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Ir has more than once been suggested to me that I should translate Homer. That is a task for which I have neither the time nor the courage; but the suggestion led me to regard yet more closely a poet whom I had already long studied, and for one or two years the works of Homer were seldom out of my hands. The study of classical literature is probably on the decline; but, whatever may be the fate of this study in general, it is certain that as instruction spreads and the number of readers increases, attention will 10 be more and more directed to the poetry of Homer, not indeed as part of a classical course, but as the most important poetical monument existing. Even within the last ten years two fresh translations of the Iliad have appeared in England: one by a man of great ability and genuine learning, Professor Newman; the other by Mr. Wright, the conscientious and painstaking translator of Dante. It may safely be asserted that neither of these works will take rank as the standard translation of Homer; that the task of rendering him will still be attempted by other translators. 20 It may perhaps be possible to render to these some service, to save them some loss of labour, by pointing out rocks on which their predecessors have split, and the right objects on which a translator of Homer should fix his attention.

It is disputed, what aim a translator should propose to himself in dealing with his original. Even this preliminary is not yet settled. On one side it is said, that the translation ought to be such that the reader should, if possible, forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work; something 30 original,' (if the translation be in English), 'from an English hand.' The real original is in this case, it is said, taken

as a basis on which to rear a poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have affected its natural hearers.' On the other hand, Mr. Newman,

who states the foregoing doctrine only to condemn it, declares that he aims at precisely the opposite: to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as he is able, with the greater care the more foreign it may happen to be; SO that it may never be forgotten that he is imitating, and imitating in a different material.' The translator's first duty,' says Mr. Newman, is a historical one; to be faithful.' Probably both sides would agree that the translator's first duty is to be faithful; but the question at issue between them is, in what faithfulness consists.

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My one object is to give practical advice to a translator; and I shall not the least concern myself with theories of translation as such. But I advise the translator not to try 'to rear on the basis of the Iliad, a poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have affected its natural hearers; and for this simple reason, that we cannot possibly tell how the Iliad affected its natural hearers.' It is probably meant merely that he should try to affect Englishmen powerfully, as Homer affected Greeks powerfully; but this direction is not enough, 20 and can give no real guidance. For all great poets affect their hearers powerfully, but the effect of one poet is one thing, that of another poet another thing: it is our translator's business to reproduce the effect of Homer, and the most powerful emotion of the unlearned English reader can never assure him whether he has reproduced this, or whether he has produced something else. So, again, he may follow Mr. Newman's directions, he may try to be 'faithful,' he may retain every peculiarity of his original ;' but who is to assure him, who is to assure Mr. Newman 30 himself, that, when he has done this, he has done that for which Mr. Newman enjoins this to be done, adhered closely to Homer's manner and habit of thought'? Evidently the translator needs some more practical directions than these. No one can tell him how Homer affected the Greeks; but there are those who can tell him how Homer affects them. These are scholars; who possess, at the same time with knowledge of Greek, adequate poetical taste and feeling. No translation will seem to them of much worth compared with the original; but they alone can say, 40 whether the translation produces more or less the same

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effect upon them as the original. They are the only competent tribunal in this matter: the Greeks are the unlearned Englishman has not the data for judging; and no man can safely confide in his own single judgment of his own work. Let not the translator, then, trust to his notions of what the ancient Greeks would have thought of him; he will lose himself in the vague. Let him not trust, to what the ordinary English reader thinks of him; he will be taking the blind for his guide. Let him not trust 10 to his own judgment of his own work; he may be misled by individual caprices. Let him ask how his work affects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry ; whether to read it gives the Provost of Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cambridge, or Professor Jowett here in Oxford, at all the same feeling which to read the original gives them. I consider that when Bentley said of Pope's translation, it was a pretty poem, but must not be called Homer,' the work, in spite of all its power and attractiveness, was judged.

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Ὡς ἂν ὁ φρόνιμος ὁρίσειεν— as the judicious would deterzo mine—that is a test to which every one professes himself willing to submit his works. Unhappily, in most cases, no two persons agree as to who 'the judicious' are. In the present case, the ambiguity is removed: I suppose the translator at one with me as to the tribunal to which alone he should look for judgment; and he has thus obtained a practical test by which to estimate the real success of his work. How is he to proceed, in order that his work, tried by this test, may be found most successful?

First of all, there are certain negative counsels which I 30 will give him. Homer has occupied men's minds so much, such a literature has arisen about him, that every one who approaches him should resolve strictly to limit himself to that which may directly serve the object for which he approaches him. I advise the translator to have nothing to do with the questions, whether Homer ever existed; whether the poet of the Iliad be one or many; whether the Iliad be one poem or an Achilleis and an Iliad stuck together; whether the Christian doctrine of the Atonement is shadowed forth in the Homeric mythology; whether the 40 Goddess Latona in any way prefigures the Virgin Mary, and so on. These are questions which have been discussed

with learning, with ingenuity, nay, with genius; but they have two inconveniences; one general for all who approach them, one particular for the translator. The general inconvenience is, that there really exist no data for determining them. The particular inconvenience is, that their solution by the translator, even were it possible, could be of no benefit to his translation.

I advise him, again, not to trouble himself with constructing a special vocabulary for his use in translation; with excluding a certain class of English words, and with 10 confining himself to another class, in obedience to any theory about the peculiar qualities of Homer's style. Mr. Newman says that the entire dialect of Homer being essentially archaic, that of a translator ought to be as much Saxo-Norman as possible, and owe as little as possible to the elements thrown into our language by classical learning.' Mr. Newman is unfortunate in the observance of his own theory; for I continually find in his translation words of Latin origin, which seem to me quite alien to the simplicity of Homer: responsive,' for instance, which is a favourite 20 word of Mr. Newman, to represent the Homeric åμeißóμevos:

Great Hector of the motley helm thus spake to her responsive.
But thus responsively to him spake god-like Alexander.

And the word 'celestial,' again, in the grand address of
Zeus to the horses of Achilles,

You, who are born celestial, from Eld and Death exempted!

seems to me in that place exactly to jar upon the feeling as too bookish. But, apart from the question of Mr. Newman's fidelity to his own theory, such a theory seems to me both dangerous for a translator and false in itself. Dangerous 30 for a translator; because, wherever one finds such a theory announced, (and one finds it pretty often,) it is generally followed by an explosion of pedantry; and pedantry is of

itself; because, in fact, we owe to the Latin element in our language most of that very rapidity and clear decisiveness by which it is contradistinguished from the German, and in sympathy with the languages of Greece and Rome: so that to limit an English translator of Homer to words of Saxon

origin is to deprive him of one of his special advantages for translating Homer. In Voss's well-known translation of Homer, it is precisely the qualities of his German language itself, something heavy and trailing both in the structure of its sentences and in the words of which it is composed, which prevent his translation, in spite of the hexameters, in spite of the fidelity, from creating in us the impression created by the Greek. Mr. Newman's prescription, if followed, would just strip the English translator of the 10 advantage which he has over Voss.

The frame of mind in which we approach an author influences our correctness of appreciation of him; and Homer should be approached by a translator in the simplest frame of mind possible. Modern sentiment tries to make the ancient not less than the modern world its own; but against modern sentiment in its applications to Homer the translator, if he would feel Homer truly-and unless he feels him truly, how can he render him truly ?—cannot be too much on his guard. For example: the writer of an 20 interesting article on English translations of Homer, in the last number of the National Review, quotes, I see, with admiration, a criticism of Mr. Ruskin on the use of the epithet ovaioos, life-giving,' in that beautiful passage, in the third book of the Iliad, which follows Helen's mention of her brothers Castor and Pollux as alive, though they were in truth dead:

ὡς φάτο· τοὺς δ ̓ ἤδη κάτεχεν φυσίζους αἷα

ἐν Λακεδαίμονι αὖθι, φίλῃ ἐν πατρίδι γαίῃ.1

The poet,' says Mr. Ruskin, 'has to speak of the earth 30 in sadness; but he will not let that sadness affect or change his thought of it. No; though Castor and Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our mother still,-fruitful, life-giving.' This is just a specimen of that sort of application of modern sentiment to the ancients, against which a student, who wishes to feel the ancients truly, cannot too resolutely defend himself. It reminds one, as, alas ! so much of Mr. Ruskin's writing reminds one, of those words of the most delicate of living critics: Comme tout genre de composition a son écueil particulier, celui du genre romanesque,

1 Iliad, iii. 243.