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Page 21
The faults, we said, both critical and non-critical, are certainly not
lacking; and if they were not partly excused by the author's avowedly
militant position, might seem sometimes rather grave. Whatever may
have been the want of taste, and even the want of sense, in the
translation of F. W. Newman, it is almost sufficient to say that they
were neither greater nor less than might have been expected from a
person who, if the most scholarly of eccentrics, was also the most
eccentric even of English scholars. It is difficult not to think that
Mr Arnold makes too much of them and refers too frequently to them.
Such "iteration" is literally "damnable": it must be condemned as
unfair, out of place, out of taste, and even not distantly approaching
that lack of urbanity with which Mr Arnold was never tired of
reproaching his countrymen. Another translator, Mr Wright, was indeed
needlessly sensitive to Mr Arnold's strictures; but these strictures
themselves were needlessly severe. It is all very well for a reviewer,
especially if he be young and anonymous, to tell a living writer that
his book has "no reason for existing"; but chairs of literature are
not maintained by universities that their occupants may, in relation
to living persons, exercise the functions of young anonymous
reviewers. It may indeed be doubted whether these occupants should,
except in the most guarded way, touch living persons at all.
Critically too, as well as from the point of view of manners, the
_Lectures on Translating Homer_ are open to not a few criticisms.
In the first place, the assumptions are enormous, and, in some cases
at least, demonstrably baseless. One of Mr Arnold's strongest points,
for instance, not merely against Mr Newman but against Homeric
translators generally, is concerned with the renderings of the Homeric
compound adjectives, especially the stock ones--_koruthaiolos_,
_merops_, and the rest. The originals, he is never weary of repeating,
did not strike a Greek and do not strike a Greek scholar as out of the
way; the English equivalents do so strike an English reader. Now as to
the Greeks themselves, we know nothing: they have left us no positive
information on the subject. But if (which is no doubt at least partly
true) _koruthaiolos_ and _dolichoskion_ do not strike us, who have
been familiar with Greek almost as long as we can remember, as out of
the way, is that an argument? Most of us, I suppose, at about nine or
ten years old, some no doubt a little or a good deal earlier, learnt
these words as part of the ordinary Greek that was presented to us,
just as much as _kai_ and _ara_; but if we had learnt Greek as we
learn English, beginning with quite ordinary words, would it be so? I
think not; nor would it be so if people began Greek at a later and
more critical stage of their education.
It is also true that the book is full of that exceedingly arbitrary
and unproved assertion, of that rather fanciful terminology, of those
sometimes questionable �sthetic _obiter dicta_, of which, from
first to last, Mr Arnold was so prolific. When he talks about the
mysterious "grand style," and tells us that Milton can never be
affected, we murmur, "_De gustibus!_" and add mentally, "Though
Milton is the greatest of affected writers, Milton is, after
_Comus_ at least, never anything else!" When he tells us again
that at that moment (1861) "English literature as a living
intellectual instrument ranks after the literatures of France and
Germany," we remember that at the time France possessed perhaps only
one writer, Victor Hugo, and Germany absolutely none, of the calibre
of a dozen Englishmen--Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray,
Dickens, and not a few others, from Landor to Mr Ruskin; that Germany,
further, had scarcely one, though France had more than one or two,
great writers of the second class: and we say, "Either your 'living
intellectual instrument' is a juggle of words, or you really are
neglecting fact." Many--very many--similar retorts are possible; and
the most hopeless variance of all must come when we arrive at Mr
Arnold's championship of that ungainly and sterile mule the English
hexameter, and when we review the specimens of the animal that he
turns out from his own stables for our inspection.
But it matters not. For all this, and very much more than all this,
which may be passed over as unnecessary or improper, nothing like the
book had, for positive critical quality, and still more for germinal
influence, been seen by its generation, and nothing of the same
quality and influence has been seen for more than a technical
generation since. It would of course be uncritical in the last degree
to take the change in English criticism which followed as wholly and
directly Mr Arnold's work. He was not even the voice crying in the
wilderness: only one of many voices in a land ready at least to be
eared and pathed. But he was the earliest of such voices, the
clearest, most original, most potent; and a great deal of what
followed was directly due to him.
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