Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/53

 he calls 'the more antiquated or rarer words' which he has used. In this list appear, on the one hand, such words as doughty, grisly, lusty, noisome, ravin, which are familiar, one would think, to all the world; on the other hand such words as bragly, meaning, Mr Newman tells us, 'proudly fine'; bulkin, 'a calf'; plump, a 'mass'; and so on. 'I am concerned', says Mr Newman, 'with the artistic problem of attaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while remaining easily intelligible'. But it seems to me that lusty is not antiquated: and that bragly is not a word readily understood. That this word, indeed, and bulkin, may have 'a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity', I admit; but that they are 'easily intelligible', I deny.

Mr Newman's syntax has, I say it with pleasure, a much more Homeric cast than his vocabulary; his syntax, the mode in which his thought is evolved, although not the actual words in which it is expressed, seems to me right in its general character, and the best feature of his version. It is not artificial or rhetorical like Cowper's syntax or Pope's: it is simple, direct, and natural, and so far it is like Homer's. It fails, however, just where, from the inherent fault of Mr Newman's conception of Homer, one might expect it to fail,—it fails in nobleness. It presents the thought in a way