Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/140

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of a Greek quantitative metre; besides that Homer writes in a highly vocalized tongue, while ours is overfilled with consonants. I have disowned this notion of similar rhythm in the strongest terms (p. xvii of my Preface), expressly because some critics had imputed this aim to me in the case of Horace. I summed up: 'It is not audible sameness of metre, but a likeness of moral genius which is to be aimed at'. I contrast the audible to the moral. Mr Arnold suppresses this contrast, and writes as follows, p. 34. 'Mr Newman tells us that he has found a metre like in moral genius to Homer's. His judge has still the same answer: 'reproduce THEN on our ear something of 'the effect produced by the movement of Homer'. He recurs to the same fallacy in p. 57. 'For whose EAR do those two rhythms produce impressions of (to use Mr Newman's own words) "similar moral genius"'? His reader will naturally suppose that 'like in moral genius' is with me an eccentric phrase for 'like in musical cadence'. The only likeness to the ear which I have admitted, is, that the one and the other are primitively made for music. That, Mr Arnold knows, is a matter of fact, whether a ballad be well or ill written. If he pleases, he may hold the rhythm of our metre to be necessarily inferior to Homer's and to his own; but when I fully explained in my preface what were my tests of 'like