Mr Arnold condemns my translating certain names of horses. He says (p. 58): ‘Mr Newman calls Xanthus _Chesnut_; as he calls Balius _Spotted_ and Podarga _Spry-foot_: which is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale _Mdelle. Rossignol_, or Mr Bright _M. Clair_’. He is very wanting in discrimination. If I had translated Hector into _Possessor_ or Agamemnon into _Highmind_, his censure would be just. A Miss White may be a brunette, a Miss Brown may be a blonde: we utter the proper names of men and women without any remembrance of their intrinsic meaning. But it is different with many names of domestic animals. We never call a dog _Spot_, unless he is spotted; nor without consciousness that the name expresses his peculiarity. No one would give to a black horse the name Chesnut; nor, if he had called a chesnut horse by the name Chesnut, would he ever forget the meaning of the name while he used it. The Greeks called a chesnut horse _xanthos_ and a spotted horse _balios_; therefore, until Mr Arnold proves the contrary, I believe that they never read the names of Achilles’ two horses without a sense of their meaning. Hence the names ought to be translated; while Hector and Laomedon ought not. The same reasoning applies to Podarga, though I do not certainly understand ἀργός. I have taken it to mean _sprightly_.
Mr Arnold further asserts, that Homer is never ‘garrulous’. Allowing that too many others agree with me, he attributes our error to giving too much weight to a sentence in Horace! I admire Horace as an ode-writer, but I do not revere him as a critic, any more than as a moral philosopher. I say that Homer is garrulous, because I see and feel it. Mr Arnold puts me into a most unwelcome position. I have a right to say, I have some enthusiasm for Homer. In the midst of numerous urgent calls of duty and taste, I devoted every possible quarter of an hour for two years and a half to translate the Iliad, toiling unremittingly in my vacations and in my walks, and going to large expenses of money, in order to put the book before the unlearned; and this, though I am not a Professor of Poetry nor even of Greek. Yet now I am forced to appear as Homer’s disparager and accuser! But if Homer were always a poet, he could not be, what he is, so many other things beside poet. As the Egyptians paint in their tombs processes of art, not because they are beautiful or grand, but from a mere love of imitating; so Homer narrates perpetually from a mere love of chatting. In how thoroughly Egyptian a way does he tell the process of cutting up an ox and making _kebâb_; the process of bringing a boat to anchor and carefully putting by the tackle; the process of taking out a shawl from a chest, where it lies at the very bottom! With what glee he repeats the secret talk of the gods; and can tell all about the toilet of Juno. Every particular of trifling actions comes out with him, as, the opening of a door or box with a key. He tells who made Juno’s earrings or veil or the shield of Ajax, the history of Agamemnon’s breast-plate, and in what detail a hero puts on his pieces of armour. I would not press the chattiness of Pandarus, Glaucus, Nestor, Æneas, in the midst of battle; I might press his description of wounds. Indeed I have said enough, and more than enough, against Mr Arnold’s novel, unsupported, paradoxical assertion.—But this is connected with another subject. I called Homer’s manner ‘direct’: Mr Arnold (if I understand) would supersede this by his own epithet ‘rapid’. But I cannot admit the exchange: Homer is often the opposite of rapid. Amplification is his characteristic, as it must be of every improvisatore, every popular orator: condensation indeed is improper for anything but written style; written to be read privately. But I regard as Homer’s worst defect, his lingering over scenes of endless carnage and painful wounds. He knows to half an inch where one hero hits another and how deep. They arm: they approach: they encounter: we have to listen to stereotype details again and again. Such a style is anything but ‘rapid’. Homer’s garrulity often leads him into it; yet he can do far better, as in a part of the fight over Patroclus’s body, and other splendid passages.