The Project Gutenberg eBook of On Translating Homer, by Mathew Arnold

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.

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 overpowering, 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 has 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)

which they have acquired for themselves. In the 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 significance which underlies the narrative. Even in later times of richly developed life and thought, poets appear who have what may be called a balladist’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

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

(and here, since I have been reproached with undervaluing Lord Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, let 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

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

and of these the tone is given, far better than by anything of the balladists, by such things as the

I suppose I must, before I conclude, say a word or two about my own hexameters; and yet really, on such a topic, I am almost ashamed to trouble you. From those perishable objects I feel, I can truly say, a most Oriental detachment. You yourselves are witnesses how little importance, when I offered them to you, I claimed for them, how humble a function I designed them to fill. I offered them, not as specimens of a competing translation of Homer, but as illustrations of certain canons which I had been trying to establish for Homer’s poetry. I said that these canons they might very well illustrate by failing as well as by succeeding: if they illustrate them in any manner, I am satisfied. I was thinking of the future translator of Homer, and trying to let him see as clearly as possible what I meant by the combination of characteristics which I assigned to Homer’s poetry, by saying that this poetry was at once rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct in its ideas, and noble in manner. I do not suppose that my own hexameters are rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct in their ideas, and noble in manner; but I am in hopes that a translator, reading them with a genuine interest in his subject, and without the slightest grain of personal feeling, may see more clearly, as he reads them, what I meant by saying that Homer’s poetry is all these. I am in hopes that he may be able to seize more distinctly, when he has before him my

At the same time there may be innumerable points in mine which he ought to avoid also. Of the merit of his own compositions no composer can be admitted the judge.

But thus humbly useful to the future translator I still hope my hexameters may prove; and he it is, above all, whom one has to regard. The general public carries away little from discussions of this kind, except some vague notion that one advocates English hexameters, or that one has attacked Mr Newman. On the mind of an adversary one never makes the faintest impression. Mr Newman reads all one can say about diction, and his last word on the subject is, that he ‘regards it as a question about to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic landis, houndis, hartis’ (for lands, hounds, harts), and also ‘the final en of the plural of verbs (we dancen, they singen, etc.), which still subsists in Lancashire’. A certain critic reads all one can say about style, and at the end of it arrives at the inference that, ‘after all, there is some style grander than the grand style itself, since Shakspeare has not the grand manner, and yet has the supremacy over Milton’; another critic reads all one can say about rhythm, and the result is, that he thinks Scott’s rhythm, in the description of the death of Marmion, all the better for being saccadé, because the dying ejaculations of Marmion were likely to be ‘jerky’. How vain to rise up early, and to take rest late, from any zeal for proving to Mr Newman that he must not, in translating Homer, say houndis and dancen; or to the first of the two critics above quoted, that one poet may be a greater poetical force than another, and yet have a more unequal style; or to the second, that the best art, having to represent the death of a hero, does not set about imitating his dying noises! Such critics, however, provide for an opponent’s vivacity the charming excuse offered by Rivarol for his, when he was reproached with giving offence by it: ‘Ah’! he exclaimed, ‘no one considers how much pain every man of taste has had to suffer, before he ever inflicts any’.

It is for the future translator that one must work. The successful translator of Homer will have (or he cannot succeed) that true sense for his subject, and that disinterested love for it, which are, both of them, so rare in literature, and so precious; he will not be led off by any false scent; he will have an eye for the real matter, and where he thinks he may find any indication of this, no hint will be too slight for him, no shade will be too fine, no imperfections will turn him aside, he will go before his adviser’s thought, and help it out with his own. This is the sort of student that a critic of Homer should always have in his thoughts; but students of this sort are indeed rare.

And how, then, can I help being reminded what a student of this sort we have just lost in Mr Clough, whose name I have already mentioned in these lectures? He, too, was busy with Homer; but it is not on that account that I now speak of him. Nor do I speak of him in order to call attention to his qualities and powers in general, admirable as these were. I mention him because, in so eminent a degree, he possessed these two invaluable literary qualities, a true sense for his object of study, and a single-hearted care for it. He had both; but he had the second even more eminently than the first. He greatly developed the first through means of the second. In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the most undivided and disinterested love for his object in itself, the greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal. His interest was in literature itself; and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from all taint of littleness. In the saturnalia of ignoble personal passions, of which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled. He had not yet traduced his friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised what he despised. Those who knew him well had the conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his. His poem, of which I before spoke, has some admirable Homeric qualities;—out-of-doors freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity. Some of the expressions in that poem, ‘Dangerous Corrievreckan ... Where roads are unknown to Loch Nevish’, come back now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. But that in him of which I think oftenest is the Homeric simplicity of his literary life.

1. Iliad, iii. 243.

2. Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, vi. 230.

3. Iliad, xix. 420.

4. Iliad, xii. 324.

5. These are the words on which Lord Granville ‘dwelled with particular emphasis’.

6. Robert Wood, Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, London, 1775, p. vii.

7. Iliad, viii. 560.

8. Iliad, xvii. 443.

9. Iliad, vi. 444.

10. Iliad, vi. 344.

11. 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.

12. From the ballad of King Estmere, in Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, i. 69 (edit. of 1767).

13. Reliques, i. 241

14. Iliad, xvii. 443.

15. All the editions which I have seen have ‘haste’, but the right reading must certainly be ‘taste’.

16. Iliad, xix. 419.

17. Odyssey, xix. 392.

18. Mr Marsh, in his Lectures on the English Language, New York, 1860, p. 520.

19. Marmion, canto vi. 38.

20. Marmion, canto vi. 29.

21. ‘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.

22. ‘From me, young man, learn nobleness of soul and true effort: learn success from others.’—Æneid, xii. 435.

23. ‘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.

24. Paradise Lost, i. 591.

25. The Faery Queen, Canto ii. stanza I.

26. Odes, IV. vii. 13.

27. Odyssey iv. 563.

28. Odes, III. ii. 31.

29. 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 Lacedæmon,
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,
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, Lacedæmon.

English Hexameter Translations, London,

1847, p. 242.

I have changed Dr Hawtrey’s ‘Kastor’, ‘Lakedaimon’, back to the familiar ‘Castor’, ‘Lacedæmon’, 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 question 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 Θουκυδίδης.

30. For instance; in a version (I believe, by the late Mr Lockhart) of Homer’s description of the 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 English Hexameter Translations, 244.

31. See for instance, in the Iliad, the loose construction of ὅστε, xvii. 658; that of ἴδοιτο, xvii. 681; that of οἵτε, xviii. 209; and the elliptical construction at xix. 42, 43; also the idiomatic construction of ἐγὼν ὅδε παρασχεῖν, xix. 140. These instances are all taken within a range of a thousand lines; anyone may easily multiply them for himself.

32. 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, any more than in his grammar; but I seem to myself clearly to recognise an idiomatic stamp in such expressions as τολυπεύειν πολέμους, xiv. 86; φάος ἐν νήεσσιν θήῃς, xvi. 94; τιν’ οἴω ἀσπασίως αὐτῶν γόνυ κάμψειν, xix. 71; κλοτοπεύειν, xix. 149; and many others. The first-quoted expression, τολυπεύειν ἀργαλέους πολέμους, seems to me to have just about the same degree of freedom as the ‘jump the life to come’, or the ‘shuffle off this mortal coil’, of Shakspeare.

33. 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 αἰόλος ἵππος, for instance, or αἰγιόχοιο, 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 αἰόλος must have been nearly as impure a dactyl as ‘death-destined’ is to us; and αἰγιόχ 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 αἰόλλος ἵππος (or something like that), though not our effect, is not a disagreeable one. On the other hand, κορυθαιόλος as a paroxytonon, although it has the respectable authority of Liddell and Scott’s 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 μέγας κοῤῥυθαιόλλος Ἕκτωρ 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 κορυθαίολος as a proparoxytonon.

34. 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’.

35. He attacks the same line also in p. 44; but I do not claim this as a mark, how free I am from the fault.

36. If I had used such a double dative, as ‘to Peleus to a mortal’, what would he have said of my syntax?

37. Ballad-manner! The prevalent ballad-metre is the Common Metre of our Psalm tunes: and yet he assumes that whatever is in this metre must be on the same level. I have professed (Pref. p. x) that our existing old ballads are ‘poor and mean’, and are not my pattern.

38. He has also overlooked the misprint Trojans, where I wrote Troïans (in three syllables), and has thus spoiled one verse out of the five.

39. As a literary curiosity I append the sentence of a learned reviewer concerning this metre of Campbell. ‘It is a metre fit for introducing anything or translating anything; a metre that nothing can elevate, or degrade, or improve, or spoil; in which all subjects will sound alike. A theorem of Euclid, a leading article from the Times, a dialogue from the last new novel, could all be reduced to it with the slightest possible verbal alteration’. [Quite true of Greek hexameter or Shakspeare’s line. It is a virtue in the metres]. ‘To such a mill all would be grist that came near it, and in no grain that had once passed through it would human ingenuity ever detect again a characteristic quality’. This writer is a stout maintainer that English ballad metre is the right one for translating Homer: only, somehow, he shuts his eyes to the fact that Campbell’s is ballad metre! Sad to say, extravagant and absurd assertions, like these, though anonymous, can, by a parade of learning, do much damage to the sale of a book in verse.

40. I think he has mistaken the summit of the wave for a headland, and has made a single description into two, by the word Or: but I now confine my regard to the metre and general effect of the style.

41. Companion, in four syllables, is in Shakspeare’s style; with whom habitually the termination -tion is two.

42. By corrupting the past tenses of welisso into a false similarity to the past tenses of elelizo, the old editors superimposed a new and false sense on the latter verb; which still holds its place in our dictionaries, as it deceived the Greeks themselves.

43. That λλ in Attic was sounded like French l mouillée, is judged probable by the learned writer of the article L (Penny Cyclop.), who urges that μᾶλλον is for μάλιον, and compares φυλλο with folio, αλλο with alio, ἁλλ with sali.

44. Men who can bear ‘belch’ in poetry, nowadays pretend that ‘sputter’ is indelicate. They find Homer’s ἀποπτύει to be ‘elegant’, but sputter—not! ‘No one would guess from Mr Newman’s coarse phrases how elegant is Homer’!!

45. In a Note to my translation (overlooked by more than one critic) I have explained curl-ey’d, carefully, but not very accurately perhaps; as I had not before me the picture of the Hindoo lady to which I referred. The whole upper eyelid, when open, may be called the curl; for it is shaped like a buffalo’s horns. This accounts for ἑλικοβλέφαρος, ‘having a curly eyelid’.

46. I thought I had toned it down pretty well, in rendering it ‘O gentle friend’! Mr Arnold rebukes me for this, without telling me what I ought to say, or what is my fault. One thing is certain, that the Greek is most odd and peculiar.

47. In the noble simile of the sea-tide, quoted p. 138 above, only the two first of its five lines are to the purpose. Mr Gladstone, seduced by rhyme, has so tapered off the point of the similitude, that only a microscopic reader will see it.

48. It is very singular that Mr Gladstone should imagine such a poet to have no eye for colour. I totally protest against his turning Homer’s paintings into leadpencil drawings. I believe that γλαυκὸς is grey (silvergreen), χάροψ blue; and that πρασινὸς, ‘leek-colour’, was too mean a word for any poets, early or late, to use for ‘green’, therefore χλωρὸς does duty for it. Κῦμα πορφύρεον is surely ‘the purple wave’, and ἰοειδέα πόντον ‘the violet sea’.

49. He pares down ἑλκηθμοῖο (the dragging away of a woman by the hair) into ‘captivity’! Better surely is my ‘ignoble’ version: ‘Ere-that I see thee dragg’d away, and hear thy shriek of anguish’.

50. He means ours for two syllables. ‘Swiftness of ours’ is surely ungrammatical. ‘A galley of my own’ = one of my own galleys; but ‘a father of mine’, is absurd, since each has but one father. I confess I have myself been seduced into writing ‘those two eyes of his’, to avoid ‘those his two eyes’: but I have since condemned and altered it.

51. Of course no peculiarity of phrase has the effect of peculiarity on a man who has imperfect acquaintance with the delicacies of a language; who, for instance, thinks that ἑλκηθμὸς means δουλεία.

52. Ἐλλὸς needs light and gives none. Benfey suggests that it is for ἐνεὸς, as ἄλλος, alius, for Sanscrit anya. He with me refers ἔλλοψ to λέπω. Cf. squamigeri in Lucretius.

53. I do not see that Mr Arnold has any right to reproach me, because he does not know Spenser’s word ‘bragly’ (which I may have used twice in the Iliad), or Dryden’s word ‘plump’, for a mass. The former is so near in sound to brag and braw, that an Englishman who is once told that it means ‘proudly fine’, ought thenceforward to find it very intelligible: the latter is a noble modification of the vulgar lump. That he can carp as he does against these words and against bulkin (= young bullock) as unintelligible, is a testimony how little I have imposed of difficulty on my readers. Those who know lambkin cannot find bulkin very hard. Since writing the above, I see a learned writer in the Philological Museum illustrates ἴλη by the old English phrase ‘a plump of spears’.

54. I observe that Lord Lyttelton renders Milton’s dapper elf by ῥαδινὰ, ‘softly moving’.

55. Mr Arnold calls it an unfortunate sentence of mine: ‘I ought to be quaint; I ought not to be grotesque’. I am disposed to think him right, but for reasons very opposite to those which he assigns. I have ‘unfortunately’ given to querulous critics a cue for attacking me unjustly. I should rather have said: ‘We ought to be quaint, and not to shrink from that which the fastidious modern will be sure to call grotesque in English, when he is too blunted by habit, or too poor a scholar to discern it in the Greek’.

56. ‘It is the fact, that scholars of fastidious refinement, but of a judgment which I think far more masculine than Mr Arnold’s, have passed a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of my translation. I at present count eight such names’.—‘Before venturing to print, I sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women have extolled them, how greedily a working man has inquired for them, without knowing who was the translator’.—Mr Newman’s Reply, pp. 113, 124, supra.