MR. ARNOLD'S LAST WORDS ON TRANSLATING HOMER.*

MR. ARNOLD is the most lucid and delightful of living English critics. No one can deny that he has that great qualification of every true critic which he himself so well defines as consisting in a hearty wish as well as capacity "to press to the heart of the thing itself with which he is dealing—not to go off on some collateral issue about the thing." Not only does he do this, but he does so with a fine and discriminating taste, with a distinctness of thought singularly bright, and an elegance that is at once classical and modern. Still, for a critic, he remains too much himself. " The critic of poetry," he says, " should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable; he should be the ondoyant et dicers, the undulating and diverse being of Montaigne." The definition is perfect, but M. Arnold is too intel- lectual to attain the flexibility—the undulating, elastic nature he describes. His head is too clearly lifted above his subject to permit him to enter into it with full sympathy. He is a purely intellectual critic. The grace of his mind, which is very marked, verses some- what on the thin and stiff type of modern culture. There is a touch of the French renaissance school about his classical elegance. When he tells us about the "grand style," we cannot help noting this, for " grand" is half a French expression which seems to give a touch of pedantry to that inward nobility of which he makes it the outward expression. And this very slight flavour of something too intellectu- ally magnificent in Mr. Arnold's standard which runs through all his criticisms is distinctly visible even in the style of his lectures. There is humour, no doubt, but what magnificence too, in the lectures which he reads to his critics ! His motto to this rejoinder is charac- teristic : "Multi qui persequuntur me et tribulant me; a lestimoniis non declinavi," he says, with a smile no doubt, but still a smile more at his defeated enemies than at his own loftiness. Again : " For those, then, who ask the question—What is the grand style? with sincerity,

will try to make some answer, inadequate a:s it must be. For those

* On Translating Homer; Last Words. A Lecture given at Oxford by Matthew Arnold, M.A., Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford, and formerly Fellow of Oriel College. Longman.

who ask it mockingly I have no answer, except to repeat to them with compassionate sorrow, the Gospel words, 41foriemini in peecatis vestris. Ye shall die in your sins." Mr. Arnold need not have gone further. The quotation from Milton is a superfluous illustration. His own words had given us a much more perfect one : that, surely, if such a style exist, is "the grand style."

We venture this personal criticism on this accomplished critic, because it will simplify the criticism we have to make on this delightful and lucid supplement to his former lectures on translating Homer. Mr. Arnold is evidently quite unaware of the true sting of his former criticism on Mr. Newman. It was not so much in anything he said as in the ineffable superiority of manner with which lie said it; and this, though quite consistent with the genuine mo- desty of the present lecture in all that refers to scholarship or acquirement, is certainly a deeply-rooted characteristic of his fasti- dious intellectual taste. However, we have no concern with the personal aspects of his collision with Mr. Newman, and only refer to it to illustrate one important point in dispute concerning the proper ideal of a translation of Homer.

Mr. Newman had said, and we to some extent agreed with him, that many of Homer's modes of thought and speech must have seemed antiquated to the Athenians of the age of Pericles, however familiar Homer may have then been to them. Mr. Arnold now replies that familiarity or non-familiarity is the whole and sole point of issue; that if Homer's language were as familiar (for epic poetry) to the first Greek tragedians as the language of the Bible is to us for solemn and epic themes, the whole question is settled. In that case Homer was not in any sense "quaint" to the greatAttic poets, and if we are to receive as faithful an impression of him in English as Pericles received in Greek, it must be in a style which never startles us by the quaint simplicity of its manner. Chaucer, Mr. Arnold says, is, to a great extent, really grotesque and unfamiliar to us. Homer never was to the Athenians. Therefore it must be into a style much more familiar and smooth to our ears than Chaucer's that he ought to be trans- lated. Such a style is the style of the translation of the Bible— neither too modern for the genius of the poetry, nor so antique as to disguise it. We confess this seems to us very imperfect reasoning and criticism, though leading to a perfectly sound practical rule. It is, of course, as impossible to translate into a dead language without mannerism, as to adopt an antiquated costume without selt-consciousness, awkward- ness, and affectation. Mr. Newman's translation appears to us a serious warning against so unnatural an attempt. But though it may he a most mistaken course to make this attempt, it by no means follows that bad the translation been done, and done successfully, at:an earlier period of English history, it would not have had a far better chance of faithfully rendering:Homer in spirit and tone than it can ever have now. Mr. Arnold evades the true issue, which is not — was Mr. Newman right B-,--but, was not he aiming at something which, though unattainable now and not to be aimed at, should yet be ever recog- nized by a translator of Homer as one of the constant disturbing forces and difficulties in his way without vain struggles to annihilate it? We understand Mr. Arnold to express his deliberate belief that there is more true harmony between the genius of a high intellectual civilization and the genius of Homer than between the genius of a rudimentary and germinal civilization and the genius of Homer—that the cast of Homer's thought was more akin to that of Athenian lite- rature in its meridian splendour than to the ruder days and ruder tribes among whom he sang. For he says boldly : "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 or Macaulay ; he is here as much to be distinguished from them, and in the same way, as Milton is to be distin- guished 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

i'rXiiv a', or Aro) rig EniXBovior Ppords aultor,

avapar witatodkivoio erari crrOpa xeip' Opircreat . .

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, Jody. 505.

Or as

yipov, rd irpiv pip e'ucalopev Afikow stvas . . .

`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.]

or as

ter yap iirEscX6crapro fkol aeiXoZcrg aporoirrtv, Cc'e'v CIXPVILESIOVS • airroi r' delities curly . . .

For so have the gods span our destiny to us wretched mortals,—that

we should live in sorrow; but they themselves are without trouble.'— Iliad, xxiv. 525.

and of these the tone is given, far better than by anything of the balladists, by such things as the Io no piangeva: si dentro impietrai: Piangevan elli . . .

wept not: so of stone grew I within:—they wept.'—Hdr, xxxiii. 49

(Carlyle's Translation, slightly altered). of Dante; or the Fall's Cherub ! to be weak is miserable . . .

of Milton."

Mr. Arnold is surely overbold. It is, we think, less wide of the truth than the extravagant description of Homer, which he quotes from Mr. Newman, as the " savage with the lively eye," whose verse would affect us if we could hear the living Homer "like an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast." But the intellectual critic certainly does not make good, and almost makes us smile at, his comparison between Homer and Milton. No critic can, we think, enter into Homer, though he may gaze down upon him with keen in- tellectual eye, who would say this. That Homer's characteristic power is " the noble and profound application of ideas to life," sounds to us a criticism either conspicuously erroneous or needing an interpre-

tation which relieves it of all its originality. If Mr. Arnold means that Homer is greatest when he generalizes on human fortunes and characters, when with sublime pathos he brings out the dark side of human destiny, or distinguishes between the type of different cha- racters among statesmen and rulers, what lie says is most true; but it describes with equal truth the elementary stages of intellectual power in many great nations. Chaucer, for instance, though seldom sounding the deepest places of human emotion, generalizes and de- picts the outlines of character with Homeric simplicity and accuracy; and where shall we find a deeper pathos, a traer power for this very same " application of great ideas " to human life—if that is really the proper term for the noble poetry of which Mr. Arnold has just given us such magnificent specimens— than in the early Hebrew pastorals and history ? Yet who would call the Hebrew pastorals poems of a "developed intellectual order," or dream of comparing them in this respect with Milton? It seems to us that Mr. Arnold has attributed to Homer the processes of his own intellect when working upon Homer. He has not appreciated the full difference between the Homeric thought and the intellectual estimate of that thought. Homer's intellect was doubtless infinitely wider than " Macaulay's or Scott's," but to say that the kind of intellect running through the "Iliad" was equally "developed," seems to us a confusion of terms. We measure the development of intellect by the degree in which it seeks for causes and reasons, or innocently, so to speak, assumes them ; —by the elaborateness of its moral analysis—by the richness and complexity of the converging experience of centuries in its tests of practical wisdom. All this we see in Milton in the highest possible degree, and in the least possible degree in Homer. In the poorest of Macaulay's rhetorical lays there is ample sign of the intellectual culture of centuries—of an intellect that has been unfolded under the pressure of a thousand intellectual atmospheres such as that which saw the unfolding of Homer's. It seems to -us unworthy of Mr. Arnold's insight to deny that there is a kind of simplicity which belongs expressly to the youth of the world, and of each na- tion which rises to greatness in that world—and that Homer's sim- plicity is of both kinds, and is open to a more effective rendering from a nation in the bud than from the same nation in the flower. The hopeful forward glance, the innocent assumption of agencies not only unproved but undoubted and undiscussed, the kind of im- portance given to the physical nature, the absence of shame, the childlike, first-hand intellect—all these are striking characteristics of Homer which give him half his charm, and are about as abundant in Milton as dew under the burning noon 'of a tropical sun. To us Mr. Arnold's conception of Homer as, in the modern sense, a highly intellectual poet, is the one glaring deficiency in this series of exqui- site critical lectures. It is the kind of magnificent error which the French classical school might have made.