ON TRANSLATING HOMER.* SomE literary subjects are always fresh, and

Homer is one of them. Almost as much labour has been employed in criticizing those who have translated him, as by the translators themselves, yet a specimen

of a new translation or a review of the old ones is into to com- mand readers, partly among those who like to dip .into thesubject for the sake of easily gaining a little knowledge of it, partly among those who know it really well, and are glad to refresh their memories by testing successive approximations to the ideal they entertained of a really good performance. Much, however, as has been produced on the subject, very little can be pointed out which has been done in obedience to any definite principle. In most of the c.nticisins on Homer's translations there is a want of precision, which prevents them from being worthy of acceptation as realised steps towards a true theory of the way in which such a work should be executed. The main portion of every paper which has dealt with the question has been sometimes too broad, but mostly too narrow ; has some- times expatiated too much upon the problem of translation in general, but more often has confined itself to the examination of favourite

passages, and a comparison of the various ways they have been rendered by the translators. Is this faithful enough ? And, if faith- ful (that is, literal) enough, is it also sufficiently spirited P—have been the two questions to which the greater portion of all criticism on this topic may be essentially reduced. From the perusal of such dissertations, readers usually rise with an increased, but perhaps not a clearer, sense of the greatness of Homer's genius, and certainly with no clearer perception of the difficulties which beset any attempt to prevent him in an English form, or of the way in which they may be overcome. To attack this problem from what may be called the scientific point of view, to lay down its conditions and to furnish some tests—negative and positive—to which any future attempt ought to conform, is a task eminently worthy of an Oxford Professor of Poetry, or indeed of any man who has ihe opportunity of influ- encing the poetic taste and moral sympathies of his countrymen. For if Englishmen could be made to read and enjoy Homer as they do Shakspeare, their intellectual wealth would be almost doubled, and the chasm bridged over which to all but scholars still divides the modern from the ancient world.

Mr. Arnold assumes, what all will at once allow, that no existing translations of Homer are satisfactory, and that others will, from time to time, be produced. His object is to point out, for the benefit of any who may in future approach the task, "the rocks on which their predecessors have split, and the right objects on which a trans- lator of Homer should fix his attention." To attempt the execution

of a poem which may affect us as Homer affected his hearers is futile, because we do not know now how he did affect them. Nor will

literal faithfulness to the original ensure that the manner and charac- ter of that original is, after all, adhered to. Neither is it enough merely to affect an unlearned reader "powerfully," because even this

brings us no nearer to the real kind of power which Homer himself exercised. The only true test is the judgment of the scholar—not the pedant—who can read Horner with perfect ease: if a translation affects him as the original does, it will do; if not, be it ever so good in some other way, it is not a representative of Homer. It.is an equally mistaken view to aim at archaism by making a special vocabulary—because we thus lose the flexibility which the IJatin element of our lai guage affords ; and not less so to import

into casual phrases and epithets any tinge of modern thought, under an impression of the subtlety of our original. But though Homer is

not quaint in his language, and means just what he says and nothing more, lie has four characteristics, which everyone who tries to render him should bear in mind, and by a failure as to one or other of which all translators have hitherto fallen short of their aim. These are 1,

Rapidity; 2, Directness in syntax and words ; 3, Plainness in mat- ter and ideas; 4, Nobility or grandeur of style. The first of these qualities is missed by Cowper and Wright, who have taken Milton as a model, because Milton is full of inversions, and expresses himself so that the reader must turn the thought over before he entirely grasps it. No verbal fidelity will atone for this slowness of move- ment.. pope fails by the inherent defect of rhyme, which joins what the original separates, or separates what it joins—thus changing the

• On Translating Homer. Three Lectures given at Oxford. By Matthew Arnold, M. A. Longnnuss. movement of the poem—and also by his own tendency to antithesis," which make that ornate and rhetorical which should only be plain and straightforward. Chapman fails because he infuses into the simplicity of Homer's ideas a refinement and subtlety characteristic of the Elizabethan age, expressed in a grotesque form still redolent of medisavalism. Mr. Newman fails by an inadequate appreciation of the fourth quality ; he considers Homer " quaint" and "garrulous," and says that he is sometimes "prosaic" and "mean." Against all these epithets Mr. Arnold protests with the whole strength of his conviction, and argues by quoting or referring to examples of gar- rulousness, prosaic treatment, and meanness, which evidently pro- duce an effect on the reader different from anything to be found in Homer. As to "antiquated diction," we are not so certain that he makes out his case. 4 Does Mr. Newman," he says, "suppose that Homer's diction seemed antiquated to Sophocles, as Chaucer's seems to us ?" Mr. Arnold confesses that we cannot really know how Homer seemed to Sophocles ; and he confidently asks whether he seems so to a modern scholar ? We think it not impossible that Homer seemed antiquated to an Athenian of the time of Sophoeles; and to a modern scholar fresh from the style of Euripides or Xeno- phon he must surely seem as antiquated as Chaucer would to a foreigner who was previously well acquainted with Pope. Still, in whatever way the question may be answered by the best modern scholars, it must be admitted that as against Mr. Newman, Mr. Arnold has fully made out his case. He is not less trenchant in his condemnation of the idea that Homer is best represented by ballad measures. Mr. Arnold perhaps underrates ballad poetry, but we have never been of opinion that Dr. Maginn's specimens, spirited though they are, would convey to a modern reader the least idea of Homer ; for this reason, if for no other, that they break up his unity, and sacrifice everything which depends on the continuous epic flow of the poem.

Scott has often been called eminently Homeric ; but Mr. Arnold points out that even his best passages have something about them which falls far short of the Homeric manner. Tried by the highest standard—that of the five or six supreme poets of the world—his style is "a bastard epic style," an attempt to attain epic effect by giving greater elevation to the old ballad measure, but which, being unsuccessful in this, is inferior even to its model, because less natural.

In his third lecture Mr. Arnold gives some practical suggestions to enable a translator to comply with the four requirements he has made of him. To attain rapidity the translator's own sympathetic vigour of mind is not enough, unless he has also in his metre a fitting in- strument. Only three kinds of metre seem really capable of the grand style ; two of which, the heroic couplet and blank verse, have been tried. Both have shown themselves noble in a thousand in- stances, but the former has already been excluded, because it changes the movement of the poem, and, if brought down to such a narrative manner as, for instance, that of Chaucer, falls at once into an inferior key. Blank verse is not open to the latter objection, but in its greatest models, such as Milton, it attains its effect by compressing mto one allusive, self-involved sentence all that Homer expresses in two or three consecutive ones. If blank verse is to be used, it must, says Professor Arnold, be a kind of which there are few examples in English, more resembling the most rapid, unrhymed, and simple passages of Shakspeare than any other. It must not be Cowper's, which is open to the same objection as Milton's; nor must it be Tennyson's, which" belongs to another order of ideas" than that of Homer. And even when the best specimen has been chosen and imitated, Homer must still be broken up and remodelled before he can be reproduced in this metre ; and there are many chances against the success of such a hazardous experiment. With the last observation we fully concur, for eve one who has F

tried to translate even a few lines of Homer or Vir • into English blank verse, must have found how very much the passage was changed by the different length of the lines. In descriptive parts es- pecially, one third of the expressiveness is lost by the absence of that unconscious sympathy of sound and sense which does not amount to imitation, but which lends a nameless charm to many a paragraph

to all well acquainted with the classics. The objection to Tenn3-son's blank verse, however, is not so satisfactorily made out. Professor Arnold takes the lines in " Ulysses"—

" For all experience is an arch where tbro'

Gleams that untravell'd world, whose distance fades For ever and for ever as we move "—

and says that they are "too curiously considered" to be Homeric, that their rhythm is equally alien from the old poet's, and that they take up nearly as much time [to understand ?] as a whole book of the "Iliad." But Professor Arnold has chosen one of the most unfair examples possible. The poem of "Ulysses," may or may not be a true interpretation of the character of the hero, but neither its author nor the public have ever supposed it to be put forward as resembling anything that Homer might, or would, have said under any circum- stances. The poem of Tennyson by which a critic ought to test the modern capabilities of this metre, is the "Mode d'Arthur," and we should have been glad to hear Professor Arnold upon that, or upon such a work as Keats's "Hyperion ;" as it is, we think he has scarcely exhausted this part of the question.

What then is the metre he himself recommends? It is the hexa- meter. He admits that, as yet, there have been no very good English hexameters, but there is no real reason why there should not be, and he produces a specimen by Dr. Hawtrcy as the example in which Homer's general effect has been best retained. He also points to Mr. Clough's "Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich" as being Homeric both

in its rapidity and the plainness of its style; but rightly excludes Longfellow's "Evangeline," which, when at its best, has nothing Homeric about it. Although Mr. Arnold has shrunk from the task of translating Homer, he has given two specimens of the way in which he thinks his rules might be carried out. The best of these is from the parting of Hector and Andromache (11. vi. 411-465)

"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 skalk'd 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 Prism's fame and my own, in spite of the future. For that day will come, my soul is assurrd 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 mach—not Hecnba's grief, nor Priam my father's, Nor my brethren's, many and brave, who then will be lying In the bloody dust, beneath the feet of their foemen- As thy grief,when, in tears, some brazen-coated Achaian Shall transport thee away, and the day of thy freedom be ended. Then, perhaps, thou shalt work at the loom of another, in Argos,

Or bear pails to the well of Messeis, or Hypereia,

Sorely against thy will, by strong Necessity's order. And some man may say, as he looks and sees thy tears falling: See, the wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain Of the horsemen of Troy, in the day they fought for their city. So some man will say; and then thy gnef 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." This translation Mr. Arnold leaves to the judgment of scholars. We may admit it to be very good as a translation, to convey the full ,meaning of the original, and not to be wanting in a certain sort of grandeur. But it brings out the inherent defect of all English classical metres—the absence in our language of enough long words to sustain the rolling rhythm of the verse, and preclude any doubt as to the accentuation. The word "the," for instance, may be made either long or short, that is, it may be read long if one chooses to i emphasise t, but our natural way of pronouncing it is short. No writer of English hexameters has yet overcome the difficulty pre- sented by the flatness of spondees consisting of two words of this kind. "For that," "and yet," "in the, are not strong enough to begin a verse with, and they give a slowness to the measure which quite spoils it. Nor has any one been free from the opposite temp- tation to shorten words which our common map always makes long; "sees thy tears falling.," is what, in Greek or Latin, one mould call a false quantity. Until these obstacles are removed, either by extreme care or by a looser Atructure of the hexameter, we cannot Imagine that any approximation will be made to the object Mr. -Arnold has in view. But, though we do not think he has solved the :problem of how Homer should be translated, he has written a very valuable contribution towards its solution ; and every one who has .2ead these lectures will feel that his perceptions have been freshened, mot merely as to Homeric, but as to every other kind of translation. Whether Homer can or cannot be brought within the reach of the =learned, so much delicacy of taste, keenness of insight, and evi- .dence of true poetics culture, as Mr. Arnold has displayed in this—as, indeed, in his previous dissertations on kindred subjects—are very far from being thrown away.