Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/26

Rh colour; and I maintain, that “forward in mass the Trojans pitch’d,” would be an irreprovable rendering.’ He actually gives us all that as if it were a piece of scientific deduction; and as if, at the end, he had arrived at an incontrovertible conclusion. But, in truth, one cannot settle these matters quite in this way. Mr. Newman’s general rule may be true or false (I dislike to meddle with general rules), but every part in what follows must stand or fall by itself, and its soundness or unsoundness has nothing at all to do with the truth or falsehood of Mr. Newman’s general rule. He first gives, as a strict rendering of the Greek, ‘The Trojans knocked forward (or, thumped, butted forward), in close pack.’ I need not say that, as a ‘strict rendering of the Greek,’ this is good,—all Mr. Newman’s ‘strict renderings of the Greek’ are sure to be, as such, good; but ‘in close pack,’ for, seems to me to be what Mr. Newman’s renderings are not always,—an excellent poetical rendering of the Greek; a thousand times better, certainly, than Cowper’s ‘embattled close.’ Well, but Mr. Newman goes on: ‘I believe, that “forward in pack the Trojans pitch’d,” would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour.’ Here, I say, the Homeric colour is half washed out of Mr. Newman’s happy rendering of ; while in ‘pitch’d’ for , the literal fidelity of the first rendering is gone, while certainly no Homeric colour has come in its