Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/28

Rh Such a suggestion I find in Mr. Newman’s remarks on my assertion that the translator of Homer must not adopt a quaint and antiquated style in rendering him, because the impression which Homer makes upon the living scholar is not that of a poet quaint and antiquated, but that of a poet perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible. I added that we cannot, I confess, really know how Homer seemed to Sophocles, but that it is impossible to me to believe that he seemed to him quaint and antiquated. Mr. Newman asserts, on the other hand, that I am absurdly wrong here; that Homer seemed ‘out and out’ quaint and antiquated to the Athenians; that ‘every sentence of him was more or less antiquated to Sophocles, who could no more help feeling at every instant the foreign and antiquated character of the poetry, than an Englishman can help feeling the same in reading Burns’s poems.’ And not only does Mr, Newman say this, but he has managed thoroughly to convince some of his readers of it. ‘Homer’s Greek,’ says one of them, ‘certainly seemed antiquated to the historical times of Greece. Mr. Newman, taking a far broader historical and philological view than Mr. Arnold, stoutly maintains that it did seem so.’ And another says: ‘Doubtless Homer’s dialect and diction were as hard and obscure to a later Attic Greek, as Chaucer to an Englishman of our day.’

Mr. Newman goes on to say, that not only was