HOW TO VULGARISE HOMER.
MR. SAMUEL BUTLER, the able author of " Erewhon," has been trying to explain to the members of the Working Men's College in Great Ormond Street,* how full of humour is Homer. We agree as heartily with his con- tention, as we dislike, and, we may even say, are sickened by, his mode of demonstrating it. If Homer were what Mr. Butler represents him to be, he would be, not a great epic poet who commands all the springs of irony, humour, tenderness, and pathos alike, but a proficient in nauseous burlesque and the chaff of the nineteenth-century clubmen. That is not what we mean by humour, and if Homer is to be so represented to a class of men very few of whom probably can study him in his own language, the only effect will be to make the better and wiser of them think that the less they know of him, the better it will be for the reverence which the great poetical traditions of the world should excite in their hearts. However much there is in Homer that can truly be called humour, there is nothing whatever in him of the pro- fessional "funny man" of modern society. But this is just the comic character which Mr. Butler endeavours to attribute to him, and which the hearers of his lecture, if they had no other source of information on the subject, would inevitably attribute to him. Here, for instance, is Mr. Butler's account of the manner in which the Father of Gods and Men receives the prayer which Thetis brings to Zeus, that the Ackeans may be discomfited by the Trojans, in order that they may repent having offended Achilles, and may the more poignantly regret the loss of his aid :—" It will be a plagny business,' answers Jove, for me to offend Juno and put up with all the bitter tongue she will give me. As it is, she is always nagging at me and saying I help the Trojans; still, go away now at once before she finds out that you have been here, and leave the rest to me. See, I nod my head to you, and this is the most solemn form of covenant into which I can enter. I never go back upon it, nor shilly-shally with anybody when I have once nodded my head.' Which, by the way, amounts to an admission that he does shilly-shally sometimes. Then he frowns and nods, shaking the hair on his immortal head till Olympus rocks again." Now let us see how Mr. Church, in his charming "Story of the Iliad,"f which was, we trust, in the bands of the working men who went to hear the fanny man's version of Homer, renders the same passage :— • The Humour of Homer. A Lecture delivered at the Working Men's College, Great Ormond Street, January 30th, 189-2, by Samuel Butler. Cam- bridge : Metcalfe and Co.
f London : Seeley and Co.
"Then Zeus made answer much disturbed : This is a bard matter, for thou wilt set me at strife with Hera, and she will upbraid me with bitter words. Even now she is ever re- proaching me, saying that I favour the men of Troy in the battle. Therefore do thou get thee away, that she know not of thy coming ; and I will consider how this thing may be best accomplished. And now I will assure my promise with a nod ; for when I give my nod, then the thing may not be repented of or left undone.' So he spake, and nodded with his dark brows, and the hair waved about his head, and all Olympus was shaken." Now, there we have something as near probably to Homer's verse as English prose will permit an accomplished writer to approach. Mr. Butler has, indeed, availed himself of the slang use of an English word which in its true sense is a real translation of Homer's expression. "These boons you ask are full of bale to me," he says, and he uses the Greek word which is often especially applied to that which brings plague upon a people. But " plaguy " is a word that at once suggests the slang either of feeble irritability or of jocose complaint, just as " tongue " is slang for words of re- proach, and "nagging" is slang for "upbraiding," and " shilly-shally " is slang for a hesitation which conveys the possibility that if the nod which shakes the skies were not given, even the Father of Gods and Men would not regard his promise as absolutely final. Worse still is Mr. Butler's rendering of Here's attack on Zeus, when it actually takes place. "'You traitorous scoundrel,' she exclaims, which of the gods have you been taking into your counsel now ? You are always trying to settle matters behind my back, and never tell me, if you can help it, a single word about your designs.'" Now, there the words "traitorous scoundrel" are absolute interpolations. Here accuses Zeus of duplicity of purpose or finesse,—indeed of the precise quality which, when Homer attributes it to Ulysses, is certainly used by him as a term of admiring praise. He puts into her mouth no word in the least corresponding to scoundrel,' and no word that at all expresses what we mean by treachery. Here is Mr. Church's rendering :—" Who bath been in counsel with thee, thou plotter ? Thou dost always take pleasure, when I am absent, in secret devices, and never tellest thy thought to me freely." "Plotter" expresses the meaning well enough, for though in Here's mouth it is intended for reproach, in the poet's mouth it is a term of art, which implies nothing but diplomatic reserve. Mr. Butler transforms it into mere vulgar vilifica- tion.
We do not in the least deny that Homer's representation of the gods does often contain a keen irony, intended to teach that they were not ideal beings. To the god of War especially Homer's attitude is contemptuous in the highest degree, while Pallas Athene, whatever Mr. Butler may say, is always treated with a certain venera- tion. We cannot conceive, therefore, what Mr. Butler means by asserting that Homer deals more gently with the gods who favour Troy than with the gods who favour the Achteans. But even when Homer intends to express profound contempt, his language is always the language of irony, or satire, or scorn, never the language of familiar chaff like that into which Mr. Butler, with atrociously bad taste, renders it for the working men of the Ormond Street College. And the difference is great. For the former language is perfectly consistent with the grandeur and musical rhythm of the epic, while the latter is of the very essence of slip-shod familiarity, and the slouching, untidy pertness of conceited self-satisfaction.
It is even worse when our funny man endeavours to make his audience smile at the genuine simplicity of Homer, where neither irony nor satire is latent in the poet's words. Let us take Mr. Butler's version of part of the story of Nausicaa in the "Odyssey," and see how completely he debases the original by his attempts to produce a comic Homer. Here is Mr. Butler's account of that dream of Nausicaa inspired by Pallas A.then6, which induces the princess to go to the spot where Ulysses was shipwrecked and is lying in sore need of help :—" She [Pallas Athen6] went straight to the painted bedroom of Nausicaa, who was daughter to King Alcinous, and lovely as a goddess. Near her there slept two maids in waiting, both very pretty, one on either side of the doorway, which was closed with a bean. tifnlly-made door. She took the form of the famous Captain Dnmas's daughter, who was a bosom friend of Nausicaa, and just her own age ; then coming into the room like a breath of
wind she stood near the head of the bed and said—' Nausicaa, what could your mother have been about to have such a lazy daughter ? Here are your clothes all lying in disorder, yet you are going to be married almost directly, and should not only be well-dressed yourself, but should see that those about you look clean and tidy also. This is the way to make people speak well of you, and it will please your father and mother, so suppose we make to-morrow a washing-day, and begin the first thing in the morning. I will come and help you, for all the best young men among your own people are courting you, and you are not going to remain a maid much longer. Ask your father, then, to have a horse and cart ready for us at daybreak to take the linen and baskets, and you can ride too, which will be much pleasanter for you than walking,
for the washing ground is a long way out of the town.' • When they got to the river, they went to the washing pools, through which even in summer there ran enough pure water to wash any quantity of linen, no matter how dirty. Here they unharnessed the mules and turned them out to feed in the sweet juicy grass that grew by the river-side. They got the clothes out of the waggon, brought them to the water, and vied with one another in treading upon them and banging them about to get the dirt out of them. When they had got them quite clean, they laid them out by the sea-side where the waves had raised a high beach of shingle, and set about washing and anointing themselves with olive oil. Then they got their dinner by the side of the river, and waited for the sun to finish drying the clothes. By-and-by, after dinner, they took off their head-dresses and began to play at ball, and Nansican sang to them." And here, again, is Mr. Church's rendering of the same passage :—" Meanwhile Athene went to the city of Phwacians, to the palace of Alcinoiis, their King. There she betook her to the chamber where slept Nausicaa, daughter of the King, a maiden fair as are the gods. The goddess stood above the maiden, in the semblance of the daughter of Dymaz (now Dymas was a famous rover of the sea), a girl that was of like age with her, and had found favour in her sight. Athene spake, saying : Why bath thy mother so careless a child, Nausicaa ? Lo I thy raiment lieth un- washed, and yet the day of thy marriage is at hand, when thou must have fair clothing for thyself, and to give to them that shall lead thee to thy bridegroom's house ; for thus doth a bride win good repute. Do thou therefore arise with the day, and go to wash the raiment, and I will go with thee. Ask thy father betimes in the morning to give thee mules and a wagon to carry the raiment and the robes. Also it is more becoming for thee to ride than to go on foot, for the laundries are far
from the city.' When they came to the river, where was water enough for the washing of raiment though it were ever so foul, the maidens loosed the mules from the chariot, and set them free to graze in the sweet clover by the river- bank. Then they took the raiment from the wagon, and bare it to the river, and trod it in the trenches, vying one with the other. And when they had cleansed away all the stains, then they laid the garments on the shore of the sea, where the waves had washed the pebbles clean. After that they bathed, and anointed themselves ; and then they sat down to eat and drink by the river-side ; and after the meal they played at ball, singing as they played. and Nausicaa led the song." Now, what is the essential difference between these two renderings ? Just this, that Mr. Butler is familiar, while Mr. Church is dignified, the one trying to excite a smile at Nansicaa's expense, the other endeavouring to bring out the poet's deep feeling of the idyllic beauty of the scene. Observe, for instance, the jarring note in the funny man's attempt to modernise the "sea-rover Dymas " into Captain Dumas, with the French associations of the name ; and the attempt, again, to fix attention on the ideas which we connect with the adjective "dirty," though the Greeks, while they certainly intended to indicate the need of cleansing, wished to suggest nothing more. Again, the phrase "banging it about," as applied to the linen, is a pure interpolation, and a very im- pertinent interpolation, in Homer's sentence.
In a word, Mr. Butler aims at making the whole passage ex- press a certain comic familiarity of phrase with a touch of the vulgarity which is suggested by our conception of washerwomen. The poet desired only to picture the beauty of the scene, and the perfect homeliness of a sweet and natural kind of labour, as worthy of a princess as of a peasant. Mr. Butler's aim is to make his audience laugh. But in this passage the Greek itself never suggests even a smile, unless it be the smile that arises from the pleasant vision of health and youth and graceful industry. Nausicaa is "lazy" to our funny man; she is only careless (1uthipar) to the poet, as befits her youth.
Mr. Butler's object is not only to produce the effect of a comic poet, instead of what he promises to show us, a humorous poet, but to make out that the author of the " Odyssey " is certainly not identical with the author of the "Iliad," but is a woman, and not a man,—perhaps the very princess who is delineated as Nausicaa herself. He goes about to demonstrate this paradox in a very peculiar fashion. He insists that the "Odyssey" is not concerned, as the "Iliad" is, with war and slaughter and the passionate loves of men, but rather with glorifying or rehabilitating the cha- racter of women,—and for this purpose he has to ignore, of course, all the murderous detail of the slaughter of the suitors, no less than the murderous detail of the feasts of the cannibal Cyclops ; and further, he makes this extra- ordinarily false criticism on the neglect of the author of the " Odyssey " to provide Telemachus and Pisistratus with heroines as objects of their devotion :—" There is a leading young gentleman, Telemachus, who is nothing if he is not irErriyheroc, or canny, well-principled, and discreet ; he has an amiable and most sensible young male friend who says that he does not like crying at meal times—he will cry in the fore- noon on an empty stomach as much as any one pleases, but he cannot attend properly to his dinner and cry at the same time. Well, there is no lady provided either for this nice young man or for Telemachus. They are left high and dry as bachelors." Certainly ; and we can imagine no trait more final against the woman-theory of the origin of the " Odyssey " than that. Imagine a modern young lady writing a novel and failing to provide her Lord Orville with such a heroine as Evelina! Mr. Butler is hoist with his own petard. Nothing seems to agree better with the general character of the "Odyssey" than the common view that it was written by a great poet in serene old age, after the martial and youthful passions had somewhat died down in him, and when combat interested him more in the form of deliberate and rather too minutely realistic slaughter, than in the form of hot and passionate conflict ; when, moreover, youthful ardour had cooled into tender worship for the pure fidelity of woman. If the modern view of women as inveterate match-makers be at all like the truth, Mr. Butler could hardly have produced better evidence that the " Odyssey " was not written by a woman, than the neglect to provide the trim and rather priggish Telemachus with any object of adoration. To conceive the story of the bending of Ulysses' bow as told by a woman, is, indeed, a climax of literary originality.
But, completely as Mr. Butler's theory of the authorship of the " Odyssey " breaks down on examination, we object mach less to it than to his disastrous attempt to assimilate the humour of Homer to the humour of Dickens. The humour of Dickens is magnificent in its way. It is the humour of perhaps the very greatest of all comic writers ; but then, Homer was not a great comic writer, and Dickens was not a great poet. Homer's irony and satire, no less than his pathos, are penetrated by the ideality and graciousness of the most liquid-voiced, or r&..ther, sea-voiced of poets. Familiarity and farce are as far from the Homeric humour, as they are near to the abandant and redundant humour of Dickens, to his mastery of the bizarre and the absurd, as seen upon the stage of vulgar, bourgeois life. Mr. Butler has done his best to alienate every man of true insight from the mighty poet whom he proposed to interpret to the students of the Ormond Street College.
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