His work was that which the spirit of Homer put upon him, in the green fields of Hitchin. •There did shine, A beam of Homer's freer soul in mine,' he says, and by virtue of that beam, and of his devotion to Homer, George Chapman still lives. When he had completed his translations he could say, The work that I was born to do, is done.' But his translations Learning and work had been his staff through life, and had won him immortality. But for his Homer, Chapman would only be remembered by professional students. His occasional inspired lines would not win for him many readers. of the Iliad and Odyssey are masterpieces, and cannot die. Chapman's theory of translation allowed him great latitude. He conceived it to be 'a pedantical and absurd affectation to turn his author word for word,' and maintained that a translator, allowing for the different genius of the Greek and English tongues, 'must adorn' his original 'with words, and such a style and form of oration, as are most apt for the language into which they are converted.' This is an unlucky theory, for Chapman's idea of 'the style and form of oration most apt for' English poetry was remote indeed from the simplicity of Homer. The more he admired Homer, the more Chapman felt bound to dress him up in the height of rhetorical conceit. He excused himself by the argument, that we have not the epics as Homer imagined them, that 'the books were not set together by Homer.' He probably imagined that, if Homer had had his own way with his own works, he would have produced something much more in the Chapman manner, and he kindly added, ever and anon, a turn which he fancied Homer would approve. The English reader must be on his guard against this custom of Chapman's, and must remember, too, that the translator's erudition was exceedingly fantastic. Thus Chapman derives the difficult word åλønσrǹs from the letter åλa, the first in the Greek alphabet, and decides that the men whom Homer calls apŋoraì, are what modern slang calls ‘A 1 men.' Again, he names the Phoenician who seduced the nurse of Eumaeus, 'a great-wench-net-layer,' a word derived by him from Tоλνmainaλos, thus, maλevw, pertraho in retia, et mais, puella He is full of these strange philological theories, and he boldly lets them loose in his translations. Chapman has another great fault, allied indeed to a great excellence. In his speed, in the rapidity of the movement of his lines, he is Homeric. The last twelve books of the Iliad were struck out at a white heat, in fifteen weeks. Chapman was carried away by the current of the Homeric verse, and this is his great saving merit. Homer inspires him, however uncouth his utterance, as Apollo inspired the Pythoness. He 'speaks out loud and bold,' but not clear. In the heat of his hurry, Chapman flies at any rhyme to end his line, and then his rhyme has to be tagged on by the introduction of some utterly un-Homeric mode of expression. Thus, in Chapman, the majestic purity of Homer is tormented, the bright and equable speed of the river of verse leaps brawling over rocks and down narrow ravines. What can be more like Chapman, and less like Homer, than these lines in the description of the storm, How all the tops he bottoms with the deeps, Here the Greek only says 'Zeus hath troubled the deep.' It is thus that Chapman 'adorns his original.' Faults of this kind are perhaps more frequent in the Iliad than in the Odyssey. Coleridge's taste was in harmony with general opinion when he preferred the latter version, with its manageable metre, to the ruder strain of the Iliad, of which the verse is capable of degenerating into an amble, or dropping into a trot. The crudities, the inappropriate quaintnesses of Chapman's Homer, are visible enough, when we read only a page or two, here and there, in the work. Neither Homer, nor any version of Homer, should be studied piece-meal. 'He must not be read,' as Chapman truly says, 'for a few lines with leaves turned over capriciously in dismembered fractions, but throughout; the whole drift, weight, and height of his works set before the apprehensive eyes of his judge.' Thus read, the blots on Chapman's Homer almost disappear, and you see 'the massive and majestic memorial, where for all the flaws and roughnesses of the weather-beaten work the great workmen of days unborn would gather to give honour to his name.' A. LANG. THE THAMES. [From Ovid's Banquet of Sense.] Forward and back and forward went he thus, And as by London's bosom she doth fleet, Casts herself proudly through the bridge's twists, Yet straight high-flowing in her female pranks [From The Tears of Peace.] THE SPIRIT OF HOMER. 'I am,' said he, 'that spirit Elysian, That in thy native air, and on the hill Next Hitchin's left hand, did thy bosom fill With such a flood of soul, that thou wert fain, To vent it to the echoes of the vale; And I, invisibly, went prompting thee To those fair greens where thou didst English me.' Who told me, he brought stay to all my state; THE PROCESSION OF TIME. Before her flew Affliction, girt in storms, To show these Crosses borne, make peace with heaven. His craggy club; which up aloft, he hild; And all the angels singing out of heaven; And is the yellow Autumn's nightingale. HELEN ON THE RAMPART. [From Iliad III.] They reach'd the Scaean towers, Where Priam sat, to see the fight, with all his counsellors; |