Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/220

 This word is equivalent in meaning to Delicate and Nice, but has precisely the epical character in which both those words are deficient. For instance, I say, that after the death of Patroclus, the coursers 'stood motionless',

Drooping t[)o]wārd the ground their heads,   and down their plaintive eyelids Did warm tears trickle to the ground,    their charioteer bewailing. Defilèd were their dainty manes,    over the yoke-*strap dropping.

A critic who objects to this, has to learn English from my translation. Does he imagine that Dainty can mean nothing but 'over-particular as to food'?

In the compound Dainty-cheek'd, Homer shows his own epic peculiarity. It is imitated in the similar word εὐπάρᾳος applied to the Gorgon Medusa by Pindar: but not in the Attics. I have somewhere read, that the rudest conception of female beauty is that of a brilliant red plump cheek; such as an English clown admires (was this what Pindar meant?); the second stage looks to the delicacy of tint in the cheek (this is Homer's καλλιπάρῃος:) the third looks to shape (this is the εὒμορφος of the Attics, the formosus of the Latins, and is seen in the Greek sculpture); the fourth and highest looks to moral expression: this is the idea of Christian Europe. That Homer rests exclusively in the second or semibarbaric