Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/69

 But so deeply seated is the difference between the ballad-manner and Homer's, that even a man of the highest powers, even a man of the greatest vigour of spirit and of true genius—the Coryphæus of balladists, Sir Walter Scott—fails with a manner of this kind to produce an effect at all like the effect of Homer. 'I am not so rash', declares Mr Newman, 'as to say that if freedom be given to rhyme as in Walter Scott's poetry',—'Walter Scott, by far the most Homeric of our poets', as in another place he calls him,—'a genius may not arise who will translate Homer into the melodies of Marmion'. 'The truly classical and truly romantic', says Dr Maginn, 'are one; the moss-trooping Nestor reappears in the moss-trooping heroes of Percy's Reliques'; and a description by Scott, which he quotes, he calls 'graphic, and therefore Homeric'. He forgets our fourth axiom,—that Homer is not only graphic; he is also noble, and has the grand style. Human nature under like circumstances is probably in all stages much the same; and so far it may be said that 'the truly classical and the truly romantic are one'; but it is of little use to tell us this, because we know the human nature of other ages only through the representations of them which have come down to us, and the classical and the romantic modes of representation are so far from being 'one', that they remain eternally