Shining on, shining on, by no shadow made tender, Till love falls asleep in the sameness of splendour.
Such certainly is not Homer’s. His beauty, when at its height, is _wild_ beauty: it smells of the mountain and of the sea. If he be compared to a noble animal, it is not to such a spruce rubbed-down Newmarket racer as our smooth translators would pretend, but to a wild horse of the Don Cossacks: and if I, instead of this, present to the reader nothing but a Dandie Dinmont’s pony, this, as a first approximation, is a valuable step towards the true solution.
Before the best translation of the Iliad of which our language is capable can be produced, the English public has to unlearn the false notion of Homer which his _deliberately faithless_ versifiers have infused. Chapman’s conceits unfit his translation for instructing the public, even if his rhythm ‘jolted’ less, if his structure were simpler, and his dialect more intelligible. My version, if allowed to be read, will prepare the public to receive a version better than mine. I regard it as a question about to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic _landis_, _houndis_, _hartis_, etc., instead of our modern unmelodious _lands_, _hounds_, _harts_; whether the _ye_ or _y_ before the past participle may not be restored; the want of which confounds that participle with the past tense. Even the final -en of the plural of verbs (we dancen, they singen, etc.) still subsists in Lancashire. It deserves consideration whether by a _few_ such slight grammatical retrogressions into antiquity a translator of Homer might not add much melody to his poem and do good service to the language.
He attacks the same line also in p. 44; but I do not claim this as a mark, how free I am from the fault.
If I had used such a double dative, as ‘to Peleus to a mortal’, what would he have said of my syntax?
Ballad-_manner_! The prevalent ballad-_metre_ is the Common Metre of our Psalm tunes: and yet he assumes that whatever is in this metre must be on the same level. I have professed (Pref. p. x) that our _existing_ old ballads are ‘poor and mean’, and are not my pattern.
He has also overlooked the misprint _Trojans_, where I wrote _Troïans_ (in three syllables), and has thus spoiled one verse out of the five.