new is born." To the last, he has his moments of despondency. As he lies sleepless in the porch of his own house, on the rude couch allotted to him as a poor and unknown stranger, he muses how he can ever prevail against the suitors, one man against so many; he chides his own misgivings ; but he cannot allay them. Then Athena comes to him from heaven, stands above him, and comforts him: "O hard of belief! Many can trust in a weaker friend than I am, in a mortal friend; but I am divine, and I preserve thee to the end." Such is the Homeric Odysseus; no superhuman paragon, but an able, nimble-witted, brave, patient man, who fights or devises his way through many trials, not without lapses from prudence, not without experience of discouragement, but with a sound brain and a warm heart, and, thanks to the gods, with final success.

Such clear human types as these, instinct with the very essence of the Greek spirit, give to the Homeric epics that living and abiding human interest first of all for the Greeks themselves, and then for people of every race and age—which distinguishes them from all other poems of war or adventure, how rich soever in the splendor of battle or the charm of wonderland. Here is the indwelling principle of life in the Homeric poetry; but it is a harder thing Homeric to describe the characteristics of the form in which that soul is clothed. If one should say, "Read the Iliad and the Odyssey, or parts

The form of

poetry.

of them, in the original; that is the only way to obtain any adequate sense of their distinction in respect to form," he might seem to be evading his task; and yet that is strictly true; true, not only as it is, more or less, of all great poetry, but in a special degree. Translation, even the best, though it be the work of a poet, will not help far; still less will analysis, be it ever so skillful and so subtle. Nevertheless, there is one thing which any competent guide can do for those who are only about to read Homer; he can assist in orientating their minds; he can aid them in placing themselves at the right point of view; if he cannot tell them what Homer is, he can at least help them to see what Homer is not. A generation has scarcely elapsed since it was possible for an accomplished scholar to include the following epithets among those which he gave to Homer's style: "garrulous" and "quaint;" also to say, "Homer rises and sinks with his subject,-is prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is mean." Mr. Matthew Arnold's "Lectures on Translating Homer" showed once for all how erroneous is the conception which these epithets imply; we may differ from him on some points, but nothing could be better than what he says as to the four cardinal qualities of Homer, - plainness of thought, plainness of style, nobleness, and rapidity. Each plainness of can best be illustrated by a contrast. thought. First, then, plainness of thought. Agamemnon says in Homer: "There will be

Homeric

HOMERIC PLAINNESS OF THOUGHT 55

a day when sacred Ilios shall perish." How does the Elizabethan translator, Chapman, render this?

"And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I know, When sacred Troy shall shed her tow'rs, for tears of overthrow."

The addition of the epithet "stormy" to the word "day" might pass; but the thing by which Chapman violates plainness of thought, and is therefore un-Homeric, is the idea of comparing Troy's towers, as they fall, to tears which Troy sheds at her own ruin. This is not a mere padding out of the original; it is a new thought, of which the original has nothing; and moreover it is a fantastic thought, -a conceit. The Elizabethan age was fond of conceits; it was a puerile extravagance in the use of the newly recovered imagination. But if the Greek mind ever went through such a stage, that stage lies far behind Homer. When Pope said that Chapman writes, not like Homer, but as Homer might have written at an immature age, he was so far quite right. The proneness to "conceits" is a fault of immaturity.

Then as to plainness of style. Sarpedon is exhorting Glaucus to fight against the Plainness Greeks: "I would not urge thee," he of style. says, "if men could live forever. But as it is, since ten thousand fates of death beset us always, forward! Either we shall give glory to a foeman, or he to us."

Pope translates:

"But since, alas! ignoble age must come,
Disease, and death's inexorable doom,
The life which others pay, let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe."

The two last verses are an expansion of the one Greek word, toμev,-"forward!"—and how the balanced rhetoric destroys its simple force!

Note, in passing, that these two qualities, plainness of thought and plainness of style, are wholly distinct. A plain thought may be clothed in artificial language, when the result is usually bathos, as in that well-known example, where "open the bottle and cut the bread" becomes,

Set Bacchus from his glassy prison free,

And strip white Ceres of her nut-brown coat."

Or a plain style may convey a curious thought, as when Lady Macbeth says,—

"When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man."

Then thirdly, nobleness. Homer's manner is noble, whatever the subject may be, as Nobleness. he is always also simple and uncon

strained; and here the snare for the modern translator is that, in trying to be unconstrained, he is apt to become ignoble; that is, to use some word, recommended by the easy air which it gives, of which the associations are too familiar, or too prosaic-in a word, too low for poetry.

NOBLENESS—RAPIDITY

57

Chapman falls into this snare, when he renders the words spoken by the Homeric Zeus concerning the immortal steeds of Achilles & Seλú, “ye δειλώ,

hapless ones!" by a phrase which, though idiomatic, is too colloquial "poor wretched beasts!"

Rapidity.

Lastly, Homer is rapid. In combining this rapidity with unvarying nobleness, the Homeric poems are unique. Homeric rapidity has two distinct sources. The first and most essential is the quick movement of the poet's mind. His thoughts are direct; they are ever darting onward; and he does not retard their progress by details of a merely ornamental kind. "Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles," says Homer; and in his first verse he has announced his theme. Contrast the opening of "Paradise Lost":

"Of man's first disobedience and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse."

Observe that this first source of Homeric rapidity is not a necessary or universal characteristic of Greek epic poetry as such; Hesiod does not possess it. It is distinctive of Homeric epos; and though it belongs to both the Iliad and the Odyssey, it is in the Iliad that we chiefly feel this rushing impetus of mind. The other cause