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PREFACE.

There would have been less controversy about the proper
method of Homeric translation, if critics bad recognised
that the question is a purely relative one, that of Homer
there can be no final translation. The taste and the
literary habits of each age demand different qualities in
poetry, and therefore a different sort of rendering of
Homer. To the men of the time of Elizabeth, Homer would
have appeared bald, it seems, and lacking in ingenuity, if
he had been presented in his antique simplicity. For the
Elizabethan age, Chapman supplied what was then necessary, 
and the mannerisms that were then deemed of the essence of
poetry, namely, daring and luxurious conceits. Thus in
Chapman's verse Troy must 'shed her towers for tears of
overthrow,' and when the winds toss Odysseus about, their
sport must be called 'the horrid tennis.'

In the age of Anne, 'dignity' and 'correctness' had to be
given to Homer, and Pope gave them by aid of his dazzling
rhetoric, his antitheses, his nettete, his command of every
conventional and favourite artifice. Without Chapman's
conceits, Homer's poems would hardly have been what the
Elizabethans took for poetry; without Pope's smoothness,
and Pope's points, the Iliad and Odyssey would have seemed
rude, and harsh in the age of Anne. These great
translations must always live as English poems. As
transcripts of Homer they are like pictures drawn from a
lost point of view. Chaque siecle depuis le xvi a ue de ce
cote son belveder different. Again, when Europe woke to a
sense, an almost exaggerated and certainly uncritical
sense, of the value of her songs of the people, of all the
ballads that Herder, Scott, Lonnrot, and the rest
collected, it was commonly said that Homer was a
ballad-minstrel, that the translator must imitate the
simplicity, and even adopt the formulae of the ballad.
Hence came the renderings of Maginn, the experiments of Mr.
Gladstone, and others. There was some excuse for the error
of critics who asked for a Homer in ballad rhyme. The Epic
poet, the poet of gods and heroes, did indeed inherit some
of the formulae of the earlier Volks-lied. Homer, like the
author of The Song of Roland, like the singers of the
Kalevala, uses constantly recurring epithets, and repeats,
word for word, certain emphatic passages, messages, and so
on. That custom is essential in the ballad, it is an
accident not the essence of the epic. The epic is a poem of
complete and elaborate art, but it still bears some
birthmarks, some signs of the early popular chant, out of
which it sprung, as the garden-rose springs from the wild
stock, When this is recognised the demand for ballad-like
simplicity and 'ballad-slang' ceases to exist, and then all
Homeric translations in the ballad manner cease to
represent our conception of Homer. After the belief in the
ballad manner follows the recognition of the romantic vein
in Homer, and, as a result, came Mr. Worsley's admirable
Odyssey. This masterly translation does all that can be
done for the Odyssey in the romantic style. The smoothness
of the verse, the wonderful closeness to the original,
reproduce all of Homer, in music and in meaning, that can
be rendered in English verse. There still, however, seems
an aspect Homeric poems, and a demand in connection with
Homer to be recognised, and to be satisfied.

Sainte-Beuve says, with reference probably to M. Leconte de
Lisle's prose version of the epics, that some people treat
the epics too much as if the were sagas. Now the Homeric
epics are sagas, but then they are the sagas of the divine
heroic age of Greece, and thus are told with an art which
is not the art of the Northern poets. The epics are stories
about the adventures of men living in most respects like
the men of our own race who dwelt in Iceland, Norway,
Denmark, and Sweden. The epics are, in a way, and as far as
manners and institutions are concerned, historical
documents. Whoever regards them in this way, must wish to
read them exactly as they have reached us, without modern
ornament, with nothing added or omitted. He must recognise,
with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that what he now wants, namely,
the simple truth about the matter of the poem, can only be
given in prose, 'for in a verse translation no original
work is any longer recognisable.' It is for this reason
that we have attempted to tell once more, in simple prose,
the story of Odysseus. We have tried to transfer, not all
the truth about the poem, but the historical truth, into
English. In this process Homer must lose at least half his
charm, his bright and equable speed, the musical current of
that narrative, which, like the river of Egypt, flows from
an indiscoverable source, and mirrors the temples and the
palaces of unforgotten gods and kings. Without this music
of verse, only a half truth about Homer can be told, but
then it is that half of the truth which, at this moment, it
seems most necessary to tell. This is the half of the truth
that the translators who use verse cannot easily tell. They
MUST be adding to Homer, talking with Pope about 'tracing
the mazy lev'ret o'er the lawn,' or with Mr. Worsley about
the islands that are 'stars of the blue Aegaean,' or with
Dr. Hawtrey about 'the earth's soft arms,' when Homer says
nothing at all about the 'mazy lev'ret,' or the 'stars of
the blue Aegaean,' or the 'soft arms' of earth. It would be
impertinent indeed to blame any of these translations in
their place. They give that which the romantic reader of
poetry, or the student of the age of Anne, looks for in