MR. DIRT'S HEXAMETER ILIAD *

THERE happens, more or less, to Homer's translators—as we think Goethe or Schiller long ago remarked in the "Xenien"—what Homer himself represents as certain to happen to all the other gods of Olympus if they were to tug at the golden chain which was fastened to the throne of Zeus—they could not pull him down one inch ; but he, if he chose, could draw them up with both earth and sea, and binding the chain round the summit of Olympus, might leave them all, gods and goddesses, earth and sea, dangling all together be- tween hell and heaven-La meteor ominous indeed, especially to the suspended earthly spectators. And so it is with Homer and his translators :

"Though all the scribblers and rhymers cling to thee, they may not draw" thee Downwards, yet hardly clod thou draw them up to thyself."t

Not that we intend to speak with disrespect of all Homer's translators, nor of the author of the present version, as "scribblers and rhymers." Most of them have been men of culture and scholarship, and many of them genuine poets ; yet still they hang in this unpleasant and ambiguous position, united by a certain golden chain of poetic thought and wisdom to the throne of the great poet, yet all more or less in a state of unnatural suspension, neither on the firm earth of their own world nor on the proud height of his.

We cannot say that Mr. Dart is any exception to the rule. In so far as the Iliad is more unique and characteristic than the Odyssey, he has attempted a harder task than Dean Alford and Mr. Worsley, whose works we have recently reviewed, and he has not attempted it with any more effective intellectual instruments or genius. If the test of success be that which Mr. Arnold laid down—the equivalence of poetic impression made by the original and the translation on the mind of a competent scholar—we do not think Mr. Dart! will be thought to have achieved any very new level of merit. He, too, hangs in mid-air, one of the many asteroids into which translation has broken Homer's countless beauties.

He has kept to the hexameter metre which has recently received the weighty suffrage of Mr. Arnold, but which no authority can per- suade us to think in consonance with the genius of the English lan- guage; which no skill can manage so as to give it either the natural- ness of a native poem, the grace and harmony of a Greek poem, or the simplicity of an early narrative poem. The internecine hostility between the structure of English words and the structure of the hexameter metre gives a sprawling air to all English hexameters, like the attempts of an Englishman to move about easily in the long robe of an Oriental. Even in Mr. Clough's much-admired hexa- meter Vacation poem, and even, also, in the few hexameters of Dr. Hawtrey, we can see the agony which an unnatural metre im- poses on a graceful mind, though the contortions nearly vanish in the Provost of Eton's fine translation of Helen's mention of Castor and Pollux quoted by Mr. Arnold. Yet even here the comparative ease and grace are only relative—relative to other English hexameters, not to the indigenous metres of the English language. Ease of manner, continuity of style, Ionic grace, or, as Mr. Arnold finely describes it, "the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky," caunever be expressed in a metre which jolts the thought at every turn, which so exhausts the English capacity for rhythmical grasp that one line seems wholly unable to run on into the next without a little pause and a fresh lift of the voice, and which, there- fore, when most skilfully handled, seems always trying to make each line present a horizon as self-complete, clear, and harmonious as pos- sible, without the aid of those that precede and follow it. Mr. Dart has striven, very successfully on the whole, to translate Homer line for line, and thus has imposed a condition of terseness on himself which adds to the difficulty of form, though, where suc- cessful, it improves greatly the general character of the translation. Let us take as an instance the boast of Zeus in the commencement of the eighth book, to which we referred just now:

'Try me, if such be your ye Gods join together and prove me

Let the great golden chain down from heaven — that compasses all things—

And, with united strength, seek ye all, if ye can, to subvert me ! Vain is your fruitless toil:—strive ye all as ye may, ye succeed not. Zeus will remain on high :—vain the efforts of all to remove him! But, if I will to move, without effort I drag you before me ; Drag you away with ease, with the earth and the depths of the ocean ; Binding the mighty links of the chain round the peak of Olympus : Chain and all alike in the firmament swinging before me.

Such, and so strong, do I rule :—over Gods as I rule over mortals."

* The Iliad of Homer. In English Hexameter Verse. By J. Henry Dart, MA., of Exeter College, Oxford. Longman

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t " Hangen auch she Schmierer and Reimer Bich an dich, ale ziehen,

Dich nicht hinunter, doch du ziehat ale inch echwerlich Musa." Now, no one who compares his impression of this with the original will fail to see that it is much more of mosaic work, each line being a little integer in the translation, though often shading off into its neighbours in the original, and that this defect tells on the sense as well as the form by frequently compelling the translator to eke out a line too short, or clip a short one too long. For example, in the second line we have quoted, the words " that compasses all things" are a pure interpolation, the definite article prefixed to " golden chain" and the epithet " neat," are equally so ; and all this is done simply to round off the line into a more complete imaginative unity of itself, a ten- dency which, as we have said, is the vice of this unnatural English metre. Homer simply says, "Or, come, make trial, ye gods, so that ye may all know; hang down out of heaven a golden chain, and take hold all of you, both gods and goddesses;" now the simplicity, the naiveli of this challenge, which is one of its proper Homeric charms, is quite destroyed in the translation we have quoted, and chiefly by the struc- tural necessities of the hexameter line. Let us go a little further : Homer makes Zeus say, "but you would not drag from heaven to your standing-place (irettoid.te) Zeus the supreme in resources (Orfarow fliarcapa), not even if you worked very hard at it." Now how does this nail boast come out in Mr. Dart's version? We scarcely recog- nize it at all in, "Vain is your fruitless toil, strive ye all as ye may, ye succeed not

Zeus will remain on high :—vain the efforts of all to remove him!"

There is both interpolation and omission here. The pulling match is almost forgotten, lost in a cloud of abstract words; there is no translation of either of the two tuning stations, the Olympian station of Zeus against the field, or the lower level where all the other gods are stationed at their depreciating work; we have neither the "dragging," nor the "from heaven," nor the direction of the motion; we lose the epithet for Zeus, "the supreme in expedients or resources," and we lose all the simplicity and straightforwardness of the "not even if von. worked very hard at it." Zeus goes on: "But whenever I might advisedly choose to pull, I should draw you up with the very earth, and with the very sea ;" but Mr. Dart won't even allow that Zeus exerts himself, which Zeus clearly meant to do, for he says, "without effort I drag you before me," and again, "drag you away with ease,"—an idea quite foreign to the passage, and pro- bably suggested by the necessity of rounding off the metre. Again Zeus goes on, "The chain then, I should bind round the p of Olympus, but all the appendages would hang in mid-air." Now here half the Homeric character depends upon the simplicity of the "then" (Fumy) with which Zeus explains, like a child making up a tale for its own future, what he would do when he had realized all his fairy. dreams. Again, that character is definitely destroyed by the introduction of the "mighty links" of which Homer makes no mention, and the loss of the antithesis between the firm end of the chain which is to be made fast to Olympus and the dangling end where gods and goddesses are left in a very pitiable plight. Now we do not :say that all these faults are entirely ascribable to the metre; but we do say that the unnatural rhythm of an English hexa- meter suggests a filling in of some lines and a cutting down of others, which very much aggravates the tendency to pad out Homer's sim- plicity, or to clip his easy fluent manner to a given pattern.

Let us take one of Mr. Dart's more successful passages, and we gladly admit that the one we have just extracted is not by means of the highest level of his work. We will select the celebrated passage in the third book, in which Antenor describes to Helen the effect of Ulysses' speaking on the Trojan council

"0 lady, truth itself is not truer than what thou haat spoken ! Here, unto this very town, came once the god-like Odysseus :- Came on account of thee—with the Arks-loved Menelaus. I entertained the chiefs : in my palace as friends I received them : Learn'd to esteem the great talent of both, and their provident counsels. And when they came to meet with the sons of Troy in assembly, Both when erect, Menelaus excelled in the breadth of his shoulders; Both sitting down, you would say the more dignified man was Odysseus. And as they came to speak, and to reason with men in the council, When Menelaus spoke, it was clearness all, and conciseness ; Few were his words; but each word clearly heard ; he was no long

debater ; No word mimed its point : though in age of the two he was younger. But when it came to the turn of the much-suggestive Odysseus ;- Standing, and looking down, and fixing his eyes on the pavement, Tightly he grasp'd his sceptre,—nor backward .nor forward he sway'd

it—

Held it, motionless all, as a man with no knowledge of speaking ; All the appearance of one dumb with passion or 'reit of his senses ; But when the deep soft voice broke at last from the depth of his bosom — Words falling, frequent, fast, and soft as the flakes of the snow-storm- Not with Odysseus then might vie any one among mortals ; Not, as we drank his words, was one jot of his figure remember'd."

Now, surely it is the hexametrical tyranny which has made Mr. Dart translate the Homeric "0 lady, this that you have said is exceedingly close to the mark," Ciwor witteprir) by the very unan- tique phrase, "Truth itself is not truer than," &c. The other lines are much more literal and completer, without either addition or subtrac- tion, than is usual in this version: but we come on the temptation to eke out a Greek line into an equivalent English whole, which the English hexameter, from the difficulty of sliding one line into another, so often prompts, in the verse, "held it, motionless all, like a man without knowledge of speaking," where the last two words are mere stop-gaps. Homer probably meant "like an ignomut," or perhaps a "stupid or puzzled man," certainly he did not mean to imply that it was want offlueney which was written in the expression of Ulysses; indeed he explains what he did mean in the next line, by saying that he looked as if either passion or imbecility gave him this air of vacancy. Again the line, an excellent one in itself, but not a trans- lation,

"Words falling, frequent, fast, and soft as the flakes of a snow-storm,"

is rounded off to make an English unit, because the Greek line would have been too short, and it was difficult to break into the next line. "Words like the wintry snow-flakes," is all that Homer says, leaving the "frequent, fast and soft" to be inferred from the metaphor, in- stead of expressly detailed. But the passage is the best and most accurate we have examined. We could add that the constant Homeric epithets are not generally very happily rendered. Much-suggestive is not the proper epithet for Odysseus. A very suggestive man may be one whose suggestions have no weight—a mere view man. noXimstirts certainly expresses "fertile in wise advice."

Besides the defects more or less aggravated ,by the metrical exi- gencies of the ease, the version, as a whole, seems to us wanting in delicacy of feeling for the different shades of Homeric thought, humour, and sentiment, and for the peculiarities of the Homeric manner. The great speech of Hector to Andromache prophesying the fall of Troy misses many little touches that a finer eye would have perceived; it has the slight weakness of Mr. Arnold's transla- tion of the same passage without all its insight.