Therefore, I say, the translator of Homer should penetrate himself with a sense of the plainness and directness of Homer’s style; of the simplicity with which Homer’s thought is evolved and expressed. He has Pope’s fate before his eyes, to show him what a divorce may be created even between the most gifted translator and Homer by an artificial evolution of thought and a literary cast of style.
Chapman’s style is not artificial and literary like Pope’s nor his movement elaborate and self-retarding like the Miltonic movement of Cowper. He is plain-spoken, fresh, vigorous, and, to a certain degree, rapid; and all these are Homeric qualities. I cannot say that I think the movement of his fourteen-syllable line, which has been so much commended, Homeric; but on this point I shall have more to say by and by, when I come to speak of Mr Newman’s metrical exploits. But it is not distinctly anti-Homeric, like the movement of Milton’s blank verse; and it has a rapidity of its own. Chapman’s diction, too, is generally good, that is, appropriate to Homer; above all, the syntactical character of his style is appropriate. With these merits, what prevents his translation from being a satisfactory version of Homer? Is it merely the want of literal faithfulness to his original, imposed upon him, it is said, by the exigencies of rhyme? Has this celebrated version, which has so many advantages, no other and deeper defect than that? Its author is a poet, and a poet, too, of the Elizabethan age; the golden age of English literature as it is called, and on the whole truly called; for, whatever be the defects of Elizabethan literature (and they are great), we have no development of our literature to compare with it for vigour and richness. This age, too, showed what it could do in translating, by producing a master-piece, its version of the Bible.
Chapman’s translation has often been praised as eminently Homeric. Keats’s fine sonnet in its honour everyone knows; but Keats could not read the original, and therefore could not really judge the translation. Coleridge, in praising Chapman’s version, says at the same time, ‘It will give you small idea of Homer’. But the grave authority of Mr Hallum pronounces this translation to be ‘often exceedingly Homeric’; and its latest editor boldly declares that by what, with a deplorable style, he calls ‘his own innative Homeric genius’, Chapman ‘has thoroughly identified himself with Homer’; and that ‘we pardon him even for his digressions, for they are such as we feel Homer himself would have written’.