Perplexed by his knowledge of the philological aspect of Homer’s language, encumbered by his own learning, Mr Newman, I say, misses the poetical aspect, misses that with which alone we are here concerned. ‘Homer _is_ odd’, he persists, fixing his eyes on his own philological analysis of μώνυξ, and μέροψς, and Κυλλοποδίων, and not on these words in their synthetic character;—just as Professor Max Müller, going a little farther back, and fixing his attention on the elementary value of the word θυγάτηρ, might say Homer was ‘odd’ for using _that_ word;—‘if the whole Greek nation, by long familiarity, had become inobservant of Homer’s oddities’, of the oddities of this ‘noble barbarian’, as Mr Newman elsewhere calls him, this ‘noble barbarian’ with the ‘lively eye of the savage’, ‘that would be no fault of mine. That would not justify Mr Arnold’s blame of me for rendering the words correctly’. _Correctly_,—ah, but what _is_ correctness in this case? This correctness of his is the very rock on which Mr Newman has split. He is so correct that at last he finds peculiarity everywhere. The true knowledge of Homer becomes at last, in his eyes, a knowledge of Homer’s ‘peculiarities, pleasant and unpleasant’. Learned men know these ‘peculiarities’, and Homer is to be translated because the unlearned are impatient to know them too. ‘That’, he exclaims, ‘is just why people want to read an English Homer, _to know all his oddities, just as learned men do_’. Here I am obliged to shake my head, and to declare that, in spite of all my respect for Mr Newman, I cannot go these lengths with him. He talks of my ‘monomaniac fancy that there is nothing quaint or antique in Homer’. Terrible learning, I cannot help in my turn exclaiming, terrible learning, which discovers so much!
Here, then, I take my leave of Mr Newman, retaining my opinion that his version of Homer is spoiled by his making Homer odd and ignoble; but having, I hope, sufficient love for literature to be able to canvass works without thinking of persons, and to hold this or that production cheap, while retaining a sincere respect, on other grounds, for its author.
In fulfilment of my promise to take this opportunity for giving the translator of Homer a little further advice, I proceed to notice one or two other criticisms which I find, in like manner, _suggestive_; which give us an opportunity, that is, of seeing more clearly, as we look into them, the true principles on which translation of Homer should rest. This is all I seek in criticisms; and, perhaps (as I have already said) it is only as one seeks a positive result of this kind, that one can get any fruit from them. Seeking a negative result from them, personal altercation and wrangling, one gets no fruit; seeking a positive result, the elucidation and establishment of one’s ideas, one may get much. Even bad criticisms may thus be made suggestive and fruitful. I declared, in a former lecture on this subject, my conviction that criticism is not the strong point of our national literature. Well, even the bad criticisms on our present topic which I meet with, serve to illustrate this conviction for me. And thus one is enabled, even in reading remarks which for Homeric criticism, for their immediate subject, have no value, which are far too personal in spirit, far too immoderate in temper, and far too heavy-handed in style, for the delicate matter they have to treat, still to gain light and confirmation for a serious idea, and to follow the Baconian injunction, _semper aliquid addiscere_, always to be adding to one’s stock of observation and knowledge. Yes, even when we have to do with writers who, to quote the words of an exquisite critic, the master of us all in criticism, M. Sainte-Beuve, remind us, when they handle such subjects as our present, of ‘Romans of the fourth or fifth century, coming to hold forth, all at random, in African style, on papers found in the desk of Augustus, Mæcenas, or Pollio’, even then we may instruct ourselves if we may regard ideas and not persons; even then we may enable ourselves to say, with the same critic describing the effect made upon him by D’Argenson’s _Memoirs_: ‘My taste is revolted, but I learn something; _Je suis choqué mais je suis instruit_’.