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And, secondly, of Hector :

"In this fire must Hector's trial shine:

Here must his country, father, friends, be in him made divine.
And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I know,
When sacred Troy shall shed her towers for tears of overthrow."

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The question raised by the new school of critics and translators is different from what any of these have tried to solve. To interpret the sense; to satisfy the musical ear; to reproduce the poetic effect, these three conditions of a satisfactory version of a great poem are better understood, and are judged by a critical tribunal infinitely more severe than that which pronounced the verdicts of twenty years ago. The cultivation of the English ear and taste by the mere fact that the poems of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold have been written, of itself imposes one terrifying condition on the new translator; while the subtile and exquisite penetration into the spirit of remote ages, and the sanctuaries of ancient faith, to which the pioneering of the giants of modern learning has opened the way, puts a bar at the entrance to any who will not approach the task with something like a religious reverence, at least, a genuine sympathy with the spirit of a primitive and poetic creed. Add to this the questions raised by the mere vocabulary of Homer, its wealth of radicals, its multitude of bare, brief vocables, with its perfect ease and pliancy in the combining of them, its facile disregard of the formalities of orthography and syntax, its antique phrase and coloring answering to we are not agreed what precise period of our own English literature, and we have a problem that was well worthy to vex the ingenuity of the most skilful, and gauge the scholarship of the most learned, and test the poetic creed of the most cultivated pupils in the school of modern song.

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It is far from being our purpose to go over the ground of all the various essays of the last few years in this direction; still less to enter on the discussion of that question so old, and yet so tempting always, as to what precise department of modern literature answers nearest to the Homeric lay. The practical results of the discussion in the attempted versions, and the state of the question at the point to which it is brought by the men of cultivated leisure, to whom it is one of the earnest

things of life, lie before our minds as a pleasant literary fact, worth recognizing as one of the mental phases of the time, apart from the points of pure learning involved or the genuine poetic pleasure attained. Almost every reader has associations of his own, far or near, with the father of song, enough to make him glad of anything that brings him intelligently nearer to the right understanding of him, and through him of the Greek world of poetry and art. The attempts that have been made to illustrate the ballad character which some have found in the Homeric poems, the versions appearing in Blackwood and elsewhere of single passages and books, the incidental criticisms in which Ruskin sketches so vividly that island-world open to the poet's eye, all these have been part of that task of preparation by which the ear of the English public was to be won, and the way made a little plainer for our friend, the coming translator of Homer," in whose behalf the charming lectures of Mr. Arnold have been written.

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The translation of Professor Newman holds a conspicuous position among those preliminary essays of which we have just spoken. It does not claim to be, in the strictest sense, so much as a poem at all, certainly not the consummate work of art which a satisfying poetic version of the Iliad ought to be. It would be quite unjust to judge it by any such standard. It is an attempt made by a very able and accomplished scholar to convey to the unlearned English reader exactly what the songs of Homer convey to a diligent student of them, to do it without the restraints of rhyme (which makes strict fidelity impossible), but in a rhythmical form, which permits us to follow the original generally verse by verse, while it forbids us to forget that what we read is poetry, and not prose; a form also which enables us to keep sufficiently near the style of Homer himself, a style, according to Mr. Newman, "direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous, abounding with formulas, redundant in particles and affirmatory interjections, as also in grammatical connectives of time, place, and argument." Such a rhythmical form Mr. Newman considers that he has found by a process of analysis and experiment of his own, in a slight modification of the familiar old ballad measure, (the 66 common metre" of

our hymn-books,) giving it a cadence approaching that of the hexameter. Finally, having reached this result by considerations purely critical, he is gratified to find that he has "exactly alighted on the metre which the modern Greeks adopt for the Homeric hexameter, ever since they have abandoned the musical principle of quantity (or time) as determining metre, and betaken themselves to accent." He will not, moreover, let us forget that the poem we are reading is in a language very remote and strange; in a dialect of that language which was already antique, if not " quaint and odd," to the Greeks of a later day, with whom we have (in comparison) an every-day acquaintance, a dialect, in fact, which answers, as nearly as may be (he holds), to that of Chaucer or the earlier Border Minstrelsy. Accordingly, we have in his version not only a studied antiquity of phrase in general, but a glossary including such strange terms as "gramsome (direful),"mote (assembly),"skirl" (to cry shrilly), "bulkin " (calf), and "bragly" (proudly fine); which last two especially have provoked no little playful satire from Mr. Arnold.*

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An author may justly claim judgment according to the object he has in view, and indulgence for such principles of composition as he has in good faith adopted. But he will not wish to shun fair criticism. And, after making due allowance for the reasons which Mr. Newman pleads, even granting his phrases to be, now and then, both helpful and suggestive,† we feel his principle to be a mistaken one, and the thing he attempts an impossibility. An antique dialect, like Homer's, cannot be reproduced, even approximately, in the precise effect it has on the mind of the reader to whom it has grown

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* "One of his friends gravely tells me that Mr. Newman 'lived with the fellows of Balliol.' As if that made Mr. Newman's glossary less inexplicable to me! As if he could have got his glossary from the fellows of Balliol! As if I could believe that the members of that distinguished society.. were, in Mr. Newman's time, so far removed from the Attic purity of speech which we all of us admired, that, when one of them called a calf a bulkin, the rest easily understood him '; or when he wanted to say that a newspaper article was proudly fine,' it mattered little whether he said it was that or bragly." — Last Words, p. 5.

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† Such, for instance, as curling-eyed Achaians" and "clumsy-footed oxen," with his notes thereon. The sweet phrase pododáкrudos nos suggests to Mr. Newman the picture of an Oriental lady, whose finger-tips are dyed with henna.

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familiar through a special training, — least of all through a medium which has become uncouth and strange to us, and which is in no sense the mother tongue of him who uses it. A gentleman and scholar has something the air, in handling the dialect of old ballads, so simple, quaint, and tender, that he would have in handling the pastoral crook, and deporting himself as a shepherd. It is a difficulty which runs through all attempts, however skilful; it crops out in all imitations of foreign speech,-unless, indeed, the effect aimed at be dramatic, not lyrical or descriptive. The Scotch is a genuine poetic dialect, because to Burns it was his own mother tongue. So with some very tender and pleasing lyrics we have seen in some of the ruder English dialects; so with the specimens we sometimes see in the patois of rustic provinces of France or Germany. Each tongue, each local dialect, has a flavor of its own, like a strawberry or grape, and each its particular charm. And it is not a despicable taste which prefers the wild flavor of the wood-strawberry to that of the rarest seedling. But the imitation of these rustic tongues in an affected rusticity of ours is a pitiful failure, after all. And, with all the painstaking wit and genius of satiric fun in "Hosea Biglow," his efforts are at best a doubtful and a tiresome success. The Yankee dialect in them is not redeemed from its vulgarity simply because it is not genuine; it is the masquerading of a gentleman, and not the unstudied speech of the "uncouth swain." But the "Biglow Papers" no more disprove the possible idealizing of this quaint step-mother tongue of ours, though they would do it if anything could, than some genteel imitation of the Ayrshire jargon a hundred years ago would have made impossible Burns's "Field Mouse" or his "Highland Mary." The objection we feel to Mr. Newman's ancient English is not the antiquity, but the modernness of it. Some words have altered their sense, and some have lost their senses altogether. It is in vain to argue on archæological grounds against the effect on a modern reader of such phrases as "dapper-greaved Achaians," and "with mighty skirling

* Of which a clever specimen appeared a few months since in the "Atlantic." † Mr. Longfellow has shunned both failure and success, by not attempting to translate "The Blind Girl of Castèl-Cuillé" (as he suggests) into Scottish.

rushed," or of the address of Zeus to the Queen of Heaven, beginning, "O elf-possessèd wight!" Mr. Marsh has laid it down, as the test of our familiarity with a given idiom, that one should be sensible of the ludicrous effect of a blunder in using it. The imitations of old English we have seen which have to us least of this ludicrous effect, are one or two brief poems of Mr. Kingsley, and this, probably, because our ignorance of the particular idiom they copy is most profound. This difficulty is one from which grammars and dictionaries will not save us. And it is only enhanced by those undisguisedly modern phrases which cannot be avoided, and which show like a ground of glossy broadcloth on which strips of serge and brocade have been painfully stitched, — as when the Greeks "held their shields orbicular," or when, in comforting his spouse, "Great Hector of the motley helm then spake to her responsive."

It is with sincere respect to the faithful and painstaking scholarship evident throughout this version, that we have tried to separate between what it does accomplish and what it either attempts not at all or undertakes on mistaken prin

* The word thus rendered (Aapóvios) gives a curious example of Mr. Newman's practice. We count ten instances of its use in the Iliad, addressed as above to Here, (I. 561 and IV. 31); next, by Agamemnon to heroes and to laggards (II. 190, 200); by Helen to Aphrodite (III. 399); by Hector to Paris (VI. 326 and 521), to chide and to cheer; by Hector and Andromache to each other (VI. 407, 486); and, lastly, by Iris to Hecuba (XXIV. 194), in which instance it is rendered “ lady" by Mr. Newman. The word "elf" (of which creature Puck is the English type) is, to say the least, an unfortunate equivalent of Aaípov, which in Homer includes the greater deities, as Aphrodite (Il. III. 420). The word would seem to be a term of courtesy, originating (as all such phrases do) in a feeling of religious veneration; but nearly as devoid of any such suggestion, even in Homer's time, as it was afterwards in Athens, or as Monsieur is in French.

† We once set a very intelligent Spaniard about rendering "Paul and Virginia" from Castilian into English. In one passage the pretty pastoral shows Paul straying in his grief in lonely places, while "the lambs and kids followed him bleating"; or, as our young friend had it, "the lambs and the little he-goats went gaping after him." All which was duly vouched by the lexicographer. The complacency of many a modern Latin verse-monger lies no doubt in the fact that his true critics are buried in the grave of the Cæsars.

Among the descriptive personal epithets, why does not Mr. Newman make Hector " tall," as Homer does? In Il. XXIV. 477, the term is thus rightly rendered, as applied to Priam. We are particularly surprised that he should present us the names of the Homeric deities in their Latinized disguises.

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