Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/33

22 to Sophocles than arméd for arm’d, in Milton, sounds antiquated to us; but Mr. Newman’s withouten and muchel do sound to us antiquated, even for poetry, and therefore they do not correspond in their effect upon us with Homer’s words in their effect upon Sophocles. When Chaucer, who uses such words, is to pass current amongst us, to be familiar to us, as Homer was familiar to the Athenians, he has to be modernised, as Wordsworth and others set to work to modernise him; but an Athenian no more needed to have Homer modernised, than we need to have the Bible modernised, or Wordsworth himself.

Therefore, when Mr. Newman’s words bragly, bulkin, and the rest, are an established possession of our minds, as Homer’s words were an established possession of an Athenian’s mind, he may use them; but not till then. Chaucer’s words, the words of Burns, great poets as these were, are yet not thus an established possession of an Englishman’s mind, and therefore they must not be used in rendering Homer into English.

Mr. Newman has been misled just by doing that which his admirer praises him for doing, by taking a ‘far broader historical and philological view than’ mine. Precisely because he has done this, and has applied the ‘philological view’ where it was not applicable, but where the ‘poetical view’ alone was rightly applicable, he has fallen into error.

It is the same with him in his remarks on the