ments, Pseudo-Virgilian, Petrarchian and others) as "the work that he
was born to do." His version, with all its faults, outlived the popularity
even of Pope, was for more than two centuries the resort of all who, unable
to read Greek, wished to know what the Greek was, and, despite the finical
scholarship of the present day, is likely to survive all the attempts made
with us. I speak with all humility, but as having learnt Homer from Homer
himself, and not from any translation, prose or verse. I am perfectly aware
of Chapman's outrageous liberties, of his occasional unfaithfulness (for a
libertine need not necessarily be unfaithful in translation), and of the
condescension to his own fancies and the fancies of his age, which obscures
not more perhaps than some condescensions which nearness and contemporary
influences prevent some of us from seeing the character of the original.
But at the same time, either I have no skill in criticism, and have been
reading Greek for fifty years to none effect, or Chapman is far nearer
Homer than any modern translator in any modern language. He is nearer in
the Iliad than in the Odyssey--an advantage resulting from his choice of
vehicle. In the Odyssey he chose the heroic couplet, which never can give
the rise and fall of the hexameter. In the Iliad, after some hesitation
between the two (he began as early as 1598), he preferred the fourteener,
which, at its best, is the hexameter's nearest substitute. With Chapman it
is not always at its best--very far from it. If he never quite relapses
into the sheer doggerel of the First Period, he sometimes comes perilously
near to it. But he constantly lifts his wings and soars in a quite
different measure which, when he keeps it up for a little, gives a
narrative vehicle unsurpassed, and hardly equalled, in English poetry for
variation of movement and steady forward flow combined. The one point in
which the Homeric hexameter is unmatched among metres is its combination of
steady advance with innumerable ripples and eddies in its course, and it is
here that Chapman (though of course not fully) can partly match it. It is,
however, one of the testimonies to the supreme merit of the Homeric poems
that every age seems to try to imitate them in its own special mannerisms,
and that, consequently, no age is satisfied with the attempts of another.
It is a second, that those who know the original demur at all.

The characteristics of Chapman, then, are very