Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/283

 despair of it. Homer moves with noble ease: blank verse must not be suffered to forget that the movement of

Came they not over from sweet Lacedæmon

is ungainly. Homer's expression of his thought is simple as light: we know how blank verse affects such locutions as

While the steeds mouthed their corn aloof

and such models of expressing one's thought are sophisticated and artificial.

One sees how needful it is to direct incessantly the English translator's attention to the essential characteristics of Homer's poetry, when so accomplished a person as Mr Spedding, recognising these characteristics as indeed Homer's, admitting them to be essential, is led by the ingrained habits and tendencies of English blank verse thus repeatedly to lose sight of them in translating even a few lines. One sees this yet more clearly, when Mr Spedding, taking me to task for saying that the blank verse used for rendering Homer 'must not be Mr Tennyson's blank verse', declares that in most of Mr Tennyson's blank verse all Homer's essential characteristics, 'rapidity of movement, plainness of words and style, simplicity and directness of ideas, and, above all, nobleness of manner, are as conspicuous as in Homer himself'. This shows, it seems to me, how hard it is for English readers of poetry, even the most accomplished, to