But let us pass to criticisms which are suggestive directly and not thus indirectly only, criticisms by examining which we may be brought nearer to what immediately interests us, the right way of translating Homer.
I said that Homer did not rise and sink with his subject, was never to be called prosaic and low. This gives surprise to many persons, who object that parts of the _Iliad_ are certainly pitched lower than others, and who remind me of a number of absolutely level passages in Homer. But I never denied that a _subject_ must rise and sink, that it must have its elevated and its level regions; all I deny is, that a poet can be said to rise and sink when all that he, as a poet, can do, is perfectly well done; when he is perfectly sound and good, that is, perfect as a poet, in the level regions of his subject as well as in its elevated regions. Indeed, what distinguishes the greatest masters of poetry from all others is, that they are perfectly sound and poetical in these level regions of their subject, in these regions which are the great difficulty of all poets but the very greatest, which they never quite know what to do with. A poet may sink in these regions by being falsely grand as well as by being low; he sinks, in short, whenever he does not treat his matter, whatever it is, in a perfectly good and poetic way. But, so long as he treats it in this way, he cannot be said to _sink_, whatever his matter may do. A passage of the simplest narrative is quoted to me from Homer:—
ὤτρυνεν δὲ ἕκαστον ἐποιχόμενος ἐπέεσσιν, Μέσθλην τε, Γλαῦκόν τε, Μέδοντά τε, θερσιλοχόν τε ...[58]
and I am asked, whether Homer does not sink _there_; whether he ‘_can_ have intended such lines as those for poetry’? My answer is: Those lines are very good poetry indeed, poetry of the best class, _in that place_. But when Wordsworth, having to narrate a very plain matter, tries _not_ to sink in narrating it, tries, in short, to be what is falsely called poetical, he does sink, although he sinks by being pompous, not by being low.
Onward we drove beneath the Castle; caught, While crossing Magdalen Bridge, a glimpse of Cam, And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn.
That last line shows excellently how a poet may sink with his subject by resolving not to sink with it. A page or two farther on, the subject rises to grandeur, and then Wordsworth is nobly worthy of it: