rhetoric of the best 
 kind, consists, and reached so high a pitch of excel- 
 lence in this, as the English. Our sense for rhetoric 
 has in some ways done harm to us in our cultivation 
 of literature, harm to us, still more, in our cultivation 
 of science ; but in the true sphere of rhetoric, in 
 public speaking, this sense has given us orators whom 
 I do think we may, without fear of being contradicted 
 and accused of blind national vanity, assert to have 
 inherited the great Greek and Roman oratorical tradi- 
 tion more than the orators of any other country. 
 Strafford, Bolingbroke, the two Pitts, Fox, — to cite 
 no other names, — I imagine few will dispute that 
 these call up the notion of an oratory, in kind, in ex- 
 tent, in power, coming nearer than any other body of 
 modern oratory to the oratory of Greece and Rome. 
 And the affinity of spirit in our best public life and 
 greatest public men to those of Rome, has often struck 
 observers, foreign as well as English. Now, not only 
 have the Germans shown no eminent aptitude for 
 rhetoric such as the English have shown, — that was 
 not to be expected, since our public life has done so
 
 90 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 much to develop an aptitude of this kind, and the 
 public life of the Germans has done so little, — but 
 they seem in a singular degree devoid of any aptitude 
 at all for rhetoric. Take a speech from the throne in 
 Prussia, and compare it with a speech from the throne 
 in England. Assuredly it is not in speeches from the 
 throne that English rhetoric or any rhetoric shows 
 its best side ; — they are often cavilled at, often justly 
 cavilled at ; — no wonder, for this form of composition 
 is beset with very trying difficulties. But what is to 
 be remarked is this ; — a speech from the throne falls 
 essentially within the sphere of rhetoric, it is one's 
 sense of rhetoric which has to fix its tone and style, 
 so as to keep a certain note always sounding in it ; in 
 an English speech from the throne, whatever its faults, 
 this rhetorical note is always struck and kept to ; in 
 a Prussian speech from the throne, never. An English 
 speech from the throne is rhetoric ; a Prussian speech 
 is half talk, — heavy talk, — and half effusion. This is 
 one instance, it may be said ; true, but in one instance 
 of this kind the presence or the absence of an aptitude 
 for rhetoric is decisively shown. Well, then, why 
 am I not to say that we English get our rhetorical 
 sense from the Norman element in us, — our turn 
 for this strenuous, direct, high-spirited talent of 
 oratory, from the influence of the strenuous, direct, 
 high-spirited Normans? Modes of life, institutions, 
 government, and other such causes, are sufficient, 
 I shall be told, to account for English oratory. 
 Modes of life, institutions, government, climate, 
 and so forth, — let me say it once for all, — will
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 91 
 
 further or hinder the development of an aptitude, 
 but they will not by themselves create the aptitude 
 or explain it. On the other hand, a people's habit and 
 complexion of nature go far to determine its modes 
 of life, institutions, and government, and even to pre- 
 scribe the limits within which the influences of climate 
 shall tell upon it. 
 
 However, it is not my intention, in these remarks, 
 to lay it down for certain that this or that part of 
 our powers, shortcomings, and behaviour, is due to a 
 Celtic, German, or Norman element in us. To estab- 
 lish this I should need much wider limits, and a know- 
 ledge, too, far beyond what I possess ; all I purpose 
 is to point out certain correspondences, not yet, per- 
 haps, sufficiently observed and attended to, which 
 seem to lead towards certain conclusions. The fol- 
 lowing up the inquiry till full proof is reached, — or 
 perhaps, full disproof, — is what I want to suggest to 
 more competent persons. Premising this, I now go 
 on to a second matter, somewhat more delicate and 
 inward than that with which I began. Every one 
 knows how well the Greek and Latin races, with their 
 direct sense for the visible, palpable world, have suc- 
 ceeded in the plastic arts. The sheer German races, 
 too, with their honest love of fact, and their steady 
 pursuit of it, — their fidelity to nature, in short, — 
 have attained a high degree of success in these arts ; 
 few people will deny that Albert Diirer and Eubens, 
 for example, are to be called masters in painting, and 
 in the high kind of painting. The Celtic races, on the 
 other hand, have shown a singular inaptitude for the
 
 92 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 plastic arts ; the abstract, severe character of the 
 Druidical religion, its dealing with the eye of the 
 mind rather than the eye of the body, its having no 
 elaborate temples and beautiful idols, all point this 
 way from the first; its sentiment cannot satisfy itself, 
 cannot even find a resting-place for itself, in colour 
 and form ; it presses on to the impalpable, the ideal. 
 The forest of trees and the forest of rocks, not hewn 
 timber and carved stones, suit its aspirations for 
 something not to be bounded or expressed. With 
 this tendency, the Celtic races have, as I remarked 
 before, been necessarily almost impotent in the higher 
 branches of the plastic arts. Ireland, that has pro- 
 duced so many powerful spirits, has produced no 
 great sculptors or painters. Cross into England. 
 The inaptitude for the plastic art strikingly dimin- 
 ishes, as soon as the German, not the Celtic element, 
 preponderates in the race. And yet in England, too, 
 in the English race, there is something which seems 
 to prevent our reaching real mastership in the plastic 
 arts, as the more unmixed German races have reached 
 it. 'Keynolds and Turner are painters of genius, who 
 can doubt if? but take a European jury, the only 
 competent jury in these cases, and see if you can get 
 a verdict giving them the rank of masters, as this rank 
 is given to Raphael and Correggio, or to Albert Diirer 
 and Rubens. And observe in what points our English 
 pair succeed, and in what they fall short. They fall 
 short in architectonic^, in the highest power of compo- 
 sition, by which painting accomplishes the very utter- 
 most which it is given to painting to accomplish ; the
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 93 
 
 highest sort of composition, the highest application of 
 the art of painting, they either do not attempt, or they 
 fail in it. Their defect, therefore, is on the side of 
 art, of plastic art. And they succeed in magic, in 
 beauty, in grace, in expressing almost the inexpress- 
 ible : here is the charm of Eeynolds's children and 
 Turner's seas ; the impidse to express the inexpress- 
 ible carries Turner so far, that at last it carries him 
 away, and even long before he is quite carried away, 
 even in works that are justly extolled, one can see 
 the stamp-mark, as the French say, of insanity. The 
 excellence, therefore, the success, is on the side of 
 spirit. Does not this look as if a Celtic stream met 
 the main German current in us, and gave it a some- 
 what different course from that which it takes natu- 
 rally? We have Germanism enough in us, enough 
 patient love for fact and matter, to be led to attempt 
 the plastic arts, and we make much more way in them 
 than the pure Celtic races make ; but at a certain 
 point our Celtism comes in, with its love of emotion, 
 sentiment, the inexpressible, and gives our best paint- 
 ers a bias. And the point at which it comes in is 
 just that critical point where the flowering of art into 
 its perfection commences; we have plenty of painters 
 who never reach this point at all, but remain always 
 mere journeymen, in bondage to matter; but those 
 who do reach it, instead of going on to the true con- 
 summation of the masters in painting, are a little over- 
 balanced by soul and feeling, work too directly for 
 these, and so do not get out of their art all that may 
 be got out of it.
 
 94 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 The same modification of our Germanism by 
 another force which seems Celtic, is visible in our 
 religion. Here, too, we may trace a gradation be- 
 tween Celt, Englishman, and German, the difference 
 which distinguishes Englishman from German appear- 
 ing attributable to a Celtic element in us. Germany 
 is the land of exegesis, England is the land of Puri- 
 tanism. The religion of Wales is more emotional 
 and sentimental than English Puritanism; Roman- 
 ism has indeed given way to Calvinism among the 
 Welsh, — the one superstition has supplanted the other, 
 — but the Celtic sentiment which made the Welsh 
 such devout Catholics, remains, and gives unction to 
 their Methodism ; theirs is not the controversial, 
 rationalistic, intellectual side of Protestantism, but 
 the devout, emotional, religious side. Among the 
 Germans, Protestantism has been carried on into 
 rationalism and science. The English hold a middle 
 place between the Germans and the Welsh; their 
 religion has the exterior forms and apparatus of a 
 rationalism, so far their Germanic nature carries 
 them ; but long before they get to science, their feel- 
 ing, their Celtic element catches them, and turns 
 their religion all towards piety and unction. So Eng- 
 lish Protestantism has the outside appearance of an 
 intellectual system, and the inside reality of an emo- 
 tional system : this gives it its tenacity and force, for 
 what is held with the ardent attachment of feeling is 
 believed to have at the same time the scientific proof 
 of reason. The English Puritan, therefore (and 
 Puritanism is the characteristic form of English
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 95 
 
 Protestantism), stands between the German Pro- 
 testant and the Celtic Methodist ; his real affinity 
 indeed, at present, being rather with his Welsh 
 kinsman, if kinsman he may be called, than with his 
 German. 
 
 Sometimes one is left in doubt from whence the 
 check and limit to Germanism in us proceeds, whether 
 from a Celtic source or from a Norman source. Of 
 the true steady-going German nature the bane is, as 
 I remarked, flat commonness ; there seems no end to 
 its capacity for platitude ; it has neither the quick 
 perception of the Celt to save it from platitude, nor 
 the strenuousness of the Norman ; it is only raised 
 gradually out of it by science, but it jogs through 
 almost interminable platitudes first. The English 
 nature is not raised to science, but something in us, 
 whether Celtic or Norman, seems to set a bound to 
 our advance in platitude, to make us either shy of 
 platitude or impatient of it. I open an English 
 reading -book for children, and I find these two 
 characteristic stories in it, one of them of English 
 growth, the other of German. Take the English 
 story first : — 
 
 " A little boy accompanied his elder sister while 
 she busied herself with the labours of the farm, ask- 
 ing questions at every step, and learning the lessons 
 of life without being aware of it. 
 
 "'Why, dear Jane,' he said, 'do you scatter 
 good grain on the ground ; would it not be better to 
 make good bread of it than to throw it to the greedy 
 chickens?'
 
 96 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 " ' In time,' replied Jane, ' the chickens will grow 
 big, and each of them will fetch money at the market. 
 One must think on the end to he attained without 
 counting trouble, and learn to wait.' 
 
 " Perceiving a colt, which looked eagerly at him, 
 the little boy cried out : ' Jane, why is the colt not 
 in the fields with the labourers helping to draw the 
 carts'?' 
 
 " ' The colt is young,' replied Jane, c and he must 
 lie idle till he gets the necessary strength ; one must 
 not sacrifice the future to the present.' " 
 
 The reader will say that is most mean and trivial 
 stuff, the vulgar English nature in full force ; just 
 such food as the Philistine would naturally provide 
 for his young. He will say he can see the boy fed 
 upon it growing up to be like his father, to be all for 
 business, to despise culture, to go through his dull 
 days, and to die without having ever lived. That 
 may be so ; but now take the German story (one of 
 Krummacher's), and see the difference : — 
 
 " There lived at the court of King Herod a rich 
 man who was the king's chamberlain. He clothed 
 himself in purple and fine linen, and fared like the 
 king himself. 
 
 " Once a friend of his youth, whom he had not 
 seen for many years, came from a distant land to 
 pay him a visit. Then the chamberlain invited 
 all his friends and made a feast in honour of the 
 stranger. 
 
 " The tables were covered with choice food placed 
 on dishes of gold and silver, and the finest wines of
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 97 
 
 all kinds. The rich man sate at the head of the 
 table, glad to do the honours to his friend who was 
 seated at his right hand. So they ate and drank, and 
 were merry. 
 
 "Then the stranger said to the chamberlain of 
 King Herod : ' Kiches and splendour like thine 
 are nowhere to be found in my country' And he 
 praised his greatness, and called him happy above all 
 men on earth. 
 
 " Well, the rich man took an apple from a golden 
 vessel. The apple was large, and red, and pleasant to 
 the eye. Then said he : ' Behold, this apple hath 
 rested on gold, and its form is very beautiful.' And 
 he presented it to the stranger, the friend of his youth. 
 The stranger cut the apple in two ; and behold, in the 
 middle of it there was a worm ! 
 
 " Then the stranger looked at the chamberlain ; 
 and the chamberlain bent his eyes on the ground, and 
 sighed." 
 
 There it ends. Now I say, one sees there an 
 abyss of platitude open, and the German nature 
 swimming calmly about in it, which seems in some 
 way or other to have its entry screened off for the 
 English nature. The English story leads with a 
 direct issue into practical life : a narrow and dry 
 practical life, certainly, but yet enough to supply a 
 plain motive for the story ; the German story leads 
 simply nowhere except into pathos. Shall we say 
 that the Norman talent for affairs saves us here, or 
 the Celtic perceptive instinct 1 one of them it must 
 be, surely. The Norman turn seems most germane 
 
 VOL. IL H
 
 98 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 to the matter here immediately in hand ; on the other 
 hand, the Celtic turn, or some degree of it, some 
 degree of its quick perceptive instinct, seems neces- 
 sary to account for the full difference between the 
 German nature and ours. Even in Germans of 
 genius or talent the want of quick light tact, of 
 instinctive perception of the impropriety or impossi- 
 bility of certain things, is singularly remarkable. 
 Herr Gervinus's prodigious discovery about Handel 
 being an Englishman and Shakspeare a German, the 
 incredible mare's-nest Goethe finds in looking for the 
 origin of Byron's Manfred, — these are things from 
 which no deliberate care or reflection can save a man ; 
 only an instinct can save him from them, an instinct 
 that they are absurd ; who can imagine Charles Lamb 
 making Herr Gervinus's blunder, or Shakspeare mak- 
 ing Goethe's 1 but from the sheer German nature this 
 intuitive tact seems something so alien, that even 
 genius fails to give it. And yet just what constitutes 
 special power and genius in a man seems often to be 
 his blending with the basis of his national tempera- 
 ment, some additional gift or grace not proper to 
 that temperament ; Shakspeare's greatness is thus in 
 his blending and openness and flexibility of spirit, 
 not English, with the English basis; Addison's, in 
 his blending a moderation and delicacy, not English, 
 with the English basis ; Burke's, in his blending a 
 largeness of view and richness of thought, not Eng- 
 lish, with the English basis. In Germany itself, in 
 the same way, the greatness of their great Frederic 
 lies in his blending a rapidity and clearness, not
 
 CELTIC LITEEATUEE. 99 
 
 German, with the German basis; the greatness of 
 Goethe in his blending a love of form, nobility, 
 and dignity, the grand style, — with the German 
 basis. But the quick, sure, instinctive perception 
 of the incongruous and absurd not even genius seems 
 to give in Germany; at least, I can think of only 
 one German of genius, Lessing (for Heine was a 
 Jew, and the Jewish temperament is quite another 
 thing from the German), who shows it in an eminent 
 degree. 
 
 If we attend closely to the terms by which 
 foreigners seek to hit off the impression which we 
 and the Germans make upon them, we shall detect 
 in these terms a difference which makes, I think, in 
 favour of the notion I am propounding. Nations in 
 hitting off one another's characters are apt, we all 
 know, to seize the unflattering side rather than the 
 flattering ; the mass of mankind always do this, and 
 indeed they really see what is novel, and not their 
 own, in a disfiguring light. Thus we ourselves, for 
 instance, popularly say " the phlegmatic Dutchman " 
 rather than "the sensible Dutchman," or "the 
 grimacing Frenchman " rather than " the polite 
 Frenchman." Therefore neither we nor the Ger- 
 mans should exactly accept the description strangers 
 give of us, but it is enough for my purpose that 
 strangers, in characterising us with a certain shade 
 of difference, do at any rate make it clear that there 
 appears this shade of difference, though the character 
 itself, which they give us both, may be a caricature 
 rather than a faithful picture of us. Now it is to be
 
 100 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 noticed that those sharp observers, the French, — who 
 have a double turn for sharp observation, for they 
 have both the quick perception of the Celt, and the 
 Latin's gift for coming plump upon the fact, — it is 
 to be noticed, I say, that the French put a curious 
 distinction in their popular, depreciating, we will 
 hope inadequate, way of hitting off us and the 
 Germans. While they talk of the " betise alle- 
 mande," they talk of the "gauchcrie anglaise ;" 
 while they talk of the "Allemand balourd" they 
 talk of the "Anglais empetrd ;" while they call the 
 German "niais," they call the Englishman "mttan- 
 colique." The difference between the epithets balourd 
 and empetrd exactly gives the difference in character 
 I wish to seize ; balourd means heavy and dull, 
 empetri means hampered and embarrassed. This 
 points to a certain mixture and strife of elements 
 in the Englishman; to the clashing of a Celtic 
 quickness of perception with a Germanic instinct for 
 going steadily along close to the ground. The Celt, 
 as we have seen, has not at all, in spite of his quick 
 perception, the Latin talent for dealing with the fact, 
 dexterously managing it, and making himself master 
 of it ; Latin or Latinised people have felt contempt 
 for him on this account, have treated him as a poor 
 creature, just as the German, who arrives at fact in 
 a different way from the Latins, but who arrives 
 at it, has treated him. The couplet of Chrestien of 
 Troyes about the Welsh : — 
 
 . . . Gallois sont tous, par nature, 
 Plus fous que betes en pature —
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 101 
 
 is well known, and expresses the genuine verdict of 
 the Latin mind on the Celts. But the perceptive 
 instinct of the Celt feels and anticipates, though he 
 has that in him which cuts him off from command 
 of the world of fact; he sees what is wanting to 
 him well enough ; his mere eye is not less sharp, 
 nay, it is sharper, than the Latin's. He is a quick 
 grenius, checkmated for want of strenuousness or else 
 patience. The German has not the Latin's sharp 
 precise glance on the world of fact, and dexterous 
 behaviour in it ; he fumbles with it much and long, 
 but his honesty and patience give him the rule of it 
 in the long run, — a surer rule, some of us think, 
 than the Latin gets; — still, his behaviour in it is 
 not quick and dexterous. The Englishman, in so 
 far as he is German, — and he is mainly German, — 
 proceeds in the steady-going German fashion ; if he 
 were all German he woidd proceed thus for ever 
 without self-consciousness or embarrassment; but, 
 in so far as he is Celtic, he has snatches of quick 
 instinct which often make him feel he is fumbling, 
 show him visions of an easier, more dexterous be- 
 haviour, disconcert him and fill him with misgiving. 
 No people, therefore, are so shy, so self-conscious, so 
 embarrassed as the English, because two natures are 
 mixed in them, and natures which pull them such 
 different ways. The Germanic part, indeed, triumphs 
 in us, we are a Germanic people ; but not so wholly 
 as to exclude hauntings of Celtism, which clash with 
 our Germanism, producing, as I believe, our humour, 
 neither German nor Celtic, and so affect us that we
 
 102 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 strike people as odd and singular, not to be referred 
 to any known type, and like nothing but ourselves. 
 "Nearly every Englishman," says an excellent and 
 by no means unfriendly observer, George Sand, 
 "nearly every Englishman, however good-looking 
 he may be, has always something singular about 
 him which easily comes to seem comic ; — a sort of 
 typical awkwardness (gaucherie typique) in his looks 
 or appearance, which hardly ever wears out." I say 
 this strangeness is accounted for by the English 
 nature being mixed as we have seen, while the 
 Latin nature is all of a piece, and so is the German 
 nature, and the Celtic nature. 
 
 It is impossible to go very fast when the matter 
 with which one has to deal, besides being new and 
 little explored, is also by its nature so subtle, eluding 
 one's grasp unless one handles it with all possible 
 delicacy and care. It is in our poetry that the 
 Celtic part in us has left its trace clearest, and in 
 our poetry I must follow it before I have done. 
 
 VI. 
 
 If I were asked where English poetry got these 
 three things, its turn for style, its turn for melan- 
 choly, and its turn for natural magic, for catching 
 and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully 
 near and vivid way, — I should answer, with some 
 doubt, that it got much of its turn for style from a 
 Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got much of 
 its melancholy from a Celtic source ; with no doubt
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 103 
 
 at all, that from a Celtic source it got nearly all its 
 natural magic. 
 
 Any German with penetration and tact in matters 
 of literary criticism will own that the principal de- 
 ficiency of Gennan poetry is in style ; that for style, 
 in the highest sense, it shows but little feeling. Take 
 the eminent masters of style, the poets who best give 
 the idea of what the peculiar power which lies in 
 style is, — Pindar, Virgil, Dante, Milton. An example 
 of the peculiar effect which these poets produce, you 
 can hardly give from German poetry. Examples 
 enough you can give from German poetry of the 
 effect produced by genius, thought, and feeling ex- 
 pressing themselves in clear language, simple lan- 
 guage, passionate language, eloquent language, with 
 harmony and melody ; but not of the peculiar effect 
 exercised by eminent power of style. Every reader 
 of Dante can at once call to mind what the peculiar 
 effect I mean is ; I spoke of it in my lectures on 
 translating Homer, and there I took an example of 
 it from Dante, who perhaps manifests it more emi- 
 nently than any other poet. But from Milton, too, 
 one may take examples of it abundantly ; compare 
 this from Milton : — 
 
 nor sometimes forget 
 
 Those other two equal with me in fate, 
 So were I equall'd with them in renown, 
 Blind Thamyris and blind Mteonides— 
 
 with this from Goethe : — 
 
 Es bildet ein Talent sieh in der Stille, 
 Sich ein Character in dem Strom der "Welt
 
 104 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 Nothing can be better in its way than the style in 
 which Goethe there presents his thought, but it is 
 the style of prose as much as of poetry ; it is lucid, 
 harmonious, earnest, eloquent, but it has not received 
 that peculiar kneading, heightening, and recasting 
 which is observable in the style of the passage from 
 Milton, — a style which seems to have for its cause a 
 certain pressure of emotion, and an ever-surging, yet 
 bridled, excitement in the poet, giving a special 
 intensity to his way of delivering himself. In poetical 
 races and epochs this turn for style is peculiarly 
 observable; and perhaps it is only on condition of 
 having this somewhat heightened and difficult manner, 
 so different from the plain manner of prose, that 
 poetry gets the privilege of being loosed, at its best 
 moments, into that perfectly simple, limpid style, 
 which is the supreme style of all, but the simplicity 
 of which is still not the simplicity of prose. The 
 simplicity of Menander's style is the simplicity of 
 prose, and is the same kind of simplicity as that 
 which Goethe's style, in the passage I have quoted, 
 exhibits ; but Menander does not belong to a great 
 poetical moment, he comes too late for it ; it is the 
 simple passages in poets like Pindar or Dante which 
 are perfect, being masterpieces of poetical simplicity. 
 One may say the same of the simple passages in 
 Shakspeare ; they are perfect, their simplicity being 
 a poetical simplicity. They are the golden, easeful, 
 crowning moments of a manner which is always 
 pitched in another key from that of prose, a manner 
 changed and heightened; the Elizabethan style,
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 105 
 
 regnant in most of our dramatic poetry to this day, 
 is mainly the continuation of this manner of Shak- 
 speare's. It was a manner much more turbid and 
 strewn with blemishes than the manner of Pindar, 
 Dante, or Milton ; often it was detestable ; but it 
 owed its existence to Shakspeare's instinctive impulse 
 towards style in poetry, to his native sense of the 
 necessity for it ; and without the basis of style every- 
 where, faulty though it may in some places be, we 
 should not have had the beauty of expression, unsur- 
 passable for effectiveness and charm, which is reached 
 in Shakspeare's best passages. The turn for style is 
 perceptible all through English poetry, proving, to 
 my mind, the genuine poetical gift of the race ; this 
 turn imparts to our poetry a stamp of high distinc- 
 tion, and sometimes it doubles the force of a poet not 
 by nature of the very highest order, such as Gray, 
 and raises him to a rank beyond what his natural 
 richness and power seem to promise. Goethe, with 
 his fine critical perception, saw clearly enough both 
 the power of style in itself, and the lack of style in 
 the literature of his own country ; and perhaps if we 
 regard him solely as a German, not as a European, 
 his great work was that he laboured all his life to 
 impart style into German literature, and firmly to 
 establish it there. Hence the immense importance 
 to him of the world of classical art, and of the pro- 
 ductions of Greek or Latin genius, where style so 
 eminently manifests its power. Had he found in the 
 German genius and literature an element of style 
 existing by nature and ready to his hand, half his
 
 106 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 work, one may say, would have been saved him, and 
 he might have done much more in poetry. But as it 
 was, he had to try and create, out of his own powers, 
 a style for German poetry, as well as to provide con- 
 tents for this style to carry ; and thus his labour as a 
 poet was doubled. 
 
 It is to be observed that power of style, in the 
 sense in which I am here speaking of style, is some- 
 thing quite different from the power of idiomatic, 
 simple, nervous, racy expression, such as the expres- 
 sion of healthy, robust natures so often is, such as 
 Luther's was in a striking degree. Style, in my sense 
 of the word, is a peculiar recasting and heightening, 
 under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of 
 what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add 
 dignity and distinction to it ; and dignity and distinc- 
 tion are not terms which suit many acts or words of 
 Luther. Deeply touched with the Gemeinheit which 
 is the bane of his nation, as he is at the same time a 
 grand example of the honesty which is his nation's 
 excellence, he can seldom even show himself brave, 
 resolute, and truthful, without showing a strong dash 
 of coarseness and commonness all the while ; the 
 right definition of Luther, as of our own Bunyan, is 
 that he is a Philistine of genius. So Luther's sincere 
 idiomatic German, — such language is this: "Hilf 
 lieber Gott, wie manchen Jammer habe ich gesehen, 
 dass der gemeine Mann doch so gar nichts weiss von 
 der christlichen Lehre ! " — no more proves a power 
 of style in German literature, than Cobbett's sinewy 
 idiomatic English proves it in English literature.
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 107 
 
 Power of style, properly so called, as manifested in 
 masters of style like Dante or Milton in poetry, 
 Cicero, Bossuet or Bolingbroke in prose, is some- 
 thing quite different, and has, as I have said, for 
 its characteristic effect, this : to add dignity and dis- 
 tinction. 
 
 Style, then, the Germans are singularly without, 
 and it is strange that the power of style should show 
 itself so strongly as it does in the Icelandic poetry, if 
 the Scandinavians are such genuine Teutons as is com- 
 monly supposed. Fauriel used to talk of the Scan- 
 dinavian Teutons and the German Teutons, as if they 
 were two divisions of the same people, and the com- 
 mon notion about them, no doubt, is very much this. 
 Since the war in Schleswig-Holstein, however, all 
 one's German friends are exceedingly anxious to 
 insist on the difference of nature between themselves 
 and the Scandinavians ; when one expresses surprise 
 that the German sense of nationalitv should be so 
 deeply affronted by the rule over Germans, not of 
 Latins or Celts, but of brother Teutons or next door 
 to it, a German will give you I know not how long a 
 catalogue of the radical points of unlikeness, in genius 
 and disposition, between himself and a Dane. This 
 emboldens me to remark that there is a fire, a sense 
 of style, a distinction, in Icelandic poetry, which 
 German poetry has not. Icelandic poetry, too, shows 
 a powerful and developed technic ; and I wish to 
 throw out, for examination by those who are com- 
 petent to sift the matter, the suggestion that this 
 power of style and development of technic in the
 
 108 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 Norse poetry seems to point towards an early Celtic 
 influence or intermixture. It is curious that Zeuss, 
 in his grammar, quotes a text which gives counte- 
 nance to this notion ; as late as the ninth century, he 
 says, there were Irish Celts in Iceland ; and the text 
 he quotes to show this, is as follows : — " In 870 A.D., 
 when the Norwegians came to Iceland, there were 
 Christians there, who departed, and left behind them 
 Irish books, bells, and other things ; from whence it 
 may be inferred that these Christians were Irish." 
 I speak, and ought to speak, with the utmost diffi- 
 dence on all these questions of ethnology; but I 
 must say that when I read this text in Zeuss, I 
 caught eagerly at the clue it seemed to offer • for I 
 had been hearing the Nibelungen read and commented 
 on in German schools (German schools have the good 
 habit of reading and commenting on German poetry, 
 as we read and comment on Homer and Virgil, but 
 do not read and comment on Chaucer and Shakspeare), 
 and it struck me how the fatal humdrum and want 
 of style of the Germans had marred their way of 
 telling this magnificent tradition of the Nibelungen, 
 and taken half its grandeur and power out of it ; 
 while in the Icelandic poems which deal with this 
 tradition, its grandeur and power are much more 
 fully visible, and everywhere in the poetry of the 
 Edda there is a force of style and a distinction as 
 unlike as possible to the want of both in the German 
 Nibelungen. 1 At the same time the Scandinavians 
 
 1 Lord Strangford's note on this is: — "The Irish monks 
 whose bells and books were found in Iceland could not have
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 109 
 
 have a realism, as it is called, in their genius, which 
 abundantly proves their relationship with the Ger- 
 mans ; any one whom Mr. Dasent's delightful books 
 have made acquainted with the prose tales of the 
 Norsemen, will be struck with the stamp of a Teutonic 
 nature in them ; but the Norse poetry seems to have 
 something which from Teutonic sources alone it could 
 not have derived ; which the Germans have not, and 
 which the Celts have. 
 
 This something is style, and the Celts certainly 
 have it in a wonderful measure. Style is the most 
 striking quality of their poetry. Celtic poetry seems 
 to make up to itself for being unable to master the 
 world and give an adequate interpretation of it, by 
 throwing all its force into style, by bending language 
 at any rate to its will, and expressing the ideas it 
 has with unsurpassable intensity, elevation, and effect 
 It has all through it a sort of intoxication of style, — 
 a Pindarism, to use a word formed from the name of 
 
 contributed anything to the old Norse spirit, for they had per- 
 ished before the first Norsemen had set foot on the island. 
 The form of the old Norse poetry known to us as Icelandic, 
 from the accident of its preservation in that island alone, is 
 surely Pan-Teutonic from old times ; the art and method of its 
 strictly literary cultivation must have been much influenced by 
 the contemporary Old-English national poetry, with which the 
 Norsemen were in constant contact ; and its larger, freer, and 
 wilder spirit must have been owing to their freer and wilder 
 life, to say nothing of their roused and warring paganism. 
 They could never have known any Celts save when living in 
 embryo with other Teutons." 
 
 Very likely Lord Strangford is right, but the proposition 
 with which he begins is at variance with what the text quoted 
 by Zeuss alleges.
 
 110 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 the poet, on whom, above all other poets, the power 
 of style seems to have exercised an inspiring and 
 intoxicating effect ; and not in its great poets only, 
 in Taliesin, or Llywarch Hen, or Ossian, does the 
 Celtic genius show this Pindarism, but in all its 
 productions : — 
 
 " The grave of March is this, and this the grave of Gwythyr ; 
 Here is the grave of Gwgawn Gleddyfreidd ; 
 But unknown is the grave of Arthur." 
 
 That comes from the Welsh Memorials of the Graves 
 of the Warriors, and if we compare it with the familiar 
 memorial inscriptions of an English churchyard (for 
 we English have so much Germanism in us that our 
 productions offer abundant examples of German want 
 of style as well as of its opposite) : — 
 
 ' ' Afflictions sore long time I bore, 
 Physicians were in vain, 
 Till God did please Death should me seize 
 And ease me of my pain " — 
 
 if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with 
 the English, which in their Gemeinheit of style are 
 truly Germanic, we shall get a clear sense of what 
 that Celtic talent for style I have been speaking of is. 
 Or take this epitaph of an Irish Celt, Angus the 
 Culdee, whose FdlirS, or festology, I have already 
 mentioned ; — a festology in which, at the end of the 
 eighth or beginning of the ninth century, he collected 
 from " the countless hosts of the illuminated books of 
 Erin " (to use his own words) the festivals of the Irish 
 saints, his poem having a stanza for every day in the
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. Ill 
 
 year. The epitaph on Angus, who died at Cluain 
 Eidhnech, in Queen's County, runs thus : — 
 
 " Angus in the assembly of Heaven, 
 Here are his tomb and his bed ; 
 It is from hence he went to death, 
 In the Friday, to holy Heaven. 
 
 "It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was rear'd ; 
 It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was buried ; 
 In Cluain Eidhnech, of many crosses, 
 He first read his psalms." 
 
 That is by no eminent hand ; and yet a Greek epitaph 
 could not show a finer perception of what constitutes 
 propriety and felicity of style in compositions of this 
 nature. Take the well-known Welsh prophecy about 
 the fate of the Britons : — 
 
 " Their Lord they will praise, 
 Their speech they will keep, 
 Their land they will lose, 
 Except wild Wales. " 
 
 To however late an epoch that prophecy belongs, 
 what a feeling for style, at any rate, it manifests ! 
 And the same thing may be said of the famous 
 Welsh triads. We may put aside all the vexed ques- 
 tions as to their greater or less antiquity, and still 
 what important witness they bear to the genius for 
 literary style of the people who produced them ! 
 
 Now we English undoubtedly exhibit very often 
 the want of sense for style of our German kinsmen. 
 The churchyard lines I just now quoted afford an 
 instance of it ; but the whole branch of our literature, 
 — and a very popular branch it is, our hymnology, —
 
 112 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 to which those lines are to be referred, is one con- 
 tinued instance of it. Our German kinsmen and we 
 are the great people for hymns. The Germans are 
 very proud of their hymns, and we are very proud 
 of ours ; but it is hard to say which of the two, the 
 German hymn-book or ours, has least poetical worth 
 in itself, or does least to prove genuine poetical 
 power in the people producing it. I have not a word 
 to say against Sir Eoundell Palmer's choice and ar- 
 rangement of materials for his Book of Praise ; I am 
 content to put them on a level (and that is giving 
 them the highest possible rank) with Mr. Palgrave's 
 choice and arrangement of materials for his Golden 
 Treasury ; but yet no sound critic can doubt that, so 
 far as poetry is concerned, while the Golden Treasury 
 is a monument of a nation's strength, the Book of 
 Praise is a monument of a nation's weakness. Only 
 the German race, with its want of quick instinctive 
 tact, of delicate, sure perception, could have invented 
 the hymn as the Germans and we have it ; and our 
 non-German turn for style, — style, of which the very 
 essence is a certain happy fineness and truth of poeti- 
 cal perception, — could not but desert us when our 
 German nature carried us into a kind of composition 
 which can please only when the perception is some- 
 what blunt. Scarcely any one of us ever judges our 
 hymns fairly, because works of this kind have two 
 sides, — their side for religion and their side for 
 poetry. Everything which has helped a man in his 
 religious life, everything which associates itself in his 
 mind with the growth of that life, is beautiful and
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 113 
 
 venerable to him ; in this way, productions of little 
 or no poetical value, like the German hymns and 
 ours, may come to be regarded as very precious. 
 Their worth in this sense, as means by which we have 
 been edified, I do not for a moment hold cheap ; but 
 there is an edification proper to all our stages of de- 
 velopment, the highest as well as the lowest, and it is 
 for man to press on towards the highest stages of his 
 development, with the certainty that for those stages, 
 too, means of edification will not be found wanting. 
 Now certainly it is a higher state of development 
 when our fineness of perception is keen than when 
 it is blunt. And if, — whereas the Semitic genius 
 placed its highest spiritual life in the religious senti- 
 ment, and made that the basis of its poetry, — the 
 Indo-European genius places its highest spiritual life 
 in the imaginative reason, and makes that the basis 
 of its poetry, Ave are none the better for wanting the 
 perception to discern a natural law, which is, after all, 
 like every natural law, irresistible ; we are none the 
 better for trying to make ourselves Semitic, when 
 Nature has made us Indo-European, and to shift the 
 basis of our poetry. We may mean well ; all manner 
 of good may happen to us on the road we go ; but 
 we are not on our real right road, the road we must 
 in the end follow. 
 
 That is why, when our hymns betray a false 
 tendency by losing a power which accompanies the 
 poetical work of our race on our other more suitable 
 lines, the indication thus given is of great value and 
 instructiveness for us. One of our main gifts for 
 
 VOL. II. I
 
 114 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 poetry deserts us in our hymns, and so gives us a 
 hint as to the one true basis for the spiritual work of 
 an Indo-European people, which the Germans, who 
 have not this particular gift of ours, do not and can- 
 not get in this way, though they may get it in others. 
 It is worth noticing that the masterpieces of the 
 spiritual work of Indo-Europeans, taking the pure re- 
 ligious sentiment, and not the imaginative reason, for 
 their basis, are works like the Imitation, the Dies Ires, 
 the Stabat Mater,— works clothing themselves in the 
 Middle- Age Latin, the genuine native voice of no Indo- 
 European nation. The perfection of their kind, but 
 that kind not perfectly legitimate, they take a 
 language not perfectly legitimate ; as if to show, that 
 when mankind's Semitic age is once passed, the age 
 which produced the great incomparable monuments of 
 the pure religious sentiment, the books of Job and 
 Isaiah, the Psalms, — works truly to be called in- 
 spired, because the same divine power which worked 
 in those who produced them works no longer, — as if 
 to show us, that, after this primitive age, we Indo- 
 Europeans must feel these works without attempting 
 to remake them ; and that our poetry, if it tries to 
 make itself simply the organ of the religious senti- 
 ment, leaves the true course, and must conceal this 
 by not speaking a living language. The moment 
 it speaks a living language, and still makes itself the 
 organ of the religious sentiment only, as in the 
 German and English hymns, it betrays weakness ;— 
 the weakness of all false tendency. 
 
 But if, by attending to the Germanism in us
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 115 
 
 English and to its works, one has come to doubt 
 whether we, too, are not thorough Germans by 
 genius and with the German deadness to style, one 
 has only to repeat to oneself a line of Milton, — a 
 poet intoxicated with the passion for style as much as 
 Taliesin or Pindar, — to see that we have another side 
 to our genius beside the German one. Whence do we 
 get it ? The Normans may have brought in among 
 us the Latin sense for rhetoric and style, — for, indeed, 
 this sense goes naturally with a high spirit and a 
 strenuousness like theirs, — but the sense for style 
 which English poetry shows is something finer than 
 we could well have got from a people so positive and 
 so little poetical as the Normans ; and it seems to me 
 we may much more plausibly derive it from a root of 
 the poetical Celtic nature in us. 
 
 Its chord of penetrating passion and melancholy, 
 again, its Titanism as we see it in Byron, — what other 
 European poetry possesses that like the English, and 
 where do we get it from 1 The Celts, with their 
 vehement reaction against the despotism of fact, with 
 their sensuous nature, their manifold striving, their 
 adverse destiny, their immense calamities, the Celts 
 are the prime authors of this vein of piercing regret 
 and passion, — of this Titanism in poetry. A famous 
 book, Macpherson's Ossian, carried in the last century 
 this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am 
 not going to criticise Macpherson's Ossian here. Make 
 the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious, 
 in the book, as large as you please ; strip Scotland, if 
 you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which
 
 116 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 on the strength of Macpherson's Ossian she may have 
 stolen from that vetus et major Scotia, the true home 
 of the Ossianic poetry, Ireland ; I make no objection. 
 But there will still be left in the book a residue with 
 the very soul of the Celtic genius in it, and which 
 has the proud distinction of having brought this soul 
 of the Celtic genius into contact with the genius of 
 the nations of modern Europe, and enriched all our 
 poetry by it. Woody Morven, and echoing Sora, and 
 Selma with its silent halls ! — we all owe them a debt 
 of gratitude, and when we are unjust enough to for- 
 get it, may the Muse forget us ! Choose any one of 
 the better passages in Macpherson's Ossian and you 
 can see even at this time of day what an apparition 
 of newness and power such a strain must have been 
 to the eighteenth century : — 
 
 " I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were 
 desolate. The fox looked out from the windows, the 
 rank grass of the wall waved round her head. Raise 
 the song of mourning, bards, over the land of 
 strangers. They have but fallen before us, for one 
 day we must fall. Why dost thou build the hall, son 
 of the winged days ? Thou lookest from thy towers 
 to-day ; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert 
 comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles 
 round thy half-worn shield. Let the blast of the 
 desert come ! we shall be renowned in our day." 
 
 All Europe felt the power of that melancholy ; but 
 what I wish to point out is, that no nation of Europe 
 so caught in its poetry the passionate penetrating 
 accent of the Celtic genius, its strain of Titanism, as
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 117 
 
 the English. Goethe, like Napoleon, felt the spell of 
 Ossian very powerfully, and he quotes a long passage 
 from him in his Werther. But what is there Celtic, 
 turbulent, and Titanic about the German Werther, 
 that amiable, cultivated, and melancholy young man, 
 having for his sorrow and suicide the perfectly de- 
 finite motive that Lotte cannot be his 1 Faust, again, 
 has nothing unaccountable, defiant, and Titanic in 
 him ; his knowledge does not bring him the satisfac- 
 tion he expected from it, and meanwhile he finds 
 himself poor and growing old, and baulked of the 
 palpable enjoyment of life ; and here is the motive 
 for Faust's discontent. In the most energetic and 
 impetuous of Goethe's creations, — his Prometheus, — 
 it is not Celtic self-will and passion, it is rather the 
 Germanic sense of justice and reason, which revolts 
 against the despotism of Zeus. The German Sehnsucht 
 itself is a wistful, soft, tearful longing, rather than a 
 struggling, fierce, passionate one. But the Celtic 
 melancholy is struggling, fierce, passionate ; to catch 
 its note, listen to Lly warch Hen in old age, addressing 
 his crutch : — 
 
 ' ' my crutch ! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the 
 water-flag yellow ? Have I not hated that which I love ? 
 
 ' ' my crutch ! is it not winter- time now, when men talk 
 together after that they have drunken ? Is not the side of my 
 bed left desolate ? 
 
 ' ' my crutch ! is it not spring, when the cuckoo passes 
 through the air, when the foam sparkles on the sea ? The young 
 maidens no longer love me. 
 
 " my crutch ! is it not the first day of May ? The furrows, 
 are they not shining ; the young corn, is it not springing ? Ah I 
 the sight of thy handle makes me wroth.
 
 118 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 ' ' my crutch ! stand straight, thou wilt support me tht 
 better ; it is very long since I was Llywarch. 
 
 " Behold old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of 
 my head to my teeth, to my eyes, which women loved. 
 
 "The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me 
 together, — coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow. 
 
 " I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from 
 me ; the couch of honour shall be no more mine ; I am miser- 
 able, I am bent on my crutch. 
 
 ' ' How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when 
 he was brought forth ! sorrows without end, and no deliverance 
 from his burden." 
 
 There is the Titanism of the Celt, his passionate, 
 turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotisn? 
 of fact ; and of whom does it remind us so much as 
 of Byron ? 
 
 " The fire which on my bosom preys 
 Is lone as some volcanic isle ; 
 No torch is kindled at its blaze ; 
 A funeral pile ! " 
 
 Or, again : — 
 
 " Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, 
 Count o'er thy days from anguish free, 
 And know, whatever thou hast been, 
 'Tis something better not to be." 
 
 One has only to let one's memory begin to fetch 
 passages from Byron striking the same note as that 
 passage from Llywarch Hen, and she will not soon 
 stop. And all Byron's heroes, not so much in collision 
 with outward things, as breaking on some rock of 
 revolt and misery in the depths of their own nature ; 
 Manfred, self-consumed, fighting blindly and passion- 
 ately with I know not what, having nothing of the
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 119 
 
 consistent development and intelligible motive of 
 Faust, — Manfred, Lara, Cain, what are they but 
 Titanic 1 Where in European poetry are we to find 
 this Celtic passion of revolt so warm-breathing, puis- 
 sant, and sincere ; except perhaps in the creation of 
 a yet greater poet than Byron, but an English poet, 
 too, like Byron, — in the Satan of Milton 1 
 
 • • • ■ " What though the field be lost ? 
 All is not lost ; the unconquerable will, 
 And study of revenge, immortal hate, 
 And courage never to submit or yield, 
 And what is else not to be overcome." 
 
 There, surely, speaks a genius to whose composition 
 the Celtic fibre was not wholly a stranger ! 
 
 And as, after noting the Celtic Pindarism or power 
 of style present in our poetry, we noted the German 
 flatness coming in in our hymns, and found here a 
 proof of our compositeness of nature ; so, after noting 
 the Celtic Titanism or power of rebellious passion in 
 our poetry, we may also note the Germanic patience 
 and reasonableness in it, and get in this way a second 
 proof how mixed a spirit we have. After Llywarch 
 Hen's :— 
 
 " How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when 
 he was brought forth " — 
 
 after Byron's : — 
 
 " Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen " — 
 
 take this of South ey's, in answer to the question 
 whether he would like to have his youth over 
 again : —
 
 120 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 " Do I regret the past ? 
 Would I live o'er again 
 The morning hours of life ? 
 Nay, William, nay, not so ! 
 Praise be to God who made me what I am, 
 Other I would not be." 
 
 There we have the other side of our being ; the 
 Germanic goodness, docility, and fidelity to nature, 
 in place of the Celtic Titanism. 
 
 The Celt's quick feeling for what is noble and 
 distinguished gave his poetry style ; his indomitable 
 personality gave it pride and passion ; his sensibility 
 and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the 
 gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical 
 charm of nature. The forest solitude, the bubbling 
 spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in romance. 
 They have a mysterious life and grace there ; they 
 are Nature's own children, and utter her secret in a 
 way which make them something quite different from 
 the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and Latin 
 poetry. Now of this delicate magic, Celtic romance 
 is so pre-eminent a mistress, that it seems impossible 
 to believe the power did not come into romance from 
 the Celts. 1 Magic is just the word for it, — the magic 
 of nature ; not merely the beauty of nature, — that the 
 Greeks and Latins had ; not merely an honest smack 
 of the soil, a faithful realism, — that the Germans had ; 
 but the intimate life of Nature, her weird power and 
 
 1 Ehyme, — the most striking characteristic of our modern 
 poetry as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main 
 source, to our poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call 
 its romantic element, — rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence 
 tends to show, comes into our poetry from the Celts.
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 121 
 
 her fairy charm. As the Saxon names of places, with 
 the pleasant wholesome smack of the soil in them, — 
 Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford, — are to the Celtic 
 names of places, with their penetrating, lofty heauty, 
 — Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon, — so is the homely 
 realism of German and Norse nature to the fairy-like 
 loveliness of Celtic nature. Gwydion wants a wife 
 for his pupil: "Well," says Math, "we will seek, I 
 and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for 
 him out of flowers. So they took the blossoms of the 
 oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms 
 of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a 
 maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever 
 saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name 
 of Flower- Aspect." Celtic romance is full of exquisite 
 touches like that, showing the delicacy of the Celt's 
 feeling in these matters, and how deeply Nature lets 
 him come into her secrets. The quick dropping of 
 blood is called " faster than the fall of the dewdrop 
 from the blade of reed -grass upon the earth, when 
 the dew of June is at the heaviest." And thus is 
 01 wen described : " More yellow was her hair than 
 the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter 
 than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands 
 and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemony 
 amidst the spray of the meadow fountains. " For loveli- 
 ness it would be hard to beat that ; and for magical 
 clearness and nearness take the following : — 
 
 "And in the evening Peredur entered a valley, 
 and at the head of the valley he came to a hermit's 
 cell, and the hermit welcomed him gladly, and there
 
 122 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 he spent the night. And in the morning he arose, 
 and when he went forth, behold, a shower of snow 
 had fallen the night before, and a hawk had killed a 
 wild-fowl in front of the cell. And the noise of the 
 horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted 
 upon the bird. And Peredur stood and compared 
 the blackness of the raven, and the whiteness of the 
 snow, and the redness of the blood, to the hair of the 
 lady whom best he loved, which was blacker than the 
 raven, and to her skin, which was whiter than the 
 snow, and to her two cheeks, which were redder than 
 the blood upon the snow appeared to be." 
 
 And this, which is perhaps less striking, is not less 
 beautiful : — 
 
 " And early in the day Geraint and Enid left the 
 wood, and they came to an open country, with 
 meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the 
 meadows. And there was a river before them, and 
 the horses bent down and drank the water. And 
 they went up out of the river by a steep bank, and 
 there they met a slender stripling with a satchel 
 about his neck ; and he had a small blue pitcher in 
 his hand, and a bowl on the mouth of the pitcher." 
 
 And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek 
 in its clear beauty, is suddenly magicalised by the 
 romance touch : — 
 
 " And they saw a tall tree by the side of the river, 
 one-half of which was in flames from the root to the 
 top, and the other half was green and in full leaf." 
 
 Magic is the word to insist upon, — a magically 
 vivid and near interpretation of nature ; since it is
 
 CELTIC LITEEATUEE. 123 
 
 this which constitutes the special charm and power 
 of the effect I am calling attention to, and it is for 
 this that the Celt's sensibility gives him a peculiar 
 aptitude. But the matter needs rather fine handling, 
 and it is easy to make mistakes here in our criticism. 
 In the first place, Europe tends constantly to become 
 more and more one community, and we tend to 
 become Europeans instead of merely Englishmen, 
 Frenchmen, Germans, Italians ; so whatever aptitude 
 or felicity one people imparts into spiritual work, 
 gets imitated by the others, and thus tends to become 
 the common property of all. Therefore anything so 
 beautiful and attractive as the natural magic I am 
 speaking of, is sure, nowadays, if it appears in the 
 productions of the Celts, or of the English, or of the 
 French, to appear in the productions of the Germans 
 also, or in the productions of the Italians ; but there 
 will be a stamp of perfectness and inimitableness 
 about it in the literatures where it is native, which it 
 will not have in the literatures where it is not native. 
 Novalis or Eiickert, for instance, have their eye fixed 
 on nature, and have undoubtedly a feeling for natural 
 magic ; a rough-and-ready critic easily credits them 
 and the Germans with the Celtic fineness of tact, the 
 Celtic nearness to Nature and her secret ; but the 
 question is whether the strokes in the German's 
 picture of nature 1 have ever the indefinable delicacy, 
 
 1 Take the following attempt to render the natural magic 
 supposed to pervade Tieek's poetry: — " In diesen Diehtungen 
 herrscht eine geheimnissvolle Innigkeit, ein sonderbares Einver- 
 standniss mit der Natur, besonders mit der Pfianzen-und Stein- 
 reich. Der Leser fiililt sich da wie in einem verzauberten
 
 124 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 charm, and perfection of the Celt's touch in the pieces 
 I just now quoted, or of Shakspeare's touch in his 
 daffodil, Wordsworth's in his cuckoo, Keats's in his 
 Autumn, Obermann's in his mountain birch-tree or 
 his Easter-daisy among the Swiss farms. To decide 
 where the gift for natural magic originally lies, 
 whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, we must 
 decide this question. 
 
 In the second place, there are many ways of 
 handling nature, and we are here only concerned 
 with one of them ; but a rough-and-ready critic 
 imagines that it is all the same so long as nature 
 is handled at all, and fails to draw the needful dis- 
 tinction between modes of handling her. But these 
 modes are many ; I will mention four of them now : 
 there is the conventional way of handling nature, 
 there is the faithful way of handling nature, there is 
 the Greek way of handling nature, there is the 
 magical way of handling nature. In all these three 
 last the eye is on the object, but with a difference ; 
 in the faithful way of handling nature, the eye is on 
 
 "Walde ; er hbrt die unterirdischen Quellen melodisch rauschen ; 
 wildfremde "Wunderblumen schauen ihn an mit ihren bunten 
 sehnsiichtigen Augen ; unsichtbare Lippen kiissen seine Wangen 
 mit neckender Zartlichkeit ; hohe Pilze, wie goldne Glockcn, 
 wachsen Iclingend empor am Fusse der Baume;" and so on. 
 Now that stroke of the hohe Pilze, the great funguses, would 
 have been impossible to the tact and delicacy of a born lover 
 of nature like the Celt, and could only have come from a German 
 who has hineinstudirt himself into natural magic. It is a cry- 
 ing false note, which carries us at once out of the world of 
 nature-magic and the breath of the woods, into the world of 
 theatre-magic and the smell of gas and orange-peel.
 
 CELTIC LITEEATURE. 125 
 
 the object, and that is all you can say ; in the Greek, 
 the eye is on the object, but lightness and brightness 
 are added ; in the magical, the eye is on the object, 
 but charm and magic are added. In the conventional 
 way of handling nature, the eye is not on the object ; 
 what that means we all know, we have only to think 
 of our eighteenth-century poetry : — 
 
 "As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night" — 
 
 to call up any number of instances. Latin poetry 
 supplies plenty of instances too ; if we put this from 
 Propertius's Hylas : — 
 
 ' ' manus heroum .... 
 Mollia composita litora fronde tegit " — 
 
 side by side the line of Theocritus by which it was 
 suggested : — 
 
 "\ei/j.wv yap c<piv ^kcito /U^yas, an^ddeaaip oveiap" — 
 
 we get at the same moment a good specimen both of 
 the conventional and of the Greek way of handling 
 nature. But from our own poetry we may get speci- 
 mens of the Greek way of handling nature, as well as 
 of the conventional : for instance, Keats's : — 
 
 " What little town, by river or seashore, 
 Or mountain-built with quiet citadel, 
 Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn ? " 
 
 is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theo- 
 critus ; it is composed with the eye on the object, a 
 radiancy and light clearness being added. German 
 poetry abounds in specimens of the faithful way of 
 handling nature ; an excellent example is to be found
 
 126 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 in the stanzas called Zueignung, prefixed to Goethe's 
 poems ; the morning walk, the mist, the dew, the 
 sun, are as faithful as they can be, they are given 
 with the eye on the object, but there the merit of 
 the work, as a handling of nature, stops ; neither 
 Greek radiance nor Celtic magic is added ; the power 
 of these is not what gives the poem in question its 
 merit, but a power of quite another kind, a power of 
 moral and spiritual emotion. But the power of Greek 
 radiance Goethe could give to his handling of nature, 
 and nobly too, as any one who will read his IFanderer, 
 —the poem in which a wanderer falls in with a 
 peasant woman and her child by their hut, built out 
 of the ruins of a temple near Cuma, — may see. Only 
 the power of natural magic Goethe does not, I think, 
 give; whereas Keats passes at will from the Greek power 
 to that power which is, as I say, Celtic ; from his : — 
 
 "What little town, by river or seashore" — 
 
 to his : — 
 
 "White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine, 
 Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves " — 
 
 or his : — 
 
 . . . ' ' magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn " — 
 
 in which the very same note is struck as in those 
 extracts which I quoted from Celtic romance, and 
 struck with authentic and unmistakable power. 
 
 Shakspeare, in handling nature, touches this Celtic 
 note so exquisitely, that perhaps one is inclined to 
 be always looking for the Celtic note in him, and not
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 127 
 
 to recognise his Greek note when it comes. But if 
 one attends well to the difference between the two 
 notes, and bears in mind, to guide one, such things 
 as Virgil's " moss-grown springs and grass softer than 
 sleep : " — 
 
 "Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba" — 
 
 as his charming flower-gatherer, who : — 
 
 " Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens 
 Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi " — 
 
 as his quinces and chestnuts : — 
 
 . . . ' ' cana legam teuera lanugine mala 
 Castaneasque nuces " 
 
 then, I think, we shall be disposed to say that in 
 
 Shakspeare's : — 
 
 ' ' I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, 
 Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, 
 Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, 
 With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine " — 
 
 it is mainly a Greek note which is struck. Then, 
 again in his : — 
 
 . . . . " look how the floor of heaven 
 Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold ! " 
 
 we are at the very point of transition from the Greek 
 note to the Celtic ; there is the Greek clearness and 
 brightness, with the Celtic aerialness and magic com- 
 ing in. Then we have the sheer, inimitable Celtic 
 note in passages like this : — 
 
 " Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead, 
 By paved fountain or by rushy brook, 
 Or in the beached margent of the sea " —
 
 ^28 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 or this, the last I will quote : — 
 
 " The moon shines bright. In such a night as this, 
 When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, 
 And they did make no noise, in such a night 
 Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls — 
 
 ' ' in such a night 
 
 Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew — 
 
 ' ' in such a night 
 
 Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand, 
 Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love 
 To come again to Carthage." 
 
 And those last lines of all are so drenched and in- 
 toxicated with the fairy-dew of that natural magic 
 which is our theme, that I cannot do better than end 
 with them. 
 
 And now, with the pieces of evidence in our hand, 
 let us go to those who say it is vain to look for 
 Celtic elements in any Englishman, and let us ask 
 them, first, if they seize what we mean by the power 
 of natural magic in Celtic poetry ; secondly, if Eng- 
 lish poetry does not eminently exhibit this power ; 
 and, thirdly, where they suppose English poetry got 
 it from 1 
 
 I perceive that I shall be accused of having rather 
 the air, in what I have said, of denying this and that 
 gift to the Germans, and of establishing our differ- 
 ence from them a little ungraciously and at their 
 expense. The truth is, few people have any real 
 care to analyse closely in their criticism ; they merely 
 employ criticism as a means for heaping all praise on
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 129 
 
 what they like, and all blame on what they dislike. 
 Those of us (and they are many) who owe a great 
 debt of gratitude to the German spirit and to Ger- 
 man literature, do not like to be told of any powers 
 being lacking there ; we are like the young ladies 
 who think the hero of their novel is only half a hero 
 unless he has all perfections united in him. But 
 nature does not work, either in heroes or races, 
 according to the young ladies' notion. We all are 
 what we are, the hero and the great nation are what 
 they are, by our limitations as well as by our powers, 
 by lacking something as well as by possessing some- 
 thing. It is not always gain to possess this or that 
 gift, or loss to lack this or that gift. Our great, our 
 only first-rate body of contemporary poetry is the 
 German; the grand business of modern poetry, — a 
 moral interpretation, from an independent point of 
 view, of man and the world, — it is only German 
 poetry, Goethe's poetry, that has, since the Greeks, 
 made much way with. Campbell's power of style, 
 and the natural magic of Keats and Wordsworth, 
 and Byron's Titanic personality, may be wanting to 
 this poetry ; but see what it has accomplished with- 
 out them ! How much more than Campbell with his 
 power of style, and Keats and Wordsworth with their 
 natural magic, and Byron with his Titanic personality ! 
 Why, for the immense serious task it had to perform, 
 the steadiness of German poetry, its going near the 
 ground, its patient fidelity to nature, its using great 
 plainness of speech, poetical drawbacks in one point 
 of view, were safeguards and helps in another. The 
 VOL. II. K
 
 130 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 plainness and earnestness of the two lines I have 
 already quoted from Goethe : — 
 
 "Es bildet ein Talent sicli in der Stille, 
 Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt " — 
 
 compared with the play and power of Shakspeare's 
 style or Dante's, suggest at once the difference be- 
 tween Goethe's task and theirs, and the fitness of the 
 faithful laborious German spirit for its own task. 
 Dante's task was to set forth the lesson of the world 
 from the point of view of mediaeval Catholicism ; the 
 basis of spiritual life was given, Dante had not to 
 make this anew. Shakspeare's task was to set forth 
 the spectacle of the world when man's spirit re-awoke 
 to the possession of the world at the Renaissance. 
 The spectacle of human life, left to bear its own 
 significance and tell its own story, but shown in all 
 its fulness, variety, and power, is at that moment the 
 great matter; but, if we are to press deeper, the 
 basis of spiritual life is still at that time the tradi- 
 tional religion, reformed or unreformed, of Christen- 
 dom, and Shakspeare has not to supply a new basis. 
 But when Goethe came, Europe had lost her basis of 
 spiritual life ; she had to find it again ; Goethe's task 
 Avas, — the inevitable task for the modern poet hence- 
 forth is, — as it was for the Greek poet in the days of 
 Pericles, not to preach a sublime sermon on a given 
 text like Dante, not to exhibit all the kingdoms of 
 human life and the glory of them like Shakspeare, 
 but to interpret human life afresh, and to supply a 
 new spiritual basis to it. This is not only a work for 
 style, eloquence, charm, poetry ; it is a work for
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 131 
 
 science ; and the scientific, serious German spirit, not 
 carried away by this and that intoxication of ear, and 
 eye, and self-will, has peculiar aptitudes for it. 
 
 We, on the other hand, do not necessarily gain by 
 the commixture of elements in us ; we have seen how 
 the clashing of natures in us hampers and embarrasses 
 our behaviour; we might very likely be more at- 
 tractive, we might very likely be more successful, 
 if we were all of a piece. Our want of sureness of 
 taste, our eccentricity, come in great measure, no 
 doubt, from our not being all of a piece, from our 
 having no fixed, fatal, spiritual centre of gravity. 
 The Rue de Eivoli is one thing, and Nuremberg is 
 another, and Stonehenge is another; but we have a 
 turn for all three, and lump them all up together. 
 Mr. Tom Taylor's translations from Breton poetry 
 offer a good example of this mixing; he has a genuine 
 feeling for these Celtic matters, and often, as in the Evil 
 Tribute of Nomenoe, or in Lord Nairn and the Fairy, he 
 is, both in movement and expression, true and appro- 
 priate ; but he has a sort of Teutonism and Latinism 
 in him too, and so he cannot forbear mixing with his 
 Celtic strain such disparates as : — 
 
 "'Twas mirk, mirk night, and the water bright 
 Troubled and drumlie flowed " — 
 
 which is evidently Lowland-Scotchy ; or as : — 
 
 " Foregad, but thou'rt an artful hand ! " 
 
 which is English-stagey ; or as : — 
 
 "To Gradlon's daughter, bright of blee, 
 Her lover he whispered tenderly — 
 Bethink thee, sweet Dahut ! the key /'
 
 132 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 which is Anacreontic in the manner of Tom Moore. 
 Yes, it is not a sheer advantage to have several strings 
 to one's bow ! if we had been all German, we might 
 have had the science of Germany ; if we had been all 
 Celtic, we might have been popular and agreeable ; if 
 we had been all Latinised, we might have governed 
 Ireland as the French govern Alsace, without getting 
 ourselves detested. But now we have Germanism 
 enough to make us Philistines, and Normanism 
 enough to make us imperious, and Celtism enough 
 to make us self-conscious and awkward ; but German 
 fidelity to Nature, and Latin precision and clear rea- 
 son, and Celtic quick-wittedness and spirituality, we 
 fall short of. Nay, perhaps, if we are doomed to 
 perish (Heaven avert the omen !), we shall perish by 
 our Celtism, by our self-will and want of patience 
 with ideas, our inability to see the way the world is 
 going ; and yet those very Celts, by our affinity with 
 whom we are perishing, will be hating and upbraiding 
 us all the time. 
 
 This is a somewhat unpleasant view to take of the 
 matter ; but if it is true, its being unpleasant does not 
 make it any less true, and we are always the better 
 for seeing the truth. What we here see is not the 
 whole truth, however. So long as this mixed consti- 
 tution of our nature possesses us, we pay it tribute 
 and serve it ; so soon as we possess it, it pays us 
 tribute and serves us. So long as we are blindly and 
 ignorantly rolled about by the forces of our nature, 
 their contradiction baffles us and lames us ; so soon 
 as we have clearly discerned what they are, and begun
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 133 
 
 to apply to them a law of measure, control, and guid- 
 ance, they may be made to work for our good and to 
 carry us forward. Then we may have the good of 
 our German part, the good of our Latin part, the 
 good of our Celtic part; and instead of one part 
 clashing with the other, we may bring it in to continue 
 and perfect the other, when the other has given us 
 all the good it can yield, and by being pressed further, 
 could only give us its faulty excess. Then we may 
 use the German faithfulness to Nature to give us 
 science, and to free us from insolence and self-will ; 
 we may use the Celtic quickness of perception to give 
 us delicacy, and to free us from hardness and Philis- 
 tinism ; we may use the Latin decisiveness to give us 
 strenuous clear method, and to free us from fumbling 
 and idling. Already, in their untrained state, these 
 elements give signs, in our life and literature, of their 
 being present in us, and a kind of prophecy of what 
 they could do for us if they were properly observed, 
 trained, and applied. But this they have not yet been ; 
 we ride one force of our nature to death ; we will be 
 nothing but Anglo-Saxons in the Old World or in the 
 New ; and when our race has built Bold Street, Liver- 
 pool, and pronounced it very good, it hurries across 
 the Atlantic, and builds Nashville, and Jacksonville, 
 and Milledgeville, and thinks it is fulfilling the designs 
 of Providence in an incomparable manner. But true 
 Anglo-Saxons, simply and sincerely rooted in the 
 German nature, we are not and cannot be; all we have 
 accomplished by our onesidedness is to blur and con- 
 fuse the natural basis in ourselves altogether, and to
 
 134 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 become something eccentric, unattractive, and inhar- 
 monious. 
 
 A man of exquisite intelligence and charming 
 character, the late Mr. Cobden, used to fancy that a 
 better acquaintance with the United States was the 
 graDd panacea for us ; and once in a speech he be- 
 wailed the inattention of our seats of learning to 
 them, and seemed to think that if our ingenuous 
 youth at Oxford were taught a little less about the 
 Ilissus, and a little more about Chicago, we should all 
 be the better for it. Chicago has its claims upon us, 
 no doubt ; but it is evident that from the point of 
 view to which I have been leading, a stimulation of 
 our Anglo-Saxonism, such as is intended by Mr. Cob- 
 den's proposal, does not appear the thing most need- 
 ful for us ; seeing our American brothers themselves 
 have rather, like us, to try and moderate the flame of 
 Anglo-Saxonism in their own breasts, than to ask us 
 to clap the bellows to it in ours. So I am inclined 
 to beseech Oxford, instead of expiating her over- 
 addiction to the Ilissus by lectures on Chicago, to give 
 us an expounder for a still more remote-looking object 
 than the Ilissus, — the Celtic languages and literature. 
 And yet why should I call it remote ? if, as I have 
 been labouring to show, in the spiritual frame of us 
 English ourselves, a Celtic fibre, little as we may have 
 ever thought of tracing it, lives and works Aliens in 
 speech, in religion, in blood ! said Lord Lyndhurst ; the 
 philologists have set him right about the speech, the 
 physiologists about the blood ; and perhaps, taking 
 religion in the wide but true sense of our whole spiri-
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. 135 
 
 tual activity, those who have followed what I have 
 been saying here will think that the Celt is not so 
 wholly alien to us in religion. But, at any rate, let 
 us consider that of the shrunken and diminished re- 
 mains of this great primitive race, all, with one insig- 
 nificant exception, belongs to the English empire; 
 only Brittany is not ours ; we have Ireland, the Scotch 
 Highlands, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall. They 
 are a part of ourselves, we are deeply interested in 
 knowing them, they are deeply interested in being 
 known by us ; and yet in the great and rich univer- 
 sities of this great and rich country there is no chair 
 of Celtic, there is no study or teaching of Celtic mat- 
 ters ; those who want them must go abroad for them. 
 It is neither right nor reasonable that this should be 
 be so. Ireland has had in the last half century a band 
 of Celtic students, — a band with which death, alas ! 
 has of late been busy,- — from whence Oxford or Cam- 
 bridge might have taken an admirable professor of 
 Celtic ; and with the authority of a university chair, 
 a great Celtic scholar, on a subject little known, and 
 where all would have readily deferred to him, might 
 have by this time doubled our facilities for knowing 
 the Celt, by procuring for this country Celtic docu- 
 ments which were inaccessible here, and preventing 
 the dispersion of others which were accessible. It is 
 not much that the English Government does for science 
 or literature ; but if Eugene O'Curry, from a chair of 
 Celtic at Oxford, had appealed to the Government to 
 get him copies or the originals of the Celtic treasures 
 in the Burgundian Library at Brussels, or in the
 
 136 ON THE STUDY OF 
 
 library of St. Isidore's College at Eome, even the 
 English Government could not well have refused him. 
 The invaluable Irish manuscripts in the Stowe Library 
 the late Sir Eobert Peel proposed, in 1849, to buy 
 for the British Museum ; Lord Macaulay, one of the 
 trustees of the Museum, declared, with the confident 
 shallowness which makes him so admired by public 
 speakers and leading-article writers, and so intolerable 
 to all searchers for truth, that he saw nothing in the 
 whole collection worth purchasing for the Museum, 
 except the correspondence of Lord Melville on the 
 American war. That is to say, this correspondence 
 of Lord Melville's was the only thing in the collec- 
 tion about which Lord Macaulay himself knew or 
 cared. Perhaps an Oxford or Cambridge professor 
 of Celtic might have been allowed to make his voice 
 heard, on a matter of Celtic manuscripts, even against 
 Lord Macaulay. The manuscripts were bought by 
 Lord Ashburnham, who keeps them shut up, and will 
 let no one consult them (at least up to the date when 
 O'Curry published his Lectures he did so) " for fear 
 an actual acquaintance with their contents should 
 decrease their value as matter of curiosity at some 
 future transfer or sale." Who knows 1 Perhaps an 
 Oxford professor of Celtic might have touched the 
 flinty heart of Lord Ashburnham. 
 
 At this moment, when the narrow Philistinism, 
 which has long had things its own way in England, 
 is showing its natural fruits, and we are beginning to 
 feel ashamed, and uneasy, and alarmed at it ; now, 
 when we are becoming aware that we have sacrificed
 
 CELTIC LITEEATURE. 137 
 
 to Philistinism culture, and insight, and dignity, and 
 acceptance, and weight among the nations, and hold 
 on events that deeply concern us, and control of the 
 future, and yet that it cannot even give us the fool's 
 paradise it promised us, hut is apt to break down, and 
 to leave us with Mr. Roebuck's and Mr. Lowe's lauda- 
 tions of our matchless happiness, and the largest cir- 
 culation in the world assured to the Daily Telegraph, 
 for our only comfort ; at such a moment it needs some 
 moderation not to be attacking Philistinism by storm, 
 but to mine it through such gradual means as the slow 
 approaches of culture, and the introduction of chairs 
 of Celtic. But the hard unintelligence, which is just 
 now our bane, cannot be conquered by storm ; it 
 must be suppled and reduced by culture, by a growth 
 in the variety, fulness, and sweetness of our spiritual 
 life ; and this end can only be reached by studying 
 things that are outside of ourselves, and by studying 
 them disinterestedly. Let us reunite ourselves with 
 our better mind and with the world through science ; 
 and let it be one of our angelic revenges on the Phil- 
 istines, who among their other sins are the guilty 
 authors of Fenianism, to found at Oxford a chair of 
 Celtic, and to send, through the gentle ministration 
 of science, a message of peace to Ireland.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 . . . . Nunquamne reponam? 
 
 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 instruc- 
 tion 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 monu- 
 ment 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
 
 142 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 of Dante. It may safely be asserted that neither 
 of these works will take rank as the standard trans- 
 lation 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 in 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 
 translator'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
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 143 
 
 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 " faith- 
 ful," he may "retain every peculiarity of his ori- 
 ginal;" but who is to assure him, who is to assure 
 Mr. Newman himself, that, when he has done this, 
 he has done that for which Mr. Newman enjoins 
 'Jiis 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
 
 144 ON TRANSLATING 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 pro- 
 duces 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 ordi- 
 nary 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 appre- 
 ciate poetry; whether to read it gives the Provost 
 of Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cambridge, or 
 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 transla- 
 tion, " It was a pretty poem, but must not be called 
 Homer," the work, in spite of all its power and 
 attractiveness, was judged. 
 
 '12s o.v o fypovijxos oplcreiev, — " as the judicious 
 would determine," — that is a test to which every 
 one professes himself willing to submit his works. 
 Unhappily, in most cases, no two persons agree as
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 145 
 
 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 1 
 
 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 Iliad stuck together ; whether the Christian doc- 
 trine 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 in- 
 convenience is that their solution by the translator, 
 even were it possible, could be of no benefit to his 
 translation. 
 
 VOL. II. L
 
 146 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 I advise him, again, not to trouble himself with 
 constructing a special vocabulary for his use in trans- 
 lation ; 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 Mr. Newman, to repre- 
 sent the Homeric a/^et^o/ievos : 
 
 " Great Hector of the motley helm thus spake to her responsive. 
 " But thus responsively to him spake god-like 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 ; be- 
 cause, 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
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 147 
 
 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 Kome : so that to limit an English trans- 
 lator 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 in the struc- 
 ture 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 <f>vcri{oos } "life-giving," in that beautiful
 
 148 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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 : 
 
 (5s <f>&TO ' rovs 5' ijSt] Karex ev 4' vff ^ oos °" a 
 kv AaKedaifiovL audi, (f>i\rj iv TrarpiSi yairj. 1 
 
 " 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 senti- 
 ment 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 ecueil 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 ex- 
 ample of " le faux " in criticism ; it is false. It is not 
 true, as to that particular passage, that Homer called 
 the earth (f>vo-i£oos, 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 him- 
 self 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 senti- 
 mentality, eminently modern, inspires Homer at all. 
 " From Homer and Polygnotus I every day learn 
 
 1 Iliad, iii. 243.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 149 
 
 more clearly," says Goethe, " that in our life here 
 above ground we have, properly speaking, to enact 
 Hell : " l — if the student must absolutely have a key- 
 note 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 posi- 
 tive. "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, Chap- 
 man has failed in rendering him; while for want of ap- 
 preciating the fourth, his nobleness, Mr. Newman, who 
 has clearly seen some of the faults of his predecessors, 
 has yet failed more conspicuously than any of them. 
 
 1 BrUfwechscl zwischen Schiller uitd Goctlte, vi. 230.
 
 150 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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 trans- 
 lator 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 dis- 
 appears. 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 fanci- 
 fulness of the Elizabethan age, entirely alien to the 
 plain directness of Homer's thought and feeling ; 
 while between Mr. 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
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 151 
 
 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 re- 
 turning 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 re- 
 minded 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 would 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 direct-
 
 152 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 ness 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." 
 
 Here 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. In- 
 stead 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 :
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 153 
 
 " 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 of 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, 
 
 E&vde, tI fioi. Oavarov fxavreveai ; ovM rl ere XPV' 1 
 ' ' 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 exigences of 
 
 1 Iliad, xix. 420.
 
 154 ON TEANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 rhyme," to quote Mr. Newman, "positively forbid 
 faithfulness ; " because " a just translation of any 
 ancient poet in rhyme," to quote Cowper, "is im- 
 possible." 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 of 
 the poem is changed. In these lines of Chapman, for 
 instance, from Sarpedon's speech to Glaucus, in the 
 twelfth book of the Iliad : — 
 
 ' ' friend, if keeping back 
 Would keep back age from us, and deatb, 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 va or 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. 
 
 ovre Kev avros evl irpJoroicn fj.axoilJ.'riv, 
 ovre Ke ae ffriWoifu J u.ax 7 F e 's Kv^iaveipav 1 
 "Neither would I myself go forth to fight with the foremost, 
 Nor would I urge thee on to enter the glorious battle," 
 
 1 Iliad, xii. 324.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 155 
 
 says Homer ; there he stops, and begins an opposed 
 movement : 
 
 vvv 5' — e/j.wrjs yap Kjjpes ecpeuTcicnv Oavaroio — 
 " But — for a thousand fates of death stand close to us always" — 
 
 This line, in which Homer wishes to go away with 
 the most marked rapidity from the line before, Chap- 
 man 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 feel- 
 ing, we ought to have left behind us entirely, and to 
 be moving farther and farther away from. 
 
 Ehyme 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 anti- 
 thesis. No passage could show this better than the 
 passage I have just quoted, on which I will pause for 
 a moment. 
 
 Robert Wood, Avhose 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 develop- 
 ing themselves, and strongly interested him, relates
 
 156 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 of this passage a striking story. He says that in 
 1762, at the end of the Seven Years' War, being 
 then Under-Secretary of State, he was directed to 
 wait upon the President of the Council, Lord Gran- 
 ville, 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 :— 
 
 u> irinov, d fiei> yap irbXe/xov irepl rdvde <pvy6vre, 
 
 aiel 5rj /MeWoi/xev dy!]pw t d6avdrw re 
 
 Za<r€<r6', oiJTe ksv airbs ivl irpdiToiai /xaxoi/jLyjv, 1 
 
 oflre Ke <xk <tt{X\oi/m fJ-dxyv is Kvbidveipav ' 
 
 vvv 5' — ?fj.TT7]s yap Hypes icpearaviv Oavdroio 
 
 fivplai, as ovk kari (pvyeiv fipbrov, ovd' viraXv^at — 
 
 tofiev. 
 
 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 atten- 
 tion, and recovered spirits enough to declare the 
 approbation of a dying statesman (I use his own 
 words) ' on the most glorious war, and most honour- 
 able peace, this nation ever saw.'" 2 
 
 1 These are the words on which Lord Granville "dwelled 
 with particular emphasis." 
 
 2 Robert Wood, Essay on the Original Genius and Writings 
 of Homer, London, 1775, p. vii.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 157 
 
 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 last 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, Avhat 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 better 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 " —
 
 158 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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 to/zev. 
 
 A literary and intellectualised language is, how- 
 ever, in its own way well suited to grand matters ; and 
 Pope, with a language of this kind and his own ad- 
 mirable 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, pas- 
 sages of narrative or description, that he and his style 
 are sorely tried, and prove themselves weak. A per- 
 fectly 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 a 
 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. 
 
 Every one 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
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 159 
 
 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 by the chariots, Avaited for the 
 bright-throned Morning. " 1 
 
 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, 
 AVhose 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 
 
 1 Fliad, viii. 5G0.
 
 160 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 plain narrative, where Homer is still power and delight- 
 ful, Pope, by the inherent fault of his style, is in- 
 effective and out of taste. Wordsworth says some- 
 where, 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 pointedly 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 de- 
 scription, 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;
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 161 
 
 and all these are Homeric qualities. I cannot say 
 that I think the movement of his fourteen-syllable 
 line, which has heen 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 own. Chapman's diction, too, is gene- 
 rally 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 1 Is it merely 
 the want of literal faithfulness to his original, imposed 
 upon him, it is said, by the exigences of rhyme? 
 Has this celebrated version, which has so many ad- 
 vantages, 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 pro- 
 ducing 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 
 every one 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. Hallam 
 
 VOL. II. M
 
 162 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 pronounces this translation to be " often exceedingly 
 Homeric ; " and its latest editor boldly declares that 
 by what, with a deplorable style, 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 unfaithf ulness 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 plain- 
 ness 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 con- 
 tents 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 de- 
 scribe it temperately. Happily, in the translation of 
 the Bible, the sacred character of their original in-
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 163 
 
 spired 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 litera- 
 ture, 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 trans- 
 lation, the introductory verses, and the dedications. 
 You will find : — 
 
 " An Anagram of the name of our Dread Prince, 
 My most gracious and sacred Maecenas, 
 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 
 as that which divides him from Voltaire. Pope has 
 been sneered at for saying that Chapman writes 
 " somewhat as one might imagine Homer himself to
 
 164 ON" TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 have written before he arrived at years of discretion." 
 But the remark is excellent : Homer expresses him- 
 self 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. What 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 under- 
 standing with all Voltaire's admirable simplicity and 
 rationality. 
 
 My limits will not allow me to do more than
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 165 
 
 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 ex- 
 press 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 : — 
 
 el fiev yap, ir6\efiov irepl rdvSe (pvybvre, 
 aid 5ij jxiWoLfiev dyrjpui t ddavdrw re 
 tcrcrecrd', — - 
 
 "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 : — 
 
 "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 ; " 
 
 and so on. Again ; in another passage which I have 
 before quoted, where Zeus says to the horses of 
 Pelcus, 
 
 tl a<pQ'C 86/j.ev HrfKrfL avaKTi 
 6vrjT<£ ; v[ie?s 8' earbv ayrjpw t' dOavdrcx) re -1 
 
 " Why gave we you to royal Peleus, to a mortal ? but ye are 
 without old age, and immortal." 
 
 1 Iliad, xv ii. 443.
 
 166 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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, busy on 
 behalf of my father's great glory, and my own." 1 In 
 Chapman's hand's 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 : " — 
 
 iaaerai fjfiap, 6V av iror' 6XwXt/ "IXios ipy. 
 1 Iliad, vi. 444.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 167 
 
 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 over- 
 throw. " 
 
 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. Chap- 
 man translates his object into Elizabethan, as 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 common- 
 place, must not be ignoble. I have shown you how 
 translators of Homer fail by wanting rapidity, by
 
 168 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 wanting simplicity of style, by wanting plainness of 
 thought : in a second lecture I will show you how a 
 translator fails by wanting nobility. 
 
 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 transla- 
 tion, 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 feel- 
 ing, 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 lan- 
 guage ; 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 judg- 
 ment 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 I have already quoted, " be
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 169 
 
 appreciated by the scholar accustomed to test a trans- 
 lation 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 Chap- 
 man'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 transla- 
 tion, — that it shall, as nearly as possible, reproduce 
 for him the general effect of Homer. This, then, re- 
 mains the one proper aim of the translator : to repro- 
 duce 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. New- 
 man. 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 schoolboys 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.
 
 170 ON TRANSLATING HOMEli. 
 
 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 pecu- 
 liarity 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 : repro- 
 duce 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 pro- 
 duces 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, to 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
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 171 
 
 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, garru- 
 lous." 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 sen- 
 tences 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 antiquated 
 to obtain pardon of the reader for its frequent home- 
 liness." "I am concerned," he says again, "with the 
 artistic problem of attaining a plausible aspect of 
 moderate antiquity, while remaining easily intelli- 
 gible." And again, he speaks of "the more anti- 
 quated style suited to this subject." Quaint ! anti- 
 quated ! — but to whom 1 ? 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 1 ? or that 
 Homer's diction seemed antiquated to Sophocles, as 
 Chaucer's diction seems antiquated to us? But we
 
 172 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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 im- 
 pression of a poet quaint and antiquated 1 ? does he 
 make this impression on Professor Thompson, or Pro- 
 fessor Jowett 1 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." But 
 does Homer ever compose in a language which pro- 
 duces 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 Shak- 
 speare — need I say it 1 — 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 Shak- 
 speare is sometimes.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 173 
 
 "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, as I need not remind any one 
 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 mediaeval romancers, for in- 
 stance, 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 Coeur 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 ; every one will feel it to be garrulous ;
 
 174 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 every one will understand what is meant when is 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 
 mediaeval poet ? I have no fear of the answer. 
 
 I follow the same method with Mr. Newman's two 
 other epithets, p-osaic 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 its 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 pre- 
 cision 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 undoubt- 
 edly 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 impres- 
 sion 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
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 175 
 
 of nobleness, even when it deals with Thersites or 
 with Irus 1 
 
 Well then, Homer is neither quaint, nor garrulous, 
 nor prosaic, nor mean : and Mr. Newman, in seeing 
 him so, sees him differently from 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 be- 
 gins;" 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 expres- 
 sion 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 more
 
 176 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 gently surprised them, quaint. Using the two words 
 in this manner, I say, that when Mr. Newman trans- 
 lates Helen's words to Hector in the sixth book, 
 
 Aaep e/j,eio, Kvvbs KaKOfj.7]xdvov, oKpvo^crarjs, 1 — 
 
 "0, 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, 
 
 Ti]v 5' 7]fiei(3eT iireira fiiyas Kopvdaio\os"EKTU3p, — 
 
 " Great Hector of the motley helm then spake to her respon- 
 sive," — 
 
 or the common expression evKvyijuSes 'A^atot, " 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 kwos kciko- 
 firj^dvov, or, KopvOatoXos "E/<Tay>, or, ivKv/jfitSes 'A^atoi. 
 These expressions no more seem odd to him than the 
 simplest expressions in English. He is not more 
 checked by any feeling of strangeness, strong or weak, 
 when he reads them, than when he reads in an Eng- 
 lish 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 
 
 1 Iliad, vi. 344.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 177 
 
 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 inas- 
 much as he is ignoble ; for a noble air, and a grotesque 
 air, the air of the address, 
 
 Aaep efieio, Kvvbs Ka.Kop.-qxo.vov, oKpuoeV crrys, — 
 
 and the air of the address, 
 
 "0, 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 kvKvq- 
 /xtoes 'Axeaot, — 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 he 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 hragly, 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 
 VOL. II. N
 
 178 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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 ex- 
 pect it to fail, — it fails in nobleness. It presents the 
 thought in a way which is something more than 
 unconstrained,— over-familiar ; something more than 
 easv> — 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 good 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. New- 
 man has, 
 
 "A thousand fires along the plain, I say, that night were burn- 
 ing,"- 
 
 he presents his thought familiarly ; in a style which 
 may be the genuine style of ballad-poetry, but which
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 179 
 
 is not the style of Homer. Homer moves freely ; 
 but when Mr. Newman has, 
 " Infatuate ! that thou wert lord to some other army," *— 
 
 he gives himself too much freedom ; he leaves us too 
 much to do for his rhythm ourselves, instead of giving 
 to us a rhythm like Homer's, easy indeed, but master- 
 ing our ear with a fulness of power which is irre- 
 sistible. 
 
 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 per- 
 haps 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 
 
 1 From the reproachful answer of Ulysses to Agamemnon, 
 who had proposed an abandonment of their expedition. This 
 is one of the ' ' tonic " passages of the Iliad, so I quote it : — 
 " Ah, unworthy king, some other inglorious army 
 Should'st thou command, not rule over us, whose portion 
 
 for ever 
 Zeus hath made it, from youth right up to age, to be winding 
 Skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of us perish." 
 
 Iliad, xiv. 84.
 
 180 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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 fitting 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 ex- 
 travagantly 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.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 181 
 
 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 despera- 
 tion upon them and upon the balladists who have mis- 
 led them, and I exclaim : " Compared with you, Milton 
 is Homer's double ; there is, whatever you may think, 
 ten thousand times more of the real strain of Homer 
 in, 
 
 ' Blind Thamyris, and blind Mseonides, 
 And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old, ' — 
 than in, 
 
 ' Now Christ thee save, thou proud porter, 
 
 Now Christ thee save and see, ' 1 — 
 or in, 
 
 "While the tinker did dine, he had plenty of wine." 2 
 
 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 trans- 
 lator 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 
 
 1 From the ballad of King Estmere, in Percy's Reliques of 
 Ancient English Poetry, i. G9 (edit, of 1767). 
 
 2 Reliques, i. 241.
 
 182 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 anything less than a masterwork, the co-operation or 
 consolidation of several poets becomes possible, for 
 talent is not uncommon ; the moment you have much 
 less than a masterwork, they become easy, for medio- 
 crity 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 con- 
 tributed 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 composi- 
 tion 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 of Michael Angelo. So the insurmountable 
 obstacle to believing the Iliad a consolidated work of 
 several poets is this : that the work of great masters
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 183 
 
 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 instinc- 
 tively seek a style in which their comparative inferi- 
 ority 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 
 weaknesses into broad relief. This is a convenience ; 
 but it is a convenience which the ballad-style pur- 
 chases 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 degene- 
 rate into doggerel." It is true of its "moral quali- 
 ties," 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 is 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 power- 
 ful : the ballad -manner and movement are often 
 either jaunty and smart, so not noble ; or jog-trot 
 and humdrum, so not powerful.
 
 184 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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 nryself 
 with the Nibelungen Lay, I prefer to look at the 
 ballad-style as directly applied to Homer, in Chap- 
 man's version and Mr. Newman's, and in the Homeric 
 Ballads of Dr. Maginn. 
 
 First I take Chapman. I have already shown 
 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 noble- 
 ness. In a passage which I have already quoted, the 
 address of Zeus to the horses of Achilles, where 
 Homer has — •
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 185 
 
 2 oeihw, tL <r<pwi ddfiev Ilr/X-^t Hvolkti 
 
 dvqrQ ; vfMeis 8' earbv ayrjpw t ddavaTto re ! 
 
 ^ iva 5vGT7}voi<n /xer AfOpdcnv &\ye' 'ix r \ T0V > 1 
 
 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 2 the miseries poured out on human fates ?' " 
 
 There are many faults in this rendering of Chap- 
 man's, but what I particularly wish to notice in it is 
 the expression " Poor wretched beasts " for a SeiXw. 
 This expression just illustrates the difference be- 
 tween 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 an expression shall be plain and natu- 
 ral, 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. 
 'A SeiAw is as plain, as simple as "Poor wretched 
 beasts;" but it is also noble, Avhich " 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. 
 
 1 Iliad, xvii. 443. 
 2 All the editions which I have seen have "haste," but the 
 right reading must certainly be "taste."
 
 186 ON TRANSLATING 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 pro- 
 phesied his death to him. 1 
 
 "Achilles, far in rage, 
 Thus answered him : — It fits not thee thus proudly to presage 
 My 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 move- 
 ment of Homer, — 
 
 rj pa, /ecu ii> irpuiTOis l&xuv £%e fiuivvxas tirirovs ? 
 1 Iliad, xix. 419.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 187 
 
 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 pinchbeck 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 are not at 
 all Homeric, they have not the least in the world 
 the manner of Homer. There is a celebrated inci- 
 dent 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." 1 
 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," — 
 
 1 Odyssey, xix. 392.
 
 188 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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, 
 
 vl£e 8' dp Hcraov iovaa dvaxO' ebv avrUa 8' 'i-yvio 
 ovk-fp/ ' 
 
 without having the detestable 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 1 gravely observes that for 
 
 1 Mr. Marsh, in his Lectures on the English Language, New 
 York, 1860, p. 520.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 189 
 
 his countrymen this rhythm has a disadvantage in 
 heing like the rhythm of the American national air 
 Yankee Doodle, and thus provoking ludicrous associa- 
 tions. Yankee Doodle is not our national air : for 
 us Mr. Newman's rhythm has not this disadvantage. 
 He 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 : — 
 
 " gentle friend ! if thou and I, from this encounter 'scaping, 
 Hereafter might forever 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 pur- 
 sue us 
 Which never mortal may evade, though sly of foot and 
 
 nimble ; — 
 Onward ! and glory let us earn, or glory yield to some one. — 
 
 " 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
 
 190 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 all Pope's radical difference of manner from Homer, 
 it gives us of the real effect of 
 
 el /J.ei> yap, w6\e/xov wepl rbvbe (pvydvre — 
 
 than Mr. Newman's lines. And now, why are Mr. 
 Newman's lines faulty? They are faulty, first, be- 
 cause, as a matter of diction, the expressions " 
 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 expres- 
 sions 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. Oin-e /ce ere 
 crTeWoijii fidx 7 ] 1 ' * s KvSidveipav, — "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 1 " 
 
 I will by no means make search in Mr. Newman's 
 version for passages likely to raise a laugh ; that 
 search, alas ! would be far too easy. I will quote 
 but one other passage from him, and that a passage 
 where the diction is comparatively inoffensive, in
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 191 
 
 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 hodest death to me ? from thee this was not 
 needed. 
 Myself right surely know also, 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 Padorga Spry-foot ; which 
 is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale 
 Mdlle. Piossignol, 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 als6 that 'tis 
 my doom to perish, — compared with the ev vv rot oTSa 
 <al avros, o [xol /xopos ev6d& oXkcrOai of Homer. 
 
 But 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 Coryphaeus 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
 
 192 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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 the 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 ages 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 repre- 
 sentations 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 
 distinct, 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 some- 
 thing utterly unlike them, and as belonging to another 
 world. So the Greeks in Shakspeare's Troilus and
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 193 
 
 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," 1 
 
 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 ; 
 Edmund 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." 2 
 
 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 1 I may point out to him that 
 the movement of Scott's lines, while it is rapid, is also 
 
 1 Marmion, canto vi. 38. 2 Marmion, canto vi. 29. 
 
 VOL. II.
 
 194 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 at the same time what the French call saccacU, 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 judg- 
 ment 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 
 to put them side by side with this of Scott. For 
 example, when Homer says : — 
 
 a\\&, cpiXos, Oave /cat cnV tLt] dXvcptpeai ourws; 
 KarOaue /cat ndrpo/cAos, oirep aio irdKhbv afieivwv, 1 
 
 that is in the grand style. When Virgil says :— 
 
 "Disce, puer, virtutem ex me veruraque laborem, 
 Fortunam ex aliis," 2 
 
 that is in the grand style. When Dante says : — 
 
 ' ' Lascio lo fele, et vo pei dolci pomi 
 Promessi a me per lo verace Duea ; 
 Ma fino al centro pria convien ch' io tomi," 3 
 
 1 "Be content, good friend, die also thou! why lamentest 
 thou thyself on this wise ? Patroclus, too, died, who was a far 
 better than thou."— Iliad, xxi. 106. 
 
 2 ' ' From me, young man, learn nobleness of soul and true 
 effort : learn success from others." — JEneid, xii. 435. 
 
 3 " I leave the gall of bitterness, and I go for the apples of 
 sweetness promised unto me by my faithful Guide ; but far as 
 the centre it behoves me first to fall."— Hell, xvi. 61.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 195 
 
 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," 1 
 
 that, finally, is in the grand style. Now let any one, 
 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 
 standards, 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 
 
 1 Paradise Lost, i. 591.
 
 196 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 the grand style, of adequately rendering Homer. 
 Scott is certainly at his best in his battles. Of Homer 
 you could not 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 and they 
 are both of them natural, and therefore touching and
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 197 
 
 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 trans- 
 lator 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 noble- 
 ness 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 trans- 
 lator 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 satis- 
 fying competent judges, in the hope of making it 
 clear to the future translator, 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,
 
 198 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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 
 any one 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 too, 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 litera- 
 ture. 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
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 199 
 
 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 pre- 
 sent 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 critical 
 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 Eng- 
 lish 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
 
 200 ON TRANSLATING HOMEE. 
 
 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. 
 
 IIL 
 
 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 arti- 
 ficial both in his style and in his words ; Chapman 
 renders him ill because he is fantastic in his ideas ; 
 Mr. Newman renders him ill because he is odd in his 
 words and ignoble in his manner. All four trans- 
 lators 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 move- 
 ment 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 noble- 
 ness : but it is in the artificial character of his style 
 and diction that he is most unlike Homer. Chap- 
 man's movement, words, style, and manner, are often 
 far enough from resembling Homer's movement, 
 Avords, style, and manner ; but it is the fantasticality 
 of his ideas which puts him farthest from resembling 
 Homer. Mr. Newman's movement, grammatical
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 201 
 
 style, and ideas, are a thousand times in strong con- 
 trast 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 sen- 
 tence ; I will avoid Cowper's slowness, Pope's arti- 
 ficiality, Chapman's conceits, Mr. Newman's oddity ; 
 I will take Cowper's dignified manner, Pope's impetu- 
 ous movement, Chapman's vocabulary, Mr. Newman's 
 syntax, and so make a perfect translation of Homer." 
 Undoubtedly in certain points the versions of Chap- 
 man, 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 imi- 
 tate 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 move- 
 ment, 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.
 
 202 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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 ; 
 and 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 dart- 
 ing 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 every one, — 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 mea- 
 sure 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 corre- 
 spondences t 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 a far worse
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 203 
 
 measare 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 fiom far 
 To all that in the wide deep wandering are." 1 
 
 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 Spen- 
 ser ; that light which shines so unexpected and with- 
 out fellow in our century, an Elizabethan born too 
 late, 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 
 1 TJie Faery Queen, Canto ii. stanza 1.
 
 204 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 the Spenserian stanza nor any form of ballad-verse, 
 — between which, as vehicles for Homer's poetry, the 
 translator has to make his choice. Every one will at 
 once remember a thousand passages in which both 
 the ten-syllable couplet and blank verse prove them- 
 selves to have nobleness. Undoubtedly the move- 
 ment 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 suc- 
 ceeded best when it essayed a sensibly lower style, the 
 style of Chaucer, for instance; whose narrative manner, 
 though a very good and sound manner, is certainly 
 neither the grand manner nor the manner of Homer. 
 The rhymed ten-syllable couplet being thus ex- 
 cluded, 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
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 205 
 
 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 Para- 
 dise Lost, our country owes the glory of having pro- 
 duced 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 litera- 
 ture, does not share with him. Not a tragedy of 
 Shakspeare but contains passages in the worst .of 
 all styles, the affected 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
 
 206 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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 move- 
 ment, the metrical cast, corresponds with the mode of 
 evolution of the thought, with the syntactical cast, 
 and is indeed determined by it. Milton charges him- 
 self 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 preg- 
 nant 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 
 makes 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 abound- 
 ing 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, 
 Wi]viv aeiSe, 0ea, — at the second word announcing the 
 proposed action : Miton 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. "
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 207 
 
 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 the man who had the warn- 
 ing voice was the same man who saw the Apocalypse. 
 Homer would have said, "0 for that warning voice, 
 which John heard," — and if it had suited him to say 
 that John also saw the Apocalypse, he would have 
 <nven 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 iEneas, where the 
 rich Tullus and Ancus are, — pulvis et umbra sumus." * 
 He never actually says where we go to ; he only indi- 
 cates it by saying that it is that place where -ZEneas, 
 Tullus, and Ancus are. But Homer, when he has to 
 speak of going down to the grave, says, definitely, 
 e? 'HXva-tov ireStov — o,Q6.vu.toi irijxxpovo-LV^ — "The 
 immortals shall send thee to the Ely sian plain ;" and it 
 1 Odes, IV. vii. 13. 2 Odyssey, iv. 563.
 
 208 ON TRANSLATING HOMEK. 
 
 is not till after he has definitely said this, that he 
 adds, that it is there that the abode of departed wor- 
 thies is placed : ode £av#us 'PaSdfxavdvs, — " Where the 
 yellow - haired Bhadamanthus is." Again; Horace, 
 having to say that punishment sooner or later over- 
 takes crime, says it thus : 
 
 "Raro anteeedentem scelestum 
 Deseruit pede Poena claudo." 1 
 
 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 neces- 
 sarily 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, al- 
 though it is the fashion with other people to cut down 
 theirs, he says that Benevolus "reprieves The obso- 
 
 1 Odes, III. ii. 31.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 209 
 
 lete prolixity of shade." It must not be Mr. Tenny- 
 son'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 per- 
 fectly 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 deter- 
 mines 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 
 him afresh ; and this is a process which is full of 
 risks. It may, no doubt, be the veal Homer that 
 issues new from it ; it is not certain beforehand that 
 it cannot be the real Homer, as it is certain that from 
 vol. ii. r
 
 210 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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 ^Eson : 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 pre- 
 serving 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 con- 
 siderable 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 ex- 
 pression, which no 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 forego. Applied to Homer, 
 this metre affords to the translator the immense sup- 
 port 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 re- 
 produce this general effect is at once the translator's
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 211 
 
 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 con- 
 firm me in the opinion that for translating Homer 
 into English verse the hexameter should be used. 
 The most successful attempt hitherto made at render- 
 ing 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. Euskin extracts the sentimental consola- 
 tion already noticed by me. The author is the 
 accomplished Provost of Eton, Dr. Hawtrey ; and 
 this performance of his must be my excuse for 
 having taken the liberty to single him out for 
 mention, as one of the natural judges of a transla- 
 tion of Homer, along with Professor Thompson and 
 Professor Jowett, whose connection with Greek litera- 
 ture is official. The passage is short; 1 and Dr. 
 
 1 So short, that I quote it entire : — 
 
 " Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia ; 
 Known to me well are the faces of all ; their names I remember ; 
 Two, two only remain, whom I see not among the commanders, 
 Castor fleet in the car, — Polydeukes brave with the cestus, — 
 Own dear brethren of mine, — one parent loved us as infants. 
 Are they not here in the host, from the shores of loved Lace- 
 
 daemon, 
 Or, though they came with the rest in ships that bound through 
 
 the waters, 
 Dare they not enter the fight or stand in the council of Heroes,
 
 212 ON TRANSLATING HOMEK. 
 
 Hawtrey'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 
 
 All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened ? 
 So said she ; — they long since in Earth's soft arms were 
 reposing, 
 There, in their own dear land, their Fatherland, Lacedsemon." 
 English Hexameter Translations; London, 1847 ; p. 242. 
 
 I have changed Dr. Hawtrey's "Kastor," " Lakedaimon, " 
 back to the familiar "Castor," " Lacedsemon, " in obedience to 
 my own rule that everything odd is to be avoided in rendering 
 Homer, the most natural and least odd of poets. I see Mr. 
 Newman's critic in the National Review urges our generation 
 to bear with the unnatural effect of these rewritten Greek names, 
 in the hope that by this means the effect of them may have to 
 the next generation become natural. For my part, I feel no 
 disposition to pass all my own life in the wilderness of pedantry, 
 in order that a posterity which I shall never see may one day 
 enter an orthographical Canaan ; and, after all, the real ques- 
 tion is this : whether our living apprehension of the Greek 
 world is more checked by meeting in an English book about 
 the Greeks, names not spelt letter for letter as in the original 
 Greek, or by meeting names which make us rub our eyes and 
 call out, " How exceedingly odd !" 
 
 The Latin names of the Greek deities raise in most cases the 
 idea of quite distinct personages from the personages whose idea 
 is raised by the Greek names. Hera and Juno are actually, to 
 every scholar's imagination, two different people. So in all 
 these cases the Latin names must, at any inconvenience, be 
 abandoned when we are dealing with the Greek world. But I 
 think it can be in the sensitive imagination of Mr. Grote only, 
 that "Thucydides" raises the idea of a different man from 
 Qovicvdldys.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 213 
 
 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 poem, 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 in 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,
 
 214 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 and which Homer's translator ought to reproduce, 
 — the sense of having, within short limits of time, 
 a large portion of human life presented to him, 
 instead of a small portion. 
 
 Mr. 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 lumber- 
 ing ; 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 ; 1 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 the 
 
 1 For instance ; in a version (I believe, by the late Mr. 
 Lockbart) of Homer's description of tbe parting of Hector and 
 Andromache, there occurs, in the first five lines, but one 
 spondee besides the necessary spondees in the sixth place ; in 
 the corresponding five lines of Homer there occur ten. See 
 Enalish Hexameter Translations, 244.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER, 215 
 
 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 
 one's self of it ; and Lord Eedesdale 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 justifica- 
 tion 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 he 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 Tirhias in the line : — 
 
 " And Tiresias 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; " 
 
 for 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
 
 216 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 no peculiar effect or beauty of cadence to reward you. 
 It is a real fault, when Mr Newman has : — 
 
 " Infatuate ! 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 insignifi- 
 cant 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 readei 
 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, that 
 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 1 It is the merit of 
 a metre appropriate to your subject, that it in some 
 degree suggests and carries with itself a style appro- 
 priate 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
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 217 
 
 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, 
 modern 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. 1 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 : — 
 
 1 See, for instance, in the Iliad, the loose construction of Sore, 
 xvii. 658 ; that of tooiro, xvii. 681 ; that of ol're, xviii. 209 ; and 
 the elliptical construction at xix. 42, 43 ; also the idiomatic 
 construction of iywv 8de irapaax^f, xix. 140. These instances 
 are all taken within a range of a thousand Hues ; any one may 
 easily multiply them for himself.
 
 218 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 " 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 idio- 
 matic, 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 
 parsed. So, again, Chapman's grammar is loose and 
 idiomatic where he says, 
 
 "Even share hath he that keeps his tent, and/je 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
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 219 
 
 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 trans- 
 lator 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 as 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 Shak- 
 speare 1 — 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, 1 he should 
 
 1 Our knowledge of Homer's Greek is hardly such as to 
 enable us to pronounce quite confidently what is idiomatic in 
 his diction, and what is not, anymore than in his grammar;
 
 220 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 be as idiomatic as he can be without ceasing to be 
 noble. Therefore the idiomatic language of Shak- 
 speare — 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 
 
 but I seem to myself clearly to recognise an idiomatic stamp in 
 such expressions as To\vire<jeiv iroKijxovs, xiv. 86 ; <f>dos ev v-fjeaaiv 
 Orjrjs, xvi. 94 ; tiv o'ioi cunraalws clvtCjv ybvv Ka/xiJ/eLv, xix. 71 ; 
 K\oToweveiv, xix. 149 ; and many others. The first-quoted ex- 
 pression, To\vireijeii> apydXiovs TroXtfiovs, seems to me to have 
 just about the same degree of freedom as the "jump the life to 
 come," or the "shuffle q^this mortal coil," of Shakspeare.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 22] 
 
 diction, was plain in the quality of his thought. It 
 is possible that a thought may be expressed with 
 idiomatic plainness, and 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, how- 
 ever, 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," —
 
 222 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 this 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 idio- 
 matic 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 fanciftdness." 
 
 So essentially characteristic of Homer is his plain- 
 ness and naturalness of thought, that to the preserva-
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 223 
 
 tion 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 in- 
 disputable fact that it is so ; that Homer's jiepo-n-wv 
 dv9p(x>irwv 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 
 Euglish 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 Gen 
 ravvTrerrXe 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 to 
 us as Milton's words when he says, "Let gorgeous 
 Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping by." In- 
 stead of rendering fj,u,wxa<s tWovs by Chapman's 
 "one-hoofed steeds," or Mr. Newman's "single-hoofed 
 horses," he must speak of horses in a way Avhich sur- 
 prises us as little as Shakspeare surprises us when ho
 
 224 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 says, "Gallop apace, you fiery -footed steeds. " Instead 
 of rendering /itXi^Sea Ovfxov by " life as honey plea- 
 sant," he must characterise life with the simple pathos 
 of Gray's "warm precincts of the cheerful day." In- 
 stead of converting ttolov <xe eVos </>uyei/ epxos oSovtwv ; 
 into the portentous remonstrance, " Betwixt the out- 
 work of thy teeth what word hath slipt 1 " 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 at- 
 tention 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 /xepoips, — an improper share of the 
 reader's attention is necessarily diverted to this an- 
 cillary word, to this word which Homer never intended 
 should receive so much notice ; and a total effect 
 quite different from Homer's is thus produced. There- 
 fore 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 inven- 
 tion, with an abundance of which persons of more
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 225 
 
 ingenuity than judgment have not enriched our lan- 
 guage 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 
 perfect 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 : — 
 
 VOL. II. y
 
 226 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 ' ' 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 and 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 plain- 
 ness and directness, I repeat the word " fires " as he 
 repeats -n-vpd, 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
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 227 
 
 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 any- 
 thing 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 comes 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 
 Shakiug, 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, Avhich 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 in-
 
 228 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 stance, is a very artificial and literary way of rendering 
 Homer's words, and so is, "coursers of immortal strain." 
 
 Mvpofievu 8' &pa Tih ye I8tbv, iXerjae Kpovtuv, — 
 " And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bewailing, 
 And he shook his head, and thus addressed his own bosom : — 
 
 ' 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 Eedesdale visits with just re- 
 prehension. x 
 
 1 It must be remembered, however, that, if we disregard 
 quantity too much in constructing English hexameters, we also 
 disregard accent too much in reading Greek hexameters. We 
 read every Greek dactyl so as to make a pure dactyl of it ; but, 
 to a Greek, the accent must have hindered many dactyls from 
 sounding as pure dactyls. When we read at6\os 'iiriros, for 
 instance, or alyi6xoio, the dactyl in each of these cases is 
 made by us as pure a dactyl as " Tityre," or "dignity ; " but to 
 a Greek it was not so. To him al6\os must have been nearly as 
 impure a dactyl as " death-destined " is to us ; and alyi6x nearly 
 as impure as the "dressed his own " of my text. Nor, I think, 
 does this right mode of pronouncing the two words at all spoil 
 the run of the line as a hexameter. The effect of alSWos iwttos 
 (or something like that), though not our effect, is not a disagree- 
 able one. On the other hand, Kopv0ai6\os as a paroxytonon, 
 although it has the respectable authority of Liddell and Scott's
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 229 
 
 I 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 Chap- 
 man's version of some passages in the speech of Hector 
 at his parting with Andromache. One astounding con- 
 ceit will probably still be in your remembrance, — 
 
 " When sacred Troy shall shed her tow' rs for tears of overthrow," — 
 
 as a translation of 6V av ttot okuXy "IAio? Ip-q. I will 
 quote a few lines which may 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 your- 
 selves. 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, 
 Should they behold their Hector shrink from war, 
 And act the coward's part ? Nor doth my soul 
 Prompt the base thought." 
 
 Expede llerculem: you see just what the manner 
 
 is. 
 
 Lexicon (following Heyne), is certainly wrong ; for then the 
 word cannot be pronounced without throwing an accent on the 
 first syllable as well as the third, and fieyas KoppvOaidWos 
 "E/ctw/3 would have been to a Greek as intolerable an ending for 
 a hexameter line as "accurst orphanhood -destined houses" 
 would be to us. The best authorities, accordingly, accent Kopv 
 daioXos as a proparoxytonon.
 
 230 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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." 
 'H Kal ifjLol r&de iravra jitAei, yvvai' d\\a /xd\' aivQs, — 
 
 that is what Homer has, that is his style and move- 
 ment, 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, 
 If 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,
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 231 
 
 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 Messei's, or Hypereia, 
 Sorely against thy will, by strong Necessity's order. 
 And some man may say, as he looks and sees thy tears falling: 
 Sec, 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." 
 
 The main question, whether or no this version 
 reproduces for him the movement and general effect 
 of Homer better than other versions 1 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, eAKecri7re7rAovs, 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 unambigu- 
 ous than Homer himself ; the connection of meaning 
 
 i Dr. Hawtrey also has translated this passage ; but here, he 
 has not, I think, been so successful as in his " Helen on the 
 walls of Troy."
 
 232 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 must be even more distinctly marked in the trans- 
 lation 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 evfipXdw, — "armed with good 
 ashen spear," say 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 eiyx/wAico 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 ev/x/xeAiw, for fear of disturbing the balance 
 of expression in Homer's sentence. In the fourteenth 
 line, again, I translate x a ^ K0 X iT( * >VMV D y " brazen- 
 coated." Mr. Newman, meaning to be perfectly 
 literal, translates it by "brazen-cloaked," an expres- 
 sion 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
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 233 
 
 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 djiecfSo/xevos 7rpocre^>r/, was not too 
 bookish an expression. Let us both, I say, consult 
 our Bibles : Mr. Newman will nowhere 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 forth- 
 with 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 con- 
 suiter 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 jxkya 
 vijirtoi) 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 Shakspcare'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
 
 234 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 astonishment, the passage at the end of the nineteenth 
 book of the Iliad, the dialogue between Achilles 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 mil 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 ; 't is 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: 
 " '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
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 235 
 
 what I call a loose and idiomatic grammar. In writ- 
 ing 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 re-attempted, and may be re- 
 attempted successfully. There are great works 
 composed of parts so disparate that one translator is 
 not 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
 
 236 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 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 trans- 
 lator 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 the late 
 Professor Wilson — love to talk of Homer and his 
 poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no very 
 Jeep 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. 
 
 i 
 
 t>
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 237 
 
 LAST WORDS. 
 
 " Multi, qui persequuntur me, et tribulant me: a testimoniis nc-D 
 declinavi." 
 
 Buffon, the great French naturalist, imposed on 
 himself the rule of steadily ahstaining from all answer 
 to attacks made upon him. " Je n'ai jamais repondu 
 a aucune critique," he said to one of his friends who, 
 on the occasion of a certain criticism, was eager to 
 take up arms in his behalf ; " je n'ai jamais repondu 
 a aucune critique, et je garderai le meme silence sur 
 celle-ci." On another occasion, when accused of 
 plagiarism, and pressed by his friends to answer, 
 " II vaut mieux," he said, " laisser ces mauvaises 
 gens dans l'incertitude." Even when reply to an 
 attack was made successfully, he disapproved of it, 
 he regretted that those he esteemed should make it. 
 Montesquieu, more sensitive to criticism than Buffon, 
 had answered, and successfully answered, an attack 
 made upon his great work, the Esprit des Lois, by the 
 Gazetier Janseniste. This Jansenist Gazetteer was a 
 periodical of those times, — a periodical such as other 
 times, also, have occasionally seen, — very pretentious, 
 very aggressive, and, when the point to be seized was 
 at all a delicate one, very apt to miss it. " Notwith- 
 standing this example," said Buffon, — who, as well 
 as Montesquieu, had been attacked by the Jansenist 
 Gazetteer, — " notwithstanding this example, I think 
 I may promise my course will be different. I shall 
 uot answer a single word."
 
 238 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 And to any one who has noticed the baneful effects 
 of controversy, with all its train of personal rivalries 
 and hatreds, on men of letters or men of science ; to 
 any one who has observed how it tends to impair, 
 not only their dignity and repose, but their produc- 
 tive force, their genuine activity ; how it always 
 checks the free play of the spirit, and often ends by 
 stopping it altogether ; it can hardly seem doubtful, 
 that the rule thus imposed on himself by Buffon was 
 a wise one. His own career, indeed, admirably shows 
 the wisdom of it. That career was as glorious as it 
 was serene ; but it owed to its serenity no small part 
 of its glory. The regularity and completeness with 
 which he gradually built up the great work which he 
 had designed, the air of equable majesty which b 
 shed over it, struck powerfully the imagination of hi^ 
 contemporaries, and surrounded Buffon's fame with e 
 peculiar respect and dignity. " He is," said Fredericl' 
 the Great of him, " the man who has best deserved 
 the great celebrity which he has acquired." And this 
 regularity of production, this equableness of temper, 
 he maintained by his resolute disdain of personal 
 controversy. 
 
 Buffon's example seems to me worthy of all 
 imitation, and in my humble way I mean always to 
 follow it. I never have replied, I never will reply, 
 to any literary assailant ; in such encounters tempers 
 are lost, the world laughs, and truth is not served. 
 Least of all should I think of using this Chair as a 
 place from which to carry on such a conflict. But 
 when a learned and estimable man thinks he has
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 239 
 
 reason to complain of language used by me in this 
 Chair, — when he attributes to me intentions and 
 feelings towards him which are far from my heart, I 
 owe him some explanation, — and I am bound, too, to 
 make the explanation as public as the words which 
 gave offence. This is the reason why I revert once 
 more to the subject of translating Homer. But being 
 thus brought back to that subject, and not wishing to 
 occupy you solely with an explanation which, after 
 all, is Mr. Newman's affair and mine, not the public's, 
 I shall take the opportunity, — not certainly to enter 
 into any conflict with any one, — but to try to estab- 
 lish our old friend, the coming translator of Homer, 
 yet a little firmer in the positions which I hope we 
 have now secured for him ; to protect him against 
 the danger of relaxing, in the confusion of dispute, 
 his attention to those matters which alone I consider 
 important for him ; to save him from losing sight, in 
 the dust of the attacks delivered over it, of the real 
 body of Patroclus. He will, probably, when he 
 arrives, requite my solicitude very ill, and be in 
 haste to disown his benefactor; but my interest in 
 him is so sincere that I can disregard his probable 
 ingratitude. 
 
 First, however, for the explanation. Mr. Newman 
 has published a reply to the remarks which I made 
 on his translation of the Iliad. He seems to think 
 that the respect which at the outset of those remarks 
 I professed for him must have been professed ironi- 
 cally ; he says that I use " forms of attack against him 
 which he does not know how to characterise ; " that I
 
 240 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 " speak scornfully " of him, treat him with " gratui- 
 tous insult, gratuitous rancour ; " that I " propagate 
 slanders" against him, that I wish to "damage him 
 with my readers," to " stimulate my readers to de- 
 spise " him. He is entirely mistaken. I respect Mr. 
 Newman sincerely ; I respect him as one of the few 
 learned men we have, one of the few who love learn- 
 ing for its own sake ; this respect for him I had before 
 I read his translation of the Iliad, I retained it while 
 I was commenting on that translation, I have not lost 
 it after reading his reply. Any vivacities of expres- 
 sion which may have given him pain I sincerely 
 regret, and can only assure him that I used them 
 without a thought of insult or rancour. When I took 
 the liberty of creating the verb to Neivmanise, my in- 
 tentions were no more rancorous than if I had said to 
 Miltonise ; when I exclaimed, in my astonishment at 
 his vocabulary, " With whom can Mr. Newman have 
 lived ? " I meant merely to convey, in a familiar 
 form of speech, the sense of bewilderment one has at 
 finding a person to whom words one thought all the 
 world knew seem strange, and words one thought 
 entirely strange, intelligible. Yet this simple expres- 
 sion of my bewilderment Mr. Newman construes into 
 an accusation that he is " often guilty of keeping low 
 company," and says that I shall " never want a stone 
 to throw at him." And what is stranger still, one of 
 his friends gravely tells me that Mr. Newman " lived 
 with the fellows of Balliol." As if that made Mr. 
 Newman's glossary less inexplicable to me ! As if he 
 could have got his glossary from the fellows of Balliol !
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 241 
 
 As if I could believe that the members of that dis- 
 tinguished society — of whose discourse, not so many- 
 years afterwards, I myself was an unworthy hearer — 
 were in Mr. Newman's time so far removed from the 
 Attic purity of speech which we all of us admired, 
 that when one of them called a calf a bulkin, the rest 
 " easily understood " him ; or, when he wanted to 
 say that a newspaper-article was " proudly fine," it 
 mattered little whether he said it was that or hragly ! 
 No ; his having lived with the fellows of Balliol does 
 not explain Mr. Newman's glossary to me. I will no 
 longer ask " with whom he can have lived," since 
 that gives him offence ; but I must still declare that 
 where he got his test of rarity or intelligibility for 
 words is a mystery to me. 
 
 That, however, does not prevent me from enter- 
 taining a very sincere respect for Mr. Newman, and 
 since he doubts it, I am glad to reiterate my expres- 
 sion of it. But the truth of the matter is this : I 
 unfeignedly admire Mr. Newman's ability and learn- 
 ing ; but I think in his translation of Homer he has 
 employed that ability and learning quite amiss. I 
 think he has chosen quite the wrong field for turning 
 his ability and learning to account. I think that in 
 England, partly from the want of an Academy, partly 
 from a national habit of intellect to which that want 
 of an Academy is itself due, there exists too little of 
 what I may call a public force of correct literary 
 opinion, possessing within certain limits a clear sense 
 of what is right and wrong, sound and unsound, and 
 sharply recalling men of ability and learning from any 
 
 VOL. II. R
 
 242 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 flagrant misdirection of these their advantages. I 
 think, even, that in our country a powerful misdirec- 
 tion of this kind is often more likely to subjugate and 
 pervert opinion than to be checked and corrected 
 by it. 1 Hence a chaos of false tendencies, wasted 
 efforts, impotent conclusions, works which ought 
 never to have been undertaken. Any one who can 
 introduce a little order into this chaos by establishing 
 in any quarter a single sound rule of criticism, a 
 single rule which clearly marks what is right as right, 
 and what is wrong as wrong, does a good deed ; and 
 his deed is so much the better the greater force he 
 counteracts of learning and ability applied to thicken 
 the chaos. Of course no one can be sure that he has 
 fixed any such rules ; he can only do his best to fix 
 them ; but somewhere or other, in the literary opinion 
 of Europe, if not in the literary opinion of one nation, 
 in fifty years, if not in five, there is a final judgment 
 on these matters, and the critic's work will at last 
 stand or fall by its true merits. 
 
 Meanwhile, the charge of having in one instance 
 misapplied his powers, of having once followed a false 
 tendency, is no such grievous charge to bring against 
 
 1 " It is the fact, that scholars of fastidious refinement, but 
 of a judgment which I think far more masculine than Mr. 
 Arnold's, have passed a most encouraging sentence on large 
 specimens of my translation. I at present count eight such 
 names."— " Before venturing to print, I sought to ascertain 
 how unlearned women and children would accept my verses. I 
 could boast how children and half-educated women have ex- 
 tolled them, how greedily a working man has inquired for them, 
 without knowing who was the translator." — Mr. Newman's 
 Reiily, pp. 2, 12, 13.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 243 
 
 a man ; it does not exclude a great respect for him- 
 self personally, or for his powers in the happier mani- 
 festation of them. False tendency is, I have said, an 
 evil to which the artist or the man of letters in 
 England is peculiarly prone ; but everywhere in our 
 time he is liable to it, — the greatest as well as the 
 humblest. "The first beginnings of my Wilhelm 
 Meister," says Goethe, " arose out of an obscure sense 
 of the great truth that man will often attempt some- 
 thing for which nature has denied him the proper 
 powers, will undertake and practise something in 
 which he cannot become skilled. An inward feeling 
 warns him to desist " (yes, but there are, unhappily, 
 cases of absolute judicial blindness!), "nevertheless he 
 cannot get clear in himself about it, and is driven 
 along a false road to a false goal, without knowing 
 how it is with him. To this we may refer everything 
 which goes by the name of false tendency, dilettan- 
 teism, and so on. A great many men waste in this 
 way the fairest portion of their lives, and fall at last 
 into wonderful delusion." Yet after all,— Goethe 
 adds, — it sometimes happens that even on this false 
 road a man finds, not indeed that which he sought, 
 but something which is good and useful for him; 
 " like Saul, the son of Kish, Avho went forth to look 
 for his father's asses, and found a kingdom." And 
 thus false tendency as well as true, vain effort as well 
 as fruitful, go together to produce that great move- 
 ment of life, to present that immense and magic 
 spectacle of human affairs, which from boyhood to old 
 age fascinates the gaze of every man of imagination,
 
 244 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 and which would he his terror, if it were not at the 
 same time his delight. 
 
 So Mr. Newman may see how wide -spread a 
 danger it is, to which he has, as I think, in setting 
 himself to translate Homer, fallen a prey. He may 
 be well satisfied if he can escape from it by paying it 
 the tribute of a single work only. He may judge 
 how unlikely it is that I should " despise " him for 
 once falling a prey to it. I know far too well how 
 exposed to it we all are ; how exposed to it I myself 
 am. At this very moment, for example, I am fresh 
 from reading Mr. Newman's Reply to my Lectures, a 
 reply full of that erudition in which (as I am so often 
 and so good-naturedly reminded, but indeed I know 
 it without being reminded) Mr. Newman is immeasur- 
 ably my superior. Well, the demon that pushes us 
 all to our ruin is even now prompting me to follow 
 Mr. Newman into a discussion about the digamma, 
 and I know not what providence holds me back. 
 And some day, I have no doubt, I shall lecture on 
 the language of the Berbers, and give him his entire 
 revenge. 
 
 But Mr. Newman does not confine himself to com- 
 plaints on his own behalf, he complains on Homer's 
 behalf too. He says that my "statements about 
 Greek literature are against the most notorious and 
 elementary fact;" that I "do a public wrong to 
 literature by publishing them ; " and that the Pro- 
 fessors to whom I appealed in my three Lectures, 
 " would only lose credit if they sanctioned the use I 
 make of their names." He does these eminent men
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 245 
 
 the kindness of adding, however, that "whether the}' 
 are pleased with this parading of their names in behalf 
 of paradoxical error, he may well doubt," and that 
 " until they endorse it themselves, he shall treat my 
 process as a piece of forgery." He proceeds to discuss 
 my statements at great length, and with an erudition 
 and ingenuity which nobody can admire more than I do. 
 And he ends by saying that my ignorance is great. 
 
 Alas ! that is very true. Much as Mr. Newman 
 was mistaken when he talked of my rancour, he is 
 entirely right when he talks of my ignorance. And 
 yet, perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes find 
 myself wishing, when dealing with these matters of 
 poetical criticism, that my ignorance were even greater 
 than it is. To handle these matters properly there is 
 needed a poise so perfect that the least overweight in 
 any direction tends to destroy the balance. Temper 
 destroys it, a crotchet destroys it, even erudition may 
 destroy it. To press to the sense of the thing itself 
 with which one is dealing, not to go off on some col- 
 lateral issue about the thing, is the hardest matter in 
 the world. The "thing itself" with which one is 
 here dealing, — the critical perception of poetic truth, 
 — is of all things the most volatile, elusive, and evan- 
 escent ; by even pressing too impetuously after it, one 
 runs the risk of losing it. The critic of poetry should 
 have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, the most 
 free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable ; he should 
 be indeed the "ondoyant et divers," the undulating 
 and diverse being of Montaigne. The less he can deal 
 with his object simply and freely, the more things he
 
 246 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 has to take into account in dealing with it,— the more, 
 in short, he has to encumber himself, — so much the 
 greater force of spirit he needs to retain his elasticity. 
 But one cannot exactly have this greater force by 
 wishing for it ; so, for the force of spirit one has, the 
 load put upon it is often heavier than it will well 
 bear. The late Duke of Wellington said of a certain 
 peer that " it was a great pity his education had been 
 so far too much for his abilities." In like manner, 
 one often sees erudition out of all proportion to its 
 owner's critical faculty. Little as I know, therefore, 
 I am always apprehensive, in dealing with poetry, 
 lest even that little should prove " too much for my 
 abilities." 
 
 With this consciousness of my own lack of learning, 
 —nay, with this sort of acquiescence in it, with this 
 belief that for the labourer in the field of poetical 
 criticism learning has its disadvantages, — I am not 
 likely to dispute with Mr. Newman about matters of 
 erudition. All that he says on these matters in his 
 Reply I read with great interest : in general I agree 
 with him ; but only, I am sorry to say, up to a cer- 
 tain point. Like all learned men, accustomed to desire 
 definite rules, he draws his conclusions too absolutely; 
 he wants to include too much under his rules; he does 
 not quite perceive that in poetical criticism the shade, 
 the fine distinction, is everything ; and that, when he 
 has once missed this, in all he says he is in truth but 
 beating the air. For instance : because I think Homer 
 noble, he imagines I must think him elegant ; and in 
 fact he says in plain words that I do think him so, —
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 247 
 
 that to me Homer seems " pervadingly elegant." But 
 he does not. Virgil is elegant, — "pervadingly ele- 
 gant," — even in passages of the highest emotion : 
 
 "0, ubi cam pi, 
 Spercheosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacasnis 
 Taygeta ! " > 
 
 Even there Virgil, though of a divine elegance, is still 
 elegant : but Homer is not elegant ; the word is quite 
 a wrong one to apply to him, and Mr. Newman is 
 quite right in blaming any one he finds so applying 
 it. Again ; arguing against my assertion that Homer 
 is not quaint, he says : " It is quaint to call waves 
 wet, milk white, blood dusky, horses single-hoofed, words 
 winged, Vulcan Lobfoot (KvWottoSIwv), a spear long- 
 shadowy," and so on. I find I know not how many 
 distinctions to draw here. I do not think it quaint 
 to call waves wet, or milk white, or words vnnged ; but 
 I do think it quaint to call horses single-hoofed, or 
 Vulcan Lobfoot, or a spear longshadowy. As to calling 
 blood dusky, I do not feel quite sure ; I will tell Mr. 
 Newman my opinion when I see the passage in which 
 he calls it so. But then, again, because it is quaint 
 to call Vulcan Lobfoot, I cannot admit that it was 
 quaint to call him KvXXottoSlwv • nor that, because it 
 is quaint to call a spear longshadowy, it was quaint to 
 call it SoAtxocrKiov. Here Mr. Newman's erudition 
 misleads him : he knows the literal value of the 
 Greek so well, that he thinks his literal rendering 
 
 1 " for the fields of Thessaly and the streams of Spercheios ! 
 for the hills alive with the dances of the Laconian maidens, 
 the hills of Taygetus ! " — Georgics, ii. 4S6.
 
 248 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 identical with the Greek, and that the Greek must 
 stand or fall along with his rendering. But the real 
 question is, not whether he has given us, so to speak, 
 full change for the Greek, but how he gives us our 
 change : we want it in gold, arid he gives it us in 
 copper. Again: "It is quaint," says Mr. Newman, 
 " to address a young friend as ' Pippin ! ' — it is 
 quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are 
 belabouring." Here, too, Mr. Newman goes much 
 too fast, and his category of quaintness is too compre- 
 hensive. To address a young friend as " Pippin !" 
 is, I cordially agree with him, very quaint ; although 
 I do not think it was quaint in Sarpedon to address 
 Glaucus as w irk-Trov : but in comparing, whether in 
 Greek or in English, Ajax to an ass whom boys are 
 belabouring, I do not see that there is of necessity 
 anything quaint at all. Again ; because I said that 
 eld, lief, in sooth, and other words, are, as Mr. Newman 
 uses them in certain places, bad words, he imagines 
 that I must mean to stamp these words with an abso- 
 lute reprobation ; and because I said that " my 
 Bibliolatry is excessive," he imagines that I brand all 
 words as ignoble which are not in the Bible. Nothing 
 of the kind : there are no such absolute rules to be 
 /aid down in these matters. The Bible vocabulary is 
 to be used as an assistance, not as an authority. Of 
 the words which, placed where Mr. Newman places 
 them, I have called bad words, every one may be 
 excellent in some other place. Take eld, for instance : 
 when Shakspeare, reproaching man with the depend- 
 ence in which his youth is passed, says :
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 249 
 
 ' ' all thy blessed youth 
 Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms 
 Of palsied eld," . . . 
 
 it seems to me that eld comes in excellently there, in 
 a passage of curious meditation ; but when Mr. New- 
 man renders ayi)p<o r aQav6.no re by " from Eld and 
 Death exempted," it seems to me he infuses a tinge 
 of quaintness into the transparent simplicity of 
 Homer's expression, and so I call eld a bad word in 
 that place. 
 
 Once more. Mr. Newman lays it down as a 
 general rule that "many of Homer's energetic de- 
 scriptions are expressed in coarse physical words." 
 He goes on: "I give one illustration, — Tpwes irpo- 
 vTvxpav ao/YAies. Cowper, misled by the ignis fatuus of 
 ' stateliness,' renders it absurdly : 
 
 ' The powers of Ilium gave the first assault 
 Embattled close ; ' 
 
 but it is, strictly, ' The Trojans knocked forward (or, 
 thumped, butted forward) in close pack' The verb is 
 too coarse for later polished prose, and even the 
 adjective is very strong (packed together). I believe, 
 that ' forward in pack the Trojans pitched,' would 
 not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour ; and 
 I maintain, that ' forward in mass the Trojans 
 pitched,' would be an irreprovable rendering." He 
 actually gives us all that as if it were a piece of scien- 
 tific deduction ; and as if, at the end, he had arrived 
 at an incontrovertible conclusion. But, in truth, one 
 cannot settle these matters quite in this way. Mr. New- 
 man's general rule may be true or false (I dislike to
 
 250 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 meddle with general rules), but every part in what 
 follows must stand or fall by itself, and its soundness 
 or unsoundness has nothing at all to do with the 
 truth or falsehood of Mr. Newman's general mle. 
 He first gives, as a strict rendering of the Greek, 
 " The Trojans knocked forward (or, thumped, butted 
 forward), in close pack." I need not say that, as a 
 "strict rendering of the Greek," this is good, — all 
 Mr. Newman's " strict renderings of the Greek " are 
 sure to be, as such, good ; but " in close pack," for 
 aoAA«s, seems to me to be what Mr. Newman's ren- 
 derings are not always, — an excellent poetical render- 
 ing of the Greek ; a thousand times better, certainly, 
 than Cowper's " embattled close." Well, but Mr. 
 Newman goes on : "I believe that, ' forward in pack 
 the Trojans pitched,' would not be really unfaithful 
 to the Homeric colour." Here, I say, the Homeric 
 colour is half washed out of Mr. Newman's happy 
 rendering of doXXees ; while in " pitched " for 7rpo- 
 vrvxpav, the literal fidelity of the first rendering is gone, 
 while certainly no Homeric colour has come in its 
 place. Finally, Mr. Newman concludes : "I main- 
 tain that ' forward in mass the Trojans pitched,' 
 would be an irreprovable rendering." Here, in what 
 Mr. Newman fancies his final moment of triumph, 
 Homeric colour and literal fidelity have alike aban- 
 doned him altogether ; the last stage of his translation 
 is much worse than the second, and immeasurably 
 worse than the first. 
 
 All this to show that a looser, easier method than 
 Mr. Newman's must be taken, if we are to arrive at
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 251 
 
 any good result in these questions. I now go on to 
 follow Mr. Newman a little further, not at all as 
 wishing to dispute with him, hut as seeking (and this 
 is the true fruit we may gather from criticisms upon 
 us) to gain hints from him for the establishment of 
 some useful truth about our subject, even when I 
 think him wrong. I still retain, I confess, my con- 
 viction that Homer's characteristic qualities are 
 rapidity of movement, plainness of words and style, 
 simplicity and directness of ideas, and, above all, 
 nobleness, the grand manner. Whenever Mr. New- 
 man drops a word, awakens a train of thought, which 
 leads me to see any of these characteristics more 
 clearly, I am grateful to him ; and one or two sug- 
 gestions of this kind which he affords, are all that 
 now, — having expressed my sorrow that he should 
 have misconceived my feelings towards him, and 
 pointed out what I think the vice of his method of 
 criticism, — I have to notice in his Eeply. 
 
 Such a suggestion I find in Mr. Newman's remarks 
 on my assertion that the translator of Homer must 
 not adopt a quaint and antiquated style in rendering 
 him, because the impression which Homer makes upon 
 the living scholar is not that of a poet quaint and 
 antiquated, but that of a poet perfectly simple, per- 
 fectly intelligible. I added that we cannot, I confess, 
 really know how Homer seemed to Sophocles, but 
 that it is impossible to me to believe that he seemed 
 to him quaint and antiquated. Mr. Newman asserts, 
 on the other hand, that I am absurdly wrong here ; 
 that Homer seemed " out and out " quaint and anti-
 
 252 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 quated to the Athenians ; that " every sentence of 
 him was more or less antiquated to Sophocles, who 
 could no more help feeling at every instant the foreign 
 and antiquated character of the poetry than an Eng- 
 lishman can help feeling the same in reading Burns's 
 poems." And not only does Mr. Newman say this, 
 but he has managed thoroughly to convince some of 
 his readers of it. " Homer's Greek," says one of 
 them, " certainly seemed antiquated to the historical 
 times of Greece. Mr. Newman, taking a far broader 
 historical and philological view than Mr. Arnold, 
 stoutly maintains that it did seem so." And another 
 says : " Doubtless Homer's dialect and diction were 
 as hard and obscure to a later Attic Greek as Chaucer 
 to an Englishman of our day." 
 
 Mr. Newman goes on to say, that not only was 
 Homer antiquated relatively to Pericles, but he is 
 antiquated to the living scholar; and, indeed, is in 
 himself " absolutely antique, being the poet of a bar- 
 barian age." He tells us of his " inexhaustible quaint- 
 nesses," of his "very eccentric diction;" and he 
 infers, of course, that he is perfectly right in render 
 ing him in a quaint and antiquated style. 
 
 Now this question,— whether or no Homer seemed 
 quaint and antiquated to Sophocles, — I call a delight- 
 ful question to raise. It is not a barren verbal dis- 
 pute ; it is a question " drenched in matter," to use 
 an expression of Bacon ; a question full of flesh and 
 blood, and of which the scrutiny, though I still think 
 we cannot settle it absolutely, may yet give us a 
 directly useful result. To scrutinise it may lead us
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 253 
 
 fco see more clearly what sort of a style a modern 
 translator of Homer ought to adopt. 
 
 Homer's verses were some of the first words which 
 a young Athenian heard. He heard them from his 
 mother or his nurse before he went to school ; and at 
 school, when he went there, he was constantly occu- 
 pied with them. So much did he hear of them that 
 Socrates proposes, in the interests of morality, to 
 have selections from Homer made, and placed in the 
 hands of mothers and nurses, in his model republic ; 
 in order that, of an author with whom they were 
 sure to be so perpetually conversant, the young might 
 learn only those parts which might do them good. 
 His language was as familiar to Sophocles, we may 
 be quite sure, as the language of the Bible is to us. 
 
 Nay, more. Homer's language was not, of course, 
 in the time of Sophocles, the spoken or written lan- 
 guage of ordinary life, any more than the language of 
 the Bible, any more than the language of poetry, is 
 Avith us ; but for one great species of composition — 
 epic poetry — it was still the current language ; it was 
 the language in which every one who made that sort 
 of poetry composed. Every one at Athens who 
 dabbled in epic poetry, not only understood Homer's 
 language, — he possessed it. He possessed it as every 
 one who dabbles in poetry with us, possesses what 
 may be called the poetical vocabulary, as distin- 
 guished from the vocabulary of common speech and 
 of modern prose : I mean, such expressions as per- 
 chance for perhaps, spake for spoke, aye for ever, don for 
 put on, charmdd for charm' d, and thousands of others.
 
 254 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 I might go to Burns and Chaucer, and, taking 
 words and passages from them, ask if they afforded 
 any parallel to a language so familiar and so pos- 
 sessed. But this I will not do, for Mr. Newman 
 himself supplies me with what he thinks a fair 
 parallel, in its effect upon us, to the language of 
 Homer in its effect upon Sophocles. He says that 
 such words as mon, londis, libbard, ivithouten, muchel, 
 give us a tolerable but incomplete notion of this 
 parallel ; and he finally exhibits the parallel in all 
 its clearness, by this poetical specimen : — 
 
 " Dat mon, quliich hauldeth Kyngis af 
 Londis yn feo, niver 
 (I tell 'e) feereth aught ; sith hee 
 Doth hauld hys londis yver." 
 
 Now, does Mr. Newman really think that Sophocles 
 could, as he says, "no more help feeling at every 
 instant the foreign and antiquated character of 
 Homer, than an Englishman can help feeling the 
 same in hearing" these lines? Is he quite sure of 
 it ? He says he is ; he will not allow of any doubt 
 or hesitation in the matter. I had confessed we 
 could not really know how Homer seemed to 
 Sophocles ; — " Let Mr. Arnold confess for himself," 
 cries Mr. Newman, "and not for me, who know 
 perfectly well." And this is what he knows ! 
 
 Mr. Newman says, however, that I "play falla- 
 ciously on the words familiar and unfamiliar;" that 
 " Homer's words may have been familiar to the 
 Athenians (i.e. often heard) even when they were 
 either not understood by them or else, being under-
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 255 
 
 stood, were yet felt and known to be utterly foreign. 
 Let my renderings," he continues, "be heard, as Pope 
 or even Cowper has been heard, and no one will be 
 ' surprised. ' " 
 
 But the whole question is here. The translator 
 must not assume that to have taken place which has 
 not taken place, although, perhaps, he may wish it 
 to have taken place, — namely, that his diction is 
 become an established possession of the minds of 
 men, and therefore is, in its proper place, familiar 
 to them, will not "surprise" them. If Homer's 
 language was familiar, — that is, often heard, — then 
 to this language words like londis and libbard, which 
 are not familiar, offer, for the translator's purpose, 
 no parallel. For some purpose of the philologer 
 they may offer a parallel to it ; for the translator's 
 purpose they offer none. The question is not, 
 whether a diction is antiquated for current speech, 
 but whether it is antiquated for that particular pur- 
 pose for which it is employed. A diction that is 
 antiquated for common speech and common prose, 
 may very well not be antiquated for poetry or certain 
 special kinds of prose. " Peradventure there shall 
 be ten found there," is not antiquated for Biblical 
 prose, though for conversation or for a newspaper 
 it is antiquated. "The trumpet spake not to the 
 armed throng," is not antiquated for poetry, although 
 we should not write in a letter, "he sjmke to me," or 
 say, " the British soldier is armed with the Enfield 
 rifle." But when language is antiquated for that 
 particular purpose for which it is employed, — as
 
 256 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 numbers of Chaucer's words, for instance, are anti- 
 quated for poetry, — such language is a bad repre- 
 sentative of language which, like Homer's, was never 
 antiquated for that particular purpose for which it 
 was employed. I imagine that LT^Ai/LaSew for II^Aei- 
 Sov, in Homer, no more sounded antiquated to 
 Sophocles than armid for arm'd, in Milton, sounds 
 antiquated to us; but Mr. Newman's mthouten and 
 mucliel do sound to us antiquated, even for poetry, 
 and therefore they do not correspond in their effect 
 upon us with Homer's words in their effect 
 upon Sophocles. When Chaucer, who uses such 
 words, is to pass current amongst us, to be familiar 
 to us, as Homer was familiar to the Athenians, he 
 has to be modernised, as Wordsworth and others set 
 to work to modernise him ; but an Athenian no more 
 needed to have Homer modernised, than we need to 
 have the Bible modernised, or Wordsworth himself. 
 
 Therefore, when Mr. Newman's words bragly, 
 bidkin, and the rest, are an established possession 
 of our minds, as Homer's words were an established 
 possession of an Athenian's mind, he may use them ; 
 but not till then. Chaucer's words, the words of 
 Burns, great poets as these were, are yet not thus 
 an established possession of an Englishman's mind, 
 and therefore they must not be used in rendering 
 Homer into English. 
 
 Mr. Newman has been misled just by doing that 
 which his admirer praises him for doing, by taking a 
 "far broader historical and philological view than" 
 mine. Precisely because he has done this, and has
 
 OX TRANSLATING HOMER. 257 
 
 applied the " philological view " where it was not 
 applicable, but Avhere the " poetical view " alone was 
 lightly applicable, he has fallen into error. 
 
 It is the same with him in his remarks on the 
 difficulty and obscurity of Homer. Homer, I say, 
 is perfectly plain in speech, simple, and intelligible. 
 And I infer from this that his translator, too, ought 
 to be perfectly plain in speech, simple, and intelli- 
 gible ; ought not to say, for instance, in rendering 
 
 Ovre Ke <rh ctt^Woi/m ^xn" cs Kv^tdveipav . . . 
 
 " Nor liefly thee Avould I advance to man-ennobling 
 battle," — and things of that kind. Mr. Newman 
 hands me a list of some twenty hard words, invokes 
 Buttman, Mr. Maiden, and M. Benfey, and asks me 
 if I think myself wiser than all the world of Greek 
 scholars, and if I am ready to supply the deficiencies 
 of Liddell and Scott's Lexicon ! But here, again, 
 Mr. Newman errs by not perceiving that the ques- 
 tion is one not of scholarship, but of a poetical trans- 
 lation of Homer. This, I say, should be perfectly 
 simple and intelligible. He replies by telling me 
 that aSivus, etAiVoSes, and crtyaAoeis are hard words. 
 Well, but what does he infer from that % That the 
 poetical translation, in his rendering of them, is to 
 give us a sense of the difficulties of the scholar, and 
 so is to make his translation obscui'e 1 If he does 
 not mean that, how, by bringing forward these hard 
 words, does he touch the question whether an English 
 version of Homer should be plain or not plain ? If 
 Homer's poetry, as poetry, is in its general effect on 
 VOL. II. S
 
 258 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 the poetical reader perfectly simple and intelligible, 
 the uncertainty of the scholar about the true meaning 
 of certain words can never change this general effect. 
 Kather will the poetry of Homer make us forget his 
 philology, than his philology make us forget his 
 poetry. It may even be affirmed that every one 
 who reads Homer perpetually for the sake of enjoy- 
 ing his poetry (and no one who does not so read him 
 will ever translate him well), comes at last to form a 
 perfectly clear sense in his own mind for every im- 
 portant word in Homer, such as dStvos, or rj\i/3aTo<;, 
 whatever the scholar's doubts about the word may 
 be. And this sense is present to his mind with 
 perfect clearness and fulness, whenever the word 
 recurs, although as a scholar he may know that he 
 cannot be sure whether this sense is the right one 
 or not. But poetically he feels clearly about the 
 word, although philologically he may not. The 
 scholar in him may hesitate, like the father in 
 Sheridan's play; but the reader of poetry in him 
 is, like the governor, fixed. The same thing happens 
 to us with our own language. How many words 
 occur in the Bible, for instance, to which thousands 
 of hearers do not feel sure they attach the precise 
 real meaning; but they make out a meaning for 
 them out of what materials they have at hand ; and 
 the words, heard over and over again, come to convey 
 this meaning with a certainty which poetically is 
 adequate, though not philologically. How many 
 have attached a clear and poetically adequate sense 
 to "the beam" and "the 'mote" though not pre-
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 259 
 
 cisely the right one ! How clearly, again, have 
 readers got a sense from Milton's words, " grate on 
 their scrannel pipes," who yet might have been 
 puzzled to write a commentary on the word scrannel 
 for the dictionary ! So we get a clear sense from 
 dStvus as an epithet for grief, after often meeting 
 with it and finding out all we can about it, even 
 though that all be philologically insufficient; so we 
 get a clear sense from eiAiVoSes as an epithet for 
 cows. And this his clear poetical sense about the 
 words, not his philological uncertainties about them, 
 is what the translator has to convey. Words like 
 bragly and bulkin offer no parallel to these words ; 
 because the reader, from his entire want of fami- 
 liarity with the words bragly and bulkin, has no clear 
 sense of them poetically. 
 
 Perplexed by his knowledge of the philological 
 aspect of Homer's language, encumbered by his own 
 learning, Mr. Newman, I say, misses the poetical 
 aspect, misses that with which alone we are here con- 
 cerned. " Homer is odd," he persists, fixing his eyes 
 on his own philological analysis of fxwvvg, and pepoips, 
 and KvXXoTroSioiv, and not on these words in their 
 synthetic character ; — just as Professor Max Miiller, 
 going a little farther back, and fixing his attention on 
 the elementary value of the word dvydr-qp, might say 
 Homer was "odd" for using that word; — "if the 
 whole Greek nation, by long familiarity, had become 
 inobservant of Homer's oddities," — of the oddities of 
 this " noble barbarian," as Mr. Newman elsewhere 
 calls him, this "noble barbarian" with the "lively
 
 260 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 eye of the savage," — " that would he no fault of mine. 
 That would not justify Mr. Arnold's hlame of me for 
 rendering the words correctly." Correctly, — ah, hut 
 what is correctness in this case 1 This correctness of 
 his is the very rock on which Mr. Newman has split. 
 He is so correct that at last he finds peculiarity 
 everywhere. The true knowledge of Homer hecomes 
 at last, in his eyes, a knowledge of Homer's " pecu- 
 liarities, pleasant and unpleasant." Learned men 
 know these " peculiarities," and Homer is to be trans- 
 lated because the unlearned are impatient to know 
 them too. "That," he exclaims, "is just why people 
 want to read an English Homer, — to know all his 
 oddities, just as learned men do." Here I am obliged to 
 shake my head, and to declare that, in spite of all my 
 respect for Mr. Newman, I cannot go these lengths 
 with him. He talks of my "monomaniac fancy that 
 there is nothing quaint or antique in Homer." Ter- 
 rible learning, — I cannot help in my turn exclaim- 
 ing, — terrible learning, which discovers so much ! 
 
 Here, then, I take my leave of Mr. Newman, 
 retaining my opinion that his version of Homer is 
 spoiled by his making Homer odd and ignoble ; but 
 having, I hope, sufficient love for literature to be able 
 to canvass works without thinking of persons, and to 
 hold this or that production cheap, while retaining a 
 sincere respect, on other grounds, for its author. 
 
 In fulfilment of my promise to take this oppor- 
 tunity for giving the translator of Homer a little 
 further advice, I proceed to notice one or two other 
 criticisms which I find, in like manner, suggestive ;
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 261 
 
 which give us an opportunity, that is, of seeing more 
 clearly, as we look into them, the true principles on 
 which translation of Homer should rest. This is all I 
 seek in criticisms; and, perhaps (as I have already 
 said) it is only as one seeks a positive result of this 
 kind, that one can get any fruit from them. Seeking 
 a negative result from them, — personal altercation and 
 wrangling, — one gets no fruit; seeking a positive 
 result, — the elucidation and establishment of one's 
 ideas, — one may get much. Even bad criticisms may 
 thus be made suggestive and fruitful. I declared, in 
 a former lecture on this subject, my conviction that 
 criticism is not the strong point of our national 
 literature. Well, even the bad criticisms on our 
 present topic which I meet with, serve to illustrate 
 this conviction for me. And thus one is enabled, 
 even in reading remarks which for Homeric criticism, 
 for their immediate subject, have no value, — which 
 are far too personal in spirit, far too immoderate in 
 temper, and far too heavy-handed in style, for the 
 delicate matter they have to treat, — still to gain light 
 and confirmation for a serious idea, and to follow the 
 Baconian injunction, semper aliquid addiscere, always to 
 be adding to one's stock of observation and knowledge. 
 Yes, even when we have to do with writers who, — to 
 quote the words of an exquisite critic, the master of 
 us all in criticism, M. Sainte-Beuve, — remind us, when 
 they handle such subjects as our present, of " Komans 
 of the fourth or fifth century, coming to hold forth, 
 all at random, in African style, on papers found in 
 the desk of Augustus, Maecenas, or Pollio," — even
 
 262 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 then we may instruct ourselves if we may regard 
 ideas and not persons; even then we may enable 
 ourselves to say, with the same critic describing the 
 effect made upon him by D'Argenson's Memoirs: 
 " My taste is revolted, but I learn something ; — Je suis 
 choque" maisje suis instruit." 
 
 But let us pass to criticisms which are suggestive 
 directly and not thus indirectly only, — criticisms by 
 examining which we may be brought nearer to what 
 immediately interests us, — the right way of translating 
 Homer. 
 
 I said that Homer did not rise and sink with his 
 subject, was never to be called prosaic and low. This 
 gives surprise to many persons, who object that parts 
 of the Iliad are certainly pitched lower than others, 
 and who remind me of a number of absolutely level 
 passages in Homer. But I never denied that a subject 
 must rise and sink, that it must have its elevated and 
 its level regions; all I deny is, that a poet can be 
 said to rise and sink when all that he, as a poet, can 
 do, is perfectly well done ; when he is perfectly 
 sound and good, that is, perfect as a poet, in the level 
 regions of his subject as well as in its elevated regions. 
 Indeed, what distinguishes the greatest masters of 
 poetry from all others is, that they are perfectly 
 sound and poetical in these level regions of 
 their subject, — in these regions which are the 
 great difficulty of all poets but the very greatest, 
 which they never quite know what to do with. A 
 poet may sink in these regions by being falsely grand 
 as well as by being low ; he sinks, in short, whenever
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 263 
 
 he does not treat his matter, whatever it is, in a 
 perfectly good and poetic way. But, so long as he 
 treats it in this way, he cannot be said to sink, what- 
 ever his matter may do. A passage of the simplest 
 narrative is quoted to me from Homer :— 
 
 dxrpvvev d£ Zkoittov iwoixi/J-evos iirieatriv, 
 
 MiaOXrjv re, TXavKdv re, Midovrd re, Qepai\ox6v re . . .* 
 
 and I am asked, whether Homer does not sink there ; 
 
 whether he " can have intended such lines as those 
 
 for poetry t " My answer is : Those lines are very 
 
 good poetry indeed, poetry of the best class, in that 
 
 place. But when Wordsworth, having to narrate a 
 
 very plain matter, tries not to sink in narrating it, 
 
 tries, in short, to be what is falsely called poetical, he 
 
 does sink, although he sinks by being pompous, not 
 
 by being low. 
 
 " Onward we drove beneath the Castle ; caught, 
 "While crossing Magdalen Bridge, a glimpse of Cam, 
 And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn." 
 
 That last line shows excellently how a poet may sink 
 with his subject by resolving not to sink with it. A 
 page or two farther on, the subject rises to grandeur, 
 and then Wordsworth is nobly worthy of it : — 
 
 " The antechapel, where the statue stood 
 Of Newton with his prism and silent face, 
 The marble index of a mind for ever 
 Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone." 
 
 But the supreme poet is he who is thoroughly sound 
 
 and poetical, alike when his subject is grand, and 
 
 when it is plain : with him the subject may sink, but 
 
 1 Iliad, xvii. 216.
 
 264 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 never the poet. But a Dutch painter does not rise 
 and sink with his subject, — Defoe, in Moll Flanders, 
 does not rise and sink with his subject, — in so far as 
 an artist cannot be said to sink who is sound in his 
 treatment of his subject, however plain it is : yet 
 Defoe, yet a Dutch painter, may in one sense be said 
 to sink with their subject, because though sound in 
 their treatment of it, they are not poetical, — poetical 
 in the true, not the false sense of the word ; because, 
 in fact, they are not in the grand style. Homer can 
 in no sense be said to sink with his subject, because 
 his soundness has something more than literal natural- 
 ness about it ; because his soundness is the soundness 
 of Homer, of a great epic poet ; because, in fact, he is 
 in the grand style. So he sheds over the simplest 
 matter he touches the charm of his grand manner ; 
 he makes everything noble. Nothing has raised more 
 questioning among my critics than these words, — 
 noble, the grand style. People complain that I do not 
 define these words sufficiently, that I do not tell them 
 enough about them. "The grand style, — but what 
 is the grand style 1 " — they cry ; some with an incli- 
 nation to believe in it, but puzzled ; others mockingly 
 and with incredulity. Alas ! the grand style is the 
 last matter in the world for verbal definition to deal 
 with adequately. One may say of it as is said of 
 faith : " One must feel it in order to know what it 
 is." But, as of faith, so too one may say of noble- 
 ness, of the grand style : " Woe to those who know 
 it not ! " Yet this expression, though indefinable, has 
 a charm ; one is the better for considering it ; bovum
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER 265 
 
 est, nos hie esse ; nay, one loves to try to explain it, 
 though one knows that one must speak imperfectly. 
 For those, then, who ask the question, — What is the 
 grand style 1 — with sincerity, I will try to make some 
 answer, inadequate as it must be. For those who 
 ask it mockingly I have no answer, except to repeat 
 to them, with compassionate sorrow, the Gospel words : 
 Moriemini inpeccatis vestris, — Ye shall die in your sins. 
 But let me, at any rate, have the pleasure of again 
 giving, before I begin to try and define the grand 
 style, a specimen of what it is. 
 
 " Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole, 
 More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged 
 To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days, 
 On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues." . . , 
 
 There is the grand style in perfection ; and any one 
 Avho has a sense for it, will feel it a thousand times 
 better from repeating those lines than from hearing 
 anything I can say about it. 
 
 Let us try, however, what can be said, controlling 
 what we say by examples. I think it will be found 
 that the grand style arises in poetry, when a noble 
 nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with 
 severity a serious subject. I think this definition will 
 be found to cover all instances of the grand style in 
 poetry which present themselves. I think it will be 
 found to exclude all poetry which is not in the grand 
 style. And I think it contains no terms which are 
 obscure, which themselves need defining. Even those 
 who do not understand what is meant by calling 
 poetry noble, will understand, I imagine, what is
 
 266 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 meant by speaking of a noble nature in a man. But 
 the noble or powerful nature — the bedeutendes indi- 
 viduum of Goethe — is not enough. For instance, Mi- 
 Newman has zeal for learning, zeal for thinking, zeal 
 for liberty, and all these things are noble, they ennoble 
 a man ; but he has not the poetical gift : there must 
 be the poetical gift, the "divine faculty," also. And, 
 besides all this, the subject must be a serious one (for 
 it is only by a kind of license that we can speak of 
 the grand style in comedy) ; and it must be treated 
 with simplicity or severity. Here is the great difficulty : 
 the poets of the world have been many ; there has 
 been wanting neither abundance of poetical gift nor 
 abundance of noble natures; but a poetical gift so 
 happy, in a noble nature so circumstanced and trained, 
 that the result is a continuous style, perfect in sim- 
 plicity or perfect in severity, has been extremely rare. 
 One poet has had the gifts of nature and faculty in 
 unequalled fulness, without the circumstances and 
 training which make this sustained perfection of style 
 possible. Of other poets, some have caught this per- 
 fect strain now and then, in short pieces or single 
 lines, but have not been able to maintain it through 
 considerable works ; others have composed all their 
 productions in a style which, by comparison with the 
 best, one must call secondary. 
 
 The best model of the grand style simple is Homer ; 
 perhaps the best model of the grand style severe is 
 Milton. But Dante is remarkable for affording ad- 
 mirable examples of both styles ; he has the grand 
 style which arises from simplicity, and he has the
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 267 
 
 grand style which arises from severity ; and from him 
 I will illustrate them both. In a former lecture I 
 pointed out what that severity of poetical style is, 
 which comes from saying a thing with a kind of in- 
 tense compression, or in an allusive, brief, almost 
 haughty way, as if the poet's mind were charged with 
 so many and such grave matters, that he would not 
 deign to treat any one of them explicitly. Of this 
 severity the last line of the following stanza of the 
 Purgatory is a good example. Dante has been telling 
 Forese that Virgil had guided him through Hell, and 
 he goes on : — 
 
 " Indi m' han tratto su gli suoi conforti, 
 Salendo e rigirando la Montagna 
 Che drizza voi che il mondofece torti." 1 
 
 " Thence hath his comforting aid led me up, climbing 
 and circling the Mountain, which straightens you whom the 
 world made crooked" These last words, " la Montagna 
 che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti." — " the Mountain 
 which straightens you whom the world made crooked" — 
 for the Mountain of Purgatory, I call an excellent 
 specimen of the grand style in severity, where the 
 poet's mind is too full charged to suffer him to speak 
 more explicitly. But the very next stanza is a beau- 
 tiful specimen of the grand style in simplicity, where 
 a noble nature and a poetical gift unite to utter a 
 thing with the most limpid plainness and clearness : — 
 
 "Tanto dice di farmi sua compagua 
 Ch' io sar6 la dove fia Beatrice ; 
 Quivi convien che senza lui rimagna. " 2 
 
 1 Purgatory, xxiii. 124. 2 Ibid, xxiii. 127.
 
 268 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 " So long," Dante continues, " so long he (Virgil) 
 saith he will bear me company, until I shall be there 
 where Beatrice is ; there it behoves that without him 
 I remain." But the noble simplicity of that in the 
 Italian no words of mine can render. 
 
 Both these styles, the simple and the severe, are 
 truly grand ; the severe seems, perhaps, the grandest, 
 so long as we attend most to the great personality, to 
 the noble nature, in the poet its author ; the simple 
 seems the grandest when we attend most to the 
 exquisite faculty, to the poetical gift. But the simple 
 is no doubt to be preferred. It is the more magical : 
 in the other there is something intellectual, something 
 which gives scope for a play of thought which may 
 exist where the poetical gift is either wanting or pre- 
 sent in only inferior degree : the severe is much more 
 imitable, and this a little spoils its charm. A kind 
 of semblance of this style keeps Young going, one 
 may say, through all the nine parts of that most in- 
 different production, the Night Thoughts. But the 
 grand style in simplicity is inimitable : 
 
 cu'dw d<7<£a\7?S 
 ovk 'iyevr out AlaKi8q, irapa. Ylyjkei, 
 oiire trap' avridio} Kao/j.(±> ' XiyovTCLi. /j.av j3porujv 
 8\j3ov vwiprarov ol crxe2V, o'l re Ktxl xpvcafXTri/Kcov 
 fieXirop-evdv iv opei Moicae, Kal if eirTairuXois 
 dl'ov Qrjj3a.is . . - 1 
 
 1 " A secure time fell to the lot neither of Pcleus the son of 
 yEacus, nor of the godlike Cadmus ; howbeit these are said to 
 have had, of all mortals, the supreme of happiness, who heard 
 the golden-snooded Muses sing, one of them on the mountain 
 (Pelion), the other in seven -gated Thebes."
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 269 
 
 There is a limpidness in that, a want of salient points 
 to seize and transfer, which makes imitation impos- 
 sible, except by a genius akin to the genius which 
 produced it. 
 
 Greek simplicity and Greek grace are inimitable ; 
 but it is said that the Iliad may still be ballad-poetry 
 while infinitely superior to all other ballads, and that, 
 in my specimens of English ballad-poetry, I have been 
 unfair. Well, no doubt there are better things in 
 English ballad-poetry than 
 
 "Now Christ thee save, thou proud porter," . . . 
 
 but the real strength of a chain, they say, is the 
 strength of its weakest link ; and what I was trying 
 to show you was, that the English ballad-style is not 
 an instrument of enough compass and force to corre- 
 spond to the Greek hexameter; that, owing to an 
 inherent weakness in it as an epic style, it easily runs 
 into one of two faults, — either it is prosaic and hum- 
 drum, or, trying to avoid that fault, and to make 
 itself lively (sefaire vif), it becomes pert and jaunty. 
 To show that, the passage about King Adland's porter 
 serves very w T ell. But these degradations are not 
 proper to a true epic instrument, such as the Greek 
 hexameter. 
 
 You may say, if you like, when you find Homer's 
 verse, even in describing the plainest matter, neither 
 humdrum nor jaunty, that this is because he is so 
 incomparably better a poet than other balladists, be- 
 cause he is Homer. But take the whole ransre of 
 Greek epic poetry, — take the later poets, the poets of
 
 270 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 the last ages of this poetry, many of them most 
 indifferent, — Coluthus, Tryphiodorus, Quintus of 
 Smyrna, Nonnus. Never will you find in this in- 
 strument of the hexameter, even in their hands, the 
 vices of the ballad-style in the weak moments of this 
 last : everywhere the hexameter — a noble, a truly 
 epical instrument — rather resists the weakness of its 
 employer than lends itself to it. Quintus of Smyrna 
 is a poet of merit, but certainly not a poet of a high 
 order; with him, too, epic poetry, whether in the 
 character of its prosody or in that of its diction, is no 
 longer the epic poetry of earlier and better times, nor 
 epic poetry as again restored by Nonnus : but even in 
 Quintus of Smyrna, I say, the hexameter is still the 
 hexameter ; it is a style which the ballad-style, even 
 in the hands of better poets, cannot rival. And in 
 the hands of inferior poets, the ballad-style sinks to 
 vices of which the hexameter, even in the hands of a 
 Tryphiodorus, never can become guilty. 
 
 But a critic, whom it is impossible to read without 
 pleasure, and the disguise of whose initials I am sure 
 I may be allowed to penetrate,— Mr. Spedding,— says 
 that he "denies altogether that the metrical move- 
 ment of the English hexameter has any resemblance 
 to that of the Greek." Of course, in that case, if the 
 two metres in no respect correspond, praise accorded 
 to the Greek hexameter as an epical instrument will 
 not extend to the English. Mr. Spedding seeks to 
 establish his proposition by pointing out that the 
 system of accentuation differs in the English and in 
 the Virgilian hexameter ; that in the first, the accent
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 271 
 
 and the long syllable (or what has to do duty as such) 
 coincide, in the second they do not. He says that we 
 cannot be so sure of the accent with which Greek 
 verse should be read as of that with which Latin 
 should; but that the lines of Homer in which the 
 accent and the long syllable coincide, as in the Eng- 
 lish hexameter, are certainly very rare. He suggests 
 a type of English hexameter in agreement with the 
 Virgilian model, and formed on the supposition that 
 " quantity is as distinguishable in English as in Latin 
 or Greek by any ear that will attend to it." Of the 
 truth of this supposition he entertains no doubt. 
 The new hexameter will, Mr. Spedding thinks, at 
 least have the merit of resembling, in its metrical 
 movement, the classical hexameter, which merit the 
 ordinary English hexameter has not. But even with 
 this improved hexameter he is not satisfied ; and he 
 goes on, first to suggest other metres for rendering 
 Homer, and finally to suggest that rendering Homer 
 is impossible. 
 
 A scholar to whom all who admire Lucretius owe 
 a large debt of gratitude,— Mr. Munro,— has replied 
 to Mr. Spedding. Mr. Munro declares that "the 
 accent of the old Greeks and Romans resembled our 
 accent only in name, in reality was essentially differ- 
 ent ; " that " our English reading of Homer and 
 Virgil has in itself no meaning ; " and that " accent 
 has nothing to do with the Virgilian hexameter." If 
 this be so, of course the merit which Mr. Spedding 
 attributes to his own hexameter, of really correspond- 
 ing with the Virgilian hexameter, has no existence.
 
 272 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 Again ; in contradiction to Mr. Spedding's assertion 
 that lines in which (in our reading of them) the accent 
 and the long syllable coincide, 1 as in the ordinary 
 English hexameter, are " rare even in Homer," Mr. 
 Munro declares that such lines, " instead of being 
 rare, are among the very commonest types of Homeric 
 rhythm." Mr. Spedding asserts that " quantity is 
 as distinguishable in English as in Latin or Greek 
 by any ear that will attend to it ; " but Mr. Munro 
 replies, that in English "neither his ear nor his 
 reason recognises any real distinction of quantity 
 except that which is produced by accentuated and 
 unaccentuated syllables." He therefore arrives at 
 the conclusion that in constructing English hexa- 
 meters, " quantity must be utterly discarded ; and 
 longer or shorter unaccentuated syllables can have no 
 meaning, except so far as they may be made to pro- 
 duce sweeter or harsher sounds in the hands of a 
 master." 
 
 It is not for me to interpose between two such 
 combatants ; and indeed my way lies, not up the 
 highroad where they are contending, but along a 
 bypath. With the absolute truth of their general 
 propositions respecting accent and quantity, I have 
 nothing to do ; it is most interesting and instructive 
 to me to hear such propositions discussed, when it is 
 Mr. Munro or Mr. Spedding who discusses them ; 
 but I have strictly limited myself in these Lectures 
 to the humble function of giving practical advice to 
 
 1 Lines such as the first of the Odyssey : 
 "Avopa fioi Hvveire, Movaa. iroMrpoTrov, 8? fid\a ToXXa . „ ,
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 273 
 
 the translator of Homer. He, I still think, must not 
 follow so confidently, as makers of English hexameters 
 have hitherto followed, Mr. Munro's maxim, — quantity 
 may be utterly discarded. He must not, like Mr. Long- 
 fellow, make seventeen a dactyl in spite of all the 
 length of its last syllahle, even though he can plead 
 that in counting we lay the accent on the first syllable 
 of this word. He may he far from attaining Mr. 
 Spedding's nicety of ear ; — may be unable to feel that 
 " while quantity is a dactyl, quiddity is a tribrach," and 
 that " rapidly is a word to which we find no parallel 
 in Latin ; " — but I think he must bring himself to 
 distinguish, with Mr. Spedding, between " tti der- 
 wearied eyelid," and " the wearied eyelid," as being, 
 the one a correct ending for a hexameter, the other 
 an ending with a false quantity in it; instead of 
 finding, with Mr. Munro, that this distinction " con- 
 veys to his mind no intelligible idea." He must 
 temper his belief in Mr. Munro's dictum, — quantity 
 must be utterly discarded, — by mixing with it a belief 
 in this other dictum of the same author, — two or more 
 consonants take longer time in enunciating than one. 1 
 
 1 Substantially, however, in the question at issue between 
 Mr. Munro and Mr. Spedding, I agree with Mr. Munro. By 
 the italicised words in the following sentence, " The rhythm of 
 the Virgilian hexameter depends entirely on caesura, pause, and 
 a due arrangement of words," he has touched, it seems to me, 
 in the constitution of this hexameter, the central point, which 
 Mr. Spedding misses. The accent, or Jwightcncd tone, of Virgil 
 in reading his own hexameters, was probably far from being the 
 same thing as the accent or stress with which we read them. 
 The general effect of each line, in Virgil's mouth, was probably 
 therefore something widely different from what Mr. Spedding 
 
 VOL. II. T
 
 274 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 Criticism is so apt in general to be vague and im- 
 palpable, that when it gives us a solid and definite 
 possession, such as is Mr. Spedding's parallel of the 
 Virgilian and the English hexameter with their differ- 
 ence of accentuation distinctly marked, we cannot be 
 too grateful to it. It is in the way in which Mr. 
 Spedding proceeds to press his conclusions from the 
 parallel which he has drawn out, that his criticism 
 seems to me to come a little short. Here even he, I 
 think, shows (if he will allow me to say so) a little 
 of that want of pliancy and suppleness so common 
 among critics, but so dangerous to their criticism ; he 
 is a little too absolute in imposing his metrical laws ; 
 he too much forgets the excellent maxim of Menander, 
 so applicable to literary criticism : — 
 
 KaXoj' ol v6/j.oi <r<p6op elalv ' 6 5' bpQv tovs vb/xovs 
 \iav d/c/3i/3ws, (rvK0<puvT7]s (palverai' 
 
 " Laws are admirable things ; but he who keeps his 
 eye too closely fixed upon them, runs the risk of 
 becoming " — let us say, a purist. Mr. Spedding is 
 
 assumes it to have been : an ancient's accentual reading was 
 something which allowed the metrical beat of the Latin line to 
 be far more perceptible than our accentual reading allows it to 
 be. 
 
 On the question as to the real rhythm of the ancient 
 hexameter, Mr. Newman has in his Rephj a page quite admir- 
 able for force and precision. Here he is in his element, and his 
 ability and acuteness have their proper scope. But it is true 
 that the modern reading of the ancient hexameter is what the 
 modern hexameter has to imitate, and that the English reading 
 of the Virgilian hexameter is as Mr. Spedding describes it. 
 Why this reading has not been imitated by the English hexa- 
 meter, I have tried to point out in the text.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 275 
 
 probably mistaken in supposing that Virgil pro- 
 nounced his hexameters as Mr. Spedcling pronounces 
 them. He is almost certainly mistaken in supposing 
 that Homer pronounced his hexameters as Mr. Sped- 
 ding pronounces Virgil's. But this, as I have said, is 
 not a question for us to treat ; all we are here con- 
 cerned with is the imitation, by the English hexameter, 
 of the ancient hexameter in its effect upon us moderns. 
 Suppose we concede to Mr. Spedding that his parallel 
 proves our accentuation of the English and of the 
 Virgilian hexameter to be different : what are we to 
 conclude from that ; how will a criticism — not a for- 
 mal, but a substantial criticism — deal with such a fact 
 as that 1 Will it infer, as Mr. Spedding infers, that 
 the English hexameter, therefore, must not pretend to 
 reproduce better than other rhythms the movement 
 of Homer's hexameter for us, — that there can be no 
 correspondence at all between the movement of these 
 two hexameters, — that if we Avant to have such a 
 correspondence, we must abandon the current English 
 hexameter altogether, and adopt in its place a new 
 hexameter of Mr. Spedding's Anglo-Latin type, — 
 substitute for lines like the 
 
 " Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia " . . 
 of Dr. Hawtrey, lines like the 
 
 " Procession, complex melodies, pause, quantity, accent, 
 After Virgilian precedent and practice, in order "... 
 
 of Mr. Spedding ? To infer this, is to go, as I have 
 complained of Mr. Newman for sometimes going, a 
 great deal too fast. I think prudent criticism must
 
 276 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 certainly recognise, in the current English hexameter, 
 a fact which cannot so lightly be set aside ; it must 
 acknowledge that by this hexameter the English ear, 
 the genius of the English language, have, in their 
 own way, adopted, have translated for themselves the 
 Homeric hexameter ; and that a rhythm which has 
 thus grown up, which is thus, in a manner, the pro- 
 duction of nature, has in its general type something 
 necessary and inevitable, something which admits 
 change only within narrow limits, which precludes 
 change that is sweeping and essential. I think, 
 therefore, the prudent critic will regard Mr. Sped- 
 ding's proposed revolution as simply impracticable. 
 He will feel that in English poetry the hexameter, if 
 used at all, must be, in the main, the English hexa- 
 meter now current. He will perceive that its having 
 come into existence as the representative of the 
 Homeric hexameter, proves it to have, for the English 
 ear, a certain correspondence with the Homeric hexa- 
 meter, although this correspondence may be, from 
 the difference of the Greek and English languages, 
 necessarily incomplete. This incompleteness he will 
 endeavour, 1 as he may find or fancy himself able, 
 
 1 Such a minor change I have attempted by occasionally 
 shifting, in the first foot of the hexameter, the accent from the 
 first syllable to the second. In the current English hexameter, 
 it is on the first. Mr. Spedding, who proposes radically to 
 subvert the constitution of this hexameter, seems not to under- 
 stand that any one can propose to modify it partially ; he can 
 comprehend revolution in this metre, but not reform. Accord- 
 ingly he asks me how I can bring myself to say, "i?<ft\veen 
 that and the ships," or " There sat fifty men ; " or how I can 
 reconcile such forcing of the accent with my own rule, that 
 
 •
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 277 
 
 gradually somewhat to lessen through minor changes, 
 suggested by the ancient hexameter, but respecting 
 the general constitution of the modern : the notion of 
 making it disappear altogether by the critic's invent- 
 ing in his closet a new constitution of his own for the 
 English hexameter, he will judge to be a chimerical 
 dream. 
 
 When, therefore, Mr. Spedding objects to the 
 English hexameter, that it imperfectly represents the 
 movement of the ancient hexameters, I answer : We 
 
 " hexameters must read themselves.'''' Presently he says that he 
 cannot believe I do pronounce these words so, but that he thinks 
 I leave out the accent in the first foot altogether, and thus get 
 a hexameter with only five accents. He will pardon me : I 
 pronounce, as I suppose he himself does, if he reads the words 
 naturally, "Between that and the ships," and "there sat 
 fifty men." Mr. Spedding is familiar enough with this accent 
 on the second syllable in Virgil's hexameters ; in " et U mon- 
 tosa," or " Ve/oces jaculo." Such a change is an attempt to 
 relieve the monotony of the current English hexameter by 
 occasionally altering the position of one of its accents ; it is not 
 an attempt to make a wholly new English hexameter by habit- 
 ually altering the position of four of them. Very likely it is 
 an unsuccessful attempt ; but at any rate it does not violate 
 what I think is the fundamental rule for English hexameters, — 
 that they be such as to read themselves without necessitating, on 
 the reader's part, any non -natural putting-on or taking- off 
 accent. Hexameters like these of Mr. Longfellow, 
 
 " In that delightful land which is washed by the Delaware's 
 
 waters, " 
 and, 
 
 " As if they fain would appease the Dryads, whose haunts they 
 molested," 
 
 violate this rule ; and they are very common. I think the 
 blemish of Mr. Dart's recent meritorious version of the Iliad is 
 that it contains too many of them.
 
 278 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 must work with the tools we have. The received 
 English type, in its general outlines, is, for England, 
 the necessary given type of this metre; it is hy 
 rendering the metrical beat of its pattern, not by 
 rendering the accentual beat of it, that the English 
 language has adapted the Greek hexameter. To 
 render the metrical beat of its pattern is something ; 
 by effecting so much as this the English hexameter 
 puts itself in closer relations with its original, it 
 comes nearer to its movement than any other metre 
 which does not even effect so much as this ; but Mr. 
 Spedding is dissatisfied with it for not effecting more 
 still, for not rendering the accentual beat too. If he 
 asks me why the English hexameter has not tried to 
 render this too, why it has confined itself to rendering 
 the metrical beat, why, in short, it is itself, and not 
 Mr. Spedding's new hexameter, — that is a question 
 which I, whose only business is to give practical 
 advice to a translator, am not bound to answer ; but 
 I will not decline to answer it nevertheless. I will 
 suggest to Mr. Spedding that, as I have already said, 
 the modern hexameter is merely an attempt to imitate 
 the effect of the ancient hexameter, as read by us 
 moderns; that the great object of its imitation has 
 been the hexameter of Homer ; that of this hexameter 
 such lines as those which Mr. Spedding declares to 
 be so rare, even in Homer, but which are in truth 
 so common, — lines in which the quantity and the 
 reader's accent coincide, — are, for the English reader, 
 just from that simplicity (for him) of rhythm which 
 they owe to this very coincidence, the master-type ;
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 279 
 
 that so much is this the case, that one may again and 
 again notice an English reader of Homer, in reading 
 lines where his Virgilian accent would not coincide 
 with the quantity, abandoning this accent, and read- 
 ing the lines (as we say) by quantity, reading them as 
 if he were scanning them; Avhile foreigners neglect 
 our Virgilian accent even in reading Virgil, read even 
 Virgil by quantity, making the accents coincide with 
 the long syllables. And no doubt the hexameter of 
 a kindred language, the German, based on this mode 
 of reading the ancient hexameter, has had a powerful 
 influence upon the type of its English fellow. But 
 all this shows how extremely powerful accent is for 
 us moderns, since we find not even Greek and Latin 
 quantity perceptible enough without it. Yet in these 
 languages, where we have been accustomed always to 
 look for it, it is far more perceptible to us Englishmen 
 than in our own language, where we have not been 
 accustomed to look for it. And here is the true 
 reason why Mr. Spedding's hexameter is not and 
 cannot be the current English hexameter, even though 
 it is based on the accentuation which Englishmen 
 give to all Virgil's lines, and to many of Homer's, — 
 that the quantity which in Greek or Latin words we 
 feel, or imagine we feel, even though it be unsup- 
 ported by accent, we do not feel or imagine we feel 
 in English words when it is thus unsupported. For 
 example, in repeating the Latin line 
 
 " Ipsa tibi blandos /undent cunabula flores, 
 
 an Englishman feels the length of the second syllable
 
 280 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 of /undent, although he lays the accent on the first ; 
 but in repeating Mr. Spedding's line, 
 
 ' Softly cometli slumber closing th' o'erwearied eyelid," 
 
 the English ear, full of the accent on the first syllable 
 of closing, has really no sense at all of any length in 
 its second. The metrical beat of the line is thus 
 cuiite destroyed. 
 
 So when Mr. Spedding proposes a new Anglo- 
 Virgilian hexameter he proposes an impossibility; 
 when he " denies altogether that the metrical move- 
 ment of the English hexameter has any resemblance 
 to that of the Greek," he denies too much; when he 
 declares that, "were every other metre impossible, 
 an attempt to translate Homer into English hexameters 
 might be permitted, but that such an attempt he himself 
 would never read" he exhibits, it seems to me, a little 
 of that obduracy and over-vehemence in liking and 
 disliking, — a remnant, I suppose, of our insular 
 ferocity, — to which English criticism is so prone. 
 He ought to be enchanted to meet with a good 
 attempt in any metre, even though he would never 
 have advised it, even though its success be contrary 
 to all his expectations ; for it is the critic's first duty 
 — prior even to his duty of stigmatising what is bad — 
 to welcome everything that is good. In welcoming this, 
 he must at all times be ready, like the Christian con- 
 vert, even to burn what he used to worship, and to 
 worship what he used to burn. Nay, but he need 
 not be thus inconsistent in welcoming it; he may 
 retain all his principles : principles endure, circum-
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 281 
 
 stances change ; absolute success is one thing, relative 
 success another. Kelative success may take place 
 under the most diverse conditions ; and it is in 
 appreciating the good in even relative success, it is in 
 taking into account the change of circumstances, that 
 the critic's judgment is tested, that his versatility 
 must display itself. He is to keep his idea of the 
 best, of perfection, and at the same time to be 
 willingly accessible to every second best which offers 
 itself. So I enjoy the ease and beauty of Mr. Sped- 
 ding's stanza, 
 
 " Therewith to all the gods in order due ..." 
 
 I welcome it, in the absence of equally good poetry 
 in another metre, 1 although I still think the stanza 
 
 1 As I welcome another more recent attempt in stanza, — Mr. 
 Worsley's version of the Odyssey in Spenser's measure. Mr. 
 Worsley does me the honour to notice some remarks of mine on 
 this measure : I had said that its greater intricacy made it a 
 worse measure than even the ten-syllable couplet to employ for 
 rendering Homer. He points out, in answer, that "the more 
 complicated the correspondences in a poetical measure, the less 
 obtrusive and absolute are the rhymes." This is true, and 
 subtly remarked ; but I never denied that the single shocks of 
 rhyme in the couplet were more strongly felt than those in the 
 stanza ; I said that the more frequent recurrence of the same 
 rhyme, in the stanza, necessarily made this measure more 
 intricate. The stanza repacks Homer's matter yet more arbit- 
 rarily, and therefore changes his movement yet more radically, 
 than the couplet. Accordingly, I imagine a nearer approach 
 to a perfect translation of Homer is possible in the couplet, well 
 managed, than in the stanza, however well managed. But 
 meanwhile Mr. Worsley, — applying the Spenserian stanza, that 
 beautiful romantic measure, to the most romantic poem of the 
 ancient world ; making this stanza yield him, too (what it 
 never yielded to Byron), its treasures of fluidity and sweet ease;
 
 282 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 unfit to render Homer thoroughly well, — although I 
 still think other metres fit to render him better. So 
 I concede to Mr. Spedding that every form of trans- 
 lation, prose or verse, must more or less break up 
 Homer in order to reproduce him ; but then I urge 
 that that form which needs to break him up least is 
 to be preferred. So I concede to him that the test 
 proposed by me for the translator — a competent 
 scholar's judgment whether the translation more or 
 less reproduces for him the effect of the original — 
 is not perfectly satisfactory; but I adopt it as the 
 best we can get, as the only test capable of being 
 really applied ; for Mr. Spedding's proposed substitute 
 — the translations making the same effect, more or 
 less, upon the unlearned which the original makes 
 upon the scholar — is a test which can never really be 
 applied at all. These two impressions — that of the 
 scholar, and that of the unlearned reader — can, 
 practically, never be accurately compared ; they are, 
 and must remain, like those lines we read of in 
 Euclid, which, though produced ever so far, can 
 never meet. So, again, I concede that a good verse- 
 translation of Homer, or, indeed, of any poet, is very 
 difficult, and that a good prose-translation is much 
 easier; but then I urge that a verse -translation, 
 while giving the pleasure which Pope's has given, 
 might at the same time render Homer more faithfully 
 
 above all, bringing to his task a truly poetical sense and skill, 
 — bas produced a version of tbe Odyssey much the most pleas- 
 ing of those hitherto produced, and which is delightful to read. 
 For the public this may well be enough, nay, more than 
 enough ; but for the critic even this is not yet quite enough.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 283 
 
 than Pope's ; and that this being possible, we ought 
 not to cease wishing for a source of pleasure which 
 no prose-translation can ever hope to rival. 
 
 Wishing for such a verse-translation of Homer, 
 believing that rhythms have natural tendencies which, 
 within certain limits, inevitably govern them ; having 
 little faith, therefore, that rhythms which have mani- 
 fested tendencies utterly un-Homeric can so change 
 themselves as to become well adapted for rendering 
 Homer, — I have looked about for the rhythm which 
 seems to depart least from the tendencies of Homer's 
 rhythm. Such a rhythm I think may be found in 
 the English hexameter, somewhat modified. I look 
 with hope towards continued attempts at perfecting 
 and employing this rhythm ; but my belief in the 
 immediate success of such attempts is far less con- 
 fident than has been supposed. Between the recogni- 
 tion of this rhythm as ideally the best, and the 
 recommendation of it to the translator for instant 
 practical use, there must come all that consideration 
 of circumstances, all that pliancy in foregoing, under 
 the pressure of certain difficulties, the absolute best, 
 which I have said is so indispensable to the critic. 
 The hexameter is, comparatively, still unfamiliar in 
 England ; many people have a great dislike to it. A 
 certain degree of unfamiliarity, a certain degree of dis- 
 like, are obstacles with which it is not wise to contend. 
 It is difficult to say at present whether the dislike tc 
 this rhythm is so strong and so wide-spread that it 
 will prevent its ever becoming thoroughly familiar. 
 I think not, but it is too soon to decide. I am in-
 
 284 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 clined to think that the dislike of it is rather among 
 the professional critics than among the general public ; 
 I think the reception which Mr. Longfellow's Evan- 
 geline has met with indicates this. I think that even 
 now, if a version of the Iliad in English hexameters 
 were made by a poet who, like Mr. Longfellow, has 
 that indefinable quality which renders him popular, — 
 something attractive in his talent, which communicates 
 itself to his verses, — it would have a great success 
 among the general public. Yet a version of Homer 
 in hexameters of the Evangeline type would not 
 satisfy the judicious, nor is the definite establishment 
 of this type to be desired ; and one would regret that 
 Mr. Longfellow should, even to popularise the hexa- 
 meter, give the immense labour required for a transla- 
 tion of Homer, when one could not wish his work to 
 stand. Kather it is to be wished that by the efforts 
 of poets like Mr. Longfellow in original poetry, and 
 the efforts of less distinguished poets in the task of 
 translation, the hexameter may gradually be made 
 familiar to the ear of the English public ; at the same 
 time that there gradually arises, out of all these 
 efforts, an improved type of this rhythm ; a type 
 which some man of genius may sign with the final 
 stamp, and employ in rendering Homer ; a hexa- 
 meter which may be as superior to Vosse's as Shak- 
 speare's blank verse is superior to Schiller's. I am in- 
 clined to believe that all this travail will actually take 
 place, because I believe that modern poetry is actually 
 in want of such an instrument as the hexameter. 
 In the meantime, whether this rhythm be des-
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 285 
 
 tincd to success or not, let us steadily keep in 
 mind what originally made us turn to it. We turned 
 to it because we required certain Homeric character- 
 istics in a translation of Homer, and because all other 
 rhythms seemed to find, from different causes, great 
 difficulties in satisfying this our requirement. If the 
 hexameter is impossible, if one of these other rhythms 
 must be used, let us keep this rhythm always in mind 
 of our requirements and of its own faults, let us com- 
 pel it to get rid of these latter as much as possible. 
 It may be necessary to have recourse to blank verse ; 
 but then blank verse must de-Coivperise itself, must 
 get rid of the habits of stiff self-retardation which 
 make it say " Not fewer shone," for " So many shone." 
 Homer moves swiftly : blank verse can move swiftly 
 if it likes, but it must remember that the movement 
 of such lines as 
 
 ' ' A thousand fires were burning, and by each ..." 
 
 is just the slow movement which makes us despair of 
 it. Homer moves with noble ease : blank verse must 
 not be suffered to forget that the movement of 
 
 ' ' Came they not over from sweet Lacedsemon ..." 
 
 is ungainly. Homer's expression of his thought is 
 simple as light : we know how blank verse affects 
 such locutions as 
 
 " While the steeds mouthed their com aloof ..." 
 
 and such modes of expressing one's thought are 
 sophisticated and artificial. 
 
 One sees how needful it is to direct incessantly the 
 English translator's attention to the essential charac-
 
 286 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 teristics of Homer's poetry, when so accomplished a 
 person as Mr. Speckling, recognising these characteris- 
 tics as indeed Homer's, admitting them to be essential, 
 is led by the ingrained habits and tendencies of 
 English blank verse thus repeatedly to lose sight of 
 them in translating even a few lines. One sees this 
 yet more clearly, when Mr. Spedding, taking me to 
 task for saying that the blank verse used for render- 
 ing Homer "must not be Mr. Tennyson's blank 
 verse," declares that in most of Mr. Tennyson's blank 
 verse all Homer's essential characteristics — " rapidity 
 of movement, plainness of words and style, simplicity and 
 directness of ideas, and, above all, nobleness of manner 
 — are as conspicuous as in Homer himself." This 
 shows, it seems to me, how hard it is for English 
 readers of poetry, even the most accomplished, to feel 
 deeply and permanently what Greek plainness of 
 thought and Greek simplicity of expression really 
 are : they admit the importance of these qualities in 
 a general way, but they have no ever-present sense of 
 them ; and they easily attribute them to any poetry 
 which has other excellent qualities, and which they 
 very much admire. No doubt there are plainer 
 things in Mr. Tennyson's poetry than the three lines 
 I quoted ; in choosing them, as in choosing a speci- 
 men of ballad-poetry, I wished to bring out clearly, 
 by a strong instance, the qualities of thought and 
 style to which I was calling attention ; but when Mr. 
 Spedding talks of a plainness of thought like Homer's, 
 of a plainness of speech like Homer's, and says that 
 he finds these constantly in Mr. Tennyson's poetry, I
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 287 
 
 answer that these I do not find there at all. Mr. 
 Tennyson is a most distinguished and charming poet ; 
 but the very essential characteristic of his poetry is, 
 it seems to me, an extreme subtlety and curious 
 elaborateness of thought, an extreme subtlety and curi- 
 ous elaborateness of expression. In the best and most 
 characteristic productions of his genius, these charac- 
 teristics are most prominent. They are marked char- 
 acteristics, as we have seen, of the Elizabethan poets ; 
 they are marked, though not the essential, character- 
 istics of Shakspeare himself. Under the influences 
 of the nineteenth century, under wholly new condi- 
 tions of thought and culture, they manifest them- 
 selves in Mr. Tennyson's poetry in a wholly new way. 
 But they are still there. The essential bent of his 
 poetry is towards such expressions as — 
 
 " Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars ; " 
 
 " O'er the sun's bright eye 
 Drew the vast eyelid of an inky cloud ; " 
 
 " When the cairned mountain was a shadow, sunned 
 The world to peace again ;" 
 
 ' The fresh young captains flashed their glittering teetb, 
 The huge bush-bearded barons heaved and blew ; " 
 
 " He bared the knotted column of his throat, 
 The massive square of his heroic breast, 
 And arms on which the standing muscle sloped 
 As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, 
 Running too vehemently to break upon it." 
 
 And this way of speaking is the least plain, the most 
 un-Homeric, which can possibly be conceived. Homer 
 presents his thought to you just as it wells from the 
 source of his mind : Mr. Tennyson carefully distils his
 
 288 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 thought before he will part with it. Hence comes, in 
 the expression of the thought, a heightened and ela- 
 borate air. In Homer's poetry it is all natural thoughts 
 in natural words ; in Mr. Tennyson's poetry it is all 
 distilled thoughts in distilled words. Exactly this 
 heightening and elaboration may be observed in Mr. 
 Spedding's 
 
 "While the steeds mouthed their corn aloof," 
 
 (an expression which might have been Mr. Tennyson's) 
 
 on which I have already commented ; and to one who 
 
 is penetrated with a sense of the real simplicity of 
 
 Homer, this subtle sophistication of the thought is, I 
 
 think, very perceptible even in such lines as these, — 
 
 " And drunk delight of battle with my peers, 
 Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy, " — 
 
 which I have seen quoted as perfectly Homeric. Per- 
 fect simplicity can be obtained only by a genius of 
 which perfect simplicity is an essential characteristic. 
 So true is this, that when a genius essentially 
 subtle, or a genius which, from whatever cause, is in 
 its essence not truly and broadly simple, determines 
 to be perfectly plain, determines not to admit a shade 
 of subtlety or curiosity into its expression, it cannot 
 ever then attain real simplicity ; it can only attain a 
 semblance of simplicity. 1 French criticism, richer in 
 its vocabulary than ours, has invented a useful word 
 
 1 I speak of poetic genius as employing itself upon narrative 
 or dramatic poetry, — poetry in which the poet has to go out of 
 himself and to create. In lyrical poetry, in the direct expres- 
 sion of personal feeling, the most subtle genius may, under the 
 momentary pressure of passion, express itself simply. Even 
 here, however, the native tendency will generally be discernible.
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 289 
 
 to distinguish this semblance (often very beautiful 
 
 and valuable) from the real quality. The real quality 
 
 it calls simplicity the semblance simplesse. The one is 
 
 natural simplicity, the other is artificial simplicity. 
 
 What is called simplicity in the productions of a 
 
 genius essentially not simple, is, in truth, simplesse. 
 
 The two are distinguishable from one another the 
 
 moment they appear in company. For instance, let 
 
 us take the opening of the narrative in Wordsworth's 
 
 Michael : — 
 
 " Upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale 
 There dwelt a shepherd, Michael was his name ; 
 An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb. 
 His bodily frame had been from youth to age 
 Of an unusual strength ; his mind was keen, 
 Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs ; 
 And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt 
 And watchful more than ordinary men." 
 
 Now let us take the opening of the narrative in Mr. 
 Tennyson's Dora : — 
 
 " With Farmer Allan at the farm abode 
 William and Dora. William was his son, 
 And she his niece. He often looked at them, 
 And often thought, ' I'll make them man and wife.' " 
 
 The simplicity of the first of these passages is simpli- 
 
 cU4; that of the second, simplesse. Let us take the 
 
 end of the same two poems : first, of Michael ; — 
 
 " The cottage which was named the Evening Star 
 Is gone, — the ploughshare has been through the ground 
 On which it stood ; great changes have been wrought 
 In all the neighbourhood : yet the oak is left 
 That grew beside their door : and the remains 
 Of the unfinished sheepfold may be seen 
 Beside the boisterous brook of Greemhead Ghyll." 
 VOL. II. U
 
 290 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 And now, of Dora : — 
 
 ' ' So those four abode 
 Within one house together ; and as years 
 Went forward, Mary took another mate : 
 But Dora lived unmarried till her death." 
 
 A heedless critic may call both of these passages 
 simple if he will. Simple, in a certain sense, they 
 both are ; but between the simplicity of the two there 
 is all the difference that there is between the simplicity 
 of Homer and the simplicity of Moschus. 
 
 But — whether the hexameter establish itself or 
 not, whether a truly simple and rapid blank verse be 
 obtained or not, as the vehicle for a standard English 
 translation of Homer — I feel sure that this vehicle 
 will not be furnished by the ballad-form. On this 
 question about the ballad-character of Homer's poetry, 
 I see that Professor Blackie proposes a compromise : 
 he suggests that those who say Homer's poetry is 
 pure ballad -poetry, and those who deny that it is 
 ballad-poetry at all, should split the difference between 
 them ; that it should be agreed that Homer's poems 
 are ballads a little, but not so much as some have said. 
 I am very sensible to the courtesy of the terms in 
 which Mr. Blackie invites me to this compromise; 
 but I cannot, I am sorry to say, accept it ; I cannot 
 allow that Homer's poetry is ballad-poetry at all. A 
 want of capacity for sustained nobleness seems to me 
 inherent in the ballad-form, when employed for epic 
 poetry. The more we examine this proposition, the 
 more certain, I think, will it become to us. Let us 
 but observe how a great poet, having to deliver a
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 291 
 
 narrative very weighty and serious, instinctively 
 shrinks from the ballad -form as from a form not 
 commensurate with his subject-matter, a form too 
 narrow and shallow for it, and seeks for a form which 
 has more amplitude and impressiveness. Every one 
 knows the Lucy Gray and the Ruth of Wordsworth. 
 Both poems are excellent ; but the subject-matter of 
 the narrative of Ruth is much more weighty and 
 impressive to the poet's own feeling than that of the 
 narrative of Lucy Gray, for which latter, in its un- 
 pretending simplicity, the ballad -form is quite ade- 
 quate. Wordsworth, at the time he composed Ruth, — 
 his great time, his annus mirabilis, about 1 800, — strove 
 to be simple; it was his mission to be simple; he 
 loved the ballad-form, he clung to it, because it was 
 simple. Even in Ruth he tried, one may say, to use 
 it ; he would have used it if he could : but the gravity 
 of his matter is too much for this somewhat slight 
 form ; he is obliged to give to his form more ampli- 
 tude, more augustness, to shake out its folds. 
 
 " The wretched parents all that night 
 Went shouting far and wide ; 
 But there was neither sound nor sight 
 To serve them for a guide." 
 
 That is beautiful, no doubt, and the form is adequate 
 to the subject-matter. But take this, on the other 
 
 ' ' I, too, have passed her on the hills, 
 Setting her little water-mills 
 
 By spouts and fountains wild ; 
 Such small machinery as she turned, 
 Ere she had wept, ere she had mourned, 
 
 A young and happy child."
 
 292 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 Who does not perceive how the greater fulness and 
 weight of his matter has here compelled the true and 
 feeling poet to adopt a form of more volume than the 
 simple ballad-form ? 
 
 It is of narrative poetry that I am speaking ; the 
 question is about the use of the ballad-form for this. 
 I say that for this poetry (when in the grand style, 
 as Homer's is) the ballad-form is entirely inadequate; 
 and that Homer's translator must not adopt it, because 
 it even leads him, by its own weakness, away 
 from the grand style rather than towards it. We 
 must remember that the matter of narrative poetry 
 stands in a different relation to the vehicle which 
 conveys it, — is not so independent of this vehicle, so 
 absorbing and powerful in itself, — as the matter of 
 purely emotional poetry. When there comes in 
 poetry what I may call the lyrical cry, this trans- 
 figures everything, makes everything grand; the 
 simplest form may be here even an advantage, because 
 the flame of the emotion glows through and through 
 it more easily. To go again for an illustration to 
 Wordsworth ; — our great poet, since Milton, by his 
 performance, as Keats, I think, is our great poet by 
 his gift and promise ; — in one of his stanzas to the 
 Cuckoo, we have : — 
 
 " And I can listen to thee yet ; 
 Can lie upon the plain 
 And listen, till I do beget 
 That golden time again. " 
 
 Here the lyrical cry, though taking the simple ballad- 
 form, is as grand as the lyrical cry coming in poetry 
 of an ampler form, as grand as the
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 293 
 
 " An innocent life, yet far astray ! " 
 
 of Ruth ; as the 
 
 " There is a comfort in the strength of love " 
 
 of Michael. In this way, by the occurrence of this 
 lyrical cry, the ballad-poets themselves rise sometimes, 
 though not so often as one might perhaps have hoped, 
 to the grand style. 
 
 ' ' lang, lang may their ladies sit, 
 Wi' their fans into their hand, 
 Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spence 
 Come sailing to the land. 
 
 " lang, lang may the ladies stand, 
 Wi' their gold combs in their hair, 
 Waiting for their ain dear lords, 
 For they'll see them nae mair." 
 
 But from this impressiveness of the ballad-form, when 
 its subject-matter fills it over and over again, — is, 
 indeed, in itself, all in all, — one must not infer its 
 effectiveness when its subject-matter is not thus over- 
 powering, in the great body of a narrative. 
 
 But, after all, Homer is not a better poet than the 
 balladists, because he has taken in the hexameter a 
 better instrument ; he took this instrument because 
 he was a different poet from them ; so different, — not 
 only so much better, but so essentially different, — 
 that he is not to be classed with them at all. Poets 
 receive their distinctive character, not from their 
 subject, but from their application to that subject of 
 the ideas (to quote the Excursion) 
 
 "On God, on Nature, and on human life," 
 which they have acquired for themselves. In the
 
 294 ON TRANSLATING HOMEE. 
 
 ballad-poets in general, as in men of a rude and early 
 stage of the world, in whom their humanity is not 
 yet variously and fully developed, the stock of these 
 ideas is scanty, and the ideas themselves not very 
 effective or profound. From them the narrative 
 itself is the great matter, not the spirit and signifi- 
 cance which underlies the narrative. Even in later 
 times of richly developed life and thought, poets 
 appear who have what may be called a battadist's 
 mind ; in whom a fresh and lively curiosity for the 
 outward spectacle of the world is much more strong 
 than their sense of the inward significance of that 
 spectacle. When they apply ideas to their narrative 
 of human events, you feel that they are, so to speak, 
 travelling out of their own province: in the best of 
 them you feel this perceptibly, but in those of a lower 
 order you feel it very strongly. Even Sir Walter 
 Scott's efforts of this kind, — even, for instance, the 
 
 " Breathes there the man with soul so dead," 
 
 or the 
 
 " woman ! in our hours of ease," — 
 
 even these leave, I think, as high poetry, much to be 
 desired ; far more than the same poet's descriptions 
 of a hunt or a battle. But Lord Macaulay's 
 
 ' ' Then out spake brave Horatius, 
 
 The captain of the gate : 
 ' To all the men upon this earth 
 Death corneth soon or late,' " 
 
 (and here, since I have been reproached with under- 
 valuing Lord Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, let
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 295 
 
 me frankly say that, to my mind, a man's power to 
 detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good 
 measure of his fitness to give an opinion about 
 poetical matters at all), — I say, Lord Macaulay's 
 
 ' ' To all the men upon this earth 
 Death cometh soon or late," 
 
 it is hard to read without a cry of pain. But with 
 Homer it is very different. This "noble barbarian," 
 this "savage with the lively eye," — whose verse, Mr. 
 Newman thinks, would affect us, if we could hear the 
 living Homer, " like an elegant and simple melody 
 from an African of the Gold Coast," — is never more 
 at home, never more nobly himself, than in applying 
 profound ideas to his narrative. As a poet he belongs 
 — narrative as is his poetry, and early as is his date 
 — to an incomparably more developed spiritual and 
 intellectual order than the balladists, or than Scott 
 and Macaulay ; he is here as much to be distinguished 
 from them, and in the same way, as Milton is to be 
 distinguished from them. He is, indeed, rather to 
 be classed with Milton than with the balladists and 
 Scott ; for what he has in common with Milton — the 
 noble and profound application of ideas to life — is the 
 most essential part of poetic greatness. The most 
 essentially grand and characteristic things of Homer 
 are such things as — 
 
 irX-qv 8', oV ou7rw rts enixObvios /3por6s &\\os, 
 avopbs TratOocpdvoio ttotI (Trd/xa xelp' optyeadai, 1 
 
 1 "And I have endured — the like whereof no soul upon the 
 earth hath yet endured — to carry to my lips the hand of him 
 who slew my child." — Iliad, xxiv. 505.
 
 296 ON TRANSLATING HOMER, 
 
 or as — 
 
 Kal at, ytpov, to trplv fih aKovo/iev 6\(l<.ov dvai, 1 
 
 or as — 
 
 us yap €TT€K\ib<ravTo 6eol decXolcn Ppordiaiv, 
 %ueiv axvvp.£vovs ' avrol dt t &K7)dies elaiv, 2 
 
 and of these the tone is given, far better than by any 
 thing of the balladists, by such things as the 
 
 " Io no piaugeva : si dentro impietrai : 
 Piangevan elli . . ." 3 
 
 of Dante ; or the 
 
 " Fall'n Cherub ! to be weak is miserable " 
 
 of Milton. 
 
 I suppose I must, before I conclude, say a word or 
 two about my own hexameters; and yet really, on 
 such a topic, I am almost ashamed to trouble you. 
 From those perishable objects I feel, I can truly say, 
 a most Oriental detachment. You yourselves are 
 witnesses how little importance, when I offered them 
 to you, I claimed for them, — how humble a function 
 I designed them to fill. I offered them, not as speci- 
 mens of a competing translation of Homer, but as 
 illustrations of certain canons which I had been try- 
 ing to establish for Homer's poetry. I said that these 
 
 1 "Nay and thou too, old man, in times past wert, as we 
 hear, happy." — Iliad, xxiv. 543. In the original this line, for 
 mingled pathos and dignity, is perhaps without a rival even in 
 Homer. 
 
 3 " For so have the gods spun our destiny to us wretched 
 mortals,— that we should live in sorrow ; but they themselves 
 are without trouble." — Iliad, xxiv. 525. 
 
 3 "/wept not: so of stone grew I within -.—they wept."— 
 Hell, xxxiii. 49 (Carlyle's Translation, slightly altered).
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 297 
 
 canons they might very well illustrate by failing as 
 well as by succeeding : if they illustrate them in any 
 manner, I am satisfied. I was thinking of the future 
 translator of Homer, and trying to let him see as 
 clearly as possible what I meant by the combination 
 of characteristics which I assigned to Homer's poetry, 
 — by saying that this poetry was at once rapid in 
 movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct 
 in its ideas, and noble in manner. I do not sup 
 pose that my own hexameters are rapid in movement, 
 plain in words and style, simple and direct in their 
 ideas, and noble in manner ; but I am in hopes that 
 a translator, reading them with a genuine interest in 
 his subject, and without the slightest grain of per- 
 sonal feeling, may see more clearly, as he reads them, 
 what I mean by saying that Homer's poetry is all 
 these. I am in hopes that he may be able to seize 
 more distinctly, when he has before him my 
 
 "So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of the Xantlms," 
 or my 
 
 "Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you ! " 
 or my 
 "So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle, " 
 
 the exact points which I wish him to avoid in Cow- 
 per's 
 
 " So numerous seemed those fires the banks between," 
 
 or in Pope's 
 
 " Unhappy coursers of immortal strain," 
 or in Mr. Newman's 
 "He spake, and, yelling, held a-front bis singledioofed horses."
 
 298 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 At the same time there may be innumerable points in 
 mine which he ought to avoid also. Of the merit of 
 his own compositions no composer can be admitted 
 the judge. 
 
 But thus humbly useful to the future translator I 
 still hope my hexameters may prove ; and he it is, 
 above all, whom one has to regard. The general 
 public carries away little from discussions of this 
 kind, except some vague notion that one advocates 
 English hexameters, or that one has attacked Mr. 
 Newman. On the mind of an adversary one never 
 makes the faintest impression. Mr. Newman reads 
 all one can say about diction, and his last word on 
 the subject is, that he " regards it as a question about 
 to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer 
 ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic landis, houndis, 
 hartis " (for lands, hounds, harts), and also " the final 
 en of the plural of verbs (we dancen, they singen, 
 etc.)," which " still subsists in Lancashire." A certain 
 critic reads all one can say about style, and at the end 
 of it arrives at the inference that, " after all, there is 
 some style grander than the grand style itself, since 
 Shakspeare has not the grand manner, and yet has 
 the supremacy over Milton ; " another critic reads all 
 one can say about rhythm, and the result is, that he 
 thinks Scott's rhythm, in the description of the death 
 of Marmion, all the better for being saccadS, because 
 the dying ejaculations of Marmion were likely to be 
 "jerky." How vain to rise up early, and to take rest 
 late, from any zeal for proving to Mr. Newman that 
 he must not, in translating Homer, say houndis and
 
 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 299 
 
 dancen ; or to the first of the two critics above quoted, 
 that one poet may be a greater poetical force than 
 another, and yet have a more unequal style; or to 
 the second, that the best art, having to represent 
 the death of a hero, does not set about imitating his 
 dying noises ! Such critics, however, provide for an 
 opponent's vivacity the charming excuse offered by 
 Rivarol for his, when he was reproached with giving 
 offence by it : — " Ah ! " he exclaimed, " no one con- 
 siders how much pain every man of taste has had to 
 suffer, before he ever inflicts any." 
 
 It is for the future translator that one must work. 
 The successful translator of Homer will have (or he 
 cannot succeed) that true sense for his subject, and 
 that disinterested love of it, which are, both of them, 
 so rare in literature, and so precious ; he will not be 
 led off by any false scent ; he will have an eye for the 
 real matter, and, where he thinks he may find any 
 indication of this, no hint will be too slight for him, 
 no shade will be too fine, no imperfections will turn 
 him aside, — he will go before his adviser's thought, 
 and help it out with his own. This is the sort of 
 student that a critic of Homer should always have in 
 his thoughts; but students of this sort are indeed rare. 
 
 And how, then, can I help being reminded what a 
 student of this sort we have just lost in Mr. Clough, 
 whose name I have already mentioned in these lec- 
 tures i He, too, was busy with Homer ; but it is not 
 on that account that I now speak of him. Nor do I 
 speak of him in order to call attention to his qualities 
 and powers in general, admirable as these were. I
 
 300 ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 
 
 mention him because, in so eminent a degree, he pos- 
 sessed these two invaluable literary qualities, — a true 
 sense for his object of study, and a single-hearted care 
 for it. He had both ; but he had the second even 
 more eminently than the first. He greatly developed 
 the first through means of the second. In the study 
 of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the most un- 
 divided and disinterested love for his object in itself, 
 the greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything 
 accidental or personal. His interest was in literature 
 itself ; and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to 
 his character, which kept him so free from all taint of 
 littleness. In the saturnalia of ignoble personal pas- 
 sions, of which the struggle for literary success, in old 
 and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, 
 he never mingled. He had not yet traduced his 
 friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged 
 what he admired, nor praised what he despised. 
 Those who knew him well had the conviction that, 
 even with time, these literary arts would never be 
 his. His poem, of which I before spoke, has some 
 admirable Homeric qualities ; — out-of-doors freshness, 
 life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity. Some of the ex- 
 pressions in that poem, — "Dangerous Corrievreckan 
 . . . Where roads are unknown to Loch Nevish" — come 
 back now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. 
 But that in him of which I think oftenest is the 
 Homeric simplicity of his literary life. 
 
 THE END OF VOL. II.
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 
 
 
 
 m 1 2 1976 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 GAYLORD 
 
 
 
 PRINTED IN U.S.A.
 
 AA 000 199 912 7
 
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