Matthew Arnold

“ Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys it, even erudition may destroy it. To press to the sense of the thing itself with which one is dealing, not to go off on some collateral issue about the thing, is the hardest matter in the world. The ‘thing itself’ with which one is here dealing, the critical perception of poetic truth, is of all things the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent; by even pressing too impetuously after it, one runs the risk of losing it. The critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable ”

“ To reproduce Shakspeare would be in any case a ‘surprising’ mode of translating Homer: but the principle which changes ‘single-hoofed’ into a different epithet which the translator thinks better, is precisely that which for more than two centuries has made nearly all English translation worthless. To throw the poet into your crucible, and bring out old Pelias young, is not a hopeful process. I had thought, the manly taste of this day had outgrown the idea that a translator’s business is to melt up the old coin and stamp it with a modern image. ”

“ That the poetical translation, in his rendering of them, is to give us a sense of the difficulties of the scholar, and so is to make his translation obscure? If he does not mean that, how, by bringing forward these hard words, does he touch the question whether an English version of Homer should be plain or not plain? If Homer’s poetry, as poetry, is in its general effect on the poetical reader perfectly simple and intelligible, the uncertainty of the scholar about the true meaning of certain words can never change this general effect. ”

“ Spenser’s verse is fluid and rapid, no doubt, but there are more ways than one of being fluid and rapid, and Homer is fluid and rapid in quite another way than Spenser. Spenser’s manner is no more Homeric than is the manner of the one modern inheritor of Spenser’s beautiful gift,—the poet, who evidently caught from Spenser his sweet and easy-slipping movement, and who has exquisitely employed it; a Spenserian genius, nay, a genius by natural endowment richer probably than even Spenser ”

“ The old English balladist may stir Sir Philip Sidney’s heart like a trumpet, and this is much: but Homer, but the few artists in the grand style, can do more; they can refine the raw natural man, they can transmute him. So it is not without cause that I say, and say again, to the translator of Homer: ‘Never for a moment suffer yourself to forget our fourth fundamental proposition, Homer is noble’. For it is seen how large a share this nobleness has in producing that general effect of his, which it is the main business of a translator to reproduce. ”

“ I say, he is merely inadvertent, he cannot be ignorant, that the Homeric metre, like my metre, subserves prosaic thought with the utmost facility; but I hold it to be, not indavertence, but blindness, when he does not see that Homer’s τὸν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος is a line of as thoroughly unaffected oratio pedestris as any verse of Pythagoras or Horace’s Satires. 135But on diction I defer to speak, till I have finished the topic of metre.
I do not say that any measure is faultless. Every measure has its foible: mine has that fault which every uniform line must have; it is liable to monotony. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Interpreting these words from the contrast of Mr Arnold’s own poems, I claim his suffrage as on my side, that Homer is often in a style much lower than what the moderns esteem to be poetical. But I protest, that he carries it very much too far, and levels the noblest down to the most negligent style of Homer. The poet is not always so ‘ignoble’, as the unlearned might infer from my critic’s specimens. He never drops so low as Shakspeare; yet if he were as sustained as Virgil or Milton, he would with it lose his vast superiority over these, his rich variety. ”

“ The ballad-measure is quite able to give due effect to the vigour and spirit which its employer, when at his very best, may be able to exhibit; and, when he is not at his best, when he is a little trivial, or a little dull, it will not betray him, it will not bring out his weakness into broad relief. This is a convenience; but it is a convenience which the ballad-style purchases by resigning all pretensions to the highest, to the grand manner. It is true of its movement, as it is not true of Homer’s, that it is ‘liable to degenerate into doggerel’. ”

“ Poets who cannot work in the grand style instinctively seek a style in which their comparative inferiority may feel itself at ease, a manner which may be, so to speak, indulgent to their inequalities. The ballad-style offers to an epic poet, quite unable to fill the canvas of Homer, or Dante, or Milton, a canvas which he is capable of filling. ”

“ For Homer is not only rapid in movement, simple in style, plain in language, natural in thought; he is also, and above all, noble. I have advised the translator not to go into the vexed question of Homer’s identity. Yet I will just remind him that the grand argument—or rather, not argument, for the matter affords no data for arguing, but the grand source from which conviction, as we read the Iliad, keeps pressing in upon us, that there is one poet of the Iliad, one Homer—is precisely this nobleness of the poet, this grand manner ”

“ Therefore the idiomatic language of Shakspeare—such language as, ‘prate of his whereabout’; ‘jump the life to come’; ‘the damnation of his taking-off’; ‘his quietus make with a bare bodkin’—should be carefully observed by the translator of Homer, although in every case he will have to decide for himself whether the use, by him, of Shakspeare’s liberty, will or will not clash with his indispensable duty of nobleness. He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible. ”

“ Even Mr Brandreth skips it. It is not merely offensive words; but the purest and simplest phrases, as a man’s ‘dear life’, ‘dear knees’, or his ‘tightly-built house’, are a stumbling-block to translators. No stronger proof is necessary, or perhaps is possible, than these phenomena give, that to shed an antique hue over Homer is of first necessity to a translator: without it, injustice is done both to the reader and to the poet. Whether I have managed the style well, is a separate question, and is matter of detail. ”

“ To read Homer’s own thoughts is to wander in a world abounding with freshness: but if we insist on treading round and round in our own footsteps, we shall never ascend those heights whence the strange region is to be seen. Surely an intelligent learned critic ought to inculcate on the unlearned, that if they would get instruction from Homer, they must not expect to have their ears tickled by a musical sound as of a namby-pamby poetaster; but must look on a metre as doing its duty, when it ‘strings the mind up to the necessary pitch’ in elevated passages ”

“ Like all learned men, accustomed to desire definite rules, he draws his conclusions too absolutely; he wants to include too much under his rules; he does not quite perceive that in poetical criticism the shade, the fine distinction, is everything; and that, when he has once missed this, in all he says he is in truth but beating the air. For instance: because I think Homer noble, he imagines I must think him elegant; and in fact he says in plain words that I do think him so, that to me Homer seems ‘pervadingly elegant’. ”

“ When I say, the translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author;—that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; ”

“ They grow out of its excellences and cannot be separated. By avoiding a few eccentric phrases you will do little to remove the deep-seated eccentricity of its very essence. Odd and eccentric it will remain, unless you despoil it of its heart, and reduce it to a fashionable philosophy’. And just so do I reply to Mr Arnold. The Homeric style (whether it be that of an individual or of an age) is peculiar, is ‘odd’, if Mr Arnold like the word, to the very core. Its eccentricities in epithet are mere efflorescences of its essential eccentricity. ”

“ Inspiration from a metre which has no recognised type? from a metre which the heart and soul of the nation ignores? I believe, if the metre can inspire anything, it is to frolic and gambol 129with Mr Clough. Mr Arnold’s English hexameter cannot be a higher inspiration to him, than the true hexameter was to a Greek: yet that metre inspired strains of totally different essential genius and merit.
But I claim Mr Arnold himself as confessing that our ballad metre is epical, when he says that Scott is ‘bastard-epic’. ”

“ Our present literature, which is very far, certainly, from having the spirit and power of Elizabethan genius, yet has in its own way these faults, eccentricity, and arbitrariness, quite as much as the Elizabethan literature ever had. They are the cause that, while upon none, perhaps, of the modern literatures has so great a sum of force been expended as upon the English literature, at the present hour this literature, regarded not as an object of mere literary interest but as a living intellectual instrument, ranks only third in European effect and importance among the literatures of Europe ”

“ But take the whole 255range of Greek epic poetry, take the later poets, the poets of the last ages of this poetry, many of them most indifferent, Coluthus, Tryphiodorus, Quintus of Smyrna, Nonnus. Never will you find in this instrument of the hexameter, even in their hands, the vices of the ballad-style in the weak moments of this last: everywhere the hexameter, a noble, a truly epical instrument, rather resists the weakness of its employer than lends itself to it. ”

“ 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; but I well know that this is quite insufficient to establish the merits of a translation. It is nevertheless one point. ‘Homer is popular’, is one of the very few matters of fact in this controversy on which Mr Arnold and I are agreed. ‘English hexameters are not popular’, is a truth so obvious, that I do not yet believe he will deny it. Therefore, ‘Hexameters are not the metre for translating Homer’. ”

“ Be so much more the man, the thought in the two last of these lines is, when you seize it, a perfectly clear thought, and a fine thought; but it is a curious thought: Homer would not have used it. These are favourable instances of the union of plain style and words with a thought not plain in quality; but take stronger instances of this union,—let the thought be not only not plain in quality, but highly fanciful: and you have the Elizabethan conceits; you have, in spite of idiomatic style and idiomatic diction, everything which is most un-Homeric ”

“ I cannot assent to a critic killing the vital powers of our tongue. If Shakspeare might invent the compound ‘heaven-kissing’, or ‘man-ennobling’, so might William Wordsworth or Matthew Arnold; and so might I. Inspiration is not dead, nor yet is the English language.
Mr Arnold is slow to understand what I think very obvious. Let me then put a case. What if I were to scold a missionary for rendering in Feejee the phrase ‘kingdom of heaven’ and ‘Lamb of God’ accurately; also ‘saints’ and other words characteristic of the New Testament? ”

“ I cannot allow that Homer’s poetry is ballad-poetry at all. A want of capacity for sustained nobleness seems to me inherent in the ballad-form when employed 279for epic poetry. The more we examine this proposition, the more certain, I think, will it become to us. Let us but observe how a great poet, having to deliver a narrative very weighty and serious, instinctively shrinks from the ballad-form as from a form not commensurate with his subject-matter, a form too narrow and shallow for it, and seeks for a form which has more amplitude and impressiveness. ”

“ It is quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring, Ulysses to a pet ram, Agamemnon in two lines to three gods, and in the third line to a bull; the Myrmidons to wasps, Achilles to a grampus chasing little fishes, Antilochus to a wolf which kills a dog and runs away. Menelaus striding over Patroclus’s body to a heifer defending her first-born. It is quaint to say that Menelaus was as brave as a bloodsucking fly, that Agamemnon’s sobs came thick as flashes of lightning ”