English Literature in the Sixteenth Century<\/a>, 27-28), English humanists were most interested in style, but the style was mostly Latin: \u201cGreek was given abundance of \u2018mouth honor,\u2019 but only the minor Greek authors (Plutarch, Heliodrous, Chilles Tatius, the Anthology) were really relished. Greek will not take the hard, high polish which was what the humanists principally cared for: it is too supple, sensitive, and intimate. You can hardly be marmoreal in Greek . . . It would be quite a mistake to think of the sixteenth century as a period in which we were much influenced by the spirit or form of Greek literature. Plato\u2019s influence was one of doctrine not of form: he affected philosophers and philosophizing poets. Chapman\u2019s Homer was in that age impossible for us to assimilate.\u201d<\/p>\nHe adds, \u201cThe great age of Greek influence is not the sixteenth century but the nineteenth. Shelley, Landor, Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Ruskin, and even Morris, were all, in their different ways, more receptive of the Greek spirit than any Elizabethan. No doubt they saw the Greeks with a romantic distortion of their own, but that is a trifle compared with the humanistic distortion\u2026.a very large area of sensibility is common to the ancient, the medieval, and the romantic mind, and that humanism stands outside that area. Until the fog of classicism has lifted, the greater classics are invisible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The different treatments are evident from a comparison of Chapman\u2019s Homer<\/em>\u00a0and Douglas\u2019s translation of the\u00a0Aeneid<\/em>: \u201cBoth translators read their own philosophy into the originals. As Virgil\u2019s afterworld became hell and purgatory in Douglas, so in Chapman the nod of Zeus is related to the doctrine of the first Mover. In an age with no real historic sense this was perhaps inevitable. Again, both read their own practical ideals into their authors: but here Chapman is far more disabled than Douglas. The Scot\u2019s knightly and Christian ideal is not, for poetical purposes, very far removed from Virgilian pietas <\/em>and valour: but there is a yawning abyss between the despair and passion of Homer\u2019s warriors and Chapman\u2019s half-Stoical, half-Machiavellian, idea of the Great Man. Chapman\u2019s Homer <\/em>is always teaching lessons (not always very noble) of civil and domestic prudence which never crossed the real Homer\u2019s mind. We may say of Chapman, as he (gratuitously) makes Hecuba say of Hector, \u2018policy was his undoing. . . . His Jove hardly ever addresses Juno without some comment by Chapman on the proper treatment of shrewish wives. When Agamemnon sacrifices . . . we are told how \u2018the politick king made show respectes to heaven.\u2019 In vi.160 et seq. Homer says that Anteia wanted Bellerophontes to lie with her in secret \u2018but did not at all persuade the right-minded and prudent Bellerophontes\u2019: Chapman explains that his prudence led him to shun \u2018the danger of a princesse loue.\u2019 Later in the same book we have twelve wholly original lines explaining Hector\u2019s reason for addressing Paris exactly as he did.\u201d<\/p>\nLewis argues that this comes from his admiration for Homer: Chapman was sure that Homer had something important to say even if what he wrote seemed inconsequential. When he added lines, he thought he was making explicit the important themes that Homer intended.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to C. S. Lewis (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 27-28), English humanists were most interested in style, but the style was mostly Latin: \u201cGreek was given abundance of \u2018mouth honor,\u2019 but only the minor Greek authors (Plutarch, Heliodrous, Chilles Tatius, the Anthology) were really relished. Greek will not take the hard, high polish […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,941],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classics","category-renaissance"],"yoast_head":"\n
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