ore after his shipwreck, "_the sea had soaked his heart through_," it
is not the mere simplicity of the language, but the vivid conception which
went before and compelled the simplicity, that is impressive. We believe
Mr. Newman is right in refusing to sacrifice a good word because it may be
pronounced mean by individual caprice, wrong in attempting the fatal
impossibility of rescuing a word which to all minds alike conveys a low or
ludicrous meaning, as, for example, _pate_, and _dopper_, for which he
does battle doughtily. Mr. Newman is guilty of a fallacy when he brings up
_brick, sell_, and _cut_ as instances in support of his position, for in
these cases Mr. Arnold would only object to his use of them in their
_slang_ sense. He himself would hardly venture to say that Hector was a
_brick_, that Achilles _cut_ Agamemnon, or that Ulysses _sold_ Polyphemus.
It is precisely because Hobbes used language in this way that his
translation of Homer is so ludicrous. Wordsworth broke down in his theory,
that the language of poetry should be the every-day speech of men and
women, though he nearly succeeded in finally extirpating "poetic diction."
We think the proper antithesis is not between prosaic and poetic words,
nor between the speech of actual life and a conventionalized diction, but
between the language of _real_ life (which is something different from the
actual, or matter-of-fact) and that of _artificial_ life, or
society,--that is, between phrases fit to express the highest passion,
feeling, aspiration, and those adapted to the intercourse of polite life,
whence all violent emotion, or, at least, the expression of it, is
excluded. This latter highly artificial and polished dialect is
accordingly as suitable to the Mock-Heroic (like "The Rape of the Lock")
as it is inefficient and even distasteful when employed for the higher and
more serious purposes of poetry. It was most fortunate for English poetry
that our translation of the Bible and Shakspeare arrested our language,
and, as it were, crystallized it, precisely at its freshest and most
vigorous period, giving us an inexhaustible mine of words familiar to the
heart and mind, yet unvulgarized to the ear by trivial associations.

The whole question of Homeric translation in its entire range, between
Chapman on the one hand and Pope and Cowper on the other, is opened afresh
by this controversy. The difficulty of the undertaking, and still more of
dogmatizing on the pro