Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/39

28 critic, the master of us all in criticism, M. Sainte Beuve,—remind us, when they handle such subjects as our present, of ‘Romans of the fourth or fifth century, coming to hold forth, all at random, in African style, on papers found in the desk of Augustus, Mæcenas, or Pollio,’—even then we may instruct ourselves if we regard ideas and not persons; even then we may enable ourselves to say, with the same critic describing the effect made upon him by Memoirs: ‘My taste is revolted, but I learn something;—Je suis choqué, mais je suis insturit.’

But let us pass to criticisms which are suggestive directly and not thus indirectly only; criticisms by examining which we may be brought nearer to what immediately interests us,—the right way of translating Homer.

I said that Homer did not rise and sink with his subject, was never to be called prosaic and low. This gives surprise to many persons, who object that parts of the Iliad are certainly pitched lower than others, and who remind me of a number of absolutely level passages in Homer. But I never denied that a subject must rise and sink, that it must have its elevated and its level regions; all I deny is, that a poet can be said to rise and sink when all that he, as a poet, can do, is perfectly well done; when he is perfectly sound and good, that is, perfect as a poet, in the level regions of his subject as well as in its elevated regions. Indeed, what distinguishes the