CHAPMAN'S HOMER. George Chap man (1559-1634), writer of plays and contem porary of Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare, was a great translator in the great age of translations that brought forth the English Bible and so many versions and adaptations of the ancient classics. He pub lished seven books of the 'Iliad' in 1598, and by 1616 had published together the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' complete in rhymed 14 syllable verse. The literature of his own time contains much complimentary allusion to him, and the esteem of later generations is manifest in many glowing tributes from eminent literary characters, probably the most familiar and the most stimulating being Keats's sonnet, °Much have I travelled in the realms of gold:' " Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold The "loud and bold' of Keats contains or suggests the qualities that have made Chap man's translation live in spite of the lack of polish, of exactness, and sometimes of dignity, that are charged against it. Pope, his later rival, says she covers his defects by a daring fiery spirit that animates his translation' Even Matthew Arnold, the severe critic of all translations of Homer, who declares that °in a verse translation no original work is any longer recognizable,' characterizes Chapman as °plain spoken, fresh, vigorous, and, to a certain degree, rapid." Arnold, however, condemns him on the whole. "Homer,' he says, °is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in his words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer is noble in his manner. . . . Chapman renders him ill because he is fantastic in his ideas. . . . His conceits are un-Homeric,
and his rhyme is un-Homeric; his manner and movement are un-Homerici his diction . . . often offends . . . by wanting Homeric noble ness.' He condemns him most of all because she cannot forbear to interpose a play of thought between his object and its expression. Chapman translates his object into Elizabethan, as Pope translates it into the Augustan of Queen Anne; both convey it to us through a medium.' For the Elizabethan age,” write Butcher and Lang in thepreface to their translation of the Odyssey, "Chapman supplied what was then necessary, and the mannerisms that were then deemed of the essence of poetry, namely, daring and luxurious conceits. . . . Without Chapman's conceits, Homer's poems would hardly have been what the Elizabethans took for poetry; without Pope's smoothness, and Pope's points, the Iliad and the Odyssey would have seemed tame, rude, and harsh in the age of Anne.' If, as Arnold reasonably insists, the real test of successful translation is the attempt to satisfy the scholar who has also poetical feeling, Chapman must be said to please most those not perfectly possessed of the means of really judging him as a translator, but who come to his work more or Jess as to an original poem in the Eliza bethan manner. Such readers will find him admirable for what R. H. Horne calls "his commanding energies, fulness of faith in his author's genius, and in his own inspired sym pathies, his primitive power, and rough truth fulness of description'; and will feel not only the inspiration of the Homeric narrative but the inspiration of the translator himself.