"The trampling of swift steeds is in my ears.'

The two translations of this line well illustrate, also, the superiority of Mr. Bryant's translation as a metrical composition. He is a master of our heroic blank verse, as even the earliest of his poems proved; not indeed of those lofty and intricate harmonies, of which Milton alone has proved it capable; not of those ethereal, lingering melodies, which died with Shelley; not of the verse of Tennyson, which more than half hides a fascinating depth under a brilliant superficial polish; but the verse of Bryant has also its own characteristic music and beauties. It is varied, easy, and pleasing, and is not excelled by any other in its power of rising to an exalted solemnity, and of sinking to a natural familiarity; of sympathizing in its movement with all forms of passion, and of reflecting, without abruptness, all changes of tone. On the other hand, Lord Derby was not a poet, and the most serious fault which the general reader finds in him is his want of mastery over this difficult form of composition. His lines can be scanned," but they are very rarely melodious. They satisfy the mind with their sense, but not the ear with their music. In Homer the sound is the first source of power. Mr. Bryant has succeeded in giving to his verse something of the charm which the scholar finds in the grand roll of the inimitable Greek hexameter; but in Lord Derby's pages the sound is no source of power, and has no charm whatever. It would be ungracious to single out passages in which the want of melody is conspicuous, since no ear that is attuned to our noblest metre, as Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Tennyson have written it, can find enjoyment in any page of Lord Derby's verse.

66

In order to bring this discussion within fair limits, it has been necessary to avoid citations. But to illustrate all that has been said of the merits and faults of the translators, it is desirable to set before the reader at least one passage, in the various forms which the best of them have given to it. For this purpose we may appropriately select a few lines, which are characteristic in themselves of the Homeric fire and magnificence, and have been imitated in the most splendid battlescene in contemporary poetry, that of Lyonnesse, described by Mr. Tennyson in "The Passing of Arthur"

"In the mist

Was many a noble deed, many a base,

And chance and craft and strength in single fights.
And ever and anon with host to host

Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn,
Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash
Of battle-axes on shattered helms, and shrieks
After the Christ, of those who falling down
Looked up for heaven, and only saw the mist;
And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,
Oaths, insults, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,
Sweat, writhings, anguish, laboring of the lungs
In that close mist, and cryings for the light,

Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead."

The literal meaning of Homer's words may be given thus, in bald prose:

"And they (the armies) when now meeting they reached one place, struck together oxhides (shields), and together spears and mights (strong frames) of warriors in bronze breastplates; but shields with bosses were dashed on one another, and a great din arose. And there at once was wailing and exultation of warriors, slaying and slain, and the earth ran with blood." *

Chapman's unequal version fails here, and is not worth quoting. Pope's is thoroughly characteristic, both of his de fects and of his merits :

"Now shield with shield, with helmet helmet closed,

To armor armor, lance to lance opposed.

Host against host with shadowy squadrons drew,
The sounding darts in iron tempests flew,
Victors and vanquished join promiscuous cries,

And shrilling shouts and dying groans arise;

With streaming blood the slippery fields are dyed,
And slaughtered heroes swell the dreadful tide."

Homer's first line is entirely changed in meaning, and loses all its simplicity, by the transposition made for the sake of

* οἱ δ ̓ ὅτε δή ρ' ἐς χῶρον ἕνα ξυνιόντες ίκοντο,

σύν ῥ ̓ ἔβαλον ῥινούς, σὺν δ ̓ ἔγχεα καὶ μένὲ ἀνδρῶν
χαλκεοθωρήκων· ἀτὰρ ἀσπίδες ὀμφαλόεσσαι
ἔπληντ' ἀλλήλῃσι, πολὺς δ ̓ ὀρυμαγδός ορώρει.
ἔνθα δ' ἅμ' οιμωγή τε καὶ εὐχωλὴ πέλεν ἀνδρῶν
ὀλλύντων τε καὶ ὀλλυμένων· ῥέε δ' αἵματι γαῖα.

Iliad, IV. 446-451.

rhyme; and the fourth and eighth lines of Pope are made for the rhyme only, having not a word in Homer to justify them. The simple, but impressive antithesis of the original, “wailing and exultation of slaying and slain," is multiplied into a long series of verbal contrasts, adding enormously to that artificial character which is always, at best, displayed to some extent by rhyming couplets. It is almost unnecessary to point out the inconsistency of such phrases as "shadowy squadrons,' "iron tempests," "slippery fields" which are "dyed," and a "tide" that is "swelled" by "slaughtered heroes," with the Homeric tone.

Cowper did his best on this passage, with the following result:

"And now the battle joined. Shield clashed with shield
And spear with spear, conflicting corselets rang,

Bossed bucklers met, and tumult wild arose.
Then, many a yell was heard, and many a shout
Loud intermixed, the slayer o'er the maimed

Exulting, and the field was drenched with blood."

Cowper's boast, while censuring Pope for adding so much of his own to Homer, was "I have omitted nothing, I have invented nothing." But he certainly, without knowing it, invented the slowest, heaviest blank verse ever written by a man of genius, and fettered Homer with it. His "conflicting corselets," "shout loud intermixed," and "field drenched," not only suggest thoughts quite foreign to the original and out of harmony with the epic style, but they load his lines with a weight under which they cannot move. Instead of Homer's unconscious and lavish fulness, he gives us condensation; instead of Homer's straightforwardness, forced and halting inversions of the natural order.

Professor Newman saw clearly that the Homeric poems were the Greek ballads, and that rhyme was impossible in a translation of them; but he strangely inferred that an English ballad metre without rhyme would best represent the metrical form of the Iliad. His version of this passage

is:

"When to encounter hasting, they were on one spot assembled,

Hides clashed on hides, and spear on spear, and might with might of heroes
In brazen armor corsleted; the shields with sturdy bosses
Each upon each leant hard, and raised tumultuous disorder.

Then rose there, all around, of men a groaning and a boasting,
From victors or from vanquished; and reeked the earth with carnage."

On the other hand, Professor Blackie felt that the abandonment of rhyme only uncloaks the ragged poverty of our ballad metres, yet believed that no other metre is appropriate to Homer. He gives us these lines:

"But now the hosts together rushed, and each did each assail,

And buckler upon buckler rang, and hurtled mail on mail;

And might of man did might oppose, flashed spear to spear, and rang
The war-cry loud and shrill, and shield met shield with brassy clang ;
And many a shout and many a yell to heaven commingled goeth,
From men who struck and men who fell; the field with crimson floweth."

In all these attempts there is very little of the Homeric style or effect, and it seems strange that either the ear or the mind of a translator could be satisfied with any of them. It seems quite as strange that every one of them should have followed Chapman and Pope in the artificial and unepic repetitions of the nouns "shield," "spear," and "might," or their substitutes, of which Homer, of course, has nothing.

Turning to the writers of English hexameters, we find the following report of the passage by Mr. Simcox:

"But when the hosts advancing met in the midst of the champaign,

Then together were dashed shields, spears, and the strength of the heroes
Armed in brazen mail, while ever each boss-bearing buckler

One 'gainst the other clashed, and loud was the roar of the tumult.
Then together arose the wail and the boast of the heroes

Slaying and being slain, while the ground with the red blood was flowing."

Sir John Herschel has also made what are called hexameters of the same lines, thus:

"Now when at length the hosts were met and were hurled on each other, Clashed together their spears and the tough bull-hides of their bucklers, Breast against breast, and might against might, they drove, and the bosses Round, of their shields, met rude, and dire was the crash of their meeting. Then to the sky broke forth loud shouts and groans of the heroes Slaying and slain. Then streamed with blood the ground that they trampled."

If this is verse, lovers of English poetry will ask, what is prose? The six hexameters here include seventy-six words, each with its own distinct word accent, where the Greek has but forty-seven. While there are in each line of the Greek,

upon the average, three metrical pauses or cæsuras, that is to say, places in which the flow of the metre is more or less interrupted, by the end of one word and the beginning of another, there are ten in each English line. In reading Homer, the voice has to utter, in the six lines, one hundred and five distinct consonant sounds; but in reading Sir John Herschel's translation, one hundred and eighty-five must be pronounced in the corresponding passage. Thus in English hexameters not only is quantity, the essential principle of the hexameter, wholly unknown, but the multiplicity of little words destroys the metrical value of the pauses, on the proper adjustment of which the harmony of the heroic Greek verse depends, and delays and breaks up the movement; while, finally, the accumulation of rough consonant sounds in our words adds vastly to these defects. Measured by the ear, there is not in the Iliad a line either so harsh in sound or exacting so much time for its utterance as the most rapid and musical hexameter in either of the translations quoted above.

Lord Derby's rendering of the same passage preserves more closely the sense of the Greek than any of the preceding :

"When to the midst they came, together rushed
Bucklers and lances, and the furious might
Of mail-clad warriors; bossy shield on shield
Clattered in conflict; loud the clamor rose.
Then rose too mingled shouts and groans of men
Slaying and slain; the earth ran red with blood."

Here are positive faults enough; the word "rushed "suggests a personification of the weapons wholly foreign to the spirit of the original; "the midst" is weak; "furious" is a superfluous addition; "clattered" is undignified and inaccurate; "too" is ambiguous to the ear, and makes the verse halt as well as the sense; and "in conflict," "mingled," and "red" are the translator's tameness, for which Homer is not responsible. The lines are a fair specimen of the dead level of Lord Derby's verse. If the Iliad were known to the world only in his version, it would be read with interest as a picture of the heroic age, but Homer would never find a place among the great names in literature.