The fun which Lucian made of his mythology, a rhetorical critic like Mr Arnold could make of his diction, if he understood it as he understands mine. He takes credit to himself for not ridiculing me; and is not aware, that I could not be like Homer without being easy to ridicule. An intelligent child is the second-best reader of Homer. The best of all is a scholar of highly masculine taste; the worst of all is a fastidious and refined man, to whom everything quaint seems ignoble and contemptible.
I might have supposed that Mr Arnold thinks Homer to be a polished drawing-room poet, like Pope, when I read in him this astonishing sentence, p. 35. 'Search the English language for a word which does not apply to Homer, and you could not fix on a better word than quaint'. But I am taken aback at finding him praise the diction of Chapman's translation in contrast to mine. Now I never open Chapman, without being offended at his pushing Homer's quaintness most unnecessarily into the grotesque. Thus in Mr Gladstone's first passage above, where Homer says that the sea 'sputters out the foam', Chapman makes it, 'all her back in bristles set, spits every way her foam', obtruding what may remind one of a cat or a stoat. I hold sputter to be epical[1], because it is strong;*
- ↑ Men who can bear 'belch' in poetry, nowadays
