Chapman comes at the head of a chapter on seventeenth-century poetry as a useful reminder that "fantastic" is not a very distinctive title to apply to the poetry of Donne and his followers,—that if conceit and far-fetched similitudes are a sign of decadence, then Elizabethan poetry was born decadent, for from first to last it is, in Arnold's phrase, "steeped in humours and fantasticality up to its very lips." Whether we consider Chapman's original poems or his translations, his obscure, pedantic, harsh, yet always ardent and fitfully splendid hymns and complimentary verses, or the Homer which Keats has immortalised, it would be difficult to conceive a poet who, despite his classics, his eulogies of learning, and his friendship for Jonson, is more essentially "Gothic" as Addison and Thomson used the word. It is a tribute to the genius of Homer that there was so much in the Iliad and Odyssey which Chapman could translate well, or even greatly. He is at his best, it seems to me, when describing the rush of fighting, and for this, as well as other reasons, his Iliad is better than his Odyssey; but when full justice has been done to the animation of his style, its entire freedom from otiose filling-out, its not infrequent felicity and splendour of phrase, the last word on the inadequacy of Chapman's colloquialisms and conceits to reproduce the dignity and simplicity of Homer has been spoken by Matthew Arnold.[1]
It is difficult, in the absence of such contemporary evidence as is afforded to-day by critical reviews, to
- ↑ On Translating Homer. Lond., 1861.
